x CONCERNING MEPHISTOPHELES 173 



O glaube mir, der manche tausend Jahre 

 An dieser harten Speise kaut. 



His wounds are scarred over, though their memory 

 remains. Is it not natural then that he should long have 

 ceased to feel the misery of life, and long have replaced 

 it by a merely intellectual conviction, which would scarce 

 impede the pleasurable exercise of his faculties ? We are 

 often told that with a hard heart and a good digestion a 

 man can stand much : how much more a demon who 

 could certainly dispense with a heart, and probably with 

 a digestion ? And so he is not personally miserable. 

 The note of personal suffering mingles no longer with his 

 indictment of the world : nay, he may even feel relief at 

 having cast off all personal responsibility for the senseless 

 spectacle. Well may he be serene, and even gay his 

 pessimism, like his witches elixir, is very old and 

 defecated 



Das auch nicht mehr im mindsten stinkt. 



In a word, Mephisto has become a thorough intellectualist, 

 and complete intellectualism is perhaps the most diabolical 

 thing we can conceive. For to evil-doing, as to all other 

 carnal pleasures, cometh satiety at the last. But not 

 so to intellectual contemplation. To its idle curiosity 

 nothing is good, nothing evil, nothing sacred, nothing 

 shocking, but everything is food for a reflection, cold and 

 unending and unsparing. It peeps and pries upon a 

 mother s grave ; it is equally at home in Heaven and in 

 Hell. Once therefore it has judged and passed its 

 condemnation, there is no obvious reason why any 

 recrudescence of feeling should lead it to reverse its 

 verdict. 



It is this intellectualism which Gretchen has detected 

 in Mephisto, and which forms the really valid ground 

 for her otherwise thoroughly feminine dislike. Not 

 that of course we should be justified in taking Mephisto 

 altogether at her valuation. Indeed, there is a pre 

 posterous incongruity in the thought of judging the 

 cosmic spirit of negation by the feminine intuitions of a 



