In the version of "Faust" given by Irving at the Lyceum, Wills did his
best to follow the main lines of Goethe's construction. Unfortunately he
was less satisfied with Goethe's verse, though it happens that the verse
is distinctly better than the construction. He kept the shell and threw
away the kernel. Faust becomes insignificant in this play to which he
gives his name. In Goethe he was a thinker, even more than a poet. Here
he speaks bad verse full of emptiness. Even where Goethe's words are
followed, in a literal translation, the meaning seems to have gone out
of them; they are displaced, they no longer count for anything. The
Walpurgis Night is stripped of all its poetry, and Faust's study is
emptied of all its wisdom. The Witches' Kitchen brews messes without
magic, lest the gallery should be bewildered. The part of Martha is
extended, in order that his red livery may have its full "comic relief."
Mephistopheles throws away a good part of his cunning wit, in order that
he may shock no prejudices by seeming to be cynical with seriousness,
and in order to get in some more than indifferent spectral effect.
Margaret is to be seen full length; the little German soubrette does her
best to be the Helen Faust takes her for; and we are meant to be
profoundly interested in the love-story. "Most of all," the programme
assures us, Wills "strove to tell the love-story in a manner that might
appeal to an English-speaking audience."
Now if you take the philosophy and the poetry out of Goethe's "Faust,"
and leave the rest, it does not seem to me that you leave the part which
is best worth having. In writing the First Part of "Faust" Goethe made
free use of the legend of Dr. Faustus, not always improving that legend
where he departed from it. If we turn to Marlowe's "Dr. Faustus" we
shall see, embedded among chaotic fragments of mere rubbish and refuse,
the outlines of a far finer, a far more poetic, conception of the
legend. Marlowe's imagination was more essentially a poetic imagination
than Goethe's, and he was capable, at moments, of more satisfying
dramatic effects. When his Faustus says to Mephistopheles:
One thing, good servant, let me crave of thee,
To glut the longing of my heart's desire:
That I may have unto my paramour
That heavenly Helen which I saw of late;
and when, his prayer being granted, he cries:
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burned the topless towers of Ilium?
he is a much more splendid and significant person than the Faust of
Goethe, who needs the help of the devil and of an old woman to seduce a
young girl who has fallen in love with him at first sight. Goethe, it is
true, made what amends he could afterwards, in the Second Part, when
much of the impulse had gone and all the deliberation in the world was
not active enough to replace it. Helen has her share, among other
abstractions, but the breath has not returned into her body, she is
glacial, a talking enigma, to whom Marlowe's Faustus would never have
said with the old emphasis:
And none but thou shalt be my paramour!
What remains, then, in Wills' version, is the Gretchen story, in all its
detail, a spectacular representation of the not wholly sincere
witchcraft, and the impressive outer shell of Mephistopheles, with, in
Sir Henry Irving's pungent and acute rendering, something of the real
savour of the denying spirit. Mephistopheles is the modern devil, the
devil of culture and polite negation; the comrade, in part the master,
of Heine, and perhaps the grandson and pupil of Voltaire. On the Lyceum
stage he is the one person of distinction, the one intelligence; though
so many of his best words have been taken from him, it is with a fine
subtlety that he says the words that remain. And the figure, with its
lightness, weary grace, alert and uneasy step, solemnity, grim laughter,
remains with one, after one has come away and forgotten whether he told
us all that Goethe confided to him.