essay: ‘On Simple Imitation of Nature; Manner; Style’ (1789).
magical power: in a conversation of 16 December 1829 Eckermann remarks (and Goethe agrees) that in ‘Helena’ Mephistopheles ‘always seems to be playing a secretly active part’. It is indeed notable that throughout most of Act III Phorcyas-Mephistopheles appears to be magically in charge of all that is going on. He describes Faust’s castle to Helen, undertakes to ‘surround her’ with it instantly (9049), and the scene changes to it as soon as she consents. Earlier, he claps his hands and summons up ‘masked dwarf-like figures’ who obey his instructions like magic slaves in a Märchen, as he supervises with comic relish their preparations for the ritual slaughter of Helen (8936-46). He is, as it seems, running the whole show, rather as if it were indeed a show, a play within a play like the ‘Walpurgis Night’s Dream’ in Part One. This is partly (as Mommsen argues) a technical device on Goethe’s part: given the difficulties of stage presentation of magical events, an epic, fabling element is needed; it takes the form of Mephistopheles-Scheherazade’s fantastic narratives, which describe what is happening, or indeed cause it to happen, and which at the same time, in effect, demonstrate and celebrate the power of poetic imagination.
precedent: in his final version (Acts II and III) Goethe alludes twice (7435 f, 8876-9.) to the posthumous encounter of Helen and Achilles, thus lending plausibility to Faust’s own enterprise; in the first case, rather curiously, he deliberately alters their meeting-place from the island of Leuce to the Thessalian city of Pherae, in order to contaminate the Leuce motif with the similar but better-known story of Alcestis, who was brought back from the dead after nobly sacrificing herself for her husband Admetus, king of Pherae (see Index, Pherae).
Euphorion: the old German Faust books also mention a son bom to Faust and Helen by their diabolic union; the boy’s name is Justus Faustus, and he disappears after his father’s sudden death, prompting one 17th-century commentator to wonder whether he had been properly baptized For details of the Greek Euphorion story, see Index. One of the most interesting of the paralipomena to Goethe’s version is the discarded draft (BA 196) of a speech for Phorcyas-Mephistopheles, evidently written in a relaxed mood, in which Goethe makes fun of his own treatment of the Euphorion story and even of the venerable iambic trimeter. As part of her narrative to the Chorus at the beginning of Sc. 13, Phorcyas describes the boy’s birth and alludes to his mythological provenance: Faust and Helen, she explains, will presently emerge from their underground grotto
Wedded parentally by a charming little boy,
Whom they have called Euphorion; that was long ago
His step-stepbrother’s name, now no more questions please!
Enough, you soon will see him; though this case is worse
Than on the English stage, where gradually some brat
Can grow from tiny stature to heroic size.
Here it’s still crazier: only just been begotten and at once he’s born.
He leaps, he dances, he can fence already! Though
Some say that’s nonsense, others think: this must not be
Humdrumly understood, there’s some deep meaning here.
They smell a mystery, no doubt, perhaps they even smell
Mystification, Indian and Egyptian lore;
And to know how to clip it all together, how
To make a proper brew, an etymological
Dance—to enjoy all that’s the mark of scholarship.
And so say we; profoundly it convinces us,
Such neo-symbolism and its faithful neophytes.
But now I am no longer useful in this place.
Poetic fiction’s ghostly thread spins on and on
Till in the end it tragically breaks.
stipulation: the rule requiring Helen to remain in Sparta is not made explicit in the final ‘Helena’ text, but is mentioned several times in the later paralipomena, notably that of 1826 (BA 73), where Persephone imposes this condition on her in the unwritten Hades scene.
monks: this anticipates the role of the clergy in the war of Act IV, where Goethe continues his familiar line of anticlerical satire (see p. lviii). The three giants with whose assistance the Faust of BA 70 defeated the monks are also featured in Acts IV and V. In his illuminating article on Faust’s political role in the last two Acts, Vaget (1980) states not quite correctly that the war with the monks takes place in Greece (in fact the BA 70 version of the Helen story is located entirely in Germany).
classical-romantic. Goethe tends to use the term ‘romantic’, as here, to mean ‘modern’ in the widest sense, that is to say as including the Middle Ages but not classical antiquity; belonging, in other words, to the Christian era, and having more to do with northern than with southern Europe. The paradoxical description ‘classical-romantic’ points to the mixture of ancient and modern styles in the piece and to the idea of a synthesis of two historical cultures, as well as perhaps to Byron, in whom such a synthesis is in some ways personified.
Faust’s education: this point has been made by Williams (1983, ‘Faust and Helen,’ 30 f.); in the light of it, the critical dispute over the degree of reality or illusoriness to be attributed to the Helen of Act III becomes otiose.
classical metres: ancient Greek verse was ‘quantitative’ in the sense that the syllables were either ‘long’ or ‘short’, and the lines were regulated structures of such syllables, with stress accent playing no part. Modern German or English verse is ‘accentual’, with stress as the chief factor. Subject to this basic difference, some impression of the specific character of Greek versification can be given by modern (and especially German) accentual imitations which substitute stressed and unstressed syllables for longs and shorts respectively. In Faust Goethe imitates above all the ‘iambic trimeter’ of the classical drama, a line consisting basically (with certain permitted variations) of three metrical units each of which is in principle a double iambus (– –). It therefore tends to have twelve syllables like the modern alexandrine; but there is a certain difference of rhythm between these two lines, more easily conveyed in German than in English. The other ‘Greek’ line in Act III, used especially by the Chorus, is the ‘trochaic tetrameter’ of four double trochees (– –). The Chorus also uses odes with repeating patterns of strophe, antistrophe, and epode, in which the first two are metrically identical and the third a variation (e.g. 8610-37). Goethe imitates these forms with some accuracy and subtlety.
Behramgur. this hidden allusion is not the only example of Arabic-Persian influence in these scenes, as Mommsen has shown: the whole style of Faust’s courtship of Helen, whether direct or by proxy through Lynceus, is essentially that of an Oriental prince (the watchman who fails to notice the royal guest’s approach is not only condemned to death but must be instantly executed unless she pardons him; all the jewels and treasures in the world cannot compare with her beauty, etc.).
Marianne von Willemer: Goethe first met Marianne in July 1814 while revisiting his native city of Frankfurt and while engaged on the writing of the West-Eastern Divan; his emotional involvement with her was perhaps the profoundest of all his attachments to women, and inspired some of his greatest poetry. The then 30-year-old Marianne Jung, a former actress of considerable literary and musical talent, had in 1800 become the protégée of Johann Jakob von Willemer, a rich Frankfurt banker twenty-four years her senior; their marriage, officially formalized in September 1814, remained childless and unhappy. The mutual love and understanding between Marianne and Goethe was at its height during his further visit in the late summer of 1815 to Willemer’s country house near Frankfurt, and again during the brief meeting in Heidelberg in September which was to be their last. They often communicated by allusions or numerical references to the newly written Divan poems, adopting the personae of ‘Suleika’ and ‘Hatem’, and Marianne herself contributed several of the poems, which Goethe retouched and adopted as his own. He was evidently alarmed, however, by the depth of the passion he had come to feel for her
and had aroused in her. Shortly after the death of his own wife Christiane in June 1816, he set out in a state of mental conflict to visit Frankfurt once more, but two hours after leaving Weimar his carriage overturned, a mishap which he interpreted as an omen; he returned home and decided to break off the relationship without explanation. For years he maintained a cruel silence, despite Marianne’s consequent nervous illnesses and desperate pleas, and despite the entreaties of Willemer himself, who was flattered by the great poet’s attentions to his wife and later even went so far as to propose that Goethe should leave Weimar and move permanently back to Frankfurt, living with them in a ménage à trois. In 1819 Goethe began again to reply to Marianne’s letters, and an affectionate correspondence was resumed; but between 1815 and his death he avoided any further meeting with her. Marianne, though she lived until 1860, never really recovered from the shock of losing Goethe, and his emotions too were never quite extricated from the experience. Three weeks before his death Marianne received a packet which he asked her to leave unopened ‘until the uncertain time comes’. It contained all her letters to him and a short poem entitled ‘A Legacy’:
To my darling now I send them,
Back into the hand that penned them—
How I waited for them, burning
With the love they were returning!—
To her heart they poured from, may
These her letters find their way,
Ever ready to recall
There the loveliest time of all.
Wager. See above, pp. xiii f.
Byzantine Hellenic revival: as one authority has put it: ‘The rise of Mistra was almost the only bright spot in the history of the Peloponnese during the 14th century’ (Woodhouse, 1986). Mystra became, among the few centres of culture remaining under Byzantine control (others were Constantinople itself, Thessalonica and Trebizond), especially prominent during the lifetime of Gemistus Pletho (c.1360-1452; his adopted name was modelled on ‘Plato’). Pletho settled in Mystra around the turn of the century, and became an influential and controversial teacher, enjoying the protection of the enlightened Imperial family and living to a remarkable age. His views went well beyond the official discreet coexistence of humanistic classical learning with Orthodox Christianity, and indeed amounted to an outright neo-paganism. In 1438-9 he visited Italy, officially as a member of the Imperial delegation to the ecclesiastical Council of Florence; his lectures to Italian scholars were heard with enthusiasm, and contributed to the Renaissance in Italy by helping to pioneer the study of Platonism there. He became so admired a figure that twelve years after his death a cultured Venetian condottiere, on an expedition against the Turks in the Peloponnese, removed his body from Mystra and brought it back to Rimini for honorific reburial; this was not long after Pletho’s most daring book, posthumously brought to light, had been formally burnt in Constantinople by order of the Patriarch. (Cf. also Runciman 1970, 1980).
Menelaus: it has been argued that, historically, the Greeks of late antiquity and the Dark Ages neglected the cities and regions of the former classical culture, allowing them to be overrun by the barbarians, and that the Byzantines later did the same, thus giving the Franks their opportunity to occupy the peninsula. Faust may then be thought of as engaged on an operation to rescue the threatened ‘Helen’ from the Greeks themselves; her lawful custodian Menelaus thus becomes the representative of post-classical Greece and Byzantium. On this view, his threatened attack stands for the imminent Byzantine reconquest, and the credit for the preservation of the Hellenic heritage goes not to the Byzantine culture of Mystra and elsewhere, but to Western and in particular (however implausibly) Germanic peoples (sic Beutler and D. Lohmeyer).
Faust’s Arcadia: the pastoral or ‘bucolic’ tradition here represented goes back to antiquity, beginning in Greek poetry with the idylls of Theocritus (3rd century BC) and in Latin with Virgil (70-19 BC), the latter making ‘Arcadia’ (see also Index) its central symbol. In Faust’s description of the ideal landscape Goethe deliberately uses the characteristic imagery of Virgil’s Eclogues (mountain pastures, shady trees and caves, flocks and streams, reference to Pan and Apollo, etc.). Apollo (9558 f; see Index) in fact adopted the disguise of a shepherd not in Arcadia but in Thessaly.
Arcadian refuge: the secluded Arcadian setting of Faust’s brief union with Helen suggests to Boyle (1982-3,138) Goethe’s attempt (vainly, as he himself came to see) to establish classical forms and classical taste in a kind of idyllic isolation from the revolutionary politics and wars that preoccupied the rest of contemporary Europe and transformed the face of Germany; cf. also pp. xxvii, xlii f.
Act IV soliloquy: the symbolic significance of the cumulus and cirrus cloud formations observed by Faust is made clear in a short manuscript sketch of Act IV (paralipomenon BA 106), where Goethe writes ‘Half the cloud rises south-eastwards as Helen, the other half north-westwards as Gretchen’. In his meteorological writings, under the influence of the English meteorologist Luke Howard, Goethe interpreted the movements and metamorphoses of clouds as a struggle between the higher and lower regions of the atmosphere, symbolizing the ascent of the human spirit from the moist, earthly level to the drier and ‘purer’ upper ether. For the similar cloud symbolism of Sc. 23, cf. p. lxxv.
the ending ‘already written’: see esp. conversation with Boisserée, 3 August 1815; cf. remark to Eckermann, 24 January 1830.
Sc. 23: Mason points out interestingly in this connection that the angelic choruses in Sc. 22 and 23 are metrically similar to the Easter choruses in Sc. 4 of Part One (written c.1800).
entelechies of the Homunculus and Faust: cf. pp. lxxii, lxxvi f.
‘mountain people’: Goethe had read about such gnome-like creatures in the Anthropodemus Plutonicus (see 2nd note to p. xxix). After Faust’s mysterious speech, no further reference is made to them and his description of the ‘mountain folk’ (10425) does not seem to fit either the ghosts in the suits of armour or the unpleasant Three Mighty Men (see following notes) who now take over the battle.
phantom army: Goethe had read Walter Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, which was one source for this widespread folklore motif.
three fighting-men: the biblical references alongside the text, here and elsewere, were probably added by Riemer. In Luther’s translation of 2 Sam. 23 David’s three champions have Hebrew names; ‘Raufebold (Raubebold)’ and ‘Eilebeute’ (the name of the camp-follower who joins the Three in Sc. 16) are from Isa. 8: 1. (cf. also Paralipomena, p. 244, and Sc. 18-19).
the Emperor: it is notable that he here (10417-20) recalls his vision of fire which he described to Mephistopheles and Faust on the morning after the Carnival in Act I (5989-6002). The experience seems to have left a lasting impression on him, which again suggests that Goethe may have intended the magical later episodes of the Carnival scene as a symbolic education of the Emperor (cf. p. xxvi).
Golden Bull: Goethe had known this historic document since his Frankfurt days; a commentary on it, which he reread in 1831, had been published in 1766 by J. D. von Olenschlager, a friend of the Goethe family. By its provisions, the Electoral College was to consist of four temporal and three ecclesiastical princes (the King of Bohemia, the Duke of Saxony, the Margrave of Brandenburg, and the Count Palatinate of the Rhine, together with the Archbishops of Mainz, Cologne, and Trier). The Electors also held ceremonial court offices such as High Chamberlain, High Seneschal, and Imperial Cupbearer (as distributed to the three secular princes in Goethe’s scene). These arrangements, which in effect represented the decentralization of the Empire, remained theoretically in force through the centuries, until the Empire was dissolved by Napoleon in 1806.
enfeoffment scene: a rough sketch of Act IV written in May 1831 (BA 107) mentions the grant of titles and lands to the four princes, then Faust’s request to be granted ‘the barren sea coasts’, to which the Emperor accedes, ‘glad to be able to fob him off so easily’. A curious point is that in another fragment (BA 219) the formal document read out
by the Chancellor refers to Faust by name (‘Faustus, the Fortunate as he is rightly called’), although in the rest of the Act there is no indication that the Emperor or anyone else has recognized him as the magician who introduced the paper money and whose name was known in that episode (6560).
Philemon and Baucis: in the comic theatrical ‘prelude’ of 1802 (its tide Was wir bringen, literally ‘What we are offering’, is roughly equivalent to ‘What you will’ or ‘As you like it’) Mercury visits the couple disguised as a traveller, and offers them a magic carpet which will carry them from their tumbledown hut to a magnificent temple (representing the new theatre); ‘Baucis’ is reluctant to go, suspecting that the stranger is the Devil; Faust’s magic carpet is even cited as a precedent. A further link between the Faust version and the classical story is perhaps the motif of the flood, with its biblical connotation of a new beginning to the world after divine punishment.
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