Free B00ARI2G5C EBOK by J. W. von Goethe, David Luke Page A

like Act II, ends with a great pagan mystery: the old wine is drunk, the grape’s new juice replaces it, the earth passes again through its eternal self-renewal and self-transformation.
5 THE COMPLETION OF
FAUST
    The fact that the five Acts of Part Two were almost entirely written between late February 1825, half-way through Goethe’s seventy-sixthyear, and late July 1831, shortly before his eighty-second and last birthday, is already so astonishing that we need not be unduly surprised by his method of working. This was, as we have seen, to take up particular Acts or scenes in no particular order but as mood and instinct dictated and then to piece them together, leaving gaps and filling them in in due course. Something like a record of the progress of this work can be constructed from the letters and conversations and from manuscripts of the text or paralipomena in so far as these are datable; this evidence is sometimes clear, sometimes scanty or obscure, sometimes contradictory. Soon after the publication of Act III in the spring of 1827 Goethe confided to Zelter (letter of 24 May 1827) that he had now reached the beginning of Act IV, and that he intended to continue the work from this point, the point at which Faust, carried out of the world of classical antiquity by the cloud formed from Helen’s garments, has been deposited again in the world of ‘his evil genius’. It is not clear from this or from any other external evidence that Goethe actually wrote at this time Faust’s important opening soliloquy (10039-66). It would have been an appropriate moment to do so: the speech, still in classical trimeters, is a pivotal passage, both an epilogue or valediction to the Helen experience (10050-4) and a prologue to Acts IV and V, a turning back to the medieval, ‘romantic’ world of Mephistopheles, the Emperor, and Gretchen, whose image stirs in him now as a deep memory of the heart (10055-66). * Nevertheless, certain affinities between this soliloquy and the final scene of Act V (Sc. 23 ‘Mountain Gorges’, written probably in December 1830) suggest that it may indeed have been written after Scene 23 or at about the same time, and therefore probably in February 1831, when the main work on Act IV is known to have been started, as Eckermann confirms (conversation of 13 February 1831: ‘Goethe told me he is continuing the fourth Act of
Faust
and has now successfully written the beginning in the way he wished”). This was after the completion of the first three Acts and not quite all of Act V. In 1827, soon after the letter to Zelter of 24 May, he had changed his mind about continuing with Act IV and taken up Act I instead: the elf scene and Faust’s first dealings with the Emperor. As we saw, this material was carried forward as far as line 6036, and then hurriedly published in 1828 as the Act I fragment, rather as if Goethe had decided to serialize the rest of Part Two. But a curiousgap of about eighteen months then followed, in which he turned to the completion of his novel
Wilhelm Master’s Journeyman Years
and the autobiographical
Italian Journey
. In the latter part of 1829
Faust
was again resumed, and by the end of that year he had finished Act I and the opening scenes of Act II (Sc. 8 and 9). The ‘Classical Walpurgis Night’ (Sc. 10) then occupied him until well into the summer of 1830, when Act II was at last declared to be finished (letter to Eckermann, 9 August 1830). For some months after this the record is incomplete, but seems to suggest that the concluding scene of Act V (Sc. 23, ‘Mountain Gorges’) was mainly written in December 1830, though like much of the rest of the Act V material it may have been planned, if not actually sketched on paper, very much earlier.
    The genesis and dating of the last four scenes (Sc. 20-3) thus remain controversial. Goethe states repeatedly, over the years, that Act V is already finished or ‘as good as finished’ or was finished long ago, * though its first