Facts and fancies for the curious from the harvest-fields of literature

by Unknown

FALSITIES AND FALLACIES

False Ascription

Büchmann in his “Geflügelte Worte” (“Winged Words”), Berlin, 1882, says, “Universally, yet without the least warrant, the following lines are ascribed to Martin Luther:

“Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib, und Gesang,

Der bleibt ein Narr sein Lebenlang.”

“Who loves not wine, wife, and song,

Remains a fool his whole life long.”

Weib, wife, was originally written weiber, women. It was changed by Th. Weyler in his “Thinkers’ and Poets’ Words.”

Even the Luther Room in the Wartburg, says Büchmann, has the couplet on the wall. Its first appearance in literature was in 1775, in Der Wandsbecker Bote of Matthias Claudius, a popular German writer, who incorporated it in a humorous toast or “health.” Roeseler (Berlin, 1873) credits Claudius with the authorship of the couplet, but according to Redlich (Hamburg, 1871), the author was John Henry Voss, who cited it in the Muses’ Almanac (Hamburg, 1777), and repeated it in a published collection of his poems. When it appeared in the Almanac the Hamburg pastors were so incensed at Voss’s slur upon Luther that they defeated his election as a teacher in the Johanneum.

The Lentulus Letter

The letter alleged to have been sent to the Senate of Rome by Publius Lentulus, “President of Judea in the reign of Tiberius Cæsar,” describing the person of Jesus Christ, is now generally admitted to have been written by a monk in the fourteenth century. In the works of the Greek historian, Nicephorus, who lived in that century, and whom Weismann considers a credulous, uncritical writer, is a description of the personal appearance of Jesus Christ, for which no authority is given, and which is said to be derived from the ancients. This passage bears a strong resemblance to the apocryphal letter of Lentulus, and possibly served as a basis for it. It is most likely that the letter was a Latin translation or adaptation of the description given by Nicephorus. Dr. Edward Robinson, after a thorough examination of the evidence, sums up the case very pointedly as follows: “In favor of the authenticity of the letter (Epistola Lentuli) we have only the purport of the inscription. There is no external evidence whatever. Against its authenticity we have the great discrepancies and contradictions of the inscription; the fact that no such person as Lentulus existed at the time and place specified, nor for many years before and after; the utter silence of history in respect to the existence of such a letter; the foreign and later idioms of its style; the contradiction in which the contents of the epistle stand with established historical facts, and the probability of its having been produced at some time not earlier than the eleventh century.”

The earliest appearance of the clumsy forgery was in the MS. writings of St. Anselm, who lived in the eleventh century. No Publius Lentulus can be identified as “President of Judea” in the reign of Tiberius. Judea had but two procurators in his reign, Valerius Gratus, from 16 to 27 A. D., and Pontius Pilate, from 27 to 37 A. D. Not only is there no contemporary witness in profane history to the appearance of Jesus, but there is none to his existence, except, perhaps, Josephus (“Antiquities,” xviii. 3). But even this has certainly been interpolated, and is regarded as spurious in toto by some of the most careful scholars. In fact, it is generally acknowledged that there is no contemporary allusion to Christ in secular history—although some defend the genuineness of the passage relating to Him in Josephus. The earliest authentic allusion to the founder of Christianity is in Pliny’s famous letter to Trajan, and in the “Annals” of Tacitus—both written in the first quarter of the second century.

Scott’s Fabrications

Lockhart, in his “Life of Sir Walter Scott,” thus refers to the source of a large number of the mottoes in the Waverly Novels:

It was in correcting his proof-sheets of the “Antiquary” that Scott first took to equipping his chapters with mottoes of his own fabrication. On one occasion he happened to ask John Ballantyne, who was sitting by him, to hunt for a particular passage in Beaumont and Fletcher. John did as he was bid, but did not succeed in discovering the lines. “Hang it, Johnnie,” cried Scott, “I believe I can make a motto sooner than you will find one.” He did so accordingly; and from that hour, whenever memory failed to suggest an appropriate epigraph, he had recourse to the inexhaustible mines of “Old Play” or “Old Ballad,” to which we owe some of the most exquisite verses that ever flowed from his pen.

William Tell

Baring-Gould long ago demolished what was left of the Tell myth. Nevertheless, at the Schiller centennial, in Berlin, it was proposed to commemorate the occasion by giving to one of the principal streets of the suburb of Rixdorf the name of that William Tell whom Schiller contributed so much to glorify by his drama. Whereupon several of the town councillors arose and called attention to the fact that the Tell of Schiller and of patriotic Helvetian tradition had been shown to be a myth, not only by trustworthy investigators outside of Switzerland, but so acknowledged by Swiss antiquarians themselves.

The Finding of Moses

Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema, the distinguished Anglo-Dutch painter and Royal Academician in London, has put an end to our illusion that Moses as a child was found in the bulrushes. Sir Lawrence painted a picture of “The Finding of Moses,” which proved to be one of the features of the Royal Academy exhibition, and on attention having been drawn to the fact that there are no bulrushes in the painting, Sir Lawrence immediately proved that there were no such things as bulrushes in Egypt, and especially not on the Nile. Sir Lawrence explains that he had assured himself of this fact while in Egypt, which he had visited in order to get the local color before painting the picture, which had already been purchased by Sir John Arid, the constructor of the great Nile dam. The picture possesses special interest for Sir John Arid in view of the fact that it is his own daughter who sat for the figure of Pharaoh’s daughter. Our illusion about the bulrushes seems to have originated in a faulty translation of the passage in Exodus xi. 3. The bulrush of Egypt is the papyrus (cyperus papyrus).

A Historic Phrase Disputed

At a memorable anniversary banquet of the Veterans of the Mexican war, L. B. Mizner, of Solano, in the course of an eloquent address, took occasion to correct a fabrication which had passed into history, attributing to General Taylor, the hero of Buena Vista, the slang admonition, “A little more grape, Captain Bragg.” Such language was unworthy of the man and the historic moment when the result of the most desperate and memorable battle of the war was wavering in the balance, and nothing, said Mr. Mizner, would have been more foreign to the character of General Taylor in his manner in trying emergencies than such an exclamation. “Holding the position of an interpreter on the staff of General Taylor,” said the speaker, “I was seated on my horse immediately near him, when Captain Bragg dashed hurriedly up, saluted the General and reported, ‘General, I shall have to fall back with my battery or lose it.’ Several of his guns had already been dismounted, a large part of his horses killed, and about thirty of his men were prostrate on the heath. On receiving the report General Taylor turned on his horse and surveyed the situation for a few seconds—he required no field-glass, for the scene of conflict was not far removed—and the reply was, ‘Captain Bragg, it is better to lose a battery than a battle.’ This was the interview on which was based the famous slang phrase that was never uttered by the General to whom it was imputed. Captain Bragg returned to his battery with renewed determination, and by the efforts of that gallant officer and his brave command the tide of battle was turned, and the greatest victory of the war was won.”

The Maelstrom

When the elders of the generation now passing away read Schiller’s tragic story of “The Diver,” they recall the teachings in their childhood’s geographies of the Maelstrom off the northwestern coast of Norway. A late report on the fisheries of the Lofoten Archipelago says that the Maelstrom is only one of many whirlpools between the islands, and that it is so lightly regarded by the sailors that they pass and repass it in their little vessels at all stages of the tide, only avoiding it in fogs or storms. So far from drawing whales into its vortex, it is a favorite resort of the fish, and the fishermen reap a rich piscatorial harvest from its bosom. Even in stormy weather the rate of the tide does not exceed six miles an hour.

Don’t Give Up the Ship

Among famous battle sayings is the well-known phrase attributed to the dying Lawrence. Some years ago a daughter of the late Major Benjamin Russell, for many years editor of the Boston Centinel, a bright, interesting woman and a brilliant raconteur, told numerous anecdotes of her father, who was a strongly individualized and notable character for a long period. Among them was the following:

“The battle between the Chesapeake and the Shannon took place just off the Massachusetts coast, and a sailor in some way got ashore and hurried to Boston with the news. It was in the night and he went straight to the Centinel office, where he found Major Russell, to whom he told the story, including the death of Lawrence. ‘What were his last words?’ said the major. ‘Don’t know,’ said the man. ‘Didn’t he say, “Don’t give up the ship?”’ ‘Don’t know,’ said the man. ‘Oh, he did,’ said the major, ‘I’ll make him say it’—and he did—so much for history.”

At the time of the battle of Allatoona Pass, General Sherman sent a dispatch to General Corse, saying, “Hold Allatoona, and I will assist you.” But the genius of history, with his facile pen, made Sherman say, “Hold the fort, for I am coming.”

Specific Gravity

Considering the vigorous condition of the myth of the Connecticut Blue Laws, in spite of the repeated exposure of its falsity, this gem from “A General History of Connecticut,” written by the original Blue Law manufacturer, the Rev. Samuel Peters, is valuable. It is quoted in Goodspeed’s catalogue, and is part of the veracious author’s description of the Connecticut River:

“Two hundred miles from the Sound is a narrow of five yards only, formed by two shelving mountains of solid rock, whose tops intercept the clouds. Through this chasm are compelled to pass all the waters which in the time of floods bury the northern country. Here water is consolidated without frost, by pressure, by swiftness, between the pinching sturdy rocks to such a degree of induration that an iron crow floats smoothly down its current—here iron, lead, and cork have one common weight; here steady as time and harder than marble, the stream passes, irresistible if not swift as lightning.”

Pocahontas

The rescue of Captain Smith by Pocahontas, according to his assertion, took place in 1607, when she was a child not quite ten years of age. No mention was made of it until eight years afterwards, and the first circumstantial account of it was not published until seventeen years later, when it appeared in Smith’s “General Historie of Virginia.” According to the 1624 folio, Smith’s narrative of the tableau in which he was a central figure runs thus:

“A long consultation was held, but the conclusion was, two great stones were brought before Powhatan; then as many as could, layd hands on him [Smith], dragged him to them, and thereon layd his head, and being ready with their clubs to beate out his braines, Pocahontas, the King’s dearest daughter, when no intreaty could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death; whereat the Emperor was contented he should live to make him hatchets, and her, bells, beads, & copper; for they thought him as well of all occupations as themselves. For the King himselfe will make his owne robes, shoes, bowes, arrowes, pots; plant, hunt, or doe anything so well as the reste.”

Captain Smith’s “True Relation” was published in England in 1608, and his “Map of Virginia,” with memoranda of his observations, in 1612. In neither of them, nor in contemporary writings, such as the narrative of Wingfield, the first President of the Colony, is there any reference to his deliverance from savage clubbing. Smith’s first reference to it was in 1816 in a letter addressed to the Queen in behalf of “the Lady Rebecca,” or Pocahontas. The outward and visible motive of the invention was commendable enough. In the earnest expression of his regard for her, and of his acknowledgment of her touching friendship for him, he found the surest medium for the promotion of her welfare in attracting to her the special sympathy and attention of the English Court. Whether or not he was too gallant to seek prestige for himself, it is certain that he had little need of it, for his whole life was crowded with strange adventure.

The Penn Treaty

Our great painters sometimes usurp the functions of the historian, but with their anachronisms and audacities they do more to perpetuate the memory of scenes which never occurred than tradition-mongers and story-tellers are capable of doing. The apocryphal character of some of the scenes in the Rotunda of the Capitol at Washington has often been noted. West’s familiar painting of Penn’s treaty with the Indians under the elm at Shackamaxon is a notable example of this class. As a mere work of art it has been subjected to scornful criticism, because of its improbable groupings, and, as Mr. Bancroft says, “the artist, faithful neither to the Indians nor to Penn, should have no influence on history.” As to the conference, it has been utterly demolished by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. No treaty of amity was made in 1682. The earliest formal agreement to live in friendship and peace, on record, was in 1701, and that was made, not with the Delawares, but with the interior tribes,—the Susquehannas, Minnequas, and Conestogas. Penn was a methodical man, and careful to preserve the evidences of his purchases of lands from the Indians. They are to be found in the minutes of the Provincial Council and in the books of the Recorders of Deeds in the various counties of the Province. But the treaty of 1682, if there had been such an agreement, was of immeasurably more value than any of them. It was a covenant for quiet possession of those lands which might thereafter be acquired under covenant of title. Conceding the great importance of the treaty, it can scarcely be conceived that all proof connected with it should be allowed to perish. There is nothing to be found in the Archives of Pennsylvania, in the writings of William Penn himself, or of his friends and contemporaries, to show that such an event ever took place. The only plea under which it can be sheltered is a letter preserved in the State records at Harrisburg, under date of April 21, 1682, which Penn gave to Lieutenant-Governor Markham previous to the first voyage, and was addressed to the Indians, offering them peace, friendship, and protection. There is an endorsement upon this letter, stating that Thomas Holme, his Surveyor-General, “did read this letter to the Indians,” and as he lived in the house near the elm which stood where the monument has since been erected, this circumstance may have given early currency to the Penn treaty story, which has since been strengthened by West’s picture. Holme probably did call the Indians together beneath the great elm, as it was a spot likely to be selected for the purpose, and there read them the letter from Penn, month of August following, but this is all there ever was of a treaty.

The Good Old Times

What fallacies and sophistries are comprehended in that oft-repeated phrase, “The good old times.” There are still people who sigh for the grand old days of Good Queen Bess! Glorious days, truly, when the common people lived like swine and starving wretches were hung for stealing a loaf; when the filthy rushes on palace floors bred pestilence; when gluttony and drunkenness and brutality were masked under courtly manners; when conversation among the highest class was spiced with profanity and vulgarity; when the coin was clipped and debased; when the whole kingdom was overrun with thieves and highwaymen; when royal usurpations and proclamations assumed the force of law; and when the Crown compelled plunder of church property, iniquitous taxation, coercion of juries, and arbitrary imprisonment. In our daily life we are in the enjoyment of material comforts and conveniences, at home, in business, in travel, in distant communication, in the market, in commerce, in government, the cheapest of which the royal revenues of Queen Bess could not have purchased. Edmund Burke lamented that the age of chivalry passed away with Marie Antoinette. He forgot that her Court was itself grossly immoral, and the passionate admirers of chivalry seem to forget that the knights were not all Sidneys or Bayards. St. Palaye says in his “Memoirs of Chivalry” that never was there greater corruption of manners than in the times of knight-errantry,—never was the empire of debauchery more universal. St. Louis discovered a sink of iniquity close to his own tent in the most holy of the crusades. The intelligent reader of “Ivanhoe” knows full well that the thrilling scene between the Templar Bois-Guilbert and Rebecca, as she stood upon the verge of the parapet ready for the fatal plunge, is not a mere fancy sketch. How few ever stop to consider why the most honorable order of British knighthood is called the Order of the Bath. Dean Stanley says “it is because the knights who enlisted in the defense of right against wrong, truth against falsehood, honor against dishonor, were laid in a bath on the evening before they were admitted to the Order, and thoroughly washed, in order to show how bright and pure ought to be the lives of those who engage in a noble enterprise.” What gave the symbol special significance was the fact that it was the one wash of a lifetime. Dr. Playfair, in speaking of the causes of epidemics, says, “Think of 33 generations, who, like Oppian, never washed at all!”

Shakespeare’s Defiance of Historical Fact

The audacity of Shakespeare in constructing the plots of certain of his plays, in “defiance of the possibilities of history and the capacities of human nature,” has been sharply commented upon by Dr. Van Buren Denslow and other recent writers. Attention has been drawn to the fact that at no period in the administration of the civil law in Italy during the Middle Ages could the validity of the bond given to Shylock by Antonio, in the “Merchant of Venice,” have been made the subject of grave judicial investigation. Dr. Denslow thinks that the “literary audacity” shown in the “Merchant of Venice” pales before the “crude and barbarous vigor” with which all the legal ideas of the Danes and of every other race are defied in “Hamlet,” and all the possibilities of Scotch history, habits, and character are trampled under foot in “Macbeth.” Concerning “Hamlet” he says,—

It is contrary to the principles of human nature everywhere that the affection of parents for their brothers and sisters should exceed that for their children, and especially for their sons. This being true, the law of inheritance of thrones and rank, which is always fashioned after the law of descent of lands and goods, would necessarily require that when Claudius Hamlet, King of Denmark, the father of young Hamlet, died, leaving a son of full age, the crown should descend directly to the son, and if young Hamlet were a minor the late queen consort would be regent merely.

But the play of “Hamlet” opens one month after Claudius’s death, with his brother enthroned instead of his son, and the former queen consort to Claudius Hamlet is now consort to his surviving brother.

Furthermore, this impossible mis-descent is assumed by all the persons of the drama to be a mere matter of course, and the younger Hamlet’s entire calamity is pictured as being his loss of his father, with no allusion whatever to his loss of a throne.

It is not indicated whether the queen had been a queen jointly regnant with the elder Hamlet or a queen consort to him; but the assumption of the text is that her entire dignity had been derived through her husband, not that she was queen regnant in her own right nor that these successive husbands were mere kings consort, deriving their positions through her. The new king assumes all the attributes of a monarch, as if his brother’s death were absolutely all that was needed to make him king. He sends commissioners to Norway, and, according to the words of Rosencrantz, this king was assumed to have power to assure the crown to Hamlet at his death, and had done so before discovering whether his own incestuous marriage to his brother’s widow would have issue.

It was impossible that the Ghost should have assumed that his demise would have devolved the crown on his brother, impossible that young Hamlet should assume it, impossible that any portion of the people of Denmark or of any other kingdom on earth should have assumed it, and therefore impossible that the murder should be assumed to be commissible with the motive assigned, viz., of succeeding to the throne or the queen. She would have been only dowager queen and young Hamlet would have been king.

In “Macbeth” we have the like assumption on the part of a Scottish captain who has just won in a recent skirmish the title of “Thane,” that if he can assassinate his king, Duncan, though Duncan’s two athletic sons, Malcolm and Donalbain, survive and are in full health, yet Macbeth will then become king. No election or proclamation by the army, no renunciation by the heirs-apparent, no concurrence of the nobles is called for. To Lady Macbeth the succession appears assured as soon as she learns that Duncan is about to sleep under their roof. Nothing but murder is required to win a crown for a person between whom and the throne there stand two male heirs, both on the ground, one General Banquo, as distinguished as himself, and many earls and notables. Succession by assassination was at all times as foreign to the Scotch character and history as cannibalism. Hospitality to guests, and especially at night, is an inborn and deeply felt religion among the Scotch people. In a country where hospitality is thus sacred and assassination is a thing unknown, the hideousness of murdering a king by night to get his throne is a foreign travesty on its face. Such crimes might occur in Northern Africa or Southern Asia, and even in Italy. During the invasion of Italy by the Lombards events occurred from which the criminal atrocity and ferocity of Macbeth might have been drawn. But to locate them in Scotland at any period is simply to transfer to the atmosphere of the Highlands a kind and form of depravity which, while it never existed in its fulness anywhere, never found any type or suggestion among the Scots.

The tremendous energy of Shakespeare’s tragedies lifts them above dramatic criticism, and makes them the standard. Their heroes are not men, their heroines are not women. Both are survivals over into the modern stage-life of the artist-made gods of the mythological pantheon. Richard III. is a better Satan than Milton drew. Macbeth is a better Belial. It is a proof of the moral advance of this age that the good taste of society revolts from the notion that Shakespeare’s men were human. It does not greatly care for monstrosities of any kind in fiction, any more than for tortures in a theory of destiny. It prefers a drama whose characters are not revolting and do not rape for the graceful form of History.

The three plays cited furnish strong proofs, if any were needed, that the author of the plays could not have looked at his plots through a legalist imagination like that of Lord Bacon, the first lawyer in his day of the kingdom. They are the product of an imagination in which the descent of a throne to a brother, or to a successful chieftain in preference to a son, creates no sense of incongruity.

The Bacon Humbug

In the course of a newspaper discussion of the authorship of the poems and plays attributed to Shakespeare, the assertion that present day scholarship is almost unanimous in discrediting the editors of the First Folio (1623) brought out from Mr. William Winter, the accomplished dramatic critic, the following sharp reply:

“There is no disposition on the part of the defenders of Shakespeare to make use of ‘intemperate language.’ Indeed, considering their provocation, they have displayed uncommon patience. The most ‘intemperate language’ that has been used in the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy, has been used by Baconians, such as the late Mr. Donnelly and the present Mr. W. H. Edwards. A little acerbity, as remarked by Andrew Lang, is, perhaps, unavoidable in such a discussion. To those who believe—having every reason to believe, and no reason whatever to doubt—that the plays were written by Shakespeare, the attempt to ruin his renown seems nothing less than a criminal desecration.

“It has not been said and it is not thought, by any person acquainted with the subject, that the First Folio of Shakespeare was thoroughly edited, or that it is free from defects; but it is confidently maintained that Heminge and Condell, in their association with that book, were entirely disinterested and absolutely honest, and that without compensation and probably at a pecuniary loss, they rendered a service to literature such as entitles them to everlasting gratitude and esteem.

“Certain commentators, like Spalding, Wright, and Madden, have been pleased to impugn the integrity of Heminge and Condell, but, in so doing, they have gone much further than there was ever any warrant for them to go. Heminge and Condell did not ‘fail in their duty;’ the First Folio is not ‘dishonest;’ and to say, or to insinuate, that it has been discredited is to use the language of gross injustice and sheer extravagance.

“The primary defect in the First Folio—the defect to which all modern editors of Shakespeare have called attention, and the point upon which so much stress is now laid—is the discrepancy between a few words of the preface and the contents of the book. In their ‘Address’ or preface, Heminge and Condell say, ‘We have scarce received from him (Shakespeare) a blot in his papers.’ It has been found, however, that several of the plays were, in fact, reprinted from earlier quartos, and that, in some cases, earlier quartos that were not consulted contain a better text than the Folio. This is the sum of all the fault that can be imputed to Heminge and Condell, except, indeed, that the proofs of the Folio were not carefully read and scrupulously corrected; but Heminge and Condell were not men of letters.

“The late J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps was an implicit believer in William Shakespeare as the author of the plays; he never wavered in that belief; he is acknowledged as ‘the most competent Shakespeare worker who ever lived.’ The language of Halliwell-Phillipps accordingly, with reference to the First Folio and to Heminge and Condell, ought to carry some weight. These are his words,—

“‘These estimable men who are kindly remembered in the poet’s will are not likely to have encouraged the speculation from motives of gain.... When we find Heminge and Condell not only initiating and vigorously supporting the design, but expressing their regret that Shakespeare himself had not lived to direct the publication, who can doubt that they were acting as trustees for his memory, or that the noble volume was a record of their affection? Who can ungraciously question their sincerity?... What plausible reason can be given for not accepting the literal truth of their description of themselves as ‘a pair so careful to show their gratitude to the dead?’... Heminge and Condell speak of themselves as mere gatherers, and it is nearly certain that all that they did was to ransack their dramatic stores for the best copies of the plays that they could find, handing those copies over to the printers, in the full persuasion that, in taking this course, they were morally relieved of all further responsibility.... Out of the thirty-six dramas that they collected one-half had never been published in any shape.... There is nothing to show that fair copies were ever made in those days for the prompters.... So far from being astonished at the textual imperfections of the Folio, we ought to be profoundly thankful for what is, under the circumstances, its marvellous state of comparative excellence. Heminge and Condell did the best they could, to the best of their judgment. It never could have entered their imagination that the day would arrive for the comfort of intellectual life to be marred by the distorted texts of ‘Hamlet’ or ‘Lear.’ There cannot, indeed, be a doubt that, according to their lights, they expressed a sincere conviction when they delivered the immortal dramas to the public as being ‘absolute in their numbers, as he (Shakespeare) conceived them.’... There is nothing in the writings of Heminge and Condell to warrant a suspicion that there was a single wilful misrepresentation of facts.... Statement ... that the entire volume was printed from the author’s own manuscripts would have been a serious misrepresentation, but the language of Heminge and Condell does not necessarily, under any line of interpretation, express so much, and in all probability they are here speaking themselves in their managerial capacity, referring to the singularly few alterations that they had observed in the manuscripts which he delivered to them for the use of the theatre.... Nor, in our measure of gratitude for the First Folio—the greatest literary treasure the world possesses—should we neglect to include a tribute to Ben Jonson.’

“The First Shakespeare Folio distinctly and unequivocally declares that its contents (all the Shakespeare plays except ‘Pericles’), were written by William Shakespeare—then, 1623, deceased—and it is prefaced with a noble tribute to him, by his great contemporary Ben Jonson, and with a portrait of him, authenticated by Jonson’s verses. The authenticity of that book was not questioned by any person living at the time of its publication, nor was its validity assailed until many generations had passed away. It remains authentic; and no amount of pettifogging as to its defects—all of which are easily comprehensible and explicable—will ever destroy its force as conclusive evidence of the authorship of Shakespeare.

“It is not forgotten (strange if it were, considering how continuously and strenuously the fact is proclaimed!) that actors and dramatic authors, in the time of ‘Eliza and our James,’ were legally liable to severe penalties for satire of ‘the great.’ What of it? Penal legislation did not make actors less industrious in their vocation, or authors less prolific, or the theatre less popular. Shakespeare, Greene, Heywood, Marlowe, Lyly, Nash, Lodge, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, and all the rest, continued to write plays, and continued not to be ashamed of them or afraid of the law. Nature also has laws; and the product of the English poetic drama, between 1580 and 1640, surpasses, in wealth, variety, and splendor, every kindred product in the history of mankind.

“Direct, conclusive, final evidence that Henry Chettle referred to Shakespeare, in the apology that he made for having published Robert Greene’s attack on ‘Shakescene,’ does not exist: that is to say, the name of Shakespeare is not actually mentioned by Chettle; but, if ‘imputation and strong circumstance, which lead directly to the door of truth,’ are evidence, the rational conclusion is irresistible that the reference was to Shakespeare. Upon a careful reading of Greene’s ‘Groats-worth of Wit’ and Chettle’s ‘Kind Heart’s Dream,’ no other conclusion seems possible. Shakespeare scholars have invariably accepted it.

“Inquiry as to the authenticity of the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647 need not here be pursued. There might be a time to consider ‘analogy’ between the circumstances of that book and those of the First Folio of Shakespeare, if, primarily, it could be shown that Beaumont and Fletcher were actors, that they bequeathed money to two fellow-actors with which to buy memorial rings, and that those two fellow-actors, ‘careful to show their gratitude to the dead,’ collected and published their plays, as a duty of affectionate friendship and ‘to do an office for the dead.’ At present the two books stand before the world in a totally different light,—for the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647 (on its face authentic) was introduced by a stationer who had never known or seen those authors and knew nothing about them or their works, save what he had gleaned at second-hand.

“No case can be made for Bacon as the author of Shakespeare by aspersing the memory of Heminge and Condell, or by assailing the authenticity of their Folio. The Baconian delusion is not a product of scholarship, but of perverse incredulity and crazy and mischievous conjecture. Delia Bacon went mad over it years ago, and since her time there has been a procession of harmless lunatics steadily moving in the same way. Every little while some new crank starts up with a theory that something well known to have happened ‘never could have happened,’ and upon that gratuitous assumption a prodigious structure of phantasy is very soon reared. Lately, for example, it has impressed several persons as remarkable that a scantily educated youth, reared in a little rural village, and adventurously migrating to the capital to seek his fortune, should have acquired, so soon and so readily, the correct style that appears in the poems of ‘Venus and Adonis,’ ‘Tarquin and Lucrece,’ and the Sonnets. Instances of admirably correct versification made by novices, illiterate as well as scholastic, throughout the history of poetical literature, meantime, causes no surprise. The youthful achievements of Cowley and Pope and Chatterton are taken quite as a matter of course. James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, who had no education at all, nevertheless could, and did, write verse as harmonious, as correct, and as finished as that of Sir Walter Scott, who possessed every advantage that education could bestow. ‘He lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.’

“That which has happened to others, however, must not—in the reasoning of these censors—happen to Shakespeare. He alone, of all men, must be thought to have developed by rule and line. The dominant fact, all the same, remains unchanged,—the decisive fact of Shakespeare’s colossal, transcendent poetic genius, the instantaneous insight and intuition whereby he grasped all knowledge of human nature, and the faculty of clear, fluent, illuminative expression, whereby he was able to utter all things in a language of imperishable beauty. Nothing indeed could be more preposterous than the wild theory on which the whole Baconian fabric of detraction reposes,—the theory that because, to prosaic perception, a certain thing seems unlikely to have happened, therefore it never did happen. Byron mentions a certain Abbé who wrote a treatise on the Swedish Constitution, proving it to be indissoluble and eternal, just as Gustavus III. had destroyed it: ‘Sir,’ said the Abbé, ‘the King of Sweden may overthrow the Constitution, but not my book.’ Shakespeare, of course, ought not to have been able to write the ‘Venus,’ or the ‘Lucrece,’ or the Sonnets, or the Plays, or anything else, and he would not have been had he possessed a properly respectful prescience of the doubts of Mr. Hallam, the mental perplexities of the portentous Owen, and the excruciating divinations of Mrs. Gallup—that oracular dame whose fiery-footed steeds are just now prancing over the mangled remains not merely of the philosopher Bacon, but of Queen Elizabeth and all her ‘spacious times.’ But, unhappily for these distressed beings, Shakespeare did write all those things, and the fact of his authorship of them remains as solid and permanent as any fact ever was, since the beginning of recorded time.

“All the ciphers that ever a perturbed ingenuity has read into Elizabethan literature cannot shape the uncontroverted and incontrovertible truth that is written in marble over that sacred tomb in Stratford Church: ‘Shakespeare, with whom quick Nature died; Nestor in wisdom, Socrates in genius, Virgil in art.’ And if anything were needed utterly to discredit and finally to explode the Bacon humbug, it would be supplied by the monstrous story that Mrs. Gallup’s reckless and mischievous fancy has evolved, and that Mr. Mallock later has had the astounding effrontery in some sort to countenance,—a story that covers Queen Elizabeth with shame, that makes Essex and Bacon her children (their father being Leicester), so that Bacon becomes practically the murderer and defamer of his own brother, and while darkening Bacon’s already tarnished reputation with unspeakable infamy, capsizes all authentic records of Elizabeth’s time, taxes even the credulity of ignorance, makes common sense ridiculous, and turns all knowledge to laughter and contempt.”

Stratford-on-Avon

A London editor, in commenting upon the work of the Stratford iconoclasts, says it is deplorable to have doubts started as to whether the Shakespeare Museum contains a single genuine relic; whether Anne Hathaway’s cottage is not, after all, a simple fraud; and Mary Arden’s farm a disreputably unhistorical building. Anne Hathaway’s cottage is a place which every Shakespeare-loving visitor to his native town makes a point of inspecting. It has been good enough for all the myriad tourists of all nationalities that have flocked to see it; yet a dark rumor has been going about seriously affecting its bona fides as a genuine article. Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, the Shakespearian critic, we are told, is of opinion that the probabilities are decidedly against the so-called cottage ever having contained the woman who, at the age of twenty-seven, married William Shakespeare when the latter was only nineteen. Here is a pleasing illusion dissipated at once. Those who have visited the spot can no longer, as they recall that lowly cot nestling among its trees and ascend again in fancy the creaking wooden staircase, picture to themselves the May mornings when the Bard of All Time must have gone the same round on a courting expedition, and probably sat under the eaves with his arm round his future bride. The sighing tourist will whisper, What next? Well, the next surprise in store for him is the disestablishment and disendowment of the old farmhouse still shown as that in which the poet’s mother, Mary Arden, lived. Its history is now said to be altogether inconsistent with the theory that any of the ancestors of the Shakespeare stock ever resided there. In addition to the attack on the Bard’s wife, his mother too meets with this tragic fate. We are on the high road to having it proved that no such person as Mary Arden ever lived; that, in fact, Shakespeare was such a wonderful man that he never had a mother at all. This about the cottage and farmhouse is distinctly bad news for those who some time ago spent their money on the “Shakespeare Fund,” which went to purchasing for the good of the nation all the spots considered to be traditionally connected with the life of the master-poet. It is also bad news for the tourists and pilgrims. Will they care to go to the shrine of the great dramatist if a cloud of doubt surrounds some of its most cherished monuments?

The people of the little old market-town on the quiet Avon are resentful over this scepticism. The Stratfordians would be the last people in the world to admit the truth of the story about Anne Hathaway’s cottage or Mary Arden’s farm, even when backed up by such a competent critic in these matters as Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps. They have hitherto found the fame of the Prince of Poets exceedingly useful to their small borough. Shakespeare represents bread-and-butter to many of the excellent burghers and burgesses. They owe to him their winter’s stock of coals and their weekly supply of cabbages and candles and household matches. Should any ruthless hand remove from them this source of legitimate gain, then the contiguous workhouse would soon feel the result. This idea, therefore, about Anne Hathaway’s cottage must be regarded simply with disgust by every loyal citizen of the good Warwickshire town. In private they all probably wish to goodness that these pestilent critics were at the bottom of the sea, with their destructive doubts and depressing hypotheses. With one accord, no doubt, the Stratford folk would combine to duck the unfortunate author of the latest Shakespearian heresy in the reedy Avon if they could lay hands on him. Such theories, they think, ought to be put down with a strong hand. What is Parliament about that it allows honest people’s bread to be thus taken out of their mouths? They would boycott the theory-mongers if they could. It would, indeed, be an evil day were the last of the tourists to appear at Stratford. What, no more American enthusiasts? No more smoke-dried pedants and musty students of “First Folios?” No more excursions to the local shrine and personally-conducted mobs of open-mouthed worshippers all gone “away in the ewigkeit?” Such an idea is enough to cause an effusion of blood on the brain of those who have lived all their lives in the shadow of the church where the poet’s dust rests, and where the remarkable effigy is to be seen which is still considered to be one of the best portraits extant of the sublime genius.

When a theory like this is once started, no human being can tell how far the stone will roll, or what will be the ultimate result. What would be the effect on the Shakespeare-worshipping tourist if everything at Stratford were shown to him as being only doubtfully connected with the Bard? For example, instead of the guide-post pointing the way to Anne Hathaway’s cottage, it might be sadly truthful to say, “To the reputed cottage of Anne Hathaway,” and Mary Arden’s farm ought to be ticketed as an “uncertain” building. Shakespeare’s tomb in the church would have to be pointed out as the tomb “either of Shakespeare or somebody else;” and if Shakespeare never wrote his own plays, it really does not much matter whose sepulchre it may be. That famous curse on the person who moves his bones would pass unnoticed; for who would care for a curse launched by somebody who was not Shakespeare, but a local versifier who flourished three hundred years ago, or perhaps the tombstone man himself, who may have charged a little more if he carved a quatrain of his own invention on the stone? Then, supposing the Shakespeare Museum were to experience a breath of the same critical spirit, where would the ring be that the Bard wore, the chair, the books that he might have used, and so on? That ancient chair was described by Washington Irving years ago. He says it is the most favorite object of curiosity in the whole of the house. He draws a picture of how Shakespeare may have sat in it when a boy, watching the slowly-revolving spit with all the longing of an urchin; or of an evening “listening to the gossips and cronies of Stratford, dealing forth church-yard tales and legendary anecdotes of the troublesome times of England.” Yes, no doubt he may have done so; and it is because of that delightful possibility that everybody used to sit down in his chair, to its great detriment. Americans are particularly anxious, the custodian asserts, to take a seat where the Bard of Avon had once sat. No sooner did they get into the room than they raced for the chair. After a severe scuffle one proud man succeeded in being the first to sit down in it; but after this sort of thing had gone on for some time, the chair was found to be so rickety that henceforth nobody was allowed to touch it. Washington Irving rather cruelly remarks that the chair partook of the volatile nature of the Santa Casa of Loretto or the Flying Chair of the Arabian Enchanter, for “though sold some time ago to a Northern Princess, it has found its way back again to the old chimney-corner.” This is one of those critical calumnies which need to be indignantly refuted. To doubt Shakespeare’s chair means a depression in the relic and tourist trade at Stratford; and, after all, what does it matter if the chair is a modern one, supposing that everybody believes it to be that in which Shakespeare sat while he composed “Macbeth”? The ordinary tourist does not ask for doubts—he wants certainty. Dogmatism is what is required at literary shrines; not a halting, hesitating statement that “Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps thinks this,” and “Mr. Somebody Else thinks that,” but a downright positive assertion of fact. Anne Hathaway’s cottage will lose half its attractions if the miserable carping spirit of a regard for historic accuracy comes in. There is nothing like resolute, good-humored credulity in such matters.

L. E. L. Assumes a Virtue

William Howitt remarks, “I met Letitia E. Landon in company at a time when there was a report that she was actually though secretly married.[^[4]] Mrs. Hofland, on entering the room, went up to her in her plain, straightforward way, and said, ‘Ah, my dear, what must I call you, Miss Landon, or whom?’ After well-feigned surprise at the question, Miss Landon began to talk in a tone of merry ridicule at this report, and ended by declaring that as to love or marriage, they were things she never thought of. ‘What then have you been doing with yourself this last month?’

[4]. In later years, when L. E. L. married Governor Machan, of Cape Coast Castle, West Africa, she was thirty-six years of age, and died a few months afterwards.

“‘Oh, I have been puzzling my brain to invent a new sleeve; how do you like it?’ showing her arm.

“‘You never think of such a thing as love!’ exclaimed a sentimental young man; ‘you, who have written so many volumes upon it?’

“‘Oh, that’s all professional, you know,’ exclaimed she, with an air of merry scorn.

“‘Professional!’ said a grave Quaker who stood near; ‘why dost thou make a difference between what is professional and what is real? Dost thou write one thing and think another? Does not that look very much like hypocrisy?’

“To this the astonished poetess made no reply, but by a look of genuine amazement. It was a mode of putting the matter to which she had evidently never been accustomed. And, in fact, there can be no question that much of her writing was professional. She had to win a golden harvest for the comfort of others dear to herself; and she felt, like all authors who have to cater to the public, that she must provide, not so much what she would of her free-will choice, but what they expected of her.”

The Burning of Rome, A.D. 54

None of the stereotyped falsities of history have been reiterated with more persistence than that which represents the Emperor Nero on the summit of the tower of Mæcenas fiendishly fiddling and singing his verses while Rome was burning. Aside from the anachronism as to fiddling—the violin only dates from the middle of the sixteenth century—and admitting that the classic lyre of antiquity was meant, we have the authoritative statement of Tacitus that at the time of the fire Nero was at his villa at Antium, fifty miles from Rome. There is little doubt that Nero was the most depraved representative of pagan sensuality, but on the occasion of a conflagration which was planned and prompted by him for a wise purpose, he exhibited qualities greatly to his credit. Lanciani says that Nero conceived the gigantic plan of renewing and rebuilding the city, and as it was “crowded at every corner with shrines and altars and small temples which religious superstition made absolutely inviolable, and as the work of improvement was fiercely opposed by private owners of property, and gave occasion to an endless amount of lawsuits, and appraisals, and fights among the experts, he rid himself of all these difficulties in the simplest and easiest way.” Of the fourteen regions or wards into which Rome had been divided by Augustus, three were completely destroyed, and seven for the greater part, without any loss of life. In the work of reconstruction, the architects, Severus and Celer, were ordered to draw their plans in accordance with the best principles of hygiene and comfort. In anticipation of the lengthy period that would be required for clearing and rebuilding, Nero caused an enormous number of tents and wooden booths to be secretly prepared for the houseless multitude, and ordered fleets of grain-laden Mediterranean vessels from Sardinia, Sicily, Numidia, and Egypt to be conveniently near to prevent famine. This comprehensive provision for material improvement was made by a broad-minded, public-spirited man, who was in advance of his age, and who transformed narrow lanes into broad avenues, filthy slums into shaded squares and fountains, and shabby houses into magnificent public and private buildings.

Mummy Wheat

In how many sermons has the indestructibility of truth been illustrated by the wheat wrapped up with an Egyptian mummy and germinating after thousands of years! Yet this pleasing story has met with well-founded refutation. Sir J. D. Hooker, of London, an eminent authority on growth in the natural world, being appealed to, says: “The story of Egyptian mummy wheat having germinated has never been confirmed, and is not credited by any one who is warranted by knowledge and experience in such matters to give an opinion. Innumerable attempts to stimulate mummy wheat into vitality have each and all failed.”

Anglo-Saxon as a Race Term

The term Anglo-Saxon as descriptive of Englishmen or Americans, is as incorrect as the use of the word Gothic in differentiation of pointed architecture. Mr. S. D. O’Connell, of the Bureau of Statistics, Washington, in a letter on the misuse of the term, says that among ethnologists the phrase Anglo-Saxon is never used as descriptive of a race, or of English institutions. Hence, he remarks, “no well-educated person of the present generation can be excused for using it descriptively of the English-speaking peoples; because there never was an Anglo-Saxon race nor an Anglo-Saxon institution to impart dominating influences to our civilization. The dominating influences must be traced to some other source than that of barbarian Teutonic tribes, even if we should grant the development of our civilization to the dominating influences of the people of the British Isles, who, in the early settlements of this part of the continent, so largely colonized it. Our British ancestors, after the invasion of the Romans, adopted the civilizing influences of the more civilized peoples of Europe, and whatever dominating influence the English-speaking peoples have to-day is due, to some extent at least, to that civilization, and to the vigor of the people, which no distinct race can claim as its own.

“‘The truth is,’ as the Chicago Tribune has said, ‘that to plume ourselves upon our Anglo-Saxon extraction is ridiculous. Compared with us, the Romans, who first comprised all the vagabonds of Italy, and finally incorporated into the empire all the semi-barbarians of Europe, were a homogeneous race.’ That paper humorously cites Defoe’s ‘True-Born Englishman’ of his day:

“‘A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction—

In speech an irony, in fact a fiction;

A metaphor invented to express

A man akin to all the universe.

* * * * *

Forgetting that themselves are all derived

From the most scoundrel race that ever lived,

A horrid crowd of rambling thieves and drones,

Who ransacked kingdoms and dispeopled towns.

The Pict, and painted Briton, treacherous Scot,

By hunger, theft, and rapine hither brought;

Norwegian pirates, buccaneering Danes,

Whose red-haired offspring everywhere remains;

Who, joined with Norman-French, compound the breed,

From whence your ‘Free-born Englishmen’ proceed.’

“Anything more motley and heterogeneous than the English people, even before the Norman invasion, made up as they were from the veins of ancient Britons, Romans, Picts, Scots, Danes, Angles, and Saxons, it would be hard to conceive. This mixture of races and bloods shows plainly that the idea of an Anglo-Saxon race is sheer nonsense. How much more nonsensical it is to use the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in race classification of the American people, when they have compounded and are daily more and more compounding the confusion of its British blood with infusions from the veins of all other nations.

“Of course we have an Anglo-Saxon strain in our blood, as we have the Norman, a mixture of the Teutonic and Celtic, the old British—that is, the Celtic—the Germanic, and the Latin, so called. But which strain is the predominant one it is difficult to say. The best ethnologists incline to the opinion that it is the Celtic.

“Out upon this cant about ‘races,’ and especially the gabble about ‘Anglo-Saxon institutions,’ which we hear so often from persons who know little or nothing of the forefathers and forerunners of the English-speaking people, and less of their own, or of the science which is concerned with the natural history of man.

“The fiction that credits to Anglo-Saxon blood all the enterprise, progress, and best institutions of the centuries past has been the cause of more persecution in the name of religion, and bloodshed in the name of God, than the most malevolent influences that have ever caused brethren to imbrue their hands in the blood of brothers since the first murder. It has created and still sustains the most bitter and unjust and unfounded prejudices against the people of Ireland and their descendants everywhere among English-speaking peoples. Leaders of thought and educators should teach the English-speaking people of this land of liberty and constitutional equality—as the great leaders of thought in Great Britain and Ireland are now doing—that there is no distinction of race or blood or origin among the English-speaking peoples of to-day, nor has there been for long centuries past; that the great landmarks of our civilization were erected upon and the foundations of our political institutions laid in the Christian religion; and that to its benign and dominating influence are to be attributed the greatness and progress of the English-speaking peoples among the nations of the earth.”

Guillotin

It is a remarkable instance of the vitality of a popular error that Thackeray, who was well acquainted with French history should, in his “Philip,” chapter XVI, have fallen into the mistake of supposing that Dr. Guillotin perished by the instrument which bears his name, but which he did not, as Thackeray says, invent. Thackeray does not actually assert that Guillotin died on the guillotine, but he puts it in the form of a question, the answer to which is, of course, intended to be yes: “Was not good Dr. Guillotin executed by his own neat invention?” Now nothing is more certain than that Guillotin survived the great revolution many years, and died a natural death in 1814.