had taken firm hold on the popular imagination and when Goethe was a boy (he was born in 1749) he saw a Faust-puppenspiel at Frankfurt, and afterwards at Strassburg, when he was a young man of about twenty. He was at this time evidently also familiar with the old

    Faustbuch

   itself, and it was then (about 1770) that he seems to have first conceived the idea of the drama which he sealed up as finished sixty years later (1831), a few months before his death.

   Goethe's early manhood coincided with

   that period in German thought and literature which is called the 'Sturm und Drang'—that is the Storm and Stress—period. The subject of Faust, the attraction of which had for so long lain dormant, appealed powerfully to the adherents of this new school, with their gospel of the divine rights of the human heart and of genius, with their wild passionate graspings after omniscience, their Titanic heaven-storming aspirations after the unattainable and indescribable. Lessing himself, though never a genuine Sturm und Drang writer, began a

    Faust

   , and when Goethe began his drama a new

    Faust

   , it is said, was being announced in almost every quarter of Germany. Someone (I think it was Bayard Taylor) has reckoned up

    twenty-nine Fausts

   that were actually published in Germany while Goethe was working at his. Some one else (I think Ludwig von Arnim) has said: 'Not enough

    Fausts

   are yet written. Every one should write one. There is as much room for them as for straight lines in the circumference of a circle'—which, as you know, is conceived by geometricians to consist of an infinite number of infinitely small straight lines.

   None of these twenty-nine

    Fausts

   are, as far as I know, of any value or interest except the unfinished play by Lessing, which, as it was written while Goethe was still a lad, and seems to have been only printed in fragments at some later date, can hardly come under Bayard Taylor's list. From 

 Prev. P 22/81 next