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THE TWO FAUSTS.*

THE history of the life and death of Dr. Faustus, who sold himself to the devil, once gave a tragedy to the British stage, long amused the nursery, and within the last half-century has been made, by the genius of the German Goethe, to furnish food for reflection to every thinking man of letters. In the following essay to examine the two great dramas which have been built upon the legend, the writer must begin by warning the reader, that Goethe is to him a sealed volume. Our first acquaintance with his Faustus was through the French of M. Stapfer of Belgium; this, with the English version of Dr. Anster, we humbly presume to hope, gives a thorough idea of the original. Every important passage has been subjected to a new translation by dissatisfied scholars, but we apprehend that the differences which exist between them are rather characteristic of the peculiar train of thought of the correcting critic, than the detection or correction of serious error. We have, for example, a translation of the Walpurgis Night, by Shelly, varying considerably from that of Dr. Anster; and yet this gentleman does not hesitate to say in his preface, that had he not anticipated the publication of Shelly's poem, he should have hazarded asking the permission of his relatives to reprint the fragments from his poems, rather than venture himself on a translation. Confessing thus candidly our ignorance of the original, we must pray the reader to put as much faith in Dr. Anster as we do ourselves, and shall not hereafter apologize for quoting from his book.

Of the original legend we must also acknowledge our ignorance. Some time about 1590,f "The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Dr. Faustus," written by Kit Marlowe, was

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exhibited by the Lord Admiral's servants. Marlowe, whose brief career of thirty-one years was in point of time contemporaneous with Shakspeare, is as an author or dramatist his predecessor. His is the first great name in the annals of British dramatic literature. He helped to found the stage, and then sank into obscurity, his light being dimmed by the superior lustre of his immortal successor. The excellency of Faustus was undoubted, but it was forgotten in the surpassing greatness of Hamlet and Macbeth. The legend again resumed its dominion in the nursery and around the winter's hearth, until the great German poet invested it with a new dignity, and it then began to be recollected that an English poet had formerly handled the same subject. A brief notice of each is the object of the present article.

There is not, however, much ground whereon to institute a comparison between the two poems. The English poem is a tragedy, written for the stage, and formerly acted. The German has very little more of the drama about it than the dialogue, the scenery, and what may be called stage directions. The English drama has all the simplicity of the sixteenth century, the German all the refinement of the nineteenth. The Faustus of Marlowe is a man, a mere man; a man in all his strength, and in all his weakness; a man who claims our sympathy even while he sins, for his sins are natural, tangible, and (for it is hard to rid ourselves of hereditary superstitions) possible. The hero of Goethe is, we think, something less than a man. Profoundly learned, he is yet the slave of profound ignorance. The Faustus of Marlowe knows that sorrow must follow sin, and justly reproaches no one but himself for his own misery; that

The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, written by Ch. Marlowe.

1590.

Faustus, a Dramatic Mystery. Translated from the German of Goethe. By John Anster, LL.D. London. 1835.

† Marlowe was slain in May, 1593, by Francis Archer.

The royal theatres were not patented until the accession of James I. Before that time the theatres were under the patronage of some powerful nobleman.

of the German, on the contrary, seems never to consider himself aught but as a puppet in the leading-strings of his master, and showers unavailing reproaches upon his infernal guide for every mishap which common sense should teach him to be the inevitable result of his own folly. The Faustus of Marlowe is at least blinded by sin, that of Goethe sins by shutting his own eyes. The English poet seems to have had a keen sense of the truth of divine revelation, the German to have viewed it as an object of cold and wordy criticism,—

The emptiness of human learning fills the mind of Marlowe's Faustus with dissatisfaction and disgust. A misunderstanding of a text of Scripture wherein all men are included under sin drives him to despair, and tempts him to add to his other sins the deeper one of magic. We have said that he was blinded by sin. We do not desire to enter into a theological controversy on the influence of sin over a man's conduct. The apprehension of the consequences of sins already committed, involves him more deeply :

"Seeing Faustus hath incurred eternal death,

By desperate thoughts against Jove's deity."

This is the motive which impels him. As to the rest, he sins with open eyes. The devils lure him with no delusive joys in expectancy. The truth, the naked truth they are compelled to tell him, as to their own misery and their lost happiness.

We give a part of his dialogue with Mephistopheles.*

"Faustus.-Who is this Lucifer, thy lord? Mephostophilis.-Arch regent, and commander of all spirits. Faustus.-Was not that Lucifer an angel

once ?

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philis so passionate

For being deprived of the joys of heaven!
Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude,
And scorn those joys thou never shalt
possess.

Go, bear these tidings to great Lucifer:
Seeing Faustus hath incurred eternal death
By desperate thoughts against Jove's deity,
Say he surrenders up his soul
Letting him live in all voluptuousness,
So he will spare him four-and-twenty years,
Having thee ever to attend on me;
To give me whatsoever I shall ask;
To tell me whatsoever I demand;
To slay mine enemies and to aid my friends,
And always be obedient to my will,"

The good and bad angels of Faustus enter the lists. The one urges him onward, the other admonishes repentance and prayer. Even the devil dares not lie. When asked what good the possession of Fautus's soul would do lamen miseris socios habuisse doloris,” to Lucifer, the candid answer is, "Soa phrase best translated by the vulgar adage-" Misery loves company." Wealth and honors, sensual delights, gain the victory over the better angel of the unfortunate Doctor, and the compact with Lucifer is signed, sealed, and delivered with all the formalities of a regular legal transaction.

Marlowe calls him Mephostophilis.

Let us now turn to the German drama. We pass over the prologue, evidently borrowed from the book of Job. It is difficult to avoid the idea of blasphemy in perusing it, and yet perhaps it would be difficult to produce a sentence or even a line, which would warrant the accusation. The admirers of Goethe defend him by the example of the earlier dramatists, who abound in similar scenes. This defence would be conclusive were the poem contemporary with those whose example is quoted to defend it. The moral sentiments are progressive; the preacher who should now use the language of Olivier Maillard, would be deprived of his pulpit. Yet Maillard was no unworthy precursor of Luther. But to return from our digression: Mephistopheles asks and obtains from God permission to tempt his servant Faustus. It is impossible not to fall into the track of every critic on Faustus, and inquire what was the grand idea intended to be conveyed by the writer. A great critic himself, the poet is in spite of ourselves made to pass through the same ordeal to which he has subjected others. If in Marlowe we find that he has dealt out poetical justice, we care very little about the moral. In Goethe, on the contrary, we care little for any sort of poetical justice, but involuntarily ask what system of philosophy the poet intends to inculcate. We naturally look for this in the prologue. Faustus is held forth as a good man. He is the servant of Der Herr, and he, at least, in giving permission for the temptation of his servant, announces a sentiment which we cannot avoid believing is to be the moral of the poem, but which is singularly and fatally falsified at every step in the subsequent career of the subject of the experiment:

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Marlowe, as we have already seen, makes Faustus embrace the study of magic from despair at the consequences of sin. The Faustus of Goethe is introduced to us as a proficient in the black art. At his call, spirits answer from the "vasty deep," and he holds familiar converse with them. He is oppressed with a sense of the littleness of his own nature, the natural limits to the acquisition of knowledge drives him to distraction. Life to him is clothed in the darkest habiliments. The same unhealthy spirit which made Childe Harold imagine himself unhappy, or rather which prevented him from becoming happy, is our hero's. And here we see a marked difference between the terms of the compact he makes with Lucifer, and that entered into by the hero of the English dramatist. The latter, undisturbed by the self-inflicted woes of a sickly imagination, barters for pleasure. Viewing eternity as lost, he makes an effort to enjoy time. The former, on the contrary, defies the power of Lucifer even for worldly pleasure :

"Comfort and quiet!-no, no! none of

these

not.

For me;-I ask them not—I seek them
If ever I upon the bed of sloth
Lie down and rest, then be the hour in

which

I so lie down and rest, my last of life.
Canst thou by falsehood or by flattery
Make me one moment with myself at peace,
Cheat me into tranquillity? Come, then,
And welcome life's last day-be this our
wager!"

A safe compact this with Lucifer, and one which shows a better knowledge of the consequences of sin than was possessed by Marlowe's Faustus. As his good angel was continually urging him to repentance, so the man who wilfully commits evil will forever be attended by the stings of a remorseful conscience.

The

But we have anticipated. drama is considerably advanced before we arrive at the compact with Mephistopheles. The opening scene 18 a beautiful one, and the poet has added to its beauties by the introduction of an unexpected jeu de théatre. Faustus is introduced to us on Easter even, reflecting painfully on his own condition. The reputation he enjoys among men,

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In dusky gloom immers'd? Oh! rather speak

To hearts of soft and penetrable mould!
I hear your message, but I have not faith-
And miracle is Faith's beloved offspring!
I cannot force myself into the spheres
Where those good tidings of great joy are
heard;

And yet, from youth, familiar with the sounds,

E'en now they call me back again to life; Oh! once, in boyhood's time, the love of heaven

Came down upon me with mysterious kiss, Hallowing the stillness of the sabbathday!

Then did the voices of those bells, melodious,

Mingle with hopes and feelings mystical; And prayer was then, indeed, a burning joy!

Feelings resistless, incommunicable, Drove me a wanderer through fields and woods.

The tears gushed hot and fast-then was the birth

Of a new life and a new birth for me; These bells announced the merry sports of youth,

This music welcomed in the merry spring; And now am I once more a little child, And old Remembrance, twining round my heart,

Forbids this act, and checks my daring steps

Then sing ye forth-sweet songs that breathe of heaven!

Tears come, and Earth hath won her child again."

We shall not follow the Doctor through the various scenes offered to

tempt him by Mephistopheles. The boon that he requires is only rapturous excitement. The brawls of a tavern only fill him with disgust; in the witch's retreat he drinks the elixir of life, and becomes sensible to the passion of love.

As soon as Margaret appears upon the scene, we feel ourselves fascinated; it is no longer possible to lay down the book. But the fascination is one of

Her

painful interest. She is represented as being in the humble walks of life, and it is, perhaps, this very circumstance which, by exposing an additional weakness, gives her a strange claim upon our sympathy. It is an imperfect sympathy, however. Young, tender, ignorant, confiding, passionate, we see her rushing on to destruction. He who seeks her love, can be guided only by an unhallowed instinct. Knowing this, we dare not, cannot sympathize with any of those sweet emotions which, caused by a purer sentiment, would have formed one of the most attractive pictures of female devotion. She is touchingly drawn throughout. artless prattle with Faustus before she falls, teaches us that a heart so tender and confiding must surely be worth the devotion of a true and manly bosom; and we shudder at the reflection, that invisible and infernal agents are at work to crush it. Her wo at her fall, and the fatal consequences which follow it, (the death of her mother and the assassination of her brother,) are heartrending in the extreme; and have not, however, for her the wholesome and consoling sympathy with which we compassionate the frailties of others; we feel that the dreadful agonies which she endures in the cathedral, when, while others are praying, an evil spirit comes to torment her, are but the natural goadings of remorse, and it is with a sort of melancholy pleasure that we behold her firmness, (or rather madness, for it is madness which the poet depicts,) in resisting the efforts of Faustus to save her from her prison and the awful consequences of childmurder, feeling assured that the power of the evil one over her has passed away, and that though human laws shall punish, pardon and salvation may

await her hereafter.

Were we to follow merely our fancy in making a quotation, we would insert almost every passage in which Mar

garet appears; we must, however, be moderate, and shall give at a venture the following extract from one of her first conversations with Faustus; the topics may raise a smile in those whose taste is based on the dialogues of fashionable novels; we have, however, the deepest reverence for the unsophisticated nature, the bewitching artlessness, which she here exhibits: "Margaret.-Think of me when you are A moment, now and then-of you gone, I shall have time enough to think. Faustus.-Your time is passed then, much

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Its cradle was by my bedside;

It kept me half the night awake. To make it quiet, when I tried,

At times must I get up, to take The little urchin into bed:

This would not do-then must I rise, Walk up and down with measured tread,

Then daylight brought its tasks to me :
And seek with songs to hush its cries.
Ere dawn must I at washing be-
Go to the market,-light the fire:
And, if I felt the trouble tire
On one day, 'twas the same the next-
I felt dispirited and vext
At times; but I was wrong in this;
For, after all, his labor is

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