COUNT SIGISMUND’S WILL.
The theatrical season in Paris, now at its height, has not yet been marked by the production of any particularly successful pieces. At about this time last year, the clever comedy of Lady Tartuffe afforded agreeable occupation to the critics, and abundant amusement to the town. At the Gymnase, the Fils de Famille, of which two versions have since been produced upon the London stage, and Philiberte, a sparkling three-act comedy in verse, full of wit, but rather Régence in its tone and style, nightly filled the house with select and gratified audiences. L’Honneur et l’Argent, M. Ponsard’s respectable and proper, but, in our opinion, wearisome play, had a triumphant run at the Odeon; whilst, at the Vaudeville, the Lady with the Camelias, who, objectionable though she was in some respects, was certainly, as far as talent went, immeasurably superior to her various imitators and successors, drew all Paris to her seductive boudoir. This winter no play of decided merit and importance has been produced at any theatre. In more than one instance, attempts have been made to proclaim the success of a piece immense, when in reality it was most moderate; and, at the Gymnase, Diane de Lys has really had a considerable run; but this has been owing to extraneous circumstances, and to the excellence of the acting, much more than to any intrinsic merits of the play, which derived a sort of scandalous interest from a generally-credited report that the author, Alexander Dumas the younger, had merely dramatised an adventure of his own—altering, however, the catastrophe; for the play closes with the death of the lover, shot by the offended husband. Rumour went so far as to point to a foreign lady of rank as the original of the Duchess Diana, and the playwright was blamed for his indiscretion. Whether there were grounds for such censure, or whether the tale was a mere ingenious invention, industriously circulated by the author’s friends to give a spurious popularity to a rather amusing but very worthless piece, it is hard to decide—the one case being quite as probable as the other. The Gymnase, however, boasts of its Diana as a signal triumph—which she may be to its treasury, although in other respects she does the theatre no great credit, beyond displaying an excellent cast and admirable acting. That agreeable theatre needs something to console it for the loss of its most valuable and accomplished comedian, Bressant, summoned by the higher powers from the scene of his numerous triumphs to the classic boards of the Française. There he had the good taste to make his first appearance in a play of Molière’s in preference to the less sterling class of comedy with which he is more familiar; and, both by his acting, and by the enthusiastic greeting he met from a crowded house, he at once proved himself a valuable accession to the talent and popularity of the first French theatre. That establishment just now has greater need of good new plays than of good new actors. It is unfortunate in its authors, and the drama droops under the imperial régime. Alexander Dumas—whose outrageous vanity and fanfaronades, daily displayed in the columns of the new journal, the Mousquetaire, which he owns and edits, have lately made him the laughingstock of Paris,—after writing two five-act historical plays in about as many days each, and having them both accepted by the committee, but prohibited before performance—probably because the authorities did not think the most important theatre in France a fit stage for such mountebank feats of rapid writing—has been fain to console himself (supposing his egregious self-conceit not to have set him above all need of consolation) by the cordial reception of a one-act comedy called Romulus, which has both humour and character. He has boasted of this little success almost as much as of the merits of his two great failures, the interdicted plays; has published the piece (the idea of which is derived from a passage in one of Auguste La Fontaine’s tales) in the feuilleton of his paper, where he also printed monstrous stories about his having written it in some wonderfully short space of time. But this clever silly man has made himself such a reputation as a Munchausen that none now believe him; and, moreover, it is very well known in Paris that the piece in question was planned, and in great part written, by an accomplished French actor, much esteemed in England, to whose cultivated taste and extensive reading some of the best dramatists of the day have on various occasions been indebted for advice and assistance, which they have not all been so slow as Mr Dumas to acknowledge.
The expectations of many persons, conversant with the relative merits of the principal living writers for the French stage, were lately raised high by the announcement of a five-act comedy from the united pens of two of the most successful of these, Messrs Emile Augier and Jules Sandeau. Both of these gentlemen have distinguished themselves as dramatists, although M. Sandeau is perhaps best known as the author of some very clever and agreeable novels. Indeed, since the regretted decease of Charles de Bernard, few have been more successful in that branch of literature. His style is that in which modern French writers have best succeeded—the roman de mœurs, or novel of society, whose attraction and interest depend rather upon accurate delineation and delicate satire of the habits, follies, and foibles of the time, than in startling situations and complicated intrigues. The late Charles de Bernard, to whose charming talent we some years ago devoted an article, and whose collected works have just received the well-deserved honour of posthumous republication, was an adept in the style, and was also one of the most inventive writers of his day. Most of his novels and tales display, in addition to a refined and extensive knowledge of French society and character, much ingenuity of plot and originality of incident. Of the same school, Jules Sandeau has more pathos and sentiment, less originality and wit. Like that of most novelists who are also dramatists, his dialogue is terse, spirited, and life-like, although less pointed and sparkling than that of the author of Gerfaut. Occasionally he reminds us of that clever whimsical writer, Alphonse Karr, but of Karr in his happiest moods, when he abjures triviality, and produces such novels as Genevieve and La Famille Alain. One of the favourite stock-pieces at the Comédie Française, Mademoiselle de la Seiglière, is by Sandeau, founded on his own novel of the same name. Another of his tales, La Chasse au Roman, he dramatised conjointly with Augier, and the piece brought out the other day, La Pierre de Touche—The Touchstone—is also founded on a novel by Sandeau, entitled Un Héritage. How is it, many have asked, that, with an excellent subject—that of a highly popular romance—to work upon, M. Sandeau and the witty and experienced author of Gabrielle, Philiberte, and other justly successful plays, have produced a comedy which has been more or less hissed every night of its performance, and which, instead of awakening the sympathies or exciting the admiration of the public, has produced an impression so manifestly unfavourable, that the authors deemed it necessary to publish a letter in explanation and vindication—a letter the publishers of the play have reproduced in the form of a preface? Before replying to this question, or sketching the plot of the play, we will give a slight outline of the novel on which it is founded. Our readers will hardly have forgotten another of M. Sandeau’s novels, Sacs et Parchemins, of which we some time ago gave an account.[[4]] Those who have read, with the amused interest it could hardly fail to excite, M. Sandeau’s account of the vaulting ambition of the retired draper Levrault, and of the desperate and ludicrous expedients of the ruined Viscount de Montflanquin, in his French Wolf’s Crag, will not be unwilling to follow the same writer upon German ground, to the ancient castle of Hildesheim, and into the humble abode of Franz Müller, the musician of Munich. We will briefly glance at the spirited and characteristic opening chapters of Un Héritage.
It was a great day for Master Gottlieb Kaufmann, notary in the little German town of Mühlstadt. Count Sigismund Hildesheim was just dead, and his will was to be opened in presence of his assembled relatives. Gottlieb, attired in suitable sables, the silver buckles of his shoes replaced by others of burnished steel, fidgetted to and fro between his study and his office, his office and his drawing-room, scolding his clerks, sending away clients, and watching the clock, whose lazy hands, he thought, crept more slowly than usual round the dial. Noon was the hour fixed for the reading of the will, and as yet it was but nine. It was an anxious morning for the worthy notary. The very pig-tail that dangled from his nape quivered with impatience. The cause of his excitement was his doubt whether the heir to the castle and fine estate of Hildesheim would continue to employ him. There were other notaries at Mühlstadt, and all were eager to secure so rich a client. Master Gottlieb had spared no pains to retain the lucrative employment. His drawing-room chairs, stripped of the cases that usually protected them from the pranks of the flies, were drawn round a table spread with an old scarlet velvet cover; near this table, another chair, elevated upon a temporary platform, seemed to preside over the absent assembly. From time to time, Master Gottlieb seated himself in it, studied his gestures and attitude, and contemplated his reflection in a glass, endeavouring to combine regret and obsequiousness in the expression of his habitually jovial physiognomy. His face was to do double duty—to deplore the departed and offer his services to the survivors. Further to propitiate the clients he desired to secure, Master Gottlieb—himself of a convivial turn, fond of a cool bottle and a merry catch—had prepared, in an adjoining room, an elegant collation. On a cloth of dazzling whiteness were temptingly displayed cold meats, fragrant fruits, and antique flasks, dim with venerable dust. The notary had spared nothing worthily to honour the memory and regale the heirs of the departed Count.
Count Sigismund Hildesheim had passed, almost from his youth upwards, for an oddity, an original, slightly crazed, and only just sane enough to be intrusted with the guidance of himself and his affairs. In reality he was none of those things, but a misfortune in early life, acting upon a singularly sensitive and impressionable nature, had decided his whole destiny. As a youth, at the university of Heidelberg, he shunned the society of the students, and, of an evening, instead of devoting himself to beer, tobacco, roaring songs and political theories, he loved to walk out and watch the sunset from the summit of the beautiful hills that enclose the valley of the Neckar. Returning home, on a May night, from one of these solitary rambles, his attention was arrested, as he passed through the outskirts of the town, by a fresh and melodious voice, proceeding from a window decked and entwined with flowers. The song was one of those wild and plaintive ditties, often of great antiquity, heard in remote mountain districts, seldom written, but orally transmitted from generation to generation. Surprised and charmed, Sigismund paused and listened; then he cast a curious glance into the room. A young girl was seated at a piano, and by the light of a lamp he distinguished her to be of great beauty. Thenceforward, every evening, on his return from his walks, the pensive student lingered at that window. He was seldom disappointed; most evenings the young girl was at her piano; and the song that at first had fascinated him was evidently her favourite. At last—how this came about it is immaterial to inquire—instead of pausing at the window, Sigismund went in at the door, and became a constant visitor to Michaële and her mother.
The dwelling of the widow and her child was humble, but elegant in its poverty. War, which had robbed them of a husband and father, had left them but a scanty pension for their support. Sigismund was as much attracted by the mother’s kind and graceful manners as he had been enchanted by the daughter’s bright eyes and sweet voice. He had lost his own mother when an infant; his father’s harsh and haughty character had repelled his affection. He found a home, congenial to his tastes and sympathies, in the secluded cottage in Heidelberg’s suburbs, and there he and Michaële formed plans of future happiness undisturbed by fear of obstacles to their union. But Michaële’s mother, who at first partook their hopes, could not repress forebodings of evil when she remembered that Sigismund was the heir of an ancient and wealthy family. Her fears proved too well founded. When Sigismund, on quitting the university, spoke to his father of his projects, he encountered an insurmountable opposition, and was compelled to postpone them. As often as he could escape from Hildesheim he hurried to Heidelberg, to pass a few days of mingled grief and joy. Michaële never complained; she had always smiles and loving words to welcome Sigismund, but in his absence and in secret she pined away. At last his father died. A week after his funeral the young count was at Heidelberg. It was too late. Michaële was given up by the physicians; three days afterwards she breathed her last. More than once, during those three days of cruel anguish, the dying girl made Sigismund play the melody that had been the origin of their acquaintance, and which they both passionately loved. Often, in happier times, they had sung it together, with joy and gratitude in their hearts. It was an air that Michaële had learned when a child, in the mountains of the Tyrol. It had fixed itself indelibly in her memory, and when she died, in Sigismund’s arms, the sweet melody was hovering on her lips.
There is something rather German than French in the strain of the early chapters of Un Héritage, but they are a mere prologue to the book, and are unheeded by the dramatist. After the death of his betrothed, Count Sigismund abandoned himself to the most passionate and despairing grief. He remained at Heidelberg with Michaële’s mother, who would not quit the spot where she had dwelt with her daughter. She did not long survive her bereavement. Sigismund followed her to the grave, and returned to Hildesheim, where he lived in complete retirement, avoiding intercourse with his neighbours. He would not be consoled, and lived alone with his sorrow. When this became calmer, he opened his piano and would have played the Tyrolese air he and his departed love had so often repeated. But in vain did he rack his memory and try every note of the instrument. The melody had fled, and would not return. It had departed with the soul of her from whom he had learned it. His long paroxysm of grief had utterly driven it from his recollection.
What does M. Sandeau now, but send his melancholy hero forth, a pilgrim over hill and dale, in quest of the lost melody so inextricably intertwined with the memory of her he had so tenderly and deeply loved. After innumerable efforts to seize the fugitive sounds, after bursts of impatience, anger, almost of frenzy, the enthusiastic Sigismund departed, wandering in search of an old song. The idea is fantastical; it may be deemed far-fetched; but it certainly is not unpoetical.
“He set out for the Tyrol; on the summit of the mountains, in the depths of the valleys, he listened to the songs of the shepherds: no voice repeated the air Michaële sung. After traversing Switzerland and Italy he returned to Germany, and his gentle, touching monomania then assumed a new form. He travelled on foot, like a poor student, listening to every fresh young voice that met his ear as he passed through the villages; in cities, on the public squares, when he saw a crowd gathered round a band of itinerant singers, he joined it, and stirred not from the place until the alfresco minstrels had exhausted their musical store. Whilst thus persisting in the pursuit of this Tyrolese air, which fled before him as did Ithaca from Ulysses, it will easily be understood that he paid little attention to the management of his estate. Before commencing his travels, which had lasted several years, he had installed in his castle two old cousins of his mother, Hedwige and Ulrica von Stolzenfels.”
Hereabouts M. Sandeau shelves sentiment and the pathetic, and strikes into a vein akin to satire, in which, as he showed us in Sacs et Parchemins, and some others of his books, he is by no means less happy. The two old Stolzenfels are a capital sketch. In the whole course of their lives, prolonged to a period it would be ungallant to guess at, they had had but one affection—for a scamp of a nephew, who had ruined them, but whom they still idolised, although hopeless of his conversion to better courses. For this handsome, reckless officer, whose innumerable follies were redeemed, in their partial eyes, by his good looks and prepossessing manners, they had emptied their purses, sold their diamonds, and left themselves with an income barely sufficient for their support. They would not have given a copper to a beggar; for Captain Frederick they would have stripped themselves of their last dollar, and have deemed themselves more than repaid by a visit from him in his fulldress of captain of hussars. When Sigismund offered them apartments in his castle, they gladly accepted them, at first merely as a comfortable home free of cost; but when they observed his absence of mind and his total neglect of his affairs, they formed other projects. By nature and habit haughty and sour to everybody but their beloved hussar, they forced themselves to be gentle and humble with Sigismund. Under pretence of watching over his interests, they gradually assumed the whole management of his house, and soon it might have been supposed that he was the guest and that they were his hostesses. When he set out upon his rambles, Frederick, who was in garrison in a neighbouring town, installed himself at the castle and disposed of everything as though it had been his patrimony, keeping horses, dogs, and huntsmen continually on their legs. The servants, accustomed to obey the two old ladies, and seeing that they obeyed their nephew, obeyed him likewise. Meanwhile Hedwige and Ulrica built castles in the air for their darling; or, it should rather be said, they grasped in imagination the one already built on the broad domain of Hildesheim. Sigismund, they were convinced, could not live long, leading the strange, wandering, unhappy life he did. Why should he not leave part of his property to Frederick? Why not all? How could it be better bestowed? The hussar, to do him justice, entered into none of their schemes. He drank Sigismund’s wine, thinned his preserves, knocked up his horses, and cared for little besides. When Sigismund came home for a few days, the captain made no change in his habits, and the count, for his part, in no way interfered with them.
To the infinite consternation of the old maids, there one day arrived at the castle a distant relative of Sigismund’s father, of whom they had heard nothing for many years, and whom they sincerely trusted had departed for a better world. Had a thunderbolt dropped into their aprons they could hardly have been more thunderstruck. Major Bildmann, who had always been rather a loose character, had just lost his last ducat at the gaming-table. In this extremity, Dorothy, his wife, could think of nothing better than to have recourse to Count Sigismund. She was careful not to speak to him of her husband’s irregularities, and concocted a little romance about faithless trustees and insolvent bankers, which Sigismund implicitly believed. He was touched by the tale of her misfortunes.
“My mother’s two cousins,” he said, after listening in silence, “occupy the right wing of the castle; come and install yourself with the major in the left wing. There will still be plenty of room for me.”
Dorothy took him at his word. A week afterwards she returned with Major Bildmann, and with little Isaac, an abominable brat whom she had forgotten to mention. This mattered not. Sigismund had again quitted the castle in pursuit of his chimera.
The consternation of a pair of magpies, disturbed in the plucking of a pigeon by the sudden swoop of a leash of sparrow-hawks, may give some idea of the feelings of Ulrica and Hedwige at this intrusion upon their territory. There was deadly hatred between the right wing and the left. When Sigismund returned home he did not observe this. The two maiden ladies certainly insinuated that the Bildmanns were no better than they should be; and the Bildmanns scrupled not to declare that the Stolzenfels were no great things; but Sigismund, whilst they spoke, was thinking of his Tyrolese air, and when they paused, he thanked them for having made his house the asylum of every domestic virtue.
Leaving the inmates of Hildesheim to their dissensions and illusions, and passing over a few chapters, we seek a contrast in an humble dwelling in Bavaria’s art-loving capital. It is the abode of Franz Müller, the musician, Edith his wife, and Spiegel their friend. Franz and Spiegel had been brought up together, and had passed the flower of their youth in poverty, working and hoping. Franz studied music, Spiegel was passionately fond of painting; art and friendship scared discouragement from their doors. For the space of three years they wandered on foot, knapsack on shoulder and staff in hand, through Germany and the Tyrol, stopping wherever the beauty of the country tempted them, and purveying, each in his own manner, for the wants of the community. Sometimes Spiegel painted a few portraits, at others Müller gave lessons in singing or on the piano; or when they arrived in a town on the eve of a great festival, he offered to play the church organ at the next day’s solemnity. Art and liberty was their motto. In the course of their wandering existence they visited the most beautiful valleys, the most picturesque mountains, opulent cities, splendid picture galleries, and amassed a treasure of reminiscences for future fireside conversation. They resolved never to marry, lest domestic cares should interfere with their enthusiastic pursuit of art. Spiegel kept his word, but Franz, in a little Tyrolese town, saw and loved Edith. In vain did the painter draw an alarming picture of the inconveniences of matrimony; Franz married, and thenceforward his friend deemed him lost to art. It was reserved for the gentle Edith to convince Spiegel of the contrary, and to tame his somewhat wild and vagabond nature. When first the newly-married pair settled at Munich, he seldom went to see them, but gradually his visits became more frequent, until one day, he hardly knew how, he found himself dwelling under their roof. In a small house Müller had taken, he had reserved a bedroom and studio for his friend. In that modest abode, situated outside Munich, between a front court whose walls disappeared under a drapery of vines and a little garden crowded with sweet flowers, happy years flew by. Happy, but not prosperous. At first Spiegel had painted pictures, with two or three of which he was tolerably satisfied, whilst Franz pronounced them masterpieces. But they found no purchasers, and the artist, once so ambitious, cheerfully resigned his hopes of fame, and gave drawing lessons. Müller had composed sonatas and a symphony; they were as unsuccessful as Spiegel’s pictures. Vanquished by the innumerable barriers that interpose between a poor and unknown musician and the public, he, too, submitted to give lessons. With strict economy they managed to live, but they laid by nothing; and Müller was often uneasy when he thought of the future, and of the two beautiful children Edith had born him.
“One evening, during Spiegel’s absence from Munich, Franz came home with a more care-laden brow than usual, and Edith sat down to the piano and sang a favourite air, which had more than once dispelled his momentary melancholy. The window was open, and her voice, fresh, pure, and sonorous, was audible outside the house. Franz listened, his gloom gradually softening into reverie, whilst Herman and Margaret rolled upon the carpet like kittens at play. That young woman, whose fair hair fell in abundant tresses upon her bare shoulders—those two fine children, joyously gambolling—the dreamer, whose hand sustained his thoughtful brow, composed a charming picture. Suddenly a stranger appeared, and paused upon the threshold of the apartment. He had entered so gently, that none had heard his steps or now observed his presence. Edith continued her song; the intruder listened motionless, and in apparent ecstasy, whilst silent tears coursed down his pale cheeks prematurely furrowed by pain or sorrow.”
At the stranger’s entreaty, Edith again and again repeated the song, which was from her native Tyrol. He listened with deep emotion. By ordinary persons he might have been deemed mad or intrusive, and received accordingly; but he had had the good fortune to fall amongst artists. He passed the evening with them, conversing as kindly and familiarly as though they had been old friends. He found means to draw out Franz, to make him speak of himself, his hopes and wishes, his discouragements and disappointments, his long-cherished desire for fame, his uneasiness about the prospects of his children. Then he asked him to play a piece of his own composition. Müller played one of his best sonatas, to which the stranger listened with the attention of a judge who will not lightly decide. The piece played out, he seemed thoughtful, but said nothing. Poor Müller, who had expected applause, consoled himself by thinking that the eccentric stranger did not understand music. Instead of praising the fine composition he had just heard, the unbidden guest, so kindly welcomed, turned to Edith and asked her for a copy of the Tyrolese air. She had never seen it noted, she said, and doubted that it ever had been, but Franz would note it for him. “Most willingly” was the reply of the good-tempered artist, who could not repress a smile at the ill success of his own performance. In a very few minutes he had covered a sheet of music-paper with spots and scratches. Edith graciously offered it to the stranger. He seized it with an expression of grateful joy, glanced hastily over it, pressed Edith’s hand to his lips, cast an affectionate glance at the children, and left the house, as he had entered it, swift and noiseless as a shadow. He had not mentioned his name; his kind hosts had not inquired it; they never saw him again.
On a certain evening, Count Sigismund returned to Hildesheim Castle, after one of his long absences, his countenance lighted up with a mysterious joy. He spoke to no one, put aside the servants who crowded round him, and shut himself up in his apartment. Soon his piano was heard resounding under his fingers; he at last had found the air he so long had sought. But he did not long enjoy his victory. He had worn himself out in pursuit of his mania. One morning, subsequent to a night during great part of which the piano had been continually heard, a servant entered his room. Sigismund was still seated at the instrument, one hand resting on the keys, the other hanging by his side, his eyes closed, his mouth half open and smiling. He seemed to sleep, but he was dead.
There were present at the reading of Count Sigismund von Hildesheim’s last will and testament the two ladies Stolzenfels; Major Bildmann, a brokendown gambler of braggadocio air and vinous aspect; his wife Dorothy, whose thin pale lips, and sharp, hooked nose, gave her no small resemblance to a bird of prey; and their son Isaac, a horrible urchin with the profile of a frog and a head of scrubby white hair, who, having been ordered by his mother to behave decorously and look sorrowful, had given his features a sulky twist, which considerably augmented their naturally evil expression. The opposed camps of Bildmann and Stolzenfels observed each other with dislike and distrust. After some waiting, the gallop of a horse was heard, and Captain Frederick entered, whip in hand, and his boots covered with dust. All who were interested being thus assembled, Master Gottlieb broke the seals of the will, which the count had deposited in his keeping a month before his death. Divested of customary formalities and of preliminary compliments to the family, the contents of the document were in substance as follows:—
“My mother’s two cousins, Hedwige and Ulrica von Stolzenfels, have at all times shown me the most disinterested affection. To leave me more leisure and liberty, they have kindly taken the management of my house, and have superintended, with unceasing zeal and activity, that of my estates. Frederick, by his youth and gaiety, has enlivened my dwelling. To him I am indebted for the only cheerful moments I for many years have known. Since their establishment under my roof, the Stolzenfels have proved themselves my affectionate and devoted friends; their conduct has excited my admiration and respect, and I desire they should know that I duly appreciate it.”
About this time Hedwige and Ulrica seemed to grow several inches taller, and cast a triumphant glance at the major and Dorothy. As to Frederick, who, since the reading began, had been sketching with the point of his horse-whip, upon the dusty surface of one of his boots, a likeness of Master Gottlieb, he gave the last touch to his work, and commenced upon the other foot the portrait of Isaac. The notary continued.
“The straightforward frankness and integrity of Major Bildmann have been, I here declare, a great consolation to me, after the deceptions of all kinds that I experienced in my youth. Mrs Bildmann has vied with my mother’s cousins in zeal and devotedness. The complete absence of all self-interested views has given a noble and affecting character to their rivalry. In return for so much attention and care, they neither asked nor expected other reward than my affection. The Bildmanns have an equal right with the Stolzenfels to my gratitude.”
This became puzzling. A division of the property was the most natural inference. Master Gottlieb, dubious where to seek the rising sun, smiled benignly on all around. Urged by the impatient hussar, he resumed the reading of the will.
“At Munich, at No 9, in the street of the Armourers, lives a young musician, Franz Müller by name. He has hitherto contrived, by hard work, by giving lessons, to support his wife and children, who tenderly love him. But Müller is no ordinary musician; and his genius, to develop itself, needs but leisure. It is to him, Franz Müller, residing at Munich, at No 9, in the street of the Armourers, that I bequeath my entire property.”
It is highly improbable that Master Gottlieb’s peaceable parlour had ever before been the scene of such an uproar as this paragraph of the will occasioned. The major, Dorothy, and the two old maids, were for attacking the document on the ground of the testator’s insanity; but Frederick, who could not restrain his laughter at this eccentric close to an eccentric life, firmly opposed this, and the bullying major quailed before his resolute tone and mien. Franz Müller not being present, Master Gottlieb no longer troubled himself to smile on anybody; but, in an authoritative tone, called attention to the closing passages of the will.
“Desiring,” the singular document proceeded, “to insure, after my death, the welfare of my farmers and servants, which I feel that I have neglected too much during my life, I make it a condition of my bequest that Franz Müller shall inhabit the castle for nine months of every year, and dismiss none of my people. As to my dear relatives, the Stolzenfels and the Bildmanns, nothing is to be changed in their manner of life, and they are to inhabit the castle as heretofore. Wishing to insure their independence, it is my will that Müller shall annually pay to Ulrica von Stolzenfels one thousand florins; to Hedwige von Stolzenfels one thousand florins; to Frederick von Stolzenfels one thousand florins; to Major Bildmann two thousand florins, with reversion, in case of his death, to Dorothy Bildmann. And that he should take from his first year’s revenue a sum of ten thousand florins, the interest on which is to be allowed to accumulate until the majority of Isaac, to whom interest and capital are then to be paid over.
“I give to Frederick von Stolzenfels the free use of my horses and dogs, with right of chase over my estates.
“I annex to the present will a Tyrolese air; I desire that it may be engraved on my tomb and serve as my epitaph.”
After listening to this strange document, which they declared worthy to have proceeded from a lunatic asylum, the ladies had no appetite for Master Gottlieb’s collation. The major would gladly have tried the contents of the cobwebbed bottles, but his wife dragged him away. Frederick sprang upon his horse and galloped off, taking with him upon his boots the portraits of Isaac and the notary. This functionary, finding himself deserted by his guests, called in his head clerk to help him to drink the health of the absent legatee.
Poor, well-meaning, simple-minded Count Sigismund would have turned in his grave had he known all the mischief and unhappiness, envy, hatred, and discord, of which his extraordinary will sowed the seed and gave the signal. The journey from Munich to Hildesheim was, for Franz and Edith, a series of enchanting dreams. There was but one drawback to their joy; Spiegel had refused to accompany them. “No more drudgery, no more lessons!” Müller had enthusiastically exclaimed, when a letter from Master Gottlieb, expressing a hope of the continuance of the Hildesheim patronage, and enclosing a copy of the will, tied with blue ribbons, confirmed the intimation of good fortune he had already gleaned from a newspaper paragraph. “The world belongs to us; we are kings of the earth! You shall paint pictures, I will compose symphonies and operas; we will fill Germany with our fame.” And he formed innumerable projects. Their life thenceforward was to be a fairy scene, a delightful and perpetual alternation of refined enjoyments and artistic toil. Edith partook her husband’s enthusiasm; Spiegel at first said nothing, and when he did speak he gave his friends to understand that he could not share their prosperity. He did not like new faces; he preferred the cottage at Munich to the abode of a castle, and was proof against all entreaties. Franz and Edith secretly resolved to buy the little house as a gift to their friend. In nine months they would return to see him, and perhaps, when they again set out for Hildesheim, he would consent to accompany them. Whilst preparing for departure, and burning useless papers, Franz laid his hand upon the only symphony he had found time to write. Carefully turning over its leaves, with a disdainful air, he was about to toss it into the fire, when Spiegel seized his arm and rescued the composition.
Müller had written to the Hildesheim steward to announce his arrival, and to forbid all pomp, ceremony, and public rejoicings on the occasion. He thought his instructions too literally carried out, when, upon reaching, some hours after nightfall, the huge gates of the castle, all decorated with stags’ horns, boars’ tusks, and wolves’ heads, he found no servant to receive him, not a light on the walls or in the windows, not a torch in the gloomy avenues of the park. After the postilion had cracked his whip and wound his horn for the better part of half an hour, a glimmering light appeared, a clanking of keys was heard, and the gates, slowly opening, disclosed the sour visage of Wurm the steward, muttering maledictions on the untimely visitors. Upon learning who they were, and at the rather sharp injunction of Müller, who was exasperated at the delay, he made what haste he could to awaken the servants, and ushered his new master and mistress into their apartments—immense rooms, nearly bare of furniture; for, even during Sigismund’s lifetime, the Stolzenfels and Bildmann, taking advantage of his frequent absence of mind, and from the castle, had stripped that part of the edifice he had reserved for his own use. Edith mentally contrasted the vast gloomy halls with her snug abode at Munich, and thought it would have been but kind had the ladies Stolzenfels and Mrs Bildmann been there to receive her. But a night’s rest, a brilliant morning, and the view of the immense lawns and rich foliage of the park, effaced the first unpleasant impression, and, having previously sent to know when they could be received, she and her husband presented themselves in the apartments of Hedwige and Ulrica. On their entrance, the two old ladies, who were seated in the embrasure of a window, half rose from their seats, resumed them almost immediately, and pointed to chairs with a gesture rather disdainful than polite. Poor Edith, who, in the innocence of her heart, had expected smiling countenance and a friendly welcome, felt herself frozen by their vinegar aspect. She turned red, then pale, and knew not what to say. Müller, without noticing the ladies’ looks, recited a little speech he had prepared for the occasion, expressive of his gratitude to Count Sigismund for having bequeathed him, in addition to his estates, his amiable family. He begged and insisted that they would change nothing in their mode of life, &c. &c. Why should they change anything? was Ulrica’s sharp and haughty reply; the count had left them by his will what he had given them in his lifetime; they had their rights and asked nothing beyond them. Hedwige pitched it in rather a lower key. Their tastes were very simple. They had sought neither applause nor luxury at Hildesheim. Count Sigismund had always put his carriage and horses at their disposal. Müller hoped they would continue to make use of them. They were lovers of solitude, Hedwige continued, of silence and meditation. With Count Sigismund’s consent they had planted a quickset hedge round a little corner of the park—not more than two or three acres. It would pain them, she confessed, to give up this little enclosure, whither they repaired to indulge their evening reveries. Franz eagerly assured them that none should disturb them in their retreat. Having obtained these assurances, and repelled, with chilling stiffness, Edith’s warm-hearted advances, the amiable spinsters relapsed into silence, which all their visitors’ efforts were insufficient to induce them to break, until the upset of a table of old china, occasioned by the gambols of Herman and a black cat, effectually roused them from their assumed apathy. The Müllers beat a retreat and went to call on Major Bildmann and his wife, whom they surprised in the midst of a domestic squabble—a circumstance of itself sufficient, had others been wanting, to secure them a surly reception. Franz’s mild and gentle bearing encouraged the major to assume his most impertinent tone, whilst his falcon-faced spouse ventured offensive inuendoes as to the real motives of Count Sigismund’s will—inuendoes whose purport was utterly unsuspected by the pure-hearted Müllers. Here, too, there was an enclosure in the case, where the major cultivated the flowers his dear Dorothy preferred, and where the infant Isaac loved to disport himself. As an old soldier, Major Bildmann added, he loved the chase, which was the image of war. The count had allowed him the range of his preserves. Müller eagerly confirmed him in all his privileges. On quitting the Bildmann wing he found Wurm waiting for him to pass the servants in review. He made them an affecting little speech, by which they seemed very little affected. Then Wurm named them. There were Mrs Bildmann’s waitingmaid and the major’s valet, the servants of the ladies Stolzenfels, the cooks of the right and left wings, Isaac’s nurse, Major Bildmann’s butler, Captain Frederick’s grooms and huntsmen, &c. &c. Müller inquired for his own servants—those that had been Count Sigismund’s. They were all before him. The two wings had swallowed up the body. Wurm felt secretly surprised at a musician’s needing servants when the count had done without them. Müller dryly informed him that Count Sigismund’s servants were his, and that he made him responsible for their attention to his service. He said nothing to Edith of this strange scene, and tried to dissipate the painful impressions she had brought away from their two visits, by praising the major’s military frankness and the aristocratic bearing of the sisters. But he was at a loss to explain why the apartments of the Stolzenfels and Bildmanns were richly and sumptuously furnished and decorated, whilst those the owners of the castle occupied exhibited little beside bare walls. Meanwhile the right and left wings, between whom there had been a sort of hollow alliance since the reading of the will, assembled in conclave. Never was there such a voiding of venom. The self-same idea had occurred to all these disappointed and charitable relations. Edith’s beauty at once explained the count’s frequent absence from home and his unjust will. She was the syren that had led him astray. Little Margaret was his very image. It was a crying shame, a burning scandal. The old maids clasped their hands and rolled their eyes. Ulrica was for attacking the will on the ground of immoral influence and captivation. The major had always been of the same opinion, but Frederick would not agree, and nothing should induce the major to fight a member of his family. The fact was, notwithstanding his Bobadil airs, Major Bildmann had very little fancy for fighting with anybody. The council broke up, all its members declaring they would quit the castle sullied by the presence of these adventurers—all fully resolved to remain and to wait the course of events.
We must compress into a few lines the leading incidents of the second half of Un Héritage. Müller had not been a month at the castle, when great annoyances succeeded to the petty disagreeables he had encountered on his first arrival. Master Wolfgang the Hildesheim lawyer was his evil genius. There was a certain lawsuit, that had already lasted through three generations, in which, as Count Sigismund’s heir, he found himself entangled. The whole matter in dispute was but half an acre of land, which Müller would gladly have abandoned, but Wolfgang proved to him, as clear as day, the impropriety of so doing, the disrespect to the memory of the late count, and so forth—and, the most cogent argument of all, he exhibited to him the sum total of the costs he would have to pay if he admitted himself vanquished. It was an alarming figure, and ready money was not abundant with Müller, whom the Stolzenfels and Bildmanns dunned for their first year’s annuity and for the legacy to little Isaac; who had to pay for extensive repairs of the castle, for the costly mausoleum which, in the first effusion of his gratitude, he had ordered for Count Sigismund, and various other charges. So the lawsuit went on—the delight of Master Wolfgang, and a daily drain upon Müller’s purse. The harvest was bad, the farmers asked for time, and grumbled when worse terms than their own were proposed to them. Careless Count Sigismund had spoiled all around him by letting them do as they liked, and Müller’s greater activity and vigilance, and his attempts to check fraud and peculation, speedily earned him the ill-will of the whole neighbourhood. Gentle-hearted Edith, anxious to expend a portion of her sudden wealth in improving the condition of the poor, was soon disgusted by their ingratitude, and was utterly at a loss to understand the chilling looks, ironical smiles, and mysterious whisperings of which she was the object whenever she went beyond the limits of her own park, to which she soon confined herself. Her servants showed no sense of the kindness with which she treated them; they, too, had adopted and spread the vile rumours first set abroad by the malice of the two vixen spinsters and of the Bildmanns, with respect to the count’s real motives for bequeathing his estates to the Müllers. Fortunately it was impossible for Edith, who was purity itself, ever to suspect the real cause of the ill-will shown to her. Captain Frederick, when his regimental duties permitted him to visit the castle, discovered at a first interview, with a rake’s usual clear-sightedness in such matters, the utter falseness of the injurious reports in circulation. He became a constant visitor to the Müllers, and was in fact their only friend and resource in the solitude in which they lived; for the neighbouring squires, the hobereaus of the country around, had not returned Müller’s visits, nor taken any notice of him beyond attacking him at law; some upon a question of water-power, which he had innocently diminished by winding a stream that ran through his grounds, others for damage done to their fields, by the trespasses of the Hildesheim hounds, followed by Captain Frederick and his huntsmen. Nor was this all—there was discord yet nearer home: Müller’s children, having trespassed upon the Bildmanns’ private garden, were brutally ejected by the major, whom Müller angrily reproached. The major bullied and insisted upon satisfaction, which Franz, exasperated by a long series of annoyances, was perfectly willing to give him, and a duel would have ensued had not the major, when he saw that the musician, as he contemptuously called him, meant to fight, sent an apology. It was accepted, but next day Müller ordered his three gardeners to root up and clear away the hedges of the Stolzenfels and Bildmann enclosures. The knaves remonstrated and finally refused, and, when dismissed, they refused to go, alleging that the late count’s will deprived Müller of the power of sending them away. More work for the lawyers. Müller sent for labourers, and the hedges disappeared. Notices of action from the ladies Stolzenfels and Major Bildmann. The villain Wolfgang chuckled and rubbed his hands, upon which he had now six lawsuits for Müller’s account. In the count’s crack-brained will, drawn up by himself, without legal advice, the letter was everywhere at variance with the spirit. Müller’s apartment was encumbered with law papers; he could not sit down to his piano, to seek oblivion of his cares in his beloved art, without being interrupted by Wolfgang’s parchment physiognomy. As for composition, it was out of the question: he had no time for it, nor was his harassed mind attuned to harmony. He became morose and fanciful, jealous of the hussar’s attention to Edith, who, for her part, grieved to see her husband so changed, and sighed for the cottage at Munich, where Spiegel, meanwhile, had worked hard, had sold some pictures, had paid the rent that Franz, in the midst of his troubles, had forgotten to remit to him, and had purchased, with the fruits of his own toil and talent, the little dwelling of which, when their prosperity first burst upon them, the Müllers had planned to make him a present. The contrast was striking between anticipation and realisation.
No schoolboy ever more eagerly longed for “breaking-up” day, than did Müller for the termination of his nine month’s compulsory abode at Hildesheim. It came at last, and he and Edith and their children were free to quit the scene of strife and weariness, and to return to Munich and to Spiegel. On making up the accounts of the year, Müller found that, out of the whole princely revenue of the estates, he had but a thousand florins left. He had lived little better than at Munich (much less happily), and had committed no extravagance; annuities, legacies, repairs, monument, did not account for half the sum expended; all the rest had gone in law expenses. There remained about enough to pay travelling charges to Munich. Müller sent for Wolfgang, forbade him to begin any new lawsuit in his absence, and departed. He found a warm welcome at the cottage. Spiegel received his friends with open arms, and three happy months passed rapidly away. Upon the last day, when Edith and Franz were looking ruefully forward to their return to Hildesheim’s grandeur and countless disagreeables, Spiegel insisted upon their accompanying him to the performance of a new symphony, concerning which the musical world of Munich was in a state of considerable excitement. The piece, it was mysteriously related, was from the pen of a deceased composer, was of remarkable originality and beauty, and had been casually discovered amongst a mass of old papers. The concert-room was crowded. At the first bars of the music, Müller thought he recognised familiar sounds, and presently every doubt was dissipated. It was his own composition—the despised symphony he had been about to destroy, but which Spiegel had rescued. The audience, at the close of each part, were rapturous in their applause. When the finale had been played, the composer’s name was called for with acclamations. The leader of the orchestra advanced, and proclaimed that of Franz Müller.
A few days later, Master Gottlieb the notary received a letter from the lord of Hildesheim. “According to the stipulations of the will,” Müller wrote, “I am bound to inhabit the castle of Hildesheim for nine months in the year. I remain at Munich and forfeit my right to the property.” Forthwith began a monster lawsuit, one of the finest Master Wolfgang had known in the whole course of his experience. It was between the Bildmanns and the Stolzenfels. It lasted ten years. The major and Dorothy died before it was decided, Isaac fell from a tree, when stealing fruit, and broke his neck. The Stolzenfels triumphed. The hussar redoubled his extravagance. The estate, already encumbered with law expenses, was sold to pay his debts. Ulrica and Hedwige died in poverty.
It ought surely not to have been difficult for practised dramatists to construct a pleasant and piquant comedy out of the leading idea and plentiful incidents of this amusing novel, which is by no means the less to be esteemed because it boldly deviates from the long-established routine, which demands a marriage as the wind-up of every book of the class. It is much more common in France than in England for play-writers to seek their subjects in novels of the day, and it is then customary, often indispensable, to take great liberties both with plot and characters, and sometimes to retain little besides the main idea of the book. Upon that idea there is of course no prohibition against improving, but authors who vary it for the worse, manifestly do themselves a double injury, because the public, familiar with the merits of the book, are disgusted to find it deteriorated in the play. They look for something better, not worse, in the second elaboration of the subject, and certainly they have a right to do so, and to be dissatisfied when the contrary is the case. In the present instance, a most unpleasant play has been based upon a good novel. In Emile Augier, M. Sandeau has taken to himself a dangerous collaborateur. He should have dramatised Un Héritage unassisted—as he dramatised, with such happy results, his novel of Mademoiselle de la Seiglière. That is a most successful instance of the French style of adaptation to the stage. There, too, as in the present case, great liberties have been taken. In two out of the four acts, scarcely anything is to be traced of the novel, which has as tragical an ending as the comedy has a cheerful and pleasant one. But the whole tenor of the play was genial and sympathetic. In the Pierre de Touche, as the present comedy is called, the reverse is the case, and no wonder that its cynical and exaggerated strain jarred on the feelings of the usually quiet audience at the Française, and elicited hisses rarely heard within those decorous walls, where silence and empty benches are the only tokens the public usually give of its disapprobation. From our acquaintance with M. Sandeau’s writings, we do not think that he would of himself have perpetrated such a repulsive picture of human nature as he has produced in combination with M. Augier. They have obliterated or distorted most of the best features of the novel. In Un Héritage, the character of Franz Müller is at once pleasing and natural. He is not represented as perfect—he has his failings and weaknesses like any other mortal, and they are exhibited in the book, although we have not, in the outline we have traced of it, had occasion to give them prominence. But his heart is sound to the last. Wealth may momentarily bewilder, but it does not pervert him. He is true to his affections, and has the sense and courage to accept honourable toil as preferable to a fortune embittered by anxiety and dissension. The reader cannot help respecting him, and feeling pained at his countless vexations and annoyances. No such sympathy is possible with the Franz of the play, who is the most contemptible of mortals. A more unpleasant character was probably never introduced into any book, and it is untrue to nature, for it has not a single redeeming point. The authors have personified and concentrated in it the essences of heartlessness, selfishness, and of the most paltry kind of pride. Somewhat indolent, and with a latent spark of envy in his nature, the needy artist, converted into a millionaire, suddenly displays his evil instincts. Their growth is as supernaturally rapid as that of noxious weeds in a tropical swamp. The play opens in the cottage at Munich. Edith, Franz’s cousin, is not yet married to him. An orphan, she had been brought up by his father, at whose death Franz took charge of her. She was then a child, and Franz and Spiegel hardly perceived that she had become a woman until they were reminded of it by the passion with which she inspired both of them. Spiegel, a noble character, generously sacrifices to his friend’s happiness his own unsuspected love. Edith (the names are changed in the play, but we retain them to avoid confusion) is affianced to her cousin, and on the eve of marriage. Just then comes the fortune. The authors have substituted for the Bildmanns and Stolzenfels an elderly spendthrift baron and an intriguing margravine and her pretty daughter. The love passages in the life of the deceased count are cancelled, and he is represented as an eccentric old gentleman, passionately fond of music, and cherishing a great contempt for his very distant relations, to whom he leaves only a moderate annuity. They have scarcely become acquainted with Franz when they discern the weak points in his character and conspire to profit by them. Treated with cutting contempt, as a mere parvenu, by the haughty nobility of Bavaria, Franz’s pride boils over, and he consents to be adopted by the baron and converted into the Chevalier de Berghausen, at the immoderate price of the payment of the old roué nobleman’s debts. He finds Spiegel a wearisome Mentor; to his diseased vision Edith appears awkward contrasted with the courtly dames he now encounters. Their marriage is postponed from week to week, by reason of the journeys and other steps necessary to establish Franz in the ranks of the nobility of the land. Titled, and with armorial bearings that date from the crusades, how much more fitting an alliance, the baron perfidiously suggests, would be that of the margravine, who graciously condescends to intimate her possible acceptance of him as a son-in-law. We are shown the gangrene of selfishness and vanity daily spreading its corruption through his soul. He quarrels with his honest, generous friend, slights his affianced bride, and finally falls completely into the clutches of the intriguers who beset him. His very dog, poor faithful Spark, (his dog and Spiegel’s)—which, as the painter, with tears in his eyes and a cheek pale with anger and honest indignation, passionately reminds him—had slept on his feet and been his comfort and companion in adversity—is killed by his order because he did not appreciate the difference between castle and cottage, but took his ease upon the dainty satin sofas at Hildesheim as upon the rush mat at Munich. Edith, compelled to despise the man she had loved, preserves her womanly dignity, and breaks off the projected marriage just as the last glimmer of honour and affection are on the point of being extinguished in her cousin’s bosom by the dictates of a despicable vanity. The curtain falls, leaving him in the hands of his hollow friends, and allowing the spectator to foresee the union of Edith and Spiegel. Not one kindly touch of natural feeling redeems Franz’s faithlessness to his friend, and to his love his ingratitude—for he would many a day have been hungry, if not houseless, but for the generous toil of Spiegel, who had devoted himself to the drudgery of teaching, that Franz might have leisure to mature the genius for which his partial friend gave him exaggerated credit—his false pride and his ridiculous vanity. He is left rich, but miserable. That which he has wilfully lost can be dispelled neither by the enjoyments wealth procures, nor by the false friends who hang on him but to plunder him. In their vindication, the authors insist on “the terrible morality” of their denouement. We admit it, but do not the less persist in the opinion that their play, although by no means devoid of wit and talent, leaves a most painful and disagreeable impression upon the mind. It presents the paradoxical and complicated phenomenon of a comedy which has been censured by press and public and yet continues to be performed; which draws tolerably numerous audiences, and is invariably received with symptoms of disapprobation.
NEWS FROM THE FARM.[[5]]
“The Ayrshire Ploughman,” glorious Burns, tells us that the muse of his country found him, as Elijah did Elisha, at the plough, and threw her inspiring mantle over him. Grateful Caledonia sent her inspired child to an excise office! and in the discriminating patronage the wits of Grub Street found material for interminable sneers. Did the Southerns, however, reward the author of the “Farmer’s Boy,” and indicate their appreciation of the many fine passages that grace his “News from the Farm,” by a wiser or more generous patronage? The minister of the day (Lord Sidmouth, if we remember rightly) did bestow upon the poet some most paltry and ungenial office; but alas! poor Bloomfield died neglected in the straits of penury, and under the clouds of dejection. It had been better indeed, in every way, could it have been so arranged that the marvellous Robin should have been allowed to sing his lyrics
——“in glory and in joy,
Following his plough upon the mountain side,”
and that Bloomfield had been permitted to indite more “News from the Farm” amid the pleasant rural scenes that nursed his pastoral muse. But the patronage of genius has never been successful. Unusual peril seems the heritage of high gifts, and to minister rightly to such a man as Burns or Bloomfield is no easy task. It is not so with ordinary men, whose intellectual and imaginative powers harmonise with the common duties of their station, and raise no splendid incongruities to be subdued and regulated. But it is not with inspired ploughmen that our country gentlemen and tenant-farmers are called upon to deal, but with men of common clay—with the brawny peasants who till their fields and tend their herds, and whose toil has turned the sterile North into a garden of Ceres. Have our agricultural labourers been neglected—have their physical wellbeing and their moral and educational training been overlooked and left uncared for, while the classes above them and around them have had their comforts and privileges, moral and social, infinitely multiplied? This were indeed sad “news from the farm;” but although this were unhappily proved to be true, we are not then prepared to pronounce sweeping censure upon the parties apparently most nearly implicated in the degradation of our rural population. Many, very many, of the owners and occupants of the soil, we know, are deeply alive to the duties which they owe to the labouring poor who live under them, and discharge them to the best of their ability, although not, it may be, to the extent their benevolent wishes would desire. The question that may be raised on such a subject is not, Have our rural labourers been left stationary while the classes above them have all been elevated in their social condition? but rather, Are they worse off, and do they enjoy fewer advantages, than those in the same class of life—the industrious poor who inhabit our large cities and manufacturing towns and villages? Is the ploughman in his bothy unfurnished with table or chair, and the peasant in his “clay-built biggin,” damp and smoky though it be, more miserably accommodated with the comforts and conveniences of life than the haggard sons of toil, who are doomed to burrow in the murky lanes and blind alleys of our teeming seats of merchandise? Does the brawny arm and ruddy complexion of the ploughman bespeak deficient food or raiment, and manifest such dubious symptoms of health as the pinched countenance and pallid complexion of the attenuated artisans who live in “populous city pent?” Yes, responds promptly the inhabitant of the city; but that robust health is not due to the miserable bothy and the mud cabin, but to the pure air of the country, and the breezy gales of incense-breathing morn, and the healthful toil of the open field, which are the unchartered boons of a gracious Heaven, and in no respect the gifts of the lords of the soil. In the rejoinder of Mr Urbanus there is no doubt substantial truth; but that very rejoinder, perhaps, contains an explanation of the neglect pointed at. The robust health of the peasant has not admonished the country gentleman of duty neglected, and no emaciated frame and loopholed raggedness have appealed to his sympathies and rebuked his indifference. The opulent inhabitants of our cities have been addressed in a different strain, and the deadly typhus and the inscrutable plague of Asia have been the stern preachers to which they have been doomed to listen. If they have led the van in reformatory and sanitary measures for improving the social condition of the industrious poor, it is not very evident that their philanthropy has been quite spontaneous, or that it has been altogether uninfluenced by considerations suggested by a regard to their own personal safety and selfish interest. Those who may be disposed to range the country against the town, or curious to strike the balance of merit in the field of philanthropic enterprise betwixt our merchant princes and our country gentlemen, may prosecute such inquiries as have been indicated if they please; but for ourselves, we have no taste for such unprofitable investigation, and would rather lend a helping hand to a most interesting movement that has been lately originated towards improving the social condition of our agricultural labourers—a most loyal and peaceful race, forming, upon the whole, the best-conditioned part of the industrious classes of the kingdom.
Thanks to the Rev. Harry Stuart, of Oathlaw, if not for having originated the movement, for having at least given it a most unquestionable impetus, and for indicating the direction which it ought to take. We have read his Agricultural Labourers, &c., with remarkable interest and pleasure—a pleasure very different, and we believe much higher, than the most elaborate writing of the most brilliant pamphleteer could have given us. Mr Stuart, indeed, has nothing of the littérateur about him, and his style is the very reverse of artistic. He tells us that his appeal has been “got up in great haste,” but we scarcely think it could have been better had more time been devoted to its composition. It had been no improvement, in our estimation, had his Essay been tricked out in rhetorical embroidery, and been embellished with well-poised and finely-polished periods. We are quite sick of the flash and sparkle of the journalists, of their stilted eloquence and startling antithesis. The editor of every country newspaper writes nowadays as grandly as Macaulay, and apes to the very life “the long-resounding march and energy divine” of Burke and Bolingbroke. It is really a relief in these times to be spoken to in plain, natural, homespun English. When an honest gentleman has anything of importance to communicate, for ourselves we are very well pleased that he should use the vernacular, and address us in simple Anglo-Saxon. This is exactly what Mr Stuart has done. He writes from a full heart, and is manifestly so possessed with his theme that he has had no time to think of the belles-lettres and the art rhetorical. The minister of Oathlaw is peradventure no popular orator, and has never probably paraded himself on the platform, and his name is in all likelihood unknown to the sermon-fanciers of Edinburgh, but nevertheless he is quite a pastor to our taste. Living without pride amongst his people, going from house to house, knowing well the trials of every household, a patient listener to the homely annals of the poor, catechising the young, exhorting the unruly, helping the aged to trim their lamps and gird up their loins, we can understand how well and how quietly this worthy clergyman discharges the duties of the pastorate, reaping a nobler guerdon in the love of those amongst whom he lives and labours than ever the noisy trump of fame blew into ambition’s greedy ear. We rejoice to think that there are many such pastors in our country parishes, who, with their families, constitute sympathetic links of kindly communication betwixt the rich and the poor, and from whom, as from centres of civilisation, are shed on all around the gentle lights of literary refinement and Christian charity. These are the men who form the strength of our Established Church, and not her doctors and dignitaries; and, indeed, over our retired rural parishes it is evident that nothing but an endowed resident parochial clergy can permanently exert the beneficent influence of the pastoral office.
The origin of Mr Stuart’s address he states as follows: He became a member of the Forfarshire Agricultural Association upon the understanding, that the improvement of the social condition of the agricultural labourers was to be one of the objects to which the Association should direct its attention. Such seems to have been the intention of the society, or at least its committee were so ready to welcome the idea, that they forthwith asked Mr Stuart to address them upon the subject, and he did so accordingly. His auditors were so pleased, and, it may be, so instructed, that they requested the author to publish his address; and under the auspices of the Forfarshire Association it has been given to the world.
We have often thought that each of our counties has a distinct character of its own, and is distinguished by features peculiar to itself. While the Forfarshire coast has its populous towns, the seats of mercantile enterprise, and of thriving manufactures, the county has likewise been long eminent for its agriculture. By the symmetry and beauty of his Angusshire “doddies,” Hugh Watson of Keillor has made the county famous for its cattle. In Forfarshire, Henry Stephens practised the art which he has so admirably illustrated in his book. The son of a small farmer in this county, while a student at college, invented and elaborated, without aid or patronage, in a rude workshop, that reaper which American ambition has now so covered with fame. Forfarshire gentlemen, although non-resident, are not disposed to forget the claims of their native county, and by means of “the Angusshire Society” they annually distribute among its schools numerous prizes, thus countenancing the cause of education throughout the county, stimulating its ingenious youth to exertion, and animating its teachers in their honourable toil. And now the Forfarshire Agricultural Society, under the mild appeals of the Pastor of Oathlaw, have led the way in organising an association for raising the social condition of the agricultural labourers of the kingdom. So all hail to old Angus!—and may her proprietors, pastors, and tenant-farmers long be eminent in their spheres of duty, and cordially unite in the field of benevolent enterprise.
Mr Stuart’s pamphlet has been extensively read by landed proprietors and the better classes of our farmers. We wish it were universally so by these parties; and we wish, too, it were read and inwardly digested by the factors and agents to whom our large proprietors have committed the conduct of their business, and the care of their properties, and the welfare of those who cultivate them. It is impossible to read the speeches of the most interesting meeting held here on the 10th January last, and presided over by his Grace the Duke of Buccleuch, without feeling that Mr Stuart’s pamphlet has literally proved “news from the farm” to very many of the owners and occupiers of the soil—the very parties who ought to know best the habits and discomforts of our agricultural labourers. It is very remarkable, indeed, that the Duke of Buccleuch seems accurately informed upon the subject; that he has personally inspected the dwellings of the agricultural labourers on his estate; and that he has personally issued instructions regarding the improvement of their cottages. Considering the territorial extent of his Grace’s estates, and the varied and momentous interests that claim and receive his Grace’s attention, his conduct and example, as well as his benevolent and patriotic words, will carry a severer reproof to those landowners who shall hereafter continue indifferent to the comfort and welfare of the labourers, than the most biting speech of the most pungent pamphleteer. Why, it may be asked, has Mr Stuart been left to make such a discovery? Why did the tenant-farmers, who are daily witnessing with their own eyes the discomforts of the agricultural labourers, who are most deeply interested in their physical and moral condition, and to whom Providence has more immediately committed the care of their interests—why did they not complain, and call for some amelioration of an evil so discreditable? But the fact is, that such men as Messrs Watson, Finnie, Cowie, and many others we might name, have never ceased to avail themselves of every opportunity of directing attention to the condition of our agricultural labourers, but they have heretofore, for the most part, addressed themselves to unprepared and reluctant audiences. Moreover, for many years our tenant-farmers have been struggling with such difficulties of their own, as have left them little time or inclination for devising expedients for improving the condition of their labourers. And it is likewise to be remembered that many of the farmers are themselves so little elevated above the peasantry in point of education and habits and domestic tastes, that it would be idle to expect that they should see any necessity for elevating the condition of the agricultural labourers.
This class of tenants must consider the present movement as fantastic, and absurd, and uncalled for, and they will prove, we fear, the greatest obstructives in the way of its success. So that if the truth is to be spoken, many proprietors would require first to improve the habits and elevate the character of their tenantry, before they attempt to elevate the social condition of their agricultural labourers. The nearer the tenant approaches the labourer in point of education and social habits, the more careless and indifferent is the former to the comforts of the latter, and the less inclined to ameliorate his condition. We think it by no means an impossible thing that there are not a few farmers throughout Scotland who are looking upon the present movement in behalf of our rural labourers not only as savouring of idle sentimentalism, but who are contemplating it with a jealous eye, as an attempt of the proprietors to place the condition of the servant upon the same platform with that of the master. There is, indeed, a class of small farmers, highly estimable and worthy, and quite fit, in respect of capital, for their position, who cultivate their possessions by means of their own families, aided by perhaps one or two servant-lads. In these cases the servants live truly as members of the family, and are treated as such; and this is the farm-service which, above all others, virtuous and thoughtful parents desire for their children.
The tenant-farmers are, probably, likewise prepared to rebut any charge of indifference brought against them, by stating that they have found so great difficulty in getting proper house-accommodation for their own families, and suitable and enlarged farm-buildings to enable them satisfactorily to carry on the business of the farm, and to meet the requirements of an improved husbandry, that the idea of asking a better style of cottages for their labourers would have been Utopian. The farmer, too, has but a temporary interest in the land, and but a temporary connection with the agricultural labourers upon his farm; and with more immediate wants and difficulties of his own to contend with, to suppose that he should expostulate with a reluctant proprietor, and set himself devotedly to improve and remodel the houses of his labourers, is to expect from him an extent of philanthropic enthusiasm quite uncommon, and, therefore, quite unreasonable. The landowner occupies a very different position—but, however inexplicable it may seem, he has not hitherto had his attention directed to the cottages of the labouring poor upon his estate. This confession of previous ignorance was ingenuously made by the speakers at the Edinburgh meeting, and we believe that they did not misrepresent the information upon the subject that had hitherto generally prevailed among the landed proprietors of Scotland. Lord Kinnaird, at a meeting of the “Dundee Model Lodging-House Association,” on 13th January, expressed himself as follows: “Until he had read that pamphlet (Mr Stuart’s), he had had no right idea of the bothies on his estate. Thinking such a matter was an arrangement purely between the farmer and his labourers, he had not visited them till lately; but having now done so, he felt they were a reproach to him, and must be improved.” And yet Lord Kinnaird resides for the most part upon his estate—he takes an anxious and most kindly interest in the moral, educational, and physical wellbeing of the people who live upon it,—and having such an acknowledgment from a nobleman so benevolent and active, the irresistible inference is, that other proprietors in his position are not only ignorant of the bothies, but of the condition of the cottages upon their properties.
It appears from Mr Stuart, that the parochial clergy, the body to which he belongs, have for many years had their attention anxiously directed towards the case of the agricultural labourers. He tells us that the synods of Perth, Stirling, Aberdeen, and Angus and Mearns have instituted inquiries regarding their condition—these inquiries being chiefly intended, as might have been expected, to ascertain the moral, religious, and educational state of our labourers, although the effects of the bothy system and of feeing-markets upon the social condition of servants are likewise investigated. Through the courtesy of a clerical correspondent, we have before us reports from twenty-seven parishes in Morayshire, in answer to a series of questions circulated by the synod of Moray in 1848, as well as a copy of the Elgin Courant, April 1848, containing a very full discussion by that ecclesiastical court on the moral and social condition of the agricultural labourers of that province. The synod of Angus and Mearns instituted an investigation of the same kind some fifteen years ago, and a most elaborate report, based upon the information collected, was drawn up. Measures were suggested for elevating the condition of the farm-servants; and in some counties pastoral addresses were read from the pulpits of the Established Church upon the subject. It appears, however, that this agitation of the question by the Church met with no countenance or encouragement from the laity. We know, indeed, that Sir John Stuart Forbes, and two or three other proprietors, took then an interest in the inquiry, and were alive to its importance—but, generally speaking, the proprietors and farmers seem to have been quite unprepared to take up the subject.
It is very curious, nevertheless, to observe that the very evils pointed out by Mr Stuart in his pamphlet, and the very remedies suggested by him, are all embraced and expounded in the reports of the ecclesiastical courts now before us.[[6]] It is a remarkable instance, apparently, of the well-known mental phenomenon, that the mind previously must have undergone some preparation for the reception of the truth, before the truth can suitably affect it. Mr Stuart has had the sagacity, or good fortune, to fix upon the opportune moment for making his appeal, and to find a benevolently disposed auditory. He has done what his brethren, in synods assembled, could not do. He has effectually hit the nail upon the head—and we hope he will reiterate the blow again and again, until he sees the objects of his benevolent wishes in some good measure obtained.
It appears to us that on such a subject as the present every thing approaching to exaggeration should be most anxiously avoided. There is a danger, now that the attention and interest of the public have been so awakened, that overdrawn pictures of the degraded condition of our Scottish peasantry will be indulged in; and this is all the more likely, as proving acceptable to the democratic classes, and as reflecting disgrace on the character of landed proprietors. In point of fact, we believe that it is unquestionable that our rural population, both in respect of their sanitary and moral condition, occupy a position very superior to that of the manufacturing classes of our towns. By the census of 1841, for every two deaths in agricultural districts there were more than three in our towns; and in towns exclusively manufacturing, such as Leeds and Birmingham, there were seven deaths for every two in agricultural localities. Glasgow is the only Scottish town where the statistics of mortality are noted, and there ten would die out of a population of three hundred, while out of the same number in agricultural counties there would be only three deaths. In the matter of moral statistics by the same census the commitments in manufacturing districts, compared with agricultural, were as five to one. We believe the statistics of drunkenness would report likewise in favour of the superior sobriety of our rural population, so that our agricultural labourers, it seems, are truly more healthy, more sober, more virtuous, at least in the eye of the criminal law, than those of the labouring classes in our towns. We believe that the agricultural labourers are better fed and better clothed, and, in many aspects of the case, as well housed as the labouring classes in our large towns and cities. In this fashion, if he pleases, the landowner may evade all appeals to his benevolence, and may scornfully reject all reproachful insinuations of having neglected the condition of the labouring poor upon his estates. He may well inquire how far he has contributed to raise the poor on his estate to a higher social condition in respect of health and sobriety, when contrasted with the poor of our towns; and if this has not been so much the necessary result of their circumstances and manner of life, that a very slender portion of the merit can be appropriated by him. The opulent inhabitants of our cities are not bound by any especial tie of social duty to the degraded and dissipated poor of the cities. They are not their tenants, nor are they engaged in their employment. Though living in close proximity with them, the rich are, for the most part, profoundly ignorant of the condition of their poorer fellow-citizens, who breathe the mephitic exhalations of unventilated lanes, and whose homes are but dismal cellars, into which the meridian sun, struggling through dense masses of hovering vapour, fails to transmit anything stronger than a murky twilight.
If the country gentleman can persuade himself that he holds no nearer relationship to the tenantry and labourers upon his estate, than the wealthy citizen does to the industrious poor who live within the same municipal bounds, but who otherwise are totally unconnected with them, it would be unreasonable to expect from such a one those expressions of regret which have fallen so gracefully from the lips of others, or that he will find any difficulty in escaping all appeals addressed to him, not only as he is not conscious of having overlooked any duty, but because he is prepared to deny that he has any duty to discharge in the matter. Or if the country gentleman can take up the very elevated position which a certain school of economists have of late been expounding and pressing upon his attention, then he will have reached a region so pure, and so superterrestrial as to be infinitely raised above all vulgar care about the comfort and welfare of those who till the glebe and tend the herds of that “dim spot which men call earth.” According to this high philosophy, the landowner is taught to look upon his land as a mere article of commerce, and that the great question with him ought to be to discover how, with the least possible outlay, he can raise from it the greatest possible revenue. To examine into the condition of the cottages upon the estate—to build new ones, and to improve the old—to do this personally, or, as that may be impossible, to order it to be done by some competent and responsible party—all this seems out of his department as the owner of the land and the recipient of the rent. If the farmer is content that his labourers should live in miserable hovels, where their physical energies must be debilitated, and where the decencies of their moral condition must suffer wrong, where their fitness for their daily toil is being impaired by the discomforts of their homes, and where, from the same cause, the period in the ploughman’s life of complete capability for his work must infallibly be abridged, what signifies all this to the landowner? His political economy saves him from all compunction. If the thews and sinews of the ploughman, by such treatment, become prematurely useless, it matters not—the wheels and pinions can be replaced, and other thews and sinews will be found to work the work. It is a devout hallucination upon the part of Mr Stuart to fancy that he can persuade such a landowner as this, that, on mere pecuniary grounds, it would prove a wise economy in him to build new cottages and to remodel the old, and to improve and add to the bothy accommodation. Mr Stuart’s argument on such a subject would necessarily be largely leavened with moral considerations, which the economics of the landlord did not embrace, and the mere money-profit looms dubiously in the distance. Mr Stuart would have no chance with such a stern philosopher as this, who could demonstrate by an irrefragable arithmetic that he could do the thing cheaper! We are sorry to think that any such party should be in the position of a landed proprietor. ’Tis a pity such a man had not had his money invested in the Three per Cents, or in a street of three-storeyed tenements suitable to accommodate the middle classes of society, who would take care of themselves, and, peradventure, of the laird likewise. We know no situation in human life so enviable as that of a country gentleman. His privileges are manifold, and his appropriate recreations and pleasures exquisite. His peculiar duties are indeed very responsible, but they are deeply interesting and delightful. Surely a country gentleman is knit by dearer and more sacred ties to the people that live upon his estate, and that cultivate his fields, than the rich man of the city to the poor artisan, to whom he is united by the accident of his living in the neighbouring street. Nay, we hope that no country gentleman would care to be thought actuated by no warmer or kindlier feelings towards the pendiclers and poor cottagers that dwell on his estate, than the potent noblesse of the cotton-mills can reasonably be expected to be towards the shadowy troops of sallow girls that, like so many animal automata, ply their nimble fingers o’er the power-looms and spinning-jennies of their tall-chimneyed temples. If the accursed commercial element is henceforth to be the sole ruling motive in the management of landed property, the country gentleman will speedily sink to the level of a commercial gentleman. The charms of his position will die away—the honours now so spontaneously rendered to him will be withheld—and the ancestral influence of his house and name will become the poet’s dream. We have contrasted the condition of the labouring poor in the country with that of the labouring poor in the town, but there can be no just comparison betwixt the position of a landed proprietor, and the duties which it entails towards the agricultural labourers on his property, and the position of a mill-spinner towards the people whom he employs; and we should be sorry if any landowner should seek in this way to vindicate his subsequent neglect of the duties which Providence has manifestly laid upon him. If our landed proprietors are not imbued with some just sense of the responsibilities of their station, and actuated by some steadfast determination to practise self-denial in other matters, that they may improve the condition of the industrious poor upon their properties, we despair utterly of any permanent practical good resulting from the present movement. If our farmers are, as a body, not prepared at present heartily to enter upon the work of reformation, we have to thank one class of politicians who have for years been industriously indoctrinating the farmer with the dogma that his business, in its highest phase, was just the manufacture of certain agricultural products from the soil. The farmer long listened in wonder to the lecturer, not knowing well what the high-sounding philosophy might mean. But he at last embraced the doctrine, and he now, we fear, too often entertains the feelings which the doctrine was so likely to engender. As a manufacturer, the farmer cannot for his life see that he has any more concernment than any other manufacturer with the condition, character, and habits of his operatives. For a year he hires them, and they go, and he sees them no more. The root of the evil Mr Stuart correctly traces up to the altered feelings and conduct of proprietors and tenants towards their dependants.
Mr Stuart, in speaking of our agricultural labourers, “as things were” some sixty years ago, adverts to a period when the servants lived in family with their masters—when the master sat patriarchally at the head of his table, surrounded by his children and domestics, and when all knelt at the same family altar to offer up the evening prayer. The social characteristics of the people of that day were excellent; but their creature comforts were few, and their agriculture wretched. It was the era of run-rig, of outfield and infield—the former being scourged as the common foe—while on the latter our agricultural sires practised high farming. During the summer the men were half idle, and in the winter they were wholly so, saving that occasionally in the forenoon that venerable implement the flail, wielded by a lusty arm, might be heard dropping its minute-guns on the barn-floor. The women wrought the work in summer, and plied the wheel in winter. We are old enough to remember the spinning-wheel, and are disposed to echo the sentiment of the poet—
“Grief, thou hast lost an ever-ready friend,
Now that the cottage spinning-wheel is mute;
And care a comforter that best could suit
Her froward mood, and softliest reprehend.”
Mr Stuart reverts to this bygone age in a strain of tenderness; but he faithfully depicts its grievous physical disadvantages as they were experienced by the poor. There is a dash of romance in Mr Stuart’s genial nature, and he has interwoven his narrative with some quaint old-world reminiscences; but his excellent sense conducts him always to the sound conclusion. He does not idly sigh for that which has passed away; and he sees that the habits of a former age, if they could be recalled, would not suit the taste of the present generation, nor meet the exigencies of the existing agriculture. In certain districts of Aberdeenshire and elsewhere, the farm-servants may be said yet to live in the family—that is, they get their food in the kitchen, and by the kitchen-fire they sit in the winter evenings until they retire to their beds, which are generally in the stable. But the master and his family are meanwhile in the parlour. The master’s restraining presence is not in the kitchen; and upon the testimony alike of farmers and of clergymen, now lying upon our table, the results of the system are so deplorable, that bothies are asked for and preferred as the least of two evils.
In portraying the progress of agricultural improvement, Mr Stuart discovers the origin of the bothy and bondager systems. The throwing two or three farms into one, and the gradual decay of the cot-houses, and the aversion of the proprietor to build new ones, from a mistaken economy, originated both modes of accommodating farm-servants. But if such were the causes of the evil, its cure is self-evident. We have only to retrace our steps, and we will recover the position which we have abandoned. It took, however, half a century to develop the evil, and not in a day can we hope to see the remedy accomplished. In building more cottages, then, you take the sure way of mitigating the evils of both systems; and by proceeding in this work, if you do not ultimately exterminate the evil, you will so circumscribe and diminish it that it must become all but innocuous. The practice of enlarging farms has gone far enough, but if the expense of their subdivision were not intolerable, we would not in this item undo what we have done. There can be no doubt that our large farmers have been the great improvers; not only have they led the way in improving the cultivation of the soil and the stock of the country, but they have been the parties who have introduced to public notice the new manures, and the new and better implements of husbandry, and to them we now look as indispensable and powerful auxiliaries in elevating the social condition of the labourers. On the large farm, all that is wanted is a proportionate increase of cottages to accommodate the staff of agricultural servants, with a few houses on the outskirts of the farm for jobbers and day-labourers, whose assistance, with that of their families, may be got at a busy season on the farm.
At all times, and in all places, and by all sorts of people, the bothy is condemned. Mr Stuart condemns it, and laments the evils which it originates, and the habits which it induces, and the immoralities which it cherishes; but we are sorry to think that he writes so hopelessly about the possibility of its extinction. We would have been better pleased had he pronounced its doom, and had he proclaimed against it, in unmistakable accents, a war of extermination, gradual but sure, and inexorable. It merits nothing but hearty and unhesitating condemnation. We are well acquainted with bothy economics, and we never knew but one that was even decently conducted. Mr Stuart seems to think the evil necessary and irremovable, and that the only thing left to the philanthropist is to mitigate its horrors. But why so? The bothy system is partial and local. There are large provinces of the kingdom where it is totally unknown. We have the ocular demonstration, then, that it is not indispensable. But Mr Stuart says, that in escaping Charybdis, you sail the good ship Agriculture straight into the boiling quicksand of Syrtis—that, the bothy abandoned, you irretrievably encounter the evils of the bondager system. We are humbly of opinion, however, that our excellent friend somewhat overstates the evils of this latter system. There are inconveniences and disadvantages connected with it, but these are not for a moment to be compared with the discomforts, and with the temptations to nocturnal rambling and loose living, with which the bothy system is so beset. The bondager system does not affect young ploughman lads in the slightest degree; it is limited to young women, and to them the system is the same as domestic service in the farmer’s house, when field-work is associated with that service. But Mr Stuart seems to confound the bondager with the cottage system, while in reality they have no necessary connection. There are two bugbears in the way of abolishing the bothy—the one the landlords, and the other the tenants. The landlord is alarmed at the expense of building the necessary cottages. This will be got over. The tenant is alarmed at the expense of maintaining the ploughman in the cottage when built—a most remarkable mistake. But so it is that, be-north the Forth, many farmers, from long habit, and from ignorance of the cottage system as it exists in the Border counties, have become so wedded to the bothy, that in accomplishing its abolition we expect more resistance from them than from landlords. The model bothy, in mere material accommodation, will effect nothing unless it has separate apartments, furnished with fire and light, and other necessary appliances; and if it be so, where will be its superior economy to either landlord or tenant, when contrasted with the expense of a separate cottage? Abrogate the bothy system entirely, for otherwise moralists may lament in vain, and parents bewail the ruined virtue of their children.
Considering apparently the system too firmly rooted to admit of eradication, Mr Stuart strenuously inculcates the instant improvement of the bothy accommodation. But if he succeeds, will he not have stereotyped the bothy as a permanent part of the economy and constitution of the farm; and what, then, has been achieved? The physical discomforts of the bothy will have in a good measure disappeared, but the place is not disinfected of the moral contagion which the system communicates. Let half-a-dozen of ploughman lads be associated in a bothy, and however tidy and snug and commodious the apartments, yet when their age and circumstances are remembered—when it is considered that they are without a head, to control, counsel, and direct them, that each is his own master—we confess that to us it seems chimerical to expect that any desirable measure of decency, or sobriety, or order, will prevail within the walls of the bothy. It is in vain to tell a well-disposed lad that he can escape the pollution of a wicked associate in the bothy, by retiring to his own apartment. How can he sit there on a winter evening (winter is the season when bothy wickedness takes its swing), unaccommodated as it is either with fire or light? We fear, therefore, that the “model bothy” even would not arrest or extinguish the moral mischief that emanates from this system. It is remarkable that the speakers at the Edinburgh meetings do not say that they contemplate the improvement of the bothy system. Their resolution to encourage the multiplication of suitable cottages for the labourers on the farm, they saw, involved in due time the extinction of the bothy system. Moreover, we fancy that neither the Duke of Buccleuch nor the Marquis of Tweeddale has a single bothy upon their estates, unless one for the journeymen gardeners in the vicinity of their residences. Once erect a sufficiency of cottages, and the unmarried lads will find a sister, or aunt, or some female relative to keep house for them. Having such an object before them, they will be taught habits of economy, and will save money, that they may be ready to furnish a cottage. Once in it, they have a home and property, and will become attached to their situation. The bothy turns ploughmen into nomads, and gives them restless, undomestic, and migratory habits. Erect a sufficiency of cottages, and the bothy will die a natural death. No proprietor or tenant will erect or maintain a bothy for a solitary ploughman, who happens to have no female friend who can cook his food and keep his cottage. Infallibly he will find other accommodation. The boy, to whom the bothy is a very school of corruption, ought to live in family with the master, and it should be the master’s duty to watch over his morals, and to aid in some manner in his education. If he is a parent, let him say how he would like his own boy, when he leaves the paternal roof, to be neglected, tempted, corrupted.
Mr Stuart quotes from Mr Laing’s book on Norway a description of the Norwegian borststue or bothy, which is commodious and comfortable, and well supplied with all conveniences; and then he asks, “Now, I would hold such to be a model bothy; and cannot the farming in Scotland afford to give what it affords to give in Norway?” No doubt of it, provided you demonstrate that the bothy is indispensable; but to that premise we demur. Mr Laing communicates nothing to us of the moral effects of the borststue, which would be modified by the social habits of the people, and by the degree of kindly intercourse subsisting between master and servant. But in fact the example of Norway, neither in the matter of cottages nor bothies, is truly applicable to our country. In Norway the cottage is a loghouse, and costs nothing but the nails and the window-glass, while every Norwegian knows enough of loghouse-carpentry to erect a cottage for himself. With regard to the borststue, there is a necessity for it in Norway that does not exist here. The outdoor farm-work, which meets with but partial interruptions in our climate, is at an absolute standstill in Norway for six months of the year, from the severity of a protracted winter. The result is, that the outdoor work must be accomplished during a few weeks in spring, and of course a more numerous staff of servants must be maintained than with us; for, from the military and passport system prevailing in Norway, it is impossible to summon in an additional supply of workers to suit the emergency. The tenant-farmer is thus more dependent on the agricultural labourers; and we believe that there prevails in Norway more of that friendly interchange of sympathy and of kindness between master and servant than now unhappily characterises our social condition, which, nevertheless, sweetens all toil, and turns aside the poisoned arrow of temptation, and plucks the sting from suffering, whether experienced in Scottish bothy or Norwegian borststue. For ourselves, we have only one prescription for the bothy system, and that is, raze it. The system is too pregnant with all moral evil to be temporised with. We cannot consent to any parley, to negotiate for delay, and to write protocols anent its possible improvement. We are almost certain that the minister of Oathlaw agrees with us, but that he has thought it prudent to soften his voice when speaking of the bothy, in the fear that it would alarm his auditors at the revolutionary extent of his demands. But now that he has caught the ear of the noble and the good of the land, and awakened in generous hearts so magnanimous a response, let the lute become a trumpet in his hand, and let him blow a blast so loud and clear as shall scatter this disgrace of Scottish agriculture to the winds of heaven.
Most earnestly do we press upon our readers that our Scottish peasantry, and agricultural labourers, and common ploughmen, are highly deserving of consideration and kindness, and of every attempt that can be made to increase their comforts and to ameliorate their moral and social condition. There is an incredible and most criminal ignorance not only among the higher, but among the middle classes of society, regarding at once the habits and hardships of this important class of the community. The newspaper paragraphist, in his select vocabulary, describes the ploughman as a clown, a clodpole, a lout. That smart draper, with the exquisitely-tied cravat and his inimitably arranged hair, all redolent of musk, smiles complacently when he sees John the hind rolling along the pavement on his huge hobnailed boots, and considers him the very impersonation of stolidity. John’s dress is appropriate, however, to his calling, and to see the draper in pumps and silk stockings floundering through a new-ploughed field, or picking his steps daintily through a feeding-byre, where the musk must yield to the ammonia, would, we fancy, be a phenomenon not less provocative of laughter. Nothing is so ridiculous as the very prevalent idea that our Scottish agricultural labourers are a stupid race. They are shrewd, sagacious, and intelligent about their own business; and because they are so, they are continually being drafted away to England and Ireland. The employments of a common ploughman are various, and of a nature calculated to cultivate his powers of observation and of thought. Mr Stephens, after describing the extent of observation, of judgment, and of patience, required in a good ploughman, adds—“To be so accomplished implies the possession of talent of no mean order.”—Book of the Farm, vol. i. p. 163. Talent necessary for a ploughman! exclaims the incredulous and amazed citizen, and fancies that the author must speak ironically. Nay; he never wrote soberer truth in his lifetime, and in your ignorance you wonder.
There is another reason why not only the comforts, but why the moral and intellectual powers of the agricultural labourer should be cared for. The common ploughman has committed to his trust property which, on a very moderate computation, may be valued at £100. This property, of a nature so likely to receive injury from carelessness and inattention, is daily in his hands, and under his charge, and at his mercy. We need scarcely add, too, how deeply he may in other respects injure his employer, as, for instance, by the imperfect ploughing or careless sowing of a field. To what common servant, in any sphere of life, is property so valuable so exclusively intrusted? It is plain that a party so confided in, as a ploughman must be, ought not to have his sense of responsibility and of moral obligation blunted and impaired by barbarous neglect. Hitherto our agricultural labourers have not occupied themselves with discussing “the rights of labour and the duties of capital.” But if landlords and tenants are resolved to consider the whole management of land as a mere matter of commerce, we cannot see why these operatives should not be led to philosophise as well as others. The labourer may apply in all equity that principle to his own case which the landlord and tenant are severally applying to theirs. The severance between employer and employed has of late been developed to an extent never before witnessed in any age, and it threatens, at this moment, to throw a terrific chasm athwart the whole structure of society. Not only among mill-masters and men, but among many other classes very differently circumstanced, have we witnessed combination and counter-combination, and their disastrous consequences. A slight agrarian grumbling might possibly do good; and, from all that we can learn, there is a sulky discontent slumbering in many an honest fellow’s bosom, that could easily be fanned, by a skilful experimenter, into a visible flame. It will be better, in every respect, to anticipate and ward off the evil. Its causes and its cure have been well expounded by Mr Stuart. But if our agricultural labourers are too patient sufferers to complain, too sensible to imbibe the pestilent doctrines of Messrs Newton and Cowel, and too wide apart to have it in their power to combine, whether for good or for evil—and if, on these accounts, there is no ground for alarm, is it wise, is it kind of you, to take advantage of their peaceful dispositions, and of their powerlessness to unite in proclaiming their wrongs, and in vindicating their rights? There is a remedy within the reach of many of them, and of which they are silently availing themselves. They can emigrate. They are doing so quietly, determinedly. They are not absolutely astricti glebæ. The canker of neglect is eating away the ties that bind them to their Fatherland. Multitudes of the best of them have gone, and thousands would follow if they had the means. Emigration, if it proceeds unchecked, will render “strikes” unnecessary, even if we are inclined to consider such things as visionary and impossible among an agricultural population.
They who have not read Mr Stuart’s appeal, may conclude, from the professed object of that Association to which his appeal has conducted, that he has inculcated nothing more than the improvement of existing cottages, and the building of many new ones more commodious and comfortable. His philanthropy, however, is more comprehensive. With an excursive pen he reviews the whole moral, educational, and social characteristics of the agricultural labourer’s condition, and sketches the remedies for its various evils. When, therefore, Mr Stuart merely proposed at the meeting of the 10th January, as the main feature of the proposed Association, the establishment of an office in Edinburgh for the reception of plans and models, and improved fittings and furnishings for cottages, accessible to all inquirers, it seemed to us, retaining as we did a delightful reminiscence of his pamphlet, a most impotent conclusion. He appeared to have descended from the high moral arena into the mortar-tub, and we were in terror lest some journalist, in a slashing leader, should cover his scheme with inextinguishable burlesque. It seemed likewise a mystery to us how there could be such extreme difficulty in erecting a commodious and comfortable cottage, as that an office in our metropolis should be required for the exhibition of right models. It might have looked that, instead of a labourer’s cottage, it was a medieval temple of most intricate composite that was required, and for the conception of which the genius of Scottish architecture was unequal without the aid of unusual patronage. We feared, too, that the Association might be described by some malignant pen as a company of Scottish proprietors resolving to raise the marketable value of their estates by adding to the buildings thereupon. Such silly caricatures might perhaps have been anticipated, and in fact some small sneers were dropped by one or two of the Radical newspapers; but the admirable tone of the speeches at the meeting, when the Association was formed, seemed for the time to have stayed the old hatred of the democratic press towards our landed proprietors. That our readers may understand correctly the intentions and views of “The Association for promoting improvement in the dwellings and domestic condition of agricultural labourers in Scotland,” we recommend to their perusal the report of the committee now published, and which we hope may be widely circulated. The noblemen and country gentlemen composing the Association have combined, not for the purpose of raising their rentals, but for the purpose of improving the domestic condition of the agricultural labourers, by improving their dwellings. They have united together for the purpose of directing attention to the subject, and of encouraging and aiding others in removing an evil which they candidly confess they have hitherto overlooked and neglected. The evil is of long standing and of gigantic dimensions, and it has been felt that the benevolent zeal and efforts of individuals required to be concentred into the potent agency of one national association, to effect its abatement and to work out its final extinction. In the matter of house accommodation for our agricultural labourers, while on many estates a very great deal has been done to improve it, yet very generally over the kingdom it is a notorious fact that no improvement in their dwellings has taken place for the last half-century. One article of furniture in the cottages of our Scottish peasantry has excited the indignation of all but those who repose their weary limbs on it—we refer to the box-bed. The medical faculty time immemorial have denounced it as a very “fever case.” Mr Stuart and his reverend brethren have lamented the stifling insalubrity of the formidable structure. Fine ladies and gentlemen have wondered at the stupid attachment of the Scottish peasant to a dormitory so barbarous. The Duke of Buccleuch has solved the riddle. He tells us, that when he ordered the box-bed to be taken out of the cottage down came the roof! And thus that which has been the stay and support of many a tottering tenement has been most ignorantly condemned. Nor is this all. So very damp and cold are too many of the cottages, that in order to exclude these evils in some measure by night, the box-bed is indispensable during eight months of the year; and we predict that unless comfortable cottages, rightly roofed, lathed, and floored are erected, the box-bed will prove stronger than Mr Stuart, and will retain its hold on the affections of the labourer, upholding at once its own position and the roof of the dwelling that affects to shelter it from the elements. That there is likewise a lack of cottages in our agricultural districts is unquestionable. They have been allowed to decay and disappear, from economical considerations entirely delusive, to an extent extremely prejudicial. The diminished population of our rural parishes proves the fact; and if any one will contrast the census papers of 1841 with those of 1851, which exhibit the number of the inhabited houses in the several counties of Scotland, they will find a demonstration that may probably startle them. The Association takes it for granted that an improved domestic condition will follow in the wake of improved dwellings being given to the poor, and no thoughtful and observing person will doubt this. It has been beautifully said, “Between physical and moral delicacy a connection has been observed, which, though founded by the imagination, is far from being imaginary. Howard and others have remarked it. It is an antidote against sloth, and keeps alive the idea of decent restraint and the habit of circumspection. Moral purity and physical are spoken of in the same language; scarce can you inculcate or command the one, but some share of approbation reflects itself upon the other. In minds in which the least germ of Christianity has been planted, this association can scarce fail of having taken root: scarce a page of Scripture but recalls it.” It is of the very essence of every good system to develop the virtues necessary to its success; and to the humanising influence of a comfortable and commodious cottage, old habits of filthiness and sloth would gradually yield, and would every day become a lessening evil. Such cottages would secure at once the services of the best class of workmen, and thus a mercenary self-interest would find it to its advantage to follow where benevolence had led the way. The influence of example upon the rich, and the influence of superior house-accommodation upon the social condition of the poor, must be gradual. This has been duly contemplated.
It is scarcely necessary, we fancy, to expound this part of the case. It is now pretty generally understood. If, however, any of our readers have not considered this subject, or continue to entertain some lingering doubts regarding the effects of improved house-accommodation upon the social, sanitary, and moral condition of the people, we most anxiously recommend to their perusal Dr Southwood Smith’s “Results of Sanitary Improvement, illustrated by the operation of the metropolitan societies for improving the dwellings of the industrious classes, &c.” The pamphlet costs twopence, and it may take a quarter of an hour to read it; but never, we believe, were statistics ever given to the world so surprising and so encouraging,—matter at once so suggestive of deep thought, and so animating to the aspirations of practical philanthropy. Lord Shaftesbury is at present circulating this most pregnant epitome of the effects of sanitary improvement among the parochial boards of Scotland. It is a most seasonable missive—vindicating the speculations of Mr Stuart, and placing on the basis of demonstration the certainty of the effect of the intended operations of the Duke of Buccleuch’s association. The pecuniary element will be thought our main difficulty, but we are quite satisfied that the tendency is to exaggerate it. Be it remembered that we want no cottages ornées, and (with your leave, Mr Stuart) no model bothies, but merely warm, dry, convenient houses for honest ploughmen to live in. Let wealthy proprietors, if they please, adorn their estates with picturesque villas, crowned with projecting roofs and ornamental chimneys; but the Association over which the Duke of Buccleuch presides does not desire a single sixpence to be spent which will not contribute to the comfort of the cottage. The reformatory change may proceed by degrees, and in no one year need the outlay be serious; but on this part of the subject we refer our readers to the views of Sir Ralph Anstruther, as contained in his speech on the 10th January, and more fully explained in his letter (Courant, January 20th). While the Association professes, in the mean time (and we think wisely and judiciously), to limit its attention to the improvement of the dwellings of agricultural labourers, and thereby to raise their domestic condition, it seems evident that the basis of its operations may be easily extended, and that the benevolent object in view will almost naturally widen that basis. That object is to ameliorate the domestic condition of the labourer; but if other causes as well as that of improved house-accommodation will contribute towards the wished-for amelioration, these, it may be expected, in due time will come to be embraced within the benevolent range of its fostering influence. To prevent misapprehension and remove ignorance, we would respectfully suggest the propriety of the Association instituting a statistical inquiry into the physical, moral, and educational condition of the agricultural labourers of the kingdom. Such statistics would form a valuable supplement to the agricultural statistics collected under the instruction of Mr Hall Maxwell. Information seems necessary to enable the Association rightly to exercise its influence, even in improving the dwellings of the poor. In some parts of the west of Scotland a sort of mud cottage is raised at an expense of £3! and a fit model for one county may be utterly unfit for another. All requisite information we believe could be obtained, by addressing a schedule of inquiry to the parochial clergy, who are manifestly ready to lend their aid. In any event, our landed proprietors cannot well afford to have more “news from the farm” thrust upon them by the spontaneous exertions of volunteer philanthropists. The public, indeed, seem to have been infinitely surprised that our landed proprietors should have been so ignorant of the condition of the dwellings and of the circumstances of the people upon their estates; and the inference is, that there must have been something grievously wrong in the management of their affairs. No man, of course, can expect that the proprietor of a large landed estate should know minutely the condition of every cottage on it, and the discomforts of its poor inhabitant. But the ignorance confessed goes greatly beyond this. It was surely the more immediate duty of the tenant-farmer to have protected his dependants, and to have represented their disadvantages to the proprietor. And what has the factor been doing in the mean time? General Lindsay, at the meeting of the 10th January, in a speech overflowing with admirable feeling, said, that “the factor was afraid of increasing his expenditure.” Quite right; but why was he not afraid, too, of misrepresenting the kindly feelings of his constituent towards the industrious poor upon his estate—of concealing from him knowledge which, if he wished to do his duty, it was indispensable for him to possess—of alienating from him and his house the love and veneration of his people—of rendering his privileges odious now, and of imperilling his position on any coming convulsion of the commonwealth? We have not only now the evil of non-resident proprietors, but, in many cases, the evil of non-resident factors. The door of communication betwixt landlord and tenant is thus effectually shut up; and the poor cottager, who was wont to have access even to “his honour,” finds things so altered that an audience with the factor is become impossible. The accountant is as ignorant as his constituent “of the dwellings and domestic condition of the agricultural labourers,” and thus there is a complete abnegation of all the peculiar duties and responsibilities which Providence has manifestly laid on the owners of land. It is impossible to deny, on the other hand, that very many of the tenant-farmers, imitating the manners of their betters, have become sadly neglectful of the duties which they owe their dependants. To give as little and get as much as he can, is now, in too many cases, the short and simple rubric of that code which guides the landlord in his contract with the tenant. The tenant extends the principle, and looks upon the labour of his ploughman as a mere purchaseable article, that supplements the deficiency of machinery, and is necessary to guide the muscular energies of the horse. With the ploughman, however, the sale of his labour is the sale of himself—the devotion of his sentient nature, with feelings, affections, sympathies, as lively as those of his master, and with a pride and self-esteem as sensitive to unkindness and wrong. It was in every respect seemly that the present movement should originate with the proprietors, for the house-accommodation must plainly be given by them; but now that they have intimated, in so kind words, their good wishes and benevolent intentions, we hope the farmers will consider whether expressions of “repentance” for the past are not due from them as well as from others, and whether works “meet for repentance” should not instantly be undertaken by them. Because the landlord has made his “confession,” it is conceivable that the tenant may now fancy that nothing remains but that he should make a clamorous onset on the laird for more cottages. We hope he will not be unreasonable, but will perceive that he must put his own shoulder to the work, and be prepared to make some sacrifices, and to practice some self-denial. We fear that some of the tenantry require to be instructed, stimulated, and watched in discharging that part of the duty which falls to them in promoting the desired reformation. We are quite of the opinion of the Duke of Buccleuch, that more cottages should not be let with the farm than the number necessary to accommodate the servants requisite for the work of the farm. The other cottagers should rent their holdings immediately from the landlord.
We know no class of workmen who have so few holidays, and so few opportunities for rational recreation, as our ploughmen. They may have the right to go to some annual feeing-market, and out of this solitary feast the poor fellows try naturally to extract as much pleasure as they can, turning the day into a carnival of many-coloured evil. All other classes of workpeople have their occasional holiday—their trip by an excursion-train—the Saturday afternoon, in a slack season, to see friends and kindred; but no such pleasures fall to the ploughman’s lot. In the winter, indeed, he is on “short time,” but what is done to make his evening hours pleasant, profitable, instructive? In the agricultural world we shall certainly have no “lock-out,” and perhaps no “strike,” but it may be wise, at least, to anticipate possible contingencies by acts of kindness and of well-considered indulgence. The yawning gulf betwixt the high and the low of the land is the most ominous evil of these times, and should be bridged over by sympathetic communication whilst it can. The wintry neglect of his superiors is worse to be borne by the labourer than the cold of his miserable cottage. Let us listen to Mr Stuart on an evil which seems to have entered like iron into his kindly soul. Addressing landlords, he says—
“Let their visits and their smile be frequently seen in the house of the poorest cottar, although he be but a hired labourer; for not fifty years ago, that same man would have been a crofter, or a small farmer, waiting on ‘his honour,’ and welcomed by ‘his honour,’ with his rent or his bondage. That he is not so now, is owing more to ‘his honour’s’ change of customs for his own profit, than to the cottar’s own fault, or to the profit of the cottar’s own social position and feelings. Let there be some upmaking, then, for this change, so far as such things can be made up for, not in the shape of money, but in that which his forefathers valued much more than money, and which he will value as highly again, if ‘his honour’ will only but give him time and means whereby he may recover his self-esteem and his proper training; and one of the most powerful and most valued of all these means would, in a little time, be ‘his honour’s’ friendly visits to his humble dwelling.”
Now that the Scottish people know that the Duke of Buccleuch finds time to inquire personally into the condition of the peasantry on his estates, no proprietor, however ancient his lineage and proud his name, will be excused who fails to go and do likewise, or who fails at least to acquaint himself with the condition of the labourers who cultivate his fields. Personal inquiry we would recommend, although it should not lead to the rendering of one cottage more comfortable than it was before. We recommend it for the proprietor’s own behoof. “The most certain softeners of a man’s moral skin, and sweeteners of his blood, are, I am sure, domestic intercourse in a happy marriage, and intercourse with the poor,” writes Arnold; and, as if he had felt the virtue flowing out of such intercourse, he repeats the thought thus in another place, “Prayer, and kindly intercourse with the poor, are the two great safeguards of spiritual life.” One-half the world does not know how the other half lives, and one-half of the bitternesses of human life arises from our not understanding one another. Little do the great ones of the earth know how much they lose by avoiding kindly acquaintance with poor and humble neighbours.
We know of no public meeting that has taken place in our time, where the speeches delivered possessed a higher moral value than those that fell from the speakers at the meeting of the 10th January last. The turbulent, disrupted, and gloomy condition of the manufacturing classes, rendered them admirably seasonable. They have shed a benignant influence over the agricultural community. They have awakened hopes that were growing faint, and fine old Scottish feelings that were dying out, and have proved a healing anodyne to a wound that was rankling in many a bosom. The opening speech of the noble chairman we have read more than once, and ever with renewed delight. Many an honest labourer has read it too, with glistening eye and joyful heart, and its perusal has prepared him for fighting more heroically the battle of his life. Some of the sentiments of the noble Duke we cannot withhold from our columns:—
“He thought it would not be disputed that, generally speaking, throughout Scotland, the habitations of these labourers were very defective, especially in those accommodations for comfort and delicacy. In former days the farm-servant was accommodated in the farmer’s house, where he took his meals, and so was under the moral control of his employers. But now the farm-labourer was put into a bothy, generally a most wretched place to live in, and often the worst building on the farm. He could not blink the question involved in the subject. They had not come there to bandy compliments to one another, but to speak the truth. It might be said to him and those who came there to find fault with the present system: You ought to come with clean hands, and be able to say that all the bothies on your estate were such as they ought to be. He confessed with shame that he could show as bad specimens on his property as could be found in Scotland. He would not conceal it that the condition of many of the cottages on his estate was as bad as could be. How this state of things had arisen it was not difficult to see.... He examined a number of their cottages himself, and found many of them quite in a falling-down state. In one of them, when he took a box-bed out of it, down came the roof. Such things would be found not so very uncommon if these cottages were looked into. Then what an evil effect such houses had upon the moral feelings of those who occupied them! Many of the persons who lived in them were highly educated, and it might well be conceived that a person of refinement living in a place fit for a pig would be discontented, as well as unhappy. How could they expect, when they saw men, women, and children all living and sleeping in one apartment, that they could be otherwise than demoralised? Could they wonder that all their delicacy of feeling was destroyed? Mothers had said to him, how could they bring up their daughters with respectability when there was not that separation of rooms which there ought to be? Then there was a great disinclination on the part of the tenantry to the landlord taking these cottages into his hand. They said they must have every single thing under their own control. It was all very well for them to say that as regarded the lodgment of their domestic and special farm-servants, but it did not follow that it was absolutely necessary that all the cottages of the agricultural labourers should belong to the farmer. He did not think that it was right that the farm-labourer should be bound down to work for one man only. But the person who really benefited by the landlord taking the cottage into his own hands was the farm-labourer himself; and he had seen the moral effect produced by providing better houses for this class of labourers, in a quarter where thieving and poaching had formerly been the disgrace of the people; but since their houses were improved, there was a great and beneficial reformation in these respects. It was really gratifying to see the change which took place in the feelings of these people towards their landlord, when they knew he was taking an interest in their welfare. Here, when he passed, they showed they regarded him as their friend, and were not filled with unpleasant suspicions about him.”
The gems in the ducal coronet never emitted a tenderer or more fascinating ray than when its noble owner entered the lowly cottage on his mission of kindness, and since the preceding sentiments were spoken, we believe that from many a Scottish heart the fervent prayer has been sent to heaven’s gate, that “the good Buccleuch” may long be spared to his country.
ALEXANDER SMITH’S POEMS.[[7]]
Some time ago a volume of poems appeared, over which there arose a great roar of critical battle, like the conflict over the dead Valerius, when “Titus pulled him by the foot, and Aulus by the head.” Many hailed the author as a true poet, and prophesied his coming greatness; others fastened on obvious defects, and moused the book like Snug the joiner tearing Thisbe’s mantle in his character of lion. Now that the hubbub has subsided, our still small voice may be heard.
The poet in question has at once deprecated and defied criticism in a sonnet, (p. 232).
“There have been vast displays of critic wit
O’er those who vainly flutter feeble wings,
Nor rise an inch ’bove ground,—weak poetlings!
And on them to the death men’s brows are knit.
Ye men! ye critics! seems’t so very fit
They on a storm of Laughter should be blown
O’er the world’s edge to Limbo? Be it known,
Ye men! ye critics! that beneath the sun
The chiefest woe is this,—when all alone,
And strong as life, a soul’s great currents run
Poesy-ward, like rivers to the sea,
But never reach’t. Critic, let that soul moan
In its own hell, without a kick from thee.
Kind Death, kiss gently, ease this weary one!”
Alexander Smith is partly right and partly wrong. It is true that, throned in his judicial chair, the critic, more intent on displaying his own powers than on doing justice to his subject, is apt to drop the mild and equal scales, and brandish the trenchant glittering sword. He ought to say in his heart, Peradventure there shall be found ten fine lines in this book—I will not destroy it for ten’s sake.
But, on the other hand, there is a class to which forbearance would be misapplied and criminal. It would too much resemble our prison discipline, where Mr William Sykes, after a long course of outrages on humanity, is shut up in a palace, treated like a prodigal son, and presently converted to Christianity. An absurd monomaniac, who, like Joanna Southcote, mistaking a dropsical disorder for the divine afflatus, and demanding worship on no better grounds than the greatness of his own blown conceit, may, by mere force of impudent pretension, induce a host of ignorant followers to have faith in him, ought to be exposed and ridiculed. Not savagely, perhaps, for the first offence; the pantaloons should be loosed with a paternal hand, and the scourge mildly applied. If he still persists in misdoing, it should be laid on till the blood comes.
But Alexander Smith is far from coming under the latter denomination. A writer, especially a young writer, should be judged by his best; and there is enough excellence in the volume to cover many more sins than it contains, though they are numerous. And while it is a mistake to suppose that a fine poetic soul, however sensitive, will “let itself be snuffed out by an article,” yet there have been instances where undue severity has defrauded a writer of his just fame for many a long year; and though the critic, in the end, has been compelled to render up the mesne profits of applause, yet that is small consolation for the sense of wrong, and the deprivation of merited influence and reputation.
While foreign writers sketch us as the most matter-of-fact and pudding-eating of peoples—while we pique ourselves on sturdy John Bullism, and cheerfully accept the portrait of an absurd old gentleman in a black coat, and a broad-brimmed hat and gaiters, with his hands in his well-filled breeches pockets, as a just impersonation of the genius of the nation, it is an obvious fact that a poet never had such a certainty of being appreciated in England as now. Fit audience is no longer few. Let him sound as high a note as he can for the life of him, he will yet find echoes enough to constitute fame. There are homes in England almost as common as hothouses, where fine criticism is nightly conversation—where appreciators, as true as any who review in newspapers, hail a good and great writer as a personal friend. Here may be found all the elements necessary for the recognition of merit and the detection of imposture. Sturdy good sense refuses to believe in gaudy pretension; keen logic exposes emptiness; enthusiastic youth glows at the high thought, the splendid image; and the soft feminine nature responds, with ready tears and unsuppressed sighings, to all legitimate appeals to the heart.
With such tribunals more plentiful than county courts, a man is no longer justified in decrying fame, or appealing for justice to posterity. It must be an untoward accident, indeed, that cheats an author of his due, when so many are eager to exchange praise for his fine gold. The demand for excellence in authorship exceeds the supply; and there are plenty of keen readers who, having traversed the realms of English poesy, yet thirst for fresh fields and pastures new. Therefore, if an ardent spirit finds the world deaf to his utterances, let him search uncomplainingly for the fault in his own mind, and never rashly conclude that for his fondly believed-in powers of thought and expression there is, as yet, no sympathetic public. Especially in poetry is the appetite of the time unsatisfied; mediocrity, which should be inadmissible, is indulgently received, and the poets of established reputation are on every shelf. Editions of Shakespeare appear in perplexing numbers, and the rusty armour in which a champion for his text appears, is contended for as if it were the heaven-forged panoply of Achilles.
Mr Smith leaves his feelings on the subject of fame open to doubt. One might almost fancy him a poet who, having desired fame too ardently in his hot youth, had discovered its emptiness in riper age. A sonnet is devoted to the depreciation of fame; whereas Walter, in the Life-drama, is more than enthusiastic to achieve it. We have no doubt the ardent wishes which Mr Smith expresses through his hero are genuine, and that the philosophy of the sonnet is a philosophy he only fancies he has acquired. Combativeness may inspire the soldier to achievement, rivalry the statesman; both may be, in some measure, indifferent to other fame than the applause of their contemporaries. But it is in vain for the poet to express indifference to the opinion of the world and of posterity. Why has he written, except that thoughts bearing his impress may sound in the ears of the future, and that the echoes they arouse may convey to him, in his silent resting-place, tidings of the cheerful day, assuring him of a tenure in the earth he loved, and a lasting position among the race who were his brothers? What would not man do to secure remembrance after death? For this Erostratus burnt Diana’s temple; for this the Pyramids were built, and built in vain; for this kings have destroyed nations; for this the care-worn money-getter gives his life to the founding of a wealthy name; and if a man may gain it more effectually by the simple publishing of thoughts, whose conception was to him a pleasure, let him be thankful that what all so ardently desire was granted to him on such easy terms, and that he may continue to be a real presence on this earth, when most of his contemporaries are as though they had never been.
Taking it for granted, then, that when a young poet publishes a work wherein the hero expresses an ardent desire for fame, the poet is himself speaking through the character, it will be interesting to see how he proposes to achieve it. Mr Smith tells us, through his hero, that his plan for immortalising himself is “to set this age to music.” That, he says, is the great work before the poet now.
To set this age to music!—’tis a phrase we have heard before of late years. Never was an age so intent upon self-glorification as this. Like the American nation, it spends half its time looking in the glass; and, like it, always with the same loudly-expressed approbation of what the mirror reveals. It has long been its habit to talk its own praises, and now they must be sung. When polkas were first introduced, many familiar sounds were parodied, to give character to tunes of the new measure. Among these was the Railway-polka, in which the noise of the wheels and the clatter of machinery were admirably imitated; while a startling reality was given to the whole, by the occasional hoarse scream of the engine. Now, we fear that the effort of a poet to set the age to music would result in something resembling the railway polka—something more creditable as a work of ingenuity than of art, and embodying more appeals to the sense than to the heart or the imagination. To him who stands apart from the rush and roar, the many voices of the age convey a mingled sound that would scarcely seem musical even to the dreaming ear of a poet.
We see the spirit of the middle ages—the spirit of religious intolerance and superstitious faith—of deepest earnestness, and of bigotry springing out of that earnestness—reflected in Dante’s page. Spenser shows us the days of the plume and the spear, when the beams of chivalry yet gilded the earth, when the motto of noble youth was—God and my lady. Another phase of the same era—the era of romantic discovery and adventure, when there were yet fairies on the green, and enchanted isles in the ocean—reappears in the works of Shakespeare. Pope has fixed for ever the time of courtliness, of external polish and artificial graces—the time when woman was no more divine—when Una had degenerated into Chloe—when love had given place to intrigue, devotion to foppery, faith to reasoning; yet a pleasant and graceful time. And it is no wonder that the poet, now, feeling that he too possesses “the vision and the faculty divine,” should long to leave his name, not drifting over space, but anchored firmly on the times he lived in.
But none of these old poets went to work with the deliberate intention of setting his age to music. Where that, so far as we can see the meaning of the phrase, has been done, it is because the poet lived so much among the characteristic men and scenes of his age, that his mind, more impressionable and more true in its impressions than others, was imbued with its spirit, and moulded to its forms; so that, whatever his mind transmitted was coloured by those hues, and swayed by those outlines. The poet did not hunt about for the characteristics of his age, and then deliberately embody them: he chose a congenial theme when it offered itself, and it, unconsciously to him, became a picture of a phase of the time. When our age, too, is set to music, if ever, it will be in this way.
If ever—For ages of the world, as worthy of note perchance as this, and more rich in materials for poetry, have passed away without being set to music. Every great change of society, and of mankind’s opinions, does not necessarily call for a poet to sing it. It may be more suitably reproduced through some other medium than verse—in newspapers, for instance, or in advertising vans. Of course, no man in his senses would say a word against this age of ours; he could expect nothing less than to be immediately bonneted, like an injudicious elector who has hissed the popular candidate; yet we would have liked Alexander Smith to indicate the direction in which he intends to seek his materials. Does he see anything heroic in an ardent desire to secure ease and comfort at the cost of many old and once respectable superstitions, such as honour and duty? Can he throw over the cotton trade “the light that never was on sea or shore?” Or, is popular oratory distinguished by “thoughts that breathe and words that burn?” Will the railway station and the electric telegraph figure picturesquely in the poet’s dream? Yet, when the age is set to music, these chords will be not the most subdued in the composition. Mr Macaulay said about as much as could be said for the spirit of the age, when he drew a contrast in popular prose between the present and the past. Had he tried the subject in poetry, he would have found the task much less congenial than when he sung so manfully “how well Horatius kept the bridge, in the brave days of old.”
Alexander Smith has one characteristic in common with Tennyson, the author of Festus, and some other poets of the time. All seem to have great power in the regions of the dreary. Their gaiety is spasmodic; when they smile, ’tis like Patience on a monument, as if Grief were sitting opposite. If this is their way of setting the age to music, ’tis, if most musical, yet most melancholy. Tennyson, who possesses the power of conveying the sentiment of dreariness beyond most poets that ever lived, generally selects some suitable subject for the exercise of it, such as Mariana in the Moated Grange; but Mr Smith’s hero, and Festus, are miserable from choice, and revel in their unaccountable woe, like the character in Peacock’s novel, whose notion of making himself agreeable consists in saying, “Let us all be unhappy together.” Not thus, O Alexander! sounds the keynote of the genial soul of a great poet.
Our author’s notion of what constitutes a crushing affliction is altogether peculiar. A particular friend of his hero, after becoming quite blasphemous because he wanted “to let loose some music on the world,” and couldn’t (p. 137), commits suicide on a mountain, though whether by rope, razor, or prussic acid, we are not informed. However, being deranged, he no doubt received Christian burial. And Mr Smith, speaking for himself in the sonnet already quoted, says that—
“Beneath the sun
The chiefest woe is this—When all alone,
And strong as life, a soul’s great currents run
Poesy-ward, like rivers to the sea,
But never reach it.”
The chiefest woe!—the chiefest, Alexander! Neither Job nor Jeremiah have enrolled it among human afflictions. Is there no starvation, nor pain, nor death in the world? Is the income-tax repealed? We appeal from Alexander in travail of a sonnet, with small hope of safe delivery, to Alexander in the toothache, and we are confident he will change his opinion. Let him look at Hogarth’s “Distressed Poet,” and see what it is that moves his sympathy there. Not the perplexity of the poor poet himself—that raises only an irreverent smile—but the poor good pretty wife raising her household eyes meekly and wonderingly to the loud milkwoman, their inexorable creditor—the piece of meat that was to form their scanty dinner, abstracted by the felonious starveling of a cur,—these touch on deeper woes than the head-scratching distress of the unproductive poet.
To return to Mr Smith’s idea of setting the age to music. The first requisite clearly is, that the musician shall be pre-eminently a man of the age. It is at once evident that oldfashioned people, with any lingering remnants of the heroic or dark ages about their ideas, would be quite out of place here. None but liberals and progressionists need apply. These are so plentiful that there will be no difficulty in finding a great number who embody the most prominent characteristics of the time. Having got the man of the age, a tremendous difficulty occurs. We are very much afraid there will not only be nothing poetical in the cast of his ideas, but that he will be the embodiment of everything that is prosaic. Call to mind, O Alexander! the qualities essential to a poet—at the same time, picture to yourself a Man of the Age—and then fancy what kind of music you will extract from him. Set the age to music, quotha! Set the Stocks to music.
Having thus signally failed to point out how the thing is to be done, we will tell Alexander how it will not be done. Not by uttering unmeaning complaints against Fate and Heaven, and other names of similar purport which we will not set down here, like a dog baying the moon. Not by uttering profane rant, which, as it would not have been justified by the mad despair of a Lear or an Othello, is horribly nonsensical in the mouth of a young gentleman who ought to have taken a blue pill because his liver was out of order. Not by pouring forth floods of images and conceits which afford no perception of the idea their author would convey. Not by making the moon and the sea appear in such a variety of ridiculous characters that we shall never again stroll by moonlight on the shore without seeing something comical in the aspect of the deep and the heavenly bodies. Not by——But we have just lighted on a passage which proves that Mr Smith knows what is right as well as anybody can tell him:—
“Yet one word more—
Strive for the poet’s crown, but ne’er forget
How poor are fancy’s blooms to thoughtful fruits.”
And again—
“Poet he was not in the larger sense—
He could write pearls, but he could never write
A poem round and perfect as a star.”
That is the point. Not to dismiss images unprotected on the world, like Mr Winkle’s shots—which, we are informed, were “unfortunate foundlings cast loose upon society, and billeted nowhere”—but to mature a worthy leading idea, waiting, watching, fostering it till it is full-grown and symmetrical in its growth; and from which the lesser ideas and images shall spring as naturally, necessarily, and with as excellent effect of adornment, as leaves from the tree.
Whether Alexander can do this, yet remains to be proved. Some of the requisites he possesses in a high degree. Force, picturesqueness of conception, and musical expression, all of which he has displayed, will do great things when giving utterance to a theme well chosen and well designed; but at present they only tell us, like a harp swept by the wind, of the melodies slumbering in the chords. Such is the Æolian character of the Life-drama—fitful, wild, melancholy, often suggestive of something exquisitely sweet and graceful, but faint, fugitive, and incoherent. When our poet sounds a strain worthy of the instrument, our pæans shall accompany and swell the chorus of applause.
The sonnets, as conveying tangible ideas, and such as excite interest and sympathy, have greatly exalted our opinion of the poet’s powers. They have not been much quoted as yet by any of his discerning admirers, perhaps because there is little or nothing in them but what a plain man may understand, and they contain few allusions to the ocean or any of the planets. But here is one showing a fine picture—a picture that appeals to the imagination and the heart. It is at once manly and pathetic, representing a friendless, but independent and aspiring genius:—
“Joy, like a stream, flows through the Christmas streets,
But I am sitting in my silent room—
Sitting all silent in congenial gloom.
To-night, while half the world the other greets
With smiles, and grasping hands, and drinks, and meats,
I sit and muse on my poetic doom.
Like the dim scent within a budded rose,
A joy is folded in my heart; and when
I think on poets nurtured ’mong the throes,
And by the lowly hearths of common men—
Think of their works, some song, some swelling ode
With gorgeous music glowing to a close,
Deep-muffled as the dead-march of a god—
My heart is burning to be one of those.”
As Mercutio says, “Is not this better, now, than groaning? Now art thou sensible—now art thou Romeo.” We hope he will be “one of those,” and think he may. Only he must believe that, however fine and rare the poetic faculties he has evinced, they cannot produce anything for posterity of themselves, but must build on a foundation of thought and art.
We are afraid, though we have not descended to verbal criticism, but have only indicated essential faults, that Alexander will think we have treated his book in an irreverent spirit; but, nevertheless, it is a truly paternal one. Even in such mood did we deal, of late, with our own beloved first-born, heir of his mother’s charms and his father’s virtues—a fine, clever fellow, in whom his parents take immense pride, though we judiciously conceal it for fear of increasing the conceit which is already somewhat conspicuous in his bearing. We rather think he had been led astray by the example of that young scoundrel, Jones, who threatened to hang himself if his mother didn’t give him five-and-twenty shillings to pay his score at the pastry-cook’s, and so terrified the poor lady into compliance. However that may be, our offspring, George, being denied, of late, some unreasonable requests, straightway went into sulky heroics—spoke of himself as an outcast—stalked about with a gloomy air in dark corners of the shrubbery with his arms folded—smiled about twice a-day, in a withering and savage manner, though his natural disposition is cheerful and inclined to fun—and begged to decline to hold any further intercourse with his relatives. He kept up the brooding and injured character with great consistency (except that he always came regularly to meals, and eat them with his customary appetite, which is a very fine and healthy one), and was encouraged in it by his grandmother, who, between ourselves, reader, is a rather silly old woman, much given in her youth to maudlin sentimentalism, and Werterism, and bad forms of Byronism. She would take him aside, pat his head, kiss his cheek, and call him her poor dear boy, and slip money into his pocket, which he neither thanked her for, nor offered to refuse; and he became more firmly persuaded than ever, that he was one of the most ill-used young heroes that ever existed. This we were sorry to see—like Mrs Quickly, we cannot abide swaggerers—and we bethought ourselves of a remedy. Some parents would have got in a rage and thrashed him—but he is a plucky young fellow, and this would only have caused him to consider himself a martyr; others would have mildly reasoned with him—but this would have given his fault too important and serious an air, so we treated him to a little irony and ridicule—caustic, not contemptuous, and more comical than spiteful. Just before beginning this course of treatment, we happened to overhear him making love, in the library, to Charlotte Jones (sister of the before-mentioned admirer of confectionary), a great, fat, lymphatic girl, who was spending a few days with his sisters, and who has no more sentiment or passion in her than so much calipee. However, he seemed to have quite enough for both, and poured forth his romantic devotion with a fervid fluency which I suspect must be the result of practice—for the young scamp is precocious, and conceived his first passion, at the age of nine, for a fine young woman of four-and-twenty. Charlotte, working away the while at a great cabbage-rose, not unlike herself, which she is embroidering in worsted, listened to his raptures with a lethargic calmness contrasting strongly with the impassioned air of the youth, who was no doubt ready, like Walter, Mr Smith’s hero, for the consideration of a kiss (if the placid object of his affections would have consented to such an impropriety), to “take Death at a flying leap”—which is undoubtedly the most astonishing instance of agility on record since the cow jumped over the moon to the tune of “Hi, diddle, diddle.” Our entrance, just as he had got on his knees, and was going to take her hand, somewhat disconcerted him; and we turned the incident to such advantage, that our very first jest at him in the presence of the family caused him (the boy has a fine sense of humour) to retire precipitately from the room, for fear he should compromise his dignity by exploding in laughter. He strove to preserve his gloomy demeanour for a day or two; but finding it of no effect to maintain a stern scowl on his forehead, while his mouth expanded in an unwilling grin, he gave up the attempt; and now greets any allusion to his former tragedy airs with as hearty a laugh as anybody.
Our impression is very strong that Mr Smith is not himself satisfied with his work, and that the undiscriminating applause he has met with in some quarters will not deceive him. He must know that the ornaments of the Life-drama are out of all proportion to the framework, and that the latter is too loosely put together to float far down the crowded stream of time. He has a strong leaning to mysticism, a common vice of the times, and should therefore exclude carefully all ideas which he cannot render clear to himself, and all expressions which fail to convey his meaning clearly to others. He should remember that, though a fine image may be welcomed for its own sake, yet, as a rule, similes and images are only admissible as illustrations, and if they do not render the parent thought more clear, they render it more cloudy. His great want is a proper root-idea, and intelligible theme which shall command the sympathies of other minds: these obtained, he will shake his faults like dewdrops from his mane; and he will find that his tropes, thus disciplined, will not only obtain double force from their fitness, but will also be intrinsically finer than the random growths of accident. It is true that Mr Smith, through his spokesman, Walter, mentions a plan for a poem, his “loved and chosen theme,” (p. 38). He says,
“I will begin in the oldest—Far in God,
When all the ages, and all suns and worlds,
And souls of men and angels lay in Him,
Like unborn forests in an acorn cup.”
A prospect, the mere sketch of which fills us with concern. If we thought he would listen, we would say—No, Mr Smith; don’t begin in the oldest—leave the “dead eternities” alone, and don’t let your “first chorus,” on any account, be “the shouting of the morning stars.” Rather begin, as you propose to end, with “silence,” than in this melancholy way. Let your thoughts be based on the unalterable emotions of the heart, not on the wild driftings of the fancy. Observe all that strongly appeals to the feelings of others and of yourself—let art assist you to select and to combine—your warm imagination will give life to the conception, and your powers of fancy and language will vividly express it. Don’t set down any odd conceit that may strike you about the relation of the sea and the stars, and the moon; but when you conceive an image which, besides being fine in itself, shall bear essential, not accidental, relation to some part of your theme, put it by till your main subject, in its natural expansion, affords it a fitting place.
Following this course, we trust that Alexander will prove worthy of the many illustrious scions of the house of Smith who have distinguished themselves since Adam, and maintain its precedence over the houses of Brown, Jones, and Robinson. Sydney the Reverend—Horace and James of the Rejected Addresses—and William, of the modest and too obscure dramas (noticed by us before), might well become prouder of the patronymic to which they have already lent lustre, when Alexander, mellowed by time, and taught by thought and experience, shall have produced his next and riper work.
THE EPIDEMICS OF THE MIDDLE AGES.[[8]]
This extremely interesting work of Dr Hecker’s consists of three several treatises, or historical sketches, published at different times, and here collected in a single volume. They are translated and published under the direction of the Sydenham Society—a society which has been the means of introducing to the medical profession, and to the English reader, some of the most eminent works of German physicians and physiologists. It is seldom, indeed, that their publications are of the popular and amusing description of the one we have selected for notice; but, speaking of them as a series, they are of that high philosophic character which must render them acceptable to every man of liberal education. How far they are accessible to the public at large we have not the means of knowing, nor whether the purchase of any single volume is a practicable matter to a non-subscriber; but, at all events, means, we think, ought to be taken to place the whole series on the shelves of every public library.
The great plague of the fourteenth century, called in Germany The Black Death, from the dark spots of fatal omen which appeared on the bodies of its victims; the Dancing Mania, which afterwards broke out both in Germany and Italy; and the Sweating Sickness, which had its origin in England, but extended itself also widely upon the Continent—these form the three subjects of Dr Hecker’s book. The dancing mania, known in Germany as St John’s or St Vitus’s Dance, and in Italy as the poison of the Tarantula or Tarantism, will be most likely to present us with novel and curious facts, and we shall be tempted to linger longest upon this topic. Readers of all kinds, whether of Thucydides, or Boccaccio, or Defoe, are familiar with the phenomena and events which characterise a plague, and which bear a great resemblance to each other in all periods of history. We shall, therefore, refrain from dwelling at any length upon the well-known terrors of the Great Mortality or the Black Death.
Yet the subject is one of undying interest. The Great Plague is, in this respect, like the Great Revolution of France; you may read fifty histories of it, and pronounce it to be a topic thoroughly worn out and exhausted; and yet when the fifty-first history is put into your hands, the chance is that you will be led on, and will read to the very last page with almost undiminished interest. The charm is alike in both cases. It is that our humanity is seen in its moments of great, if not glorious excitement—of plenary inspiration of some kind, though it be of an evil spirit—seen in moments when all its passions, good and bad, and the bad chiefly, stand out revealed in full unfettered strength. And the history, in both cases, is of perpetual value and significance to us. Plagues, as our own generation can testify, are no more eradicated or banished from the cities of mankind than political revolutions. They read a lesson to us which, terrible as it is, we are still slow in learning.
We are often haunted with the dread of over-population. This fear may perhaps be encountered by another of a quite opposite description, when we read that in the fourteenth century one quarter at least of the population of the Old World was swept away in the short space of four years! Such is the calculation which Dr Hecker makes, on the best sources of information within his reach. If such devastating plagues arise, as our author thinks, from great physical causes over which man has no control, from an atmospheric poison not traceable to his ignorance or vice, and which no advancement in science can prevent or expel, there is indeed room for an undefined dread of periodical depopulations, putting to the rout all human calculations and all human forethought. But on this point we have our doubts.
“An inquiry into the causes of the Black Death,” says our author, “will not be without important results in the study of the plagues which have visited the world, although it cannot advance beyond generalisation without entering upon a field hitherto uncultivated, and, to this hour, entirely unknown. Mighty revolutions in the organism of the earth, of which we have credible information, had preceded it. From China to the Atlantic the foundations of the earth were shaken—throughout Asia and Europe the atmosphere was in commotion, and endangered, by its baneful influence, both vegetable and animal life.” When, however, Dr Hecker proceeds to specify the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and other terrific events which shook the foundations of the earth from China to the Atlantic, we do not find that the enumeration at all bears out this general description. A large proportion of such disastrous phenomena as he has been able to collect relate to China; and although the plague should be proved to have travelled from the East, it is not traced, as an identical disease, so far eastward as to China, and therefore is but vaguely connected with the great droughts and violent rains which afflicted that region of the earth. Nearer at home, in Europe, we have mention made of “frequent thunderstorms,” and an eruption of Ætna, but thunderstorms and a volcanic eruption have not, on other occasions, given rise to a plague; not to add, that if the atmosphere of Europe was tainted from causes of this kind, springing from its own soil and its own climate, it would be quite superfluous to trace the disease to the East at all. We should merely say that a similar disease broke out in different countries at the same time, demonstrating some quite cosmical or universal cause. The most important fact which is mentioned here, as proving some wide atmospheric derangement, is the “thick stinking mist seen to advance from the East and spread itself over Italy.” But Dr Hecker himself adds, that at such a time natural occurrences would be transformed or exaggerated into miracles; and we are quite sure that any really extraordinary event, occurring simultaneously with the plague, would, without further inquiry, be described as the cause of it. An unusual mist, just as a comet or any unusual meteor, appearing at the time, would be charged with the calamity.
On so obscure a subject we have no desire to advance any dogmatic opinion. There are facts connected with this and other great epidemics which, to men of cautious research, have seemed to point to some widespreading poison, some subtle, deleterious matter diffused through the air, or some abnormal condition of the atmosphere itself. Such there may be, acting either as immediate or predisposing cause of the disease. But to our apprehension, all plagues and pestilences have been bred from two well-known and sufficient causes—famine and filth. Scanty and unwholesome diet first disorders and debilitates the frame, fevers ensue, the foul atmosphere of crowded unventilated dwellings becomes impregnated by breathings that have passed through putrid lungs; and thus the disease, especially in a hot climate, attains to that malignity that the stricken wretch, move him where you will, becomes the centre of infection to all around him, and from his pestiferous dwelling there creeps a poison which invades even the most salubrious portion of the town; which, stealing through the garden-gate and over the flower-beds, enters even into the very palace itself. Doubtless other causes may co-operate, as unusual rains and fogs; the fact that a murrain amongst cattle sometimes accompanies or precedes a plague, indicates local causes of this description; but the true source of the disease lies in the city man has built, in his improvidence or injustice, his ignorance or his sloth.
It is thus that Dr Hecker speaks of the manner in which the disease may be propagated, so far as the agency of man is concerned:—we do not seem to want any quite cosmical influence.
“Thus much from authentic sources of the nature of the Black Death. The descriptions which have been communicated contain, with a few unimportant exceptions, all the symptoms of the Oriental plague, which have been observed in more modern times. No doubt can obtain on this point. The facts are placed clearly before our eyes. We must, however, bear in mind that this violent disease does not always appear in the same form; and that, while the essence of the poison which it produces, and which is separated so abundantly from the body of the patient, remains unchanged, it is proteoform in its varieties, from the almost imperceptible vesicle, unaccompanied by fever, which exists for some time before it extends its poison inwardly, and then excites fevers and buboes, to the fatal form in which carbuncular inflammations fall upon the most important viscera.
“Such was the form which the plague assumed in the fourteenth century, for the accompanying chest affection, which appeared in all the countries whereof we have received any account, cannot, on a comparison with similar and familiar symptoms, be considered as any other than the inflammation in the lungs of modern medicine, a disease which at present only appears sporadically, and owing to a putrid decomposition of the fluids is probably combined with hemorrhages from the vessels of the lungs. Now as every carbuncle, whether it be cutaneous or internal, generates in abundance the matter of contagion which has given rise to it, so therefore must the breaths of the affected have been poisonous in this plague, and on this account its power of contagion wonderfully increased; wherefore the opinion appears incontrovertible that, owing to the accumulated numbers of the diseased, not only individual chambers and houses, but whole cities, were infected; which, moreover, in the middle ages, were, with few exceptions, narrowly built, kept in a filthy state, and surrounded with stagnant ditches. Flight was in consequence of no avail to the timid; for some, though they had sedulously avoided all communication with the diseased and the suspected, yet their clothes were saturated with the pestifierous atmosphere, and every inspiration imparted to them the seeds of the destructive malady which, in the greater number of cases, germinated with but too much fertility. Add to which the usual propagation of the plague through clothes, beds, and a thousand other things to which the pestilential poison adheres,—a propagation which, from want of caution, must have been infinitely multiplied; and since articles of this kind, removed from the access of air, not only retain the matter of contagion for an indefinite period, but also increase its activity, and engender it like a living being, frightful ill consequences followed for many years after the first fury of the pestilence was passed.”
It may be worth noticing that Dr Hecker, or his translator, uses the terms contagion and infection indiscriminately; nor is the question entered into whether the disease is capable of being propagated by mere contact, without inhaling the morbific matter, or becoming inoculated with it through some puncture in the skin. Dr Hecker nowhere gives countenance to such a supposition. The poison would hardly penetrate by mere touch through a sound and healthy skin. Such a belief, however, was likely enough to prevail at a time when we are told that “even the eyes of the patient were considered as sources of contagion, which had the power of acting at a distance, whether on account of their unwonted lustre or the distortion which they always suffer in plague, or whether in conformity with an ancient notion, according to which the sight was considered as the bearer of a demoniacal enchantment.”
Avignon is here mentioned as the first city in which the plague broke out in Europe. We have a report of it from a contemporary physician, Guy de Chauliac, a courageous man, it seems, who “vindicated the honour of medicine by bidding defiance to danger, boldly and constantly assisting the affected, and disdaining the excuse of his colleagues, who held the Arabian notion, that medical aid was unavailing, and that the contagion justified flight.” The plague appeared twice in Avignon, first in the year 1348, and twelve years later, in 1360, “when it returned from Germany.” On the first occasion it raged chiefly amongst the poor; on the second more amongst the higher classes, destroying a great many children, whom it had formerly spared, and but few women. We presume that on the second occasion the plague was re-introduced at once amongst the merchant class of the city, and this would account for fewer women falling victims to it, because men of this class could take precautions for the safety of their wives and daughters. But why a greater number of children should have died, when the women were comparatively spared, is what we will make no attempt to explain.
How fatal it proved at Florence, Boccaccio has recorded. It is from him we learn with certainty that other animals besides man were capable of being infected by the disease—a fact of no little interest in the history of the plague. He mentions that he himself saw two hogs, on the rags of a person who had died of plague, after staggering about for a short time, fall down dead as if they had taken poison. A multitude of dogs, cats, fowls, and other domesticated animals, were, he tells us, fellow-sufferers with man.
In Germany the mortality was not so great as in Italy, but the disease assumed the same character. In France, it is said, many were struck as if by lightning, and died on the spot—and this more frequently among the young and strong than the old. Throughout England the disease spread with great rapidity, men dying in some cases immediately, in others within twelve hours, or at latest in two days. Here, as elsewhere, the inflammatory boils and buboes were recognised at once as prognosticating a fatal issue. It first broke out in the county of Dorset. Few places seem to have escaped; and the mortality was so great that contemporary annalists have reported (with what degree of accuracy we cannot say) that throughout the whole land not more than a tenth part of the inhabitants had survived.
The north of Europe did not escape, nor did all the snows of Russia protect her from this invasion. In Norway the disease broke out in a frightful manner. Nor was the sea a refuge; sailors found no safety in their ships; vessels were seen driving about on the ocean and drifting on the shore, whose crews had perished to the last man.
It is a terrible history, this of a plague. Nevertheless, if we were capable of surveying such events from an elevated position, where past and future were revealed to our view, and the whole scheme of creation unfolded to our knowledge, we should doubtless discover that even plagues and pestilences play their parts for the welfare and advancement of the human race. Nor are we without some glimpses of their utility. Viewing the matter, in the first place, in a quite physiological light, let us suppose that disease has been generated in a great city, that debilitated parents give birth to feeble offspring, that the fever, or whatever it may be, is wasting the strength of whole classes of the population, is it not better that such disease should attain a power and virulence that will enable it to sweep off at once a whole infected generation, men, women, and children, leaving the population to be replaced by the healthier who would survive? would not this be better than to allow the disease to perpetuate itself indefinitely, and thus to continue to multiply from an infected stock? The poison passes on, and searches out other neighbourhoods where the like terrible remedy is needed. Ay, but it passes, you say, into cities and districts where no such curative process, no such restoration of the breed, was called for. But it is always thus with the great laws of nature, or of Providence. Thus far, and no farther! is said to the pestilence as well as to the ocean; but the line along the beach is not kept or measured with that petty precision which a land-surveyor would assuredly have suggested. Man’s greatness arises in part from this struggle with an external nature, which threatens from time to time to overwhelm him. There is, according to his measurement of things, a dreadful surplus of power and activity, both in the organic and the inorganic world. Nowhere are the forces of nature exactly graduated to suit his taste or convenience. Happily not. Man would sink into the tameness and insipidity of an Arcadian shepherd, or the sheep he feeds and fondles, if every wind that blew were exactly tempered to his own susceptibility.
But the moral effects of plague and pestilence—what good thing can be said of them? A general dissoluteness, an unblushing villany, for the most part prevails: a few instances of heroic virtue brighten out above the corrupted mass. Well, is it nothing, then, that from time to time our nature should be fully revealed to us in its utmost strength for good or for evil? A very hideous revelation it may sometimes be, but not the less salutary on this account. The mask of hypocrisy is torn off a whole city; in one moment is revealed to a whole people what its morality, what its piety is worth. Of the island of Cyprus, we are told, that an earthquake shook its foundations, and was accompanied by so frightful a hurricane that the inhabitants, who had slain their Mahometan slaves in order that they might not themselves be subjected by them, fled in dismay in all directions. Who had slain their Mahometan slaves! Their Christianity had brought them thus far on the road of moral culture! At Lübeck, the Venice of the North, the wealthy merchants were not, in this extremity, unmindful of the safety of their souls; they spent their last strength in carrying their treasures to monasteries and churches. Useless for all other purposes, their gold would now purchase heaven. To such intelligent views of Christianity had they attained! But the treasure had no longer any charm for the monks; it might be infected; and even with them the thirst for gold was in abeyance. They shut their gates upon it; yet still it was cast to them over the convent walls. “People would not brook an impediment to the last pious work to which they were driven by despair.”
Did all desert their post, or belie their professions? No; far from it. Amongst other instances, take that of the Sisters of Charity at the Hotel Dieu. “Though they lost their lives evidently from contagion, and their numbers were several times renewed, there was still no want of fresh candidates, who, strangers to the unchristian fear of death, piously devoted themselves to their holy calling.”
But how cruel had their fears made the base multitude of Christendom! They rose against the Jews. They sought an enemy. The wells were poisoned; the Jews had poisoned them. Sordid natures invariably strive to lose the sense of their own calamity in a vindictive passion against some supposed author of it. For this reason it is, that, whatever the nature of the public distress may be, they always fasten it upon some human antagonist, whom they can have the luxury of hating and reviling. If they cannot cure, they can at least revenge themselves.
“The noble and the mean fearlessly bound themselves by an oath to extirpate the Jews by fire and sword, and to snatch them from their protectors, of whom the number was so small, that throughout all Germany but few places can be mentioned where these unfortunate people were not regarded as outlaws, and martyred and burnt. Solemn summonses were issued from Berne, to the towns of Basle, Freyburg, and Strasburg, to pursue the Jews as prisoners. The burgomasters and senators, indeed, opposed this requisition; but in Basle the populace obliged them to bind themselves by an oath to burn the Jews, and to forbid persons of that community from entering their city for the space of two hundred years. Upon this all the Jews in Basle, whose number could not be inconsiderable, were enclosed in a wooden building, constructed for the purpose, and burnt together with it, upon the mere outcry of the people, without sentence or trial, which indeed would have availed them nothing. Soon after the same thing took place at Freyburg. A regular diet was held at Bennefeeld, in Alsace, where the bishops, lords, and barons, as also deputies of the counties and towns, consulted how they should proceed with regard to the Jews: and when the deputies of Strasburg—not, indeed, the bishop of this town, who proved himself a violent fanatic—spoke in favour of the persecuted, as nothing criminal was substantiated against them, a great outcry was raised, and it was vehemently asked why, if so, they had covered their wells and removed their buckets?” [The wells were not used in the mere suspicion that they were poisoned, and then the covering of them up became a proof with these reasoners that they had been poisoned]. “A sanguinary decree was resolved upon, of which the populace, who obeyed here the call of the nobles and superior clergy, became but the too willing executioners. Wherever the Jews were not burnt they were at least banished, and so being compelled to wander about, they fell into the hands of the country people, who without humanity, and regardless of all laws, persecuted them with fire and sword. At Spires the Jews, driven to despair, assembled in their own habitations, which they set on fire, and thus consumed themselves with their families.”
The atrocities, in short, that were committed against this unhappy people were innumerable. At Strasburg 2000 men were burnt in their own burial-ground. At Mayence, 12,000 are said to have been put to a cruel death. At Eslingen the whole Jewish community burned themselves in their own synagogue. Those whom the Christians saved they insisted upon baptising! And, as fanaticism begets fanaticism, Jewish mothers were seen throwing their children on the pile, to prevent their being baptised, and then precipitating themselves into the flames. From many of the accused the rack extorted a confession of guilt; and as some Christians also were sentenced to death for poisoning the wells, Dr Hecker suggests that it is not improbable the very belief in the prevalence of the crime had induced some men of morbid imagination really to commit it. When a faith in witchcraft, he observes, was prevalent, many an old woman was tempted to mutter spells against her neighbour. The false accusation had ended in producing, if not the crime itself, yet the criminal intention.
When we remember what took place in England under the reign of one Titus Oates, we shall not conclude that these terrible hallucinations of the public mind are proofs of any very peculiar condition of barbarism. Then, as at the later epoch to which we have alluded, a very marvellous plot was devised and thoroughly credited. All the Jews throughout Christendom were under the control and government of certain superiors at Toledo—a secret and mysterious council of Rabbis—from whom they received their commands. These prepared the poison with their own hands, from spiders, owls, and other venomous animals, and distributed it in little bags, with injunctions where it was to be thrown. Dr Hecker gives us, in an appendix, an official account of the “Confessions made on the 15th September, in the year of our Lord 1348, in the castle of Chillon, by the Jews arrested in Neustadt on the charge of poisoning the wells, springs, and other places, also food, &c., with the design of destroying and extirpating all Christians.” These confessions were, of course, produced by the rack, or by the threat of torture, and the manifest inutility of any defence or denial. Nor must it be forgotten, that the official report was drawn up after the whole of the Jews at Neustadt had been burnt on this very charge. Amongst these confessions is one of Balaviginus, a Jewish physician, arrested at Chillon “in consequence of being found in the neighbourhood.” He was put for a short time upon the rack, and, after being taken down, “confessed, after much hesitation, that, about ten weeks before, the Rabbi Jacob of Toledo sent him, by a Jewish boy, some poison in the mummy of an egg: it was a powder sewed up in a thin leathern pouch, accompanied by a letter, commanding him, on penalty of excommunication, and by his required obedience to the law, to throw the poison into the larger and more frequented wells of Thonon.” Similar letters had been sent to other Jews. All Jews, indeed, were under the necessity of obeying these injunctions. He, Balaviginus, had done so; he had thrown the poison into several wells. It was a powder half red and half black. Red and black spots were produced by the plague; it was right that this poison should partake of these two colours.
Conveyed over the lake from Chillon to Clarens to point out the well into which he had thrown the powder, Balaviginus, “on being conducted to the spot, and having seen the well, acknowledged that to be the place, saying, ‘This is the well into which I put the poison.’ The well was examined in his presence, and the linen cloth in which the poison had been wrapped was found. He acknowledged this to be the linen which had contained the poison; he described it as being of two colours—red and black.” We follow in imagination this Jewish physician. Taken from the rack to his cell, he repeats whatever absurdity his unrelenting persecutors put into his mouth. Rabbi Jacob of Toledo—mummy of an egg—what you will. Conducted to the well—yes, this was the well; shown the very rag—yes, this was the rag;—and the powder? yes, it was red and black. What scorn and bitterness must have mingled with the agony of the Jewish physician!
Amidst all this we hear the scourge and miserable chant of the Flagellants, stirring up the people to fresh persecutions, and infecting their minds with a superstition as terrible as the vice it pretended to expiate. This was not, indeed, their first appearance in Europe; nor did the Flagellants do more, at the commencement, than exaggerate the sort of piety their own church had taught them. Happily, as their fanaticism rose, they put themselves in opposition to the hierarchy, and were thus the sooner dispersed. In their spiritual exultation they presumed to reform or to dispense with the priesthood. They found themselves, therefore, in their turn subjected to grave denunciations, and pronounced to be one cause of the wrath of Heaven.
All this time what were the physicians doing? In the history of the plague, written by a physician, the topic, we may be sure, is not forgotten. But the information we glean is of a very scanty, unsatisfactory character. As to the origin of the plague—“A grand conjunction of the three superior planets, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, in the sign of Aquarius, which took place, according to Guy de Chauliac, on the 24th March 1345, was generally received as its principal cause. In fixing the day, this physician, who was deeply versed in astrology, did not agree with others; wherefore there arose various disputations of weight in that age, but of none in ours.” The medical faculty of Paris pronounced the same opinion. Being commissioned to report on the causes and the remedies of this Great Mortality, they commence thus: “It is known that in India, and the vicinity of the Great Sea, the constellations which emulated the rays of the sun, and the warmth of the heavenly fire, exerted their power especially against that sea, and struggled violently with its waters.” Hence vapours and corrupted fogs; hence no wholesome rain, or hail, or snow, or dew, could refresh the earth. But notwithstanding this learning, quite peculiar to the age, they were not more at fault than other learned bodies have been in later times, in the practical remedies they suggested against the disease. They were not entirely occupied in fixing the day when Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn, had combated the sun over the great Indian Ocean. “They did,” as Dr Hecker says, “what human intellect could do in the actual condition of the healing art; and their knowledge of the disease was by no means despicable.” When fevers have attained to that malignancy that they take the name of plagues, they have escaped, we suspect, from the control of the physician;—just as when fires take the name of conflagrations, you must devote all your efforts to the saving of what is yet unconsumed, and checking the extension of the flames.
Amongst the consequences of the plague, Dr Hecker notices that the church acquired treasures and large properties in land, even to a greater extent than after the Crusades; and that, on the subsidence of the calamity, many entered the priesthood, or flocked to the monasteries, who had no other motive than to participate in this wealth. He adds, also, that,—
“After the cessation of the Black Plague, a greater fecundity in women was everywhere remarkable—a grand phenomenon, which, from its occurrence after every destructive pestilence, proves to conviction, if any occurrence can do so, the prevalence of a higher power in the direction of general organic life. Marriages were, almost without exception, prolific, and double and treble births were more frequent than at other times; under which head we should remember the strange remark, that after the ‘great mortality’ the children were said to have got fewer teeth than before; at which contemporaries were mightily shocked, and even later writers have felt surprise.
“If we examine the grounds of this oft-repeated assertion, we shall find that they were astonished to see children cut twenty, or at most twenty-two teeth, under the supposition that a greater number had formerly fallen to their share. Some writers of authority, as, for example, the physician Savonarola, at Ferrara, who probably looked for twenty-eight teeth in children, published their opinions on this subject. Others copied from them without seeing for themselves, as often happens in other matters which are equally evident; and thus the world believed in a miracle of an imperfection in the human body, which had been caused by the Black Plague.”
That a fresh impetus would be given to population seems to us quite sufficiently accounted for, without calling into aid any “higher power in the direction of general organic life.” Men and women would marry early; and the very fact of their having survived the plague would, in general, prove that they were healthy subjects, or had been well and temperately brought up. There would be the same impetus to population that an extensive emigration would cause, and an emigration that had carried away most of the sick and the feeble. The belief that double and treble births were more frequent than at other times, may perhaps be explained in the same manner as the belief that there were fewer teeth than before in the human head. No accurate observations had been at all made upon the subject.
We come next in order to The Dancing Mania—an epidemic of a quite different character. Not, indeed, as the name might imply, that the convulsive dance was a very slight affliction—it was felt to be quite otherwise; but because it belongs to that class of nervous maladies in which there is great room for mental or psychical influence. Such disorders spring up in a certain condition of the body, but the form they assume will depend on social circumstances, or the ideas current at the time. And thus Dr Hecker finds no difficulty in arranging the Convulsionnaires of France, or the early Methodists of England and Wales, in the same category as the maniacal dancers of Germany. It was in all the cases a physical tendency of a similar character, brought out under the influence of different ideas.
Dr Hecker mentions a case which, from the simplicity of the facts, would form a good introduction to others of a more complicated character. In the year 1787, at a cotton-manufactory at Hodden Bridge, in Lancashire, a girl put a mouse into the bosom of another girl, who had a great dread of mice. It threw her into a fit, and the fit continued, with the most violent convulsions, for twenty-four hours. On the following day three other girls were seized in the same way; on the day after six more. A report was now spread that a strange disease had been introduced into the factory by a bag of cotton opened in the house. Others who had not even seen the infected, but only heard of their convulsions, were seized with the same fits. In three days, the number of the sufferers had reached to twenty-four. The symptoms were, a sense of great anxiety, strangulation, and very strong convulsions, which lasted from one to twenty-four hours, and of so violent a nature that it required four or five persons to prevent the patients from tearing their hair, and dashing their heads against the floor and walls. Dr St Clare was sent for from Preston. Dr St Clare deserves to have his name remembered. The ingenious man took with him a portable electrical machine. The electric shock cured all his patients without an exception. When this was known, and the belief could no longer hold its ground that the plague had been brought in by the cotton bag, no fresh person was affected.
If we substitute for the cotton bag a belief in some demoniacal influence, compelling people to dance against their will, we have the dancing mania of Germany. Unhappily there was no St Clare at hand, with his electrical machine, to give a favourable shock to body and mind at once, and thus disperse the malady before it gathered an overpowering strength by the very numbers of the infected.
“The effects of the Black Death,” writes Dr Hecker (whose account of the disorder we cannot do better than give, with some abridgments), “had not yet subsided, when a strange delusion arose in Germany. It was a convulsion which in the most extraordinary manner infuriated the human frame, and excited the astonishment of contemporaries for more than two centuries, since which time it has never reappeared. It was called the Dance of St John, or of St Vitus, on account of the Bacchantic leaps by which it was characterised, and which gave to those affected, whilst performing their wild dance, and screaming and foaming with fury, all the appearance of persons possessed. It did not remain confined to particular localities, but was propagated by the sight of the sufferers, like a demoniacal epidemic, over the whole of Germany and the neighbouring countries to the north-west, which were already prepared for its reception by the prevailing opinions of the times.
“So early as the year 1374, assemblages of men and women were seen at Aix-la-Chapelle, who had come out of Germany, and who, united by one common delusion, exhibited to the public, both in the streets and in the churches, the following strange spectacle. They formed circles hand in hand, and, appearing to have lost all control over their senses, continued dancing, regardless of the bystanders, for hours together, in wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion. They then complained of extreme oppression, and groaned as if in the agonies of death, until they were swathed in clothes, bound tightly round their waists, upon which they again recovered, and remained free from complaint until the next attack. This practice of swathing was resorted to on account of the tympany which followed these spasmodic ravings; but the bystanders frequently relieved patients in a less artificial manner, by thumping or trampling upon the parts affected. While dancing, they neither saw nor heard, being insensible to external impressions through the senses, but were haunted by visions, their fancies conjuring up spirits, whose names they shrieked out; and some of them afterwards asserted that they felt as if they had been immersed in a stream of blood, which obliged them to leap so high. Others, during the paroxysm, saw the heavens open, and the Saviour enthroned with the Virgin Mary, according as the religious notions of the age were strangely and variously reflected in their imaginations.”
The disease spread itself in two directions. It extended from Aix-la-Chapelle through the towns of the Netherlands, and also through the Rhenish towns. In Liege, Utrecht, and many other towns of Belgium, the dancers appeared with garlands in their hair, and their waists already girt with a cloth or bandage, that they might receive immediate relief on the attack of the tympany. It seems that the crowd around were often more ready to administer relief by kicks and blows than by drawing this bandage tight. The most opposite feelings seem to have been excited in the multitude by these exhibitions. Sometimes an idle and vicious mob would take advantage of them, and they became the occasion of much riot and debauchery. More frequently, however, the demoniacal origin of the disease, of which few men doubted, led to its being regarded with astonishment and horror. Religious processions were instituted on its account, masses and hymns were sung, and the whole power of the priesthood was called in to exorcise the evil spirit. The malady rose to its greatest height in some of the towns on the Rhine. At Cologne the number of the possessed amounted to more than five hundred, whilst at Metz the streets are said to have been filled (numbering women and children together) with eleven hundred dancers. Even those idle vagabonds who, for their own purposes, imitated their convulsive movements, assisted to spread the disorder; for in these maladies the susceptible are infected quite as easily by the imitation as by the reality.
The physicians stood aloof. Acknowledged as a demoniacal possession, they left the treatment of the disease entirely to the priesthood; and their exorcisms were not without avail. But it was necessary to this species of remedy that the patients should have faith in the church and its holy ministers. Without faith there would certainly, in such a case, be no cure; and, unhappily, the report had been spread by some irreverend schismatics that the disorder itself was owing—to what will our readers suppose?—to an imperfect baptism—to the baptism of children by the hands of unchaste priests. Where this notion prevailed, the exorcism, we need not say, was unavailing.
The malady first bore the name of St John’s Dance, afterwards that of St Vitus’s. This second name it took from the mere circumstance that St Vitus was the saint appealed to for its cure. A legend had been framed with a curious disregard—even for a legend—of all history and chronology, in which St Vitus, who suffered martyrdom, as the church records, under the Emperor Domitian, is described as praying, just before he bent his neck to the sword, that he might protect from the Dancing Mania all those who should solemnise the day of his commemoration, and fast upon its eve. The prayer was granted; a voice from heaven was heard saying, “Vitus, thy prayer is accepted.” He became, of course, the patron saint of those afflicted with the dancing plague. But the name under which it first appeared, of St John’s Dance, receives from Dr Hecker an explanation which points out to us a probable origin of the disease itself, or of the peculiar form which it assumed.
“The connection,” he says, “which John the Baptist had with the dancing mania of the fourteenth century, was of a totally different character. He was originally far from being a protecting saint to those who were attacked, or one who would be likely to give them relief from a malady considered as the work of the devil. On the contrary, the manner in which he was worshipped afforded an important and very evident cause for its development. From the remotest period, perhaps even so far back as the fourth century, St John’s day was solemnised with all sorts of strange and rude customs, of which the original mystical meaning was variously disfigured among different nations by superadded relics of heathenism. Thus the Germans transferred to the festival of St John’s day an ancient heathen usage—the kindling of the ‘hodfyr,’ which was forbidden them by St Boniface; and the belief subsists even to the present day, that people and animals that have leaped through these flames, or their smoke, are protected for a whole year from fevers and other diseases, as if by a kind of baptism by fire. Bacchanalian dances, which have originated from similar causes among all the rude nations of the earth, and the wild extravagancies of a heated imagination, were the constant accompaniments of this half-heathen, half-christian festival.”
In a note at a subsequent page Dr Hecker cites some curious passages to show what in the middle ages took place at “St John’s fires.” Bones, horns, and other rubbish were heaped together to be consumed in smoke, while persons of all ages danced round the flames as if they had been possessed. Others seized burning flambeaus, and made a circuit of the fields, in the supposition that they thereby screened them from danger; while others again turned a cartwheel, to represent the retrograde movement of the sun. The last circumstance takes back the imagination to the old primitive worship of the sun; and perhaps the very fires of St John might date their history from those kindled in honour of Baal or Moloch. Dr Hecker suggests that mingling with these heathen traditions or customs a remembrance of the history of St John’s death—that dance which occasioned his decapitation—might also have had its share in determining the peculiar manner in which this saint’s day should be observed. However that may be, as we find that the first dancers in Aix-la-Chapelle appeared with St John’s name in their mouths, the conjecture is very probable that the wild revels of St John’s day had given rise, if not to the disease, yet to the type or form in which it appeared.
At a subsequent period, indeed, when the disorder had assumed, if we may so speak, a more settled aspect, the name of St John was no otherwise associated with it than the name of St Vitus. People danced upon his festival to obtain a cure. And these periodical dances, while they relieved the patients, assisted also to perpetuate the malady. Throughout the whole of June, we are told, prior to the festival of St John, many men felt a disquietude and restlessness which they were unable to overcome. They were dejected, timid, and anxious; wandered about in an unsettled state, being tormented with twitching pains, which seized them suddenly in different parts; they eagerly expected the eve of St John’s day, in the confident hope that, by dancing at the altars of this saint, they would be freed from all their sufferings. Nor were they disappointed. By dancing and raving for three hours to the utmost scope of their desires, they obtained peace for the rest of the year. For a long time, however, we hear of cases which assumed the most terrific form. Speaking of a period which embraced the close of the fifteenth century, Dr Hecker says:—
“The St Vitus’s dance attacked people of all stations, especially those who led a sedentary life, such as shoemakers and tailors; but even the most robust peasants abandoned their labours in the fields, as if they were possessed by evil spirits; and thus those affected were seen assembling indiscriminately, from time to time, at certain appointed places, and, unless prevented by the lookers-on, continuing to dance without intermission, until their very last breath was expended. Their fury and extravagance of demeanour so completely deprived them of their senses, that many of them dashed their brains out against the walls and corners of buildings, or rushed headlong into rapid rivers, where they found a watery grave. Roaring and foaming as they were, the bystanders could only succeed in restraining them by placing benches and chairs in their way, so that, by the high leaps they were tempted to take, their strength might be exhausted.”
Music, however, was a still better resource. It excited, but it hastened forward the paroxysm, and doubtless reduced it to some measure and rhythm. The magistrates even hired musicians for the purpose of carrying the dancers the more rapidly through the attack, and directed that athletic men should be sent among them, in order to complete their exhaustion. A marvellous story is related on the authority of one Felix Plater: Several powerful men being commissioned to dance with a girl who had the dancing mania till she had recovered from her disorder, they successively relieved each other, and danced on for the space of four weeks! at the end of which time the patient fell down exhausted, was carried to an hospital, and there recovered. She had never once undressed, was entirely regardless of the pain of her lacerated feet, and had merely sat down occasionally to take some nourishment or to slumber, and even then “the hopping movement of her body continued.”
Happily, however, this mania grew more rare every year, so that in the beginning of the seventeenth century we may be said to be losing sight of it in Germany. Nor shall we follow out its history further in that country, because the same disorder, under a different form, made its appearance in Italy, and we must by no means neglect to notice the dancing mania which was so universally attributed to the bite of the tarantula. Whatever part the festival of St John the Baptist performed in Germany, as an exciter of the disease, that part was still more clearly performed in Italy by the popular belief in the venom of a spider.
We shall not go back with Dr Hecker into the fears or superstitions of classical times as to the bite of certain spiders or lizards; we must keep more strictly to our text; we must start from the period when men’s minds were still open to pain and alarm on account of the frequent return of the plague.
“The bite of venomous spiders, or rather the unreasonable fear of its consequences, excited at such a juncture, though it could not have done so at an earlier period, a violent nervous disorder, which, like St Vitus’s dance in Germany, spread by sympathy, increasing in severity as it took a wider range, and still further extending its ravages from its long continuance. Thus, from the middle of the fourteenth century, the furies of The Dance brandished their scourge over afflicted mortals; and music, for which the inhabitants of Italy now probably for the first time manifested susceptibility and talent, became capable of exciting ecstatic attacks in those affected, and thus furnished the magical means of exorcising their melancholy.”
Does the learned doctor insinuate that the Italians owed their natural taste for music to this invasion of Tarantism?
“At the close of the fifteenth century we find that Tarantism had spread beyond the boundaries of Apulia, and that the fear of being bitten by venomous spiders had increased. Nothing short of death itself was expected from the wound which these insects inflicted; and if those who were bitten escaped with their lives, they were said to be pining away in a desponding state of lassitude. Many became weak-sighted or hard of hearing; some lost the power of speech; and all were insensible to ordinary causes of excitement. Nothing but the flute or the cithern afforded them relief. At the sound of these instruments they awoke as if by enchantment, opened their eyes, and moving slowly at first, according to the measure of the music, were, as the time quickened, gradually hurried on to the most passionate dance. It was generally observable that country people, who were rude and ignorant of music, evinced on these occasions an unusual degree of grace, as if they had been well practised in elegant movements of the body; for it is a peculiarity in nervous disorders of this kind that the organs of motion are in an altered condition, and are completely under the control of the overstrained spirits.”
This increased agility and grace of movement is by no means to be discredited by the reader. It is a symptom which distinguishes one class of epileptic patients. Some have attributed it to an over-excitement of the cerebellum. However that may be, there are greater wonders than this contained in our most sober and trustworthy books on the disorders of the nervous system. We continue the account:—
“Cities and villages alike resounded throughout the summer season with the notes of fifes, clarinets, and Turkish drums; and patients were everywhere to be met with who looked to dancing as their only remedy. Alexander ab Alexandro, who gives this account, saw a young man in a remote village who was seized with a violent attack of Tarantism. He listened with eagerness and a fixed stare to the sound of a drum, and his graceful movements gradually became more and more violent, until his dancing was converted into a succession of frantic leaps, which required the utmost exertion of his whole strength. In the midst of this overstrained exertion of mind and body the music suddenly ceased, and he immediately fell powerless to the ground, where he lay senseless and motionless until its magical effect again aroused him to a renewal of his impassioned performances.”
We have put the expression “mind and body” in italics, because we may as well take this opportunity to observe, that although convulsions of this kind are excited, and assume a certain form on account of the predominance of some idea, yet, when once called forth, they are almost entirely mechanical in their nature. Mere animal excitability—what is called the reflex action, or other automatic movements quite as little associated with the immediate operations of “mind”—carry on the rest of the process. And it is some consolation to think that the appearance of pain and distress which marks convulsive disorders of all descriptions, is, for the most part, illusory. The premonitory symptoms may be very distressing, but the condition of the patient, when the fit is on, is that of insensibility to pain.
The general conviction was, that by music and dancing the poison of the tarantula was distributed over the whole body, and expelled through the skin; but, unfortunately, it was also believed that if the slightest vestige of it remained behind the disorder would break out again. Thus there was no confidence excited in a perfect cure. Men who had danced themselves well one summer watched the next summer for the returning symptoms, and found in themselves what they looked for. Thus—
“The number of those affected by it increased beyond belief, for whoever had actually been, or even fancied that he had been once bitten by a poisonous spider or scorpion, made his appearance annually whenever the merry notes of the Tarantella resounded. Inquisitive females joined the throng and caught the disease—not indeed from the poison of the spider, but from the mental poison which they eagerly received through the eye; and thus the cure of the Tarantati gradually became established as a regular festival of the populace.”
It was customary for whole bands of musicians to traverse Italy during the summer months, and the cure of the disordered was undertaken on a grand scale. This season of dancing and music was called “The women’s little carnival,” for it was women more especially who conducted the arrangements. It was they, too, it seems, who paid the musicians their fee. The music itself received its due share of study and attention. There were different kinds of the Tarantella (as the curative melody was called) suited to every variety of the ailment.
One very curious circumstance connected with this disease must not pass unnoticed—the passion excited by certain colours. Amongst the Germans, those afflicted by St Vitus’s dance were enraged by any garment of the colour of red. Amongst the Italians, on the contrary, red colours were generally liked. Some preferred one colour, some another, but the devotion to the chosen colour was one of the most extraordinary symptoms which the disease manifested in Italy. The colour that pleased the patient he was enamoured of; the colour that displeased excited his utmost fury.
“Some preferred yellow, others were enraptured with green; and eyewitnesses describe this rage for colours as so extraordinary that they can scarcely find words with which to express their astonishment. No sooner did the patients obtain a sight of their favourite colour than they rushed like infuriated animals towards the object, devoured it with their eager looks, kissed and caressed it in every possible way, and, gradually resigning themselves to softer sensations, adopted the languishing expression of enamoured lovers, and embraced the handkerchief, or whatever article it might be which was presented to them, with the most intense ardour, while the tears streamed from their eyes as if they were completely overwhelmed by the inebriating impression on their senses.
“The dancing fits of a certain Capuchin friar in Tarentum excited so much curiosity that Cardinal Cajetano proceeded to the monastery that he might see with his own eyes what was going on. As soon as the monk, who was in the midst of his dance, perceived the spiritual prince clothed in his red garments, he no longer listened to the tarantella of the musicians, but with strange gestures endeavoured to approach the cardinal, as if he wished to count the very threads of his scarlet robe, and to allay his intense longing by its odour. The interference of the spectators, and his own respect, prevented his touching it, and thus, the irritation of his senses not being appeased, he fell into a state of such anguish and disquietude that he presently sunk down in a swoon, from which he did not recover until the cardinal compassionately gave him his cape. This he immediately seized in the greatest ecstasy, and pressed, now to his breast, now to his forehead and cheeks, and then again commenced his dance as if in the frenzy of a love fit.”
Another curious symptom, which was probably connected with this passion for colour, was an ardent longing for the sea. These over-susceptible people were attracted irresistibly to the boundless expanse of the blue ocean, and lost themselves in its contemplation. Some were carried so far by this vague passionate longing as to cast themselves into the waves.
The persuasion of the inevitable and fatal consequences of being bitten by the tarantula was so general that it exercised a dominion over the strongest minds. Men who in their sober moments considered the disorder as a species of nervous affection depending on the imagination, were themselves brought under the influence of this imagination, and suffered from the disorder at the approach of the dreaded tarantula. A very striking anecdote of this kind is told of the Bishop of Foligno. Quite sceptical as to the venom of the insect, he allowed himself to be bitten by a tarantula. But he had not measured the strength of his own imagination, however well he had estimated the real malignancy of the spider. The bishop fell ill, nor was there any cure for him but the music and the dance. Many reverend old gentlemen, it is said, to whom this remedy appeared highly derogatory, only exaggerated their symptoms by delaying to have recourse to what, after all, was found to be the true and sole specific.
But even popular errors are not eternal. This of Tarantism continued, our author tells us, throughout the whole of the seventeenth century, but gradually declined till it became limited to single cases. “It may therefore be not unreasonably maintained,” he concludes, “that the Tarantism of modern times bears nearly the same relation to the original malady as the St Vitus’s dance which still exists, and certainly has all along existed, bears, in certain cases, to the original dancing mania of the dancers of St John.”
In a subsequent chapter, our author informs us that a disease of a similar character existed in Abyssinia, or still exists, for the authority he quotes is that of an English surgeon who resided nine years in Abyssinia, from 1810 to the year 1819. We cannot pretend to say that we have ever seen the book, which the learned German has, however, not permitted to escape him—we have never seen the Life and Adventures of Nathaniel Pearce, written by himself; but, judging by the extract here given, Nathaniel Pearce must be a person worth knowing, he writes with so much candour and simplicity. The disease is called in Abyssinia the Tigretier, because it occurs most frequently in the Tigrè country. The first remedy resorted to is the introduction of a learned Dofter, “who reads the Gospel of St John, and drenches the patient with cold water daily.” If this does not answer, then the relations hire a band of trumpeters, drummers, and fifers, and buy a quantity of liquor; all the young men and women of the place assemble at the patient’s house, and she (for it is generally a woman), arrayed in all the finery and trinkets that can be borrowed from the neighbours, is excited by the music to dance, day after day if necessary, till she drops down from utter exhaustion. The disease is attended with a great emaciation; and the doctor says “he was almost alarmed to see one nearly a skeleton move with such strength.” He then proceeds to recount his own domestic calamity in a strain of the most commendable candour:—
“I could not have ventured to write this from hearsay, nor could I conceive it possible until I was obliged to put this remedy in practice upon my own wife, who was seized with the same disorder. I at first thought that a whip would be of some service, and one day attempted a few strokes when unnoticed by any person, we being by ourselves, and I having a strong suspicion that this ailment sprang from the weak minds of women, who were encouraged in it for the sake of the grandeur, rich dress, and music which accompany the cure. But how much was I surprised, the moment I struck a light blow, thinking to do good, to find that she became like a corpse; and even the joints of her fingers became so stiff that I could not straighten them. Indeed, I really thought that she was dead, and immediately made it known to the people in the house that she had fainted, but did not tell them the cause; upon which they immediately brought music, which I had for many days denied them, and which soon revived her; and I then left the house to her relations, to cure her at my expense. One day I went privately with a companion to see my wife dance, and kept at a short distance, as I was ashamed to go near the crowd. In looking steadfastly upon her, while dancing or jumping, more like a deer than a human being, I said that it certainly was not my wife; at which my companion burst into a fit of laughter, from which he could scarcely refrain all the way home.”
The capability of sustaining the most violent exercise, for a long time together, and on very little food, is not one of the least perplexities attendant upon these nervous or epileptic diseases. The partial suspension of sensation and volition, by sparing the brain, may have something to do with it. But into scientific perplexities of this kind we cannot now enter. One plain and homely caution is derivable from all these histories. Good sense is a great preservative of health. Do not voluntarily make a fool of yourself, or your folly may become in turn the master of your reason. Epilepsy has been brought on by the simulation of epilepsy. We doubt not that a man might dance to his own shadow, and talk to it, as it danced before him on the wall, till he drove himself into a complete frenzy. A sect in America thought fit to introduce certain grimaces, laughing, weeping, and the like, into their public service. It was not long before their grimaces, in some of their numbers, became involuntary; the muscles of the face had escaped the control of the will. A decided tongue-mania was exhibited a short time amongst the Irvingites. Happily, in the present state of society, men’s minds are called off into so many directions, that a predominant idea of this kind has little chance of establishing itself in that tyrannous manner which we have seen possible in the middle ages. But it is better not to play with edged tools. If people will stand round a table, fixing their minds on one idea—that a certain mysterious influence will pass through their fingers to move the table—they will lose, for a time, the voluntary command over their own fingers, which will exert themselves without any volition or consciousness on their part. They are entering, in fact, into that state which, in the olden time, was considered a demoniacal possession; so that, speaking from this point of view, one may truly say that “Satan does turn the table,” but it is by entering into the table-turner. When we have been asked whether there is anything in mesmerism, we have always answered—a great deal more than you ought, without medical advice, to make trial of. Nor do we at all admire the performance of the so-called electro-biologist. Experiments in the interest of science are permissible; but is it fit that any one should practise the art of inducing a temporary state of idiocy in persons of weak or susceptible nerves, for the purpose of collecting a crowd, and passing round the hat?
The subject of the third treatise of Dr Hecker is the Sweating Sickness. This third part is more miscellaneous than its predecessors, and we have no space to do justice to its varied and sometimes disputable matter. Dr Hecker describes the sweating sickness as a legacy left us by the civil wars of York and Lancaster. It first developed itself in Richmond’s army, which had been collected from abroad, over-fatigued by long marches in a very damp season, and probably ill supplied with rations. Its rapid extension through the cities he attributes to the intemperance of the English, to their overfeeding, and the want of cleanliness in their houses. Gluttony, and the filth of the rush-covered floors, he detects even amongst the wealthiest of the land. For a minute description of the disease, and the Doctor’s investigation into the nature of it, we must refer to the book itself.
On the physicians, and the manner in which they addressed themselves to the encounter of this strange calamity, there is a passage which it may be instructive to peruse:—
“The physicians could do little or nothing for the people in this extremity. They are nowhere alluded to throughout this epidemic, and even those who might have come forward to succour their fellow-citizen, had fallen into the errors of Galen, and their dialectic minds sank under this appalling phenomenon. This holds good even of the famous Thomas Linacre, subsequently physician in ordinary to two monarchs, and founder of the College of Physicians in 1518. In the prime of his youth he had been an eyewitness of the events at Oxford, and survived even the second and third eruption of the sweating sickness; but in none of his writings do we find a single word respecting this disease, which is of such permanent importance. In fact, the restorers of the medical science of ancient Greece, who were followed by all the most enlightened men in Europe, with the single exception of Linacre, occupied themselves rather with the ancient terms of art than with actual observation, and in their critical researches overlooked the important events that were passing before their eyes. This reminds us of the later Greek physicians, who for four hundred years paid no attention to the smallpox, because they could find no description of it in the immortal works of Galen!”
Who shall say, in reading such passages, that the New Philosophy of Bacon, which reads now like old common-sense, was not sadly wanted, if the learned physician, while feeling his patient’s pulse, could see only with the eyes of Galen? In the fourteenth century we see the physician busied with his astrology, and laboriously fixing the day when Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, did battle with the sun over the great Indian Ocean; in the sixteenth we find him, with quite dialectic mind, absorbed in the study of his classical authorities; at the present time we may truly say that there are no inquiries conducted with a more philosophical spirit, or with greater zeal and energy, than those which relate to the human frame, its functions and its diseases. The extreme complexity of the subject renders our progress slow. And yet progress can hardly be said to have been slow. Let any one take up that admirable little manual on The Nervous System, by Dr Herbert Mayo, and compare it with any work a hundred years old: it is a new science; and that not only from the new facts which a Robert Bell and a Marshall Hall, and other distinguished men in France and Germany, have added to our knowledge, but from the fine spirit of philosophical inquiry which presides over the whole. We have not only left astrology behind, we have not only left behind the undue reverence to classical authority, but we have thrown aside that dislike and depreciation of physiology which the metaphysician had done his part to encourage, and have entered, as with a fresh eye and a beating heart, upon the study of the wonders of the human frame.