ial and so poignant is the question
of woman to the great drama, that the passage in which the incident of
Helen is introduced far surpasses anything else in Marlowe's play, and
indeed is one of the grandest and most beautiful in all literature.

"Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,
And burned the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

* * * * *

O, thou art fairer than the evening air,
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars."

Still, Marlowe's _motif_ is not sex but theology. The former heretics
whom we named had been saved--Theophilus by the intervention of the
Blessed Virgin Mary, and Pope Sylvester snatched from the very jaws of
hell--by a return to orthodoxy. That was in the Roman Catholic days, but
the savage antithesis between earth and heaven had been taken over by
the conscience of Protestantism, making a duality which rendered life
always intellectually anxious and almost impossible. It is this
condition in which Marlowe finds himself. The good and the evil angels
stand to right and left of his Faustus, pleading with him for and
against secular science on the one side and theological knowledge on the
other. For that is the implication behind the contest between magic and
Christianity. "The Faust of the earlier Faust-books and ballads, dramas,
puppet shows, which grew out of them, is damned because he prefers the
human to the divine knowledge. He laid the Holy Scriptures behind the
door and under the bench, refused to be called Doctor of Theology, but
preferred to be called Doctor of Medicine." Obviously here we find
ourselves in a very lamentable _cul-de-sac_. Idealism has floated apart
from the earth and all its life, and everything else than theology is
condemned as paganism.

Goethe changes all that. In the earlier _Weltschmerz_ passages some
traces of it still linger, where Faust renounces theology; but even
there it is not theology alone that he renounces, but philosophy,
medicine, and jurisprudence as well, so that his renunciation is
entirely different from that of Marlowe's Faustus. In Goethe it is no
longer one doctrine or one point of view against another doctrine or
another point of view. It is life, vitality in all its forms, against
all mere doctrine whatsoever.

"Grey, dearest friend, is every theory,
But golden-green is the tree of life."

Thus the times had passed into a s