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This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copy order if, in its judgement, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of the copyright law. AUTHOR: GAGE, WILLIAM LEONARD TITLE: THE SALVATION OF FAUST PLACE: BOSTON DA TE : 1889 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES PRESERVATION DEPARTMENT BIBLIOGRAPHIC MICROFORM TARHFT Master Negative # 9ii- ?^<^5^ - lo Original Material as Filmed - Existing Bibliographic Record G05 G121 Gage, William Leonard, 1832-1889. The salvation of Faust; a study of Goethe's poem, with special reference to the second part and the problem of life. Boston, Cuoples and Hurd, 1889. 82 p. Restrictions on Use: TECHNICAL MICROFORM DATA FILM SIZE:_.,l5^^ REDUCTION RATIO: //< IMAGE PLACEMENT: lA (^p IB IIB DATE FILMED: 2: /2-JiS_ INITIALS____/T4^5S HLMEDBY: RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS. INC WOODDRIDGE. Ct" c Association for Information and Image Management IIOOWayneAvenue, Suite 1100 Silver Spring, Maryland 20910 301/587-8202 Ce mi ntimeter 1 2 3 iiiiliiii iiiiliiii II ilii 1 II 4 5 iliiiiliiiiliiii 6 7 8 < |iil III iiil|iiiliiiilii ? 10 11 III iiiiliiiiliiiiliiii 12 mj 11 jj 13 ililim 14 15 mm lllllllll Mill T1 In ches "ITTV'V 2 1 1 1 1.0 1 M M 3 tii 2.8 Hi ^ |3.2 ■ 63 ■ 80 ■- II 4.0 t. ^ 1.4 i|ii i|ii|ii j 1 1 [ 4 2.5 2.2 2.0 1.8 1.6 11 1 1 1 5 1 1 f T If 1 I.I 1.25 MflNUFflCTURED TO fillM STflNDflRDS BY APPLIED IMAGE. INC. P 'i f 1. tntl)eCtipof3^mig«jrk TrlE LIBRARIES 1^ ♦' \i i Z- / / / y-(f ^ ..♦-*-»-*-*^ (y>""^«s'->-t ^ z^.:. ..• ) /y — -6. ■•-«-< /C^ > rMfe.' THE SALVATION OF FAUST V I THE SALVATION OF FAUST A STUDY OF GOETHE'S POEM WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE SECOND PART AND THE PROB- LEM OF LIFE BY WILLIAM LEONARD GAGE BOSTON CUPPLES AND HURD (C{)E 2C(0onquin JDretfj 1889 o o y ^^ f Copyright, 1889, Bt WILLIAM LEONARD GAGE. All rights reserved. fi SIVEItSIDB, CAMBRIDGE: ELBCTROTYPBD AND PRINTED BT H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. PREFACE. It is one of the glories of Lessing that he conceived the plan, and partly executed it, of writing a "Faust" in which the keynote should be Aspira- tion and Salvation ; and had he done so we should have had a work greater than even Nathan the Wise. But it was left to Goethe to carry this out; and in what manner and to what a ma- jestic height of attainment it is my task in this book to show. Berlioz, in giving the name " The Damnation of Faust " to his superb and thrilling treatment of the old Faust legend, has taken but a part of the work as planned by Lessing and executed by Goethe; yet even in his b PREFACE. libretto how plainly is the Goethe in- fluence to be seen. Still, in his work, as in Gounod's and Mr. Irving-'s, the great Goethe conception of Aspiration and Salvation is seen only in Margaret -, not at ail in Faust. It is safe to say that the line of de- velopment which will be found in this book could not have been possible for years after "Faust " was finished. The old prejudice against Goethe, largely based upon the invariable habit of studying him in his youthful years and those spent in Weimar before the Italian journey ; the fascination of that splendid youth in the Storm and Stress period of his life, filled with loves and longings and vagaries, with Titan power and overwhelming charms of face and manner and utterance, — this, added to the conviction that the Second Part of " Faust " was, in all regards, inferior to PREFACE, 7 the First, incoherent, crabbed in style, pedantic, and halting, caused it for years to be spoken of with disrespect, and warned thinkers from its pages. But this is past ; a new interest has set in, and, in all fair probabiHty, " Faust " in its complete form is to become the Di- vina Commedia of our age, the great- est of our nineteenth century's Uterary monuments. Had Dante written in our time, he might have contested with Goethe for the first place ; but as Dante presents the theology of the Mediaeval Age and Goethe that of our time, the one who is of us and with us must seem the greater as deaUng with that which is to us so vital and transcendent. I may, perhaps, be presumptuous enough to ask my readers to take these pages without a break in the first pe- rusal, and to examine the notes in a sec- ond and more leisurely reading. I shall 8 PREFACE. ask, too, for some indulgence towards my repetitious summing up of the ar- gument from time to time ; for, as it is no light task to present the entire ar- gument of " Faust " within this limited space, it has seemed to me well to be sure that my reader be not hurried too rapidly from stage to stage. Habtford, Coxn. THE SALVATION OP FAUST. The story of Faust, the magician, is one which has been familiar to almost every German for nearly three hundred years. The legend bearing his name and telUng of his compact with the devil, that in consideration of all kinds of sensual joy for the period of twenty- four years he should sell his soul, was carried to England near the close of the sixteenth century;^ Marlowe, Shake- speare's great contemporary, caught it up and produced it in a five-act play, yet never popularized it there ; and till Gounod, a Frenchman, made an opera out of it, and BerHoz, a German, made a cantata, and Wills, an EngUshman, 10 THE SALVATION OF FAUST. made a play out of it for Mr. Irving and Miss Terry, it has never been known to the people at large either in England or America. It wiU, perhaps, be a surprise to the reader that after , Marlowe, and before Goethe wrote his "Faust," there appeared fifty-one dramas having Faust as their theme; nearly all of these in Germany. And in evi- dence that Goethe's "Faust," though seeming to be the only one, is by no means alone even in modern litera- ture, I add that seventy - two different dramas having Faust as their motive have been written since Goethe's was published.^ But I bear in mind that in our land, outside of a small circle of German scholars, and outside of the very large number who owe their acquaintance with " Faust " to Gounod, Berhoz, and Henry Irving, there exists but a slight THE SALVATION OF FAUST. 11 acquaintance with the work as a whole, — with its profound treatment of the problem of life.^ To the popular com- prehension " Faust " is the story of a man who sold his soul to the devil as an equivalent for one form of pleasure, caused the ruin of a beautiful girl, and after a wild carouse and a complete ex- haustion of the resources of sin, miser- ably perished,* Margaret being saved by her repentance, and Faust being doomed to the loss of eternal blessedness. With the close of what I may call the episode of Margaret, it is popularly supposed that "Faust" ends ; and if there be any reference to a Second Part much longer than the First, it is generally dismissed as unintelligible or incoherent, as un- worthy of study, and as the product of a great poet in his dotage. It is to combat and rectify this mis- apprehension that I write these pages. 12 THE SALVATION OF FAUST. I wish to place before the reader the poem in its unity and its wholeness; I wish to show that to end with the First Part without studying the Second is to propound a problem and to post- pone its solution ; it is to be content with an incident in life, instead of ris- ing to a consideration of the study of human life in its complete sweep. Before entering upon a statement of " Faust " in its wholeness, however, I must at the outset do away with the pop- ular notion that the First Part is simple and the Second Part unintelligible, and, in fact, incomprehensible. For many, many years I did not attempt to read the Second Part, although I had read the First again and again. I did not at- tempt it because of the prejudice which was raised against it in my mind when I was a youth. I now declare that I have with me the whole concurrence of mod- THE SALVATION OF FAUST, 13 ern comment on " Faust " that it is the First Part that is deep and difficult, that it is the Second which is free from in- surmountable perplexities. I do not in this deny that to understand the Second requires a much wider range of learning and a longer experience of life than the First ; to follow all the allusions in the second and third acts of the Second Part demands a vaster erudition than even " Paradise Lost." But the great difficulties of the work are in the Fii'st Part : the diverging conceptions of Me- phistopheles, including the origin and mission of evil, the diverghig conceptions of the Erdgeist or "Earth-spirit," the question of the comprehensiveness of Goethe's plan, all these have taxed the skill of commentators^ far more than the problems of the Second Part. By this I do not mean that there are not difficulties in the Second; the free use 14 THE SALVATION OF FAUST. of allegory in which it abounds must of course give rise to unending discussion. This, in fact, was what Goethe intended to do ; and he not only said that he had put many mysteries into it, but he also refused to answer questions which could clear up difficulties. He declared that he intended to bequeath it to those who should come after him as a perpetual debating ground where men of varied views should find themselves reflected ; where men should always be disinterring a buried fund of problems on which to sharpen their wits. And so I cannot accord with the opinion of Mr. Lewes, Goethe's ablest biographer in my judgment, that the Second Part of "Faust" is a mere heap- ing up of undigested materials, having no plan and therefore no key. But that view which was only too common in the first years after it appeared has now THE SALVATION OF FAUST, 15 gone, and in the mass of modern com- ment I find little or no trace of such a notion. In contrasting the two Parts in re- spect of difficulty of comprehension, I may perhaps give my own impressions best in this sentence: that the First, however long studied, will still leave in the mind of the reader unsettled prob- lems; while the Second Part, studied with equal care, will open itself to the reader to his own complete satisfaction. He at least will feel that he has the key to its meaning, though he may not be able to make it appear to others as he reads it himself. In general, it may be said in a word that the story of Faust is the story of Goethe's hfe. As the " Prelude " is the story of Wordsworth's youth and the " Excursion " the story of his maturer years, so in a far more close and vivid 16 THE SALVATION OF FAUST. sense is " Faust " the record of the whole career of that wonderful man who, born in 1749 and dying in 1832, lived through the storms of the French Rev- olution, and survived long enough to see the opening of the great industrial era which is now at its heig^ht. He wit- nessed the upheaval of thought caused by Rousseau and his school ; he wit- nessed the passing away of the old wor- ship of convention and the coming in of the age of freedom ; he saw this, too, ripen into a newer and better stage, and become amenable to wise control ; he lived till all that is settled and calm and fruitful had come into Germany and into the world. And as his own life was divided into two gi*eat parts, that before the Italian visit and that after it, so is his " Faust." The fust part of Goethe's life was the Titan period, the Storm and Stress period, the period of THE SALVATION OF FAUST. 17 " Werther," and " Gtitz," and " Prome- theus;" the second, the period of " Tasso, " and " Hermann and Doro- thea," the period of his long and pa- tient scientific studies, the period of the Second Part of " Faust," with its tran- quillity, its learning, its exhaustive sum- mary of history, its fruitful use of even the mythologies of the ancient world to make clear the meaning of the nine- teenth century. Goethe once said truly of his poems, " They are all confessions." I may add that each is a bit of his own biography, told in the most exquisite language, each the mirror of an actual thought, experience, love, fancy, delight, but "Faust" is the summing up of them all. The clue to the study of " Faust," as to that of all his writings, is there- fore a minute knowledge of the life of this most fascinating man ; this figure THE SALVATION OF FAUST. who commands the attention of all the age and the most idolatrous regard of millions as no man has done who has ever lived. It is now fifty-seven years since Goethe died, yet it may be said of him alone that every year, so far from dinmiing his fame and burying his deeds in oblivion, is only quickening the curiosity of men, is only bringing out the minutest details, is making him the most discussed as well as the most be- wondered man of our, or of any, age. Every year books are published about him,^ and no signs appear of anything but an augmented interest as well as a calmer judgment and growing enthusi- asm, which, while making all allowances for the failures of humanity, is placing him in a hght only shared by Shake- speare, Homer, and Dante. I do not mean to intimate that Faust is Goethe, that is, they are interchange- THE SALVATION OF FAUST. 19 able names ; but I may say that Goethe in portraying Faust has depicted him- self and his career — all his experi- ments on life, all his failures, all his successes. And this is one reason why, in reading "Faust," we see that the other characters are drawn with a firmer, clearer hand than Faust himself. Me- phistopheles, Gretchen, Wagner, all are done with bold and decisive strokes ; only Faust has any marks of dimness. Dim, I say, not indistinct, for Goethe knew himself. Like all his dealings with himself he was always cool and deliberate; the reader may recall Dr. Bartol's very witty saying that " Goethe loved too wisely and not well." He was never betrayed beyond himself ; and just as in his youth he was capable of giving up Frederika because she stood in hi, path, a„ act ot self-abnegation on Goethe's part which I have seldom / 20 THE SALVATION OF FAUST. heard praisecU as it deserves ; as he left Wetzlar and Lotte Buff and Lili Schcine- man ; as he could do this and did do this always, so he could take himself in hand and calmly review his career. And this he did, and " Faust " is, in its most simple and rudimentary sense, the story of Goethe's Ufe. Of course, the tragedy of Margaret corresponds, taken in its extreme re- sults, with no external circumstance in Goethe's career; but the full develop- ment in his own penitent heart of that which took place in his youth, the bringing out into logical results and terrible culminations of what he felt in his youthful fascination with Gretchen of Frankfurt and Frederika of Sesen- heim, and what he had seen in the heart-workings of Frederika in her dis- appointment and after her surrender of him, gave him the key to that fascinat- \ THE SALVATION OF FAUST, 21 ing and soul-searching tragedy to which we give the name of " Faust," and to which we should more strictly give the name of "Margaret."^ There is Uttle doubt that the theme kindled as he wrought it out ; that the loveliness of the character of this sweet peasant girl drew his own heart to her ; and that he was carried away by his theme. He did not stop his pen till he had reached the close; traced the logic of passion and remorse and circumstance to the bitter end ; saw her lost and then saw her saved by the triumphant force of her own penitent heart. Written as all those scenes were in his early youth, while he was between twenty and twenty -five years of age, written while he was in the very thick of his own powerful and tempestuous experience, they are the best, strongest, and most moving lines that he ever penned,^ and I do not won- ( ' "mmia |» 22 THE SALVATION OF FAUST. der that they took up a disproportionate part of his whole " Faust," a part which I cannot think that they claimed when he planned the poem. For I am quite clear that despite what seems to be Goethe's own conflicting testimony, he had even in the year 1772, when he was twenty-three, and during the following years, when he was writ- ing what I may call the " Margaret- Faust," '° a conception more or less de- fined of the whole work; so that, al- though in a letter to Schiller years after the edition of 1790 was printed he speaks of making a new plan, his words are to be read in the light of his letter to William von Humboldt a few months before his death in 1832, that for sixty years he carried the plot of "Faust" substantially unchanged in his mind. Between 1801, when the First Part was completed in the form in which it was TEE SALVATION OF FAUST. 23 to remain, and 1824, when he took up in earnest the Second Part, during that quarter of a century Goethe was living his life and thus preparing himself to write the conclusion of " Faust." This he dreaded to begin ; and we owe it to his friend Eckermann (let it not be for- gotten) that at the age of seventy-five he took up the task and went on till the age of eighty-one, little by Uttle, not in the old fire of youth, a hand- breadth at a time, as he pathetically tells us," until it was done, sealed up, and laid away, not to be published till his eyes should be closed. " Now," he says to Eckermann, — " now that ^ Faust ' is done, it matters not what I do more ; my life is complete : what I have after this is out of pure grace." The man Faust, like his prototype Job, may be said to be subject to three temptations; and singularly they are I THE SALVATION OF FAUST. the three which are depicted in the New Testament as coming to our adorable Saviour. The Satan of Job is a much more simple and rudimental conception than the Satan of Faust ; the trials to which Job was subjected monotonous in comparison with those of Faust. With Job there is a succession of catas- trophes : on horror's head horrors accu- mulate ; but they all appeal to the same note in human nature. Following the analogy of the story of the temptation of Christ, I may say that Goethe has caused his Faust to feel, first, the lust of the flesh, then the lust of glory, and then the lust of dominion. As the lover of Margaret he touches the depths of sensual passion ; as the aU- powerful adviser at the court of the German emperor, where we find hhn early in the Second Part, he rises to a bewildering height of glory; as a mih- THE SALVATION OF FAUST. 25 tary hero in the fourth act, as the sav- ior of the emperor at a time when his realm seemed to be at a rival's mercy, he takes a place where his reward, com- mensurate with his services, gives him the special glory which he seeks, who is intrusted with princely sway. The briefest statement of the Second Part of " Faust " is a recognition of these last two great temptations following the one which is the theme of the First Part. The "little world," as it is called, of the First Part opens out into the " great world " of the Second Part, the hfe of the palace and the camp. The culmination of the First Part is the Salvation of Margaret : the power of penitence to deliver from sin and from its penalty. From her sin and shame, from the abandonment of her remorse, the suffering Margaret is called away to peace and happiness because 26 THE SALVATION OF FAUST. she has passed through the gospel con- ditions and comes into the estate of pardon and redeeming grace. There Faust disappears, and our last view of him is as a doomed man. No concep- tion can do justice to the horrible ago- nies of mind mth which the First Part closes on the betrayer of Margaret, the slayer of her brother, and indirectly of her mother. The repentance of Gretchen has its counterpart in the de- spair of Faust. But the Second Part, and the whole poem, viewed as a whole, and subordinating the story of Mar- garet to the whole, is the story of Faust's Salvation ; and so in spite of the great temptations, the lust of glory and of dominion, he comes in the closing scene to a salvation depicted with a grandeur of language and a wealth of illustration which leave behind even the last lines of the First Part. It only THE SALVATION OF FAUST 27 needs a greater than Gounod or Berlioz to set that closing scene to worthy music and we shall have incomparably the greatest work in the world ; the one that is highest, deepest, and widest ; " and I am not forgetting the " Messiah " of Handel while I write this, but I am remembering that ascending line of an- gels and heavenly presences who greet the redeemed Faust and usher him into the heavenly city; and I am under a sense of the greatness and of the pathos — the heart-stirring pathos — in which all these supernal figures salute him, and choirs of little children ; while the T oice of the redeemed Gretchen is also lieard giving him welcome who in life had done her such woful harm, and yet whom the Divine Love was now usher- ing into everlasting habitations. I have given already what may be called the most condensed analysis of '■■■■■• ■■ 28 THE SALVATION OF FAUST, " Faust ; " that which makes it the his- tory of a final deliverance from the three great temptations of Hfe; the three which, with some external modifi- cations, are given in the New Testament as approaching our Divine Lord, — ap- petite, avarice, ambition. But so brief a statement will not suffice if we would go further and make it the subject of a more searching analysis. For those who have read the Second Part of " Faust " will remember that after he has revived from the exhaustion of dismay in which the First Part leaves him; after he has entered upon his brilliant career at the German emperor's court ; after his bold stroke in paying the debts and setting the insolvent and pleasure-lov- ing monarch on his feet again ; after be- coming the idol of all the courtiers by resorting to a trick of finance, whos(, final outcome should be ruin ; after all i THE SALVATION OF FAUST. 29 this, — the brilUant success followed by the complete failure, — we have still the spectacle of his temptation by the beauty of Helen of Troy. It needs no careful reading of the book to see that this is no repetition of the story of Margaret ; Helen is the representative, not of physical beauty simply, but of grace and of all that we mean by Gre- cian culture. Faust, the man of the North, the man whose mind has been fed on the romanticism of the North, on Gothic architecture and the ballads and tales of the Mediaeval Age, is en- amored of Helen, who represents all the wisdom and repose of the classic times and lands. It is the story in other forin of Goethe and his visit to Italy, and there is good reason, therefore, why Goethe could and should write the third act of the Second Part very early in the century, and that he could 30 THE SALVATION OF FAUST. m pubKsh the act by itself, a complete work, — an interlude, — which, though a part of " Faust," could be understood without the rest. There is, I beUeve, no difference of opinion regarding the grandeur of that third act, known as the " Helena." When it was pubUshed in 1826, during Goethe's Hfe, and while portions of the first, second, fourth, and fifth acts were still unwritten, he had per- fected this wonderful episode, the song of the marriage of Faust and Helen, the song of the birth and death of their son Euphorion. Viewed as a part of tbo great " Faust " story, it depicts the ef- fort to satisfy the human soul with the ripest fruits of culture ; shows the fu- tility of attempting to stifle the hunger of the heart with any products of skiU, taste, and thought. Viewed as a pirt of Goethe's own life, it was a confession that not even the ItaUan journey and THE SALVATION OF FAUST. 31 all that it gave could solve certain un- answered questions and meet certain unappeased cravings of his nature ; but viewed as a scene within a side chapel of the great cathedral which we call " Faust," it may be regarded as the mar- riage of Northern Romance and South- ern Grace, the old Chivalry of North- ern Europe, with its song and arms and Gothic magnificence, and the gentle, cultured, classic Beauty of the South, with its love and melodious language and soothing charm. The child of this iinion is Euphorion, who Goethe tells us stands for Byron, the representative of )oth schools, the finest issue, in Goethe's opinion, of both schools ; and in Eupho- rion's fate Goethe also tells us that he has pictured Byron's fate in Greece, fall- " ng on the battlefield a martyr to liberty. But oh ! how can I do justice in these few words to all the fulness of that i 4 /I'" - 32 THE SALVATION OF FAUST, beautiful third act, reproducing as it does the very spirit of antiquity ; writ- ten before Goethe's powers had faded, written out of that thorough compre- hension of both the North and the South ! He who as a student at Stras- burg had loved the old minster so that he discovered with his eye what the original plan had been ; and who, when asked how he knew that in certain de- tails, which he named, the plan had not been followed out, answered, " TJie building itself told me," — this was tl e man, this man, who in writing " Got z von Berlichingen " taught Walter Scott the art of romance;" this was the man who in his later studies had sc drunk in the spirit of antiquity that ia his Faust he could depict the spirit ol' the North, in his Helena the spkit of the South, and in Euphorion the mod- em spirit in which both are united : not I _ \ THE SALVATION OF FAUST. 33 I' merely as in a blazing meteor like By- ron, but in the tempered and permanent qualities of the best poetry of our time. The Second Part of " Faust " begins, then, with Faust at the German em- peror's court ; and his temptation there is tlie lust of power and glory. His agent and servant, Mephistopheles, sug- gests the expedient of giving out paper money to pay the imperial debts ; it succeeds, Faust becomes the one whom all admire, the most trusted courtier and the most powerful man. Under the stimulus of this success, and desiring to please the emperor, he causes a great spectacle to appear, in which the whole past comes to view, all the men who have lifted the world from its low estate to its higher, beginning with the simple tillers of the soil and ending with the highest representatives of statecraft and skdl. It is a picture of the history of m 34 THE SALVATION OF FAUST. THE SALVATION OF FAUST. 35 civilization, done with perfect art and with overflowing knowledge. The an- cient Fates, the ancient Furies, the an- cient Graces, all have their place, not coming forward in forms which dismay, but all of them in their appointed rela- tions to ancient thought and the arcient world of conduct. Poetry and Pru- dence and Fear and Irony and Wealth — these and fifty others — have their place and their word : and they are all so proportioned each to each that the masquerade, as it is called, is at once a parody on the emperor's court, on life, on history, on the sum of human expe- rience. It is incidental to the Second Part ; it may be omitted without losing the thread of the plot, but it is a won- derful picture. That which confessedly troubled Goethe most in writing his " Faust " was how to make the transitions be- tween the stages of the play. How to pass, for example, from the opening test of Faust in the Second Part, that of limitless power and glory and its failure to give him lasting satisfaction, and the test of perfect culture ; the admiration of beauty in its highest sense and the failure of that test. Goethe's correspon- dence and his recorded conversations with Eckermann let us into this secret. He had so much to say in " Faust " that he must give his meaning in allegories and the language of symbol. He en- countered the difficulty which Schiller saw and predicted, that in the Second Part his matter would be too vast for any frame to hold ; hence his enforced use of such images as filled the Second Part, — a line of suggestive pictures drawn largely from antiquity, from the classic world. The machinery to which be was compelled to resort to bridge 36 THE SALVATION OF FAUST, over the first act, already described by me, Faust at the imperial court, and the third, the Helena, was accomplished by resorting to what Goethe calls the Classical Walpurgis Night. The Wal- purgis Night of the First Part was a coarse and bestial attempt on the part of Mephistopheles to animahze Faust; to take him at the stage where his lust for Margaret had landed him and make him fall in love with creatures which were devilish. Like the coarse snares of Auerbach's Cellar, this fell off from the high and essentially noble nature of Faust, and he was master where it was intended that he should be a victim. But it was impossible for the coarse, strong, violent scenes of the Brocken top to be reproduced in the cooler and more tranquil reahn of classic life ; and hence the Walpurgis Night of the Second Part is entirely unlike its namcr THE SALVATION OF FAUST. 37 sake of the First Part. It is the in- troduction of Faust to the past. It is the elaborate preparation by which the reader is made ready for a transfer of the hero to a place and a time far re- moved ; from the Europe of the Middle Ages to the ancient world of Greece. To make the mind ready for the meet- ing of Faust and Helen on common ground, to put the mind into such con- ditions that their meeting, their mutual love, and their marriage shall seem con- sistent with the whole play, — this, of course, demanded special preparations and enormous sMU. To this end, old Wagner, the pedant of the First Part, whose learned talk, erudite but not wise, wiU be remembered by all, is summoned on the field. He is seen in the act of maldng a man in a bottle, a little chem- ically-formed man, and with Mephisto- pheles' help, he does actually create the 38 THE SALVATION OF FAUST. Httle feUow, a bright spark-Uke being, Homunculus by name, to whom is de- puted the task of guiding Faust and Mephistopheles to the classical world. To this world Wagner himself is not allowed to go. Erudition, dead erudi- tion, has not the key ; it must be eru- dition brightened by esprit ; erudition kindled into fire. And yet that can only be the guide. It is not permitted to pass on to reward. Homunculus himself attains incompleteness, and hav- ing done his task disappears. Nor may Mephistopheles be the guide. As Faust's servant he must be his compan- ion, but in the classical realm he must change his name and appear in the form of a hateful, witchlike creature known as Phorkyas ; for in the classi- cal world the contrast to the fair and the good is not the bad but the ugly. I freely admit that, were it not for THE SALVATION OF FAUST, 39 the brightness of Homunculus, the Httle man in the bottle, the second act of the Second Part would be, or I may more guardedly say might be, a trifle ponder- ous. But the old Wagner coming to life again, now a successful man, — Pro- fessor Wagner; and the reappearance of the callow youth who in the First Part of " Faust " will be remembered as having been inducted by Mephis- topheles into all manner of deviltries, and who concluded to study medicine the better to practice them ; and espe- cially the hght pleasantries of Homun- culus, the Uttle fellow in the bottle, who seems made simply to shine, relieve it, make it pleasant reading, and fulfill perfectly what Goethe intended, carry- ing us over to the great theme of the third act, written — let me repeat — prior to the rest of the Second Part of ** Faust," and only needing to be put 40 THE SALVATION OF FAUST. into right relations mth the body of the wort And, if I may add a word of confes- sion, I will say that it is a problem which I have debated somewhat in my own mind why into that second act Goethe has wrought that long dispute between old Thales and old Anaxagforas : one, Thales, contending that the world was formed in gradual stages and by deposits from water ; the other contend- ing with much lor^e and little politeness that it was the result of volcanic airen- cies. This view was so distasteful to Goethe, in fact, he carried what I may call a hatred to it so far, that some have thought that he brought it into " Faust " merely to ridicule it ; and those who re- gard the Second Part as a collection of odds and ends, a kind of old man's rag- bag, take this view of the Thales and Anaxagoras debate on geology. But THE SALVATION OF FAUST. 41 when I notice that the two men are working for the conversion of the little man in the bottle, this little fellow who is always striving to be, I can under- stand that they are seriously called in to help him in his efforts to shine to some purpose. I freely admit that one pas- sage in the First Part of " Faust," the scene known as the Walpurgis Night's Dream, cannot possibly be explained on any theory save that Goethe hated cer- tain men so badly that he took a paper originally written for Schiller's " Muse- nalmanach," and literally lugged it into "Faust; " into the First Part, too, pub- lished when he was in the prime of his life. But I am not persuaded that any such folly as his dislike to Werner and the men who represented the volcanic view of the origin of the earth caused him to violate the proprieties when he came to write the Second Part. 42 THE SALVATION OF FAUST, Returning from a digression made in the interest of those to whom I am not a pioneer in this task, I address myself afresh and in a kind of review to what has been said, before pushing on to fresh fields. Looking at " Faust " as a whole I remind you that it is a progres- sive story, a series of trials followed by victory ; it is in the end the history of a saved, and not a fallen, soul. The prob- lem placed before this man who in the First Part comes before us as a great, but dissatisfied scholar, knowing all things yet contented with none, this man who in the depth of his discontent is just saved from suicide by the hal- lowed relations which the Easter bells and the Easter songs bring back ; the problem placed before this distracted and despaiiing man is, who shall give him a single day — nay, a single hour — which shall be so filled with heart- THE SALVATION OF FAUST. 43 easing solace that he can say to it, Stay, stay, thou art so fair. And when the whispering devil, coming first in the form of a poodle, then of a jaunty, bright, alert man, promises to bring such a day, such an hour, Faust agrees to sell his soul for it. He will take all the chances of the life to come. Give me a sufficing Now and you may have all the Then. Here Goethe leaves the old legend, as he does in so many other instances, and reaches out to the condi- tions of the widest, deepest life. The wager simply stated is this, Give me what I want, what I shall be content to keep that will fill all my desires, and you may have my soul. And then come the trials. I have stated them as three, following the New Testament analogy and summing them up under the most general heads. But we may divide and subdivide. First comes the ! TEE SALVATION OF FAUST. trial in Leipzig, in Auerbach's Cellar, the test of the wild student carouse, the trial by revelry ; but it passes entirely over Faust. Yet the love potion which is brewed there and which he drinks, works its disastrous charm, and he comes under the spell of Margaret's beauty; and so the story of all that woe opens and is unfolded, with its tragic solem- nity, heightened, if possible, by the un- seemly flirtations of Mephistopheles and Martha. At the end Margaret is saved, a penitent, ransomed soul, and seem- ingly Faust is damned. Then the Second Part opens with his coming out of the swoon of despaii*. Nature, the flowers, and the birds of spring minister to him as he lies on the verdant bank. Nature, which allows no one to live on in utter despair even when the heads- man's axe is impending, suffers Fausv. to revive, and whispers to him her sooth- • t # t I THE SALVATION OF FAUST. 45 ing words : type of the wonderful min- istrations of God's mercy. Then comes the entrance on the " great world," the counterpart to the " little world " of the First Part. Mephistopheles is appointed jester to the Emperor of Germany, and Faust, by Mephistopheles' connivance, becomes the powerful man who saves the emperor from bankruptcy. The great event is followed by a brilliant masquerade, of which I spoke before, in which all the history of the world, the whole order of civilization, passes before the emperor : the mimic picture of life, the bridge between the ages, the mirror of the imperial court, the mirror of man in all his joys and son-ows. It is a great study, this masquerade, even if de- tached from the story of " Faust " and meditated by itself. But we move on, for we find that not even in the intoxication of this princely • ' i 46 THE SALVATION OF FAUST. pageant which ushers in a vision of Helen of Troy in all the beauty, the charm, the fascinating and bewildering perfections of her face and form, not even in this is his heart stilled ; for as he in his proud sense of greatness and worthiness and irresistible claim tries to grasp her, she vanishes mid the sound of a convulsion so tremendous that Faust sinks senseless to the earth; and thus the first act of the Second Part is ended. Of course the story does not end ; for as I have akeady said, the second act with its elaborate machinery of Wagner, and the Disciple, and the Httle man in the bottle, and Mephistopheles, always present, bridges the gulf between Ger- many and Greece, between the feudal age and the classic age, between north- ern romanticism and southern grace, and brings Helen and Faust into such re- lations that in the third act — the great # > I #1 't TEE SALVATION OF FAUST. 47 and beautiful act called the " Helena," published by itself in Goethe's lifetime and prized as one of the most exquisite fragments in the world — the marriage of Faust and Helen is accomplished, and their boy is born, the beautiful Eupho- rion, type of Byron, type, too, of the modern spirit, fruit and issue of the two parents, the gothic and the classic thought, herald of the industrial age in which we live. But the point which we are to hold in our grasp is this : that in this com- plex trial, this test which comes to his sense of power commanding presence and beauty subduing force, in all this there comes no hour when Faust can say. Stay, stay, thou art so fair. Eu- phorion perishes, a victim to his own ungovernable flight ; Helen vanishes from Faust, leaving only her vail and mantle behind. It may all be expressed 48 TBE SALVATION OF FAUST. in the parallel words of Eeclesiastes : Vanity and vexation of spirit. There is that beyond to which Faust still aspires. The beauty of Margaret, and now the beauty of Helen, meaning all that we call the height of human cul- ture, the supreme beauty of intellect and grace and art, all this leaves him still unsatisfied. " The bed is shorter than that a man can stretch himself upon it, and the covering is narrower than that he can wrap himself in it," if I may reverently quote the language of the prophet Isaiah. With the fourth act we come to what we may call plain saiUng, and it is plain sailing to the end of the whole work, to the close of the fifth act. The great allegories are over, the wealth of learn- ing, the array of symbols covering meanings and hints altogether too vast for any other vehicle of thought. We 111 • l# t |# THE SALVATION OF FAUST. 49 come to the true trend of the book, the Salvation of Faust. In the first act he has appeared as the ally and de- liverer of the Emperor of Germany ; in the fourth, he is summoned again to reHeve that emperor. There is a great revolt ; a formidable rival is approach- ing ; the monarch whom Faust had assisted when on the verge of bank- ruptcy now begs for military help, and with Mephistopheles' aid it is granted. Faust delivers the emperor, gives him back his throne in peace, and is re- warded by being made prince absolute of a great tract of land bordering on a mighty sea. It comes to Faust in the exercise of his new dignity that it mil be a grand and worthy work to add to even the lordly domain conferred upon him by rescuing from the ocean, Hol- land-like, a great supplementary tract, which, with Mephistopheles' aid, he 50 THE SALVATION OF FAUST. does; and populous cities rise, great harbors filled with mighty fleets appear, and Faust is filled with glory. But all this, like a chapter out of Ecclesiastes, only leaves him empty of heart. The hour does not yet come when he can say, Stay, thou art so fair. And in the opening of the fifth and the last act, we behold him, this great man, this Faust, this prince, witli wealth and honor and power and glory, the king- doms of tlie world at his feet, so to speak, still asking for that which is be- yond. At the opening of the fifth act a most pleasing scene appears ; two old people with Grecian names, Philemon and Baucis, husband and wife, are pre- sented to view in their httle cottage, where a stranger is seeking shelter. Just in the foreground is seen, and it is told like Homer, a great harbor filled with its ships ; and in the background i • ^ m l# THE SALVATION OF FAUST. 51 further away from the sea is a palace which Faust is building for himself. The little hut of Philemon and Baucis stands in the way of Faust; it ob- structs the full view of the sea and the tract which he has won from the waves. He endeavors to buy the hut, to pay for it far more than it is worth, to gain it by all gentle arts ; and, at last, he em- powers Mephistopheles to secure it, but without violence. The wily servant goes out, but finding them obstinate, he kills them and burns their house. Re- porting this to his master, he brings about unconsciously the crisis of the whole career of Faust. He sees as by a Hghtning flash into his own heart ; he sees what he is capable of ; he reads his selfishness, his folly, his miserable ambition ; he is what would have been called a half century ago convicted of sin ; he is introduced to himself. There m 52 THE SALVATION OF FAUST have been moments before, both in the First and Second Parts, when he has come to a rupture with Mephistopheles, when he has seen how low and bHnd, how limited in vision, how destitute of high aun and noble feeling, how coarse and Philistine-like the devil is, but these breaks have soon been healed over and the two, Mephistopheles and Faust, have held together. But now it is over. Faust casts the devil off;^^ Faust ab- jures magic and its mfernal aids; he takes that step which in the Bible is so powerfully rendered in the words " Get thee behind me, Satan ; " or, again, " Re- sist the devil and he will flee from you." But tliis, though a crisis, is not one which at once brings light and joy. We have not yet reached the conditions of peace. The poem passes on into greater depths and into thicker dark- ness. Four old gray-haired women ap- i # # TEE SALVATION OF FAUST. 53 pear at the door of Faust's new palace ; he hears their words, he knows their names. They are Want, Guilt, Care, and Need. They hold their conference at the gate, and Care passes in through the key-hole and becomes the guest. I know nothing in poetry more solemn than this scene. In whispered words the four had uttered without that an- other form is drawing near — the form of Death. As Faust hears it he trem- bles, for to him it is a terrible word. And one who knows how terrible the thought of death always was to Goethe, how he refused to speak of it and to think of it, can understand with what feelings he, a man of eighty-one, penned this scene, this picture of his own life, and wrote, so to speak, his own epitaph. Care enters ; Care utters the words which for the first time bow down this strong man, whose age is represented 64 THE SALVATION OF FAUST. at this period to be a full hundred. At length Care breathes upon him, and Faust is made bhnd. Yet though blind and old, there comes to him, even then, the inspiration of a new hope. All at once he seizes the conception that he will build new cities and per- fect new plans and finish the task of gaining dominion from the sea, that other men may be made happy, that, in the language of our modern time, the world may be the better for his living in it, or, in the nobler language of our Saviour, that he may lose his life and yet find it. In his blindness, in his old age, he seizes his shovel and begins his glorious and self-forgetful work. We see at a glance that we are here not only close to the altruism of Herbert Spencer, but to the highest secrets of the Christian scheme of life. And so he dies, in the triumph of his career. *• TBE SALVATION OF FAUST. 55 when, at last, the hour has come in which for the first time he can say, Stay, thou art so fair. And then Mephistopheles and liis harpy attendants claim his soul. For, technically, Faust has lost his wager ; but heavenly spirits appear and refuse to surrender him, and fierce is the bat- tle of words which is waged. Yet, be- cause Faust has not attained, because he has only looked into the promised land, and, also, because the devil is impotent in the face of penitence, therefore, with all his clamor and bluster, and that of his attendants, he cannot take the soul he claims. The wager cannot be ex- acted. The domain in which Faust has won his triumph over himself is not ad- mitted to be within the province which Satan rules. It is the victory of the Right, of the Truth ; it is the victory of God, and not even the devil has a 66 THE SALVATION OF FAUST. lien upon the domain of God.*^ And so Faust is saved ; and the poem comes to an end with such splendors and glories and ineffable magnificences as no lan- guage of mine can possibly suggest ; and it is all penetrated and punctuated with the sharp, harsh, biting taunts and defi- ance of Mephistopheles, over and above which, in great organ tones, sounds the heavenly anthem, the angelic symphony. Saints now glorified, the spirits of just men made perfect, come one after the other and welcome him; a chorus of blessed boys issues forth to meet him ; angels and younger angels, and yet more perfect angels, vie with each other in their jubilant tumults of rejoicing, and all heaven comes forth to meet the man who has passed his trials, has lived his life, and is more than conqueror. But, oh ! the pathos of that which re- mains. Up to this time it is hke Mil- i1 THE SALVATION OF FAUST. 57 ton, it is like Handel, it is like the great Lift Up chorus of Gounod's " Redemp- tion ; " but the end is ushered in with notes so tenderly and tremulously hu- man that even in their sweet humanity they utter a louder Gloria than that wliich went before ; for Mary Magdala is there with her welcome, and the Woman of Samaria is there with her welcome, and Mary of Egypt is there with her welcome, and, oh ! how shall I write it ! with what tender suffusions of feeling, and almost with tears, do we go on to read, " One of the penitents, for- merly named Margaret," pressing to- wards him ; she, too, even she, welcom- ing in heaven her lover, her betrayer, the great sinner, now redeemed and ac- cepted, amid the splendors of the skies. The ewig-weibliche even there; the ever- womanly still drawing on; even there the power of the divine love triumphant. 1^31 58 THE SALVATION OF FAUST, It goes without saying that the reader has been running his own parallels be- tween this story and the whole line of Christian tradition ; the regular teach- ings of the church. And I must not omit to say that in this last scene Goethe has gone beyond what I have indicated ; he has not left us with the bald natural- ism that a man who is noble enough and striving enough solves the whole problem of life. I do not want to read into the poem more than I find there ; but I do find in the last scenes the recognition of divine love, of di- vine grace ; there is the moving out of heavenly forces toward this man so sore beset with the temptations of hfe. The angels who escort Faust to the immortal regions thus sing : — " Gerettet ist das edle Glied Der Geisterwelt vom Bosen ; Wer immer strebend sich bemiiht Den kdnnen wir erl5sen ; THE SALVATION OF FAUST. 59 Und hat an ihm die Liebe gar Von oben Theil genommen, Begegnet ihm die selige Schaar Mit herzlichen Willkommen." *' Saved is this noble soul from ill, Our spirit peer. Wlioever Strives forward with unswerving wiU, Him can we aye deliver; And if with him celestial love Hath taken part, — to meet him Come down the angels from above; With cordial hail they greet him." Is not this a poetical rendering of St. Paul's "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling ; for it is God that worketh within you to will and to do after his good pleasure " ? ^^ And yet I cannot claim that Goethe, either in his own life or in that por- trayal of his career which he gives in "Faust," attained to what we have a right to call the Christian standard. When Hermann Grimm says that "Faust vaiBSiiiilM 60 THE SALVATION OF FAUST. is the gospel of human salvation through human activity," he gives what on the whole comes the nearest to Goethe's * aim. The great Christian recognitions at the close, the coming out of the heavenly love to meet the man who has advanced towards it, is after all delayed to a point where we must con- fess that the most of the battle has been fought alone. Every now and then Goethe comes so near the Christian Hues that we hold our breath and wonder whether he is to be the greatest of all our allies ] and then we find that only in a constructive sense, not in the plain use of words, can we claim liim. I may refer to that touching passage in the First Part where Faust, just on the verge of suicide because he cannot solve the problem of life, with all his learning, is recalled by the Easter bells and song ; but, after all, candor compels us to THE SALVATION OF FAUST. 61 grant that it is not because of the in- ner meaning of the resurrection hymn "Christ is Risen," but because that great strain of faith and the Easter morning bells touch his memory, bring back his youth, and with youth his hope, and he stays his hand. So also that New Testament exposition in the First Part of St. John's verse " In the begin- ning was the Word." Here, when he passes on step by step and reads into the meaning that the Word is not the mere communication of God's thought in language, but in action, we have to ask. Is Goethe with us or is he against us? But when we pass to the great strain of the poem, there is no doubt in my mind, and I think there can be in no other's mind, that while not bring- ing out with any clearness and fulness the manner in which the divine love operates in drawing men outward and 62 THE SALVATION OF FAUST. upward, — while quite excluding those uames and methods which we wontedly associate with the Christian faith, — yet on the judgment side, on that side which is most neglected to-day, the woe of sin, the dreadful penalty of sin, the stupid, blind, gross character of evil, the wreck of life when in aUiance with the devil, all this is told with a power and a range of illustiation which must make the book a memorable ally to all who are striving to warn men from the wiatli of the divine Judge." The poem could not rise above the level of Goethe's own life, but it could rise to that level ; a life which had once been tempestuous and wild, fidl of episodes which men read and do not forget, but a life which in its latest decades was passing on into calmness and strength and outgiving and a wise espousal of all broadest in- terests. I protest against this forget- .§ ^ ^ TEE SALVATION OF FAUST. 63 ting of the aged Goethe in the constant iteration of the deeds and loves of the youthful Goethe, as I protest against the forgetting of the Second Part of " Faust " because the First is so thrill- ing, so tragic, so full of the fire and fascination of youth. I sum up, then, the upward flight of this man as in three soaring circles : the first, the quest of earthly beauty ; the second, the quest of spiritual beauty ; the third, the quest of heavenly beauty. From the first two he fell back ; but in the third he conquered. Or, if I may yet again depict his upward striving as the search for truth, it would be the longing of the soul after truth gained by the bitter experience of life; then, by seeking beauty as revealed in culture and art and grace ; then, by joy at- tained in the efforts made not for self but for man ; and lastly, in the hal- sai > 64 THE SALVATION OF FAUST. lowed blessedness which comes from union with the glorified and in the fel- lowships of heaven. I will cheerfully confess that not for years have I taken up a study which more puts me in the way of high thoughts and holy living than the study of " Faust ; " and certainly never a poem so full of intellectual spui\ As a work of culture, it, of course, out- ranks the greatest productions of the human mind. Take its extent as com- pared with the longest of Shakespeare's greatest works, take its learning as com- pared with Milton's greatest works, take its range as compared \\ith Dante, take its pictures of life as compared with Homer, and it will be seen that in its aggregated qualities it may be safely called the higliest achievement of the human mind.^^ Goethe, the most fur- nished man of our time, the most (f. i i THE SALVATION OF FAUST. 65 powerful, the most experienced, gave his whole life to its production ; lived it out year by year and decade by decade, stopped when he had written out his own experience up to a certain date, and then lived on till from his life new lessons should be distilled. But he put into it not only all that he was, he put into it all that he had read and thought and seen; all that men throughout the entii-e past had accu- mulated. His greatest contemporaries, Carlyle in England ; William von Hum- boldt, Schelling, Hegel in Germany; Napoleon in Prance,^^ all looked up to him as the one gi-eatest man of their time ; and all that he had garnered out of the richest treasuries of the present and of the past, he has sifted, culled, condensed, and packed away for us in the wonderful work which we call " Faust." NOTES. 1. It forms no part of my plan to enter upon a discussion of the origin of the Faust legend ; certainly not to trace it in its early course. To a certain extent the same story may be fomid in one of Calderon's plays; and it is perhaps not too much to say that it is the substantial thought which underlies the temptation of Adam and Eve. But the Faust legend proper, that which comes out into full light in the early part of the sixteenth century, has been traced by my friend, Mr. Richardson, of the Hartford Theological Seminary Library, with characteristic thorough- ness, and forms an exceedingly interesting study taken by itself and without relation to that phase which is my special theme in this essay. Mm The best German edition of " Faust " is Schro- er*s, in two volumes, badly printed, indeed, like r the spoken drama as merely the old and un- developed legend put into shape for our time, we may perhaps think them as complete as Mar- lowe's contemporaries thought his work when it was put upon the stage; but in fact, the Goethe " Faust " is that from which all the mod- ern adopters have drawn, and therefore their work is but fragmentary, for they have not gone beyond the First Part of Goethe's work. 5. The ablest and amplest discussion of these questions is found in the last edition of Kuno Fischer's work on " Faust." He is not to be confounded with Frederick Vischer, an eariier and also a very able commentator. Kuno Fischer has traced the history of Faust with great thorough- ness and with great fairness. He shows the close relation between Goethe's conception of the Erdgeist or Earth Spirit and the soaring nature of the youthful Goethe. He shows, too, how the poet's half-playful conception of Mephistopheles, the roguish, elfish, witty, wily spirit, the " com- panion " whom the Lord gave to Faust, passed in time into the malignant and truly diabolical Mephistopheles as he appears in the portions of \ V 70 NOTES. NOTES. 71 the First Part which were written last, as well as in the Second Part. He is also exceedingly thorough in his studies as to the dates of composi- tion, and though not diffuse, he yet brings to- gether into his work of less than five hundred open print pages, a great mass of information touching both Goethe and his " Faust." 6. Goethe societies exist in neariy all the coun- tries where literature is most honored. In Eng- land, such men as Edward Dowden, the Shake- spearean commentator, preside over them ; and the Goethe society of Germany embraces the most eminent men in all departments of science, art, and letters. The recent opening of Goethe's private archives in Weimar and the conveying of these to a special Goethe society is perhaps the most striking literary movement of recent time ; and the publication of the results is one of the most eagerly looked-for events in the great circle of scholars. 7. It seems to me that no charge against Goethe's character, certainly in his youth, is less grounded than that he was a man all intellect and no heart. Not to go beyond the Frederica epi- sode, is it possible to read his diary and the letters of those days and not see the heart- struggles of the man ? The fear of offending his father, and perhaps still more the dread of dis- pleasing his sister, the instinct of incompatibility between himself and this young untrained girl, causing him to decide that he dared not go on, all this is no argument that he was not a man of warm, true, and honorable emotions, yet at the command of a wise control. He had not, per- haps, the passionate sensibility of Schiller; but in the capacity of loving, he was, I think, his equal. Nor do I think it the result of a thorough knowledge of Goethe's character to charge upon him a willingness to trifle with hearts. He had a wonderful openness to all fresh, buoyant na- tures in both men and women, and in his early Weimar years we find that in both men and women he had a joyful, enthusiastic delight. In this he was different from Schiller, who was drawn almost exclusively to women ; his affec- tion for Korner and a few others emphasizing the delicate sensibility which made his friend- ships with women so conspicuous an element in m i 72 NOTES. NOTES. 73 his character. But Goethe loved life as life : and I do not find my old and inherited notion that he experimented on young girls' souls, con- finned by later studies. He was easily drawn to artless, healthy, earnest natures; to spirits like his Margaret ; and yet when he found that he was being swept into an attachment which would not result in his permanent happiness, he could fly, as he did again and again. In the one case where this capacity of escape failed him, in that of the woman who became his wife, there was a remarkable complexity of conditions : she was clearly one of those robust natures, skilled in the arts of housekeeping and able to minister to the physical wants of a man whose mind was cheered and kept active by women like Char- lotte von Stein, and whose social tastes were met not only by the ladies of the Weimar Court, but by gifted women like Corona Schroeter. With all these to warm and stimulate his intellect, he wanted the repose and comfort of a home ; and he found it in the society of a woman so common in birth and so unendowed with the graces which would commend her, that it is still a wonder to thousands that Goethe could have made her the intimate companion of his life. It is obvious tl '^' ' ^> I ♦> i ^1 « ( that not even yet have we an adequate knowl- edge of Christine Vulpius on the spiritual side ; but that there were gifts and devotion of heart, and more capacity of understanding Goethe than we have commonly supposed, I firmly be- lieve. 8. I cannot agree with those commentators who are so positive in identifying Margaret (or Gretchen, as she is called in many of the oldest scenes) with any person. To assert that she is the portrait of the Frankfort working-girl Gretchen, described with such spirit in Goethe's autobiography, or to assert with equal positive- ness that she is or is not the close portrait of Frederica, is to encroach on a domain which is not our own. I admit that Goethe's heroes and heroines are life studies in a very different sense from Schiller's ; and in many cases, notably and by his own confession in his borrowing many features of Mephistopheles from his caus- tic friend Merck, he has portrayed men and women whom he knew; yet seldom in such closeness as to allow us to dogmatize on them. It is my impression that in the Margaret of " Faust," there are features drawn from both m i 72 NOTES. Ms character. But Goethe loved life as life : and I do not find my old and inherited notion that he experimented on young girls' souls, con- firmed by later studies. He was easily drawn to artless, healthy, earnest natures; to spirits like his Margaret ; and yet when he found that he was being swept into an attachment which would not result in his permanent happiness, he could fly, as he did again and again. In the one case where this capacity of escape failed him, in that of the woman who became his wife, there was a remarkable complexity of conditions : she was clearly one of those robust natures, skilled in the arts of housekeeping and able to minister to the physical wants of a man whose mind was cheered and kept active by women like Char- lotte von Stein, and whose social tastes were met not only by the ladies of the Weimar Court, but by gifted women like Corona Schroeter. With all these to warm and stimulate liis intellect, he wanted the repose and comfort of a home ; and he found it in the society of a woman so common in birth and so unendowed with the graces which would commend her, that it is still a wonder to thousands that Goethe could have made her the intimate companion of his life. It is obvious NOTES. 73 ^1 i^ 4f I %l t ( that not even yet have we an adequate knowl- edge of Christine Vulpius on the spiritual side ; but that there were gifts and devotion of heart, and more capacity of understanding Goethe than we have commonly supposed, I firmly be- lieve. 8. I cannot agree with those commentators who are so positive in identifying Margaret (or Gretchen, as she is called in many of the oldest scenes) with any person. To assert that she is the portrait of the Frankfort working-girl Gretchen, described with such spirit in Goethe's autobiography, or to assert with equal positive- ness that she is or is not the close portrait of Frederica, is to encroach on a domain which is not our own. I admit that Goethe's heroes and heroines are life studies in a very different sense from Schiller's ; and in many cases, notably and by his own confession in his borrowing many features of Mephistopheles from his caus- tic friend Merck, he has portrayed men and women whom he knew; yet seldom in such closeness as to allow us to dogmatize on them. It is my impression that in the Margaret of *' Faust," there are features drawn from both 74 NOTES. the Frankfort Gretchen and the lovely girl of Sesenheim, the pastor's daughter ; that she has the peasant quality from the former, the naive, sweet, artless charm from the latter. 9. It is a little singular that the publication of Goethe*s ** Faust " in 1790 called out Uttle enthu- siasm; a few, like Steffens and the Schlegels, recognized its ability and spoke with warmth of its wonderful language ; but the book made little stir. Not so when the whole First Part was pub- lished in 1808 ; then it was hailed with acclama- tion, and from that time to this there has been a chorus of rapture over its singularly beautiful style, its strength, smoothness, fire, melody, and verbal felicity. The Second Part has not been judged so leniently. It is the fashion to speak of it as unpoetical, crabbed, pedantic, verbose ; as exhibiting frequent marks of senility; a charge which I find greatly exaggerated. Per- haps, as a whole, the Second Part is not so plas- tic as the First ; it has many words which smell of the midnight oil ; but, as a whole, there is the same liberal use of the terse, strong, people's words; the same smoothness and finish and I i| C ( J^ < ( NOTES. 75 melody. If I may cite the first examples which occur to me, —the waking of Faust at the begin- ning of the Second Part, the scene in which the aged Philemon and Baucis appear at the opening of the fifth act, the monologue of Helen in the third act, and the wonderful last scene of all, — I may say that they cannot be thought for a mo- ment inferior to the very best writing in the First Part ; though, of course, lacking in that fiery quality which is felt everywhere in the older por- tion of the play. 10. " Faust " was probably conceived as early as 1769, when Goethe was but twenty years old ; but he did not begin to compose the scenes much before 1773. During that and the following years the most of the first sketch or Fragment was written. This was published in 1790, and has been re- cently reprinted. It contains most of the First Part, with certain important omissions which the special student will discover at once, such as the Dedication and the Prologue in Heaven. 11. In a conversation with his friend Eckermann, March 11, 1828, Goethe said: "There was a 76 NOTES. time in my life when I could easily produce a printed sheet day by day. My * Geschwister ' I wrote in three days, and my * Clavigo/ as you know, in eight. I cannot do that now ; and yet I cannot even in my old age lament a want of pro- ductivity. Ten or twelve years ago, in the happy days which followed the war of the Liberation, when I was writing the ' Songs in the Divan,' I was prolific enough, and used to compose two or three daily, writing wherever I happened to be, in the country, at a hotel, or in a carriage. Now, while I am working at the Second Part of my * Faust,' I can compose only in the early morning, when I feel myself refreshed with sleep and have not entered into the vexations of a new day. But how little it is that I accomplish under the happiest circumstances; only a page at best ; generally not more than a handbreadth ; and when I am not in a good frame of mind, still less." 12. It may not be known to every reader that Goethe's Second Part of " Faust " is now played very frequently in Germany, and that by its adap- tation to the taste of our time in its love of the gorgeous and the supernatural, it, like the opera t I" 'I / f I [ NOTES. 77 of the latest school, has a very great charm. It is not unfrequently played in Germany as a trilogy, occupying three consecutive nights ; and the resources of the stage, which in Goethe's time would have been entirely inadequate to present nearly all the mythological features of the Second Part, are not much more drawn upon than they are in the more exacting works of Wagner. It does not seem possible that Goethe, or any of his friends, should have regarded it as feasible Uiat the Second Part of " Faust " should ever be pre- sented on the stage ; but even in minor thea- tres, such as that of Mannheim, this is done with great success. Frederick Vischer, the commen- tator who of all is perhaps the most outspoken in his likes and dislikes, and who is always enter- taining even if he be not convincing, attributes all this to the degeneracy of our time ; the taste for the gaudy and the merely spectacular. But Vischer has no moderation in his condemnation of all that relates to the Second Part of ** Faust ; " he condemns the style, the substance, the whole work, considers it the product of a de- praved taste, and in no way to be compared with the power of the First Part. He has no fear of Lttper, or Diintzer, or any other of the wholesale TSSSWKSB f i i 78 NOTES. admirers, and strikes out always in the most vigorous and entertaining fashion. And yet his views have had but litUe convincing weight with readers. 13. The reader will, of course, remember that Scott translated " G5tz " in his earlier days, and caught from it the fire which afterwards burned »o brightly in his poems and tales. It is not too much to say that Goethe's influence, through Scott, on English literature is one of the grand- est instances of indirect working which the his- tory of authorship exhibits. It is indeed true that subsequently Faust ad- dressing Mephistopheles by the title of " over- seer " enlists his aid in his building projects ; but the whole tone of the passage shows that the old magical mania is gone; he wants to hear the honest ring of the spade and the shovel; he wants to see the busy crowds of men all active in their tasks. The language of Mephistopheles is plainly that of surrender ; he sees and confesses that Faust is no longer in his toUs. That which is called in the Christian scheme of life " con- i ■ J 4A I. 'f ^^ Bii. ( NOTES. 79 sciousness of sin " is revealed in various passages ; among others, in the interview with Care, the man's sense of failure comes plainly into sight. 15. Since writing this passage, I find in Coupland's " Spirit of Faust " (London, George Bell & Sons) a passage which confirms this view, and which I wiU quote here : — "Although Mephistopheles sees himself out- witted and imagines himself defrauded, he has really not won, but lost, his wager. Faust signed away his soul on condition that Mephistopheles should procure him a moment of bliss sufficient to make him declare that he could wish to linger lazily in such happiness for evermore. Faust has not lost, but gained, the day for two reasons: first, because it is not Mephistopheles who has brought his bliss; secondly, because that bliss was not the bliss of ease, but a bliss of the fullest activity. Mephistopheles certainly did not help him to the rapture he felt at the fatal moment ; on the contrary, it came as a consequence of his unaided effort. Mephistopheles had done his last service when he burned the cottage of Phile- mon, but it was Faust's own unsuggested scheme 80 NOTES. NOTES, 81 which exerted the final fascination. Again, it was no moment of passive enjoyment which he pro- nounced so fair ; it was no present moment at all ; it was a vision of a remote future when he would be merely a spectator of the realized de- velopment of the most powerful creative work of his whole life. An actively engaged people toiling on soil which he had procured for them — such was the dream which he beheld trans- lated into fact in this remote future that brought him the perfect moment. Faust had baffled Mephistopheles aU his life, because his self-ex- pression was not the self-satisfaction the fiend had intended ; it was not self-indulgence, but BeMevelopment, self-progress, an ever-expand- ing self which furthered the life of a larger and larger circle of mankind." This work of Coupland's, of 366 pages clear type, so different from most of the badly printed German works on " Faust," is an admirable ex- position, and is invaluable for one who does not easily master the German language. 16. It is one of the strange and discordant notes of onr time that whUe some old-fashioned people i > are bewailing, and seemingly with justice, the silence of the modern pulpit on the tremendous penalties of sin, this theme has passed over into literature, and on the pages not alone of men like Carlyle, and of women like George Eliot, but in this great " Faust," which is confessedly above all modern works, it is wrought out with a cogency and insight and heart-searching power which not even the sermons of Jonathan Edwards can sur- pass. The age will not lack teachers of what is called the doctrine of sin while these great names command the attention and the assent which they do to-day. 17. I did not know until after writing this passage that I have on my side the authority of so dis- tinguished and fair-minded an ecclesiastic as the Dutch commentator Van Osterzee, who in his paper on " The Relation of Goethe to Christian- ity" alludes to the very passage which I have cited, and the close of " Faust " as an interesting and convincing proof that Goethe intended more than a mere artistic use of what may be called Christian machinery. I think, indeed, that for artistic reasons he uses the Roman Catholic mould in which to cast his conceptions ; but it is 82 NOTES. evident that the recognition of Christianity in the close of this great poem is most striking evidence of the place which religion had in the poet's thought. 18. Vischer, in the introduction to his work on " Faust," compares it to a great fan-shaped city with many breaks in the streets, and with a tow- ering central thought which can be seen from all points. Those who have visited Carlsruhe in Germany will see and admire the force of Vischer's comparison. i \ J 19. When, after the battle of Jena and Napoleon's decisive victory over Prussia, Goethe, who had not the reputation of being excessively patriotic, was presented to him, Napoleon was so struck with his aspect and his words that he ejaculated " Vous Ues un hymrm ! " lU O S Lfl CO M G05 G121 m a S m = .Ml •LO - in f«s^ t PK p% ,/%,, -V/i / NOT BOUND AUG 1 7 1954 *M^Aas^s»''rai^,;:"-: , i!..*i' »--l,iii'.;^.>iii:-'ft-1ii*i*w«al«i«!5