Respecting the part which Mephistopheles performs in the drama we have already said something. Going about the world, linked to Faust, is to him only a racy way of acting the devil. Having as his companion a man so flighty in his notions did but increase the flavour of whatever he engaged in. All through he is laughing in secret at Faust, and deriving a keen enjoyment from his transcendental style of thinking. Faust’s noble qualities are all Greek and Gaelic to his cold and devilish nature. He has a contempt for all strong feeling, all sentiment, all evangelism. He enjoys the Miltonic vastly. Thus in the “Prologue in Heaven” he quizzes the Archangels about the grandiloquence of their song. Not that he does not understand that sort of thing intellectually, but that it is not in his nature to sympathize with anything like sentiment. Hence, when he assumes the sentimental himself and mimicks any lofty strain, although he does it full justice in as far as giving the whole intellectual extent of meaning is concerned, yet he always does so in words so inappropriate emotionally that the effect is a parody. He must have found amusement enough in Faust’s company to have reconciled him in some measure to losing him finally.
But to go on. Mephistopheles acts the devil all through. In the first place he acts the devil to Faust himself, for he is continually taking his own way and starting difficulties whenever Faust proposes anything. Then again in his conduct towards the other principal personages of the drama it is the same. In the murder of poor Margaret, her mother, her child, and her brother, we have as fiendish a series of acts as devil could be supposed capable of perpetrating. And, lastly, in the mere filling up and side play, it is the same. He is constantly doing unnecessary mischief. If he enters Auerbach’s wine-cellar and introduces himself to the four drinking companions, it is to set the poor brutes fighting and make them cut off each other’s noses. If he spends a few minutes in talk with Martha, it is to make the silly old woman expose her foibles. The Second Part of Faust is devilry all through, a tissue of bewilderments and devilries. And while doing all this Mephistopheles is still the same cold, self-possessed, sarcastic being. If he exhibits any emotion at all, it is a kind of devilish anger. Perhaps, too, once or twice we recognise something like terror or flurry. But on the whole he is a spirit bereft of feeling. What could indicate the heart of a devil more than his words to Faust in the harrowing prison scene?
“Komm, komm, ich lasse dich mit ihr im Stich.”
And now for a word or two describing Milton’s Satan and Goethe’s Mephistopheles by each other:—Satan is a colossal figure; Mephistopheles an elaborated portrait. Satan is a fallen Archangel scheming his future existence; Mephistopheles is the modern Spirit of Evil. Mephistopheles has a distinctly marked physiognomy; Satan has not. Satan has a sympathetic knowledge of good; Mephistopheles knows good only as a phenomenon. Much of what Satan says might be spoken by Raphael; a devilish spirit runs through all that Mephistopheles says. Satan’s bad actions are preceded by noble reasonings; Mephistopheles does not reason. Satan’s bad actions are followed by compunctious visitings; Mephistopheles never repents. Satan is often “inly racked;” Mephistopheles can feel nothing more noble than disappointment. Satan conducts an enterprise; Mephistopheles enjoys an occupation. Satan has strength of purpose; Mephistopheles is volatile. Satan feels anxiety; Mephistopheles lets things happen. Satan’s greatness lies in the vastness of his motives; Mephistopheles’s in his intimate acquaintance with everything. Satan has a few sublime conceptions; Mephistopheles has accumulated a mass of observations. Satan declaims; Mephistopheles puts in remarks. Satan is conversant with the moral aspects of things and uses adjectives; Mephistopheles has a preference for nouns, and uses adjectives only to convey significations which he knows to exist. Satan may end in being a devil; Mephistopheles is a devil irrecoverably.
Milton’s Satan and Goethe’s Mephistopheles are literary performances; and, for what they prove, neither Milton nor Goethe need have believed in a Devil at all. Luther’s Devil, on the other hand, was a being recognised by him as actually existing—as existing, one might say, with a vengeance. The strong conviction which Luther had on this point is a feature in his character. The narrative of his life abounds in anecdotes showing that the Devil with him was no chimera, no mere orthodoxy, no fiction. In every page of his writings we have the word Teufel, Teufel, repeated again and again. Occasionally there occurs an express dissertation upon the nature and functions of the Evil Spirit; and one of the longest chapters in his Table Talk is that entitled “The Devil and his Works”—indicating that his conversation with his friends often turned on the subject of Satanic agency. Teufel was actually the strongest signification he had; and, whenever he was excited to his highest emotional pitch, it came in to assist his utterance at the climax, and give him a correspondingly powerful expression. “This thing I will do,” it was common for him to say, “in spite of all who may oppose me, be it duke, emperor, priest, bishop, cardinal, pope, or Devil.” Man’s heart, he says, is a “Stock, Stein, Eisen, Teufel, hart Herz,” (“a stock, stone, iron, Devil, hard heart”). And it was not a mere vague conception he had of this being, such as theology might oblige. On the contrary, he had observed him as a man would his personal enemy, and in so doing had formed a great many conclusions respecting his powers and his character. In general, Luther’s Devil may be defined as a personification, in the spirit of Scripture, of the resisting medium which Luther had to toil his way through—spiritual fears, passionate uprisings, fainting resolutions within himself; error, weakness, envy, in those around him; and, without, a whole world howling for his destruction. It is in effect as if Luther had said, “Scripture reveals to me the existence of a great accursed Being, whose function it is to produce evil. It is for me to ascertain the character of this Being, whom I, of all men, have to deal with. And how am I to do so except by observing him working? God knows I have not far to go in search of his manifestations.” And thus Luther went on filling up the Scriptural proposition with his daily experience. He was constantly gaining a clearer conception of his great personal antagonist, constantly stumbling upon some more concealed trait in the Spirit’s character. The Being himself was invisible; but men were walking in the midst of his manifestations. It was as if there were some Being whom we could not see, nor directly in the ordinary way have any intercourse with, but who every morning, before it was light, came and left at our doors some exquisite specimen of his workmanship. It would, of course, be difficult under such disadvantages to become acquainted with the character of our invisible correspondent and nightly visitant; still we could arrive at a few conclusions respecting him, and the more of his workmanship we saw the more insight we should come to have. Or again, in striving to realize to himself the Scriptural proposition about the Devil, Luther, to speak in the language of the “Positive Philosophy,” was but striving to ascertain the laws according to which evil happens. Only the Positive Philosophy would lay a veto on any such speculation, and pronounce it fundamentally vicious in this respect—that there are not two courses of events, separable from each other, in history, the one good and the other evil, but that evil comes of good and good of evil; so that, if we are to have a science of history at all, the most we can have is a science of the laws according to which, not evil follows evil, but events follow each other. But History to Luther was not a physical course of events. It was God acting, and the Devil opposing.
So far Luther did not differ from his age. Belief in Satanic agency was universal at that period. We have no idea now how powerful this belief was. We realize something of the truth when we read the depositions in an old book of trials for witchcraft. But it is sufficient to glance over any writings of the period to see what a real meaning was then attached to the words “Hell” and “Devil.” The spirit of these words has become obsolete, chased away by the spirit of exposition. That was what M. Comte calls the Theological period, when all the phenomena of mind and matter were referred to the agency of Spirits. The going out of the belief in Satanic agency (for even those who retain it in profession allow it no force in practice) M. Comte would attribute to the progress of the spirit of that philosophy of which he is the apostle. We do not think, however, that the mere progress of the scientific spirit—that is, the mere disposition of men to pursue one mode of thinking with respect to all classes of phenomena—could have been sufficient of itself to work such an alteration in the general mind. We are fond of accounting for it, in part at least, by the going out, in the progress of civilization, of those sensations which seem naturally fitted to nourish the belief in supernatural beings. The tendency of civilization has been to diminish our opportunities of feeling terror, of feeling strongly at all. The horrific plays a much less important part in human experience than it once did. To mention but a single instance: we are exempted now, by mechanical contrivances for locomotion, &c., from the necessity of being much in darkness or wild physical solitude. This is especially the case with those who dwell in cities, and therefore exert most conspicuously an intellectual influence. The moaning of the wind at night in winter is about their highest experience of the kind; and is it not a corroboration of the view now suggested that the belief in the supernatural is always strongest at the moment of this experience? Scenes and situations our ancestors were in every day are strange to us. We have not now to travel through forests at the dead of night, nor to pass a lonely spot on a moor where a murderer’s body is swinging from a gibbet. Tam o’ Shanter, even before he came to Allowa’ Kirk, saw more than many of us see in a life-time.
“By this time he was ’cross the ford
Whaur in the snaw the chapman smoored,
And past the birks and muckle stane
Whaur drunken Charlie brak’s neck-bane,
And through the whins and by the cairn
Whaur hunters fand the murdered bairn,
And near the thorn aboon the well
Whaur Mungo’s mither hanged hersel’.”
This effect of civilization in reducing all our sensations to those of comfort is a somewhat alarming circumstance in the point of view we are now taking. It is necessary, for many a reason, to resist the universal application of the “Positive Philosophy,” even if we adopt and adore it as an instrument of explication. The “Positive Philosophy” commands us to forbear all speculation into the inexplicable. For the sake of many things this order must be disregarded. Speculation into the metaphysical is the invariable accompaniment of strong feeling; and the moral nature of man would starve upon such chopped straw as the mere intellectual relations of similitude and succession. Nor does it meet the demands of the case to say that the “Positive Philosophy” would be always far in arrear of the known phenomena, and that here would be mystery enough. No! the “Positive Philosophy” would require to strike a chasm in itself under the title of the Liberty of Hypothesis. We do not mean the liberty of hypothesis merely as a means of anticipating theory, but for spiritual and imaginative purposes. It is in this light that one would welcome Animal Magnetism, or any thing else whatever that would but knock a hole through the paper wall that incloses our mode of being, snub the self-conceit of our present knowledge, and give us other and more difficult phenomena to explain.