B00ARI2G5C EBOK (2 page)

I am particularly indebted to Dr John R. Williams of the University of St Andrews, not only for his various specialized published writings on
Faust
Part Two but also for his kindness in reading my introductory essay and notes, which have benefited considerably from his expertise. Valuable suggestions arising out of the Introduction have also been made by Dr R. W. Truman, Professor Dimitri Obolensky and Mr R. L. Vilain. Mr Vilain was also kind enough to double check the proofs of the whole edition. For the classical material I owe much to the erudition of Professor P.J. Parsons as well as to M. C. Howatson’s
Oxford Companion to Classical Literature
(1989). My remaining errors, in these addenda and in the translation, must await later correction or at least exposure.

D.L.

A story-book full of
wonders, wisdom and
far-ranging fancy.

E
MIL
S
TAIGER

In the spring of 1827 Philippe Albert Stapfer, a retired Swiss diplomat living in Paris, who a few years earlier had published a successful translation of Goethe’s dramatic works in four volumes, was planning a new, separate French edition of
Faust
, Part One, to be illustrated by Delacroix. He had heard that the nearly 78-year-old Goethe was about to publish a sequel or second part, and wrote to him for information. Goethe had in fact recently decided to begin preparing a final collected edition of his works, the so-called
Ausgabe letzter Hand
(ALH), and this indeed had been the main practical stimulus for his resumption of work on
Faust
. He was including in it what we now know as Act III of Part Two, the ‘Helena’ Act, printed as a separate dramatic poem; this would be the first published piece of
Faust
material since the appearance of the ‘First Part of the Tragedy’ in 1808. It duly appeared in April 1827, in volume 4 of the ALH, under the title ‘Helena: a classical-romantic phantasmagoria. Intermezzo (
Zwischenspiel
) for
Faust’
. Goethe replied to Stapfer’s letter on 3 April, explaining that for the time being he had nothing to add to Part One, in which no changes were to be made; the forthcoming ‘Helena’ was

an intermezzo [
un interméde
] belonging to the second part, and this second part is entirely different from the first in its conception, its execution and its scene of action, which is set in higher regions. It is not yet finished, and I am only publishing this intermezzo as a sample, to be fitted into the rest later.

Stressing the total stylistic difference between ‘Helena’ and Part One, Goethe assures Stapfer that he will be able to satisfy himself when he reads it that the Helen drama ‘cannot be connected in any way
to the first part’, and that the French publisher will prejudice the success of his proposed edition if he attempts to do so. On the other hand, he, Goethe, would of course be happy to see a French edition of ‘Helena’ appear in a separate volume.

The complete Part Two, the long-awaited ‘sequel’, was unveiled in December 1832, having been deliberately withheld by Goethe until after his death. One other instalment had appeared during his lifetime: the first three and a half scenes of Act I, published in 1828 alongside Part One in volume 12 of the ALH. But ‘Helena’, as he emphasized from the start to Stapfer and others, was a different matter:
*
how different, for instance, were Faust’s dealings with Helen of Troy from his affair with poor Gretchen, that youthful story from which the author now distanced himself with remarkable asperity. In March or April 1827, just as ‘Helena’ was seeing the light of day, he wrote a review of a now forgotten academic work on ancient drama, in which, referring in passing to
Faust
, he describes the central tragic theme of Part One dismissively as ‘that earlier relationship, which came to grief in the chaos of misunderstood learning, middle-class narrow-mindedness, moral disorder and superstitious delusions’. By contrast, Faust’s relationship with Helen is one ‘presenting itself in a freer domain of art and pointing to loftier views’. Notwithstanding the strong probability that in his youthful Frankfurt period he also conceived and planned a Faust-Helen story in some form,
*
the Goethe of 1827 clearly wishes to lay all possible emphasis on the autonomy and self-sufficiency of his newly published version, to keep it pure from all contamination by the tragic
Urfaust
material which he now seems to regard as belonging almost to a pre-Goethean previous existence. And it is indeed now almost literally true that ‘Helena’
‘ne peut en aucune façon se rattacher à la première partie’
. The old Dr Faustus legend, to be sure, had from its sixteenth-century beginnings included the motif of the return of Helen from the dead to be Faustus’s ‘paramour’.
*
But even apart from Goethe’s deliberate classical Greek and operatic stylizations, which differentiate ‘Helena’ not only from Part One but from most of the rest of Part Two as well, its story would make almost as much sense on its own if the hero’s name were not Faust but, say, Roland or Rinaldo or Walther von der Vogelweide; Mephistopheles has in any case changed both his name and his sex. A spectator or reader who knew nothing of Part One or of the Faustus legend would be
at no great disadvantage. He would be more puzzled by the remaining Acts; but here, even if we know Part One and the legend, some perplexities remain. Why, for instance, is this Second Part called ‘the Second Part
of the Tragedy’?
The word ‘tragedy’ would be appropriate if the fatal Pact, the ‘blood-scribed document’ which the Devil (for it is he) waves in the face of the dead Faust at the end (Sc. 22) of Act V, were to turn out to have remained in force all along; if the hero, for all his great creative exploits and his visions of beauty in nature and art, were nevertheless utterly destroyed in the end by some ingrown taint, the inescapable perduration of an original decision or curse. But no: that scene is written like the comic ending of a medieval mystery play in which the Devil is foiled after all, in this case by the ambiguous small print of his contract plus the distracting ribaldry of a verbal romp with come-hitherish boy angels.

Answers to this can be offered: we can point out for instance that the ‘Prologue in Heaven’ at the beginning of Part One, in which the non-tragic ending is predicted, is in fact not printed as a prologue to ‘the First Part of the Tragedy’ but to
Faust
as a whole. We can then maintain that the two scenes following Faust’s death (Sc. 22 and 23 in the present edition) are jointly an epilogue to the whole drama, which thus becomes a tragedy in two parts framed within a mystery play. Nevertheless, confronted with a ‘Second Part’ which the author himself insists is
‘complétement différente de la premiére’
, and which turns so decisively away from the ultimately naturalistic consistency of tragic drama towards epic and lyric digressiveness, towards the operatic mode, towards allegorical disguise and masquerade, pageant and festival, and not least towards comedy,
*
only the most persistently naïve commentator will seek to interpret it from beginning to end, or indeed at all, in terms of such concepts of traditional dramatic naturalism as the unfolding of a consistent action or Faust’s moral progress; still less should we cling to reading it in terms of the traditional devil’s-bargain story to which the ‘blood-scribed document’ belongs. This much-discussed Pact or Wager, as we saw, already creates much confusion in Part One, its terms having been devised by Goethe about a quarter of a century after he wrote the Gretchen tragedy, with which they are flatly inconsistent; and another quarter-century was to elapse before his main work on Part Two was even begun. In fact the Wager scene only really makes sense if we forget about it completely during the Gretchen tragedy
and during Part Two, Acts I—IV.
*
In Act V, Scene 22, it at last comes into its own, and Goethe consents to close the ring of dramatic form by bringing back a motif that had, essentially, been devised as belonging to the ending. Faust is not ‘damned’ by the ‘loss’ of the Wager, because the contrary outcome had been built into both the Wager scene and the ‘Prologue’ when they were written at the turn of the century; his ‘salvation’, already foreseen in the ‘Prologue’ and enacted at the end of Act V, is the Wager’s proper and only intelligible context.

Goethe wrote
Faust
intermittently over a period of about sixty years, in four widely separated phases of composition which have already been partly considered in the context of Part One.
*
The third of them was at the turn of the century: the
annus mirabilis
1797 and a few years after that, during which both Goethe and his close intellectual partner Schiller published or wrote or began, and intensively discussed with each other, much of their finest work. These were the ‘classical’ years, the Schiller years, which Goethe later called his ‘best period’ (conversation with Boisserée, 3 August 1815); they were the years in which he was most strongly under the influence of Greek tragedy and epic, and in which he began to write ‘Helena’. In June 1797, when he again resumed work on
Faust
, nothing of it had been published except the puzzling and truncated ‘Fragment’ of 1790. It was now that he wrote the ‘Prologue in Heaven’ and decided to divide the whole drama into two parts. He concentrated for the time being on supplying the missing material for the first, but also produced some fragments for the second, writing c.1800 a version of the first 269 lines of ‘Helena’ and sketching, or at least planning, some of the scenes of Act V. His correspondence with Schiller during these years contains not only a number of exchanges on
Faust
but also, in 1797, an important discussion of the nature of dramatic and epic form and their differentiation. According to their agreed theory, drama as such is characterized by logical consistency and economy, the precipitation of the action towards the denouement, the subordination of the parts to a single purpose which the end will bring to fulfilment. In the epic style, on the other hand, ‘sensuous breadth’ is of the essence: a certain discursive lingering over pleasing detail and episode for its own sake, a tendency of the parts to pursue their own enjoyable autonomy rather than remain functions of a tightly controlled, enddirected
whole. All the evidence suggests that whereas Schiller’s instincts inclined him in practice towards drama, and specifically towards tragic drama in which the form is at its purest, Goethe was by nature an epic and lyric writer. Or, more exactly, what Goethe really wanted to do was to write dramatically nuanced epic, or epically and lyrically enriched drama. In the former genre he published, also in 1797, his idyllic short narrative poem of German middle-class life,
Hermann and Dorothea
, which was a brilliant popular and artistic success. He did not repeat this achievement, but its influence is evident in some of the new scenes for Part One written at this time.
*
They reflect a shift towards a more liberal, less austere style of drama, including a tendency towards opera, a form of which both Goethe and Schiller approved for its decisively anti-naturalistic character. With his songs, chants and choruses of soldiers, dancing revellers, angels, demons, and witches in the 1797-1801 scenes, Goethe introduced an element that was to come further into its own in Part Two. Drama does not drop out of sight, but it moves still further from naturalism, and drifts increasingly into epic and other more relaxed modes. His willingness to publish separate instalments of Part Two is itself significant. Even the advance announcement of a non-tragic or supra-tragic denouement in the Prologue could be counted as an additional epic feature; such a procedure (as he had written to Schiller on 22 April 1797) must remove a work from the vulgar sphere of dramatic suspense. As an example he cited Homer’s
Odyssey
, in which the hero’s eventual safe return from his wanderings is implied in the opening lines.

Goethe evidently found that the 1797 theory of epic form accommodated his deepest artistic instincts; but for Schiller, whose classical dramatic masterpieces were written in these last years of his life, logical integration and a carefully constructed overall unity remained essential to dramatic form as such. To the author of
Maria Stuart
, Goethe’s dramatic work seemed (as he frankly remarked to him in a letter of 26 December 1797) ‘epically flawed’ rather than truly tragic. Under his influence, Goethe made serious efforts to think of
Faust
as a work which, when finished, would be an intellectually integrated whole, as required by the official theory; and in his letters to him, as we have seen, he often refers apologetically to his doubts on this score.
*
In the summer of 1797, probably at Schiller’s prompting, he appears to have worked out a plan for the unfinished two-part drama
and to have set down a detailed written scheme, from which however only a brief and highly obscure fragment has survived (see paralipomenon BA5 and note). Schematic analysis was uncongenial to the creative process by which this unclassifiable work came into being. Nevertheless, on the evidence of remarks attributed to him by conversation-partners at this period and later, Goethe remained ambiguous on the question of whether
Faust
is an intellectual unity, with a central theme or idea running through both parts. He is on record as claiming both that there is (but he will not say what it is) and that there is not (or at least that he does not know of one). Heinrich Luden, for instance, a young history professor from Berlin, visited him in the summer of 1806, shortly after he had finished Part One and sent it off to his publishers; Luden of course knew only the 1790 ‘Fragment’, but claimed to be able to quote most of that by heart. With great obsequiousness he ventured to express some scepticism as to whether this ‘fragment’ could ever become part of a whole. Goethe, very much on the defensive, insisted that it was and would be so, that there was a central point, a basic idea, and that if Luden found contradictions in the ‘Fragment’, it was because he did not appreciate sufficiently that in poetry there are no contradictions, only in real life. How strange an idea Luden must have of the way
Faust
had been written: did he suppose the poet ‘simply did not know what he was about, but started writing at random and straight into the blue, merely using the name of Faust as a thread on which to string one bead after another in case they got lost’? (conversation with Luden, 19 August 1806). Later, more than twenty years after Schiller’s death, when he was no longer under his rationalizing influence and had written and published ‘Helena’, Goethe was talking to his young and pedantic companion Ecker-mann (conversation with Eckermann, 6 May 1827): he reverted to the point on which he had expressed himself so emphatically to the young and pedantic Luden, and even used the same metaphor to say what appears to be the exact opposite: