The Essays of Douglas Jerrold

by Douglas William Jerrold

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.