rehabilitation of the hero. His Faustus is still damned, but he is
transformed into the sort of personage that Aristotle approves of for
the hero of tragedy, essentially human and noble, but led astray by some
excusable vice or error. Marlowe’s public would see in Doctor Faustus a
man and a Christian like themselves, carried a bit too far by ambition
and the love of pleasure. He is no radical unbeliever, no natural mate
for the devil, conscienceless and heathen, like the typical villain of
the Renaissance. On the contrary, he has become a good Protestant, and
holds manfully to all those parts of the creed which express his
spontaneous affections. A good angel is often overheard whispering in
his ear; and if the bad angel finally prevails, it is in spite of
continual remorse and hesitation on the Doctor’s part. This excellent
Faustus is damned by accident or by predestination; he is brow-beaten by
the devil and forbidden to repent when he has really repented. The
terror of the conclusion is thereby heightened; we see an essentially
good man, because in a moment of infatuation he had signed away his
soul, driven against his will to despair and damnation. The alternative
of a happy solution lies almost at hand; and it is only a lingering
taste for the lurid and the horrible, ingrained in this sort of
melodrama, that sends him shrieking to hell.
What makes Marlowe’s conclusion the more violent and the more
unphilosophical is the fact that, to any one not dominated by
convention, the good angel, in the dialogue, seems to have so much the
worse of the argument. All he has to offer is sour admonition and
external warnings:
_O Faustus, lay that damned book aside,_
_And gaze not on it lest it tempt thy soul,_
_And heap God’s heavy wrath upon thy head._
_Read, read, the Scriptures; that is blasphemy...._
_Sweet Faustus, think of heaven, and heavenly things._
To which the evil angel replies:
_No, Faustus, think of honour and of wealth._
And in another place:
_Go forward, Faustus, in that famous art,_
_Wherein all nature’s treasure is contained._
_Be thou on earth as Jove is in the sky,_
_Lord and commander of these elements._
There can be no doubt that the devil here represents the natural ideal
of Faustus, or of any child of the Renaissance; he appeals to the vague
but healthy ambitions of a young soul, that would make trial of the
world. In other words, this devil represents the true good, and it is no
wonder if the honest Faustus cannot resist his suggestions. We like him
for his love of life, for his trust in nature, for his enthusiasm for
beauty. He speaks for us all when he cries:
_Was this the face that launched a thousand ships_
_And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?_
Even his irreverent pranks, being directed against the pope, endear him
the more to an anti-clerical public; and he appeals to courtiers and
cavaliers by his lofty poetical scorn for such crabbed professions as
the law, medicine, or theology. In a word, Marlowe’s Faustus is a martyr
to everything that the Renaissance prized,--power, curious knowledge,
enterprise, wealth, and beauty.
How thoroughly Marlowe and Goethe are on the way towards reversing the
Christian philosophy of life may be seen if we compare _Faust_ for a
moment (as, in other respects, has often been done) with _The
Wonder-working Magician_ of Calderon. This earlier hero, St. Cyprian of
Antioch, is like Faust in being a scholar, signing away his soul to the
devil, practising magic, embracing the ghost of beauty, and being
ultimately saved. Here the analogy ends. Cyprian, far from being
disgusted with all theory, and particularly with theology, is a pagan
philosopher eagerly seeking God, and working his way, with full faith in
his method, toward Christian orthodoxy. He floors the devil in
scholastic argument about the unity of God, his power, wisdom, and
goodness. He falls in love, and sells his soul merely in the hope of
satisfying his passion. He studies magic chiefly for the same reason;
but magic cannot overrule the free-will of the Christian lady he loves
(a modern and very Spanish one, though supposed to adorn ancient
Antioch). The devil can supply only a false phantasm of her person, and
as Cyprian approaches her and lifts her veil, he finds a hideous
death’s-head beneath; for God can work miracles to cap those of any
magician, and can beat the devil at his own game. Thunderstruck at this
portent, Cyprian becomes a Christian. Half-naked, ecstatic, taken for a
madman, he bears witness loudly and persistently to the power, wisdom,
and goodness of the one true God; and, since the persecution of Decius
is then going on, he is hurried away to martyrdom. His lady, sentenced
also for the same cause, encourages him by her heroic attitude and
words. Their earthly passion is dead; but their souls are united in
death and in immortality.
In this drama we see magic checkmated by miracles, doubt yielding to
faith, purity resisting temptation, passion transformed into zeal, and
all the glories of the world collapsing before disillusion and
asceticism. These glories are nothing, the poet tells us, but dust,
ashes, smoke, and air.
The contrast with Goethe’s _Faust_ could not be more complete. Both
poets take the greatest liberties with their chronology, yet the spirit
of their dramas is remarkably true to the respective ages in which they
are supposed to occur. Calderon glorifies the movement from paganism to
Christianity. The philosophy in which that movement culminated--Catholic
orthodoxy--still dominates the poet’s mind, not in a perfunctory way,
but so as to kindle his imagination, and render his personages sublime
and his verses rapturous. Goethe’s _Faust_, on the contrary, glorifies
the return from Christianity to paganism. It shows the spirit of the
Renaissance liberating the soul, and bursting the bonds of traditional
faith and traditional morals. This spirit, after manifesting itself
brilliantly at the time of the historical Faust, had seemed to be
smothered in the great world during the seventeenth century. Men’s
characters and laws had reaffirmed their old allegiance to Christianity,
and the Renaissance survived only abstractly, in scholarship or the fine
arts, to which it continued to lend a certain classic or pseudo-classic
elegance. In Goethe’s time, however, a second Renaissance was taking
place in the souls of men. The love of life, primal and adventurous, was
gathering head in many an individual. In the romantic movement and in
the French Revolution, this love of life freed itself from the politic
compromises and conventions that had been stifling it for two hundred
years. Goethe’s hero embodies this second, romantic emancipation of the
mind, too long an unwilling pupil of Christian tradition. He cries for
air, for nature, for all experience. Cyprian, on the other hand, an
unwilling pupil of paganism, had yearned for truth, for solitude, and
for heaven.
Such was the legend that, to the great good fortune of mankind,
fascinated the young Goethe, and took root in his fancy. Around it
gathered the experiences and insights of sixty well-filled years:
_Faust_ became the poetical autobiography and the philosophic testament
of Goethe. He stuffed it with every enthusiasm that diversified his own
life, from the great alternative of romantic or classical art, down to
the controversy between Neptunism and Vulcanism in geology, and to his
fatherly admiration for Lord Byron. Yet in spite of the liberties he
took with the legend, and the personal turn he gave it, nothing in its
historical associations escaped him. His life in Frankfort and in
Strassburg had made the mediaeval scene familiar to his fancy; Herder
had communicated to him an imaginative cult for all that was national
and characteristic in art and manners; the spell of Gothic architecture
had fallen on him; and he had learned to feel in Shakespeare the
infinite strength of suggestion in details, in multitudinous glimpses,
in lifelike medleys of sadness and mirth, in a humble realism in
externals, amid lyric and metaphysical outpourings of the passions. The
sense for classic beauty which had inspired Marlowe with immortal lines,
and was later to inspire his own _Helena,_ was as yet dormant; but
instead he had caught the humanitarian craze, then prevalent, for
defending and idealizing the victims of law and society, among others,
the poor girl who, to escape disgrace, did away with her new-born child.
Such a victim of a selfish seducer and a Pharisaical public was to add
a desirable touch of femininity and pathos to the story of Faust:
Gretchen was to take the place, at least for the nonce, of the coveted
Helen.
This Gretchen was to be no common creature, but one endowed with all the
innocence, sweetness, intelligence, fire, and fortitude which Goethe was
finding, or thought he was finding, in his own Gretchens, Kätchens, and
Frederickes. For the young Goethe, though very learned, was no mere
student of books; to his human competence and power to succeed, he
joined the gusts of feeling, the irresponsible raptures, the sudden
sorrows, of a genuine poet. He was a true lover, and a wayward one. He
could delve into magic with awe, in a Faust-like spirit of adventure; he
could burn offerings in his attic to the rising sun; he could plunge
into Christian mysticism; and there could well up, on occasion, from the
deep store of his unconscious mind, floods of words, of images, and of
tears. He was a genius, if ever there was one; and this genius, in all
its freshness, was poured into the composition of _Faust_,--the most
kindred of themes, the most picturesque and magical of romances.
In Goethe’s first version of the poem, before the story of Gretchen, we
find the studious Faust, as in Marlowe, soliloquizing on the vanity of
the sciences. They grasp nothing of the genuine truth; they are verbal
shams. They have not even brought Faust fame or riches. Perhaps magic
might do better. The air was full of spirits; could they be summoned to
our aid, possibly the secrets of nature might be unlocked. We might
reach true science, and through it undreamt-of power over the material
world. For Nature, according to Goethe, really has secrets. She is not
all open to eventual inspection; she is no mere mechanism of minute
parts and statable laws. Our last view of her, like our first glimpse,
must be interpreted; from the sum of her manifestations we must divine
her soul. Therefore only a poetic and rhetorical art, like magic, has
any chance of unveiling her, and of bringing us face to face with the
truth.
In this invocation of spirits, as Goethe’s Faust makes it, there is no
question of selling, or even of risking, the soul. This Faust, unlike
Marlowe’s, has no faith and no fear. From the point of view of the
church he is damned already as an unbeliever; but, as an unbeliever, he
is looking for salvation in another quarter. Like the bolder spirits of
the Renaissance, he is hoping to find in universal nature, infinite,
placid, non-censorious, an escape from the prison-house of Christian
doctrine and Christian law. His magic arts are the sacrament that will
initiate him into his new religion, the religion of nature. He turns to
nature also in another sense, more characteristic of the age of Goethe
than of that of Faust. He longs for grandiose solitudes. He feels that
moonlight, caves, mountains, driving clouds, would be his best medicine
and his best counsellors. The souls of Rousseau, Byron, and Shelley are
pre-incarnate in this Faust, the epitome of all romantic rebellions.
They coexist there with the souls of Paracelsus and Giordano Bruno. The
wild aspects of nature, he thinks, will melt and renew his heart, while
magic reveals the mysteries of cosmic law and helps him to exploit them.
Full of these hopes, Faust opens his book of magic at the sign of the
Macrocosm: it shows him the mechanism of the world, all forces and
events playing into one another and forming an infinite chain. The
spectacle entrances him; he seems to have attained one of his dearest
ambitions. But here he comes at once upon the other half, or, as Hegel
would call it, the other moment, of the romantic life. Every romantic
ideal, once realized, disenchants. No matter what we attain, our
dissatisfaction must be perpetual. Thus the vision of the universe,
which Faust now has before him, is, he remembers, only a vision; it is a
theory or conception.[3] It is not a rendering of the inner life of the
world as Shakespeare, for instance, feels and renders it. Experience, as
it comes to him who lives and works, is not given by that theoretical
vision; in science experience is turned into so many reviewed events,
the passage of so much substance through so many forms. But Faust does
not want an image or description of reality; he yearns to enact and to
become the reality itself.
In this new search, he fixes his eye on the sign of the Earth-Spirit,
which seems more propitious to his present wish. This sign is the key to
all experience. All experience tempts Faust; he shrinks from nothing
that any mortal may have endured; he is ready to undertake everything
that any mortal may have done. In all men he would live; and with the
last man he will be content to die.[4] So mighty is his yearning for
experience that the Earth-Spirit is softened and appears at his bidding.
In a red flame he sees its monstrous visage, and his enthusiasm is
turned to horror. Outspread before him is the furious, indiscriminate
cataract of life, the merciless flux, the infinite variety, the absolute
inconstancy of it. This general life is not for any individual to
rehearse; it bursts all bounds of personality. Each man may assimilate
that part only which falls within his understanding, only that aspect
which things wear from his particular angle, and to his particular
interests. _Du gleichst_, the Earth-Spirit cries to him,--_du gleichst
dem Geist den du begreifst, nicht mir._
This saying--that the life possible and good for man is the life of
reason, not the life of nature--is a hard one to the romantic,
unintellectual, insatiable Faust. He thinks, like many another
philosopher of feeling, that since his is a part of the sum of
experience, the whole of experience should be akin to his. But in fact
the opposite is far nearer the truth. Man is constituted by his
limitations, by his station contrasted with all other stations, and his
purposes chosen from amongst all other purposes. Any great scope he can
attain must be due to his powers of representation. His understanding
may render him universal; his life never can. Faust, as he hears this
sentence from the departing Earth-Spirit, collapses under it. He feels
impotent to gainsay what the tumult of the world is thundering at him,
but he will not accept on authority so unwelcome and chastening a truth.
All his long experience to come will scarcely suffice to convince him of
it.
These are the chief philosophical ideas that appear in the two earlier
versions of Goethe’s _Faust_,--the _Urfaust_ and the _Fragment_. What
Mephistopheles says to the young student is only a clever expansion of
what Faust had said in his first monologue about the vanity of science
and of the learned professions. Mephistopheles, too, finds theory
ashen, and the tree of life green and full of golden fruit; only, having
more experience than Faust of the second disenchanting moment in the
romantic dialectic, he foresees that this golden fruit also will turn to
ashes in the mouth, as it did in the garden of Eden. Science is folly,
but life is no better; for after all is not science a part of life?
When we turn to the first part in its final shape, or to the entire
drama, we find many changes and additions that seem to transform the
romantic picture of the opening scene, and to offer us a rounded
philosophy. The changes, however, are more in expression than in
ultimate substance, and the additions are chiefly new illustrations of
the ancient theme. Critics who study the _Entstehungsgeschichte_ of
works of art help us to analyze them more intelligently and reproduce
more accurately what, at various times, may have been the intention of
their authors. Yet these bits of information would be dearly bought if
we were distracted by them from what gives poetic value and individual
character to the result--its total idiosyncrasy, its place in the moral
world. The place in the moral world of Goethe’s _Faust_ as a whole is
just the place which the opening scene gave it in the beginning. It
fills more space, it touches more historical and poetic matters; but its
centre is the old centre, and its result the old result. It remains
romantic in its pictures and in its philosophy.
The first addition that promises to throw new light on the idea of the
drama is the _Prologue in Heaven_. In imitation of _The Book of Job_, we
find the morning stars--the three archangels--singing together; and then
follows a very agreeable and humorous conversation between the Lord and
Mephistopheles. The scene is in the style of mediaeval religious plays,
and this circumstance might lead us to suppose that the point at issue
was the salvation of Faust’s soul. But that, in the literal sense, is
far from being the case. As in _Job_, the question is what sentiments
the tempted mortal will maintain during this life, not what fate will
afterwards overtake his disembodied spirit. Dead men, Mephistopheles
observes, do not interest him. He is not a devil from a subterranean
hell, concerned, out of pique or ambition, to increase the population of
tortured shades in that fabulous region. He dwells in the atmosphere of
earth; he knows nothing of the suns or the worlds, the life of man is
his element.[5] He remains--what he was in the first versions of the
play--a part of the Earth-Spirit, one of its embodiments. His particular
office, as we shall see presently, is to precipitate that continual
destruction which is involved in the continual renewal of life. He finds
it very foolish of Faust to demand everything and be satisfied with
nothing; and his wager is that Faust may be brought to demand nothing
and be satisfied with what chance throws in his way, that he shall lick
the dust, and lick it with pleasure,[6] that he shall renounce the
dignity of willing what is not and cannot be, and crawl about, like the
serpent, basking in the comforts of the moment.
Against this, the Lord pronounces Faust to be his servant,--the servant,
that is, of an ideal,--and declares that whoever strives after an ideal
must needs go astray; yet in his necessary errors, the good man never
misses the right road.[7] In other words, to have an ideal to strive
for, and, like Faust, never to be satisfied, is itself the salvation of
man. Faust does not yet know this. He half believes there is some
concrete and ultimate good beyond, and so is bitter and violent in his
dissatisfaction; but in due season he will come to clearness on this
subject, and understand that only he deserves freedom and life who must
daily win them afresh.[8] Mephistopheles himself, with his mockeries and
seductions, helps to keep the world moving and men wide awake.[9]
Imperfection is all that is possible in the world of action; but the
angels may gather up and fix in thought the perfect forms approached or
suggested by existence.[10]
In the two earlier versions of _Faust_, Mephistopheles appears without
introduction; we find him amusing himself by giving ambiguous advice to
an innocent scholar, and accompanying Faust in his wanderings. His
mocking tone and miraculous powers mark him at once as the devil of the
legend; but several passages prove that he is a deputy of the
Earth-Spirit evoked by Faust in the beginning. That he should be both
devil and world-demon ought not to surprise the learned.[11] The devils
of popular mediaeval religion were not cut out of whole cloth: they were
simply the Neoplatonic demons of the air, together with the gods of
Olympus and the more ancient chthonic deities, blackened by sectarian
zeal, and degraded by a coarse and timid imagination. Many of these
pagan sprites, indeed, had been originally impish and mischievous, since
not all the aspects of nature are lovely or propitious, nor all the
dreams of men. But as a whole they were without malice in their
irresponsible, elemental life,--winged powers darting through space
between the earth and the moon. They were not dwellers in a subterranean
hell; they were not tormentors nor tormented. Often they swarmed and
sang blithely, as they do in _Faust_ and even in the _Wonder-working
Magician_; and if at other times they croaked or hooted, it was like
frogs and owls, less lovely creatures than humming-birds, but not less
natural.
One of these less amiable spirits of the atmosphere, especially of its
ambient fire, is the Mephistopheles of Goethe. Why he delighted in evil
rather than in good he himself explains in a profound and ingenious
fashion. Darkness or nothingness, he says, existed alone before the
birth of light. Nothingness or darkness still remains the fundamental
and, to his mind, the better part of that mixture of being and privation
which we call existence. Nothing that exists can be preserved, nor does
it deserve to be; therefore it would have been better if nothing had
ever existed.[12] To deny the value of whatever is, and to wish to
destroy it, according to him, is the only rational ambition; he is the
spirit that denies continually, he is the everlasting No. This
spirit--which we might compare with the Mars of Lucretius--has great
power in the world; every change, in one of its aspects, expresses it,
since in one of its aspects, every change is the destruction of
something. This spirit is always willing evil, for it wills death, with
all the folly, crime, and despair that minister to death. But in willing
evil, it is always accomplishing good; for these evils make for
nothingness, and nothingness is the true good. The famous couplet--
_Ein Teil von jener Kraft_
_Die stets das Böse will, und stets das Gute schafft--_
is far from expressing the Hegelian commonplace with which it is usually
identified. It does not mean that destruction serves a good purpose
after all because it clears the way for “something higher.”
Mephistopheles is not one of those philosophers who think change and
evolution a good in themselves. He does not admit that his activity,
while aiming at evil, contributes unintentionally to the good. It
contributes to the good intentionally, because the evil it does is, in
his opinion, less than the evil it cures. He is the cruel surgeon to the
disease of life.
If he admitted the other interpretation, he would be _ipso facto_
converted to the view of the Lord in the _Prologue_. His naughtiness
would become, in his own eyes, a needful service in the cause of
life,--a condition of life being really vital and worth living. He might
then continue his sly operations and biting witticisms, without one drop
more of kindness, and yet be sanctioned in everything by the Absolute,
and adopt the smile and halo of the optimist. He would have perceived
that he was the spice of life, the yeast and red pepper of the world,
necessary to the perfect savour of the providential concoction. As it
is, Mephistopheles is far more modest. He says that he wills evil,
because what he wills is contrary to what his victims will; he is the
great contradictor, the blaster of young hopes. Yet he does good,
because these young hopes, if let alone, would lead to misery and
absurdity. His contradiction nips the folly of living in the bud. To be
sure, as he goes on to acknowledge, the destructive power never wins a
decisive victory. While everything falls successively beneath his
sickle, the seeds of life are being scattered perpetually behind his
back. The Lucretian Venus has her innings, as well as the Lucretian
Mars. The eternal see-saw, the ancient flux, continues without end and
without abatement.