Faust (trans. Bayard Taylor)/Introduction

I know how much prepossession I encounter, in claiming for the Second Part of Faust a higher intellectual character, if a lower dramatic and poetical value, than the First Part. In Mr. Hayward’s Appendix, and Mr. Lewes’ Life of Goethe, the Second Part is virtually declared to be a secondary, unimportant work, chaotic in detail and without any consistent design as a whole, in short, the mistake of Goethe’s old age, instead of being, as it really is, the conception of his prime, partly written, and entirely planned, before the publication of the First Part.

The five translations which have already appeared have, unfortunately, not succeeded in presenting the work clearly and attractively to the English reader. Those of Bernays, Macdonald, and Gurney are characterized by knowledge of the text, but give no satisfactory clew to the author’s ​design; while that of Dr. Anster, the most readable of all, and showing a further insight into the meaning, is a very loose paraphrase, rather than a translation. The original metres, which are here even more important than in the First Part, have been retained by no translator. I do not wish to be understood as passing an unfriendly judgment upon the labors of my predecessors; for I have learned what difficulties stood in their way, and also how easy it is, in the perplexing labyrinth of German comment, to miss the simplest and surest key to Goethe’s many-sided allegories.

The first mistake which many of the critics have made is in attempting any comparison of the two parts. While the moral and intellectual problem, which is first stated in the Prologue in Heaven, advances through richer and broader phases of development to its final solution, the story which comes to an end in Margaret’s dungeon is not resumed. The Second Part opens abruptly in a broad, bright, crowded world; we not only breathe a new atmosphere, but we come back to Faust and Mephistopheles as if after a separation of many years, and find that our former acquaintances have changed in the interval, even as ourselves. “It must be remembered,” says Goethe, “that the First Part is the development of a somewhat obscure individual condition. It is almost wholly subjective; it is the expression of a confused, restricted, and passionate nature.” On the other hand, we learn from the study of Goethe’s life ​that the wealth of the material which he had accumulated for the Second Part occasioned an embarrassment in regard to the form, which partly accounts for the long postponement of the work. He expressly declares^[1] that the Second Part of the drama must be performed upon a different, a broader, and more elevated stage of action; that one who has not lived in the world and acquired some experience will not know how to comprehend it; and that, like an unsolved riddle, it will repeatedly allure the reader to the renewed study of its secret meanings.

The last of these declarations is not egotistical, because it is so exactly true. No commentary can exhaust the suggestiveness of the work. Schiller doubted that a poetic measure could be formed, capable of holding Goethe’s plan; and we find, indeed, that the substance overflows its bounds on all sides. With all which the critics have accomplished, they have still left enough untouched to allow fresh discoveries to every sympathetic reader. There are circles within circles, forms which beckon and then disappear; and when we seem to have reached the bottom of the author’s meaning, we suspect that there is still something beyond. The framework lay buried so long in the sea of Goethe’s mind, that it became completely incrusted, here and there with a barnacle, it is ​true, but also with a multitude of pearl-oysters. Many of the crowded references are directly deducible from the allegory; still more are made clear to us through a knowledge of Goethe’s development, as man and poet; while some few have lost the clew to their existence, and must probably always stand, orphaned and strange, on one side or other of the plain line of development running through the poem.

The early disparagement which the Second Part of Faust received is only in our day beginning to give way to an intelligent recognition of its grand design, its wealth of illustration, and the almost inexhaustible variety and beauty of its rhythmical forms. Although its two chief offences (to the German mind) are not yet, and perhaps never can be wholly, condoned, the period of misconception is over, and the voices of rage or contempt, once so frequently heard, are becoming faint and few. The last twenty-five years have greatly added to our means of elucidation; and much that seemed to be whim or purposed obscurity is now revealed in clear and intelligible outlines. When Vischer compares the work to a picture of the old Titian, wherein the master-hand is still recognized, but trembling with age and stippling in the color with slow, painful touches, he forgets that the design was already drawn, and some of the figures nearly completed, in the Master's best days. I should rather liken it to a great mosaic, which, looked at near at hand, shows us the mixture of precious ​marbles and common pebbles, of glass, jasper, and lapis-lazuli; but, seen in the proper perspective, exhibits only the Titanic struggle of Man, surrounded with shapes of Beauty and Darkness, towards a victorious immortality.

It would have been better, undoubtedly, if the completion of the work had not been so long delayed, and Goethe had thereby been able to give us, with more limited stores of knowledge, a greater poetic unity. It is hardly the feebleness of the octogenarian which we perceive. The acquisitions of the foregoing thirty years seemed to have gradually formed a crust over the lambent poetical element in his nature; but the native force of the latter is nowhere so wonderfully revealed as here, since it is still able to crack and shiver the erudite surface of his mind, and to flame out clearly and joyously. Wherever it thus displays itself, it is still the same pure, illuminating, solving and blending power, as in his earlier years.

The reader to whom this book is a new land must of necessity be furnished with a compass and an outline chart before he enters it. He may, otherwise, lose his way in its tropical jungles, before reaching that “peak in Darien,” from which Keats, like Balboa, beheld a new side of the world. While the Notes contain as much interpretation of the details of the plan as seems to be possible at present, I consider that a brief previous statement of the argument is absolutely required.

​We must forget the tragical story of the First Part, and return to the compact between Faust and Mephistopheles, where the latter declares: “The little world, and then the great, we’ll see.” The former world is at an end, and, after an opening scene which symbolizes the healing influences of Time and Nature, Faust and his companion appear at the Court of the German Emperor. The ruined condition of the realm gives Mephistopheles a chance of acquiring place and power for Faust, through the introduction of a new financial system. While this is in progress, the days of Carnival furnish the occasion for a Masquerade, crowded with allegorical figures, representing Society and Government. Goethe found that no detached phases of life were adequate to his purpose. Faust, in the First Part, is an individual, in narrow association with other individuals: here he is thrown into the movement of the world, the phenomena of human development, and becomes, to a certain extent, typical of Man. Hence the allegorical character of the Masquerade, which is confusing, from the great range and mixture of its symbolism.

The Emperor’s wish to have Paris and Helena called from the Shades (as in the original Legend) is expressed when Faust is already growing weary of the artificial life of the Court. Mephistopheles sends him to the mysterious Mothers, that he may acquire the means of evoking the models of Beauty; and at this point the artistic, or æsthetic ​element—the sense of the Beautiful in the human mind—is introduced as a most important agent of human culture, gradually refining and purifying Faust’s nature, and lifting it forever above all the meanness and littleness of the world. Mephistopheles is bound by his compact to serve, even in fulfilling this aspiration which he cannot comprehend; but he obeys unwillingly, and with continual attempts to regain his diminishing power. After the apparition of Helena, and Faust’s rash attempt to possess at once the Ideal of the Beautiful, the scene changes to the latter’s old Gothic chamber, where we meet the Student of the First Part as a Baccalaureus, and find Wagner, in his laboratory, engaged in creating a Homunculus. This whimsical sprite guides Faust and Mephistopheles to the Classical Walpurgis-Night, where the former continues his pilgrimage towards Helena (the Beautiful), while the latter, true to his negative character, finally reaches his ideal of Ugliness in the Phorkyads. The allegory of the Classical Walpurgis-Night is also difficult to be unravelled, but it is not simply didactic, like that of the Carnival Masquerade. A purer strain of poetry breathes through it, and the magical moonlight which shines upon its closing Festals of the Sea prepares us for the sunbright atmosphere of the Helena.

This interlude, occupying the Third Act, is another allegory, complete in itself, and only lightly attached to the course of the drama. While it ​exhibits, in the latter connection, the aesthetic purification of Faust’s nature, its leading motive is the reconciliation of the Classic and Romantic elements in Art and Literature. Euphorion, the child of Faust and Helena, who vanishes in flame, leaving only his garments and lyre behind him, is then presented to us as Byron, and the Act closes with a transmigration of “the fair humanities of old religion” into the spirit and sentiment of Modern Poetry.

The Fourth Act exhibits Faust to us, enlightened and elevated above his former self, and anxious for a grand and worthy sphere of activity. His aim is, to bend Nature to the service of Man,— to bar the ocean from a great stretch of half-submerged land, and thus conquer the aimless force of the unruly elements. Mephistopheles takes advantage of the political dissensions of the Empire, and the appearance of a new claimant for the crown, at the head of an army, to proffer his own and Faust’s services to the Emperor. A battle takes place; the rebels are defeated, through the magic arts of Mephistopheles, and Faust receives the sea-shore in feoff forever.

The Fifth Act opens on the accomplished work. Faust, a hundred years old, inhabits a palace, in the midst of a green, thickly-peopled land, diked from the sea. But he has not yet found the one moment of supreme happiness. A pestilential marsh still remains to be drained; and he has not succeeded in gaining the coveted possession of a ​sand-hill near his palace, the residence of an old couple who have charge of a little chapel on the downs. Mephistopheles endeavors to implicate him in the guilty seizure of this Naboth’s vineyard, but is again baffled. Faust, become blind, finds a clearer light dawning upon his spirit: while the workmen are employed upon the canal which completes his great work, he perceives that he has created free and happy homes for the coming generations of men, and the fore-feeling of satisfied achievement impels him to say to the passing Moment: “Ah, still delay,—thou art so fair!” When the words are uttered, he sinks upon the earth, dead.

The struggle of Mephistopheles with the angels for the possession of Faust’s soul, and a scene in Heaven, where Margaret appears, like Beatrice in Dante’s Paradiso, as the spiritual guide of her redeemed lover, close the drama. Although the condition of the compact has been fulfilled, Mephistopheles loses his wager. In willing the Bad, he has worked the Good: the “obscure aspiration” in Faust’s nature has lifted itself, through Love, Experience, the refining power of the Beautiful, and beneficent activity, to more than an instinct, to a knowledge of “the one true way.” The Epilogue in Heaven carries us back to the Prologue, and indicates to us, through a wondrous, mystic symbolism, the victorious vitality of Good and the omnipotence of the Divine Love.

Briefly, then, Act I. represents Society and ​Government; Acts II. and III. the development of the Idea of the Beautiful as the highest human attribute, with almost a saving power; Act IV., War; and Act V., Beneficent Activity, crowned by Grace and Redemption. The financial scheme, the discussion of geological theories, the union of the Classic and Romantic, and the introduction of those three tricksy spirits, the Boy Charioteer, Homunculus, and Euphorion (whom I have interpreted as different personifications of Goethe’s own Poetic Genius), must be considered as digressions from the direct course of the plot. In order to understand how they originated, and the probable raisons d’être by which the author justified them to his own mind, I refer the reader to the Notes, which will be found indispensable. I might, indeed, have greatly added to the latter, had I not felt obliged to consider that those to whom the material is not familiar may as easily lose their clew through too much detail of interpretation as from the unexplained text.

Goethe’s chief offence is the license which he allows himself in regard to his language. We find, especially in those portions which were last written, frequent instances of crabbed, arbitrary construction, words and compounds invented in defiance of all rule, and various other deviations from his own full, clear, and rounded style.^[2] This ​has been contemptuously called the “Privy-Councillor’s dialect” (Geheimrathssprache) by some of the critics, who assail Goethe with cries of wrath; but it is a feature of the original which cannot be reproduced in the translation, and ought not to be, if it could be. If the reader now and then falls upon an unusual compound, or a seemingly forced inversion of language, I must beg him to remember that my sins against the poetical laws of the English language are but a small percentage of Goethe’s sins against the German. The other difficulty seems to lie partly in the intellectual constitution of the critics themselves, many of whom are nothing if not metaphysical. The fulness of the matter is such that various apparently consistent theories may be drawn from it, and much of the confusion which has thence ensued has been charged to the author’s account. Here, as in the First Part, the study of Goethe’s life and other works has been my guide through the labyrinth of comment; I have endeavored to give, in every case, the simplest and most obvious interpretation, even if, to some readers, it may not seem the most satisfactory.

​I have adhered, as those familiar with the original text will perceive, to the same plan of translation. The original metres are more closely reproduced than even in the First Part, for the predominance of symbol and aphorism, in the place of sentiment and passion, has, in this respect, made my task more easy; and there are, from beginning to end, less than a score of lines where I have been compelled to take any liberty with either rhythm or rhyme. Indeed, the form, especially in the Helena, is so intimately blended with the symbolical meaning, that I cannot conceive of the two being separated; for they are soul and body, and separation, to us, is death of the one and disappearance of the other. The classic metres, which Goethe uses, surely lend themselves as readily to the English language as to the German; and, while I have rendered this portion of the drama almost as literally as would be possible in prose, I can only hope that the unaccustomed ear will not be startled and repelled by its new metrical character. I am not aware that either the iambic trimeter or the trochaic tetrameter has ever been introduced into English verse. The classic reader, who may miss the cæsura here and there, will, I trust, recognize both the necessity and the justification.

In concluding this labor of years, I venture to express the hope that, however I may have fallen short of reproducing the original in another, though a kindred language, I may, at least, have assisted ​in naturalizing the masterpiece of German literature among us, and to that extent have explained the supreme place which has been accorded to Goethe among the poets of the world. Where I have differed from the German critics and commentators, I would present the plea, that the laws of construction are similar, whether one builds a cottage or a palace; and the least of authors, to whom metrical expression is a necessity, may have some natural instinct of the conceptions of the highest.