Shadows of the Stage | Page 8

the Furies was long ago selected as the typical image of supreme
anguish and immitigable suffering; but Orestes is less a lamentable
figure than Faust--fortified though he is, and because he is, with the
awful but malign, treacherous, and now impotent sovereignty of hell.
To deaden his sensibility, destroy his conscience, and harden him in
evil the Fiend leads him into a mad revel of boundless profligacy and
bestial 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