"The more he has, the more he asks for
Our grand devil, Lucifer.
Does he wish the sky to pour
Souls by thousands running o'er?
The more they come, he longs for more,
For his appetite is sore.
The more he has, the more he asks for,
Our grand devil, Lucifer."
Lucifer, deafened by their hubbub, stops his ears, and tries to silence them. Impossible! "On with the song!" cries Belial, and the uproar continues.
The "Mystery of the Passion" also commences with a scene in hell, the tone of which appears still more singular. God is in consultation with the heavenly court upon the redemption of the human race. Lucifer, alarmed, convokes his assembly.
"Devils of hell-fire, horned and terrible,
Infamous dogs, why sit ye idle?
Start up, ye fat ones, young, old, and naked;
Serpents atrocious, hump-backed and twisted."
The devils hastily assemble. Satan is the first to respond to the gracious appeal.
"What is't thou wishest, bull-dog outrageous—
Fetid, infected, abhorrent, mendacious?
For thee we have forfeited heaven and all,
To suffer such evils as no one can measure—
And now, is cursing your only pleasure?"
Belial calls Lucifer a bag full of rottenness, whose only food is toads, and [{593}] complains also that it is his nature to torment them.
"This constant habit with the mystery-makers of representing the demons as insulting each other in their colloquies," says M. Douhaire, "is born of a profound thought. We are told that the wicked despise each other. It is this which the Christian dramatists put into action. Nothing can give a more terrible idea of hell than these disputes, where the demons mutually accuse each other of sufferings which cannot be abated."
Here is a reflection full of justice, and indispensable for a right interpretation of the moral aim of the "mysteries." But there still remains the literary and philosophical remark of M. Saint-Beuve upon the general tendency of this epoch to a reproduction of the morals and language of the most common and vulgar life. For the dramatists might have represented the wickedness of the demons—the horror and disorder of hell—without seeking their phrases in a vocabulary of the lowest stamp.
The frequent change from seriousness to buffoonery, from the beautiful to the burlesque, has a similar origin in the tastes of our ancestors for the actualities of ordinary life, where these transitions are habitual. But it also rose out of the necessity of keeping up the interest of a spectacle which continued many days, sometimes many weeks. Variety was a necessity. That popular assembly would consent to weep or even to be serious morning and evening for a month? Let us take an example where triviality, liveliness, and morality are all united together, We borrow it from M. Onesime Le Roy, who found it in an unedited "Mystery of the Passion." and published it in 1837.