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?
