X 



CONCERNING MEPHISTOPHELES 



ARGUMENT 



M. the real hero of Faust, but his character concealed behind his masks. 

 He is really a philosophic pessimist who knows his opposition to be 

 futile. His pessimism compared with Faust s. How he has grown 

 cheerful and an intellectualist. The meaning of Gretchen s criticism. 

 M. as the Schalk. Not seriously concerned to win Faust s soul. 

 Absurdity of the vulgar interpretation. M. as Faust s redeemer. But 

 he has recourse to miracle ; which spoils the argument from Faust s 

 redemption. The possibility of redeeming M. 



IT has often been remarked that the Devil tends to 

 become the real hero of any work of art into which he 

 is introduced. However that may be, he is certainly 

 the hero of the greatest poem in modern literature, of 

 Goethe s Faust. Properly to appreciate Mephistopheles, it 

 is fortunately not necessary to depreciate the other chief 

 characters of the drama, to minimise Gretchen as an 

 episode which usually comes earlier in the history of a 

 German student, and to disparage Faust as an effete 

 pedant, who, even when saved by the might of the Devil 

 and the gracious permission of the Deity, remains to the 

 end essentially commonplace and thoroughly deserving of 

 eternal reunion with so excellent a Hausfrau as Gretchen 

 would doubtless have developed into. 



But there certainly is an air of paradox about the 

 assertion that Mephistopheles is the real hero of Faust, 

 and so it becomes necessary to clear away the prejudices 

 that have obscured his character. We must try to 

 understand Mephistopheles himself, to understand, that is, 

 why he has become a rebel against the divine order, to 



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