Faust idealistically demands an expansion of his life to include all human experience; and Mephistopheles, left alone to reveal his true intentions in a soliloquy rather resembling those of Shakespeare’s lago, rejoices in the prospect of destroying Faust by a process of disillusionment, disgust, and frustration. Goethe leaves it open what exactly is meant by Mephistopheles’ prediction (1867) that his victim will ‘perish’ (zugrunde gehn; by suicide? in madness?), since the literalistic Christian concept of damnation is evidently one that he wishes to supersede. Nevertheless, this is still a comparatively straightforward Teufelspakt situation, though with the actual terms of the bargain left out—indeed, Mephistopheles’ concluding lines (1866 f.) even read like a hint by Goethe to his readers that the precise terms of the contract itself are unimportant.

We do not know exactly at what point between February 1788 and the appearance of Faust. A Fragment in 1790 Goethe wrote this new Faust-Mephistopheles material, the most significant of the second-phase scenes; merely that it comes first in the sequence of the 1790 text. At least one of the new scenes was written in Rome, in the gardens of the Villa Borghese; this is thought to have been the one called A Witch’s Kitchen (Sc. 9, 2337–604). Its main theme is Faust’s rejuvenation and sexual invigoration, and Goethe may have decided to add it because (being now fifteen years older than when he had written the Urfaust) he felt that the Urfaust’s transition between Faust the disillusioned professor of uncertain age and ‘Heinrich’, the passionate wooer of a young girl, was rather too sudden. We may also detect, in this scene as in Faust’s new speech to Mephistopheles about human totality, and in the third of these new Fragment scenes (A Forest Cavern, 3217–373), a general tendency of this second composition-phase to ennoble Faust, to emphasize his intellectual and philosophical nature—rather as if the post-Storm-and-Stress Goethe felt that there was here some kind of imbalance in the Urfaust version which now, for publication, needed redressing. The Faust of the Witch’s Kitchen is not seen to be at once pursuing a particular German girl of humble station, not seen to be initiating a German domestic tragedy, but to be longing for ideal Womanhood (2429–40). In Mephistopheles’ concluding comment (2603 f.) Goethe subtly contrives to suggest to the reader an association of this lofty abstraction both with the already-written story of Gretchen (whose first appearance now follows, in 2605) and with the legendary Helen whose procurement, or that of a phantasm in her shape, had always been an essential motif in the Faustus tradition. Here Goethe seems to suggest, en passant, his awareness that it would be desirable to include a Helen episode in his own version if he were to complete it. The ‘classical’ Goethe, moreover, now seems to have distanced himself from the kind of north-European, Germanic folkloristic element which had been so striking a feature of the youthful and ‘romantic’ Urfaust. In the closing scenes of the latter there had been a savage devil-dog accompanying Faust (Sc. 26, lines <16–19>; cf. Note 125), magic black horses on which Faust and Mephistopheles ride and which must vanish at dawn (Sc 26, line <65>, Sc. 27, Sc. 28 lines 4599 f.), and gallows-witches at whom Faust gazes with fascinated horror (Sc. 27); and none of this had been treated with the least trace of irony. Not only are all these closing scenes omitted from the 1790 Fragment, but the Faust of this version also finds witches ridiculous and contemptible (2337 ff., etc.) and Goethe writes his new witch-scene in a comic spirit, inserting dramatically irrelevant satirical material (2450 ff., 2557–62, etc.) and in general treating witchcraft and magic as motifs which are no longer imaginatively serious to him. Mephistopheles himself sums the matter up in 2497 f., ironically dismissing ‘the northern fiend’ as a thing of the past.

Equally, in Sc. 8 (Aucrbach’s Tavern), which for purposes of the 1790 version Goethe now improved by revising it completely into verse, Faust no longer does the traditional chapbook trick with the wine himself; this piece of magical slapstick is left to Mephistopheles, with Faust remaining a bored spectator. The tendency is to dignify him, and to ‘classicize’ the material at as many points as possible. Thus the next of the new scenes (Sc. 17, 3217–373, A Forest Cavern) begins with a lofty and rhetorical soliloquy by Faust, a kind of prayer to the Earth Spirit, and the only passage in the whole of Part One to have been written in iambic blank verse—the metre of Iphigenia and Tasso on which Goethe was working at this time. Faust here also gives thanks to the Earth Spirit for initiating him (when?) into the secrets of Nature, into contemplative knowledge of the ordered ‘sequence’ or ‘series’ of living creatures (3225 f.). Since this has no relevance to the dramatic context, that is to say the seduction of Gretchen, it seems probable that in inserting this speech in 1788 or 1789 Goethe was more concerned with a poetic celebration of his own scientific studies, which he was then actively pursuing in Italy, than with keeping close to the events or atmosphere of the Urfaust. Interestingly, he has retained the Earth Spirit, presumably for want of any more suitable idea for the time being, but the ‘terrible vision’ of Scene 4 (482) has become hard to recognize through the stately iambics. So, too, has Gretchen: her name in this classicizing speech has become stylistically unusable, so she is identified with the vision in the witch’s magic mirror, ‘that lovely woman’s image’ (3248).

The Forest Cavern scene is in fact a rather strange amalgam of new material written at this time, and old motifs retained from the Urfaust. One reason for the retentions is Goethe’s already mentioned decision not to include the last three scenes of the Gretchen tragedy (Sc. 26, 27, 28) in the 1790 Fragment, but to end the latter with the Cathedral scene (Sc.