Byron’s devil in A Vision of Judgment is, like Caliban’s ideas of Setebos, “altogether such an one” as Byron conceived himself to be. He is a terrible figure, whose
“Fierce and unfathomable thoughts engraved
Eternal wrath on his immortal face.”
He shows diabolical sarcasm when he says, “I’ve kings enough below, God knows!” And how like Oscar Wilde is the devil he pictures to us in his symbolic story, The Fisherman and his Soul. The prince of darkness who appears to the young fisherman that wishes to sell his soul to the devil is “a man dressed in a suit of black velvet cut in Spanish fashion. His proud face was strangely pale, but his lips were like a proud red flower. He seemed weary and was leaning back toying in a listless manner with the pommel of his saddle.” When the fisherman unthoughtedly utters a prayer that baffles the fiend for the time, the demon mounts his jennet with the silver harness and rides away, still with the proud, disdainful face, sad with a blasé weariness unlike the usual alertness of the devil. He has a sort of Blessed Damozel droop to his figure, and the bored patience of a lone man at an afternoon tea. Wilde shows us some little mocking red devils in another of his stories,[143] and The Picture of Dorian Gray is a concept of diabolism.
Scott in The Talisman puts a story of descent from the Evil One in the mouth of the Saracen, the legend of the spirits of evil who formed a league with the cruel Zohauk, by which he gained a daily sacrifice of blood to feed two hideous serpents that had become a part of himself. One day seven sisters of wonderful beauty are brought, whose loveliness appeals to the immortals. In the midst of supernatural manifestations the earth is rent and seven young men appear. The leader says to the eldest sister:
I am Cothreb, king of the subterranean world. I and my brethren are of those who, created out of elementary fire, disdained even at the command of Omnipotence, to do homage to a clod of earth because it is called man. Thou mayest have heard of us as cruel, unrelenting, and persecuting. It is false. We are by nature kind and generous, vengeful only when insulted, cruel only when affronted. We are true to those that trust us; and we have heard the invocations of thy father the sage Mithrasp, who wisely worships not only the Origin of Good, but that which is called the Source of Evil. You and your sisters are on the eve of death; but let each give to us one hair from your fair tresses in token of fealty, and we will carry you many miles to a place of safety where you may bid defiance to Zohauk and his ministers.
The maidens accept the offer and become the brides of the spirits of evil.
The devil in Scott’s Wandering Willie’s Tale,[144] also speaks a good word for himself. When the gudesire meets in the woods the stranger who sympathizes with his obvious distress, the unknown offers to help him, saying, “If you will tell me your grief, I am one that, though I have been sair miscaa’d in the world, am the only hand for helping my freends.” The gudesire tells his woes and says that he would go to the gates of hell, and farther, to get the receipt due him, upon which the hospitable stranger conducts him to the place mentioned. The canny Scot obtains the document, outwits the devil, and wins his way back to earth unscathed.
One marked aspect of recent devil-fiction is the tendency to gloze over his sins and to humanize him. This is shown to a marked degree in Marie Corelli’s sentimental novel, The Sorrows of Satan, where she expends much anxious sympathy over the fiend. To Miss Corelli’s agitated mind Satan is a much maligned martyr who regretfully tempts mortals and is grieved when they yield to his beguilements. Her perfervid rhetoric pictures him as a charming prince, handsome, wealthy, yet very lonesome, who warns persons in advance that he is not what he seems and that they would do well to avoid him. But the fools rush in crowds to be damned. According to her theory, the devil is attempting to work out his own salvation and could do so save for the weakness of man. He is able to get a notch nearer heaven for every soul that resists his wiles, though in London circles his progress is backward rather than forward. How is Lucifer fallen! To be made a hero of by Marie Corelli must seem to Mephisto life’s final indignity! Her characterization of the fiend shows some reminiscence of a hasty reading of Milton, Goethe, and the Byronic Cain.
The devil has a human as well as dæmonic spirit in Israel Zangwill’s They that Walk in Darkness, where he appears as Satan Maketrig, a red-haired hunchback, with “gigantic marble brow, cold, keen, steely eyes, and handsome, clean-shaven lips.” He seems a normal human being in this realistic Ghetto setting, though he bears a nameless sense of evil about with him. In his presence, or as he passes by, all the latent evil in men’s souls comes to the surface. He lures the rabbi away from his wife, from God, and from all virtue, yet to see him at the end turn away again in spirit to the good, spurning the tempter whom he recognizes at last as dæmonic. There is a human anguish in the eyes of Satan Maketrig, that shows him to be not altogether diabolic, and he seems mournful and appealing in his wild loneliness. His nature is in contrast to that of the fiend in Stanley J. Weyman’s The Man in Black. Here his cold, sardonic jesting that causes him to play with life and death, so lightly, his diabolic cunning, his knowledge of the human heart and how to torture it, remind us of Iago. The dark shade extends to the skin as well as to the heart in the man in black in Stevenson’s Thrawn Janet, for he exercises a weird power over his vassal, the old servant, and terrifies even the minister. And War Letters from a Living Dead Man, written by Elsa Parker but said to be dictated by a correspondent presumably from somewhere in hell, shows us His Satanic Majesty with grim realism up to date.
The devil appears with mournful, human dignity, yet with superhuman gigantism in Algernon Blackwood’s Secret Worship, where the lost souls enter into a riot of devil-worship, into which they seek to draw living victims, to damn them body and soul. One victim sees the devil thus: