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THE STORY OF FAUST

or

Buying the World at the Price of the Soul

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The story of Faust is an Acted Sermon on the text, "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul." The natural heads for such a sermon are two:

1. What is it to gain the whole world?

2. What is it to lose the soul?

But to act the answers to these questions is very different from putting them from a pulpit in words. There are two famous versions of this story:

The Old Version: by Marlowe (before 1597), at the commencement of the Romantic Drama.

The New Version: by Goethe (1806), at the culmination of the Romantic epoch. [Unquestionably prompted by close study of Marlowe's version, which it adapts at every turn to the new intellectual conditions of Goethe's age.]

1. As to the first head both versions agree. Gaining the whole world is dramatized under the form of Magic, that is, the suspension of second causes allowing unlimited realization of Will.

2. The answers to the second head are as widely apart as the sixeenth and nineteenth centuries.

 

Marlowe's Version

In dramatic form, the Romantic Drama is seen in the process of settling down—traces of Greek Chorus, Old English Masque and Miracle, Extempore relief scenes.

The play treated as a story falls naturally into three divisions:

A. The formation of a compact with an Emissary from Hell: twenty-four years of "the World" in exchange for the soul. [Avoid confusion between Mephistophilis and Mephistopheles.]