This latter, indeed, seems to us, in spite of the admiration of English critics, a decided failure.  There is in him no trace of either the cruel, icy-cold malignity of the fiend of Goethe, or the awful grandeur of Milton’s Tempter.  It cannot be said that Marlowe’s Devil seduces Faustus.  He is almost on the verge of repentance himself; of the two, he is decidedly the better Christian.  The proposition of the compact comes from Faustus himself, and Mephistopheles only accepts it.  Marlowe’s Faustus knows nothing of the feeling of aversion and disgust with which Goethe’s Faust sees himself bound to his hellish companion; he calls him, repeatedly, “sweet Mephistopheles,” and declares,—­

  “Had I as many souls as there be stars,
  I’d give them all for Mephistopheles.”

Mr. Hallam, in comparing Marlowe’s production with Goethe’s, remarks,—­“The fair form of Margaret is wanting.”  As if this were all that was wanting!  Margaret belonged, indeed, exclusively to Goethe.  But Helena, the favorite ideal of beauty of all old writers, is introduced in the popular tale, and so, too, in Marlowe.  Faustus conjures up her spirit at the request of the students.  Her beauty is described with glowing colors; “it would,” says the old romance, “nearly have enflamed the students, but that they persuaded themselves she was a spirit, which made them lightly passe away such fancies.”  Not so Faustus; although he is already in the twenty-third year of his compact, he himself falls in love with the spirit, and keeps her with him until his end.  In all this, Marlowe follows closely; though he has good taste enough to suppress the figure of the little Justus Faustus, who was the fruit of this union.

It now only remains to us to consider the way in which modern poets have apprehended the idea of the Faust-fable.  None of the German dramas and operas which the seventeenth century produced, though they never failed to draw large audiences, could be compared, in poetical value, to Marlowe’s tragedy.  The German stage of that period was of very low standing, and the few poets who wrote for it, as, for instance, Lohenstein, preferred foreign subjects,—­the more remote in space and time, the better.  The writers of neither the first nor the second Silesian school were exactly the men to appreciate the depth of a legend like that of Faustus,—­still less the watery poets of the beginning of the eighteenth century.  Lessing, who, with his sharp, sound criticism, and his clear perception of the beautiful, led the way to a higher state of things in literature, appears also to have been the first to discover the deep meaning buried in the popular farces of Faustus.  He pronounced it worthy the genius of a Shakspeare, and himself attempted to make it the subject of a tragedy.  How much it occupied his mind we may conclude from the circumstance that he seems to have made for it two plans, essentially different from each other.  We can only regret that they were never executed.