University of Virginia Library

POSTSCRIPT.

I doubt not some of my readers have been not a little surprised and disappointed in not meeting with the celebrated “Prologue in Heaven,” prefixed to this drama. I had translated the whole of this piece, and intended to have inserted it complete in its proper place, immediately after the prelude, but I was dissuaded from this by friends whose opinion I respect; and I am perfectly convinced, that the motives, as well of propriety as of prudence, that have induced me to give it here in a somewhat castigated shape, will satisfy every reasonable person of proper feeling. For neither the indifference with which this matter is treated by persons with whom piety is not ranked among the virtues, nor the more refined sophistries of those who attempt to justify this Prologue on certain latitudinarian principles, said to be peculiar to German Aesthetics, could ever convince me, that the tone of careless familiarity in which things divine are here spoken of, was in any wise worthy of the great poet from whom it came. It could, therefore, be my duty as a translator alone, that could ever have induced me to publish this Prologue. But an English translation of a celebrated

poem such as Faust, is not intended, like an edition of an ancient classic, to circulate only among a few of the learned. In this case, it is the duty of a translator to consult the feelings of those for whom the translation is made; and no one can blame him for removing from the gate of his poetic garden a sentinel, whose strange and forbidding demeanour could not fail to repel the chief of those visitors, whose good will he was most anxious to conciliate.

Actuated by such motives, I have given the Prologue here, stript merely of those colloquial familiarities, which are its chief blemish in the original. Take away the tone of conversational levity from this much-bespoken piece, and I fear not to say that, in the matter of it, there is nothing that can give offence to the most strait-laced orthodoxy. Those who compare my translation with Shelley's or Mr Hayward's, will find that I have omitted nothing that is anywise essential to the subject-matter of the Prologue; and I rather feel pleased that, in the shape in which it here stands, it will probably give satisfaction to all, except those impure and ignoble minds whose memory is chiefly retentive of a few obscenities and levities, which, like so many casual spots on the sun, and arising perhaps unavoidably from the nature of the subject, throw a slight shade of human weakness over this noblest and—let me speak it in the words of my own feeling—this divinest of poems.

PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN.

The Lord. The Heavenly Hosts, afterwards Mephistopheles.
The three Archangels come forward.
RAPHAEL.
The Sun doth chime his ancient music,
To brethren-spheres' contending song,
And, on his fore-appointed journey,
With thunder-pace he rolls along.
Strength drink the angels from his glances,
Though no one comprehend him may;
God's works of grandeur unconceived,
Are bright as on creation's day.

GABRIEL.
And swift, and swift, beyond conceiving,
Spins Earth its self-revolving flight;
Alternates Paradisian brightness,
With gloom of deep and fearful night.
Wide foams the sea in mighty currents,
Beneath the rocks, with murmurs hoarse;
And rock and sea are onward hurried
In one eternal circling course.

MICHAEL.
And storms loud rage with storms contending,
From sea to land, from land to sea,
And weave around the globe unwearied
A chain of deepest energy.
The lightning's desolation flameth
Before the pealing thunder's way,
But still, O Lord, thine angels worship
The soft revolving of thy day.

THE THREE TOGETHER.
Strength drink the angels from thy glances,
Though no one comprehend thee may,
Thy works of grandeur unconceived,
Are bright as on creation's day.

So far this splendid hymn, which might, in all justice, be allowed to plead as loudly for Goethe's piety, as the subsequent part of this Prologue has been supposed to do for his indifference in things religious. Then enters Mephistopheles, and after introducing himself, on the score of his having been allowed from the most ancient times to shew himself amongst the sons of God (Job i. 6), and apologising in language the most revolting to well-tuned ears, for his deficiency in the art of hymn-making, proceeds to descant, in a true Byronic strain, on that threadbare and profitless theme, the misery of human nature:

Of sun and worlds I little have to say,
I only see how men must fret their lives away.
The little god o'the world continues still the same,
A riddle great as when first from your hands he came.
A little better would he drag life on,
Had he the semblance not of heavenly light from Thee;
He calls it reason, but uses it alone
To be more brutish than brute can be.
He is, methinks, [OMITTED]
Like one of the long-legged race
Of grasshoppers, that spring, and spring, and spring,
And straightway in the grass the same old song they sing;
'Twere well that from the grass he never rose,
On every stubble must he break his nose!

To this hackneyed burden of a hackneyed song, it is answered:

Hast thou then nothing more to say?
Must I still hear the same complaint
Against the Earth from day to day?
Wilt thou then never be content?

Discontent is the soul of Byronism and devilry, and Mephistopheles accordingly replies:
No, Lord! I find things there no better than before;
I must confess I do deplore
Man's hapless lot, and scarce have heart myself
To torture the poor miserable elf.

The Devil is then asked if he knows Faust, the vassal (knecht) of the Lord. To which answer is made in the affirmative, with the following characteristic description of the Doctor's character:

His food and drink are of no earthly taste,
His restless spirit drives him to the waste,
His madness he himself half understands;
The loveliest stars from Heaven he demands,
And every highest joy that Earth commands,
And all that's near, and all that's far,
Soothes not his deep-moved spirit's war.

To this, the important answer is given:

Though destined for a time to grope his way,
Soon shall I lead him into open day.
Well knows the gard'ner when green shoots appear,
That bloom and fruit await the coming year.

The Devil then asks permission to tempt Faust, and a dialogue ensues, of which the form, if not the spirit, is evidently borrowed from the second chapter of the Book of Job. It is first answered:

As long as on the earth he lives,
So long thou hast my free permission;
Man still must err so long he strives.

Mephistopheles
accepts the permission; and adds, in his own cold sarcastic manner:
------ With the dead
'Tis not my wont to ply my trade.
I chiefly prize the cheeks that plump and rosy be.
For a vile corpse my taste is far too nice;
I do just as the cat does with the mice.

The Devil then receives full permission to try all his efforts against Faust:

Go, drag this spirit from his native fount,
And lead him on, can'st thou his will surmount,
Into perdition down with thee.
But stand ashamed when thou at length shalt see,
An honest man, mid all his strivings dark,
Finds the right way, though lit but by a spark.

These two last lines are of the utmost importance, as obscurely intimating the design of the poet to bring Faust to Heaven in the long run. The fiend now exults in the prospect of success, and exclaims, in the language of a boaster:

If I should carry through my measure,
My triumph then from free lungs let me hold;
Dust shall he eat, and that with pleasure,
Like my cousin the serpent so fam'd of old.

The answer given to this speech is important, in connection with the character of Goethe's devil; and also, towards the conclusion, poetically beautiful, though not without a tincture of what we are wont to call “German mysticism.” We give it complete:

And even so, thou hast full liberty
To shew thee here, whene'er it pleases thee.
Of all the spirits that deny,
The cunning rogue gives least offence to me.
From labour man is far too apt to shrink,
And into utter sloth to sink;
As comrade, therefore, I assign'd him one
Who, as a restless devil, still whets and spurs him on.
But you, ye sons of Heaven's own choice,
In the One living Beautiful rejoice!
The self-evolving Energy divine,
Enclasp you round with love's embrace benign,
And to the hov'ring forms that round you float,
Give firm existence by enduring thought.

And with this the heaven closes, and the angels disperse; and the reader has before him the whole of the much bespoken Prologue, curtailed by scarce a dozen of lines, which have nothing to recommend them but their levity. In other respects, however, this Prologue is worth studying, as it affords, in some sense, a key to the characters of Faust and Mephistopheles; and of their mutual relation, at least in the poet's view, to that Being whose guiding hand directs unseen every action, meanest as well as greatest, in the varied drama of human life.