Devil. Not so fast, Faustus. In the first place, I take away from thee thy mighty magic rod, and confine thee in the narrow circle which I draw around thee. Here shalt thou listen to me, and howl and tremble. I will unfold to thee the consequences of thy deeds, and will assassinate thee through downright despair.
“Fool! thou sayest thou hast learnt to know man! Where? How and when hast thou attained this knowledge? Hast thou ever sounded his nature? Hast thou separated from him that which he has acquired, and which is foreign to him? Hast thou distinguished that which proceeds from his heart, from that which is merely
the affect of an imagination corrupted by artifice? Hast thou compared the wants and the desires resulting from his nature, with those which he owes to civilisation? Hast thou considered man in his proper shape, where each of his movements bears the stamp of his inward disposition? Thou hast taken the mask of society for his natural figure; and thou hast only known that man whom his titles, his rank, his riches, his power, and his acquirements have corrupted. Thou hast only known him who has sacrificed his nature to thy own idol,—to vanity. Thou hast merely frequented palaces and courts, where men spurn away the unfortunate, and laugh at the complaints of the oppressed, whilst they are dissipating in revel-rout and roar that which they have robbed them of. Thou hast seen the sovereigns of the world; thou hast seen tyrants surrounded by their parasites and their infamous courtesans; and thou hast seen priests who make use of religion as an instrument of oppression. Such are the men thou hast seen, and not him who groans under the heavy yoke, and comforts himself with the hope of
futurity. Thou hast passed by with disdain the hut of the poor and simple man, who does not even know your artificial wants by name, who gains his bread by the sweat of his brow, shares it faithfully with his wife and children, and rejoices, at the last moment of his life, in having completed his long and laborious task. If thou hadst opened his door, thou wouldst not indeed have found a vain ideal of heroic and over-refined virtue, which is only the offspring of your vices and your crimes; but thou wouldst have seen a man who, in meekness and resigned magnanimity, shows more force of soul, than do your renowned heroes in their blood-stained fields of battle, or your ministers in their perfidious cabinets. If it were not for these, and for your priests, and above all for your false philosophers, the gates of hell would soon be closed. Canst thou say that thou knowest man, when thou hast only sought for him in the paths of vice and crime? Dost thou know thyself? I will make your wounds yet deeper, and pour poison into them. But if I had a thousand human tongues, and were to keep thee here
confined for as many years, I should still be unable to enumerate to thee all the frightful consequences of thy actions and thy temerity. Know now the result of thy life, and remember, that I have scarcely fulfilled one of thy insensate desires without having forewarned thee to check it. It is by thy command that I have interrupted the course of things, and committed crimes which I myself could scarcely have imagined; so that, devil as I am, I am not so bad as thyself.
“Dost thou remember the nun Clara, and the voluptuous night which thou didst pass with her? But how canst thou have forgotten her? Listen now to the consequences. A short time after thy departure, the Bishop, who was her friend and protector, died; and she, having become a mother, was condemned, as an object of public horror, to be starved with her child in a dark dungeon. In her ravenous hunger she fell upon the newly-born, ate of thy flesh and her own, and prolonged her existence as long as there was a bone for her to gnaw. In what had she sinned?—she who did not comprehend her crime; she who did not know,
or even suspect, the author of her ignominy and her frightful death. Feel now the result of one single moment of pleasure, and tremble! Hast thou not strengthened the delusion which condemned her? Must not hell now bear the reproach of thy crime? Those people condemned the child as the spawn of Satan, and murdered the mother under the idea that she had been possessed by him; and through this thy deed thou hast bewildered their minds, and those of their posterity.
“Thou wast not more fortunate with the Prince Bishop. He caused, it is true, Hans Ruprecht to be buried, and provided for his family. He likewise, by the trick I played him, lost his fat, and became the most mild and merciful of princes; but he so relaxed the band of social order by his over-indulgence, that his subjects soon became a horde of drunkards, sluggards, ruffians, and highwaymen. The present Bishop is obliged to be their executioner, and to disperse and destroy a hundred families, in order that the rest, terrified by their example, may again become
humanised, and submit to the laws. The furies themselves could not do half the injury to these people which those now do to whom the Bishop has been obliged to intrust the sword of justice and the power of vengeance.
“Doctor Robertus, the renowned champion of freedom, the man after thine own heart, was from his earliest youth an enemy to the Minister, whom he hated on account of his talents. Envy and jealousy caused his independence of spirit; and if he had been in the situation of the other, he would have adopted with pleasure the most cruel principles of despotism, for which his wild and ferocious heart was only formed. The honest man was the Minister; Robertus was a monster, who would have set the whole world in a blaze, and has done it partly, in order to satisfy his boundless ambition. Thou didst oblige me to rescue him, and to furnish him with a large sum of money. He made such good use of his freedom, his gold, and the enthusiasm which his miraculous escape had caused among the people, that he soon succeeded in stirring up a dreadful rebellion. He