Part III of the Faust-book relates his 'feats of nigromancy at the

courts of Potentates' and elsewhere, and his 'terrible end and departure.' At Innsbruck, in the presence of Charles V. and his court he summons up the shades of Alexander the Great and his consort, I suppose Roxana, the beautiful Bactrian princess. You may be interested to learn that Alexander the Great was a 'well-built stout little man with a thick yellow-red beard, red cheeks, and eyes like a basilisk,' and that the old chronicler, quite after the fashion of the modern purveyor for ladies' journals, informs us that Roxana wore a dress entirely of blue velvet trimmed with gold pieces and pearls. The following chapters strike one as hardly in the same key with the rest of the book. They relate feats which remind one rather of Baron Muenchhausen. Faust swallows up a wagon of hay and a team of horses that get in his way. He makes stag-antlers grow on the head of a nobleman--saws off his own foot to give it as security for a loan borrowed from a Jew (reminding one of Shylock and his 'pound of flesh')--treats students to wine magically procured (as in the scene in Auerbach's cellar in Goethe's poem)--cuts off people's heads and sends them to the barber to be shaved, and then replaces them (a most useful invention)--makes flowers appear in vases (like modern spiritualists or Indian jugglers)--and lets flowers and grapes flourish in his garden at Christmas-time. His most important feat is summoning up (as he does in Goethe's poem) the shade of Helen of Troy. You will wish for a description of Helen--at least of her dress. She appeared in a splendid robe of black-purple ... her hair, of a glorious golden hue, hung down to her knees--she had coal-black eyes, a lovely face, and a round head, her lips red as cherries, with a little mouth and a neck like a white swan, cheeks red as a rosebud, and a tall straight figure. A fit of remorse now seizes our magician. He is visited by a pious old man who nearly persuades him to repent and break his bond with the devil. But Mephisto is too cunning for him, and induces him to sign a new compact with his blood, promising to procure him Helen. For (as is also the case in Goethe's poem) Faust himself has fallen violently in love with the phantom that he had raised. By the help of Mephistopheles Helen herself--or one of her 'doubles' which play a part in Greek mythology--is summoned up, and lives with Faust as his wife. (At his death she, and their son, Justus Faust, disappear.) In the last year he is overwhelmed with terrible despair, which is deepened by the mockeries of the demon. On the last evening he invites his friends to supper at the village Rimlich, near Wittenberg. After the supper, he addresses his companions in a speech of intense and pathetic remorse, praying that God will save his soul though his body is forfeit to the devil. He tells them that at the stroke of twelve the demon will come to fetch him. He begs them to go quietly to bed, and not to be alarmed if they hear a great uproar. At midnight a mighty wind sweeps over the house, and a terrible hissing is heard as of innumerable serpents. Faust's cries for help gradually die away. They rush into the supper room and find him torn to pieces--eyes, brains, and teeth scattered in all directions. 'After this,' says our chronicler, 'it was so uncanny in the house that no man dared live in it. Doctor Faust also appeared in person to his Famulus (assistant) Wagner by night, and related to him many still more weird and mysterious things.... And thus endeth the whole and truthful Historia and Magic of Dr. Faust, from which every Christian man should take warning, and specially those who are of a presumptuous, proud, curious and obstinate mind and head, that they may flee from all Magic, Incantation, and other works of the devil. Amen! This I wish for each and every one from the ground of my heart. Amen! Amen!' The great popularity of this original Faust-book led to the publication of many other versions of the story. In the very next year a Faust-book in rime appeared. In some of these versions Mephisto has a very bad time of it, Faust setting him all kinds of impossible tasks--such as writing the name of Christ or painting a crucifix, or taking him on Good Friday to Jerusalem--until the demon begs for his release, offering to give back the written compact. In Strassburg at a shooting competition Faust's magic bullet strikes Mephisto, who 'yells out again and again' in pain. In a Dutch version, where the demon has the name 'Jost,' Faust amuses himself by throwing a bushel of corn into a thorn hedge late at night, when poor 'Jost' is tired to death, and bids him pick up every grain in the same way as in the old story Venus vents her malice on Psyche. The most important German version was that by Widmann--an amplification of the old Faust-book. There also appeared a life of Faust's Famulus (assistant), Christopher Wagner, whom the devil attends in the form of an ape. Of one of these versions (I think Widmann's) there appeared about 1590 an English translation, which was supplemented by various English ballads on the same subject, and it was an Englishman--Shakespeare's great contemporary, the poet Christopher Marlowe--who was himself, as you know, a man of Faust-like temperament, and not unlike him in his fate--being killed in a drunken brawl--who first _dramatized_ the story. His brilliant and lurid play, 'The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus' follows very closely most of the details given in the German Faust-books. Its poetical beauties (and they are many) are unfortunately, as Hallam rightly remarks, intermingled with a great deal of coarse buffoonery. Possibly he had to consult the taste of his public in introducing such a large ingredient of this buffoon element--taken from what I called the Muenchhausen portion of the old legend. Patriotic German commentators sometimes deny that Goethe knew Marlowe's play (though he knew Shakespeare well), but I think there is no doubt that the opening monologue of Marlowe's play inspired the more famous, though scarcely finer, opening scene of Goethe's drama. 'Theology, adieu!' Faustus exclaims, taking up a book of magic-- These metaphysics of magicians, And necromantic books are heavenly ... All things that move between the quiet poles Shall be at my command--Emperors and kings Are but obey'd in their several provinces,... But _his_ dominion that excels in _this_ Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man. A sound magician is a mighty god. Here, Faustus, tire thy brains to gain a deity. His agony of despair at the last moment is very finely depicted, and there are not a few passages in the play which, for beauty of expression and thought, are truly Shakespearean. Some of you possibly know the magnificent lines addressed to Helen of Troy, which begin thus: Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium-- and the lines which seem to allude to the identification of Helen with Selene, the Moon-goddess-- O thou art fairer than the evening air Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars. Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter When he appeared to hapless Semele; More lovely than the monarch of the sky, In wanton Arethusa's azur'd arms. Marlowe's play was written about 1590. Now it is asserted that about this time English travelling players visited Germany, and perhaps introduced there Marlowe's drama; and possibly _this_ was the beginning of the German 'puppet-plays' on the subject of Faust. I do not feel quite sure about it. Faust puppet-plays seem to have existed almost simultaneously with the old Faust-books, and there is even the trace of one _before_ the oldest Faust-book; at least in the archives of the University of Tuebingen an entry has been unearthed in which in 1587 two students were condemned to the 'Karzer,' or 'Black hole,' for composing a 'Puppenspiel' on the subject of Dr. Faust. In these Puppenspiele (puppet-shows) the comic element largely prevails and is kept up by the comic figure Kasperle, a buffoon or 'Hanswurst' of the same character as the Italian Pulcinella, the progenitor of our English 'Punch.' As might be expected, these puppet-shows introduced a great many variations of the story, most of them a mixture of tragedy and comedy. In one a raven brings the contract from the devil for Faust to sign. One of the conditions is that for twenty-four years Faust is not to _wash_, or comb his hair or cut his nails--like Struwwelpeter. When Faust attempts to embrace Helen she turns into a snake--and when he is finally carried off by the demon, Kasperle gives (what Euripides is accused of sometimes giving) a comic turn to the tragic catastrophe by cracking jokes. For about 150 years after Marlowe no attempt was made by any German writer to use the subject artistically. Indeed during this period Germany, devastated by the Thirty Years War and afterwards by French literary influence, produced no literature worthy of mention, and what writers it possessed were not such as would be likely to perceive the poetic material contained in a popular puppet-show. But the legend had taken firm hold on the popular imagination and when Goethe was a boy (he was born in 1749) he saw a Faust-puppenspiel at Frankfurt, and afterwards at Strassburg, when he was a young man of about twenty. He was at this time evidently also familiar with the old _Faustbuch_ itself, and it was then (about 1770) that he seems to have first conceived the idea of the drama which he sealed up as finished sixty years later (1831), a few months before his death. Goethe's early manhood coincided with that period in German thought and literature which is called the 'Sturm und Drang'--that is the Storm and Stress--period. The subject of Faust, the attraction of which had for so long lain dormant, appealed powerfully to the adherents of this new school, with their gospel of the divine rights of the human heart and of genius, with their wild passionate graspings after omniscience, their Titanic heaven-storming aspirations after the unattainable and indescribable. Lessing himself, though never a genuine Sturm und Drang writer, began a _Faust_, and when Goethe began his drama a new _Faust_, it is said, was being announced in almost every quarter of Germany. Someone (I think it was Bayard Taylor) has reckoned up _twenty-nine Fausts_ that were actually published in Germany while Goethe was working at his. Some one else (I think Ludwig von Arnim) has said: 'Not enough _Fausts_ are yet written. Every one should write one. There is as much room for them as for straight lines in the circumference of a circle'--which, as you know, is conceived by geometricians to consist of an infinite number of infinitely small straight lines. None of these twenty-nine _Fausts_ are, as far as I know, of any value or interest except the unfinished play by Lessing, which, as it was written while Goethe was still a lad, and seems to have been only printed in fragments at some later date, can hardly come under Bayard Taylor's list. From these fragments it is clear that Lessing meant to save Faust's soul, if not his body. Toward the end of the last act, when the devils are triumphing over their apparent victory and the possession of Faust's body, a voice from heaven is heard: 'Triumph not! Ye have not won the battle over human nature and human knowledge. The Deity has not given to man the noblest impulses in order to bring him to eternal misery. What you imagine you possess is only a phantom.' Although we cannot tell for certain how Lessing meant to solve the problem, I think it is almost certain that Faust was to work out his own salvation amidst error and sin much as Goethe's Faust does. Before attempting (as I shall do on other occasions) to give a description of the two parts of Goethe's poem--in attempting which I shall keep as closely as I can to the original and to questions arising directly out of Goethe's own words--it will be useful and interesting to consider the most striking points in which his _Faust_ differs essentially from all its predecessors, except perhaps Lessing's--and Lessing, although he struck the new chord, did not resolve it. But this is a subject involving many and far-reaching questions, which, if they are to be solved at all, are not to be solved by theory and dogma. I shall therefore endeavour to state the case as simply and as objectively as possible, avoiding metaphysical cobwebs and giving the _ego_ and _non-ego_ a wide berth. I shall content myself in most cases with merely pointing out the doctrine apparently preached by Goethe (reminding you now and then that even his own seemingly categorical dogmas were to him merely temporary forms of thought) and shall prefer to let much justify its existence as an integral part of the living whole rather than to expel the life by dissection and to examine the dead parts through the spectacles of a commentator. In my next lecture, after a brief consideration of these preliminary questions, I shall try to describe the first Part of the drama--a task of more than common difficulty, for the story is familiar to many of you, and a bare rehearsal of the action of the play would prove wearisome, while any attempt to communicate by means of translation the wonderful beauty and force of Goethe's words is almost bound to prove a failure. In my third lecture I shall treat the second Part of the play, the action of which is far less generally known. It is not often read and is seldom seen on the stage. Indeed it was not written for the stage and does not lend itself to ordinary dramatic and operatic purposes, as the first Part does with its Gretchen episode. It embraces too huge a circle--a circle within which lie all the possibilities of human life. It is a kind of framework for all the tragedies and comedies and epics and lyrics ever conceived, or conceivable. What unity it has is not of the stage or the dramatic Unities. But nevertheless on the stage it produces effects which impress one with the sense of an imaginative power of an extraordinary kind. Many years ago, when it was being given in the Dresden theatre, I saw it performed four or five times and I remember noticing the wonderful attraction that it had for minds of a certain class (and no very limited class), while for others it was just such an unintelligible farrago of wearisome 'Zeug' as Dante's _Paradiso_ and Beethoven's _Ninth Symphony_ are sometimes said to be. I believe it is the fashion with certain critics (especially with those who have read it superficially) to speak of the Second Part of Goethe's _Faust_, as they do of _Paradise Regained_, with a certain superciliousness, as a superfluous excrescence, the artistically almost worthless product of a mind that had worked itself out and had exhausted its 'Idea.' The truth is that the _first_ Part is only the merest fragment, and although the subject of Faust is endless and can never be fully treated in any one work of art (the whole poem 'necessarily remaining a fragment,' as Goethe himself said), nevertheless the _second_ Part does solve in one of many possible ways the problem left unsolved by the first half of the poem, namely the final attainment of peace and happiness by the human soul, and it is one of the noblest monuments of the human intellect existing in the literature of the world. Indeed it is, I think, still more than this. It is not merely a monument of intellect but of poetic imagination, and I am much inclined to believe that the _Paradiso_ of Dante and the Second Part of Goethe's _Faust_ are perhaps two of the best, the most infallible, touchstones for discovering whether we really possess what Tennyson calls the 'poetic heart'--not a trumpery aesthetic imitation but the genuine article. II GOETHE'S 'FAUST'