"Mephistopheles" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is to be found the salon, known as the "blue salon," once hallowed by the occupancy of M. de Talleyrand. The window is still pointed out at which the eminent diplomatist used to sit surveying the crowds that thronged the Boulevards, with his usual fine and cynical smile, like a Mephistopheles of the nineteenth century. A little later, and one has a vision of a young man of short stature, elegantly dressed, who every day or two rides up to door or window, springs from his horse, calls for a particular kind of ice, which he imbibes with a sort of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... in the dusk of the evening, and looking out over the green pasture to where the nigher hills ceased and the distant seemed to come immediately after, their distance only indicated by color, though the whole Ohio "bottom" was between, she forgot the Mephistopheles who sat not far away, and dreamed of August, the "grand," as she fancifully called him. And he let her sit and dream undisturbed for a long time, until the darkness settled down upon the hills. Then ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... which to prefer him. As the noisy, lively, mischievous urchen in the Gamin de Paris, and as the griping old miser in the Fille de l'Avare, he is equally excellent. His countenance is remarkable. A clever critic has said of him, that he has the physiognomy of a Mephistopheles and the eye of an angel. The observation is singularly happy. There is something Mephistophelian in the curve of his nose, and in the lines around his mouth. His command of expression is extraordinary; his eyes, especially, alternately flash fire and grow dim with melancholy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... written the greater part of a novel. This book, written under the influence of his youthful embarrassments, amatory and pecuniary, was of a very fierce, gloomy, and passionate sort,—the Byronic despair, the Wertherian despondency, the mocking bitterness of Mephistopheles of Faust, were all reproduced and developed in the character of the hero; for our youth had just been learning the German language, and imitated, as almost all clever lads do, his favourite poets and writers. Passages in the volumes once so loved, and now read so seldom, ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... History of the United States, Vol. 2, p. 180. "Pickering and Griswold could win their game only by bartering their souls; they must invoke the Mephistopheles of politics, Aaron Burr. To this they had made up their minds from the beginning. Burr's four years of office were drawing to a close. He had not a chance of regaining a commanding place among Republicans, for he was bankrupt ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... applied externally (as when rubbed upon boots) attracts dogs by its smell. Grant saw a young chimpanzee throw itself into convulsions of terror at the sight of a large snake; and even among ourselves a Gretchen can often detect a Mephistopheles. An insect of the genius bombyx will seize another of the genus parnopaea, and kill it wherever it finds it, without making any subsequent use of the body; but we know that the last-named insect lies in wait for the eggs ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... God and tempted and ruined man, not out of hatred to him, hardly out of envy; but in mere sport, as a cruel child may torment an insect;—in one word, a scorner. And so true was his conception felt to be, that men of that character are now often called by the very name which he gave to his Satan—Mephistopheles. Beware therefore of the scornful spirit, as well as of the openly sinful or of the ungodly. If you wish to learn the law of the Lord, keep your souls pious, pure, reverent, and earnest; for it is only the pure in heart who shall see God; and only those who do God's ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... nothing devilish which it has not represented. And this part of art is often of the highest aesthetic merit. Velasquez's pictures of dwarfs and degenerate princes are as artistic as Raphael's Madonnas; Goethe's Mephistopheles is one of his supreme artistic achievements; Shakespeare is as successful artistically in his delineation of Lady Macbeth as of Desdemona. Now for us who claim that the purpose of art must be divined from the actual practice of artists, from the inside, and ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... drawing of destiny in the shape of Mephistopheles playing at chess with man for his soul, a game in which we may imagine the clever adversary making a feint of unintended moves so as to set the beguiled mortal on carrying his defensive pieces away from the true ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... versification, condensed in thought, tainted in matter, evincing a cankered more than a caustic spirit, and producing an effect at once indecent and inhuman. To prove that this scourging of villany, which would have put Mephistopheles to the blush, was inspired by no respect for virtue, he soon followed it up with a poem so licentious that, before it was circulated to any extent, it was suppressed by order of Archbishop Whitgift, and nearly all the copies destroyed. A writer ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... strokes of the brush a painter could have so altered the expression of this face, that what had been a serene representation of the Eternal Father should change to the sneering mask of a Mephistopheles; for though sovereign power was revealed by the forehead, mocking folds lurked about the mouth. He must have sacrificed all the joys of earth, as he had crushed all human sorrows beneath his potent will. ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... to his memory." We can see the whole scene at a glance, the stolid unconsciousness of Sancho and the perplexity of his master, upon whose perception the incongruity has just forced itself. This is Sancho's mission throughout the book; he is an unconscious Mephistopheles, always unwittingly making mockery of his master's aspirations, always exposing the fallacy of his ideas by some unintentional ad absurdum, always bringing him back to the world of fact and commonplace by force ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... untumbled. The happy simp prefers a 4 per cent that pays to a 15 per cent investment that returns only engraved prospectuses. He stands on that street corner looking for an imaginary angel parachuting down, and enjoys himself more than the Mephistopheles who is laughing up ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... in it with Dolly every Sunday. When he arrives to a certain point in a certain highway, where the road is smooth and hard, and undulates up and down like a Coney Island chute for many miles, he leans forward and puts his chin close to the back of the chauffeur, who is French, and looks like Mephistopheles. ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... lying-in-wait sort of expression conceivable. His mouth is alive with a kind of working and impatient nervousness; and when he has burst forth as he does constantly with a particularly successful cataract of expression, it assumes a curl of triumphant scorn that would be worthy of Mephistopheles. His hair is as extraordinary as his taste in waistcoats. A thick, heavy mass of jet-black ringlets falls on his left cheek almost to his collarless stock, which on the right temple is parted and put away with the smooth carefulness of a girl." A lady who met him at dinner described him ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... admitted them, the other by a window from floor to ceiling. And this window was in two great sheets of ruby glass, so that Pocket looked down red-hot iron steps into a crimson garden, and therefrom to his companion dyed from head to foot like Mephistopheles. ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... a little later, after the publication of the Reminiscences, Blackwood denounced the "old man eloquent" as "a blatant impostor, who speaks as if he were the only person who knew good from bad. ... Every one and every thing dealt with in his History is treated in the tone of a virtuous Mephistopheles." The World remarks that Carlyle has been made to pay the penalty of a posthumous depreciation for a factitious fame; "but the game of venomous recrimination was begun by himself.... There is little that is ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... quite powerless. For he knew the guard of the train would jeer too. It is not so easy to interfere with honest third-class Bolognesi in Bologna station, even if they have taken another man's seat. Powerless, his brow knitted, and looking just like Mephistopheles with his high forehead and slightly arched nose, Mephistopheles in a rage, he hauled down Aaron's bag and handed it to Angus. So they transferred themselves to the first-class carriage, while the fat man and his party in the third-class watched in jeering, triumphant silence. Solid, ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... of Eversleigh, when that sallow-faced surgeon is his partner at whist, or hangs about his chair at ecarte," said one of the officers in Reginald Eversleigh's regiment. "It's my opinion that black-eyed Frenchman is Mephistopheles in person. I never saw a countenance that so fully realized my idea of ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... difficult to describe it. He seemed to experience a feeling of satisfaction and triumph at the revelations the woman had made; added to which was something that might be termed shrewd; ironical, and derisive. In fact, his face bore no bad resemblance to that of Mephistopheles, as represented in Retsch's powerful conception and delineation of it in his illustration of Goethe's "Faust," so inimitably translated by ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... that blue stuff on your face." (He was made up for Mephistopheles.) Then, after a pause, "But why—why don't you take it!" She was only five years old at ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... lace collar, and absurd little puffed sleeves. The Englishman was a Puritan, his daughter a Quakeress, Mr. Johnson a Huguenot Lover, Miss Emmeline a Colonial Lady, Doctor Geddes a bearded and belted Boyar, and The Author a painfully realistic Mephistopheles, his eyebrows corked upward and his mustache waxed into points. Mr. Jelnik ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... Massacre of the Bishop of Liege," and similar subjects. Goethe in his conversations with Eckerman expressed great admiration of Delacroix's interpretations of scenes in "Faust" (the brawl in Auerbach's cellar, and the midnight ride of Faust and Mephistopheles to deliver Margaret from prison). Goethe hoped that the French artist would go on and reproduce the whole of "Faust," and especially the sorceress' kitchen and the scenes on the Brocken. Other painters of the romantic school were Camille ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... had "neither time nor inclination" for reply, and that a mutual understanding with Loofs was impossible because their scientific views were entirely different. Could anything be more suggestive of the words of Mephistopheles: ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... mal-odor, in mere zero to you and to every one, even to the rotting bodies themselves:—is there any wise Editor that would connect himself with that? These are the fields of History which are to be, so soon as humanly possible, SUPPRESSED; which only Mephistopheles, or the bad Genius of Mankind, can contemplate ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Indian records. They are, especially those which are from the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot, inspired with a genial cosmopolite humor. While Glooskap is always a gentleman, Lox ranges from Punch to Satan; passing through the stages of an Indian Mephistopheles and the Norse Loki, who appears to have been his true progenitor. But neither is quite like anything to be found among really savage races. When it is borne in mind that the most ancient and mythic of these legends ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... fallen to the lowest degree of disrepute in the theater. The actors of mimes ridiculing Jupiter's gallant adventures did not believe in their reality any more than the author of Faust believed in the compact with Mephistopheles. ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... Phillis, Dolly, and myself: Dilly and Dicky were to follow, and Robin had preceded us by two days—was met at the station by an informal but influential little deputation, consisting of Mr Cash, my agent, a single-minded creature who would cheerfully have done his best to get Mephistopheles returned as member if he had been officially appointed to further that gentleman's interests; old Colonel Vincey, who would as cheerfully have voted for the same candidate provided he wore Conservative colours; Mr Bugsley, a leading linen-draper and ex-Mayor of the town, vice-chairman ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... expression conceivable. His mouth is alive with a kind of impatient nervousness, and when he has burst forth with a particularly successful cataract of expression, it assumes a curl of triumphant scorn that would be worthy of Mephistopheles. A thick, heavy mass of jet-black ringlets falls over his left cheek almost to his collarless stock, while on the right temple it is parted and put away with the smooth carefulness of a girl's, and shines most unctuously ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... so exquisite, that all Europe, nay, the Pope would be inflamed to behold them. The passage is omitted, though worthy of the satiric vein of Mephistopheles. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... unknown to serious-minded antiquity, although they originated in classic Italy. It is the grotesque, lastly, which, colouring the same drama with the fancies of the North and of the South in turn, exhibits Sganarelle capering about Don Juan and Mephistopheles crawling about Faust. ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... principles and passions; it does not see the phenomena of earth in heavenly or logical relations, does not transform life into art, and is a panorama, but not a picture. So long as man and heroism and strife endure, shall Achilles, Godfrey, Satan, and Mephistopheles be types; for they are artistic expressions of essential and historical realities. But though the beck of curiosity lead us through the labyrinthine plot of a novel, long as Gibbon's way through the Dark Ages, yet, when we have finished it, the bubble collapses, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... uniform binding in sets Moods Work Hospital Sketches A Modern Mephistopheles and A Whisper in the Dark 4 volumes ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... the "Orphee," most splendid. An opera of "Faust," a very sad and noble rendering of that sad and noble story. Stage management remarkable for some admirable, and really poetical, effects of light. In the more striking situations, Mephistopheles surrounded by an infernal red atmosphere of his own. Marguerite by a pale blue mournful light. The two never blending. After Marguerite has taken the jewels placed in her way in the garden, a weird evening draws on, and ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... powerless to reveal the torments of the imprisoned in a modern steel inquisition, rocking and pitching at the mercy of mighty torrents in a mid-ocean cyclone. Mephistopheles, seeking severest punishment for the damned, displayed tenderness in not adopting the super-heated and sooted pits where stokers in storms at sea are forced to ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... through the world, familiar with the ways of princes and peers, priests and peasants, travelling in many lands, exhausting the resources of art and learning, seeing through the sins and shams and sorrows of life, and laughing at everything, like a good-natured, large-hearted Mephistopheles. But he had never learned the true philosophy of joyousness in the sincere love of nature, the deep phases of humanity, and the affluence and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... trenches is a far cry, and Ares, God of Battles, may well yawn at the entertainment with which the Demon of War is providing him. But the spectator of this grim "revue" lacks something of the patience of its creator, and our Mephistopheles, marking the god's protest, will doubtless hurry the scene and diversify it with new devilries to restore his interest. Indeed, that has happened ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... instantly relieved, for the voice was that of his revered chief, Mr. Broby, who, he now recollected, was to figure at the masquerade as Mephistopheles. Behind him peeped forth the faces of his two daughters, one as Morning and the ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... some germ of good to be loved, some fragment of beauty to be admired. The mother washes and decks out the dirty or careless child, but no one can ask her to wash and deck out a goblin with a heart like hell. No one can kill the fatted calf for Mephistopheles. The cause which is blocking all progress today is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are revolutionaries, if the world is evil ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... toward Berenice, meditating, as he was, a course which should be destructive to Braxmar, was gentle, courteous, serenely thoughtful. Like a true Mephistopheles he was waiting, surveying Mrs. Carter and Berenice, who were seated in front chairs clad in such exotic draperies as opera-goers affect—Mrs. Carter in pale-lemon silk and diamonds; Berenice in purple and old-rose, with a jeweled comb in her hair. ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... nice protector of outraged national rights!!! Thus Richard, Duke of Gloucester, appears with prayer-book and rosary on the terrace of the castle, thus Mephistopheles dons the mask of lawyer and philosopher, thus Iscariot kisses the Saviour.—"My German Fatherland," by PASTOR TOLZIEN, quoted in ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... board of a man-of-war. Having no name, it was necessary to christen him on the ship's books, and the first lieutenant, who had entered him, struck with his remarkable expression of countenance, and being a German scholar, had named him Mephistopheles Faust, from whence his Christian name had been razed to Mesty. Mesty in other points was an eccentric character; at one moment, when he remembered his lineage, he was proud to excess, at others he was grave and almost sullen—but when nothing ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... glide noiselessly from scene to scene, a whisper here, a look there, and perhaps a shrug of the shoulder or scarcely perceptible motion of the hand; yet, all through, it would be evident that he was the snake on two legs, the anointed Mephistopheles, the intellect without the feeling—and, with all that, he could not be the hero of a play. Or, if he was made the hero, he would be changed from the quiet self-contained character I have supposed him, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... easy way to convince yourself, my dear Von Hamner," replied Hendry, with a slight shrug of his shoulders. "Suppose you go and interview this modern Mephistopheles yourself?" ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... thick with blossom in the hot sun. Yes! the world had the heart to go on, to bud and build, and sing,—though Jenny was gone. And in that bright spring, see horrible and useless age still hobbling out into the beam! What was life but one huge Mephistopheles laugh beneath the windows of ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... continued Tomsky, "is a romantic character; he has the profile of a Napoleon and the heart of a Mephistopheles. It is said he has at least three crimes on his conscience. But how pale ...
— The Queen Of Spades - 1901 • Alexander Sergeievitch Poushkin
... another disciple of the same school: he inspires me with the strongest antipathy I ever felt for a human being. Insignificant and disagreeable is his appearance, he looks as if all the bile under heaven had found its way into his complexion, and all the infernal irony of a Mephistopheles into his turned-up nose and insolent curled lip. He is, he says he is, an atheist, a materialist, a sensualist: the pains he takes to deprave and degrade his nature, render him so disgusting, that I could not even speak in his presence; ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... who insisted upon his own 'dasturi' as well. Here a famished cat crouched over a pile of garbage hard by the sweeper's 'gali'; there on the opposite side of the road a Marwadi with the features of Mephistopheles dozed over his account book; and a little further away a naked child was dipping her toes in a pool of sullage water that had dripped from the broken pipe athwart the house wall. Darkness reigned on the upper floors. At intervals a faint ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... Marguerite's prison, Mephistopheles sang, and the orchestra imitated the gallop of ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... hoping will be soon changed. So long, however, as the deadly liquor is sold in almost every store and cabin, the cause of disturbances will remain, and men's active brains, continually fired with poison as they are, will concoct schemes diabolical enough to shame a Mephistopheles. ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... Prometheus Unbound that "the character of Satan engenders in the mind a pernicious casuistry, which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs, and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure." Goethe's Mephistopheles is less dignified than Milton's Satan, but he is full of energy and intellect, and if Faust eventually escapes from his clutches it is only by a miracle. At any rate, Mephistopheles is not an object ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... acquire this knowledge and the resulting power for twenty-four years, he sells his soul to Mephistopheles. Faustus then proceeds to enjoy all that the new order of things promised. He commands Homer to come from the realm of shades to sing his entrancing songs. He summons Helen to appear before him in the morning of her beauty. The apostrophe to her shows the vividness ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... next to Cicero and Virgil, are such as convey to the modern scholar no idea but that of intense obsoleteness,—Ramus's Definitions, Burgersdicius's Logic, Heereboord's Meletemata; and for Seniors, on Saturday, Ames's Medulla. This is such a curriculum as Mephistopheles, in his character of Magister, might have recommended in irony to the student ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... easily deceived in these matters, is it strange that in peculiar states of mind or body, we are so completely imposed on in others? At p. 353 we have the story on which Goethe has founded a singular exploit of Mephistopheles in the ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... substitution of monumental thematicism for lyric emotion. In MS. is also a prelude to Goethe's "Faust" for full orchestra. It has very definite leading motives, which include "Faust's Meditations," "Visions of Margarethe," "Evil" and "Love" (almost inversions of each other), "Mephistopheles," and the like. The strife of these elements is managed with great cleverness, ending beatifically with the motive of Gretchen dying ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... handsome as they were varied, were made up of the youth and beauty of the neighbourhood, with the exception of the bottom couple of the last set; here, Mrs. Fraudhurst appeared, gorgeously attired, as Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, with no other for her partner than Ralph Coleman in the garb of Mephistopheles. At the conclusion of the first Quadrille, the Baronet seated himself in the state chair, with his old friends on either side, for their dancing days like his own was now as a thing of the past, but looking on with inward satisfaction at the gay assembly, until the memories ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... Dutch log of wood who passed for a man and who was called Elie Magus, interrupted himself to laugh an uncanny laugh which frightened the painter. He fancied he heard Mephistopheles ...
— Pierre Grassou • Honore de Balzac
... and devil! What Mephistopheles is in me I feel far the first time in this hour, and I feel it, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - KARL-LUDWIG SAND—1819 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... the kiss, Mashenka leaps up and impulsively embraces me. At that instant, Mashenka's maman appears in the doorway of the arbour. . . . She makes a face as though in alarm, and saying "sh-sh" to someone with her, vanishes like Mephistopheles through ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... considered him her father's evil genius, and believed him to be somehow at the bottom of the troubles of her life. Thus every year this man, John Wiggins, grew more hateful, and she accustomed herself to think of him as an evil fiend, a Mephistopheles, by whose crafty wiles her father's heart had been estranged from her. Such, then, was the nature of Edith's bereavement; and as she mourned over it she did not mourn so much over the reality as over her vanished hope. He was gone, and with him was gone the expectation of meeting him and winning ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... him the thought of taking refuge in a supernatural realm, of appealing to invisible powers, which plunged him, for a considerable time, into the dreams of Illuminati and made him even invent a religion? This irony of Mephistopheles, who carries on so audacious a game with the weakness and the desires of man, is it not the mocking, scornful side of the poet's spirit, a leaning to sullenness, which can be traced even into the earliest years of his life, a bitter leaven thrown into a strong ...
— Faust • Goethe
... departments of morals they may be found drawing it closer than many good uncharitable Christians among us would wish. In one very popular novel the victim spends his wife's fortune at the gaming-table, leaves her to starve, lives with another woman, and, having committed forgery, plots with the Mephistopheles of the story to buy his own safety at the price of his wife's honour. This might seem bad enough, but worse remains. It is told in a smothered whisper, by the faithful domestic, to the horrified family, that he has reason ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... said I affectionately, "and have all the lower traits of the Yankee character. But I will use you to carry me to Kehl, as Faust used Mephistopheles. By the by, your carriage is a comfortable one and saves my time. I have two hours before I need return ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... your joke, conte; but remember that if you place the countess in the position of Marguerite, you, as the giver of the jewels, naturally play the part of Mephistopheles." ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... Styles, which I had thought were new in Paris, were familiarly worn in Perry by the mill hands. White kid gloves were en regle. The play was "Faust." All allusions to the triumph of religion over the devil; all insinuations on the part of Mephistopheles in regard to the enviable escape of Martha's husband and of husbands in general, from prating women in general; all invocations of virtue and moral triumph, were greeted with bursts of applause. Between the acts ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... the Emperor-King of Prussia is growing. Cutting himself clear from the timid souls who are still possessed of a sense of right, he assumes the proportions of a Machiavelli and a Mephistopheles combined. William the Incalculable, as his subjects call him, develops to his own advantage the influences and the power of evil. What new distress will he bring to Christian souls, this applauder of the Armenian massacres, when, after having ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... poem—dwelt with enthusiasm on the airy beauty of its lyrics, the terrible pathos of the scene before the Mater Dolorosa, and the deep skill shown in the various subtle shadings of character between Mephistopheles and poor Margaret. He remarked, however, of the Introduction (which I suspect was new to him), that blood would out—that, consummate artist as he was, Goethe was a German, and that nobody but a German would ever have provoked a comparison with the Book of Job, "the grandest poem that ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... bedroom, you may come, too, if you like, because it commands a view of Church Road. I shouldn't sleep a wink unless I knew that he had gone in with her. It'll be precisely like Faust and Marguerite going into the house, and you and I are Mephistopheles and Martha. ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... N. Satan, the Devil, Lucifer, Mephistopheles, Ahriman[obs3], Belial; Samael, Zamiel, Beelzebub, the Prince of the Devils. the tempter[1]; the evil one, the evil spirit; the Adversary; the archenemy; the author of evil, the wicked one, the old Serpent; the Prince of darkness, the Prince of this world, the Prince of the power of the air; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... opposing hill; to see that ideal of strength, suppleness, and joyous flight, lie nerveless and flaccid at his feet; to be able to call the thicket-like antlers of the splendid animal his own, was for the time the one ambition of Hilary Sercombe; for he was of the brood of Mephistopheles, the child of darkness, whose delight lies in undoing what God has done—the nearest that any evil power can ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... were being held up by an outsider; with Barbara in full sight up here by the orchestra, they must know who was doing it. I wondered not to have Vandeman in my hair already; but he and his consort stood in dignified silence; it was his committee who came after me, a Mephistopheles, a troubadour, an Indian brave, a Hercules with his club, swarming up the step, wanting to know if I was the man responsible, why the devil I had done it, who the devil I thought I was, ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... consciousness; it lags behind. A condition of things arises where the living moral consciousness of the people conflicts with the established law, where legal forms are superannuated, but still exist, and Mephistopheles' ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... clucked in the yard; also, the magpies tootled beyond the lagoon, and a couple of axes sounded faintly across the flat; and I even heard, through the open window, the noise of some old back-delivery chattering through a crop of hay on an adjacent farm. "Give me your address," continued Mephistopheles, replenishing his glass. ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... she said, "could understand till now the instinctive dread with which poor Margaret, in Faust, shrinks from the hateful presence of Mephistopheles. I now feel it in myself. The dislike and suspicion I first felt for that man—Smith, or whatever else he may call himself—has grown into literal detestation and terror. I hate him—I am afraid of him—I never knew what anguish of mind was until he entered our doors; ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... of the personality of Paganini, as you remember, except that he was a smaller man; long, gaunt, yellowish hands and the face of a haggard Mephistopheles. The critics quarrelled about him, as critics only quarrel about real genius, and while one school proclaimed that Tcheriapin had discovered an entirely new technique, a revolutionary system of violin playing, another school was equally positive in declaring that ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... of the day's news had presented, even to that last unmistakable touch of fatuous self-complacency. Coming after such a damning indictment of the age as that one day's chronicle of world-wide bloodshed, greed, and tyranny, was a bit of cynicism worthy of Mephistopheles, and yet of all whose eyes it had met this morning I was, perhaps, the only one who perceived the cynicism, and but yesterday I should have perceived it no more than the others. That strange dream it was which had made all the difference. For I know not ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... nothing seems impossible. They "vow to weep seas, live in fire, eat rocks, tame tigers," as Troilus knew. Mephistopheles exclaims: ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... charge of "grumbling." Why couldn't he be nice— as he used to be? And Coombes was such a harmless little man, too, nourished mentally on Self-Help, and with a meagre ambition of self-denial and competition, that was to end in a "sufficiency." Then Jennie came in as a female Mephistopheles, a gabbling chronicle of "fellers," and was always wanting his wife to go to theatres, and "all that." And in addition were aunts of his wife, and cousins (male and female) to eat up capital, insult him personally, ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... was coming to yours to know if you dine with Lord Lilburne. He told me he had asked you. I have just left him. And, by the sofa of Mephistopheles, there was the prettiest Margaret you ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... head and feet, that is to say, by accepting the direct opposite of the Catholic dogma: and then he reascends to the light, by using the Devil himself as a monstrous ladder. Faust ascends to Heaven, by stepping on the head of the vanquished Mephistopheles. Hell is impassable for those only who know not how to turn back from it. We free ourselves from its ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... again seated on the driving-phaeton which he had brought that day, Lord Mountclere looked gleeful, and shrewd enough in his own opinion to outwit Mephistopheles. As soon as they were ascending a hill, and he could find time to free his hand, he pulled off his glove, and drawing from his pocket a programme of the Melchester concert referred to, contemplated ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... and overwhelm his assailant with a clearness and vigor of argument and a power of style with which few pens could cope. He was not only assailed with the rudest violence of newspaper denunciation, but he was alluded to by Whig speakers in scornful terms, while caricaturists represented him as the Mephistopheles of the Van Buren Administration, and Log Cabin Clubs roared offensive campaign songs at midnight before his house, terrifying his children by the discharges of a small cannon. Defeat stared him in the face, but he never quailed, ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... close-cropped, with expansive chest to waistcoat, and compressive waist to coat: saturnine as to his pantaloons, calm as to his feminine boots, precious as to his jewellery, smooth and white as to his linen: dark-eyed, high-foreheaded, hawk-nosed - got up, one thinks, like Lucifer or Mephistopheles, or Zamiel, transformed into a highly genteel Parisian - has the green end of a pine-apple sticking out ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... Mme. Nilsson; Siebel, Mme. Scalchi; Martha, Mlle. Lablache (whose mother had been expected to appear in the part, but was prevented by judicial injunction); Faust, Signor Campanini; Valentine, Signor Del Puente; Mephistopheles, Signor Novara. ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... grows upon one the more one thinks of it. Why did it never occur to them? There would have been a bit of a bother with the Old Man. I can imagine Mephistopheles being upset about it, thinking himself swindled. Of course, if that was the ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... Satan — N. Satan, the Devil, Lucifer, Mephistopheles, Ahriman^, Belial; Samael, Zamiel, Beelzebub, the Prince of the Devils. the tempter; the evil one, the evil spirit; the Adversary; the archenemy; the author of evil, the wicked one, the old Serpent; the Prince of darkness, the Prince of this world, the Prince of the power of the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... temper and imagination, which may be typified by it, producible in Germany; especially if we think how the more delicate uses of Rosin, as indispensable to the Fiddle-bow, have developed themselves, from the days of St. Elizabeth of Marburg to those of St. Mephistopheles ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... about to end his troubles and uncertainty in death, when an Easter hymn sung in the distance by a chorus of villagers seems to bid him stay his hand. With a quick revulsion of feeling he calls on the powers below, and, rather to his surprise, Mephistopheles promptly appears. In exchange for his soul, the devil offers him youth, beauty, and love, and, as an earnest of what is to come, shows him a vision of the gentle Margaret sitting at her spinning wheel. Faust is enraptured, ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... cruelty, sarcasms, and meanness—with the infidel as with the bigot. The sincere seeker for truth, whether he wander through the paths of unbelief or of faith, never forgets to love, never courts notoriety, and is neither a satirical court-fool nor a would-be Mephistopheles. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the Emperor in the latter days of his reign. Utterly unscrupulous, with everything to gain for himself and his party, and with absolutely nothing to lose but a life which he took good care to save by avoiding danger, he insinuated himself into the confidence of Maximilian, and became the Mephistopheles of the last act in the Mexican drama. Having but recently risen to the confidential position he now occupied near the person of the Emperor, the latter's abdication was obviously against his interests. When the ministers threatened ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... adapted from Goethe, and was admirably performed, more especially the parts of "Mephistopheles" and "Margaret," in which Madame Dorval acts inimitably. This actress has great merit; and the earnestness of her manner, and the touching tones of her voice, give a great air of truth to her performances. The prison-scene was powerfully acted; and the madness of "Margaret" when ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... great basso of the Opera, accompanied at the piano by one of the unclassified ladies, was just finishing Mephistopheles' drinking song out of Faust when the ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... Mephistopheles' words, when he hands over to Faust the proceeds of a voyage. [War, trade, and ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... show more than traces of it. Says Hertwig: "Protoplasm is not a single chemical substance, however complicated, but a mixture of many substances, which we must picture to ourselves as finest particles united in a wonderfully complicated structure." Truly protoplasm is, to borrow Mephistopheles' expression concerning blood, a "quite peculiar juice." And the complexity of the nucleus is far more evident than that of the protoplasm. Is protoplasm itself the result of a long development? If so, out of what and how did it develop? We cannot even ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... Penautier was discharged; fuller information was desired concerning Belleguise, and the arrest of Martin was ordered. On the 24th of March, Lachaussee had been broken on the wheel. As to Exili, the beginner of it all, he had disappeared like Mephistopheles after Faust's end, and nothing was heard of him. Towards the end of the year Martin was released for want of sufficient evidence. But the Marquise de Brinvilliers remained at Liege, and although she was shut up in a convent she had ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... them simultaneously—a thick vapour filled the room, which gradually cleared off, and left no traces of Hans' visitors but three small sticks of stone brimstone. The truth flashed upon the barber—his visitor was the far-famed Mephistopheles. Hans packed up his remaining wardrobe, razor, strop, soap-dish, scissors and combs, and turned his back upon Stocksbawler forever. Four years passed away, and Hans was again a thriving man, and Agnes Flirtitz the wife of the doctor of Stocksbawler. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... A tall Mephistopheles in scarlet silk, whose high shoulders lent him added height, had joined them. His peaked cap and feather sparkled with lurid points of fire. ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... along the road of Initiation, and the spirit of his Victim—in her translunar Apotheosis—would not have been there to lift him Heavenwards at the last. And yet no one could say that Goethe disparages the enormity of Faust's crime. That ineffable retort of Mephistopheles, when, on those "black horses," they are whirled through the night to her dungeon, "She is not the first," has the essence of all pity and wrath in its cruel sting. Mephistopheles himself is the most interesting of all Devils. And he is so because, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... demonology" which is as amusing a thing as he ever wrote. The drawings he made for it show specimens of the evolution of various types of devil into various types of humans: the devils themselves are carefully classified—the common or garden serpent (Tentator Hortensis), the red devil (Diabolus Mephistopheles) the blue devil (Caeruleus Lugubrius) etc. Mr. J. Milton's "specimen" is discussed and various methods of pursuing observations in supernatural history which "possesses an interest which will remain after health, youth and ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... dome of baldness. Immediately under his eyes his cheekbones had so high a colour that they might have been painted scarlet; three black tufts, two on the upper lip and one under the lower, seemed to touch up the face with the fierce moustaches of Mephistopheles. His eyes had that "dancing madness" in them which Stevenson saw in the Gaelic eyes of Alan Breck; but he sometimes distorted the expression by screwing a monstrous monocle into one of them. A man more unmistakable would have been hard to find. ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... involved a species of horrible fascination which affected one like a nightmare. You do not understand yet what was this remarkable and most hideous feature. I can scarcely find words to describe it to you so that you can catch the full force of the idea—I must try, however. You have often seen Mephistopheles in his flame-colored dress, and caught some kind of impression that the face was of the same hue, though the fact was that it was of the natural color, and only affected by the lurid character of the dress and by the Satanic penciling of the eyebrows! You have? Well, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... preternatural; like magic, ghosts, sorcery, fairies, genii, and the like. What violates law is unnatural. What is so low down that it lies below law, as chaos before creation; or nebulous matter not yet beginning to obey the law of gravitation; or intelligences, like Mephistopheles or Satan, who have sunk so low in sin as to have lost the perception of right and wrong, is subternatural, below nature. What belongs to a religion above the laws of time and space, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... thought they must indeed be an unimaginative set! In that dark face before them was Mephistopheles at least—der Geist der stets verneint—if nothing more violent. His cool, scornful features were lighted up with some of the excitement which he could not drill into the assemblage before him. Had he been gifted with the requisite organ he would have acted and sung the chief ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... hood-winked and waylaid, and whom we shall try to catch unarmed. Then when the hour of triumph shall sound, I will rise up; from Germany, in her intoxication, I will snatch a covenant, which, like that of Faust with Mephistopheles, she has signed with her blood, and by which she also, like Faust, has traded her soul away for the good things ...
— The Meaning of the War - Life & Matter in Conflict • Henri Bergson
... No doubt he had sinned gaily enough in that far-off time when life's cup was still brimming with wine, and no asp hid among the roses; but Nemesis had been an unseen spectator of all his thoughtless actions, and now she came to demand her just dues. He felt somewhat as Faust must have felt when Mephistopheles suggested a visit to Hades, in repayment of those years of magic youth and magic power. So long ago it seemed since he had married Rosanna Moore, that he almost persuaded himself that it had been only a dream—a pleasant dream, with a disagreeable awakening. When she had ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... Gounod's most popular opera Mephistopheles conjures up visions of Phryne, Lais, Aspasia, Cleopatra, and Helen of Troy to beguile the jaded interest of Faust. The list reads almost like a catalogue of the operas of Massenet whose fine talent was largely given to the celebration of the famous courtesans of the ancient ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... distasteful. Of God and the world he thought he knew as much as his teacher, and the scholastic analysis of the processes of thought seemed to him only the deadening of the faculties which he had received from nature. Of these dreary hours in the lecture-rooms the biting comments of Faust and Mephistopheles on university studies in ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... Germany as a house of dreams, seen the Valkyrie race by, heard the swan song, wept with Werther and with Marguerite, smiled cynically with Mephistopheles, languished with the Palm Tree and the Pine of Heine; who has not sat at the feet of Germany as a philosopher, and traced the very fissures of his own brain in following thinking into thought; but who in all the world longs for this new Germany of the barracks, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... cool again, Lorton," he said to me, with an expression of amiability and mingled pity on his face, that made him look to me like Mephistopheles, "you will, I know, be sorry for what you've said; and when you learn good manners I will be glad to speak to you again!" and, he walked back to the church, with the air of a person who had been deeply injured, but who had ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... abroad a second time, and from her return the next year until her death in Boston from overwork on March 6th, 1888, the day of her father's funeral, she published twenty volumes, including two novels: one anonymous, 'A Modern Mephistopheles,' in the 'No Name' series; the other, 'Work,' largely a record of her own experience. She rewrote 'Moods,' and changed the sad ending of the first version to a more cheerful one; followed the fortunes of her 'Little Women' and their children in 'Little Men' and 'Jo's Boys,' and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... His mind expands and his ideals rise. It is a little incongruous to suppose that some infinitely wiser and affectionate parent was looking on all the time and giving no assistance. In the dialogue between Mephistopheles and God which Goethe prefixes to his Faust, the devil obviously scores. In the sight of such an intelligence man must have made a pretty fool of himself during the last 1500 years. We human beings are more charitable. Take ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... would consent to a cessation of hostilities and an enduring treaty of peace. This was done, and though Labouchere, Louis's agent, had so little to offer that his propositions were farcical, yet there was at least the show of a diplomatic negotiation. At this juncture the superserviceable Mephistopheles of the Empire, Fouche, intervened. By an agent of his own he approached the cabinet of St. James with an offer of peace on the basis of restoring the Spanish Bourbons and compensating Louis XVIII by a kingdom to be carved from the territories of the ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... The thought of getting rid of Kromitzki does not come from the outside, but springs from me and exists within me. I have come down to that morally, and if I do not commit the deed it is a mere matter of nerves. The part of my inward Mephistopheles is confined to mocking and whispering into my ear that the deed would only prove my energy, and not ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... superior gusto with which the Eastern, as well as the Western tale-teller describes his scoundrels and villains whilst his good men and women are mostly colourless and unpicturesque. So Satan is the true hero of Paradise-Lost and by his side God and man are very ordinary; and Mephistopheles is much better society than ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... nearly resembles the ordinary symphony in that it is in three distinct movements—with pauses between—which stand, respectively, for the three chief characters in Goethe's drama: Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles. In the Faust Symphony the principle of transformation or metamorphosis of themes is of such importance that it may be defined as their rhythmic, melodic and harmonic modification for the purpose of changing the meaning to correspond with a modification ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... look not so fierce on me, Adders and serpents, let me breathe awhile; Ugly hell gape not; come not, Lucifer; I'll burn my books; oh! Mephistopheles!" ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... He was a little man, with sharp black eyes shaded by the heaviest of black brows, and it was his notion to trim his mustaches and beard after the fashion set by the third Napoleon and imitated faithfully by those who sing the part of Mephistopheles in Faust. Hence, his ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... return. His course of action, likewise that of his friends, permitted him little obscurity, and when the rumors of his finally obtaining lodging at Beaver Beach, and of the celebration of his installation there, were presently confirmed, he stood in the lime-light indeed, as a Mephistopheles upsprung through the trap-door. ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... emotion hardly short of terror that seizes us, as we listen to the stringent unflinching paradox of this heterogeneous figure. Rameau is the squalid and tattered Satan of the eighteenth century. He is a Mephistopheles out at elbows, a Lucifer in low water; yet always diabolic, with the bright flash of the pit in his eye. Disgust is transformed into horror and affright by the trenchant confidence of his spirit, the daring thoroughness ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... realised that the remarkable being who had caused the commotion was none other than the devil. Yielding to an irresistible impulse, but without really knowing what he was doing, the Vicomte whipped out a pistol, and, pointing at Mephistopheles, fired. In an instant, fire and witches vanished, and all was ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... the decision, and Jack left the service. At his request, his devoted admirer Mesty—an abbreviation of Mephistopheles—an African, once a prince in Ashantee and now the cook of the midshipmen's mess, was allowed to leave the service and accompany our hero to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... on, this papier-mache Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe. He, don't you see, had been planning to be assistant-manager ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... Stendhal's was not historical, but he almost made it so likewise—Scott and Miss Austen had set the types, given the methods, arranged the processes as definitely as Fust, or Coster, or Gutenberg, or Fust's friend Mephistopheles—who perhaps, on the whole, has the best title to the invention—did in another matter three hundred ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... wish to drink your reeking pots of beer, whisky, wine, or other disgusting alcoholic liquors; if you wish to go to the theatre and listen to Mephistopheles, to the devil, to Marguerite, the dissolute hussy, and Doctor Faust, her foul accomplice; if you wish to gorge yourselves upon the oyster, scavenger of the sea, and the pig, scavenger of the earth—a scavenger that there is some question of making use of in ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... where there is air and moisture, and a temperature which is not always below freezing point, though even eternal frost does not exclude life entirely, as is proved by the existence of the glacier flea, showing that even in the icy coverings of the Alps life still is possible. Mephistopheles may therefore well say: ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various
... not it. I am afraid of the man himself. He reminds me of that hateful creature—what is he?—in the opera, for which Mr. Aird gave us the tickets, and which Agnes went with us to see—Mephistopheles." ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... time in her life, Hilda now grew acquainted with that icy demon of weariness, who haunts great picture galleries. He is a plausible Mephistopheles, and possesses the magic that is the destruction of all other magic. He annihilates color, warmth, and, more especially, sentiment and passion, at a touch. If he spare anything, it will be some such ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Twelfth Day mummers are in season. They are called "Julebukker," or Christmas goblins. They invariably appear after dark, and in masks and fancy dresses. A host may therefore have to entertain in the course of the season, a Punch, Mephistopheles, Charlemagne, Number, Nip, Gustavus, Oberon, and whole companies of other fanciful and historic characters; but, as their antics are performed in silence, they are not particularly ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... be there to decide for you, child, or you'll be snapped up by the first adventurer that comes along," declared Nora. "Don't trust him if he has a mustache. 'Daring Dick of the Black Gang' had a little twisted mustache like Mephistopheles in 'Faust'." ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... dance. Here arrives Major Hardy to a din of welcome. And under his instructions they burn the champagne corks, and therewith decorate their faces. One is ornamented with a pointed beard and the devil's horns, and turned into Mephistopheles. One is given an unshaven chin, and made to represent Moses Ikeystein. Another is a White-eyed Kaffir. And don't think Major Hardy omits himself. Not ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... very name of Bernard Shaw Fills me with mingled Mirth and Awe. Mixture of Mephistopheles, Don Quixote, and Diogenes, The Devil's wit, the Don's Romance Joined to the Cynic's arrogance. Framed on Pythagorean plan, A Vegetable Souperman. Here you may see him crown with bay The Greatest Playwright ...
— Confessions of a Caricaturist • Oliver Herford
... recall it. There actually were two or three who, during the entire scene, had nothing but sneers to give, and sat, as I heard a member remark, "a group fit for the pencil of Retzsch, fresh from its delineations of Mephistopheles." I need not write upon the page which mentions Richard Cobden their names, which, to reverse Palmerston's praise, are engraved only upon the least creditable pages of the history of their own ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... hearer to tears—this wifely faith. Surely the saint that lay behind the Mephistopheles in his face must have as real an existence, if the woman who knew him only as man, undazzled by the glitter of his fame, unwearied by his long sickness, found him thus ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the Professor. "The Present is an age of doubt and disbelief, and darkness; out of which shall arise a clear and bright Hereafter. In the second part of Goethe's Faust, there is a grand and striking scene, where in the classical Walpurgis Night, on the Pharsalian Plains, the mocking Mephistopheles sits down between the solemn antique Sphinxes, and boldly questions them, and reads their riddles. The red light of innumerable watch-fires glares all round about, and shines upon the terrible face of the arch-scoffer; while on either ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... of love, and a spirit of rest, as if breathing from St. John the Evangelist, had seemed to mould the harmonies of that earliest stage in my childhood which had just vanished; but now, on the other hand, some wicked Harlequin Mephistopheles was apparently commissioned to vex my eyes and plague my heart, through the next succession of two or three years: a worm was at the roots of life. Yet, in this, perhaps, there lurked a harsh beneficence. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... Part of that Power, not understood, Which always wills the bad And always works the good. (Mephistopheles, in Faust.) ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... scene was accomplished with modesty that almost became fright. She nearly danced the jewel song and embraced the tenor with passion in the love duet. In the church scene, overcome with terror at the sight of Mephistopheles, she flung her prayer book across the stage.... Her appearance was almost shocking and the first lines of the part of Marguerite, "Non monsieur, je ne suis demoiselle, ni belle" had a merciless application. ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... rather than the force of their conscience, he exercises a fascination almost irresistible. To everybody, indeed, who has in him any latent evil not overbalanced by the habitual performance of positive duties, Densdeth's companionship is morally blighting. The character, fearful in its way as the Mephistopheles of Goethe, is represented ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... taste did not prevent his employing it on what was coarse and puerile. Common slang abounds, as in "The Vulgar Little Boy;" he talks of "the devil's cow's tail," and is little afraid of extravagances. His metre often assists him, and we have often comic rhyming as where "Mephistopheles" answers to ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... (Mephistopheles and final chorus) of the "Faust" Symphony in score—and the complete arrangement of this same ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... are all the women asking me who is that good-looking Mephistopheles, with the burning eyes, who is prowling around my rooms as if searching for a victim. Why, you're smiling for all the world like poor Jim when he used to do ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... of these throw his arms about and stamp on the ground, as if unable to behold any one. I once heard a young lady in New York profess unbounded admiration for him, because "he looked so charmingly like the devil." For many years the New York Herald always described him as the Reverend Mephistopheles Hurlbut. There was another very beautiful lady who afterwards died a strange and violent death, as also a friend of mine, an editor in New York, both of whom narrated to me at very great length "a grotesque Iliad of the wild career" of ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... OFFENBACHS—(there is considerable difference between the latter and the Pharisees)—of that once gay theatre. Like many other French frivolities, it has lately yielded to Teutonic tragedy. The cold and calculating German "MEPHISTOPHELES" treads the stage where once tripped the light feet of Parisian beauty. The burlesque Germans of the Grand Duchy of Gerolstein have vanished before the grim and earnest countrymen of grand and simple old King WILLIAM. It will be long before the French players find heart to burlesque anew the ...
— Punchinello Vol. II., No. 30, October 22, 1870 • Various
... talk of your flyers and stayers, All bosh—when he strips you can see his eye range Round his rivals, with much the same look as Tom Sayers Once wore when he faced the big novice, Bill Bainge. Like Stow, at our hustings, confronting the hisses Of roughs, with his queer Mephistopheles' smile; Like Baker, or Baker's more wonderful MRS., The terror of blacks at the source of the Nile; Like Triton 'mid minnows; like hawk among chickens; Like—anything better than everything else: He stands ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... than I was in the same plight—even Coleridge; who admires the perfect German Diction, the Songs, Choruses, etc. (which are such parts as cannot be translated into Prose); he also praises Margaret and Mephistopheles; but thinks Faust himself dull, and great part of the Drama flat and tiresome; and the whole Thing not a self-evolving Whole, but an unconnected Series of Scenes: all which are parts that can be judged of from Translation, by Goethe's own Authority. ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... have been content with reading his early poems, and with seeking Byron in "Childe Harold" or in the heroes of his Oriental poems; which is about as just as to look for Shakspeare in Iago, Milton in Satan, Goethe in Mephistopheles, or Lamartine in the ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... benefited her husband by stirring in him a noble discontent, she passed from earth; and it was left for John Milton to repeat twice more his marital venture, with a similar result. And in this, Fate sends back a fact that leers like Mephistopheles, by way of answer to Milton's pamphlets on divorce: Why should the State grant a divorce, when great men refuse to learn by experience, and, given the opportunity, only repeat the blunders they have ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... succession. Chamillart, a pitiful creature of Madame de Maintenon's, sat in Colbert's place; gone were Turenne and Conde and Luxembourg; the armies of the descendant of St. Louis were led by the Duke of Vendome, a foul lecher, whose inhuman vices went far to justify the gibe of Mephistopheles that men use their reason "um thierischer ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... tell me about security!" Colonel Zareff barked. "You should have seen the lengths our staff went to. I remember, once, on Mephistopheles ..." ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... of it,' said the captain, with an impatient laugh. 'You are quite a Mephistopheles, Will—I say it ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... for the right way we would twice have taken a wrong turning. As we came into the Place Stanislas, still a pale oasis of moonlight, I saw standing in front of the hotel two figures, black as if cut out of velvet. One, that of a man, was singularly tall and thin, as a Mephistopheles of the stage. The other was that of a woman in a long cloak, small and slight as a child of fourteen. Dierdre O'Farrell, of course! It could be no one else. But who was the man? A dim impression that the figure was vaguely ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... but his sketch of the actor as Sardanapalus (1853), "with a wine-cup of the period," sets on record one of the most perfect archaeological revivals that had ever been seen on the English stage. But it was Kean's "Mephistopheles" (1854) that afforded Punch his chance, for the actor's realisation was so wide of Goethe's creation that it was a Frenchified demon, played as a comic character. Punch admitted the beauty of the production, ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... faster, and filled me with a new sense of strength. I said to myself that without this woman I was but an imperfect being, but that with her I could accomplish everything to which I should set my hand. Like the great Doctor, when he thought he had cheated Mephistopheles at last, I could have cried aloud to the fleeting moment, Verweile ...
— The Upper Berth • Francis Marion Crawford
... embroidered cushion at the foot of the bed; and her boudoir, which looked to the Vatican, was full of vases of malachite and the skins of wild animals, and had a bronze clock on the chimney-piece set in a statue of Mephistopheles. The only other occupant of her house, besides her servants, was a distant kinswoman, called her aunt, and known to familiars as the Countess Betsy; but in the studio below, which was connected with the living rooms by a circular staircase, and ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... Lemaitre's genius took a new development in creating the part of Mephistopheles. The feature of the part which balked and baffled him was the infernal laugh indicated by Goethe. By every expedient that mimicry could suggest day after day he studied to give forth that terrible laugh, but all his efforts were useless: he could not satisfy his conception with his execution. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... weep—how much further distant is he than Iago from spiritual death, even when, in procuring the fall of Man, he completes his own fall! It is only in Goethe's Mephistopheles that a fit companion for Iago can be found. Here there is something of the same deadly coldness, the same gaiety in destruction. But then Mephistopheles, like so many scores of literary villains, has Iago ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... them he is little more than a buffoon. To Southern Europe, he is the bold, prompt, shrewd, popular ideal, suiting himself by craft to every superior, regarding all things with a shoulder-shrugging, quizzical philosophy; a democratic Mephistopheles; a lurking devil, equalizing himself, and the people with him, by wit and insolence, with nobility itself. Among the Latin races, as in the East, such Figaros often rise, like Oliver le Daim, to power, and the people ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... picturesqueness, and a diabolical subtlety. Whether he paws at his cloak, or clutches upon the handle of his stick, or splutters hatred, or cringes before his prey, or shakes with lean and wrinkled laughter, he is always the great part and the great actor. 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, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... mantled in a full flood. Shosshi stood breathless, gazing half suspiciously, half credulously at his strictly honorable Mephistopheles. ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... MEPHISTOPHELES.—I will bind myself to your service here, and never sleep nor slumber at your call. When we meet on the other side, you shall do as much ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... will remember the trustful docility of the student received by Doctor Mephistopheles in the First Part of Faust, and the very different demeanour of the same student when he reappears, in the Second Part, as Baccalaureus. More than one foreign professor in Japan must have been reminded of that contrast by personal experience, and must have wondered whether ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... accomplish, if only human skill could make it pay. The exchequer of France had been brought into a condition of something very like {184} bankruptcy by the long and wasting war; and a projector was found who promised to supply the deficiency as boldly and as liberally as Mephistopheles does in the second part of "Faust." John Law, a Scotchman, and unquestionably a man of great ability and financial skill, had settled in France in consequence of having fought a duel and killed his man in his own country. [Sidenote: 1710-1720—The South Sea Company] Law set up a company ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... Dante Symphony. I have read somewhere that Liszt used pages to produce an effect which Berlioz accomplished in the apparition of Mephistopheles in Faust with three notes. This comparison is unjust. Berlioz's happy discovery is a work of genius and he alone could have invented it. But the sudden appearance of the Devil is one thing and the depiction of Hell quite another. Berlioz tried such a depiction at the end ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... surprised at you! Do you know, you're getting a regular Mephistopheles, Spike? Suppose I hadn't an iron will, what would happen? You really must select your subjects of conversation more carefully. You're bad company for the likes ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... depth of it, expressed by one passage of Goethe's in the end of the 2nd part of Faust;—the notable one that follows the song of the Lemures, when the angels enter to dispute with the fiends for the soul of Faust. They enter singing—"Pardon to sinners and life to the dust." Mephistopheles hears them first, and exclaims to his troop, "Discord I hear, and filthy jingling"—"Mistoene hoere ich; garstiges Geklimper." This, you see, is the extreme of bad taste in music. Presently the angelic host begin strewing roses, which discomfits ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... very personation of animal sensual life. He would have been to Faust a more dangerous tempter than Mephistopheles. There was no sneer on HIS lip at the pleasures which animated his voice. To one awaking to a sense of the vanities in knowledge, this reckless ignorant joyousness of temper was a worse corrupter than all the icy mockeries of a learned ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton |
