B00ARI2G5C EBOK (50 page)

great fight:
the battle of Pydna (168
BC
) in which Rome finally defeated Macedon; see note to Introd. p. xxix on Pharsalus and Pydna. Since Pydna is well to the north of Mount Olympus, Goethe’s description of the battle as taking place between Olympus and the Peneus (7465 f.) seems inaccurate.

Manto:
see Introd., p. xxxii and Index.

Seismos:
(see Index). The whole episode (beginning here and continuing intermittently until line 7948) of the new mountain suddenly tossed up out of the earth by the earthquake-god Seismos, the creatures that begin swarming all over it, and the reactions of the Homunculus, Thales, and Anaxagoras to these phenomena, have usually been interpreted as a political allegory referring to the French Revolution of 1789, though an allusion to that of 1830 may also have been intended if Goethe wrote this part of the Classical Walpurgis Night in July of that year or later. In his fragmentary satirical narrative
The Journey of the Sons of Megaprazon
, written in 1792, he had already used a similar complex of imagery: an allegorical class-structured island suddenly blown apart by an earthquake, and the traditional war between the pygmies and the cranes or herons (the ‘geranomachy’, a motif from Greek mythology), representing the struggle between the mob and the aristocracy. The episode in
Faust
appears to be a reprise and elaboration of these allegorical themes, alluding to events in France as well as to the neptunist-vulcanist controversy. The fall of the meteor which wipes out the warring factions (7936-41) has been interpreted as the decisive intervention of Napoleon. It also seems probable, as Williams (1983, ‘Seismos’) has argued on textual evidence, that Goethe (never averse to a Rabelaisian jest) intended the various small inhabitants of the upstart mountain to be by-products of a gigantic fart by the earthquake-god; and furthermore, that the episode in which the Cranes of Ibycus (see Index) execute justice on the pygmies (7883-99) may represent the stem measures that Goethe in 1830 thought the governing classes should take against actual or threatened mob violence (Williams, 1984).

Blocksberg, etc.:
Mephistopheles mentions various topographical features of the Blocksberg region (the Ilsenstein, the Heinrichshöhe, the Schnarcher, Elend) which occurred in the ‘northern’ Walpurgis Night scene (see Part One, Sc. 24).

natural cliff:
in another indirect expression of Goethe’s ‘neptunist’ view, the oread (mountain nymph) contrasts her authentic mountain, shaped by the slow processes of geological time, with Seismos’s
unnatural ‘lump’ which, as Mephistopheles has noted (7808 ff.), was magically upheaved ‘in just one night’ and will vanish at dawn like a phantom.

Anaxagoras’s conjuration of the moon:
the Seismos episode, interwoven with the wanderings of Mephistopheles, the enquiries of the Homunculus, and the geological altercation between the philosophers Thales and Anaxagoras (see Index), reaches its climax in this speech which completes the ironic discrediting of the latter’s views and of his pretensions as a rival mentor to the Homunculus. The ‘vulcanist’ Anaxagoras, in a literally lunatic vision, seeks to emulate the power of the Thessalian sorceresses to call the moon down to earth; the moon-goddess will perhaps save the pygmies (‘my people’, 7904) from the avenging cranes. His imagined success is explained by the fall of a meteor, seemingly originating from the moon (7939), which knocks away the top of the ‘artificial’ mountain and crushes both the pygmies and their enemies. The sudden and violent processes on which Anaxagoras pins his faith are thus parodied both by the formation of the mountain ‘from underground’ and by its deformation from above, all within a few hours (7942-5). The whole sequence of events is pronounced by Thales (7946) to have been mere ‘fantasy’. The moon-meteor, whatever its political significance in the allegory, seems to be Goethe’s variant on the Greek legend according to which the historical Anaxagoras correctly predicted the fall of a meteor from the sun. The invocation of the moon as both a heavenly and an underground (chthonic) power (7900-9) reflects the triune character of the moon-goddess, who was identified in Greek myth with Artemis (Diana) and the witch-goddess Hecate (7905). See Index, Diana; also Williams, 1976.

resinous smell:
in the German text Goethe punningly associates the Harz Mountains with the homophonous but etymologically distinct word
Harz
(resin).

the lofty Cabin:
the bizarre episode of the ‘Cabiri’ (pp. nof, 113 ff.; see Index) was another of Goethe’s afterthoughts exclusive to the final version. It appears to serve a thematic purpose: these mysterious Aegean deities, known only to the classically erudite, are introduced as honoured guests into the Sea Festival because their peculiar characteristic is to have not yet fully come into being. They too are still developing and even, like Faust, ‘striving’:

By an onward urge obsessed,
Hungry with a strange unrest
For a goal beyond their reach.

                        (8203-5)

Eckermann comments ruefully to Goethe on 17 February 1831 that
Faust
‘does contain some intellectual exercises’, and that he had only understood this passage because he had read a book on the Cabiri by a contemporary scholar. ‘I have always found’, replies Goethe relentlessly, ‘that to know things is a great help.’

a poet’s spell … three thousand years:
Nereus alludes to the Trojan War and to the semi-legendary poet who immortalized it (see Index, Troy). Homer (?8th century
BC
) is traditionally identified as the author of the two great epic masterpieces of Greek literature, the
Riad
and the
Odyssey;
regarded as supreme among poets, his name is given to an age and to a whole corpus of heroic myth and legend.

no Eagle, no Lion
…: see Introd., p. xl; the eagle, winged lion, cross, and crescent moon are respectively Byzantium, Venice, the Crusaders, and the Turks.

Scene 11
: this first scene (8488-9126) of the ‘Helen’ Act closely imitates the style and metre of a classical Greek tragedy (cf. Introd., p. xliii and note). The iambic trimeter used by Helen and Phorcyas (Mephistopheles) is dominant; the Chorus uses ode forms with patterns of metrically related strophes, and at certain points the dialogue changes to trochaic tetrameter (8909-29, 8957-70, 9067-70). The exchange of invective between Phorcyas and the Chorus in alternating single lines (‘stichomythia’, 8810-25) is a further convention of the style.

in duplicated shape:
see
Helen
in Index.

A phantom to a phantom:
see Helen and Achilles in Index.

three-headed hell-hound:
the monstrous (in some accounts fifty-headed) dog Cerberus who guarded the entrance to the underworld. Hercules (q.v.), as one of his Labours, dragged him up to earth and then returned him.

fruit… ashes:
the so-called apple of Sodom, referred to by Milton (
Paradise Lost
, x, 560-6) and Byron (
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
, III, 34: ‘The apples on the Dead Sea’s shore, all ashes to the taste’). The fruit (
cabtropis procera
) outwardly resembles an apple, but is filled with hairy seeds, popularly identified with the ash from the holocaust of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Faust’s speech:
at this point the versification of the dialogue begins to change, and the metres of medieval and modern poetry (especially rhymed verse) become dominant until just before the end of the Act; cf. Introd., p. xliii.

Arcadia:
see Introd., p. xlvi f. and note.

daughter of Crete:
Mephistopheles-Phorcyas has claimed (8864 f.) to have been carried off into slavery by Menelaus on his expedition to Crete.

Hermes:
Arcadia was especially associated with Hermes (Mercury), who was thought to have been born there. Goethe takes his catalogue of the god’s exploits (9645-78) straight from Hederich’s mythological lexicon (see 2nd note to p. xxviii).

the young girl:
there is no agreed interpretation of this curious episode.

‘a well-known figure’
: the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), had died of a fever in Greece while helping the Greeks in their war of liberation from Turkish rule. On the significance of Goethe’s posthumous allegorical tribute to him by casting him as Faust’s son, see Introd., pp. xlvii f.

Chorus:
The Chorus’s lament for ‘Euphorion’ (9907-38) refers in general terms to Byron’s character and career (his aristocratic birth, early death, success with women, poetic genius, rebellion against conventional morality, adoption of the ‘high purpose’ of Greek liberation). In the course of their discussion of the Byron episode, Goethe asks Eckermann whether he has noticed ‘that when the Chorus sing his lament, they are quite out of character? Earlier they are in the ancient style throughout, or at least they never cease to be a chorus of young girls; but here they suddenly become serious and full of lofty reflections, uttering things that they have never thought of and never could have thought of.’ Eckermann replies that he had indeed noticed it, but that ‘such small discrepancies cannot count against a higher beauty if they are the means to its achievement. The song after all had to be sung, there was no other chorus present, and so the girls had to sing it’ (conversation of 5 July 1827). From 9939, after the music has stopped, both Helen and the Chorus revert to ancient metres.

Phorcyas’s speeches and unmasking:
the last words from Mephistopheles to Faust in Act III (9945-54) are a serious exhortation quite devoid of the speaker’s usual cynical inflections; they are thus, as Goethe himself remarked of the Chorus’s lament for Byron, ‘quite out of character’ (see previous note). It is perhaps a pity that no similar pronouncement by Goethe himself on 9945-54 has been recorded, as commentators might then have laid this point to rest. As it is, we have instead the already quoted conversation with Eckermann of 16 December 1829, in which Goethe endorses Ecker
mann’s impression that Mephistopheles exercises some degree of secret control (
Mitwirkung
) not only in the making of the Homunculus but throughout the ‘Helena’ action (see note to p. xxxix). Goethe had evidently decided to suggest that Mephistopheles, whether disguised as the court jester or as Phorcyas, is in some respects a representative of poetic inventiveness, considered as a kind of ‘magical’ creativity; hints of this, as we have seen, are already dropped in Act I (see Introd., p. xxvi), and the role of poet also at times appears to be given subliminally to Faust himself (see Introd., pp. xxvii and xxxvi f). Here as elsewhere (see Introd., pp. xxxiii f.) Goethe seems to have been less concerned with consistency, with the construction of dramatic figures who would always speak ‘in character’, than with making a statement by means of a symbolic dramatic fantasy, in this case a statement about the nature of art. In Act III it is notable that Mephistopheles not only speaks unironically here about the ennobling effect of Helen (i.e., of classical beauty) on Faust, but also spoke similarly (9620-8) about Euphorion, the newly born personification of Poetry: ‘the future master-maker of all beauty, through whose limbs the everlasting music is already flowing.’ He reverts to his more usual cynical manner in his mocking speech (9955-61) about the dead Euphorion’s garments and their promise of modish literary imitation; he then comes forward and sits down in the proscenium, and when the Chorus has sung the praises of ‘the elements’ and disappeared into them he rises, still outside the stage, like some gigantic master of ceremonies, and removes his actor’s mask and actor’s cothurni (the special leather boots that were worn as a symbol of the classical high tragedy). Phorcyas is revealed as Mephistopheles, ready with his unspoken last words on the ‘drama’ (
Stuck
) that we have witnessed. By this ironical final stage direction, Goethe seems to suggest that the whole solemn and stylized ‘Helena’ action still has, as originally intended, something of the character of an intermezzo, a second-order ‘play within a play’; and that art has two aspects or natures, that of timeless monumentality and that of illusion.

Faust’s soliloquy:
see Introd., p. 1 and note.

Eph. 6:12:
Goethe associates Mephistopheles’ reference to the infernal host’s ‘lordship of the upper air’ with St Paul’s warning that our real enemies are not of flesh and blood, but evil spiritual powers of all kinds, including (the point is obscured by the Authorized Version but clearer in the Greek or in Luther’s German) ‘wicked spirits in the celestial regions’. Mephistopheles seems to be saying (10091-4) that the unseen presence of demons in the earth’s atmosphere is something that mankind has taken a long time to discover.

Moloch’s hammer:
‘Moloch’ appears in the Old Testament as the name of a Canaanite god associated with human sacrifice; in Milton and his German imitator Klopstock he is a fierce demon in the service of Satan. In Klopstock’s epic
The Messiah
(1848), which Goethe read as a child, he lives among mountains, and strengthens his defences by building new mountains round them (n. 354 ff.).

Babylonian debauch:
Mephistopheles has been describing to Faust the luxurious life of a typical
ancien régime
ruler, surrounded by a pleasure-loving court and a large formal garden such as that of Versailles (which the German princelings of the 18th century strove to imitate). Faust’s comment, literally translated, is merely ‘Vulgar and modern! Sardanapalus!’. Sardanapalus (668-26
BC
), reputedly the most decadent and corrupt of the ancient Babylonian despots, was eventually (like Louis XVI) dethroned by a rebellion. He was the titular hero of a drama by Byron (1821) which the latter had dedicated to Goethe.

mountain people, Peter Quince, Three Mighty Men:
for the ‘mountain people’ and the three giants, see Introd. pp. lvii f. and notes. Peter Quince, in Shakespeare’s
Midsummer Night’s Dream
, is the leader of the group of naïve tradesmen who present the ‘merry and tragical’ play of
Pyramus and Thisbe
at the ducal court; the comparison of Mephistopheles’ sinister ‘rabble’ to these characters seems inappropriate.