The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · a tragedy in two parts · three prefatory pieces, a first part in scenes and a second in five acts · 12,111 lines · 1808 and 1832 · in Goethe’s German, read from knowledge of the standard text, with the desk’s own English glosses
Mode
Tragedy as world-drama; folk tragedy, satire, masque, Greek tragedy, opera and mystery play in one action
Mythos
The devil’s pact turned into a wager; Job’s heaven; Helen raised from the dead; the ruined girl who becomes the intercessor
Phase
One life, from the scholar’s midnight to the blind engineer’s death and the ascent; the small world, then the great
Presentation
Drama in verse; three prefatory pieces, a first part in scenes and a second in five acts, 12,111 lines on the continuous count, one prose scene outside it, at least nine verse systems
Register
From the archangels’ hymn to Auerbach’s cellar, from Gretchen’s folk strophes to Greek trimeter and Baroque alexandrines, ending in eight short lines
Scale
Heaven, the world and hell; three thousand years; one man
Governing Proposition
A scholar who has studied everything and knows nothing wagers his soul that no moment will ever content him, and is led through a girl’s ruin, an emperor’s court, the Greek past and a coast won from the sea, to die blind, speaking the forbidden words in the subjunctive. The wager of the work is that the striving which makes a modern self is paid for by other people, and that it may still be drawn upward.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The work opens three times before it begins. In the Zueignung, four stanzas of ottava rima written in 1797, the poet greets the wavering figures of his youth as they come back, with the friends who first heard them dead or scattered. In the Vorspiel auf dem Theater a director wants a full house, a poet posterity and a merry person the present, and the quarrel ends by promising the programme of the whole: the circle of creation on a narrow stage of boards, from heaven through the world to hell. Then the Prolog im Himmel, modelled on the first chapter of Job, opens with the archangels’ hymn to the sounding sun.
Mephisto bets that he can lead Faust down his own road. The Lord allows it while Faust lives on earth, and gives his reason in a line that stands over everything after it: “Es irrt der Mensch, so lang er strebt.”
“Man errs as long as he strives.” (317) A good man in his dark urge, the Lord adds, knows the right way well enough. Mephisto, left alone, remarks how decent it is of so great a lord to speak so humanly with the devil. The frame is set before the hero appears: error is the condition of striving, and the patience of heaven the condition of error.
Inside that frame stands a work made across sixty years, from Goethe’s early twenties to the last months of his life. Part One, published in 1808, runs with its prefaces to line 4612. Part Two, five acts finished in the summer of 1831 and sealed until after his death, runs on to 12,111, more than three lines in five of the whole, and its acts shorten as the end nears. The verse changes with the world it carries: at least nine systems, from ottava rima and the rattling Knittelvers of the sixteenth century to Gretchen’s folk strophes, Dante’s terza rima, the trimeter of Greek tragedy and the alexandrines of a Baroque court, with one scene left in prose.
Movement II
Faust begins by night in a high-vaulted Gothic room, in Knittelvers, the four-stress line of Hans Sachs revived. He has studied philosophy, law, medicine and, worse, theology, and stands there no wiser than before. He wants to know what holds the world together at its innermost. He summons the Earth Spirit and is refused, told that he is like the spirit he comprehends and not like it. He raises a phial of poison to his lips, and the Easter bells and choirs stop him. The tear wells up, he says, and the earth has him again.
On Easter Sunday, among the crowds at the town gate, an old peasant thanks him for the cures he gave in the plague, and Faust confides that they killed as many as they saved. He feels two souls in his breast, each wanting to part from the other. A black poodle follows him home, and he sits down to translate the Gospel of John. Word will not do, nor Sense, nor Power: “Im Anfang war die Tat!”
“In the beginning was the Deed!” (1237) The poodle swells, and Mephisto steps out as a travelling scholar, “Ein Teil von jener Kraft, / Die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft.”
“Part of that power / which always wills evil and always works good.” (1335–1336)
The bargain is not the chapbook’s. The old pact sold a soul for twenty-four years of service; this is a wager on contentment: “Werd’ ich zum Augenblicke sagen: / Verweile doch! du bist so schön! / Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen, / Dann will ich gern zugrunde gehn!”
“If ever I say to the moment: / Stay, then! you are so fair! / then you may cast me in chains, / then I will gladly go to ruin!” (1699–1702) They shake on it, and Mephisto asks for a signature in blood all the same, so the older contract survives beside the new. Then, in Faust’s gown, he tells a student that all theory is grey and the golden tree of life green, and the two go out to see the small world, and then the great.
Movement III
In the witch’s kitchen Faust drinks the draught that makes him young and sees in a mirror a woman of perfect beauty; Mephisto promises he will soon see Helen in every woman. The small world is a girl coming from confession. Faust offers her his arm in the street and she refuses it. He stands in her small clean room, moved by its order; she comes home, sings the ballad of the king in Thule as she undresses, and finds the jewels Mephisto has left. The neighbour Marthe is brought a false report of her husband’s death, and Faust must swear to what he never saw. In the garden Gretchen talks of the little sister she raised and pulls the petals from a flower.
The cost is never shown directly. Alone in a forest cave, in the one sustained blank verse of Part One, Faust thanks the sublime spirit that gave him all he asked, and Mephisto talks him back to her. At her spinning wheel she sings: “Meine Ruh’ ist hin, / Mein Herz ist schwer; / Ich finde sie nimmer / Und nimmermehr.”
“My peace is gone, / my heart is heavy; / I shall find it never, / never again.” (3374–3377) She asks how he stands on religion, and he answers that feeling is everything and a name sound and smoke. She gives her mother the sleeping draught he supplies. At the well a friend gossips about a girl pregnant and abandoned, and Gretchen, alone, sees herself, and prays at the town wall to the Mother of Sorrows.
Her brother Valentin fights the serenaders and dies under a sword Mephisto guides, cursing his sister as a whore before the neighbours. At the requiem an evil spirit whispers that her mother died of the draught, while the choir sings the Dies irae. On the Brocken, among the witches, Faust sees a pale figure with a red line round her neck. Only in prose, in the one scene the verse does not reach, does he learn that she is condemned. In the prison she is mad, has drowned her child, will not go with him, and shrinks from him when she sees his companion. The verdict divides: “Sie ist gerichtet!” “Ist gerettet!”
“She is judged!” “Is saved!” (4611) Part One ends on a voice calling him by his name: “Heinrich! Heinrich!” (4612)
Movement IV
Part Two begins with forgetting. Faust lies exhausted in a meadow while Ariel and the elves wash him in the dew of Lethe through the night. He wakes at sunrise, in Dante’s terza rima, turns from the sun that blinds him to the rainbow in a waterfall, and finds there what a man can hold: “Am farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben.”
“In the coloured reflection we have life.” (4727) The great world follows. The Emperor’s realm is bankrupt and its army unpaid, and Mephisto, as the new fool, proposes that the treasure buried in the ground belongs to the crown. During a carnival masquerade the Emperor signs a note against that treasure; by morning it has been copied by the thousand, and the empire is rich.
The Emperor wants to see Helen and Paris. Mephisto has no power over the pagan dead, and sends Faust down to the Mothers, goddesses of the formless where every shape is kept. Faust brings the images up before the court, grasps at Helen, and falls senseless. In his old study, the pen still dried with his blood, Wagner is making a man in a glass. Homunculus lights up, reads Faust’s dream of Leda and the swan, and takes them to the Classical Walpurgis Night on the field of Pharsalus, among sphinxes, griffins and sirens. Faust is carried by the centaur who once carried Helen. Homunculus, spirit wanting a body, breaks his glass on Galatea’s shell chariot and pours his flame into the sea, and the sirens hail Eros, who began all things.
Helen arrives at Sparta from Troy, speaking the trimeter of Greek tragedy, and finds at her husband’s hearth a hideous housekeeper, Mephisto in a borrowed shape. She takes refuge with a northern lord, Faust as a medieval knight. His tower warden speaks in rhyme; Helen asks how to speak so, and Faust teaches her, line answering line, until their exchange closes on the present as their happiness. Their son Euphorion leaps higher and higher, wants to fly, wants war, and falls dead like Icarus. Helen vanishes, leaving her dress and veil, which turn to cloud and carry Faust to a mountain. There he declares his last will, to take land from the sea, and wins the shore from the Emperor with a victory made of illusions.
Movement V
The land is made. An old couple out of Ovid, Philemon and Baucis, keep their cottage, their chapel and their lindens on a dune above the new gardens and dikes, built, Baucis says, by night, with fire and human sacrifice. Faust, very old, cannot bear the bell of a chapel he does not own, and orders them moved to a better farm. Mephisto and his three mighty men, home with plunder and calling war, trade and piracy three in one, burn the cottage; the couple die of fright, and a stranger who resists is killed. Faust curses the deed: he wanted exchange, he says, not robbery. He is never made to answer for it.
At midnight four grey women come, Want, Guilt, Care and Need, and only Care gets in. Faust will not acknowledge her, and she breathes on him and blinds him. Within, he answers, a bright light shines, and he calls for the work to be finished. Outside, half-rotted ghosts dig at Mephisto’s order, and the blind man hears their spades as his canal. He speaks his last vision, a free people on free ground, and the wager’s words come back, 9,882 lines after they were made, with the mood of the verb changed: “Zum Augenblicke dürft’ ich sagen: / Verweile doch, du bist so schön!”
“Then to the moment I might say: / Stay, then, you are so fair!” (11581–11582) He calls it a foretaste, says he enjoys now the highest moment, and falls. Five hundred and twenty-five lines remain.
Angels come down strewing roses that burn the devils, and while Mephisto gapes at them they carry off Faust’s immortal part. In the mountain gorges of the last scene they sing as they carry him: “Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, / Den können wir erlösen.”
“Whoever strives with constant effort, / him we can redeem.” (11936–11937) Among the penitents who intercede is one once called Gretchen, who prays in the form of her prayer at the town wall, now in joy. The work that opened in heaven closes there, in eight lines: “Alles Vergängliche / Ist nur ein Gleichnis; / Das Unzulängliche, / Hier wird’s Ereignis; / Das Unbeschreibliche, / Hier ist’s getan; / Das Ewig-Weibliche / Zieht uns hinan.”
“All that passes / is only a likeness; / the insufficient / here becomes event; / the indescribable / here is done; / the Eternal-Feminine / draws us on high.” (12104–12111)
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the work as one. The spine passes the subtractive test outright: the Lord’s wager (317) and Faust’s (1699–1702) are answered at the death and in the angels’ lines (11936–11937). Gretchen cannot go, because she is what the striving costs, and she returns as intercessor; Helen cannot go, because the present the wager names is first lived with her. What holds the axis at 8.2 is what the plan permits rather than compels: the Walpurgis Night’s Dream, a satire on the 1790s; a masquerade twice as long as its burden; a scene of freckle cures; the Classical Walpurgis Night’s catalogue of creatures; and most of Act IV, whose argument needs one scene. The plan compels the scale; the execution permits much of it.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: the modern self is made by a striving that consents to no moment, and what it develops it pays for with other people. The wager makes the refusal of satisfaction the condition of being alive (1699–1702). Appetite in the small world ruins a girl, her mother, her brother and her child; in the great world value is conjured as credit on buried gold, a war is won by illusion, and trade is piracy. The free people of the last speech are announced by a blind man while ghosts dig his grave, on ground cleared by two deaths. It holds without Goethe’s heaven. Held off the top: the ending lets Faust leave Philemon and Baucis unanswered for, and some of Part Two must be decoded rather than seen.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Height at the ceiling; frequency high in Part One and in Acts III and V, lower elsewhere. In Part One: the archangels’ hymn, the Earth Spirit, the Easter bells, the spinning wheel (3374–3377), the prayer at the town wall, the Dies irae, and the prison, the work’s most terrible stretch, to “Heinrich! Heinrich!” (4612). In Part Two: the waking at sunrise (4727), the Mothers, the sirens’ hymn to Eros, Helen’s entrance in trimeter, Euphorion’s fall, the warden’s song, the blinding, the death and the Chorus Mysticus. Held from the top by frequency: the Walpurgis Night’s Dream, much of the masquerade, the freckle scene and most of Act IV rise little or not at all.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Myth built, not evoked, at three levels. The legend is rebuilt: the chapbook’s pact for twenty-four years becomes a wager on contentment under Job’s heaven, and its Helen, a succubus who bears Faust a son, becomes the marriage of antiquity and the northern Middle Ages, with Poetry for their child. Myths are made new: the Mothers, Goethe’s invention, are the descent into the formless that beauty’s return requires, and Homunculus is spirit seeking body, found by dissolving into the sea. Gretchen, who has no source in the legend, becomes the woman the striver ruins and then his intercessor. The particular is kept: the jewel box, the spinning wheel, the poodle. Held below the summit because much of the Classical Walpurgis Night is mythology as pageant.
Score: 9.6 / 10
The inheritance is the Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587) and Marlowe’s damnation (printed 1604). The departures are total: the pact turned into a wager whose terms define the human; a girl’s tragedy of seduction and infanticide set inside the scholar’s legend; a tragedy whose hero is saved; a second part that crosses three thousand years and moves from Greek trimeter to Baroque alexandrine, from masque to opera to mystery play, against every convention of the stage, Weimar’s included. The stake was real: Goethe gave his last six years to Part Two, sealed it, and five days before his death called it “diese sehr ernsten Scherze”, “these very serious jests”. Held below the summit: Shakespeare and Calderón had already mixed forms, and the frame is Job’s.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows, because each world speaks its own verse: Knittelvers for the sixteenth-century scholar, the free madrigal line for Mephisto, folk strophes for Gretchen, blank verse for the one moment of gratitude, prose for the one scene where verse fails, Dante’s terza rima for a rebirth (4727), trimeter for Helen, and rhyme taught to her as the marriage of two ages. The architecture knows it too. The wager returns 9,882 lines later with “Werd’ ich” become “dürft’ ich” (1699, 11581), so whether Faust lost is held in the mood of a verb. Held a step down by sixty years of accretion: the prose scene kept from the earliest draft, the Earth Spirit residue, and acts that shrink from 1,953 lines to 1,004.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: two centuries of re-examination without exhaustion. Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne and Carlyle; Spengler’s “Faustian” soul (1918); Lukács’s Faust-Studien; Marshall Berman’s tragedy of development in All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1982); Hans Christoph Binswanger on money and magic (1985); Albrecht Schöne’s commentary (1994). The yield is in the work. Did Faust lose the wager, given “dürft’ ich” (11581)? Is he saved by striving or by love from above (11936–11937), and is that justice or grace? Is the reclaimed land a free people’s ground or a murderer’s estate? What are the Mothers? Who won the Prologue’s wager, the Lord or the devil who said Faust would eat dust? Each answer reopens the others.
Score: 9.8 / 10
A published work, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is great: it remade the legend into the modern myth of the striving self and its cost, showed that a drama could hold a civilisation’s history and its forms, and made German verse do what none had done. The reach is held a step lower: much of it abroad runs through music and the legend rather than Goethe’s text, and Part Two had few dramatic successors. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Schubert’s Gretchen am Spinnrade (1814), Berlioz (1846), Liszt’s Faust Symphony, Gounod (1859), Boito (1868) and Mahler’s Eighth (1910), whose second part sets the last scene; Byron’s Manfred, Nerval’s translation (1828), Madách, Bulgakov and Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (1947); Delacroix’s lithographs (1828) and Murnau’s film (1926).
Score: 9.5 / 10
Survival is demonstrated: Part One has stood for 218 years, Part Two for 194, and the text survives whole. Its phrases live in common German speech: des Pudels Kern, the two souls in one breast, the Gretchenfrage. The surface is fixed in places, and it is charged: the Walpurgis Night’s Dream mocks the critics and philosophers of the 1790s, and Part Two’s topical matter, from the paper money to the quarrel over whether fire or water made the earth and the Baccalaureus’s Fichtean idealism, needs notes. Outside German, survival is narrower: Part One is read and sung, Part Two seldom staged. Nationalist, National Socialist and East German appropriation bent its reception; the work survived each, but its readers had to recover it.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Judged on Goethe’s German. As verse the command is at the ceiling of the language, and its range is wide: the Knittelvers rattle of the opening; Mephisto’s epigrams (1335–1336); the folk-song economy of the spinning wheel, ten quatrains of two-stress lines (3374–3413); the Greek gravity of the trimeter; the rhyme lesson made action; and the last eight lines, where three rhyme sounds (“-liche” four times, “Gleichnis” with “Ereignis”, “getan” with “hinan”) carry the whole metaphysics in twenty-one words. As construction it falls short of the verse. Part One’s ellipses earn themselves. Part Two is barely a play: the masquerade and the Classical Walpurgis Night are processions, Act IV is the weakest act, and the late style can clot into allegorical density.
Score: 9.5 / 10
One law governs the work: striving errs and rises, and love draws it upward. The two most distant elements, the prison and the masquerade, or Auerbach’s cellar and the mountain gorges of the end, obey it: Gretchen returns in the form of her own prayer, the wager’s words return at the death, and Mephisto runs throughout. Narrowness is not the issue; few works range wider. The cost is in the joins of sixty years. In the forest cave and the prose scene Faust thanks or reproaches the sublime spirit for his companion, as if the Earth Spirit had sent Mephisto; the Prologue, written later, sends him from heaven. The pact of service here for service beyond and the wager on the moment are never reconciled, and grace overrides both.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The orders are as many as any work holds, and the Vorspiel announces them: from heaven through the world to hell. Consciousness and its division, two souls in one breast (1112–1113); the family, in Gretchen’s mother, brother, sister and child; the town, the church, the university; the state in bankruptcy, the court, money, war and the Church’s share of victory; labour, engineering, colonisation and forced work; science, from geology to the man in the glass; antiquity and the Middle Ages married; art and poetry; nature; the sacred, from the Prologue to the last scene. One life and one wager integrate them. Held a step from the top because in Part Two some orders are exhibited in procession rather than bound into action.
Score: 9.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Bottomless Well at 9.8, with The Encompassed at 9.7 and The Archetypal Deep at 9.6. Two centuries of return in which every answer reopens the others, more orders of reality held by one life and one wager than almost any work holds, and a legend rebuilt into myth, with the Mothers, Homunculus and Gretchen made new.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.2, held by what the plan permits rather than compels (the Walpurgis Night’s Dream, the length of the masquerade and of the Classical Walpurgis Night, the freckle scene and most of Act IV), while the spine, from the two wagers to Gretchen, Helen and the death, passes the subtractive test outright. Next above it, The Inner Law at 9.0: one law, strained at the joins of sixty years.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.4, The Made at 9.5, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.6, The Unconcealment at 9.5, The Swerve at 9.5, Pressure on Tradition at 9.5 and The Imperishable at 9.3 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.2, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.7. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Faust. Eine Tragödie in Goethe’s German, judged as one work: the three prefatory pieces, Der Tragödie erster Teil (1808) and Der Tragödie zweiter Teil in fünf Akten, finished in the summer of 1831, sealed, and published after Goethe’s death on 22 March 1832. No text was in hand. Line numbers are those of the continuous count of the scholarly editions, 12,111 lines, with the one prose scene, Trüber Tag. Feld, outside it; they are given only where they are sure. The Urfaust and the Fragment of 1790 are context only, and nothing is scored on them. German is quoted only where its words are certain, in the modernised spelling of the standard editions, and everything else is paraphrased. Every English gloss is the desk’s own, plain and literal, and none is taken from a published translation. The sound of the verse is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged. Figures that could not be verified, among them most scene boundaries within the acts, word counts and speaker shares, are not given.