order of the king Frederick William IV, he illustrated the works of Frederick the Great, Illustrationen zu den Werken Friedrichs des Grossen (1843–1849). By these works Menzel established his claim to be considered one of the first, if not actually the first, of the illustrators of his day in his own line. Meanwhile Menzel had set himself to study unaided the art of painting, and he soon produced a great number and variety of pictures, always showing keen observation and honest workmanship—subjects dealing with the life and achievements of Frederick the Great, and scenes of everyday life, such as “In the Tuileries,” “The Ball Supper,” and “At Confession.” Among the most important of these works are “The Forge” (1875) and “The Market-place at Verona.” Invited to paint “The Coronation of William I. at Koenigsberg,” he produced an exact representation of the ceremony without regard to the traditions of official painting. Menzel died at Berlin on the 9th of February 1905. In Germany he received many honours, and was the first painter to be given the order of the Black Eagle.
MENZEL, WOLFGANG (1798–1873), German poet, critic and
literary historian, was born on the 21st of June 1798, at Waldenburg
in Silesia, studied at Breslau, Jena and Bonn, and after
living for some time in Aarau and Heidelberg finally settled in
Stuttgart, where, from 1830 to 1838, he had a seat in the Württemberg
Diet. His first work, a clever and original volume of
poems, entitled Streckverse (Heidelberg, 1823), was followed in
1824–1825 by a popular Geschichte der Deutschen in three volumes
and in 1829 and 1830 by Rübezahl and Narcissus, the dramatized
fairy-stories upon which his reputation as a poet chiefly rests.
In 1851 he published the romance of Furore, a lively picture of
the period of the Thirty Years’ War; his other writings include
Geschichte Europas, 1789–1815 (2 vols. Stuttgart, 1853), and
histories of the German War of 1866 and of the Franco-German
War of 1870–71. From 1826 to 1848 Menzel edited a “Literaturblatt "
in connexion with the Morgenblatt; in the latter year
he transferred his allegiance from the Liberal to the Conservative
party, and in 1852 his “Literaturblatt” was revived in that
interest. In 1866 his political sympathies again changed, and
he opposed the “particularism” of the Prussian “junkers”
and the anti-unionism of south Germany. He died on the 23rd
of April 1873 at Stuttgart. His library of 18,000 volumes was
afterwards acquired for the university of Strassburg.
MENZELINSK, a town of eastern Russia, in the government
of Ufa, 142 m. N.W. of the town of Ufa, and 10 m. from the left
bank of the Kama. Pop. (1897), 7542. Its fair is one of the
most important in the southern Ural region for cattle, hides, furs,
grain, tea, manufactured articles, crockery, &c., which are sold
to the annual value of £500,000. The town was founded in 1584.
MEPHISTOPHELES,[1] in the Faust legend, the name of the evil spirit in return for whose assistance Faust signs away his
soul. The origin of the conception and name of Mephistopheles
has been the subject of much learned debate. In Dr Fausts
Höllenzwang “Mephistophiel” is one of the seven great princes
of hell; “he stands under the planet Jupiter, his regent is named
Zadkiel, an enthroned angel of the holy Jehovah . . .; his form
is firstly that of a fiery bear, the other and fairer appearance is as
of a little man with a black cape and a bald head.” The origin
of the idea of Mephistopheles in Faust’s mind is thus clear. He
was one of the evil demons of the seven planets, the Maskim of
the ancient Akkadian religion, a conception transmitted through
the Chaldeans, the Babylonians and the Jewish Kabbala to
medieval and modern astrologers and magicians. This fact
suggests a plausible theory of the origin of the name. In the
ancient Mesopotamian religion the Intelligence of Jupiter was
Marduk, “the lord of light,” whose antithesis was accordingly
conceived as the lord of darkness. Mephistopheles, then (or
rather Mephostophiles, as the Faust-books spell the name) is
“he who does not love light” (Gr. μή, φῶς, φίλης).[2]
To Faust himself, somnambulist and medium, Mephistopheles had—according to Kiesewetter—a real existence: he was “the objectivation of the transcendental subject of Faust,” an experience familiar in dreams and, more especially, in the visions of mediums and clairvoyants. He was thus a “familiar spirit,” akin to the “daemon” of Socrates; and if he was also half the devil of theology, half the kobold of old German myth, this was only because such “objectivations” are apt to clothe themselves in forms borrowed from the common stock of ideas current at the time when the seer lives; and Faust lived in an age obsessed with the fear of the devil, and by no means sceptical of the existence of kobolds. It is suggested, then, in the light of modern psychical research, that Mephistopheles, though (as the Faust-books record) invisible to any one else, was visible enough to Faust himself and to Wagner, the famulus who shared his somnambulistic experiences. He was simply Faust’s “other self,” appearing in various guises—as a bear, as a little bald man, as a monk, as an invisible presence ringing a bell—but always recognizable as the same “familiar.”
The Mephostophiles of the Faust-books and the puppet plays passed with little or no modification into literature as the Mephistophilis of Marlowe’s Faustus. Mephistophilis has the kobold qualities: he not only waits upon Faustus and provides him with sumptuous fare; he indulges in horse-play and is addicted to practical joking of a homely kind. He is, however, also the devil, as the age of the Reformation conceived him: a fallen angel who has not forgotten the splendour of his first estate, and who pictures to Faust the glories of heaven, in order to accentuate the horrors of the hell to which he triumphantly drags him. Goethe’s Mephistopheles is altogether another conception. Some of the traditional qualities are indeed preserved: the practical joke, for instance, in the scene in Auerbach’s Keller shows that he has not altogether shed his character as kobold; and, like the planet-spirits of the old magic he appears alternately in animal and human shape. He is also identified with the devil; thus, in accordance with old German tradition, he is dressed as a nobleman (ein edler Junker), all in red, with a little cape of stiff silk, a cock’s feather in his hat, and a long pointed sword; at the witches’ Sabbath on the Brocken he is hailed as “the knight with the horse’s hoof,” and Sybel in Auerbach’s Keller is not too drunk not to notice that he limps. But his limp is the only indication that he is Lucifer fallen from heaven. He could not, like Marlowe’s Mephistophilis or Milton’s Satan, regretfully paint the glories of the height from which he has been hurled; for he denies the distinction between high and low, since “everything that comes into being deserves to be destroyed.”[3] He is, in short, not the devil of Christian orthodoxy, a spirit conscious of the good against which he is in revolt, but akin to the Evil Principle of the older dualistic systems, with their conception of the eternal antagonism between good and evil, light and darkness, creation and destruction. (See Faust.) (W. A. P.)
MEPPEL, a town in the province of Drente, Holland, 1612 m. by
rail N. by E. of Zwolle. Pop. (1903), 10,470. It is favourably
situated at the confluence of a number of canals and rivers which communicate hence with the Zuider Zee by the Meppeler Diep, and rose rapidly into prominence in the 19th century. The chief
business is in butter, eggs, cattle and pigs, while bleaching, dyeing and shipbuilding are also carried on here.
MEQUINEZ (the Spanish form of the Arabic Miknasa), a city of Morocco, situated 1600 ft. above the sea, about 70 m. from the west coast and 36 m. W.S.W. of Fez, on the road to Rabat, in 33° 56′ N., 5° 50′ W. The town wall with its four-cornered towers is pierced by nine gates, one, the Báb Bardain, with fine tile-work. A lower wall of wider circuit protects the luxuriant gardens in the outskirts. Mequinez at a distance appears a city of palaces, but it possesses few buildings of any note except the palace and the mosque of Mulai Ismail, which serves as the royal burying-place. The palace, founded in 1634, was described in 1821 by John Windus in his Journey to Mequinez (London 1825) as “about 4 m. in circumference, the whole building exceeding massy, and the walls in every part very thick; the outward one about a mile long and 25 ft. thick.” The interior is composed of oblong court-yards surrounded by buildings and arcades. These buildings are more or less square with pyramidal roofs ornamented outside with green glazed tiles, and inside with
- ↑ In the Faustbuch of 1587 it is spelt Miphostophiles; by Marlowe Mephistophilis; by Shakespeare (Merry Wives of Windsor, Act i.) Mephostophilus. The form Mephistopheles adopted by Goethe first appears in the version des Christlich Meinenden, c. 1712.
- ↑ Kiesewetter, p. 163. To Schröer this derivation seems improbable, and he appears to prefer that from Hebrew Mephiz, destroyer, and tophel, liar (Faust, ed. 1886, i. 25), which is certainly supported by the fact that almost all the names of devils in the magic-books of the 16th century are derived from the Hebrew.
- ↑ Alles was entsteht ist werth dass es zu Grunde geht.
