FAUST: A TRAGEDY

The appearance of this Second Edition of my translation of “Faust,” after an interval of more than forty years from the publication of the original edition, may seem to require a word of explanation. Very soon after the issue of the first edition I became convinced that with the usual tendency of ambitious young men, I had allowed my enthusiasm to overrule my discretion, and ventured upon a task that demanded a much riper experience of life, and a much more finished dexterity of execution than was to be expected from a person of my age and capacity. I accordingly passed a verdict of condemnation upon it, and—notwithstanding the more lenient sentence passed on the work by not a few friendly voices—continued to regard it as a juvenile performance, which had done the best service of which it was capable, by teaching me my ignorance. This verdict was confirmed in my mind by the appearance of the admirable version of the same poem by my accomplished friend, Sir Theodore Martin, with whose laurels, thus nobly earned, I was inclined to think it a sort of impertinence to interfere. But, as time went on, and, while I was employing my whole energies on laborious works in quite another sphere, I still continued to hear people, whose judgment I could not altogether despise, praising and quoting my “Faust;” in which partial estimate they were no doubt confirmed by the approval of the late George Lewes, in his classical Life of Goethe, and of the Germans generally, who, from the close intercourse I have always maintained with that people, are inclined to look on my doings in the field of their literature with a specially favourable eye. Under these circumstances, it was only natural for me to imagine that the condemnation I had passed on my first juvenile attempt in verse had perhaps been too severe; and that, after all, I owed it to myself, and to Goethe, and to the noble people with whom I had been from my youth so intimately connected, to give my translation a thorough revisal, and to republish it in a form which might be as worthy of the ambition that such an attempt implied as my literary capability admitted. I accordingly, some four or five years ago, employed the leisure of the summer months in correcting, and in not a few places carefully rewriting, the whole work in the shape in which it now appears.

The principal fault which led me to condemn so severely my early work was a certain deficiency in the easy natural grace, which every one who knows the great German poet must recognise as one of the most attractive characteristics of his composition. This deficiency arose in my case partly from want of experience in the dexterous use of poetical expression, partly from the habit of clinging too closely to the words of the original, which is the natural vice of a young and conscientious translator. Long practice in such matters has now convinced me that a literal version of a great poem never can be a graceful version; and poetry without grace is like painting without colour, or preaching without faith; it lacks the very feature which makes it what it pretends to be, and gives it a right to exist. Those who wish to be minutely curious about the ipsissima verba of a great poem should read a prose translation; the mere want of the rhythmical movement never can deprive the work of its ideal character and elevating influence; and in the case of Faust this has been amply proved by the excellent translation of Mr. Hayward, which, I believe, has now reached a twelfth edition. But the problem of the poetical translator is to give, not the words, but the character of the original; to transfer its spirit, its tone, its salient features, and its rhythmical attitude, into another tongue, so far as the capabilities of that other tongue render such a transference possible. This is the principle on which I have worked. It would have been easy for me to have made many passages more literal; but, in doing so, I should have sacrificed the freedom of handling, without which I am convinced that graceful ease and naturalness in rhythmical composition is impossible.

There are some peculiarities in the rhythm of Faust to which it may be as well specially to call the attention of the English reader. While the fundamental metre is the octosyllabic Iambic, there is a liberal use of the decasyllabic line, whenever the dignity of the subject seems to require it, and not seldom, too, I fancy, from a fine instinct which Goethe had to avert what Byron calls “the fatal facility” of the octosyllabic stanza. This facility the German poet counteracts also in another way, by the variety of the places to which he attaches his rhyme; the couplet being constantly varied with the quatrain, and that either in the way of the alternate lines rhyming, or the first with the fourth, and the second with the third. But a still more characteristic feature in the rhythm of Faust is the frequent use of the Alexandrian line of twelve syllables, and that, not as Pope and Dryden use it, for giving greater volume and swell to a closing line, but simply to indulge an easy motion, such as we may imagine a German to delight in, when smoking his pipe and sipping his beer on a mild summer evening, beneath the village lime tree. I request the English reader particularly to note this peculiarity, and generally to tune his ear to the varied flow of Goethe’s easy rhythm; otherwise he will be apt to blame the translator, who certainly is not bound to sacrifice one of the most characteristic features of his author to propitiate the favour of the most ignorant, the most uncultivated, and the most lazy section of his readers. In the strictly lyrical parts of the poem it will be found that, if not with curious minuteness, certainly in general tone and effect, I have carefully followed the movement of the original. To have done otherwise, indeed, would have been difficult for me, to whom the movement of the original, in all its changes, has long been as familiar as the responses of the Church Service to a devout Episcopalian. Only let the reader not expect from me any attempt to give back on every occasion the trochaic rhymes or double endings, as we call them, of the original. Such an attempt will only be made by the writer who is more anxious to gain applause by performing a difficult feat, than to ensure grace by conforming to the plain genius of the language in which he writes.

J. S. B.

Altnacraig, Oban,

1st October 1880.

PRELIMINARY.

The story of Dr. Faustus and the Devil is one of such deep human significance, and, from the Reformation downwards, of such large European reputation, that in giving some account of its origin, character, treatment, legendary and poetical, I shall seem to be only gratifying a very natural curiosity on the part of the intelligent reader.

We, who live in the nineteenth century, in a period of the world’s intellectual development, which may be called the age of spiritual doubt and scepticism, in contradistinction to the age of faith and reverence in things traditional, which was first shaken to its centre by the violent shock of the Reformation, can have little sympathy with the opinions as to spiritual beings, demoniacal agency, magic, and theosophy, that were so universally prevalent in the sixteenth century. We believe in the existence of angels and spirits, because the Scriptures make mention of such spiritual beings; but this belief occupies a place as little prominent in our theology, as its influence is almost null in regard to actual life. In the sixteenth century, however, Demonology and Angelography were sciences of no common importance; and were, too, a fruitful root whence the occult lore of the sages, and the witch, ghost, and magic craft of the many took their rise, and spread themselves out into a tree, whose branches covered the whole earth with their shadow. From the earliest Christian fathers, to the last lingering theosophists of the seventeenth century, we can trace a regular and unshaken system of belief in the existence of infinite demons and angels in immediate connection with this lower world, with whom it was not only possible, but of very frequent occurrence, for men to have familiar intercourse. Psellus,[i1] the “prince of philosophers,” does not disdain to enter into a detailed account of the nature and influence of demons, and seems to give full faith to the very rankest old wives’ fables of dæmones incubi et succubi, afterwards so well known in the trials for witchcraft which disgraced the history of criminal law not more than two centuries ago. Giordano Bruno, the poet, the philosopher, and free-thinker of his day, to whom the traditionary doctrines of the Church were as chaff before the wind, was by no means free from the belief in magic, the fixed idea of the age in which he lived. “O! quanta virtus,” says he, in all the ebullition of his vivid fancy, “O quanta virtus est intersectionibus circulorum et quam sensibus hominum occulta!!! cum caput draconis in sagittario exstiterit, diacedio lapide posito in aqua, naturaliter (!) spiritus ad dandum responsa veniunt.”[i2] The comprehensive mind of Cornelius Agrippa, the companion of kings and of princes, soon sprung beyond the Cabbalistical and Platonical traditions of his youth; but not less is his famous book “De Philosophia Occulta” a good specimen of the intellectual character of the age in which he lived. The noted work “De Vanitate Scientiarum” is a child of Agrippa, not of the sixteenth century. The names of Cardan, Campanella, Reuchlin, Tritheim, Pomponatius, Dardi, Mirandula, and many others, might be added as characteristic children of the same spirit-stirring era; all more or less uniting a strange belief in the most baseless superstitions, with deep profundity of thought, and comprehensive grasp of erudition.

To understand fully the state of belief in which the intellect of the sixteenth century stood in regard to magic, astrology, theosophy, etc., it will be necessary to cast an eye back to the early history of Christianity and philosophy.

There can, in the first place, be no doubt that the genius of the Christian religion is completely adverse to that exaggerated and superstitious belief in the power of the Devil and Evil Spirits, which was so prevalent in the first ages of the Church, and increased to such a fearful extent in the Middle Ages. The Jewish religion, too, was founded on the great and fundamental doctrine that there is but one God, as opposed to the Hindoo and Persian notion of conflicting divinities, so universally spread over the East; and all the wild waste of doctrines concerning demons (διδασκαλίαι δαιμονίων, 1 Tim. iv. 1), with which the fertility of Rabbinical invention overran the fair garden of Mosaic theology, has been very properly relegated by German divines to its true source, the Babylonish captivity. Such, however, is the proneness of human reason to all sorts of superstition, that, though the New Testament Scriptures expressly declare[i3] that Jesus Christ came to annihilate the power, and destroy the works of the Devil, the monotheism of primitive Christianity was, in a few centuries, magnified into a monstrous system of demonological theology, little better than Oriental Dualism. The declension to this superstition was so much the more easy, as there were not wanting certain passages of Scripture (Eph. ii. 2, and vi. 12; 2 Thess. ii. 9), which ignorant and bigoted priests could easily turn to their own purposes, in magnifying this fancied power of the great enemy of man. A man like Del Rio would find devils within the walls of the New Jerusalem; so wonderfully sharp is his Jesuitical nose to scent out even the slightest motion of infernal agency.

The Gnostic and Manichæan heresies which infested the Church during the first five or six centuries could not be without their influence in exalting the power of the principle of evil; but writers of a far more philosophical character and more sober tone than those Oriental heresiarchs cannot be exempted from the charge of having contributed fairly to the same result. Of those fathers of the Church who did not, like Arnobius and Lactantius, exclaim against all philosophy, as opposed to the simplicity of the gospel, the greater number belonged to the Alexandrian school of Neo-Platonists, who, with all their sublime idealism, are known to have cherished, with a peculiar fondness, some of the most childish and superstitious notions to which philosophic mysticism has given birth. No lover of piety and virtue springing from a high and soul-ennobling philosophy, but must love and reverence the memory of such names as Proclus, Plotinus, and Jamblichus. It cannot, however, be denied that the overstrained ideas of these pure spirits went a great way to promote the growth of the prevalent superstitions with regard to theurgy and magic. The life of Plotinus seems, from the account given by Porphyry, to have been considered by himself and his admirers as an uninterrupted intercourse with spiritual intelligences, yea, with the one original Spirit himself; and in the Enneads of this prince of philosophic mystics, we have already fully developed all that system of mutual sympathies and antipathies, of concords and discords, between the all-animated parts of that mighty animal the World, which so readily allowed themselves to be worked into a system of practical theurgy and magic. Jamblichus, again, was not only a mystical philosopher, who sought to arrive at union (ἕνωσις) with the Divine Being by intellectual contemplation, but a magician and theurgist, as his work on the Egyptian mysteries, and the many legends told of him by his biographers, sufficiently prove.

I have been thus particular in holding forth the decidedly magical and theurgic character of the Alexandrian School of Platonists, in the second and third centuries, as it is easy to perceive that the revival of the Platonic, or rather Neo-Platonic philosophy, on occasion of the restoration of learning in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, had a principal share in the formation of the theosophic and magical views of the sixteenth century, which it is my intention here to characterise. The world had become heartily sick of the eternal boom-booming of the Aristotelian bitterns.[i4] The hungry spirit of man, aroused from its lethargic slumber, demanded some more vital nourishment than the skeleton distinctions of a thought-dissecting logic, and the vain pomposity of a learned terminology, could afford; and when such men as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccacio had taught the world to prefer the fulness of poetical life to the nakedness of scholastic speculation, no wonder that Plato, Plotinus, and Proclus, when brought into the West by the learned fugitives of Constantinople, should have received a hearty welcome, and exercised a deep-spread influence over the philosophy of the succeeding centuries. Gemistus Pletho, Bessarion, and Marsilius Ficinus, are well known as the three principal restorers of the Platonic philosophy in the fifteenth century: but it deserves especially to be remarked, that these men were far from being pure worshippers of their great master, but mixed it up with the theurgic dreamings of Jamblichus and Porphyry, nay, even went as far back as Pythagoras and Hermes Trismegistus, and held the simple Platonic doctrines as of comparatively little consequence, unless taken in connection with the mighty system which, out of such strange materials, had been built up by the Neo-Platonists.[i5]

In connection with the revival of the Platonic philosophy in Italy, we cannot omit to mention the name of Reuchlin, whose zeal for cabbalistical studies is said to have been first excited by the famous Johannes Picus Mirandula.[i6] Reuchlin was a German, and is the more interesting to us as the contemporary, or rather the master and instructor of Agrippa, Melancthon, and many celebrated men of the sixteenth century, whose names stand immediately connected with the story of Doctor Faust. To complete the wild dreamings of the Italian Platonists, nothing was now wanting but a revival of the Rabbinical and Talmudistic lore; and Reuchlin, whom Europe still reveres as the father of Hebrew learning in modern Theology, was precisely the man for this purpose. It was natural that the language of the sacred Book should have been considered as containing something mystical and transcendental even in its very letters; and we need not wonder that the enthusiasm of the first Hebrew scholars in Germany should have discovered the key of all the sciences in that cabbalistic lore, which we are now accustomed to use in common discourse, as a synonym for the most childish and unintelligible jargon.

Taking, thus, the prevailing theology of the Church, in connection with the impulse which the human mind had received from the revival of the Platonic philosophy, and the strong reaction, which the risings of independent thought in the breasts of men like Telesius, Campanella, and Bruno, had raised against the long-established despotism of the Aristotelian philosophy,—and all this worked up to a point by the revival of Cabbalism, through Reuchlin and other cultivators of Oriental literature,—we shall have no difficulty in perceiving at once the leading features of the age in which Faust flourished, and the causes which led to their development. We see the human intellect, in being roused into new life from the icy night of scholasticism, surrounded by the glowing but unsubstantial morning-clouds of a philosophy of feeling and imagination. Sufficiently occupied with gazing, child-like, on the hovering shapes that teemed so richly from its new-awakened being, it had no time, no wish, to enter upon the severe task of conscious manhood, that of criticising its own powers, and defining, with cautious precision, what the mind of man can know, and what it cannot know,—and was thus destined, for a short season, to flounder through the misty regions of theosophy and magic, till it should learn, from experience, to find at once its starting-point and its goal, in the exhaustless fulness of actual Nature.

In such an age, and under the influence of opinions, religious and philosophical, so different from those now prevalent, flourished the mysterious hero of modern magic, whom the pen of Goethe has made, likewise, one of the principal heroes of modern poetry. That a good deal of obscurity should have gathered around such a character,—that the love of the marvellous should have united with the ignorance of the age, in magnifying juggling tricks into miracles of magic, and clouding with a poetical mistiness that which was clear and definite,—is not to be wondered at. But that such a character actually existed, the tradition perpetuated from age to age on its native soil, and found, with little variation, scattered over almost every country, and clothed in almost every language of Europe, is of itself sufficient evidence. Popular legends seldom spring, like the antediluvian and prelapsarian traditions of the Talmudists, or the genealogies of old Celtic families, from mere airy nothingness; and, however contradictory and inconsistent their integrant parts may appear, they have all formed themselves around a nucleus of substantial reality. Nevertheless, as there is nothing so absurd which has not been asserted by some one of the philosophers, so there have not been wanting men of learning and investigation, who have seriously set themselves to the task of proving away the personality of the renowned Doctor Faust.[i7] But to detect a few chronological inaccuracies in the common popular legend, and to hold out to merited contempt the silliness, and even the impossibility of many things contained in it, may afford an opportunity for the display of a pedantic erudition, but can give no ground for the sweeping conclusion that the person, of whom these stories are told, did actually never exist. The monks were clever fellows; but, with all their ability, they would have found it difficult to invent such a story as Faust—so generally believed—out of mere nothing. The sceptics themselves are sensible of this; and, accordingly, Dürr, the chief of them, while he denies the personality of Faust the magician, endeavours to give a probable reason for the prevalence of the story, by throwing the whole burden upon the back of Faust the printer, father-in-law of Peter Schoeffer, and fellow-workers both of Guttenburg,—the famous trio, among whom the honour of the invention of printing is divided. The envy of the monks, acting on the ignorance of the age, here comes most opportunely into play, to explain how the inventor of such a novel art of multiplying books should have been generally accounted a magician. There can, indeed, be little doubt that he was so accounted by many ignorant people; and as this idea is sufficiently poetical, Klingemann has taken advantage of it in his tragedy of Doctor Faust.[i8] The main objection, however, on the face of this theory, is, that all the legends of Faust agree in placing the hero of magic fully half a century later than Faust the printer, who flourished about 1440. It is true, indeed, that some of the Volksbücher (vide Dürr, ut supra) ascribe to the Emperor Maximilian, what is generally told of Charles V., viz. that Doctor Faust conjured up before him the apparitions of Alexander the Great and his queen; but the other tricks, which were played before Cardinal Campegio and Pope Adrian, agree better with the age of Charles V. than with that of Maximilian. It is quite possible, however, that Faust may have exhibited his magical skill before both these emperors, whose reigns occupied the space from 1492 to 1558, Maximilian dying in 1519; for even the date of Maximilian will never bring us back to the era when Faust the printer was in his glory.

The personality of Faust, however, is not left to rest upon the mere traditionary evidence of the vulgar legend. The diligence of German antiquaries, even before Goethe’s Faust gave importance to the theme, had collected many trustworthy historical testimonies in confirmation of the common belief. Dürr’s Letter on this subject is dated 1676; and, not seven years afterwards, appeared Neumann’s historical disquisition De Fausto praestigiatore. This essay I have not seen at full length; but from the epitome given of it by Hauber (Bibliotheca Magica, vol. ii. p. 706), I fear that there may be but too much cause for the remark of Heumann,[i9] that “it smacks too much of the young graduate.” It was certainly a very pious motive that induced Neumann, a student of Wittenberg, to attempt removing from his alma mater the shame of having given birth, or even education, to such a notorious character as Doctor Faust; but truth often forces us to admit what fondest prejudice would fain deny. The next critical essay on Faust, is that of Heumann, just quoted, in Hauber’s Library of Magic, and it contains the most important of these historical testimonies to the truth of the Faustish legend, which have since been so comprehensively exhibited in one work by Doctor Stieglitz.[i10]

As all the traditions agree in representing Faust as having studied at Wittenberg, and there, too, exhibited a number of magical tricks to his good friends the students, it was natural to suspect that Luther or Melancthon should, somewhere or other, make mention of such a notorious character. And, accordingly, Stieglitz follows Horst (Zauber-Bibliotheck, vi. 87) in asserting that Melancthon actually does make mention of Doctor Faust in one of his epistles; but as neither of these writers cites the passage, or mentions in what particular part of Melancthon’s work it is to be found, I barely mention this circumstance on their authority. There is, however, very great probability that the testimony of Joannes Manlius, in his Collectanea, the principal one relied on both by Heumann and Stieglitz, is, in reality, to be considered as a testimony of Melancthon. Manlius himself[i11] says of his Collectanea, “Labor hic noster collectus ex ore D. Phillippi Melanchthonis aliisque clarissimis viris,” and might, on this account, as Heumann remarks, have fitly been named Melancthoniana, or Melancthon’s Table-Talk. But be this as it may, Manlius’ testimony is most decided, and runs as follows:—“I was acquainted with a certain person, called Faust of Kundling, a small town in Wurtemberg. He was a Cracovian Scholasticus, and read lectures on magic in the university there. He was a great rambler (vagabatur passim), and possessed many secrets. At Venice, wishing to amuse the populace, he boasted that he would fly up to heaven. The devil accordingly wafted him up a certain height, but dashed him down again in such a plight, that he lay half-dead on the ground. A few years ago, the same John Faust, on the last day of his life, was found sitting in the common inn of a certain village in the Duchy of Wittenberg. He was, indeed, a most vile blackguard (turpissimus nebulo), of a most filthy life, so much so, indeed, that he once and again almost lost his life on account of his excesses. The landlord of the inn asked him why he sat there so sad, contrary to his wont? “Be not terrified if you shall hear anything on this night,” was his short answer. And at midnight the house was shaken. Next morning, near mid-day, as Faust did not make his appearance, the landlord entered into his chamber, and found him lying beside his bed, with his face on the ground, having been so slain by the devil. When he was yet alive, he was accompanied by a dog, which was the devil. ... This Faust the magician, a most vile beast, and a common sewer of many devils (cloaca multorum diabolorum), was also a great boaster, and pretended that all the victories of the Imperial armies in Italy were gained by the help of his magic.”[i12] With this account agrees exactly that given by Wier,[i13] the disciple and confidant of the celebrated Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim. Del Rio,[i14] who wrote at the end of the sixteenth century, introduces him along with the same Agrippa, playing tricks on the poor landlords, with whom they sojourned in their vagabond excursions, by paying them with money which turned into crumbs and chaff, whenever the magicians were out of sight; but his connection with such a philosopher as Agrippa is much to be doubted, as Wier has not even hinted at it in the passage where he treats expressly of the Doctor.

The only other contemporary writer from whom I shall quote at length, is Begardi[i15] whose book, Zeyger der Gesundheit, was published in 1539, and contains the following interesting testimony to the age and character of Faust, which I give here from the German, as it stands in Dr. Stieglitz’s essay.

“There is yet a celebrated character whom I would rather not have named; but since I must mention him, I will tell what I know of him in a few words. Some years ago this man passed through almost all lands, princedoms, and kingdoms, making his name known to everybody, and making great show of his skill, not in medicine only, but in chiromancy, necromancy, physiognomy, visions in crystals, and such like. And in these things he not only acquired great notoriety, but also obtained the name of a famous and experienced master. He did not conceal his name, but called himself Faust, and used to subscribe himself philosophus philosophorum. But of those who were cheated by him, and complained of the same to me, there is a great multitude. His promise was great like that of Thessalus in Galen’s days, as also his fame like that of Theophrastus;[i16] but his deeds, as I have heard, were almost always found to be very petty and deceitful, though he was, to speak plainly, not slow at giving, and especially taking, money, as many a worthy person had cause to know. But now the matter is not to be remedied; past is past, and gone is gone. I must even leave the matter as it is; and see thou to it, that thou treat it as a good Christian ought to do.”

Thus far Begardi in his honest naïve language. Heumann cites further a long passage from Tritheim’s Epistolæ Familiares,[i17] describing a character altogether similar to that above described by Manlius and Begardi; with this remarkable difference, that he is not called Doctor John Faust, as he is by Manlius, and in all the vulgar traditions, but “Magister Georgius Faustus Sabellicus, Faustus Junior.” I think Stieglitz has been too precipitate in concluding that difference in the name must necessarily imply a difference in the person. The vagabond wonder-workers of those days were wont to have a number of names, as the example of Paracelsus alone is sufficient to show. With regard to the denomination of “Faustus junior,” this cannot certainly refer to our John Faust, with whom this George (if he was a different person) must have been contemporary. It probably relates to Faust the printer, who has also been accused of magic, or to some other Faust of the fifteenth century, whose fame has been now swallowed up in that of Doctor John Faust of Wittenberg.

Camerarius and Gesner[i18] also make mention of Doctor Faust; but let the passages already quoted suffice to prove the historical reality of our magical hero.

Joining together these historical testimonies and the popular traditions, it is not difficult to come to a pretty accurate conclusion as to the real character of Doctor Faust. He appears to have been a man of extensive learning, especially in medical and astrological, perhaps too in philological and theological, science. But, driven by a restless spirit, and a vain desire of popular applause, he seems to have early abandoned the calm and steady path that leads to professional eminence, and sought after that noisy but less substantial fame, which his scientific skill was fitted to procure for him in the eyes of the gazing multitude. Many of the greatest philosophers, indeed, as Solomon, Roger Bacon, and Cornelius Agrippa, have been accounted magicians for no other reason than their uncommon wisdom, far surpassing that of the age in which they lived; but there is too much reason to suspect that Faust’s fame as a magician rests upon much more questionable grounds, and the whole account of his life and exploits leaves upon our mind the impression that he was a very clever vagabond quack, rather than a retired and contemplative philosopher. There is much in all that is told of him that recalls to our mind the biography of Paracelsus, a man certainly of great genius, but of much greater impudence, who gained his living by acting upon the folly of mankind.[i19] By all accounts, indeed, Faust was a man of much more distinguished academic learning than Paracelsus, of whom historians even question whether he ever studied at any university; but as a vagabond, a boaster, and a wonder-promiser, the one is perhaps only not superior to the other. With a little knowledge of medicine, a little classical lore, some dexterity in performing sleight-of-hand wonders, and a panoply of assurance, a clever man like Faust or Paracelsus may easily obtain a livelihood, and, what is more, an imperishable name. For such characters a strolling life is at once a pleasure and a necessity. Paracelsus soon lost his chair at Basle,—for a man is never a hero to his valet-de-chambre,—and, if we may believe the common legend, Faust scarcely left a corner of the earth unvisited, and filled Asia and Europe with his renown.

And verily he has had his reward. Since the time of his death, not only Germany, but England, France, and Holland, have swarmed with “prodigious and lamentable histories” of the “great magician John Faust, with his testament and his terrible death.” Magical books under his name have become as famous as those of Solomon;[i20] artists and poets have vied with one another in rendering his name immortal in the annals of Art; tragedies and comedies, puppet-plays and operas, ballads and novels, essays, and dissertations and commentaries, prologues and epilogues, and all the varied paraphernalia of genius and erudition, have been heaped on one another, to adorn the trophy of Doctor John Faustus, the great German quack. The wondrous exploits of Faust are endless, and it would be an endless task to recount the tithe of them. Were I to enter upon an exposition of how Doctor Faust first cited Mephistopheles on a crossroad in the midst of a dark fearful wood near Wittenberg,—how the Devil visited him frequently in his own study in all shapes and sizes,—how the Doctor was, after some hesitation, prevailed on to sell his soul to Lucifer, and to that effect signed a formal bond with blood drawn from his own arm,—how he neglected all the warnings of his good genius, and even the terrible writing that appeared on his wounded arm, Homo Fuge!—how the wily Devil dissuaded him from the quiet of a domestic life, when he wished to marry, that he might drag him into all kinds of licentiousness,—how he forced Mephistopheles to answer all his importunate interrogatories, as to the state of Hell, and the condition of the damned, which the Devil painted in colours as terrible as if he had been an Evangelist of the north-west Highland type,—how Faust was transported into Hell upon the back of Beelzebub, and left floundering through the chaos of the abyss,—how he travelled from star to star, and surveyed all the infinity of worlds, with as much expedition as the imagination of a modern poet,—how he turned astrologer, and vied with the fame of Nostradamus,—how he wandered over the whole world, and saw Rome, which is a city where there is a river called Tiber, and Naples, which is the birthplace of Virgil, who was also a great magician, and caused a passage to be made through the rock of Posilippo, in one night, a whole mile long,—how he played the devil in the Sultan’s seraglio, and passed himself off for Mahomet with the ladies of the palace,—how he sat invisible at the Pope’s banquet, and whipped away all the tit-bits from the plates of Pope Adrian and his assessors of the scarlet stockings, so that his Holiness was obliged to believe that some tormented soul from Purgatory was haunting the Vatican, and ordered prayers to be made accordingly,—how he further showed his enmity to the Church by making secret broaches in the wine-casks of the Bishop of Saltzburg’s cellar, and being on one occasion surprised by the butler, perched the poor wretch upon a tree, where he sprawled like a limed bird for the whole length of a frosty night,—how he called up the apparition of Alexander the Great and his Queen before the Emperor Charles V., who assured himself of the reality of this vision by touching the wart which history reports to have been upon the hero’s neck,—how in like manner he frightened the students of Erfurt by raising the ghost of Polypheme, and bewitched his good friends the students, and himself to boot, by the apparition of the beautiful Helena,—how he bamboozled a boor by promising him a penny for as much hay as he could eat from his waggon, and then swallowing the whole cart-load down, as easily as it had been a spoonful of Sauerkraut,—how he sold a fine horse for a small price to a jockey, who, delighted with the bargain, set off galloping upon this wightest of steeds, till he came to a running stream, in the middle of which, and just where the water was deepest, the animal all at once changed into a bottle of straw, and left the poor rider floundering up to the neck in the flood,—how he caused horns to grow out of a certain freeborn gentleman’s temples, when he was sleeping with his head out of the window, in such a manner that, when he awoke, like an ox in a stile, he could neither move backwards nor forwards,—and how, finally, he at last met with the death which his shameful life merited, and was torn in pieces by the Devil with such violence, that the whole house was shaken as by an earthquake.—To narrate all, or one tithe of these wonderful events, would require more pages than the circulating libraries would tolerate, and far exceed the limits of these introductory remarks. I, however, the less regret that I am unable to enter at length upon this theme, as the task has been already performed, partly by Kit Marlow, and partly by Mr. Roscoe,[i21] in a collection of German tales, which I may presume to be accessible to most of my readers.

Let us ask now what materials this story possesses, which have so recommended it to the genius of modern Europe for a high dramatic treatment; and for an answer to this question happily we have not far to seek. The moral significance of the legend lies on the surface of the popular chap-book; and the dramatic writer who should have omitted it altogether, would have proved himself unworthy of the noble function which he exercises. ’Tis the world-old story of the pride of knowledge, and the impatience of limitation with which that knowledge is often accompanied. “Eritis sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum.” “Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” The desire to be as God, looking into the soul of things, and commanding the mystical machinery of the universe, is the rank outblossoming of an unchastened intellectual ambition, leading naturally to discontent with the common human limits of the knowable, and to a morbid intermeddling with supernatural powers and forces, in order to lift the lofty speculator out of the vulgar sphere of confined humanity. This kicking against the bars of finite knowledge is of course rebellion against the constitution of things, disownment of the divine authority which imposed these limitations, and alliance with the Evil Spirit, whom popular belief acknowledges as the incarnation of that spirit of impatience, pride, and presumption, out of which this rebellion springs. Here we have the real motive which gives moral dignity and human interest to the legend of Faust. The compact of the Wittenberg doctor with Mephistopheles is only a striking instance of what is constantly taking place in the thinking world before us, especially in these days of curious microscopic prying into the seeds of things, and pretentious parading of all sorts of dogmatic and negative philosophies, ambitiously engaged in the insane attempt to explain the existence of a reasonable world, independent of a reasonable cause. “Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth.” It is the greed of knowledge, where knowledge is not possible, and the lack of love and reverence, the indispensable conditions of moral sanity, that in ages of dreamy speculation lead to the practice of magic and necromancy, and in days of nice scientific measurement, to a hollow and heartless atheism, clothing itself in the philosopher’s mantle and accepted as wisdom by the unthinking. This aspect of the Faust legend, accordingly, did not escape the notice of Marlow, who has set it forth prominently, if not profoundly, in the opening scene of his drama; a scene which bears, indeed, a striking likeness to the opening scene in Goethe’s poem, in the fashion that a rough-hewn Highland hut is the same sort of thing as a neat English cottage, only in a more rude and unscientific style. A secondary element contained in the Faust legend arises out of the reaction which, in certain natures, is apt to plunge disappointed intellectual ambition into a course of sensual indulgence. The key to the invisible world being denied us, let us make what we can of the visible. If we cannot be as gods in our knowledge, at least let us be men in our enjoyments, as largely and as deeply as to our sensuous nature is allowed; and, to attain this, let us overlook all bounds of vulgar morality and petty propriety; for to acknowledge these would be only to substitute one kind of cribbing limitation for another; and limitation of any kind is what the proud heart of the intellectually ambitious will not accept. But, to scorn all limit and regulation in the exercise of our social instincts is to practice systematic selfishness; in other words, to call in the aid of the author of Evil, to enable us to gratify our sensual passions in the grandest style; which of course leads in the end to the ruin of all parties concerned, and of some who are only accidentally connected with the direct offender. This is the tragedy of Faust, as handled by the great German poet, and handled in a style which bids fair to keep it prominently in the general European eye, as long as Dante’s divine comedy and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. But there is another element in the popular legend which both Marlow and Goethe have used, and which stands to the moral kernel of the story, pretty much as the witch atmosphere in which Macbeth moves to Macbeth’s personal career. Faust is a magician, as well as a thinker; and his alliance with the Powers of Evil implied not merely that all sources of sensual gratification should be placed at his disposal; but specially that a power over Nature should be granted him, in virtue of which, by asserting his superiority over the vulgar conditions of space and time, by which humanity is bound, his vanity might be flattered, and his person raised to a platform of public estimation with which neither Pope, nor Kaiser, nor any earthly dignity might contend. Faust, therefore, must appear as an exhibitor of magical tricks; and, as this is the vulgar and shallow element of the legend, it naturally plays the principal part both in the common chap-book, and in the dramatic adaptation of Marlow, whose handling of the legend altogether is commonplace, and, except in some of the lighter parts of sharp repartee, certainly not worthy of his reputation as one of the heralds of Shakespeare in the early history of the great English drama. Goethe, on the other hand, has wisely given these juggling tricks a very subordinate place in his treatment of the legend; the scene in Auerbach’s cellar being, I think, the only thing of the kind directly taken from the chap-book; and brought in also with great wisdom, in order to make it plain that Faust, with all his strongly sensual tendencies, was essentially an intellectual creature, who could not be seduced even by the Devil into any sympathetic fellowship with the pot-companions of a public beer-cellar. He felt, however, strongly, at the same time, that, as in the case of Macbeth, with which he was well acquainted, some wild and grotesque atmosphere was necessary for the magic doctor to figure in when he was not occupied directly with his love adventure; so he followed our great dramatist in making the witches’ cauldron as necessary to his hero’s passion as it was to Macbeth’s ambition; and along with this thoroughly mediæval and altogether appropriate adjunct of the witches’ kitchen, he contrived to bring in afterwards the wild and weird traditions of a supernatural character which attach to the famous Brocken mountain, the central and topmost elevation of the great ridge of the Harz in Northern Germany; thus rooting his poem locally in the fatherland as firmly as Walter Scott did for us in Scotland when he made the soft beauties of Tweedside, and the picturesque grandeur of the Perthshire Highlands, inseparably associated with the creations of his poetic fancy. And this brings me to a fourth element in the legend with which Marlow did not require to concern himself particularly, but which, from a great poet of Goethe’s character and with Goethe’s position, could not receive a perfunctory treatment. If the native home of the whole legend is in all its parts essentially German, most especially German is its connection with Wittenberg, and through it with the German University system. Not only the general speculative tendency so characteristic of our trans-Rhenane brethren, but the special academic and scholastic hue of their learning, is vividly portrayed in this national drama. Not more native to the Cumberland meres is Wordsworth, and to the banks of Doon is Robert Burns, than Goethe’s Faust is to Göttingen, Leipzig, and Bonn. A university in Germany is socially a more powerful thing, though architecturally and aristocratically by no means so magnificent a thing as Oxford in England. The German professors are the great representatives and leaders of the national mind in all departments of thought; this is the case only to a certain limited extent in our country. The academical element, therefore, must assert a prominent place in a truly German national poem. And so it is here. The learned Doctor who sells his soul to the Devil was a professor; a man of books certainly, and a trainer of youth; and some of the most suggestive scenes in the poem are those in which the contrast between mere academical learning with the wisdom of deeper thought and the living experience of life is hit off with a few rapid but telling strokes.

I have no desire to preoccupy the judgment of the English reader by any detailed criticism of the merits and defects of Faust as a dramatic poem. As a tale of human interest it will always be largely appreciated, even beyond the circle of strictly poetical readers; and readers of a more specially cultivated taste will not allow any small faults that might readily be pointed out, whether in the structure of the poem or in the treatment of the characters, to interfere with their enjoyment of so rare a combination of profound thought, wise observation, and deep pathos, as this famous production exhibits. I will take the liberty, however, of suggesting to the students of the poem a careful comparison with Lord Byron’s Manfred, and our great dramatist’s Hamlet, as particularly fruitful in valuable conclusions. All Byron’s characters, as the offspring of pride and unchastened ambition, are in a certain sense Fausts, but Manfred in a particular degree; and, though the idea that Byron’s tragedy was borrowed from Goethe’s could proceed only from a superficial knowledge of his lordship’s character, and from an ignorance of the circumstances which gave rise to the composition of that poem, it is not the less certain that there is a great resemblance between the character of Manfred and that of Faust. From what this resemblance proceeds Lord Byron has himself most satisfactorily told us:—“It was the Steinbach, and the Jungfrau, and something else, much more than Faust,”[i22] that produced the gigantic Titan-like apparition of Manfred. That something else here mentioned was Lord Byron himself, who, had he lived in the sixteenth century, would probably enough have been a magician (at all events a Giordano Bruno), and might have been immortalised by some modern poet as the great English Doctor Faust. How, then, does Manfred stand as compared with Faust? Exactly in the same way, we must assume, as Byron stands when contrasted with Goethe. Byron is more sublime; Goethe more human. Byron has more wing; Goethe a better use of his wing. Byron is more intense, more impetuous, and more forcible; Goethe more rich, more various, more mellow, and more ripe. But the chief difference is this, that in all his poetry Goethe is wise; Byron never. Accordingly, we may say that with all its grandeur Manfred is essentially a mad poem. It overleaps the bounds of all sane thinking with no apparent purpose, and certainly with little apparent effect but the glorification of monstrous pride. Still there is a moral lesson at the root of the story, if the reader will take the trouble to think it out. The man who could find no pleasure in existence, except in the gratification of an unnatural passion, could end only as Manfred ended, and die communing with his own proud soul and the evoked spirits of earth and air, amid the frost-bound ridges of the Alps. But, in order to attain this solitary Titanic sublimity, the poet has sacrificed all human probability and all human interest. It is a sublime poem, Manfred; but it is the sublime of monstrosity. The sublime of the Prometheus of Æschylus is a very different thing: it is the sublime, in the first place, not of an unnatural man, but of a god; and, in the second place, it is the sublime of a soul inspired by ill-regulated philanthropy, not by unchastened passion. I presume there are few things finer in the English language than that midnight soliloquy in the third act of Manfred, when the Count, looking forth from his lonely tower on the stars and the snow-shining mountains, recalls a night spent amid the ruins of the Colosseum, and the palace of the Cæsars in Rome—a soliloquy which certainly will lose nothing by a detailed comparison with the strikingly similar monologue in the fourth act of Goethe’s great poem; but the misfortune is, when admiration has been spent on particular passages, one can take no general impression away from the work except this, that the poet wrote under the influence of some sad disease of morbid sublimity, and his heroes were made in Titanic proportions, after his own likeness. In every view, therefore, except in regard to the power of one or two individual passages, the study of Manfred can only tend to raise in the mind of the reader a most profound admiration for the more healthy tone, the more ripe wisdom, the more rich material, and the more skilful treatment, of the German writer. With Shakespeare’s great work it is quite otherwise. Hamlet unquestionably has many striking points of similarity with Faust. The same moody melancholy, and tendency to contemplation of suicide; the same lofty discontent with his environment, and misanthropic contempt for the humanity with which he stood in direct relationship; the same communion with the unseen world, though in a different form; the same feebleness and indecision of character in the hero, with occasional blind plunges into strokes that hurry himself and others into ruin. In his morbid state of mind the ghost acts according to the same law on the hero of our great English tragedy that Mephistopheles does on the German doctor; but the ghost in the one case for the Devil, in the other—though both incarnated creations of a diseased mind—indicates in the strongest possible way the diverse character of the disease. Hamlet is an essentially noble character sunk into melancholy by the abnormal character of the immediate social element in which it was his destiny to move; the moody contemplation of the social wrongs which were rife round about him generated the idea of revenge, or taking the moral law into his own hand; and of this rash idea of revenge the ghost is dramatically the voice and the spur. But, though plunging himself and his environment into misery by following out his bloody suggestions, Hamlet never forfeits our respect. He is never selfish; and suffers more from excessive sensibility to the sins of others than from any faults that may be placed fairly at his own door. Otherwise with Faust; he is at bottom a compound of a sentimentalist and a sensualist; and, though the metaphysical perplexities in which at the outset of his career he is found entangled, excite in the reader some emotion of pity, yet the feebleness and irresolution of his conduct afterwards, the ease with which he allows himself to be dragged by his fiendish guide through all kinds of selfish indulgence and moral meanness, cannot fail to inoculate the reader with a strong feeling of contempt. This no doubt was meant by the poet; and very properly so; as a noble character never could have fallen into the sensual trap so cunningly laid for him by the Tempter; still it is a misfortune to the piece, and imperatively demands the large compensation which it receives from the profound tragic interest with which the consummate art of the dramatist has contrived to invest the closing scenes with poor Margaret.

It is well known to the literary public that the author of Faust, as generally read by foreigners, always looked upon this production as only the first part of the great “Divina Comedia,” to use the language of Dante’s time, with which he was to enrich the literature of his century. The incomplete character of the first part, indeed, is distinctly indicated in the introductory scene called the “Prologue to Heaven,” which contains the following lines:—

“Though now he serve me stumblingly, the hour

Is nigh, when I shall lead him into light.

When the tree buds, the gardener knows that flower

And fruit will make the coming season bright.”[i23]

To a “divine comedy,” indeed, in the large style, which should contain a vindication of the ways of God to man, a second part of Faust was as necessary as Dante’s Paradiso was to his Inferno, or the Prometheus Unbound of Æschylus to the Prometheus Bound, or the last four chapters of the Book of Job to the rest of the poem; and when Goethe wrote this Prologue in Heaven—a piece by no means necessary to Faust as an acting play—it is impossible to imagine that he had not then distinctly purposed and dimly planned the singular poem now known as the second part of Faust. For the sake, therefore, of those readers of the great German tragedy, within the scope of whose vision the second part of Faust is, for various reasons, never likely to come, I will set down here a somewhat detailed panoramic view of that remarkable production. A few remarks, then, will enable any person of common intelligence to understand the exact relation which exists between the two works.

The first act opens with a pleasing landscape scene, in the midst of which Faust is discovered reclining upon a flowery turf, weary, restless, and seeking repose. The hour is twilight, and round the weary one Ariel and other quaint and pleasant Spirits are hovering in airy circles, entertaining his fancy with lovely shows, and lulling him with sweet sounds; quite a piece of Nature’s most voluptuous and luxuriant beauty, such as Goethe’s soul delighted to bathe in. As the Spirits continue their song, accompanying the watches of the night, the dawn approaches to the ear of mortal men calmly and gently, but to the sense of Spirits, the march of the hours is heard as a storm: the gigantic rock-gates of the East creak fearfully; Phœbus rolls his chariot wheels in thunder; and eye and ear are startled at the strong coming of the day. Faust then wakens, and gratefully welcomes the fresh tide of a renewed existence which, after the soothing influences of the magic sleep, seems to stream in upon him. A resolution is strongly stirred in his breast to strive after the highest perfection of which human nature is capable.

The second scene brings us from the fairy into the court atmosphere. The Emperor sits on his throne, surrounded by all sorts of courtiers, ministers, and other appendages of Majesty; the astrologer and the fool, significantly for those times (for we must suppose the end of the fifteenth or the beginning of the sixteenth century), occupying not the least conspicuous place. Forthwith begins a somewhat prolix discourse between the Imperial Majesty and his principal ministers—Chancellor, Treasurer, Master of the Household, etc., the burden of which is—a very common one with great people and people in office—that they have no money and are at their wit’s end how to get it. The fool, into whose shoes Mephistopheles has cunningly shuffled himself, is applied to for the aid of his sage counsels, and is not slow with the common resource of German devils and necromancers—hidden treasures. But before the spade and the mattock can be brought into play to unearth this hidden heap, as it happens to be Carnival, there must be a masquerade. The Emperor, too, has just come from Rome, whither he had gone, according to the laudable old custom of the Heinrichs and Ottos and Friedrichs, to get himself dubbed Holy Roman Emperor, and with his crown on his head, he has brought also the fool’s cap. Scene third, accordingly, exhibits a rich show of foolery and masquerading of all sorts. Flower-girls and gardeners; mothers and daughters; fishers, fowlers, and foresters; Pulcinellos, parasites, and drunkards; poets and critics; the three Graces, Aglaia, Hegemone, and Euphrosyne; the three Fates, Atropos, Clotho, and Lachesis; the three Furies, Alecto, Megæra, and Tisiphone; Fear, Hope, and Providence leading in Victory, who stands on the top parapet of a tower—all this moves in motley operatic splendour before the eyes of the spectator; and the various personages, as they pass, festoon themselves, so to speak, with short speeches and moral reflections in the style of the masques of our old English dramatists—points prettily enough curled and frizzled, and agreeable enough, doubtless, to hear with music in an opera, but rather wearisome to read in a long sequence as part of a written play. Then, that Doctor Faust may have something to do in his own peculiar province of magic, for the command of which, as we know, he has sold his soul to the Devil, we have a grand chariot brought upon the stage by four horses; and in this chariot are two allegorical personages, the charioteer boy (Knabenlenker), that is to say, Poetry or intellectual wealth, and Plutus, the god of material wealth, a character fitly sustained by Doctor Faust himself. These two scatter their riches profusely among the mob of masquers—Poetry pearls and spangles, which turn into moths and beetles as soon as snatched; Plutus golden guineas and silver pennies; but they are red hot, and burn the fingers of the appropriators. A general row takes place, which, however, is only the overture to a greater one, with which the masquerade concludes. Preceded and surrounded by dancing groups of fauns and satyrs, giants, nymphs, and gnomes, the Emperor appears in the character of the great Pan, the All of the world (πᾶν). Plutus, i.e. Faustus, is now ready to close the scene with a fire trick, like to that which, on the first start of his magical career, he played off upon Brander, Siebel, Frosch, and the other worthies of Auerbach’s cellar. The little dwarfish gnomes take the mighty Pan by the hand and lead him to a hole in the rock, whence a fountain of fire wells out with many a freakish spurt of subterranean flame. This the universal δαίμων, or mighty Pan, beholds with infinite satisfaction; but lo! as he bends forward to contemplate such miracle more near, his beard unglues itself and catches fire; and the flame begins to play about at a furious rate, cracking like a whip right and left, and with long snaky tongues licking the roof of the welkin. The stage is now one web of confusion and consternation; all hands are at work to clap extinguishment on the earth-born flame; but the more they plash and potter in the wild element, the more it blazes, and the cry is raised—Oh treason!—that the Emperor is burning; whereupon the herald very appropriately lifts up the moral complaint:—

“O Youth, O Youth! and wilt thou never

Learn to rein thy fancies flighty?

O Highness, Highness! wilt thou never

Be as wise as thou art mighty?”

and herewith, and with a conjuration of soft dews and mists convocated by Plutus to lay the flaming devils whom he had raised, ends the spectacle and the scene.

What next? The fourth scene discovers the Emperor on his holy Roman throne, as in the second. Faust hopes that his Majesty has readily pardoned the frolic of flame-jugglery with which the preceding day’s sport had ended; and the Emperor expresses his high delight with the exhibition of such tricks; for nothing could give him greater pleasure than to imagine himself for a season a king of salamanders. Mephistopheles then comes forward with the finished draught of his new scheme for the replenishing of the Imperial exchequer; and, that his Majesty may not have long to wait for the drudgery of the mattock and spade in bringing to light the hidden treasures before promised, the affair is to be managed in the meantime by paper money; and straightway, upon the faith of the to-be-unearthed gold, the Minister of Finance is relieved from his perplexities, and the whole country rises and swells and billows up in a flux of prosperity. This as a prelude; but the serious work is yet to come. The Emperor requests the great conjuror to produce for his amusement something better than salamanders, and more wonderful even than paper money. He wishes to see the famous beauty, the Spartan Helen who set Troy on fire, and Paris the princely shepherd, whose well-trimmed locks and gold-embroidered mantle had prevailed to seduce her from her fidelity to her royal husband. Faust engages to gratify the Imperial wishes; and Mephistopheles, after a little demurring—the shades of the classical world being not within his proper domain—consents. Whereupon the hero, holding in his hand a magic key which he has received from his comrade, descends through the earth into the empty and bodiless realm of the Mothers; and, having abstracted from their presence a mystical tripod, ascends into the upper air, and appears before the Imperial Court, where, habited as a priest, he instantly invokes the shade of the famous pair, to whom Aphrodite has been so lavish of her gifts. They forthwith appear, and, environed by music and mist, exhibit their classical charms, and repeat their storied loves to the modern eye. The exhibition, of course, after the first surprise is over, produces different effects on the spectators, according to their different tastes; the Court critics, like other brethren of the same carping fraternity, must have something to object, even to the queen of beauties; but Faust is fascinated, and, at the first glance, falls violently in love with the phantom which himself had raised. As before the vanishing form which he had seen in the magic mirror, when in the witches’ kitchen, so here again he stands transfixed with wonder, gazes in ecstasy, glows with passion, and, losing all sense of propriety, raves in jealous indignation at Paris, for venturing to handle too familiarly the object of his adoration. He then rushes insanely to seize the bodiless form; but no sooner has fleshly touch troubled the spiritual essence than an explosion follows. The Doctor falls down in a swoon; the fair apparitions vanish; and Mephistopheles, taking the hero on his back, leaves the scene of the luckless conjuration amid darkness and confusion. Thus ends the first act.

The second act displays the old Gothic, high-vaulted, narrow chamber which we remember to have seen in the first scene of the first act of this strange drama. This chamber formerly belonged to Doctor Faust; it now belongs to his hopeful disciple in the art of alchemy, the learned Doctor Wagner, whom we at once recognise as an old friend. To refresh old memories further, the same young student is introduced, to whom Mephistopheles, masqued in academical cap and gown, had given such admirable instructions on his first entrance to college life. He is now no longer a freshman, but a Bachelor of Arts, well crammed with the customary amount of book lore, notable, also, for a certain heroic dash of scepticism, which has taught him to believe that a large amount of what passes for learning in the world is humbug, and that the professors of learning, generally, are only a more respectable sort of quacks. He stands in no need now of a Faust or a Mephistopheles to instruct him; for he knows more than all the most learned doctors can teach him by the simple omnipotence of his own conceit. He has studied theology under some neologic doctor of the age, is a decided disbeliever in the personality of the Devil, and boasts with the most confident faith in the infallibility of his own Ego—“Unless I will, no devil may exist!” But the principal character in this scene is the learned Doctor Wagner himself, who is exhibited in his laboratory, bending and blowing over the hot coals of his furnace in the act of making a man. And anon, not so much by the chymick wit of Wagner, of course, as by the magic of Mephistopheles, Homunculus does actually come forth, all glowing and eager, enclosed within a glass phial, a brisk little fellow, brimful of elastic energy, and fired with the heroic resolve to be developed into the fulness of the freedom of the perfect man, bursting his vitreous hull with all possible expedition. To his chymick “fatherkin” Wagner he pays little or no respect, but recognises Mephistopheles on the spot as first cousin; in Faust, and the dreams of Spartan Helen that occupy his fancy, being, like the Doctor, of a hot and amorous temperament, he takes a wonderful interest; and, spurred on by that lust of intellectual adventure which is characteristic of his nature, after a few preliminary remarks, proposes to Mephistopheles that they should all three set themselves afloat on the magic mantle, and balloon over to Thessaly, where, amid the haunts of Erichtho and other famous witches, an assembly of old classical ghosts and goblins, heroes and heroines, is that night to be held. On this phantasmal expedition the worthy triad accordingly set out without delay; Homunculus to enlarge his mind and achieve development; Faust to search out Helen; and Mephistopheles from mere curiosity; for, in fact, he is quite a stranger in the classical Hades, and is not, from anything that has come to his ear, inclined to imagine that there is anything in Olympus which will suit his humour half so well as the witches on the Brocken.

We are now prepared for what the poet has evidently dressed up with special care, as the imposing spectacle of the second act, intending to overpower the senses of the spectator with a profusion of imaginative wealth, in the same fashion as he managed the Carnival in the first act; with this slight difference, that, whereas there we had a show of masqued realities, here we have a show of real phantoms. To this phantasmal exhibition the poet gives the name of the Classical Walpurgis-Night, or May-Day Night, the counterpart of the Gothic Walpurgis-Night set forth with such power and variety in the first part of the drama. Like the short intermezzo of Oberon and Titania’s golden wedding on the Brocken, the strange motley dance of figures that are here made to pop up before us with significant saws in their mouths, have little or nothing to do with the main action of the piece. Faust and Homunculus and Mephistopheles appear at intervals merely flitting through its luxuriant variety like fire-flies in a forest full of lions and tigers, and camelopards, and every curious wild beast. The scene is in the Pharsalian Plains—Thessaly being the native ground of classical witchcraft and enchantment—the time of course midnight. The prologue is spoken by Erichtho, Lucan’s famous witch, in Iambic trimeters which the poet handles with the fine rhythmical tact so prominent in all his productions. Immediately after her monologue the three magical aeronauts appear; then colossal ants gathering gold grains; with them gigantic griffins, keepers of the gold, and Arimaspi fighting with the griffins for its possession; then Sphynxes, and Sirens, and Stymphalides, and various, to the classical ear familiar, monsters of the bird genus, who hold much talk, but not of much significance, with Faust and his conductor. Suddenly the scene changes to the banks of the Peneus, where the god of the classical flood sits crowned with reeds, surrounded by gracefully sportive groups of Nymphs, and majestically sailing swans. Thereafter a hollow tramp of horses’ hoofs announces the arrival of the Centaur Chiron, wise pedagogue of Achilles and other renowned classical heroes. Him Faust accosts, and requests a clue to the haunt of the fair Helen, the possession of whom still burns in his inordinate desire as the only thing capable of making him happy. To this request the wise bi-form demi-god is not able, from his own resources, to accede; but he takes the Doctor on his back; and off they tramp together to the temple-cave of Manto—the famous prophet-daughter of Æsculapius. With her Faust enters the subterranean regions, the realm of Persephone; and the possession of Helen, as we shall see in the third act, is the reward of his intrepidity. But, though Faust seems now amply provided for, the phantasmal hubbub goes on. The Sirens and the Sphynxes again come to the front, singing and soliloquising as before; likewise the ants and the griffins; and to them presently are associated, Seismos (earthquake), the Pygmies or Lilliputians, and the Idæan Dactyles or Tom Thumbs of antiquity; with them—in honour of Schiller, we may suppose—the cranes of Ibycus; then Empusa the foul ass-footed blood-sucking hag, and troops of hideous Lamias to captivate the Gothic taste of Mephistopheles; but even these are not ugly enough for him; so he wanders on through the Fair, till he encounters the three daughters of Phorcys, who had only one eye and one tooth among them; and from one of these he borrows her hideous mask, that he may perform juggleries behind it in a future part of the play. Meanwhile Homunculus, in prosecution of his eager desire to be developed, has hunted out two philosophers, Anaxagoras and Thales; and under the guidance of the latter, he proceeds through the peopled air to the adjacent bays of the Ægean Sea, where the marine gods and demi-gods are holding their revels. To this water-festival the scene finally changes; and forthwith a new swarm of vocal apparitions begins to buzz around us; among whom (besides the Sirens, whom we had before) Nereus and Proteus, the Telchins of Rhodes, the Cabiri of Samothrace, with troops of shell-blowing Tritons, and Nereids riding on dolphins and hippocampes, are the most remarkable. With these fair apparitions, and the pleasant aquatic sports in which they are engaged, Homunculus, under the appropriate teaching of Thales, the water-philosopher, seems vastly delighted; and mounting on the dolphin-back of Proteus, careers about from creek to creek, seeking anxiously for a just occasion of being fully developed. This desired consummation, accordingly, happens sooner perhaps than the little man had fancied, and in an unexpected fashion; for, as he bounds along from wave to wave gallantly, on the back of the multiform sea-god, the lovely Galatea, the fairest of the daughters of Doris, suddenly presents herself to his view, all radiant with marine beauty, like a sea-Venus, drawn in a shell-car. To stand unmoved at such a spectacle was not possible, as we may remember, even to ponderous Polypheme in the Ovidian ballad, much less to a nimble and highly excitable Homunculus. A commotion is immediately observed in the waters close to Galatea’s car; the silver foam becomes red and glowing; the spark of Homunculus dilates itself into a blaze; a breaking of glass and a plashing of water is heard; and a bright illumination spreads itself widely over the festal waves. Hereupon breaks in full and symphonious the song of the Sirens.

“Hail to Ocean, silver plashing,

Hail to Fire around it flashing,

Hail to pure Air’s breezy pinions,

Hail to deep Earth’s dark dominions;

Blithely to the elements four,

Festal notes symphonious pour.”

And with this erotic explosion the Classical Walpurgis-Night ends, and the third act of the drama commences. This third act is entirely made up of another fanciful piece, exhibiting the phantasmal loves of Faust and Helen. The famous Lacedæmonian beauty appears surrounded by a chorus of Trojan captive maids in the palace of Menelaus, at Sparta. Her husband, on the way back from the weary capture of Troy, is still on the broad seas, Helen having been sent before to prepare a sacrifice in honour of his expected arrival. For this sacrifice everything had been prescribed by Menelaus, only not the victim; and, while Helen is wondering with herself what might be the cause of this omission, Mephistopheles suddenly appears in the mask of one of the Phorcyades, and, giving himself out for the old housekeeper of the palace, succeeds in filling the mind of Helen with no unreasonable fears, that she is, in fact, herself the victim destined by her death to atone for the decennial toils and troubles of the Greeks before Ilium. From the imminent danger thus impending there is no safety for the fair but to throw herself under the guidance of Mephistopheles, into the arms of Faust, who, by his accustomed magical machinery, has established himself in a grand Gothic castle, hard by, among the ridges of Taygetus. No sooner is this resolution taken, than the scene suddenly changes from a classical palace a thousand years before Christ, to a Gothic castle a thousand years after Christ, where, in the midst of knights and squires, courtiers, cavaliers, and other appropriate supernumeraries, marshalled plentifully around, the thaumaturgic Doctor appears as a German prince of the Middle Ages, with dignity and loyal regard, coming forward to pay his homage to the paragon of classical beauty. After a few gallant speeches gracefully made and gracefully responded to, Helen, of course, surrenders at discretion; and the scene changes to a lovely Arcadian district, with wood and water, mountain and mead, richly variegating the pastoral solitude, the abode of love. What is there enacted you may guess partly, but not altogether; you may well imagine that Faust and Helen are there depicted as enjoying all the raptures that, to transcendental lovers, in such a place, naturally belong; but you will not guess that from their phantasmal embrace a son is born, and that this son, under the name of Euphorion, is neither more nor less than impersonated Poetry, the same, or a similar allegorial character, that we were already introduced to in the first act, under the name of the Boy-charioteer. Here, in this third act, he appears brisk and nimble, tricksy as a Mercury, lovely as a Cupid, precocious, impetuous, and elastic as a Chatterton. And, like a Chatterton, he will not run and leap only in the fashion of common boys, but he bounds and skips, right and left, above and below, without reason or measure. Light and agile in every motion, more like a bird than a boy, he is tempted to believe that the air, not the earth, is his proper element, and, notwithstanding the importunate warnings of his parents, assays, like Icarus, to bestride the air, and, like Icarus, falls and perishes. This mournful catastrophe the poet gladly makes use of to dissolve the spell of Helen’s phantasmal existence, and to put a finale on the unsubstantial classical courtship of Doctor Faust. The mother precipitates herself after the son, a second time to find her home in the dim halls of Proserpine; and the hero, by the direction of Mephistopheles, seizes the dropped mantle of Helen, and, wrapping himself in it, is straightway enveloped in clouds and borne aloft through far space, even back to honest Deutschland, in quest of new adventures.

The fourth act is very short, merely a stepping-stone to the fifth, it would appear. In the first scene Faust is exhibited in a new character. Pleasures both real and fantastical having been exhausted, he now girds his loins to work, and that neither in the Moon nor in any extra-terrene sphere, but even on this sorry planet, which his high-soaring spirit had so long despised:—

“No talk of moons! this earth for mighty deeds

Hath scope enough: the man who dares succeeds;

I’ve hatched a plan of manful stout adventure,

And with brave heart on bold career I enter!”

This is a great improvement, no doubt; but, as Faust never does anything to the end of his career without magic and the fellowship of the Devil, the activity into which he immediately dashes has no effect in exciting the admiration of the spectator. The Emperor, it seems—the same with whom we made acquaintance in the first act—notwithstanding the unexpected aid of hidden treasures and paper money, being a lover of pleasure rather than of governing, has fallen into discredit with his subjects; and a counter-Kaiser—according to the not uncommon practice of Popes and Kaisers in the Middle Ages—is set up. Faust, though he professes himself no great admirer of the special sphere of activity which is opened up by war, nevertheless, for the love he bears to the Emperor, who is a good fellow with a thousand foibles, allows himself to be persuaded by Mephistopheles to take part in the war against the counter-Kaiser. This war, as was to be expected with Mephistopheles behind scenes, is brought speedily to a glorious conclusion, and that specially by the intervention of the three mighty men of David (2 Sam. xxiii. 8), and a host of Undenes with water juggleries, whom Mephistopheles calls to the rescue: and the Doctor, like Bellerophon in Homer, is rewarded for his heroic soldiership by an extensive grant of land along the sea-coast, great part of which, however, has yet to be redeemed from the waves. So ends act the fourth.

Act fifth exhibits our hero, now in extreme old age—exactly one hundred years, we learn from Eckermann—after some seven or eight decades of mortal life spent first in all sorts of vain speculation, and then in all sorts of idle dissipation and lawless indulgence, at length settled down as a landed proprietor, a great agricultural improver, a redeemer of waste lands from the sea, a builder of harbours, and a promoter of trade. But in the midst of engrossing business and continued occupation, as much, at least, as axe and spade, ditch and dyke can furnish him withal, he is the old man still, discontented and unhappy. The lord of a vast tract of sea-coast, and of uncounted acres, he is miserable, because an old peasant and his old wife—Baucis and Philemon—are the owners of a little cottage near his house, and a few lime trees, which deform his lawn and obstruct his view. ’Tis the old story of Ahab, King of Israel, and Naboth’s vineyard (1 Kings xxi.), as Mephistopheles, who is well versed in Scripture, takes occasion to inform us. Well, what is to be done? The attendant fiend of course undertakes (like certain Highland proprietors whom we hear of) to expel the good old people from their old dwelling; and Faust, like the same Caledonian aristocracy, solaces his conscience with the salve that he will provide the good people a far more valuable and more convenient lodging in some remote corner of his estate. Meanwhile Mephistopheles, not over scrupulous about means, and not being able to persuade the stiff-necked and timid old snails to creep out of their shell, settles the matter—as has been practised also in the Scottish Highlands—by applying fire to habitation and habitant at once; the pious old pair fall a sacrifice to the greed of the master and the violence of the man; and with this blood on his hands, Faustus now prepares, with all possible heroic confidence, to meet death and to mount up to Heaven.

We are now arrived at the closing scene of this eventful history. ’Tis midnight: the scene is Faust’s castle; before the door of his chamber four grey old hags appear. “I,” says the one, “am called Want.” “I,” says the second, “Guilt.” “I,” says the third, “Care.” “I,” quoth the fourth, “am called Need.” Of these four, however, only one can do, or attempt to do, any harm to the magical Doctor, for he is now a rich man; and rich men can know nothing of Want or Need, nor of Guilt, either, we are told; but Care leaps in through the keyhole, and annoys him a little before his dismissal. The Doctor, however, is heroically determined not to yield to this demon; and he finds his sure remedy for all unpleasant cogitations in unremitted work. The great pioneers of land improvement, canals and ditches, must be proceeded with; and the indefatigable Doctor, even after pestilential Care had blown a blinding blast into his eyes, marches into the grave with the spade and the pick-axe in his hand. Then commences a scene of a most singular character. The terrible jaws of Hell yawn wide on the left side of the stage, and a contest commences between Mephistopheles on the one hand, and the descending angels on the other, for the possession of the soul of Faust. At first the Evil Spirit seems confident of success, strengthened as he is by a numerous host of multiform imps and devils, who come up in swarms from the steaming mouth of the abyss; but the fury of this malignant host is soon disarmed in a very simple way, by a band of young blooming boy-angels scattering a shower of celestial blossoms over the heads of the infernals. Beneath the fire of these apparently innocent weapons, the legion of horned, and dumpy, and wizened devils fall head foremost into the pit whence they had issued; while their mighty master, Mephistopheles, stands so captivated by the bright bloom and the pretty looks of the rosy cherubs, that in the very moment when heroism is most necessary, he loses all his manhood, and a few beardless boys, with psalms and flosculosities, cheat him of the immortal soul which was his by the signature of blood, and by the seal of a lifetime spent in giving free rein to all sorts of foolish fancies and unprincipled iniquities.

After this catastrophe there remains nothing but the formal introduction of Faust to Heaven, for which the closing scene is appropriated. The Virgin Mary, surrounded by pious Anchorites and fair Penitents, with Fathers seraphic and ecstatic, is revealed in the heavenly glory, awaiting the arrival of redeemed souls from earth; and immediately the band of angels that had worsted Mephistopheles appear aloft in triumph, bearing the immortal part of Faust, and singing a hymn, the words of which are intended to convey the moral of the piece:—

“A rescued spirit to the goal

We bring of Earth’s probation;

The ever-active striving soul

Works out its own salvation.

And when, in love and mercy strong,

His God and Saviour meets him,

The angel-choir, to join their throng,

With hearty welcome greets him.”

Among the throng of redeemed Penitents one appears conspicuous, whose name, while she lived on earth, was Margaret; she is close by the Virgin, interceding for Faust, and ever as she mounts with the Queen of Heaven to higher stages of glory, draws the newcomer after her to share in her sempiternal blessedness. The curtain then falls; the redeemed throngs ascend; and the scene resounds with the mystical chorus:—

“Earth and earthly things

Type the celestial,

Shadow and show

Is all glory terrestrial;

Beauty immortal

The rapt spirit hails,

Where the eternally-

Female prevails.”

After so detailed an account of this rich and various exhibition of imaginative power, the student of this great world-drama, to use a German phrase, can have no difficulty in understanding the theology and the theodicy of the great Teutonic poet. The promise of the Prologue in Heaven is fulfilled; there is no such thing as everlasting punishment; and the Evil Spirit is sure to be cheated even of the souls for whom he has most surely bargained, if that soul, after staining itself with any number of sins, only perseveres at last in some course of honourable and useful activity. This is not according to the common Protestant conception in such cases; for Protestantism, having abolished Purgatory, lies under a necessity of peopling Tartarus more largely; and besides, after such a solemn compact with the Evil One, and twenty-four years (for that is the number given in the legend) spent in unrepented indulgence of all sensualities and vanities, it was dramatically as well as theologically inconsistent to redeem such a deliberate and persistent sinner from the damnation for which he had bargained. But the hell of the mediæval Catholic Church, though terrible enough in its pictorial presentation (as many an Italian cloister testifies) was more accommodating in its adaptation to the many forms of human weakness; and so, to magnify the grace of God, and make Christ all in all, after a fashion which the severe Protestant Calvinist is forced to condemn, the mediæval form of the Faust legend could afford to save Faust, notwithstanding his blood-sealed transaction with the Devil; and no one has a right to blame Goethe, morally and theologically, for having adopted this view of the matter. But, though the salvation of Faust, according to the feeling of orthodox mediæval Christianity, is permissible, and even desirable, the manner in which, and the process by which, his salvation is achieved by the German Protestant poet differs very much from the treatment it receives at the hand of the Catholic Church. In Christian theology—and in any healthy system of human Ethics too, I imagine—the forgiveness of a great sinner always implies confession of guilt, and a process, sometimes painful and protracted, of repentance and amendment; but of this not a hint occurs in the second part of Faust; and so the moral instincts of man, which had been so strongly appealed to in the first part, are ignored, with a feeling of great moral dissatisfaction as the unavoidable result. So much for the ethico-theological aspect of the case. Æsthetically, and viewed as a dramatic continuation of the first part, the second part of the poem is much more at fault, and must be pronounced, with all its wealth of imaginative reproduction, and all its luxuriance of rhythmical form, a magnificent failure. If this judgment appears severe, it must be remembered that the very excellence of the first part, considered morally and dramatically, rendered a satisfactory continuation of it, even to the genius of a Goethe, both impolitic and impossible. Who would ever dream of a continuation of Hamlet? Had it pleased our great dramatic master to keep Hamlet alive amid the general catastrophe of the play, as he might lightly have done, the future fate of his hero would only have been a matter of historical curiosity. For dramatic purposes his course was finished. So with Faust. Though he remains on the stage in the pathetic closing scene, dramatically his part is played out. The “Hither to me!” of his fiendish companion is quite enough for the satisfaction of the moral feeling which the catastrophe has excited; all beyond this is a matter, no doubt, for metaphysical speculation and theological solution, but with which the dramatist has nothing to do. But even if there were any feeling in the breast of the spectator, causing him to look for some terrestrial continuation of the sad story which he has been witnessing, by the manner in which he has conducted this continuation the poet has altogether cut himself off from the moral sympathy which so spontaneously flowed as a tribute to his art in the first part. The history of Faust and Margaret, notwithstanding the magical or diabolic background on which it figures, is a simple story of flesh and blood, a story which would remain equally true and equally affecting were the demon and the witches removed altogether from the scene. But now, in this second part, we are charmed by the wand of the fiendish harlequin into a region of mere fancy and phantasmagoria, into a swarming Fair, so to speak, of multitudinous phantasmal figures, through the midst of which the real actors flit to and fro like a few idle civilians amid the ordered files and motley groups of some gigantic host. The primary here is buried in the secondary; the actors are lost in their environment; and the real throughout, in a most unreal fashion, confounded with the ideal. Faust, of course, and Mephistopheles, and even Wagner, peering with glittering eye through the smoke of his alchymical kitchen, are the same creatures of flesh and blood that we were made acquainted with in part one; only all perhaps a little enfeebled in character; Mephistopheles a little more of the conjuror, and a little less of the Devil; Faust much less of a thinker, and not a whit less of a sensualist; Wagner much less modest, and much more besotted in the disnatured studies and fanciful operations of his chemical kitchen. All this is real. But this real Faust becomes enamoured of a phantom Helen; and of this monstrous embrace an ideal poetic child, incarnating, we presume, the contrary beauties of the Classical and the Romantic schools, is the product. Of such a strange jumble we may say truly, as Jeffrey said falsely of Wordsworth’s “Excursion,” “This will never do.” Such a violation of all the principles of common sense and of good taste cannot be pardoned even to Goethe. The faults of men of genius, it has been said, are the consolation of the dunces; but whether the dunces choose to console themselves in this way or not, the fact is certain, that on the stern battlefield of public life, and no less in the flowery realms of imaginative construction, a great genius is precisely the man to make occasionally a great blunder. There may be some few great things, and some wonderful things, and not a few wise things (as who could expect otherwise from Goethe) in the second part of Faust; but it is certainly neither a great drama nor the just sequence of a great drama. I am inclined to compare it with the rich fanciful work familiar to the students of art, in the so-called Loggie, or galleries of Raphael, in the Vatican. In the first part of Faust, Goethe is a great dramatist; in the second part he is an arabesque painter. It is no small matter to compose poetical arabesques, as our poet has done so luxuriantly in the Classical Walpurgis Night, and other parts of this piece; and a very natural affair, too, one may remark, in the circumstances of the present composition. It is rare, perhaps impossible, in the history of literary manifestation, that a poet should commence a great poem in the fervour of youth, continue it through the firmness of middle life, and finish it in the serenity of an advanced old age, with a homogeneousness of inspiration, and a perfectly consistent handling throughout. Goethe, in particular, was a man who grew, as he advanced, into many new shapes, and, of course, grew out of the old ones; and, though he was to the end a consummate artist, and there was no question of decayed powers, much less of dotage, in the grand old octogenarian, it was an artistic blunder in him to weave the fantastic tissue of fair forms, which amused his later years, into a common web with the tale of strong human passion, which had grown into a well-rounded dramatic shape under the influence of his most fervid youthful inspirations. The error lay in the name and the connection perhaps more than in the matter. A classical Walpurgis Night, or a love adventure with a resuscitated Helen of Troy, might have formed a very pleasing exhibition as a masque or show for an academical celebration—as at Oxford, for instance, in Commemoration season—while, as a second part of Faust, it falls flat. Let it contain as many allegories as the wise old poet-philosopher may have meant to smuggle into it, and as many mysteries as the mystery-loving race of German commentators may have strained themselves to draw out of it; as it stands, and where it stands, and with the claims which it necessarily makes, it remains a brilliant blunder and a magnificent mistake; and with this we must be content. Those whose organ of reverence is stronger than their love of truth, will, of course, think otherwise; and this is no doubt the most suitable excuse for any nonsense that may have been thought or written on the subject; but, if it be a part of the wisdom of life to learn to look calmly on plain facts, even when most disagreeable, it belongs no less to an educated literary judgment to admit honestly the special shortcomings of a great genius, without prejudice to his general merits. An ignorant worship is a poor substitute for a just appreciation.

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ.

Dr. Henry Faust, a scholar.

Wagner, Faust’s servant.

Mephistopheles, a Devil.

Margaret, Faust’s love. Also called Gretchen.

Martha, Margaret’s neighbour.

Eliza, an acquaintance of Margaret’s.

Valentin, Margaret’s brother.

Altmayer, Brander, Frosch, Siebel, patrons of Auerbach’s Wine Cellar.

Students, Spirits, Women, Angels, Servants, Beggars, Soldiers, Peasants, Cat-Apes, Witches, Director of the Theatre, Leader of the Orchestra, Idealist, Realist, Sceptic, etc.

DEDICATION.

Prefixed to the Later Editions of Faust.

Ye hover nigh, dim-floating shapes again,

That erst the misty eye of Fancy knew!

Shall I once more your shadowy flight detain,

And the fond dreamings of my youth pursue?

Ye press around!—resume your ancient reign,—

As from the hazy past ye rise to view;

The magic breath that wafts your airy train

Stirs in my breast long-slumbering chords again.

Ye raise the pictured forms of happy days,

And many a dear loved shade comes up with you;

Like the far echo of old-memoried lays,

First love and early friendship ye renew.

Old pangs return; life’s labyrinthine maze

Again the plaint of sorrow wanders through,

And names the loved ones who from Fate received

A bitter call, and left my heart bereaved.

They hear no more the sequel of my song,

Who heard my early chant with open ear;

Dispersed for ever is the favouring throng,

Dumb the response from friend to friend so dear.

My sorrow floats an unknown crowd among,

Whose very praise comes mingled with strange fear;

And they who once were pleased to hear my lay,

If yet they live, have drifted far away.

And I recall with long-unfelt desire

The realm of spirits, solemn, still, serene;

My faltering lay, like the Æolian lyre,

Gives wavering tones with many a pause between;

The stern heart glows with youth’s rekindled fire,

Tear follows tear, where long no tear hath been;

The thing I am fades into distance grey;

And the pale Past stands out a clear to-day.

PRELUDE AT THE THEATRE.

Manager of a Strolling Company.—Stage-poet—Merryfellow.

Manager.

Ye twain, in good and evil day

So oft my solace and my stay,

Say, have ye heard sure word, or wandering rumour

How our new scheme affects the public humour?

Without the multitude we cannot thrive,

Their maxim is to live and to let live.

The posts are up, the planks are fastened, and

Each man’s agog for something gay and grand.

With arched eyebrows they sit already there,

Gaping for something new to make them stare.

I know the public taste, and profit by it;

But still to-day I’ve fears of our succeeding:

’Tis true they’re customed to no dainty diet,

But they’ve gone through an awful breadth of reading.

How shall we make our pieces fresh and new,

And with some meaning in them, pleasing too?

In sooth, I like to see the people pouring

Into our booth, like storm and tempest roaring,

While, as the waving impulse onward heaves them,

The narrow gate of grace at length receives them,

When, long ere it be dark, with lusty knocks

They fight their way on to the money-box,

And like a starving crowd around a baker’s door,

For tickets as for bread they roar.

So wonder-working is the poet’s sway

O’er every heart—so may it work to-day!

Poet.

O mention not that motley throng to me,

Which only seen makes frighted genius pause;

Hide from my view that wild and whirling sea

That sucks me in, and deep and downward draws.

No! let some noiseless nook of refuge be

My heaven, remote from boisterous rude applause,

Where Love and Friendship, as a God inspires,

Create and fan the pure heart’s chastened fires.

Alas! what there the shaping thought did rear,

And scarce the trembling lip might lisping say,

To Nature’s rounded type not always near,

The greedy moment rudely sweeps away.

Oft-times a work, through many a patient year

Must toil to reach its finished fair display;

The glittering gaud may fix the passing gaze,

But the pure gem gains Time’s enduring praise.

Merryfellow.

Pshaw! Time will reap his own; but in our power

The moment lies, and we must use the hour.

The Future, no doubt, is the Present’s heir,

But we who live must first enjoy our share.

Methinks the present of a goodly boy

Has something that the wisest might enjoy.

Whose ready lips with easy lightness brim,

The people’s humour need not trouble him;

He courts a crowd the surer to impart

The quickening word that stirs the kindred heart.

Quit ye like men, be honest bards and true,

Let Fancy with her many-sounding chorus,

Reason, Sense, Feeling, Passion, move before us,

But, mark me well—a spice of folly too!

Manager.

Give what you please, so that you give but plenty;

They come to see, and you must feed their eyes;

Scene upon scene, each act may have its twenty,

To keep them gaping still in fresh surprise:

This is the royal road to public favour;

You snatch it thus, and it is yours for ever.

A mass of things alone the mass secures;

Each comes at last and culls his own from yours.

Bring much, and every one is sure to find,

In your rich nosegay, something to his mind.

You give a piece, give it at once in pieces;

Such a ragout each taste and temper pleases,

And spares, if only they were wise to know it,

Much fruitless toil to player and to poet.

In vain into an artful whole you glue it;

The public in the long run will undo it.

Poet.

What? feel you not the vileness of this trade?

How much the genuine artist ye degrade?

The bungling practice of our hasty school

You raise into a maxim and a rule.

Manager.

All very well!—but when a man

Has forged a scheme, and sketched a plan

He must have sense to use the tool

The best that for the job is fit.

Consider what soft wood you have to split,

And who the people are for whom you write.

One comes to kill a few hours o’ the night;

Another, with his drowsy wits oppressed,

An over-sated banquet to digest;

And not a few, whom least of all we choose,

Come to the play from reading the Reviews.

They drift to us as to a masquerade;

Mere curiosity wings their paces;

The ladies show themselves, and show their silks and laces,

And play their parts well, though they are not paid.

What dream you of, on your poetic height?

A crowded house, forsooth, gives you delight!

Look at your patrons as you should,

You’ll find them one half cold, and one half crude.

One leaves the play to spend the night

Upon a wench’s breast in wild delight;

Another sets him down to cards, or calls

For rattling dice, or clicking billiard balls.

For such like hearers, and for ends like these

Why should a bard the gentle Muses tease?

I tell you, give them more, and ever more, and still

A little more, if you would prove your skill.

And since they can’t discern the finer quality,

Confound them with broad sweep of triviality—

But what’s the matter?—pain or ravishment?

Poet.

If such your service, you must be content

With other servants who will take your pay!

Shall then the bard his noblest right betray?

The right of man, which Nature’s gift imparts,

For brainless plaudits basely jest away?

What gives him power to move all hearts,

Each stubborn element to sway,

What but the harmony, his being’s inmost tone,

That charms all feelings back into his own?

Where listless Nature, her eternal thread,

The unwilling spindle twists around,

And hostile shocks of things that will not wed

With jarring dissonance resound,

Who guides with living pulse the rhythmic flow

Of powers that make sweet music as they go?

Who consecrates each separate limb and soul

To beat in glorious concert with the whole?

Who makes the surgy-swelling billow

Heave with the wildly heaving breast,

And on the evening’s rosy pillow,

Invites the brooding heart to rest?

Who scatters spring’s most lovely blooms upon

The path of the belovèd one?

Who plaits the leaves that unregarded grow

Into a crown to deck the honoured brow?

Who charms the gods? who makes Olympus yield?

The power of man in poet’s art revealed.

Merryfellow.

Then learn such subtle powers to wield,

And on the poet’s business enter

As one does on a love-adventure.

They meet by chance, are pleased, and stay

On being pressed, just for a day;

Then hours to hours are sweetly linked in chain,

Till net-caught by degrees, they find retreat is vain.

At first the sky is bright, then darkly lowers;

To-day, fine thrilling rapture wings the hours,

To-morrow, doubts and anguish have their chance,

And, ere one knows, they’re deep in a romance.

A play like this both praise and profit brings.

Plunge yourself boldly in the stream of things—

What’s lived by all, but known to few—

And bring up something fresh and new,

No matter what; just use your eyes,

And all will praise what all can prize;

Strange motley pictures in a misty mirror,

A spark of truth in a thick cloud of error;

’Tis thus we brew the genuine beverage,

To edify and to refresh the age.

The bloom of youth in eager expectation,

With gaping ears drinks in your revelation;

Each tender sentimental disposition

Sucks from your art sweet woe-be-gone nutrition;

Each hears a part of what his own heart says,

While over all your quickening sceptre sways.

These younglings follow where you bid them go.

Lightly to laughter stirred, or turned to woe,

They love the show, and with an easy swing,

Follow the lordly wafture of your wing;

Your made-up man looks cold on everything,

But growing minds take in what makes them grow.

Poet.

Then give me back the years again,

When mine own spirit too was growing,

When my whole being was a vein

Of thronging songs within me flowing!

Then slept the world in misty blue,

Each bud the nascent wonder cherished,

And all for me the flowerets grew,

That on each meadow richly flourished.

Though I had nothing then, I had a treasure,

The thirst for truth, and in illusion pleasure.

Give me the free, unshackled pinion,

The height of joy, the depth of pain,

Strong hate, and stronger love’s dominion;

O give me back my youth again!

Merryfellow.

The fire of youth, good friend, you need, of course,

Into the hostile ranks to break,

Or, when the loveliest damsels hang by force,

With amorous clinging, from your neck,

When swift your wingèd steps advance

To where the racer’s prize invites you,

Or, after hours of wheeling dance,

The nightly deep carouse invites you.

But to awake the well-known lyre

With graceful touch that tempers fire,

And to a self-appointed goal,

With tuneful rambling on to roll,

Such are your duties, aged sirs; nor we

Less honour pay for this, nor stint your fee;

Old age, not childish, makes the old; but they

Are genuine children of a mellower day.

Manager.

Enough of words: ’tis time that we

Were come to deeds; while you are spinning

Fine airy phrases, fancy-free,

We might have made some good beginning.

What stuff you talk of being in the vein!

A lazy man is never in the vein.

If once your names are on the poet’s roll,

The Muses should be under your control.

You know our want; a good stiff liquor

To make their creeping blood flow quicker;

Then brew the brewst without delay;

What was not done to-day, to-morrow

Will leave undone for greater sorrow.

Don’t stand, and stare, and block the way,

But with a firm, set purpose lay

Hold of your bright thoughts as they rise to view,

And bid them stay;

Once caught, they will not lightly run away,

Till they have done what in them lies to do.

Among the sons of German play,

Each tries his hand at what he may;

Therefore be brilliant in your scenery,

And spare no cost on your machinery.

Let sun and moon be at your call,

And scatter stars on stars around;

Let water, fire, and rocky wall,

And bird and beast and fish abound.

Thus in your narrow booth mete forth

The wide creation’s flaming girth,

And wing your progress, pondered well,

From heaven to earth, from earth to hell.

PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN.

The Lord—The Heavenly Hosts: afterwards Mephistopheles.

Raphael.

The Sun doth chime his ancient music

’Mid brothered spheres’ contending song.

And on his fore-appointed journey

With pace of thunder rolls along.

Strength drink the angels from his glory,

Though none may throughly search his way:

God’s works rehearse their wondrous story

As bright as on Creation’s day.

Gabriel.

And swift and swift beyond conceiving

The pomp of earth is wheeled around,

Alternating Elysian brightness

With awful gloom of night profound.

Up foams the sea, a surging river,

And smites the steep rock’s echoing base,

And rock and sea, unwearied ever,

Spin their eternal circling race.

Michael.

And storm meets storm with rival greeting,

From sea to land, from land to sea,

While from their war a virtue floweth,

That thrills with life all things that be.

The lightning darts his fury, blazing

Before the thunder’s sounding way;

But still thy servants, Lord, are praising

The gentle going of thy day.

All the Three.

Strength drink the angels from thy glory,

Though none may search thy wondrous way;

Thy works repeat their radiant story,

As bright as on Creation’s day.

Mephistopheles.

Sith thou, O Lord, approachest near,

And how we fare would’st fain have information,

And thou of old wert glad to see me here,

I stand to-day amid the courtly nation.

Pardon; no words of fine address I know,

Nor could, though all should hoot me down with sneers;

My pathos would move laughter, and not tears,

Wert thou not weaned from laughter long ago.

Of suns and worlds I’ve nought to say,

I only see how men must fret their lives away.

The little god o’ the world jogs and jogs on, the same

As when from ruddy clay he took his name;

And, sooth to say, remains a riddle, just

As much as when you shaped him from the dust.

Perhaps a little better he had thriven,

Had he not got the show of glimmering light from heaven:

He calls it reason, and it makes him free

To be more brutish than a brute can be;

He is, methinks, with reverence of your grace,

Like one of the long-leggèd race

Of grasshoppers that leap in the air, and spring,

And straightway in the grass the same old song they sing;

’Twere well that from the grass he never rose,

On every stubble he must break his nose!

The Lord.

Hast thou then nothing more to say?

And art thou here again to-day

To vent thy grudge in peevish spite

Against the earth, still finding nothing right?

Mephistopheles.

True, Lord; I find things there no better than before;

I must confess I do deplore

Man’s hopeless case, and scarce have heart myself

To torture the poor miserable elf.

The Lord.

Dost thou know Faust?

Mephistopheles.

The Doctor?

The Lord.

Ay: my servant.

Mephistopheles.

Indeed! and of his master’s will observant,

In fashion quite peculiar to himself;

His food and drink are of no earthly taste,

A restless fever drives him to the waste.

Himself half seems to understand

How his poor wits have run astrand;

From heaven he asks each loveliest star,

Earth’s chiefest joy must jump to his demand,

And all that’s near, and all that’s far,

Soothes not his deep-moved spirit’s war.

The Lord.

Though for a time he blindly grope his way,

Soon will I lead him into open day;

Well knows the gardener, when green shoots appear,

That bloom and fruit await the ripening year.

Mephistopheles.

What wager you? you yet shall lose that soul!

Only give me full license, and you’ll see

How I shall lead him softly to my goal.

The Lord.

As long as on the earth he lives

Thou hast my license full and free;

Man still must stumble while he strives.

Mephistopheles.

My thanks for that! the dead for me

Have little charm; my humour seeks

The bloom of lusty life, with plump and rosy cheeks;

For a vile corpse my tooth is far too nice,

I do just as the cat does with the mice.

The Lord.

So be it; meanwhile, to tempt him thou art free;

Go, drag this spirit from his native fount,

And lead him on, canst thou his will surmount,

Into perdition down with thee;

But stand ashamed at last, when thou shalt see

An honest man, ’mid all his strivings dark,

Finds the right way, though lit but by a spark.

Mephistopheles.

Well, well; short time will show; into my net

I’ll draw the fish, and then I’ve won my bet;

And when I’ve carried through my measure

Loud blast of trump shall blaze my glory;

Dust shall he eat, and that with pleasure,

Like my cousin the snake in the rare old story.

The Lord.

And thou mayst show thee here in upper sky

Unhindered, when thou hast a mind;

I never hated much thee or thy kind;

Of all the spirits that deny,

The clever rogue sins least against my mind.

For, in good sooth, the mortal generation,

When a soft pillow they may haply find,

Are far too apt to sink into stagnation;

And therefore man for comrade wisely gets

A devil, who spurs, and stimulates, and whets.

But you, ye sons of heaven’s own choice,

In the one living Beautiful rejoice!

The self-evolving Energy divine

Enclasp you round with love’s embrace benign,

And on the floating forms of earth and sky

Stamp the fair type of thought that may not die.

Mephistopheles.

From time to time the ancient gentleman

I see, and keep on the best terms I can.

In a great Lord ’tis surely wondrous civil

So face to face to hold talk with the devil.

FAUST.

ACT I.

Scene I.

Night.

Faust discovered sitting restless at his desk, in a narrow high-vaulted Gothic chamber.

Faust.

There now, I’ve toiled my way quite through

Law, Medicine, and Philosophy,

And, to my sorrow, also thee,

Theology, with much ado;

And here I stand, poor human fool,

As wise as when I went to school.

Master, ay, Doctor, titled duly,

An urchin-brood of boys unruly

For ten slow-creeping years and mo,

Up and down, and to and fro,

I lead by the nose: and this I know,

That vain is all our boasted lore—

A thought that burns me to the core!

True, I am wiser than all their tribe,

Doctor, Master, Priest, and Scribe;

No scruples nor doubts in my bosom dwell,

I fear no devil, believe no hell;

But with my fear all joy is gone,

All rare conceit of wisdom won;

All dreams so fond, all faith so fair,

To make men better than they are.

Nor gold have I, nor gear, nor fame,

Station, or rank, or honoured name,

Here like a kennelled cur I lie!

Therefore the magic art I’ll try,

From spirit’s might and mouth to draw,

Mayhap, some key to Nature’s law;

That I no more, with solemn show,

May sweat to teach what I do not know;

That I may ken the bond that holds

The world, through all its mystic folds;

The hidden seeds of things explore,

And cheat my thought with words no more.

O might thou shine, thou full moon bright,

For the last time upon my woes,

Thou whom, by this brown desk alone,

So oft my wakeful eyne have known.

Then over books and paper rose

On me thy sad familiar light!

Oh, that beneath thy friendly ray,

On peaky summit I might stray,

Round mountain caves with spirits hover,

And flit the glimmering meadows over,

And from all fevered fumes of thinking free,

Bathe me to health within thy dewy sea.

In vain! still pines my prisoned soul

Within this curst dank dungeon-hole!

Where dimly finds ev’n heaven’s blest ray,

Through painted glass, its struggling way.

Shut in by heaps of books up-piled,

All worm-begnawed and dust-besoiled,

With yellowed papers, from the ground

To the smoked ceiling, stuck around;

Caged in with old ancestral lumber,

Cases, boxes, without number,

Broken glass, and crazy chair,

Dust and brittleness everywhere;

This is thy world, a world for a man’s soul to breathe in!

And ask I still why in my breast,

My heart beats heavy and oppressed?

And why some secret unknown sorrow

Freezes my blood, and numbs my marrow?

’Stead of the living sphere of Nature,

Where man was placed by his Creator,

Surrounds thee mouldering dust alone,

The grinning skull and skeleton.

Arise! forth to the fields, arise!

And this mysterious magic page,

From Nostradamus’ hand so sage,[n1]

Should guide thee well. Thy raptured eyes

Shall then behold what force compels

The tuneful spheres to chime together;

When, taught by Nature’s mightiest spells,

Thine innate spring of soul upwells,

As speaks one spirit to another.

In vain my thought gropes blindly here,

To make those sacred symbols clear;

Ye unseen Powers that hover near me,

Answer, I charge ye, when ye hear me!

[He opens the book, and sees the sign of the Macrocosm.][n2]

Ha! what ecstatic joy this page reveals,

At once through all my thrilling senses flowing!

Young holy zest of life my spirit feels

In every vein, in every nerve, new glowing!

Was it a God whose finger drew these signs,

That, with mild pulse of joy, and breath of rest,

Smooth the tumultuous heaving of my breast,

And with mysterious virtue spread the lines

Of Nature’s cipher bare to mortal sight?

Am I a God? so wondrous pure the light

Within me! in these tokens I behold

The powers by which all Nature is besouled.

Now may I reach the sage’s words aright;

“The world of spirits is not barred;

Thy sense is shut, thy heart is dead!

Up, scholars, bathe your hearts so hard,

In the fresh dew of morning’s red!”

[He scans carefully the sign.]

How mingles here in one the soul with soul,

And lives each portion in the living whole!

How heavenly Powers, ascending and descending,

From hand to hand their golden ewers are lending,

And bliss-exhaling swing from pole to pole!

From the high welkin to earth’s centre bounding,

Harmonious all through the great All resounding!

What wondrous show! but ah! ’tis but a show!

Where grasp I thee, thou infinite Nature, where?

And you, ye teeming breasts? ye founts whence flow

All living influences fresh and fair?

Whereon the heavens and earth dependent hang,

Where seeks relief the withered bosom’s pang?

Your founts still well, and I must pine in vain!

[He turns the book over impatiently, and beholds the sign of the Spirit of the Earth.]

What different working hath this sign?

Thou Spirit of the Earth, I feel thee nearer;

Already sees my strengthened spirit clearer;

I glow as I had drunk new wine.

New strength I feel to plunge into the strife,

And bear the woes and share the joys of life,

Buffet the blasts, and where the wild waves dash,

Look calmly on the shipwreck’s fearful crash!

Clouds hover o’er me—

The moon is dim!

The lamp’s flame wanes!

It smokes!—Red beams dart forth

Around my head—and from the vaulted roof

Falls a cold shudder down,

And grips me!—I feel

Thou hover’st near me, conjured Spirit, now;

Reveal thee!

Ha! how swells with wild delight

My bursting heart!

And feelings, strange and new,

At once through all my ravished senses dart!

I feel my inmost soul made thrall to thee!

Thou must! thou must! and were my life the fee!

[He seizes the book, and pronounces with a mysterious air the sign of the Spirit. A red flame darts forth, and the Spirit appears in the flame.

Spirit.

Who calls me?

Faust. [turning away]

Vision of affright!

Spirit.

Thou hast with mighty spells invoked me,

And to obey thy call provoked me,

And now——

Faust.

Hence from my sight!

Spirit.

Thy panting prayer besought my might to view,

To hear my voice, and know my semblance too;

Now bending from my native sphere to please thee,

Here am I!—ha! what pitiful terrors seize thee,

And overman thee quite! where now the call

Of that proud soul, that scorned to own the thrall

Of earth, a world within itself created,

And bore and cherished? that with its fellows sated

Swelled with prophetic joy to leave its sphere,

And live a spirit with spirits, their rightful peer.

Where art thou, Faust? whose invocation rung

Upon mine ear, whose powers all round me clung?

Art thou that Faust? whom melts my breath away,

Trembling even to the life-depths of thy frame,

Like a poor worm that crawls into his clay!

Faust.

Shall I then yield to thee, thou thing of flame?

I am that Faust, and Spirit is my name!

Spirit.

Where life’s floods flow

And its tempests rave,

Up and down I wave,

Flit I to and fro!

Birth and the grave,

Life’s hidden glow,

A shifting motion,

A boundless ocean

Whose waters heave

Eternally;

Thus on the sounding loom of Time I weave

The living mantle of the Deity.

Faust.

Thou who round the wide world wendest,

Thou busy Spirit, how near I feel to thee!

Spirit.

Thou’rt like the spirit whom thou comprehendest,

Not me! [Vanishes.

Faust.

Not thee!

Whom, then?

I, image of the Godhead,

Dwarfed by thee! [Knocking is heard.]

O death!—’tis Wagner’s knock—I know it well,

My famulus; he comes to mar the spell!

Woe’s me that such bright vision of the spheres

Must vanish when this pedant-slave appears!

Scene II.

Enter Wagner in night-gown and night-cap; a lamp in his hand.

Wagner.

Your pardon, sir, I heard your voice declaiming,

No doubt some old Greek drama, and I came in,

To profit by your learned recitation;

For in these days the art of declamation

Is held in highest estimation;

And I have heard asserted that a preacher

Might wisely have an actor for his teacher.

Faust.

Yes; when our parsons preach to make grimaces,

As here and there a not uncommon case is.

Wagner.

Alack! when a poor wight is so confined

Amid his books, shut up from all mankind,

And sees the world scarce on a holiday,

As through a telescope and far away,

How may he hope, with nicely tempered skill,

To bend the hearts he knows not to his will?

Faust.

What you don’t feel, you’ll hunt to find in vain.

It must gush from the soul, possess the brain,

And with an instinct kindly force compel

All captive hearts to own the grateful spell;

Go to! sit o’er your books, and snip and glue

Your wretched piece-work, dressing your ragout

From others’ feasts, your piteous flames still blowing

From sparks beneath dull heaps of ashes glowing;

Vain wonderment of children and of apes,

If with such paltry meed content thou art;

The human heart to heart he only shapes,

Whose words flow warm from human heart to heart.

Wagner.

But the delivery is a chief concern

In Rhetoric; and alas! here I have much to learn.

Faust.

Be thine to seek the honest gain,

No shallow-tinkling fool!

Sound sense finds utterance for itself,

Without the critic’s rule.

If clear your thought, and your intention true,

What need to hunt for words with much ado?

The trim orations your fine speaker weaves,

Crisping light shreds of thought for shallow minds,

Are unrefreshing as the foggy winds

That whistle through the sapless autumn leaves.

Wagner.

Alas! how long is art,

And human life how short!

I feel at times with all my learned pains,

As if a weight of lead were at my heart,

And palsy on my brains.

How high to climb up learning’s lofty stair,

How hard to find the helps that guide us there;

And when scarce half the way behind him lies,

His glass is run, and the poor devil dies!

Faust.

The parchment-roll is that the holy river,

From which one draught shall slake the thirst for ever?

The quickening power of science only he

Can know, from whose own soul it gushes free.

Wagner.

And yet the spirit of a bygone age,

To re-create may well the wise engage;

To know the choicest thoughts of every ancient sage,

And think how far above their best we’ve mounted high!

Faust.

O yes, I trow, even to the stars, so high!

My friend, the ages that are past

Are as a book with seven seals made fast;

And what men call the spirit of the age,

Is but the spirit of the gentlemen

Who glass their own thoughts in the pliant page,

And image back themselves. O, then,

What precious stuff they dish, and call’t a book,

Your stomach turns at the first look;

A heap of rubbish, and a lumber room,

At best some great state farce with proclamations,

Pragmatic maxims, protocols, orations,

Such as from puppet-mouths do fitly come!

Wagner.

But then the world!—the human heart and mind!

Somewhat of this to know are all inclined.

Faust.

Yes! as such knowledge goes! but what man dares

To call the child by the true name it bears?

The noble few that something better knew,

And to the gross reach of the general view,

Their finer feelings bared, and insight true,

From oldest times were burnt and crucified.

I do beseech thee, friend,—’tis getting late,

’Twere wise to put an end to our debate.

Wagner.

Such learned talk to draw through all the night

With Doctor Faust were my supreme delight;

But on the morrow, being Easter, I

Your patience with some questions more may try.

With zeal I’ve followed Learning’s lofty call,

Much I have learned, but fain would master all. [Exit.

Scene III.

Faust. [alone]

Strange how his pate alone hope never leaves,

Who still to shallow husks of learning cleaves!

With greedy hand who digs for hidden treasure,

And, when he finds a grub, rejoiceth above measure!

Durst such a mortal voice usurp mine ear

When all the spirit-world was floating near?

Yet, for this once, my thanks are free,

Thou meanest of earth’s sons, to thee!

Thy presence drew me back from sheer despair,

And shock too keen for mortal nerve to bear;

Alas! so giant-great the vision came,

That I might feel me dwarf, ev’n as I am.

I, God’s own image that already seemed

To gaze where Truth’s eternal mirror gleamed,

And, clean divested of this cumbering clay,

Basked in the bliss of heaven’s vivific ray;

I, more than cherub, with fresh pulses glowing,

Who well nigh seemed through Nature’s deep veins flowing

Like a pure god, creative virtue knowing,

What sharp reproof my hot presumption found!

One word of thunder smote me to the ground.

Alas! ’tis true! not I with thee and thine

May dare to cope! the strength indeed was mine

To make thee own my call, but not

To chain thee to the charmèd spot.

When that blest rapture thrilled my frame,

I felt myself so small, so great;

But thou didst spurn me back with shame,

Into this crazy human state.

Where find I aid? what follow? what eschew?

Shall I that impulse of my soul obey?

Alas! alas! but I must feel it true,

The pains we suffer and the deeds we do,

Are clogs alike in the free spirit’s way.

The godlike essence of our heaven-born powers

Must yield to strange and still more strange intrusion;

Soon as the good things of this world are ours,

We deem our nobler self a vain illusion,

And heaven-born instincts—very life of life—

Are strangled in the low terrestrial strife.

Young fancy, that once soared with flight sublime,

On venturous vans, ev’n to th’ Eternal’s throne,

Now schools her down a little space to own,

When in the dark engulphing stream of time,

Our fair-faced pleasures perish one by one.

Care nestles deep in every heart,

And, cradling there the secret smart,

Rocks to and fro, and peace and joy are gone.

What though new masks she still may wear,

Wealth, house and hall, with acres rich and rare,

As wife or child appear she, water, flame,

Dagger, or poison, she is still the same;

And still we fear the ill which happens never,

And what we lose not are bewailing ever.

Alas! alas! too deep ’tis felt! too deep!

With gods may vie no son of mortal clay;

More am I like to worms that crawl and creep,

And dig, and dig through earth their lightless way,

Which, while they feed on dust in narrow room,

Find from the wanderer’s foot their death-blow and their tomb.

Is it not dust that this old wall

From all its musty benches shows me?

And dust the trifling trumperies all

That in this world of moths enclose me?

Here is it that I hope to find

Wherewith to sate my craving mind?

Need I spell out page after page,

To know that men in every age

And every clime, have spurred in vain

The jaded muscle and the tortured brain,

And here and there, with centuries between,

One happy man belike hath been?

Thou grinning skull, what wouldst thou say,

Save that thy brain, in chase of truth, like mine,

With patient toil pursued its floundering way

By glimmering lights that through dim twilight-shine?

Ye instruments, in sooth, now laugh at me,

With wheel, and cog-wheel, ring, and cylinder;

At Nature’s door I stood; ye should have been the key,

But though your ward be good, the bolt ye cannot stir.

Mysterious Nature may not choose

To unveil her secrets to the stare of day,

And what from the mind’s eye she stores away,

Thou canst not force from her with levers and with screws.

Thou antique gear, why dost thou cumber

My chamber with thy useless lumber?

My father housed thee on this spot,

And I must keep thee, though I need thee not!

Thou parchment roll that hast been smoked upon

Long as around this desk the sorry lamp-light shone;

Much better had I spent my little gear,

Than with this little to sit mouldering here;

Why should a man possess ancestral treasures,

But by possession to enlarge his pleasures?

The thing we use not a dead burden lies,

But what the moment brings the wise man knows to prize.

But what is this? there in the corner; why

Does that flask play the magnet to mine eye?

And why within me does this strange light shine,

As the soft nightly moon through groves of sombre pine?

I greet thee, matchless phial; and with devotion

I take thee down, and in thy mellow potion

I reverence human wit and human skill.

Fine essence of the opiate dew of sleep,

Dear extract of all subtle powers that kill,

Be mine the first-fruits of thy strength to reap!

I look on thee, and soothed is my heart’s pain;

I grasp thee, straight is lulled my racking brain,

And wave by wave my soul’s flood ebbs away.

I see wide ocean’s swell invite my wistful eyes,

And at my feet her sparkling mirror lies;

To brighter shores invites a brighter day.

A car of fire comes hovering o’er my head,

With gentle wafture; now let me pursue

New flight adventurous, through the starry blue,

And be my wingèd steps unburdened sped

To spheres of uncramped energy divine!

And may indeed this life of gods be mine,

But now a worm, and cased in mortal clay?

Yes! only let strong will high thought obey,

To turn thy back on the blest light of day,

And open burst the portals which by most

With fear, that fain would pass them by, are crossed.

Now is the time by deeds, not words, to prove

That earth-born man yields not to gods above.

Before that gloomy cavern not to tremble,

Where all those spectral shapes of dread assemble,

Which Fancy, slave of every childish fear,

Bids, to the torment of herself, appear;

Forward to strive unto that passage dire,

Whose narrow mouth seems fenced with hell’s collected fire;

With glad resolve this leap to make, even though

That thing we call our soul should into nothing flow!

Now come thou forth! thou crystal goblet clear,

From out thy worshipful old case,

Where thou hast lain unused this many a year.

In days of yore right gaily didst thou grace

The festive meetings of my grey-beard sires,

When passed from hand to hand the draught that glee inspires.

Thy goodly round, the figures there

Pictured with skill so quaint and rare,

Each lusty drinker’s duty to declare

In ready rhyme what meaning they might bear,

And at one draught to drain the brimming cup,—

All this recalls full many a youthful night.

Now to no comrade shall I yield thee up,

Nor whet my wit upon thy pictures bright;

Here is a juice intoxicates the soul

Quickly. With dark brown flood it crowns the bowl.

Let this last draught, my mingling and my choice,

With blithesome heart be quaffed, and joyful voice,

A solemn greeting to the rising morn!

[A sound of bells is heard, and distant quire-singing.

Quire of Angels.

Christ is arisen!

Joy be to mortal man,

Whom, since the world began,

Evils inherited,

Faust: A Tragedy

FAUST: A TRAGEDY

TRANSLATOR’S DEDICATION.

CONTENTS.

PREFACE.

PRELIMINARY.

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ.

DEDICATION.

PRELUDE AT THE THEATRE.

PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN.

FAUST.

ACT I.

Scene I.

Scene II.

Scene III.