THE GERMAN POPULAR LEGEND OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS.
We doubt whether any popular legend has ever taken deeper root among the common people and spread farther in the world than the story of Dr. Faustus and his reckless compact with the Evil One. We do not intend to compare it, of course, to those ancient traditions which seem to have constituted a tie of relationship between the most distant nations in times anterior to history. These are mostly of a mythological character,—as, for instance, those referring to the existence of elementary spirits. Their connection with mankind has, in the earliest times, occupied the imagination of the most widely different races. A certain analogy we can easily explain by the affinity of human hearts and human minds. But when we find that exactly the same tradition is reëchoed by the mountains of Norway and Sweden in the ballad of "Sir Olaf and the Erl-king's Daughter," which the milkmaid of Brittany sings in the lay of the "Sieur Nann and the Korigan," and in a language radically different from the Norse,—when, here and there, the same forms of superstition meet us in the ancient popular poetry of the Servians and modern Greeks, which were familiar to the Teutonic and Cambrian races of early centuries,—must we not believe in a primeval intimate connection between distant nations? are we not compelled to acknowledge that there must have existed, in those remote times, means of communication unknown to us?
We repeat, however, that, in calling the legend of Dr. Faustus the most widely-spread we know of, we cannot allude to these primitive traditions, the circulation of which is perfectly mysterious. We speak of such popular legends as admit of their origin being traced. Among these the Faustus-tradition may be called comparatively new. To us Americans, indeed, whose history commences only with the modern history of Europe, a period of three hundred years seems quite a respectable space of time. But to the Germans and the Scandinavians, from whose popular lore the names of Horny Siegfried and Dietric of Berne, (Theodoric the Great,) and of Roland, are not yet completely erased, a story of the sixteenth century must appear comparatively modern.
The popularity of the legend of Faustus, although of German origin, was, almost from its first rise, not confined to German lands. The French, Dutch, and English versions of the poor Doctor's adventurous life are but very little younger than his German biographies; and it was about the same time that he was made the subject of a tragedy by Marlowe, one of the most gifted of Shakspeare's dramatic predecessors. We are not afraid of erring, when we ascribe the uncommon popularity and rapid circulation of this legend principally to its deep and intrinsic moral interest. Faustus's time of action was exactly the period of the great religious reformation which shook all Europe. During the sixteenth century, even the untaught and illiterate classes learned to watch more closely over the salvation of their souls than when they felt themselves safe beneath the guardianship of the Holy Mother Church. And to those who remained under the guidance of the latter, the dangers of learning and independent thinking, and of meddling with forbidden subjects, were pointed out by the monks with two-fold zeal. It cannot, therefore, surprise us, that the life and death of a famous contemporary, who for worldly goods and worldly wisdom placed his soul at stake, excited a deep and general interest. In one feature, indeed, his history bears decidedly the stamp of the great moral revolution of the time: we mean its awful end. There are two legends of the Middle Ages—and perhaps many more—in which the fundamental ideas are the same. The two Saints, Cyprianus, (the "Magico Prodigioso" of Calderon,) and Bishop Theophilus, (the hero of Conrad of Würzburg,) were both tempted by the Devil with worldly goods and worldly prosperity, and allured into the pool of sin perhaps deeper than Faustus; but repentance and penitence saved them, and secured to them finally a place among the saints of the Church. But for Faustus there is no compromise; his awful compact is binding; and whatever hope of his salvation modern poetry has excited for the unfortunate Doctor is, to say the least, in direct contradiction of the popular legend.
Faustus was the Cagliostro of the sixteenth century. It is not an easy task to find the few grains of historical truth referring to him, among the chaff of popular fiction that several centuries have accumulated around his name. A halo so mysterious and miraculous surrounds his person, that not only have various other famous individuals, who lived long before or after him, been completely amalgamated with him, but even his real existence has been denied, and not much over a hundred years after his death he was declared by scholars to be a mere myth. A certain J.C. Duerr attempted to prove, in a learned "Dissertatio Epistolica de Johanne Fausto," (printed at Altorf, in 1676,) that the magician of that name had never existed, and that all the strange things which had been related of him referred to the printer John Faust, or Fust,—who had, indeed, been confounded with him before, although he lived nearly a century earlier. And when we think of the superstitious fear and monkish prejudice with which the great invention of printing was at first regarded, such a confusion of two persons of similar name, and both, in the eyes of a dark age, servants of Satan, cannot surprise us. Our John Faustus was also sometimes confounded with two younger contemporaries, one of whom was called Faustus Socinus, and made Poland the chief theatre of his operations; the other, George Sabellicus, expressly named himself Faustus Junior, also Faustus Minor. Both were celebrated necromancers and astrologers, who probably availed themselves of the advantage derived from the adoption of the famous name of Faustus.[1]
A second attempt to prove the historical nonentity of Dr. Faustus was made at Wittenberg, in the year 1683. Some of his popular biographers had claimed for him a professorship at that celebrated university, or at least brought him into connection with it,—a pretension which the actual professors of that learned institution thought rather prejudicial to their honor, and which they were desirous of seeing refuted. Stimulated, as it would seem, by a zeal of this kind, J.G. Neumann wrote a "Dissertatio de Fausto Praestigiatore," in which he not only tried to prove that Dr. Faustus had never been at Wittenberg, but pronounced his whole story fabulous. An attempt like this would not surprise us in our own time, the age of historical skepticism; but the seventeenth century gave credit to narratives having much slighter foundation. Although this dissertation was full of historical mistakes and erroneous statements, it made some sensation, as is proved by its four successive editions. It was also translated into German. All Neumann's endeavors, however, could not stand against the testimony of contemporaries, who partly had known Faustus personally, partly had heard of him from living witnesses, and allude to his death as an occurrence of recent date.
John Faustus, or rather, after the German form of his name, Faust, was born in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, probably not before the year 1490. According to the oldest "Volksbuch" (People's Book) which bears his name,[2] his parents then lived at Roda, in the present Duchy of Saxe-Weimar. The same place is likewise named as his native village by G.R. Widmann, his first regular biographer, who says that his father was a peasant.[3] Although these two works are the foundation of the great number of later ones referring to the same subject, some of these latter deviate with respect to Faustus's birthplace. J.N. Pfitzer, for instance, who, seventy years after Widmann, published a revised and much altered edition of his book, makes Faust see the light at Saltwedel, a small town belonging then to the principality of Anhalt, and must have had his reasons for this amendment. A confusion of this kind may, indeed, have early arisen from a change of residence of our hero's parents during his infancy. But the oldest Volksbuch was written nearly forty years after the death of Faustus, and Widmann's work appeared even ten years later,—both, indeed, professing to be founded on the Doctor's writings, as well as on an autobiographical manuscript, discovered in his library after his death. Perhaps, however, the assertion of two of his contemporaries, one of whom was personally acquainted with him, is more entitled to credit in this respect. Joh. Manlius and Joh. Wier—the latter in his biography of Cornelius Agrippa—name Kundlingen, in Würtemberg, as his birthplace.
Manlius, in his work, "Collectanea Locorum Communium," (Basel, 1600,) speaks of him as of an acquaintance. He says that Faustus studied at Krakow, in Poland, where there was a regular professorship of Magic, as was the case at several universities. Others let him make his studies at Ingolstadt, and acquire there the honors of a Doctor of Medicine. Both these statements may be true, as also that he was for some time the companion and pupil of Cornelius Agrippa, of Nettesheim, the celebrated scholar, whose learning and mysterious researches after the philosopher's stone brought him, like many other wise men of the age, into suspicion of witchcraft. Agrippa had a pet dog, black, like the mystical companion of Dr. Faustus, and, in the eyes of a superstitious multitude, like him, the representative of the Evil One. Black dogs seem to have been everywhere considered as rather suspicious creatures. The Pope Sylvester II. had also a favorite black poodle, in whom the Devil was supposed to have taken up his abode. According to Wier, however, Agrippa's black dog was quite a harmless beast, and remarkable only for the childlike attachment which the great philosopher had for him. It may be worth remarking, that this writer, although he speaks of Faustus in his biography of Agrippa, makes no mention of his ever having been a friend or scholar of the latter.
In several of the old stories of Faustus, we read that he had a cousin at Wittenberg, who took him as a boy to his house, brought him up, and made him his heir when he died. If this was true, it would be more probable that he was a native of Saxony than of Suabia. It is, however, more probable that this narrative rests on one of the numerous cases found in old writings in general, and above all in the history of Faustus, in which the names Wittenberg and Würtemberg are confounded. Our hero's abode at the former place was very probably merely that of a traveller; he left there, as we shall soon see, a very unenviable reputation. It is true that Saxony was the principal scene of the Doctor's achievements; but this very circumstance makes it improbable that he was born and brought up there, as it is well known that "a prophet hath no honor in his own country."
Faust's studies were not confined to medicine and the physical sciences. He was also considered eminent as a philologist and philosopher. Physiology, however, with its various branches and degenerate offshoots, was the idol of the scholars of that age, and of Faustus among the rest. A passionate desire to fathom the mysteries of Nature, to dive into the most hidden recesses of moral and physical creation, had seized men of real learning, and seduced them into mingling absurd astrological and magical fancies with profound and scholarlike researches. The deepest thinkers of their time, like Nostradamus, Cardan, Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, Thomas Campanella, flattered themselves that they could enter, by means of art and science, into communion with good or evil spirits, on whose aid they depended for obtaining knowledge, fame, wealth, and worldly honors and enjoyments. Faustus was one of those whom a passion for inquiry, in league with a powerful, sensual nature, led astray. What had been originally an honest thirst for knowledge, a deep interest in the supernatural, became gradually a morbid craving after the miraculous, the pretension of having attained the unattainable, and the attempt to represent it by means of vulgar jugglery.