The book is full of this oblique humor, satirizing earth, heaven, and hell. The stranger by his comments on theological creeds satirizes religion, and Satan is an intended parody of God. He sneers at man's "mongrel moral sense," which tells him the distinction between good and evil, insisting that he should have no choice, that the right to choose makes him inevitably choose the wrong. He makes little figures out of clay and gives them life, only to destroy them with casual ruthlessness a little later and send them to hell. In answer to the old servant's faith in God, when she says that He will care for her and her mistress, since "not a sparrow falleth to the ground without His Knowledge," he sneers, "But it falls, just the same! What's the good of seeing it fall?" He is a new diabolic figure, yet showing the composite traits of the old, the dæmonic wisdom and sarcasm, the superhuman magnetism to draw men to him, and the human qualities of geniality, sympathy, and boyish charm. One of the most significant and frequent motifs of the diabolic in literature is that of the barter of the human soul for the devil's gift of some earthly boon, long life or wealth or power, or wisdom, or gratification of the senses. It is a theme of unusual power,--what could be greater than the struggle over one's own immortal soul?--and well might the great minds of the world engage themselves with it. Yet that theme is but little apparent in later stories. We have no such character in recent literature that can compare with Marlowe's Dr. Faustus or Goethe's Mephistopheles or Calderon's wonder-working magician. Hawthorne's Septimius Felton makes a bargain with the devil to secure the elixir of life, there is a legend in Hardy's _Tess of the D' Urbervilles_ of a man that sold himself to the minister of evil, and the incident occurs in various stories of witchcraft, yet with waning power and less frequence. The most significant recent use of it is in W. B. Yeats's drama.[147] This is a drama of Ireland, where the peasants have been driven by famine to barter their souls to the devil to buy their children food, but their Countess sells her own soul to the demon that they may save theirs. This vicarious sacrifice adds a new poignancy to the situation and Yeats has treated it with power. This is the only recent appearance of the devil on the stage for he has practically disappeared from English drama, where he was once so prominent. The demon was a familiar and leading figure on the miracle and Elizabethan stage, but, like the ghost, he shows more vitality now in fiction. The devil is an older figure in English drama than is the ghost, but he seems to have played out. [147] _Countess Cathleen._