23)—a very unfortunate truncation dramatically, to be explained partly by the fact that the three scenes in question were in prose. Goethe evidently now regarded it as stylistically necessary to complete Faust as a verse drama if at all, yet for some reason he could not, at the Fragment stage, bring himself to rewrite these closing scenes in verse as he had done in the case of Auerbach’s Tavern. On the other hand, he felt it to be important, for purposes of the Fragment, to retain and publish in some form the passage (Sc. 26, <37—41>) which assigns responsibility to the Earth Spirit for Faust’s dependence on Mephistopheles (cf. Note 72). This was after all, in the whole of his existing pre-1775 material, the only hint of Mephistopheles’ status and provenance—a demonological question about which Goethe by 1790 had evidently still not made up his mind. Accordingly, the lines <37–41> are rewritten in iambic verse and inserted at the end of Faust’s soliloquy (3241–6); and in addition to the ascription of responsibility to the Earth Spirit (‘you added a companion’, 3243) it is notable that the central motif of Mephistopheles’ cynicism (‘cold mocking breath … turn your gifts to nothing’, 3245 f.) is retained and indeed made clearer than in the corresponding Urfaust passage. There is one further highly significant Urfaust retention in A Forest Cavern, namely the passage which is now lines 3345–65. Originally it had been part of that unfinished Urfaust sketch (also omitted from the Fragment) which was to become, in the final 1808 version, the scene of Gretchen’s brother’s death (Sc. 22). In this speech Faust, with passionate and tormented eloquence, expresses his remorse at having ruined Gretchen, and compares himself to a kind of wandering Cain figure cursed by God, rushing like a mountain torrent down his course of destruction: a brilliant Storm and Stress outburst, anticipating as it did, in the early 1770s, a whole nineteenth-century generation or more of English, French, and Russian late-Romantic villain-heroes and Byronic hommes fatals. Goethe, in 1788 or 1789, must have recognized that this inspired Urfaust passage was too good not to use. Accordingly, without significant textual alteration and preserving its irregular verse form, he simply shifted its dramatic position forwards and included it in A Forest Cavern (cf. Notes 71 and 75). Here it not only provided this scene with a dramatic climax but also, as a passage which showed Faust to be capable of remorse, further dignified him and thus served one of Goethe’s general purposes at the Fragment stage.

The new material added at this second phase of composition (1788–90) has something of a transitional and provisional character and makes a rather mixed and inconclusive impression. Faust as a character becomes more elevated and dignified, the stylistic changes tend in the same direction; magical and folkloristic themes, including that of the Devil (in 2495–513 for instance), are treated more distantly, as occasions for miscellaneous satire and amusing ribaldry. But the main problem, that of how to treat Faust’s bargain with Mephistopheles, has still not been solved, and it appears that Goethe, while seeking to integrate earlier material into a modified and expanded conception, still wishes to keep his options open. The new Fragment scenes, more particularly Mephistopheles’ soliloquy, have elements of continuity with the Urfaust, and are at least as consistent with a tragic as with a non-tragic (Salvationist) treatment of the story as a whole.

By 1797, when the third phase of work on Faust began, Goethe had been for about ten years the creator and central representative of what is now known as Weimar Classicism and generally regarded as the high noon of German literary history: a sophisticated literary culture emerging, in a manner not paralleled elsewhere in Europe, between the Storm and Stress (which it had transcended but by which it was at a deeper level still nourished) and the official German ‘Romantic’ movement in which, from the late 1790s onward, a generation of relatively minor talents attempted the thankless task of giving German creative writing a new direction in reaction against the still developing Goethe. By this time the latter’s important published works included the Roman Elegies (which appeared after some delay in 1795), his second novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1794–6), and above all his masterly symbolic ‘answer’ to the French Revolution, Hermann and Dorothea (1797), a small-scale idyllic epic in Homeric verse celebrating stability, normality, the values of German middle-class life, and the indestructible natural cycle. Since 1794 Goethe had also been joined, as a close friend and literary ally, by Schiller (1759–1805) whose development through his own Storm and Stress phase had by a different route reached a position very similar to Goethe’s, and who in the last few years of the decade produced his mature masterpieces, the classical historical tragedies Wallenstein and Maria Stuart (first performed respectively in 1799 and 1801). Had it not been for the stimulus of Schiller’s active interest in the Faust project, it is doubtful if Goethe would ever have finished Part One or for that matter written Part Two. As it was, when he turned his attention to Faust again in the summer of 1797, just after completing Hermann and Dorothea, he did so with reluctance and mixed feelings. In his letters to Schiller at this time he refers to the unfinished project in deprecating terms: ‘This misty and murky path’ (Dunst und Nebelweg, 22 June 1797), ‘this symbolic, ideal and nebulous world’ (24 June), ‘airy phantoms … a great proliferation of fungi … these tomfooleries’ (1 July), ‘the northern phantoms’ (5 July), ‘this tragelaphus’ (i.e. mythical goat-stag hybrid; 6 December), ‘this barbarian production’ which ‘by its northern nature should appeal to a vast northern public’ (28 April 1798). By ‘barbarian’ and ‘northern’ he means ‘unclassical’. He specifically concedes on 27 June 1797 that he does not think of Faust as a work governed by the highest principles of classical dramaturgy (such as he and Schiller in their correspondence of those years had been trying to formulate) but as a loosely constructed commodious dramatic poem: ‘… I shall see to it that its parts are pleasing and entertaining and give food for thought, … (whereas) the whole will always remain a fragment …’ Yet it is significant and moving that at this very time (24 June), and using the very same phrase (Dunst und Nebel) as in his letter of the 22nd, the 48-year-old Goethe wrote the beautiful ottava rima stanzas called Dedication which were to preface the finished Part One: the ghosts of the Urfaust world here rise around him ‘out of the mist and murk’ (line 6) as with plangent nostalgia, over an interval of twenty-five years, he evokes his youth and its genius. The ambivalence of his present feelings becomes all the clearer when we read a poem called Valediction, written in the same metre as Dedication and probably at the same time, which he intended as a corresponding epilogue to the whole work, but did not in the end publish. Here he ‘takes leave’ of Faust in lines such as the following:

… Who would portray the heart’s confusions, when
His path has led him into clarity?
Enough! Farewell now to the limitations
Of this barbarian world of incantations!

The great personal importance which Faust evidently had for him, and his own considerable aesthetic doubts about this ‘not wholly worthless poetic monstrosity’ (to Schiller, 16 September 1800), are both reflected in the continuation which he now nevertheless achieved, and we should lose sight of neither.

Our impression that Goethe was by this time treating the Faust project not more than half seriously is reinforced by the curious prefatory conversation-piece (also in all probability written in the summer of 1797) which he calls Prelude on the Stage. This discussion of general theatrical and literary problems between a director, a poet, and a comic actor contains nothing specifically relevant to Faust as such; it has even been suggested that it originally had no connection with Faust at all but was written in 1795 as a prelude (equally irrelevant in content) to Goethe’s fragmentary sequel for the libretto of Mozart’s Magic Flute. The Dedication, Prelude, and Prologue in Heaven nevertheless were all placed as ‘prefaces’ in front of Faust, and a common intention does arguably underlie all three of them.