There is an end of light and heat for this day, and the plants, like
the birds, must sleep and even dream, if Keats be right.[18] Theirs is
perhaps not the sleep which we know, but nothing is more certain than
the change which they undergo in darkness. In some plants the leaflets
curl downwards, in others upwards; in many the flowers close altogether,
and are folded almost as they were when buds. But all green plants show
one phenomenon. Whereas under light the leaves take up the air in the
little mouths on the underside of their leaves, and after working up
the carbonic-acid gas into carbon for the building of their stems and
branches, return the rest in the shape of pure oxygen, purifying and
sweetening the air; when night comes the process is reversed. Then they
retain the oxygen and exhale carbonic-acid gas only, and that is why
careful nurses, though they may not know the reason, turn plants out
of a sick-room when the night comes on. It has been calculated that of
those little stomates on the underside of a beech leaf, little kitchens
or laboratories in which the tree prepares its food, there are no fewer
than a million. Yes, the plants must sleep—all save certain disreputable
night-blooms, which, like owls and bats and witches, hate the light and
haunt the darkness. In a few hours the first glimmer of dawn will break;
the rosy-fingered goddess will rouse her choir of birds, and they, with
their morning hymn, will awaken the trees and the flowers; the blessed
dew will fall, distilling the sweet scents of woodland and gardenland,
and the joy of the world and of the plants will spring into the birth of
a day.
If I were able to accept, as do the pious Buddhists, the doctrine of
rebirth and the transmigration of souls, I, noting what I have called
the purposeful movements of plant-life, should be inclined to go a step
further than they do. If a man may have been in a previous state of
existence a stag, a monkey, or a snake, why should he not equally have
been a tree, a shrub, or a poisonous creeper? The stately dignity of the
oak, the sweet virtues of the rose, the venomous juice of the deadly
nightshade, are qualities which might be traced in many a reincarnation.
The image, at any rate, is found in Ezekiel: “Behold, the Assyrian was a
cedar in Lebanon with fair branches and with a shadowing shroud and of an
high stature, and his top was among the thick boughs” (Ezekiel xxxi. 3).
When all is said and done, is it so very foolish, as we sit
wool-gathering and drinking in the sweetness of a summer’s evening
amid the fragrance of our Veluvana, to let our thoughts run riot among
the many-coloured clouds of fancy, tracing some faint signs of kinship
between the moods of men and the moods of plants? And if, in the
indulgence of these whimsies, treating the search for knowledge, not
as we English are supposed to take our pleasures—_moult tristement_—we
should chance to strike some tiny spark of truth hitherto hidden from us,
may we not call in Horace as counsel for the defence and ask:
“——ridentem dicere verum
Quid vetat?”
Enshrined, as it were, in a temple of secular oaks, and other grave and
reverend trees, there stands a small mulberry tree, very humble and
inconspicuous, having hardly as yet reached the dignity of a shrub. In
the late spring and early summer it is surrounded by flaming azaleas,
white and deep purple lilacs, and other flowering Japanese maples, with
their coral buds bursting into crimson leaves—all the “embroidery” of
the Japanese forests, which look as if they had been planted to do
honour to the little waif, the radiance of whose pedigree, indeed,
outshines all their glory. It is like the beggar-maid at the African King
Cophetua’s court, but, like that humble maiden, worthy of royal favour
above all the flaunting beauties who surrounded that “magnanimous and
illustrate” monarch’s throne; for that little tree, or tree that, by the
grace of Pomona, shall yet be, is an undoubted scion of the tree which
Shakespeare planted in the garden of the new home which he built for his
prosperous retirement at Stratford-on-Avon. The story is complete in
all its details. It has been told by Malone in his life, and recently
by Sir Sidney Lee in the admirable new edition of his life of the poet,
and is confirmed by what Dr. Johnson told Boswell when they visited Mrs.
Gastrell.
In the year 1597 Shakespeare, minded to end his days in his native town,
as should become an Armiger of good means, bought New Place, which had
been the most considerable house in Stratford; but the buildings were
in ruins, and the poet built himself a new house with three gables, the
centre of which carried a shield with the spear, which he adopted as his
coat-of-arms. “Shakespeare paid for it,” writes Sir Sidney Lee, “with two
gardens, the then substantial sum of sixty pounds. A curious incident
postponed legal possession. The vendor of the Stratford Manor House,
William Underhill, died suddenly of poison at another residence in the
county—Fillongley, near Coventry—and the legal transfer to the dramatist
was left at the time incomplete. Underhill’s eldest son Fulk died a minor
at Warwick next year, and after his death he was proved to have murdered
his father. The family estates were thus in danger of forfeiture, but
they were suffered to pass to the felon’s next brother Hercules, who, on
coming of age in 1602, completed in a new deed the transfer of New Place
to Shakespeare.” Sir Sidney goes on to say that the poet does not appear
to have permanently settled at New Place until 1611. In the meantime, he
had been busy rebuilding the house and planning his garden. And now for
the history of the famous mulberry tree.
Soon after his accession to the throne King James the First appears to
have been fascinated by the idea of establishing the cultivation of
silk in this country. There was a Frenchman, a native of Picardy, of
the name of Forest, who, in the year 1608, “kept greate store of English
silk-worms at Greenwich, the which the King, with great pleasure, came
often to see them worke; and of their silke he caused a piece of taffeta
to be made” (Malone’s “Life of Shakespeare”). This led to the King’s
planting many hundred thousand mulberry trees in this country, those
destined for the Midland Counties being distributed by a Frenchman named
Véron. But the King also planted a number of trees south of Hyde Park, at
the western end of what now are Buckingham Palace Gardens. These trees
gave the name to the famous “Mulberry Gardens,” of which I shall say a
word later.
It seems that on his return from one of his annual excursions to London,
Shakespeare brought back with him a young mulberry tree, and with his own
hands planted it in his garden, in which tradition says that he loved
to work. What more natural than that the courtier-actor, who was as
much petted by King James as he had been in the previous reign, should
wish to enrich his Eden with a specimen of the latest botanical craze?
After passing through various hands, the house passed back to Sir Hugh
Clopton, whose family had formerly possessed it. Sir Hugh pulled down
Shakespeare’s three-gabled and ugly house, and built one more suitable
to his position, where, in May, 1742, Malone tells us that he hospitably
entertained Garrick, Macklin and Delane under the poet’s own mulberry
tree. In 1790 the father of Mr. Davenport’s clerk, then ninety-five years
old, told Malone that as a boy he lived in the next house to New Place,
and that he had often eaten of the fruit of the tree, some branches of
which overhung his father’s garden; that it was planted by the poet, and
the first mulberry tree to be seen in the neighbourhood.
In 1752 Henry Talbot, son-in-law and executor of Sir Hugh Clopton, sold
New Place to a clergyman of the name of Gastrell, a man of fortune and
Vicar of Frodsham in Cheshire, apparently an ill-conditioned, quarrelsome
man, who was soon in hot water with his neighbours. He had a dispute
with the town over assessments, in which, by the by, he was utterly in
the wrong, and he so resented the desire of sightseers to be admitted
to view the famous mulberry tree, that to spite them and the townsfolk
he, in 1758, cut down the tree, his wife urging him to the impious act,
as Dr. Johnson told Boswell. She, the Lady Macbeth of this “withered
murder,” was a daughter of Sir Thomas Aston and sister to Mrs. Walmesley,
the wife of Johnson’s first patron, and to the lovely Molly Aston, whose
beauty so stirred the inflammable Dr. Johnson that the groves and woods
of Staffordshire and Derbyshire rang with its praises sung by an elderly
Tityrus in a bush-wig. The grand old amorist never wearied of celebrating
the charms of his lovely ladies. Even the Island of Skye was forced to
resound with the perfections of his Thralia Dulcis in one of the worst
Sapphic odes that ever brought wrath upon a fifth-form boy.
At last the vandal parson, irritated beyond measure by his own bilious
spite, declared that the house should pay no more assessments, so he
pulled it down and broke it up for sale of the building materials.
As Shakespeare’s own house had been long since destroyed by Sir Hugh
Clopton, that did not signify so much, but the murder of the sacred tree
was another matter. We may be sure that when Macbeth and Lady Macbeth
finally turned their backs upon Stratford, their departure was not
bemoaned by their neighbours.
Blessed are the enthusiasts. It is true that they are sometimes egregious
bores, but they are never so bad as the iconoclasts, and they do much
good in the world. Before the murder of the famous mulberry tree Edward
Capell, the Shakespearian commentator, whose work rather fell under the
cruel lash of Dr. Johnson, had managed to secure a cutting of it, which
he carried to Troston Hall, his place in Suffolk, and planted in his
garden. There is no easier tree to propagate than the mulberry; in that
respect, it is like the willow. Cut a branch of it and stick it in the
ground, and when the spring comes it will begin to show signs of life.
Lurking in mysterious hiding-places in the bark are myriads of tiny
unsuspected buds, full of life and vigour, which in due season will send
down little slender fibres till they reach the soil, whence they derive
nourishment; in time the buds will burst their prison of bark, and before
many years are past a new tree will bear fruit. So Mr. Capell’s cutting
throve amazingly and gave birth to a little colony of offshoots. How or
when I know not, Troston passed into the possession of Mr. Lofft, and
he, when about to let the place and disperse his collection of plants,
wrote to Sir William Thiselton Dyer, October 6th, 1896, offering “some
scions of Shakespeare’s tree” to Kew. I at once wrote, begging for one of
these scions, that it might be planted in Buckingham Palace Gardens—the
site of the old mulberry plantation of King James. What more appropriate
home could be found for it? There still stands, by the by, in the Palace
grounds a venerable mulberry tree which must be the one last relic of
King James’s attempt at silk-worm cultivation.
The mulberry gardens were soon converted into a pleasure resort after
the manner of the Vauxhall and Cremorne of my youth. Both Evelyn and
Pepys mention them and give them the worst of characters. Evelyn calls
them (May 10th, 1654) “the only place of refreshment about the town
for persons of the best quality to be exceedingly cheated at, Cromwell
and his partisans having shut up and seized on Spring Gardens, which
till now had been the usual rendezvous for ladies and gallants at this
season.” Pepys, in his outspoken way, went further in his condemnation
some years later. His spades were always spades—yet the sly old dog
confessed to having amused himself greatly there. There is in especial a
very characteristic account of a dinner there, given by Mr. Sheres, at
which Pepys was introduced to a Spanish Olio, “a very noble dish, such
as I never saw better or any more of. This and the discourse he did give
us of Spain, and description of the Escuriall, was a fine treat.” The
entertainment seems to have been managed with an eye to economy, for
after dinner they all went off to Brentford, ordering the waiter to set
on one side what had not been eaten, and they would come back and have
it for supper. What would the head waiter at the “Ritz” or the “Carlton”
say to such an order as that? But the evening was spoilt by the sudden
indisposition of poor Mr. Sheres, the amphitryon of the Olio, probably
the cause of the trouble—to which Pepys appears to have returned to the
“noble dish” with appetite, issuing unscathed from the temptation.
Sir Charles Sedley, the profligate wit and brilliant writer, of whom
Charles the Second said that “Nature had given him a patent as Apollo’s
viceroy,” and that “his style, whether in writing or discourse, would be
the standard of the English tongue,” wrote a play called the _Mulberry
Garden_, which Pepys, a great playgoer and probably a good judge, damned
with faint praise. The “Tribullus of his age,” as Dryden dubbed him in
his dedication to “The Assignation,” for once had failed to score.
The story of Shakespeare’s mulberry has led me far astray, and when we
get to Evelyn and Pepys it is difficult not to wander on. But I must curb
my prolixity. I think I have said enough to show that the Troston plants
have a pedigree which it would defy all the sagacity and learning of
the College of Heralds to demolish. Kew, always generous, has continued
to propagate from them, and as Sir David Prain, the present director,
writes to Sir Sidney Lee: “We have sent plants to places where there are
memorials of Shakespeare, and to people interested in matters relating to
him.” It is to the kindness of Sir William Thiselton Dyer that I owe my
special treasure.
I do not know upon what authority is based the statement that the tree
now growing in New Place is a scion of the old tree—probably it is. But,
in any case, there are offshoots enough propagated by the pious care of
Kew from the Troston stock to do away with any fear lest the dynasty
should die out.
RUSSIA
The time which I spent in Russia in 1863-64 was a transition period.
Transition periods in history are always difficult to describe, and still
more difficult to explain. It is comparatively easy to tell the story of
some great concrete fact, a world-encompassing war, a revolution, the
upheaval of a dynasty; but to set out the causes which, working during a
period of externally unruffled calm, are brewing the hell-broth; to show
the hidden powers which are silently operating under the surface to bring
about a mighty change—that is a task before which even those who have the
best information may well hesitate.
Every skilled newspaper correspondent will, without much difficulty,
write a brilliant description of an earthquake with all the harrowing
and soul-stirring horrors of the upheaval; but even the most experienced
seismologist hardly dares to set on paper his estimate of the mysterious
hidden forces, which, battling in the bowels of the earth, unseen and
unsuspected, burst out in their wrath to wreak the tragedies of Lisbon
or of Catania. So it is with transition periods in history. They are
generally marked by peace and prosperity. There are often no outward
signs to sound the alarm that there is trouble ahead.
The political catastrophe, like the earthquake, comes without warning;
like the wrecking typhoon, it may be preceded by a dead calm. It will
be said with justice that these violent similes do not fit the case
of Russia. There has been no great epidemic of violence, no fierce
upheaval like that of the French Revolution. Individual murders there
have been. The pages of Russian history are stained by cruelty and
murder, culminating in the barbarous tragedy of the death of the Emperor
Alexander the Second; but the changes which have taken place have been
wrought without disturbing the atmosphere of the world at large. None the
less, the revolution here has been far-reaching.
The Russia of to-day differs _toto coelo_ from the Russia of a hundred
years ago. Absolutism died with the Emperor Nicholas, and no Russian Tsar
will ever again be able to rule, or even try to rule, without taking
into account the will of his people. The relations between the sovereign
and his subjects are for that very reason happier than they ever were,
and the events of the last two years have shown that loyalty has not
perished because autocracy has given up the ghost. The strength of Holy
Russia to-day, in the face of the German war of aggression, lies in the
determined attitude of the people—in their pious love for their country,
in their almost fanatical belief in their Church, and in their veneration
for the great White Tsar who is the head of that Church.
The nineteenth century opened darkly enough for Russia. The Emperor
Paul had been on the throne for four years—a gloomy, unhappy man, not
without ability, not without the wish to do what was right, until his
mind was unhinged by madness. The first acts of his reign were worthy
of all praise. He showed kindly feeling, clemency, and even generosity
to the Poles, setting free those that had been imprisoned, and making
ample provision for their heroic leader, Kosciusko. His edict enacting
that the succession to the throne should be determined, not by the will
or caprice of the reigning sovereign, but by a fixed and certain law of
primogeniture, was a wise measure, calculated to save his country from
the intrigues and bloodshed under which she had suffered so long.
But the early days of his reign were embittered by the knowledge conveyed
to him by his Vice-Chancellor, Count Bezbarooks, that it had been the
intention of his mother, Catherine the Great, to exclude him from the
succession in favour of his own son, Alexander. Apart from that, he was
a haunted man. Haunted by the murder of his father, Peter the Third,
knowing full well that if the hand was the hand of Orloff, the dictating
voice was the voice of his mother, Catherine.
[Illustration: THE EMPEROR PAUL I.
_From a contemporary Print._
[_To face p. 248._]
Haunted by suspicion, unable to trust any living soul—if a curtain
rustled, stirred by the wind, a murderer stood hidden behind it; if two
courtiers spoke in a whisper, it was a conspiracy; a cough was the signal
to a confederate; once when the Empress was talking in a low voice to a
foreign ambassador, he bade her speak up, saying: “You may be prepared to
play the part of Catherine, but I would have you remember that in me you
will not find a Peter the Third.” A terrible speech, showing what he knew
of the past, what he dreaded in the future!
His wife, his ministers, his officers, were all under suspicion. He
looked upon his Court as a hotbed of treason, conspiracy and murder.
It was not to be wondered at that in a brain so tortured, the seeds of
hereditary madness should have been swift to germinate. Then came all
those grotesquely savage edicts which could only be accounted for by
insanity. The wearing of trousers, or of a round hat, were crimes to be
punished by the knut; short hair without pigtails constituted a criminal
offence; ladies must stop their carriages and step out into the snow
and mud to salute him when his sleigh or carriage came in sight. Three
ladies who disobeyed the order—one of whom was hurrying to fetch a
doctor to her dying husband—were seized by the police, carried off to the
guard-house, stripped, shaved and whipped. It was clear that the man was
as mad as Bedlam, but there were no Anticyræ for Tsars.
Russia took the law into her own hands. A conspiracy was formed,
with Count Peter Pahlen, Minister President and Military Governor of
Petersburg, at its head, to put an end to despotism—a cruel weapon in
the hands of a lunatic. The conspirators were men of the highest rank
by birth and by virtue of office—Pahlen himself, prime minister and
the trusted friend of his Sovereign, who delighted in loading him with
honours. In the night of the 24th of March they forced their way into
the Michailow Palace, surprised the unhappy Emperor in his bedroom and
strangled him with his own military sash. He fought with the demoniac
fury of a madman, for he was of strong and muscular build, and it was
no easy matter to overpower him. He tried to burst into the Empress’s
apartments, which adjoined his, but here his distrust of her proved his
undoing—he had caused the door which led to her rooms to be hermetically
fastened. His suspicions closed to him the one possibility of escape, the
one refuge with the wife who would not have failed him in his sore need.
Paul’s foreign policy was feeble. He detested the French Revolution,
and yet threw himself into the arms of Napoleon; at other times he was
prepared to flirt with England. The most noteworthy of his acts was the
edict in regard to the succession to which I have alluded above. Its
importance lay especially in the fact that it drove the first nail into
the coffin of absolutism. It is evident that an “absolute” monarch, who
has been deprived of his omnipotence in any one particular, ceases _ipso
facto_ to be flawlessly absolute. Certainly, absolutism did not finally
die till fifty-five years later. But a rift in the panoply of the Tsars
had been made by the Emperor Paul.
I heard much about the reign of the mad Tsar when I was at St. Petersburg
in 1863. There were still some old people who could talk about those
days. Count Peter Pahlen had been long dead; after the murder he betook
himself to his country place and disappeared from public life. But I had
to represent my chief at the funeral of his brother, who commanded the
cavalry against Napoleon in 1812, and with a still younger brother, Count
Nicholas Pahlen, I was intimate in London for several years. Another
link with that time was old Countess Rasumowski, who had been divorced
and banished from the Court, but forgiven and taken into favour again
by Paul. It was one of his acts of clemency. She was sister-in-law of
Beethoven’s friend to whom he dedicated the famous quartets. How old she
was I know not, but she was a great figurehead in Russian society, and on
her name-day all St. Petersburg, from the Emperor downwards, flocked to
her house. I had to go, as my chief had a cold, and I represented him.
The dear naughty old lady was sitting in state, dressed all in white like
a bride, with a wreath of pink roses round her head. That and the rouge
with which she had plastered her poor withered cheeks made her look quite
antediluvian. She must certainly have been near a hundred. The memory
of Count Ribeaupierre, who was Grand Maitre de la Cour, and with whom I
was also acquainted, went even further back. He had been page of honour
to the Empress Catherine, who died in 1796. These are names only worth
mentioning, in order to show that some of my impressions of the unhappy
Tsar’s reign were drawn at first-hand.
Judging from the accounts given by the few old people who themselves
remembered those times, and from the talk of younger men who had heard
from their own fathers—perhaps actors in the crime—the whole history
of that midnight murder, the outrage did not arouse any excitement
commensurate with the horror of the deed. Men had become callous; they
had grown used to seeing the rulers of the reigning dynasty disappear
by violent or mysterious deaths. What really would have startled them
would have been to hear that a Tsar had died a peaceful death in his bed,
for murder had come to be looked upon as the natural end of a Romanoff.
On the morning of the 24th of March St. Petersburg, awakening to the
gruesome news of the night, heaved a sigh of relief, and went about its
business. That business was the accession of a new Tsar.
Alexander has been accused of being privy to his father’s murder, but
from all the evidence which I was able to gather, this was a calumny.
There is no doubt that he was in touch with the conspirators, and that he
was a consenting party to his father’s removal from the throne. Paul’s
state was such that not even a son could wish to see his father remain
vested with the terrible power of the autocrat of all the Russias. But
murder, let alone parricide, was not in his nature. All the acts of his
reign gave the lie to so hideous a charge. The man who set free the
political exiles in Siberia, who abolished torture from the criminal code
of his country, who made it illegal to hold sales of serfs, who helped
to extend the blessings of education by founding universities, was a
wise and humane ruler. Even the policy which made him countenance the
conspiracy against his father was in the interests of humanity. Had he
known the extremity to which that plot was to be pushed, we may be sure
that he would have fought rather than not interpose his authority.