"For, when they die,
Their souls are soon dissolved in elements;
But mine must live still to be plagued in hell.
Curs'd be the parents that engender'd me!
No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer
That hath deprived thee of the joys of heaven."

Goethe, with his changed conception of life in general, could not have
accepted this ending. It was indeed Lessing who first pointed out that
the final end for Faust must be his salvation and not his doom; but
Goethe must necessarily have arrived at the same conclusion even if
Lessing had not asserted it. It is clearly visible throughout the play,
by touches here and there, that Faust is not "wholly damnable" as Martha
is. His pity for women, relevant to the main plot of the play, breaks
forth in horror when he discovers the fate of Margaret. "The misery of
this one pierces me to the very marrow, and harrows up my soul; thou art
grinning calmly over the doom of thousands!" And these words follow
immediately after an outbreak of blind rage called forth by
Mephistopheles' famous words, "She is not the first." Such a Faust as
this, we feel, can no more be ultimately lost than can the
Mephistophilis of Marlowe. As for Marlowe's Faust, the plea for his
destruction is the great delusion of a hard theology, and the only
really damnable person in the whole company is the Mephistopheles of
Goethe, who seems from first to last continually to be committing the
sin against the Holy Ghost.

The salvation of Faust is implicit in the whole structure and meaning of
the play. It is worked out mystically in the Second Part, along lines of
human life and spiritual interest far-flung into the sphere that