08 - Argan, G.C. História Da Arte Italiana - A Arte Grega

Publications of the English Goethe Society
ISSN: 0959-3683 (Print) 1749-6284 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ypeg20
Faust, Part One and France: Stapfer’s Translation,

Delacroix’s Lithographs, Goethe’s Responses
Robert Vilain
To cite this article: Robert Vilain (2012) Faust, Part One and France: Stapfer’s Translation,
Delacroix’s Lithographs, Goethe’s Responses, Publications of the English Goethe Society, 81:2,
73-135, DOI: 10.1179/0959368312Z.0000000006
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/0959368312Z.0000000006
Published online: 12 Nov 2013.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 235
View related articles
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ypeg20
Download by: [University of Lethbridge] Date: 22 April 2016, At: 19:20

publications of the english goethe society, Vol. lxxxi No. 2, 2012, 73–135
Faust, Part One and France: Stapfer’s

Translation, Delacroix’s Lithographs,
Goethe’s Responses
Robert Vilain
Downloaded by [University of Lethbridge] at 19:20 22 April 2016
University of Bristol, UK
The first French translation of Goethe’s Faust, Part One, by Albert Stapfer,
was published in January 1823, and a new edition with magnificent litho-
graphs by Eugène Delacroix appeared in February 1828. Clarifying details of
the publication history and the identities of Goethe’s earliest French transla-
tors, and then revisiting the nature of Delacroix’s inspiration and thus the
relationship of text and image in his volume, this article explores the literary
and political context in which the French translation emerged and Goethe’s
engagement with the development of Romanticism in France as mediated
in Le Globe. His responses to the translation and the illustrations emerge as
much more ambivalent than is usually assumed, a stance that matches the
late Goethe’s attitude to the work itself.
keywords Goethe, Faust, Delacroix, Albert Stapfer, nineteenth-century

German literature, French reception of German literature, romanticism, transla-
tion, illustrated books
The 1828 French edition of Goethe’s Faust, Part One, with seventeen illustrative
lithographs and a portrait of Goethe by Eugène Delacroix, is a landmark in the
history of graphic art, nowadays routinely described with cascades of superlatives as
‘one of the very greatest of all illustrated books’ and ‘one of the supreme illustrated
books of the world’.1 It was the first major instance in France of the use of litho-
graphy to illustrate a contemporary work of literature, and can be said to have
redefined the very relationship of book and illustration, of writer and artist, in print.
The aged Goethe eagerly anticipated its appearance and, ostensibly, showered praise
on Delacroix for the ways in which his imagination outdid even the author’s own.
‘Die Franzosen tadeln an ihm seine Wildheit’, Eckermann quotes him as saying, but
1
David Bland, A History of Book Illustration, 2nd edn, London, 1969, p. 281; Gordon N. Ray, The Art of the
French Illustrated Book, 1700–1914, 2 vols, Ithaca, 1982, i, 210.
© The English Goethe Society 2012 DOI 10.1179/0959368312Z.0000000006

74 ROBERT VILAIN
Goethe is usually thought to have considered this ‘Wildheit’ perfectly appropriate.2

There is more to it than this, however.
This tremendous book has been widely studied: as a work of art in its own right,
as a stage in the artistic development of a great Romantic artist, as one of the most
important of the many attempts to illustrate a towering work of nineteenth-century
literature, for its contribution to the shift of focus in the Faust legend in Europe
from Faust to Mephistopheles, and to some extent also as marking a decisive point
in the growth of Goethe’s reputation in France, a process in which he was himself
extremely interested. However, it occupies a unique place at the crux of a number of
broader and more complex aspects of literary and cultural history. The nature of the
translation itself and details of its reception in France shed (not entirely consistent)
light on the gradual relaxation of French neo-classical prejudice and the rise of
Romanticism, which are in turn both determined by and manifested in the increasing
openness of France towards other literatures. The person of the translator, his back-
ground and the circles in which he moved allow us to explore more precisely nascent
Franco-German literary relations in the period. What they reveal is the politically
radical nature of some of these relations, the way in which Goethe was received in
France, and Goethe’s own views of France. The ‘French Faust’ provides evidence for
Goethe’s preoccupation with the idea of ‘Weltliteratur’ and in particular what the
very business of translation itself meant for him, as an indispensable component of
his dreams of international literary awareness. These ideas were partly developed
in connection with his interest in the radical Parisian literary and cultural journal,
Le Globe. Close examination of Goethe’s quite distinct views on the translation and
Delacroix’s lithographs illuminates not only his uncomfortable re-encounter with an
intensely personal work completed over two decades previously but also the dangers
of too national a reading of Faust and the Faustian. And for this to be appreciated
fully, more has to be said about the ways in which Delacroix’s images relate to the
text with which they are associated — that association being itself not entirely
straightforward in origin, and often regarded as at best tenuous.
This study seeks to combine these perspectives so as to gain a more rounded view
of just how influential the 1828 French Faust was and is, making good some of the
imperfections in the communication between French and German scholarship on
the way. Working with new material, it also seeks to provide clearer detail and
differentiation in some areas of genesis and reception. Despite some meticulous
scholarship, the study of the French Faust translations is still beset by unnecessary
confusion and error in a number of very basic respects. These include even the
identity of the first translator, the order in which French versions appeared and the
dates of their publication, and technical issues about illustrations — quite apart from
less empirically determinable matters concerning the nature of the translations them-
selves and how they relate to Delacroix’s lithographs. ‘Appalling confusion in the
French works of reference, as well as in German literature’ is how Edwin H. Zeydel
described the situation nearly seventy years ago, and despite his and others’ clarifica-
tions, that confusion is still present in ways that are by no means all trivial.3 This
2
MA, xix, 167, 29 November 1826.
3
Edwin H. Zeydel, ‘An Unpublished Note of Goethe’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 43 (1944),
380–83 (p. 382).
FAUST, PART ONE AND FRANCE 75
essay therefore attempts to provide an accurate account of the circumstances in which

Faust was translated and published in France in the 1820s, a reassessment of the
principal stimuli for Delacroix’s interest, and an analysis of Goethe’s responses both
to the first French translation of his work and to the 1828 illustrated edition.
Stapfer’s translation
The nineteenth century saw Faust translated into French in full or in part more
than twenty times,4 beginning with the prose fragments included by Mme de Staël in
De l’Allemagne (1810) and ending with Georges Pradez’s metrical version published
in Lausanne in 1895. The complete Faust I first appeared in 1823 in two versions,
one by ‘Albert Stapfer’, as volume iv of a collected edition of Goethe’s dramas,5
the other by Louis-Clair Beaupoil, Comte de Saint-Aulaire, in a series devoted to
translations of plays from various languages.6 Despite very respectable scholarly

investigations,7 some uncertainty persists in the critical literature as to which of these
is in fact the earlier translation,8 and this is due in part, no doubt, to an error in
the prefaces to Gérard de Nerval’s more celebrated version. The preface to the first
edition of Nerval’s translation (1828) lists Stapfer after Saint-Aulaire, merely giving
the impression that this was the order in which the versions appeared; however, the
third edition (1840) specifically names Saint-Aulaire as ‘le premier traducteur de
Faust’. Such errors still occur in recent scholarship and not always in non-specialist
works,9 but there is in fact very clear evidence for the priority of Stapfer’s translation.
4
See Martha Langkavel, Die französischen Übersetzungen von Goethes Faust, Strasbourg, 1902, pp. ii–iv.
5
Œuvres dramatiques de J. W. Goethe, traduites de l’allemand; précédées d’une notice biographique et litté-
raire sur Goethe, ii–iv, Paris, 1821–23 (published by Auguste Bobée); i, Paris, 1825 (published by Auguste
Sautelet). References in previous studies cite either Bobée or Sautelet as the publisher of the whole series: the
former published volume iii in November 1821, ii in February 1822, and iv in January 1823; volume i finally
appeared in August 1825 with Sautelet, who reissued the set and was responsible for reprinting all the volumes
in 1825. Mesnier issued a second edition in 1828. The ‘Notice’ by Stapfer in volume i is a very substantial
essay of 184 pages, but a shorter version appeared separately in 1824 (see Bibliographie de la France, 23
October 1824, p. 634).
6
Chefs-d’œuvre des théâtres étrangers — allemand, anglais, chinois, danois, espagnol, hollandais, indien,
italien, polonais, portugais, russe, suédois — traduits en français, 25: Chefs-d’œuvre du théâtre allemand.
Goethe 1, Paris, 1823 (= Saint-Aulaire, Faust), published by Pierre-François Ladvocat, one of the most
prominent publishers of the works of the French Romantics.
7
Such as André Lelarge, ‘La première traduction française de Faust’, Bulletin du bibliophile et du bibliothécaire,
20 April 1932, pp. 151–60.
8
See, for example, Günter Busch, Eugène Delacroix: Der Tod des Valentin, Frankfurt am Main, 1973, p. 27
(referring to Saint-Aulaire’s as ‘eine erste, äußerst freie und unvollständige Übersetzung’); Jean Malaplate, ‘Zur
Problematik der Übersetzung Goethescher Poesie ins Französische. ‘“Faust I” und “II”’, Goethe-Jahrbuch, 103
(1986), 173–85 (p. 175); and Hans-Jürgen Malles, ‘Übersetzungen’, in Goethe Handbuch, ed. by Bernd Witte,
Theo Buck, Hans-Dietrich Dahnke, Regine Otto and Peter Schmidt, 5 vols in 6, Stuttgart, 1996–99, iv/2,
1067–72 (‘Die ersten vollständigen Übersetzungen des Faust I ins Französische bzw. Englische führten Graf de
Saint-Aulaire 1823 und Abraham Hayward 1833 aus’, p. 1071). Like several others — including Fernand
Baldensperger, Goethe en France Paris, 1920, p. 99, and Jakob Otto Kehrli, Die Lithographien zu Goethe von
Eugène Delacroix, Bern, 1949, p. 19 — Malaplate relies on Stapfer’s note in the 1828 edition, which appears
to cite 1825 as the date of his Faust translation, whereas this is in fact the year in which the four-volume
edition of Goethe’s dramatic works was completed with the volume that included his ‘Notice’.
9
See, for example, David Cairns, Berlioz, 2 vols, i: The Making of an Artist, 1803–1832, Berkeley, CA, 2000,
p. 290, which prioritizes Saint-Aulaire’s translation and dates it 1822; and a slip in Goethe, FA, ii, xxxvii, 879,
which dates Stapfer’s version 1822.
76 ROBERT VILAIN
This was announced on 11 January 1823 in the Bibliographie de la France; Goethe

received a copy from Stapfer on 18 January, and it was discussed in the February
1823 issue of the Revue encyclopédique.10 The first item in Saint-Aulaire’s volume
(the publisher Ladvocat’s note to subscribers) is dated 25 September 1823; the Biblio-
graphie announced publication on 4 October.11 Moreover, Saint-Aulaire refers to
Stapfer’s translation in the preface to his own: he confesses that he simply did not
understand two of the scenes in the original (‘Hexenküche’ and ‘Walpurgisnacht’)
and praises ‘le savant travail de M. Albert S.’ — ‘Albert S***’ being how the preface
to Stapfer’s own 1823 translation had been signed.12
There has been a further difficulty. Doubt still persists in some quarters as to
which ‘Albert Stapfer’ was responsible for this translation. Was it Philippe-Albert
Stapfer (1766–1840), a Swiss academic, poet and translator, sometime minister and
Ambassador to Paris, and founder of the Swiss National Library? Or was it his son,
the twenty-one-year-old Frédéric-Albert-Alexandre Stapfer (1802–92), a journalist

involved in the revolutionary events of 1830?13 A study of Faust in France published
in 2009 remarks on this question in a footnote, and while it concludes that in all
likelihood Stapfer fils was the translator, the caveat is added: ‘Von welchem der
beiden Stapfer die Übersetzung stammt, wird sich wohl nicht einwandfrei nachweisen
lassen’.14 An essay on Goethe’s reception of Delacroix’s lithographs published in 2011
notes: ‘in der Literatur ist bis heute strittig, ob die Übersetzung von Philippe-Albert
[. . .] oder seinem Sohn [. . .] stammt’.15 But the translation was quite unambiguously
the work of the younger Stapfer. The confusion dates back at least to the mid-19th
century — the 1855 edition of a standard reference work confidently attributes
the French Faust to Philippe-Albert16 — but the uncertainty and inaccuracy are
10
See Goethes Bibliothek, ed. by Hans Ruppert, Weimar, 1958, p. 259 (no. 1805); Charles Coquerel, ‘Faust,
poëme dramatique, traduit de l’allemand en prose et vers, par Albert Stapfer’, Revue encyclopédique,
17 (February 1823), 384–85.
11
‘Note sur Faust’, in Saint-Aulaire, Faust, p. 15; Lea Marquart, Goethes ‘Faust’ in Frankreich, Heidelberg, 2009,
p. 75, n. 70; see also Langkavel, Die französischen Übersetzungen, pp. 24–25.
12
Stapfer, Faust (1823), p. vi. Marquardt makes a similar point but refers to the second edition of Saint-Aulaire’s
version, which is slightly modified: the original’s debt to Stapfer refers not to ‘le savant travail’ but to ‘un
jeune littérateur plein de mérite, qui n’a pas été rebuté par des difficultés contre lesquelles je n’ai pas eu
le courage de lutter. J’ajouterai même que l’essai [in the sense of ‘attempt’ rather than ‘essay’] de M. Albert
S. [. . .] a été pour moi un nouveau motif de découragement: j’ai reconnu dans sa traduction une parfaite
connaissance de la langue allemande’. The hapless Saint-Aulaire does not seem very much more confident
about his work even after having borrowed his rival’s versions, since he concludes the paragraph, ‘cependant
l’ensemble ne me parait [sic] pas beaucoup plus clair en français qu’en allemand’ (‘Note sur Faust’, p. 30).
13
The latter was known to his friends and family simply as ‘Albert’ and is referred to thus in what follows.
Neither should be confused with another Stapfer with a pedigree of publications on Goethe, the critic Paul
Stapfer (1840–1917), Albert’s nephew, who was Professor of ‘littérature étrangère’ (German and English) at
Grenoble and later of French Literature at the University of Bordeaux.
14
Marquart, Goethes ‘Faust’ in Frankreich, p. 75.
15
Reiner Zeeb, ‘Goethes neues Frankreichkonzept und der Empfang von Delacroix’ Lithos zu “Faust I”
1826/1828’, in Aus Hippocrenes Quell: Ein Album amicorum kunsthistorischer Beiträge zum 60. Geburtstag
von Gerd-Helge Vogel, ed. by Kevin E. Kandt and Hermann Vogel von Vogelstein, Berlin, 2011, pp. 116–35
(pp. 121–22).
16
Biographie universelle, ancienne et moderne, Paris, 1855, lxxxiii, 20. This predates the source of confusion
given by Zeydel, ‘Unpublished Note’, p. 382, namely, the Catalogue général de la Librairie Française pendant
25 ans (1840–1865), Paris, 1867–71, iv (1871), p. 436 (n.b. not ii [1868], p. 463 as Zeydel notes, which is a
reference to another edition of Stapfer’s translation).
perpetuated in many modern library catalogues.17 Specialist works on the history of

the book are not immune.18 Even a respected modern English translator of Faust
opens his ‘Introduction’ with the confident but multiply erroneous assertion: ‘In the
spring of 1827 Philippe-Albert Stapfer, a retired Swiss diplomat living in Paris, who
a few years earlier had published a successful translation of Goethe’s dramatic works
in four volumes, was planning a new, separate edition of Faust, Part One, to be
illustrated by Delacroix’.19 He can hardly be blamed for the error, however. Zeydel
has already shown how the Weimar edition of Goethe’s works is badly inconsistent
on this point,20 and while the latest editions of Goethe are usually more reliable, even
they are not always perfectly accurate: the editor of the volume Tag- und Jahreshefte
in the Frankfurt edition, for example, indexes the French translator of Goethe’s
Œuvres dramatiques as ‘Philipp Albert’.21
There was no perceptible uncertainty among contemporaries: Saint-Aulaire (who
was in a good position to know) referred to his rival in his own preface as ‘un jeune
littérateur plein de mérite’, which could hardly apply to a statesman in his late fifties.
Goethe refers to Stapfer’s ‘talentvolle Jugend’ in a letter to him written in 1826.22
Albert Stapfer sent his Preface to a friend, Etienne-Jean Delécluze, who wrote back
to him about it, praising also ‘le monologue de Faust’.23 Other friends were kept
informed about its progress — a letter from Stapfer’s publisher Auguste Sautelet to
Jean-Jacques Ampère, for example, assures him ‘Albert a fini sa notice, il y a mis
beaucoup d’esprit’,24 and Prosper Mérimée congratulates Stapfer on its ‘vigoureux
argumens’ a few weeks later, ‘en regrettant seulement qu’elle fût si courte’. Mérimée
asks for his regards to be passed on to Stapfer’s parents.25 The identity of the
translator was well known outside this private circle too: when a review in an English
periodical from 1836 mocked the pretensions of an English translator of Faust,
Abraham Hayward, and asked rhetorically ‘Does Mr H. know who M. Stapfer is?’,
17
The online catalogue of the Library of Congress, the Staatsbibliothek, Berlin, and the Institut national de
l’histoire de l’art, Paris, for example, all opt for Stapfer père; France’s Système Universitaire de Documentation
(Sudoc) gives the conflation ‘P. A. Stapfer (fils)’, which Zeydel dates back to the printed catalogue of the
Bibliothèque Nationale — it has been corrected in the online version only recently; the British Library gives
only the name ‘Albert Stapfer’ and (unusually) no birth-and-death dates, but electronically cross-refers to
‘Philipp Albert’; while the ‘Ebook and Texts’ section of The Internet Archive (www.archive.org) consistently
identifies the Stapfer of the Faust translation as Philippe-Albert.
18
Frédéric Barbier’s essay ‘Les formes du livre’ in Histoire de l’édition française: 2, Le livre triumphant,
1660–1830, ed. by Henri-Jean Martin and Roger Chartier, with Jean-Pierre Vivet, Paris, 1984, p. 538, refers
to the 1828 Faust as a new edition of Philippe-Albert’s translation.
19
Goethe, Faust. Part Two, trans. by David Luke, Oxford, 1994, p. ix.
20
Zeydel, ‘Unpublished Note’, pp. 382–83.
21
Goethe, FA, i, xvii, 1011. John Cooper, Mendelssohn, Goethe and the Walpurgisnacht: The Heathen Muse in
European Culture, 1700–1850, Rochester, NY, 2007, p. 168, attributes the translation to Philippe-Albert and
dates the publication 1825. For an example from work on France rather than Goethe, see John Claiborne
Isbell, The Birth of European Romanticism: Truth and Propaganda in Staël’s ‘De l’Allemagne’, Cambridge,
1994, where two of three indexed references to ‘Stapfer, A.’ are to Philippe-Albert, the other to Albert.
22
WA, iv, xli, 125; draft, headed ‘An Philipp Albert Stapfer’ in that edition (see also note 224).
23
Letter of 2 November 1824 published in Robert Baschet, E.-J. Delécluze. Témoin de son temps. 1781–1863,
Paris, 1942, p. 97, n. 1. This must refer to the fragment translated into verse discussed below, pp. 92–93.
24
André-Marie et Jean-Jacques Ampère, Correspondance et Souvenirs (de 1805 à 1864), ed. by Mme H[enriette]
C[heuvreux], 2 vols, Paris, 1875, i, 281 (letter of 3 November 1824).
25
Prosper Mérimée, Correspondance générale, ed. by Maurice Parturier, 15 vols & 2 supplements, Paris,
1941–47; Toulouse, 1953–64, i, 6–8.
78 ROBERT VILAIN
the reply supplied was affirmative and detailed, although not without its own
pitfalls:
He knows probably also that the father of M. Stapfer resided in Paris in the character of
Ambassador of Switzerland; that M. Stapfer himself [i.e. Philippe-Albert] is a German,
who did not leave Germany before the age of 25; that from a German university he came
to Paris, where he obtained some reputation by a translation of a work of Kant. M.
Stapfer [the son] is not an unknown individual; he is one of the regular writers in the
National, which is both a sign of merit and a sure guarantee of notoriety.26
Stapfer fils was born in Paris on 26 January 1802, while his father (a pastor who had
held chairs of Philology and Theology in Berne before becoming Minister for the
Arts, Sciences, Public Works, Bridges and Roads in 1798) was Minister Plenipotenti-
ary there. Philippe-Albert’s marriage to a Frenchwoman prompted him to settle in
France permanently, and he rapidly became a central figure in literary circles with an
interest in Franco-German cultural relations and remained on friendly terms with
Benjamin Constant (translator of Schiller’s Wallenstein), Alexander von Humboldt,
and Mme de Staël. The Stapfer household was evidently a lively and welcoming one,27
and Albert fils met some of the most influential cultural and political figures of the
age in his own home. For a time his tutor was François Guizot, a man of letters who
became a powerful supporter of a constitutional monarchy after the July Revolution,
an advisor and minister to Louis Philippe, and later briefly Prime Minister of France.28
After seeing him suffer a bout of intense frustration and depression in June 1807, the
Stapfers took Guizot under their wing and employed — and housed — him for three
years to educate their sons. This was a particularly generous act considering the
significance that education had long had for Philippe-Albert, both professionally as a
government minister promoting policies of educational reform, and personally: ‘Mes
enfants’, he wrote, ‘sont de bons petits êtres qui auraient peut-être besoin du collège
et de l’éducation du coup de poing; mais quand, au malheur de s’en priver, il faut
ajouter encore celui de les voir estropiés et réduits à des machines dépouillées du feu
sacré de Prométhée, on y pense à deux fois et on préfère les voir moins savants
et moins machines’.29 His educational choices for his children might consciously have
been made so that they should not end up like Goethe’s Faust at the opening of the
‘Nacht’ scene.
The young Albert was taught drawing by the painter and critic Etienne-Jean
Delécluze, who wrote for the Journal des débats, which supported the liberal opposition
26
[Anon.], ‘Translators of the Faust — Hayward, Anster etc.’, London and Westminster Review, 25.2 (April–
July 1836), 366–89 (pp. 374–75). Cockiness of this sort should be set against some extraordinary misconcep-
tions, however, such as the report in The Dublin Review listing translations of Faust including four in French:
‘by the Comte St Aulaire, M. Stapfer, M. Gérard (a pseudonym) and M. Delacroix’: [C. W. Russell], ‘Recent
Translations of the Faust — Its Sacred Poetry’, The Dublin Review, 9.18 (November 1840), 477–506
(p. 479).
27
See, for example, Lelarge, ‘Première traduction’, pp. 153–54, and Kehrli, Lithographien, pp. 30–31.
28
On the years Guizot spent with the Stapfers, see Charles H. Pouthas, La Jeunesse de Guizot (1787–1814),
Paris, 1936, pp. 170–99.
29
Letter to La Harpe of 6 November 1809, quoted in Pouthas, Jeunesse de Guizot, pp. 171–72. Goethe noted
positive support for his work from Guizot in a note on Stapfer’s ‘Notice’ to the translations, mentioning ‘was
die Herren Stapfer, Fauriel, Guizot mir und meinen Werken zu Liebe getan’ (MA, xiii/1, 539).
against Charles X. Delécluze’s memoirs offer further poignant confirmation of Albert

Stapfer’s talents and ambitions. Inspired like Guizot by the hospitality and generos-
ity of Stapfer père, and by regular salons of intellectuals and politicians meeting in
the library of his brother-in-law, Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (father of the architect),
Delécluze set up a series of gatherings of his own which were attended by Stapfer and
his cousin Amédée Bouffé, Edouard Monot (whose sister married Albert Stapfer’s
brother Charles-Louis), Jean-Jacques Ampère, and (occasionally) the publisher
Auguste Sautelet, despite the fact that Delécluze was nearly twice their age. ‘Un jour’,
Delécluze recounts, ‘[Sautelet] vint avec Mérimée, qu’Étienne avait déjà eu l’occasion
de connaître chez M. Stapfer le père’, and the author quickly became the life and soul
of the group, giving a private reading of his (now lost) drama Cromwell there in
1822.30 As the group expanded, meeting every Sunday from 12 to 5, notable habitués
included Stendhal and the reformist politician Prosper Duvergier de Hauranne.
Delécluze summarizes the nature of the group: ‘En deux mots et pour employer
ceux consacrés à cette époque, ils étaient libéraux et romantiques’.31 In addition to
contextualizing Stapfer’s upbringing in a house famous for its huge library and by
a father legendary for his learning and linguistic skill, Delécluze also gives a neat
pen-portrait of Albert Stapfer himself:
Quant à Albert Stapfer [. . .] outre les études classiques qu’il avait faites, chez le pasteur
Monod, il avait appris de bonne heure, sous la direction de son père, les langues alle-
mande et anglaise. C’était alors un jeune home déjà fort spirituel, avide de sciences et de
nouveautés, lancé dans l’opposition politique la plus vive, romantique déterminé et l’un
des habitués du dimanche qui, après avoir émis ses théories en politique et en littérature
avec ardeur, les défendait toujours très-spirituellement et avec verve. Il se livrait aussi avec
assez de succès à la poésie; et outre la traduction qu’il acheva vers cette époque du théâ-
tre de Goëthe, il publia celle de Faust, écrite en vers et avec talent; ce qui a fait regretter
que ce jeune écrivain ait abandonné brusquement le culte des lettres.32
The only reservation he expresses about young Stapfer concerns his over-enthusiasm
for Beyle, alias Stendhal, and his lack of critical distance from his ideas: ‘Albert
Stapfer et quelques autres des plus jeunes, marchant sous la bannière levée par Beyle,
se laissaient séduire par les sophismes de cet homme spirituel, mais irréfléchi, pour
qui toute nouveauté ayant chance de déranger ce qui était bien établi avait un attrait
irrésistible’.33
Albert Stapfer’s other friends included Auguste Sautelet, publisher of Le Globe and
the overtly militant Le National, as well as Volume I of the series of Goethe transla-
tions to which Stapfer had himself contributed. Sautelet’s own uncritical cult of a
literary lineage beginning with Werther and including Chateaubriand’s René and Sen-
ancour’s Obermann was thought by contemporaries to have contributed to his suicide
in May 1830.34 Less susceptible members of the circle included the historian and
travel-writer Jean-Jacques Ampère (son of the more famous physicist) and Victor
30
Etienne-Jean Delécluze, Souvenirs de soixante années, Paris, 1862, p. 222.
31
Delécluze, Souvenirs, p. 225.
32
Delécluze, Souvenirs, pp. 230–31.
33
Delécluze, Souvenirs, pp. 157–58.
34
Baldensperger, Goethe en France, pp. 77–78.
80 ROBERT VILAIN
Cousin — a philosopher, journalist, academician, Professor at the Sorbonne (where

he was one of Balzac’s teachers between 1816 and 1819), and, from 1840, Minister of
Education. Politically, Cousin was one of the ‘doctrinaires’, a group of liberal royal-
ists led by Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, but the environment in which Albert Stapfer
grew up was often more critical both of Empire and Restoration. Albert’s own
credentials as a libertarian and militant were impeccable. He worked on the liberal
opposition paper Le National from its foundation in 1830 and remained a member
of the editorial staff until 1835. As such he was one of the signatories of the famous
‘journalists’ protest’ against the July Ordinances issued on 26 July 1830, and he later
received the July Medal in recognition of his energetic defence of liberty.
According to Quérard, the other translators of the four-volume series of Goethe
translations in which Stapfer’s Faust appeared were ‘Cavagnac [sic] et Margueré’.35
Neither is easily identified, although the former is probably a near contemporary of
Stapfer’s, Eléonore-Louis Godefroy Cavaignac (1801–45), initially a lawyer, then a

revolutionary journalist for Le National and republican politician. His father Jean-
Baptiste had been a ‘Montagnard’ member of the Republican Convention in 1790; his
brother, General Louis-Eugène Cavaignac, was briefly de facto French head of state
in 1848 (losing out to Louis Napoleon). In the 1820s Godefroy wrote a play, Dubois
Cardinal, ou tout chemin mène à Rome, and a short novel, Une tuerie de cosaques,
which were published together in 1831, and from 1829 he contributed short stories to
the Gazette littéraire (published by Sautelet). He was one of the founders of the
‘Société des Amis du Peuple’ and the ‘Société des Droits de l’Homme’, who took part
in the Parisian risings of the early 1830s before escaping to England in 1835, where
he met Carlyle and his circle.36 John Stuart Mill described Cavaignac as ‘a man whose
name is energy [. . .] who impresses you with a sense of irresistible power and
indomitable will [. . .] intense in everything’.37
Politically, therefore, the circles in which the first translator of Faust moved were
full of reformist energy, intensely intolerant of restrictions to human liberty, and
liberal to the core. Culturally they were outstandingly cosmopolitan — according
to Guizot’s biographer, ‘[l]e milieu de Stapfer [. . .] était le foyer le plus ardent de
cosmopolitisme à Paris’38 — but they also displayed a pronounced Germanophilia
that was itself not unrelated to their political concerns. Delécluze’s cultivation of
35
Joseph Marie Quérard, La France littéraire, ou Dictionnaire bibliographique des savants, iii, Paris, 1829,
p. 395. By 1855 (in Le Quérard: Archives d’histoire littéraire, de biographie et de bibliographie françaises)
the spellings have mutated to ‘Cavaignac et Marguerré’ and Stapfer is wrongly identified as Philippe-Albert
(p. 164). Zeydel insists that the spelling ‘Cavaignac’ is incorrect, giving no reason and not offering to identify
him (‘Unpublished Note’, p. 380). Margueré was the name of a family of Parisian lawyers active under the
Convention and well into the nineteenth century; Etienne-Philippe Margueré de Lusigny and his son Jean-
Edouard Margueré, together with Nicolas-Philippe Margueré, were all professionally active in the 1820s (see
Tableau des Avocats à la Cour Royale de Paris, Paris, 1829, pp. 31, 37, 49, 69, 76, and 107). If any of these
was the co-translator of Goethe, the most likely is Jean-Edouard.
36
See Joachim Ambert, Portraits reìpublicains. Armand Carrel, Godefroy Cavaignac, Armand Marrast, Le
Colonel Charras, Paris, 1870, pp. 79–155, which gives his date of birth as 1800. There is no reference to
translations in this account or in the biographical sketch by Emmanuel Gonzalès in Cavaignac’s posthu-
mously published Romans militaires, Paris, 1886, pp. vii–xxviii.
37
The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill, ed. by Frances D. Mineka, 2 vols, Toronto, 1963, i, 196 (letter to
Thomas Carlyle, 25 November 1833). See also Frederick W. Hilles, ‘The Hero as Revolutionary: Godefroy
Cavaignac’, in Carlyle and His Contemporaries, ed. by John Clubbe, Durham, NC, 1976, p. 79.
38
Pouthas, Jeunesse de Guizot, p. 183.
Stapfer and his friends was due in part to their knowledge of the English language,
but he admired their facility in German too.39 Cousin had visited Germany a number
of times, and maintained cordial relations with Hegel and Schelling. He visited
Weimar in October 1817, April 1825, when he discussed the French translations
of Faust with Goethe himself, and July 1831.40 He was nearly unable to make one
journey because he had been arrested in Dresden in 1824, transferred to Berlin, and
imprisoned for several months under suspicion of political conspiracy and spreading
revolutionary propaganda. Goethe was particularly interested in Cousin’s work Frag-
ments philosophiques (1826) for its insights into epistemology and cognition.41
It is easy to forget just how marginal German literature and culture were in France
in the early 1800s, and the extent to which intercultural suspicion was mutual. In
the 1750s Friedrich Melchior Baron von Grimm actively promoted Franco-German
cultural relations via the manuscript journal Correspondance littéraire — promoting
the north-German Gottsched and the Swiss Albrecht von Haller in particular — but
relations with Rousseau and Diderot deteriorated and his influence waned. Another
Swiss poet, Salomon Gessner, was promoted heavily by Michel Huber, but it was
Huber’s four-volume Choix de poésies allemandes (1766) — with its epigraph from
yet another Swiss-German, Johann Jakob Bodmer (‘Auch Deutsche können sich auf
den Parnassus schwingen’) — that marked the point at which France had the first
opportunity to get to know German literature. It played the role for the eighteenth
century in France that Mme de Staël’s De l’Allemagne would play in the nineteenth
century, and championed Lessing’s call for greater attention to the English model
than to the French the better to develop a truly German literary culture.42
Huber’s anthology coincided with a brief vogue for German literature in Paris
in the 1760s, from which Klopstock and Lessing benefited, with Diderot’s support.
Neither was greeted with unqualified approbation, however. Der Messias never found
favour in France, and although Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie was eventually
published in French in 1785, it appeared anonymously, its translator (François
Cacault) fearing a backlash provoked by Lessing’s hostility to French drama. With
the notable exception of Schiller’s Die Räuber, the dramas of the Sturm und Drang
were in general badly received, seen in France as nationalistic and aggressively
gallophobic. Before Werther burst upon the scene, it was above all the idyllic pastoral
poetry of the Swiss that sustained French attention, together with isolated dramas
such as Klopstock’s Der Tod Adams (1757) — possibly by association with Gessner’s
epic poem Der Tod Abels (1758).
The exception is interesting: Schiller enjoyed a burst of popularity during the
French Revolution. The sensational 1782 Mannheim première of Die Räuber was
39
Delécluze, Souvenirs, p. 123.
40
Victor Cousin, Fragments et souvenirs, 3rd edn, Paris, 1857, pp. 155–56. Cf. Goethes Gespräche: eine
Sammlung zeitgenössischer Berichte aus seinem Umgang, ed. by Flodoard Freiherr von Biedermann, revised
by Wolfgang Herwig, 5 vols in 6, Munich, 1998 [= GG], iii/1, 771–77 and iii/2, 933–34.
41
See Jost Schillemeit, ‘“Le Globe No. 43, sehr bedeutend”: Ein Beitrag zum Thema “Der späte Goethe und
Frankreich”’, in Studien zur Goethezeit, ed. by Rosmarie Schillemeit, Göttingen, 2006, pp. 254–67.
42
Michel Huber, Choix de poésies allemandes, Paris, 1766. See Louis Reynaud, L’Influence allemande en France
au XVIIIe et au XIXe siècle, Paris, 1922, p. 23, and Thomas Buffet, ‘Le Choix de poésies allemandes de
Michael Huber (1766), une traduction poétique et une histoire critique de la poésie allemande’, Revue de
littérature comparée, 330 (2009), 207–20.
82 ROBERT VILAIN
immediately reviewed in Le Pot Pourri,43 which denounced it as ‘[un] drame mon-

strueux [. . .] par intervalle assez obscène’. Only three years later, however, it was
translated into French as Les Voleurs by Nicolas de Bonneville in the twelfth and final
volume of Nouveau Théâtre allemand, a collection of twenty-seven plays edited with
Adrien Chrétien Friedel.44 Schiller was generally well served, with a translation judged
to be ‘animée, nerveuse, volontairement brutale, audacieuse parfois jusqu’à
l’incorrection’, and it made a lasting if isolated impression on the French literary
scene — although when Sébastien Mercier proposed Schiller as a model for French
drama in 1787, he was shouted down in the literary press.45 On 10 March 1792, how-
ever, the Théâtre du Marais staged an adaptation of Die Räuber by the Alsatian Jean
Henri Ferdinand Lamartelière that made Schiller’s play, if not its author, famous
across France, and earned Schiller the citizenship of France (the diploma was made
out in the name of ‘Gille’ and described him as a ‘publiciste allemand’46). It was
reprised several times between then and the end of the century, sometimes in two
Parisian theatres simultaneously. Karl Moor was often associated with the Terror and
the folly of trying to re-establish justice using violent means; Robert the robber chief
was seen as a precursor of Robespierre in the public mind. By 1799, Bonaparte was
trying to capitalize on Schiller’s popularity too, by promoting an idealized vision of
‘le grand réformateur Robert, homme terrible mais juste, champion des libertés révo-
lutionnaires, mais aussi défenseur de l’ordre, chef de belles troupes disciplinées’, a
stance from which the Consulate was rapidly to distance itself.47 Other translations
followed, of Don Carlos (1799) by Adrien de Lezay-Marnésia, a friend of Charles de
Villers, and of Die Jungfrau von Orléans (1802) by Charles Frédéric Cramer and
Louis Sébastien Mercier, but even so it cannot be said that Schiller became well
known until Mme de Staël focused on his work in De l’Allemagne.
John Claiborne Isbell trenchantly describes the climate in which German literature
was regarded with much suspicion, but out of which the Faust translations were
eventually to grow: ‘two French authorities prohibited even discussing the Germans
in 1810: Napoleon [. . .] and Classical prejudice’,48 and they were mutually reinforc-
ing. In 1805, at a time therefore when even educated public awareness of German
literature in France was very limited, the Emperor Napoleon is said to have contemp-
tuously dismissed German literature tout court as ‘unnecessary’. Napoleon may have
felt he had had his fingers burned when he attempted to harness the impact of the
1792 adaptation of Die Räuber for his own purposes, for he complained that, like
everything Germanic, it was too tainted with politics:
43
See Edmond Egli, Schiller et le romantisme français, 2 vols, Paris, 1927, i, 66.
44
Nouveau Théâtre allemand, ou recueil des pièces qui ont paru avec succès sur les théâtres des capitales
allemandes, trans. and ed. by Adrien Chrétien Friedel and (from volume iii) Nicolas de Bonneville, 12 vols,
Paris, 1782–85, xii (1785), 17–244. This important collection opened with Lessing’s Emilia Galotti and Goethe’s
Clavigo, and includes Leisewitz’s Julius von Tarent mingling them and Schiller indiscriminately with a
host of others whose reputations have not stood the test of time, such as Unzer, Bertuch, Wetzel, Engel, von
Toerring, and Gebler. See also Alan Raitt, A. C. Friedel et ‘Le nouveau théâtre allemand’: Un intermédiaire
méconnu, Amsterdam, 1996.
45
Egli, Schiller et le romantisme français, i, 71–74 and 79–81.
46
See Ehrhard Bahr, ‘Der Räuber-Autor als Ehrenbürger der Französischen Republik’, in Ethik und Ästhetik:
Festschrift für Wolfgang Wittkowski zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Richard Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1995, pp.
147–52
47
See Egli, Schiller et le romantisme français, pp. 112–17.
48
Isbell, Birth of European Romanticism, p. 6.
Bon[aparte] [äußerte], man brauche die deutsche Litteratur nicht und überdem könnten
die Deutschen nichts [sagen], sogar nicht über Chemie und Physik, ohne Politik, Freiheit
und Revolution einzumischen.49
These remarks are not fully representative of Napoleon’s attitude: he had been a
passionate fan of Werther for a time, although when he met Goethe in October 1808
he deprecated the conflation of the motif of passion with socio-political damage to
Werther’s self-esteem caused by the ‘Verdruß’.50 In spite of Napoleon’s hostility,
Mme de Staël’s De l’Allemagne, completed in 1810, pulped by Napoleon’s soldiers
and only finally published with a Preface in London in 1813, takes conscious risks by
‘treat[ing] Germany as a coherent unit’, by taking seriously its potential for making
a massive cultural contribution to Europe, and by praising it.51
Napoleon’s comments were reported in the context of a plan to establish a Bibli-
othèque germanique, a Paris-based journal promoting German literature, which
Napoleon hypocritically supported in the presence of one of its key supporters,

Archbishop Karl Theodor von Dalberg, while deriding it behind his back. The French
Emperor was not alone in his scepticism about the value of German literature, and
it was not a uniquely French perspective. Frederick the Great consistently despised
German literature, as was abundantly evident from an essay (in French, naturally)
that he published on the subject in 1780, arguing that ‘une langue à demi barbare’
with as many dialects as there are provinces and principalities is an inadequate basis
for a noble literary culture: ‘jusqu’ici les belles-lettres n’ont pas prospéré dans notre
sol’.52 His views were controversial but influential. The Bibliothèque germanique
project was described by another German-speaking contemporary in revealing
terms:
Euer Erzkanzler [= Dalberg] hat den hiesigen Gelehrten eine Grille in den Kopf gesetzt,
die alle Köpfe verdreht. Die Quelle aller Weisheit und Gelehrsamkeit soll nur in Teutsch-
land fliessen; von dieser soll ein Bach nach Paris geleitet werden. Seit vier Wochen
beschäftigt sich das Institut national mit nichts mehr als dem Projekt, ein Journal für
teutsche Literatur zu Stande zu bringen. Ich werde wegen dieses Projekts recht gequält
und widerstehe bis jetzt allen Zumuthungen, an diesem Plan theilzunehmen. Wenn der
Kaiser, der sich persönlich für die Sache interessirt, mir nicht durch Subscription auf
200 Exemplare für den Schaden steht, so will ich nicht der Donquixotte der teutschen
Literatur sein, welche mit allem ihrem Guten und Schlechten einmal nicht auf diesen
Boden passt. Du kannst Dir aber nicht denken, welch ein augenblicklicher Enthusiasmus
jetzt alle diese Menschen packt, besonders die, so etwas teutsch können.53
49
Quoted in a letter from Friedrich Bertuch to Karl Böttiger of 11 March 1805, published by Ludwig Geiger,
‘Eine deutsche Zeitschrift in Frankreich (1805)’, Zeitschrift für vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte, NF 10
(1896), 350–52 and 493–95 (p. 352).
50
See Müller’s account in GG, ii, 334.
51
52
‘De la littérature allemande’, in Frédéric II, roi de Prusse, Œuvres philosophiques, Paris, 1985, pp. 423–55
(pp. 424–25). A draft of this is thought to have been written in the early 1750s.
53
He is quoted by Philipp Christian Weyland, a translator and senior civil servant in Weimar, who was writing
to Karl Böttiger on 7 February 1805; published in Geiger, ‘Eine deutsche Zeitschrift’, pp. 350–51. Schöll replied
to Böttiger on 30 March 1805: ‘Sie wissen doch, dass ich teil daran genommen hatte und in meinem Hause
den deutschen Musen einen Saal eröffnen wollte, aber Jupiter [= Napoleon] wollte nicht’ (p. 494).
84 ROBERT VILAIN
Thus the Alsace-born, Paris-based historian, publisher, and diplomat, Maximilian

Samson Frederick Schöll voiced his suspicions of the value of German culture in 1805.
Other more influential Germans were unconvinced that France was able and suitable
to receive it, as is evident from a letter sent by Wilhelm von Humboldt from Paris to
Goethe in April 1798:
Von deutscher Literatur bildet man sich ein, hier viel zu wissen. Sie glaubt man sogar sehr
zu kennen und zu lieben. [. . .] Aber man darf nur ein bißchen zuhören, um zu finden, wie
es mit dieser Kenntnis und Liebe steht. Ich habe mir fest vorgenommen, daß durch mich
nie eine deutsche Zeile (es müßte denn bloße Gelehrsamkeit sein) hier bekannt werden
soll. Die Franzosen sind noch zu weit von uns entfernt, als daß sie uns da, wo wir auch
nur anfangen, eigentümlich zu werden, begreifen sollten, so weit, daß die Verschiedenheit
der Sprachen ordentlich als ein kleines Hindernis dagegen erscheint.54
These negative responses testify simultaneously to the presence of a small and

evidently irritating minority that was passionate about Germany and its culture.
Mme de Staël’s De l’Allemagne, warts and all, is predicated both on almost universal
ignorance of the subject matter and on the existence of a will to learn. By the time
the second French Faust translation appeared late in 1823, Le Moniteur universel
counted it among the works that would be devoured by ‘une foule de lecteurs avides
de connaître et de juger les productions originales des muses étrangères’.55 But even
then it would be an exaggeration to say that the battle for acceptance had been won.56
While there was most certainly a receptive audience in France for German literature,
it took significant effort, and indeed political will, for any kind of satisfaction to be
achieved.
Between these positions — the dominant negativity of the late eighteenth century
and the greater enthusiasm of the 1820s — lay a good deal of hard work by a small
group of enthusiasts. According to Pouthas: ‘deux hommes sont les chefs d’orchestre
de ce nouveau chœur, pourrait-on dire s’il y avait une partition commune et un
accord des instruments: Charles de Villers et [Philippe-Albert] Stapfer’,57 and they
had been the prime movers too in the Bibliothèque germanique project.58 Both were
committed Germanophiles, but Villers developed a reputation for zealotry and
fanaticism, while Pouthas describes Stapfer as acting with greater discernment and
less political aggression.59 He offered a focal point for liaison between a large number
of emigrés and other Germanophiles, authors and translators, visiting Germans, émigré
Swiss, academics and librarians, politicians (including Dalberg), and publishers.
The journal project foundered — in the view of one contemporary because of the
illiberal political climate of the time60 — but it was not unique. It was one among
several short-lived attempts to buck the trend of the times, and had partly been
54
Briefe an Goethe, ed. by Karl Robert Mandelkow, 2 vols, Hamburg, 1965, i, 310.
55
Le Moniteur universel, 24 November 1823; quoted by Baldensperger, Goethe en France, p. 127.
56
See Christian Andrew Edward Jensen, L’évolution du romantisme: L’année 1826, Paris, 1959, p. 159: ‘Les
allusions à Goethe sont, en 1826, assez rares’.
57
58
For full details see Louis Wittmer, Charles de Villers (1865–1813): Un intermédiaire entre la France et
l’Allemagne, Geneva, 1908, pp. 262–71.
59
60
Letter from Marc-Auguste Pictet to Charles de Villers cited in Wittmer, Villers, p. 267, n. 1.
inspired by the publication in January 1804 of a journal with strong Germanophile

tendencies founded by Joseph-Marie de Degérando and others, Les Archives littérai-
res de l’Europe, jointly published in Tübingen and Paris.61 The problem was that the
circle of those interested was still small, certainly small enough to be politically
intimidated: ‘ne nous illusionnons pas’, writes Pouthas, ‘[c]e milieu de germanisants
est bien restreint et ne dépasse pas le cadre des spécialistes’.62 A more robust initiative
under politically less repressive circumstances was needed, and the Stapfers and
Goethe’s Faust were central to this when it took place.
The reception of German literature in France in the 1820s was relatively sluggish
but it was dominated by the reception of Goethe. This did not escape the notice of
the great man himself, who commented in his diary on ‘das neuere Verhältniß der
Franzosen, der ausländischen Literaturen’ to German.63 After a visit to Goethe in
1825, Victor Cousin reported asking what he might do for Goethe in Paris: ‘où on
commençait à s’intéresser à la littérature allemande, où on traduisait Schiller et

Goethe’.64 There was certainly work to be done: in 1804 Benjamin Constant had
derided Faust as ‘une dérision de l’espèce humaine’, having read it in German while
visiting Goethe in Weimar with Mme de Staël. He had at first not felt at ease with
Goethe, noting in his Journal on 27 January and 28 February 1804: ‘Gêne de toute
conversation avec lui’, his pretentions to scientific knowledge and his indifference to
politics, but within a month he recorded enthusiastically: ‘je ne connais personne au
monde qui ait autant de gaîté, de finesse, de force et d’étendue dans l’esprit que
Goethe’.65 Faust, he said, was worse than Candide, ‘tout aussi immoral, aride et
desséchant, et il y a moins de légèreté, moins de plaisanteries ingénieuses et beaucoup
plus de mauvais goût’.66 Mme de Staël herself supposes Goethe aware of ‘toutes
les fautes de goût’ with which the play can reasonably be reproached.67 The Vicomte
de Saint-Chamans regretted that Faust had not been left to the puppeteers and cites
approvingly a contemporary Cours de littérature dramatique which takes Goethe to
task for departing from ‘[les] bornes de l’imitation théâtrale’ to produce a play where
individual scenes may be engaging but ‘ne sont point entrelacés avec le tissu de
l’action, et paraissent tout-à-fait arbitraires’. He concludes ‘Je suppose que Goëthe ne
connaissait pas le bon goût’.68 The author of the lectures on literature he cites was
61
It folded in March 1808 as a result of political changes that made French nationalism a more amenable stance
than European cosmopolitanism. See Jean-Luc Chappey, ‘Les Archives littéraires de l’Europe (1804–1808)’,
La Révolution Française: Dire et faire l’Europe à la fin du XVIIIe siècle: http://lrf.revues.org/index284.html,
paragraph 27 (accessed 16 April 2012).
62
Pouthas, Jeunesse de Guizot, pp. 194–95.
63
WA, iii, x, 219, 19 July 1826.
64
GG, iii/1, 772.
65
GG, i, 908 and 923.
66
Benjamin Constant, Journal Intime, new edn, ed. by Paul Rival, Paris, 1928, p. 22 (12 February 1804; not
included in GG).
67
Mme de Staël, De l’Allemagne, ed. by La Comtesse Jean de Pange with Simone Balayé, 5 vols, Paris, 1958–60,
iii, 123. This phrase is from the closing paragraphs on Faust; the opening remarks include the phrase ‘Certes,
il ne faut y chercher ni le goût, ni la mesure’ (iii, 70). Frederick the Great had written in similar terms of
‘le peu de goût qui, jusqu’à nos jours règne en Allemagne’ (‘La littérature allemande’, p. 441).
68
[Auguste] Vicomte de S[aint-Chamans], L’anti-romantique, ou Examen de quelques ouvrages nouveaux, Paris,
1816, pp. 141–42.
86 ROBERT VILAIN
August Wilhelm Schlegel.69 Baldensperger shows how, for the defenders of classicism,
the success of a production of Schiller’s Wallenstein by Lebrun in March 1820 raised
fears that Goethe’s Faust might be on the way too, and cites newspaper comments
that all try to belittle it for its sensationalism and formal laxity.70 French hesitation
was noted abroad, and an English edition of Faust from 1859 registers a somewhat
condescending disapproval of this, noting that, while by that point twenty-two trans-
lations had appeared in English (some in a sixth edition), France had produced only
four: ‘they are all, with the exception of that by Henry Blaze, of a very indifferent
stamp. That by Saint-Aulaire is brilliant but not faithful [. . .] Stapfer’s translation
is so faithful as to be in many parts utterly incomprehensible [. . .] As to Gerard’s
[Nerval’s], its preface is the best portion of the work’.71
The charge of over-fidelity on Stapfer’s part (in comparison with Saint-Aulaire’s
panache) is often made, but in France Stapfer’s translation was well received and
it was decisive in enhancing Goethe’s reputation there. Coquerel in the Revue

encyclopédique wrote of Goethe’s ‘ouvrage remarquable’, specifically praising its
dramatic qualities and ‘une véritable unité de conception [. . .] une idée fondamentale
et philosophique’.72 Stapfer, he said, is a ‘talent flexible’, conscientious and felicitous,
particularly with respect to the fidelity of his version and the range of verse forms he
attempts in his renderings of some of the scenes. There is the obligatory reference
to whether or not the translation perpetrates errors of taste, but on this occasion it
raises more interesting questions:
Chose remarquable, quoique M. A. Stapfer ait rendu très fidèlement les idées et les figures
de Goethe, on est étonné de ne pas trouver dans ses vers des comparaisons mystiques ou
fades qui effraient le bon goût. Quelques personnes prétendent que l’auteur de Werther
s’est corrigé. Quoi qu’il en soit, ce serait induire en erreur les amateurs du romantisme,
que de leur recommander une traduction qui, en général, est sagement écrite.73
Coquerel distances this Faust from Romantic mysticism; the scene singled out for
praise is one that perplexes many modern readers, the whimsical procession of
satirical swipes that constitutes the ‘Walpurgisnachtstraum’, which Coquerel presents
like a battle of wits in a society salon, completely ignoring the satanic revelry that
encapsulates it. In the light of what one would nowadays consider a distorted focus
such as this, it is easier to comprehend a review in La Pandore of 4 February 1826
that trumpeted Goethe as ‘le Voltaire de l’Allemagne’, a somewhat bizarre rapproche-
ment apparently intended to focus on the two men’s breadth of achievement, ‘malgré
les diversités de caractère’.74
69
See August Wilhelm Schlegel, Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, in Kritische Schriften und
Briefe, ed. by Edgar Lohner, 7 vols, Stuttgart, 1967, vi, 278–79. These were published in French in 1814 as
Cours de littérature dramatique in a translation by the Swiss writer Albertine Necker de Saussure.
70
Baldensperger, Goethe et la France, p. 126.
71
G. G. Zerffi, Goethe’s Faust, with Critical and Explanatory Notes, London, 1859, p. xxix.
72
Coquerel, ‘Faust, poëme dramatique’. p. 384.
73
Ibid., p. 385.
74
Quoted in Jensen, L’évolution du romantisme, p. 160. The epithet ‘der deutsche Voltaire’ has been applied to
several writers, including Christoph Martin Wieland and Friedrich von Schönaich, but Friedrich Schlegel used
it of Goethe in his 1815 lectures on Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur (Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-
Ausgabe, ed. by Ernst Behler with Jean-Jacques Anstett and Hans Eichner, Paderborn, 1958–, vi, 403).
The tendency to classicize was shared by the most influential account of Goethe’s
Faust between its publication in 1808 and the appearance of Delacroix’s lithographs,
that of Mme de Staël in a chapter of De l’Allemagne. Isbell argues persuasively
that de Staël’s tendentious description is not ‘the product of repeated random error’
but conforms to a consistent pattern of interpretation that tends to ‘push Goethe’s
Faust, as Constant did Schiller’s Wallenstein, in the direction of French neoclassical
tragedy’.75 He suggests that she did so — in a book that introduced Romanticism to
France and that consistently ‘condemn[s] strict Classicism as sterile and archaic’ —
because of the importance she attached to public taste.76 De Staël’s principle was to
triumph over what she calls ‘la répugnance naturelle aux spectateurs français, pour
ce qu’ils appellent le genre anglais ou le genre allemand’ by strictly monitoring all sins
against good taste and by proceeding with literary propaganda or proselytism ‘presque
timidement’, all the more so when the work concerned is a daring one.77 Isbell’s study
of the omissions and rearrangements of Faust I in de Staël’s long summary shows

how she makes a ‘quite different play’ of it, with Mephistopheles pushed to the
fore as the driving force, evil incarnate, and a Faust less motivated by ‘Streben’ than
bored and in search of diversion.78 In French, de Staël’s Faust acknowledges that
Mephistopheles is imposed upon him, wholly in charge (‘il faut que je supporte ce
compagnon froid’), whereas in the original he is described as a personal necessity,
‘[den] Gefährte[n], den ich schon nicht mehr / Entbehren kann’.79 Isbell shows how
the passivity of a languid Faust and a dignified Gretchen make of their situation ‘a
bizarre mirror-image of a Racinian tragedy, a French neoclassical ideal, whose plots
also chronicle the remorseless progression of forces beyond the scope of the heroes’
own volition’.80 Rhetorically, de Staël’s exclamation-laden synopsis is more melodra-
matic than Goethe’s drama; all three of the main characters speak the same lofty
French and the dictates of good taste ensure that all traces of physical desire or dis-
figuring pain are smoothed away. Crucially, most of Mephistopheles’ dialogue is cut
(‘Quel mauvais goût [. . .] de faire paraître le diable dans une pièce’81) and thereby
also the evidence for his wit, malice, and cynicism. Isbell’s thesis is that De l’Allemagne
is a piece of carefully wrought propaganda designed both in direct opposition to
Napoleon and as a means of overcoming the stranglehold of Catholic neo-classicism
in France. Both ends were served by introducing a Romanticism of de Staël’s own
invention, based on an image of a Germany that was potentially rather than actually
coherent (which is not to say uniform) in geographical, political, philosophical, and
cultural terms. And in order to achieve these ends, major concessions had to be made
to the very taste she was endeavouring to reform, and German literature had to an
extent to be caricatured.
75
Isbell, Birth of European Romanticism, pp. 69–70.
76
Ibid., p. 72.
77
Mme de Staël, De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, ed. by Paul van
Tieghem, Geneva, 1959, p. 357.
78
After she describes the departure of Faust’s pupil, for example, Mme de Staël introduces the Gretchen tragedy
with ‘Faust s’ennuie, et Méphistophélès lui conseille de devenir amoureux’ (De l’Allemagne, iii, 95).
79
De l’Allemagne, iii, 105, a translation of the text at MA, vi/1, 629 (ll. 3244–45), my emphasis. The B manuscript
for De l’Allemagne proves that this is not a mistranslation but a conscious decision (iii, 105, note to l. 1).
80
81
De Staël, De l’Allemagne, iii, 128 (Manuscript B). There is probably some irony intended in this phrase, but
the dialogue is cut nonetheless.
88 ROBERT VILAIN
Albert Stapfer thus faced various forms of hostility, indifference or trepidation

when he published his version of Faust in 1823, and the courage needed to publish
a complete version with some pretensions to accuracy and fidelity should not be
underestimated.82 Baschet praises Stapfer’s boldness even in considering translations
of a major figure such as Goethe at such a tender age. Contrasting Saint-Aulaire and
Stapfer, he notes that the former’s version is ‘sans doute plus élégante’ but ‘beaucoup
trop libre’, while the latter’s is ‘un peu dépourvu[e] de chaleur et d’accent’ but has
the merit of precision: ‘en dépit des gaucheries que l’âge du traducteur à défaut des
difficultés du texte excuserait assez, elle mettait à la portée de la génération roman-
tique une interprétation suffisamment proche de l’original’.83 Using one of the 1808
editions of Faust. Eine Tragödie published by Cotta in Tübingen,84 Stapfer himself
distinguishes between two distinct types of writing in Faust ‘dont l’une est toute
dramatique, l’autre toute lyrique’.85 He translated most of it into prose, using verse
for songs and prayers and for the ‘Prolog im Himmel’, the ‘Walpurgisnacht’, and the
‘Walpurgisnachtstraum’, and gives a perfectly sensible justification for adopting prose
based on the history of the use of verse in French drama: ‘Peut-être même eut-il [sic]
été plus difficile de plier’ — Stapfer intensified this to ‘humilier’ in 1828 — ‘le vers
français au ton vulgaire de certains passages qu’il ne l’a été d’élever la prose au ton
poétique de certains autres’.86 He makes a parallel case for his sections in verse: ‘tous
morceaux d’une poésie cadencée, dont le principal charme consiste, pour la plupart,
soit dans le choix du rhythme [sic] et l’arrangement des vers, soit même uniquement
dans la désinence des rimes. Ici je n’eusse pu me permettre la prose sans manquer au
premier des devoirs d’un traducteur, ‘la fidélité’ (‘l’exactitude’ in 1828).87 But as Zeeb
notes, Stapfer was not averse to making cuts or minor additions of his own, rendering
the translation as a whole ‘in sich eine experimentelle Arbeit über das übliche Wagnis
einer Übersetzung hinaus’.88 Langkavel has a detailed list of both successes and infe-
licities, and while she acknowledges some distinctly wobbly moments, suggests good
reason to be impressed with the finished product.89
Stapfer’s translation does not come with an aesthetic agenda as pronounced as that
of Mme de Staël, although in both 1823 and 1828 prefaces, as well as in the 1825
‘Notice’ on Goethe’s life and work, there is a subtle insistence on naturalness that
is not without political ramifications. In 1823 Stapfer complains about a French
82
The 1823 and the 1828 editions do not print the same text; the latter contains numerous modifications
and improvements to the original, some quite significant. In what follows, the 1823 translation is cited for
preference, because of its chronological priority. A fuller study of the variations is needed. Quotations from
each version (and from the 1825 ‘Notice’) referenced in subsequent footnotes are identified only by date and
page number.
83
Baschet, Delécluze, p. 96.
84
These refer to the ‘Brocktophantasmist’, which is the orthography used by Stapfer in a note in his 1823 edition.
The only other option, the 1817 edition of Goethe’s Werke, also published by Cotta, has a text almost
identical to that of the 1808 Werke, but corrects this name to ‘Procktophantasmist’. See Goethe’s Werke,
viii (1808), 206–07; Faust. Eine Tragödie von Goethe (1808), 274–75; Goethe’s Werke, ix (1817), 206–07.
The auction catalogue Livres et archives du château de Talcy: Collections Stapfer: Vente le 16 Novembre 1931,
Paris, 1931, p. 21 (no. 36), lists one of the 1808 volumes as part of Stapfer’s father’s library.
85
1823, p. iii.
86
1823, p. iii; 1828, p. ii.
87
1823, p. iii; 1828, p. ii.
88
Zeeb, ‘Goethes neues Frankreichkonzept’, p. 121.
89
Langkavel, Die französischen Übersetzungen, pp. 8–22.
translation of Widman’s sixteenth-century reworking of the popular Faust tale, saying

‘on dirait que le traducteur a totalement oublié qu’il écrit en français’;90 in 1828 he
insists ‘le ton du dialogue reste toujours celui de la conversation ordinaire’.91 That
certainly characterizes his rendering of Faust’s first encounter with Mephistopheles:
MEPHISTOPHELES.
Ich salutiere den gelehrten Herrn!
Ihr habt mich weidlich schwitzen machen.
FAUST.
Wie nennst du dich?
MEPHISTOPHELES.
Die Frage scheint mir klein,
Für einen, der das Wort so sehr verachtet,
Der, weit entfernt von allem Schein,

Nur in der Wesen Tiefe trachtet.
FAUST.
Bei euch, ihr Herrn, kann man das Wesen
Gewöhnlich aus dem Namen lesen,
Wo es sich allzu deutlich weis’t,
Wenn man euch Fliegengott, Verderber, Lügner heißt.
Nun gut wer bist du denn?
MEPHISTOPHELES.
Ein Teil von jener Kraft,
Die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft.
FAUST.
Was ist mit diesem Rätselwort gemeint?
MEPHISTOPHELES.
Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint!
Und das mit Recht; denn alles was entsteht,
Ist wert daß es zu Grunde geht;
Drum besser wär’s daß nichts entstünde.
So ist denn alles was ihr Sünde,
Zerstörung, kurz das Böse nennt,
Mein eigentliches Element.92
MÉPHISTOPHÉLÈS.
Salut au savant Docteur! Vous m’avez fait rudement suer.
FAUST.
Comment te nommes-tu?
MÉPHISTOPHÉLÈS.
La question me paraît de peu d’importance pour quelqu’un qui méprise si fort les mots,
qui ne s’arrête jamais à l’apparence, et qui regarde surtout au fond des êtres.
90
1823, p. v.
91
1828, p. ii.
92
MA, vi/1, 571, 11. 1325–44.
90 ROBERT VILAIN
FAUST.
C’est que vous autres messieurs, vous portez ordinairement des noms qui peignent assez
bien votre nature; c’est ou Beelzébuth, ou malin Esprit, ou menteur qu’on vous appelle.
Hé bien, qui donc es-tu?
MÉPHISTOPHÉLÈS.
Une partie de cette puissance qui veut toujours le mal et fait toujours le bien.
FAUST.
Que veut dire cette énigme?
MÉPHISTOPHÉLÈS.
Je suis l’Esprit qui toujours nie. Et cela avec raison; car tout ce qui existe mérite d’être
anéanti, et il vaudrait beaucoup mieux que rien n’existât. Ainsi tout ce que vous appelez
péché, destruction, en un mot le mal, c’est mon élément.93
Despite the shift from verse into prose, this version of the encounter preserves both
the swagger of Mephistopheles’ self-presentation and Faust’s initial scepticism. The

sentences are kept relatively short and key rhetorical and stylistic devices (like the
anaphoric antithesis of ‘stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft’, the deployment
of subjunctive forms after ‘besser wär’s’ and ‘il vaudrait mieux’, and the ominous
final emphasis on the word ‘element’) are preserved.
In the introduction to the 1828 edition, Stapfer is enthusiastic about the bold
novelties of the work in exactly the ways for which de Staël felt it necessary to
apologize — ‘il n’a jamais été rien conçu de plus original, de plus étrange; jamais les
fictions n’ont été portées à un excès de délire, qui dépasse de plus loin les bornes
communes’ — and when he notes Goethe’s use (and abuse) of the supernatural he is
careful to say that the subject matter demands it. In the 1825 ‘Notice’ he explains
much more fully what he means, suggesting that witches, wizards, animals, and
spirits both contextualize Mephistopheles (‘sa figure y prend un relief dont elle eût
manqué sans eux’94), and complete the infernal end of ‘cette échelle d’êtres animés’
that culminates at the other in the Archangels and God himself. The essay refers
frequently to pairs of opposites that have their roots in Goethe himself, and here
Stapfer justifies the presence of the supernatural because it permits the reader to
intuit ‘ce principe immuable qui, sans être lui-même beau ni laid, bon ni méchant,
créateur ni destructeur, produit l’harmonie et le désordre, le bien et le mal, fait et
défait continuellement’.95 Far from being embarrassed by the physical presence of the
devil in the drama, he sees it as an essential constituent.
The translation itself is in places more reserved than the original, however,
and while made with an eye to bringing both a decidedly non-classical work from
Germany to the developing literary scene in France, has its own classicizing moments.
His translation of the ‘Prolog im Himmel’ is a case in point. The imagery and diction
are classical from the outset, Raphaël’s song beginning ‘Le soleil poursuit son
cantique / Dans le chœur des mondes roulans: / Le long de sa carrière antique / Il
imprime ses pas brûlans’.96 While this is in many respects a very sensitive rendering
of the original — ‘poursuit son cantique’ echoing the sense of repeating a traditional
93
1823, pp. 63–64.
94
1825, p. 84.
95
1825, pp. 84–85.
96
1823, p. 19.
pattern in ‘nach alter Weise’, and ‘sa carrière antique’ rephrasing the predictability of
‘ihre vorgeschriebene Reise’, for example — its tensions have been entirely smoothed
out. There is no ‘Brudersphären Wettgesang’, no culmination in ‘Donnergang’, and
while Stapfer’s verses conjure up an image of the classical Apollo in his flaming
chariot, Goethe’s do not. In the next stanzas Stapfer preserves almost all the imagery
of sea and storm, but it has an explanatory tone rather than an emotional feel.
Sections such as ‘Et son aveugle turbulence / Agite les gouffres profonds. / L’éclair
flamboie à traits sinistres, / La foudre fend le ciel obscur’97 tame much of the force of
‘und [Stürme] bilden wütend eine Kette / Der tiefsten Wirkung rings umher. / Da
flammt ein blitzendes Verheeren / Dem Pfade vor des Donnerschlags’.98 ‘Aveugle’ is
a splendid lateral-thinking way of rendering the directionless lack of control implied
by ‘Kette’ and ‘rings umher’, but the elemental energy of ‘wütend’ and ‘blitzendes
Verheeren’ are disciplined by the classicizing diction of ‘flamboie’ and ‘fend le ciel’.
The shifts in tone on occasion are all the more apparent in the passages that
Stapfer chooses to render in prose, and there are some interesting differences between
different versions of the translation. In 1823 the famous cry of frustration opening
the ‘Nacht’ scene, ‘Habe nun, ach!’, starts without an exclamation (‘J’ai donc tout
appris’99) and, while it is replaced in the 1828 version, what emerges is a highly
contained, not to say timid, ‘Eh bien donc’.100 The mounting sense of dissatisfaction
conveyed in the taut ‘Heiße Magister, heiße Doktor gar’ becomes the wordier, more
pompous ‘Je porte, il est vrai, le titre de Docteur, celui de Maître’ (and the inversion
of the titles is curious). Goethe’s Faust ‘[zieht] [s]eine Schüler an der Nase herum’
— suggesting that he feels his teaching has been a form of game or even swindle —
but Stapfer’s ‘mène et promène [s]es pauvres élèves par le nez dans un labyrinthe
inextricable’,101 which both blames the students for their stupidity and the subject for
its unfathomable complexity, neither of which is implied by the original: the labyrinth
is a classical reference that Goethe does not make here. Faust’s anguished guilt is
palpable in ‘Das will mir schier das Herz verbrennen’, and it is almost entirely lost
in Stapfer’s laconic ‘J’en mourrai’. The consequence is pithily expressed in German:
‘Drum hab ich mich der Magie ergeben’; while in French it is reflectively explained:
‘Je ne vois plus maintenant qu’une chose à essayer, c’est de me jeter dans la magie.
Il le faut’. Goethe continues:
Ob mir durch Geistes Kraft und Mund
Nicht manch Geheimnis würde kund;
Daß ich nicht mehr mit sauerm Schweiß
Zu sagen brauche, was ich nicht weiß;
Daß ich erkenne, was die Welt
Im Innersten zusammenhält,
Schau’ alle Wirkenskraft und Samen,
Und tu nicht mehr in Worten kramen.102
97
1823, pp. 19–20.
98
MA, vi/i, 543, ll. 261–64.
99
1823, p. 27.
100
1828, p. 19.
101
1823, p. 27.
102
MA, vi/i, 545, ll. 378–85.
92 ROBERT VILAIN
Stapfer renders the passage thus:

Si l’Esprit, si la Parole pouvait enfin dessiller mes yeux et leur dévoiler cet abyme où je
brûle de descendre, que je ne fusse plus esclave des mots, et contraint de dire à grand’peine
ce que j’ignore, que je connusse tout ce que la nature cache dans ses entrailles, et tout ce
qu’il y a pour l’homme en face de l’énergie du monde des semences éternelles!103
Here phrases communicating Faust’s anguish in physical, bodily terms (‘mit saurem
Schweiß’, ‘Samen’) are softened, albeit only partly since ‘entrailles’ is a gesture in this
direction, and the capitalized nouns ‘Esprit’ and ‘Parole’ suggest an appeal to the
Christian God rather than the dark powers to which Faust is resorting. These are
precisely the sorts of intervention that Isbell notes in de Staël (although of course
they are not accompanied here by huge omissions and the wholesale redisposition
of certain sections of the drama). The absence of the metrical features of Goethe’s
Knittelvers, the powerful rhymes, and his frequent use of alliteration, as well as a
significant diminution of rhetorical devices such as anaphora and the accumulation
of nouns, together contribute towards the generally more decorous tone of the French.
Stapfer is caught between two stools: the Racinian Alexandrine is perfectly capable
of expressing anger, frustration, and despair, but he is left with classical diction and
a Romantic form, which is an uneasy mixture.
Stapfer notes precisely this point in his ‘Notice’: ‘Nous pourrions en France nous
en fournir une idée, d’après la magie aussi puissante sur nous du style de Racine, si
Racine ne s’était tenu renfermé dans certaines limites qu’il ne dépasse jamais; tandis
que Goethe, se livrant sans contrainte à l’élan de sa verve, prend tous les tons, revêt
toutes les formes, épuise toutes les nuances’.104 His point is perhaps best illustrated
by the verse translation that he made of the first 481 lines of ‘Nacht’. Not previously
considered by any of the commentators on the French translations of Faust, it is
included in the ‘Notice’, and opens thus:
Jurisprudence, et vous, philosophie,
Médecine, et toi-même, hélas!
Orgueilleuse théologie,
De vos promesses je suis las.
Moi qui vous consacrai ma vie
Dans l’espoir d’être un jour savant,
Au bout d’une si longue enquête
Me voici, pauvre folle tête,
Au même point qu’auparavant.
A ce métier j’ai gagné plus d’un titre;
On m’a nommé, déjà depuis long-temps,
Maître et docteur. Oui, voilà bien dix ans
Qu’aux heures du sommeil courbé sur ce pupitre,
J’use mes yeux à noircir du papier,
Et qu’en chaire, le jour, je sue
A traîner le faible écolier
103
1823, p. 28.
104
1825, p. 86.
Dans un dédale sans issue.

Et je commence enfin à voir
Que nous ne pouvons rien savoir.
Idée horrible qui me tue!105
The fluent but rhythmically varied four-beat verse of the original is rendered into
regular octosyllabics (except for the first, decasyllabic line), with a variety of rhyme
patterns, and Goethe’s eleven lines become a much more prolix twenty. Stapfer
inserts a contrast between Faust’s exhausting daytime ‘teaching’ and his nightly study,
hunched over his desk, peering at his papers. The labyrinth of 1823 (retained in
1828 but in a slightly different phrase) becomes ‘un dédale sans issue’, and thereby
even more overtly classicized than in the prose versions. The image of Faust’s heart
consumed in flame by the realization that he can know nothing is rendered with a
little more power than the ‘J’en mourrai’ of the 1823 and 1828 versions, but it is,
significantly, an idea that kills Faust in 1825, not the violent rupture of the organ of
feeling. There is here a real attempt to do justice to Goethe’s verse, but the pull of
the diction traditionally associated with French dramatic verse is much too strong
even for so self-aware a translator as Stapfer. The evidence of the short verse extracts
in the ‘Notice’ suggests that his decision to translate the bulk of Faust into prose was
well advised.
Delacroix’s lithographs
The title page of Delacroix’s Faust announces the work with due magnificence thus:
FAUST, Tragédie de M. de Goethe, traduite en français par M. Albert Stapfer, Ornée
d’un Portrait de l’Auteur, et de dix-sept dessins composés d’après les principales scènes
de l’ouvrage et exécutés sur pierre par M. Eugène Delacroix (A Paris, chez Ch. Motte,
Éditeur, Imprimeur-Lithographe de LL. AA. RR. Mgr le Duc d’Orléans et Mgr le Duc de
Chartres, Rue des Marais N° 13; Et chez Sautelet, Libraire, Place de la Bourse. m dccc
xxviii).
No precise chronology for the genesis of Delacroix’s lithographs has been established,
but he started work sometime in 1825, had not started the portrait by October 1827,
and was hurriedly finishing the preparation of the stones in December 1827.106 The
printing was completed very late in 1827 by Jean-Baptiste Gaultier-Laguionie, and
the book was published in February the following year.107 The lithographs were
reproduced in three ways: on white, rose or light blue china paper mounted on
heavier white paper (when the images measured c. 305 × 230 mm); printed directly
105
1825, pp. 93–100.
106
See Correspondance générale d’Eugène Delacroix, ed. by André Joubin, 5 vols, Paris, 1936–38, i, 201, 204, and
209. Something of the hurry can be detected in the frequent minor errors in the captions (e.g. the omission of
‘noble’ and the closing up of ‘oseraisje’ in Plate 8; the capital ‘D’ for ‘Dames’ in Plate 9, several missing accents
in Plate 16, etc.).
107
See Bibliographie de la France, 16 February 1828, p. 117.
94 ROBERT VILAIN
onto heavy white paper (c. 430 × 292 mm); or on ‘large paper’ (c. 540 × 350 mm).108
The quality of prints varies considerably.109
The potential to achieve this level of print quality is a key element in the overall
importance of this publication, which derives from a combination of Delacroix’s
individual skill as an artist, the expressive possibilities created by the new technique
of lithography, and the consequences for book production that this new form implied.
Riva Castleman summarizes:
[T]he inventive lithographs with which Eugène Delacroix paid homage to the great
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s masterpiece, Faust, announced a definitive change in the
attitude of artists toward working in the book form. Between the time that Delacroix’s
book appeared in 1828 and the last decade of the century there were only a few times
that fine artists (as opposed to illustrators [. . .]) joined their images to literature. [. . .]
Because of the technical disparities between printing (from shaped surfaces) and printing
lithographic stones (from flat surfaces), Delacroix’s single-page lithographs had to be
separately printed and inserted between appropriate pages of the text. The result was
totally new: the richness of the lithographs, both in their bold emphasis on the range of
darks made possible by the medium and in their dramatic imagery, presented the artist’s
contribution as equal, if not somewhat superior, to that of the author of the text.110
Lithography was invented by Alois Senefelder in 1798, and the technique reached
France a few years later; Delacroix, it seems, ‘took advantage of the lithographic press
which Godefroy Engelmann made available to artists in 1816’,111 and on which in
1818 Engelmann produced an edition of La Fontaine’s Fables with 116 illustrations
by Carle Vernet. Delacroix’s earliest experimentations with the technique were a
series of political cartoons and caricatures published in Le Miroir in the early 1820s,
and a set of antique medals issued by Engelmann in 1825.
The Faust prints already reveal a change of style from the[se] earlier lithographs [. . .].
Delacroix had begun to experiment with the crayon, already evident in his 1825 print,
Macbeth Consultant les Sorcières [. . .] in which first appears his scratching technique
later to be known as the manière noire, or ‘dark manner’. In this approach, the artist
works from black to white by scratching away the areas he wishes to appear as light from
a black surface. Expanding upon this in the Faust, Delacroix showed a greater freedom
in the crayon strokes and an increased emphasis on chiaroscuro.112
108
See Philip Hofer: Some Drawings and Lithographs for Goethe’s Faust by Eugène Delacroix (Harvard College
Library, 1964), [p. 15], which notes that both Stapfer and Napoleon’s second wife, Marie Louise, possessed
copies on ‘large paper’.
109
Kehrli, Lithographien, p. 20, gives a detailed account of the deterioration in quality between Motte’s first
edition and the second (published by Villain sometime after 1837) and third (published by Danlos, with
Veyron as lithographer, before 1873) and fourth (published by Goyer and Hermet, perhaps even after 1885).
The updated edition of Delteil’s 1908 catalogue, Delacroix, the Graphic Work: A Catalogue Raisonné,
translated and revised by Susan Strauber, San Francisco, 1997, p. 147, notes that ‘the specific details of the
different Faust editions still require clarification’, which remains true.
110
Riva Castleman, A Century of Artists’ Books, New York, 1994, pp. 16–17; the example given of a later work
is Manet’s illustrations for Mallarmé’s translation of Poe’s The Raven (1875).
111
Ann G. Yaffe, with Leila W. Kinney, Prints of Eugène Delacroix, New Haven, CT, 1977, p. 5.
112
Yaffe, Prints of Eugène Delacroix, pp. 5–6.
Crayon lithography in particular ‘lent itself to the most delicate nuances of light and
shadow, ranging from misty luminosity to deep and mysterious blacks and permitting
emphasis on tone and color rather than delineation’ and as such it was ‘far more
congenial to the aims of the French Romantic painters than etching and engraving’.113
This was important because stylistic originality could be authentically transmitted to
the final publication. Lithography ‘has the inestimable advantage of being absolutely
autographic. By every other method of multiplication known, the design must be
changed entirely before it can yield a print. On steel, the lines must be engraved;
on copper, bitten in; on wood left in relief. But a lithograph is the drawing itself,
unchanged, actually as the artist made it, multiplied by the printing press’.114 And
Delacroix made the most of the advantages of what was originally called ‘polyauto-
graphy’. According to Frédéric Barbier, the Faust lithographs ‘manifestent un rapport
nouveau entre l’artiste et le monde extérieur: les contrastes et la précision du dessin
sont accentués au centre et s’atténuent vers les marges, celles-ci allant parfois jusqu’à
disparaître. C’est ainsi le principe de la vision naturelle qui se trouve mis en valeur,
par une composition centrifuge et un rapport nouveau établi entre proche (du
spectateur) et lointain’.115 A new vision, originality in the use of pen and crayon, and
the manipulation of tonal contrast rather than gentle gradation all contributed to
an explosive contribution to the history of the book.
This is a modern perspective, however. Within months of their appearance,
Delacroix’s images were parodied and caricatured as examples of the Romantics’
overblown emotionalism.116 Delacroix himself later summarized the response as
having established him as ‘un des coryphées de l’école du laid’.117 The volume was
a commercial failure precisely because of its aesthetic daring: ‘like all pioneering
ventures in a new art style [. . .] it was derided by the critics on all sides. The
established neoclassical tradition in art had been flouted; the public [. . .] was wholly
unprepared for such controversial images or so mystical a drama’.118 An encyclopedia
published in Paris in the 1830s dismisses Delacroix’s lithographs devastatingly:
‘Aussi faibles de pensée que d’exécution, elles déparent plutôt qu’elles n’embellissent
le livre de luxe dont elles devaient être le plus bel ornement, le plus puissant
commentaire’.119 The negative attitude prevailed for some time: looking back in 1876,
the critic Charles Blanc described the lithographs with some nastiness:
Sortis de l’imagination et jetés du premier coup sur la pierre, sans aucun souvenir de la
nature, ces dessins, les premiers surtout, ressemblent aux essais d’un enfant qui aurait
113
Garo Z. Antreasian with Clinton Adams, The Tamarind Book of Lithography: Art & Techniques, New York,
1971, p. 75.
114
Lithography and Lithographers: Some Chapters in the History of the Art by Elizabeth Robins Pennell
together with Descriptions and Technical Explanations of Modern Artistic Methods by Joseph Pennell
President of the Senefelder Club, London, 1915, p. 17.
115
Barbier, ‘Les formes du livre’, in Histoire de l’édition française, ii, 538.
116
Geneviève Doy identifies one such, published in 1829 by A. B. Thomas in a series entitled ‘Le Rêve, ou Les
Effets du romantisme sur un jeune surnuméraire à l’arrière’ (‘Delacroix et Faust’, Nouvelles de l’estampe,
21 [1975], 18–23 [pp. 22–23]).
117
Delacroix, Correspondance, iv, 303 (1 March 1862; emphasis in the original).
118
Hofer, Some Drawings [pp. 3–4].
119
Alexis-François Artaud de Montor, Encyclopédie des gens du monde, 22 vols, Paris, 1833–44, vii/1 (1836),
686.
96 ROBERT VILAIN
l’ingénuité et l’aplomb de l’ignorance avec les instincts du génie. Il en est que l’on dirait
tracés de la main indécise d’un somnambule; d’autres paraissent crayonnés par une
pensionnaire qui a passé trois mois dans une classe de dessin.120
The nicest thing he can find to say is that some, such as Faust and Mephistopheles
galloping on horseback on the Witches’ Sabbath, ‘sont rendus tolérables et parfois
poétiques par l’éloignement même de toute réalité’.121 A standard reference work of
the late nineteenth century displays a degree of ambivalence. On the one hand Henri
Béraldi asserts: ‘Il n’est plus besoin de rompre des lances pour lui. Nous ne sommes
plus aux temps où Delacroix était discuté, voire insulté: personne ne conteste
aujourd’hui qu’il soit l’un des deux plus grands peintres modernes’ (the other being
Ingres), but on the other he describes the effect of the Faust lithographs as ‘d’un
romantisme échevelé’.122 Distaste prevailed for some decades, with an auction cata-
logue from 1931 listing a later edition of the same translation (illustrated by Jean-Paul
Laurens) with the note ‘Les illustrations plairont aux personnes qui ne goûteraient
pas celles de Delacroix’.123
Delacroix’s attention was first drawn to Faust in 1824, probably by his life-long
friend, the civil servant Jean-Baptiste Pierret, the catalyst for the mentions of Faust
and Götz von Berlichingen in Delacroix’s Journal.124 It is unclear precisely how he
decided to work on the series that was published in 1828, but it is usually assumed
that Delacroix’s inspiration for these lithographs was visual — an earlier series of
illustrations for Faust and above all from the stage — rather than from the printed
word. When questioned later about his sources, Delacroix did not mention the text
of Goethe’s drama at all: he claimed that the principal stimulus was the London
performance of a Faust drama, and Daniel Terry’s portrayal of Mephistopheles
in particular. He was dismissive of Faust, Part Two as a literary work (‘un ouvrage
mal digéré et peu intéressant au point de vue littéraire’), and while he admitted that
it had potential for illustration because of the range of characters and styles, it was
not sufficiently popular for him to consider it seriously. The same letter famously
complains about the combination of text and images in the 1828 Faust, regretting that
Motte ‘eut la malheureuse idée d’éditer ces lithographies avec un texte qui nuisit
beaucoup au débit’.125
It is almost certain that Delacroix knew two earlier series of engravings by Peter
Cornelius and Moritz Retzsch,126 and specific instances of their influence on the
costumes and settings of the Faust lithographs can be traced,127 despite the fact that
120
Charles Blanc, Les artistes de mon temps, Paris, 1876, p. 42.
121
Ibid.
122
Béraldi, Les graveurs du xixe siècle: guide de l’amateur d’estampes modernes, 12 vols, Paris, 1885–92, v (1886),
155 and 161.
123
Livres et archives du château de Talcy, p. 23 (no. 42): Goethe, Faust, traduction d’Albert Stapfer, avec une
préface par P. Stapfer, Paris, 1885.
124
Eugène Delacroix, Journal, ed. by Michèle Hannoosh, 2 vols, Paris, 2009, i, 120–22.
125
Delacroix, Correspondance, iv, 303–04, 1 March 1862.
126
Bilder zu Goethe’s Faust von P. Cornelius. Gestochen von R. Ruscheweyh, Frankfurt am Main, 1816; Umrisse
zu Goethe’s Faust. Gezeichnet von Moritz Retzsch, Stuttgart, 1816. In 1826 Retzsch issued a second part,
adding eleven to the original twenty-nine images.
127
See Frank Anderson Trapp, The Attainment of Delacroix, Baltimore, 1971, pp. 153–54, for a summary.
neither series had been published in France by the point at which Delacroix began
work in 1825.128 When Delacroix notes on 20 February 1824: ‘Toutes les fois que je
revois les gravures de Faust, je me sens saisi de l’envie de faire une toute nouvelle
peinture, qui consisterait à calquer pour ainsi dire la nature’129 — making this a
possible terminus a quo for the conception of the Faust series — he may be referring
either to Cornelius or to Retzsch, but it is more likely that he means the famous series
of twenty-six plates by Retzsch, of which he made sketches.130 Published in 1816 by
Cotta and entitled Umrisse zu Goethe’s Faust, these had a decisive influence on the
reception of Goethe’s drama in England and France. Their combination of geometric
angularity (in the settings, the buildings, and the rooms) and cascading fluidity (in the
clothing and gestures of the figures) lifts the characters of Faust into the foreground.
Cotta reissued the work in 1820 and, at about the same time, an English version of
the Outlines was published by J. H. Bohte in London with a translation of some
sixty lines of the original and explanatory notes by George Soane, younger son of Sir
John Soane: ‘This was the first attempt to give the English public any idea of Faust’.131
A rival firm, Boosey, published engravings by Henry Moses after Retzsch in the same
year.132 This series was ‘in demand all over Western Europe’.133
A copy of one of the Retzsch engravings, Faust signing the pact with Mephistoph-
eles, appears as the frontispiece to another edition of Faust in French from exactly
the same period, Faust, Tragédie de Goëthe: Nouvelle traduction complète en prose
et vers, par Gérard, published in Paris by Dondey-Dupré Père et Fils late in 1827
(although dated 1828) [Figure 1]. This is the most famous of French translations, the
version by Gérard de Nerval. Comparing the illustration both with Retzsch’s 1816
original [Figure 2] and the 1820 English copy [Figure 3], it is clear that the frontispiece
to Nerval’s translation is a copy of the London edition. Moses had completed the
ceiling vaulting to the right, increased the length of the curtain covering the bookcase,
added a few books on each shelf, omitted a spoon on the ground near Faust’s feet,
128
In a book published in Paris in January 1824 entitled Faust, 26 planches lithographiées par Muret, the plates
are in fact copies of Retzsch (cf. Doy, ‘Delacroix et Faust’, pp. 21–22). The publisher was Villain, who was
to produce later editions of the Delacroix Faust. Stapfer mentions Retzsch in his Preface to the 1828 edition,
p. i.
129
Delacroix, Journal, i, 120. Pace Trapp, The Attainment of Delacroix, p. 144 (where the entry is mistakenly
dated 1825), the entry does not identify the engravings as being by Cornelius.
130
Delacroix mentions these in 1862 in the letter to Budry cited above (Correspondance, iv, 303), dating his
first acquaintance ‘vers 1821’. Raymond Escholier, however, suggests that the 1824 reference is to Cornelius:
‘Le Faust d’Eugène Delacroix’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 71 (1929), 174–84 (p. 176); Kehrli assumes that,
because parallels with Cornelius can be shown, this reference must be to his series (Lithographien, pp. 10 and
58); cf. also Zeeb, ‘Goethes neues Frankreichkonzept’, p. 125.
131
Leonard L. Mackall, ‘Soane’s Faust Translation now first published, from the unique advance sheets sent to
Goethe in 1822’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 112 (1904), 277–97. Goethe
liked this: ‘In England hat ein Herr Soane meinen Faust bewundernswürdig verstanden und dessen Eigenthüm-
lichkeiten mit den Eigenthümlichkeiten seiner Sprache und den Forderungen seiner Nation in Harmonie zu
bringen gewußt’ (WA, iv, xxxvi, 61).
132
Retsch’s [sic] Series of Twenty-Six Outlines, illustrative of Goethe’s Tragedy of Faust, engraved from the
originals by Henry Moses. And an Analysis of the Tragedy, London, 1820.
133
Roger Paulin, William St Clair, and Elinor Shaffer, ‘A Gentleman of Literary Eminence’: A Review Essay,
London, 2008, p. 16. An edition of Faust engravings ‘d’après les dessins de Ret[z]sch’ was published in Paris
in May 1828 by Audot and went into a second edition by September (see Bibliographie de la France, 17 [1828],
381 and 679).
98 ROBERT VILAIN
figure 1 Faust signing the pact with Mephistopheles: frontispiece to Gérard de Nerval,
Faust, Tragédie de Goëthe: Nouvelle traduction compleÌte en prose et en vers, Paris, 1828.
This and Figures 2 and 3 by permission of the Rare Books Division, Department of Rare Books
and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.
and increased the detail in the pile of books on the desk, for example. The illustration
in the French volume stretches the whole image horizontally (adding even more blank
wall than Moses to the buttress on the left and inserting space between the tiled stove,
centre, and the pile of wood to the right), omits a line of tiles on the stove, and adds
a label to the bottle, bottom right. Both later versions reduce the contrast between
figures and background, which detracts from the force of the images. Minor though
these details are in isolation, they remind us of the importance of the detour via
London made by Faust before the German text reached a French audience. Retzsch
was even associated with Stapfer’s text at one point, in 1828, when La Librarie
Romantique in Brussels issued an edition with twenty-six engravings, evidently
Moses’ versions of Retzsch, adapted once again by Kennerley and engraved by Trueb
and Branche.134
The significance of previous illustrations for the Faust lithographs is overshadowed
by Delacroix’s sensational experience of Faust on the London stage. Delacroix wrote
to Pierret in June 1825 in terms that obviously anticipate his Faust: ‘J’ai vu ici une
pièce de Faust qui est la plus diabolique qu’on puisse imaginer. Le Méphistophélès
est un chef-d’œuvre de caractère et d’intelligence’.135 The play he had seen on 14
June was a version by George Soane with Daniel Terry, which premiered on 16 May
134
Although they do not list this particular publication, this is an example of the 1828 stage in the dissemination
of Retzsch’s illustrations described by Paulin et al., ‘A Gentleman’, p. 19.
135
Delacroix, Correspondance, i, 160, 18 June 1825.
figure 2 Faust signing the pact with Mephistopheles, from Umrisse zu Goethe’s Faust.
Gezeichnet von Moritz Retzsch, Stuttgart, 1816.
figure 3 Faust signing the pact with Mephistopheles, from Retsch’s [sic] Series of Twenty-
Six Outlines, illustrative of Goethe’s Tragedy of Faust, engraved from the originals by Henry
Moses, London, 1820.
100 ROBERT VILAIN
that year in Drury Lane with music by R. H. Bishop, C. Horn, and T. Cooke. The
insistence in the secondary literature on Delacroix that this play was based on Goethe
seems to stem from Delacroix himself — ‘C’est le Faust de Goethe, mais arrangé’, is
how he describes it in that letter to Pierret136 — and on this basis it has been described
as ‘pillaging’ rather than adaptation, an attempt to satisfy ‘les goûts “diabolo”’ that
had been aroused in the public by another recently mangled German work, Carl
Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz.137 A notoriously extravagant scene from
the London staging of Der Freischütz, the Wolf’s Lair, making use of the spectacular
diorama developed by Clarkson Stanfield, has been shown to have influenced
Delacroix’s dramatic use of light and shade in the Faust series, most directly in Plate
15 (‘L’ombre de Marguerite apparaissant à Faust’, from the Walpurgisnacht scene).138
Similar effects were used in the London Faust production, but there it seems to
have been the sly, sardonic Mephistopheles as played by Terry that most impressed
Delacroix.
But the London Faust can hardly be regarded as an adaptation of Goethe’s work,
with which it has not much more in common than the title and the names of two
further protagonists in the dramatis personae, Mephistophiles [sic] and Wagner.139
The action of Faustus: A Romantic Drama in Three Acts (known under the title The
Devil and Dr Faustus after its first performance) largely takes place in Venice, Milan,
and Naples; Faust murders not only the brother of his lover (Enrico and Adine,
respectively) but the King of Naples too. Where Goethe opens his play with Faust’s
renunciation of dry-as-dust learning, Soane attributes these sentiments to Wagner
who goes out drinking with friends and sings:
I’m a young German scholar, and think the best college,
Where a man may acquire the very best knowledge,
Is a pretty girl’s heart; — where admitted, — at ease,
You arrive at the honours, and take your degrees.
He ends more salaciously still:

Then away with all musty old learning at once,
Books and devils for love I’ll for ever renounce;
Hebrew, Latin, and Greek all aside may be flung,
For the tongue of all tongues is a pretty girl’s tongue.140
In one of the several versions of the text, the play’s culminating triumphant exclama-
tion — ‘Saved!’ — is not uttered by God but by Adine (the equivalent of Gretchen),
who holds a crucifix in front of the dying Faust (who has betrayed her with her
cousin Rosolia, and has been bitten by a snake), before herself suddenly falling
136
Ibid.
137
Katharine A. Lochnan, ‘Les lithographies de Delacroix pour Faust et le théâtre anglais des années 1820’,
Nouvelles de l’estampe, 87 (1986), 6–13 (p. 8).
138
See Lochnan, ‘Les lithographies’, pp. 6–11, and P. T. van der Merwe, The Life and Theatrical Career of
Clarkson Stanfield (1793–1867), PhD thesis, University of Bristol, 1979, 2 vols.
139
According to Busch, who reproduces the original playbills, ‘nirgends erschien der Name Goethes als des
eigentlichen und weithin bekannten Urhebers des Faust-Stückes’ (Eugène Delacroix, p. 21): it is correct to state
that Goethe’s name was nowhere used, but not to imply that he was the originator of this drama.
140
Faustus: A Romantic Drama in Three Acts, London, 1825, p. 15 (published by John Miller).
down dead beside him.141 The version that Delacroix saw ends with ‘a demon’
(Mephistopheles) drawing Faust down to hell, despite Adine’s attempt to intervene.142
Delacroix’s notes from that evening’s performance have recently been published in
the new edition of his Journal, and they prove to be a remarkably accurate record.
One slip is interesting: he consistently calls the character of Rosolia ‘Julia’, perhaps
because Soane’s play has such obvious debts to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
While the London Faust was certainly a strong impulse for Delacroix’s lithographs,
its significance relative to that of the text of Goethe’s play is usually overstated, as
it is in Richard Friedenthal’s biography, for example, which claims altogether too
boldly: ‘The inspiration for Delacroix’s illustrations [. . .] was not Goethe’s Faust at
all, but a spectacular Faust play in London’.143 Evidence that Delacroix read Goethe
carefully at some point exists in the form of manuscript notes consisting of extracts
from Saint-Aulaire’s translation.144 These have been provisionally dated 1824 and
begin with almost the whole of the ‘Prologue sur le théâtre’, which is odd since,
of all the sections of Faust, this is the most lacking in emotional intensity, being a
suggestion that the drama is the ad hoc improvisation of travelling players.145
Delacroix truncates a few speeches and underlines one sentence at the end of a
speech by the Theatre Director: ‘Contenter les hommes, cela est trop difficile;
cherchez seulement à les émouvoir; il n’importe comment, par la peine ou par
le plaisir’.146 The original reads: ‘Sucht nur die Menschen zu verwirren, / Sie zu
befriedigen ist schwer — — / Was fällt euch an? Entzückung oder Schmerzen?’147
— and it is immediately apparent that Saint-Aulaire’s ‘émouvoir’, which so struck
Delacroix, is something of a misrepresentation: ‘to move’ is not ‘to distract’, ‘con-
found’ or ‘disconcert’. This is a tiny detail, but it is a telling example of a tendency
in the Faust reception in France after Mme de Staël to pick and choose the aspects
that most appealed to emerging Romanticism. ‘Verwirren’ is a key term in the multi-
layered ‘set up’ that is the plot of Goethe’s Faust I in its 1808 form, including the
almost self-referential attempts in the ‘Vorspiel auf dem Theater’ to establish the
work’s dramatic unity. France was not interested in the secure perspective or critical
distance that this layering creates for its author, whose more recent classical aes-
thetic is at odds with the romantic core of the work. Delacroix quotes nothing here
from the ‘Prolog im Himmel’, which forms another of these layers, adding the ironic
141
This is the text published in Faustus: A Romantic Drama in Three Acts, by George Soane, Esq. [. . .] Printed
from the Acting Copy. With Remarks, Biographical & Critical by D-G [= George Daniel], vol. 33, no. 3 [play
249], London [n.d.], pp. 56 and 58 (published by John Cumberland).
142
Faustus: A Romantic Drama (Miller, 1825), pp. 58–59. Doy correctly deduces that this is the version that
Delacroix must have seen, but is unaware of this publication and cites instead a manuscript preserved in the
British Museum (‘Delacroix et Faust’, pp. 18–19). Another similar version, in prose, was published under the
title The Devil & Dr Faustus in Three Acts Adapted to the Theatrical Characters and Scenes in the Same,
London: William Cole [n.d.].
143
Richard Friedenthal, Goethe: His Life and Times, London, 1965, p. 516.
144
Attention was first drawn to these in 1975 by Doy, ‘Delacroix et Faust’, p. 22 and n. 21. The manuscript is
now in the Bibiliothèque de l’Institut National d’histoire de l’art, Paris, and the notes have been published
in the new edition of Delacroix’s Journal, ii, 1457–63. They have not to my knowledge been explored in
detail.
145
Saint-Aulaire, Faust, pp. 34–39.
146
Delacroix, Journal, ii, 1458; Saint-Aulaire, Faust, p. 36.
147
MA, vi/1, 538, ll. 131–33.
102 ROBERT VILAIN
perspectives on human striving established by the Lord’s wager with Mephistopheles,

although there is a caption from this scene for the most famous of the final litho-
graphs, ‘Méphistophélès dans les airs’.148
The other sections noted by Delacroix almost all anticipate his lithographs in
various ways. He cites a few lines from the opening scene dismissing the parapherna-
lia of scientific research and focusing on Faust’s address to a skull: ‘Que me dirais-tu,
toi, emblème hideux de la mort’ (‘Was grinsest du mir hohler Schädel her?’)149 —
the very moment captured in Plate 2. Delacroix then lists four possible subjects for
drawings: ‘Sylphes et démons volant dans l’air’150 — which was not executed, but
may possibly have been the germ of Plate 1 — ‘Méphistophèles dans les airs’;
‘Méphisto et l’écolier’ (which became Plate 6); ‘Méphisto et Faust entrant dans le
cabinet’, and ‘Faust et Wagner assis dans la campagne’ (Plate 3). The third of these
is hard to place in the text: the only point at which both Faust and Mephistopheles
enter a room that could be described as a ‘cabinet’ together is when the latter is
disguised as a dog;151 but it may refer to Mephistopheles entering either Faust’s study
(‘Studierzimmer’, Plate 5) or perhaps their exploration of Gretchen’s room (not
illustrated), especially since their purpose in doing so is to leave the casket of jewels,
a significant moment that Delacroix might well have thought worthy of illustration.152
Delacroix quotes from the ‘Zwinger’ scene where Gretchen places flowers before an
icon of the Mater Dolorosa and notes the single word ‘Valentin’, with reference to
the following scene, ‘Nacht. Straße vor Gretchens Tür’: neither becomes the subject
of one of the lithographs, but related scenes are chosen for Plates 10, 11, and 12
(‘Gretchen am Spinnrad’, Valentin’s murder, and Faust’s flight thereafter). Plate 13
illustrates ‘Marguerite à l’église’, from which the next section of the notes quotes
several passages of Gretchen’s dialogue with the Evil Spirit.153 The next reference, the
single phrase ‘Reproches de Faust à Méphistophélès’, refers to ‘Trüber Tag. Feld’,
which is not illustrated, but the following page and a half of extracts all come
from the final prison scene.154 Interestingly, Delacroix includes the song heard from
within the cell, ‘Ma mère, le catin, / qui m’a tuée’, which Saint-Aulaire had cut and
relegated to a note. Plate 17 illustrates this scene.
The subjects of seven of the seventeen lithographs are thus directly anticipated
in these notes, which mention or quote from scenes closely related to two or three
more of Delacroix’s final choice of subjects. Few if any of the seventeen can be
related at all closely to the London Faust, despite Delacroix’s claim in 1855 that ‘la
vue de cette pièce [. . .] toute défigurée qu’elle était, m’a inspiré l’idée de faire mes
compositions lithographiées’.155 This statement has always been interpreted as giving
148
Stapfer, Faust (1828), opposite p. 14. On the relevance of the caption, see below. On the complexities and
dramaturgical functions of the multi-layered structure that Faust gradually obtains, see Albrecht Schöne’s
commentary in Goethe, FA, i, vii/2, 151–52.
149
Delacroix, Journal, ii, 1459; Saint-Aulaire, Faust, p. 57; MA, vi/1, 553 (l. 664).
150
Delacroix, Journal, ii, 1460; Saint-Aulaire, Faust, p. 84; MA, vi/1, 575 (l. 1506).
151
Saint-Aulaire, Faust, p. 76.
152
Saint-Aulaire, Faust, p. 86 or p. 123. It seems unlikely that it refers to the pair entering Auerbach’s Tavern (p.
108, as suggested in Journal, ii, 1460, n. 8).
153
Delacroix, Journal, ii, 1460–61; Saint-Aulaire, Faust, pp. 176–78; MA, vi/1, 646–47.
154
Delacroix, Journal, ii, 1461–63; Saint-Aulaire, Faust, pp. 179 and 182–89; MA, vi/1, 667–73.
155
Delacroix, Journal, i, 918, 28–29 June 1855.
straightforward primacy to the London staging but it implies a familiarity with

a model against which to judge the ‘disfigurement’ of the story in that version, a
model which the letter of 18 June 1825 identifies as Goethe.156 Delacroix’s reading
notes have not been precisely dated, but that is not decisive for the point at issue here.
If they were made in 1824 as simple ‘notes de lecture’ — as the editor of the Journal
plausibly suggests157 — they provide evidence of an interest in Goethe’s drama on
Delacroix’s part that predates the stimulus of Soane’s play, which must then be seen
as a reminder for, rather than the fons et origo of, Delacroix’s project. If they were
written on Delacroix’s return to France after seeing the London Faust, then they sug-
gest that the London play was not in itself sufficient for the development of his inter-
est in the subject. Either way, the usual assumptions about the relative importance of
text and performance need revisiting.
The close correlation between the notes and the subjects for the lithographs
does suggest that they played a central role in Delacroix’s planning for the series,
although the fact that Delacroix used Saint-Aulaire rather than Stapfer reinforces
his retrospective claim for the original independence of the images from Motte’s
publication plans. When the two merged is not clear, but it cannot have been late in
1827 as has been claimed. An undated note from Motte to Delacroix that appears
to initiate their collaboration reads: ‘Si vous aviez quelques instants à me sacrifier,
nous pourrions peut-être, un de ces soirs, arranger une affaire diabolique avec
Faust. J’ai quelques idées à vous communiquer pour l’exploitation de ce sorcier’.158
Moreau-Nélation links this approach to the Salon of October 1827, which exhibited
Delacroix’s Mort de Sardanapale but refused his Méphistophélès apparaissant à
Faust, and the artist was certainly in close contact with Motte at this point. But at
exactly the same time Delacroix was lamenting his inability to produce a lithograph
portrait of Goethe in short order, not least because of the risk of continued delay for
the Faust volume as a whole: ‘il me peine extrêmement de voir encore retarder la
publication d’un ouvrage qui traîne depuis deux ans passés’.159 Via Motte he also
apologised to Stapfer for trying his patience too.160 This implies that he had himself
been working on the project for some time already (he says ‘two years’), which is
confirmed by the fact that Goethe was aware of the collaboration between Motte,
Stapfer, and Delacroix as early as January 1827 — and had received proof copies of
two of the lithographs in November 1826.161
There has been a tendency in critical studies of Delacroix’s lithographs to follow
his own cue from 1862 and read them in almost complete isolation from the text of
Goethe’s play. In extreme cases this has led to errors such as the misidentification
156
Delacroix, Correspondance, i, 160.
157
Delacroix, Journal, ii, 1457.
158
Étienne Moreau-Nélation, Delacroix raconté par lui-même: étude biographique d’après ses lettres, son journal,
etc., 2 vols, Paris, 1916, i, 94.
159
Delacroix, Correspondance, i, 201, October 1827.
160
Ibid., i, 202.
161
Letter to Cotta, 26 January 1827 (WA, iv, xlii, 25); conversation with Eckermann, 29 November 1826 (MA,
xix, 166–68). Nonetheless, the date of October 1827 as the beginning of the collaboration was reasserted as
recently as 2011 in the introduction to an edition of Delacroix’s lithographs with Nerval’s translation: Arlette
Sérullaz, ‘Un parcours initiatique. Delacroix illustrateur de “Faust”’, in Goethe, Faust, La Petite Collection,
Paris, 1997 (new edn 2011), p. 14.
104 ROBERT VILAIN
of the figures in Plate 4 as Faust, Mephistopheles, and the Poodle by a series of

distinguished critics,162 when the figure in the centre is obviously Wagner (it should
hardly need pointing out that the dog in this scene is Mephistopheles). That such an
error could be made three times over thirty-five years suggests much less interest in
the work that stimulated the images on the part of the critics than was evidently the
case for the artist himself. Delacroix’s dismissive attitude to the ‘malheureuse idée’
of publishing his work alongside the text — he claimed it damaged sales — was on
one level a gambit in his retrospective attempts to construct an image of himself as a
put-upon artist, suffering at the hands of an exploitative publisher. Trapp has already
shown that this claim is not wholly justifiable.163 But Delacroix’s initial explorations
of the material were certainly independent of Motte and there is internal evidence in
the series that confirms a more unsystematic approach than that of the hired illustra-
tor, which is a crucial feature of Delacroix’s style. Each plate is self-contained; each
episode selected from Faust is exploited for its dramatic or atmospheric potential
without excessive regard for narrative consistency. This means that on a fairly trivial
level there are inconsistencies — the disappearance of Wagner’s beard between Plates
3 and 4, for example, or his and Faust’s frequent changes of headgear and shoes even
when there has been no significant time lapse in the action of the play (Plates 12 and
13, for example, set moments apart, depict both protagonists in completely different
costumes). However, this is not to say that the relationship between text and image
is tenuous. On a fairly elementary level once more, the plates depict precise character
traits (the pedantic earnestness of Wagner in Plate 3, for example) or details of props
(such as the skull in Plate 2 and the wine spout in Plate 7) that are derived directly
from Goethe. And it should not be forgotten that almost every image, in fact, is a
focused illustration of a scene from Goethe’s play, the only exception being Plate 1,
Mephistopheles in flight, for which there is no specifically matching textual equivalent
and whose ironic caption from the ‘Prolog im Himmel’ bears little relation to the
arresting and wholly unironic image.
The inconsistencies are nonetheless striking. Delacroix’s sequence of lithographs
for Hamlet shows a much higher degree of evenness than the Faust images, despite
having taken much longer to complete (nearly a decade between 1834 and 1843, as
opposed to about two and a half years for Faust). The Shakespearean protagonist
remains physically consistent throughout. A few examples show the implications of
Delacroix’s approach in the earlier series. Faust in Plate 3 is as careworn as he was
in the ‘Nacht’ scene: weary, with his head resting on his hand, his left arm on his
knee, he turns rudely away from Wagner, who is earnestly trying to engage him in
conversation, a finger raised as if to make a point in disputation, a heavy tome under
his arm.164 Faust’s low mood is highlighted in the caption — ‘Heureux qui peut con-
server l’espérance de surnager sur cet océan d’erreurs! [. . .] l’esprit a beau déployer
ses ailes, le corps, hélas! n’en a point à y ajouter’ — and is in obvious contrast to the
moods suggested by the young couple arm-in-arm behind Faust and the round dance
in the middle distance. Walking home in Plate 4, Faust is not significantly happier,
162
Adolphe Moreau, Eugène Delacroix et son œuvre, Paris, 1873, no. 62; Alfred Robaut, L’Œuvre complet de
Eugène Delacroix: Peintures, Dessins, Gravures, Lithographies, commenté par Ernest Chesneau, Paris, 1885,
p. 238; Loys Delteil, Le Peintre graveur illustré, iii: Ingres et Delacroix, Paris, 1908, no. 61.
163
Trapp, Attainment of Delacroix, p. 144.
164
I do not see ‘sly, cynical withdrawal’ here, as Trapp does (Attainment of Delacroix, p. 149).
and seems irritated by the dog snapping at his heels. In Plate 6, ‘Méphistophélès
recevant l’écolier’, Faust can be seen peeping out from the curtain, without his heavy
coat, dressed in a younger man’s clothes, hose and garter, stylish jacket, and tipped
cap. His beard is a little shorter, but not as neatly trimmed as in Plate 7 in Auerbach’s
Tavern, where the transformation to dandy or Junker is nearly complete. As well as
wearing more youthful clothing — different from that in the previous plate, and more
martial, almost armour-like here, partly because he is carrying a large sword — his
legs here are more muscular, he is more dispassionate, taller, firmer, his arms
behind his back, showing some impatience at the degrading scene before him. In this
respect Delacroix’s Faust preserves the double standards of Goethe’s, a willingness to
benefit from the service of Mephistopheles combined with a degree of disdain and
hypocritical distaste for the sordid trickery in which they indulge.
Goethe’s Faust is also transformed into a younger man, of course, but in one
‘chemical’ stage, by means of a magic potion in the scene following Auerbach’s

Tavern, that of the Witches’ Kitchen, a scene not chosen by Delacroix, despite
Goethe’s particularly eager anticipation of it as reported by Eckermann on 29
November 1826.165 The reasons for this reticence may not be unrelated to the reasons
for the changes in Faust’s appearance, and they provide an interesting illustration
of something that Goethe praised about the series. From the outset Delacroix was
chiefly drawn to the figure of Mephistopheles, less as sinister devil or demon than as
a dark component within the human sphere. As Faust emerges from the medieval
gloom of the scholar’s cell, guided by an impressively vigorous, smartly dressed young
man, he enacts Delacroix’s drawing of the Faust legend from out of the atmosphere
of mystery and mysticism that still to some extent characterizes Goethe’s version.
Delacroix reflected in 1856 that he had once had ‘ce sens du mystérieux’ but that it
had been ‘détourné par mes travaux sur place, sujets allégoriques’.166 The exception
in the Faust series to the humanizing trend, Plate 15 (‘L’ombre de Marguerite’), is
not usually regarded as Delacroix’s finest work,167 and the ‘Walpurgisnacht’ scene
(Plate 16), rather than an evocation of the weirdly supernatural, is a study in human
and equine bodies, the physical strength of the huge galloping horses controlled by a
tensely urgent Faust and an almost casually forceful Mephistopheles.
Anchoring the devil in the physical world is essential because the transformation
that Delacroix’s Faust undergoes, in a sense, is that he becomes Mephistopheles. In
Plate 5 [Figure 4], when Mephistopheles appears to Faust, he is assured and confident,
even arrogant, staring unflinchingly down his pointed nose, which is strikingly paral-
leled by a sharp, protruding chin and by the angle of his soft hat. He stands firmly
on muscular legs, his sword absolutely vertical between them; his left arm is held
across his chest as if he is about to begin a bow. Mephistopheles exudes strength,
virility, and power, and wears the costume of a nobleman, with a tunic decorated
with bold stripes and open at the chest to reveal a fine white shirt. Faust is rising from
his chair in some alarm, his right hand raised almost as if to ward off a magic force,
his left hand poised over a passage in the large book he is reading, his eyes registering
fear or alarm. Mephistopheles’ elegance and poise contrast vividly with the Gothic
165
166
Delacroix, Journal, i, 1019 (30 May 1856).
167
See, for example, Trapp, Attainment of Delacroix, p. 150, who describes it as ‘uninspired, as though [. . .]
Delacroix approached the task perfunctorily, without interest or conviction’.
106 ROBERT VILAIN
figure 4 ‘Méphistophélès apparaissant à Faust’, Plate 5 from FAUST, Tragédie de M. de

Goethe Paris, 1828 (opposite page 38).
This and figures 5-9 by permission of the Graphic Arts Collection, Department of Rare Books
and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.
heaviness of Faust: Faust wears a thick coat or gown, sits at a huge oak table with a
heavy cloth, and in a solid carved chair. Behind him is a brocade curtain. The old is
starkly confronted with the new, the Gothic will be forced to give way to the modern;
Faust is defensive, Mephistopheles dominant; self-doubt encounters self-confidence.
Plate 8 [Figure 5] presents a very different situation. The qualities that Mephistoph-
eles represented have been transmitted to Faust: Delacroix underlines this in every
compositional detail — in similarities of posture and dress, in the parallel positioning
of their swords, in the musculature of their legs and the almost balletic positioning
of the feet, in the tilt of their heads, and above all in the virtual mutation of Faust’s
physiognomy into that of Mephistopheles. Gretchen is a slim, elegantly dressed young
woman; her posture suggests resistance to Faust’s importunate grasp of her waist, her
facial expression is slightly haughty, fitting Faust’s description of her as having ‘tant
de modestie et de décence, et en même temps quelque chose de dédaigneux’.168 She is
here shown caught in a pincer-movement between a Faust and a Mephistopheles
168
Stapfer, Faust (1828), p. 73. See also Zeeb, ‘Goethes neues Frankreichkonzept’, p. 127: ‘Delacroix verans-
chaulicht Textverweise auf Gretes Sehnsucht nach “edlem Stand”, die Goethe zunächst vom Charakter des
schlicht-reinen bürgerlichen Mädchens absetzt’.
figure 5 ‘Faust cherchant à séduire Marguerite’, Plate 8 of the 1828 Faust (opposite
page 72).
whose aims are now completely convergent. Mephistopheles’ greater experience and
boldness is perhaps subtly suggested by the full visibility of his sword, Faust’s being
still partly hidden by his cloak, but the direction of their gazes shows that there is
no longer much to choose between them: Mephistopheles looks over his shoulder
approvingly at Faust, and Faust looks at us, as if seeking our approval. In Delacroix’s
108 ROBERT VILAIN
conception of the story, this is Faust’s lowest moral point, the point where he is
most completely subsumed by the agenda of his diabolical partner,169 the point where
conscience is least evident.
The same logic obtains, albeit from a different perspective, on the other striking
occasion when Faust’s features merge into those of Mephistopheles. In Plate 17
[Figure 6], as Faust attempts to free Marguerite from prison, Marguerite’s naked
breasts suggest sin and vulnerability and her dark, unseeing eyes convey the loss of
figure 6 ‘Faust dans le prison de Marguerite’, Plate 17 of the 1828 Faust (opposite page
140).
169
On this ‘Konstellation absoluter Abhängigkeit’, see Ursula Sinnreich, ‘Delacroix’ Faust-Illustrationen’, in
Eugène Delacroix: Themen und Variationen: Arbeiten auf Papier, ed. by Margret Stuffmann, Stuttgart, 1987,
pp. 56–65 (p. 61).
her reason. She resists the embrace of Faust, who leans urgently towards her, his right
hand around her waist, his left pointing to the door, a long sword hanging sugges-
tively between his legs. Mephistopheles is standing in the doorway in a white tunic
but hunched and far less dashing than usual; his left arm is raised to urge Faust to
leave, at an angle that reinforces the diagonal of his sharp pointed features — the
trimmed beard over the jutting chin emphasized by the style of his hat, sweeping
backwards. These are matched by Faust’s face and hat, his chin protrudes almost
unnaturally towards Marguerite, the feathers in his cap flowing behind. These paral-
lels do not so much articulate a low point in Faust’s moral degeneration (he is after
all attempting to resist Mephistopheles) as reflect Marguerite’s perception of him.
To her, he is obviously indistinguishable from the devil, and this symbolic alliance
means more than anything Faust can promise. As she shies away from them, she leans
towards the unseen source of most of the light in the lithograph (the little prison
window is obviously not what produces the glow that bathes all three of the figures),
which suggests the divine alternative that pronounces the words ‘Elle est sauvée’ at
the top of the next page.
The angular features of Delacroix’s Mephistopheles have been impressed upon the
viewer from the outset in Plate 1 [Figure 7]: his jutting chin and sharp nose set up a
strong local diagonal with the peaks of his hair and this is echoed by the diagonal of
one wing and his right leg. He seems existentially poised, and the flashes of light on
the twisted planes of his naked body create a complex pattern that exudes energy and
tension. There is glee, mischief, and evil in the pose and the gaze of his flaming eye.
At this point he is what Ursual Sinnreich calls ‘[ein] dämonisches Zwitterwesen
zwischen Mensch und Tier’,170 and the distinctiveness of these features reminds us
continually of this duality. It is most acutely stated again in Plate 12 [Figure 8b],
which represents a scene only moments after the previous one, the duel with Valentin,
and whose caption is the very next sentence in Mephistopheles’ speech on page 110
of the 1828 edition. This is the only point where two illustrations are bound in
together without intervening pages of text. The differences between them are so strik-
ing as to constitute gross inconsistencies, but the juxtaposition suggests deeper, and
more logical, discontinuities. Where Plate 11 [Figure 8a] is light, the moon casting
long shadows around the action in the centre and shining on the buildings behind,
Plate 12 is dark, the pools of moonlight accusatory rather than illuminating. Faust is
not the same man: while in Plate 11 he is determined, his face smooth and taut, now
the plumes are gone from his hat, his clothing is darker, heavier, and less ornament-
ed, and his sword is no longer a rapier but a simpler, heavier weapon. He has aged
in seconds, his face is cast down as it was in the very earliest plates, he is older now
that the thrill of the duel is over and he is having to be pulled away from the scene
of his crime by Mephistopheles. In Plate 11 (which owes its essential structure to the
equivalent scene in Retzsch), Mephistopheles is relaxed, as usual, resting back on one
foot, the sword in his right hand, his left by his side; he looks on dispassionately as
murder is committed, careful not to step on the mandolin he has laid down on the
ground beside him. Now he is almost grotesquely contorted, his sword under his arm,
his neck twisted as far back as it can reach as he looks over his shoulder at the death
scene, his hand lifted with spread fingers as if registering excitement. Faust looks
170
Sinnreich, ‘Delacroix’ Faust-Illustrationen’, p. 57.
110 ROBERT VILAIN
figure 7 ‘Méphistophélès dans les airs’, Plate 1 of the 1828 Faust (opposite page 14).
figure 8a ‘Duel de Faust et de Valentin’, Plate 11 of the 1828 Faust (opposite page 110)
like a palace guard, Mephistopheles almost like a malign Pierrot.171 Faust’s body
shows the sudden descent of guilt on his shoulders as he realizes both his part in the
underhand way in which a man has died and how his own agency has been effec-
tively replaced by that of Mephistopheles; Mephistopheles thrives on the trickery and
is ecstatically uplifted by the dishonourable nature of the deed.
The overall architecture of Delacroix’s Faust series is based on broad structural
contrasts — between interior and exterior, freedom and imprisonment, night and
day, youth and age, and so on. Goethe noted this too: ‘Herr De Lacroix scheint
hier in einem wunderlichen Erzeugnis zwischen Himmel und Erde, Möglichem und
Unmöglichem, Rohstem und Zartestem [. . .] sich heimatlich gefühlt [. . .] zu haben’.172
171
The associations between the Faust story and the Pierrot figure from the commedia dell’arte may be
unconscious or even coincidental in this lithograph but they are very striking and continue to resurface for
many decades to come. I have drawn attention to some of these in ‘An Innocent Abroad: The Pierrot Figure
in German and Austrian Literature at the Turn of the Century’, PEGS, 67 (1997), 69–99 (esp. pp. 77–82).
Delacroix’s twelfth plate is the first in a line of such associations that culminates in Klaus Mann’s Hendrik
Höfgen, who is catapulted to fame by his interpretation of the role of Mephistopheles as ‘der tragische Clown,
der diabolische Pierrot’ (Klaus Mann, Mephisto: Roman einer Karriere, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1989, p. 195).
Klaus Maria Brandauer in the white-faced Pierrot mask is a chillingly memorable recurrent image in István
Szábo’s film of the novel.
172
MA, xviii/2, 125–26.
112 ROBERT VILAIN
figure 8b ‘Méphistophélès fuyant après le duel’, Plate 12 of the 1828 Faust (opposite
page 110).
The detail of this architecture is often articulated in intensely imagined constellations

of characters. The triad in Plate 17 features the same figures as the one in Plate 8, but
as the scene moves from the street to the cell the dynamic changes utterly, with Faust
the one trapped rather than Marguerite. The spatial circumscription of the last plate
is an echo too, both of the second (in Faust’s study) and of the tenth (Marguerite at
her spinning wheel), where the shelf of domestic objects (books, a candlestick, bottles,
and a cloth) is itself a modest echo of the high shelf crammed with objects — mostly
books and scrolls, but skulls, a skeleton, phials, and bottles too — in the other
illustration of Faust’s study, Plate 5. Outdoor scenes near the beginning (Plates 3 and
4 with Faust, Wagner, and the dog) have contrasting pendants near the end (Plates
14 and 16, in the Harz Mountains and on the Witches’ Sabbath).173 A genesis over
more than two years, with its immediate stimuli a combination of a play in English,
a translation in French, and two previous sets of illustrations by German artists,
produces surface inconsistencies, to be sure, but these are hardly troublesome in the
context of the explosions of meaning from powerful moments throughout. Sinnreich’s
assertion that ‘diese Bilder erzählen nicht, sie zeigen’ is certainly true; however, it
is surely less obviously the case that ‘das Bild [kennt] kein Nacheinander im Sinne
der erzählenden Sprache, sondern nur ein Zugleich’.174 While one can assent to her
view that ‘der Zyklus als ganzer [entwickelt] die Tragödie nicht als Geschehen’, the
consequence drawn from this — that the cycle is ‘als additive Bildsequenz zu einer
atmosphärisch verflochtenen Einheit komponiert’ — overstates the independence of
the images from the narrative on which it is based.175 Delacroix declines to adhere in
detail to the narrative consistency of the text, not because the text does not matter to
him but because he has other means to achieve an interpretation that nonetheless
shows a deep understanding of how the relationship of Faust and Mephistopheles in
particular shifts and develops at key moments within that text.176
The portrait with which the 1828 edition of Faust opens [Figure 9] was made by
Delacroix at the last minute. He never met Goethe and based his lithograph on a
drawing of the seventy-seven-year-old completed by Johann Joseph Schmeller in the
second half of December 1826. That drawing has not survived, but a copy that Motte
had made by Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse is reproduced in the portrait supplement to the
Propyläen edition, allowing us to see how Delacroix has altered his model.177 The
173
For other examples see Breon Mitchell, The Complete Illustrations from Delacroix’s Faust and Manet’s
The Raven, Bloomington, IN, 1981, p. 1.
174
Sinnreich, ‘Delacroix’ Faust-Illustrationen’, pp. 57–58.
175
Ibid. This and the essay by Zeeb both offer, albeit from very different angles, a wealth of interesting interpre-
tative detail on the whole series.
176
A similar reading of Faust and Mephistopheles is hinted at by Roy Howard Brown, ‘The Formation of
Delacroix’s Heroes between 1822 and 1831’, The Art Bulletin, 66.2 (1994), 237–54. He briefly compares Faust
and Mephistopheles to the ‘twin’ figures in the painting Dante et Virgile aux enfers (1822), who together ‘show
a complex psychic wholeness, active in its rejection (Dante), and passive in its acceptance (Virgil)’ (p. 240).
In Delacroix’s depictions, Goethe’s dual protagonists are said to be ‘more alike than the earlier [pair]’ (p. 244),
and indeed there are points where almost a merging of characters seems intended. However, Brown’s conclu-
sion, that ‘Delacroix’s Faust expresses a more aggressive satanic spirit than the deeply introspective, morally
troubled hero of the play’, neglects a number of Delacroix’s depictions of Faust in the series and treats the
sequence more as a series of disjunct moments than I have suggested is appropriate.
177
Die Bildnisse Goethes, ed. by Ernst Schulte-Strathaus, Munich, 1910, p. 146. See also Arpad Weixlgärtner,
‘Paralipomena zum Thema: Goethe und Delacroix’, Die graphischen Künste, NF 4 (1939), 150–56 (p. 150).
114 ROBERT VILAIN
figure 9 Delacroix, portrait of Goethe from the 1828 Faust.

famous oyster eyes are preserved, but Delacroix has firmed up the jowls, strengthened
the chin and smoothed the cheeks. Goethe’s hair is darker and less formally styled,
his head is tilted slightly upwards, a soft fur collar is substituted for the turned-up
swallow-tail lapels of the original, the coat is unbuttoned, the simple buttons of the
original have become stylish frogging (which gives the whole the suggestion of a
military riding coat), and the white cravat is looser. None of these changes is espe-
cially significant individually, but together they make Goethe look less austere and
more youthful, in his fifties, say, rather than his mid-seventies, and therefore at about
the age he was when Faust I was first published. His expression is pensive, perhaps
just a little anxious, whereas in Schmeller’s portrait he looks more comfortable, more
secure. It is a romanticized image, an imaginative recreation of Delacroix’s idea
of Goethe-the-poet, and as such is a snapshot of an impression in the way that his
illustrations of Goethe’s text are, in part at least.
Goethe’s responses
Goethe’s views of Delacroix’s lithographs were formed in a way that initially must
have privileged the almost epiphanic disjointedness that many critics see as the
way they operate. In November 1826 he received proofs of Plates 7 (Auerbach’s
Tavern) and 16 (Faust and Mephistopheles on horseback) sent to him via the Weimar
Oberbaudirektor Clemens Coudray, and Eckermann reports his enthusiastic amaze-
ment ‘daß Herr Delacroix meine eigene Vorstellung bei Szenen übertroffen hat, die
ich selber gemacht habe’.178 The two images are praised as ‘geistreich’ and ‘trefflich’
(later they are called ‘wild und geistreich genug’ and ‘wundersam’179), the artist is said
to possess ‘großer Verstand’ and to be ‘ein großes Talent’. ‘Die Franzosen tadeln
an ihm seine Wildheit’, Goethe continues, but ‘hier kommt sie ihm recht zustatten’.
On 30 November he discussed the proofs with his friend Hofrat Johann Heinrich
Meyer, a Swiss painter and art historian on whose judgements in artistic matters
Goethe often relied. Goethe clearly took the trouble to find out about Delacroix’s
reputation, and announced the impending arrival of the complete volume in Über
Kunst und Altertum in May 1827 with the somewhat ambivalent description of the
artist as ‘ein Künstler, dem man ein entschiedenes Talent nicht ableugnet, dessen
wilde Art jedoch, womit er davon Gebrauch macht, das Ungestüm seiner Konzeptio-
nen, das Getümmel seiner Kompositionen, die Gewaltsamkeit der Stellungen und die
Rohheit des Kolorits [man] keineswegs billigen will’.180 The word ‘wild’ recurs again
and again in these judgements — and yet again in a published review of the complete
volume in 1828, where ‘eine gewisse wilde Behandlungsart’ is noted.181 Together they
bear witness to a degree of nervousness on Goethe’s part, doubtless fostered by Meyer,
178
MA, xix, 168 (29 November 1826). Goethe was already familiar with recent improvements in the
technology of lithography, as an 1826 essay on ‘Steindruck’ in Über Kunst und Altertum makes clear (MA,
xiii/2, 228–31, esp. p. 229).
179
WA, iv, xlii, 25 (to Cotta, 26 January 1827) and WA, iv, xlii, 111 (to Graf Reinhard, 30 March 1827).
180
MA, xiii/1, 558, the ‘Bemerkung des Übersetzers’ following Goethe’s translation of an article on ‘Mythologie,
Hexerei, Feerei’ from Le Globe (originally in Über Kunst und Altertum, vi/1 [completed December 1826,
printed May 1827]).
181
MA, xviii/2, 125.
116 ROBERT VILAIN
to whom he passed the lithographs on 3 January 1827, asking him ‘das Minimum was
zu ihrem Lobe gesagt werden kann mit wenigen Worten auszudrücken’182 — not a
phrase that radiates enthusiasm — in a postscript to a review he was writing for Über
Kunst und Altertum. Meyer’s short essay ‘Äußerungen eines Kunstfreundes’ appeared
in volume vi/ii. He stressed the provisional nature of the images, referring to them as
‘Entwürfe’ that are ‘nicht so zart und glatt vollendet’, and contrasted them with what
German artists had produced on the same theme: ‘Ein Deutscher jedoch hat alles
durchgängig ernster genommen, die Figuren mit mehr Sorgfalt und wissenschaftlicher
gezeichnet’.183 He referred to the inconsistencies discussed above in a very restrained
way: ‘einem andern, der mehr auf zyklische Folge der Bilder geachtet, mag es gelun-
gen sein, die Charaktere mit mehrerer Stetigkeit durch die ganze Reihe durchzuführen’.
Cornelius and Retzsch are not named in the essay, but they are almost certainly the
illustrators Meyer had in mind. Meyer, ‘vom sterbenden Klassizismus befangen’,184
was significantly less open to the Romantic spirit of Delacroix’s lithographs even than
the ageing Goethe.
After eager anticipation revealed in several letters and conversations,185 Goethe
received a leather-bound copy of the illustrated Faust on 22 March 1828,186 accom-
panied by a letter from Motte dated 30 February.187 The tutor to the Grand-Duke’s
son, Frédéric Soret, noted in his diary for that day: ‘l’intérêt qu’il y a pris et des
louanges données à quelques planches, non point par la beauté du dessin, mais pour
la hardiesse et la diablerie de la conception. Le poète disait avoir été souvent compris
par l’artiste’.188 Two days later Staatskanzler Friedrich von Müller reported rather
less eagerness: ‘Mit den Bildern von La Croix kann man nur zum Teil zufrieden sein,
manche sind doch gar zu wild und grell, ja verzeichnet, auch durchgehends zu düster
gehalten. Einzelne sind aber genial komponiert’.189 The charge of wildness is made
again here, although it is not clear from this note which views are Goethe’s and which
are Müller’s. Goethe was so ambivalent about these images that he probably
took more notice than usual of others’ views without resolving their contradictions
for himself. He certainly discussed them a number of times with Coudray and
Meyer.190
When he announced the appearance of the volume in Über Kunst und Altertum,
vi/2 (1828) — a copy of which was sent to Stapfer191 — Goethe praised Delacroix for
182
WA, iv, xlii, 4.
183
Quoted from the complete transcription in Kehrli, Lithographien, pp. 27–28.
184
Kehrli, Lithographien, p. 29.
185
See MA, xix, 167; WA, iv, xlii, 25 (letter to Cotta, 26 January 1827: ‘Die zugesagten Exemplare Faust erwarte
mit Vergnügen; auf den Pariser Abdruck bin ich neugierig’); WA, iv, xlii, 111 (letter to Reinhard, 30 March
1827: ‘Nun erwarten wir auch die neue Ausgabe des Faust’).
186
WA, iii, xi, 196.
187
See Heinz Lüdecke, ‘Goethe, Delacroix und die Weltliteratur’, Goethe: Neue Folge des Jahrbuchs der Goethe-
Gesellschaft, 33 (1971), 54–74 (p. 55).
188
GG, iii/2, 258. The German edition of Soret’s diaries quoted in MA, xviii/2, 862 (and often elsewhere)
somewhat misleadingly translates ‘intérêt’ as ‘Freude’: Zehn Jahre bei Goethe. Erinnerungen an Weimars
klassische Zeit 1822–1832, Leipzig, 1929, p. 225.
189
GG, iii/2, 259, 24 March 1828.
190
WA, iii, xi, 196 and 216.
191
WA, iv, xliv, 278; letter to Friedrich Carl Weyland, 16 August 1828. There is a facsimile in Kehrli,
Lithographien, 25.
having ‘einen unruhig strebenden Helden mit gleicher Unruhe des Griffels begleitet’,192
a phrase that manages to capture simultaneously his admiration for the artist’s
skill and his reservations about the intensity of the images. The reason that these
contradictory impressions can co-exist, and the reason that Goethe seems not to have
striven to resolve them, is his strong sense that Delacroix has penetrated to the heart
of his work and captured something that he himself had all but lost sight of. Goethe’s
response to Delacroix’s lithographs is a complex one, not adequately accounted
for with the usual assumptions in the secondary literature that it was consistently
enthusiastic, citing only the positive elements of the survey above,193 or with the
equally partial view taken by others, such as Friedenthal, to the effect that ‘Goethe
felt that the splendour of this beautiful edition was dulled by the illustrations’.194
His response to Delacroix cannot be divorced entirely from his response to seeing
his work translated into French in such a prominent way and from the necessary
emotional re-engagement with the creations of past decades that this prompted. He
did feel at some remove from Faust I, even though he was completing and publishing
sections of Faust II between 1826 and 1828, and he does not at any point overtly link
his reception of the Delacroix volume with this undertaking. In a brief, unpublished
review of a work on classical drama from this period (March 1827) he stresses the
autonomy of the new work: ‘das in freierer Kunst-Region hervortritt und auf höhere
Ansichten hindeutet, als jenes frühere, das in dem Wust mißverstandener Wissen-
schaft, bürgerlicher Beschränktheit, sittlicher Verwirrung, abergläubischen Wahns zu
Grunde ging’, which forcefully marks his distance.195
Goethe’s review of the Stapfer/Delacroix volume is about himself and his complex
reactions to a work he completed more than a quarter of a century previously but
began thinking about much earlier even than that.196 The 1808 edition of the first part
of Faust is already inscribed with uncertainty about the past, for it opens with a
reluctant glance back at Goethe’s first thoughts on the subject from the early 1770s:
‘Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten! / Die früh sich einst dem trüben Blick
gezeigt’197 — and ‘Zueignung’ itself was written more than a decade before this, in
1797. In his 1828 review Goethe again opens with an insistence on his current aliena-
tion from the time when Faust I was written: ‘Wenn ich die französische Übersetzung
meines Faust in einer Prachtausgabe vor mir liegen sehe, so werd’ ich erinnert an jene
Zeit, wo dieses Werk ersonnen, verfaßt und mit ganz eignen Gefühlen niedergeschrie-
ben worden’.198 This is a moving document, which testifies to Goethe’s uncertainty
192
MA, xviii/2, 125.
193
Sérullaz, ‘Un parcours initiatique’, pp. 16–17; Paul Jamot, ‘Goethe et Delacroix’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 8
(1932), 279–98 (pp. 287–88); Trapp, Attainment of Delacroix, pp. 144–45; Thomas Fusenig, ‘Faust-Rezeption
in der bildenden Kunst’, in Goethe Handbuch, ed. by Bernd Witte et al., ii, 514–21 (referring to ‘Goethes
wohlwollender Kommentar’, p. 515); Wiederholte Spiegelungen: Weimarer Klassik 1759–1832, ed. by Gerhard
Schuster and Caroline Gille, 2 vols, Munich, 1999, ii, 746 (which summarizes ‘die Lithographien [. . .] finden
[Goethes] Zustimmung und Bewunderung’, although the commentary to another exhibit notes a resurgence of
scepticism when Goethe receives the full set of lithographs; ii, 756).
194
Goethe, p. 516.
195
MA, xviii/2, 66.
196
Faust I was nearly complete by 1801 but left untouched until it was revised with Riemer and quickly
completed before being sent in May 1806 to Cotta; the manuscript sat with the printers, virtually untouched,
for two years until publication in 1808.
197
MA, vi/1, 535.
198
MA, xviii/2, 124.
118 ROBERT VILAIN
in the face of these feelings. He returns again and again to the quality of the volume’s
production (‘Prachtausgabe [. . .] in typographischer Vollendung [. . .] ein Foliofor-
mat, Papier, Lettern, Druck, Einband, alles ohne Ausnahme bis zum Vollkommnen
gesteigert [. . .] Prachtglanz’) and marvels at how such perfection appears to capture
or freeze ‘für immer die Entwickelungsperiode eines Menschengeistes [. . .] der von
allem was die Menschheit peinigt auch gequält, von allem was sie beunruhigt auch
ergriffen, in dem was sie verabscheut gleichfalls befangen, und durch das was sie
wünscht auch beseligt worden’. Goethe seems fascinated by being confronted with
his own past: ‘Ist nun jenes Gedicht seiner Natur nach in einem düsteren Element
empfangen’, he writes, ‘so nimmt es sich in der französischen, alles erheiternden, der
Betrachtung, dem Verstande entgegenkommenden Sprache, schon um vieles klarer
und absichtlicher aus’. Just under eighteen months later he was to make an almost
identical point to Eckermann about Nerval’s translation: ‘in dieser französischen
Übersetzung wirkt alles wieder durchaus frisch, neu und geistreich. [. . .] Auch muß
man bedenken, daß der erste Teil aus einem etwas dunkelen Zustand des Individuums
hervorgegangen’.199 He went further in 1830 than he had in 1828: ‘Im Deutschen,
sagte er, mag ich den Faust nicht mehr lesen’.
The physical beauty of the volume and the effects of the new language, Goethe
implies, may calm his turbulent impressions but they also neutralize them, and this
is the point at which his praise for Delacroix is deployed: ‘Dabei ist aber Eins
besonders merkwürdig, daß ein bildender Künstler sich mit dieser Produktion in
ihrem ersten Sinne dergestalt so befreundet, daß er alles ursprünglich Düstere in
ihr eben so aufgefaßt’ — and here follows the phrase quoted above expressing his
admiration at how the unease of the hero is reflected in the unease of the drawing.
He notes yet again how Delacroix ‘sich heimatlich gefühlt [hat]’ and operates ‘wie in
dem Seinigen’ and it is this almost osmotic interpenetration of Delacroix’s present
and Goethe’s distant emotions that resist the potentially neutralizing effects of the
beautiful volume: ‘Dadurch wird denn jener Prachtglanz in eine düstere Welt geführt
und die uralte Empfindung einer märchenhaften Erzählung wieder aufgeregt’. The last
sentence of the review begins with an honest admission — ‘Ein weiteres getrauen wir
uns nicht zu sagen’ — which captures perfectly the deep-seated ambiguity that I have
suggested troubled Goethe upon receiving this book.
Goethe’s attitude to Romantic art in general was always at best reserved and often
extremely negative. His response in 1814 to a collection of ‘altdeutsche Kunst’
beloved by the Romantics for its depiction of a glorious German medieval past
offers an interesting parallel to his reaction to Delacroix. Visiting the Boisserée
Collection in Heidelberg, Goethe is said to have made a similar rueful reflection on
his increasing age:
Da hat man nun [. . .] auf seine alten Tage sich mühsam von der Jugend, welche das
Alter zu stürzen kommt, seines eigenen Bestehens wegen abgesperrt, und hat sich, um sich
gleichmäßig zu erhalten, vor allen Eindrücken neuer und störender Art zu hüten gesucht,
und nun tritt da mit einem Male vor mich hin eine ganz neue und bisher mir unbekannte
Welt von Farben und Gestalten, die mich aus dem alten Gleise meiner Anschauungen und
Empfindungen herauszwingt, — eine neue, ewige Jugend, und wollte ich auch hier etwas
199
MA, xix, 347, 3 January 1830.
sagen, es würde diese oder jene Hand aus dem Bilde herausgreifen, um mir einen Schlag
ins Gesicht zu versetzen.200
On the face of it, this is a powerful admission and recantation of previous prejudice,
and, given the status of this collection for the Romantics, a kind of revelation
that lifted ‘[Goethes] klassizistische Überzeugungen aus den Angeln’.201 But Goethe’s
interest was in the historical significance of the works, which had previously been
obscured by poor critical presentations of the period by the very Romantic circles
who were trying to win him over by inviting him to Heidelberg. Ernst Osterkamp has
shown precisely ‘wie unangefochten seine klassische Kunstauffassung durch
das Erlebnis der altdeutschen Bilder bleibt’ and his essay on the collection should be
read ‘als Antwort [. . .] auf die vorangegangenen Beschreibungsversuche altdeutscher
Malerei: als eine Korrektur romantischer Kunstbetrachtung aus dem Geiste der
Klassik’.202 In a similar way, while the most positive of Goethe’s responses to Dela-
croix register the ‘slap in the face’ that the unexpected often gives, and even some
embarrassment at the fine line Goethe now feels he may have been treading in his
youth, they do not imply any sort of Romantic conversion.
Goethe’s nervousness about Delacroix paradoxically may have been fostered by the
reporting of Le Globe. He is known to have read two articles that discuss Delacroix,
published on 28 September 1824 and 14 October 1826.203 The first is an appreciation
of Scène des massacres de Scio exhibited at the Académie des Beaux-Arts and,
while it begins by stressing how Delacroix is in fact ‘beaucoup plus réfléchi que tous
ceux qui le prennent pour un jeune étourdi’, the passages that Goethe has marked
stress his lack of compositional orthodoxy, which, while exciting and laudable, is felt
to deprive the painting of its overall beauty. The second, by Ludovic Vitet, is
devoted principally to Eugène Devéria (brother of Achille, the artist who drew the
wrappers of the 1828 Faust), who is characterized by the epithet ‘le superlatif de M.
Delacroix’. From this review Goethe copied into his notebook the phrase ‘il a franchi
la région du bizarre, il est dans celle de l’incroyable’. There is no record that Goethe
knew another article on Delacroix’s Scène des massacres de Scio, also by Vitet, which
appeared on 3 June 1826, but if he did, it will have reinforced his impressions of the
artist’s cavalier attitude to composition and structure, his tendency towards the
grotesque, a dissonant use of colours, in short his abandonment ‘avec une sorte de
bravade’ of ‘tous les procédés ordinaires de l’art’.204 It ends with a specific comparison
with Goethe’s Faust: ‘Si Goethe eût toujours déraisonné comme quand il nous mène
au sabbat et chez les sorcières, il est douteux qu’il eût obtenu la place qui était due à
son génie’. Delacroix is here associated with precisely those parts of Faust I that
Goethe himself wished to see him illustrate — ‘ich freue mich besonders auf die
Hexenküche und Brockenszenen’, he said to Eckermann on receiving the proof
200
GG, ii, 960–61 (recollection by Johann Baptist Bertram in 1863).
201
Richard Benz, Goethe und die romantische Kunst, Munich [1940], p. 50, quoted disapprovingly by
Ernst Osterkamp, Im Buchstabenbilde: Studien zum Verfahren Goethescher Bildbeschreibungen, Stuttgart,
1991, p. 230.
202
Osterkamp, Im Buchstabenbilde, pp. 230–31.
203
See Hamm, Goethe und die Zeitschrift ‘Le Globe’, pp. 175–77 and 372–73.
204
L[udovic]V[itet], ‘Exposition des tableaux en bénéfice des Grecs; II. M. Delacroix’, Le Globe, 3 June 1826,
pp. 372–74.
120 ROBERT VILAIN
plates,205 and at about the same time he predicted: ‘wahrscheinlich gelingen dem
Künstler die übrigen wilden ahnungsvollen und seltsamen Situationen gleichfalls’,206
which makes an implicit distinction between the ‘wild’ scenes and others less strange.
It is as if Goethe’s preconceptions about Delacroix’s talent — iconoclasm, passion,
and excess — could be accommodated as long as they were associated with the
exceptionally darker, more mysterious, more obviously Romantic aspects of his Faust,
and while he only had two proofs to consider. When he is faced with the complete
series, in which these qualities are seen to apply across the board, he is shocked at
how revealing Delacroix’s art has been of his own psyche.
Time and again Goethe emphasized the way the Faust illustrations offered new
perspectives on his own work. When Eckermann remarked ‘daß solche Bilder zum
besseren Verstehen des Gedichts sehr viel beitrügen’, Goethe did not merely agree
that other readers might be helped in this way, but focused on his own understanding:
‘die vollkommnere Einbildungskraft eines solchen Künstlers zwingt uns’ — the

pluralis majestatis here, as it was in the review — ‘die Situation so gut zu denken,
wie er sie selber gedacht hat’. There follows Goethe’s often-quoted remark about the
superiority of Delacroix’s imagination to his own: ‘Und wenn ich nun gestehen muß,
daß Herr Delacroix meine eigene Vorstellung bei Szenen übertroffen hat, die ich
selber gemacht habe, um wie viel mehr werden nicht die Leser alles lebendig und über
ihre Imagination hinausgehend finden!’ Eckermann has already reported a similar
confession: ‘“Da muß man doch gestehen”, sagte Goethe, “daß man es sich selbst
nicht so vollkommen gedacht hat”’.207 And Goethe’s note on the impending reissue
of the Stapfer translation in Über Kunst und Altertum refers to Delacroix’s ability
‘Bilder hervorzubringen, an die Niemand hätte denken können’.208 These are not
merely ironic, as Stuart Atkins has suggested.209 On one level these are compliments
to an artist whose genius Goethe clearly recognized, but they reveal also his mixed
emotions on being reminded of a work completed long ago but with which he still
evidently identified. If one is to believe the report made by Victor Pavie of a visit to
Weimar with David d’Angers (who was making a bust of Goethe), by 1829 Goethe
had rejected Delacroix. In a reflection never quoted in studies of this relationship,
Pavie recalls Goethe’s ‘réserve’ on the subject of these lithographs:
Le génie de Delacroix, essentiellement dramatique, tout d’imagination et de sentiment,
avait moins déféré, dans l’interprétation du Faust, au point de vue railleur et sceptique,
qu’il ne s’était complu au mouvement des scènes, au jeu des passions et à la splendeur des
effets. Il a tiré à lui, il s’est montré lui-même, et, à ce titre, n’a pu se concilier les pleins
suffrages d’un auteur moins soucieux d’un soleil que d’un satellite. L’interprète de Faust,
au gré de Wolfgang, c’était Retzsch.210
It may be that Pavie’s report is coloured by his own responses to Delacroix or

clouded by the gap of forty-five years between the event and the publication (his
205
MA, xix, 167–68, 29 November 1826.
206
MA, xiii/1, 559, early December 1826.
207
208
MA, xiii/1, 558.
209
Stuart Atkins, ‘A Reconsideration of Some Misunderstood Passages in the “Gretchen Tragedy” of Goethe’s
Faust’, Modern Language Review, 48 (1953), 421–34 (p. 432). There is too much evidence of Goethe’s
ambivalence about these illustrations to sustain the idea that his praise is merely ironic.
210
GG, iii/2, 513.
memoir, Goethe et David: Souvenirs d’un voyage à Weimar, was published in 1874).
There is certainly nothing quite so categorical in previous statements and reports of
Goethe’s views. That said, many of the elements here are familiar — the tension
between passionate involvement and ironic reserve, for example, and the focus on the
uniquely personal vision of an artist thinking the unthinkable — and the distancing
gesture in the assertion that Delacroix has made himself the centre of the work is
by no means incompatible with the ambivalence already identified.
In the context of the French translations of his Faust, Goethe often explicitly
reflected on how his own changing opinions of his works over time were linked with
the new perspectives offered by their reception abroad. Writing to Reinhard on 12
May 1826 he noted, ‘Verhalt’ ich mich doch selbst gegen meine Productionen ganz
anders, als zur Zeit, da ich sie concipirte. Nun bleibt es höchst merkwürdig, wie
sie sich zu einer fremden Nation verhalten und zwar so spät, bey ganz veränderten
Ansichten der Zeit’.211 The author had certainly been flattered by what he described
to his publisher in 1822 as ‘das Wohlwollen des Auslands’ in the form of translations
of his work,212 and he followed the reviews closely.213 He expressed his pleasure at
the way the French wrote of his works on receiving, in 1822, two of the volumes
published by Bobée:
die Franzosen übersetzen meine dramatischen Arbeiten und ich muß eine Befreyung von
Vorurtheil, eine Höhe ihrer Ansicht bewundern. Indessen die Deutschen in einer beinahe
unverständlich werdenden Sprache sich Gedanken und Urtheil einander mittheilen,
so bedient sich der Franzose herkömmlicher Ausdrücke, weiß sie aber so zu stellen, daß
sie wie ein aus Planspiegeln zusammengesetzter Hohlspiegel kräftig auf einen Focus
zusammen wirken.214
Goethe was not always so complimentary about the French in his evocation of the
reciprocal benefits of broadening horizons: to Zelter, after receiving a copy of the
last volume in the series, he wrote that ‘[er] veranlaßt mich zu gar manchen Betrach-
tungen. Die neustrebenden Franzosen können uns gar gut brauchen, wenn sie ihre
bisherige Literatur als beschränkt einseitig und stationär vorstellen wollen. Sie setzen
mit aller Gewalt eine allgemeinere Kenntnis der sämmtlichen Literaturen durch’.215
And Zelter commented after reading Ampère’s review of Stapfer’s translation that
Goethe sent him: ‘Es kann keine größere Zufriedenheit geben als wenn man sich
selbst in Andern wiederfindet’.216
211
WA, iv, xli, 29–30.
212
Goethe und Cotta. Briefwechsel 1797–1832, ed. by Dorothea Kuhn, 3 vols, Stuttgart, 1979–83, ii, 92 (8
September 1822). See also a letter to Reinhard from 10 June 1822, in which he mentions the translations (he
had received volumes iii and ii in January and March 1822). The set was completed when Weyland returned
from Paris in the summer of 1826 with volume i, sent by Stapfer (cf. letters to Müller, 3 August 1826, WA,
iv, xli, 103–04, and to Zelter, 4 August 1826, WA, iv, xli, 114), and forms part of the permanent collection
of the Weimar Goethe Museum: see Wiederholte Spiegelungen, ii, 746.
213
‘Eine Recension der Übersetzung meiner dramatischen Arbeiten hat mir auch viel Vergnügen gemacht’,
he wrote to Reinhard on 12 May 1826, referring to Ampère’s review in Le Globe: ‘Was auf mich besonders
erfreulich wirkt, das ist der gesellige Ton, in dem alles geschrieben ist’ (WA, iv, xli, 29–30).
214
WA, iv, xxxvi, 60–61, letter to Reinhard, 10 June 1822.
215
WA, iv, xli, 114, 5 August 1826.
216
MA, xx/1, 949, 2 September 1826.
122 ROBERT VILAIN
Goethe’s ambivalence about Delacroix should be distinguished from his reception

of the translation itself, although they obviously have factors in common. He could
be less than positive about attempts to translate his work into French — remarking
to Victor Cousin in 1825 that ‘tant de traductions prouvent un désir du mieux, et on
ne peut nier qu’il y ait de la bonne volonté en France [. . .] mais je n’ai pas lu ces
traductions’.217 And Förster relates (sometime between March 1828 and August 1831)
that Goethe mocked ‘[d]ie neueren und neuesten Übersetzer des Faust’ as being ‘was
die Unkunde unserer Sprache betrifft, nicht hinter ihrer geistreichen und berühmten
Landsmännin, der Frau von Staël, zurückgeblieben’.218 Nevertheless, it seems that
Goethe approved of Stapfer’s translation. This is what Stapfer claims in the first
note to the 1828 edition in which he speaks of the ‘accueil bienveillant’ that its first
publication received ‘du public allemande et de M. de Goethe lui-même’,219 and
Eckermann also described Stapfer’s version as ‘höchst gelungen’, doubtless echoing
Goethe’s own thoughts.220 Stapfer’s version of Faust had been as anxiously antici-
pated in 1825 as the illustrated volume was to be in 1828 — Müller wrote to Victor
Cousin urging him to send it as soon as it appeared, the request coming ‘aussi de la
part de Madame de Goethe’.221 Goethe does not comment directly on Stapfer’s work
in the notice he contributed to Über Kunst und Altertum, but Staatskanzler von
Müller reported to Graf Reinhard on 24 March 1828: ‘Die Übersetzung gefällt’.222 It
is clear that Goethe admired Nerval’s version as well (Müller adds to this report of
Goethe’s approval, ‘doch hält Goethe die von Girodet [= Gérard, i.e. Nerval] noch
vorzüglicher’) and, on the day that Goethe received the new volume, he spent the
evening examining it alongside Nerval’s translation.223 Nonetheless, Stapfer’s was the
only French version preserved in Goethe’s own library and it appears that Nerval’s
name continued to be elusive.224
Goethe took particular notice of Stapfer’s long essay in volume 1 of the French
edition of his plays, recording in his diary for 19 July 1826 that he had finished
reading it and was considering penning a response.225 A draft exists:
217
GG, iii/1, 772.
218
GG, iii/2, 699 (where it is dated 16 October [1829?]). This conversation must post-date the arrival of the
Delacroix volume (March 1828), by which time four French translations of Faust had been published (de Staël,
Stapfer, Saint-Aulaire, and Nerval), none of which contains the unattributed howlers that Goethe reportedly
cites.
219
Stapfer, Faust (1828), p. 145 (not only in the 1838 revised edition by Friedlander, as Langkavel suggests,
Die französischen Übersetzungen, p. 22). This may refer specifically to a medal sent by Goethe to his ‘treuer
Übersetzer’ in May 1826 (see below, and WA, iv, xli, 43).
220
MA, xix, 563, 3 May 1827.
221
GG, v, 249, 26 September 1825.
222
MA, xviii/2, 862.
223
WA, iii, xi, 196 (22 March 1828). On 3 January 1830, he again praised Nerval’s translation to Eckermann
(MA, xix, 347).
224
See Goethes Bibliothek, ed. by Ruppert, p. 262, no. 1826 (the 1828 edition), and WA, iv, i, 108: ‘Den Namen
eines faustischen Übersetzers in Verse vergaß ich’ (undated letter to Riemer), which must be ‘Gérard’ because
Stapfer is named and Saint-Aulaire is in prose. Birte Carolin Sebastian, Die Rezeption Goethes in Le Globe,
PhD thesis, University of Munich, 2004, 85, cites a rumour that Goethe wrote to Nerval in glowing terms
(‘Je ne me suis jamais si bien compris qu’en vous lisant’). But the source (Baldensperger, Goethe et la France,
p. 131) in fact writes ‘il n’est pas exact qu’il [l’]ait écrit’, or in other words that the story is inaccurate.
225
WA, iii, x, 219.
Daß Sie mein durch Herrn Präsidenten Weyland ausgesprochenes dankbares Andenken
freundlich aufgenommen und mir dagegen Ihre schätzbare Übersetzung nunmehr
vollständig mittheilen wollen, hat mir eine besondere Freude gemacht, vorzüglich auch da
ich der Recension Ihrer so bedeutenden Arbeit in der Zeitschrift Le Globe in diesen Tagen
alle Aufmerksamkeit zu schenken Ursache hatte. Ersehen Sie gefällig aus beykommendem
Hefte, was ich sowohl über jenen Aufsatz als die von Ihnen mit so viel Liebe und Sorgfalt
gefaßte Notiz zu äußern Gelegenheit nahm, und Sie werden daraus ersehen, daß es
in einem so hohen Alter die angenehmste Empfindung erregt, wenn eine talentvolle
Jugend den Spuren unseres Lebensganges durch so manche labyrinthische Verwicklung
aufmerksam zu folgen geneigt ist.226
The dominant note is pleasure at the care that Stapfer has taken with his study,
and Goethe was pleased enough to re-read the translations and the analytical essay
in March 1827.227 The Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände had deemed this essay
‘zuverlässig das Befriedigendste, was bisher in Frankreich über [Goethe] geschrieben

ward’.228 On 28 March 1827 Stapfer wrote cautiously to Goethe asking for sight of
what was reputed to be a new scene for Faust I:
Monsieur, En recevant, par les mains de Mons. de Humboldt, la nouvelle marque de
bienveillance dont vous avez daigné m’honorer, j’ai de nouveau senti le besoin de vous en
témoigner ma reconnaissance; et j’y aurais cédé tout de suite, si je n’avais craint de vous
importuner trop souvent de mes lettres. Je me félicite aujourd’hui d’avoir été retenu
jusqu’ici par cette crainte: car étant chargé de vous faire une demande peut-être indiscrète,
l’idée de n’avoir point encore abusé de vos momens cette année va me donner, pour vous
l’adresser, une hardiesse, dont je vois bien que j’eusse manqué sans cela. — Ce qui con-
tribue aussi à m’enhardir, c’est que la demande dont je parle a rapport à une publication
pour laquelle vous avez déjà eu la bonté de montrer quelque intérêt, en envoyant à son
éditeur un léger croquis d’après vous. Vous avez même vu, m’a-t-on dit, plusieurs des
dessins qui doivent en faire partie, et n’en avez pas été trop mécontent. Or il se présente
maintenant à nous un obstacle, que je viens vous prier de vouloir bien lever, si cela est
faisable. Vous devinez sans doute qu’il s’agit de la scène nouvelle dont on assure que vous
allez enrichir votre Faust, et dont la publication paraît trop prochaine, pour que nous ne
nous fassions pas un devoir de retarder la nôtre jusqu’à ce qu’il nous devienne possible
de nous procurer cette scène, et d’en joindre la traduction à celle du reste de votre bel
ouvrage. — Mais comme nous sommes d’ailleurs entièrement prêts, l’éditeur voudrait
beaucoup n’attendre que tout juste le temps nécessaire. Il m’a donc chargé de vous
demander d’avoir l’extrême complaisance de m’envoyer à Paris un exemplaire à part de
la nouvelle édition de Faust, dès qu’il y en aura de disponibles; afin qu’immédiatement
après, je puisse me mettre à traduire ce qui se trouvera manquer aux anciennes, et le lui
livrer pour être imprimé.229
226
WA, iv, xli, 125; dated late August 1826, but corrected by Hamm as not earlier than 9 September 1826 (Goethe
und die Zeitschrift ‘Le Globe’, p. 77).
227
GG, iii/2, 103 (letter from Müller to Reinhard, 3/5 March 1827): ‘die Analyse seiner Schriften in dem
Vorbericht hat ihm teilweise sehr gefallen und manche Bemerkung sehr treffend geschienen’.
228
[Anon.], ‘Zwei französische Übersetzungen Goethe’scher Gedichte’, Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände:
Literaturblatt, 72 (9 September 1925), 285–87 (p. 286).
229
WA, iv, xlii, 335–36, with minor corrections.
124 ROBERT VILAIN
Goethe responded very politely in early April 1827, identifying the scene as the Helen
of Troy episode in Faust II, and emphasizing that it was not in any way connected
to Faust I. Goethe mentions Motte, although Stapfer does not, and this suggests that
he was already well informed about the new project.230 The following month he
entertained Ampère and Fritz (Frédéric) Stapfer, a cousin of Albert’s, to lunch in
Weimar, which Eckermann described on 4 May thus: ‘Zu Ehren Ampères und seines
Freundes Stapfer großes Diner bei Goethe. Die Unterhaltung war laut, heiter und bunt
durcheinander. Ampère erzählte Goethen viel von Mérimée, Alfred de Vigny und
anderen bedeutenden Talenten’.231 The Stapfer cousin, reports Ampère, earned his
invitation solely because of his connection to Albert.232
After Goethe received his copy of the 1828 Faust, he wrote directly to Stapfer on
16 August 1828,233 and Stapfer wrote to Goethe on 6 December to thank him for ‘die
großherzogliche postume Gabe’.234 Goethe had been so touched by the gift of the
volume that he had immediately made arrangements for Motte and Stapfer to be
given medals in commemoration,235 and Stapfer is doubtless here thanking Goethe for
his — ‘posthumously’ because Grand-Duke Karl August (who had also been sent a
copy of the Delacroix volume) died on 14 June 1828. No medal was awarded to
Delacroix, which, while far from being a conclusive rejection, is in keeping with the
ambivalence of Goethe’s response to the illustrations.
There is more obvious enthusiasm detectable in Goethe’s attitude to the group
of young French Germanophiles who were promoting his work, Faust included,
in France in the late 1820s, but that too masks some uncertainties. In May 1826
when Goethe planned to ask his old friend Friedrich Leopold Weyland to take a
commemorative medal to Stapfer, he also asked for his compliments to be delivered
to a number of other acquaintances and contacts: ‘In Paris bitte mich den Herren
v. Humboldt, v. Cuvier, v. Gérard bestens zu empfehlen; auch die Herren Hase
und Cousin freundlichst zu begrüßen; sodann Herrn Stapfer, dem treuen Übersetzer
meiner dramatischen Werke, beykommende Medaille als wohlgemeyntes Andenken
zu überliefern’.236 Many of his admirers in France were associated with the lively
left-wing journal Le Globe. Eckermann reported on 3 October 1828 how Goethe was
amazed by the passionate intensity of Le Globe journalists as he monitored his French
reception in their pages: ‘Was aber die Herren vom Globe für Menschen sind [. . .]
wie die mit jedem Tage größer, bedeutender werden und alle wie von Einem Sinne
230
WA, iv, xlii, 118–20 (there headed ‘Philippe Albert Stapfer’ and dated 3 April 1827, although the letter is to
Stapfer fils and the correct date is 4 April as can clearly be seen from the facsimiles in Livres et archives du
château de Talcy, no. 48, and Kehrli, Lithographien, p. 21). The signature on this letter is the one reproduced
beneath the portrait of Goethe in the 1828 Faust (Figure 9).
231
MA, xix, 568, cf. GG, iii/2, 121.
232
GG, iii/2, 122 (letter from Ampère to Albert Stapfer, 9 May 1827). The guest was not Albert himself, as
Lüdecke and others assert (‘Goethe, Delacroix und die Weltliteratur’, p. 61).
233
WA, iii, xi, 263. This letter may have contained the copy of Über Kunst und Altertum, vi/2 (published on 10
July 1828) dedicated ‘Herren Stapfer, zu geneigtem Andenken’ that was preserved in the Stapfer Collection
(Livres et archives du château de Talcy, no. 47).
234
WA, iii, xii, 8 and 358, diary entry for 17 January 1829.
235
WA, iv, xliv, 274, letter to Müller, 16 August 1828.
236
WA, iv, xli, 43 (draft letter to Philipp Christian Weyland, 26 May 1826). The medal referred to is probably
a portrait of Goethe struck in 1824 by Jean François Antoine Bovy.
durchdrungen sind, davon hat man kaum einen Begriff. In Deutschland wäre ein
solches Blatt rein unmöglich. Wir sind lauter Particuliers, an Übereinstimmung ist
nicht zu denken’.237 They offered a model for unity of purpose and a sense of shared
humanity that he found refreshing.
Le Globe was founded in September 1824 by a group of young liberals under Pierre
Leroux and Paul-François Dubois, and when, at Dubois’s behest, Goethe was given
a full set of 200 issues from 1824 and 1825 by the Berlin lawyer Eduard Gans on
1 January 1826, he was instantly fascinated. His library contains these and most
subsequent issues up to 1831. Goethe admired this ‘Gesellschaft junger energischer
Männer’, whom he described as ‘Leute von Welt, heiter, klar, kühn bis zum äußersten
Grade’,238 doubtless in part because in old age he found that very youthful energy
attractive, and in part also because of their admiration for him: between 1824 and
1830 no fewer than 133 articles mentioned him or his works, and twenty-six of these
were specifically devoted to Goethe.239 But Goethe seems only to have read about
one-third of the total — he himself wrote of his excerpts from them in Über Kunst
und Altertum that they were not solely designed to raise his own profile, claiming
‘ich bezwecke ein Höheres’240 — and Le Globe interested him first and foremost as
a mouthpiece for cosmopolitanism and internationalism that matched his own
concerns. He was full of admiration for how the ‘Globisten’ reflected the modern age,
noting to Kaspar von Sternberg how ‘Der Zeitgeist läßt sich hier klar, mächtig und
furchtbar erblicken’,241 and stimuli from Le Globe are detectable in his own works,
including Faust II.242
Goethe was visited a number of times by some of the leading lights of Le Globe.
In addition to Cousin’s visits noted above, Jean-Jacques Ampère was in Weimar
between 22 April and 16 May 1827 and, despite being annoyed by the publication
(without the author’s knowledge) of a letter about him from Ampère to Julie
Récamier, Goethe was well disposed towards him because of his very positive
two-part review of the Stapfer translations of his dramas in Le Globe in April and
May 1826. Ampère dined with him three times, discussing his father’s work, Victor
Cousin, and Stapfer’s translation,243 and he sent reports of his encounters to Albert
Stapfer on 23 April and 9 May.244 The first letter notes how Goethe talked of Stapfer
‘avec la considération qu’on lui sait pour vous’, and the second advises paying Goethe
the compliment of reporting publicly on his Über Kunst und Altertum articles in
Le Globe. It ends with an enthusiastic personal recommendation to Stapfer of the
Helena episode from Faust II, astonishing partly because of its treatment of ‘la tant
belle question du classique et du romantique’, but also because it is the work of a
237
MA, xix, 256.
238
WA, iv, xli, 29 (letter to Reinhard, 12 May 1826); MA, xix, 161 (conversation with Eckermann, 1 June
1826).
239
See Birte Carolin Sebastian, Von Weimar nach Paris: Die Goethe-Rezeption in der Zeitschrift ‘Le Globe’,
Cologne, 2006, p. 9.
240
MA, xviii/2, 12.
241
WA, iv, xli, 167, 19 September 1826.
242
See Adolf Beck, ‘De quelques apports du “Globe” à la pensée et à l’œuvre de Goethe’, Bulletin de la Faculté
des Lettres de Strasbourg, 32 (1953/54), 133–55.
243
GG, iii/2, 109 and 119–20.
244
GG, iii/2, 110–11 and 121–22.
126 ROBERT VILAIN
man in his late seventies. Eckermann showed Ampère some of the records of his
conversations with Goethe and reported to his fiancée: ‘[er] freut sich auf den
Zeitpunkt, wo er sie mit dem berühmten Stapfer wird übersetzen können’, a project
that never came to fruition.245
Ampère’s review essay prompted Goethe to publish a response in Über Kunst
und Altertum,246 which is less a critical engagement with it than the near-complete
translation set in the context of the emerging Franco-German literary dialogue of the
past few years. Goethe registers the gradual weakening both of Germany’s ‘entschiedene
Abneigung’ towards France and French opinions of German writing, and of the
traditional ‘eigensinniges Ablehnen’ of things German by French writers as they seek
‘frische Quellen [. . .] um sich zu erquicken, zu stärken’. He finds it highly significant
that for these purposes France should turn ‘nicht zu einem vollendeten, anerkannten,
sondern zu einem lebendigen, selbst noch im Streben und Streiten begriffenen
Nachbarvolke’, implicitly articulating reservations about the rigidity of the French

establishment that he draws from the original.247 There Ampère laments French
ignorance of the fact that Goethe, far from being a one-trick wonder as the author
of Werther, has been for fifty years or more the presiding genius of German literature,
and attributes this state of affairs to France’s inability to come to terms with the
nature of Goethe’s genius. It is his originality that France cannot cope with, he says,
because this requires repeated and renewed attempts at familiarization with the
unknown, and the effort is too much for ‘les imaginations paresseuses’ and will ‘scan-
daliser les doctrines exclusives’. Ampère labours the point — ‘il déconcerte tellement
les habitudes de la critique et même celles de l’admiration, que l’on a besoin, pour le
goûter tout entier, de n’avoir pas plus que lui de préjugés littéraires’ — because he is
attacking the French literary and political establishment for its want of imagination
and hidebound traditionalism. Goethe is a valuable model precisely because he
has personally enacted a series of revolutionary developments of the very kind that
French literature needs to undergo, rejecting the hegemony of classical models and
the imitative mode in favour of writing from experience: ‘il ne voulait rien peindre
qu’il n’eût vu ou senti’, remarks Ampère, and he stresses the ‘emploi parfaitement
libre’ that Goethe makes of his authentic sensibility and powerful imagination.
While always sympathetic, the review is not wholly sycophantic, although even the
damning dismissal of Clavigo and Stella is performed, in Goethe’s words, ‘mit
möglichster Artigkeit’.248 Ampère conducts his readers swiftly through the landmarks
of Goethe’s career as a dramatist, pausing to admire the robust density of Götz von
Berlichingen and, in Part II, to ponder less effusively the works of the classical period,
Iphigenie auf Tauris and Torquato Tasso. They present a problem for him because
they appear to be imitative of tradition in ways that Ampère criticized so fiercely in
245
GG, iii/2, 124, 11 May 1827.
246
MA, xiii/1, 539–53 (originally in Über Kunst und Altertum, v/3 [September 1826], 131–45, and vi/1 [May
1827], 94–111); Le Globe review article appeared in two parts on 29 April (3.55, pp. 294–95) and 20 May 1826
(3.64, pp. 341–43). For the French original of the sections translated by Goethe, see also Heinz Hamm, Goethe
und die Zeitschrift ‘Le Globe’: Eine Lektüre im Zeichen der ‘Weltliteratur’, Weimar, 1998, pp. 346–49 and
351–57.
247
MA, xiii/1, 540.
248
MA, xiii/1, 545.
the first part of his review. He has to walk a fine line, praising both the subtlety with
which Goethe responds to the formal stimulus of classical drama — ‘le sentiment
de la beauté extérieure telle qu’elle se montre dans la nature méridionale et les
monuments de l’antiquité’ — and the power of the personal emotion and individual
self-expression that these plays nonetheless articulate. He reads Tasso as Goethe’s
mouthpiece in strikingly romantic terms (‘la peinture [. . .] des troubles d’une imagi-
nation en proie à elle-même, qui [. . .] s’enflamme, se décourage, se désespère [. . .]
s’exalte’) and sees Iphigenie as the expression of ‘les conceptions du poëte [qui]
sont les siennes et non celles de Sophocle’, concluding ‘je ne puis le blâmer beaucoup
d’être resté lui-même’ and for having endowed his classical characters with modern
sensibilities and emotions.
Proceeding via a brief consideration of Egmont, which Ampère regards as the
apogee of Goethe’s dramatic career because it so beautifully depicts the tragedy of
the modern hero, the review devotes its longest paragraph to Faust: ‘création bizarre
et profonde, drame étrange’, an amalgam not only of every conceivable poetic style
and form but also of the full gamut of human emotion, and once more an expression
of Goethe himself ‘tout entier’. Ampère’s enthusiastic homage revels in the para-
doxes of Faust, the combination of an ironic Mephistopheles as the expression of ‘le
côté dédaigneux et sarcastique de l’esprit de Goethe, disposition chagrine [. . .] levain
amer que déposèrent pour jamais dans une âme forte des dégoûts précoces’ with an
ardent but exhausted Faust: ‘que poursuivent [. . .] les fantômes de son imagination
et les ennuis de sa pensée’, both counterpointed with the ‘céleste abandon’ of the
pious Marguerite. The article ends with high praise for Stapfer, the translator of
the most difficult of the plays (Götz, Egmont, and Faust) and author of a fine
explanatory preface with a wealth of related biographical and literary material. Of
the translation itself Ampère says: ‘Parfois, placé entre la nécessité de paraître étrange
et le danger d’être inexact, il a préféré courageusement le premier inconvénient. Mais
ce défaut, si c’en est un, est une garantie d’exactitude qui doit rassurer tous ceux qui
demandent avant tout au traducteur de leur transmettre la physionomie et le caractère
de son auteur’.
Ampère concludes that Stapfer has succeeded in his goal of giving the French
public for the first time a sound basis from which to appreciate the works of one
of the most significant of European writers, and that in itself must have been good
reason for Goethe to cherish both this appreciation and the new edition of Stapfer’s
translation that came out just under two years later. Goethe will not have forgotten
the leading idea of this review — that his works are all in some respects what he
had himself already described in Dichtung und Wahrheit, ii/7, as ‘Bruchstücke einer
großen Konfession’249 — when he returned to Stapfer’s French version of Faust in
1828 and wrote the revealing review in Über Kunst und Altertum discussed above.
Ampère had singled out Faust as ‘l’expression le plus complète qu[e Goethe] ait
donné de lui-même’, ‘une éloquente révélation de la partie la plus secrète et la plus
agitée de l’âme de Goethe’, claiming that ‘Faust le [= Goethe] contient tout entier’.250
Goethe explicitly approved, especially of Ampère’s identification not only of Faust’s
249
MA, xvi, 306.
250
Ampère, ‘Œuvres dramatiques de Goethe (II)’, Le Globe, 20 May 1826, p. 342.
128 ROBERT VILAIN
‘düstere[s], unbefriedigte[s] Streben’ but Mephistopheles’ mockery and irony ‘als

Teile meines eigenen Wesens’.251 Nonetheless it must have been a very peculiar
experience for Goethe to find himself stirred once more by a work that he knew the
world saw as a form of intimate psycho-autobiography. Goethe refers to this peculiar
feeling in another brief essay in the same volume of Über Kunst und Altertum
devoted to Stapfer’s ‘Notice’ rather than to Ampère’s review of the translations.
Goethe enjoins all his friends to read the biographical essay and praises its author’s
perceptiveness. He implies, slightly obliquely, that while some of the insights are
surprising even to him, Goethe, they are not without validity: ‘Ferner ist merkwürdig,
wie er [. . .] zu gewissen Ansichten über seinen Gegenstand gelangte, die denjenigen
in Verwunderung setzen der sie vor allen andern hätte gewinnen sollen, und dem sie
doch entgangen sind, eben weil sie zu nahe lagen’. Goethe describes both Stapfer’s
‘Notice’ and Ampère’s review as ‘gerade in dem Augenblick höchst bedeutend, da es
mir zur Pflicht geworden mich mit mir selbst, meinem Geleisteten und Vollbrachten,
wie dem Verfehlten und dem Versäumten zu beschäftigen’,252 confirming the force
with which this translation was making him reflect upon his own life and works.
Ironically, Goethe’s appreciation of Le Globe was couched in exactly the same
terms as those in which Napoleon had voiced his suspicion of German literature two
decades previously: ‘Die Herren Globisten schreiben keine Zeile die nicht politisch
wäre’,253 and while the specific echo is coincidental, the importance to both Goethe
and the younger generation of French writers of the relationship it expresses is not.
The journal was simultaneously a radical political mouthpiece and one of the
principal champions of the emerging Romantic movement in France — the very
incarnation of Victor Hugo’s famous dictum that ‘le romantisme [. . .] n’est [. . .] que
le libéralisme en littérature’254 — and it overtly associated the obstacles in the
path of literary progress towards a modern, autonomous French literature with the
quasi-xenophobic cultural blinkeredness that was the product of years of political
repression under Napoleon. The understanding of the term ‘romantic’ that Le Globe
gradually developed, while inspired by German culture via Mme de Staël, had little
to do with the German Romantics’ creeds and forms, Goethe’s distaste for which is
well known. Le Globe’s developing conception of Romanticism combined the view
of Prosper Duvergier de Hauranne that ‘les littératures [surgissent] des besoins, des
mœurs, des idées de chaque siècle et de chaque peuple’ (suggesting that the Romantic
desire for ‘liberté’ as opposed to ‘routine’ is the legitimate expression of an intrinsic,
natural revolutionary force within humanity) with Ludovic Vitet’s conception of
Romanticism as the culmination of the individual’s drive for freedom initiated in
the French Revolution. Vitet accuses the government of acting on behalf of classical
restriction: ‘nos classiques ont un auxiliaire qu’on ne peut combattre à armes égales;
nous voulons parler du gouvernement, qui par son intervention dans les lettres et les
arts porte un coup mortel à toute tentative originale, à tout essai d’innovation’. Vitet
251
MA, xix, 564, to Eckermann, 3 May 1827.
252
Goethe, [article on ‘Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de Goethe par Albert Stapfer’], MA, xiii/1, 537–39
(p. 538), originally in Über Kunst und Altertum, v/3 (September 1826), 171–76.
253
WA, i, xlii/2, 486, 6 March 1826.
254
Victor Hugo, Preface to Hernani, in Œuvres complètes, Paris, 2002, viii: Théâtre 1, ed. by Anne Ubersfeld,
p. 539.
has no more patience with a republic in which the uneducated majority dictates taste
than with the absolutism of the Sun King. Art can only achieve full emancipation
in a liberal age, when freedom of thought and conscience is guaranteed against the
dictatorship of an individual or the masses via the freedom of the press, and in the
absence of state intervention in the form of censorship and subvention policies —
which amounts to a form of ‘free market’.255 Goethe annotated all three of the articles
that expound these views.256
The notion of a ‘free market’ was characteristic of Goethe’s idea of ‘Weltliteratur’
during this period, a conception which encompasses processes of exchange and
international discussion in the form of letters and reviews as well as indispensable
‘persönliche Gegenwart’ of the type that consistently characterized Goethe’s relations
with the young French literary scene that included Stapfer.257 Goethe’s earliest uses
of the term ‘Weltliteratur’ occur in January 1827,258 when he was actively discussing
the first proofs of the Delacroix lithographs, and when he identifies ‘ein Höheres’ as
the unselfish component of his interest in Le Globe and other French papers such as
Le Journal de Commerce; he links it explicitly with his conviction that ‘es bilde sich
eine allgemeine Weltliteratur, worin uns Deutschen eine ehrenvolle Rolle vorbehalten
ist’.259 And the two issues of the sixth volume of Über Kunst und Altertum that
appeared in 1827 and 1828 put these precepts into practice. Central to Goethe’s
conception of ‘Weltliteratur’, what Ernst Robert Curtius called ‘der Freihandel der
Begriffe und Gefühle’,260 was translation, and Goethe also uses the vocabulary of
trade. The translator is ‘[der] Vermittler dieses allgemein geistigen Handels’, ‘[macht]
den Wechseltausch zu befördern sich zum Geschäft’ and his is ‘eines der wichtigsten
und würdigsten Geschäfte in dem allgemeinen Weltverkehr’.261 A very revealing
extension of his conception of the nature of translation appears in a letter to Thomas
Carlyle in June 1828:
Hier aber tritt eine neue, vielleicht kaum empfundene, vielleicht nie ausgesprochene
Bemerkung hervor: daß der Übersetzer nicht nur für seine Nation allein arbeitet, sondern
auch für die aus deren Sprache er das Werk herüber genommen. Denn der Fall kommt
öfter vor als man denkt, daß eine Nation Saft und Kraft aus einem Werke aussaugt und
in ihr eigenes inneres Leben dergestalt aufnimmt, daß sie daran keine weitere Freude
haben, sich daraus keine Nahrung weiter zueignen kann. Vorzüglich begegnet dieß den
Deutschen, die gar zu schnell alles was ihnen geboten wird verarbeiten und, indem sie es
255
Prosper Duvergier de Hauranne, ‘Du romantique’, Le Globe, 24 March 1825, pp. 423–24; Ludovic Vitet,
‘France. De l’indépendance en matière du goût. Du Romantisme’, Le Globe, 2 April 1825, pp. 443–45;
and ‘Littérature. De l’indépendance du goût. De l’intervention du gouvernement dans les lettres et les arts’,
Le Globe, 23 April 1825, pp. 491–93.
256
Cf. Hamm, Goethe und die Zeitschrift ‘Le Globe’, pp. 221–22, 227–30, and 240–42.
257
‘Zu den Versammlungen deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte’, MA, xviii/2, 357.
258
MA, xviii/2, 12; cf. also MA, xviii/2, 698–99 (noting a diary entry of 15 January, a letter to Streckfuß from
27th, and a conversation with Eckermann on 31st).
259
MA, xviii/2, 12; originally in Über Kunst und Altertum, vi/2 (1827), 123–33.
260
Ernst Robert Curtius, ‘Goethe als Kritiker’, in Kritische Essays zur europäischen Literatur, Frankfurt am Main,
1984, pp. 28–58 (p. 47).
261
Goethe, ‘German Romance’, MA, xviii/2, 85–87 (p. 86); originally in Über Kunst und Altertum, vi/2 (1828),
279–84. Cf. WA, iv, xlii, 270 (the letter to Carlyle dated 20 July 1827, from which Goethe took some of this
text).
130 ROBERT VILAIN
durch mancherlei Wiederholungen umgestalten, es gewissermaßen vernichten. Deshalb

denn sehr heilsam ist, wenn ihnen das Eigne durch eine wohlgerathene Übersetzung
späterhin wieder als frisch belebt erscheint.262
It is difficult to read these remarks, made less than three months after Goethe received
the illustrated edition of Faust, without linking them to that volume and to Goethe’s
renewed encounter with his own earlier work. If such a connection is legitimate, then
revisiting Faust in French has given new life to Goethe’s own, and potentially to the
German appreciation of the work generally. ‘Weltliteratur’ is often described as an
alternative to ‘national’ or ‘patriotic’ literature and better suited to communicating
common humanity,263 but the relationship is triangular rather than polar: ‘In jedem
Besondern [. . .] wird man durch Nationalität und Persönlichkeit hindurch jenes
Allgemeine immer mehr durchleuchten und durchschimmern sehn’.264
The editorial in the first issue of Le Globe amounts to a definition of French

Romanticism: rejected are the attempts by a coterie of critics and publishers to dictate
public taste, antiquated forms championed by a backward-looking cultural elite and
political interference in literary life; to be sustained are the ever-increasing openness
to the literary traditions of other countries (and of France beyond Paris) and inde-
pendence of critical judgement. Six months later Duvergier summarized the message
thus: ‘En un mot, asservissement aux règles de la langue, indépendance pour tout le
reste: telle doit être au moins la devise des romantiques; tel est le drapeau qu’ils
opposent à celui qui porte en grosses lettres les mots intolérance et routine’.265 In an
article on the development of Goethe’s concept of ‘Weltliteratur’ Hendrik Birus cites
Schiller’s famous announcement in 1794 of the journal that was to be the cornerstone
of Weimar classicism, Die Horen: ‘Je mehr das beschränkte Interesse der Gegenwart
die Gemüter in Spannung setzt, einengt und unterjocht, desto dringender wird das
Bedürfnis, durch ein allgemeines und höheres Interesse an dem, was rein menschlich
und über allem Einfluß der Zeiten erhaben ist, sie wieder in Freiheit zu setzen und
die politisch geteilte Welt unter der Fahne der Wahrheit und Schönheit wieder zu
vereinigen’.266 Schiller rejected the politicization of culture in the wake of the French
Revolution, while Le Globe intended precisely the opposite. Goethe had been by no
means blind to the radical political ambitions of Le Globe’s circle — noting in
his diary: ‘Der Charakter des Globe als absoluter Liberalismus oder theoretischer
Radikalismus erkannt’267 — and while he accepted explicitly in a letter to Reinhard
262
WA, iv, xliv, 140, 15 June 1828.
263
See MA, xvii, 698.
264
WA, iv, xlii, 269 (letter to Thomas Carlyle, 20 July 1827); my emphasis. See also Hendrik Birus, ‘Goethes Idee
der Weltliteratur. Eine historische Vergegenwärtigung’, in Weltliteratur heute: Konzepte und Perspektiven,
ed. by Manfred Schmeling, Würzburg, 1995, pp. 5–28 (p. 23).
265
[Paul-François Dubois], ‘Prospectus du journal littéraire Le Globe’, Le Globe, 15 September 1824, pp. 1–2, and
Duvergier de Hauranne, ‘Du romantique’, Le Globe, 24 March 1825, p. 423. See also Walter Mönch, ‘Vom
Werdegang und Wesen der französischen Romantik nach einigen Dokumenten des Globe’, Zeitschrift für
französische Sprache und Literatur, 62 (1939), 409–28 (p. 414).
266
Friedrich Schiller, ‘Ankündigung’ for Die Horen, in Werke: Nationalausgabe, ed. by Julius Petersen and
Hermann Schneider, xxii: Vermischte Schriften, ed. by Herbert Meyer, Weimar, 1958, pp. 106–09 (p. 106);
cf. Birus, ‘Goethes Idee der Weltliteratur’, p. 7.
267
WA, iii, x, 161, 14 February 1826.
‘daß ihre Zwecke weiter liegen, als mir in meinem Alter zu blicken erlaubt ist’,268 he
always saw these as potentially dangerous and Schiller’s position always remained
preferable. Goethe’s enthusiasm for Le Globe began to wane about a year before it
ceased publication in 1831, largely because its liberal principles were becoming
obscured by party-political messages in the context of the approaching July
Revolution.269 The combination of enthusiastic appreciation for emerging French
Romanticism and scepticism about what it implied politically matches the mixture of
appreciation and anxiety in his reception of the 1828 Faust.
Goethe’s concerns about Delacroix’s lithographs were not unreasonable. According
to Gordon Ray, this Faust ‘inaugurated a tradition of fantastic medievalism in
illustration. Delacroix’s whole apparatus of melodramatic settings and characters,
mannered costumes, and weird accessories, such as the creatures out of Bosch and
Bruegel who figure in the large lithograph of the witches’ Sabbath [. . .] was drawn
upon again and again in the decades that followed’, culminating in Gustave Doré’s
engravings for Balzac’s Contes drolatiques in 1855.270 Examples of this somewhat
selective form of reception might include Louis Boulanger (1806–67) — whose sensa-
tional lithographs ‘La Ronde du Sabbat’ (1828), after Victor Hugo, and ‘Lenore’
(1857), illustrating Gottfried August Bürger’s supernatural ballad, clearly owe much
to individual plates in Delacroix’s Faust — and Antoine (Tony) Johannot, who
provided melodramatic illustrations for Blaze’s French translation of Faust in
1847.271
This is a version of the tendency that Goethe had already regretted in Cornelius’s
illustrations, which he felt were stylistically anchored in ‘die deutsche Kunstwelt des
16. Jahrhunderts’. In a very diplomatically phrased letter, Goethe suggested that
Cornelius turn instead towards classical antiquity as a source of inspiration.272
Cornelius had expressly indicated his intention in the Faust illustrations to be ‘ganz
deutsch’,273 and in the words of a modern critic his images appropriate Faust ‘als
eine Nationaldichtung’, even laying the foundations for ‘eine betont nationale
Faust-Rezeption’.274 Such a tendency was anathema to Goethe, both when he first
saw Cornelius’s series and in 1828 when he received Delacroix’s lithographs. The
Faust figure has all too easily been assumed to be ‘recht aus der Mitte des deutschen
Charakters und seiner Grundphysiognomie wie geschnitten’, as Schelling put it in the
earliest years of the 19th century.275 Faust, who is in Goethe’s drama an ‘exzentrische
Gestalt’, has been elevated by many into ‘eine vorbildhaft-exemplarische’. ‘[D]as Bild
dieses geduldlosen, ruhelosen, maßlosen und glücklosen Egozentrikers [wurde] zum
nationalen Mythos verklärt’.276 In a recollection of uncertain reliability, the writer
268
WA, iv, xli, 159, 20 September 1826.
269
Hamm, Goethe und die Zeitschrift ‘Le Globe’, p. 11.
270
Ray, The Art of the French Illustrated Book, i, 208–10.
271
Le Faust de Goethe, trans. by Henri Blaze, Paris, 1847.
272
WA, iv, xxii, 87–89, 8 May 1811.
273
Quoted in Herman Riegel, Peter Cornelius: Festschrift zu des grossen Künstlers hundertstem Geburtstage,
23.September 1883, Berlin, 1883, p. 31.
274
Frank Büttner, Peter Cornelius: Fresken und Freskenprojekte, 2 vols, Wiesbaden, 1980 and 1999, i, 36.
275
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, reprint of the posthumous 1859 edition,
Darmstadt, 1980, p. 83. The lectures were originally delivered in 1802–3.
276
See Albrecht Schöne’s commentary in FA, i, vii/2, 36–41 (pp. 36–37).
132 ROBERT VILAIN
and museum director Friedrich Förster claimed that Goethe nodded his approval
when Förster suggsted that ‘das tiefsinnigste Werk der deutschen Dichtkunst (der
Faust) wie ein Evangelium durch die ganze Welt seine Völkerwanderung angetreten
hat, und wie Dichter und Philosophen der fremden Nationen sich bemühen, in den
Geist desselben einzudringen’,277 but this is altogether too nationalising a formulation
to be convincing as an account of Goethe’s views in the late 1820s. Goethe’s alleged
response demands more serious consideration because it makes use of an image he
had previously formulated in the context of Delacroix’s lithographs in a letter. ‘Nun
ja’, Förster claims Goethe replied, ‘wir sind so etwas deutscher Sauerteig gewesen;
das fängt schon an zu gären; sie mögen es draußen und drüben mit ihrer Masse
durchkneten und sich daraus ein Backwerk nach ihrem Geschmack zurechtmachen’.
Of the impending edition with Delacroix’s lithographs he had written to Reinhard in
1827: ‘Und so wirkt unser alter Sauerteig immer fort auf neues Backwerk, das wir uns
denn wohl mögen gefallen lassen’.278 The image of the ‘living starter dough’, to which
new ingredients are added to produce new ‘generations’ of bread, is striking. On the
one hand, it is one of mutual cooperation and the organic growth of the new from
the old; on the other, however, Goethe does not sound altogether pleased with what
then emerges because it is unpalatable.
The scholar who suggested that Cornelius inaugurated a ‘nationalizing’ reception
of Faust also says that in Delacroix’s lithographs ‘alles Nationale [ist] gleichgültig
geworden’. Yet while Delacroix cannot possibly be said to have propounded a
clichéd, medievalising, traditionally ‘German’ Faustian atmosphere, Goethe seems to
have believed or sensed that this was not the case. The reasons have to do with his
status within the emerging French Romantic movement and his opportunistic use of
a German myth to articulate his local revolutionary ambitions. His Faust has been
called ‘une sorte de pendant à la préface de Cromwell, un manifeste à l’adresse de la
foule, des croyances et des ambitions de la nouvelle école’.279 Delaborde singles out
the Faust lithographs as a unique statement made at the height of a heated debate
of a position that was toned down shortly afterwards: ‘En lithographiant, quelques
années après la publication de son Faust, une seconde série de scènes empruntées
cette fois au théâtre de Shakspeare [sic], Delacroix usait de son talent avec une tout
autre prudence, avec une volonté beaucoup plus ferme de ne sacrifier aux hasards de
la verve ni l’expression vraisemblable des choses, ni les justes exigences du procédé’.
The ‘violences dans la pratique’ and the ‘audaces dans le dessin’ in the 1828 publica-
tion seem confusing to later viewers who find it hard to appreciate ‘ce que le tout
pouvait avoir d’excusable, d’opportun même’.280 Delacroix was described by Le
Figaro in 1825 as marching at the head of the Romantics in art, manifesting all
the faults and defects of that school, ‘l’incorrection, l’enflure, l’absence de goût, une
espèce de dévergondage que l’on prend pour l’hardiesse, et la prétention de se croire
277
GG, iii/2, 701, 16 October [1829?]. See also note 285 below: what follows this quotation (a comparison of the
national characteristics of Cornelius’ and Delacroix’s figures) cannot be regarded as a reliable account given
Förster’s demonstrable confusion of the two artists.
278
WA, iv, xlii, 111, 30 March 1827.
279
Henri Delaborde, ‘La lithographie dans ses rapports avec la peinture’, Revue des Deux-Mondes, 47 (1863),
558–99 (p. 572).
280
Ibid., p. 573.
du génie, parce que l’on dispense de toute étude et de toute espèce de règles’.281 The
editorial manifesto of Le Globe in 1824 might have been the checklist of positives
against which this litany of negative features was drawn up. Over and over again,
Delacroix was criticized for not following the rules, for lacking taste and for indi-
vidualism — and even Le Globe thought he was going too far. There was much
personal animosity too, and according to a popular, no doubt apocryphal, story first
bruited in 1855, after Delacroix left his rival’s gallery at the Exposition universelle,
Ingres, the champion of classicism, had the windows opened so as to dispel the smell
of sulphur.282 He had become closely associated with this subject matter. All this
hides more complex truths about Delacroix’s huge self-discipline and hard work, and,
more surprisingly, his attachment to the establishment (he made eight attempts to
gain election to the Institut de France), but it also shows how self-conscious Delacroix
was in the 1820s of being the representative of a revolutionary generation.
In seizing upon Faust and in foregrounding the figure of Mephistopheles as

the incarnation of the essence of evil, Delacroix was indeed being opportunistic. He
harnessed an unmistakably un-French, most decidedly non-classical, work to give
expression to a tug between romantic idealism and modern scepticism. He was in a
sense therefore already moving beyond — or at least reflecting critically upon — the
Romantic movement as he showed Faust’s consumption by Mephistopheles’ calculat-
ing cynicism, the weakness and naivety of Faust’s aspirations and the sheer power of
unprincipled self-indulgence in his adversary-cum-companion. There is no ‘Prolog im
Himmel’ in Delacroix’s series of lithographs: there may be a French translation of
that text in the volume, and the caption to the famous ‘Méphistophélès dans les airs’
may be taken from it, but as has already been suggested that caption has little to do
with the image and there is no reference to the divine task of ethical stimulation that
Goethe’s devil is performing and no dramaturgical distancing. No wonder Goethe
was concerned: in the context of the upheavals being reported by Le Globe it was
easy to see Delacroix’s 1828 lithographs as symbolic of a devil-may-care search for a
means of self-expression outside the realms of the traditional, which in part they
were, even if this view understates the reflection and craft that they also represent.
Goethe is said to have maintained of his Faust, ‘Dieses Gedicht hat man so
oft darzustellen gesucht, ich halte aber dafür, daß es wenig für die bildende Kunst
geeignet sei, weil es zu poetisch ist’.283 He had written to his publisher, Cotta, as
early as 1805, ‘Den Faust, dächt’ ich, gäben wir ohne Holzschnitte und Bildwerk. Es
ist so schwer, daß etwas geleistet werde, was dem Sinne und dem Tone nach zu einem
Gedicht passt. Kupfer und Poesie parodiren sich gewöhnlich wechselsweise’.284 He
evidently felt — sometimes at least — that the act of interpretative narrowing that
an illustration inevitably represents was a risk. One may speculate that the fact that
Delacroix’s series, whatever its precise genesis, was conceived with a greater degree
of independence from the text than those of more straightforward ‘illustrators’ made
281
Le Figaro, 22 August 1825, quoted in Jensen, L’évolution du romantisme, p. 326.
282
Louis Enault, ‘Palais des Beaux-Arts’, La Presse littéraire, 25 May 1855, p. 418.
283
GG, iii/2, 320, May–July 1828 (expressing nonetheless a preference for Retzsch over Cornelius).
284
WA, iv, xix, 77, 25 November 1805.
134 ROBERT VILAIN
itself powerfully felt to Goethe from the outset. This gave it a special capacity to
re-illuminate the author’s thinking — in the ways Goethe himself so often described.
But it was not wholly independent of the text, certainly much less so than most com-
mentators have assumed, and its proximity gave Goethe pause for thought. There is
another report of dubious reliability which suggests that Goethe admitted to Förster
how he had simply failed to notice a misinterpretation of the scene on the Rabenstein
in Delacroix’s Plate 16: ‘Mich haben die beiden vortrefflich galoppierenden Reiter auf
den schaubenden Rossen so in Anspruch genommen’, Goethe is supposed to have
said, ‘daß ich die Szene auf dem Rabensteine noch nicht mit Bedacht angesehen habe;
Sie mögen wohl das Richtige getroffen haben’.285 Whether this account is accurate or
not, the exploration undertaken here of Goethe’s complex responses to Delacroix
would suggest that such a moment of fascinated inattention is wholly plausible but
that it had to remain fleeting. Delacroix’s own agenda in these spectacular lithographs
is so evident, even when he remains ‘faithful’ as a visual translator of Goethe’s work,

that its author could hardly fail to recall ‘das Persönliche’ in the work as well as its
competing national and transnational potential.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to record his gratitude here to the many who have supported,
facilitated, and commented on the substance of this project: The Graphic Arts
Collection of the Princeton University Library for a Research Grant in 2011; The
Graphic Arts Collection and the Rare Books Division, Department of Rare Books and
Special Collections, Princeton University Library, for the images and permission to
reproduce them here; Liz Appel and Cobb Mixter (New York); Professor Matthew
Bell (King’s College London); Dr Nigel Harkness (Queen’s University, Belfast);
Dr Katherine Lunn-Rockliffe (Hertford College, Oxford); Julie Mellby and the staff
of the Graphic Arts Collection, Princeton University Library; Gretchen Oberfranc
(Princeton University Library Chronicle); Ben Primer, Associate University Librarian
for Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library; Professor T. J.
Reed (The Queen’s College, Oxford); Patience Robinson (Oxford); Vicki Woods
(American Vogue); Dr Jennifer Yee (Christ Church, Oxford); Professor and Mrs
Theodore Ziolkowski (Princeton University); the staff of Bristol University Library,
the Taylorian Institute, the Sackler Library, and the Ashmolean Museum; and the
librarians of All Souls College, Christ Church, Hertford College, and Lady Margaret
Hall (Oxford). Particular thanks are due to Dr Steffan Davies (University of Bristol)
and Professor W. Daniel Wilson (Royal Holloway, University of London), who kind-
ly commented in detail on earlier drafts. Responsibility for any errors or inadequacies
that remain is, of course, the author’s own.
285
GG, iii/2, 295. This is a reflection made some years after the actual conversation with Goethe, it misdates that
conversation (1822, when it must have been 1826 or just possibly 1828) and confuses Delacroix with Cornelius
throughout. There is a sense here that Förster is pleased at having caught the Grand Old Man of German
Letters napping.
Notes on contributor
Robert Vilain studied German and French at the Universities of Oxford and Bonn
and completed a DPhil in comparative literature in Oxford in 1994. After eighteen
years at Royal Holloway, University of London, he was appointed to the Chair of
German at the University of Bristol in 2010. He is the author of monographs on The
Poetry of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and French Symbolism (2000) and Yvan Goll: The
Thwarted Pursuit of the Whole (forthcoming, 2013), and between 2003 and 2011
co-edited the journal Austrian Studies with Judith Beniston. He now edits the series
Modern German and Austrian Studies for Lang.
Correspondence to: Robert Vilain, German Department, University of Bristol, 21
Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8 1TE. Email: robert.vilain@bristol.ac.uk.

08 - Argan, G.C. História Da Arte Italiana - A Arte Grega

Încărcat de

Informații document

Titlu original

Drepturi de autor

Formate disponibile

Partajați acest document

Partajați sau inserați document

Opțiuni de partajare

Vi se pare util acest document?

Este necorespunzător acest conținut?

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

08 - Argan, G.C. História Da Arte Italiana - A Arte Grega

Încărcat de

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

Publications of the English Goethe Society

ISSN: 0959-3683 (Print) 1749-6284 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ypeg20

Faust, Part One and France: Stapfer’s Translation,

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/0959368312Z.0000000006

Published online: 12 Nov 2013.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 235

View related articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

Download by: [University of Lethbridge] Date: 22 April 2016, At: 19:20

Faust, Part One and France: Stapfer’s

keywords Goethe, Faust, Delacroix, Albert Stapfer, nineteenth-century

© The English Goethe Society 2012 DOI 10.1179/0959368312Z.0000000006

Goethe is usually thought to have considered this ‘Wildheit’ perfectly appropriate.2

essay therefore attempts to provide an accurate account of the circumstances in which

translations of plays from various languages.6 Despite very respectable scholarly

This was announced on 11 January 1823 in the Bibliographie de la France; Goethe

the twenty-one-year-old Frédéric-Albert-Alexandre Stapfer (1802–92), a journalist

perpetuated in many modern library catalogues.17 Specialist works on the history of

against Charles X. Delécluze’s memoirs offer further poignant confirmation of Albert

Cousin — a philosopher, journalist, academician, Professor at the Sorbonne (where

Stapfer’s, Eléonore-Louis Godefroy Cavaignac (1801–45), initially a lawyer, then a

immediately reviewed in Le Pot Pourri,43 which denounced it as ‘[un] drame mon-

Napoleon hypocritically supported in the presence of one of its key supporters,

Thus the Alsace-born, Paris-based historian, publisher, and diplomat, Maximilian

These negative responses testify simultaneously to the presence of a small and

inspired by the publication in January 1804 of a journal with strong Germanophile

commençait à s’intéresser à la littérature allemande, où on traduisait Schiller et

it was decisive in enhancing Goethe’s reputation there. Coquerel in the Revue

of the omissions and rearrangements of Faust I in de Staël’s long summary shows

Albert Stapfer thus faced various forms of hostility, indifference or trepidation

translation of Widman’s sixteenth-century reworking of the popular Faust tale, saying

Der, weit entfernt von allem Schein,

the swagger of Mephistopheles’ self-presentation and Faust’s initial scepticism. The

Stapfer renders the passage thus:

Dans un dédale sans issue.

He ends more salaciously still:

perspectives on human striving established by the Lord’s wager with Mephistopheles,

straightforward primacy to the London staging but it implies a familiarity with

of the figures in Plate 4 as Faust, Mephistopheles, and the Poodle by a series of

‘chemical’ stage, by means of a magic potion in the scene following Auerbach’s

ﬁgure 4 ‘Méphistophélès apparaissant à Faust’, Plate 5 from FAUST, Tragédie de M. de

The detail of this architecture is often articulated in intensely imagined constellations

ﬁgure 9 Delacroix, portrait of Goethe from the 1828 Faust.

‘die vollkommnere Einbildungskraft eines solchen Künstlers zwingt uns’ — the

It may be that Pavie’s report is coloured by his own responses to Delacroix or

Goethe’s ambivalence about Delacroix should be distinguished from his reception

‘zuverlässig das Befriedigendste, was bisher in Frankreich über [Goethe] geschrieben

Nachbarvolke’, implicitly articulating reservations about the rigidity of the French

‘düstere[s], unbefriedigte[s] Streben’ but Mephistopheles’ mockery and irony ‘als

durch mancherlei Wiederholungen umgestalten, es gewissermaßen vernichten. Deshalb

The editorial in the first issue of Le Globe amounts to a definition of French

In seizing upon Faust and in foregrounding the figure of Mephistopheles as

is so evident, even when he remains ‘faithful’ as a visual translator of Goethe’s work,

S-ar putea să vă placă și