offender. This is the tragedy of Faust, as handled by the great German poet, and handled in a style which bids fair to keep it prominently in the general European eye, as long as Dante’s divine comedy and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. But there is another element in the popular legend which both Marlow and Goethe have used, and which stands to the moral kernel of the story, pretty much as the witch atmosphere in which Macbeth moves to Macbeth’s personal career. Faust is a magician, as well as a thinker; and his alliance with the Powers of Evil implied not merely that all sources of sensual gratification should be placed at his disposal; but specially that a power over Nature should be granted him, in virtue of which, by asserting his superiority over the vulgar conditions of space and time, by which humanity is bound, his vanity might be flattered, and his person raised to a platform of public estimation with which neither Pope, nor Kaiser, nor any earthly dignity might contend. Faust, therefore, must appear as an exhibitor of magical tricks; and, as this is the vulgar and shallow element of the legend, it naturally plays the principal part both in the common chap-book, and in the dramatic adaptation of Marlow, whose handling of the legend altogether is commonplace, and, except in some of the lighter parts of sharp repartee, certainly not worthy of his reputation as one of the heralds of Shakespeare in the early history of the great English drama. Goethe, on the other hand, has wisely given these juggling tricks a very subordinate place in his treatment of the legend; the scene in Auerbach’s cellar being, I think, the only thing of the kind directly taken from the chap-book; and brought in also with great wisdom, in order to make it plain that Faust, with all his strongly sensual tendencies, was essentially an intellectual creature, who could not be seduced even by the Devil into any sympathetic fellowship with the pot-companions of a public beer-cellar. He felt, however, strongly, at the same time, that, as in the case of Macbeth, with which he was well acquainted, some wild and grotesque atmosphere was necessary for the magic doctor to figure in when he was not occupied directly with his love adventure; so he followed our great dramatist in making the witches’ cauldron as necessary to his hero’s passion as it was to Macbeth’s ambition; and along with this thoroughly mediæval and altogether appropriate adjunct of the witches’ kitchen, he contrived to bring in afterwards the wild and weird traditions of a supernatural character which attach to the famous Brocken mountain, the central and topmost elevation of the great ridge of the Harz in Northern Germany; thus rooting his poem locally in the fatherland as firmly as Walter Scott did for us in Scotland when he
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