And where is Faust? He has fled. The avengers of blood are on his track. His selfish passion has been the cause of death to Gretchen's mother and brother and has brought ruin on her--to end in madness, infanticide and the block.
I have often wondered whether the limitations of art might not allow the possibility of some drama on the same lines as _Faust_ in which he might be saved by the purity and nobility of womanhood, as in the story of Cyprian and Justina, instead of, as here, using the ruin of a poor girl as a stepping-stone in his career of self-salvation. Or, what if he had felt such horror and remorse at her fate that he had broken his compact and freed himself from the demon? It will be said, perhaps, that this would have been undramatic and that such a view is merely sentimental and subversive of all true art. But, once more, what if he had bravely stood by Gretchen, or had even shared her fate when she refused to be saved by him?
Anyhow, Goethe did not choose any of these methods; and if he had done so we should have had no second Part of _Faust_--nor indeed our next scene, the _Walpurgisnacht_.
Pursued not only by the avengers of blood but by the avenging furies of his own conscience, Faust has plunged into a reckless life and experiences those after-dreams of intellectual and æsthetic extravagance which so often follow such riotous living. This period--that of sensual riot and æsthetic dalliance--Goethe has, I think, symbolized by two wild and curious scenes, the _Walpurgisnacht_ and Oberon's Wedding, a kind of 'after-dream' of the _Walpurgisnacht_.
The connexion of these scenes with the main action of the play has puzzled many critics, especially the curious Intermezzo which follows the _Walpurgisnacht_, the 'Golden Wedding of Oberon and Titania,' a kind of dream-vision, or rather nightmare, in which besides the fairies of Shakespeare's fairyland, besides will-o'-the-wisps and weather-cocks and shooting stars, numerous authors, philosophers and artists and other characters appear, including Goethe himself as the 'Welt-kind.' This scene was not originally written for _Faust_, but Goethe inserted it (I imagine) as an allegorical picture of over-indulgence in æstheticism and intellectualism (the 'opiate of the brain,' as Tennyson calls it)--a vice into which one is apt to be seduced by the hope of deadening pain of heart. Although not written for the play, this Intermezzo cannot be said to be superfluous, for the subject of _Faust_ is one that admits of almost any imaginative conception that is descriptive of the experiences of human nature in its quest of truth.