THE BLACK DEATH IN EAST ANGLIA.
"So they died! The dead were slaying the dying,
And a famine of strivers silenced strife:
There were none to love and none to wed,
And pity and joy and hope had fled,
And grief had spent her passion in sighing;
And where was the Spirit of Life?"
From across the Channel during the last few months [Footnote: February, 1884.] there have come to us tidings of a visitation of pestilence which have seemed to some men very disquieting, and to some heavy with menace. From Italy, the land beyond the Alps; from Spain, the land beyond the Pyrenees; from seaports in France and cities of the plain, we hear that the cholera has been striking down its victims. The Phantom with the deadly breath has shown strange caprice in his coming and going; but when he has been suspected to be nigh at hand, wild-eyed Panic has shown herself as of old. It is sad and discouraging to find that, spite of all our boasted progress--all that science has taught us, and all that we are supposed to have learnt--the attitude of the multitude when certain dangers threaten, appears to be as it was, and that we still hear of shuddering wretches trying to fight a dreaded enemy by letting off old muskets and drenching portmanteaus with Condy's fluid.
Such things have been before. Must they recur again? Philosophers comfort us with the assurance that our brains are larger than those of our forefathers. Nay, that the convolutions of the said brains are more complex. How about the _moral fibre?_ Are we never to have stouter hearts or more "bowels and mercies?" In the face of the same circumstances, will men for ever show themselves the same? Or is it that all these stories of mad stampedes and of chaotic anarchy breaking loose here and there--anarchy gibbering, blind, profligate and senselessly cruel--are true only of exceptional communities, as yet unaffected by the great lift which optimists confidently believe in, and which they unhesitatingly assure us is steadily going on?
The cholera has abated, we are told; as we were told it would. Thus far we in England have escaped its ravages. Experts--and experts are the people whose vocation it is to speak without doubt or hesitation whenever they speak--experts assure us that London was never more free from cholera than during this present summer. Other experts--they too speaking with authority--confidently affirm that our time is coming, that a severe visitation is impending; that all we have heard of hitherto of the ravages of the epidemic elsewhere, will prove but child's play in comparison with that which we shall hear of by and by. "And then, sir, you'll see!" That is a comforting assurance--at any rate, _some_ of us will survive.
But what do we know of the march of any mysterious form of death that has ever appeared in bygone ages, suddenly starting up and striding over the earth--"the land as a garden of Eden before him, and behind him a desolate wilderness?" We have most of us read of such frightful visitations in Thucydides, in Ovid, in Virgil, in Lucretius, not to mention the moderns; but if any of us were to write down the sum and substance of his knowledge, and attempt to discover from any trustworthy evidence the nature, the course, and the intensity of any great plague that has ever proved a real scourge upon any large section of the human race, what would his summing-up amount to? How long would it take to write; or rather, when it was written, how long would it take to read?
This island of Great Britain has more than once been visited by pestilence. De Foe has left us an inimitable romance, which he calls "The History of the Plague in London in 1665." How much or how little of sober fact there may be in those thrilling incidents, worked up so marvellously by the great novelist, it is impossible to say. That there is at least as much of fiction as of fact in the book none can doubt. The author was a child when the plague was raging--a child of two years' old, toddling about the butcher's shop. The plague of 1665 did not travel far; out of London its incidence was comparatively trifling. The cholera has visited us again and again, but never on a scale to demoralize the people at large. Only once in our history has the destroyer passed over England, leaving probably no shire unvisited by his awful presence, and no parish in which there was not one dead. It is never fair to draw inferences from the silence of historians; but it is at least significant that among all contemporary writers who have made mention of the Black Death--as it has been agreed to call it--the Black Death in the reign of Edward III.--there is little mention of any panic, few ugly tales of desertion of the dying, no flagrant instances of miserable creatures crying that the wells were poisoned. On the contrary, we have proof that as a rule men died at their posts during all that trying time, that those in authority never lost their heads, and that though there must, of course, have been isolated cases of abject fear, expressing itself in the maddest extravagances of despair, yet we have to look long and look far and wide to find such cases--and after all our search may be fruitless.
As yet the history of the Black Death can hardly be said to have been investigated at all; and until specialists can be prevailed upon to examine the evidence ready at hand, we shall continue to be put off with mere generalities when we ask for more light upon a calamity which was the most stupendous that ever befell this island.
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We have all heard of Boccaccio's _Decameron_--only naughty people have _read it_--and how it was written when the plague was raging at Florence, the great plague that carried off Petrarch's Laura, and those other thousands of whom the world knew nothing then and knows nothing now. Some, too, have heard that the plague swept over Europe--desolating, devastating--the spectre with the swinging scythe mowing down broad swathes of men. Some, when they hear of it, picture to themselves Pope Clement VI. at Avignon, sitting in that vast palace that overlooks the Rhone, the stench of corpses mastered for him by the fragrant smoke of aromatic logs burning in huge pyres round about him night and day. Some have heard of Giovanne Villani, the historian of Florence, who wrote feebly about that same pestilence in his native city, and who doubtless would have written more, and more plainly and more strongly, but that in the midst of his writing Azrael touched him too, and his pen fell from his hand. [Footnote: Muratori, "Rerum Italicarum Scriptores," vol. xiii. pp, 1-771.] Some few, again, have a faint recollection of that Emperor of the West, John Cantacuzene, who ruled at Constantinople when the plague was, and who wrote about it. [Footnote: His four books of Histories are to be found in the "Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae.">[ Didn't he? Nay! Hadn't he a son, Andronicus, who died of it? How did it come to pass that Gibbon did not so much as allude to it? Some, peradventure, think of Rome and of Rienzi, and how it was about that time that he was potent, or was he in hiding there among the Fraticelli? And isn't there something too about the plague visiting Greenland, and putting back the clock that was moving on steadily, but which suddenly stopped? How vague we are!