She had probably attempted to deal with the black man as she had been accustomed to deal with her husband; but though the female scold is generally considered a match for the devil, yet in this instance she appears to have had the worst of it. She must have died game, however, for it is said Tom noticed many prints of cloven feet deeply stamped about the tree, and found handsful of hair that looked as if they had been plucked from the coarse shock of the black woodsman. Tom knew his wife’s prowess by experience. He shrugged his shoulders as he looked at the fierce signs of clapper-clawing. “Egad!” he said to himself, “Old Scratch must have had a tough time of it!”
The devil amuses himself in various ways, as is seen by the antics of the mysterious stranger in Poe’s The Devil in the Belfry, who comes curvetting into the old Dutch village with his audacious and sinister face and curious costume, to upset the sacred time of the place. The visitant in Bon Bon is likewise queer as to dress and habits. He wears garments in the style of a century before, having a queue but no shirt, a cravat with an ecclesiastic suggestion, also a stylus and black book. His facial expression is such as would have struck Uriah Heap dumb with envy, and the hint of hoofs and a forked tail is cleverly given though not obtruded. The most remarkable feature of his appearance, however, is that he has no eyes, simply a dead level of flesh. He declares that he eats souls and prefers to buy them alive to insure freshness. He has a taste for philosophers, when they are not too tough.
The satiric devil, like the satiric ghost, is seen in modern fiction. Eugene Field has a story of a demon who seems sympathetic, weeping large, gummy tears at hearing a mortal’s woes, and signing the conventional contract on a piece of asbestos paper. He agrees to do everything the man wishes, for a certain term of years, in return for which he is to get the soul. If the devil forfeits the contract, he loses not only that victim but the souls of two thousand already in his clutches. The man shrewdly demands trying things of him, but the demon is game, building and endowing churches, carrying on philanthropic and reform work without complaint, but balking when the man asks him to close the saloons on Sunday. Rather than do that, he releases the two thousand and one souls and flies away twitching his tail in wrath.[146]
The most recent, as perhaps the most striking, instance of the satiric devil is in Mark Twain’s posthumous novel, The Mysterious Stranger. A youth, charming, courtly, and handsome appears in a medieval village, confessing to two boys that he is Satan, though not the original of that name, but his nephew and namesake. He insists that he is an unfallen angel, since his uncle is the only member of his family that has sinned. Satan reads the thoughts of mortals, kindles fire in his pipe by breathing on it, supplies money and other desirable things by mere suggestion, is invisible when he wills it so, and is generally a gifted being. This perennial boy—only sixteen thousand years old—makes a charming companion. He says to Marget that his papa is in shattered health and has no property to speak of,—in fact, none of any earthly value,—but he has an uncle in business down in the tropics, who is very well off, and has a monopoly, and it is from this uncle that he drew his support. Marget expresses the hope that her uncle and his would meet some day, and Satan says he hoped so, too. “May be they will,” says Marget. “Does your uncle travel much?”
“Oh, yes, he goes all about,—he has business everywhere.”
The book is full of this oblique humor, satirizing earth, heaven, and hell. The stranger by his comments on theological creeds satirizes religion, and Satan is an intended parody of God. He sneers at man’s “mongrel moral sense,” which tells him the distinction between good and evil, insisting that he should have no choice, that the right to choose makes him inevitably choose the wrong. He makes little figures out of clay and gives them life, only to destroy them with casual ruthlessness a little later and send them to hell. In answer to the old servant’s faith in God, when she says that He will care for her and her mistress, since “not a sparrow falleth to the ground without His Knowledge,” he sneers, “But it falls, just the same! What’s the good of seeing it fall?” He is a new diabolic figure, yet showing the composite traits of the old, the dæmonic wisdom and sarcasm, the superhuman magnetism to draw men to him, and the human qualities of geniality, sympathy, and boyish charm.
One of the most significant and frequent motifs of the diabolic in literature is that of the barter of the human soul for the devil’s gift of some earthly boon, long life or wealth or power, or wisdom, or gratification of the senses. It is a theme of unusual power,—what could be greater than the struggle over one’s own immortal soul?—and well might the great minds of the world engage themselves with it. Yet that theme is but little apparent in later stories. We have no such character in recent literature that can compare with Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus or Goethe’s Mephistopheles or Calderon’s wonder-working magician. Hawthorne’s Septimius Felton makes a bargain with the devil to secure the elixir of life, there is a legend in Hardy’s Tess of the D’ Urbervilles of a man that sold himself to the minister of evil, and the incident occurs in various stories of witchcraft, yet with waning power and less frequence. The most significant recent use of it is in W. B. Yeats’s drama.[147] This is a drama of Ireland, where the peasants have been driven by famine to barter their souls to the devil to buy their children food, but their Countess sells her own soul to the demon that they may save theirs. This vicarious sacrifice adds a new poignancy to the situation and Yeats has treated it with power. This is the only recent appearance of the devil on the stage for he has practically disappeared from English drama, where he was once so prominent. The demon was a familiar and leading figure on the miracle and Elizabethan stage, but, like the ghost, he shows more vitality now in fiction. The devil is an older figure in English drama than is the ghost, but he seems to have played out.
The analysis and representation of the devil as a character in literature have covered a great range, from the bestiality of Dante’s Demon in the Inferno to Milton’s mighty angel in ruins, with all sorts of variations between, from the sneering cynicism of Goethe’s Mephisto to the pinchbeck diabolism of Marie Corelli’s sorrowful Satan, and the merry humor and blasphemous satire of Mark Twain’s mysterious stranger. We note an especial influence of Goethe’s Mephistopheles in the satiric studies of the demon, an echo of his diabolic climax when in answer to Faust’s outcry over Margaret’s downfall and death, he says, “She is not the first!” One hears echoing through all literature Man Friday’s unanswerable question, “Why not God kill debbil?” The uses of evil in God’s eternal scheme, the soul’s free choice yet pitiful weakness, are sounded again and again. The great diabolic figures, in their essential humanity, their intellectual dignity, their sad introspection, their pitiless testing of the human soul to its predestined fall, are terrible allegorical images of the evil in man himself, or concepts of social sins, as in Ivan, the Fool. The devils of the great writers, reflecting the time, the racial characteristics, the personal natures of their creators, are deeply symbolic. Each man creates the devil that he can understand, that represents him, for, as Amiel says, we can comprehend nothing of which we have not the beginnings in ourselves. As each man sees a different Hamlet, so each one has his own devil, or is his own devil. This is illustrated by the figure in Julian Hawthorne’s Lovers in Heaven, where the dead man’s spirit meets the devil in the after life,—who is his own image, his dæmonic double. Some have one great fiend, while others keep packs of little, snarling imps of darkness. A study of comparative diabolics is illuminating and might be useful to us all.