Demonology and Devil-lore Part 42

What the story of Faust and Mephistopheles had become in the popular mind of Germany, when Goethe was raising it to be an immortal type of the conditions under which genius and art can alone fulfil their task, is well shown in the sensational tragedy written by his contemporary, the playwright Klinger. The following extract from Klinger's 'Faust'

is not without a certain impressiveness.

'Night covered the earth with its raven wing. Faust stood before the awful spectacle of the body of his son suspended upon the gallows. Madness parched his brain, and he exclaimed in the wild tones of dispair:

'Satan, let me but bury this unfortunate being, and then you may take this life of mine, and I will descend into your infernal abode, where I shall no more behold men in the flesh. I have learned to know them, and I am disgusted with them, with their destiny, with the world, and with life. My good action has drawn down unutterable woe upon my head; I hope that my evil ones may have been productive of good. Thus should it be in the mad confusion of earth. Take me hence; I wish to become an inhabitant of thy dreary abode; I am tired of light, compared with which the darkness in the infernal regions must be the brightness of mid-day.'

But Satan replied: 'Hold! not so fast--Faust; once I told thee that thou alone shouldst be the arbiter of thy life, that thou alone shouldst have power to break the hour-gla.s.s of thy existence; thou hast done so, and the hour of my vengeance has come, the hour for which I have sighed so long. Here now do I tear from thee thy mighty wizard-wand, and chain thee within the narrow bounds which I draw around thee. Here shalt thou stand and listen to me, and tremble; I will draw forth the terrors of the dark past, and kill thee with slow despair.

'Thus will I exult over thee, and rejoice in my victory. Fool! thou hast said that thou hast learned to know man! Where? How and when? Hast thou ever considered his nature? Hast thou ever examined it, and separated from it its foreign elements? Hast thou distinguished between that which is offspring of the pure impulses of his heart, and that which flows from an imagination corrupted by art? Hast thou compared the wants and the vices of his nature with those which he owes to society and prevailing corruption? Hast thou observed him in his natural state, where each of his undisguised expressions mirrors forth his inmost soul? No--thou hast looked upon the mask that society wears, and hast mistaken it for the true lineaments of man; thou hast only become acquainted with men who have consecrated their condition, wealth, power, and talents to the service of corruption; who have sacrificed their pure nature to your Idol--Illusion. Thou didst at one time presume to show me the moral worth of man! and how didst thou set about it! By leading me upon the broad highways of vice, by bringing me to the courts of the mighty wholesale butchers of men, to that of the coward tyrant of France, of the Usurper in England! Why did we pa.s.s by the mansions of the good and the just? Was it for me, Satan, to whom thou hast chosen to become a mentor, to point them out to thee? No; thou wert led to the places thou didst haunt by the fame of princes, by thy pride, by thy longing after dissipation. And what hast thou seen there? The soul-seared tyrants of mankind, with their satellites, wicked women and mercenary priests, who make religion a tool by which to gain the object of their base pa.s.sions.

'Hast thou ever deigned to cast a glance at the oppressed, who, sighing under his burden, consoles himself with the hope of an hereafter? Hast thou ever sought for the dwelling of the virtuous friend of humanity, for that of the n.o.ble sage, for that of the active and upright father of a family?

'But how would that have been possible? How couldst thou, the most corrupt of thy race, have discovered the pure one, since thou hadst not even the capacity to suspect his existence?

'Proudly didst thou pa.s.s by the cottages of the pure and humble, who live unacquainted with even the names of your artificial vices, who earn their bread in the sweat of their brow, and who rejoice at their last hour that they are permitted to exchange the mortal for the immortal. It is true, hadst thou entered their abode, thou mightst not have found thy foolish ideal of an heroic, extravagant virtue, which is only the fanciful creation of your vices and your pride; but thou wouldst have seen the man of a retiring modesty and n.o.ble resignation, who in his obscurity excels in virtue and true grandeur of soul your boasted heroes of field and cabinet. Thou sayest that thou knowest man! Dost thou know thyself? Nay, deeper yet will I enter into the secret places of thy heart, and fan with fierce blast the flames which thou hast kindled there for thee.

'Had I a thousand human tongues, and as many years to speak to thee, they would be all insufficient to develop the consequences of thy deeds and thy recklessness. The germ of wretchedness which thou hast sown will continue its growth through centuries yet to come; and future generations will curse thee as the author of their misery.

'Behold, then, daring and reckless man, the importance of actions that appear circ.u.mscribed to your mole vision! Who of you can say, Time will obliterate the trace of my existence! Thou who knowest not what beginning, what middle, and end are, hast dared to seize with a bold hand the chain of fate, and hast attempted to gnaw its links, notwithstanding that they were forged for eternity!

'But now will I withdraw the veil from before thy eyes, and then--cast the spectre despair into thy soul.'

'Faust pressed his hands upon his face; the worm that never dieth gnawed already on his heart.'

The essence and sum of every devil are in the Mephistopheles of Goethe. He is culture.

Culture, which smooth the whole world licks, Also unto the Devil sticks.

He represents the intelligence which has learned the difference between ideas and words, knows that two and two make four, and also how convenient may be the dexterity that can neatly write them out five.

Of Metaphysics learn the use and beauty!

See that you most profoundly gain What does not suit the human brain!

A splendid word to serve, you'll find For what goes in--or won't go in--your mind.

On words let your attention centre!

Then through the safest gate you'll enter The temple halls of certainty. [182]

He knows, too, that the existing moment alone is of any advantage; that theory is grey and life ever green; that he only gathers real fruit who confides in himself. He is thus the perfectly evolved intellect of man, fully in possession of all its implements, these polished till they shine in all grace, subtlety, adequacy. Nature shows no symbol of such power more complete than the gemmed serpent with its exquisite adaptations,--freed from c.u.mbersome prosaic feet, equal to the winged by its flexible spine, every tooth artistic.

From an ancient prison was this Ariel liberated by his Prospero, whose wand was the Reformation, a spirit finely touched to fine issues. But his wings cannot fly beyond the atmosphere. The ancient heaven has faded before the clearer eye, but the starry ideals have come nearer. The old h.e.l.ls have burnt out, but the animalism of man couches all the more freely on his path, having broken every chain of fear. Man still walks between the good and evil, on the hair-drawn bridge of his moral nature. His faculties seem adapted with equal precision to either side of his life, upper or under,--to Wisdom or Cunning, Self-respect or Self-conceit, Prudence or Selfishness, l.u.s.t or Love.

Such is the seeming situation, but is it the reality? Goethe's 'Faust'

is the one clear answer which this question has received.

In one sense Mephistopheles may be called a German devil. The Christian soul of Germany was from the first a changeling. The ancient Nature-worship of that race might have had its normal development in the sciences, and alone with this intellectual evolution there must have been formed a related religion able to preserve social order through the honour of man. But the native soul of Germany was cut out by the sword and replaced with a mongrel Hebrew-Latin soul. The metaphorical terrors of tropical countries,--the deadly worms, the burning and suffocating blasts and stenches, with which the mind of those dwelling near them could familiarise itself when met with in their scriptures, acquired exaggerated horrors when left to be pictured by the terrorised imagination of races ignorant of their origin. It is a long distance from Potsdam and Hyde Park to Zahara. Christianity therefore blighted nature in the north by apparitions more fearful than the southern world ever knew, and long after the pious there could sing and dance, puritanical glooms hung over the Christians of higher lat.i.tudes. When the progress of German culture began the work of dissipating these idle terrors, the severity of the reaction was proportioned to the intensity of the delusions. The long-famished faculties rushed almost madly into their beautiful world, but without the old reverence which had once knelt before its phenomena. That may remain with a few, but the cynicism of the noisiest will be reflected even upon the faces of the best. Goethe first had his attention drawn to Spinoza by a portrait of him on a tract, in which his really n.o.ble countenance was represented with a diabolical aspect. The orthodox had made it, but they could only have done so by the careers of Faust, Paracelsus, and their tribe. These too helped to conventionalise Voltaire into a Mephistopheles. [183]

Goethe was probably the first European man to carry out this scepticism to its full results. He was the first who recognised that the moral edifice based upon monastic theories must follow them; and he had in his own life already questioned the right of the so-called morality to its supreme if not tyrannous authority over man. Hereditary conscience, pa.s.sing through this fierce crucible, lay levigable before Goethe, to be swept away into dust-hole or moulded into the image of reason. There remained around the animal nature of a free man only a thread which seemed as fine as that which held the monster Fenris. It was made only of the sentiment of love and that of honour. But as Fenris found the soft invisible thread stronger than chains, Faust proved the tremendous sanctions that surround the finer instincts of man.

Emanc.i.p.ated from grey theory, Faust rushes hungrily at the golden fruit of life. The starved pa.s.sions will have their satisfaction, at whatever cost to poor Gretchen. The fruit turns to ashes on his lips. The pleasure is not that of the thinking man, but of the accomplished poodle he has taken for his guide. To no moment in that intrigue can the suffrage of his whole nature say, 'Stay, thou art fair!' That is the pact--it is the distinctive keynote of Goethe's 'Faust.'

Canst thou by falsehood or by flattery Make me one moment with myself at peace, Cheat me into tranquillity?--come then And welcome life's last day.

Make me to the pa.s.sing moment plead.

Fly not, O stay, thou art so fair!

Then will I gladly perish.

The pomp and power of the court, luxury and wealth, equally fail to make the scholar at peace with himself. They are symbolised in the paper money by which Mephistopheles replenished the imperial exchequer. The only allusion to the printing-press, whose inventor Fust had been somewhat a.s.sociated with Faust, is to show its power turned to the work of distributing irredeemable promises.

At length one demand made by Faust makes Mephistopheles tremble. As a mere court amus.e.m.e.nt he would have him raise Helen of Troy. Reluctant that Faust should look upon the type of man's harmonious development, yet bound to obey, Mephistopheles sends him to the Mothers,--the healthy primal instincts and ideals of man which expressed themselves in the fair forms of art. Corrupted by superst.i.tion of their own worshippers, cursed by christianity, they 'have a Hades of their own,'

as Mephistopheles says, and he is unwilling to interfere with them. The image appears, and the sense of Beauty is awakened in Faust. But he is still a christian as to his method: his idea is that heaven must be taken by storm, by chance, wish, prayer, any means except patient fulfilment of the conditions by which it may be reached. Helen is flower of the history and culture of Greece; and so lightly Faust would pluck and wear it!

Helen having vanished as he tried to clasp her, Faust has learned his second lesson. When he next meets Helen it is not to seek intellectual beauty as, in Gretchen's case, he had sought the sensuous and sensual. He has fallen under a charm higher than that of either Church or Mephistopheles; the divorce of ages between flesh and spirit, the master-crime of superst.i.tion, from which all devils sprang, was over for him from the moment that he sees the soul embodied and body ensouled in the art-ideal of Greece.

The redemption of Faust through Art is the gospel of the nineteenth century. This is her vesture which Helen leaves him when she vanishes, and which bears him as a cloud to the land he is to make beautiful. The purest Art--Greek Art--is an expression of Humanity: it can as little be turned to satisfy a self-culture unhumanised as to consist with a superst.i.tion which insults nature. When Faust can meet with Helen, and part without any more clutching, he is not hurled back to his Gothic study and mocking devil any more: he is borne away until he reaches the land where his thought and work are needed. Blindness falls on him--or what Theology deems such: for it is metaphorical--it means that he has descended from clouds to the world, and the actual earth has eclipsed a possible immortality.

The sphere of Earth is known enough to me; The view beyond is barred immortality: A fool who there his blinking eyes directeth, And o'er his clouds of peers a place expecteth!

Firm let him stand and look around him well!

This World means something to the capable; Why needs he through Eternity to wend?

The eye for a fict.i.tious world lost, leaves the vision for reality clearer. In every hard chaotic object Faust can now detect a slumbering beauty. The swamps and pools of the unrestrained sea, the oppressed people, the barrenness and the flood, they are all paths to Helen--a n.o.bler Helen than Greece knew. When he has changed one scene of Chaos into Order, and sees a free people tilling the happy earth, then, indeed, he has realised the travail of his manhood, and is satisfied. To a moment which Mephistopheles never brought him, he cries 'Stay, thou art fair!'

Mephistopheles now, as becomes a creation of the Theology of obtaining what is not earned, calls up infernal troops to seize Faust's soul, but the angels pelt them with roses. The roses sting them worse than flames. The roses which Faust has evoked from briars are his defence: they are symbols of man completing his nature by a self-culture which finds its satisfaction in making some outward desert rejoice and blossom like the rose.

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE WILD HUNTSMAN.

The Wild Hunt--Euphemisms--Schimmelreiter--Odinwald--Pied Piper--Lyeshy--Waldemar's Hunt--Palne Hunter--King Abel's Hunt --Lords of Glorup--Le Grand Veneur--Robert le Diable--Arthur-- Hugo--Herne--Tregeagle--Der Freischutz--Elijah's chariot--Mahan Bali--Dehak--Nimrod--Nimrod's defiance of Jehovah--His Tower-- Robber Knights--The Devil in Leipzig--Olaf hunting pagans-- Hunting-horns--Raven--Boar--Hounds--Horse--Dapplegrimm--Sleipnir --Horseflesh--The mare Chetiya--Stags--St. Hubert--The White Lady --Myths of Mother Rose--Wodan hunting St. Walpurga--Friar Eckhardt.

The most important remnant of the Odin myth is the universal legend of the Wild Huntsman. The following variants are given by Wuttke. [184]

In Central and South Germany the Wild Hunt is commonly called Wutenden Heere, i.e., Wodan's army or chase--called in the Middle Ages, Wuotanges Heer. The hunter, generally supposed to be abroad during the twelve nights after Christmas, is variously called Wand, Waul, Wodejager, h.e.l.ljager, Nightjager, Hackelberg, Hackelberend (man in armour), Fro G.o.de, Banditterich, Jenner. The most common belief is that he is the spectre of a wicked lord or king who sacrilegiously enjoyed the chase on Sundays and other holy days, and who is condemned to expiate his sin by hunting till the day of doom. He wears a broad-brimmed hat; is followed by dogs and other animals, fiery, and often three-legged; and in his spectral train are the souls of unbaptized children, huntsmen who have trodden down grain, witches, and others--these being mounted on horses, goats, and c.o.c.ks, and sometimes headless, or with their entrails dragging behind them. They rush with a fearful noise through the air, which resounds with the cracking of whips, neighing of horses, barking of dogs, and cries of ghostly huntsmen. The unlucky wight encountered is caught up into the air, where his neck is wrung, or he is dropped from a great height. In some regions, it is said, such must hunt until relieved, but are not slain. The huntsman is a Nemesis on poachers or trespa.s.sers in woods and forests. Sometimes the spectres have combats with each other over battlefields. Their track is marked with bits of horseflesh, human corpses, legs with shoes on. In some regions, it is said, the huntsmen carry battle-axes, and cut down all who come in their way. When the hunt is pa.s.sing all dogs on earth become still and quiet. In most regions there is some haunted gorge, hill, or castle in which the train disappears.

In Thuringia, it is said that, when the fearful noises of the spectral hunt come very near, they change to ravishing music. In the same euphemistic spirit some of the prognostications it brings are not evil: generally, indeed, the apparition portends war, pestilence, and famine, but frequently it announces a fruitful year. If, in pa.s.sing a house, one of the train dips his finger in the yeast, the staff of life will never be wanting in that house. Whoever sees the chase will live long, say the Bohemians; but he must not hail it, lest flesh and bones rain upon him.