Who daily conquers them anew.”
When Mephisto summons his devils to carry the soul to hell, a host of angels flies from heaven to repel them, and as they bear Faust’s immortal soul into the upper air, they proclaim
“Whoe’er aspires unweariedly
Is not beyond redeeming.”
The Devil had not given Faust the blissful moment, but had only enabled him to find a compromise between dream and reality by creative work. Faust’s craving remained unfulfilled, and his reconcilement to the conditions of life was only temporary. But as that is the only possibility, as man’s highest aspirations never can be completely satisfied, the wager was from the first destined to be unfulfilled.
In Goethe’s Faust the theme received the highest treatment of which it was capable. At the time when he first came in contact with the story, Faust dramas were being announced by authors from all corners of Germany, and perhaps it would not be too much to say that every German poet since Goethe has cherished the hope of some day creating his own Faust. Of the tragedies, farces, operas, pantomimes, ballets, novels, short stories, poems, folk-songs and even parodies on the subject, it may be said that their name is legion, and it appears to have been cast into every possible art-form. It will, perhaps, suffice to mention here a dance-poem which was written by the poet Heinrich Heine in 1851 for performance at Drury Lane. Lumley, the director of the theatre, had already made preparations for the production, when it was laid aside as unsuitable. One of the latest treatments of the theme is Faust and the City, by Lunacharski, the Minister of Education in Soviet Russia.
Footnotes
[12] K. Engel: Zusammenstellung der Faust-Schriften [Oldenburg, 1885], pp. 188 ff.
[13] Bayard Taylor’s translation.
V
The Wagner Book
The first edition of the German Wagner book was published anonymously, without mention even of its place of origin, in 1593, under a title of which the following is a translation:—