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 dykes, 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 passion, one more selfish illusion.
As he had no conscience in his love, and sought and secured nobody’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 passionate 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 canals 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-assertion. 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 dykes 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, pronounced
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 God’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 passed, 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 constitute 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. God 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 passions of it were necessary and
creative passions. 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 God. That God and your own conscience should
pronounce 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 balls 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
butterfly 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
analogy 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
balls 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, because of its
very imperfection there, perfect when 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 attitude, 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 God.
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 space 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 titles 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, passage 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 pass, 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
passion 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 attitude 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 cumbrous 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 eggshell, 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; asserts 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
attitude 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 assortment 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 snatches of it, more or less
prolonged; and the more prolonged the experience represented is the more
it will be a collection of snatches, 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 erklärender, 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’ Gelüst ergriff ich bei den Haaren,
Was nicht genügte, liess ich fahren,
Was mir entwischte, liess ich ziehn.
Ich habe nur begehrt und nur vollbracht
Und abermals gewünscht und so mit Macht
Mein Leben durchgestürmt; erst gross und mächtig,
Nun aber geht es weise, geht bedächtig.
[3] _Faust_, Part i., _Studierzimmer_, i.:
Welch Schauspiel! aber, ach! ein Schauspiel nur!
Wo fass’ ich dich, unendliche Natur?
Euch, Brüste, wo?
[4] _Faust_, Part i., _Studierzimmer_:
Du, Geist der Erde, bist mir näher;
Schon fühl’ ich meine Kräfte höher,
Schon glüh’ ich wie von neuem Wein;
Ich fühle Mut, mich in die Welt zu wagen,
Der Erde Weh, der Erde Glück zu tragen,...
Mit Stürmen 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 Wangen.
Für 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 Lust.
[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 täglich sie erobern muss.
[9] Ibid., Part i., _Prolog im Himmel_:
Des Menschen Thätigkeit 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,
Umfass’ euch mit der Liebe holden Schranken,
Und was in schwankender Erscheinung schwebt,
Befestiget mit dauernden Gedanken!
[11] _Faust_, Part i., _Wald und Höhle_:
Erhabner Geist, du gabst mir, gabst mir alles,
Warum ich bat. Du hast mir nicht umsonst
Dein Angesicht im Feuer zugewendet....
O, dass dem Menschen nichts Vollkommnes wird,
Empfind’ ich nun. Du gabst zu dieser Wonne,
Die mich den Göttern nah und näher bringt,
Mir den Gefährten, &c.
Also, ibid., _Trüber Tag_: Grosser herrlicher Geist, der du mir zu
erscheinen würdigtest, der du mein Herz kennest und meine Seele, warum
an den Schandgesellen mich Schmieden, der sich am Schaden weidet und am
Verderben sich letzt?
[12] _Faust_, Part i., _Studierzimmer_, ii.:
Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint!
Und das mit Recht; denn alles, was entsteht,
Ist wert, dass es zu Grunde geht;,
Drum besser wär’s, dass nichts entstünde....
Ich bin ein Teil des Teils, der anfangs alles war,
Ein Teil der Finsternis, die sich das Licht gebar....
Was sich dem Nichts entgegenstellt,
Das Etwas, diese plumpe Welt,
So viel als ich schon unternommen,
Ich wusste nicht ihr beizukommen....
Wie viele hab’ ich schon begraben!
Und immer cirkuliert ein neues, frisches Blut.
So geht es fort, man möchte rasend werden!
[13] _Faust_, Part ii. Act i., _Anmutige Gegend_:
Kleiner Elfen Geistergrösse
Eilet, we sie helfen kann;
Ob er heilig, ob er böse,
Jammert sie der Unglücksmann.
[14] _Faust_, Part ii. Act i., _Anmutige Gegend_:
Alles kann der Edle leisten,
Der versteht und rasch ergreift.
The whole scene will repay study.
[15] _Faust_, Part ii. Act i., _Anmutige Gegend_:
Des Lebens Fackel wollten wir entzünden,
Ein Feuermeer umschlingt uns, welch ein Feuer!...
So bleibe denn die Sonne mir im Rücken!
Der Wassersturz, das Felsenriff durchbrausend,
Ihn schau’ ich an mit wachsendem Entzücken....
Allein wie herrlich, diesem Sturm erspriessend,
Wolbt sich des bunten Bogens Wechseldauer,...
Der spiegelt ab das menschliche Bestreben....
Am farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben.
[16] _Faust_, Part i., _Studierzimmer_:
Ins hohe Meer werd’ ich hinausgewiesen,...
Zu neuen Sphären reiner Thätigkeit....
Hier ist es Zeit, durch Thaten zu beweisen,
Dass Manneswürde nicht der Götterhöhe weicht,...
Zu diesem Schritt sich heiter zu entschliessen
Und war’ es mit Gefahr, ins Nichts dahin zu fliessen.