"Kiss no woman if her lips be red; look not upon her if she be very
fair," is the maxim taught him. "If thou love her, all is over, and thy
whole past and remaining labor and pains will be in vain." How pathetic
a situation this, how much more terrible than that of Faust, when he has
reached the turning-point in his career! A nature which could accept an
earthly immortality on these terms, for the sake of his fellows, must
indeed have been a hard and chilly one. But there is still too much of
the heart in it, to admit of being satisfied with so cruel an
abstraction. On the verge of success, as he supposes, with the
long-sought drink standing ready for his lips, Septimius nevertheless
seeks a companion. Half unawares, he has fallen in love with Sybil, and
thenceforth, though in a way he had not anticipated, "all is over." Yet,
saved from death by the poison in which he had hoped to find the spring
of endless life, his fate appears admirably fitting. There is no picture
of Mephisto hurrying him off to an apparently irrevocable doom. The
wrongs he has committed against himself, his friends, humanity,--these,
indeed, remain, and are remembered. He has undoubtedly fallen from his
first purity and earnestness, and must hereafter be content to live a
life of mere conventional comfort, full of mere conventional goodness,
conventional charities, in that substantial English home of his. Could
anything be more perfectly compensatory?
Nothing is more noticeable than the way in which, while so many
symbolisms spring up out of the story, the hero's half-crazed and
bewildered atmosphere is the one which we really accept, until the
reading is ended.
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