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Untitled Article
and when all the known dialects of the earth are exhausted in its development , an unknown tongue will be at hand ,, not to enhance the folly , but to vary the manifestation . Not merely to perplex the understanding is the witch there ; she sets his senses and his imagination on fire by a draught from her charmed cup and a look into her magic glass , in which he sees the figure of Margaret .
We are next introduced to this admirable creature , the conception of whose character demonstrates no less the jgreat author ' s exquisite sense of moral beauty than this whole work does the immeasurable extent of his thinking and imaginative powers . Her innocence is such that Mephistopheles has no power over her . It would seem , though this is but our inference , that this innocence becomes even the safeguard of Faustus himself ; for that appetite which is imbibed from the witches' chalice becomes
an ennobling passion . The fierce conflict within him between his desire , that hurries him on to her destruction , and his love , that makes her an object of compassion ;—betwixt his irresistible appetite and his unextinguishable remorse , excite the deepest sympathy ; while the accompanying derision and mockery of the demon , his profligate jests , and impudent scorn of all the good that still lingers in Faustus , add to the already powerful compound that comic element which so singularly sharpens and seasons the poem .
Amid the scenes in which these opposite ingredients are mixed together is one which Madame de Stael has noticed with more than her usual discernment—it is that in which Margaret questions Faustus about his religion . The episode of Margaret becomes now intensely pathetic—her shame at the apprehended exposure of her guilt—her prayer to the Virgin before an image in the street , and the scene in the cathedral , in which her
devotions are , on the one hand , stimulated by the choral singing of the ' Dies ir < e > dies ilia , ' &c , but , on the other , impeded by the whisperings of an infernal spirit , which infuse despair , and she mistakes for the workings of her own mind , are intensely pathetic . This latter scene terminated the fragments which for many years were all that was publicly known of Faust . These
that follow have been added at different periods : nor do we know when they were written . It will be an object of research to the future editors of Goethe . Not the style merely , but the structure of the drama undergo great changes in the course of its progress . There is more action and far less of discourse and metaphysics than in the earlier scenes .
The poet next leads us to a spot well known in the history of superstition in Germany—the mountain of the Harz in Hanover . Here on the Walpurgisnacht , May-day night , witches hold t | ieir sabbath , and thither go Faustus and Mephistopheles . We , happily , the English public , have been put in possession of a
Untitled Article
Goethe's Work * . 740
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 2, 1832, page 749, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1824/page/29/
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