Many of the echoes here are of Dante, that other spiritual traveller, who is finally guided through the spheres of heaven by Beatrice, his beloved, and granted a vision of the Trinity after St Bernard has interceded for him with the Virgin. Even Dante’s ending is dominated by the ‘Virgin Mother, daughter of her Son’; God himself remains hidden in a flash of the unknowable. In Goethe the absence of God, and especially of Christ, is more pointed. His avoidance of the stylistic error of attempting the celestial judgement scene was certainly due to the fact that the Father and the Son were no longer viable for him as imaginatively serious symbols; on the other hand, something, so to speak, could be done with the Mother, notwithstanding her centrality in the Catholic cult. His attitude to Catholicism was on the whole hostile, though it softened to some extent under the influence (mainly in 1814-15) of Boisserée and the latter’s enthusiasm for medieval art. It is conceivable (as I have tried to suggest elsewhere*) that he might have been less unsympathetic to Eastern Orthodoxy had he known anything about it. But what Faust expresses is a personal synthesis, a symbolic complex not to be construed as realistic in a metaphysical sense—not, that is to say, as corresponding to a system of transcendent realities, as having (in today’s jargon) a transcendent referent. The poem embodies, without metaphysical commitment, the poet’s sense of the real mystery of life; in this it borrows substance and resonance from the main traditions available to Goethe, of which two were pre-eminent. The myth complex of classical antiquity and the myth complex of medieval Christianity could be presented as equipollent alternatives; and this seems to be the sense of their juxtaposition in the 1830 stratum of Part Two, the additions made to it in that year: the ‘Classical Walpurgis Night’ (more especially the final Sea Festival) and ‘Mountain Gorges’. Underlying both is Goethe’s personal myth and mystique of the ‘Eternal Feminine’, of which Galatea, Aphrodite, Luna, and Helen are embodiments no less than the Mater Gloriosa and Gretchen. Even in the words of her most ardent devotee, Goethe’s Virgin Mother is ‘Göttern ebenbürtig (12011, literally ‘born the equal of gods’); the phrase, used also of Helen in Act II,* is an unmistakable paganizing nuance. The synthesis is underlined by Faust’s memorable soliloquy at the beginning of Act IV, a speech that may well, like the rest of the Act, have been written in 1831 (but see above, p. 1) and therefore after ‘Mountain Gorges’, as the possible link between its last two lines (10065 f.), the words of the Virgin (12094 f.), and the last two lines of the whole poem (12110 f.) might suggest. The soliloquy is where Faust comes nearest to expressing both elements in Goethe’s vision; in the final scene he is carried beyond what can be expressed.
Of the celebrated ‘Chorus Mysticus’ (which Goethe originally called ‘Chorus in excelsis’) Staiger has written that it is sung by no one, that it is ‘only a voice filling the universe’. We are already far above the ‘mountain gorges’ among which the scene began: beyond this point lies only that of which the natural world and the world of human love are ‘but a parable’. This is the reality that has been ‘inaccessible’ (unzulânglich probably in the old sense of unzugânglich*) but will now be manifest (Eragnis probably in the old sense of Erdugnis, something grasped by the eye), the deed to which no description was adequate. The enigmatic force of these eight concluding lines (heightened immeasurably, but not explained, by Mahler’s setting*) defies comment; like Faust, we are left wordless, but perhaps in an onward movement into the mystery.
Although the ‘Helena’ Act had been greeted with acclaim in some quarters when it appeared five years earlier, the posthumous release of Part Two as a whole in 1832 was a disappointment for the public. After the strong dramatic meat of Part One, it was now offered obscure, pallid allegory and operatic extravaganza, the work, as it seemed to many, of an octogenarian poet who had outlived his own genius. The initial reception and exiguous stage history of The Second Part of the Tragedy’ has been briefly sketched in the Introduction to Part One (pp. xlvii ff.); notably, it was not until 1876 that an integral performance of both Parts was given in any theatre. Critical reaction to Part Two in the first few decades after its publication ranged from ridicule (as in Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s vulgarly facetious parody ‘Faust: the Third Part of the Tragedy’, by ‘Deutobald Symbolizetti Allegoriowitsch Mystifizinski’) to moral or religious outrage (as with Wolfgang Menzel, who declared that if Faust deserved salvation after destroying Gretchen and her family, then every pig that rolls in a flower-bed deserves to be the gardener). Much attention, as the critical generations passed, was concentrated on the ‘Faustian’ nature as such. How was it to be defined? Was it an exemplum horrendum or an exemplum ad imitandum? What special vice or virtue of the German soul did it represent? A variety of idealizing interpretations came to be offered, more particularly in the heyday of German national self-consciousness, the years of empire between 1870 and 1918. The quasi-Christian ending, often a stumbling-block, could also be accepted as a merely symbolic endorsement by Goethe of whatever grandiose secular qualities the critic chose to ascribe to the hero. The terrible events of German history in the present century have made this line of interpretation difficult, at least for the ideologically uncommitted Western reader; increasingly, the critical solution has been to emphasize the ‘dark’ irony and ambiguity of Acts IV and V. But the author of the profoundest literary treatment of the Faust material in post-Goethean times, while retaining the theme (launched in effect, if not in intention, by Goethe) of Faust as a quintessentially German figure, was constrained for this very reason to abandon Goethe’s accommodating and on the whole optimistic deflection of the story. Thomas Mann’s tragic novel Doctor Faustus returns to the stark morality mode of the sixteenth-century legend. Fusing the two main elements of Mann’s critical diagnosis of the fatality inherent in German culture as he saw it, his Faustus becomes both a composer of genius and a subtle allegorical embodiment of Nietzsche’s creative and destructive contribution to twentieth-century values. His diabolic bargain is the mortal sickness that inspires his music, the most ‘magical’, most ‘unpolitical’, and yet least Goethean of the arts; his inevitable damnation is to collapse in the end into madness, as Nietzsche had done. It is the fate of’my friend, my fatherland’, for whose soul the appalled narrator’s last words can only entreat mercy; Doctor Faustus was written between 1943 and 1947. In so far as it alludes to Goethe at all, it upholds him in the doomed hero’s perspective as a model of ‘classical’ health, sanity, and balance.
The problems of translation in both parts of Faust are much the same, and have been discussed in the Introduction to Part One (pp. xlix-lv). For Part Two I have worked with essentially similar assumptions, which may be summarized as the principle, or dogma, that readable prosodic correspondence must be allowed priority over referential literalness. In Part Two, indeed, this priority gains added weight from the fact that Goethe deliberately gives the versification itself symbolic dramatic significance at certain points, especially in Act III. Fortunately the conventional constraints of ancient Greek metres, or rather of their German accentual imitations, are less severe than those of rhymed verse; it seems less difficult to devise English equivalents of Helen’s iambic trimeters, or the chorus’s trochaic tetrameters and triadic odes, than of Gretchen’s folk-ballad quatrains, in which the enigma of simplicity becomes the greatest obstacle of all.
CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY OF THE COMPOSITION AND PUBLICATION OF FAUST PART TWO
c.1770–5 Goethe’s earliest plans for Faust possibly include a conception of the Helen story and of Faust’s salvation.
1790 Publication of the unfinished Part One as ‘Faust. A Fragment’.
1797 Goethe decides to divide Faust into two parts; schematic note (paralipomenon BA 5) indicating his overall conception at that time of Part One and Part Two.
c.1800 Unpublished sketches or notes (MS not preserved) for conclusion of Part Two, Act V (probably only for Scenes 20, 21, 22).
c.1800 Unpublished fragmentary version (269 lines) of the opening of Act III in iamb
ic trimeters.
1808 Publication of Part One (Faust. The First Part of the Tragedy’).
1816 Early version of Part Two, Acts I, III, and IV (paralipomenon BA 70), dictated as a narrative sketch but not published (possibly conceived much earlier).
1825 (25 February-c.4 April) Act III, Scene 11 and beginning of Scene 12 written.
1825 (March) Revision of (?1800) material for Act V, Scenes 22, ?20, and ?21.
1826 Faust’s speech in Act I Prologue possibly written in March/April.
1826 (March) Resumption of Act III; Scenes 12 and 13 finished in early June.
1826 (December) Unpublished narrative sketch (paralipomenon BA73) of Part Two, Act II (‘Helena’s antecedents’).
1827 (April) Act III published as ‘Helena, an intermezzo for Faust’ in Goethe’s last edition of his collected works (Ausgabe letzter Hand, vol. 4).
1827 (?June/July) Act I Prologue finished.
1827 (July)-1828 (January) Act I, Scenes 2 and 3 written, and Scene 4 as far as line 6036.
1828 (April) Publication of this Act I fragment (ALH, vol. 12, with Part One).
1828 (February)-1829 (September) Work on other projects, including the third part of the Italian Journey.
1829 (September) Resumption of Faust: remainder of Act I (Scene 4 from 6037 and Scenes 5, 6, 7) and opening of Act II (Scenes 8 and 9) written by the end of the year.
1830 (January) ‘Classical Walpurgis Night’ (Act II, Scene 10) begun; continued in February, March, June; final completion perhaps later in the year.
1830 Act V, Scene 23, probably written in December, with some additions in 1831.
1831 (February) Act IV begun (but Faust’s opening soliloquy possibly written in May 1827).
1831 (April) Scenes 17, 18, 19 (Philemon and Baucis episode) added to the otherwise essentially complete Act V.
1831 (22 July) Completion of Act IV and thus of the whole of Faust. Goethe seals the MS.
1832 (January) MS reopened (readings to friends; ?some minor revisions).
1832 (22 March) Death of Goethe.
1832 (December) Posthumous publication of Part Two (‘The Second Part of the Tragedy’) in ALH, vol. 41.
INDEX OF SCENES
Act One
[PROLOGUE] (Scene I) A beautiful landscape
AN IMPERIAL PALACE
Scene 2 The throne-room
Scene 3 A spacious hall [The Carnival Masque]
Scene 4 A pleasure-garden
Scene 5 A dark gallery
Scene 6 Brighdy lit halls
Scene 7 The great hall
Act Two
Scene 8 A high-vaulted, narrow Gothic room
Scene 9 A laboratory
Scene 10 CLASSICAL WALPURGIS NIGHT
a The Pharsalian plain
b The Peneus
c By the Upper Peneus, as before
d Rocky inlets of the Aegean Sea
Act Three
Scene 11 In front of the palace of Menelaus in Sparta
Scene 12 The inner courtyard of a castle
Scene 13 Arcadia
Act Four
Scene 14 High mountains
Scene 15 On the foothills
Scene 16 The rival emperor’s tent
Act Five
Scene 17 Open country
Scene 18 A palace
Scene 19 Deep night
Scene 20 Midnight
Scene 21 The great forecourt of the palace
Scene 22 Burial rites
Scene 23 Mountain gorges
FAUST
THE SECOND PART OF THE TRAGEDY
ACT ONE
1.[PROLOGUE]*. A BEAUTIFUL LANDSCAPE
[FAUST, lying among grass and flowers, exhausted and restless, trying to sleep. Dusk.
SPIRITS, graceful little shapes, hovering and circling round.]
ARIEL* [his song accompanied by Aeolian harps].
When the blossoms hovering
Rain on meadows green and new,
All earth’s children feel the spring,
Bright with universal dew.
Come then, little elfin spirits,
All alike to help and bless;
Ours to heed no sins or merits
But to pity man’s distress.
4620
You, round this mortal’s head circling in air,
Heal now his heart, in noble elfin fashion:
Soothe its fierce conflict and the bitter passion
Of self-reproach’s burning darts, make clean
His soul of all the horrors it has seen.
Four are night’s vigils: now with fair
Contentment fill each one immediately.
First lay his head where it is soft and cool,
Then bathe him in the dew of Lethe: see,
His clenched limbs will relax, he will be free,
4630
As he gains strength and feels the day before him.
Obey the highest elfin rule,
And to the sacred light restore him!
CHORUS [singly and in two or more voices, by turns and together].
When a fragrance has descended
All about the green-girt plain,
Richer air with mist-clouds blended,
Evening dusk comes down again;
Lulls to infant-sweet reposing,
Rocks the heart with whispering sighs,
And this wanderer feels it closing
4640
On his daylight-weary eyes.
Now to night the world surrenders,
Sacred love joins star to star;
Little sparkles, greater splendours,
Glitter near and gleam from far,
Glitter in the lake reflecting,
Gleam against the clear night sky;
Deepest seals of rest protecting
Glows the full moon strong and high.
4650
Soon the hours have slipped away,
Pain and happiness are past;
Trust the light of the new day,
Feel your sickness will not last!
Green the valleys, hillsides swelling,
Bushing thick to restful shade,
And the fields, their wealth foretelling,
Rippling ripe and silver-swayed!
Have you wishes without number?
Watch the promise of the dawn!
Lightly you are wrapped in slumber:
4660
Shed this husk and be reborn!
Venture boldly; hesitation
Is for lesser men—when deeds
Are a noble mind’s creation,
All his enterprise succeeds.
[A tremendous roaring sound heralds the approach of the sun.]
ARIEL. Hear the tempest of the Hours!
For to spirit-ears like ours
Day makes music at its birth.
Hear it! Gates of rock are sundering
And the sun-god’s wheels are thundering:
4670
See, with noise light shakes the earth!
Hear it blare, its trumpets calling,
Dazzling eyes and ears appalling,
Speechless sound unheard for dread!
Quickly, into flowers deep,
Into rocks and foliage creep,
Hide where elves in silence sleep:
Ear it strikes is stricken dead.
FAUST. How strong and pure the pulse of life is beating!*
Dear earth, this night has left you still unshaken,
4680
And at my feet you breathe refreshed; my greeting
To you, ethereal dawn! New joys awaken
All round me at your bidding: beckoning distance,
New-stirring strength, new resolution taken
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