Another programme from Frankfort of the year 1742 announces that after the play there will be a dance, after the dance a ballet, and if time permits, after the ballet there will be a merry comedy.
It will thus be seen to what depths the story of Faust had fallen, before the time came to raise it to the plane of the world’s greatest tragedies. It was Lessing who first saw the potentialities of the theme, and he pointed them out in the famous seventeenth Literaturbrief of the 16th of February, 1759, which commenced a new era for German literature, henceforth to turn away from French models and seek inspiration from Shakespeare. The stilted superficiality of French literature was to yield to the more congenial vigour of the English. It is true that Lessing did not recognize the worth of Marlowe, who stood in the shadow of his greater contemporary, but he declares that the old German plays had possessed much of the English quality. “To mention only the best known of them: Doctor Faust has a number of scenes, which could only have been imagined by a Shakespearean genius. And how deeply was, and in part still is, Germany in love with her Doctor Faust! One of my friends possesses an old draft of this tragedy, and he has communicated a scene to me in which there is undoubtedly much that is great.” He then prints a scene, which was really composed by himself, and among his papers after his death were found sketches relating to his plan for a Faust drama. It is certain that Lessing intended to reject the obsolete orthodox view that Faust must necessarily pay for his sins by an eternity of damnation. The Catholic theologians had permitted sorcerers to be saved by repentance, but the spirit of the Reformation demanded that Faust forfeit his soul, and from this inevitable doom there was no appeal. The age of Enlightenment, on the other hand, looked upon the intellect as supreme, and it was obviously absurd that Faust’s attempt to solve an intellectual problem should lead to the loss of his soul. It is to Lessing that is due the fundamental change in the conception of the Faust problem, whereby Faust is not damned, but saved. The longing to penetrate the mysteries of the universe is no longer regarded as an instinct implanted in humanity by the Devil.
So far as we can judge from the fragments, Lessing’s Faust was to be driven to the pact solely by his thirst for knowledge. Goethe was to create the eternal type, the man who seeks to encompass the universe, who demands complete and ultimate satisfaction for the limitless craving of the human soul. The first impulse to create a Faust drama of his own came to Goethe from a marionette version of the popular drama, a performance of which he saw in Leipzig in his student days, for he never saw it performed by living actors, and neither the Folk book nor Marlowe’s tragedy came into his hands until much later. It was a task which occupied him all his life. His original draft, the Urfaust, has only been discovered in manuscript in recent times, but in the year 1790 he published Faust. A Fragment. The first part of the completed tragedy appeared in 1808, and the second part in 1833, a year after Goethe’s death.
The fundamental difference between Goethe’s conception of the problem and all that had gone before is typified in the fact that it is not a pact into which Faust enters with Mephisto, but a wager. There are indeed two wagers. In the Prologue in Heaven, Mephisto discusses Faust with the Lord and says,[13]
“What will you bet? There’s still a chance to gain him,
If unto me full leave you give,
Gently upon my road to train him!”
The Lord enters into the spirit of the thing and replies,
“As long as he on earth shall live,
So long I make no prohibition,