J. E. JACKSON.

THE FAUST CATALOGUE. DOCTOR FAUSTUS: The Man-the Myth -the Idea.

WHO has not heard of this same Doctor, and his famulus Mephistopheles? He has been immortalized in more forms than falls to the lot of one man in a nation's history. The ballad-singer, the novelist, the dramatist, and the divine, have all helped to make him famous. He has been revered as a scholar and flouted as a juggler; wafted to Paradise on the pinions of angels, and driven to Hades amid the exultant yells of imps and demons. He has figured, diminutively, in the marionettes of

Holland and Germany, and moved in kingly proportions on the stages of most European cities. Merlin has been outvied by him in miracles, Bacchus himself in wine-bibbing. The brush of some native artist drew him as a tippler astride a tub; the pencils of Rembrandt and Sichem, as the pale seer in profound and meditative mood. He resembles an indiarubberface that you can squeeze which way you will. A strange, odd, triangular kind of man, he is ever irritating the Germans into a book-rash, and dancing fantastic measures before them, like a delirium-born goblin. He has been caught, caged, and wingclipped at last, and it is amusing to

see the result.* With all his cabalistic art, he can only preserve the mere show of it by still retaining an odd threefold character.

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Four or five places claim the honour or dishonour of his birth-place, but the testimony of Manlins and Wier, both contemporaries, are in favour of Kundlingen in Wurtemburg. He was born in the latter part of the fifteenth century, and was sent in early life by his father, whom some represent as a peasant, and others as a physician, to a university to be trained for a doctor of medicine. There seems to be some uncertainty as to whether his name was George or John, and where he went to college. The majority adhere to John as his name, and Manlins affirms that "he was a student at Cracow, and learned there the magic art. This art," he adds, was there formerly in great repute, and there were public lectures given on it." He must have studied something more than this-in fact, medicine proper, for he soon appears as having taken his degree at Ingolstadt. For a time, too, he seems to have been the pupil of Cornelius Agrippa, of Nettesheim, learning magic and other secret arts. But he gets restless, and wants, perhaps, at first, purely and modestly to be exhibiting his knowledge and power. He takes one Christoph Wagner as his famulus, and begins life as a travelling physician, thus allying himself with the wandering scholars and mountebanks, who were the last sad decrepit representatives of the ancient minstrels. He has with him a dog, which he might represent to be a devil in attendance, but which is an ordinary-looking animal, if the likeness in Auerbach's cellar is a correct one. There might be an evil expression in the animal's phiz, contracted from connection and sympathy with an evil master, but one strongly suspects that all its pranks were miere results of mechanical

*The "Faust Catalogue," by Franz Peter. Leipsic.

training, and that it had wherewitha a weakness for bones.

It is in these wanderings that his real character comes out like a photograph. In a letter written by one Tritheim to Johann Wirdung, the mathematician, dated August 20, 1507, we learn a little of his performances. He calls himself the fountain of necromancy, chiromancy, pyromancy, agromancy, and other arts, and seems to have addressed a puffing advertisement to Johann. But Tritheim writes, "I know his villany. When, last year, I returned from Mark-Brandenburg, I found this fellow near Geilenhausen. Many foolish things were told me about him at the inn, things which, with great recklessness, he had undertaken to perform. As soon as he heard of my arrival he decamped, and could not be prevailed upon by anybody to present himself before me." Some of the priests in the town told the writer of the above, that he had declared to the people, that his mind and memory were so great, that were the writings of Plato and Aristotle to perish from the memory of men, he, like another Ezra, could perfectly restore them. He even vaunted at Wurzburg, during Tritheim's stay there, that he could perform miracles like our Saviour.

We can follow him pretty narrowly by contemporary testimony. "Eight days ago," writes Conrad, Canon of Gotha, October 3, 1513, "a certain chiromanticus came to Erfurt, Georgius Faustus by name-a mere boaster and fool-vulgar people admire him; the priests may rise against him--I heard him holding forth at the inn; I do not reprove his boasting. What have I to do with other people's madness!" An old Erfurt chronicle gives us further details of his visit to that city. mission having been obtained, by what kind of speciousness we can well guess, for him to lecture on Homer to the students of the university, he gathered them in a purposely darkened room to summon some of

Per

the more famous characters before them. Two, intended for Polyphemus and Cyclops, appeared, the latter in all the glory of red-hair, with an iron spear in his hand, and the human thighs in his mouth. The room then shook terribly, two students were said to have been bitten by Cyclops, and the farce ended in the fright of all. Dr. Klinger, the guardian of the Convent, was sent to try and convert Faustus, and failing, he was solemnly delivered over to Satan and expelled the city.

The next notice we have of him is

nishing the company by making his exit astride a tub. We read that,

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in Begard's "Guide to Health," (Worms: 1539), where he speaks of him as roving, some years ago," through different parts of the kingdom. He called himself then Philosophum Philosophorum. Begard waggishly goes on " But the number of those who have complained to me of having been cheated by him is very great. In deeds he was, I hear, found small and deceitful, but in taking and receiving money he was never slow." Probably his quick disappearance without paying his shot, caused him to be painted riding out of the door on a wine-tub, in Auerbach's cellar at Leipsic. At least there must be a substratum of fact in the scenes of the two pictures still extant in this curious old tavern. That they have remained there ever since they were painted, were done expressly for the vault, and very soon after his death, is shown by the way they fit the vaulted roof, the early date on them (1525), the ancient costumes, and the inscriptions. The pictures seem to have been restored in 1759, and there are visible traces of older inscriptions than the present ones. In the first picture Faustus is at a table, surrounded with students and musicians, lifting a goblet in one hand, and beating time Iwith the other on the table. The inscription, translated, reads thus :"Live, drink, and be merry, remembering this Faust and his hours. It came slowly but fully."

The second one depicts him asto

Dr. Faustus on this day
From Auerbach's cellar rode away,
On a barrel of wine astride,
By many mothers' children eyed;
This through his subtle art achieved,
And for it he the Devil's reward received.

Gast, the author of "Sermones Conviviales" (Basil: 1554), had the honour of dining with the omniscient and omnipretentious doctor at the great college, when he must needs bring some strange birds to be cooked. "He had a dog with him, and a horse (I believe it was Satan), and they were able to do anything. Some people told me they once saw the dog assume the form of a servant, and bring victuals." Gast, writing this between the years 1543 and 1548, speaks of his deplorable end, but I prefer to quote the account from Manlins' notes of the lectures of Melancthon and others (Basil: 1562):-"A few years ago, the same Johannes Faustus was sitting very sad in a village of the Duchy of Wurtemburg. It was the last day of his life. The landlord asked him why he was so unusually sad (but he was really the very worst rascal, and had led a most villanous life, and was several times nearly executed for his vices)." He tells his host not to be frightened that night, and in the morning, after a stormy night, they found him "lying near his bed, his face twisted round, as he had been killed by the devil."

So much for the human Faustus, as he is described by his contemporaries whose veracity is indubitable.

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He began to grow into a myth ere he was well buried. His system of magic, the Compulsion of Hell," printed either in his life-time or immediately after his decease, together with the "Volksbuch, or People's Book," and other biographies of him, helped to keep his fame alive. At every fair, puppet-shows represented his marvels to open-mouthed crowds, and cheap lives of him were vended,

as sheets of doggrel songs are now-adays.

The early character of the mythic doctor probably has some of the popular element in it. The myth runs thus-He has exhausted all human knowledge, and still thirsting for more, seizes upon magic as the key to universal science. While brooding discontentedly over his tomes, he discovers a spell, conjures a spirit, quails at first, but afterwards conquers. He then interrogates several. First comes Mochiel. How quick

art thou ?" "Like the wind." "Thou shalt not serve me. Get thee back." "Like the bird in the air," answers Aniquel the Second. "Still too slow. Begone!" "I am quick as the thought of man," says Aziel the Third. "Right for me! thee will I keep." This becomes transformed into a poodle and Mephistopheles. His natural evasive celerity in life becomes a mantle of passage after his death. He pretends at first to vast learning, and that failing, he resorts to tippling and the coarsest jugglery. He runs away with Pope Adrian's cup and platter at a banquet, and boxes his ears when he makes the sign of the cross; he sells a man a bundle of hay for a horse, and dares his famulus to draw the crucifixion. So far, we discern a good deal of the historic element. The account of Manlins and Gast too, merely suppose the action of the devil in his death. The priests made it a certainty.

Restless in his life-time, he was not to be left without transmigration even in his death. He passes into Poland, as the myth, under the sounding name of Twardowski; into Spain, and becomes the "Magic Prodigioso" of Calderon; into Italy, and is one Don Giovanni -all legends of seers and magicians who have mysterious intercourse with demons and caco-demons, are appropriated as adumbrations of Faustus.

Here we get into the ideal. Faustus soon comes to represent the unsatisfied intellect of man, grasping at a mastery over all things. The legend

presented rare food for a nation given to psychological curiosities, and poet after poet adorned it with still wilder fancies. Lessing led the way, in a few brief scenes he at one time contemplated fashioning into a tragedy. We have him described in these fragments as "a solitary, thinking youth, entirely devoted to wisdom, living and breathing only for it, renouncing every passion but the one for truthhighly dangerous to thee (Satan), and to us all, if he were ever to be a teacher of the people." Satan attempts his seduction, is cheated by a phantom raised by Faust's good angel, and the whole ends in the discomfiture of the devil, and the confirmation of the youth in his pure and loving desires. Here is indeed a marvellous change from the Faustus of reality, the boasting scholar, and the common trickster. The Faustus of Marlowe was founded on the old

Volksbuch," and written prior to 1590, being first acted about that time. It is much less ideal than Lessing's; hence the position I give it. The essentials of the legend are given, but the whole is a coarser and truer picture of the man, as well as the myth. In him, as the represen tative of Germany, we see the true spirit of the age-natural philo sophy, incited by the new life of printing, merging into a mad, grotesque pantheism-the old forces combating with the new; a bible-chaining, book-monopolizing spirit, with a broad and democratical freedom of thought the last expiring effort of mysticism to quench the dawnings of a more liberal and comprehensive knowledge.

The Faust of Goethe is really the philosophic Faust of his own age and his own self, disgusted with knowledge, human and divine, and longing for self-glorification and intellectual kingship. He would be an aristocrat in both its worldly and its mental sense. The magic and the entire drapery are insufficient to disguise the new man; he shines forth like a statue through a gauzy veil. He lives