_False Ascription_
Büchmann in his “Geflügelte Worte” (“Winged Words”), Berlin, 1882, says,
“Universally, yet without the least warrant, the following lines are
ascribed to Martin Luther:
“Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib, und Gesang,
Der bleibt ein Narr sein Lebenlang.”
“Who loves not wine, wife, and song,
Remains a fool his whole life long.”
Weib, wife, was originally written weiber, women. It was changed by Th.
Weyler in his “Thinkers’ and Poets’ Words.”
Even the Luther Room in the Wartburg, says Büchmann, has the couplet on
the wall. Its first appearance in literature was in 1775, in _Der
Wandsbecker Bote_ of Matthias Claudius, a popular German writer, who
incorporated it in a humorous toast or “health.” Roeseler (Berlin, 1873)
credits Claudius with the authorship of the couplet, but according to
Redlich (Hamburg, 1871), the author was John Henry Voss, who cited it in
the _Muses’ Almanac_ (Hamburg, 1777), and repeated it in a published
collection of his poems. When it appeared in the _Almanac_ the Hamburg
pastors were so incensed at Voss’s slur upon Luther that they defeated
his election as a teacher in the Johanneum.
_The Lentulus Letter_
The letter alleged to have been sent to the Senate of Rome by Publius
Lentulus, “President of Judea in the reign of Tiberius Cæsar,”
describing the person of Jesus Christ, is now generally admitted to have
been written by a monk in the fourteenth century. In the works of the
Greek historian, Nicephorus, who lived in that century, and whom
Weismann considers a credulous, uncritical writer, is a description of
the personal appearance of Jesus Christ, for which no authority is
given, and which is said to be derived from the ancients. This passage
bears a strong resemblance to the apocryphal letter of Lentulus, and
possibly served as a basis for it. It is most likely that the letter was
a Latin translation or adaptation of the description given by
Nicephorus. Dr. Edward Robinson, after a thorough examination of the
evidence, sums up the case very pointedly as follows: “In favor of the
authenticity of the letter (Epistola Lentuli) we have only the purport
of the inscription. There is no external evidence whatever. Against its
authenticity we have the great discrepancies and contradictions of the
inscription; the fact that no such person as Lentulus existed at the
time and place specified, nor for many years before and after; the utter
silence of history in respect to the existence of such a letter; the
foreign and later idioms of its style; the contradiction in which the
contents of the epistle stand with established historical facts, and the
probability of its having been produced at some time not earlier than
the eleventh century.”
The earliest appearance of the clumsy forgery was in the MS. writings of
St. Anselm, who lived in the eleventh century. No Publius Lentulus can
be identified as “President of Judea” in the reign of Tiberius. Judea
had but two procurators in his reign, Valerius Gratus, from 16 to 27 A.
D., and Pontius Pilate, from 27 to 37 A. D. Not only is there no
contemporary witness in profane history to the appearance of Jesus, but
there is none to his existence, except, perhaps, Josephus
(“Antiquities,” xviii. 3). But even this has certainly been
interpolated, and is regarded as spurious _in toto_ by some of the most
careful scholars. In fact, it is generally acknowledged that there is no
contemporary allusion to Christ in secular history—although some defend
the genuineness of the passage relating to Him in Josephus. The earliest
authentic allusion to the founder of Christianity is in Pliny’s famous
letter to Trajan, and in the “Annals” of Tacitus—both written in the
first quarter of the second century.
_Scott’s Fabrications_
Lockhart, in his “Life of Sir Walter Scott,” thus refers to the source
of a large number of the mottoes in the Waverly Novels:
It was in correcting his proof-sheets of the “Antiquary” that Scott
first took to equipping his chapters with mottoes of his own
fabrication. On one occasion he happened to ask John Ballantyne, who was
sitting by him, to hunt for a particular passage in Beaumont and
Fletcher. John did as he was bid, but did not succeed in discovering the
lines. “Hang it, Johnnie,” cried Scott, “I believe I can make a motto
sooner than you will find one.” He did so accordingly; and from that
hour, whenever memory failed to suggest an appropriate epigraph, he had
recourse to the inexhaustible mines of “Old Play” or “Old Ballad,” to
which we owe some of the most exquisite verses that ever flowed from his
pen.
_William Tell_
Baring-Gould long ago demolished what was left of the Tell myth.
Nevertheless, at the Schiller centennial, in Berlin, it was proposed to
commemorate the occasion by giving to one of the principal streets of
the suburb of Rixdorf the name of that William Tell whom Schiller
contributed so much to glorify by his drama. Whereupon several of the
town councillors arose and called attention to the fact that the Tell of
Schiller and of patriotic Helvetian tradition had been shown to be a
myth, not only by trustworthy investigators outside of Switzerland, but
so acknowledged by Swiss antiquarians themselves.
_The Finding of Moses_
Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema, the distinguished Anglo-Dutch painter and
Royal Academician in London, has put an end to our illusion that Moses
as a child was found in the bulrushes. Sir Lawrence painted a picture of
“The Finding of Moses,” which proved to be one of the features of the
Royal Academy exhibition, and on attention having been drawn to the fact
that there are no bulrushes in the painting, Sir Lawrence immediately
proved that there were no such things as bulrushes in Egypt, and
especially not on the Nile. Sir Lawrence explains that he had assured
himself of this fact while in Egypt, which he had visited in order to
get the local color before painting the picture, which had already been
purchased by Sir John Arid, the constructor of the great Nile dam. The
picture possesses special interest for Sir John Arid in view of the fact
that it is his own daughter who sat for the figure of Pharaoh’s
daughter. Our illusion about the bulrushes seems to have originated in a
faulty translation of the passage in Exodus xi. 3. The bulrush of Egypt
is the papyrus (_cyperus papyrus_).
_A Historic Phrase Disputed_
At a memorable anniversary banquet of the Veterans of the Mexican war,
L. B. Mizner, of Solano, in the course of an eloquent address, took
occasion to correct a fabrication which had passed into history,
attributing to General Taylor, the hero of Buena Vista, the slang
admonition, “A little more grape, Captain Bragg.” Such language was
unworthy of the man and the historic moment when the result of the most
desperate and memorable battle of the war was wavering in the balance,
and nothing, said Mr. Mizner, would have been more foreign to the
character of General Taylor in his manner in trying emergencies than
such an exclamation. “Holding the position of an interpreter on the
staff of General Taylor,” said the speaker, “I was seated on my horse
immediately near him, when Captain Bragg dashed hurriedly up, saluted
the General and reported, ‘General, I shall have to fall back with my
battery or lose it.’ Several of his guns had already been dismounted, a
large part of his horses killed, and about thirty of his men were
prostrate on the heath. On receiving the report General Taylor turned on
his horse and surveyed the situation for a few seconds—he required no
field-glass, for the scene of conflict was not far removed—and the reply
was, ‘Captain Bragg, it is better to lose a battery than a battle.’ This
was the interview on which was based the famous slang phrase that was
never uttered by the General to whom it was imputed. Captain Bragg
returned to his battery with renewed determination, and by the efforts
of that gallant officer and his brave command the tide of battle was
turned, and the greatest victory of the war was won.”
_The Maelstrom_
When the elders of the generation now passing away read Schiller’s
tragic story of “The Diver,” they recall the teachings in their
childhood’s geographies of the Maelstrom off the northwestern coast of
Norway. A late report on the fisheries of the Lofoten Archipelago says
that the Maelstrom is only one of many whirlpools between the islands,
and that it is so lightly regarded by the sailors that they pass and
repass it in their little vessels at all stages of the tide, only
avoiding it in fogs or storms. So far from drawing whales into its
vortex, it is a favorite resort of the fish, and the fishermen reap a
rich piscatorial harvest from its bosom. Even in stormy weather the rate
of the tide does not exceed six miles an hour.
_Don’t Give Up the Ship_
Among famous battle sayings is the well-known phrase attributed to the
dying Lawrence. Some years ago a daughter of the late Major Benjamin
Russell, for many years editor of the _Boston Centinel_, a bright,
interesting woman and a brilliant raconteur, told numerous anecdotes of
her father, who was a strongly individualized and notable character for
a long period. Among them was the following:
“The battle between the _Chesapeake_ and the _Shannon_ took place just
off the Massachusetts coast, and a sailor in some way got ashore and
hurried to Boston with the news. It was in the night and he went
straight to the _Centinel_ office, where he found Major Russell, to whom
he told the story, including the death of Lawrence. ‘What were his last
words?’ said the major. ‘Don’t know,’ said the man. ‘Didn’t he say,
“Don’t give up the ship?”’ ‘Don’t know,’ said the man. ‘Oh, he did,’
said the major, ‘I’ll make him say it’—and he did—so much for history.”
At the time of the battle of Allatoona Pass, General Sherman sent a
dispatch to General Corse, saying, “Hold Allatoona, and I will assist
you.” But the genius of history, with his facile pen, made Sherman say,
“Hold the fort, for I am coming.”
_Specific Gravity_
Considering the vigorous condition of the myth of the Connecticut Blue
Laws, in spite of the repeated exposure of its falsity, this gem from “A
General History of Connecticut,” written by the original Blue Law
manufacturer, the Rev. Samuel Peters, is valuable. It is quoted in
Goodspeed’s catalogue, and is part of the veracious author’s description
of the Connecticut River:
“Two hundred miles from the Sound is a narrow of five yards only, formed
by two shelving mountains of solid rock, whose tops intercept the
clouds. Through this chasm are compelled to pass all the waters which in
the time of floods bury the northern country. Here water is consolidated
without frost, by pressure, by swiftness, between the pinching sturdy
rocks to such a degree of induration that an iron crow floats smoothly
down its current—here iron, lead, and cork have one common weight; here
steady as time and harder than marble, the stream passes, irresistible
if not swift as lightning.”
_Pocahontas_
The rescue of Captain Smith by Pocahontas, according to his assertion,
took place in 1607, when she was a child not quite ten years of age. No
mention was made of it until eight years afterwards, and the first
circumstantial account of it was not published until seventeen years
later, when it appeared in Smith’s “General Historie of Virginia.”
According to the 1624 folio, Smith’s narrative of the tableau in which
he was a central figure runs thus:
“A long consultation was held, but the conclusion was, two great stones
were brought before Powhatan; then as many as could, layd hands on him
[Smith], dragged him to them, and thereon layd his head, and being ready
with their clubs to beate out his braines, Pocahontas, the King’s
dearest daughter, when no intreaty could prevaile, got his head in her
armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death; whereat the
Emperor was contented he should live to make him hatchets, and her,
bells, beads, & copper; for they thought him as well of all occupations
as themselves. For the King himselfe will make his owne robes, shoes,
bowes, arrowes, pots; plant, hunt, or doe anything so well as the
reste.”
Captain Smith’s “True Relation” was published in England in 1608, and
his “Map of Virginia,” with memoranda of his observations, in 1612. In
neither of them, nor in contemporary writings, such as the narrative of
Wingfield, the first President of the Colony, is there any reference to
his deliverance from savage clubbing. Smith’s first reference to it was
in 1816 in a letter addressed to the Queen in behalf of “the Lady
Rebecca,” or Pocahontas. The outward and visible motive of the invention
was commendable enough. In the earnest expression of his regard for her,
and of his acknowledgment of her touching friendship for him, he found
the surest medium for the promotion of her welfare in attracting to her
the special sympathy and attention of the English Court. Whether or not
he was too gallant to seek prestige for himself, it is certain that he
had little need of it, for his whole life was crowded with strange
adventure.
_The Penn Treaty_
Our great painters sometimes usurp the functions of the historian, but
with their anachronisms and audacities they do more to perpetuate the
memory of scenes which never occurred than tradition-mongers and
story-tellers are capable of doing. The apocryphal character of some of
the scenes in the Rotunda of the Capitol at Washington has often been
noted. West’s familiar painting of Penn’s treaty with the Indians under
the elm at Shackamaxon is a notable example of this class. As a mere
work of art it has been subjected to scornful criticism, because of its
improbable groupings, and, as Mr. Bancroft says, “the artist, faithful
neither to the Indians nor to Penn, should have no influence on
history.” As to the conference, it has been utterly demolished by the
Historical Society of Pennsylvania. No treaty of amity was made in 1682.
The earliest formal agreement to live in friendship and peace, on
record, was in 1701, and that was made, not with the Delawares, but with
the interior tribes,—the Susquehannas, Minnequas, and Conestogas. Penn
was a methodical man, and careful to preserve the evidences of his
purchases of lands from the Indians. They are to be found in the minutes
of the Provincial Council and in the books of the Recorders of Deeds in
the various counties of the Province. But the treaty of 1682, if there
had been such an agreement, was of immeasurably more value than any of
them. It was a covenant for quiet possession of those lands which might
thereafter be acquired under covenant of title. Conceding the great
importance of the treaty, it can scarcely be conceived that all proof
connected with it should be allowed to perish. There is nothing to be
found in the Archives of Pennsylvania, in the writings of William Penn
himself, or of his friends and contemporaries, to show that such an
event ever took place. The only plea under which it can be sheltered is
a letter preserved in the State records at Harrisburg, under date of
April 21, 1682, which Penn gave to Lieutenant-Governor Markham previous
to the first voyage, and was addressed to the Indians, offering them
peace, friendship, and protection. There is an endorsement upon this
letter, stating that Thomas Holme, his Surveyor-General, “did read this
letter to the Indians,” and as he lived in the house near the elm which
stood where the monument has since been erected, this circumstance may
have given early currency to the Penn treaty story, which has since been
strengthened by West’s picture. Holme probably did call the Indians
together beneath the great elm, as it was a spot likely to be selected
for the purpose, and there read them the letter from Penn, month of
August following, but this is all there ever was of a treaty.
_The Good Old Times_
What fallacies and sophistries are comprehended in that oft-repeated
phrase, “The good old times.” There are still people who sigh for the
grand old days of Good Queen Bess! Glorious days, truly, when the common
people lived like swine and starving wretches were hung for stealing a
loaf; when the filthy rushes on palace floors bred pestilence; when
gluttony and drunkenness and brutality were masked under courtly
manners; when conversation among the highest class was spiced with
profanity and vulgarity; when the coin was clipped and debased; when the
whole kingdom was overrun with thieves and highwaymen; when royal
usurpations and proclamations assumed the force of law; and when the
Crown compelled plunder of church property, iniquitous taxation,
coercion of juries, and arbitrary imprisonment. In our daily life we are
in the enjoyment of material comforts and conveniences, at home, in
business, in travel, in distant communication, in the market, in
commerce, in government, the cheapest of which the royal revenues of
Queen Bess could not have purchased. Edmund Burke lamented that the age
of chivalry passed away with Marie Antoinette. He forgot that her Court
was itself grossly immoral, and the passionate admirers of chivalry seem
to forget that the knights were not all Sidneys or Bayards. St. Palaye
says in his “Memoirs of Chivalry” that never was there greater
corruption of manners than in the times of knight-errantry,—never was
the empire of debauchery more universal. St. Louis discovered a sink of
iniquity close to his own tent in the most holy of the crusades. The
intelligent reader of “Ivanhoe” knows full well that the thrilling scene
between the Templar Bois-Guilbert and Rebecca, as she stood upon the
verge of the parapet ready for the fatal plunge, is not a mere fancy
sketch. How few ever stop to consider why the most honorable order of
British knighthood is called the Order of the Bath. Dean Stanley says
“it is because the knights who enlisted in the defense of right against
wrong, truth against falsehood, honor against dishonor, were laid in a
bath on the evening before they were admitted to the Order, and
thoroughly washed, in order to show how bright and pure ought to be the
lives of those who engage in a noble enterprise.” What gave the symbol
special significance was the fact that it was the one wash of a
lifetime. Dr. Playfair, in speaking of the causes of epidemics, says,
“Think of 33 generations, who, like Oppian, never washed at all!”
_Shakespeare’s Defiance of Historical Fact_
The audacity of Shakespeare in constructing the plots of certain of his
plays, in “defiance of the possibilities of history and the capacities
of human nature,” has been sharply commented upon by Dr. Van Buren
Denslow and other recent writers. Attention has been drawn to the fact
that at no period in the administration of the civil law in Italy during
the Middle Ages could the validity of the bond given to Shylock by
Antonio, in the “Merchant of Venice,” have been made the subject of
grave judicial investigation. Dr. Denslow thinks that the “literary
audacity” shown in the “Merchant of Venice” pales before the “crude and
barbarous vigor” with which all the legal ideas of the Danes and of
every other race are defied in “Hamlet,” and all the possibilities of
Scotch history, habits, and character are trampled under foot in
“Macbeth.” Concerning “Hamlet” he says,—
It is contrary to the principles of human nature everywhere that the
affection of parents for their brothers and sisters should exceed that
for their children, and especially for their sons. This being true, the
law of inheritance of thrones and rank, which is always fashioned after
the law of descent of lands and goods, would necessarily require that
when Claudius Hamlet, King of Denmark, the father of young Hamlet, died,
leaving a son of full age, the crown should descend directly to the son,
and if young Hamlet were a minor the late queen consort would be regent
merely.
But the play of “Hamlet” opens one month after Claudius’s death, with
his brother enthroned instead of his son, and the former queen consort
to Claudius Hamlet is now consort to his surviving brother.
Furthermore, this impossible mis-descent is assumed by all the persons
of the drama to be a mere matter of course, and the younger Hamlet’s
entire calamity is pictured as being his loss of his father, with no
allusion whatever to his loss of a throne.
It is not indicated whether the queen had been a queen jointly regnant
with the elder Hamlet or a queen consort to him; but the assumption of
the text is that her entire dignity had been derived through her
husband, not that she was queen regnant in her own right nor that these
successive husbands were mere kings consort, deriving their positions
through her. The new king assumes all the attributes of a monarch, as if
his brother’s death were absolutely all that was needed to make him
king. He sends commissioners to Norway, and, according to the words of
Rosencrantz, this king was assumed to have power to assure the crown to
Hamlet at his death, and had done so before discovering whether his own
incestuous marriage to his brother’s widow would have issue.
It was impossible that the Ghost should have assumed that his demise
would have devolved the crown on his brother, impossible that young
Hamlet should assume it, impossible that any portion of the people of
Denmark or of any other kingdom on earth should have assumed it, and
therefore impossible that the murder should be assumed to be commissible
with the motive assigned, viz., of succeeding to the throne or the
queen. She would have been only dowager queen and young Hamlet would
have been king.
In “Macbeth” we have the like assumption on the part of a Scottish
captain who has just won in a recent skirmish the title of “Thane,” that
if he can assassinate his king, Duncan, though Duncan’s two athletic
sons, Malcolm and Donalbain, survive and are in full health, yet Macbeth
will then become king. No election or proclamation by the army, no
renunciation by the heirs-apparent, no concurrence of the nobles is
called for. To Lady Macbeth the succession appears assured as soon as
she learns that Duncan is about to sleep under their roof. Nothing but
murder is required to win a crown for a person between whom and the
throne there stand two male heirs, both on the ground, one General
Banquo, as distinguished as himself, and many earls and notables.
Succession by assassination was at all times as foreign to the Scotch
character and history as cannibalism. Hospitality to guests, and
especially at night, is an inborn and deeply felt religion among the
Scotch people. In a country where hospitality is thus sacred and
assassination is a thing unknown, the hideousness of murdering a king by
night to get his throne is a foreign travesty on its face. Such crimes
might occur in Northern Africa or Southern Asia, and even in Italy.
During the invasion of Italy by the Lombards events occurred from which
the criminal atrocity and ferocity of Macbeth might have been drawn. But
to locate them in Scotland at any period is simply to transfer to the
atmosphere of the Highlands a kind and form of depravity which, while it
never existed in its fulness anywhere, never found any type or
suggestion among the Scots.
The tremendous energy of Shakespeare’s tragedies lifts them above
dramatic criticism, and makes them the standard. Their heroes are not
men, their heroines are not women. Both are survivals over into the
modern stage-life of the artist-made gods of the mythological pantheon.
Richard III. is a better Satan than Milton drew. Macbeth is a better
Belial. It is a proof of the moral advance of this age that the good
taste of society revolts from the notion that Shakespeare’s men were
human. It does not greatly care for monstrosities of any kind in
fiction, any more than for tortures in a theory of destiny. It prefers a
drama whose characters are not revolting and do not rape for the
graceful form of History.
The three plays cited furnish strong proofs, if any were needed, that
the author of the plays could not have looked at his plots through a
legalist imagination like that of Lord Bacon, the first lawyer in his
day of the kingdom. They are the product of an imagination in which the
descent of a throne to a brother, or to a successful chieftain in
preference to a son, creates no sense of incongruity.
_The Bacon Humbug_
In the course of a newspaper discussion of the authorship of the poems
and plays attributed to Shakespeare, the assertion that present day
scholarship is almost unanimous in discrediting the editors of the First
Folio (1623) brought out from Mr. William Winter, the accomplished
dramatic critic, the following sharp reply:
“There is no disposition on the part of the defenders of Shakespeare to
make use of ‘intemperate language.’ Indeed, considering their
provocation, they have displayed uncommon patience. The most
‘intemperate language’ that has been used in the Shakespeare-Bacon
controversy, has been used by Baconians, such as the late Mr. Donnelly
and the present Mr. W. H. Edwards. A little acerbity, as remarked by
Andrew Lang, is, perhaps, unavoidable in such a discussion. To those who
believe—having every reason to believe, and no reason whatever to
doubt—that the plays were written by Shakespeare, the attempt to ruin
his renown seems nothing less than a criminal desecration.
“It has not been said and it is not thought, by any person acquainted
with the subject, that the First Folio of Shakespeare was thoroughly
edited, or that it is free from defects; but it is confidently
maintained that Heminge and Condell, in their association with that
book, were entirely disinterested and absolutely honest, and that
without compensation and probably at a pecuniary loss, they rendered a
service to literature such as entitles them to everlasting gratitude and
esteem.
“Certain commentators, like Spalding, Wright, and Madden, have been
pleased to impugn the integrity of Heminge and Condell, but, in so
doing, they have gone much further than there was ever any warrant for
them to go. Heminge and Condell did not ‘fail in their duty;’ the First
Folio is not ‘dishonest;’ and to say, or to insinuate, that it has been
discredited is to use the language of gross injustice and sheer
extravagance.
“The primary defect in the First Folio—the defect to which all modern
editors of Shakespeare have called attention, and the point upon which
so much stress is now laid—is the discrepancy between a few words of the
preface and the contents of the book. In their ‘Address’ or preface,
Heminge and Condell say, ‘We have scarce received from him (Shakespeare)
a blot in his papers.’ It has been found, however, that several of the
plays were, in fact, reprinted from earlier quartos, and that, in some
cases, earlier quartos that were not consulted contain a better text
than the Folio. This is the sum of all the fault that can be imputed to
Heminge and Condell, except, indeed, that the proofs of the Folio were
not carefully read and scrupulously corrected; but Heminge and Condell
were not men of letters.
“The late J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps was an implicit believer in William
Shakespeare as the author of the plays; he never wavered in that belief;
he is acknowledged as ‘the most competent Shakespeare worker who ever
lived.’ The language of Halliwell-Phillipps accordingly, with reference
to the First Folio and to Heminge and Condell, ought to carry some
weight. These are his words,—
“‘These estimable men who are kindly remembered in the poet’s will are
not likely to have encouraged the speculation from motives of gain....
When we find Heminge and Condell not only initiating and vigorously
supporting the design, but expressing their regret that Shakespeare
himself had not lived to direct the publication, who can doubt that they
were acting as trustees for his memory, or that the noble volume was a
record of their affection? Who can ungraciously question their
sincerity?... What plausible reason can be given for not accepting the
literal truth of their description of themselves as ‘a pair so careful
to show their gratitude to the dead?’... Heminge and Condell speak of
themselves as mere gatherers, and it is nearly certain that all that
they did was to ransack their dramatic stores for the best copies of the
plays that they could find, handing those copies over to the printers,
in the full persuasion that, in taking this course, they were morally
relieved of all further responsibility.... Out of the thirty-six dramas
that they collected one-half had never been published in any shape....
There is nothing to show that fair copies were ever made in those days
for the prompters.... So far from being astonished at the textual
imperfections of the Folio, we ought to be profoundly thankful for what
is, under the circumstances, its marvellous state of comparative
excellence. Heminge and Condell did the best they could, to the best of
their judgment. It never could have entered their imagination that the
day would arrive for the comfort of intellectual life to be marred by
the distorted texts of ‘Hamlet’ or ‘Lear.’ There cannot, indeed, be a
doubt that, according to their lights, they expressed a sincere
conviction when they delivered the immortal dramas to the public as
being ‘absolute in their numbers, as he (Shakespeare) conceived
them.’... There is nothing in the writings of Heminge and Condell to
warrant a suspicion that there was a single wilful misrepresentation of
facts.... Statement ... that the entire volume was printed from the
author’s own manuscripts would have been a serious misrepresentation,
but the language of Heminge and Condell does not necessarily, under any
line of interpretation, express so much, and in all probability they are
here speaking themselves in their managerial capacity, referring to the
singularly few alterations that they had observed in the manuscripts
which he delivered to them for the use of the theatre.... Nor, in our
measure of gratitude for the First Folio—the greatest literary treasure
the world possesses—should we neglect to include a tribute to Ben
Jonson.’
“The First Shakespeare Folio distinctly and unequivocally declares that
its contents (all the Shakespeare plays except ‘Pericles’), were written
by William Shakespeare—then, 1623, deceased—and it is prefaced with a
noble tribute to him, by his great contemporary Ben Jonson, and with a
portrait of him, authenticated by Jonson’s verses. The authenticity of
that book was not questioned by any person living at the time of its
publication, nor was its validity assailed until many generations had
passed away. It remains authentic; and no amount of pettifogging as to
its defects—all of which are easily comprehensible and explicable—will
ever destroy its force as conclusive evidence of the authorship of
Shakespeare.
“It is not forgotten (strange if it were, considering how continuously
and strenuously the fact is proclaimed!) that actors and dramatic
authors, in the time of ‘Eliza and our James,’ were legally liable to
severe penalties for satire of ‘the great.’ What of it? Penal
legislation did not make actors less industrious in their vocation, or
authors less prolific, or the theatre less popular. Shakespeare, Greene,
Heywood, Marlowe, Lyly, Nash, Lodge, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, and
all the rest, continued to write plays, and continued not to be ashamed
of them or afraid of the law. Nature also has laws; and the product of
the English poetic drama, between 1580 and 1640, surpasses, in wealth,
variety, and splendor, every kindred product in the history of mankind.
“Direct, conclusive, final evidence that Henry Chettle referred to
Shakespeare, in the apology that he made for having published Robert
Greene’s attack on ‘Shakescene,’ does not exist: that is to say, the
name of Shakespeare is not actually mentioned by Chettle; but, if
‘imputation and strong circumstance, which lead directly to the door of
truth,’ are evidence, the rational conclusion is irresistible that the
reference was to Shakespeare. Upon a careful reading of Greene’s
‘Groats-worth of Wit’ and Chettle’s ‘Kind Heart’s Dream,’ no other
conclusion seems possible. Shakespeare scholars have invariably accepted
it.
“Inquiry as to the authenticity of the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of
1647 need not here be pursued. There might be a time to consider
‘analogy’ between the circumstances of that book and those of the First
Folio of Shakespeare, if, primarily, it could be shown that Beaumont and
Fletcher were actors, that they bequeathed money to two fellow-actors
with which to buy memorial rings, and that those two fellow-actors,
‘careful to show their gratitude to the dead,’ collected and published
their plays, as a duty of affectionate friendship and ‘to do an office
for the dead.’ At present the two books stand before the world in a
totally different light,—for the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647 (on
its face authentic) was introduced by a stationer who had never known or
seen those authors and knew nothing about them or their works, save what
he had gleaned at second-hand.
“No case can be made for Bacon as the author of Shakespeare by aspersing
the memory of Heminge and Condell, or by assailing the authenticity of
their Folio. The Baconian delusion is not a product of scholarship, but
of perverse incredulity and crazy and mischievous conjecture. Delia
Bacon went mad over it years ago, and since her time there has been a
procession of harmless lunatics steadily moving in the same way. Every
little while some new crank starts up with a theory that something well
known to have happened ‘never could have happened,’ and upon that
gratuitous assumption a prodigious structure of phantasy is very soon
reared. Lately, for example, it has impressed several persons as
remarkable that a scantily educated youth, reared in a little rural
village, and adventurously migrating to the capital to seek his fortune,
should have acquired, so soon and so readily, the correct style that
appears in the poems of ‘Venus and Adonis,’ ‘Tarquin and Lucrece,’ and
the Sonnets. Instances of admirably correct versification made by
novices, illiterate as well as scholastic, throughout the history of
poetical literature, meantime, causes no surprise. The youthful
achievements of Cowley and Pope and Chatterton are taken quite as a
matter of course. James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, who had no education
at all, nevertheless could, and did, write verse as harmonious, as
correct, and as finished as that of Sir Walter Scott, who possessed
every advantage that education could bestow. ‘He lisped in numbers, for
the numbers came.’
“That which has happened to others, however, must not—in the reasoning
of these censors—happen to Shakespeare. He alone, of all men, must be
thought to have developed by rule and line. The dominant fact, all the
same, remains unchanged,—the decisive fact of Shakespeare’s colossal,
transcendent poetic genius, the instantaneous insight and intuition
whereby he grasped all knowledge of human nature, and the faculty of
clear, fluent, illuminative expression, whereby he was able to utter all
things in a language of imperishable beauty. Nothing indeed could be
more preposterous than the wild theory on which the whole Baconian
fabric of detraction reposes,—the theory that because, to prosaic
perception, a certain thing seems unlikely to have happened, therefore
it never did happen. Byron mentions a certain Abbé who wrote a treatise
on the Swedish Constitution, proving it to be indissoluble and eternal,
just as Gustavus III. had destroyed it: ‘Sir,’ said the Abbé, ‘the King
of Sweden may overthrow the Constitution, but not my book.’ Shakespeare,
of course, ought not to have been able to write the ‘Venus,’ or the
‘Lucrece,’ or the Sonnets, or the Plays, or anything else, and he would
not have been had he possessed a properly respectful prescience of the
doubts of Mr. Hallam, the mental perplexities of the portentous Owen,
and the excruciating divinations of Mrs. Gallup—that oracular dame whose
fiery-footed steeds are just now prancing over the mangled remains not
merely of the philosopher Bacon, but of Queen Elizabeth and all her
‘spacious times.’ But, unhappily for these distressed beings,
Shakespeare did write all those things, and the fact of his authorship
of them remains as solid and permanent as any fact ever was, since the
beginning of recorded time.
“All the ciphers that ever a perturbed ingenuity has read into
Elizabethan literature cannot shape the uncontroverted and
incontrovertible truth that is written in marble over that sacred tomb
in Stratford Church: ‘Shakespeare, with whom quick Nature died; Nestor
in wisdom, Socrates in genius, Virgil in art.’ And if anything were
needed utterly to discredit and finally to explode the Bacon humbug, it
would be supplied by the monstrous story that Mrs. Gallup’s reckless and
mischievous fancy has evolved, and that Mr. Mallock later has had the
astounding effrontery in some sort to countenance,—a story that covers
Queen Elizabeth with shame, that makes Essex and Bacon her children
(their father being Leicester), so that Bacon becomes practically the
murderer and defamer of his own brother, and while darkening Bacon’s
already tarnished reputation with unspeakable infamy, capsizes all
authentic records of Elizabeth’s time, taxes even the credulity of
ignorance, makes common sense ridiculous, and turns all knowledge to
laughter and contempt.”
_Stratford-on-Avon_
A London editor, in commenting upon the work of the Stratford
iconoclasts, says it is deplorable to have doubts started as to whether
the Shakespeare Museum contains a single genuine relic; whether Anne
Hathaway’s cottage is not, after all, a simple fraud; and Mary Arden’s
farm a disreputably unhistorical building. Anne Hathaway’s cottage is a
place which every Shakespeare-loving visitor to his native town makes a
point of inspecting. It has been good enough for all the myriad tourists
of all nationalities that have flocked to see it; yet a dark rumor has
been going about seriously affecting its _bona fides_ as a genuine
article. Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, the Shakespearian critic, we are told,
is of opinion that the probabilities are decidedly against the so-called
cottage ever having contained the woman who, at the age of twenty-seven,
married William Shakespeare when the latter was only nineteen. Here is a
pleasing illusion dissipated at once. Those who have visited the spot
can no longer, as they recall that lowly cot nestling among its trees
and ascend again in fancy the creaking wooden staircase, picture to
themselves the May mornings when the Bard of All Time must have gone the
same round on a courting expedition, and probably sat under the eaves
with his arm round his future bride. The sighing tourist will whisper,
What next? Well, the next surprise in store for him is the
disestablishment and disendowment of the old farmhouse still shown as
that in which the poet’s mother, Mary Arden, lived. Its history is now
said to be altogether inconsistent with the theory that any of the
ancestors of the Shakespeare stock ever resided there. In addition to
the attack on the Bard’s wife, his mother too meets with this tragic
fate. We are on the high road to having it proved that no such person as
Mary Arden ever lived; that, in fact, Shakespeare was such a wonderful
man that he never had a mother at all. This about the cottage and
farmhouse is distinctly bad news for those who some time ago spent their
money on the “Shakespeare Fund,” which went to purchasing for the good
of the nation all the spots considered to be traditionally connected
with the life of the master-poet. It is also bad news for the tourists
and pilgrims. Will they care to go to the shrine of the great dramatist
if a cloud of doubt surrounds some of its most cherished monuments?
The people of the little old market-town on the quiet Avon are resentful
over this scepticism. The Stratfordians would be the last people in the
world to admit the truth of the story about Anne Hathaway’s cottage or
Mary Arden’s farm, even when backed up by such a competent critic in
these matters as Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps. They have hitherto found the
fame of the Prince of Poets exceedingly useful to their small borough.
Shakespeare represents bread-and-butter to many of the excellent
burghers and burgesses. They owe to him their winter’s stock of coals
and their weekly supply of cabbages and candles and household matches.
Should any ruthless hand remove from them this source of legitimate
gain, then the contiguous workhouse would soon feel the result. This
idea, therefore, about Anne Hathaway’s cottage must be regarded simply
with disgust by every loyal citizen of the good Warwickshire town. In
private they all probably wish to goodness that these pestilent critics
were at the bottom of the sea, with their destructive doubts and
depressing hypotheses. With one accord, no doubt, the Stratford folk
would combine to duck the unfortunate author of the latest Shakespearian
heresy in the reedy Avon if they could lay hands on him. Such theories,
they think, ought to be put down with a strong hand. What is Parliament
about that it allows honest people’s bread to be thus taken out of their
mouths? They would boycott the theory-mongers if they could. It would,
indeed, be an evil day were the last of the tourists to appear at
Stratford. What, no more American enthusiasts? No more smoke-dried
pedants and musty students of “First Folios?” No more excursions to the
local shrine and personally-conducted mobs of open-mouthed worshippers
all gone “away in the ewigkeit?” Such an idea is enough to cause an
effusion of blood on the brain of those who have lived all their lives
in the shadow of the church where the poet’s dust rests, and where the
remarkable effigy is to be seen which is still considered to be one of
the best portraits extant of the sublime genius.
When a theory like this is once started, no human being can tell how far
the stone will roll, or what will be the ultimate result. What would be
the effect on the Shakespeare-worshipping tourist if everything at
Stratford were shown to him as being only doubtfully connected with the
Bard? For example, instead of the guide-post pointing the way to Anne
Hathaway’s cottage, it might be sadly truthful to say, “To the reputed
cottage of Anne Hathaway,” and Mary Arden’s farm ought to be ticketed as
an “uncertain” building. Shakespeare’s tomb in the church would have to
be pointed out as the tomb “either of Shakespeare or somebody else;” and
if Shakespeare never wrote his own plays, it really does not much matter
whose sepulchre it may be. That famous curse on the person who moves his
bones would pass unnoticed; for who would care for a curse launched by
somebody who was not Shakespeare, but a local versifier who flourished
three hundred years ago, or perhaps the tombstone man himself, who may
have charged a little more if he carved a quatrain of his own invention
on the stone? Then, supposing the Shakespeare Museum were to experience
a breath of the same critical spirit, where would the ring be that the
Bard wore, the chair, the books that he might have used, and so on? That
ancient chair was described by Washington Irving years ago. He says it
is the most favorite object of curiosity in the whole of the house. He
draws a picture of how Shakespeare may have sat in it when a boy,
watching the slowly-revolving spit with all the longing of an urchin; or
of an evening “listening to the gossips and cronies of Stratford,
dealing forth church-yard tales and legendary anecdotes of the
troublesome times of England.” Yes, no doubt he may have done so; and it
is because of that delightful possibility that everybody used to sit
down in his chair, to its great detriment. Americans are particularly
anxious, the custodian asserts, to take a seat where the Bard of Avon
had once sat. No sooner did they get into the room than they raced for
the chair. After a severe scuffle one proud man succeeded in being the
first to sit down in it; but after this sort of thing had gone on for
some time, the chair was found to be so rickety that henceforth nobody
was allowed to touch it. Washington Irving rather cruelly remarks that
the chair partook of the volatile nature of the Santa Casa of Loretto or
the Flying Chair of the Arabian Enchanter, for “though sold some time
ago to a Northern Princess, it has found its way back again to the old
chimney-corner.” This is one of those critical calumnies which need to
be indignantly refuted. To doubt Shakespeare’s chair means a depression
in the relic and tourist trade at Stratford; and, after all, what does
it matter if the chair is a modern one, supposing that everybody
believes it to be that in which Shakespeare sat while he composed
“Macbeth”? The ordinary tourist does not ask for doubts—he wants
certainty. Dogmatism is what is required at literary shrines; not a
halting, hesitating statement that “Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps thinks
this,” and “Mr. Somebody Else thinks that,” but a downright positive
assertion of fact. Anne Hathaway’s cottage will lose half its
attractions if the miserable carping spirit of a regard for historic
accuracy comes in. There is nothing like resolute, good-humored
credulity in such matters.
_L. E. L. Assumes a Virtue_
William Howitt remarks, “I met Letitia E. Landon in company at a time
when there was a report that she was actually though secretly
married.[4] Mrs. Hofland, on entering the room, went up to her in her
plain, straightforward way, and said, ‘Ah, my dear, what must I call
you, Miss Landon, or whom?’ After well-feigned surprise at the question,
Miss Landon began to talk in a tone of merry ridicule at this report,
and ended by declaring that as to love or marriage, they were things she
never thought of. ‘What then have you been doing with yourself this last
month?’
Footnote 4:
In later years, when L. E. L. married Governor Machan, of Cape Coast
Castle, West Africa, she was thirty-six years of age, and died a few
months afterwards.
“‘Oh, I have been puzzling my brain to invent a new sleeve; how do you
like it?’ showing her arm.
“‘You never think of such a thing as love!’ exclaimed a sentimental
young man; ‘you, who have written so many volumes upon it?’
“‘Oh, that’s all professional, you know,’ exclaimed she, with an air of
merry scorn.
“‘Professional!’ said a grave Quaker who stood near; ‘why dost thou make
a difference between what is professional and what is real? Dost thou
write one thing and think another? Does not that look very much like
hypocrisy?’
“To this the astonished poetess made no reply, but by a look of genuine
amazement. It was a mode of putting the matter to which she had
evidently never been accustomed. And, in fact, there can be no question
that much of her writing was professional. She had to win a golden
harvest for the comfort of others dear to herself; and she felt, like
all authors who have to cater to the public, that she must provide, not
so much what she would of her free-will choice, but what they expected
of her.”
_The Burning of Rome_, A.D. 54
None of the stereotyped falsities of history have been reiterated with
more persistence than that which represents the Emperor Nero on the
summit of the tower of Mæcenas fiendishly fiddling and singing his
verses while Rome was burning. Aside from the anachronism as to
fiddling—the violin only dates from the middle of the sixteenth
century—and admitting that the classic lyre of antiquity was meant, we
have the authoritative statement of Tacitus that at the time of the fire
Nero was at his villa at Antium, fifty miles from Rome. There is little
doubt that Nero was the most depraved representative of pagan
sensuality, but on the occasion of a conflagration which was planned and
prompted by him for a wise purpose, he exhibited qualities greatly to
his credit. Lanciani says that Nero conceived the gigantic plan of
renewing and rebuilding the city, and as it was “crowded at every corner
with shrines and altars and small temples which religious superstition
made absolutely inviolable, and as the work of improvement was fiercely
opposed by private owners of property, and gave occasion to an endless
amount of lawsuits, and appraisals, and fights among the experts, he rid
himself of all these difficulties in the simplest and easiest way.” Of
the fourteen regions or wards into which Rome had been divided by
Augustus, three were completely destroyed, and seven for the greater
part, without any loss of life. In the work of reconstruction, the
architects, Severus and Celer, were ordered to draw their plans in
accordance with the best principles of hygiene and comfort. In
anticipation of the lengthy period that would be required for clearing
and rebuilding, Nero caused an enormous number of tents and wooden
booths to be secretly prepared for the houseless multitude, and ordered
fleets of grain-laden Mediterranean vessels from Sardinia, Sicily,
Numidia, and Egypt to be conveniently near to prevent famine. This
comprehensive provision for material improvement was made by a
broad-minded, public-spirited man, who was in advance of his age, and
who transformed narrow lanes into broad avenues, filthy slums into
shaded squares and fountains, and shabby houses into magnificent public
and private buildings.
_Mummy Wheat_
In how many sermons has the indestructibility of truth been illustrated
by the wheat wrapped up with an Egyptian mummy and germinating after
thousands of years! Yet this pleasing story has met with well-founded
refutation. Sir J. D. Hooker, of London, an eminent authority on growth
in the natural world, being appealed to, says: “The story of Egyptian
mummy wheat having germinated has never been confirmed, and is not
credited by any one who is warranted by knowledge and experience in such
matters to give an opinion. Innumerable attempts to stimulate mummy
wheat into vitality have each and all failed.”
_Anglo-Saxon as a Race Term_
The term Anglo-Saxon as descriptive of Englishmen or Americans, is as
incorrect as the use of the word Gothic in differentiation of pointed
architecture. Mr. S. D. O’Connell, of the Bureau of Statistics,
Washington, in a letter on the misuse of the term, says that among
ethnologists the phrase Anglo-Saxon is never used as descriptive of a
race, or of English institutions. Hence, he remarks, “no well-educated
person of the present generation can be excused for using it
descriptively of the English-speaking peoples; because there never was
an Anglo-Saxon race nor an Anglo-Saxon institution to impart dominating
influences to our civilization. The dominating influences must be traced
to some other source than that of barbarian Teutonic tribes, even if we
should grant the development of our civilization to the dominating
influences of the people of the British Isles, who, in the early
settlements of this part of the continent, so largely colonized it. Our
British ancestors, after the invasion of the Romans, adopted the
civilizing influences of the more civilized peoples of Europe, and
whatever dominating influence the English-speaking peoples have to-day
is due, to some extent at least, to that civilization, and to the vigor
of the people, which no distinct race can claim as its own.
“‘The truth is,’ as the _Chicago Tribune_ has said, ‘that to plume
ourselves upon our Anglo-Saxon extraction is ridiculous. Compared with
us, the Romans, who first comprised all the vagabonds of Italy, and
finally incorporated into the empire all the semi-barbarians of Europe,
were a homogeneous race.’ That paper humorously cites Defoe’s ‘True-Born
Englishman’ of his day:
“‘A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction—
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction;
A metaphor invented to express
A man akin to all the universe.
* * * * *
Forgetting that themselves are all derived
From the most scoundrel race that ever lived,
A horrid crowd of rambling thieves and drones,
Who ransacked kingdoms and dispeopled towns.
The Pict, and painted Briton, treacherous Scot,
By hunger, theft, and rapine hither brought;
Norwegian pirates, buccaneering Danes,
Whose red-haired offspring everywhere remains;
Who, joined with Norman-French, compound the breed,
From whence your ‘Free-born Englishmen’ proceed.’
“Anything more motley and heterogeneous than the English people, even
before the Norman invasion, made up as they were from the veins of
ancient Britons, Romans, Picts, Scots, Danes, Angles, and Saxons, it
would be hard to conceive. This mixture of races and bloods shows
plainly that the idea of an Anglo-Saxon race is sheer nonsense. How much
more nonsensical it is to use the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in race
classification of the American people, when they have compounded and are
daily more and more compounding the confusion of its British blood with
infusions from the veins of all other nations.
“Of course we have an Anglo-Saxon strain in our blood, as we have the
Norman, a mixture of the Teutonic and Celtic, the old British—that is,
the Celtic—the Germanic, and the Latin, so called. But which strain is
the predominant one it is difficult to say. The best ethnologists
incline to the opinion that it is the Celtic.
“Out upon this cant about ‘races,’ and especially the gabble about
‘Anglo-Saxon institutions,’ which we hear so often from persons who know
little or nothing of the forefathers and forerunners of the
English-speaking people, and less of their own, or of the science which
is concerned with the natural history of man.
“The fiction that credits to Anglo-Saxon blood all the enterprise,
progress, and best institutions of the centuries past has been the cause
of more persecution in the name of religion, and bloodshed in the name
of God, than the most malevolent influences that have ever caused
brethren to imbrue their hands in the blood of brothers since the first
murder. It has created and still sustains the most bitter and unjust and
unfounded prejudices against the people of Ireland and their descendants
everywhere among English-speaking peoples. Leaders of thought and
educators should teach the English-speaking people of this land of
liberty and constitutional equality—as the great leaders of thought in
Great Britain and Ireland are now doing—that there is no distinction of
race or blood or origin among the English-speaking peoples of to-day,
nor has there been for long centuries past; that the great landmarks of
our civilization were erected upon and the foundations of our political
institutions laid in the Christian religion; and that to its benign and
dominating influence are to be attributed the greatness and progress of
the English-speaking peoples among the nations of the earth.”
_Guillotin_
It is a remarkable instance of the vitality of a popular error that
Thackeray, who was well acquainted with French history should, in his
“Philip,” chapter XVI, have fallen into the mistake of supposing that
Dr. Guillotin perished by the instrument which bears his name, but which
he did not, as Thackeray says, invent. Thackeray does not actually
assert that Guillotin died on the guillotine, but he puts it in the form
of a question, the answer to which is, of course, intended to be yes:
“Was not good Dr. Guillotin executed by his own neat invention?” Now
nothing is more certain than that Guillotin survived the great
revolution many years, and died a natural death in 1814.