Mephistopheles seems to say, "I would," or "I may;" Satan, "I WILL!"
Napoleon coped with destiny, and read in the stars his horoscope; and he moved on to its fulfillment as the cannon-ball which he sped, regardless of the ruin it made. Talleyrand played with men and associated with women, and, like the Vicar of Bray, by a mobility in duplicity, retained his place under every form of government. Bonaparte was more like Satan; Talleyrand, Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles copes with man, and laughs over his success in human weakness; Satan copes with God, and energizes, by his nervous oratory, the myriads of hell to rise against the Omnipresent in arms. The one shirks and dodges through life; the other rises above life, defies Death and conquers Despair.
In Mephistopheles we have a dove in gentleness, if need be; a serpent in cunning at all times; but he never rises to that lofty daring in which the heroic element consists. "But Satan's might intellectual is victorious over all extremities of pain; amid agonies unutterable, he delineates, resolves, and oven exults. Against the sword of Michael, the thunder of Jehovah, the flaming lake, and the marl burning with solid fire; against the prospect of an eternity of unintermittent misery, his spirit bears up unbroken, resting on its own innate energies, requiring no support from any thing external, nor even from hope itself!"
Satan and Mephistopheles are neither old wives' devils, such as those of Tasso and Klopstock; they are not vast, well-defined machines, munching Iscariots, like Dante's Satan; not allegorico-mystico-sophistico-metaphysical devils, like Bailey's Lucifer, hungering and thirsting after unrighteousness, and striving to reconcile good with evil, and to educe purity out of pollution.
There is a fascination both in Satan and in Mephistopheles, which belongs not to the heroes of Byron and Bailey. Byron reflects in his Lucifer his own morbid doubtings, and reviles God with a bitterness of spirit which deserves the reprobation of the good. Bailey, in his Festus, loses all regard for the properties of the diabolic, His devil falls in love in one place; in another, scolds the damned like a fish-woman, reproves his under-fiends for laziness, telling them that they
