It may seem strange to pass immediately from the time of Marcus Aurelius
to Marlowe and Goethe, and yet the tale upon which these two poets
wrought is one whose roots are very deep in history, and which revives
in a peculiarly vital and interesting fashion the age-long story of
man's great conflict. Indeed the saga on which it is founded belongs
properly to no one period, but is the tragic drama of humanity. It
tells, through all the ages, the tale of the struggle between earth and
the spiritual world above it; and the pagan forms which are introduced
take us back into the classical mythology, and indeed into still more
ancient times.
The hero of the story must be clearly distinguished from Fust the
printer, a wealthy goldsmith of Mayence, who, in the middle of the
fifteenth century, was partner with Gutenberg in the new enterprise of
printing. Robert Browning, in _Fust and his Friends_, tells us, with
great vivacity, the story of the monks who tried to exorcise the magic
spirits from Fust, but forgot their psalm, and so caused an awkward
pause during which Fust retired and brought out a printed copy of the
psalm for each of them. The only connection with magic which this Fust
had, was that so long as this or any other process was kept secret, it
was attributed to supernatural powers.
Faust, although a contemporary of Fust the printer, was a very different
character. Unfortunately, our information about him comes almost
entirely from his enemies, and their accounts are by no means sparing in
abuse. Trithemius, a Benedictine abbot of Spanheim in the early part of
the sixteenth century, writes of him with the most virulent contempt, as
a debauched person and a criminal whose overweening vanity arrogated to
itself the most preposterous supernatural powers. It would appear that
he had been some sort of travelling charlatan, whose performing horse
and dog were taken for evil spirits, like Esmeralda's goat in Victor
Hugo's _Notre Dame_. Even Melanchthon and Luther seem to have shared the
common view of him, and at last there was published at Frankfurt the
_Historie of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr. John Faustus_.
The date of this work is 1587, and a translation of it appeared in
London in 1592. It is a discursive composition, founded upon
reminiscences of some ancient stroller who lived very much by his wits;
but it took such a hold upon the imagination of the time that, by the
latter part of the sixteenth century, Faust had become the necromancer
_par excellence_. Into the Faust-book there drifted endless necromantic
lore from the Middle Ages and earlier times. It seems to have had some
connection with Jewish legends of magicians who invoked the _Satanim_,
or lowest grade of elemental spirits not unlike the "elementals" of
modern popular spiritualism. It was the story of a Christian selling his
soul to the powers of darkness, and it had behind it one of the poems of
Hrosvitha of Gandersheim which relates a similar story of an archdeacon
of Cilicia of the sixth century, and also the popular tradition of Pope
Sylvester the Second, who was suspected of having made the same bargain.
Yet, as Lebahn says, "The Faust-legend in its complete form was the
creation of orthodox Protestantism. Faust is the foil to Luther, who
worsted the Devil with his ink-bottle when he sought to interrupt the
sacred work of rendering the Bible into the vulgar tongue." This legend,
by the way, is a peculiarly happy one, for Luther not only aimed his
ink-bottle at the Devil, but most literally and effectively hit him with
it, when he wrote those books that changed the face of religious Europe.
The _Historie_ had an immense and immediate popularity, and until well
into the nineteenth century it was reproduced and sold throughout
Europe. As we read it, we cannot but wonder what manner of man it really
was who attracted to himself such age-long hatred and fear, and held the
interest of the centuries. In many respects, doubtless, his story was
like that of Paracelsus, in whom the world has recognised the struggle
of much good with almost inevitable evil, and who, if he had been born
in another generation, might have figured as a commanding spiritual or
scientific authority.
Christopher Marlowe was born at Canterbury in 1564, two months before
Shakespeare. He was the son of a shoemaker, and was the pupil of Kett, a
fellow and tutor of Corpus Christi College. This tutor was probably
accountable for much in the future Marlowe, for he was a mystic, and was
burnt for heresy in 1589. After a short and extremely violent life, the
pupil followed his master four years later to the grave, having been
killed in a brawl under very disgraceful circumstances. He only lived
twenty-nine years, and yet he, along with Kyd, changed the literature of
England. Lyly's Pastorals had been the favourite reading of the people
until these men came, keen and audacious, to lead and sing their "brief,
fiery, tempestuous lives." When they wrote their plays and created their
villains, they were not creating so much as remembering. Marlowe's plays
were four, and they were all influential. His _Edward the Second_ was
the precursor of the historical plays of Shakespeare. His other plays
were _Tamburlaine the Great_, _Dr. Faustus_, and _The Jew of Malta_
(Barabbas). These three were all upon congenial lines, expressing that
Titanism in revolt against the universe which was the inspiring spirit
of Marlowe. But it was the character of Faust that especially fascinated
him, for he found in the ancient magician a pretty clear image of his
own desires and ambitions. He was one of those who loved "the dangerous
edge of things," and, as Charles Lamb said, "delighted to dally with
interdicted subjects." The form of the plays is loose and broken, and
yet there is a pervading larger unity, not only of dramatic action, but
of spirit. The laughter is loud and coarse, the terror unrelieved, and
the splendour dazzling. There is no question as to the greatness of this
work as permanent literature. It has long outlived the amazing
detractions of Hallam and of Byron, and will certainly be read so long
as English is a living tongue.
The next stage in this curious history is a peculiarly interesting one.
In former days there sprang up around every great work of art a forest
of slighter literature, in the shape of chap-books, ballads, and puppet
plays. By far the most popular of the puppet plays was that founded upon
Marlowe's _Faust_. The German version continued to be played in Germany
until three hundred years later. Goethe constructed his masterpiece
largely by its help. English actors travelling abroad had brought back
the story to its native land of Germany, and in every town the bands of
strolling players sent Marlowe's great conception far and wide. In
England also the puppet play was extremely popular. The drama had moved
from the church to the market-place, and much of the Elizabethan drama
appeared in this quaint form, played by wooden figures upon diminutive
boards. To the modern mind nothing could be more incongruous than the
idea of a solemn drama forced to assume a guise so grotesque and
childish; but, according to Jusserand, much of the stage-work was
extremely ghastly, and no doubt it impressed the multitude. There is
even a story of some actors who had gone too far, and into the midst of
whose play the real devil suddenly descended with disastrous results. It
must, however, be allowed that even the serious plays were not without
an abundant element of grotesqueness. The occasion for Faustus' final
speech of despair, for instance, was the lowering and raising before his
eyes of two or three gilded arm-chairs, representing the thrones in
heaven upon which he would never sit. It does not seem to have occurred
to the audience as absurd that heaven should be regarded as a kind of
drawing-room floating in the air, and indeed that idea is perhaps not
yet obsolete. However that may be, it is quite evident that such
machinery, ill-suited though it was to the solemnities of tragedy, must
have been abundantly employed in the puppet plays.
The German puppet play of _Faust_ has been transcribed by Dr. Hamm and
translated by Mr. Hedderwick into English. It was obtained at first with
great difficulty, for the showmen kept the libretto secret, and could
not be induced to lend it. Dr. Hamm, however, followed the play round,
listening and committing much of it to memory, and his version was
finally completed when his amanuensis obtained for a day or two the
original manuscript after plying one of the assistants with much beer
and wine. It was a battered book, thumb-marked and soaked with lamp oil,
but it has passed on to posterity one of the most remarkable pieces of
dramatic work which have come down to us from those times.
In all essentials the play is the same as that of Marlowe, except for
the constant interruptions of the clown Casper, who intrudes with his
absurdities even into the most sacred parts of the action, and entirely
mars the dreadful solemnity of the end by demanding his wages from Faust
while the clock is striking the diminishing intervals of the last hour.
It was through this curious intermediary that Goethe went back to
Marlowe and created what has been well called "the most mystic poetic
work ever created," and "the _Divina Commedia_ of the eighteenth
century." Goethe's _Faust_ is elemental, like _Hamlet_. Readers of
_Wilhelm Meister_ will remember how profound an impression _Hamlet_ had
made upon Goethe's mind, and this double connection between Goethe and
the English drama forms one of the strongest and most interesting of all
the links that bind Germany to England. His _Faust_ was the direct
utterance of Goethe's own inner life. He says: "The marionette folk of
_Faust_ murmured with many voices in my soul. I, too, had wandered into
every department of knowledge, and had returned early enough, satisfied
with the vanity of science. And life, too, I had tried under various
aspects, and always came back sorrowing and unsatisfied." Thus _Faust_
lay in the depths of Goethe's life as a sort of spiritual pool,
mirroring all its incidents and thoughts. The play was begun originally
in the period of his _Sturm und Drang_, and it remained unpublished
until, in old age, the ripened mind of the great poet took it over
practically unchanged, and added the calmer and more intellectual parts.
The whole of the Marguerite story belongs to the earlier days.
There is nothing in the whole of literature which could afford us a
finer and more fundamental account of the battle between paganism and
idealism in the soul of man, than the comparison between the _Fausts_ of
Marlowe and of Goethe. But before we come to this, it may be interesting
to notice two or three points of special interest in the latter drama,
which show how entirely pagan are the temptations of Faust.
The first passage to notice is that opening one on Easter Day, where the
devil approaches Faust in the form of a dog. Choruses of women,
disciples, and angels are everywhere in the air; and although the dog
appears first in the open, yet the whole emphasis of the passage is upon
the contrast between that brilliant Easter morning with its sunshine and
its music, and the close and darkened study into which Faust has shut
himself. It is true he goes abroad, but it is not to join with the rest
in their rejoicing, but only as a spectator, with all the superiority as
well as the wistfulness of his illicit knowledge. Evidently the
impression intended is that of the wholesomeness of the crowd and the
open air. He who goes in with the rest of men in their sorrow and their
rejoicing cannot but find the meaning of Easter morning for himself. It
is a festival of earth and the spring, an earth idealised, whose spirit
is incarnate in the risen Christ. Faust longs to share in that, and on
Easter Eve tries in vain to read his Gospel and to feel its power. But
the only cure for such morbid introspectiveness as his, is to cast
oneself generously into the common life of man, and the refusal to do
this invites the pagan devil.
Another point of interest is the coming of the _Erdgeist_ immediately
after the _Weltschmerz_. The sorrow that has filled his heart with its
melancholy sense of the vanity and nothingness of life, and the
thousandfold pity and despondency which go to swell that sad condition,
are bound to create a reaction more or less violent towards that sheer
worldliness which is the essence of paganism. In Bunyan's _Pilgrim's
Progress_ it is immediately after his floundering in the Slough of
Despond that Christian is accosted by Mr. Worldly Wiseman. Precisely the
same experience is recorded here in Faust, although the story is subtler
and more complex than that of Bunyan. The _Erdgeist_ which comes to the
saddened scholar is a noble spirit, vivifying and creative. It is the
world in all its glorious fullness of meaning, quite as true an idealism
as that which is expressed in the finest spirit of the Greeks. But for
Faust it is too noble. His morbid gloom has enervated him, and the call
of the splendid earth is beyond him. So there comes, instead of it, a
figure as much poorer than that of Worldly Wiseman as the _Erdgeist_ is
richer. Wagner represents the poor commonplace world of the wholly
unideal. It is infinitely beneath the soul of Faust, and yet for the
time it conquers him, being nearer to his mood. Thus Mephistopheles
finds his opportunity. The scholar, embittered with the sense that
knowledge is denied to him, will take to mere action; and the action
will not be great like that which the _Erdgeist_ would have prompted,
but poor and unsatisfying to any nobler spirit than that of Wagner.
The third incident which we may quote is that of _Walpurgis-Night_. Some
critics would omit this part, which, they say, "has naught of interest
in bearing on the main plot of the poem." Nothing could be more mistaken
than such a judgment. In the _Walpurgis-Night_ we have the play ending
in that sheer paganism which is the counterpart to Easter Day at the
beginning. Walpurgis has a strange history in German folklore. It is
said that Charlemagne, conquering the German forests for the Christian
faith, drove before him a horde of recalcitrant pagans, who took a last
shelter among the trees of the Brocken. There, on the pagan May-day, in
order to celebrate their ancient rites unmolested, they dressed
themselves in all manner of fantastic and bestial masks, so as to
frighten off the Christianising invaders from the revels. The Walpurgis
of _Faust_ exhibits paganism at its lowest depths. Sir Mammon is the
host who invites his boisterous guests to the riot of his festive night.
The witches arrive on broomsticks and pitchforks; singing, not without
significance, the warning of woe to all climbers--for here aspiration of
any sort is a dangerous crime. The Crane's song reveals the fact that
pious men are here, in the Blocksberg, united with devils; introducing
the same cynical and desperate disbelief in goodness which Nathaniel
Hawthorne has told in similar fashion in his tale of _Young Goodman
Brown_; and the most horrible touch of all is introduced when Faust in
disgust leaves the revel, because out of the mouth of the witch with
whom he had been dancing there had sprung a small red mouse. Throughout
the whole play the sense of holy and splendid ideals shines at its
brightest in lurid contrast with the hopeless and sordid dark of the
pagan earth.
Returning now to our main point, the comparison of Marlowe's play with
Goethe's, let us first of all contrast the temptations in the two.
Marlowe's play is purely theological. Jusserand finely describes the
underlying tragedy of it. "Faust, like Tamburlaine, and like all the
heroes of Marlowe, lives in thought, beyond the limit of the possible.
He thirsts for a knowledge of the secrets of the universe, as the other
thirsted for domination over the world." Both are Titanic figures
exactly in the pagan sense, but the form of Faustus' Titanism is the
revolt against theology. From the early days of the Christian
persecutions, there had been a tendency to divorce the sacred from the
secular, and to regard all that was secular as being of the flesh and
essentially evil. The mediæval views of celibacy, hermitage, and the
monastic life, had intensified this divorce; and while many of the monks
were interested in human secular learning, yet there was a feeling,
which in many cases became a kind of conscience, that only the divine
learning was either legitimate or safe for a man's eternal well-being.
The Faust of Marlowe is the Prometheus of his own day. The new knowledge
of the Renaissance had spread like fire across Europe, and those who saw
in it a resurrection of the older gods and their secrets, unhesitatingly
condemned it. The doctrine of immortality had entirely supplanted the
old Greek ideal of a complete earthly life for man, and all that was
sensuous had come to be regarded as intrinsically sinful. Thus we have
for background a divided universe, in which there is a great gulf fixed
between this world and the next, and a hopeless cleavage between the
life of body and that of spirit.
In this connection we may also consider the women of the two plays.
Charles Lamb has asked, "What has Margaret to do with Faust?" and has
asserted that she does not belong to the legend at all. Literally, this
is true, in so far as there is no Margaret in the earlier form of the
play, whose interest was, as we have seen, essentially theological. Yet
Margaret belongs to the essential story and cannot be taken out of it.
She is the "eternal feminine," in which the battle between the spirit
and the flesh, between idealism and paganism, will always make its last
stand. Even Marlowe has to introduce a woman. His Helen is, indeed, a
mere incident, for the real bride of the soul must be either theological
or secular science; and yet so essential and so poignant is the question
of woman to the great drama, that the passage in which the incident of
Helen is introduced far surpasses anything else in Marlowe's play, and
indeed is one of the grandest and most beautiful in all literature.
"Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,
And burned the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
* * * * *
O, thou art fairer than the evening air,
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars."
Still, Marlowe's _motif_ is not sex but theology. The former heretics
whom we named had been saved--Theophilus by the intervention of the
Blessed Virgin Mary, and Pope Sylvester snatched from the very jaws of
hell--by a return to orthodoxy. That was in the Roman Catholic days, but
the savage antithesis between earth and heaven had been taken over by
the conscience of Protestantism, making a duality which rendered life
always intellectually anxious and almost impossible. It is this
condition in which Marlowe finds himself. The good and the evil angels
stand to right and left of his Faustus, pleading with him for and
against secular science on the one side and theological knowledge on the
other. For that is the implication behind the contest between magic and
Christianity. "The Faust of the earlier Faust-books and ballads, dramas,
puppet shows, which grew out of them, is damned because he prefers the
human to the divine knowledge. He laid the Holy Scriptures behind the
door and under the bench, refused to be called Doctor of Theology, but
preferred to be called Doctor of Medicine." Obviously here we find
ourselves in a very lamentable _cul-de-sac_. Idealism has floated apart
from the earth and all its life, and everything else than theology is
condemned as paganism.
Goethe changes all that. In the earlier _Weltschmerz_ passages some
traces of it still linger, where Faust renounces theology; but even
there it is not theology alone that he renounces, but philosophy,
medicine, and jurisprudence as well, so that his renunciation is
entirely different from that of Marlowe's Faustus. In Goethe it is no
longer one doctrine or one point of view against another doctrine or
another point of view. It is life, vitality in all its forms, against
all mere doctrine whatsoever.
"Grey, dearest friend, is every theory,
But golden-green is the tree of life."
Thus the times had passed into a sense of the limits of theology such as
has been well expressed in Rossetti's lines--
"Let lore of all theology
Be to thee all it can be,
But know,--the power that fashions man
Measured not out thy little span
For thee to take the meting-rod
In turn and so approve on God."
So in Goethe we have the unsatisfied human spirit with its infinite
cravings and longings for something more than earth can give--something,
however, which is not separated from the earth, and which is entirely
different from theological dogma or anything of that sort. In this,
Goethe is expressing a constant yearning of his own, which illuminated
all his writings like a gentle hidden fire within them, hardly seen in
many passages and yet always somehow felt. It is _through_ the flesh
that he will find the spirit, _through_ this world that he will find the
next. The quest is ultimately the same as that of Marlowe, but the form
of it is absolutely opposed to his. Goethe is as far from Marlowe's
theological position as _Peer Gynt_ is, and indeed there is a
considerable similarity between Ibsen's great play and Goethe's. As the
drama develops, it is true that the love of Faust becomes sensual and
his curiosity morbid; but the tragedy lies no longer in the belief that
sense and curiosity are in themselves wrong, but in the fact that Faust
fails to distinguish their high phases from their low. We have already
seen that the _Erdgeist_ which first appeals to Faust is too great for
him, and it is there that the tragedy really lies. The earth is not an
accursed place, and the _Erdgeist_ may well find its home among the
ideals; but Wagner is neither big enough nor clean enough to be man's
guide.
The contrast between the high and low ideals comes to its finest and
most tragic in the story of Margaret. Spiritual and sensual love
alternate through the play. Its tragedy and horror concentrate round the
fact that love has followed the lower way. Margaret has little to give
to Faust of fellowship along intellectual or spiritual lines. She is a
village maiden, and he takes from her merely the obvious and lower kind
of love. It is a way which leads ultimately to the dance of the witches
and the cellar of Auerbach, yet Faust can never be satisfied with these,
and from the witch's mouth comes forth the red mouse--the climax of
disgust. In Auerbach's cellar he sees himself as the pagan man in him
would like to be. In Martha one sees the pagan counterpart to the pure
and simple Margaret, just as Mephistopheles is the pagan counterpart to
Faust. The lower forms of life are the only ones in which Martha and
Mephistopheles are at home. For Faust and Margaret the lapse into the
lower forms brings tragedy. Yet it must be remembered also that Faust
and Mephistopheles are really one, for the devil who tempts every man is
but himself after all, the animal side of him, the dog.
The women thus stand for the most poignant aspect of man's great
temptation. It is not, as we have already said, any longer a conflict
between the secular and the sacred that we are watching, nor even the
conflict between the flesh and the spirit. It is between a higher and a
lower way of treating life, flesh and spirit both. Margaret stands for
all the great questions that are addressed to mankind. There are for
every man two ways of doing work, of reading a book, of loving a woman.
He who keeps his spiritual life pure and high finds that in all these
things there is a noble path. He who yields to his lower self will
prostitute and degrade them all, and the tragedy that leads on to the
mad scene at the close, where the cries of Margaret have no parallel in
literature except those of Lady Macbeth, is the inevitable result of
choosing the pagan and refusing the ideal. The Blocksberg is the pagan
heaven.
A still more striking contrast between the plays meets us when we
consider the respective characters of Mephistopheles. When we compare
the two devils we are reminded of that most interesting passage in
Professor Masson's great essay, which describes the secularisation of
Satan between _Paradise Lost_ and the _Faust_ of Goethe:--
"We shall be on the right track if we suppose Mephistopheles to be what
Satan has become after six thousand years.... Goethe's Mephistopheles is
this same being after the toils and vicissitudes of six thousand years
in his new vocation: smaller, meaner, ignobler, but a million times
sharper and cleverer.... For six thousand years he has been pursuing the
walk he struck out at the beginning, plying his self-selected function,
dabbling devilishly in human nature, and abjuring all interest in the
grander physics; and the consequence is, as he himself anticipated, that
his nature, once great and magnificent, has become small, virulent, and
shrunken. He, the scheming, enthusiastic Archangel, has been soured and
civilised into the clever, cold-hearted Mephistopheles."
Marlowe's devil is of the solemn earlier kind, not yet degraded into the
worldling whom Goethe has immortalised. Marlowe's Mephistophilis is
essentially the idealist, and it is his Faust who is determined for the
world. One feels about Mephistophilis that he is a kind of religious
character, although under a cloud. The things he does are done to organ
music, and he might be a figure in some stained-glass window of old. Not
only is he "a melancholy devil, with a soul above the customary hell,"
but he actually retains a kind of despairing idealism which somehow
ranks him on the side rather of good than of evil. The puppet play
curiously emphasises this. "Tell me," says Faust, "what would you do if
you could attain to everlasting salvation?" "Hear and despair! Were I to
attain to everlasting salvation, I would mount to heaven on a ladder,
though every rung were a razor edge." The words are exactly in the
spirit of the earlier play. So sad is the devil, so oppressed with a
sense of the horror of it all, that, as we read, it almost seems as if
Faust were tempting the unwilling Mephistophilis to ruin him.
"Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it;
Think'st thou that I, who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being depriv'd of everlasting bliss?
O Faustus, leave these frivolous demands,
Which strike a terror to my fainting soul!"