Page:Kickerbocker Feb 1833 vol 1 no 2.djvu/21

inspection will the essential significance of the poem display itself. Perhaps it is even chiefly by following these fainter traces and tokens that the true point of vision for the whole is discovered to us; and we stand at last in the proper scene of Faust; a wild and wonderous region, where in pale light, the primeval Shapes of Chaos, as it were, the Foundations of Being itself, seem to loom forth, dim and huge, in the vague Immensity around us; and the life and nature of Man, with its brief interests, its misery and sin, its mad passion and poor frivolity, struts and frets its hour, encompassed and overlooked by that stupendous All, of which it forms an indissoluble though so mean a fraction. He who would study all this must for a long time, we are afraid, be content to study it in the original."

"Mephistopheles comes before us, not arrayed in the terrors of Cocytus and Phlegethon, but in the natural indelible deformity of wickedness; he is the Devil, not of Superstition, but of Knowledge. Here is no cloven foot, or horns and tail: he himself informs us that, during the late march of intellect, the very Devil has participated in the spirit of the age, and laid these appendages aside.^[1] Doubtless, Mephistopheles 'has the manners of a gentleman;' he 'knows the world;' nothing can exceed the easy tact with which he manages himself; his wit and sarcasm are unlimited; the cool heartfelt contempt with which he despises all things, human and divine, might make the fortune of half a dozen 'fellows about town.' Yet, withal, he is a devil in very deed; a genuine Son of Night. He calls himself the Denier, and this truly is his name; for, as Voltaire did with historical doubts, so does he with all moral appearances; settles them with a N'en croyez rien. The shrewd, all-informed intellect he has, is an attorney intellect; it can contradict, but it cannot affirm. With lynx vision, he descries at a glance the ridiculous, the unsuitable, the bad; but for the solemn, the noble, the worthy, he is blind as his ancient Mother. Thus does he go along, qualifying, confuting, despising; on all hands detecting the false, but without force to bring forth, or even to discern, any glimpse of the true, Poor Devil! what truth should there be for him? To see Falsehood is his only Truth; falsehood and evil are the rule, truth and good the exception which confirms it. He can believe in nothing, but in his own self-conceit, and in the indestructible