V. THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY HERO
Surveying subsequent treatments of the Faust theme,
in 1910 W. A. Phillips declared:
... [Goethe's] Faust remains for the modern world the final
form of the legend out of which it grew, the magnificent
expression of the broad humanism which, even in spheres
accounted orthodox, has tended to replace the peculiar
studium theologicum which inspired the early Faust-books
(Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., art. “Faust”).
Other “Fausts” appeared during the composition and
publication of Goethe's drama or shortly thereafter,
notably dramatic works by Friedrich Müller (1778),
J. H. von Soden (1797), J. F. Schink (1804), C. D.
Grabbe (1829), a novel by F. M. Klinger (1791), a lyric
scene by Pushkin (1826), and a verse story by Nikolaus
Lenau (1835f.), but none can be said to add important
new dimensions to the legend.
Publication in 1790 of Faust, ein Fragment—some-
what less than half the text of Part I—established the
preeminence of Goethe's poem, which the speculative
philosopher F. W. von Schelling immediately hailed
as Germany's “characteristic poetic work,” as an ex-
pression of the ambivalent feelings arising from a
peculiarly German Begier nach Erkenntnis der Dinge
(“thirst for cognition”). (In Faust II Goethe satirized
the hunger for spiritual infinitude attributed to his
protagonist in Schelling's Philosophie der Kunst
[1802].) Thanks to romantic philosophy, by its very
nature “mythic” (glorification of the Absolute without
any strict theological frame of reference; speculative
indifference to the evidence of empirical science),
Goethe's Faust was soon to become itself a myth. Mme
de Staël's response to Faust I (De l'Allemagne, Part
2, Ch. 23) is cooler than that of the German romantics
and her mentor A. W. Schlegel, but despite an obvi-
ously neo-classical literary bias she concludes her influ-
ential discussion of the work and its author with the
words:
... when a genius such as Goethe's rids itself of all tram-
mels, its host of thoughts is so great that on every side they
go beyond and subvert the limits of art.
Goethe's Faust, regarded as a work both uniquely
German and sui generis, was thus long admired (as by
Shelley and Byron) or condemned (chiefly by Christian
moralists) according to the worth attached to secular
German thought and culture. The Faust of Grabbe's
Don Juan und Faust is not only a “profound” thinker,
but also a German nationalist and a scientific positivist,
and even Nikolaus Lenau's romantic-philosophical hero
derives his stature in the first instance from his
preeminence in research (Forschen). As Germany, es-
pecially after the establishment of the Second Empire,
ceased to be “the land of poets and thinkers” only,
Goethe's poem was read ever more frequently as a
glorification of action, which alone could permit full
realization of individual and social values; if Faust still
symbolized all mankind, mankind's best interests were
facilely equated with those of Germany. Elsewhere
Faust still stood for German romanticism's “mystical
faith in will and action” (the formulation is that of
Santayana, frankly hostile to idealistic and vitalistic
systems of German philosophy from Fichte on, in Three
Philosophical Poets, 1900).
Faust was also to stand for the power of modern
science and technology to create a better world (Élie
Metchnikoff, Goethe et Faust, 1907), or—this was
closest to the spirit of Goethe, except when equated
with the cult of the Superman (Übermensch is used
in Goethe's text only with pejorative irony)—for a
fruitful religious or ethical liberalism. German artists
depicted Faust as a Teutonic hero, while in France—
and for musicians—he chiefly remained a symbol of
human frailty or spirituality.
