Faust Part 1

4347–54: the two philosophical positions here parodied are that of post-
Kantian, especially Fichtean, subjective idealism which regards the
external world as a product of the mind, and that of realism or
empiricism which insists on its objective reality.

4360: the ‘flames’ seem to be the spectral flickerings that are supposed
to lead the initiate to buried treasure (cf. Note 86).

4367–82: these quatrains probably refer to various émigré types of the
years following the French Revolution.

4383–6: the allusion is probably not to the revolutionary masses in a
literal sense, but once again to what Goethe elsewhere calls ‘literary
sans-culottes’; the ensuing comments by Puck and Ariel (4387–94) also
seem to suggest this.

4393 f.: Ariel’s summons to the ‘hill of roses’ (Rosenhügel) remains
obscure, and no light is cast on it by pointing out that there are rose-
bushes round Oberon’s palace in Canto 12 of Wieland’s epic (cf. Note
111). Ariel’s words may possibly be a reference to the dawning day, as
are perhaps those of the next quatrain which closes the ‘dream’.

(after 4398): Goethe originally (cf. Introd., p. xxxix) intended a further
scene at this point, in which the Walpurgis Night sequence would end
climactically with a satanistic ritual at the top of the mountain. His
surviving manuscript draft for it includes the following disjointed notes:

After the Intermezzo. Solitude A wild place Trumpets sounded
Lightning and thunder from above Pillars of fire, smog, fog. A rock
jutting out. It is Satan. A great crowd round him. (…] Satan’s speech
etc. Presentations. Investitures.

There are some verse sketches, mainly satirical material of a trivial
and indecent kind (notably a passage in praise of Satan’s enormous
anal cavity) but also further prose jottings in a more serious vein:

Midnight. The spectacle vanishes. Volcano. Chaotic dispersal. […]
On red-hot ground. The apparition naked Her hands behind her back
Not covering her face or her private parts Singing Her head falls off
The blood spurts up and puts out the fire Night A rushing sound
Witch-children chattering From which Faust learns that Faust Meph

The ‘apparition’ seems to be the ‘pale young girl’ taking the form of
Gretchen (4190; the word Idol is used in both passages), and the last
words of the note seem to lead directly into the scene A Gloomy Day
(Sc. 26) in which Faust has learnt of Gretchen’s plight.

(Sc. 26, 27, 28): these last three Urfaust scenes were all omitted from the
1790 Fragment, which ended with Gretchen fainting in the cathedral.
They were originally in prose, and at the Fragment stage Goethe
evidently felt that he could neither versify them nor publish them
unverified (cf. Introd., pp. xxiv, xl f.). When he finally turned his
attention to them again in 1798, he versified and considerably extended
the Prison scene itself, but decided to leave the other two as they were,
with only slight emendations, and adding the title A Gloomy Day. Open
country to Sc. 26. The short Sc. 27 (Night. In open country) may have
originally been thought of as prose, but in the German it has a strong
rhythmic character and the first and fifth lines do in fact rhyme; the
editions have accordingly always treated it as if it were free verse and
resumed the line-numbering at 4399. A Gloomy Day is thus of special
interest as the only prose scene in Faust, as well as for other reasons (cf.
Notes 124 and 125).

<10>, vulgar diversions: this phrase, occurring as it does in the Urfaust
text, may indicate that even at that stage the young Goethe was planning
to incorporate in Faust a Walpurgis Night scene or something equivalent
to it. There is already a fleeting allusion to the Blocksberg in the Urfaust
version of Auerbach’s Tavern (made clearer in the revised Fragment text,
2113 f.), though this may not be significant.

<14>f. Oh infinite Spirit and <37> Oh you great splendid Spirit, etc.:
it is dear that Faust is addressing the Earth Spirit, who ‘deigned to
appear to him’ (481 f.) and who, in the archaic Urfaust conception which
these passages vestigially represent, was evidently thought of (at least by
Faust) as having control over Mephistopheles and as being responsible
for the latter’s relationship to Faust (<38>f.; cf. 3243 f.). On the
question of the status of the Earth Spirit cf. Introd., pp. xvi f., xxiv f.,
xxxi f., and Notes 14 and 72. It may be noted that Faust’s present
description of the Spirit (<38>) as a being who ‘knows my heart and
my soul’ seems hardly consistent with its scornful attitude to him in 512
f. and in the scene of its appearance generally (cf. also 1747), and some
commentators have even speculated that there was another (lost) Urfaust
scene in which it reappeared and treated Faust more benignly.

<15–20>, the form of a dog … his favourite shape: this, too, seems to
be a surviving archaic conception, peculiar to the Urfaust, of Faust’s
dealings with Mephistopheles. In it, the latter not only assumed the
shape of a dog as in the old Faust-book (cf. Note 23) but also frequently
accompanied Faust in this form. The breed of dog is not specified, but it
was evidently large enough to terrify ‘innocent wayfarers’. This curious
scenario is compatible with the chapbook material but in no way
compatible with Goethe’s final version, where Mephistopheles adopts
canine form only once, to insinuate himself into Faust’s company at their
first meeting, in the comical shape of a poodle (1147–323). As usual
Goethe did not delete the earlier dog passage when revising the prose
scene, and it therefore remains as another detail which we can explain
historically but not dramatically.

4399, gallows-mound: in German Rabenstein, literally ‘ravens’ rock’.
When criminals were hanged or broken on the wheel, the rough stone-
built mound on which (for better public viewing) they were executed
was generally outside any town, because their bodies would be left there
unburied and would attract ravens and crows. Such places were of
course uncanny. Faust and Mephistopheles ride past one on their way to
the town in which Gretchen is awaiting her relatively merciful execution
by beheading in the market-square (4588–94), after which she evidently
expects to be buried (4521–6). The witches at the gallows-mound are
reminiscent of those in Macbeth; the scene is also thought to have been
influenced by Gottfried August Bürger’s famous Storm and Stress ballad
Lenore (1774), in which a lover returning from the grave to fetch his
mistress carries her off through the night, and on their way they ride
past a place of execution with spirits hovering round it.

4412–20: in the Shakespearian parallel scene, the crazed Ophelia in
Hamlet sings ‘snatches of old songs’ which like much else in her wild talk
have a folkloristic character. The source for Gretchen’s song at this point
is the old tale of the Juniper Tree, of which many versions are known in
Europe. In it a little boy is killed by his mother or stepmother and
unknowingly eaten by his father; his sister buries his bones under the
tree, whereupon he turns into a bird and sings:

My mother she killed me,
My father he ate me,
My sister Mary-Annie
All my bones she found,
My bones in a silk cloth she bound,
And laid them under the juniper tree:
Kee-witt! kee-witt! what a fine bird am I!

At the time of writing the Urfaust in the early 1770s Goethe must have
known some version of this story, or at least of the song (probably he
had heard the tale from his mother as a child). In 1809, a year after the
appearance of Faust Part One but quite independently of it, a Low
German version of The Juniper Tree (Von dem Machandelboom) was sent
to the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm as a contribution to their
forthcoming collection of folk-tales, and in 1812 they published it in
their first volume. In Gretchen’s version the song is poignantly distorted
to fit her own case, the boy calling his mother ‘the whore’ who killed
him. In 4449 f. she again refers to an old Märchen or folk-tale (not
necessarily the same one) which she feels has some reference to herself.

On the relevance of folk-culture to the Gretchen drama generally cf.
Introd., p. xviii.

4590: the ceremonies at a public execution such as Goethe had in mind
here included the tolling of a bell (the ‘poor sinner’s bell’,
Armesünderglöcklein) as the prisoner was conveyed through the streets to
the scaffold, and the breaking of a white rod above his head in token of
final condemnation. The prisoner was tied to a chair and beheaded with
a special executioner’s sword.

4599 f.: Mephistopheles’ magic horses will vanish at daybreak.