ands of
the devil. "Baudelaire's motto," as Mr. James Huneker has well
remarked, "might be the reverse of Browning's lines: The Devil is in
his heaven. All's wrong with the world."

Baudelaire's devil is a dandy and a boulevardier with wings. Each
author, it has been said, creates the devil in his own image.

The greatest boon which Satan could offer Baudelaire was to free him
from that great modern monster, _Ennui_, which selects as its prey the
most highly gifted natures. The boredom of life--this was, indeed, as
this unhappy poet admits, the source of all his maladies and of all
his miseries. He called it the "foulest of vices" and hoped to escape
from it "by dreaming of the superlative emotional adventure, by
indulging in infinite, indeterminate desire" (Irving Babbit). His
preface to the _Flowers of Evil_, in which he addresses the reader,
ends with the following statement in regard to the nature of this
modern beast of prey: "Among the jackals, the panthers, the hounds,
the apes, the scorpions, the vultures, the serpents--the yelling,
howling, growling, grovelling monsters which form the foul menagerie
of our vices--there is one which is the most foul, the most wicked,
the most unclean of all. This vice, although it uses neither
extravagant gestures nor makes a great outcry, would willingly make a
ruin of the earth, and swallow up all the world in a yawn. This is
_Ennui!_ who, with his eye moistened by an involuntary tear, dreams of
scaffolds while smoking his hookah. Thou knowest him, this delicate
monster, hypocritical reader, my like, my brother!"

In Gorky's story "The Devil" the devil himself suffers from _ennui_.

But Baudelaire believed he had good reason to doubt Satan's word, and,
therefore, prayed to the Lord to make the devil keep his promise to
him. He had little faith in the father of lies. In his book called
_Artificial Paradises_ (1860) Baudelaire expressed the thought that
the devil would say to the eaters of hashish, the smokers of opium, as
he did in the olden days to our first parents, "If you taste of the
fruit, you will be as the gods," and that the devil no more kept his
word with them than he did with Adam and Eve, for the next day, the
god, tempted, weakened, enervated, descended even lower than the
beast.

The representation of the devil in the shape of a he-goat goes back to
far antiquity. Goat-formed deities and spirits of the woods existed in
the religions of India, Assyria, Greec