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Title: Mere mortals
Medico-historical essays
Author: C. MacLaurin
Release Date: June 29, 2023 [eBook #71069]
Language: English
Credits: MWS and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MERE MORTALS ***
_Post Mortems: II_
MERE MORTALS
_Boswell_: But of what use will my book be when it is finished?
_Johnson_: Never mind the use—do it!
* * * * *
History is an Art and should be written with imagination.
ANATOLE FRANCE.
_Post Mortems: Two_
Mere Mortals
Medico-Historical Essays
By
C. MacLaurin
M.B.C.M., F.R.C.S.E., Hon. Deg. Padua
_Lately Lecturer in Clinical Surgery, the
University of Sydney; Late Consulting
Surgeon, Royal Prince Alfred
Hospital, Sydney; Late Honorary
Surgeon, Royal
Hospital for Women,
Sydney_
[Illustration]
New York
George H. Doran Company
COPYRIGHT, 1925,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
MERE MORTALS
—B—
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
This book is
Affectionately Dedicated
To my Wife
and
To my Daughter
MRS. A. P. MACKERRAS
Preface
Great numbers of people, especially medical men, have written to me
asking me to continue the short studies of great men of the past that I
began in _Post Mortem_; and the result is the present volume.
Many reviewers complained that _Post Mortem_ contained too much “medical
jargon,” whatever that may mean. There is doubtfully such a thing as
medical jargon; it is merely a method of expressing thoughts for which
there is no English equivalent except by the method of a cumbrous
sentence. For that reason I have tried to translate my thoughts into
English whenever it is possible. If by mischance a technical term should
have crept in, you will find most medical terms in any decent modern
English dictionary; or failing that, they are all simply taken from the
Greek. But there is another jargon than medical. There is the filthy
jargon which insists on saying “the Red Plague” when we mean syphilis; or
“in a certain interesting condition” when we mean to say “pregnant.”
That jargon I absolutely refuse to use. Those elderly people with fixed
minds who prefer that sort of thing had better stick to _Little Arthur_
or something equally fictitious. As a doctor writing on very serious
subjects I must claim the doctor’s privilege of writing with absolute
frankness; without suspicion of coarseness.
And I beg you not to accept as diagnoses what are sheer speculations.
Acknowledgments
The first drafts of these essays appeared in the _Australasian Medical
Journal_, _The Sydney Bulletin_, the Australian _Home, Art in Australia_,
and the Australian _Forum_. They have nearly all been considerably
modified with the growth of knowledge and frequent rewriting. I have to
thank Miss Kibble, of the New South Wales Public Library, for assisting
me immensely in hunting up many authorities from whom I quote. Without
her help this book could never have been written.
Glossary
_Imperative idea_: An idea that, however malapropos it may be,
keeps mounting into consciousness.
_Obsession_: An imperative idea that compels appropriate action.
_Phobias_: Unconscious fears, often acquired in early infancy,
which may ruin a man’s whole life for him. There are many
different kinds of “phobia” of which syphilophobia is probably
the most common.
These three are all signs of:
_Psychasthenia_: A weird half-sister of neurasthenia, generally
the result of heredity, combined with abnormal education in
early youth. In the psychasthenic state the patient may be
subject to all manner of imperative ideas, obsessions and
phobias. Sometimes he stammers, sometimes he is compelled by
his “unconscious” to jerk his limbs about in quaint antics;
sometimes he is afflicted with awful doubts and scruples.[1]
All the other medical terms are, I think, explained in the text as they
arise.
Contents
PAGE
DR. JOHNSON 17
KING HENRY THE SAINT 40
_The Tragedy of the Tudors_:
(_a_) KING HENRY VIII 50
(_b_) EDWARD VI 76
(_c_) MARY TUDOR 86
(_d_) QUEEN ELIZABETH 93
IVAN THE TERRIBLE 103
LUTHER’S DEVIL 117
HENRY FIELDING 128
KING JAMES I 136
KING CHARLES I 143
KING CHARLES II, CATHERINE OF BRAGANZA AND NELL GWYNN 148
HENRI QUATRE AND MARGUERITE DE VALOIS 163
FREDERICK THE GREAT 189
THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE 209
SOME EPIDEMICS OF SOCIAL IMPORTANCE 222
F. W. NIETZSCHE 247
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 255
BARUCH SPINOZA 269
Mere Mortals
Dr. Johnson
There can be little doubt that the illustrious Dr. Johnson was a
psychasthenic. His father could see in life nothing but gloom, though
his mother seems to have been hearty and sensible enough. Therefore
presumably we are entitled to say that the Great Cham’s family history
was faulty. At an early age he developed some trouble that his parents
diagnosed as scrofula, or tuberculous glands of the neck, but Boswell
expressly hints was suspected to have been caught from a nurse. They took
him to England’s kindly but not intelligent majesty, Queen Anne, who,
wearing a long black hood and diamonds to impress her patients, touched
him for his “grievous malady.” But she did not cure him; rather it would
seem that she made him worse; for all Johnson’s frightful jerkings and
grimaces, roarings and puffings, may possibly be traced back to that one
moment of nervous tension when he felt himself a little boy, the observed
of all observers, waiting to be touched by the sister-in-law of William
the Dutchman.
A child of bad heredity—indeed any child—must be treated with the utmost
care long before it appears to be conscious, before it appears to take
notice of what is going on around it; quarrelsome parents and angry
nurses may so warp his whole mental outlook that it is spoiled for life.
And it could not have been a good thing for the coming Great Cham to
subject him to such nervous strain as was necessarily involved in taking
him before Queen Anne. He was lucky in that it did not make him stammer.
Many a sensitive boy has been made to stammer by less than was involved
in Sam’s childish treatment. Long before a child appears to be conscious
its mind is taking notice of all that goes on around it, and its whole
future life may be warped in one moment of terror or anxiety. And the
sad thing is that probably Mrs. Johnson senior had made a mistake in
diagnosis, that probably little Sam was not suffering from scrofula at
all, but from some swelling of the glands of the neck that was due to
something in his scalp. That he lived till he was seventy-five seems to
show that he never suffered either from tuberculosis or syphilis, those
two great slayers; and if his glands had really been tuberculous it is
probable that, bursting, they would have formed a “mixed infection” that
would have had more serious effects than mere local scarring.
It is possible that while the incident persisted in Johnson’s conscious
memory as a “confused and solemn memory,” in his unconscious memory it
may have persisted in those extraordinary antics which to Boswell seemed
a sort of St. Vitus’s dance. Perhaps in them we see the struggles of a
sensitive little boy to avoid the frightful ordeal of being “touched”
and resentment at the insult to his masculine grandeur. We know that his
masculinity had already been very much insulted at the age of three when
a schoolmistress ran after him lest he fall into the gutter.
Psychasthenia is a grim half-sister to neurasthenia, from which it
appears to differ in that, while neurasthenia merely shows that the man’s
nervous system is not sufficiently strong to stand the stout clouts
and buffets of this wicked world, in psychasthenia he has never had a
chance. The best translation of the term “psychasthenic” appears to be
“unbalanced,” and, though probably psychasthenia was about the best
term that Professor Janet could have selected for this queer condition,
still it conveys an unwarranted implication of imbecility, for many
men of the greatest genius have been utterly unbalanced. The man of
genius is seldom actually insane, but he is often unbalanced and of the
manic-depressive temperament; at any moment he may be “knocked off his
perch” and may become definitely insane.
Thus, subject always to the possible denial of the alienists, I should
certainly imagine that Beethoven was psychasthenic, for he was always
falling in and out of love, was constantly quarrelling with his
landlords, cast his rice pudding at the cook, jammed his hat fiercely on
his head when he and Goethe walked before royalty, was looked upon as
crazy, and used to run about the fields trying to roar the latest melody
that had come into his head. And Charles Lamb not only stammered but had
a sister who was definitely insane.
The unbalanced are subject to queer actions which appear to take their
origin in the unconscious mind. Thus, there arise from the unconscious
into consciousness imperative ideas which insist on recognition however
malapropos they may happen to be. Sometimes these actually go on to form
obsessions, and I must ask you to permit me to define these two important
terms. The imperative idea simply arises into consciousness out of the
unconscious. When it compels appropriate action it is generally, though
not always, called an obsession. Thus, when Johnson walked along Fleet
Street the imperative idea arose from his unconscious that it would be
a fitting thing to put his hand upon every horse-post that he passed.
When he did so or turned on his tracks that no horse-post should be left
uncapped the definition of an obsession would appear to be correct. And
from the unconscious arise those queer phobias or fears which often so
strangely influence their actions.
Still gossiping about the unbalanced, was St. Francis of Assisi entirely
sane when he left all the money that he owed his father on a heap of his
clothes and set out to build a church with his own hands? If this be
insanity let us have more of it. The ordinary sane stodgy man does not
lead the world; secure in his stodginess he makes money and lives happy
ever after. But the genius is always a little “cracked,” otherwise he
would probably not be a genius. And so many of them have been ill men; in
fact one can hardly call to mind as one writes a single really healthy
and sane genius, unless possibly Sir Walter Scott. St. Francis is said to
have had renal tuberculosis.
That is probably the only real serious objection to birth-control; you
can never tell whom you are condemning to perpetual absence of life.
Thus Abraham Lincoln, strictly speaking, should never have been born,
for his mother, Nancy Hanks, though never insane, lived all her life in
the depths of gloom and on the verge of insanity. Yet it would appear
that the absence of Old Abe at a given crisis of the world’s history
might have made some difference to civilisation. And even if we are to
take bodily health as the criterion of fitness, what about Mozart, the
tuberculous and pallid little genius of Vienna whom many people still
consider as the very greatest musician that ever lived? Certainly not
even Beethoven in his first period ever attained to Mozart’s delicious
childlikeness of touch.
If the world had insisted that St. Francis of Assisi, Abe Lincoln, and
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart should not have been born one would think that
the world would now be a poorer place than it is. And one names only a
few; for Spinoza should never have been born, doomed to live only a few
years and then to die of tuberculosis while he was mystically trying to
reduce God to a mathematical formula.
In fact one could go on for weeks on this subject, and the conclusion
that any fair-minded person must reach is that birth-control, even of
the apparently unfit, is too risky an experiment for the human race
to try if it wishes to keep its geniuses. You never can tell what the
infant may turn out that you are preventing from being born. But I am
aware that this is a highly contentious subject, and that awful thing,
“the sex-war,” is involved in it. People are sure to have differences of
opinion about it; since woman has risen to her new estate these opinions
will assuredly be held with more vigour than ever.
“Treat ’em rough” is a known and tried aphorism, which has been elevated
to a pitch of almost epic grandeur by Schopenhauer’s “Pitch ’em
downstairs”; and probably some such aphorism was in Johnson’s mind when
he rode with old Mrs. Porter to the church that they might be married,
and, you remember, reduced her to tears before they got there. Up till
then he probably had only the poet’s knowledge of woman; but that after
such an ill beginning the marriage turned out so happily, seems to argue
that Mrs. Porter, though she might paint her face, was nevertheless
a woman with the heart of a lion to tame his aggressively masculine
soul. And it is quite possible that before she died—she was twice his
age, you know—he began to have for her a love similar to that one has
for a mother. Of course it may be that Boswell, in his uncomplimentary
description of Johnson’s wife, was misled by jealousy of her who sat too
near the throne of his hero-worship. But in any case she must have been a
remarkable woman to tame Ursa Major as she did.
If one were to translate psychasthenic into “poor in spirit”—which is not
very far from its Greek meaning—probably we should come very near to its
real inner meaning; and we have the best possible authority for knowing
the post-mortem future of the poor in spirit. If the Kingdom of Heaven
is to be composed of such men as Johnson and Beethoven it would not be a
bad place to inhabit, though the shade of Johnson would certainly insist
on carrying home some fallen angel, while Beethoven would probably throw
something at a monotonous orchestra of harps, if he could hear it.
In support of the contention that towards the end of her life he had
begun to consider Mrs. Porter as less a wife in the ordinary sense of the
term than a mother-surrogate whom he could trust as a faithful friend who
would never desert him whatever the circumstances, here is a letter that
he wrote to the Rev. Dr. Taylor on the day she died:
“SIR,
“Pray desire Mrs. Taylor to inform me what mourning I should
buy for my mother and Miss Porter, and bring a note of writing
with you.”
His dear wife dead he could not trust himself even to buy mourning
without her aid.
He appears not to have been able even to take care of himself without
some woman to act the mother towards him. Years later he found another
mother-surrogate in Mrs. Thrale, who saw to it that he wore respectable
clothing with brass buttons, and silver buckles—not too big—on his shoes.
It was evidently a severe blow to him when the naughty thing went and
married Signor Piozzi, for it left him without a single woman to show him
how to take care of himself.
That nervous malady which Boswell diagnosed as a sort of St. Vitus’s
dance probably merely represented the violent impulsive and involuntary
movements occasionally seen in psychasthenia; had the defect affected the
nerves of speech Johnson would probably have stammered; but one can never
imagine a man so aggressive stammering.
How far back in life is it possible to remember? Freud thinks that the
first five years of life are not retained in conscious memory, although
they exercise the greatest possible influence upon our afterlives.
Personally I try to think that my first recollection is that of the
frightful itching that accompanied the wearing of my first pair of
knickerbockers, which my mother used to tell me occurred on my fourth
birthday; but it is so difficult to distinguish between what you remember
and what older people have told you that one must sometimes think that
after all probably Freud may be right, and it is impossible to remember
before the fifth birthday.
Johnson’s roars and bluster were probably really to conceal an innate
shyness that is frequently seen in very nervous men. In further evidence
that he was at heart a shy man here is a letter that he wrote to his old
friend Dr. Birch:
“March 29, 1765.
“To Dr. Birch,
“Sir:
“I have sent some parts of my dictionary, such as were at hand,
for your inspection. The favour which I ask of you is that if
you do not like them, you will say nothing.
“I am, sir,
“Your most affectionate humble servant,
“SAM JOHNSON.”
He could not even bear to hear the faithful words of his old friend about
the child of his brain, though he felt himself entitled to sign “your
most affectionate humble servant.”
Like most men of apparently strong common sense, when you look too
critically into their dogmata, Johnson’s common sense begins to look
more like uncommon foolishness; for it was certainly no answer to Bishop
Berkeley’s metaphysics to bang his foot against a stone. It requires a
far more subtle argument which must probably be fortified by the eye of
faith, which, you remember, has been defined as “the faculty of believing
what you know to be untrue.” But Johnson’s argument is the sort of bluff
obvious thing that so appeals to a common-sense person like John Bull.
And doubtless that is why Johnson has so appealed to John Bull that he
has almost been elevated to the pinnacle of a national hero. Full of
rats, poor old gentleman; yet one can’t help loving him for his rats.
As woman seldom stammers, so she is seldom afflicted by psychasthenia,
which, being a variation, appears to be almost confined to the male,
like genius. Woman is seldom “ratty”; she has far too much hard common
sense. Who ever heard of women killing each other to settle whether a
word should be spelt homooisian or homoousian? Or to decide whether there
are three Gods or One? Yet men have waged savage tumult over these very
things, which no person can possibly know. Sometimes lady novelists seem
to go ratty when they try to describe men, and ultimately describe some
creature who is like nothing on earth; but it is only fair to say that
such lady novelists are suspected by men to be between the ages of forty
and fifty, and probably for a time slightly unbalanced. But the normal
average woman is far saner than the normal average man. Once she has
secured her man her chief duty afterwards seems to be to see that his
rats do not lead him away from the paths of respectability, into such
nonsense as that of Bernard Palissy, for instance, who burned even his
furniture to keep the stove going that might lead to the discovery of a
porcelain glaze, even though his wife and children might starve. No woman
ever followed a will-o’-the-wisp with such fury, simply because no woman
was ever so ratty; it is hardly respectable; it seems to be purely a
matter of sex-physiology.
But we must dilate yet a little further on the utterly unbalanced
character of Johnson. An incident is told of him in 1784, when he was
about 74 years of age; as it is impossible to tell it better than
Boswell, let us leave it in Boswell’s own words. “Coming home late one
night he found a poor woman lying in the street, so much exhausted that
she could not walk; he took her upon his back” (by the way it was a quite
unnecessarily laborious and cumbersome way to carry a woman; for a giant
like Sam it would have seemed an easier matter to stoop down and pick
her up in his arms), “and carried her to his home, where he found her to
be one of those wretched females who have sunk to the lowest levels of
vice, poverty, and disease. Instead of upbraiding her he had her taken
care of with all care and tenderness for a long time at considerable
expense, till she was restored to health and endeavoured to put her into
a virtuous way of living.” This was just the sort of kind, impulsive, and
senseless thing that would seem so utterly natural to a psychasthenic
and so utterly silly to a normal man. We know now that it is almost
impossible to reclaim a prostitute, for no normal woman ever becomes a
prostitute. Normal woman always has far too much dignity and self-respect
and reads too mystic a meaning into the sexual act ever to offer herself
to the embraces of any casual man in the street, however great her
economic distress; rather if driven into a corner by poverty a normal
woman finds some one male friend to help her, so that she may console
herself with the thought that at least she is married in the sight of
God, if not in the sight of man. Normal woman is essentially monogamous.
But Sam appears to have been as hopeful of success as Theodora when
she made her famous raid upon the brothels of Byzantium; one would
like to know the ultimate success or failure of his adventure into the
underworld. We know that poor Theodora failed absolutely. One cannot help
wondering what Anna Williams would have thought of it, for women are the
enemies of women; but fortunately for her she seems to have been recently
dead, having quarrelled with everyone who was open to quarrel with her.
If this be true, at least she never knew to what depths of degradation
Samuel could sink. But a doctor can easily imagine the fulsome gratitude
that would be lavished by the poor starving prostitute upon the huge
preserver when she woke up and found him giving her something to eat
without wanting anything else from her. Prostitutes do not meet with so
much disinterested kindness in this world that it ever palls. That is why
it is so sad that sexual reclamation of them is almost impossible, for
too often they carry the seeds of their own destruction with them.
Then there is that delicious incident of Mr. Osborn the bookseller. “The
fellow insulted me, so I beat him; but it was in the privacy of my own
chamber—it was not in his shop.” Of course. To knock down a publisher was
only quite right and proper. Who would not do it? But even a publisher
has his rights. To do it in his own shop would be to expose him to the
insults of his own servants, and that is positively not done, especially
by an Oxford man. Rats, pure rats. Yet publishers are said to be fair
game for authors and so far no close-season has been proclaimed for them.
Few men attain to the age of seventy odd without some warning that they
are mortal and that the grave is waiting. Of course there is the classic
instance of Voltaire, who from the age of sixty odd complained of mortal
illness, and yet, recovering, lived to a vast age, wizened, malicious,
and “peaky” as a rat. But then, like Mr. Blake, Voltaire was a regular
out and out hardened sinner and words could not possibly express the
contempt that he felt for the mediæval devil of eighteenth-century
Christianity. Probably he persisted in living on just to cheat the devil
of his just due because he despised him so.
As a matter of fact we often find that soon after fifty some illness
attacks a man from which he never really recovers, even though he may
appear to be well; there is always the trifling difference in him that
marks the passage of the years. Johnson’s warning came to him—though he
did not observe it—many years before when Boswell could observe the sight
that he made of himself as he gobbled his meals.
He was evidently very fond of eating; himself, he boasted of his delicate
tastes in food; and when he ate “the veins of his forehead stood out and
a strong perspiration was visible.” This appears to have much disgusted
Macaulay, but most of us have seen similar prowess in perfectly worthy
men. Presumably when Boswell said “the veins of his forehead” he meant
the superficial temporal arteries, for if they had really been the
soft and thin-walled veins, Johnson, bestrewn with bladders, would
have looked indeed noteworthy. But there came a time when they stood
out once too often, and probably they never shrank back again to the
normal size, but became thickened. Thus his blood-pressure rose under
the strain of arteriosclerosis and in the course of years the inevitable
results of gluttony overtook him. Drink, guzzle, and syphilis are the
three deadly sins, and they are deadly in proportion to the effect that
they cause upon the arteries. And in the term “arteries” one includes
heart and kidneys. The heart is simply a large expansion of an artery,
and the kidneys are merely a network of arterioles and capillaries;
if one part goes all the rest follow, and thus it is that the term
“cardiovascular disease” is generally used to describe the results of
high blood-pressure. It is of course possible that Johnson’s glooms may
have been due to intestinal auto-intoxication; but melancholia is a
constant companion of an unduly sensitive nervous system.
Warnings came in 1782 with breathlessness and pain in the chest; the
heart was evidently beginning to rebel, but the first real alarming
warning came on the night of June 17th, 1783, when he awoke in the middle
of the night and found that he could not speak. Trying to write, he
found that “my hand made wrong letters,” that is to say he had not only
aphasia, but “agraphia” or loss of power to write. Possibly if anybody
had happened to think of it he might have been able to communicate with
the outer world by means of children’s block letters. But nobody did; and
when his servant came in the morning he could not comprehend why the old
gentleman expected him to read something that he had written instead of
speaking in answer to his own chatter.
This sudden aphasia in old people is not uncommon, and may be due to
several causes, that all in one way or other affect the so-called “speech
centre” of the brain. As the “writing centre” is situated in the very
near vicinity, it is not surprising that a lesion that affects one
generally also affects the other. That Johnson’s right hand was not also
paralysed at the same time is rather unusual, because the left side of
the brain which controls the right side of the body also contains the
speech centre; and it is supposed that it does so because man has for
many thousands of years been accustomed to use his right hand more than
his left, wherefore the left side of his brain would naturally be more
ready to acquire new functions than the right, which only controls the
comparatively awkward left hand. If this theory be true it would rather
seem to show that men were accustomed to use their right hands long
before they could speak; and this indeed is quite probable.
The exact lesion would appear to have been that one of the cerebral
arteries that supplied the left side of Johnson’s brain had for
some reason been thrown into a state of spasm, and caused temporary
softening of the brain owing to interference with its blood-supply.
If an artery had actually burst on the site of a tiny aneurysm, as
occasionally happens in cases of arteriosclerosis, the old man would
not have recovered so soon, even temporarily. As it was, he seems to
have recovered sufficiently by July to pay a visit to Dr. Langton at
Rochester. The shock and terror induced by an attack of aphasia are
generally very dreadful. I remember one elderly lady, who had always been
of a most gentle and virtuous way of living, who one day suddenly sat up
in bed with a scream, clutching at her bedclothes and at her throat and
uttering meaningless noises like an ape. Twelve hours later she had for
a time recovered her power of speech, and after lying musing for half
an hour, said in her customary gentle voice, “I should like some fish;
they say fish is good for the brain.” She had somewhere read that fish
contains a large amount of phosphorus, which is supposed to be good for
the brain—by patent-medicine vendors. But I shall never forget the scream
of that poor lady, nor the look of terror that came over her gentle face.
Johnson’s terror led him to write a prayer for his recovery, done in
Latin verse. “The lines were not very good, but I knew them to be not
very good, so concluded that I was not impaired in my faculties.” There
you see at once the supreme passion of the man—Learning—coming out in
what he thought to be the very article of death.
Then, “in order to rouse the vocal organs, I took two drams. Wine has
been celebrated for the production of eloquence, so I put myself into
violent motion and I think repeated it; but all was in vain.” It is
hardly fair to comment upon this action of a man bemused with terror
and aphasia that probably wine was the very worst thing he could have
taken; for it tends to raise the blood-pressure. Not that it made much
difference; Death was focussing his eyes on Dr. Johnson; the call was
coming, and no earthly power could avert it.
But apparently even Boswell nods; for after telling of Johnson’s terrible
illness in 1783 he goes on to tell how in _1784_ he was able to put a
woman on his back and carry her home. Well, one simply does not believe
it; the thing is impossible; Boswell must have got his dates mixed a
little; for to carry a woman, even though she were starving and the man
a giant, is no small feat; and if the man were very old and had just
recovered from an attack of aphasia, it would be absolutely incredible.
Really, wonderful though we men are—in no way more wonderful than in our
power of believing nonsense—we are not such terrible fellows as some say.
After the paralytic stroke all the devils in hell seem to have settled
upon the poor old gentleman, with their gout, dropsy, and continual
fear of death. Probably the gout was simply another manifestation of
the defect of metabolism—faulty chemical physiological process, or
dystrophy—that had caused his high blood-pressure. The asthma and
oppression in his chest were probably due to a failing heart; and thence
also doubtless came the dropsy; for dropsy is not a disease—it is a
symptom of many things, generally cardiac or renal. And his cough became
exceedingly troublesome, possibly due to congestion of the base of his
lungs that would be caused in a way much the same as caused the dropsy;
he was becoming “water-logged.”
A rather remarkable thing is that, once having become filled up with
dropsy, he got rid of it apparently suddenly. If I remember rightly Dr.
Johnson was taking squills at the time, and squills is still used for
getting rid of fluid from the body, though it has been supplanted by
more efficient drugs. One might perhaps think that hope told Johnson
a flattering tale, but he says expressly that he got rid of twenty
pints. Queer things happen in dropsy, and even such a pseudo-miracle as
Johnson’s is not unknown. Once water-logged with dropsy, legs, belly,
lungs and all, it would have seemed to require a miracle to get him
emptied, and miracles seldom happen.
The really wonderful thing is, however, that a man of so gloomy a
temperament as the Great Cham should have retained such comparative
cheerfulness of spirits as he had even after an experience so depressing
as an attack of aphasia. He must have been a remarkably brave old man,
which is quite in accordance with his strongly masculine character. And
this discovery of the wrong dating of one of the most remarkable things
that Boswell tells of him only makes his conduct more heroic; for if what
I surmise is true, Miss Williams must have been alive and quarrelsome,
ready to give Sam the rough side of her tongue for daring to carry home a
woman of abandoned character. Cynics have said that to marry a woman is
to marry a conscience; but it is even more terrible when the woman is not
a man’s wife, but, old, blind, deaf, and quarrelsome, is dependent on his
generosity for a living. She may probably consider it her duty to look
after his morals as strictly as though she were his wife.
His actual end seems to have been caused by a mild terminal pneumonia,
which in a healthy young person would have been thrown off like a cold in
the head; but was too much for ancient lungs and tired heart.
“To be miserable,” said Goldsmith, who had known what it was to be
inarticulate and despised, “was to ensure the protection of Dr. Johnson.”
Was not that a better definition of sainthood than whimsically to pervert
the Sermon on the Mount?
To sum up, probably all Johnson’s psychasthenic involuntary movements,
which made him so strange a figure to his contemporaries, took their
origin in unconscious memory of some affront to his childish masculinity,
such as would be caused by taking him to Queen Anne to be “touched.” And
she was not even a king, nor yet even in the direct line of accession
either! These women! They will go poking their noses in everywhere.
And possibly here too many have been the source of those extraordinary
imperative ideas which it was dangerous to deny, lest he roar at you for
an ignorant and intolerant fellow. Assuredly you cannot treat a child too
carefully if you want it to grow up a sane and normal member of the human
race.
King Henry the Saint
It was probably because of his unfair treatment when he was a child
that Henry VI of pathetic memory was driven “psychasthenic” in its
etymological meaning of “weak-souled.” His father was Henry V, the strong
man of Agincourt; his mother Katherine of Valois, herself the daughter
of a lunatic. This little boy, of unsound heredity, was born at Windsor
while his father was fighting in France, and barely was he five months
old when his mother bethought her that her duty was by the side of her
husband. She therefore left her baby to the care of a wet-nurse while
she herself crossed the Channel. At that time Henry V was sickening for
the illness which was soon to kill him. Probably it was the result of
hard fighting and worry, together with, as was so often the case with
fifteenth-century kings, eating too much.
When he was less than two years old his faithful lieges of the House of
Commons asked that they might see him; so mother, nurse and baby set off
in “chairs” from Windsor to London. On a certain Saturday they reached
Staines, on the banks of the Thames, and on the following day they had
purposed to journey to London. But alas! this defilement of the Sabbath
so horrified the little king, then doubtless “teething,” that he set up
a vast hullabaloo: so bitterly did he weep that the distracted mother
and nurse had perforce to take him back to his lodgings, where doubtless
the maternal slipper bore its part in his education, for the horrified
chronicler tells us that she used every effort. This may have been
the first of the famous thrashings that little Henry received, though
probably there had been others; in fact, his boyhood seems, to put it
crudely, to have been one long wallop. The day of rest having been passed
in consoling the infant, and no doubt giving him teething powders or
dill-water, and other days having arrived by effluxion of time, they
finally got him up to Westminster, where doubtless he twiddled his toes
and “gooed” before an admiring concourse of members of Parliament.
Soon afterwards the privy council appointed another nurse, probably
because the first had so signally failed to smother his bawlings when
his subjects had wished to see him. To her he gave an edict that she
was to use “every effort to reasonably chastise Us on meet occasion”;
so it was clear that chastisement bulked largely in the thoughts of
fifteenth-century educationists in dealing with Henry VI.
When he was five he opened Parliament in person, and was set upon a horse
to ride throughout London, where the lieges remarked upon the wonderful
likeness he bore to the “lovely countenance” of his illustrious father.
Quite probably there was a certain amount of imagination in this remark,
because everybody knows how a lump of putty on a baby’s face is stoutly
asserted by an adoring nurse to be the living image of the noble Roman
nose of its father. The imagination of nurses is indeed wonderful.
Then he was, by the terms of his father’s will, put into the hands of the
Earl of Warwick as preceptor. Warwick is generally held to have been the
model of a preceptor, but one has doubts; for in after years, when Henry
had reached the years of articulate complaint, he meekly spoke to the
privy council of the thrashings that he had had to endure. Byron has well
summed up the orthodox method of instruction:
“O ye who teach the ingenuous youth of nations,
England, France, Holland, Italy or Spain;
I pray you chastise them on all occasions;
It mends their morals—never mind the pain.”
And as the House of Lancaster was nothing if not orthodox I have no doubt
that the good Earl did his duty faithfully by his pupil.
Next he had to be crowned King of England; and the ceremony seems to
have been distinguished by the inordinate number of times that the
archbishop had to strip the little boy to his undershirt and make him don
other robes. A collection of clerics had to assist him off the platform
staggering under the weight of that crown which was to prove too heavy
for him when the murderous political uproar of the Wars of the Roses came
to pass.
Then they took him to Paris to crown him King of France, by order of
his father, who, dying, still considered himself the great conqueror of
France. According to Miss Christie, biographer of Henry VI, the English
did everything possible on the occasion to hurt the feelings of the
French, but probably little Henry quite enjoyed the service, just like a
modern schoolboy. At any rate he got away for a time from his preceptor,
who had been busily employed as gaoler to Joan of Arc, treating her with
quite unnecessary savagery.
Then came the long process of making peace with France after the Hundred
Years’ War. It seems to have consisted of each side making truces which
were meant to be broken as soon as made. Then, when he was twenty-three,
his subjects ordered their meek king to get him a wife, and after a hunt
with varying fortunes among all the princesses of Western Europe who
seemed likely to suit, he selected Margaret of Anjou, an exceedingly
pretty and lively girl with whose portrait he fell in love. She was then
sixteen, and set off for England with high hopes on both sides. Alas!
once more the pathetic tragi-comedy of poor Henry VI’s life displayed
itself; for the crossing was terribly rough, and Margaret was desperately
seasick. Henry rushed to meet her, doubtless to see if she was as pretty
as her picture, but she had caught chicken-pox on the ship and he had to
postpone the wedding until the pretty bride recovered. Her experience was
almost like that of some English brides, who, reaching Melbourne, have
found the mosquitoes so attentive that they have come on to Sydney a mere
simulacrum of the blooming fresh beauty that had got on board the ship so
hopefully at Tilbury Docks.
Six years later, when the Wars of the Roses were coming into full blast
and England was rent in twain by quarrels among aristocratic families
which were only to be settled by the rise of the heavy-handed Tudors,
she bore him his only son; but the effort was disastrous not to her,
but to poor young Henry himself. The anxiety, both over her and over
his distracted country, had driven him “melancholy,” and he developed
well-marked melancholia.[2] While the king lay helpless and silly, unable
even to take cognisance of his new-born son when Margaret held it up to
him, Margaret took the leadership of England into her own strong hands.
One cannot help wondering how Margaret got on with the nursing. As she
was just about to become a mother herself she could not have been very
strong; certainly not strong enough to nurse a great big helpless baby as
well as her own tiny pink little new-born. Probably she got the duchess
of this or the countess of that to do the bulk of the work—for nursing is
hard work. There is far more in it than merely fanning a fevered brow and
talking romantic nonsense to a helpless man. One often sees two little
energetic women go to a bedside, grasp a sick man where it will not hurt
him, and then in the twinkling of an eye, he, a mass of incarnate pain,
has been moved to an entirely new position with never a twinge. But—they
are _professional_ nurses; it has taken them years to learn the little
trick. It does not come to woman by a special gift of God. The most
fervent wifely devotion does not compensate for its absence. We saw a
great deal of these aristocratic amateur nurses during the war; there
was a certain royal lady who sometimes used to help me at operations
in London, and a great big kind-hearted smiling woman she was, though
not very intelligent. But if she made a blunder—and it was never very
serious—she always passed it off with so happy a smile that we always
overlooked it.
If my reading of Queen Margaret’s character is correct she was a very
determined though not very wise young woman, and if her assistant made a
bad break doubtless she felt the rough edge of the queen’s tongue. But
the main thing was that poor silly young Henry recovered and his wife was
able to get on with her war without being worried by anything worse than
the normal troubles of a nursing mother.
If she had been a woman before, nursing her saintly husband as if he had
been her son, she became a tigress now that she had a real son of her own
to fight for; and we have a vivid picture of her raising an army for the
House of Lancaster:
“Many assembled for love they bare to the king, but more for
the fear they had for the queen, whose countenance was so
terrible and whose look was so fearful that to all men against
whom she took a small displeasure her frouning was their
undoing and her indignation was their death.”
Could this furious mænad have been the same as the pretty girl who
landed, eager, seasick, and ready for chicken-pox, just before her
wedding?
We need not go through the whole melancholy history of the Wars of the
Roses, which were really just the fifteenth-century murderous way of
holding a general election, but without even our modern profession of
principles. Everybody knows how Edward IV became king in one of the
temporary lulls, how Henry VI, after another attack of melancholia, was
captured in spite of the efforts of his strenuous wife; and how, at the
battle of Bosworth Henry VII killed his rival Richard of Gloucester, and
at last began modern history with the iron rule of the Tudors. Many of us
have been to St. Albans, and will be interested in the two particularly
savage elections that were held in that city; by a strange misnomer they
have been called battles. The wounded used to run into the vast old
cathedral for shelter while the election raged furiously up and down the
pleasant streets of that dear old town. Of all the houses that looked
down upon the fighting and resounded to the roar of the newly invented
cannon I suppose that the only ones still standing are the cathedral
itself and the ancient hostelry at which so many of us have had afternoon
tea.
Edward IV imprisoned poor hapless Henry for years; but at last the
redoubtable Warwick the Kingmaker restored the rightful—and by that time
melancholic and imbecile—monarch to the throne, amid general rejoicings.
His second reign lasted only ten months, terminating in the Tower. There
can be little doubt that Richard of Gloucester murdered him privily
therein. In 1910 his remains were dug up, and his thin light skull was
found with its remnants of hair still plastered with blood.
It would appear that King Henry took to religion as a means of escape
from the miseries of his youth. Probably he felt that in the Church only
could he see the slightest sign of sympathy for little overthrashed boys.
He was the gentlest and most virtuous of men. The most violent oath
that even his worst sufferings ever wrung from his lips was “Forsoothe
and forsoothe,” sometimes varied by “Fie for shame.” Queen Margaret
could have done better. Once he fled from a ball because the clothes of
the ladies displayed more than he thought proper. But even the fury of
Margaret could not protect him when Richard Hunchback found him in the
way.
Henry’s obsessions took the form of impulsive and senseless generosity
to his supposed friends, and of singing unduly loudly in church. Though
he was meek enough, Richard of Gloucester showed him that he could not
inherit the earth, and according to some religions Margaret, being a
woman, would never have been allowed to show him the way past the golden
gate into the kingdom of heaven.
Poor, gentle, virtuous Henry; so well-meaning, yet so overwhelmed by the
sense of his sin!
And poor tigerish Margaret of Anjou! If she had had sense enough to “come
in out of the wet” we might now be saying “Good Queen Peggy” instead
of “Good Queen Bess.” But how can you expect a woman to show common
sense and self-restraint when she knows they are attacking her only
son? They killed him at last at Tewkesbury almost before her eyes, and
thenceforward Margaret became a very tigress and was always intriguing
with Louis XI to avenge herself upon the Yorkists.
King Henry VIII
“Never ask me,” said John Hunter, “what I have said or written,
but ask me what my present opinions are and I will tell you.”
“Know syphilis in all its manifestations and relations, and all
other things clinical shall be added unto you.”—OSLER.
It is extraordinary what a popular aversion there seems to be to the
idea that this man had syphilis, and that many of his actions were due
to his syphilis. To judge by the number of letters that I have received
from both England and America one would be inclined to think that he
was suffering from measles. This I interpret in two ways: firstly, that
people still cling to the idea that syphilis is a “loathsome disease”;
secondly, that they do not wish to have their pet ideal of a monster
rationally explained in medical terms. As a matter of fact, syphilis is
far more than a loathsome disease of skin and bone; it would be quite as
reasonable to call it often a very grim disease of brain, mind, soul and
body. Since the general use of mercury its skin and bone manifestations
have sunk into comparative harmlessness, and since the general use of
the arseno-benzol compounds the disease seems to have become still less
dangerous to the body; but there is always before us the fact that it may
be a very terrible affliction for mind and nervous tissues. But people
love to hug their little delusions, and so long as they cling to the idea
that it is only a “loathsome disease,” so long will syphilis continue
to destroy the flower of the human race—hard-working intellectual
middle-aged men who once upon a time were very human youths.
And there seems to be a misconception about its hereditary nature. The
child of a syphilitic may be apparently healthy in appearance, though
its resistance to other diseases may be low; it would need a blood
examination by Wassermann’s test to make sure that its troubles were
really syphilitic. It need not necessarily show the classical symptoms of
“snuffles,” wasting, and rash. All that may happen is that its whole body
resisting power is damaged, and it falls a prey to one or other of the
innumerable disease germs that are always ready to attack us.
Furthermore, so virulent is sectarian prejudice that almost every single
point about Henry’s life seems still to be in dispute. If anybody could
tell me a safe track through the maze of conflicting accounts of the
reign of Henry Tudor, between the modern feminists who still cling to the
idea that he was an unspeakable monster, the Roman Catholic Church which
still paints him as the very devil, Froude who hailed him as the great
Protestant hero of the Reformation, and the accounts of the ordinary man
who looks upon him as a bloodthirsty spot of grease—I believe Charles
Dickens used that elegant description—I should welcome it; but as I have
no criterion of truth but what medical experience has shown me to be true
of men, women and disease, I can only follow the account of him given
by Professor Pollard, who, treating him with studied moderation, was
prepared to consider him as the “great Erastrian,” the protagonist of
State against Church. No doubt that is substantially true. It is not for
a doctor to say.
Even the number of premature births endured by his wives is in dispute;
and all sorts of cock-and-bull stories are made up to show that his
children, if born alive, or his wives if they took ill were singularly
subject to the effects of cold and overlong christenings. Once would be
all very well; but when it happens more than once it becomes suspicious.
It is wonderful what people can invent when they wish to explain a thing
by religious and political conspiracies—of which they can really _know_
nothing in an age so utterly different from ours, in which the actors
have long gone beyond our intimate knowledge—when the obvious medical
truth is staring them in the face. Human beliefs have changed, but
syphilis is still the same.
I follow Pollard because he impresses me as a man of common sense. I
have not met him; but the sheer virulent abuse of the ordinary man is no
argument and is a better description of the critic’s own mind than of his
subject.
The facts which can only reasonably be explained by the idea that he was
suffering from constitutional syphilis are as follows—I put them in the
order in which they impress myself:
(_a_) The extraordinary number of premature births and dead
children from two of his wives, one of whom was young and
healthy. The early death of Catherine’s first-born son is
attributed to the strain of a long christening on a bitter
midwinter day.
(_b_) The poor health of at least three of his children, Mary
Tudor, Edward VI, and the illegitimate Duke of Richmond;
whether Elizabeth escaped the infection is at least doubtful
since Professor Chamberlain has carefully investigated the
details of her health.
(_c_) The terrible degeneration, mental, moral, and physical,
which set in in his early middle age.
(_d_) The facts contained in the extract from the _British
Medical Journal_ of 1910: “From being an able and athletic man
he had become a mass of loathsome infirmities. He was bloated
in face and so unwieldy that he could hardly pass through an
ordinary door. His legs were swollen and covered with festering
sores, causing an unbearable stench. Towards the end those
about him saw that death was at hand, though, according to
Foxe, he would never allow it to be mentioned in his hearing.
Kings never seem to have liked it to be recognised that they
are mortal, in which reluctance to face facts they are much
like other people.”
(_e_) The sinus in his leg which caused him unbearable agony
whenever it was closed. This seems to have been syphilitic
periostitis occurring in an essentially neurotic man.
(_f_) Death in stupor at the comparatively early age of
fifty-five.
Not any single one of these symptoms is indubitable evidence of
syphilis, but taken altogether there is no other reasonable explanation.
In syphilis and self-indulgence we have the secret of the whole tragic
development of this king’s character. Syphilis alone would doubtfully
have accounted for it, even less perhaps gluttonous and bibulous
self-indulgence. It is quite true that after his first marriage he
seems to have abandoned all moral restraint, or at least guidance by
ecclesiastics and the Church; but his dreadful degeneration was not a
result of doing so; he did so because he was influenced by the spirochæte
and gluttony combined. To-day, when a man gets into gaol for any
particularly shameless offence—especially sexual—the very first thing
that the police surgeon does is to perform a Wassermann test upon his
cerebro-spinal fluid; and I am perfectly certain that if it were possible
to do so upon Henry Tudor, the report would come back marked “Wassermann
plus,” and probably towards the end of his life “plus plus plus!”
But when did he catch it? He does not seem to have _obviously_ infected
any of his wives, so far as we can tell, so the inference is that he must
have caught it several years before he married Catherine of Aragon. Well,
he married her when he was little more than eighteen, so he must have
caught it when he was thirteen or fourteen, at about the very earliest
that a gay and showy boy of the Renaissance could manage to catch it.
Then probably the primary lesion, so apparently innocent and harmless,
healed up under the influence of some simple ointment,[3] just as it does
to-day in thousands of men, who bitterly rue later the one little slip
that was to cause them all their woes—and Henry went his life through,
probably having quite forgotten the trifling incident. To this day we
find that those cases of syphilis which are trifling at first, are just
the very cases which, under the influence of worry, lack of treatment, or
overstrain, go so tragically wrong at the end. The somewhat wicked pun is
common among medical men: “Five minutes with Venus may mean a lifetime
with Mercury,” a specimen of sardonic jesting with death that so appeals
to many doctors, however kindly and serious they may really be.
In no way can we better trace his degeneration than in his treatment
of his wives; so I propose to describe it alone of all his innumerable
misdeeds.
Firstly, it is a great mistake to suppose that the only nervous
result of syphilis is general paralysis. Among neurotic people it may
cause serious mental troubles although it may not affect the actual
brain-tissue so far as we can see with a microscope. As this is perhaps
not generally known, I quote a sentence from the _Oxford Textbook of
the Practice of Medicine_, by various authors, published in 1922. “Such
patients are generally psychasthenic, ill-balanced and degenerate.” The
writer is speaking of the effects of syphilis upon mental diseases, and
its propensity to cause “phobias” and “obsessions.”
His first wife was Catherine of Aragon, who was some six years older than
himself. After a fierce struggle with the pope the obliging Archbishop
Cranmer pronounced a divorce between them. Martin Hume considers that
this was entirely for personal reasons, because she had lost her personal
charms, and because Henry had fallen in love with Anne Boleyn. Probably
there was a great deal of the personal element in it, and it is quite
possible that if Catherine had been willing to go into a convent and
leave her husband to another woman—he actually proposed that the pope
should allow him two wives—there might not have been the divorce that has
been fruitful of such stupendous results for England. Catherine seems to
have been a woman much under the influence of Spanish religiosity, and
undoubtedly put up a strenuous fight to keep her husband; as was only
right and proper. Probably the real degeneration in the king was yet to
come; the spirochæte was still biding its time.
Since there seems to be a good deal of doubt about the exact dates of the
famous premature births of Catherine, I give from Professor Pollard her
actual record. On January 31st, 1510, seven months after marriage, she
gave birth to a daughter still-born. Eleven months later, on January 1st,
1511, there was a son, who died in three days, as is still said because
of the inordinate length of his christening. In September, 1513, there
was another son, who was either still-born, or died immediately after
it was born. In June, 1514, there was yet another son, but he, too, was
no sooner christened than dead. Then, on February 18th, 1516, came the
little Princess who, being born to misery, became “Bloody Mary.” Then, in
1517 “it is probable that there were several miscarriages.” On November
18th, 1518, came the last of the unhappy woman’s efforts. It was a boy
and still-born. And Catherine was by now forty years of age and obviously
could have no more children. She had done her best, poor lady, but found
her husband’s spirochætes too much for her.
General experience is that the tendency in constitutional syphilis is
to cause a string of prematurely born children or miscarriages; then a
child born at full time, but showing evidences of disease; then, the
tendency having worn itself out, one or more backward but seemingly
healthy children. But, after Mary was born, apparently the tendency still
remained. Probably local internal trouble still persisted in Catherine,
and she had not entirely worn out the infection. Undoubtedly a good
modern surgeon would have cured her and altered the history of England.
That the stout-hearted daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella actually died
of the syphilis which she had probably gained from her husband would
appear to be shown by the account of the post-mortem examination which
was secretly held by a man who was trying to prove that Henry VIII had
poisoned her. He reported after getting the body ready for embalming,
that she was all sound but the heart, which was “black and hideous, with
a black excrescence which clung closely to the outside.” Doubtless this
represented an aortic aneurysm, which is known to be a common result
of untreated syphilis. I know that the findings have been attributed
to cancer of the heart; but cancer of the heart is so rare, if it ever
occurs, while aneurysm is so common, that I prefer the interpretation
here given.
I regret that my little essay on Henry’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, has
been much misunderstood by readers of _Post Mortem_. The view I there
took was that if the stories about her were true they could only be
explained by the supposition that she was suffering from nymphomania.
Nymphomania does not necessarily imply that a girl is of abandoned
character; it is a pathological condition of the nervous system. To this
day it sometimes comes on after childbirth, especially if accompanied by
terror and anxiety. It is in these women part of the Curse of Eve.[4]
It may happen to any woman, and sometimes causes scandal before it is
discovered. What circumstances could be imagined more terrible than those
in which the tragic second queen found herself.
Henry had married her in hopes of gaining a son and heir in spite of the
curse which people believed lay upon him for the multifarious premature
births of her predecessor, or rather for the mortal sin of marrying
his deceased brother’s wife. Still further to complicate the matter,
Catherine of Aragon had sworn that she had never had connection with the
dead Prince Arthur at all. Truly the whole thing becomes more and more
complex as we gaze. A canon law which looked upon a carnal act as a deed
which must be sanctified by God whenever it was performed, either before
or after marriage; a girl who desired to be queen; another older woman
who fought fiercely for her rights as both wife and religious fanatic;
a multitude of fierce partisans; racial, political, and religious
animosities; over all a man enraged by “love,” fear, and brutality.
Who could get at the truth about poor little Anne’s marriage? It is
impossible; one can only sympathise with everybody, and try to understand.
As I said, if the stories are true they can only be explained on
pathological grounds. What girl in her senses would go rushing about the
Court soliciting promiscuously in the manner of which Anne is accused?
Mr. Philip W. Sergeant has written a book to prove that all the stories
are really based upon slanders set agoing by Chapuys, ambassador of
Charles V; and it was to fierce religious and political animosity that
Anne owed her bad reputation. According to him she was really a rather
vindictive, free-spoken woman, a great worker with her hands, fond of
dress, musical, and passionately fond of dancing. This is a new outlook
on the Anne of Froude and most historians, but is confirmed by several
known facts. For instance, some of her laborious needlework is said to be
still preserved in Hampton Court Palace. I have not seen it, for it is
many years since I was at that palace; but it must be very sad to gaze
upon it and think how tragic was the fate of Mr. Sergeant’s dancing,
singing, industrious little queen.
Another thing upon further reflection rather casts doubt even on the
pathological explanation. Froude accused her of soliciting Sir Henry
Norreys after the birth of Elizabeth—if I remember rightly, it was less
than three weeks afterwards. Is it conceivable that Sir Henry Norreys
would be allowed alone into Her Majesty’s sick-room only three weeks
after the greatest event of any woman’s life—the birth of her first-born?
A lady who claims to be an Irish descendant of that George Boleyn
who was accused of adultery and incest with Anne has written a long
and interesting letter concerning her family and Anne in particular.
Narrating the family traditions—and, as she says, family traditions must
always be accorded great value—she tells me that the descendants of
George Boleyn hold strongly that Anne may have been a gay little flirt,
but that there was never anything really morally wrong with her; and that
the whole accusation was in her own words—she is an American—a “frame-up”
on the part of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell. Quite possibly, therefore,
Anne may really have given nothing more than nods and becks and wreathed
smiles to the men who were accused of adultery with her; possibly even
the musician, Mark Smeaton, may have had his confession wrung out of him
entirely by torture and by Cromwell’s terrible personality.
The truth about her burial seems to be that she was not bundled into a
cask as I heard from one of the caretakers at the Tower, but that she
was hurriedly put into a partly filled box of arrows. According to Mr.
Sergeant they dug up the box in 1876 and found her delicate skeleton,
with slender bones and severed neck. It is all very tragic and very sad.
The difficulty is that Cromwell seems to have taken care that all the
evidence in her favour perished. We do not hear from her friends.
It was apparently during Queen Anne Boleyn’s reign that the first
appearance began of that frightful physical degeneration in the King
which so impressed all his contemporaries; and it was probably from
that circumstance that Anne gained the discredit of being the great
prime mover in his degeneration; it was not fair of Mr. P. C. Yorke,
in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, to say that she appealed only to his
lower nature. Some woman when he was about fourteen had done so most
effectually, and years later Anne had to suffer for it. He probably
appealed to Anne through his music, for he was a skilled musician,
and one of the anthems which he wrote is still performed in English
cathedrals.
There are still one or two things to remark when dealing with Anne
Boleyn. First of all there was the birth of Elizabeth when she expected
and fervently prayed for a son; secondly, the next was a miscarriage,
said to have been brought on by seeing Jane Seymour sitting on her
husband’s knee; another account is that it was a son prematurely born
through anxiety because of a fall that he had when riding. Again these
premature births! One would have thought that the constitutional syphilis
in Henry VIII must have long worn itself out by that time!
Last of all we must glance at the conduct of the very obliging Archbishop
Cranmer. He pronounced the decree of divorce—which, by the way, neither
Catherine nor Henry himself ever seems to have recognised. Then he was
present when Anne and Henry were married secretly. Then, when Anne,
looking upon him as a friend, appealed to him in her desperate trouble
at the end, he sent her a non-committal answer. As Mr. Sergeant dryly
comments, it has only recently been proposed that this obliging man be
made a saint of the Anglican Church.
There can be little doubt of the reason why Henry married Jane Seymour.
Before he got Anne put out of harm’s way he had fallen in love, as he
called it, with Jane; and the Seymours, being very powerful people who,
observing that the king’s passions were already all-powerful with him
(owing to his illness), took advantage of them to see that he married
the new star, simply for the sake of their own particular sect, which
happened to be Catholic. Here we see at once the fact that Henry, who
thought himself so strong, was in reality already at the mercy of party
politics.
Jane Seymour seems to have been a nondescript sort of woman, gentle and
harmless. At the end of about a year she was delivered of the little son
who, because his father’s syphilis had seemingly worn itself out, passed
through the perils of his infancy only to die ultimately of what looks
very much like pulmonary tuberculosis, the other curse of the Tudors.
Childbirth killed the colourless Jane Seymour, undoubtedly through
puerperal septicæmia, though once again the cock-and-bull story of an
overlong christening has been revived.
Next came Anne of Cleves, the famous “great Flanders mare” of legendary
reputation, of whom we have all learned at school. Again, according to
Major Hume, Henry was so worked upon by his political advisers that he
for once made an utter fool of himself, and married a picture by Holbein
procured by Thomas Cromwell. In recommending this marriage Cromwell took
a great risk, for, as is well known, no man can select either wife, pipe
or hat for another. It is said that Henry had proposed to the French
ambassador that he should hold a sort of Babylonian marriage-market among
the damsels of France, whence he should select the prettiest; but it is
also said, by Professor Pollard this time, that the Frenchman made such
an answer that for the only recorded time in his life, Henry was seen to
blush. It is difficult to imagine such a jape—even if French—as would
make Henry Tudor blush.
The important thing to tell about Anne of Cleves is that Henry, having
passed several nights in her room, proclaimed that he had discovered that
she was not _virgo intacta_. There are also several indecent stories that
he was said to have related of her, but as they are not entirely germane
to my present object, and as I do not wish this to be a mere _chronique
scandaleuse_ I omit them.
While he was thus uncertain, being almost in the position of Hajji Baba
when he discovered that he had married a veiled woman who turned out
to be excessively plain, Henry again strove for freedom. He secured it
by simply repudiating his bride on the Euripidean method of “it was my
tongue that swore,” not my soul. Anne seems to have been a good-natured
sort of German frau who accepted the inevitable with a good grace, and
doubtless she was not sorry to be left alone with her knitting. Henry
gave her £4,000 a year and two country houses, and called her his sister.
She was not above cracking a risky joke with her temporary husband when
he became still more prodigious as to his size and gluttony. It was while
he was worried about Anne that Luther announced that Squire Harry thought
himself to be God.
Lady Catherine Howard was the most pitiful of all, as Anne Boleyn was the
most tragic. Once again there was the inevitable see-saw of politics;
Henry had got rid of Thomas Cromwell the Protestant by the simple method
of cutting off his head in circumstances of unusual brutality even for
the sixteenth century; and once more the Roman Catholics came on top.
The result was the sacrifice of pretty Catherine Howard. That she was by
far the best looking of all Henry’s wives can hardly be denied. Nobody
looking at her gentle and thoughtful little face in the portrait that
hangs in the National Portrait Gallery would ever dream that she was
so immoral as people tried to prove. Her eyes were hazel, her hair was
auburn; and she looks as virginal as though she had never been near the
Court. Yet she was said to have had entanglements with at least three
men. She had had a very unhappy childhood, and received due thrashings
from her aunt the Duchess of Norfolk when that lady took a fancy to
bestow them; but little education. She had no maternal supervision to
keep her on the straight and narrow path in that sinful Court. Her music
master, Mannock, boasted that she had promised to be his mistress; a
kinsman named Dereham said that she was his wife; and she was reported to
be engaged to her cousin, Culpepper. And now she was bestowed upon this
new and dreadful suitor, His Gracious Majesty[5] himself. No wonder that
Martin Hume became almost dithyrambic about it. Indeed, Catherine Howard
had a hard fate.
I quote directly from Professor Pollard, who mercifully glosses over
the piteous details. “Rumours of Catherine Howard’s past indiscretions
had at length reached the ears of the privy council.... Twenty-four
hours later Cranmer put in his hands the evidence of the queen’s
misconduct. Henry refused to believe it in the rude awakening from his
dreams; he ordered a strict investigation to be made. Its results left
no room for doubt. Dereham confessed his intercourse; Mannock admitted
having taken liberties; and finally the queen herself confessed her
guilt. The king was overwhelmed with grief and vexation, and shed
bitter tears. He offered his wife a pardon and she might have escaped
with nothing worse than a divorce had not proofs come to hand of her
misconduct with Culpepper during Henry’s recent absence in the north.
This offence was high treason and could not be covered by Henry’s pardon
for her prenuptial immorality.” Henry feared lest the blood royal be
contaminated. In January, 1542, Parliament considerately relieved this
blubbering and neurotic man of his responsibility by “passing an Act of
Attainder directed against his new wife, which, to save him pain, was
signed by a Commission in his stead. Catherine declined his permission
to go down to the house of Parliament and defend herself in person.” In
due course she was beheaded in the Tower. The story is that she said, “I
had rather die a Culpepper than live a Queen.” Doubtless in confessing at
the back of her mind was the thought that it were better to be dead than
to be married to King Henry VIII at the moment that his mental syphilis
was approximating to its greatest terrors with all its obsessions and
phobias. Seemingly the Parliament of England was not always so brave
as we now think it to be. But if he knew so much about women as he had
professed in the case of his repudiation of Anne of Cleves, why had he
not applied his knowledge to the case of Catherine Howard before?
It seems a reasonable thing to glance at the other symptoms of syphilis
that occurred at the time during the reign of Catherine Howard when his
greatest degeneracy was coming on.
The ulcer on his leg sometimes closed, and the pain was so intense that
he sometimes became speechless with agony and went black in the face.[6]
He grew more and more corpulent every day. When he went on progress to
the north he cleared the Tower by issuing orders that every prisoner
in it was to be beheaded. If these in an absolute monarch are not
symptoms of syphilitic psychasthenia, of a frightful moral and physical
degeneration, what are they? Symptoms of whooping-cough, perhaps!
Next and last came Catherine Parr, who was said to have been degraded
to the royal bed by the Protestants to gain their own ends. She must
have been a brave woman to tackle the task of nursing this man, whose
temper by that time was like that of a wild beast owing to his obsessions
and phobias. She was no beauty; she was short in stature, but gifted
with amazing tact. She had already been twice a widow, so evidently she
thought she understood the art of nursing and managing men, even such a
man as her new husband. She is said to have been at the time in love with
Sir Thomas Seymour, whom she married after Henry’s death, only to die in
a short time of puerperal fever. She reconciled Henry to his daughter,
Elizabeth, and is said to have kept the peace between her and the
Princess Mary. We are told that she once had a theological dispute with
the king; a risky thing to do. “A good hearing it is,” said Henry, “when
women become such clerks; and a fine thing it is to be taught in mine old
days by my wife.” Catherine explained that what she had said was merely
intended to “minister talk”; so Henry answered, “Is it so, sweetheart;
then we are friends again,” and when Lord Chancellor Wriothesley came to
arrest her Henry called him beast, knave and fool. She must indeed have
been a remarkably clever woman, whatever her religious opinions.
As to his death it is quite impossible to get at the real truth. He had
sent the Duke of Norfolk to the Tower and had ordered his execution to be
fixed for February 28th, 1546. But, alas, on the 27th Henry lay dying.
The exact details are so squabbled over for purposes of sectarianism,
that it is impossible to distinguish between truth and falsehood. It is
said on the one side that he died in an agony of conscience; on the other
that Archbishop Cranmer came to ask him to give some token of his belief
in Jesus Christ. The king is said to have roused himself from his stupor
and pressed Cranmer’s hand. While there are not sufficient details to
offer an opinion it is possible that his stupor was uræmic, due to the
slow degeneration of his kidneys during the many years that his body and
mind had been degenerating. But one would prefer to have some independent
authority for the statement that the dying man understood sufficient of
what Cranmer was saying to him to press his hand at the mention of the
blessed name of Christ.
To the best of my ability and in accordance with the best modern
historical knowledge, I have drawn as honestly as I can the true
character of Henry VIII, Defender of the Faith, as seen by a doctor.
There are many stories told about him that I purposely have omitted from
fear of being accused of exaggeration. But the general atmosphere of
lust, obscenity, grandiose ideas, such as were noticed by Luther, and
violence combined with cowardice, especially about disease, is all very
typical of syphilis; one might almost call it diagnostic. He never became
an indecent honest lunatic such as Ivan the Terrible, for ingenious
historians who know the exact circumstances so far as anybody can know
them at this time of day, are still able to find logical reasons for even
the most dreadful of his actions. He did not become terrible; he became
loathsome. To use the words of a witty journalist friend of mine he was
not Henry the Terrible; he was Henry the Horrible. He is the one man who
ever disproved Shakespeare’s vaunt:
“This England never did nor never shall
Lie at the proud feet of a conqueror.”
For if England did not lie at the proud and probably dropsical feet of
this obsessional syphilitic with doubtless a gigantic blood-pressure to
add to his bad temper, words have no meaning.
The whole conduct of the English people throughout the Reformation is a
beautiful example of the working of Dr. Wilfrid Trotter’s herd instinct.
Like a swarm of bees England swept this way and that, uncertain how to
fly, looking for a resting-place where it might start the new era just as
the swarm searches for a place to start a new hive; and then, suddenly,
with no obvious reason, darts upon its way, upon the usual English way of
a compromise which doubtfully satisfies the strongest party.
It adds to the remark of R. L. Stevenson’s cynical old Frenchman: “The
English are a stupid people who have sometimes blundered into good.”
How many men lost their lives owing to Henry’s syphilitic obsessions
and phobias it is quite impossible to say. The comparatively slight
derangement of judgment in those tyrannical times may have meant the
block for scores. Perhaps when Sir Thomas More said, “Her Majesty Queen
Anne Boleyn may dance and sing but her turn may still shortly come,” the
acutest mind in England perceived that his king was not entirely normal
in mind.
Henry VIII was never a despot. If the law did not allow him to do as he
wished, he simply got Parliament to alter it for him.
Edward VI
This poor little boy, in whom all the tragedy of the Tudors seems to have
concentrated itself, was born to Henry VIII and Queen Jane Seymour in
1537. Henry had already forgiven himself for his conduct to Anne Boleyn,
and was deeply attached to his new queen; during the progress of the
christening he sat by the side of his wife and held her hand in order
that she might not be too exhausted by the strain. She, poor thing, had
to wear a great gown of ermine, and to sit upright on a state pallet
to welcome and bless her little son as the service terminated. But her
loving arms could not save him; already within him were implanted the
seeds of death, a tuberculous tendency from his grandfather, Henry VII,
and actual spirochetes from his father, Henry VIII. And, as Queen Jane
clutched him to her bosom, she herself began to shiver; no doubt she
thought her shivering was from fear lest she lose her son; but within a
week of his birth she lay dead, probably from puerperal septicæmia. Henry
was heart-broken; but at least the curse of the Church had been lifted;
he could now honestly say that he had begotten a legitimate and living
son, and that the succession of the English throne was safe. Where the
brilliant little Anne Boleyn had failed, this commonplace and featureless
Queen Jane, so colourless that everybody liked her, or at least did not
hate her, had succeeded. So she being dead, Henry at once communicated
with the Court of France in order to get him another wife, if possible;
that the Pope might see how impotent he was to affect human destiny.
This was not because he was incurably lustful, but because it was still
important to have another heir, should little Edward turn sick and die.
Already, one thinks, the English Prometheus was scaling Olympus with
determined, though engrossed, footsteps; already Zeus might well tremble
at the ponderous footfalls of this fat and syphilitic man.
But little Edward did not seem likely to die; for, to all appearances
he was a strong and healthy little boy. If the Court of England had
purposely meant to deny that Edward was syphilitic it could not have
chosen better words to do it in, for, as the message announcing the
glad news of his progress said, “he sucketh like a child of puissance.”
In the typical infantile hereditary syphilis the baby suffers from
“snuffles,” and its sucking powers are, to say the least, inadequate. But
the spirochæte has other ways of taking its revenge upon its host. It may
lie latent for years, and so poison the child’s resisting powers that
he falls an easy victim to some deadly bacterium. In the case of little
Edward it seems to have been the tubercle bacillus that first seized upon
its chance; and when, fifteen years later, just after puberty, it was
working its deadly will upon him the spirochæte of syphilis joined the
assault.
Edward was an affectionate little boy, of good impulses. Of course it
was unthinkable that a prince should ever be flogged; so the fond father
appointed a whipping-boy to act vicariously in his stead. It was Barnaby
Fitzpatrick who was honoured by receiving the royal thrashings, though
Edward was such a good little boy that Barnaby was seldom called upon
for duty, and grew up a firm friend of the little king who might have
suffered in his person but for him. Edward’s wet-nurse was a motherly
woman whom he later called his “mother-jak.” I do not know what childish
utterance that may have represented, but it is silly enough a term to
have come from the mouths of babes and sucklings. At eleven months old
no less a personage than Thomas Cromwell visited him officially and, no
doubt, dandled him upon his knee. Says Cromwell’s secretary, speaking
of this time, “And I do assure your lordship that I never saw so goodly
a child of his age; so merry, so good and loving a countenance, and so
earnest an eye, as it were exercising a judgment towards every person who
repaireth to his grace; and, as it seemeth to me, his grace encreaseth
well in the air where he is.” (Already he had been sent to the country
for his health.) “And, albeit a little of his grace’s flesh decayeth,
yet he shooteth out in length and waxeth firm and stiff and he can
steadfastly stand.” So clearly he was a nice little boy of eleven months,
if anything rather forward for his age.
When he was about two, his father, the king, used to take his little son
in his arms and stand at the window to show the multitude how bravely his
boy was fighting life; and the crowd would clap and cheer for joy, for
King Henry VIII was still beloved, and the Tudor succession was at every
Englishman’s heart; the awful mental and physical degeneration in the
king was still to come, and there is no more delightful scene in Henry
VIII’s life than that of him standing at the window holding up his son to
be cheered by the crowd. How little we really know of our public men!
Who could have foretold that this smiling king was to become the most
murderous tyrant who ever sat upon the throne of England? For the present
let him be glad, and his little son with him, smiling and chuckling with
true Tudor tact. The tragedy to both comes soon enough.
Some time before this, the proud wet-nurse announced that her
foster-child “has three teeth and a fourth appeareth.” I cannot
discover the exact age at which this announcement was made. It would
be interesting to know whether his dentition was entirely normal; but
probably little Edward seemed normal enough. When he came to be educated
the amount of learning that was stuffed into that poor child’s head was
simply amazing—worthy of Elizabeth; worthy of bluff King Hal himself. He
could speak both Latin and Greek; he habitually wrote in Latin, and could
translate a Latin author into Attic Greek. For his friend he selected
little Jane Dormer, a girl of his own age; the two ran about and played
together. The two made a pretty picture, if you can forget the fate that
was hanging over the little boy. He kept a journal, and a day came,
April 2nd, 1552, when he noted “this day I fell sick of the measles and
the smallpox.” The young diagnostician must have been very sure of his
insight. The fact that two dissimilar eruptions came out on the little
boy at the same time rather seems to indicate that there was some other
toxin at work, probably syphilitic.
As he grew up he began to show signs of both obstinacy and religiosity,
which, with a little encouragement, might have become as fanatic as
those of Mary Tudor herself and led to a real good old sixteenth-century
religious persecution. It was perhaps fortunate for England that the
clever little boy died before he could do any real mischief. We know
a great deal about his actual death. For a long time his health had
been failing; he was racked with a constant and incurable cough, and
apparently showed all the symptoms of a rapid consumption. The regular
doctors having failed to cure him, England’s Majesty was entrusted to the
care of a woman who professed to have acquired possession of a cure-all.
Under her treatment the king became rapidly worse. “His legs swelled,
his complexion became sallow, his hair fell out; the terminal joints of
his fingers fell off” (syphilitic dactylitis?). “Eruptions came out on
his skin, and he lost his fingers.” The luckless laundress who washed
his shirts also suffered from terrible things; she lost her nails and
the skin off her fingers, which gave rise to the suspicion that some
one had been trying to poison the king her employer. But probably either
she had been using some cheap soap or else she had syphilis herself. So,
the quack having proved that her cure-all was doing the king more harm
than good, was sent about her business, and the regular doctors were
recalled. Froude thought that she had been using some mineral poison, and
that in truth Edward VI had actually been poisoned by her, though not
intentionally. As for me, I am quite prepared to believe that she had
somehow got hold of a preparation of mercury which she was using on the
light-hearted assumption, which was probably true, that in 1550 everybody
was suffering from syphilis, and that when she tried it on Edward’s form,
already wasted and powerless by the long struggle with tuberculosis, the
spirochætes that had been lying latent within him suddenly became active
during the “storms of puberty” with the terrifying results that we have
just seen. Possibly the woman may have bragged of her discovery about
mercury; and everybody would at once say, “See what you are doing to our
beloved young king with your mineral poisons!” There is much virtue in a
name. Call mercury a “mineral poison,” and it is at once damned as much
as if you had called it a “drug.” But vegetable poisons are far worse
than mineral poisons; yet nobody dreams of saying that we should not take
strychnine to “buck us up,” nor morphine to relieve us of intolerable
pain. Probably it was that woman’s hard luck that she tried mercury at
the very moment when the king’s latent syphilis was about to come to the
surface; and no doubt it was just such incidents as this which have given
to mercury such a bad name, that the moment one prescribes it the patient
always says, “Not mercury, doctor, please.”
But that unfortunate woman was dismissed and the regular practitioners
returned to their prey with the good old sixteenth-century remedies for
coughs, which, if they could not cure, would certainly not bring the
patient all out in a rash. The rumour went about that they were poisoning
the king, that he was already dead. As young Edward lay gasping and
coughing and sweating on his death-bed his attendants said to him that it
would be wise for him to let himself be seen; so, with true Tudor sense
of duty, he dragged himself to the window and looked out at the crowd
waiting like ghouls to hear that he was dead. When they saw his face,
grey, pinched and dying, the crowd cheered as it cheered when it saw him
held up in his father’s arms. Though some cheered, yet some held to it
that a man who could look so ghastly must be dead, and indeed the rumour
that he was dead was but confirmed by the sight of him.
His last prayer was “O Lord God, free me, I beseech you, from this
calamitous life.” What was that poor young lad doing that he had
already begun to wonder why he had ever been born, as many men have
wondered about themselves since him? Tuberculosis of the lungs is often
accompanied by a sense of euphoria, that is to say, the patient does not
feel so ill as he should feel. But syphilis of the lung is gloomy enough,
and sometimes gives rise to symptoms indistinguishable from tuberculosis.
On the whole, therefore, I might rather be inclined to hazard a guess
that it was syphilis of the lung that killed little Edward VI. I grant
that this guess might be based mainly on that sad prayer, coupled with
all the other symptoms that I have narrated. Then, after he had been
trying to look upon his subjects with eyes that probably saw nothing, he
suddenly cried, “I faint—Lord, receive my soul,” and fell back dead.
But is it not rather fantastic to summon either in particular of the two
Earthly Twins, tubercle and syphilis, to the final assault, especially
a manifestation of syphilis so rare as syphilis of the lung? These two
form an alliance when it occurs that is not like the alliance of States;
they do not quarrel, but never let go their grip until the patient
dies. And it is in an alliance between delayed hereditary syphilis and
pulmonary tuberculosis that we must probably seek for the death of Edward
VI.
Probably it was lucky for him, and lucky for England that he died; and he
did well by wondering why he was ever born. How much more violently would
the wonder of life have shocked him when he came to learn how thorny is
the path of a man who is too religious! _Sed Dis aliter visum._ It needed
no inscrutable wisdom on the part of the Almighty to realise that Edward
Tudor was “better dead.”
Mary Tudor
I have already discussed the character of this unhappy woman in _Post
Mortem_. To the psychology that I there enunciated I have nothing to add;
and I still believe that if she had not been for so long an old maid,
if she had not been neglected by Philip II, or if she had been married,
as she probably would have preferred, to Charles V, England would not
have had occasion to call her “Bloody Mary.” She but supplies another
instance, if one were needed, that religion and sex[7] are not far apart.
For details as to her physical health I am indebted to the _British
Medical Journal_ for 1910, where there appeared that noteworthy series
of articles on Royal Deathbeds which has been so useful to historically
minded doctors.
As a child she was always sickly, though as she grew up she had to
undergo the rigid mental discipline that Henry enforced on all his
children. Being a very learned man himself, he naturally tried to imbue
them with his own hunger for knowledge; and all three rivalled their
father in intellectual endeavour.
With better fortune, better health, and perhaps we might say with a less
exacting father, Mary might have been as great as he. Instead her really
great parts turned her into the road of tyranny and persecution, and
“Bloody Mary” she will remain for all time.
The “storms of puberty” that had shattered the frail barque of Edward VI,
and brought his latent spirochætes to the surface, beat hard upon Mary’s
body, and left her an embittered and sickly woman, with an intellect
below her station, and a conscience above it. But what she mistook for
the love of God—religion—was probably a love more fleshly; the desire
of the moth for the star, as Shelley puts it poetically. Indeed, it is
difficult to describe this primitive instinct in language that shall not
be poetical; the great brain of man has idealised love until it is the
emotion furthest from prose that humanity is capable of suffering; and
that which is originally common to man and the brutes becomes the noblest
feeling of the human brain; transcendental. And when again sublimated it
may lead to the fiercest of injustices, to the most savage of religious
persecutions. To that goal it led Mary Tudor, the most unhappy woman in
English history.
As a girl she suffered from menstrual troubles that caused her great
pain; her normal menstruation was often scanty; and this has been
attributed to overstudy. To this day we find that any overstrain, or
even a sudden change of climate, may cause amenorrhœa in a young woman;
many of our English girl-immigrants, having left the depths of an
English summer for the mildness of a Sydney winter, suddenly terrify
their friends by becoming amenorrhœic, often to their unfounded mental
distress. Later on she suffered from what she called her “old guest,”
of which the chief symptom was amenorrhœa. The probability is that
soon after her marriage with Philip she really did become pregnant,
and miscarried. The disappointment weighed heavily on her mind. Was it
possible that she, who was so earnest, virtuous and religious, should
be affected by the same curse as the wives of her father? She became
cachectic—that is to say, her complexion assumed the ashy hue of a
person dying of cancer; and her abdomen swelled as though she were again
pregnant. Sir Spencer Wells in 1877 hazarded the guess that she probably
suffered from “ovarian dropsy,” an old-fashioned term for what we should
now call “parovarian cyst,” a tumour that takes its origin from a little
body adjacent to the ovary, and, being distended with fluid, causes
enormous swelling of the abdomen. It is the one abdominal tumour which,
if tapped, may possibly not return, and the patient may be cured with no
further ado.
For years before she died she had suffered from very bad health; she was
never well, and could never attend to her work properly, owing to the
terrible headaches that afflicted her; these were possibly due to her bad
eyesight. With these also went palpitation of the heart. She never became
old, for she died at forty-two; and most likely the proverb was as true
with her as it still is with every young person—“If you feel your heart,
it is not your heart; it is something else, generally your stomach.”
It is quite true that she, like Charles V, felt the loss of Calais
desperately; her exact words to her ladies-in-waiting were, “When I am
opened you will find Calais lying on my heart.” Probably the fluttering
at her heart put the idea into her head; and equally probably that
fluttering ultimately came from her pelvic distress, which in turn would
doubtless cause indigestion. We often see similar cases to-day.
Her father had compelled her to sign a statement that his marriage
with Catherine of Aragon had been “by God’s law and man’s incestuous
and unlawful”; thereby forcing her to declare herself a bastard. The
parliament of her brother Edward VI passed an Act of Uniformity that
enjoined services in English and did not permit of the Mass. To Mary,
as a devout Roman Catholic, this appeared to be a form of persecution.
She therefore appealed to her cousin the Emperor who intervened on her
behalf, as he had tried to intervene on behalf of her mother during the
divorce. But this time he was more successful, for he threatened England
with war unless Mary’s freedom of worship was restored to her, and her
right of hearing Mass in her own chapel after the old canons. It is easy
to see that the great Tudor dictator was dead and that only a sick woman
sat on his throne. But Mary seems to have had no approximately impartial
adviser. Throughout her reign she had no one to help her but the Emperor,
who, great as he was, could not be called impartial in those dreadful
times.
She was by no means personally cruel; she was lenient to political
prisoners and restored out of her own privy purse some of the monasteries
which her father had robbed. When her tumour—if it was a tumour—returned,
in 1557, she drew up a will in expectation of the dangers of childbirth.
She added a codicil to this in October, 1558, which showed that she had
abandoned all hope of children. Her husband had not returned to her after
he had gone to Belgium to see Charles V abdicate, and the elderly wife at
last saw that no child of hers was to govern England.
In 1558 she suffered from what was then called “the new burning ague,”
which is now thought to have been the influenza; in that year it was
raging in England, killing thousands of people.
She died suddenly in November, 1558, in full possession of her mind,
while she was hearing Mass in her own private chamber, a right that she
had won after such bitter struggles. Although no post-mortem examination
was held, it is generally thought that she died of an ovarian tumour,
though that is not likely to be correct, because an ovarian tumour would
not cause sudden death. Nor is there any record of any sickness that
would cause a heart disease that might kill her suddenly, unless perhaps
the influenza may have weakened her heart. I rather fancy that my own
guess is correct as given in _Post Mortem_ that she died of “degeneration
of heart and arteries,” not necessarily but probably syphilitic and
inherited from her father.
Any doctor looking at the portrait of her wizened, lined, and prematurely
aged face would probably say, “That woman must have been a hereditary
syphilitic,” especially if he knew the history of Henry VIII. I am
surprised to see that in the actual record of her life there appears to
be none of the usual symptoms of hereditary syphilis beyond the general
ill-health that was hers all her days, poor creature. Doubtless the
illness in her father was working itself out by the time that she was
born.
But she was very short-sighted; and possibly, as Sir Clifford Allbutt
points out, this may have been due to “interstitial keratitis,” an
affection of the cornea of the eye which is almost confined to hereditary
syphilitics. So that in Mary also we see the effects of the “tragedy
of the Tudors.” I am certain that that wizened face must come from
hereditary syphilis, because one of the first patients I ever had looked
extraordinarily like Mary Tudor, and the swellings on her arms for
which she consulted me melted rapidly under the influence of mercury.
Her photograph lies in my desk to this day as a perfect illustration of
delayed hereditary syphilis.
Queen Elizabeth
No decent man would add to the slanders that have been passed upon this
extraordinary woman, who stood at the head of the English nation when it
was engaged in one of its fiercest struggles for very existence. These
slanders are so numerous in quantity, but in quality so much alike, that
they may all be summed up in one—slander against her sexual morality.
Professor Chamberlin(2), evidently considering that the morals of a
great queen of the sixteenth century should resemble those of a great
queen of the nineteenth, spent many years in ascertaining the nature of
the sicknesses from which she was said to have suffered. The farrago of
somewhat quackish-sounding symptoms that he discovered has no meaning
in modern medicine. She has been slandered quite enough, poor lady, and
I for one shall not add anything to it. Rather than seek an explanation
for the innumerable contemporary physiological slanders I propose to see
whether they are possible.
They may be said to have been summed up by the kindest, most gentle
and most sympathetic of historians, Professor A. F. Pollard(1), whose
immense industry and meticulous fairness will at once absolve him from
any obvious conscious bias, sectarian or otherwise. Writing of her
extraordinary juggling with her numerous suitors he says: “There is
evidence that she had no option in the matter and that a physical defect
precluded her from hopes of issue. On this supposition her conduct
becomes intelligible, her irritation at parliamentary pressure on the
subject pardonable, and her outburst on the news of Mary Stuart’s
motherhood a welcome sign of genuine feeling. Possibly there was a
physical cause for Elizabeth’s masculine mind and temper, and for the
curious fact that no man lost his head over her as many did over Mary
Queen of Scots. To judge from portraits, Mary was as handsome as her
rival; but apparently Elizabeth had no feminine fascination, and even
her extravagant addiction to the outward trappings of her sex may have
been due to the absence or atrophy of deeper feminine feelings. The
impossibility of marriage made her all the freer with her flirtations,
and she carried some of them to lengths which scandalized a public
unconscious of Elizabeth’s real security.”
To analyse such remarkable slanders as those passed by Mary Queen of
Scots(3), and many years after Elizabeth’s death by Ben Jonson(4) in
his tipsy tattling would need a paper more suited for a gynæcological
journal than for general publication. Without emulating Ben by going
into unpleasant physical details I content myself by saying that so far
as I know there is _no_ physical defect of the female form obvious to
the sufferer which will preclude hope of offspring, and yet allow her
to reach the age of nearly seventy. Before coming to that conclusion
the author laid down four postulates to himself[8] which will occur to
every critically minded doctor; and it seems to him that every suggestion
fails miserably in at least one of these postulates. And since, when
tested in this way, every slander founded on the physical appearance of
her body necessarily fails, it is equally possible that the suspicions
thus based may be equally without foundation. Such rumours about her are
founded upon a lamentable want of knowledge of woman’s physiological and
anatomical necessities.(11)
It seems to me, that we can gather better evidence from contemporary
portraits than from contemporary religious slanders; it is well known
that whenever sixteenth-century religion came in at the door objective
truth flew out at the window. No one can study the beautiful portrait
of Queen Elizabeth which Miss Gwen John allows me to publish without
thinking: “That is not the portrait of a loose woman! She may have been
cruel, vindictive, merciless, but she cannot have been loose and sensual.”
Her amazing personality is best explained by the new science of the
ductless glands—endocrinology.[9] Sometimes she seems to have had all
the male qualities, such as swearing, roughness of speech, freedom from
convention. Sometimes she seems to have behaved like a doting old maid,
in her inordinate love of dress, jewellery, and flattery. Rather than
believe that she was abnormal in form, which I think to be impossible
considering the known facts of her physiology, I find it easier to
believe that in some way her “endocrine balance” was abnormal. It is
now rather more than suspected that no individual is entirely male or
entirely female; the psychic qualities of both sexes are more or less
mingled in everybody, and thus we could easily explain the remarkable
fact noted by Professor Pollard that no man ever seems to have fallen
in love with Elizabeth sufficiently to risk his head for her. A century
before, Owen Tudor fell in love with Katherine of Valois(7), and risked
death by marrying her secretly. But no such vehement lover appeared for
Elizabeth; and, if he had, her want of “endocrine balance” would not
have prevented her from child-bearing. When she shouted to Sir Nicholas
Throckmorton, “God’s death, villain, I’ll have thy head,”(3) the violence
of the male in her came to the surface; when she fondled and fooled with
the Duke of Alençon and called him her “little frog”(6) and other silly
names, the doting old maid in her was paramount. Major Hume considers
that it was with the Duke of Alençon that Elizabeth was in love for the
first and only time in her life; and it is quite possible.
The only thing that my speculation does not explain is the bitter cry
from the heart that was wrung from her when she heard of the birth of
King James I to her great rival, Mary Queen of Scots: “The Queen of Scots
is the lighter of a fair son, but I am a barren stock!”(3) How did she
know? Was she thinking of the amazing number of miscarriages that befell
two of her father’s wives, which to us now appear such certain evidence
that he was probably suffering from constitutional syphilis? That is the
best suggestion I am able to make.
Innumerable attempts have been made to explain the slanders upon Queen
Elizabeth, from Miss Gwen John’s explanation given in her little play,
“The Prince,”(12) that probably they arose from accidental episodes that
occurred when she was about her normal duties at Court, to Major Hume’s
idea—which is generally held—that they were the result of purposeful
“hoaxing” by the Great Queen, all done for the sake of her country. True,
like her father Henry VIII, Elizabeth was very patriotic; but, as one of
Professor Chamberlin’s doctors suggests, it is difficult to distinguish
between her patriotism and her desire to keep her own head on her
shoulders. So far as I know the present suggestion—that the contemporary
rumours about her physical malformation were impossible—has never been
put forward before. It again leaves the field open for those who are able
to estimate the effects of sectarian enthusiasm upon the human mind to
find some other explanation than a physical malformation.
Her character has been so much besmirched by slander that we are
sometimes apt to forget that in reality she was as clever and
intellectual as her great father in his youth. She knew several
languages, and to seek consolation in the worries that necessarily befell
her it is said that she translated Boëthius’ “Consolatio Philosophiæ.”(9)
If we are to remember her as the man-struck old maid who philandered with
and petted her favourites, it is equally well for us to remember her as
the intellectual woman who was able to translate a deep philosophical
work. The extremely intellectual qualities that one finds in Elizabeth
are sometimes forgotten in the whirlwind of sectarian slander and
patriotism that had centred itself on her head. Possibly the reason why
she fixed upon Boëthius for translation—he had already been done by
Chaucer—is because he wrote his great “consolation” in prison while he
was awaiting the Roman executioner. Perhaps she thought that his case
somewhat resembled her own.
Her dual personality came out strongly in her last words. According to
Sir Sidney Lee they were “Ad inferos eat melancholia”—“To hell with
melancholy.” Not long afterwards she fell into a deep coma(10)—probably
caused by septic intoxication from an abscess in her tonsils, acting
upon a woman whose arteries were much older than her years—and died in
her sleep. In these words one sees the reckless courage that we suppose
to be male, swearing and laughing in the face of death however unwelcome
he may be, and the feminine desire to charm which led her to paint her
face as she said them.
But after all, the best epitaph upon Elizabeth is the little verse that
she scratched upon a windowpane at Woodstock Manor, where her loving
sister Mary was “entertaining” her much as we entertained Napoleon at St.
Helena:
“Much is suspected of me;
Nothing proved can be;
Elizabeth prisoner.”
And perhaps it is as well that nothing can be proved against the personal
morality of one of the greatest women in history. One imagines that her
wraith would laugh ironically at all our vain efforts, as her young
girlhood evidently laughed at poor Mary as she scratched the words
_Elizabeth prisoner_.(5)
I take from the _British Medical Journal_ of 1910 the description of her
actual death, because it is in accordance with my own experience of the
deaths of fierce and obstinate old ladies.
Lady Southwell, one of her maids of honour, said: “She kept her bed
for fifteen dayes besides the three dayes that she sat upon her stool
without speaking; until one day, being pulled upon her feet by force,
she stood upon her feet for fifteen hours. Her Majestie understood that
Mr. Secretarie Cecil had given forth that she was mad; and therefore in
her sickness she said ‘Cecill, know thou that I am not mad; you must not
try to make Queen Jane of me.’” Queen Jane was “Crazy Jane,” mother of
Charles V, and this recollection of the days of her youth, when Charles
V was the greatest man in the world, is very characteristic of an old
person. “And,” continues Lady Southwell, “though by Cecil’s means many
stories were spread about that she was mad, myself, nor anie that were
about me, could never see that her speeches, so well adapted, proved her
distracted mind.”
Then they lifted her into bed; she fell asleep; and the last of the
great personal monarchs of England died in coma. There was no sectarian
nonsense about her waking from a stupor to press anybody’s hand, when all
she wanted was to get on with her dying.
But though Elizabeth was so great and had such an astonishing effect on
English history(8) it would be a mistake to turn her into the heroine of
a sentimental novel.
(1) A. F. Pollard, _Political History of England_.
(2) F. Chamberlin, _Private Character of Queen Elizabeth_.
(3) F. Chamberlin, _The Sayings of Queen Elizabeth_.
(4) Ben Jonson, _Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden_.
(5) F. A. Mumby, _Girlhood of Queen Elizabeth_.
(6) M. S. Hume, _Courtships of Queen Elizabeth_.
(7) Mabel Christie, _Henry VI_.
(8) Rachel Taylor, _Aspects of the Italian Renaissance_.
(9) _The Australasian Journal of Philosophy_, June, 1924.
(10) Facts from the _British Medical Journal_, 1910; guess my own.
(11) Julian Huxley, _Essays of a Biologist_.
(12) Gwen John, _The Prince_.
Ivan the Terrible
The life of this criminal lunatic has been described so often, with
so much journalistic horror, that I hesitate to offer the plain
matter-of-fact comments of a doctor upon it.
In order to understand the Russia of the last few centuries, we must
first of all glance at Russian history. Under the brutal yoke of the
Mongols the Russians learned the worst extremes of cruelty to which the
vanquished in an Oriental country must submit; for, their country laid
waste by civil war and devastated by the Tartars, the whole people were
familiar with bloodshed, misery and cruelty. A man’s children were his
slaves, whom he could sell four times, and his wife and family lay under
a sterner rule of fatherhood than ever obtained even in Rome or in Asia.
Prisoners of war had to sell themselves as slaves lest they starve.
Ivan was born in 1530, son of Vassili Ivanovitch and Helena Glinska. One
of his brothers was an imbecile, and his father was sullen, changeable,
and savagely ferocious.
When Ivan was three years of age his father died, and, under the regency
of his mother his education in vice began; indeed, it seems to have been
prodigious. Although Helena seems to have done her best to protect him,
he was encouraged by courtiers to yield to every form of self-indulgent
vice that is possible to a young man. He used to watch with delight his
dogs as they fell upon prisoners whom he had had thrown to them; and was
constantly suspicious of the Boyars, or aristocrats, whom he suspected
to have organised conspiracies against him. It is said that they used to
organise their conspiracies either in the name of Ivan or of his mother;
and they were opposed by their natural enemies, the trading classes.
Hence it was that Ivan conceived a violent hatred and terror of the
Boyars, and an equally foolish trust in the merchants. He had to suffer
many indignities, and saw his favourites murdered before his eyes. Ivan
struck back, until at last he captured one Shousky, last of the Boyars,
and gleefully threw him to the dogs from the balcony whence he had often
seen his prisoners eaten. A great fire broke out in Moscow in 1547,
when Ivan was seventeen years old; seventeen hundred people perished in
the flames. The populace rose in fury, accusing his grandmother and her
sons of setting Moscow ablaze. Being a good grandson Ivan acted with
vigour; he did not try to ascertain how far the old lady and his uncles
were guilty, but incontinently seized upon the ringleaders of the people
and put them to death as they deserved. In the midst of the pother a
monk—one Sylvester—appeared. He seems to have been like one of those
Oriental prophets who are said to have dared to tell the truth to kings.
Bravely facing Ivan, he foretold the future in many visions and dreams;
and warned Ivan that it was owing to his own misdeeds that Russia was
suffering such tragic torments.
For some reason Ivan spared him, called together a synod of priests and
other intelligentsia of Russia and asked for its aid in the government.
Flattered, the synod drew up rules for its ruler; and the next ten years
are pictured to us—possibly by friends of the synod—as a veritable
_quinquennium Neronis_; though the period was longer than Nero’s. There
was good government and outward prosperity; the army was reformed; a new
code of laws was devised; a printing press was established; Archangel
was founded; trade with England was set afoot through the White Sea;
by victories in Livonia the frontier was pushed towards the Baltic;
fortresses against the Tartars were established in the Crimea; and the
Turks were driven back. In these wars Ivan IV showed himself to be a
great and able general; a worthy predecessor of that Peter the Great who
was soon to come after him.
But this was too good to last. In 1552 his wife died: Anastasia, first
of the Romanoffs, the woman, as it would now seem, who saved Russia by
protecting the Tsar from harpies. Ivan was heart-broken. He suspected her
to have been poisoned, as every sudden death in the sixteenth century was
attributed to poison; and from a little village near Moscow he wrote a
violent letter, accusing the Boyars both of poisoning his Anastasia and
of misgoverning Russia during his minority. He concluded by threatening
that God called him to abandon the ungrateful people, who were unworthy
of such love as his.
This threw Russia into a panic. “How shall we get on without our ruler?”
they asked. “Who will defend us against our enemies? What will the sheep
do without their shepherd?”
Evidently Ivan was a politician of no mean order; he knew his Russia.
Touched by the weeping of the herd, he returned to his subjects. But how
changed an Ivan! Formerly he had been a splendid man physically, tall,
broad-shouldered, with hawk nose and eagle eyes; a true tsar of the
dynasty of Rurik; fit leader of the great Russian people. On his return
to his loving people he was suddenly become thin and wasted; his hair was
falling; his skin was dull; his eyes had lost their brilliance; physical
degeneration had already set in.
Considering his subsequent history, it is probable that in the fit of
petulance after the death of his beloved wife he had become infected
with syphilis, which was then at the height of its conquering career
throughout Europe. Eight days after her death he married a Circassian
woman, who was of a rough mind, and of coarse breed; possibly it may
have been from her that he caught his disease, for to her influence is
generally attributed his mental degeneration.
Such a fate often happens to a physically strong young man who suddenly
finds himself deprived of his helpmate; and it was a wise law of the
Romans, that every Governor of a province must be married; if for no
other reason than that a wife would protect him from the attacks of other
women who might mean him less well than she.
When he was seventeen, he had proclaimed himself “Tsar,” thus showing
himself bolder than his predecessors, who had perforce to content
themselves with the title of “Grand-Duke.”
Now, in his new-found glory, with his new wife by his side, he raised for
himself a bodyguard of 6,000 men, whom he called the Opritschnitza. These
men rode through the countryside with besoms and dogs’ skulls at their
saddle-bows. The emblems were supposed to signify that they would sweep
away and hunt down all enemies of the Tsar.
But the Boyars were still to be properly punished for their wickedness;
there were a few left, and at least the children of the infamous brood
survived and had to be brought to justice; so Ivan rode through the land
from country-house to country-house at the head of his men, besoms, dogs’
skulls, and all, slaying and burning; a right merry journey. Those whom
he could not kill perished in the snow, and all Russia lay in terror of
Æsop’s “King Stork.” Better had it been for Russia if the people had
left him in his self-imposed quarantine, to recover in peace from his
skin-syphilis before it had attacked his brain. For a man suddenly driven
mad by securing absolute power, and worried by fighting, revenge, and
murder, to rage desperately about the country instead of treating his
syphilis even by the crude methods that were in vogue in the middle
of the sixteenth century, was sheer madness. To this day we find that
physical and mental rest, fresh air, and mercury, are the standbys in the
treatment of syphilis, and quite probably it is less deadly to-day than
it was in 1550.
It was the custom in Russia for the Tsar, when he wanted a wife, to
collect all the most beautiful women from whom he should make his choice;
and in 1570 he, in need of another wife, collected no less than 2,000
girls; them he kept in captivity for more than a year, treating them as
he would, ruthlessly and relentlessly, a symptom truly characteristic of
cerebral syphilis in a man untroubled by restraints, moral or legal. From
these he chose another wife for himself and one for his son, that the
great name of Ivan should not perish from the earth.
The shuddering remainder he bestowed on his courtiers, or sent home.
Cerebral syphilis is an extraordinary thing. Besides causing general
paralysis, which is known positively to be syphilitic, the disease acts
upon the arteries of the brain, and the symptoms that it causes seem to
depend upon the areas of the brain that the diseased arteries supply. If
the affected area is the front of the brain in which the intellectual
faculties are supposed to be, all the symptoms of violent mental
irritation are caused. They may begin quite early in the disease, and
may last for many years till the patient’s death; much appears to depend
upon whether the patient has been able to live a decent and quiet life.
That in the case of Henry VIII his disease apparently led to nothing more
monstrous than cutting off two of his wives’ heads—possibly they deserved
it—and to violent and murderous political activity, would rather seem
to show that if he had had a chance of rest and treatment he might have
been no worse a king than many others who have won fame and gratitude.
At least he was a highly educated man who certainly meant well at first.
Ivan from the beginning was little better than a brute, of shocking
family history and evil impulses. In him it probably went far beyond the
stage of mere syphilitic psychasthenia.[10]
Seven wives in all were his, so that he beat Henry’s record by one. I
suppose he showed the same miserable story of domestic unhappiness,
but I have not been sufficiently interested to find out. Some of his
letters are still extant, and they show all the signs of insanity, in
their unwieldy length, their foolish cunning, their voluble avoidance
of the main point, and their inconsequence. On the evidence of these
letters alone any two doctors to-day would “sign up” Ivan IV. To say
that he became wildly sexual would be to understate the matter: he
developed the morals of a satyr. This is all very characteristic of
syphilitic insanity, whose victims often find its worst effects in an
utter abandonment of sexual restraint. It is almost as if the disease,
being often the result of impurity, revenges itself on the victim by
accentuating the very incontinence which has caused it.
The rest of the story of Ivan the Terrible—it is strange that history has
not yet called him Ivan the Great—is not very interesting, except for two
shocking incidents that we shall relate in their turn. It is simply the
record of a man with an Oriental mind, maddened by syphilis, abandoning
himself to the most ruthless cruelty, experimenting as if to plumb the
depths of human wickedness. It would be wearisome both to tell it and to
read it, with all the senseless stabbings, the stamping on the feet of
helpless menials, the red-hot pokers, the experiments in torture, the
burnings, the infamy. Let us hold our noses and turn to historical facts
of a broader interest.
A man, in order to curry favour with the Tsar, wrote a private letter
to the King of Poland accusing the great city of Novgorod of conspiring
against its ruler. Ivan found it by a trick, possibly with the connivance
of the writer. He held his peace, just as Henry VIII had remained silent
when he first heard of the sin of Anne Boleyn. But, without a word to
anybody, he collected an army of 15,000 men, whom he marched towards the
doomed city, around which he erected a barricade of stakes that no one
might enter or leave so as to escape the just punishment of an outraged
Tsar. Then, for every day throughout a period of five weeks 500 to 1,000
of the citizens were led into his presence and put to death in all sorts
of amusing ways; Ivan’s cleverness in devising new ways of killing seems
to have been really wonderful. So wicked was the city that neither man,
woman, nor child was spared, until but a scanty few remained alive. This
niggardly remainder he collected before him, and forced to pray for
the beloved Tsar. Like many syphilitic lunatics he had long considered
himself to be God.
Then his eldest son, Ivan, who had grown up very like himself in
character, so that people were already looking into the future with
forebodings, took offence at what the half-witted fellow thought to be
his father’s insult to his wife, Helena. With a roar Ivan rushed upon
his son, striking him on the head with a heavy staff shod with iron. Ivan
the prince dropped insensible, and died in a few days. Tsar Ivan was
shocked unutterably, did penance and for a time seemed to regain sanity
in his grief for the loss of his bright boy. But only for a time; soon
the old monotonous régime of insensate cruelty returned.
1584 was a great year for Ivan. Feeling rather unwell the brilliant idea
struck him that a well-born English girl would just suit his whim; so
he sent a special messenger to Queen Elizabeth to select him one, also
to inform her that, should his mutinous subjects prove unruly he would
honour England by seeking therein a sanctuary. Thrice happy England;
sanctuary for so many politicians! Well might refugees from the Austrian
troubles in 1848 seek her green fields for peace.
The Virgin Queen selected one of her maids of honour, Lady Mary Hastings,
for this dishonour. The Earl of Huntingdon, Lady Mary’s father, and Lady
Mary herself, shuddered and protested at the thought of her marriage with
this dreadful man, especially as Ivan’s seventh wife was still alive, and
he had blithely proposed to set her aside in favour of the fair English
maid, as the wretched creature would not die, nor leave him single,
nor allow him to poison her. But for once, at least, Elizabeth’s heart
conquered her head, and she did not press the match; it was too tragic
even for the sixteenth century, so that no English girl graced Moscow any
more than did Caliban marry Miranda.
But Death was still waiting, inexorably. No doubt Ivan had long forgotten
the apparently trifling illness from which he had suffered after the
death of his first wife, or rather soon after his second marriage, but it
had not forgotten him. Nature never forgets and seldom forgives, as so
many doctors have said about Life.
A frightful portent, a comet, appeared in the sky, and as Ivan saw its
horrid tail the thought struck him that it had come to warn him of his
death. All Russia was at once in a ferment. Soothsayers were summoned
from all the ends of the Tsardom. No less than sixty were collected
to save the life of the Tsar, that religious lunatic, who had thought
himself to be God; but the best they could do was to promise him that
he would not die until twelve days had elapsed. “It will be the worse
for you if your promise holds good,” said Ivan in a fury; and with that
he made up his mind to slay the soothsayers if he should survive the
twelve days. The wife of his surviving son, who was to succeed him as
the half-imbecile Tsar Feodor—syphilis again!—came to comfort him in his
terrors, that this mighty Tsar should not have to go down into the dark
his hand unpressed by any woman’s; but Ivan indecently assaulted her and
she fled in terror. To the later Ivan every woman was less feminine than
female.
The twelfth day dawned and Ivan prepared the scaffold for the execution
of the soothsayers. He himself took what precautions occurred to his
simple soul, and spent most of the day on a sofa playing draughts with
one of his male favourites—surely the most harmless and safest of joys;
surely Ivan could have done nothing better unless he had forestalled
fate by a good course of mercury thirty years before! At last, just as
Ivan was beginning to congratulate himself that he had beaten fate,
beaten the comet and beaten the astrologers, and was glutting himself
with the anticipation of his next merry jest, he suddenly choked,
uttered a stifled cry and fell back dead. Fate and syphilis had won; the
astrologers had predicted so accurately that their heads were even then
trembling on their shoulders. What had happened? No doubt his syphilis
had affected the aortic valve of his heart, as it frequently does to-day.
The blood, instead of coursing on its orderly way throughout his body,
had run back into his heart, which, being overfull of blood, had stopped;
and in a moment Ivan the Terrible was dead. The people wept for him, as
being the Tsar. “Such was the Tsar,” sobbed an admirer. “Such as he was,
God made him.”
I do not ask you to suppose that I have diagnosed Ivan from any special
knowledge of my own; the facts I have enumerated are all to be found in
a book called _The Blot upon the Brain_, by the late Dr. W. W. Ireland,
a once-celebrated alienist of Edinburgh, who, so far as I know, was the
first to suggest that Ivan IV probably suffered from syphilis. I go
further, and suggest that he probably suffered from diffuse cerebral
syphilis and syphilis of the aortic valve, just as people do to this day.
Twenty years ago I read that syphilis was unusually widespread in Russia,
and I have often wondered since 1917 whether that long ago epidemic can
possibly have had anything to do with recent Russian politics.
Luther’s Devil
Those people who find it difficult to suppose that God so loves man
that He occasionally suspends the operation of the principle of the
conservation of energy in order that He may interfere in purely human
affairs on this tiny planet will also find it difficult to believe
in a personal devil who roams the world seeking whom he may devour
and haunting people. Yet Martin Luther, who started the movement that
ultimately led the world back to science and reason, had no difficulty
whatever in believing this nonsense, and an infinity of other nonsense
that to us nowadays seems little short of stark staring crazydom. Surely
the poor gentleman must have been deranged, one thinks. Not at all, for
Luther had the evidence of his own senses that he was haunted. He heard
the foul fiend whistle and roar in his ears; the devil so gripped his
heart that Luther never knew that the next moment might not be his last;
sometimes he would cause him to be so giddy that when quietly sitting at
work Luther was forced to fall from his stool. What was the matter with
Martin Luther?
To begin with, most assuredly he was never mad; at the most one could
fairly say that, like most of the great leaders of thought, Luther was
probably of the manic-depressive temperament, with that strange mixture
of apparently insane egotism and gloomy pessimism that so marks people of
that temperament. In his famous prayer he orders his God about in a way
that one can only compare to that of the Presbyterian divine who cried
in a moment of irritation, “Noo, Lord, that’s fair ridic’lous.” If you
read Luther’s _Table-talk_, you will at once be struck with his curious
temperament, which could combine a certain amount of shrewd common sense,
such as you would expect from a man of Saxon peasant stock, with profound
belief in the supernatural, a good deal of disbelief in his fellow-man,
virulent hatred of the Pope and all his works, and a good deal of what
looks uncommonly like sheer mysticism. _En passant_ I found therein the
solution of a problem that has long puzzled me. What was the mysterious
“sin against the Holy Ghost” that nobody seems to understand? Let Luther
explain it to us himself. Many persons have imagined that it represented
one of those sexual perversions against which primitive races have so
often launched a fierce tabu, simply because they knew nothing of sexual
pathology. But really, according to Luther, it was nothing of the kind.
“Sins against the Holy Ghost are: first, presumption; second, despair;
third, opposition to and condemnation of the known truth; fourth, not to
wish well but to grudge one’s brother and neighbour the grace of God;
fifth, to be hardened; sixth, to be impenitent.”
The only fault one has to find with this is that Luther does not tell
us how to recognise the truth when one sees it. What _is_ the criterion
of truth? Otherwise it would seem to be a fairly good description of
a certain type of neurasthenia. Many neurasthenics must go in mortal
sin every day of their lives, for it is well known that the devil is
particularly on the lookout for sins against the Holy Ghost.
Probably Luther’s devil merely represented symptoms due to his wretched
health. There is an excellent description of his dystrophy in Hartmann
and Grisar’s monumental _Life of Luther_, and Dr. Cabanes went over it
again from the point of view of modern medicine; while nearly fifty years
ago Dr. W. W. Ireland of Edinburgh reviewed it from the point of view
of an alienist of that time. But Ireland did not perceive the immense
influence of Luther’s physical ailments on his mental condition. How
could you expect him to, fifty years ago? From these three sources,
therefore, I draw the material for this essay. A précis of Dr. Cabanes’
essay appeared in the _St. Louis Urologic and Cutaneous Review_ for
November, 1924.
Those fanatic Protestants who still believe that Luther was a meek and
mild sort of monk who was driven to revolt by the sins of the “Whore of
Babylon” should read his _Table-talk_ in order that they may learn what
manner of man he really was; and it will be surprising if they rise from
it without an insight into Luther’s character that may possibly change
their whole conception of the Reformation. Far from being a gentle and
Christlike son of the Church, he was, so far as I can gather from his
own words, perhaps the most frenzied theologian of that dark century of
theologians. In sheer outrageous superstition he could outdistance even
the most ignorant peasant; his fear of the devil amounted to possession,
because he attributed to the action of the foul fiend every single
thing that he could not understand. An hour spent in reading Luther’s
_Table-talk_ gives a better insight into the mind of man during that
most terrible of all centuries than a year spent in reading an ordinary
history. The most reasonable excuse that we can make for him is that he
was ill during the greater part of his life, suffering from one of the
most distressing of all ailments.
From about the age of thirty he suffered from dreadful noises in the
head, banging, whistling, thumping, and crashing. These were accompanied
by terrible attacks of giddiness, which sometimes actually caused him to
fall from his stool, and rendered work impossible. Towards middle life
he became so neurasthenic that his mental condition became almost that
of a lunatic—and indeed the Catholics did not miss the opportunity to
say that he had actually become mad; but probably this was but a tit for
Luther’s own tat of extraordinary theological violence, and was certainly
never true. But what is true is that he began to suffer from pains in the
region of the heart, accompanied by a sense of dreadful oppression, so
that sometimes he thought himself to be dying. As he grew older he became
very deaf, and his cardiac distress became still more terrible.
All these things were to Luther certain evidence that his personal devil
was attacking him; it is said that once he threw a pot of ink at the
fiend, and the marks of it are still shown. All these things can be
explained easily—as Dr. Cabanes suggested—if we suppose that Luther
was suffering from Ménière’s disease of the labyrinth, a disease of the
inner ear that occasionally attacks middle-aged and gouty people, and
is supposed to have added its tragedy to Dean Swift’s already tragic
life. The labyrinth is composed of the semi-circular canals, structures
which are directed longitudinally and laterally to the axis of the body,
and assist us in maintaining our equilibrium; if anything goes wrong
in these tiny tubes an unconquerable feeling of giddiness overwhelms
us, and it is thought that it is the washing this way and that of the
fluid in these canals that causes the deathly feeling of giddiness in
seasickness. And the fact that Luther’s deafness steadily increased as he
grew older seems to show that it was really caused by Ménière’s disease.
In 1541 he seems to have suffered from middle-ear disease, accompanied by
dreadful earaches and discharge from the ear; while this lasted he became
temporarily quite deaf, but all the time the labyrinthine disorder was
going on.
Although he never seems actually to have suffered from gout, there seems
to be no doubt that he was of the gouty diathesis, and that uric acid was
constantly circulating in his blood, which, added to his manic-depressive
temperament, would undoubtedly increase his tendency to gloom. If there
can be any worse devil than frightful noises in the head, neurasthenia
and uric acid in the blood, it would be interesting to learn what it is.
Many a man has been driven to suicide by nothing worse. That Luther seems
to have resisted any temptation to suicide that he may have had, speaks
volumes for the strength of his purpose.
Probably the pains in his heart and accompanying fear of death
represented a gigantic rise in his blood-pressure that would naturally
occur in a man of such furious polemic zeal. And it may be that it
possibly went so far as to cause angina pectoris. The accompanying fear
of death certainly looks like angina, for there is no disease more
frightful than angina; the patient feels as though the very grave were
yawning for him.
Luther seems to have ultimately become on almost friendly terms with his
devil. One night at the castle of Wartburg he heard a dreadful noise on
the stair which woke him up—probably it represented noises in his own
ears. He got out of bed in a rage with the insolent fiend.
“Is that thou, devil?” he shouted, but Satan said not a word. Then
Luther, seeing that Auld Hornie was not to be drawn, got back into bed,
piously commended himself to the care of the Lord Jesus Christ, and
ultimately got off to sleep again. And this is the sort of thing that
went on day and night with the Reformer. What a difference a course
of salicylates and bromides might have made to Luther, and possibly
through him to the whole Reformation, for there can be little doubt that
Luther’s devil played a great part in spurring him to yet more furious
religious zeal. Sometimes even he began to despair, and admitted that
it was impossible to make peace with the Pope so long as the papacy
was the papacy and Luther was Luther. Viewed in this light, that in
a sense he was Athanasius _contra mundum_, Luther’s dictatorial and
egotistical prayer to his God becomes almost pathetic, for he felt
himself alone on the side of God against the mighty power whom he frankly
calls anti-Christ, with hardly a soul helping him; it may have been
during those passionate appeals to God for guidance before he made the
break that his blood-pressure began to rise, for nothing causes the
blood-pressure to rise like passionate emotion of any kind. Perhaps forty
years later it killed him. Rising blood-pressure kills with exceeding
slowness; let excitable politicians beware, for the same rules apply to
them to-day as applied to poor Martin Luther, who was really less a man
of God than a most furious politician.
Both Hartmann and Grisar and Dr. Cabanes give substantially the same
accounts of his sudden death; so probably it is assured in spite of
the Catholic story that he committed suicide. For two years a stone in
the bladder had added to the tortures of his Ménière’s disease, and on
February 17th, 1546, his last seizure attacked him. While at Eisleben
he became very restless. “Here at this little village I was baptised,”
he said. “It may be that I shall remain here.” In the evening he felt
that oppression in the chest of which he had so often complained, so he
got his attendants to rub him down with hot flannels, and as soon as he
felt better sat down to a light supper. In the middle of the night he
awoke, feeling deadly ill. “O my God,” he said, “I do feel so ill; I
feel as though I were dying,” and complained of a terrible oppression
in his chest. His doctors found him bathed in a cold sweat and without
perceptible pulse. He murmured his favourite text from St. John, “God
so loved the world that He gave his only begotten son that whosoever
believeth in him shall not perish, but shall have life everlasting.” Then
he became unconscious and his friends shouted into his deaf ears the
question whether he remained steadfast in his faith in Christ and his
doctrine, to which they thought they heard him say “Yes,” though probably
he did not hear them. At three in the morning his breathing suddenly
became audible, and after a deep sigh he died. Probably this is a true
account, for we often see the breathing of a dying man assume the up and
down character that we call “Cheyne-Stokes.”
For some extraordinary reason Messrs. Hartmann and Grisar attributed this
obvious death from heart-failure to apoplexy. One can only suppose that
they had never seen a man die of apoplexy; and Dr. Cabanes is undoubtedly
right when he attributes it to heart-defeat after a long period of high
blood-pressure. Probably a certain amount of angina pectoris also entered
into the picture, which is much the same thing put into other language.
But it may be that Dr. Cabanes was too materialistic in supposing
that the cause of Luther’s high blood-pressure was drink, in spite of
Melanchthon’s explicit statement that Luther was only a moderate drinker.
Probably he was no worse than other Germans of the time; and it seems
to be undoubtedly true that intense emotion can permanently so put up
the blood-pressure that the patient ultimately dies even if only after
a great many years; and surely no man ever strained his vascular system
more terribly than Martin Luther.
Luther was not a nice man; but nice men do not revolutionise the world.
Henry Fielding
In the gloomy procession of drink, gluttony, and syphilis which makes up
so large a part of history—always excepting for a moment Joan of Arc,
that “one white angel of war” whom the English and French burned because
she did not and could not ever become mature, as I have shown in _Post
Mortem_—there is at least one very great man whom one can only pity, if
my ideas about him are correct, without the faintest trace of censure—the
author of that “foul, coarse and abominable” book, _Tom Jones_, which has
been such a nightmare to the prude and yet shows human nature better than
most of the books which are welcomed in country parsonages.
On January 1st, 1753, a young servant girl named Betty Canning
disappeared from a house in Aldermanbury, London, where she had been
employed as a servant; she reappeared on the 29th of the month at her
mother’s home, starving, half-clad, and with a fine story of abduction
and imprisonment. She identified an old gipsy-woman as her assailant,
who, being a gipsy, old and ugly, was promptly seized and sentenced
to be hanged after the light-hearted manner of the eighteenth century.
Though London was divided into two camps, for and against Betty Canning,
there seems to have been no talk of a vigilance committee, probably
because the great heart of the people was not stirred by evening
newspapers about the woes of a little servant. One of Betty’s witnesses
was a little servant girl named Virtue Hall, whose delightful name alone
should have induced credence; and Virtue appeared before Fielding, who
was then a magistrate looking into the mystery of Betty Canning, to
support Betty’s claims for vengeance. If the gipsy had been a man no
doubt she would have been hanged promptly; but, as she was a woman, the
psychology of those days could not imagine why Betty should have accused
her of abduction and a certain amount of trouble was taken to test the
truth of Betty’s accusations. As a result the gipsy was by a miracle let
off, and Betty got seven years for perjury. Nowadays it seems quite an
ordinary sort of case, where a hysterical girl will perjure her immortal
soul in order to attract attention to herself, whatever may be the
results to others; but the real interest to us lies in the light that
it casts on the sick mind of Fielding himself; for he actually believed
Virtue and published a pamphlet in support of her evidence.
This done, Fielding’s health began to warn him that he must take care
of himself, and he set about curing the chronic gout which had long
crippled him. He took an ancient remedy of Galen’s, called “the Duke of
Portland’s remedy”—Fielding was always fond of experimenting upon himself
with quack medicines—and was advised to try the waters of Bath. Meantime
he had busied himself with dogging the footsteps of no less than five
gangs of street-robbers; and in the midst of the turmoil there came a
peremptory message from the Duke of Newcastle to attend at Newcastle
House and discuss the depredations of yet more cutthroats. For months
he worked hard at the pursuit, with splendid results for the peace of
London, but disastrous results upon his own health, for he had become
deeply jaundiced and “fallen away to a shadow.” No more was to be seen
that handsome Harry Fielding who had worked so hard for literature and
civic peace; whose generosity and goodness to the poor, outcast, and
oppressed has become proverbial; but a wasted, dropsical man of pinched
face, who could hardly leave his chair, so crippled was he with the gout
and so heavy with the dropsy. The time had long gone by for Bath, if
indeed it had ever existed. The winter of 1753-4 was terribly severe and
his doctors told him that he must seek a warmer climate. Even Bishop
Berkeley’s tar-water had failed, so things must have looked black indeed
for Fielding as he was carried laboriously on board the ship _Queen of
Portugal_ for the long voyage to Lisbon. His wife, the successor of that
beloved woman whom he has immortalised in _Sophia Western_ and _Amelia
Booth_, accompanied him to nurse him, though I am afraid the poor lady
was not much use as a nurse to a sick man whose every movement caused him
pain; the very winds fought against him, and it was weeks before the ship
could get away from the Isle of Wight into blue water.
It must have been a miserable voyage for Fielding; he was confined to
the cabin because he could not mount the companion ladder owing to his
weakness and pain. Twice he had to be tapped for his dropsy; the food
was bad, his wife confined to her bed with a terrible toothache that
could not be relieved because the tooth seems to have had a peculiar root
that defied all attempts at removal; but he himself, sitting propped
up in the stuffy cabin, wrote the most delightful and uncomplaining
journal imaginable, which is quite as brilliant as, and even more moving
than, any of his novels. It is written in Fielding’s own half-jocular,
half-satirical and wholly sympathetic style, but is entirely free from
that occasional coarseness that has shocked even a generation that seems
to revel in the sex-neurotic and introspective psychoanalytical novel.
Better to use an occasional naughty word than to give the impression of
being constantly possessed by unclean thoughts of sex, which seems to be
the unhappy fate of some modern novelists.
Although he has given us an excellent description of his symptoms it
is difficult to reduce it to terms of modern pathology and to name his
actual sickness. I thought at first that he must have had cirrhosis of
the liver, because it is well known to cause severe dropsy, wasting,
haggard face, and despair. But after carefully reconsidering the symptoms
I came to the conclusion that such an idea was untenable, for cirrhosis
is not noted for its jaundice, and moreover it is caused by long and
continuous drinking, whereas Fielding is known to have been a reasonably
abstemious drinker. But there is an even more terrible disease which
would even better than cirrhosis exactly suit the conditions of our
problem, cancer. If we imagine Fielding to have suffered from a certain
form of internal malignant tumour spreading to the peritoneum, all his
symptoms would be at once explained, deep jaundice, dropsy, wasting and
frightful appearance. I am assuming that Fielding’s form of “dropsy” was
what we now call “ascites,” that is to say, an outpouring of serous fluid
into the peritoneum. His so-called asthma may possibly have been due to
heart trouble owing to the strain on his heart caused by oppression from
the dropsy, and his “gout” to septic disease of his teeth, which would
account for the toothless condition which so disfigured him towards the
end of his life and prevented him from eating the ship’s food.
Unlike some writers who, being possessed by their own unconscious minds,
are led into filth, Fielding, though occasionally coarse, is never dirty.
I remember during some months, when all the cats, dogs and roosters in
the neighbourhood combined in an assault upon sleep, and an occasional
kookooburra joined in the noise, I read through the whole of _Amelia_ and
thought it one of the most delightful books in the world; and a rereading
of it tends to confirm me in that belief. Amelia, for all her scarred
nose, is one of the most charming women in fiction, though she had a
great deal to put up with in her husband, Captain Booth, and though she
_would_ call him “Billy.”
Fielding himself was what the Americans would call a “he-man.” He was not
one of the miserable, whining, introspective heroes of post-war fiction;
and in Tom Jones and Captain Booth he has drawn a man as he thought a
man should be, and as good men probably are if we would stop our ears
to the howls of the old women. And these heroes of his were probably
drawn from himself. That terrible ironic creature, Jonathan Wild, of
course represents his knowledge of the Old Bailey; it is a grim book,
and far too ironical for most people, though it has not the sardonic and
shuddering laughter of Dean Swift and his Struldbrugs.
But if he had cancer when he started on his last voyage he must have
had it coming on when he believed Virtue’s tarradiddle, and possibly
it was because of his poor health that he believed her. No man with a
cancer beginning to gnaw at his vitals could possibly take the trouble to
cross-examine a brazen hussy who was determined to deceive him, and we
can even understand that chapter in _Amelia_ when he stops the narrative
to deliver a violent attack upon the medical profession, possibly because
when he was writing _Amelia_ he must occasionally have felt the slight
twinge and noticed the slight jaundice that would be the first symptom
that all was not well.
But he was a very kind man, even as a magistrate. He knew too much about
human nature to be harsh with anybody, and possibly Virtue, in telling
untruths, had touched a soft spot in his generous heart; in other words,
Virtue and Betty must have “vamped” him.
King James I
It would be easier to say what was not the matter with this walking
pathological museum than to name his actual disease. From early youth
till death his life was one long pain. He could hardly walk until
he was nearly six years old, and this defect was attributed by his
physician, Sir Theodore Mayerne, to the bad milk of a drunken wet-nurse.
Mayerne,[11] who left a full account of James’s health, seems to have
been an acute man, but nowadays we should rather attribute the somewhat
neurotic troubles from which James suffered to his unconscious infantile
disgust at the drunken woman than to the influence of her bad milk.
He himself certainly did not use milk as his drink when he came to years
of “discretion.” He was afflicted with the normal gigantic appetite of
kings in those days. He ate anything and everything so long as it could
be eaten: not even Charles V could have excelled his prowess. He drank,
indiscriminately, beer, spirits, Spanish wines, cider, sweet French
wines, and muscatel, probably mixing them all right royally. His interior
organs were always too full, and he got rid of the vast surplus in
whatever disgusting way, up or down, happened to be convenient, so, in
every way, he must have been a most unpleasant companion.
He was subject to catarrh, and was much affected by cold and damp; he
was constantly spitting, hawking, and blowing his nose. As handkerchiefs
were not then in general use, I have heard that he used his sleeve or
his finger and thumb, which would not add to his “clubability.” He
had some difficulty in swallowing, owing, as Sir Theodore puts it, to
some narrowing of his fauces, inherited from his mother, Mary Queen
of Scots, and from his grandfather, James V of Scotland. Putting two
and two together, the constant blowing of his nose and the “narrowing”
of his throat, one imagines that probably the poor man suffered from
adenoids and enlarged tonsils. He occasionally suffered from gravel,
often accompanied by blood. He constantly suffered from another ignoble
trouble, which in the course of years bled copiously. If he was specially
worried in mind or body—and a king is always worried—he would become
jaundiced. Whenever anything more than usually alarming occurred, the
unhappy man would get diarrhœa, just like an anxious student awaiting his
interview with the examiners. He used faithfully to insist on his being
bled every day, until his least dignified ailment saved the doctors the
trouble. When he dismissed his Parliament of 1610 apparently his diarrhœa
became profuse. In fact, if you can think of any ailment that I have
not mentioned from which he suffered—so be it that it was excessively
undignified—I wish you would tell me what it was.
He had a truly psychasthenic dread of pain, yet hated all doctors,
possibly because he had suffered too much at our hands. His teeth
were all decayed, so that he could chew nothing, but had perforce to
bolt his food. A man with the decayed teeth that so distinguished the
“most learned fool in Christendom” would naturally in time suffer from
arthritis; and in middle age this complaint so crippled him that he could
hardly mount his horse. He detested purgatives, and considered that
any medicine, to do good, must act upon the bowels without griping the
patient; till late in his life he would not even allow an enema, probably
because it hurt him.
With death came, as usual, a little of that dignity that was so sadly
lacking in his life. S. R. Gardiner says that he died of a fever, but it
is impossible even to guess at its nature. Early in the morning of March
27th, 1625, he was so ill that he had to send for his son Prince Charles,
who came running into the king’s room in a nightshirt. Seeing his son,
King James tried to raise himself on his pillows and to say something;
but his voice had become so weak as to be inaudible, so that even then
he failed. He was understood to say “Veni, Domine Jesu,” and soon his
breathing ceased; in fact, like most people, he passed painlessly into
the sleep that knows no waking. He had done with all his pain and
constant discomfort, and, so far as he knew, with the misunderstanding
that afflicted him in his life in England and has certainly afflicted his
memory ever since. Poor James did not have a chance from his infancy. It
has been said that he failed because he did not understand the English
people; but how could you expect him to do that when he was constantly
worried by the most distressing and undignified of all ailments? And was
it not also equally their duty to try to understand him?
They held a post-mortem examination upon him, because there were the
usual accusations of poisoning, apparently founded largely upon the
swelling of his tongue. They found that his heart was enormously
enlarged, and that in his left kidney, which was greatly shrunken, there
reposed two stones, from which doubtless had come that gravel which had
so afflicted him during his life. Possibly his enlarged heart and swollen
tongue, together with his vast overeating and drinking, may have meant
that King James I had chronic Bright’s disease.
How far the drunken wet-nurse may have influenced his later life no
one can say; but it is quite possible that the unconscious infant may
have felt a disgust that went far to cause that nervousness and lack
of dignity of which his subjects complained. But how could any man be
dignified when he was suffering constantly from gravel and the other
tormenting, itching, weakening, and ignoble trouble?
But surely we have omitted the most important point in James’s supposed
character: the unnatural offences of which he was suspected. Well, Sir
Theodore Mayerne, who has told us so frankly all about his hawking
and spitting, his diarrhœa, his gravel, his stones, and his bleeding
hæmorrhoids, does not seem to know anything about the unnatural offences.
The pure mind always seems to turn towards this sort of offence when it
thinks of its neighbour. In 1642, according to the _American Mercury_ of
April, 1924, the Puritans, hardly settled down in the American colonies,
were already accusing each other of the most awful sexual offences. And
before convicting James of such offences one would prefer the evidence of
a level-headed doctor to that of all the seventeenth-century Puritans in
the world.
It is strange how minds, under the influence of fierce religious fervour,
always turn, and always have turned, to unnatural sexual offences. It
is not a product of patristic Christianity, as so many have thought.
On reading _The Golden Ass_, of Apuleius, one must be struck with the
amazing moral filth of the Roman Empire. After wading through hundreds
of pages of gay and libidinous dirt, one suddenly finds that one is
assisting in religious propaganda. Apuleius paints his fellow-countrymen
and women in such black colours simply because he wants them to join in
the worship of the Great Mother, which was then so formidable a rival to
Christianity in the Roman Empire.
So, considering the known facts of religious propaganda, I do not believe
a single word of the slanders upon James I. There were Puritans about.
It is possible that Petronius, in his _Satyricon_—if he wrote it—drew a
truthful picture of the Empire under Nero, because he does not profess to
moralise or to convert anybody whatever to any supposed better religion.
One is sometimes inclined to agree with Gibbon that “all (_organised_)
religions are equally false and equally useful.”
But it would be absurd to suppose that James the Sixth and First was
merely the ridiculous creature that I have depicted here. Those who wish
to prove that he was a coward have first to account for the known fact
that, until his knees stiffened under the influence of his decayed teeth,
he was a brave and first-class horseman. It may be true that he could
never bear the sight of a drawn sword; neither could Lord Roberts bear
the sight of a cat. Before he was dragged to England he did for Scotland
what the heavy-handed Tudors did for South Britain. By his skill and
diplomacy he welded even fierce little Scotland into an orderly country,
and taught the Scots lords and the ministers of the General Assembly that
the king was their master.
King Charles I
Doctors seldom take much interest in politics. It is their general
experience that for all the tumult and the shoutings of politicians
nobody ever seems one penny the better for the uproar, for vast sums are
wasted which would be much better expended in a way that we really do
know something about, such as the cure of disease and the public health
generally. In some ways the most interesting thing about the “Martyred
Monarch” is the expression of wistful melancholy which is shown on the
famous portrait by Van Dyck. It is undoubtedly due to this portrait that
so much sympathy has always been felt for him; and the tragedy of King
Charles has always impressed thoughtful men as a tragedy from the Greek.
In his early youth he stammered so badly that until he was ten he could
hardly speak at all. Stammering is supposed to be a nervous habit due to
a psychasthenic phobia; and the worst case of stammering that I ever knew
was said to have been acquired by a nervous child of three, owing to a
negligent nurse having locked him up in a dark cupboard while she read
novels. Stammerers often express themselves by their pen; and several
eminent writers, both in the past and in the present day, have been
stammerers. Not less acute than other men—indeed often far more acute
than the average—yet as they are invariably shy they are incapable of
showing it in conversation; and the brutal outburst of Carlyle concerning
poor Charles Lamb reflects an opinion that is too often held by the
impatient and intolerant.
King Charles had during his day the finest collection of art-treasures
in Europe; and in that fact we see the essentially refined and
artistic character of the man, for he not only had the treasures, but
understood them. Stammering often tends to improve as the man grows
older. Demosthenes is said to have cured himself by shouting at the sea
waves, while King Charles succeeded to a large extent by speaking with
extraordinary slowness and dignity, though to some extent the habit
remained with him to the end. Strangely enough the sad and pathetic
expression on Van Dyck’s portrait is not unlike the sad and pathetic
expression on the famous portrait statue of Demosthenes by Polyeuctes;
although of course Demosthenes was of a much more aggressive character
and more ready to make himself felt in public than Charles Stuart.
But in Van Dyck’s portrait we see probably the unconscious infantile fear
in the baby Charles that ultimately led him to stammer; and possibly
in the utterly wrong-headed obstinacy of the king in holding on to an
impossible position, we see the determination that resulted in his curing
himself sufficiently to attain the crown.
An incident occurred during his trial that may have led to a false
impression. “They will not suffer me to speak,” he cried brokenly as they
led him away. Is it possible that during that dreadful moment the old
bad habit of his childish days returned, so that King Charles actually
_could_ not speak for the time?
He is said to have been one of the few kings of really noble domestic
character, a faithful husband and affectionate father. Yet though he
could be faithful to his wife he could not help telling lies to his
friends.
“Vanquished in life his death
By beauty made amends;
The passing of his breath
Won its defeated ends.”
Charles was temperate, chaste and serious; he treated those about him
with punctilious courtesy and expected the same in return.
But it may be that in the twistings and turnings of his political
career we see the qualities that are not inconsistent with the artistic
temperament.
As for the apparent cause of Charles’s stammering, that is quite
impossible even to guess. It is possible that he, a naturally sensitive
and refined little boy, may have been unconsciously terrified by his
father’s unpleasant personal habits. At any rate, let us keep a soft spot
in our hearts for the ill-fated king.
Whence came the somewhat nervous strain that runs, like a brass thread,
through the whole dynasty of the Stuarts, I hesitate to speculate:
perhaps from Darnley, father of James I. They always make me think of
a set of naughty children wedged between the great gloomy Tudors and
the unpleasant Hanoverians. There was James I, who is generally held
by the English to have been an egregious person; next, Charles I, who,
probably, would have done better as a poet; then Charles II, who was by
far the cleverest of them, but was too lazy; and lastly the gloomy and
exceedingly immoral—if all tales are true—James II, who was a man too
much under the influence of religion. It is said that he used to get
absolution after every time that he visited his mistress. Then there was
that poor, lonely, stupid Anne, who could not, for some reason, rear a
single one of her numerous children.
King Charles II
As the best thing that we hear of the life of King Charles II is the
manner of his leaving it, I confine myself to a description of his
death. You will get a moderately good account of it in Bishop Burnet’s
history, of which Swift was so scornful; and a recognisable account
of it in Lord Macaulay, written with all the fixed ideas of the early
nineteenth century colouring the ink; but the real truth appeared in an
article in the _British Medical Journal_ for 1910, which again was drawn
largely from Dr. Raymond Crawfurd’s _Last Days of Charles II_. As Dr.
Crawfurd gives the official report of Sir Charles Scarburgh, one of the
consultants in attendance at the time, probably we may take it that we
have the exact details so far as the medical science of 1685 could give
them.
Towards the end of 1684 the king did not feel quite well: he was
irritable and depressed, and thought it wise to remain indoors during
the mornings, instead of taking his usual active walks. He attributed
his illness to gout. It would be interesting to speculate on what the
disease actually was that so often was called “gout” in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. There are many conditions which cause symptoms
such as might be mistaken for gout; let us leave it at that, for even
to-day a doctor, forced to give to a vague complaint a name, sometimes
takes refuge in the euphemism “rheumatic gout.” During these few days
indoors he amused himself by playing with mercury in his laboratory,
for, as is well known, he was of scientific bent. At last came the
fateful morning, Monday, February 2nd, 1685. At eight o’clock the king,
while being shaved, fell back with a cry into the arms of an attendant,
Lord Aylesbury. According to Dr. Scarburgh, “Charles, having just left
his bed, was walking about quietly in his bedchamber when he felt some
unusual disturbance in his brain, which was followed by loss of speech
and violent convulsions.” There happened to be present at the time two
of the king’s physicians who, so as promptly to forestall so serious a
danger to “this best of kings,” as Scarburgh has it, opened a vein in his
right arm and drew 16 ounces of blood. As a matter of fact, this assault,
though seemingly homicidal, was probably as good a thing as could have
been done for him, though few doctors would have the moral courage
to do it to-day. His head was closely shaved; his neck and shoulders
were blistered and scarified; emetics, purgatives and clysters were
administered, and every reputable doctor, regardless of his religion,
was summoned to the defence. Whitehall must have presented a lively
spectacle that winter morning with all the periwigs and silver buckles
and gold-headed canes and wise faces. In fact, they did what they could:
if they had known that the cause of the convulsions was probably that the
king’s kidneys had “gone on strike,” they could have done little more
than endeavour to get rid of the poisons that must have been circulating
in his body by some other effluent than by the urine. After about two
hours their efforts were crowned with success. The king, whose face had
been hideously black,—i.e., cyanosed—and whose eyes had been rolling this
way and that, woke up, and proceeded to give an account of himself. The
poisons had for a time been got out of his body; but only for a time. He
said that, not feeling very well when he awakened, he had gone to his
private closet to get some “king’s drops,” which Dr. Crawfurd explains
to have been “a volatile extract of bone made in the king’s laboratory
according to the formula of the late Dr. Goddard, and in high repute on
the Continent.”
Charles was then out of immediate danger, and during the Tuesday he
remained fairly well except for some soreness about the neck and mouth,
which was probably due to the efforts that had had to be made to get him
to swallow his medicines. Just so to-day, a patient occasionally wakes
up from an anæsthetic with a stiff jaw after the efforts which have
had to be made to pull his tongue forward if his breathing has given
trouble while he was unconscious. Charles complained of great pain in
his interior, which was probably less a symptom of his illness than of
the violent purgatives that had been forced down his throat; but to the
horrified Bishop Burnet it was “agonies.”
The doctors, pestered by the ministers of the Crown to give the king’s
illness a name, were greatly perturbed, and all fourteen[12] of them
entered into many grave consultations one with another. On the afternoon
of Wednesday, February 4th, the convulsions returned, and as intermittent
fever was then especially prevalent in and about London they said that
probably His Majesty was suffering from that complaint, though to be
sure the violent convulsions, cyanosed skin, loss of speech, and turning
of the eyeballs did not look quite like intermittent fever. But the
council was satisfied, which, to the doctors wrestling with a mysterious
and complex disease, was probably all that they could expect, for it
enabled them to say that they now knew what to do, and that, apparently,
the king was in no great immediate danger. As the _British Medical
Journal_ rather unkindly points out: “On June 21st, 1902, the late King
Edward’s Private Secretary wrote that there was not a word of truth
in the rumours that had been floating about concerning His Majesty’s
health, though on June 24th the coronation was postponed and he had to be
operated on for appendicitis”; though, considering what a sudden thing
acute appendicitis is, there is little wonder that three days before
anyone might not have known of his coming ill health.
On the Thursday occurred those dramatic events of which conventional
historians have made so much. When he was first taken ill on the Monday
his poor wife had hurried to his side, and had taken the place of at
least one of his mistresses in nursing him. Catherine of Braganza may not
have had sufficient physical charm to keep his wayward fancy, and may not
have been able to bear him an heir,[13] but at least she was faithful
to him unto his death. In her presence the other women retired, and she
nursed her husband until the horrors of the sick room overcame her; she
felt faint and withdrew; as Macaulay says, “was carried senseless to her
chamber.” Little wonder; the sick room must indeed have been horrible to
every sense, with all the purgatives and clysters and cauterization of
bare skin, and a husband writhing in convulsions and rolling his eyes,
apparently in the utmost agony, though I doubt if he felt anything at all
in his fits. Early in her married life she had fainted when Charles had
introduced her to his mistress _en titre_. There had been many occasions
for fainting since then, and she had been accused of trying to poison
Charles, who had humiliated her. Later on she sent word to him that she
asked his pardon for being too ill to come to his aid; and Charles said,
“She ask my pardon, poor woman! I ask hers, with all my heart.” Yet the
time was to come when she was accused of inducing him to turn Roman
Catholic. Macaulay seems rather to blame the Duchess of Portsmouth for
seeing that he was “reconciled” to the Church, as she would doubtless
put it, but there is another suggestion that occurs to myself. With all
his laziness and clever frivolity, Charles was, after all, very much
like other men; he had had a mother, and Queen Henrietta Maria, though
a daughter of Henri Quatre, was an ardent Roman Catholic; during the
first few years of her married life with King Charles I she had undergone
a great deal of hardship for her religion. She must have frequently,
like other mothers, talked over religious matters with her children;
and when Charles II came to die, when his courage and self-esteem were
weakened by the crowning humiliation of death, it is quite possible that
in that awful moment he may have sincerely turned to Mother Church, that
Church which had consoled his mother, as a refuge. And hence doubtless
arose that dramatic interlude in the act of dying that Macaulay paints
so vividly. The Duchess of Portsmouth may have wept and poured out her
heart to the French Ambassador as he says; no doubt the Benedictine monk,
John Huddlestone, was summoned just as he says; but after all, it is the
penitent himself who had to do penance, and quite possibly Charles, in
trying to swallow the holy bread, was really unconsciously remembering
the teachings of his Roman Catholic mother. We have seen how Elizabeth,
when dying, recalled to her memory events of her youth; why should we
not think just the same of Charles II? He was not mad as Protestants
said; he was just dying. It is quite a common incident with the dying,
and is supposed to account for the known phenomenon that rationalists,
when they feel their brain is beginning to betray them, have embraced
Christianity. Then he commended the Duchess to the care of his brother,
the Duke of York, afterwards James II, “and,” he said, “let not poor
Nelly starve.” Again he was thinking of the past, this time the recent
past, for “pretty witty Nell” (as Pepys calls her), “the most indiscreet
and the wildest creature that ever was in a court” (as Burnet calls her),
had been his mistress for many years—since about 1670—and was the most
popular of all, “a true child of the London streets.” She, it is said,
was the only woman who was really faithful to him at heart except his
wife. At half-past ten on the Friday, Charles again became speechless;
before twelve he was dead, probably of a uræmic coma due to chronic
Bright’s disease.
Then came the inevitable accusations of poisoning which attended every
sudden death in that suspicious age. We can, I believe, even explain some
of the symptoms that were considered so suspicious. It was quite natural
that Louise de Querouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, should be accused of
poisoning him, for it was well known at that time that Frenchwomen and
Roman Catholics invariably worked by poison, and unhappily for Louise
she was both. But what kind of poison could cause blue spots to form
upon a man’s chest? And what kind of poison could make his tongue swell
up? I must try to explain in popular language what chronic Bright’s
disease really is. It is not merely a disease of the kidneys. The kidneys
indeed become sclerosed, or hardened, and in time become shrivelled;
but with this the arteries and heart also become diseased; the heart
becomes enlarged, and the blood-vessels thickened and hardened; rather
than a disease of the kidneys alone it is almost a thickening of the
arteries all over the body, including those in the kidneys. And with this
thickening goes a loss of elasticity, so that blood-vessels are apt to
rupture at the slightest provocation. So that in the struggles of his
uræmic convulsions it is quite possible that tiny capillaries of the
king’s chest may have ruptured and caused blue spots on the neighbouring
skin. If he had not died it is quite probable that the whites of his eyes
might have become bloodshot, from the rupture of some tiny arteriole. It
often happens to-day in Bright’s disease.
And the tongue? Quite frequently the tongue and larynx suddenly swell up
in chronic Bright’s disease, and the patient suffocates before he can
obtain relief. King Charles was indeed poisoned, though not by human
agency. He was poisoned by the toxins which should have been excreted by
his own kidneys, but could not be got rid of by any human aid; that is to
say, he probably died of uræmia from chronic Bright’s disease.
A post-mortem examination was held, so we can get even further evidence.
One could not expect a doctor in the seventeenth century to observe
that his kidneys were obviously diseased, or that part of his brain was
œdematous or softened, as often happens in Bright’s disease, and would no
doubt cause the loss of speech. But they did observe that his heart was
enlarged, a most significant point.
I remember one of the very first private patients that I ever had, nearly
thirty years ago. A middle-aged Englishman had come to Sydney from China
for his health, apparently feeling fairly well, though debilitated by
the tropical climate. Suddenly, as he was shaving, he was taken ill with
a violent fit of convulsions, and, in spite of all that we could do for
him, died in the course of two or three days with symptoms that exactly
resembled those so graphically portrayed by Lord Macaulay and Dr.
Crawfurd.
There is much of extraordinary interest to be found in Dr. Crawfurd’s
book which gives the fantastic truth about medicine in 1685,[14] I can
only advise you to read the book. In spite of the queer medicines that
they used to prescribe I fancy that doctors at that time had more common
sense than we moderns seem to think, and I very much doubt if anything
could have saved King Charles’s life, except perhaps for a short time.
He had come to his end. Our treatment would have been less drastic, but
little more successful.
The cause of chronic Bright’s disease is not definitely known. It has
been attributed to innumerable things; indeed, to everything which any
given physician does not like himself; and comparatively recently it
has even been attributed to improper feeding in infancy, so far back in
life are its roots supposed to go. Indeed, it is generally thought to be
hereditary; but probably it is still a mystery, though overeating and
overdrinking may have something to do with it, not to mention, of course,
syphilis, but so many men who have not had syphilis die of chronic
Bright’s disease that it would not be fair to state it as the cause.
But why is it that Henri Quatre, whose morals were little if at all
better than those of Charles, has become a national hero, while Charles
is always held up as a byword for infamy? I do not know; but the usual
explanation is that the English are at heart Puritans, and M. Chevrillon,
in his recent essays on English literature, has accepted that as the
reason for the popularity of Kipling and Galsworthy. But I sometimes
wonder whether, had England been more successful under Charles II, so
much would have been heard of his immorality. After all, Lord Nelson was
not a Joseph, but he saved England from Napoleon; whereas Charles II saw
the Dutch fleet in the Thames, and ran about chasing butterflies while
the guns thundered.
All medical students, and most doctors, pass through a period when they
are convinced that they have chronic Bright’s disease, and it is not
till after visiting their physicians in an agony of mind that they are
relieved of their mental distress. Let not a lay reader be silly enough
to copy these apprehensive doctors. No man can be his own physician.
But perhaps the most interesting things about Charles II are the
sterility of his wife, Catherine of Braganza, and his affection for “poor
Nelly,” which she undoubtedly returned. Catherine appears to have been a
convent-bred maiden with beautiful eyes. She was by no means the king’s
first or last love; and several months after the marriage she fell ill
of some sickness that brought her to death’s door, so that they had to
administer extreme unction. It was probably owing to this illness that
she never had a child, and was afterwards often ill. Such a trouble as
pelvic peritonitis, with inflammation of the Fallopian tubes, often
causes sterility. It is Nature’s stupid way of saving the patient’s life
that she isolates the inflammation and seals the tubes, so that the woman
indeed lives, but miserable, sterile, neurasthenic, and in constant
pain. What was the actual cause of the illness in Catherine’s case it is
impossible to say. One ventures to hazard a guess that the real cause of
Catherine’s sterility was simply adhesions and blocked Fallopian tubes;
it is certain that it had nothing to do with King Charles’s potency,
because he had many natural children by other women. It is in that severe
illness several months after she was married that the explanation of her
sterility probably lies. We see innumerable cases of this sort to-day.
About Nell Gwynn. She was herself the daughter of a prostitute who, in
a fit of drink, one night fell into a ditch and was drowned. Her charm
over the king probably lay in her wit and recklessness; she dared to say
to him things that no one else on earth ventured. She was faithful to
him after he had won her—if indeed she took much winning. Other women,
such as La Belle Stuart, and Louise de Querouaille, pretended to resist
him for a time, but Nell seems to have been really fond of him and did
not resist at all. Remember she was, before she became an actress, an
orange-girl—that is to say, a prostitute. Everything we hear of her tells
of her uniform kindness and generosity; she was of course extremely loose
in her conduct and morals, but she seems to have cared little for money.
She died about two years after the king, apparently of a stroke that had
brought on one-sided paralysis or hemiplegia; and considering the assured
facts of her youth, and the early age at which she died, that stroke was
probably caused by syphilis, which had lain latent in her ever since the
time when she sold herself with her oranges in the pit of Drury Lane.
But no person should attempt to describe the life either of Charles II or
Nell Gwynn who has the slightest tendency to moralise; for neither the
wittiest of the Stuarts nor the clever little actress can be explained on
conventional codes of morality. It is the attempt to consider Charles II
as if he had been a child of Queen Victoria, and to moralise over him,
that makes most books about him so repulsive.
But Nell did not try to enter politics; she resisted the temptation to be
queen, even if the opportunity had ever offered. She knew that her only
function in life was to charm; and with the coldly realistic outlook on
life that is common to all prostitutes, she knew that in the position of
a queen she must come up against the harsh facts of reality, and that,
like Anne Boleyn, she would probably lose her head in every sense of the
word. Mere power to charm is not for a queen. Nell’s memory, owing to
her wisdom and self-restraint, has been tenderly treated by the English
people, in spite of that prudery which has scoffed at the real cleverness
of her royal lover. Nell Gwynn, to use her own coarse words, was content
to remain “the Protestant whore,” the cleverness of her tongue enabled
her to keep her place at Court against all rivals, and her charm even
impresses us to-day, who have never seen her dance nor heard her cockney
witticisms. “Let not poor Nelly” fade from our memories.
Henri Quatre
The great thing about Henri Quatre, from the point of view of a medical
essayist, is that no person of an anti-syphilitic fury will expect him
to be classed as an awful warning of the devastations of that disease.
Poor Henri died of good honest assassination, the product of an even
worse disease than syphilis—sectarian intolerance. A disease which could
cause the awful wars of Henri’s own life, and a few years later the
most dreadful of all wars—the Thirty Years’—need not fear to be classed
alongside even the most disreputable and destructive of human disorders.
And the fact that nobody in these terrible wars ever had the least idea
why people were killing each other only makes the marvel of sectarian
intolerance even more amazing than it is. Of course, there is no such
thing as _religious_ intolerance. Religion should make war impossible,
and should inculcate tolerance for other people’s opinions. Did the
good-natured and kindly gods of old Greece ever breed a religious war?
Did anybody ever go swashbuckling in helmet and armour for Zeus or
Aphrodite? Unless perhaps Aphrodite to him meant some individual woman
who had been raped from her home, such as Helen of Troy; and Helen
probably meant some vague abstraction of a Greek woman as opposed to a
barbarian, if she did not symbolise Greek trade through the Hellespont,
obstructed by Trojan robber bands. The Marxian materialist view of
history grows rather attractive when it is applied to people who have
been dead three thousand years.
Quite apart from the murderous sectarian squabbles, which have been
dignified by the name of religious wars, the life of Henri Quatre, very
properly classed as one of the heroes of France, is extraordinarily
interesting to a doctor. But in many ways the most interesting thing
about him was his relations with women. Henri may have had some
conscience about religion—though I doubt it—but, like our own Charles
II, he had absolutely no conscience about women. To him, whether he was
married or not, any pretty girl was fair game; and those who care to
read pornography can find plenty of it in the record of his life. The
seventeenth century was a period of bitter sectarian differences, and
it was a time when the divine right of kings to possess pretty girls
was elevated almost to an article of faith. Thus we had the marvellous
spectacles of King Henri IV and King Charles II, of whom the one became
a national hero, the other a byword for flippancy and falsehood. I am
not going to be led into any temptation to find the cause of the one
phenomenon in the other—to say that if it had not been a period of such
bitter sectarianism the virtue of girls might have been more sacred to
kings, because there have been good kings and bad kings at all times;
girls have been virtuous or wanton, whatever their religion; and the
seventeenth century was not the only century in history. The sixteenth
and eighteenth could show instances of moral depravity quite as bad as
that of either Henri Quatre or Charles Stuart. Let us see what a doctor
may be able to say about Henri Quatre.
When he was about nineteen he married Marguerite de Valois, the third of
that name, who has achieved fame under the popular name of Reine Margot.
She was sister to King Henri III of France; our Henri was at that time
only king of Navarre; his little kingdom lay in the south of France,
near the borders of Spain. His father had been Anthony of Bourbon; his
mother Joan of Albret. Joan had agreed to the marriage with a very heavy
heart: she feared the bright eyes of the Catholic enchantress who was
to bewitch her own beloved son. She herself was a Huguenot, who looked
upon Marguerite as sent directly from the devil. If Marguerite had really
been sent by Satan to the inferno of Parisian wickedness she needed no
great ensnaring; for, when she married the good Henri of Navarre, simple
young country bumpkin that he was, she is said to have already had an
affair with the Duke of Guise, and her reputation for virtue would not
have passed any great test. She was pretty, and what was more potent,
she had a peculiar charm of manner that enabled her to capture all but
the most resistant of men. Many of us remember how Marguerite, in the
“Huguenots” of Meyerbeer, dances along the stage singing to her lute and
plangent orchestral pizzicati “The fair land of Touraine.” Although this,
according to Wagner, is very inartistic, still, it is very charming, and
has no doubt left Marguerite for us moderns with a character that is
more beautiful than it really was. She could no more resist enchanting a
man than Henri could resist trying to possess a good-looking girl: the
bonds of matrimony sat very lightly upon both. There was no love in the
marriage, which was, almost more cynically than most royal marriages,
simply an affair of State. Catherine de Medici, Marguerite’s mother,
wished to convert Henri to the Catholic faith, and at the same time to
make him an enemy of Spain, which, under Don John of Austria, had just
won the earth-shaking victory of Lepanto.
But Marguerite could do something else besides make love: she could
write. At a time when every one else was striving to be distinguished in
style Marguerite wrote as simply and clearly as if she were speaking;
and her _Memories_ are therefore still delightful to read. Just after
her marriage the massacre of St. Bartholomew broke out. Let the royal
lady tell how it affected herself. “An hour later, while I was fast
asleep, someone came beating at my door with hands and feet, and shouting
Navarre, Navarre! My nurse, thinking it was my husband, ran to open
the door. It was a gentleman, wounded by a sword-thrust in the elbow,
and his arm cut by a halberd, who rushed into my room pursued by four
archers. Seeking safety he threw himself on my bed. Feeling this man
clutching me I threw myself into the open space between the bed and the
wall, where, he still grasping me, we both rolled over, both screaming
and both equally frightened. Fortunately the Captain of my Guards, M.
de Nancay, came by, and seeing me in such a plight could not help
laughing, but drove the archers out of the room, and gave me the life of
the poor gentleman, who was still clinging to me, and whom I caused to
be tended in my dressing-room till he was quite cured. While I changed
my nightdress,”—Marguerite was lucky to be wearing one in 1572—“for he
had covered me with his blood, M. de Nancay told me what had happened,
and assured me that my husband was in the king’s room and was quite
safe. Making me throw on a dressing-gown, he led me to the room of my
sister, Madame de Lorraine, which I reached more dead than alive; just
as I was going into the anteroom a gentleman, trying to escape from the
archers who were pursuing him, fell dead three paces from me. I too fell
half-fainting into the arms of M. de Nancay, and felt as if the same blow
had pierced us both.”
Dumas describes this incident in _Marguerite de Valois_; but his
description is no more vivid than Marguerite’s. The temptation to make
the poor fugitive the hero of his book was too great, and he turned
the ill-fated De la Mole into Marguerite’s unwilling bedfellow on that
night of weeping. I dare say that Marguerite was not sorry to be able to
save the poor man’s life, even though Dumas makes her behave far from
generously to his hero later. If I remember rightly she has him tortured
by the “boot.”
Queen Joan, her mother-in-law, describes her as being very pretty, but
one could not see her face for the paint; she was rather too stout,
and was tightly laced. Afterwards, when she had abandoned all sense of
decency, she became enormously fat, and could hardly get through an
ordinary door. Her intelligence and great fondness for reading probably
did not make Henri love her any better, because he could never finish
a serious book. She said about her brother Henri III that if all the
treachery in the world should perish Henri III had enough to restock it;
so it is clear that brother and sister did not really love one another;
and probably Marguerite could not resist the temptation to make a
scathing epigram.
But Joan need not have been so perturbed over her son falling into the
hands of the satanic Marguerite, for, if all tales were true, she was
no great saint herself. Once, when Henri III was in a particularly bad
temper, he went to Marguerite in church and called her all manner of
abominable names, so that she turned and ran weeping out of the church.
Later he went up to Henri Quatre and half-apologised for his rudeness,
explaining it because of some unfortunate incidents that had been
rumoured about Queen Joan’s own virtue. Henri laughed, and afterwards
said, “What a nice fellow he must be! He thinks by saying that I am a
bastard to make up for calling my wife a prostitute!” That was really
much the sort of thing that our own beloved Charles II might have said;
and it shows Henri Quatre as a maker of epigrams with just sufficient
truth in them to hurt. And all done with a kindly smile, too.
When the civil war broke out Henri of Navarre took the lead with
furious energy on the Protestant side; and it was then that he won his
reputation for soldiering and for romance. The white plume of Navarre
has been an oriflamme for many a novelist ever since. And it was more
than romance, though treated romantically by Macaulay in his _Battle
of Ivry_. Henry had bound upon his head a great plume of white peacock
feathers just before the battle. “Should the standards fall,” he cried,
“rally round the white plume of Navarre. I promise you that it shall
be found in the thickest of the fighting.” He made good his boast, for
he charged the Catholics two horses’ lengths ahead of his followers,
and fought furiously until his sword was beaten out of shape and his
right arm swelled with over-exertion—I suppose the lymphatics of the arm
became somehow obstructed, but I confess I do not quite understand the
pathological condition; still, the incident made a great impression upon
his soldiers and gave Henri of Navarre a name for immense courage and
enterprise. As a result of many hours’ fierce fighting the Protestants
swept the field, partly because the Swiss mercenaries, finding that
the League had not paid their wages, surrendered incontinently. “Pas
d’argent—pas de Suisse,” was their excellent motto, which the League
should have remembered. If Henri had swept on to Paris the opinion is
that he might have entered it with very little trouble. But he had
no money, he had fired away all his ammunition, and the roads were
made impassable by recent rains; moreover, even if Paris had opened
her gates to him the Pope would never have ceased his hostility to a
Protestant king of France; and once more the old spectre of civil war,
interminable, bloodthirsty, and dreadful, would have arisen. And, after
all, the majority of Frenchmen were Catholic; and the mighty power of
Spain waited just over the Pyrenees to help the Pope if indeterminate
civil war should occur. Paris lay, weakly defended, ready for assault;
but it would have been a terrible crime for Henri to give the word, and
to subject his capital to a worse than St. Bartholomew. So he agreed to
“receive instruction,” saying before he did so that his religion was that
of all brave men. Paris, strictly invested, suffered the worst horrors of
famine. Soldiers killed and ate stray children, and a woman even salted
down and ate her own babies who had died of starvation. It is said that
the poor creature went “melancholy” from this Thyestian feast, and who
can wonder? The great Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma, was arriving
from the Netherlands with a relieving army of Spaniards; he outmanœuvred
Henri, and opened navigation to the beleaguered city. Henri could neither
pay his men nor would he permit them to pay themselves by the sack of the
city, so naturally they went home. Henri and a few faithful friends and
horse soldiers retired to watch and hope. Thus was fulfilled the prophecy
of his great, though somewhat thrifty, ally, Elizabeth of England, that
“if God shall, by His merciful grace, grant you victory, I swear to you
that it will be more than your carelessness deserves.” Kipling, in an
unforgettable phrase, has told us all about the “female of the species”;
and in many ways, Elizabeth was the female of the species to which Henri
Quatre belonged. The daughter of Henry VIII would have had no mercy if
her own ends had been at stake. And yet, I don’t know. Tilly a few years
afterwards showed at Magdeburg the horrors that could be perpetrated by
religious enthusiasts; and one hates to think that Elizabeth’s famous
patriotism could ever have allowed her to sacrifice London for a point
of belief. Henri Quatre had not only allowed friends in Paris to be fed
while he was supposed to be investing it savagely, but he had allowed it
to slip through his fingers when he might have captured it, all through
a tender-heartedness that would spare its citizens the horrors of a
Magdeburgian sack. It is no wonder that with all his faults he is one
of the heroes of France. Then Parma, finding that the Parisians hated
Spanish pride more than they hated French Protestants, went away with his
invincible army; and as soon as his back was turned Henri resumed the
siege. Parma had proved, if nothing more, that he was a better strategist
than Henri Quatre; but Paris returned to the old misery of starvation and
disease, a misery that it has so often braved nobly.
And now began Henri’s more serious troubles with women. For a long time
he had an affair with one Madame de Grasmont, whom he called Corisande.
To her he wrote the most passionate of letters. Anybody would think to
read them that he really loved her; but even as he besieged Paris he
had fallen in love with the abbesses of Poissy and Montmartre, whose
profession should have taught them wisdom if not virtue. Now came a
more serious affair. In 1590 he met a Gabrielle d’Estrees, with whom he
fell violently in love while he was “carrying on” with the other three
ladies. She already had a beautiful lover; but that did not matter to
Henri Quatre. Probably it only caused him to admire her the more. He
slipped through detachments of the enemy dressed as a woodcutter with a
bundle of straw on his head to visit her: a nice romantic and undignified
action for a king; but we shall see later, as he grew older, how he could
stoop even lower. For the present the problem was how to gain possession
of Gabrielle, get rid of Corisande, and set up a nominal possessor who
should not be a rival in Gabrielle’s heart. He got her father to marry
Gabrielle to a M. de Liancourt, an aged widower with eleven children,
while Henri IV enjoyed the _droits de seigneur_. Corisande, growing old,
dropped out of the picture.
Then came a fierce struggle for Rouen, with Parma hovering ready to give
battle. Again he showed his superiority to Henri Quatre as a strategist
by transporting his army secretly across the Seine and escaping Henri’s
threatened attack. Henri had a much larger army than Parma’s, and it
was only Parma’s extraordinary skill that saved him from destruction.
But now came the end of the long war; for Parma died and Henri turned
Catholic. “Paris is well worth a Mass!” as he did not say. We have
always been taught to consider this as an act of shameless cynicism; but
there was a great deal to be said in Henri’s favour: certainly from the
point of view of the twentieth century his action was the only thing
that could have brought peace to his country. Though Parma was dead,
Spain was still powerful and vengeful; the Catholic priests called Henri
heretic, relapsed miscreant, devil and bastard, whom the soldiers knew
to be a kind and generous friend, always smiling and ready to help.
Gabrielle—“charmante Gabrielle,” who has given her name to a song that
Henri wrote in her honour—urged him to turn Catholic, that the Pope might
perhaps divorce Marguerite and let him marry Gabrielle. So Henri yielded,
threw his scruples to the winds, and embraced the Old Religion; though
his embrace was probably not so ardent as those which he gave to the
abbesses, who more corporeally represented the faith to which he yielded.
An amusing sidelight on his character is thrown by his message to Queen
Elizabeth by the mouth of her supposed lover Essex, whom she had been
rating soundly because he had lost too many Englishmen in Henri’s wars.
The irate Virgin was so flattered by Henri’s praise of her beauty and
charm that it needed all her caution and frugality to keep England
from plunging single-handed into yet another great war with Spain on
his behalf. Happily for us she had sense enough to keep out of it; and
before her help became necessary Henri had gone to Mass. When Henri fell
so shamelessly in love with Gabrielle he was thirty-five years of age,
and perhaps the ordinary neurasthenia of middle age began to trouble
him—that cause of so much marital unhappiness and so many divorces.
But, if any one woman could be said to have captured his heart, it was
undoubtedly Gabrielle. I once read an account of her written by a lady,
possibly unmarried. Anyhow, none would have guessed from this extremely
proper description that she was Henri’s official mistress; the good
lady seems never to have heard of a man being anything but a woman’s
husband. Gabrielle was rather ample of figure—Henri seems to have liked
his women fat—and had deep blue eyes and golden hair. Her face was kind
and smiling, her manner gentle; before she fell in love with Henri her
morals had been, to say the least, unconventional; after she admitted
the king to her friendship she continued her relations with the lover
who had innocently introduced her to this more enterprising king. She
was extravagant, and the king loaded her with jewels at a time when he
said he was penniless; created her Marchioness of Monceaux and Duchess of
Beaufort. He was as faithful to her as it was possible for him to be to
any woman, which is not saying very much. At any rate his _amours_ were
henceforth conducted with a certain amount of decency and discretion.
When she died the only book found in her possession was her “book of
hours.” Except for her easy morals it would be impossible to find a
greater contrast than that between her and Marguerite, who could wrap
herself in learned books, play the lute, and write like a novelist. It
would seem impossible for even “Aunt Tabitha” of a lady’s newspaper to
give to Marguerite de Valois any hints on the art of managing a husband;
but it is clear that she did not go the right way about it with Henri
of Navarre; and Gabrielle d’Estrees was evidently much more to his
taste, for he remained approximately, though not bigotedly, faithful to
her till she died. In justice to Marguerite it is only fair to say that
she never liked him; she was forced by mother and brother into marrying
him; and probably even a sixteenth-century princess had her preferences.
The ultimate result was that Gabrielle became a sort of idol among the
people, who overlooked her unusual position for the sake of her wide-set
blue eyes and kind smile; and a few years after she died she was already
a legend. To this day she and Henri Quatre are greeted with a kindly
smile among the French when one mentions them, and “charmante Gabrielle”
is still a well-known song.
As the years rolled by she bore him several children, and more and more
took the position of his wife. He became still more infatuated with her;
and she, for her part, abandoned the life of dissipation which is said to
have distinguished her youth. Henri wanted to marry her; she must have
had great powers of fascination to make him so faithful after so many
years. The idea was to procure a divorce from Marguerite and elevate his
mistress to the throne. But just before the proposed marriage Gabrielle
went to Paris and stayed at the house of an Italian named Zamet. On
April 7th, 1599, she became very ill, and was artificially delivered
of a dead child on the 9th. She fell into violent convulsions; on the
10th she became unconscious, and that evening she died. Of course Sully,
who did not like her—for even Gabrielle had her enemies—hinted that she
was poisoned—such was the reputation of the Italians in Paris at that
time—and Sully’s ill-natured hint has evidently influenced historians to
this day, for the good lady whom I quoted above repeats it as at least
probable. But is it not much more probable that she died of puerperal
eclampsia? She was middle-aged; she had had several children; she was
far from slight in figure. At the Royal Hospital for Women in Sydney we
find that most of these women who die nowadays from eclampsia are very
much like Gabrielle in age, figure, and the number of their children.
Of course it is impossible to say definitely; but I should be very much
surprised to find that Gabrielle’s kidneys were absolutely healthy
during that last year of her life. And it is quite possible that in
that last confinement Gabrielle in this way paid the penalty for her
dissipation in early youth. It is at least more likely that she should
die from a perfectly well-known and fatal disease such as eclampsia
than that anybody should try to poison a woman so generally popular,
though she had enemies who were both jealous of her and disliked the
idea of a royal mistress becoming Queen of France. Kidney trouble is
often caused by drink, and people at the Court of France—indeed, all
over Europe—generally used to drink too much in those days. After all,
it is only a speculation that could easily explain the sudden death of
an apparently perfectly healthy woman just as the moment was approaching
when she would achieve her ambition.
Henri was broken-hearted; he swore that never more could he see happiness
again. Yet three months later he was paying court to a very different
sort of woman from Gabrielle—to Henriette d’Entragues, a slim girl of
eighteen with a bitter tongue. He was then about fifty years of age, and
had led a very anxious and troubled life. He had been a hard rider, a
famous cavalryman. At the end of a few weeks of “courtship” he induced
Henriette to accept a document in which he promised to marry her if she
could bear him a living son in the course of a year. Henriette agreed
to try, and joyfully took her position as the mistress and promised
wife of the King. But alas for Henriette! Six months later there came a
terrible thunderstorm that caused her to miscarry, and released Henri
of his bargain. But his ministers had already engaged him to Marie de’
Medici; and Henri probably felt that Jove’s thunderbolt had come to his
assistance. By that time Marguerite had been duly divorced by an obliging
Pope, who would no doubt do a great deal for the brand plucked from the
burning of Protestantism. In middle age Marguerite became enormously fat,
and there are many stories told about her orgies with footmen and other
tall fellows. It is said that, if they died in her service, she used to
carry their hearts about her in a bag, and that she used to wear a wig
made from their locks of yellow hair. Indeed, imagination has exhausted
itself in devising infamies for the last years of Marguerite de Valois.
It is difficult to recognise this corpulent and beraddled woman in the
gay young princess who danced to lute and pizzicati strings in the
“Huguenots.” Reine Margot indeed had a sorrowful ending, judging by the
ordinary canons of human happiness. But perhaps the stories are not true.
She is always considered an amazing example of the Valois faculty for
combining artistic sensibility with the grossest lust. Strange things are
said to have happened in history; and one must always remember her very
unhappy marriage.
Soon after fifty old age, according to Sir Humphrey Rolleston, usually
touches the average man lightly on the shoulder, and his friends begin
indelicately to “chaff” him, saying, “Oh, you’re not as good a man as
you were ten years ago”; it is then that the average man, according to
some philosophers, begins to feel happy for the first time in his life.
Proverbs have been coined about this well-known fact, on the lines of
the Greek “call no man happy till he is dead.” According to another
school of philosophy happiness only comes with the loss of the teeth.
But sometimes the aging man boasts of his prowess as if to defy time and
proverbs. Such a hero is always abnormal: either the first symptoms of
some nervous disease are beginning to show themselves, or some other less
subtle change is occurring in his body. His position is very much like
that of a lady who, after the climacteric, observes that what she thinks
to be the normal periodical discharge has returned; she does not know
that this is often the first sign of cancer of the womb, and that what
she thinks to be rejuvenescence is really often her death-warrant. Youth
never returns; the tale of years is inexorable. It is lucky for the old
man if he has some faithful friend who will guard him, and, as is said
euphemistically, “keep him out of mischief”—that is to say, keep him
from catching syphilis, which is a terrible thing in old age, or at any
age. The old man thus afflicted seems absolutely to go mad about women;
dignity, honour, decency, and all else, are forgotten.
When to ordinary senility there is added the intolerable desire that
accompanies such trouble as I have mentioned, all other considerations
are cast to the winds. After his marriage to Marie de’ Medici Henri
abandoned even the pretence of decency. Marie seems to have had to let
him go his own way. As for him, he complained that she made his life a
hell upon earth, and he attempted to assuage his wounded feelings with
every other girl who came his way. There were many such who yielded
to the king while they mocked at the elderly man with their younger
lovers. Then, in 1609 he met Charlotte de Montmorency, a charming and
beautiful maiden of fifteen. He saw her while she was rehearsing for
a mask, dressed up as a nymph of Diana. He was passionately arrested
by her beauty, but soon afterwards was laid up with an attack of gout.
Alas, Charlotte was already engaged to a M. de Bassompierre; but this
did not daunt the conqueror of Gabrielle d’Estrees. He had dealt with
such trifles before. As he lay groaning with the gout he thought out a
brilliant scheme, which he amazingly proposed to M. de Bassompierre. He
sent for the young man, told him that he was frantically in love with
Charlotte, and asked him to give up the idea of marrying her so that the
damsel should be free to become Henri’s platonic mistress, with all her
virginal beauty untouched. And de Bassompierre actually agreed to give
up his bride. Naturally Charlotte was deeply aggrieved, and gave her
easy-going and youthful lover such a withering glance that he retired
in mortification to his own room and could not eat for three days. But
that did not mean that Henri was to possess her; for, in the easy fashion
of those days, he married her to the Prince de Condé, who was supposed
to think only of hunting and field-sports and not at all about women.
But Condé’s nature changed after marriage to a beautiful girl, as any
cynic might have expected; and he became mightily annoyed when he saw
the king aping the young man in silks and satins, and paying violent
court to his beautiful young wife; nor was Charlotte so discreet as she
might have been, for she received from him desperate love-letters and
poems, and answered them erotically and foolishly. The young husband and
the elderly lover quarrelled fiercely, and Henri lost what dignity he
still possessed. Then Condé took her away for safety to a castle near
Flanders; Henri followed, and stood by the roadside, disguised as one of
his own huntsmen, with a patch over one eye that he might have the joy
of gazing upon her for a moment. Seeing her at a window, he would bow
and kiss his hand, placing the other hand over his heart, and assuming
all the ridiculous antics of an elderly lover on the stage. The Duc de
Montmorency, her father, wished Charlotte to yield that he might gain
the favour of the king. When Condé heard this he thought he had better
take more active measures, so the young couple hastened over the border,
whither Henri could not follow them. The actual details of the next
few months are not very interesting; they simply represent the frantic
efforts of a man who was getting senile to gratify an adulterous passion.
It is said that he even threatened war with Spain for Charlotte’s bright
eyes, but this is probably not true. Henri loved his country enough to
prevent him from doing anything so wicked. But if his prostate was not
growing too large he showed all the mental symptoms of it so far as we
can tell to-day. The incident is one of the most painful in history, and
calls for all one’s sympathy with the “sorrows of a poor old man.”
Then came Ravaillac and his dagger to end Henri’s misery; and probably,
to those who know the inevitable end of a man suffering possibly from
enlarged prostate without modern surgery, Providence was kind to Henri
in sparing him years of real misery and pain. Assassination is at least
a merciful death to a man who at fifty-five has nothing to look forward
to but the “labour and sorrow” of the Psalmist. People often wonder what
further reforms he might have effected in France; but it is the common
experience that a man does not live very long after such an incident as
that with Charlotte de Montmorency. We cannot even guess at the cause
of this degeneration in Henri and Marguerite. Syphilis would no doubt
account for it; but so far as I know there is no reason to suspect it. He
had done great work for France. Besides the merciful Edict of Nantes,
which gave freedom of worship to the French Protestants for generations,
he reformed her finances, organised her army, and introduced the silkworm
industry which has done so much to strengthen the people of that amazing
country. The French have long ago forgiven his sins against morality
and decency, and taken him to their hearts as one of the greatest of
Frenchmen. And now, when his wonderful personal charm has long mouldered
to dust, the evil that he did is interred with his bones: only the good
remains in the memory of mankind.
* * * * *
The best book about the troubles of old age is _The Medical Aspects of
Old Age_, by Sir Humphrey Rolleston, which, though originally written for
doctors, should be read by every man and woman in the land; for perhaps
it would induce in them a greater sympathy for the old men. “Enlarged
prostate” must be taken symbolically. The whole subject of these senile
attacks of concupiscence is still under discussion, and, just as you
spared me a too close inquiry into Elizabeth’s physical attributes, I
ask you to spare me the inquiry into those of an equally great, but far
more lovable, sovereign, Henri Quatre. The incident of Henri Quatre and
Charlotte de Montmorency seems to represent what is known as a “psychosis
of involution” occurring somewhat prematurely owing to Henri’s hard life
in the field.
Frederick the Great
If it be true that most great men are slightly “cracked” surely this
fact is proved by the peculiarities of Frederick the Great. I propose
to defend the memory of this most illustrious of Prussian soldiers and
minor poets from the infamous slander that he died of syphilis. Frederick
had the misfortune to win his glory in fighting against three women: the
Empress Maria Theresa, the Empress Elizabeth of Russia, and Madame de
Pompadour; and, most unwisely, he tried to fight them, not only with guns
and bayonets, but with jibes and flouts and jeers. His father, as is well
known, was King Frederick William Hohenzollern of Brandenburg, who was
famous for his regiment of giants. These colossal creatures averaged well
over six feet high, and to find them Europe, Asia, Africa and America
were ransacked at vast expense. Frederick William must have been at heart
a man of scientific mind, for he experimented in breeding with these
human cattle; and doubtless his experience, had it been recorded with
true Prussian accuracy, would have been the forerunner of those results
of the Abbé Mendel which have laid the foundation for the science of
eugenics. Unhappily his cattle were less submissive than Mendel’s peas or
the Chillingham bulls, for, in spite of all the floggings and bribings
to which Frederick William resorted, he was not always successful in
securing his results. One day, when he was going from Potsdam to Berlin,
he saw a fine strapping Saxon girl, a very giantess, whom he at once saw
would be a fit wife to produce more gigantic toys if coupled with one of
his guards; so he stopped her and entered into conversation with her.
“Art thou married, mädchen?” he asked her in his hearty Prussian way.
“No, kingly majesty,” she curtsied.
“Take thou then this letter to the commandant at Potsdam,” he said,
“and there shall be for thee a dollar. Here it is, in thy hand, girl”;
and putting a letter and a dollar in the girl’s great hand, he resumed
his journey to Berlin. The blue-eyed girl knew Frederick William’s
ways, and, running on toward Potsdam, met an ancient crone sitting by
the wayside. To this old hag, therefore, she gave the king’s gracious
letter with strict injunctions to give it to the commandant himself, and
thereupon made the best of her way towards home without calling into
Potsdam at all. When the commandant read the letter he found that it was
an imperative order to marry the bearer to a certain private soldier,
and at his peril fail not; experience had shown the commandant that his
portion would be the cane or the royal boot should the king return and
find Private Schmidt still unwed. The ancient crone, naturally, did not
object, but Schmidt, who probably had another fräulein in his mind’s
eye, sobbed and made a great moan. Still, there were His Majesty’s royal
orders, and they must be obeyed, so the marriage duly took place. When
the king returned to Potsdam, he found Schmidt still blubbering in a
truly Prussian ecstasy, and the lady still rejoicing that at the end of
a doubtless ill-spent life she had at length found a husband. As it was
obvious that this experiment in Mendelism would be unlikely to be really
successful, there was ultimately nothing to do but to divorce the couple,
and the maiden returned home still a maid, while the soldier ceased his
lamentations.
This was the kind of father that fate had given to Frederick the Great;
and his discipline seems, from all accounts, to have been terribly
severe. At the age of about twenty his father forced him to marry a young
lady, Christina-Elizabeth of Brunswick-Bevern, apparently against his
will. It is said that Frederick really wanted to marry an English girl;
and, according to Lord Dover, who took his account from the Princess of
Bareith, the marriage was never consummated, for, hardly had the candles
been put out when an alarm of fire was raised in the castle. Frederick
hastily got out of bed, rushed to the help of the fire-fighters, and
never returned to his bride. The reason of this very unusual action has
been the subject of endless conjecture. The princess from whose memoirs
Lord Dover drew his account was quite sure of it, because the queen, her
mother, told her so for a fact more than a year after Frederick had run
from his bride. It is suspected that Frederick had syphilis, and that he
did not wish to give it to the young lady; this, of course, is possible,
though it would seem to be rather unlike the usual conduct of an
eighteenth-century soldier; and again, it is said that it was really she
who had syphilis, because some time later she developed a trouble in her
leg and was in danger of her life. Needless to say, that by itself would
be no evidence whatever of syphilis. Another explanation of the desertion
was that there may have been some physiological or anatomical trouble
with the unwilling husband himself; many years afterwards, when he was
lying dead at Sans Souci, the gallant fellows, whose unpleasant duty it
was to wash his body, took advantage of the opportunity to examine his
royal person, and issued a special announcement that His Late Majesty
was as complete as any other man. But Frederick really loved his wife of
an hour. He showed it by visiting her once a year on her birthday, and,
such was the honour in which he held her, that he took off his boots for
the occasion, and visited her in his stockings. He kept a special pair of
black silk stockings just to visit his wife in, and, as he would never
permit these to be held up with garters, they were always hanging down
his shrunken shanks in great creases. Undoubtedly he must have loved her,
and what is more important, undoubtedly she must have loved him, for he
never washed himself, and yet she stood him.
The only portrait of the young lady that I have seen shows her to have
been apparently a rather stupid and ordinary German girl; and it is said
that she once boasted of having had a miscarriage to her husband. On
the whole, perhaps a good deal of unnecessary sympathy has been poured
out upon her, and doubtless that was part of the penalty that Frederick
had to pay for having jibed at three women whom he had made his enemies
even without the jibes. Catherine of Russia was certainly not a woman to
insult; and Madame de Pompadour was quite able to take care of herself in
a battle of tongues. As for poor Maria Theresa, she was probably too high
and mighty, too utterly hurt at the saints for forsaking her in her hour
of need, to condescend to answer Frederick in the bitter way that suited
himself. But Marie Antoinette held, in common parlance, her end up. Like
Maria Theresa, her mother, she was a Habsburg, and no doubt, like all
the Habsburgs, despised these upstarts of Hohenzollerns. It was probably
through her, or somebody equally pure-minded, that many of the stories
of Frederick’s abominable and unnatural vices first arose. Well has the
daughter defended her mother in the combat of slander that has signalised
Frederick the Great and his Prussia.
As it is vastly important to know his _real_ habits, I draw a description
of them from his latest English biographer, Mr. Norwood Young.
“In later years Frederick gave up shaving, and merely clipped at his
beard with scissors. He seldom washed any part of his person, even
his hands and face. In that respect he was very different from his
father,[15] who used soap and water freely, and often complained of his
son’s dirtiness. One of his valets concluded from his master’s dislike of
water that he must be afflicted with a kind of hydrophobia. His height
has been variously stated, the extreme ranges being 5 feet 4 inches
and 5 feet 7½ inches. He was neither thin nor fat; in his youth he was
rather inclined to stoutness, but he became very thin before he died.
His complexion was tanned—doubtless because it was seldom washed, like a
tramp’s to-day; but unlike a tramp’s, it was touched up with red paint.
His eyes were prominent and blue-grey.”
People who never wash themselves acquire a curious complexion which is
distinguishable to a doctor at a glance, for it is quite different from
the healthy tan of sun and air.
Hardly had he come to the throne when he attacked Maria Theresa, and
marched his army into Silesia without warning. The iron ramrod of the
Prussians proved successful, giving Frederick’s troops a far greater
rapidity of fire than was possible to the wooden ramrod of the Austrians.
But I am not now concerned with Frederick’s glories, and if you are
interested in them you will get a far more vivid account of them from
Lord Macaulay than I would care to write, even if I could; a later writer
has referred scoffingly to “Macaulay’s lurid style.” All that I set out
to prove was that this great man did not die of syphilis, as wicked
slanders have said of him.
Maria Theresa humbled, and Prussia for the first time on the map as a
war-state, Frederick returned home to a well-deserved rest, and built
himself the palace of Sans Souci, where he settled down to form a great
centre of literature and arts on the lines of the French Academy.
He was hardly a German in many ways; his favourite language was French,
and his great ambition was to be a poet. Although he could speak three
languages he could spell none; and a writer in the _Quarterly_ for 1847
gives some instances of his peculiarities in that respect.
When writing a letter he used to add, in his own handwriting, some
words often of bitter jibe or of sardonic humour; and these words
were generally wrongly spelt. Thus, he used to spell “winter” hiverd,
“actress” actrisse, “old” vieu, and “pay” peyer. That he never learned to
spell “pay” properly was doubtless because he hated to think of such a
thing; throughout his life, economy was his ruling passion.
To improve his spelling, grammar, and poetical construction, he invited
Voltaire to stay with him at Sans Souci, and everyone knows that the
two poets did not get on well together. Macaulay took the squabble too
seriously, and worked himself up into a rage over it, with much about
Voltaire’s “withering irony,” and other early Victorian and exaggerated
phrases. It has been left for Mr. Lytton Strachey, the man who told us
the truth about Queen Victoria, to tell us the truth about the famous
Voltaire-Frederick squabble, and he makes it possible to compress it
into a phrase. They were two poets, each trying to overreach the other.
Frederick, in the eyes of the world, won, because he had the greater poet
arrested, thus winning by the only way he knew—by force of arms; also
he dared to call Voltaire a monkey. In our war-hospital, I remember,
we had a monkey as a pet, which used to live at the top of one of the
entrance gate-posts. When the descendants of Frederick the Great used
to emulate him by letting loose poison gas, it was the duty of the
quartermaster-serjeant to put the poor little shivering beast into a
gas-helmet. At about that time Lytton Strachey’s book came out, and I
sometimes read it as I looked at the monkey and heard the incessant
tramp of feet that, to me, is the chief remembrance of the war, apart
from the disgusting nature of the wounds and the thundering noise. And
as the tramping men, marching to death in interminable thousands, looked
up astonished at the monkey, I used to wonder at the effrontery of the
king who would compare one of the greatest intellects that ever lived
in France to that of a monkey. Voltaire got his revenge, more deadly
than Marie Antoinette’s. In 1759, the most glorious year of Frederick’s
life, he published _Candide_, which, though a joyful satire on Leibnitz’
philosophy that this was the best of all possible worlds, contained, if I
am not much mistaken, a far more deadly description of the new style of
civilised warfare introduced by the Great Frederick. Listen (I quote from
Mr. Philip Littell’s translation):
“No,” said Dr. Pangloss, “Miss Cunegonde was ripped open by the Bulgarian
soldiers, after having been violated by many; they broke her father’s
head for attempting to defend her; my lady, her mother, was cut in
pieces; my poor pupil was served just the same as his sister; and, as
for the castle, they have left not one stone upon another, not a barn,
nor a sheep, nor a duck, nor a tree.” For “Bulgarian” read “Prussian,”
and you will see the great improvements that Frederick made in war.
Voltaire, like Anatole France, had an unrivalled power for saying the
utmost possible in the fewest words; and yet some blockheads try to
deceive themselves by saying that Anatole France is not of the school of
Voltaire! I suppose they do so because they have made up their minds that
Voltaire was a wicked man and an atheist, whereas Anatole France is at
least now an accepted wit and therefore can say what he likes.
But two years after Voltaire died, Frederick used to pray to his
God—if he had any—“Divin Voltaire, ora pro nobis!” that is to say, he
acknowledged that Voltaire had triumphed. This to me seems characteristic
of the man who bullied Maria Theresa.
Of course the Seven Years’ War was a very wonderful feat of endurance for
the Prussian people, just as was the Great War; and in it Frederick won
a reputation which was marvellous till a yet greater arose in the art of
slaughter. The history of it is repulsive, in that it shows the triumph
of unscrupulous burglary against people who only wanted to be left in
peace. The results of our own war were better at least on paper, though
fortunately it did not produce any man so great as Frederick.
But now I come to the purpose of this essay: to show the real cause of
this extraordinary man’s death.
On August 4th, 1784, he attended a review in Silesia in the midst of six
hours of driving rain, during the progress of which he refused to put on
a coat and became drenched to the skin. Arriving home he felt ill and
shivery with a constant cough. During the autumn of that year his fever
left him, but was succeeded by a harsh dry cough which never left him.
His strength diminished, and his legs began to swell; he had constant
oppression in his chest—that is to say, his heart began to fail him—and
he could not breathe if he lay in bed, but had to spend his days and
nights in an arm-chair; that is to say, he probably had what we now call
“cardiac asthma.”...
As the summer of 1786 gradually returned he began to improve, so he
went from Potsdam to Sans Souci, which he never left alive. He was then
under the care of the Court physicians, Selle and Cothenius, and the
surgeon Frese. Unfortunately for Dr. Selle he hinted that the great man
probably had dropsy, so Frederick flew into a rage, dismissed him, and
wrote to Hanover, where there dwelt an eminent man of the name of Dr.
Zimmermann, who arrived at Potsdam on June 26th, 1786. When Frederick saw
him he asked at once, “Doctor, can you cure me?” To which Zimmermann,
being evidently a courtly fellow, answered, “I can relieve you, sir.”
Zimmermann, it strikes one, must have known that men like Selle and
Cothenius would know enough about their patient to render it dangerous
for any outsider to offer an opinion carelessly. The first thing for
Zimmermann to do was evidently to try to gain his patient’s confidence,
because never was there a more unruly man, especially where eating and
drinking were concerned. The doctor found that Frederick would talk on
literature and poetry as long as he would allow him, although it made him
cough violently; and his first line of treatment was to get Frederick to
promise to read through _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_. No
doubt he thought that that gigantic book would be a good way of keeping
his patient quiet for a very long time. Then the conversation would
shift to other sovereigns; and Zimmermann was able to give Frederick
some of the truth about the health of Empress Catherine of Russia, whose
surprising immorality must have been an attractive feature to a soldier.
“But,” said Zimmermann, “she boasts that her health costs her only
eighteenpence a year!” “Wonderful!” applauded the aged emperor, “I always
said she was a woman of supreme genius.”
Then Zimmermann, seeing that Frederick was really ill, asked that he
might be allowed to have a consultation with the dismissed Selle. This
threw Frederick into a passion; his face flushed beneath the paint,
and his eyes glowed with a deepened fury; his voice roared with anger;
one fit of violent coughing after another came upon him, so that
Zimmermann thought it wiser to desist, and return to his talk of scandal
or literature. But he had already gained sufficient information to
leave us a valuable report as to the king’s physical condition. “His
legs were swollen with dropsy, which also extended up on to the skin
of the abdomen, and, though he was not feverish, his pulse was hard
and violent.” That is to say, he was probably suffering from a high
blood-pressure with failing heart, which was causing his dropsy.
Next day Zimmermann was able cautiously to approach the question of
treatment, which indeed needed much tact, for Frederick obstinately
refused to try any of the doctor’s remedies, especially any suggestion
that he should moderate his gigantic appetite. Zimmermann suggested
taraxacum; and after a good deal of discussion the gallant soldier agreed
to try it. Taraxacum, or dandelion, used sometimes to be given as a
purgative that was supposed to act specially on the liver; and no doubt
Zimmermann thought that if he could get the king’s bowels to act freely
the dropsy might be relieved.
But next day the doctor had once again to go over the whole arguments.
Of the three doses of taraxacum that he had carefully measured out with
his own hands for the king, only one had been consumed; and Frederick sat
looking with horror-stricken eyes upon the medicine glass as though it
had been a piece of artillery.
Frederick said enthusiastically, “I assure you that though my legs are
swelled I am not dropsical. The only thing that is the matter with me
is that I am a little asthmatical.” Zimmermann must have begun to
suspect that to give taraxacum to his unruly patient would be very much
like firing a pistol at the Rock of Gibraltar, but he persevered with
a tenacity equal to Frederick’s own, and ultimately got him faithfully
to promise to take his medicine. In the morning Frederick started on
his medicine cautiously little by little, and by a miracle began to
improve. Then nothing could be too good for the Herr Doktor with his
wonderful taraxacum. It was saving the royal life. But Zimmermann added
another condition. Majesty must eat less, and not so much of eel-pies.
Then all the glory departed out of Zimmermann. That ignorant fellow
Selle, with his balderdash about dropsy, was a better doctor after all,
and Zimmermann, who really seems to have tried to act in as decent a
manner as was possible towards his colleagues, allowed Selle to write
and receive reports concerning the patient’s progress even though he
was in disgrace. Frederick was a sworn enemy to all medicines, except
a powder of his own, consisting of rhubarb and Glauber’s salts. At any
moment the taraxacum might be thrown to the dogs, and the king’s own
powder substituted behind the physician’s back. (Between ourselves it was
not a bad powder.) “And,” groaned Zimmermann, “no idea could be formed
of the excess which His Majesty allowed himself in his diet; his cooks
were obliged to season his food in a manner sufficient to destroy his
stomach; those dishes which were the most difficult of digestion were his
favourites, especially Prussian peas, which were certainly the hardest
in the world. This was the cause of all those attacks of vomiting and
violent pain in the stomach which attacked him after every meal, and of
the severe colic from which he suffered every week, and nobody durst
remonstrate with him about it.”
Next day, when Zimmermann was sent for hastily to see the king he found
him attacked with a terrible fit of coughing so violent that he spat
blood. This is not uncommon in cases of very high blood-pressure, and
frequently puts an unobservant physician off the scent. Still, under the
purgative effect of the taraxacum, he began to get gradually better,
and as he felt himself the subject of a miracle he ate more and more,
until he devoured a pie of eels so hot and so highly seasoned that, to
use the words of a fellow-sufferer, it seemed as if it had been baked
in hell. After this he got an unusually violent attack of colic which
he attributed to the taraxacum; and, to use Shakespeare’s words,
“Zimmermann’s cake was dough.” Zimmermann forecasted that Frederick
would soon suffer from bleeding hæmorrhoids, “And how will Your Majesty
like that, please?” Majesty did not like the prospect at all, but on
July 12th, when Zimmermann left, his prophecy came to pass, which was
perhaps a good thing for the gluttonous patient. Then Selle tried to
get rid of some of the dropsy by making incisions in his right leg; and
the ancient ingrained dirt in his skin took a hand in the game; the cut
suppurated and became intolerably offensive. Even Selle began to lose
heart when he made a second incision and the wound became violently
inflamed and erysipelatous. But Frederick never lost heart: if he found
that he had a more violent indigestion than ever after his overeating,
he simply took a double dose of his own powder; and on August 4th the
erysipelatous inflammation spread all over the leg and on to the abdomen;
blisters arose and burst, and from them leaked a quart of fluid a day,
by which treatment the dropsy slowly abated, until, after a struggle
worthy of his struggles in the Seven Years’ War, he gradually sank
under a slow pneumonia, which is the natural end of man. But it is a
cruel slander upon this mighty king to say that he died of syphilis,
though occasionally syphilis is said to cause high blood-pressure. He
was seventy-five years of age, and therefore there were seventy-five
excellent reasons for his death. If to them you add years of gluttony and
sepsis, caused by a lifetime of dirt, you get the real cause of the death
of Frederick the Great. Did I not say rightly that Frederick the Great,
like most other great men, was a trifle “cracked?”
The poet Campbell, in the last volume of his life of Frederick, gave a
detailed account of some of the horrors of his death-bed, but, though
interesting, they are too disgusting for my clean pages, and I shall
not inflict them on the reader. They are chiefly concerned with the
difficulty that his friends found in getting his body in a fit state of
cleanliness for the grave. A lifetime of ingrained dirt! No wonder the
startled washers found it necessary to get the water out of him somehow
in that hot summer weather.
This is the truth that lies behind the demure paragraph of the ordinary
English biographies: “Frederick died after a long illness (which he bore
with exemplary fortitude), contracted, such was his sense of duty, by
prolonged exposure to the rain while reviewing his troops in the province
which he had rescued from the Queen of Hungary owing to his wonderful
genius.”
The Children’s Crusade and “The Pied Piper”
Which of us can remember a time when he did not know “The Pied Piper
of Hamelin?” Which of us can remember a time when he thought it
merely funny, or could not recite the joyous thing by heart like his
schoolfellows? If the gliding years have stolen the detailed memory, at
least they have not stolen the enormous impression that the poem made
upon children; for we can still see the piper with his pin-point pupils
and his light hair without tuft on cheek nor beard on chin, and his
queer parti-coloured clothes: just like a Chinaman he seemed to us—like
the poor mysterious “John” from whom we used to steal bananas and evoke
torrents of uncouth gibberish. Perhaps he too was trying to tell us in
his mildly explosive way how he had talked with the Cham of Tartary or
the Nizam of Asia; perhaps he was telling us of some other mysterious
potentate for whom he had contracted to bewitch vermin, though to be
sure we had never observed any great love for music in him, nor did his
fingers itch to do anything more than heave his stave on to his shoulders
or pick out faulty vegetables for the cook. And how deliciously the piper
had piped the rats from that little mediæval town: “O rats! rejoice, for
the world is grown to one vast drysaltery!” We did not quite know what
a drysaltery was, but to use Australian slang, it must contain things
positively “bosker” to eat. The rough and tripping metre appealed to
boyhood, and the queer words that we did not quite understand, though
we felt that in a minute we should; such as “nuncheon” and “justling.”
It seemed quite right and proper to say that salt sprinkled on a candle
flame would burn green; and it savours of the “knowledge of good and
evil” to know that it really burns yellow. It is good fun to try to
reread the poem with a boy’s mind. But it is impossible; you cannot
fully surrender yourself to the poet’s magic as a boy can, and you catch
yourself wondering how much of it is really true; and, not content with
the jolly way in which the story is told, you wonder whether it is
“founded on fact” like so many other boys’ stories. That is the real
tragedy of life, that a time comes when you cannot be contented with
simple faith in good stories.
Probably there is really some foundation for the legend, which was not
uncommon and was told of several other towns in the Middle Ages when
grown men were really more like children than little boys are to-day.
That, I take it, is the only way to study the Middle Ages—to remember
that the world had not yet quite grown up and men were not as gods, but
in many ways like children. Otherwise how can you explain many very
wonderful things that undoubtedly happened? (Not that we are particularly
godlike to-day except some men in their own estimations; but at least
some of us are beginning to have the germs of common sense.)
The true foundation is much more pathetic than Browning’s poem, which
to us boys seemed so funny, for we were not old enough to sympathise
or to see the tragedy upon which it dances. That came later, when we
learnt that “nuncheon” is not the funniest thing in the world and life
has forced upon us a knowledge of things other than “good and evil.”
The Koppelberg into which the children danced is not a “mighty top”; no
crowded little bones have been unearthed from it; it is just so high that
a child would be hidden from sight as it danced on its way to Cologne.
Of course one naturally accuses the gipsies, for there were certainly
gipsies in Europe even so early as the twelfth century, let alone the
thirteenth; three centuries were to pass before they reached their
climax. According to the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ the legend of the
Pied Piper dates from 1284, though Browning in the poem dates it _July
22nd, 1376_. I believe the reason for his error is not definitely known;
but I think it is possible to guess. On either date there were plenty of
gipsies about, and no doubt they would be quite prepared to pick up an
odd child or two if they saw money in the abduction. But it is impossible
to believe that they would dare to try any such mighty abduction as
was achieved by the Pied Piper. Europe would have gone mad with rage;
probably every gipsy would have had his throat cut by infuriated parents
and the race would have been exterminated.
Nor is it likely that the so-called “Dancing Mania” was more than in part
a solution, because that was really a spiritual reaction from the Black
Death of 1348; probably people were so glad to have remained alive that
they danced firstly for joy, afterwards from “mass-suggestion.” It is a
partial solution of our difficulty because it began in Aix-la-Chapelle
in 1374; as Hecker says, “Hardly had the graves of the victims of the
Black Death been covered in”; which is a somewhat excitable way of saying
“a few years.” The dancing neurasthenia lasted a long time, and recurred
all over Europe in several epidemics. Just so, after a terrible war, do
we dance to-day, though few of us, looking at our gloomy and barbaric
dances, would dream that these short-frocked maidens are dancing for joy.
In 1375 it had spread the thirty-six miles to Cologne, and in _1376_ the
few miles to Hamelin.
I do not attempt to explain the episode of the rats, beyond saying that
the story is not uncommon, that there is to this day a “Ratfanger’s
Haus” in the ancient town of Hamelin, and that according to the original
legend the piper was accused of sorcery. Any man who studied the habits
of rats and learned how to catch them did so in peril of being accused of
sorcery; and quite likely Browning, writing for children, made the mayor
and corporation more ridiculous by saying that they had spent all their
money in gluttony and could not pay the rat-catcher his fee. “A thousand
guilders! Come, take fifty!” With what shuddering delight did we hear
the absurd and obese old mayor brave the vengeance of the piper in those
awful words. How could he ever have had the courage to do it? The real
legend of Hamelin says that the piper was accused of being a sorcerer.
But it is the children who most interest us to-day. We must find a motive
which could excuse an atrocious crime and hold it for righteousness. That
motive we find in the Crusades; and it has been often suggested that in
the “Children’s Crusade” we find the real foundation of the episode.
Although we nowadays number the Crusades in a charming regularity and
order, probably the people who took part in them did not realise that
they were anything but episodes in a furious and weary struggle which,
up to 1212 at least, had had little more result than disaster and
destruction. Children saw their fathers dragged away to the East, and,
lost in a gloomy fog of war and despair, mostly disappear for ever.
Their mothers and their priests told them that daddy had gone to get
back the tomb of Christ and save it from wicked men; and the world was
sunk in misery and poverty and despair; up to 1212 at least, the war had
had no further result than the capture of Acre in 1191, the elevation
of Saladin to a pinnacle of romantic glory, the barbarous quarrels
among Christians, and the frightful attack upon Constantinople which had
led to the destruction in hideous circumstances of that once glorious
city in 1204. In 1212 the grown men of Europe had become heartily sick
of the weary struggle, and it occurred to the clergy that, since it
seemed likely that the tomb of Christ could never be recovered by sinful
men—and if you read Gibbon you will see that many of the Crusaders
were exceedingly sinful, Cross and all—it was only right to try if the
innocence of little boys might not be able to prevail over the powers
of evil. It is not suggested that the clergy really encouraged the
“Children’s Crusade,” though some people seem to think that they did. All
the authorities that Hecker was able to consult show that the saner of
the clergy were as much horrified by this result of the neurasthenia of
the time as the parents.
In Germany a little boy named Nicholas, of whom we know nothing but his
name, appeared in _July, 1212_, and gave out that he was sent directly
from God to lead the children to the Holy Land. Vast numbers crowded to
follow him in spite of everything that the parents could do to keep the
little people at home. Finding that the boys were determined to go, the
parents, with true German forethought, provided them with “harlots” to
keep them company and entertain them on the way. Personally I believe
that for this unpleasant word we should read “nurses,” for the average
age of the boys seems to have been rather under twelve than over. There
was a considerable number of older men and women, whose morals suffered
sadly. They crossed the Alps in straggling swarms dignified by the name
of armies; they wore Crusaders’ uniform and bore themselves as soldiers
of the Cross; some little girls joined them in boys’ clothes—even then
they couldn’t keep the girls from following the boys into mischief, just
as to-day we cannot keep them from playing that most dangerous game for
girls, Rugby football; the total number of the children was at least
30,000; their real starting-point was Cologne, which you reach from
Hamelin, as I have said, after you cross the Koppelberg. Many of them
starved in the Alps or were eaten by wolves; crowds of robbers infested
them and ate their substance and seized their clothing; they reached
Genoa and were mocked at by the sensible Italians, who were sadly wanting
in that faith which should lead little boys to victory against black
men who rode about on horses and carried big swords and shouted to Allah
as they fought. The armies scattered, and it is possible that stragglers
reached Transylvania and formed the basis for one verse of the “Pied
Piper.” Some certainly settled in Genoa and became ultimately rich and
prosperous, but some of them tried to return home through the wolves and
mountains, only to find their friends as mocking as the Italians, for
nothing fails like failure. Some reached Innocent III, the pope, and
after having been made by that astute statesman to swear that they would
become Crusaders when they grew up, were told to go back home again.
A few sturdy little fellows reached Brindisi and found that the sea
would not divide before them; they were sold as slaves to the Saracens,
and thus reached the Holy Land, but in far other guise than that of
conquerors. Very few of them all ever saw their mothers again.
This is what many people now believe to have been the real basis of
Browning’s poem, though it is quite possible that he did not know it
himself but intended it to refer to one of the idle legends of sorcery
that I have mentioned. If he had known it was a thing so tragic would he
have treated it in so jocular a vein?
Even more pitiful was the tragedy of the French children in the same
year when the world really seems to have gone mad. The leader was a
little shepherd boy of twelve, named Stephen. Matthew Paris in ponderous
language calls him a bad little boy—I suppose he had stolen some cleric’s
apples or done something else equally atrocious. The children in their
madness called him St. Stephen; and he worked miracles. One morning in
_July_, 1212, he thought he saw Christ, who not only accepted a piece of
bread from Stephen’s grubby hand, but gave him a letter to the king, and
told him to lead an army of children to the Sepulchre. The king of France
ordered Stephen not to be silly, and forbade other little girls and boys
to attend his meetings, and the parents, so far as they could, put them
under lock and key. Just so and with as little success might we confine
behind a feeble mediæval lock to-day a little boy who wanted to go
swimming. Very few little girls joined Stephen. The heart-broken parents
did everything that they knew to keep their little sons at home, and some
of the boys were killed in a mad crush to get a lock of Stephen’s hair;
in response Stephen promised that the Mediterranean would open before
them and allow them to reach the Holy Land dry-shod. The richer parents
sent guides; the poorer boys found their own way to the sea. The unhappy
mothers could not tell us their feelings when they saw their sons thus
dragged away by suggestion; because they could not write; but one would
like to know what clerk it was whom Stephen saw and thought to be Christ.
He, apparently, was the direct cause of Stephen’s delusion; he, and his
letter.[16]
At length they reached Marseilles and found the Mediterranean as blue
as ever and as treacherous. Two shipowners met them while they were
wondering why the sea had not even a tide, far less showed signs of
opening for little boys. Let us give these shipowners their glorious
names; they were William Porcus and Hugh Ferreus. They welcomed the
boys and joined in their services, behaving, to the boys’ eyes, as true
Christians. Stephen rejoiced in them, for all through the south of France
he had met nothing but robbers and most unchristian men. William the Pig
and Iron-hearted Hugo offered to take them to Palestine on shipboard for
sheer love of God, as it seemed unlikely that the sea would open to give
them passage as Stephen had promised. The little boys filled seven large
ships and set forth joyfully and with cheerful shouts, singing hymns of
victory. Two of the ships were wrecked in a storm off St. Pierre’s Rock,
near Sardinia, and every boy on board was drowned. They were the lucky
ones, because in time the survivors reached a strange and savage land
which was not Holy, but was Egypt, where black men came on board and
bought them all as slaves; and not one of those little boys ever reached
France again. The usual stories were set afoot that some of them had
been martyred rather than turn Moslem; but all that is known for certain
is that eighteen years later seven hundred of them were still alive—but
no longer little boys. It does not require much knowledge of Egypt to
picture the tree of knowledge of which those little boys had been forced
to eat. The extraordinary thing is that neither French nor German boys
seem to have known of the deeds of the others.
The only light in the gloom is that the free-thinking Emperor Frederick
II afterwards laid hands upon William and Hugo and hanged them
ingloriously with several other scoundrels. Probably he did this on
general principles, and not on account of the little boys.
Of course the frightful episode of the Children’s Crusade is merely an
instance of the extraordinary suggestibility of children. You can do
anything with a little boy if you work upon his imagination and subject
him to “mass-suggestion.”
I believe that the date in the “Pied Piper of Hamelin” is that of the
dancing neurasthenia when it attacked that town; the rat episode is a
distorted recollection of some rat-legend attributed to Hamelin but which
may have referred to other places; the theft of the children refers
to the German branch of the Children’s Crusade, whose Hamelin members
crossed the Koppelberg to reach Cologne.
And the leader’s name was Nicholas—Old Nick?
Some Epidemics of Social Importance
There is some reason to believe that Hippocrates himself, our
professional father, who drew up that oath by which all modern doctors
measure their conduct, knew the bubonic plague when he saw it, though he
never went through a plague epidemic. The first epidemic of which we have
detailed knowledge is the great plague of Athens in the Peloponnesian
War about which there can be very little doubt, for it was described by
one of the greatest literary artists of Greece, who saw it all with his
own eyes, and suffered from it. Thucydides was not a doctor, but like
Cervantes he had the eye and mind of a doctor; and he could describe a
disease so plainly that many other ancient and even mediæval historians
have taken their descriptions of their own epidemics straight from his
with never an acknowledgment. And in Thucydides’ account of that plague
we get the invariable conditions of all epidemics—the ungovernable
terror of the people, the powerlessness of the doctors, the abandonment
of all moral laws, the wild accusations of poisoning by enemies, the
selfishness, cowardice, and ignorance of man in a panic, the hysterical
dancing in the shadow of the tomb. From this one learn all.
I give a translation of Thucydides’ description of the symptoms, by
C. Foster Smith. It must be remembered that Athens was being besieged
and the Athenians had brought all the farmers into Athens so that the
Spartans should find no food for the Lacedæmonian armies; the device of
an already beaten nation.
“The disease began in Ethiopia and then descended into Egypt and Libia.
Then it suddenly fell upon the Piræus and city of Athens, so that people
at first said that the Peloponnesians had put poison into the cisterns.
Afterwards it reached the upper city also, and from that time the
mortality became greater. I have had the disease myself and seen others
sick of it. Suddenly men were seized first with an intense heat of the
head and redness and inflammation of the eyes, and the parts inside
the mouth became bloodshot and exhaled an unnatural and fœtid breath.
In the next stage sneezing and hoarseness came on and in a short time
the disorder descended to the chest attended by severe coughing and
sneezing. There was severe vomiting of every kind attended by great
distress; and in most cases ineffectual retching producing violent
convulsions which sometimes abated directly, sometimes not very long
afterwards. The body was not very hot to the touch; it was not pale, but
reddish, livid, and breaking out into small blisters and ulcers. Patients
could not bear to have on them the slightest covering or linen sheets,
but wanted to be quite uncovered and would have liked best to throw
themselves into cold water—indeed, many who were not prevented did so.
Most of them died on the seventh or ninth day from internal heat, but had
still some strength left. After the crisis the disease sometimes attacked
the privates and fingers and toes, so that many patients lost these,
though some lost the eyes also. Immediately after recovery there was
often loss of memory, so that many failed to remember either themselves
or their friends. The most dreadful thing was the despondency of the
victims.”
I am glad to say that I personally did not serve in the Balkan campaigns,
but many doctors who did tell me that Thucydides’ description might,
with a little imagination, be stretched to include that plague which
proved so distressing to Dr. Elsie Inglis and her gallant band. In other
words, Thucydides was describing typhus fever, which has always been
the enemy of besieged cities, especially in hot and dirty surroundings.
Dr. Crawfurd states that we may look upon it as almost certain that the
plague of Athens was typhus fever, though he discusses at considerable
length the academic question whether it might not have been bubonic
plague or smallpox. At least we can say for certain that the plague of
Athens showed more of the symptoms of typhus fever than of any other
known disease; and if Dr. Crawfurd is wrong he had made a very shrewd
guess. From my own experience of typhus, which is small, I should
certainly be inclined to support him. But typhus nowadays is a thing
almost of the past except in times of war. That we owe simply to washing
ourselves and our clothes better than of old. It is a remarkable thing in
clinical experience that typhus frequently accompanies bubonic plague,
because they are both diseases of primitive civilisations like India and
China to-day.
Passing over the innumerable ancient attacks of pestilence upon mankind,
we come to the great plague of the Antonines which was probably the real
cause of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, for it is extremely
doubtful whether the Empire ever recovered from it. To most of us this
plague is remarkable for the fact that Galen, the Roman Hippocrates,
ran away from it, and has left us an account of it which seems to have
been drawn second-hand from Thucydides. In the Roman Empire many of the
physicians were Greek slaves and had the slave mind. Though Galen himself
was not a slave, still he was a man of his time, and it was not then
thought imperative that a doctor should, in Dr. Crawfurd’s words, be
“captain of his soul.”[17] Dr. Crawfurd gives many instances of honoured
names whose owners ran before the onset of plague; and it was not till
the Black Death that we find the real true silent courage that we now
expect from the medical profession as a matter of course.
The plague of the Antonines seems to have varied in different parts
of the Empire and at different times of its devastating career.[18]
Occasionally it seems to have taken the appearance of smallpox, sometimes
of typhus, and perhaps at times an infusion of bubonic plague may
have thrust in its frightful form. It would be much easier for after
generations to guess at the truth if only poor Galen had not taken
wing and fled; for he was an acute clinician. At its first onset he
fled to Campania and, finding no safety there, took ship to Pergamos.
Thence, after two years’ absence, he returned at the urgent summons
of the emperor, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, and after a brief stay in
Rome rejoined him again at Aquileia. But there was no rest for his
weary soul; again pestilence pursued him. The thing would be comic if
we could forget the frightful misery of mankind when the foundations
of civilisation were crumbling before the assaults of micro-organisms.
Man was engaged in one of his greatest battles to the death against the
wild; and the rat, the body-louse, and the direct infection of smallpox
were apparently leagued in an assault upon his works. It is a dramatic
thing to stand before the great statue of Marcus Aurelius at the head of
the Capitoline steps in Rome, near the smell of the caged wolves, and
to ponder that the real enemy of that somewhat tedious emperor was, not
the Quadi or the Marcomanni, but, unknown to himself, if Dr. Crawfurd is
right, the ignoble body-louse and the squeaking, fighting, greedy Mus
Decumanus.[19] And yet he sits there so proudly upon his wonderful horse,
looking every inch an emperor yet unable to cast even a moral maxim at
his ignoble foes.
After the plague of the Antonines we come to the great plague of
Justinian and here at last we have the evidence of an exact historian
who did not run and could state what he saw in language that we can
understand. Gibbon says hesitantly that Procopius was a doctor, though
probably in truth he was a lawyer. Possibly he was too much afraid of the
naughty little Empress Theodora, whom he was afterwards to slander, to
forsake the path of duty and run away when the world seemed dying; but
at any rate he has left us a remarkable account of the plague of 542,
one of the most terrible recorded visitations of epidemic disease; and
after reading Gibbon’s somewhat excitable account of it I think that few
doctors will deny that it was real old bubonic plague that has so often
made history. Justinian suffered from it and recovered; we do not know
enough about the exact circumstances to estimate its exact effects upon
the world; but we can be pretty certain that the bacillus pestis did not
lay waste the Byzantine Empire for nothing. Gibbon estimates the total
loss of life at a hundred millions; but one doubts if the population
of the Roman Empire, even in its palmiest days, was ever much larger,
and surely the plague could not have swept off everybody in the known
world, though we do know that, if it really breaks loose in flea-bitten
surroundings, plague can do an infinity of mischief, probably more than
any other known disease.
We leave the dead old world that shook at Cæsar’s nod, and leap in one
moment to the very beginnings of the modern world, to the Black Death of
1348; for, though the Middle Ages were still to drag their slow length
along for at least a century, there can be little doubt that after the
Black Death had terrified mankind all our modern problems were beginning,
if only in embryo. The original source of it seems to have been China,
and the epidemic proceeded with most leisurely footsteps until it took
ship for Europe. Dr. Hecker[20] in 1833 wrote an exhaustive account of
it from mediæval records; but since 1833 the cell-theory of Schleiden
and Schwann has revolutionised medicine, and even Dr. Hecker has to be
translated into modern terminology; so rapidly has medicine changed that
a book written ten years ago is already obsolete. Indeed, it is not
too much to say that more has been discovered in medicine within the
last thirty years than in the whole previous half-million years during
which man has been upon the earth; one sometimes becomes terrified at
the amazing growth of knowledge. Whither is it all leading us? Are we
becoming as gods? Vespasian joked about himself when he was dying; let
us not really grow “pumpkinified,” to use Seneca’s words about Claudius,
when we think ourselves becoming deified.
The Black Death seems to have come to Europe from Africa by ship in 1348.
The harbingers of the epidemic began in 1347 with earthquakes and floods
in China and Egypt; in far-away China the earth opened and swallowed
men. Frightful portents appeared in the sky (of course I am simply
quoting this nonsense from Hecker and his mediævalists) and the seasons
changed, summer becoming winter. At that time, according to Hecker, the
sheet of ice was formed which has since prevented men from looking upon
the coast of Greenland; there were unequalled rains and the floodgates
of heaven were opened in a more than Noachian deluge. Vast swarms of
locusts appeared and died; and the want of the crops which they had
devoured thrust man, whose hold upon the earth is always so feeble, to
the edge of that slight precipice which generally protects him from the
Valley of Starvation. The earth opened, and into the crevasses men fell,
never to be seen again; from the crevasses arose a horrid stench. Into
this world, even more starved and terrified by the adventure of living
than was common in the Middle Ages, the rat and the bacillus pestis made
their death-dealing plunge. The epidemic which they brought seems to have
been carried from the sultry delta of the Nile by ship to Greece and
Italy; four fugitives—and unknown numbers of rats and fleas—fled to find
safety in Marseilles, carrying their own destruction with them. Thence
the plague went to Avignon, at that time the residence of the pope; and
ultimately to England where it landed in the southwest counties, taking
half a year to crawl to London. As acutely noted by Procopius, plague
always spreads inland from the shores of the sea, and we now know that
it spreads just so fast as the rat can run and no faster. In 1348 they
knew nothing about rats and bacteria, but attributed everything to bad
air or evil spirits; and they noted that there was a continuance of
southerly winds, which of course in Greece and Italy are hot winds and
may possibly have spread the plague by bringing the ships and their
contained rats. In Germany they had some story about a dense pestiferous
fog which smelt abominably and so was obviously the cause of the Black
Death. It is difficult to say how much truth there was in these stories
of fog, though they are too numerous and too well attested to be utterly
ignored; they have naturally been seized upon by historical novelists in
search of the dramatic and anxious to show that in 1348 everything was
different from things as they are to-day. Possibly they accounted for the
preponderance of pneumonic plague.
John Cantacuzenos, Byzantine emperor, whose own son died of it, left a
description that entirely fits in with our modern knowledge of plague,
buboes, black spots and all, though there is a certain resemblance to
Thucydides which makes one rather believe that he was adding to his
narrative for dramatic effect. Strangely modern is his description of the
dull stupor that affects so many plague patients to-day. We all noticed
it in the slight epidemic that affected Sydney some years ago. Then again
John specially stated that some patients were attacked by a violent pain
in the chest, with difficulty of breathing and a putrid expectoration.
This looks uncommonly like the pneumonic type of plague which proved so
destructive in Manchuria in 1910.
But the most interesting feature of the Black Death was its attack upon
Avignon, where Guy de Chauliac was physician to the pope. It lasted eight
months, with the usual concomitants of numbers of dead so huge that the
living could not bury them. As trench after trench became filled, no
matter how hard the living worked, the pope blessed the Rhone and had
the bodies hurled into that rushing stream, doubtless to the joy of
the rats. Guy himself showed the courage that one expects in a modern
doctor, and has left us a perfectly recognisable description, which is
commented upon by both Dr. Hecker and Dr. Crawfurd. It is in Guy himself
that our interest dwells; for at last Medicine had found its soul. His
colleagues, being trained in Arabian medicine, all told him that the
plague was inevitably fatal, that medicine could do nothing, and that he
was only courting destruction by staying to comfort those whom he knew
that he could not save. Guy himself had a theory that strong purgation
would cure the disease, though he knew that the only real safety was in
flight. He stayed; though whether he was prevented from running by the
medicines that he prescribed or by sheer courage no one can say. His
own words were “As for me I did not dare absent myself, though I was in
constant fear.” To be feared of a thing and yet to do it—that is what
makes the prettiest kind of a man; and to be afraid only of his own
conscience makes a man a hero. Guy was afraid of his own conscience,
not of the plague, and therefore he has become one of the heroes of
medicine. No doubt he donned his quaint mediæval anti-infection costume
with its beaky vizor, and went from door to door trying to bring a little
hope to the gloomy death-beds of the frightened people; no doubt he had
himself to clean up the mess caused by his treatment, which must have
been calamitous. But he lives in the memory of his colleagues, for we are
all proud to belong to the profession of that simple-minded doctor of
Provence, and try to act like him though with less messy treatment. He
was a brave man.
The epidemic endured at Avignon for eight months, and Guy tells us that
for the first three it took the form, in our terminology, of pneumonic
plague and was intensely infectious, but for the other five it seems to
have been the ordinary bubonic that was so fatal in London in 1665. Guy
remained in Avignon for the Black Death, and faced its return twelve
years later. In the first visitation the poor suffered, but in the
second the rich; but, rich or poor, Guy remained at his post with his
ample store of aloes to win the love of the dying whom he could not save.
We know now some results of crude aloes which are not very pleasant, and
I wonder whether Master Guy de Chauliac ever noticed them, or whether
his patients ever came running to him to cure them of the effects of his
aloes.
To sum up, it is probable that the series of epidemics that we call
the Black Death were all different varieties of the plague; bubonic,
pneumonic, septicæmic, hæmorrhagic, etc. The sentimental and journalistic
Nordic nations, such as the English and Germans, muttered the horrified
name “Black Death,” afraid to give the thing a name, just as to-day
they talk about the “Red Plague” or “a certain loathsome disease” when
they mean to say syphilis; but the more clear-sighted and logical
Mediterranean peoples knew that the thing certainly killed them, though
they did not know what it was, so they simply called it La Grande
Mortelaga—the Great Mortality, which it assuredly was. We prosaic
moderns simply call it the plague, whose dread name even to-day makes us
shudder. We do not fear it, because we know exactly how it is spread,
and that, to use Osler’s epigrammatic words, all that one needs to
defeat an epidemic of plague is a stout heart and a long purse. During
the fourteenth century men’s hearts, being very ignorant, were not very
stout, and their purses were atrociously short. It would hardly be too
much to say that during the Middle Ages, and up till about 1700, the
greatest cause of death in cities was the plague. After 1700 people
slowly began to become rich, and to build better houses which would keep
the rat at a distance, so that man conquered the plague without knowing
how he had done it. But the conditions in the Middle Ages must have
been frightful. Listen to the words of Dr. Abram in _English Life and
Manners in the Later Middle Ages_ about the overcrowding, which would put
even Glasgow to shame. He is referring to the Miller of Trumpington in
Chaucer’s _Reve’s Tale_; and the miller cannot have been a very poor man;
he was prosperous and on edge for his dignity. But in his house there
was only one bedroom, where slept he himself, his wife, his baby, his
grown-up daughter, and two undergraduates from Cambridge all at once.
No wonder the rats and fleas were rampant and the plague swept over the
land. And as for the personal cleanliness of these crowded peoples,
there was none.[21] If I wished to use another jargon than medical I
would say it was a minus quantity, but personally I prefer the medical,
because that means something and is exact.
The Black Death revived that strange and mournful sect of the
flagellants, the Brotherhood of the Cross. The spirit of man, which
is capable of such wonders, must needs bow before that shadow of
itself which it has projected into the infinite, and ask pardon of
its anthropomorphic fourteenth-century God for the fancied sins which
had brought these horrors upon the world. The quaint figures of the
flagellants wandered, cross on breast, in doleful procession all over
Europe, chanting dolorous hymns of misery that bore the seeds of
rebellion against that very God whom they affected to supplicate. They
would reach a church, lie down in circles, strip off their clothing and
flog each other with scourges of nails. People crowded to watch the
blood flow, while doubtless the rats and fleas rejoiced if rejoicing be
possible to beings so lowly. In these flagellants probably lay the real
seeds of the Reformation which was to come. They sometimes seized upon
a church and rebelliously conducted Mass without an authorised priest,
although the pope, Clement VI, who was a brave man and faced the plague
like a hero, had given absolution in advance to every patient who should
be taken sick. Man wanted his own priest, and sometimes when he sent in
his last extremity his priest would not come, or was dead of the plague,
so that when the epidemic had abated, and the world was struggling to
recover itself and reap the neglected harvests, men were only too ready
to believe the stories about the priests and their women which were even
then paving the way for the Reformation. The Statute of Labourers, in
England, was the herald of many of our modern political ideas. Those
unhappy men who died, stupefied by plague, were really dying for humanity.
We cannot make an accurate guess even at the actual number of people lost
during the Great Mortality. Hecker, after taking the utmost trouble,
thought that at least a fourth of the people of Europe perished, but in
some places far more; thus in Avignon, of which we have the most exact
information, about nine-tenths. This vast mortality in Avignon was
not caused by de Chauliac and his aloes, any more than it was due to
Pope Clement and his blessing. Probably de Chauliac’s treatment had no
influence one way or the other; neither did the question of pope and
anti-pope nor the great schism. But we know more about what happened at
Avignon than anywhere else, because de Chauliac was a brave doctor who
told the truth.
We do not forget the plague, because it takes very good care of that, and
is still, though we have long purses, the nightmare of health officials
who keep their silent watch over the health of mankind.
But, in dealing with epidemic diseases that have affected civilisation
we must not forget malaria. Like syphilis itself, its social effects
have been prodigious. Malaria was undoubtedly, with typhus and possibly
smallpox, one of the real causes of the fall of the Roman Empire. The
work of Sir Ronald Ross in discovering that it is spread by the anopheles
mosquito, is one of the great epoch-making discoveries of history. There
are few countries in the world which are free from malaria to-day.
Unquestionably it is the cause of the anæmia and poor physique of the
inhabitants of most tropical countries; and Australia is fortunate
in having so few anopheles mosquitoes, though we have so many other
varieties of the abominable little pests. That the numerous returned
soldiers who were infected with malaria in Palestine have comparatively
rarely spread their disease is due to the rarity of the anopheles in
Australia; but doctors are always on the lookout for this particular pest
and let us hope will keep it to its natural habitat in moister countries.
Probably the real reason of the good physique of Australians is that
the British race, for the first time in history, has had the chance of
developing in a warm climate with no malaria. We are making a mistake in
concentrating on the search for the discovery of the will-o’-the-wisp
cause of cancer, which, though a very terrible and horrible disease,
possibly associated into the very mystery of life itself, has probably
less important social effects than either syphilis or malaria. I do not
merely refer to the actual death-rate from these diseases, though it
is probable that syphilis indirectly causes more deaths than cancer,
tuberculosis or overeating. The trouble is that syphilis works in so
mysterious a way; it is sly and subtle in its effects; it lies long
latent and springs up again to the slaughter after the man who is its
victim has long forgotten that he ever had it; and it conceals itself
under innumerable guises. The great problem before the civilised world
to-day is not the cure of cancer; it is the prevention of syphilis.
We know exactly how to prevent syphilis in the male. Metchnikoff and
Calmette have shown us by experimental proof that is irrefragable. That
their method is impossible to apply satisfactorily in the female owing
to anatomical reasons is no reason whatever for so solemnly concealing
its existence from young men, because, if it were generally known to the
male, the females would not be affected and the contagiousness of the
disease would die out in one generation. It is painful to think of the
vast mortality and misery that is caused by this one disease when every
decent doctor knows exactly how to prevent it. With moral education in
self-restraint together with application of Metchnikoff’s discoveries,
which are known to every doctor, there is no reason whatever why syphilis
should not be entirely abolished from the educated world. The other
venereal diseases though serious are of comparatively minor importance;
even gonorrhœa, which sterilises so many women and blinds so many babies,
is less important because it does not affect the brain.
My own opinion is, that while moral education should certainly be
attended to, every boy should have a quiet talk with his doctor before he
goes to boarding-school and still better perhaps before he goes to the
university. It is common experience that more lads become infected while
they are young and ignorant, during the time of their university life,
than at any other time.
We have apparently got over our post-war epidemic of influenza, which
sensationally minded people called the Black Death without knowing what
they said. But has fate altogether done with us? Has the war really left
no other sequel than the influenza? Only this morning I was reading an
article by Mr. Stephen Graham in the _Nineteenth Century and After_, in
which he refers to the frightful post-war corruption of women in London,
as shown by the mad competition among prostitutes for the favours of men.
I can corroborate that article fully, for last year I went travelling
over many parts of Europe, and I was impressed and horrified by exactly
the same thing. A man cannot leave his hotel unaccompanied without being
set upon by these women, who are evidently starving and desperate.
London, Paris, and Rome are all the same; there is nothing to choose
between them.
Nothing seems to be done about this frightful menace. Let us take care
lest a rival to the Black Death may ruin the people of Europe. Immorality
must be paid for somehow; and it does no good for politicians to wrangle
over trifles such as the German restitutions when there is a very much
more dreadful menace knocking at the world’s doors.
During Tudor times, when the world seems to have been almost at its
lowest stage of filth, there were great epidemics of typhus fever in
Europe, especially in Italy; thus reviving memories of Athens and the
Roman Empire, which to the eyes of modern men seem to have been an age
of beauty. Typhus is beyond all other diseases the disease of filth,
war, and misery; and that it spread so vigorously in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries seems to show that things at that time were less
romantic than people try to depict. Probably, if we could get at the real
truth, throughout recorded history, typhus has slain more people than any
other epidemic disease, possibly even more than the plague itself.
There can be little doubt as to the identity of the “Sweating Sickness”
of Tudor times. It seems to have begun with the bloodshed of the Wars of
the Roses, as the army of Henry VII marched in misery, slush, and triumph
after the battle of Bosworth. Very soon after the king’s entry into
London the sweating sickness began to spread among the overcrowded houses
of the capital. It ravaged high and low; at first it spread largely
among young and vigorous men; in one week it took two lord mayors and
six aldermen. The coronation of Henry VII was postponed by reason of the
general distress, and the disease spread without interruption over the
whole country. Nobody seemed to be immune; and when it attacked Oxford
the professors and students fled alike in a common terror, so that the
ancient university was as deserted as it was, for a more worthy reason,
during our late war.
After its first appearance, sudden and savage, the English Sweat for
a time abandoned its victims, and the mediæval world resigned itself
to its normal accompaniments of epidemic typhus, smallpox, and plague.
Soon after the return of Columbus we begin to hear of a new and terrible
disease, syphilis,[22] though there has been great argument as to whether
it may not have been yaws, which is a comparatively mild tropical
long-continued ailment. To my mind the fact is convincing that we find
no real traces of syphilis in the bones from ancient burial-places. If
it had existed in the ancient world we should certainly have found such
evidences.
But the English Sweat was only biding its opportunity; for it returned
mildly in 1506; and again severely in 1517; and again, in its worst
epidemic, in 1528. By this time the world was beginning to think that
we were eternally damned; and when in 1529, it spread to Hamburg, the
good North Germans tried to signify their belief in the usual manner by
confining their patients in the best replica of hell that they could
imagine. Every patient, whatever his sickness, was hidden under a heap
of featherbeds; the stove was driven to its full force; the windows shut
and sealed with rags; and the patient’s relatives heaped themselves upon
him until it sometimes happened that he was actually smothered by their
well-meant efforts.
Besides the sweat, influenza recurred again and again; and slew its
thousands and tens of thousands. It probably so weakened Mary Tudor’s
heart that she died suddenly while hearing Mass.
Now what was this dreadful Sweating Sickness which so paralysed over and
over again the strong arm of the Tudors? Osler describes it confidently
as what we call miliary fever; a disease which now and then breaks out in
little valleys of Italy and Eastern Europe; kills a few harmless people;
and suddenly departs as quickly as it came.
Of course there must always be doubt as to all these mediæval epidemics.
One symptom may impress one doctor as due to one special disease, another
symptom may impress another as the most important. Thus, thinking of the
plague of Athens, what impressed me most was the fact that Thucydides
expressly mentioned the fact that the patient’s fingers and genitals used
sometimes to drop off when he seemed on the high road to recovery. We see
just the same symptom in epidemic typhus to-day.
It is difficult exactly to understand ancient pathological terms; when
an ancient observer says “peticula” or “bubo” or “macula” or uses other
learned terms, we cannot be quite sure that he means to convey exactly
the same idea as the words imply to ourselves. There is always room for
honest difference of opinion. But after carefully reviewing the diseases
of old I fancy most people will agree with Sydney Smith when he wrote:
“The good of olden times let others state.
I think it lucky I was born so late.”
With all the glamour that enthusiasts and romanticists have cast upon the
Middle Ages we are probably very much happier to-day.
F. W. Nietzsche
I had long shared the general belief that this remarkable man died of
general paralysis; but a brief study of the facts as they are set forth
in Frau Foster-Nietzsche’s book, _The Lonely Nietzsche_, will convince
any fair-minded person, as they did me, that such an hypothesis is
untenable. As Nietzsche was undoubtedly one of the makers of the modern
mind it will be worth while to study his health a little, for the more we
study it the more remarkable he becomes.
From youth onwards he was subject to dreadful headaches, often
accompanied by vomiting and intense pain in the eyes. He had temporary
strokes of paralysis, and sometimes lost the power of speech. Probably
the disease from which he suffered was what we now call migraine or “sick
headache.” This is a trouble that is almost confined to persons of active
and intelligent mind, and the cause of it is quite unknown. Nietzsche,
imagining that his headaches had something to do with his digestion, used
to starve himself and lead the most ascetic life; but all to no purpose.
Starvation rather tends to make the patient worse. As a rule this
sickness tends to improve as the patient grows older; but in Nietzsche’s
case advancing age brought no relief. Work was impossible, and he had
to get leave of absence from his position as Professor of Classical
Philology in the University of Basel in 1876. Later on he tried to resume
work, but spent many years in wandering from one health resort to another
in almost constant pain; indeed, he said that for him two hundred days
out of every year were days of pain.
This migraine is a very terrible complaint which affects mostly the elect
of the earth: those whose brains are far above the average. Women are
more often affected by it than men; and in them it appears to become
worse periodically and at the climacteric. Afterwards it generally leaves
them. Clods do not suffer from migraine; the trouble appears to be one of
the prices that very clever men have to pay for their brains. Sufferers
from it are generally very prone to seasickness and to trainsickness, and
once an attack is in full blast no treatment whatever but natural sleep
seems to relieve it. The pain appears to be so terrible that the stomach
is paralysed by the sheer violence of it, and such drugs as aspirin,
phenacetin, and even opium pills are useless because they are at once
vomited. Sometimes symptoms indistinguishable from those of migraine
persist for many years in cases of chronic Bright’s disease; and there is
reason to suspect that it may be accompanied by some sudden constriction
of an artery in the brain. In the worst cases the pain also affects the
eye; and occasionally there is confusion of speech or even positive
aphasia. Possibly even a stroke of paralysis may occur, and there is the
usual fear of insanity that seems to accompany all nervous troubles in
highly neurotic men.
Late in the year 1888 the blow fell; and Nietzsche became definitely
insane. Nietzsche’s sister has left us quite a good account of it which
enables us to guess with a certain amount of probability the actual
nature of his insanity; though we must always remember that he had been
suffering from this terrible agony for years and had already had strokes
that were probably due to a temporary constriction of a cerebral artery.
During the latter end of 1888 Nietzsche was even more than usually
worried; sensitive old women, Wagnerians and all the little people were
writing him abusive letters. Something had to go. Either angry people
must leave him alone or the delicate filament of Nietzsche’s mind must
snap. It had already been strained past endurance by his headaches and
pains in the eye and incessant self-denial. The first symptom seems to
have been that his Italian landlady noticed that Professor Nietzsche had
suddenly taken to imbibing gigantic draughts of water. Suddenly, while he
was walking near his home, he fell down in the street and could not get
up again; that is to say, probably one of his cerebral arteries had gone
into a state of spasm. His landlord found him and helped him home, where
he lay for two days on a sofa in a lethargic, probably semi-conscious,
state; he would not say a word nor answer questions. When he awoke to the
world again he was deranged. He talked loudly to himself and would not
allow people into his room, for he said he was composing an oratorio. He
had always been interested in music. He began to write wild letters to
his friends and relatives, accusing them of all sorts of silly things,
but, be it observed, of nothing indecent. Then he began to accuse himself
of fancied extravagance. When he met Professor Oberbeck he ran towards
him and embraced him, saying, “My dear fellow, I hope you’ve brought me
money; I’ve been living so extravagantly!” Nietzsche extravagant; a man
who was a byword for asceticism and who did not even then realise the
fame and fortune that was beginning to come to him! When they examined
his papers they found 900 francs among them. They took him to Jena, where
he was admitted to an asylum. Unhappily his friends had no specimen of
his handwriting to assist the asylum doctors, and as it was before the
days of the cerebro-spinal Wassermann test, it is not surprising that
the poor doctors, driven to give the thing a name, hinted at general
paralysis, though they seem to have eaten their words later.
The ordinary typical case of general paralysis is much as follows: An
apparently perfectly sane and normal man suddenly goes out and orders
a dozen motor-cars, or twenty-three cameras, or fifty arm-chairs, or
a dozen sets of gymnastic apparatus or something equally silly; then
he goes home to his wife very well pleased with himself and boasts how
he has suddenly become the best cyclist in Europe or the most famous
cricketer. No doubts for him, gladsome fellow! Probably he will also tell
her that he is God. Or perhaps he will indecently assault some little
girl before the very eye of some hitherto friendly policeman. Sometimes
the disease will begin with purely neurasthenic and gloomy symptoms,
so that even a clever doctor may be put off the scent for months or
years. But when he is examined carefully it will generally be found that
his hand is tremulous so that he cannot write intelligibly; his tongue
trembles and perhaps wobbles in and out like a trombone; his speech is
indistinct; the pupils of his eyes may be unequal or not circular. Later
come the fits and increasing dementia that haunt him till his death.
The fact that Nietzsche suffered from doubts about money and showed no
sign of obscenity seems to point to a totally different form of insanity.
Faithful to the principle that no doctor ought to offer a diagnosis
without having seen the patient, I hesitate to say definitely what was
the matter with Nietzsche, especially as Dr. Oscar Levy of Hamburg is
still alive and knows the Nietzsche case intimately; but I should not
wonder if the poor overwrought man was suddenly seized by something akin
to melancholia,[23] that last infirmity of sensitive minds. As clods
do not suffer from migraine they comparatively rarely attain to the
heights—or depths—of melancholia. Under the influence of nursing, rest
and protection from the attacks of the world, he partly recovered, but,
as generally happens with melancholia in middle age, he seems to have
become more emotional and partly demented before the chronic trouble
that may have caused his headaches ultimately killed him. Throughout
his insanity the difficulty in speaking pursued him. “I don’t speak
prettily,” he would pathetically say; and after a tremor that may have
been uræmic he passed away.
No philosopher has been more shockingly misrepresented to the British
public; and now that the bitterness of the war is over it is quite time
that we should make some effort to understand what he intended. The
famous “superman” was not a big bullying German _picklehaube_; it seems
to have represented what a man might become if freed from conventional
repression: if his instincts were perfect in every way. The “will to
power” was not the arrogance that caused the war; as a matter of fact,
no man ever attacked German militarism so fiercely as did Nietzsche.
It really represented what the modern evolutionist means by survival
value in all organisms. Possibly Nietzsche made a mistake in attributing
prudery to the effects of Pauline Christianity; the very essence of
prudery is now thought to lie in unconscious regrets of the old for their
lost sexual power. It seems to be a frustrated wish-fulfilment and is
found among people who worship mumbo-jumbo, as well as among those who
pretend to follow Jesus.
Nietzsche did well to point out, as Huxley pointed out years ago, that
“all men are _not_ born free and equal,” as optimists have averred. A
little healthy pessimism would be very good for the world; it would teach
it to be more careful about paying its debts and would prevent it from
blundering into an ignorant war such as the last one.
But nobody who has ever seen the disgusting spectacle of a man dying of
general paralysis, demented, helpless, lying bestial, an obscene body
that has long survived its soul, deserted by every one but his mother and
his old aunts, could ever look at the portrait of the dying Nietzsche,
gazing so wistfully into the setting sun, and say that Nietzsche died of
general paralysis. The Italians called him Il Santo, the Saint; so far
did he seem to them above all moral frailty.
It was probably owing to his incessant pain that he could never settle
down to systematise his philosophy, but had to write in epigrams.
Arthur Schopenhauer
It is difficult not to smile at this peculiar philosopher, even though
he has obtained nearly as many admirers as Nietzsche himself, and it is
a dangerous thing to offend a Nietzschian. But let us treat him with the
seriousness that he would have insisted upon as his right.
He was born in Dantzig in 1788; he died in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1860, a
philosopher to whom both Germany and England have laid claim, because
his father wished him to be born in England, and took his mother there
just before the expected birthday, but the good lady suddenly took fright
at the English—is it possible that there can have been anybody on earth
who has not liked the English?—and insisted on going back to Germany for
the confinement. I have actually heard that to this very natural whim of
a pregnant woman is to be attributed Arthur’s detestation of women! In
that idea perhaps we may see the natural thought of all Englishmen that
England is the only fit country for a man to be born in. But his father
had his revenge; for he called the little son “Arthur” and the lady,
being a dutiful German wife, had to submit, consoling herself by the
thought that it was a German as well as an English name. But Arthur’s
detestation of women is probably to be attributed to a more physical
cause, as we shall see.
In 1793 Dantzig was annexed by Prussia, so the Schopenhauers moved to
Hamburg. Later on, when the question of Arthur’s education came to be
settled, they decided to send him to both France and England; and in
London the future pessimist was placed at a boarding-school kept by
a clergyman at Wimbledon—poor little boy. For some reason he found
the life, and more particularly the religious training of the good
schoolmaster, intensely irksome; and long afterwards he referred with
disgust to the atmosphere of cant and hypocrisy which permeated England
at that time. _Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis._
In 1807 his father was found dead in the canal at Hamburg, being
suspected to have thrown himself from an upper story; and Arthur, out
of respect for his father’s wishes, definitely took up his duties in an
office, though personally he longed to be an author. His mother, being
now free from the encumbrance of a husband—at least presumably she found
him an encumbrance—took to literature as a minor novelist at Weimar. When
Arthur went to join her, he found that she seemed to have forgotten the
memory of his father; and before very long they quarrelled. At the age
of twenty-one Arthur determined to enter the university of Göttingen as
a medical student; and later on took to philosophy, and gained his Ph.D.
It was probably while he was at the university that he caught syphilis;
and for long underwent the heroic doses of mercury at intervals that
the nineteenth century thought essential for the cure of that disease.
It was not till the time of Fournier and Sir Jonathan Hutchinson that
it was recognised that, while mercury was essential, it was not so
much the amount of mercury as the faithful years of its intermittent
duration that were really necessary; and Schopenhauer duly went through
the proper course of huge doses accompanied by all the wretchedness
of salivation, depression, and internal pain, that used to be thought
necessary for every syphilitic if he would escape the legendary tortures
of that wonderful disease. He frequently complained to his friends of his
treatment; but, in spite of the sufferings that it caused him, he had in
reality little to complain about, for he lived to seventy years of age
and escaped the graver nervous troubles that often accompany untreated
syphilis. Nowadays, of course, we should put him on injections of one of
the arseno-benzol compounds, accompanied probably with rubbings, pills
or injections of mercury, and insist on his taking moderate exercise
in the fresh air and living a sober, righteous and godly life without
excitement or dissipation. While we should be chary of giving a definite
prognosis we should tell him that probably he would see no more of his
disease either in himself or his children if he took care of himself and
faithfully continued his treatment. But Schopenhauer, while escaping the
more serious nervous, bone and skin manifestation of syphilis, evidently
did not escape the psychasthenic troubles, the obsessions and imperative
ideas—the phobias; and syphilophobia had him in its grip till the end of
his life. In this strange condition the patient becomes possessed by an
undue terror of syphilis and its results; and often the fear of syphilis
becomes transferred to the fear of every other infectious disease until
his life becomes a burden to him as he walks perpetually in the presence
of evil spirits which ache to devour him. Probably it was to these
phobias that he owed his unnatural hatred of women, and his hatred
of the lower side of man’s nature. He knew that these “under-sized,
short-legged, long-haired creatures who were not really beautiful,” went
about the world simply for the purpose of spreading syphilis—made a trade
of it, in short; and that he, being a man of strongly sexual impulses,
could not resist their embrace, though he knew it to be death. He had
no wax wherewith he might shut his ears to their siren songs, while his
sturdy rowers propelled his boat beside their lair; he could not leave
his house without knowing that some of them would lure him with their
dreadful charms; how different the miserable creatures were from the
proper form of a human being, which should be, like Arthur Schopenhauer
himself, a rather short, square, blue-eyed, sturdy North German. And so
his miserable life went on, carrying its own torture with it, and daily
his thoughts turned more and more to the utter wretchedness of life, and
the stupidity of those followers of Fichte and Hegel who simply _would_
not see the truth. Probably his pessimism was a direct result of his
syphilophobia.
He kept a diary in accordance with his plan of absolute self-confession;
and there are many thoughts on love and marriage, written during the
years 1819-22 and 1825-31, which his modest English biographer describes
as being quite too frank for publication. These thoughts were written
down in English; probably Schopenhauer doubted whether the Deity
understood that language, just as we nowadays are quite certain that He
does not understand French or Latin. But we can leave them unread, in the
certain surety that they were completely coarse.
He now fell into a quarrel with Hegel, for, as he thought, purposely
setting the world against the mighty Arthur Schopenhauer, of whom
probably Hegel at that time had never heard in his life. He now began
to indulge in that most expensive and unsatisfactory of all amusements,
lawsuits.
In 1821 he found three women gossiping on the landing outside his door;
so naturally he complained to his landlady, who assured him that such
a thing would not happen again. Alas! a few days later there they were
again, still cackling. Schopenhauer warned them to be off, and not to
disturb his lordly self. Two of them, being meek and as he thought
women really should be, departed, but the third was of sterner stuff
and refused. She was a maiden sempstress of fifty who lived in the room
higher up. Schopenhauer incontinently took her by the waist and threw
her downstairs[24] with a coarse description of her character to boot;
and after her flung her sewing and the tools of her trade. Heard a body
ever the like? She took him to court, as no proper woman should do, and
the philosopher defended his own case. An ungallant judge decided in his
favour, and naturally the aggrieved lady appealed. This short-legged,
long-haired female actually appealed against the decision given in favour
of the Right, in favour of the great pessimist philosopher, of the
Neo-Buddhist who just then wanted to get away to Italy for a holiday!
And will it be believed that an unjust, nay, an inhuman, judge would
not postpone the hearing of the appeal, so that once more Schopenhauer
should be able to air his eloquence. In Schopenhauer’s absence in the
sunny south the case was decided against him, and he was sentenced to pay
the long-haired, etc., creature damages. Three years later the spinster
renewed her assaults upon him, having discovered that he had injured her
so severely that she was unable to earn her living; and this time the
court ordered Schopenhauer to pay her a pension of £9 a year for the rest
of her life. This was really getting beyond a joke, and Schopenhauer
appealed; but unsuccessfully. Therefore he was faced with the prospect of
paying the damsel this pension until the Greek calends; for it is well
known that women are very hard to kill, and when they are in receipt of
a pension they will live for ever out of sheer spite. But unfortunately
for her she died of cholera some time afterwards; and Schopenhauer,
receiving notice that he was relieved of pensioning her, showed his joy
by scrawling upon the paper the appropriate—and obscene—words: “Obit
anus—abit onus.” Thus it was proved that from woman came all man’s woes;
but few men have the chance to revenge themselves on the sex by an
epigram. As a rule, woman gets her epigram in first, owing to her agile
tongue.
The last few years of his life were spent at Frankfurt-am-Main, where his
was the most perfect instance of a quiet and philosophic life of which I
have any knowledge, except Spinoza’s. The fires of his youth and middle
age had died down, and the ashes took a long while to become stone-cold.
At half-past seven every morning he rose and took a bath, taking
particular care to wash his eyes very thoroughly.[25] Then, having
ordered his housekeeper strictly to keep to her kitchen, he made himself
coffee, and settled down to work for three or four hours; this being
in his opinion the utmost that the human brain could stand at severe
intellectual labour, in which he was probably right. At noon she came and
timidly knocked at his door, whereupon he left his books and began to
play upon his flute. At 1 p.m. he went to the Englischer Hof for dinner;
and there he ate in silence with a gold coin displayed ostentatiously
beside his plate. After this had gone on for some years he explained to
a friend that he had kept the coin as a wager to himself that he should
present it to the poor-box if anybody should start a discussion about
any single subject under the sun but women, wine, and horses. After
dinner, with the faithful coin still unused in his pocket, he went home,
read light literature for a couple of hours, and at four o’clock went
for a brisk walk into the suburbs. His only companion was a poodle-dog,
and “Schopenhauer with his dog” has become a legend; the local children
used to call it “young Schopenhauer.” After two hours of walking at his
utmost speed, summer or winter, he went to the reading-room, and read
_The Times_. This literature predisposing him for sleep, he went home,
ate a very light supper, got out his long pipe, smoked for an hour, “and
so to bed.”
And this went on for about ten years, until, one day he noticed that
he could not walk quite so fast as usual, and that he was beginning to
get breathless when he was going uphill. By this time he had become
more egotistical than ever; his chief pleasure was in reading laudatory
comments in the newspapers upon Herr Doktor Arthur Schopenhauer
_hochwohlgeboren_ and his wonderful philosophy. Gradually praise and
public fame began to come to him. A steady stream of people came to
see him, among them many women attracted by the thought of the great
woman-hater.[26] As his heart began slowly to fail his doctor visited him
every day; until one day the philosopher was laid up with a slight attack
of pneumonia. Recovering from this, he tried to resume his invariable
routine; but on September 20th he had another bad attack. On the morning
of the 21st he rose as usual. A few minutes after his housekeeper had
left him, his doctor called and found him lying dead on his sofa. The
Goddess Luetina, assuming her least terrible appearance, had carried him
to the Nirvana where no women could trouble him.
It is one thing to write a witty essay against women, just to annoy the
feminists, who, poor ladies, have such quaint ideas about men and are,
in physiological language so excessively ready to react to stimuli.
But Schopenhauer’s case was far otherwise; with him it was a matter of
coarseness in his mind and sheer lust in his body. No wonder he despised
the animal in man. In hating woman he was really hating himself because
he could not resist them.
And it was probably well for him that he had to complain of his gigantic
doses of mercury, for, with his family history of a father who committed
suicide and his own worrying and neurotic mind, he was just the sort
of man to get cerebral syphilis or general paralysis. I have read many
attempts to explain Schopenhauer’s misogyny, but I rather fancy we can
detect the real reason for it in his own syphilophobia. Some critics
have tried to explain it by slandering his mother and sister, on the
assumption that every man can only judge woman by the women he knows; and
that Joanna Schopenhauer and Adele Schopenhauer must therefore have been
of bad character. Possibly! But he was full of phobias and obsessions.
And the best thing we read about him was his genuine love for Beethoven.
Often he would sit and listen to a symphony, dreaming with his eyes shut;
and, the last divine chords sounded, he would leave his seat rudely, lest
some lesser music should blur the impression.
I have often thought of writing a history of the effect of syphilis upon
the history of the world; but the difficulties appal me. We now know that
syphilis is less a disease of skin and bone, than a very grim disease
of the nervous system; and so secretive is it, so it loves to conceal
itself under other names, that even to-day, though every doctor is
acutely on the lookout for it, it would be impossible from the mortality
returns to pick out which man or woman died of syphilis and which of some
apparently quite distinct affection. All that is safe to say is that the
very flower of the human race, the greatest artists, poets, musicians and
philosophers, have all rested under a strong suspicion of having fought
against the spirochæte before it killed them. Too likely such a history
as passes through my mind would degenerate into a mere _chronique
scandaleuse_, and nobody would believe it.
So long as there is this horrible and disgusting prudery about syphilis,
so long will it continue to lay waste the fairest part of the human
race; and few doctors will disagree with Schopenhauer, the poor hopeless
syphilophobe, when he said that war and syphilis are the two greatest
foes to humanity.
The great effect of the philosophy of Schopenhauer has probably been
indirect. When the young undergraduate of Oxford enunciated the belief
that there is nothing new and nothing true, and no matter, he probably
thought that he was quoting the beliefs of the great woman-hater; but it
was reserved for a mind far nobler and more truly poetical to see the
real inner meaning of Schopenhauer’s thoughts. The great discovery of
Schopenhauer was that the evil in man has quite as much to do with his
character as the good. Thomas Hardy, in writing the _Woodlanders_ and
_Tess of the D’Urbervilles_, was really transfiguring Schopenhauer’s
somewhat arid philosophy until it became a beautiful truth. Hardy, in a
sense, was simply a reaction from the foolish optimism of the Victorians;
from the cheerful caricaturing of human nature by Charles Dickens;
from the mock cynicism of Thackeray. That some people still say that
his novels are grey and unduly pessimistic simply means that they have
not yet grasped the full truth about human nature. And surely Hardy’s
“Immanent Will” was truly Schopenhaueresque.
Healthy minds have converted Schopenhauer’s pessimism into the gentle
pessimism of the present day, which may be rather beautiful and poetical
than hideous. That Schopenhauer could be so vulgarly insulting to women
was simply the index of his own diseased mind.
His opinions about women were merely an instance of the utterly degrading
effect of syphilis upon the human brain and soul.
Baruch Spinoza
This, the most wonderful of all philosophers, the most daring, the most
scientific, was born, a little Jew of Portuguese descent, in Amsterdam on
November 28th, 1632, at a time when the European world was riven by the
fiercest sectarian contention; when the hounds of the Spanish Inquisition
were baying hell-fire and destruction to any man who should dare to
differ from the dogmas of the pope as to objective truth. He grew up to
be a typical Oriental—like Jesus Himself—with all the Oriental powers of
mysticism.
Desirous of completing his knowledge of Latin, he took lessons from a
certain doctor of medicine, one Van den Ende, who eked out his income by
taking pupils. Whether the worthy Van den Ende employed his spare time
by inoculating Spinoza with what Hume afterwards called his “hideous
atheistical doctrines” is not apparently known; but it seems certain
that Spinoza thus early came under the influence of that series of ideas
which so many people have complained of as “medical materialism,”
whatever that may mean. Ignorant people have, from the very earliest
times, complained that doctors have no religion; that we only look upon
the materialist side of man; that we are blind to ethical truth and to
the eternal verities of Plato. This, of course, is sheer nonsense. It
is quite true that few, if any, doctors have been burned at the stake
for a point of belief; but that is simply because the medical profession
has always preferred, if burning were in the question, to be burned
for something that could be proved objectively, such as the difference
between scarlet fever and cancer, for instance, and not because of
an opinion that apparently depends upon a state of mind or upon the
education that any given man has received, or upon the surroundings in
which he grew up.
It is said that Van den Ende had a daughter with whom Spinoza fell in
love; but the critics have cast so many doubts upon the pretty romance
that has been woven between them that nowadays it is not generally
believed. Some rash words of Spinoza’s having come to the ears of
the authorities of the synagogue, they summoned him before them to
explain; but, seeing that he had already parted in very truth from the
conventional Hebrew worship, and not wishing to have any public scandal
among the community, the Chief Rabbi offered him a pension of 1,000
florins if he would outwardly conform and appear occasionally in the
synagogue; that is to say, if Spinoza would turn hypocrite. But this
was not at all in accordance with Spinoza’s character, so, since he
refused to be coerced, it became necessary to excommunicate him from the
synagogue after an unavailing attempt had been made by some footpad to
assassinate him. Spinoza drew up a protest against his excommunication,
but did not publish it. He dropped the name of Baruch and took the name
of Benedict; in this possibly there may have been a shimmer of irony at
his excommunication, for both names mean “blessed.” Such irony would
be in accordance with what one might expect from a pupil of Van den
Ende, who in truth seems to have been an ironical man. Later, he fell
into trouble with the French authorities in Paris, and was hanged for a
conspirator. Van den Ende seems to have been a very undoctor-like sort of
doctor, for it is seldom indeed that any of our profession conspire with
anybody; least of all for a religious or political purpose. Marat, of
course, was a brilliant exception, but he came to an untimely end.
Expelled from the Hebrew Church, and with the Inquisition waiting
open-mouthed to burn him if it had the chance, Spinoza spent the rest
of his short life in little towns of Holland, keeping himself alive by
grinding spectacles. The tubercle bacillus was already beginning to eat
away his lungs, and men howled at him as an atheist whenever he went into
the street. But already he had many admirers. A man named De Fries left
him a small fortune which Spinoza refused, saying that the man’s brother
and rightful heir had more need of it than he. The brother accepted it
on the sole condition that Spinoza should take sufficient money to keep
him alive. Even of this, which was offered on the assumption that Spinoza
would need 500 florins, he would only accept 300 florins annually, and
gave the rest to the poor.
During the five years following his excommunication Spinoza worked hard
at his philosophical speculations, and at his lens-grinding, attaining
a great reputation for thoroughness in his work. A little society
of doctors and medical students was formed to study the Cartesian
philosophy, and by sheer learning, daring of speculation, and elevation
of moral character, the little Hebrew became the leader; and thus began
the extraordinary admiration for the philosophy of Spinoza which has
always distinguished biological scientists.
Spinoza attained eminence in many ways before the end came. His landlady,
a Madame van den Spyek, came to him in a religious difficulty. She knew
that Spinoza was good and learned, though people _did_ call him an
atheist, and went saying what a sorry time he would have of it when the
Inquisition got hold of him. Yet she heard so much about the different
sects, which were struggling so fiercely all over Europe. What was she,
a decent and pious woman who worshipped God after the manner of her
fathers, to believe? She would ask the gentle and learned atheist; so she
went diffidently to him and opened her heart to him. Thus spake Spinoza:
“Your religion is a good religion, madame; you have no need to seek after
another, and neither need you doubt of your eternal welfare so long as,
with due pious observances, you continue to live a life of peace and
charity with all.”
Just so might have spoken T. H. Huxley two hundred years later; just so
might have spoken Plato two thousand years earlier; so assuredly would
not have spoken Bishop Tertullian, who said, two hundred years after the
crucifixion of a loving and forgiving Jesus, “Credo quia impossibile,”
and rejoiced to think that those who differed from him in opinions were
safely frizzling in hell.
Spinoza, in his strenuous devotion to scientific truth, knowing nothing
about the tiny rod-shaped bacillus that was growing in his lungs, led a
most unhealthy life. Sometimes for three months together his footsteps
would not cross the lintel; he lived a life of asceticism worthy of
Nietzsche himself, or of a monk of the Thebaid, though for a very
different reason. Eating just enough to keep him alive and no more,
cheerful and merry with his friends, averse from all political and
religious contention, he was proud of only one thing—his self-control.
People said that he used to be vastly amused by setting two spiders to
fight one another. Of course this story really represents Spinoza’s
interest in the weird marriage rights of the Arachnidæ. These are really
extraordinarily interesting, and many a thoughtful man has followed them,
with the aid of an electric torch, in the dusk of the evening when the
sexes conjoin. The female is considerably larger and more powerful than
the male; and she sits quietly waiting with a naughty gleam in her bright
eyes, at the centre of the web. He, insignificant despicable wretch,
dances timidly towards her, two of his paws held out with the caution
of a professional pugilist. They meet, he continuing his excessive
caution. Then a moment of love, an almost imperceptible caress, and he
flees literally for his life with hell at his heels. Should the dutiful
wife catch him, woe worth the day for the husband. The wicked creature,
having sated her sinful lust, devours him, claw, spinnerets and all.
Marriage from the point of view of a spider must be an exciting business.
I do not know what are the odds on the escape of the male; but doubtless
Spinoza worked them out from his own observations. Personally I should
fancy that the male has about an even chance. I have often watched
among the mosquitoes only to find after an hour that the male could not
approach at all, dare he never so wisely. But I have seen horrid orgies
of cannibalism should the husband be a shade too slow. It is feminism _in
excelsis_; she, great, big, hulking brute that she is, cannibalistically
eats her dear little mate with his slender and spiderly grace. And likes
to do it, too. Fabre thought that it was a sort of religious rite among
the Arachnidæ; but let us think better of the race of spiders than that.
I have no doubt whatever that it was while Spinoza was watching the
spiders at their cannibalistic love-making that the amazing spectacle of
the presence of so much cruelty in Nature thrust itself before his mind,
and led him to speculate why he, too, a man so good and virtuous, who
had never harmed a single living creature in his life, should yet be so
ill and coughing and sweating and spitting and falling away to a shadow.
It was then probably that he evolved his stately system of pantheism
that has so impressed the scientific world. Why should the performance
of a purely natural function, one which God has implanted in the spiders
that they might propagate their species, be attended with such savagery?
This story about Spinoza is told by Dr. Colerus, the Lutheran divine
who afterwards became his biographer. Naturally Colerus misunderstood
Spinoza’s scientific enthusiasm, and equally naturally Spinoza, being
accused of atheism, was also accused of cruelty as monstrous as that of
Domitian in his most palmy days. An atheist in the seventeenth century
was known to be capable of all.
There is really little more to tell about the short life of Spinoza.
He was offered a post at the University of Heidelberg as professor of
philosophy, but politely declined on the score of his health. Probably
he did so really because he did not care to set himself in a position
where a turn of the wheel of war might put him at the mercy of the
hounds of the Inquisition, with their burnings and tortures and _auto da
fe’s_ and religious wars. The real call to join his spirit with that of
the Immanent God came when he was forty-two years old in 1674. However
deeply a man may speculate upon “God, Man, and his well-being”—to name
only one of his works—the tubercle bacillus takes no heed of motives,
and will ever be ready to attack him if he denies himself food and fresh
air. Thus it was that his friends of The Hague went quietly to church one
afternoon, doubtless thinking nothing of the troublesome cough from which
he had suffered for so long; and that when they returned they did not
hear his cheerful voice, for he was lying dead at his spectacle grinding.
He had a short life; we can sum it up in a few words: Spinoza was a good
man and he died poor. When they came to look into his effects they found
nothing but a very little money, just enough to satisfy his creditors;
the tools of his trade and a few lenses, which were afterwards sold as
being of great intrinsic value because he had ground them so well.
It was many years before the real worth of the little Hebrew began to
dawn upon the world; and then it was not the doctors nor the scientific
men to whom it appealed but the poets, for like all true poets he was a
mystic. During the eighteenth century, until the French Revolution began
to free men’s minds, he was looked upon as an atheist, and even the
good-natured Hume, possibly ironically, spoke of his hideous atheistical
doctrine. But the poets, in the ecstasy of joy that accompanied the
liberation of mankind, saw far otherwise. Goethe begun to understand
him, and Novalis, the German hymn-writer, spoke famously of him as a
“God-intoxicated man”; a man drunk with the intellectual love of God.
Indeed, the very word “love” is too carnal a term to apply to Spinoza’s
philosophy. It was probably some such feeling that led people to hesitate
deeply before changing the ancient terms “Faith, Hope, and Charity” into
“Faith, Hope, and Love,” although Spinoza in his mysticism, and our
modern mystic, Professor Freud,[27] would have approved it.
After Novalis came Coleridge and Wordsworth; and thenceforward Spinoza’s
fame began rapidly to extend, until it has influenced the whole of
modern thought. Benjamin Jowett, in one of his biological sermons
delivered in Edinburgh, the home of Calvinism, spoke of him as one of the
best men who ever lived, and compared his life to that of John Bunyan,
sorrowfully admitting that the tinker would probably have burnt the
spectacle-grinder if they could have met.
Like Jowett, Dean Inge also has been touched by the wonder of Baruch the
Jew. “Beatitudo non est premium virtutis, sed ipsa virtus,” said Spinoza.
“Heaven,” repeats Dean Inge, “is not the _reward_ of virtue; it is virtue
itself.” And again speaking of Spinoza, he says, “No thoroughgoing
rationalist philosophy can explain the working of a mind in love.”
Accepting as proved that Spinoza’s philosophy has enormously influenced
the modern world, let us consider what it really is. Spinoza’s pantheism
does not consist, as so many amiable spiritualists seem to think, of
a kindly God of mystic light, surrounded by a fluttering crowd of
disembodied spirits with a general atmosphere of worship throughout the
universe. It is a highly mystical and rather stern philosophy which leads
to surprising results and best explains the known facts of life. God is
infinite, with attributes of extension and thought; therefore He must
embrace all good and all evil. As He is infinite He must be coterminous
with the universe in which there can be nothing else but God. In fact,
God is reality. God is the universe. Christ, in Spinoza’s view, is a
mystical conception Who includes all the gentleness, all the wisdom,
all the loving-kindness, of the world. He is the method by which God
communicated His will to man. Putting it briefly, Spinoza was a complete
monist, who made no distinction whatever between spirit and matter.
The further we extend scientific inquiry the more we confirm Spinoza’s
views of the universe. Nebulæ have been discovered whose light takes a
million years to reach the earth; so also did Spinoza account for the
existence of evil in the world, that it could only exist because God
allowed it, and as we cannot understand why God should allow it, the
natural corollary must be that it is a part of Himself. As his fellow-Jew
Heine said: “All our modern philosophers, perhaps unconsciously to
themselves, see through the glasses that Baruch Spinoza ground.”
Spinoza began the revolt against the orthodox conception of a fall
from virtue on the part of man; and he was strongly supported by the
doctrine of evolution which was the greatest contribution of the
nineteenth century to thought. One would have thought that there could
be no single educated man in the world to-day who does not firmly
believe that man has ascended from an ape-like animal, for one has only
to stroll around any decent museum to see the irrefragable proofs in
the skulls and prehistoric remains of man who lived far beyond recorded
time, long before man had learned to speak or to act with his fellow-man
in societies. Yet to this day some obscurantists try to prohibit the
teaching of natural selection; as if it mattered! In spite of them
natural selection will go on triumphant, however the wilfully blind may
rage. But we have passed beyond the stage of natural selection so far as
man is concerned. We now live in the age of intellect, the psychozoic
age. The little naked, helpless creature that had so stern a fight for
existence against the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros has developed a
brain such as never was in the world before, and that brain is beginning
to take a hand in nature’s game. Evolution is proceeding, not by tooth
and claw, not by ravening and bloodshed, but by the discoveries of such
men as Luther Burbank, who has revolutionised horticulture; of Henry
Ford, who has revolutionised transport; and of our own Australian
Farrar, who, by revolutionising wheat-growing, has made it possible for
two blades of wheat to grow where one grew before. In the world of ideas
evolution is proceeding by the thoughts of such men as Darwin, Nietzsche,
Schopenhauer and thousands of young biologists. The brain of man will
work towards perfection possibly by birth control, sterilisation of the
unfit, and beyond all by the elimination of syphilis.
The process of evolution towards righteousness was interrupted for five
sad years by the World War, which was due to a stupid misunderstanding of
that very doctrine of evolution to which Spinoza’s philosophy had pointed
the way. But pantheism must be looked upon, not as a religion, but as a
scientific philosophy. As a religion it does not satisfy the heart of man.
Eternity, according to Spinoza, is not merely a long time: it is really
a mode of thought, and cannot be reduced to measurements of time. That
is strangely like what one hears from countless pulpits to-day, if the
occupants thereof have opened their ears to modern thought. We are
living in eternity to-day, and should act as if our actions were to be
eternal. Still speaking mystically, heaven is to be a good man; hell is
to be a bad man. There can be nothing worse even if we do know what is
happening to us after death. And no better man ever lived upon the earth
than the despised little Jew, Spinoza. Except for fear of being accused
of perpetrating an epigram upon a most solemn subject, I might say that
it is better to be God-intoxicated with Spinoza than priest-intoxicated
with the various unphysiological Christian creeds. T. H. Huxley, who was
accused of all sorts of nonsense, recognised that it was necessary to
create an ideal Jesus for man, because, as the critics have shown, owing
to the intervention of very imperfect men, we do not really know what
were His real teachings; still, we must make an ideal for ourselves;
and for every man his own religion must lie between himself and his
God, or it is no religion. But so long as it leads to tolerance, mercy,
loving-kindness, and duty, he cannot go far wrong. All these things were
taught by Spinoza, and, so far as we know, by Jesus Christ.
But possibly the recent discovery of the unconscious mind may have cast a
doubt even upon the stately pantheism of Spinoza. Possibly what he took
to be the attributes of God are in reality purely human conceptions.
Possibly animals, being so much more under the influence of the
unconscious mind than men are, do not feel as we do, and there may not
be so much cruelty in the world as we suppose. We know that in men the
unconscious mind was the first to be evolved, and certainly it is the
last to die.[28] To that extent at least may we give thanks to God, and
as George Santayana says in his essay on Spinoza to all the little men
who have sneered at Spinoza: “I do not believe you; God is great.”
But if Spinoza was the greatest of philosophers we must also remember
that he was one of the first, if not the very first, of the critics
of the Bible who endeavoured to see that wonderful book through clear
glasses, through spectacles that were properly ground, because he had
ground them himself. He had not the advantage of modern physiology and
psychology, whereby we know that a book, written by men in a state of
semi-savagery, such as Moses and the other supposed authors of the
Pentateuch, must reflect their semi-savage minds and the thickened
cerebral arteries which must have been theirs if they were so old as
tradition states. None the less he came to very much the same conclusions
as have been reached by the most learned and scientific of modern
commentators. As the doctrine of evolution has cast a doubt amounting
to certainty upon the story of creation, so Spinoza, by reason of his
intellectual love of God, has cast a doubt upon the theory of a personal
God, of an all-wise and all-loving Father. The existence of evil in the
world, so ever-present, so clamant, so insistent, by itself disproves the
existence of such a personality. Where was the fatherly God of the deists
when the late war broke out? Perchance he slept or was gone on a journey.
Such an absentee God is no God for modern man. By recognising that evil,
if, and so far as it exists, must be part of God himself, Spinoza fell
in absolutely with modern thought, only he lived three hundred years too
soon. But the discovery, or hypothesis, of the unconscious mind, has had
still more startling effects upon philosophy; for who can now say that
he is not unconsciously listening to the voice of his grandmother when
he is formulating his most earnest conclusions? Those sanguine persons,
mostly politicians who state proudly that they are satisfied to remain
undisturbed with the beliefs that they have learned at their mother’s
knee, are probably unconsciously retailing the beliefs that she in her
turn learned from her mother, and she from hers. Beliefs acquired in
very early youth remain till the end of life as if they were divine;
Gibbon has shown the debt that the early Church owed to women, who were
doubtless the contemporary mothers and grandmothers and had the maternal
mind; dear, amiable, credulous, superstitious creatures they were, though
perhaps a trifle narrow-minded. Undoubtedly these women were not persons
of critical and scientific mind, though to every one of their sons and
grandsons they must have seemed to speak with awful “respectability,”
just as old ladies do to this very day. It has been very well said that
whenever one feels a conviction of absolute certainty approximating to
the divine, one is probably listening to the still small voice of the
“herd” speaking through one’s unconscious memory; and common experience
is that the herd generally speaks most emphatically through the dulcet
tones of that dear old lady, that real transmitter of the herd ideas of
past generations, the grandmother. _She_, not Spinoza, nor Nietzsche,
nor Darwin, nor Schopenhauer, has been the real maker of thought to the
present day.
Let Spinoza and Nietzsche go hang as abominations unto the Lord, atheists
and capable of the utmost wickedness—but _not_ of sectarian wars and
wholesale tortures and burnings. And as for Voltaire—one simply shudders
at his ribaldry and irrepressible mockery of so-called religion which
caused savage persecution in the name of the best and most merciful of
men—Jesus Christ. To that extent at least _l’infame_ has passed away,
largely owing to Voltaire, though personally he could not have been a
very nice man if all tales are true. But certain sects are still willing
to apply another form of torture than thumbscrew, rack and stake to those
who dare to differ in opinion from their grandmothers.
I see that I have omitted the most mystical of Spinoza’s conceptions.
God, besides having the attributes mentioned, has infinite substance.
That was really why they turned him out of the synagogue, and would
have liked to burn him if they could. The idea of giving a body to
God whom St. John defined as an emotion! God is _Love_! Nowadays the
identification of matter with electricity and the modern conception of
the ether is the nearest that science can reach to Spinoza’s dreamings,
but that in no way detracts from his extraordinary insight into the
universe. Even taking Spinozism in its most material aspect, we find
that the more we extend the bounds of the known universe the greater
it becomes, until infinity seems to become rather more than a mere
mathematical conception denoted by a mathematical symbol.
What we gain from Spinoza then—and the best of men, the best of the
clergy, agree—is that eternity is a state of mind; that is to say, it is
a purely human conception. Perhaps if we go further and say that good and
evil, instead of being attributes of the infinite God, are also purely
human conceptions, we shall come still nearer to absolute truth.
But quite clearly the notion of God as an all-wise and all-loving Father
is inconsistent with medical experience. The only decent thing nature has
done for man is to give us our unconscious minds, without which we should
be stunned and maddened by the intolerable thunder of our hearts, the
rushing through our arteries, the incessant dripping of our kidneys and
even more uncomely internal parts. And the way nature has treated woman
is still more shocking. Any earthly father who treated his children as
nature has treated woman would be considered rather as a stepfather.
Nowadays Spinoza’s pantheism suggests to scientific men the mighty
forces that lie locked up within the atom.[29] So far as we know, the
universe, however vast it may be, is, in the last resource, composed of
atoms. But once again, and fifty times over, I would most strenuously say
that pantheism is a philosophy: it is _not_ a religion. It is too stern,
too scientific, too consistent with known facts, ever to attract the
countless bruised hearts, relics of the late war, longing for comfort in
their grief.
Even otherwise intelligent men often ask me whether the _Religio Medici_
of Sir Thomas Browne really represents the religion of modern doctors.
The nearest approach to a talk about religion I have ever heard from
a doctor was once when I heard one doctor say of another that he was
believed to pray for his patients; but in that I seem to scent a savour
of professional jealousy. Otherwise I might almost feel justified in
saying that _Religio Medici_ is generally considered by doctors to be
a farrago of quackery, mysticism, credulity, and astrology, put into
gorgeous and quite unnecessarily obscure language; full of sound and
fury; signifying nothing. Probably Browne was unconsciously remembering
the teachings of some old lady who had impressed the truth upon him in
his early infancy—probably with her slipper.
But I cannot close this essay upon the greatest of all philosophers
better than by repeating the words of Ernest Renan upon him when they
dedicated the great statue at The Hague in 1882: “Woe unto him who in
passing should hurl an insult at this gentle and pensive head. He would
be punished, as all vulgar souls are punished, by his own vulgarity, and
by his incapacity to conceive what is divine. This man from his granite
pedestal will point out to all men the way of blessedness which he had
found; and ages hence the cultivated traveller, passing by this spot,
will say in his heart, ‘The truest vision man ever had of God, came
perhaps, here.’”
Nor can one do better than follow Spinoza so far as earthly intelligence
can lead us. Those people whose hearts the war has left bruised and
broken are fortunate if they can still believe what they learned at
their mother’s knee. She, dear, simple, lovable soul, knew nothing about
the unconscious mind, nor physiology, nor historical criticism, nor
Spinoza and his majestic pantheism. All she knew was that her sons were
unhappy, and she must comfort them as best she could. Men have always
been unhappy, and women have always tried to comfort them according to
their sons’ needs. All good men have the same religion, and they have all
learned it at their mother’s knee.[30]
Of all the philosophers who have tried to solve the awful mystery of the
Infinite God, Baruch Spinoza probably came as near to it as He will ever
allow.
But man must work out his own salvation, and it is not right to blame
the infinite God if anything fails to happen as we desire. “Let us still
cultivate our garden.”
THE END
FOOTNOTES
[1] There are innumerable English synonyms for psychasthenic, mostly
slang. A few are unbalanced, half-crazy, half-cracked, half-dotty,
peculiar, queer, etc. But none of these expresses the exact meaning of
the Greek; indeed, it is impossible absolutely to escape from medical
jargon, except by a phrase.
[2] Probably it was the clinical type with stupor, in which grief and the
sense of sin become so overwhelming that the patient can hardly move.
[3] According to Professor J. J. Welsh many ointments in use at the time
contained mercury.
[4] In cases resembling nymphomania that occur after childbirth we call
it puerperal insanity.
[5] The title was only recent. Formerly he had been called “His Grace.”
[6] See how neurotic he was at the time!
[7] Please note that “sex” does _not_ mean “sensuality.”
[8] These postulates are:
(_a_) Her supposed deformity must have been such as would allow
her terrible father and her anxious mother to accept her as a
daughter, although they both desperately longed for a son and
heir.
(_b_) It must have been such as would have been known to
herself.
(_c_) It could not have interfered with the ordinary
physiological processes of her life.
(_d_) It must have been such as would not interfere with her
living in at least tolerable health to the age of sixty-nine.
[9] If it is a science.
[10] Please do not look upon this as a diagnosis; all we say positively
is that the spirochæte must have affected his mind.
[11] _British Medical Journal_, 1910.
[12] Some say sixteen.
[13] Much the same libels on Catherine’s physical condition were spread
about her as had already been said about Elizabeth.
[14] Macaulay makes such fun of the poor doctors, with many sensational
adjectives, but I shall not reprint it here.
[15] A Freudian would say that Frederick’s dirtiness simply represented
an unconscious revolt against the tyranny of his father.
[16] Probably he was some crazy fellow of the minor clergy. The whole
world seems to have gone mad at this time; it only shows us what the
Crusades really meant to Europe.
[17] _Plague and Pestilence in Art and Literature_, by Raymond Crawfurd.
[18] Friedlander, taking his account of it entirely from Galen,
considered it to have been “petechial typhus,” or smallpox. The sanitary
condition of Rome must have been perfectly frightful, and to read
Friedlander makes one shudder.
[19] Probably Mus Rattus, the black rat, at that time. Mus decumanus, the
brown rat, does not seem to have begun to conquer the black rat till the
eighteenth century.
[20] _Epidemics of the Middle Ages._
[21] Of course this mainly refers to the poor. It is said that the serfs
deforested Europe in order that their betters might have a weekly hot
bath.
[22] The question of the first appearance of syphilis in Europe appears
to have been settled by an article in the _St. Louis Urological and
Cutaneous Review_ for 1924.
[23] Probably, like so many leaders of thought, Nietzsche was of the
manic-depressive temperament, with all the apparently insane egotism of
that temperament.
[24] It reminds one of Beethoven and the rice pudding, and of Henry VIII
and his loving subjects. But, whereas Henry, being a law-abiding, even
though impetuous, sovereign, was able to satisfy his obsessions by due
process of law, Schopenhauer and Beethoven had to take the matter into
their own forthright hands. And yet they say that the world did not
improve in those 300 years.
[25] Probably he was thinking of gonorrhœal ophthalmia, and dreading
lest he catch it by the unconventional way of a bath. No doubt somebody
had warned him against the dangers of the towel. He was full of quaint
ideas about infection. He must have walked in a maze of ghosts due to his
syphilophobia.
[26] I hate to remind the world of the ancient slander—
A woman, a dog, and a crab-apple tree,
The more you thrash ’em the better they be.
[27] Similarly Freud’s use of the term “sex” has been much misunderstood.
It does not mean sensuality. In man it has been so sublimated as to come
nearer to pity and love than to mere brute instinct.
[28] So far as we know we invariably become unconscious before we die; it
seems to be exactly like falling asleep.
[29] Or rather perhaps the infinite forces of the universe _as grasped by
the mind of man_.
[30] Of course because religion and science have nothing whatever to do
with each other. Religion is an emotion comparable to pity and love—that
is, to sex. Science is the observation of phenomena, which religion
sometimes unwisely tries to solve by transcendental explanations.
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