Note 124) to be subordinate to the Earth Spirit and the latter to be responsible for Faust’s bondage to Mephistopheles. Further questions then arise about the ‘Gretchen tragedy’, into which the Urfaust version presently resolves itself. Like the Earth Spirit passage, it is a personal invention by the young Goethe, a characteristic and quite new contribution to the Faustus theme, though its connection with the Faustus story as such remains puzzlingly tenuous, and it is even possible that he originally conceived it quite independently of his Faust project. Goethe’s Gretchen story is not simply an episode in the career of a magician, a supernatural amorous encounter like the traditional chapbook episode made famous by Marlowe, in which Helen of Troy is procured as Faust’s succubus; and it goes far beyond the passing mention, in the 1674 chapbook, of a ‘very pretty but poor servant-girl’ whom the doctor loves but because of his satanic contract cannot marry. Rather, it is a compelling romantic love-story in which the whole emphasis shifts to the innocent female partner and her tragic fate. It takes over and dominates the entire Urfaust conception, displacing the specifically Faustian themes. We must look outside the Faust tradition for explanations of why the young Goethe’s Faust drama, and our attention, are suddenly sidetracked in this way.

They lie partly in the preoccupations of the later eighteenth century and especially of the Storm and Stress phase. The Gretchen story reflects, for one thing, the current sentimental enthusiasm about natural simplicity. Gretchen appeals so strongly to Faust because he is an intellectual and she is not, because of her naïvety, intuitiveness, integrity and fundamental innocence; Faust, like Werther, embodies a feeling that was the young Goethe’s own experience. Secondly, there was the cult of folk-literature: the theme of the girl left pregnant by her lover and killing their child to avoid disgrace was known to Goethe as a folk-ballad motif current in and outside Germany. (The ballads with which he was familiar and which he would recite to his friends included some from Scotland which are still in our anthologies.) Goethe himself wrote a short poem in the ballad style about an abandoned unmarried mother (Vor Gericht, ‘Before the Judge’,? 1775). Gretchen, who sings a haunting ballad-like song at her first appearance and a song from a folk-tale at her last, is herself rather like a figure out of a ballad or a Märchen, as she herself almost seems to realize in the prison scene (lines 4448 f.). The laconic structure of the Gretchen drama—scenes that leap from high point to high point of the story, often over long periods of time and without connecting explanations—has itself been compared to that of the folk-ballad. A third factor was the powerful influence on Goethe and his generation of another sixteenth-century cult figure. Shakespeare was to them the supreme poet, the genius of geniuses, the inspired child of Nature, warbling his native wood-notes wild; Goethe had already invoked his authority for the structural and stylistic iconoclasm of Götz von Berlichingen. The Gretchen theme too must have seemed to lend itself naturally to ‘Shakespearean’ treatment: abandonment of the unities of time and place, mixture of tragic and comic scenes, and certain specific motifs which may well be conscious echoes. Fourthly, the strong emotional charge of the Gretchen drama may be partly explained by certain specific elements of Goethe’s recent personal experience. It may be a mistake to attach as much importance as the earlier biographical critics did to his passing love-affair (probably not amounting to actual seduction) with Friederike Brion, the simple country girl in Alsace of whom he later wrote in idyllicizing terms in his autobiography but whom he abandoned with cruel suddenness after writing a few of his most famous poems about her. It is possible that he felt remorse about this which found indirect expression (little other evidence of it is extant) in his story of Faust and Gretchen. A probably more important stimulus from real life, however, was the execution for infanticide in January 1772 of Susanna Margaretha Brandt, a simple girl whose brother (like Gretchen’s) was a soldier, who claimed to have been seduced on the promptings of the Devil, and with the help of a drug, by a young travelling goldsmith, and who had killed her child to avoid public disgrace. Her prison was only 200 yards from the Goethe family house in Frankfurt, where the poet was at that time practising as a lawyer. By a series of slightly uncanny coincidences, several members of his family and household were quite closely involved with aspects of this much-discussed case and even with details of the execution, which took place by beheading, with the usual macabre medieval ceremonial (cf. lines 4587–94 and Note 128). The question of whether the death penalty should be retained for infanticide was at that time a current legal controversy in the more enlightened German states (cf. Note 82). The Brandt case must have deeply affected the 22-year-old Goethe, and may well have been what chiefly moved him to introduce the Gretchen story into his Faust drama.

If this was a mistake, it was an inspired one, for in this part of the play the young Goethe, worthy of his model, achieves the highest levels of poetry and for once also a truly Shakespearean tragic pathos. We may, it is true, still wonder how we are meant to understand the integration of this powerful but essentially extraneous domestic tragedy into the specific story of a bargain between ‘Faust’ (whose real name and identity Gretchen never knows) and ‘the Devil’. The traditional devil’s-bargain (Teufelspakt) motif was evidently one that caused Goethe some difficulty, and this may well have been the chief reason for his long delay in completing Part One. In the Urfaust material there is no clarification whatever of the specific Faustian contract with Mephistopheles; Mephistopheles is simply there. But dramatically there is no difficulty about his role as devil (or, as the Devil) in the Gretchen affair.