Five-minute digest

Faust, Part Two

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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.

Top Lessons

Money backed by nothing dug up
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Life made in a glass
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Verified Quotes

“He only earns his freedom and existence”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part Two, Act V, Great Outer Court of the Palace, trans. Bayard Taylor (1871).Quote card

Faust, Part One, Scene XV, Margaret's Room (at the spinning-wheel)
My peace is gone, My heart is sore: I never shall find it, Ah, nevermore! Alone at her wheel, Gretchen sings of the love for Faust that has taken her peace; Schubert set the song in 1814.
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An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Of Ideas
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“Stand on free soil among a people free”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part Two, Act V, Great Outer Court of the Palace, trans. Bayard Taylor (1871).Quote card

Chronicle of the Fourth Crusade and the Conquest of Constantinople, Full Text
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“Throughout their whole existence men are blind”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part Two, Act V, Midnight, trans. Bayard Taylor (1871).Quote card

Faust, Part One, Scene XVI, Martha's Garden
Faust gives Gretchen a phial to put her mother to sleep; the later scenes reveal that the mother died of it.
Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 2
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Faust, Part One, Scene XXV, Dungeon
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Faust, Part One, Scene I, Night
Faust despairs of his learning and lifts a cup of poison to drink at dawn before the Easter bells stop him.
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“Whoe’er aspires unweariedly”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part Two, Act V, Mountain-Gorges, Forest, Rock, trans. Bayard Taylor (1871).Quote card

The War of the Worlds, Book Two, Chapter VIII (Dead London)
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“The Woman-Soul leadeth us”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part Two, Act V, Mountain-Gorges, Forest, Rock (Chorus Mysticus), trans. Bayard Taylor (1871).Quote card

Mark Antony's Funeral Oration ("Friends, Romans, countrymen"), Act 3, Scene 2 (opening of the oration)
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Faust, Part One, Scene XVI, Martha's Garden
Faust gives Gretchen a phial to put her mother to sleep; the later scenes reveal that the mother died of it.
The Discourses, Book I, Ch. 16
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Faust, Part One, Scene II, Before the City-Gate (German l. 1112)
Two souls, alas! reside within my breast, And each withdraws from, and repels, its brother. On the Easter walk Faust explains to Wagner his divided longing for the earth and for the heights.

Faust, Part Two

Summary

Top Lessons

Money backed by nothing dug up

Life made in a glass

The cottage in the way

Saved by striving or by grace?

Verified Quotes