Three Philosophical Poets Part 8

Nor is this all. On some sand-dunes that diversified the original beach, an old man and his wife, Philemon and Baucis, lived before the advent of Faust and his improvements. On the hillock, besides their cottage, there stood a small chapel, with a bell which disturbed Faust in his newly built palace, partly by its importunate sound, partly by its Christian suggestions, and partly by reminding him that he was not master of the country altogether, and that something existed in it not the product of his magical will. The old people would not sell out; and in a fit of impatience Faust orders that they should be evicted by force, and transferred to a better dwelling elsewhere. Mephistopheles and his minions execute these orders somewhat roughly: the cottage and chapel are set on fire, and Philemon and Baucis are consumed in the flames, or buried in the ruins.

Faust regrets this accident; but it is one of those inevitable developments of action which a brave man must face, and forget as soon as possible. He had regretted in the same way the unhappiness of Gretchen, and, presumably, the death of Euphorion; but such is romantic life. His will, though shaken, is not extinguished by such misadventures. He would continue, if life could last, doing things that, in some respect, he would be obliged to regret: but he would banish that regret easily, in the pursuit of some new interest, and, on the whole, he would not regret having been obliged to regret them. Otherwise, he would not have shared the whole experience of mankind, but missed the important experience of self-accusation and of self-recovery.

It is impossible to suppose that the citizens he is establishing behind leaky d.y.k.es, so that they may always have something to keep them busy, would have given him unmixed satisfaction if he could really have foreseen their career in its concrete details. Holland is an interesting country, but hardly a spectacle which would long entrance an idealist like Faust, so exacting that he has found the arts and sciences wholly vain, domesticity impossible, and kitchens and beer-cellars beneath consideration. The career of Faust himself had been far more free and active than that of his industrious burghers could ever hope to be. His interest in establishing them is a masterful, irresponsible interest. It is one more arbitrary pa.s.sion, one more selfish illusion.

As he had no conscience in his love, and sought and secured n.o.body's happiness, so he has no conscience in his ambition and in his political architecture; but if only his will is done, he does not ask whether, judged by its fruits, it will be worth doing. As his immense dejection at the beginning, when he was a doctor in his laboratory, was not founded on any real misfortune, but on restlessness and a vague infinite ambition, so his ultimate satisfaction in his work is not founded on any good done, but on a pa.s.sionate wilfulness. He calls the thing he wants for others good, because he now wants to bestow it on them, not because they naturally want it for themselves. Incapable of sympathy, he has a momentary pleasure in policy; and in the last and "highest" expression of his will, in his statesmanship and supposed public spirit, he remains romantic and, if need be, aggressive and criminal.

Meantime, his end is approaching. The smoke from that poor little conflagration turns into shadowy-shapes of want, guilt, care, and death, which come and hover about him. Want is kept off by his wealth, and guilt is transcended by his romantic courage. But care slips through the keyhole, breathes upon him, and blinds him; while death, though he does not see it, follows close upon his heels. Nevertheless, the old man--Faust is in his hundredth year--is undaunted, and all his thoughts are intent on the future, on the work to which he has set his hand. He orders the digging to proceed on the ca.n.a.ls he is building; but the spirits that seem to obey him are getting out of hand, and dig his grave instead.

When he feels death upon him, Faust has one of his most splendid moments of self-a.s.sertion. He has stormed through the world, he says, taking with equal thanks the buffets and rewards of fortune;[22] and the last word of wisdom he has learned is that no man deserves life or freedom who does not daily win them anew. He will leave the d.y.k.es he has thrown up against the sea to protect the nation he has established; a symbol that their health and freedom must consist in perpetual striving against an indomitable foe. The thought of many generations living in that wholesome danger and labour fills him with satisfaction; he could almost say to this moment, in which that prospect opens before his mind's eye, "Stay, thou art so fair."[23] And with these words--a last challenge and mock surrender to Mephistopheles--he sinks into the grave open at his feet.

Who has won the wager? Faust has almost, though not quite, p.r.o.nounced the words which were to give Mephistopheles the victory; but the sense of them is new, and Mephistopheles has not succeeded in making Faust surrender his will to will, his indefinite idealism. Since what satisfies Faust is merely the consciousness that this will to will is to be maintained, and that neither he, nor the colonists he has brought into being, will ever lick the dust, and take comfort, without any further aspiration, in the chance pleasures of the moment. Faust has maintained his enthusiasm for a stormy, difficult, and endless life. He has been true to his romantic philosophy.

He is therefore saved, in the sense in which salvation is defined in the _Prologue in Heaven_, and presently again in the song of the angels that receive his soul when they say: "Whosoever is unflagging in his striving for ever, him we can redeem."[24] This salvation does not hang on any improvement in Faust's character,--he was sinful to the end, and had been G.o.d's unwitting servant from the very beginning,--nor does it lie in any revolution in his fortunes, as if in heaven he were to be differently employed than on earth. He is going to teach life to the souls of young boys, who have died too soon to have had in their own persons any experience of Rathskellers, Gretchens, Helens, and Walpurgisnachts.[25] Teaching (though not exactly in these subjects) had been Doctor Faustus' original profession; and the weariness of it was what had driven him to magic and almost to suicide, until he had escaped into the great world of adventure outside. Certainly, with his new pupils he will not be more content; his romantic restlessness will not forsake him in heaven. Some fine day he will throw his celestial school-books out of the window, and with his pupils after him, go forth to taste life in some windier region of the clouds.

No, Faust is not saved in the sense of being sanctified or brought to a final, eternal state of bliss. The only improvement in his nature has been that he has pa.s.sed, at the beginning of the second part, from private to public activities. If, at the end of this part, he expresses a wish to abandon magic and to live like a man among men, in the bosom of real nature, that wish remains merely Platonic.[26] It is a thought that visited Goethe often during his long career, that it is the part of wisdom to accept life under natural conditions rather than to pretend to evoke the conditions of life out of the will to live. This thought, were it held steadfastly, would const.i.tute an advance from transcendentalism to naturalism. But the spirit of nature is itself romantic. It lives spontaneously, bravely, without premeditation, and for the sake of living rather than of enjoying or attaining anything final. And under natural conditions, the vicissitudes of an endless life would be many; and there could be no question of an ultimate goal, nor even of an endless progress in any particular direction. The veering of life is part of its vitality,--it is essential to romantic irony and to romantic pluck.

The secret of what is serious in the moral of _Faust_ is to be looked for in Spinoza,--the source of what is serious in the philosophy of Goethe. Spinoza has an admirable doctrine, or rather insight, which he calls seeing things under the form of eternity. This faculty is fundamental in the human mind; ordinary perception and memory are cases of it. Therefore, when we use it to deal with ultimate issues, we are not alienated from experience, but, on the contrary, endowed with experience and with its fruits. A thing is seen under the form of eternity when all its parts or stages are conceived in their true relations, and thereby conceived together. The complete biography of Caesar is Caesar seen under the form of eternity. Now the complete biography of Faust, Faust seen under the form of eternity, shows forth his salvation. G.o.d and Faust himself, in his last moment of insight, see that to have led such a life, in such a spirit, _was_ to be saved; it was to be the sort of man a man should be. The blots on that life were helpful and necessary blots; the pa.s.sions of it were necessary and creative pa.s.sions. To have felt such perpetual dissatisfaction is truly satisfactory; such desire for universal experience is the right experience. You are saved in that you lived well; saved not after you have stopped living well, but during the whole process. Your destiny has been to be the servant of G.o.d. That G.o.d and your own conscience should p.r.o.nounce this sentence is your true salvation. Your worthiness is thereby established under the form of eternity.

The play, in its philosophic development, ends here; but Goethe added several more details and scenes, with that abundance, that love, of symbolic pictures and poetic epigrams which characterizes the whole second part. As Faust expires, or rather before he does so, Mephistopheles posts one of his little demons at each aperture of the hero's body, lest the soul should slip out without being caught. At the same time a bevy of angels descends, scattering the red roses of love and singing its praises. These roses, if they touch Mephistopheles and his demons, turn to b.a.l.l.s of fire; and although fire is their familiar element, they are scorched and scared away. The angels are thus enabled to catch the soul of Faust at their leisure, and bear it away triumphantly.

It goes without saying that this fight of little boys over a fluttering b.u.t.terfly cannot be what really determines the issue of the wager and the salvation of Faust; but Goethe, in his conversations with Eckermann, justifies this intervention of a sort of mechanical accident, by the a.n.a.logy of Christian doctrine. Grace is needed, besides virtue; and the intercession of Gretchen and the Virgin Mary, like that of the Virgin Mary, Lucia, and Beatrice, in Dante's case, and the stratagem of the b.a.l.l.s of fire, all stand for this external condition of salvation.

This intervention of grace is, at bottom, only a new symbol for the essential justification, under the form of eternity, of what is imperfect and insufficient in time. The chequered and wilful life of Faust is not righteous in any of its parts; yet righteousness is imputed to it as a whole; divine love accepts it as sufficient; speculative reason declares that to be the best possible life which, to humdrum understanding, seems a series of faults and of failures. If the foretaste of his new Holland fills, from a distance, the dying Faust with satisfaction, how much more must the wonderful career of Faust himself deserve to be accepted and envied, and proclaimed to be its own excuse for being! The faults of Faust in time are not counted against him in eternity. His crimes and follies were blessings in disguise. Did they not render his life interesting and fit to make a poem of? Was it not by falling into them, and rising out of them, that Faust was Faust at all? This insight is the higher reason, the divine love, supervening to save him. What ought to be imperfect in time is, i because of its very imperfection there, perfect when I viewed under the form of eternity. To live, to live just as we do, that--if we could only realize it--is the purpose and the crown of living. We must seek improvement; we must be dissatisfied with ourselves; that is the appointed att.i.tude, the histrionic pose, that is to keep the ball rolling. But while we feel this dissatisfaction we are perfectly satisfactory, and while we play our game and constantly lose it, we are winning the game for G.o.d.

Even this scene, however, did not satisfy the prolific fancy of the poet, and he added a final one,--the apotheosis or _Himmelfahrt_ of Faust. In the Campo Santo at Pisa Goethe had seen a fresco representing various anchorites dwelling on the flanks of some sacred mountain,--Sinai, Carmel, or Athos,--each in his little cave or hermitage; and above them, in the large s.p.a.ce of sky, flights of angels were seen rising towards the Madonna. Through such a landscape the poet now shows us the soul of Faust carried slowly upwards.

This scene has been regarded as inspired by Catholic ideas, whereas the _Prologue in Heaven_ was Biblical and Protestant; and Goethe himself says that his "poetic intention" could best be rendered by images borrowed from the tradition of the mediaeval church. But in truth there is nothing Catholic about the scene, except the names or t.i.tles of the personages. What they say is all sentimental landscape-painting or vague mysticism, such as might go with any somewhat nebulous piety; and much is actually borrowed from Swedenborg. What is Swedenborgian, however,--such as the notion of heavenly instruction, pa.s.sage from sphere to sphere, and looking through other people's eyes,--is in turn a mere form of expression. The "poetic intention" of the author is, as we have seen, altogether Spinozitic. Undoubtedly he conceives that the soul of Faust is to pa.s.s, in another world, through some new series of experiences. But that destiny is not his salvation; it is the continuance of his trial. The famous chorus at the very end repeats, with an interesting variation, the same contrast we have seen before between the point of view of time and that of eternity. Everything transitory, says the mystic chorus,[27] is only an image; here (that is, under the form of eternity) the insufficient is turned into something actual and complete; and what seemed in experience an endless pursuit becomes to speculation a perfect fulfilment. The ideal of something infinitely attractive and essentially inexhaustible--the eternal feminine, as Goethe calls it--draws life on from stage to stage.

Gretchen and Helen had been symbols of this ideal; Goethe's green old age had felt, to the very last, the charm of woman, the sweetness and the sorrow of loving what he could not hope to possess, and what, in its ideal perfection, necessarily eludes possession. He had reconciled himself, not without tears, to this desire without hope, and, like Piccarda in the _Paradiso_, he had blessed the hand that gave the pa.s.sion and denied the happiness.[28] Thus, in dreaming of one satisfaction and renouncing it, he had found a satisfaction of another kind. _Faust_ ends on the same philosophical level on which it began,--the level of romanticism. The worth of life lies in pursuit, not in attainment therefore, everything is worth pursuing, and nothing brings satisfaction--save this endless destiny itself.

Such is the official moral of _Faust_, and what we may call its general philosophy. But, as we saw just now, this moral is only an afterthought, and is far from exhausting the philosophic ideas which the poem contains. Here is a scheme for experience; but experience, in filling it out, opens up many vistas; and some of these reveal deeper and higher things than experience itself. The path of the pilgrim and the inns he stops at are neither the whole landscape he sees as he travels, nor the true shrine he is making for. And the incidental philosophy or philosophies of Goethe's _Faust_ are, to my mind, often better than its ultimate philosophy. The first scene of the second part, for instance, is better, poetically and philosophically, than the last. It shows a deeper sense for the realities of nature and of the soul, and it is more sincere. Goethe there is interpreting nature with Spinoza; he is not dreaming with Swedenborg, nor talking equivocal paradoxes with Hegel.

In fact, the great merit of the romantic att.i.tude in poetry, and of the transcendental method in philosophy, is that they put us back at the beginning of our experience. They disintegrate convention, which is often c.u.mbrous and confused, and restore us to ourselves, to immediate perception and primordial will. That, as it would seem, is the true and inevitable starting-point. Had we not been born, had we not peeped into this world, each out of his personal eggsh.e.l.l, this world might indeed have existed without us, as a thousand undiscoverable worlds may now exist; but for us it would not have existed. This obvious truth would not need to be insisted on but for two reasons: one that conventional knowledge, such as our notions of science and morality afford, is often top-heavy; a.s.serts and imposes on us much more than our experience warrants,--our experience, which is our only approach to reality. The other reason is the reverse or counterpart of this; for conventional knowledge often ignores and seems to suppress parts of experience no less actual and important for us as those parts on which the conventional knowledge itself is reared. The public world is too narrow for the soul, as well as too mythical and fabulous. Hence the double critical labour and reawakening which romantic reflection is good for,--to cut off the dead branches and feed the starving shoots. This philosophy, as Kant said, is a cathartic: it is purgative and liberating; it is intended to make us start afresh and start right.

It follows that one who has no sympathy with such a philosophy is a comparatively conventional person. He has a second-hand mind. Faust has a first-hand mind, a truly free, sincere, courageous soul. It follows also, however, that one who has no philosophy but this has no wisdom; he can say nothing that is worth carrying away; everything in him is att.i.tude and nothing is achievement. Faust, and especially Mephistopheles, do have other philosophies on top of their transcendentalism; for this is only a method, to be used in reaching conclusions that shall be critically safeguarded and empirically grounded. Such outlooks, such vistas into nature, are scattered liberally through the pages of _Faust_. Words of wisdom diversify this career of folly, as exquisite scenes fill this tortuous and overloaded drama. The mind has become free and sincere, but it has remained bewildered.

The literary merits of Goethe's _Faust_ correspond accurately with its philosophical excellences. In the prologue in the theatre Goethe himself has described them; much scenery, much wisdom, some folly, great wealth of incident and characterization; and behind, the soul of a poet singing with all sincerity and fervour the visions of his life. Here is profundity, inwardness, honesty, waywardness; here are the most touching accents of nature, and the most varied a.s.sortment of curious lore and grotesque fancies. This work, says Goethe (in a quatrain intended as an epilogue, but not ultimately inserted in the play),--this work is like human life: it has a beginning, it has an end; but it has no totality, it is not one whole.[29] How, indeed, should we draw the sum of an infinite experience that is without conditions to determine it, and without goals in which it terminates? Evidently all a poet of pure experience can do is to represent some s.n.a.t.c.hes of it, more or less prolonged; and the more prolonged the experience represented is the more it will be a collection of s.n.a.t.c.hes, and the less the last part of it will have to do with the beginning. Any character which we may attribute to the whole of what we have surveyed would fail to dominate it, if that whole had been larger, and if we had had memory or foresight enough to include other parts of experience differing altogether in kind from the episodes we happen to have lived through. To be miscellaneous, to be indefinite, to be unfinished, is essential to the romantic life. May we not say that it is essential to all life, in its immediacy; and that only in reference to what is not life--to objects, ideals, and unanimities that cannot be experienced but may only be conceived--can life become rational and truly progressive? Herein we may see the radical and inalienable excellence of romanticism; its sincerity, freedom, richness, and infinity. Herein, too, we may see its limitations, in that it cannot fix or trust any of its ideals, and blindly believes the universe to be as wayward as itself, so that nature and art are always slipping through its fingers. It is obstinately empirical, and will never learn anything from experience.

[1] Eckermann, Conversation of May 6, 1827: "Das ist zwar ein wirksamer, manches erklarender, guter Gedanke, aber es ist keine Idee die dem Ganzen ... zugrunde liege."

[2] _Faust_, Part it-i. Act v. 375-82:

Ich bin nur durch die Welt gerannt; Ein jed' Gel.u.s.t ergriff ich bei den Haaren, Was nicht genugte, liess ich fahren, Was mir entwischte, liess ich ziehn.

Ich habe nur begehrt und nur vollbracht Und abermals gewunscht und so mit Macht Mein Leben durchgesturmt; erst gross und machtig, Nun aber geht es weise, geht bedachtig.

[3] _Faust_, Part i., _Studierzimmer_, i.:

Welch Schauspiel! aber, ach! ein Schauspiel nur!

Wo fa.s.s' ich dich, unendliche Natur?

Euch, Bruste, wo?

[4] _Faust_, Part i., _Studierzimmer_:

Du, Geist der Erde, bist mir naher; Schon fuhl' ich meine Krafte hoher, Schon gluh' ich wie von neuem Wein; Ich fuhle Mut, mich in die Welt zu wagen, Der Erde Weh, der Erde Gluck zu tragen,...

Mit Sturmen mich herumzuschlagen Und in des Schiffbruchs Knirschen nicht zu zagen.

[5] _Faust, Prolog im Himmel_:

Mit den Toten Hab' ich mich niemals gern befangen.

Am meisten lieb' ich mir die vollen, frischen w.a.n.gen.

Fur einen Leichnam bin ich nicht zu Haus; Mir geht es, wie der Katze mit der Maus....

Von Sonn' und Welten weiss ich nichts zu sagen, Ich sehe nur, wie sich die Menschen plagen.

[6] _Faust, Prolog im Himmel_:

Staub soll er fressen, und mit l.u.s.t.

[7] Ibid.:

Es irrt der Mensch, so lang' er strebt.

Ein guter Mensch in seinem dunkeln Drange Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewusst.

[8] _Faust_, Part ii. Act v.:

Ja! diesem Sinne bin ich ganz ergeben.

Das ist der Weisheit letzter Schluss: Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben, Der taglich sie erobern muss.

[9] Ibid., Part i., _Prolog im Himmel_:

Des Menschen Thatigkeit kann allzu leicht erschlaffen, Er liebt sich bald die unbedingte Ruh; Drum geb' ich gem ihm den Gesellen zu, Der reizt und wirkt und muss als Teufel schaffen.

[10] Ibid.:

Das Werdende, das ewig wirkt und lebt, Umfa.s.s' euch mit der Liebe holden Schranken, Und was in schw.a.n.kender Erscheinung schwebt, Befestiget mit dauernden Gedanken!