shelter among the trees of the Brocken. There, on the pagan May-day, in
order to celebrate their ancient rites unmolested, they dressed
themselves in all manner of fantastic and bestial masks, so as to
frighten off the Christianising invaders from the revels. The Walpurgis
of _Faust_ exhibits paganism at its lowest depths. Sir Mammon is the
host who invites his boisterous guests to the riot of his festive night.
The witches arrive on broomsticks and pitchforks; singing, not without
significance, the warning of woe to all climbers--for here aspiration of
any sort is a dangerous crime. The Crane's song reveals the fact that
pious men are here, in the Blocksberg, united with devils; introducing
the same cynical and desperate disbelief in goodness which Nathaniel
Hawthorne has told in similar fashion in his tale of _Young Goodman
Brown_; and the most horrible touch of all is introduced when Faust in
disgust leaves the revel, because out of the mouth of the witch with
whom he had been dancing there had sprung a small red mouse. Throughout
the whole play the sense of holy and splendid ideals shines at its
brightest in lurid contrast with the hopeless and sordid dark of the
pagan earth.

Returning now to our main point, the comparison of Marlowe's play with
Goethe's, let us first of all contrast the temptations in the two.
Marlowe's play is purely theological. Jusserand finely describes the
underlying tragedy of it. "Faust, like Tamburlaine, and like all the
heroes of Marlowe, lives in thought, beyond the limit of the possible.
He thirsts for a knowledge of the secrets of the universe, as the other
thirsted for domination over the world." Both are Titanic figures
exactly in the pagan sense, but the form of Faustus' Titanism is the
revolt against theology. From the early days of the Christian
persecutions, there had been a tendency to divorce the sacred from the
secular, and to regard all that was secular as being of the flesh and