39TJ123-8-2009 LK VWD0011 Tradition Humanistic 6th Edition W:220mm x H:292mm 175L 115 Stora Enso M/A Magenta (V)Goethe’s Faust: The
Quintessential Romantic Hero
CHAPTER 28 The Romantic Hero 3939Slave Songs and Spirituals
The nineteenth century witnessed the flowering of a
unique type of folk song that expressed the heroic grief and
hopes of the American slave community. Slave songs,
sometimes termed “sorrow songs,” formed the basis of what
later became known as “spirituals.” These songs, the most
significant musical contribution of America’s antebellum
population, were a distinctive cultural form that blended
the Methodist and Baptist evangelical church music of the
eighteenth century with musical traditions brought from
Africa to the Americas in the course of 200 years.
A communal vehicle that conveyed the fervent longing
for freedom, slave songs and spirituals based their content
in Bible stories, usually focused on deliverance—the pas-
sage of the “Hebrew children” out of Egyptian bondage, for
instance—and the promise of ultimate, triumphant libera-
tion. A typical spiritual, such as “Sometimes I Feel Like a
Motherless Child,” tempers despair with enduring faith. In
form, spirituals embellished typically Protestant melodies
and antiphonal structures with the complex, percussive
rhythms (such as polymeter and syncopation), overlapping
call and response patterns, and improvisational techniques
of traditional African music (see chapter 18).
A powerful form of religious music, the spiritual came to
public attention only after 1871, when an instructor of
vocal music at Fisk University in Tennessee took the
school’s student choir on a university fundraising tour. A
similar group was established by Hampton Institute (now
Hampton University in Virginia) in 1873. Beyond the
commercial popularity of this song form, spirituals have
come to influence the development of numerous musical
genres, including jazz, gospel, and blues (see chapter 36).
Of all literary heroes of the nineteenth century, perhaps
the most compelling is Goethe’s Faust. The story of Faust
is based on a sixteenth-century German legend: a traveling
physician and a practitioner of black magic, Johann or
Georg Faust, was reputed to have sold his soul to the Devil
in exchange for infinite knowledge. The story became the
subject of numerous dramas, the first of which was The
Tragical History of Doctor Faustuswritten by the English
playwright Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593). Faust was
the favorite Renaissance symbol of the lust for knowledge
and power balanced against the perils of eternal damna-
tion—a theme that figured largely in literary characteriza-
tions of Don Juan as well. In the hands of the German poet
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), Faust became
the paradigm of Western man and the quintessential
Romantic hero.
One of the literary landmarks of its time,Faustwas the
product of Goethe’s entire career: he conceived the piece
during the 1770s, published Part One in 1808, but did not
complete the play until 1832. Although ostensibly a drama,
Faustmore closely resembles an epic poem. It is written in a
lyric German, with a richness of verse forms that is typical of
Romantic poetry. As a play, it deliberately ignores the
Classical unities of time and place—indeed, its shifting “cin-
ematic” qualities make it more adaptable to modern film
than to the traditional stage. Despite a cosmic breadth,
which compares with Milton’sParadise Lostor Dante’s
Divine Comedy, Goethe’sFaustfocuses more narrowly on the
human condition. Goethe neither seeks to justify God’s ways
to humanity nor to allegorize the Christian ascent to salva-
tion; rather, he uncovers the tragic tension between heroic
aspirations and human limitations. A student of law, medi-
cine, theology, theater, biology, optics, and alchemy, Goethe
seems to have modeled his hero after himself. Faust is a man
of deep learning, a Christian, and a scientist. Having mas-
tered the traditional disciplines, he has turned to magic “to
learn what it is that girds/ The world together in its inmost
being.” While the desire to know and achieve has driven
his studies, he feels stale, bored, and deeply dissatisfied:
“too old for mere amusement,/ Too young to be without
desire.” On the verge of suicide, he is enticed by Satan to
abandon the world of the intellect for a fuller knowledge of
life, a privilege that may cost him dearly.
The Prologue of Faust is set in Heaven, where (in a
manner reminiscent of the Book of Job) a wager is made
between Mephistopheles (Satan) and God. Mephis-
topheles bets God that he can divert Faust from “the path
that is true and fit.” God contends that, though “men make
mistakes as long as they strive,” Faust will never relinquish
his soul to Satan. Mephistopheles then proceeds to make a
second pact, this one with Faust himself, signed in blood:
if he can satisfy Faust’s deepest desires and ambitions to the
hero’s ultimate satisfaction, Mephistopheles will win
Faust’s soul. Mephistopheles lures the despairing scholar
out of his study (“This God-damned dreary hole in the
wall”) and into the larger world of experience (Figure
28.5). The newly liberated hero then engages in a passion-
ate love affair with a young woman named Gretchen.
Discovering the joys of the sensual life, Faust proclaims the
priority of the heart (“Feeling is all!”) over the mind.
Faust’s romance, however, has tragic consequences, includ-
ing the deaths of Gretchen’s mother, her illegitimate child,
her brother, and, ultimately, Gretchen herself.
Nevertheless, at the close of Part One, Gretchen’s pure and
selfless love wins her salvation.
In the second part of the drama, the hero travels with
Mephistopheles through a netherworld in which he meets
an array of witches, sirens, and other fantastic creatures.
He encounters the ravishing Helen of Troy, symbol of ideal
beauty, who acquaints Faust with the entire history of
humankind; but Faust remains unsated. His unquenched
thirst for experience now leads him to pursue a life of
action for the public good. He undertakes a vast land-
reclamation project, which provides habitation for millions
of people. In this Promethean effort to benefit humanity,
the aged and near-blind Faust finally finds personal fulfill-
ment. He dies, however, before fully realizing his dream,
thus never declaring the satisfaction that will doom him to
Hell. While Mephistopheles tries to apprehend Faust’s soul