Faust

In brief

Goethe’s Faust is a play in two parts that occupied him for some sixty years. In a Prologue in Heaven the Lord lets Mephistopheles try his luck on a scholar named Faust. On earth the old man, sick of learning, stakes his soul on a bet: if he ever begs a moment to stay, he is lost. Mephistopheles makes him young and leads him to Margaret, a small-town girl. Her mother dies of a sleeping draught Faust supplies; her brother dies on his sword; she drowns their baby and waits in a cell for the executioner. Part One ends there, with a voice from above saying she is saved and Faust dragged away. Part Two wipes all of it in a healing sleep. Faust floats paper money for an Emperor, raises Helen of Troy, has a son by her who falls to his death, wins a strip of coast in a war, and burns out an old couple who stand in the way of his dikes. Blind and very old, he says the fatal words, or nearly. Angels steal his soul while Mephistopheles is ogling them, and Margaret receives him above.

Most English readers have met half of this. Every English Faust on Project Gutenberg stops at Part One, including the one linked here, so Part Two is linked separately below.

The argument

The usual summary is that striving redeems, and the angels say so as they carry him off: “Whoe’er aspires unweariedly / Is not beyond redeeming” (Act V, Mountain Gorges). I think the whole play exists to make that sentence hard to say. The Lord concedes the cost in the Prologue: “While Man’s desires and aspirations stir, / He cannot choose but err” (Prologue in Heaven). Then Goethe shows the bill twice, at two scales. In Part One a man’s appetite destroys a family of four. In Part Two a man’s project destroys Philemon, Baucis and their guest. It is the same crime, committed once by a lover and once by a developer.

Faust never repents of either. His nearest approach is the rage of Dreary Day, and the rage is aimed at Mephistopheles, who answers: “She is not the first” (Dreary Day). The next time we see Faust he is asleep in a meadow, and the spirits have washed him clean (Part Two, Act I). The angels’ couplet goes on: “And if he feels the grace of Love / That from On High is given”. Faust’s salvation is an unearned gift that sits beside his crimes without cancelling them. The poem leaves both standing and will not do the arithmetic for you.

The bet itself is no help, because Goethe makes it a farce of drafting. Faust’s terms are exact: “When thus I hail the Moment flying: / ‘Ah, still delay—thou art so fair!’” (The Study). His last speech repeats the words in the conditional, about a future he only imagines: “Then dared I hail the Moment fleeing” (Act V, Midnight). Has he lost? Mephistopheles says so, and is then robbed anyway, by his own lust: “You are so fair, forsooth, I’d like to kiss you” (Act V, the Great Outer Court). The contest for a human soul ends in low comedy.

Four Fausts

The Urfaust is the young Goethe’s play, written about 1772 to 1775: twenty-two scenes, largely the Gretchen story, with no bet or Prologue. He did not print it. It survives because a Weimar court lady, Luise von Göchhausen, copied it, and it was found among her papers and published by Erich Schmidt in 1887. Its dungeon scene is in prose, and it ends on Mephistopheles’ verdict with no reprieve. Gretchen at her wheel there cries Mein Schoß, her womb, where the later text has Mein Busen.

Faust: A Fragment of 1790 was the first printing. It stops at the Cathedral, leaving out Valentine’s death and the dungeon, and it still has no way of explaining why Faust and the Devil are together.

Part One of 1808 came after Schiller pressed Goethe to return to the work in the late 1790s. It supplies the frame: the Dedication, the Prelude, the Prologue in Heaven and the bet. It keeps one scene in prose, Dreary Day, from the first version. And it adds two words to the ending. To Mephistopheles’ “She is judged!” a voice now replies, “She is saved!” (Dungeon), in German “Ist gerettet!”. Part Two’s theology begins there.

Part Two was the work of his last years. The Helena act appeared on its own in 1827. He finished the rest in 1831, sealed the manuscript, and told Wilhelm von Humboldt in his last letter, of 17 March 1832, that he wished he could have shared these very serious jests with his friends. He died five days later, and it was printed that year.

The shape of the play

Part One runs about 4,600 lines in twenty-five scenes, with three openings stacked before the action. The poet addresses his own past in the Dedication, a theatre manager and a clown argue about box office, and God takes a bet. Then the small world: study, tavern, street, garden, bedroom, well, cathedral. The Margaret scenes get shorter as they get worse. Margaret’s Room, At the Fountain and Donjon are hardly more than songs. The Walpurgis Night arrives at the point where the story should be most urgent, with Faust dancing on the Brocken while she sinks toward the scaffold.

Part Two is some 7,500 lines in five acts, each its own world: a pageant of what a modern man might do with public life. Act I is the court and its paper money. Act II is the Classical Walpurgis Night, a hallucinated tour of Greek myth that follows the test-tube spirit Homunculus. Act III moves through three thousand years, from Sparta to a medieval castle to Arcadia. Act IV is a brief, cynical war. Act V is the coast, and the Mountain Gorges, which climb through anchorites and penitents in a Catholic heaven written by a man who was nothing of the sort.

The voices

Almost all of it rhymes, and the variety is the point. Faust’s opening is in Knittelvers, the jogging doggerel of Hans Sachs, an antique form for a man trapped in antique learning: “And here, poor fool! with all my lore / I stand, no wiser than before” (Night). Margaret gets ballad and folk song. Mephistopheles talks in quick, worldly epigrams: “My worthy friend, gray are all theories, / And green alone Life’s golden tree” (The Study). Part Two adds Greek trimeters for Helen, and in Act III she learns to rhyme from Faust, a marriage of two traditions enacted in the prosody. Many lines have become German proverbs, and no translation carries that across. Set the German beside Taylor: “Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust” (two souls live, alas, in my breast) becomes “Two souls, alas! reside within my breast” (Before the City-Gate), which is close. The last two lines are not: “Das Ewig-Weibliche / Zieht uns hinan” (the eternal feminine draws us on) becomes “The Woman-Soul leadeth us / Upward and on!” (Act V, Mountain Gorges).

Damned and saved

The historical Faust, a wandering magician who died about 1540, became a warning in the German chapbook of 1587, and Marlowe made that warning into a tragedy. English players carried it to Germany, where it sank into farce and puppet shows, and the boy Goethe knew the puppets. So the two plays are one story with the ending reversed, and the differences are the argument.

Marlowe’s Faustus signs a contract, and the contract is enforced to the minute. Goethe’s Faust scorns the parchment and makes a bet about his own character. Marlowe’s hero has twenty-four years and a striking clock; Goethe’s has no term at all, and his danger is contentment. Each play has an intercessor. Marlowe’s Old Man pleads once and goes off to his own martyrdom. Goethe’s Margaret, in the end, pleads and is heard: Faust is the man who wronged her, and she asks to teach him (Act V, Mountain Gorges). Each has Helen, and for Marlowe she is a devil whose kiss seals the loss, while for Goethe she is a chapter of education. In Marlowe’s world repentance would save Faustus and he cannot manage it. In Goethe’s, Faust never tries and is saved regardless. The Weimar play has stopped believing in hell and keeps its machinery as a joke. Mephistopheles even speaks the old formula at the deathbed, “It falls; and it is finished, here!”, the word from the Cross, Consummatum est, with which Faustus signs his bond.

The people

Faust is grander in his own eyes than in anyone else’s. “Two souls” is a fine phrase for wanting everything. He is capable of awe, as in Forest and Cavern, and of contempt, and he hardly ever thinks about another person for long. Faust’s revision of St John, “In the Beginning was the Act” (The Study), is the motto of the whole career.

Mephistopheles

Mephistopheles introduces himself as “the Spirit that Denies” and as “Part of that Power, not understood, / Which always wills the Bad, and always works the Good” (The Study). He is witty, tired and correct about nearly everything but the universe. He does the dirty work and takes the blame, which is convenient for Faust.

Margaret

Margaret, or Gretchen, is the play’s moral centre and its finest writing. She is “older than fourteen”, pious, sharp, and poor. Her song at the wheel, “My peace is gone” (Margaret’s Room), and her question in the garden, “Believest thou in God?” (Martha’s Garden), are simple and unanswerable. Faust answers the question with a beautiful evasion: “Feeling is all in all: / The Name is sound and smoke”. At the end, offered escape by Faust and the Devil, she refuses and gives herself to judgment. She alone in the play takes a decision and accepts its price.

Philemon, Baucis and Care

Philemon and Baucis take their names from Ovid’s old couple, and they stand on the last plot Faust does not own (Act V, Open Country). He wants only that they be moved, and he sends Mephistopheles, who burns them out (Act V, Dead of Night). Care, one of four grey women, slips in by the keyhole and blinds him: “Throughout their whole existence men are blind” (Act V, Midnight). He thinks the digging he hears is his workforce: “How I rejoice, to hear the clattering spade!” The diggers are Lemures making his grave, or as Mephistopheles puts it, “Von keinem Graben, doch vom Grab” (of no ditch, but of a grave).

The English

Bayard Taylor’s translation of 1870–71 is the best known complete one free of copyright, and it is what this page quotes. Project Gutenberg’s #14591 is a complete text of Part One, all twenty-five scenes, but only Part One, in a 1925 printing with Harry Clarke’s illustrations and without Taylor’s notes. Brooks (#14460) and Blackie (#63203) on Gutenberg are also Part One alone; Blackie’s preface of 1880 assumes the “second part of Faust” is beyond most readers. Taylor’s Part Two, with notes, is a scan at the Internet Archive, as is A. G. Latham’s Everyman version of both parts. The German of Part One and Part Two is on Gutenberg.

Taylor’s weakness is the price of his virtue. He keeps the original metres and rhymes, as he promised, so he pads and inverts to reach them, and his diction was archaic when he wrote it: “Accurséd”, “doth”, “thou’rt”. Mephistopheles loses speed in the process, and speed is his character. Where Goethe’s German is at its plainest, Taylor reaches for the elevated, as “Woman-Soul” shows. And he prints blanks in the bawdy duet with the old witch, “a————————”, following the early German printings, which also had dashes there; the words now stand restored in the German.

Readers and critics

Shelley translated two scenes, and a partial version of 1821 has been attributed to Coleridge by Frederick Burwick and James McKusick. Gérard de Nerval’s French appeared in 1828. Part Two was long treated as an embarrassment or an allegorical puzzle.

The most useful modern reading is Marshall Berman’s in All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1982). His chapter “Goethe’s Faust: The Tragedy of Development” calls Faust dreamer, lover and developer in turn, and treats Philemon and Baucis as the casualties of modernisation. That makes Part Two more contemporary than its reputation allows. Hans Christoph Binswanger’s Money and Magic does something similar for the paper-money scene, reading it as an alchemy that actually works.

Afterlives

Music took most from it: Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust, Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust (1846), which restores the older ending, Liszt’s Faust Symphony (1857), Gounod’s opera (1859), Boito’s Mefistofele (1868), and Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, whose second part sets the final scene. Murnau’s silent film (1926) mixes Goethe with the older legend, and Alexander Sokurov’s Faust (2011) ends his cycle of films about power. Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita takes its epigraph from Mephistopheles’ self-description, and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947) goes back to the damned Faust to tell the story of Germany.

The play is performed in Germany constantly, but rarely whole. Part One had its premiere in Braunschweig in 1829; both parts unabridged were first given at the Goetheanum in Dornach in 1938; and Peter Stein’s production at Expo 2000 in Hanover played all 12,110 lines.

How to read it

Buy a modern version of both parts. David Luke’s (Oxford, 1987 and 1994) is rhymed and lively, and the one to start with. David Constantine’s (Penguin, 2005 and 2009) and Martin Greenberg’s (Yale, 1992 and 1998) are good second opinions. Walter Arndt’s (Norton, 1976) comes with critical apparatus. Walter Kaufmann’s bilingual Anchor (1961) is strong on Part One but gives only selections of Part Two. Stuart Atkins’s (1984) is the plain one for checking sense.
The free modern route. A. S. Kline’s complete version is free to read, numbered by Goethe’s lines, and has anchors for each scene, so this page’s Part Two links go there, while its Part Two quotations remain Taylor’s.
Do not skip Part Two. Read Act I and Act V first, and then go back for Helen. Accept that the Classical Walpurgis Night needs footnotes.

Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (printed 1604). The same man, with hell still real.
The Book of Job. The Prologue’s model, with a less amiable wager.
Dante, The Divine Comedy (about 1320). Another man led to heaven by a woman he once loved.
Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus (1947). A composer’s pact, set against Germany’s, and Goethe’s optimism answered.