Faust, Part 1

FAUST

(PART 1)

By JOHANN GOETHE

Translated By ANNA SWANWICK

Introduction by F. H. HEDGE

Faust, Part 1

By Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Translated by Anna Swanwick

Introduction by F. H. Hedge

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-7513-0

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-7680-9

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Cover Image: a detail of Faust on Easter morning, by Johann Peter Krafft (1780-1856), oil on canvas / De Agostini Picture Library / G. Nimatallah / Bridgeman Images.

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

DEDICATION

PROLOGUE FOR THE THEATRE

PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

FAUST

BIOGRAPHICAL AFTERWORD

Introduction

The notion of a formal compact with a personal fiend, once so prevalent, had in the Middle Ages a special application to such as were versed beyond the mark of their time in the mysteries of physical science, like Friar Bacon, Albert the Great, and Cornelias Agrippa. Dr. Faustus, of German tradition, was one of those to whom this suspicion attached. Johann Faust, not to be confounded with his namesake, the reputed inventor of the art of printing, was a veritable historical personage. Born at Knittlingen, in Würtemberg, he studied medicine, and also magic, then a recognized branch of learning, at the University of Cracow, visited various parts of Europe, and afterward led a wandering life in Germany, professing supernatural power, and styling himself philosophus philosophorum. Melancthon, as reported by his pupil Manlius, speaks of him as having visited Wittenberg some time after the battle of Pavia, 1525, and as boasting that by his magic arts he had procured the victory in that battle for Charles V.

He is also mentioned by Philip Begardi, a physician of repute in his day, in a work entitled Index Sanitatum, published in 1539.

Around this slight nucleus of historic fact there clustered, in the sixteenth century, portentous accretions of fabulous matter. A supposed league with the enemy of mankind was precisely the soil for such growths. Gast, a theologian of the time, who dined with Faust at Basel, as he says in his Sermones Conviviales, represents him accompanied by two devils, one in the shape of a dog, the other in that of a horse.

His death, of which nothing certain is known, was depicted with great horror of circumstance as a warning against commerce with Satan. By some he is said to have been torn in pieces by the Adversary when the term of his service—twenty-four years—had expired; by others to have been turned on his face in the coffin as often as he was laid in the right position.

The earliest printed narrative of Faust’s adventures is that of Spiess, published in Frankfort, in 1587. An English translation of this in 1590 furnished Marlowe with the subject matter of his Dr. Faustus, a Tragedy, which enjoyed a brief popularity on the English stage, but was not published until ten years after the author’s death.

Goethe appears to have derived his knowledge of the Faust legend partly from the work of Widmann, published in 1599, and another more modern in its form, which appeared in 1728, and partly from the puppet plays exhibited in Frankfurt and other cities of Germany, of which that legend was then a favorite theme. He was not the only writer of his day who made use of it. Some thirty of his contemporaries had produced their Fausts during the interval which elapsed between the conception and completion of his great work. Oblivion seems to have overtaken them all, with the exception of Lessing’s, of which, unfortunately, we have only a few fragments. The MS. of the complete work was unaccountably lost on its way to the publisher, between Dresden and Leipzig.

It is known to all who are familiar with Goethe’s life and writings, that the composition of Faust proceeded spasmodically, with many and long interruptions between the inception and conclusion. Projected in 1769, at the age of twenty, it was not completed till the year 1831, at the age of eighty-two. The reasons for so long a delay in the case of a writer who often composed so rapidly, have been widely discussed by recent critics. The true explanation I think is to be found in the fact of the author’s removal to Weimar when only a small portion of the work had been written, when only the general conception and one or two leading ideas were present to his thought, and before the plan of the whole was matured. That change of residence, with the new interests, the official duties, the multiplicity of engagements attending it, made a thorough break in Goethe’s literary life. Several works begun or planned were left unfinished, and Faust among the rest. Some of these were never resumed, and the same fate would apparently have befallen Faust but for the urgent solicitation of friends. He took the MS. with him to Rome, and from there he wrote, in 1788, to friends at home, that he was going to work upon his Faust again, and that he thought that he had recovered the thread of the piece. For thought, Bayard Taylor says felt sure; but Goethe’s language was not so decided.{1} The thread of an unfinished work after the lapse of fifteen years is not easily recovered; my own opinion is, that Goethe never did recover it; and hence the long delay in the completion of the work. We know, at any rate, that the only addition made to it then was the scene in the Witch’s Kitchen. That, as we learn from Eckermann, was written in the villa Borghese—the most unlikely place in the world for such a composition. In the midst of southern and classic associations, this extravaganza of northern diablerie! In 1790 a fragment of the First Part was published, wanting several of the best scenes in the work, as we now have it. Then again there is a long gap. Meanwhile he had become acquainted and intimate with Schiller, and at his instigation he made several unsuccessful attempts to finish Faust. Grief for Schiller’s death, which occurred in 1805, caused new delay; but at last, in 1808, the First Part was published entire as we now have it in a uniform edition of the author’s works. Meanwhile a portion of the Second Part, comprising the whole of the third act, had been already composed. This was published separately, in 1827, with the title, Helena, a Classic-Romantic Phantasmagoria, With the exception of parts of the first act in 1828, nothing more of the second part of Faust appeared in print during the author’s lifetime. But the octogenarian had rigorously bound himself to finish it if possible before, as he said, the great night should come, in which no man can work. Fortunately the closing scenes were already written. Slowly and painfully the work proceeded at intervals during the three remaining years, and was not completed until within seven months of his death.

Had ever a poet’s masterpiece such a genesis? Birth-pangs extending over sixty years!

The history of its composition reveals itself here and there in the finished work, especially in the second part. The first half of the fifth act gives one the impression of an outline not filled up, indications instead of representations; a design imperfectly executed. Single passages, striking in themselves, are loosely connected, and this first half bears no proportion to the last. The fourth act is rich in suggestion, but labors in the structure. The third act, an exquisite poem in itself, is an interlude, and does not further the development of the plot. The same may be said of the Classical Walpurgis Night in the second. In short, although one grand design may be supposed in the poet’s mind to have comprehended and clinched the whole, the want of unity in the execution of the Second Part is painfully apparent to all in whose estimation the interest of single portions does not compensate for the halting of the plot. Even the First Part, with all its grandeur and its fire, its pathos and its sweetness, bears marks of interruption in its composition. A single prose scene contrasts with strange though not unpleasant effect the metrical movement of the rest. Gaps and seams and joints and splicings are here and there apparent. The work is too great to be injured by them, but they bear witness of arrested and fitful composition. The scene with Valentine, one of the most spirited, is introduced with some violence by Mephistopheles’ serenade before Gretchen’s door. The Walpurgisnachtstraum, or Oberon and Titania’s Golden Wedding is lugged in with no motive in the drama, whose action it only serves to interrupt. In old English poems the divisions are sometimes called Fyttes (fits). It has seemed to me that the term would be an apt designation of the scenes in Faust, They were thrown off by the author as the fit took him.

But the effect of the long arrest which, after Goethe’s removal to Weimar, delayed the completion of the Faust, is most apparent in the wide gulf which separates, as to character and style, the Second Part from the First. So great indeed is the distance between the two, that without external historical proofs of identity, it would seem from internal evidence altogether improbable, in spite of the slender thread of the fable which connects them, that both poems were the work of one and the same author. And really they were not the same. The change which had come over Goethe when returned from Italy had gone down to the very springs of his intellectual life. The fervor and the rush, the sparkle and foam of his early productions had been replaced by the stately calm and the luminous breadth of view that is born of experience. The torrent of the mountains had become the river of the plain. Romantic impetuosity had changed to classic repose. He could still, by occasional efforts of the will, cast himself back into old moods, resume the old thread, and so complete the first Faust. But we may confidently assert that he could not, after the age of forty, have originated the poem, any more than, before his Italian tour, he could have written the second Faust, purporting to be a continuation of the first. The difference in spirit and style is enormous.

As to the question which of the two is the greater production, it seems to me a very preposterous one. They are incommensurable. It is like asking which is greater, Dante’s Commedia or Shakespeare’s Macbeth. As to which is the more generally interesting, no question can arise. There are thousands who enjoy and admire the First Part to one who even reads the Second. The interest of the former is poetic and thoroughly human; the interest of the other is partly poetic, but mostly philosophical and scientific. The one bears you irresistibly on; you forget the writer and his genius in the theme. The other draws your attention to the manner, and leaves you cold and careless of the theme. The transition from the first to the second is like the change from a hill country to a richly-cultured champaign; from the wild picturesqueness of nature to the smooth perfection of art.

In one respect, at least, the Second Part is nowise inferior to the First, namely, in rhythmical beauty. It abounds in metrical prodigies, proof at once of the marvelous plasticity of the language, and the technical skill of the poet, whose versification, at the age of fourscore, exhibits all the ease and dexterity of youth, and to whom it seems to have been as natural to utter himself in verse as in prose.

The symbolical character of Faust is assumed by all the critics, and in part confessed by the author himself. Besides the general symbolism pervading and motiving the whole, a symbolism of human destiny, and here and there a shadowing forth of the poet’s private experience, there are special allusions, local, personal, enigmatic conceits, which have furnished topics of learned discussion, and taxed the ingenuity of numerous commentators. We need not trouble ourselves with these subtleties. But little exegesis is needed for a right comprehension of the true and substantial import of the work.

The key to the plot is given in the Prologue in Heaven. The Devil, in the character of Mephistopheles, asks permission to tempt Faust; he boasts his ability to get entire possession