SOME ACCOUNT OF A STAGE DEVIL
The “principle of evil,” as commonly embodied in the theatre, has been a sorry affair; the stage devil, in a word, a shabby person. From the time of the mysteries at Coventry to the melodramas of the phosphoric pen of the blue-fire dramatists, the father of iniquity has made his appearance in a manner more provocative of contempt than of peace; a candidate for our smiles, rather than a thing of terrors; we have chuckled where we should have shuddered.
That the stage devil should have been so commonplace an individual, when there were devils innumerable where-from an admirable selection of demons might be “constantly on hand,” made it the more inexcusable on the part of those gentlemen invested with the power of administering to, and in some measure forming, public taste. What a catalogue of devils may be found in the Fathers! Let us particularise a few from the thousand of demons with which the benevolent imaginations of our ancestors have peopled the air, the earth, and the flood. Poor humanity stands aghast at the fearful odds of spiritual influences arrayed against it; for it is the fixed opinion of Paracelsus, that “the air is not so full of flies in summer as it is at all times of invisible devils”; whilst another philosopher declares that there is “not so much as an hairbreadth empty in earth or in water, above or under the earth!” Cornelius Agrippa has carefully classified devils, making them of nine orders. The first are the false Gods adored at Delphos and elsewhere in various idols, having for their captain Beelzebub; the second rank is of “liars and equivocators,” as Apollo—poor Apollo!—“and the like”; the third are “vessels of anger, inventors of all mischief,” and their prince is Belial; the fourth are malicious, revengeful devils, their chief being Asmodeus; the fifth are cozeners, such as belong to magicians and witches, their prince is Satan; the sixth are those aerial devils that corrupt the air, and cause plagues, thunder, fire, and tempests—Meresin is their prince; the seventh is a destroyer, captain of the fairies; the eighth is an accusing or calumniating devil; and the ninth are all these in several kinds, their commander being Mammon. Of all these infernal creatures Cornelius Agrippa writes, with the confidence and seeming accuracy of a man favoured with their most intimate acquaintance.
In addition to these we have, on the authority of grave philosophers, legions of household devils, from such as “commonly work by blazing stars,” fire-drakes, or ignes fatui, to those who “counterfeit suns and moons, and oftentimes sit on ship masts.” Their common place of rendezvous, when unemployed, is Mount Hecla. Cardon, with an enviable gravity, declares that “his father had an aerial devil bound to him for twenty and eight years.” Paracelsus relates many stories, all authenticated, of she-devils, “that have lived and been married to mortal men, and so continued for certain years with them, and after for some dislike have forsaken them.” Olaus Magnus—a most delightful liar—has a narrative of “one Hotheius, a king of Sweden, that, having lost his company as he was hunting one day, met with these water-nymphs and fairies, and was feasted by them”; and Hector Boethius of “Macbeth and Banquo, two Scottish lords, that, as they were wandering in the woods, had their fortune told them by three strange women!” For the “good people,” the wood-nymphs, foliots, fairies, they are, on the best authority, to be seen in many places in Germany, “where they do usually walk in little coats some two feet long.” Subterranean devils are divided by Olaus Magnus into six companies; they commonly haunt mines, “and the metal-men in many places account it good luck, a sign of treasure and rich ore, when they see them.” Georgius Agricola (de subterraneis animantibus) reckons two more kinds, “that are clothed after the manner of metal-men, and will do their work.” Their office, according to the shrewd guess of certain philosophers, “is to keep treasure in the earth that it be not all at once revealed.”
On the 20th of June 1484, it is upon record that the devil appeared “at Hamond, in Saxony,” in the likeness of a field-piper, and carried away a hundred and thirty children “that were never after seen!” I might fill folios with the pranks and malicious mummeries of the evil spirit, all, too, duly attested by the most respectable witnesses, but shall at once leave the demons of the philosophers for the spirits of the playmongers, the devils of the world for the devils of the stage.
Why is it that, nine times out of ten, your stage devil is a droll rather than a terrible creature? I suspect this arises from the bravado of innate wickedness. We endeavour to shirk all thoughts, all recollections of his horrible attributes, by endowing him with grotesque propensities. We strive to laugh ourselves out of our fears: we make a mountebank of what is in truth our terror, and resolutely strive to grin away our apprehensions. Surely some feeling of this kind must be at the bottom of all our ten thousand jokes at the devil’s expense—of the glee and enjoyment with which the devil is received at the theatre; where, until the appearance of Mr Wieland, he had been but a commonplace absurdity, a dull repetition of a most dull joke.
Wieland has evidently studied the attributes of the evil principle; with true German profundity, he has taken their length, and their depth, and their breadth, he has all the devil at his very finger ends, and richly deserves the very splendid silver-gilt horns and tail (manufactured by Rundell and Bridges) presented to him a few nights since by the company at the English Opera-house; presented with a speech from the stage-manager, which, or I have been grossly misinformed, drew tears from the eyes of the very scene-shifters.
Can anybody forget Wieland’s devil in the Daughter of the Danube? Never was there a more dainty bit of infernal nature. It lives in my mind like one of Hoffman’s tales, a realisation of the hero of the nightmare, a thing in almost horrible affinity with human passions. How he eyed the Naiades, how he laughed and ogled, and faintingly approached, then wandered round the object of his demoniacal affections! And then how he burst into action! How he sprang, and leapt, and whirled, and, chuckling at his own invincible nature, spun like a teetotum at the sword of his baffled assailant! And then his yawn and sneeze! There was absolute poetry in them—the very highest poetry of the ludicrous: a fine imagination to produce such sounds as part of the strange, wild, grotesque phantom—to give it a voice that, when we heard it, we felt to be the only voice such a thing could have. There is fine truth in the devils of Wieland. We feel that they live and have their being in the realms of fancy; they are not stereotype commonplaces, but most rare and delicate monsters, brought from the air, the earth, or the flood; and wherever they are from, bearing in them the finest characteristics of their mysterious and fantastic whereabouts.
Wieland’s last devil, in an opera bearing his fearful name, is not altogether so dainty a fellow as his elder brother of the Danube, whose melancholy so endeared him to our sympathies, whose lackadaisical demeanour so won upon our human weakness. In The Devil’s Opera the hero is more of the pantomimist than of the thinking creature; he is not contemplative, but all for action; he does not, like the former fiend, retire into the fastness of his infernal mind to brood on love and fate, but is incessantly grinning, leaping, tumbling; hence he is less interesting to the meditative part of the audience, though, possibly, more attractive to the majority of playgoers, who seem to take the “evil principle” under their peculiar patronage, laughing, shouting, and hurrahing at every scurvy trick played by it on poor, undefended humanity; though, with a bold aim of genius on the part of the author, the devil, in the opera, is made the ally of love and virtue against blind tyranny and silly superstition. The devil is changed, bound, the bond-slave of the good and respectable part of the dramatis personae, to the confusion of the foolish and the wicked. This is certainly putting the “evil principle” to the very first advantage. The best triumph of the highest benevolence is, undoubtedly, to turn the dominating fiend into the toiling vassal, and in the new opera this glory is most unequivocally achieved.
To Wieland we are greatly indebted for having reformed the “infernal powers” of the theatre; for having rescued the imp of the stage from the vulgar commonplace character in which he has too long distinguished himself, or, I ought rather to say, exposed himself; for there was no mystery whatever in him: he was a sign-post devil, a miserable daub, with not one of those emanations of profound, unearthly thought—not the slightest approach to that delicacy of colouring, that softening of light into shade, and shade into light, that distinguish the devil of Wieland. No: in him we have the foul fiend divested of all his vulgar, Bartlemy Fair attributes; his horns, and tail, and saucer-eyes, and fish-hook nails, are the least part of him; they are the mere accidents of his nature, not his nature itself; we have the devil in the abstract, and are compelled to receive with some consideration the popular and charitable proverb that declares him to be not quite so black as limners have shadowed him.
By the rarest accident I have obtained some account of the birth and childhood of Wieland. It appears that he is a German born, being the youngest of six sons of Hans Wieland, a poor and most amiable doll-maker, a citizen of Hildesheim. When only four years old the child was lost in the Hartz Mountains, whither his father and several neighbours had resorted to make holiday. The child had from his cradle manifested the greatest propensities towards the ludicrous; it was his delight to place his father’s dolls in the most preposterous positions, doing this with a seriousness, a gravity, in strange contrast with his employment. It was plain to Professor Teufelskopf, a frequent visitor at the shop of old Wieland, employed by the professor on toys that are yet to astound the world—being no other than a man and wife and four children, made entirely out of pear-tree, and yet so exquisitely constructed, as to be enabled to eat and drink, cry, and pay taxes, with a punctuality and propriety not surpassed by many machines of flesh and blood—I say it was the opinion of Professor Teufelskopf that young Wieland was destined to play a great part among men, an opinion we are happy to say nightly illustrated by the interesting subject of this memoir. We have, however, to speak of his adventures when only four years old, in the Hartz Mountains. For a whole month was the child missing, to the agony of its parents, and the deep regret of all the citizens of Hildesheim, with whom little George was an especial favourite. The mountains were overrun by various parties in search of the unfortunate little vagrant, but with no success. It was plain that the boy had been caught away by some spirit of the mines with which the marvellous districts abound, or, it might be, carried to the very height of the Brockenberg, by the king of the mountains, to be his page and cup-bearer. The gravest folks of the Hildesheim shook their heads, and more than two declared that they never thought George would grow up to be a man—he was so odd, so strange, so fantastic, so unlike any other child. The despair of Hans Wieland was fast settling into deep melancholy, and he had almost given up all hope, when, as he sat brooding at his fireside one autumn night, his wife—she had quitted him not a minute to go upstairs—uttered a piercing shriek. Hans rushed from the fireside, and in an instant joined his wife, who, speechless with delight and wonder, pointed to the nook in the chamber where little George was wont to sleep, and where, at the time, but how brought there was never, never known, the boy lay in the profoundest slumber; in all things the same plump, good-looking child, save that his cheek was more than usually flushed. Hans Wieland and his wife fell upon their knees and sobbed thanksgivings.
I cannot dwell upon the effect produced by this mysterious return of the child upon the people of Hildesheim. The shop of Hans Wieland was thronged with folks anxious to learn from the child himself a full account of his wanderings, of how he happened to stray away, of what he had seen, and by what means he had been brought back. To all these questions, though on other points a most docile infant, George maintained the most dogged silence, several of the church authorities, half a dozen professors, nay, the great Teufelskopf himself, questioned the child; but all in vain, George was resolutely dumb. It was plain, however, that he had been the playfellow, the pet of supernatural beings; and though there can be but little doubt that his friends and devils as shown upon the stage are no other than faithful copies of the grotesque originals at this moment sporting in the neighbourhood of the Brockenberg, Mr Wieland, as I am credibly informed, though a gentle and amiable person in other respects, is apt to be ruffled, nay, violent, if impertinently pressed upon the subject of his early wanderings. When, however, we reflect upon the great advantages obtained by Mr Wieland from what is now to be considered the most fortunate accident of his childhood, we must admit that there is somewhat less praise due to him than if he appeared before us as a great original. Since I have commenced this paper, I have been informed by Mr Dullandry, of The Wet Blanket, that the goblin in The Daughter of the Danube, a touch of acting in which Mr Wieland gathered a wreath of red-hot laurels, is by no means what it was taken for, a piece of fine invention on the part of the actor, but an imitation, a most servile copy of the real spirit that carried George away from his father and friends, tempting the little truant with a handful of the most delicious black cherries, and a draught of kirschen-wasser. That every gesture, every movement, nay, that the leer of the eye and the “villainous hanging of the nether lip,” the sneeze, the cough, the sigh, the lightning speed, the
“Infernal beauty, melancholy grace,”
all the attributes of mind and body of that most delicate fiend of the Brockenberg, were given in the hobgoblin of the Danube. Hence, if Mr Wieland be not, as we thought him, a great original, he is most assuredly the first of mimics, and has turned a peril of his childhood to a golden purpose. Dullandry declares upon the best authority—doubtless his own—that the devil of the Brockenberg, when little George cried to go home to his father and mother, his brother and sister, would solace the child by playing upon a diabolic fiddle, the strings of wolf’s gut and the bow-string from the snowy hair of the witch of the Alps, dancing the while, and by the devilish magic of the music bringing from every fissure in the rocks, every cleft in the earth, and from every stream, their supernatural intelligences to caper and make holiday, for the especial delight of the poor, kidnapped son of the doll-maker of Hildesheim. If this be true, and when Dullandry speaks it is hard to doubt, his words being pearls without speck or flaw—if this be true, we here beg leave to inform Mr Wieland that from this minute we withdraw from him a great part of that admiration with which we have always remembered the spasmodic twitch of his elbow, the self-complacency about his eyes and jaws, the lofty look of conscious power, the stamping of the foot, and the inexhaustible energy of bowing which marked his Devil on Two Sticks, all such graces and qualifications being, as from Dullandry, it now appears, the original property of the devil of the Brockenberg. However, to return to our narrative, which, as I am prepared to show, has in these days of daring speculation the inestimable charm of truth to recommend it to the severest attention of my readers.
Little George remained a marvel to the good citizens of Hildesheim, few of whom, for certain prudential reasons, would any longer permit their children to play with him; fearing, and reasonably enough, some evil from contact with a child who was evidently a favourite with the spirits of the Hartz Mountains. However, this resolution had no effect on George, who more than ever indulged in solitary rambles, becoming day by day more serious and taciturn. His little head—as Professor Teufelskopf sagaciously observed—was filled with the shapes and shadows haunting the Brockenberg. Many were the solicitations made by Teufelskopf and rival professors to Hans Wieland, to be permitted to take little George and educate him for a philosopher, an alchemist, in fact for anything and everything, the boy displaying capacities, as all declared, only to be found in an infant Faust. To all these prayers Hans Wieland was deaf. He resolved to bring up his son to the honest and useful employment of doll-making; keeping, if possible, his head from the cobwebs and dust of the schools, and making him a worthy minister to the simple and innocent enjoyments of baby girls,[[9]] rather than consenting to his elevation as a puzzler and riddler among men. Thus our hero, denied to the scholastic yearnings of the great Teufelskopf, sat at home, articulating the joints of dolls, and helping to make their eyes open and shut, when—had his father the true worthy ambition in him—the boy would have been inducted into knowledge that might have given him supernatural power over living flesh and blood, bending and binding it to his own high, philosophic purposes. Hans Wieland, however, was a simple, honest soul, with a great, and, therefore, proper sense of the beauties and uses of the art of doll-making. Glad also am I to state that little George, with all his dreaminess, remained a most dutiful, sweet-tempered boy; and might be seen, seven hours at least out of the twenty-four, seated on a three-legged stool fitting the arms and legs of the ligneous hopes of the little girls of Hildesheim, his thoughts, it may be, far, far away with the fiddling goblin of the Brockenberg, making holiday with the multitude of spirits in the Hartz Mountains.
[9]. One of the most touching instances of the “maternal instinct,” as it has been called, in children, came under my notice a few months ago. A wretched woman, with an infant in her arms, mother and child in very tatters, solicited the alms of a nursery-maid passing with a child, clothed in the most luxurious manner, hugging a large wax doll. The mother followed the girl, begging for relief “to get bread for her child,” whilst the child itself, gazing at the treasure in the arms of the baby of prosperity, cried, “Mammy, when will you buy me a doll?” I have met with few things more affecting than the contrast of the destitute parent begging her bread (the misery seemed real) and the beggar’s child begging of its mother for a “doll!”
“Would solace the child by playing upon a diabolic fiddle”
This mental abstraction on the part of little George was but too often forced upon the observation of the worthy Hans, the young doll-maker constantly giving the looks and limbs of hobgoblins to the faces and bodies of dolls, intended by the father to supply the demand for household dolls of the same staid and prudish aspect, of the same proportion of members, as the dolls that had for two hundred years soothed and delighted the little maidens of Hildesheim. It is a fact hitherto unknown in England, that in the Museum of Hildesheim—a beautiful, though somewhat heavy building of the Saxon order—there are either eleven or twelve (I think twelve) demon dolls made by young Wieland, and to this day shown to the curious—though the circumstance has, strangely enough, remained unnoticed by the writers of Guide Books—as faithful portraits of the supernatural inhabitants of the Hartz Mountains. I am told, however, that within the last three years, one of the figures has been removed into a separate chamber, and is only to be seen by an express order from the town council, in consequence of its lamentable effects on the nerves of a certain German princess, who was so overcome by the exhibition, that it was very much feared by the whole of the principality—extending in territory at least a mile and a quarter, and containing no less than three hundred and twenty subjects—the territory would pass to a younger brother, or, what is worse, be the scene of a frightful revolution, an heir direct being wanted to consolidate the dynasty. This unfortunate event, though, possibly, fatal to the future peace of the said principality, is nevertheless a striking instance of the powerful imagination or rather of the retentive memory of the young Wieland. The doll, like all the others, is a true copy from diabolic life. How the painful story attached to it should have escaped all the foreign correspondents of all the newspapers is a matter of surpassing astonishment.
We have now arrived at an important change in the life of our hero. His father had received a munificent order for three dolls from Prince Gotheoleog, a great patron of the fine arts in all their many branches. The dolls were intended by the prince—he was the best and most indulgent of fathers—as presents for his daughters; and, therefore, no pains, no cost, were to be spared upon them. After a lapse of three months the order was completed; and young Wieland, then in his seventh year, was dressed in his holiday suit, and—the dolls being carried by Peter Shnicht, an occasional assistant of Hans Wieland—he took his way to the palace of the prince. It was about half-past twelve when he arrived there, and the weather being extremely sultry, George sat down upon the palace steps to rest and compose himself before he ventured to knock at the gate. He had remained there but a short time, when he was addressed by a tall, majestic-looking person clothed in a huntsman’s suit, and carrying a double-barrel gun, a weapon used in the neighbourhood of Hildesheim in boar-shooting, who, asking our hero his name and business, was struck with the extraordinary readiness of the boy’s answers, and, more than all, with a certain look of diabolic reverence peeping from his eyes, and odd smiles playing about his mouth. The stranger knocked at the gate, gave his gun to a servant, and bade the little doll-maker follow the domestic, who showed him into a sumptuous apartment. The reader is prepared to find in the man with the gun no other person than Prince Gotheoleog himself, who in a few minutes reappeared to George, asked him in the most condescending manner various questions respecting his proficiency in reading and writing, and finally dismissed him with ten groschen for his extraordinary intelligence. Six months after this Prince Gotheoleog was appointed ambassador to the court of St James’s, and young Wieland attended him in the humble, yet most honourable capacity of page. This appointment Hans Wieland, in his simplicity, believed would effectually win his romantic son from his errant habits, would cure him of day-dreaming, by plunging his neck deep into the affairs of this world. Alas! it had precisely the reverse effect upon the diplomatic doll-maker. From the moment that he found himself associated, though in the slightest degree, with politics, the latent desire to play the devil burst forth with inextinguishable ardour. A sense of duty—a filial regard for the prejudices of his father—did for a time restrain him from throwing up his very lucrative and most promising situation in the household of Prince Gotheoleog, and kept him to the incessant toil, unmitigated drudgery of diplomatic life; but having one luckless night gained admission into the gallery of the House of Commons on the debate of a certain question, to which I shall not more particularly allude, and there having seen and heard a certain member, whose name I shall not specify, sway and convulse the senate, George resolved from that moment to play the devil, and nothing but the devil, to the end of his days. He immediately retired to Bellamy’s, and penned his resignation to Prince Gotheoleog, trusting, with the confidence of true genius, to fortune, to his own force of character, or, what is more likely, without once thinking of the means or accidents, to obtain the end of his indomitable aspirations—an appearance as the devil. Unrivalled as Wieland is as the representative of the fiend in all his thousand shapes—to be sure the great advantages of our hero’s education in the Hartz Mountains are not to be forgotten—it is yet to be regretted that he ever
“To the playhouse gave up what was meant for mankind.”
It is, and must ever be, a matter of sorrow not only to his best wishers, but to the friends of the world at large, that those high qualifications, those surpassing powers of diabolic phlegm, vivacity and impudence, which have made Mr Wieland’s devils the beau idéal of the infernal, had not been suffered to ripen in the genial clime of diplomacy. In the full glow of my admiration of his diabolic beauties—that is, since the facts above narrated have been in my possession—I have often scarcely suppressed a sigh to think how great an ambassador has been sacrificed in a play-house fiend. Indeed, nothing can be more truly diplomatic than the supernatural shifts of Wieland. Had he acted in France, in the days of Napoleon, he had been kidnapped from the stage, and, nolens volens, made a plenipotentiary.
It is a painful theme to dwell upon the strugglings of modest, and, consequently, unsupported genius. Therefore I shall, at least for the present, suppress a very long and minute account of the trials that beset our hero in his attempts to make known the wonders that were in him. I shall not relate how he was flouted by one manager, snubbed by another, derisively smiled upon by a third; how, at length, he obtained a footing in a theatre, but was condemned to act the minor iniquities, less gifted men being promoted to play the devil himself. In all these trials, however, in all these disappointments and occasional heartburnings, the genius of our hero continued to ripen. His horns still budded, and his tail gave token of great promise; and, at length, he burst upon the town, from top to toe, intus et in cute, a perfect and most dainty devil. Great as his success has been, I should not have thus lengthily dwelt upon it, were I not convinced of its future increase. There are grand mysteries in Wieland—part of his infant wanderings in the Hartz—yet to be revealed. I feel certain from the demoniacal variety of his humour, that there are a legion of spirits, fantastic and new, yet to be shown to us; all of them the old acquaintance of our hero’s babyhood, all from the same genuine source of romance as his Devil on Two Sticks, his Devil of the Danube, and his Devil of the Opera.
Having discussed the professional merits of Mr Wieland, the reader may probably feel curious respecting the private habits of a man so distinguished by his supernatural emotions. I am enabled, it is with considerable satisfaction I avow it, to satisfy the laudable anxiety of the reader, and from the same authentic materials that have supplied the principal part of this notice.
Mr Wieland is a gentleman of the most retired and simple manners. After the severest rehearsals of a new devil he has been known to recreate himself in the enclosure of St James’s Park; and further, to illustrate his contemplative and benevolent habits, by flinging to the various water-fowl in the canal—by-the-way, in imitation of a great regal authority—fragments of cake and biscuits. His dress is of the plainest kind, being commonly a snuff-coloured coat buttoned up to the neck; a white cravat, drab small-clothes, and drab knee-gaiters. A gold-headed cane, said to have been in the possession of Cornelius Agrippa, is sometimes in his hand. He is occasionally induced to take a pinch of snuff, but was never seen to smoke. His face is as well known at the British Museum as are the Elgin Marbles, Mr Wieland having for some years been employed on a new edition of the Talmud. Although a German by birth, Mr Wieland speaks English with remarkable purity, having had the advantage of early instruction in our language from a British dramatist, who, driven from the stage by the invasion of French pieces, sought to earn his precarious bread as a journeyman doll-maker with Mr Wieland, senior. We could enter into further particulars, but shall commit a violence upon ourselves, and here wind up what we trust will henceforth prove a model for all stage biographers.
The inquiring reader may possibly desire to learn how we became possessed of the valuable documents from which the above narrative is gathered. To this we boldly make answer; we blush not, while we avow, that our dear friend Dullandry has a most careless habit of carrying his most valuable communications for The Wet Blanket in his coat pocket; and that only on Thursday last we overtook him, with his papers peeping from their sanctuary, when—when, in a word, the temptation was too much for us, and the consequence is, that the reader has “some account of a stage devil.”
Why should all dramatic truths be confined to the impartial and original pages of The Wet Blanket?
Saint Patty