The most invulnerable of Goethe's writings are his lyrical poems; against the best of these, criticism can allege nothing. They need no interpreter. But the reader who studies them in chronological order will observe that as time went on, the lyric which is a spontaneous jet of feeling is replaced by the lyric in which there is constructive art and considerate evolution. In the poems of the 'West-Östlicher Divan' Goethe returns to the lyric of spontaneity, but their inspiration is rather that of a gracious wisdom, at once serious and playful, than of passion.
His period of romance and sentiment is best represented by 'The Sorrows of Werther.' His adult wisdom of life is found most abundantly in 'Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.' The world has long since agreed that if Goethe is to be represented by a single work, it shall be by 'Faust.' And even those who perceive that 'Faust' is best understood by being taken along with Goethe's other writings—his early 'Prometheus,' his autobiography, his travels in Italy, his classical dramas, his scientific studies, his work as a critic, his vast correspondence, his conversations in old age—cannot quarrel with the judgment of the world.
'Faust,' if we include under that name the First and the Second Parts, is the work of Goethe's whole life. Begun and even far advanced in early manhood, it was taken up again in his midmost years, and was completed with a faltering hand in the closing season of his old age. What it loses in unity, or at least in harmonious development as a piece of art, it gains in autobiographical interest. All his works, Goethe said, constituted a great confession. More than any other of his writings, 'Faust' is the confession of his life.
There are two ways in which a reader may deal with 'Faust.' He may choose for his own delight a fragment, detach it and disregard the rest; he may view this fragment, if he pleases, as a whole, as a rounded work of art. Such a reader will refuse to pass beyond the First Part of the vast encyclopædic poem. To do this is legitimate. The earliest form in which we possess the drama, that of the transcript made by Fräulein von Göchhausen, is a tragedy which might be named 'The Tragedy of Margaret.' Possibilities of further development lay in the subject, were indeed required by the subject, and Goethe had probably already conceived certain of them; yet the stadium in the progress of Faust's history included in 'The Tragedy of Margaret' had a unity in itself. But a reader may approach 'Faust' otherwise; he may view it as expressing the complete mind of Goethe on some of the deepest problems of human life. Viewing it thus, he must accept the whole work as Goethe has given it; he must hold in abeyance, at least for a time, his own particular likings and dislikes. While keeping his mind open to all the poetry of Faust, he will soon discover that here is something more than a poem. It may be unfortunate for the work of art that it belongs, certainly in its execution, possibly even in the growth of its conception, to far sundered periods of its author's career, when his feelings respecting art were different, when his capacity for rendering his ideas was now more and now less adequate. Such a reader, however, would part with nothing: in what is admirable he finds the master's hand; in what is feeble he discovers the same hand, but faltering, and pathetic in its infirmity. He is interested in 'Faust' not solely or chiefly as 'The Tragedy of Margaret': he finds in it the intellect, the character, the life of Goethe; it is a repository of the deepest thoughts and feelings concerning human existence of a wise seer, a repository in which he laid by those thoughts and feelings during sixty years of his mortal wayfaring.
From early manhood to extreme old age 'Faust' was with Goethe, receiving now and again, in Frankfort, in Weimar, in Rome, some new accession. We can distinguish the strata or formations of youth, of manhood, and of the closing years. We recognize by their diversities of style those parts which were written when creation was swift and almost involuntary, a passion and a joy, and those parts through which Goethe labored at an old man's pace, accomplishing to-day a hand's-breadth, to-morrow perhaps less, and binding blank pages into his manuscript, that the sight of the gaps might irritate him to produce. What unity can such a work possess, except that which comes from the fact that it all proceeded from a single mind, and that some main threads of thought—for it would be rash to speak of a ground idea—run through the several parts and bind them together? 'Faust' has not the unity of a lake whose circuit the eye can contemplate, a crystal set among the hills. Its unity is that of a river, rising far away in mountain solitudes, winding below many a mirrored cliff, passing the habitations of men, temple and mart, fields of rural toil and fields of war, reaching it may be dull levels, and forgetting the bright speed it had, until at last the dash of waves is heard, and its course is accomplished; but from first to last one stream, proceeding from a single source. Tourists may pick out a picturesque fragment of its wanderings, and this is well; but perhaps it is better to find the poetry of its entire career, from its cloudy cradle to the flats where it loses itself in the ocean.
The first part of 'Faust' is itself the work of more periods than one. The original conception may belong to Goethe's student days at Strassburg. He had grown weary of the four Faculties,—alas, even of theology; he had known a maiden as fair and sweet and simple as Gretchen, and he had left her widowed of her first love; and there in Strassburg was the presence of that old Cathedral, which inspired so terrible a scene in the 'Faust.' From Strassburg he returned to Frankfort, and no moments of his career of authorship were more fruitful than these which preceded the first Weimar years. It was in the heart of the Storm and Stress; it was the time of 'Götz' and 'Mahomet' and the 'Wandering Jew' and 'Werther' and 'Prometheus.' Here in Faust was another and a nobler Werther seeking the infinite; here was another Prometheus, a Titan shackled yet unsubduable. By Goethe's twenty-sixth year the chief portions of the 'Faust, a Fragment,' published when he was forty-one, had been written. But two scenes were added in Rome,—one of these strange in its fantasy, the Witches' Kitchen,—as if to show that the poet of the North was not quite enslaved by the beauty of classic art. It was in the last decade of the eighteenth century that Schiller succeeded in persuading Goethe to open his Faust papers, and try to recover the threads of his design. Not until 1808, Goethe's fifty-ninth year, was the First Part published as we now possess it. It is therefore incorrect to speak of this Part as the work of the author's youth; even here a series of strata belonging to different periods can be distinguished, and critics have contended that even in this Part may be discovered two schemes or plans not wholly in harmony each with the other.
The first Fragment was written, as has been said, in the spirit of the Storm and Stress. Goethe was weary of the four Faculties. The magic work of the time which was to restore vigor and joy to men was Nature. This is the theme of the opening scene of 'Faust.' Among old instruments and dusty folios and ancestral lumber and brute skeletons, away from Nature and her living founts of inspiration, the old scholar has found neither joy nor true knowledge. He opens the book of Nostradamus and gazes upon the sign of the Macrocosm; here in a symbol he beholds the life and energy of nature:—
"Where shall I grasp thee, infinite Nature, where?
Ye breasts, ye fountains of all life whereon
Hang heaven and earth."
He cannot grasp them; and then turning from the great Cosmos, he thinks he may at least dare to invoke the spirit of our own mother planet Earth. But to Faust, with eyes bleared with the dust of the study, to Faust, living in his own speculations or in dogmatic systems, the aspect of the Earth Spirit—a living fire—is terrible. He falls back upon himself almost despairing, when the famulus Wagner enters. What Werner was to the idealist Wilhelm Meister, Wagner is to the idealist Faust: the mere scraping together of a little hoard of barren facts contents Wagner; such grief, such despair as Faust's, are for this Philistine of learning impossible. And then the fragment of 1790 passes on to Mephistopheles. Whether or not Goethe found the features of his critical demon in Herder (as Grimm supposes), and afterwards united these to the more pronounced likeness in his friend Mephistopheles Merck, matters little. Whether Herder and Merck had been present or not, Goethe would have found Mephistopheles in his own heart. For the contrast between the idealist Faust and the realist Mephistopheles exists in some form or other in almost every great creation of Goethe. It is the contrast between Werther and Albert, between Tasso and Antonio, between Edward and the Captain. Sometimes the nobler spirit of worldliness is dwelt on, as in the case of Antonio; sometimes the cold, hard, cynical side, as in the case of Mephistopheles. The theme of Faust as originally conceived was the turning of an idealist from his own private thoughts and dreams to the real world; from all that is unnatural,—systems, speculations, barren knowledge,—to nature and the founts of life; from the solitary cell to the company of men; to action, beauty, life, and love. If he can really succeed in achieving this wisely and well, Faust is saved. He is delivered from solitude, the inane of speculation, the vagueness of idealism, and made one with the band of his toiling fellows. But to accompany him there is the spirit of base worldliness, the realist, the cynic, who sees the meaner side of all that is actual, who if possible will seduce Faust into accepting the world apart from that elevating spirit which ennobles actual life, who will try to baffle and degrade Faust by degrading all that he now seeks,—action and beauty and life and love.
It is Goethe himself who is at odds with himself,—the realist Goethe set over against the idealist Goethe; and Mephistopheles is the base realist, the cynic whose endeavor is to mar the union of high poetry and high prose in human life, which union of high poetry with high prose Goethe always looked upon as the true condition of man's activity. In the Prologue in Heaven, written when Schiller had persuaded Goethe to take up the threads of his play, the Lord speaks of Faust as his servant. Mephistopheles wagers that he will seduce Faust from his allegiance to the Highest. The Lord does not wager; he knows:—