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