Finally, the effects of lightning itself are sometimes such as to produce upon the mind of an impartial but unscientific beholder the firm idea that a bodily thunderbolt must necessarily have descended from heaven. In sand or rock, where lightning has struck, it often forms long hollow tubes, known to the calmly discriminating geological intelligence as fulgurites, and looking for all the world like gigantic drills such as quarrymen make for putting in a blast. They are produced, of course, by the melting of the rock under the terrific heat of the electric spark; and they grow narrower and narrower as they descend till they finally disappear. But to a casual observer, they irresistibly suggest the notion that a material weapon has struck the ground, and buried itself at the bottom of the hole. The summit of Little Ararat, that weather-beaten and many-fabled peak (where an enterprising journalist not long ago discovered the remains of Noah’s Ark), has been riddled through and through by frequent lightnings, till the rock is now a mere honeycombed mass of drills and tubes, like an old target at the end of a long day’s constant rifle practice. Pieces of the red trachyte from the summit, a foot long, have been brought to Europe, perforated all over with these natural bullet marks, each of them lined with black glass, due to the fusion of the rock by the passage of the spark. Specimens of such thunder-drilled rock may be seen in most geological museums. On some which Humboldt collected from a peak in Mexico, the fused slag from the wall of the tube has overflowed on to the surrounding surface, thus conclusively proving (if proof were necessary) that the holes are due to melting heat alone, and not to the passage of any solid thunderbolt.
But it was the introduction and general employment of lightning-rods that dealt a final deathblow to the thunderbolt theory. A lightning-conductor consists essentially of a long piece of metal, pointed at the end, whose business it is, not so much (as most people imagine) to carry off the flash of lightning harmlessly, should it happen to strike the house to which the conductor is attached, but rather to prevent the occurrence of a flash at all, by gradually and gently drawing off the electricity as fast as it gathers, before it has had time to collect in sufficient force for a destructive discharge. It resembles in effect an overflow pipe, which drains off the surplus water of a pond as soon as it runs in, in such a manner as to prevent the possibility of an inundation, which might occur if the water were allowed to collect in force behind a dam or embankment. It is a floodgate, not a moat: it carries away the electricity of the air quietly to the ground, without allowing it to gather in sufficient amount to produce a flash of lightning. It might thus be better called a lightning-preventor than a lightning-conductor: it conducts electricity, but it prevents lightning. At first, all lightning-rods used to be made with knobs on the top, and then the electricity used to collect at the surface until the electric force was sufficient to cause a spark. In those happy days, you had the pleasure of seeing that the lightning was actually being drawn off from your neighborhood piecemeal. Knobs, it was held, must be the best things, because you could incontestably see the sparks striking them with your own eyes. But as time went on, electricians discovered that if you fixed a fine metal point to the conductor of an electric machine it was impossible to get up any appreciable charge, because the electricity kept always leaking out by means of the point. Then it was seen that if you made your lightning-rods pointed at the end, you would be able in the same way to dissipate your electricity before it ever had time to come to a head in the shape of lightning. From that moment the thunderbolt was safely dead and buried. It was urged, indeed, that the attempt thus to rob Heaven of its thunders was wicked and impious: but the common-sense of mankind refused to believe that absolute omnipotence could be sensibly defied by twenty yards of cylindrical iron tubing. Thenceforth the thunderbolt ceased to exist, save in poetry, country houses, and the most rural circles; even the electric fluid was generally relegated to the provincial press, where it still keeps company harmoniously with caloric, the devouring element, nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum, and many other like philosophical fossils: while lightning itself, shorn of its former glories, could no longer wage impious war against cathedral towers, but was compelled to restrict itself to blasting a solitary rider now and again in the open fields, or drilling more holes in the already crumbling summit of Mount Ararat. Yet it will be a thousand years more, in all probability, before the last thunderbolt ceases to be shown as a curiosity here and there to marvelling visitors, and takes its proper place in some village museum as a belemnite, a meteoric stone, or a polished axe head of our neolithic ancestors. Even then, no doubt, the original bolt will still survive as a recognised property in the stock-in-trade of every well-equipped poet.-Cornhill Magazine.
THE LOCAL COLOR OF “ROMEO AND JULIET.”
BY WILLIAM ARCHER.
“Romeo and Juliet” affords a good illustration of the fallacy which lies at the root of the Shakespearologists’ panegyrics of the poet’s “local color.” We are told that every touch and tint is correctly and vividly Italian. Schlegel, Coleridge, and Philarète Chasles have sought to concentrate in impassioned word-pictures the coloring at once of “Romeo and Juliet” and of Italy. What Shakespeare designed to paint, in vivid but perfectly general hues, was an ideal land of love, a land of moonlight and nightingales, a land to which he had certainly travelled, perhaps before leaving the banks of the Avon. It happens that Italy, of all countries in the material world, most closely resembles this fairyland of the youthful fantasy. If we must place it on the earth at all, we place it there. Therefore did Shakespeare willingly accept the Italian names for scene and characters provided in his original; and, therefore, our scenic artists very properly draw their inspiration from Italian orange groves and Italian palaces. But it is a fundamental error to regard Romeo and Juliet as specifically Italians, or their country as Italy and nothing but Italy. Their pure-humanity is of no race, their Italy has no latitude or longitude. Shakespeare could not if he would, and would not if he could, have given it the minutely accurate local color of which we hear so much.
Could not if he would, for even the most devout believers in his visit to Italy place it after the date of “Romeo and Juliet” and before that of “The Merchant of Venice.” Now, to maintain that the poet evolved Italian local color out of his inner consciousness is merely a piece of the supernaturalism which infects Shakespearology. Schiller, by diligent study and conversations with Goethe, grasped the cruder local colors of Switzerland, but Shakespeare had no means or opportunity for such study, and no Goethe to aid him. By lifelong love two modern Englishmen have attempted to construct an Italy in their imagination; Rossetti quite successfully, Mr. Shorthouse more or less so. Shakespeare had neither the motives nor the means for attempting any such feat.
But further, had Shakespeare known Italy as well as Mr. Browning, he would still have refrained from loading “Romeo and Juliet” with local color. His audience did not want it, could not understand it, would have been bewildered by it. The very youth of Juliet (“she is not fourteen”) proves, it is said, that the poet thought of her as an early-developed Italian girl. Now, the physiological observation here implied is in itself questionable, and, had it conflicted with their pre-conceptions as to the due period of first love in girls, would have been incomprehensible, if not repellent, to an Elizabethan audience. We, though taught to regard it as “local color,” are, by our social conventions, so accustomed to place the marriageable age later, that in our imagination we always add three or four years to Juliet’s fourteen; and on the stage the addition is generally made in so many words. But the social conventions of Shakespeare’s time tended in precisely the opposite direction. Anne, daughter of Sir Peter Warburton, was only twelve when, in 1539, she was married to Sir Edward Fitton. In Porter’s “Angrie Women of Abington,” published in 1599, some five years after the probable date of “Romeo and Juliet,” it is explicitly stated that fifteen was the ordinary age at which girls married. That was the age of Lady Jane Grey at her marriage: the wife of Sir Simon d’Ewes was even younger; and a little research could easily supply a hundred other cases. In Johnson’s “Crowne Garland of Goulden Roses” (1612) a girl who is single at twenty expresses her despair of ever being married. Thus we find that this renowned proof of Juliet’s Italian nature resolves itself into a familiar trait of English social habit in the sixteenth century. Had it been otherwise, it would have been a fault and not a merit in a play which addressed itself, not to an ethnological society, but to a popular audience.
A touch which may possibly have conveyed to Shakespeare’s audience a peculiarly Italian impression, is Lady Capulet’s suggestion that Romeo should be poisoned. In the sixteenth century poisoning was commonly known in England as “the Italian crime,” and was probably connected with Italy in the popular mind as are macaroni and organ-grinders at the present day. But poison is part of the stock-in-trade of the tragic dramatist, and plays a prominent part in the two most distinctly northern of the poet’s works, “Hamlet” and “Lear,” Again, the Apothecary’s speech,—