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Mr. Faust By: Arthur Davison Ficke (1883-1945) |
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MR. FAUST BY ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE NEW YORK
MITCHELL KENNERLEY
MCMXIII
COPYRIGHT 1913 BY
MITCHELL KENNERLEY THE·PLIMPTON·PRESS
NORWOOD·MASS·U·S·A
CONTENTS
PAGE INTRODUCTION vii LIST OF PLAYS BY ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE x MR. FAUST 1
The author gratefully acknowledges his debt for permission
to reprint one of the lyrics herein, which appeared
originally in "Poetry."
INTRODUCTION
Through all the work of Arthur Davison Ficke runs a note of bigness
that compels attention even when one feels that he is still groping
both for form and thought. In "Mr. Faust" this note has assumed
commanding proportions, while at the same time the uncertainty
manifest in some of the earlier work has almost wholly disappeared.
Intellectually as well as artistically, this play shows a surprising
maturity. It impresses me, for one, as the expression of a
well rounded and very profound philosophy of life and this philosophy
stands in logical and sympathetic relationship to what the western
world to day regards as its most advanced thought. The evolutionary
conception of life is the foundation of that philosophy, which,
however, has little or nothing in common with the materialistic and
dogmatic evolutionism of the last century. The work sprung from that
philosophy is full of the new sense of mystery, which makes the men of
to day realize that the one attitude leading nowhere is that of
denial. Faith and doubt walk hand in hand, each one being to the other
check and goad alike. And with this new freedom to believe as well as
to question, man becomes once more the centre of his known universe.
But there he stands, humbly proud, not as the arrogant master of a
"dead" world, but merely as the foremost servant of a life principle
which asserts itself in the grain of sand as in the brain of man. Yet "Mr. Faust" is by no means a philosophical or moral tract. It is,
first of all and throughout, a living, breathing work of art, instinct
with beauty and faithful in its every line to the principle laid down
by its author in the preface to one of his earlier volumes: "Poetical
imagination must fail altogether if it descends from its natural
sphere and assumes work which is properly that of economic or
political experience. Nor can it usefully urge its own peculiar
intuitions as things of practical validity." Mr. Ficke was born in 1883 at Davenport, Iowa, and there he is still
living, although I understand that he has since then been wandering in
so many other regions, physical and spiritual, that he can hardly call
it his home. He graduated from Harvard in 1904 and spent the next
travelling in all sorts of strange and poetic places Japan, India,
the Greek mountains, the Aegean Islands. Returning to the United
States, he studied law and was admitted to the Bar in 1908. While
studying, he taught English for a year at the University of Iowa,
lecturing on the history of the Arthurian Legends. He was a mere boy when he began to write, turning from the first to
the metrical form of expression and remaining faithful to it in most
of his subsequent efforts. His poems and essays have been printed in
almost all the leading magazines. So far he has published five volumes
of verse: "From the Isles," a series of lyrics of the Aegean Sea; "The
Happy Princess," a romantic narrative poem; "The Earth Passion," a
series of poems which may be characterized as the effort of a
star gazer to find satisfaction in the things of the earth; "The
Breaking of Bonds," a Shelleyan drama of social unrest, where he has
tried to formulate a hope for our final emergence from the maelstrom
of class conflict; and "Twelve Japanese Painters," a group of poems
expressive of the peculiar and alluring charm of the great Japanese
painters and their world of remote beauty... Continue reading book >>
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