e pagan counterpart to the pure
and simple Margaret, just as Mephistopheles is the pagan counterpart to
Faust. The lower forms of life are the only ones in which Martha and
Mephistopheles are at home. For Faust and Margaret the lapse into the
lower forms brings tragedy. Yet it must be remembered also that Faust
and Mephistopheles are really one, for the devil who tempts every man is
but himself after all, the animal side of him, the dog.

The women thus stand for the most poignant aspect of man's great
temptation. It is not, as we have already said, any longer a conflict
between the secular and the sacred that we are watching, nor even the
conflict between the flesh and the spirit. It is between a higher and a
lower way of treating life, flesh and spirit both. Margaret stands for
all the great questions that are addressed to mankind. There are for
every man two ways of doing work, of reading a book, of loving a woman.
He who keeps his spiritual life pure and high finds that in all these
things there is a noble path. He who yields to his lower self will
prostitute and degrade them all, and the tragedy that leads on to the
mad scene at the close, where the cries of Margaret have no parallel in
literature except those of Lady Macbeth, is the inevitable result of
choosing the pagan and refusing the ideal. The Blocksberg is the pagan
heaven.

A still more striking contrast between the plays meets us when we
consider the respective characters of Mephistopheles. When we compare
the two devils we are reminded of that most interesting passage in
Professor Masson's great essay, which describes the secularisation of
Satan between _Paradise Lost_ and the _Faust_ of Goethe:--

"We shall be on the right track if we suppose Mephistopheles to be what
Satan has become after six thousand years.... Goethe's Mephistopheles is
this same being after the toils and vicissitudes of six thousand years
in his new vocation: smaller, meaner, ignobler, but a million times
sharper and cleverer.... For six thousand years he has been pursuing the
walk he struck out at the beginning, plying his self-selected function,
dabbling devilishly in human nature, and abjuring all interest in the
grander physics; and the consequence is, as he himself anticipated, that
his nature, once great and magnificent, has become small, virulent, and
shrunken. He, the scheming, enthusiastic Archangel, has been soured and
civilised into the clever, cold-hearted Mephistophel