Renascence. But whereas the Renascence had been a large national or
European movement, advancing towards its ends partly through popular
passions and a new enthusiasm, the work which Goethe accomplished was
more an affair of intelligence, criticism, conscious self-direction. It
was less of a flood sweeping away old dikes and dams, and more of a dawn
quietly and gradually drawing back the borders of darkness and widening
the skirts of light. A completely developed human being, for the uses of
the world,--this was the ideal in which Goethe's thoughts centred, and
towards which his most important writings constantly tend. A completely
developed State or commonwealth should follow, as an ideal arising out
of the needs and demands of a complete individual. Goethe knew that
growth comes not by self-observation and self-analysis, but by exercise.
Therefore he turned himself and would turn his disciples to action, to
the objective world; and in order that this action may be profitable, it
must be definite and within a limited sphere. He preaches
self-renunciation; but the self-renunciation he commends is not
self-mortification; it is the active self-abandonment of devotion to our
appropriate work. Such is the teaching of 'Wilhelm Meister': it traces
the progress of a youth far from extraordinary, yet having within him
the capacity for growth, progress through a thousand errors and
illusions, from splendid dreams to modest reality. Life is discovered by
Wilhelm to be a difficult piece of scholarship. The cry for freedom in
'Goetz,' the limitless sigh of passion heard in 'Werther,' are heard no
more. If freedom is to be attained, it can only be through obedience; if
we are to "return to nature," it cannot be in Rousseau's way but through
a wise art of living, an art not at odds with nature, but its
complement:--
"This is an art which does mend nature--but
The art itself is nature."
If we ask,--for this, after all, is the capital question of
criticism,--What has Goethe done to make us better? the answer is: He
has made each of us aspire and endeavor to be no fragment of manhood,
but a man; he has taught us that to squander ourselves in vain desires
is the road to spiritual poverty; that to discover our appropriate work,
and to embody our passion in such work, is the way to true wealth; that
such passion and such toil must be not servile, but glad and free; that
the use of our intelligence is not chiefly to destroy, but to guide our
activity in construction; and that in doing our best work we incorporate
ourselves in the best possible way in the life of our fellows. Such
lessons may seem obvious; but they had not been taught by Goethe's great
predecessors, Voltaire and Rousseau. Goethe, unlike Voltaire, inculcates
reverence and love; unlike Rousseau, he teaches us to see objects
clearly as they are, he trains us to sanity. And Europe needed sanity in
the days of Revolution and in the days which followed of Reaction.
Sanity for the imagination Goethe found in classical art. The young
leader of the Romantic revival in Germany resigned his leadership; he
seemed to his contemporaries to have lost the fire and impulse of his
youth; his work was found cold and formal. A great change had indeed
taken place within him; but his ardor had only grown steadier and
stronger, extending now to every part of his complex nature. The change
was a transition from what is merely inward and personal to what is
outward and general. Goethe cared less than formerly to fling out his
private passions, and cared more to comprehend the world and human life
and to interpret these through art. He did not go into bondage under the
authority of the ancients; but he found their methods right, and he
endeavored to work as they had worked. For a time the reaction carried
him too far: in seeking for what is general, he sometimes passed on to
what is abstract, and so was forced into the error of offering symbols
to represent these abstractions, instead of bodying forth his ideas in
imaginative creations. But in the noble drama of 'Iphigenie,' in the
epic-idyll of 'Hermann und Dorothea,' and in many of the ballads written
during his period of close companionship with Schiller, we have examples
of art at once modern in sentiment and classical in method.
Goethe's faith in the methods of classical art never passed away, but
his narrow exclusiveness yielded. He became, with certain guiding
principles which served as a control, a great eclectic, appropriating to
his own uses whatever he perceived to be excellent. As in 'Hermann und
Dorothea' he unites the influences of Greek art with true German
feeling, so in his collection of short lyrics, the 'West-Oestlicher
Divan' (West-Eastern Divan), he brings together the genius of the Orient
and that of the Western world, and sheds over both the spiritual
illumination of the wisdom of his elder years. Gradually his creative
powers waned, but he was still interested in all--except perhaps
politics--that can concern the mind; he was still the greatest of
critics, entering with his intelligence into everything and
understanding everything, as nearly universal in his sympathies as a
human mind can be. The Goethe of these elder years is seen to most
advantage in the 'Conversations with Eckermann.'
The most invulnerable of Goethe's writings are his lyrical poems;
against the best of these, criticism can allege nothing. They need no
interpreter. But the reader who studies them in chronological order will
observe that as time went on, the lyric which is a spontaneous jet of
feeling is replaced by the lyric in which there is constructive art and
considerate evolution. In the poems of the 'West-Oestlicher Divan' Goethe
returns to the lyric of spontaneity, but their inspiration is rather
that of a gracious wisdom, at once serious and playful, than of passion.
His period of romance and sentiment is best represented by 'The Sorrows
of Werther.' His adult wisdom of life is found most abundantly in
'Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.' The world has long since agreed that
if Goethe is to be represented by a single work, it shall be by 'Faust.'
And even those who perceive that 'Faust' is best understood by being
taken along with Goethe's other writings--his early 'Prometheus,' his
autobiography, his travels in Italy, his classical dramas, his
scientific studies, his work as a critic, his vast correspondence, his
conversations in old age--cannot quarrel with the judgment of the world.
'Faust,' if we include under that name the First and the Second Parts,
is the work of Goethe's whole life. Begun and even far advanced in early
manhood, it was taken up again in his midmost years, and was completed
with a faltering hand in the closing season of his old age. What it
loses in unity, or at least in harmonious development as a piece of art,
it gains in autobiographical interest. All his works, Goethe said,
constituted a great confession. More than any other of his writings,
'Faust' is the confession of his life.
There are two ways in which a reader may deal with 'Faust.' He may
choose for his own delight a fragment, detach it and disregard the rest;
he may view this fragment, if he pleases, as a whole, as a rounded work
of art. Such a reader will refuse to pass beyond the First Part of the
vast encyclopaedic poem. To do this is legitimate. The earliest form in
which we possess the drama, that of the transcript made by Fraeulein von
Goechhausen, is a tragedy which might be named 'The Tragedy of Margaret.'
Possibilities of further development lay in the subject, were indeed
required by the subject, and Goethe had probably already conceived
certain of them; yet the stadium in the progress of Faust's history
included in 'The Tragedy of Margaret' had a unity in itself. But a
reader may approach 'Faust' otherwise; he may view it as expressing the
complete mind of Goethe on some of the deepest problems of human life.
Viewing it thus, he must accept the whole work as Goethe has given it;
he must hold in abeyance, at least for a time, his own particular
likings and dislikes. While keeping his mind open to all the poetry of
Faust, he will soon discover that here is something more than a poem. It
may be unfortunate for the work of art that it belongs, certainly in its
execution, possibly even in the growth of its conception, to far
sundered periods of its author's career, when his feelings respecting
art were different, when his capacity for rendering his ideas was now
more and now less adequate. Such a reader, however, would part with
nothing: in what is admirable he finds the master's hand; in what is
feeble he discovers the same hand, but faltering, and pathetic in its
infirmity. He is interested in 'Faust' not solely or chiefly as 'The
Tragedy of Margaret': he finds in it the intellect, the character, the
life of Goethe; it is a repository of the deepest thoughts and feelings
concerning human existence of a wise seer, a repository in which he laid
by those thoughts and feelings during sixty years of his mortal
wayfaring.
From early manhood to extreme old age 'Faust' was with Goethe, receiving
now and again, in Frankfort, in Weimar, in Rome, some new accession. We
can distinguish the strata or formations of youth, of manhood, and of
the closing years. We recognize by their diversities of style those
parts which were written when creation was swift and almost involuntary,
a passion and a joy, and those parts through which Goethe labored at an
old man's pace, accomplishing to-day a hand's-breadth, to-morrow perhaps
less, and binding blank pages into his manuscript, that the sight of the
gaps might irritate him to produce. What unity can such a work possess,
except that which comes from the fact that it all proceeded from a
single mind, and that some main threads of thought--for it would be rash
to speak of a ground idea--run through the several parts and bind them
together? 'Faust' has not the unity of a lake whose circuit the eye can
contemplate, a crystal set among the hills. Its unity is that of a
river, rising far away in mountain solitudes, winding below many a
mirrored cliff, passing the habitations of men, temple and mart, fields
of rural toil and fields of war, reaching it may be dull levels, and
forgetting the bright speed it had, until at last the dash of waves is
heard, and its course is accomplished; but from first to last one
stream, proceeding from a single source. Tourists may pick out a
picturesque fragment of its wanderings, and this is well; but perhaps it
is better to find the poetry of its entire career, from its cloudy
cradle to the flats where it loses itself in the ocean.
The first part of 'Faust' is itself the work of more periods than one.
The original conception may belong to Goethe's student days at
Strassburg. He had grown weary of the four Faculties,--alas, even of
theology; he had known a maiden as fair and sweet and simple as
Gretchen, and he had left her widowed of her first love; and there in
Strassburg was the presence of that old Cathedral, which inspired so
terrible a scene in the 'Faust.' From Strassburg he returned to
Frankfort, and no moments of his career of authorship were more fruitful
than these which preceded the first Weimar years. It was in the heart of
the Storm and Stress; it was the time of 'Goetz' and 'Mahomet' and the
'Wandering Jew' and 'Werther' and 'Prometheus.' Here in Faust was
another and a nobler Werther seeking the infinite; here was another
Prometheus, a Titan shackled yet unsubduable. By Goethe's twenty-sixth
year the chief portions of the 'Faust, a Fragment,' published when he
was forty-one, had been written. But two scenes were added in Rome,--one
of these strange in its fantasy, the Witches' Kitchen,--as if to show
that the poet of the North was not quite enslaved by the beauty of
classic art. It was in the last decade of the eighteenth century that
Schiller succeeded in persuading Goethe to open his Faust papers, and
try to recover the threads of his design. Not until 1808, Goethe's
fifty-ninth year, was the First Part published as we now possess it. It
is therefore incorrect to speak of this Part as the work of the author's
youth; even here a series of strata belonging to different periods can
be distinguished, and critics have contended that even in this Part may
be discovered two schemes or plans not wholly in harmony each with the
other.
The first Fragment was written, as has been said, in the spirit of the
Storm and Stress. Goethe was weary of the four Faculties. The magic work
of the time which was to restore vigor and joy to men was _Nature_. This
is the theme of the opening scene of 'Faust.' Among old instruments and
dusty folios and ancestral lumber and brute skeletons, away from Nature
and her living founts of inspiration, the old scholar has found neither
joy nor true knowledge. He opens the book of Nostradamus and gazes upon
the sign of the Macrocosm; here in a symbol he beholds the life and
energy of nature:--
"Where shall I grasp thee, infinite Nature, where?
Ye breasts, ye fountains of all life whereon
Hang heaven and earth."
He cannot grasp them; and then turning from the great Cosmos, he thinks
he may at least dare to invoke the spirit of our own mother planet
Earth. But to Faust, with eyes bleared with the dust of the study, to
Faust, living in his own speculations or in dogmatic systems, the aspect
of the Earth Spirit--a living fire--is terrible. He falls back upon
himself almost despairing, when the famulus Wagner enters. What Werner
was to the idealist Wilhelm Meister, Wagner is to the idealist Faust:
the mere scraping together of a little hoard of barren facts contents
Wagner; such grief, such despair as Faust's, are for this Philistine of
learning impossible. And then the fragment of 1790 passes on to
Mephistopheles. Whether or not Goethe found the features of his critical
demon in Herder (as Grimm supposes), and afterwards united these to the
more pronounced likeness in his friend Mephistopheles Merck, matters
little. Whether Herder and Merck had been present or not, Goethe would
have found Mephistopheles in his own heart. For the contrast between the
idealist Faust and the realist Mephistopheles exists in some form or
other in almost every great creation of Goethe. It is the contrast
between Werther and Albert, between Tasso and Antonio, between Edward
and the Captain. Sometimes the nobler spirit of worldliness is dwelt on,
as in the case of Antonio; sometimes the cold, hard, cynical side, as in
the case of Mephistopheles. The theme of Faust as originally conceived
was the turning of an idealist from his own private thoughts and dreams
to the real world; from all that is unnatural,--systems, speculations,
barren knowledge,--to nature and the founts of life; from the solitary
cell to the company of men; to action, beauty, life, and love. If he
can really succeed in achieving this wisely and well, Faust is saved. He
is delivered from solitude, the inane of speculation, the vagueness of
idealism, and made one with the band of his toiling fellows. But to
accompany him there is the spirit of base worldliness, the realist, the
cynic, who sees the meaner side of all that is actual, who if possible
will seduce Faust into accepting the world apart from that elevating
spirit which ennobles actual life, who will try to baffle and degrade
Faust by degrading all that he now seeks,--action and beauty and life
and love.
It is Goethe himself who is at odds with himself,--the realist Goethe
set over against the idealist Goethe; and Mephistopheles is the base
realist, the cynic whose endeavor is to mar the union of high poetry and
high prose in human life, which union of high poetry with high prose
Goethe always looked upon as the true condition of man's activity. In
the Prologue in Heaven, written when Schiller had persuaded Goethe to
take up the threads of his play, the Lord speaks of Faust as his
servant. Mephistopheles wagers that he will seduce Faust from his
allegiance to the Highest. The Lord does not wager; he _knows_:--
"Though now he serve me in a maze of doubt,
Yet I will lead him soon where all is clear;
The gardener knows, when first the bushes sprout,
That bloom and fruit will deck the riper year."
These vague passionate longings of Faust after truth and reality and
life and love are not evil; they are good: they are as yet indeed but
the sprouting of the immature leaf and bud, but the Lord sees in these
the fruit that is to be. Therefore let Mephistopheles, the spirit of
negation, try his worst, and at the last discover how an earnest
striver's ways are justified by God. Faust may wander, err, fall,
grievously offend,--"as long as man lives, man errs;" but for him who
ever strives upward, through all his errors, there is redemption in the
end.
The poem belongs to its epoch. Faust is the idealist, Mephistopheles is
the realist, of the eighteenth century. Faust aspires to nature and
freedom like one who had drunk deeply of Rousseau. Mephistopheles speaks
like a degraded disciple of Voltaire, who has lost his master's positive
faith in the human reason. Goethe can accept as his own neither the
position of Voltaire nor that of Rousseau; but actually he started in
life as an antagonist of Voltaire and a disciple of Rousseau, and in
like manner his Faust starts on his career as one who longs for a
"return to nature." While from merely negative criticism nothing
virtuous can be born, the vague longings of one who loves and hopes
promise measureless good.
Faust's vast aspirations, then, are not sinful; they only need to be
limited and directed to suitable ends. It is as God's servant that he
goes forth with the Demon from his study to the world. And
Mephistopheles's first attempt to degrade Faust is a failure. In the
orgy of Auerbach's cellar, while the boisterous young bloods clash their
glasses, the old scholar sits silent, isolated, ashamed. It is only by
infecting his blood with the witch's poison that Mephistopheles can lay
hold of the spirit of Faust even for a time; and had he not seen in the
mirror that vision of Helena, whom he rightly loves, and whom indeed he
needs, he could not have put to his lips the filthy brewage of the
witch. But now indeed he is snared; the poison rages in his veins; for
one hour he is transformed into what the world basely calls a man of
pleasure. Yet Faust is not wholly lost: his better self, the untrained,
untamed idealist, begins to reassert its power; the fumes of the poison
dissipate themselves. Guilty though he be, his love of Margaret is not
what Mephistopheles requires that it should be: it is not calculating,
egoistic, cynical, nor dull, easeful, and lethargic. It is not the crime
of an experienced worldling nor of a dull, low liver: it is the crime of
one whose unwise heart and untaught imagination delude him; and
therefore though his fall be deep, it is not fatal. The wrong he has
wrought may be blind and terrible as that of Othello to Desdemona; but
it is not the serpentine stinging of an Iago or a Mephistopheles.
So through anguish and remorse Faust is doing off the swathe-bands of
delusion, learning to master his will, learning his own heart, learning
the meaning of existence: he does not part from his ideal self, his high
aspirations, his ardent hopes; he is rather transforming these into
realities; he is advancing from dreams to facts, so that in the end,
when his life becomes a lofty prose, it may be interpenetrated by a
noble poetry.
It were long to trace the history of Faust through the ever purifying
and ascending scale of energies exhibited in the Second Part of the
drama. Affairs of State, science, art, war--all that Goethe had known by
experience--appear in this encyclopaedic poem. One word, however, must be
said respecting the 'Helena.' It is a mistake to view this central
portion of the Second Part as solely or chiefly an allegory of the
wedlock of classic and romantic art. As science is shown to form a
needful part of Faust's turning from the inane of metaphysics to the
positive world, so from the Greek spirit he learns sanity and strength;
the deliverance of the ideal man in Faust is aided by the beauty and the
healthfulness of classic art. Through beauty, as Schiller tried to show
in his letters on 'AEsthetic Culture,' we attain to freedom. Faust is not
an artist, but a _man_; Helena is but one of the spirits whose influence
is needed to make him real and elevated. It is she who qualifies him
for achieving practical work in a high, ideal spirit.
The Fourth Act of the Second Part is wholly concerned with practical
work. What is this which engages the student of the metaphysic cell, who
had gone through the four Faculties, and is now once again grown old?
What is this? Only well-defined and useful activity. He has rescued some
acres of arable land from the rage of the barren sea.
But Faust is not yet wholly delivered from evil; his activity is useful,
indeed, but it lacks the finer grace of charity. He commissions
Mephistopheles to destroy the cottage of old Philemon and Baucis, which
stands in the way of his territorial improvements. It is the last crime
of the unregenerate will. The four gray women--Care and Blame and Want
and Crime--now assail him; but there is virtue in him to the last.
However it may be with himself, grant only that ages hence the children
of men, free and happy, may dwell upon the soil which he has saved for
their place of labor and of love,--grant but this, and even in the
anticipation of it he is made possessor of the highest bliss. Nor indeed
is higher permitted to man on earth. And now that Faust has at last
found satisfaction, and said to the passing moment, "Stay, thou art so
fair," the time has come for Mephistopheles to claim his soul. But in
this very aspiration after the perfect joy of others--not his own--Faust
is forever delivered from the Evil One. The gray old man lies stretched
upon the sand. Higher powers than those of his own will take him, guard
him, lead him forward. The messengers of God bear away his immortal
part. All Holy Hermits, all Holy Innocents, all Holy Virgins, the less
and the greater Angels, and redeemed women who have sinned and sorrowed
and have been purified, aid in his ultimate purification. It is the same
thought which was interpreted in a lower key when Wilhelm Meister's fate
was intrusted to Natalia. Usefulness is good; activity is good: but over
all these should soar and brood the Divine graces of life, and love the
chief of these. That which leads us farther than all the rest is what
Goethe names "the imperishable womanly grace," that of love. And so the
great mystery-play reaches its close.
[Signature: Edward Dowden]
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born at
Frankfort-on-the-Main, August 28th, 1749; he attended the
University of Leipzig 1765-1768, and went to Strassburg in
1770, where he met Herder, made the acquaintance of
Shakespeare, and in 1771 took his degree. 'Goetz von
Berlichingen' in 1773 announced the dawn of a new era in
German letters, and in 1774 'The Sorrows of Werther' made the
poet world-famous. In 1775 Goethe accepted the invitation of
Duke Carl August and went to Weimar, which remained
thenceforth his home. The Italian journey, marking an epoch in
the poet's life, took place in 1786-1787. The 'Faust Fragment'
appeared in 1790. The friendship with Schiller, also of
far-reaching importance in Goethe's life, began in 1794 and
was terminated only by Schiller's death in 1805. 'Hermann and
Dorothea' was published in 1797. In 1806 Goethe married
Christiane Vulpius. The First Part of 'Faust' appeared in
1808;--in 1816 the poet is at work upon his 'Autobiography'
and the 'Italian Journey'; the first part of 'Wilhelm
Meister's Apprenticeship' appeared in 1821, and was completed
in 1829. 'Faust' was finished on July 20th, 1831. Goethe died
at Weimar on March 22d, 1832.
FROM 'FAUST'
CHORUS OF THE ARCHANGELS; FROM THE PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN
Shelley's Translation
_Raphael_--
The sun makes music as of old
Amid the rival spheres of heaven,
On its predestined circle rolled
With thunder speed; the angels even
Draw strength from gazing on its glance,
Though none its meaning fathom may
The world's unwithered countenance
Is bright as at creation's day.
_Gabriel_--
And swift and swift with rapid lightness
The adorned earth spins silently,
Alternating Elysian brightness
With deep and dreadful night; the sea
Foams in broad billows from the deep
Up to the rocks, and rocks and ocean,
Onward, with spheres which never sleep,
Are hurried in eternal motion.
_Michael_--
And tempests in contention roar
From land to sea, from sea to land;
And raging, weave a chain of power,
Which girds the earth as with a band.
A flashing desolation there
Flames before the thunder's way;
But thy servants, Lord, revere
The gentle changes of thy day.
CHORUS OF THE THREE
The angels draw strength from thy glance,
Though no one comprehend thee may;
Thy world's unwithered countenance
Is bright as on creation's day.
SCENES FROM 'FAUST'
Translated by Bayard Taylor
All the following selections from 'Faust' are from Taylor's
translation. Copyright 1870, by Bayard Taylor, and reprinted
here by permission of and special agreement with Mrs. Taylor,
and Houghton, Mifflin & Co., publishers, Boston.
FAUST AND WAGNER
FAUST