All 3 Uses of
Faust
in
Man And Superman
- Mozart's is the last of the true Don Juans; for by the time he was of age, his cousin Faust had, in the hands of Goethe, taken his place and carried both his warfare and his reconciliation with the gods far beyond mere lovemaking into politics, high art, schemes for reclaiming new continents from the ocean, and recognition of an eternal womanly principle in the universe.†
Chpt Ded.
- Goethe's Faust and Mozart's Don Juan were the last words of the XVIII century on the subject; and by the time the polite critics of the XIX century, ignoring William Blake as superficially as the XVIII had ignored Hogarth or the XVII Bunyan, had got past the Dickens-Macaulay Dumas-Guizot stage and the Stendhal-Meredith-Turgenieff stage, and were confronted with philosophic fiction by such pens as Ibsen's and Tolstoy's, Don Juan had changed his sex and become Dona Juana, breaking out of…†
Chpt Ded.
- Did I not say, when I was arranging that affair of Faust's, that all Man's reason has done for him is to make him beastlier than any beast.†
Chpt 3 *
Definition:
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(Faust) literary character who sells his soul to the devil in order to become all-knowing, or godlikeeditor's notes: Faust's most famous appearances are as the protagonist of Christopher Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus" (1604) and Goethe's "Faust" (1832).
A German necromancer, Georg Faust (~1480-~1538) is thought to have been an actual person who inspired the Faustian legend.