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Title: Post mortem: Essays, historical and medical

Author: C. MacLaurin

Release date: October 1, 2022 [eBook #69078]

Language: English

Original publication: 1922: George H. Doran Company, 1923

Credits: MWS, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POST MORTEM: ESSAYS, HISTORICAL AND MEDICAL ***





Post Mortem


[Illustration:                                       [_Photo, Anderson._

  THE EMPEROR CHARLES V.
  From a portrait by Titian (Madrid, Prado).]




  Post Mortem
  Essays, Historical and Medical

  C. MacLaurin
  M.B.C.M., F.R.C.S.E., LL.D.

  _Lecturer in Clinical Surgery
  University of Sydney, etc._


  New York:
  George H. Doran Company




  _Made and Printed in Great Britain by_ Butler & Tanner,
    _Frome and London_




Preface


Whether the “great man” has had any real influence on the world, or
whether history is merely a matter of ideas and tendencies among
mankind, are still questions open to solution; but there is no doubt
that great persons are still interesting; and it is the aim of this
series of essays to throw such light upon them as is possible as
regards their physical condition; and to consider how far their
actions were influenced by their health. There are many remarkable
people in history about whom we know too little to dogmatize, though
we may strongly suspect that their mental and physical conditions were
abnormal when they were driven to take actions which have passed into
history; for instances, Mahomet and St. Paul. Such I have purposely
omitted. But there were far more whose actions were clearly the result
of their state of health; and some of these who happen to have been
leaders at critical epochs I have ventured to study from the point of
view of a doctor. This point of view appears to have been strangely
neglected by historians and others. If the background against which it
shows its heroes and heroines should appear unsentimental and harsh,
at least it appears to medical opinion as probably true; and it is our
duty to seek Truth. If it appears to assume an iconoclastic attitude
towards many ideals I am sorry, and can only wish that the patina cast
upon their characters were more sentimental and beautiful.

Jeanne d’Arc and the Emperor Charles V were undoubtedly heroic
figures who have been almost worshipped by many millions of people;
yet undoubtedly they were human and subject to the unhappy frailties
of other people. This in no way detracts from their renown. I must
apologize for treating Don Quixote as a real person; he was quite as
much a living individual as anyone in history. Through his glamour we
can get a real glimpse of the character of Cervantes.

In Australia we have no access to the original sources of European
history; we must rely upon the “printed word” as it appears in standard
monographs and essays.

I owe many thanks to Miss Kibble, of the research department of the
Sydney Public Library, without whose help this work could never have
been undertaken.

SYDNEY, 1922.




Contents


                                                        PAGE

  THE CASE OF ANNE BOLEYN                                 13

  THE PROBLEM OF JEANNE D’ARC                             34

  THE EMPRESS THEODORA                                    65

  THE EMPEROR CHARLES V                                   88

  DON JOHN OF AUSTRIA, CERVANTES, AND DON QUIXOTE        114

  PHILIP II; AND THE ARTERIO-SCLEROSIS OF STATESMEN      144

  MR. AND MRS. PEPYS                                     157

  EDWARD GIBBON                                          180

  JEAN PAUL MARAT                                        191

  NAPOLEON I                                             204

  BENVENUTO CELLINI                                      226

  DEATH                                                  232




Illustrations


  The Emperor Charles V            _Frontispiece_

  Mary Tudor                       _Face p._   16

  The Empress Theodora                 ”       72

  Perseus and the Gorgon’s Head        ”      228




The Case of Anne Boleyn


There is something Greek, something akin to Œdipus and Thyestes, in
the tragedy of Anne Boleyn. It is difficult to believe, as we read it,
that we are viewing the actions of real people subject to passions
violent indeed yet common to those of mankind, and not the creatures of
a nightmare. Yet I believe that the conduct of the three protagonists,
Henry, Catherine, and Anne, can all be explained if we appreciate the
facts and interpret them with the aid of a little medical knowledge
and insight. Let us search for this explanation. Needless to say we
shall not get it in the strongly Bowdlerized sketches that most of us
have learnt at school; it is a pity that such rubbish should be taught,
because this period is one of the most important in English history;
the actors played vital parts; and upon the drama that they played has
depended the history of England ever since.

In considering an historical drama one has to remember the curtain
of gauze which Time has drawn before us, and to allow for its colour
and density. In the case of Henry VIII and his time, though the
actual materials are enormous, yet everything has to be viewed
through an _odium theologicum_ that is unparalleled since the days of
Theodora. In the eyes of the Catholics, Henry was, if not the actual
devil incarnate, at all events the next thing; and their opinion has
survived among many people who ought to know better to the present day.
Decidedly we must make a great deal of allowance.

Henry succeeded to the throne, nineteen years of age, handsome, rather
free-living, full of _joie-de-vivre_, charming, and with every promise
of greatness and happiness. He died at fifty-five, unhappy, worn down
with illness, at enmity with his people, with the Church, and with the
world in general, leaving a memory in the popular mind of a murderous
concupiscence that has become a byword. About the time that he was
a young man, syphilis, which is supposed to have been introduced by
Columbus’ men, ran like a whirlwind through Europe. Hardly anyone seems
to have escaped, and it was said that even the Pope upon the throne of
St. Peter went the way of most other people, though it is possible that
this accusation was as unreliable as many other accusations against
the popes. Be that as it may, the foundations were then laid for that
syphilization which has transformed the disease into its present
mildness. It is impossible to doubt that Henry contracted it in his
youth[1]; the evidence will become clear to any doctor as we proceed.

The first act of his reign was to marry for political reasons Catherine
of Aragon, who was the widow of his elder brother Arthur. She was
daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, and, though far from
beautiful, proved herself to possess a great and noble soul and a
courage of well-tempered steel. The English people took her to their
hearts, and when unmerited misfortune fell upon her never lost the
love they had felt for her when she was a happy young woman. Though
she was six years older than Henry, the two lived happily together for
many years. Seven months after marriage Catherine was delivered of
a daughter, still-born. Eight months later she had a son, who lived
three days. Two years later she had a still-born son. Nine months
later she had a son, who died in early infancy, and eighteen months
afterwards the infant was born who was to live to be Queen Mary. Henry
was intensely disappointed, and for the first time turned against his
wife. It was all important to produce an heir to the throne, for
it was thought that no woman could rule England. No woman had ever
ruled England, save only Matilda, and her precedent was not alluring.
So Henry longed desperately for a son; nevertheless as the little
Mary grew up--a sickly child--he became passionately devoted to her.
She grew up, as one can see from her well-known portrait, probably
an hereditary syphilitic. For a time Henry had thought of divorcing
Catherine, but his affection for Mary probably turned the scale in her
mother’s favour. Catherine had several more miscarriages, and by the
time she was forty-two ceased to menstruate; it became clear that she
would have no more children and could never produce an heir to the
throne.

[Illustration:                                       [_Photo, Anderson._

  MARY TUDOR.
  From a portrait by Moro Antonio (Madrid, Prado).]

During these years Henry’s morals had been no worse than those of any
other prince in Europe; certainly better than Louis XIV and XV, who
were to come after him, or Charles II. He met Mary Boleyn, daughter
of a rich London merchant, and made her his mistress. Later on he
met Anne Boleyn, her sister, a girl of sixteen, and fell in love. We
have a very good description of her, and several portraits. She was
of medium stature, not handsome, with a long neck, wide mouth, bosom
“not much raised,” eyes black and beautiful and a knowledge of how
to use them. Her hair was long, and it appears that she used to wear
it long and flowing in the house. It was not so very long since Joan
of Arc had been burnt largely because she went about without a wimple,
and Mistress Anne’s conduct with regard to her hair was probably
worse in those days than for a girl to be seen smoking cigarettes
when driving a motor-car to-day. At any rate, she acquired demerit by
it, and everybody was on the look-out for more serious false steps.
The truth seems to be--so far as one can ascertain truth from reports
which, even if unprejudiced, came from people who knew nothing about a
woman’s heart--that she was a bold and ambitious girl who laid herself
out to capture Henry, and succeeded. Mary Boleyn was thrust aside, and
Henry paid violent court in his own enormous and impassioned way to
Anne. We have some of his love letters; there can be no doubt of his
sincerity, or that his love for Anne was, while it lasted, the great
passion of his life. Had she behaved herself she might have retained
that love. She repulsed him for several years, and we can see the idea
of divorce gradually growing in his mind. He appealed to Pope Clement
VII to help him. Catherine defended herself bravely, and stirred Europe
in her cause. The Pope hesitated, crushed between the hammer and the
anvil, between Henry and the Emperor Charles V. Henry discovered that
his marriage with Catherine had come within the prohibited degrees,
and that she had never been his wife at all. It was a matter of doubt
then--and I believe still is--whether the Pope’s dispensation could
acquit them of mortal sin. Apparently even his Holiness’ influence
would not have been sufficient to counterbalance the crime of marrying
his deceased brother’s widow; nevertheless it was rather remarkable
that, if Henry were really such a stickler for the forms of canon law
as he now wished to make out, he never troubled to raise the question
until after he had fallen in love with some one else. He definitely
promised Anne that he would divorce Catherine, marry Anne, and make her
Queen of England. Secure in his promise, Anne yielded to her lover,
seeing radiant visions of glory before her. How foolish would any girl
be who let slip the chance--nay, the certainty--of being the Queen!
Yet she was to discover that even queens can be bitterly unhappy.
Anne sprang joyfully into the unknown, as many a girl has done before
her and since, trusting to her power to charm her lover; and became
pregnant. Meanwhile the struggle for the divorce proceeded, the Pope
swaying this way and that, and Catherine defending her honour and
her throne with splendid courage. The nurses and astrologers declared
that the fœtus was a son, and the lovers, mad with joy, were married
in secret, divorce or no divorce. The obliging Archbishop Cranmer
pronounced that the marriage with Catherine was null and void, as the
Pope would not do so.

The time came for Anne to fulfil her promise and provide an heir. King
and queen anticipated the event in the wildest excitement. There had
been several lovers’ quarrels, which had been made up in the usual
manner; once Henry was heard to say passionately that he would rather
beg his bread in the streets than desert her. Yet it is doubtful
whether Anne Boleyn was ever anything more than an ambitious courtesan;
it is doubtful whether she ever felt anything towards him but her
natural wish to be queen. In due course her baby was born, and it was a
girl--the girl who afterwards became Queen Elizabeth.

Henry’s disappointment was tragic, and for the first time Anne began to
realize the terror of her position. She was detested by the people and
the Court, who were emphatically on the side of the noble woman whom
she had supplanted. She had estranged everybody by her vain-glory and
arrogance in the hour of her triumph; and it began to be whispered
that even if her own marriage were legal while Catherine was still
alive, yet it was illegal by the canon law, for Mary Boleyn, her
sister, had been Henry’s wife in all but name. Canonically speaking,
Henry had done no better by marrying her than by marrying Catherine.
A horrible story went around that he had been familiar with her
mother first, and that Anne was his own daughter, and moreover that
he knew it. I think we can definitely and at once put this aside as
an ecclesiastical lie; there is absolutely no evidence for it and it
is impossible to conceive two persons more unlike than the little
lively brunette and the great fresh-faced “bluff King Hal.” Moreover,
Henry denied the story absolutely, and whatever else he was, he was a
man who was never afraid to tell the truth. Most of the difficulties
in understanding this complex period of our history disappear if we
believe Henry’s own simple statements; but these suffer from the
incredulity which Bismarck found three hundred years later when he told
his rivals the plain unvarnished truth.

Let us anticipate events a little and narrate the death of Catherine,
which took place in 1536, nearly three years after the birth of
Elizabeth. The very brief and sketchy accounts which have survived give
me the impression that she died of uræmia, but no definite opinion
can be given. Henry, of course, lay under the immediate charge of
having poisoned her, but I do not know that anybody believed it very
seriously. So died this unhappy and well-beloved lady, to whom life
meant little but a series of bitter misfortunes.

After Elizabeth was born the tragedy began to move with terrible
impetus towards its climax. Henry developed an intractable ulcer on
his thigh, which persisted till his death, and frequently caused him
severe agony whenever the sinus closed. He became corpulent, the result
of over-eating and over-drinking. He had been immensely worried for
years over the affair of Catherine; as a result his blood-pressure
seems to have risen, so that he was affected by frightful headaches,
which often incapacitated him from work for days together. He gave up
the athleticism which had distinguished his resplendent youth, aged
rapidly, and became a harassed, violent, ill-tempered middle-aged
man--not at all the sort of man to turn into a cuckold.

Yet this is precisely what Anne did. Less than a month after Elizabeth
was born--while she was still in the puerperal state--she solicited Sir
Henry Norreys, the most intimate friend of the King, to be her lover.
A week later, on October 17th, 1533, he yielded. During the next
couple of years Anne seems to have gone absolutely out of her senses,
if the contemporary stories are true. She seems to have solicited
several prominent men of the Court, and even to have stooped to one
of the musicians; worst of all, it was said that she had committed
incest with her brother, Lord Rocheford. Nor did she behave with the
ordinary consideration for the feelings of others that might have
brought her hosts of friends--remember, she was a queen!--should the
time ever come when she should need them. It does not require any great
amount of civility on the part of a queen to win friends. Arrogant
and overbearing, she estranged everybody at Court; she acted like
a beggar on horseback, and was left without a friend in the place.
And she, who owed her husband such a world, behaved towards him with
the same arrogance as she showed to others, and in addition jealousy
both concerning other women whom she feared and concerning the King’s
beloved daughter, Mary. She spoke to the Duke of Norfolk--her uncle on
the mother’s side, and one of the greatest peers of the realm--“like a
dog”; as he turned away he muttered that she was “une grande putaine.”
The most polite interpretation of the French word is “strumpet.” When
the Duke used such a word to his own niece, what sort of reputation
must have been gathering about her?

She had two more miscarriages. After the second the King’s fury flamed
out, and he told her plainly that he deeply regretted having married
her. He must have indeed been sorry; he had abandoned a good woman for
a bad; for her he had quarrelled with the Pope and with many of his
subjects; whatever conscience he had must have been tormenting him:
all these things for the sake of an heir, which seemed as hopelessly
unprocurable as ever. Both the women seemed affected by some fate which
condemned them to perpetual miscarriages; this fate, of course, was
Henry’s own syphilis, even supposing that neither wife had contracted
it independently. (It is much to Anne Boleyn’s credit or discredit,
that to a syphilitic husband she bore a daughter so vigorous as
Elizabeth, though Professor Chamberlin does not appear to think very
highly of her health.)

Meanwhile all sorts of scandalous rumours were flying about; and
finally a maid of honour, whose chastity had been impugned, told a
Privy Councillor that no doubt she herself was no better than she
should be, but that at any rate her Majesty Queen Anne was far worse.
The Privy Councillor related this to Thomas Cromwell; he, the rumours
being thus focussed, dared to tell the King. Henry changed colour, and
ordered a secret inquiry to be held. At this inquiry the ladies of
the bedchamber were strictly cross-examined, but nothing was allowed
to happen for a few days, when a secret commission was appointed,
consisting of the Chancellor, the judges, Thomas Cromwell, and other
members of the Council. Sir William Brereton was first sent to the
Tower, then the musician Smeaton. Next day there was a tournament at
Greenwich, in the midst of which Henry suddenly rose and left the
scene, taking Norreys with him. Anne was brought before the Commission
next day, and committed to the Tower, where she found that Sir Francis
Weston had preceded her. Lord Rocheford, her brother, joined her almost
immediately on the charge of incest.

The Grand Juries of Kent and Middlesex returned true bills on the
cases, and the Commission drew up an indictment, giving names, places,
and dates for every alleged act. The four commoners were put on
trial at Westminster Hall. Anne’s father, Lord Wiltshire, though he
volunteered to sit, was excused attendance, since a verdict of guilty
against the men would necessarily involve his daughter. One may read
this either way, against or in favour of Anne. Either Wiltshire was
enraged at her folly, and merely wished to end her disgrace; or it may
be that he thought he would be able to sway the Court in her favour.
Possibly he was afraid of the King and wished to show that he at least
was on his royal side, however badly Anne may have behaved. In dealing
with a harsh and tyrannical man like Henry VIII it is difficult to
assess human motives, and one prefers to think that Wiltshire was
trying to do his best for his daughter. Smeaton the musician confessed
under torture; the other three protested their innocence, but were
found guilty and were sentenced to death. Thomas Cromwell, in a
letter, said that the evidence was so abominable that it could not be
published. Evidently the Court of England had suddenly become squeamish.

Anne was next brought to trial before twenty-five peers of the realm,
her uncle the Duke of Norfolk being in the chair. Probably, if the
story just related were true, the Duke’s influence would not be exerted
very strongly in her favour, and she was convicted and sentenced to
be hanged or burnt at the King’s pleasure; her brother was tried
separately and also convicted. It is said that her father and uncle
concurred in the verdict; they may have been afraid of their own
heads. On the other hand, it is possible that Anne was really guilty;
unfortunately the evidence has perished. The five men were executed
on Tower Hill in the presence of the woman, whose death was postponed
from day to day. In the meantime Henry procured his divorce from her,
while Anne, in a state of violent hysteria, continuously protested her
innocence. On the night before her execution she said that the people
would call her “Queen Anne sans tête,” laughing wildly as she spoke; if
one pronounces these words in the French manner, without verbal accent,
they form a sort of jingle, as who should say “ta-ta-ta-ta”; and this
foolish jingle seems to have run in her head, as she kept repeating
it all the evening; and she placed her fingers around her slender
neck--almost her only beauty--saying that the executioner would have
little trouble, as though it were a great joke. These things were put
to the account of her light and frivolous nature, and have probably
weighed heavily with posterity in attempting to judge her case; but
it is clear that they were merely manifestations of hysteria. Joan
of Arc, whose character was probably the direct antithesis of Anne
Boleyn’s, laughed when she heard the news of her reprieve. Some people
think she laughed ironically, as though a very simple peasant-girl
could be ironical if she tried. Irony is a quality of the higher
intelligence. But cannot a girl be allowed to laugh hysterically for
joy? Or cannot Anne Boleyn be allowed to laugh hysterically for grief
and terror without being called light and frivolous? So little did
her contemporaries understand the human heart. A few years later came
one Shakespeare, who could have told King Henry differently; and the
extraordinary burgeoning forth of the English intellect in William
Shakespeare is one of the most wonderful things in our history. Before
the century had terminated in which Anne Boleyn had been considered
light and frivolous because she had laughed in the shadow of the block,
Shakespeare had plumbed the depths of human nature.

Anne was beheaded on May 19th, 1536, in the Tower, on a platform
covered thickly with straw, in which lay hidden a broadsword. The
headsman was a noted expert brought over specially from St. Omer, and
he stood motionless among the gentlemen onlookers until the necessary
preliminaries had been completed. Then, Anne kneeling in prayer and her
back being turned towards him, he stole silently forward, seized the
sword from its hiding-place, and severed her slender neck at a blow. As
she had predicted, he had little trouble, and she never saw either her
executioner or the sword that slew her.[2] Her body and severed head
were bundled into a cask, and were buried within the precincts of the
Tower; and Henry threw his cap into the air for joy. On the same day he
obtained a special dispensation to marry Jane Seymour. He married her
next day.

The chief authority for the reign of Henry VIII is contained in the
_Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII_, edited by Brewer
and Gairdner. This gigantic work, containing more than 20,000
closely printed pages, is probably the greatest monument of English
scholarship; the prefaces to the different volumes are remarkable for
their learning and delightful literary style. Froude’s history is
charming and brilliant as are all his writings, but is now rather out
of date, and is marred by his hero-worship of Henry and his strong
Protestant bias. He sums up absolutely against Anne, and, after reading
the letters which he publishes, I do not see how he could have done
anything else. He believes her innocent of incest, however, and
doubtless he is right. Let us acquit her of this crime, at any rate.
A. F. Pollard’s _Life of Henry VIII_ is meticulously accurate, and is
charmingly written; he thinks it impossible that the juries could have
found against her and the court have convicted without the strongest
evidence, which has not survived. P. C. Yorke sums up rather against
her in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_; but S. R. Gardiner thinks the
charges too horrible to be believed and that probably her own only
offence was that she could not bear a son. Professor Gardiner had
evidently seen little of psychological medicine, or he would have known
that no charge is too horrible to believe. The “Unknown Spaniard” of
the _Chronicle of Henry VIII_ is an illiterate fellow enough, but no
doubt of Anne’s guilt appears to enter his artless mind; he probably
represents the popular contemporary view. He says that he took his
stand in the ring of gentlemen who witnessed the execution. He gives an
account of the arrest of Sir Thomas Wyatt the poet--the first English
sonneteer--and the _ipsissima verba_ of a letter which Wyatt wrote to
Henry, narrating how Anne had solicited him even before her marriage
in circumstances that rendered her solicitation peculiarly brazen and
shameless. That Henry should have pardoned him seems to show that the
real crime of Anne was that she had contaminated the blood royal; a
capital offence in a queen in almost all ages and almost every country.
Before she became a queen Henry was probably complaisant enough to
Anne’s peccadilloes; but afterwards--that was altogether different.
“There’s a divinity doth hedge” a queen!

Lord Herbert of Cherbury, writing seventy years later, narrates the
ghastly story with very little feeling one way or the other. Apparently
the legend of Anne’s innocence and Henry’s blood-lust had not yet
arisen. The verdict of any given historian appears to depend upon
whether he favours the Protestants or the Catholics. Speaking as a
doctor with very little religious preference one way or the other, the
following considerations appeal strongly to myself. If Henry wished
to get rid of a barren wife--barren through his own syphilis!--as he
undoubtedly did, then Mark Smeaton’s evidence alone was enough to
hang any queen in history from Helen downward, especially if taken
in conjunction with the infamous stories related by the “Unknown
Spaniard.” Credible or not, these stories show the reputation that
attached to the plain little Protestant girl who could not provide
an heir to the throne--the sort of reputation which mankind usually
attaches to a woman who, by unworthy means, has attained to a high
position. Why should the King and Cromwell, both exceedingly able men,
gratuitously raise the questions of incest and promiscuity and send
four innocent men to their deaths absolutely without reason? Why should
they raise all the tremendous family ill-will and public reprobation
which such an act of bloodthirsty tyranny would have caused? Stern as
they were they never showed any sign of mere blood-lust at any other
time; and the facts that Anne’s father and uncle both appear to have
concurred in the verdict, and that, except for her own denial, there
is not a word said in her favour, seems to require a great deal of
explanation.

We can thoroughly explain her conduct by supposing that she was
afflicted by hysteria and nymphomania. There are plenty of accounts
of unhappy women whose cases are parallel to Anne’s in the works of
Havelock-Ellis and Kisch. There is plenty of indubitable evidence that
she was hysterical and unbalanced, and that she passionately longed
for a son; and it is simpler to believe her the victim of a well-known
and common disease than that we should suppose the leading statesmen
of England and nearly the whole of its peerage suddenly to be affected
with blood-lust. It has been suggested that Anne, passionately longing
for a son and terrified of her husband’s tyrannical wrath, acted like
one of Thomas Hardy’s heroines centuries later and tried another
lover in the hope that she would gratify her own and Henry’s wishes.
This course of procedure is probably not so uncommon as some husbands
imagine and would satisfy the questions of our problem but for Anne’s
promiscuity and vehemence in solicitation. If her sole object in
soliciting Norreys was to provide a son, why should she have gone from
man to man till the whole Court seems to have been ringing with her ill
fame?

Her spasms of violent temper after her marriage, her fits of jealousy,
her foolish arrogance and insolence to her friends, are all mental
signs which go with nymphomania, and the fact that her post-nuptial
incontinence seems to have begun while she was still in the puerperal
state after the birth of her only living child seems highly
significant. It is not uncommon for sexual desire to become intolerable
in nervous and puerperal women. The proper place for Anne Boleyn was a
mental hospital.

Henry VIII’s case, along with those of his children, deserve a paper to
themselves. Henry himself died of neglected arterio-sclerosis just in
the nick of time to save the lives of better men from the executioner;
Catherine Parr, who married him probably in order to nurse him--it
is possible that she was really fond of him and that there was even
then something attractive about him--succeeded in outliving him by a
remarkable effort of diplomatic skill and courage, though had Henry
awakened from his uræmic stupor probably her head would have been added
to his collection. On the whole, one cannot avoid the conclusion that
his conduct to his wives was not all his fault. They seem to have done
no credit to his power of selection. The first and the last appear to
have been the best, considered as women.

Inexorable Nemesis had avenged Catherine. The worry of the divorce left
her husband with an arterial tension which, added to the royal temper,
caused great misery to England and ultimately death to himself; and
her mean little rival lay huddled in the most frightful dishonour that
ever befell a woman. Decidedly there is something Greek in the complete
horror of the tragedy.




The Problem of Jeanne d’Arc


In 1410-12 France was in the most dreadful condition that has ever
affected any nation. For nearly eighty years England had been at
her throat in a quarrel which to our minds simply exemplifies the
difference between law and justice; for it seems that the King of
England had mediæval law on his side, though to our minds no justice;
the Black Death had returned more than once to harass those whom war
had spared; no man reaped where he had sown, for his crops fell into
the hands of freebooters. Misery, destitution, and superstition were
man’s bedfellows; and the French mind seemed open to receive any marvel
that promised relief from its intolerable agony. Into this land of
terror was born a little maid whose mission it was to right the wrongs
of France; a maiden who has remained, through all the vicissitudes of
history, extraordinarily fascinating, yet an almost insoluble problem.
It is undeniable that she has exercised a vast influence upon mankind,
less by her actual deeds than by the ideal which she set up; an ideal
of courage, simple faith, and unquenchable loyalty which has inspired
both her own nation and the nation which burnt her. When the English
girls cut their hair short in the worst time of the war;[3] when the
French soldiers retook Fort Douaumont when all seemed lost: these
things were done in the name of Joan of Arc.

The actual contemporary sources from which we draw our ideas are
extraordinarily few. There is of course the report of the trial for
lapse and relapse, which is official and is said not to be garbled. It
is useful, not only for the Maid’s answers, which throw a good deal of
light on her mentality, but for the questions asked, which appear to
give an idea of reports that seem to have been floating about France
at the time. The only thing which interested her judges was whether
she had imperilled her immortal soul by heresy or witchcraft, and from
that trial we shall get few or no indications of her military career or
physical condition, which are the things that most interest modern men.
About twenty years after her execution it occurred to her king, who had
repaid her amazing love and self-sacrifice with neglect, that since
she had been burnt as a witch it followed that he must owe his crown
to a witch; moreover, her mother and brother had been appealing to
him to clear her memory, for they could not bear that their child and
sister should still remain under a cloud of sorcery. King Charles VII,
who was now a great man, and very successful as kings go, therefore
ordered the case to be reopened, in which course he ultimately secured
the assistance of the reigning Pope. Charles could not restore the Maid
to life, but he could make things unpleasant for the friends of those
who had burned her; and so we have the so-called Rehabilitation Trial,
consisting of reports and opinions, given under oath, from many people
who had known her when alive. As King Charles was now a great man, some
of the clerics who had helped to condemn her crowded to give evidence
in the poor child’s favour, attributing the miscarriage of justice
in her case to people who were now dead or hopelessly unpopular; some
friends of her childhood came forward and people who had known her
at the time of her glory; and, perhaps most important, some of her
old comrades in arms rallied round her memory. We thus have a fairly
complete account of her battles, friendships, trials, character, and
death; if we read this evidence with due care, remembering that more
than twenty years had elapsed and the mentality of mediæval man, we
may take some of the statements at their face value. Otherwise there
is absolutely no contemporary evidence of the Maid; Anatole France has
pricked the bubble of the chroniclers and of the Journal of the siege
of Orleans. But there is so much of pathological interest to be found
in the reports of the trials that I need no excuse for a brief study of
them in that respect.

The record of the life of Jeanne d’Arc is all too short, and the main
facts are not in dispute. It is the interpretation of these facts
that _is_ in dispute. She was born on January 6th, 1412; the year is
uncertain. Probably she did not know herself. In the summer of 1424 she
saw a great light on her right hand and heard a voice telling her to
be a good girl. This voice she knew to be the voice of God. Later on
she heard the voices of St. Michael the Archangel, of St. Catherine,
and of St. Margaret. St. Michael appeared first, and warned her to
expect the arrival of the others, who came in due course. All three
were to be her constant companions for the rest of her life. At first
their appearances were irregular, but later on they came frequently,
especially at quiet moments. Sometimes, when there was a good deal of
noise going on, they appeared and tried to tell her something, but she
could not hear what they said. These she called her Council, or her
Voices. Occasionally the Lord God spoke to her himself; Him she called
“Messire.”

As Jeanne grew more accustomed to her heavenly visitors they came in
great numbers, and she used to see vast crowds of angels descending
from heaven to her little garden. She said nothing to anybody about
these unusual events, but grew up a brooding and intensely religious
girl, going to church at every possible opportunity, and apparently
neglecting her ordinary duties of looking after her father’s sheep and
cattle. She learned to sew and knit, to say her Credo, Paternoster, and
Ave Maria; otherwise she was absolutely ignorant, and very simple in
mind and honest. She was dreamy and shy; nor did she ever learn to read
or write.

Later on the voices told her to go into France, and God would help
her to drive out the English. She continually appealed to her father
that he should send her to Vaucouleurs, where the Sieur Robert de
Baudricourt would espouse her cause. Ultimately he did so; and at first
Robert laughed at her. He was no saint; in his day he had ravaged
villages with the best noble in the land; and he was not convinced
that Jeanne was really the sent of God that she claimed. When she
returned home she found herself the butt of Domremy; nine months later
she ran away to Vaucouleurs again, and found Robert more helpful. He
had for some time felt sympathy with the dauphin Charles, and had
grown to detest the English and Burgundians; and he now welcomed the
supernatural aid which Jeanne promised; she repeated vehemently that
God had sent her to deliver France, and that she had no doubt whatever
that she would be able to raise the siege of Orleans, which was then
being idly invested by the English.

Robert sent her to the Dauphin, who lay at Chinon. He was no hero,
this Dauphin, but a poverty-stricken ugly man, with spindle-shanks and
bulbous nose, untidy and careless in his dress, and for ever blown this
way and that by the advice of those around him. Weak, and intensely
superstitious, he would to-day have been the prey of every medium who
cared to attack him; he received Jeanne kindly, and ultimately sent
her to Poitiers to be examined as to possible witchcraft by a great
number of learned doctors of the Church, who could be relied upon to
discern a witch as soon as anybody.

She was deeply offended at being suspected of witchcraft, and was
not so respectful to her judges as she might have been; occasionally
she sulked, and sometimes she answered the reverend gentlemen quite
saucily. She is an attractive and very human little figure at Poitiers
as she moves restlessly upon her bench, and repeatedly tells the
doctors that they should need no further sign than her own deeds; for
when she had relieved Orleans it would be obvious enough that she was
sent directly from God. At Poitiers she had to run the gauntlet of
the inevitable jury of matrons, who were to certify to her virginity,
because it was well known that women lost their holiness when they
lost their virginity. The matrons and midwives certified that she was
_virgo intacta_; how the good ladies knew is not certain, because even
to-day, with all our knowledge of anatomy and physiology, we often
find it difficult to be assured on this point. However, there can be
little doubt that they were correct; probably they were impressed with
Jeanne’s obvious sincerity and purity of mind. All women seem to have
loved Jeanne, which is a strong point in her favour. The spiritual
examination dragged on for three weeks; these poor doctors were
determined not to let a witch slip through their hands, and it speaks
well for their patience and good temper, considering how unmercifully
Jeanne had “cheeked” them, that they ultimately found that she was a
good Christian. Any ordinary man would have seen that at once; but
these gentlemen knew too much about the wiles of the Devil to be so
easily influenced; and it was a source of bitter injustice to Jeanne at
her real and serious trial for her life that she was unable to produce
their certificate.

The Dauphin took her into his service and provided her with horse,
suit of armour, and banner, as befitted a knight; also maidservants
to act propriety, page-boy, and a steward, one Jean d’Aulon. All that
we hear of d’Aulon, in whose hands the honour of the Maid was placed,
is to his credit. A witness at the Rehabilitation Trial said that he
was the wisest and bravest man in the army. We shall hear more of
him. Throughout the story, whenever he comes upon the scene we seem
to breathe fresh air. He was the very man for the position, brave,
simple-hearted, and passionately loyal to Jeanne. There is no reason
to doubt that in spite of his close companionship with her there was
never any romantic or other such feeling between them; he said so
definitely, and he is to be believed. His honour came through it all
unstained; and he let himself be captured with her rather than desert
her. It is clear from his evidence that the personality of the Maid
profoundly affected him. After Jeanne’s death he was ransomed, and was
made seneschal of Beaucaire.

Jeanne was enormously impressed by her banner, which was made by a
Scotsman, Hamish Power by name; she described it at her trial.

“I had a banner of white cloth, sprinkled with lilies; the world was
painted there, with an angel on each side; above them were the words
‘Jhesus Maria.’” When she said “the world” she meant God holding the
world up in one hand and blessing it with the other. Later on she
does not seem very certain whether “Jhesus Maria” was above or at the
side; but she is very certain that she was tremendously proud of the
artistic creation--yes, “forty times” prouder of her banner than of her
sword; even though the sword was from St. Catherine herself, and was
the very sword of Charles Martel centuries before. When the priests
dug it up without witnesses and rubbed it their holy power cleansed it
immediately of the rust of ages.

When she arrived at Orleans she found the English carrying on a
leisurely blockade by means of a series of forts between which cattle
and men could enter or leave the city at will. The city was defended
by Jean Dunois, Bastard of Orleans. The title Bastard implies that
he would have been Duc d’Orleans only that he had the misfortune to
be born of the wrong mother. There have been several famous bastards
in history, and the kindly morality of the Middle Ages seems to have
thought little the worse of them for their misfortune. It is only
fair to state that there is some doubt as to whether Jeanne was sent
in command of the army, or the army in command of Jeanne; indeed,
all through her story it is never easy to be certain whether she was
actually in command, and Anatole France looks upon her as a sort of
military _mascotte_ rather than a soldier. Nor has Anatole France
ever been properly answered. Andrew Lang did his best, as Don Quixote
did his best to fight the windmills, but Mr. Lang was an idealist and
romanticist, and could not defeat the laughing irony of M. France.
Indeed, what answer is possible? Anatole France does not laugh at the
poor little Maid; he laughs through her at modern French clericalism.
Nobody with a heart in his breast could laugh at Jeanne d’Arc! Anatole
France simply said that he did not believe the things which Mr. Lang
said that he believed; he would be a brave man who should say that M.
France is wrong.

When she reached Orleans a new spirit at once came into the defenders,
just as a new spirit came into the British army on the Somme when
the tanks first went forth to battle--a spirit of renewed hope; God
had sent his Maid to save the right! In nine days of mild fighting,
in which the French enormously outnumbered the English, the siege
was raised. The French lost a few score men; the English army was
practically destroyed.

Next Jeanne persuaded the Dauphin to be crowned at Rheims, which was
the ancient crowning-place for the French kings. In this ancient
cathedral, in whose aisles and groined vaults echoed the memories and
glories of centuries, he was crowned; his followers standing around
in a proud assembly, his adoring peasant-maid holding her grotesque
banner over his head; probably the most extraordinary scene in all
history. After Jeanne had secured the crowning of her king, ill-fortune
was thenceforth to wait upon her. She was of the common people, and it
was only about eighty years since the aristocracy had shuddered before
the herd during the Jacquerie, the premonition of the Revolution of
1789. Class feeling ran strongly, and the nobles took their revenge;
Jeanne, having no ability whatever beyond her implicit faith in Heaven,
lost her influence both with the Court and with the people; whatever
she tried to do failed, and she was finally captured in a sortie from
Compiêgne in circumstances which do not exclude the suspicion that she
was deliberately sacrificed. The Burgundians held her for ransom, and
locked her up in the Tower of Beaurevoir. King Charles VII refused--or
at any rate neglected--to bid for her; so the Burgundians sold her to
the English. When she heard that she was to be given into the hands
of her bitterest enemies she was so troubled that she leaped from the
tower, a height of sixty or seventy feet, and was miraculously saved
from death by the aid of her friends--Saints Margaret and Catherine. It
is easier to believe that at her early age--she was then about nineteen
or possibly even less--her epiphyseal cartilages had not ossified, and
if she fell on soft ground it is perfectly credible that she might not
receive worse than a severe shock. I remember a case of a child who
fell from a height of thirty feet on to hard concrete, which it struck
with its head; an hour later it was running joyfully about the hospital
garden, much to the disgust of an anxious charge-nurse. It is difficult
to kill a young person by a fall--the bones and muscles yield to
violent impact, and life is not destroyed.

Jeanne having been bought by the English they brought her to trial
before a court composed of Pierre Cauchon, Lord Bishop of Beauvais, and
a varying number of clerics; as Anatole France puts it, “a veritable
synod”; it was important to condemn not only the witch of the Armagnacs
herself but also the viper whom she had been able to crown King of
France. If they condemned her for witchcraft they condemned all her
works, including King Charles. If Charles had been a clever man he
would have foreseen such a result and would have bought her from the
Duke of Burgundy when he had the chance. But when she was once in the
iron grip of the English he could have done nothing. It was too late.
If he had offered to buy her the English would have said she was not
for sale; if he had moved his tired and disheartened army they would
have handed her over to the University of Paris, or perhaps the dead
body of one more peasant-girl would have been found in the Seine below
Rouen, and Cauchon would have been spared the trouble of a trial.
Therefore we may spare our regrets on the score of some at least of
King Charles’s ingratitudes. It is possible that he did not buy her
from the Burgundians because he was too stupid, too poor, or too
parsimonious; it is more likely that his courtiers and himself began
to believe that her success was so great that it could not be explained
by mortal means, and that there must be something in the witchcraft
story after all. It could not have been a pleasant thing for the French
aristocrats to find that when a little maid from Domremy came to help
the common people, these scum of the earth suddenly began to fight as
they had not fought for generations. Fully to understand what happened
we must remember that it was not very long since the Jacquerie, and
that the aristocratic survivors had left to their sons tales of
unutterable horrors.

However, Jeanne was put on her trial for witchcraft, and after a long
and apparently hesitating process--for there had been grave doubts
raised as to the legality of the whole thing--she was condemned to
death. Just before the Bishop had finished his reading of the sentence
she burst into tears and recanted, when she really understood that they
were even then preparing the cart to take her to the stake. She said
herself, in words which cannot possibly be misunderstood, that she
recanted “for fear of the fire.”

The sentence of the court was then amended; instead of being burned
she was to be held in prison on bread and water and to wear woman’s
clothes. She herself thought that she was to be put into an
ecclesiastical prison and be kept in the charge of women, but there
is nothing to be found of this in the official report of the first
trial. As she had been wearing men’s clothes by direct command of
God her sin in recanting began to loom enormous before her during
the night; she had forsaken her God even as Peter had forsaken Jesus
Christ in the hour of his need, and hell-fire would be her portion--a
fire ten thousand times worse than anything that the executioner could
devise for her. She got up in the morning and threw aside the pretty
dress which the Duchess of Bedford had procured for her--all women
loved Jeanne d’Arc--and put on her war-worn suit of male clothing.
The English soldiers who guarded her immediately spread abroad the
bruit that Jeanne had relapsed, and she was brought to trial for this
contumacious offence against the Holy Church. The second trial was
short and to the point; she tried to show that her jailers had not kept
faith with her, but her pleadings were brushed aside, and finally she
gave the _responsio mortifera_--the fatal answer--which legalized the
long attempts to murder her. Thus spoke she: “God hath sent me word by
St. Catherine and St. Margaret of the great pity it is, this treason
to which I have consented to abjure and save my life! I have damned
myself to save my life! Before last Thursday my Voices did indeed tell
me what I should do and what I did then on that day. When I was on the
scaffold on Thursday my Voices said to me: ‘Answer him boldly, this
preacher!’ And in truth he is a false preacher; he reproached me with
many things I never did. If I said that God had not sent me I should
damn myself, for it is true that God has sent me; my Voices have said
to me since Thursday: ‘Thou hast done great evil in declaring that what
thou hast done was wrong.’ All I said and revoked I said for fear of
the fire.”

To me this is the most poignant thing in the whole trial, which I have
read with a frightful interest many times. It seems to bring home the
pathos of the poor struggling child, and her blind faith in things
which could not help her in her hour of sore distress.

Jules Quicherat published a very complete edition of the Trial in 1840,
which has been the basis for all the accounts of Jeanne d’Arc that
have appeared since. An English translation was published some years
ago which professed to be complete and to omit nothing of importance.
But this work was edited in a fashion so vehemently on Jeanne’s
side, with no apparent attempt to ascertain the exact truth of the
judgments, that I ventured to compare it with Quicherat, and I have
found some omissions which to the translator, as a layman, may have
seemed unimportant, but which, to a doctor, seem of absolutely vital
importance in considering the truth about the Maid. These omissions
are marked in the English by a row of three dots, which might be
considered to mark an omission,--but on the other hand might not.
Probably the translator considered them too indecent, too earthly, too
physiological, to be introduced in connexion with the Maid of God. But
Jeanne had a body, which was subject to the same peculiarities and
abnormalities as the bodies of other people; and upon the peculiarities
of her physiology depended the peculiarities of her mind.

Jean d’Aulon, her steward and loyal admirer, said definitely in the
Rehabilitation Trial, in 1456:--

“Qu’il oy dire a plusiers femmes, qui ladicte Pucelle ont veue par
plusiers foiz nues, et sceue de ses secretz, que oncques n’avoit eu la
secret maladie de femmes et que jamais nul n’en peut rien cognoistre ou
appercevoir par ses habillements, ne aultrement.”

I leave this unpleasantly frank statement in the original Old French,
merely remarking that it means that Jeanne never menstruated.
D’Aulon must have had plenty of opportunities for knowing this, in
his position as steward of her household in the field. He guards
himself from innuendo by saying that several women had told him.
Jeanne’s failing to become mature must have been the topic of amazed
conversation among all the women of her neighbourhood, and no doubt
she herself took it as a sign from God that she was to remain virgin.
It is especially significant that she first heard her Voices when
she was about thirteen years of age, at the very time that she
should have begun to menstruate; and that at first they did not come
regularly, but came at intervals, just as menstruation itself often
begins. Some months later she was informed by the Voices that she was
to remain virgin, and thereby would she save France, in accordance
with a prophecy that a woman should ruin France, and a virgin should
save it. Is it not probable that the idea of virginity must have been
growing in her mind from the time when she first realized that she
was not to be as other women? Probably the delusion as to the Voices
first began as a sort of vicarious menstruation; probably it recurred
when menstruation should have reappeared; we can put the idea of
virginity into the jargon of psycho-analysis by saying that Jeanne had
well-marked “repression of the sex-complex.” The mighty forces which
should have manifested themselves in normal menstruation manifested
themselves in her furious religious zeal and her Voices. Repression
of the sex-complex is like locking up a giant in a cellar; sooner or
later he may destroy the whole house. He ended by driving Jeanne d’Arc
to the stake. That was a nobler fate than befalls some girls, whom the
same giant drives to the streets; nobler, because Jeanne the peasant
was of essentially noble stock. Her mother was Isabel Romée--the
“Romed woman”--the woman who had had sufficient religious fervour to
make the long and dangerous pilgrimage to Rome that she might acquire
the merit of seeing the Holy Father; Jeanne herself made a still more
dangerous pilgrimage, which has won for her the love of mankind at the
cost of her bodily anguish. Madame her mother saved her own soul by
her pilgrimage, and bore an heroic daughter; Jeanne saved France by
her courage and devotion to her idea of God. And this would have been
impossible had she not suffered from repression of the sex-complex and
seen visions therefore.

Another remarkable piece of evidence has been omitted from the English
translation. It was given by the Demoiselle Marguerite la Thoroulde,
who had taken Jeanne to the baths and seen her unclothed. Madame la
Thoroulde said, in the Latin translation of the Rehabilitation Trial
which has survived: “Quod cum pluries vidit in balneo et stuphis
[sweating-bath] et, ut percipere potuit, credit ipse fore virginem.”

That is to say, she saw her naked in the baths and could see that she
was a virgin! What on earth did the good lady think that a virgin
would look like? Did she think that because Jeanne did not look like a
stout French matron she must therefore be a virgin? Or did she see a
strong and boyish form, with little development of hips and bust, which
she thought must be nothing else but that of a virgin? That is the
explanation that occurs to me; and probably it also explains Jeanne’s
idea that by wearing men’s clothes she would render herself less
attractive to the mediæval soldiery among whom her lot was to be cast.
An ordinary buxom young woman would certainly not be less attractive
because she displayed her figure in doublet and hose; Rosalind is none
the less winsome when she acts the boy; and I should have thought that
Jeanne, by wearing men’s clothes, would simply have proclaimed to her
male companions that she was a very woman. But if the idea be correct
that she was shaped like a boy, with little feminine development, the
whole mystery is at once solved. It is to be remembered that we know
absolutely nothing about Jeanne’s appearance[4]; the only credible
hint we have is that she had a gentle voice.

In the Rehabilitation Trial several of her companions in arms swore
that she had had no sexual attraction for them. It is quaint to
read the evidence of these respectable middle-aged gentlemen that
in their hot and lusty youth they had once upon a time met at least
one young girl after whom they had not lusted; they seem to consider
that the fact proved that she must have come from God. Anatole France
makes great play with them, but it would appear that his ingenuity
is in this direction misplaced. Is it not possible that Jeanne was
unattractive to men because she was immature--that she never became
more than a child in mind and body? Even mediæval soldiery would not
lust after a child, especially a child whom they firmly believed to
have come straight from God! It must be remembered that to half of
her world Jeanne was unspeakably sacred; to the other half she was
undeniably a most frightful witch. Even the executioner would not
imperil his immortal soul by touching her. It was the custom to spare
a woman the anguish of the fire, by smothering her, or rendering her
unconscious by suddenly compressing her carotids with a rope before the
flames leaped around her. But Jeanne was far too wicked for anybody
to touch in this merciful office; they had to let her die unaided;
and afterwards, so wicked was her heart, they had to rescue it from
the ashes and throw it into the Seine. Is it conceivable that men who
thought thus would have ventured hell-fire by making love to her? Yet
more--it is quite possible that she had no bodily charms whatever; we
know nothing of her appearance. The story that she was charming and
beautiful is simply sentimental legend. Indeed, it is difficult not to
become sentimental over Jeanne d’Arc.

A noteworthy feature in her character was her Puritanism. She
prohibited her soldiers from consorting with the prostitutes that
followed the army; sometimes she even forced them to marry these women.
Naturally the soldiers objected most strongly, and in the end this was
one of the causes that led to her downfall. Jeanne used to run after
the prohibited girls and strike them with the flat of her sword; in one
case the girl was killed. In another the sword broke, and King Charles
asked, very sensibly, “Would not a stick have done quite as well?”
This is believed by some people to have been the very sword of Charles
Martel which the priests had found for her at St. Catherine’s command,
and naturally the soldiers, deprived of their female companions,
wondered what sort of a holy sword could it have been which could
not even stand the smiting of a prostitute? When people suffer from
repression of the sex-complex the trouble may show itself either by
constant indirect attempts to find favour in the eyes of individuals
of the opposite sex, or sometimes by actually forbidding all sexual
matters; Puritanism in sexual affairs is often an indication that
all is not quite well with a woman’s subconscious mind; nor can one
confine this generalization to one sex. It is not for one moment to be
thought that Jeanne ever had the slightest idea of what was the matter
with her; the whole of her delusions and Puritanism were to her quite
conscious and real; the only thing that she did not know was that her
delusions were entirely subjective--that her Voices had no existence
outside her own mind. Her frantic belief in them led her to an heroic
career and to the stake. She did not consciously repress her sex;
Nature did that for her.

Women who never menstruate are not uncommon; most gynæcologists
see a few. Though they are sometimes normal in their sexual
feelings--sometimes indeed they are even nymphomaniacs or very nearly
so--yet they seldom marry, for they know themselves to be sterile, and,
after all, most women seem to know at the bottom of their hearts that
the purpose of women is to produce children.

But there is still more of psychological interest to be gained from a
careful reading of the first trial. It is possible to see how Jeanne’s
unstable nervous system reacted to the long agony. We had better, in
order to be fair, make quite certain why she was burned. These are the
words uttered by the good Bishop of Beauvais as he sentenced her for
the last time:--

“Thou hast been on the subject of thy pretended divine revelations
and apparitions lying, seducing, pernicious, presumptuous, lightly
believing, rash, superstitious, a divineress and blasphemer towards
God and the Saints, a despiser of God Himself in His sacraments;
a prevaricator of the Divine Law, of sacred doctrine and of
ecclesiastical sanctions; seditious, cruel, apostate, schismatic,
erring on many points of our Faith, and by these means rashly guilty
towards God and Holy Church.”

This appalling fulmination, summed up, appears to mean--if it means
anything--that she believed that she was under the direct command of
God to wear man’s clothes. To this she could only answer that what she
had done she had done by His direct orders.

Theologians have said that her answers at the trial were so clever
that they must have been directly inspired; but it is difficult to see
any sign of such cleverness. To me her character stands out absolutely
clearly defined from the very beginning of the six weeks’ agony; she is
a very simple, direct, and superstitious child struggling vainly in the
meshes of a net spread for her by ecclesiastical politicians who were
determined to sacrifice her to serve the ends of brutal masters. She
had all a child’s simple cunning; when the Bishop asked her to repeat
her Paternoster she answered that she would gladly do so if he himself
would confess her. She thought that if he confessed her he might
have pity on her, or, at least, that he would be bound to send her
to Heaven, because she knew how great was the influence wielded by a
Bishop; she thought that she might tempt him to hear her in the secrets
of the confessional if she promised to repeat her Paternoster to him!
Poor child--she little knew what was at the bottom of the trial.

She sometimes childishly boasted. When she was asked if she could sew,
she answered that she feared no woman in Rouen at the sewing; just
so might answer any immature girl of her years to-day. She sometimes
childishly threatened; she told the Bishop that he was running a great
risk in charging her. She had delusions of sight, smell, touch, and
hearing. She said that the faces of Saints Catherine and Margaret were
adorned with beautiful crowns, very rich and precious, that the saints
smelled with a sweet savour, that she had kissed them, that they spoke
to her.

There was a touch of epigram about the girl, too. In speaking of her
banner at Rheims, she said: “It had been through the hardships--it were
well that it should share the glory.” And again, when the judges asked
her to what she attributed her success, she answered, “I said to my
followers: ‘Go ye in boldly against the English,’ _and I went myself_.”
The girl who said that could hardly have been a mere military
_mascotte_. Yet, in admitting so much, one does not admit that she may
have been a sort of Amazon. As the desperation of her position grew
upon her she began to suffer more and more from her delusions; while
she lay in her dungeon waiting for the fatal cart she told a young
friar, Brother Martin Ladvenu, that her spirits came to her in great
numbers and of the smallest size. When despair finally seized upon her
she told “the venerable and discreet Maître Pierre Maurice, Professor
of Theology,” that the angels really had appeared to her--good or bad,
they really had appeared--in the form of very minute things[5]; that
she now knew that they had deceived her. Her brain wearied by her long
trial of strength with the Bishop, common sense re-asserted its sway,
and she realized--the truth! Too late! When she was listening to her
sermon on the scaffold in front of the fuel destined to consume her,
she broke down and knelt at the preacher’s knees, weeping and praying
until the English soldiers called out to ask if she meant to keep them
there for their dinner; it is pleasing to know that one of them broke
his lance into two pieces, which he tied into the form of a cross and
held it up to her in the smoke that was already beginning to arise
about her.

Her last thoughts we can never know; her last word was the blessed name
of Jesus, which she repeated several times. In public--though she had
told Pierre Maurice in private that she had “learned to know that her
spirits had deceived her”--she always maintained that she had both seen
and believed them because they came from God; her courage was amazing,
both physical and moral. She was twice wounded, but she said that
she always carried her standard so that she would never have to kill
anybody--and that in truth she had never killed anybody.

Her extraordinary accomplishment was due to the unbounded superstition
of the French common people, who at first believed in her implicitly;
it was Napoleon, a French general, who said that in war the moral is
to the spiritual as three is to one; our Lord said, “By faith ye shall
move mountains”; and it must not be forgotten that she went to Orleans
with powerful reinforcements which she herself estimated at about ten
to twelve thousand men. This superstition of the French was more than
equalled by the superstition of the English, who looked upon her as a
most terrifying witch: one witness at the Rehabilitation Trial said
that the English were a very superstitious nation, so they must have
been pretty bad. Indeed, most of the witnesses at that trial seem to
have been very superstitious; one must examine their evidence with care
lest one suddenly finds that one is assisting at a miracle.

She seems to have been hot-tempered and emphatic in her speech, with
a certain tang of rough humour such as would be natural in a peasant
girl. A notary once questioned the truth of something she said at her
trial; on inquiry it was found that she had been perfectly accurate;
Jeanne “rejoiced, saying to Boisguillaume that if he made mistakes
again she would pull his ears.” Once during the trial she was taken ill
with vomiting, apparently caused by fish-poisoning, that followed after
she had eaten of some carp sent her by the Bishop. Maître d’Estivet,
the promoter of the trial, said to her, ‘Thou _paillarde_!’ (an abusive
term), ‘thou hast been eating sprats and other unwholesomeness!’ She
answered that she had not; and then she and d’Estivet exchanged many
abusive words. The two doctors of medicine who treated her for this
illness gave evidence, and it is pleasing to see that they seem to
have been able to rationalize a trifle more about her than most of
her contemporaries. But, taken all through, her evidence gives the
impression of being exceedingly simple and straightforward--just the
sort of thing to be expected from a child.

It is noteworthy that a great many witnesses at the Rehabilitation
Trial swore that she was “simple.” Did they mean that she was
half-witted? Probably not. More probably it was true that she always
wanted to spare her enemies, when, in accordance with the custom of the
Hundred Years’ War, she should rather have held them for ransom if they
had been noble or slain them if they had been poor men. To the ordinary
brutal mediæval soldiery such conduct would appear insane. Possibly,
of course, the term “simple” might have been used in opposition to the
term “gentle.”

May I be allowed to give a vignette of Jeanne going to the
burning, compiled from the evidence of many onlookers given at the
Rehabilitation Trial? She assumed no martyresque imperturbability; she
did not hold her head high in the haughty belief that she was right
and the rest of the world wrong, as a martyr should properly do. She
wept bitterly as she walked to the fatal cart from the prison-doors;
her head was shaven; she wore woman’s dress; her face was swollen and
distorted, her eyes ran tears, her sobs shook her body, her wails moved
the hearts of the onlookers. The French wept for sympathy, the English
laughed for joy. It was a very human child who went to her death
on May 30th, 1431. She was nineteen years of age--according to some
accounts, twenty-one--and, unknown to herself, she had changed the face
of history.




The Empress Theodora


This famous woman has been the subject of one of the bitterest
controversies in history; and, while it is impossible to speak fully
about her, it is certain that she was a woman of remarkable beauty,
character, and historical position. For nearly a thousand years
after her death she was looked upon as an ordinary--if unusually
able--Byzantine princess, wife of Justinian the lawgiver, who was one
of the ablest of the later Roman Emperors; but in 1623 the manuscript
was discovered in the Vatican of a secret history, purporting to have
been written by Procopius, which threw a new and amazing light on her
career.

Procopius--or whoever wrote this most scurrilous history--states
that the great Empress in early youth was an actress, daughter of a
bear-keeper, and that she had sold tickets in the theatre; her youth
had been disgustingly profligate: he narrates a series of stories
concerning her which cannot be printed in modern English. The worst of
these go to show that she was an ordinary type of Oriental prostitute,
to whom the word “unnatural,” as applied to vice, had no meaning.
The least discreditable is that the girl who was to be Empress had
danced nearly naked on the stage--she is not the only girl who has done
this, and not on the stage either. She had not even the distinction
of being a good dancer, but acquired fame through the wild abandon
and indecency with which she performed. At about the age of twenty
she married--when she had already had a son--the grave and stately
Justinian: “the man who had never been young,” who was so great and
learned that it was well known that he could be seen of nights walking
about the streets carrying his head in a tray like John the Baptist.
When he fell a victim to Theodora’s wiles he was about forty years
of age. The marriage was bitterly opposed by his mother and aunts,
but they are said to have relented when they met her, and even had a
special law passed to legalize the marriage of the heir to the throne
with a woman of ignoble birth; and, after the death of Justin, Theodora
duly succeeded to the leadership of the proudest court in Europe. This
may be true; but it does not sound like the actions of a mother and old
aunts. One would have thought that a convenient bowstring or sack in
the Bosphorus would have been the more usual course.

So far we have nothing to go by but the statements of one man; the
greatest historian of his time, to be sure--if we can be certain that
he wrote the book. Von Ranke, himself a very great critical historian,
says flatly that Procopius never wrote it; that it is simply a
collection of dirty stories current about other women long afterwards.
The Roman Empire seems to have been a great hotbed for filthy tales
about the Imperial despots: one has only to remember Suetonius, from
whose lively pages most of our doubtless erroneous views concerning the
Palatine “goings on” are derived; and to recall the foul stories told
about Julius Cæsar himself, who was probably no worse than the average
young officer of his time; and of the last years of Tiberius, who was
probably a great deal better than the average. Those of us who can cast
their memories back for a few years can doubtless recall an instance of
scurrilous libel upon a great personage of the British Empire, which
cast discredit not on the gentleman libelled but upon the rascal who
spread the libel abroad. It is one of the penalties of Empire that
the wearer of the Imperial crown must always be the subject of libels
against which he has no protection but in the loyal friendship of his
subjects. Even Queen Victoria was once called “Mrs. Melbourne,” though
probably even the fanatic who howled it did not believe that there was
any truth in his insinuation. And Procopius did not have the courage
to publish his libels, but preferred to leave to posterity the task
of finding out how dirty was Procopius’ mind. Probably he would not
have lived very long had Theodora discovered what he really thought of
her. He was wise in his generation, and had ever the example of blind
Belisarius before him to teach him to walk cautiously.

Démidour in 1887, Mallet in 1889, and Bury also in 1889, have once more
reviewed the evidence. The two first-mentioned go very fully into it,
and sum up gallantly in Theodora’s favour; but Bury is not so sure.
Gibbon, having duly warned us of Procopius’ malignity, proceeds slyly
to tell some of the most printable of the indecent stories. Gibbon is
seldom very far wrong in his judgments, and evidently had very little
doubt in his own mind about Theodora’s guilt. Joseph Maccabe goes over
it all again, and “regretfully” believes everything bad about her.
Edward Foord says, in effect, that supposing the stories were all
true, which he does not appear to believe, and that she had thrown
her cap over the windmills when she was a girl--well, she more than
made up for it all when she became Empress. After all, it depends upon
how far we can believe Procopius; and that again depends upon how far
we can bring ourselves to believe that an exceedingly pretty little
Empress can once upon a time have been a _fille de joie_. That in its
turn depends upon how far each individual man is susceptible to female
beauty. If she had been a prostitute it makes her career as Empress
almost miraculous; it is the most extraordinary instance on record of
“living a thing down,” and speaks volumes for her charm and strength of
personality.

She lived in the midst of most furious theological strife. Christianity
was still a comparatively new religion, even if we accept the
traditional chronology of the early world; and in her time the experts
had not yet settled what were its tenets. The only thing that was
perfectly clear to each theological expert was that if you did not
agree with his own particular belief you were eternally damned,
and that it was his duty to put you out of your sin immediately by
cutting your throat lest you should inveigle some other foolish
fellows into the broad path that leadeth to destruction. Theodora was
a Monophysite--that is to say, she believed that Christ had only one
soul, whereas it was well known to the experts that He had two. Nothing
could be too dreadful for the miscreants who believed otherwise. It
was gleefully narrated how Nestorius, who had started the abominable
doctrine of Monophysm, had his tongue eaten by worms--that is, died
of cancer of the tongue; and it is not incredible that Procopius, who
was a Synodist or Orthodox believer, may have invented the libels
and secretly written them down in order to show the world of after
days what sort of monster his heretical Empress really was, wear she
never so many gorgeous ropes of pearls in her Imperial panoply. It
is difficult to place any bounds to theological hatred--or to human
credulity for that matter. The whole question of the nature of Christ
was settled by the Sixth Œcumenical Council about a hundred and fifty
years later, when it was finally decided that Christ had two natures,
or souls, or wills--however we interpret the Greek word Φύσις--each
separate and indivisible in one body. This, and the Holy Trinity, are
still, I understand, part of Christian theology, and appear to be
equally comprehensible to the ordinary scientific man.

But it is difficult to get over a tradition of the eleventh
century--that is to say, six hundred years before Procopius’ _Annals_
saw the light--that Justinian married “Theodora of the Brothel.”
Although Mallet showed that Procopius had strong personal reasons for
libelling his Empress, one cannot help feeling that there must be
something in the stories after all.

Once she had assumed the marvellous crown, with its ropes of pearls,
in which she and many of the other Empresses are depicted, her whole
character is said to have changed. Though her enemies accused her of
cruelty, greed, treachery, and dishonesty--and no accounts from her
friends have survived--yet they were forced to admit that she acted
with propriety and amazing courage; and no word was spoken against
her virtue. In the Nika riots, which at one time threatened to depose
Justinian, she saved the Empire. Justinian, his ministers, and even the
hero Belisarius, were for flight, the mob howling in the square outside
the Palace, when Theodora spoke up in gallant words which I paraphrase.
She began by saying how indecorous it was for a woman to interfere in
matters of State, and then went on to say: “We must all die some time,
but it is a terrible thing to have been an Emperor and to give up
Empire before one dies. The purple is a noble winding-sheet! Flight is
easy, my Emperor--there are the steps of the quay--there are the ships
waiting for you; you have money to live on. But in very shame you will
taste the bitterness of death in life if you flee! I, your wife, will
not flee, but will stay behind without you, and will die an Empress
rather than live a coward!” Proud little woman--could that woman have
been a prostitute selling her body in degradation? It seems impossible.

The Council, regaining courage, decided for fighting; armed bands were
sent forth into the square; the riot was suppressed with Oriental
ferocity; and the Roman Empire lasted nearly a thousand years more.
“Toujours l’audace,” as Danton said nearly thirteen hundred years
later, when, however, he was not in imminent peril himself.

[Illustration:                                        [_Photo, Alinari._

  THE EMPRESS THEODORA.
  From a Mosaic (Ravenna, San Vitale).]

In person Theodora was small, slender, graceful, and exquisitely
beautiful; her complexion was pale, her eyes singularly expressive:
the mosaic at Ravenna, in stiff and formal art, gives some evidence of
character and beauty. She was accused, as I have said, of barbarous
cruelties, of herself applying the torture in her underground private
prisons; the stories are contradictory and inconsistent, but one story
appears to be historical: “If you do not obey me I swear by the living
God that I will have you flayed alive,” she said with gentle grace
to her attendants. It is said that her illegitimate son, whom she
had disposed of by putting him with his terrified father in Arabia,
gained possession of the secret of his birth, and boldly repaired to
Constantinople in the belief that her maternal affection would lead her
to pardon him for the offence of having been born, and that thereby
he would attain to riches and greatness; but the story goes that he
was never seen again after he entered the Palace. Possibly the story
is of the nature of romance. She dearly longed for a legitimate son,
and the faithful united in prayer to that end; but the sole fruit of
her marriage was a daughter, and even this girl was said to have been
conceived before the wedding.

When she was still adolescent she went for a tour in the Levant with
a wealthy Tyrian named Ecebolus, who, disgusted by her violent temper
or her universal _charity_, to use Gibbon’s sly phrase, deserted her
and left her penniless at Alexandria. The men of Egypt appear to have
been less erotic than the Greeks, for she remained in dire poverty,
working her way back home by way of the shores of the Euxine. In Egypt
she had become a Monophysite; and when she reached Constantinople it
is said that she sat in a pleasant home outside the Palace and plied
her spinning-wheel so virtuously that Justinian fell in love with her
and ultimately married her, having first tried her charms. Passing
over the obvious difficulty that a girl of the charm and immorality
of Procopius’ Theodora need never have gone in poverty while men were
men, the wonder naturally arises whether the girl who went away with
Ecebolus was the same as she who returned poor and alone and sat so
virtuously at her spinning-wheel as to bewitch Justinian. Mistaken
identity, or rather loss of identity, must have been commoner in
those days than these when the printing-press and rapid postal and
telegraphic communication make it harder to lose one’s self. However,
granting that there was no confusion of identity, one may believe--if
one tries hard enough--that she was befriended by the Monophysites in
Egypt, and may have “found religion” at their hands, and, by suffering
poverty and oppression with them, had learned to sympathize with the
under-world. Though the story may seem to be more suitable for an
American picture-show than for sober history, still one must admit that
it is not absolutely impossible. When she became great and famous she
did not forget those who had rescued her in the days of her affliction;
and her influence on Justinian is to be seen in the “feminism” which is
so marked in his code. What makes it not impossible is the well-known
fact that violent sexuality is in some way related to powerful
religious instincts; and the theory that the passions which had led
Theodora to the brothel may, when her mind was turned to religion, have
led her to be a Puritan, is rather attractive. But nothing is said
about Theodora which has not in some way been twisted to her infamy.
The only certain fact about her is that she had enormous influence over
her husband, and it is difficult to believe that a great and able man
like Justinian could have entirely yielded his will to the will of a
cruel and treacherous harlot. The idea certainly opens an unexpectedly
wide vista of masculine weakness.

She used this influence in helping to frame the great Code of
Justinian, which has remained the standard of law in many countries
ever since. A remarkable feature about this code is that, while it
is severe on the keepers of brothels, it is mild to leniency on the
unhappy women who prostituted themselves for these keepers’ benefit.
The idea that a prostitute is a woman, with rights and feelings like
any other woman, appears to have been unknown until Theodora had it
introduced into the code of laws which perpetuates her husband’s
memory. One night she collected all the prostitutes in Constantinople,
five hundred in all--were there only five hundred in that vast
Oriental city?--shut them up in a palace on the Asiatic shore of the
Bosphorus, and expected them to reform as she had reformed, but with
less success; as our modern experience would lead us to expect. The
girls grew morbidly unhappy, and many threw themselves into the sea.
Even in a lock hospital we know how difficult it is to reclaim girls
to whom sexual intercourse has become a matter of daily habit, and if
Theodora’s well-meant attempt failed we must at least give her credit
for an attempt at an idealistic impossibility. These girls did not
have the prospect of marrying an Emperor; no pearl-stringed crown was
dangled before their fingers for the grasping. Poor human nature is
not so easily kept on the strait and narrow path as Theodora thought.
Throughout her life she seems to have had great sympathy for the
poor and the oppressed, and one feels with Edward Foord that one can
forgive her a great deal. We must not forget that her husband called
her his “honoured wife,” his “gift from God,” and his “sweet delight”;
and spoke most gratefully of her interest and assistance in framing
his great code of laws. Was her humanitarianism, her sympathy with
down-trodden women, the result of her own sad past experience? To think
so would be to turn her pity towards vice into an argument against her
own virtue, and I shrink from doing so. Let us rather believe that she
really did perceive how terribly the Fates have loaded the dice against
women, and that she did what she could to make their paths easier
through this earth on which we have no continuing city.

Her health gave her a great deal of trouble, and she spent many months
of every year in her beautiful villas on the shores of the Sea of
Marmora and the Bosphorus. She remained in bed most of every day,
rising late, and retiring early. To Procopius and the Synodists these
habits were naturally signs of Oriental weakness and luxury; but may
not the poor lady have been really ill? She visited several famous
baths in search of health, and we have a vivid account of her journey
through Bithynia on her way to the hot springs of the Pythian Apollo
near Brusa.

We have no evidence as to the nature of her illness. Her early life,
of course, suggests some venereal trouble, and it is interesting
to inquire into the position of the various venereal diseases at
that time. Syphilis I think we may rule out of court; for it is now
generally believed that that disease was not known in Europe until
after the return of Columbus’ men from the West Indian islands. Some of
the bones of Egypt were thought to show signs of syphilitic invasion
until it was shown by Elliott Smith that similar markings are caused
by insects; and no indubitable syphilitic lesion has ever been found
in any of the mummies. If syphilis did really occur in European
antiquity, it must have been exceedingly rare and have differed widely
in its pathological effects from the disease which is so common
and destructive to-day; that is to say, in spite of certain German
enthusiasts, it could not have been syphilis.

But gonorrhœa is a very old story, and was undoubtedly prevalent in the
ancient world. Luys indeed says that gonorrhœa is as old as mankind,
and was named by Galen himself, though regular physicians and surgeons
scorned to treat it. It is strange that there is so little reference to
this disease in the vast amount of pornographic literature which has
come down to us. Martial, for instance, or Ovid; nothing would seem too
obscene to have passed by their salacious minds; yet neither of them so
much as hint that such a thing as gonorrhœa existed. But it is possible
that such a disease might have been among the things unlucky or “tabu.”
All nations and all ages have been more or less under the influence
of tabu, which ranges from influence on the most trivial matters to
settlement of the gravest. Thus, many men would almost rather die than
walk abroad in a frock coat and tan boots, or, still more dreadful, in
a frock coat and Homburg hat, though that freakish costume appears to
be common enough in America. In this matter we are under the influence
of tabu--the thing which prevents us, or should prevent us, from eating
peas with our knife, or making unseemly noises when we eat soup, or
playing a funeral march at a cheerful social gathering. In all these
things the idea of _nefas_--unlucky--seems more or less to enter;
similarly we do not like to walk under a ladder lest a paint-pot should
fall upon us. Many people hate to mention the dread word “death,” lest
that should untimely be their portion. Just so possibly a licentious
man like Ovid may have been swayed by some such fear, and he may have
refrained from writing about the horrid disease which he must have
known was ever waiting for him.

But though it may seem to have been impossible that any prostitute
should have escaped gonorrhœa in Byzantium, just as it is impossible
in modern London or Sydney, yet there is no evidence that Theodora so
suffered; what hints we have, if they weigh on either side at all, seem
to make it unlikely. She had a child after her marriage with Justinian,
though women who have had untreated gonorrhœa are very frequently or
generally sterile. Nor is there any evidence that Justinian ever had
any serious illness except the bubonic plague, from which he suffered,
and recovered, during the great epidemic of 546. I assume that the
buboes from which he doubtless suffered at that time were not venereal
but were the ordinary buboes of plague. He had been Theodora’s husband
for many years before that terrible year in which the plague swept away
about a third of the population of the Roman Empire, where it had been
simmering ever since the time of Marcus Aurelius. If Theodora really
had gonorrhœa, Justinian must have caught it, and it is unlikely that
he would have called her his “honoured wife.”

A more probable explanation of her continued ill-health might be
that she became septic at her confinement, when the unwanted girl
was born. When the Byzantines spoke of a child as being “born in the
purple,” they spoke literally, for the Roman Empress was always sent
to a “porphyry palace” on the Bosphorus for her confinement; and once
there she had access to less good treatment than is available for
any sempstress to-day. It is impossible to suppose that the porphyry
palace--the “purple house”--ever became infected with puerperal sepsis
because there was never more than one confinement going on at a time
within its walls, and that only at long intervals. Still, there must
have been a great many septic confinements and unrecorded female
misery from their results among the women of that early world; and
that must be remembered when we consider the extraordinarily small
birth-rate of the Imperial families during so many centuries. Had the
Roman Emperors been able to point to strong sons to inherit their
glories, possibly the history of the Empire would have been less
turbulent. A Greek or Roman Lister might have altered the history of
the world by giving security of succession to the Imperial despot.

After all, it is idle to speculate on Theodora’s illness, and it does
not much matter. She has long gone to her account, poor fascinating
creature; all her beauty and wit and eager vivacity are as though
they had never been save for their influence upon her husband’s laws.
Theodora is the standing example of woman’s fate to achieve results
through the agency of some man.

She died of cancer, and died young. There is no record of the original
site of the cancer; the ecclesiastic who records the glad tidings
merely relates joyfully that it was diffused throughout her body, as
was only right and proper in one who differed from him in religious
opinions. It is generally thought that it started in the breast. No
doubt this is a modern guess, though of course cancer of the breast
is notorious for the way in which its secondary growths spread through
liver, lungs, bones, neck, spine, and so forth; and there is little
reason to suppose that the guess is incorrect. After trying all the
usual remedies for “lumps,” her physicians determined to send her to
the baths of Brusa, famous in miraculous cure. There were two large
iron and two large sulphur springs, besides smaller ones; and people
generally went there in spring and early summer when the earth was
gaily carpeted with the myriad flowers that spring up and fade before
the heat of the Mediterranean July. May we infer from the choice of a
sulphur bath that the cancer had already invaded the skin? Possibly.
Such a horror may have been the determining factor which induced the
Empress and her physicians to travel afield. But if so, surely the
recording priest missed a chance of rejoicing; for he does not tell us
the glad news. All over Bithynia and the Troad there were, and are, hot
mineral springs; Homer relates how one hot spring and a cold gushed
from beneath the walls of Troy itself. The girls of Troy used to wash
their clothes in the hot spring whenever Agamemnon would let them.

When Theodora went to Brusa she was accompanied by a retinue of four
thousand, and Heaven resounded with the prayers of the Monophysites;
but the Orthodox refused to pray for the recovery of so infamous a
heretic, just as they had refused to join in her prayers for a son.
Theodora met with little loving-kindness on this earth after she had
left Egypt; possibly the world repaid her with what it received from
her.

The sanctuaries of Asklepios were the great centres of Greek and Roman
healing, and the treatment there was both mental and physical. The
temples were generally built in charming localities, where everything
was peace and loveliness; the patients lay in beds in beautiful
colonnades, and to them, last thing at night, priests delivered restful
and touching services; when sleep came upon them they dreamt, and
the dreams were looked upon as the voice of God; they followed His
instructions and were cured. They were not cured, however, if they had
cancer. One Ælius Aristides has left us a vivid--and unconsciously
amusing--account of his adventures in search of health; he seems to
have been a neurotic man who ultimately developed into a first-class
neurasthenic. To him his beloved god was indeed a trial, as no doubt
Aristides himself was to his more earthly physicians. He would sit
surrounded by his friends, to whom he would pour out his woes in true
neurasthenic style. Aristides seems never to have been truly happy
unless he was talking about his ailments, and he loyally followed
any suggestion for treatment if only he could persuade himself that
it came from the beloved Asklepios. The god would send him a vision,
that ordered him to bathe three times in icy water when fevered, and
afterwards to run a mile in the teeth of a north-east wind--and the
north-easters in the Troad can be bitter indeed; very different from
the urbane and gentle breath that spreads so delicious a languor over
the summer of Sydney! This behest the much-tried man of faith would
dutifully perform, accompanied by a running bodyguard of doctors and
nurses marvelling at his endurance and the inscrutable wisdom of the
god, though they expected, and no doubt in their inmost hearts hoped,
that their long-suffering patient would drop dead from exhaustion.
There were real doctors at these shrines besides priests. The doctors
seem to have been much the same kind of inquisitive and benevolent
persons as we are to-day; some of them were paid to attend the poor
without fee. The nurses were both male and female, and appear to have
been most immoral people. Aristides was the wonder of his age; his
fame spread from land to land, and it is marvellous that he neither
succumbed to his heroic treatment nor lost his faith in the divine
being that subjected him to such torment. Both facts are perhaps
characteristic of mankind. The manner of his end I do not know.

In Theodora’s time Asklepios and the other Olympian divinities had
long been gathered to their fathers before the advancing tides of
Christianity and Earth-Mother worship; but though the old gods were
gone the human body and human spirit remained the same, and there is no
doubt that she was expected to dream and bathe and drink mineral waters
just as Aristides had done centuries before; and no doubt a crowd of
sympathizing friends sat round her on the marble seats which are still
there and tried to console her--a difficult task when the sufferer has
cancer of the breast. She sat there, her beauty faded, her once-rounded
cheeks ashy with cachexia and lined with misery, brooding over the real
nature of the Christ she was so soon to meet, wondering whether she or
her implacable enemies were in the right as to His soul--whether He
had in truth two souls or one. She had made her choice, and it was too
late now to alter; in any case she was too gallant a little Empress to
quail in the face of death, come he never so horribly. Let us hope that
she had discovered before she died that Christ the All-merciful would
forgive even so atrocious a sin as attributing to Him a single soul!
All her piety, all the prayers of her friends, and all the medical
skill of Brusa proved in vain, and she died in A.D. 548, being then
forty years of age. So we take leave of this woman, whom many consider
the most remarkable in history. Let us envisage her to ourselves--this
graceful, exquisite, little cameo-faced lady, passionate in her loves
and her hates, with some of the languor of the East in her blood, much
of the tigress; brave in danger and resourceful in time of trouble;
loyal and faithful to her learned husband as he was loyal to her; yet
perhaps a little despising him. Except Medea, as seen by Euripides,
Theodora was probably the first feminist, and as such has made her mark
upon the world. On the whole her influence upon the Roman Empire seems
to have been for good, and the merciful and juster trend of the laws
she inspired must be noted in her favour.

Theodora dead, the glory of Justinian departed. He seemed to be stunned
by the calamity, and for many critical months took no part in the
world’s affairs; even after he recovered he seemed but the shadow of
his old self. Faithful to her in life, he remained faithful after her
death, and sought no other woman; that is another reason for thinking
that Procopius lied. He lived, a lonely and friendless old man, for
eighteen more years, hated by his subjects for his extortionate
taxation--which they attributed to the extravagance of the crowned
prostitute, though more likely it was due to the enormous campaigns of
Belisarius and Narses the eunuch, as a result of which Italy and Africa
once more came under the sway of the East. Justinian was lonely on his
death-bed, and the world breathed a sigh of relief when he was gone. He
had long outlived his glory.




The Emperor Charles V


That extraordinary phenomenon which, being neither Holy, nor Roman, nor
yet strictly speaking an Empire, was yet called the Holy Roman Empire,
began when Charlemagne crossed the Alps to rescue the reigning Pope
from the Lombards in A.D. 800. The Pope crowned him Roman Emperor of
the West, a title which had been extinct since the time of Odoacer more
than three hundred years before. The revival of the resplendent title
caused the unhappy people of the Dark Ages to think for a moment in
their misery that the mighty days of Augustus and Marcus Aurelius had
returned; it seemed to add the power of God to the romance of ages and
the brute power of kings. During the next two centuries the peoples of
France and Germany gradually evolved into two separate nations, but it
was impossible for men to forget the great brooding power which had
given the _Pax Romana_ to the world, and its hallowed memory survived
more beneficent than possibly it really was; it appeared to their
imaginations that if it were possible to unite the sanctity of the Pope
with the organizing power of Rome the blessed times might again return
when a man might reap in peace what he had sown in peace, and the
long agony of the Dark Ages might be lifted from mankind. When Henry
the Fowler had welded the Germans into a people with a powerful king
the time appeared to have arisen, and his son Otto was crowned Holy
Roman Emperor. He was not Emperor of Germany, nor German Emperor; he
was _Holy Roman Emperor_ of the German people, wielding power, partly
derived from the religious power of the Pope, and partly from the
military resources of whatever fiefs he might hold; and this enormous
and loosely knit organization persisted until 1806--nearly seven
hundred years from the time of Otto, and more than 1,000 years after
the time of Charlemagne.

This mediæval Roman Empire was founded on sentiment; it took its power
from blessed--and probably distorted--memories of a golden age, when
one mighty Imperator really did rule the civilized world with a strong
and autocratic hand. It was a pathetic attempt to put back the hands
of the clock. It bespoke the misery through which mankind was passing
in the attempt to combine feudalism with justice. When the mediæval
Emperor was not fighting with the Pope he was generally fighting
with his presumed subjects; occasionally he tried to defend Europe
from the Turks. He might have justified his existence by defending
Constantinople in 1453, by which he would have averted the greatest
disaster that has ever befallen Europe. He missed that opportunity, and
the mediæval Empire, though it survived that extraordinary calamity,
yet continued ramshackle, feeble, and mediævally glorious until
long past the Protestant Reformation. Being Roman, of course it was
anti-Lutheran, and devoted its lumbering energies to the destruction
of the Protestants. No Holy Roman Emperor ever rivalled the greatness
of Charles V, in whose frame shone all the romance and glamour of
centuries. How vast was his power is shown when we consider that he
ruled over the Netherlands, Burgundy, Spain, Austria, much of what is
now Germany, and Italy; and he was not a man to be contented with a
nominal rule.

He was born in Ghent in 1500 to Philip, Duke of Burgundy, and Juana,
who is commonly known as “Crazy Jane”; it is now generally believed
that she was insane, though the Spaniards shrank from imputing insanity
to a queen. From his father he inherited the principalities of the
Netherlands and Burgundy; from his mother he inherited the kingships
of Spain, Naples, and the Spanish colonies. When his grandfather,
the Hapsburg Emperor Maximilian, died, Charles was elected Emperor
in 1519; the other candidate was Francis I of France. The electors
were the seven _Kurfursten_ of Germany, and Charles bribed the harder
of the two. What power on earth could summon before a magistrate the
kings of France and Spain on a charge of improperly influencing the
vote of a German princelet? Once having attained to the title of Roman
Emperor, added to the enormous military power of King of Spain, Charles
immediately became the greatest man in the world. He was strong,
cautious, athletic, brave, and immeasurably sagacious; his reputation
for wisdom long survived him.

Francis did not forgive him his victory, and for the next quarter of a
century--until 1544--Europe resounded with the rival cries of the two
monarchs, unhappy Italy being usually the actual scene of battle. At
Pavia in 1525 Francis had to say “All is lost save honour”--the precise
definition of “honour” in Francis’s mind being something very different
from what it is to-day. Francis was captured and haled to Madrid to
meet his grim conqueror, who kept him in prison until he consented to
marry Charles’s favourite sister Eleanor of Austria, and to join with
him in an alliance against the heretics. This Eleanor was a gentle and
beautiful lady whom Charles treated with true brotherly contempt; yet
she loved him. As soon as Francis was out of prison he forgot that he
was married, and made love to every pretty girl that came his way.

Francis being safely out of the way, Charles turned to the great aim
of his life--to reconcile Protestants with Catholics throughout his
colossal Empire. He was a strong Catholic, and displayed immense energy
in the reconciliation. According to Gibbon, who quotes the learned
Grotius,[6] he burned 100,000 Netherlanders, and Gibbon dolefully
remarks that this one Holy Roman Emperor slew more Christians than
all the pagan Roman Emperors put together. Charles appears to have
grown gradually into the habit of persecution; he began comparatively
mildly, and it was not till 1550 that he began to see that there was
really nothing else to do with these dull and obstinate Lutherans but
to burn them. He could not understand it. He was sure he was right, and
yet the more Netherlanders he burned the fewer seemed to attend mass.
Moreover, it was impossible to believe that those things the miscreant
Luther had said about the immoral conduct of the monks could be true;
once upon a time he had met the fellow, and had him in his power;
why had he not burned him once and for all and saved the world from
this miserable holocaust which had now become necessary through the
man’s pestilential teaching? So Charles went on with his conciliation,
driven by conscience--the most terrible spur that can be applied to the
flanks of a righteous man. No doubt Torquemada acted from conscience,
and Robespierre; possibly even Nero could have raked up some sort of
a conscientious motive for all he did--the love of pure art, perhaps.
“_Qualis artifex pereo!_” said he in one of those terse untranslatable
Latin phrases when he was summoning up his courage to fall upon his
sword in the high Roman manner; surely there spoke the artist: “How
artistically I die!”

The activities of Charles were so enormous that it is impossible in
this short sketch even to mention them all. Besides his conquest of
Francis and, through him, Italy, he saved Europe from the Turk. To
Francis’s eternal dishonour he had made an alliance with the last
great Turkish Sultan, Solyman the Magnificent. The baleful power which
had conquered Constantinople less than a century before seemed to
be sweeping on to spread its abominations over Western Europe; and
history finds it difficult to forgive Francis for assisting its latest
conqueror. Men remembered how Constantine Palæologus had fallen amidst
smoke and carnage in his empurpled blazonry, heroic to the last; they
forgot that the destruction of 1453 was probably the direct result
of the Venetian and French attack under Dandolo in 1204, from which
Constantinople never recovered. In talking of the “Terrible Turk” they
forgot that Dandolo and his Venetians and Frenchmen had committed
atrocities quite as terrible as the Turks’ during those days and nights
when Constantinople was given over to rapine; and now the brilliant
Francis appeared to be carrying on Dandolo’s war against civilization.
So when Charles stepped forward as the great hero of Europe, and drove
the Turks down the Danube with an army under his own leadership he was
hailed as the saviour of Christendom; it is to this that he owes a
good deal of his glory, and he nobly prepared the world for the still
greater victory of Lepanto to be won by his son Don John of Austria.

Moreover, it was during his reign that the great American conquests of
the Spanish armies occurred, and the name of Fernando Cortes attained
to eternal glory; and the Portuguese voyager Maghellan made those
wonderful discoveries which have so profoundly influenced the course of
history. There had been no man so great and energetic as Charles since
Charlemagne; since him his only rival for almost super-human energy has
been Napoleon.

That pathetic and unhappy queen whom we call “Bloody Mary” had been
betrothed to Charles for diplomatic reasons when she was an infant,
but he had broken off the engagement and ultimately married Isabella
of Portugal, whose fair face is immortalized by Titian in the portrait
that still hangs in the Prado, Madrid. Auburn of hair, with blue eyes
and delicate features, she looks the very type of what we used to call
the tubercular diathesis; and there can be no doubt that Charles really
loved her. Before he married her he had had an illegitimate daughter by
a Flemish girl; ten years after she died Barbara Blomberg, a flighty
German, bore him a son, the famous Don John of Austria. But while
Isabella lived no scandal attached to his name. Unhappily his only
legitimate son was Philip, afterwards Philip II of Spain.

When Mary came to the throne she was intensely unhappy. During the
dreadful years that preceded the divorce of Catherine of Aragon,
Charles had strongly supported Catherine’s cause; and Mary did not
forget his aid when she found herself a monarch, lonely and friendless.
She let him know that she would be quite prepared to marry him if he
would take her.[7] Probably Charles was terrified by the advances of
the plain-faced old maid, but the opportunity of strengthening the
Catholic cause was too good to miss. The house of Austria was always
famous for its matrimonial skill; the hexameter pasquinade went:

      “Bella gerant alii--tu, felix Austria, nube!”
  (“Others wage war for a throne--you, happy Austria, marry!”)

Charles, in his dilemma, turned to his son Philip, who nobly responded
to the call of duty. Of him Gibbon might have said that “he sighed as a
lover, but obeyed as a son” if he had not said it concerning himself;
and Philip broke off his engagement to the Infanta of Portugal, and
married the fair English bride himself.

Charles was still the greatest and most romantic figure in Europe--a
mighty conqueror and famous Emperor; any woman would have preferred him
to his mean-spirited son; and Mary was grateful to him for powerful
support during years of anguish. She obeyed his wishes, and took the
son instead of the father.

Queen Mary’s sad life deserves a word of sympathetic study. With
her mother she had passed through years of hideous suffering,
culminating in her being forced by her father to declare herself a
bastard--probably the most utterly brutal act of Henry’s reign. She had
seen the fruits of ungovernable sexuality in the fate of her enemy Anne
Boleyn; added to her plain face this probably caused her to repress
her own sex-complex; finally she married the wretched young creature
Philip, who, having stirred her sexual passions, left her to pursue
his tortuous policy in Spain. All the time, as I read the story, she
was really desirous of Charles, his brilliant father. Love-sick for
Charles; love-sick for Philip, to whom she had a lawful right set at
naught by leagues of sea; love-sick for _any_ man whom her pride would
allow her to possess--and I do not hint a word against her virtue--she
is not a creature to scorn; she is rather to be pitied. Her father
had been a man of strong passions and violent deeds; from him she had
inherited that tendency to early degeneration of the cardiovascular
system which led to her death from dropsy at the early age of
forty-two; and her repressed sex-complex led her into the ways of a
ruthless religious persecution, probably increased by the object-lesson
set her by her hero. From this repressed sex-complex also sprang her
fierce desire for a child, though the historians commonly attribute
this emotion to a desire for some one to carry on her hatred of the
Protestants. I remember the case of a young woman who was a violent
Labour politician; unfortunately it became necessary for her to lose
her uterus because of a fibroid tumour. She professed to be frantically
sorry because she could no longer bear a son to go into Parliament to
fight the battle of the proletariat against the wicked capitalist; but
once in a moment of weakness she confessed that what she had really
wanted was not a bouncing young politician, but merely a dear little
baby to be her own child. Probably some such motive weighed with
Mary. People laughed at her because she used to mistake any abdominal
swelling, or even the normal diminution of menstruation that occurs
with middle age, for a sign of pregnancy[8]; but possibly if she had
married Charles instead of Philip, and had lived happily with him as
his wife, she would not have given her people occasion to call her
“Bloody Mary.” She is the saddest figure in English history. From her
earliest infancy she had been taught to look forward to a marriage
with the wonderful man who to her mind--and to the world’s--typified
the noblest qualities of humanity--courage, bravery, rich and profound
wisdom, learning and love of the beautiful in art and music and
literature; friend and admirer of Titian and gallant helper of her
mother. Her disappointment must have been terrible when she found him
snatched from her grasp and saw herself condemned either to a life of
old maidenhood or to a loveless marriage with a mean religious fanatic
twelve years younger than herself. The mentality which led Mary to
persecute the English Protestants contained the same qualities as had
led Joan of Arc to her career of unrivalled heroism, and to-day leads
an old maid to keep parrots. When an old maid undresses it is said that
she puts a cover over the parrot’s cage lest the bird should see her
nakedness; that is a phase of the same mentality as Mary’s and Joan’s.
Loneliness, sadness, suppressed longing for the unattainable--it is
cruel to laugh at an old maid.

But Charles was to show himself mortal. He had always been a colossal
eater, and had never spared himself either in the field or at the
table. One has to pay for these things; if a man wishes to be a great
leader and to undertake great responsibilities he must be content
to forswear carnal delights and eat sparingly; and it is hardly an
exaggeration to say that it is less harmful to drink too much than
to eat too much. At the age of thirty Charles began to suffer from
“gout”--whatever it was that they called gout in those days. At the
age of fifty he began to lose his teeth--apparently from pyorrhœa.
Possibly his “gout” may have really been the result of focal infection
from his septic teeth. At fifty his gout “flew to his head,” and
threatened him with sudden death. When he was fifty-two he suddenly
became pale and thin, and it was noticed that his hair was rapidly
turning grey. Clearly his enormous gluttony was beginning to result in
arterio-sclerosis, and at fifty-four it was reported to his enemy the
Sultan that Charles had lost the use of an arm and a leg. Sir William
Stirling-Maxwell thought that this report was the exaggeration of an
enemy; but it is quite possible that Charles really suffered from that
annoying condition known as “intermittent claudication,” which is such
a nuisance to both patient and doctor in cases of arterio-sclerosis. In
these attacks there may be temporary paralysis and loss of the power
of speech. The cause of them is not quite clear, because they seldom
prove fatal; but it is supposed that there is spasm of some small
artery in the brain, or perhaps a transitory dropsy of some motor area.
Charles’s speech became indistinct, so that towards the end of his
life it was difficult to understand what he meant. It has generally
been supposed that this was due to his underhung lower jaw and loss of
teeth; but it is equally probable that dropsy of the speech-centre may
have been at the root of the trouble, such as is so frequently observed
in arterio-sclerosis or its congener chronic Bright’s disease, and is
also often caused by over-strain and over-eating. He began to feel
the cold intensely, and sat shivering even under the warmest wraps;
he said himself that the cold seemed to be in his bones. Probably
there was some spasm of the arterioles, such as is often seen in
arterio-sclerosis.

By this time, what with the failure of his plans against the
Protestants and his wretched health, he had made up his mind to resign
the burden of Empire, and to seek repose in some warmer climate, where
he could rest in the congenial atmosphere of a monastery. No Roman
Emperor had voluntarily resigned the greatest position in the world
since Diocletian in A.D. 305; curiously enough he too had been a
persecutor, so that his reign is known among the hagiographers as “the
age of martyrs.”

Charles called together a great meeting at the Castle of Caudenburg
in Brussels in 1556. All the great ones of the Empire were there,
and the Knights of the Golden Fleece, an order which still vies for
greatness with our own order of the Garter; possibly it may now even
excel that order, because it is unlikely that it will ever again be
conferred by an Austrian Emperor. Like the Garter, it had “no damned
pretence of merit about it.” If you were entitled to wear the chain
and insignia of the Golden Fleece, you were a man of very noble birth.
Yet, like the Order of the Thistle, the Fleece may yet be revived, and
may recover its ancient splendour. On the right of the Emperor sat his
son Philip, just returned, a not-impetuous bridegroom, from marrying
Mary of England. On his left he leant painfully and short of breath
upon the shoulder of William the Silent, who was soon to become of
some little note in the world. It was a strange group: the great, bold
Emperor whose course was so nearly run; the mean little king-consort of
England; and the noble patriot statesman who was soon to drag Philip’s
name in the dust of ignominy. Charles spoke at some length, recounting
how he had won many victories and suffered many defeats, yet, though so
constantly at war, he had always striven for peace; how he had crossed
the Mediterranean many times against the Turk, and had made forty
long journeys and many short ones to see for himself the troubles of
his subjects. He insisted proudly that he had never done any man a
cruelty or an injustice. He burst into tears and sat down, showing the
emotionalism that so often attends upon high blood-pressure; and the
crowd, seeing the great soldier weep, wept with him. Eleanor gave him
a cordial to drink, and he resumed, saying that at last he had found
the trials of Empire more than his health would allow him to sustain.
He had decided to abdicate in favour of his beloved son Philip. It was
given to few monarchs to die and yet to live--to see his own glory
continued in the glory which he expected for his son. It seems to have
been a really touching and dramatic scene, causing an immense sensation
throughout Europe. If there were ever an indispensable man it would
have appeared at that time to be the Emperor Charles V; the world
quaked in apprehension.

It was some time before Charles could carry out his design, but
ultimately he went, by a long and dangerous journey, to the place
of his retirement, Yuste, in Estremadura, Northern Spain, where
there slept a little monastery of followers of St. Jerome; why he--a
Fleming--should have picked on this lonely and inaccessible place is
not known. With him went a little band of attendants, chief among whom
was his stout old chamberlain, Don Luis Quixada, of whom we shall hear
more when we come to consider Don John of Austria. This Quixada seems
to have been a fine type of Spanish grandee, loyal and faithful; a
merry grandee also, who added sound sense to jocund playfulness. Note
well the name; we shall meet it again to some purpose.

Charles was mistaken in supposing that he could find rest at Yuste; the
world would not let him rest. He had been a figure too overwhelming. He
spent his days in reading dispatches from all who were in trouble and
fancied that the great man could pluck them from the toils. Chief of
his suppliants was his son Philip, who found the mantle that had seemed
to sit so easily on his father’s mighty shoulders intolerably heavy
when he came to wear it himself. To the man who is strong in his wisdom
and resolution difficulties disappear when they are boldly faced.
Philip was timorous, poor-spirited, pedantic, and procrastinating. He
constantly appealed to his father for advice, and Charles responded
in letters which seem to show, in their evidence of annoyance, the
irritability that goes with a high blood-pressure. An epidemic of
Reformation was breaking out in Spain, however sterile might seem the
soil of that nation for Protestantism to flourish. It is not quite
clear why no serious move towards the Reformed Religion ever took
place among the Spaniards. It is probable that the ancient faith had
thrust its roots too deeply into their hearts during the centuries of
struggle against the Moors. In the minds of the Spanish people it had
been the Church which had inspired their ancestors--not the kings;
and they were not going to desert the old religion now that they saw
it attacked by the Germans. Moreover, the fierce repression which was
practised by the Spanish Inquisition must have had its effect. Lecky
formed the opinion that no new idea could survive in the teeth of
really determined persecution; and the history of religion in Spain and
France seems to bear him out.

However, the old war-horse in his retirement snuffed the battle and the
joyous smell of the burnings, and stoutly urged on the Inquisitors,
at whatever cost to his own quiet. Spain remained diligently Roman
Catholic at the orders of the Holy Roman Emperor and his son Philip;
and at this moment, when Charles was so urgently longing for peace and
retirement, English Mary, his cousin and daughter-in-law, in whose
interests he had loyally braved God, man, and Pope, lost Calais; the
French, under the Duke of Guise, took it from her. She might well
grieve and say the name would be found written on her heart; she but
echoed the feelings of her beloved Emperor. For weeks he mumbled with
toothless jaws the agony of his soul over this crowning misfortune, and
from this he never really recovered. Already how had the times changed
since the Spanish infantry had overrun Europe at his command!

But he could do nothing; he had abdicated. That iron hand was now so
crippled with gout that it could hardly even open an envelope, had to
sign its letters with a seal, and constantly held a tiny chafing-dish
to keep itself warm. Charles sat shivering and helpless, wrapped in a
great eiderdown cloak even in midsummer; his eyes fell on the portrait
of his beloved wife and of that plain Mary who had wished to marry
him, and on several favourite pictures by Titian. He listened to the
singing of the friars, and was resentful of the slightest wrong note,
for he had an exceedingly acute musical ear. The good fathers, in their
attempts to entertain him, brought famous preachers to preach to him;
he listened dutifully--he, whose lightest word had once shaken Europe,
but who now could hardly mumble in a slurring voice! And in spite of
the protests of Quixada he heroically sat down to eat himself to death.
It has been said that marriage for an old man is merely a pleasant way
of committing suicide; it is doubtful whether Charles enjoyed his
chosen method of self-poisoning, for he had lost the sense of taste,
and no food could be too richly seasoned for his tired palate. Vast
quantities of beef, mutton, venison, ham, and highly flavoured sausages
went past those toothless jaws, washed down by the richest wines, the
heaviest beers; the local hidalgoes quickly discovered that to reach
the Emperor’s heart all they had to do was to appeal to his stomach,
so they poured in upon him every kind of rich dainty, to the despair
of Quixada, who did his best to protect his master. “Really,” said he,
“kings seem to think that their stomachs are not made like other men’s!”

He sometimes used to go riding, but one day, when he was mounting his
pony, he was suddenly seized with an attack of giddiness so severe that
he nearly fell into the arms of Quixada, so that the Emperor, who had
once upon a time been the _beau ideal_ of a light cavalryman, had to
toil about heavily on foot in the woods, and to strive to hold his gun
steadily enough to shoot a wood-pigeon.

He spent his spare time watching men lay out for him new parterres and
planting trees; man began with a garden, and in sickness and sorrow
ends with one. The Earth-Mother is the one friend that never deserts
us.

For some time he took a daily dose of senna, which was probably the
best thing he could have taken in the absence of Epsom salts, but
nothing could get rid of the enormous amount of rich food that poured
down his gullet. He was always thinking of death, and there seems to
be little doubt that he really did rehearse his own funeral. He held
a great and solemn procession, catafalque and all, and, kneeling in
front of the altar, handed to the officiating friar a taper, which was
symbolical of his own soul. He then sat during the afternoon in the hot
sun, and it was thought that he caught a feverish chill, for he took
to his bed and never left it alive; for hours he held the portrait of
Isabella in his hands, recalling her fresh young beauty; he clasped
to his bosom the crucifix which he had taken from her dead fingers
just before they had become stiff. Then came the fatal headache and
vomiting which so often usher in the close of chronic Bright’s disease.
We are told that he lay unconscious, holding his wife’s crucifix,
till he said: “Lord, I am coming to Thee!” His hand relaxed--was the
motor-centre becoming œdematous?--and a bishop held the crucifix before
his dying eyes. Charles sighed, “Aye--Jesus!” and died. Whether or no
he died so soon after saying these things as the good friar would have
us believe, it is certain that his end was edifying and pious, and such
as he would have wished.

The great interest of Charles V to a doctor, now that the questions
over which he struggled so fiercely are settled, is that we can seldom
trace so well in any historical character the course of the disease
from which he died. If Charles had been content to live on milky food
and drink less it is probable that he would have lived for years;
he might have yielded to the constant entreaties of his friends and
resumed the imperial crown; he might have taken into his strong hands
the guidance of Spain and the Netherlands that was overwhelming Philip;
his calm good sense might have averted the rising flood that ultimately
led to the revolt of the Netherlands; possibly he might even have
averted the Spanish Armada, though it seems improbable that he could
have lived thirty years. But Spain might have avoided that arrogant
behaviour which has since that day caused so many of her troubles; with
the substitution of Philip for Charles at that critical time she took a
wrong turning from which she has never since recovered.

The death of Charles V caused an extraordinary sensation in
Europe--even greater than the sensation caused by his abdication.
Immense memorial services were held all over the Empire; people
wondered how they were ever to recover from the loss. Stout old Quixada
said boldly that Charles V was the greatest man that ever had been
or ever would be in the world. If we differ from him, at all events
his opinion helps us to appreciate the extraordinary impression that
Charles had made upon his time, and it is now generally agreed that he
was the greatest man of the sixteenth century, which was so prodigal
of remarkable men. Possibly William the Silent might be thought still
greater; but he was much less resplendent; he lacked the knightly
glamour that surrounded the head of the Holy Roman Emperor; he wore no
Golden Fleece; no storied centuries fluttered over his head. Yet, if
we come to seek a cause for this immense impression, it is not easy
to find. There is no doubt that he was a stout defender of the old
religion at a time when it sorely needed defenders, and to that extent
Romance broods over his memory--the romance of things that are old.
He was a man of remarkable energy, and a great soldier at a time when
soldiering was not distinguished by genius. He appears to have had
great personal charm, though I can find few sayings attributed to him
by which we can judge the source of that charm. There is nothing in his
history like the gay insouciance, the constant little personal letters
to friends, of Henri Quatre; things with Charles V seem to have been
rather serious and legal than friendly. He was fond of simple joys,
like watchmaking, and he got a remarkable clockmaker, one Torriano, to
accompany him to Yuste to amuse his last months. He left behind him a
great many watches, and naturally the story grew that he had said: “If
I cannot even get my watches to agree, how can I expect my subjects
to follow one religion?” But it is probable that this pretty story
is quite apocryphal; it is certainly very unlike Charles’s strongly
religious--not to say bigoted--character. He was proud and autocratic,
yet could unbend, and the friars of Yuste found him a good friend. The
boys of the neighbouring village used to rob his orchard, much to the
disgust of the Emperor; he set the police on their track, but died
before the case came up for trial. After his death it was found that he
had left instructions that the fines which he expected to receive from
the naughty little ragamuffins were to be given to the poor of their
village. Among these naughty little boys was probably young Don John of
Austria, whom Quixada had brought to see his supposed father; and it is
said that Charles acknowledged him before he died.

Lastly, Charles had the inestimable advantage of being depicted by
one of the greatest artists of all time. It is impossible to look
upon his sad and thoughtful face, as drawn by the great Titian,
without sympathy. The strong, if underhung, jaw which he bequeathed
to his descendants and is still to be seen in King Alfonso of Spain;
the wide-set and thoughtful eyes; the care-worn furrowed brow; the
expression of energy and calm wisdom: all these belonged to a great man.

Two hundred years after he died, when his body had long been removed
to the Escorial where it now lies in solemn company with the bodies
of many other Spanish monarchs, a strange fate allowed a visiting
Scotsman to view it. Even after that great lapse of time it was,
though mummified, little affected by decay; there were still on his
winding-sheet the sprigs of thyme which his friends had placed there;
and the grave and stately features as painted by Titian were still
vividly recognizable.

We should be quite within the bounds of reason in saying that Charles
V was the greatest man between Charlemagne and Napoleon. He was less
knightly than Charlemagne--probably because we know more about him;
he had no Austerlitz nor Jena to his credit--nor any Moscow; but in
devouring energy and vastness of conception there was little to choose
between the three. Charlemagne left behind him the Holy Roman Empire
with its enormous mediæval significance, whereas Napoleon and Charles
V left comparatively little or nothing. He was the heroic defender of
a losing cause, and wears the romantic halo that such heroes wear; yet
whatever halo of chivalry, romance, and religious fervour surrounds his
name, it is difficult to forget that he deliberately ate himself to
death. An ignoble end.




Don John of Austria, Cervantes, and Don Quixote


Two great alliances, of which you will read nothing in ordinary
history-books, have pre-eminently influenced mankind. The first was
between the Priest and the Woman, and seems to have begun in Neolithic
times, when Woman was looked upon as a witch with some uncanny power
of bewitching honest men and somehow bringing forth useless brats for
no earthly reason that could be discovered. From this alliance grew
the worship of Motherhood, and hence many more modern religions. When,
on Sundays, you see ranks of men in stiff collars sitting in church
though they would much rather be playing tennis, you know that they
are expiating in misery the spankings inflicted by their Neolithic
ancestors perhaps 10,000 years ago: their wives have driven them to
church, and Woman, as usual, has had the last word.

But the other alliance, that between Man and Horse, has been a more
terrible affair altogether, and has led to Chivalry, the cult of the
Man on the Horse, of the Aristocrat, of the Rich Man. Though the Romans
had a savage aristocracy they never had Chivalry, probably because
they never feared the cavalryman. The Roman legion, in its open order,
could face any cavalry, because the legionary knew that the man by his
side would not run away; if he, being a misbegotten son of fear, did
so, then the man behind him would take advantage of the plungings of
the horse to drive his javelin into the silly animal while he himself
would use his sword upon the rider. It was left for the Gran Catalan
Company of Spain and the Scots under Wallace and Bruce to prove in
mediæval times that the infantryman would beat the cavalryman.

The Romans never adopted the artificial rules of Chivalry; it was the
business of the legions to win battles--to make money over the business
if they could, but first and foremost to win battles. They had no ideas
about the “point of honour” which has cost so many a man his life. The
main thing was that the legions must not run away; it was for the enemy
to do the running. To the Romans it never seems to have occurred that
Woman was a creature to be sentimentally worshipped, or that it really
mattered very much whether you spoke of a brace of grouse or a couple,
of a mob of hounds or a pack; but to the Knight of Chivalry these were
vital matters.

With Charlemagne and his Franks a new civilization came into full
flower; and Chivalry--the “worship of God and the ladies,” to quote
Gibbon’s ironic phrase--swayed the minds of Northern Europe for
centuries.

Chivalry has been much misunderstood in modern times. We probably see
Chaucer’s “varry parfit gentil knight” as poets and idealists would
have us see him and not as he really was. There was no sentimentality
about your knight. “Gentle” did not mean “kind”; it meant really “son
of a landowner.” A knight had to do things in the manner considered
fashionable by his class; he had to call things precisely by the names
taught him by some older knight--his tutor and university combined; the
slightest slip and he would be considered as the mediæval equivalent
of our “bounder”; he had to wear the proper clothes at the proper
time, and to obey certain arbitrary--often quite artificial--“manners
and rules of good society,” or he would be considered lacking in
“good form”; he must recognize the rights of the rich as against the
poor, but it did not follow that he should recognize any rights of
the poor as against the rich. Even Bayard, knight _sans peur et sans
reproche_, would probably have seemed a most offensive fellow to a
twentieth-century gentleman if he, with his modern ideas, could have
met the Chevalier; and the sensation caused by the kindly conduct of
Sir Philip Sidney in handing his drink of water to a wounded soldier
at Zutphen shows how rare such a thing must have been. It was done a
thousand times in the late war, and nobody thought anything about it.
To the extent of the sensation of Zutphen Chivalry had debased mankind;
the evil that it did lived after it. It did good in teaching the world
manners and a certain standard of honourable conduct; it did not teach
morality, or real religion, or real kindness. These things were left
for the poor to teach the rich.

This unsentimental harangue leads us to “the last knight of
Europe”--Don John of Austria, around whose name there still shines a
glamour of romance like the sound of a trumpet. About nine years after
the death of the Empress Isabel, Charles V went a-wandering, still
disconsolate, through his mighty empire. He was sad and lonely, for
it was about the time when the arterio-sclerosis which was to kill
him began to depress his spirits. At Ratisbon, where he lay preparing
for the great campaign which was to end in the glorious victory of
Muhlburg, they brought to him to cheer him up a sweet singer and pretty
girl named Barbara Blomberg, daughter of a noble family. She sang to
the Emperor to such purpose that he became her lover, and in due
course Don John was born. By this time Charles had discovered that his
pretty nightingale was a petulant, extravagant, sensual young woman,
by no means the sort of mother a wise man would select to bring up his
son; so he took the boy from her care and sent him to a poor Spanish
family near Madrid. Whatever Charles V did in his private life seems
to have borne the stamp of wisdom and kindness, however little we
may agree with some of his public actions. Probably Barbara did not
object; it must have been rather alarming for the flighty young person
to have the tremendous personality of the great Emperor constantly
overlooking her folly; she married a man named Kugel, ruined him by her
extravagance, and died penniless save for an annuity of 200 florins
left her by the Emperor in his will. I read a touch of sentimentality
into Charles’s character. It is difficult to wonder more at his
memory of his old light-of-love in his will, or at his accurate and
uncomplimentary estimate of her value. Probably he was rather ashamed
of some of his memories; so far as I can find out there were not many
such, and he wished to hush up the whole incident. Probably Barbara was
not worth much more than 200 florins per annum.

Still keeping secret the parentage of the child, whom he called
Jeronimo after his favourite saint, Charles handed him over to the care
of his steward, Don Luis de Quixada, asking that Maddalena his wife
should regard Jeronimo as her own son. Quixada had not been married
very long, and naturally Maddalena wondered whence came this cheery
little boy of which Quixada seemed so fond; nor would he gratify her
curiosity, but hushed her with dark sayings; she kissed the baby in
public, but wept in secret for jealousy of the wicked female who had
evidently borne a son in secret to her husband before he had married
his lawful wife. One night the castle caught fire, and Quixada, flower
of Spain’s chivalry though he was, rescued the child before he returned
to save Maddalena. It is wrong to call him a “grandee of Spain,” for
“grandee” is a title much the same as our “duke”; had he been a grandee
I understand that his true name would have been “Señor Don Quixada,
duca e grandi de España.” One would think that this action would have
added fuel to Maddalena’s jealousy, but she believed her husband when
he told her that Jeronimo was a child of such surpassing importance to
the world that it had been necessary for a Quixada to save him even
before he saved his wife, and quite probably she then, for the first
time, began to suspect his real parentage. Charles V was then the
great Catholic hero, and the whole Catholic world was weeping for his
abdication. So Maddalena developed a strong love for Jeronimo, which
died only with herself. She lived for a great many years and bore no
children; Jeronimo remained to her as her only son. He always looked
upon her as his mother, and throughout his life wrote to her letters
which are still delightful to read; whatever duty he had, in whatever
part of the world, he always found time to write to Maddalena in the
midst of it, and, like a real mother, she kept the letters.

It is said that Charles when dying kissed Jeronimo and called him son;
he certainly provided for him in his will. After his death Quixada
at first tried to keep the matter secret, but afterwards sent him
to live at the Court with his brother Philip II, who treated him as
he treated everybody else but Charles V--“the one wise and strong
man whom he never suspected, never betrayed, and never undervalued,”
as Stirling-Maxwell says. Jeronimo was then openly acknowledged by
Philip as Charles’s natural son, being called Don John of Austria.
Philip’s own son, a youth of small intelligence, who afterwards died
under restraint--Philip was of course accused of poisoning him--once
called him _bâtarde et fils de putaine_--bastard and strumpet’s son.
The curly-headed little boy kept his hands by his side and quietly
replied, “Possibly so; but at any rate I had a better _father_ than
you!” Even by that time he had begun to see that his mother was no
saint, and could tell between a great man and a little. Philip could
never forgive Don John for being a gallant youth such as his father
had hoped that Philip would be and was not; and Don John, conscious
of his mighty ancestry, ardently longed to be a real gallant King of
Romance, such as his father had hoped Philip would become. Charles,
in his will, had expressed a hope that he would be a monk, and Philip
actively fought for this, though Charles had left the decision to Don
John’s own wishes. In Philip’s eyes no doubt a gay and bold younger
brother would be less dangerous to the State--i.e. to Philip--as a monk
than as a soldier; yet is it not possible that Philip only thought he
was loyally helping to follow out his father’s wishes? He was generally
a “slave of duty,” though his slavery often led him into tortuous
courses. The Church is a great leveller, and religion is a pacifying
and amaranthine repast. But no monkish cowl would suit Don John; his
locks were fair and hyacinthine, and no tonsure should degrade them.
After a struggle Philip yielded, and Don John was sent in command of
the galleys against the Algerian pirates. He did well, and next year
he commanded the land forces against the rebel Moriscoes of Granada.
Here, in his very first battle, he lost his foster-father and mentor,
Quixada, who died a knightly death in rallying the army when it
meditated flight. A true knight of Spain, this Quixada, from the time
when he took the little son of imperial majesty under his care till
the time when he gave up his life lest that little son, now become a
radiant young man, should suffer dishonour by his army running away.
All Spain, from Philip downward, mourned the death of this most valiant
gentleman, which is another thing that makes me think that Philip’s
conduct towards Don John was not quite so black as it has been painted.
He could certainly recognize worth when it did not conflict with his
own interests--that is to say, with the interests of Spain as he saw
them. Quixada’s action in concealing the parentage of Don John from his
wife was just the sort of loyal and unwise thing that might have been
expected from a chivalrous knight, using the word “chivalrous” as it is
commonly understood to-day; a dangerous thing, for many a woman would
not have had sufficient faith in her husband to believe him when he
suddenly produced an unexplained and charming little boy soon after he
was married. Maddalena de Ulloa acted like an angel; Don Quixada acted
like--Don Quixote! Now we see why I asked you particularly to note the
name when we first came across it in the essay on Charles V. Whence did
Cervantes get the idea for Don Quixote if not from the foster-father of
Don John?

Two years later he got the real chance of his life. The Turks, having
recovered from the shock inflicted on them by Charles V, captured
Cyprus and seemed about to conquer all the little republics of the
Adriatic. The Pope, Pius V, organized the “Holy League” between Spain
and Venice, between the most fiercely monarchical of countries and the
most republican of cities; and Don John was appointed Admiral-in-chief
of the combined fleets of the “Last Crusade,” as the enterprise is
called from its mingled gallantry and apparent unity and idealism. For
the last time men stood spellbound as Christendom attacked Mohammed.

  Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
  And Don John of Austria is going to the war,

sings Chesterton in _Lepanto_, one of the most stirring battle-poems
since the _Iliad_.

  Sudden and still--hurrah!
  Bolt from Iberia!
  Don John of Austria
  Is gone by Alcalar.

It is difficult for us nowadays to realize the terror of the Turks
that possessed Europe in the sixteenth century; mothers quieted
their children by the dreadful name, and escaped sailors recounted
indescribable horrors in every little seaport from Albania to
Scotland. Many thousands of Christian slaves laboured at the oars
of the war-galleys, not, as is generally thought, as hostages that
these galleys might not be sunk. They were the private property of
the captains, who treated their own property better than they treated
the property of the Grand Turk. Thus, it was not the worst fate for a
Christian galley-slave to serve in the galley of his owner. He would
not be exposed to reckless sinking at any rate; if the galley sank, it
would be because the owner could not help it. Nor would he be likely
to be impaled upon a red-hot poker or thrown upon butchers’ hooks, as
might happen to the slave of the Sultan. So it would seem that some
unnecessary pity has been spilt upon the slaves of the galleys. Their
lot might have been worse, to put things in their most favourable light.

  King Philip’s in his closet with the Fleece about his neck,
  (Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
  Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines
  Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
  (“_But Don John of Austria has burst the battle line!_”)
  Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
  Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate’s sloop.
  _Vivat Hispania!
  Domino gloria!_
  Don John of Austria
  Has set his people free!

This “last crusade” culminated in the great battle of Lepanto, in 1571,
where the Turks lost about 35,000 men and their whole battle fleet
except forty galleys which crawled home disabled. There was a good deal
of discussion about the action of an Italian galley under Doria, but
Cervantes, in _Don Quixote_, seems to have been quite satisfied with
it. No such wonderful battle was fought at sea until the Nile itself,
which is the most perfect of all sea-fights.

The sensation throughout Europe was indescribable. Everything helped to
make the victory romantic--the gallant young bastard admiral compared
with the unattractive king under whom he served, the sudden relief from
terrible danger, and the victory of Christ over Mahound, so dramatic
and complete, all combined to stir the pulses of Christendom as they
had never been stirred before--even in the earlier Crusades when the
very tomb of Christ was the point under dispute. Men said that Mahound,
when he heard the guns of Don John, wept upon the knees of his houris
in his Paradise; black Azrael, the angel of death, had turned traitor
upon his worshippers.

This glorious victory was won largely by the extraordinary daring and
inspiring personality of the Emperor’s bastard, who now, at the summit
of human glory, saw himself condemned to retire into the position of
a subject. The rest of the life of the “man who would be king” is the
record of thwarted ambition and disappointed hopes. Spain and Venice
quarrelled, and Lepanto was not followed up; Philip lost the chance
of retrieving 1453 and of changing the history of Europe in Spain’s
favour ever since. Christian set once more to killing Christian in
the old melancholy way; Venice made peace with the Sultan, and Don
John set about carving out a kingdom for himself. In dreams he saw
himself monarch of Albania, or of the Morea; and in body he actually
recaptured Tunis, once so gloriously held by his father. But Philip
would not support him and he had to retire. Cervantes, in _Don
Quixote_, evidently thinks Philip quite right. Tunis was a “sponge
for extravagance, and a moth for expense; and as for holding it as a
monument to Charles V, why, what monument was necessary to glory so
eternal?” Don John returned home without a kingdom to his brother,
who no doubt let him see that he was becoming rather a nuisance with
his expensive dreams. In 1576 he was placated by an appointment as
Governor-General to the Netherlands, where he quickly found himself
confronted by a much greater, though less romantic, man than himself.
William of Orange was now the unquestioned leader of the revolt of the
Dutch against the Roman Catholic power of Philip, and when Don John
reached the Netherlands he found himself Governor with no subjects.
After fruitless negotiations he retired, a very ill man, to Namur;
he had become thin and pale, and lost his vivacity. His heart was
not in his task. He was meditating the extraordinary “empresa de
Inglaterra”--the “enterprise of England”--which now seems to us so
fantastic. The Spanish army was to evacuate the Netherlands and to be
rapidly ferried across to Yorkshire; by a lightning stroke it was to
release Mary Queen of Scots, that romantic Queen, and marry her to Don
John, the romantic victor of Lepanto; Elizabeth was to be slain, and
the Pope was to bless the union of romance with romance. But Elizabeth
would have taken a deal of slaying. One cannot help surmising that
Don John may have dreamed this fantasy because he had been educated
by Quixada; it was a dream that might have passed through the addled
brain of Don Quixote himself. The victor of Lepanto should better have
understood the mighty power of the sea; the galleys which had done so
well in the Mediterranean would have been worse than useless in the
North, where the storms are a worse enemy than the Turks.

But Philip, either through timidity, or jealousy, or wisdom, would
have none of it; after long delay he sent an important force to the
Netherlands under the command of Don John’s cousin, Alexander Farnese,
Prince of Parma, the greatest general Spain ever produced. Don John
abandoned his dreams to fall with this army upon the Protestants at
Gemblours, where he, or Farnese--opinions differ--won a really great
victory, the last that was to honour his name.

A curious incident in this campaign was that the Spaniards were
attacked by a small Scottish force at a place called Rejnements. The
Scotsmen began, _more Scotorum_, by singing a psalm. Having thus
prepared the way spiritually, they prepared it physically by casting
off their clothes, and to the horror of the modest Spaniards attacked
naked with considerable success. Many of us, no doubt, remember how the
Highlanders in the late war were said to have stained their bodies with
coffee or Condy’s fluid and, under cover of a Birnam’s wood composed of
branches of trees, emulated the bold Malcolm and Macduff by creeping
upon the Germans attired mainly in their boots and identity disks; a
sparse costume in which to appear before nursing sisters should they
be wounded. I had the honour of operating upon one hefty gentleman who
reached the C.C.S. in this attire, sheltered from the bitter cold by
blankets supplied by considerate Australians in the field ambulance.
We from a southern land considered the habit more suitable for the
hardy Scot than for ourselves; though we remembered that an Australian
surgeon at Gallipoli, finding that his dressings had run short, tore
his raiment into strips and, when the need came, charged the Turks
berserk attired in the costume of Adam before the Fall. But we did not
remember that gallant Scotsmen had done something similar in 1578. No
doubt the sight of a large man, dressed in cannibal costume and dancing
horribly on the parapet while he poured forth a string of uncouth Doric
imprecations, led to the tale that the British Army was employing
African natives to devour the astonished Bosche.

Don John could not follow up the victory of Gemblours. He had neither
money nor sufficient men; the few short months remaining to him were
spent in imploring aid from his brother. Philip did nothing; possibly
he was jealous of Don John; possibly he was fully occupied over the
miserable affair of Antonio Perez and the Princess of Eboli. One would
like to think that he had lucid intervals in which he recognized the
insensate folly of the whole business; but like his father he was
spurred on by his conscience. In addition to the other troubles of
Don John his army began to waste away with pestilence, no doubt, it
being now autumn, with typhoid, that curse of armies before the recent
discovery of T.A.B. inoculation. Don John fell sick, in September,
1578, of a fever, but, his doctors considering the illness trifling,
continued to work. One Italian, indeed, said that he would die, whereas
another sick man, believed to be _in articulo mortis_, would recover.
The guess proved right, and when Don John died the Italian surgeon’s
fortune was made. Thus easily are some reputations gained in our
profession; it is easier to make a reputation than to keep it.

For nearly three weeks Don John struggled to work, encouraged by his
physicians; there came a day, towards the end of September, when he,
being already much wasted by his illness, was seized by a most violent
pain and immediately had to go to bed. He became delirious, and babbled
of battle-fields and trumpet-calls; he gave orders to imaginary lines
of battle; he became unconscious. After two days of muttering delirium
he awakened, and, as he was thought to be _in extremis_, took extreme
unction. Next day the dying flicker continued, and he heard the priest
say mass; though his sight had failed and he could not see, he had
himself raised in the bed, feebly turned his head towards the elevation
of the Host and adored the body of Christ with his last glimmer of
consciousness. He then fell back unconscious, and sank into a state
of coma, from which he never rallied. In all, he had been ill about
twenty-four days.

These events could be easily explained on the supposition that
this young man’s brave life was terminated by that curse of young
soldiers--ruptured typhoid ulcer in ambulatory typhoid fever. His army
was dwindling with pestilence; he himself walked about feeling feverish
and “seedy” and losing weight rapidly for a fortnight; he was just
at the typhoid age, in the typhoid time of the year, and in typhoid
conditions; his ulcer burst, causing peritonitis; the tremendous shock
of the rupture, together with the toxæmia, drove him delirious and then
unconscious; being a very strong young man he woke up again as the
first shock passed away; as the shock passed into definite peritonitis
unconsciousness returned, and he was fortunate in being able to hear
his last mass before he died. I see no flaw in this reasoning.

The rest of the story is rather quaint. By next spring Philip had
given orders for the embalmed body to be brought to Spain, and it
was considered rather mean of him that the body of his brother was
to be brought on mule-back. But Philip was at his wits’ end for
money to prosecute the war, and no doubt he himself looked upon his
“meanness” as a wise economy. The body was exhumed, cut into three
pieces--apparently by disjointing it at the hips--and stuffed into
three leather bags which were slung on mule-back in a pack-saddle. When
it came within a few miles of the Escorial it was put together again,
laid upon a bier, and given a noble funeral in a death-chamber next to
that which had been reserved for the great Emperor his father. There I
believe it still lies, the winds of the Escorial laughing at its dreams
of chivalrous glory.

Philip, suspicious of everybody and everything, had given orders that,
should Don John die, his confessor was to keep an accurate record of
the circumstances; and it is from the report of this priest that the
above account has been drawn by Stirling-Maxwell, so we can look upon
it as authoritative. Philip was accused of poisoning him, and for a
moment this supposition was borne out by the extreme redness of the
intestines; but this is much more easily explained by the peritonitis.
Again, Philip’s enemies have said that Don John died of a broken
heart, because the priest reported that one side of his heart was
dry and empty; but this too is quite natural if we suppose that the
last act of Don John’s life was for his heart to pump its blood into
his arteries, as so often happens in death. Young men do not die of
broken hearts; “Men have died and worms have eaten them--but not for
love!” as Rosalind says in her sweet cynicism. In elderly men with high
blood-pressures it is quite possible that grief and worry may actually
cause the heart to burst, and to that extent novelists are right in
speaking of a “broken heart.” Otherwise the disease, or casualty, is
unknown to medicine. No amount of worry, or absence of worry, would
have had any effect upon Don John’s typhoid ulcer.

Besides the suspicion of poisoning, Don John was rumoured to have died
of the “French disease,” even the name of the lady being mentioned.
While he was certainly no more moral than any other gay and handsome
young prince of his time, there is not the slightest reason for
supposing the rumour to have been anything but folly. Syphilis does
not kill a man as Don John died, while ambulatory typhoid fever most
assuredly does. Therefore the lady in question must remain without her
glory so far as this book is concerned, though her name has survived,
and not only in Spanish.

Don John was a handsome young man, graceful and strong. There are many
contemporary portraits of him, perhaps the best being a magnificent
statue at Messina, which he saved from the Turks at Lepanto. He had
frank blue eyes and yellow curls, and a very great charm of manner;
but he was liable to attacks of violent pride which estranged his
friends. He was the darling of the ladies, and was esteemed the flower
of chivalry in his day; but William of Orange warned his Netherlanders
not to be deceived by his appearance; in his view Philip had sent
a monster of cruelty no less savage than himself. But William was
prejudiced, and Don John is still one of the great romantic figures of
history. It is difficult to speculate reasonably on what might have
happened if he had not died. It has been thought that he might have led
the Armada, in which case that most badly-managed expedition would at
least have been well led, and no doubt England would have had a more
determined struggle; but it seems to me more likely that Don John and
Philip would have quarrelled, and that Fortune would have been even
less kind to Spain than she was. Those who love Spain must be on the
whole rather glad that Don John died before he had been able to cause
more trouble than he did. It is difficult to agree entirely with those
who would put the blame entirely on Philip for the troubles between him
and Don John, or would interpret every act of Philip to his detriment.
The whole story might be equally interpreted as the effort of a most
conscientious and narrow-minded man endeavouring to follow out what he
thought to be his father’s wishes and at the same time to keep a wild
young brother from kicking over the traces. Compare Butler’s, _The Way
of All Flesh_.

But the real interest to us of Don John is in his relations with
Cervantes.

  Cervantes on his galley puts his sword into its sheath
  (_Don John of Austria rides homewards with a wreath_),
  And he sees across a weary land a winding road in Spain
  Up which a lean and foolish knight rides slowly up in vain.

And it will be a sad world indeed when Don Quixote at last reaches the
top of that winding road and men cease to love him.

At Lepanto Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (please pronounce the “a’s”
separately) was about twenty-five years of age, and was lying below
deck sick of a fever. When he heard the roar of the guns of Don John
he sprang from his bed and rushed on deck in spite of the orders of
his captain; he was put in charge of a boat’s crew of twelve men and
went through the thick of the fighting. Every man in Don John’s fleet
was fired with his religious enthusiasm, and Cervantes’ courage was
only an index of the wild fervour that distinguished the Christians on
that most bloody day. He was wounded in the left hand, “for the greater
glory of the right,” as he himself quaintly says, and never again could
he move the fingers of the injured hand; no doubt the tendon sheaths
had become septic, and he was lucky to have kept the hand at all. It
has been sapiently remarked that the world would have had a great loss
if it had been the right hand; but healthy people who lose the right
hand can easily learn to write with the left. Cervantes remained in
the fleet for some years until, on his way home, he was captured by
Algerian pirates; put to the service of a Christian renegade--a man
who had turned Mussulman to save his life or from still less worthy
motive--Cervantes made several attempts to escape, but these were
unsuccessful, and he remained in captivity for some years until his
family had scraped up enough to ransom him. In _Don Quixote_ there is
a good deal about the renegadoes, and much of the well-known story of
the “escaped Moor” is probably autobiographical; from these hints we
gather that the renegadoes were not quite so bad as has been generally
thought, or else that Cervantes was far too big-minded a man to believe
unnecessary evil about anybody.

Back in Spain, he went into the army for two years, until, in 1582, he
gave up soldiering and took to literature. He found the pen “a good
stick but a bad crutch,” and in 1585 returned to the public service as
deputy-purveyor of the fleet. In 1594 he became collectors of revenues
in Granada, and in 1597 he became short in his accounts and fell into
jail. There he seems to have begun _Don Quixote_; he somehow obtained
security for the repayment of the missing money, was released penniless
into a suspicious world, and published the first part of _Don Quixote_
in 1605. It was enormously well received, and from that day to this has
remained one of the most successful of all books. Ten years later he
found that dishonest publishers were issuing spurious second parts, so
he sat himself down to write a genuine sequel. This differs from most
sequels in that it is better than the original; it is wiser, mellower,
less ironical; Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are still more lovable
than they were before, and one imagines that Cervantes must have spent
the whole ten years in collecting--or inventing--the wonderful proverbs
so wisely uttered by the squire.

Though Cervantes wrote many plays he is now remembered mainly by his
one very great romance, which is read lovingly in every language of
every part of the world, so that the epithet “Quixotic” is applied
everywhere to whatsoever is both gallant and foolish; an epithet which
reflects the mixture of affection and pity in which the old Don is
universally held, and is more often considered to be a compliment than
the reverse. Curiously enough, women seldom seem to like Don Quixote;
only the other day a brilliant young woman graduate told me that she
thought he was a “silly old fool!” That was all she could see in him;
but he is universally now thought to represent the pathos of the man
who is born out of his time. As has been so well said, “This book
is not meant for laughter--it is meant for tears.” I can do no more
than advise everybody to get a thin-paper copy and let it live in the
pocket for some months, reading it at odd moments; it is the wisest and
wittiest book ever published. “Blessed be the man who invented sleep,”
is a typical piece of Panzan philosophy with which most wise men will
agree.

But when we have done sentimentalizing over the hidden meaning that
undoubtedly underlies Don Quixote, we must not forget that it is
extraordinarily funny even to a modern mind. The law that the humour of
one generation is merely grotesque to the next does not seem to apply
to _Don Quixote_; and I dare swear that the picture of the mad old Don,
brought home from the inn of Maritornes, looking so stately in a cage
upon a bullock-wagon, guarded by troopers of the Holy Brotherhood, and
escorted by the priest and the barber, with the distracted Sancho Panza
buzzing about wondering what has become of his promised Governorship,
is absolutely the funniest thing in all literature; all the funnier
because the springs of our laughter flow from the fount of our tears.

Now I cannot help thinking that when Cervantes began to write _Don
Quixote_ in prison, feeling bitter and sore against a world which had
imprisoned him, and stiffened his hand for him, and condemned him to
poverty and imprisonment, he must have had in his mind the story of
the young bastard of Imperial Majesty who had risen to such heights
of glory over Lepanto. It is not contended that Don Quixote was
consciously intended to be a characterizature of Don Quixada or Don
John, though his real name was Alonzo Quixana or Quixada, Don Quixote
being a _nom de guerre_ born of his frenzy; but I find it hard to
believe that Cervantes had not heard of the foolish loyalty of Quixada
in the matter of Jeronimo, or of the romantic dreams of Don John. It
would seem that in these two incidents we find the true seeds of _Don
Quixote_. It is not true that “Cervantes laughed Spain’s chivalry
away.” Chivalry, meaning the social order of the true crusades, had
long been dead even in Spain, the most conservative of nations. What
really laughed Spain’s chivalry away was the gay and joyous laugh of
Don John himself, who would have plunged her into a great war for a
dream. The man who seriously thought of dashing across the North Sea to
marry Mary Queen of Scots would have been quite capable of tilting at
windmills. In his inmost heart Cervantes must have seen his folly.

The death of Don Quixote is probably the most generally famous in
literature, vying with that of Colonel Newcome, though more impressive
because it is less sentimental. Cervantes had begun by rather jeering
at his old Don, and subjecting him to uncalled-for cudgellings and
humiliations; he then fell in love with the brave old lunatic, as
everybody else has fallen in love with him ever since, and by the time
that he came to die had drawn him as a really noble and beautiful
character, who shows all the pathos of the idealist who is born out of
his time. The death of Don Quixote is, except the death of one other
Idealist, the most affecting death in all literature; the pathos is
secured by means similarly restrained. The Bachelor Samson Carrasco,
in his determination to cure Don Quixote of his knight-errant folly,
had dressed himself up as “The Knight of the White Moon,” and vowed
that there was another lady more fair than Dulcinea del Toboso. At
that blasphemy Don Quixote naturally flew to arms and challenged the
insolent knight. By that time Rosinante was but old bones, so the
Bachelor, being well-mounted on a young charger, overthrew the old
horse and his brave old rider, and Don Quixote came to grass with a
terrible fall. Then the Bachelor made Don Quixote vow that he would
cease from his knight-errantry for a whole year, by which time it was
hoped that he would be cured. They lifted his visor and found the
old man “pale and sweating”; evidently Cervantes had seen some old
man suffering from shock, and described what he saw in three words.
From this humiliation Don Quixote never really recovered. He reached
home and formed the mad idea of turning shepherd with Sancho and the
Bachelor, and living out his penance in the fields. But Death saw
otherwise, and the old man answered his call before he could do as he
wished. He was seized with a violent fever that confined him to his
room for six days; finally he slept calmly for some hours, and again
awakened, only to fall into one attack of syncope after another until
he died; the sanguine assurance of Sancho Panza that Dulcinea had been
successfully disenchanted could not save him. Like most idealists he
died a sad and disappointed man, certain of one thing only--that he was
out of touch with the majority of mankind.

Cervantes was far too great an artist to kill his old hero by some such
folly as “brain fever”--which nonsense I guess to have been typhoid. I
believe that in describing the death of Don Quixote he was thinking of
some old man whom he had seen crawl home to die after a severe physical
shock, disappointed and disillusioned in a world of practical youth in
which there is no room for romantic old age--probably some kind old
man whom he himself had loved. These old men usually die of hypostatic
pneumonia, which has been called the “natural end of man,” and is
probably the real broken heart of popular medicine. The old man, after
a severe shock, is affected by a weakened circulation; the lungs are
attacked by a slow inflammation, and he dies, usually in a few days,
in much the same way as died Don Quixote. Cervantes did not know that
these old men die from inflammation of the lungs; no doubt he observed
the way they die, and immortalized his memories in the death of Don
Quixote. I have written this to point out Cervantes’ great powers of
observation. He would probably have made a good doctor in our day.

This theory of _Don Quixote_, that at its roots lie memories of Don
John and Don Quixada, is in no way inconsistent with Cervantes’ own
statement that he wrote the book to ridicule the romances of Chivalry
which were so vitiating the literary taste of seventeenth-century
Spain; at the back of his mind probably lay his own memories of foolish
and gallant things, quite worthy of affectionate ridicule such as he
has lavished on his knight-errant.




Philip II and the Arterio-Sclerosis of Statesmen


When the Empress Isabel was pregnant with the child which was to be
Philip II, she bethought her of the glory that was hers in bearing
offspring to a man so famous as the Roman Emperor, and she made up her
mind that she would comport herself as became a Roman Empress. When,
therefore, her relations and midwives during the confinement implored
her to cry out or she would die, the proud Empress answered, “Die I
may; but call out I _will not_!” and thus Philip arrived into the world
sombre son of a stoical mother and heroic father. Doubtless she thought
that she would show a courage equal to his father’s, hoping that the
son would then prove not unworthy. Though she was very beautiful, as
Titian’s famous portrait shows, she seems to have been a gloomy and
austere woman, and Charles, being absent so long from her side at his
wars, had to leave Philip’s education mainly to her. His part consisted
of many affectionate letters full of good and proud advice. Yet Philip
grew up to be a merry little golden-haired boy enough, who rode about
the streets of Toledo in a go-cart amidst the crowds that we are told
pressed to see the Emperor’s son. The calamity of his life was that
Charles had bequeathed to him the kingdom of the Netherlands. Charles
himself was essentially a Fleming, who got on exceedingly well with
his brother Flemings, Reformation or no Reformation; they were quite
prepared to admit that the great man might have some good reason for
his religious persecution, peculiar though it no doubt seemed. But
Philip was a foreigner; and a foreigner of the race of Torquemada who,
so they heard, had so strengthened the Inquisition less than a century
before that now it was really not safe to think aloud in matters of
religion. So the Dutch rose in revolt under William of Orange, and
the Dutch Republic came into being. Philip was only able to save the
southern Netherlands from the wreck, which ultimately formed the
kingdom of Belgium. Philip always thought that if he could only get
England on his side the pacification of the Netherlands would be easy;
so, at the earnest request of Charles, he married Mary Tudor, a woman
twelve years older than himself, a marriage which turned out unhappily
from every point of view, and has wrongly coloured our general opinion
of Philip’s character. The unfortunate attempt to conquer England by
the Armada, a fleet badly equipped and absurdly led, has also led
us to despise both him and his Spaniards, whence came the general
English schoolboy idea that the Spanish were a nation of braggarts
ruled by a murderous fool, whose only thirst was for Protestant gore.
But this idea was very far from being true. Philip was no fool; he
was an exceedingly learned, conscientious, hard-working, careful, and
painstaking bureaucrat, who might have done very well indeed had he
been left the kingdom of Spain alone; but had no power of attracting
foreigners to his point of view. He always did his best according to
his lights; and if his policy sometimes appears tortuous to us, that
is simply because we forget that it was then thought perfectly right
for kings to do tortuous things for the sake of their people, just as
to-day party leaders sometimes do extraordinarily wicked things for the
sake of what they consider the principles of their party. Unfortunately
for Philip he often failed in his efforts; and the man who fails is
always in the wrong.

He was constantly at war, sometimes unsuccessfully, often victoriously.
Unlike Charles he did not lead his armies in person, but sat at home
and prayed, read the crystal, and organized. After the great battle
of St. Quentin, in which he defeated the French, he vowed to erect a
mighty church to the glory of St. Lawrence which should excel every
other building in the world; and for thirty years the whole available
wealth of Spain and the Indies was poured out on the erection of the
Escorial, which the Spaniards look upon as the eighth wonder of the
world, and who is to say that they are wrong? Situated about twenty
miles from Madrid, in a bleak and desolate mountain range, it reflects
extraordinarily well the character of the man who made it. Under one
almost incredible roof it combines a palace, a university, a monastery,
a church, and a mausoleum. The weight of its keys alone is measured in
scores of pounds; the number of its windows and its doors is counted in
hundreds; it contains the greatest works of many very great artists,
and the tombs of Charles V and his descendants. It stands in lonely
grandeur swept by constant bitter winds, a fit monument for a lonely
and morose king. Its architecture is Doric, and stern as its own
granite.

The character of Philip II has been described repeatedly, in England
mainly by his enemies, who have laid too much stress on his cruelty
and bigotry. Though he was fiercely religious, yet he loved art and
wrote poetry; though he would burn a heretic as blithely as any man,
yet he was a kind husband to his four wives, whom he married one after
the other for political reasons; though he was gloomy and austere,
yet he loved music, and was moved almost to tears by the sound of the
nightingale in the summer evenings of Spain. His people loved him and
affectionately called him “Philip the prudent”; they forgave him his
mistakes, for they knew that he worked always for the ancient religion
which they loved, and for the glory of Spain.

Unlike Charles his father, he was austere in his mode of life, and
always had a doctor at his side at meals lest he should forget his
gout. He was a martyr to that most distressing complaint, no doubt
inherited from his father. He lived abstemiously, but took too little
exercise; it would have been better for his health--and probably for
the world--had he followed his armies on horseback like Charles, even
if he had recognized that he was no great general.

His death, at the age of seventy-two, was proud and sombre, as befitted
the son of the Empress Isabel, who had scorned to cry when he was
born. We can understand a good deal about Philip if we consider him
as spiritually the son of that proud sombre woman rather than of his
glorious and energetic father. In June, 1598, he was attacked by an
unusually severe attack of gout which so crippled him that he could
hardly move. He was carried from Madrid to the Escorial in a litter,
and was put to bed in a little room opening off the church so that he
could hear the friars at their orisons. Soon he began to suffer from
“malignant tumours” all over his legs, which ulcerated, and became
intensely painful, so that he could not bear even a wet cloth to be
laid upon them or to have the ulcers dressed. So he lay for fifty-three
days suffering frightful tortures, but never uttering a word of
complaint, even as his mother had borne him in silence for the sake of
the great man who had begotten him. As the ulcers could not be dressed,
they naturally became covered with vermin and smelled horribly. Stoical
in his agony, he called his son before him, apologizing for doing so,
but it was necessary. “I want,” he said, “to show you how even the
greatest monarchies must end. The crown is slipping from my head, and
will soon rest upon yours. In a few days I shall be nothing but a
corpse swathed in its winding-sheet, girdled with a rope.” He showed no
sign of emotionalism, but retained his self-control to the last; after
he had said farewell to his son he considered that he had left the
world, and devoted the last few days of his life to the offices of the
church. The monks in the church wanted to cease the continual dirges
and services, but he insisted that they should go on, saying: “The
nearer I get to the fountain, the more thirsty I become!”

These seem to have been his last words; he appears to have retained
consciousness as long as may be.

Let us reason together and try if we can make head or tail of this
extraordinary illness. The first certain fact about Philip II is that
he long suffered from gout, apparently the real old-fashioned gout in
the feet. In the well-known picture of him receiving a deputation of
Netherlanders, as he sits in his tall hat beneath a crucifix, it is
perfectly evident that he is suffering tortures from gout and wearing
a large loosely fitting slipper. These unfortunate gentlemen seem to
have selected a most unpropitious moment to ask favours, for there
is no ailment that so warps the temper as gout. When a man suffers
from gout over a period of years it is only a matter of time till his
arteries and kidneys go wrong and he gets arterio-sclerosis. We may
take it, therefore, as certain that at the age of seventy-two Philip
had sclerosed arteries and probably chronic Bright’s disease like his
father before him. Gout, Bright’s disease, and high blood-pressure,
are all strongly hereditary, as every insurance doctor knows; that
is to say, the son of a father who has died of one of these three is
more likely than not to die ultimately of some cognate disease of
arteries or kidneys or heart, all grouped together under the name of
cardio-vascular-renal disease.

But what about the “malignant tumours”? “Malignant tumour” to-day means
cancer of one sort or another, and assuredly it was not cancer that
killed Philip. Probably the word “tumour” simply meant “swelling.” Now,
what could these painful swellings have been which ulcerated and smelt
so horribly? Why not gangrene? Ordinary senile gangrene, such as occurs
in arterio-sclerosis, neither causes swellings, nor is it painful,
nor does it smell nor become verminous; but diabetic gangrene does
all these things. Diabetes in elderly people may go on for many years
undiscovered unless the urine be chemically examined, and may only
cause symptoms when the arterio-sclerosis which generally complicates
it gives results, such as sudden death from heart-failure, or diabetic
gangrene. Thus a very famous Australian statesman, who had been known
to have sugar in his urine for many years, was one morning found dead
in his bath, evidently due to the high blood-pressure consequent on
diabetic arterio-sclerosis.

Diabetic gangrene often begins in some small area of injured skin, such
as might readily occur in a foot tortured with gout; it ulcerates,
is exceedingly painful, and possessed of a stench quite peculiar to
its horrid self. It does not confine itself to one foot, or to one
area of a leg, but suddenly appears in an apparently healthy portion,
having surreptitiously worked its way along beneath the skin; its first
sign is often a painful swelling which ulcerates. The patient dies
either from toxæmia due to the gangrene, or from diabetic coma; and
fifty-three days is not an unlikely period for the torture to continue.
On the whole it would seem that diabetic gangrene appearing in a man
who has arterio-sclerosis is a probable explanation of Philip’s death.
The really interesting part of this historical diagnosis is the way in
which it explains his treatment of the Netherlands. What justice could
they have received from a man tortured and rendered petulant with gout
and gloomy with diabetes?

Charles V had taken no care of himself, but had gone roaring and
fighting and guzzling and drinking all over Europe; Philip had led
a very quiet, studious, and abstemious life, and therefore he lived
nearly twenty years longer than his father. Possibly when he came to
suffer the torments of his death he may have thought the years not
worth his self-denial: possibly he may have regretted that he did not
have a good time when he was young, but this is not likely, for he was
a very conscientious man.

When Philip lay dying he held in his hand the common little crucifix
that his mother and father had adored when they too had died; his
friends buried it upon his breast when they came to inter him in the
Escorial, where it still lies with him in a coffin made of the timbers
of the _Cinco Chagas_, not the least glorious of his fighting galleys.

Arterio-sclerosis, high blood-pressure, hyperpiesis, and chronic
Bright’s disease--all more or less names for the same thing, or at
any rate for cognate disorders--form one of the great tragedies of
the world. They attack the very men whom we can least spare; they are
essentially the diseases of statesmen. Although these diseases have
been attributed to many causes--that is to say, we do not really know
their true cause--it is certain that worry has a great deal to do with
them. If a man be content to live the life of a cabbage, eat little,
and drink no alcohol, it is probable that he will not suffer from high
blood-pressure; but if he is determined to work hard, live well, and
yet struggle furiously, then his arteries and kidneys inevitably go
wrong and he is not likely to stand the strain for many years. Unless
a politician has an iron nerve and preternaturally calm nature, or
unless he is fortunate enough to be carried off by pneumonia, then
he is almost certain to die of high blood-pressure if he persists in
his politics. I could name a dozen able politicians who have fallen
victims to their political anxieties. The latest, so far as I know,
was Mr. John Storey, Premier of New South Wales, who died of high
blood-pressure in 1921; before him I remember several able men whom
the furious politics of that State claimed as victims. In England Lord
Beaconsfield seems to have died of high blood-pressure, and so did Mr.
Joseph Chamberlain. Mr. Gladstone was less fortunate, in that he died
of cancer. He must have possessed a calm mind to go through his furious
strugglings without his kidneys or blood-vessels giving way; that, and
his singularly temperate and happy home-life, preserved him from the
usual fate of statesmen.

Charles V differed from Mr. Gladstone because he habitually ate
far too much, and could never properly relax his mental tension.
His arterio-sclerosis had many results on history. It was probably
responsible for his extreme fits of depression, in one of which it
pleased Fate that he should meet Barbara Blomberg. If he had not been
extraordinarily depressed and unhappy, owing to his arterio-sclerosis,
he would probably not have troubled about her, and there would have
been no Don John of Austria. If he had not had arterio-sclerosis he
would probably not have abdicated in 1556, when he should have had many
years of wise and useful activities before him. If his judgment had
not been warped by his illness he would probably never have appointed
Philip II to be his successor as King of the Netherlands; he would
have seen that the Dutch were not the sort of people to be ruled by
an alien. And if there had been no Don John it is possible that there
would have been no Don Quixote. Once again, if Philip had not been
eternally preoccupied with his senseless struggle against the Dutch,
it is probable that he would have undertaken his real duty--to protect
Europe from the Turk. When one considers how the lives of Charles and
his sons might have been altered had his arteries been carrying a lower
blood-tension, it rather tends to alter the philosophy of history to a
medical man.

Again, when we consider that the destinies of nations are commonly
held in the hands of elderly gentlemen whose blood-pressures tend to
be too high owing to their fierce political activities, it is not too
much to say that arterio-sclerosis is one of the greatest tragedies
that afflict the human race. Every politician should have his
blood-pressure tested and his urine examined about once a quarter, and
if it should show signs of rising he should undoubtedly take a long
rest until it falls again; it is not fair that the lives of millions
should depend upon the judgment of a man whose mind is warped by
arterio-sclerosis.




Mr. and Mrs. Pepys


Samuel Pepys, Father of the Royal Navy, and the one man--if indeed
there were any one man--who made possible the careers of Blake and
Nelson, died in 1703 in the odour of the greatest respectability.
Official London followed him to his honoured grave, and he left behind
him the memory of a great and good servant of the King in “perriwig”
(alas, to become too famous), stockings and silver buckles. But
unhappily for his reputation, though greatly to the delight of a wicked
world, he had, during ten momentous years, kept a diary. It was written
in a kind of shorthand which he seems to have flattered himself would
not be interpreted; but by some extraordinary mischance he had left a
key amongst his papers. Early in the nineteenth century part of the
Diary was translated, and a part published. A staggered world asked for
more, and during the next three generations further portions were made
public, until by this time nearly the whole has been published, and it
is unlikely that the small remaining portions will ever see the light.

Pepys seems to have set down every thought that came into his
head as he wrote; things which the ordinary man hardly admits to
himself--even supposing that he ever thinks or does them--this stately
Secretary of the Navy calmly wrote in black and white with a garrulous
effrontery that absolutely disarms criticism. In its extraordinary
self-revelation the Diary is unique; it is literally true that there
is nothing else like it in any other language, and it is almost
impossible that anything like it will ever be written again; the man,
the moment, and the occasion can never recur. I take it that every
man who presumes to call himself educated has at least a nodding
acquaintance with this immortal work; but a glance at some of its
medical features may be interesting. The difficulties at this end of
the world are considerable, because the Editor has veiled some of the
more interesting medical passages in the decent obscurity of asterisks,
and one has to guess at some anatomical terms which, if too Saxon to
be printable in modern English, might very well have been given in
technical Latin. Let us begin with a brief study of the delightful
woman who had the good fortune--or otherwise--to be Pepys’s wife.
Daughter of a French immigrant and an Irish girl, Elizabeth Pepys was
married at fourteen, and her life ended, after fifteen somewhat hectic
years, in 1669, when she was only twenty-nine years of age. Pepys
repeatedly tells us that she was pretty--and no one was ever a better
judge than he--and “very good company when she is well.” Her portrait
shows her with a bright, clever little face, her upper lip perhaps a
trifle longer than the ideal, bosom well developed, and a coquettish
curl allowed to hang over her forehead after the fashion of the Court
of Charles II. She spoke and read French and English; she took the
keenest interest in life, and set to work to learn from her husband
arithmetic, “musique,” the flageolet, use of the globes, and various
accomplishments which modern girls learn at school. Mrs. Pepys imbibing
all this erudition from her husband, while her pretty little dog lies
snoring on the mat, forms a truly delightful picture, and no doubt our
imagination of it is no more delightful than the reality was three
hundred years ago. I suppose it was the same dog as he whose puppyish
indiscretions had led to many a fierce quarrel between husband and
wife; Pepys always carefully recorded these indiscretions, both of the
dog and, alas, of himself. It is clear that the sanitary conveniences
in Pepys’s house could not have been up to his requirements.

Husband and wife went everywhere together, and seem really to
have loved each other; the impression that I gather from Pepys’s
exceedingly candid description of her is that she was a loyal and
comradely wife, with a spirit of her own, and a good deal to put up
with; for though Pepys was continually--and causelessly--jealous of
her, yet he did not hold that he was in any way bound to be faithful
to her on his own side. So they pass through life, Pepys philandering
with every attractive woman who came his way, and Mrs. Pepys dressing
herself prettily, learning her little accomplishments, squabbling with
her maids, and looking after her house and his meals, till one day she
engaged a servant, Deb Willet by name, who brought a touch of tragedy
into the home. In November, 1668, Deb was combing Pepys’s hair--no
doubt in preparation for the immortal “perriwig”--when Mrs. Pepys came
in and caught him “embracing her,” thus occasioning “the greatest
sorrow to me that ever I knew in this world,” as he puts it.

Mrs. Pepys was “struck mute,” and was silently furious. Outraged Juno
towered over the unhappy Pepys, and so to bed without a word, nor slept
all night; but about two in the morning Juno became very woman; woke
him up and told him she had “turned Roman Catholique,” this being,
in the state of politics at that time, probably the thing which she
thought would hurt him more than anything else she could say. For
the next few days Pepys is sore troubled, and his usual genial babble
becomes almost incoherent. The wrong dating and the expressions of
“phrenzy” show the mental agony that he passed through, and there can
be no doubt that the joy of life passed out of him, probably never more
fully to return. The rest of the Diary is written in a style graver
than at first--some of it is almost passionate. He describes with much
mental agitation how he woke up in the middle of one night, and found
his wife heating a pair of tongs red-hot and preparing to pinch his
nose; gone for ever were the glad days when he could pull her nose, and
the “poor wretch” thought none the worse of the lordly fellow. Twice
had he done so, and, as he says, “to offend.” One would like to have
Mrs. Pepys’s account of this nose-pulling, and what she really thought
of it. Some people have found the struggle of Pepys to cure himself of
his infatuation for Deb humorous; to any ordinarily sympathetic soul
who reads how he prayed on his knees in his own room that God would
give him strength never again to be unfaithful, and how he appealed
again and again to his wife to forgive him, and how he, to the best
of his ability, avoided the girl, the whole business becomes rather
too painful to be funny, even though the unhappy man has the art of
making himself ridiculous in nearly every sentence. Finally, in a fury
of jealousy, she forced him to write a most insulting letter to Miss
Willet, a letter that no woman could ever possibly forgive, and Pepys’s
life appears to have settled down again. His sight failing him[9]--it
is thought that he suffered from hypermetropia combined with early
presbyopia--he abandoned the Diary just at the time when one would have
dearly liked to hear more; and we never hear the end either of Deb or
of their married happiness. Reading between the lines, one gathers
that probably Deb was more sinned against than sinning, and that Mrs.
Pepys had more real reason to be angry about many women of whom she
had never heard than about the young woman whose flirtation was the
actual _casus belli_. It is an unjust world. The two went abroad for
a six-months’ tour in France and Holland, and immediately after they
returned Mrs. Pepys fell ill of a fever; for a time she appears to
have fought it well, but she took a bad turn and died. Considering
her youth, the season of the year, and that they had just returned
from the Continent, the disease was possibly typhoid. Pepys erected an
affectionate memorial to her, and was later on buried by her side. He
took the last sacrament with her as she lay dying, so we may reasonably
suppose that she died having forgiven him, and it is not unfair to
imagine that the trip abroad was a second honeymoon. They were two
grown-up children, playing with life as with a new toy.

Mrs. Pepys was liable to attacks of boils in asterisks; and a Dr.
Williams acquired considerable merit by supplying her with plasters
and ointments. On November 16, 1663, “Mr. Hollyard came, and he and
I about our great work to look upon my wife’s malady, which he did,
and it seems her great conflux of humours heretofore that did use to
swell there did in breaking leave a hollow which has since gone in
further and further till it is now three inches deep, but as God will
have it did not run into the body-ward, but keeps to the outside of
the skin, and so he will be forced to cut open all along, and which
my heart will not serve me to see done, and yet she will not have no
one else to see it done, no, not even her mayde, and so I must do it
poor wretch for her.” Pepys is in a panic at the thought of assisting
at the opening of this subcutaneous abscess; one can feel the courage
oozing out at the palms of his hands as one reads his agitated words.
To his joy, next morning Mr. Hollyard, on second thoughts, “believes
a fomentation will do as well, and what her mayde will be able to do
as well without knowing what it is for, but only that it is for the
piles.” Evidently the “mayde’s” opinion was of some little moment in
Mrs. Pepys’s censorious world. Mr. Pepys would have been much troubled
to see his wife cut before his face: “he could not have borne to have
seen it.” Mr. Hollyard received £3 “for his work upon my wife, but
whether it is cured or not I cannot say, but he says it will never come
to anything, but it may ooze now and again.” Mr. Hollyard was evidently
easily satisfied. Of course, there must have been a sinus running in
somewhere, but it is impossible to guess at its origin. Possibly some
pelvic sepsis; possibly an ischio-rectal abscess. A long time before
he had noted that his wife was suffering from a “soare belly,” which
may possibly have been the beginning of the trouble, but there is no
mention of any long and serious illness such as usually accompanies
para-metric sepsis. On the whole, I fancy ischio-rectal abscess to
be the most likely explanation. Later on she suffers from abscesses
in the cheek, which “by God’s mercy burst into the mouth, thus not
spoiling her face”; and she had constant trouble with her teeth. It is
thus quite probable that the origin of the whole illness may have been
pyorrhœa, and no doubt this would go hard with her in the fever from
which she died. Possibly this may have been septic pneumonia arising
from septic foci in the mouth; but, after all, it is idle to speculate.

Mrs. Pepys never became pregnant during the period covered by the
Diary, though there were one or two false alarms. There is no
mention of any continuous or constant ill-health, such as we find in
pyo-salpinx or severe tubal adhesions; and such being the case, her
sterility may quite likely have been as much his fault as hers.

One cannot read the Diary without wishing that we could have heard
a little more of her side of the questions that arose. What did she
really think of her husband when he pulled her nose? Twice, too, no
less! Stevenson calls her “a vulgar woman.” Stevenson’s opinion on
every matter is worthy of the highest respect, as that of a sensitive,
refined, and artistic soul; but I cannot help thinking that sometimes
his early Calvinistic training tended to make him rather intolerant
to human weakness. His judgment of François Villon always seems to me
intolerant and unjust, and he showed no sign in his novels of ever
having made any effort to comprehend the difficulties and troubles
which surround women in their passage through the world. He understood
men--there can be no doubt of that; but I doubt if he understood
women even to the small extent which is achieved by the average man.
Personally I find Mrs. Pepys far from “vulgar”; generally she is simply
delightful. True, one cannot concur with her action over the letter to
Deb. It was cruel and ungenerous. But she probably knew her husband
well by that time, and judged fairly accurately the only thing that
would be likely to bring him up with a round turn, and again we have
not the privilege of knowing Deb except through Pepys’s possibly too
favourable eyes. Deb may have been all that Mrs. Pepys thought her,
and she may have richly deserved what she got. After all, there is
in every woman protecting her husband from the onslaughts of “vamps”
not a little of the wild-cat. Even the gentlest of women will defend
her husband--especially a husband who retains so much of the boy as
Pepys--from the attempts of wicked women to steal him, poor innocent
love, from her sacred hearth; will defend him with bare hands and
claws, and totally regardless of the rules of combat; and it is this
touch of cattishness in Mrs. Pepys which makes one’s heart warm
towards her. For all we know Deb Willet may have been a “vamp.” Mrs.
Pepys was certainly the “absolute female.”

Mr. Pepys suffered from stone in the bladder before he began to keep
a diary. He does not appear to have been physically a hero; had he
been a general, no doubt he would have led his army bravely from the
rear except in case of a retreat; but so great was the pain that he
submitted his body to the knife on March 26, 1658. Anæsthetics in
those days were rudimentary, relaxing rather than anæsthetizing the
patient. There is some reason to believe that they were extensively
used in the Middle Ages, and contemporaries of Shakespeare seem to have
looked on their use as a matter of course; but for some reason they
became less popular, and by the seventeenth century most people had to
undergo their operations with little assistance beyond stout hearts and
sluggish nervous systems.

Cutting for the stone was one of the earliest of surgical operations.
In ancient days it was first done in India, and the glad news that
stones could be successfully removed from the living body filtered
through to the Greeks some centuries before Christ. Hippocrates knew
all about it, and the operation is mentioned in that Hippocratic oath
according to which some of us endeavour to regulate our lives. At first
it was only done in children, because it was considered that adult
men would not heal properly, and the only result in them would be a
fistula. The child was held on the lap of some muscular assistant, with
one or two not less muscular men holding its arms and legs. The surgeon
put one or two fingers into the little anus and tried to push the
stone down on to the perineum, helped in this manœuvre by hypogastric
pressure from another assistant. He then cut transversely above the
anus, strong in the faith that he might, if the gods willed, open into
the neck of the bladder. Next he tried to push out the stone with his
fingers still in the anus; it is not quite clear whether he would take
his fingers out of the anus and put them into the wound or vice versa;
this failing, he would seize the stone with forceps and drag it through
the perineum. As time went on it was discovered that more than three or
four assistants could be employed, using others to sit on the patient’s
chest, thus adding the _peine forte et dure_ to the legitimate terrors
of ancient surgery and surrounding him with a mass of men. Imbued with
a spirit of unrest by the struggles of the patient the mass swayed
this way and that, until it was discovered that by adding yet more
valiants to the wings of the “scrum,” who should answer heave with
counter-heave, the resultant of the opposing forces would hold even the
largest perineum steady enough for the surgeon to operate; and men came
under the knife for stone. Next the patient was tied up with ropes,
somewhat in the style we used in our boyhood’s sport of cock-fighting.
What a piece of work is the Rope! How perfect in all its works--from
the Pyramids--built with the aid of the Rope and the Stick--to the
execution of the latest murderer. One might write pages on the
influence of the Rope on human progress; but for our purpose we may
simply say that probably Mr. Pepys was kept quiet with many yards of
hemp. Those who cut for the stone were specialists, doing nothing else;
their arrival at a patient’s house must have resembled an invasion,
with their vast armamentarium and crowds of assistants. By Pepys’s time
Marianus Sanctus had lived--yes, so greatly was he venerated that they
called him “Sanctus,” the Holy Man; Saint Marianus if you will. He it
was, in Italy in 1524, who invented the apparatus major, which made
the operation a little less barbarous than that of the Greeks. This
God-sent apparatus consisted mainly of a grooved staff to be shoved
into the bladder and a series of forceps. You cut on to the staff as
the first step of the operation; it was believed that if you cut in
the middle line in the raphe the wound would never heal, owing to the
callosity of the part; moreover, if you carried your incision too far
back you would cause fatal hæmorrhage from the inferior hæmorrhoidal
veins. Having, then, made your incision well to the right or left, you
exposed the urethra, made a good big hole in that pipe, and inserted a
fine able pair of tongs, with which you seized hold of the stone and
crushed it if you could, pulling it out in bits; or if the stone were
hard, and you had preternaturally long fingers, you might even get
it out on a finger-tip. It was always considered the mark of a wise
surgeon to carry a spare stone with him in his waistcoat pocket, so
that the patient might at least have a product of the chase to see if
the surgeon should find his normal efforts unrewarded. Diagnosis was
little more advanced in those days than operative surgery; there are
numbers of conditions which may have caused symptoms like those of a
stone, and it was always well for the surgeon to be prepared.

This would be the operation that was performed on Mr. Pepys. The
results in many cases were disastrous; some men lost control of their
sphincter vesicæ; many were left with urinary fistulæ; in many the
procreative power was permanently destroyed by interference with the
seminal vesicles and ducts. Probably some of us would prefer to keep
our calculi rather than let a mediæval stone-cutter perform upon us; we
are a degenerate crew. It is not altogether displeasing to imagine the
roars of the unhappy Pepys, trussed and helpless, a pallid little Mrs.
Pepys quaking outside the door, perhaps not entirely sorry that her own
grievances were being so adequately avenged, although the vengeance was
vicarious; while the surgeon wrestled with a large uric acid calculus
which could with difficulty be dragged through the wound. It is all
very well for us to laugh at the forth-right methods of our ancestors;
but, considering their difficulties--no anæsthesia, no antiseptics,
want of sufficient surgical practice, and the fact that few could
ever have had the hardness of heart necessary to stand the patient’s
bawlings, it is remarkable that they did so well and that the mortality
of this appalling operation seems only to have been from 15 to 20 per
cent. Moreover we may be pretty sure that no small stone would ever
be operated upon; men postponed the operation until the discomfort
became intolerable. It remained for the genius of Cheselden, when Pepys
was dead and possibly in heaven some twenty years, to devise the
operation of lateral lithotomy, one of the greatest advances ever made
in surgery. This operation survived practically unchanged till recent
times.

Pepys’s heroism was not in vain, and was rewarded by a long life free
from serious illness till the end. March 26 became to him a holy day,
and was kept up with pomp for many years. The people of the house
wherein he had suffered and been strong were invited to a solemn feast
on that blessed day, and as the baked meats went round and the good
wine glowed in the decanters, Mr. Pepys stood at his cheer and once
again recounted the tale of his agony and his courage. Nowadays, when
we are operated upon with little more anxiety than we should display
over signing a lease, it is difficult to imagine a state of things such
as must have been inevitable in the days before Simpson and Lister.

The stone re-formed, but not in the bladder. Once you have a uric
acid calculus you can never be quite sure you have done with it until
you are dead, and in the case of Mr. Pepys recurrence took place
in the kidney. When he died, an old man, in 1703, they performed a
post-mortem examination on his body, suspecting that his kidneys
were at fault, and in the left kidney found a nest of no less than
seven stones, which must have been silently growing in the calyces
for unnumbered years. Nor does it seem to me impossible that his
extraordinary incontinence--he never seems to have been able to resist
any feminine allurement, however coarse--may really have been due to
the continued irritation of the old scar in his perineum. There is
often a physical condition as the basis for this type of character, and
some trifling irritation may make all the difference between virtue and
concupiscence. This reasoning is probably more likely to be true than
much of the psycho-analysis which is at present so fashionable among
young ladies. Possibly also the sterility of Mrs. Pepys may have been
partly due to the effects of the operation upon her husband.

One unpleasant result to Mr. Pepys was the fact that whenever
he crossed his legs carelessly he became afflicted with a mild
epididymitis--he describes it much less politely himself, doubtless in
wrath. His little failing in this respect must have been a source of
innocent merriment to the many friends who were in the secret. He was
also troubled with attacks of severe pain whenever the weather turned
suddenly cold. At first he used to be in terror lest his old enemy had
returned, but he learned to regard the attacks philosophically as part
of the common heritage of mankind, for man is born to trouble as the
sparks fly upward. Probably they were due to reflex irritation from the
stones growing in the kidney. He does not seem to have passed any small
stones per urethram, or he would assuredly have told us. He took great
interest in his own emunctories--probably other people’s, too, from
certain dark sayings.

Considering the by no means holy living of Mr. Pepys, it is rather
remarkable that he never seems to have suffered from venereal disease,
and this leads me to suspect that possibly these ailments were not
so common in the England of the Restoration as they are to-day. It
seems impossible that any man could live in Sydney so promiscuously
as Mr. Pepys without paying the penalty; and the experience of our
army in London seems to show that things there must be much the same
as here (Sydney). I often wonder whether Charles II and his courtiers
were really representative of the great mass of people in England
at that time; probably the prevalence of venereal disease in modern
times is due to the enormous increase in city life; probably men
and women have always been very much the same from generation to
generation--inflammable as straw, given the opportunities which occur
mainly in cities and crowded houses.

Ignoble as was Pepys, he yet showed real moral courage during the
Plague. When that great enemy of cities attacked London he, very
wisely, sent his family into the country at Woolwich, while he remained
faithful to his duty and continued to work at the navy in Greenwich,
Deptford, and London. I cannot find in the Diary any mention of any
particular attraction that kept him in London during those awful five
months; he would, no doubt, have mentioned her name if there had been
such; yet candour compels me to observe that there was seldom any one
attraction for Mr. Pepys, unless poor Deb Willet may have somehow
mastered--temporarily--his wayward heart. But, as might have been
expected, he was little more virtuous during his wife’s absence than
before; indeed, possibly the imminent danger of death may have led him
to enjoy his life while yet he might, with his usual fits of agonized
remorse, whose effects upon his conduct were brief. We owe far more
to his organizing power and honesty--not a bigoted variety--than is
generally remembered. His babble is not the best medium for vigorous
description, and you will not get from Pepys any idea of the epidemic
comparable with that which you will get from the journalist Defoe;
yet through those months there lurks a feeling of horror which still
impresses mankind. The momentary glimpse of a citizen who stumbles over
the “corps” of a man dead of the plague, and running home tells his
pregnant wife; she dies of fear forthwith; a man, his wife, and three
children dying and being buried on one day; persons quick to-day and
dead to-morrow--not in scores, but in hundreds; ten thousand dying in a
week; the horrid atmosphere of fear and suspicion which overlay London;
and Pepys himself setting his papers in order, so that men might think
well of him should it please the Lord to take him suddenly: all give
us a sense of doom all the more poignant because recently we went
through a much milder version of the same experience ourselves. The
papers talked glibly of the influenza as “The Plague.” How different
it was from the real bubonic plague is shown by the statistics. In
five months of 1665 there died of the plague in the little London of
that day no less than about 70,000 people, according to the bills of
mortality; in truth, probably far more; that is to say, probably a
fifth of the people perished. There is no doubt that the bubonic plague
kept back the development of cities, and therefore of civilization,
for centuries, and that the partial conquest of the rat has been one
of the greatest achievements of the human race. What is happening in
Lord Howe Island, where it is exceedingly doubtful whether rats or men
shall survive in that beautiful speck of land, shows how slender is the
hold which mankind has upon the earth; and wherever the rat is able to
breed unchecked, man is liable to sink back into savagery. The rat,
the tubercle bacillus, and the bacillus of typhoid are the three great
enemies of civilization; we hold our position against them at the price
of eternal vigilance, and probably the rat is not the least deadly of
these enemies.

I need not go through the Diary in search of incidents; most of them,
while intensely amusing, are rather of interest to the psychologist
in the study of self-revelation than to the medical man. When Pepys’s
brother lay dying the doctor in charge hinted that possibly the trouble
might have been of syphilitic origin; Pepys was virtuously wrathful,
and the unhappy doctor had to apologize and was forthwith discharged.
I cannot here narrate how they proved that the unhappy patient had
never had syphilis in his life; you must read the Diary for that. Their
method would not have satisfied either Wassermann or Bordet. Another
time Pepys was doing something that he should not have been doing at
an open window in a draught; the Lord punished him by striking him
with Bell’s palsy. Still again, at another time he got something that
seems to have resembled pseudo-ileus, possibly reflex from his latent
calculi. Everybody in the street was much distressed at his anguish;
all the ladies sent in prescriptions for enemata; the one which
relieved him consisted of small beer! Indeed, one marvels always at
the extraordinary interest shown by Pepys’s lady-friends in his most
private ailments. London must have been a friendly little town in the
seventeenth century, in the intervals of hanging people and chopping
off heads.

But the great problem remains: Why did Pepys write down all these
intimate details of his private life? Why did he confess to things
which most men do not confess even to themselves? Why did he write
it all down in cypher? Why, when he narrated something particularly
disgraceful, did he write in a mongrel dialect of bad French, Italian,
Spanish, and Latin? He could not have seriously believed that a person
who was able to read the Diary would not be able to read the very
simple foreign words with which it is interspersed. Most amazing of
all: Why did he keep the manuscript for more than thirty years, a
key with it? One thinks of the fabled ostrich who buries his head in
the sand. The problem of Pepys still remains unsolved, in spite of
the efforts of Stevenson in _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_.
Stevenson was the last man in the world to understand Pepys, but more
competent exegetists have tried and failed. One can only say that
his failing sight--which Professor Osborne of Melbourne attributes
to astigmatism--has deprived the world of a treasure that can never
be sufficiently regretted. No man can be considered educated who has
not read at least part of the Diary; in no other way is it possible
to get so vivid a picture of the ordinary people of a past age; as we
read they seem to live before us, and it comes as a shock to remember
that poor Pall Pepys--his plain sister--and “my wife” and Mrs.
Batelier--“my pretty valentine”--and Sir William Coventry and Mercer,
and the hundreds more who pass so vividly before us, are all dead these
centuries.

If this little paper shall send some to the reading of this most
extraordinary book, I shall be more than satisfied. The only edition
which is worth while is Wheatley’s, in ten volumes, with portraits and
a volume of _Pepysiana_. The smaller editions are apt to transmute
Pepys into an ordinary humdrum and industrious civil servant.




Edward Gibbon


For many years it has been taught--I have taught it myself to
generations of students--that Gibbon’s hydrocele surpassed in greatness
all other hydroceles, that it contained twelve pints of fluid, and that
it was, in short, one of those monstrous things which exist mainly
in romance; one of those chimeras which grow in the minds of the
half-informed and of those who wish to be deceived. For a brief moment
this chimera looms its huge bulk over serious history; it is pricked;
it disappears for ever, carrying with it into the shades the greatest
of historians, perhaps the greatest of English prose writers. What do
we really know about it?

The first hint of trouble given by the hydrocele occurs in a letter by
Gibbon to his friend Lord Sheffield. It is so delicious, so typical
of the eighteenth century, of which Gibbon himself was probably the
most typical representative, that I cannot resist re-telling it. Two
days before, he has hinted to his friend that he was rather unwell;
now he modestly draws the veil. “Have you never observed, through my
inexpressibles, a large prominency _circa genitalia_, which, as it
was not very painful and very little troublesome, I had strangely
neglected for many years?” “A large prominency _circa genitalia_” is
a variation on the “lump in me privits, doctor,” to which we are more
accustomed. Gibbon’s is the more graceful, and reminds us of the mind
which had described chivalry as the “worship of God and the ladies”;
the courteous and urbane turn of speech which refuses to call a spade a
spade lest some polite ear may be offended.

Gibbon had been staying at Sheffield House in the preceding June--the
letter was written in November--and his friends all noted that “Mr.
G.” had become strangely loath to take exercise and very inert in
his movements. Indeed, he had detained the house-party in the house
during lovely days together while he had orated to them on the folly of
unnecessary exertion; and such was his charm that every one, both women
as well as men, seems to have cheerfully given up the glorious English
June weather to keep him company. Never was he more brilliant--never a
more delightful companion; yet all the time he was like the Spartan boy
and the wolf, for he knew of his secret trouble, yet he thought that no
one else suspected. It is an instance of how little we see ourselves as
others see us that this supremely able man, who could see as far into
a millstone as anyone, lived for years with a hydrocele that reached
below his knees while he wore the tight breeches of the eighteenth
century and was in the fond delusion that nobody else knew anything
about it. Of course, everybody knew; probably it had been the cause of
secret merriment among all his acquaintance; when the tragedy came to
its last act it turned out that every one had been talking about it all
the time, and that they had thought it to be a rupture about which Mr.
Gibbon had of course taken advice.

After leaving Sheffield House the hydrocele suddenly increased, as
Gibbon himself says, “most stupendously”; and it began to dawn upon
him that it “ought to be diminished.” So he called upon Dr. Walter
Farquhar; and Dr. Farquhar was very serious and called in Dr. Cline,
“a surgeon of the first eminence,” both of whom “viewed it and palped
it” and pronounced it a hydrocele. Mr. Gibbon, with his usual good
sense and calm mind, prepared to face the necessary “operation” and a
future prospect of wearing a truss which Dr. Cline intended to order
for him. In the meantime he was to crawl about with some labour and
“much indecency,” and he prayed Lord Sheffield to “varnish the business
to the ladies, yet I am much afraid it will become public,” as if
anything could any longer conceal the existence of this monstrous
chimera. It is hardly credible, but Gibbon had had the hydrocele
since 1761--thirty-two years--yet had never even hinted of it to
Lord Sheffield, with whom he had probably discussed every other fact
connected with his life; and had even forbidden his valet to mention it
in his presence or to anyone else. Gibbon, the historian who, more than
any other, set Reason and Common Sense on their thrones, seems to have
been ashamed of his hydrocele. Once more we wonder how little even able
men may perceive the truth of things! In 1761 he had consulted Cæsar
Hawkins, who apparently had not been able to make up his mind whether
it was a hernia or a hydrocele. In 1787 Lord Sheffield had noticed a
sudden great increase in the size of the thing; and in 1793, as we have
seen, it came to tragedy.

He was tapped for the hydrocele on November 14; four quarts of fluid
were removed, the swelling was diminished to nearly half its size,
and the remaining part was a “soft irregular mass.” Evidently there
was more there than a simple hydrocele, and straightway it began to
refill so rapidly that they had to agree to re-tap it in a fortnight.
Mr. Cline must have felt anxious; he would know “how many beans make
five” well enough, and his patient was the most distinguished man
in the world. Many students who have at examinations in clinical
surgery wrestled with Cline’s splint will probably consider that
Cline’s punishment for inventing that weapon really began on the day
when he perceived Gibbon’s hydrocele to be rapidly re-filling. The
fortnight passed, and the second tapping took place, “much longer, more
searching, and more painful” than before, though only three quarts of
fluid were removed; yet Mr. Gibbon said he was much more relieved than
by the first attempt. Thence he went to stay with Lord Auckland at a
place called Eden Farm; thence again to Sheffield House. There, in the
dear house which to him was a home, he was more brilliant than ever
before. It was his “swan song.” A few days later he was in great pain
and moved with difficulty, the swelling again increased enormously,
inflammation set in, and he became fevered, and his friends insisted
on his return to London. He returned in January, 1794, reaching his
chambers after a night of agony in the coach; and Cline again tapped
him on January 13. By this time the tumour was enormous, ulcerated and
inflamed, and Cline got away six quarts. On January 15 he felt fairly
well except for an occasional pain in his stomach, and he told some of
his friends that he thought he might probably live for twenty years.
That night he had great pain, and got his valet to apply hot napkins to
his abdomen; he felt that he wished to vomit. At four in the morning
his pain became much easier, and at eight he was able to rise unaided;
but by nine he was glad to get back into bed, although he felt, as
he said, _plus adroit_ than he had felt for months. By eleven he was
speechless and obviously dying, and by 1 p.m. he was dead.

I believe that the key to this extraordinary and confused narrative is
to be found in the visit to Cæsar Hawkins thirty years before, when
that competent surgeon was unable to satisfy himself as to whether he
was dealing with a rupture or a hydrocele. It seems now clear that
in reality it was both; and Gibbon, who was a corpulent man with a
pendulous abdomen, lived for thirty years without taking care of
it. But he lived very quietly; he took no exercise; he was a man of
calm, placid, and unruffled mind; probably no man was less likely to
be incommoded by a hernia, especially if the sac had a large wide
mouth and the contents were mainly fat. But the time came when the
intra-abdominal pressure of the growing omentum became too great, and
the swelling enormously increased, first in 1787 and again in 1793.
When Cline first tapped the swelling he was obviously aware that
there was more present than a hydrocele, because he warned Gibbon
that he would have to wear a truss afterwards, and moreover, though
he removed four quarts of fluid, yet the swelling was only reduced by
a half. Probably the soft irregular mass which he then left behind
was simply omentum which had come down from the abdomen. But why did
the swelling begin to grow again immediately? That is not the usual
way with a hydrocele, whose growth and everything connected with it
are usually indolently leisurely. Could there have been a malignant
tumour in course of formation? But if so, would not that have caused
more trouble? Nor would it have given the impression of being a soft
irregular mass. However, the second tapping was longer and more painful
than the first, though it removed less fluid; and Gibbon was more
relieved. But this tapping was followed by inflammation. What had
happened? Possibly Cline had found the epididymis; more probably his
trochar was septic, like all other instruments of that pre-antiseptic
period; at all events, the thing went from bad to worse, grew
enormously, and severe constitutional symptoms set in. The ulceration
and redness of the skin, which was no doubt filthy enough--surgically
speaking--after thirty years of hydrocele, look uncommonly like
suppurative epididymitis, or suppuration in the hydrocele. Thus Gibbon
goes on for a few days, able to move about, though with difficulty,
till he cheers up and seems to be recovering; then falls the axe, and
he dies a few hours after saying that he thought he had a good chance
of living for twenty years.

Could the great septic hydrocele, connected with the abdomen through
the inguinal ring, have suddenly burst its bonds and flooded the
peritoneum with streptococci? Streptococcic peritonitis is one of the
most appalling diseases in surgery. Its symptoms to begin with are
vague, and it spreads with the rapidity of a grass fire in summer.
After an abdominal section the patient suddenly feels exceedingly
weak, there is a little lazy vomiting, the abdomen becomes distended,
the pulse goes to pieces in a few hours, and death occurs rapidly
while the mind is yet clear. The surgeon usually calls it “shock,”
or thinks in his own heart that his assistant is a careless fellow;
but the real truth is that streptococci have somehow been introduced
into the abdomen and have slain the patient without giving time for
the formation of adhesions whereby they might have been shut off and
ultimately destroyed. That is what I believe happened to Edward Gibbon.

The loss to literature through this untimely tragedy was, of course,
irreparable. Gibbon had taken twenty years to mature his unrivalled
literary art. His style was the result of unremitting labour and
exquisite literary taste; if one accustoms oneself to the constant
antitheses--which occasionally give the impression of being forced
almost more for the sake of dramatic emphasis than truth--one must
be struck with the unvarying majesty and haunting music of the
diction, illumined by an irony so sly, so subtle--possibly a trifle
malicious--that one simmers with joyous appreciation in the reading.
That sort of irony is more appreciated by the onlookers than by its
victims, and it is not to be marvelled at that religious people felt
deeply aggrieved for many years at the application of it to the Early
Christians. Yet, after all, what Gibbon did was nothing more than
to show them as men like others; he merely showed that the evidence
concerning the beginnings of Christendom was less reliable than the
Church had supposed. The _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ shows
the history of the world for more than a thousand years, so vividly,
so dramatically, that the characters--who are great nations--move on
the stage like actors, and the men who led them live in a remarkable
flood of living light. The general effect upon the reader is as
if he were comfortably seated in a moving balloon traversing over
Time as over continents; as if he were seated in Mr. Wells’s “Time
Machine,” viewing the disordered beginnings of modern civilization. I
believe that no serious flaw in Gibbon’s history has been found, from
the point of view of accuracy. Some people have found it too much a
_chronique scandaleuse_, and some modern historians appear to consider
that history should be written in a dull and pedantic style rather
than be made to live; furthermore, the great advance in knowledge of
the Slavonic peoples has tended to modify some of his conclusions.
Nevertheless, Gibbon remains, and so far as we can see, will ever
remain, the greatest of historians. Though we might not have had
another _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, yet we might reasonably
have looked for the completion of that autobiography which had such a
brilliant beginning. What would we not give if that cool and appraising
mind, which had raised Justinian and Belisarius from the dead and
caused them to live again in the hearts of mankind, could have given
its impressions of the momentous period in which it came to maturity?
If, instead of England receiving its strongest impression of the
French Revolution from Carlyle--whose powers of declamation were more
potent than his sense of truth--it had been swayed from the beginning
by Gibbon? In such a case the history of modern England--possibly of
modern Russia--might have been widely different from what we have
already seen.




Jean Paul Marat


It has always been the pride of the medical profession that its aim
is to benefit mankind; but opinions may differ as to how far this aim
was fulfilled by one of our most eminent confrères, Jean Paul Marat.
He was born in Neufchatel of a marriage between a Sardinian man and a
Swiss woman, and studied medicine at Bordeaux; thence, after a time
at Paris, he went to London, and for some years practised there. In
London he published _A Philosophical Essay on Man_, wherein he showed
enormous knowledge of the English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish
philosophers; and advanced the thesis that a knowledge of science was
necessary for eminence as a philosopher. By this essay he fell foul of
Voltaire, who answered him tartly that nobody objected to his opinions,
but that at least he might learn to express them more politely,
especially when dealing with men of greater brains than his own.

The French Revolution was threatening; the coming storm was already
thundering, when, in 1788, Marat’s ill-balanced mind led him to abandon
medicine and take to politics. He returned to Paris, beginning the
newspaper _L’Ami du Peuple_, which he continued to edit till late
in 1792. His policy was simple, and touched the great heart of the
people. “Whatsoever things were pure, whatsoever things were of good
repute, whatsoever things were honest”--so be it that they were not
Jean Paul Marat’s, those things he vilified. He suspected everybody,
and constantly cried, “Nous sommes trahis”--that battle-cry of Marat
which remained the battle-cry of Paris from that day to 1914. By his
violent attacks on every one he made Paris too hot to hold him, and
once again retired to London. Later he returned to Paris, apparently
at the request of men who desired to use his literary skill and
violent doctrines; he had to hide in cellars and sewers, where it was
said he contracted that loathsome skin disease which was henceforth
to make his life intolerable, and to force him to spend much of his
time in a hot-water bath, and would have shortly killed him only for
the intervention of Charlotte Corday. In these haunts he was attended
only by Simonne Everard, whose loyalty goes to show either that there
was some good even in Marat, or that there is no man so frightful but
that some woman may be found to love him. Finally, he was elected to
the Convention, and took his seat. There he continued his violent
attacks upon everybody, urging that the “gangrene” of the aristocracy
and bourgeoisie should be amputated from the State. His ideas of
political economy appear to have foreshadowed those of Karl Marx--that
the proletariat should possess everything, and that nobody else should
possess anything. Daily increasing numbers of heads should fall in the
sacred names of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality. At first a mere
600 would have satisfied him, but the number rapidly increased, first
to 10,000, then to 260,000. To this number he appeared faithful, for
he seldom exceeded it; his most glorious vision was only of killing
300,000 daily.

He devoted his energies to attacking those who appeared abler and
better than himself, and the most prominent object of his hatred was
the party of the Girondins. These were so called because most of them
came from the Gironde, and they are best described as people who wished
that France should be governed by a sane and moderate democracy, such
as they wrongly imagined the Roman Republic to have been. They were
gentle and clever visionaries, who dreamed dreams; they advised, but
did not dare to perform; the most famous names which have survived
are those of Brissot, Roland, and Barbaroux. Madame Roland, who has
become of legendary fame, was considered their “soul”; concerning
her, shouts Carlyle: “Radiant with enthusiasm are those dark eyes, is
that strong Minerva-face, looking dignity and earnest joy; joyfullest
she where all are joyful. Reader, mark that queen-like burgher-woman;
beautiful, Amazonian-graceful to the eye; more so to the mind.
Unconscious of her worth (as all worth is), of her greatness, of her
crystal-clearness, genuine, the creature of Sincerity and Nature, in an
age of Artificiality, Pollution and Cant”--and so forth. But Carlyle
was writing prose-poetry, sacrificing truth to effect, and it is unwise
to take his poetical descriptions as accurate. Recent researches
have shown that possibly Manon Roland was not so pure, honest, and
well-intentioned as Carlyle thought--nor so “crystal-clear.” Summed up,
the Girondins represented the middle classes, and the battle was now
set between them and the “unwashed,” led by Robespierre, Danton, and
Marat.

What manner of man, then, was this Marat, physically? Extraordinary!
Semi-human from most accounts. Says Carlyle: “O Marat, thou
remarkablest horse-leech, once in d’Artois’ stable, as thy bleared
soul looks forth through thy bleared, dull-acrid, woe-stricken face,
what seest thou in all this?” Again: “One most squalidest bleared
mortal, redolent of soot and horse-drugs.” There appears to have been
a certain amount of foundation for the lie that Marat had been nothing
more than a horse-doctor, for once when he was brevet-surgeon to the
bodyguard of the Compte d’Artois he had found that he could not make a
living, and had been driven to dispense medicines for men and horses;
his enemies afterwards said that he had never been anything more than
a horse-leech. Let us not deprive our own profession of one of its
ornaments. His admirer Panis said that while Marat was hiding in the
cellars, “he remained for six weeks on one buttock in a dungeon”;
immediately, therefore, he was likened to St. Simeon Stylites, who,
outside Antioch, built himself a high column, repaired him to the top,
and stood there bowing and glorifying God for thirty years, until he
became covered with sores. Dr. Moore gives the best description of him.
“Marat is a little man of a cadaverous complexion, and countenance
exceedingly expressive of his disposition; to a painter of massacres
Marat’s head would be invaluable. Such heads are rare in this country
(England), yet they are sometimes to be met with in the Old Bailey.”
Marat’s head was enormous; he was less than five feet high, with
shrivelled limbs and yellow face; one eye was higher placed than the
other, “so that he looked lop-sided.” As for his skin disease, modern
writers seem to consider that we should nowadays call it “dermatitis
herpetiformis,” though his political friends artlessly thought it was
due to the humours generated by excessive patriotism in so small a body
attacking his skin, and thus should be counted for a virtue. Carlyle
hints that it was syphilis, thus following in the easy track of those
who attribute to syphilis those things which they cannot understand.
But syphilis, even if painful, would not have been relieved by sitting
for hours daily in a hot bath.

Mentally he appears to have been a paranoiac, to quote a recent
historical diagnosis by Dr. Charles W. Burr, of Philadelphia.
Marat suffered for many years from delusions of persecution, which
some people appear to take at their face value; the _New Age
Encyclopedia_ specially remarks on the amount of persecution that he
endured--probably all delusional, unless we are to consider the natural
efforts of people in self-defence to be persecution. He suffered from
tremendous and persistent “ego-mania,” and appears to have believed
that he had a greater intellect than Voltaire. Marat, whom the mass of
mankind regarded with horror, fancied himself a popular physician, whom
crowds would have consulted but for the unreasonable and successful
hatred of his enemies. Possibly failure at his profession, combined
with the unspeakable irritation of his disease, may have embittered his
mind, and for the last few months of his life there can be little doubt
that Marat was insane.

It seems to be certain that he organized, if he did not originate, the
frightful September massacres. There were many hundreds of Royalists in
the prisons, who were becoming a nuisance. The Revolution was hanging
fire, and well-meaning enthusiasts began to fear that the dull clod
of a populace would not rise in its might to end the aristocracy; so
it was decided to abolish these unfortunate prisoners. A tribunal was
formed to sit in judgment; outside waited a great crowd of murderers
hired for the occasion. The prisoners were led before the tribunal, and
released into the street, where they were received by the murderers
and were duly “released”--from this sorrowful world. The most famous
victim was the good and gentle Princess de Lamballe, Superintendent of
the Queen’s Household. The judge at her trial was the notorious Hébert,
anarchist, atheist, and savage, afterwards executed by his friend
Robespierre when he had served his turn. Madame collapsed with terror,
and fainted repeatedly during the mockery of a trial, but when Hébert
said the usual ironical, “Let Madame be released,” she walked to the
door. When she saw the murderers with their bloody swords she shrank
back and shrieked, “Fi--horreur.” They cut her in pieces; but decency
forbids that I should say what they did with all the pieces. Carlyle,
who here speaks truth, has a dark saying about “obscene horrors with
moustachio _grands-levres_,” which is near enough for anatomists to
understand. The murderers then stuck her head on a pike, and held her
fair curls before the Queen’s window as an oriflamme in the name of
Liberty. Madame was but one of 1,100 whose insane butchery must be laid
to the door of Marat; though some friends of the Bolsheviks endeavour
to acquit him we can only say that if it was not his work it looks
uncommonly like it.

The battle between the Girondins, who were bad fellows, but less
bad than their enemies of the “Mountain”--Robespierre, Danton, and
Marat--continued; it was a case of _arcades ambo_, which Bryon
translates “blackguards both,” though Virgil, who wrote the line--in
the Georgics--probably meant something much coarser. The “Mountain”
began to get the upper hand, and the Girondins fled for their lives,
or went to the guillotine. The Revolution was already “devouring its
children.”

At Caen in Normandy there lived a young woman, daughter of a decayed
noble family which in happier days had been named d’Armont, now Corday.
Her name was Marie Charlotte d’Armont, and she is known to history
as Charlotte Corday. She had been well educated, had read Rousseau,
Voltaire, and the encyclopædists, besides being fascinated by a dream
of an imaginary State which she had been taught to call the Roman
Republic, in which the “tyrannicide” Brutus loomed much larger and more
glorious than in reality. Some Girondists fled to Caen to escape the
vengeance of Marat; Charlotte, horrified, resolved that the monster
should die; she herself was then nearly twenty-five years of age.
I have a picture of her which seems to fit in very well with one’s
preconceived ideas of her character. She was five feet one inch in
height, with a well-proportioned figure, and she had a wonderful mass
of chestnut hair; her eyes were large, grey, and set widely apart; the
general expression of her face was thoughtful and earnest. Perhaps it
would hardly be respectful to call her an “intense” young lady; but
there was a young lady who sometimes used to consult me who might very
well have sat for the portrait; she possessed a type of somewhat--dare
I say?--priggish neurosis which I imagine was not unlike the type of
character that dwelt within Charlotte Corday--extreme conscientiousness
and self-righteousness. Such a face might have been the face of a
Christian martyr going to the lions--if any Christian martyrs were ever
thrown to the lions, which some doubt. She went silently to Paris,
attended only by an aged man-servant, and bought a long knife in the
Palais Royal; thence she went to Marat’s house, and tried to procure
admission. Simonne--the loyal Simonne--denied her, and she returned to
her inn. Again she called at the house; Marat heard her pretty voice,
and ordered Simonne to admit her. It was the evening of July 13, four
years all but one day since the storming of the Bastille, and Marat
sat in his slipper-bath, pens, ink, and paper before him, frightful
head peering out of the opening, hot compresses concealing his hair.
Charlotte told him that there were several Girondists hiding at Caen
and plotting against the Revolution. “Their heads shall fall within a
fortnight,” croaked Marat. Then, he being thus convicted out of his own
mouth, she drew forth from her bosom her long knife, and plunged it
into his chest between the first and second ribs, so that it pierced
the aorta. Marat gave one cry, and died; Charlotte turned to face the
two women who rushed in, but not yet was she to surrender, for she
barricaded herself behind some furniture and other movables till the
soldiers arrived. To them she gave herself up without trouble.

At her trial she made no denial, but proudly confessed, saying, “Yes,
I killed him.” Fouquier-Tinville sneered at her: “You must be well
practised at this sort of crime!” She only answered: “The monster!--he
seems to think I am an assassin!” She thought herself rather the agent
of God, sent by Him to rid the world of a loathsome disorder, as Brutus
had rid Rome of Julius Cæsar.

In due course she was guillotined, and an extraordinary thing happened.
A young German named Adam Lux had been present at the trial, standing
behind the artist who was painting the very picture of which I have a
reproduction--it is said that Charlotte showed no objection to being
portrayed--and the young man had been fascinated by the martyresque air
of her. He attended the execution, romance and grief weighing him down;
then he ran home, and wrote a furious onslaught on the leaders of the
Mountain who had executed her, saying that her death had “sanctified
the guillotine,” and that it had become “a sacred altar from which
every taint had been removed by her innocent blood.” He published
this broadcast, and was naturally at once arrested. The revolutionary
tribunal sentenced him to death, and he scornfully refused to accept a
pardon, saying that he wished to die on the same spot as Charlotte, so
they let him have his wish. The incident reminds one of a picture-show,
and it is not remarkable that an American, named Lyndsay Orr, has
written a sentimental article about it.

The people of Paris went mad after Marat’s death; his body, which was
said to be decaying with unusual rapidity, was surrounded by a great
crowd which worshipped it blasphemously, saying, “O Sacred Heart of
Marat!” This worship of Marat, which showed how deeply his teaching
had bitten into the hearts of the people, culminated in the Reign
of Terror, which began on September 5, 1795, whereby France lost,
according to different estimates, between half a million and a million
innocent people. Some superior persons seem to think that Marat had
little or no influence on the Revolution, but to my mind there can be
no doubt that the Terror was largely the result of his preaching of
frantic violence, and it is a lesson that we ourselves should take to
heart, seeing that there are persons in the world to-day who would
emulate Marat if they possessed his enormous courage.

I need not narrate the history of the Reign of Terror, which was
even worse than the terror which the Bolsheviks established in
Russia. Not even Lenin and Trotsky devised anything so atrocious as
the _noyades_--wholesale drownings--in the Loire, or the _mariages
républicains_ on the banks of that river, and it is difficult to
believe that the teaching of Marat had nothing to do with that
frightful outbreak of bestiality, lust, and murder.

The evil that men do lives after them. There was little good to be
buried in Marat’s grave, doctor though he was.




Napoleon I


There is not, and may possibly never be, an adequate biography of
this prodigious man. It is a truism to say that he has cast a doubt
on all past glory; let us hope that he has rendered future glory
impossible, for to judge by the late war it seems impossible that
any rival to the glory of Napoleon can ever arise. In the matter of
slaying his fellow-creatures he appears to have reached the summit of
human achievement; possibly also in all matters of organization and
administration. Material things hardly seemed to affect him; bestriding
the world like a colossus he has given us a sublime instance of
Intellect that for many years ruthlessly overmastered Circumstance.
That Intellect was finally itself mastered by disease, leaving behind
it a record which is of supreme interest to mankind; a record which,
alas, is so disfigured by prejudice and falsehood that it is difficult
to distinguish between what is true and what is untrue. Napoleon
himself possessed so extraordinary a personality that nearly every
one whom he met became a fervent adorer. With regard to him we can
find no half-tones, no detached reporters; therefore it is enormously
difficult to find even the basis for a biography. Fortunately, that is
not now our province. It is merely necessary that we shall attempt to
make a consistent story of the reports of illness which perplex us in
regard to his life and death; it adds interest to the quest when we
are told that sometimes disease lent its aid to Fate in swaying the
destinies of battles. And yet, even after Napoleon has lived, there are
some historians who deny the influence of a “great man” upon history,
and would attribute to “tendencies” and “ideas” events which ordinary
people would attribute to individual genius. Some persons think that
Napoleon was merely an episode--that he had no real influence upon
history; it is the custom to point to his career as an exemplification
of the thesis that war has played very little real part in the moulding
of the course of the world. Into all this we need not now enter, beyond
saying that he was the “child of the French Revolution” who killed
his own spiritual father; the reaction from Napoleon was Metternich,
Castlereagh, and the Holy Alliance; the reaction from these forces of
repression was the late war. So it is difficult to agree that Napoleon
was only an “episode.” We have merely to remark that he was the most
interesting of all men, and, so far as we can tell, will probably
remain so. As Fielding long ago pointed out in _Jonathan Wild_, a
man’s “greatness” appears to depend on his homicidal capacity. To make
yourself a hero all you have to do is to slaughter as many of your
fellow-creatures as God will permit. How poor the figures of Woodrow
Wilson or Judge Hughes seem beside the grey-coated “little corporal”!
Though it is quite probable that either of these most estimable
American peacemakers have done more good for the human race than was
achieved by any warrior! So sinful is man that we throw our hats in the
air and whoop for Napoleon the slaughterer, rather than for Woodrow
Wilson, who was “too proud to fight.”

When Napoleon was sent to St. Helena he was followed by a very few
faithful friends, who seem to have spent their time in hating one
another rather than in comforting their fallen idol. It is difficult
to get at the truth of these last few years because, though most of
the eye-witnesses have published their memoirs, each man seems to have
been more concerned to assure the world of the greatness of his own
sacrifice than to record the exact facts. Therefore, though Napoleon
urged them to keep diaries, and thereby make great sums of money
through their imprisonment, yet these diaries generally seem to have
aimed rather at attacking the other faithful ones than at telling us
exactly what happened.

The post-mortem examination of Napoleon’s body was performed by
Francesco Antommarchi, a young Corsican physician, anatomist, and
pathologist, who was sent to St. Helena about eighteen months before
Napoleon’s death in the hope that he, being a Corsican, would be able
to win the Emperor’s confidence and cure the illness of which he was
already complaining. Unfortunately, Antommarchi was a very young man,
and Napoleon suspected both his medical skill and the reason of his
presence. Napoleon used to suffer from severe pains in his stomach;
he would clasp himself, and groan, “O, mon pylore!” By that time he
was suffering from cancer of the stomach, and Antommarchi did not
suspect it. When Napoleon groaned and writhed in agony it is said
that Antommarchi merely laughed, and prescribed him tartar emetic in
lemonade. Napoleon was violently sick, and thought himself poisoned; he
swore he would never again taste any of Antommarchi’s medicine. Once
again Antommarchi attempted to give him tartar emetic in lemonade;
it was not in vain that Napoleon had won a reputation for being a
great strategist, for, when Antommarchi’s back was turned he handed
the draught to the unsuspecting Montholon. In ten minutes that hero
reacted in the usual manner, and extremely violently. Napoleon was
horrified and outraged in his feelings; quite naturally he accused
Antommarchi of trying to poison him, called him “assassin,” and refused
to see him again. Another fault that Napoleon found with the unhappy
young man was that whenever he wanted medical attendance Antommarchi
was not to be found, but had to be ferreted out from Jamestown, three
and a half miles away; so altogether Antommarchi’s attendance could not
be called a success. Napoleon in his wrath was “terrible as an army
with banners.” Even at St. Helena, where the resources of the whole
world had been expended in the effort to cage him helpless, it must
have been no joke to stand up before those awful eyes, that scorching
tongue; and it is no wonder that Antommarchi preferred to spend the
last few weeks idling about Jamestown rather than forcing unwelcome
attention upon his terrible patient.

Worst of all, Antommarchi at first persuaded himself that Napoleon’s
last illness was not serious. When Napoleon cried in his agony, “O,
mon pylore!” and complained of a pain that shot through him like a
knife, Antommarchi merely laughed and turned to his antimony with
catastrophic results. It shakes our faith in Antommarchi’s professional
skill to read that until the very last moment he would not believe
that there was much the matter. The veriest blockhead--one would
imagine--must have seen that the Emperor was seriously ill. Many a case
of cancer of the stomach has been mistaken for simple dyspepsia in
its early stages, but there comes a time when the true nature of the
disease forces itself upon even the most casual observer. The rapid
wasting, the cachexia, the vomiting, the pain, all impress themselves
upon both patient and friends, and it is difficult to avoid the
conclusion that Antommarchi must have been both careless and negligent.
When the inevitable happened, and Napoleon died, it was Antommarchi who
performed the autopsy, and found a condition which it is charitable to
suppose may have masked the last symptoms and may have explained, if it
did not excuse, the young anatomist’s mistaken confidence.

We conclude our brief sketch of the unhappy Antommarchi by saying that
when he returned to Europe he published the least accurate and most
disingenuous of all accounts of Napoleon’s last days. His object seems
to have been rather to conceal his own shortcomings than to tell the
truth. This book sets the seal on his character, and casts doubt on
all else that comes from his pen. He may have been, as the _Lancet_
says, a “trained and competent pathologist”; he was certainly a most
unfortunate young man.

The post-mortem was performed in the presence of several British
military surgeons, who appear to have been true sons of John Bull,
with all the prejudice, ignorance, and cocksureness that in the eyes
of other nations distinguish us so splendidly. Though truthfulness
was not a strong point with Antommarchi, he seems to have known his
pathology, and has left us an exceedingly good and well-written report
of what he found. Strange to relate, the body was found to be still
covered thickly with a superficial layer of fat, and the heart and
omenta were also adipose. This would seem impossible in the body of a
man who had just died from cancer of the stomach, but is corroborated
by a report from a Dr. Henry, who was also present, and is not unknown.
I remember the case of an old woman who, though hardly at all wasted,
was found at the autopsy to have an extensive cancerous growth of the
pylorus; the explanation was that the disease had been so acute that
it slew her before there had been time to produce much wasting. At one
point Napoleon’s cancerous ulcer had perforated the stomach, and the
orifice had been sealed by adhesions. Dr. Henry proudly states that he
himself was able to thrust his finger through it. The liver was large
but not diseased; the spleen was large and “full of blood”--probably
Antommarchi meant engorged. The intestine was covered by small
bright-red patches, evidently showing inflammation of lymphatic tissue
such as frequently occurs in general infections of the body. The
bladder contained gravel and several definite calculi. There was hardly
any secondary cancerous development, except for a few enlarged glands.
Antommarchi and the French generally had diagnosed before death that
he was suffering from some sort of hepatitis endemic to St. Helena,
and the cancer was a great surprise to them--not that it would have
mattered much from the point of view of treatment.

Napoleon’s hands and feet were extremely small; his skin was white and
delicate; his body had feminine characteristics, such as wide hips and
narrow shoulders; his reproductive organs were small and apparently
atrophied. He is said to have been impotent for some time before he
died. There was little hair on the body, and the hair of the head was
fine, silky, and sparse. Twenty years later his body was exhumed and
taken to France, and Dr. Guillard, who was permitted to make a brief
examination, stated that the beard and nails appeared to have grown
since death; there was very little sign of decomposition; men who had
known him in life recognized his face immediately it was uncovered.

Leonard Guthrie points out that some of these signs seem to indicate
a condition of hypo-pituitarism--the opposite to the condition of
hyper-pituitarism which causes “giantism.” Far-fetched as this theory
may appear, yet it is possible that there may be something in it.

The autopsy showed beyond cavil that the cause of death was cancer of
the stomach, and it is difficult to see what more Antommarchi could
have done in the way of treatment than he did, although certainly an
irritant poison like tartar emetic would not have been good for a man
with cancer of the stomach, even if it did not actually shorten his
life. But Napoleon was not a good patient. He had seen too much of
army surgery to have a great respect for our profession; indeed, it is
probable that he had no respect for anybody but the Emperor Napoleon.
He, at least, knew his business. He could manœuvre a great army in the
field and win battles--and lose them too. But even a lost Napoleonic
battle--there were not many--was better managed than a victory of any
other man; whereas when you were dealing with these doctor fellows you
could never tell whether their results were caused by their treatment
or by the intervention of whatever gods there be. Decidedly Antommarchi
was the last man in the world to be sent to treat the fallen, but still
imperious, warrior.

The symptoms of impending death seem to have been masked by a continued
fever, and probably Antommarchi was not really much to blame. This idea
is to some extent borne out by a couple of specimens in the Museum
of the Royal College of Surgeons, which are said to have belonged to
the body of Napoleon. The story is that they were surreptitiously
removed by Antommarchi, and handed by him to Barry O’Meara, who in his
turn gave them to Sir Astley Cooper. That baronet handed them to the
museum, where they are now preserved as of doubtful origin. But their
genuineness depends upon whether we can believe that Antommarchi would
or could have removed them, and whether O’Meara was telling the truth
to Sir Astley Cooper. It is doubtful which of the two first-mentioned
men is the less credible, and Cooper could not have known how
untruthful O’Meara was to show himself, or he would probably not have
thought for one moment that the specimens were genuine. O’Meara was
a contentious Irishman who, like most other people, had fallen under
the sway of Napoleon’s personal charm. He published a book in which
he libelled Sir Hudson Lowe, whose hard fate it was to be Napoleon’s
jailer at St. Helena--that isle of unrest. For some reason Lowe never
took action against his traducer until it was too late, so that his own
character, like most things connected with Napoleon, still remains a
bone of contention. But O’Meara had definitely put himself on the side
of the French against the English, and it was the object of the French
to show that their demigod had died of some illness endemic to that
devil’s island, aggravated by the barbarous ill-treatment of the brutal
British. We on our side contended that St. Helena was a sort of earthly
paradise, where one should live for ever. The fragments are from
_somebody’s_ ileum, and show little raised patches of inflamed lymphoid
tissue; Sir William Leishman considers the post-mortem findings,
apart from the cancer, those of some long-continued fever, such as
Mediterranean fever.

Mediterranean or Malta fever is a curious specific fever due to the
_Micrococcus melitensis_, which shows itself by recurrent bouts of
pyrexia, accompanied by constipation, chronic anæmia, and wasting.
Between the bouts the patient may appear perfectly well. There are
three types--the “undulatory” here described; the “intermittent,” in
which the attacks come on almost daily; and the “malignant,” in which
the patient only lives for a week or ten days. It is now known to be
contracted by drinking the infected milk of goats, and it is almost
confined to the shores of the Mediterranean and certain parts of India.
It may last for years, and it is quite possible that Napoleon caught
it at Elba, of which Mediterranean island he was the unwilling emperor
in 1814. Thence he returned to France, as it was said, because he had
not elba-room on his little kingdom. It is certain that for years he
had been subject to feverish attacks, which army surgeons would now
possibly classify as “P.U.O.,” and it is quite possible that these may
in reality have been manifestations of Malta fever.

It has been surmised by some enthusiasts that the frequency of
micturition, followed by dysuria, to which he was liable, may have
really been due to hyper-pituitarism. Whenever we do not understand a
thing let us blame a ductless gland; the pituitary body is well hidden
beneath the brain, and its action is still not thoroughly understood.
But surely we need no further explanation of this miserable symptom
than the stones in the bladder. Napoleon for many years might almost
be said to have lived on horseback, and riding is the very thing to
cause untold misery to a man afflicted with vesical calculus. Dysuria,
attendant upon frequency of micturition, is a most suggestive symptom;
nowadays we are always taught to consider the possibility of stone, and
it is rather surprising that nobody seems to have suspected it during
his lifetime. This could be very well accounted for by remembering the
general ignorance and incompetence of army surgeons at the time, the
mighty position of the patient, and his intolerance of the medical
profession. Few men would have dared to suggest that it would be well
for him to submit to the passage of a sound, even if the trouble ever
became sufficiently urgent to compel him to confide so private a matter
to one so lowly as a mere army doctor. Yet he had known and admired
Baron Larrey, the great military surgeon of the Napoleonic Wars; one
can only surmise that his calculi did not give him much trouble, or
that they grew more rapidly in the sedentary life which he had led at
St. Helena.

During the last year or so he took great interest in gardening, and
spent hours in planting trees, digging the soil, and generally behaving
somewhat after the manner of a suburban householder. He was intensely
bored by his forced inaction, and used to take refuge in chess. His
staff at first welcomed this, but unhappily they could find nobody bad
enough for the mighty strategist to beat; yet nobody dared to give him
checkmate, and it was necessary to lose the game foolishly rather than
to defeat Napoleon. It is clear that the qualities requisite in a good
chess-player are by no means the same as those necessary to outmanœuvre
an army.

Throughout his life his pulse-rate seldom exceeded fifty per minute; as
he grew older he was subject to increasing lassitude; his extremities
felt constantly chilly, and he used to lie for hours daily in hot-water
baths. Possibly these may have been symptoms of hypo-pituitarism; Lord
Rosebery follows popular opinion in attributing his laziness to the
weakening effects of hot baths. Occasionally Napoleon suffered from
attacks of vomiting, followed by fits of extreme lethargy. It is quite
possible that these vomiting attacks may have been due to the gastric
ulcer, which must have been growing for years until, about September,
1820, it became acutely malignant.

The legend that Napoleon suffered from epilepsy appears, according
to Dr. Ireland, to rest upon a statement in Talleyrand’s memoirs.
In September, 1805, in Talleyrand’s presence, Napoleon was seized
after dinner with a sort of fit, and fell to the ground struggling
convulsively. Talleyrand loosened his cravat, obeying the popular
rule in such circumstances to “give him air.” Remusat, the chief
chamberlain, gave him water, which he drank. Talleyrand returned to the
charge, and “inundated” him with eau-de-Cologne. The Emperor awakened,
and said something--one would like to know what he said when he felt
the inundation streaming down his clothes--probably something truly
of the camp. Half an hour later he was on the road that was to lead
him--to Austerlitz, of all places! Clearly this fit, whatever it may
have been, was not epilepsy in the ordinary sense of the term. There
was no “cry,” no biting of the tongue, no foaming at the mouth, and
apparently no unconsciousness. Moreover, epilepsy is accompanied by
degeneration of the intellect, and nobody dares to say that Austerlitz,
Jena, and Wagram--to say nothing of Aspern and Eckmuhl--were won by
a degenerate. Eylau and Friedland were also to come after 1805, and
these seven names still ring like a trumpet for sheer glory, daring,
and supreme genius. I suppose there is not one of them--except perhaps
Aspern--which would not have made an imperishable name for any lesser
general. It is impossible to believe that they were fought by an
epileptic. If Napoleon really had epilepsy it was assuredly not the
“_grand mal_” which helps to fill our asylums. It is just possible that
“_petit mal_” may have been in the picture. This is a curious condition
which manifests itself by momentary loss of consciousness; the patient
may become suddenly dreamy and purposeless, and may perform curious
involuntary actions--even crimes--while _apparently_ conscious. When he
recovers he knows nothing about what he has been doing, and may even
resume the interrupted action which had occupied him at the moment of
the seizure. Some such explanation may account for Napoleon’s fits of
furious passion, that seem to have been followed by periods of lethargy
and vomiting. It is a sort of pleasing paradox--and mankind dearly
loves paradox--to say that supremely great men suffer from epilepsy.
It was said of Julius Cæsar, of St. Paul, and of Mohammed. These men
are said to have suffered from “falling sickness,” whatever that may
have been; there are plenty of conditions which may make men fall to
the ground, without being epileptic: Ménière’s disease, for instance.
It is ridiculous to suppose that Julius Cæsar and Napoleon--by common
consent the two greatest of the sons of men--should have been subject
to a disease which deteriorates the intellect.

It is possible that some such trouble as “_petit mal_” may have been
at the bottom of the curious stories of a certain listless torpor
that appears to have overcome Napoleon at critical moments in his
later battles. Something of the kind happened at Borodino in 1812, the
bloodiest and most frightful battle in history till that time. Napoleon
indeed won, in the sense that the exhausted Russians retreated to
Moscow, whither he pursued them to his ill-fortune; but the battle was
not fought with anything like the supreme genius which he displayed in
his other campaigns. Similarly, he is said to have been thus stricken
helpless after Ligny, when he defeated Blucher in 1815. He wasted
precious hours in lethargy, which should have been spent in his usual
furious pursuit of his beaten foe. To this day the French hold that,
but for Napoleon’s inexplicable idleness after Ligny, there would
have been no St. Helena; and, with all the respect due to Wellington
and his thin red line, it is by no means certain that the French are
wrong. But nations will continue to squabble about Waterloo till there
shall be no more war; and 1814 had been the most brilliant of his
campaigns--probably of any man’s campaigns.

“Of woman came the beginning of sin, and through her therefore we
all die,” said the ungallant author of Ecclesiasticus; and it is
certain that Napoleon was extremely susceptible to feminine charms.
Like a Roman emperor, he had but to cast a glance at a woman and she
was at his feet. Yet probably his life was not very much less moral
than was customary among the great at that time. When we remember
his extraordinary personal charm, it is rather a matter for wonder
that women seem to have had so little serious effect upon his life,
and he seems to have taken comparatively little advantage of his
opportunities. His first wife, Josephine Beauharnais, was a flighty
Creole who pleased herself entirely; in the vulgar phrase, she “took
her pleasure where she found it.” To this Napoleon appears to have
been complaisant, but as she could not produce an heir to the dynasty
which he wished to found, he divorced her, and married the Austrian
princess Marie Louise, whose father he had defeated and humiliated as
few sovereigns have ever been humiliated. She deserted him without
a qualm when he was sent to Elba; when he was finally imprisoned at
St. Helena there was no question of her following him, even if the
British Government had had sufficient imagination to permit such a
thing. Napoleon, who was fond of her, wanted her to go with him; but
one could not expect a Government containing Castlereagh, Liverpool,
and Bathurst, to show any sympathy to the fallen foe who had been a
nightmare to Europe for twenty years. She would never consent to see
Josephine. It is said that Napoleon’s _libido sexualis_ was violent,
but rapidly quelled. In conversation at St. Helena he admitted having
possessed seven mistresses; of them he said simply, “C’est beaucoup.”
When he was sent to St. Helena his mother wrote and asked to be allowed
to follow him; however great a man’s fall, his mother never deserts
him, and asylum doctors find that long after the wife or sisters forget
some demented and bestial creature, his mother loyally continues her
visits till the grave closes over one or the other. But more remarkable
is the fact that Pauline Bonaparte, who was always looked upon as a
shameless hussy, would have followed him to St. Helena, only that
she was ill in bed at the time. She was the beautiful sister who sat
to Canova for the statue of Venus in the Villa Borghese. It was then
thought most shocking for a lady of high degree to be sculptured as a
nude Venus--perhaps it is now; I say, _perhaps_. There are few ladies
of high degree so beautiful as Princess Pauline, as Canova shows her.
A friend said to her about the statue, “Were you not uncomfortable,
princess, sitting there without any clothes on?” “Uncomfortable,” said
Princess Pauline, “why should I be uncomfortable? There was a stove
in the room!” There are many other still less creditable stories told
about her. It was poor beautiful Pauline who lost her husband of yellow
fever, herself recovering of an attack at the same time. She cut off
her hair and buried it in his coffin. This was thought a wonderful
instance of wifely devotion, until the cynical Emperor remarked: “Quite
so; quite so; of course, she knows it will grow again better than ever
for cutting it off, and that it would have fallen off anyhow after the
fever.” Yet when he was sent to Elba, this frivolous sister followed
him, and she sold every jewel she possessed to make life comfortable
for him at St. Helena. She was a very human and beautiful woman, this
Pauline; she detested Marie Louise, and once in 1810 at a grand fête
she saucily poked out her tongue at the young Empress in full view
of all the nobles. Unhappily Napoleon saw her, and cast upon her a
dreadful look; Pauline picked up her skirts and ran headlong from the
room. When she heard of his death she wept bitterly; she died four
years afterwards of cancer. Her last action was to call for a mirror,
looking into which she died, saying, “I am still beautiful; I am not
afraid to die.”

In attempting to judge Marie Louise it must be remembered that there
is a horrid story told of Napoleon’s first meeting with her in France
after the civil marriage had been performed by proxy in Vienna. It is
said that the fury of his lust did her physical injury, and that that
is the true reason why she never forgave him and deserted him at the
first opportunity. She bore him a son, of whom he was passionately
fond, but after his downfall the son--the poor little King of Rome
immortalized by Rostand in “_l’Aiglon_”--fell into the hands of
Metternich, the Austrian, who is said to have deliberately contrived
to have him taught improper practices, lest he should grow up to
be as terrible a menace to the world as his father. But all these
are rumours, and show how difficult it is to ascertain the truth of
anything connected with Napoleon.

When Napoleon fell to the dust after Leipzig, Marie Louise became too
friendly with Count von Neipperg, whom she morganatically married after
Napoleon’s death. Although he heard of her infidelity, he forgave her,
and mentioned her affectionately in his will, thereby showing, to
borrow a famous phrase of Gibbon about Belisarius, “Either less or
more than the character of a man.”

For nine days before he died he lay unconscious and babbled in
delirium. On the morning of May 5, 1821, Montholon thought he heard
the words “_France ... armée ... tête d’armée._” The dying Emperor
thrust Montholon from his side, struggled out of bed, and staggered
towards the window. Montholon overpowered him and put him back to bed,
where he lay silent and motionless till he died the same evening. The
man who had fought about sixty pitched battles, all of which he had
won, I believe, but two--who had caused the deaths of three millions
of his own men and untold millions of his enemies--died as peacefully
in his bed as any humble labourer. What dim memories passed through
his clouded brain as he tried to say “head of the army”? A great
tropical storm was threatening Longwood. Did he recall the famous “sun
of Austerlitz” beneath whose rays the _grande armée_ had elevated its
idolized head to the highest pitch of earthly glory? Who can follow the
queer paths taken by associated ideas in the human brain?




Benvenuto Cellini


No one can read Benvenuto’s extraordinary autobiography without being
reminded of the even more extraordinary diary of Mr. Pepys. But there
is one very great difference. Cellini dictated his memoirs to a little
boy for the world at large, and did not profess to tell the whole
truth--rather those things which came into his mind readily in his old
age; but Pepys wrote for himself in secret cypher in his own study, and
the reason of his writing has never yet been guessed. Why did he set
down all his most private affairs? And when they became too disgraceful
even for Mr. Pepys’s conscience, why did he set them down in a mongrel
mixture of French and Spanish? Can we find a hint in the fact that he
left a key to the cypher behind him? Did he really wish his Diary to
remain unreadable for ever? Was it really a quaint and beastly vanity
that moved him?

But Cellini wrote _per medium_ of a little boy amanuensis while he
himself worked, and possibly he may have deliberately omitted some
facts too shameful for the ears of that _puer ingenuus_; though I
have my doubts about this theory. He frankly depicts himself as a
cynical and forth-right fellow always ready to brawl; untroubled by
conventional ideas either of art or of morality; ready to call a spade
a spade or any number of adjectived shovels that came instantly to
his mind. If it be great writing to express one’s meaning tersely,
directly, and positively, then Cellini’s is the greatest of writing,
though we have to be thankful that it is in a foreign language. The
best translation is probably that of John Addington Symonds--a cheaper
and excellent edition is published in the _Everyman Library_--and
nobody who wishes to write precisely as he thinks can afford to go
without studying this remarkable book. And having studied it he will
probably come to the conclusion that there are other things in writing
than merely to express oneself directly. There is such a thing as
beauty of thought as well as beauty of expression; and probably he will
end by wondering what is that thing which we call beauty? Is it only
Truth, as even such a master of Beauty as Keats seems to have thought?
Why is one line of the _Grecian Urn_ more beautiful than all the blood
and thunder of Benvenuto?

Cellini says that he caught the “French evil”--i.e. syphilis--when he
was a young man; he certainly did his best to catch it. His symptoms
were abnormal, and the doctors assured him that his disease was not
the “French evil.” However, he knew better, and assumed a treatment
of his own, consisting of _lignum vitæ_ and a holiday shooting in the
marshes. Here he probably caught malaria, of which he cured himself
with guaiacum. We know now that, alas, syphilis cannot be cured by
such means; and the fact that he lived to old age seems to show that
there was something wrong with his diagnosis. I have known plenty of
syphilitics who have reached extreme old age, but they had not been
cured by _lignum vitæ_ and a holiday; it was mercury that had cured
them, taken early and often, over long periods. I very much doubt
whether he ever had the “French evil” at all.

 [Illustration:                                         [_Photo, Brogi._

  PERSEUS AND THE GORGON’S HEAD.
  Statue by Benvenuto Cellini (Florence, Loggia de’ Lanzi).]

But apart from this and from his amazing revelations of quarrelling and
loose living, the autobiography is worth reading for its remarkable
description of the casting of his great statue of Perseus, which now
stands in the Loggia dei Lanzi at Florence hard by the Uffizi. By the
time the book had reached so far the little boy had long wearied of the
job of secretary, and the old man had buckled down to the labour of
writing with his own hand. I dare swear that he wrote this particular
section at one breath, so to speak; the torrent of words, poured forth
in wild excitement, carry the reader away with the frenzy of the writer
as Benvenuto recalls the greatest hours of his life. Nowhere is such an
instance of the terrible labour pains of a true artist as his offspring
comes to birth.

The great statue does more than represent Perseus; it represents the
wild and headlong mind of Benvenuto himself. Perseus stands in triumph
with the Gorgon’s head in one hand and a sword in the other. You can
buy paper-knives modelled on this sword for five lire in Florence
to-day. The gladness and youthful joy of Perseus are even more striking
than those of Verrochio’s David in the Bargello just near at hand.
Verrochio has modelled a young rascal of a Jew who is clearly saying:
“Alone I did it; and very nice too!” Never was boyish triumph better
portrayed. But Benvenuto’s Perseus is a great young man who has done
something very worthy, and knows that it is worthy. He has begun to
amputate the head very carefully with a neat circular incision round
the neck; then, his rage or his fear of the basilisk glance getting the
better of him, he has set his foot against the Gorgon’s shoulder and
tugged at the head violently until the grisly thing has come away in
his hand, tearing through the soft parts of the neck and wrenching the
great vessels from the heart.

As is well known, opportunities for performing decapitation upon a
Gorgon are few; apart from the rarity of the monster there is always
the risk lest the surgeon may be frozen stiff in the midst of the
operation; and it becomes still more difficult when it has to be
performed in the Fourth Dimension through a looking-glass. We have
the authority of _The Mikado_ that self-decapitation is a difficult,
not to say painful, operation, and Benvenuto could not have practised
his method before a shaving-mirror, because he had a bushy beard,
though some of us have inadvertently tried in our extreme youth before
we have learned the advisability of using safety razors. Anyhow,
Benvenuto’s Perseus is a very realistic, violent, and wonderful piece
of sculpture; if he had done nothing else he would have still been one
of the greatest artists in the world. My own misfortune was in going
to Florence before I had seriously read his autobiography; I wish to
warn others lest that misfortune should befall them. Read Cellini’s
autobiography--_then_, go to Florence! You will see how the author of
the autobiography was the only man who could possibly have done the
Perseus; how, in modelling the old pre-hellenic demigod, he was really
modelling his own subconscious mind.




Death


When William Dunbar sang, “Timor mortis perturbat me,” he but expressed
the most universal of human--perhaps of animate--feelings. It is no
shame to fear death; the fear appears to be a necessary condition of
our existence. The shame begins when we allow that fear to influence
us in the performance of our duty. But why should we fear death at
all? It is hardly an explanation to say that the fear of death is
implanted in living things lest the individual should be too easily
slain and thereby the species become extinct. Who implanted it? And
why is it so necessary that that individual should survive? Why is it
necessary that the species should survive? And so on--to name only a
few of the unanswerable questions that crowd upon us whenever we sit
down to muse upon that problem which every living thing must some
time have a chance of solving. The question of death is inextricably
bound up with the interpretation of innumerable abstract nouns, such
as truth, justice, good, evil, and many more, which all religions make
some effort to interpret. Philosophy attempts it by the light of man’s
reason; religion by a light from some extra-human source; but all alike
represent the struggles of earnest men to solve the insoluble.

Nor is it possible to obtain help from the great men of the past,
because not one of them knew any more about death than you do yourself.
Socrates, in Plato’s _Phædo_, Sir Thomas Browne in the _Religio Medici_
and the _Hydriotaphia_, Shakespeare in _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ and many
other plays, St. Paul in various epistles, all tried to console us
for the fact that we must die; the revolt against that inevitable end
of beauty and ugliness, charm and horror, love and hate, is the most
persistent note in literature; and there are few men who go through
life without permitting themselves to wonder, “What is going to happen
to me? Why should I have to die? What will my wife and children do
after me? How is it possible that the world will go on, and apparently
go on just the same as now, for ages after an important thing like
me is shovelled away into a hole in the ground?” I suppose you have
dreamed with a start of horror a dream in which you revisit the world,
and looking for your own house and children, find them going along
happily and apparently prosperous, the milkman coming as usual, a woman
in the form of your wife ordering meals and supervising household
affairs, the tax-gatherer calling--let us hope a little less often
than when you were alive--the trams running and the ferry-boats packed
as usual, and the sun shining, the rain falling sometimes, Members of
Parliament bawling foolishly over nothing--all these things happening
as usual; but you look around to see anybody resembling that beautiful
and god-like creature whom you remember as yourself, and wheresoever
you look he is not there. Where is he? How can the world possibly go
on without him? Is it really going on, or is it nothing more than
an incredible dream? And why are you so shocked and horror-stricken
by this dream? You could hardly be more shocked if you saw you wife
toiling in a garret for the minimum wage, or your children running
about barefoot selling newspapers. The shocking fact is not that you
have left them penniless, but that you have had to leave them at all.
In the morning joy cometh as usual, and you go cheerfully about your
work, which simply consists of postponing the day of somebody else’s
death as long as you can. For a little time perhaps you will take
particular note of the facts which accompany the act of death; then
you will resign yourself to the inevitable, and continue doggedly to
wage an endless battle in which you must inevitably lose, assured of
nothing but that some day you too will lie pallid, your jaw dropped,
your chest not moving, your face horribly inert; and that somebody will
come and wash your body and tie up your jaw and put pennies on your
eyes and wrap you in cerements and lift you into a long box; and that
large men will put the box on their shoulders and lump you into a big
vehicle with black horses, and another man will ironically shout Paul’s
words, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”
And in the club some man will take your seat at lunch, and the others
will say you were a decent sort of fellow and will not joke loudly for
a whole meal-time. And ten years hence who will remember you? Your wife
and children, of course--if they too have not also been carried away
in long boxes; a few men who look upon you with a kindly patronage as
one who has fallen in the fight and cannot compete with them now; but
otherwise? Your hospital appointments have long been filled up by men
who cannot, you think, do your work half so well as you used to do it;
your car is long ago turned into scrap-iron; your little dog, which
used to yelp so joyously when you got home tired at night and kicked
him out of the way, is long dead and buried under your favourite
rose-bush; your library, which was your joy for so many years, has long
been sold at about one-tenth of what it cost you; and, except for the
woman who was foolish enough to love and marry you and the children
whom the good creature brought into the world to carry on your name,
you are as though you had never been. Why should this be? And why are
you so terrified at the prospect?

During the past few years we have had ample experience of death, for
there are few families in Australia, and I suppose in England, France,
Germany, Italy, Russia, and Europe generally, which have not lost some
beloved member; yet we are no nearer solving the mystery than we were
before. We know no more about it than did Socrates or Homer. The only
thing that is beginning to haunt the minds of many men is whether those
gallant boys who died in the war were not better off than the men who
survived. At least they know the worst, if there be anything to know;
and have no longer to fear cancer and paralysis and the other diseases
of later life. Many men have written in a consolatory vein about old
age, but the consolants have in no way answered the dictum that if by
reason of strength our years exceed threescore and ten, yet is our
strength but labour and sorrow. No doctor who has seen an old man with
an enlarged prostate and a septic kidney therefrom, or with cancer of
the tongue, can refrain from wishing that that man had died twenty
years sooner, because however bad the fate in store for him it can
hardly be worse than what he suffers here on earth. And possibly there
are worse things on earth even than cancer of the tongue; possibly
cancer of the bladder is the most atrocious, or right-sided hemiplegia
with its aphasia and deadly depression of soul. Young men do not suffer
from these things; and no one can attend a man so afflicted without
wishing that the patient had died happily by a bullet in Gallipoli
before his time came so to suffer. Yet as a man grows older, though the
likelihood of his death becomes more and more with every passing year,
his clinging to bare life, however painful and terrible that life may
be, becomes more intense. The young hardly seem to fear death; that is
a fear almost confined to the aged. How otherwise can we explain the
extraordinary heroism shown by the boys of every army during the late
war? I watched many beautiful and gallant boys, volunteers mark you,
march down the streets of Sydney on their way to a quarrel which nobody
understood--not even the German Kaiser who started it; and when my own
turn came to go I patched up many thousands who had been shattered: the
one impression made upon me was the utter vileness and beastliness of
war, and the glorious courage of the boys in the line. Before the order
went forth forbidding the use of Liston’s long splint in the advanced
dressing stations, men with shattered lower limbs used to be brought in
with their feet turned back to front. High-explosive shells would tear
away half the front of a man’s abdomen; men would be maimed horribly
for life, and life would never be the same again for them. Yet none
seemed to complain. I know that our own boys simply accepted it all as
the inevitable consequence of war, and from what I saw of the English
and French their attitude of mind was much the same. The courage of the
boys was amazing. I am very sure that if the average age of the armies
had been sixty instead of under thirty, Amiens would never have been
saved or Fort Douaumont recovered, nor would the Germans have fought so
heroically as we must admit they did. Old men feel death approaching
them, and they fear it. We all know that our old patients are far more
nervous about death than the young. I remember a girl who had sarcoma
of the thigh, which recurred after amputation, and I had to send
her to a home for the dying. She did not seem very much perturbed. I
suppose the proper thing to say would be that she was conscious of her
salvation and had nothing to fear; but the truth was that she was a
young rake who had committed nearly every crime possible to the female
sex, and she died as peacefully and happily as any young member of the
Church I ever knew. But who is so terrified as the old woman who trips
on a rough edge of the carpet and fractures her thigh-bone? How she
clings to life! What terrors attend her last few weeks on earth, till
merciful pneumonia comes to send her to endless sleep!

I do not remember to have noticed any of that ecstasy which we are
told should attend the dying of the saved. Generally, so far as I
have observed, the dying man falls asleep some hours or days before
he actually dies, and does not wake again. His breathing becomes more
and more feeble; his heart beats more irregularly and feebly, and
finally it does not resume; there comes a moment when his face alters
indescribably and his jaw drops; one touches his eyes and they do
not respond; one holds a mirror to his mouth and it is not dulled;
his wife, kneeling by the bedside, suddenly perceives that she is a
widow, and cries inconsolably; one turns away sore and grieved and
defeated; and that is all about it! There is no more heroism nor pain
nor agony in dying than in falling asleep every night. Whether a man
has been a good man or a bad does not seem to make any difference. I
have seldom seen a death-agony, nor heard a death-rattle that could
be distinguished from a commonplace snore. Possibly the muscles may
become wanting in oxygenation for some time before actual death, and
thrown into convulsive movements like the dance of the highwayman
at Tyburn while he was dying of strangulation, and these convulsive
movements might be looked upon as a death-agony; but I am quite sure
that the patient never feels them. To do so would require that the
sense of self-location would persist, but what evidence we have is
that that is one of the first senses to depart. Possibly the dying man
may have some sensation such as we have all gone through while falling
asleep--that feeling as though we are falling, which is supposed to
be a survival from the days when we were apes; possibly there may be
some giddiness such as attends the going under an anæsthetic, and is
doubtless to be attributed to the same loss of power of self-location;
but the impression that has been forced upon me whenever I have seen
any struggling has been that the movements were quite involuntary,
purposeless, and meaningless. And anything like an agony or a
death-rattle is rare. Far more often the man simply falls asleep, and
it may be as difficult to decide when life passes into death as it is
to decide when consciousness passes into sleep.

Nor have I ever heard any genuine last words such as we read in books.
I doubt if they ever occur. At the actual time of death the man’s body
is far too busy with its dying for his mind to formulate any ideas.
The nearest approach to a “last word” that I ever remember was when a
very old and brilliant man, who, after a lifetime spent in the service
of Australia, lay dying, full of years and honour, from suppression of
urine that followed some weeks after an operation on his prostate. It
was early in the war, and Austria, with her usual folly, was acting
egregiously. The nurse was trying to rouse the old man by reading to
him the war news. He suddenly sat up, and a flash of intelligence came
over his face. “Pah--Austria with her idiot Archdukes--that was what
Bismarck said, wasn’t it?” Then he fell back, and went to sleep; nor
could the visits of his family and the injections of saline solution
into his veins rouse him again from his torpor. He lay unconscious for
nearly a week. That is the only instance of the “ruling passion strong
in death” that I remember. He had always hated Bismarck and despised
the Austrians, and for one brief moment hatred and contempt awakened
his clouded brain. And Napoleon said, “_Tête d’armée_.”

There is no need, so far as we can tell, to fear the actual dying.
Death is no more to be feared than his twin-brother Sleep, as the
very ancient Greeks of Homer surmised; it is _what comes after_ that
many people fear. “To sleep--perchance to dream” nightmares? Well, I
do not know what other people feel when they dream, but for myself I
am fortunate enough to know, even in the midst of the most horrible
nightmare, that it is all a dream; and I dare say that this is a
privilege common to many people. The blessed sleep that comes to tired
man in the early morning, with which cometh joy, is well worth going
through nightmare to attain; and I think I am not speaking wildly in
claiming that most men pass the happiest portions of their lives in
that early morning sleep. One of the horrors of neurasthenia is that
early morning sleep is often denied to the patient.

But the idea of hell is to many persons a real terror, not to be
overmastered by reason. God has not made man in His own image; man
has made God in his. As Grant Allen used to say: “The Englishman’s
idea of God is an Englishman twelve feet high”; and the old Jews, who
were a very savage and ruthless people, created Jehovah in their own
image. To such a God eternal punishment for a point of belief was quite
the natural thing, and nineteen centuries of belief in the teaching
of a loving and forgiving Christ have not abolished that frightful
idea. It is one of the disservices of the Mediæval Church to mankind
that it popularized and enforced the idea of hell, and that idea has
been diligently perpetuated by some narrow-minded sects to this very
day. But to a modern man, who, with all his faults, is a kindly and
forgiving creature, hell is unthinkable, and he cannot bring himself
to believe that it was actually part of the teaching of Christ. If the
New Testament says so, then, thinks the average modern man, it must be
in an interpolation by some mediæval ecclesiastic whose zeal outran his
mercy; and an average modern man is not seriously swayed by any idea
of everlasting flames. He may even quaintly wonder, if he has studied
the known facts of the universe, where either hell or heaven is to
be found, considering that they are supposed to have lasted for ever
and to be fated to last as long. In time to come the souls, saved and
lost, must be of infinite number, if they are not so already; and an
infinite number would fill all available space and spill over for an
infinite distance, leaving no room for flames, or brimstone, or harps,
or golden cities. Perhaps it may not be beyond Almighty Power to solve
this difficulty, but it is a very real one to the average thoughtful
man. When we begin to realize infinity, to realize that every one
of the millions of known suns must each last for millions of years,
after which the whole process must begin again, endure as long, and so
on _ad infinitum_, the thing becomes simply inconceivable; the mind
staggers, and takes refuge in agnosticism, which is not cured by the
scoffing of clergymen whom one suspects of not viewing things from a
modern standpoint. Jowett once answered a young man whom he evidently
looked upon as a “puppy” by thundering at him: “Young man, you call
yourself an agnostic; let me tell you that _agnostic_ is a Greek word
the Latin of which is _ignoramus_!” Jowett evidently did not in the
least understand that young man’s difficulties, nor the difficulties of
any man whose training has been scientific--that is, directed towards
the ascertaining what is demonstrably true. Scoffing and insolence like
that only react upon the scoffer’s head, and rather breed contempt than
comfort. Nor is the problem of God Himself any more easy of solution,
unless we are prepared to see Him everywhere, in every minute cell
and tiny bacterium. If we confess to such a belief we are immediately
crushed with the cry of “mere Pantheism,” or even “Spinozism,” as
though these epithets, meant to be contemptuous, led us any further
on our way. You cannot solve these dreadful problems by a sneer, and
Voltaire, the prince of scoffers, would have had even more influence on
thought than he had if he had contented himself with a less aggressive
and polemic attitude towards the Church.

Hell is a concrete attempt at Divine punishment. Punishment for what?
For disobeying the commandments of God? How are we to know what God
really commanded? And how are we to weigh the relative effects of
temptation and powers of resistance upon any given man? How are we to
say that an action which in one man may be desperately wicked may not
be positively virtuous in another? It is a commonplace that virtue
changes with latitude, and that we find “the crimes of Clapham chaste
in Martaban.” Why should we condemn some poor maiden of Clapham to burn
for ever for a crime which she may not recognize as a crime, whereas we
applaud a damsel of Martaban for doing precisely the same thing? And
what is sin? Is there any real evidence as to what the commandments
of God really are? Modern psychology seems to hold that virtue and
vice are simply phases of the herd-complex of normal man, and have
been evolved by the herd during countless generations as the best
method of perpetuating the human species. No individual man made his
own herd-complex, by which he is so enormously swayed; no individual
man made his own sex-complex, or his ego-complex, or anything that is
his. How can he be held responsible for his actions by a God Who made
him the subject of such frightful temptations and gave him such feeble
powers of resistance? Edward Fitzgerald--who, be it remembered, knew
no more about these things than you or I--summed up the whole matter
in “Man’s forgiveness give--and take,” and probably this simple line
has given more comfort to thoughtful men than all Jowett’s bluster.
Fitzgerald has at least voiced the instinctive rebellion which every
man must feel when he considers the facts of human nature, even if he
has given us otherwise no more guidance than a call to a poor kind of
Epicureanism which lays stress on a book of verse underneath a bough,
and thou beside me singing in a wilderness. If our musings lead us to
Epicureanism, at least let it be the Epicureanism of Epicurus, and not
the sensual pleasure-seeking of Omar. True, Epicureanism laid stress
on the superiority of mental over physical happiness; it were better to
worship at the shrine of Beethoven than of Venus, and better to take
your pleasure in the library than in the wine-shop. But nobler than
Epicurus was Zeno, the Stoic, whose influence on both the ancient and
the modern worlds has been so profound. If we are to take philosophy
as our guide, Stoicism, which inculcates duty and self-restraint,
and is supported by the great names of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus
Aurelius, is probably our best leading light. Theoretically it should
produce noble characters; practically it has produced the noblest, if
the _Meditations_ of Marcus Aurelius were really written by him and not
by some monk in the Middle Ages. If we follow the teaching of Stoicism
we shall, when we come to die, at least have the consolation that we
have done our duty; and if we realize the full meaning of “duty” in
the modern world to include duty done kindly and generously as well
as faithfully, we shall be living as nearly to the ideals laid down
by Christ as is possible to human nature, and we shall assuredly have
nothing to fear.

Anæsthesia gives some faint hint as to the possibility of a future
life. It is believed that chloroform and ether abolish consciousness
by causing a slight change in the molecular constitution of nervous
matter, as for instance dissolving the fatty substances or lipoids.
If so minute a change in the chemistry of nervous matter has the
power of totally abolishing consciousness, how can the mind possibly
survive the much greater change which occurs in nervous matter after
corruption has set in? Nor has there ever been any proof that there
can be consciousness without living nervous matter. One turns to the
spiritualistic evidence offered by Myers, Conan Doyle, Oliver Lodge,
and other observers, but after carefully studying their reports one
feels inclined to agree with Huxley that spiritualism has merely added
a new terror to death, for, according to the spiritualists, death
appears to transform men into idiots who on earth were known to be able
and clever, and the marvel is not the miracles which they report, but
that clever men should be found to believe them.

An even more remarkable marvel than the marvel of Lodge and Conan Doyle
was the marvel of John Henry Newman, who, a supremely able man, living
at the time of Darwin, Huxley, and the vast biological advancement
of the Victorian era, was yet able in middle life to embrace the far
from rationalistic doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. That he
was tempted to do so by the opportunity which his action gave him
of becoming a prince of the Church is too ridiculous an assumption
to stand for a moment. The man _believed_ these things, and believed
them with greatness, nobility, and earnestness; when he ’verted he
was forty-four years of age, and it was not for about thirty years
that he was created a cardinal. The only explanation that can be given
is that we have not yet fathomed the depths of the human mind; there
is a certain type of mind which appears to see things by what it
calls intuition and is not open to reason on the basis of evidence or
probability.

Probably what most men fear is not death but the pain and illness which
generally precede death; and apart from that very natural dread there
is the dread of leaving things which are dear to every one. After
all, life is sweet to most of us; it is pleasant to feel the warm sun
and see the blue sky and watch the shadows race over far hills; an
occasional concert, a week-end spent at golf, or at working diligently
in the garden; congenial employment, or a worthy book to read, all help
to make life worth living, and the mind becomes sad at the thought of
leaving these things and the home which they epitomize. I remember once
in a troopship, a few days out from an Australian port, when the men
had all got over their sea-sickness and were beginning to realize that
they really were started on their Great Adventure, that I went down
into their quarters at night, and found a big young countryman who had
enlisted in the Artillery, sobbing bitterly. It was a long time before
kindly consolation and a dose of bromide sent him off to sleep. In the
morning he came to see me and tried to apologize for his unmanliness.
“I’m not afraid of dyin’, sir,” he explained. “I want to stoush some of
them Germans first, though. It’s leaving all me life in Australia if I
’appen to stop a lump of lead, sir--that’s what’s worryin’ me.” Life in
Australia meant riding on horseback when he was not following at the
plough’s tail. It was the only life he knew, and he loved it. But I
was fully convinced that he no more feared actual death than he feared
a mosquito, and when he left the ship at Suez, and joined lustily in
the singing of “Australia will be there”--who so jovial as he? He got
through the fighting on Gallipoli, only to be destroyed on the Somme;
his horse, if it had not already been sent to Palestine, had to submit
to another rider; his acres to produce for another ploughman.

The last illness is, of course, sometimes very unpleasant, especially
if cancer or angina pectoris enter into the picture, but I have often
marvelled at the endurance of men who should, according to all one’s
preconceived ideas, be broken up with distress. Not uncommonly a man
refuses to believe that he is really so seriously ill as other people
think, and there is always the hope eternal in every breast that he
will get better. Quite commonly he looks hopefully in the glass every
morning as he shaves for signs of coming improvement; there are few men
who really believe that sentence of early death has been passed upon
them.

The illness which causes the most misery is an illness complicated
with neurasthenia, and probably the neurasthenic tastes the bitterest
misery of which mankind is capable, unless we admit melancholia into
the grisly competition. But I often think that the long sleepless early
morning hours of neurasthenia, when the patient lies listening for the
chimes, worrying over his physical condition and harassed with dread
of the future, are the most terrible possible to man. Nor are they in
any way improved by the knowledge that sometimes neurasthenia does not
indicate any real physical disease.

But it is difficult to find any really rational cause for the desire
to live longer, unless Sir Thomas Browne is right in thinking that the
long habit of living indisposeth us for dying. After all, what does
it really matter whether we die to-morrow or live twenty more years?
In another century it will be all the same; at most we but postpone
dissolution. Death has to come sooner or later; and whatever we believe
of our life beyond the grave is not likely to make any difference. We
were not consulted as to whether we were to be born, nor as to the
parts and capabilities which were to be allotted to us, and it is
exceedingly unlikely that our wishes will be taken into consideration
as regards our eternal disposition. We can do no more when we come
to die than take our involuntary leap into the dark like innumerable
living creatures before us, and, conscious of having done our duty to
the best that lay in us, hope for the best.

Twentieth-century biological science appears to result in a kind of
vague pantheism, coupled with a generous hedonism. Scientific men
appear to find their pleasure, not like the old Greeks, sought by
each man for himself, but rather in “the greatest happiness of the
greatest number.” It is difficult for a modern man to feel entirely
happy while he knows of the vast amount of incurable misery that exists
in the world. The idea of Heaven is simply an idea that the atrocious
injustice and unhappiness of life in this world must be balanced by
equally great happiness in the life to come; but is there any evidence
to favour such a belief? Is there any evidence throughout Nature that
the spirit of justice is anything but a dream of man himself which is
never to be fulfilled? We do not like to speak of “death,” but prefer
rather to avoid the hated term by some journalistic periphrasis, such
as “solved the great enigma.” But is there any enigma? Or are we going
to solve it? Is it not more likely that our protoplasm is destined to
become dissolved into its primordial electrons, and ultimately to be
lost in the general ocean of ether, and that when we die we shall solve
no enigma, because there is no enigma to solve?

To sum up, death probably does not hurt nearly so much as the ordinary
sufferings which are the lot of everybody in living; the act of death
is probably no more terrible than our nightly falling asleep; and
probably the condition of everlasting rest is what Fate has in store
for us, and we can face it bravely without flinching when our time
comes. But whether we flinch or not will not matter; we have to die
all the same, and we shall be less likely to flinch if we can feel
that we have tried to do our duty. And what are we to say of a man who
has seen his duty, and urgently longed to perform it, but has failed
because God has not given him sufficient strength? “Video meliora
proboque, deteriora sequor,” as old Cicero said of himself. If there
is any enigma at all, it lies in the frustrated longings and bitter
disappointment of that man.

Probably the best shield throughout life against the atrocious evils
and injustices which every man has to suffer is a kind of humorous
fatalism which holds that other people have suffered as much as
ourselves; that such suffering is a necessary concomitant of life
upon this world; and that nothing much matters so long as we do our
duty in the sphere to which Fate has called us. A kindly irony which
enables us to laugh at the world and sympathize with its troubles is
a very powerful aid in the battle; and if a doctor does his part in
alleviating pain and postponing death--if he does his best for rich
and poor, and always listens to the cry of the afflicted,--and if he
endeavours to leave his wife and children in a position better than he
himself began, I do not see what more can be expected of him either
in this world or the next. And probably Huxley was not far wrong when
he said: “I have no faith, very little hope, and as much charity as
I can afford.” It is amazing that there are some people in the world
to-day who look upon a man who professes these merciful sentiments as
a miscreant doomed to eternal flames because he will not profess to
believe in their own particular form of religion. They think they have
answered him when they proclaim that his creed is sterile.




FOOTNOTES:


[1] I have read or heard that one of the charges against Cardinal
Wolsey was that he had given the King syphilis by whispering in his
ear. The nature of the story so whispered is not disclosed, but may
be imagined. But the proud prelate had several perfectly healthy
illegitimate children, and on the whole it is probable that Henry
caught the disease in the usual way.

[2] They really seem to have taken some little pains to make the death
of the King’s old flame as little terrible as possible. They might
have burnt her or subjected her to the usual grim preliminaries of the
scaffold. Probably they did this not because the King had ever loved
her, but because she was a queen, and therefore not to be subjected to
needless infamy; one of the Lord’s anointed, in short.

[3] To pause for a moment, probably the element of human sacrifice may
have entered into the hair-cutting episode, as it did in the action of
the women of Carthage during the last siege; and possibly there may
have been some shamefaced reserve in the attributing of the fashion
to the example of an egregious “Buster Brown” of New York. To my own
memory the fashion was first called either the “Joan of Arc” cut or
the “Munitioner” cut. The “Buster Brown” cut came later, and seems to
have been seized upon by the English as an excuse against showing deep
feelings. It is pleasanter to think that Joan of Arc was really at that
time in the hearts of English women; the cult of semi-worship that
so strengthened the Allies was really worship of the qualities which
mankind has read into the memory of the little maid of Domremy. As she
raised the siege of Orleans, so her memory encouraged the Allies to
persevere through years of agony nearly as great as her own.

[4] We can see from the statues of Jeanne d’Arc how near akin are the
sex-complex and the art-complex. I do not refer to the innumerable
pretty statues scattered throughout the French churches, which are
merely ideal portraits of sainted women. The magnificent equestrian
statue by Fremiet in the Place des Pyramides, Paris, is a portrait of a
plump little French peasant-girl trying to look fierce, and succeeding
about as well as Audrey might if she tried to play Lady Macbeth. But it
is essentially female, and, in my idea of Jeanne d’Arc, is therefore
wrong, for we really know nothing about her beyond what we read in
the trials. Even more female is the statue of her by Romaneill in the
Melbourne Art Gallery, in which the artist has actually depicted the
corslet as curved to accommodate moderate-sized breasts, a thing which
would probably have shocked Jeanne herself, for she wished to make
herself sexually unattractive. The face, though common, is probably
accurate in that it depicts her expression as saintly. No doubt when
she was listening to her Voices she did look dreamy and ethereal. But
we have no authority for believing that she was in the slightest degree
beautiful--if anything, she was probably rather the reverse.

[5] I hate to suggest that these specks before the eyes may have been
the result of toxæmia from the intestine induced by confinement and
terror.

[6] Grotius was the Dutchman who could write Latin verse at the age of
nine, and had to leave Holland because of fierce theological strife. He
began the study for his great work on the laws of war in prison, from
which he escaped by the remarkable loyalty of his wife. Like so many
romantic episodes, fiction is here anticipated by fact.

[7] Sir W. Stirling-Maxwell, _The Cloister Life of Charles V_.

[8] It has been thought that she suffered from
“phantom-tumour”--“pseudo-cyesis” in medical language.

[9] Dr. Gordon Davidson, a well-known ophthalmic surgeon of Sydney,
thinks that Pepys probably suffered from iridocyclitis, the result of
some toxæmia, possibly caused by his extreme imprudence in eating and
drinking.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.



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