Thus far therefore we have come: by Faust being saved it is meant that he escapes from the fiend and reaches heaven, reaches the 'higher spheres' of existence, as Goethe expresses it.
But the mere fact of his being saved does not form the essential difference between this drama and earlier versions of the story. The point of real importance is that he is not saved in a downward course by the intervention of some _deus ex machina_, some orthodox counter-charm. His course is not downward. His yearnings are not for bodily ease and sensual enjoyment but for truth--truth, not to be attained by speculation or scientific research but by action and feeling--by struggling onward through error and sin, and by gaining purification and strength from trial and suffering and resistance to evil; so that evil itself is a means to his salvation and Mephistopheles an instrument of good. Rising on the stepping-stones of his dead self he finds at last a certain measure of peace and is in the end reunited to her whose earthly happiness he had indeed ruined but whose love his heart has never forgotten. Indeed it is her love that is allowed to guide him ever aright and to draw him up to higher spheres.
When we once realize this we also realize how meaningless, or how indescribably less full of meaning, the poem would be without its second Part. And yet many, when they speak of Goethe's _Faust_, mean merely the first Part--or perhaps merely the little episode of Gretchen given in Gounod's opera.
I spoke of Goethe's gospel of self-salvation. Since doing so I have recalled to memory some words of his which may seem to refute me. In reference to the song of the angels at the end of the poem he wrote as follows: 'These verses contain the key of Faust's salvation: namely, in Faust himself an ever higher and purer aspiration, and from above eternal love coming to his help; and they are in harmony with our religious conceptions, according to which we cannot attain to heaven by our own strength unless it is helped by divine grace.'
It is true that _after death_ Faust's soul is saved from the demons and is carried up to heaven by God's angels, but Goethe's drama is mainly the drama of Faust's earthly life, and from the 'Prologue in Heaven,' where, as it seems, the Deity undertakes _not_ to help him, but leaves him to fight the battle entirely in his own strength, until the last moment of his earthly existence there is no hint whatever, I think, of anything but self-salvation. On no occasion does he show the slightest sense of his own helplessness or of dependence on God's mercy. As for _remorse_, Goethe regarded it as a false emotion and as unworthy of a man. Although the perfect balance of his mind and his respect for much that he could not himself accept saved him from the almost brutal insouciance of such a form of expression he would probably have agreed with Walt Whitman, who tells us that animals should serve us as an example because 'they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins; they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.'