"What, is great Mephistophilis so passionate
For being deprived of the joys of heaven?
Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude,
And scorn those joys thou never shalt possess."

Goethe's Mephistopheles near the end of the play taunts Faust in the
words, "Why dost thou seek our fellowship if thou canst not go through
with it?... Do we force ourselves on thee, or thou on us?" And one has
the feeling that, like most other things the fiend says, it is an
apparent truth which is really a lie; but it would have been entirely
true if Marlowe's devil had said it.

The Mephistopheles of Goethe is seldom solemnised at all. Once indeed on
the Harz Mountains he says--

"Naught of this genial influence do I know!
Within me all is wintry.

* * * * *

How sadly, yonder, with belated glow,
Rises the ruddy moon's imperfect round!"

Yet there it is merely by discomfort, and not by the pain and hideous
sorrow of the world surrounding him, that he is affected. He is like
Satan in the Book of Job, except that he is offering his victim luxuries
instead of pains. In the prologue in Heaven he speaks with such a jaunty
air that Professor Blackie's translation has omitted the passage as
irreverent. He is the spirit that _denies_--sceptical and cynical, the