B00ARI2G5C EBOK (9 page)

The theme of man’s struggle against elemental chaos, beginning historically in the
Meteorology
essay and the 1825-6 Act V material, is (in the structural dramatic sequence) first announced in the ‘antecedent’ Act IV, the function of which is to show how Faust comes to be in a position to execute his plan of mastering the sea. But here another problem arises. In the final, 1831 stage of the work, in the months in which he wrote the whole of Act IV and the Philemon and Baucis scenes, Goethe presents Faust in so negative a light that the effect of the macro-theme is prejudiced, and in the view of some critics destroyed. In this 1831 stratum (and here Goethe may again have been influenced by external contemporary events) Faust appears, despite the impressiveness of his project, as the very opposite of mature or ‘perfectible’; indeed, the sharpest expression of this view would be to say that in the last stage of his career he becomes a criminal or a madman. Nevertheless, in the paradoxical final conclusion which many readers have found unacceptable, Faust is ‘saved’: Goethe thus adheres to his earlier ‘Salvationist’ plan which goes back certainly as far as 1825 and probably much further. In considering the events of Acts IV and V, we must bear both sides of this paradox and final ironic ambiguity in mind.

In the opening scene of Act IV (Sc. 14) the two serious poetic high points are the already mentioned transitional soliloquy (10039-66) and the speech (10198-233) in which Faust expounds ‘with passionate excitement’ his vision of driving back the sea. In between, we return to the basically comic mode of contemptuous
badinage
between Faust and Mephistopheles, familiar from Part One and from the ‘Mothers’ scene in Part Two. Mephistopheles, having borrowed another magic object from the
Märchen
tradition, arrives on seven-league boots to meet his client among high mountain peaks, a landscape not unlike that of the Prologue to Act I, a previous significant turning-point. The venue prompts Mephistopheles to some incidental geological discussion with Faust, echoing the dispute between Anaxagoras and Thales (7851-72). Faust’s view is instinctively ‘neptunistic’: to him it is self-evident that nature’s creative processes are slow and gradual, and that the theory of violent volcanic upheaval is of the Devil. In the context of the rest of this Act we may say that the corresponding view of political change is metaphorically implied here as well. Mephistopheles then asks for his further instructions, and the dialogue proceeds, again along familiar lines, to contrast Faust’s high-mindedness with Mephistopheles’ cynicism. The most important parallel with Part One, however, is the development of this diabolic role into its practical corollary: as before, Faust’s passionate wishes, the very expression of which gives them a certain nobility, must be not only mocked but corrupted in the very process of their fulfilment, vitiated in their translation into reality. As before, Goethe’s Devil is the spirit not only of negation, but also of realization: the shadow that in the tragic interpersonal world of humanity falls between the vision and the act. In the present case, Faust first scorns the offer of princely wealth and a life devoted merely to luxury and pleasure (10136-54, 10160-75); he then outlines his plan, which involves the acquisition of property and power, but as the means to a great deed. Again he accuses Mephistopheles of being incapable of understanding the needs of the human spirit, which are essentially creative; and again Mephistopheles need not argue with this, since he will now immediately begin to corrupt Faust’s project, to turn his creativeness into destruction.

At the end of the BA 70 sketch we read that Faust acquires great wealth after waging war on the monks who had tried to seize the castle in Germany into which (in this early plan) he had magicked
the Helen episode; there is no mention here of the Emperor, whose only role in BA 70 was to receive Faust at court and request the Helen and Paris apparitions. In the 1831 version the Emperor is reintroduced with great prominence, his story being taken up from the point at which Faust and Mephistopheles left it in Act I. The introduction of paper money has of course led to inflation and economic chaos, and the right of the pleasure-seeking Emperor to rule has been called in question. In the hope of replacing him with a prince who will bring about stability and justice, a faction of the high nobility and clergy has elected a rival Emperor (
Gegenkaiser
). The resulting war has reached a critical point, and Mephistopheles now inveigles Faust into magically intervening on the legitimate Emperor’s side, in the expectation of being rewarded with the lands along the sea-coast. Great emphasis, partly sinister and partly comic, is laid on the diabolic character of Faust’s military intervention. Basically Goethe is here reviving material from the old Faust legend, according to which Dr Faustus used his magic arts to win battles for the Emperor Charles V. Mephistopheles now appears to be largely in control of events, as in Act III. Presumably briefed by him, Faust presents himself to the beleaguered Emperor as the agent and emissary of a notorious magician whose life the Emperor once spared when on a progress through Italy at the time of his coronation; the ‘necromancer of Norcia’ (a place in the Sabine Hills long associated with the black arts) is now supposedly repaying his debt of gratitude for having been snatched from the stake at the last moment (10439-52). The battleground is mountainous terrain, and among the helpers and servers provided or proposed by Mephistopheles and Faust are mysterious earth-wights referred to as ‘the mountain people’ (10320) and as ‘ancient human powers from primal mountains’ (10317 f.); this theme is strikingly developed by Faust in 10425-36.
*
Mephistopheles conjures up a phantom army by sending demons to animate suits of medieval armour (10557-64
*
), and the enemy is further terrified at crucial moments by magic floods (10717-41) and magic fire (10742-62). He also produces three monstrous fightingmen with (in the German text) biblical names
*
: these go back to the BA 70 version, and appear again in the Philemon and Baucis episode (written at the same time as Act IV), as if to make a symbolic link between the violence of the war and the unintended violent criminality of Faust’s eviction of the old couple. They appear to have
demonic powers, and their activities help to complete the rout of the enemy forces.

The rightful but weak and foolish Emperor is restored to his throne by these dubious means; he has risen above his weakness and foolishness at only one point, when he learns that a rival Emperor threatens him.
*
The latter, whom we are perhaps meant to think of as a Napoleonic figure and a potentially just ruler, has been utterly destroyed. The first act of the restored Emperor is the ceremonial granting of titles and offices of state to the four princes who have officially assisted him in the war; their functions will include that of electing future emperors. This scene is a foreshortened and ironic expression of the basic constitution of the Holy Roman Empire, as promulgated by Charles IV in his Golden Bull of 1356.
*
Written in the formal alexandrine metre of the French classical drama and its German imitations, the scene appears to be intended to present the restored Emperor as a ruler hallowed by centuries of tradition and legitimacy, while at the same time suggesting his actual dependence on the princes he purports to create; in particular, he is under the power of the Church. The Lord Chancellor, speaking as Archbishop, affects concern for the young ruler’s spiritual welfare in view of the ‘satanic’ means he has used to re-establish his throne, and demands as penance an enormous gift of property in the form of an ecclesiastical foundation (10981-11002). This rich comic vein of anticlerical satire was one of which Goethe had never tired since the early
Urfaust
days (see Part One, Sc. 12); the Act even ends with one of the stock devices of classical comedy, when the Archbishop makes his reverential exit but returns twice with ever more rapacious afterthoughts, including the demand that the entire revenue of the lands reclaimed from the sea by the accursed sorcerer be paid to the Church. In Goethe’s plan, this last part of the Act was to have contained a scene showing Faust’s formal enfeoffment with the coastal lands: curiously, however, he omitted this important dramatic moment, just as he had omitted the (as one might have thought) equally important scene at the end of Act II in which Faust was to have been granted permission to remove Helen from the underworld (see above, p. xxxiii f.). Once again, a significant dramatic link, a piece of story-line, is left to the reader’s imagination. In each case, Goethe may have felt that such a scene was out of keeping with the essentially comic, perhaps ‘epic’ character of the rest of the Act, or
that the link was too obvious to need spelling out; in any event, in both cases it was left in the form of fragmentary sketches.
*
Nevertheless, the underlying theme of Faust’s acquisition of vast tracts of land still remains central to Act IV, and Goethe seems to suggest that by the way in which this has been done it is Faust, as much as the Emperor, who becomes morally vulnerable.

This whole last-written part of
Faust
needs to be seen against the background of Goethe’s political views in general and the European events of 1830 in particular. Goethe, who from the age of 26 had been in the service of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, an absolute but enlightened ruler, was always strongly anti-revolutionary. His poetic answer to the first French Revolution was
Hermann and Dorothea
(1797), with its idyllic picture of small-town or semi-rural German bourgeoisie, set against the turbulent background of the Revolution and its international consequences. Notoriously, he professed great admiration for Napoleon, but with reservations which are also on record. After 1815, when in the general settlement his patron was created Grand Duke and the Weimar territories were enlarged, Goethe was more of a restorationist than ever. It was his conviction that revolutions are to be blamed in the first instance on the rulers, on their failure to be sufficiently enlightened autocrats to introduce necessary social reforms at the right time and the right pace. But under no circumstances was violent popular intervention to be countenanced: it was ‘unnatural’, like a volcano or an earthquake. The ‘revolutionary mob’ is motivated in practice only by the basest self-interest (conversation with Eckermann, 27 April 1825), and the young and ignorant should keep out of high matters of State (conversation with Eckermann, 21 March 1831). The so-called July Revolution of 1830, by which the last legitimate Bourbon king of France was deposed, was deeply shocking to him, seeming as it did to threaten a repetition of the tragedy of 1789; nor was he much reassured by the brevity of the upheaval and the precarious replacement of Charles X by Louis Philippe, a relatively liberal and very bourgeois prince from the Orléans branch of the dynasty. There were also minor repercussions in Germany—student riots and uprisings, for instance—as near home as Jena. But Goethe also felt that moral responsibility lay with the King, for not having adopted the right reforming policies: Charles X, like Louis XVI before him, had let down the cause of progress, and betrayed his duty as a prince.
Goethe’s philosophy of political and social change seemed to be in ruins: was any other programme on offer?

Here we must note that in the years before the July Revolution, and especially in the last year and a half of his life that followed it, Goethe had acquainted himself with the teachings of the so-called Saint-Simoniens or Saint-Simonistes, the followers of Claude-Henri, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), the eccentric scion of a ducal family more famously represented by the memorialist Louis, Due de Saint-Simon, the caustic observer of Louis XIV’s court. Claude-Henri, turned social philosopher, instructed his valet to wake him every morning with the words ‘Souvenez-vous, Monsieur le Comte, que vous avez de grandes choses à faire’. Goethe, an assiduous reader of
Le Temps
and
Le Globe
, had his attention drawn to this man by an obituary published in 1825, the year of his resumption of work on
Faust
. Five years later he was prompted by the July Revolution to delve more deeply into the ideas of what was now a flourishing intellectual sect, professing a new and radical programme of sociopolitical reorganization. In May 1831, just as he was working on the last stratum of
Faust
, he read Armand Bazard’s official
Exposition de la doctrine saint-simonienne
, which disturbed him even more than the Revolution itself. The ‘Saint-Simoniens’, starting from a meritocratic work ethic, advocated the introduction of social equality and the abolition of hereditary land tenure and all other hereditary rights; property was to be distributed by an enlightened oligarchy of ‘leaders’ on the basis of merit, rather as in the Soviet Communist system of the twentieth century the party authorities moved writers (for instance) into smaller or larger apartments according to their productivity. The Saint-Simonien movement also developed a strongly religious colouring, with an ‘église’, a special symbolic costume, and a ‘père suprême’ for whom a ‘holy bride’ was to be selected. Eventually the French authorities banned the brotherhood in the interests of public morals, and about six weeks before his death Goethe learnt with satisfaction of the arrest of its leader.

It is probable that Scenes 15-20 of
Faust
Part Two reflect to some extent Goethe’s sceptical and pessimistic reaction to these political and ideological developments. The Emperor appears as not wholly unsympathetic, but as idle and irresponsible; the clergy and aristocracy are cynical and self-seeking; at the other end of the scale, Buster, Bagger, and Hugger, the three
‘allegorische Lumpe’
, as the
German text calls them (10329), who end up plundering the defeated rival Emperor’s treasure, probably represent the detested
Lumpen-proletariat
, as Goethe might have called it at a later date. All this could well be read as a gloomy and sardonic symbolic commentary on what Goethe, in his remarkable last letter to Wilhelm von Humboldt written five days before his death (17 March 1832), describes as ‘a bewilderment of counsel (which) rules the world, urging bewildered action’. Can we interpret the final actions and speeches of Faust himself in the same way? In this context it is worth noting that existing and proposed laws concerning property, possession, and dispossession were a central theme in the Saint-Simonien system; also, that in 1821 Saint-Simon himself, in one of his pamphlets, had called for the radical agricultural reorganization of France, the recultivation of barren areas, the draining of swamps, and the building of roads, bridges, and canals. It was probably fairly common for forward-looking intellectuals early in the industrial era to imagine future large-scale civil engineering projects of this kind; at any rate, Saint-Simon’s disciple Barthélémy-Prosper Enfantin was one of the first to suggest a canal through the isthmus of Panama. Such a plan was also described by Goethe’s friend the scientist Alexander von Humboldt (Wilhelm’s brother), and Goethe himself, to judge by a conversation with Eckermann in 1827, was fascinated by the thought not only of a Panama canal (which he was sure the Americans would eventually build) but also of a British Suez canal and a German Rhine-Danube canal, though he was doubtful about the likelihood of the latter. He would be glad, he said, to live another fifty years for the sake of witnessing such achievements (conversation of 21 February 1827). The organization of nature, the mastery of the sea by the human mind: something of this futuristic excitement may have been present in Goethe’s imagination as he envisaged Faust’s final project—and some misgiving as well, for reasons which nearly two centuries of industrial and technological development since Goethe’s time have made all too obvious.