and when, his prayer being granted, he cries: 

  Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
  And burned the topless towers of Ilium?

he is a much more splendid and significant person than the Faust of Goethe, who needs the help of the devil and of an old woman to seduce a young girl who has fallen in love with him at first sight.  Goethe, it is true, made what amends he could afterwards, in the Second Part, when much of the impulse had gone and all the deliberation in the world was not active enough to replace it.  Helen has her share, among other abstractions, but the breath has not returned into her body, she is glacial, a talking enigma, to whom Marlowe’s Faustus would never have said with the old emphasis: 

  And none but thou shalt be my paramour!

What remains, then, in Wills’ version, is the Gretchen story, in all its detail, a spectacular representation of the not wholly sincere witchcraft, and the impressive outer shell of Mephistopheles, with, in Sir Henry Irving’s pungent and acute rendering, something of the real savour of the denying spirit.  Mephistopheles is the modern devil, the devil of culture and polite negation; the comrade, in part the master, of Heine, and perhaps the grandson and pupil of Voltaire.  On the Lyceum stage he is the one person of distinction, the one intelligence; though so many of his best words have been taken from him, it is with a fine subtlety that he says the words that remain.  And the figure, with its lightness, weary grace, alert and uneasy step, solemnity, grim laughter, remains with one, after one has come away and forgotten whether he told us all that Goethe confided to him.

IV.  THE JAPANESE PLAYERS

When I first saw the Japanese players I suddenly discovered the meaning of Japanese art, so far as it represents human beings.  You know the scarcely human oval which represents a woman’s face, with the help of a few thin curves for eyelids and mouth.  Well, that convention, as I had always supposed it to be, that geometrical symbol of a face, turns out to be precisely the face of the Japanese woman when she is made up.  So the monstrous entanglements of men fighting, which one sees in the pictures, the circling of the two-handed sword, the violence of feet in combat, are seen to be after all the natural manner of Japanese warfare.  This unrestrained energy of body comes out in the expression of every motion.  Men spit and sneeze and snuffle, without consciousness of dignity or hardly of humanity, under the influence of fear, anger, or astonishment.  When the merchant is awaiting Shylock’s knife he trembles convulsively, continuously, from head to feet, unconscious of everything but death.  When Shylock has been thwarted, he stands puckering his face into a thousand grimaces, like a child who has swallowed medicine.  It is the emotion of children, naked sensation, not yet clothed