The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (111 page)

While celebrated in Germany as the poet and across Europe as the last universal man, Goethe claims a place among great creators of Western literature for one work, his
Faust
. He probably first conceived it when he was a twenty-one-year-old law student in Strassburg in 1770, he wrote and revised it off and on until his death in 1832, and the last part was published posthumously. A product of his whole writing career, it became his own kind of anthology of all forms of prose and verse, from doggerel to the subtlest meter, in varied forms of drama, dance, and lyric.

Goethe’s
Faust
theme, like that of Joyce’s
Ulysses
, had been tested long before his time. The original Dr. Faustus was an unsavory necromancer of German folklore, who traveled widely, who died about 1540, and left a legacy of alchemy, magic, and astrology. He made a pact with the Devil, for which he was expelled from several cities. Despised as a sodomite, a
gourmand, and a drunkard, he died from mysterious causes. Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560), Luther’s collaborator, reported that Faust was strangled by the Devil in a rural inn in Württemberg on the day his evil pact came due. The legend, spread by Lutherans in the Reformation, expressed both reaction against the Roman Church and awe at Renaissance magic and science. As a parable of the perils of forbidden knowledge the Faust legend seemed to prove the need to keep learning within respectable bounds. But precisely because Faust explored the frontiers of forbidden knowledge his notoriety grew alongside Protestant orthodoxy. A collection of Faust stories, the
Spies Faustbuch
, published in German in Frankfurt in 1587, was reprinted eighteen times in the next ten years, was widely translated and frequently revised. Goethe probably knew the book.

It told the simple story of an arrogant scholar seeking unlimited power and knowledge who puts aside the proper science of theology for the forbidden science of magic. To secure this power for a number of years he sells his soul to the Devil. Faust then delights the theater audience by raising the dead, flying over the earth, and winning the beautiful Helen of Troy for his mistress. Finally, when his time is up, he is taken off to Hell.

The English translation of the
Spies Faustbuch
, entitled
The historie of the damnable life and deserved death of Doctor John Faustus
was itself magically transformed by Christopher Marlowe into his immortal play
The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
(1604). Marlowe’s Faustus is no mere necromancer but a man of infinite ambition lusting to be “great Emperor of the world.” The familiar plot is embellished with some of Marlowe’s best poetry, including the classic salutation to Helen:

The dramatic climax is the anguish of Faust when his twenty-four years of power come to an end and he is dragged off to Hell. Marlowe stays in the tradition of the medieval morality play. But he adds the Reformation note that Faustus is damned not only for inordinate ambition but for his fatalism and his refusal to accept the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith. Marlowe’s play was popular in the German puppet theater, where both Lessing and Goethe saw it as children. They both used the old scenario to challenge the Enlightenment faith in reason, to affirm instead the sovereign self, the power of Weltschmerz and the striving of the individual genius.

As Goethe developed the Faust legend he transformed the leading character. Doctor Faust, no longer a mere legendary necromancer, has become
a universal hero, a self in quest of fulfillment, as recounted in two parts. Part One, the most widely read, which was published in 1808, offers scenes long familiar on the stage; Part Two, twice as long and published only after Goethe’s death in 1832, is complex, obscure, and symbolic. His hero turns out to be not only a man of lust (he is that too), but a restless striver, reaching for his full humanity, and finally justified by God Himself.

The play begins with a Prologue in Heaven, where God agrees to let Mephistopheles (the Devil) try to win his bet that he can capture the soul of Doctor Faust. While God is confident that Mephistopheles cannot succeed, the play shows the Devil’s efforts and Faust’s response. An opening soliloquy by Faust declares his disillusionment with all knowledge—“philosophy, jurisprudence and medicine, too, and, worst of all, theology.” Mephistopheles then engages Faust in a pact to give himself up to be the Devil’s servant if at any moment of delight, he says, “Stay, thou art so fair! (
Verweihle doch, du bist so schön
.)” Hoping to trap Faust into this moment of climactic satisfaction, Mephistopheles tempts him finally with the delectable Gretchen. Faust, though with misgiving, seduces her, she ends in a dungeon and a miserable death—a victory for Mephistopheles—while Faust himself is overcome with remorse.

The second part offers five wildly melodramatic and allegorical acts. These include a scene of Helen of Troy recalled from Hades to be pursued by Faust. Their son Euphorion, who stands for poetry and the union of classical and romantic traditions (and incidentally, too, Lord Byron!) disappears in flames. This works a kind of catharsis, and a born-again Faust goes seeking ways to serve his fellowman. When, with the help of Mephistopheles, he has reclaimed some land from the sea, he feels the ultimate satisfaction, exclaims “Stay, thou art so fair!” and falls dead. When Mephistopheles tries to seize Faust’s soul for Hell, it is rescued and borne away by angels. With this happy ending, the drama becomes, in Dante’s sense, a Comedy.

Like
Hamlet
, Goethe’s
Faust
offers a wide panorama of scenes from the vulgar to the sublime, with passages of wondrous poetry that can be sensed even through the veil of translation. And it also preserves the iridescence of its modern theme. From it Oswald Spengler christened our Western culture “Faustian,” and others too have found it an unexcelled metaphor for the infinitely aspiring always dissatisfied modern self.

Goethe himself was wary of simple explanations. When his friends in Rome accused him of incompetence in metaphysics, he replied. “I, being an artist, regard this as of little moment. Indeed, I prefer that the principle from which and through which I work should be hidden from me.” In his conversations (May 6, 1827) with Eckermann he explained why he laughed
at “the people who … come and ask what idea I sought to embody in my
Faust.”

From the beginning God, too, explains that man will always be in the Devil’s path:

Man is to be judged, then, not only by his acts, but by his hopes, always better than his deeds:

Man’s problem, and his hope, come from the divine in him, which Mephistopheles explains:

In his opening soliloquy Faust asks himself:

And Faust’s ambition has no bounds.

Faust finally discovers that he is to be judged not by his finding but by his seeking. The last words of Part II end not with a conclusion but with a beckoning: “Das Ewig Weibliche/Zieht uns hinan” (The Eternal Feminine draws us on). This, Goethe’s greatest work, was a monument to the inconclusiveness of experience. And man’s life, like
Faust
, was an unfinished poem. Since “Doubt grows with knowledge,” Goethe urged his readers “to quietly revere the unfathomable.”

If a measure of self-esteem is willingness to put oneself in words, surely few men have lived who can match Goethe. The standard critical edition of his
works in German comes to 133 volumes and includes every form of prose, poetry, fiction, and drama. These comprise letters, speeches, essays, travel journals, treatises, government reports, scientific papers, recorded conversations, diaries, and much more. They are heroic in purpose as well as in volume, for there is no art, no aspect of politics or science on which Goethe does not express himself. His European celebrity probably even exceeded that of Voltaire, whose collected works come only to some thirty volumes and who never produced a work of the stature of
Faust
And Goethe somehow managed to be praised for all the virtues, including skepticism and humility. Carlyle, never given to understatement, acclaimed him “the Wisest of our Time.” Goethe focused the adoration of the eminent Victorians, including Matthew Arnold and George Eliot, who accompanied George Henry Lewes (1817–1878) to Weimar for his classic
Life of Goethe
(1855). Even if it were in our tradition to match the German scholars’ humorless idolizing of their great writers, W. H. Auden observed, “it would be much more difficult for us to idolize Shakespeare the man because we know nothing about him, whereas Goethe was essentially an autobiographical writer, whose life is the most documented of anyone who ever lived; compared with Goethe, even Dr. Johnson is a shadowy figure.”

Goethe’s own writings, beginning with
Werther
, spotlighted himself and drew pilgrims to Weimar. Largely because of him, Weimar became “the Athens of Germany.” Thomas Mann captured Goethe’s permeating influence on Weimar in
The Beloved Returns
(1940), when Charlotte Buff, having borne eleven children, and now a widow of sixty, comes back. No shrewd public relations consultant could have bettered what Goethe did casually for himself—by his attractive person, his many widely advertised love affairs, and his numerous books, which reached all Europe in translation. Goethe’s audience with Napoleon at Erfurt in October 1808 became a legend. On greeting Goethe, Napoleon exclaimed with a fixed look,
“Vous êtes un homme!”
—a rapid compliment, which he repeated to his entourage and was then spread across Europe. Napoleon noted that Goethe was “very well preserved” for his age, said he had read
Werther
seven times, and had taken it to Egypt with him. And he asked if Goethe had ever written tragedies. Incidentally, the emperor criticized a passage in
Werther
as being “unnatural,” because, according to Goethe, it suggested an undue power for fate.

Goethe himself, in a widely quoted aphorism, declared that all his works were only “fragments of a great confession” (
Bruchstücke einer grossen Konfession
.) The heroic self Goethe created was something quite new in Western literature. He said that the classic axiom “Know thyself” only expressed the efforts of a priesthood to distract men from the active life and commit them to a sterile preoccupation with the self. Yet Goethe probably
wrote more about himself than anyone before or since. Along with Gibbon he is one of the first writers to chronicle the history of his own life fully, as a history of himself, and not of his deeds or works. Goethe knew and admired the works of Montaigne, he read Rousseau and made a pilgrimage to his place of refuge on the Lake of Biel, and he translated Cellini’s autobiography into German.

Goethe’s self-preoccupation never ceased. At the age of sixty he wrote his autobiography under the puzzling title
Dichtung und Wahrheit
(Poetry and Truth). Its two volumes began with his birth, followed his early loves and enthusiasms, and concluded in 1775, when at twenty-six he was invited to Weimar. So he declared the public importance of everything about himself even when he had only begun to be a public person. “For the principal task of biography,” Goethe declared in his Preface, “I believe, is to present a man in the conditions of his time, and to show to what extent those conditions, taken as a whole, thwart or favor him, how he forms from it all a view of the world and of man, and how, if he is an artist, a poet, or a writer, he then takes that view and projects it back into the world.”