Faust: A Tragedy
thought, wise observation, and deep pathos, as this famous
production exhibits. I will take the liberty, however, of suggesting
to the students of the poem a careful comparison with Lord Byron's
Manfred, and our great dramatist's Hamlet, as particularly
fruitful in valuable conclusions. All Byron's characters, as the
offspring of pride and unchastened ambition, are in a certain sense
Fausts, but Manfred in a particular degree; and, though the idea
that Byron's tragedy was borrowed from Goethe's could proceed
only from a superficial knowledge of his lordship's character, and
from an ignorance of the circumstances which gave rise to the
composition of that poem, it is not the less certain that there is a
great resemblance between the character of Manfred and that of
Faust. From what this resemblance proceeds Lord Byron has himself
most satisfactorily told us:--"It was the Steinbach, and the
Jungfrau, and _something else_, much more than Faust,"[*i22] that
produced the gigantic Titan-like apparition of Manfred. That
_something else_ here mentioned was Lord Byron himself, who, had he
lived in the sixteenth century, would probably enough have been a
magician (at all events a Giordano Bruno), and might have been
immortalised by some modern poet as the great English Doctor Faust.
How, then, does Manfred stand as compared with Faust? Exactly in the
same way, we must assume, as Byron stands when contrasted with
Goethe. Byron is more sublime; Goethe more human. Byron has more
wing; Goethe a better use of his wing. Byron is more intense, more
impetuous, and more forcible; Goethe more rich, more various, more
mellow, and more ripe. But the chief difference is this, that in all
his poetry Goethe is wise; Byron never. Accordingly, we may say that
with all its grandeur Manfred is essentially a mad poem. It
overleaps the bounds of all sane thinking with no apparent purpose,
and certainly with little apparent effect but the glorification of
monstrous pride. Still there is a moral lesson at the root of the
story, if the reader will take the trouble to think it out. The man
who could find no pleasure in existence, except in the gratification
of an unnatural passion, could end only as Manfred ended, and die
communing with his own proud soul and the evoked spirits of earth
and air, amid the frost-bound ridges of the Alps. But, in order to
attain this solitary Titanic sublimity, the poet has sacrificed all
human probability and all human interest. It is a sublime poem,
Manfred; but it is the sublime of monstrosity. The sublime of the
Prometheus of Æschylus is a very different thing: it is the
sublime, in the first place, not of an unnatural man, but of a god;
and, in the second place, it is the sublime of a soul inspired by
ill-regulated philanthropy, not by unchastened passion. I presume
there are few things finer in the English language than that
midnight soliloquy in the third act of Manfred, when the Count,
looking forth from his lonely tower on the stars and the
snow-shining mountains, recalls a night spent amid the ruins of the
Colosseum, and the palace of the Cæsars in Rome--a soliloquy which
certainly will lose nothing by a detailed comparison with the
strikingly similar monologue in the fourth act of Goethe's great
poem; but the misfortune is, when admiration has been spent on
particular passages, one can take no general impression away from
the work except this, that the poet wrote under the influence of
some sad disease of morbid sublimity, and his heroes were made in
Titanic proportions, after his own likeness. In every view,
therefore, except in regard to the power of one or two individual
passages, the study of Manfred can only tend to raise in the mind of
the reader a most profound admiration for the more healthy tone, the
more ripe wisdom, the more rich material, and the more skilful
treatment, of the German writer. With Shakespeare's great work it
is quite otherwise. Hamlet unquestionably has many striking points
of similarity with Faust. The same moody melancholy, and tendency to
contemplation of suicide; the same lofty discontent with his
environment, and misanthropic contempt for the humanity with which
he stood in direct relationship; the same communion with the unseen
world, though in a different form; the same feebleness and
indecision of character in the hero, with occasional blind plunges
into strokes that hurry himself and others into ruin. In his morbid
state of mind the ghost acts according to the same law on the hero
of our great English tragedy that Mephistopheles does on the German
doctor; but the ghost in the one case for the Devil, in the
other--though both incarnated creations of a diseased
mind--indicates in the strongest possible way the diverse character
of the disease. Hamlet is an essentially noble character sunk into
melancholy by the abnormal character of the immediate social element
in which it was his destiny to move; the moody contemplation of the
social wrongs which were rife round about him generated the idea of
revenge, or taking the moral law into his own hand; and of this rash
idea of revenge the ghost is dramatically the voice and the spur.
But, though plunging himself and his environment into misery by
following out his bloody suggestions, Hamlet never forfeits our
respect. He is never selfish; and suffers more from excessive
sensibility to the sins of others than from any faults that may be
placed fairly at his own door. Otherwise with Faust; he is at bottom
a compound of a sentimentalist and a sensualist; and, though the
metaphysical perplexities in which at the outset of his career he is
found entangled, excite in the reader some emotion of pity, yet the
feebleness and irresolution of his conduct afterwards, the ease with
which he allows himself to be dragged by his fiendish guide through
all kinds of selfish indulgence and moral meanness, cannot fail to
inoculate the reader with a strong feeling of contempt. This no
doubt was meant by the poet; and very properly so; as a noble
character never could have fallen into the sensual trap so cunningly
laid for him by the Tempter; still it is a misfortune to the piece,
and imperatively demands the large compensation which it receives
from the profound tragic interest with which the consummate art of
the dramatist has contrived to invest the closing scenes with poor
Margaret.
It is well known to the literary public that the author of Faust, as
generally read by foreigners, always looked upon this production as
only the first part of the great "_Divinia Comedia_," to use the
language of Dante's time, with which he was to enrich the
literature of his century. The incomplete character of the first
part, indeed, is distinctly indicated in the introductory scene
called the "Prologue to Heaven," which contains the following
lines:--
"Though now he serve me stumblingly, the hour
Is nigh, when I shall lead him into light.
When the tree buds, the gardener knows that flower
And fruit will make the coming season bright."[*i23]
To a "divine comedy," indeed, in the large style, which should
contain a vindication of the ways of God to man, a second part of
Faust was as necessary as Dante's Paradiso was to his Inferno, or
the _Prometheus Unbound_ of Æschylus to the _Prometheus Bound_, or
the last four chapters of the Book of Job to the rest of the poem;
and when Goethe wrote this Prologue in Heaven--a piece by no means
necessary to Faust as an acting play--it is impossible to imagine
that he had not then distinctly purposed and dimly planned the
singular poem now known as the second part of Faust. For the sake,
therefore, of those readers of the great German tragedy, within the
scope of whose vision the second part of Faust is, for various
reasons, never likely to come, I will set down here a somewhat
detailed panoramic view of that remarkable production. A few
remarks, then, will enable any person of common intelligence to
understand the exact relation which exists between the two works.
The first act opens with a pleasing landscape scene, in the midst of
which Faust is discovered reclining upon a flowery turf, weary,
restless, and seeking repose. The hour is twilight, and round the
weary one Ariel and other quaint and pleasant Spirits are hovering
in airy circles, entertaining his fancy with lovely shows, and
lulling him with sweet sounds; quite a piece of Nature's most
voluptuous and luxuriant beauty, such as Goethe's soul delighted
to bathe in. As the Spirits continue their song, accompanying the
watches of the night, the dawn approaches to the ear of mortal men
calmly and gently, but to the sense of Spirits, the march of the
hours is heard as a storm: the gigantic rock-gates of the East creak
fearfully; Phœbus rolls his chariot wheels in thunder; and eye and
ear are startled at the strong coming of the day. Faust then wakens,
and gratefully welcomes the fresh tide of a renewed existence which,
after the soothing influences of the magic sleep, seems to stream in
upon him. A resolution is strongly stirred in his breast to strive
after the highest perfection of which human nature is capable.
The second scene brings us from the fairy into the court atmosphere.
The Emperor sits on his throne, surrounded by all sorts of
courtiers, ministers, and other appendages of Majesty; the
astrologer and the fool, significantly for those times (for we must
suppose the end of the fifteenth or the beginning of the sixteenth
century), occupying not the least conspicuous place. Forthwith
begins a somewhat prolix discourse between the Imperial Majesty and
his principal ministers--Chancellor, Treasurer, Master of the
Household, etc., the burden of which is--a very common one with
great people and people in office--that they have no money and are
at their wit's end how to get it. The fool, into whose shoes
Mephistopheles has cunningly shuffled himself, is applied to for the
aid of his sage counsels, and is not slow with the common resource
of German devils and necromancers--hidden treasures. But before the
spade and the mattock can be brought into play to unearth this
hidden heap, as it happens to be Carnival, there must be a
masquerade. The Emperor, too, has just come from Rome, whither he
had gone, according to the laudable old custom of the Heinrichs and
Ottos and Friedrichs, to get himself dubbed Holy Roman Emperor, and
with his crown on his head, he has brought also the fool's cap.
Scene third, accordingly, exhibits a rich show of foolery and
masquerading of all sorts. Flower-girls and gardeners; mothers and
daughters; fishers, fowlers, and foresters; Pulcinellos, parasites,
and drunkards; poets and critics; the three Graces, Aglaia,
Hegemone, and Euphrosyne; the three Fates, Atropos, Clotho, and
Lachesis; the three Furies, Alecto, Megæra, and Tisiphone; Fear,
Hope, and Providence leading in Victory, who stands on the top
parapet of a tower--all this moves in motley operatic splendour
before the eyes of the spectator; and the various personages, as
they pass, festoon themselves, so to speak, with short speeches and
moral reflections in the style of the masques of our old English
dramatists--points prettily enough curled and frizzled, and
agreeable enough, doubtless, to hear with music in an opera, but
rather wearisome to read in a long sequence as part of a written
play. Then, that Doctor Faust may have something to do in his own
peculiar province of magic, for the command of which, as we know, he
has sold his soul to the Devil, we have a grand chariot brought upon
the stage by four horses; and in this chariot are two allegorical
personages, the charioteer boy (_Knabenlenker_), that is to say,
Poetry or intellectual wealth, and Plutus, the god of material
wealth, a character fitly sustained by Doctor Faust himself. These