1712, what was to prove the most popular of all the Faust-books: The League with the Devil established by the world-famous Arch-necromancer and Wizard Dr Johann Faust. By a Christian Believer (Christlich Meynenden). This version, which bore the obviously false date of 1525, passed through many editions, and was circulated at all the fairs in Germany. Abroad the success of the story was scarcely less striking. A Danish version appeared in 1588; in England the History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr John Faustus was published some time between 1588 and 1594; in France the translation of Victor Palma Cayet was published at Paris in 1592 and, in the course of the next two hundred years, went through fifteen editions; the oldest Dutch and Flemish versions are dated 1592; and in 1612 a Czech translation was published at Prague.
Besides the popular histories of Faust, all more or less founded on the original edition of Spies, numerous ballads on the same subject were also soon in circulation. Of these the most interesting for the English reader is A Ballad of the life and death of Dr Faustus the great congerer, published in 1588 with the imprimatur of the learned Aylmer, bishop of London. This ballad is supposed to have preceded the English version of Spies’s Faust-book, mentioned above, on which Marlowe’s drama was founded.
To Christopher Marlowe, it would appear, belongs the honour of first realizing the great dramatic possibilities of the Faust legend. The Tragicall History of D. Faustus as it hath bene acted by the Right Honourable the Earle of Nottingham his servants was first published by Thomas Bushall at London in 1604. As Marlowe died in 1593, the play must have been written shortly after the appearance of the English version of the Faust story on which it was based. The first recorded performance was on the 30th of September 1594.
As Marlowe’s Faustus is the first, so it is imcomparably the finest of the Faust dramas which preceded Goethe’s masterpiece. Like most of Marlowe’s work it is, indeed, very unequal. At certain moments the poet seems to realize the great possibilities of the story, only to sacrifice them to the necessity for humouring the prevailing public taste of the age. Faustus, who in one scene turns disillusioned from the ordinary fountains of knowledge, or flies in a dragon-drawn chariot through the Empyrean to search out the mysteries of the heavens, in another is made to use his superhuman powers to satisfy the taste of the groundlings for senseless buffoonery, to swindle a horse-dealer, or cheat an ale-wife of her score; while Protestant orthodoxy is conciliated by irrelevant insults to the Roman Church and by the final catastrophe, when Faustus pays for his revolt against the Word of God by the forfeit of his soul. This conception, which followed that of the popular Faust histories, underlay all further developments of the Faust drama for nearly two hundred years. Of the serious stage plays founded on this theme, Marlowe’s Faustus remains the sole authentic example until near the end of the 18th century; but there is plenty of evidence to prove that in Germany the Comedy of Dr Faust, in one form or another, was and continued to be a popular item in the repertories of theatrical companies until far into the 18th century. It is supposed, with good reason, that the German versions were based on those introduced into the country by English strolling players early in the 17th century. However this may be, the dramatic versions of the Faust legend followed much the same course as the prose histories. Just as these gradually degenerated into chap-books hawked at fairs, so the dramas were replaced by puppet-plays, handed down by tradition through generations of showmen, retaining their original broad characteristics, but subject to infinite modification in detail. In this way, in the puppet-shows, the traditional Faust story retained its popularity until far into the 19th century, long after, in the sphere of literature, Goethe had for ever raised it to quite another plane.
It was natural that during the literary revival in Germany in the 18th century, when German writers were eagerly on the look-out for subjects to form the material of a truly national literature, the Faust legend should have attracted their attention. Lessing was the first to point out its great possibilities;[1] and he himself wrote a Faust drama, of which unfortunately only a fragment remains, the MS. of the completed work having been lost in the author’s lifetime. None the less, to Lessing, not to Goethe, is due the new point of view from which the story was approached by most of those who, after about the year 1770, attempted to tell it. The traditional Faust legend represented the sternly orthodox attitude of the Protestant reformers. Even the mitigating elements which the middle ages had permitted had been banished by the stern logic of the theologians of the New Religion. Theophilus had been saved in the end by the intervention of the Blessed Virgin; Pope Silvester, according to one version of the legend, had likewise been snatched from the jaws of hell at the last moment. Faust was irrevocably damned, since the attractions of the studium theologicum proved insufficient to counteract the fascinations of the classic Helen. But if he was to become, in the 18th century, the type of the human intellect face to face with the deep problems of human life, it was intolerable that his struggles should issue in eternal reprobation. Error and heresy had ceased to be regarded as crimes; and stereotyped orthodoxy, to the age of the Encyclopaedists, represented nothing more than the atrophy of the human intellect. Es irrt der Mensch so lang er strebt, which sums up in one pregnant line the spirit of Goethe’s Faust, sums up also the spirit of the age which killed with ridicule the last efforts of persecuting piety, and saw the birth of modern science. Lessing, in short, proclaimed that the final end of Faust must be, not his damnation, but his salvation. This revolutionary conception is the measure of Goethe’s debt to Lessing. The essential change which Goethe himself introduced into the story is in the nature of the pact between Faust and Mephistopheles, and in the character of Mephistopheles himself. The Mephistopheles of Marlowe, as of the old Faust-books, for all his brave buffoonery, is a melancholy devil, with a soul above the unsavoury hell in which he is forced to pass a hopeless existence. “Tell me,” says Faust, in the puppet-play, to Mephistopheles, “what would you do if you could attain to everlasting salvation?” And the devil answers, “Hear and despair! Were I able to attain everlasting salvation, I would mount to heaven on a ladder, though every rung were a razor edge!” Goethe’s Mephistopheles would have made no such reply. There is nothing of the fallen angel about him; he is perfectly content with his past, his present and his future; and he appears before the throne of God with the same easy insolence as he exhibits in Dame Martha’s back-garden. He is, in fact, according to his own definition, the Spirit of Denial, the impersonation of that utter scepticism which can see no distinction between high and low, between good and bad, and is therefore without aspiration because it knows no “divine discontent.” And the compact which Faust makes with this spirit is from the first doomed to be void. Faustus had bartered away his soul for a definite period of pleasure and power. The conception that underlies the compact of Faust with Mephistopheles is far more subtle. He had sought happiness vainly in the higher intellectual and spiritual pursuits; he is content to seek it on a lower plane since Mephistopheles gives him the chance; but he is confident that nothing that “such a poor devil” can offer him could give him that moment of supreme satisfaction for which he craves. He goes through the traditional mummery of signing the bond with scornful submission; for he knows that his damnation will not be the outcome of any formal compact, but will follow inevitably, and only then, when his soul has grown to be satisfied with what Mephistopheles can purvey him.
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“Canst thou with lying flattery rule me |
It is because Mephistopheles fails to give him this self-satisfaction
