The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' Part 2

I believe it is the fashion with certain critics (especially with those who have read it superficially) to speak of the Second Part of Goethe's _Faust_, as they do of _Paradise Regained_, with a certain superciliousness, as a superfluous excrescence, the artistically almost worthless product of a mind that had worked itself out and had exhausted its 'Idea.'

The truth is that the _first_ Part is only the merest fragment, and although the subject of Faust is endless and can never be fully treated in any one work of art (the whole poem 'necessarily remaining a fragment,' as Goethe himself said), nevertheless the _second_ Part does solve in one of many possible ways the problem left unsolved by the first half of the poem, namely the final attainment of peace and happiness by the human soul, and it is one of the n.o.blest monuments of the human intellect existing in the literature of the world.

Indeed it is, I think, still more than this. It is not merely a monument of intellect but of poetic imagination, and I am much inclined to believe that the _Paradiso_ of Dante and the Second Part of Goethe's _Faust_ are perhaps two of the best, the most infallible, touchstones for discovering whether we really possess what Tennyson calls the 'poetic heart'--not a trumpery aesthetic imitation but the genuine article.

II

GOETHE'S 'FAUST'

PART I

When Goethe wrote to Schiller announcing his intention of once more taking up his unfinished _Faust_, Schiller replied: 'My head grows dizzy when I think of it. The subject of Faust appears to supply such an infinity of material.... I find no circle large enough to contain it.'

Goethe answered: 'I expect to make my work at this barbarous composition, this _Fratze_ [_i.e._ caricature, as he often called it]

less difficult than you imagine. I shall throw a sop to exorbitant demands rather than try to satisfy them. The whole will always remain a fragment'--a fragment, perhaps we may add, in the same sense as even the grandest Gothic building may be said to be only a part of the infinitely great ideal Gothic structure which will never be seen on earth, whereas in the Parthenon we have, or rather the Athenians in the days of Pericles had, something final and complete, something which will tolerate no addition.

If Schiller's head grew dizzy at the thought of a Faust-drama, I fear that one who has no Schiller head on his shoulders may prove a poor guide among the precipices and ravines of Goethe's life-poem, where the path is often very steep and slippery. But I will do my best; and perhaps I had better treat our subject as I proposed. At first I shall point out a little more distinctly some of the characteristics which distinguish Goethe's drama from the earlier versions of the story. Then I shall try to guide you steadily and rapidly through the action of the first Part, offering whatever comment may seem useful, and now and then perhaps asking you to step aside from the track in order to get a peep over some of the aforementioned precipices.

As we have already seen, one great difference between Goethe's _Faust_ and many older versions of the story (including Marlowe's play, but excluding Lessing's fragment) is the fact that the sinner is saved.

Shortly before his death, in 1832, Goethe wrote to Wilhelm v. Humboldt: 'Sixty years ago, when as a young man I first conceived the idea of my _Faust_, the whole plan of it lay clearly before me.' From the first therefore Goethe had conceived the second Part as integral to his poem.

He knew that, if he were to write a _Faust_ at all, Faust must be saved.

We have already arrived at the edge of one of those precipices of which I spoke--Faust must be saved. But what did Goethe mean, or, to ask a fairer question, what do we ourselves mean, by being _saved_? No formula of words seems able to provide us with a satisfactory answer. We can indeed use metaphors drawn from the universe of Time and s.p.a.ce--we can speak of 'another world' and of a 'future life'--but as soon as we attempt to conceive such existence _sub specie aeternitatis_ our imagination fails: to use the metaphor of Socrates, we are dazzled by the insupportable radiance of the eternal and infinite, and seek to rest our eyes by turning them toward shadows, reflexions, images: we accept the beautiful image--the enigma (as St. Paul calls it) or allegory--of a heaven in some far inters.p.a.ce of world and world.

As a poet, and especially as a dramatic poet, Goethe, if he treated the subject at all, was compelled to accept some imaginative conception of a future life, and he could scarcely accept any other but that which was in keeping with the old legend--that heaven of angels and saints and penitents which was the converse of the legendary h.e.l.l and its fiends.

Whether however he was justified by the principles of true dramatic art in his attempt to depict his imaginative conception and to place on the stage a representation of heaven may be doubted. Certainly the effect of Goethe's picture, especially when seen on the stage, is such that one cannot but wish some other solution might have been devised, and one feels as if one understood better than before why it was that Shakespeare's dramatic instinct allowed no such lifting of the veil. You remember the last words of the dying Hamlet: 'The rest is silence.'

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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d.'

Let us however dismiss criticism and turn to what Goethe as poet has given us--perhaps the n.o.blest picture that dramatic art can give: that of a man striving onward and upward in his own strength, confronting (as Goethe says in reference to Shakespeare's plays) the inexorable course of the universe with the might of human will. We might take as the Alpha and Omega of _Faust_ these two lines from the poem:

Es irrt der Mensch so lang er strebt,

and

Nur rastlos betatigt sich der Mann,

the sense of which is that human nature must ever err as long as it strives, but that true manhood is incessant striving.

It is a n.o.ble picture--perhaps the n.o.blest conceivable. You remember Browning's lines:

One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake.

It will have already become evident what abstruse and insoluble questions present themselves--rise, as it were, like ghosts of many an ancient creed, on every side, as soon as we have crossed the threshold of this great Mausoleum of human thought and imagination. There is the spectre of the great Mystery of existence--of Life and Death and Eternity; and that of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; and that of Evil itself--a phantom a.s.suming at times such a visible and substantial shape and then dissolving into thin air as mere negation. And this Mephistopheles--are we to regard him as a self-existent genuine demon of a genuine h.e.l.l, or as our own mind's shadow? Is he something external, something that we can avoid, something that we can put to flight by resisting and get entirely free of--or has each one of us signed with the blood of his human nature a compact with some such spiritual power, with the demonic element within him, with that spirit of negation, of cynicism, of cold unideal utilitarian worldly-wisdom which mocks at faith and love and every high and tender impulse--that part of our nature which, when some poor girl is sinking in the abyss, prompts us to answer our heart's appeal with the sneer of Mephistopheles: 'She isn't the first!'? Surely we can well understand the scorn and contempt which Faust feels for this demon companion of his. 'What canst thou, poor devil, give me?' he exclaims--'Was the human spirit's aspiration Ever understood by such as thou!'

The real action of the play begins with the celebrated monologue of Faust. But this is preceded by a _Dedication_, by the _Prelude in the theatre_, and by the _Prologue in Heaven_, added at various periods of Goethe's life. The _Prelude_ consists of a scene between a poet, a theatrical director and a 'comic person.' It is merely a clever skit in which Goethe has a hit at the public and those who supply it with so-called drama. It has no organic connexion with the play. The _Prologue in Heaven_ begins with the songs of the three Archangels--sonorous verses of majestic harmony, like some grand overture by Bach or Handel. These verses are, I think, meant to intimate the great harmonious order and procession of the natural and moral universe, as Pythagoras intimated them by his 'Music of the Spheres'--those eternal laws against which man, that tiny microcosm, so vainly strives.

Mephistopheles now enters, as in the Book of Job Satan is described entering G.o.d's presence, and, just as it happens in the Bible, the Lord asks him if he knows Faust, and, as in the case of Job, it is G.o.d himself who not only allows but seems even to challenge the demon to try his powers, foretelling his failure although promising no help to Faust.

'It is left to thee,' says the Lord to Mephistopheles. 'Draw this aspiring spirit from his fountain-head and lead him downward on thy path, if thou canst gain a hold upon him, and stand ashamed when thou shalt have to confess that a good man amidst his dim impulses is well conscious of the right way.'

That which distinguishes this scene from the similar scene in _Job_ is its irreverence. Indeed one might almost call it flippancy, and few would deny that at times this flippancy is painful to them. The only excuse that I can find for it is that, rightly or wrongly, Goethe meant us to be pained. I believe that here Mephistopheles represents especially that element in human nature which is perhaps the meanest and most disgusting of all, namely flippant and vulgar irreverence, and although we may not agree with John Wesley's definition of man as 'half brute, half devil,' most of us will probably allow that a certain part of our nature (that part which Mephistopheles seems to represent) is capable of an irreverence and a vulgarity of which the devil himself might almost be ashamed.

The monologue with which the action of the play begins strikes at once the new chord and gives us the leading motive--one so entirely different from that of the old legend--so indescribably n.o.bler than that which is given in the opening monologue of Marlowe's play. But the old framework is still there. Faust renounces book-learning and betakes himself to magic.

I've studied now philosophy, Jurisprudence and medicine, And e'en, alas, theology From end to end with toil and teen, And here I stand with all my lore, Poor fool, no wiser than before.

No dog would live thus any more!

Therefore to magic I have turned, If that through spirit-word and power Many a secret may be learned That I may find the inner force Which binds the world and guides its course, Its germs and vital powers explore And peddle with worthless words no more.

Disgusted with the useless quest after that science which deals only with phenomena and their material causes, he turns to magic, as he does in the old legend; but it is here no diabolic medieval wizardry which shall enable him to summon the devil, for, as we shall see, Faust does not summon the devil; Mephistopheles comes to him uncalled. Goethe has merely used this motive of magic to intimate attainment of perfect knowledge of Nature through the might of genius--that revelation of the inner secrets of the universe which he himself, in what he calls the 't.i.tanic, heaven-storming' period of his life, believed to be attainable by human genius in communion with Nature.

'Nature and Genius' was the watchword of the followers of Rousseau and the apostles of the Sturm und Drang gospel--a return to and communion with Nature, such as Wordsworth preached and practised, and such as Byron also preached but did not practise. Only to the human spirit in full communion with the spirit of Nature, of which it is a part, are revealed her mysteries. All other means, as Faust tells us, are useless.

Mysterious even in the open day Nature within her veil withdraws from view.

What to thy spirit she will not display Cannot be wrenched from her with crowbar or with screw.

Faust turns from his dreary little world of books and charts and retorts and skeletons. He opens the window and gazes at the moon floating in her full glory through the heaven. His heart is filled with a yearning to be 'made one with Nature,' and in words which remind one of certain lines of Wordsworth he exclaims:

O might I on some mountain height, Encircled in thy holy light, With spirits hover round crags and caves, O'er the meadows float on the moonlight's waves.

Then, turning from Nature, he casts once more a look around his dreary cell:

Ah me, this dungeon still I see, This drear accursed masonry, Where e'en the welcome daylight strains But duskly through the painted panes, Hemmed in by many a toppling heap Of books worm-eaten, grey with dust, Which to the vaulted ceiling creep Against the smoky paper thrust, With gla.s.ses, boxes, round me stacked And instruments together hurled, Ancestral lumber stuffed and packed-- Such is my world! And what a world!...

Alas! In living Nature's stead, Where G.o.d his human creatures set, In smoke and mould the fleshless dead And bones of beasts surround me yet.

He takes up the book of the Mystic astrologer Nostradamus and sees in it the sign, or cipher, of the universe. As he gazes a wondrous vision reveals itself: the mystic lines of the cipher seem to live and move and to form one living whole; and in spirit he beholds the Powers of Nature ascending and descending and reaching to each other golden vessels filled with the waters of life and wafting with their wings blessing and harmony through the universe.

And yet from this vision he turns away dissatisfied:

What wondrous vision! yet a vision only!

Where shall I grasp thee, Nature infinite?

And from this cipher of the material universe, this vision of inconceivable immensity and infinite diversity, the human spirit which is not content with the dead bones of science and has entered into communion with Nature cannot but turn away dissatisfied--and even with despair. Let me try to ill.u.s.trate this in a more matter-of-fact way.

The human mind discovers, let us say, that the earth is not the centre of the universe; that the sun is larger than the 'bottom of a cask,' as in the old legend Faust discovered it to be; that there are other worlds quite as large as ours; that this earth of ours is a good deal smaller than the sun and actually revolves round it; that even the sun itself is not the centre of the universe but one of many suns--one of the countless stars in that enormous starry wreath that surrounds us, and which we call the Milky Way. And we direct our telescopes to this Milky Way and find that what we took for nebula is for the most part an acc.u.mulation of countless millions of suns, each perhaps with its planets. Then, as we sweep the sky with our gla.s.s, we discover numberless little wreath-like spiral cloudlets, and find that they also are just such wreaths of countless millions of suns and solar systems, and that these seemingly tiny wreaths are revolving round some central body or system, which itself must revolve round some other, and that again round another ... until imagination fails. Is there, we ask, some final centre of all? some unmoved source of motion? Or is the material universe infinite?