The German Myth
" Deutschland ist Hamlet," the poet Freiligrath wrote more than a hundred years ago, likening Germany brooding over its lost freedom to the unhappy ghost which walked the battlements of Elsinore. " Deutschland ist Faust," Thomas Mann recently declared with greater perspicacity, implying that the spirit of restless enquiry, which the popular philosopher Spengler had identified with the German mind, had run amok after strange and false gods. How this legend of Faustus became as it were the national myth of the Germans is the fascinating story which Professor Butler tells us in the third and last of her volumes on the history of the Magus. Two previous books had dealt with the development of the legend from prehistoric times. The Myth of the Magus (1947) showed how much of popular tradition and legendary lore had coalesced in the necro- mancer and astrologer of the sixteenth century, Dr. Johannes Faust. In Ritual Magic (1949) Miss Butler stressed the importance of the late mediaeval accretion to the story of a pact made with the devil for the sake of power and knowledge.
Here, then, was a subject after the heart of a new society which had broken with the thought and belief of the mediaeval church, and was all agog for the exciting theory of the Renaissance that man and not God was the centre of the universe. The chief protagonist of the revolt against ancient tradition was Luther, and it is surely no accident that the popular embodiment of the myth was another German, Dr. Faustus, who significantly had close connections both with Wittenberg and Erfurt, the strongholds of Protestantism and paganism respectively.
But to Protestant and Catholic alike magic was witchcraft and witchcraft heresy, and what could be more natural than that some Lutheran diyine should have seized upon the popular figure of Dr. Faustus whb it was common knowledge, had recently been torn limb from limb by the devil with whom he had made a pact for a term of years ? The Volksbuch von Doktor Faust, published in Frank- furt in 1587 as " a solemn and terrible warning to all Christians," is directly or indirectly the source of all the numerous Fausts—and Miss Butler lists some fifty of them or more without by any means exhausting their number—who have stalked through the pages of European literature.
The effective traditional opening of the scholar in his study despair- ing of attaining to absolute knowledge by legitimate means and, in his despair, turning to magic is due to the genius of Marlowe. Almost as soon as the English translation appeared, a year after its German original, he sensed the tragic potentialities in the theme, and his supreme mastery of dramatic verse begot passages of wondrous force and beauty ; witness the famous aspostrophe to Helen of Troy. In spite of the tiresome buffoonery of the clown, which tradition prevented him from discarding, Marlowe's Dr. Faustus is probably the greatest of all the tragic versions the legend has inspired. And it was these dramatic qualities which endeared it to the German public when the English comedians carried the play with them on their wanderings, making the most of its obvious-external exciting action to an audience which knew no English. This melodrama, as it soon' became, was kept alive by puppet-showmen, and Goethe himself confesses to the lasting impression left upon his youthful imagination by their performances. It was from such lowly com- pany that the theme was rescued by Lessing and returned to the legitimate stage. The succeeding movement of Storm and Stress fastened upon Faust as the embodiment of all its adolescent dreams of mental and bodily titanism. There is, however, little of this in Goethe's Urfaust (as it is convenient to call his first draft preserved by a lucky chance) in which the earnest scholar in his study soon makes room for the ardent lover in the market-place. It is the supreme pathos of this unhappy love-story which has captured the imagination of the world, reinforced as it is by the ingratiating melodies of Gounod's opera.
It is a far cry from the uncompromising realism of the Urfaust to the symbolism of the First and, especially, of the Second Part of Goethe's Faust. From "The Prologue in Heaven "it is clear that Faust is to be regarded as the prototype of humanity, the subject nothing less than the vindication of man's dark, idealistic striving which, though it may lead through crime and guilt, can yet, by God's grace, deserve salvation if he will but cultivate the divine spark within. Miss Butler is inclined to belittle Goethe's solution as cheating the reader of the tragic thrill which she thinks the legend demands. And perhaps Goethe's ending is only Et pis aller in the face of the . insoluble problem of gocd and evil which, like light and darkness, must endure as long as creation itself.
But to come to Goethe with dramatic criteria derived from Shakes- peare is to confuse tragedy with the tragic. For to Goethe the very fact of existence is tragic, and the resurrection and apotheosis of the hero of even greater importance than his physical death. How much closer, then, in spirit is Goethe to the original myth than those modern German poets—the Wagners and Mullers, the Grillparzers and Len- aus and Heines—who, dissatisfied with Goethe's compromise, have preferred to let their Faust perish with doctrinaire finality ! Of all of them perhaps Thomas Mann alone has recaptured something of the tragic intensity inherent in the hero's" damnable end." His mad musician, Andreas Leverkuhn, is under the delusion that he has bartered his soul to the devil, as Germany had sold herself body and soul to the evil forces of Nazism. The parallel is drawn by the author himself, in his commentary on his Doktor Faustus of 1949.
It is, however, pace Miss Butler, the satanic state of mind and soul engendered by a false ideology which imparts the tragic intensity to Leverkuhn's end, rather than any fidelity of adherence to the text of the old Volksbuch of 1587. For this ill-composed work with its clumsy prose fell out of favour with the public until it was revived (and reprinted) in 1847 through the scholarly interests of Germanists in Goethe's sources. This is perhaps the chief weakness in Professor Butler's fascinating book ; that its author tests every literary version of the legend by its fidelity to the text of what she somewhat mis- leadingly calls the " Urfaustbook " (neglecting the Latin original and the Wolfenbuttel MS. from which it derives) ; forgetful of the fact that the relation between myth and literature is a two-way traffic and that, in the modern world, this is the only means it has of growing. In this sense Valery's Mon Faust, with its emphasis on living, living consciously : " Vivre. N 'est ce pas tout ? Mais il faut le savoir," enriches the myth with a new awareness of the problem underlying it. Whereas Miss Dorothy Sayers, in her Devil to Pay, merely turns it back upon itself. There is only one way, she avers, taking her stand as resolutely on Christian doctrine as the anonymous divine of the first Faust Book—only one way to overcome evil : by recognising it for what it is and doing penance for falling under its
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