The literary history of Faust is much too long to be even outlined here; a few points must suffice us.  In a book published in Frankfort in 1587 by a German writer named Spiess, the legend received its first printed form.  An English ballad on the subject appeared within a year.  In 1590 there came a translation of the entire story, which was the source from which Marlowe drew his “Tragical History of the Life and Death of Dr. Faustus,” brought forward on the stage in 1593 and printed in 1604.  New versions of the legend followed each other rapidly, and Faust became a favorite character with playwrights, romancers, and poets.  Toward the end of the eighteenth century, when Goethe conceived the idea of utilizing the subject for publishing his comprehensive philosophy of human life, it seems to have held possession of a large portion of literary Germany.  All together, it was in the mind of the great poet from his adolescence till his death; but while he was working on his original plan, literary versions of the legend were published by twenty-eight German authors, including Lessing, whose manuscript, unhappily, was lost.  Goethe had known the legend from childhood, when he had seen puppet-plays based on it—­these plays being the vulgar progeny of Marlowe’s powerful tragedy, which is still an ornament of English literature.  Music was a part of these puppet-plays.  In the first one that fell into my hands I find the influence of opera manifest in recitatives and airs put into the mouth of Mephistopheles, and comic songs sung by Kasperle, the Punch of the German marionette fraternity.

The love tale which furnished forth the entire opera book of mm.  Carre and Barbier is, as I have said, wholly the invention of Goethe.  There is the shadowy form of a maiden in some of the versions of the legend, but not a hint of the romantic sentiment so powerfully and pathetically set forth by the poet.  Nor did the passion either for good or evil play a part in the agreement between Faust and the devil.  That agreement covered five points only:  Faust pledged himself to deny God, hate the human race, despise the clergy, never set foot in a church, and never get married.  So far from being a love episode in the story, when Faustus, in the old book by Spiess, once expressed a wish to abrogate the last condition, Mephistopheles refused him permission on the ground that marriage is something pleasing to God, and for that reason in contravention of the contract.  “Hast thou,” quoth Mephistopheles, “sworn thyself an enemy to God and to all creatures?  To this I answer thee, thou canst not marry; thou canst not serve two masters, God and thy prince.  For wedlock is a chief institution ordained of God, and that thou hast promised to defy as we do all, and that thou hast not only done, but, moreover, thou hast confirmed it with thy blood.  Persuade thyself that what thou hast done in contempt of wedlock, it is all to thine own delight.  Therefore, Faustus,