Faust, Part Two

Summary

Faust, Part Two is the vast sequel Goethe worked on for most of his life and sealed among his papers shortly before his death in 1832. Part One had ended in a prison cell with Margaret's condemnation and a voice from above saying she is saved. Part Two leaves the small world of the German town for 'the great world': the court, the classical past, war and politics, and finally heaven. It runs to five acts in almost every verse form Goethe knew. Bayard Taylor's verse translation of 1871 is attached. Act I opens with Faust asleep in an alpine meadow while Ariel's spirits wash away his remorse. Restored, he and Mephistopheles enter the service of a bankrupt Emperor. Mephistopheles solves the treasury crisis by issuing paper money backed by buried treasure that no one has dug up; a carnival masque follows, and at the Emperor's request Faust descends to the mysterious Mothers to bring back the phantoms of Paris and Helen. When he tries to seize Helen's image it explodes. In Act II Faust's old assistant Wagner has made Homunculus, a tiny spirit in a glass phial, who guides Faust and Mephistopheles to the Classical Walpurgis Night in Thessaly, a crowded night of sphinxes, philosophers and sea-gods ending in a festival of the elements in which Homunculus breaks his glass against Galatea's shell to begin bodily life. Act III is the Helen act. Helen returns from Troy to Menelaus's palace at Sparta, is frightened by Phorcyas (Mephistopheles in disguise) into fleeing to a medieval castle, and there meets Faust as a northern lord. Their union, staged as a marriage of the classical and the romantic, produces Euphorion, a winged boy who leaps higher and higher until he falls to his death; the episode is often read as Goethe's tribute to Byron. Helen vanishes, leaving her garments. In Act IV Faust, now wanting power to act rather than to enjoy, helps the Emperor win a civil war with Mephistopheles' phantom armies and receives a coastal strip to reclaim from the sea. In Act V the hundred-year-old Faust is a great developer whose dikes and canals are built by forced labour. Irritated by the old couple Philemon and Baucis, whose cottage and chapel spoil his view, he orders them moved; Mephistopheles' men burn them out. Care breathes on Faust and blinds him. Hearing the spades of the Lemures digging his grave, he imagines them digging his canal, pictures a free people on free soil, and speaks the words of his old wager, that he could bid the moment stay. He dies. Mephistopheles claims his soul, but angels scattering roses distract him and carry Faust's immortal part upward through hermits, penitent women and the Mater Gloriosa, with Margaret among the penitents. The ending has divided readers: is Faust saved by grace, by striving, or by a poetic symbolism that sits loosely to doctrine? Students should weigh the angels' words against the cottage that burned so that his land could be cleared.

Plot or Argument

• Act I: healing sleep, paper money and the Mothers

  Ariel's spirits restore Faust. At the Emperor's court Mephistopheles introduces paper currency, a carnival masque displays the state as allegory, and Faust descends to the Mothers to summon Paris and Helen; reaching for Helen, he is struck senseless.

• Act II: Homunculus and the Classical Walpurgis Night

  In Faust's old study Wagner creates Homunculus, who leads the travellers to Thessaly. Faust seeks Helen through Chiron and Manto, Mephistopheles takes the shape of a Phorcyad, and Homunculus, advised by Thales and Proteus, dissolves into the sea at Galatea's festival.

• Act III: Helen, Faust and Euphorion

  Helen arrives at Sparta, flees with her captive Trojan women to Faust's castle, and is wooed into speaking in rhyme. In an Arcadian idyll their son Euphorion is born, soars, falls and calls his mother after him into the underworld.

• Act IV: war and reward

  From a mountain height Faust announces his plan to win land from the sea. With the help of the Three Mighty Men and magical illusions he and Mephistopheles win the Emperor's battle against a rival emperor, and Faust is granted the shore.

• Act V: Philemon and Baucis, Care and death

  A wanderer finds the old couple's cottage beside Faust's new land. Faust's order to remove them ends in their deaths. Four grey women come; Care alone enters and blinds him. He dies speaking of a free people, and the Lemures lay him in the grave.

• Act V: entombment and the mountain gorges

  Mephistopheles and his devils wait for the soul, but are routed by the angels' roses and Mephistopheles is distracted by desire for the angels. Faust's immortal part rises past the Holy Anchorites; the penitent who was once Margaret asks to teach him, and the Chorus Mysticus closes the play.

Characters

• Faust, protagonist

  Restored after Margaret's death, he passes from courtier and lover of Helen to land-reclaimer and ruler, still restless at a hundred.

• Mephistopheles, devil and servant

  Witty manager of Faust's projects, at home in the court but out of place among classical forms, he is cheated of the soul at the end.

• The Emperor, ruler

  A pleasure-loving monarch whose bankrupt realm is rescued by paper money and then torn by civil war.

• Helen, Helen of Troy

  The ideal of classical beauty, summoned as an image in Act I and present in her own person in Act III.

• Homunculus, artificial being

  A spirit of light born in Wagner's phial who longs for a body and finds it in the sea.

• Wagner, Faust's former assistant

  Now a famous scholar who creates life in a glass by laboratory method.

• Euphorion, son of Faust and Helen

  A brilliant, reckless child of poetry whose flight ends in death.

• Philemon and Baucis, old couple

  Hospitable cottagers, named after Ovid's pair, who die when Faust's project requires their land.

• Care, allegorical figure

  The one grey woman who can enter Faust's palace; she blinds him.

• Gretchen (Una Poenitentium), penitent

  Margaret of Part One, who intercedes for Faust before the Mater Gloriosa.

Lessons

• Money backed by nothing dug up

  Mephistopheles rescues the Emperor's treasury with paper notes secured on treasure still in the ground. The scene satirizes credit, inflation and a court that wants prosperity without work, and it is one of the earliest literary treatments of paper money.

  • Why does the court accept the notes so eagerly?
  • What does it suggest that the devil invents this currency?
  • Where else in the play does an illusion stand in for a reality?

• Life made in a glass

  Wagner creates Homunculus by a precise laboratory method, yet the being is pure spirit and must seek nature in order to become fully alive. Goethe sets the scientist's confidence beside the slow processes of growth he admired in nature.

  • What does Homunculus lack, and how does he try to get it?
  • How is Wagner different from Faust as a seeker of knowledge?
  • How does Homunculus compare with Frankenstein's creature?

• The cottage in the way

  Faust's greatest project, reclaiming land for millions, requires removing an old couple and their chapel. Their deaths show the cost of a vision pursued without regard for neighbours, and Faust's half-repentance does not undo it.

  • Why does the sound of the chapel bell torment Faust?
  • Is Faust guilty of the deaths he did not intend?
  • Can a good end justify the means he used?

• Saved by striving or by grace?

  The angels say that whoever strives unweariedly can be redeemed, and add that love from above must also take part. The final scenes draw on Catholic imagery of saints, penitents and the Virgin. Students should distinguish what the play says from what Christian teaching holds about salvation.

  • What do the angels say saves Faust, and what is the role of Gretchen?
  • Does Faust ever repent in the way the penitent women have?
  • How would Augustine or Dante judge this ending?

Context

Goethe drafted the Helen episode as early as 1800 and published it as an interlude in 1827, but most of Part Two was written between 1825 and 1831, during the restored monarchies after Napoleon and the first decades of industrialization. Its paper money echoes the French assignats and the financial schemes of John Law, its land reclamation reflects Goethe's interest in engineering projects from Dutch dikes to planned canals at Panama and Suez, and its Classical Walpurgis Night engages the geological debate between Neptunists and Vulcanists.

Composition

Goethe finished the manuscript in the summer of 1831, sealed it, and directed that it be published after his death; it appeared in 1832 as a volume of his posthumous works. Bayard Taylor, an American poet and diplomat, published his translation of both parts in 1870-1871 with extensive notes, omitted from the attached text.

Reception

Early readers found Part Two obscure and allegorical, and it was rarely staged complete until the twentieth century. It later became central to discussions of modern technology and development; the Philemon and Baucis episode is often cited in debates about progress and its victims. Mahler set the final scene in his Eighth Symphony (1906-1907).

Comparisons

• Faust, Part One

  Part One stages Faust's wager and his ruin of Margaret in a small German world; Part Two widens to empire and myth, and only at the end returns to Margaret as an intercessor.

• The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus

  Marlowe's Faustus also summons Helen and is dragged to hell at the end; Goethe keeps the Helen scene but reverses the ending, a change worth testing against both plays' theology.

• The Divine Comedy

  The mountain-gorges scene, with its Doctor Marianus and Mater Gloriosa, echoes Dante's Paradiso and Saint Bernard's prayer, but Goethe's ascent ends in symbol rather than the beatific vision.

• Metamorphoses

  Ovid's Philemon and Baucis are rewarded by the gods for hospitality; Goethe borrows their names and has them destroyed by a modern benefactor.

• Frankenstein

  Wagner's Homunculus and Victor's creature are both made in a laboratory; Homunculus seeks a body in nature, while the creature has a body and seeks a companion.

• Paradise Lost

  Milton's Satan and Goethe's Mephistopheles are both cheated by divine purposes, but Milton's poem rests on fall and redemption while Goethe leaves the meaning of Faust's rescue open.

Quotes

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write the scene Goethe leaves offstage: Mephistopheles' men arriving at Philemon and Baucis's cottage, told by the Wanderer who visited them earlier.

• Essay

  Argue whether Faust's final vision of a free people redeems or condemns his life, using the deaths of Philemon and Baucis as evidence.

• Classroom

  Design a banknote for the Emperor's court based on the paper-money scene, and annotate it with what backs it and what the court believes it is worth.

• Poetry

  Write a short ode in Euphorion's voice as he climbs higher, then a closing stanza in Helen's voice after his fall.

• Fiction

  Tell the Classical Walpurgis Night from Homunculus's point of view, inside his glass, up to the moment he breaks it.

Further Reading

• Faust, Part One, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• Conversations with Goethe, Johann Peter Eckermann

  Records Goethe's remarks while finishing Part Two.

• All That Is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman

  Opens with a reading of Faust as the tragedy of development.

• Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe