One afternoon I walked the entire length of the Nevski Prospekt, no mean achievement in a heavy overcoat. I began at the banks of the restless, blustering Neva, passed the extraordinary statue of Peter the Great, came through the garden by the statue of Gogol, and with the thin gold spire of the Admiralty at my back, entered the long avenue.
I followed the immense extension of the Nevski, clear to the cemetery, and stood reverently before the tomb of Dostoevski. Here in January, 1881, the body of the great novelist was laid in the grave, in the presence of forty thousand mourners.
In a corner of the enclosure I found the tomb of the composer Chaikovski; I gazed on the last resting-place of Glinka, father of Russian music. On account of the marshy soil, the graves are built above instead of below the surface of the ground, exactly as they are in New Orleans. It is in reality a city of the dead, the only place where a Russian finds peace. I passed out on the other side of the cemetery, walked through the grounds of the convent, and found myself abruptly clear from the city, on the edge of a vast plain.
XXII
THE DEVIL
It is rather a pity that the Devil has vanished with Santa Claus and other delectable myths; the universe is more theatrical with a “personal devil” roaming at large, seeking whom he may devour. In the book of Job the Devil played the part of the return of the native, coming along in the best society in the cosmos to appear before the Presence. And when he was asked where he came from, he replied in a devilishly debonair manner, “From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.”
There are so many things in this world that seem to be the Devil’s handiwork, and there are so many people who look like the devil, that it seems as if he could not be extinct. His chief service to the universal scene was to keep virtue from becoming monotonous; to warn even saints that they must mind their step; to prove that eternal vigilance is the price of safety. The Enemy of Mankind never took a holiday. Homer might nod, but not he. In fact, on human holidays he was, if possible, unusually efficient. The idleness of man was the opportunity of Satan.
The principle of evil is so active, so tireless, so penetrating that the simplest way to account for it is to suppose that men and things receive constantly the personal attention of the Devil. Weeds, and not vegetables, grow naturally; illness, not health, is contagious; children and day-labourers are not instinctively industrious; champagne tastes better than cocoa.
Throughout the Middle Ages, although every one believed steadfastly in the reality of the Devil and that he was the most unscrupulous of all foes, there was a certain friendliness with him, born, I suppose, of daily intimacy. It was like the way in which hostile sentries will hobnob with one another, swap tobacco, etc., in the less tense moments of war. The Devil was always just around the corner and would be glad of an invitation to drop in.
Thus in the mediæval mystery plays, the forerunners of our modern theatres, the Devil was always the Clown. He supplied “comic relief” and was usually the most popular personage in the performance. He appeared in the conventional makeup, a horrible mask, horns, cloven hoofs and prehensile tail, with smoke issuing from mouth, ears and posterior. He did all kinds of acrobatic feats, and his appearance was greeted with shouts of joy. In front of that part of the stage representing Hellmouth he was sometimes accompanied with “damned souls,” persons wearing black tights with yellow stripes. On an examination at Yale I set the question, “Describe the costume of the characters in the mystery plays.” One of the students wrote: “The damned souls wore Princeton colours.”
The modern circus clown comes straight from the Devil. When you see him stumble and fall all over himself, whirl his cap aloft and catch it on his head, distract the attention of the spectators away from the gymnasts to his own antics, he is doing exactly what his ancestor the Devil did in the mediæval plays.