teacher of the people." Satan resolves at once to seduce and destroy him. But Faustus's good angel has mercy on him. He buries him in a deep sleep, and creates in his place a phantom, with which the cheated devils try successfully the whole process of temptation and seduction. All this appears to Faustus in a dream. He awakes; the Devil discovers his error, and flies with shame and fury, and Faustus, thanking Providence for its warning, clings to truth and virtue more firmly than ever.
The other plan, to judge from the fragment we possess, is less fanciful, and seems to follow more closely the popular tradition, according to which the temptations of Faustus were by no means external, but lay deep in his individual mind. In one of its lightly-sketched scenes, the poet has evidently availed himself of the one from the Miracle-Book heretofore mentioned, and, indeed, with a great deal of force. Faustus, impatient and annoyed at the slow process of human action, desires the quickest servant from hell, and successively cites seven spirits. One after another he rejects. The arrows of the plague, the wings of the winds, the beams of light, are all not quick enough for him. The fifth spirit rises:—
"Faustus. How quick art thou?
"Fifth Spirit. As quick as the thoughts of men.
"Faustus. That is something!—But the thoughts of men are not always quick. They are slothful when truth and virtue demand them. Thou canst be quick, if thou wilt. But who will warrant me thy being always quick?—No, I trust thee as little as I ought to have trusted myself.—Ah!—(to the sixth spirit.) Now tell me how quick thou art!
"Sixth Spirit. As quick as the vengeance of the Avenger. "Faustus. Of the Avenger? Of what Avenger?
"Sixth Spirit. Of the All-powerful, the Terrible, who has kept vengeance for himself alone, because vengeance is his delight.
"Faustus. Devil, thou blasphemest, for I see thou art trembling!—Quick, thou sayest, as the vengeance of———no! he may not be named among us! Quick, thou sayest, is his vengeance? Quick? And I still live? And I still sin?
"Sixth Spirit. That he suffereth thee still to sin is the beginning of his vengeance.
"Faustus. Oh that a Devil should teach me this!—But no, his vengeance is not quick; if thou art no quicker, begone!—(To the seventh spirit.) How quick art thou?
"Seventh Spirit. Unsatisfiable (unzuvergnuegender) mortal! If I, too, am not quick enough for thee———
"Faustus. Tell me, then, how quick?
"Seventh Spirit. No more nor less than the transition from Good to Evil.
"Faustus. Ha! thou art my devil! Quick as the transition from Good to Evil!—Yes, that is quick! Nothing is quicker!—Away from here, ye horrors of Orcus! Away!—Quick as the transition from Good to Evil!—I have learned how quick that is! I know it!"
Lessing had this fragment printed in the "Literaturbriefe," professedly as a specimen of one of the old popular dramas, despised at that time by the higher classes, though Lessing remarks,—"How fond was Germany once of its Dr. Faustus,—and is so, partly, still!" But even this bold reformer of German taste seems not to have had the temerity to come forward at once as the author of a conception so entirely contrary to the reigning rules and the Frenchified taste by which, at the period of the "Literaturbriefe," (1759-1763,) Germany was still subjugated.
We do not know whether some of the young poets who took hold of the subject a short time after were instigated by this fragment of Lessing's, or whether they were moved by the awakening German Genius, who, just at that period, was beginning to return to his national sources for the quenching of his thirst. Between 1770 and 1780, Lenz and Maler Mueller composed, the former his "Hoellenrichter," the latter his dramatized Life of Dr. Faustus. No more appropriate hero could have been found for the young "Kraft-Genies" of the "Sturm und Drang Periode" (Storm and Stress period) of German literature. Schreiber, Soden, Klinger, Schink, followed them, the last-named with several productions referring to the subject. In 1786, Goethe communicated to the world,
