Page:Devil stories - an anthology.djvu/318

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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

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