A Celebration of Wilkie Collins, 1902 Article

A Celebration of Wilkie Collins, article in The Speaker 1902

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IN his recently published biography of Dickens, Mr. F. G. Kitton, referring to Edwin Drood, mentions the report that Wilkie Collins had undertaken to complete the work which Dickens left unfinished. An older generation may remember that the reputation of Collins then stood so high that the rumour was not dismissed as preposterous. It was considered that he possessed qualifications fitting him well for the task. Perhaps no contemporary writer was better acquainted with Dickens’s method of work, or in stronger sympathy with his instinct for melodrama and “intensity.” The two had collaborated more than once-—with astonishing success, if the object aimed at was to ignore the characteristics of each. Wilkie Collins explained how the thing was done. The plot decided upon, they wrote their respective portions side by side, and each inserted passages in the chapters of the other, with the result that this arrangement deprived the passages so treated of their Dickens or Collins flavour, and rendered, as Wilkie Collins said, discovery of the exact nature of the collaboration difficult, if not impossible. It was a diversion that pleased them both; but the wonder cannot be suppressed that Dickens was so willing to sacrifice his individuality. Wilkie Collins left Edwin Drood alone, of course. That his name should ever have been associated with it was absurd. He himself never had any intention of laying his hand upon the magician’s work, but the collaboration left distinct and definite traces upon his own style, more particularly in minor characterisations.

Literary fashions are almost as changeable as fashions in dress, and Wilkie Collins is to-day out of fashion. True, many of his novels have acquired the fame of the sixpenny edition. But his is not a name to conjure with, and if reference is ever made to him, it is as the producer of sensational novels of a type which long ago lost its freshness. Mr. Guy Boothby is, no doubt, regarded by many as his lineal successor, possibly as an improvement upon him. Every decade has its host of sensational writers. Wilkie Collins was only a sensational writer; he has had his vogue, and is known no more.

Is this attitude towards him right? Is it just to look upon him as the inventor of ingenious “shockers" and nothing better? A fair consideration of the score of novels from his pen cannot but result in the conclusion that Wilkie Collins is entitled to a place among the writers of his country much higher than has yet been granted him. He is in many respects a great novelist. In his best books there is an insight into character, intensity of imagination, a wealth of ingenuity, humour, and a compelling interest, that no modern worker in the same department of fiction possesses. The books produced towards the end of his life are curiously unequal, but who can deny the extraordinary merit of The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Armadale, of the short stories of After Dark? Anyone unfamiliar with Wilkie Collins should read A Terrible Strange Bed, in the After Dark volume. In that-—surely one of the finest short stories in the language—-nearly all his qualities are exhibited, on a small scale. A drugged man lying on a bed which has a heavy tester, a picture of a cavalier wearing a hat with three plumes-—the materials are simple, but they are treated with masterly skill.

Reading the story, we are reminded of Edgar Allan Poe. The drugged man, preternaturally excited by an overdose of the opiate, is alone in the room; there is only the picture to arrest his attention. The feathers in the gallant hat have a strange fascination for him. He watches them. After a while he fancies there is a difference in them. One of them is not so plain to view as at first; part of it has disappeared. How has this happened? As he endeavours to explain the matter to himself, the second feather alters; and ultimately the third. Then the truth flashes upon him; the tester is sinking, so slowly, so noiselessly, that had he slept its descent would not have wakened him; and its quiet, remorseless fall blots out the picture. At first, paralysed with fright, he can only stare stupidly at the descending death. Then, with an effort, he rolls from the bed; and so just escapes being crushed to death. There is a horror in this story that never degenerates into repulsiveness; an eeriness that holds the reader as spell-bound under the sliding terror as the intended victim.

The Moonstone has been called the best detective story ever written. It is, at once, much more and much less than that. The detective part of it is not only secondary, but, on the whole, ineffective. Sergeant Cuff is an admirable figure, but he is beaten in a way that would have shamed Sherlock Holmes. The power of the story lies in the suggestion of mystery, wonderfully sustained. The unaccountable disappearance of the diamond; the feeling of hostile influences around the chief persons of the story; the way in which the various points of view are expressed by Wilkie Collins’s favourite method-—not then out worn-—often trusting the telling of the tale to first one, then another of the characters—-these are the elements which give the novel its attractiveness. The story does not stand or fall by the complexity of its machinery; it has the interest of character. The heroine is excellently sketched, and there is real pathos in Rosanna Spearman and the luckless doctor‘s assistant who is successful in unravelling the many-sided puzzle. But it is in The Woman in White that we find Wilkie Collins’s greatest triumph in characterisation. The book grips one from the start; the touch of a hand laid slightly and suddenly on the shoulder of Walter Hartright as he was walking home from Hampstead at night thrills the reader as it thrilled him. We are held in the bonds of the mystery throughout. But even more than in the story are we interested in Count Fosco, a creation or which the greatest novelist might be proud. There is not a false touch in the conception. A magnificent, terrible villain, who yet cultivates the courtesies of life, the love of the arts, and has a true tenderness for his white mice and his canaries—he reminds us of the dark chronicles of the Latin race, of the suave criminals of fifteenth century Italy. Armadale is, perhaps, Wilkie Collins’s maturest work. In no other of his novels do we find the same ease, deftness of execution, and sureness of touch in dealing with his men and women. The fascinating adventuress Miss Gwilt——a near relation of Becky Sharp’s-—the country solicitor, Pedgift, Senior, and the easy-going "hero," Allan Armadale—-these present three distinct types, each drawn with equal power and fidelity to life. Allan Armadale, especially, is worthy of George Eliot.

Mr. Hardy holds that modern writers have no story to tell. Wilkie Collins had, and knew well how to tell it. He, like the Ancient Mariner, holds the reader with his glittering eye from first to last. So potent is his power that even in those stories that are not his best one is compelled to read on. His methods are not the methods of to-day--but the admission is not a condemnation, and many a modern novelist, who sneers at his technique, might, if he would, learn a much-needed lesson from Wilkie Collins. Though his imagination had a strain of that feverishness which Taine fancied he detected in Dickens, yet it was entirely devoid of offence. In his writing there is none of the spiritual clamminess that pervades the writing of Poe. Though in his books “horrors upon horrors’ head accumulate," the tone is absolutely healthy, the trend clean and wholesome. Collins had a full sense of the responsibility attaching to a writer of fiction-—especially the class of fiction in which he was an expert. And when many of the popular writers of to-day are buried in the limbo of oblivion, the name of Wilkie Collins will, we venture to think, survive as the representative of a school of fiction which has boasted numerous craftsmen, but few masters. - Alpha

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The Fear of Death by Edward Lawrence Keyes M.D. 1910

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"The knell, the shroud, the mattock and the grave,
The deep, damp vault, the darkness and the worm."

SURELY an unlovely contemplation; but is the actuality itself so desperate? I shall endeavour to show that it is not, aided by some observations selected from a professional experience covering nearly half a century.

Primarily, one may ask, is the fear of death a constant fact? Probably it exists to a considerable extent among adults. But is it of all mankind generally true that, "He that cuts off twenty years of life, cuts off so many years of fearing death"?

A drowning man will catch at a straw. One who jumps into the water with the motive of self-destruction, when in face of the ultimate fact, will very often accept means of escape.
The instinct of self-preservation is implanted in us by nature, and is shared to a greater or less extent by all living creatures.

But the fear of death is another matter, and is probably not a natural law, but an acquired peculiarity. Insects and animals do not seem to possess it — although they all commonly struggle to escape disagreeable predicaments and to save their physical structure when its integrity is threatened.

Yet very many intelligent human beings shrink from the idea of death, prefer not to talk about it except in a general way, and experience uncomfortable sensations when in its
visible presence.

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This fear is physical. It is not in its essence moral; nor is it intellectual, and it has nothing directly to do with one's solicitude as to the future condition of the departed, or with pity as to the distress his demise may have occasioned to others left behind.

The fear of death is and always has been very easily dominated by strong emotions. Military valour, religious zeal, the exalted tension of pride or duty or affection, easily lead men of the soundest disposition to wholly disregard death and everything pertaining to it; while the innumerable motives — jealousy, pique, anger, disappointment, sorrow, sickness, distress of any sort, pecuniary loss, disgrace, and a thousand others that lead to suicide — indicate into what contempt the act of death may be thrown by other even trivial emotions.

At Ceos, an island in the AEgean Sea, it appears there was a law at one time obliging all the inhabitants over sixty to end their lives by drinking poppy or hemlock juice; but the law was not enforced except in periods of prospective famine; and of this act AElian records that the antiquated Ceans, bedecked with wreaths, collected together and drank hemlock with joy to put an end to an existence that could no longer be of any benefit to the state.

This age of sixty, then, appears to have been early recognised as a point at which one might be justified in making his quietus — and that, too, before the discovery of chloroform.

The ancient prevalence of harakiri in Japan, when sometimes all the followers of a Daimio slaughtered themselves as a matter of course upon the death of their chief, would seem to indicate a very moderate fear of death in that nation, although here the stronger emotions of pride, sense of personal honour, disgrace if the act be not performed, are involved; and the fact that the suttee in India is only restrained by the strong, overshadowing arm of England is another like indication.

It may be, then, that our own intensified physical horror of death is the inherited product of centuries of religious teaching, and that in its roots it has essentially a moral basis.

But it is as natural to die as it is to live — and as easy. Practically all the distress witnessed as taking place in the act of dying is the automatic tissue struggle against dissolution, and is not recognised by the individual who seems to be acutely suffering. Occasionally in the delirium of fever, in uraemia and other intoxications, in certain of the brain degenerations witnessed in old age, there is an exhilaration or happy, peaceful calm that pervades the final scene.

I remember one dear lady, a Swedenborgian, who believed that after death one would follow the occupation that had been most congenial in the present life. This lady was especially fond of babies, fondling them and giving them personal care. When she came to die, of a lingering, most painful illness — at the final moment a beatific smile pervaded her countenance, she beamed in gentle ecstasy, and murmured, "Now I see the heavenly light; I see a baby."

Yet Nature is not often so lavish with her kindness. Usually everything is dulled, blunted, so that at the border line between life and death it is often difficult, even impossible for a certain time, to say whether the soul has fled or not. It was long debated in medical circles whether or not there was a reliable test for death. Indeed, the tissues always survive the departure of the vital spark for a longer or shorter time. A muscle will contract to the electric current for a considerable time after the eye is dull, the intellect a closed book, the soul on its way. The hair grows palpably after death.

Of course there are some exceptions, and once in a while, so I read and so I am told, some one dies really in conscious terror and protest; but I have not seen such a taking off, and I can state candidly that of the many scores of deaths that I have witnessed, in hospital and out, among the very poor and very wealthy, the young and the old, the pious and the blasphemer, some of which have been very painful to behold, in nearly all of them the main actor at the last moment was not conscious of what was going on. The occasional examples of conscious cheerfulness are the exception, and still more so instances of terminal torture.

One morning I was urgently summoned to call at a neighbour's, the message being that the master of the house had been found dead in bed. He had been well as usual on retiring the night before. In the early morning a maid-servant about the house had seen him leave his room to enter the bath-room. As he did not come to breakfast, he was supposed to be sleeping. Later on, the household becoming uneasy, some one entered his room, and found the old gentleman dead, wreathed in smiles.

A post-mortem examination disclosed a small puncture like a pinprick in the thin, degenerate wall of the main artery just as it left the heart. This puncture lay within the pericardial sac — the fibrous membrane that holds the heart as in a bag; and so the method of death became evident. With each pulse-beat there had been forced out into the pericardial sac through the pin-prick hole a few drops of blood, and the gradual accumulation of this blood slowly but relentlessly pressed upon the heart, until that great hollow muscle was painlessly crushed out of function. What could be more gracious than such a death? And yet this old gentleman may have spent many hours of his more than eighty years of life in vague contemplative terror of the onslaught of the dread destroyer.

A most zealously pious individual, perfectly sure of his soul's salvation, often shrinks from the contemplation of dissolution as strenuously as the hardened sinner indifferent to his soul's welfare, perhaps stoically accepting his possibility of infinite damnation with a supercilious smile.

And yet, practically, we are all to ourselves immortal. We must all die, we know it and we say it — but not just yet; and, as a general rule, I believe, the "just yet" does not come to us ever, during consciousness, for we always have hope; therefore, in very fact, we are immortal.

I well remember a kind-hearted old gentleman who for years had this mortal terror of death. After a slight apoplexy, which destroyed the vision in one eye, he became practically bedridden. He was obliged to receive constant attention from a trained nurse; he had to be fed, he saw no one — yet he told me that even in that condition he would be willing to live on forever.

On the other hand, I recall a case exactly the reverse. This also was an old gentleman, a lawyer of great prominence. On an occasion, being very ill, he entertained me night after night at length with most philosophic crystallisations of thought relative to life and its terminations, but did not directly allude to his own approaching dissolution, which seemed imminent and which he plainly contemplated. He recovered, and grew old in sections, as it were. Soft cataract occurred in both his eyes, so that reading, his main source of comfort, was denied him; yet his cataracts could not be removed. His legs failed him, so that he constantly stumbled going about the house, but, being of an imperious nature, he would not accept the services of a constant attendant. He became restless and could not sleep. His stomach gave out and he could not eat — nor did he have any desire to eat. Other functions faltered, making life a burden.

In this condition one day he said to me: "Doctor, I shall continue to lie here on my bed because I am too weak to stand. I shall take sips of water and eat fragments of cracked ice because I am thirsty; but I shall take no more food unless I become hungry. I am not now hungry and see no reason why I should eat food. If by taking food and stimulants I could gain strength enough to get out of this bed, what would be the advantage? I could not walk about without stumbling; I could not digest my food; I could not see to read. I should be nursing a vegetable existence."

I tried to persuade him to take a brighter view of the situation, but in vain. Finally I said to him, "Well, if I order you any prescription will you take it?" He deliberated a moment, and then with a gentle but serious smile replied: "Doctor, if you will assure me that what you are about to ask me to do will not prolong life, I shall do it."

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People who are ill, seriously ill, do not, as a rule, ask whether they may expect to die or not. In light illnesses they do ask, tempestuously, sometimes hysterically; but not when the real crisis is imminent. Then they do not in words approach the real issue. There are exceptions to this, as well as to all rules, among which the most notable that I have encountered was that of a certain distinguished statesman. His mind was singularly clear, his emotions, on the whole, secondary. His last illness was quite prolonged, and his final sinking away gradual, without pain. Perhaps a day before his death I examined him carefully, as was my custom, finding the usual evidences of slowly ebbing vitality. He had not spoken or taken food for a day or more, and during this period I examined him many times, saying nothing, and he being, as it seemed, absolutely torpid, making no motion, evidencing no sensibility; but manifestly his keen mind had been alert to what had been going on, and in seeming jocose reproof at the inefficiency of result of my repeated examinations, he smiled feebly without opening his eyes and remarked, in a pleasant voice, "Well, doctor, am I officially dead yet?" He never spoke again in my hearing; but surely here was no struggle, no regret.

In sickness it is the common rule for whatever dread or terror or horror of death there may be to expend itself during the earlier stages of the malady, and when the real termination is at hand the sensibilities and the senses are so obtunded by kindly nature that one sinks to rest as in going to sleep.

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If there be convulsive seizures they are fearful to behold; but when such patients, instead of dying in their convulsions, recover, they have no memory of the seizure; therefore, surely the one who dies has none. The final agony, as it is called, the gasping, contractile muscular spasm, like a shudder, that so often accompanies the last breath — these things are reflexes in a physical way, and do not mean any struggle or resistance or any consciousness of pain or discomfort. The same may be said of the mucous rattling in the throat and the seemingly painful and laboured breathing of the final ending.

Those who have had this stress and have recovered have no memory of what seemed to be a painful struggle. Therefore, I believe it to be more than probable that the final act of dying is as simple and as painless as going to sleep — and practically we all die daily, without knowing it, when we go to sleep for the night.

Many wish for death; either to escape prolonged physical suffering or, more often, to get rid of mental distress of one sort or another. To bear with the latter calls for moral more than physical courage. The suicide is judged harshly by the sound mind.

"When all the blandishments of life are gone,
The coward sneaks to death, the brave live on."

The advocacy of the propriety of suicide, although sustained with serious argument by the Stoics, the Epicureans, the Cynics — by most of the philosophers — was, after all, a material and heathen contention.

The axiom, Mori licet cui vivere non placeat, has been repudiated alike by the Christian religion, by modern society, and by common sense. A self-respecting character accepts life as a trust to be made the best of and to be rendered up without personal co-operation, just as it was received without personal solicitation. This contention has always been sustained by the Christian Church, and St. Augustine, in the City of God, argued against the Stoical pretension that reason made man the arbiter of his own life, and that man was superior to the gods in that he could rid himself of his life, which the gods could not. For the Stoics maintained that earthly ills — pain, misery, distress, age, etc. — were reasons making suicide justifiable; but St. Augustine answered that a philosophy which, teaches man to ignore complacently the ills of the flesh cannot consistently at the same time justify him in taking his own life to escape these same ills.

But the desire for death, either by the sound or unsound mind, is apart from this investigation. The present point is, is death itself the horrible thing that so many believe it to be?

A woman leaps shrieking from an upper window and is impaled upon an iron picket fence. Lifted off, she groans and writhes in agony, and presently dies in torture and distress. The sympathetic spectators sigh with relief, look at one another anxiously, and exclaim : "What a horrible death! She died in torture."

And so she did. She died in torture — perhaps, also, she died in a silk dress, but not of it; she died of shock, or hemorrhage, or because some important vital organ was thrown out of function — and not one of these three things is in itself painful.

This woman might have made the same leap with the same shrieks and been impaled in a manner as painful, entailing all the agony and all the writhing, all the distress, and yet, not having injured a vital organ, not having had a sufficient shock, not having lacerated an important blood-vessel, she might very well recover.

On the other hand, by the same fall, without the shrieks, she might have struck upon her head, broken her neck, and died without any knowledge of having been hurt or injured in any way.

A personal incident demonstrates this assertion to me satisfactorily. One day in March my horse was brought to the door. I mounted, noticing that the asphalt pavement was swept to glittering brightness by the wind. Presently I became conscious of riding quietly along the road more than a mile from home, but felt uncomfortable about the head. Removal of my hat showed that it was broken and dirty and disclosed the fact that the scalp was matted with blood. The clothing also upon that side showed evidence of having touched the ground.

I asked a policeman if I had fallen from the horse. He grinned assent, manifestly believing me to be tipsy. I turned quietly homeward and entered the stable. The floorman there said to me, "I hear that you have had a bad fall, sir." I sent for the groom who had carried this report to the stable. He affirmed that, having brought around the horse, I had mounted. The horse had started off and immediately gone down upon the slippery pavement, landing me squarely on my head. The horse went up the street, but turned presently, was caught and led back. The groom and another thought I had been killed, as I was unconscious for a moment, but presently I revived, and, in spite of their expostulations, insisted, rather incoherently, that, having come out to ride, ride I would, so they helped me mount and I trotted quietly up the road.

I was absolutely unaware of any of these happenings, and to this day have no recollection of any pain or discomfort at the time, or even of having fallen at all, and I must have been knocked out for many minutes to have covered the ground to the spot where consciousness returned. The lump and the wound upon the head, lasting many days, were ample proof that something had happened; yet if I had never recovered consciousness after the fall death would have been absolutely painless and non-terrible.

In short, it seems to me that all physical trouble or distress occurs before death, and does not cause death, although it may be a symptom of the thing that really does cause death; and that death finally in itself is a kindly phenomenon.

It is surely so in illness. We suffer the agony of peritonitis, but the agony does not kill. It is the painless sepsis that does the work. We writhe in the torture of renal colic, but it is the possible kidney suppression and consequent intoxication and other complications that interest the surgeon, not the pain. The distress during breathing is worse in asthma than that experienced in pneumonia — pneumonia that has been justly called "the old man's friend." Indeed, in any malady, as a rule, all pain and distress have usually terminated some time before death, which in itself is finally painless.

It would seem natural to expect that advancing age, fully aware of failing function and progressively diminishing vigour, would welcome prospective death, or at least accept it with greater complacency than would be the case with rank and vigorous youth, glowing in the consciousness of untrammelled physical capacity.

"Youth with its sunlit, passionate eyes, Its roseate velvety skin."

But this does not seem to be the fact.

Children, of course, in their innocent ignorance, look upon death in curious wonderment. The healthy youth and vigorous man, unless during a temporary lapse into emotional morbidness or hysterical despondency, consider the event so remote as not to be worthy of present action; but old age, jealous of escaping opportunity, desires to hoard the slippery years, and shrinks from contemplating the inevitable.

And yet youth is long and age is short. Ennui is frequent in the former, time lags, the years teem unending in spite of the multiplicity of joyous incident. In age the galloping years hardly give us time to read the numbers on the mile-posts. Happily so; how dreadful it would be were it reversed, if youth should gallop, and creeping, creaking age prolong itself with interminable ennui! Campbell puts it aptly:

"Heaven gives our years of fading strength
    Indemnifying fleetness,
And those of youth a seeming length
    Proportioned to their sweetness."

And yet we well know that no one may be called happy until he is dead. The dread possibilities of failure and disgrace are often suspended over gray hairs and only fail to fall on account of the timely intervention of death.

How many tendencies to evil — more especially moral failings curbed during the forceful period of robust manhood — assert their supremacy later on and bring down to disgrace a life history that would have sparkled with credit if only a timely death had intervened to prevent the babbling inefficiency of dotage: for truly there is nothing so undignified, so paltry, so unworthy, as the vapid foolishness of very advanced age, even if it be not vicious.

Therefore, after life has achieved something, death should be looked upon as a welcome visitor, a kindly friend.

The motto chosen by John Fiske to adorn his library inculcates admirably a well-recognised point of view:

"Disce ut semper victurus;
Vive ut eras moriturus"

Continue to learn as though you were to live forever; direct your life as if you expected to die tomorrow.

Following this maxim death becomes an incident in life as acceptable as birth.

"Death is the crown of life.

Were death denied, poor man would live in vain.
Were death denied, to live would not be life.
Were death denied, e'en fools would wish to die."

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Shakespeare and Plagiarism by Henry Noble MacCracken 1910

Shakespeare and Plagiarism by Henry Noble MacCracken 1910

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Among the curious alterations in public sentiment that have come in the last century or two, none is more striking than the change of attitude in regard to what is called "plagiarism." Plagiarism may be defined as the appropriation for one's own use of the literary ideas of another. The laws of patent and of copyright have led us into thinking that the ideas of a play must not be borrowed in any degree, but must originate in every detail with the writer. This is as if we should say to an inventor, "Yes, you may have invented a safety trigger for revolvers, but you must not apply it to revolvers until you have invented a completely new type of revolver from the original matchlock."

But the playwright of to-day cannot help plagiarizing his technique, many of his situations, and even his plots from earlier plays; consequently, he tries to conceal his borrowings, to placate public opinion by changing the names and the environment of his characters.

The Elizabethan audiences were less exacting. If a play about King Lear were written and acted with some success, they thought it perfectly honest for another dramatist to use this material in building up a new and better play on the story of King Lear. They cared even less when the dramatist went to other dramas for hints on minor details. The modern audience, if not the modern world at large, holds the same view. So long as the mind of the borrower transforms and makes his own whatever he borrows, so long will his work be applauded by his audience, whatever be the existing state of the copyright laws or of public fastidiousness.

Hence we do not to-day hunt up the sources of Shakespeare's plots and characters in order to prove plagiarism, but in order to understand just how great was the power of his genius in transmuting common elements into his fine gold.

It is customary to say: "Shakespeare did not invent his plots. He was not interested in plots." So far is this from the truth that the amount of pains and skill spent by him in working over any one of his best comedies or tragedies would more than suffice for the construction of a very good modern plot. It is more true to say of most of his work, "Shakespeare did not waste his time in inventing stories. [There are two plays at least which have plots probably original with Shakespeare — Love's Labour's Lost and The Tempest. Both of these draw largely, however, from contemporary history and adventure, and the central idea is directly borrowed from actual events.] He took stories where he found them, realized their dramatic possibilities, and spent infinite pains in weaving them together into a harmonious whole."

There is one other point to remember. The sources of Shakespeare's plays were no better literary material than the sources of most Elizabethan plays. Shakespeare's practice in adapting older plays was the common practice of the time. We can measure, therefore, the greatness of Shakespeare's achievement by a comparison with what others have made out of similar material.

Just as Shakespeare's plays fall into the groups of history, tragedy, and comedy, so his chief sources are three in number: biography, as found in the Chronicle of Holinshed and Plutarch's Lives; romance, as found in the novels of the period, which were most of them translations from Italian novelle; and dramatic material from other plays.

Holinshed. — Raphael Holinshed (died 1580?) published in 1578 a history of England, Scotland, and Ireland, usually known as Holinshed's Chronicle. The two immense folio volumes contain an account of Britain "from its first inhabiting" up to his own day, largely made up by combining the works of previous historians. The Chronicle bears evidence, however, of enormous and painstaking research which makes it valuable even now. Holinshed's style was clear, but not possessed of any distinctly literary quality. Much of what Shakespeare used was indeed but a paraphrase of an earlier chronicler, Edward Hall. Holinshed was uncritical, too, since he made no attempt to separate the legendary from the truly historical material. So far as drama is concerned, however, this was rather a help than a hindrance, since legend often crystallizes most truly the spirit of a career in an act or a saying which never had basis in fact. The work is notable chiefly for its patriotic tone, of which there is certainly more than an echo in Shakespeare's historical plays. But the effects of steadfast continuity of national purpose, of a belief in the greatness of England, and of an insistent appeal to patriotism, which are such important elements in Shakespeare's histories, are totally wanting in Holinshed.

Not only are all of the histories of Shakespeare based either directly or through the medium of other plays upon Holinshed, but his two great tragedies, Macbeth and King Lear (the latter through an earlier play), and his comedy Cymbeline are also chiefly indebted to it. The work was, moreover, the source of many plays by other dramatists.

Plutarch. — Plutarch of Chaeronea, a Greek author of the first century a.d., wrote forty-six "parallel" Lives, of famous Greeks and Romans. Each famous Greek was contrasted with a famous Roman whose career was somewhat similar to his own. The Lives have been ever since among the most popular of the classics, for they are more than mere biographies. They are the interpretation of two worlds, with all their tragic history, by one who felt the fatal force of a resistless destiny.

A scholarly French translation of Plutarch's Lives was published in 1559 by Jacques Amyot, Bishop of Bellozane. Twenty years after (1579) Thomas North, later Sir Thomas, published his magnificent English version. The vigor and spirit which he flung into his work can only be compared to that of William Tyndale in his translation of the New Testament. Here was very different material for drama from the dry bones of history offered by Holinshed. Shakespeare paid North the sincerest compliment by borrowing, particularly in Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, not only the general story, but whole speeches with only those changes necessary for making blank verse out of prose. The last speeches of Antony and Cleopatra are indeed nearly as impressive in North's narrative form as in Shakespeare's play.

In addition to the tragedies already named, Julius Caesar and almost certainly the suggestion of Timon of Athens, though not the play as a whole, were taken from Plutarch's Lives. Other Elizabethans were not slow to avail themselves of this unequaled treasure-house of story.

Italian and Other Fiction. — Except for Geoffrey Chaucer (1338-1400), whose Troilus and Criseyde Shakespeare dramatized, and John Gower (died 1408), whose Confessio Amantis is one of the books out of which the plot of Pericles may have come, there was little good English fiction read in the Elizabethan period. Educated people read, instead, Italian novelle, or short tales, which were usually gathered into some collection of a hundred or so. Many of these were translated into English before Shakespeare's time; and a number of similar collections had been made by English authors, who had translated good stories whenever they found them.

One of these was Gli Heccatommithi, 1565 (The Hundred Tales), by Giovanni Giraldi, surnamed Cinthio, which was later translated into French and was the source of Measure for Measure and Othello. Another collection was that of Matteo Bandello, whose Tales, 1554-1573, translated into French by Belleforest, furnished the sources of Much Ado About Nothing, and perhaps Twelfth Night. The greatest of these collections was the Decameron, c. 1353, by Giovanni Boccaccio, one of whose stories, translated by William Painter in his Palace of Pleasure, 1564, furnished the source of All's Well That Ends Well. Another story of the Decameron was probably the source of the romantic part of the plot of Cymbeline. The Merry Wives of Windsor had a plot like the story in Straparola's Tredici Piacevole Notte (1550), Thirteen Pleasant Evenings; and The Merchant of Venice borrows its chief plot from Giovanni Florentine's II Pecorone.

Two of Shakespeare's plays are based on English novels written somewhat after the Italian manner — As You Like It on Thomas Lodge's novel-poem, Rosalynde, and The Winter's Tale from Robert Greene's Pandosto. The Two Gentlemen of Verona is from a Spanish story in the Italian style, the Diana of Jorge de Montemayor. The Comedy of Errors from Plautus is his only play based on classical sources.

The Italian novelle emphasized situation, but had little natural dialogue and still less characterization. The Elizabethan dramatists used them only for their plots. Never did works of higher genius spring from less inspired sources.

The Plays used by Shakespeare.—Although Shakespeare made up one of his plots, the Comedy of Errors, from two plays of Plautus (254-184 b.c), the Menaechmi and Amphitruo, the rest of the plays he used for material were contemporary work. He borrowed from them plots and situations, and occasionally even lines. With the exception, however, of one of the early histories, the plays he made use of are in themselves of no value as literature. Their sole claim to notice is that they served the need of the great playwright. None but the student will ever read them. In practically every case Shakespeare so developed the story that the fiction became essentially his own; while the poetic quality of the verse, the development of character, and the heightening of dramatic effect, which he built upon it, left no more of the old play in sight than the statue shows of the bare metal rods upon which the sculptor molds his clay.

Seven histories go back to the earlier plays on the kings of England. The Second and Third Parts of Henry VI are taken from two earlier plays often called the First and Second Contentions (between the two noble houses of York and Lancaster). The First and Second parts of Henry IV, and Henry V, are all three an expansion of a cruder production, the Famous Victories of Henry V. Richard III is based upon the True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of York; King John upon the Troublesome Reigne of John, King of England, the latter undoubtedly the best of the sources of Shakespeare's Histories.

King Leir and His Daughters is the only extant play which is known to have formed the basis of a Shakespearean tragedy. Shakespeare made additions in this case from other sources, borrowing Gloucester's story from Sidney's Arcadia. The earlier play of Hamlet, which it is believed Shakespeare used, is not now in existence.

Among the comedies, the Taming of the Shrew is directly based upon the Taming of a Shrew. Measure for Measure is less direct, borrowing from George Whetstone's play in two parts, Promos and Cassandra (written before 1578).

The existence of versions in German and Dutch of plays which present plots similar in structure to Shakespeare's, but less highly developed, leads scholars to advance the theory that several lost plays may have been sources for some of his dramas. Entries or mentions of plays, with details like Shakespeare's, dated earlier than his own plays could have been in existence, are also used to further the same view. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and, with less reason, Timon of Athens, and Twelfth Night, are thought to have been based more or less on earlier lost plays.

Finally, a number of plays perhaps suggested details in Shakespeare's plays. Of plays so influenced, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and Henry VIII are the chief. But the debt is negligible at best, so far as the general student is concerned.

To conclude, what Shakespeare borrowed was the raw material of drama. What he gave to this material was life and art. No better way of appreciating the dramatist at his full worth could be pursued than a patient perusal and comparison of the sources of his plays with Shakespeare's own work.

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The Critical Characteristics of Edgar Allan Poe 1851

The Critical Characteristics of Edgar Allan Poe, article in Graham's Magazine Feb 1851

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Poe was, as we have observed, a critic as well as a poet; and, we must write it, an irritable, inconsistent, at times unjust, often personal, always, when criticising unfavorably, sarcastic, bitter, and unsparing critic. His criticisms, many of them, were too pointed, too bitter, too cruelly galling to the assailed to be endured with equanimity or without sharp resentment. His literary rank, and high repute for taste, artistic skill, and general judgment concerning letters, were too eminent to allow him or his attacks to be treated with scorn, or passed over in silence. They have been cruelly and unmanfully avenged.

They show the worst phase of Poe's literary character, and we would that we could in justice pass them by unconsidered-—but bad as they indeed are, they are not in any degree so bad as they have been made to seem, and do not to our eyes indicate a bad heart, a malicious desire to give pain, or to avenge fancied injuries, an envious jealousy of the repute of others, or an arrogant self-confidence, that rendered him, as it has been alleged, careless of the rights of others.

A poetical artist himself of the highest order, a rhythmist and versifier skilled almost beyond example, an analyzer and mental anatomist of wondrous power, he was as intolerant of false rhyme, false rhythm, ill-regulated metre, as the utmost fanatic for music of a false note or discord; as intolerant, as he was certain to detect and merciless to punish. Doubtless they did jar on his sensitive poetic nerves, and excited a storm of indignation which he could allay only by exposing what seemed to him an imposture and a sham.

It does not, however, appear to us that in most or many instances, personal jealousy, or personal resentments could have had much to do. Many of those whom he most scientifically and pitilessly mangles are persons so infinitely below all comparison with him in genius, art, skill or learning, that jealousy is a thing not to be thought of. Jealousy never could have intervened between Edgar Allan Poe and Dr. "Flaccus" Ward, or William Ellery Channing, William W. Lord, or Henry B. Hirst, as felt by the former toward the latter; yet it is these whom he has pursued with something closely resembling personal animosity and vindictiveness, though except in one instance, that of Mr. Hirst, we have reason to believe that he had no personal acquaintance with, and consequently no liking or disliking for any one of the three above mentioned.

Of his pertinacious and long-sustained enmity to one whom we esteem and he, to judge from some of his chance passages, seems to have himself esteemed, the first of American poets, the most original no less than the purest, noblest, and serenest —Mr. Longfellow—we must speak differently. In this case, jealousy was possible, for both stood so near to the summit of the tree that there was even room for rivalry, and probably there was some jealousy in the case. But utterly unjust as we consider his outcry against Mr. Longfellow for plagiary, which he repeated absolutely usque ad nauseam, we must admit that we believe he had convinced himself of the truth of the charge, and we believe he never convinced anybody else.

But it must be observed that the detection of possible or probable plagiaries was a prominent and peculiar point in his singular idiosyncrasy. It was an occupation peculiarly suited to his captious, scrutinizing, analytic mind, to his doubting and suspicious temper, to his peculiar notions concerning evidence, investigation, ratiocination, to his wide and discursive reading, to his fine poetic memory, and to his peculiar habits of finding proofs in trifles light as air, and of seeking for them in the most improbable places and manners.

He was perpetually discovering plagiarisms of persons wholly indifferent to him, not only on himself—-though this was so completely a monomania on his part that he would in no sort have astonished or dismayed us had he sat down gravely to prove that Shakespeare, or Milton, or Pindar had plagiarized some one or more of his works-—but on others, whose writings in many instances it is a thousand to one the accused had never seen, and fifty to one that he had never heard of. But he had a blood-hound's nose for a fancied plagiarism, and when he once found, or suspected one, he never left the track till he had run it into the ground, going even to the length of finding convincing proofs of the plagiarism in the very circumstances which, we hesitate not to say, would have wrought on any one else the contrary conviction. As for instance, in the case of Motherwell's ballad of Bonnie George Campbell, translated into German by Wolff, and translated into English by Professor Longfellow, for this very magazine.

Now, Professor Longfellow's version contains one deviation from the original, which, had his version not been a translation, would have been a deviation from true antithesis or parallelism, an alteration from the better to the worse, which so able a scholar, and so skilful a versifier could not have committed accidentally, and which, had he been stealing so barefacedly and literally, he would not have resorted to purposely for concealment of his theft. The cause of the change is evident, at a glance, by one who looks to the German, and is otherwise utterly inexplicable. The ballad of Motherwell commences thus—

Hie upon Hielands
And low upon Tay.

The German, translating literally, either ignorantly, or by the error of his printer, wrote Tag for Tay, signifying in English Day, and Professor Longfellow, in translating it, failed to detect the blunder, and wrote

High in the Highlands
And deep in the day,

there being no possible parallelism to be drawn, or antithesis to be made, between high and low, or high and deep, the one relating to a point of place, the other to a point of time.

This fact struck us so forcibly, on first reading the beautiful lines in question, without having previously read Motherwell, or heard of the alleged plagiarism, that we observed and commented on the singular incompleteness and want of truth in the apposition, so unlike the usual accuracy and finish which are Longfellow's great characteristics.

Yet not only did this never strike Poe, in his determination to detest and expose a plagiarism, an end possessing as great a charm to him as ever did the discovery of a long-hidden murder to Mr. Bucket the detective; but he even found in another circumstance, the omission of a very forcible and important Scottish word, to the manifest injury of the sense, doubtless omitted by the German owing to his inability to translate or comprehend it, which is, in truth, strong circumstantial evidence in favor of the double translation, evidence in favor of the reality of this plagiarism. Though such a plagiarism, had it been one, could have been ascribed to nothing short of actual insanity in the plagiarist, discovery being inevitable, and early and ignominious exposure imminent.

The attacks, therefore, on Mr. Longfellow, we do not so much regard as the consequences of animosity or jealousy, as of the peculiar character of Poe's genius and disposition, such as his mania for prying into mysteries, and hunting out or manufacturing evidences and resemblances, no difficult art for one of his rare capacity for analysis and ratiocination, such as his power of inventing facts to establish theories, and converting conclusions deduced from preexisting circumstances into the originating causes of the very circumstances.

In the same point of view we regard his accusation against Mr. Aldrich, of plagiarism on a ballad of Hood's, where we defy any one, with less than Poe's acuteness and patient subtlety of analysis, to detect even a remote parallelism, although he contrives almost to establish a direct plagiarism.

Again, we consider it a strong argument against the attribution of his sarcastic and cynical criticisms to personal jealousy or pique, and a preconceived determination to pull down reputations, that, with exception of Mr. Longfellow, all those whom he has most cause to regard with envy, as possessing equal or higher reputations, are those whom he criticises most favorably and most fairly; while many of those on whom he uncorks the phials of his indignation, with a fury wholly disproportioned to the value of the offenders or the weight of the offences, arc often persons of so small consideration as to make one marvel at the amount of good vituperation wasted.

It is singular, but not the less true, that with his keen perception, great power of analysis, exquisite taste and strong discrimination, he is not, even when most disposed to be candid and impartial, an able or trustworthy critic. He seems to have lacked the power of comparison, and even of deliberate judgment, apart even from his monomania concerning plagiarism, and he unquestionably erred in endeavoring to weigh all talent in his own balance, and to measure all intellectual stature by his own standard. His judgment, too, we imagine, was greatly affected by casual circumstances, temper it may be, changes of health, alterations of spirits, ills external, or cares internal, which seem to have acted on his mind and reasoning faculties, as a change of wind from west to eastward jars and jangles the physical constitution of others. This rendered him inconsistent, led him to laud an author to the skies on one day and in one page, and to tread him into the very dust on another—-see, for example, his opinions of Bulwer Lytton, as recorded on page 503, and again on page 562 of his Marginalia, which are in direct contradiction the one to the other; and twenty other absolutely opposite opinions of different persons, in different places, as Longfellow, Tennyson, Hirst, and many others, whom in one place he loads with praise, and in another absolutely buries under obloquy.

Still, we believe that he meant to record his true opinion, and did record what at the moment he believed to be true. He criticised, however, according to feeling and impulse on the spur of the moment, not according to real judgment or calm opinion, except when he was criticising according to theory and by some fanciful standard, when he of course criticized one-sidedly. The two methods did him equal injustice, and himself more injustice than even the victims of his mental scalpel; they gained him the reputation of being a false, envious, deliberately unjust and intentionally cruel critic; when he should only have been regarded as a capricious and inconstant judge, careless whether he gave pain or not, inconsiderate, irritable, a little vain, a great deal egotistical, and not a little given to writing what is called a slashing article. His "Literati" is the least creditable, and to himself the most unfortunate, of all his productions. His Marginalia, with something of the same tart and acrimonious sententiousness, have at times smartness, cleverness, discrimination and sound judgment.

Here is a happy and subtle distinction, from his Fifty Suggestions, both shrewd and true:—-"Bryant and Street are both, essentially, descriptive poets; and descriptive poetry, even in its happiest manifestations, is not of the highest order. But the distinction between Bryant and Street is very broad. While the former, in reproducing the sensible images of nature, reproduces the sentiments with which he regards them, the latter gives us the images and nothing more. He never forces us to feel what he must have felt."

The following, from the Marginalia, is clever, quaint, and to the point:

"Men of genius are far more abundant than is supposed. In fact, to appreciate thoroughly the work of what we call genius is to possess all the genius by which the work was produced. But the person appreciating may be utterly incompetent to reproduce the work or anything similar, and this solely through lack of what may be termed constructive ability-—a matter quite independent of what we agree to understand in the term genius. . . . Hence," and for other reasons cleverly stated, but too long to quote, "works of genius are few, while mere men of genius are, as I say, abundant."

But this, the last which we shall quote, is curious, as coming from a person so pertinacious in seeing plagiary where none else can discover it; a person, not without some show of color, accused of what he certainly would have called plagiarism in another, though we do not so consider it; a person, lastly, who seems to consider casual coincidence of thoughts, expressions, or even deductions from the same facts, as impossible between equal and kindred thinkers; and the more curious that, in connection with some other passages, in one of which he calls Mr. Longfellow the first and in another the most original of American authors, he at moments had truer and more just ideas of the amount of originality and plagiarism to be found in the world of letters, than he argues in his ordinary mood. "Imitators are not, necessarily, unoriginal—-except at the exact point of imitation. Mr. Longfellow, decidedly the most audacious imitator in America, is markedly original, or, in other words, imaginative, upon the whole; and many persons have, from the latter branch of the fact, been at a loss to comprehend, and therefore to believe, the former. Keen sensibility of appreciation, that is to say, of the poetic sentiment, in distinction from the poetic power, leads almost inevitably to imitation. Thus all great poets have been gross imitators. It is, however, a mere non distributio medii hence to infer that all great imitators are poets."

Truly yes! as much so as to say that all great poets are gross imitators. But let the passage go for its worth, and it is worth much. But here we have done with the criticisms, and are glad to have done with them, happier should we have been had he, and could we have done without them.

It is on his tales, and on his poems yet more decidedly, that the reputation of Mr. Poe must stand; and both, in their line and manner, are inimitable.

His tales may be divided into three heads: those of grotesque fancy, partaking the character of the hoax, such as "The Adventure of one Hans Pfaal," "The Balloon Hoax," "Von Kempelen and his Discovery," "The Descent into the Maelstrom," and one or two others of less merit; those of grotesque, mysterious horror, partaking of the same character of hoax, such as "Mesmeric Revelation," "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," and "The Premature Burial," in all of which an appearance of reality and vraisemblance so perfect as almost to compel credence to what we know to be impossible, is maintained by earnestness of style, vigor of description, minute attention to the most seemingly immaterial and trivial details, the mingling of known truths of nature with the wildest and strangest fancies, and "the application of scientific principles, so far as the whimsical nature of the subject would permit," to subjects whimsical, absurd and impossible.

Than "The Descent into the Maelstrom" nothing can be finer or fuller of genius; nor can the English language, we think, anywhere be found in greater force and vigor, than in the description of the whirlpool and the weather. It is impossible to read it without believing what you know to be the wildest fiction, a reality and a narrative of true events.

"Mesmeric Revelation" and "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," though full of almost insane horror, making the hair bristle and the blood curdle as one reads, and the latter involving so flagrant an impossibility as that of a dead man, kept seven months in a dead-alive state by mesmeric power, speaking after death, and, when released from the mesmeric state, collapsing into instant putrefaction, though not even intended as a hoax, were actually believed, and commented on, as real or pretended truths, by grave authorities.

In the next class we have the stories of analysis or ratiocination,such as the "Gold Bug," turning on the solution of a cipher invented for the purpose of being solved; the "Murders in the Rue Morgue," turning on the discovery of the method of a murder by the evolution of evidence from a train of circumstances manufactured for the purposes of evolving such evidence; "The Mystery of Marie Roget," or an attempt to approximate a solution of the secret of a real murder, that of Mary Rogers, by the application of new principles of solution to real evidence; and "The Purloined Letter," a deduction of truth from a similar examination to fabricated evidence, similar in plan to "The Murders of the Rue Morgue." In these stories the powers of analysis and the acuteness of reasoning are such that we cannot avoid the conclusion that Poe would have actually made a criminal lawyer of intense sagacity, unwearied patience, and unequalled analytic force; as he proved himself to be, by the actual solution of many most difficult ciphers submitted to him for analysis, a decipherer of the first order.

The prose fictions of the last head are tales of pure imagination, some of unmixed horror, some of horror, mysticism, and melancholy awfully and painfully combined, some of grotesque horror, and some of grotesque mystery only, such as "The Lady Ligeia," "The Black Cat," the "House of Usher," the "Masque of the Red Death," "William Wilson," and "Metzengerstein."

The power of all these, however various, is the same, and of the same nature. Earnestness of manner, an intensity of conviction simulated on the part of the writer so as to shape or force conviction on the part of the reader, a management of the supernatural never attained or approached by any other writer, making it appear positively natural, a mysticism so regulated as to shock no sense of the rational, a horror, a gloom, a melancholy, and an awful creed or want of creed, which we fear were all but too real.

Added to these are a choice, a power, a fitness of diction, a largeness of vocabulary, an adaptation of sense to sound, and of manner to matter, which we shall seek in vain in any other American, if not English, writer; a style flowing, round, copious, grand, a perfect originality-—and what do we lack that should constitute a genius?

His verse, which is sui generis, seems at first more original than his prose, but it is not so in truth; imaginative in the highest, incomparably perfect in rhythmical melody, artistical almost to a fault, for in some portions the art has failed to conceal the art, and in others, we are irresistibly abstracted from the sense to marvel at the exquisite system of sound, and driven to forget the poem in mute admiration of the art and magic of the poet. Never was a rarer syllabler of words, never a more industrious and patient finisher, never a rarer versifier. The method of the poems is much the same as that of the graver and

more solemn stories, but they have a more delicate and graceful tone, a softer and more spiritual sentiment; they deal with melancholy and solemn awe, rather than with hideous and viewless horror; they are sad, intensely sad and hopeless, lingering, clinging to overwhelming recollections of bygone happiness, lost and despaired of, never to return, as the green leaves to the bare tree, as the glad morning to the weary watcher. As works of art, they are perfect; as works of imagination, wonderful; as revelations of a human heart, so worn and withered; a human intellect, so shattered and disjointed, that we cannot listen to its woeful utterances without shuddering at the intensity of woe which must have inspired them, without mourning to

"See that noble and most sovereign reason
Like sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh."

The sad and troubled soul has fallen asleep, in that calm place "where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest." May no dreams come across that sleep, save dreams of peace and hope, and may he so awake that he shall know a happier life hereafter than that he toiled through here so sadly, and to so sad an ending. Peace be with him.

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