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 Iphigénie 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 réflexions 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, Jéhovah 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 prosélytes, 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 hérésies 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 élixirs of life, bred in the popular superstition a mysterious awe and attached to almost all scientific investigation the epithet ‘black,’ or diabolic, as opposed to the ‘white art’ of holding communion with good spirits. Alchemy and astrology (words meaning merely what we call chemistry and astronomy) became words of hellish import, and he who practised these arts was in league with Satan. Thus were regarded such men as Lully, Roger Bacon, the Abbot Tritheim, and (perhaps best known of all, at least to all readers of Browning) Bombastes Paracelsus, the contemporary of Faust, born at Einsiedeln, between Brunnen and the lake of Zuerich, in the year 1493.

Thus the sixteenth-century form of our legend is of the most tragic character. In the oldest Faust-legend, which first took shape in this century, there is no hint of his being saved. And another of its characteristics is its strong anti-papal tendency. The devil appears in the guise of a monk, and even as Mahomet or Antichrist in the guise of the Pope himself.

But the Renaissance (if not the Reformation) introduced another, entirely new and most important, element into the legend one which enabled Goethe to use the sulphurous old myth as the subject for a great poem. Not only was there a renaissance of learning, but also of art an intense longing for both Knowledge and Beauty. To know everything to learn the inner secret of Nature to understand, as Faust longed to understand,

The inmost force
That binds the world and guides its course

this yearning after perfection by Knowledge was one of the fruits of the Renaissance. The other was the yearning to gain perfection by means of feeling, by the ecstatic contemplation of and communion with perfect Beauty ’to love infinitely and be loved,’ as Aprile says in Browning’s Paracelsus. These two impulses, the one toward Knowledge and the other toward Love, were doubtless awakened by the study of Aristotle, that ‘master of those who know,’ and of Plato’s doctrine of the soul’s love-inspired yearnings for Truth and Beauty and for communion with the Perfect and the Eternal.

I have called them two impulses, and to the mind they must ever appear distinct, nay sometimes contrary; but I need not remind you how Christianity teaches us to reconcile the ancient feud between the mind and the heart between Knowledge and Love. You may perhaps remember how Dante, to intimate to us that there can be no true knowledge without love and no true love without knowledge, speaks of the Cherubim and the Seraphim as ideally the same, and tells us that the Seraphs, who love most, also know most.

Both these impulses are noble and awaken our sympathy.

Now, in order that tragic art may have its effect it must possess what Aristotle calls [Greek: pathos], so that we may be able to sympathize with the sufferer. Thus, for instance, Milton enlists our sympathies even with his Satan, and it is perhaps because we cannot sympathize in any way with Dante’s Lucifer that many feel repelled by the terrible creation. But even in the oldest of the Faust-legends, and far more of course in Goethe’s Faust, we are attracted by a ‘pathetic’ element, viz., the unsatisfied and insatiable longing of a human soul for Knowledge for Truth and its still intenser yearnings after ideal Beauty.

Thus, even the Faust of the older sixteenth-century legend, although he ultimately falls a victim to the devil, has noble and high impulses by which we feel strongly attracted. He is lost, not through these impulses, these yearnings for knowledge, but through his magic, and his sensual life. In spite of more than one fit of remorse he is unable to free himself from the lusts of the flesh; he is obliged to sign a second bond with Mephisto and is dragged down ever lower into the abyss, until the jaws of hell open and swallow him up while the Faust of Goethe’s poem gains strength through many an error and many a grievous fall, gradually shakes off the diabolic influence and rising on the stepping-stones of his dead self is finally rescued by God’s mercy and reaches the higher spheres of another life.

How infinitely grander how illimitable in its vistas the subject becomes when thus treated by a great poet we all must feel. And even if we cannot with a whole heart accept as a true Gospel what (in spite of Goethe’s admission that God’s mercy was a necessary factor) seems to be a gospel of self-salvation, we should not forget that this picture of a man pressing on in his own strength amidst the lusts of the flesh and the errors of the mind is perhaps the noblest and grandest kind of picture that dramatic art can offer us that of the human will in its struggle against destiny. In any case, I think, we cannot refuse our sympathy for these yearnings and searchings for truth amidst error. Do you remember what Lessing said about such longings? ’If God’ he said ’should hold Truth itself in His right hand, and in His left the longing for Truth, and should say to me Choose! I would humbly fall down before His left hand and say: Father, pure Truth is for Thee alone. Give me the longing for Truth, though it be attended with never-ending error.’

There seems no doubt that a man named Johann Faust, renowned for his learning and credited with magical powers, actually did exist probably about 1490 to 1540. (He was therefore a contemporary of Paracelsus, and also of Luther, Charles V., Henry VIII. and Raphael.) Several notices of this Dr. Johann Faust occur in writers of the period. One of the most circumstantial is by the friend and biographer of Melanchthon, who himself seems to have met Faust. But the various myths that gathered round the magician were, it seems, first published in a continuous narrative in 1587, that is about fifty years after his death. This is the old Frankfurter Faustbuch, of which only one perfect specimen is now known to exist. It is, I believe, in Leipzig. A mutilated copy is in the Vienna Library.

One day, when to escape for a time from the German commentators above mentioned I had gone out for a walk, I found my way to the old Wasserkirche now the Free Library of the city of Zuerich, and here I discovered a facsimile reprint of this old Frankfurt Faust-book. As this is the oldest and most authentic basis of all later forms of the story and is doubtless the one which (as well as the puppet-play on the subject) Goethe used as the ground-plan for his poem, I perhaps cannot do better than give a brief abstract of its contents.

It is written in quaint old German and is interspersed with many pious comments, biblical quotations and Latin words and phrases, and now and then it breaks out into doggerel verse. The editor (Spiess by name) tells us that he publishes the book ’as a warning to all Christians and sensible people to avoid the terrible example of Doctor Faustus.’ He evidently takes the thing very seriously and has purposely (as he says) omitted all ‘magic formulae,’ lest ’any should by this Historia be incited to inquisitiveness and imitation.’ Johann Faust, according to this version, was born at Roda, a village near Weimar. (Other versions say at Knittlingen in Wuertemberg.) His parents were honest God-fearing peasants. His great abilities induced a rich relation in Wittenberg to adopt and educate him. He studied theology at Wittenberg (known to us all through Hamlet and Luther) and also at Cracow, outrivalling all competitors and gaining the title of Doctor of Theology. But he had not only a ‘teachable and quick’ but also a ‘foolish, silly, inquisitive’ head, and neglecting the Bible became a ‘Speculator’ and prided himself more on being an Astrologus and a Mathematicus than a Theologus. As the old chronicler expresses it, he ’took to himself eagle’s wings and desired to search out the reasons of all in heaven and on earth.’

He now takes to ’Zauberei’ magic. Where four roads meet in the Spessart Wald, a forest near Wittenberg, he inscribes mystic circles and performs incantations for the purpose of summoning the devil. After all kinds of fearful apparitions and noises, by which Faust is almost terrified to death, a demon appears in the shape of a ‘grey monk.’ Faust invites him to visit him at his house in Wittenberg. The demon visits him there and tells him of all the horrors of hell. But Faust persists in his plan and makes a second rendezvous with the demon, who has now procured leave from his lord and master Lucifer to offer his services and attendance. The compact is made. The demon is to serve him for twenty-four years. Faust is to renounce Christianity and to hate all Christians, and at the end of twenty-four years he is to belong to the demon ’to have power, rule and dominion over his soul, body, flesh, blood, and possessions, and that for all eternity.’ This compact has to be signed with blood. Faust pierces his hand, and the blood flows out and forms the words ’O homo fuge!’ ’O man, escape!’ but Faust, though alarmed, is not deterred. It is now agreed that the demon shall appear, whenever summoned, in the form of a Franciscan monk. He then reveals his name: Méphistophélès, 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 Méphistophélès 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.