Illustrative Approaches to Goethe's Faust

RONALD SALTER Illustrative Approaches to Goethe's Faust With the exception of Grimm's fairy tales, no work of German literature has attracted a larger number of illustrators than Goethe's Faust. In fact, when the first part of the poem appeared in 1808, artists seemed to respond with greater enthusiasm than the rest of the reading public. Goethe himself became acquainted with roughly a dozen illustrative efforts, of which those by Peter Cornelius (fig. 1) and Eugène Delacroix (fig. 2) stand out as the most notable.1 Although the initial reception oÃ- Faust may have been bolstered by the avid support of the artists, Goethe's own position on the issue of illustrated literature remained ambivalent at best. At first he had rejected the idea altogether, instructing his publisher Cotta: Den Faust, dächt ich, gäben wir ohne Holzschnitte und Bildwerk. Es ist so schwer, daß etwas geleistet werde, was dem Sinne und dem Tone nach zu einem Gedicht paßt. Kupfer und Poesie parodieren sich gewöhnlich wechselweise. Ich denke, der Hexenmeister soll sich allein durchhelfen.2 Even the technically accomplished drawings by Cornelius would not make him change his mind. Goethe, who became increasingly irritated by the unbridled medieval nostalgia of the Nazarenes and regarded Cornelius as one of their ringleaders, simply dismissed the pictures as too "altdeutsch."3 But when he saw samples of Delacroix's lithographs in 1826-1827 he was forced—at least temporarily—to reconsider his long-standing prejudice that the all too "poetical" Faust could probably not be illustrated. No doubt, Goethe instinctively recognized Delacroix's creative contribution to the 58 GOETHE SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA 1. Cornelius: "Street" Ronald Salter 59 2. Delacroix: "Street" 60 GOETHE SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA text, admitting that in some instances the artist had even surpassed his own poetical conceptions. He praised Delacroix's unquestionable talent and his sensitivity to the dark and mysterious substrata of the play.4 From our contemporary perspective, the Faust cycles of Cornelius and Delacroix respectively strike us as prototypes of two discrete trends which have determined the illustration of Faust up to this day. The one trend focuses more timidly on external aspects of the text, the other seeks a personal and profound interaction with its meaning. Curiously, Cornelius and Delacroix had several things in common: they both represented European Romanticism without rejecting classical aesthetics completely; they took their motifs from history, biblical and literary sources; they shared an admiration for Shakespeare; and both illustrated Faust between the ages of twenty-six and twenty-eight of their own choosing . But their attitudes toward art and life showed also fundamental differences reflected in their dissimilar approaches to Goethe's poem. A comparative look at the treatment of the "Street" scene bears this out. Still under the impact of seventeenth-century genre, Cornelius seems primarily concerned with a detailed description of the time and place of narrative action (fig. 1 ), while Delacroix takes the historical setting only as a point of departure, shifting the emphasis from outer to inner action in his attempt to visualize invisible forces of archetypal and universally human significance operating behind the empirical façade (fig. 2). The overly explicit medieval backdrop is exchanged for a few fragmentary architectural indications, and Faust's stylized and rather wooden gesture in offering Gretchen his arm is replaced by a much more subtle body language of uncanny animal grace. Cornelius has Mephisto posing irrelevantly in the background; Delacroix makes him an integral part of the ominous equation. Faust has actually taken on a Mephistophelian appearance in this venture of seduction, as the supple catlike males—their hapless prey between them—prance with their prominent swords, their symbols of death and phallic power, toward the shadowy background, while Gretchen's eery pallor, the downcast eyes and mild distortions of her arms and back anticipate her future suffering. Wedged in between the sinister twin pillars of her demise in an ambivalent gesture of half-submission and haughty rejection, this Gretchen has little in common with the familiar cliché of an insipidly coy and innocent Teutonic blonde of post-Nazarene vintage. She is not just another prop along the Faustian journey , as...