his avocation. Faust says: "I understand you

now:

"Wholesale annihilation won't prevail,

So you're beginning on a smaller scale."

To which Mephistopheles replies, (as I think) half in remorse, half in scorn :

"And to say truth, as yet with small success.

Oppos'd to nothingness, the world,

This clumsy mass, subsisteth still;

Not yet is it to ruin hurl'd,

Despite the efforts of my will.

Tempests and earthquakes, fires and flood, I've tried;

Yet land and ocean still unchang'd abide.

And then of beasts and men, the accursed brood,

Neither o'er them can I extend my sway.
What countless myriads have I swept away!
Yet ever circulates the fresh young blood."

This bitterness flashes out more than once in the drama. When Faust is closing his compact with Mephistopheles, he declares that he craves excitement, that excitement is the sphere of man, that the scope of all his powers thenceforth would be to know in his own heart all human weal and woe, to grasp in thought the lofty and the deep, and to dilate his individual mind to all the thoughts and passions of men. Mephistopheles answers (I think with more of sorrow than of satire) :

"Oh, credit me, who, still as ages roll,

Have chew'd this bitter fare from year to year,
No mortal, from the cradle to the bier,

Digests the ancient leaven. Know, this Whole
Doth for the Deity alone subsist!

He in eternal brightness doth exist,

Us into darkness he hath brought, and here
Where day and night alternate, is your sphere."

Again, is there not a depth of despair, at which one might shudder, revealed in the words in which Mephistopheles declares himself

"Part of that power which still

Produceth good, while it deviseth ill?"

If I had space here, I should dilate upon what seems to me a most instructive part of the drama : I mean the scene where Faust concludes his agreement with the Spirit of Evil. I shall merely notice one feature of this dialogue, which I have not seen dissected by the critics. Faust yearns for the Infinite, at first, vaguely and indefinitely; but he gradually becomes reckless; and pronounces a withering anathema upon love, and hope, and faith, and, more than all, upon patience. Here he becomes really devilish; he treads the same path that Satan has trod before him; he becomes actually like Mephistopheles in some respects. Further on, he determines to close his ears to the problem which has vexed and harassed him so much throughout his life. He resolves to enjoy activity for the sake of activity, to forget the future of eternity, to be utterly indifferent as to whether hereafter we shall love or hate, and whether, also,

in those distant spheres there is a depth below or a height above. Here he becomes more like the great Fallen Spirit who is huxtering with him for his soul; and here Mephistopheles breaks in—“In this mood you may venture it!" A little more of this dexterous handling and Faust is confirmed in the despair of his tempter—

I

"I feel it, I have heap'd upon my brain

The gather'd treasure of man's thought in vain,
And when at length from studious toil I rest,
No power, new-born, springs up within my breast,
A hair's breadth is not added to my height,

I am no nearer to the infinite."

pass to the next scene, in which Mephistopheles, to keep his hand in, and not to lose time, while waiting for Faust, dons the Doctor's long gown, and (literally) plays the devil with the Student. The whole scene bears out Professor Masson's observation, that Mephistopheles feels a necessity for eternal activity, no matter of what sort, provided only that, it will produce as much disorder as possible in the universe. I shall only pause to notice one passage, where, it seems to me, the ancient splendour of Satan's remorse is faintly shadowed. The young Student says that he has no taste for jurisprudence as a profession. And here Mephistopheles seems to look back upon his former self, and upon the grandeur of his rebellion, when he answers with disguised bitterness :—

"Laws are a fatal heritage,—
Like a disease, an heir-loom dread;

...

Their course they trail from age to age,
And furtively abroad they spread. . . .
That thou 'rt a grandson is thy woe!
But of the law on man impress'd

By nature's hand, there's ne'er a thought."

The scene which follows, in Auerbach's Cellar in Leipsic, is to the same effect, only that here Mephistopheles has no very great object in view, and goes about his business in the spirit of aimless devilry (or "devilment") which is only worthy of himself and of the "fast" young man of modern society. Indeed, as Carlyle has suggested, there is a perfect analogy between the two characters in more points than one. Mephistopheles seems to realize an immense satisfaction in frightening a few poor creatures who are half drunk, by turning their wine into fire, and by deluding them into the dangerous hallucination that their reciprocal noses are clustering grapes, and that it would be a fine thing to use their knives upon them. In a precisely analogous spirit the "fast" youth rejoices in a tavernrow, and generally disappears, like Mephistopheles, the moment his position becomes critical. In the Witch's Kitchen Mephistopheles amuses himself at the expense of that lady by smashing her glasses and gallipots. In a similar spirit the "fast" young gentleman defaces hall-doors and demolishes windows, for no reason very obvious to the student of

human nature. But the acme of fast humanity finds its analogy in the cruel flirtation of Mephistopheles with Martha.

Another point in the character of Mephistopheles is his confirmed and habitual satire. Sarcasm is often the rage of little minds; but it is more frequently as the withered leaves of a majestic lightning-blasted tree, the decayed energy of a crushed and ruined spirit. Sarcasm (if I may make the distinction) is a grander thing than satire. The term, coming from cagnásw, to tear flesh like dogs, to bite the lips in rage, conveys a deeper moral significance than a word derived from the olio of the Romans. There was sarcasm in the Satan of Milton; majestic sarcasm in his blasphemy, like the crash of discord on a noble organ. But Mephistopheles is less sarcastic than satirical, I think. He is altogether a much smaller spirit than the ruined Archangel of Milton. He has grown shrivelled and puny in his long experience of persevering evil. There is an esoteric satire on man lurking in the song which Goethe puts into the mouth of Mephistopheles, the song beginning

"Once on a time a monarch
Possess'd a splendid flea,

The which he fondly cherish'd,

As his own son were he!"

But the blasphemy has lost its thunder, as its author has lost his sublimity. Mephistopheles has