different from that of the Faust-legend.
Mephistopheles as the abettor of Faust's amorous passion has no need
of magic. The role of Faust--that of a man pulled irresistibly by
sexual passion, yet constantly tormented by his conscience--is
repulsive, but very human. As he stands before the prison gate he says
that "the whole sorrow of mankind" holds him in its grip. But this is
a part of what he wished for. He wished for universal experience--to
feel in his own soul all the weal and all the woe of humankind. At the
end of the First Part he has drained the cup of sin and suffering.

Imbedded in the love-tragedy is one scene which will seem out of tune
with what has just been said--the Walpurgis Night. Here we are back
again in the atmosphere of the legend, with its magic, its witchcraft,
its gross sensuality. We hardly recognize our friend Faust when we
find him dancing with naked witches and singing lewd songs on the
Brocken. The scene was written in 1800 when Goethe had become a little
cynical with respect to the artistic coherence of _Faust_ and looked
on it as a "monstrosity." It was a part of the early plan that Faust
should add to the burden of his soul by frivolously deserting Margaret
in the shame of her approaching motherhood and spending some time in
gross pleasures. The visit to the Witches' Sabbath on the Brocken was
afterward invented to carry out this idea. In itself the idea was a
good one; for if Faust was to drain the cup of sorrow, the ingredient
of self-contempt could not be left out of the bitter chalice. A
sorrow's crown of sorrow is not so much remembering happier things as
remembering that the happy state came to an end by one's own
wrongdoing. Still, most modern readers will think that Goethe, in
elaborating the Brocken scene as an interesting study of the uncanny
and the vile, let his hero sink needlessly far into the mire.

At the beginning of the Second Part Goethe does not reopen the book of
crime and remorse with which the First Part closes. He needs a new
Faust for whom that is all past--past, not in the sense of being
lightly forgotten, but built into his character and remembered, say,
as one remembers the ecstasy and the pain of twenty years ago. So he
ushers him directly into the new life over a bridge of symbolism. The
restoring process which in real life takes many years he concentrates
into a single night and represents it as the work of kindly nocturnal
fairies and the glorious Alpine