writer to use the subject artistically. Indeed during this period
Germany, devastated by the Thirty Years War and afterwards by French
literary influence, produced no literature worthy of mention, and what
writers it possessed were not such as would be likely to perceive the
poetic material contained in a popular puppet-show.
But the legend had taken firm hold on the popular imagination and when
Goethe was a boy (he was born in 1749) he saw a Faust-puppenspiel at
Frankfurt, and afterwards at Strassburg, when he was a young man of
about twenty. He was at this time evidently also familiar with the old
_Faustbuch_ itself, and it was then (about 1770) that he seems to have
first conceived the idea of the drama which he sealed up as finished
sixty years later (1831), a few months before his death.
Goethe's early manhood coincided with that period in German thought and
literature which is called the 'Sturm und Drang'--that is the Storm and
Stress--period. The subject of Faust, the attraction of which had for so
long lain dormant, appealed powerfully to the adherents of this new
school, with their gospel of the divine rights of the human heart and of
genius, with their wild passionate graspings after omniscience, their
Titanic heaven-storming aspirations after the unattainable and
indescribable. Lessing himself, though never a genuine Sturm und Drang
writer, began a _Faust_, and when Goethe began his drama a new _Faust_,
it is said, was being announced in almost every quarter of Germany.
Someone (I think it was Bayard Taylor) has reckoned up _twenty-nine
Fausts_ that were actually published in Germany while Goethe was working
at his. Some one else (I think Ludwig von Arnim) has said: 'Not enough
_Fausts_ are yet written. Every one should write one. There is as much
room for them as for straight lines in the circumference of a
circle'--which, as you know, is conceived by geometricians to consist of
an infinite number of infinitely small straight lines.
None of these twenty-nine _Fausts_ are, as far as I know, of any value
or interest except the unfinished play by Lessing, which, as it was
written while Goethe was still a lad, and seems to have been only
printed in fragments at some later date, can hardly come under Bayard
Taylor's list. From these fragments it is clear that Lessing meant to
save Faust's soul, if not his body. Toward the end of the last act, when
the devils are triumphing over their apparent victory and the possession
of Faust's body, a voice from heaven is heard: 'Triumph not! Ye have not
won the battle over human nature and human knowledge. The Deity has not
given to man the noblest impulses in order to bring him to eternal
misery. What you imagine you possess is only a phantom.'
Although we cannot tell for certain how Lessing meant to solve the
problem, I think it is almost certain that Faust was to work out his own
salvation amidst error and sin much as Goethe's Faust does. Before
attempting (as I shall do on other occasions) to give a description of
the two parts of Goethe's poem--in attempting which I shall keep as
closely as I can to the original and to questions arising directly out
of Goethe's own words--it will be useful and interesting to consider the
most striking points in which his _Faust_ differs essentially from all
its predecessors, except perhaps Lessing's--and Lessing, although he
struck the new chord, did not resolve it. But this is a subject
involving many and far-reaching questions, which, if they are to be
solved at all, are not to be solved by theory and dogma. I shall
therefore endeavour to state the case as simply and as objectively as
possible, avoiding metaphysical cobwebs and giving the _ego_ and
_non-ego_ a wide berth. I shall content myself in most cases with merely
pointing out the doctrine apparently preached by Goethe (reminding you
now and then that even his own seemingly categorical dogmas were to him
merely temporary forms of thought) and shall prefer to let much justify
its existence as an integral part of the living whole rather than to
expel the life by dissection and to examine the dead parts through the
spectacles of a commentator.
In my next lecture, after a brief consideration of these preliminary
questions, I shall try to describe the first Part of the drama--a task
of more than common difficulty, for the story is familiar to many of
you, and a bare rehearsal of the action of the play would prove
wearisome, while any attempt to communicate by means of translation the
wonderful beauty and force of Goethe's words is almost bound to prove a
failure.
In my third lecture I shall treat the second Part of the play, the
action of which is far less generally known. It is not often read and is
seldom seen on the stage. Indeed it was not written for the stage and
does not lend itself to ordinary dramatic and operatic purposes, as the
first Part does with its Gretchen episode. It embraces too huge a
circle--a circle within which lie all the possibilities of human life.
It is a kind of framework for all the tragedies and comedies and epics
and lyrics ever conceived, or conceivable. What unity it has is not of
the stage or the dramatic Unities. But nevertheless on the stage it
produces effects which impress one with the sense of an imaginative
power of an extraordinary kind.
Many years ago, when it was being given in the Dresden theatre, I saw it
performed four or five times and I remember noticing the wonderful
attraction that it had for minds of a certain class (and no very limited
class), while for others it was just such an unintelligible farrago of
wearisome 'Zeug' as Dante's _Paradiso_ and Beethoven's _Ninth Symphony_
are sometimes said to be.
I believe it is the fashion with certain critics (especially with those
who have read it superficially) to speak of the Second Part of Goethe's
_Faust_, as they do of _Paradise Regained_, with a certain
superciliousness, as a superfluous excrescence, the artistically almost
worthless product of a mind that had worked itself out and had exhausted
its 'Idea.'
The truth is that the _first_ Part is only the merest fragment, and
although the subject of Faust is endless and can never be fully treated
in any one work of art (the whole poem 'necessarily remaining a
fragment,' as Goethe himself said), nevertheless the _second_ Part does
solve in one of many possible ways the problem left unsolved by the
first half of the poem, namely the final attainment of peace and
happiness by the human soul, and it is one of the noblest monuments of
the human intellect existing in the literature of the world.
Indeed it is, I think, still more than this. It is not merely a monument
of intellect but of poetic imagination, and I am much inclined to
believe that the _Paradiso_ of Dante and the Second Part of Goethe's
_Faust_ are perhaps two of the best, the most infallible, touchstones
for discovering whether we really possess what Tennyson calls the
'poetic heart'--not a trumpery aesthetic imitation but the genuine
article.
II
GOETHE'S 'FAUST'
PART I
When Goethe wrote to Schiller announcing his intention of once more
taking up his unfinished _Faust_, Schiller replied: 'My head grows dizzy
when I think of it. The subject of Faust appears to supply such an
infinity of material.... I find no circle large enough to contain it.'
Goethe answered: 'I expect to make my work at this barbarous
composition, this _Fratze_ [_i.e._ caricature, as he often called it]
less difficult than you imagine. I shall throw a sop to exorbitant
demands rather than try to satisfy them. The whole will always remain a
fragment'--a fragment, perhaps we may add, in the same sense as even the
grandest Gothic building may be said to be only a part of the infinitely
great ideal Gothic structure which will never be seen on earth, whereas
in the Parthenon we have, or rather the Athenians in the days of
Pericles had, something final and complete, something which will
tolerate no addition.
If Schiller's head grew dizzy at the thought of a Faust-drama, I fear
that one who has no Schiller head on his shoulders may prove a poor
guide among the precipices and ravines of Goethe's life-poem, where the
path is often very steep and slippery. But I will do my best; and
perhaps I had better treat our subject as I proposed. At first I shall
point out a little more distinctly some of the characteristics which
distinguish Goethe's drama from the earlier versions of the story. Then
I shall try to guide you steadily and rapidly through the action of the
first Part, offering whatever comment may seem useful, and now and then
perhaps asking you to step aside from the track in order to get a peep
over some of the aforementioned precipices.
As we have already seen, one great difference between Goethe's _Faust_
and many older versions of the story (including Marlowe's play, but
excluding Lessing's fragment) is the fact that the sinner is saved.
Shortly before his death, in 1832, Goethe wrote to Wilhelm v. Humboldt:
'Sixty years ago, when as a young man I first conceived the idea of my
_Faust_, the whole plan of it lay clearly before me.' From the first
therefore Goethe had conceived the second Part as integral to his poem.
He knew that, if he were to write a _Faust_ at all, Faust must be saved.
We have already arrived at the edge of one of those precipices of which
I spoke--Faust must be saved. But what did Goethe mean, or, to ask a
fairer question, what do we ourselves mean, by being _saved_? No formula
of words seems able to provide us with a satisfactory answer. We can
indeed use metaphors drawn from the universe of Time and Space--we can
speak of 'another world' and of a 'future life'--but as soon as we
attempt to conceive such existence _sub specie aeternitatis_ our
imagination fails: to use the metaphor of Socrates, we are dazzled by
the insupportable radiance of the eternal and infinite, and seek to rest
our eyes by turning them toward shadows, reflexions, images: we accept
the beautiful image--the enigma (as St. Paul calls it) or allegory--of
a heaven in some far interspace of world and world.
As a poet, and especially as a dramatic poet, Goethe, if he treated the
subject at all, was compelled to accept some imaginative conception of a
future life, and he could scarcely accept any other but that which was
in keeping with the old legend--that heaven of angels and saints and
penitents which was the converse of the legendary hell and its fiends.
Whether however he was justified by the principles of true dramatic art
in his attempt to depict his imaginative conception and to place on the
stage a representation of heaven may be doubted. Certainly the effect of
Goethe's picture, especially when seen on the stage, is such that one
cannot but wish some other solution might have been devised, and one
feels as if one understood better than before why it was that
Shakespeare's dramatic instinct allowed no such lifting of the veil. You
remember the last words of the dying Hamlet: 'The rest is silence.'
Thus far therefore we have come: by Faust being saved it is meant that
he escapes from the fiend and reaches heaven, reaches the 'higher
spheres' of existence, as Goethe expresses it.
But the mere fact of his being saved does not form the essential
difference between this drama and earlier versions of the story. The
point of real importance is that he is not saved in a downward course by
the intervention of some _deus ex machina_, some orthodox counter-charm.
His course is not downward. His yearnings are not for bodily ease and
sensual enjoyment but for truth--truth, not to be attained by
speculation or scientific research but by action and feeling--by
struggling onward through error and sin, and by gaining purification and
strength from trial and suffering and resistance to evil; so that evil
itself is a means to his salvation and Mephistopheles an instrument of
good. Rising on the stepping-stones of his dead self he finds at last a
certain measure of peace and is in the end reunited to her whose earthly
happiness he had indeed ruined but whose love his heart has never
forgotten. Indeed it is her love that is allowed to guide him ever
aright and to draw him up to higher spheres.
When we once realize this we also realize how meaningless, or how
indescribably less full of meaning, the poem would be without its second
Part. And yet many, when they speak of Goethe's _Faust_, mean merely the
first Part--or perhaps merely the little episode of Gretchen given in
Gounod's opera.
I spoke of Goethe's gospel of self-salvation. Since doing so I have
recalled to memory some words of his which may seem to refute me. In
reference to the song of the angels at the end of the poem he wrote as
follows: 'These verses contain the key of Faust's salvation: namely, in
Faust himself an ever higher and purer aspiration, and from above
eternal love coming to his help; and they are in harmony with our
religious conceptions, according to which we cannot attain to heaven by
our own strength unless it is helped by divine grace.'
It is true that _after death_ Faust's soul is saved from the demons and
is carried up to heaven by God's angels, but Goethe's drama is mainly
the drama of Faust's earthly life, and from the 'Prologue in Heaven,'
where, as it seems, the Deity undertakes _not_ to help him, but leaves
him to fight the battle entirely in his own strength, until the last
moment of his earthly existence there is no hint whatever, I think, of
anything but self-salvation. On no occasion does he show the slightest
sense of his own helplessness or of dependence on God's mercy. As for
_remorse_, Goethe regarded it as a false emotion and as unworthy of a
man. Although the perfect balance of his mind and his respect for much
that he could not himself accept saved him from the almost brutal
insouciance of such a form of expression he would probably have agreed
with Walt Whitman, who tells us that animals should serve us as an
example because 'they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their
sins; they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.'
Let us however dismiss criticism and turn to what Goethe as poet has
given us--perhaps the noblest picture that dramatic art can give: that
of a man striving onward and upward in his own strength, confronting (as
Goethe says in reference to Shakespeare's plays) the inexorable course
of the universe with the might of human will. We might take as the Alpha
and Omega of _Faust_ these two lines from the poem:
Es irrt der Mensch so lang er strebt,
and
Nur rastlos betaetigt sich der Mann,
the sense of which is that human nature must ever err as long as it
strives, but that true manhood is incessant striving.
It is a noble picture--perhaps the noblest conceivable. You remember
Browning's lines:
One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.
It will have already become evident what abstruse and insoluble
questions present themselves--rise, as it were, like ghosts of many an
ancient creed, on every side, as soon as we have crossed the threshold
of this great Mausoleum of human thought and imagination. There is the
spectre of the great Mystery of existence--of Life and Death and
Eternity; and that of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; and that of Evil
itself--a phantom assuming at times such a visible and substantial shape
and then dissolving into thin air as mere negation. And this
Mephistopheles--are we to regard him as a self-existent genuine demon of
a genuine Hell, or as our own mind's shadow? Is he something external,
something that we can avoid, something that we can put to flight by
resisting and get entirely free of--or has each one of us signed with
the blood of his human nature a compact with some such spiritual power,
with the demonic element within him, with that spirit of negation, of
cynicism, of cold unideal utilitarian worldly-wisdom which mocks at
faith and love and every high and tender impulse--that part of our
nature which, when some poor girl is sinking in the abyss, prompts us to
answer our heart's appeal with the sneer of Mephistopheles: 'She isn't
the first!'? Surely we can well understand the scorn and contempt which
Faust feels for this demon companion of his. 'What canst thou, poor
devil, give me?' he exclaims--'Was the human spirit's aspiration Ever
understood by such as thou!'
The real action of the play begins with the celebrated monologue of
Faust. But this is preceded by a _Dedication_, by the _Prelude in the
theatre_, and by the _Prologue in Heaven_, added at various periods of
Goethe's life. The _Prelude_ consists of a scene between a poet, a
theatrical director and a 'comic person.' It is merely a clever skit in
which Goethe has a hit at the public and those who supply it with
so-called drama. It has no organic connexion with the play. The
_Prologue in Heaven_ begins with the songs of the three
Archangels--sonorous verses of majestic harmony, like some grand
overture by Bach or Handel. These verses are, I think, meant to intimate
the great harmonious order and procession of the natural and moral
universe, as Pythagoras intimated them by his 'Music of the
Spheres'--those eternal laws against which man, that tiny microcosm, so
vainly strives.
Mephistopheles now enters, as in the Book of Job Satan is described
entering God's presence, and, just as it happens in the Bible, the Lord
asks him if he knows Faust, and, as in the case of Job, it is God
himself who not only allows but seems even to challenge the demon to try
his powers, foretelling his failure although promising no help to Faust.
'It is left to thee,' says the Lord to Mephistopheles. 'Draw this
aspiring spirit from his fountain-head and lead him downward on thy
path, if thou canst gain a hold upon him, and stand ashamed when thou
shalt have to confess that a good man amidst his dim impulses is well
conscious of the right way.'
That which distinguishes this scene from the similar scene in _Job_ is
its irreverence. Indeed one might almost call it flippancy, and few
would deny that at times this flippancy is painful to them. The only
excuse that I can find for it is that, rightly or wrongly, Goethe meant
us to be pained. I believe that here Mephistopheles represents
especially that element in human nature which is perhaps the meanest and
most disgusting of all, namely flippant and vulgar irreverence, and
although we may not agree with John Wesley's definition of man as 'half
brute, half devil,' most of us will probably allow that a certain part
of our nature (that part which Mephistopheles seems to represent) is
capable of an irreverence and a vulgarity of which the devil himself
might almost be ashamed.
The monologue with which the action of the play begins strikes at once
the new chord and gives us the leading motive--one so entirely different
from that of the old legend--so indescribably nobler than that which is
given in the opening monologue of Marlowe's play. But the old framework
is still there. Faust renounces book-learning and betakes himself to
magic.
I've studied now philosophy,
Jurisprudence and medicine,
And e'en, alas, theology
From end to end with toil and teen,
And here I stand with all my lore,
Poor fool, no wiser than before.
No dog would live thus any more!
Therefore to magic I have turned,
If that through spirit-word and power
Many a secret may be learned
That I may find the inner force
Which binds the world and guides its course,
Its germs and vital powers explore
And peddle with worthless words no more.
Disgusted with the useless quest after that science which deals only
with phenomena and their material causes, he turns to magic, as he does
in the old legend; but it is here no diabolic medieval wizardry which
shall enable him to summon the devil, for, as we shall see, Faust does
not summon the devil; Mephistopheles comes to him uncalled. Goethe has
merely used this motive of magic to intimate attainment of perfect
knowledge of Nature through the might of genius--that revelation of the
inner secrets of the universe which he himself, in what he calls the
'Titanic, heaven-storming' period of his life, believed to be attainable
by human genius in communion with Nature.
'Nature and Genius' was the watchword of the followers of Rousseau and
the apostles of the Sturm und Drang gospel--a return to and communion
with Nature, such as Wordsworth preached and practised, and such as
Byron also preached but did not practise. Only to the human spirit in
full communion with the spirit of Nature, of which it is a part, are
revealed her mysteries. All other means, as Faust tells us, are useless.
Mysterious even in the open day
Nature within her veil withdraws from view.
What to thy spirit she will not display
Cannot be wrenched from her with crowbar or with screw.
Faust turns from his dreary little world of books and charts and retorts
and skeletons. He opens the window and gazes at the moon floating in her
full glory through the heaven. His heart is filled with a yearning to be
'made one with Nature,' and in words which remind one of certain lines
of Wordsworth he exclaims:
O might I on some mountain height,
Encircled in thy holy light,
With spirits hover round crags and caves,
O'er the meadows float on the moonlight's waves.
Then, turning from Nature, he casts once more a look around his dreary
cell:
Ah me, this dungeon still I see,
This drear accursed masonry,
Where e'en the welcome daylight strains
But duskly through the painted panes,
Hemmed in by many a toppling heap
Of books worm-eaten, grey with dust,
Which to the vaulted ceiling creep
Against the smoky paper thrust,
With glasses, boxes, round me stacked
And instruments together hurled,
Ancestral lumber stuffed and packed--
Such is my world! And what a world!...
Alas! In living Nature's stead,
Where God his human creatures set,
In smoke and mould the fleshless dead
And bones of beasts surround me yet.
He takes up the book of the Mystic astrologer Nostradamus and sees in it
the sign, or cipher, of the universe. As he gazes a wondrous vision
reveals itself: the mystic lines of the cipher seem to live and move and
to form one living whole; and in spirit he beholds the Powers of Nature
ascending and descending and reaching to each other golden vessels
filled with the waters of life and wafting with their wings blessing and
harmony through the universe.
And yet from this vision he turns away dissatisfied:
What wondrous vision! yet a vision only!
Where shall I grasp thee, Nature infinite?
And from this cipher of the material universe, this vision of
inconceivable immensity and infinite diversity, the human spirit which
is not content with the dead bones of science and has entered into
communion with Nature cannot but turn away dissatisfied--and even with
despair. Let me try to illustrate this in a more matter-of-fact way.
The human mind discovers, let us say, that the earth is not the centre
of the universe; that the sun is larger than the 'bottom of a cask,' as
in the old legend Faust discovered it to be; that there are other worlds
quite as large as ours; that this earth of ours is a good deal smaller
than the sun and actually revolves round it; that even the sun itself is
not the centre of the universe but one of many suns--one of the
countless stars in that enormous starry wreath that surrounds us, and
which we call the Milky Way. And we direct our telescopes to this Milky
Way and find that what we took for nebula is for the most part an
accumulation of countless millions of suns, each perhaps with its
planets. Then, as we sweep the sky with our glass, we discover
numberless little wreath-like spiral cloudlets, and find that they also
are just such wreaths of countless millions of suns and solar systems,
and that these seemingly tiny wreaths are revolving round some central
body or system, which itself must revolve round some other, and that
again round another ... until imagination fails. Is there, we ask, some
final centre of all? some unmoved source of motion? Or is the material
universe infinite?