FAUST AND MEPHISTO

How does Faust wear in the flicker of the footlights? Do the monologues sound with glorious resonance or are they only philosophical fustian? The question is not difficult to answer. The thunder-words of the poet-dramatist still thrill us with their meaning and with their music, the clash of souls still makes thrall of our imagination. To read Faust is to attain the summit of an intellectual peak of Darien. To witness an adequate performance of Faust is to win fresh pleasure for eye and ear. If Hamlet inspired Goethe and Marlowe before Shakespeare, his Faust in turn created a memorable literature. The very title crowds pages in encyclopædias. Sculptors chisel masterpieces after reading the poem-play; the Mephisto of the Russian Antokolsky is not easily forgotten and George Grey Barnard was inspired by the famous line, “Two spirits, alas, reside within my breast” (the group is now at the Metropolitan Museum). Painters, almost innumerable, from Ary Scheffer to the rawest art student of yesteryear have traced on the canvas the loves of Gretchen and Faust. Barbier and Carré mutilated the poem in search of effective theatrical material, and Gounod melted with sensuous ecstasy when he made the musical setting. Lenau presented a sinister, half-mad Faust, a self-portrait; the conservative Spohr surrounded the story with antiquated music. Wagner, perhaps more than other composers, realized the travailing Faust spirit in his overture, which is a masterpiece. Franz Liszt has of all men evoked within the walls of his symphonic palace both the static and dynamic Faust and the Gretchen of our dreams. His Mephisto is the cynical spirit of denial. Berlioz, as in a tremendous fresco, has painted with torrential energy the infernal glories of the theme. He even dragged his hero to Hungary so that he might give him the pleasure of hearing the Rakoczy March as orchestrated by the audacious Frenchman. Arrigo Boito, only half Latin, with Polish blood in his veins, has given us the ideal Mephisto and dared the impossible by composing the second part of Goethe’s master work.

In song Gretchen has been celebrated from Schubert to the troubadour of yesterday. In romance, Turgénieff, that gentle giant, has depicted the soul of Faust transposed to Russian soil. What the Faust spirit worked in an unbalanced temperament may be noted in Nietzsche, whose later rhapsodies stemmed from Euphorion’s song in the Second Part: “Let me be skipping. Let me be leaping. To soar and circle through ether sweeping is now the passion that me hath won.” Therein is the kernel of the dancing philosopher, Zarathustra, who called man “a bridge connecting animal and superman.” And recall the line in Faust: “Die ird’sche Brust im Morgenrot,” which served as a title for one of the unhappy philosopher’s sanest books. Goethe is the matrix of modern thought; he contained Wagner as he contained Nietzsche. Wagner, of course, went to Schopenhauer for his peculiar brand of pessimism. You can’t miss the Faustlike touches in Tannhäuser; the thirst for illimitable pleasure, the redemption of the eternal-womanly—all this is Faust redivivus. John Addington Symonds laments that Marlowe did not follow his Doctor Faustus with a Tannhäuser. “He assuredly would have not suffered this high mystic theme to degenerate into any mere vulgarities of a sensual Venusberg,” wrote the Englishman, with one eye fastened on Wagner’s version of the wonderful legend. No trivial thirst for carnal pleasures but the desire for beauty beyond human reach would have been Marlowe’s conception of the brave old tale. Lohengrin is a Faust, so is Siegfried. Parsifal is Faust in the vapors of mysticism, enveloped by a Buddhistic pity; surely the “Good Friday spell” was born of that exquisite episode near the close of Act I in Faust, where the poet-philosopher gives over his contemplated suicide, ravished by sweet memories of his youth, his Sabbath wandering in spring woods and meadows.

At one time Goethe thought of translating Marlowe. His music is magical. It colored Shakespeare; it created a new dramatic school. Marlowe is the father of English tragedy. What if Shakespeare had died at the same age as Marlowe? “We may admit that in rhyme he never did anything worth Marlowe’s Hero and Leander,” says Swinburne. Charles Lamb adored Marlowe, though he mocked the “pampered jades of Asia.” Yet the hand that fashioned the turgid and bombastic Tamburlane also penned that lovely lyric “Come lie [‘live,’ in revised editions] with me and be my love” (The Passionate Shepherd). It is as sparklingly pure as a bar of Mozart. But Marlowe is more dramatic poet than dramatist. His characters are set forth with a mass of psychologic details that recall some modern masters. He is an early Browning with a mouth of gold. His words sing. Yet he would never have written the last speech of Paracelsus: “I press God’s lamp close to my breast; its splendor soon or late will pierce the gloom.” Marlowe was not a believer. The desperate damnation of his Faust chills the blood. “Where gods are not, ghosts abound.” Marlowe could surround his unhappy hero with all the machinery of diabolism; Beelzebub, Prince of Flies, the Seven Deadly Sins, imps and goblins. He could utter that thrilling line, “See where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament,” but he had not the talent of belief—for it is both a gift and talent, belief in the unseen. If he had with Browning’s Childe Roland to the Dark Tower come, he would have died hopeless, impenitent, as in reality he did die. His Faust is the archetype of the explorer in the “unplumbed, salt, estranging sea” of knowledge. He cries:

“Had I as many souls as there be stars I’d give them all for Mephistopheles.” He craves eternal wisdom, “infinite richness in a little room.” Mephistopheles has built for him the walls of Thebes with ravishing music. He would fain have this devil “wall all Germany with brass.” He sees Lucifer, “chief lord and regent of the night,” and still are his longings unassuaged. This feverish simulacrum of a man who aspired to know things terrestrial and celestial Marlowe incarnated in his tragedy.

And what horrors he conjures up in Mephistopheles’s description of Hades—a description less material, nevertheless revealing a grandeur of conception second only to Dante’s. This damned creature of the English poet stands for men who achieve victories or defeats by the force of their intellect. Faust summons spirits from the vasty deep, converses with them when they come, argues, even wrangles, and would circumvent them in discussion. Spiritual explorers from Giordano Bruno to Spinoza and Nietzsche are Fausts. And on the plane scientific so are Galileo and Darwin and Einstein. All who slough off decaying half-truths are Fausts who must suffer for their frankness the plagues of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Sordello’s “Dante, pacer of the shore,” was a mediæval Faust whose richly veined ore is half hidden in the clay of scholasticism. And so the mountains converse with mountains, Dante with Goethe, Bach with Beethoven, Marlowe with Browning.

Human insects, slowly toiling to the summits, from time to time catch glimpses of trailing cloud-glories and overhear the far-off rumblings of divine events. Then the mists part and another Faust comes to earth, telling us of the strange secrets he has surprised. “A sound magician is a mighty god,” sings Marlowe. Goethe said: “Gray are all theories and green alone life’s golden tree.” To read Marlowe is to feel the itch of quotation. Has there ever been anything more vivid or pitiable since Dante than the English poet’s Edward II, in his “cave of care,” standing in mire and puddle, “and lest I should sleep, one plays continually upon a drum”? It is Chinese in its hideous suggestion of torture; we must go to Octave Mirbeau’s Le Jardin des Supplices, or the newly published fiction of Charles Petit, Le Fils du Grand Eunuque, for its match. Faust is a fatalist; “his atheism has a background of terror thinly veiled by the mind’s inquisitiveness.” Che sarà, sarà! he declares, and then berates his satanic famulus for showing him so little. He knows that the jealous gods have somewhere buried proofs of the origin of all things, and, like Maurice de Guerin, he would have demanded: “But upon the shores of what ocean have they rolled the stone that hides them?”