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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
<DW25> 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.

For about 150 years after Marlowe no attempt was made by any German
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?

Then we turn our gaze in another direction and we find in the tiniest
grain of sand countless millions of molecules whose atoms (or
electrons), it is said, are in perpetual motion, revolving like the
stars. Are then (we ask) the stars themselves nothing but molecules? Is
the whole material universe nothing but some grain of sand on the shore
of the ocean of eternity?

We turn away dazzled, and we rest our eyes, as Socrates was wont to say,
on images, on reflexions. We try to make the mystery intelligible, or
at least to pacify the reason by throwing it some such sop as the theory
that 'Size is only relative,' or that 'Space is only a mode of
consciousness' and therefore nothing real in itself. Or we lull the mind
to sleep with imaginative metaphors and speak (as Plato did) of the
Central Fire of Hestia, the Hearth and Home of the Universe, or we call
that mysterious unmoved centre of all motion the Throne of God. Thus we
try to lay the spectre of infinite Space.

Or consider Time instead of Space. In a single second how many waves of
light are supposed to enter the eye? About 500 billions I believe. And
of these waves some 500 would not exceed the breadth of a hair. Now any
being to whom these tiny waves were as slow as the ripples on a pond are
to us would live our human life of three score years and ten in the
hundredth part of _his_ second, while a being on one of those great
worlds of space revolving but once in long aeons around its centre would
live--if his life were measured as ours--millions of our years. Here
again, in our dazzlement, we have recourse to metaphor and theory: we
lay the spectre of Time by explaining it away as merely a 'mode' and as
therefore of no objective reality. In other words, dazed and outworn by
the incomprehensible infinities of Time and Space we console ourselves
with the theory that it is all a mere phenomenon, a projection of our
own mind, and with Faust we exclaim

    What wondrous vision! yet a vision only!

and in the words of a still greater master of magic than Faust himself
we despairingly add that

           like the baseless fabric of this vision,
    The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
    The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
    Yea all that it inherit, shall dissolve
    And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
    Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
    As dreams are made of.

From the cipher of the vast material universe, the Macrocosm, we turn
away, as Faust did, with unsatisfied yearnings. Whither then shall we
turn? Where shall we grasp Nature--not the empty vision, but the warm
living form? It is in our own heart that we find a refuge from the
infinities of Space and Time--in that human heart by which we live, in
its tenderness, its joys, its fears. Here, and here alone, we find those
ultimate facts of existence which need no explanation, and which we
accept just as they are, without any questionings. Here we find an
infinite universe--no less infinite than that of Space and Time--the
universe of feeling.

From the cipher of the Macrocosm Faust turns to that of the
Earth-spirit, the spirit of human life and feeling. He is filled with a
sudden, passionate yearning to share in the joys and the sorrows and the
aspirations and the strivings of humanity:

    Thou, Spirit of the Earth, art nearer.
    I feel my powers loftier, clearer,
    I glow, as drunk with new-made wine;
    New strength I feel out in the world to dare,
    The woes of earth, the bliss of earth to bear,
    To fight my way, though storms around me lash,
    Nor know dismay amid the shipwreck's crash.

He calls upon this Earth-spirit, the Spirit of human life. He bends all
the might of his human will to draw him down from his sphere. 'Come!' he
exclaims. 'Thou must! Thou must!--e'en should it cost my life!'
Enveloped in blinding flame the Spirit of life appears. At the
apparition Faust cowers back terrified and turns his face away. But it
is only for the moment. Stung by the contemptuous words of the phantom
he answers: 'Shall I yield to _thee_, Spectre of flame? 'Tis I, 'tis
Faust, thine equal!' The human Mind claims equality with the Spirit of
earthly life. But the phantom exclaims: 'Thou art akin to the spirit
that thou comprehendest--not to me!'--and disappears. Faust has yet to
learn a lesson that the mind of man can never learn of itself, the real
nature and meaning of human life. But he has beheld the vision of life,
he has received the baptism of fire. Henceforth he is to fight his way
through the storms of life and passion--to pass onward and upward and at
last to rise to 'higher spheres'; and amidst the fierce and insidious
assaults of flesh and devil we shall see that he looks for strength and
guidance to this Spirit that appeared to him in the blinding vision of
living empyreal flame.

Scarcely has the Earth-spirit vanished when, with a timid knock, there
enters Faust's _famulus_, or assistant, Wagner. He has heard Faust's
voice and from its excited tones has concluded that he is practising
declamation--reciting perhaps a Greek play. The poor amiable dryasdust
literary and scientific worm-grubber, whose maxim of life is _Zwar weiss
ich viel, doch moecht' ich Alles wissen_ (I know indeed a good deal, but
I want to know _Everything_), wishes to profit from a lesson in
elocution. A scene follows in which the contrast is graphically depicted
between this half lovable, half contemptible scientific bookworm and
Faust's Titanic heaven-storming aspirations after absolute truth. When
he is once more left alone, longing to face the mystery of life but
crushed by the contempt of the Earth-spirit, Faust is seized by despair.
He shrinks from encountering life, with its delusive joys, its pitiless
injustice and its arbitrary fate. He resolves to seek certainty--to
solve the riddle of life by death. As he moves the cup of poison to his
lips there comes floating through the air the chime of bells and,
perhaps from some near chapel, the hymn of Easter morn:

    Joy unto mortals! Christ is arisen!

He pauses. Memories of childhood sweep over him, and he yields to the
sweet voices that call him back from the threshold of the unseen.

    Sound on sweet hymns of heaven! As gentle rain
    My tears are falling. Earth hath me again.

Thus Faust escapes the cowardly act of suicide and gains new strength
through the awakening, for a time at least, of the consciousness, which
had slumbered within him since the unreasoning days of childhood, that
there is that beyond life which alone makes life worth having.

The next scene shows us Faust already in contact with human nature, as
represented by holiday crowds flocking out of the town into the woods
and adjacent villages at Eastertide. Those who know Germany well will
feel the art with which Goethe at once transports us into the midst of a
Germanic Feiertag in spring-time, with its bright sunlight, its throngs
of townspeople streaming into the country--happy and merry without
vulgar rowdyism; the smugly dressed apprentice and the servant-girl in
her Sonntagsputz; the pert student and the demure Buergermaedchen with her
new Easter hat and her voluminous-waisted Frau Mama; the sedate
school-master or shopkeeper, leading his toddling child; sour-faced
officials; grey-locked and spectacled professors and 'town-fathers'
discussing the world's news or some local grievance--all flocking
countryward, with some Waldhaus or Forsthaus Restaurant as their
ultimate goal. And those who know Frankfurt will recognize the scene at
once: up there above Sachsenhausen, on the road to the pine-woods and
the Jaegerhaus, from which one sees the whole city lying below one, with
its great Dom and its medieval gates--the river Main gliding through its
midst and glittering away westward toward the Rhine; and in the far
background the Taunus range and the dark Feldberg.

Amidst this scene, externally still the more than middle-aged German
professor (he must be fifty-seven or so) but with a heart full of newly
wakened yearnings for human life with all its joys and passions, Faust
wanders, trying to feel sympathy with all these multitudinous human
beings, attracted perhaps here and there, but evidently for the most
part repelled and discouraged. He has yet to learn that a love for and a
knowledge of humanity, such as he finally reaches, must begin with love
for and knowledge of _one_ human heart.

As he and Wagner return toward the city Faust gives vent to his pent-up
feelings--pours contempt on his own book-learning and wasted life and
expresses his yearnings for Nature, and the longing of his spirit for
wings to fly away into the infinite:

    For in each soul is born the rapture
    Of yearning upward, and away,
    When o'er our heads, lost in the azure,
    The lark sends down her thrilling lay,
    When over crags and pine-clad highlands
    The poising eagle slowly soars,
    And over plains and lakes and islands
    The crane sails by to other shores.

Whereat Wagner exclaims:

    I've had myself at times an odd caprice,
    But never yet such impulses as these.
    The woods and fields soon get intensely flat,
    And as for flight--I never longed for that!

Poor dear Wagner, how well one seems to know thee, with thy purblind
spectacled eyes peering into fusty books and parchments, or bending over
thy crucibles and retorts! Truly a novel and interesting sight it would
be to see _thee_ assuming wings. In thy philosophy there is naught but
dreams of elixirs of life or homunculi. Thy highest aspiration nowadays
would be to find the mechanical equivalent of thought--to prove that
Shakespeare's and Dante's imagination was due only to a slightly
abnormal movement of brain-molecules--to find some method of measuring
faith, hope and charity in foot-pounds and thine own genius in electric
volts. Thou wouldst live and die, as other eminent scientists of these
latter days have done, in the certain hope and faith of demonstrating
irrefutably that this curious phenomenon which we call 'life' is nothing
but the chemical action set up by the carbonic acid and ammonia of the
protoplasm.

As they walk and talk there appears a black dog ranging to and fro
through a field, as if on the track of game. Ever nearer and nearer he
circles, and in his wake, as it appears to Faust, trails a flickering
phosphorescent gleam. But Wagner ridicules the idea as an optical
delusion. _He_ sees nothing but an ordinary black poodle. 'Call him,' he
says, 'and he'll come fawning on you, or sit up and do his tricks, or
jump into the water after sticks.' The poodle follows them--and makes
himself at home by the stove in Faust's study.

Faust has thus, after his first contact with the outer world of
humanity, returned once more to his cell--to the little world of his own
thoughts and feelings. He finds himself once more amidst his piled-up
books, his crucibles and retorts, his bones and skulls. He lights his
lamp and feels the old familiar glow of intellectual satisfaction. _But
the poodle is there._ Faust has brought home with him something that
will now haunt him to the last moment of his life. There has been
awakened in his nature the germ of that acorn (to use Goethe's metaphor
with regard to Hamlet) that will soon strike root and shatter the vase
in which it is planted.

At present he is almost unconscious of this new presence. He is buried
in thought, and his thoughts lead him toward the question of Revelation.
He is drawn to take up a Bible and turns, with a mind full of
metaphysical curiosity, to the passage 'In the beginning was the [Greek:
logos]--the Word.' More than once there comes from the poodle a growl of
disapprobation. Faust threatens to turn him out, and proceeds with his
biblical criticism.... 'In the beginning was the [Greek: logos].' How
shall he translate [Greek: logos]? It cannot mean merely a 'word.' ... A
word must have meaning, _thought_--and thought is nothing without
_act_.... So this 'Word,' this 'Logos,' must be translated as Act or
Deed.

These speculations are interrupted by horrible growlings, barks, and
howlings. As Faust looks towards the poodle he sees it rapidly swelling
up into a monstrous form--huger than an elephant or hippopotamus, with
fiery eyes and enormous tusks in its gaping mouth. He tries to exorcise
the phantom with 'Solomon's key' and other magic formulae, and at length,
when he threatens it with the mystic formula of the Trinity, it
dissolves into mist, and out of the mist steps forth Mephistopheles,
dressed as a 'travelling scholar'--an itinerant professor, or quack
doctor.

I find that some commentators accuse Goethe of dramatic inconsistency
and of interrupting the sequence of the action, because he makes Faust
for a time return to his old speculations, and because Mephistopheles
does not at once appear in the shape with which we are so familiar--with
his 'red gold-trimmed dress and mantle of stiff silk and the
cock-feathers in his hat,' the type of the dissolute man-about-town of
the period. To me it seems very natural that, dispirited by his first
contact with the outer world--unable to feel any real sympathy with the
rollicking and sleek self-sufficiency of that holiday crowd, Faust
should turn again to reflexion and speculation, and that when he is in
this depressed and metaphysical mood the demonic element in his nature
should first present itself--and that too in the disguise of an
itinerant professor. For is it not the case that to many of us the devil
_has_ come first just at such a time and in just such disguise?

Questioned as to his name and personality, Mephisto defines himself (he
too being in a metaphysical mood) as 'the spirit of negation,' and as 'a
part of that power which always wills evil and always works good'--'a
part of that darkness which alone existed before the creation of
light'--and he expresses the hope that, as light is dependent for its
existence on the material world, both it and the world will ere long
return to chaos and darkness. I have already touched upon this question
of Evil as merely negative--merely a part of the whole--and will not
detain you further over it.

Mephistopheles now wishes to take his leave, promising to visit Faust
again. 'Visit me as you like,' says Faust, 'and now--there is the
window! there's the door! or the chimney is at your service.' But the
devil must go out by the same way as he has entered, and on the
threshold to keep out evil spirits Faust has painted a mystic pentagram,
a figure with five points, the outer angle of which, being inaccurately
drawn, had left a gap through which Mephisto had slipped in; but being
once in, as in a mouse-trap, he cannot get out again.

As Faust now seems inclined to keep him prisoner, Mephistopheles summons
spirits, who sing Faust to sleep. Then he calls a rat to gnaw a gap in
the pentagram, and escapes.

When, in the next scene, Mephistopheles again appears, Faust is in a
very different state of mind, and Mephistopheles is also in a different
shape. He is decked out with silken mantle and with cock-feathers in his
hat, ready for any devilry. Faust is in the depths of morbid despair and
bitterness at the thought of life:

    'What from the world have I to gain?--
     _Thou must renounce! renounce! refrain!_
     Such is the everlasting song
     That fills our ears our whole life long ...
     With horror day by day I wake
     And weeping watch the morning break
     To think that each returning sun
     Shall see fulfilled no wish of mine--not one.'

He vows he would rather die. 'And yet,' sarcastically remarks Mephisto,
'some one a night or two ago did not drink a certain brown liquid.'
Stung by the sarcasm, Faust breaks out into curses against life, against
love and hope, and faith ... and 'cursed be patience most of all!'

Here is the devil's opportunity. 'Life is yours yet, and all its
pleasures. Of what's beyond you nothing know. Give up all this morbid
thinking, these dreams and self-delusions! Be a man! Enjoy life! Plunge
into pleasures of the senses! I will be your guide and show you the life
worth living!'

In an ecstasy of embitterment and despair, though fully conscious that
such a life can never bring him satisfaction and happiness, Faust
exclaims: 'What wilt _thou_, poor devil, give me? Was the human spirit,
in its aspirations, ever understood by such as _thou_?... And yet--hast
thou the food that never satiates--hast thou red gold--hast thou love,
passionate faithless love--hast thou the fruits that rot before one
plucks them--hast thou the fruits of that tree of sensual pleasure which
daily puts forth new blossoms--then done! I accept.' 'But if,' he adds
(and, alas, I must give merely the sense of these noble verses--for all
translation is so unutterably flat)--'if I ever lay myself on the bed of
idle self-content, if ever thou canst fool me with these phantoms of the
senses, if ever I say to the passing moment, _Stay; thou art so
fair!_--then let my life be ended. This wager I offer thee.' 'Topp!'
('Done!') exclaims Mephistopheles; and, as you know, the compact is
signed by Faust with his own blood.

You will observe that here there is no mention, as in the old legend, of
any term of years--the compact is _for life_. Of what may come after
this life Faust makes no mention in his wager. He expressly says that
all he cares about, all he can know, is _this_ life, and that he will
hear nothing about any future life. This may be agnosticism or whatever
else we like to call it, but it is not formally selling one's soul, with
or without one's body, for a _future_ life and for all eternity.

Moreover Faust has _not_ summoned the devil. The devil has come to
him--is indeed a part of him. He does _not_ league himself with a
hell-fiend for the sake of worldly power or fame or sensual enjoyment,
of which he speaks with contempt. He only offers to come forward into
the battle of life and of passions to test the nobler powers and the
deeper beliefs and the yet dim aspirations of his better nature against
the powers of evil, against what he calls the 'cold devil's-fist' of
negation and cynicism and disbelief, against the brute within the man.

    Thou hearest me! I do not speak of joy--
    I dedicate myself to passion--pleasure--pain--
    Enamour'd hate, and rapture of disdain.
    What's highest or what's lowest I will know,
    And heap upon my bosom weal and woe.

Footsteps are now heard approaching. It is one of Faust's scholars.
Faust 'has no heart to meet him'--and no wonder. He goes; and
Mephistopheles, throwing around him Faust's professorial mantle and
placing the professorial cap upon his head, awaits the scholar. The
scene which ensues, in which Mephisto gives the young aspirant for
knowledge his diabolic advice and his diabolic views on Science, Logic,
Metaphysics, Medicine and even Theology--would offer ample material for
a very long course of lectures; but as it is one which is not closely
connected with the main action of the play it will have to be omitted.
The scholar retires--his poor young head whirling round like a
mill-wheel with the advice he has received and carrying away his album,
in which the devil has inscribed his favourite text 'Ye shall be as
gods, knowing good and evil.' Then Faust re-enters, Mephistopheles
spreads out his silken cape, and on it the two fly away through the air
on their adventures--first through the small and then the greater
world--first the world of personal feelings and passions, then the
greater world (is it really greater?) of art and politics and Humanity.

Faust had said, as you remember,

    What wilt thou, poor devil, give me?
    Was the human spirit, in its aspirations
    Ever understood by such as thou?

This is the leading motive of all that follows. With ever-deepening
disgust and contempt Faust, in his quest for truth through the jungles
and quagmires of human passions, follows his guide. If ever Faust seems
to catch sight of any far-off vision of eternal truth and beauty--as he
does at times in his love for Gretchen, and again in his passion for
ideal beauty in Helen, and once again in that devotion to the cause of
Humanity which finally allows him to express a satisfaction in life, and
thus causes his life to end--if ever Faust shows any sign of real
interest or satisfaction, it is just _then_ that Mephistopheles displays
most clearly his utter inability to understand the 'human spirit in its
aspirations'; and it is _then_ that he shows most plainly his own
diabolic nature, pouring out his cynical contempt and gnashing his teeth
at what he deems Faust's irrational disgust for all those bestialities
that seem to him (Mephistopheles) the sweetest joys of existence.

His very first attempt is a dead failure. He has carried Faust off
through the air to Leipzig, and here he brings him into what to the
Mephisto-nature doubtless seems highly desirable and entertaining
company--to the 'sing-song' (as I believe it is called in England) of
tippling brawling students. The scene is Auerbach's Cellar, a well-known
Leipzig 'Kneipe'--a kind of Wine taproom or Bodega. Among these brawling
comic-songsters Mephistopheles is in his element, and he treats them to
a comic ditty:

    Of old there lived a king,
      Who had a great big flea
    As dear as any thing,
      Or any son, could be ...

and so on. We need not linger over the repulsive scene--so graphically
described.

Finally Mephistopheles bores holes in the table and draws wine from
them.

The students come to handicuffs over it; they spill the wine, and it
turns into flame.

Amidst their drunken uproar Faust and Mephistopheles disappear.

During the whole of this scene Faust _speaks no single word_, except a
curt but polite greeting on entering the Cellar and an appeal to
Mephistopheles to take him away from this 'scene of swinish bestiality.'
How different from the part that Faust plays in the old story where he
himself, not Mephistopheles, joins in the revelry and buffoonery!

Auerbach's Cellar existed till lately, though the house above it had
been rebuilt. It was the original 'Keller' that is mentioned in the old
legend. In it were to be seen two old pictures (with the date 1525). One
represented Faust sitting at table with students; in the other he is
flying off through the door astride on a wine cask.

A weird scene now ensues: the Witches' Kitchen.

Faust had asked how it was possible for him, the thought-worn
grey-haired professor, to care for, or take part in, what Mephistopheles
looked upon as 'life.' Mephistopheles therefore takes him to a witch,
from whom he is to receive a magic draught that will 'strip off some
thirty years from his body,' so that he becomes a young, man of, say,
about twenty-seven. This scene in the Witches' Kitchen is sometimes said
to represent allegorically a long course of dissipation through which
Mephistopheles takes Faust, and which of course could not be represented
otherwise without extending the action of the play beyond all reasonable
limits. It is true that, after the draught Faust's character seems
considerably changed for the worse. He develops a recklessness and a
licentiousness which scandalize even Mephistopheles himself, who tells
him that he is 'almost as bad as a Frenchman.'

Whether we should understand it thus, or not, I do not feel quite sure,
but anyhow we have in future--to the end of the first Part--to take into
account the fact that, although loathing all such swinish sensuality as
that of tippling students, and hating all forms of mean selfishness and
cunning and hypocrisy, Faust is (as so often is the case with otherwise
noble and lovable men) open to assault at that point where, as nowhere
else, the sensuous and ideal in our human nature seem to touch and
coalesce.

When they enter the Witch is not at home. In the midst of the kitchen is
a large cauldron, and at its side, skimming it and seeing that it does
not run over is a Meerkatze--a kind of female ape. The Meerkater, or
male ape, squats by the fire, warming himself, and near by are several
young apes. Mephistopheles is enraptured at the sight of the 'tender
pretty beasts,' but Faust finds them more disgusting than anything he
has ever seen.

The apes perform all kinds of antics and chatter a weird medley of half
sense, half nonsense, in which one can dimly discern satirical allusions
to various forms of the literary, political, and religious cant of
Goethe's generation.

The animals enthrone Mephistopheles in a chair, give him a feather brush
for a sceptre, and offer him a broken crown, which he is to glue
together with 'sweat and blood.' It is like some horrid nightmare. We
feel as if we were going mad; and so does Faust himself. But suddenly he
catches sight of a magic mirror, in which he sees a form of ravishing
beauty--not that of Gretchen or Helen, but some form of ideal
loveliness. He stands there entranced.

But at this moment the cauldron boils over. A great flame shoots up the
chimney. With a scream the witch comes clattering down, and launches
curses at the intruders--not recognising the devil in his costume as
modern roue. He abuses her roundly and tells her that his horns, tail
and cloven hoof are gone out of fashion, modern culture having tabooed
them; and he forbids her to address him as Satan. That name is not
up-to-date: he is now 'der Herr Baron.'

With a hocus-pocus of incantations she brews the magic draught, which
Faust drinks. He is then hurried away by Mephistopheles back into the
world of humanity.

We have now come to the story of Margarete or Gretchen, which by many,
perhaps by most, is looked upon as constituting the main subject of
Goethe's _Faust_. It is doubtless the part which attracts one, which
appeals to one's _heart_, more than any other, and it forms by itself a
pathetic little tragedy. The story itself is merely the old sad story of
passion, weakness and misery, which has been told thousands of times in
all ages and all languages.

It would be worse than useless to endeavour by any dissecting process to
discover how by some act of creative power Goethe has inspired this
little story with such wondrous vitality that there is probably in all
literature scarcely any character that lives for us, that seems so real,
as Gretchen. Possibly to feel this one needs a knowledge of the original
poem and an acquaintance not only with that Germany which is generally
known to the English visitor, but also with just that class of which
Gretchen is typical, and with just those little ways and those forms of
expression which are peculiar to that class and to the part of Germany
to which Gretchen belonged. Every single word that she utters is so
absolutely true to nature that we seem to hear the voice of some real
living Gretchen, and can hardly believe that she merely exists in our
imagination. This may perhaps be asserted of other poetic creations; but
I confess that I know no other, not even in Shakespeare, that produces
on me quite the same kind of illusion. Homer's Nausicaa, the Antigone
and Electra of Sophocles, Rosalind, Miranda, Imogen, Portia,
Cordelia--all these live for me, but not quite as Gretchen. Their
presence I feel as something living, but a little visionary. Gretchen I
can see, and hear and almost touch. I need not recount at length her
story, for it is too well known. I need only recall to you memories of
certain facts and scenes: that first meeting in the street; the
mysterious presents from the unknown lover; the meeting in the
neighbour's garden and Gretchen's innocent prattlings about her home
life; Faust's growing passion, and the vain battlings of his higher
nature; the insidious promptings and cynical ridicule of his demonic
companion; the song of Gretchen at her spinning-wheel; her loving
anxiety as to Faust's religious opinions, and his celebrated confession
of faith; the sleeping draught by which Gretchen causes the death of her
mother; her shame, remorse and despair; Gretchen kneeling with her gift
of tear-sprent flowers before the Virgin's image; the return of her
brother, the young soldier, Valentin, and _his_ death--stabbed by her
lover (or rather by Mephisto) at night beneath her window, and cursing
her as he dies; the scene in the Cathedral; the pealing organ and the
solemn tones of the Dies Irae mingling with the terrible words of the
accusing spirit, till Gretchen sinks fainting to the ground.

And where is Faust? He has fled. The avengers of blood are on his track.
His selfish passion has been the cause of death to Gretchen's mother and
brother and has brought ruin on her--to end in madness, infanticide and
the block.

I have often wondered whether the limitations of art might not allow the
possibility of some drama on the same lines as _Faust_ in which he might
be saved by the purity and nobility of womanhood, as in the story of
Cyprian and Justina, instead of, as here, using the ruin of a poor girl
as a stepping-stone in his career of self-salvation. Or, what if he had
felt such horror and remorse at her fate that he had broken his compact
and freed himself from the demon? It will be said, perhaps, that this
would have been undramatic and that such a view is merely sentimental
and subversive of all true art. But, once more, what if he had bravely
stood by Gretchen, or had even shared her fate when she refused to be
saved by him?

Anyhow, Goethe did not choose any of these methods; and if he had done
so we should have had no second Part of _Faust_--nor indeed our next
scene, the _Walpurgisnacht_.

Pursued not only by the avengers of blood but by the avenging furies of
his own conscience, Faust has plunged into a reckless life and
experiences those after-dreams of intellectual and aesthetic extravagance
which so often follow such riotous living. This period--that of sensual
riot and aesthetic dalliance--Goethe has, I think, symbolized by two wild
and curious scenes, the _Walpurgisnacht_ and Oberon's Wedding, a kind of
'after-dream' of the _Walpurgisnacht_.

The connexion of these scenes with the main action of the play has
puzzled many critics, especially the curious Intermezzo which follows
the _Walpurgisnacht_, the 'Golden Wedding of Oberon and Titania,' a kind
of dream-vision, or rather nightmare, in which besides the fairies of
Shakespeare's fairyland, besides will-o'-the-wisps and weather-cocks and
shooting stars, numerous authors, philosophers and artists and other
characters appear, including Goethe himself as the 'Welt-kind.' This
scene was not originally written for _Faust_, but Goethe inserted it (I
imagine) as an allegorical picture of over-indulgence in aestheticism and
intellectualism (the 'opiate of the brain,' as Tennyson calls it)--a
vice into which one is apt to be seduced by the hope of deadening pain
of heart. Although not written for the play, this Intermezzo cannot be
said to be superfluous, for the subject of _Faust_ is one that admits of
almost any imaginative conception that is descriptive of the experiences
of human nature in its quest of truth.

But let us return to the _Walpurgisnacht_. On the 1st of May a great
festival was held by the ancient Druids, who on the preceding night used
to perform on the mountains their terrible sacrifices, setting ablaze
huge wickerwork figures filled with human beings. Hence in later times
the superstition arose that on this night witches ghouls and fiends held
their revels on the Brocken, or Blocksberg, in the Harz mountains. The
name of Saint Walpurga (an English nun, who came to Germany in the
eighth century) became associated with this Witches' Sabbath, as the 1st
of May was sacred to her. To this midnight orgy of the _Walpurgisnacht_
Mephistopheles takes Faust.... They are lighted on their toilsome ascent
of the Blocksberg by a will-o'-the-wisp. A vast multitude of witches and
goblins are flocking to the summit; the midnight air resounds with their
shrieks and jabberings; weird lights flash from every quarter, revealing
thronging swarms of ghoulish shapes and dancing Hexen. The trees
themselves are dancing. The mountains nod. The crags jut forth long
snouts which snort and blow. Amid the crush and confusion Faust has to
cling fast to his guide. Once the two get parted, and Mephistopheles is
in anxiety lest he should lose Faust entirely, the idea being, I
suppose, that sometimes a human being outruns the devil himself in the
orgies of sensuality. At last they reach the dancers. Mephistopheles is
here in his element and joins in the dances with eagerness, bandying
jokes with the old hags and flirting with the younger witches. Nor does
Faust seem at all disinclined to follow suit. He however desists
dismayed when, as he is dancing with a witch of seductive loveliness, a
red mouse jumps out of her mouth.

At length, when Mephisto, who finds it getting too hot even for him,
comes again to Faust, he discovers him silently gazing at a weird
sight--one that might well have sobered him. 'Look!' says Faust:

    'Look! seest thou not in the far distance there,
     Standing alone, that child, so pale and fair?
     She seems to move so slowly, and with pain,
     As if her feet were fettered by a chain.
     I must confess, I almost seem to trace
     My poor good Gretchen in her form and face.'

Mephistopheles answers:

    'Let her alone! It's dangerous to look.
     It's a mere lifeless ghoul, a spectre-spook.
     Such bogeys to encounter is not good;
     Their rigid stare freezes one's very blood,
     And one is often almost turned to stone.
     Medusa's head, methinks, to thee is known!'

But Faust will not be convinced. It _is_ Gretchen--his 'poor good
Gretchen' as he calls her. And what is that red bleeding gash around
her neck? What terrible thought does it suggest!

    'How strange that round her lovely neck,
     That narrow band of red is laid
     No broader than a knife's keen blade!'

'Quite right!' answers Mephistopheles with a ghastly joke--

    'Quite right! I plainly see it's so.
     Perseus cut off her head, you know.
     She often carries it beneath her arm.'

He hurries Faust away. But soon these terrible presentiments are
realized. Faust learns--how we are not told--that Gretchen is in prison,
and condemned to death on the scaffold; for in her madness--yes, surely
in madness--she has drowned her own child.

Instead of attempting to describe what follows, I shall offer a literal
prose translation of some parts of the concluding scene, asking you to
supply by your imagination, as best you may, the power and harmony of
Goethe's wonderful verse.



_A gloomy day. Open country._

_FAUST and MEPHISTOPHELES. FAUST is speaking._

     FAUST. In misery! In despair! Piteously wandering day after
     day o'er the face of the earth,--and now imprisoned! That
     sweet unhappy being shut up in a dungeon, as a criminal, and
     exposed to horrible torments! Has it come to _this_!--to
     this!... Treacherous, villainous spirit! and _this_ thou
     hast concealed from me!... Stand there, stand, and roll thy
     devilish eyes in fury! Imprisoned! In hopeless misery!
     Delivered over to evil spirits and the heartless verdict of
     mankind!... And _thou_ meantime hast lulled me with
     loathsome dissipation ... thou hast hidden from me her
     ever-deepening despair, and hast suffered her to perish
     helplessly.

     MEPH. She isn't the first.

     FAUST. Dog! Abominable monster! Turn him, O Infinite Spirit,
     turn this reptile back into his dog-shape ... that he may
     crawl on his belly before me ... that I may trample the
     abandoned wretch underfoot. Not the first!... Woe! Woe not
     to be grasped by any human soul, that _more_ than _one_
     should sink into this abyss of misery--that the _first_, in
     her writhing agony before the eyes of the All-merciful,
     should not have made satisfaction for the guilt of all
     others. The misery of this _one_ pierces with agony my
     deepest soul--and _thou_ calmly grinnest at the fate of
     thousands!

     MEPH. Here we are again, at the end of our wits!--where the
     common sense of you mortals loses its hold and snaps. Why
     dost thou make fellowship with us, if thou canst not carry
     it through? Wilt thou fly, and art not secure from
     dizziness? Did we thrust ourselves upon thee, or thou
     thyself upon us?

     FAUST. Gnash not thy ravening teeth at me! I loathe thee!
     Mighty, glorious Spirit--thou who didst deign to appear to
     me, and knowest my heart and soul, why dost thou fetter me
     to this satellite of shame, who revels in evil and gluts
     himself on destruction?

     MEPH. Hast thou done?

     FAUST. Save her, or woe to thee! The most terrible curse on
     thee for thousands of years!

     MEPH. I cannot loose the bonds of the avenger--cannot undo
     his bolts. _Save her!_... Who was it that ruined her ... I
     or thou?

[_FAUST glares wildly round him._

     MEPH. Wilt thou grasp after a thunderbolt? 'Tis well that it
     was not given to you miserable mortals!...

     FAUST. Take me to her! She _shall_ be free!... Take me to
     her, I say, and liberate her!

     MEPH. I will take thee to her--and do what I _can_ do.
     Listen! Have I all power in heaven and on earth?--I will
     becloud the jailer's senses. Then do thou get possession of
     the keys, and lead her forth with human hand. I will keep
     watch.--The magic steeds will be at hand ... I will carry
     you off. So much lies in my power.

     *     *     *     *     *

     _Night. The open country. FAUST and MEPHISTOPHELES
     galloping past on black horses. They pass a group of
     witches busy round their cauldron. They reach the prison.
     Within is heard the voice of GRETCHEN singing an old
     plaintive ballad. FAUST listens:_

     'She dreams not' (he says) 'that her loved one is
     listening, and hears her chains rattle and the straw as it
     rustles.'

[_He unlocks the prison door and steps in._

     GRETCHEN (_crouching into her bed of straw_). Woe, woe--they
     are coming! Bitter death!

     FAUST. Hush! hush! I am come to free thee.

     GRETCHEN (_grovelling before him_). If thou art a man, O
     pity my distress!

     FAUST. Thou wilt awaken the watchmen with thy cries. [_He
     seizes her chain to unlock it._

     GRETCHEN (_kneeling_). Who has given you, heads-man, this
     power over me? You have come for me already at midnight.
     Pity me, and let me live! Is to-morrow morning not soon
     enough? And I am still so young--and I must die! Fair was I
     too, and that was my ruin. Pity me! What harm have I ever
     done to thee! I never saw thee before in all my life.

     FAUST. Can I endure this misery?

     GRETCHEN. I am wholly in your power. But let me first suckle
     my child. I held it in my bosom all the night. They took it
     from me, to vex me, and _now_ they say I've killed it....
     And I shall never be happy any more!

     FAUST (_kneels beside her_). He that loves thee kneels
     before thee.

     GRETCHEN. O let us kneel and call upon the saints. But ...
     ah!... Look!... Under those steps, under the threshold, hell
     is flaming. The Evil One is raging there so furiously.
     Listen, how he roars and thunders!

     FAUST. Gretchen! Gretchen!

     GRETCHEN (_listening_). That was the voice of my friend!
     Where is he? I heard him call.... Right through the howling
     and uproar of hell, through the horrid laughter of the
     devils, I recognized that sweet loving tone.

     FAUST. It is I.

     GRETCHEN. Thou!... O say it once more! (_Clasping him._) It
     is! it is he! Where is now all my pain? Where is the anguish
     of the dungeon and the chain?

     FAUST. Come! Come with me!

     GRETCHEN. O stay!... I am so happy at thy side.... What! not
     one kiss!... Ah, woe, thy lips are cold. Where is all thy
     love? Who has stolen it from me?

     FAUST. Come! Follow!... Be courageous, loved one! Come with
     me!

     GRETCHEN. Thou art loosening my chain.... Know'st thou, my
     friend, _whom_ thou art releasing?

     FAUST. Come, come! Night is already on the wane.

     GRETCHEN. My mother I have killed. I have drowned my child.
     Was it not given to thee and to me? Yes, to thee too.... And
     thou art really here! Thou! I can scarce believe it. Give me
     thy hand--thy dear hand! _Ah_, but it is wet. Wipe it, wipe
     it! It looks like blood upon it. O God, what hast thou done!
     Put up thy sword, I beg thee! Put it away!

     FAUST. Let the past be past. Thou art killing me.

     GRETCHEN. No--_thou_ must live!... I will tell thee about
     the graves that thou must provide to-morrow. Give mother
     the best place, and brother close to her--and me a little on
     one side ... only not too far away. And lay the little one
     in my bosom.... No one else shall lie with me. To cling to
     thy side, that was once such sweet blissful joy ... but I
     seem no longer able ... as if I had to force myself, and as
     if thou didst thrust me back.... And yet it _is_ thou, and
     thou look'st so kind and good.

     FAUST. If thou feel'st that it is I, then come!

     GRETCHEN. Out _there_?

     FAUST. To freedom!

     GRETCHEN. I dare not. For me there is no hope more. What is
     the use to flee? They are lurking after me.... It's so
     wretched to have to beg, and that too with a bad conscience.
     It's so wretched to wander about in strange lands ... and
     they'll catch me all the same.

     FAUST. I shall be with thee.

     GRETCHEN. _Quick! Quick!_ Save it! Save my child!... Onward!
     Right up that path alongside the stream ... over the bridge
     ... there!... into the wood.... There! to the left! there,
     where the plank lies--in the pond! Catch hold of it! Catch
     it! It's rising!... It's struggling! Save it! save it!

     FAUST. Bethink thyself! One step and thou art free!

     GRETCHEN. If only we were over that hill!... There's mother
     sitting there on a stone. (Ah! what was that, like an icy
     hand, grasping my hair?) ... She sits and wags with her
     head--she does not beckon or nod to us ... her head droops
     so heavily. Yes, she slept so long, and she will wake no
     more. She slept that we might have joy. Ah, those were happy
     times!

     FAUST. No entreaty avails--no words are of use. I shall have
     to carry thee away. [_Seizes hold of her._

     GRETCHEN. _Let me go!_ I will not suffer violence. Seize not
     hold of me so murderously. All _else_ I did for _love_ of
     thee.

     FAUST. The day is dawning! Dearest! dearest!

     GRETCHEN. _Day?_ Yes--the day is coming! The last day is
     dawning! It was to have been my wedding day. Woe to my
     wreath! But what is, must be! We shall see each other again
     ... but not at the dance! The crowd is thronging.... One
     hears no word.... The square, the streets, cannot contain
     them.... The bell is tolling--the staff is broken.... They
     seize me! They bind me fast! I am being dragged already to
     the block! Each feels the axe at his own neck as its keen
     blade flashes down on _mine_ ... and the world lies dark and
     silent as the grave.

     FAUST. O that I never had been born!

     MEPH. (_appears at the door_). Come! or you are lost!...
     Foolish, useless hesitation--delaying and gossiping! My
     horses are shuddering and the morning twilight breaks.

     GRETCHEN (_seeing MEPHISTOPHELES_). What is this that rises
     from the ground? He! _He!_ Send him away! What does _he_
     want at this holy spot?

     MEPH. (_to FAUST_). Come! come! or I shall leave you in the
     lurch.

     GRETCHEN. I am thine, Father--save me! Ye angels, holy
     cohorts, encamp around me and defend me! (_To FAUST._)
     Heinrich, I shrink from thee in horror.

     MEPH. She is judged.

     VOICE FROM ABOVE. She is saved.

     MEPH. _to_ FAUST. Here! to me!

[_Disappears with FAUST._

     [_A VOICE FROM WITHIN--the voice of GRETCHEN--calls on the
     name of him she once loved--of him who has robbed her of
     happiness and life itself. Fainter and fainter it calls,
     then dies away into silence._




III

GOETHE'S 'FAUST'


PART II


The picture which Goethe has given us in _Faust_ is in its main outlines
the picture of Goethe's own life. The Faust of Part I is the Goethe of
early days--of the Sturm und Drang period--the Goethe of _Werther's
Leiden_, of _Goetz_, of _Prometheus_, of Gretchen, Lotte, Annette,
Friederike and Lili; the Faust of the earlier scenes of Part II is
Goethe at the ducal court of Weimar; the Faust of the _Helena_ is Goethe
in Italy, Goethe at Bologna, standing in ecstatic veneration before what
was then believed to be Raphael's picture of St. Agatha, or wandering
through the Colosseum at Rome, or writing his _Iphigenie_ on the shores
of the Lago di Garda; and the Faust of the last act of all is Goethe
reconciled to life and finding a certain measure of peace and happiness
in his home, in the sympathy of his good-natured but unrefined wife and
of others whom he loved, as well as in his scientific and philosophical
studies--until he seals up the MS. of his great poem and (to use his own
words) 'regards his life-work as ended and rests in the contemplation of
the past,' and then, a few months later, passes away from earth,
murmuring as he dies 'More light!'

It will be remembered that at the end of Part I Faust is dragged away by
Mephistopheles and leaves poor Gretchen to her doom. The fatal axe has
now fallen. Gretchen is dead.

In the opening scene of Part II we find him 'lying on a grassy bank,
worn out and attempting to sleep.' A considerable time has evidently
elapsed--a time doubtless of bitter grief and of the fiercest accusation
against his evil counsellor, that part of his human nature which is
represented by Mephistopheles and from which even in the last hour of
his life (as we shall see) he confesses it to be impossible wholly to
free himself:

    Daemonen, weiss ich, wird man schwerlich los.
    Das geistig-strenge Band is nicht zu trennen.

'From demons it is, I know, scarce possible to free oneself. The
spiritual bond is too strong to break.'

But it is not from grief or self-accusation that Faust is to gain new
inspiration. It is from the healing power of Nature--in which Goethe
believed far more than in remorse.

The scene amidst which Faust is now lying reminds one of some Swiss
valley. The rising sun is pouring a flood of golden light over the
snow-fields of the distant mountains and down from the edge of an
overhanging precipice is falling a splendid cataract, such as the
Reichenbach or the Staub-bach, amidst whose spray gradually forms
itself, as the sunshine touches it, an iridescent bow, brightening and
fading, but hanging there immovable. Through this scene are flitting
elfin forms--Ariel and his fays--singing to the liquid tones of Aeolian
harps and lapping Faust's world-worn senses in the sweet harmonies of
Nature, tenderly effacing the memories of the past and inspiring him
with new hopes and new strength to face once more the battle of life.

He watches the rising sun, but blinded by excess of light he turns away,
unable to gaze upon the flaming source of life, as erst he had turned
from the apparition of the Earth-spirit. He seeks to rest his dazzled
eyes in reflected light (a metaphor used, as you may remember, also by
Socrates in the parable of the Cave)--in the sun-lit mountain <DW72>s,
the pine-woods and the glittering walls of rock, and in the colours of
the foam-bow suspended amidst the spray of the swift down-thundering
cataract. In the ever-changing colours but motionless form of this bow
hanging over the downward rush of the torrent Faust finds a symbol of
human life suspended with its ever-varying hues above the stream of
time.

It is one of the truest and the most beautiful of all similitudes, this
of pure sunlight refracted and broken into colours, symbolizing the One
and the Many, the perfect and the imperfect, the eternal and the
temporal. Doubtless you are already thinking of Shelley's magnificent
lines:

    The One remains, the Many change and pass;
      Heaven's light for ever shines, Earth's shadows fly,
    Life, like a dome of many- glass,
      Stains the white radiance of eternity.

Into such variegated scene of reflected and refracted light Faust is now
entering. He has passed through the 'little world' of personal
feeling--the world of the One, of the heart, and he is entering what
Mephistopheles calls the 'greater world' (for greater it appears to be
from the Mephistophelean standpoint)--the world of the 'many,' of
politics and ethics and art and literature and society--the world whose
highest ideal is success, or, at the best, the 'greatest good of the
greatest number' and the evolution of that terrible ghoul the so-called
Super-man.

It is at the court of a German Kaiser that Faust first makes trial of
this so-called greater world. The young monarch has lately returned from
Italy, where, as was once customary, he had been crowned by the Pope
with the iron Lombard crown. By his extravagances he has already emptied
the imperial coffers. His Chancellor, his Treasurers, his Paymasters are
all at the verge of despair, and the Empire is on the brink of
bankruptcy. To add to these misfortunes (perhaps the greatest of them in
the opinion of the young Kaiser) the court-fool has tumbled downstairs
and has broken his neck; so at least it is believed; but cats and fools
have a way of falling on their feet, and this fool turns up again later.
Meanwhile however Mephistopheles presents himself and is accepted as a
_locum tenens_. To him the Kaiser turns for advice, and Mephistopheles
proposes a clever expedient--meant as a satire on modern systems of
finance and State security. He suggests that, as the land belongs to the
Kaiser, and as in the ground there are doubtless great quantities of
hidden treasures, buried in olden times, the Kaiser should, on the
security of these hidden and as yet undiscovered treasures, issue
'promises to pay'--in other words paper money. This is done, and
suddenly the imperial court, in spite of its empty coffers, finds itself
in affluence. The young Kaiser, delighted at the opportunity of
indulging his taste for display and extravagance, decides on holding a
masquerade, such as he had lately witnessed at the Roman Carneval.

The description of this great court masquerade occupies a considerable
space in Goethe's drama, and is generally looked upon by the
commentators as one of the least successful parts of _Faust_. The
question is, how are we to estimate _success_ in such a matter? For
myself I confess that I find this masquerade scene tedious and irksome,
and can with difficulty read it through; but is not this just the effect
that Goethe wished to produce? Is not this just the effect that society,
with all its masquerades and mummeries, inevitably produces on any one
who, like Faust and with Faust's ideals and aspirations, is making trial
of life in order to discover under what conditions it is worth living?
Instead of telling us in so many words that Faust makes trial of all the
pomps and vanities of fashionable society and finds them utterly empty
and ridiculous, fatal to all true life and disgusting to all true
manliness, Goethe gives us a picture of this tiresome foolish scene,
with all its absurdities and falsities and trumpery grandeurs, amidst
which our friend Mephistopheles is so entirely in his element, and where
Faust, with evident self-contempt and disgust, forces himself for a
moment to play a part. The various elements of fashionable society--and,
as a contrast, certain very unfashionable elements--are introduced under
the disguise of these masked figures. Marketable belles and heiresses
in the guise of flower-girls offer their charms and their fortunes in
the form of flowers and fruits to the highest bidder. The anxious mother
is there with her daughters, hoping that among so many fools _one_ may
be at last secured. Idlers, parasites, toadies, club-frequenters and
diners-out are there in the masks of court-fools, and buffoons. The
working man, the trade-unionist and the striker, comes marching amidst
this scene of revelry, forcing his way through the ranks of consternated
society, roughly asserting the sole nobility of labour and demanding the
overthrow of the aristocrat and the capitalist--no new cry, as you see!
Indeed it is as old as Rome and Athens and Babylon--as old, almost, as
humanity itself. Then appear the Graces, symbols of the refinements and
elegancies of life, and the Fates, symbolizing the powers of Order and
Law, and the Furies, the types of revolution and war, and a huge
elephant, the incorporation of the unwieldy State or Public, reminding
one of the 'Leviathan' of the philosopher Hobbes, and Thersites (that
evil-tongued mischief-maker described by Homer) representing
society-scandal and calumny. Then comes a chariot whose charioteer is a
beautiful boy, representing art or poetry. He is the same Euphorion whom
we shall meet later as the son of Faust and Helen, and identical with
Byron. On the chariot is enthroned Faust as Plutus the God of Money, and
behind him as groom or armour-bearer sits Mephisto, an emaciated
hollow-eyed apparition denoting Avarice. Nymphs, Fauns, Satyrs and
Gnomes--types of the powers of Nature--attend the car and do homage to
the God of Money. The gnomes offer to show their master Plutus a
subterranean treasure-horde of molten gold. He approaches too close and
his beard catches fire. In a few moments an immense conflagration
spreads through the crowds of revellers, which would have ended in a
terrible catastrophe (such as had actually happened at the French court
shortly before Goethe wrote this scene, and such as happened some
fifteen years ago in Paris at some bazaar) had not Faust with the help
of Mephistopheles extinguished the flames by the aid of magic.

The young Kaiser now demands from Faust that he shall give the court a
display of his magic arts. He commands him to raise the shades of Paris
and Helen. Faust applies to Mephisto, but he professes himself unable to
raise the shades of classical heroes and heroines. 'This heathen Greek
folk,' he says, 'have their own hell and their own devils. _I_ have no
power over them. Still--there _is_ a means.' He then tells Faust that he
will have to descend to the 'Mothers,' 'die Muetter,' mysterious deities
(mentioned by Greek authors) as worshipped in Sicily and dwelling in the
inmost depths of the universe, at the very heart of Nature, beyond the
conditions of Time and Space. He who will raise the shade of Helen, or
ideal beauty, must descend first to the 'Mothers'--must enter the realm
of the spiritual, the unconditioned, the ideal, to which there is no
defined road, and to which even _thought_ cannot guide him. He must
surrender himself in _contemplation_ and sink to the very centre of the
world of appearances. Mephistopheles gives Faust a key, which glows and
emits flames as he grasps it. Holding this key he will sink down to the
realm of the Mothers, where he will find a glowing tripod (the symbol
of that Triad or Trinity which plays so large a part in the old
Pythagorean philosophy and in more than one religion). This tripod he is
to touch with the key, and it will rise with him to the surface of the
earth.

The imperial court is assembled. A stage has been erected. The court
astrologer announces the play and Mephistopheles is installed in the
prompter's box. All is in expectation and excitement. Then on the stage
is seen rising from the ground the form of Faust attended by the tripod.
He touches the tripod with the glowing key. A dense mist of incense
arises, and as it clears away is seen--Paris. His appearance is greeted
by the enthusiastic comments of the court ladies, young and old, and
criticized by the men courtiers--with evident jealousy. Helen then
appears, and the comments and criticisms are reversed, female jealousy
now having its turn. Faust stands entranced at the loveliness of Helen.
In spite of the angry protests of Mephistopheles from the prompter's
box, who tells him to keep to his role and not to be taken in by a mere
phantom of his own raising. Faust, unable any longer to control himself
when Paris attempts to carry off Helen, rushes forward to rescue her. A
great explosion takes place and all is darkness. Faust has fallen
senseless to the ground. Mephistopheles picks him up and carries him
away--with contemptuous remarks.

At the beginning of the next act we find Faust lying, still insensible,
on his bed in his old room, where we first met him--his professor's
study. His daring attempt to grasp ideal beauty has ended, as it often
does end, and as it ended in Goethe's own case, in failure of a sudden
and explosive nature. He is now to have an experience of a different
nature. During the years while he has been making his first trial of the
outer world, his old Famulus, Wagner, now professor in Faust's place,
has been devoting _his_ whole time and energies to realising that dream
of science--the chemical production of life.

It is, says Professor Romanes, 'the dream of modern science that a
machine _may_ finally be constructed so elaborate in its multiple play
of forces that it would begin to show evidences of consciousness and
mind'--mind and motion being, according to certain modern scientists,
identical. Curiously enough a scientist of the same name--Wagner--who
lived in the last century, did, like Faust's Famulus Wagner, in the same
way devote his life to the production of a living organism--a
'homunculus'--in the conviction, as he asserted, that 'in course of time
chemistry is bound to succeed in producing organic bodies and in
creating a human being by means of crystallization'--an assertion not
very different from that of a still more trustworthy scientist, for
Professor Huxley himself has told us that he lived in 'the hope and the
faith that in course of time we shall see our way from the constituents
of the protoplasm to its properties,' _i.e._ from carbonic acid, water,
and ammonia to that mysterious thing which we call vitality or
life--from the molecular motion of the brain to Socratic wisdom,
Shakespearean genius, and Christian faith, hope and charity.

In the background of the stage we see Faust still lying insensible on
his bed. Mephistopheles comes forward muttering sarcastic comments on
Faust's foolish infatuation. 'He whom Helen paralyzes,' he says,
'doesn't come to his wits again so soon.' He then pulls the bell. The
windows rattle and the walls shake, as with earthquake. Wagner's
terrified Famulus appears. He says that his master, the Herr Professor,
has locked himself up for days and nights together in his laboratory;
that he is engaged in a most delicate and important operation, namely
that of manufacturing a human being, and he really cannot be disturbed.
Mephistopheles however sends him back to demand admittance. Meanwhile he
dons Faust's professorial costume, which he finds hanging in its old
place but infested with legions of moths, which buzz around him piping
welcome to their old mate. Then he takes his seat in Faust's
professorial chair, and the same scholar enters to whom as a timid
'Fuchs,' or freshman, Mephistopheles had in the first Part of the play
given his diabolic advice as to the choice of a profession. The scholar
is _now_, after a course of University education, a match for the devil
himself. He flouts poor Mephisto as a dried-up old pedant, not up to
date with the new generation's aesthetic and literary self-conceits, or
with its contempt for its elders--and for everything else except its own
precious self. 'Youth and its genius,' he exclaims, 'are the only things
of value; as soon as one is thirty years of age he's just as good as
dead ... and it would be far better if all people at thirty were knocked
on the head'; and he storms out of the room. Mephistopheles consoles
himself with the fact that the devil is old enough to have seen a good
many such new generations, with all their absurdities, their up-to-date
fads and follies, pass away and give place to other forms of still more
up-to-date and self-conceited absurdity.

Mephisto now enters the laboratory, where Wagner is intently engaged in
watching his chemical compound gradually crystallizing within a huge
glass retort. As he watches, the outlines of a diminutive human being--a
mannikin or 'homunculus'--become visible and rapidly gain distinct form.
A tiny voice is heard issuing from the glass retort and addressing
Wagner as 'Daddy' and Mephistopheles as 'Cousin'; and it is to the
presence of this 'Cousin,' we may infer, rather than to his scientific
'Daddy' that the Homunculus really owes his existence. With the
connivance of Mephistopheles, the Mannikin, still in his glass retort,
slips from the enamoured paternal grasp of Wagner, and floats through
the air into the adjacent room, hovering above Faust, who is still
asleep on his couch.

As it hovers above the sleeper it begins to sing--to describe ravishing
dreamland scenery--inspiring Faust with visions of sensuous loveliness.
It then bids Mephistopheles wrap Faust in his magic mantle and prepare
for an aerial flight.... 'Whither?' asks Mephistopheles. '_To Greece!_'
is the answer: to the Pharsalian plain in Thessaly; and in spite of the
protests of Mephistopheles (who has no taste for the land of classic
art) he is forced to obey. The sleeping form of Faust is borne aloft,
the Mannikin leading the way like a will-o'-the-wisp, gleaming within
his glass retort. '_Und ich?_' exclaims poor old Wagner in piteous
accents. '_Ach, du!_' says Homunculus, '_Du bleibst zu Hause--!_' 'You
just stop at home, and grub away among your musty manuscripts, and work
away at your protoplasms and your elixirs of life.' Thus, guided by the
Homunculus, Faust and Mephistopheles set forth on their aerial journey
to ancient Greece--to the land where the ideals of art have found their
highest realization--in quest of Helen, the supreme type of all that the
human mind has conceived as beautiful.

It is often asked, and I think _we_ may fairly ask, what Goethe meant to
symbolize by his Homunculus. You will have noticed that his material
components (as the carbonic acid and ammonia of Professor Huxley's
protoplasm) are supplied by his scientific 'Daddy,' but that the 'tertia
vis,' that third power or 'spiritual bond' which combines his material
components, is supplied by the supernatural presence of Mephistopheles.
I believe this Homunculus to be a symbol of poetic genius or
imagination, which uses the material supplied by plodding pedantry--by
critical research, antiquarianism, scholarship, and science--slips from
the hands of its poor enamoured Daddy, and flies off to the land of
idealism. Here, as we shall see, the Mannikin breaks free from his glass
retort and is poured out like phosphorescent light on the waves of the
great ocean.

But the quest for Helen, for ideal beauty, leads through scenes haunted
by forms of weird and terrible nature--those forms in which the human
imagination, as it gradually gains a sense of the supernatural and a
sense of art, first incorporated its conceptions--forms, first, of
hideous and terrific character: monstrous idols of Eastern and Egyptian
superstition, Griffins, and Sphinxes, and bull-headed Molochs, and
horned Astartes, and many-breasted Cybeles, till in the Hellenic race it
rose to the recognition of the beautiful and bodied forth divinity in
the human form divine, and found its highest ideal of beauty in Helen,
divinely fair of women. This phase in Faust's development--this stage in
his quest for beauty and truth--this delirium of his 'divine madness,'
as Plato calls our ecstasy of yearning after ideal beauty, is symbolized
by the classical _Walpurgisnacht_. (You remember the other
_Walpurgisnacht_--that on the Blocksberg--which I described before.)

Guided by the Mannikin, Faust and Mephistopheles arrive at the
Pharsalian fields--the great plain of Thessaly, renowned for the battle
of Pharsalus, in which Caesar conquered Pompey--renowned too as the
classic ground of witches and wizards. Griffins, Sphinxes and Sirens
meet them. They can tell Faust nothing about Helen, but they direct him
to Cheiron the Centaur (a link, as it were, between the monstrous forms
of barbarous oriental imagination and Hellenic art). Cheiron the Centaur
has himself borne Helen on his back, and excites Faust's passion by the
description of her beauty. He takes Faust to the prophetess Manto,
daughter of the old blind Theban prophet Teiresias, and she conducts him
to a dark fissure--a Bocca dell' Inferno--at the foot of Mount Olympus,
such as that which you may have seen in the Sibyl's cave on Lake
Avernus; and here (as once Orpheus did in search of Eurydice) he
descends to the realms of the dead to seek the help of Persephone, Queen
of Hades, in his quest for Helen. Meanwhile Mephisto has found that in
spite of his distaste for classic art and beauty there are elements in
the classical witches' sabbath not less congenial to him than those of
the Blocksberg with its northern and more modern types of devilry and
bestiality. He is enchanted with the ghoulish vampire Empusa and the
monster Lamia, half-snake half-woman, and at length finds _his_ ideal of
beauty in the loathsome and terrible Phorkyads, daughters of Phorkys, an
old god of the sea. The Phorkyads are sometimes described as identical
with, sometimes as sisters of, the Gorgons, and represent the climax of
all that Greek imagination has created of the horrible. The three
sisters are pictured in Greek mythology as possessing between them only
one eye and one tooth, which they pass round for use. They dwelt in
outer darkness, being too terrible for sun or moon to look upon. Even
Mephistopheles is at first a little staggered by the sight, but he soon
finds himself on familiar terms with them and ends by borrowing the form
of one of them (she becoming for the time absorbed into her two
sisters)--for as medieval devil he has no right of entree into that
classical scene in which he and Faust are now to play their parts. It is
therefore in the form of a Phorkyad or Gorgon that Mephisto will appear
when we next meet him.

Meanwhile the Homunculus has found congenial spirits among the
sea-nymphs and sirens on the shores of the Aegean. He longs to gain
freedom from his glass, in which he is still imprisoned. Nereus the
sea-god is unable to help him, but sends him to his father Proteus, the
great ocean prophet, who bears him out into the midst of the ocean. Here
Galatea the sea-goddess (identical with Aphrodite, the sea-born symbol
of the beauty of the natural-world) passes by in her chariot drawn by
dolphins and surrounded by Nereids. The Homunculus in an ecstasy of
love dashes himself against her chariot. The glass is shattered and he
is poured forth in a stream of phosphorescent light over the waves--thus
being once more made one with Nature.

The theory that _water_ was the prime element, a theory advocated
especially by the old Ionic philosopher Thales, was held by Goethe, who
was a 'sedimentarist' in geological matters, and in this classical
_Walpurgisnacht_ he has introduced, much to the annoyance of many
critics, a dispute between Thales and other sages on the question
whether the formation of the world was due to fire or water.

We have now reached that part of _Faust_ which is known as the _Helena_.
It was written before the rest of Part II, though doubtless when he
wrote it Goethe had already conceived the general outline of the whole
poem. Of the wonderful versatility of Goethe's genius no more striking
example can be given than the sudden and complete change of scene, and
not only scene but ideas and feelings, by which we are transported from
the age of Luther and the court of a German Kaiser and the laboratory of
a modern scientist back--some 3500 years or so--to the age of the
Trojan war.

Instead of extravagance and grotesqueness, instead of the diversity, the
rich ornamentation, the heaven-soaring pinnacles and spires of Gothic
imagination--we have in the _Helena_ sculpturesque repose, simplicity,
dignity and proportion. It is as if we had been suddenly transported
from some Gothic cathedral to the Parthenon, or to Paestum.

I know no poet who in any modern language has reproduced as Goethe has
done in his _Iphigenie_ and in the _Helena_ not only the external form
but also the spirit of Hellenic literature. While reading the _Helena_
we feel ourselves under the cloudless Grecian sky; we breathe the
Grecian air with Helen herself.

The scene is laid before the palace of Menelaus at Sparta. Helen,
accompanied by a band of captive Trojan maidens, has been disembarked at
the mouth of the river Eurotas by Menelaus, on his return from Troy, and
has been sent forward to Sparta to make preparation for the arrival of
her husband and his warriors. Once more after those long eventful years
since she had fled to Troy with Paris she stands as in a dream before
her own palace-home, dazed and wearied, her mind distraught with anxious
thoughts; for during the long wearisome return across the Aegean sea her
husband Menelaus has addressed no friendly word to her, but seemed
gloomily revolving in his heart some deed of vengeance. She knows not if
she is returning as queen, or as captive, doomed perhaps to the fate of
a slave.

She enters the palace alone. After a few moments she reappears,
horror-struck and scarce able to tell what she has seen. Crouching
beside the central hearth she has found a terrible shape--a ghastly
haggard thing, like some phantom of hell. It has followed her. It stands
there before her on the threshold of her palace. In terrible accents
this Gorgon-like monster denounces her, recounting all the ruin that by
her fatal beauty she had wrought, interweaving into the story the
various legends connected with her past life--those mysterious legends
that connect Helen not only with Paris and Menelaus but with Theseus and
Achilles and with Egypt--legends of a second phantom-Helen, the 'double'
of that Helen whom Menelaus has carried home from Troy--until alarmed
and distracted, doubting her own identity, overwhelmed by anxiety about
the future and by terror at the grisly apparition, she seems herself to
be in truth fading away into a mere phantom, and sinks senseless to the
ground. After a fierce altercation between the chorus of captive maidens
and the Gorgon-shape (in whom you will have recognized our old friend
Mephistopheles) Helen returns to consciousness. Then the
Phorkyad-Mephistopheles tells her that the preparations which she has
been ordered to make are in view of a sacrifice to be performed on the
arrival of Menelaus and that she herself (Helen) is the destined victim.

In despair Helen appeals to the Gorgon for advice, who bids her take
refuge in the neighbouring mountains of Arcadia, where a robber
chieftain has his stronghold. Under the guidance of Mephisto, who raises
a thick mist, she and her maidens escape. They climb the mountain; the
mists rise and they find themselves before the castle of a medieval
bandit-prince, and it is Faust himself who comes forth to greet her and
to welcome her as his queen and mistress. Faust, the symbol of the
Renaissance and modern art, welcomes to his castle the ideal of Greek
art and beauty.

The stately Greek measures now give way to the love-songs of Chivalry
and Romance--to the measures of the Minnesinger and the Troubadour.
Faust kneels in homage before the impersonation of ideal beauty, and
Helen feels that she is _now_ no longer a mere ideal, a mere phantom.
She clings to her new, unknown lover, as to one who will make her
realize her own existence. It is an allegory of modern art--the art of
Dante, Giotto, Raphael, Shakespeare and Goethe--receiving as its queen
the ideal of Greek imagination and inspiring, as it were, the cold
statue with the warm vitality of a higher conception of chivalrous love
and perfect womanhood.

I have mentioned how the stately Greek measures in the _Helena_ give way
to the metres of Romance and Chivalry. Perhaps it may be well to explain
some of these various metres.

The scene opens, as you know, with Helen's dignified and beautiful
speech:

    Bewundert viel und viel gescholten Helena.

That is the well-known _iambic trimeter_, _i.e._ the metre of six feet
(twelve syllables) used in all the speeches in Greek tragedy.

Thus the _Oedipus Tyrannos_ of Sophocles begins:

    [Greek: O tekna, Kadmou tou palai nea trophe]

and so on. It has twelve syllables, mostly (iambics) as in our blank
verse. But blank verse has only ten syllables: 'I cannot tell what you
and other men.' If one adds two syllables one gets the Greek iambic
verse, thus: 'I cannot tell what you and other men believe.' The Chorus
in the _Helena_ uses various rhythms such as are found in the choruses
of Greek tragedy:

        Schweige, schweige,
    Missblickende, missredende du!
    Aus so graesslichen, einzahnigen
    Lippen was enthaucht wohl
    Solchem furchtbaren Greuelschlund!

Then Mephistopheles, as the Phorkyad, when Helen falls fainting,
addresses her suddenly in another measure--a longer verse, such as is
sometimes used by the Greek tragedians and comedians when something new
occurs in the play. It is called a _tetrameter_, and consists of fifteen
syllables (mostly - U, called trochees). Thus, in Greek, [Greek: oi
gerontes oi palaioi memphomestha te polei]--and in German:

    Tritt hervor aus fluechtigen Wolken hohe Sonne dieses Tags--

or the fine lines spoken by Helen:

    Doch es ziemet Koeniginnen, allen Menschen ziemt es wohl,
    Sich zu fassen, zu ermannen, was auch drohend ueberrascht.

When Faust appears he begins to speak at once in modern blank verse of
ten syllables, such as we know in Milton and Shakespeare and Schiller.
One might have expected him to speak in some earlier romantic measure,
to have used perhaps the metre of the old Nibelungenlied, as in

    Es ist in alten Maehren wunders viel geseit,
    Von Heleden lobebaeren, von grosser Arebeit,

which is supposed to date from about 1150; or in Dante's _terza rima_,
of about 1300, as

    Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.

But blank verse is after all the metre _par excellence_ of the
Renaissance, that is of the revival of Greek influence, and Goethe chose
it for this reason.

Now the Watchman Lynceus ('the keen-eyed,' as the word means--and you
perhaps remember him as the watchman of the Argonauts on the good ship
Argo) represents here the early pre-Renaissance poets of Italy and
Provence and Germany--the Troubadours and Trouveres and Minnesinger, who
were so surprised and dazzled by the sudden sunrise of the Renaissance
with its wonderful new apparition of Greek art that they (as Lynceus in
_Faust_) failed to announce its coming; and therefore Lynceus here
speaks in a kind of early Troubadour metre, with _rime_. In classical
poetry there is no rime. They did not like it; they even ridiculed it.
For instance Cicero, the great orator, once tried to write poetry, and
produced a line that said 'O fortunate Rome, when I was consul!' This
was not only conceited of him but unfortunately the line contained a
rime and this rime brought down an avalanche of ridicule on his head. 'O
fortunatam natam me consule Romam' was this unfortunate line. Rime was
probably first adopted by the monks in their medieval Latin hymns and
was used by the Troubadours and early Italian poets when they began to
write in the vulgar tongue. Dante uses it in his canzoni and sonnets
and ballads, as well of course as in his great poem. So it is quite
right to make Lynceus speak in rime. Helen of course has never heard
rime before, and she turns to Faust and asks him what it is that sounds
so strange and beautiful in this song of Lynceus; and she wants to know
how _she_ too can learn the art. So Faust tells her just to try and the
rimes will come of their own accord. But I will quote the passage, for
it is very pretty; and I will add a rough translation.

       Doch wuenscht' ich Unterricht warum die Rede
       Des Manns mir seltsam klang, seltsam und freundlich--
       Ein Ton scheint sich dem and'ren zu bequemen;
       Und hat ein Wort zum Ohre sich gesellt,
       Ein andres kommt, dem ersten liebzukosen....
       So sage denn, wie spraech' ich auch so schoen.

FAUST. Das ist gar leicht--es muss vom Herzen geh'n.
       Und wenn die Brust von Sehnsucht ueberfliesst
       Man sieht sich um, und fragt....

HELEN.                    wer mitgeniesst.

FAUST. Nun schaut der Geist nicht vorwaerts, nicht zurueck--
       Die Gegenwart allein ...

HELEN.                ist unser Glueck--

FAUST. Schatz ist sie, Hochgewinn, Besitz und Pfand.
       Bestaetigung, wer gibt sie?

HELEN.                     Meine Hand.

(HELEN. I fain would ask thee why the watchman's song
       So strangely sounded--strange but beautiful.
       Tones seemed to link themselves in harmony.
       One word would come and nestle in the ear,
       Then came another and caressed it there.
       But say--how can I also learn the art?

FAUST. Quite easily--one listens to one's heart,
       And when its longings seem too great to bear
       We look around for one ...

HELEN.             our joy to share.

FAUST. Not past nor future loving hearts can bless,
       The _present_--

HELEN.        is alone our happiness.

FAUST. Before the prize of beauty, lo I stand,
       But who assures the prize to me?

HELEN.                     My hand!)

In the midst of this life of chivalrous love and romance Faust and Helen
pass a period of ecstatic bliss. But, as Goethe himself found, such
ecstasies are only a passing phase. The end comes inevitably and
suddenly. A son is born to them, Euphorion by name (the name of the
winged son of Helen and Achilles, according to one legend). He is no
common human child. As a butterfly from its chrysalis he bursts at once
into fully developed existence. He is of enchanting beauty but wild and
capricious; spurning the common earth he climbs ever higher and higher
amidst the mountain crags, singing ravishing melodies to his lyre. He
reaches the topmost crag and casts himself into the air. A flame
flickers upwards, and the body of a beautiful youth 'in which one seems
to recognize a well-known form' falls to the ground, at the feet of
Faust and Helen.

Euphorion symbolizes modern poetry, and the well-known form is that of
Byron. For a moment the body lies there; it then dissolves in flame,
which ascends to heaven, and a voice is heard calling on Helen to
follow.

Yes, she must follow. As flame she must return to her home in the
Empyrean--the home of ideal beauty and all other ideals. However much we
strive to realize ideal beauty in art or in our lives, however we may
hold it to our hearts as a warm and living possession, it always escapes
our grasp. The short-lived winged child of poetic inspiration gleams but
for a moment and disappears, as a flame flickering back to its native
empyrean. And she, the mother, she too must follow, leaving us alone to
face the stern reality of life and of death.

In the embrace of Faust Helen melts away into thin air, leaving in his
arms her robe and veil. These change into a cloud, which envelops him,
raises him into the air and bears him also away. The Phorkyad picks up
Euphorion's lyre and mantle; he steps forward and addresses the
audience, assuring them that in the leavings of poetic genius he has got
enough to fit out any number of modern poets, and is open to a bargain.
He then swells up to a gigantic height, removes the Gorgon-mask, and
reveals himself as Mephistopheles once more the northern modern devil;
and the curtain falls.

When it rises for the Fourth Act we see a craggy mountain peak before
us. A cloud approaches, and deposits Faust on the topmost crag. It
lingers for a time, assuming wondrous shapes and then gradually melts
away into the blue. Faust gazes at it. In its changing outlines he seems
to discern first the regal forms of Olympian goddesses, of Juno, of
Leda--then of Helen. But they fade away and, ere it disappears, the
cloud assumes the likeness of that other half-forgotten human form which
once had aroused in his heart that which he now feels to have been a
love far truer and deeper than all his passion for ideal beauty--that
'swiftly felt and scarcely comprehended' love for a human heart which,
as he now confesses to himself, 'had it been retained would have been
his most precious possession.'

A seven-league boot now passes by--followed in hot haste by another. Out
of the boots steps forth Mephistopheles. He asks contemptuously if Faust
has had enough of heroines and all such ideal folly. He cannot
understand why Faust is still dissatisfied with life. Surely he has seen
enough of its pleasures. He advises him, if he is weary of court life,
to build himself a Sultan's palace and harem and live in retirement--as
Tiberius did on the island of Capri. 'Not so,' answers Faust. 'This
world of earthly soil Still gives me room for greater action. I feel new
strength for nobler toil--Toil that at length shall bring me
satisfaction.'

He has determined to devote the rest of his life to humanity, to the
good of the human race. It is a project with which Mephistopheles
naturally has little sympathy. But he is forced to acquiesce, and, being
bound to serve Faust even in this, he suggests a plan. The young Kaiser
is at present in great difficulties. He is hard pressed by a rival
Emperor--a pretender to the Imperial crown. Mephisto will by his magic
arts secure the Kaiser the victory over this pretender, and then Faust
will claim as recompense a tract of country bordering on the ocean. Here
by means of canals and <DW18>s, dug and built by demonic powers, Faust is
to reclaim from the sea a large region of fertile country and to found a
kind of model republic, where peace and prosperity and every social and
political blessing shall find a home. The plan is carried out. At the
summons of Mephistopheles appear three gigantic warriors by whose help
the battle is won, and Faust gains his reward--the stretch of land on
the shore of the ocean. And he is not the only gainer. The Archbishop
takes the opportunity of extracting far more valuable concessions of
land from the young Kaiser as penance for his having associated himself
with powers of darkness. The prelate even extracts the promise of tithes
and dues from all the land still unclaimed by Faust. As Mephistopheles
aptly remarks, the Church seems to have a good digestion.

Many years are now supposed to elapse. Faust has nearly completed his
task of expelling the sea and founding his ideal state. What had been a
watery waste is now like the garden of Eden in its luxuriant fertility.
Thousands of industrious happy mortals have found in this new country a
refuge and a home. Ships, laden with costly wares, throng the ports. On
an eminence overlooking the scene stands the castle of Faust, and not
far off are a cottage and a chapel. On this scene the last act opens. A
wanderer enters. He is seeking the cottage which once used to stand
here, on the very brink of the ocean. It was here that he was
shipwrecked: here, on this very spot, the waves had cast him ashore:
here stands still the cottage of the poor old peasant and his wife who
had rescued him from death. But now the sea is sparkling in the blue
distance and beneath him spreads the new country with its waving
cornfields. He enters the cottage and is welcomed by the poor old
couple (to whom Goethe has given the names Philemon and Baucis, the old
peasant and his wife who, according to the Greek legend, were the only
Phrygians who offered hospitality to Zeus, the King of the Gods, as he
was wandering about in disguise among mortals).

Faust comes out on to the garden terrace of his castle. He is now an old
man--close upon a hundred years of age. He gazes with a feeling of
happiness and satisfaction at the scene that lies below him--the wide
expanse of fertile land, the harbours and canals filled with shipping.
Suddenly the bell in the little chapel begins to ring for Vespers.

Faust's happiness is in a moment changed into bitterness and anger. This
cottage, this chapel, this little plot of land are as thorns in his
side: they are the Naboth's vineyard which he covets and which alone
interferes with his territorial rights. He has offered large sums of
money, but the peasant will not give up his home.

Mephistopheles and his helpers (the same three gigantic supernatural
beings who took part in the battle) appear. Faust vents his anger and
chagrin with regard to the peasant and the irritating ding-dong-dell of
the vesper bell. He commissions Mephistopheles to persuade the peasant
to take the money and to make him turn out of his wretched hut.
Mephistopheles and his mates go to carry out the order. A few moments
later flames are seen to rise from the cottage and chapel.
Mephistopheles returns to relate that the peasant and the wanderer
proved obstinate: in the scuffle the wanderer had been killed; the
cottage had caught fire, and old Philemon and his wife had both died of
terror.

Faust turns upon Mephistopheles with fierce anger and curses him. 'I
meant exchange!' he exclaims. 'I meant to _make it good with money_! I
meant not robbery and murder. I curse the deed. Thou, not I, shalt bear
the guilt.'

Here I do not find it easy to follow Faust's line of argument. Fair
exchange is certainly said to be no robbery--but this theory of 'making
everything good with money' is one which the average foreigner is apt to
attribute especially to the average Britisher, and it does not raise
Faust in one's estimation. I suppose he thinks he is doing the poor old
couple a blessing in disguise by ejecting them out of their wretched
hovel and presenting them with a sum of money of perhaps ten times its
value.

Possibly Goethe means it to be a specimen of the kind of mistake that
well-meaning theoretical philanthropists are apt to commit with their
Juggernaut of Human Progress. Faust is filled with great philanthropic
ideas--but perhaps he is a little apt to ignore the individual. Anyhow
his better self 'meant not robbery and murder' and is perhaps quite
justified in cursing its demonic companion and giving him the whole of
the guilt.

The scene changes. It is midnight. Faust, sleepless and restless, is
pacing the hall in his castle. Outside, on the castle terrace, appear
four phantom shapes clothed as women in dusky robes. They are Want,
Guilt, Care, and Need. The four grey sisters make halt before the
castle. In hollow, awe-inspiring tones they recite in turn their
dirge-like strains: they chant of gathering clouds and darkness, and of
their brother--Death. They approach the door of the castle hall. It is
shut. Within lives a rich man, and none of them may enter, not even
Guilt--none save only Care. She slips through the keyhole. Faust feels
her unseen presence.

'Is any one here?' he asks.

'The question demandeth _Yes_!'

'And thou ... who art thou?'

''Tis enough that I am here.'

'Avaunt!'

'I am where I should be.'

Faust defies the phantom. She, standing there invisible, recites in
tones like the knell of a passing-bell the fate of a man haunted by
Care: how he gradually loses sight of his high ideals and wanders
blindly amid the maze of worldly illusions--how he loses faith and
joy--how he starves amidst plenty--has no certain aim in life--burdening
himself and others, breathing air that chokes him, living a phantom
life--a dead thing, a death-in-life--supporting himself on a hope that
is no hope, but despair--never content, never resigned, never knowing
what he should do, or what he himself wishes.

'Accursed spectres!' exclaims Faust. 'Thus ye ever treat the human race.
From demons, I know, it is scarce possible to free oneself. But _thy_
power, O Care--so great and so insidious though it be, I will _not_
recognize it!'

'So _feel_ it now!' answers the phantom. 'Throughout their whole
existence men are mostly _blind_--So let it be at last with thee!'

She approaches, breathes in Faust's face, and he is struck blind.

He stands there dazed and astounded. Thick darkness has fallen upon him.
At last he speaks:

    Still deeper seems the night to surge around me,
    But in my inmost spirit all is light.
    I'll rest not till the finished work has crown'd me.
    God's promise--that alone doth give me might.

He hastens forth, groping his way in blindness, to call up his workmen.
His life is ending and he must end his work. It is midnight, but the
light within him makes him think the day has dawned. In the courtyard
there are awaiting him Mephistopheles and a band of Lemurs--horrible
skeleton-figures with shovels and torches. They are digging his grave.
Faust mistakes the sound for that of his workmen, and incites them to
labour. He orders the overseer, Mephistopheles, to press on with the
work ... to finish the last great moat--or 'Graben.'

'_Man spricht_,' answers Mephistopheles _sotto voce_,

    'Man spricht, wie man mir Nachricht gab,
     Von keinem _Graben_--doch vom Grab.'

It is no moat, no Graben, that is now being dug, but a grave--a Grab.

Standing on the very verge of his grave, Faust, reviewing the memories
of his long life, feels that _at last_, though old and blind, with no
more hopes in earthly existence, he has won peace and happiness in
having worked for others and in having given other human beings a
measure of independence and of that true liberty and happiness which are
gained only by honest toil. He alone truly _possesses_ and can _enjoy_
who has made a thing his own by earning it.

    Yes, to this thought I hold with firm persistence;
    The last result of wisdom stamps it true;
    He only earns his freedom and existence
    Who daily conquers them anew.
    And such a throng I fain would see--
    Would stand on a free soil, with people free.

Standing there, on the very edge of his new-dug grave he blesses the
present moment and bids it stay. The fatal words are spoken and
according to the compact his life must end.

He sinks lifeless to the ground. The Lemurs lay him in the open grave.
Mephistopheles, triumphant, looks on and exclaims:

    No joy could sate him, no delight suffice.
    To grasp at empty shades was his endeavour.
    The latest, poorest emptiest moment--this--
    Poor fool, he tried to hold it fast for ever.
    Me he resisted in such vigorous wise;
    But Time is lord--and there the old man lies!
    The clock stands still.

'Stands still,' repeats a voice from heaven, 'still, silent, as the
midnight.' 'It is finished,' says Mephistopheles. 'Nay. 'Tis but past,'
answers the voice. 'Past!' exclaims Mephistopheles; 'how _past_ and yet
not _finished_?' ... He is enraged at the suspicion that life, though
past, may not be _finished_--that Faust's human soul may _yet_ elude
that hell to which he destines it ... that of annihilation.

The Lemurs group themselves round the grave and chant with hollow
voices, such as skeletons may be supposed to have, a funeral dirge.
Meantime Mephistopheles is busy summoning his demons to keep watch over
the dead body, lest the soul should escape like a mouse, or flicker up
to heaven in a little flamelet. Hideous forms of demons, fat and thin,
with straight and crooked horns, tusked like boars and with claws like
vultures, come thronging in, while the jaw of hell opens itself, showing
in the distance the fiery city of Satan.

At this moment a celestial glory is seen descending from heaven and
voices of angels are heard singing a song of triumph and salvation. They
approach ever nearer--Mephistopheles rages and curses, but in vain. They
come ever onward, casting before them roses, the flowers of Paradise,
which burst in flame and scorch the demons, who, rushing at their
angelic adversaries with their hellish prongs and forks and launching
vainly their missiles of hell-fire, are hurled back by an invisible
power and gradually driven off the stage, plunging in hideous ruin and
combustion down headlong into the jaws of hell.

Mephistopheles alone remains, foaming in impotent rage. He is surrounded
by the choir of white-robed angels. He stands powerless there, while
they gather to themselves Faust's immortal part and ascend amidst songs
of triumph to heaven.

Some of us, perhaps most of us--in certain moods at least--feel
inclined to close the book here, as we do with _Hamlet_ at the words
'the rest is silence.' And this feeling is all the stronger when we have
witnessed the stage decorator's pasteboard heaven, where Apostles and
Fathers are posed artistically in rather perilous situations amid rocks
and pine-trees, or balance themselves with evident anxiety mid-air on
pendent platforms representing clouds. Altogether this stage-heaven is a
very uncomfortable and depressing kind of place.

But when read in Goethe's poem and regarded as an allegorical vision the
scene has a certain impressive grandeur, and some of the hymns of
adoration and triumph are of exceeding beauty.

This Scene in Heaven opens with the songs of the three great Fathers,
the Pater Ecstaticus, Pater Profundus, and Pater Seraphicus, symbolizing
the three stages of human aspiration, namely ecstasy, contemplation and
seraphic love. The Seraphic Father is of course St. Francis of Assisi.
In heaven, as he did on earth, he sings of the revelation of Eternal
Love.

Angels are now seen ascending and bearing Faust's immortal part, and as
they rise they sing:

    The noble spirit now is free
      And saved from evil scheming.
    Whoe'er aspires unweariedly
      Is not beyond redeeming,
    And if he feels the grace of Love
      That from on high is given
    The blessed hosts that wait above
      Shall welcome him to heaven.

His yet unawakened soul is greeted by the heavenly choirs and by the
three penitents, the Magdalene, the woman of Samaria and St. Mary of
Egypt.

Then appears 'timidly stealing forth' the glorified form of her who on
earth was called Gretchen. In words that remind one of her former prayer
of remorse and despair in the Cathedral she offers her petition to the
Virgin:

        O Mary, hear me!
        From realms supernal
        Of light eternal
    Incline thy countenance upon my bliss!
        My loved, my lover,
        His trials over
    In yonder world, returns to me in this.

The Virgin in her glory appears. She addresses Gretchen:

    Come, raise thyself to higher spheres!
    For he will follow when he feels thee near.

Gretchen soars up to the higher heaven, and the soul of Faust, now
awakening to consciousness, rises also heavenward following her, while
the chorus of angels sings, in words the beauty and power of which I
dare not mar by translation, telling how all things earthly are but a
vision, and how in heaven the imperfect is made perfect and the
inconceivable wins attainment, and how that which leads us upward and
heavenward is immortal love.

    Alles Vergaengliche
    Ist nur ein Gleichnis;
    Das Unzulaengliche,
    Hier wird's Ereignis;
    Das Unbeschreibliche,
    Hier ist's getan;
    Das Ewig-weibliche
    Zieht uns hinan.

  +--------------------------------------------------------------+
  | Transcriber's Notes:                                         |
  |                                                              |
  | Page 15: Full stop added after "dishes"                      |
  | Page 117: "happended" amended to "happened"                  |
  | Page 128: closing quote mark added after 'double'            |
  |                                                              |
  | Hyphenation has generally been standardized. However, when   |
  | hyphenated and unhyphenated versions of a word each occur    |
  | an equal number of times, both versions have been retained   |
  | (out-rivalling/outrivalling; up to date/up-to-date).         |
  +--------------------------------------------------------------+





End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust', by
H. B. Cotterill

*** 