B00ARI2G5C EBOK (10 page)

The negative aspects of Faust’s role in the 1831 scenes are plain enough. For the sake of his ‘higher aims’ and ‘noble purpose’ (10302 f.), he has needed no persuasion by Mephistopheles to ally himself with a corrupt, anti-reformist regime, with the forces of reaction and absolute power. He could, after all, have intervened on the side of the (possibly more enlightened) ‘rival Emperor’ instead,
but his war profit might then have been less secure. By the beginning of Act V he has achieved his ambition ‘to rule and to possess’ (10187), and notwithstanding his theoretical status as a vassal of the Emperor owing tithes to the Church, his control over the new coastal territories appears to be unrestricted. At the beginning of Scene 18 he is said to be ‘in extreme old age’; Goethe remarked to Eckermann on 6 June 1831 that he had intended him to be exactly 100 years old. Some critics have calculated from this symbolic age that the reclamation project must have been in progress for about fifty years; the text, however, tells us nothing further on this point. Nor does Faust’s symbolic status as, to all intents and purposes, owner and master of the coastal lands lend itself to exact realistic definition. We can think of him as a medieval or
ancien régime
feudal lord, an independent prince, an eccentric aristocrat trying to turn Utopian theory into practice, a ruthless landowner carrying out clearances, a cynical industrial entrepreneur, or a totalitarian dictator (of the left or of the right) forcing through a five-year plan. Incidental links with Saint Simonism seem probable in view of Goethe’s documented interest in it at the time; but the Saint-Simonistes were not the only proto-socialist visionaries of the early nineteenth century or the only ones who could have been known to him. In any case Goethe cannot have wished to tie the denouement of this symbolic drama to a specific allegorical-satirical meaning, and it would be absurd to see it exclusively as a prophetic denunciation or glorification of this or that future historical development, whether Marxist or Wilhelmineexpansionist or National Socialist, as critics of various persuasions have done. If we are looking for modern parallels to the intended forceful eviction and resettlement of Philemon and Baucis, one that might well suggest itself today would be the policy of the infamous Ceauçescu regime in Romania, which in the 1980s embarked on the wholesale destruction of traditional culture and architecture in the interests of a brutal and soulless reorganization. But Faust does not in fact seem to be driven by a paranoid political ideology of this or any other kind. The dimension we are in here is psychological. The old couple’s cottage and the chapel beside it offend Faust by the very fact of not belonging to him, of representing an innocent tradition not dependent on his will. His impulse seems not so much political or social as perversely artistic: a vision of controlling the elements, of creating a world, a landscape in real space and time:

… those few trees not my own
Spoil the whole world that is my throne.
From branch to branch I planned to build
Great platforms, to look far afield,
From panoramic points to gaze At all I’ve done; as one surveys
From an all-mastering elevation
A masterpiece of man’s creation.
I’d see it all as I have planned:
Man’s gain of habitable land.

(11241–50)

(cf. also 11153-8.) The vision is tainted with perfectionism, corrupted with the fantasy of omnipotence, and yet there is still something noble about it: the artist’s pride and ruthless absorption in his own work.

Shortly after writing the Philemon and Baucis episode, Goethe told Eckermann, not quite correctly, that his story of the old couple whose names he had borrowed from classical legend had nothing to do with the old Greek story (conversation of 6 June 1831). He also told him a month earlier (conversation of 2 May 1831) that the ‘intention’ of these scenes was about thirty years old. As usual, it is not clear what this early conception or intended treatment of the story can have amounted to; but a piece of external evidence from 1802 does tend to confirm the dating, and also sheds some light on the otherwise obscure connection between Scenes 17-19 and the classical Philemon and Baucis. Goethe, who was in fact particularly fond of idyllic motifs all his life, had known since his youth Ovid’s story of the simple old couple who gave shelter to Jupiter and Mercury without recognizing them and were rewarded by the gods for their hospitality (see Index, Philemon). In 1802, in a minor theatrical work written for the opening of a new theatre, he had used the story, inventing his own variant of it. This otherwise quite unimportant occasional piece expressly compares the husband and wife to Philemon and Baucis, and includes two motifs that reappear in the
Faust
scenes: that of the magical transportation of the couple to a fine new dwelling (11278 ff.) and that of the wife’s suspicion that evil forces are at work (11111–14).
*
In the finished
Faust
episode of 1831 (by whatever stages it may have come to be written) Goethe’s main emphasis is undoubtedly on the contrast between idyllic rustic
simplicity and Faust’s ruthless organization, his overbearing and, as the old couple see it, ‘godless’ power (11131). As Goethe further develops the story in Act V, another classical name rather strangely recurs: that of Lynceus the far-seer, the watchman who played a part in the Helen episode (Sc. 12) and was also mentioned in the ‘Classical Walpurgis Night’ as one of the mythical Argonauts (7377). He now (Sc. 19) reappears to perform the classical dramatic function of witnessing a violent off-stage event ‘from the walls’ (teichoscopy). His opening lines (11288-303), immediately preceding his description of the burning of the old couple’s cottage, are the famous lyric piece
‘Zum Sehen geboren
…” which is often quoted out of context as the aged Goethe’s final positive pronouncement on life; in fact, it is the first example of the clearly intended ironies of context that pervade Act V. Faust, unaware that his instructions have been exceeded, muses on the favour he is doing the old couple by resettling them in a new house. Mephistopheles appears, with the three monstrous servants, to complete the picture of the catastrophe by his narrative.

At this point there occurs a series of developments that raise difficult interpretative questions. First, Faust curses the ‘reckless, savage deed’ (11372, literal version), and by implication curses Mephistopheles and the Three. Does this amount to a renunciation of Mephistophelean magic, as 11404 ff. will seem to suggest? When he next speaks to Mephistopheles (11551), he is blind, and apparently takes him for his clerk of works. Secondly, does line 11382 in Faust’s next and last speech in Scene 19 (‘A rash command, too soon obeyed!’) amount to an expression of remorse, an acknowledgement that he cannot shake off responsibility for the murder by blaming his agent? Thirdly, how exactly is Scene 19, and the Philemon and Baucis episode generally, related to Scene 20 (‘Midnight’, the first of the three ‘core’ scenes), in which Faust is confronted by the spectral figure of Care? Faust’s last six lines (11378-83) seem intended to link the two, but Scene 20 was written in 1825-6 and Scene 19 in 1831, which calls in question the usually assumed relevance of the Care scene to Faust’s feelings about his crime. (It is not even clear that the Care scene was originally conceived as taking place immediately before Faust’s death (Sc. 21); the reference to ‘our brother… Death’ (11397) by the Four Grey Women can be read as meaning that he is approaching, but still distant). As against this ‘disconnection’ of Scene
20, we have to bear in mind Goethe’s piecemeal way of working and the fact that both Scene 20 and the Philemon and Baucis sequence may go back in ‘intention’ to c.1800, and consequently that their present dramatic continuity in the final text may be as Goethe intended. The point has a certain importance in that it is relevant to how the mysterious figure of Care is to be understood.

One of the puzzles in the lines spoken by the Four Grey Women at the beginning of’Midnight’ (11384-91) is the meaning of the word
Schuld
in 11384 (the name of one of the apparitions) which I have translated ‘Debt’. Some critics are inclined to take it in its other German sense as ‘guilt’: that is, moral or criminal responsibility for a wrong action, with or without an awareness or feeling of culpability (
Schuldgefühl
). Since
Schuld
, like Want and Need, declares herself to be unable to enter the house of a rich man (11386-9), the commercial sense seems prima facie more likely, especially in view of the uncertainty as to whether this scene was originally conceived as having any connection with the Philemon and Baucis episode—that is to say, with Faust’s crime. In any case ‘debts’ (ò
ɸ
ειλ
ματα) are a metaphor for sins (‘trespasses’) in a text even more famous than
Faust;
also, the inability of’guilt’ to enter Faust’s palace would merely mean that the objective guilt for his crime cannot be brought home to him. It is notable that after line 11382 there is not the slightest allusion to the death of the old couple, in Scene 20 or anywhere else; indeed, Faust in 11438 ff. even congratulates himself on having become more wise and circumspect in his old age. Some commentators, concerned to raise Faust’s moral status by insisting that he is capable of remorse, seize upon an observation by Goethe, made in a quite different context (
Wilhelm Master’s Journeyman Years
, book I, ch. 7), to the effect that
conscience
is ‘closely akin’ to care (that is, to brooding anxiety); but in that passage Goethe was merely remarking that ‘conscience’ tends to degenerate into ‘remorseful anxiety [
reuige Unruhe
] that can embitter one’s life’, and this is precisely what Faust in Scene 20 is repudiating. If Care is supposed to personify his moral conscience, it is strange that nothing she says to him contains any hint of moral prompting or accusation. What she does instead is to recite, without even really addressing him, a relentless description of her dark power over mankind (11424-31, 11453-66, 11471-86). Faust recognizes her as a hostile, life-poisoning demon (11487-91), and ends by defying her in an attitude clearly intended to be seen as
heroic (11493 f.). She responds by cursing and blinding him, as witches and demons were reputedly able to do; and he replies, again in heroic mode:

Night seems to close upon me deeper still,
But in my inmost soul a bright light shines.
hasten to complete my great designs.

(11499–501)

Care’s evocation of the symptoms of paralysing neurotic anxiety is so terrifyingly realistic as to suggest that this pathological state was one well known to Goethe, the hidden shadow of his constant advocacy of’action’.
Sorge
(‘anxiety’ might in some ways be a better translation than ‘care’) has already been compellingly evoked in Part One, in one of the scenes written at the turn of the century:

Care makes its nest in the heart’s deepest hole
And secretly torments the soul;
Its restless rocking motion mars our mind’s content.
Its masks are ever-changing, it appears
As house and home, as wife and child, it will invent
Wounds, poisons, fires and floods — from all
These blows we flinch before they ever fall,
And for imagined losses shed continual tears.

(644–51)

The theme of
Sorge
as the enemy of the creative, heroic-daemonic personality was also prominent in the historical drama
Egmont
(1788). In ‘Midnight’ (which is in all probability one of the scenes also planned or sketched at the turn of the century) Care has become an aspect of the elemental chaos against which Faust must struggle. With Mephistopheles in disgrace, she comes to haunt him instead. There seems to be a link between her visitation and his dismissal (if that is what it was) of Mephistopheles; above all, it is linked to his important soliloquy at the beginning of this crucial scene ‘Midnight’, after Care has entered his house but before he has noticed her presence (11398-419). Musing on what he has partly heard the Four Grey Women say and on their mention of death, he looks inwards and back at his career, remembering the despairing curse he had pronounced on the world and himself (1587-1606; cf. 1607-26). He now sees the words he spoke then as criminal, as an offence against life; and for the first time he formulates the wish to renounce
magic (11404-11). By implication, this decision (repeated in 11423 when he is tempted to repel Care with a magic command) amounts to renouncing the services of Mephistopheles; if he can do so, he will have ‘broken through to freedom’ (11403) and be confronting nature as a man without special advantages, a man ‘all alone’ (11406). If we are looking for the positive, even noble, features in Goethe’s final portrayal of Faust, then this new resolve must count as exceptionally significant. Psychologically it represents growth away from the illusion of omnipotence, the acceptance of a world over which he has only limited control and in which he is susceptible, for instance, to the infirmities of old age. Sudden blindness does not reduce him to despair or even to inactivity. He will continue with his symbolic project: the imposition upon nature of a shaping, civilizing will.

We are perhaps meant to assume that the tragedy of Philemon and Baucis has inwardly opened Faust’s eyes to the corrupting character of his partnership with Mephistopheles; in any event, this is one of the few cases in which we might speak of moral progress or increased insight on Faust’s part. Both his major speeches in ‘Midnight’ (11398-419 and 11433-52), in which he retrospectively and not uncritically reviews his life, are important in this way. But they are almost certainly both built into Goethe’s early and continuing conception: there is not really any evidence that this essential conception changed, even during the completion of Act V, as has sometimes been suggested. In the 1825-6 H2 core material (and therefore, for all we know, in the original c.1800 conception) Faust’s decision to renounce magic is already present; and so are both the swamp-draining project and the philanthropic motive, though these two appear in more rudimentary form. In H2, as well as damming back the sea, he is also draining inland swamps with a ‘vast ditch’. The drainage project (which seems to have been an earlier plan of Goethe’s, going back to before the North Sea floods) is expanded and explained in the final 1831 revision (11559-62), but is not first added at that stage to suggest a new philanthropic, social purpose, as some commentators have supposed. Lines 11559-62 are merely inserted to make the drainage scheme consistent with the dike scheme. As to Faust’s philanthropy, in the shorter H2 version of his last speech he is already declaring that he will make a place in which millions can settle,