Mephistopheles.
I greet the learned gentleman!
I’ve got a proper sweating ’neath your ban.
Faust.
What is thy name?
Mephistopheles.
What is my power were better,
From one who so despises the mere letter,
Who piercing through the coarse material shell,
With Being’s inmost substance loves to dwell.
Faust.
Yes, but you gentlemen proclaim
Your nature mostly in your name;
Destroyer, God of Flies, the Adversary,[1]
Such names their own interpretation carry.
But say, who art thou?
Mephistopheles.
I am a part of that primordial Might,
Which always wills the wrong, and always works the right.
Faust.
You speak in riddles; the interpretation?
Mephistopheles.
I am the Spirit of Negation:
And justly so; for all that is created
Deserves to be annihilated.
’Twere better, thus, that there were no creation.
Thus everything that you call evil,
Destruction, ruin, death, the devil,
Is my pure element and sphere.
Faust.
Thou nam’st thyself a part, yet standest wholly here.
Mephistopheles.
I speak to thee the truth exact,
The plain, unvarnished, naked fact,
Though man, that microcosm of folly deems
Himself the compact whole he seems.
Part of the part I am that erst was all,
Part of the darkness, from whose primal pall
Was born the light, the proud rebellious Light,
Which now disputeth with its mother Night,
