Page:Devil stories - an anthology.djvu/14

 compose their greatest works. It is a significant fact that the greatest imaginations have discerned an attraction in Diabolus. What would the world's literature be if from it we eliminated Dante's Divine Comedy, Calderón's Marvellous Magician, Milton's Paradise Lost, Goethe's Faust, Byron's Cain, Vigny's Eloa, and Lermontov's Demon? Sorry indeed would have been the plight of literature without a judicious admixture of the Diabolical. Without the Devil there would simply be no literature, because without his intervention there would be no plot, and without a plot the story of the world would lose its interest. Even now, when the belief in the Devil has gone out of fashion, and when the very mention of his name, far from causing men to cross themselves, brings a smile to their faces, Satan has continued to be a puissant personage in the realm of letters. As a matter of fact, Beelzebub has perhaps received his greatest elaboration at the hands of writers who believed in him just as little as Shakespeare did in the ghost of Hamlet's father.

Commenting on Anatole France's The Revolt of the Angels, an American critic has recently written: "It is difficult to rehabilitate Beelzebub, not because people are of one mind concerning Beelzebub, but because they are of no mind at all." How this demon must have laughed when he read these lines! Why, he needs no rehabilitation. The Devil has never been absent from the world of letters, just as he has never been missing from the world of men. Since the days of Job, Satan has taken a deep interest in the affairs of the human race; and while most writers content themselves [xii]