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A logical positivist and a poodle

Stephen Spender

FAUST: PART I by Johann Wolgang von Goethe translated by David Luke OUP L15, £2.50 At last! A translation of Goethe's masterpiece which reads like a masterpiece in English. David Luke conveys the mean- ing, intellectual passion and Byronic raci- . ness of the original. This is a poet's as well as a scholar's version, for David Luke has written origin- al poems of great distinction. The beauti- ful, though fragmentary, version of the play done by Louis MacNeice for the BBC tends to break up into passages like sepa- rate poems. The excellence of David Luke's Faust is his command of an under- lying unifying impetus which runs through all the varied poetic forms employed, a unity achieved despite the fact that Goethe wrote the first part of his play at widely spaced intervals over a period of 30 years, and that he based it on an earlier version, written in an archaic style, which is gener- ally known as the Urfaust. Altogether, Parts I and II were written over a period of 60 years, from the early 1770s to 1832, shortly before the poet's death. Faust seems much closer to the century of Joyce and Eliot than to that of Marlowe and other re-workers of the legend. Like Joyce with Ulysses or Eliot with the Fisher King, Goethe takes up the old myth or legend — that of the great scholar of universal learning who sold his soul to the devil — and applies it to the situation of a quite different, and modern, world. Faust is a dualist. From the stand-point of today we might wryly view him as a kind of proto-Logical Positivist (`stop peddling in words that mean nothing to me'). Having arrived at the point where he is convinced that his mind cannot attain to knowledge of any reality corresponding to his philoso- phy's metaphysical terminology he decides to invoke; through magic spells, powers outside himself, and through his physical senses, embrace the tangible external world of lust and glory:

With me there are two souls, alas, and their Division tears my life in two. One loves the world, it clutches her, it binds Itself to her, clinging with furious lust: The other longs to soar beyond the dust Into the realm of high ancestral minds.

At first, in a mysterious scene, Faust seems to receive this outsideness of Nature in a visitation from the Earth Spirit, but this strange phantom rejects and abandons him. Mephistopheles, emanating from the form of a poodle, then appears and prom- ises:— at a price — to be his companion in pursuit of the world of sensuous pleasures.

Mephistopheles, surely, is the projection of Faust himself, embodying what Faust can achieve as a grasping, active agent embracing the external world. The brilliant debates between Faust and Mephis- topheles are really the dialogues between Faust I and Faust II going on inside the head of this man of genius. The vestigial legend of Faust signing away his immortal soul has become a metaphor for this inner struggle between opposing voices going on inside Faust. The scene of his selling his soul to the devil is played out as parody:

MEPHISTOPHELES The merest scrap of paper meets the case And, for your signature, a drop of blood.

FAUST If that is all you want, I'll willingly go through With such a farce, to humour you.

MEPHISTOPHELES Blood is a juice with curious properties.

In a scene in which, putting on Faust's academic gown, Mephistopheles imperson- ates him, Mephistopheles acts out a tuto- rial with an over-zealous student with little more arrogant contempt than Faust him- self has shown in an earlier scene with his famulus Wagner. The disillusionment, arrogance and despair which are Faust's become in Mephistopheles a concentrate of absolute cynicism.

When Faust embarks on the course of his seduction of Gretchen which — given his Mephistophelean identity — is bound to lead to the innocent girl's destruction, he becomes the raving Romantic lover. Mephistopheles, sneering at him, talks sense. Here they are two aspects of a shared world of Romantic poetry, like the high-minded Shelley and the cynical Byron. A speech of Mephistopheles mock- ing Faust and laying bare the selfishness of his passion for Gretchen, suggests to me some unrecorded conversation between Byron and Shelley on — say — the lake of Geneva in which Byron is mocking Shel- ley's soul-mating with some lady whose life he will certainly ruin, and whom he is bound to abandon:

MEPHISTOPHELES What supernatural delight!

Out on the mountains all the dewy night Embracing earth and heaven with ecstasy, Swelling up into a divinity - Earth's guts yield to your thrusting aspira- tion.

Your heart contains the six days of creation, So proud, so strong, such rapture, God knows what!

A love that overflows and penetrates the lot: Mere mortal men no more! And then, my. friend, How does the lofty intuition end?

(With a gesture) I could mention how, but I'd better not.

Gretchen, pure, innocent, pathetic, living with her mother, spinning on her wheel, and very pretty does not appear until half way through the play, and there is very little preparation either for her or for the complete change of direction in the play which her appearance brings. Until now action and scene have been on the daemo- nic Northern Gothic scale: Faust, Mephis- topheles, wild countryside, students, pedants, peasants and bumpkins, thunder, lightning, witches' cauldrons, students' wine cellars. Faust and Mephistopheles make wonderfully inspired travelogue but there is little story. Now the Faust and Gretchen of Gounod's opera take over.

The entrance of Gretchen on to the scene strikes me as like the transplant of the heart of a pure maiden into the body of a stranded giant. Nothing can be more certain than that this daemonic body of intellect and imagination will reject this delicate organ: though the slaughter of her brother, mother, baby and herself seems a bit excessive. Nevertheless the scenes of Gretchen in prison and of her madness have a humanity and pathos which redeem the play from the mistiness and murkiness, `airy northern phantoms', 'this tragelphus' (ie mythical goat-stag hyb- rid), 'barbarian production' about which Goethe, in his letters to Schiller, himself complains.

With the opening scene of Part II, with Faust found lying restless on flowery turf and serenaded by Ariel and other sprites, the tragedy of Gretchen becomes absorbed into the wider panorama of the classical world, the commedia in which Romantic Tragedy is but an incident. I implore David Luke to translate Part II — Goethe's Finnegans Wake.