B00ARI2G5C EBOK (44 page)

There is some dispute about what the third apparition should be, and the already conjured spirits become restless; several important phantoms appear together. Bizarre complications ensue, and finally the theatre and the spirits disappear simultaneously. The real Faust lies in the background in a swoon, with three lamps shining on him; Mephistopheles takes to his heels, the onlookers begin to suspect that there are two of them, and there is a general feeling that things are not as they should be.

When Mephistopheles meets Faust again he finds him in a most passionate condition. He has fallen in love with Helen, and now orders his magical factotum to summon her up and deliver her into his arms. There are difficulties about this. Helen belongs to the underworld, and although magic arts can draw her out of it, they cannot hold her. Faust insists; Mephistopheles undertakes the task. Infinite longing on Faust’s part for the supreme beauty he has now recognized. An old castle is chosen as the residence of the latter-day Paris; its owner has gone to the wars in Palestine, but its keeper is a magician. Helen appears: her bodily form has been restored to her by a magic ring. She believes she has come from Troy and is just arriving in Sparta. She finds everything lonesome and longs for company, especially male company which all her life she could never do without. Faust appears as a German knight, a likeness most strangely contrasting with the heroine from antiquity. She finds him odious; but since he has a flattering tongue, she gets used to him little by little, and he becomes the successor of so many heroes and demigods. The offspring of this union is a son, who is no sooner born than he dances, sings and hews the air like a fencer. It must be mentioned that the castle is surrounded by a magic circle, and these half-real beings can survive only if they remain within this enclosure. The rapidly growing boy is the joy of his mother’s heart. He may do whatever he pleases, being only forbidden to cross a certain stream. But one festive day he hears music from the other side and sees the country people and the soldiers dancing. He crosses the boundary-mark and mixes with them, becomes involved in a brawl, wounds a number of people, but is finally killed with a consecrated sword. The castle magician retrieves his body. His mother is inconsolable, and as she wrings her hands in despair she rubs the ring off her finger and falls into Faust’s arms, but he embraces only her empty robe. Both mother and son have vanished. Mephistopheles,
who has in the meantime assumed the shape of an aged housekeeper-woman and witnessed all these events, tries to console his friend and tempt him to a desire for riches. The lord of the castle has perished in Palestine, monks try to seize the property, their benedictions dissolve the magic circle. Mephistopheles advises Faust to resort to physical force, and provides him with three helpers and servers called Buster, Bagger and Hugger. Faust now judges himself to be sufficiently equipped and dismisses Mephistopheles and the castellan; he makes war on the monks, avenges his son’s death and wins great possessions. In the course of all this he grows old, and how the story continues will be seen when at a future date we assemble the fragments, or rather the separately composed passages of this Second Part, and thereby preserve some material that will be of interest to our readers.

(
c) Unpublished synopsis (1826) of an early conception of Act II (from paralipomenon BA 73
*
)

(…)The old legend tells us (and the scene is duly included in the puppet play) that Faust in his lordly arrogance requires Mephistopheles to procure for him the beautiful Helen of Greece, and that Mephistopheles after some demur consents to do so. In our own version we felt in duty bound not to omit so significant a motif; it is hoped that the following pages may serve for the time being as an account of how we have sought to discharge this obligation, and what we have judged to be a fitting introduction to the theme.

During a great feast at the German Emperor’s court, Faust and Mephistopheles are commanded to conjure up spirits; unwillingly, but having no choice, they evoke the required apparitions of Helen and Paris. Paris enters, and the ladies are in ecstasies; the men vainly seek to cool their enthusiasm by criticizing him on this point and that. Helen enters, and the men are beside themselves; the women examine her closely, and contrive to cast a derogatory light on this splendid figure by mocking the heroic size of her feet and her ivory complexion which is in all probability painted on, but above all by casting dubious aspersions which are indeed only too well founded in her true history. Paris stoops to embrace her, and Faust, carried away by such sublime beauty, overboldly tries to thrust him aside;
a thunderclap fells him, the apparitions vanish, and the feast ends in tumult.

Faust lies in a long and heavy trance-like sleep, during which his dreams are visibly and circumstantially enacted before the eyes of the audience; but he is recalled to life, steps forward in an exalted state, entirely absorbed by a lofty vision, and vehemently demands from Mephistopheles the possession of Helen. Mephistopheles, not liking to admit that he has no competence in the classical Hades and is not even a welcome visitor there, resorts to his former well-tried method of driving his employer hither and thither in all directions. This leads to all manner of remarkable developments, and in the end, to allay his master’s impatience, Mephistopheles persuades him to pay a visit—
en passant
as it were and
en route
to his destination—to Professor Doctor Wagner (for such is now the latter’s academic status). They find him in his laboratory, crowing triumphantly over the success he has just had in bringing a chemical mannikin into existence.

This creature now immediately shatters his luminous glass retort, and emerges from it as an active, well-formed little midget. The recipe for his progeniture is hinted at in mystical terms; he gives demonstrations of his talents, and in particular it becomes clear that his head contains a general historical universal calendar, for he can at any given moment state what has happened in human affairs whenever, since the creation of Adam, there has been the same configuration of the sun, moon, earth and planets. And sure enough, he at once shows off this talent by announcing that the present night exactly coincides with that in which preparations were made for the battle of Pharsalus and on which neither Caesar nor Pompey slept a wink. On this point he falls into an argument with Mephistopheles, who on the evidence of the Benedictine fathers will not accept that that great event occurred at this hour, but declares it to have been several days later. In reply it is pointed out to him that the Devil has no business relying on the statements of monks. But since he obstinately insists that he is right, the dispute seems likely to disappear into irresoluble chronological controversy; the chemical mannikin, however, now gives further proof of his profound historical-mythical nature, and draws attention to the simultaneous occurrence of the Classical Walpurgis Night, which since the beginning of the mythical world has always been celebrated in Thessaly, and
which in accordance with the basic epochal coherence of world history was indeed the real occasion of the disaster they are discussing. The four of them decide to go there, and Wagner, for all his haste, does not forget to take a clean glass phial with him, hoping that with luck he may be able to collect here and there the elements needed for the making of a little chemical woman. He puts the glass in his left and the chemical mannikin in his right breast pocket, whereupon they entrust themselves to the travelling cloak. A flying commentary from the pocketed mannikin provides them with an unending flood of geographical and historical detail on every place they pass over; and this, together with the lightning speed of their conveyance, quite distracts their minds until at last they set foot on the plain of Thessaly, under the bright but waning moon.

Here on the desolate heath they first encounter Erichtho, who is greedily breathing in the inextinguishable smell of decay that hangs over these fields. She has been joined by Erichthonius, and we are now given etymological proof of the close kinship between these two, of which the ancients knew nothing. Unfortunately, since he is rather lame, she is often obliged to carry him on one arm, and even, when the young prodigy displays a peculiar passion for the chemical mannikin, to take the latter on her other arm too—a matter on which Mephistopheles does not fail to make malicious comment.

Faust has become involved in conversation with a sphinx which is sitting there on its back paws, and they embark on an endless exchange of the most abstruse questions and enigmatic answers. Nearby, in the same posture, sits a watchful griffin of the gold-guarding species, who interrupts them from time to time, though without shedding the least light on anything. A colossal ant, also a gold-hoarder, has joined them, and confuses the discussion still further. But with our minds already at such desperate odds, we must now lose faith in our senses as well. Empusa appears, having put on an ass’s head in honour of today’s feast, and proceeds to change into further shapes, thereby provoking the other well-defined figures to restless impatience, though not to self-transformation. Sphinxes, griffins, and ants now appear in infinite profusion, developing out of themselves as it were. We see indeed all the monsters of antiquity, swarming and running to and fro: chimeras, goat-stags and half-human hybrids, together with numerous many-headed snakes. Harpies flutter and flit about like bats, circling uncertainly; even the dragon Python
appears in the plural, and the Stymphalian birds of prey, with their sharp beaks and webbed feet, come whizzing past one after another as quick as arrows. But suddenly, hovering over them all like a cloud, comes a procession of sirens, singing and making music: they plunge into the Peneus and bathe, plashing and piping, then settle on the trees by the riverside and sing the sweetest of songs. Nereids and Tritons now begin by excusing themselves, since they are prevented by their bodily shape from joining in this feast, notwithstanding the proximity of the sea. But they then invite the whole company very pressingly to come and take their pleasure in the various waters and gulfs and islands and coasts of the neighbourhood; part of the crowd follows this enticing invitation and plunges seawards.

Our travellers, however, being more or less accustomed to such spook-shows, scarcely notice all this as it hums around them. The chemical mannikin, creeping about on the ground, picks out of the soil a whole lot of phosphorescent atoms, some radiating blue light and others purple. He conscientiously hands them over to Wagner for his phial, though he doubts if they can ever be used to make a female chemical midget. But when Wagner, to inspect them more closely, gives them a good shake, whole cohorts of Pompeyan and Caesarean troops appear, eager perhaps to retake the component parts of their individualities by storm and thus achieve legitimate resurrection. And indeed they nearly succeed in reassuming these inanimated corporealities; but the four winds, which have been buffeting each other all night, protect the present owner, and the phantoms hear from every side the unwelcome message that the remnants of their Roman greatness have long ago been whirled away in all directions and taken up into a million creative processes to be formed anew.

The tumult is not lessened, but so to speak appeased for a moment, when attention is drawn to an event in the middle of the wide plain. There the earth first quakes, then swells up, and a mountain range is formed, running right up to Scotusa and down to the Peneus, even threatening to block the river. The head and shoulders of Enceladus thrust themselves out of the ground, for sure enough, he has been burrowing along under sea and land to join the important celebration. Flickering flames come licking up out of various chasms. Natural philosophers, likewise inevitably present on this occasion, begin vehemently disputing the phenomenon, Thales
ascribing everything to water and moisture, Anaxagoras seeing molten and melting masses everywhere. They mingle their solo perorations with the rest of the choral hubbub; both quote Homer, and each calls the past and the present to witness. Thales, in a rolling didactic flood of self-complacent argument, relies vainly on spring tides and diluvial cataclysms; Anaxagoras, wild as the element that rules him, speaks with greater passion, and prophesies a rain of meteorites, whereupon one immediately falls down out of the moon. The crowd hails him as a demigod, and his adversary is obliged to retreat to the sea-shore.

But before the mountain ravines and summits have even settled into their firm shapes, swarms of pygmies emerge from the gaping chasms round about: as the giant is still heaving himself upwards, they take possession of his upper arms and shoulders and use them as dancing-floors and playgrounds. At the same time countless hosts of cranes circle with shrill cries round the hairy summit of his head, as if they were flying over dense forests, and this promises a delightful warlike spectacle before the end of the festivities.

These many events and others as well we must imagine, if we can, as simultaneous, for that is how they happen. Mephistopheles in the meantime has made the acquaintance of Enyo, whose grandiose ugliness has so startled him that he has nearly lost his composure to the point of uttering rude and offensive exclamations. But he pulls himself together, and bearing in mind that she has lofty ancestors and is influentially connected, tries to win her favour. They understand each other and come to an agreement, the stated terms of which do not seem to amount to much, but which has hidden implications that are all the more remarkable and fraught with consequence. Faust for his part has sought out Chiron, who lives in the mountains nearby and is making his usual round. A serious tutorial interview with this primeval pedagogue is disturbed, if not interrupted, by a group of Lamiae, who continually circle in and out between Chiron and Faust: attractive women of all kinds, blonde, dark, tall, short, dainty and buxom, each of them speaking or singing, walking or dancing, darting or gesticulating, so that if Faust had not received into his heart the supreme image of beauty, he would inevitably have been seduced. And Chiron meanwhile, old and incorruptible as he is, seeks to explain to his new and intelligent acquaintance the principles he has applied in educating his noble
heroes; thus we hear the story of the Argonauts, with Achilles as the climax. But when the pedagogue comes to describe the results of his efforts, it is not a very cheerful one; for they have just gone on living and acting as if they had not been educated at all.