6, 1224–37). After the essentially comic exorcism of the poodle, we have the first confrontation between Faust and Mephistopheles, and it is notable that they are here at once polarized as spokesmen of life-affirmation and pure nihilism respectively (1363–84). It is also a matter of great interest and importance that Faust, both here and in the next scene (Sc. 7), treats the ‘Devil’ with scorn and contempt—an attitude very different from his helpless hanging on Mephistopheles’ worldly advice in the 1790 Fragment passage (1776–1834). We are here brought back to the methodological controversy about how the interpretation of Faust should be approached.

Sc. 7 (Faust’s Study 11), which contains in its newly written part (1530–769) the actual negotiation of the ‘pact’ between Faust and Mephistopheles and is therefore often referred to as the ‘Pact’ scene, is the main stumbling-block for critics who insist on a logical exegesis of the finished 1808 text and refuse on principle to take its complex genesis into account. It is bound to be looked upon as a central scene, since it contains Goethe’s long-delayed solution to what appears to have been his main problem in adapting the Faust legend, namely that of recasting the old motif of the devil’s bargain in a modern and sophisticated form. A minor example of the methodological difficulty arises from the very fact that there is a hiatus, explicable historically but not otherwise, between the beginning of this scene (1530) and the end of the preceding Sc. 6 (cf. Note 25). As to Sc. 7 generally, it will best make sense if we bear in mind the following three points. (1) The whole Faust-Mephistopheles negotiation is a composite product, most of it belonging to the third (1797–1801) phase of composition, but an important part of it to the second (lines 1770–867, already published in the 1790 Fragment); indeed, if we also count the Urfaust dialogue between Mephistopheles and the student as part of the same scene, which it officially is, then we may say that Sc. 7 represents all three of the chronological levels of Part One. (2) The new pact-negotiation, written during the same years as the other new additions Sc. 3 (the Prologue in Heaven) and Sc. 6 (the Logos scene), is based on the same general conception as these and must be seen in the light of them. (3) In particular, the negotiation must be interpreted in the new ironic perspective of the Prologue; that is to say, Faust’s attitude and utterances in this negotiation must be seen as subject in some degree to ironic authorial distance. This third consideration throws light, for example, on the otherwise obscure passage 1583–626. Faust here utters a grand rhetorical curse on human life and its vain deluding joys, and this is immediately followed (1607–26) by a ‘chorus of spirits’ lamenting his destruction of ‘the beautiful world’ and exhorting him to build it again in his heart. There is here a quite clear parallel with the contemporaneously written part of Sc. 4 in which the suicidal Faust is brought to ‘love the earth once more’ (784; literally, ‘belong to the earth once more’) by another chorus of unseen singers with their message of affirmation. The invisible chorus in the Pact scene is clearly not one of Mephistophelean spirits, notwithstanding Mephistopheles’ immediate claim that they are and his cynical parody of their words (1627–34). The spirit-chorus, if we are to judge by the content and tone of what it actually says, can only be an answering, healing echo to Faust’s mood of subjective despair, an answer from deep within him—or (which essentially comes to the same thing) from above him: a concealed message from the divine Author to his ‘confused servant’. And what, except in such a perspective of tolerant detachment, are we to make of the central passage 1635–707, in which the deadly serious traditional Teufelspakt is paradoxically transformed into a mere wager? A bet or wager is a kind of contract that is something more like a game, and this in itself raises the question of how seriously we are to take it. The conception seems to be relatively traditional as far as line 1674, but at 1675 Goethe reverts emphatically to the new and paradoxical theme, characteristic of the third-phase material and quite absent from the 1790 version, of Faust’s contempt for the ‘Devil’ to whom he is about to ‘sell himself. In Sc. 6 he mocked Mephistopheles’ vain life-destroying enterprise (1379–84); now he mocks him as the purveyor of worthless because merely transitory pleasures (1675–87). He then vows that none of these will ever ‘lull him into self-sufficiency’ (1695) and challenges Mephistopheles to prove him wrong.

This challenge constitutes the ‘wager’: Faust literally bets his life that Mephistopheles can never make him complacent and inactive (1692–8). Up to this point what he says is relatively straightforward.