SOURCE: Gearey, John. “Faust II and the Darwinian Revolution.” In Goethe's Other Faust: The Drama, Part II, pp. 14-30. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992.

[In the following essay, Gearey considers the ways in which Goethe's scientific interests and ideas shaped the structure of Faust II.]

In a footnote to the Introduction of his Origin of Species, Darwin cites Goethe as among those earlier thinkers whose views in one way or another had anticipated his own. ‘It is rather a singular instance of the manner in which similar views arise at about the same time, that Goethe in Germany, Dr. Darwin [his grandfather] in England, and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire … in France, came to the same conclusion on the origin of species, in the years 1794-95.’ That is precisely my point. Whatever the differences in the concept of evolution that Goethe and Darwin separately espoused, and however significant those differences would eventually prove to be in subsequent scientific thought, they nevertheless partook of the common revolution in thinking that was occurring in the age.¹ Darwin refers here, of course, to Goethe the scientist, but we note that he chooses to single out for recognition not any particular accomplishment of his early contemporary, but his general method or approach. The equivalent in art of method or approach in science, however, is form. While the scientific thought of the age played an important role in the creation of Faust almost from the beginning, it is to the form rather than the content of that thought that the second part of the work owes its unusual genius and with which the present [essay], for the most part, is concerned.

Darwin said of Goethe: ‘He has pointedly remarked that the future question for naturalists will be how, for instance, cattle got their horns, and not for what they are used.’² We ask how Faust II came to have its form and not what purpose it served.

The question may seem idle, just as when applied in the scientific realm its implications are not at first clear. But the same distinction between the concept of creation by design and by adaptation that caused a revolution in thought when brought to bear in the natural world has a bearing also in the world of art. Not that the future question for criticism should be how a work of art got its form. Creation by design has been so persistent an assumption in the tradition that it seems almost a definition of art. It is only when a distinct departure from the norm takes place in a radical assertion of content over form that we can speak of a true variant having come into being and meaningfully ask the question.

Faust II provides such an opportunity, perhaps unprecedented. For the sense of form is the product of tradition, and what deviates significantly from the tradition will appear unformed and thus unartistic, unless, establishing itself, the deviant in turn becomes absorbed in a new progression which gradually identifies, clarifies, and justifies its existence. This was the case with Romanticism. The tradition creates form and form is created by the tradition, after the fact. There are, to be sure, exceptions. One thinks of Dante's Divine Comedy, a work which no more evolved formally (its content is another matter) from a literary past than it produced a new poetic medium for the future. But Dante was creating within a framework of inherited moral and metaphysical values which he accepted, and reflected in his poem. Without the guide of form his meanings can be surmised from the suppositions underlying his work. Goethe was attempting in Faust to create a new set of values from a new set of suppositions. Here structure emerged not as a vehicle for the expression of ideas but as a mode of experience outside of which the new suppositions and values were not to be conveyed. It has been said of Faust that it does not express a philosophy so much as it creates a modern myth.

We have Faust II in transit. If we read the work against the past it seems propelled by its otherness away from the tradition and yet not toward any subsequent development that might serve to identify its purposes and explain its differences. This, again, is in regard to form, not matter. If there have been developments in art that throw Faust II into new perspective, they have come not from drama, or for that matter from literature, but from the visual arts. Here the revolution in form has succeeded not only in creating but in establishing new modes of perception. A kind of literary cubism does in fact suggest itself in the interrupted sequences and broken surfaces of Faust II. Goethe was conscious of this problem of re-creating reality in art: ‘Since much of our experience does not allow itself to be expressed directly, I have long since used the device of conveying more hidden meanings by juxtaposing images one against the other and as it were mirroring themselves.’³ It was as if the deeper currents in the age, or the deeper potential of the Faust theme which was its herald, had already prompted in the late Goethe a development that would subsequently emerge as a general and broad concern: the imitation in art of reality perceived, not by the eye but in the mind.

Goethe did not plan an original or experimental design for Faust. He placed little importance on originality, which he was more likely to see as mannerism. Experimentation of the kind that the early German Romantics championed in their esthetic theory, if less in poetic practice, he scorned. His own originality derived not from novelty but from the ability to express wholly and truly what in others almost invariably appeared fragmentary or forced. The fundamental nature of his genius rested upon this wholeness of mind which we admire more than we can imitate. In his experimentation he also shunned novelty, choosing his models from classical or traditional, folk or popular literature. Rarely did he look to innovate. Only in his early, Sturm und Drang period do we find exceptions.

But how to account for the dramatically disjunctive structure of Faust II, for its apparent lack of wholeness, if it is not the product of originality or experimentation? It is the result of an evolution. The work from its inception seems to have followed an inner law or laws that more than considerations of art determined its course. Goethe often spoke of the work as if it had a life of its own. In a letter to his publisher, it is a ‘witches' creation’—ein Hexenprodukt.⁴ At the height of his classical period, which Faust spanned, as it spanned all other stages of his development in its long years in the making, he could refer to it in a letter to the art historian Hirt as a ‘barbarism’ from which he would happily be free.⁵ To the end the work remained ‘the strangest the world has seen or will see,’ as he wrote to the composer Zelter.⁶ And while Part II, with its five-act format and its verse forms derived from classical traditions, presents itself superficially as a balanced conclusion to a tumultuous beginning, in fact it represents a far more radical departure from the norm than Part I and gains its balance only through a revision, a re-seeing, of the dramatic form at a depth that meter, rhyme, and the division into acts do not touch. Yet the departure and the newly discovered vision were not the product of design so much as the result of demands and constraints upon the work that, gradually but inevitably accumulating, had somehow finally to be confronted and resolved. The form of Faust II, one might say, is what remained after all other matters had been settled except the matter of form.

Yet the play is not formless. ‘Content brings form with it; form is never without content,’ Goethe himself wrote in the plan of 1800. Moreover, he held to this tenet, if that is what it may be called, this fact of art that becomes apparent and gains meaning only in the event of a mutation in form. Such an event was Faust II, a triumph of content over form which yet brought form with it.

How this occurred, and how it was possible, are questions that will concern us in general and in detail throughout this study. For the triumph of content over form, as I say, is the process of evolution itself. In citing Darwin and the evolutionist mode of thinking I was not merely using modern concepts to describe a phenomenon as easily understood simply as development and change, but seeking to identify the matrix of thought that produced both Faust II and On the Origin of Species, a revolution in art and a revolution in science.⁷

The age as a whole had eaten of the tree of scientific knowledge. Not only Goethe, who practiced science, but the poets of his and the later generation that his lifetime spanned show a remarkable awareness of the scientific developments in their times.⁸ Remarkable, because we are often inclined, wrongly, to think of this era that we call Romantic as distancing itself from the world of science. We think rather of the philosophes of an earlier generation as joining the poetic and the scientific in their thought. But it was in natural history, as we noted at the outset, that the great advances of the age occurred, so that the so-called Romantic poets and writers in pursuing the subject that was in fact their characteristic concern—Nature—had their science where their interest lay. An affinity in structure rather than in content of thought again suggests itself in the separate fields. Thus, Schiller, who was exceptionally unconcerned with science, seems nevertheless through sheer application of his contemporary intelligence to have uncovered in history, and in the analysis of history in his dramas, the same kind of developmental contexts that were emerging in science to explain the phenomena of the natural world. The moral dilemma posed by the new understanding was the distinctly modern feature he brought to the concept of tragedy and yet, with its implications of determinism, historicism, and relativism, the feature that repulsed him. The dilemma drove him back, as we noted in the preceding chapter, upon an idealistic moral position, a position prevalent in the age but, by its absolutist nature, not truly of the age. Similarly, Herder, who gained that title he is sometimes accorded of ‘father’ of modern history precisely through the importance he placed on historical development as a determinant in human action, failed to draw new moral conclusions from the base he had newly conceived for human behavior. Herder, it is true, was a pastor and his moral precepts were tied to religion. But it is also true that he did not write dramas, which is a form of expression, a mode of discourse that demands a moral resolution in a way that history and science do not.

In Faust II Goethe fully absorbed the implications of the science and thought of his day and drew the ultimate conclusions. It was not that his science went deeper than that of his literary contemporaries, though surely it did. But whereas Balzac, for example, cited the work of the celebrated naturalists of the era, Buffon, Cuvier, and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, as analogous to his own great undertaking in The Human Comedy,⁹ Goethe made the bridge with science in principle. The extent to which the form of Faust II deviates from the dramatic tradition is a measure of the depths at which his thought conflicted with the view of human action on which the traditional dramatic forms were predicated. There is no suggestion of such a departure for the novel in The Human Comedy.¹⁰ Nor do we find in general in Goethe a radical morality radically portrayed. Faust is alone in pressing the question,¹¹ though less in its capacity as a philosophical poem than in the condition of its being. The pact, or wager, it concludes with the Devil requires that it demonstrate in its action what it presumes in its thought, and that thought was different from any thought that had come before.

The Renaissance has been described as a secularization of an essentially religious frame of mind inherited from the Middle Ages.¹² Goethe, as if in an inevitable next step, sought a naturalization of the abstract moral and metaphysical principles of the preceding age through the scientific understanding that was the mark of his own age. His view did not preclude what had come before, rather it reinterpreted or, better, co-interpreted the ways of God to man in terms of the laws of nature. The Prologue in Heaven of Part I had already set the pattern. From the higher vantage point it afforded, but now in the physical sense, Goethe was able to effect the transmission of his science into poetry by the description from eternity of the earth in its turbulent, almost violent atmosphere that was the arena in which the action would play itself out. The description is as physically accurate as it is poetically striking and dramatically relevant. The point is not its scientifically conceived accurateness, however, nor its expressive beauty, but its reminder that the physical and the poetic are one, or, at least, they strive to be one. Goethe in the essay On Morphology stated: ‘One forgot that science had developed out of poetry; one did not consider that after a revolution in time the two might again meet on a higher plane, to their mutual advantage.’¹³

Appropriately, then, Faust Part II begins with what has been called a ‘prelude on earth.’¹⁴ The contrast helps to relate the two parts—an impression Goethe attempted to reinforce in any minor way as he faithfully developed the theme in his work at the expense of its dramatic continuity. But the importance of this second prologue lies again in its physical, and thus philosophical, positioning of man. The Faust who, standing on earth, looks to heaven, to the sun, in order to know and to see, must turn away blinded, as if in a scientific confirmation of the religious or philosophical concept that certain truths are not allowed to man. Faust turns his back to the sun so that he may see by its reflected light: ‘So let the sun behind me stand.’¹⁵ This position of man in the universe, in ‘die große Welt,’ which is the composite world of times and places in the play, determines the nature and development of its action just as the glimpse of the turbulence in his physical setting anticipated the inner life of the individual in ‘die kleine Welt’ of Part I.

A transformation and naturalization of morality also occurs immediately in Part II. The Faust who has sinned so greatly in the Gretchen tragedy is not made to repent and so proceed as hero and protagonist in a new action. He is made to sleep. Sleep ‘removes the burning shaft of keen remorse,’ as does repentance; sleep ‘bathes him in the dew of Lethe's stream,’¹⁶ restoring him to life, as if nature were causing with time what morality causes through sentiment. Not that the transforming of the philosophical and the moral into the physical and the natural introduces a new vision in which the scientific grasp or basis of reality would substitute for the abstract and diffused concepts in earlier thought. Faust in fact ends with a religious epilogue. But the religiously colored ending is no more a concession to the historical setting of the theme than is the biblically allusive Prologue in Heaven, as fitting as both might be. Nor, conversely, does it represent a final, transcendent vision. Like the poetic and the scientific, the moral and the natural, it is yet another metaphor, a co-interpretation.

The structure of Part II is designed to bring the audience or the reader, but not Faust, to that recognition. ‘Everything transitory / Is but a metaphor,’ as the Chorus Mysticus says in summary at the end of the play. His progress will be the reliving of the deeper antecedent experience that brings him to an ultimate resolution, a ‘final wisdom’ in his time, as if he were a child of the collective unconscious. Our progress is a growing awareness of that process.

Faust II is there more for us, as Faust I was there for the hero. At times we observe with him events in which he himself has little active part. The action itself, by its nature, is almost always at one remove, for us in the sense that we are experiencing illusion or poetry, for him in that he knows that the substance of his life is not ‘real’ but the product of magic. When he attempts to make real his union with Helen of Troy, initially at the end of Act II and again at the end of Act III, his attempts are frustrated. If we in turn try to grasp an objective reality behind the symbolism in the play, or behind a physical reality a metaphysical truth, we will be similarly misled. These terms will have become metaphors, and magic will have joined their ranks. Magic is here another word for poetry, which also creates from nothing.

Yet, as allusive, imaginative, recondite, and, at times, playful as Faust II may be, its underlying theme is that of time and place. This is not the time and place of traditional drama, to be sure. Nor is it the time and place of historical fact, which would have compromised the purpose of the play in moving its hero through different worlds of thought and states of mind. For these worlds were conceived not simply as products of earlier causes in a continuity leading to a present but as truly evolving, with a life and development in their own right, and in that sense free. The fantastic countenance of the work, its literary cubistic aspect, reflects the need that Goethe felt to keep these worlds distinctly separate so that they would better tell against one another and against the world and state of mind that would ultimately obtain for Faust in his moment of decision in his time and place. That was the purpose: to resolve within a single sphere of existence a problem separately and differently resolved in other spheres in the play; to frame the moral choice within always deepening and broadening contexts.

What these contexts were will be discussed when they emerge separately. I mention here time and place only to suggest that Goethe's poetic rendering of the past has less to do with poetry and fantasy than with his understanding of history as influencing the unconscious no less than the conscious actions of men, that is, his understanding of history as culture. In this understanding lay an answer to the question that had initially been raised in Urfaust, that is in the early period of revolt when Goethe himself, like Faust, saw little use in a knowledge of history, if indeed it were attainable. There the past seemed ‘a book with seven seals’ and our attempts to explain other times a futile effort resulting in a mere reflection of our own times.¹⁷ Part II, through the medium of poetry, breaks the seal and penetrates the past in a way that it may be known and absorbed. When we enter the world of classical antiquity, for example, we hear the steady and measured rhythms of greek tragedy, the iambic trimeters; when Helen joins Faust in the modern world she notes its rhymed speech, that symbolic expression of a state of mind poised between remembrance and anticipation—the modern, the romantic state. The two worlds are there in their very verse forms.

How did the work come to have its form? I repeat the question, not rhetorically with a view to summarizing the answers already stated or implied, but in order to make a final point. For while our present discussion has indicated the many reasons why traditional forms could not serve Goethe as his drama took on more and more the colorings and suppositions of a new era in thought, still it has not suggested what form could and did serve.

Faust II, we said, is not formless. Yet its structure in depth, its juxtaposing of material and motifs in abrupt and unforeseen sequence, casts the whole into such extraordinary and unique relief that we are made, not so much to see its content in a new light, as to alter our mode of thinking in order to be able to ‘see.’ It is not surprising that when the work first appeared, in 1832, it was not judged with much understanding. Instead it was viewed against the past, and a manner of thinking born of the past was used to judge it. The lack of dramatic cohesion in the play was attributed to the waning powers in the aged author who had after all brought himself to complete his Faust only in the last years of his life.¹⁸ An inversion of this critique found willfulness rather than lack of clarity (though both might be symptoms of senility) in the face that Faust II presented and, in recognizing the multiplicity of perspective afforded the work by its apparently total freedom of form, at the same time denied that freedom as such to art. ‘Every work of art must convey its infinite meaning in finite form.’¹⁹ Nor did later critical literature on Faust II answer the questions raised by the initial reaction. The tendency was to resolve the problems presented by the text within the larger frame of reference that is Goethe himself in his works and total development. The censure was gone but the sense of esthetic displacement, which is the initial and persistently striking feature of our experience of Faust II, remained.

For the challenge from the beginning was not to uncover a hidden design either within or outside the work that would create new and elaborate harmonies. The challenge, I believe, was to pose the question that was impossible to pose from within an esthetic that presupposed design and purpose as the beginning and the end, the goal, of creativity. Not why Faust II took its unique form, but how, was to be the question. For, once posed, an answer would lie close to hand.

The answer lay in the motif of magic. The element of magic, so indigenous to the theme and in such potentially radical opposition to the concept of order as to attract the young Sturm und Drang Goethe when he first conceived Faust, grew as the work itself grew. What had served mainly as accompaniment to the action in Part I became its mover and shaper in Part II and thus its dramatic expression. From the background in the play, magic emerged as foreground and altered the mode of perception. One senses Goethe himself attempting to resist this poetic development as he time and again plans and then abandons scenes and motif which would have created links with logic and traditional thought. It was as if he had deliberately to suppress those conceptual instincts that were part of his times and his literary heritage in order to allow creative urges that anticipated the future to hold sway. The transition from the ‘little’ to the ‘great world’ required more than a mere extension of time and place, as it proved. The relation of cause and effect had also to be adjusted if a new sense of life and view of things were to emerge. In true evolutionary fashion, the element of magic in the play both allowed and forced this adjustment. It provided the freedom to create patterns and juxtapositions of reality that exist in the mind but not in time, while establishing in the process an order of thought from which there was no return in the play.

Goethe does not use magic to account for the unaccountable in Faust II. So employed, the motif only reestablishes the order it is designed to upset. So employed, nothing changes in the world in which magic has occurred and the perception of that world remains the same. But Goethe was intent on altering perception. Mephistopheles alighting in the first scene of Act IV in seven-league boots that would account for the great distances he is supposed to have traversed is the exception. The rule is the fate of Helen. Evoked as a phantom by Mephistopheles, she then materializes in her own realm, only to vanish literally into the air when she takes leave of Faust. Magic giveth and magic taketh away. Not that the inexplicability, the mystery, of these occurrences was the purpose in their design. Nor was the transitoriness of things their intended meaning. The world of Faust II is presented in abrupt disjunctions, phantasmagorically, but not on the assumption that there exists in essence outside the work a world similarly designed. The play is not an imitation, a representation. Yet it is also not a fantasy. The past, or rather the pasts, it evokes are meant as real, as realities in poetic guise, and it is only against the background they form that the final resolution in the play gains its true significance. But the presentation of this past is unusual in that it offers neither a continuous action, in the manner of history, nor a concentrated action, in the manner of drama. It presents rather the past contained in the present, multilayered, as it exists in the mind, as it exists in culture.

Magic made possible the transfer of this vision to the stage.²⁰ But in the process, and in the necessity, of suspending time and the laws of cause and effect, which magic by its nature prescribes, it also replaced the sense of history or life or drama as progression by a new sense or experience of the constant emergence of things within a context. By evoking the past within the present, realities within a reality or, if one will, illusions within the illusion or fiction that is the work of art itself, magic created or induced a way of seeing no longer compatible with the traditional view (whence the disjunction) but suggestive of the altered mode of thought in the new age. Magic effected here in the realm of poetry what the new concept of time had brought about in the science of the day, an opening onto a world of the past vastly expanded in its relation to man, a ‘große Welt.’ I am not speaking of Darwin and the specialized concept of evolution but of the more generalized development that had occurred earlier and created what we called at the outset of this chapter the structure or form in the thought of both Darwin and Goethe, and in the poetic no less than the scientific writings of the latter. The phenomenon of emergence in the physical, plant, and animal worlds was his concern from the beginning in his scientific work and it found its least sober, perhaps, but most illuminating expression in his search for a plant primeval from which all plant life had emerged, his Urpflanze. Yet life as constant emergence within a context was a model of thought he had encountered as well outside the realm of science, in the realm of history. The concept of history as culture that we associate with Herder and further identify in Goethe is an evolutionist concept simply in its view of the unfolding of events not as progression but as process. In its modern, laboratory sense the word ‘culture’ means growth in a medium.

The form or structure of Faust as a whole, to repeat, evolved. The very fact of a second part to the work was less the result of design than necessity. It was not the desire to explore a universe newly measured and history newly conceived that prompted the journey into the great world. The central action alone, the issue of good and evil, when re-seen and developed within the new mode of thought produced of itself the kind of expanding contexts not found in earlier forms of drama because not present in earlier forms of thinking. Like the phenomena of nature, good and evil were no longer to be conceived abstractly or absolutely, created once and for all in the nature of man as the universe itself had been created once and for all at some beginning in time. A Faust drama in one part was not to be written any more, as it were. Just as magic had emerged from its mainly poetic and atmospheric role to transform the conceptual and perceptual character of the play, the moral issue, newly conceived, transformed the concept of the hero and the nature of the dramatic action. There is every evidence that the Faust of Urfaust was not conceived as a representative hero, as a symbol of Western man, which he became only later. The great world was not created as an arena for the actions of a representative Faust, therefore, so much as he became that figure by his presence and his actions in that great world. The moral issue determined the dramatic development, not the dramatic the moral, which is the case in traditional drama that offers objective reality as a confrontation in which the actions of the hero or heroine are tested and not, as here, as a context in which they are understood. This distinction becomes more important when we attempt to define the moral character and justify the salvation of Faust, whose actions are too often seen simply as the product of an individual will rather than the expression at a given stage of a cultural evolutionary process. The proliferation of dimensions that comprises Faust II reflects this process; and to read only its last act as a fitting conclusion to Part I, which is often done when the work is read in translation and one seeks its ‘essential meaning,’ is to miss the point.²¹ Its meaning, and its drama, if a different type of drama, lie in the comprehensively imagined worlds that surround and define the action and project it beyond. Faust does not come to a conclusion so much as it reaches a point that can be declared a present. It brings us to where we are in time, which is the only conclusion possible in an evolutionist mode of thought.

Goethe did not need Darwin in order to carry out his evolutionist intention in Faust II. An awareness of the mechanics of evolution, which was the achievement of Darwin and alone rendered the theory scientific,²² might well have hampered him. The fantastic creatures, half-man, half-beast, who pass through the Classical Walpurgis Night in playful tableau might have lost their suggestive powers had they been made to resemble a scientifically imagined reality. Instead, Goethe adapted, he ‘naturalized,’ myth. He placed his sphinxes, centaurs, griffins, pygmies, and other legendary creatures in a perspective that was concerned with the emergence of earth forms and physical beings and thus included them in his grand theme of a developing universe. We think of science too often as preceding poetry in the arrival at truth and indeed praise those poets who are even aware of its discoveries.²³ It is rare that we can identify, as here in the example of Goethe, Darwin, and evolution, the truer picture of a new sense of things, a ‘truth,’ coming into being in separate realms in its separate ways. Not that Goethe contributes to science with his parade of creatures from myth. This is Goethe the poet, not the scientist, speaking. But he contributes to the evolution of thought, as he leads us to discover in these projections of the primitive mind the element of animal interrelatedness that will eventually become scientific theory. If science and poetry come together in Goethe, it is because he believed they emerge from a common source. They were, after all, combined in him.

But we need Darwin in order to understand Faust II, if not in its content, in the particulars of its form. We are dealing here with a work that not only reflects a mode of thought but is itself best understood within that mode. We spoke of magic as a mechanism in its evolution, as a factor or motif given in the legend but made now to serve not only a new but a necessary function. Magic opened up a world hidden by the traditional imitation or representation of reality in art, the very world or context within which the new sense of the human condition alone could be portrayed. Or, more accurately, it reopened a world in which the spiritual and abstract underpinnings and antecedents of experience once had their place and filled it with natural causes. The completed Faust stands in that relation to the Divine Comedy. Paradoxically, the broadest movement in literature from Dante to Goethe was toward a verisimilitude or realism which, at least in drama, came to exclude more and more of the reality that was considered more and more the truly real. In Faust II, magic interrupted the progression to reveal a new real world.²⁴

Goethe did not deliberately create a disjunctive whole in Faust so much as he omitted or discarded elements of dramatic and thematic continuity that would have served to ‘complete’ the work, but at the same time belie its content. A completed form implied a completed world. Many of the plot factors and motifs contained in the plans, sketches, notes, and verse jottings to Faust, as we shall see, will suggest familiar and traditional links in motivation and logic, and their abandonment an uneasiness with just such explicit design. But it was not by default alone that the great disjunction of form, and thus the great freedom of allusion, arose in Faust II. Rather the development in the composition of the work, its internal evolution which produced the external form, was itself the determining factor.

Long before Act I, Goethe had conceived and in part written a Helena, a planned ‘Interlude to Faust,’ which, altered, eventually became Act III. Begun in his classical period, the Helena was an uncompromising imitation of ancient tragedy, with a Chorus and in classical meters. Goethe had thus fashioned a separate world in its own right, which was not to be joined artistically, but only conceptually, to the other worlds in Faust, including the world of Part I. In the awareness of this fact and this necessity, we sense, unable to join, he began artistically and formally to put asunder. He now created each world in its own right and with its own laws of composition, each ‘a little world standing on its own.’²⁵ He would trust, as he said when the work was finally completed, that ‘the idea of the whole will present itself to the intelligent reader, though he will not be lacking in transitions to supply.’²⁶ Like magic, the Helena had functioned as an evolutionary mechanism. The part had not been inspired and created by the design, the design was inspired and created by the part.

Yet this ‘supplying of meaning,’ an expression Goethe used as well in reference to Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre,²⁷ was to be no mere esthetic exercise. The becoming aware of what one unconsciously knows through culture, through the living but disjunctive experience of the past, was also a moral imperative: ‘Would thou possess thy heritage … render it thine own.’²⁸Faust II brings us through the past, in its broadest and deepest human sense, to a present, but not in the manner in which we experience history, or experience knowledge that is presented already possessed and therefore not for our own possessing, but as poetry and culture are experienced. We noted above that poetry, like magic, provided an appropriate means of expressing the vision in Faust II of evolving views of life, views that are to be understood as changing in time. We may now say that it was the only means. For in this way Faust itself, as poetry, as cultural artifact, takes its place in the very development it was created to describe.

Notes

1. The meaning of the word ‘evolution’ is itself evolving. It is thus perhaps best to speak of the concept as an ‘evolutionist sense,’ as does Günter Martin in a recent article, ‘Goethes evolutionärer Sinn’ (Goethe-Jahrbuch, vol. 105 [1988], pp. 247-69). Martin suggests that the difficulty we have in distinguishing between the strictly scientific and the more philosophical implications of the concept derives from the modern tendency to falsely separate the human from the physical sciences, thus obstructing understanding of an earlier age when this was not so clearly done. Goethe believed in what would later be called epigenesis, a theory of development that envisions a chain of new formations from a common beginning; the Darwinian theory envisions evolution as a series of mutations. The German words Neubildung and Umbildung, ‘new formation’ and ‘transformation,’ perhaps make the distinction most clearly. Before Darwin, the ‘theory of evolution’ was understood as a development or expansion of a pre-existing form (in effect, a homunculus) and was also called Preformation, a term which relates the idea of evolution to concepts dating back to Empedocles. Caspar Friedrich Wolff (1733-94) was the first to propose the theory of Epigenese against Preformationstheorie in Goethe's time and that surely had something to do with the satire in Act II. Yet Goethe saw the human being as the crown of creation, for all that he may have regarded nature and the surrounding world of culture, politics, and art as eternally evolving. This is in contradistinction to Darwin and to Nietzsche. See, e.g., George Wells, ‘Goethe and Evolution’ (Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 28 [1967], pp. 537-50). For Goethe's writings in geology and morphology, see Douglas Miller, ed. and trans., Goethe: Scientific Studies (New York, 1988).

2. This note appears in the second edition of On the Origin of Species. Darwin does not quote Goethe directly, but from Karl Meding, Goethe als Naturforscher in Beziehung zur Gegenwart (Dresden, 1860). Goethe does not in fact make his own analogy with cattle and their horns but rather in scientific terms which Meding obviously rendered more familiar in the interest of popularization.

3. In a letter to the Islamic scholar K. J. L. Iken, 27 September 1827.

4. To Cotta, 2 January 1799.

5. To Alois Hirt, 25 December 1797.

6. Karl Fr. Zelter, 6/7 June 1828.

7. See Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (Garden City, NY, 1962). Her title suggested my chapter heading.

8. See Alexander Gode-von Aesch's excellent Natural Science in German Romanticism (New York, 1941).

9. In the preface (1842) to the series of novels under that title. In The Wild Ass's Skin, ch. 1, is the remark: ‘Is not Cuvier the greatest poet of our century?’ The contrast with the English Romantic poets is interesting. ‘Much of the new poetry tended to devote itself to revealing man's inner nature … This position tended to make poetry and science antagonistic, or to render one a continuation of, or development from, the other. The former point of view was supported by Coleridge and his followers, who regarded these spheres as entirely antithetical. Wordsworth, on the other hand, felt that even “the remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet's art if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us … as enjoying and suffering beings”’ (Ralph B. Crum, Scientific Thought in Poetry [New York, 1931], p. 129). See also Frederick Burwick, The Damnation of Newton: Goethe's Theory and Romantic Perception (Berlin and New York, 1986).

10. Balzac does plan a series of ‘études analytiques,’ ‘études philosophiques,’ ‘études des moeurs,’ which were to illustrate the principles of human behavior.

11. Die Wahlverwandtschaften also derives a radical morality from a scientific premise, but the novel is not radical in its artistic form.

12. Robert Ergang has written that ‘the secularization of life, thought and culture is the essence of the Renaissance’ (The Renaissance [New York, 1967], p. v).

13. Zur Metamorphose der Pflanzen. Schicksal der Druckschrift, 1817 (Artemis edition, vol. 17, p. 90).

14. Stuart Atkins in his discussion of Pleasant Landscape in Goethe's Faust: A Literary Analysis (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), p. 101.

15. My translation of ‘So bleibe denn die Sonne mir im Rücken’ (l. 4715).

16. ‘Entfernt des Vorwurfs glühend bittre Pfeile’ (l. 4624) / … ‘Dann badet ihm im Tau aus Lethes Flut’ (l. 4629).

17. In the original version: ‘Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heißt, / Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist, / In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln’ (ll. 224ff.).

18. Otto Pniower, in ‘Fausts zweiter Teil,’ Dichtungen und Dichter: Essays und Studien (Berlin, 1912), p. 74, is most dogmatic on this point. Wilhelm Emrich sees this approach to the question as typical of nineteenth-century German criticism of Faust II (Die Symbolik von Faust II [Bonn, 1957], p. 66).

19. Friedrich Theodor Vischer acknowledges the ‘Unendlichkeit der Perspektive’ in Faust II, but warns: ‘Jedes Kunstwerk soll in endlicher Form die unendliche Bedeutung tragen, keinem soll diese Perspektive fehlen; bei Goethes Faust aber springt das Auge über Vordergrund und Mittelgrund jeden Augenblick weg, um sich in dieser unendlichen Aussicht zu verlieren …’ (quoted in Karl R. Mandelkow, Goethe im Urteil seiner Kritiker, vol. 2 [Munich, 1977), p. 180).

20. Goethe contradicts himself on the question whether Faust II was intended for the theater, at times speaking of the effectiveness of certain motives or scenes when imagined on the stage, at others seeming to dismiss the possibility of a performance of the play. (‘Almost unthinkable,’ to Eckermann, 20 December 1829.) He speaks directly of an ‘audience’ and of ‘the performance’ in his ‘Ankündigung’ to the Helena, which might more easily have been staged. On the question of performing the whole work, he says to Eckerman, 20 December 1829, ‘Geht nur und laßt mir das Publikum, von dem ich nichts hören mag. Die Hauptsache ist, daß es geschrieben steht.’ On the problems and challenges of staging a modern performance of Faust II, see, e.g., Jocelyn Powell, ‘Reflections on Staging Faust, Part II’ (Publications of the English Goethe Society, n.s., vol. 48 [1978], pp. 52-80).

21. It was also one of the reactions in the misunderstanding of the work when it first appeared: ‘Für die Geschichte Fausts an sich, dramatisch genommen, könnten vielleicht die vier ersten Akte ganz wegfallen’ (quoted in Mandelkow, Goethe, vol. 2, p. 68). This contention is repeated in effect by Heinrich Rickert in Goethes Faust: Die dramatische Einheit der Dichtung (Tübingen, 1932).

22. Manfred Wenzel makes this simple and most important point at the beginning of his extensively thorough study ‘Goethe und Darwin: Goethes morphologische Schriften in ihrem naturwissenschaftshistorischen Kontext’ (Dissertation, Bochum, 1982).

23. In ch. V, ‘Poetry Champions Evolution: Goethe,’ Crum (Scientific Thought) looks for reflections of the new scientific view only in Goethe's didactic poems and not in the inner structure of his art. Since Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1970) we have come to see the relation of science to its times in a new light.

24. The great world that Calderon opens up in his dramas is sometimes cited as a precedent for the ‘große Welt’ that Goethe creates in Faust II, but Calderon is drawing on a world and universe already preconceived in Catholic doctrine, as we noted earlier in the similar comparison with Dante, whereas Goethe was attempting to reflect a view only newly emerging and as yet to take established form either in thought or in art. On Calderon and Goethe see, e.g., Swana Hardy, Goethe, Calderon und die Theorie des romantischen Dramas (Heidelberg, 1965); also Stuart Atkins, ‘Goethe, Calderon and Faust II,’ Germanic Review, vol. 28 (1953), pp. 83-98.

25. As Goethe said of Act IV to Eckermann, 13 February 1831.

26. To Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1 December 1831; similarly in a conversation with his assistant Fr. Wilhelm Riemer, undated, 1830/31. Eckermann himself speaks of a ‘set of small world circles [in Faust], which, enclosed within themselves, certainly affect, but have little do with, one another’ (13 February 1831).

27. Quoted in Klaus F. Gille, Wilhelm Meister im Urteil der Zeitgenossen (Assem, 1971), p. 283.

28. From Part I: ‘Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, / Ewirb es, um es zu besitzen’ (ll. 682-3).