e 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 word implies, and in
doing that he not only heeded the