The sixteenth century was an age of forbidden exploration: old dogmas and certainties were being challenged, a new humanism was developing, the sciences were emancipating themselves from their magical antecedents, and all this could in the popular imagination easily be invested with an aura of dread and a savour of blasphemy. The legend of the daring magus who sells himself to the Devil for new knowledge and new powers was one that flourished in this atmosphere. A shadowy historical figure existed to give it a name: from a few scattered sources we hear of a certain Georg Faust who lived between about 1480 and 1540, a disreputable wandering academic charlatan who laid claim to out-of-the-way knowledge and healing gifts and was said to have come to a violent end. After his death legend credited him with academic titles, he became ‘Dr Johannes Faustus’ (the name in its Latinized form meaning favoured or fortunate), he had been a professor at Wittenberg, the Devil had kept him company in the shape of a black dog, he had conjured up characters from Homer in front of his students, played tricks on the Pope and Emperor and other princes, and on the expiry of his agreed term of twenty-four years had duly been torn to pieces by demons and carried off to hell. In the course of the century crude folk-narratives came into circulation in Germany, retailing the magician’s sensational adventures and moralizing piously about his dreadful example. These Faust chapbooks, of which the first known example was printed in Frankturt in 1587, continued to be published until the early eighteenth century in successive variants. From the outset translations quickly appeared in other countries, and an early English version inspired the first dramatic treatment of the theme: Christopher Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, written probably in 1592 and published posthumously in 1604. It was common in Elizabethan times for English actors to travel with their repertoires to foreign courts, and thus it was not long before debased versions of Marlowe’s tragedy became well known in the German-speaking territories, entering also the repertoire of the popular puppet theatres (in which they still survive today). Goethe seems first to have encountered the legend in the form of a puppet play when he was a child, and also to have read at an early stage the 1725 version of the Faust chapbook. Rather surprisingly, he did not himself read Marlowe’s play until 1818 (and even then in a German translation), though indirectly and in vulgarized form he would know something of its contents, especially from the puppet tradition. We do not know exactly when he first thought of using the legend for his own purposes. But Goethe’s age, like Marlowe’s, was one of change and ferment, of emergent humanism, of challenge to cultural establishments; and it is evident that either during or shortly after his student days in Leipzig in the late 1760s he perceived the expressive value of the Faust story, its relevance to his own generation and his own interests. For one thing it was folklore, a folk-tale, the kind of popular anonymous literature which the prevailing taste of the eighteenth century had despised. But the new enthusiasm, inspired by Rousseau, was for the natural, the primitive, the uneducated, and the unspoilt; and nowhere were these ideals embraced with more fervour than by the young Goethe and his Storm and Stress followers. From Herder in 1770 he had learnt the cult of old folk-songs and ballads, an interest reflected in the Urfaust and in his early poetry. This was in large part also a quest for the national past as such, at a time when Germany was not a nation and was seeking a sense of cultural identity. The Storm and Stress Goethe, looking for antecedents and roots, turned his attention to the great age of Reuchlin and Ulrich von Hutten, of Paracelsus and Luther and Hans Sachs. It was also in 1770 that he conceived his dramatic chronicle of the life of Gottfried von Berlichingen, the ‘knight with the iron hand’: his play (published in its final version as Götz von Berlichingen in 1773) idealized this sixteenth-century robber-baron (1480–1562) as a champion of simple natural German virtues against the sophistication of the Latinized court class (paralleled in Goethe’s time by the French-speaking aristocracy against which the German and middle-class literary revival had to assert itself). It was also a work which provocatively cast aside, as the Urfaust was to do, all the neoclassical dramatic conventions still imposed on Germany by the influence of French taste, and it brought the young Goethe immediate fame in his own country. A clearly parallel project was the idealization and heroicization of Berlichingen’s legendary contemporary ‘Faust’. Prometheus, the rebellious demigod who had symbolized the protest of the human spirit in one of Goethe’s most powerful early poems, could now be unbound.
Marlowe, indeed, who at the time of his early death in 1593 was under threat of prosecution for atheism, had perhaps already taken a step in this direction by investing his Faustus with some measure of heroic dignity, especially in the famous and moving final scene. But the time had now come for dispensing with his damnation as well. By the late eighteenth century it had long been less fashionable to burn heretics, witches, and wizards or even to believe in the Devil; this was common ground between the Storm and Stress and the Enlightenment, and Goethe was not the first important writer to consider Faust’s eligibility for salvation. His immediate precursor, the critic and dramatist Lessing (1729–81), was essentially a sophisticated representative of mature Enlightened culture, but he also decisively influenced the thought and literary values of the incipient Goethezeit. Motivated both by his antagonism to dogmatic supernaturalistic Christianity and by his interest in possible characteristically national themes for German writers, Lessing had himself projected and partly written a Salvationist treatment of the once notorious and now neglected legend. He published one scene of it as an ‘anonymous’ fragment in 1759, but his Salvationist conception was not clear from this and did not become known until much later, some years after his death, although whatever else existed of his Faust manuscript had by then unaccountably disappeared. It is thus not clear to what extent the young Goethe was influenced by Lessing, nor do we in any case know whether or not he intended a Salvationist version of the story at the Urfaust stage. What we do know, however, is that in 1768 a new factor had entered into his interest in the theme, when he immersed himself in the works of various occultistic and alchemistic writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Paracelsus (who became in some ways his model for Faust) and Giordano Bruno, as well as the eighteenth-century Swedish theosophist Swedenborg. This was after he had fallen ill in Leipzig and returned to Frankfurt to recover, breaking off his studies. In Book XI of his autobiography Poetry and Truth, written more than forty years later, he recalls how deeply dissatisfied he had been as a student with the aridly rationalistic and materialistic philosophy and cosmology which then, in the name of Enlightenment, dominated the academic world at Leipzig and elsewhere: the French encyclopédistes, he felt, had reduced Nature to a dead system. It must have seemed to Goethe that the bold theological and demonological adventurer ‘Faust’ could well be used as a symbolic mouthpiece for the anti-scientific, antirationalistic, pantheistic, and mystical world-view to which he himself felt drawn. The influence of this conception is quite evident in the opening pages of the Urfaust. The young Goethe’s Faust exists not in a Christian but in a pantheistic frame of reference; he summons up not the traditional Devil but the Earth Spirit (cf. Note 14). There is every indication that in Goethe’s original conception it was not Mephistopheles or God, but this Earth Spirit—representing as it seems the divine yet at the same time demonic creative and destructive forces of Nature and earthly activity—who was to preside over the destiny of his hero.
Goethe evidently found that for the time being at least he could not satisfactorily develop this original and fascinating idea. The Faustus legend had from the first been born out of Christian assumptions, and though the young Goethe personally, after (and no doubt as a result of) his Pietistic phase, was out of sympathy with Christianity, the artistic pull of its tradition was too strong. In the Urfaust, which is of course not dramatically complete or continuous, the hero’s dialogue with the Earth Spirit breaks off inconclusively, and soon after this we encounter for the first time Mephistopheles, eng
aged in academic badinage with a naive student, his presence and relationship to Faust left unexplained in a vast lacuna corresponding to the still unwritten lines 606 to 1867. Nor did Goethe ever explain, even when this gap came to be filled, why the Urfaust Mephistopheles appears from certain indications in the text (cf. Note 124) to be subordinate to the Earth Spirit and the latter to be responsible for Faust’s bondage to Mephistopheles. Further questions then arise about the ‘Gretchen tragedy’, into which the Urfaust version presently resolves itself. Like the Earth Spirit passage, it is a personal invention by the young Goethe, a characteristic and quite new contribution to the Faustus theme, though its connection with the Faustus story as such remains puzzlingly tenuous, and it is even possible that he originally conceived it quite independently of his Faust project. Goethe’s Gretchen story is not simply an episode in the career of a magician, a supernatural amorous encounter like the traditional chapbook episode made famous by Marlowe, in which Helen of Troy is procured as Faust’s succubus; and it goes far beyond the passing mention, in the 1674 chapbook, of a ‘very pretty but poor servant-girl’ whom the doctor loves but because of his satanic contract cannot marry. Rather, it is a compelling romantic love-story in which the whole emphasis shifts to the innocent female partner and her tragic fate. It takes over and dominates the entire Urfaust conception, displacing the specifically Faustian themes. We must look outside the Faust tradition for explanations of why the young Goethe’s Faust drama, and our attention, are suddenly sidetracked in this way.
They lie partly in the preoccupations of the later eighteenth century and especially of the Storm and Stress phase. The Gretchen story reflects, for one thing, the current sentimental enthusiasm about natural simplicity. Gretchen appeals so strongly to Faust because he is an intellectual and she is not, because of her naïvety, intuitiveness, integrity and fundamental innocence; Faust, like Werther, embodies a feeling that was the young Goethe’s own experience. Secondly, there was the cult of folk-literature: the theme of the girl left pregnant by her lover and killing their child to avoid disgrace was known to Goethe as a folk-ballad motif current in and outside Germany. (The ballads with which he was familiar and which he would recite to his friends included some from Scotland which are still in our anthologies.) Goethe himself wrote a short poem in the ballad style about an abandoned unmarried mother (Vor Gericht, ‘Before the Judge’,? 1775). Gretchen, who sings a haunting ballad-like song at her first appearance and a song from a folk-tale at her last, is herself rather like a figure out of a ballad or a Märchen, as she herself almost seems to realize in the prison scene (lines 4448 f.). The laconic structure of the Gretchen drama—scenes that leap from high point to high point of the story, often over long periods of time and without connecting explanations—has itself been compared to that of the folk-ballad. A third factor was the powerful influence on Goethe and his generation of another sixteenth-century cult figure. Shakespeare was to them the supreme poet, the genius of geniuses, the inspired child of Nature, warbling his native wood-notes wild; Goethe had already invoked his authority for the structural and stylistic iconoclasm of Götz von Berlichingen. The Gretchen theme too must have seemed to lend itself naturally to ‘Shakespearean’ treatment: abandonment of the unities of time and place, mixture of tragic and comic scenes, and certain specific motifs which may well be conscious echoes. Fourthly, the strong emotional charge of the Gretchen drama may be partly explained by certain specific elements of Goethe’s recent personal experience. It may be a mistake to attach as much importance as the earlier biographical critics did to his passing love-affair (probably not amounting to actual seduction) with Friederike Brion, the simple country girl in Alsace of whom he later wrote in idyllicizing terms in his autobiography but whom he abandoned with cruel suddenness after writing a few of his most famous poems about her. It is possible that he felt remorse about this which found indirect expression (little other evidence of it is extant) in his story of Faust and Gretchen. A probably more important stimulus from real life, however, was the execution for infanticide in January 1772 of Susanna Margaretha Brandt, a simple girl whose brother (like Gretchen’s) was a soldier, who claimed to have been seduced on the promptings of the Devil, and with the help of a drug, by a young travelling goldsmith, and who had killed her child to avoid public disgrace. Her prison was only 200 yards from the Goethe family house in Frankfurt, where the poet was at that time practising as a lawyer. By a series of slightly uncanny coincidences, several members of his family and household were quite closely involved with aspects of this much-discussed case and even with details of the execution, which took place by beheading, with the usual macabre medieval ceremonial (cf. lines 4587–94 and Note 128). The question of whether the death penalty should be retained for infanticide was at that time a current legal controversy in the more enlightened German states (cf. Note 82). The Brandt case must have deeply affected the 22-year-old Goethe, and may well have been what chiefly moved him to introduce the Gretchen story into his Faust drama.
If this was a mistake, it was an inspired one, for in this part of the play the young Goethe, worthy of his model, achieves the highest levels of poetry and for once also a truly Shakespearean tragic pathos. We may, it is true, still wonder how we are meant to understand the integration of this powerful but essentially extraneous domestic tragedy into the specific story of a bargain between ‘Faust’ (whose real name and identity Gretchen never knows) and ‘the Devil’. The traditional devil’s-bargain (Teufelspakt) motif was evidently one that caused Goethe some difficulty, and this may well have been the chief reason for his long delay in completing Part One. In the Urfaust material there is no clarification whatever of the specific Faustian contract with Mephistopheles; Mephistopheles is simply there. But dramatically there is no difficulty about his role as devil (or, as the Devil) in the Gretchen affair. Whatever Goethe’s personal scepticism as to the Christian doctrine of the Devil, there is no doubt that here at least he understood its aesthetic and theatrical possibilities, and to this extent the Gretchen story has indeed successfully attached itself to the Faust story. The Mephistopheles of the Urfaust is not simply the worldly companion of the hesitant seducer, cynically encouraging him to gratify his lust and then scoffing at the consequences. If he lacked the additional dimension of being (at least so far as Gretchen with her simple Catholic belief is concerned) the personal agent of transcendent evil, the drama would lose half its point: the ironies of the ‘catechism’ scene (Sc. 19, 3414–543), the sinister overtones of Sc. 26, and the dramatic climax of the closing scene (Sc. 28) in the prison, where Gretchen’s instinctive shrinking from ‘that man you have with you’ becomes sudden clear recognition of what Mephistopheles really is and what this implies about her lover. Dramatically essential, too, is the young Goethe’s identification of ‘the Devil’ with a kind of absolute cynicism. This enables him, by contrasting Mephistopheles with Faust and still more strikingly with Gretchen, to give the drama weight and balance—to make it embody a paradoxically realistic double view of human emotions and relationships which both fully expresses romantic sentimentalism and critically transcends it. This alone makes the Gretchen drama a profounder, more multidimensional work than the almost exactly contemporaneous Sorrows of Werther, in which Mephistopheles with his constant cynical commentary on the love-affair has no counterpart. Moreover, this brilliantly established motif of the Devil as cynic, and his dialectical relationship with Faust as romantic or idealist, remains constant on various levels throughout the later-written scenes of Part One as the maturing Goethe came to create it, and has strong claims to be considered the unifying and integrating theme of the work as a whole.
In 1775 came the main turning-point in Goethe’s outward career, when at the invitation of the reigning Duke Karl August he went to Weimar, eventually settling in this tiny principality on a permanent basis. The young duke, one of the most enlightened of the numerous small-scale absolute monarchs in ancien régime Germany, greatly admired Goethe and soon appointed h
im to a number of public offices. The poet became involved in a host of practical affairs, partly as a result of which he began at this time also to develop a far-reaching interest in various scientific studies. For years he found he had too little time for creative literary work, but the constraints and responsibilities were also salutary. Before long he had lost sympathy with his ‘Storm and Stress’ friends and grown away from this whole tendency. He had brought the Urfaust manuscript with him from Frankfurt as an untidy jumble of papers, and is known to have given informal readings from it to members of the court circle; it was presumably after one such literary evening that Luise von Göchhausen, a lady-in-waiting to the dowager duchess, borrowed the precious autograph and copied it with or without the poet’s knowledge. For Goethe there was for the time being no question of continuing work on this strange and fragmentary youthful masterpiece. But by 1786 he was increasingly chafing at the precarious accommodation he had reached with himself in these first Weimar years. In September he suddenly took temporary leave from his duties and travelled to Italy, where he remained, chiefly in Rome, until June 1788. He himself felt this flight to the south, more especially his stay in Rome and the contact with classical antiquity which this gave him, to be a new turning-point in at least his inner life, a deeply rejuvenating and transforming experience. It seems that some kind of sexual self-liberation was also involved, in that immediately upon his return to Weimar he set up house with the beautiful if scantly educated Christiane Vulpius, who continued to live with him (after 1806 officially as his wife) until her death in 1816. All this—the anagram, so to speak, of ROMA/AMOR—was celebrated around 1790 in the Roman Elegies, a cycle of erotic poems in elegiac distichs which now count among Goethe’s greatest achievements. The Italian journey, however, had also coincided with preparations for the first complete edition of his writings so far, and this practical stimulus had led him not only to collect and revise his poems, finish unfinished works (including two major plays in the classical style, Iphigenia in Tauris and Torquato Tasso, both continued or completed in Italy and published respectively in 1787 and 1790) but also, in February 1788, to reconsider the problem of Faust.