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,—
Such mortal drugs I have; but Mantua’s law
Is death to any he that utters them,
is held up as a peculiarly Italian touch, no such law appearing in the
English statute-book of the time. The fact is that Shakespeare found
the idea in Brooke’s “Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet,” and
used it simply to heighten the terror of the situation.
The insult of “biting the thumb” is said, rather doubtfully, to be
characteristically Italian; but what can be more English than the cry
for “clubs, bills, and partisans” which immediately follows it? Lord
Campbell, indeed, seeks to prove Shakespeare’s minute knowledge of
_English_ law by the frequent and accurate references to it in this
opening scene. The “grove of sycamore” under which Romeo is described
as wandering, is said to be of unmistakably Italian growth; why, then,
does Schlegel, though one of the originators of the local-color theory,
seek to make it still more Italian by translating it “Kastanienhain”?
Had Shakespeare possessed either the will or the ability to transport
his hearers into specifically Italian scenes, would he have confined
himself to mentioning one tree, which is neither peculiar to Italy nor
a particularly prominent feature in Italian landscapes? Where are the
oranges and olives, the poplar, the cypress, and the laurel? Where are
the rushing Adige and the gleaming Alps? Where is the allusion to the
Amphitheatre, which could scarcely have been wanting had the poet known
or cared anything about Verona except as the capital of his mythic
love-land? It might as well be argued that he intended the local color
to be peculiarly English because he makes Capulet call Paris an “Earl.”
The truth is that when the reader’s imagination is heated to a
certain point, the colors which subtle associations have implanted
in it flush out of their own accord, with no stronger stimulus from
the poet than is involved in the mere mention of a name. There is a
strict analogy in the Elizabethan theatre. Given poetry and acting
which powerfully excited the feelings, and the placard bearing the
name of “Agincourt” made all the glaring incongruities vanish, and
conjured up in the mind of each hearer such a picture of the tented
field as his individual imagination had room for. So it is with the
Italy of “Romeo and Juliet.” Our fancy being quickened by the mere
glow of the poetry, the very name “Verona” places before us a vivid
picture composed of all sorts of reminiscences of art, literature, and
travel. The pulsing life of the two lovers—types of pure-humanity as
general as ever poet fashioned—easily puts on a southern physiognomy
with their Italian names. The might of a name has power to cloak even
openly incongruous details. It is only on reflection, for instance,
that we recognize in Mercutio a most un-Italian and distinctly Teutonic
figure, an “angelsächsisch-treuherzig” humorist, as Kreyssig truly
says, who is even made to ridicule Italian manners and phrases with the
true Englishman’s provincial intolerance. Thus all of us, in reading
“Romeo and Juliet,” are haunted by visions of Italy, whose origin the
commentators strive to find in individual touches of local color and
costume, instead of in the powerful stimulus given to all sorts of
latent associations by the whole force of the poet’s genius. Even apart
from travel, pictures and descriptions which do actually aim at local
color have made us far more familiar with Italy than any Elizabethan
audience can possibly have been. It is scarcely paradoxical to maintain
that the least imaginative among us gives to the love-land of “Romeo
and Juliet” far more accurately Italian hues than it wore in the
imagination of Shakespeare himself. In the same way I, for my part,
never read Marlowe’s “Jew of Malta” without forming a vivid picture
of the narrow, sultry stairways of Valetta (which I have never seen),
conjured up, not certainly by any individual touches of description in
the text, but by the mere imaginative vigor of the whole presentation.
Conversely, too, a work of small vitality, a second-rate French tragedy
for instance, may be full of accurate local and historical allusion,
and may yet transport us no whither beyond the cheerless steppes of
frigid alexandrines. There is an art, and a high art, to which definite
local color is essential, but Shakespeare’s is of another order. If
we want a masterpiece of strictly Italian coloring we must go, not to
“Romeo and Juliet,” but to Alfred de Musset’s “Lorenzaccio.”
Shakespeare, in short, presents us with so much, or so little, of
the Italian manners depicted in Brooke and Paynter as would be
readily comprehensible to his audience. The fact, too, that the whole
love-poetry of the period was influenced by Cisalpine models gave to
the forms of expression in certain portions of his work a slightly
Italian turn. For the rest, he imbued the great erotic myth with the
warmest human life, and left it to create an atmosphere and scenery of
its own in the imagination of the beholder. No atmosphere or scenery
can be more appropriate than those of an Italian summer, and therefore
it is right that our scenic artists should strain their resources to
reproduce its warm luxuriance of color. “For now these hot days is the
mad blood stirring,” says Benvolio, and if we choose to call this hot
air a scirocco, why not? But Shakespeare knew nothing of scirocco or
tramontana; he knew that warmth is the life-element of passion, and
made summer in the air harmonise with summer in the blood. That is the
whole secret of his “local color.”—_Gentleman’s Magazine._
WILLIAM SMITH AND WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.
In the year 1856 Lord Ellesmere, then President of the Shakspeare
Society, received one day a little pamphlet bearing the at that time
astounding title, “Was Lord Bacon the author of Shakspeare’s Plays?”
The writer’s name was Smith. Mr. William Henry Smith, of 76 Harley
Street, writer on Shakspeare, is the style he goes by in the Catalogue
of the British Museum, to distinguish him from others of the name,
whose works fill no less than eight volumes of that Catalogue, and have
a special index all to themselves, thereby nobly confirming the truth
of our Mr. Smith’s answer to some irreverent critics who had jested
on his patronym, that it was “a name which some wise and many worthy
men have borne—which though not unique, is perfectly genteel.” What
Lord Ellesmere, either in his presidential or merely human capacity,
thought of the pamphlet, we do not know; but Lord Palmerston (who had
passed the threescore years then) is said to have declared himself
convinced by it, though he is also said to have added that he cared
not a jot who the author of the plays might have been provided he was
an Englishman. By some of the critics poor Mr. Smith was very roughly
handled, and what seems to have galled him most was an insinuation by
Nathaniel Hawthorne (then at Liverpool as American Consul) that he had
merely taken for his own the ideas of Miss Delia Bacon, whose book
was not published till the year after Mr. Smith’s pamphlet, but of
whose speculation some rumors had before that come “across the Atlantic
wave.” This Mr. Smith (in his next publication, _Bacon and Shakspeare;
an Inquiry touching Players, Playhouses, and Play-writers in the Days
of Elizabeth_, 1857) most emphatically denied. He had never heard the
name of Miss Bacon till he saw it in a review of his pamphlet: he could
not for a long while find what or where she had written, and when he
did so the alleged insinuation seemed to him too preposterous to be
worth notice. Out of courtesy to Mr. Hawthorne, however, he made his
denial public; Mr. Hawthorne returned the courtesy of acceptance, and
so this part of the great Baconian controversy slept in peace. In 1866
appeared in New York, a book called _The Authorship of Shakspeare_,
the work of a Mr. Nathaniel Holmes, which so enchanted Mr. Smith that
he vowed “Providence had provided exactly the champion the cause
required,” and that for him it remained only “to retire to the rear of
this unexpected American contingent,” and to “make himself useful in
the commissariat department.” This American book had, among its other
striking merits, this unique one—of being such that no man could
possibly quarrel with it. “If argument,” says Mr, Smith, “is ever to
outweigh preconception and prejudice, the preponderance can only be in
one direction”—perhaps the only judgment ever formulated by mortal man
which it would be literally impossible to traverse. In this rearward
position Mr. Smith modestly abode for eighteen years; but now—“now
that the triumph seems so near at hand, we cannot resist coming to the
front to congratulate those that have fought the battle upon their
success, and, we candidly own, to show ourselves as a veteran who has
survived the campaign, and is ready to give an honest account of the
stores which still remain on his hands.” This congratulation and these
stores may be read and seen in another little pamphlet just published
by Mr. Smith, and to be bought at Mr. Skeffington’s shop in Piccadilly.
It is in no spirit of cavil or disparagement that we overhaul those
stores, but solely out of curiosity. We have read Mr. Smith’s last
pamphlet, and read again his two earlier ones, with the most lively
interest and amusement. Indeed, we have never for our part, been
able to see the necessity for that “lyric fury” into which some of
Mr. Smith’s opponents have lashed themselves. His theory has amused
thousands of readers—readers of Bacon (both Francis and Delia), of
Shakspeare, and of Mr. Smith; it has harmed nobody; it has added fresh
lustre to the memories of two great men. Surely, then, we should do ill
to be angry, and to be angry with one so courteous and good-humored as
Mr. Smith would be a twofold impossibility. Moreover, we have always
felt that there was a great deal to be said for the theory that Francis
Bacon wrote the plays printed under the name of William Shakspeare,
just as there is a great deal to be said for the converse of the
theory, or for any other speculation with which the restless mind of
man chooses for the moment to concern itself. After a certain lapse of
years there can be no proof positive, no mathematical proof, that any
man did or did not write anything. The mere fact of a work having gone
for any length of time under such or such a name _proves_ nothing; that
the manuscript is confessedly in a particular man’s handwriting, or
the undisputed receipt of a manuscript from a particular man, really,
when one comes to consider it, _proves_ nothing, so far as authorship
is concerned. Take the excellent ballad of “Kafoozleum,” for instance.
That, like Shakspeare’s plays, was known and popular before it was
printed; like those, it was printed anonymously; no manuscript of it is
known to exist; the authorship is unknown. A hundred years hence who
will be able to _prove_ it was not written by Lord Tennyson, let us
say? One line in it runs “A sound there falls from ruined walls.” Why
should not some speculative Smith a hundred years hence point to this
line as proof conclusive that it must be the work of him who wrote,
“The splendor falls on castle walls”? The parallel would be at least
incomparably closer than any of those as yet found in the undisputed
writings of Bacon and the alleged writings of Shakspeare. Let this
be, however; we are not now concerned with any attempt to destroy Mr.
Smith’s theory, for which, we repeat, we still feel, as we have always
felt, there is very much to be said—very much to be said, of course,
on both sides; the puzzle is how very little Mr. Smith, and those about
him, have found to say on their side.
And, in truth, little as Mr. Smith had found to say in 1856-57 he
has found still less to add now in 1884. His “stores” are still very
scanty. He has, indeed, satisfied himself (he had “an intuitive idea”
of it in 1856) that Shakspeare could neither read nor write, beyond
scrawling most illegibly his own name (the reading he passes by), and
curiously enough on the evidence, or rather hypothesis, of another
Smith one William James! But, of course, as no scrap of Shakspeare’s
handwriting is known to exist beyond six signatures, all tolerably like
each other, this hypothesis cannot stand for very much. Yet really this
is the only fresh “fact” Mr. Smith has added to his stores in all these
seven-and-twenty years. He recapitulates his old “facts” and, we must
add, some of his old blunders, when he says “there is no record of his
having been in any way connected with literature until the year 1600,”
forgetful of the mention of Shakspeare’s name as author of _The Rape
of Lucrece_ in the prelude to Willobie’s _Avisa_ (1594), the marginal
reference to the same work in Clarke’s _Polimanteia_ (1595), and the
long catalogue of the works then attributed to Shakspeare, as well as
the very high praise given to him and them in Meres’s _Palladis Tamia_,
1598. The allusions in Greene’s _Groatsworth of Wit_ and Chettle’s
_Kind-Harts Dreame_ we put by as hypotheses merely; but how curious
it is to find the champions of this theory so strangely ignorant,
or careless of facts familiar, we will not say to every student of
Shakspeare’s writings, because the word student in connexion with those
works has come to have a rather distasteful sound in these Alexandrian
days, but to every one who has ever had any curiosity about the man
to whom these marvellous works are commonly attributed. Nor is this
knowledge within the reach only of those who have money, leisure, or
learning. Any one who is able to procure a ticket of admission to
the Reading-Room of the British Museum may get it at first hand for
himself; numberless books exist any one of which at the cost of a few
shillings will furnish him with it at second-hand. We remember to have
been much struck last year, when turning over the leaves of Mrs. Pott’s
edition of the _Promus_, with many proofs of the same ignorance of what
one may call the very alphabet of the subject. Coleridge, as we all
know now blundered much in the same way in his lectures on Shakspeare;
but our knowledge both of the poet and his times has very greatly
increased since Coleridge lectured. Mr. Smith and Mrs. Pott cannot
now soothe themselves with the thought that it is better to err with
Coleridge than to shine with Mr. Halliwell-Phillips or Mr. Furnivall;
they have only themselves to blame if the world declines to take
seriously a theory which its champions have been at so little serious
pains to examine and support.
The well-known passage in the _Sonnets_ (Bacon’s or Shakspeare’s)
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand,
receives curious confirmation from Mr. Smith’s writings. He has
studied Bacon’s works so closely and long that he has insensibly
infected himself with some of that great man’s peculiarities. It is
the vice, says Bacon, in the _Novum Organum_, of high and discursive
intellects to attach too much importance to slight resemblances, a vice
which leads men to catch at shadows instead of substances. Mr. Smith
quotes this saying; yet how must this vice have got possession of his
intellect when he drew up that list of “Parallel passages, and peculiar
phrases, from Bacon and Shakspeare,” which may be read in his _Bacon
and Shakspeare_! Take one instance only:—In the _Life of Henry VII._
occurs this passage: “As his victory gave him the knee, so his purposed
marriage with the Lady Elizabeth gave him the heart, so that both knee
and heart did truly bow before him”; in _Richard II._ is this line,
“Show heaven the humbled heart and not the knee”; and in _Hamlet_ this,
“And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee.” Is it possible that Mr.
Smith would seriously have us draw any inference from the fact that in
these three passages the word “knee” occurs and in two of them the word
“heart”? Really, he might as well insist that, because Mr. Swinburne
has written “Cry aloud; for the old world is broken” and because Mr.
Arnold has declared himself to be “Wandering between two worlds, one
dead, the other powerless to be born,” the author of _Dolores_ and the
author of the _Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse_ must be one and the
same man! Again, Macaulay has noticed how, contrary to general custom,
the later writings of Bacon are far superior to the earlier ones in
richness of illustration. It is the same with Mr. Smith. His first
pamphlet, though direct and lucid enough, was singularly free from
all illustration or ornament of any kind. His next contains passages
of wonderful richness and imagination. Bacon, he says, is like an
orange-tree, “where we may observe the bud, the blossom, and the
fruit in every stage of ripeness, all exhibited in one plant at the
same time.” And he goes on in a strain of splendid eloquence:—“The
stentorian orator in the City Forum, who, restoring his voice with the
luscious fruit, continues his harangue to the applauding multitude,
little reflects, that the delicate blossom which grew by its side, and
was gathered at the same time, decorates the fair brow of the fainting
bride in the far-off village church.” Never surely before has the
familiar fruit of domestic life been so poetized since “Bon Gaultier”
wrote of the subjects of the Moorish tyrant how they would fain have
sympathized with his Christian prisoner:—
But they feared the grizzly despot and his myrmidons in steel,
So their sympathy descended in the fruitage of Seville.