Doctor Claudius, A True Story

by F. Marion Crawford

"I have ventured to bring you some marrons glacés," said Barker, when he was seated, producing at the same time a neat bonbonnière in the shape of a turban. "I thought they would remind you of Baden. You used to be very fond of them."

"Thanks," said she, "I am still." And she took one. The curtain rose, and Barker was obliged to be silent, much against his will. Margaret immediately became absorbed in the doings on the stage. She had witnessed that terrible last act twenty times before, but she never wearied of it. Neither would she have consented to see it acted by any other than the great Italian. Whatever be the merits of the play, there can be no question as to its supremacy of horror in the hands of Salvini. To us of the latter half of this century it appears to stand alone; it seems as if there could never have been such a scene or such an actor in the history of the drama. Horrible—yes! beyond all description, but, being horrible, of a depth of horror unrealised before. Perhaps no one who has not lived in the East can understand that such a character as Salvini's Othello is a possible, living reality. It is certain that American audiences, even while giving their admiration, withhold their belief. They go to see Othello, that they may shudder luxuriously at the sight of so much suffering; for it is the moral suffering of the Moor that most impresses an intelligent beholder, but it is doubtful whether Americans or English, who have not lived in Southern or Eastern lands, are capable of appreciating that the character is drawn from the life.

The great criticism to which all modern tragedy, and a great deal of modern drama, are open is the undue and illegitimate use of horror. Horror is not terror. They are two entirely distinct affections. A man hurled from a desperate precipice, in the living act to fall, is properly an object of terror, sudden and quaking. But the same man, reduced to a mangled mass of lifeless humanity, broken to pieces, and ghastly with the gaping of dead wounds—the same man, when his last leap is over and hope is fled, is an object of horror, and as such would not in early times have been regarded as a legitimate subject for artistic representation, either on the stage or in the plastic or pictorial arts.

It may be that in earlier ages, when men were personally familiar with the horrors of a barbarous ethical system, while at the same time they had the culture and refinement belonging to a high development of æsthetic civilisation, the presentation of a great terror immediately suggested the concomitant horror; and suggested it so vividly that the visible definition of the result—the bloodshed, the agony, and the death-rattle—would have produced an impression too dreadful to be associated with any pleasure to the beholder. There was no curiosity to behold violent death among a people accustomed to see it often enough in the course of their lives, and not yet brutalised into a love of blood for its own sake. The Romans presented an example of the latter state; they loved horror so well that they demanded real horror and real victims. And that is the state of the populations of England and America at the present day. Were it not for the tremendous power of modern law, there is not the slightest doubt that the mass of Londoners or New Yorkers would flock to-day to see a gladiatorial show, or to watch a pack of lions tearing, limb from limb, a dozen unarmed convicts. Not the "cultured" classes—some of them would be ashamed, and some would really feel a moral incapacity for witnessing so much pain—but the masses would go, and would pay handsomely for the sport; and, moreover, if they once tasted blood they would be strong enough to legislate in favour of tasting more. It is not to the discredit of the Anglo-Saxon race that it loves savage sports. The blood is naturally fierce, and has not been cowed by the tyranny endured by European races. There have been more free men under England's worst tyrants than under France's most liberal kings.

But, failing gladiators and wild beasts, the people must have horrors on the stage, in literature, in art, and, above all, in the daily press. Shakspere knew that, and Michelangelo, who is the Shakspere of brush and chisel, knew it also, as those two unrivalled men seem to have known everything else. And so when Michelangelo painted the Last Judgment, and Shakspere wrote Othello (for instance), they both made use of horror in a way the Greeks would not have tolerated. Since we no longer see daily enacted before us scenes of murder, torture, and public execution, our curiosity makes us desire to see those scenes represented as accurately as possible. The Greeks, in their tragedies, did their slaughter behind the scenes, and occasionally the cries of the supposed victims were heard. But theatre-goers of to-day would feel cheated if the last act of Othello were left to their imagination. When Salvini thrusts the crooked knife into his throat, with that ghastly sound of death that one never forgets, the modern spectator would not understand what the death-rattle meant, did he not see the action that accompanies it.

"It is too realistic," said Mr. Barker in his high thin voice when it was over, and he was helping Margaret with her silken wrappings.

"It is not realistic," said she, "it is real. It may be an unhealthy excitement, but if we are to have it, it is the most perfect of its kind."

"It is very horrible," said Miss Skeat; and they drove away.

Margaret would not stay to see the great man after the curtain fell. The disillusion of such a meeting is too great to be pleasurable. Othello is dead, and the idea of meeting Othello in the flesh ten minutes later, smiling and triumphant, is a death-blow to that very reality which Margaret so much enjoyed. Besides, she wanted to be alone with her own thoughts, which were not entirely confined to the stage, that night. Writing to Claudius had brought him vividly into her life again, and she had caught herself more than once during the evening wondering how her fair Northern lover would have acted in Othello's place. Whether, when the furious general takes Iago by the throat in his wrath, the Swede's grip would have relaxed so easily on one who should dare to whisper a breath against the Countess Margaret. She so lived in the thought for a moment that her whole face glowed in the shade of the box, and her dark eyes shot out fire. Ah me! Margaret, will he come back to stand by your side and face the world for you? Who knows. Men are deceivers ever, says the old song.

Home through the long streets, lighted with the pale electric flame that gives so deathly a tinge to everything that comes within the circling of its discolour; home to her rooms with the pleasant little fire smouldering on the hearth, and flowers—Barker's flowers—scenting the room; home to the cares of Clémentine, to lean back with half-closed eyes, thinking, while the deft French fingers uncoil and smooth and coil again the jet-black tresses; home to the luxury of sleep unbroken by ill ease of body, though visited by the dreams of a far-away lover—dreams not always hopeful, but ever sweet; home to a hotel! Can a hostelry be dignified with that great name? Yes. Wherever we are at rest and at peace, wherever the thought of love or dream of lover visits us, wherever we look forward to meeting that lover again—that is home. For since the cold steel-tipped fingers of science have crushed space into a nut-shell, and since the deep-mouthed capacious present has swallowed time out of sight, there is no landmark left but love, no hour but the hour of loving, no home but where our lover is.