By way of beginning Faust is taken to Auerbach’s Cellar, where four jolly companions are assembled for a drinking-bout.  He is simply disgusted with the grossness and vulgarity of it all.  He is too old—­so the Devil concludes—­for the role he is playing and must have his youth renewed.  So they repair to an old witch, who gives Faust an elixir that makes him young again.  The scene in the witch’s kitchen was written in Italy in 1788, by which time Goethe had come to think of his hero as an elderly man.  The purpose of the scene was to account for the sudden change of Faust’s character from brooding philosopher to rake and seducer.  Of course the elixir of youth is at the same time a love-philter.

Then come the matchless scenes that body forth the short romance of Margaret, her quick infatuation, her loss of virgin honor, the death of her mother and brother, her shame and misery, her agonizing death in prison.  Here we are in the realm of pure realism, and never again did Goethe’s art sound such depths of tragic pathos.  The atmosphere of the love-tragedy is entirely different from that of the Faust-legend.  Mephistopheles as the abettor of Faust’s amorous passion has no need of magic.  The role of Faust—­that of a man pulled irresistibly by sexual passion, yet constantly tormented by his conscience—­is repulsive, but very human.  As he stands before the prison gate he says that “the whole sorrow of mankind” holds him in its grip.  But this is a part of what he wished for.  He wished for universal experience—­to feel in his own soul all the weal and all the woe of humankind.  At the end of the First Part he has drained the cup of sin and suffering.

Imbedded in the love-tragedy is one scene which will seem out of tune with what has just been said—­the Walpurgis Night.  Here we are back again in the atmosphere of the legend, with its magic, its witchcraft, its gross sensuality.  We hardly recognize our friend Faust when we find him dancing with naked witches and singing lewd songs on the Brocken.  The scene was written in 1800 when Goethe had become a little cynical with respect to the artistic coherence of Faust and looked on it as a “monstrosity.”  It was a part of the early plan that Faust should add to the burden of his soul by frivolously deserting Margaret in the shame of her approaching motherhood and spending some time in gross pleasures.  The visit to the Witches’ Sabbath on the Brocken was afterward invented to carry out this idea.  In itself the idea was a good one; for if Faust was to drain the cup of sorrow, the ingredient of self-contempt could not be left out of the bitter chalice.  A sorrow’s crown of sorrow is not so much remembering happier things as remembering that the happy state came to an end by one’s own wrongdoing.  Still, most modern readers will think that Goethe, in elaborating the Brocken scene as an interesting study of the uncanny and the vile, let his hero sink needlessly far into the mire.