Stories as a mode of thinking/1

by Richard Green Moulton

 

THE STORY OF FAUST

or

Buying the World at the Price of the Soul

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The story of Faust is an Acted Sermon on the text, "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul." The natural heads for such a sermon are two:

1. What is it to gain the whole world?

2. What is it to lose the soul?

But to act the answers to these questions is very different from putting them from a pulpit in words. There are two famous versions of this story:

The Old Version: by Marlowe (before 1597), at the commencement of the Romantic Drama.

The New Version: by Goethe (1806), at the culmination of the Romantic epoch. [Unquestionably prompted by close study of Marlowe's version, which it adapts at every turn to the new intellectual conditions of Goethe's age.]

1. As to the first head both versions agree. Gaining the whole world is dramatized under the form of Magic, that is, the suspension of second causes allowing unlimited realization of Will.

2. The answers to the second head are as widely apart as the sixeenth and nineteenth centuries.

 

Marlowe's Version

In dramatic form, the Romantic Drama is seen in the process of settling down—traces of Greek Chorus, Old English Masque and Miracle, Extempore relief scenes.

The play treated as a story falls naturally into three divisions:

A. The formation of a compact with an Emissary from Hell: twenty-four years of "the World" in exchange for the soul. [Avoid confusion between Mephistophilis and Mephistopheles.]

B. The twenty-four years of "the World." Mediæval conception of magic: unlimited pleasure, unlimited knowledge, magic tricks as relief scenes.

C. The price of the Soul paid at the conclusion of the term of years; last hour on earth of a doomed soul. A masterpiece of dramatic realisation; especially note the device of "dramatic back-ground" (borrowed from Job xxxvi-xxxviii); gradual rise through the final hour of the tempest which is to break at the moment of doom.

Marlowe's answer to the second head is to show a Soul in the process of being lost in this world (to say nothing of the next) by the paralysis of will produced by repeated acts of self-surrender. Especially notice; apparent external restraints on Faust at the end are in reality no more than natural consequences of self-inflicted emotional shocks—thus Marlowe with great skill has reconciled demoniac agency with free will.

Note such passages as page 34, line 21; page 37,^[1] line 3; page 63, line 13; page 66, lines 21-4; page 68; lines 13, 16, 17. Here Faustus supposes himself to be physically attacked by invisible demons. But it is more in accordance with the general drift of the play to understand these as hysterical convulsions, the natural result of oft-repeated emotional transition from the height of hope to the depth of despair.

 

[Goethe's Version

is not included in the present course, but will be a good companion study. Briefly its thinking on the second head may be summed up thus: The issue is changed at the last moment by a bold evasion of the poet, Faust's acts suggesting, not being saved, but saving others.]

1. The top line of page 37 is in other texts given to the Good Angel, not to Faustus: and this makes the better reading.