for twenty-four years Faust is
not to _wash_, or comb his hair or cut his nails--like Struwwelpeter.
When Faust attempts to embrace Helen she turns into a snake--and when
he is finally carried off by the demon, Kasperle gives (what Euripides
is accused of sometimes giving) a comic turn to the tragic catastrophe
by cracking jokes.

For about 150 years after Marlowe no attempt was made by any German
writer to use the subject artistically. Indeed during this period
Germany, devastated by the Thirty Years War and afterwards by French
literary influence, produced no literature worthy of mention, and what
writers it possessed were not such as would be likely to perceive the
poetic material contained in a popular puppet-show.

But the legend had taken firm hold on the popular imagination and when
Goethe was a boy (he was born in 1749) he saw a Faust-puppenspiel at
Frankfurt, and afterwards at Strassburg, when he was a young man of
about twenty. He was at this time evidently also familiar with the old
_Faustbuch_ itself, and it was then (about 1770) that he seems to have
first conceived the idea of the drama which he sealed up as finished
sixty years later (1831), a few months before his death.

Goethe's early manhood coincided with that period in German thought and
literature which is called the 'Sturm und Drang'--that is the Storm and
Stress--period. The subject of Faust, the attraction of which had for so
long lain dormant, appealed powerfully to the adherents of this new
school, with their gospel of the divine rights of the human heart and of
genius, with their wild passionate graspings after omniscience, their
Titanic heaven-storming aspirations after the unattainable and
indescribable. Lessing himself, though never a genuine Sturm und Drang
writer, began a _Faust_, and when Goethe began his drama a new _Faust_,
it is said, was being announced in almost every quarter of Germany.
Someone (I think it was Bayard Taylor) has reckoned up _twenty-nine
Fausts_ that were actually published in Germany while Goethe was working
at his. Some one else (I think Ludwig von Arnim) has said: 'Not enough
_Fausts_ are yet written. Every one should write one. There is as much
room for them as for straight lines in the circumference of a
circle'--which, as you know, is conceived by geometricians to consist of
an infinite number of infinitely small straight lines.

None of these twenty-nine _Fausts_ are, as far as I know, of any value
or i