Marlowe's  Faustus  is  a  Teutonic  and  a  medieval


634  SHAKSPERE'S  PREDECESSORS.
sceptic.  There  is  nothing  light  or  Latin  in  his  atti-
tude ;  no  carelessness  or  banter,  no  irony,  no  willing-
ness to  sneer  away  the  ruin  of  his  soul  in  epigrams.
He  personifies  disbelief  as  disbelief  then  was  ;  con-
vinced of  a  supernatural  environment  of  spiritual
realities  ;  surrounded  by  the  terrors  of  a  ghostly  world.
The  Florentine  indifference  of  Machiavelli,  absorbed  in
actualities  of  human  life  ;  the  Venetian  indifference
of  Aretino,  besotted  with  Greek  wine  and  wanton
cynicism  ;  the  modern  indifference  of  free-thinkers,
who  have  divested  their  minds  of  God  and  devil,
heaven  and  hell ;  were  all  alike  alien  to  his  nature.
Faustus  doubts,  indeed,  whether  there  be  a  hell —
confounds  this  in  his  bolder  moments  with  Elysium.
Yet  he  sells  himself,  soul  and  body,  by  a  formal
bond,  signed  with  the  blood  of  his  own  veins,  to
Lucifer  ;  and  the  first  questions  he  addresses  to  his
familiar,  concern  the  state  of  fallen  spirits.  His
atheism  has  a  background  of  terror  thinly  veiled  by
the  mind's  inquisitiveness.  He  is  the  sceptic  of  an
age  of  nightmares  ;  and  though  these  only  come  at
intervals,  they  recur  with  fearful  and  accelerated  force
as  time  advances.  Faustus  risks  the  future  for  the
sake  of  novel  experience  and  present  power.  Discon-
tented with  the  known  results  of  former  speculations,
wearied  with  the  stale  sic  probo  of  the  schools,  he
flings  himself  into  the  devil's  arms.  This  fatigue  of
current  knowledge,  this  attempt  to  transcend  its  tedious
limitations  by  a  compact  with  the  fiend,  was  only
possible  in  a  theological,  unscientific  age.  Modern
scepticism  is  both  more  subtle  and  less  passionate.
