MR. STEPHEN PHILLIPS AS A WRITER OF TRAGEDY 1 29 



the feet of Raphael, Mephistopheles claims his wager won; but an 

 angel from the Prologue declares that Faust has been ennobled by a 

 higher, holier love springing from his sin. During his speech "angels 

 are seen bearing the soul of Faust upward toward Margaret." In 

 the last two lines Mephistopheles says with almost touching patness 

 and piety : 



Still to the same result I war with God: 



I will the evil, I achieve the good. 



In the name of Life, what mockery is this? When the voice from 

 above declares that Margaret is saved, we believe; because our 

 own hearts had decided that she was no more guilty than a trampled 

 flower; but what about Faust? Goethe tried, at any rate, to make 

 him expiate his sin by service and suffering; bitter years of struggle 

 and writhing upward preceded the end; even the angels admit the 

 limitations of their saving power: 



Wer immer strebend, sich bemiiht, 

 Den konnen wir erlosen. 



But in so far as the real action of the play goes, our new Faust is 

 transported to heavenly joys after his moment of wild agony and 

 self-reproach, which, for all the evidence before us, is much more 

 likely to be the drunkard's morning misery than the dawning of a 

 new spiritual day within his heart. It is as idle to put the assurance 

 that he hastened his salvation on the authoritative lips of an accred- 

 ited angel as it is to have it supported by the Devil; we are left 

 absolutely unconvinced and rebeUious. This man has chosen the 

 easiest of preys; has dragged a maiden to a grave of shame; has 

 been responsible for the murder of her mother, the drowning of her 

 child, the death of her brother; and he shall be saved because of the 

 nobihty of her self-immolation, because of a bitter repentance endur- 

 ing at least a moment and a grandiloquent declaration that still he 

 fights upward and battles to the skies. It may be transcendent 

 mastery of dramatic effect; it may be exalted emotion-mongering; 

 but it is ahen to the best spirit of the age in which we Hve, it is con- 

 trary to the eternal verities. Faust must live and suffer and serve 



