PREFACE.

Ir is gratifying to me to see this Book reprinted in Germany. In England it has been long out of print, and I have to thank Baron Tauchnitz's courtesy in communicating to me his wish that this

German edition

the third should appear as one of his series of English translations from German authors, for rousing me from the indolent delay, which has for many years prevented me from having it republished.

Large extracts from this translation were printed many years ago in "Blackwood's Magazine." Their publication in the "Magazine" was probably the first detailed notice which the English public had of the Poem. In England we had our popular stories of Faust; his "Tragical Life and Death" formed the subject of ballads and dramas. The "Devil and Dr. Faustus" figured everywhere in puppet-play exhibition. "The story," says Warton, writing at the close of the last century and who was himself fond of witnessing all such exhibitions "frightens children at puppet-shows in the country-towns." When I first ventured on a translation of Goethe's Poem, it was natural that I should have called the hero not "Faust,"

but "Faustus" the name by which alone he was known in England. The legend is of course German; but our Marlowe seems, as is acknowledged by Lessing who was himself engaged with the subject to have been the first who felt its dramatic capabilities. To have written the name "Faust," not "Faustus," could scarcely have been done, when my extracts from the Poem were first published. There would be some inconvenience in now continuing this designation, and perhaps some impropriety in calling Goethe's Poem by any other name than that which he gave it. It may, however, be mentioned, that in the Second Part the hero is now and then called "Faustus," and it was Goethe's habit in conversation so to name him.

very few

A few of this Book have the passages character of paraphrase; and these, perhaps, I might be disposed to alter, if it were not that when a reader of the original, who is led to look at the translation, complains of this, I incline to think that he does not sufficiently consider the position of those readers of whom chiefly, if not alone, a translator should think. "Translations," says Johnson, "are for people who cannot read the original." What such a critic as I have imagined complains of as paraphrase, may in some cases be absolutely necessary to render intelligible the full thought of the German words; may at times be necessary for the purpose of preserving some peculiar form of expression-metaphorical or even literal which the translator thinks could not be omitted without injury, but which could not

be preserved on any other conditions than those involved in what is called paraphrase.

An inconvenience of more moment may seem to arise from the use of paraphrase in the translation of a Poem so popular in Germany that many lines have passed into proverbs, and are familiarly introduced in writing and conversation in a variety of applications. These, it may be said, should be given literally. Could it be imagined as possible under any circumstances that by any form of translation this effect could be produced in another country, there might be some meaning in what I feel to be a plausible objection; but a little consideration will show that where there is in the original an epigrammatic condensation of thought, it may be necessary, even when the translator has preserved or sought to preserve the epigrammatic form, for him to add a line or two expanding the compressed expression of his author, for the purpose of rendering it at once intelligible. I feel that thus only could many parts of the Poem be even readable in English. However, I am saying too much on a subject that does not affect as many as half-a-dozen in the volume. I allowed mypages self no liberties except those implied in the fact that I was translating a Poem, and was writing in the hope that the translation itself at however humble a distance from Goethe's great Work might be recognised as a Poem. I have claimed no privileges which the exigencies of the tasks they had undertaken did not compel such masters of the full powers of our

language as Dryden and Coleridge to avail themselves of and without the free exercise of which, to translate any poem faithfully would, I believe, be impossible.

After such an interval as has elapsed since the first publication of this translation, it is impossible that it should not now and then have occurred to me to wish to make some changes. This will happen to one even in the republication of an original work — how much more in reprinting a translation, particularly where the work translated has been the subject of so much criticism, and where many eminent writers have sought to show this and the other passage in some new light. Perhaps the feeling that some changes might be here and there necessary, or might be expected, has been one of the causes of my hesitating to reprint the volume; but in truth, though I have looked over many of the books about Faust, which day after day appear in Germany and France, I have met with little that would lead me to any useful change; and I feel that any great changes of a printed poem are on the whole undesirable. I almost agree

with Goethe in what he says in a letter which I find in the last book published in England of the "Goethelitteratur," Slater's translation of "Goethe's Letters to Leipzig Friends:" - "A printed book is like a dried fresco painting; it admits of no alteration." few passages, however, have been altered. The changes are for the most part unimportant.

A

There are a few passages in blank verse where