to persuade mortals that there is no real distinction between good and bad, or between high and low.  We have seen in the character of Cornelius in Marius the Epicurean “some inward standard ... of distinction, selection, refusal, amid the various elements of the period.”  Here is the extreme opposite.  There is no divine discontent in him, nor longing for happier things.  He would never have said that he would climb to heaven upon a ladder of razor edges.  There is nothing of the fallen angel about him at all, for he is a spirit perfectly content with an intolerable past, present, and future.  Before the throne of God he swaggers with the same easy insolence as in Martha’s garden.  He is the very essence and furthest reach of paganism.

So we have this curious fact, that Marlowe’s Faust is the pagan and Mephistophilis the idealist; while Goethe reverses the order, making paganism incarnate in the fiend and idealism in the nobler side of the man.  It is a far truer and more natural story of life than that which had suggested it; for in the soul of man there is ever a hunger and thirst for the highest, however much he may abuse his soul.  At the worst, there remains always that which “a man may waste, desecrate, never quite lose.”

One more contrast marks the difference of the two plays, namely, the fate of Faust.  Marlowe’s Faust is utterly and irretrievably damned.  On the old theory of an essential antagonism between the secular and the sacred, and upon the old cast-iron theology to which the intellect of man was enjoined to conform, there is no escape whatsoever for the rebel.  So the play leads on to the sublimely terrific passage at the close, when, with the chiming of the bell, terror grows to madness in the victim’s soul, and at last he envies the beasts that perish—­

                          “For, when they die,
     Their souls are soon dissolved in elements;
     But mine must live still to be plagued in hell. 
     Curs’d be the parents that engender’d me! 
     No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer
     That hath deprived thee of the joys of heaven.”

Goethe, with his changed conception of life in general, could not have accepted this ending.  It was indeed Lessing who first pointed out that the final end for Faust must be his salvation and not his doom; but Goethe must necessarily have arrived at the same conclusion even if Lessing had not asserted it.  It is clearly visible throughout the play, by touches here and there, that Faust is not “wholly damnable” as Martha is.  His pity for women, relevant to the main plot of the play, breaks forth in horror when he discovers the fate of Margaret.  “The misery of this one pierces me to the very marrow, and harrows up my soul; thou art grinning calmly over the doom of thousands!” And these words follow immediately after an outbreak of blind rage called forth by Mephistopheles’ famous words, “She is not the first.”  Such a Faust as this, we feel, can no more be ultimately lost than can the Mephistophilis of Marlowe.  As for Marlowe’s Faust, the plea for his destruction is the great delusion of a hard theology, and the only really damnable person in the whole company is the Mephistopheles of Goethe, who seems from first to last continually to be committing the sin against the Holy Ghost.