Faust’s long-forgotten beloved appears, as ‘una poenitentium, formerly called Gretchen’, and intercedes for her ‘returning’ lover who is, as she puts it, ‘no longer clouded (getrübt)’. The Mater Gloriosa invites her to ‘rise to higher spheres’ to which Faust, ‘if he senses your presence’, will follow her. The motif of a woman’s redemptive goodness and love is paralleled elsewhere in Goethe (Iphigenia, The Elective Affinities) and of course in other writers before and since. Here, as a mystique of femininity, it is Goethe’s touchingly personal version of the theme of divine grace, expressed in the often-quoted last two lines of the enigmatic Chorus Mysticus which closes this scene and the entire work:

All that must disappear
Is but a parable;
What lay beyond us,* here
All is made visible;*
Here deeds have understood
Words they were darkened by;
Eternal Womanhood
Draws us on high.

Such an ending may not be strictly Christian, but it expresses that deep-rooted trust in the maternal goodness and timeless meaningfulness of the world which was Goethe’s form of all-sustaining love and faith.

The question of the overall dramatic unity of Faust in both its Parts, or even of Part One considered (if it is legitimate to do so) on its own, is vexed and controversial. If, for example, we reflect on the relationship between the Gretchen drama and the rest of Part One, a problem arises which can be explained, though not solved, in terms of the history of the play’s genesis. The ‘Wager’ passage in Sc. 7, written about twenty-five years after the Gretchen material but preceding it in the final text, sets up, as we have seen, a scenario according to which Mephistopheles may claim Faust’s life if Faust ever experiences a moment so beautiful that he wishes it to be prolonged. Theoretically, if Goethe had wanted Part One to be at all costs a dramaturgically consistent whole, he would before republishing the Gretchen scenes in 1808 have had to revise them in the light of this Wager, so that in the course of his passionate love-affair Faust would never be seen, or supposed, to experience a perfect moment of this kind. It would be the merest pedantry to insist that the fateful Moment does not count as such unless Faust actually also pronounces the fateful words. Tacitly and in effect, therefore, Faust must be presumed to have forfeited his life to Mephistopheles several times over when he was with Gretchen (perhaps in Sc. 16, perhaps on his first night with her and subsequently). To have revised the Gretchen drama in this way, however, would have been a radical and absurd operation, which Goethe quite rightly did not attempt. As we have seen in other contexts, the shaping of Faust into a logical whole was not his highest priority, and was certainly never allowed to override his respect for the compelling beauty of his already published youthful work. He therefore made no attempt to integrate the Gretchen tragedy with the Wager, but left it to all intents and purposes as he had originally written it, subject to certain revisions and additions which we have noted and which were made for quite different reasons. The effect is that since the whole Faust-Mephistopheles negotiation, culminating in the strongly emphasized Wager scene, precedes the whole Gretchen story in the finished 1808 version, any attentive and unprejudiced reader or spectator of the latter may well be puzzled, or even get the impression that Part One is a play falling into two halves (the second beginning with Sc. 10 or perhaps Sc. 8) which have little or nothing to do with each other. The difficulty is only partly met if we argue, hindsightedly and in unitarian fashion, that Faust’s affair with Gretchen does not in a broader sense constitute loss of the Wager, if only because his passion for her appears to abate, and in any case because in the total perspective of Parts One and Two it may be seen as only one tragic episode among others in his career, and one that has not finally satisfied him. To assume (as indeed the ending of Part Two might suggest) that the Wager is not meant to be taken altogether seriously or literally, is perhaps our only recourse. But once again Faust here presents us, for historical reasons, with a structural problem which may or may not be a serious artistic flaw.

We have from Goethe himself a number of observations that may be regarded as relevant to this point and to the question of the ‘unity’ of Faust in general. Many of them date, as we have seen, from the summer of 1797 when he resumed work on Part One. A further such comment, probably also written at that time, was a nine-line verse epigram which he intended to place at the end of the play under the title Curtain Speech (Abkündigung), a counterpart to the Prelude on the Stage as the poet’s Valediction would have been to Dedication. The actor was to call for applause, remarking:

… Our play is rather like the life of Man:
We make a start, we make an end—
But make a whole of it? Well, do so if you can.

(Des Menschen Leben ist ein ähnliches Gedicht: es hat wohl einen Anfang, hat ein Ende, allein ein Ganzes ist es nicht.) Later, Goethe planned that this apologia should appear at the end of Part Two; in the event, like Valediction, it was left unpublished. But as we have already seen, Goethe conceded to Schiller at the time of finishing Part One that Faust could never claim to be an integral whole: ‘the whole thing (das Ganze) will always remain a fragment’ (27 June 1797); and it is noticeable how often he reverted to this point later on, especially in his last years when he was engaged on Part Two. The words ‘fragment’, ‘fragmentary’, and especially ‘incommensurable’, turn up repeatedly, referring specifically to Part Two but probably applicable to Part One as well: ‘(I intended) the Second Part… to be less fragmentary than the first’ (? 1830/1, reported by Riemer); ‘the more incommensurable and elusive to the understanding a work of literature is, the better it is’ (conversation with Eckermann, 6 May 1827); ‘Faust is really a quite incommensurable quantity, and all attempts to make it rationally intelligible are vain’ (Eckermann, 3 January 1830). To Eckermann, as to Schiller, he declares: ‘In a work of this kind all that matters is that the individual component parts (die einzelnen Massen) should be meaningful and clear, although it will always be incommensurable as a whole—while nevertheless for that very reason remaining, like an unsolved problem, a constant stimulus to repeated study’ (13 February 1831). The actor’s valediction of 1800, by its choice of simile, made a further point: the poem, the drama, is like human life itself. It has been said of Goethe that fragmentariness was of the essence of his genius; also, that his poetry and his life were close to each other, as in a kind of symbiosis. The two points are related, as he himself seems to suggest by the much-quoted remark in his autobiography (Poetry and Truth, Book VII) that all his works are ‘fragments of a great confession’. The description applies pre-eminently to Faust.