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Untitled Article
same Opinion of the woric itself . With unaffected humility . Tire confess our inability to do this to our satisfaction . Tfie very title of the poem will ihfarnk our read ers ^ that it has been framed out of the legendary tale which everybody has heard of , and which was even found a fit subject for thfe drama , by © tog of the great contemporaries of Shakspeare . It never occurred to
Marlow to make his Fattstus the vehicle of philosophy ; but his tragedy abounds in talent * and has somfc scenes of great poetical beauty . Thfe subject , however , is better kfiown to the people than to the educated class . We recollect buying the The Tragical Story of Doctor Faustus / as it hung dangling from a string against a wall , more than forty years ago , and being duly frightened by the reading of it . We have not seen it of late years ; the age i $
grown too rational , as well as refined * for such coarse appeals td the superstitious feelings of the vulgar . It was , probably , about the same time that Goethe became aware of the infinite capabi- * lities of the Gothic fiction . The tale is current through all Europe \ and the idea of the possibility of acquiring supernatural
power bjr preternatural means , or , in other words ,, by a cofnpafct with the devil , has formed , for centuries , an inherent and inseparable part of th& popular creed . That Gofethe , when he wrote his first-published fragments , being about twenty-five years oldj had already clearly developed in his mind the philosophical problem which was afterwards executed , is by no means certain . The
first-published fragments are still the finest of the work ; but thfcy are independent of the leading philosophical ideas . The prodrarriaj the prologue in heaven , &c , are the produce of his ripfer years . -v In an introduction to Helena , an intermezzo to Faustus , onfe of the latest of Goethe ' s writings , he thus explains his idea of the principal person : —
• The character of Faustos , at the height to which he has been raised , in the modern work , above the ancient and coarse legendary tal £ , represents a irian who is ill at ease , and impatient under the restraints which appertain to our common nature , finds the possession of the . highest knowledge ? , and the enjoyment of the deepest felicity ,
insufficient , in the slightest degree , to appease his longing-. He is a spirit , therefore , which , in its restlessness , is ever changing its position , and is ever coming back to its former state more wretched than before . This feeling is so analogous to the modern state of existence , ( hat several tn $ n ol talents havte felt themselves impelled to undertake the solution of the fcrtttrtern . *
Our author has nowhere , in didactic verse , said what idea he meant to personify in the Evil Spirit to whom , in his agony , Faustus applies ; but no inscription is necessary under the figure . Btowever , as ( here are varieties even in infernal natures—according to Mi ( tori—it may be right to say tnus much , —that Mephistopheles is a laughing devil—au iinpudent and scornful derider of
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Goethe * s Wfcrk * . 749
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 2, 1832, page 743, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1824/page/23/
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