as well as over the seas that ebb and flow with the salt tides. It is by their thoughts, so much higher than their emotions, that we know the men of the eighteenth century; and by their quick sensibility to the sting of life, the men of the nineteenth. . . . For, from a sensitive correspondence with environment our race has passed into another stage; it is marked now by a passionate desire for the mastery of life — a desire, spiritualized in the highest lives, materialized in the lowest, so to mould environment that the lives to come may be shaped to our will. It is this which accounts for the curious likeness in our to-day with that of the Elizabethans; their spirit was the untamed will, but our will moves in other paths than theirs, paths beaten for our treading by the ages between." Such words as these are well worth reflection, for they contain profound wisdom. Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas - probably Marlowe himself were nothing more nor less than Nietzsche's Superman; and we know very well what he is and what he wants. But his influence is already on the wane; for he is not only no God, he knows less of the meaning of life than a little child. WLyntheses TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT THE PROLOGUE FROM jigging veins of rhyming mother wits, Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine And then applaud his fortune as you please. n A superior n in the text indicates a note at the end of the volume. |