AN INTERVIEW WITH THE DEVIL.

It is only during inclement weather that writers who cannot command the oracular and prophetic freedom, which is the proud possession of the morning and evening journals, can hope to gain even the smallest audience; for the masses are more hungry for facts which lie, than for the truth, or even those fine fantasies that afford us some surcease of wide-open eyed sorrow. If this paper is ever read at all, it should be read in gloomy weather. Indeed, it is intended to be read on a gray day, as it was written on a wild night. Only very robust imaginations feel the fascination or the eternal questions of life and death in the wide ample world of broad, white sunlight; for their animal spirits get the better of their reason. In rainy weather we writers flatten our noses against the panes of strange windows, lost to all sense of propriety, in the wild hope that some one within is reading one of our amusing works. In the case of the present writer, however, it is all proper to say that he has suffered disillusionment so often that he has espoused a chill dignity, and sits at home and reads his own works in a spirit of grim appreciation. Indeed, accepting the appalling vacuity of the million noisy heads as an incurable fact—a fact that should chasten the vanity of those whose hopes and ambitions and thought are borne and blown hither and thither, like puff-balls upon the acclaiming wind of ten thousand pairs of lungs—it may be said with perfect propriety that it is nothing less than impertinence for any writer, who aims to rise above the biting lechery of the common imaginations, to expect to find readers under clear skies. Even the midsummer sun, which is surely innocent of any such evil intention, seems to only ripen distracting noises in the minds of the vast majority sunk in the turgid mean of commonplace; for how many good souls can be bothered with anything more abstract than the very latest soggy novel, just hot and dirty from the press, in sunshiny weather? Even moonshine is wasted upon all but those feather-brains on the lookout for ghosts.

And it may be noted, although it is not strictly relevant, that, with the multiplication of periodicals of one sort and another, even stormy weather is beginning to fail the few writers in our day who are audacious enough to still cling to the old ambitions of letters, in spite of worldly prudence and all the warnings of the literary tip-staffs who infallibly know “the market”—for in the periodical world it is raining hot-baked sensations and novelties every hour in the twenty-four—the depressing vulgar commonplaces that have made up the round of human existence from the dawn of history and always will. But we must make up our minds to accept this as one of the small ironies of life: thought is smothered in an immense spawn of crocodile words. The newspapers we have always with us; and they succeed in making such an unceasing and damnable din that only an insignificant minority of exceptionally cool heads can hear themselves think.

It is worthy of remark that the printing press has contributed in no small degree toward driving the Devil out of orthodox theology. This is a fact, although Atheists, Rationalists and Materialists claim the credit of it. Indeed, His Eminence confessed to me, over a bottle of Lachryma Christi at the Theological Club, that he was completely discouraged, and he announced that he was revolving in his mind the expediency of abandoning the long and honorable career, which he has enjoyed in the polity of human life. He said that he had found his old-fashioned and painstaking tortuous methods of depraving men’s minds suddenly rendered absolutely puerile, ridiculous and contemptible by comparison with the unwearied and stupendous operations of the steam-presses of journalism. The meeting depressed me greatly; for whatever opinions other folk may profess to hold of the Devil, the more sober imaginations, the humorous writers, will always be glad to testify to the ungrudged and inestimable services he has continually rendered them in their arduous and ill-paid calling. I have since learned definitely that the Devil was in good earnest, and has retired into a voluntary exile, whence endless deputations of learned, suppliant, apologetic and furious theologians have endeavored to coax him, but entirely in vain. He has abdicated, he replies steadfastly, forever; and the desperate situation of the theologians, whose calling and character is seriously imperiled by his obstinacy, leaves him perfectly unmoved. He declares he has been long abandoned by those who flourished upon the pleasantries which he devised to make life amusing, and being under no sort of moral obligation to ingrates who have publicly held his name and character in abhorrence, he cheerfully abandons them to their wretched fate. He himself is humbled; let them taste of his bitterness, as they have shared in his prosperity, without any honest acknowledgment of his benefaction. He is still great enough to preserve his dignity; let them preserve their own as best they can. And this ought not to be a difficult business; for there are still a multitude of fools in the world, and any new noisy dogma is not more than twenty-four hours old before a million credulous heads believe it embodies the immanent truth of the universe. Such subtle wits as the theologians, and those whom they serve, can assuredly find a way out of the mire of misfortune, as the multitude is always hospitable to miracle workers, though deaf and blind to facts and truth.

The Devil himself, however, has discovered the ironies of the ambition that can only prosper upon the folly of fools. He recognizes the omnipotence of his rivals, the omniscient journalists, in this vineyard, and is content to let them discover in due time that wisdom does not consist in the counting of noses, and that mere bawdy optimism brings its own dissatisfaction. And, moreover, in retiring, the Devil is sustained by the firm conviction that his old laborious schemes for the befuddlement and bewilderment and corruption of mankind will not only be ably continued, but improved and surpassed in subtlety and thoroughness by these audacious and unscrupulous successors. So his decision is irrevocable; he has abdicated forever. Emulation would but emphasize the futile and ludicrous pretensions of his old ingrate protegees, the theologians; and the Devil is not ungenerous, even in misfortune, even to those base hypocrites who have enjoyed his protection and reviled him. Then, retirement with dignity is better than embittered ambition and a fall without dignity. As he points out—and those who have known him in better days should assuredly sustain him in his noble and philosophic humility, so rare among the great of fallen fortunes—it is worse than useless for him to labor painfully to cultivate a deep and stirring delight in original sin in one promising little urchin, spending weary days and anxious and tender solicitude on the hard benches of the public schools, when the great and omniscient newspaper press can at any given moment set a whole nation, or even the whole civilized world, crawling upon all fours, nosing and wallowing in filth. Only a few aboriginal tribes escape, and the Devil does not deem these worthy of cultivation, since civilization is encroaching upon them and their days are already numbered.

The Devil was always notoriously an abandoned pessimist, and his dismal view of the outcome of the great modern passion for literacy is probably due to disappointed ambition and malevolence; for, granting all the suffocating triviality and vulgarity of the Sabbatical literature dished up in the seventh day’s newspapers, it must always in strict justice be remembered that long and beautiful abstracts of sermons of soporific platitude, and charmingly convincing illogic, appear regularly in the Monday morning issues. And so optimists may feel that the morals of civilization are safe.

But, on the other hand, evil tongues cannot be silenced. If the accumulation of facts were not such a patently depraved, atrabilious and libellous business, there would be fewer cynics, and cheerful, good natured optimism would expire for want of that venomous opposition which contracts hopeless stupidity into stony and barren virtue. Epigrams would become dissipated in the most undivided passion for truth, in order to diffuse it again into commonness among eager and hungry ears; but the fact is, these ears are now enamored of such noises as cost them no sort of intellectual effort.

It may as well be stated here that the Devil has somehow lost a great deal of his popularity in the congregations of the elect, through the continual assaults of Philistines and the unfortunate discovery of natural facts, that have taken catastrophe out of the Devil’s hands and transferred it to the domain of inflexible and insensible law. But the moral cowardice revealed in this abandonment of the Devil is certainly pathetic. Yet we must remember that it is ever so—for the people who turn on us first are the ones we have most benefited. And this seems to be one of Nature’s devices for diverting our energies into new channels of well doing.

Walter Blackburn Harte.