BOOKS.

MR. THEODORE MARTIN'S " FAUST."*

Mn. THEODORE MARTIN is always a graceful and scholarly trans- lator, and he has, we should gather, spent more than usual labour on this work, which constitutes, as far as we can judge from recollec- tion of other versions, the best translation of Faust in verse we have yet had in England. In its own way Mr. Hayward's prose transla- tion of Faust remains still as near as we are likely to approach to the drift of the original, but then that is only because it makes no attempt at rendering that melody and movement in the poem which is a large part of its essence. Mr. Martin will be the first to feel the chasm which separates his elegant translation from Goethe's poem. The chief loss is in the rush of feeling and in nicety of expression. We miss the direct boiling and seething of Goethe's youthful emotion and seem to find cold air-bubbles in its place. We miss too many of those delicacies of thought which depend on the exact connection in which a word strikes the mind, and which may be as completely lost in an apparently faithful translation as a prismatic colour by an angular movement of a few seconds in the surface of a crystal.

Goethe was fond of repeating that Faust was "something quite incommensurable," and that "all efforts to bring it within the scope of the understanding were in vain." "Also you must remember," he said to Eckermann, "that the first part of Faust is the expression of a somewhat obscure condition of the individual. But it is just this obscurity which fascinates men, and they puzzle over it as over every insoluble problem." Goethe took no little delight in having added this to the enigmas—the in- soluble problems—of universal literature, without having lost anything of living force by the twilight shadows which he had dropped around his great poem. He had the greater, and much the better, part of Faust ready before he went to Weimar,— before he was twenty-five years old. And it pictures better than any other of his works the fermentation of his rich, loosely-knit, German nature ;—the thirst of his youth, its impatience, self- mockery, dreamy mysticism, feverish passion, turbulent fancy,

• Faust. A Dramatic Poem by Goethe. Translated into English Yet86 by Theodora Martin. London Blackwood.

shadowy presentiments, and, above all, that insatiable craving for a wide and various experience of vivid emotions which Goethe half-justified to his own mind by ascribing to himself something of a representative character—of a manifest destiny' to exhaust and record for ever the different phases of human experience.

No one who tries to understand Faust should forget the apparently magniloquent words—afterwards incorporated in Egmont—with which Goethe burst away at this time from a mild and, let us add, middle-aged spinster in Heidelberg, on the eve of his departure for Weimar :—" Child, child no more ! lashed as by invisible spirits, the sun-steeds of time rush onward with the light car

of our destiny, and nothing remains to us but bravely and com- posedly to hold fast the reins; and now to the right, now to the left, here from a rock, there from a precipice, to avert the wheels. Whither he is going who can tell ? Scarcely can he remember whence he came!" This sense of a destiny driving them on through the tangle of life is common enough with men of high ambition in the proper sense of that word,—men whose leading passion is power. But this is precisely the missing passion in Faust, whose thirst, like Goethe's, is to share all individual desires, cravings, insights, enjoyments, to sound every depth that belongs to human nature, except apparently the desire of dominion, —to feel his nature expand to the utmost boundary of created sympathy and want, with- out seeming even to vibrate to the lust of rule. Faust himself ex- presses this yearning to Mephistopheles, "My breast, cured of the thirst of knowledge, shall henceforth bare itself to every pang. I will enjoy in my own heart's 'core all that is parcelled out among mankind ; grapple in spirit with the highest and deepest ; heap the weal and woe of the whole race upon my breast, and thus dilate my own self to the self of humanity, and like it, too, perish in the end." This is the centrifugal passion for absolute universality, and neglects, almost as its opposite, that concentrating rage of ambition—into which nevertheless it would usually climb. This deficiency is characteristic of Germany, of Goethe, and therefore of his Faust, and gives that looseness of fibre, that straggling air of vagrancy to the poem, which contrasts so curiously with the fire and the force of its intellectual and sensual passion. In Goethe and in Faust this craving for experience has no centre, no locus as it were ; it tends into the vague and indefinite in all directions ; there is no drawing together of its various threads into a practical career ; and the reason is because this selfish thirst for experience never ripens into the absorbing master-passion, which, to anybody but a German, would seem the natural goal of such a craving as Faust's. Of this, however, there is no trace in Goethe, and hence the dispersion of power, the absence of natural climax, in this extraordinary poem. It delineates the sallies of an insatiable nature into the most different regions of desire, without supplying any connection between them beyond. the personality of the hero. The intellectual key-note of Faust is the notion that the craving for universal experience leads man beyond the bounds of morality and into the power of the tempter, yet that this may be the destined transgression of a representative man, and that every such unlawful excursion beyond the natural limits of what is proper for such a man may, by thedisgust and disappoint- ment of the intoxication in which it ends, drive him back on a life

of temperate reason and modest aspirations. The mood of the poe.n is throughout that of the turbid, somewhat obscure heat of spontaneous intellectual fermentation, which is, however, con- stantly reminded by the coldest irony of the limits it is passing, and perpetually finding every fresh experience turn to dust and ashes on the lips. Faust embodies the vague, involuntary, turbid fermentation of the juices (or, as vintagers would call it, the must) of a rich nature. Nor do we ever approach any proper climax, any convergence of the various currents of desire into one deep stream. This is the distinguishing "note" of Goethe's Faust, which separates it from the other poems on the same subject.

And this mood offers no doubt very special difficulty to the trans- lator. To catch the exact tone of the poem, the tone of turbid, con- fused German feeling, thick, unclear, yet perfectly poetical and racing along with the force of a maelstrom, and to render also simultaneously the cold condensing surface of the Satanic mind, " that still Produces good while still devising ill," is no easy task for an Englishman, to whom, still more than to a German, Faust must ever be, as Goethe said, " etwas Incommensura- beks." Mr. Martin filters away too much the turbid nature of Faust in his elegant English. Take, for example, the celebrated curse which Faust invokes when Mephistopheles reminds him that the Easter Hymn had drawn the poison from his lips and made him shrink from suicide ; it strikes us as wanting in driving force, especially

as it approaches its climax, as still more wanting in turbulence of feeling, and as injuring the whole sense by the Interpolation of an apocryphal curse on " calm " in order to rhyme with "halm," in a passage which is devoted to a tirade against the illusions of youth and hope—amongst which calm is certainly not usually to be reckoned. It is so ungracious to criticize without putting in a competitive translation open to retort, that we venture one, only to show where we think Mr. Martin's version defective :— "And first be cunt," &c., is like the first head of a sermon,— far too formal, and not a true reflection of the German word voraus. Then, too, Geduld, in this passage at least, is scarcely "endurance." It refers to that disposition to be patient with the ills of life in the hope of something better with which the Easter Hymn had tem- porarily inspired Faust. He curses patience as the practical result of a delusive hope and faith with which childish memories had inspired him. Endurance is simply fortitude. Patience has the forward look in it, and this is what this passage obviously requires. But in neither our version nor Mr. Martin's is the tumid rush of passionate impulse at all adequately given. Yet this is not a difficult passage ; compared with most of Faust's reveries, it is very easy. Elsewhere Mr. Martin too often misses a beauty by want of literalness. Take the exquisite passage in which Faust describes the city holiday-makers on Easter Sunday :—

"FAUST.

"Freed from the ice are river and rill By the quickening glance of the gracious Spring ; Green with promise are dale and hill.

Old winter, palsied and shivering, Back has crept to his mountains bleak, And sends from them, as he flies appalled.

Showers of impotent hail, to streak

The fields that are green as emerald.

But the sun in his might disdains to bear One trace of the snow, and everywhere The stirrings and strivings of growth are rife, And all things don the bright hues of life.

Flowers are scant, but the landscape is gay With multitudes dress'd for a holiday."

In the last lines the poetry has in great measure evaporated through looseness of translation. "But the sun in his might disdains to bear one trace of the snow" is sadly dilated (and, as usual, absorbs heat, instead of giving it out, in the process) from Goethe's simple "Aber die Sonne duldet kein weisses." Then

"Uberall regt sich Bildung und Streben Alles will sich mit Farben belebeu ; Dooh an Blumen fehlt's im Revier Sie nimmt geputzte Menschen dafar,"

is quite missed in the English. Goethe wants to say "Everything is intent upon enlivening itself with colour, yet flowers are scant in the neighbourhood, so the sun takes gaily-dresssd people instead," and lights them up —as later in the season it would light up the flowers.

The want of fermenting power is, then, the fill3L defect of Mr.

Martin's version ;—the washing out of delicate turns in the thought the second. Still it is full of spirit, especially in the tilting be- tween Mephistopheles and his interlocutors. It would not be easy to find a better version of the fine passage where Mephistopheles,

"Ms. Manript.

"If, when my brain was rack'd and reeling,

A sweet and old familiar chime Beguiled my all of childish feeling With memories of a happier time; Now do I curse whaVer doth pen With wizard coil these souls of ours, And chains them to this dreary den With cozening and deceitful powers. And first be curet the proud con- ceit, Which girds our minds as with a fence, Curet be the semblances that cheat, And play and palter with our sense! Curst be the false and flattering dream Of fame—a name beyond the grave, Curst all that ours we fondly deem, As wife and child, as plough and slave !

Be Mammon curet, when he with Pelf Inspires to deeds were else renown, When he, to sot and pamper self, Makes silken smooth our couch of down !

Curse on the vine-grape's j uicy balm, Curse on love's soul-entrancing thrall, A curse on hope, on faith, on calm, And on endurance more than all !" " If in that fearful whirl of thought, By sweet familiar sounds beguiled, The man's resolve was set at naught By feelings that had thrilled the Then curse I all the juggling show, And luring baits that tempt the mind, To exile in this cave of woe, To hope's deceit and flattery blind. Curst, before all, the high esteem That wraps the soul in falsehood

dense'

Accurst the trick of things that seem That breeds a lie in every sense ! Cunt be the dreams whose fond deceits Our names with deathless fame endow, Curst be possession's flattering cheats Of wife or child, of slave or plough! Accurst be Mammon when with gold He rouses us to daring deeds, Or, smoothing out the pillow's fold, To soft repose luxurious leads! Accurst be love's delicious vow, Accurst the glorious purple vine, Accurst be hope, faith curst be thou, And patience my worst curse be thine."

in Faust's dress, sows evil thoughts in the mind of the student, than this .— " MEPHISTOPHELES (aside). "This prosing bores me. I must play The devil now in my own way.

Aloud.) Well, any simpleton may seize The soul of Medicine with ease— You simply study through and through The world of man and nature too, To end with leaving things to God, To make or mar them. 'Tis in vain, That you go mooning all abroad, Picking up science grain by grain : Each man learns only what he can. But he that has the gift and power, To profit by the passing hour, He is your proper man.

You're not ill-built,—will, I conceive, Shaw mettle on occasion due ;— If you but in yourself believe Others will then believe in you. Especially be sure to find The way to manage the womenkind. Their everlasting Ohs! and Abs! Of this be sure, Whate'er their fashion or their cause, All from one point admit of cure. With air respectful and demure Approach as they advance, and, mum ! You have them all beneath your thumb. But a degree must first instil Conviction in them, that your skill Surpasses other people's then At once they make you free of all Those tete-h-tete endearments small, Years scarce secure for other men : The little pulse adroitly squeeze, With looks on fire with passion seize, And boldly clasp the tapering waist, To see if it be tightly laced.

"STUDENT.

"Oh, that is much more in my way ! One sees at least the where and how.

" nurturrornmags.

"Dear friend, all theory is grey, And green life's golden tree."

No doubt Mephistopheles is easier to translate than Faust. His thoughts, instead of welling up thick with perplexities and contra- dictory feelings, are all clear-cut scorn, malice, and impurity. This it takes only wit and keenness of mind to translate,—and of such qualities Mr. Martin has an ample stock.