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 Iphigénie 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 Méphistophélès 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 Méphistophélès 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 slopes, 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-coloured 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 Méphistophélès 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 Méphistophélès presents himself and is accepted as a locum tenens. To him the Kaiser turns for advice, and Méphistophélès 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 Méphistophélès 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 Méphistophélès 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. Méphistophélès 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 Méphistophélès 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 Méphistophélès from the prompter’s box, who tells him to keep to his rôle 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. Méphistophélès 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. Méphistophélès 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. Méphistophélès 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, Méphistophélès 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. Méphistophélès 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 Méphistophélès 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 Méphistophélès, 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 Méphistophélès wrap Faust in his magic mantle and prepare for an aerial flight.... ‘Whither?’ asks Méphistophélès. ‘To Greece!’ is the answer: to the Pharsalian plain in Thessaly; and in spite of the protests of Méphistophélès (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 élixirs of life.’ Thus, guided by the Homunculus, Faust and Méphistophélès 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 Méphistophélès. 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 Méphistophélès arrive at the Pharsalian fields the great plain of Thessaly, renowned for the battle of Pharsalus, in which Cæsar 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 Méphistophélès 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 Iphigénie 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 Méphistophélès) Helen returns to consciousness. Then the Phorkyad-Méphistophélès 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 Méphistophélès, 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 trochées). Thus, in Greek, [Greek: oi gérontes oi palaioi memphomestha te polei] and in German:

Tritt hervor aus fluechtigen Wolken hohe Sonne dièses 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 Trouvères 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 Méphistophélès 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 Méphistophélès. 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 Méphistophélès 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 dykes, 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 Méphistophélès 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 Méphistophélès 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.

Méphistophélès 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 Méphistophélès to persuade the peasant to take the money and to make him turn out of his wretched hut. Méphistophélès and his mates go to carry out the order. A few moments later flames are seen to rise from the cottage and chapel. Méphistophélès 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 Méphistophélès 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 Méphistophélès 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, Méphistophélès, to press on with the work ... to finish the last great moat or ‘Graben.’

‘Man spricht,’ answers Méphistophélès 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. Méphistophélès, 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 Méphistophélès. ’Nay. ‘Tis but past,’ answers the voice. ‘Past!’ exclaims Méphistophélès; ’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 Méphistophélès 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 Méphistophélès 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.

Méphistophélès 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.