Читать книгу Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century: Literary Portraits - Георг Брандес - Страница 18
Оглавление[19] Gesammelte Werke, vi. 5.
[20] Heyse und Kurz, Novellenschatz des Auslandes, Bd. VIII.
[21] Heyse und Kurz, Deutscher Novellenschatz, Bd. I. s. xix.
[22] Kinder der Welt, ii. 265.
[23] Did not a critic of this sort take it upon himself to get up a "warning" in the same style, against Goethe's "Faust"? "The purport of this immoral work," he wrote, "is the following: A physician (Dr. Med.), already pretty well advanced in years, is weary of study, and hankers after carnal pleasures. Finally he signs a bond with the devil. The latter leads him through divers low diversions (which, for instance, consist in making half-drunk students still more drunk) to a burgher's daughter, a young maiden, whom Faust (the doctor) at once attempts to seduce. A couple of rendez-vous at the house of an old procuress prepare the way for this. As the seduction, however, cannot be brought about speedily enough, the devil gives Faust a jewel-case to present to the young maiden. Wholly powerless to resist this gift, that is to say, not even seduced, simply purchased, Gretchen yields to Faust; and in order to be all the more undisturbed with her lover she doses her old mother with a narcotic, which kills the old woman. Then after being the cause of her brother's death, she destroys her child, the fruit of her shame. In prison she employs herself in singing obscene songs. That her lover left her in the lurch we cannot wonder when we consider his religious principles. He is, as the scene in which his donna questions him about his faith clearly proves, no Christian; indeed, he does not even seem to believe in a God, although he endeavors to grasp at all sorts of empty subterfuges to conceal his absolute unbelief.
"As this wicked book, notwithstanding all this, finds, as we hear to our astonishment, many readers, indeed, even lady readers, and is in constant demand at the circulating libraries in our city, we beg of all fathers of families to watch over the spiritual welfare of those belonging to them, to whom such profligate reading is all the more dangerous because its immoral teachings are veiled in a polished, insinuating form."
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN.
