Three Philosophical Poets Part 7

Such a victim of a selfish seducer and a Pharisaical public was to add a desirable touch of femininity and pathos to the story of Faust: Gretchen was to take the place, at least for the nonce, of the coveted Helen.

This Gretchen was to be no common creature, but one endowed with all the innocence, sweetness, intelligence, fire, and fort.i.tude which Goethe was finding, or thought he was finding, in his own Gretchens, Katchens, and Frederickes. For the young Goethe, though very learned, was no mere student of books; to his human competence and power to succeed, he joined the gusts of feeling, the irresponsible raptures, the sudden sorrows, of a genuine poet. He was a true lover, and a wayward one. He could delve into magic with awe, in a Faust-like spirit of adventure; he could burn offerings in his attic to the rising sun; he could plunge into Christian mysticism; and there could well up, on occasion, from the deep store of his unconscious mind, floods of words, of images, and of tears. He was a genius, if ever there was one; and this genius, in all its freshness, was poured into the composition of _Faust_,--the most kindred of themes, the most picturesque and magical of romances.

In Goethe's first version of the poem, before the story of Gretchen, we find the studious Faust, as in Marlowe, soliloquizing on the vanity of the sciences. They grasp nothing of the genuine truth; they are verbal shams. They have not even brought Faust fame or riches. Perhaps magic might do better. The air was full of spirits; could they be summoned to our aid, possibly the secrets of nature might be unlocked. We might reach true science, and through it undreamt-of power over the material world. For Nature, according to Goethe, really has secrets. She is not all open to eventual inspection; she is no mere mechanism of minute parts and statable laws. Our last view of her, like our first glimpse, must be interpreted; from the sum of her manifestations we must divine her soul. Therefore only a poetic and rhetorical art, like magic, has any chance of unveiling her, and of bringing us face to face with the truth.

In this invocation of spirits, as Goethe's Faust makes it, there is no question of selling, or even of risking, the soul. This Faust, unlike Marlowe's, has no faith and no fear. From the point of view of the church he is d.a.m.ned already as an unbeliever; but, as an unbeliever, he is looking for salvation in another quarter. Like the bolder spirits of the Renaissance, he is hoping to find in universal nature, infinite, placid, non-censorious, an escape from the prison-house of Christian doctrine and Christian law. His magic arts are the sacrament that will initiate him into his new religion, the religion of nature. He turns to nature also in another sense, more characteristic of the age of Goethe than of that of Faust. He longs for grandiose solitudes. He feels that moonlight, caves, mountains, driving clouds, would be his best medicine and his best counsellors. The souls of Rousseau, Byron, and Sh.e.l.ley are pre-incarnate in this Faust, the epitome of all romantic rebellions.

They coexist there with the souls of Paracelsus and Giordano Bruno. The wild aspects of nature, he thinks, will melt and renew his heart, while magic reveals the mysteries of cosmic law and helps him to exploit them.

Full of these hopes, Faust opens his book of magic at the sign of the Macrocosm: it shows him the mechanism of the world, all forces and events playing into one another and forming an infinite chain. The spectacle entrances him; he seems to have attained one of his dearest ambitions. But here he comes at once upon the other half, or, as Hegel would call it, the other moment, of the romantic life. Every romantic ideal, once realized, disenchants. No matter what we attain, our dissatisfaction must be perpetual. Thus the vision of the universe, which Faust now has before him, is, he remembers, only a vision; it is a theory or conception.[3] It is not a rendering of the inner life of the world as Shakespeare, for instance, feels and renders it. Experience; as it comes to him who lives and works, is not given by that theoretical vision; in science experience is turned into so many reviewed events, the pa.s.sage of so much substance through so many forms. But Faust does not want an image or description of reality; he yearns to enact and to become the reality itself.

In this new search, he fixes his eye on the sign of the Earth-Spirit, which seems more propitious to his present wish. This sign is the key to all experience. All experience tempts Faust; he shrinks from nothing that any mortal may have endured; he is ready to undertake everything that any mortal may have done. In all men he would live; and with the last man he will be content to die.[4] So mighty is his yearning for experience that the Earth-Spirit is softened and appears at his bidding.

In a red flame he sees its monstrous visage, and his enthusiasm is turned to horror. Outspread before him is the furious, indiscriminate cataract of life, the merciless flux, the infinite variety, the absolute inconstancy of it. This general life is not for any individual to rehea.r.s.e; it I bursts all bounds of personality. Each man may a.s.similate that part only which falls within his understanding, only that aspect which things wear from his particular angle, and to his particular interests. _Du gleichst_, the Earth-Spirit cries to him,--_du gleichst dem Geist den du begreifst, nicht mir._

This saying--that the life possible and good for man is the life of reason, not the life of nature--is a hard one to the romantic, unintellectual, insatiable Faust. He thinks, like many another philosopher of feeling, that since his is a part of the sum of experience, the whole of experience should be akin to his. But in fact the opposite is far nearer the truth. Man is const.i.tuted by his limitations, by his station contrasted with all other stations, and his purposes chosen from amongst all other purposes. Any great scope he can attain must be due to his powers of representation. His understanding may render him universal; his life never can. Faust, as he hears this sentence from the departing Earth-Spirit, collapses under it. He feels impotent to gainsay what the tumult of the world is thundering at him, but he will not accept on authority so unwelcome and chastening a truth.

All his long experience to come will scarcely suffice to convince him of it.

These are the chief philosophical ideas that appear in the two earlier versions of Goethe's _Faust_,--the _Urfaust_ and the _Fragment_. What Mephistopheles says to the young student is only a clever expansion of what Faust had said in his first monologue about the vanity of science and of the learned professions. Mephistopheles, too, finds theory ashen, and the tree of life green and full of golden fruit; only, having more experience than Faust of the second disenchanting moment in the romantic dialectic, he foresees that this golden fruit also will turn to ashes in the mouth, as it did in the garden of Eden. Science is folly, but life is no better; for after all is not science a part of life?

When we turn to the first part in its final shape, or to the entire drama, we find many changes and additions that seem to transform the romantic picture of the opening scene, and to offer us a rounded philosophy. The changes, however, are more in expression than in ultimate substance, and the additions are chiefly new ill.u.s.trations of the ancient theme. Critics who study the _Entstehungsgeschichte_ of works of art help us to a.n.a.lyze them more intelligently and reproduce more accurately what, at various times, may have been the intention of their authors. Yet these bits of information would be dearly bought if we were distracted by them from what gives poetic value and individual character to the result--its total idiosyncrasy, its place in the moral world. The place in the moral world of Goethe's _Faust_ as a whole is just the place which the opening scene gave it in the beginning. It fills more s.p.a.ce, it touches more historical and poetic matters; but its centre is the old centre, and its result the old result. It remains romantic in its pictures and in its philosophy.

The first addition that promises to throw new light on the idea of the drama is the _Prologue in Heaven_. In imitation of _The Book of Job_, we find the morning stars--the three archangels--singing together; and then follows a very agreeable and humorous conversation between the Lord and Mephistopheles. The scene is in the style of mediaeval religious plays, and this circ.u.mstance might lead us to suppose that the point at issue was the salvation of Faust's soul. But that, in the literal sense, is far from being the case. As in _Job_, the question is what sentiments the tempted mortal will maintain during this life, not what fate will afterwards overtake his disembodied spirit. Dead men, Mephistopheles observes, do not interest him. He is not a devil from a subterranean h.e.l.l, concerned, out of pique or ambition, to increase the population of tortured shades in that fabulous region. He dwells in the atmosphere of earth; he knows nothing of the suns or the worlds, the life of man is his element.[5] He remains--what he was in the first versions of the play--a part of the Earth-Spirit, one of its embodiments. His particular office, as we shall see presently, is to precipitate that continual destruction which is involved in the continual renewal of life. He finds it very foolish of Faust to demand everything and be satisfied with nothing; and his wager is that Faust may be brought to demand nothing and be satisfied with what chance throws in his way, that he shall lick the dust, and lick it with pleasure,[6] that he shall renounce the dignity of willing what is not and cannot be, and crawl about, like the serpent, basking in the comforts of the moment.

Against this, the Lord p.r.o.nounces Faust to be his servant,--the servant, that is, of an ideal,--and declares that whoever strives after an ideal must needs go astray; yet in his necessary errors, the good man never misses the right road.[7] In other words, to have an ideal to strive for, and, like Faust, never to be satisfied, is itself the salvation of man. Faust does not yet know this. He half believes there is some concrete and ultimate good beyond, and so is bitter and violent in his dissatisfaction; but in due season he will come to clearness on this subject, and understand that only he deserves freedom and life who must daily win them afresh.[8] Mephistopheles himself, with his mockeries and seductions, helps to keep the world moving and men wide awake.[9]

Imperfection is all that is possible in the world of action; but the angels may gather up and fix in thought the perfect forms approached or suggested by existence.[10]

In the two earlier versions of _Faust_, Mephistopheles appears without introduction; we find him amusing himself by giving ambiguous advice to an innocent scholar, and accompanying Faust in his wanderings. His mocking tone and miraculous powers mark him at once as the devil of the legend; but several pa.s.sages prove that he is a deputy of the Earth-Spirit evoked by Faust in the beginning. That he should be both devil and world-demon ought not to surprise the learned.[11] The devils of popular mediaeval religion were not cut out of whole cloth: they were simply the Neoplatonic demons of the air, together with the G.o.ds of Olympus and the more ancient chthonic deities, blackened by sectarian zeal, and degraded by a coa.r.s.e and timid imagination. Many of these pagan sprites, indeed, had been originally impish and mischievous, since not all the aspects of nature are lovely or propitious, nor all the dreams of men. But as a whole they were without malice in their irresponsible, elemental life,--winged powers darting through s.p.a.ce between the earth and the moon. They were not dwellers in a subterranean h.e.l.l; they were not tormentors nor tormented. Often they swarmed and sang blithely, as they do in _Faust_ and even in the _Wonder-working Magician_; and if at other times they croaked or hooted, it was like frogs and owls, less lovely creatures than humming-birds, but not less natural.

One of these less amiable spirits of the atmosphere, especially of its ambient fire, is the Mephistopheles of Goethe. Why he delighted in evil rather than in good he himself explains in a profound and ingenious fas.h.i.+on. Darkness or nothingness, he says, existed alone before the birth of light. Nothingness or darkness still remains the fundamental and, to his mind, the better part of that mixture of being and privation which we call existence. Nothing that exists can be preserved, nor does it deserve to be; therefore it would have been better if nothing had ever existed.[12] To deny the value of whatever is, and to wish to destroy it, according to him, is the only rational ambition; he is the spirit that denies continually, he is the everlasting No. This spirit--which we might compare with the Mars of Lucretius--has great power in the world; every change, in one of its aspects, expresses it, since in one of its aspects, every change is the destruction of something. This spirit is always willing evil, for it wills death, with all the folly, crime, and despair that minister to death. But in willing evil, it is always accomplis.h.i.+ng good; for these evils make for nothingness, and nothingness is the true good. The famous couplet--

_Ein Teil von jener Kraft_ _Die stets das Bose will, und stets das Gute schafft--_

is far from expressing the Hegelian commonplace with which it is usually identified. It does not mean that destruction serves a good purpose after all because it clears the way for "something higher."

Mephistopheles is not one of those philosophers who think change and evolution a good in themselves. He does not admit that his activity, while aiming at evil, contributes unintentionally to the good. It contributes to the good intentionally, because the evil it does is, in his opinion, less than the evil it cures. He is the cruel surgeon to the disease of life.

If he admitted the other interpretation, he would be _ipso facto_ converted to the view of the Lord in the _Prologue_. His naughtiness would become, in his own eyes, a needful service in the cause of life,--a condition of life being really vital and worth living. He might then continue his sly operations and biting witticisms, without one drop more of kindness, and yet be sanctioned in everything by the Absolute, and adopt the smile and halo of the optimist. He would have perceived that he was the spice of life, the yeast and red pepper of the world, necessary to the perfect savour of the providential concoction. As it is, Mephistopheles is far more modest. He says that he wills evil, because what he wills is contrary to what his victims will; he is the great contradictor, the blaster of young hopes. Yet he does good, because these young hopes, if let alone, would lead to misery and absurdity. His contradiction nips the folly of living in the bud. To be sure, as he goes on to acknowledge, the destructive power never wins a decisive victory. While everything falls successively beneath his sickle, the seeds of life are being scattered perpetually behind his back. The Lucretian Venus has her innings, as well as the Lucretian Mars. The eternal see-saw, the ancient flux, continues without end and without abatement.

Thus Mephistopheles has a philosophy, and is justified and consistent in his own eyes; yet in the course of the drama he wears various masks and has various moods. All he says and does cannot be made altogether compatible with the essence of his mind, as Goethe finally conceived it.

The dramatic figure of Mephistopheles had been fixed long before in its graphic characteristics. Mephistopheles, for instance, is extremely old; he feels older than the universe. There is nothing new for him; he has no illusions. His feeling for anyone he sees is choked, as happens to old people, by his feelings for the infinite number of persons he remembers. He is heartless, because he is impersonal and universal. He is altogether inhuman; he has not the shames nor the tastes of man. He often a.s.sumes the form of a dog,--it is his favourite mask in this earthly carnival. He is not averse to the witches' kitchen, with its senseless din and obscenity. He puts up good-naturedly with the grotesque etiquette of the spirit-world, observes all the rules about signing contracts in blood, knocking thrice, and respecting pentagrams.

Why should he not? Dogs and demons of the air are forms of the Earth-Spirit as much as man; man has no special dignity that Mephistopheles should respect. Man's morality is one of the moralities, his conventions are not less absurd than the conventions of other monkeys. Mephistopheles has no prejudice against the snake; he understands and he despises his cousin, the snake, also. He understands and he despises himself; he has had time to know himself thoroughly.

His understanding, however, is not impartial, because he is the advocate of death; he cannot sympathize with the other half of the Earth-Spirit, which he does not represent,--the creative, propulsive, enamoured side, the side that wors.h.i.+ps the ideal, the love that makes the world go round. What enchants an ingenuous soul can only amuse Mephistopheles; what torments it gives him a sardonic satisfaction. Thus he comes to be in fact a sour and mocking devil. At other times, when he opposes the silliness and romanticism of Faust, he seems to be the spokesman of all experience and reason; as when he warns Faust that to be at all you must be something in particular. Yet even this he says by way of checking and denying Faust's pa.s.sion for the infinite. The soberest truth, when unwelcome, may seem to the sentimental as diabolical as the most cynical lie; so that in spite of the very unequal justness of his various sentiments, Mephistopheles retains his dramatic unity. We recognize his tone and, under whatever mask, we think him a villain and find him delightful.

Such is the spirit, and such are the conditions, in which Faust undertakes his adventures. He thirsts for all experience, including all experience of evil; he fears no h.e.l.l; and he hopes for no happiness. He trusts in magic; that is, he believes, or is willing to make believe, that apart from any settled conditions laid down by nature or G.o.d, personal will can evoke the experience it covets by its sheer force and a.s.surance. His bond with Mephistopheles is an expression of this romantic faith. It is no bargain to buy pleasures on earth at the cost of torments hereafter; for neither Goethe, nor Faust, nor Mephistopheles believes that such pleasures are worth having, or such torments possible.

The first taste Faust gets of the world is in Auerbach's cellar, and he finds it at once unpalatable. His mature and disdainful mind cannot be amused by the sodden merriment he sees there. He is without that simplicity and heartiness which might find even drunken gaiety attractive; to put up with such follies, one must know nothing, like Brander, or everything, like Mephistopheles. Faust still feels the "pathos of distance;" he is acutely conscious of something incomparably n.o.ble just out of reach. In the witches' kitchen, which he next visits, pleasure is still more ugly and shallow; here the din is even more nonsensical, and the fancy more obscene. Yet Faust comes forth with two points gained in his romantic rehabilitation; he has taken the elixir of youth and he has seen the image of Helen in a mirror. He is henceforth in love with ideal beauty, and being young again, he is able to find ideal beauty in the first woman he sees.

The great episode of Gretchen follows; and when he leaves her (after the duel with her brother) to view the wild revels of the Walpurgisnacht, his youth for a moment catches the contagion of that orgy. His love of ideal beauty, which remains unsatisfied, saves him, however, from any lasting illusion. He sees a little red mouse running out of the mouth of a nymph he is pursuing, and his momentary inclination turns to aversion.

When he goes back to Gretchen in her prison, it is too late for him to do more than recognize the ruin he has brought about,--Gretchen dishonoured, her mother poisoned, her brother killed, her child drowned by her in a pond, and she herself about to be executed. Gretchen, who is the only true Christian in this poem, refuses to be rescued, because she wishes to offer her voluntary death in propitiation for her grave, though almost involuntary, offences.

This is the end of Faust's career through the world of private interests,--the little world,--and we may well ask what has been the fruit of his experiments so far. What strength or experience has he ama.s.sed for his further adventures? The answer is to be found in the first scene of the second part, where Goethe reaches his highest potency as a poet and as a philosopher. We are transported to a remote, magnificent, virgin country. It is evening, and Faust is lying, weary but restless, on a flowering hillside. Kindly spirits of nature are hovering above his head. Ariel, their leader, bids them bring solace to the troubled hero. It is enough he was unfortunate--they make no question whether he was a saint or a sinner.[13] The spirits in chorus then sing four lovely stanzas, one for each watch of the night. The first invokes peace, forgetfulness, surrender to the healing influence of sleep. Pity and remorse, they seem to say, in the words of Spinoza, are evil and vain; failure is incidental; error is innocent. Nature has no memory; forgive yourself, and you are forgiven. The song of the second watch merges the unhappy soul again in the infinite incorruptible substance of nature. The stars, great or little, twinkling or pure, fill the sky with their ordered peace, and the sea with their trembling reflection. In this universal circulation there is no private will, no permanent division. In the next watch we find the plastic stress of nature beginning to rea.s.sert itself; seeds swell, sap mounts up the thawing branches, buds grow full; everything recovers a fresh individuality and a tender, untried will. Finally, the song of the fourth watch bids the flowers open their petals and Faust his eyes.

Forces renewed in repose should tempt a new career. Nature is open to the brave, to the intelligent; all may be n.o.ble, who dare to be so.[14]

Soothed by these ministrations, Faust awakes full of new strength and ambition. He watches with rapture the sunlight touch the mountain-tops and creep down gradually into the valleys. When it reaches him, he turns to look directly at the sun; but he is dazzled. He seems to remember the Earth-Spirit that had once allured and then rejected him.

We wish, he says, to kindle our torch of life, and we produce a conflagration, a monstrous medley of joy and sorrow, love and hate. Let us turn our backs upon the sun, upon infinite force and infinite existence. Fitter for our eyes the waterfall over against it, the torrent of human affairs, broken into a myriad rills. Upon the mists that rise from it the sunlight paints a rainbow, always vanis.h.i.+ng, but always restored. This is the true image of rational human achievement.

We have our life in the iridescence of the world.[15] Or, as Sh.e.l.ley has said it for us,--

_Life, like a dome of many-coloured gla.s.s,_ _Stains the white radiance of eternity,_ _Until death tramples it to fragments._

This death, however, is itself unstable. The Lucretian Venus, by reshaping our senses and instincts, builds that coloured dome once more.

The rainbow is renewed, as the mists rise again or the wind dies down, and creation is glorious as on the first day.

This is Goethe's theory of rejuvenation and immortality. It is thoroughly naturalistic. There is a life after death, but only for such souls as have enough scope to identify themselves with those forms which nature, in her uncertain oscillations, always tends to reproduce. A deep mind has deep roots in nature,--it will bloom many times over. But what a deep mind carries over into its next incarnation--perhaps in some remote sphere--is not its conventional merits and demerits, its load of remorse, or its sordid memories. These are washed away in its new baptism. What remains is only what was deep in that deep mind, so deep that new situations may again imply and admit it.

When, after the scene with the Earth-Spirit, Faust thought of suicide, he regarded it as a means to escape from oppressive conditions and to begin a fresh life under conditions wholly different and unknown. It was as if a man in middle life, disgusted with his profession, should abandon it to take up another. Such a resolution is serious. It expresses a great dissatisfaction with things as they stand, but it also expresses a great hope. Death, for Faust, is an adventure, like any other; and if, contrary to his presumption, this adventure should prove the last, that, too, is a risk he is willing to run. Accordingly, as he lifted the poison to his lips, he drank to the dawn, to a new springtime of existence. It was by no means the saddest nor the weakest moment of his life.[16]

Although the sound of an Easter hymn checked him, bringing sentimental memories of a religion in which he no longer believed, the transformation scene he looked for was only postponed. There is not much difference between dying as he had thought to die and living as he was about to live. Venomous essences, artificially brewed, were hardly necessary to bring him to a new life; the adventures he was entering upon were suicidal enough, for he was to strive without hope of attainment, and to proceed by pa.s.sionate wilfulness or magic, without accepting the discipline of art or reason. Now, at the close of the first part, he has drained this poisoned life to the dregs, and the fever into which he falls carries him of itself into a new existence. He is not grown better or more reasonable; he is simply starting afresh, like a new day or a new person. It contains, however, the fundamental part of his character; his will remains wayward, but indomitable, and his achievements remain fruitless. Only he will henceforth be romantic on a broader stage, that of history and civilization; and his magic will summon before him illusions somewhat more intellectual, counterfeits of beauty and of power. His old loves have blown over, like the storms of a bygone year; and with only a dreamlike memory of his past errors, he goes forth to meet a new day.

Among the allurements which, in the old legend, prompted Faust to sell his soul to the devil, one was the beauty of woman. The poor recluse, grown gray among his parchments, had never noticed real women, or had not found them beautiful. Pedantic child that he was, when he thought of the beauty of woman, he thought only of Helen of Troy. And Helen, to the Faust of the legend, was simply what Venus might be to Tannhauser,--a woman more ravis.h.i.+ng than other ravis.h.i.+ng women. She was the supreme instance of a vulgar thing. The young Goethe, however, who was a poet and a true German, and loved with his soul, was not attracted by this ideal. He gave his Faust a tenderer love,--a love of the heart as well as of the senses. Later, also, when Goethe took up the old legend again in a more antiquarian spirit, and restored Helen to her place in it, he transformed her from a symbol of feminine beauty alone into a symbol for all beauty, and especially for the highest beauty, that of h.e.l.las. The second love of Faust is the pa.s.sion for cla.s.sicism.

This pa.s.sion in a romantic age is not so paradoxical as it may sound.

Winckelmann and the philologians were restoring something ancient. It was the romantic pa.s.sion for all experience--for the faded experience of the ancients also--that made, for them, the poetry and the charm of antiquity. How dignified everything was in those heroic days! How n.o.ble, serene, and abstracted! How pure the blind eyes of statues, how chaste the white folds of the marble drapery! Greece was a remote, fascinating vision, the most romantic thing in the history of mankind. The sad, delicious emotion one felt before a ruined temple was as sentimental as anything one could feel before a ruined castle, but more elegant and more choice. It was sentimentality in marble. The heroes of the _Iliad_ were idealized in the same way as the savages of Rousseau were idealized, or as the robbers of Schiller.

The romantic cla.s.sicism of the Napoleonic era lies between the polite cla.s.sicism of the French seventeenth century and the archaeological cla.s.sicism of our present Grecians. French cla.s.sicism had been quite indifferent to the picturesque aspects of ancient life; it could tolerate on the stage an Achilles in a periwig and laces. What the French tragedians had adopted from the ancients was something inward, a standard of character and motive, or a criterion of taste. They studied harmony and restraint, not because these had been Greek qualities, but because they were qualities essentially reasonable and beautiful, naturally belonging, even in modern times, to a cultivated society and a cultivated poet. Again, the admiration for Greece which is common in our time among people of judgement differs from that of Goethe and his age; for if we admire the artistic expression of ancient life in poetry or sculpture, we know that these manifestations were made possible by a long political and moral discipline, and that, in spite of that discipline, ancient art remained very mixed, and often grotesque and impure.

For Goethe, however, as for Byron, Greece was less a past civilization, to be studied scientifically, than a living idea, a summons to new forms of art and of sentiment. Goethe was never so romantic as when he was cla.s.sical. His distichs are like theatrical gestures; he feels the sweep of his toga as he rounds them off. His Iphigenia is a sentimental dream--_verflucht human_, as he himself came to feel; and his Helena is an evocation of magic, magical not merely by accident and in the story, but essentially so, in her ghostly semi-consciousness and gla.s.sy beauty.

The apparent incongruities of the scenes in which she appears, surrounded by German knights in the court of a feudal castle, are not real incongruities. For this Helen is not a thing of the past; she is the present dream and affectation of things cla.s.sical in a romantic era. Faust and his va.s.sals offer Helen the most chivalrous and exaggerated homage; they introduce her, as a play queen, into their society. Faust retires with her to Arcadia,--the land of intentional and mid-summer idleness. Here a son, Euphorion, is born to them, a young genius, cla.s.sic in aspect, but wildly romantic and ungovernable in temper. He scales the highest peaks, pursues by preference the nymphs that flee from him, loves violence and unreason, and finally, thinking to fly, falls headlong, like Icarus, and perishes. His last words call his mother after him, and she follows, leaving her veil and mantle behind, as Euphorion had left his lyre. On the mantle of Helen, which swells into a cloud, Faust is borne back again to his native Germany; its virtue, as he learns, is to lift him above all commonness.

This long allegory is charming enough, as a series of pictures and melodies, to leave the reader content not to interpret it; yet the intention of the poet is clear, if we care to disentangle it. By going down into the bowels of nature, where the earth G.o.ddesses dwell, who are the first mothers of all life and of all civilizations alike, we may gather intelligence to comprehend even the most alien existence. Greece, after such a reversion to the elemental, will appear to us in her unmatched simplicity and beauty. The vision will be granted us, although the object we see belongs to a distant past; and if our enthusiasm, like that of Faust, is pa.s.sionate and indomitable, we may actually persuade the Queen of the Dead to yield up Helen that we may wed her.

Our scholars.h.i.+p and philosophy, our faithful imitation of Greek art and literature, may actually render the Greek scene familiar to us. Yet the setting of this recovered genius will still be modern; it will become half modern itself; we shall have to teach Helen to rhyme. The product of this hybrid inspiration will be a romantic soul in the garb of cla.s.sicism, a lovely wild thing, fated to die young. When this enthusiasm has dashed itself against the hard conditions of life, the beauty of Greece, that was its mother, will also pale before our eyes.

We shall be, perforce, content to let it return to the realm of irrevocable past things. Only its garment, the monuments of its art and thought, will remain to raise us, if we have loved them, above all vulgarity in taste and in moral allegiance.

It is an evidence of Goethe's great wisdom that he felt that romantic cla.s.sicism must be subordinated or abandoned; that Helen must evaporate, while Faust returned to Germany and to the feeling that after all Gretchen was his true love.[17] At the same time the issue of this wonderful episode is a little disappointing. At the beginning, the vision of Helen in a mirror had inspired Faust with renewed enthusiasm.

The sight of her again, in the magic play, had altogether enraptured and overwhelmed him; and this inspiration had come just when, after the death of Gretchen, he had resolved to pursue not all experience, as at first, but rather the best, experience,[18]--a hint that the transformations of Faust's will were expected somehow to const.i.tute a real progress. There was, indeed, among mortals such an infinite need of this incomparable and symbolic Helen, that it could move the very guardians of the dead to mercy and to tears. When we remember all this, we have some reason to expect that a great and permanent improvement in the life and heart of our hero should follow on his obtaining so rare a boon. But to live within Arcadia Helen was not needed; any Phyllis would have served.

Helen, to be sure, leaves some relics behind, by which we may understand that the influence of Greek history, literature, and sculpture may still avail to cultivate the mind and give it an air of distinction. Perhaps in the commonwealth he is about to found, Faust would wish to establish not only d.y.k.es and freedom, but also professors.h.i.+ps of Greek and archaeological museums. And the lyre of Euphorion, which is also left us, may signify that poems like Byron's _Isles of Greece_, Keats's _Grecian Urn, Die Gotter Griechenlands_ of Schiller, and Goethe's own cla.s.sical pieces will continue to enrich European literature. This is something, but not enough to lift Faust's immense enthusiasm for Helen above a cra.s.s illusion. That dream of a perfect beauty to be achieved, of a perfect life to be lived according to nature and reason, would have ended in a little scholars.h.i.+p and a little pedantry. Faust would have won Helen in order to hand her over to Wagner.

Helen was queen of Sparta; and although of course the Doric Sparta of Lycurgus was something much later, and had nothing to do with the Sparta of Homer, yet taken symbolically it is the happiest accident that Helen, the type of Greek perfection in beauty, should have been queen of Sparta, the type of Greek perfection in discipline. A Faust that had, truly deserved and understood Helen would have built her an h.e.l.lenic city; he would have become himself an _??a? ??d???_, a master of men, one of those poets in things, those shapers of well-bred generations and wise laws, of which Plato speaks, contrasting them with Homer and other poets in words only. For the beauty of mind and body that fascinates the romantic cla.s.sicist, and which inspired the ancient poets themselves, was not a product of idleness and sentimentality, nor of material and forced activity; it was a product of orderly war, religion, gymnastics, and deliberate self-government.

The next turn in Faust's fortunes actually finds him a trader, a statesman, an empire-builder; and if such a rolling stone could gather any moss, we should expect to see here, if anywhere, the fruits of that "aesthetic education of mankind" which Helen represented. We should expect Faust, who had lain in the lap of absolute beauty, to understand its nature. We should expect him, in eager search after perfection, to establish his state on the distinction between the better and the worse,--a distinction never to be abolished or obscured for one who has loved beauty. In other words, he might have established a moral society founding it on great renunciations and on enlightened heroisms, so that the highest beauty might really come down and dwell within that city.

But we find nothing of the sort. Faust founds his kingdom because he must do something; and his only ideal of what he hopes to secure for his subjects is that they shall always have something to do. Thus the will to live, in Faust, is not in the least educated by his experience. It changes its objects because it must; the pa.s.sions of youth yield to those of age; and among all the illusions of his life the most fatuous is the illusion of progress.

It is characteristic of the absolute romantic spirit that when it has finished with something it must invent a new interest. It beats the bush for fresh game; it is always on the verge of being utterly bored. So now that Helen is flown, Mephistopheles must come to the rescue, like an amiable nurse, and propose all sorts of pastimes. Frankfort, Leipzig, Paris, Versailles, are described, with the entertainments that life there might afford; but Faust, who was always _difficile_, has been rendered more so by his recent splendid adventures. However, a new impulse suddenly arises in his breast. From the mountain-top to which Helen's mantle has borne him, he can see the German Ocean, with its tides daily covering great stretches of the flat sh.o.r.e, and rendering them brackish and uninhabitable. It would be a fine thing to reclaim those wastes, to plant there a prosperous population. After Greece, Faust has a vision of Holland.

This last ambition of Faust's is as romantic as the others. He feels the prompting towards political art, as he had felt the prompting towards love or beauty.[19] The notion of transforming things by his will, of leaving for ages his mark upon nature and upon human society, fascinates him;[20] but this pa.s.sion for activity and power, which some simple-minded commentators dignify with the name of altruism and of living for others, has no steady purpose or standard about it.[21]

Goethe is especially lavish in details to prove this point. Magic, the exercise of an unteachable will, is still Faust's instrument.

Mephistopheles, by various arts of illusion, secures the triumph of the emperor in a desperate war which he is carrying on against a justifiable insurrection. As a reward for the aid rendered, Faust receives the sh.o.r.e marches in fief. The necessary d.y.k.es and ca.n.a.ls are built by magic; the spirits that Mephistopheles commands dig and build them with strange incantations. The commerce that springs up is also illegitimate: piracy is involved in it.