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.
