5. Who offers much, brings something unto many.
“One should give his works the greatest possible variety and excellence, so that each reader may be able to select something for himself, and thus, in his own way, become a participant.”—Goethe to Schiller (1798).
6. This, aged Sirs, belongs to you.
It is the Poets whom the Merry-Andrew thus addresses. His assertion of the perpetual youth of Genius is not ironical, but (as appears from the Manager’s remarks) is intended as a compliment.
“To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood, to combine the child’s sense of wonder and nov- eity with the appearances which every day, for perhaps forty years, had rendered familiar,—
this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talent.”—Coleridge.
7. From Heaven, across the World, to Hell.
Goethe says to Eckermann (in 1827): “People come and ask, what idea I have embodied in my Faust? As if I knew, myself, and could express it! ‘From Heaven, across the World, to Hell’—that might answer, if need were; but it is not an idea, only the course of the action.”
The reference in this line, curiously enough, is to the course of action in the old Faust-Legend, not to the close of the Second Part, the scene of which is laid in Heaven, instead of Hell. Yet at the time when the line was written the project of the Second Part—in outline, at least—was completed. Did Goethe simply intend to keep his secret from the reader?
8. Prologue in Heaven.
Some of Goethe’s commentators suppose that this Prologue was added by him, from the circumstance that the
