THE DEVIL IN A NUNNERY

BY FRANCIS OSCAR MANNStory

According to a German legend, the devil is master of all arts, and certainly he has given sufficient proof of his musical talent. Certain Church Fathers ascribed, not without good reason, the origin of music to Satan. “The Devil,” says Mr. Huneker in his diabolical story “The Supreme Sin” (1920), “is the greatest of all musicians,” and Rowland Hill long ago admitted the fact that the devil has all the good tunes. Perhaps his greatest composition is the Sonata del Diavolo, which Tartini wrote down in 1713. This diabolical master-piece is the subject of Gérard de Nerval’s story La Sonate du Diable (1830). While the devil plays all instruments equally well, he seems to prefer the violin. Satan appears as fiddler in the poem “Der Teufel mit der Geige,” which has been ascribed to the Swiss anti-Papist Pamphilus Gengenbach of the sixteenth century. In Leanu’s Faust (1836) Mephistopheles takes the violin out of the hands of one of the musicians at a peasant-wedding and plays a diabolical czardas, which fills the hearts of all who hear it with voluptuousness. An opera Un Violon du Diable was played in Paris in 1849. The Devil’s Violin, an extravaganza in verse by Benjamin Webster, was performed the same year in London. In his story “Les Tentations ou Eros, Plutus et la Gloire” Baudelaire presents the Demon of Love as holding in his left hand a violin “which without doubt served to sing his pleasures and pains.” The devil also appears as limping fiddler in a California legend, which appeared under the title “The Devil’s Fiddle” in a Californian magazine in 1855. Death, the devil’s first cousin, if not his alter ego, has the souls, in the Dance of Death, march off to hell to a merry tune on his violin. Death appears as a musician also in the Piper of Hamlin. In this legend, well known to the English world through Browning’s poem “Pied Piper of Hamelin” (1843) and Miss Peabody’s play The Piper (1909), the rats are the human souls, which Death charms with his music into following him. In the Middle Ages the soul was often represented as leaving the body in the form of a mouse. The soul of a good man comes out of his mouth as a white mouse, while at the death of a sinner the soul escapes as a black mouse, which the devil catches and brings to hell. Mephistopheles, it will be recalled, calls himself “the lord of rats and mice” (Faust, 1, 1516). Devil-Death has inherited this wind instrument from the goat-footed Pan.

“The Devil is more busy in the convents,” we are told by J. K. Huysmans in his novel En route (1895), “than in the cities, as he has a harder job on hand.”