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THE DESCENT 257
pare the German and American methods of treating the big religious subject. The different points of view presented by the two stories are these. " Ben Hur " says there are but two sides of human Life, Good and Bad. Man cannot save himself; God will save him. For Christ the problem of sexual sin did not exist. The " spirit " in the end overcomes the latter. The story reveals how the Romans, representing hard material forces, are overcome by the spirit of Christianity. The saving element is belief in a higher power. The Romans are not to be overcome by human force but by spiritual. In the final scene of the picture Ben Hur drops his sword, but not in a manner to suggest that he is overcome by spiritual grace, has undergone the act of conversion, that he has realised truth and is speaking it from his heart. He suggests rather that his sword is being taken from him by manual force, that in fact he is overcome by the sense of a powerful manual force, not by spiritual conversion. Of course, this is in harmony with what goes before, the mad excitement of the chariot race and the exciting but pictorial beauty of the sea fight. The whole thing is in a materialistic vein.
"Faust" contains Goethe's argument that man cannot be saved by the love of God. No one can save him except himself. He cannot be saved by pity and compassion but by courage. Philosophy would seem to be the saving element. In the picture Love is made the atoning and saving element. It rules out Goethe and substitutes sentimental slush. Goethe was concerned with the triumph of the evil, in the ruin of human beings. An accomplished, but pleasure-loving and weak-willed man leagues himself to the Devil, the embodiment of superhuman evil. Faust sells himself for the sake of short-lived sensual gratification — the possession of the virgin Gretchen. The love scenes are meant to be scenes of mockery. In the picture they are scenes of bathos. According to one eminent interpreter, " the tissue of the piece is mockery, misery and disaster." According to Murnau, or whoever was responsible for the ending