#faust himself

'Faust was quickly hailed as the incarnation of the German character and influenced German historiography, philosophy, and self-interpretation. Millions of young men decided they were like Faust, and some found the German destiny in boundless, ruthless, Faustian striving. Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Representation (1819), considered such striving as the essence not merely of man but of the cosmos. Spengler, precisely a hundred years later, saw Faust as the representative of Western man and called Western civilization "the Faustian culture." After all that, Faust - as who would not? - seems rather trying: one finds oneself eager to not his faults, his lack of humor, his pretentiousness, his self-deceptions. But Goethe used Faust's incurable romanticism as an effective foil for Mephistopheles. The nineteenth century thrilled to Faust's elevated cadences and put up with Mephistopheles' uninhibited sarcasm. The modern reader finds himself embarrassed by Faust's flowery phrases, and relieved by the cynical retorts that reminds us continually that Goethe never wholly identified himself with his romantic hero. If Faust's poetic flights sometimes seem glib, that is not Goethe's fault but Faust's - and not his only fault either. It is, moreover, one of the devices by which Goethe makes Mephisto an engaging personality in spite of everything.

Even as Shakespeare enlists our sympathy for Lear and Coriolanus - although they behave repulsively in many ways - by wisely choosing their antagonists [love the idea of faust as mephisto's antagonist instead of vice versa, but also intrigued by the coriolanus/aufidius parallel implied...], Goethe forces us to sympathize with Mephistopheles. Unlike Faust, Mephisto has a sense of humor and is even capable of laughing at himself; he is a keen psychologist who sees through convention and pretense; and, though radically dishonest when it suits his purposes, he confronts us with a rarely equaled candor just when Faust's enthusiasm outsoars all scrupulous concern with truth or honesty. It may well be that Mephistopheles is Goethe's greatest single creation, and that he has come into his own only in the twentieth century, after Heine and Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, Freud and Shaw, Gide and Joyce, Mann and Sartre - who would hardly be offended at being called Mephisto's progeny - had changed our sensibilities.

Of course, Goethe's Mephistopheles is not without ancestors, and the most important of these may be found in the Bible. It is a commonplace that Goethe's Prologue in Heaven is modeled on the first two chapters of the Book of Job, but it has not been widely noted how much his Mephisto owes to the few lines spoken by Satan. After God's praise of Job, "that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil, Satan answered the Lord: Does Job fear God for nothing?" And after God has taken away all that Job had and reproved Satan, saying that "still he holds fast his integrity," Satan retorts: "Skin for skin! All that a man has he will give for his life; but put forth your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face." This is Mephistopheles in ovo: a cynicism of nihilistic proportions. But what poet before Goethe realized this possibility? And it was Goethe, too, who fused this nihilism with his own inimitable sense of humor, now broad and earthy, now acidly penetrating.

Some critics still lament the fact that some of Heine's tenderest poems are punctured in the last line by a ruthless cynicism. They do not deny that this is specifically modern, but it is an aspect of modernity that they oppose. it was partly for this reason that the early twentieth-century poet Stefan George, and his very influential "Circle", considered Heine an arch-villain. (They had other reasons, too; for example, Heine's immensely witty but nasty polemic against the poet Platen, though written in 1829, was in many ways applicable to Stefan George - not only as a man but also as a poet.) George's followers, ranging all the way from the perceptive Friedrich Gundolf to some brutal Nazi hacks, lacked the deeply humane quality of Heine's irony and underestimated both his poetry and his superb prose. They considered him the ancestor of modern journalism. But it seems far more just to see him as a link between Goethe and Nietzsche (as Nietzsche himself saw Heine) - a link between Faust and the twentieth century.

Goethe realized the limitations of romanticism and its questionable character even before romanticism had become the style of an age. The very figure of Faust which inspired romantic poets, philosophers, and composers, and was accepted by the German people as their own ideal prototype - this poetic but unscrupulous titan who, for all his noble sentiments, becomes involved in brutal deeds - is the constant butt of Mephisto's mockery. The function of Mephistopheles resembles that of Heine's sudden sarcasms: romantic reverie is felt to be too glib, too near the cliché, too far from honesty - and hence must be exposed. It will no longer do to import comic scenes into a tragedy, as Shakespeare did: what is wanted is a device that will permit the poet a continual contrast to point up the questionable character of our feelings and conventions - what feelings hide behind conventions , and how conventional most of our feelings are - in one world - Mephistopheles. Thus Goethe's Faust is closer to Ulysses than to the Odyssey. It is one of the first and greatest works of modern literature. And Mephistopheles is one of the most inspired characters in the whole of world literature.'