Faust: A Tragedy

“Faust,” after an interval of more than forty years from the publication of the original edition, may seem to require a word of explanation. Very soon after the issue of the first edition I became convinced that with the usual tendency of ambitious young men, I had allowed my enthusiasm to overrule my discretion, and ventured upon a task that demanded a much riper experience of life, and a much more finished dexterity of execution than was to be expected from a person of my age and capacity. I accordingly passed a verdict of condemnation upon it, and—notwithstanding the more lenient sentence passed on the work by not a few friendly voices—continued to regard it as a juvenile performance, which had done the best service of which it was capable, by teaching me my ignorance. This verdict was confirmed in my mind by the appearance of the admirable version of the same poem by my accomplished friend, Sir Theodore Martin, with whose laurels, thus nobly earned, I was inclined to think it a sort of impertinence to interfere. But, as time went on, and, while I was employing my whole energies on laborious works in quite another sphere, I still continued to hear people, whose judgment I could not altogether despise, praising and quoting my “Faust;” in which partial estimate they were no doubt confirmed by the approval of the late George Lewes, in his classical Life of Goethe, and of the Germans generally, who, from the close intercourse I have always maintained with that people, are inclined to look on my doings in the field of their literature with a specially favourable eye. Under these circumstances, it was only natural for me to imagine that the condemnation I had passed on my first juvenile attempt in verse had perhaps been too severe; and that, after all, I owed it to myself, and to Goethe, and to the noble people with whom I had been from my youth so intimately connected, to give my translation a thorough revisal, and to republish it in a form which might be as worthy of the ambition that such an attempt implied as my literary capability admitted. I accordingly, some four or five years ago, employed the leisure of the summer months in correcting, and in not a few places carefully rewriting, the whole work in the shape in which it now