The third incident which we may quote is that of Walpurgis-Night.  Some critics would omit this part, which, they say, “has naught of interest in bearing on the main plot of the poem.”  Nothing could be more mistaken than such a judgment.  In the Walpurgis-Night we have the play ending in that sheer paganism which is the counterpart to Easter Day at the beginning.  Walpurgis has a strange history in German folklore.  It is said that Charlemagne, conquering the German forests for the Christian faith, drove before him a horde of recalcitrant pagans, who took a last 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 essentially evil.  The mediaeval 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