“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, for the first time, a fragment of that astonishing dramatic poem which has since been acknowledged, by the whole literary public, as his masterpiece, and the most remarkable monument of his great genius.[6] The whole first part of the tragedy, still under the name of a fragment, was not published before 1808.  Since then Germany may be said to have been inundated by “Fausts” in every possible shape.  Dramas by Nic.  Voigt, K. Schoene, Benkowitz,—­operas by Adolph Baeurle, J. von Voss, Bernard, (with music by Spohr,)—­tales in verse and prose by Kamarack, Seybold, Gerle, and L. Bechstein,—­and besides these, the productions of various anonymous writers, followed close upon each other in the course of the next twenty years.  Chamisso’s tragedy of “Faustus,” “in one actus,” in truth only a fragment, had already appeared in the “Musenalmanach” of 1804.