“How am I glutted with conceit of this! Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please, Resolve me of all ambiguities, Perform what desperate enterprise I will? I’ll have them fly to India for gold, Ransack the ocean for orient pearl, And search all corners of the new-found world For pleasant fruits and princely delicates; I’ll have them read me strange philosophy, And tell the secrets of all foreign kings.” And yet it is always to the pleasures of the intellect that he returns. It is when the good and evil spirits come to him for the second time that wealth is offered as a bait, and after Faustus has signed away his soul to Lucifer, he is tempted even by more sensual allurements. I may be reading into the book what is not there, but I cannot help thinking that Marlowe intended in this to typify the inevitably continuous degradation of a soul that has renounced its ideal, and the drawing on of one vice by another, for they go hand in hand like the Hours. But even in his degradation the pleasures of Faustus are mainly of the mind, or at worst of a sensuous and not sensual kind. No doubt in this Marlowe is unwittingly betraying his own tastes. Faustus is made to say:-- “And long ere this I should have slain myself Had not sweet pleasure conquered deep despair. Have I not made blind Homer sing to me Of Alexander’s love and Œnon’s death? And hath not he that built the walls of Thebes With ravishing sound of his melodious harp Made music with my Mephistophilis? Why should I die, then? basely why despair?” This employment of the devil in a duet seems odd. I remember no other instance of his appearing as a musician except in Burns’s “Tam o’ Shanter.” The last wish of Faustus was Helen of Troy. Mephistophilis fetches her, and Faustus exclaims: “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, And burned the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss! * * * * * Here will I dwell, for Heaven is in these lips, And all is dross that is not Helena: * * * * * Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.” No such verses had ever been heard on the English stage before, and this was one of the great debts our language owes to Marlowe. He first taught it what passion and fire were in its veins. The last scene of the play, in which the bond with Lucifer becomes payable, is nobly conceived. Here the verse rises to the true dramatic sympathy of which I spoke. It is swept into the vortex of Faust’s eddying thought, and seems to writhe and gasp in that agony of hopeless despair:--