Page:Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron (1824).djvu/157



“The Germans,” said he, “and I believe Goëthe himself, consider that I have taken great liberties with ‘Faust.’ All I know of that drama is from a sorry French translation, from an occasional reading or two into English of parts of it by Monk Lewis when at Diodati, and from the Hartz mountain-scene, that Shelley versified from the other day. Nothing I envy him so much as to be able to read that astonishing production in the original. As to originality, Goëthe has too much sense to pretend that he is not under obligations to authors, ancient and modern;—who is not? You tell me the plot is almost entirely Calderon’s. The fête, the scholar, the argument about the Logos, the selling himself to the fiend, and afterwards denying his power; his disguise of the plumed cavalier; the enchanted mirror,—are all from Cyprian. That magico prodigioso must be worth reading, and nobody seems to know any thing about it but you and Shelley. Then the vision is not unlike that of Marlow’s, in his ‘Faustus.’ The bed-scene is from ‘Cymbeline;’ the song or serenade, a translation of Ophelia’s, in ‘Hamlet;’ and, more than all, the prologue is from Job, which is the first drama in the world, and