first words he utters, and is so admirably consistent throughout, that the reader is never at a loss how to interpret him.
22. Where ye for men twist shredded thought like paper.
This line, which reads, literally, “In which ye twist (or curl) paper-shreds for mankind,” has been curiously misunderstood by most translators. The article der before Menschheit was supposed by Hayward to be in the genitive instead of the dative case, and he gives the phrase thus: “in which ye crisp the shreds of humanity”! Blackie even says “the shavings of mankind,” and most of the other English versions repeat the mistake, in one or another form. In the French of Blaze and Stapfer, however, the reading is correct. Goethe employs the word Schnitzel (shreds or clippings) as a contemptuous figure of speech for the manner in which thought is presented to mankind in the discourses described by Faust. Therefore by using the expression “shredded thought” in English, the exact sense of the original is preserved.
23. Ah, God! but Art is long.
Goethe was very fond of using the “ars longa, vita brevis” of Hippocrates. It occurs again in Scene IV., where he puts it into the mouth of Mephistopheles. The American reader is already familiar with the phrase, from Mr. Longfellow’s beautiful application of it, in his “Psalm of Life.”
24. Or, at the best, a Punch-and-Judy play.
The German phrase, Haupt-und Staats-action, was applied, about the end of the seventeenth century, to the popular puppet-plays which represented famous passages of history. It seems to have been, originally, a form of announcement invented by some proprietor of a wandering puppet-theatre, and may therefore be equivalently translated, as a “First-Class Political Performance!” The phrase was afterwards applied to plays acted upon the stage, and Goethe even makes use of it to designate Shakespeare’s historical dramas. in the puppet-plays the heroic figures (Alexander, Pompey,
