Perhaps, however, the most curious and interesting fact which the opening of this tomb has ascertained is that testified to by the hair still remaining on the skull which was that of Alexander. It is a black curly hair of a coarse quality, such as a man of mixed black blood may be supposed to have had. It is recorded that one of the wounds given by the bravo Scoronconcolo, whom Lorenzino had hired to assist him in the murder, and who ran up to complete the job when his master was disabled by being fast held by the teeth of Alexander, was a stab in the face. And of the truth of this tradition also the skull of the murdered man still affords evidence; for on the left-hand side of the face, a little below the socket of the eye, there is a mark in the bone beneath the cheek which must have been made by the point of the sword or dagger that inflicted the wound, and which shows that the bravo Scoronconcolo's thrust must have been a shrewd one.
It will readily be supposed that the scene at the opening of the sepulchre must have been a very impressive one. There, in that solemn chapel of white and black marble which the genius of Michael Angelo prepared for the repose of his sovereigns and patrons, with his lifelike and immortal presentations of the forms of the dead who have filled all story with their names, looking down on the deed with sad and solemn faces, who would not, while thus forcing the prison-house of the tomb to render up its terrible and long-concealed secrets, have been deeply sensible of a feeling of awe and reverence? Even putting aside all such sentiments as the contemplation of such a memento mori is usually found to inspire in most men, the purely scientific historical inquirer must have felt the importance of the occasion, and the great desirability of making the most in an historical point of view of so rare an opportunity. I am sorry to be obliged to record that the Florentines, so far as could be judged from their conduct and bearing, felt nothing of all this. No one who knows them as well as I do would have expected reverence from them under any possible or imaginable circumstances; but one might have expected such due care and decency of proceeding as would have sufficed to render the examination of the remains as historically instructive as possible, and to preserve the record for a future generation. But this was very far from being the case. A learned professor of anatomy indeed attended at the opening of the tomb, but instead of touching the remains himself, or utilizing his science by handling them as they ought to have been handled, he called a workman, and by him the bodies were torn out from their resting-place in fragments. The clothes were of course torn to pieces in the operation; the lace from the shirt of Alexander was permitted to be stolen; and the same fate, as has been stated, overtook his teeth. No sort of preparation had been made for any possible examination of the remains to any good purpose. They were laid out anyhow, as the phrase is, on a little marble bench in the chapel. Those who remember the place will not need to be told how perfect a sham any pretence of examination must have been under such circumstances. When this pretence had been gone through, the bones were cast back again into the marble sarcophagus by the workman, "like"—as one eye-witness of the scene describes it—"the bones of dogs." And when the same person looked into the sarcophagus after this tossing back had been effected, he saw a mere confused heap of the scattered bones of two skeletons undistinguishably mixed together. "I cannot help," writes the same eye-witness, "expressing my sense of the barbaric acts which I witnessed. Historic skeletons—the father of Catherine de' Medici, the son-in-law of Charles V.; Florentine nobles—one a duke of Florence, the other of Urbino—both bad enough fellows, no doubt, but could any Communists have acted worse? Besides, Communist mobs assert principles, and do these things in hot blood. But this most monstrous outrage was committed coolly by pure stupidity and the carelessness which cannot be moved by any consideration to take any trouble that can by any possibility be avoided. Had they turned up a quantity of the bones of animals to examine them, they could not have done worse." It is fair to add that some of the organs of the Florentine press stigmatized the proceedings upon this occasion as they deserved to be stigmatized.
T.A.T.
T.W. ROBERTSON.
The qualifications needed by the novelist and by the dramatist are at once alike and unlike. Differing in manner rather than in matter, they are rarely found united in one man. Scott, from whose novels many stirring plays have been taken, was incapable of writing one himself; Thackeray, even after he was the well-known author of Vanity Fair, could not find a manager willing to produce his comedy; and Thackeray's great master, Fielding, comparatively failed as a dramatist, though Joseph Surface is Blifil and Charles Surface is Tom Jones, and from the same work Colman derived his comedy of the Jealous Wife, which holds the stage to this day. By dint of hard work a man might make himself a novelist, but the dramatist, like the poet, must be born. He who possesses the power of writing successfully for the stage will surely show it in his first work. This theory accounts for the signal success of the Cantab, a slight farce played in 1861 at the London Strand Theatre. The material was weak and worn-out, but the fun was not forced: it flowed naturally from the situations. There was a freshness and a firmness about the little piece which showed the hand of a young author capable of better things. Three years later, Mr. Sothern, desiring a part diametrically the opposite of Lord Dundreary, produced David Garrick, and in 1865 Society made its first appearance on the stage of the Prince of Wales's Theatre. Then T. W. Robertson stepped to the front rank of living English dramatists.
The author had found his audience and his actors. The Prince of Wales's Theatre was directed by a burlesque actress, and devoted to light comedy and extravaganza: after that it gave up burlesque, merely heightening the effect of the comedy and prolonging the programme by a quiet farce. The company was small and strong, the theatre was well managed, and plays were handsomely mounted. After the success of Society until Robertson's death its main reliance was upon his pen. In 1866 Ours was first produced, followed in 1867 by Caste. The pieces of other authors, although carefully played and well mounted, were uniform failures. Mr. Edmund Yates's Tame Cats, and Mr. Dion Boucicault's How She Loves Him! were each withdrawn after a run of a very few nights, whereas School Play, an M.P. succeeded each other with undisputed success. At the Haymarket Theatre David Garrick was followed by Home and Birth.
The day was won, and the successful author could afford to rest on his laurels. But he was ambitious and a hard worker; so he continued to write and adapt. To counterbalance the good-fortune of David Garrick and Home at the Haymarket, and the series of six at the Prince of Wales's Theatre, there was a list of failures—Birth, Progress, Dreams and War. But his comedies were far more successful than his heavier plays: his belief in his power to construct good acting dramas must have been sadly shaken by the total failure of For Love, the Shadow-Tree Shaft and the Nightingale. There can be no better proof of their want of success than the fact that at a time when American managers were eager for his comedies, not one of his dramas was ever produced in the United States. But in spite of the comparative failure of his later works, his death was felt to be the loss of a dramatic author of some performance and of greater promise,
We have a way of nicknaming a new writer after one of his most celebrated predecessors whom we imagine him to resemble, and then we find fault with him for not having all the qualities of an author whom he probably has no desire to imitate. False friends of T.W. Robertson called him the "modern Sheridan." Few writers are more dissimilar. Robertson in his dialogue and construction imitated the modern French dramatists; Sheridan, the old English, Congreve, Farquhar and Wycherley. Robertson especially delighted in love-scenes—there are generally two at least in each of his comedies: I cannot remember one in any of Sheridan's. The dialogue of the author of the School for Scandal is artificial and glittering—that of the author of School is generally more natural, and always less brilliant. They have, however, one point in common: they both practiced Molière's maxim, Je prends mon bien où je le trouve. They both unhesitatingly plagiarized. Robertson in particular easily assimilated foreign matter. He turned Le Dégel and Les Ganaches of M. Sardou into A Rapid Thaw and Progress. David Garrick was taken from Dr. Robin, a French play, itself imitated from the German. Home closely follows L'Aventurière of M. Émile Augier. Madame de Girardin's La Joie fait peur, previously translated by Mr. G.H. Lewes as Sunshine through the Clouds, gave Robertson the situation of the last act of War: Mr. Dion Boucicault has since deftly adapted the same delightful little piece under the name of Kerry, or Night and Morning. The Cinderella-like plot of School is taken from the Aschenbrödel of Roderick Benedix: the school examination was suggested by a French vaudeville, En classe, mesdemoiselles! The part of Beau Farintosh is a weak revival of Garrick's Lord Chalkstone and Colman and Garrick's Lord Ogleby; and the strong situation in the fourth act is imitated from Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré of George Sand.
But Robertson is decidedly strongest when he walks without crutches. His own original plays, Society, Caste, Ours, are by far his best. A foreign support made him limp. Of all his adaptations, home alone is really good: most of the others failed. Although that cosmopolitan mosaic School has been the most successful of his pieces in London—it has passed its five hundredth night—it is by no means the best. Success is not necessarily a test of real merit. Evidently, School has the elements of popularity, although it is a very weak piece, although it is full of foreign matter, and although it violates that most necessary rule of dramatic art, declaring no play should contain an effect, a line, a scene or an act which does not bear on the end in view by developing either the characters or the action. The entire second act, containing the farcical examination-scene, is useless. Robertson again sinned in this way in the Nightingale: although it had no effect on the plot, although it was entirely unnecessary, he introduced a pretty tableau representing the heroine, a lovely prima-donna, singing under the silver moonbeams in a boat rocked to and fro by the waves.