B00ARI2G5C EBOK (7 page)

In the first scene, that of Helen’s supposed homecoming to ancient Sparta, Faust is not present, but is waiting for her to be brought to him, as the tenuous link with the old Faust legend still requires. Scene it opens unambiguously in the manner of an Aeschylean or Euripidean tragedy: the heroine and her chorus of captive Trojan women outside the palace, her expository monologue in iambic trimeters, the chorus answering with lyric odes in triadic form, a foreboding of doom, a monstrous prophetic figure confronting the heroine and the chorus, single-line altercations (‘stichomythia’, as in 8810-25), passages of agitated trochaic tetrameter (8909-29, etc.).
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As the situation and the role of Phorcyas-Mephistopheles develop, the style shifts towards comedy (9010-24, 9044-8, and very notably Mephistopheles’ mock-macabre preparations for Helen’s execution, 8937-46). On her consenting to seek the stranger’s protection, the scene clouds over and changes, overleaping the centuries but not moving far in space, and Helen comes to Faust in his medieval castle. In this central scene (12) of the play as well as of Act III, Goethe combines, with great subtlety and originality, the immediate story and its allegorical significance as a marriage of classical and modern cultures. This is done very simply by prosodic metamorphosis. The ancient rhymeless trimeter has been retained until the moment of Faust’s ceremonious entry, but here, hardly perceptibly at first, it begins to disappear: Faust speaks in the iambic pentameters of Shakespeare’s ‘blank verse’, which had become the classic line of Goethean and Schillerian drama, and Helen instinctively answers in the same metre. From this point on, the dialogue is further and progressively enriched with medieval and modern verse forms. Faust’s watchman Lynceus speaks in rhymed quatrains like a
Minne-sänger;
Helen, puzzled by the recurring sounds that so strangely beautify the ends of his lines, must be instructed by Faust on ‘the way our peoples speak’. As they draw nearer together, she answers him in lines first end-rhymed (9377-84) and then internally rhymed as well (9411-18). This extraordinary poetic courtship also has an Oriental source, revealed by its precedent in Goethe’s own work: one of the poems in the
West-Eastern Divan
tells the legend of the Persian poet Behramgur, whose beloved mistress Dilaram helped him to invent rhymed verse by echoing his words.
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This poem (1818)
had in its turn enshrined a personal memory, that of his brief happiness in 1814-15 with Marianne von Willemer, the ‘Suleika’ of the
Divan:
by a curious interaction of inspiration, their love had also moved Marianne to write love-poems echoing those sent to her by Goethe, in the same style and of a quality equal to his.
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In the Faust-Helen passage the dramatic meaning, the autobiographical meaning, and the allegory (‘so far away and yet so near… long past and yet so new’) are perfectly blended.

At the culminating point of Faust’s love-dialogue Phorcyas-Mephistopheles, absent for the last 400 lines since rescuing Helen and her women from the vengeance of Menelaus, bursts in to warn them that the outraged husband is approaching at the head of his army. Unitarian critics who cannot forget Faust’s Wager
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in Part One argue that Mephistopheles chooses this moment to interrupt because Faust has just, in effect, blessed the passing moment (9417 f.) and thus probably lost his bet (1699 ff.). But while it is true that the Faust of Act III is the Faust not so much of perpetual striving and divine discontent as of maturity and fulfilment, it would for reasons already mentioned be implausible to press the point about consistency. Nor need we consider too curiously the question of the ‘reality’ or otherwise of the threat from Menelaus which Mephistopheles reports or invents for obvious dramatic reasons. More difficult questions arise when we consider the historical and allegorical aspects of Faust’s supposed presence in Greece and the warlike role he and Menelaus now assume.

Goethe’s earlier plan, sketched as we have seen in the 1816 paralipomenon, was that Helen should appear by magic in a castle in Germany, occupied by Faust while its owner fights in one of the Crusades. When he came to work on the final version in 1825, he modified and developed this idea in the light of his researches at that time into the early history of the Peloponnèse (or the ‘Morea’ as it was also called in medieval and later times). In one of the
Elegies
that celebrate his own rejuvenating contact with the ‘classical soil’ of Rome in 1788, he had ironically compared himself to a barbarian from the north, taking possession of Rome in the person of his Roman mistress ‘Faustina’. What he learnt now about the successive invasions of Greece by various northern barbarian tribes, before and after the sack of ancient Sparta by Alaric the Goth in
AD
395, provided him with a similar motif which could be vaguely based on historical
fact. The ‘northern’ Faust was to go to the Peloponnèse in search of Helen; he might thus be compared not only to the southward-migrating Germanic tribes of the Dark Ages but also to the not essentially dissimilar crusading settlers from various parts of Western Europe who, in the early thirteenth century, carved up the peninsula, set up usurping principalities all over what was after all a territory of the Christian Byzantine Empire, and built military strongholds at various points. The descriptions by Lynceus (9281-96) and by Faust himself (9446-73) of Faust’s army and its activities identifies him loosely with all these invaders. He is of course a composite and generalized figure, like the Emperor in Acts I and IV, and the same goes for his symbolic ‘Gothic’ castle (9017-30), which need not be thought of as corresponding to any specific place. Goethe adopts a violently compressed time-scale, and treats the events in a highly selective manner, changing historical and geographical facts at will for the sake of his broad general purpose of bringing about some kind of encounter, as his story demanded, between a Greek classical heroine and a German medieval knight. Some details suggest, however, that he may have particularly had in mind the Fourth Crusade and the period immediately following it. At this time, members of the Frankish Villehardouin dynasty, on their way from Palestine to share the spoils of the infamous sacking and desecration of Constantinople in 1204, were blown off course and landed near Pylos (9454 f.). They subdued the whole region, styled themselves ‘princes of Achaea’, and in 1249 their successors finished building a fortress a few miles west of Sparta, at Mystra (Myzethra, modern Greek Mystras, otherwise usually Latinized as Mistra). It has been common to ‘identify’ this as Faust’s castle, although the latter (8994-9002) is considerably further north, near the source of the Eurotas. A more serious discrepancy, however, is that between Faust, as the agent of a high cultural synthesis, and the Villehardouins who were after all little more than brutal adventurers. Their lordship in Mystra was in any case short-lived, since they were decisively defeated by the Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII Paleologus shortly before he also, in 1261, recaptured Constantinople from Western occupation. By the peace settlement, the Frankish invaders were able to remain in the Morea for the time being, but Byzantine rule was restored in Mystra and certain other strongholds (Maina and Monemvasia); cadet members of the imperial family became ‘Despots’ of Mystra, and in
the following century Byzantium reconquered the rest of the peninsula. During the 200 years of the Paleologan dynasty, ending with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, the Empire was territorially much reduced and politically in terminal decline; but Mystra became and remained the centre of a great intellectual and artistic revival, which increasingly asserted its debt to the ancient ‘Hellenic’ tradition.
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This cultural golden age developed not under Frankish rule or any other Germanic or Western influence, as
Faust
commentators (Beutler and D. Lohmeyer, for instance) have usually asserted, but as a result of the Byzantine reconquests.

It seems bizarre that Goethe, who must have had some knowledge of these facts, should in what amounts to a symbolic cultural history of medieval Greece leave wholly out of account the only medieval Greek civilization remotely qualifying to be described as a Renaissance. There is a baffling ambiguity (or perhaps some deeper ironic intention) in the position of Faust as commander of an army of pillaging barbarians (8999 ff., 9281-96, 9450-7; Mommsen has also compared them to the forces of Arab warlords) who are nevertheless receptive to the classical heritage of Greece, personified by Helen, as their Greek-named spokesman Lynceus appears to be (9273-80, 9313-32, 9346-55). In Faust’s final speech to them, after dividing up the whole Peloponnèse between the Germanic tribes of the earlier incursions (who seem to be synchronically identified with the thirteenth-century Frankish settlers), he orders them to surround and protect Helen and to establish her as queen of Sparta and overlord of them all, who will bring about an age of gold, plenty, and justice (9474-81). He thus seems strangely poised between the role of a recoverer and re-creator of culture and that of a destroyer. It is not really clear what the precious ‘classical heritage’ is being retrieved from, assimilated to, and defended against, or by whom; and the role of Menelaus (if it is to be interpreted allegorically at all) remains obscure and far-fetched.
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The ‘Mystra’ scene nevertheless reaches a positive climax when in his closing speech (9506-73) Faust magnificently evokes the idealized Arcadia where he now proposes to settle with Helen. This is probably the greatest piece of pastoral poetry in German literature, and another of the outstanding lyrical passages with which Part Two from time to time rises above allegorical obscurity and learned dispute. The ‘Arcadia’ here described bears little resemblance, of
course, to the arid central region of the Peloponnèse that still goes by that name; the safe haven to which Helen is now spirited away is the traditional
locus amoenus
, or earthly paradise, of poetic fancy.
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Another long but unspecified lapse of historical time (9574) is reduced to an instant, and the third scene of Act III takes place in what appears to be the early nineteenth century. Except for the opening and closing passages, which revert to ancient metrical conventions, Scene 13 not only uses rhymed verse but is meant to be staged as an opera, with singers replacing the acting cast (conversation with Eckermann, 25 January 1827) and continuous music from the birth until the death of Euphorion (9679-938). It must presumably have been Goethe’s intention to present the allegorical figure of Faust’s son in the medium of an enhanced, second-order art; the reader, however, is here at a disadvantage, since in the absence of music much of the text fails to rise above the level of an unaccompanied libretto of average quality. (Its style of jingling versification, indeed, has been shown by Arens to resemble that of
Erwin and Elmira
, an operetta or
Singspiel
which the young Goethe wrote in his Frankfurt days.) Goethe claimed at different times to have had different models or parallels in mind for Euphorion (some critics have proposed Mozart in this connection, or even Goethe’s own son August). In 1827 he told Eckermann that the identification with Byron had not been his original plan but an afterthought stimulated by the news of the poet’s death in 1824. He explained that Euphorion, like the Charioteer in Act I, is ‘the personification of Poetry’, and that Byron was his only possible choice ‘as a representative of the most modern poetic period’ and as unquestionably ‘the greatest talent of the century’ (conversation of 5 July 1827). The appropriateness of Byron was further heightened by his special enthusiasm for the cause of Greek liberation from the Turks, which led to his death at Missolonghi (not, admittedly, in battle, but from malaria) and his continuing status as a Greek national hero. In general he must have appealed even to the elderly Goethe as a romantic rebel, a scorner of convention who had probably committed incest with his sister, an exile from England who lived in Italy for his last eight years; appealed as a reminder, perhaps, of Goethe’s own youth, of a
Geniezeit
remembered with ambivalent nostalgia. All this is summed up in the Chorus’s (dramatically impossible but poetically noble) lament for Byron in 9907-38. Dramatically, however, there is an obvious parallel between Euphorion’s
salute to the Peloponnèse (9823-6), his timeless call to the warriors of Greece to fight for its freedom (9843-50), and Faust’s own summoning of his warriors in Helen’s defence. Once again, the noblest Greek heritage must be defended against its destroyers.

The story of Helen and Achilles on Leuce is Goethe’s main classical Greek parallel for his Faust-Helen-Euphorion drama, though the latter also has some affinity to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. In both these sources the motif of prohibition is central: the beloved must return to Hades and be lost for ever if a certain stipulation is infringed. In Mommsen’s interpretation, this already happened when Faust persuaded Helen to leave his castle and come with him to ‘Sparta’s near neighbourhood, Arcadia’ (9569): his Faustian arrogance and discontent have breached the condition, and Helen is doomed to vanish. This is not entirely persuasive, as Persephone’s stipulation that she must not leave Sparta has not been made explicit in the final text, only in the unpublished paralipomena; moreover, Helen has in any case already left Sparta when she joins Faust in his northern castle, despite which the two of them are allowed an Arcadian idyll of uncertain duration (9574). Goethe may have intended, in the final version, merely to hint at the underlying prohibition and to impose only an approximate obedience to it, for which Sparta’s ‘neighbourhood’ would suffice; or even to apply it not to Sparta but to Arcadia itself. The leafy groves and underground caverns in which Faust and Helen find themselves give the impression of being a kind of secluded and protected royal demesne, a designated island of refuge which they will leave at their peril.
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The further law binding Euphorion himself is more easily interpreted: from the old
Märchen
motif of the 1816 sketch which forbids him to pass over a magic circle, an interesting and significant symbolic idea has developed. His father explains to him why he must not attempt to fly, and it is no accident that the myth of Antaeus, invoked by Faust himself as he touched the Greek earth (7077), here reappears: