The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust'

by H. B. Cotterill

At the beginning of the next act we find Faust lying, still insensible, on his bed in his old room, where we first met him—his professor's study. His daring attempt to grasp ideal beauty has ended, as it often does end, and as it ended in Goethe's own case, in failure of a sudden and explosive nature. He is now to have an experience of a different nature. During the years while he has been making his first trial of the outer world, his old Famulus, Wagner, now professor in Faust's place, has been devoting his whole time and energies to realising that dream of science—the chemical production of life.

It is, says Professor Romanes, 'the dream of modern science that a machine may finally be constructed so elaborate in its multiple play of forces that it would begin to show evidences of consciousness and mind'—mind and motion being, according to certain modern scientists, identical. Curiously enough a scientist of the same name—Wagner—who lived in the last century, did, like Faust's Famulus Wagner, in the same way devote his life to the production of a living organism—a 'homunculus'—in the conviction, as he asserted, that 'in course of time chemistry is bound to succeed in producing organic bodies and in creating a human being by means of crystallization'—an assertion not very different from that of a still more trustworthy scientist, for Professor Huxley himself has told us that he lived in 'the hope and the faith that in course of time we shall see our way from the constituents of the protoplasm to its properties,' i.e. from carbonic acid, water, and ammonia to that mysterious thing which we call vitality or life—from the molecular motion of the brain to Socratic wisdom, Shakespearean genius, and Christian faith, hope and charity.

In the background of the stage we see Faust still lying insensible on his bed. Mephistopheles comes forward muttering sarcastic comments on Faust's foolish infatuation. 'He whom Helen paralyzes,' he says, 'doesn't come to his wits again so soon.' He then pulls the bell. The windows rattle and the walls shake, as with earthquake. Wagner's terrified Famulus appears. He says that his master, the Herr Professor, has locked himself up for days and nights together in his laboratory; that he is engaged in a most delicate and important operation, namely that of manufacturing a human being, and he really cannot be disturbed. Mephistopheles however sends him back to demand admittance. Meanwhile he dons Faust's professorial costume, which he finds hanging in its old place but infested with legions of moths, which buzz around him piping welcome to their old mate. Then he takes his seat in Faust's professorial chair, and the same scholar enters to whom as a timid 'Fuchs,' or freshman, Mephistopheles had in the first Part of the play given his diabolic advice as to the choice of a profession. The scholar is now, after a course of University education, a match for the devil himself. He flouts poor Mephisto as a dried-up old pedant, not up to date with the new generation's æsthetic and literary self-conceits, or with its contempt for its elders—and for everything else except its own precious self. 'Youth and its genius,' he exclaims, 'are the only things of value; as soon as one is thirty years of age he's just as good as dead ... and it would be far better if all people at thirty were knocked on the head'; and he storms out of the room. Mephistopheles consoles himself with the fact that the devil is old enough to have seen a good many such new generations, with all their absurdities, their up-to-date fads and follies, pass away and give place to other forms of still more up-to-date and self-conceited absurdity.

Mephisto now enters the laboratory, where Wagner is intently engaged in watching his chemical compound gradually crystallizing within a huge glass retort. As he watches, the outlines of a diminutive human being—a mannikin or 'homunculus'—become visible and rapidly gain distinct form. A tiny voice is heard issuing from the glass retort and addressing Wagner as 'Daddy' and Mephistopheles as 'Cousin'; and it is to the presence of this 'Cousin,' we may infer, rather than to his scientific 'Daddy' that the Homunculus really owes his existence. With the connivance of Mephistopheles, the Mannikin, still in his glass retort, slips from the enamoured paternal grasp of Wagner, and floats through the air into the adjacent room, hovering above Faust, who is still asleep on his couch.

As it hovers above the sleeper it begins to sing—to describe ravishing dreamland scenery—inspiring Faust with visions of sensuous loveliness. It then bids Mephistopheles wrap Faust in his magic mantle and prepare for an aerial flight.... 'Whither?' asks Mephistopheles. 'To Greece!' is the answer: to the Pharsalian plain in Thessaly; and in spite of the protests of Mephistopheles (who has no taste for the land of classic art) he is forced to obey. The sleeping form of Faust is borne aloft, the Mannikin leading the way like a will-o'-the-wisp, gleaming within his glass retort. 'Und ich?' exclaims poor old Wagner in piteous accents. 'Ach, du!' says Homunculus, 'Du bleibst zu Hause—!' 'You just stop at home, and grub away among your musty manuscripts, and work away at your protoplasms and your elixirs of life.' Thus, guided by the Homunculus, Faust and Mephistopheles set forth on their aerial journey to ancient Greece—to the land where the ideals of art have found their highest realization—in quest of Helen, the supreme type of all that the human mind has conceived as beautiful.

It is often asked, and I think we may fairly ask, what Goethe meant to symbolize by his Homunculus. You will have noticed that his material components (as the carbonic acid and ammonia of Professor Huxley's protoplasm) are supplied by his scientific 'Daddy,' but that the 'tertia vis,' that third power or 'spiritual bond' which combines his material components, is supplied by the supernatural presence of Mephistopheles. I believe this Homunculus to be a symbol of poetic genius or imagination, which uses the material supplied by plodding pedantry—by critical research, antiquarianism, scholarship, and science—slips from the hands of its poor enamoured Daddy, and flies off to the land of idealism. Here, as we shall see, the Mannikin breaks free from his glass retort and is poured out like phosphorescent light on the waves of the great ocean.

But the quest for Helen, for ideal beauty, leads through scenes haunted by forms of weird and terrible nature—those forms in which the human imagination, as it gradually gains a sense of the supernatural and a sense of art, first incorporated its conceptions—forms, first, of hideous and terrific character: monstrous idols of Eastern and Egyptian superstition, Griffins, and Sphinxes, and bull-headed Molochs, and horned Astartes, and many-breasted Cybeles, till in the Hellenic race it rose to the recognition of the beautiful and bodied forth divinity in the human form divine, and found its highest ideal of beauty in Helen, divinely fair of women. This phase in Faust's development—this stage in his quest for beauty and truth—this delirium of his 'divine madness,' as Plato calls our ecstasy of yearning after ideal beauty, is symbolized by the classical Walpurgisnacht. (You remember the other Walpurgisnacht—that on the Blocksberg—which I described before.)

Guided by the Mannikin, Faust and Mephistopheles arrive at the Pharsalian fields—the great plain of Thessaly, renowned for the battle of Pharsalus, in which Caesar conquered Pompey—renowned too as the classic ground of witches and wizards. Griffins, Sphinxes and Sirens meet them. They can tell Faust nothing about Helen, but they direct him to Cheiron the Centaur (a link, as it were, between the monstrous forms of barbarous oriental imagination and Hellenic art). Cheiron the Centaur has himself borne Helen on his back, and excites Faust's passion by the description of her beauty. He takes Faust to the prophetess Manto, daughter of the old blind Theban prophet Teiresias, and she conducts him to a dark fissure—a Bocca dell' Inferno—at the foot of Mount Olympus, such as that which you may have seen in the Sibyl's cave on Lake Avernus; and here (as once Orpheus did in search of Eurydice) he descends to the realms of the dead to seek the help of Persephone, Queen of Hades, in his quest for Helen. Meanwhile Mephisto has found that in spite of his distaste for classic art and beauty there are elements in the classical witches' sabbath not less congenial to him than those of the Blocksberg with its northern and more modern types of devilry and bestiality. He is enchanted with the ghoulish vampire Empusa and the monster Lamia, half-snake half-woman, and at length finds his ideal of beauty in the loathsome and terrible Phorkyads, daughters of Phorkys, an old god of the sea. The Phorkyads are sometimes described as identical with, sometimes as sisters of, the Gorgons, and represent the climax of all that Greek imagination has created of the horrible. The three sisters are pictured in Greek mythology as possessing between them only one eye and one tooth, which they pass round for use. They dwelt in outer darkness, being too terrible for sun or moon to look upon. Even Mephistopheles is at first a little staggered by the sight, but he soon finds himself on familiar terms with them and ends by borrowing the form of one of them (she becoming for the time absorbed into her two sisters)—for as medieval devil he has no right of entrée into that classical scene in which he and Faust are now to play their parts. It is therefore in the form of a Phorkyad or Gorgon that Mephisto will appear when we next meet him.

Meanwhile the Homunculus has found congenial spirits among the sea-nymphs and sirens on the shores of the Aegean. He longs to gain freedom from his glass, in which he is still imprisoned. Nereus the sea-god is unable to help him, but sends him to his father Proteus, the great ocean prophet, who bears him out into the midst of the ocean. Here Galatea the sea-goddess (identical with Aphrodite, the sea-born symbol of the beauty of the natural-world) passes by in her chariot drawn by dolphins and surrounded by Nereids. The Homunculus in an ecstasy of love dashes himself against her chariot. The glass is shattered and he is poured forth in a stream of phosphorescent light over the waves—thus being once more made one with Nature.

The theory that water was the prime element, a theory advocated especially by the old Ionic philosopher Thales, was held by Goethe, who was a 'sedimentarist' in geological matters, and in this classical Walpurgisnacht he has introduced, much to the annoyance of many critics, a dispute between Thales and other sages on the question whether the formation of the world was due to fire or water.