From the very beginning of his musings on the theme Goethe thought of Faust as a man better than his reputation; as a misunderstood truth-seeker who had dared the terrors with which the popular imagination invested hell, in order that he might exhaust the possibilities of this life.  Aside from his desire of transcendental knowledge and wide experience, there was a third trait of the legendary Faust which could hardly seem to Goethe anything but creditable to human nature:  his passion for antique beauty.  According to the old story Faust at one time wishes to marry; but as marriage is a Christian ordinance and he has forsworn Christianity, the Devil gives him, in place of a lawful wife, a fantom counterfeit of Helena, the ancient Queen of Beauty.  The lovely fantom becomes Faust’s paramour and bears him a remarkable son called Justus Faustus.

What wonder if the young Goethe, himself disappointed with book-learning, eager for life, and beset by vague yearnings for mystic insight into the nature of things, saw in Faust a symbol of his own experience?  But as soon as he began to identify himself with his hero it was all up with Faust’s utter damnableness:  a young poet does not plan to send his own soul to perdition.  At the same time, he could not very well imagine him as an out-and-out good man, since that would have been to turn the legend topsy-turvy.  The league with the Devil, who would of course have to be conceived as in some sense or other an embodiment of evil, was the very heart of the old story.

At first Goethe planned his drama on lines that had little to do with traditional ideas of good and bad, heaven and hell, God and Devil.  Faust is introduced as a youngish professor who has studied everything and been teaching for some ten years, with the result that he feels his knowledge to be vanity and his life a dreary routine of hypocrisy.  He resorts to magic in the hope of—­what?  It is important for the understanding of the poem in its initial stages to bear in mind that Faust is not at first a votary of the vulgar black art which consists in calling up bad spirits and doing reprehensible things by their assistance.  Further on he shows that he is a master of that art too, but at first he is concerned with “natural magic,” which some of the old mystics whom Goethe read conceived as the highest and divinest of sciences.  The fundamental assumption of natural magic is that the universe as a whole and each component part of it is dominated by an indwelling spirit with whom it is possible for the magician to get into communication.  If he succeeds he becomes “like” a spirit—­freed from the trammels of the flesh, a partaker of divine knowledge and ecstatic happiness.