Faust: First Part Read online

  He evidently decided that he would not now attempt to finish it, but publish it as ‘a fragment’ with a few revisions and additions. The chief difficulty was still the ‘great lacuna’ (as he himself later called it) between what are now lines 605 and 1868. He had an effective beginning (354–605), and an ending so overwhelming that it must have been difficult to see what could ever be made to follow it. What was to be done about the missing middle? At the very least, Mephistopheles must not be allowed simply to appear without explanation from nowhere, in a comic scene, with no hint of his standing or of the nature of his business with Faust. Even if Goethe could not yet work out his own modernized version of the terms of their traditional bargain, the reading public must at least be given some hint that an unspecified bargain has taken place. He therefore wrote a short new piece of dialogue between Faust and Mephistopheles (which now appears as lines 1770–850 of Sc. 7). To make it quite clear that a still unfilled gap precedes this passage, he inserted a row of dashes before the first line (as may still be seen in the 1790 edition) and began in the middle of a sentence with the word ‘and’, as well as in the middle of a rhymed quatrain (1768–71). In this new dialogue, and in the soliloquy by Mephistopheles which follows it (1851–67), Goethe set out what at that stage seemed to him to be appropriate as the aims, or programmes, respectively of his hero and of the Devil. Faust idealistically demands an expansion of his life to include all human experience; and Mephistopheles, left alone to reveal his true intentions in a soliloquy rather resembling those of Shakespeare’s lago, rejoices in the prospect of destroying Faust by a process of disillusionment, disgust, and frustration. Goethe leaves it open what exactly is meant by Mephistopheles’ prediction (1867) that his victim will ‘perish’ (zugrunde gehn; by suicide? in madness?), since the literalistic Christian concept of damnation is evidently one that he wishes to supersede. Nevertheless, this is still a comparatively straightforward Teufelspakt situation, though with the actual terms of the bargain left out—indeed, Mephistopheles’ concluding lines (1866 f.) even read like a hint by Goethe to his readers that the precise terms of the contract itself are unimportant.

  We do not know exactly at what point between February 1788 and the appearance of Faust. A Fragment in 1790 Goethe wrote this new Faust-Mephistopheles material, the most significant of the second-phase scenes; merely that it comes first in the sequence of the 1790 text. At least one of the new scenes was written in Rome, in the gardens of the Villa Borghese; this is thought to have been the one called A Witch’s Kitchen (Sc. 9, 2337–604). Its main theme is Faust’s rejuvenation and sexual invigoration, and Goethe may have decided to add it because (being now fifteen years older than when he had written the Urfaust) he felt that the Urfaust’s transition between Faust the disillusioned professor of uncertain age and ‘Heinrich’, the passionate wooer of a young girl, was rather too sudden. We may also detect, in this scene as in Faust’s new speech to Mephistopheles about human totality, and in the third of these new Fragment scenes (A Forest Cavern, 3217–373), a general tendency of this second composition-phase to ennoble Faust, to emphasize his intellectual and philosophical nature—rather as if the post-Storm-and-Stress Goethe felt that there was here some kind of imbalance in the Urfaust version which now, for publication, needed redressing. The Faust of the Witch’s Kitchen is not seen to be at once pursuing a particular German girl of humble station, not seen to be initiating a German domestic tragedy, but to be longing for ideal Womanhood (2429–40). In Mephistopheles’ concluding comment (2603 f.) Goethe subtly contrives to suggest to the reader an association of this lofty abstraction both with the already-written story of Gretchen (whose first appearance now follows, in 2605) and with the legendary Helen whose procurement, or that of a phantasm in her shape, had always been an essential motif in the Faustus tradition. Here Goethe seems to suggest, en passant, his awareness that it would be desirable to include a Helen episode in his own version if he were to complete it. The ‘classical’ Goethe, moreover, now seems to have distanced himself from the kind of north-European, Germanic folkloristic element which had been so striking a feature of the youthful and ‘romantic’ Urfaust. In the closing scenes of the latter there had been a savage devil-dog accompanying Faust (Sc. 26, lines <16–19>; cf. Note 125), magic black horses on which Faust and Mephistopheles ride and which must vanish at dawn (Sc 26, line <65>, Sc. 27, Sc. 28 lines 4599 f.), and gallows-witches at whom Faust gazes with fascinated horror (Sc. 27); and none of this had been treated with the least trace of irony. Not only are all these closing scenes omitted from the 1790 Fragment, but the Faust of this version also finds witches ridiculous and contemptible (2337 ff., etc.) and Goethe writes his new witch-scene in a comic spirit, inserting dramatically irrelevant satirical material (2450 ff., 2557–62, etc.) and in general treating witchcraft and magic as motifs which are no longer imaginatively serious to him. Mephistopheles himself sums the matter up in 2497 f., ironically dismissing ‘the northern fiend’ as a thing of the past.

  Equally, in Sc. 8 (Aucrbach’s Tavern), which for purposes of the 1790 version Goethe now improved by revising it completely into verse, Faust no longer does the traditional chapbook trick with the wine himself; this piece of magical slapstick is left to Mephistopheles, with Faust remaining a bored spectator. The tendency is to dignify him, and to ‘classicize’ the material at as many points as possible. Thus the next of the new scenes (Sc. 17, 3217–373, A Forest Cavern) begins with a lofty and rhetorical soliloquy by Faust, a kind of prayer to the Earth Spirit, and the only passage in the whole of Part One to have been written in iambic blank verse—the metre of Iphigenia and Tasso on which Goethe was working at this time. Faust here also gives thanks to the Earth Spirit for initiating him (when?) into the secrets of Nature, into contemplative knowledge of the ordered ‘sequence’ or ‘series’ of living creatures (3225 f.). Since this has no relevance to the dramatic context, that is to say the seduction of Gretchen, it seems probable that in inserting this speech in 1788 or 1789 Goethe was more concerned with a poetic celebration of his own scientific studies, which he was then actively pursuing in Italy, than with keeping close to the events or atmosphere of the Urfaust. Interestingly, he has retained the Earth Spirit, presumably for want of any more suitable idea for the time being, but the ‘terrible vision’ of Scene 4 (482) has become hard to recognize through the stately iambics. So, too, has Gretchen: her name in this classicizing speech has become stylistically unusable, so she is identified with the vision in the witch’s magic mirror, ‘that lovely woman’s image’ (3248).

  The Forest Cavern scene is in fact a rather strange amalgam of new material written at this time, and old motifs retained from the Urfaust. One reason for the retentions is Goethe’s already mentioned decision not to include the last three scenes of the Gretchen tragedy (Sc. 26, 27, 28) in the 1790 Fragment, but to end the latter with the Cathedral scene (Sc. 23)—a very unfortunate truncation dramatically, to be explained partly by the fact that the three scenes in question were in prose. Goethe evidently now regarded it as stylistically necessary to complete Faust as a verse drama if at all, yet for some reason he could not, at the Fragment stage, bring himself to rewrite these closing scenes in verse as he had done in the case of Auerbach’s Tavern. On the other hand, he felt it to be important, for purposes of the Fragment, to retain and publish in some form the passage (Sc. 26, <37—41>) which assigns responsibility to the Earth Spirit for Faust’s dependence on Mephistopheles (cf. Note 72). This was after all, in the whole of his existing pre-1775 material, the only hint of Mephistopheles’ status and provenance—a demonological question about which Goethe by 1790 had evidently still not made up his mind. Accordingly, the lines <37–41> are rewritten in iambic verse and inserted at the end of Faust’s soliloquy (3241–6); and in addition to the ascription of responsibility to the Earth Spirit (‘you added a companion’, 3243) it is notable that the central motif of Mephistopheles’ cynicism (‘cold mocking breath … turn your gifts to nothing’, 3245 f.) is retained and ind
eed made clearer than in the corresponding Urfaust passage. There is one further highly significant Urfaust retention in A Forest Cavern, namely the passage which is now lines 3345–65. Originally it had been part of that unfinished Urfaust sketch (also omitted from the Fragment) which was to become, in the final 1808 version, the scene of Gretchen’s brother’s death (Sc. 22). In this speech Faust, with passionate and tormented eloquence, expresses his remorse at having ruined Gretchen, and compares himself to a kind of wandering Cain figure cursed by God, rushing like a mountain torrent down his course of destruction: a brilliant Storm and Stress outburst, anticipating as it did, in the early 1770s, a whole nineteenth-century generation or more of English, French, and Russian late-Romantic villain-heroes and Byronic hommes fatals. Goethe, in 1788 or 1789, must have recognized that this inspired Urfaust passage was too good not to use. Accordingly, without significant textual alteration and preserving its irregular verse form, he simply shifted its dramatic position forwards and included it in A Forest Cavern (cf. Notes 71 and 75). Here it not only provided this scene with a dramatic climax but also, as a passage which showed Faust to be capable of remorse, further dignified him and thus served one of Goethe’s general purposes at the Fragment stage.

  The new material added at this second phase of composition (1788–90) has something of a transitional and provisional character and makes a rather mixed and inconclusive impression. Faust as a character becomes more elevated and dignified, the stylistic changes tend in the same direction; magical and folkloristic themes, including that of the Devil (in 2495–513 for instance), are treated more distantly, as occasions for miscellaneous satire and amusing ribaldry. But the main problem, that of how to treat Faust’s bargain with Mephistopheles, has still not been solved, and it appears that Goethe, while seeking to integrate earlier material into a modified and expanded conception, still wishes to keep his options open. The new Fragment scenes, more particularly Mephistopheles’ soliloquy, have elements of continuity with the Urfaust, and are at least as consistent with a tragic as with a non-tragic (Salvationist) treatment of the story as a whole.

  By 1797, when the third phase of work on Faust began, Goethe had been for about ten years the creator and central representative of what is now known as Weimar Classicism and generally regarded as the high noon of German literary history: a sophisticated literary culture emerging, in a manner not paralleled elsewhere in Europe, between the Storm and Stress (which it had transcended but by which it was at a deeper level still nourished) and the official German ‘Romantic’ movement in which, from the late 1790s onward, a generation of relatively minor talents attempted the thankless task of giving German creative writing a new direction in reaction against the still developing Goethe. By this time the latter’s important published works included the Roman Elegies (which appeared after some delay in 1795), his second novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1794–6), and above all his masterly symbolic ‘answer’ to the French Revolution, Hermann and Dorothea (1797), a small-scale idyllic epic in Homeric verse celebrating stability, normality, the values of German middle-class life, and the indestructible natural cycle. Since 1794 Goethe had also been joined, as a close friend and literary ally, by Schiller (1759–1805) whose development through his own Storm and Stress phase had by a different route reached a position very similar to Goethe’s, and who in the last few years of the decade produced his mature masterpieces, the classical historical tragedies Wallenstein and Maria Stuart (first performed respectively in 1799 and 1801). Had it not been for the stimulus of Schiller’s active interest in the Faust project, it is doubtful if Goethe would ever have finished Part One or for that matter written Part Two. As it was, when he turned his attention to Faust again in the summer of 1797, just after completing Hermann and Dorothea, he did so with reluctance and mixed feelings. In his letters to Schiller at this time he refers to the unfinished project in deprecating terms: ‘This misty and murky path’ (Dunst und Nebelweg, 22 June 1797), ‘this symbolic, ideal and nebulous world’ (24 June), ‘airy phantoms … a great proliferation of fungi … these tomfooleries’ (1 July), ‘the northern phantoms’ (5 July), ‘this tragelaphus’ (i.e. mythical goat-stag hybrid; 6 December), ‘this barbarian production’ which ‘by its northern nature should appeal to a vast northern public’ (28 April 1798). By ‘barbarian’ and ‘northern’ he means ‘unclassical’. He specifically concedes on 27 June 1797 that he does not think of Faust as a work governed by the highest principles of classical dramaturgy (such as he and Schiller in their correspondence of those years had been trying to formulate) but as a loosely constructed commodious dramatic poem: ‘… I shall see to it that its parts are pleasing and entertaining and give food for thought, … (whereas) the whole will always remain a fragment …’ Yet it is significant and moving that at this very time (24 June), and using the very same phrase (Dunst und Nebel) as in his letter of the 22nd, the 48-year-old Goethe wrote the beautiful ottava rima stanzas called Dedication which were to preface the finished Part One: the ghosts of the Urfaust world here rise around him ‘out of the mist and murk’ (line 6) as with plangent nostalgia, over an interval of twenty-five years, he evokes his youth and its genius. The ambivalence of his present feelings becomes all the clearer when we read a poem called Valediction, written in the same metre as Dedication and probably at the same time, which he intended as a corresponding epilogue to the whole work, but did not in the end publish. Here he ‘takes leave’ of Faust in lines such as the following:

  … Who would portray the heart’s confusions, when

  His path has led him into clarity?

  Enough! Farewell now to the limitations

  Of this barbarian world of incantations!

  The great personal importance which Faust evidently had for him, and his own considerable aesthetic doubts about this ‘not wholly worthless poetic monstrosity’ (to Schiller, 16 September 1800), are both reflected in the continuation which he now nevertheless achieved, and we should lose sight of neither.

  Our impression that Goethe was by this time treating the Faust project not more than half seriously is reinforced by the curious prefatory conversation-piece (also in all probability written in the summer of 1797) which he calls Prelude on the Stage. This discussion of general theatrical and literary problems between a director, a poet, and a comic actor contains nothing specifically relevant to Faust as such; it has even been suggested that it originally had no connection with Faust at all but was written in 1795 as a prelude (equally irrelevant in content) to Goethe’s fragmentary sequel for the libretto of Mozart’s Magic Flute. The Dedication, Prelude, and Prologue in Heaven nevertheless were all placed as ‘prefaces’ in front of Faust, and a common intention does arguably underlie all three of them. Each in its own way adds to the ‘tragedy’ itself a further, external, relativizing frame of reference. First, the solemn Dedication not only alludes to the play’s fantastic and nebulous character, but also gives it the dimension of the poet’s personal history, and indeed might almost be said to stand as the author’s own invitation to us to interpret Faust by the genetic-biographical method. Secondly, the more lighthearted Prelude seems to offer the illusion-breaking ironic suggestion that the drama about to unfold is no more than a spectacular improvisation by a travelling theatrical company, intended merely to entertain German audiences. Thirdly, in the vast expanded perspective of the Prologue in Heaven, God and other eternal spectators contemplate the theatrum mundi, the human commedia; and Faust’s (or man’s) destiny, his tragedies and longings, his religious belief or unbelief, are all made subject in advance to a kind of cosmic irony, a relativizing overview. In these three prefaces Goethe seems to offer a symbolic threefold apologia, hinting (especially in the Prelude) that the reader or audience should not take the ensuing substantive drama with absolute seriousness. In this connection we should note yet another important letter, written only five days before his death (to Wilhelm von Humboldt, 17 March 1832), in which he fascinatingly refers to Faust as ‘these very serious jest
s (diese sehr ernsten Scherze)’; a similar phrase (‘these seriously intended jests’) occurs in a letter to Boisserée of 4 November 1831. Goethe was in both cases specifically referring to the still unpublished Part Two, but he would probably have regarded the description as applicable to the whole poem.

  The real opening of the final version of Part One, and the real key to Goethe’s mature conception, is of course the Prologue in Heaven (Sc. 3), which was almost certainly (like the Dedication and the Prelude) written in the summer of 1797 and in any case, on manuscript evidence, not later than April 1798. Here the earlier themes—particularly that of the Earth Spirit—are not so much abandoned as put in a new and more complex perspective. Probably (but not only) because he felt that a better-known, less private symbolism was now needed, Goethe adopted biblical material: the opening of the Book of Job, in which God gives ‘the adversary’, Satan, permission to attempt to drive the representative righteous man to despair. Goethe develops the laconic biblical narrative with great impressiveness into a grandiose and yet ironically urbane summit-conference on the value of the terrestrial natural order and of human life within it. The ‘adversary’, Mephistopheles, at once reveals himself as the cynic, but the cynic with a new dimension: the cosmic mocker and spoiler, the sardonic ironist, unimpressed by the splendid solemnity of the archangels’ song in praise of the creation, contemptuous of mankind and of Faust as its exemplar. He is the destructive critic on a maximum scale, the nihilist who literally (to adapt Wilde’s definition of cynicism) knows the value of Nothing; in a word, the ‘spirit of (perpetual) negation’, as God calls him (338) and as he later (1338) calls himself. This is an entirely logical continuation of his role in the Urfaust; indeed, it must be said that of the two major characters who are carried through from the earliest to the latest version of Part One, Faust and Mephistopheles, it is the latter who shows by far the greater consistency in his function and personality (Gretchen does not come into this comparison since she is in all essentials fully developed in the Urfaust version). The difference is merely that the Mephistopheles of the Prologue, confronting ‘the Lord’ and the other angelic powers who unlike him have remained ‘authentic’ (344), has had a high-level philosophic role added to his human persona as a cross (with some Satanic overtones) between lago and Mercutio. His low and reductive view now applies not only to love but to all that exists, including apparently himself; for him the whole of creation, or certainly of earthly creation, might as well explode as the joke in poor taste which it ultimately is. He represents genuine objective despair, as distinct from the subjective despair of the basically idealistic Faust.