B00ARI2G5C EBOK (4 page)

The rest of Act I (Sc. 2-7) is entirely concerned with events at the imperial court. About two-thirds of it was written between the summer of 1827 and February 1828, and two months later Goethe published this fragment in a new volume of his collected works, ending at line 6036 with the laconic statement ‘To be continued’. He then turned to other work, and did not finish the remaining third of the Act until the latter part of 1829. With the exception of certain poetically outstanding passages, notably in Scene 5, the court scenes of Act I must probably be for most readers (to say nothing of translators) the least rewarding part of Part Two; the disproportionately lengthy Carnival scene (Sc. 3), in particular, is something of a literary embarrassment, and a producer would not be wrong to treat it less reverently than many scholars have done. Nevertheless, it is interesting to trace the
development
of what Goethe was apparently trying to do in this Act, and here again we can profitably compare the early prose sketch BA 70 with the end-product. In the former, Faust and Mephistopheles make their way to Augsburg, where Maximilian I is holding court (in the final version these specific identifications are dropped, and the Emperor becomes a stylized, composite figure). The Emperor receives the now famous magician graciously; but their meeting is a comic social failure, obliging Mephistopheles to come to Faust’s rescue by magically replacing him as his
Doppelgánger
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The Emperor makes the traditional request for Helen to be conjured up for him, and Faust disappears for a time ‘to make the necessary preparations’ (a point left unexplained). During this interval Mephistopheles, still disguised as Faust, ingratiates himself with the court ladies by magically curing their freckles and other physical defects. The tone of facetious comedy is maintained when Paris and Helen appear and are criticized respectively by the male and female spectators. Unspecified ‘bizarre complications’ lead to the sudden disappearance of the magical scene; ‘the real Faust’ falls in a swoon, Mephistopheles vanishes, and the company is left in confusion. There is no Carnival in this scenario, and no
mention at all of certain themes that assume great prominence in the finished and vastly expanded Act I: the economic crisis in the Empire and the invention of paper money (Sc. 2, 4) or Faust’s mysterious journey to the ‘Mothers’ in search of Helen (Sc. 5). This last scene, especially, is characteristic of Goethe’s later and more serious conception, contrasting notably with the trivialities retained from the old scenario (such as Mephistopheles’ role as quack cosmetician) or added in the first half of the Carnival scene.

As finally executed, the Court sequence in Act I falls into two unequal parts, the first and longer dominated by the theme of the Empire’s bankruptcy, the second by that of the conjuration of Helen. Both are symbolic, and the first may be referred to any or all of various historical situations, such as the anarchic conditions in the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth century under Maximilian I, its terminal decay in the late eighteenth century, or the parlous state of the
ancien régime
in Louis XVI’s France.
*
Equally, in Goethe’s time there were a number of financial scandals and crises, in Germany and in England and France, resulting from the issue of paper credit.
*
In Act I, and indeed in Part Two generally, Goethe is in the last resort reflecting events of his age and especially patterns in his own life, and this makes it natural that before we come to Faust’s search for classical beauty, we should have a ‘political’ sequence, just as Goethe’s politically active career at the ducal court of Weimar began in 1776 and continued until 1786, when he made the journey to Italy with which the ‘classical’ phase of his development may be said to have begun. But over and above the merely autobiographical unity in Act I, its two main themes (the quest for wealth and the quest for ‘Helen’) can be seen as symbolic parallels. In an important letter written at the time when he was working on Scenes 2-4, Goethe refers to passages in his earlier and later poetry that have been considered obscure, and remarks (letter to Iken, 27 September 1827):

Since there is much in our experiences that cannot be clearly expressed and directly communicated, it has long been my practice to juxtapose images and let each of them, as it were, be a mirror to the other, in such a way as to reveal the more hidden meaning to attentive readers.

This method of allowing the intended theme to express itself indirectly and discreetly through parallels or contrasts is much used in
Faust
, in Part Two especially. Act I, despite its excessive length,
gains a certain overall unity or continuity if we look upon its two main themes in this way. The Emperor’s search for buried gold, on Mephistopheles’ advice, ends in the specious substitution of paper money; Faust’s search for Helen in perilous underground regions, also on Mephistopheles’ advice, ends in her brief appearance as an insubstantial phantom. Goethe seems to insert a ‘delicate hint’ (letter to Meyer 20 July 1831) of this parallel in 6191 f. and more particularly in 6197-8:

… conjuring Helen out of time
Like phantom paper-money from the air

and 6315-16:

Beauty’s like buried treasure: where it lies
Is known by art and magic to the wise.

A close association, or indeed symbolic equivalence, between the magical acquisition of wealth and the creation of beauty by the magically gifted poet is also suggested in the latter part of the Carnival masquerade (Sc. 3), which may thus also be integrated to some extent into the general sense of Act I.

Goethe had already written more than one masked pageant or revue of this kind for the Weimar court, he had witnessed the Carnival celebrations in Rome, and commentators have noted various other models or sources. He follows the conventions of the genre until about half-way through the scene, when the character of the events changes and they become magical happenings. The Herald, as master of ceremonies who describes what is taking place, is puzzled, and control of the proceedings seems to pass to Faust, who enters masked as Plutus, the god of riches. With him comes, as Goethe also explains to the puzzled Eckermann,
*
a figure from Act III (which he has already written but which has not yet officially happened): Faust’s son Euphorion, here disguised as a young Charioteer. Both Euphorion and the Charioteer are allegories of Poetry, as we learn from the same conversation between Goethe and Eckermann and from the Charioteer himself:

I am Profusion, I am Poetry (5573)

Both his kinship with Plutus and his word ‘profusion’ (literally ‘prodigality’) suggest a close association between poetic creativity
and wealth, both of which seem to be combined in Plutus at the end of the masquerade, though at this earlier point (5610-29, 5689-708) the theme is perhaps rather the poet’s gratitude to the rich patron on whom he depends. Here too we may detect an allusion to Goethe’s own experience at Weimar, including his attempt to repair the finances of Karl August’s duchy by reopening the Ilmenau silver-mine and his frequent desire for creative solitude amid his duties at court (5696). A further function of the scene (as often in such theatrical court entertainments) is to administer a discreetly allegorical moral lesson to the ruler himself: Faust is perhaps trying to educate the Emperor about the true nature and right use of wealth, as contrasted with Mephistopheles (Avarice), who can only put gold to vulgar uses (5779-94). Faust’s treasure-chest seems to turn into a vat of molten gold (5739-51) and then into a fountain of fire (5920-5); as the Emperor stoops over this vision which should enlighten him, his beard catches fire, and a general conflagration and panic are averted only by Faust-Plutus’s magic intervention (5926–86). The fire might be seen as a symbolic warning to the Emperor of the danger of war or revolution. Goethe’s main source for this incident was an old chronicle which tells of a similar disaster at the court of Charles VI of France.
*
Mommsen has demonstrated, however, that in this part of Scene 3 and at the beginning of Scene 4 he is also making use of
Arabian Nights
story-motifs.
*
It is very significant that the Act I fragment published in April 1828 ends with the Emperor (6031-6, in Sc. 4) congratulating Mephistopheles on his imaginative inventiveness and comparing him to Scheherazade, the Sultan’s wife in the frame-fiction of the
Tales
who prolongs her forfeited life by entertaining him with her inexhaustible fund of narrative. Taken in conjunction with the magic climax of the masquerade, this one express mention of the
Arabian Nights
tales and their narrator at the end of the 1828 fragment amounts (as Mommsen suggests) to a concluding celebratory homage by Goethe to the power of poetic imagination, and reinforces the thematic linkage between imaginative creativity and true wealth, the vision of classical beauty and the vision of hidden treasure.

The second phase of the court sequence in Act I begins with the ‘Mothers’ scene (Sc. 5, written in the autumn of 1829), which is also the opening point of the central Faust-Helen story in the finished Part Two as a whole. Faust’s first attempt to capture the supreme
beauty is instructively unsuccessful. He ‘descends’ in search of her, counselled by Mephistopheles in strange and compelling words (6211-17, 6239-48, 6275-91), to those timeless, spaceless goddesses
*
who are the ineffable origin of all living forms or all that was once living; they are surrounded by the images of all creatures, their business is metamorphosis and rebirth:

Formation, transformation,

The eternal Mind’s eternal delectation.
(6287-8)

From them, perhaps, Faust can retrieve for a while, as a poet might do, a beauty that belongs to the past, enchanting it into a new kind of life out of the flux of time. His speech in the conjuration scene itself (Sc. 7, 6427-38), echoing the impressive obscurity of the speeches he has just heard from Mephistopheles, confirms Goethe’s half-concealed intention to cast him in the role of a poet: in an earlier draft for 6435 f. he had written not ‘the bold magician’ but ‘the poet boldly’. (Similarly, he had planned to make ‘the poet’ intervene during the magic conclusion of the masquerade, but then decided that Plutus with his magic staff was symbolically explicit enough.) As Faust discovers, however, classical beauty cannot be truly recreated within the Gothic constraints of medieval Christendom. Helen, as Mephistopheles says of her, is ‘not my period’ (6209), and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation is not hers. She will appear only long enough for Faust to glimpse her and fall in love with her. He must try again, set out on a still longer perilous quest. To be sure, even after he has then found her, his union with her will be brief; but a lesson will have been learnt, a point will have been made, a great experience (10054) will have marked Faust (or Goethe or humanity) for ever.

We should remember that Act III, the ‘Helena’ Act, was not only the first part of Part Two to be published, but also (apart from possible fragments of Act V) the first to be written: the ‘Mothers’ scene and all the events of Act II were major afterthoughts, added four years later (in 1829-30) and designed retrospectively to provide
a basis or rationale for the already published Helen story. As we have seen, Goethe for a long time regarded the latter as almost a foreign body in Part Two: a ‘phantasmagorical intermezzo’, an episode, even as ‘my
opus supererogationis’
(letter to Boisserée, 10 December 1826). But in the end, as he worked on the first two Acts, he tried to play down this whimsical and accidental character of ‘Helena’ and to integrate it into the action as a whole. In 1828 he told Zelter how anxious he was to finish Acts I and II, so that ‘Helena’ will be ‘properly prepared’ and follow naturally from the rest ‘in an aesthetic and rational sequence’ (letter of 24 January 1828). In the final Part Two the slightly apologetic subtitle ‘classical-romantic phantasmagoria’ is dropped, but in 1826-7 it was retained for the interim publication of ‘Helena’, and in presenting so extraordinary a piece to the public, Goethe felt that an explanatory advance blurb or preface was called for. The long prose sketch of Act II (paralipomenon BA 73, December 1826) was intended for this purpose, and in its concluding sentence Goethe advises his readers to study these ‘antecedents’ of the forthcoming ‘phantasmagoria’ with care. As he then changed his mind about publishing it, they were unable to follow this advice; but we can with advantage do so today for the better understanding of Act II as well as of Act III. (Since Act II is all late material, the earlier scenario of 1816, BA 70, contains nothing at all that corresponds to it, and passes straight from its equivalent of the end of Act I to its equivalent of the beginning of Act III, as we shall see later on.)

Act II deals, though rather incompletely in its final version, with Faust’s second quest for Helen, his long journey in space and time to the classical underworld. Having made the mistake of conjuring her into the wrong environment, he is himself taken back into the gloomy, medieval world of his former study, where he lies in a trance dreaming of her mythical begetting by Zeus, who in the form of a swan visits Leda as she bathes with her maidens. From this point, before he can ‘draw back into life that unique form’ (7438 f.), he must find his way to where Helen really belongs.
*
Here again Goethe uses
Arabian Nights
sources, but since the two cultures now to be symbolically contrasted with each other are those of the Germanic Middle Ages and of Greek classical and pre-classical antiquity, it is not possible to introduce Oriental material overtly, and he therefore masks it with Greek names and Greek mythology.
*
The central motif
is that of the lovesick hero’s long and difficult journey to win an apparently unattainable prize, such as the love of a spirit-princess. One story on this model is that of Prince Asem or Hassan and the Princess of the Flying Islands of Waak al Waak, whom he first saw bathing with her maidens; he has captured her for a time, but she has disappeared into another world, and to reach her he must pass through a region inhabited by strange monsters, warned and counselled by successive advisers, etc. In order to develop this motif in Greek style, Goethe invents (in BA 73 and Act II) the extraordinary ‘Classical Walpurgis Night’, an ironic counterpart to the Germanic ‘Walpurgis Night’ of Part One, the witches’ sabbath on the Blocksberg (Sc. 24, 25). The ‘classical’ version is a Greek rite of passage celebrated in Thessaly on every anniversary of the battle of Pharsalus in 48
BC
: the decisive victory of Caesar over Pompey which seale the fate of the Roman Republic and led to the establishment of the Empire under which the provincialization of the Greek world became complete.
*
Faust must attend this ghostly festival and there find an entry to Helen’s world. Since Mephistopheles has proved incompetent in this matter, a new magical link is required, a new adviser or ‘helper’ who can remove Faust from the world of Rome’s successor, the Holy Roman Empire, and take him back to classical Greece. It is at this point that Goethe introduces the second extraordinary feature of the Act II material: the figure of the alchemical mannikin or ‘homunculus’.