A Remarkable Nietzschean Drama

DeWitt C. Wing

Mr. Faust, by Arthur Davison Ficke. (Mitchell Kennerley, New York.)

Have you thought there could be but a single Supreme? There can be any number of Supremes.—Whitman.

Mr. Faust is the embodiment of the Nietzschean attitude toward the universe. This characterization consciously ignores the legendary Faust of Goethe as having no vital kinship with his namesake. There is of course a skeletal likeness one to the other, but the hero in Mr. Ficke’s drama is incarnated with modern flesh and endued with a supreme will. His unconquerable spirit is not that of Goethe’s Faust but of Friedrich Nietzsche. Incidentally and singularly it is the spirit of Whitman. And these two men, more than any other two or twenty in the realm of literature, represent the undying god Pan, or the spirit of Youth. Nietzsche and Whitman are the understanding comrades of the young-hearted and open-minded.

Mr. Faust’s creator may have no conscious knowledge of Whitman’s poetry, which is a matter of no moment, but he has read Nietzsche, and that is momentous—indispensable—in relation to this splendid result of white-heat intellection. I say intellection because Mr. Faust is not so much a work of art as a remarkable example of reproduction. I know that, although the thought and feeling of the work rise in places to the power of an inspiration wholly personal to the author, never “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” For that is an original, authentic voice which, like everything else in nature, has no substitute or duplicate.

I can fancy a strong, healthy, organically cultured young man, just beginning to feel his way into the realities that lie outside the American cornbelt, by chance taking a peep into one of Nietzsche’s great books, and, fascinated and quickened by that marvelously contagious god, leaping to new heights of his own manhood. I should guess that in this instance the young man, who happens to be a lawyer, thirty-one years old, living at Davenport, Ia., was temporarily Christianized by bad luck, illness or something of the sort, and in this extremity, kicked by Nietzsche, experienced the feeling of personal adequacy to which Mr. Faust gives utterance. Recovering himself, he avowed his own godhood, even to the last ditch! And that is the triumphant Youth—the Nietzsche—of the thing.

A day or two subsequent to the appearance of Mr. Ficke’s book upon the market I had the pleasure of hearing it read, with well-nigh perfect sympathy and appreciation, by the foremost Nietzschean expositor in this country. Like other listeners I was amazed, charmed and aroused. Were these results referable to the play alone or in part to the reader, or to both? To what extent, I was compelled to ask, was the effect illusory or hypnotic? I had read some of Ficke’s verse, which had given no intimation of anything in its author so heroically Nietzschean as Mr. Faust. I had consequently tabbed Ficke as probably a poetic possibility, provided he lived a dozen years in an involuntary hell, undergoing a new birth. Entertaining the doubts indicated by my questions, I read Mr. Faust to myself, trying it in my fashion by the trees, the stars and the lake. Subjected to this test the play did not have the ring and lift which I had heard and felt when it was read—perhaps I should say given an added vitality—by a Nietzschean philosopher. It now impressed me as an extraordinary tour de force, reaching in some of its passages a species of accidental trans-Nietzscheanism.

Written in blank verse, the superior quality of which is admirably sustained, the style of the drama is undeniably poetical, as Edwin Björkman, the editor of Mr. Kennerley’s Modern Drama Series, states in an interesting biographical sketch; but where there is so much consciousness of workmanship—so much preoccupation with an imported idea instead of sweeping control by an inner, personal urge like that, for example, which produced Thus Spake Zarathustra—poetry is not to be expected. What surprises me is that, despite this restriction, Mr. Ficke strides upward in many lines to the borderland of the gods. In the first three acts he writes as one possessed—as an intellectualist furiously interested in Americanizing, if you please, the racial implications of the philosophy of a superhumanity which will always be associated with the name of his temporary master, Nietzsche. In these acts there is a deal of amazing revealment of insight; of aspiration for transcendent goals; of the spiritual insatiability of man. And there is a cold humor. Underneath the whole thing lies its own by-product: social dynamite!

I think that Mr. Ficke finished his play in three acts, but he added two more—to make it five, I was about to say, but in the fifth he achieves a measurable justification, for the last sentence, “Touch me across the dusk,” is poetry—the wonderful words of the dying Faust, addressed to Midge, the only person who understood him.

Near the middle of the opening act, Faust, roused by an inquiring mind to an analytical protest against things as they are, says,

That is poetical; it is cosmic in its feeling. Looking at a bust of Washington, he enviously—no, compassionately—remarks,

At this juncture Satan appears, gains recognition by recalling an incident involving Faust with a blackmailing woman in a college during his youth, and thereafter tempts him into empty, unsatisfying paradises. In his wandering and winding pilgrimage through the world Faust makes the footprints that we recognize as those of our own humanity, seeking its way—somewhither. He is offered but rejects peace, happiness, salvation and all the rest of their related consolations, knowing that none of them could satisfy his restless heart. To his uncomprehending friends he is lost, and Satan himself, to whom in such circumstances he is obviously resigned by society, fails to claim him. But Midge, the heroine, knew him; she could touch him across the dusk, which was his kind of immortality. And so Faust, with a vague consciousness of his own godhood, a sense of his own supremacy, an unshakable faith in one thing—himself—passed from the earthly freedom of his will into the great release.

It is altogether too early in the morning of humanity to expect to see this play or one like it on the stage. That it should be written by a young American and published by a young Englishman is enough to satisfy those who would enjoy its presentation, and those to whom it would be Greek or “unpleasant,” whether they saw it or read it, must wait for its truth through their children—across the dusk!