essentially evil. The mediæval views of celibacy, hermitage, and the
monastic life, had intensified this divorce; and while many of the monks
were interested in human secular learning, yet there was a feeling,
which in many cases became a kind of conscience, that only the divine
learning was either legitimate or safe for a man's eternal well-being.
The Faust of Marlowe is the Prometheus of his own day. The new knowledge
of the Renaissance had spread like fire across Europe, and those who saw
in it a resurrection of the older gods and their secrets, unhesitatingly
condemned it. The doctrine of immortality had entirely supplanted the
old Greek ideal of a complete earthly life for man, and all that was
sensuous had come to be regarded as intrinsically sinful. Thus we have
for background a divided universe, in which there is a great gulf fixed
between this world and the next, and a hopeless cleavage between the
life of body and that of spirit.

In this connection we may also consider the women of the two plays.
Charles Lamb has asked, "What has Margaret to do with Faust?" and has
asserted that she does not belong to the legend at all. Literally, this
is true, in so far as there is no Margaret in the earlier form of the
play, whose interest was, as we have seen, essentially theological. Yet
Margaret belongs to the essential story and cannot be taken out of it.
She is the "eternal feminine," in which the battle between the spirit
and the flesh, between idealism and paganism, will always make its last
stand. Even Marlowe has to introduce a woman. His Helen is, indeed, a
mere incident, for the real bride of the soul must be either theological
or secular science; and yet so essential and so poignant is the question
of woman to the great drama, that the passage in which the incident of
Helen is introduced far surpasses anything else in Marlowe's play, and
indeed is one of the grandest and most beautiful in all literature.