Shadows of the Stage | Page 8

riot--denoted by the beautiful and terrible scene upon the Brocken--and poor Margaret is abandoned to her shame, her wandering, her despair, her frenzy, her crime, and her punishment. This desertion, though, is procured by a stratagem of the Fiend and does not proceed from the design of her lover. The expedient of Mephistopheles, to lull his prey by dissipations, is a failure. Faust finds them "tasteless," and he must return to Margaret. He finds her in prison, crazed and dying, and he strives in vain to set her free. There is a climax, whereat, while her soul is borne upward by angels he--whose destiny must yet be fulfilled--is summoned by the terrible voice of Satan. This is the substance of what is shown; but if the gaze of the observer pierces beyond this, if he is able to comprehend that terrific but woeful image of the fallen angel, if he perceives what is by no means obscurely intimated, that Margaret, redeemed and beatified, cannot be happy unless her lover also is saved, and that the soul of Faust can only be lost through the impossible contingency of being converted into the likeness of the Fiend, he will understand that a spectacle has been set before him more august, momentous, and sublime than any episode of tragical human love could ever be.
Henry Irving, in his embodiment of Mephistopheles, fulfilled the conception of the poet in one essential respect and transcended it in another. His performance, superb in ideal and perfect in execution, was a great work--and precisely here was the greatness of it. Mephistopheles as delineated by Goethe is magnificently intellectual and sardonic, but nowhere does he convey even a faint suggestion of the god-head of glory from which he has lapsed. His own frank and clear avowal of himself leaves no room for doubt as to the limitation intended to be established for him by the poet. I am, he declares, the spirit that perpetually denies. I am a part of that part which once was all--a part of that darkness out of which came the light. I repudiate all things--because everything that has been made is unworthy to exist and ought to be destroyed, and therefore it is better that nothing should ever have been made. God dwells in splendour, alone and eternal, but his spirits he thrusts into darkness, and man, a poor creature fashioned to poke his nose into filth, he sportively dowers with day and night. My province is evil; my existence is mockery; my pleasure and my purpose are destruction. In a word, this Fiend, towering to the loftiest summit of cold intellect, is the embodiment of cruelty, malice, and scorn, pervaded and interfused with grim humour. That ideal Mr. Irving made actual. The omniscient craft and deadly malignity of his impersonation, swathed in a most specious humour at some moments (as, for example, in Margaret's bedroom, in the garden scene with Martha, and in the duel scene with Valentine) made the blood creep and curdle with horror, even while they impressed the sense of intellectual power and stirred the springs of laughter. But if you rightly saw his face, in the fantastic, symbolical scene of the Witch's Kitchen; in that lurid moment of sunset over the quaint gables and haunted spires of Nuremburg, when the sinister presence of the arch-fiend deepened the red glare of the setting sun and seemed to bathe this world in the ominous splendour of hell; and, above all, if you perceived the soul that shone through his eyes in that supremely awful moment of his predominance over the hellish revel upon the Brocken, when all the hideous malignities of nature and all those baleful "spirits which tend on mortal consequence" are loosed into the aerial abyss, and only this imperial horror can curb and subdue them, you knew that this Mephistopheles was a sufferer not less than a mocker; that his colossal malignity was the delirium of an angelic spirit thwarted, baffled, shattered, yet defiant; never to be vanquished; never through all eternity to be at peace with itself. The infinite sadness of that face, the pathos, beyond words, of that isolated and lonely figure--those are the qualities that irradiated all its diversified attributes of mind, humour, duplicity, sarcasm, force, horror, and infernal beauty, and invested it with the authentic quality of greatness. There is no warrant for this treatment of the part to be derived from Goethe's poem. There is every warrant for it in the apprehension of this tremendous subject by the imagination of a great actor. You cannot mount above the earth, you cannot transcend the ordinary line of the commonplace, as a mere sardonic image of self-satisfied, chuckling obliquity. Mr. Irving embodied Mephistopheles not as a man but as a spirit, with all that the