The Essays of Douglas Jerrold

by Douglas William Jerrold

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.