There is nothing in the whole of literature which could afford us a finer and more fundamental account of the battle between paganism and idealism in the soul of man, than the comparison between the Fausts of Marlowe and of Goethe.  But before we come to this, it may be interesting to notice two or three points of special interest in the latter drama, which show how entirely pagan are the temptations of Faust.

The first passage to notice is that opening one on Easter Day, where the devil approaches Faust in the form of a dog.  Choruses of women, disciples, and angels are everywhere in the air; and although the dog appears first in the open, yet the whole emphasis of the passage is upon the contrast between that brilliant Easter morning with its sunshine and its music, and the close and darkened study into which Faust has shut himself.  It is true he goes abroad, but it is not to join with the rest in their rejoicing, but only as a spectator, with all the superiority as well as the wistfulness of his illicit knowledge.  Evidently the impression intended is that of the wholesomeness of the crowd and the open air.  He who goes in with the rest of men in their sorrow and their rejoicing cannot but find the meaning of Easter morning for himself.  It is a festival of earth and the spring, an earth idealised, whose spirit is incarnate in the risen Christ.  Faust longs to share in that, and on Easter Eve tries in vain to read his Gospel and to feel its power.  But the only cure for such morbid introspectiveness as his, is to cast oneself generously into the common life of man, and the refusal to do this invites the pagan devil.

Another point of interest is the coming of the Erdgeist immediately after the Weltschmerz.  The sorrow that has filled his heart with its melancholy sense of the vanity and nothingness of life, and the thousandfold pity and despondency which go to swell that sad condition, are bound to create a reaction more or less violent towards that sheer worldliness which is the essence of paganism.  In Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress it is immediately after his floundering in the Slough of Despond that Christian is accosted by Mr. Worldly Wiseman.  Precisely the same experience is recorded here in Faust, although the story is subtler and more complex than that of Bunyan.  The Erdgeist which comes to the saddened scholar is a noble spirit, vivifying and creative.  It is the world in all its glorious fullness of meaning, quite as true an idealism as that which is expressed in the finest spirit of the Greeks.  But for Faust it is too noble.  His morbid gloom has enervated him, and the call of the splendid earth is beyond him.  So there comes, instead of it, a figure as much poorer than that of Worldly Wiseman as the Erdgeist is richer.  Wagner represents the poor commonplace world of the wholly unideal.  It is infinitely beneath the soul of Faust, and yet for the time it conquers him, being nearer to his mood.  Thus Mephistopheles finds his opportunity.  The scholar, embittered with the sense that knowledge is denied to him, will take to mere action; and the action will not be great like that which the Erdgeist would have prompted, but poor and unsatisfying to any nobler spirit than that of Wagner.