Note XI.
The ointment gives our sinews might.
“According to the orthodox theory, the witches anointed their whole body with a salve or ointment prepared in the name of the fiend, murmured a few magic sentences into their beard, and then flew up, body and soul, head and hair, actually and corporeally into the air.”—Horst’s Dæmonomagie, vol. ii. p. 203.
Note XII.
Make way, Squire Voland comes.
A name of Satan, derived probably from the Latin Volo, through the Italian Volante, expressive of that agile quality of the old deceiver, whereby he is always “going to and fro on the earth, and walking up and down in it.”—Job i. 7. See Reichard’s Geister Reich, vol. i. p. 397. But I rather suspect this appellation is connected with the office of the evil one, as chief of the flies, and other volatile tormentors. In the French edition of the popular story the devil is called “Le Diable volatique,” c. vi.;—or, better still, the devil is so called as being “the prince of the power of the air,” and therefore a flying spirit. “Mon Valet, dis moi quel esprit es-tu?—Mon Maistre Faust, je suis un esprit Volant, qui ay mon cours dans l’air sous le ciel”—in the same French history of Doctor Faust.
Note XIII.
Who then is that?—’Tis Lilith.
Lilith, from Lil, darkness, is the name of night-monster (translated screech-owl in Isaiah xxxiv. 14), who, under the deceitful form of a beautiful woman, was believed by the Jews to be most injurious to parturient women, and very often to occasion the death of young persons before they were circumcised. Buxtorf, in his Lexicon Talmudicum, gives a tolerably good account of these Hebrew Lamiæ; but the most complete and satisfactory information on this, as on all other subjects connected with ancient and modern superstition, is to be found in Horst, Zauber-Bibliothek, part vi. pp. 42 and 86.
Note XIV.
Proctophantasmist.
It is universally agreed that Nicolai, a noted Berlin publisher, who flourished about the middle and towards the end of the last century, is the person meant here. From his biography by Göcking, he appears to have been a man of remarkable mental activity and considerable literary significance in his day; but, like the Brandenburg sands on which he was located, his ideas seemed to have been somewhat flat and prosaic, and totally inadequate to grasp the significance of the great master spirits of thought, who were now asserting their rightful place on the platform of German literature. Notwithstanding the prosaic character of his mind, he became subject to a disease of seeing apparitions in clear daylight (see Dr. Hibbert’s book on apparitions), an abnormal action of the optic nerves, which was cured by the application of leeches to the part of the body on which the unfeathered biped finds it comfortable to sit. Hence the name, from the Greek πρωκτός.
Note XV.
Intermezzo.
Most of the puppet personages who pop up in this curious little piece, and explain their own significance in a stanza, may be presumed to be sufficiently familiar to all readers capable of appreciating the mind of a poetical thinker such as Goethe. I confine myself to the few following notes:—
Embryo-Spirit.—German “Geist der sich erst bildet.” A quiz upon young versifiers,—poetlings with whom rhyme and reason are opposite poles.
Orthodox.—We are indebted to the Fathers of the Church for the pious imagination that the heathen gods were devils. Milton follows the same unfounded idea. The gods of Greece were bad enough; but we need not make them worse than they were. They had their good side too. Vide Schiller’s beautiful poem, “The Gods of Greece,” which, by the by, Frantz Horn calls “Ein unendlicher Irrthum,”—an infinite error. But a man may admire an Apollo or a Minerva without meaning to be a heathen.
Purists.—There are “purists” among the German grammarians; but the allusion here must be to something else—prigs and precisians, I fancy.
Xenien.—Epigrammatic poems published by Goethe and Schiller, which were very severe on the half-poets of the day.
Hennings.—I know nothing of this character. Hayward says he was one of the victims of the Xenien, and editor of two periodicals, “The Genius of the Age,” and the “Musaget.”
The stiff man is Nicolai; he of the “old mill,” supra, p. 251. Nicolai was a great zealot against Catholics and Jesuits; but, as Frantz Horn hints, his zeal was not always according to knowledge.—Geschichte der Deutschen Poesie, vol. iii.
The Crane, I believe, is Lavater.
Note XVI.
My mother, the wanton,
That choked my breath.
“This song is founded upon a popular German story, to be found in the Kinder-und Haus-Märchen of the distinguished brothers Grimm, under the title of Van den Machandel-Boom, and in the English selection from that work (entitled German Popular Stories), under the title of The Juniper Tree.—The wife of a rich man, whilst standing under a juniper tree, wishes for a little child as white as snow and as red as blood; and, on another occasion, expresses a wish to be buried under the juniper when dead. Soon after, a little boy as white as snow and as red as blood is born: the mother dies of joy at beholding it, and is buried according to her wish. The husband marries again, and has a daughter. The second wife, becoming jealous of the boy, murders him, and serves him up at table for the unconscious father to eat. The father finishes the whole dish, and throws the bones under the table. The little girl, who is made the innocent assistant in her mother’s villany, picks them up, ties them in a silk handkerchief, and buries them under the juniper tree. The tree begins to move its branches mysteriously, and then a kind of cloud rises from it, a fire appears in the cloud, and out of the fire comes a beautiful bird, which flies about singing the following song:—
“‘Min Moder de mi slacht’t
Min Vader de me att,
Min Swester de Marleenken
Söcht alle mine Beeniken,
Un bindt sie in een syden Dook,
Legts unner den Machandelboom;
Kywitt, Kywitt! ach watt en schön Vagel ben ich!’”
Hayward’s Prose Translation of Faust,
2d edition, p. 294.
[THE END.]
transcriber’s notes
Alterations to text:
Add TOC and Dramatis Personae listing.
Relabel footnote markers and link to footnotes at end of work.
