APPENDIX II.
THE CHRONOLOGY OF FAUST.
.
FAUST is the only great work in the literature of any language which requires a biography. The first child of Goethe’s brain and the last which knew the touch of his hand, its growth runs parallel with his life and reflects all forms of his manifold study and experience. While, therefore, its plan is simple, grand, and consistent from beginning to end, the performance embraces so many varieties of style and such a multitude of not always homogeneous elements, that a chronological arrangement of the parts becomes necessary as a guide to the reader.
During the illness which lasted for nearly a year after Goethe’s return from Leipzig in 1768, while he was discussing religious questions with Fräulein von Klettenberg, reading cabalistic works and making experiments in alchemy, the subject of Faust, which was already familiar to him as a child, through the puppet-plays, took powerful and permanent hold on his imagination.[1] He carried it about with
- ↑ The premonitions of the “Storm and Stress” period, which were by
this time felt throughout Germany, directed the attention of many authors
towards Faust, as a subject for dramatic poetry. Lessing was the first to
take hold of it, but only fragments of three or four scenes of his tragedy
have been preserved. The work was completed before his journey to
Italy in 1775, and despatched from Dresden to Leipzig in a box which
was lost, and never afterwards came to light. Captain von Blankenburg,
in 1784, gave the following testimony concerning the tragedy, the manuscript
of which he had read: “He undertook his work at a time when in
every quarter of Germany Fausts were announced as forthcoming; and
I know that he completed it. I have been positively informed that he only
delayed its publication, in order that the other Fausts might first appear.”
Of these other Fausts one was published at Munich in 1775, another at Mannheim in 1776, that of the painter Müller, Goethe’s friend, in 1778,
