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.

     “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it;
     Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God,
     And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
     Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
     In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss? 
     O Faustus, leave these frivolous demands,
     Which strike a terror to my fainting soul!”

To which Faust replies—­

     “What, is great Mephistophilis so passionate
     For being deprived of the joys of heaven? 
     Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude,
     And scorn those joys thou never shalt possess.”

Goethe’s Mephistopheles near the end of the play taunts Faust in the words, “Why dost thou seek our fellowship if thou canst not go through with it?...  Do we force ourselves on thee, or thou on us?” And one has the feeling that, like most other things the fiend says, it is an apparent truth which is really a lie; but it would have been entirely true if Marlowe’s devil had said it.

The Mephistopheles of Goethe is seldom solemnised at all.  Once indeed on the Harz Mountains he says—­

“Naught of this genial influence do I know! 
Within me all is wintry.

* * * * *

How sadly, yonder, with belated glow,
Rises the ruddy moon’s imperfect round!”

Yet there it is merely by discomfort, and not by the pain and hideous sorrow of the world surrounding him, that he is affected.  He is like Satan in the Book of Job, except that he is offering his victim luxuries instead of pains.  In the prologue in Heaven he speaks with such a jaunty air that Professor Blackie’s translation has omitted the passage as irreverent.  He is the spirit that denies—­sceptical and cynical, the anti-Christian that is in us all.  His business is to depreciate spiritual values, and