Page:Kickerbocker Feb 1833 vol 1 no 2.djvu/19

In these lines, the irregularities of the rhyme follow the order of the original exactly, and those of the metre very nearly, which is a slavish and mechanical fashion of translating, but on the whole the safest. It is the Chinese tailor's principle, of copying into the new coat the rents and patches of the old one, the poor fellow could not trust himself to judge where it had been slashed for ornament, and where it had suffered from carelessness or ill usage. One course or the other must be adopted, either to make a free translation, as it is called, in which case the result will be a new poem, which must depend for its merits on those of the soi-disant translator but actual author; or to adhere faithfully, through good and evil report, to the actual original letter and text: in this case the copy is like the print of a man in the snow, tolerably accurate as far as it goes, and giving you the general ideas of length and breadth nearly enough, but not remarkable for grace, expression, warmth, coloring, or perspective.

The above dialogue results in Faust's acquiescence in Mephistopheles' proposals, and they resolve to depart and see the world together; but just at this moment a youth presents himself to be enrolled among the doctor's scholars, and to make his personal acquaintance. Mephistopheles, while Faust is preparing for his journey in his dressing room, takes his gown and personates him, and amuses himself with astonishing the boy with some unintelligible rhapsodies about the choice of a profession, talking very learnedly, but so as to make the point in question the darker for every sentence. Yet there is a vein of sincerity through the whole, because he has no objection to truth when it serves his purpose, and here in some respects it does so. His leading principle seems to be a realizing sense of the close union, and hand in hand connection, that wisdom maintains with sorrow, and of the ultimate inanity and insufficiency of human science. In urging the boy to study, therefore, he argues con amore; he bids him improve his time; reminds him that it flies fast, and he must take no holidays, but increase and store up knowledge. He seems to trust to future occasion to improve this knowledge for his own evil purposes, by misdirection, and to make its sweet fountains pour out bitter waters; in the meantime he talks for all the world like the unexceptionable chairman of an education society, and finishes by writing in the scholar's common-place book an old quotation from himself—Ye shall be as gods, knowing both good and evil.