Byron took up this strain, and tried to handle it similarly, but he had less humor than spleen. His devil drove with him into London, visited the booksellers, the Lords and Commons, and found so much geniality, that he went back delighted to his meal of homicides done in ragoût, and a rebel or two in an Irish stew, and sausages made of a self-slain Jew.
But no author has combined, in this jolly devil, such a variety of diabolic attributes as Goethe. It was necessary that life be exhibited in all its phases, and to omit laughter would have been a sad deprivation. Having bound Faust in a contract signed with his own blood, he runs with him the round of transient joy, takes him through the racking experiences of love, hampers his mind with denial, harrows it with doubt, proves to him the emptiness of pleasure, and drives him to despair, and would drive us also, but for the heavenly vision of Margaret, whose life, like the prayers of Dante's Beatrice, buoy the soul upward to the Source of Love and Light! whose life leaps from the dark drama like a silver cascade from a gloomy Alpine gorge, white in purity, spanned by the iris of Hope, and singing like a seraph of Joy.
The Satan of Milton is so familiar that it needs no analysis in order to compare him with this sneering skeptic of Goethe. The former is epical, the latter dramatic. The former is a higher reach of genius. It is transcendental. The Satan of Milton, like the witches of Macbeth or the Tempest, is supernatural. The scenery and conduct belongs not to our sphere, the earth. Mephistopheles is entirely at home among men. The Satan of Milton is vast, vague, uncertain, "floating many a rood;" a conception, not a form of matter; a shadowy phantom towering sublime like Teneriffe, with features scarred with the thunder of God's vengeance. Mephistopheles is a worldling, a changeling, a schemer, with no very determinate means, but takes any to a bad end.
Change measures, and by novelty prevail."
The Satan of Milton in intellectual massiveness is only equalled by his moral obliquity. He embodies a will more than Promethean.
