Poetry such as this has power to blind us for a moment to the underlying meaning: Faustus enjoys a temporary transfiguration. But Marlowe's muse flags in the effort to sublimate dross. Such a character as Faustus is unfitted to support tragedy. His creator inspires him with his own Bohemian joy in mere pleasure, his own thirst for fresh sensations, his own vehement disregard of restraint--a disregard which brought Marlowe to a tragic and unworthy end. But, as if in mockery, he degrades him with unmanly, ignoble qualities that excite our derision. His mind is pleased with toys that would amuse a child: at the conclusion of an almost incredibly trivial Show of the Seven Deadly Sins he exclaims, 'O, how this sight doth delight my soul!' His practical jokes are unworthy of a court jester. The congealing of his blood agitates his superstitious mind far more than the terrible frankness of Mephistophilis. Miserably mean-spirited, he seeks to propitiate the wrath of the fiend by invoking his torments upon an old man whose disinterested appeal momentarily quickened his conscience into revolt. Finally, when we recall the words with which Tamburlaine faced death, what contempt, despite the frightful anguish of the scene, is aroused by Faustus's screams of terror at the approach of Lucifer to claim him as his own! Instinctively we think of Byron's Manfred and his scorn of hell and its furies. It is his cowardice that spoils the effect of the backward glances and twinges of conscience, the intention of which has been rightly praised by so many. Marlowe probably wished to represent the strife of good and evil in a man's soul. Under other circumstances it is fair to suppose that he would have achieved success, and so have anticipated Goethe. But his Faustus moves on too low a level. Of a moral sense, independent of the dread of punishment, he knows nothing. Four times his Good Angel suggests to him a return to the right path; once an Old Man warns him; twice Mephistophilis says that which might fairly have bid him pause; twice, at least, his own conscience advises repentance. Yet only on two occasions is there any real revolt, and then only because his cowardice has been enlisted on the side of righteousness by the sudden thought of the devils that will tear him in pieces or of the hell that 'claims his right, and with a roaring voice says, "Faustus, come".' In proof of this we see his hesitation scared away by the greater terrors of a present devil, a Lucifer clothed in horror, or a threatening Mephistophilis. In his vacillations we see, not the noble conflict of good and evil impulses, but an ignoble tug-of-war between timidity and appetite.