Before I had ever seen any part of Goethe's Faust[1], though, of course,
when I was familiar enough with Marlowe's, I conceived and drew up the plan
of a work, a drama, which was to be, to my mind, what the Faust was to
Goethe's. My Faust was old Michael Scott; a much better and more likely
original than Faust. He appeared in the midst of his college of devoted
disciples, enthusiastic, ebullient, shedding around him bright surmises of
discoveries fully perfected in after-times, and inculcating the study of
nature and its secrets as the pathway to the acquisition of power. He did
not love knowledge for itself--for its own exceeding great reward--but in
order to be powerful. This poison-speck infected his mind from the
beginning. The priests suspect him, circumvent him, accuse him; he is
condemned, and thrown into solitary confinement: this constituted the
_prologus_ of the drama. A pause of four or five years takes place, at the
end of which Michael escapes from prison, a soured, gloomy, miserable man.
He will not, cannot study; of what avail had all his study been to him? His
knowledge, great as it was, had failed to preserve him from the cruel fangs
of the persecutors; he could not command the lightning or the storm to
wreak their furies upon the heads of those whom he hated and contemned, and
yet feared. Away with learning! away with study! to the winds with all
pretences to knowledge! We _know_ nothing; we are fools, wretches, mere
beasts. Anon I began to tempt him. I made him dream, gave him wine, and
passed the most exquisite of women before him, but out of his reach. Is
there, then, no knowledge by which these pleasures can be commanded? _That
way_ lay witchcraft, and accordingly to witchcraft Michael turns with all
his soul. He has many failures and some successes; he learns the chemistry
of exciting drugs and exploding powders, and some of the properties of
transmitted and reflected light: his appetites and his curiosity are both
stimulated, and his old craving for power and mental domination over others
revives. At last Michael tries to raise the Devil, and the Devil comes at
his call. My Devil was to be, like Goethe's, the universal humorist, who
should make all things vain and nothing worth, by a perpetual collation of
the great with the little in the presence of the infinite. I had many a
trick for him to play, some better, I think, than any in the Faust. In the
mean time, Michael is miserable; he has power, but no peace, and he every
day more keenly feels the tyranny of hell surrounding him. In vain he seems
to himself to assert the most absolute empire over the Devil, by imposing
the most extravagant tasks; one thing is as easy as another to the Devil.
"What next, Michael?" is repeated every day with more imperious servility.
Michael groans in spirit; his power is a curse: he commands women and wine!
but the women seem fictitious and devilish, and the wine does not make him
drunk. He now begins to hate the Devil, and tries to cheat him. He studies
again, and explores the darkest depths of sorcery for a receipt to cozen
hell; but all in vain. Sometimes the Devil's finger turns over the page for
him, and points out an experiment, and Michael hears a whisper--"Try
_that_, Michael!" The horror increases; and Michael feels that he is a
slave and a condemned criminal. Lost to hope, he throws himself into every
sensual excess,--in the mid-career of which he sees Agatha, my Margaret,
and immediately endeavours to seduce her. Agatha loves him; and the Devil
facilitates their meetings; but she resists Michael's attempts to ruin her,
and implores him not to act so as to forfeit her esteem. Long struggles of
passion ensue, in the result of which his affections are called forth
against his appetites, and, love-born, the idea of a redemption of the lost
will dawns upon his mind. This is instantaneously perceived by the Devil;
and for the first time the humorist becomes severe and menacing. A fearful
succession of conflicts between Michael and the Devil takes place, in which
Agatha helps and suffers. In the end, after subjecting him to every
imaginable horror and agony, I made him triumphant, and poured peace into
his soul in the conviction of a salvation for sinners through God's grace.
The intended theme of the Faust is the consequences of a misology, or
hatred and depreciation of knowledge caused by an originally intense thirst
for knowledge baffled. But a love of knowledge for itself, and for pure
ends, would never produce such a misology, but only a love of it for base
and unworthy purposes. There is neither causation nor progression in the
Faust; he is a ready-made conjuror from the very beginning; the _incredulus
odi_ is felt from the first line. The sensuality and the thirst after
knowledge are unconnected with each other. Mephistopheles and Margaret are
excellent; but Faust himself is dull and meaningless. The scene in
Auerbach's cellars is one of the best, perhaps the very best; that on the
Brocken is also fine; and all the songs are beautiful. But there is no
whole in the poem; the scenes are mere magic-lantern pictures, and a large
part of the work is to me very flat. The German is very pure and fine.
The young men in Germany and England who admire Lord Byron, prefer Goethe
to Schiller; but you may depend upon it, Goethe does not, nor ever will,
command the common mind of the people of Germany as Schiller does. Schiller
had two legitimate phases in his intellectual character:--the first as
author of the Robbers--a piece which must not be considered with reference
to Shakspeare, but as a work of the mere material sublime, and in that line
it is undoubtedly very powerful indeed. It is quite genuine, and deeply
imbued with Schiller's own soul. After this he outgrew the composition of
such plays as the Robbers, and at once took his true and only rightful
stand in the grand historical drama--the Wallenstein;--not the intense
drama of passion,--he was not master of that--but the diffused drama of
history, in which alone he had ample scope for his varied powers. The
Wallenstein is the greatest of his works; it is not unlike Shakspeare's
historical plays--a species by itself. You may take up any scene, and it
will please you by itself; just as you may in Don Quixote, which you read
_through_ once or twice only, but which you read _in_ repeatedly. After
this point it was, that Goethe and other writers injured by their theories
the steadiness and originality of Schiller's mind; and in every one of his
works after the Wallenstein you may perceive the fluctuations of his taste
and principles of composition. He got a notion of re-introducing the
characterlessness of the Greek tragedy with a chorus, as in the Bride of
Messina, and he was for infusing more lyric verse into it. Schiller
sometimes affected to despise the Robbers and the other works of his first
youth; whereas he ought to have spoken of them as of works not in a right
line, but full of excellence in their way. In his ballads and lighter
lyrics Goethe is most excellent. It is impossible to praise him too highly
in this respect. I like the Wilhelm Meister the best of his prose works.
But neither Schiller's nor Goethe's prose style approaches to Lessing's,
whose writings, for _manner_, are absolutely perfect.
Although Wordsworth and Goethe are not much alike, to be sure, upon the
whole; yet they both have this peculiarity of utter non-sympathy with the
subjects of their poetry. They are always, both of them, spectators _ab
extra_,--feeling _for_, but never _with_, their characters. Schiller is a
thousand times more _hearty_ than Goethe.
I was once pressed--many years ago--to translate the Faust; and I so far
entertained the proposal as to read the work through with great attention,
and to revive in my mind my own former plan of Michael Scott. But then I
considered with myself whether the time taken up in executing the
translation might not more worthily be devoted to the composition of a work
which, even if parallel in some points to the Faust, should be truly
original in motive and execution, and therefore more interesting and
valuable than any version which I could make; and, secondly, I debated with
myself whether it became my moral character to render into English--and so
far, certainly, lend my countenance to language--much of which I thought
vulgar, licentious, and blasphemous. I need not tell you that I never put
pen to paper as a translator of Faust.
I have read a good deal of Mr. Hayward's version, and I think it done in a
very manly style; but I do not admit the argument for prose translations. I
would in general rather see verse attempted in so capable a language as
ours. The French cannot help themselves, of course, with such a language as
theirs.
[Footnote 1:
"The poem was first published in 1790, and forms the commencement of the
seventh volume of _Goethe's Schriften, Wien und Leipzig, bey J. Stahel and
G. J. Goschen_, 1790. This edition is now before me. The poem entitled,
_Faust, ein Fragment_ (not _Doktor Faust, ein Trauerspiel_, as Döring
says), and contains no prologue or dedication of any sort. It commences
with the scene in Faust's study, _antè_, p. 17., and is continued, as now,
down to the passage ending, _antè_, p. 26. line 5. In the original, the
line--
"Und froh ist, wenn er Regenwürmer findet,"
ends the scene.