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THE FAUST-LEGEND
AND GOETHE'S 'FAUST'
BY
H. B. COTTERILL
EDITOR OF GOETHE'S 'IPHIGENIE'
SCHILLER'S 'LAGER' 'REFLECTIONS
FROM THE NIBELUNGENLIED' DANTE'S
'INFERNO' ETC.
LONDON
GEORGE G. HARRAP & COMPANY
9 PORTSMOUTH STREET KINGSWAY W.C.
1912
BALLANTYNE & COMPANY, LTD.
TAVISTOCK STREET, COVENT GARDEN
LONDON
PREFACE
These lectures have been given perhaps half a dozen times, in England,
in Switzerland and in Germany. On allowing them to appear in print I
should perhaps apologize to my readers for the somewhat free and
familiar style in which parts of them are written; but even if I had the
time to recast them into a more serious form I should be unwilling to do
so, for there is surely enough ponderous literature on the subject, and
although some may resent in a book what often helps to make a lecture
attractive, I think I can rely on the fact that many people agree with
the dictum of Horace:
Ridiculum aeri
Fortius et melius magnas plerumque secat res,
or, as Milton has it:
Joking decides great things
Stronger and better oft than earnest can.
Almost the only change that I have made in my MS. has been the
substitution or addition of an English translation in numerous places
where I had formerly quoted the German original. On some occasions, when
first writing the lectures, I very probably used the English version of
_Faust_ by Bayard Taylor, but I have not the book at present at hand and
cannot feel quite certain whether any of the verse translations are not
my own. The little book makes of course no pretence to be a contribution
to critical or biographical literature. It is meant especially for those
who wish to know something more about the story of Faust and about
Goethe's play, and who, because their knowledge of German does not
suffice or for other reasons, are unable to study the subject in any
more satisfactory way.
H. B. C.
FREIBURG IM BREISGAU
_August 1912_
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE OLD FAUST LEGEND 9
GOETHE'S 'FAUST' (PART I.) 56
GOETHE'S 'FAUST' (PART II.) 109
I
THE OLD FAUST-LEGEND
All of us have probably experienced the fact that it is possible to have
been familiar for a long time with some great work of imagination--some
poem or picture--to have learnt to love it almost as if it were a living
person, to imagine that we understand it and appreciate it fully, even
to fancy that it has a special message, a deeper meaning, for us than
for almost any one else, and then to come across somebody--some
commentator perhaps--who informs us that our uncritical appreciation is
quite worthless, mere shallow sentiment, and that until we can
accurately analyze and formulate the Idea which the artist endeavoured
to incorporate in his work, and classify the diverse manifestations of
this Idea as subjective, objective, symbolical, allegorical,
dramatical-psychological or psychological-dramatical, we are not
entitled to hold, far less to express, any opinion on the subject.
When I realised that I had undertaken to lecture on _Faust_, I thought
it my duty to study Goethe's German commentators--some of them at least;
for to study all would consume a lifetime. A few of the works of these
commentators I already possessed--some, I am sorry to say, with their
pages yet uncut. Others I procured, following the advice of German
friends well versed in the matter. I set to work on what was presumably
the best of these commentaries. As I laboured onwards, page after page,
I found myself from time to time turning back to the title of the book.
Sure enough, it was _Ueber Goethe's Faust_. I laboured on--the suspicion
deepening at every turn of the page that perhaps the binder might have
bound up the wrong text under the title _Ueber Goethe's Faust_. At the
fifty-third page I came to a dead stop. Except quite incidentally
neither Goethe nor Faust had as yet been mentioned. These fifty-three
pages had been entirely devoted to what seemed to my rather
unmetaphysical mind a not very luminous or edifying dissertation on the
difference between _Ansicht_ and _Einsicht_--between mere Opinion and
true critical Insight; and, as far as I could discover, the only
conclusion as yet arrived at was that the writer possessed an exclusive
monopoly in the last-mentioned article.
But I will not inflict upon you any further description of my tusslings
with Teutonic interpreters of _Faust_--with their _egos_ and _non-egos_,
their moral-aesthetic symbolisms and so on. Let us leave them to the
tender mercies of Goethe himself, who was not sparing of his ridicule in
regard to his commentators, nor, alas, at times in regard to his
countrymen. 'Of all nations,' he says, 'the Germans understand me
least.... Such people make life a burden by their abstruse thoughts and
their _Ideas_, which they hunt up in all directions and insist on
discovering in everything.... They come and ask _me_ what "Ideas" _I_
have incorporated in my _Faust_. Just as if I myself knew!--or could
describe it, even if I did know!' Of course Goethe's great poem contains
an Idea, if by that word we mean in a poem what we mean by _life_ in
anything living; but it is not by dissection and analysis that we shall
discover it. 'He who wishes,' says Goethe in _Faust_, 'to examine and
describe anything living first does his best to expel the life. Then he
has got the dead parts in his hand; but what is wanting is just the
spiritual bond.' It is my purpose--a purpose not easy of fulfilment--to
avoid this method of dissection and to place before you living
realities, not anatomical specimens.
But before we plunge _in medias res_ and grapple our present subject,
namely the old Faust-legend, I should like to say just a few words in
order to show from what standpoint I think we should regard Goethe as a
poet and a thinker--for that he is great both as a poet and as a thinker
cannot be denied.
Goethe describes his own philosophy as the philosophy of action. He
believed in impulse, in inspiration, in action, rather than in
reflexion, analysis and logic. 'Reflect not!' he makes Iphigenie
exclaim--'Reflect not! Grant freely, as thou feel'st!' And in one of his
Epigrams he says:
Yes, that's the right way,
When we cannot say
How we think. True thought
Comes as a gift, unsought.
Such theory of inspiration is thoroughly Greek, reminding one of
Plato's 'muse-inspired madman' and of what Sophocles is related to have
said to Aeschylus; 'Thou, Aeschylus, always dost the right thing--but
unconsciously ([Greek: all' ouk eidos ge]).' Thus it was also with
Goethe. All intellectual hobbies and shibboleths, all this endless
wearisome discussion and dissection and analysis and criticism and
bandying about of _opinion_, which is the very life-breath of modern
intellectual existence and modern journalistic literature, Goethe
rejected, as Plato had done in his _Phaedrus_, where he makes Socrates
call such things 'rotten soul-fodder.'
'The whole! The whole!' was Goethe's frequent exclamation--'life!
action! being!--the living whole, not the dead parts!' He was for ever
decrying mere thought, mere intellect, mere cleverness. And yet of all
moderns what greater intellect, what greater thinker, can we name than
Goethe himself? Seldom, perhaps never, has there existed a mortal so
many-sided. 'In such manifold directions'--he wrote to his friend
Jacobi--'does my nature move, that I cannot be satisfied with _one_
single mode of thought. As poet and artist I am polytheist; as a
student of Nature I am pantheist. When I need a God for my personal
nature, as a moral and spiritual human being, He also exists for me.
Heaven and earth are such an immense realm that it can only be grasped
by the collective intelligence of all intelligent beings.' Such
'collective intelligence' Goethe perhaps more nearly possessed than any
other human being has done. The lordly pleasure-house which he built for
his soul was such as Tennyson describes (and his words refer of course
to Goethe):
Full of great rooms and small the palace stood,
All various, each a perfect whole
From living Nature, fit for every mood
And change of my still soul.
And wonderfully true are those other lines of Tennyson--but rather
bitter, as perhaps was to be expected of Tennyson when he was describing
a great character with which he had so little sympathy:
I take possession of man's mind and deed.
I care not what the sects may brawl.
I sit as God holding no form of creed,
But contemplating all.
To Goethe all things, both in Nature and in Art were but transitory
reflexions of the real and eternal. 'Alles vergaengliche ist nur ein
Gleichnis'--all things transitory are but a parable, an allegory of
truth and reality--such are some of the last words of his great Poem;
and thus too he regarded his own poetry. 'I have,' he said, 'always
regarded all that I have produced as merely symbolic, and I did not much
care whether what I made were pots or dishes.' Even that life-poem of
his, _Faust_, which he planned and began as a young man of about
twenty-five, and the last lines of which he wrote a few months before
his death, aged eighty-two, only represents (as indeed do all great
works of art) _one_ aspect of belief--or perhaps I should rather say a
certain number of truth's innumerable aspects, none of them claiming to
afford a full vision, and not a few of them apparently contradictory;
for, as both Plato and Shakespeare tell us, truth cannot be directly
stated: it lies, as it were, in equipoise between contradictory
statements:
For no thought is contented. The better sort,
As thoughts of things divine ... do set the word
Against the word.
_Faust_ does not claim to be a universal Gospel, nor to offer a final
solution of the riddle of existence. It makes no attempt to pile up
Pelions on Ossas--to scale heaven with the Babel-towers of the human
reason. It merely holds up a mirror in which we see reflected certain
views of truth, such as presented themselves to Goethe from some of his
intellectual heights. To regard it and judge it otherwise--to analyse
its Idea--to insist on discovering its Moral--to compare it with some
little self-contained system of theory or dogma which we ourselves may
have finally accepted--and to condemn Goethe as a prophet of lies
because, viewing truth from such diverse standpoints (many of them
perhaps quite inaccessible for us) he may seem at times to ignore some
of our pet formulae--this, I think, would convict us of a lamentable lack
of wisdom and humility. And if at times we feel pained by what may seem
irreverent, let us remember that Goethe wrote also these words: 'With
many people who have God constantly on their tongues He becomes a
phrase, a mere name uttered without any accompanying idea. If they were
penetrated by God's greatness, they would rather be dumb and for very
reverence not dare to name Him.'
Goethe accepted not without a certain amount of pride the title given
him by some of his contemporaries--that of 'the last of the Heathen.'
But which of us will doubt the sincerity or fail to be touched by the
humility of his words: 'And yet perhaps I am such a Christian as Christ
Himself would wish me to be.'
There are doubtless but very few (and I confess that I am not one of
these select few) who can accept Goethe in all his many-sidedness. We
ordinary mortals are incapable of such Protean versatility and are sure
to find points, often many and important points, where we are strongly
repelled by his teachings and his personality. The idealist is
scandalized by his vigorous realism, the realist and materialist by his
idealism, the dogmatist by his free thought, the free-thinker by his
reverence towards religion, while the scientific expert is apt to regard
him as a mere poet, oblivious or ignorant of the fact that, although
without scientific training, besides propounding theories on Colour
which were for a time accepted by leading authorities on that subject
and besides making a discovery which had escaped the investigations of
professional Anatomists (that of the intermaxillary bone), Goethe was
the discoverer of a law, that of the metamorphosis of leaves and
flowers, which may be said to have almost revolutionised the science of
Botany.
Let us now turn to our subject and attempt to trace to its first sources
this strange and suggestive legend of Faust, the great Magician.
And first, we shall see our way more clearly if we consider what is
really the nature of that magic, or black art, which played such an
important part in the medieval imagination.
Perhaps we may say that by 'magic' was denoted that art by which one was
supposed to gain a knowledge of, and a power over, the prime elements of
Nature and its cosmic potencies, so as to be able to combine and use
them independently of natural laws. It is this power that Faust in
Goethe's play longs to attain:
... To find the force
That binds the world and guides its course,
Its germs and vital powers explore
And peddle with worthless words no more.
In almost every age and nation we find a vital Power, an ordering
Force, recognised as present in the natural world, and the human mind
seems ever prone to believe such Power to have affinity to human nature
and to be, so to speak, open to a bargain. The fetish priest, the rain
doctor, the medicine-man, the Hindu yogi, the Persian Mage, the medieval
saint, and countless miracle-workers in every age, have ever believed
themselves to be, whether by force of will, or by ecstatic
contemplation, or by potent charms, in communion with the great Spirit
of Nature, or with mighty cosmic influences--with Powers of Light or of
Darkness; with Oromasdes or Arimanes, Brahma or Siva, Jehovah or Baal;
with Zoroastrian Devs, Persian Genii, guardian angels or attendant
demons; with the Virgin Queen of heaven--whether as Selene, Astarte,
Hecate, or the Madonna; with the Prince of the powers of this
world--with or without his horns and his cloven foot.
Not only among the heathen--the orientals and Egyptians--but also among
the Chosen People we find the priests attesting their favour with the
Deity, and asserting the truth of their religion, by what we may call
orthodox magic. We all remember how Aaron's rod, in the form of an
orthodox snake, swallowed up the unorthodox rod-snakes of the Egyptian
sorcerers, and how Elijah attested the power of the true God by calling
down fire from heaven in his contest with the priests of the Sun-god
Baal. King Solomon too was for many ages credited with magic powers and
was regarded in medieval times as the great authority in matters of
wizardry.
Among the Greeks, although mysteries and witches played no small part in
the old religion and survived long in popular superstition, magic was
thrust into the background by the poetic and philosophic Hellenic
imagination. The powers of Nature were incorporated in the grand and
beautiful human forms of the Olympian gods, or in the dread shapes of
the Infernal deities. But even among those of the Greeks who were raised
far above the ordinary superstitions of the populace we find many traces
of mysticism and magic, as for example in connexion with oracles, with
divine healing, with the efficacy of images and other sacred objects,
and especially in connexion with Orphic and other Mysteries. And, while
for the most part Greek philosophy was rather imaginative than mystic,
still we encounter the genuine mystic element in such Greek sages as
Empedocles and Pythagoras, both of whom assumed the priestly character
and seem to have laid claim to supernatural powers. Empedocles indeed,
it is said, gave himself out to be a deity exiled from heaven, and was
apparently worshipped as such. According to a not very trustworthy
legend he threw himself into the crater of Mount Etna--perhaps in order
thus to solve the mystery of existence. Pythagoras is said by some to
have met his death at the hands of the people of Crotona, who set fire
to his house and burnt him alive with many of his disciples. Goethe
evidently alludes to Pythagoras (as well perhaps as to John Huss and
others who found their death at the stake) in some well-known lines,
which may be roughly thus translated:
The few that truth's deep mystery have learned
And could not keep it in their hearts concealed,
But to the mob their inner faith revealed,
Have evermore been crucified and burned.
We now come to Christianity. In the early ages of the Church the final
appeal seems to have been an appeal to miracles, and we find the
apostles and their followers claiming the sole right of working miracles
in the name of the one true God and anathematizing all other
wonder-workers as in league with Satan. We all remember Elymas the
Sorcerer struck blind by St. Paul, and the adversary of St. Peter, Simon
the Mage, around whom first gathered the myths which lived so long in
the popular imagination and many of which we shall meet with in the
legend of Dr. Faust.
This Simon, the Magus or Sorcerer, who bewitched the people of Samaria,
and was looked upon as 'the great power of God,' is said in the _Acts of
the Apostles_ to have been converted by St. Philip and to have brought
upon himself a severe rebuke from St. Peter for offering to purchase
with money the gift of wonder-working. In about the third century the
legend of Simon Magus, as related by Clement of Alexandria, seems to
have already incorporated in a mythical form the discords of the early
Church, and especially the feud between the Jewish Christians, followers
of St. Peter, and the Gentile proselytes, followers of St. Paul. Indeed
Simon the Sorcerer was in course of time regarded by some as having been
identical with St. Paul--that is to say, it was believed that St. Paul
had been none other but Simon Magus in disguise. The voice heard at St.
Paul's conversion and the light by which for a season he was struck
blind were alleged to have been feats of wizardry by which he, a wolf in
sheep's clothing, stole his way into the true fold in order to introduce
discord and to betray the Church to the Gentiles.
St. Peter, the true Simon, is said to have followed the false Simon from
city to city, out-rivalling his Satanic miracles by orthodox miracles,
until at length they reached Rome. Here Simon Magus by his magic arts
succeeded in flying up into the sky in the presence of the Emperor and
his court, but at the word of Peter the charm was broken and the wizard
fell to earth and was killed.
But, besides this, the so-called Gnostic heresy introduced other
elements into the legend. These Gnostics were a sect that arose in the
early times of Christianity. They pretended to a special insight into
the divine nature, and combined Platonic and oriental theories with
Christian dogmas. They tried to convert the story of the Redemption into
a cosmological myth, and regarded the human person of Christ as a kind
of phantom--a magic apparition. Some of these Gnostics seem to have
accepted Simon Magus as the 'Power of God'--as the Logos, or divine
Reason, by which the world was created (or reduced from chaos to an
ordered Cosmos). From this a curious myth arose. This Logos, or creative
Power, was identified with the Sun-god, as the source of life, and as
Sun-god was united to the Moon-goddess, Selene. Now the words Helen and
Selene are connected in Greek, and Helen of Troy was accepted by these
Gnostics as a mythical form of the goddess of the moon. Hence it came
that in the Gnostic form of the Simon Magus legend he was married to
Helen of Troy, and this notion found its way into the old Faust-legend,
and is used by Goethe in that exceedingly wonderful and beautiful part
of his great poem which is called the _Helena_.
After the suppression of Gnostic and other early heresies came the
contest of the now united and politically powerful Church against the
outer world of heathendom. While retaining for herself what we may call
a monopoly in orthodox magic the Church condemned as in league with the
devil _all_ speculation, whether theological or scientific--the one as
leading to heresy, the other to sensual ends, such as riches, fame, and
those lusts of the flesh and that pride of intellect which were fatal to
the contemplative and ascetic ideals of medieval Christianity.
It was not among Teuton and Celtic savages but among the learned
adherents of the old Greek philosophy that the Church in those earlier
days found her most dangerous and obstinate adversaries. Plato and
Aristotle (whose tenets the Christian Schoolmen afterwards endeavoured
to harmonize with the teaching of the Gospel) were at first brought
forward to oppose the new religion, these doctrines of Greek philosophy
being largely supplemented by mystic ideas derived from oriental
sources. It was however Pythagoras, the great Greek-Italian philosopher
of the sixth century B.C., the predecessor and to some extent the
inspirer of Socrates and Plato, who was most generally accepted as the
rival of St. Paul. It was his mystical doctrines of Number and Harmony,
of the Unit and the Triad, which were most often marshalled against the
Christian doctrine of the Unity and Trinity of the Godhead. Indeed it
even seems that Pythagoras was believed by some of these adversaries of
Christianity to be the incarnation of Deity (as had been believed in his
lifetime) and to be the friend and saviour of mankind, like Prometheus
of old, who was said to have given his life for the human race devoted
to destruction by the anger of an offended God.
No wonder that, embittered by such opponents, the Church launched her
anathema against all the profane learning of the day--all study of the
ancient heathen philosophers and poets. The gods of Olympus became
synonymous with demons and monsters of the Christian hell, as we see in
Dante and in such old legends as that of the Hill of Venus. Plato and
Aristotle, and even Homer, were put on the index. Virgil especially was
regarded as a dangerous wizard--although in another age he was honoured
almost as a prophet and a foreteller of the Messiah. I remember that
many years ago, when I was searching for Virgil's tomb on Posilipo near
Naples, I was informed by a contadino, of whom I had asked my way, that
Virgil ('Marone,' as he called him) was a great magician. The man knew
nothing of Virgil as poet. Probably Virgil's account of the descent of
Aeneas into the lower world, and that strange _Eclogue_ of his, the
_Pollio_, in which possibly a Sibylline prophecy of the coming of a
Messiah is reproduced, may have credited him with magic lore, and may
also have invested him for a time with almost the dignity of a canonical
Minor Prophet.
Now, during these ante-Reformation ages the Roman Church claimed, as I
have said, a monopoly in orthodox magic. She could send a soul to hell,
or by rites and exorcism she could save the sinner from his compact with
Satan, as one sees in such legends as those of Merlin, of Tannhaeuser, of
Robert the Devil, and of that Theophilus who was converted by flowers
sent him from Paradise by the Virgin-Martyr St. Dorothea. Of another
Theophilus, an eastern monk of perhaps the sixth century, we are told
that, like Faust, he made a written compact with the devil, but
repented and was saved by the Virgin Mary, who snatched the fatal
document from the devil's claws and gave it back to the penitent.
But there is one early example of the wizard-legend where the magician
is saved from his pact with Satan not so much by the counter-charms of
the Church as by the purity and steadfastness of Christian maidenhood,
and for this reason I think the poet Shelley is right in regarding this
legend as 'the true germ of Goethe's _Faust_.' It is the story of
Cyprian and Justina, who were among the many victims of the persecution
of the Christians by Diocletian, about 300 A.D. Cyprian was a sorcerer
of Antioch whose diabolical arts failed to overcome the sanctity of
Justina. He confessed himself conquered and withdrew into the desert as
a Christian hermit. The story has been dramatized by the Spanish poet
Calderon in his _Magico Prodigioso_, a part of which has been finely
translated by Shelley. The beautiful picture of St. Justina by Moretto,
where Cyprian is kneeling before her and a white unicorn, the symbol of
chastity, is crouching in the foreground, is well known.
With the Reformation another spirit arose and legends took a different
form. In the Protestant world the orthodox magic of the Roman Church
lost its saving power and was regarded as no less diabolic than all
other black art. He was irretrievably lost who had once given over his
soul to magic and the devil (and the devil was at this time, as we know,
a very real personage--real enough to have an inkpot hurled at his head
by Luther). The revival at the Renaissance of speculation and research,
combined as it was with all kinds of fantastic hopes of discovering
prime matter, the 'Philosopher's stone,' and elixirs of life, bred in
the popular superstition a mysterious awe and attached to almost all
scientific investigation the epithet 'black,' or diabolic, as opposed to
the 'white art' of holding communion with good spirits. Alchemy and
astrology (words meaning merely what we call chemistry and astronomy)
became words of hellish import, and he who practised these arts was in
league with Satan. Thus were regarded such men as Lully, Roger Bacon,
the Abbot Tritheim, and (perhaps best known of all, at least to all
readers of Browning) Bombastes Paracelsus, the contemporary of Faust,
born at Einsiedeln, between Brunnen and the lake of Zuerich, in the year
1493.
Thus the sixteenth-century form of our legend is of the most tragic
character. In the oldest Faust-legend, which first took shape in this
century, there is no hint of his being saved. And another of its
characteristics is its strong anti-papal tendency. The devil appears in
the guise of a monk, and even as Mahomet or Antichrist in the guise of
the Pope himself.
But the Renaissance (if not the Reformation) introduced another,
entirely new and most important, element into the legend--one which
enabled Goethe to use the sulphurous old myth as the subject for a great
poem. Not only was there a renaissance of learning, but also of art--an
intense longing for both Knowledge and Beauty. To _know_ everything--to
learn the inner secret of Nature--to understand, as Faust longed to
understand,
The inmost force
That binds the world and guides its course--
this yearning after perfection by Knowledge was one of the fruits of the
Renaissance. The other was the yearning to gain perfection by means of
_feeling_, by the ecstatic contemplation of and communion with perfect
Beauty--'to love infinitely and be loved,' as Aprile says in Browning's
_Paracelsus_. These two impulses, the one toward Knowledge and the other
toward Love, were doubtless awakened by the study of Aristotle, that
'master of those who know,' and of Plato's doctrine of the soul's
love-inspired yearnings for Truth and Beauty and for communion with the
Perfect and the Eternal.
I have called them _two_ impulses, and to the mind they must ever appear
distinct, nay sometimes contrary; but I need not remind you how
Christianity teaches us to reconcile the ancient feud between the mind
and the heart--between Knowledge and Love. You may perhaps remember how
Dante, to intimate to us that there can be no true knowledge without
love and no true love without knowledge, speaks of the Cherubim and the
Seraphim as ideally the same, and tells us that the Seraphs, who love
most, also know most.
Both these impulses are noble and awaken our sympathy.
Now, in order that _tragic_ art may have its effect it must possess what
Aristotle calls [Greek: pathos], so that we may be able to sympathize
with the sufferer. Thus, for instance, Milton enlists our sympathies
even with his Satan, and it is perhaps because we cannot sympathize in
any way with Dante's Lucifer that many feel repelled by the terrible
creation. But even in the oldest of the Faust-legends, and far more of
course in Goethe's _Faust_, we are attracted by a 'pathetic' element,
viz., the unsatisfied and insatiable longing of a human soul for
Knowledge--for Truth--and its still intenser yearnings after ideal
Beauty.
Thus, even the Faust of the older sixteenth-century legend, although he
ultimately falls a victim to the devil, has noble and high impulses by
which we feel strongly attracted. He is lost, not through these
impulses, these yearnings for knowledge, but through his magic, and his
sensual life. In spite of more than one fit of remorse he is unable to
free himself from the lusts of the flesh; he is obliged to sign a second
bond with Mephisto and is dragged down ever lower into the abyss, until
the jaws of hell open and swallow him up--while the Faust of Goethe's
poem gains strength through many an error and many a grievous fall,
gradually shakes off the diabolic influence and rising on the
stepping-stones of his dead self is finally rescued by God's mercy and
reaches the higher spheres of another life.
How infinitely grander--how illimitable in its vistas--the subject
becomes when thus treated by a great poet we all must feel. And even if
we cannot with a whole heart accept as a true Gospel what (in spite of
Goethe's admission that God's mercy was a necessary factor) seems to be
a gospel of _self-salvation_, we should not forget that this picture of
a man pressing on in his own strength amidst the lusts of the flesh and
the errors of the mind is perhaps the noblest and grandest kind of
picture that dramatic art can offer us--that of the human will in its
struggle against destiny. In any case, I think, we cannot refuse our
sympathy for these yearnings and searchings for truth amidst error. Do
you remember what Lessing said about such longings? 'If God'--he
said--'should hold Truth itself in His right hand, and in His left the
longing for Truth, and should say to me _Choose!_ I would humbly fall
down before His left hand and say: _Father, pure Truth is for Thee
alone. Give me the longing for Truth, though it be attended with
never-ending error._'
There seems no doubt that a man named Johann Faust, renowned for his
learning and credited with magical powers, actually did exist--probably
about 1490 to 1540. (He was therefore a contemporary of Paracelsus, and
also of Luther, Charles V., Henry VIII. and Raphael.) Several notices of
this Dr. Johann Faust occur in writers of the period. One of the most
circumstantial is by the friend and biographer of Melanchthon, who
himself seems to have met Faust. But the various myths that gathered
round the magician were, it seems, first published in a continuous
narrative in 1587, that is about fifty years after his death. This is
the old _Frankfurter Faustbuch_, of which only one perfect specimen is
now known to exist. It is, I believe, in Leipzig. A mutilated copy is in
the Vienna Library.
One day, when to escape for a time from the German commentators above
mentioned I had gone out for a walk, I found my way to the old
Wasserkirche--now the Free Library of the city of Zuerich, and here I
discovered a facsimile reprint of this old Frankfurt Faust-book. As this
is the oldest and most authentic basis of all later forms of the story
and is doubtless the one which (as well as the puppet-play on the
subject) Goethe used as the ground-plan for his poem, I perhaps cannot
do better than give a brief abstract of its contents.
It is written in quaint old German and is interspersed with many pious
comments, biblical quotations and Latin words and phrases, and now and
then it breaks out into doggerel verse. The editor (Spiess by name)
tells us that he publishes the book 'as a warning to all Christians and
sensible people to avoid the terrible example of Doctor Faustus.' He
evidently takes the thing very seriously and has purposely (as he says)
omitted all 'magic formulae,' lest 'any should by this Historia be
incited to inquisitiveness and imitation.' Johann Faust, according to
this version, was born at Roda, a village near Weimar. (Other versions
say at Knittlingen in Wuertemberg.) His parents were honest God-fearing
peasants. His great abilities induced a rich relation in Wittenberg to
adopt and educate him. He studied theology at Wittenberg (known to us
all through Hamlet and Luther) and also at Cracow, outrivalling all
competitors and gaining the title of Doctor of Theology. But he had not
only a 'teachable and quick' but also a 'foolish, silly, inquisitive'
head, and neglecting the Bible became a 'Speculator' and prided himself
more on being an Astrologus and a Mathematicus than a Theologus. As the
old chronicler expresses it, he 'took to himself eagle's wings and
desired to search out the reasons of all in heaven and on earth.'
He now takes to 'Zauberei'--magic. Where four roads meet in the Spessart
Wald, a forest near Wittenberg, he inscribes mystic circles and performs
incantations for the purpose of summoning the devil. After all kinds of
fearful apparitions and noises, by which Faust is almost terrified to
death, a demon appears in the shape of a 'grey monk.' Faust invites him
to visit him at his house in Wittenberg. The demon visits him there and
tells him of all the horrors of hell. But Faust persists in his plan and
makes a second rendezvous with the demon, who has now procured leave
from his lord and master Lucifer to offer his services and attendance.
The compact is made. The demon is to serve him for twenty-four years.
Faust is to renounce Christianity and to hate all Christians, and at the
end of twenty-four years he is to belong to the demon 'to have power,
rule and dominion over his soul, body, flesh, blood, and possessions,
and that for all eternity.' This compact has to be signed with blood.
Faust pierces his hand, and the blood flows out and forms the words 'O
homo fuge!'--'O man, escape!'--but Faust, though alarmed, is not
deterred. It is now agreed that the demon shall appear, whenever
summoned, in the form of a Franciscan monk. He then reveals his name:
Mephistopheles, or, as the old legend gives it, Meph_o_stoph_i_les--the
meaning of which is probably 'not loving the light'--[Greek: me phos
philon]--a compound which you may rightly remark must have been
concocted by a rather second-rate Greek scholar.
After a season of dissipation, during which Faust is supplied with all
the luxuries that he desires--wine stolen from ducal, electoral, and
episcopal cellars, soft and costly raiment from the draperies and
naperies of Nuernberg and Frankfurt and so on (he had, for instance, only
to open his window and call any bird, goose, turkey, or capon, and it
would at once fly in, ready roasted)--getting tired of this kind of
thing he falls in love and wishes to marry. But Mephisto angrily tells
him that marriage is a thing pleasing to God and against the terms of
the compact. You will notice here the Lutheran and anti-papal
tendency--marriage being a thing pleasing to God in itself, and any
compact being devilish which forbade it, as in the case of priests and
monks.
Then follow long discussions and disputations between Faust and Mephisto
on the creation of the world, on hell and heaven, and on black art and
astrology. None of us may be in a position to question a demon's
accuracy with regard to how affairs stand in Hades, but Mephisto gives a
very unorthodox account of the creation--or rather he denies that there
was any creation. Matter according to his theory (and it is a theory of
some modern scientists and not only of medieval demons)--matter is
eternal and self-existent--uncreated, or self-created, whatever that may
mean. Incited by these descriptions, and by his 'foolish silly
inquisitive head,' Faust demands that he should pay a visit to both hell
and heaven.
For the journey to Hell the services of Beelzebub have to be
requisitioned. The devilish worm, as the old writer calls Beelzebub,
places Faust in a chair or pannier made of bones, hoists the chair on to
his back and plunges (like Empedocles) into a volcano. Faust is nearly
stifled to death. He sees all kinds of griffins and monsters and great
multitudes of spirits tormented in the flames--among them emperors,
kings and princes. Then in a deep sleep he is brought home and laid on
his bed. 'This Historia and recount of what he saw in hell,' says the
old chronicler, 'hath Doctor Faustus himself written down with his own
hand, and after his death it was found lying in a sealed book.' After
this (about ten years of the twenty-four having already elapsed) he is
taken up to heaven by Mephisto in a chariot drawn by dragons--not of
course to the Empyrean, the abode of God, but up as far as the fixed
stars (the eighth sphere). He finds the sun, which before he had
believed to be only as big as the bottom of a cask, to be far larger
than the earth, and the planets to be as large as the earth, and the
clouds of the upper sky to be as dense and hard as rocks of crystal.
From these regions the earth looks as small as the 'yolk in an egg.' He
sees all the kingdoms of the earth--Europe, Asia, and Africa (not
America, although America was discovered by Columbus in 1492, about the
date of Faust's birth).
In the sixteenth year Faust wishes to pay a visit to the chief cities
and countries of the world. Mephisto changes himself into a horse--'with
wings like a dromedary.' It is, I believe, not generally supposed that a
dromedary has wings; but I suppose the old chronicler must have confused
a camel and an ostrich, thinking of the name which some Greek authors
give to the ostrich, namely _stroutho-camelos_ or 'sparrow-camel.'
On the back of his sparrow-camel horse Faust is carried through the air
to many lands and cities and at length reaches Rome, and visits the
Pope, on whom he and Mephisto (both being invisible) play various
practical jokes, blowing in his face, snatching his food away at meals
and so on, till the Supreme Pontiff orders all the bells in Rome to be
rung in order to exorcise the evil spirits by whom he is haunted. At
Constantinople they befool the Sultan with magic tricks. Mephisto
disguises himself in the official robes of the Pope and persuades the
Sultan that he is Mahomet (another cut at the Pope, as Antichrist),
while Faust installs himself in the Sultan's palace and enjoys life and
finally floats up into the air and disappears. They then visit Egypt,
India, Africa, and other places, including the Garden of Eden and
Britain.
Britain is described (rightly perhaps) as 'very damp--abounding in water
and in metals....' 'Here also is to be found,' adds our chronicler, 'the
stone of God, which Doctor Faustus brought thence.' What he means by the
stone of God is, I suppose, the so-called Philosopher's stone--used for
the manufacture of money out of any worthless substance. Faust might
have found a good deal of this stone of God without leaving Germany and
seems to have left a considerable amount of it behind in Britain.
Part III of the Faust-book relates his 'feats of nigromancy at the
courts of Potentates' and elsewhere, and his 'terrible end and
departure.' At Innsbruck, in the presence of Charles V. and his court he
summons up the shades of Alexander the Great and his consort, I suppose
Roxana, the beautiful Bactrian princess. You may be interested to learn
that Alexander the Great was a 'well-built stout little man with a thick
yellow-red beard, red cheeks, and eyes like a basilisk,' and that the
old chronicler, quite after the fashion of the modern purveyor for
ladies' journals, informs us that Roxana wore a dress entirely of blue
velvet trimmed with gold pieces and pearls.
The following chapters strike one as hardly in the same key with the
rest of the book. They relate feats which remind one rather of Baron
Muenchhausen. Faust swallows up a wagon of hay and a team of horses that
get in his way. He makes stag-antlers grow on the head of a
nobleman--saws off his own foot to give it as security for a loan
borrowed from a Jew (reminding one of Shylock and his 'pound of
flesh')--treats students to wine magically procured (as in the scene in
Auerbach's cellar in Goethe's poem)--cuts off people's heads and sends
them to the barber to be shaved, and then replaces them (a most useful
invention)--makes flowers appear in vases (like modern spiritualists or
Indian jugglers)--and lets flowers and grapes flourish in his garden at
Christmas-time. His most important feat is summoning up (as he does in
Goethe's poem) the shade of Helen of Troy. You will wish for a
description of Helen--at least of her dress. She appeared in a splendid
robe of black-purple ... her hair, of a glorious golden hue, hung down
to her knees--she had coal-black eyes, a lovely face, and a round head,
her lips red as cherries, with a little mouth and a neck like a white
swan, cheeks red as a rosebud, and a tall straight figure.
A fit of remorse now seizes our magician. He is visited by a pious old
man who nearly persuades him to repent and break his bond with the
devil. But Mephisto is too cunning for him, and induces him to sign a
new compact with his blood, promising to procure him Helen. For (as is
also the case in Goethe's poem) Faust himself has fallen violently in
love with the phantom that he had raised. By the help of Mephistopheles
Helen herself--or one of her 'doubles' which play a part in Greek
mythology--is summoned up, and lives with Faust as his wife. (At his
death she, and their son, Justus Faust, disappear.)
In the last year he is overwhelmed with terrible despair, which is
deepened by the mockeries of the demon. On the last evening he invites
his friends to supper at the village Rimlich, near Wittenberg. After the
supper, he addresses his companions in a speech of intense and pathetic
remorse, praying that God will save his soul though his body is forfeit
to the devil. He tells them that at the stroke of twelve the demon will
come to fetch him. He begs them to go quietly to bed, and not to be
alarmed if they hear a great uproar. At midnight a mighty wind sweeps
over the house, and a terrible hissing is heard as of innumerable
serpents. Faust's cries for help gradually die away. They rush into the
supper room and find him torn to pieces--eyes, brains, and teeth
scattered in all directions. 'After this,' says our chronicler, 'it was
so uncanny in the house that no man dared live in it. Doctor Faust also
appeared in person to his Famulus (assistant) Wagner by night, and
related to him many still more weird and mysterious things.... And thus
endeth the whole and truthful Historia and Magic of Dr. Faust, from
which every Christian man should take warning, and specially those who
are of a presumptuous, proud, curious and obstinate mind and head, that
they may flee from all Magic, Incantation, and other works of the devil.
Amen! This I wish for each and every one from the ground of my heart.
Amen! Amen!'
The great popularity of this original Faust-book led to the publication
of many other versions of the story. In the very next year a Faust-book
in rime appeared. In some of these versions Mephisto has a very bad time
of it, Faust setting him all kinds of impossible tasks--such as writing
the name of Christ or painting a crucifix, or taking him on Good Friday
to Jerusalem--until the demon begs for his release, offering to give
back the written compact. In Strassburg at a shooting competition
Faust's magic bullet strikes Mephisto, who 'yells out again and again'
in pain. In a Dutch version, where the demon has the name 'Jost,' Faust
amuses himself by throwing a bushel of corn into a thorn hedge late at
night, when poor 'Jost' is tired to death, and bids him pick up every
grain in the same way as in the old story Venus vents her malice on
Psyche. The most important German version was that by Widmann--an
amplification of the old Faust-book. There also appeared a life of
Faust's Famulus (assistant), Christopher Wagner, whom the devil attends
in the form of an ape. Of one of these versions (I think Widmann's)
there appeared about 1590 an English translation, which was
supplemented by various English ballads on the same subject, and it was
an Englishman--Shakespeare's great contemporary, the poet Christopher
Marlowe--who was himself, as you know, a man of Faust-like temperament,
and not unlike him in his fate--being killed in a drunken brawl--who
first _dramatized_ the story. His brilliant and lurid play, 'The
Tragical History of Dr. Faustus' follows very closely most of the
details given in the German Faust-books. Its poetical beauties (and they
are many) are unfortunately, as Hallam rightly remarks, intermingled
with a great deal of coarse buffoonery. Possibly he had to consult the
taste of his public in introducing such a large ingredient of this
buffoon element--taken from what I called the Muenchhausen portion of the
old legend. Patriotic German commentators sometimes deny that Goethe
knew Marlowe's play (though he knew Shakespeare well), but I think there
is no doubt that the opening monologue of Marlowe's play inspired the
more famous, though scarcely finer, opening scene of Goethe's drama.
'Theology, adieu!' Faustus exclaims, taking up a book of magic--
These metaphysics of magicians,
And necromantic books are heavenly ...
All things that move between the quiet poles
Shall be at my command--Emperors and kings
Are but obey'd in their several provinces,...
But _his_ dominion that excels in _this_
Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man.
A sound magician is a mighty god.
Here, Faustus, tire thy brains to gain a deity.
His agony of despair at the last moment is very finely depicted, and
there are not a few passages in the play which, for beauty of expression
and thought, are truly Shakespearean. Some of you possibly know the
magnificent lines addressed to Helen of Troy, which begin thus:
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium--
and the lines which seem to allude to the identification of Helen with
Selene, the Moon-goddess--
O thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
When he appeared to hapless Semele;
More lovely than the monarch of the sky,
In wanton Arethusa's azur'd arms.
Marlowe's play was written about 1590. Now it is asserted that about
this time English travelling players visited Germany, and perhaps
introduced there Marlowe's drama; and possibly _this_ was the beginning
of the German 'puppet-plays' on the subject of Faust. I do not feel
quite sure about it. Faust puppet-plays seem to have existed almost
simultaneously with the old Faust-books, and there is even the trace of
one _before_ the oldest Faust-book; at least in the archives of the
University of Tuebingen an entry has been unearthed in which in 1587 two
students were condemned to the 'Karzer,' or 'Black hole,' for composing
a 'Puppenspiel' on the subject of Dr. Faust.
In these Puppenspiele (puppet-shows) the comic element largely prevails
and is kept up by the comic figure Kasperle, a buffoon or 'Hanswurst' of
the same character as the Italian Pulcinella, the progenitor of our
English 'Punch.' As might be expected, these puppet-shows introduced a
great many variations of the story, most of them a mixture of tragedy
and comedy. In one a raven brings the contract from the devil for Faust
to sign. One of the conditions is that for twenty-four years Faust is
not to _wash_, or comb his hair or cut his nails--like Struwwelpeter.
When Faust attempts to embrace Helen she turns into a snake--and when
he is finally carried off by the demon, Kasperle gives (what Euripides
is accused of sometimes giving) a comic turn to the tragic catastrophe
by cracking jokes.