Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 15, No. 90, June, 1875

Mr. Mill never tires of calling Christianity a selfish religion, and glorifies his substitute as free from this defect. But Mr. Fitzjames Stephen, in his work entitled Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, has clearly pointed out that Mr. Mill has only succeeded in duping himself on this point. A man cannot free himself from self-consideration. Christianity indeed appeals to the innate desire of happiness, but condemns the overweening and blind self-regard which cannot see that the highest happiness of self flows from a just respect to the selfhood of others and from the cultivation of the spiritual nature. Love your neighbor as yourself is the Christian precept; and it has the advantage of being practicable, which Mr. Mill's has not.

Mr. Mill considerately says he will forbear to urge the moral difficulties and perversions of the Christian revelation, "the recognition, for example, of the object of highest worship in a being who could make a hell." "Is it possible," he asks, "to adore such a one without a frightful distortion of the standard of right and wrong?" "Any other of the outrages to the most ordinary justice and humanity involved in the common Christian conception of the moral character of God sinks into insignificance beside this dreadful idealization of wickedness. Most of them, too, are happily not so unequivocally deducible from the very words of Christ." Yet this very Personage, who, Mr. Mill says, implicitly believed and taught this awful doctrine, presents, he confesses, the highest type of pure morality the world has ever seen. Arguing from this phenomenon, the more hideous the creed and the more torpid or sophisticated the intellect, the higher the morality is likely to be.

In the last essay, On Theism, Mr. Mill examines the evidences in Nature for the existence of God and for the immortality of the soul. The argument from design he thinks establishes the probability of the existence of an intelligent Creator of limited power; for "who," he asks, "would have recourse to means if to attain his end his mere word were sufficient?" It may be replied to this that it is as open to an omnipotent being to accomplish his will through a long chain of causes as by a fiat acting immediately. The recourse to intermediate means does not of necessity prove a limitation of power. If the means actually chosen are defective or bad, it may imply limitation of wisdom or moral obliquity just as much as defect of power, and any choice between these alternatives is entirely arbitrary from a logical standpoint.

Monotheism, Mr. Mill asserts, is a natural product, requiring a considerable amount of intellectual culture, but always appearing at a certain stage of natural development. How, then, did it originate among the Hebrews before they had emerged from barbarism, and fail to appear among their highly civilized contemporaries, the Egyptians and Assyrians? Christlieb is more correct than Mr. Mill, we think, when he says that neither in ancient nor in modern times has it been possible to find a nation which by its own unaided powers of thought has arrived at a definite belief in one personal living God. And the latest researches of ethnologists, as they may be found admirably compiled by Mr. Tyler (himself an advocate of the development hypothesis) in his Primitive Culture, substantiate this assertion.

Mr. Mill, in dealing with Kant's dictum, that the intuition of duty implies a God of necessity, is foolish enough to say "that this feeling of obligation rather excludes than compels the belief in a divine legislator;" which is a very discreditable piece of sophistry.

In closing this short review of these interesting essays we may be permitted to quote a few of Mr. Mill's admissions, which, taken together, almost amount to a confession of faith in the Christian system, and which leave upon the mind the impression that this painful groping of an earnest inquirer after the truth, and the closer approximation he continually made to Christian dogma, would have resulted, had he lived longer, in his adoption of that faith as offering the hypothesis that best explains the perplexing phenomena of the moral world.

"Experience," he says, "has abated the ardent hopes once entertained of the regeneration of the human race by merely negative doctrine, by the destruction of superstition." Here is a declaration of the need of a system of positive truth.

Again, of the Christian revelation he says: "The sender of the alleged message is not a sheer invention: there are grounds independent of the message itself for belief in His reality.... It is moreover much to the purpose to take notice that the very imperfection of the evidences which natural theology can produce of the divine attributes removes some of the chief stumbling-blocks to the belief of revelation." Here is the raison d'être of revelation.

This revelation, it should be borne in mind, in its method and character bears a striking similarity to the natural world, from whose Author it professes to come, as was long ago pointed out by Bishop Butler, and recently with great cogency by Mr. Henry Rogers in his most forcible work on the Superhuman Origin of the Bible.

Again: "A revelation cannot be proved unless by external evidence—that is, by the evidence of supernatural facts." Here is an assertion of the necessity of miracles.

Again: "Science contains nothing repugnant to the supposition that every event which takes place results from a specific volition of the presiding Power, provided this Power adheres in its particular volitions to general laws laid down by itself;" which is the biblical representation of the divine mode of action.

Again: "All the probabilities in case of a future life are that such as we have been made, or have made ourselves before the change, such we shall enter into the life hereafter;" which is the exact declaration of Scripture.

Mr. Mill further helps the Christian cause by pointing out two flaws in Hume's argument against miracles—viz., that the evidence of experience to which its appeal is made is only negative evidence; which is not conclusive, since facts of which there had been no previous experience are often discovered and proved by positive experience to be true; and secondly, the argument assumes that the testimony of experience against miracles is undeviating and indubitable, whereas the very thing asserted on the other side is that there have been miracles, and that the testimony is not wholly on the negative side.

No Christian can read the following tribute to the character of Christ without sadness that the joy of a larger faith was rejected by its author: "Whatever else may be taken away from us by rational criticism, Christ is still left—a unique figure, not more unlike all his precursors than all his followers, even those who had the direct benefit of his teaching. About the life and sayings of Jesus there is a stamp of personal originality, combined with profundity of insight, … which must place the Prophet of Nazareth, even in the estimation of those who have no belief in his inspiration, in the very first rank of the men of sublime genius of whom our species can boast. When this pre-eminent genius is combined with the qualities of probably the greatest moral reformer and martyr to that mission who ever existed upon earth, religion cannot be said to have made a bad choice in pitching upon this man as the ideal representative and guide of humanity; nor even now would it be easy even for an unbeliever to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life.... When to this we add that to the conception of the rational critic it remains a possibility that Christ actually was what he supposed himself to be, … we may well conclude that the influences of religion on the character which will remain after rational criticism has done its utmost against the evidences of religion are well worth preserving, and what they lack in direct strength as compared with those of a firmer belief is more than compensated by the greater truth and rectitude of the morality they sanction." The confession of these last few lines refutes the whole of Mr. Mill's elaborate argument on the worthlessness and immorality of that religion which from his grave he lifts his sad and hollow voice to overthrow.

    LAWRENCE TURNBULL.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP

WOMAN'S RIGHTS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Not only we, the latest seed of Time—
… not only we that prate
Of rights and wrongs, have loved the women well.

Nearly a century and a half ago an English lady, out of patience with the intolerable assumptions of the other sex, raised her voice in behalf of her own. In 1793 there was published in London a pamphlet entitled "Woman not Inferior to Man, or a Short and Modest Vindication of the Natural Right of the Fair Sex to a Perfect Equality of Power, Dignity and Esteem with the Men. By Sophia, a Person of Quality." The title-page has a quotation from Rowe's Fair Penitent:

How hard is the condition of our sex!
—Through every state of life the slave of man!

Wherefore are we
Born with souls, but to assert ourselves,
Shake off this wild obedience they exact,
And claim an equal empire o'er the world?

From such a title and such an epigraph one might expect the most incendiary sentiments in the pages which follow, and that Sophia had nothing less in view than to overthrow the usurper; but this she disclaims: she has no intention, she avers, "to stir up any of my own sex to revolt against the men, or to invert the present order of things with regard to government and authority" Her sole object appears to be to bring men to a proper sense of their deficiencies and the emptiness of their pretensions. But she is a person of admirable dignity and discretion: it is not until the conclusion, when she has not left them a leg to stand upon, that she magnanimously waives all the advantages to accrue from their humiliation, and merely bids them in future to know their true place. The composition is in every way worthy of these elevated sentiments. Sophia need not have announced herself a person of quality: there is evidence of it on every leaf of her book. One recognizes the accomplished gentlewoman of a hundred years ago, with her solid reading, her strong common sense, her sober religious convictions, her household science. No doubt she loved fine lace and old china; there are recondite internal proofs that she was pretty; and on closing the book a far-off rustle of her brocade reaches us as she makes her spreading curtsey. But we will let her speak for herself a little. Her first position is certainly a strong one: "If this haughty sex would have us believe they have a natural right of superiority over us, why don't they prove their charter from Nature by making use of reason to subdue themselves?… Were we to see men everywhere and at all times masters of themselves, and their animal appetites in perfect subordination to their rational faculties, we should have some color to think that Nature designed them as masters to us." The doctrine of female inferiority she considers "a vulgar though ancient error," observing that until very recent ages the sun was believed to revolve round the earth, and the notion of the antipodes was "a heresy in philosophy"—that to assert the equality of the sexes now was no greater paradox than to advocate either of those theories but a short time ago. "But," she continues, "who shall the matter be tried by?" and here we suspect she has reached the root of the difficulty. Both men and women, she admits, are too much interested to be impartial judges; therefore she appeals to "rectified reason" as umpire. She considers in order the various claims to predominance which men have put forward, and confutes them one by one. "Man concludes that all other creatures were made for him because he was not created until all were in readiness for him:" even granting that to be unanswerable, she says it only proves that men were made for women, and not vice versâ: "they are our natural drudges.... Men are magnified because they succeed in taming a tiger, an elephant or such like animals;" therefore what rank must belong to woman, "who spends years in training that fiercer animal, MAN?" She instances a journeyman tailor she once saw belabor his wife with a neck of mutton, "to make her know, as he said, her sovereign lord and master. And this is perhaps as strong an argument as their sex is able to produce, though conveyed, in a greasy light.... To stoop to regard for the strutting things is not enough; to humor them more than we could children with any tolerable decency is too little; they must be served, forsooth!" It is grievous injustice to Sophia, but one almost fancies one hears Madame George Sand. She allows that to please man ought to be part of the sex's business if it were likely to succeed; "but such is the fanatical composition of their natures that the more pains is taken in endeavoring to please them, the less generally is the labor successful; … and surely women were created by Heaven for some better end than to labor in vain their whole life long." The supercilious commendations of men are gall and wormwood to her: "Some, more condescending, are gracious enough to confess that many women have wit and conduct; but yet they are of opinion that even such of us as are the most remarkable for either or both still betray something which speaks the imbecility of our sex." She makes an excellent plea forgiving women a thorough education, complaining that it is denied them, and then they are charged with being superficial: "True knowledge and solid learning cannot but make woman as well as man more humble; … and it must be owned that if a little superficial knowledge has rendered some of our sex vain, it equally renders some of theirs insupportable." With all the sex's frivolity, she adds, women have not been found to spend their lives on mere entia rationis splitting hairs and weighing motes like the Schoolmen. She concludes that men deprive women of education lest they should oust them "from those public offices which they fill so miserably." She handles her logic admirably, and exposes her adversaries for begging the question and reasoning in a circle. Of course she enforces her assertions by citing the women who have distinguished themselves in every position of responsibility, military, political and intellectual, and only refrains from multiplying instances because of their number. Not to quote those alone who have filled chairs of medicine with honor, she ingeniously remarks that the remedies classed as "an old woman's recipe" are those oftenest prescribed, to the glory of her sex, who by patience, humanity and observation have invented without the help of Galen and Hippocrates an infinity of reliefs for the sick which their adherents can neither improve nor disapprove. She makes her final point on the question of moral superiority. It is sometimes stated "that some women have been more flagitious than any men, but that in nowise redounds to the dishonor of our sex in general. The corruption of the best is ever the worst: should we grant this, … it must be owned their number would at least balance the account. I believe no one will deny but that at least upon the most moderate computation there are a thousand bad men to one bad woman." She winds up by an appeal to her own sex in the very spirit of Miss F.P. Cobbe, the sum of which is to adjure women, for their own sakes, not to be silly.

How many contemporaries of George Selwyn had their eyes opened by this clear statement of their demerits there are no means of ascertaining. But Sophia raised up at least one furious antagonist, who replied by a pamphlet called "MAN Superior to WOMAN, or a Vindication of Man's Natural Right of Sovereign Authority over the Woman, containing a Plain Confutation of the Fallacious Arguments of SOPHIA. By a GENTLEMAN." The first thing to be noted is, that whereas Sophia said her say in about fifty pages, the masculine reply covers seventy-eight in smaller print. He opens by a "Dedication to the Ladies," beginning, "Lovely creatures"—an exordium which any woman of spirit would resent, the perfidy and disrepect of his intentions being obvious in those words alone; and he continues in the tone of flippancy which was to be expected. His arguments are weak in the extreme, and his satire is pointless. The only hit is his scheme for a female university, with Mrs. Manly and Mrs. Afra Behn in the chair of literature. His summary of woman's character and occupations was given earlier, with more brevity and wit, and no less truth, by Pope. To Sophia's historical illustrations he opposes female types named Tremula, Bellnina, Novilia, etc. But in truth the production is so excessively scurrilous that one needs to remember that those were the times of Congreve and Fielding to believe that the author could have the right to style himself "A GENTLEMAN." We shudder with pity for poor Sophia, who had such a mass of filth flung at her. But that decorous personage is not disconcerted: she does not lose her head or her temper, but opens her mouth with a freedom of speech which was the prerogative of an honest woman in those days, and rejoins with a second pamphlet: "Woman's Superior Excellence over Man" Her first thrust is to regret, in behalf of the other sex, that neither Achilles nor Hector appears as their champion, but Thersites. Either her adversary was silenced, or the publishers considered that what he said was not worthy of preservation, for no further words of his appear, so that in any case she had the best of it. Her first pamphlet had a second edition in the following year. Its memory was still alive in this century, for it was quoted with respect by the Retrospective Review for 1824 in a learned article on the "Privileges of Woman," which deserves the attention of those interested in the subject.

    S.B.W.

THE TOMB OF LORENZO DE' MEDICI

I wish to chronicle in the pages of Lippincott's Magazine the record of a scene that took place this spring in the Medicean chapel attached to the church of San Lorenzo in Florence. It was in itself a remarkable and memorable scene enough, but it was yet more important as regards certain interesting points of history on which it throws a very curious light, if it does not, as many persons will be inclined to think, settle them definitively.

The little square marble chapel itself, which no visitor to Florence will have forgotten, is admired as an architectural gem of Michael Angelo, and is yet more celebrated as the shrine of some of his finest works, especially the sitting statue of Lorenzo and the recumbent statues of Twilight and Dawn on the tomb of Lorenzo. These two grand figures, it will be remembered, repose on the arched canopy over the tomb in such a position that, if not retained in their places by some means adapted for that purpose, they would slide off the rounded arch by their own weight. Now, it had been lately observed that the statue of Twilight was moving, and it was very reasonably judged to be necessary that this should be looked to. The statue was therefore carefully raised, and it was discovered that when the tomb of Lorenzo had been opened to place in it the body of the murdered Alexander, his (putative) son, the metal stanchion or peg by means of which Michael Angelo had secured his statue in its place had been replaced by a wooden one. This, in the course of the centuries which have since elapsed had become decayed, and the statue might have fallen any day. This being the case, it was thought well to raise the other statue, that of the Dawn also. But that was found to be as secure in its place as the great artist had left it. But these superincumbent statues having been thus lifted from off the sepulchre, it was suggested that the opportunity should be taken to examine the contents of the tomb.

There were several reasons which rendered such an examination historically interesting and curious. A certain degree of doubt has been cast—mainly by Grimm—on the question whether the tomb be in fact that of Lorenzo, the father of Catherine de' Medici, the celebrated queen of France—whether it be not rather that of Giuliano, his uncle. For my part, I had always thought that there was little or no foundation for the doubt. The main features of the story of Alexander will probably be in the memory of the reader. The Florentine republic and liberty were destroyed in 1527 by the united forces of the traitor pope, the Medicean Clement VII., and Charles V., with the understanding that this Alexander should marry Margaret, the emperor's illegitimate daughter, and that Florence should become a dukedom to dower the young couple withal. Who and what this Alexander was has always been one of the puzzles of history. He was, tradition says, very swarthy, and was generally believed to be the son of a Moorish slave-mother. He was certainly illegitimate; and the question, Who was his father? was always a doubtful one, though he has generally been called the son of Lorenzo. I have elsewhere given at length reasons for believing rather that whispered bit of scandal of the time which declared the pope, Clement VII., to be his father. When Florence fell he became duke, and reigned over the unhappy city for seven years, in such sort that the murder of him in 1537 by his kinsman Lorenzino, traitorously and cowardly done as the deed was, was deemed the act of a patriot. The story of such a deed, done at midnight in a private chamber, and never made the subject of legal investigation, of course reaches subsequent generations enveloped in more or less of uncertainty. Now, it was likely enough that the careful examination of the remains in the tomb in question might throw light on sundry points of Alexander's story.

In the first place, the identity of the tomb is now fixed beyond the possibility of a doubt. It was known that the body of the murdered Alexander was placed in the tomb of his putative father, Lorenzo. If, therefore, the body of Alexander should be found in this sepulchre, the tomb is proved to have been that of Lorenzo. When the lid of the sarcophagus was raised, there accordingly were the two bodies visible—one dressed in white, the other in black. It has been assumed—and I think the assumption is abundantly justified, as will presently be seen—that the skeleton in black is that of Lorenzo, and the skeleton in white that of Alexander. The relative position of the bodies was very singular. The heads were at opposite ends of the sarcophagus, and the bodies were placed, not side by side, but each between the legs of the other. One of the bodies, that of Lorenzo, seemed when the lid of the sarcophagus was raised to be headless, but on examination the skull was found under the breast of the black tunic that covered the body. There can be little doubt that it became detached when the body was moved for the purpose of placing that of Alexander in the tomb. The white garment that clad the skeleton of Alexander was an embroidered shirt ornamented with lace: the legs were covered with white leggings. The skull of this skeleton had all the teeth perfect when the sarcophagus was opened; but should the curiosity of any future generation tempt the men of that day to peer into this receptacle of the dust of tyrants, the skull of the murdered Alexander will be found to be toothless. And all sorts of suppositions and theories may be based on this singular fact, and credited, until some antiquary of the period discovers in an ancient magazine published at the period of a former examination of the sepulchre this record, in which I am obliged to declare—with a blush for the decency of the Florentines—that the teeth were all stolen by persons who were permitted to be present at the opening of the tomb. A certain special historical interest is attached to those teeth of the murdered man. The story goes that when Lorenzino stabbed him as he slept on a bed in Lorenzino's own house, to which he had been inveigled in the hope of meeting there a certain lady, the wife of a Ginori of the time, Alexander started up, and, seizing the thumb of the murderer between his teeth, held him so firmly that he could not have escaped had not a bravo whom he had hired to aid him come to his assistance. These, then, were the teeth that held so well in the death-grip of their owner! Some Florentine historically-minded virtuoso (!) appreciated the significance of the fact, and stole them from the head some three centuries and a half after that last bite of theirs. There were several gaps in the range of teeth still remaining in the skull of Alexander, which has appeared strange to some who remember that he was only twenty-seven when he died. But I think that any medical man, taking into consideration; the manner of his death, would find nothing strange in the circumstance, but on the contrary a confirmation of the truth of the facts which the chroniclers of the time have preserved for us.

Perhaps, however, the most curious and interesting fact which the opening of this tomb has ascertained is that testified to by the hair still remaining on the skull which was that of Alexander. It is a black curly hair of a coarse quality, such as a man of mixed black blood may be supposed to have had. It is recorded that one of the wounds given by the bravo Scoronconcolo, whom Lorenzino had hired to assist him in the murder, and who ran up to complete the job when his master was disabled by being fast held by the teeth of Alexander, was a stab in the face. And of the truth of this tradition also the skull of the murdered man still affords evidence; for on the left-hand side of the face, a little below the socket of the eye, there is a mark in the bone beneath the cheek which must have been made by the point of the sword or dagger that inflicted the wound, and which shows that the bravo Scoronconcolo's thrust must have been a shrewd one.

It will readily be supposed that the scene at the opening of the sepulchre must have been a very impressive one. There, in that solemn chapel of white and black marble which the genius of Michael Angelo prepared for the repose of his sovereigns and patrons, with his lifelike and immortal presentations of the forms of the dead who have filled all story with their names, looking down on the deed with sad and solemn faces, who would not, while thus forcing the prison-house of the tomb to render up its terrible and long-concealed secrets, have been deeply sensible of a feeling of awe and reverence? Even putting aside all such sentiments as the contemplation of such a memento mori is usually found to inspire in most men, the purely scientific historical inquirer must have felt the importance of the occasion, and the great desirability of making the most in an historical point of view of so rare an opportunity. I am sorry to be obliged to record that the Florentines, so far as could be judged from their conduct and bearing, felt nothing of all this. No one who knows them as well as I do would have expected reverence from them under any possible or imaginable circumstances; but one might have expected such due care and decency of proceeding as would have sufficed to render the examination of the remains as historically instructive as possible, and to preserve the record for a future generation. But this was very far from being the case. A learned professor of anatomy indeed attended at the opening of the tomb, but instead of touching the remains himself, or utilizing his science by handling them as they ought to have been handled, he called a workman, and by him the bodies were torn out from their resting-place in fragments. The clothes were of course torn to pieces in the operation; the lace from the shirt of Alexander was permitted to be stolen; and the same fate, as has been stated, overtook his teeth. No sort of preparation had been made for any possible examination of the remains to any good purpose. They were laid out anyhow, as the phrase is, on a little marble bench in the chapel. Those who remember the place will not need to be told how perfect a sham any pretence of examination must have been under such circumstances. When this pretence had been gone through, the bones were cast back again into the marble sarcophagus by the workman, "like"—as one eye-witness of the scene describes it—"the bones of dogs." And when the same person looked into the sarcophagus after this tossing back had been effected, he saw a mere confused heap of the scattered bones of two skeletons undistinguishably mixed together. "I cannot help," writes the same eye-witness, "expressing my sense of the barbaric acts which I witnessed. Historic skeletons—the father of Catherine de' Medici, the son-in-law of Charles V.; Florentine nobles—one a duke of Florence, the other of Urbino—both bad enough fellows, no doubt, but could any Communists have acted worse? Besides, Communist mobs assert principles, and do these things in hot blood. But this most monstrous outrage was committed coolly by pure stupidity and the carelessness which cannot be moved by any consideration to take any trouble that can by any possibility be avoided. Had they turned up a quantity of the bones of animals to examine them, they could not have done worse." It is fair to add that some of the organs of the Florentine press stigmatized the proceedings upon this occasion as they deserved to be stigmatized.

    T.A.T.

T.W. ROBERTSON

The qualifications needed by the novelist and by the dramatist are at once alike and unlike. Differing in manner rather than in matter, they are rarely found united in one man. Scott, from whose novels many stirring plays have been taken, was incapable of writing one himself; Thackeray, even after he was the well-known author of Vanity Fair, could not find a manager willing to produce his comedy; and Thackeray's great master, Fielding, comparatively failed as a dramatist, though Joseph Surface is Blifil and Charles Surface is Tom Jones, and from the same work Colman derived his comedy of the Jealous Wife, which holds the stage to this day. By dint of hard work a man might make himself a novelist, but the dramatist, like the poet, must be born. He who possesses the power of writing successfully for the stage will surely show it in his first work. This theory accounts for the signal success of the Cantab, a slight farce played in 1861 at the London Strand Theatre. The material was weak and worn-out, but the fun was not forced: it flowed naturally from the situations. There was a freshness and a firmness about the little piece which showed the hand of a young author capable of better things. Three years later, Mr. Sothern, desiring a part diametrically the opposite of Lord Dundreary, produced David Garrick, and in 1865 Society made its first appearance on the stage of the Prince of Wales's Theatre. Then T. W. Robertson stepped to the front rank of living English dramatists.

The author had found his audience and his actors. The Prince of Wales's Theatre was directed by a burlesque actress, and devoted to light comedy and extravaganza: after that it gave up burlesque, merely heightening the effect of the comedy and prolonging the programme by a quiet farce. The company was small and strong, the theatre was well managed, and plays were handsomely mounted. After the success of Society until Robertson's death its main reliance was upon his pen. In 1866 Ours was first produced, followed in 1867 by Caste. The pieces of other authors, although carefully played and well mounted, were uniform failures. Mr. Edmund Yates's Tame Cats, and Mr. Dion Boucicault's How She Loves Him! were each withdrawn after a run of a very few nights, whereas School Play, an M.P. succeeded each other with undisputed success. At the Haymarket Theatre David Garrick was followed by Home and Birth.

The day was won, and the successful author could afford to rest on his laurels. But he was ambitious and a hard worker; so he continued to write and adapt. To counterbalance the good-fortune of David Garrick and Home at the Haymarket, and the series of six at the Prince of Wales's Theatre, there was a list of failures—Birth, Progress, Dreams and War. But his comedies were far more successful than his heavier plays: his belief in his power to construct good acting dramas must have been sadly shaken by the total failure of For Love, the Shadow-Tree Shaft and the Nightingale. There can be no better proof of their want of success than the fact that at a time when American managers were eager for his comedies, not one of his dramas was ever produced in the United States. But in spite of the comparative failure of his later works, his death was felt to be the loss of a dramatic author of some performance and of greater promise.

We have a way of nicknaming a new writer after one of his most celebrated predecessors whom we imagine him to resemble, and then we find fault with him for not having all the qualities of an author whom he probably has no desire to imitate. False friends of T.W. Robertson called him the "modern Sheridan." Few writers are more dissimilar. Robertson in his dialogue and construction imitated the modern French dramatists; Sheridan, the old English, Congreve, Farquhar and Wycherley. Robertson especially delighted in love-scenes—there are generally two at least in each of his comedies: I cannot remember one in any of Sheridan's. The dialogue of the author of the School for Scandal is artificial and glittering—that of the author of School is generally more natural, and always less brilliant. They have, however, one point in common: they both practiced Molière's maxim, Je prends mon bien où je le trouve. They both unhesitatingly plagiarized. Robertson in particular easily assimilated foreign matter. He turned Le Dégel and Les Ganaches of M. Sardou into A Rapid Thaw and Progress. David Garrick was taken from Dr. Robin, a French play, itself imitated from the German. Home closely follows L'Aventurière of M. Émile Augier. Madame de Girardin's La Joie fait peur, previously translated by Mr. G.H. Lewes as Sunshine through the Clouds, gave Robertson the situation of the last act of War: Mr. Dion Boucicault has since deftly adapted the same delightful little piece under the name of Kerry, or Night and Morning. The Cinderella-like plot of School is taken from the Aschenbrödel of Roderick Benedix: the school examination was suggested by a French vaudeville, En classe, mesdemoiselles! The part of Beau Farintosh is a weak revival of Garrick's Lord Chalkstone and Colman and Garrick's Lord Ogleby; and the strong situation in the fourth act is imitated from Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré of George Sand.

But Robertson is decidedly strongest when he walks without crutches. His own original plays, Society, Caste, Ours, are by far his best. A foreign support made him limp. Of all his adaptations, home alone is really good: most of the others failed. Although that cosmopolitan mosaic School has been the most successful of his pieces in London—it has passed its five hundredth night—it is by no means the best. Success is not necessarily a test of real merit. Evidently, School has the elements of popularity, although it is a very weak piece, although it is full of foreign matter, and although it violates that most necessary rule of dramatic art, declaring no play should contain an effect, a line, a scene or an act which does not bear on the end in view by developing either the characters or the action. The entire second act, containing the farcical examination-scene, is useless. Robertson again sinned in this way in the Nightingale: although it had no effect on the plot, although it was entirely unnecessary, he introduced a pretty tableau representing the heroine, a lovely prima-donna, singing under the silver moonbeams in a boat rocked to and fro by the waves.

I have before spoken of Robertson's fondness for love-scenes. There are almost as many of them in one of his comedies as in one of Mr. Anthony Trollope's novels. And they are generally very good. What can be more delicious than the "spooning" in Home, if it is not the billing and cooing in Ours? But what can be more commonplace or more objectionable than the frequent remarks about love and Cupid scattered through his plays? Tom Stylus says in Society, "Love is an awful swindler—always drawing upon Hope, who never honors his drafts—a sort of whining beggar, continually moved on by the maternal police. But 'tis a weakness to which the wisest of us are subject—a kind of manly measles which this flesh is heir to, particularly when the flesh is heir to nothing else. Even I have felt the divine damnation—I mean emanation. But the lady united herself to another, which was a very good thing for me, and anything but a misfortune for her." This is altogether false: no man could ever say such things seriously—at least no man of sense would, and Tom Stylus is a man of sense. See, too, this bit of dialogue in Play:

"AMANDA. You are a good girl, and will be rewarded some day with a good man's love for this.

"ROSIE. I don't want it. I don't want anything to do with love. Love's a nasty, naughty, wicked boy, and the sooner he's put in convict-clothes and refused a ticket-of-leave, the better."

That is false too: the affected smartness of the wit does not suit the situation; or, rather, as a writer in the Athenaeum has said of a similar speech, "it suits any occasion."

In this same Play, Mrs. Kin peck soliloquizes thus: "I fell into a most unquiet sleep. I thought I saw Cliqueteaux, the old croupier, who died of love for me —of that and a complication of other disorders. A man that was a genius, with a wart on his nose. It was hereditary—the genius, not the wart," etc. Now this may be "funny," but it is not dramatic. It reminds one of the most forced passages of Artemas Ward's generally fresh and unforced humor. But perhaps the worst instance in all Robertson's play of this pitiful sacrifice of situation and character to a petty "joke" is found in Caste. Sam Gerridge, a gas-fitter and plumber, desiring to marry Polly, the daughter of Eccles, a drunken old brute, tells him so, casually mentioning that to prove his affection he will do anything he can in "the way of spirituous liquor or tobacco." This captivates the heart of old Eccles, who joins the hands of the young couple, saying with a drunken leer, "Samuel Gerridge, she is thine. Samuel Gerridge, you shall be 'er 'usband! I don't know a gasfitter man!" (The italics are in the original).

These are but minor errors, however. The great fault in Robertson's comedies is the lack of strong dramatic interest. There is no human passion. There is no exhibition of human strength and human weakness. There is little of that clash of character against character from which results true comedy. But even if his characters are mere empty-headed automata, even if his plays have not the literary value of Mr. W.S. Gilbert's, even if his pieces have not the situations of Sardou or the wit of Sheridan, he has a simple sweetness all his own. And perhaps, after all, the greatest objection to him is the weakness of his imitators. Success is always a schoolmaster. But it is not just to hold Robertson responsible for the faults of Alberry or the failings of the tea-cup-and-saucer school of comedy-writers.

    J.B.M.

THE LETTERS OF A PRINCESS

It is the fashion to decry French memoirs of court-life, and, considering the quaint freedom of style which characterizes much of this voluminous literature, it is not strange. Many of these memoirs, original letters, etc. are exceedingly interesting, because of their merciless unmasking of some of the sublime figure-heads of history; notably the letters of Madame Charlotte Elizabeth of Bavaria, widow of Monsieur, the only brother of Louis XIV. She always hated the French manners, and longed for her native sauer-kraut and sausages, which to her taste were finer than all the luxuries and dainties of the French cuisine. She was counted a severe moralist, and her tongue was more dreaded than a bayonet-charge. To be sure, her enemies more than hinted that her extraordinary virtue was trebly guarded by her ugliness. On the latter subject she says herself, "I must be cruelly ugly: I never had a passable feature. My eyes are little, my nose short and big, my lips long and flat, my cheeks hanging, my face long, my waist and my legs large, my stature short: sum-total, a little old fright." But she was intelligent and witty, and that, in France at least, goes a long way with a woman. She was also loyal and truthful. No one doubted her word when once she had spoken. This makes her testimony valuable, though many incidents circumspectly narrated by her seem incredible. Of the young duchesse de Bourgogne, second daughter of Louis XIV., she says: One of her amusements was to make her lackeys drag her over the floor by her feet. It is to be presumed that the duchess was a very young person at this time.