Faust: First Part Read online

  It is insufficiently appreciated that this is what the mature Goethe’s modernized, de-Christianized, psychologized version of ‘the Devil’ really amounts to. Weimar Classicism was, in sophisticated and non-trivial senses, idealistic and optimistic, as well as humanistic in the sense that it saw the world anthropocentrically rather than theologically, and in the sense that it took a positive, indeed Pelagian view of human nature and human potential. In Goethe’s other great symbolic drama Iphigenia, with the publication of the final version of which in 1787 Weimar Classicism can more or less be said to have begun, the same view is clearly expressed: tragedy is reversed and repudiated, and man is ‘saved’ by ‘pure humanity’ alone. The classical Goethe’s Mephistopheles is even further than the young Goethe’s from being the Satan of Christian tradition (indeed, it is even interestingly doubtful whether the visiting critic in Job has been rightly identified with that later development). He is neither Milton’s nor Marlowe’s Devil, he is de-theologized. Equally, ‘the Lord’ himself is not so much the Christian or even the Old Testament God as the impressive spokesman of the mature Goethe’s positive and life-affirming view of things. It is notable that the Prologue both begins (243–70) and ends (344–9) with the characteristically Goethean celebration of cyclic Nature and the process of eternal Becoming. Notably also, in the Lord’s interview with Mephistopheles, all reference to sin and evil or hell and damnation is studiously avoided, and even death is only mentioned as this latter-day Devil’s cue for declaring that he is not interested in whatever may happen to a man after he physically dies (318–21; the same naturalist-humanist emphasis is reiterated in the contemporaneously written ‘pact’ scene (1660–70). Goethe has thus completely surmounted the literalistic modes of belief which are presupposed by the traditional Faustus story. He gives us, not so much the drama of a human soul’s salvation or damnation, as a confrontation of opposite visions of the world. And by writing the Prologue in Heaven he also makes it quite clear that the ‘divine’ view will in the end be upheld and the Mephistophelean view confuted, the nobility of man vindicated (as in Iphigenia) and tragedy dissolved in the healing substance of hope—in other words, that ‘Faust’ will be ‘saved’. This is now Goethe’s decision on the point which the Fragment still left open.

  It is also clear that with the introduction of ‘the Lord’ in 1797 Goethe was meeting his own need for a new spokesman, marking his own shift away from a youthful, more unreserved identification with his hero—or rather with the polarity of his hero and anti-hero, Faust and Mephistopheles, of whom it has always been suggested that they represented opposite aspects of his own nature. In the maturer final version of Part One we now hear a third voice: that of the divine arbiter of the Prologue, who perceives Faust’s confusion and immaturity but confidently predicts his future development (308–11), and who has ‘never hated’ Mephistopheles but regards him as in effect yet another of his servants, who is given permission to visit him when he pleases (336–43). The addition of this third voice, this higher perspective, means that Goethe’s presentation of Faust and his dealings with Mephistopheles now contains a certain element of authorial distance, as if the poet were looking back tolerantly at the ‘confusion’, the ‘mist and murk’ of his own youth. At certain important points in the new 1797–1801 scenes this authorial irony shows itself.

  The Earth Spirit is nowhere mentioned in the Prologue, and it is often said that this new scene represents a change of plan which left two incompatible conceptions side by side in the 1808 text. The Earth Spirit was inherent, as we have seen, in the Urfaust and Fragment material which Goethe had published in 1790 and which he clearly had no wish to repudiate or rewrite. He now seems simply to leave it to the reader to integrate, as best he may, this earlier theme into the new and expanded frame of reference. Arguably, however, there is no irreducible inconsistency, in that we need not assume authorial commitment either to the theism of the Prologue or to the kind of Nature-mysticism which the Earth Spirit seems to represent. The latter may be seen as relativized, rather than contradicted, by the cosmic perspective of the present (later) scheme. Faust himself does not appear to believe in the God of the Prologue or to be aware of this transcendent dimension. His quest for God, whether he recognizes it as such or not, is through the earth, through earthly Nature and earthly experience; the Earth Spirit, we may assume, is the disguise under which ‘the Lord’ encourages Faust to be aware of him. And when God, like the God of Job, now permits Mephistopheles to try his experiment with Faust (323) and indeed ‘gives’ him to Faust (342 f., literally ‘I give him the companion’), we may with hindsight see this as the higher objective correlative of Faust’s belief that Mephistopheles has been ‘given’ (3241 ff., literally) or ‘chained’ to him (Sc. 26, <37> ff.) by the Earth Spirit. In any case, the difference between the Earth Spirit and the God of the Prologue is not radical. The latter is at most biblical but not really Christian; and although in the other scenes written in the 1797–1801 phase Christian symbolism in the narrower sense is deliberately introduced by the use of New Testament material (especially in 737–807 at the end of Sc. 4) the specifically Christian theme of salvific intervention by the incarnate and therefore suffering Creator, is, as always in Goethe, absent or at most peripheral: the new passage in Sc. 4 about Christ’s resurrection has an altogether different emphasis. A Christology presupposing man’s radical sinfulness and helplessness which only a once-for-all divine act can remedy, seems to have been quite alien to Goethe’s mind. Although the idea of salvific divine grace or at least guidance (309) does occur in the Prologue, it seems that Faust is above all to be saved by the organic development of his own rightmindedness (310 f.), combined with an unfailing refusal to relapse into inactive complacency. On such a road, we might suppose, the Earth Spirit and the God of Job would be equally suitable guides. But the essential difference between them, and sufficient reason for replacing the former by the latter, is perhaps the fact that the maturer Goethe wished to expand the perspective, to provide a sovereign arbiter more cosmic and ‘celestial’ than the Earth Spirit can be: a remoter overlord who can represent the slightly ironic detachment with which he himself, in the late 1790s, had now come to view his hero.

  There are in fact two quite crucial and characteristic features of the ‘third phase’ additions by which Part One was completed: one is this new ‘divine’ perspective, and the other is the new emphasis on ‘activity’ as the saving Faustian virtue. The three most important of the 1797–1801 scenes are undoubtedly the Prologue (Sc. 3), the scene of Faust’s first encounter with Mephistopheles (Sc. 6), and the newly written part (1530–769 in Sc. 7) of their second dialogue. In all three, the motif of activity or striving (Tätigkeit, Streben) recurs with significant frequency (317, 340 f., 1237, 1692–7, 1754–9). Here, too, it seems that we may without too much difficulty integrate an earlier conception with the final one, if we say that the Earth Spirit of the Urfaust, to which Faust seemed to commit himself, represented the principle of active energy (cf. Note 14), as contrasted with that of contemplation which was associated with the ‘Macrocosm’. The Earth Spirit and Mephistopheles, whom Faust believed to be its servant (as indeed in the new perspective he perhaps still believes) can now both appear to the reader to be servants of ‘the Lord’. In other words activity, to which in the earlier scenario the Earth Spirit lent a certain ‘diabolic’ colouring, has now become a more unambiguously positive value. In a note which Goethe made in 1797, moreover, the Earth Spirit itself is now referred to as ‘world-spirit and spirit of activity (Welt- und Tatengenius)’: the ‘earthy’ associations seem to have faded. This theme of the paramount value of activity, together with the suggestion of a new synthesis of the active and contemplative principles, is now central to Goethe’s final conception as represented by the Prologue in Heaven. There has been a maturing, a modification, an integration of the earlier theme. Hand in hand with this goes the characteristic suggestion of the Prologue that it is the Devil’s function, by means of ironic
criticism and cynical comment, to stimulate and goad man into constantly renewed active endeavour (340 f.), and thus despite himself perform for him an educative, indeed salvific role. This is the basis of Goethe’s famous paradoxical definition of Mephistopheles, who is made to describe himself (1335 f.) as a representative of

  that Power which would

  Do evil constantly, and constantly does good.

  The optimistic, non-tragic character of this conception hardly needs underlining: it amounts in fact to a conciliatory integration of the traditional polarity of God and the Devil. The antithesis that now matters is that of action and inaction. It is activity as such that ‘the Lord’ values in man, it is Faust’s motto ‘in the beginning was the deed’ (1237) that makes him God’s ‘servant’ (300) and ‘a good man’ (328). Since, however, mere activity or ‘striving’ is not in itself either moral or immoral, this removes Goethe’s scheme still further from a Christian basis as traditionally understood. The polarity of good and evil has itself been reduced, and this is entirely characteristic of Goethe’s monistic and integrative way of thinking. It was already anticipated in an essay on Shakespeare written as early as 1771:

  What we call evil is only the other side of the good, a part of its existence, belonging to it and to the whole just as necessarily as the tropics must burn and Lapland must freeze if there is to be a temperate zone in between.

  This constant tendency to balance out and reconcile opposites is something which Goethe’s admirers find profound and his detractors infuriating. He himself, in a letter written in the last year of his life, described his nature as ‘conciliatory’ and with great perceptiveness gave this as the reason why he was ‘not born to be a tragic poet’ (to Zelter, October 1831). This has been held against him as a dramatist, and it might be held against Faust. Drama as such is about contrasts, conflicts, antitheses, dualities, polarities. What is, or was, the conflict in Faust? It resists simplistic understanding as a conflict between good and evil. Schiller, writing to Goethe on 23 June 1797 and still knowing only the Fragment, suggested another formulation: its main theme is ‘the duality of human nature and the vain attempt to unite the divine and the physical in man’. Alternatively, we might say that from the outset the essential opposite in this dramatic dialectic were idealism and cynicism, the ‘high’ and the ‘low’ view of things. This is what the dramatic contrasts of the Urfaust were about: we miss its point unless we see that Mephistopheles is partly right in his assessment and prognosis of the Gretchen affair, the tragic outcome of which is his quod erat demonstrandum. Faust is torn by the conflict between an all-too-enlightened ‘devil’s’ worldly realism and his own romantic vision. In another letter of 1797 (26 June) Schiller observes to Goethe that ‘the Devil convinces our intelligence by his realism, and Faust convinces our hearts’. Faust’s ‘confusion’ to which God in the Prologue refers (308) is a symptom of this continuing struggle—but it is a struggle that points towards conciliation. The hero’s progress, the ‘clarity’ into which (like the poet of Valediction) he is to be ‘led’ (309), would involve the integration of these opposites, the development of higher syntheses beyond the Urfaust’s tragically violent polarizations (idealism and cynicism, ‘macrocosmic’ contemplation and ‘earthly’ action). Whether or not this maturity is ever actually achieved by Faust in the poem, it is the direction in which Goethe himself, through his different stages of composing it, has seemed to be moving. It is perhaps in this sense that Faust may be read as the drama of an evolving human soul and of an evolving culture.

  The longest sequence of new material added in the third phase runs from line 606 in Scene 4 to line 1769 in Scene 7, and with it Goethe at last closed the remaining ‘great lacuna’ between the end of Faust’s first conversation with Wagner in the opening Urfaust scene and the beginning of the Fragment version of his first conversation with Mephistopheles. We now have the lengthy conclusion of Sc. 4 after Wagner’s exit (606–807), the scene outside the town (Sc. 5, 808–1177), and most (1178–769) of the two ensuing scenes in Faust’s study (Sc. 6, 7) in which Mephistopheles introduces himself. One of the interesting features of this important ‘infill’ sequence is that Faust has now developed a past of his own, a youth to which he refers, in two of the new scenes, with nostalgia or bitterness (720–9, 769–82, 1023–55). Another is that Faust undergoes several striking changes of mood between despondency and hope; and we should probably be wrong to try to explain these in terms of a clearly conceived intricate ‘character’ rather than of the poet’s own wish to accommodate (as in the opening of Sc. 17 in the 1790 version) the expression of moods and thoughts of his own without overmuch concern for the dramatic context. Were we to insist on seeking a clear dramatic line in the classical manner, we might for instance wonder how it is that a man about to ‘sell himself to the Devil’ is so often in a pious and life-affirming state of mind, or so easily moves back into one (762–84, 903–40, 1068–99, 1178–237, 1379–84). But the intervention, as Faust is about to commit suicide, of angelic choirs singing about the resurrection of Christ (Sc. 4, 737–807), is moving and effective for its own sake; there is also great poetic force in the ensuing praise of spring, which Goethe quite correctly couples with the Resurrection theme (Sc. 5, 903–28), and in Faust’s translation of the Logos passage (Sc. 6, 1224–37). After the essentially comic exorcism of the poodle, we have the first confrontation between Faust and Mephistopheles, and it is notable that they are here at once polarized as spokesmen of life-affirmation and pure nihilism respectively (1363–84). It is also a matter of great interest and importance that Faust, both here and in the next scene (Sc. 7), treats the ‘Devil’ with scorn and contempt—an attitude very different from his helpless hanging on Mephistopheles’ worldly advice in the 1790 Fragment passage (1776–1834). We are here brought back to the methodological controversy about how the interpretation of Faust should be approached.

  Sc. 7 (Faust’s Study 11), which contains in its newly written part (1530–769) the actual negotiation of the ‘pact’ between Faust and Mephistopheles and is therefore often referred to as the ‘Pact’ scene, is the main stumbling-block for critics who insist on a logical exegesis of the finished 1808 text and refuse on principle to take its complex genesis into account. It is bound to be looked upon as a central scene, since it contains Goethe’s long-delayed solution to what appears to have been his main problem in adapting the Faust legend, namely that of recasting the old motif of the devil’s bargain in a modern and sophisticated form. A minor example of the methodological difficulty arises from the very fact that there is a hiatus, explicable historically but not otherwise, between the beginning of this scene (1530) and the end of the preceding Sc. 6 (cf. Note 25). As to Sc. 7 generally, it will best make sense if we bear in mind the following three points. (1) The whole Faust-Mephistopheles negotiation is a composite product, most of it belonging to the third (1797–1801) phase of composition, but an important part of it to the second (lines 1770–867, already published in the 1790 Fragment); indeed, if we also count the Urfaust dialogue between Mephistopheles and the student as part of the same scene, which it officially is, then we may say that Sc. 7 represents all three of the chronological levels of Part One. (2) The new pact-negotiation, written during the same years as the other new additions Sc. 3 (the Prologue in Heaven) and Sc. 6 (the Logos scene), is based on the same general conception as these and must be seen in the light of them. (3) In particular, the negotiation must be interpreted in the new ironic perspective of the Prologue; that is to say, Faust’s attitude and utterances in this negotiation must be seen as subject in some degree to ironic authorial distance. This third consideration throws light, for example, on the otherwise obscure passage 1583–626. Faust here utters a grand rhetorical curse on human life and its vain deluding joys, and this is immediately followed (1607–26) by a ‘chorus of spirits’ lamenting his destruction of ‘the beautiful world’ and exhorting him to build it again in his heart. There is here a quite clear parallel with the contemporaneou
sly written part of Sc. 4 in which the suicidal Faust is brought to ‘love the earth once more’ (784; literally, ‘belong to the earth once more’) by another chorus of unseen singers with their message of affirmation. The invisible chorus in the Pact scene is clearly not one of Mephistophelean spirits, notwithstanding Mephistopheles’ immediate claim that they are and his cynical parody of their words (1627–34). The spirit-chorus, if we are to judge by the content and tone of what it actually says, can only be an answering, healing echo to Faust’s mood of subjective despair, an answer from deep within him—or (which essentially comes to the same thing) from above him: a concealed message from the divine Author to his ‘confused servant’. And what, except in such a perspective of tolerant detachment, are we to make of the central passage 1635–707, in which the deadly serious traditional Teufelspakt is paradoxically transformed into a mere wager? A bet or wager is a kind of contract that is something more like a game, and this in itself raises the question of how seriously we are to take it. The conception seems to be relatively traditional as far as line 1674, but at 1675 Goethe reverts emphatically to the new and paradoxical theme, characteristic of the third-phase material and quite absent from the 1790 version, of Faust’s contempt for the ‘Devil’ to whom he is about to ‘sell himself. In Sc. 6 he mocked Mephistopheles’ vain life-destroying enterprise (1379–84); now he mocks him as the purveyor of worthless because merely transitory pleasures (1675–87). He then vows that none of these will ever ‘lull him into self-sufficiency’ (1695) and challenges Mephistopheles to prove him wrong.