Whatever Goethe’s personal scepticism as to the Christian doctrine of the Devil, there is no doubt that here at least he understood its aesthetic and theatrical possibilities, and to this extent the Gretchen story has indeed successfully attached itself to the Faust story. The Mephistopheles of the Urfaust is not simply the worldly companion of the hesitant seducer, cynically encouraging him to gratify his lust and then scoffing at the consequences. If he lacked the additional dimension of being (at least so far as Gretchen with her simple Catholic belief is concerned) the personal agent of transcendent evil, the drama would lose half its point: the ironies of the ‘catechism’ scene (Sc. 19, 3414–543), the sinister overtones of Sc. 26, and the dramatic climax of the closing scene (Sc. 28) in the prison, where Gretchen’s instinctive shrinking from ‘that man you have with you’ becomes sudden clear recognition of what Mephistopheles really is and what this implies about her lover. Dramatically essential, too, is the young Goethe’s identification of ‘the Devil’ with a kind of absolute cynicism. This enables him, by contrasting Mephistopheles with Faust and still more strikingly with Gretchen, to give the drama weight and balance—to make it embody a paradoxically realistic double view of human emotions and relationships which both fully expresses romantic sentimentalism and critically transcends it. This alone makes the Gretchen drama a profounder, more multidimensional work than the almost exactly contemporaneous Sorrows of Werther, in which Mephistopheles with his constant cynical commentary on the love-affair has no counterpart. Moreover, this brilliantly established motif of the Devil as cynic, and his dialectical relationship with Faust as romantic or idealist, remains constant on various levels throughout the later-written scenes of Part One as the maturing Goethe came to create it, and has strong claims to be considered the unifying and integrating theme of the work as a whole.

In 1775 came the main turning-point in Goethe’s outward career, when at the invitation of the reigning Duke Karl August he went to Weimar, eventually settling in this tiny principality on a permanent basis. The young duke, one of the most enlightened of the numerous small-scale absolute monarchs in ancien régime Germany, greatly admired Goethe and soon appointed him to a number of public offices. The poet became involved in a host of practical affairs, partly as a result of which he began at this time also to develop a far-reaching interest in various scientific studies. For years he found he had too little time for creative literary work, but the constraints and responsibilities were also salutary. Before long he had lost sympathy with his ‘Storm and Stress’ friends and grown away from this whole tendency. He had brought the Urfaust manuscript with him from Frankfurt as an untidy jumble of papers, and is known to have given informal readings from it to members of the court circle; it was presumably after one such literary evening that Luise von Göchhausen, a lady-in-waiting to the dowager duchess, borrowed the precious autograph and copied it with or without the poet’s knowledge. For Goethe there was for the time being no question of continuing work on this strange and fragmentary youthful masterpiece. But by 1786 he was increasingly chafing at the precarious accommodation he had reached with himself in these first Weimar years. In September he suddenly took temporary leave from his duties and travelled to Italy, where he remained, chiefly in Rome, until June 1788. He himself felt this flight to the south, more especially his stay in Rome and the contact with classical antiquity which this gave him, to be a new turning-point in at least his inner life, a deeply rejuvenating and transforming experience. It seems that some kind of sexual self-liberation was also involved, in that immediately upon his return to Weimar he set up house with the beautiful if scantly educated Christiane Vulpius, who continued to live with him (after 1806 officially as his wife) until her death in 1816. All this—the anagram, so to speak, of ROMA/AMOR—was celebrated around 1790 in the Roman Elegies, a cycle of erotic poems in elegiac distichs which now count among Goethe’s greatest achievements. The Italian journey, however, had also coincided with preparations for the first complete edition of his writings so far, and this practical stimulus had led him not only to collect and revise his poems, finish unfinished works (including two major plays in the classical style, Iphigenia in Tauris and Torquato Tasso, both continued or completed in Italy and published respectively in 1787 and 1790) but also, in February 1788, to reconsider the problem of Faust.

He evidently decided that he would not now attempt to finish it, but publish it as ‘a fragment’ with a few revisions and additions. The chief difficulty was still the ‘great lacuna’ (as he himself later called it) between what are now lines 605 and 1868. He had an effective beginning (354–605), and an ending so overwhelming that it must have been difficult to see what could ever be made to follow it. What was to be done about the missing middle? At the very least, Mephistopheles must not be allowed simply to appear without explanation from nowhere, in a comic scene, with no hint of his standing or of the nature of his business with Faust. Even if Goethe could not yet work out his own modernized version of the terms of their traditional bargain, the reading public must at least be given some hint that an unspecified bargain has taken place. He therefore wrote a short new piece of dialogue between Faust and Mephistopheles (which now appears as lines 1770–850 of Sc. 7). To make it quite clear that a still unfilled gap precedes this passage, he inserted a row of dashes before the first line (as may still be seen in the 1790 edition) and began in the middle of a sentence with the word ‘and’, as well as in the middle of a rhymed quatrain (1768–71). In this new dialogue, and in the soliloquy by Mephistopheles which follows it (1851–67), Goethe set out what at that stage seemed to him to be appropriate as the aims, or programmes, respectively of his hero and of the Devil.