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PARTISAN REVIEW
society, from the small-town milieu of Gretchen to life at court, as
well as classical antiquity. Faust is somehow defined through their
contrast-as Bloom, too, is to be understood fully only in contrast
with the ancient Ulysses. In this respect, too,
Faust
is more modern
than Shakespeare and closer to us.
The
creation of a human devil who carries humor not only into
occasional comic scenes, such as Mephisto's dialogue with the student
in Part One, but into almost every scene in the drama, reinforces
the
abandonment of the framework of a single society and leads us still
further from the sacramental and inevitable which was still charac–
teristic of Shakespeare's tragedies.
The
artist becomes sovereign and
subjects everything to caustic comments:
everything
has become prob–
lematic-every human feeling, every social institution, every received
Weltanschauung.
Faust's noble sentiments, whose often magnificent
expression delighted the nineteenth century, become foils for Mephis–
topheles' sarcastic insights: in fact, this premature brother of Nietz–
sche and Freud mercilessly exposed romanticism before it had yet
reached its full development. The social setting and the faith and
world-view that go with it are not only used as a background for
Faust's character, nor merely questioned implicitly through the
COIl–
trast with classical antiquity: they, too, become ridiculous, seen in
the mirror of Mephisto's wit.
And yet the poet is not satisfied with this by now familiar di–
vision in the modern soul. Unable to accept his
Weltanschauung
from society, he forms his own. He employs archangels, though it
does not occur to him to believe in them, ghosts, witches, wizards,
various species of devils-ingeniously invented-saints, even a
Mater
Gloriosa-but
then turns around, having finished Act V, and writes
a fourth act in which the accusations which Mephisto had raised
against the Catholic Church in Part One are substantiated before our
eyes. In the first scene of the Second Part he imitates Dante's
terza
rima
in a grandiose speech; in the last scenes he parodies Dante,
creates portable jaws of hell in contrast to Dante's awe-inspiring por–
tal to the
Inferno,
and elevates not only Gretchen but even Faust
in–
to his Dantesque heaven, while the Florentine had sent even Fran–
cesca da Rimini to hell. Yet in the end we get no mere collection of
highly polished gems with cutting edges, but a single cosmos, a world
which is the poet's own creation.
