# The Knickerbocker Gallery/The Satanic in Literature

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Samuel S. Cox
The Satanic in Literature.
By Samuel S. Cox.
It is an anachronism to date the connection of "Old Knick" with literature from the establishment of the Magazine, which is thus playfully personified by its familiar readers. Long before the brothers Clark rescued "Old Knick" from his bad fame, and gave him credit and character, there were intimate relations existing between the genius of type and the genius of "Knick."
Our votive offering upon the shrine where so many flowers, so much fruitage, and such grateful incense has been so often offered before, and malgré the terrors of the name, offered by such good and genial souls, shall be an examination into this relationship between the aforesaid genii. Before we have finished our analysis, it will be found that "Old Knick" has had more to do with human literature than we are apt to imagine, and that without him much of its mirth and more of its tragedy would be wanting.
If we are to believe the authentic records of the past, we shall find him, in the earliest times, inaugurating the typographical art. "He is in league with the devil," said the learned Sorbonne at Paris, of Dr. Faust, who had, under pretence of copying the Bible, sold the first printed edition to the Parisians at sixty crowns a volume; while those "slow coaches," the clerks, sold manuscript copies at five hundred! And the astonished professors, not dreaming of printing, and not considering the inconsistency of the devil becoming a pioneer colporteur, examined the quickly-produced copies, all minutely alike, and declared, "Surely the devil is in this marvellous matter!" And when Faust lowered his price, and multiplied his volumes, and as his red ​ink was observed to be peculiarly sanguine, they thought it best to inform the magistrate against him, as a magician, who, with his own blood, and by Satanic help, had multiplied Bibles beyond the power of human handicraft. And the magistrate, with the profundity of Justice Shallow, found that he was in league with the devil, and ordered that he be made a public bonfire. Faust saved himself by revealing his art to the Parisian parliament. The decision of Justice Shallow was not wholly in error. There is much beside his judgment to confirm the tradition. At this day there is none to deny that the devil has much to do with printed thought; if not with its form and type, certainly with its essence and spirit.
This must be so necessarily. So long as the drama of life alternates between good and evil, will the devil be a star among the actors. Being the principle of evil, he will have more or less to do with human nature, until that principle loses its place in the heart and its power over the head. It is a restless principle; ever busy at the loom of life, weaving into the tissue its sombre strands, and unrolling to the gaze its fantastic figures, which in letters become the mirror of human vicissitude.
As our imperfect nature has no exemption from its temptations, so every department of literature bears evidence of its influence. Is it the lyric gush? The principle of evil sparkles in the ruby wine, and melts with the amorous eye. Is it the stately drama? It plays the prompter, and puts on the mask. Is it the grandeur of the epic? It gives unity to the action, of which it is the hero!
To analyze this element, it may be necessary—
First, to define what is meant by the Satanic element;
Secondly, to trace it to its source and display its greatest examples in literature;
And lastly, to discuss the good taste of their appearance in so notorious a form.
I. It is hardly necessary that I should give a formal introduction to a personage so well known as the subject of my paper. Most of my readers are acquainted with him, at least by reputation. It may not be necessary to search books to define him. He can be found ​when and where you are disposed to look for him. Paracelsus stiffly maintains that the air in summer is not so full of flies as it is with his presence. The odium which hangs most heavily upon him is the odium theologicum. We do not propose to take this view of him, except so far as it may throw light upon his literary uses. A theological view might include his abuses rather than his uses.
It may be more original, if not so interesting, to consider the devil as of some use in the world. That his unprepossessing features have often inoculated the young with wholesome fear will even yet be stoutly maintained. Ever since the days of Luther, the catechisms of Germany have been adorned with a frontispiece, representing him with the appendages of horn, hoof, and forked tail; and this was one of the modes employed for teaching youth correct theological notions. But the march of intellect, which is said to lick all the world into shape, has licked the devil out. His horns are no longer a dilemma to the sinner; his claws no longer reach out after the wicked; and his tail is no longer unfolded to harrow up the soul! Our Intellectual age has acted upon him as the crowing of the cock is said to act upon ghosts—the visible presence vanishes before daylight. But it is unphilosophical to affirm that he is not, because his visible form has vanished. He may make his tracks in other people's shoes, and in the multiplicity of his engagements he does not always cover them. We may tell, from the slime he leaves behind, that a serpent went that way, and not less certainly that the devil has been about by certain actions in human society. His horns are hid under many a judge's wig; his hoof is pinched by many a patent-leather boot; and his tail concealed by costliest broadcloth. And, my fine lady, he does not disdain to hide in your dimpled smile, to wanton with your ringlets, glitter in your ear-drops, nestle in your muff, and shoot his darts in your glances.
He has no particular profession or trade, though he can lend a hand to all. He preaches, though he has never taken orders. He is no lawyer, but who can sophisticate like him? He is no doctor, but he often kills. He is no mechanic, but he glories in a glowing forge, where implements of manifold deviltry are turned out. He is no broker, but none of your old, sleek, plump cent-per-cents has such ​razors for so close a shave. He is no editor, but every one has heard of the Satanic press. He is no tailor, but ever since he sat cross-legged over the first suit of fig-leaves, he has had a remarkable run in furnishing the disguises in which cant, humbug, duplicity, and villainy appear. He is not in the mercantile line, strictly, but yet he is
In fact, he attends to no body's business, only because no body's business is every body's business. The whirr of his unseen wings, as he goes skurrying through the air, may be heard at any time by any one who chooses to listen! Any one who is after the devil will find the devil after him.
To define this ubiquitous personage is as difficult as to "paint chaos, to take a portrait of Proteus, or to catch the figure of the fleeting air," which is his principality.
But that would be a poor transcript of human thought in which this element of evil were omitted.
Whether its introduction into literature has been of any benefit to our race, we do not now consider. Even in poetry and fiction, familiarity with its presence is by no means to be coveted. If the devil is truly represented, he must be shown as a fiend of tact and talent; and then he is as certain to excite admiration as he is to blaspheme; and if, as an amiable devil, why the better devil he is made the worse devil he is; for his character then would be altogether mistaken. If the bad passions are sought to be represented in him, if he is portrayed as one seeking whom he may delude and devour, there are enough of his clan in the human mould, which the varied pen of literature has delineated, and may yet delineate.
The spirit of evil may as well be illustrated indirectly in the human character as in the direct Satanic character, for the reason that the old rogue appears more at home when abroad, more easy in a ​counterfeit than in his genuine shape. But whether in the one or the other; whether in his own dun hide the devil plays his part before the "bacon-brained" boors of the middle ages, in the "Mysteries;" or whether, as Appolyon, he wrestles with Bunyan; or, as Astorath, assaults Saint Anthony; or plays the mischief with Faustus in Marlowe; or fills Dante's Inferno with his form; or sits at the dreaming car of our first mother with Milton, whispering his wily wickedness; or hovers over Madrid on the mantle of Asmodeus; or wings his way with Byron's Cain to the netnermost abysses to look upon pre-Adamite phantoms and the chaos of death; or, with Goethe, dances through the Walpurgis Night among the witches of the Broeken; or blurts out crazed blasphemy with Bailey's Festus; or lures Beauty to a noble sacrifice in Longfellow's Golden Legend; he is not more certainly the principle of evil, and the antagonist of good, than when he plays the hypocrite with Joseph Surface, murders noble natures with the honesty of Iago, harps on his humility with Heep, or embodies the intense badness of Jeffrey Puncheons, or lubricates the downward way with Oily Gammon, or teases and cheats simplicity with Becky Sharp, or dishes out to poor school-boys molasses and brimstone with the ladle of Mrs. Squeers!
But my subject is large enough when limited to the analysis of the Satanic element in literature, where Satan appears in person, and not by proxy. The consideration of the use made of him by Dante, Marlowe, Milton, Goethe, Byron, Southey, and Bailey, will afford theine enough. Its discussion will imply an examination into the original suggestions which these authors profited by in the delineation of their several devils.
The Mosaic history of the evil spirit, his form in Eden, and the consequences of his temptations are familiar. They are the germ out of which nearly all diabolic literature has grown. Wherever introduced, the arch-rebel tempts man to his fall by the alluring fruits of pleasure and knowledge. Another Biblical account, nearly contemporaneous with that of Moses, is that in which Satan is represented as asking of God the privilege to tempt Job. It represents Satan, not as a fallen rebel, but as a tempter; the more potent because authorized by Jehovah; or, as Bailey expresses it, as the ​shadow of God himself. "There was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also." He had been walking to and fro upon the earth, and having scoffed at Job's integrity, the Lord said unto Satan, "Behold, he is in thy hand." This relation of Job has been made the scape-goat for the bold blasphemy of Byron, the insane licentiousness of Bailey, and the scoffing jeers of Goethe.
The unwritten literature of the earliest ages and rudest nations has contained traditions as to the evil spirit. He takes various forms and characteristics, according to the physical environment or condition of the people. In the Indian mythology, the dominion of the Universe was divided, and even the powers of darkness had their castes. The Indian Trinity consisted of Brahma, the Creator; Vishnu, the Preserver; and Sheva, the Destroyer. Sheva was represented as a black figure, with a terrible countenance. He is the only devil whom literature has united in the holy bands of matrimony. If he is such a monster devil, what must his wife be? Her name was Goorga. She was quite as black as her amiable husband, with forehead and eyebrows dripping blood. The feminine taste is displayed by a necklace of skulls, and ear-rings of human bodies. At her zone hang the hands of the giants whom she had slain. Quite an eligible match for Sheva, and not unsuitable for any devil!
The tropical sun of Africa daguerreotyped him in blackest shades as a divine devil, whose worship even yet holds the swart Ethiop in thrall. In Scandinavia the grim spectres of the misty North were servitors of the Great Evil One, whom to propitiate was accounted wise devotion. The power of evil was very naturally feared by the savage, and his religious instincts led him to give hostages and pay homage to an enemy more formidable than the lion of the jungle and more insidious than the serpent of the fens.
This profane idea of the devil is not unlike that of the more refined nations of antiquity, of which it is the prototype.
The Greek classics might as well be without their heroes as their Hades, Homer led Ulysses into the realms of Pluto. Thither Euripides, in the Alcestis, and Hercules Furens, represents his heroes as descending. Sophocles has shown the son of Jupiter and ​Alcemene carrying off the three-headed dog of hell. Similar marvellous narratives formed the subject of two of the lost plays of Æschylus and the soul of his grand tragedy, the sublimest effort of the Greeian tragic muse, is the man-loving and Jove-despising Prometheus, with his will of adamant, unmoved amidst the thunders and lightnings of Almighy wrath!
We find the prototype of Milton's Satan in this sullen and implacable hater of heaven. Eschylus had a genius for painting with a terrible grace. He delighted to represent those old demi-gods—those dark powers of primitive nature, who, warring against the divine order, had been driven into Tartarus, beneath a better-regulated world. The emperor among Titans, even as Satan among the fallen angels, was Prometheus, half-fiend, yet benefactor of the creature, though invincible in his endless hatred of the Creator, The Titan suffers, with what a hopeless agony! yet proud above all pain—chained to the naked rock on the shore of the encircling ocean, conscious that he holds the secret on which rests the Almighy's throne; and whether silent in the energy of his will, or giving it expression to the condoling sea-nymphs and the wandering Io; and at last, when still leaving the throats of Jove, and amidst the storms of his unappeasable vengeance, he is swallowed up in the chaotic abyss, still defiant, still exultant!
Some have found in this demi-Satan a prototype of the sacrifice of the Savior. Prometheus suffered to give man perfection; in this be was like our Savior. But he did this contrary to the will of the Omnipotent; and here the comparison fails. In one case the throes of nature were sympathetic with the sacrifice of Deity. In the other, they wore Heaven's implements of torture! The resemblance between the chained Titan and the fallen son of the morning is so striking that Milton must have taken it as his model of Satanic intellectual energy.
The spirit of the Prometheus may be found burking in nearly every mythology and religion.
Although the province of the devil was well defined and limited In the Christian dispensation, yet even in its earlier literature we find a sect, who, having taken Prometheus as a type, erected a throne on ​earth for the power of hell. The Gnostics of the second century held the doctrine of two principles, from which proceeded all things; one a wise and benevolent Deity; and the other, a principle essentially evil. Elxai and Saturninus propagated these doctrines in Syria, and in the Greek language, and instituted an order whose tenets utterly degraded the religion of Christ. Valentine of Egypt formed them into a system, and evoked out of it, by some fanciful angelic marriages, a Superior Power, called Demiurgus, from whose forming hand our globe and our race issued, and to whom men were enslaved by their evil passions. Christ came to this world to redeem it from Demiurgus, and the contest was to rage until Demiurgus was dethroned.
But another Gnostic branch held that the serpent by which our first parents were deceived was either Christ himself or Sophia, the perfect wisdom concealed under the serpent's form; and serpents became with them objects of Christian worship! The sophistry of Greece was thus renewed; the distinctions between good and evil wore brushed away, and an admirable hint given to the nineteenth-century lawyer, Bailey, of the Inner Temple, for his Festus, in which he beatifies the Gnostic vision, and makes the Deity and the devil to be one!
In the dark ages the devil assimilated himself to the gross imagination of the ignorant, and walked forth in all the material deformity of hoof, horns, claws, and tail. The medium by which he was exhibited was the theologic drama called the Mysteries. The pilgrims from the Holy Land were the actors. In later times, and even up to the Reformation, a higher form of these mysteries obtained, and greater attention was given to their composition. In these plays the devil was a favorite, for he always raised the laugh. This theologic stage usually consisted of three platforms, and the devil had the lowest, the angels the next, and God the highest. On one side of the lower platform was a yawning cave, from which the devil ascended to delight and instruct the spectators. Never a king or a baron gave to his subjects or retainers a gala where this rude representation was omitted. Indeed, the devil became so common that men ceased to regard him as other than a jolly good fellow; and the ​actor who could growl his part most demoniacally won the applause of the men and the smiles of the women.
The relics of this age are yet to be seen in Europe. Many an ancient minster or chapel has its images over the door-way carved in stone, bedaubed in canvas, or illuminated in missal, representing the laughing prince of perdition. I remember one in Fribourg, Switzerland, where the devil appears with the head of a hog, and a basketful of sinners at his back. He weighs them in the scales, and while good angels in vain strive to make the beam kick in favor of heaven, the satellites of sin strive on the other side, and that successfully. When weighed, they are shovelled into a seething caldron, where grinning imps stir them into a hotch-potch of slab hell-broth, with an industry worthy of a better cause, and an indelicacy which would shock a Parisian cuisine.
The coarseness of the dark ages disappeared, and with it this ribald devil. But in cultivated minds there still lingered a terrible form of evil. It was a reality even as late as Luther—a reality at which the burly reformer hurled his ink-stand in the Wartburg. In the fourteenth century, hell and purgatory were realities, ever present to the eye of the Christian. The vices and follies of men had run riot with a prodigality which called for a retribution; and the stern justice of Dante's intellect created an Inferno, where, with dreadful distinctness, grim and gibbering fiends should add terror to the torments of the damned. At this time learning was just opening its way out of the cloister to the sun-shine; statuary began its mission by carving a Madonna or a crucifix; painting colored a missal, as initiatory to the frescoes which now glorify the domes of the Italian 'basilicas; eloquence, waiting its Luther and Erasmus, spake in panegyric of some favorite saint; and history toyed at legends preparatory to her more serious duties: then arose Dante, and with the same power with which he dared to scale a heaven of bliss, descended to the abodes of despair.
Yet even his retributive morality, elevated for his age, partakes somewhat of its coarseness. In his description of Satan he seems to have been stricken dumb by the dread apparition, so that his pen trembles in view of its awful office. The few etchings of Satan ​which he gives, might have been then considered as sublime at the Florentine court, and would be now, had not Milton far outstretched him in the grandeur and boldness of the vision, and had not some of the features been so grotesque as to be laughable. The first observes Satan standing mid-breast in the icy lake of hell, his black banners before him, and a cloud of night around him. Dante is in stature more like a giant than the giants are his arms!
He has three faces; one of vermilion, representing anger; one between wan and yellow, representing envy; the third black, representing gloom. Vast wings shoot forth under his shoulders, made, like those of bats, without plumes, yet larger than any sails upon the sea! He flaps them, and three cold winds come forth, freezing Cocytus to its depth. His six eyes weep tears of bloody foam. At every mouth he champs a sinner, bruising them as with ponderous engine. One of these victims, honored as a special mouthful, is Judas Iscariot, the skin of whose back is stripped up occasionally, by way of variety. No dead Judas either, but extremely vital, for we are told that while his head is in the Satanic jaw he plies his feet without! The last view which Dante has, places his lordship upside down to his vision, which position certainly takes nothing from the terrible grotesqueness of the scene!
But as without the rude Mysteries we would have had no Dante, so without Dante we should have had no Miltonic Satan. The seed of one age becomes the blossom and fruit of another; for the black art of the middle ages gave Goethe the seminal idea of his great drama.
The revival of learning found Europe full of legends of devilish tricks with witches, wizards, warlocks, conjurers, magicians, astrologers, and others of that ilk. How men and women walked invisibly, rode in the air on broomsticks, gibbered a universal language, raised winds, disturbed the dead, and tormented the living—are they not ​written in the black-letter folios of the Magi, seldom to be conned seriously in this matter-of-fact age? It may now be thought very undignified in Satan to condescend to such hocus-pocus whimsies as the evil eye, magic circles, tipping tables, cabalistic words, changing a truss of hay into a horse, producing the phantom of a deer-hunt in a banqueting hall, saying the Lord's Prayer backward, and the like. That credulous age has gone by, and we, vaunting our science, sneer at it; yes, we, in this age of table-tapping spiritualism! Our learned judges who ridicule Lord Hale for his faith in witchcraft; our savans who smile at the idea of the protective horseshoe, who can not see the peculiar virtue in hanging a witch with a green withe, instead of a rope, swallow whole tomes of gibberish revelations from silly and lieing spirits, rapping out their ridiculous fanfaronade on varnished mahogany! There was something horribly definite in the shapes which peopled the medieval imagination. After beating around literature for dim intimations of spiritual devils, it is refreshing to come upon the devil in fact and in form. Those two great eyes stare at you; the flame which breathes from mouth and nostril glares upon you. There is the snaky hair and hardened horn, the dim hide and shaggy back, the divided hoof and double vibrating tongue, the brimstone smell and candles burning blue, as they wink and flicker. The air grows hot, the heart beats as it burns, and the hair of the flesh stands up, while in icy rills sensation chills to the bone! Oh! there was in this a sturdy belief, unruffled by science, quite ravishing to transcendental souls. There was then a happy propensity, especially among the ignorant, to resolve every thing strange and wonderful into devilism. A solution so convenient will commend itself to our rapping circles, as well for its simplicity as for its agreement with the maxim, that where the marvel is unaccountable, the devil is in it. Beside, if not true, it is as good a solution as any yet submitted. This is the way the ignorant people of the fifteenth century resolved all the wonders of magic and the results of alchemy. The wooden pigeon of Architus, the brazen serpent of Bœtius, which hissed, the golden birds of Leo, which sung, and the brazen head of Friar Bacon, which spoke, were evidences of Satanic connection. The scholars and chemists of that time did not feel indignant, either, at the alliance; ​for many of them, bedevilled by the madness which vanity, seclusion, and the fumes of an indigestible learning created, gave out in speeches that, in their transmutation of metals, and in their search after the elixir and the philosopher's stone, the assistance of his nether majesty had been politely tendered.
It was out of this credulity that Dr. Faustus, the sorcerer, became so intimate with the devil. Marlowe, one of Shakspeare's contemporaries, first fixed this legend in the drama. But his Faust was a vulgar sorcerer, tempted by a poor devil to sell his soul for the ordinary price of sensual pleasure and earthly glory; and who, when the forfeit comes to be exacted, shrinks with very unheroic whining.
Many German writers have attempted the same legend: they failed. It was reserved for the great leader of the German choir, to inspire, with perpetual life, this thrilling tradition. Goethe seized upon it, not to gratify the curious, but to establish a truce between the ideal of his soul and the actual of his life, which elements had long warred in his bosom with no determinate purpose or goodly end! He travels with his devil along the dusty pathways of life, penetrates into its purlieus of vice, even becomes licentious, blasphemous, and vulgar in holding the mirror up to its changeful scenes, revels in the wine-cups of the Rhine, and runs the whole round of human pleasure and knowledge; but at last, guided by the gentle spirit of Margaret, whose excellence, innocence, Christian faith, and sensitive purity could not bear even the disguised presence of evil, weeks in her an ideal so ethereally pure and consolingly serene, even amid the prisons and tortures of earth, that the seraphs of God welcome her with transporting minstrelsy on the golden lyres, as if she were the very essence of Godhood and grace! This ideal is the object of the devil's hate. Faust would woo her to himself; but Heaven at last divides them; for Faust hath sold himself to the devil, and the sweet presence of Margaret could never dwell, save in unrest, near the dark companion of her love.
The story of Faust is every one's own experience. We burn for more pleasure, knowledge, and power. The fiend promises them if we will sell to him our souls, and then the strife begins.
Solomon has been called the Faust of Scripture. He found the ​vanity of pleasure, knowledge, and power, when he had become their bondman. "A genuine and generous attachment might have placed happiness by means of the affections once more within reach of the oriental monarch. But the presence of three hundred wives and seven hundred concubines deprived him of even that contingency." Mephistopheles, the caustic and cynical voluptuary, could have wished for no better subject, "If an overgrown library can produce a surfeit of knowledge, an overstocked seraglio will more certainly bring an atrophy of the affections. When reason, feeling, and conscience are ill at ease, to fall back upon sensual indulgence for a remedy is to take a roll in the gutter by way of a medicated mud-bath!"
To this recreation the sated scholar, Faust, is invited by Mephistopheles, and in the course of their companionship, the character of Mephistopheles, as "the best and only genuine devil of modern times," is revealed. It is this character we now propose to discuss.
Mephistopheles is not the devil of horn and hoof; for he expressly repudiates the use of such signs of his calling. He says of these appendages, that they would prejudice him in society; shrewdly implying that he could get into many a man's graces in a fashionable doublet who would cut his acquaintance if he swished a tail! Carlyle has said, "Goethe's devil is a cultivated personage, acquainted with modern sciences; he sneers at witchcraft and the black art while employing them." He has the manners of your modern gentleman; can swagger and debate, drink and poetize, swear and pray, smoke and philosophize. He is a diplomatist, and can lie with "distinguished consideration." He is a politician, and can talk and trim in a bar-room with as easy a tact as in the study of the scholar. He is a sneering, scoffing devil, sharp at sarcasm, quick to the ridiculous, appreciative of the rascally, loves a lie as an Englishman does beef, or a Spaniard a bull-fight; and has altogether the coolest inventive malignity, mingled with the most infernal meanness ever embodied in literature. He is perfectly at home in a pew, can say most gracefully his grace, and dusts his knees after devotion with great demureness. He believes in himself, and is true to no one else but himself, which makes him consistently false to all.
His first appearance when he asks the Lord, with great ​self-complacency, leave to guide Faust in his own way, and offers to bet with the Almighty that he will win, is about as frigid a piece of blasphemous mockery as can be found. Obtaining and expressing great thankfulness for the privilege, he goes off from the presence of the Almighty and his angels with the remark, "I like to see the ancient one" (or old gentleman) "occasionally. It's quite civil in so great a Lord to talk with the devil himself" It is this ultimate, impudent depravity, "logical life with moral death," which makes him so fascinating to the skeptics of Germany. Yet, if need be, he can hide this repulsiveness. You may keep him company for weeks and never have a hint of hell or a sniff of brimstone. He may be with you without your knowledge, seeing without being seen, hearing without being heard, coming in without leave, and leaving without noise; can be shut neither in nor out; is seen when he is not known, and is known when he is not seen: so that he is the more potent in his allurements and dangerous in his designs, because he is so complete in his duplicity. As Spenser was called the poet's poet, so may Mephistopheles be called the devil's devil. He assumes the form of a poodle or a gentleman at will; goes off in thin air, or takes substantial form; sings songs with the jovial; talks like an institution with a "we;" argues philosophy with the pedantic, and plays the Satanic all the time.
One of his many sides is the comical. He has his fun, but it is a diabolical fun. In the wine-collar, at Leipzig, is a drinking party, loud in carousal and deep in their cups. The devil would show Faust with what little wit and much content life may fly away; and in the guise of travellers they join the party. He sings a song, furnishes liquor by boring a hole in the edge of the table, draws from-it wine, some of which, spilt by an awkward reveller, turns to flame. Then, indeed, is dismay; then ensues a fight, in which, of course, the devil gets the best; after which he transports, by his necromancy, the carousing company into a paradise of beauty, where, amid flowers and fruit they revel, plucking luscious grapes with avidity, which, as the illusion is dispelled, they find, for grapes, each other's noses.
It is said that the devil has a hand in all the fun and frolic of life. There is some reason for the assertion. The confession may not be ​creditable; but an analysis of the most comical characters of Shakespeare or Dickens will reveal a large alloy of deviltry. Mischief is first cousin to Momus. "Old Knick" always has fun at his "table." There is an infirmity in our nature which likes this flavor of sin in the wine of life; it may be because it prefers the joking to the earnest devil. Many never think of him without a chuckle, or talk of him without a joke. The majority will enjoy the Devil's Drive of Byron better than his Lucifer, and the Devil's Thoughts with Coleridge much better than Satan's speeches to his fallen comrades. Coleridge has happily seen the laughing side, and catches this view of him when he sings,
But no author has combined, in this jolly devil, such a variety of diabolic attributes as Goethe. It was necessary that life be exhibited in all its phases, and to omit laughter would have been a sad deprivation. Having bound Faust in a contract signed with his own blood, he runs with him the round of transient joy, takes him through the racking experiences of love, hampers his mind with denial, harrows it with doubt, proves to him the emptiness of pleasure, and drives him to despair, and would drive us also, but for the heavenly vision of Margaret, whose life, like the prayers of Dante's Beatrice, buoy the soul upward to the Source of Love and Light! whose life leaps from the dark drama like a silver cascade from a gloomy Alpine gorge, white in purity, spanned by the iris of Hope, and singing like a seraph of Joy.
The Satan of Milton is so familiar that it needs no analysis in order to compare him with this sneering skeptic of Goethe. The former is epical, the latter dramatic. The former is a higher reach of genius. It is transcendental. The Satan of Milton, like the witches of Macbeth or the Tempest, is supernatural. The scenery and conduct belongs not to our sphere, the earth. Mephistopheles is entirely at home among men. The Satan of Milton is vast, vague, uncertain, "floating many a rood;" a conception, not a form of matter; a shadowy phantom towering sublime like Teneriffe, with features scarred with the thunder of God's vengeance. Mephistopheles is a worldling, a changeling, a schemer, with no very determinate means, but takes any to a bad end.
The Satan of Milton in intellectual massiveness is only equalled by his moral obliquity. He embodies a will more than Promethean. ​Mephistopheles seems to say, "I would," or "I may;" Satan, "I WILL!"
Napoleon coped with destiny, and read in the stars his horoscope; and he moved on to its fulfillment as the cannon-ball which he sped, regardless of the ruin it made. Talleyrand played with men and associated with women, and, like the Vicar of Bray, by a mobility in duplicity, retained his place under every form of government. Bonaparte was more like Satan; Talleyrand, Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles copes with man, and laughs over his success in human weakness; Satan copes with God, and energizes, by his nervous oratory, the myriads of hell to rise against the Omnipresent in arms. The one shirks and dodges through life; the other rises above life, defies Death and conquers Despair.
In Mephistopheles we have a dove in gentleness, if need be; a serpent in cunning at all times; but he never rises to that lofty daring in which the heroic element consists. "But Satan's might intellectual is victorious over all extremities of pain; amid agonies unutterable, he delineates, resolves, and oven exults. Against the sword of Michael, the thunder of Jehovah, the flaming lake, and the marl burning with solid fire; against the prospect of an eternity of unintermittent misery, his spirit bears up unbroken, resting on its own innate energies, requiring no support from any thing external, nor even from hope itself!"
Satan and Mephistopheles are neither old wives' devils, such as those of Tasso and Klopstock; they are not vast, well-defined machines, munching Iscariots, like Dante's Satan; not allegorico-mystico-sophistico-metaphysical devils, like Bailey's Lucifer, hungering and thirsting after unrighteousness, and striving to reconcile good with evil, and to educe purity out of pollution.
There is a fascination both in Satan and in Mephistopheles, which belongs not to the heroes of Byron and Bailey. Byron reflects in his Lucifer his own morbid doubtings, and reviles God with a bitterness of spirit which deserves the reprobation of the good. Bailey, in his Festus, loses all regard for the properties of the diabolic, His devil falls in love in one place; in another, scolds the damned like a fish-woman, reproves his under-fiends for laziness, telling them that they ​do not earn enough to pay for the caloric that burns them; mingles love and lust; loses sight of the distinctions between the moral and the intellectual, and ends his medley with the triumph of sensibility over reason and the endevilment of God Almighty.
Suppose proclamation were made for a great congress in Pandemonium. The infernal palace of Dis is lighted with the lurid flames; the hissing of the serpents, the wail of the lost, and the surging of the liquid lake ceases for the occasion. Suddenly the smoke of the pit clears away, the seats of the Satanic senators are revealed, and the roll is called. Sheva, the black destroyer of Ind, answers for himself and queen; Prometheus, the Titanic heaven-hater, and Demiurgus, the gnostic world-king of evil, are there! The arch-fiend of the Mysteries exalts his horn, and stamps with his iron hoof! The three-faced Emperor of Dante, with his mouthful of sinners, sends a tempest from his mighty wings to announce his presence! The leering Mephistopheles swaggers to his seat with a devil-may-care air! And Lucifer, Moloch, and Belial, and Beelzebub, and all the devils of romance, tradition, and history, fill the hall. But the great leader appears not yet! Suspense reigns in the abyss! Far off his coming shines! And Satan, the self-elected king of all, strides proudly to the highest seat! Then go up the shouts which shake hell's concave!
No caucus for speaker is needed now. No wrangle for the premiership; for no voice is heard till the ruined archangel has first spoken and commanded. He overtops them all, even as Jove the gods of Olympus, "in mien and gesture proudly eminent!"
Other languages have had worse specimens of depravity in their literature than ours. France, in her licentiousness, Germany, in her skepticism, Italy, in her abandonment, have more of the elements of positive evil; but it was reserved for the English muse to produce this unrivalled genius of evil; and while we deplore that industry intellect, and will are associated with so much badness, yet, thanks to John Milton, the freeman of English intellect, at once heroic and holy, he has created an impassable gulf between evil and good, and testing human action by these most radical distinctions, sings a "Paradise Regained" from the thraldom of Satan!
Thus much for our analysis of the Satanic element of literature. ​There is much only hinted, more unsaid. My limits allow no exeursions into the fields of theology. Nor have I introspected the human heart, to find its legions of devils, who harbor along its sinuous avenues, and revel in its chambers of imagery. We may feel bold at the idea that the material devil has disappeared; may draw a relieving sigh that all these creations we have considered are but the figments of the imagination; but this one fact remains as palpable as granite, that there is a devil, all the more real because viewless, all the more subtle because concealed, all the more dangerous because he hides in our hearts, befools our senses, and makes his hell in our own unhappiness. His is a spiritual existence, and therefore a more terrible reality!
Is, then, the "Paradise Regained" but a song? And shall the fact ever be a Paradise Lost—lost—lost for ever! Shall those mysterious relations of the soul to evil, emblemed in these creations of literature, continue? Shall the soul for ever "lacerate itself with sin and misery, like a captive bird against the iron limits which necessity has drawn around it?" We answer fearfully, Yes; yet hopefully, No!
Fearfully, Yes; for while the human intellect is prostituted through print, there is the most enduring of wrongs, the most irrevocable of evils. It is the angel of light, fallen, and eclipsed of his glory, and dragging other angels with him. Wit, fancy, talent, humor, judgment, and genius join in some gifted mind with the cunning craft of deviltry, and an influence like that of a leprous spot enters and defiles the soul for ever.
Hopefully, No; for as the age grows brighter and warmer, a kindlier philosophy bedews the lip of song, and a holier spirit enkindles the fire of enthusiasm. The works of those who refuse consocration at the font of purity, who would wanton with licentiousness and error, will be thrown aside among the rubbish of dullness and duncery. The splendors of genius will not save them from the eclipses of neglect. This idolatry of the Satanic will pass away, and the prince of the power of the air will in vain seek for his old alliance with the genius of print, so long as virtue is regarded as better ​than ability, and godliness than gain. Shall the evil one for ever haunt humanity? Hopefully, no! no! no!
I have an Italian painting which is emblematic of this contest between evil and good on the earth. It is a night scene on the shores of Sicily. The artist stands amidst the broken columns and disjointed arches of a villa, beautiful in its ruin, even as man in his fall. He overlooks the blue sea. There is an unwonted blending of light and shadow on earth, wave and sky. Light and shadow! Rather lights and shadow; for two lights reveal a scene of loveliness and terror. Yon red and lurid light bursts from the top of Ætna in eruption. Yon white and tranquil light gleams from the moon, through rolling clouds of smoke—gleams in broken silver on the wave, on the ruin, against the lining of the cloud, and mingling with the lurid blaze, bepaints the mountain sides, the half-hid villages by the shore, and interpenetrates the moving masses of smoke, which the sea-breeze bears away from the peak to the inland. The chaste light of heaven thus blends with the impure fires of earth, as the good struggles with the evil,
Lo! ships skim the sea, full-rigged and swift; for interchange goes on amidst the elemental strife. In the light which fills the rents of the ruin, in the foreground, sits a rustic maiden in picturesque white boddice and scarlet kirtle, blushing at the tale of love whispered by the shepherd at her side; for love survives, though polluted Pompeiis perish! The fire-mount rises from the sea, whose waves, moonlit and musical, spring to kiss its throbbing feet and cool its raging fire; for joy is not wholly hushed by the earthquake which "smacks its rumbling lips," eager to devour. The lights reveal, amidst the villages and through the smoke, many a spire of God's church, pointing with silent emphasis upward.
But a pall overhangs the picture; yet through it the allegory shines. The shadow of evil beclouds human destiny, yet through it we see commerce knitting man to man by the amenities of intercourse; love blending heart to heart by her solaces of sweetness; joy making music on the sands of time; and religion pointing out the path of aspiration to a better home, where throes of earth and ​the temptations of Satan come nevermore! Through it shines the queen of heaven, serene as faith, and beautiful as hope.
Ætna's fires grow dim before the rising day, but that queen of heaven, untainted by its impurity, sails away to smile on other lands. The morning shows but the ashes of the wasted energies of the night of boding. Wasted? Oh! no; for even its ashes may fructify the earth; and it is well said, that in the ploughing of the earthquake, even as in the ploughing of grief, wrought by temptations, is the agriculture of God. Without it no rich immortal vintage can be gathered. And trials and temptations of the evil spirit, and the literature which enshrines it, may last, like Ætna's fire, for a night; but hopefully the heart yearns for the joy which cometh in the morning!