IL AND THE OLD MAN (1905) 268
_By John Masefield_

NOTES 279

INDEX 325

INTRODUCTION

Of all the myths which have come down to us from the East, and of all
the creations of Western fancy and belief, the Personality of Evil has
had the strongest attraction for the mind of man. The Devil is the
greatest enigma that has ever confronted the human intelligence. So
large a place has Satan taken in our imagination, and we might also
say in our heart, that his expulsion therefrom, no matter what
philosophy may teach us, must for ever remain an impossibility. As a
character in imaginative literature Lucifer has not his equal in
heaven above or on the earth beneath. In contrast to the idea of Good,
which is the more exalted in proportion to its freedom from
anthropomorphism, the idea of Evil owes to the presence of this
element its chief value as a poetic theme. The discrowned archangel
may have been inferior to St. Michael in military tactics, but he
certainly is his superior in matters literary. The fair angels--all
frankness and goodness--are beyond our comprehension, but the fallen
angels, with all their faults and sufferings, are kin to us.

There is a legend that the Devil has always had literary aspirations.
The German theosophist Jacob Boehme relates that when Satan was asked
to explain the cause of God's enmity to him and his consequent
downfall, he replied: "I wanted to be an author." Whether or not the
Devil has ever written anything over his own signature, he has
certainly helped others 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_, Calderon'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
receive