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BY E P-DUTTON &CO All rights reserved INTRODUCTION The Collaboration of the Ages in a Great Work of Art.—The ground-theme of Goethe's Faust. as is indeed the case \\'ith most if not with all great poetical creations, is not the individual fabrication of one gifted mind, but rather the climax in a long evolutionary series, through the medium of which the poet has enjoyed the collaboration of the ages. To the material which in the ripeness of time he found ready to his hand have contributed, not only the con- scious literary efforts of such of his predecessors as have been attracted by the same subject, but also the artless imaginations of the ignorant and unlettered multitude who have, through many generations of men. moulded the growing mass of inherited fact and fiction into a coherent whole in accordance with their own ways of life and thought. The reader will doubtless appreciate some introductory account of this lengthy preliminary elaboration before entering upon the study of the masterpiece in which it culminates. The Mythology of Sorcery. —For the first germ of this inherited material in the conception of the mage or wizard, who by various devices could persuade or compel to his service the supernatural powers, gods or demons, and through their agency pervert the accustomed vii viii Introduction course of nature, we must go back to the very dawn of literature, and even then we shall find such a conception already in existence, an in- heritance from the voiceless times beyond. It will be sufficient merely to hint at the currency of the belief in sorcery amongst the Jews, the Greeks, and the Romans, and, for a parallel to the forms in which it must have existed in pre- historic times, to cite the magical practices in vogue amongst savage nations in our own days. Such a belief was, indeed, in the first instance merely an outgrowth of religion, if it was not rather of the very essence of primitive religion itself. The earliest sorcerer was the priest, and the practice of sorcery by no means carried with it at first the odium which attached to it in later times. It was, however, already looked at askance amongst the Greeks and the Romans, doubtless rather on moral grounds, as being em- ployed as the instrument of malevolence, than on religious grounds as an offence against the Deity. Amongst the Jews, however, in view of their monotheistic conception of religion, sor- cery could not fail to be regarded as a form of idolatry, and as such condemned ; and this attitude grows still more marked in the Chris- tian conception of sorcery, in which it appears as devil-worship, as amongst the early Chris- tians the old heathen gods themselves figure as devils. The roll of sorcerers of whom legend tells in Christian times is a long one, and constantly receives new additions as one after another the names of the men who distinguished themselves by their learning in times of ignorance are Introduction ix enshrined in it. Three of the earher Christian legends of sorcery deserve at least a passing mention, by reason of the resemblance which they show in certain points wdth the Faust- legend. The subject of the first of these is mentioned as early as the Acts of the Apostles, in Chapter O VIII. of that book: " A certain man, called Simon, which beforetime in the same city used sorcery, and bewitched the people of Samaria." Later legend busied itself further \vith this Simon, introducing into his story traits which present so sti-iking a parallel with certain features of the Faust-legend, that many have held him to be the real original of Faust. He lost his life by an attempt to fly in Rome, whilst Faust came to grief in a similar attempt in Venice ; and he married the Homeric Helena f (in the older form of the legend Selene, the i moon-goddess). It is worthy of notice that this Simon is actually compared with Faust in the Faust-book, but with the biblical Simon, not the Simon of the later legend. In spite, however, of these striking coincidences, Kuno Fischer scouts on historical grounds the idea of any direct contribution made by this legend to the Faust-legend. The other two of the legends referred to show us the mythology of sorcer\' enriched by the conception, natural to Christianity, of a com- pact with the devil, whereby the sorcerer re- nounces Christianity, and forfeits his soul as the purchase-price of his magic-powers. These are the legend of Cyprian of Antioch, which belongs to the fourth century of the Christian X Introduction era, and was afterwards wrought into a well- known drama by Calderon, and the Theophilus- legend, which belongs to the sixth century. But neither of these legends knows anything of the irrevocable nature of the pact with the devil, which is characteristic of the medieval Faust. Cyprian is a heathen, who, like Faust, in his striving after all knowledge and power has entered into a pact with the devil, but dis- covering the powerlessness of his ally against the might of the Cross is thereby converted to Christianity and dies as a Christian martyr. Theophilus on the other hand is a Christian, who from disappointed ambition abjures the Faith at the instance of the devil in a written document signed with his blood, but repenting straightway, invokes the aid of the Virgin, and from her receives again the written pact, wrested by her from the devil. The authority quoted above likewise traverses the assertion that these legends are in the direct line of ancestry of the Faust-legend. However this may be, these three legends and countless others like them doubtless contri- buted to the stock of wizard-lore which was the common possession of all medieval Christianity, and which survived in vigorous life in the sixteenth-century German Protestantism in the bosom of which the Faust-legend had its birth. In this last scion of the wizard-legend the com- pact with the devil finally assumes an irre- vocable character; the Church itself is now powerless to intervene in favour of the recreant. In this feature Kuno Fischer finds the charac- teristic contribution of Protestantism to the ) Introduction xi mythology of sorcery. As, for Protestantism, the Pope himself is Antichrist, so the miracle- working power of the Catholic Church is itself a form of magic, equally blameworthy and in- efficacious to salvation. The man that has dabbled in sorcery and given himself to the devil is lost past redemption. The drama must be played to its tragic consummation. The Evolution of the Faust-legend. —We have thus far acquired some very general idea of the growth of the atmosphere of thought and belief in which the Faust-legend had its birth. It is the last branch of a tree which has its roots deep down in immemorial antiquity. We must now seek to trace in greater detail the origin and growth of this particular legend. The Faust-legend, before it received from the genius of Goethe a new lease of life, together with a deeper meaning, had already enjoyed in various forms a wide popularity. The inquiry into its credentials began as early as 1621, less than fifty years after the publication of the first Faust-book, when a theologian of Tübingen, Schickard, declared the story of Faust to be a mere legend, invented to the end of deterring people from the practice of magic. Another theologian. Dürr, of Altdorf, writing in 1676, is apparently the first to identify the black-artist Faust with Johann Fust, whose name is associated with the inven- tion of printing in the fifteenth century. This view is rejected by Neumann, a theologian of Wittenberg, who was moved to undertake ( 1 683 the investigation of the question chiefly, it would seem, from the desire to free that city from the — xii Introduction unwelcome association with such a disreputable character as Faust, which had become an im- portant feature in the legend. Neumann first produced documentary evidence for the exist- ence of an historical Faust, but none earlier than that of Manlius, which is quoted later " (p. xxi.). His conclusion, that Faust's life is not a downright fable, nor yet a downright history, but a middle-thing," is the view which in more recent times has generally prevailed. But the identification of the conjurer with Johann Fust (a name w'hich would correspond etymologically with the modern German Faust), far from having been regarded as controverted by Neumann's arguments, continued to be even more generally accepted. The story, probably fabulous, which relates how Fust incurred the imputation of witchcraft by reason of the ap- parently miraculous character of the new art, itself underwent a legendary growth, and was without any historical justification localised in Paris.