Pale Goethe, Marlowe, Lessing—calm your fears!
None plots to steal your laurel wreaths away.
Approach; take tickets: you shall witness here
The unromantic Faustus of to-day—
A Faustus whom no mystic choirs sustain,
No wizard fiends blind with prodigious spell.
The mortal earth shall serve him as domain
Whether he mount to Heaven or sink to Hell.
Yet, mount or sink, your lights around him shine.
And there shall flow, bubbling with woe or mirth,
From these new bottles your familiar wine,
As ancient as man's rule upon the earth.
THE FIRST ACT
The scene is the library of John Faust, a large handsome room panelled in dark oak and lined with rows of books in open book-shelves. On the right is a carved white stone fireplace, with deep chairs before it. In the far left corner of the room, on a pedestal, stands a stiff bust of George Washington. Near it hangs a wonderful Titian portrait, a thing of another world. The furniture looks as if it were, and probably is, plunder from the palace of some prince of the Renaissance.
A fire is burning in the fireplace; it, and several shaded lights, make a subdued brilliancy in the room. Before the fire sits John Faust. Brander and Oldham, both in evening dress, lounge comfortably in chairs near Faust. All three are smoking, and tall highball glasses stand within their reach.
BRANDER
You are a thorn to me, a thorn in the flesh.
Contagiously you bring to me mistrust
Of all my landmarks, when, as here to-night,
Out of the midst of every pleasant gift
The world can offer you, you raise your voice
In scoffing irony against each face,
Form, action, motive, that together make
Your life, and ours.
FAUST
Dear man, I did not mean
To send my poor jokes burrowing like a mole
Beneath your prized foundations.