III
GOETHE'S 'FAUST'
PART II
The picture which Goethe has given us in Faust is in its main outlines the picture of Goethe's own life. The Faust of Part I is the Goethe of early days—of the Sturm und Drang period—the Goethe of Werther's Leiden, of Götz, of Prometheus, of Gretchen, Lotte, Annette, Friederike and Lili; the Faust of the earlier scenes of Part II is Goethe at the ducal court of Weimar; the Faust of the Helena is Goethe in Italy, Goethe at Bologna, standing in ecstatic veneration before what was then believed to be Raphael's picture of St. Agatha, or wandering through the Colosseum at Rome, or writing his Iphigenie on the shores of the Lago di Garda; and the Faust of the last act of all is Goethe reconciled to life and finding a certain measure of peace and happiness in his home, in the sympathy of his good-natured but unrefined wife and of others whom he loved, as well as in his scientific and philosophical studies—until he seals up the ms. of his great poem and (to use his own words) 'regards his life-work as ended and rests in the contemplation of the past,' and then, a few months later, passes away from earth, murmuring as he dies 'More light!'
It will be remembered that at the end of Part I Faust is dragged away by Mephistopheles and leaves poor Gretchen to her doom. The fatal axe has now fallen. Gretchen is dead.
In the opening scene of Part II we find him 'lying on a grassy bank, worn out and attempting to sleep.' A considerable time has evidently elapsed—a time doubtless of bitter grief and of the fiercest accusation against his evil counsellor, that part of his human nature which is represented by Mephistopheles and from which even in the last hour of his life (as we shall see) he confesses it to be impossible wholly to free himself:
Dämonen, weiss ich, wird man schwerlich los.
Das geistig-strenge Band is nicht zu trennen.
'From demons it is, I know, scarce possible to free oneself. The spiritual bond is too strong to break.'