Faust: A Tragedy
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