20. Faust Explained according to Goethe's Own Method

Faust by Goethe, with introduction and continuous explanation. Edited by Karl Julius Schröer. Second, thoroughly revised edition. Heilbronn 1888

With the large volume of Goethe literature today, one runs the risk of misjudging or even overlooking what is truly significant within it. We would like to hope that this is not the case with Schröer's works on Goethe, which are a quite unique phenomenon within this literature. We would like to point out this peculiarity in connection with the recently published second edition of Schröer's Faust commentary. The way in which Schröer approaches Goethe is, to put it briefly, that which is most fertilized by the education Goethe himself has attained. For Schröer, the poet's writings are not simply the object that he approaches with the usual interest of the philologist or literary historian in order to dissect them according to the usual method of research. Above all, Schröer sought to apply his own method to Goethe himself in order to find the key to understanding the poet in the poet himself, according to the principle that if Goethe really represents the pinnacle of German education, then he can only be measured by his own measure. The great spirit becomes most fruitful for us when we first learn from him before approaching him critically.

What makes Goethe seem so great to us is the great style that permeates all his work; this is his world view and the original power that lay within him and which is even greater than all his works. He could never exhaust himself because his being, capable of almost infinite forms, rejuvenated itself after each creation. That is why his works always point us back to his life, to his personality. That is why it is so important for us to know how his creations came about. Schröer's research is based on this. Although he never forgets the philological aspect, he never makes it an end in itself, but always treats it as a means of penetrating deeper into the workings of Goethe's mind. Schröer always uses the factual, the details, to which other Goethe scholars attach such great importance, in the service of the idea. Goethe himself said of his work: "I do not rest until I find a concise point in the phenomena from which much can be derived, or rather, which voluntarily produces much from itself and carries it towards me."

We have to find this concise point again if we want to understand the poet. And Schröer's intention is to lead us to this point. With regard to the first part, the explainer now shows how Goethe is seized by the Faust idea and how it is then transformed in his mind. The Faust saga in its original sixteenth-century form is Protestant-orthodox. Faust is conceived in contrast to Luther. Both men broke with the existing church, stepped out of the historically traditional forms of religion. But in completely opposite ways. Luther did so with the Bible in his hand, pointing to the written word of God. He throws the inkwell at the head of the devil, which in the view of the time was secular scholarship. Faust is different. He not only renounces the church, but also theology itself, "no longer wanted to be called a theologian, became a man of the world, called himself a D. Medicinae, who put the Holy Scriptures behind the door and under the bench". This means nothing other than: Faust has left the paths of thought marked out by higher powers and, as a truly free man, wants to determine his own goal and direction. Therefore, according to the view of the sixteenth century, he falls prey to the infernal powers. Goethe turned him into the Faust of his time, who must not perish because he has become a "man of the world" who is warmly welcomed by the heavenly host, because he "always strives", even if, according to the true Protestant principle, he always relies on his own labor. Goethe turned the Faust idea from a Protestant-orthodox one into a Protestant-free one. This Protestant character of the Faust saga was first pointed out by Schröer, and he has thus brought a great feature into the explanation of Goethe's Faust, he has set himself a significant goal by utilizing all the details to put this basic character of the poem, which has thus been clarified, in the right light. Schröer's second task is to show how the individual images that make up the poem arose in Goethe's mind and how they gradually came together to form a whole in accordance with this guiding basic idea. For although Goethe was always guided by high idealistic motives, one must not imagine that he strove for the embodiment of abstract ideas. Ideas fill him, his nature, his work; but what he offers us in his works are concrete images. He always had to be powerfully seized by some kind of vision, then he sought to give it a poetic form. That is why Faust, for all its depth, is so full of life, so fresh. Everything bears the character of the individual, there is no dry, abstract generality to be found anywhere. In many cases, Schröer has succeeded in proving the origin of such images, indeed often the origin of the moods expressed in Faust. In doing so, he has probably done more for our understanding of Faust than can ever be done by proving when this or that scene was first written down. We will only emphasize a few things. When Goethe has Söller say the words in the sixth act of the third act of "The Accused": "Oh, how I shudder, poor man, I am boiling hot. Doctor Faust was not half too brave. Richard the Third was not half so!" We can conclude from this that he already had the figure of Faust in full tragic seriousness in mind when he wrote these lines, in 1769. Schröer adds the other fact that Goethe, after returning ill from Leipzig to Frankfurt in 1768, studied the views of Theophrastus Paracelsus and was pleased that nature was presented to him here, even if perhaps in a fantastic way in the "Golden Chain of Homer" (the aurea catena Homeri of the alchemists), in a beautiful combination that points us quite clearly to verses 447 ff. of Faust:

How everything weaves itself into the whole,
One works and lives in the other!
How heavenly forces rise up and down
And pass the golden buckets to each other!

In connection with this, we read in a letter to Friederike Oeser dated February 13, 1769: "I have seen you so rarely - as an inquiring magus hears a mandrake whistle." This is the origin of the first Faust monologue. Thus Schröer leads us to a full understanding of Faust by means of the psychological genesis of the individual parts of Faust. In the above we can clearly see how the figure of Faust appears in Goethe's mind as early as 1769 and what significance it has. Another example is the following. In the first act of the second part, where the goings-on at the imperial court are depicted with such superior humor, we are referred to Goethe's reading of Hans Sachs. Sachs' two poems "geschicht kaiser Maximiliani löblicher gedechtnus mit dem alchemisten" and "wunderlich geschicht kaiser Maximiliani löblicher gedechtnus von einem nigromanten", which Goethe read in 1775, made a vivid impression on the poet; here he found a concise point from which much can be derived. We recognize this vivid impression in the description of the goings-on at the imperial court and in the conjuring scene of Helena. The magnificent image at the end of the second part, where the good and evil spirits fight for Faust's soul, was created in a similar way. In a letter from Goethe to the painter Fr. Müller dated June 21, 1781, we see the idea come to life in the poet's imagination as he talks about a picture depicting the battle between the archangel Michael and the devil "over the corpse of Moses". He says: "If one [...] wanted to treat this subject, it could not, it seems to me, be otherwise than that the saint, still full of the graceful vision of the promised land, departs in rapture and angels are busy lifting him away in a blaze of glory. For the words: "The Lord buried him" leave us room for the most beautiful prospects, and here Satan could at most only contrast in a corner of the foreground with his black shoulders and, without laying hands on the Lord's anointed, at most only look around to see whether there might not be something for him to acquire here." Schröer comments: "Moses departs at the sight of the promised land, like Faust in view of the completion of his work. In a blaze of glory from above on the right, the heavenly host comes to carry Faust away, and as the angels lift him up, we see Mephistopheles looking around, literally like Satan in the letter to Müller." It is precisely here that one would most likely believe that Goethe started from an abstract idea, and it is interesting to see how a concrete image underlies this as well.

Goethe's Faust requires commentary. The natural freshness of the first part and the high culture of the second, which make the poetry so appealing to us, also present difficulties of a very special kind for understanding. Only when we recognize the connection between the individual and the whole of Goethe's spirit do we fully penetrate. Schröer seeks to convey this insight. It is particularly necessary for the second part, which has been so often misunderstood and misjudged. We hope that this commentary in particular will do much to ensure that the view that Schröer expresses with the words: "It is by no means a work of diminishing poetic power; it is full of life, admirable in detail and as a whole."