his own eyes; yet in the course of the drama he wears various masks and
has various moods. All he says and does cannot be made altogether
compatible with the essence of his mind, as Goethe finally conceived it.
The dramatic figure of Mephistopheles had been fixed long before in its
graphic characteristics. Mephistopheles, for instance, is extremely old;
he feels older than the universe. There is nothing new for him; he has
no illusions. His feeling for anyone he sees is choked, as happens to
old people, by his feelings for the infinite number of persons he
remembers. He is heartless, because he is impersonal and universal. He
is altogether inhuman; he has not the shames nor the tastes of man. He
often assumes the form of a dog,--it is his favourite mask in this
earthly carnival. He is not averse to the witches’ kitchen, with its
senseless din and obscenity. He puts up good-naturedly with the
grotesque etiquette of the spirit-world, observes all the rules about
signing contracts in blood, knocking thrice, and respecting pentagrams.
Why should he not? Dogs and demons of the air are forms of the
Earth-Spirit as much as man; man has no special dignity that
Mephistopheles should respect. Man’s morality is one of the moralities,
his conventions are not less absurd than the conventions of other
monkeys. Mephistopheles has no prejudice against the snake; he
understands and he despises his cousin, the snake, also. He understands
and he despises himself; he has had time to know himself thoroughly.
His understanding, however, is not impartial, because he is the advocate
of death; he cannot sympathize with the other half of the Earth-Spirit,
which he does not represent,--the creative, propulsive, enamoured side,
the side that worships the ideal, the love that makes the world go
round. What enchants an ingenuous soul can only amuse Mephistopheles;
what torments it gives him a sardonic satisfaction. Thus he comes to be
in fact a sour and mocking devil. At other times, when he opposes the
silliness and romanticism of Faust, he seems to be the spokesman of all
experience and reason; as when he warns Faust that to be at all you must
be something in particular. Yet even this he says by way of checking and
denying Faust’s passion for the infinite. The soberest truth, when
unwelcome, may seem to the sentimental as diabolical as the most cynical
lie; so that in spite of the very unequal justness of his various
sentiments, Mephistopheles retains his dramatic unity. We recognize his
tone and, under whatever mask, we think him a villain and find him
delightful.
Such is the spirit, and such are the conditions, in which Faust
undertakes his adventures. He thirsts for all experience, including all
experience of evil; he fears no hell; and he hopes for no happiness. He
trusts in magic; that is, he believes, or is willing to make believe,
that apart from any settled conditions laid down by nature or God,
personal will can evoke the experience it covets by its sheer force and
assurance. His bond with Mephistopheles is an expression of this
romantic faith. It is no bargain to buy pleasures on earth at the cost
of torments hereafter; for neither Goethe, nor Faust, nor Mephistopheles
believes that such pleasures are worth having, or such torments
possible.
The first taste Faust gets of the world is in Auerbach’s cellar, and he
finds it at once unpalatable. His mature and disdainful mind cannot be
amused by the sodden merriment he sees there. He is without that
simplicity and heartiness which might find even drunken gaiety
attractive; to put up with such follies, one must know nothing, like
Brander, or everything, like Mephistopheles. Faust still feels the
“pathos of distance;” he is acutely conscious of something incomparably
noble just out of reach. In the witches’ kitchen, which he next visits,
pleasure is still more ugly and shallow; here the din is even more
nonsensical, and the fancy more obscene. Yet Faust comes forth with two
points gained in his romantic rehabilitation; he has taken the elixir of
youth and he has seen the image of Helen in a mirror. He is henceforth
in love with ideal beauty, and being young again, he is able to find
ideal beauty in the first woman he sees.
The great episode of Gretchen follows; and when he leaves her (after the
duel with her brother) to view the wild revels of the Walpurgisnacht,
his youth for a moment catches the contagion of that orgy. His love of
ideal beauty, which remains unsatisfied, saves him, however, from any
lasting illusion. He sees a little red mouse running out of the mouth of
a nymph he is pursuing, and his momentary inclination turns to aversion.
When he goes back to Gretchen in her prison, it is too late for him to
do more than recognize the ruin he has brought about,--Gretchen
dishonoured, her mother poisoned, her brother killed, her child drowned
by her in a pond, and she herself about to be executed. Gretchen, who is
the only true Christian in this poem, refuses to be rescued, because she
wishes to offer her voluntary death in propitiation for her grave,
though almost involuntary, offences.
This is the end of Faust’s career through the world of private
interests,--the little world,--and we may well ask what has been the
fruit of his experiments so far. What strength or experience has he
amassed for his further adventures? The answer is to be found in the
first scene of the second part, where Goethe reaches his highest potency
as a poet and as a philosopher. We are transported to a remote,
magnificent, virgin country. It is evening, and Faust is lying, weary
but restless, on a flowering hillside. Kindly spirits of nature are
hovering above his head. Ariel, their leader, bids them bring solace to
the troubled hero. It is enough he was unfortunate--they make no
question whether he was a saint or a sinner.[13] The spirits in chorus
then sing four lovely stanzas, one for each watch of the night. The
first invokes peace, forgetfulness, surrender to the healing influence
of sleep. Pity and remorse, they seem to say, in the words of Spinoza,
are evil and vain; failure is incidental; error is innocent. Nature has
no memory; forgive yourself, and you are forgiven. The song of the
second watch merges the unhappy soul again in the infinite incorruptible
substance of nature. The stars, great or little, twinkling or pure, fill
the sky with their ordered peace, and the sea with their trembling
reflection. In this universal circulation there is no private will, no
permanent division. In the next watch we find the plastic stress of
nature beginning to reassert itself; seeds swell, sap mounts up the
thawing branches, buds grow full; everything recovers a fresh
individuality and a tender, untried will. Finally, the song of the
fourth watch bids the flowers open their petals and Faust his eyes.
Forces renewed in repose should tempt a new career. Nature is open to
the brave, to the intelligent; all may be noble, who dare to be so.[14]
Soothed by these ministrations, Faust awakes full of new strength and
ambition. He watches with rapture the sunlight touch the mountain-tops
and creep down gradually into the valleys. When it reaches him, he
turns to look directly at the sun; but he is dazzled. He seems to
remember the Earth-Spirit that had once allured and then rejected him.
We wish, he says, to kindle our torch of life, and we produce a
conflagration, a monstrous medley of joy and sorrow, love and hate. Let
us turn our backs upon the sun, upon infinite force and infinite
existence. Fitter for our eyes the waterfall over against it, the
torrent of human affairs, broken into a myriad rills. Upon the mists
that rise from it the sunlight paints a rainbow, always vanishing, but
always restored. This is the true image of rational human achievement.
We have our life in the iridescence of the world.[15] Or, as Shelley has
said it for us,--
_Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,_
_Stains the white radiance of eternity,_
_Until death tramples it to fragments._
This death, however, is itself unstable. The Lucretian Venus, by
reshaping our senses and instincts, builds that coloured dome once more.
The rainbow is renewed, as the mists rise again or the wind dies down,
and creation is glorious as on the first day.
This is Goethe’s theory of rejuvenation and immortality. It is
thoroughly naturalistic. There is a life after death, but only for such
souls as have enough scope to identify themselves with those forms which
nature, in her uncertain oscillations, always tends to reproduce. A deep
mind has deep roots in nature,--it will bloom many times over. But what
a deep mind carries over into its next incarnation--perhaps in some
remote sphere--is not its conventional merits and demerits, its load of
remorse, or its sordid memories. These are washed away in its new
baptism. What remains is only what was deep in that deep mind, so deep
that new situations may again imply and admit it.
When, after the scene with the Earth-Spirit, Faust thought of suicide,
he regarded it as a means to escape from oppressive conditions and to
begin a fresh life under conditions wholly different and unknown. It was
as if a man in middle life, disgusted with his profession, should
abandon it to take up another. Such a resolution is serious. It
expresses a great dissatisfaction with things as they stand, but it also
expresses a great hope. Death, for Faust, is an adventure, like any
other; and if, contrary to his presumption, this adventure should prove
the last, that, too, is a risk he is willing to run. Accordingly, as he
lifted the poison to his lips, he drank to the dawn, to a new springtime
of existence. It was by no means the saddest nor the weakest moment of
his life.[16]
Although the sound of an Easter hymn checked him, bringing sentimental
memories of a religion in which he no longer believed, the
transformation scene he looked for was only postponed. There is not much
difference between dying as he had thought to die and living as he was
about to live. Venomous essences, artificially brewed, were hardly
necessary to bring him to a new life; the adventures he was entering
upon were suicidal enough, for he was to strive without hope of
attainment, and to proceed by passionate wilfulness or magic, without
accepting the discipline of art or reason. Now, at the close of the
first part, he has drained this poisoned life to the dregs, and the
fever into which he falls carries him of itself into a new existence. He
is not grown better or more reasonable; he is simply starting afresh,
like a new day or a new person. It contains, however, the fundamental
part of his character; his will remains wayward, but indomitable, and
his achievements remain fruitless. Only he will henceforth be romantic
on a broader stage, that of history and civilization; and his magic
will summon before him illusions somewhat more intellectual,
counterfeits of beauty and of power. His old loves have blown over, like
the storms of a bygone year; and with only a dreamlike memory of his
past errors, he goes forth to meet a new day.
* * * * *
Among the allurements which, in the old legend, prompted Faust to sell
his soul to the devil, one was the beauty of woman. The poor recluse,
grown gray among his parchments, had never noticed real women, or had
not found them beautiful. Pedantic child that he was, when he thought of
the beauty of woman, he thought only of Helen of Troy. And Helen, to the
Faust of the legend, was simply what Venus might be to Tannhäuser,--a
woman more ravishing than other ravishing women. She was the supreme
instance of a vulgar thing. The young Goethe, however, who was a poet
and a true German, and loved with his soul, was not attracted by this
ideal. He gave his Faust a tenderer love,--a love of the heart as well
as of the senses. Later, also, when Goethe took up the old legend again
in a more antiquarian spirit, and restored Helen to her place in it, he
transformed her from a symbol of feminine beauty alone into a symbol for
all beauty, and especially for the highest beauty, that of Hellas. The
second love of Faust is the passion for classicism.
This passion in a romantic age is not so paradoxical as it may sound.
Winckelmann and the philologians were restoring something ancient. It
was the romantic passion for all experience--for the faded experience of
the ancients also--that made, for them, the poetry and the charm of
antiquity. How dignified everything was in those heroic days! How noble,
serene, and abstracted! How pure the blind eyes of statues, how chaste
the white folds of the marble drapery! Greece was a remote, fascinating
vision, the most romantic thing in the history of mankind. The sad,
delicious emotion one felt before a ruined temple was as sentimental as
anything one could feel before a ruined castle, but more elegant and
more choice. It was sentimentality in marble. The heroes of the _Iliad_
were idealized in the same way as the savages of Rousseau were
idealized, or as the robbers of Schiller.
The romantic classicism of the Napoleonic era lies between the polite
classicism of the French seventeenth century and the archaeological
classicism of our present Grecians. French classicism had been quite
indifferent to the picturesque aspects of ancient life; it could
tolerate on the stage an Achilles in a periwig and laces. What the
French tragedians had adopted from the ancients was something inward, a
standard of character and motive, or a criterion of taste. They studied
harmony and restraint, not because these had been Greek qualities, but
because they were qualities essentially reasonable and beautiful,
naturally belonging, even in modern times, to a cultivated society and a
cultivated poet. Again, the admiration for Greece which is common in our
time among people of judgement differs from that of Goethe and his age;
for if we admire the artistic expression of ancient life in poetry or
sculpture, we know that these manifestations were made possible by a
long political and moral discipline, and that, in spite of that
discipline, ancient art remained very mixed, and often grotesque and
impure.
For Goethe, however, as for Byron, Greece was less a past civilization,
to be studied scientifically, than a living idea, a summons to new forms
of art and of sentiment. Goethe was never so romantic as when he was
classical. His distichs are like theatrical gestures; he feels the sweep
of his toga as he rounds them off. His Iphigenia is a sentimental
dream--_verflucht human_, as he himself came to feel; and his Helena is
an evocation of magic, magical not merely by accident and in the story,
but essentially so, in her ghostly semi-consciousness and glassy beauty.
The apparent incongruities of the scenes in which she appears,
surrounded by German knights in the court of a feudal castle, are not
real incongruities. For this Helen is not a thing of the past; she is
the present dream and affectation of things classical in a romantic
era. Faust and his vassals offer Helen the most chivalrous and
exaggerated homage; they introduce her, as a play queen, into their
society. Faust retires with her to Arcadia,--the land of intentional and
mid-summer idleness. Here a son, Euphorion, is born to them, a young
genius, classic in aspect, but wildly romantic and ungovernable in
temper. He scales the highest peaks, pursues by preference the nymphs
that flee from him, loves violence and unreason, and finally, thinking
to fly, falls headlong, like Icarus, and perishes. His last words call
his mother after him, and she follows, leaving her veil and mantle
behind, as Euphorion had left his lyre. On the mantle of Helen, which
swells into a cloud, Faust is borne back again to his native Germany;
its virtue, as he learns, is to lift him above all commonness.
This long allegory is charming enough, as a series of pictures and
melodies, to leave the reader content not to interpret it; yet the
intention of the poet is clear, if we care to disentangle it. By going
down into the bowels of nature, where the earth goddesses dwell, who are
the first mothers of all life and of all civilizations alike, we may
gather intelligence to comprehend even the most alien existence. Greece,
after such a reversion to the elemental, will appear to us in her
unmatched simplicity and beauty. The vision will be granted us, although
the object we see belongs to a distant past; and if our enthusiasm,
like that of Faust, is passionate and indomitable, we may actually
persuade the Queen of the Dead to yield up Helen that we may wed her.
Our scholarship and philosophy, our faithful imitation of Greek art and
literature, may actually render the Greek scene familiar to us. Yet the
setting of this recovered genius will still be modern; it will become
half modern itself; we shall have to teach Helen to rhyme. The product
of this hybrid inspiration will be a romantic soul in the garb of
classicism, a lovely wild thing, fated to die young. When this
enthusiasm has dashed itself against the hard conditions of life, the
beauty of Greece, that was its mother, will also pale before our eyes.
We shall be, perforce, content to let it return to the realm of
irrevocable past things. Only its garment, the monuments of its art and
thought, will remain to raise us, if we have loved them, above all
vulgarity in taste and in moral allegiance.
It is an evidence of Goethe’s great wisdom that he felt that romantic
classicism must be subordinated or abandoned; that Helen must evaporate,
while Faust returned to Germany and to the feeling that after all
Gretchen was his true love.[17] At the same time the issue of this
wonderful episode is a little disappointing. At the beginning, the
vision of Helen in a mirror had inspired Faust with renewed enthusiasm.
The sight of her again, in the magic play, had altogether enraptured
and overwhelmed him; and this inspiration had come just when, after the
death of Gretchen, he had resolved to pursue not all experience, as at
first, but rather the best, experience,[18]--a hint that the
transformations of Faust’s will were expected somehow to constitute a
real progress. There was, indeed, among mortals such an infinite need of
this incomparable and symbolic Helen, that it could move the very
guardians of the dead to mercy and to tears. When we remember all this,
we have some reason to expect that a great and permanent improvement in
the life and heart of our hero should follow on his obtaining so rare a
boon. But to live within Arcadia Helen was not needed; any Phyllis would
have served.
Helen, to be sure, leaves some relics behind, by which we may understand
that the influence of Greek history, literature, and sculpture may still
avail to cultivate the mind and give it an air of distinction. Perhaps
in the commonwealth he is about to found, Faust would wish to establish
not only dykes and freedom, but also professorships of Greek and
archaeological museums. And the lyre of Euphorion, which is also left
us, may signify that poems like Byron’s _Isles of Greece_, Keats’s
_Grecian Urn, Die Götter Griechenlands_ of Schiller, and Goethe’s own
classical pieces will continue to enrich European literature. This is
something, but not enough to lift Faust’s immense enthusiasm for Helen
above a crass illusion. That dream of a perfect beauty to be achieved,
of a perfect life to be lived according to nature and reason, would have
ended in a little scholarship and a little pedantry. Faust would have
won Helen in order to hand her over to Wagner.
Helen was queen of Sparta; and although of course the Doric Sparta of
Lycurgus was something much later, and had nothing to do with the Sparta
of Homer, yet taken symbolically it is the happiest accident that Helen,
the type of Greek perfection in beauty, should have been queen of
Sparta, the type of Greek perfection in discipline. A Faust that had
truly deserved and understood Helen would have built her an Hellenic
city; he would have become himself an _ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν_, a master of men,
one of those poets in things, those shapers of well-bred generations and
wise laws, of which Plato speaks, contrasting them with Homer and other
poets in words only. For the beauty of mind and body that fascinates the
romantic classicist, and which inspired the ancient poets themselves,
was not a product of idleness and sentimentality, nor of material and
forced activity; it was a product of orderly war, religion, gymnastics,
and deliberate self-government.
The next turn in Faust’s fortunes actually finds him a trader, a
statesman, an empire-builder; and if such a rolling stone could gather
any moss, we should expect to see here, if anywhere, the fruits of that
“aesthetic education of mankind” which Helen represented. We should
expect Faust, who had lain in the lap of absolute beauty, to understand
its nature. We should expect him, in eager search after perfection, to
establish his state on the distinction between the better and the
worse,--a distinction never to be abolished or obscured for one who has
loved beauty. In other words, he might have established a moral society
founding it on great renunciations and on enlightened heroisms, so that
the highest beauty might really come down and dwell within that city.
But we find nothing of the sort. Faust founds his kingdom because he
must do something; and his only ideal of what he hopes to secure for his
subjects is that they shall always have something to do. Thus the will
to live, in Faust, is not in the least educated by his experience. It
changes its objects because it must; the passions of youth yield to
those of age; and among all the illusions of his life the most fatuous
is the illusion of progress.
It is characteristic of the absolute romantic spirit that when it has
finished with something it must invent a new interest. It beats the bush
for fresh game; it is always on the verge of being utterly bored. So
now that Helen is flown, Mephistopheles must come to the rescue, like an
amiable nurse, and propose all sorts of pastimes. Frankfort, Leipzig,
Paris, Versailles, are described, with the entertainments that life
there might afford; but Faust, who was always _difficile_, has been
rendered more so by his recent splendid adventures. However, a new
impulse suddenly arises in his breast. From the mountain-top to which
Helen’s mantle has borne him, he can see the German Ocean, with its
tides daily covering great stretches of the flat shore, and rendering
them brackish and uninhabitable. It would be a fine thing to reclaim
those wastes, to plant there a prosperous population. After Greece,
Faust has a vision of Holland.
This last ambition of Faust’s is as romantic as the others. He feels the
prompting towards political art, as he had felt the prompting towards
love or beauty.[19] The notion of transforming things by his will, of
leaving for ages his mark upon nature and upon human society, fascinates
him;[20] but this passion for activity and power, which some
simple-minded commentators dignify with the name of altruism and of
living for others, has no steady purpose or standard about it.[21]
Goethe is especially lavish in details to prove this point. Magic, the
exercise of an unteachable will, is still Faust’s instrument.
Mephistopheles, by various arts of illusion, secures the triumph of the
emperor in a desperate war which he is carrying on against a justifiable
insurrection. As a reward for the aid rendered, Faust receives the shore
marches in fief. The necessary dykes and canals are built by magic; the
spirits that Mephistopheles commands dig and build them with strange
incantations. The commerce that springs up is also illegitimate: piracy
is involved in it.
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.