The
Inhabitants Are Not At All Pleased With Their New Masters; For The
Behaviour Of The Prussian Military Has Been So Insulting And Overbearing
Towards The Burghers And Students That It Is, I Am Told, A Common
Exclamation Among The Latter, Alluding To The Prussians Having Stiled
Themselves Their Deliverers:
De nostris liberatoribus, Domine, libera
nos.
Indeed, I can evidently discern that they are not particularly
pleased at the result of the battle of Waterloo.
In the evening I went to the theatre, which has the most inconvenient form
imaginable, being a rectangle. As anti-Gallicanism is the order of the day,
only German dramas are allowed to be performed and this night it was the
tragedy of Faust, or Dr Faustus as we term him in England, not the Faust of
Goethe, which is not meant for nor at all adapted to the stage, but a drama
of that name written by Klingmann.[18] It is a strange wild piece, quite in
the German style and full of horrors and diableries. In this piece the
sublime and terrible border close on the ridiculous; for instance the Devil
and Faust come to drink in a beer-schenk or ale-house. 'Tis true the Devil
is incognito at the time and is called "der Fremde" or "the Stranger"; it
is only towards the conclusion of the piece that he discovers himself to be
Satan.... The actor who played the part of the Stranger had something in
his physiognomy very terrific and awe-inspiring. In another scene, which to
us would appear laughable and absurd, but which pleases a German audience,
three women in masks come on the stage to meet Faust, in a churchyard, and
on unmasking display three skeleton heads.
Poor Faust had stipulated to give his soul to the Devil for aiding him in
the attainment of his desires; the Devil on his part agrees to allow him to
commit four deadly sins before he shall call on him to fulfil his contract.
Faust, in the sequel, kills his wife and his father-in-law. Satan then
claims him. Faust pleads in arrest of judgement, that he has only committed
two crimes out of the four for which he had agreed; and that there
consequently remained two others for him to commit before he could be
claimed. The Devil in rejoinder informs him that his wife was with child at
the time he killed her, which constituted the third crime, and that the
very act of making a contract with the Devil for his soul forms the fourth.
Faust, overwhelmed with confusion, has not a word to say; and Satan seizing
him by the hair of his head, carries him off in triumph. This piece is
written in iambics of ten syllables and the versification appeared to me
correct and harmonious, and the sentiments forcible and poetical; this
fully compensated for the bizarrerie of the story itself, which, by the
bye, with all the reproach thrown by the adherents of the classic taste on
those of the romantic, is scarcely more outre than the introduction of
Death ([Greek:
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