NOTES.
[Footnote 1: Dedication. The idea of Faust had early entered into Goethe's mind. He probably began the work when he was about twenty years old. It was first published, as a fragment, in 1790, and did not appear in its present form till 1808, when its author's age was nearly sixty. By the "forms" are meant, of course, the shadowy personages and scenes of the drama.]
[Footnote 2: —"Thy messengers"—
"He maketh the winds his-messengers,
The flaming lightnings his ministers."
Noyes's Psalms, c. iv. 4.]
[Footnote 3: "The Word Divine." In translating the German "Werdende" (literally, the becoming, developing, or growing) by the term word, I mean the word in the largest sense: "In the beginning was the Word, &c." Perhaps "nature" would be a pretty good rendering, but "word," being derived from "werden," and expressing philosophically and scripturally the going forth or manifestation of mind, seemed to me as appropriate a translation as any.]
[Footnote 4: "The old fellow." The commentators do not seem quite agreed whether "den Alten" (the old one) is an entirely reverential phrase here, like the "ancient of days," or savors a little of profane pleasantry, like the title "old man" given by boys to their schoolmaster or of "the old gentleman" to their fathers. Considering who the speaker is, I have naturally inclined to the latter alternative.]
[Footnote 5: "Nostradamus" (properly named Michel Notre Dame) lived through the first half of the sixteenth century. He was born in the south of France and was of Jewish extraction. As physician and astrologer, he was held in high honor by the French nobility and kings.]
[Footnote 6: The "Macrocosm" is the great world of outward things, in contrast with its epitome, the little world in man, called the microcosm (or world in miniature).]
[Footnote 7: "Famulus" seems to mean a cross between a servant and a scholar. The Dominie Sampson called Wagner, is appended to Faust for the time somewhat as Sancho is to Don Quixote. The Doctor Faust of the legend has a servant by that name, who seems to have been more of a Sancho, in the sense given to the word by the old New England mothers when upbraiding bad boys (you Sanch'!). Curiously enough, Goethe had in early life a (treacherous) friend named Wagner, who plagiarized part of Faust and made a tragedy of it.]
[Footnote 8: "Mock-heroic play." We have Schlegel's authority for thus rendering the phrase "Haupt- und Staats-Action," (literally, "head and State-action,") who says that this title was given to dramas designed for puppets, when they treated of heroic and historical subjects.]
[Footnote 9: The literal sense of this couplet in the original is:— "Is he, in the bliss of becoming, To creative joy near—" "Werde-lust" presents the same difficulty that we found in note 3. This same word, "Werden," is also used by the poet in the introductory theatre scene (page 7), where he longs for the time when he himself was ripening, growing, becoming, or forming, (as Hayward renders it.) I agree with Hayward, "the meaning probably is, that our Saviour enjoys, in coming to life again," (I should say, in being born into the upper life,) "a happiness nearly equal to that of the Creator in creating.">[
[Footnote 10: The Angel-chorusses in this scene present the only instances in which the translator, for the sake of retaining the ring and swing of the melody, has felt himself obliged to give a transfusion of the spirit of the thought, instead of its exact form.
The literal meaning of the first chorus is:—
Christ is arisen!
Joy to the Mortal,
Whom the ruinous,
Creeping, hereditary
Infirmities wound round.
Dr. Hedge has come nearer than any one to reconciling meaning and melody thus:—
"Christ has arisen!
Joy to our buried Head!
Whom the unmerited,
Trailing, inherited
Woes did imprison."
The present translator, without losing sight of the fact that "the Mortal" means Christ, has taken the liberty (constrained by rhyme,—which is sometimes more than the rudder of verse,) of making the congratulation include Humanity, as incarnated in Christ, "the second Adam."
In the closing Chorus of Angels, the translator found that he could best preserve the spirit of the five-fold rhyme:—
"Thätig ihn preisenden,
Liebe beweisenden,
Brüderlich speisenden,
Predigend reisenden,
Wonne verheissenden,"
by running it into three couplets.]
[Footnote 11: The prose account of the alchymical process is as follows:—
"There was red mercury, a powerfully acting body, united with the tincture of antimony, at a gentle heat of the water-bath. Then, being exposed to the heat of open fire in an aludel, (or alembic,) a sublimate filled its heads in succession, which, if it appeared with various hues, was the desired medicine.">[
[Footnote 12: "Salamander, &c." The four represent the spirits of the four elements, fire, water, air, and earth, which Faust successively conjures, so that, if the monster belongs in any respect to this mundane sphere, he may be exorcized. But it turns out that he is beyond and beneath all.]
[Footnote 13: Here, of course, Faust makes the sign of the cross, or holds out a crucifix.]
[Footnote 14: "Fly-God," i.e. Beelzebub.]
[Footnote 15: The "Drudenfuss," or pentagram, was a pentagonal figure composed of three triangles, thus: [Illustration]
[Footnote 16: Doctor's Feast. The inaugural feast given at taking a degree.]
[Footnote 17: "Blood." When at the first invention of printing, the art was ascribed to the devil, the illuminated red ink parts were said by the people to be done in blood.]
[Footnote 18: "The Spanish boot" was an instrument of torture, like the
Scottish boot mentioned in Old Mortality.]
[Footnote 19: "Encheiresin Naturæ." Literally, a handling of nature.]
[Footnote 20: Still a famous place of public resort and entertainment. On the wall are two old paintings of Faust's carousal and his ride out of the door on a cask. One is accompanied by the following inscription, being two lines (Hexameter and Pentameter) broken into halves:—
"Vive, bibe, obgregare, memor
Fausti hujus et hujus
Pnæ. Aderat clauda haec,
Ast erat ampla gradû. 1525."
"Live, drink, be merry, remembering
This Faust and his
Punishment. It came slowly
But was in ample measure.">[
[Footnote 21:Frosch, Brander, &c. These names seem to be chosen with an eye to adaptation, Frosch meaning frog, and Brander fireship. "Frog" happens also to be the nickname the students give to a pupil of the gymnasium, or school preparatory to the university.]
[Footnote 22: Rippach is a village near Leipsic, and Mr. Hans was a fictitious personage about whom the students used to quiz greenhorns.]
[Footnote 23: The original means literally sea-cat. Retzsch says, it is the little ring-tailed monkey.]
[Footnote 24: One-time-one, i.e. multiplication-table.]
[Footnote 25: "Hand and glove." The translator's coincidence with Miss Swanwick here was entirely accidental. The German is "thou and thou," alluding to the fact that intimate friends among the Germans, like the sect of Friends, call each other thou.]
[Footnote 26: The following is a literal translation of the song referred to:—
Were I a little bird,
Had I two wings of mine,
I'd fly to my dear;
But that can never be,
So I stay here.
Though I am far from thee,
Sleeping I'm near to thee,
Talk with my dear;
When I awake again,
I am alone.
Scarce is there an hour in the night,
When sleep does not take its flight,
And I think of thee,
How many thousand times
Thou gav'st thy heart to me.]
[Footnote 27: Donjon. The original is Zwinger, which Hayward says is untranslatable. It probably means an old tower, such as is often found in the free cities, where, in a dark passage-way, a lamp is sometimes placed, and a devotional image near it.]
[Footnote 28: It was a superstitious belief that the presence of buried treasure was indicated by a blue flame.]
[Footnote 29: Lion-dollars—a Bohemian coin, first minted three centuries ago, by Count Schlick, from the mines of Joachim's-Thal. The one side bears a lion, the other a full length image of St. John.]
[Footnote 30: An imitation of Ophelia's song: Hamlet, act 14, scene 5.]
[Footnote 31: The Rat-catcher was supposed to have the art of drawing rats after him by his whistle, like a sort of Orpheus.]
[Footnote 32: Walpurgis Night. May-night. Walpurgis is the female saint who converted the Saxons to Christianity.—The Brocken or Blocksberg is the highest peak of the Harz mountains, which comprise about 1350 square miles.—Schirke and Elend are two villages in the neighborhood.]
[Footnote 33: Shelley's translation of this couplet is very fine: ("O si sic omnia!")
"The giant-snouted crags, ho! ho!
How they snort and how they blow!">[
[Footnote 34: The original is Windsbraut, (wind's-bride,) the word used in Luther's Bible to translate Paul's Euroclydon.]
[Footnote 35: One of the names of the devil in Germany.]
[Footnote 36: One of the names of Beelzebub.]
[Footnote 37: "The Talmudists say that Adam had a wife called Lilis before he married Eve, and of her he begat nothing but devils." Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.
A learned writer says that Lullaby is derived from "Lilla, abi!" "Begone Lilleth!" she having been supposed to lie in wait for children to kill them.]
[Footnote 38: This name, derived from two Greek words meaning rump and fancy, was meant for Nicolai of Berlin, a great hater of Goethe's writings, and is explained by the fact that the man had for a long time a violent affection of the nerves, and by the application he made of leeches as a remedy, (alluded to by Mephistopheles.)]
[Footnote 39: Tegel (mistranslated pond by Shelley) is a small place a few miles from Berlin, whose inhabitants were, in 1799, hoaxed by a ghost story, of which the scene was laid in the former place.]
[Footnote 40: The park in Vienna.]
[Footnote 41: He was scene-painter to the Weimar theatre.]
[Footnote 42: A poem of Schiller's, which gave great offence to the religious people of his day.]
[Footnote 43: A literal translation of Maulen, but a slang-term in
Yankee land.]
[Footnote 44: Epigrams, published from time to time by Goethe and Schiller jointly. Hennings (whose name heads the next quatrain) was editor of the Musaget, (a title of Apollo, "leader of the muses,") and also of the Genius of the Age. The other satirical allusions to classes of notabilities will, without difficulty, be guessed out by the readers.]
[Footnote 45: "Doubt is the only rhyme for devil," in German.]
[Footnote 46: The French translator, Stapfer, assigns as the probable reason why this scene alone, of the whole drama, should have been left in prose, "that it might not be said that Faust wanted any one of the possible forms of style.">[
[Footnote 47: Literally the raven-stone.]
[Footnote 48: The blood-seat, in allusion to the old German custom of tying a woman, who was to be beheaded, into a wooden chair.]
* * * * *
P. S. There is a passage on page 84, the speech of Faust, ending with the lines:—
Show me the fruit that, ere it's plucked, will rot,
And trees from which new green is daily peeping,
which seems to have puzzled or misled so much, not only English translators, but even German critics, that the present translator has concluded, for once, to depart from his usual course, and play the commentator, by giving his idea of Goethe's meaning, which is this: Faust admits that the devil has all the different kinds of Sodom-apples which he has just enumerated, gold that melts away in the hand, glory that vanishes like a meteor, and pleasure that perishes in the possession. But all these torments are too insipid for Faust's morbid and mad hankering after the luxury of spiritual pain. Show me, he says, the fruit that rots before one can pluck it, and