by Will Durant
Resolved to win back the audience that had rejected The Bride of Messina, Schiller, at Goethe’s suggestion, chose for his next drama the popular story of William Tell. He was soon on fire with the theme. “After he had gathered all necessary material,” Goethe recalled in 1820, “he sat down to work and … did not get up from his chair until the play was finished. If weariness overcame him he laid his head on his arm and slept a while. So soon as he awoke he asked … for strong black coffee to keep himself awake. So the play was written in six weeks.”144
Schiller accepted as history the legend of a William Tell who had led the revolt of the Swiss against Austria in 1308. The revolt was real; so was Gessler, the hated Austrian bailiff. Gessler, in the legend, promised Tell full pardon if he proved his famed prowess with bow and arrow by shooting an apple from his boy’s head. Tell placed two arrows in his belt; with the first he shot the apple; Gessler asked for what he had intended the second; Tell answered, “For you if the first should strike my son.” The play was acclaimed at Weimar on March 17, 1804, and soon thereafter everywhere; Switzerland adopted it as part of its national lore. Published, the play sold seven thousand copies in a few weeks. Schiller was now more famous than Goethe.
But he had less than a year of life left to him. In July, 1804, he had so violent an attack of colic that his doctor feared for his death and Schiller hoped for it. He recovered slowly, and began another play, Demetrius (the “false Dmitri” of Russian ‘history). On April 28, 1805, he saw Goethe for the last time; from that meeting Goethe returned to his home and himself fell seriously ill with colic. On the twenty-ninth Schiller’s final sickness began. Heinrich Vols reported: “His eyes were sunk deep in his head, and every nerve twitched convulsively.”145 The unhealthy tensions of literary effort, the inflammation of his bowels, and the decay of his lungs joined to destroy him. “Schiller never drank much,” said Goethe later; “he was very temperate, but in such hours of bodily weakness he was obliged to stimulate his powers with spirituous liquors.”146 On May 9 Schiller met death with a strange calm: he bade farewell to his wife, his four children, and his friends; then he fell asleep, and did not wake again. An autopsy showed the left lung completely destroyed by tuberculosis, the heart degenerated, the liver, the kidney, and the intestines all diseased. The doctor told the Duke: “Under the circumstances we cannot help wondering how the poor man could have lived so long.”147
Goethe was so ill at the time that no one dared tell him of Schiller’s death. On May 10 Christiane’s sobbing revealed it to him. “I thought I was losing my own life,” he wrote to Zelter, “and instead I lost a friend who was the very half of my existence.”148 With what remained he came to his own fulfillment.
CHAPTER XXIV
Goethe Nestor
1805-32
I. GOETHE AND NAPOLEON
SHALL we, honoring our stated limits, leave Goethe suspended at this point, with Faust on his pen and wisdom in his age, or shall we, burdening space and risking time, pursue this ever-evolving Olympian to his end? Die ewige Weisheit zieht uns hinan: timeless wisdom draws us on.1
On October 14, 1806, Napoleon defeated the Prussians at Jena. Duke Karl August, allied with Prussia, had led his own little army against the French in that battle. The routed survivors, and then the hungry victors, entered Weimar, sacked the stores, and quartered themselves in private homes. Sixteen Alsatian troops took over Goethe’s house; Christiane gave them food, drink, and beds. That night two other soldiers, intoxicated, forced their way in, and, finding no more beds available on the lower floor, ran upstairs into Goethe’s room, brandished their swords in his face, and demanded accommodations. Christiane placed herself between these soldiers and her mate, persuaded them to leave, and then bolted the door. On the fifteenth Bonaparte reached Weimar and restored order; instructions were issued that “the distinguished scholar” was not to be disturbed, and that “all measures should be taken to protect the great Goethe and his home.”2 Marshals Lannes, Ney, and Augereau stayed with him for a while, and then left with apologies and compliments. Goethe thanked Christiane for her bravery, and said to her, “God willing, we shall be man and wife.” On October 19 they were married. His good mother, who had borne lovingly with all his faults, and modestly with all his honors, sent them renewed blessings. She died on September 12, 1808, and Goethe inherited half of her estate.
In October, 1808, Napoleon presided over a meeting of six sovereigns and forty-three princes at Erfurt, and remade the map of Germany. Duke Karl August attended, taking Goethe in his retinue. Bonaparte asked Goethe to visit him on October 2; the poet came, and spent an hour with the conqueror, Talleyrand, two generals, and Friedrich von Müller, a Weimar magistrate. Napoleon complimented him on his vigor (Goethe was then fifty-nine), inquired about his family, and launched into a spirited critique of Werther. He condemned current dramas that emphasized fate. “Why talk about fate? Politics are fate. … Qu’en dit Monsieur Goet?— What does Monsieur Goethe say about it?” We do not know Goethe’s reply, but Müller reported that as Goethe was leaving the room Napoleon remarked to his generals, “Voil àun homme!” (Behold a man!)3
On October 6 Napoleon returned to Weimar, taking with him a company of actors from Paris, the great Talma among them. They played, in Goethe’s theater, Voltaire’s La Mort de César. After the performance the Emperor took Goethe aside and discussed tragedy. “The serious drama,” he said, “could very well be a school for princes as well as for the people, for in certain ways it is above history. . . . You ought to portray the death of Caesar more magnificently than Voltaire has done, and show how happy Caesar [Napoleon] would have made the world if the people had only granted him time in which to carry out his lofty plans.” And a little later: “You must come to Paris! I make this definite request of you! You will there obtain a larger view of the world, and you will find a wealth of themes for your poetry.”4—When Napoleon passed through Weimar again, after his disastrous retreat from Moscow, he asked the French ambassador to convey his greetings to Goethe.
The poet felt that in Bonaparte he had met, as he expressed it, “the greatest mind the world has ever seen.”5 He quite approved Napoleon’s rule of Germany; after all (Goethe had written in 1807), there was no Germany, only a farrago of petty states, and the Holy Roman Empire had ceased to exist in 1806; it seemed good to Goethe that Europe should be united, especially under so brilliant a head as Bonaparte’s. He did not rejoice over Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, though his Duke again led the Weimar regiments against the French. His culture and concern were too universal to let him feel much patriotic glow; and he could not find it in him, though often asked to do so, to write songs of nationalistic fervor. In his eightieth year he said to Eckermann:
How could I write songs of hatred when I felt no hate? And, between ourselves, I never hated the French, although I thanked God when we were rid of them. How could I, to whom the only significant things are civilization [Kultur]and barbarism, hate a nation which is among the most cultivated in the world, and to which I owe a great part of my own culture? In any case this business of hatred between nations is a curious thing. You will always find it most powerful and barbarous on the lowest levels of civilization. But there exists a level at which it wholly disappears, and where one stands, so to speak, above the nations, and feels the weal or woe of a neighboring people as though it were one’s own. This level was appropriate to my nature; I had reached it long before my sixtieth year.6
Would that there had been, in every major state, a million such “good Europeans”!
II. FAUST: PART I
Goethe did not accept Napoleon’s invitation to move to Paris or to write about Caesar; he had long nurtured in his mind and his manuscripts a subject that moved him more deeply than even the most majestic political career: the struggle of the soul toward understanding and beauty, the defeat of the soul by the brevity of beauty and the elusiveness of truth, and the peace obtainable by the soul through narrowing the goal and broadening the self. But h
ow to vision all this in a modern parable and dramatic form? For fifty-eight years Goethe tried.
He had learned the story of Faust7 in his childhood through chapbooks and puppet shows, and he had seen pictures of Faust and the Devil on the walls of Auerbach’s cellar in Leipzig. He himself, in youth, had meddled with magic and alchemy. His own restless search for understanding went into his conception of Faust; his reading of Voltaire and his contact with Herder’s sarcasms went into Mephistopheles; the Gretchen whom he had loved in Frankfurt, and the Friederike Brion whom he had deserted in Sesenheim, gave name and form to Margaret.
How deeply the story of Faust moved Goethe, how varied the forms it took in his thought, shows in the fact that he began to write the play in 1773, and did not finish it till 1831. Of his meeting with Herder in 1771 he wrote in his autobiography:
I most carefully concealed from him my interest in certain subjects which had rooted themselves in me, and were, little by little, molding themselves into poetic form. These were Götz von Berlichingen and Faust. … The significant puppet show of the latter resounded and vibrated, many-toned, within me. I too had wandered about in all sorts of science, and had early enough been led to see its vanity. I had, moreover, tried all sorts of ways in real life, and had always returned unsatisfied and troubled. Now these things, as well as many others, I carried about with me, and delighted myself with them in solitary hours, but without writing anything down.8
On September 17, 1775, he told a correspondent: “I felt fresh this morning, and wrote a scene of my Faust.”9 Later in that month Johann Zimmermann asked him how the play was progressing. “He brought in a bag filled with a thousand fragments of paper, and threw it on the table. ‘There,’ he said, ‘is my Faust? ”10 When he went to Weimar (November, 1775) the first form of the drama was complete.11 Dissatisfied with it, he put it aside; this Urfaust, or Original Faust, never reached print till 1887, when a manuscript copy made by Fräulein von Göchhausen was found in Weimar.12 Through fifteen more years he revised and expanded it. Finally he published it (1790) as Faust, ein Fragment, which now runs to sixty-three pages;13 this was the first printed form of the most famous play since Hamlet.
Still discontent with it, Goethe dropped the theme till 1797. On June 22 he wrote to Schiller: “I have determined to take up my Faust again, … breaking up what has been printed, arranging it in large masses, … and further preparing the development.... I only wish that you would be so good as to think the matter over on one of your sleepless nights, and tell me what you would demand of the whole, and to interpret my dreams to me like a true prophet.” Schiller replied the next day: “The duality of human nature, and the unsuccessful endeavor to unite in man the godlike and the physical, is never lost sight of. … The nature of the subject will force you to treat it philosophically, and the imagination will have to accommodate itself to serve a rational idea.” Goethe’s imagination was too rich, his vividly remembered experiences too many; he inserted many of them into the Fragment, doubling its size, and in 1808 he gave the world what we now call Faust, Part I.
Before letting his puppet say a word, he prefixed to the drama a tender Zueignung— dedication—to his dead friends; and a droll “Prologue in the Theater” between manager, playwright, and jester; and a “Prologue in Heaven” wherein God bets Mephistopheles that Faust cannot be permanently won to sin. Then at last Faust speaks, in simplest doggerel:
Habe nun, ach! Philosophie,
Juristerei und Medizin,
Und leider auch Theologie
Durchaus studiert, mit heissem Bemü hn.
Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor!
Und bin so klug als wie zuvor.
Heisse Magister, heisse Doktor gar,
Und ziehe schon an die zehen Jahr
Herauf, herab, und quer und krumm
Meine Schüler an der Nase herum,
Und sehe dass wir nichts wissen kön-nen.
I have studied, alas, philosophy,
Jurisprudence, and medicine too,
And, saddest of all, theology,
With ardent labor, through and through.
And here I stick, as wise, poor fool,
As when my steps first turned to school.
Master they style me, nay, Doctor forsooth,
And nigh ten years, over rough and smooth
And up and down, and acrook and across,
I lead my pupils by the nose,
And know that in truth we can know naught.14
This four-foot meter, handed down from Hans Sachs’s playlets, proved to be just the rippling rhythm for a drama that chastened philosophy with fun.
Faust, of course, is Goethe, even to being a man of sixty years; and, like Goethe, he was still, at sixty, thrilled by feminine loveliness and grace. His double aspiration for wisdom and beauty was the soul of Goethe; it challenged the avenging gods by its presumption, but it was noble. Faust and Goethe said Yea to life, spiritual and sensual, philosophical and gay. By contrast, Mephistopheles (who is not Satan but only Satan’s philosopher) is the devil of denial and doubt, to whom all aspiration is nonsense, all beauty a skeleton wearing skin. In many moments Goethe was this mocking spirit too, or he could not have given him such wit and life. At times Mephistopheles seems to be the voice of experience, of realism and reason checking the romantic desires and delusions of Faust; indeed, Goethe told Eckermann, “the character of Mephistopheles is … a living result of an extensive acquaintance with the world.”15
Faust does not sell his soul unconditionally; he agrees to go to hell only if Mephistopheles shows him a pleasure so durably satisfying that he will be glad to stay with it forever:
If ever on the bed of sloth I loll contented ever,
Then with that moment end my race! . . .
Should I to any moment say,
“Tarry a while, you are so fair!”*
Then may you into fetters cast me;
Then will I gladly go down there.
On this condition Faust signs the compact with his blood, and cries recklessly, “Our glowing passions in a sensual sea now will we quench!”16
So Mephistopheles takes him to Margaret—“Gretchen.” Faust finds in her all the charm of that simplicity which departs with knowledge and returns with wisdom. He woos her with jewels and philosophy:
MARGARET.
Tell me, how is’t with thy religion, pray?
Thou art a good and kindly man,
And yet, I think, small heed thereto dost pay.
KAUST.
Enough, dear child! I love thee, thou dost feel.
For those I love my blood and life I’d spill,
Nor of his faith, his church, would any man bereave.
MARGARET.
That is not right! We must believe! . . .
Dost thou believe in God?
FAUST.
What man can say, my dearest,
“I believe in God”? . . .
MARGARET.
Then thou believest not?
FAUST.
Thou winsome angel-face, mishear me not!
Who can name Him? Who thus proclaim him?
I believe Him?
Who that has feeling, his bosom steeling,
Can say, “I believe Him not”?
The All-embracing, the All-sustaining;
Clasps and sustains He not
Thee, me, Himself?
Springs not the vault of heaven above us?
Lieth not earth, firm-’stablished, ‘neath our feet? . . .
Great though it be, fill thou therefrom thine heart,
And when in the feeling wholly blest thou art,
Call it then what thou wilt!
Call it Bliss, Heart, Love, God!
I have no name for it.
Feeling is all [Gefühl ist alles ]!
Name is but sound and smoke
Clouding the glow of heaven. . . .
MARGARET.
It seemeth fair in these words of thine,
But yet … thou hast no C
hristianity.
FAUST.
Dear child!17
She is moved not by his cloudy pantheism but by the fine figure and raiment with which Mephistopheles’ magic has endowed his restored youth. She sings at her spinning wheel a song of wistful longing:
Meine Ruh ist hin,
Mein Herz ist schiver,
Ich finde sie nimmer
Und nimmermehr. . . .
Nach ihm nur schau ich
Zum Fenster binaus,
Nach ihm nur geh ich
Aus dem Haus.
Sein hoher Gang,
Sein’ edle Gestalt,
Seines Mundes Lächeln,
My peace is fled,
My heart is sore,
I shall find it never,
And nevermore. . . .
Him only I watch for,
The window near;
Him only I look for
When forth I fare.
His lofty gait,
His lordly guise,
The smile of his lips,
Seiner Augen Gewalt. . . .
Mein Busen drängt
Sich nach ihm hin.
Ach, dürft ich fassen
Und halten ihn,
Und küssen ihn,
So wie ich wollt,
An seinen Küssen
Vergehen sollt!
The might of his eyes. . . .
My bosom yearns
For him, for him.
Ah, could I clasp him
And cling to him,
And kiss him, as fain
I would, then I,
Faint with his kisses,