B00ARI2G5C EBOK (12 page)

In the last scene, Goethe drops the mock-naïve mystery-play style;
‘der alte Hen’
(as God has irretrievably become) does not make a personal anthropomorphic appearance as in the ‘Prologue in Heaven’, or in the intended Epilogue in which he was to sit in judgement over Faust and give him the benefit of the doubt. Asked by the (not wholly reliable) Friedrich Fôrster in 1828 whether that would not indeed be the right way to end the drama, Goethe is reported to have shaken his head and replied: ‘But that would be in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Faust ends as a very old man, and in old age we become mystics.’ Instinct rightly guided him to change the plan, to take us not into heaven but to the fringes of heaven, to a place both earthly and unearthly, a transitional region opening on the unknowable Otherness. This frontier is still visible at first, a landscape that will become a cloudscape: Goethe again uses the ‘salutary form and solidity’ of human art. The Pisan frescoes provided it, impressively portraying for him the first Christian hermits in their rocky desert near Egyptian Thebes (the ancient city on the site of Luxor). ‘Gli Anacoreti nella Tebaide’ showed the holy men poised between earth and sky, sitting in their caves, some with wild beasts at their feet, at different heights on the mountainside as if arranged in ascending order of spirituality. In Goethe’s version the ‘Pater Profundus’ is in the ‘lower region’, the ‘Pater Seraphicus’ higher up, and the ‘Doctor Marianus’
*
near the summit, ‘in the highest and purest cell’. In the course of the scene this motif is developed in terms of the cloud symbolism, like that of Faust’s Act IV soliloquy (see above, p. 1 and note), suggested to Goethe by his meteorological studies. Children who have died at birth, and are therefore innocent, rise into the ether in the form of clouds. Angels hover above the highest peak, carrying Faust’s soul, which in an earlier sketch (BA 239) for Scene 22 was also enveloped in a cloud. Before long we lose sight of the mountain landscape altogether as the ascent continues. The whole picture is in motion, from the extraordinary opening stanzas (‘Woods, hitherwavering…’) to the causal verb of motion that ends the entire poem (‘draws us on high’); a supreme object of love, like Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, imparts
movement to all things (κινε
ζ
ρ
μενον). The ‘Pater Ecstaticus’ levitates, ‘hovering up and down’, piercing himself with sensuous masochistic rapture (an experience for which words are found nowhere else in Goethe’s poetry). Nature is flooded with divine energies, even stationary things seeming to be in motion: the Pater Profundus (11866-89) contemplates the downward thrust of the rocks and water, the upward thrust of trees, the cleansing thunderstorm, all of them ‘love’s messengers’. Being nearest to the earth, he prays for release from bodily and mental turmoil. The newly dead infants or ‘Blessed Boys’ look down on the earth for the first time through the eyes
*
of the Pater Seraphicus (11910-17); frightenened by what they see, they then soar away from his ‘middle region’ to the still purer air around the summit. All this indirectly expresses the purifying ascent and growth of Faust himself. His ‘immortal part’, now in a ‘chrysalid’ state (11982) already containing its further metamorphosis, is carried to the same ‘upper atmosphere’ by the angels who rescued him in Scene 22 (as they now report, 11934-53). Here he is handed over to the Blessed Boys, in whose company he will break out of his cloudy or cocoon-like integument (11985
*
); later (12076-83) we are told that they for their part will learn from his experience. It is interesting that the mute but still developing Faust, in his initiation process, is passed from hand to hand (the rescuing angels, the Blessed Boys, Gretchen) just as in Act II he was passed from mentor to mentor (the Homunculus, Chiron, Manto). This is one of the striking parallels between ‘Mountain Gorges’ and the ‘Classical Walpurgis Night’. The Homunculus himself, as we have seen, is paralleled to Faust in various ways: he too is passed from one mentor to another (Anaxagoras, Thales, Nereus, Proteus), and he too is conceived in terms of Goethe’s theory of the ‘entelechy’ (cf. pp. xxx and Ixxii above). But the Homunculus entelechy is pre-incarnate and strives towards incarnation, bodily
Entstehung
, fusion with the fecund physical life of nature; his quest is accomplished when he is irresistibly drawn to Galatea. This is a pagan mystery, presided over (as Williams has interestingly shown) by the moon-goddess Luna, whom Galatea represents.
*
By contrast, the Faust entelechy is engaged in a Christian mystery of redemption and transfiguration: having survived physical death, he has still to cast off completely the bonds of earthliness from which the hermit fathers also seek release (11862 f, 11885-7). The Maturer Angels describe the
purifying process he must undergo (11954-65; it is in a discarded stage direction to this speech that the variant reading ‘Faust’s entelechy’ occurs). His ‘powerful spirit-energy’ (
starke Geisteskrafi
) has attracted the physical elements to itself (11958 ff.), forming a ‘subtle bond’ (11962,
geeinte Zwienatur
, literally ‘united dual nature’): this union can be unmade only by divine love (11964 f.), mediated in this case by Gretchen under the higher authority of the Mater Gloriosa. The Virgin Mother of God appears, like Galatea, only for a brief instant, at the climax of the scene, her epiphany dramatically prepared first by the ecstatic praises of the ‘Doctor Marianus’ (11989-12012), secondly by the prayers of her Penitent Women (themselves in cloud form) who recount their earthly experiences in the most moving stanzas of the scene, and thirdly by Gretchen, emerging from among the Penitents and herself interceded for by them. With her sorrow turned into joy, recalling and transforming the despairing words of her prayer in Part One (Sc. 21), she intercedes for her returning lover, asking and obtaining leave to continue his initiation (12092-5).

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.