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
A bitter call, and left my heart bereaved.
They hear no more the sequel of my song,
Who heard my early chant with open ear;
Dispersed for ever is the favoring throng,
Dumb the response from friend to friend so dear.
My sorrow floats an unknown crowd among,
Whose very praise comes mingled with strange fear;
And they who once were pleased to hear my lay,
If yet they live, have drifted far away.
And I recall with long-unfelt desire
