If the complex affinity between Faust and the Homunculus lends a certain unity of structure to Act II, can this unity also subsume the scenes involving Mephistopheles? The notion of bringing the Christian Devil into the world of Helen and Greek mythology, in the stylistically appropriate disguise of an aged hideous hag, belongs properly to the ‘Helena’ Act; the motif appears in paralipomenon BA 70, and the hag had already been identified in the 1800 ‘Helena’ fragment as one of the Phorcyads or Graiae. In the finalized ‘antecedents’ for Act III, Mephistopheles must be shown finding his way to this necessary transformation. In Wagner’s laboratory, the percipient Homunculus has predicted not only that Faust will be ‘in his element’ in the classical world, but that Mephistopheles will also encounter the notorious witches of Thessaly (6977 ff.). Accordingly, much of the ‘Classical Walpurgis Night’ has been devoted to his unfunny lustful adventures (a vein of half-hearted publishable indecency in which Goethe is not at his best); but he has been obliged to recognize that he is quite out of place in a remote pre-Christian world which knows nothing of good and evil or conventional morality. Thus Scene 10 as a whole, if it is a whole, may be said to follow out three thematic strands: Faust’s pursuit of Helen, the Homunculus’s pursuit of bodily existence and eventually of Galatea, and Mephistopheles’ pursuit of the Lamiae and other monsters, as if to demonstrate at his cynical level that all enterprises broadly describable as sexual are much the same. His lengthy contribution to the events ends in his badinage and comical negotiation with the Phorcyads and his metamorphosis into the appearance of one of them. The daughters of Phorcys, so old that they have only one eye and one tooth left between them, live in a place where the sun never shines, and embody a kind of absolute ugliness and squalor, the polar opposite of the absolute beauty represented by Helen. They describe themselves as daughters of the original Chaos, and as a spirit of negation Mephistopheles feels himself instantly akin to them. In Part One, after all, Faust had called him ‘strange son of chaos’ (1383), and he had defined himself as part of the original Darkness (1350). He has, so to speak, returned to his original void to discover a new identity as ‘Phorcyas’ (i.e. ‘a Phorcys-daughter’), and sardonically redefines himself as ‘the well-beloved son’ of Chaos—or possibly its daughter, since, as he also notes, he is now hermaphroditical (8029) like the Homunculus (8256). It is interesting, however, that in the Phorcyad episode Goethe is making a possibly very significant use of a classical Greek parallel, the story of Perseus. The hero Perseus, a son of Zeus, is persuaded by his false friend Polydectes to bring him the head of the Gorgon Medusa, and first seeks out the Phorcyads, who have ancient and powerful connections and are related to the Gorgons; he compels them to help him in his dangerous task by snatching their eye and tooth from them. As Mommsen conjectures, Goethe is here perhaps tacitly suggesting (to readers learned enough to catch the allusion) that Mephistopheles has after all discovered a way of obliging Faust in the matter of Helen by fetching her from Hades himself (8032 f.). In BA 73 there is, in fact, an allusion to important unspecified terms in the agreement between him and the Phorcyads, over and above the loan of the eye and the tooth; and it may be that this explains the degree of magical power* he appears to have over Helen when he reappears in Act III in the Phorcyad mask.
4 ACT III
There is a certain mystery about the abrupt dramatic transition from the ‘Classical Walpurgis Night’ to the opening of the ‘Helena’ Act, which we should not try too hard to dispel. Some earlier commentators even sought to bridge the gap by identifying Helen with the (hermaphroditic) Homunculus, on the assumption that he will by now have undergone the ‘thousand, thousand forms’ of his evolution and become ‘the beautiful human being’ which Goethe had long ago, in his essay on Winckelmann (1805) called ‘the supreme product of nature’s perpetual self-enhancement’. While accepting the relevance of this Goethean remark, we need not be over-literal. As Goethe explained in the letter quoted above, his method was to be content with suggestive juxtaposition. Act III is at least structurally connected to its ‘antecedents’ (as Act II can unofficially be called) by a strong effect of contrast: the creative chaos and flux of the Sea Festival, a half-lit, lost-and-found scene of waves and moonlight, an operatic riot of voices speaking and singing in rhymed verse, suddenly give way to the static, sunlit figure of the heroine, emerging in high relief against this background, the single voice of the protagonist opening her Attic drama in stately trimeters. And there are other contrasts and anticipations: the paradoxical world of the ‘Classical Walpurgis Night’ is not so much classical as pre-classical, archaic, pre-heroic, a pageant not of Olympian gods or Homeric heroes but of figures from earlier stories and a stranger demonology, Sphinxes who confess that Helen is not their period (7197 f.), Galatea who is not the great Aphrodite but her lesser heir, unobtrusive attendants who celebrate the timeless nature-rite regardless of passing centuries and cultures (8370-8); to say nothing, if Mommsen is right, of the hidden Oriental influence. This is a betwixt-and-between world, a condition between reality and fantasy, in which Faust re-experiences his vision of the begetting of Helen, but cannot decide whether he is seeing or dreaming or remembering (7271-312). Helen is, as it were, still in the making, not yet born, not yet ready to step ashore out of the rocking, intoxicating sea (8489 f.). The style is ambiguous, shifting ironically between lyric seriousness and persiflage (7080-98, 7426 ff.). Except for the sinister opening trimeters of the witch Erichtho (7005-39), the incongruous rhymed verse prevails: the ancient trimeter will not resume until Helen herself speaks and a drama in the fully classical style comes into being.
Although the 1826 narrative (BA 73) casts light on the events of the ‘Helena’ Act in certain important respects, it was intended as a preface to these events, and therefore stops short of the beginning of them. For comparison with an earlier (perhaps the earliest) version of what happens after Helen actually appears, we must go back to the 1816 document (BA 70). This relatively brief sketch (which, as we have noted, may represent an even earlier conception than the 1800 ‘Helena’ fragment) tells a fairly straightforward story, foreshadowing the final version at certain points. Faust, infatuated with Helen’s apparition at the imperial court, demands bodily possession of her: he is filled, we are told, with ‘infinite longing for the supreme beauty he has now recognized’. He does not, however, have to make a long journey in time and space to the classical Greek underworld in search of her. Helen, restored to life by the old device of a magic ring, meets him in a medieval German castle which she mistakes for her husband’s palace in Sparta; Faust is disguised as a crusading knight and Mephistopheles as an aged female housekeeper (not yet Hellenized as Phorcyas). A male caretaker with magic powers is also present. The theme of magic is prominent, though the symbolic implications have not been developed. The most important anticipation of the final version is that in the 1816 scenario a magic circle has been drawn round the castle, and Helen can continue her ‘half-real’ existence only if she remains within it. Goethe’s final treatment of this motif of prohibition or restriction will be to take up an ancient Greek parallel: the legend according to which Helen was allowed to return from the dead on condition that she remained on Leuce, an island in the Black Sea. This dispensation had been obtained for her by the hero Achilles, himself now also dead, but permitted to meet Helen on Leuce and there beget from this ghostly union a son called Euphorion. Goethe will adopt the essentials of this story: Achilles as the classical precedent* for Faust’s post-mortal union with Helen, Euphorion as the name of their son,* and the similar stipulation restricting her to a particular territory (in this case Sparta).* In the 1816 scenario the son (not yet named) is also subject to a prohibition: he may go anywhere he likes within the precincts of the castle, but must not cross the magic circle. Prohibitions are of course a very well-known motif in the Märchen and myths of the world (as when Bluebeard’s wife is allowed to open every door in his castle except one, or Adam and Eve may eat of every tree in the garden
except one). In the final version, the one constraint on Euphorion is that he must not attempt to fly. In both versions the son disobeys and is killed, whereupon Helen vanishes (in the 1816 scenario because, wringing her hands in grief, she loses the ring on which her bodily shape depends). The 1816 version ends with a war between Faust and the monks who have dissolved the magic circle and tried to seize the castle;* he defeats them and acquires ‘great possessions’, which seem to foreshadow on a simpler level the lands he eventually wins from the sea in Acts IV and V.
This early ‘inner Märchen about Faust and Helen is the relatively simple basis of the enriched, enhanced, elaborately allegorical final version: the three scenes (11, 12, 13) of Act III. Nor should we lose sight altogether of Goethe’s two earlier subtitles for ‘Helena’, both of which disappeared in the final edition. The 1800 fragment was called ‘Helena in the Middle Ages. A satyric drama. Episode for Faust’: this reminds us that the Helen affair is an ‘episode’, that it will span the centuries in a fantastic manner, and that it is not prima facie a tragedy (the classical Greek ‘satyr play’ was performed immediately after the tragic trilogy as a piece of vulgar light relief). The 1827 ‘Helena’, as we have seen, was announced as ‘a classical romantic* phantasmagoria’. The term ‘phantasmagoria’ is entirely appropriate, since the poet has chosen to operate wholly outside temporal constraints (7433). As Goethe himself pointed out (letter to Boisserée, 22 October 1826), the whole Act spans a period of some three thousand years, beginning with the supposed return of Helen from the Trojan War and ending with the death of Byron which the fall of Euphorion is supposed to symbolize. During all this compressed non-time Helen is ‘alive’ and can bear Faust a son, though at certain moments she wonders whether she is in fact ‘real’ or merely a phantom, as Mephistopheles tauntingly suggests (8876-81, 8930 ff.). These existential doubts give her a certain dramatic pathos, but we need not demand an exact ontology of her status in this Act, by comparison with her phantasmal manifestation in Act I, as some critics have done, insisting at one extreme that the Helen of Act III is real Greek flesh and blood born in the way of nature, or at the other that the whole thing, and perhaps Act II as well, is no more than a dream in Faust’s mind anyway. The point is not whether the Helen of Act III is ‘real’ enough, but whether Faust is by now educationally mature enough, whether he (or Goethe or the European mind) can now achieve a creative union with ‘Helen’, whether he is now qualified to reinstate for a time the fragile classical beauty and classical culture that she represents.* Above all, it is not necessary to dismiss Faust’s encounter with Helen as merely a tragic, ghostly illusion. The basic logic of the traditional story demands in any case that Helen should appear to Faust twice and vanish twice, at least if the motif of the long quest is to be used and if this is to be an episode and not the end of Faust’s adventures; there is no question of her staying with him permanently, and a way must be found of returning her sooner or later to wherever she came from. This does not detract from the symbolic value of their meeting. On the allegorical level, it is a celebratory homage, the final homage of Goethe’s life, to that culture of Greek antiquity which for so long and so profoundly influenced the culture of modern Europe, not least the literary classicism of Weimar which was Goethe’s own personal version of the Renaissance. A celebration, yet also an elegiac recognition that there cannot be a lasting synthesis of ancient and modern. A meeting and mingling of two cultural traditions is allegorized as a magic love-story. The ‘union’ of the lovers could be called short-lived, if it were taking place in time. Nevertheless, the ideal is restated; the high noon of Goethe’s experience, and of German cultural history, becomes that of the symbolic hero.
In the first scene, that of Helen’s supposed homecoming to ancient Sparta, Faust is not present, but is waiting for her to be brought to him, as the tenuous link with the old Faust legend still requires. Scene it opens unambiguously in the manner of an Aeschylean or Euripidean tragedy: the heroine and her chorus of captive Trojan women outside the palace, her expository monologue in iambic trimeters, the chorus answering with lyric odes in triadic form, a foreboding of doom, a monstrous prophetic figure confronting the heroine and the chorus, single-line altercations (‘stichomythia’, as in 8810-25), passages of agitated trochaic tetrameter (8909-29, etc.).* As the situation and the role of Phorcyas-Mephistopheles develop, the style shifts towards comedy (9010-24, 9044-8, and very notably Mephistopheles’ mock-macabre preparations for Helen’s execution, 8937-46). On her consenting to seek the stranger’s protection, the scene clouds over and changes, overleaping the centuries but not moving far in space, and Helen comes to Faust in his medieval castle. In this central scene (12) of the play as well as of Act III, Goethe combines, with great subtlety and originality, the immediate story and its allegorical significance as a marriage of classical and modern cultures. This is done very simply by prosodic metamorphosis. The ancient rhymeless trimeter has been retained until the moment of Faust’s ceremonious entry, but here, hardly perceptibly at first, it begins to disappear: Faust speaks in the iambic pentameters of Shakespeare’s ‘blank verse’, which had become the classic line of Goethean and Schillerian drama, and Helen instinctively answers in the same metre. From this point on, the dialogue is further and progressively enriched with medieval and modern verse forms. Faust’s watchman Lynceus speaks in rhymed quatrains like a Minne-sänger; Helen, puzzled by the recurring sounds that so strangely beautify the ends of his lines, must be instructed by Faust on ‘the way our peoples speak’. As they draw nearer together, she answers him in lines first end-rhymed (9377-84) and then internally rhymed as well (9411-18). This extraordinary poetic courtship also has an Oriental source, revealed by its precedent in Goethe’s own work: one of the poems in the West-Eastern Divan tells the legend of the Persian poet Behramgur, whose beloved mistress Dilaram helped him to invent rhymed verse by echoing his words.* This poem (1818) had in its turn enshrined a personal memory, that of his brief happiness in 1814-15 with Marianne von Willemer, the ‘Suleika’ of the Divan: by a curious interaction of inspiration, their love had also moved Marianne to write love-poems echoing those sent to her by Goethe, in the same style and of a quality equal to his.* In the Faust-Helen passage the dramatic meaning, the autobiographical meaning, and the allegory (‘so far away and yet so near… long past and yet so new’) are perfectly blended.
At the culminating point of Faust’s love-dialogue Phorcyas-Mephistopheles, absent for the last 400 lines since rescuing Helen and her women from the vengeance of Menelaus, bursts in to warn them that the outraged husband is approaching at the head of his army. Unitarian critics who cannot forget Faust’s Wager* in Part One argue that Mephistopheles chooses this moment to interrupt because Faust has just, in effect, blessed the passing moment (9417 f.) and thus probably lost his bet (1699 ff.). But while it is true that the Faust of Act III is the Faust not so much of perpetual striving and divine discontent as of maturity and fulfilment, it would for reasons already mentioned be implausible to press the point about consistency. Nor need we consider too curiously the question of the ‘reality’ or otherwise of the threat from Menelaus which Mephistopheles reports or invents for obvious dramatic reasons. More difficult questions arise when we consider the historical and allegorical aspects of Faust’s supposed presence in Greece and the warlike role he and Menelaus now assume.
Goethe’s earlier plan, sketched as we have seen in the 1816 paralipomenon, was that Helen should appear by magic in a castle in Germany, occupied by Faust while its owner fights in one of the Crusades. When he came to work on the final version in 1825, he modified and developed this idea in the light of his researches at that time into the early history of the Peloponnèse (or the ‘Morea’ as it was also called in medieval and later times). In one of the Elegies that celebrate his own rejuvenating contact with the ‘classical soil’ of Rome in 1788, he had ironically compared himself to a barbarian from the north, taking possession of Rome in the person of his Roman mistress ‘Faustina�
�. What he learnt now about the successive invasions of Greece by various northern barbarian tribes, before and after the sack of ancient Sparta by Alaric the Goth in AD 395, provided him with a similar motif which could be vaguely based on historical fact. The ‘northern’ Faust was to go to the Peloponnèse in search of Helen; he might thus be compared not only to the southward-migrating Germanic tribes of the Dark Ages but also to the not essentially dissimilar crusading settlers from various parts of Western Europe who, in the early thirteenth century, carved up the peninsula, set up usurping principalities all over what was after all a territory of the Christian Byzantine Empire, and built military strongholds at various points. The descriptions by Lynceus (9281-96) and by Faust himself (9446-73) of Faust’s army and its activities identifies him loosely with all these invaders. He is of course a composite and generalized figure, like the Emperor in Acts I and IV, and the same goes for his symbolic ‘Gothic’ castle (9017-30), which need not be thought of as corresponding to any specific place. Goethe adopts a violently compressed time-scale, and treats the events in a highly selective manner, changing historical and geographical facts at will for the sake of his broad general purpose of bringing about some kind of encounter, as his story demanded, between a Greek classical heroine and a German medieval knight. Some details suggest, however, that he may have particularly had in mind the Fourth Crusade and the period immediately following it. At this time, members of the Frankish Villehardouin dynasty, on their way from Palestine to share the spoils of the infamous sacking and desecration of Constantinople in 1204, were blown off course and landed near Pylos (9454 f.). They subdued the whole region, styled themselves ‘princes of Achaea’, and in 1249 their successors finished building a fortress a few miles west of Sparta, at Mystra (Myzethra, modern Greek Mystras, otherwise usually Latinized as Mistra). It has been common to ‘identify’ this as Faust’s castle, although the latter (8994-9002) is considerably further north, near the source of the Eurotas. A more serious discrepancy, however, is that between Faust, as the agent of a high cultural synthesis, and the Villehardouins who were after all little more than brutal adventurers. Their lordship in Mystra was in any case short-lived, since they were decisively defeated by the Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII Paleologus shortly before he also, in 1261, recaptured Constantinople from Western occupation. By the peace settlement, the Frankish invaders were able to remain in the Morea for the time being, but Byzantine rule was restored in Mystra and certain other strongholds (Maina and Monemvasia); cadet members of the imperial family became ‘Despots’ of Mystra, and in the following century Byzantium reconquered the rest of the peninsula. During the 200 years of the Paleologan dynasty, ending with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, the Empire was territorially much reduced and politically in terminal decline; but Mystra became and remained the centre of a great intellectual and artistic revival, which increasingly asserted its debt to the ancient ‘Hellenic’ tradition.* This cultural golden age developed not under Frankish rule or any other Germanic or Western influence, as Faust commentators (Beutler and D. Lohmeyer, for instance) have usually asserted, but as a result of the Byzantine reconquests.
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