“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:--
“Ah, Faustus,
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damned perpetually!
Stand still, ye ever-moving spheres of Heaven,
That time may cease and midnight never come;
Fair Nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.
Oh, I’ll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down?
See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul--half a drop; ah, my Christ!
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!
Yet will I call on Him. Oh, spare me, Lucifer!
Where is it now? ’T is gone; and see where God
Stretcheth out His arm and bends His ireful brows!
Mountains and hills, come, come and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!
No? No?
Then will I headlong run into the earth.
Earth, gape! Oh no, it will not harbor me!
* * * * *
Ah! half the hour is past; ’t will all be past anon.
O God,
If Thou wilt not have mercy on my soul,
Yet, for Christ’s sake, whose blood hath ransomed me,
Impose some end to my incessant pain;
Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years--
A hundred thousand--and at last be saved!
Oh, no end’s limited to damnèd souls.
Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?
Or why was this immortal that thou hast?
Ah, Pythagoras’ metempsychosis, were that true,
This soul should fly from me, and I be changed
Unto some brutish beast! All beasts are happy,
For when they die
Their souls are soon dissolved in elements;
But mine must live still to be plagued in Hell!
Cursed be the parents that engendered me!
No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer,
That hath deprived thee of the joys of Heaven.
Oh, it strikes! it strikes! Now, body, turn to air,
Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to Hell.
O soul, be changed to little waterdrops
And fall into the ocean; ne’er be found!
My God, my God, look not so fierce on me!
Adders and serpents, let me breathe awhile.
Ugly Hell, gape not. Come not, Lucifer!
I’ll burn my books. Ah, Mephistophilis!”
It remains to say a few words of Marlowe’s poem of “Hero and Leander,”
for in translating it from Musæus he made it his own. It has great
ease and fluency of versification, and many lines as perfect in their
concinnity as those of Pope, but infused with a warmer coloring and a
more poetic fancy. Here is found the verse that Shakespeare quotes
somewhere. The second verse of the following couplet has precisely
Pope’s cadence:--
“Unto her was he led, or rather drawn,
By those white limbs that sparkled through the lawn.”
It was from this poem that Keats caught the inspiration for his
“Endymion.” A single passage will serve to prove this:--
“So fair a church as this had Venus none:
The walls were of discolored jasper stone,
Wherein was Proteus carved; and overhead
A lively vine of green sea-agate spread,
Where by one hand light-headed Bacchus hung,
And with the other wine from grapes outwrung.”
Milton, too, learned from Marlowe the charm of those long sequences of
musical proper names of which he made such effective use. Here are two
passages which Milton surely had read and pondered:--
“So from the East unto the furthest West
Shall Tamburlaine extend his puissant arm;
The galleys and those pilling brigantines
That yearly sail to the Venetian gulf,
And hover in the straits for Christians’ wreck,
Shall lie at anchor in the isle Asant,
Until the Persian fleet and men of war
Sailing along the Oriental sea
Have fetched about the Indian continent,
Even from Persepolis to Mexico,
And thence unto the straits of Jubaltar.”