Tom Marshall The Queen’s College, University of Oxford

“How does Goethe address the tension between the pre-modern and the modern in Faust
(Parts I and II)?”

In the two parts of Goethe’s Faust, written between 1770 and 1832, the archetypes of
classical and modern are paired and contrasted in explicit lines of dialogue, in structural
terms, in the forms of the story’s figures, and within the varied nature of the play’s poetry
itself. To examine how Goethe treats the pre-modern and the modern in Faust is, by
necessity, also to look to the age in which he worked on this lifelong project, to the classical
history that went before it, and to the work’s future resonances and the extent to which it pre-
empts modernity, particularly in the literary sphere. Addressing both context and text will aid
an understanding of how Goethe engineers, develops and bridges the tensions between the
world of antiquity and the world of modernity in Faust.
It would be appropriate to begin with the scale and degree to which these tensions exist; it
would be nothing new to state that they are so large they threaten to engulf the whole work,
denying it any sense of a coherent whole -- right down to the most basic, fundamental level of
dividing it into two dissolute parts. Faust I (1808) takes place initially and even
predominantly in a ‘kleiner Raum’ (4,055), by which is meant a microcosmos rather than
merely Doctor Faust’s study, his ‘gotischem Zimmer’ (stage direction, Nacht); the world is
identifiably late medieval, Faust is at least partially both counterpart and Wittenberg
contemporary of Luther’s, and a Germano-Nordic aesthetic permeates the whole, even down
to given geographical details such as Leipzig or the Brocken. There are classical references
(both Icarus and Helios in Vor dem Tor), though they are few and mostly centre on
antiquity’s unattainability in an otherwise medieval milieu. For all that he is a rationalist,
Enlightenment scholar, this Faust is descended from the more clearly medieval figure of
Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1604). Almost the entire play is from his point of view; it is
subjective and tightly focussed. In contrast, Faust II (1832) ranges far and wide in an
expansive macrocosmos, from Northern Germany to the Aegean Sea and the Upper Peneus,
to a Holy Roman Empire palace in the Pfalz back to a medieval ‘laboratorium’, from
battlefields to Arcadia to Menelaus’ palace at Sparta; it offers a classical Walpurgis Nacht to
counteract the medieval one of Faust I; it is populated by swathes of figures from classical
mythology. Faust is absent, sleeping, comatose or dead for large parts of this half; he is
almost an irrelevance, and the story is certainly not related from his perspective. Where Faust
I unfolds in dark Germanic villages, shadowed rooms and witches’ kitchens, Faust II sees its
principal characters soar from gleaming palace rooms to glimmering green pastures to vast
mountain ranges. In a number of respects, the two halves of this work could not be more
different, and, inevitably, that produces a tension of its own: what is Faust? What do we
understand it as doing? What kind of single unified work contains such irreconcilable
opposites?
Casting the two halves as ‘opposites’ in this manner - with differing aesthetic concerns - is
tempting, if only because it might paradoxically lend Faust greater thematic unity. Gretchen
in Part I - the medieval, balladic archetype of seduced young innocent - is obviously
paralleled with Helena as the pinnacle of classical beauty in Part II; each offers an alternative
“idea” of the female as object of desire. Gretchen is a Christian character in a Christian story,
being led astray from which path is her tragedy; Helena is an icon of Platonic beauty, the
ultimate attainment to die for. The world Faust is born into is a ‘Kerker’ or prison; locales in
Part I tend to be limited or claustrophobic; and Germany’s university life is portrayed as
festering and cramped: ‘beschränkt von diesem Bücherhauf/den Würme nagen, Staub
bedeckt’ (402-3). Faust’s heart-rending realisation ‘weh! Steck’ich in dem Kerker noch?’
(398) illustrates that there can be no escaping it. But in the following play he does just that.
Faust II opens with its protagonist awakening from a Heilschlaf in which he has forgotten all
Tom Marshall The Queen’s College, University of Oxford

about Gretchen’s tragedy, so that he can move forward into a larger world; he wakes ‘auf
blumigen Rasen’ and when Ariel sings to him, his voice is ‘von Äolsharfen begleitet’ (stage
directions, Anmutige Gegend). Part I ends with an intimate yet desperate cry of Faust’s little-
heard first name (‘Heinrich! Heinrich!’, 4,612); Part II ends with the transcendent song of a
mystical chorus (12,104-12,111). It takes no great leap of imagination to see these two worlds
as straightforwardly distinct and opposite - medieval bad, classical good - and that broadly
fits the historical arc of human thought: did not Aufklärung, the Enlightenment, mean coming
out of the dark and into the light, out of ignorance and into knowledge, out of the
frustratingly small world into the awe-inspiringly vast?
But of course Faust I and Faust II are not simply “opposites”, each offered up as an
alternative, as two takes on the same material. Written over a course of sixty years, it is small
wonder that they are no great fit for one another; yet throughout the former, one can see
Goethe approaching the latter, whilst the latter proceeds from and builds upon its
predecessor. The structure of Faust I already reflects what is to come in Faust II, the
‘höheren Regionen durch würdigere Verhältnisse’1: from his ‘gotisches Zimmer’, Faust finds
himself in the street, in pubs, in gardens, and eventually in a forest. The surrounding
environments slowly open up ever wider until, in Faust’s post-coital moments in Wald und
Höhle, as in that rare moment of satisfaction he states ‘du gabst mir, gabst mir alles/warum
ich bat’ (3,217-18), he reaches the same doubts after consummation as Aeneas does with
Dido, in another time and place but also in a cave in a forest (Aeneid Book IV). The classical
framework is already starting to intrude as the medieval world unravels; in Part II the
medieval and the classical merge, and as one ‘enfolds’ the other, so too is it ‘enfolded’ 2 by it.
There are other connections: Helen of Troy is prefigured in Part I (‘du siehst, mit diesem
Trank im Leibe/Bald Helenen in jedem Weibe’, 2,603-4) and finally appears in Part II;
Mephisto returns to Faust’s old study, sees the same quill with which the wager was signed,
wears Faust’s old clothing, and discovers that the student in the drama’s early scenes has now
graduated and Faust’s famulus Wagner is now eminent; Gretchen intercedes for Faust as Part
II closes, mirroring the first part’s ending; and so on.
So far, however, only disparate instances of individual styles have been cited; a classical
element here, a medieval aspect there. In Part II, the two worlds interact, that is to say, they
enfold one another; an interaction which ‘surfac[es] into beautiful clarity in Act III, at the
heart of the play’3. This sequence sees Goethe most explicitly dealing with ‘the relationship
of Modernity with Antiquity, of Romanticism and the modern world with the classical past’ 4,
and doing so in every possible way: from the setting to the mythological figures right down to
classical forms of verse. Rather than the Knittelvers of Part I, poetry as the historical Faust’s
contemporaries, such as Hans Sachs (1494-1576), would have written it, Goethe turns instead
to unrhyming iambic trimeters, trochaic tetrameters and choral verse, all of which appear in
Act III (indeed, Helen is being taught how to rhyme); Erichtho speaks once more in the six-
feet unrhyming iambic lines of classical trimeter in the Klassische Walpurgisnacht, which is
more jovial, self-mocking, and ironic than its moody northern counterpart, more cheerful and
less frightening. Thus the zenith of Germany’s 18th- to 19th-century love affair with Ancient
Greece: in the magnum opus of the man who becomes, in effect, the national poet, an eighth
of the play and around 1,500 lines are devoted to a maelstrom of mythological creatures, and
the most famously beautiful woman of the ancient world is revived in the Rittersaal of the

1
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, cited in Boyle, Nicholas, “Goethe’s Theory of Tragedy”, in The Modern
Language Review Vol 105 No 4, 2010.
2
Phelan, Anthony, ‘The Classical and the Medieval in Faust II’, in A Companion to Goethe’s Faust: Parts I and
II (ed. Paul Bishop), Columbia, 2001.
3
Constantine, David, Introduction to English translation of Faust II, Penguin, 2005.
4
Ibid.
Tom Marshall The Queen’s College, University of Oxford

German Emperor at the hands of a scholar from Wittenberg. To see this as a major attempt to
bring antiquity into the everyday, to resolve the tensions between pre-modern and modern, is
not mere conjecture; in 1827, as he neared toward the end of his work on Faust II, Goethe
wrote that he hoped ‘daß der leidenschaftliche Zwiespalt zwischen Klassikern und
Romantikern sich endlich versöhne’5.
If Faust the man represents a critique of an egotistical, claustrophobic modernity, perhaps
the invigoration and enlightenment which the Romano-Grecian mythos offers the world is the
prescribed solution (which is, of course, more or less what happened to the Germany of the
Enlightenment, in that by rediscovering the language of antiquity a humanist revival was
born). It goes without saying that this is a learned play, a ‘Gelehrtentragödie’; it is logical,
then, that the restless scholar finds his answers in high art, in learned culture: Virgil, Homer,
Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Apollonius of Rhodes,
Lucan, Ovid, all of which and more appear in Faust II. Helena’s beauty makes Faust’s life
‘wünschenswert, gegründet, dauerhaft’ (6,492) as though antiquity illuminates his present; it
is Ancient Greece which wakes him from his coma (‘kehret ihm das Leben wieder/Denn er
sucht’s im Fabelreich’, 7,054-55; ‘frisch ein Geist durchglühte’, 7,077); modern life is
somehow irrigated and lit by that which lies further back. By the end of Faust I, in the wake
of the Gretchen tragedy, it seemed as though the German scholar was doomed to die; in
Faust II, after his encounters with the classical world, it seems that he is no longer damned.
Does culture, then (by which is meant predominantly classical European culture), become not
so much a source of tension with the modern world as the life-giving nourishment it so
desperately needs, a spring of freshwater for us thirsting moderns?
Perhaps this is the case. But it still leaves us at sea with regard to the question of what kind
of work Faust is: the last gasp of antiquity, or the onset of modernity? Whether or not the
prescription helps Faust the character, does Faust the work truly, actively resolve the tensions
discussed above, and if so, does it come down on one side of the fence or the other? Harold
Bloom wrote that ‘from a Western perspective [Faust is] an end rather than a beginning’6,
suggesting that for a work so ‘grotesque’, ‘unassimilable’ and ‘strange’ there must be some
quality which redeems it, which renders it so ‘universal’, and eventually identifying this
elusive element as the degree to which Faust is mythopoeic along the same lines as William
Blake and J.R.R. Tolkien. Whilst we shall slide the fact that Tolkien’s mythopoeic work does
not appear until more than a century after Goethe’s death (though it is true that in evoking
Beowulf, the Kalevala and Norse sagas he was a man somewhat removed from his own time
and in thrall to a past beyond even Goethe’s), Bloom’s focus on mythopoeia seems to obscure
the degree to which Faust is a beginning as well as an end. Caught up with wondering why
we find it alluring, Bloom neglects why it is also so grotesque and unassimilable: the degree
to which it is neither a product of antiquity, nor a product of modernity, but an ungainly thing
that straddles the two. Faust is, to misquote Saint Paul, groaning in the birth pangs of
modernity. It is Yeats’ “fascination with what’s difficult”; it is things falling apart; it is a
mélange of frequently unconnected scenes that give birth to Büchner’s Woyzeck and Dantons
Tod, to Brecht’s episches Theater. It is a phantasmagoria, placing Olympian myth alongside
Scheherazade’s Arabian Nights, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Barca and the Biblical book of
Job. It is the giddy madness of interludes within interludes, of time travel, of intermezzos
comprising forty-four satirical quatrains, of allegorical masques, of cantatas, of revels, of
dramatic monologues, of operas and operettas, of oratorios, of dance, of solos, of choral
songs… Suffice to say, we could not be further from Marlowe, let alone Aristotle’s Three
Unities of time, action and place.
5
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust. Der Tragödie erster und zweiter Teil. Urfaust, (quotation cited in
commentary by Erich Trunz), C. H. Beck, 1986.
6
Bloom, Harold, cited in Byatt, A.S, Preface to English translation of Faust, Penguin, 2005.
Tom Marshall The Queen’s College, University of Oxford

What we are closer to is, as mentioned above, the work of playwrights such as Büchner
and Brecht: scenes which appear to be unrelated to one another, or do not flow logically, or
are presented in a chronological sequence which is not strictly possible. It is a ‘play of
episodes, not organic development…a montage of scenes, which is to say of images, that
illuminate, qualify and even contradict one another’ 7. Faust ultimately dies in a farcical scene
with comedy gravediggers borrowed from Hamlet: at least Shakespeare had the old-fashioned
Aristotelian common sense to keep tragedy and buffoonery on different pages! High
seriousness meets scurrility, irony meets operatic digressions… thanks to these bizarre shifts
of tone, these frequently ridiculous juxtapositions, Faust’s scenes function almost in
paratactic isolation, as ‘discrete stanzas, each asking to be read in itself’ 8: indeed the non-
chronological nature of the work’s composition sometimes means that scenes not even
intended for Faust (such as the Walpurgisnachtstraum) became inexorably absorbed into its
bulging, heterogeneous whole. The degree to which Goethe shifts from verse-form to verse-
form, Shakespearean iambic pentameter one moment, terza rima à la Dante the next, with
alexandrines in-between, is dizzying. Opening with a discussion of how a play ought to be
conceived and performed, the work is vividly self-aware: at a later stage Mephistopheles
knowingly digresses on the pop culture perceptions of devils (‘auch die Kultur, die alle Welt
beleckt/hat auf den Teufel sich erstreckt;/das nordische Phantom ist nun nicht mehr zu
schauen,/wo siehst du Hörner, Schweif und Klauen?’, 2,495-8), and more than once it is
suggested he knows of the audience’s existence. Several narrators appear, implausibly,
distinct from the notion of a Greek chorus, and narrate the action in lyric rather than letting it
be shown to us as drama, or narrate whilst acting, just as they will do in Brecht’s plays.
Where Marlowe’s play was content to mock the Pope, Goethe’s goes so far as to mock God;
Mephistopheles calls him ‘tierisch’ (286) and compares him to a grasshopper (‘Zikaden’,
288), clearly unthinkable propositions in the historical Faust’s day. What antiquity, even what
medievalism, we may find in Faust has been fractured by modernity’s onset almost beyond
belief.
One critic wrote that this great work was ‘set by the gods as a boundary-stone to mark
where the past ends and modernity begins’ 9; even laying to one side the unconvincing
fixedhood of this image, it is not exactly an unpopular one. Citing Goethe as ‘the great
modern… for his liberation of the subject, for his analysis of technology, for his scientific
views, for his psychology, for his formal innovations, even for his political stance’ 10 is no
especially revolutionary act. Matthew Arnold saw him as a manifestation of modernity’s
essence11; David Wellbery calls Goethe’s poetry ‘the first and clearest embodiment of the new
psychic constellation of its age’12; and Marshall Berman finds him modern for exploring
existence as change, a constant act of becoming 13. To return to Bloom and his assertion that
Faust is ‘an end rather than a beginning’, it would pay to remember that endings are
beginnings, and beginnings endings; in my end, if we invert another poet, is my beginning --
and at the still point there the dance is. Goethe’s Faust is a kind of still point, a crystallisation
into amber of a unique century, a full 60 years of whose wars and revolutions flowed into it:
that great one hundred years of doubt from 1750 to 1850, taking us from secularism’s first
7
Constantine, David, Introduction to English translation of Faust, Penguin, 2005.
8
Ibid.
9
Gutzkow, cited in Brown, Jane K., “When is Conservative Modern?: or, Why Bother with Goethe?”, in
Modern Language Studies, Vol 31 No 1, 2001.
10
Brown, Jane K., “When is Conservative Modern?: or, Why Bother with Goethe?”, in Modern Language
Studies, Vol 31 No 1, 2001.
11
Ibid.
12
Wellbery, David, “Faust and the Dialectic of Modernity”, in A New History of German Literature (ed.
Wellbery), Harvard University Press, 2005.
13
Berman, Marshall, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, Verso, 1983.
Tom Marshall The Queen’s College, University of Oxford

mutterings to The Origin of Species, during which intellectuals from Voltaire onwards were
relatively certain that religion did not explain existence but were forced to live without
scientific proof why this was the case. And yet within that same still point Faust is quite the
most remarkable onward dance.
The aforementioned dream-like quality, scenes as loosely connected images, and the
sensation that the work dances giddily before you as you read, is part of why Faust makes as
much sense, if not more, as a poem as it does as a play (and by giving us three very distinct
prefaces - lyric, dramatic, and epic, in that order - it is as though we are being invited to
wonder which Faust is). As both poet and playwright, Goethe is at home with the lyric and
the dramatic; on the former, Constantine writes that its ‘very nature is to go out into other
identities, to entertain them as possibilities, never to foreclose’ 14. Lyric’s ‘glimpsed
alternative’15 is key to accepting the work’s ever-shifting styles and moods as it moves
between antiquity and modernity, shifts we could not accept on the literal level; the
preponderance of irony means nothing is quite dismissed but nothing given primacy either.
It is this same uncertain state of being both play and poem which renders Faust so
‘grotesque’ and ‘unassimilable’: how can one possibly approach a definition of its genre or its
moral? How can one possibly identify whether its tensions are resolved or continue to hang in
the balance? It may be that it is a striving as futile as Faust’s even to try, but it compels a
response. If we continue to think of Faust as distillation and progression, still point and
dance, we may accept its incommensurables. It carries the arc of history within it, history
with which Goethe was endlessly fascinated: Gothic architecture, Shakespeare, ballads,
Homer, Aristotle, his historical dramas, his love of classical poetry and Ovid in particular,
geology as ‘history of the earth’, the history of thinking about colours, and so on. Antiquity
haunts Faust the work and Faust the man. As the Renaissance created a new age from
Antiquity, using palingenesis to bring about rebirth, as the Reformation overhauled the
church to rediscover a more elemental, unadulterated quality that had been lost, and as we
persist in deploying ‘neo’-isms in our cultural history (neoclassicism, neomodernism), so too
does the ancient world recur in Faust, recreated and reinvigorated in Goethe’s poetry as the
wheel turns: ‘history is always more of the same, but in elaborated new form’ 16. Not content
merely to be haunted by antiquity, Faust is also haunted by modernity: our own. As already
explored, the spectre of Western literature that is to come casts a long shadow back over its
pages. This produces tension, yes, and it writhes dramatically, painfully, throughout Faust; it
stretches the protagonist, the man who is ‘dem modernen Wesen so analog’ 17, almost to
breaking point (‘Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! In meiner Brust/die eine will sich von der andern
trennen’, 1,112-13). And yet the whole does not break. It retains hold of its contraries and
opposites, and actively embraces them. That it does so makes it neither ancient nor modern; it
somehow transcends both, is satisfied and dissatisfied with both. While still remaining
irreconcilable, they are reconciled.
Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig / Auerbachs Keller Leipzig
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Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust. Der Tragödie erster und zweiter Teil. Urfaust,
commentary by Erich Trunz, C. H. Beck, 1986.

14
Constantine, David, Introduction to English translation of Faust, Penguin, 2005.
15
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16
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Studies, Vol 31 No 1, 2001.
17
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, cited in Boyle, Nicholas, “Goethe’s Theory of Tragedy”, in The Modern
Language Review Vol 105 No 4, 2010.
Tom Marshall The Queen’s College, University of Oxford

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1. Barry, David T., “Accommodating ‘Helena’: Reading Goethe’s Faust II at the
Intersection of Weltliteratur and his Late Morphological Writings”, in The Modern
Language Review, Vol 108 No 4, 2013.
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