, let me crave of thee,
To glut the longing of my heart's desire:
That I may have unto my paramour
That heavenly Helen which I saw of late;

and when, his prayer being granted, he cries:

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burned the topless towers of Ilium?

he is a much more splendid and significant person than the Faust of
Goethe, who needs the help of the devil and of an old woman to seduce a
young girl who has fallen in love with him at first sight. Goethe, it is
true, made what amends he could afterwards, in the Second Part, when
much of the impulse had gone and all the deliberation in the world was
not active enough to replace it. Helen has her share, among other
abstractions, but the breath has not returned into her body, she is
glacial, a talking enigma, to whom Marlowe's Faustus would never have
said with the old emphasis:

And none but thou shalt be my paramour!

What remains, then, in Wills' version, is the Gretchen story, in all its
detail, a spectacular representation of the not wholly sincere
witchcraft, and the impressive outer shell of Mephistopheles, with, in
Sir Henry Irving's pungent and acute rendering, something of the real
savour of the denying spirit. Mephistopheles is the modern devil, the
devil of culture and polite negation; the comrade, in part the master,
of Heine, and perhaps the grandson and pupil of Voltaire. On the Lyceum
stage he is the one person of distinction, the one intelligence; though
so many of his best words have been taken from him, it is with a fine
subtlety that he says the words that remain. And the figure, with its
lightness, weary grace, alert and uneasy step, solemnity, grim laughter,
remains with one, after one has come away and forgotten whether he told
us all that Goethe confided to him.

IV. THE JAPANESE PLAYERS

When I first saw the Japanese players I suddenly discovered the meaning
of Japanese art, so far as it represents human beings. You know the
scarcely human oval which represents a woman's face, with the help of a
few thin curves for eyelids and mouth. Well, that convention, as I had
always supposed it to be, that geometrical symbol of a face, turns out
to be precisely the face of the Japanese woman when she is made up. So
the monstrous entanglements of men fighting, which one sees in the
pictures, the circling of the two-handed sword, the violence of feet in
combat, are seen to be after all the natural manner of