And with brave heart on bold career I enter!”
This is a great improvement, no doubt; but, as Faust never does anything to the end of his career without magic and the fellowship of the Devil, the activity into which he immediately dashes has no effect in exciting the admiration of the spectator. The Emperor, it seems—the same with whom we made acquaintance in the first act—notwithstanding the unexpected aid of hidden treasures and paper money, being a lover of pleasure rather than of governing, has fallen into discredit with his subjects; and a counter-Kaiser—according to the not uncommon practice of Popes and Kaisers in the Middle Ages—is set up. Faust, though he professes himself no great admirer of the special sphere of activity which is opened up by war, nevertheless, for the love he bears to the Emperor, who is a good fellow with a thousand foibles, allows himself to be persuaded by Mephistopheles to take part in the war against the counter-Kaiser. This war, as was to be expected with Mephistopheles behind scenes, is brought speedily to a glorious conclusion, and that specially by the intervention of the three mighty men of David (2 Sam. xxiii. 8), and a host of Undenes with water juggleries, whom Mephistopheles calls to the rescue: and the Doctor, like Bellerophon in Homer, is rewarded for his heroic soldiership by an extensive grant of land along the sea-coast, great part of which, however, has yet to be redeemed from the waves. So ends act the fourth.
Act fifth exhibits our hero, now in extreme old age—exactly one hundred years, we learn from Eckermann—after some seven or eight decades of mortal life spent first in all sorts of vain speculation, and then in all sorts of idle dissipation and lawless indulgence, at length settled down as a landed proprietor, a great agricultural improver, a redeemer of waste lands from the sea, a builder of harbours, and a promoter of trade. But in the midst of engrossing business and continued occupation, as much, at least, as axe and spade, ditch and dyke can furnish him withal, he is the old man still, discontented and unhappy. The lord of a vast tract of sea-coast, and of uncounted acres, he is miserable, because an old peasant and his old wife—Baucis and Philemon—are the owners of a little cottage near his house, and a few lime trees, which deform his lawn and obstruct his view. ’Tis the old story of Ahab, King of Israel, and Naboth’s vineyard (1 Kings xxi.), as Mephistopheles, who is well versed in Scripture, takes occasion to inform us. Well, what is to be done? The attendant fiend of course undertakes (like certain Highland proprietors whom we hear of) to expel the good old people from their old dwelling; and Faust, like the same Caledonian aristocracy, solaces his conscience with the salve that he will provide the good people a far more valuable and more convenient lodging in some remote corner of his estate. Meanwhile Mephistopheles, not over scrupulous about means, and not being able to persuade the stiff-necked and timid old snails to creep out of their shell, settles the matter—as has been practised also in the Scottish Highlands—by applying fire to habitation and habitant at once; the pious old pair fall a sacrifice to the greed of the master and the violence of the man; and with this blood on his hands, Faustus now prepares, with all possible heroic confidence, to meet death and to mount up to Heaven.
We are now arrived at the closing scene of this eventful history. ’Tis midnight: the scene is Faust’s castle; before the door of his chamber four grey old hags appear. “I,” says the one, “am called Want.” “I,” says the second, “Guilt.” “I,” says the third, “Care.” “I,” quoth the fourth, “am called Need.” Of these four, however, only one can do, or attempt to do, any harm to the magical Doctor, for he is now a rich man; and rich men can know nothing of Want or Need, nor of Guilt, either, we are told; but Care leaps in through the keyhole, and annoys him a little before his dismissal. The Doctor, however, is heroically determined not to yield to this demon; and he finds his sure remedy for all unpleasant cogitations in unremitted work. The great pioneers of land improvement, canals and ditches, must be proceeded with; and the indefatigable Doctor, even after pestilential Care had blown a blinding blast into his eyes, marches into the grave with the spade and the pick-axe in his hand. Then commences a scene of a most singular character. The terrible jaws of Hell yawn wide on the left side of the stage, and a contest commences between Mephistopheles on the one hand, and the descending angels on the other, for the possession of the soul of Faust. At first the Evil Spirit seems confident of success, strengthened as he is by a numerous host of multiform imps and devils, who come up in swarms from the steaming mouth of the abyss; but the fury of this malignant host is soon disarmed in a very simple way, by a band of young blooming boy-angels scattering a shower of celestial blossoms over the heads of the infernals. Beneath the fire of these apparently innocent weapons, the legion of horned, and dumpy, and wizened devils fall head foremost into the pit whence they had issued; while their mighty master, Mephistopheles, stands so captivated by the bright bloom and the pretty looks of the rosy cherubs, that in the very moment when heroism is most necessary, he loses all his manhood, and a few beardless boys, with psalms and flosculosities, cheat him of the immortal soul which was his by the signature of blood, and by the seal of a lifetime spent in giving free rein to all sorts of foolish fancies and unprincipled iniquities.
After this catastrophe there remains nothing but the formal introduction of Faust to Heaven, for which the closing scene is appropriated. The Virgin Mary, surrounded by pious Anchorites and fair Penitents, with Fathers seraphic and ecstatic, is revealed in the heavenly glory, awaiting the arrival of redeemed souls from earth; and immediately the band of angels that had worsted Mephistopheles appear aloft in triumph, bearing the immortal part of Faust, and singing a hymn, the words of which are intended to convey the moral of the piece:—
“A rescued spirit to the goal
We bring of Earth’s probation;
The ever-active striving soul
Works out its own salvation.
And when, in love and mercy strong,
His God and Saviour meets him,
The angel-choir, to join their throng,
With hearty welcome greets him.”
Among the throng of redeemed Penitents one appears conspicuous, whose name, while she lived on earth, was Margaret; she is close by the Virgin, interceding for Faust, and ever as she mounts with the Queen of Heaven to higher stages of glory, draws the newcomer after her to share in her sempiternal blessedness. The curtain then falls; the redeemed throngs ascend; and the scene resounds with the mystical chorus:—
“Earth and earthly things
Type the celestial,
Shadow and shorn
Is all glory terrestrial;
Beauty immortal
The rapt spirit hails,
Where the eternally-
Female prevails.”
After so detailed an account of this rich and various exhibition of imaginative power, the student of this great world-drama, to use a German phrase, can have no difficulty in understanding the theology and the theodicy of the great Teutonic poet. The promise of the Prologue in Heaven is fulfilled; there is no such thing as everlasting punishment; and the Evil Spirit is sure to be cheated even of the souls for whom he has most surely bargained, if that soul, after staining itself with any number of sins, only perseveres at last in some course of honourable and useful activity. This is not according to the common Protestant conception in such cases; for Protestantism, having abolished Purgatory, lies under a necessity of peopling Tartarus more largely; and besides, after such a solemn compact with the Evil One, and twenty-four years (for that is the number given in the legend) spent in unrepented indulgence of all sensualities and vanities, it was dramatically as well as theologically inconsistent to redeem such a deliberate and persistent sinner from the damnation for which he had bargained. But the hell of the mediæval Catholic Church, though terrible enough in its pictorial presentation (as many an Italian cloister testifies) was more accommodating in its adaptation to the many forms of human weakness; and so, to magnify the grace of God, and make Christ all in all, after a fashion which the severe Protestant Calvinist is forced to condemn, the mediæval form of the Faust legend could afford to save Faust, notwithstanding his blood-sealed transaction with the Devil; and no one has a right to blame Goethe, morally and theologically, for having adopted this view of the matter. But, though the salvation of Faust, according to the feeling of orthodox mediæval Christianity, is permissible, and even desirable, the manner in which, and the process by which, his salvation is achieved by the German Protestant poet differs very much from the treatment it receives at the hand of the Catholic Church. In Christian theology—and in any healthy system of human Ethics too, I imagine—the forgiveness of a great sinner always implies confession of guilt, and a process, sometimes painful and protracted, of repentance and amendment; but of this not a hint occurs in the second part of Faust; and so the moral instincts of man, which had been so strongly appealed to in the first part, are ignored, with a feeling of great moral dissatisfaction as the unavoidable result. So much for the ethico-theological aspect of the case. Æsthetically, and viewed as a dramatic continuation of the first part, the second part of the poem is much more at fault, and must be pronounced, with all its wealth of imaginative reproduction, and all its luxuriance of rhythmical form, a magnificent failure. If this judgment appears severe, it must be remembered that the very excellence of the first part, considered morally and dramatically, rendered a satisfactory continuation of it, even to the genius of a Goethe, both impolitic and impossible. Who would ever dream of a continuation of Hamlet? Had it pleased our great dramatic master to keep Hamlet alive amid the general catastrophe of the play, as he might lightly have done, the future fate of his hero would only have been a matter of historical curiosity. For dramatic purposes his course was finished. So with Faust. Though he remains on the stage in the pathetic closing scene, dramatically his part is played out. The “Hither to me!” of his fiendish companion is quite enough for the satisfaction of the moral feeling which the catastrophe has excited; all beyond this is a matter, no doubt, for metaphysical speculation and theological solution, but with which the dramatist has nothing to do. But even if there were any feeling in the breast of the spectator, causing him to look for some terrestrial continuation of the sad story which he has been witnessing, by the manner in which he has conducted this continuation the poet has altogether cut himself off from the moral sympathy which so spontaneously flowed as a tribute to his art in the first part. The history of Faust and Margaret, notwithstanding the magical or diabolic background on which it figures, is a simple story of flesh and blood, a story which would remain equally true and equally affecting were the demon and the witches removed altogether from the scene. But now, in this second part, we are charmed by the wand of the fiendish harlequin into a region of mere fancy and phantasmagoria, into a swarming Fair, so to speak, of multitudinous phantasmal figures, through the midst of which the real actors flit to and fro like a few idle civilians amid the ordered files and motley groups of some gigantic host. The primary here is buried in the secondary; the actors are lost in their environment; and the real throughout, in a most unreal fashion, confounded with the ideal. Faust, of course, and Mephistopheles, and even Wagner, peering with glittering eye through the smoke of his alchymical kitchen, are the same creatures of flesh and blood that we were made acquainted with in part one; only all perhaps a little enfeebled in character; Mephistopheles a little more of the conjuror, and a little less of the Devil; Faust much less of a thinker, and not a whit less of a sensualist; Wagner much less modest, and much more besotted in the disnatured studies and fanciful operations of his chemical kitchen. All this is real. But this real Faust becomes enamoured of a phantom Helen; and of this monstrous embrace an ideal poetic child, incarnating, we presume, the contrary beauties of the Classical and the Romantic schools, is the product. Of such a strange jumble we may say truly, as Jeffrey said falsely of Wordsworth’s “Excursion,” “This will never do.” Such a violation of all the principles of common sense and of good taste cannot be pardoned even to Goethe. The faults of men of genius, it has been said, are the consolation of the dunces; but whether the dunces choose to console themselves in this way or not, the fact is certain, that on the stern battlefield of public life, and no less in the flowery realms of imaginative construction, a great genius is precisely the man to make occasionally a great blunder. There maybe some few great things, and some wonderful things, and not a few wise things (as who could expect otherwise from Goethe) in the second part of Faust; but it is certainly neither a great drama nor the just sequence of a great drama. I am inclined to compare it with the rich fanciful work familiar to the students of art, in the so-called Loggie, or galleries of Raphael, in the Vatican. In the first part of Faust, Goethe is a great dramatist; in the second part he is an arabesque painter. It is no small matter to compose poetical arabesques, as our poet has done so luxuriantly in the Classical Walpurgis Night, and other parts of this piece; and a very natural affair, too, one may remark, in the circumstances of the present composition. It is rare, perhaps impossible, in the history of literary manifestation, that a poet should commence a great poem in the fervour of youth, continue it through the firmness of middle life, and finish it in the serenity of an advanced old age, with a homogeneousness of inspiration, and a perfectly consistent handling throughout. Goethe, in particular, was a man who grew, as he advanced, into many new shapes, and, of course, grew out of the old ones; and, though he was to the end a consummate artist, and there was no question of decayed powers, much less of dotage, in the grand old octogenarian, it was an artistic blunder in him to weave the fantastic tissue of fair forms, which amused his later years, into a common web with the tale of strong human passion, which had grown into a well-rounded dramatic shape under the influence of his most fervid youthful inspirations. The error lay in the name and the connection perhaps more than in the matter. A classical Walpurgis Night, or a love adventure with a resuscitated Helen of Troy, might have formed a very pleasing exhibition as a masque or show for an academical celebration—as at Oxford, for instance, in Commemoration season—while, as a second part of Faust, it falls flat. Let it contain as many allegories as the wise old poet-philosopher may have meant to smuggle into it, and as many mysteries as the mystery-loving race of German commentators may have strained themselves to draw out of it; as it stands, and where it stands, and with the claims which it necessarily makes, it remains a brilliant blunder and a magnificent mistake; and with this we must be content. Those whose organ of reverence is stronger than their love of truth, will, of course, think otherwise; and this is no doubt the most suitable excuse for any nonsense that may have been thought or written on the subject; but, if it be a part of the wisdom of life to learn to look calmly on plain facts, even when most disagreeable, it belongs no less to an educated literary judgment to admit honestly the special shortcomings of a great genius, without prejudice to his general merits. An ignorant worship is a poor substitute for a just appreciation.
dramatis personæ
Dr. Henry Faust, a scholar.
Wagner, Faust’s servant.
Mephistopheles, a Devil.
Margaret, Faust’s love. Also called Gretchen.
Martha, Margaret’s neighbour.
Eliza, an acquaintance of Margaret’s.
Valentin, Margaret’s brother.
Altmayer, Brander, Frosch, Siebel, patrons of Auerbach’s Wine Cellar.
Students, Spirits, Women, Angels, Servants, Beggars, Soldiers, Peasants, Cat-Apes, Witches, Director of the Theatre, Leader of the Orchestra, Idealist, Realist, Sceptic, etc.
dedication
Prefixed to the Later Editions of Faust.
Ye hover nigh, dim-floating shapes again,
That erst the misty eye of Fancy knew!
Shall I once more your shadowy flight detain,
And the fond dreamings of my youth pursue?
Ye press around!—resume your ancient reign,—
As from the hazy past ye rise to view;
The magic breath that wafts your airy train
Stirs in my breast long-slumbering chords again.
Ye raise the pictured forms of happy days,
And many a dear loved shade comes up with you;
Like the far echo of old-memoried lays,
First love and early friendship ye renew.
Old pangs return; life’s labyrinthine maze
Again the plaint of sorrow wanders through,
And names the loved ones who from Fate received
