beckoning him across the world, and how can his ardent blood rest "attemptless, faint and destitute?" "Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend the rest is Scythian bathos. Like Shelley, in some prior state of existence he had loved an Antigone, and he cannot stay. But like Keats also he has an intense feeling for the imaginative show and colour of things, of milk-white steeds laden with the heads of slain men, and "Besmeared with blood that makes a dainty show," of naked negroes, of bassoes clothed in crimson silk, of Turkey carpets beneath the chariot wheels, and of a hundred kings or more with "so many crowns of burnished gold." He is intoxicated with the physical splendours of imagination, with the vast and mysterious charm of old-world cities, of Bagdad and Babylon and Samarcand. “ ́ And ride in triumph through Persepolis !' Is it not passing brave to be a king, 'And ride in triumph through Persepolis?'" With this song of radiant joy in the unattainable, young Kit Marlowe, like another Christopher, sailed to discover countries yet unknown, to attain the "sweet fruition" of his crown. Not long after Tamburlaine, appeared the Tragical History of Doctor Faustus.1 The legend of a man who sells his soul to the Devil seems to have appeared about the sixth century, and to have floated down the Middle Ages in many forms; in one form it was used by Calderon in El Magico Prodigioso. In the early part of the sixteenth century it became identified with a Doctor Faustus, who practised necromancy, and was the friend of Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa. Conrad Muth the Humanist came across a magician at Erfurt called Georgius Faustus Hemitheus of Heidelberg. Trithemius, in 1506, found a Faustus junior who boasted that if all the works of Plato and Aristotle were burnt he could restore them from memory. Melanchthon knew a Johannes Faustus born at Knütlingen, in Wurtemberg, not far from his own home, who studied magic2 at 1 The exact date is very doubtful. Mr. Bullen, in his generally admirable edition of Marlowe, thinks that the "Ballad of the life and death of Doctor Faustus the great Cungerer," licensed to be printed in Feb. 1589 (and supposed to be identical with the Roxburghe ballad with this title), was probably founded on the play. The ballad tells us that Faustus was educated by his uncle, who left his wealth to him, and gives details of his death. These and other points are not mentioned in the play, but they occur in the original prose History of Dr. Faustus, on which the ballad was certainly founded. The writer of the ballad passes by the most impressive scenes in the play, and we cannot assume that he was acquainted with it, although Professor Ward (in the full and interesting notes to his valuable edition of the play) while recognising the striking discrepancies, puts them aside with the curiously inadequate argument that ballads were often founded on plays. 2 It must be recollected that in the sixteenth century "magic" frequently included chemistry and other sciences. The services rendered to science by Paracelsus and Agrippa are scarcely yet generally recognised. Cracow, and afterwards "roamed about, and talked of secret things." The first literary version of the story of Faust was the Volksbuch which, published by Spiess in 1587, at Frankfort-on-theMain, soon after appeared in England as The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr. John Faustus. To this translation of the Faust-book Marlowe generally adhered; that is to say, in the incidents of the drama, and their sequence, he followed his authority. The wearisome comic passages, which Marlowe may or may not have written, are copied with special fidelity. Marlowe's play was probably the first dramatisation of the Faust legend; it became immediately popular, not only in England but abroad. Faustus, as well as the Jew of Malta, was acted in German by an English company in 1608, during the Carnival, at Graetz, and remained a favourite at Vienna throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Faustus was remodelled into a sort of Don Juan-by the Jesuits, it is said, who disliked his scepticism—and in this form he came into Goethe's hands. Goethe's opinion of Marlowe's Faustus we know. He had thought of translating it; when it was mentioned he burst out with an exclamation of praise: How greatly it is all planned.' The three chief versions of the old legend the Volksbuch with its medieval story in a Protestant garb, Marlowe's Renaissance rendering and Goethe's modern Faust-are all representative. The Volksbuch records Faust's history from his birth to his final dismemberment by the Devil, in the calmly epical fashion of a medieval legend; all his clownish tricks are narrated with great enjoyment, but the general atmosphere is moral and Protestant. Marlowe changed the point of view; Faust is no longer an unintelligible magician looked at from the outside, but a living man thirsting for the infinite; the sinner becomes a hero, a Tamburlaine, no longer eager to "ride in triumph through Persepolis," who at the thought of vaster delights has ceased to care for the finite splendours of an earthly crown. "A god is not so glorious as a king. I think the pleasure they enjoy in Heaven once exclaimed Tamburlaine's follower, Theridamas. Faustus, in his study, realising what magic promises, thinks otherwise: "Emperors and kings Are but obeyed in their several provinces ; Nor can they raise the wind or rend the clouds ; Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man ; Marlowe's Faustus is not impelled like the Faustus of the legend by the desire of " worldly pleasure," nor, like Goethe's, by the vanity of knowledge; it is power, power without bound, that he desires, all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, This gives him a passionate energy, an emotional sensibility which Goethe's more shifting, sceptical and complex Faust lacks. For Marlowe, also, magic was a possible reality. A very remarkable characteristic of Marlowe's Faustus, and of his work generally, which has not been sufficiently emphasised,1 is the absence of material horror. "His raptures were all air and fire." In nothing has he shown himself so much a child of the Renaissance as in this repugnance to touch images of physical ugliness. Perondinus insists on Tamburlaine's lameness, of which Marlowe says no word; the Volksbuch is crammed with details concerning the medieval Hell; Marlowe's conception of Hell is loftier than Dante's or Milton's. In reply to the question of Faustus: "How comes it then that thou art out of Hell?" Mephistophilis replies : "Why this is Hell, nor am I out of it: Think'st thou that I who saw the face of God, Am not tormented with ten thousand Hells, Such reticence as this was entirely out of the line of dramatic tradition, and even the able revisers of the edition of Faustus published in 1616, contrived to bring in a plentiful supply of horrors, not only in the account of the death of Faustus, but as a description of Hell-souls toasted on burning forks, broiling live quarters, sops of flaming fire. 1 Professor Ward, however, points out the art with which, in Edward II., Marlowe avoids exciting "the sense of the loathsome." |