The coming day is Easter Sunday. Faust and Wagner take an afternoon walk together and witness the jollity of the common people. As they are about to return home at nightfall they pick up a casual black dog that has been circling around them. Arrived in his comfortable study, Faust feels more cheerful. In a mood of religious peace he sets about translating a passage of the New Testament into German. The dog becomes uneasy and begins to take on the appearance of a horrid monster. Faust sees that he has brought home a spirit and proceeds to conjure the beast. Presently Mephistopheles emerges from his canine disguise in the costume of a wandering scholar. Faust is amused. He enters into conversation with his guest and learns something of his character. A familiar acquaintance ensues, and one day the Devil finds him once more in a mood of bitter despair, advises him to quit the tedious professorial life, and offers to be his comrade and servant on a grand tour of pleasure. After some bickering they enter into a solemn agreement according to which Faust’s life is to end whenever he shall “stretch himself on a bed of ease,” completely satisfied with the passing moment, and shall say to that moment, “Pray tarry, thou art so fair.”
We see that the Devil can win in only one way, namely, by somehow making Faust a contented sensualist. On the other hand, Faust may win in either of two ways. First, he might conceivably go on to his dying day as a bitter pessimist at war with life. In that event he would certainly never be content with the present moment. Secondly, he may outgrow his pessimism, but never come to the point where he is willing to check the flight of Time; when, that is, he shall have no more plans, hopes, dreams, that reach into the future and seem worth living for. The question is, then, whether Mephistopheles, by any lure at his command, can subdue Faust’s forward-ranging idealism. The Devil expects to win; Faust wagers his immortal soul that the Devil will not win. In the old story the Devil appears promptly at the end of the twenty-four years, puts his victim to death, and takes possession of his soul. Goethe’s Mephistopheles is a gentleman of culture for whom such savagery would be impossible. He will wait until his comrade dies a natural death and then put in his claim in the Devil’s fashion; and it will be for the Lord in heaven to decide the case.
Such is the scheme of the drama, but after the compact is made we hear no more of it until just before the end of the Second Part. The action takes the form of a long succession of adventures undertaken for the sake of experience. Duty, obligation, routine, have been left behind. Faust has nothing to do but to go about and try experiments—first in the “little world” of humble folk (the remainder of Part First), and then in the “great world” of court life, government, and war (the Second Part).