The women thus stand for the most poignant aspect of man's great temptation. It is not, as we have already said, any longer a conflict between the secular and the sacred that we are watching, nor even the conflict between the flesh and the spirit. It is between a higher and a lower way of treating life, flesh and spirit both. Margaret stands for all the great questions that are addressed to mankind. There are for every man two ways of doing work, of reading a book, of loving a woman. He who keeps his spiritual life pure and high finds that in all these things there is a noble path. He who yields to his lower self will prostitute and degrade them all, and the tragedy that leads on to the mad scene at the close, where the cries of Margaret have no parallel in literature except those of Lady Macbeth, is the inevitable result of choosing the pagan and refusing the ideal. The Blocksberg is the pagan heaven.
A still more striking contrast between the plays meets us when we consider the respective characters of Mephistopheles. When we compare the two devils we are reminded of that most interesting passage in Professor Masson's great essay, which describes the secularisation of Satan between _Paradise Lost_ and the _Faust_ of Goethe:--
"We shall be on the right track if we suppose Mephistopheles to be what Satan has become after six thousand years.... Goethe's Mephistopheles is this same being after the toils and vicissitudes of six thousand years in his new vocation: smaller, meaner, ignobler, but a million times sharper and cleverer.... For six thousand years he has been pursuing the walk he struck out at the beginning, plying his self-selected function, dabbling devilishly in human nature, and abjuring all interest in the grander physics; and the consequence is, as he himself anticipated, that his nature, once great and magnificent, has become small, virulent, and shrunken. He, the scheming, enthusiastic Archangel, has been soured and civilised into the clever, cold-hearted Mephistopheles."
Marlowe's devil is of the solemn earlier kind, not yet degraded into the worldling whom Goethe has immortalised. Marlowe's Mephistophilis is essentially the idealist, and it is his Faust who is determined for the world. One feels about Mephistophilis that he is a kind of religious character, although under a cloud. The things he does are done to organ music, and he might be a figure in some stained-glass window of old. Not only is he "a melancholy devil, with a soul above the customary hell," but he actually retains a kind of despairing idealism which somehow ranks him on the side rather of good than of evil. The puppet play curiously emphasises this. "Tell me," says Faust, "what would you do if you could attain to everlasting salvation?" "Hear and despair! Were I to attain to everlasting salvation, I would mount to heaven on a ladder, though every rung were a razor edge." The words are exactly in the spirit of the earlier play. So sad is the devil, so oppressed with a sense of the horror of it all, that, as we read, it almost seems as if Faust were tempting the unwilling Mephistophilis to ruin him.
