Devil Stories/Notes
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THE DEVIL IN A NUNNERY
BY FRANCIS OSCAR MANN
According to a German legend, the devil is master of all arts, and certainly he has given sufficient proof of his musical talent. Certain Church Fathers ascribed, not without good reason, the origin of music to Satan. "The Devil," says Mr. Huneker in his diabolical story "The Supreme Sin" (1920), "is the greatest of all musicians," and Rowland Hill long ago admitted the fact that the devil has all the good tunes. Perhaps his greatest composition is the Sonata del Diavolo, which Tartini wrote down in 1713. This diabolical master-piece is the subject of Gérard de Nerval's story La Sonate du Diable (1830). While the devil plays all instruments equally well, he seems to prefer the violin. Satan appears as fiddler in the poem "Der Teufel mit der Geige," which has been ascribed to the Swiss anti-Papist Pamphilus Gengenbach of the sixteenth century. In Leanu's Faust (1836) Mephistopheles takes the violin out of the hands of one of the musicians at a peasant-wedding and plays a diabolical czardas, which fills the hearts of all who hear it with voluptuousness. An opera Un Violon du Diable was played in Paris in 1849. The Devil's Violin, an extravaganza in verse by Benjamin Webster, was performed the same year in London. In his story "Les Tentations ou Eros, Plutus et la Gloire" Baudelaire presents the Demon of Love as holding in his left hand a violin "which without doubt served to sing his pleasures and pains." The devil also appears as limping fiddler in a California legend, which appeared under the title "The Devil's Fiddle" in a Californian magazine in 1855. Death, the devil's first cousin, if not his alter ego, has the souls, in the Dance of Death, march off to hell to a merry tune on his violin. Death appears as a musician also in the Piper of Hamlin. In this legend, well known to the English world through Browning's poem "Pied Piper of Hamelin" (1843) and Miss Peabody's play The Piper (1909), the rats are the human souls, which Death charms with his music into following him. In the Middle Ages the soul was often represented as leaving the body in the form of a mouse. The soul of a good man comes out of his mouth as a white mouse, while at the death of a sinner the soul escapes as a black mouse, which the devil catches and brings to hell. Mephistopheles, it will be recalled, calls himself "the lord of rats and mice" (Faust, 1, 1516). Devil-Death has inherited this wind instrument from the goat-footed Pan.
"The Devil is more busy in the convents," we are told by J. K. Huysmans in his novel En route (1895), "than in the cities, as he has a harder job on hand."
BELPHAGOR
BY NICCOLÓ MACHIAVELLI
This story of the devil Belphagor, who was sent by his infernal chief Pluto up to earth, where he married an earthly wife, but finally left her in disgust to go back to hell, is also of mediaeval origin. It was first printed by Giovanni Brevio in 1545, and appeared for the second time with the name of Machiavelli in 1549, twenty -two years after the death of the diabolical statesman. The two authors did not borrow from each other, but had a common source in a mediæval Latin manuscript, which seems to have first fallen into the hands of Italians, but was later brought to France where it has been lost. The tale of the marriage of the devil appeared in several other Italian versions during the sixteenth century. Among the Italian novelists, who retold it for the benefit of their married friends, may be mentioned Giovan-Francesco Straparola, Francesco Sansovino, and Gabriel Chappuys. In England this story was no less popular. Barnabe Riche inserted it in his collection of narratives in 1581, and we meet it again later in the following plays: Grim, the Collier of Croydon, ascribed to Ulpian Fulwell (1599); The Devil and his Dame by P. M. Houghton (1600); Machiavel and the Devil by Daborne and Henslowe (1613); The Devil is an Ass by Ben Jonson (1616); and Belphagor, or the Marriage of the Devil (1690). In France the story was treated in verse by La Fontaine (1694), and in Germany it served the Nuremberg poet Hans Sachs as the subject for a farce (1557).
The Eycyclopaedia Britannica is authority for the statement that Machiavelli's own married life had nothing to do with the plot of his story.
"The notion of this story is ingenious, and might have been made productive of entertaining incident, had Belphagor been led by his connubial connections from one crime to another. But Belphagor is only unfortunate, and in no respect guilty; nor did anything occur during his abode on earth that testified to the power of woman in leading us to final condemnation. The story of the peasant and the possession of the princesses bears no reference to the original idea with which the tale commences, and has no connection with the object of the infernal deputy's terrestrial sojourn" (J. C. Dunlop, History of Fiction). To this criticism Mr. Thomas Roscoe replies that "part of the humour of the story seems to consist in Belphagor's earthly career being cut short before he had served the full term of his apprenticeship. But from the follies and extravagances into which he had already plunged, we are now authorized to believe that, even if he had been able longer to support the asperities of the lady's temper, he must, from the course he was pursuing, have been led from crime to crime, or at least from folly to folly, to such a degree that he would infallibly have been condemned" (T. Roscoe, Italian Novelists).
The demon of Machiavelli offers no features of a deep psychology, but he distinguishes himself from the other demons of his period by his elegant manners. Like creator, like creature.
Belphagor, the god of the Moabites, like all other pagan gods, joined the infernal forces of Satan when driven off the earth by the Church Triumphant.
The parliament of devils, which we find in this story, was taken from the mystery-plays where the ruler of hell is represented as holding occasional receptions when he listens to the reports of their recent achievements on his behalf, and consults their opinion on matters of state. Satan, who has always wished to rival God, has instituted the infernal council in imitation of the celestial council described in the Book of Job. The source for the parliament of devils is the apocryphal book Evangelium Nicodemi. An early metrical tract under the title of the Parlement of Devils was printed two or three times in London about 1520. A "Pandemonium" is also found in Tasso, Milton, and Chateaubriand. The Parlement of Foules (14th century) is but a modification of the Parlement of Devils, for the devil and the fool were originally identical in person and may be traced back to the demonic clown of the ancient heathen cult (cf. the present writer's book. The Origin of the German Carnival Comedy, p. 37) . A far echo is Thomas Chatterton's poem The Parliament of Sprites.
This story recalls to us the saying that the heart of a beautiful woman is the most beloved hiding-place of at least seven devils.
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF SATAN
BY WILHELM HAUFF
Wilhelm Hauff, the author of this book, ranks honourably among the members of the Romantic School in Germany. As the work of a man of only twenty-two years, just out of the university, the book is a credit to its author. It must be admitted, however, that it was not altogether original with him. The idea was taken from E. Th. A. Hoffmann,—Devil-Hoffmann, as he was called by his contemporaries,—who in his short-story "Der Teufel in Berlin" also has the devil travel incognito in Germany; and the title was borrowed from Jean Paul Richter, who also claimed to edit Selections from the Devil's Papers (Auswahl aus des Teufels Papieren, 1789). There were others, too, who claimed to have been honoured by his Satanic Majesty to edit his "journal." J. R. Beard, a Unitarian minister, published in 1872 an Autobiography of Satan, Another autobiography of Satan is said to have been found among the posthumous works of Leonid Andreev, author of that original diabolical work Anathema, a tragedy (Engl. tr. 1910). This book has just appeared in English under the title Satan's Diary. Frédéric Soulié's Les Memoires du Diable (1837/8) consist of memoirs not of the devil himself, but of other people, which the Count de Luizzi, the human partner to the diabolical pact, is very anxious to know. Hauff's book consists of a series of papers, which are but loosely connected. In certain passages we hear nothing of the autobiographer. The Suavian writer apparently could digest the Diabolical only in homeopathic doses. His Satan, moreover, is a very youthful and quite harmless devil. He is nothing but a personified echo of the author's student-days. The book by Hauff is perhaps the most popular personification of the devil in German literature.
The passage presented here shows the phantastic element of the book at its best. The short introductory synopsis will give an idea of its satirical aspect. The humorous aspect has pretty nearly been lost in translation. Professor Brander Matthews has aptly said: "The German humour is like the simple Italian wines—it will not stand export."
Of all the peoples, the Germans seem to have had the most kindly feelings towards the devil. This is because they knew him better. To judge from the many bridges and cathedrals, which the demon, according to legends, has built in Germany, he must have been a frequent visitor to that country. In Frankfort, where with his own hands our author received the memoirs from the autobiographer, there is a gilded cock above the bridge in memory of the bargain the bridge-builder once made with Satan to give him the first living thing that should cross the river. The day the bridge was finished, a cock fluttered from a woman's market-basket and ran over the bridge. A claw-like hand reached down and claimed the prize.
The distinguished personage, whose adventures form the subject of this book, does not figure in it under his own name, nor does he appear here in the gala attire of tail, horns and cloven foot with which he graces the revels on the Blocksberg. He borrows for the nonce a tall, gentlemanly figure, surmounted by delicate features, dresses well, is fastidious about his ring and linen, travels post and stops at the best hotels. He begins his earthly career by studying at the renowned university of ——. As he can boast of abundant means, a handsome wardrobe and the name of Herr von Barbe, it is no wonder that on the first evening he should be politely received, the next morning have a confidential friend, and the second evening; embrace "brothers till death." He becomes much puzzled at the extraordinary manners of the students, and at their language, so different from that of every rational German. He remarks: "Over a glass of beer they often fell into singularly transcendental investigations, of which I understood little or nothing. However, I observed the principal words, and when drawn into a conversation, replied with a grave air—'Freedom, Fatherland, Nationality.'" He attends the lectures of a celebrated professor, whose profundity of thought and terseness of style are so astounding, that the German world set him down as possessed; the critical student, however, differs somewhat from that conclusion, observing —
"I have borne a great deal in the world. I have even entered into swine," ("The devil," said Luther, "knows Scripture well and he uses it in argument") "but into such a philosopher? No, indeed! I had rather be excused."
The episode here reprinted occurred in a hotel in Frankfort, where our incognito is known as Herr von Natas (which, it will be noticed, is his more familiar name read backwards). His brilliant powers of conversation, his adroit flattery, courteous gallantry, and elegant, though wayward flights of imagination, soon rendered him the delight of the whole table d'hôte. All guests, including our author, were fascinated by the mysterious stranger. But we will let the author himself tell his story.
THE DEVIL'S WAGER
BY WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
The Devil's Wager is Thackeray's earliest attempt at story-writing, was contributed to a weekly literary paper with the imposing title The National Standard, and Journal of Literature, Science, Music, Theatricals, and the Fine Arts, of which he was proprietor and editor, and was reprinted in the Paris Sketch Book (1840). The story first ended with the very Thackerayesque touch: "The moral of this story will be given in several successive numbers." In the Paris Sketch Book the last three words are changed into "the second edition." This comical tale was illustrated by an excellent wood-cut, representing the devil as sailing through the air, dragging after him the fat Sir Roger de Rollo by means of his tail, which is wound round Sir Roger's neck.
In the "Advertisement to the First Edition" of his Paris Sketch Book, Thackeray admits the French origin of this as well as of his other devil-story, The Painter's Bargain, to be found in the same volume. It was Thackeray's good fortune to live in Paris during the wildest and most brilliant years of Romanticism; and while his attitude towards this movement and its leaders, as presented in the Paris Sketch Book, is not wholly sympathetic, he is indebted to it for his interest in supernatural subjects. The Romanticism of Thackeray has been denied with great obstinacy and almost passion, for like Heinrich Heine, the chief of German Romantic ironists, he poked fun at this movement. But "to laugh at what you love," as Mr. George Saintsbury has pointed out in his History of the French Novel, "is not only permissible, but a sign of the love itself."
Mercurius makes a pun on the familiar quotation "rara avis" from Horace (Sat. 2, 2. 26), where it means a rare bird. This expression is commonly applied to a singular person. It is also found in the Satires of Juvenal (VI, 165).
THE PAINTER'S BARGAIN
BY WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
The belief in compacts with the devil is of great antiquity. Satan, contending with God for the possession of the human race, was supposed to have developed a passion for catching souls. At the death of every man a real fight takes place over his soul between an angel, who wishes to lead it to heaven, and a devil, who attempts to drag it to hell (Jude 9) . In order to assure the soul for himself in advance, Satan attempts to purchase it from the owner while he is still living—vivénte corpore, as he tells the restaurateur in Poe's story. As prince of this world he can easily grant even the most extravagant wishes of man in exchange for his soul. Office, wealth and pleasure are mainly the objects for which a man enters into a pact with the Evil One. Count de Luizzi in Frédéric Soulié's Les Mémoires du Diable sells his soul to the devil for an uncommon consideration. It is not wealth or pleasure that tempts him. What he wants in exchange for his soul is to know the past lives of his fellowmen and women, "a thing," as Mr. Saintsbury well remarks, "which a person of sense and taste would do anything, short of selling himself to the devil, not to know." The devil fulfils every wish of his contractor for a stipulated period of time, at the expiration of which the soul becomes his. Pope Innocent VIII, in his fatal bull "Summis desiderantes" of the year 1484, officially recognized the possibility of a compact with the devil. Increase Mather, the New England preacher, also affirms that many men have made "cursed covenants with the prince of darkness."
St. Theophilus, of Cilicia, in the sixth century, was the first to make the notable discovery that a man could enter into a pact of this nature. The price he set for his soul was a bishopric. This story has been superseded during the Renaissance period by a similar legend concerning the German Dr. Faustus. Other famous personages reputed to have sold their souls to the devil for one consideration or another are Don Juan in Spain, Twardowski in Poland, Merlin in England, and Robert le Diable in France. Socrates, Apuleius, Scaliger and Cagliostro are also said to have entered into compacts with him.
In devil-contracts the Evil One insists that his human negotiator sign the deed with his own blood, while the man never requires the devil to sign it even in ink. The human party to the transaction has always had full confidence in the word of the fiend. There is a universal belief that the devil invariably fulfils his engagement. In no single instance of folk-lore has Satan tried to evade the fulfilment of his share in the agreement. But the man, in violation of the written pact, has often cheated the devil out of his legal due by technical quibbles. "It is peculiar to the German tradition," says Gustav Freytag, "that the devil endeavours to fulfil zealously and honestly his part of the contract; the deceiver is man." In regard to fidelity to his word, the father of lies has always set an example to his victims. "You men," said Satan, "are cheats; you make all sorts of promises so long as you need me, and leave me in the lurch as soon as you have got what you wanted." Mediaeval man had no scruples about his breach of contract with the devil. He always considered the legal document signed with his own blood as "a scrap of paper." "But still the pact is with the enemy; the man is not bound beyond the letter, and may escape by any trick. It is still the ethics of war. We are very close to the principle that a man by stratagem or narrow observance of the letter may escape the eternal retribution which God decrees conditionally and the devil delights in" (H. D. Taylor, Mediaeval Mind). We now can understand why in Eugene Field's story "Daniel and the Devil" it seems to Satan so strange that he should be asked for a written guarantee that he too would fulfil his part of the contract. Apparently this was the first time that the devil had any transactions with an American business man, who has not even faith in Old Nick.
Reference is made in this story by the devil himself to the popular saying that the devil is not so black as he is painted. Even the devout George Herbert wrote—
"We paint the devil black, yet he
Hath some good in him all agree."
This story recalls to us the proverb: "Talk of the devil, and he will either come or send."
Washington Irving, as we have seen, thinks that he is not always very obliging.
Satan, the father of lies, is said to be the patron of lawyers. The men of the London bar formed a "Temple" corps, which was dubbed "The Devil's Own." The tavern of the lawyers on Fleet Street in London was called "The Devil."
BON-BON
This writer, to whom the inner world was more of a reality than the external world, had many visions, especially of the devil. The two seem to have been on a familiar footing. The devil, we must admit, filled Poe's imagination even if we will not go so far as to agree with his critics that he had Satan substituted for soul. His contemporaries, as is well known, would say of him: "He hath a demon, yea, seven devils are entered into him." His detractors actually regarded this unhappy poet as an incarnation of the ruler of Hades (cf. North American Review, 1856; Edinburgh Review, 1858; Dublin University Magazine, 1875) . It was but recently that a writer in the New York Times declared Poe to have been "grub-staked by demons."
The story "Bon-Bon" offers a specimen of Poe's grimly grotesque humour. It first appeared in the Broadway Journal of August, 1835.
The devil of this most un-American of all American authors is not the child of New World fancy, but part of European imagination. The scenery of the story is aptly laid in the land of Robert le Diable.
Poe's description of the devil is, on the whole, fully in accord with the universally accredited conception of his ordinary appearance. His brutal hoofs and savage horns and beastly tail are all there, only discreetly hid under a dress which any gentleman might wear. The devil is very proud of this epithet given him by William Shakespeare; and from that time on, it has been his greatest ambition to be a gentleman, in outer appearance at least; and to his credit it must be said that he has so well succeeded in his efforts to resemble a gentleman that it is now very hard to tell the two apart. The devil is accredited in popular imagination with long ears, a long (sometimes upturned) nose, a wide mouth, and teeth of a lion. It is on account of his fangs that Satan has been called a lion by the biblical writers. But although the prince of darkness can assume any form in the heavens above, in the earth beneath, and in the waters under the earth, he has never appeared as a lion. This, I believe, is out of deference to Judah, whom his father also called a lion. Hairiness is a pretty general characteristic of the devil. His hairy skin he probably inherited from the ancient fauns and satyrs. Esau is believed to have been a hairy demon. "Old Harry" is a corruption of "Old Hairy." As a rule. Old Nick is not pictured as bald, but has a head covered with locks like serpents. These snaky tresses, which already "Monk" Lewis wound around the devil's head, are borrowed, according to Sir Walter Scott, from the shield of Minerva. His face, however, is usually hairless. A beard has rarely been accorded to Satan. His red beard on the mediaeval stage probably came from Donar, whom, as Jacob Grimm says, the modern notions of the devil so often have in the background. Long bearded devils are nowhere normal except in the representations of the Eastern Church of the monarch of hell as counterpart of the monarch of heaven. The eyeless devil is original with our writer. His disciple Baudelaire in his story Les Tentations ou Éros, Plutus et la Gloire presents the second of these three Tempters as an eyeless monster. The mediaeval devil had saucer eyes. According to a Russian legend, the all-seeing spirit of evil is all covered with eyes. The cadaverous aspect of the devil is traditional. With but one remarkable exception (the Egyptian Typhon), demons are always represented lean. "A devil," said Caesarius of Heisterbach of the thirteenth century, "is usually so thin as to cast no shadow" (Dialogus Miraculorum, iii) . This characteristic is a heritage of the ancient hunger-demon, who, himself a shadow, casts no shadow. In the course of the centuries, however, the devil has gained flesh. His faded suit of black cloth recalls the mediaeval devil who appeared "in his fethers all ragged and rent."
It is not altogether improbable that the ecclesiastical appearance of the devil in this story was not wholly unintentional, as the author believes. While Satan cannot be said to be "one of those who take to the ministry mostly," he often likes to slip into priestly robes. In the "Temptation of Jesus" by Lucas van Leyden the devil is habited as a monk with a pointed cowl.
In the comparison of a soul with a shadow there is a reminiscence of Adalbert von Chamisso, whose Peter Schlendhl (1814) sells his shadow to the devil. In his story The Fisherman and His Soul Oscar Wilde considers the shadow of the body as the body of the soul.
That the devils in hell eat the damned consigned there for punishment is also in accord with mediaeval tradition. This idea probably is of Oriental origin. The seven Assyrian evil spirits have a predilection for human flesh and blood. Ghouls and vampires belong to this class of demons.
The devil's pitchfork is not the forked sceptre of Pluto supplemented by another tine, as is commonly assumed. It is the ancient sign of fertility, which is still used as a fertility charm by the Hindus in India and the Zuñi and Aztec Indians of North America and Mexico. A related symbol is the trident of Poseidon or Neptune. This symbol was recently carried in a children's May Day parade through Central Park in New York.
THE PRINTER'S DEVIL
The term "Printer's Devil" is usually accounted for by the fact that Aldus Manutius, the great Venetian printer, employed in his printing shop (about 1485) a black slave, who was popularly thought to be an imp of Satan. This expression may have a deeper significance. It may owe its origin to the fact that Fust, the inventor of the printing press, was believed to have connections with the Evil One. It will be remembered that during the Middle Ages and, in Catholic countries, even for a long time afterwards every discovery of science, every invention of material benefit to man, was believed to have been secured by a compact with the devil. Our ancestors deemed the human mind incapable, without the aid of the Evil One, of producing anything beyond their own comprehension. The red letters which Fust used at the close of his earliest printed volumes to give his name, with the place and date of publication, were interpreted in Paris as indications of the diabolical origin of the works so easily produced by him. (M. D. Conway, Demonology and Devil-Lore.) Sacred days, as is well known, are printed in the Catholic calendar with red letters, and the devil has also employed them in books of magic. This is but another instance of the mimicry by "God's Ape" of the sanctities of the Church.
In the infernal economy, where a strict division of labour prevails, the printer's devil is the librarian of hell. The books over which he has charge must be as numerous as the sands on the sea-shore. For nearly every book written without priestly command was associated in the good old days with the devil. The assertion that Satan hates nothing so much as writing or printer's ink apparently is a very great calumny. He has often even been accused of stealing manuscripts in order to prevent their publication. The prince of darkness naturally rather shuns than courts inquiry. On one occasion Joseph Görres, the defender of Catholicism, complained that the devil, provoked by his interference in Satanic affairs (he is the author of Die christliche Mystik, which is a rich source for diabolism, diabolical possession and exorcism), had stolen one of his manuscripts; it was, however, found some time afterwards in his bookcase, and the devil was completely exonerated.
The concluding paragraph of this story is especially interesting in the light of the present agitation for unbound books and a eulogy of the old Franklin Square Library.
THE DEVIL'S MOTHER-IN-LAW
Fernán Caballero is the pseudonym of Mrs. Cecilia Böhl von Faber, Marchioness de Arco-Hermoso, who was a Swiss by birth, daughter of the literary historian Johann Böhl von Faber, the Johannes of Campe's Robinson (1779). Her father initiated her early into Spanish literature, which he interpreted for her in the spirit of the Romantic movement of those early days. The interest in mediaeval traditions, which she owes to this early training, increased when, later, she went to Catholic Spain. The charm of her popular Andalusian tales consists in the fact that she fully shares with the Catholic peasants of that province an implicit faith in the truth of these mediaeval legends. In her stories we find perhaps the purest expression of mediaevalism in modem times. Fernán Caballero gradually drifted to the extreme Right in all questions of religion, art and life. She hated every liberal expression in matters of faith or art with the fanaticism of a Torquemada. This author not only shared the somewhat general Catholic view that all Protestants were eternally damned, but she naïvely believed that every son of Israel had a tail (Julian Schmidt).
The story of woman's triumph over the Devil is well characteristic of the Land of the Blessed Lady, as Andalusia is commonly called.
The legend of a devil imprisoned in a phial is also found in the work of the Spaniard Luis Velez de Guevara called El Diablo cojuelo (1641), from whom Alain Le Sage borrowed both title and plot for his novel Le Diable boiteux (1707). Asmodeus, liberated from a bottle, into which he had been confined by a magician, entertains his deliverer with the secret sights of a big city at midnight, by unroofing the houses of the Spanish capital and showing him the life that was going on in them. The legend was introduced into Spain from the East by the Moors and finally acclimated to find a place in local traditions. From that country it spread over the whole of Europe. The Asiatics believed that by abstinence and special prayers evil spirits could be reduced into obedience and confined in black bottles. The tradition forms a part of the Solomonic lore, and is frequently told in esoteric works. In the cabalistic book Vinculum Spirituum, which is of Eastern origin, it is said that Solomon discovered, by means of a certain learned book, the valuable secret of inclosing in a bottle of black glass three millions of infernal spirits, with seventy-two of their kings, of whom Beleh was the chief, Beliar (alias Belial) the second, and Asmodeus the third. Solomon afterwards cast this bottle into a deep well near Babylon. Fortunately for the contents, the Babylonians, hoping to find a treasure in the well, descended into it, broke the bottle, and freed the demons (cf. also The Little Key of Rabbi Solomon, containing the Names, Seals and Characters of the 72 Spirits with whom he held converse, also the Art Almadel of Rabbi Solomon, carefully copied by "Raphael," London, 1879). This legend is also found in the tale of the Fisherman and the Djinn in the Arabian Nights, which was also treated by the German poet Klopstock in his poem "Wintermärchen" (1776).
The devil, as it is said in this story, has a mortal hatred of the sound of bells. The origin of ringing the church bells was, according to Sir James Frazer, to drive away devils and witches. The devil in Poe's story "The Devil in the Belfry" (1839) was, indeed, very courageous in invading the belfry.
The concluding part of the story is identical with the Machiavellian tale of Belphagor.
This tale of the Devil's mother-in-law first appeared in the volume Cuentos y poesias populares Andaluces (Seville, 1859), which was translated the same year into French by Germond de Lavigne under the title Nouvelles andalouses. An English translation under the title Spanish Fairy Tales appeared in 1881. This particular story was rendered again into English two years later and included in Tales from Twelve Tongues, translated by a British Museum Librarian [Richard Garnett?], London, 1883. THE GENEROUS GAMBLER
This worshipper and singer of Satan shared his American confrère's predilection for the devil. He found his models in the diabolical scenes of Edgar Allan Poe, whom he interpreted to the Latin world. "Baudelaire," said Théophile Gautier, his master and friend, "had a singular prepossession for the devil as a tempter, in whom he saw a dragon who hurried him into sin, infamy, crime, and perversity." To Baudelaire, the trier of men's souls, the Tempter, was as real a person as he was to Job. He believed that the devil had a great deal to do with the direction of human destinies. "C'est le Diable qui tient les fils qui nous remuent!" Men are mere puppets in the hands of the devil. "Baudelaire's motto," as Mr. James Huneker has well remarked, "might be the reverse of Browning's lines: The Devil is in his heaven. All's wrong with the world."
Baudelaire's devil is a dandy and a boulevardier with wings. Each author, it has been said, creates the devil in his own image.
The greatest boon which Satan could offer Baudelaire was to free him from that great modern monster, Ennui, which selects as its prey the most highly gifted natures. The boredom of life—this was, indeed, as this unhappy poet admits, the source of all his maladies and of all his miseries. He called it the "foulest of vices" and hoped to escape from it "by dreaming of the superlative emotional adventure, by indulging in infinite, indeterminate desire" (Irving Babbit). His preface to the Flowers of Evil, in which he addresses the reader, ends with the following statement in regard to the nature of this modern beast of prey: "Among the jackals, the panthers, the hounds, the apes, the scorpions, the vultures, the serpents—the yelling, howling, growling, grovelling monsters which form the foul menagerie of our vices—there is one which is the most foul, the most wicked, the most unclean of all. This vice, although it uses neither extravagant gestures nor makes a great outcry, would willingly make a ruin of the earth, and swallow up all the world in a yawn. This is Ennui! who, with his eye moistened by an involuntary tear, dreams of scaffolds while smoking his hookah. Thou knowest him, this delicate monster, hypocritical reader, my like, my brother!"
In Gorky's story "The Devil" the devil himself suffers from ennui.
But Baudelaire believed he had good reason to doubt Satan's word, and, therefore, prayed to the Lord to make the devil keep his promise to him. He had little faith in the father of lies. In his book called Artificial Paradises (1860) Baudelaire expressed the thought that the devil would say to the eaters of hashish, the smokers of opium, as he did in the olden days to our first parents, "If you taste of the fruit, you will be as the gods," and that the devil no more kept his word with them than he did with Adam and Eve, for the next day, the god, tempted, weakened, enervated, descended even lower than the beast.
The representation of the devil in the shape of a he-goat goes back to far antiquity. Goat-formed deities and spirits of the woods existed in the religions of India, Assyria, Greece and Egypt. The Assyrian god was often associated with the goat, which was supposed to possess the qualities for which he was worshipped. The he-goat was also the sacred beast of Donar or Thor, who was brought to Scandinavia by the Phoenicians. (On the relation of satyrs to goats see also James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, vol. VIII, pp. Isqq.) At the revels on the Blocksberg Satan always appeared as a black buck.
Le bon diable, which is a favourite phrase in France, points to his simplicity of mind rather than generosity of spirit. It generally expresses the half-contemptuous pity with which the giants, these huge beings with weak minds, were regarded.
The idea that Satan would gamble for a human soul is of mediaeval origin and may have been taken by Baudelaire from Gérard de Nerval, who in his mystery play Le Prince des Sots (1830) has the devil play at dice with an angel, with human souls as stakes. As a dice-player Satan resembles Wuotan. Mr. H. G. Wells in The Undying Fire (1919) has Diabolus play chess with the Deity in Heaven.
The devil in this story falls back into speaking Hebrew when the days of his ancient celestial glory are brought back to his mind. In Louis Ménard's Le Diable au café the devil calls Hebrew a dead language, and as a modern prefers to be called by the French equivalent of his original Hebrew name. In the Middle Ages the devil's favourite language was Latin. Marlowe's Mephistopheles also speaks this language. Satan is known to be a linguist. "It is the Devil by his several languages," said Ben Jonson.
According to popular belief the devil is a learned scholar and a profound thinker. He has all science, philosophy, and theology at his tongue's end.
The Shavian devil in contradistinction to the Baudelairian fiend does bitterly complain that he is so little appreciated on earth. Walter Scott's devil (in "Wandering Willie's Tale," 1824) also complains that he has been "sair miscaa'd in the world."
The preacher to whom our author refers is the Jesuit Ravignan, who declared that the disbelief in the devil was one of the most cunning devices of the great enemy himself. (La plus grande force du diable, c'est d'être parvenu à se faire nier.) Baudelaire's disciple J. K. Huysmans similarly expresses in his novel Là-Bas (1891) the view that "the greatest power of Satan lies in the fact that he gets men to deny kim." (Cf. the present writer's essay "The Satanism of Huysmans" in The Open Court for April, 1920.) The devil mocks at this theological dictum in Pierre Veber's story "L'Homme qui vendit son âme au Diable" (1918). In Perkins's story "The Devil-Puzzlers" the devil expresses his satisfaction over his success in this regard.
The story "The Generous Gambler" first appeared in the Figaro of February, 1864, was reprinted under the title of "Le Diable" in the Revue du Dix-Neuvieme Sièle of June, 1866, and was finally included in Poèmes en Prose. This story has also been translated into English by Joseph T. Shipley.
Daudet and Maupassant furnish the best proof of the assertion made in the Introduction to this book that even the Naturalists who, as a rule, disdained the phantastic plots of the Romanticists, whose imagination was rigorously earth-bound, felt themselves nevertheless attracted by devil-lore. Although most of Daudet's subjects are chosen from contemporary French life, this short-story treats a devil-legend of the seventeenth century. This story as "The Pope's Mule" and "The Elixir of the Reverend Pere Gaucher" obviously has no other object but to poke fun at the Catholic Church. It belongs to the literary type known as the Satirical Supernatural.
This story is characteristic of Daudet's art, containing as it does all of his delicacy and daintiness of pathos, of raillery, of humour. It originally appeared in that delightful group of stories Lettres de Mon Moulin (1869).
The horns and tail of his Satanic majesty peep out as vividly in this book as the disguised devils in Ingoldsby's Legend of the North Countrie.
Although hating all men, the devil has a special hatred for the priests, and he delights in bringing them to fall. Satan loathes the priests, because, as Anatole France says, they teach that "God takes delight in seeing His creatures languish in penitence and abstain from His most precious gifts" (Les Dieux ont soif, p. 278).
It is evident from this story that the popular belief that the devil avoids holy edifices is not based on facts. Here the devil not only enters the church, but even performs the duties of a sacristan at the foot of the altar. According to mediaeval tradition the devil has his agents even in the churches. In the administration of hell where the tasks are carefully parcelled out among the thousands of imps, the church has been assigned to the fiend with the poetic name of Tutevillus. It is his duty to attend all services in order to listen to the gossips and to write down every word they say. After death these women are entertained in hell with their own speeches, which this diabolical church clerk has carefully noted down. Tradition has it that one fine Sunday this demon was sitting in a church on a beam, on which he held himself fast by his feet and his tail, right over two village gossips, who chattered so much during the Blessed Mass that he soon filled every corner of the parchment on both sides. Poor Tutevillus worked so hard that the sweat ran in great drops down his brow, and he was ready to sink with exhaustion. But the gossips ceased not to sin with their tongues, and he had no fair parchment left whereon to record their foul words. So having considered for a little while, he grasped one end of the roll with his teeth and seized the other end with his claws and pulled so hard as to stretch the parchment. He tugged and tugged with all his strength, jerking back his head mightily at each tug, and at last giving such a fierce jerk that he suddenly lost his balance and fell head over heels from the beam to the floor of the church. (From "The Vision of Saint Simon of Blewberry" in F. O. Mann's collection of mediaeval tales.)
DEVIL-PUZZLERS
BY FREDERICK BEECHER PERKINS
Through Asmodeus the devil became associated with humour and gallantry. Asmodeus sharpened his wits in his conversations with the wisest of kings. It will be recalled that this demon was the familiar spirit of Solomon, whose throne, according to Jewish legend, he occupied for three years. Perhaps it was not Solomon after all but this diabolical usurper who gathered around himself a thousand wives. It is said that Asmodeus is as dangerous to women as Lilith is to men. He loves to decoy young girls in the shape of a handsome young man. His love for the beautiful Sarah is too well known to need any comment. He is a fastidious devil, and will not have the object of his passion subject to the embrace of any other mortal or immortal.
Reference is made by the author to Albert Réville's epitome of Georg Roskoff's Geschichte des Teufels (Leipzig, 1869), a standard work on the history of the devil. The review by this French Protestant first appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes for 1870, and was translated into English the following year. A second edition appeared six years later. Roskoff's book, on the other hand, has never appeared in translation.
It is not easy to grasp the scholastic subtleties of mediaeval schoolmen. Dr. Ethel Brewster suggests the following interpretations: An chimoera bombinans in vacuo devorat secundas intentiones. Whether a demon buzzing in the air devours our good intentions. This will correspond to our saying that hell is paved with good intentions. An averia carrucae capta in vetito nomio sint irreplegibilia. Whether the carriers of a [bishop's] carriage caught in a forbidden district should be punished. We can well understand how even the devil might be puzzled by such questions.
Professor Brander Matthews aptly calls this story "diabolically philosophical."
THE DEVIL'S ROUND
A TALE OF FLEMISH GOLF
BY CHARLES DEULIN
The modern devil is an accomplished gentleman. He is the most all-round being in creation. Mynheer van Belzébuth, as he is called in this story, is indeed the greatest gambler that there is upon or under the earth. On the golf-field as at the roulette-table he is hard to beat. It was the devil who invented cards, and they are, therefore, called the Devil's Bible, and it was also he who taught the Roman soldiers how to cast lots for the raiment of Christ (John xix, 24). Dice are also called the devil's bones.
The devil carries the souls in a sack on his back also in the legend of St. Medard. It is told that this saint, while promenading one day on the shore of the Red Sea in Egypt, saw Satan carrying a bag full of damned souls on his back. The heart of this saint was filled with compassion for the poor souls and he quickly slit the devil's bag open, whereupon the souls scrambled for liberty:
"Away went the Quaker.—away went the Baker,
Away went the Friar—that fine fat Ghost,
Whose marrow Old Nick Had intended to pick
Dressed like a Woodcock, and served on toast!
"Away went the nice little Cardinal's Niece
And the pretty Grisettes, and the Dons from Spain,
And the Corsair's crew, And the coin-cliping Jew,
And they scamper'd, like lamplighters, over the plain!"
The Witches' Sabbath is the annual reunion of Satan and his worshippers on earth. The witches, mounted on goats and broomsticks, flock to desolate heaths and hills to hold high revel with their devil.
Beelzebub swears in this story by the horns of his grandfather. While the devil is known to have a grandmother, there has never been found a trace of his grandfather. Satan has probably been adopted by the grandmother of Grendel, the Anglo-Saxon evil demon. The horns have been inherited by Satan from Dionysos. This Greek god had bull-feet and bull's horns.
The reader, who is interested in the origin of the European Carnival (Shrove Tuesday) customs, is referred to the editor's monograph The Origin of the German Carnival Comedy (New York: G. E. Stechert & Co., 1920).
THE LEGEND OF MONT ST.-MICHEL
BY GUY DE MAUPASSANT
No greater proof of the permanence and persistence of the devil as a character in literature can be adduced than the fact that this writer, in whom we find the purest expression of Naturalism, for whom the visible world was absolutely all that there is, was attracted by a devil-legend. But on this point he had a good example in his god-father and master Gustave Flaubert, who, though a realist of realists, showed deep interest in the Tempter of St. Anthony.
This legend of the fraudulent bargain between a sprite and a farmer as to alternate upper- and under-ground crops, with which "the great vision of the guarded mount" is here connected, is of Northern origin, but has travelled South as far as Arabia. It will be found in Grimm's Fairy Tales (No. 189); Thiele's Danish Legends (No. 122), and T. Sternberg's The Dialect and Folk-Lore of Northampshire (p. 140). Rabelais used it as a French legend, and in its Oriental form it served as a subject for a poem by the German Friedrich Rückert ("Der betrogene Teufel"). In all these versions the agreement is entered into between the devil (in the Northampshire form it is a bogie or some other field spirit) and a peasant. It was reserved for Maupassant to make St. Michael get the better of Satan on earth as in heaven.
According to this legend the devil broke his leg when, in his flight from St. Michael, he jumped off the roof of the castle into which he had been lured by the saint. The traditional explanation for the devil's broken leg is his fall from heaven. "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven" (Luke x, 18). All rebellious deities, who were universally supposed to have fallen from heaven, have crooked or crippled legs. Hephaestos, Vulcan, Loki and Wieland, each has a broken leg. This idea has probably been derived from the crooked lightning flashes. The devil's mother in the mediaeval German mystery-plays walks on crutches. Asmodeus, the Persian demon Aeshma daeva, also had a lame foot. In Le Sage's book Le Diable hoiteux Asmodeus appears as a limping gentleman, who uses two sticks as crutches. According to rabbinical tradition this demon broke his leg when he hurried to meet King Solomon. In addition to his broken leg the devil inherited the goat-foot from Pan, the bull-foot from Dionysius and the horse-foot from Loki. The Ethiopic devil's right foot is a claw, and his left a hoof.
The devil is erroneously represented in this story as very lazy. Industry, it has been said, is the great Satanic virtue. "If we were all as diligent and as conscientious as the devil," observed an old Scotch woman to her minister, "it wad be muckle better for us."
The highest peak of a mountain is always consecrated to St. Michael. The Mont St.-Michel on the Norman Coast played a conspicuous part in the wars of the sons of William the Conqueror. Maupassant uses it as the background for several of the chapters of his novel Notre Coeur (1890). The mountain also figures in his story "Le Horla" (1886).
THE DEMON POPE
The following two stories by Richard Garnett have been taken from his book The Twilight of the Gods, which was first published anonymously in 1888, and in a "new and augmented edition," with the author's name, in 1902. The title recalls Richard Wagner's opera Götterdämmerung, but may have been directly suggested by Elémir Bourges, whose novel Le Crépuscule des dieux appeared four years earlier than Garnett's collection of stories. In his book Richard Garnett plays havoc with all religions. The demons, naturally enough, fare worse at his hands than the gods. The Twilight of the Gods is a panorama of human folly and farce. Franz Cumont has said that human folly is a more interesting study than ancient wisdom. The author finds a great joy in pointing out all the mysterious cobwebs which have collected on the ceiling of man's brain in the course of the ages. Mr. Arthur Symons rightly calls this book "a Punch and Judy show of the comedy of civilization."
The story of "The Demon Pope" is based upon a legend of a compact between a Pope and the devil. It is believed that Gerbert, who later became Pope Silvester II, sold his soul to Satan in order to acquire a knowledge of physics, arithmetic and music. The fullest account of this legend will be found in J. J. Dollinger's Fables Respecting the Popes of the Middle Ages (Engl. Translation, 1871). The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil by Paul Carus (1900) contains the following passages on this legend:
"An English Benedictine monk, William of Malmesbury, says of Pope Sylvester II, who was born in France, his secular name being Gerbert, that he entered the cloister when still a boy. Full of ambition, he flew to Spain where he studied astrology and magic among the Saracens. There he stole a magic-book from a Saracen philosopher, and returned flying through the air to France. Now he opened a school and acquired great fame, so that the king himself became one of his disciples. Then he became Bishop of Rheims, where he had a magnificent clock and an organ constructed. Having raised the treasure of Emperor Octavian which lay hidden in a subterrenean vault at Rome, he became Pope. As Pope he manufactured a magic head which replied to all his questions. This head told him that he would not die until he had read Mass in Jerusalem. So the Pope decided never to visit the Holy Land. But once he fell sick, and, asking his magic head, was informed that the church's name in which he had read Mass the other day was 'The Holy Cross of Jerusalem.' The Pope knew at once that he had to die. He gathered all the cardinals around his bed, confessed his crime, and, as a penance, ordered his body to be cut up alive, and the pieces to be thrown out of the church as unclean.
"Sigabert tells the story of the Pope's death in a different way. There is no penance on the part of the Pope, and the Devil takes his soul to hell. Others tell us that the Devil constantly accompanied the Pope in the shape of a black dog, and this dog gave him the equivocal prophecy.
"The historical truth of the story is that Gerbert was unusually gifted and well educated. He was familiar with the wisdom of the Saracens, for Borell, Duke of Hither Spain, carried him as a youth to his country where he studied mathematics and astronomy. He came early in contact with the most influential men of his time, and became Pope in 999. He was liberal enough to denounce some of his unworthy predecessors as 'monsters of more than human iniquity,' and as 'Antichrist, sitting in the temple of God and playing the part of the Devil' (the text inadvertently reads: and playing the part of God); but at the same time he pursued an independent and vigorous papal policy, foreshadowing in his aims both the pretensions of Gregory the Great and the Crusades."
MADAM LUCIFER
BY RICHARD GARNETT
Perhaps the most fascinating—and the most dangerous—character in the infernal world is this Mater tenebrarum—Our Lady of Darkness. "A lady devil," says Daniel Defoe, "is about as dangerous a creature as one could meet." When Lucifer fails to bring a man to his fall, he hands the case over to his better half, and it is said that no man has ever escaped the siren seductions of this Diabo-Lady. A poem, The Diabo-Lady, or a Match in Hell, appeared in London in 1777.
According to Teutonic mythology, this diabolical Madonna is the mother or the grandmother of Satan. The mother or grandmother of Grendel, the Anglo-Saxon evil demon, became Satan's mother or grandmother by adoption. A mother was a necessary part of the devil's equipment. Having set his mind to equal Christ in every detail of his life, Satan had to get a mother somehow. In his story "The Vision Malefic" (1920) Mr. Huneker tells of the appearance of this counterfeit Madonna on a Christmas Eve to the organist of a Roman Catholic church in New York. Partly out of devotion to her and partly also because he could not obtain the sacramental blessing of the Church, Satan was forced to remain single. In the story "Devil-Puzzlers" by Fred B. Perkins the demon Apollyon appears as an old bachelor. "I have a mother, but no wife," he tells the charming Mrs. Hicok. The synagogue was more lenient towards the devil. The rabbis did not hesitate to perform the marriage ceremony for the diabolical pair. According to Jewish tradition the chief of the fallen angels married Lilith, Adam's first wife. She is said to have been in her younger days a woman of great beauty, but with a heart of ice. Now, of course, she is a regular hell-hag. If we can trust Rossetti, who painted her Majesty's portrait, she still is a type of beauty whose fascination is fatal. This woman was created by the Lord to be the help-meet of Adam, but mere man had no attraction for this superwoman. She is said to have started the fight for woman's emancipation from man, and contested Adam's right to be the head of the family. Their married life was very brief. Their incompatibility of character was too great. One fine morning Adam found that his erstwhile angelical wife had deserted him and run away with Lucifer, whom she had formerly known in heaven.
The King-Devil apparently always succeeded somehow or other in breaking the chains with which, according to legend, he had repeatedly been bound and sealed in the lowest depths of hell. From antediluvian times the demons appear to have been attracted by the daughters of men and to have come frequently up to earth to pay court to them. The only devil who must always remain in hell is the stoker, Brendli by name. The fires of hell must not be allowed to go out.
The anatomically melancholic Burton also tells of a devil who was in love with a mortal maiden. Jacques Cazotte tells the story of Beelzebub as a woman in love with an earth-born man.