Part 8

We are in safe hands when it is Professor Dowden who guides us on the highways and bypaths of the eighteenth century, but by very reason of his accurate knowledge of the ground whereon he treads we are disappointed when he fails to point out to us some special feature of the landscape. Beauties we could hardly hope to meet with on our journey. There was not sap enough in that arid soil to nourish flowers, or send a flush of living green over hill and valley. The most serious omission is to have left entirely out of account the exceedingly interesting reactionary influences that leaped back and forth across the Channel when Marivaux's romances were devoured in England, and Richardson's _Pamela_ was in every French pocket large enough to hold it. It is in itself still an open question which of these two authors exerted the initial influence on the other, although eighteenth-century criticism invariably held that in _Marianne_ Richardson found his inspiration.

A great deal of interest attaches to an explanation of the causes of Le Sage's decline in popularity, and this question likewise Professor Dowden has not adequately presented. Le Sage saw the imperative need of mediating between the stilted heroic romances _à la Scudéry_ and the grotesque travesties of Scarron and Furetière. Inspired by the picaroon romances of Spain, he produced, amid much inferior work, _Gil Blas_, a masterpiece in its kind. The plot is loose-jointed, the composition _nil_, but the book teems with such verve and vigor that it still pulses with an abounding life when Marivaux and Richardson slumber on our shelves. Yet we must admit that the characters are vagabonds, and the sentiment not without coarseness. Love when not slighted is ridiculed, and metaphysical analysis and moral disquisitions are both refreshingly absent from the book. Hence Le Sage's claims on our consideration as the progenitor of naturalism in romance, but on this account also the reactionary wave against which he had to buffet in his declining years. Marivaux, on the other hand, saw the need of mediating between the stilted heroics of Scudéry and what he deemed the ignoble realism of Le Sage. In this resolve he elevated the characters to _bourgeois_ rank, and abandoning the empty love rhetoric of the old romances, he brought the acuteness of an analytic mind to bear on the exploitation of the tender passion; and a conscientious though desultory effort is made to study subtle phases of character in the light of surrounding circumstances. Despite the artificial _précieuse_ qualities of his style, and the unfinished condition of his novels, Marivaux enjoyed an extraordinary popularity in his day. The same problem repeats itself on a larger scale when we transfer our attention to Richardson, whose works, translated and popularized by Prévost, were read with the greatest avidity in France. Were not these such influences as Professor Dowden's profound knowledge of English literature would have qualified him to illustrate with more precision than has yet been brought to bear upon them; and was it not in point of fact almost imperative for him to deal seriously with such an important theme in the international literary history of nations?

The pages which Professor Dowden devotes to Voltaire, although brilliant, are not sufficiently suggestive of the extraordinary influence which that most celebrated of writers exercised. It was in no uncritical spirit that Mr. Morley wrote: "The existence, character, and career of this extraordinary person constituted in themselves a new and prodigious era. The peculiarities of his individual genius changed the mind and spiritual conformation of France, and in a less degree of the whole of the West, with as far-spreading and invincible an effect as if the work had been wholly done, as it was actually aided, by the sweep of deep-lying collective forces. A new type of belief, and of its shadow, disbelief, was stamped by the impression of his character and work into the intelligence and feeling of his own and modern times." Nor will Villemain be accused of rapt enthusiasm when he writes, "C'est le plus puissant renovateur des esprits depuis Luther, et l'homme qui a mis le plus en commun les idées de l'Europe par sa gloire, sa longue vie, son merveilleux esprit et son universelle clarté." The strangest fact to contemplate with regard to this unrivaled popularity, this astonishing range of influence, is that it truly constitutes an apotheosis of superficiality. And this in no disparaging spirit of Carlylese disdain for clear ideas around which hang no mists of oracular obscurity, but rather by way of tribute to a heart that beat responsively to human suffering, to a mind keenly sensible of human wrongs. Voltaire rejected the subtleties of metaphysical thought, was indeed incapable of attaining to the heights of speculative contemplation; he was only preternaturally sensitive to the moral defects of this imperfect world, and determined to bend all his efforts to the alleviation of injustice and of crime. As a further concession to his superficiality as a thinker we may frankly admit his incapacity to originate new ideas. His mind indeed was extraordinarily receptive, his intellectual curiosity unlimited, and hostile critics have availed themselves of this very receptivity as a medium of attack upon his originality. They are free to pursue him on that score, but it does not appreciably detract from his greatness in the eyes of posterity to recognize that Bayle before him had preached the doctrine of toleration; that Montesquieu had advocated the abolition of torture and of slavery, and the sanctity of social institutions, or that Boileau forsooth had upheld the dignity of classical formulas in matters literary. It is rather in the mobility of his mind and in the impressionability of his temperament that we should seek for an explanation of a philosophical disturbance in his ideas. It is not an actual mental confusion that I refer to, for his diction is never more limpid than in the expression of his easy personal beliefs; but a certain intellectual inconsistency in his habits of thought makes it impossible for us to hold him down to any definite set of opinions which we can regard as a genuine confession of faith. And this is a vital characteristic of skeptical minds of his stamp, swiftly receptive, and as open as the day to each new intellectual impulse as it arises. Thus we must attribute to his capacity for mental development, as well as to the narrowness of his philosophical range, the many contradictions which his writings exhibit in such matters of intellectual belief as are wont to give a permanent bias of thought to minds less volatile and alert. Are we to regard him as an optimist or a pessimist? a believer in immortality or devotee of annihilation? a fatalist or spiritualist in history? an advocate of free will or determinism? We can not say, and M. Faguet has amused himself with supporting each of these opinions in turn upon its appropriate text, whose clearness is beyond dispute.

If there was one set of opinions to which Voltaire may be said to have somewhat consistently adhered I may instance his vague and insipid deism, which relegated to God the rôle of an absentee landlord in this poor world which he created and governs by absolute law, but in whose affairs he only intervenes when the death rent is to be collected. He infers a creative God from the argument of the clockmaker and the clock, but takes extreme pleasure in showing how sadly the poor machine is out of order. His idea of the social utility of an avenging and rewarding God must of course be regarded as a freak of intellectual caprice, and yet his timid political instincts made him regard the terrorizing influence of the doctrine of hell with some complacency as a restraining force upon the unthinking masses. The story is well known of the atheistic conversation between D'Alembert and Condorcet at Voltaire's table, who summarily dismissed the servants from the room with the remark: "Maintenant, messieurs, vous pouvez continuer. Je craignais seulement d'être égorgé cette nuit." The _Dictionnaire philosophique_ confirms the flippant utilitarian point of view, which we must beware of regarding as a personal conviction. "I insist particularly on the immortality of the soul, because there is nothing to which I hold more than the idea of hell. We have to do with a host of rogues who have never thought; a crowd of petty people, brutes and drunkards and thieves. Preach to them if you will that there is no hell and that the soul is mortal. As for me I will cry in their ears that they are damned if they rob me." It is needless to add that convictions of this eminently practical nature did not seriously hamper Voltaire in his anti-religious crusade.

To every branch of letters Voltaire brought the same splendid qualities of mind, and need I add the same defective qualities of conscience and carelessness of the truth when his personal glory or his material advancement were concerned? The sordid pages of his life would weary us in the turning, yet his native generosity and sympathy incline us to charity; and it is wonderful how his never-failing wit can temper his vindictiveness for us, now that the sting has lost its living poison.

I have referred to Professor Dowden's unsatisfactory treatment of the international reactions which characterize the literary history of the eighteenth century. There is another omission which I have remarked in the book on a reperusal of the pages devoted to Rousseau and the encyclopedists. It might have been easily within the scope of a literary story of even moderate dimensions to have more explicitly accounted for the crumbling of the old classical ideal, to have shown that the once impregnable citadel of classical art was rotten at the base, and that those who still defended the imaginary stronghold were themselves the unconscious agents of its destruction. With reference to the irreligious influences of Cartesianism and the philosophical system of Bayle I shall say no more, save that the evident loss in prestige of the traditional religious faith, combined as it was with the rapid decentralization of the sovereign power in the state, must perforce make impossible the survival of literature on the old national basis. Again, in point of pure art a decline was inevitable in connection with the revival of Cartesianism among writers of the stamp of Fontenelle; for their prestige was synchronous with the triumph of the modern party in the famous quarrel; and no student of the _Art Poétique_ will fail to appreciate the æsthetical significance of an abandonment of classical standards of taste as an unimpeachable canon of art. Defending as Boileau did the supreme value of reason and good sense, what justification could he have found for poetry unless he had proved to the satisfaction of his generation that poetry better than any other mode of expression could render permanent the promptings of the diviner reason, as witness the eternal monuments of ancient art in the domain of poetry? The triumph of the moderns then turned men's faces in other directions, and whether literary art should henceforward advance or decline, it must at least strike root in a newer soil.

The inroads of sensibility into French literature, as exemplified in Marivaux and Prévost in the thirties, followed swiftly by the rank and file, also wrought havoc in the old classical method, though this fact may not without further reflection be conceded. But in the broad realm of psychological observation, where classic art had reigned supreme, the influx of a certain morbid sensibility strangely warped the mental vision of the observer. Diderot, a veritable sinner himself in this respect, admits as much in an unguarded moment: "L'homme sensible est trop abandonné à la merci de son diaphragme ... pour être un profond observateur et conséquemment un sublime imitateur de la nature." Every one knows Voltaire's naïve statement which bears condemnatory evidence to the bluntness of his psychology. "La nature est partout la même." And is it not, we ask, this enigmatical typical man, out of space and out of time, for whom the chimerical theories of universal perfectibility were soon to be woven?

It is incontestably true, then, that the character of human observation undergoes a sensible alteration in the course of the century, and that whereas the individual man had been heretofore studied inasmuch as he was in himself of typical value, henceforward not man the individual will be the object of study, but the observation of human relations will usurp the field, and psychological analysis will yield to social investigation.

I would add a word or two by way of conclusion to illustrate how the encyclopedists in their propaganda, aided in part by the coincident influence of Rousseau, established ideals of thought and conduct which were in the most violent contrast to the ideals cherished in the preceding century. Of course, we readily understand that the encyclopedists threw to the four corners of heaven the outworn respect of religious and political tradition. Furthermore, we may ask ourselves what it is which in a sense makes Molière and La Fontaine isolated in their century; and the answer will not be far to seek when we realize that these two alone of all their fellows urged the suspected authority of instinct as a sufficient guide for conduct. Yet how far were not even these bolder spirits from the natural man of Rousseau or of Diderot?

The views of the two centuries concerning the authority of reason seem at first sight to coincide, yet, while bearing Boileau in mind, we can confidently assert that the doctrine of the sovereignty of reason was not established as a principle of thought until the culminating years of the eighteenth century. Pascal's "taisez-vous raison imbécile" indicates how attempered and attenuated by spiritual faith were the dictates of pure reason in his day, and the reason of Boileau, as I have already observed, was strongly tinged with æstheticism. I need not, with reference to eighteenth-century reason worship, go further than to refer the curious of enlightenment on the subject to the masterly works of Morley on the period in question, in which it is precisely this unflinching devotion to reason or unreason (if the sage of Chelsea will have it thus) which stimulates his calm and logical temperament to positive enthusiasm.

A last element of contrast between the centuries is of interest in connection with the habitual mode of thought which Godwin and his political disciple Shelley borrowed from eighteenth-century French sources with reference to the true relations subsisting between laws and morals. The seventeenth-century mind held tenaciously enough to the theory that it is the _moeurs_ of a nation that inspire the laws, but the encyclopedists were inspired in their undying hope of amelioration and human progress to perfectibility by the contrary theory that men, after all, are only bad because the laws have made them so.

It may be conceded, then, that these broad relations of literary movements one with the other, the conflict of converging tendencies, and the more evident causes of the growth and decay of powerful manifestations of a nation's thought, are of quite sufficient moment to have merited fuller treatment at the hands of the eminent critic who has in all other respects fulfilled his task so admirably, that having regard to the necessary conditions of the subject, it would be above criticism if anything could be.

THE BOTANY OF SHAKESPEARE.

BY THOMAS H. MACBRIDE.

The universality of Shakespeare is the common remark of critics. Other great men have been versatile; Shakespeare alone is universal. He alone of all great men seems to have been able to follow his own advice, "to hold as it were the mirror up to Nature." On the clear surface of his thought, as on a deep Alpine lake, the whole shore lies reflected--not alone the clouds, the sky, the woods, the castles, the rocks, the mountain path by which the shepherd strolls; not alone the broad highway by which may march the king in splendor the peasant with his wain; but even the humbler objects by the still water's edge, the trodden grass, the fluttering sedge, the broken reed, the tiniest flower, all things, all Nature in action or repose finds counterpart within the glassy depths.

Hence it is that no man, at least no English-speaking man, reads Shakespeare wrong. Everybody understands him. Here is a sort of Anglo-Saxon Bible in which, so far as the world goes, every soul finds himself, with all his hopes, his doubts, his whims, depicted. We are therefore not surprised that everybody claims a share in Shakespeare; rather claims the poet as his own. The Protestant is sure that Shakespeare despised the hierarchy; the Romanist is quite as certain that he loved the Church. There exists an essay to prove him a Presbyterian; another to show that the great dramatist was a Universalist. A volume has been written to prove the man a soldier; another that he was a lawyer, a printer, a fisherman, a freemason; and here are five or six articles to show that Shakespeare was a gardener.[U]

[Footnote U: In preparation of this article the author has consulted chiefly the following: John Gerarde, The Herball or General Historie of Plants, 1597; Shakspere, Edward Dowden, 1872; William Shakespeare, Works, Globe edition, 1867; Natural History of Shakespeare, Bessie Mayou, 1877; Shakespeare's England, William Winter, 1894; The Plant lore and Garden-craft of Shakespeare, H. F. Ellacombe, 1896; The Gardener's Chronicle, sundry pamphlets, and shorter articles.]

All this simply means that the poet had a marvelous faculty for close observing; that his vision was accurate, his instinct wonderfully true. It may be therefore worth our while to study for a little this remarkable man from the standpoint of a naturalist, to see how he who so vividly paints a passion can paint a flower; how the man who limns a character, till beyond the photograph it starts to actuality, will catch the essential feature of some natural truth.

We shall nowhere lack for material. The plays are full of references to plants and flowers of every sort. England in Shakespeare's day, as now, was a land of bloom, and the poet but reflects the loveliness of beauty and color spread about him. But he does something more. He is not content with flashes of color and breathings of odor, he goes into detail and gives us the individual plant unmistakably. In his description he shows an exactitude, a discriminating perception that, had it been turned to Nature's problems seriously at all, must at once have transformed the science of his age. But Shakespeare was not a man of science; he was a poet. In his views of Nature he resembles the great poets of the world, notably Goethe; and, like Goethe, he not infrequently outruns the science of his time, uses his imagination, divining things invisible. Moreover, Shakespeare's plants are living things; they form a garden, not a herbarium. They stand before us in multitudes, so that it is difficult for the present purpose to know what to select. We must be content with a few specimen forms brought out in quotations no more extensive than seems necessary to the argument. Of course, there are many plants to-day discussed of which Shakespeare never heard. He does not speak of many sorts of fungi, of slime molds, microbes; he knew nothing about these. The microscope had hardly been invented, and the unseen world was as yet largely personified. And yet Shakespeare has not failed to note the visible signs of some of our microscopic forms. Critics have wasted their time and the patience of mankind in an effort to identify Hebona, the "leperous distilment" poured into the porches of the royal ear. Almost profitless are such discussions. Yet we may note that we have here to do with an effect; the means of producing it need not be too closely questioned. Before the rush of action, the weird setting, the voice of an apparition, the excited audience cares not what the mysterious vial may contain--ebony, henbane, yew, or whether it were entirely empty. What is called for is a speedy and mysterious taking off. Had the scene been laid in Italy, the effect had been reached by the fateful prick of a jeweled pin, some ring upon a Borgian finger whose pressure was the paralysis of death. But the king died of no such curari. Note the symptoms (Hamlet, i, 5, 64-73):

"The leperous distilment; whose effect Holds such an enmity with blood of man That swift as quicksilver it courses through The natural gates and alleys of the body, And with a sudden vigour it doth posset And curd, like eager droppings into milk, The thin and wholesome blood; so did it mine; And a most instant tetter barked about, Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust, All my smooth body."

These are the symptoms of blood-poisoning, vividly portrayed; of some contagion, communicable by infection. In foul old London Shakespeare had doubtless seen endemic, zymotic diseases of every description, and drew his picture from the life. Royal blood is notoriously unsound, royal habit leaves the porches of royal ears especially exposed. On our supposition the vial need not have contained very much, not even ebony. The dramatist had plenty of mystery ready to his hand, and the Hebona is perhaps intentionally ambiguous. Bacterial diseases were of old called plagues; they fell from heaven. Listen to King Lear:

"Now, all the plagues that in the pendulous air Hang fated o'er men's faults, light on my daughters!"

Or Caliban:

"All the infections that the sun sucks up From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall and make him By inch-meal a disease!"

Or they were attributed, as already intimated, to unseen personal agencies:

"This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet: he begins at curfew, and walks till the first cock; he gives the web and the pin, squints the eye, and makes the hare-lip; mildews the white wheat, and hurts the poor creature of earth."

I quote this latter rather also to show the accuracy and compass of Shakespeare's vision. How many people, not farmers, have seen wheat whitened by the blight! And that is exactly the description, white not "to the harvest," but whiter still to sterility and death.

But leaving aside all microscopic forms which may or may not be incidentally touched upon everywhere, we may turn our attention next to cryptogamic plants which are positively defined. The sudden springing of mushrooms, for instance, especially at night, so unreal and yet realities withal, made their creation a suitable trick for Prospero:

"You demi-puppets that By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make, Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice To hear the solemn curfew."

The "green sour ringlets on the fields whereof the ewe not bites" are "fairy rings." The same thing appears in the speech of Dame Quickly:

"And nightly, meadow-fairies, look you sing, Like to the Garter's compass, in a ring; The expressure that it bears, green let it be, More fertile-fresh than all the field to see."

Fungi, toadstools, mushrooms, and so forth, are fructifications only; the vegetative part of the plants permeates the soil, feeds on its organic matter, and spreads almost equally, we may assume, in all directions from the point of starting. When now this vegetative growth has accumulated energy to form fruit, the sporocarps or mushrooms rise all around at the limits of activity; hence, in a circle.