the witch’s mouth comes forth the red mouse—­the climax of disgust.  In Auerbach’s cellar he sees himself as the pagan man in him would like to be.  In Martha one sees the pagan counterpart to the pure and simple Margaret, just as Mephistopheles is the pagan counterpart to Faust.  The lower forms of life are the only ones in which Martha and Mephistopheles are at home.  For Faust and Margaret the lapse into the lower forms brings tragedy.  Yet it must be remembered also that Faust and Mephistopheles are really one, for the devil who tempts every man is but himself after all, the animal side of him, the dog.

The women thus stand for the most poignant aspect of man’s great temptation.  It is not, as we have already said, any longer a conflict between the secular and the sacred that we are watching, nor even the conflict between the flesh and the spirit.  It is between a higher and a lower way of treating life, flesh and spirit both.  Margaret stands for all the great questions that are addressed to mankind.  There are for every man two ways of doing work, of reading a book, of loving a woman.  He who keeps his spiritual life pure and high finds that in all these things there is a noble path.  He who yields to his lower self will prostitute and degrade them all, and the tragedy that leads on to the mad scene at the close, where the cries of Margaret have no parallel in literature except those of Lady Macbeth, is the inevitable result of choosing the pagan and refusing the ideal.  The Blocksberg is the pagan heaven.

A still more striking contrast between the plays meets us when we consider the respective characters of Mephistopheles.  When we compare the two devils we are reminded of that most interesting passage in Professor Masson’s great essay, which describes the secularisation of Satan between Paradise Lost and the Faust of Goethe:—­

“We shall be on the right track if we suppose Mephistopheles to be what Satan has become after six thousand years....  Goethe’s Mephistopheles is this same being after the toils and vicissitudes of six thousand years in his new vocation:  smaller, meaner, ignobler, but a million times sharper and cleverer....  For six thousand years he has been pursuing the walk he struck out at the beginning, plying his self-selected function, dabbling devilishly in human nature, and abjuring all interest in the grander physics; and the consequence is, as he himself anticipated, that his nature, once great and magnificent, has become small, virulent, and shrunken.  He, the scheming, enthusiastic Archangel, has been soured and civilised into the clever, cold-hearted Mephistopheles.”