sweets of the old school. I do not believe that there is a halting rhythm, a faulty line, or an imperfect rhyme in the entire poem, which thus stands forth in antipodal majesty and beauty, contrasted with those monstrous superfœtations of conceit upon inanity,—if not mere impostures,—which, native in origin or imported from America, have in these latter years brought burning disgrace upon the sacred name of poetry.[1]
To revert for a brief moment to Faust. I do not know that a Goethiana has yet been published, though Goethe, like Shakespeare and Voltaire, has created a literature of his own, and needs a bibliographer. The Meisterstück itself has, either in part or whole, been translated a score of times into English—by Lord Francis Leveson-Gower, Hayward (prose), Talbot, Anster, Blackie, Syme, Sir George Lefevre, Captain Knox, Filmore, Archer Gurney,[2] Bernays (prose), Anna Swanwick (for Bohn's Library), John Hills, Theodore Martin, Bayard Taylor, Galvan, and others, in part by Shelley and Carlyle, and anonymously (1834),—and there is already a whole library of Vorlesungen and "Essays." A paper, on "The English Translations of Goethe's Faust," will be found in the Cornhill Magazine, for September, 1872; but the English reader may be well content with the prose translation of Mr. A. Hayward, of which many editions have already appeared,[3] with its admirable introduction and elucidatory notes; the "Remarks" upon this by D. Boileau (1834, 8vo); Dr. Koller's Faust Papers (1835, small 8vo); and the metrical version of Anna Swanwick, published by H. G. Bohn, which is at once faithful and mellifluous. In the original German, the editions are of course innumerable; from the duodecimo at half a thaler, to the magnificent folio (Stuttgardt, 1854) with the twenty-four beautiful illustrations of Engelbert Siebertz, which will take the heart out of a ten-pound note.
To the "second part" of Faust, I cannot now do more than briefly allude; and can neither here attempt to offer a solution, or a demonstration of its relative continuity in respect to the earlier poem. According to Eckermann, who was a kind of "Boswell" to the great man, Goethe affirmed that in it was displayed a far richer world than in the former part; that it was less subjective in character: and that the atmosphere was higher, broader, clearer and more passionless. For a paper on it, reference may be made to Fraser's Magazine, October, 1863. It has been
- ↑ Take, for instance, the notable "Walt Whitman" hoax. An eminent literator, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, laid a cunning plot to test the gullibility of the public in matters of taste and criticism. He dug up an American "poet" who had never written a word of poetry in his life; and who, in all he had written, was bombastic, coarse, conceited, and irreverent, or generally meaningless. He reprinted him in England, wrote an eulogistic preface, and engaged some really clever fellows,—Professor Dowden, A. C. Swinburne, Robert Buchanan, etc.—to aid the scheme by unstinted and indiscriminate laudation. The bait took. Men who had never read Washington Irving or Whittier echoed the cuckoo-cry, and "Walt Whitman" was the noblest Transatlantic "tone " yet heard! Professor Bayne, in an able article in the Contemporary Review (December, 1875), pretty well shook the bran out of the puppet "poet;" but the impetus he got at starting still carries him on, and like a spent ball, he may yet roll on languidly for a time. The book is worth having, too, as a literary curiosity.
- ↑ The manifold faults and errors of Mr. Gurney's version are pointed out in the Westminster Review, vol. xxxviii. p. 532.
- ↑ The eighth edition lies before me, published in 1864, 12mo; but I question whether the translator has made any alterations or additions of any importance since the second (Moxon, 1834), a handsome volume in octavo. Mr. Hayward's translation is reviewed in Fraser's Magazine, May, 1833, p. 532.
