See him as Mephistopheles in "Faust." The Lyceum
performance was a superb pantomime, with one overpowering figure
drifting through it and in some sort directing it, the red-plumed devil
Mephistopheles, who, in Sir Henry Irving's impersonation of him, becomes
a kind of weary spirit, a melancholy image of unhappy pride, holding
himself up to the laughter of inferior beings, with the old
acknowledgment that "the devil is an ass." A head like the head of
Dante, shown up by coloured lights, and against chromolithographic
backgrounds, while all the diabolic intelligence is set to work on the
cheap triumph of wheedling a widow and screwing Rhenish and Tokay with a
gimlet out of an inn table: it is partly Goethe's fault, and partly the
fault of Wills, and partly the lowering trick of the stage.
Mephistopheles is not really among Irving's great parts, but it is among
his picturesque parts. With his restless strut, a blithe and aged
tripping of the feet to some not quite human measure, he is like some
spectral marionette, playing a game only partly his own. In such a part
no mannerism can seem unnatural, and the image with its solemn mask
lives in a kind of galvanic life of its own, seductively, with some
mocking suggestion of his "cousin the snake.
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