This is the basis of Goethe’s famous paradoxical definition of Mephistopheles, who is made to describe himself (1335 f.) as a representative of

that Power which would
Do evil constantly, and constantly does good.

The optimistic, non-tragic character of this conception hardly needs underlining: it amounts in fact to a conciliatory integration of the traditional polarity of God and the Devil. The antithesis that now matters is that of action and inaction. It is activity as such that ‘the Lord’ values in man, it is Faust’s motto ‘in the beginning was the deed’ (1237) that makes him God’s ‘servant’ (300) and ‘a good man’ (328). Since, however, mere activity or ‘striving’ is not in itself either moral or immoral, this removes Goethe’s scheme still further from a Christian basis as traditionally understood. The polarity of good and evil has itself been reduced, and this is entirely characteristic of Goethe’s monistic and integrative way of thinking. It was already anticipated in an essay on Shakespeare written as early as 1771:

What we call evil is only the other side of the good, a part of its existence, belonging to it and to the whole just as necessarily as the tropics must burn and Lapland must freeze if there is to be a temperate zone in between.

This constant tendency to balance out and reconcile opposites is something which Goethe’s admirers find profound and his detractors infuriating. He himself, in a letter written in the last year of his life, described his nature as ‘conciliatory’ and with great perceptiveness gave this as the reason why he was ‘not born to be a tragic poet’ (to Zelter, October 1831). This has been held against him as a dramatist, and it might be held against Faust. Drama as such is about contrasts, conflicts, antitheses, dualities, polarities. What is, or was, the conflict in Faust? It resists simplistic understanding as a conflict between good and evil. Schiller, writing to Goethe on 23 June 1797 and still knowing only the Fragment, suggested another formulation: its main theme is ‘the duality of human nature and the vain attempt to unite the divine and the physical in man’. Alternatively, we might say that from the outset the essential opposite in this dramatic dialectic were idealism and cynicism, the ‘high’ and the ‘low’ view of things. This is what the dramatic contrasts of the Urfaust were about: we miss its point unless we see that Mephistopheles is partly right in his assessment and prognosis of the Gretchen affair, the tragic outcome of which is his quod erat demonstrandum. Faust is torn by the conflict between an all-too-enlightened ‘devil’s’ worldly realism and his own romantic vision. In another letter of 1797 (26 June) Schiller observes to Goethe that ‘the Devil convinces our intelligence by his realism, and Faust convinces our hearts’. Faust’s ‘confusion’ to which God in the Prologue refers (308) is a symptom of this continuing struggle—but it is a struggle that points towards conciliation. The hero’s progress, the ‘clarity’ into which (like the poet of Valediction) he is to be ‘led’ (309), would involve the integration of these opposites, the development of higher syntheses beyond the Urfaust’s tragically violent polarizations (idealism and cynicism, ‘macrocosmic’ contemplation and ‘earthly’ action). Whether or not this maturity is ever actually achieved by Faust in the poem, it is the direction in which Goethe himself, through his different stages of composing it, has seemed to be moving. It is perhaps in this sense that Faust may be read as the drama of an evolving human soul and of an evolving culture.

The longest sequence of new material added in the third phase runs from line 606 in Scene 4 to line 1769 in Scene 7, and with it Goethe at last closed the remaining ‘great lacuna’ between the end of Faust’s first conversation with Wagner in the opening Urfaust scene and the beginning of the Fragment version of his first conversation with Mephistopheles. We now have the lengthy conclusion of Sc. 4 after Wagner’s exit (606–807), the scene outside the town (Sc. 5, 808–1177), and most (1178–769) of the two ensuing scenes in Faust’s study (Sc. 6, 7) in which Mephistopheles introduces himself. One of the interesting features of this important ‘infill’ sequence is that Faust has now developed a past of his own, a youth to which he refers, in two of the new scenes, with nostalgia or bitterness (720–9, 769–82, 1023–55). Another is that Faust undergoes several striking changes of mood between despondency and hope; and we should probably be wrong to try to explain these in terms of a clearly conceived intricate ‘character’ rather than of the poet’s own wish to accommodate (as in the opening of Sc. 17 in the 1790 version) the expression of moods and thoughts of his own without overmuch concern for the dramatic context. Were we to insist on seeking a clear dramatic line in the classical manner, we might for instance wonder how it is that a man about to ‘sell himself to the Devil’ is so often in a pious and life-affirming state of mind, or so easily moves back into one (762–84, 903–40, 1068–99, 1178–237, 1379–84). But the intervention, as Faust is about to commit suicide, of angelic choirs singing about the resurrection of Christ (Sc. 4, 737–807), is moving and effective for its own sake; there is also great poetic force in the ensuing praise of spring, which Goethe quite correctly couples with the Resurrection theme (Sc. 5, 903–28), and in Faust’s translation of the Logos passage (Sc.