the supernatural, he tried to embody it--and he failed.

The case was different with Marlowe. The bringing together of Faustus
and Helena had no special meaning for the man of the sixteenth century,
too far from antiquity and too near the Middle Ages to perceive as we
do the strange difference between them; and the supernatural had no
fascination in a time when it was all permeating and everywhere
mixed with prose. The whole play of _Dr. Faustus_ is conceived in a
thoroughly realistic fashion; it is tragic, but not ghostly. To
Marlowe's audience, and probably to Marlowe himself, despite his
atheistic reputation, the story of Faustus's wonders and final damnation
was quite within the realm of the possible; the intensity of the belief
in the tale is shown by the total absence of any attempt to give
it dignity or weirdness. Faustus evokes Lucifer with a pedantic
semi-biblical Latin speech; he goes about playing the most trumpery
conjuror's tricks--snatching with invisible hands the food from people's
lips, clapping horns and tails on to courtiers for the Emperor's
amusement, letting his legs be pulled off like boots, selling wisps of
straw as horses, doing and saying things which could appear tragic and
important, nay, even serious, only to people who took every second
cat for a witch, who burned their neighbours for vomiting pins, who
suspected devils at every turn, as the great witch-expert Sprenger shows
them in his horribly matter-of-fact manual. We moderns, disbelieving
in devilries, would require the most elaborately romantic and poetic
accessories--a splendid lurid back-ground, a magnificent Byronian
invocation of the fiend. The Mephistophilis of Marlowe, in those days
when devils still dwelt in people, required none of Goethe's wit
or poetry; the mere fact of his being a devil, with the very real
association of flame and brimstone in this world and the next, was
sufficient to inspire interest in him; whereas in 1800, with Voltaire's
novels and Hume's treatises on the table, a dull devil was no more
endurable than any other sort of bore. The very superiority of Marlowe
is due to this absence of weirdness, to this complete realism; the last
scene of the English play is infinitely above the end of the second
part of _Faust_ in tragic grandeur, just because Goethe made abortive
attempts, after a conscious and artificial supernatural, while Marlowe
was satisfied with perfect reality of situation. The position of
Faustus