move on, move on, and reclaim men from their blindness; share with them the intellectual strength which nature has given thee; and announce thyself to all as I have just announced thee to thyself.”
Faustus craunched his teeth while the monk was saying all these noble things about the countenance of the Devil, who turning coolly to the physiognomist, said,
“And what is thy opinion of that gentleman? Tell me what he is.”
Monk. Great, bold, mighty, powerful, soft, and mild; but thou, his companion, art greater, bolder, mightier, more powerful, more soft, more mild.
Then looking at Faustus, he exclaimed:
“Mighty pupil of a mightier man, if thy spirit and thy heart could entirely catch his greatness, thou wouldst still be merely reflecting the rays of his glory. But seat thyself, and let me take thy shadow.”
Faustus, more and more enraged to see how infinitely the monk rated him below the Devil, now burst forth:
“Shadows! yes, indeed, shadows only hast thou seen. How darest thou thus judge and measure the human race? Hast thou seen men? Where, and how? Thou hast merely seen their shadows, which thou adornest with the tinsel of thy crazed imagination, and givest them out as the true forms. Tell me what kind of human beings thou hast seen. Were they not sectaries, fanatics, visionaries, the very offscourings of human nature? Were they not vain devotees, young wives who have cold husbands, and widows who have sleepless nights? Were they not authors eager to have every mark and pimple on their insignificant features turned into a sign and prognostication of genius? Were they not grandees, whose brilliant stations rendered their physiognomies imposing to thine eye? Thou seest that I know thy customers, and have read thy book.”
Devil. Bravo, Faustus! Let me now put in a word, and tell his reverence a few mortifying truths. Brother monk, thou hast formed in thy solitary cell a phantom of perfection, and wouldst
fain thrust that into people’s heads, which, when there, poisons the brain, as the gangrene corrupts all the flesh around it. There were men long ago who ventured to judge of the innermost of their fellow-creatures from the outside; but there was some difference between them and thee. They had travelled over a considerable part of the earth; experience had made them gray; they had lived and conversed with men, visited all the lurking holes of vice and iniquity, roved from the palace to the cot, crept into the caves of savages, and thus knew what belonged to a well-organised man, and what he could do with his faculties. But shalt thou—swollen with prejudices, pent up in a convent like a toad in the trunk of an oak—pretend to have a clear idea of that which even they barely understood?