In the Broadside version, "The Devil's Walk" is a rowdy babel of styles and attitudes. ([1]) Anti-establishment jeers, personalised gibes, lofty moralising, heartfelt indignation, and millennial prophecy rub shoulders in a poem whose diction veers energetically between the demotic and the literary, the physical and the abstract. The satirical thrust of the poem - its indictment of a tyrannical and corrupt ruling class - may seem evident. The ballad excoriates, as the editors of the Longman edition have it, "the oppression of Ireland, the Peninsular War, the King, the Regency, and Religion." [2] But by intensifying the notion, borrowed from Coleridge's and Southey's "The Devil's Thoughts", that the figure of the Devil might serve as a moral touchstone, Shelley introduces into his poem some thought-provoking entanglements. A kind of sympathy for the Devil springs from the poem's relishing of his mocking contempt for the hypocritical shows of virtue and power. And yet the Devil's pleasure in the spread of corruption conflicts with the poet's final assertion that the "sons of Reason" will be able to "see" (140), that is, discerningly anticipate, the collapse of tyranny.
Shelley's model - Coleridge's and Southey's ballad - refers to the Devil throughout as "the Devil", with the exception of line 42 where he is called "Old Nicholas". By contrast, it is noticeable that Shelley's ballad takes pleasure in naming its main character in multiple ways: usually "the Devil", this personage enters the poem as "Beelzebub" (2), turns into "Satan" (28, 40, 45, 84 and 95), is referred to by "A Priest" (33) as "the tempter" (35), and by the narrator in a telling descent into slang as "Old Nick" (37). As "the Father of Hell" (108), he hideously and hilariously parodies the notion of paternal care assumed by governments and rulers. As "His sulphurous Majesty" (138) he is endowed by Shelley with an authority which, in context, outstrips that of earthly majesties, even as the Devil's destructive desires are thwarted by the vistas that open up to "Reason's penetrating eye" (137). Such multiple naming reveals how widely the Devil casts his net, how extensive is his circle of clients, and how pervasively his influence is to be found. Even (or especially) when he is denounced, his presence slyly makes itself felt:
A Priest, at whose elbow the Devil during prayer,
Sate familiarly, side by side,
Declared, that if the tempter were there,
His presence he would not abide;
Ah! Ah! thought Old Nick, that's a very stale trick,
For without the Devil, O! favourite of evil,
In your carriage you would not ride. (33-9)
This seven-line stanza, the longest in a poem that makes expressive use of varying stanza lengths, sets public and pompous "declaration" against unsettlingly sceptical "thought". One may regret the dropping of "Bawled", present in the Letter version of the poem (see line 20 of that version), with its suggestion of childishly loud-mouthed protestation. But the substitution - "Declared" - is more satirically apt. Especially after the previous line's sly claim that the Devil has "Sate familiarly" with the Priest, the word "Declared" characterises the Priest's holier-than- thou mode of speech, a characterisation also helped by the change from the Letter version's "His presence he couldnt abide" (21) to the Broadside version's "His presence he would not abide": "couldnt" makes the line snappy and irritable; "would not" wickedly mimics a would-be dignified loftiness.
The figure of the Devil is a means by which Shelley can ascribe his own scepticism to a third party. Yet if the wish to avoid prosecution provoked this tactic, it is a tactic to which the poetry gives a complicating twist, as the stanza just quoted reveals. In line 37 "Old Nick" does the thinking, serving as the vehicle of Shelley's amused disrespect for the Priest. The title "Old Nick" erupts from the stanza like a knowledge repressed by the Priest who thinks to hold the Devil at bay by naming him as "the tempter". The colloquial phrase, pointed up by the internal rhyme (with "trick"), nudges the reader in the ribs, suggesting the habitual closeness to human thought and impulse of "Old Nick". What the Devil would have us believe is that evil is all-pervasive. Here Shelley's ambivalent view of satire about which Steven Jones has written so well begins to show itself. The Devil's jaunty knowingness is a witty and vigorous means of satirising contemporary abuses, and one notes that Shelley has picked up and made much of Coleridge's and Southey's identification of the Devil as "a Gentleman" ("The Devil's Thoughts", 8), giving him an attractively aristocratic insouciance. Before transcribing the Letter version for Elizabeth Hitchener Shelley wrote, "I was once rather fond of the Devil."[3] And yet too close an identification with the Devil on Shelley's part risks turning the poem's vision into a comic Calvinism according to which, as a later poem featuring the Devil will have it, "All are damned". These words from Peter Bell the Third, III, 257, include within themselves an attack on the religious notion that "All" are "damned" through some form of predestination. In Peter Bell Shelley stresses that the social and spiritual "damnation" that he wittily and incisively depicts is a secular condition caused by human agency: "Each one damning, damns the other; / They are damned by one another, / By none other are they damned" (219-21). But the earlier poem lacks the deadly clarity of Shelley's vision in Peter Bell the Third, a vision that can allow for the entanglement of "good and bad, sane and mad ... Lovers, haters, worst and best" (252, 256) in a general state of "damnation", yet still cling - however wryly - to the belief that it is better to try "To make this ugly Hell a Heaven" (245)
The closest "The Devil's Walk" gets to espousing the vision I have called "comic Calvinism" occurs in another act of naming, or re-naming, the Devil. This is the parenthetical identification of the Devil with "nature" in line 80: "The Devil, (who sometimes is called nature,)". If "nature" here means "human nature", one glimpses how the poem's satire threatens to move beyond an exposure of rulers and leaders into something altogether more encompassing. That "threat" is held at bay in the subsequent lines, with their restricted application to "men of power" (81), said to indicate through "every change, and every feature, / Their great original" (82-3). In other words, only "men of power" can thus be described. Yet Donald Reiman and Neil Fraistat point to the likely mockery in that last phrase of Addison's description of the deity (see their annotation in the hypertext edition), and there is a quasi-Manichean suggestion, however ironic Shelley's tone, that evil has an ultimate source just as much as good has. But a counter-suggestion remains, enforced by the passive construction in "sometimes is called nature". Might not the equation of the "Devil" with "nature" serve the reactionary ends of those who refuse to believe that human nature can undergo improvement? The stanza settles for poker-faced humour; yet it glimpses, without choosing to pursue or resolve, the possibility of a quarrel between the satirist and the ameliorist in Shelley.
In the following stanza (84-7) Shelley most blatantly borrows from "The Devil's Thoughts". In both poems the sight of a lawyer killing a viper reminds the Devil "Of the story of Cain and Abel" (line 87 of Shelley's poem). What Shelley has responded to in "The Devil's Thoughts" is the idea of Satan as a diabolic reader of scripture and society. In neither poem is "the story of Cain and Abel" glossed in an orthodox way; Abel's "goodness" is ignored by both poems (in both Abel is represented by a viper), each of which stresses, rather, the fact of fratricide. Coleridge's and Southey's Devil is merely "put in mind" of the story; Shelley's Devil is "reminded ... most marvellously" of it, where the adverb may glance derisively at Christian belief in "marvels". In Shelley's poem especially we hear at such moments what Blake calls in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell "The Voice of the Devil". As in Blake's work the question raised by Shelley's poem is how committed the author is to this voice.
It would be wrong to argue that this question is uppermost in our minds when listening to, say, the knockabout fun of the attack on the Prince Regent: "For he is fat, his waistcoat gay, .../ And pantaloons are like half moons, / Upon each brawny haunch" (71, 74-5). But it does come to the fore in lines 88-93:
The wealthy yeoman, as he wanders,
His fertile fields among,
And on his thriving cattle ponders,
Counts his sure gains, and hums a song;
Thus did the Devil, thro' earth walking,
Hum low a hellish song.
"Thus", there, clinches the connection between a "wealthy yeoman" surveying his "thriving cattle" and the Devil walking the earth. Earlier, the Devil is said to "view" "His promising live stock" (24). Then the poem's emphasis was laid on the collusion between "Satan" and his "live stock": "Grinning applause, he just shewed them his claws, / And they shrunk with affright from his ugly sight / Whose works they delighted to do" (25-7). Almost like a Romantic Ironist Satan is laughingly aloof from his "works", and the poetry attributes to his "ugly sight" a capacity for keen-eyed perceptiveness into corrupt spiritual states. The proximity between Satan and poet is uneasily close, a closeness underscored by the end of the later stanza where the Devil is said to "Hum low a hellish song". It is such a song that the reader has been listening to throughout the poem, and from which Shelley tries to tear the reader (and, one suspects, himself) at the close. This search for a voice that transcends the satirical is a marked feature of Shelleyan satire, as in The Mask of Anarchy. At the end of "A Devil's Walk" Shelley tries to lessen the Devil's scope and voice. First, he introduces a new, prophetic voice: "Hark, the earthquake's crash I hear" (128). Secondly, he identifies this crash with Satan's departure and with the advent of political revolution: "Kings turn pale, and Conquerors start, / Ruffians tremble in their fear, / For their Satan doth depart" (129-31). "Their Satan" associates the Devil with Kings, Conquerors, and Ruffians, and backs off, in so doing, from earlier hints that the Devil's machinations were pervasive throughout society. But this restriction of the poem's focus to society's rulers flattens out the more cunningly disquieting notes heard beforehand, as when the Devil singles out young girls "settling some dress or arranging some ball" (31). The description of these "innocents fair" (29) as "Poor lambkins" (30) has about it an element of mock-sympathy. Ruthlessly, the poem insists on their involvement in corruption, leaving us disinclined to dispute the fact that "the Devil saw deeper there" (32). It is for such seeing that "The Devil's Walk" stays in the mind rather than for the enlightened "seeing" ascribed to "the sons of Reason" in the poem's final stanza. By comparison with the stealthy, delighted catching-out of individuals and groups earlier in the poem, the assault on the "coward soul" (143) of "The false Tyrant" (142) seems itself "Bloodless" (143), rhetorical, a shade perfunctory. Having, with the help of Coleridge and Southey, hit on a more oblique, incriminating mode of political protest than he had hitherto employed, Shelley resolves the problem of over-identification with his satirical Devil, but only by falling back at the end on a more formulaic language. Yet it is clear that "The Devil's Walk" opened up for Shelley possibilities brought to fruition in later, finer poems, passages in poems, and prose works.[4]
--MO, September 1997
1. All quotations from "The Devil's Walk" in its Broadside and Letter versions are taken from the hypertext edition edited for Romantic Circles by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. Coleridge's and Southey's ballad in its Morning Post version is also quoted from this hypertext edition.
2. Geoffrey Matthews and Kelvin Everest (eds.), The Poems of Shelley, Volume 1, 1804-1817 (London and New York: Longman, 1989), p. 231.
3. Frederick L. Jones (ed.), The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), I, 235.
4. One thinks particularly of Peter Bell the Third and the essay "On the Devil, and Devils". See Timothy Webb's comments on the former work in his edition, Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poems and Prose (London: Dent; Vermont: Tuttle, 1995), pp. 391-2.