Faust: A Tragedy
By . The Second Part. Translated in the Original Metres. By BAYARD TAYLOR. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co.
WE fear that it will require a Goethean education almost as profound as that which Mr. Taylor has won in the course of his arduous work to find in the Second Part of Faust “a higher intellectual character” than in the First. To most readers it will always appear a drama with great and beautiul passages, significant episodes, and sublime suggestions, but without limitations, or, at least, with bounds so vast and a design so vague that they are not discernible with out study closer than most men can give any work of merely human imagination. For ourselves, we confess that as we read it, we feel as if a great poet had created the drama, not so much to afford any fellow-creature instruction or pleasure, as to exercise his powers for his own amusement and surprise. Whether the purpose, whatever it was, has been justified by the result, is still a matter of very great doubt with many Goethean students. Mr. Taylor is one of the few who think it is so justified, and he certainly has helped in high degree to make the poem intelligible. In his admirably written Introduction, he gives an interpretative sketch of each act, and in the notes he makes clear whatever the light of patient research, ardent sympathy, and poetic instinct can illuminate. It is not his fault if, in spite of all care and faculty, many passages remain incapable of explanation.
Throughout, the translation appears to us worthy of the highest praise. It is graceful and musical as it is faithful, and how faithful it is will appear only to the reader who compares it with the original, for it has very few of the defects of literality. We think that, on the whole, it is even better than his version of the First Part ; and we are not quite willing to accept Mr. Taylor’s modest explanation of the fact upon ground that the “ predominance of symbol and aphorism” over “ passion of sentiment ” made his task easier; for in those passages where Goethe rises to poetry in his vast, obscure dream, his translator has reproduced him with the greatest success. No part of the version seems to us so good as the “ Helena,” in which feeling rises above the allegory, and almost dramatizes that strange conception of the union of the romantic and the classic principles through Faust and Helen in Byron, or Euphorion.
In all respects the result is a monument to the translator’s skill, sympathy, and erudition ; and if he does not succeed in making the reader agree with him concerning the relative value of the Second Part of “ Faust,” he certainly seems to have done all that could be done in English to give it the first place as an intellectual work.