according to Jusserand, much of the stage-work was extremely ghastly, and no doubt it impressed the multitude.  There is even a story of some actors who had gone too far, and into the midst of whose play the real devil suddenly descended with disastrous results.  It must, however, be allowed that even the serious plays were not without an abundant element of grotesqueness.  The occasion for Faustus’ final speech of despair, for instance, was the lowering and raising before his eyes of two or three gilded arm-chairs, representing the thrones in heaven upon which he would never sit.  It does not seem to have occurred to the audience as absurd that heaven should be regarded as a kind of drawing-room floating in the air, and indeed that idea is perhaps not yet obsolete.  However that may be, it is quite evident that such machinery, ill-suited though it was to the solemnities of tragedy, must have been abundantly employed in the puppet plays.

The German puppet play of Faust has been transcribed by Dr. Hamm and translated by Mr. Hedderwick into English.  It was obtained at first with great difficulty, for the showmen kept the libretto secret, and could not be induced to lend it.  Dr. Hamm, however, followed the play round, listening and committing much of it to memory, and his version was finally completed when his amanuensis obtained for a day or two the original manuscript after plying one of the assistants with much beer and wine.  It was a battered book, thumb-marked and soaked with lamp oil, but it has passed on to posterity one of the most remarkable pieces of dramatic work which have come down to us from those times.

In all essentials the play is the same as that of Marlowe, except for the constant interruptions of the clown Casper, who intrudes with his absurdities even into the most sacred parts of the action, and entirely mars the dreadful solemnity of the end by demanding his wages from Faust while the clock is striking the diminishing intervals of the last hour.

It was through this curious intermediary that Goethe went back to Marlowe and created what has been well called “the most mystic poetic work ever created,” and “the Divina Commedia of the eighteenth century.”  Goethe’s Faust is elemental, like Hamlet.  Readers of Wilhelm Meister will remember how profound an impression Hamlet had made upon Goethe’s mind, and this double connection between Goethe and the English drama forms one of the strongest and most interesting of all the links that bind Germany to England.  His Faust was the direct utterance of Goethe’s own inner life.  He says:  “The marionette folk of Faust murmured with many voices in my soul.  I, too, had wandered into every department of knowledge, and had returned early enough, satisfied with the vanity of science.  And life, too, I had tried under various aspects, and always came back sorrowing and unsatisfied.”  Thus Faust lay in the depths of Goethe’s life as a sort of spiritual pool, mirroring all its incidents and thoughts.  The play was begun originally in the period of his Sturm und Drang, and it remained unpublished until, in old age, the ripened mind of the great poet took it over practically unchanged, and added the calmer and more intellectual parts.  The whole of the Marguerite story belongs to the earlier days.