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As the young fry of clerks looked at this man playing bowls in the gardens of the ministry with the minister's children, they cracked their brains to guess the secret of his influence and the nature of his services; while, on the other hand, the aristocrats in all the various ministries looked upon him as a dangerous Mephistopheles, courted him, and gave him back with usury the flatteries he bestowed in the higher sphere.
For all lives freely within him: Philina and Clanchen, Mephistopheles and Mignon, are alike indifferent, or alike dear to him; he is of no sect or caste: he seems not this man or that man, but a man. We reckon this to be the characteristic of a Master in Art of any sort; and true especially of all great Poets. How true is it of Shakespeare and Homer!
I know you of old, you miserable, mocking Mephistopheles! you sneerer, you scoffer, you misbeliever! No more of that, or I will travel three hundred miles expressly to break your head. Take a glass of claret, Bob, and be true to your better nature; for I suppose you have a better nature packed away somewhere, if one could but get at it.
It was, we said, a good world, and I, simpleton, pretty and dainty as Margaret was, deemed it would go on forever. But, alas! one day came a Faust into our garden, a good Faust, with no friend Mephistopheles, and took Margaret from me. It is but a month since they were married, and the rice still lingers in the crevices of the pathway down to the quaint old iron-work gate.
"It is a great mistake to figure Mephistopheles as a rather blasé brunette," she remarked crisply. "I am absolutely certain that if you could catch the devil without his mask you'd find him a perfect blonde." "Nietzsche's blonde beast, then?" suggested Laurence, amused at her manner. "That same blonde beast is perhaps the most magnificent of animals," I put in.
"With Lady Constance Tremaine," finished Lady Merivale, in a low voice, from which all attempt at disguise had gone. Mephistopheles nodded again. "You have guessed aright, my lady," he said. "See! there they are together. A handsome pair; an admirable match. Yet it is sad to think " He stopped again. "What?" cried Lady Merivale, grasping his scarlet-clad arm in a fierce grip. "It will never be!"
Everything had gone well with him! Such was the City report of old Mr. Bertram. But let the reader say how much, or rather how little, had gone well. Faustus-like, he had sold himself to a golden Mephistopheles, and his Margaret had turned to stone within his embrace. How many of us make Faust's bargain! The bodily attendance of the devil may be mythical; but in the spirit he is always with us.
Of course, Chopin is as little successful in entirely hiding his serpentining and chromaticising tendency as Mephistopheles in hiding the limp arising from his cloven foot. Still, these fallings out of the role are rare and transient, and, on the whole, Chopin presents himself as a perfect homme du monde who knows how to say the most insignificant trifles with the most exquisite grace imaginable.
He is a calm Mephistopheles, with perfect manners, grace, variety, and an exquisite urbanity; and Mephisto is a clever jeweler; and this jeweler is a subtle musician; and this fine singer and storyteller, with his amber-like delicacy and brilliancy, is making mock of us all the while.
Also that Mephistopheles is as inexhaustible as a type of evil as Faust is as a type of virtue, and therefore that this picturesque stage devil, with all his conventionality, is akin to the serpent which tempted Eve, the Thersites of Homer, and mirabile dictu! the Falstaff of Shakespeare!
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