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Southern Horrors Northern Visions of the Mediterranean
World 1st Edition Gilbert Bonifas Digital Instant
Download
Author(s): Gilbert Bonifas; Martine Monacelli
ISBN(s): 9781443864398, 1443864390
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 1.46 MB
Year: 2013
Language: english
Southern Horrors
 Southern Horrors:
Northern Visions of the Mediterranean World

Edited by

Gilbert Bonifas and Martine Monacelli

 Southern Horrors: Northern Visions of the Mediterranean World,
Edited by Gilbert Bonifas and Martine Monacelli

This book first published 2013

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2013 by Gilbert Bonifas, Martine Monacelli and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-5030-6, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5030-8

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix

List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... xi

Introduction .............................................................................................. xiii

Gilbert Bonifas & Martine Monacelli

Prologue....................................................................................................... 1
Roderick Cavaliero

Chapter One ............................................................................................... 13

The Horrors of Catholicism in Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk,
William Henry Ireland’s The Abbess and Edward Montague’s
The Demon of Sicily
Céline Rodenas

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 27

Rome as the Enemy: Anti-Clerical Themes in the Work of the
Surrealists
Malcolm Gee

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 39

From the Italian Novella to Shakespeare and Jonson: The Representation
of Italian Horrors on the Elizabethan Stage
Christophe Camard

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 49

“Inconsistent with the Ordinary English Phlegmatic Nature”?
Violent Crime and Attitudes to Mediterranean Defendants
in the English Courts, c. 1830-1900
Neil Davie

Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 65

“The Most Degraded of Them All”: The Horrors of the Mediterranean
Race
Paul Barlow
vi Table of Contents

Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 79

“Grave of Graves”: The Responses of Grand Tourists to the Roman
Campagna
Lisa Beaven

Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 95
The Streets of Lisbon: Late Eighteenth-Century German Science between
the Scylla of People and the Charybdis of Nature
Fernando Clara

Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 105

The Powers of Southern Horrors in Dickens’s Pictures from Italy
Nathalie Vanfasse

Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 117

Unbelievable Horrors on the Riviera: Perceptions of Nice in the Writings
of Nineteenth-Century British Visitors and Winter Residents
Judit Kiraly

Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 129

When Gladstone and W. T. Stead Campaigned against the “Bulgarian
Horrors”
Jean-Claude Sergeant

Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 141

“So Apathetic and Semi-Barbarous a Nation”: The Ottoman Empire
and Questions of Art and Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Francesca Vanke

Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 155

“Southern Horrors” in a Turcophile’s Writings: The Case of Marmaduke
Pickthall
Alice Salvatore

Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 173

Years of Horror: The American Experience of the Famine
of World War I in Lebanon and Western Syria
A. Tylor Brand
 Southern Horrors: Northern Visions of the Mediterranean World vii

Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 187

Configuring Italian Horrors: From Context to Intertext in Two Novels
by Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance and The Italian
Françoise Lapraz-Severino

Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 205

Horror and Melancholia in Romantic Greece: British Reviews
of John Keats’s Lamia and John Polidori’s The Vampyre
Susan Oliver

About the Contributors ............................................................................ 217

Index of Persons ...................................................................................... 223

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis and the

Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities for hosting the symposium at
the origin of this book.
We are most grateful to the University Library’s director, Catherine
Hadjopoulou, for providing a warm and efficient hospitality, to Jean-Marc
Giaume, head of the municipal local heritage department, for his
encouragement and material assistance, and to the LIRCES research centre
(and its director Marc Marti) for its help with the organizational and
editing costs of this book, to which Dominique Vignau, who assembled
the final drafts of all the essays, has lent his precious computer know-how.
We wish to thank also most warmly our Newcastle colleague Malcolm
Gee for supporting the theme of the symposium with great enthusiasm, for
his attentive reading of the final typescript and his valuable suggestions for
improvement.
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 2-1. Léo Taxil, Le Fils du jésuite (Paris: c.1883). Frontispiece ......... 28

Fig. 2-2. Max Ernst, La femme 100 têtes (Paris: Éditions du Carrefour,
1929). Plate 143, “Rome.” Roland Penrose Archive, The Scottish
National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. © ADAGP, Paris and
DACS, London 2013 ........................................................................... 32

Fig. 2-3. Max Ernst, Le Rêve d’une jeune fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel
(Paris: Éditions du Carrefour, 1930). Chapter 2, “La Chevelure,” Plate
2: “Baldness awaits you, my child. At the first shot your hair will fly
away with your teeth and your nails. That serves only my very
invisible vestments.” Roland Penrose Archive, The Scottish National
Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS,
London 2013 ........................................................................................ 33

Fig. 5-1. Ford Madox Brown, The Romans Building a Fort at Mancenion,
A.D. 60 (1879-1880). Mural, Gambier-Perry technique, 145x320 cm.
Great Chamber, Manchester Town Hall .............................................. 65

Fig. 6-1. Diagram illustrating routes taken by Grand Tourists through the
Roman Campagna to reach Rome ........................................................ 80

Fig. 6-2. Alms plaque outside the Church of Santa Maria dell’Orazione e
Morte. Photo David R. Marshall .......................................................... 92

Fig. 6-3. Display of bones in the crypt of the Church of Santa Maria
dell’Orazione e Morte. Photo David R. Marshall ................................ 93
 INTRODUCTION

Dr Johnson chose to peregrinate to the wilderness of the Hebrides, but he

knew that it was not the right direction: “The grand object of travelling is
to see the shores of the Mediterranean,” he informed Boswell. He also
knew where savagery and civilization lay: “All our religion, almost all our
law, almost all our arts, almost all that sets us above the savages, has come
to us from the shores of the Mediterranean.”1 From the Grand Tour
onwards, such views were shared by a considerable number of northern
visitors to the South í until it was left to E. M. Forster’s Fielding, in A
Passage to India, to sum up: “The Mediterranean is the human norm.
When men leave that exquisite lake . . . they approach the monstrous and
the extraordinary.”2
These northern perceptions of the beauty, vitality, spirituality and
sensuality of Mediterranean societies í this “passion for the
Mediterranean”3 í have become the subject of numerous scholarly studies,
drawing attention away from the indisputable fact – much more prevalent
than is usually imagined – that the fascination of northern Europeans (and,
a little later Americans as well) for this “exquisite lake” was rarely so
strong that, coming from a very different political, social, cultural and
religious context, they did not also discover features of the “monstrous”
and “extraordinary” on its shores.
It was to throw more light on the much less studied, more obscure and
repellent sides of Mediterranean history and civilization that a conference
was held at the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis in April 2012. It
brought together participants from around the Mediterranean from
Portugal to Lebanon, but also from the north of Europe and Australia, all
of them desirous to decipher the ethos and unravel the nexus of mentalités
that determined the northern perception (or imagination) of a dark
Mediterranean world and inspired its representation. Covering a large time
span from the late sixteenth century to the years between the two world
wars and several facets of a topic that is not easily circumscribed, the

1
James Boswell, Life of Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 742.
2
E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), 275.
3
See John Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion. Victorians and Edwardians in the
South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
xiv Introduction

essays collected in this book (all but two of them substantially revised
versions of the papers read at the conference) draw on a variety of
sources – the visual arts, literature, monographs, travel narratives, diaries,
journalism, even trial proceedings – to explore the reverse side of the coin,
where cruelty, decrepitude, ignorance and obscurantism dominate.
When anatomising the vision of a “horrendous South” in the eyes of
Northern Europeans and (Anglo-Saxon) Americans, what is immediately
striking is the permanence of religious antipathies, inveterate and
pervasive. If, as one of the contributors to the conference pointed out,4 the
South became the locus of horror and cruelty after there developed a
North-South divide between Protestant and Catholic Europe, there is no
surprise in the recurrent association, since the days of the Reformation,
between Catholicism, inhumanity, perversion, corruption, and
backwardness in northern visions of the Mediterranean world. No wonder,
therefore, that this is an ever-present and often a dominant theme in nearly
all the contributions on the Christian South. In a variety of forms they all
probe into the anti-Catholic discourse of the last three centuries which
again and again echoes Macaulay’s view that “among the contrivances
which have been devised for deceiving and oppressing mankind,
[Catholicism] occupies the highest place.”5
In the eighteenth century the Gothic Novel, as Céline Rodenas shows
in “The Horrors of Catholicism in Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk,
William Henry Ireland’s The Abbess, and Edward Montague’s The
Demon of Sicily,” was still replete with the wrongdoings of priests and
nuns and, indeed, often built around them. The three novels use
stereotypes and prejudices borrowed from earlier centuries not merely for
Grand Guignolesque effect but more politically, in a period of
revolutionary wars, to contribute to the struggle of the (Protestant) nation
against the enemy without by fuelling a deep-seated anti-Catholicism. In
the Victorian age, although the question of Catholicism in England was for
a while at the centre of a low-key Kulturkampf,6 the Irish became
practically the sole target of anti-Catholic rhetoric (and sometimes blows)
in the British Isles before it began to peter out. However hostility to
Catholicism could still be frenziedly militant, at least among certain

4
Luc Racaut in “The Perceptions of the Catholic South in Reformation England
and during the Wars of Religion.” This paper is not part of the present collection.
5
Cited in Raymond Tumbleson, Catholicism in the English Protestant
Imagination: Nationalism, Religion and Literature, 1660-1745 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 17.
6
See for instance Victor Sage, Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 26-29.
 Southern Horrors: Northern Visions of the Mediterranean World xv

intellectuals and artists, in other parts of Northern Europe, including Paris

where the German-born Max Ernst, the central figure in Malcolm Gee’s
“Rome as the Enemy – Anti-Clerical Themes in the Work of the
Surrealists,” spent most of his creative life. The times and the context had
changed, of course, but in the end the anti-clericalism of the Surrealists
appears as no more than another version of anti-popery in its crudest form,
a rehash not only of the scurrilous writings of certain late-nineteenth
century scandal-mongering free thinkers, but of the more sensationalist
and lurid passages of the English Gothic novel which they knew well and
regarded as an “important precedent.”7 There was, though, a fundamental
difference in that the Surrealists’ Satan was a heroic figure, a liberator,
whereas the whole tradition of British anti-Catholicism is encapsulated in
the title of a 1642 anti-papist story: Trust a Papist, and Trust the Devil.
Still, Gee’s Macaulayesque conclusion seems apt in all cases: Southern
horrors, from a northern perspective, are first and foremost to be
understood “as the debilitating, criminal enslavement of humanity by the
forces and ideas embodied in and sustained by the Vatican.”
In Britain, relentless anti-Catholic propaganda, which scarcely abated
until the late eighteenth century, was the pivot on which early British
nationalism was constructed, bringing forth an image of the national self
according to which the good Briton was not only a true Christian, but also
a good Protestant. Protestantism could only remain at the centre of English
identity by building up the antagonistic image, indeed the stereotype, of
the other as “bloody Papist”8 through a flow of books, pamphlets,
sermons, drawings dwelling on Catholic atrocities, past and present, in
Europe.9 No doubt, hatred of the Pope, the denunciation of Catholic priests
as the corrupt, implacable ministers of Antichrist, could easily translate
into the belief that the whole culture of the countries lying south of the
religious divide in Europe was tainted by the evil spirit of Roman
Catholicism, that the national character was a reflection of a wicked

7
Ibid., xi-xii.
8
Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, c.1714-1780. A
Political and Social Study (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 6.
9
See Carol Wiener, “The Beleaguered Isle. A Study of Elizabethan and Early
Jacobean Anti-Catholicism,” Past and Present, n°51 (May 1971): 27-62. To some
extent this went on until the mid-Victorian age when Cardinal Newman
complained, in the words of Sage (Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition, 28),
that “horror is endemic to English Protestantism”: “We must have a cornucopia of
mummery, blasphemy, and licentiousness – of knives and ropes, and faggots and
fetters, and pulleys, and racks – if the Protestant Tradition is to be kept alive in the
hearts of the population.”
xvi Introduction

Church, and that all those who dwelt in the South were therefore potential
villains. The Elizabethans’ taste for sensationalism and exoticism as well
as the intellectual impact of Machiavelli only made things worse as
Christophe Camard points out in “From the Italian Novella to
Shakespeare and Jonson: the Representation of Italian Horrors on the
Elizabethan Stage” which explores the English image of Italy as “a
country of hot-blooded murderers and avengers.” Camard shows that
Shakespeare sometimes outdid his sources in the depiction of “classic
Italian villains” such as Iago, but adds that more often, even when he kept
close to traditional stories of revenge and hate (as in Romeo and Juliet), he
succeeded in giving the emotions he portrayed an almost timeless quality,
thus transcending the Italian context in which his contemporaries and
immediate successors readily located their own southern horrors. Even in
the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, therefore, animosity towards
Roman Catholicism was not an all-pervading sentiment, but it was
undoubtedly an ever-present current of thought and prejudice and it may
well be that Camard’s rather un-Elizabethan Shakespeare was at times the
real odd man out, and the Jacobean Webster, who only plays a supporting
role in Camard’s chapter, a better illustration of the mood of the period,10
thus bearing out Alison Shell’s view that the horrors one witnesses in
Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies “are conceived in specifically anti-
Catholic terms.”11
In the main, the stiletto-wielding Catholic vanished with the Gothic
novel, but the general suspicion that Mediterranean types were stabbing
blackguards, especially if they happened to roam the streets of England,
continued well into the mid-Victorian Age and was never totally
relinquished as Neil Davie shows in “‘Inconsistent with the Ordinary
English Phlegmatic Nature’? Violent Crime and Attitudes to
Mediterranean Defendants in the English Courts, c. 1830-1900.” It may
be, as Roderick Cavaliero writes, that “the Gothic novelists had left a dark
image of Italy that was never to be completely dispelled,” and that the
belief in “the general delinquency of Italian Roman Catholics”12 died hard.
However it seems that in the Victorian age British public opinion
distrusted foreigners more by reason of their geographical origins than

10
One of his scoundrels in The Duchess of Malfi is of course a cardinal.
11
Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination,
1558-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). See her first chapter:
“The livid flash: decadence, anti-Catholic revenge tragedy and the dehistoricised
critic.”
12
Roderick Cavaliero, Italia Romantica. English Romantics and Italian Freedom
(London: Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2007), 9 & 53.
 Southern Horrors: Northern Visions of the Mediterranean World xvii

because of their religion – rightly so as the court cases examined by Davie

concerned Orthodox Greeks and Muslim Turks as well as Spaniards or
Italians. More than religion, the growing civilization gap between an
increasingly prosperous North and a backward South was becoming the
determining judgmental factor. This fracture had been widely publicised
by many British travellers’ tales13 since the eighteenth century. These
clearly located Mediterranean countries in a pre-modern, somewhat
barbarous age in which primitive reactions were the norm, and lawlessness
always likely to break loose.14 In the South, it was believed, one could be
knifed for a peccadillo, and no wonder since modern Italians and Greeks
in particular were often regarded as thoroughly devoid of the stern fibre of
the Ancients, of whom they were no more than the degenerate
descendants, devious, excitable, highly-strung.15 In short they were a
European version of those “sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child” that
Kipling, a few years later, entrusted to the care of the (preferably
Northern) white man. That may be the reason why, as Davie suggests,
English judges, after a period of greater severity that may have been the
consequence of the rising number of immigrants evoking an image of
barbarians at the gates, tended to be more lenient, when handing out
sentences for violent crime, with foreign offenders (most of them
Mediterranean) than with the local ruffians. For after all they could not
help it; if not in their nature, it was at least in their culture.
Whatever the attitude of the judges, it reflected a hierarchical vision of
European peoples that placed Northerners (especially Anglo-Saxons) at
the top, and Mediterraneans at the bottom – a fairly common view at the
time, particularly in the last decades of the century í but whether Davie’s
judges and journalists thought the criminal culture of the Mediterranean
defendants at the Old Bailey was determined by their race rather than their
national history, is impossible to say. Even a civilizational appraisal is
never entirely free from racial assumptions, but what racial theorization
there was then in England was much more preoccupied with distinguishing
between Saxons and Celts, white and dark races, than with the finer

13
As Kathleen Turner puts it in British Travel Writers in Europe, 1750-1800
(London: Ashgate, 2001), 10: “Travel writing – the most consistently popular
genre of the eighteenth century í . . . played a central role in developing
formulations of national identity.”
14
See, for example, Cavaliero’s chapter 9 in Italia Romantica.
15
See John Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion, 228-240. Pemble, of course, is
aware that this is only one side of the coin, and that many northern travellers
looked on Mediterranean people with admiring eyes, as if they were the Noble
Savages of the nineteenth century (133-149).
xviii Introduction

nuances separating northern and southern Europeans. In “‘The Most

Degraded of Them All’: The Horrors of the Mediterranean Race,” Paul
Barlow does not fail to analyse Thomas Huxley’s lucubrations about the
pale Xanthochroi and the darker Melanochroi, but it seems that Huxley
never found in his own ideas any serious reason to discriminate between
the races of Europe,16 and “full-blown Nordicists” in Barlow’s essay are
German, French, American, rarely English. Even they, in fact, when
confining their racial assessments to Europe, were never quite certain, at
least till the Nazis came, as Barlow points out, whether Mediterraneans
were “degraded” because they were Catholic and sensuous, or whether
they had become Catholic and sensuous because they were racially
corrupted. As Robert Young underlines, “race in the nineteenth century
was always about more than just biology.” Mostly, it was “a bricolage of
cultural, religious and historical values” whose main conclusion was that
civilization was “the peculiar achievement of certain races.”17
Consciously or not, this seems to have been the ideological baggage
(as early as the Grand Tour) of the northern travellers whose writings are
examined in this book. It no doubt accounts for their frequent irritation,
indignation, repulsion, their many phobias, their hardly hidden sense of
superiority. True, these reports from the South seldom result in the clear
inference that Southerners have no capacity for civilization, but nor do
they claim that the dead weight of superstition, ignorance, intolerance once
removed they will build progressive societies. Between the lines, the
suspicion that the Mediterranean people are irredeemably degraded and
that this will always determine their culture remains ever perceptible.18
In the eighteenth century Grand Tourists, despite their eagerness to
reach Rome, carefully planned their crossing of the Roman Campagna so
as to avoid the worst effects of l’aria cattiva. Well-versed in classical lore,
they were shocked to see what the Campagna had become19 – a deserted

16
See the conclusion of his “The Forefathers and Forerunners of the English
People” published in the Pall Mall Gazette of January 10, 1870, and reprinted in
Michael Biddiss, ed., Images of Race (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1979),
157-169.
17
Robert J. C. Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2008), 48-49.
18
On this point see the perceptive remarks of Kate Flint in her introduction to
Dickens’s Pictures from Italy (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1998), xxvii-
xxviii.
19
As Jeremy Black remarks in Italy and the Grand Tour (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2003), 153: By then “the habit of judging Italy by past
descriptions was well established.”
 Southern Horrors: Northern Visions of the Mediterranean World xix

malarial wasteland, bare of trees and fatal to men. As Lisa Beaven shows
in “‘Grave of Graves’: The Responses of Grand Tourists to the Roman
Campagna” there were many ecological as well as economic reasons for
this landscape of death, but as good Protestants it did not take English
Grand Tourists long to find a sufficient explanation in papal
misgovernment, unlike some of their Catholic counterparts.20 But it was
the towns that appalled northern visitors most, and eventually their squalid
streets, decrepit buildings and bad smells, their swarms of beggars and
droves of parasitical priests and monks outweighed the beauties of the
landscape, the picturesqueness of ancient ruins, the Mediterranean light,
and made even enlightened observers like the German scientist Wilhelm
Gottlieb Tilesius von Tilenau in Fernando Clara’s “The Streets of
Lisbon. Late Eighteenth-Century German Science between the Scylla of
People and the Charybdis of Nature,” or Charles Dickens in Nathalie
Vanfasse’s “The Powers of Southern Horrors in Dickens’s Pictures
from Italy” revert to “common British clichés about France and Italy”
(Vanfasse), and more generally to Northern, Protestant stereotypes about
“a decayed and decadent Southern Europe” (Clara), the victim both of an
obscurantist Church and government, and of an all too often ne’er-do-well
populace.
If we are to believe Smollett and other late-eighteenth century
travellers, Nice did not differ much from the Lisbon of Tilesius except by
its size. It was just another southern town of “stinking streets”21 whose
boorish inhabitants were none too clean and spent their days either doing
their utmost to fleece foreign residents or going to church to perform their
devotions.22 In “Unbelievable Horrors on the Riviera. Perceptions of

20
Beaven mentions Charles-Marie de la Condamine. A counterexample would be
Jean-Baptiste Mercier du Patty, but he was a Freemason [see Jean-Christian Tautil,
“L’Etat romain en 1785 vu par du Patty dans ses Lettres sur l’Italie,” in L’Italie
vue par les étrangers, Bulletin de la Faculté des Lettres de Mulhouse, n°19 (1995):
48-51].
21
To use Southey’s description of those of Lisbon in his Journals of a Residence
in Portugal, 1800-1801 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 5. But of those of Nice
itself the Swiss mathematician and philosopher Johann Georg Sulzer had similarly
written a few years earlier: “L’intérieur de la ville est assez dépourvu d’agrémens.
Les rues sont étroites . . . elles sont fort sales en temps de pluie ; on y sent une très
mauvaise odeur” [Journal d’un voyage fait en 1775 et 1776 dans les pays
méridionaux de l’Europe, trans. from the German (Rotterdam: L. Bennet, 1789),
161].
22
See Daniel Feliciangeli, “Le développement de Nice au cours de la seconde
moitié du XVIIIe siècle: les Anglais à Nice,” in Aspects de Nice du XVIIIe au XXe
xx Introduction

Nice in the Writings of Nineteenth-Century British Visitors and Winter

Residents,” Judit Kiraly shows that until Nice became French, and often
until much later, things did not improve much, at least in the eyes of the
British. They carried on grumbling about its dirt, its offensive smells, its
“professional” beggars, its health hazards, its overcharging cabmen, and
from the days of Smollett to those of Kiraly’s petitioners of 1898 some of
them at least seem to have been convinced that should they appropriate
Nice, they could turn it into a much better place – an aspiration probably
not uncommon then among Northern tourists in the Mediterranean,23 and
the sign that this “new race of pilgrims from the remote, and once savage,
countries of the North,” to whom Gibbon refers in the concluding lines of
his book,24 now felt that it was their turn to decide who was civilized and
where.
Despite all the “horrors” they expected to encounter there, Northern
travellers had little hesitation in moving south because doing so, as Black
notes, they also moved back in time.25 Of the South they were ready to
embrace its scenery, its arts and antiquities, much less its present and its
inhabitants26 observed and judged through the prism of what Marjorie
Morgan calls “the secular dimension of Protestantism.”27 Roman-Catholic
areas, that is to say, were perceived as less prosperous, less clean, less
dynamic, less well-ordered, less educated, less free than Protestant
countries. As Morgan rightly points out, studying the Northern discourse
on the South one is tempted to define it as colonial,28 in other words to
regard anti-Catholicism as the western counterpart of Edward Said’s
orientalism.

siècles, Annales de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Nice, n°19

(1973): 45-67.
23
Black cites a similar case about Sicily (Italy and the Grand Tour, 159-160).
24
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, abridged and
edited by Dero A. Saunders (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983), 690.
25
Black, Italy and the Grand Tour, 157.
26
See C. P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1957), 25.
27
Marjorie Morgan, National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 91. In the nineteenth century the religious
detestation of Catholicism, born of the menace it was believed to be, had gone and
in Victorian travel narratives Catholicism “had come to be regarded simply as
strange and repulsive. Its unattractive aspects were still viewed as detrimental, but
only to Catholics themselves (ibid., 94).
28
Ibid., 93: “Depictions of Catholics include such words as ‘dark,’ ‘dirty,’
‘ignorant’ and ‘strange’ which cast Catholic ‘others’ in a subordinate position
relative to Protestant gazers.” Morgan, however, resists the temptation.
 Southern Horrors: Northern Visions of the Mediterranean World xxi

Orientalism, in fact, is not absent from this book and the next three
chapters deal with issues which are at the heart of Said’s work.
Geographically we seem to be passing from a North/South to a West/East
divide, but it must not be forgotten that until the early twentieth century
south-east Europe was part of the Orient as a consequence of Ottoman
presence in the Balkans, and that in the modern period political changes in
this extended Near East were largely conditioned by the views, ambitions
and fears of northern and central European powers. In Orientalism, Said
briefly mentions Henri Pirenne’s famous thesis according to which Arab
penetration into the Mediterranean created a civilizational fracture
between Christianity and Islam and put an end to what was left of
Mediterranean unity, forcing the centre of gravity of European politics and
culture northwards.29 Said argues that this shift resulted in the Orient and
Islam being “always represented as outsiders having a special role to play
inside Europe,”30 that, we gather, of the dangerous alien and general
bogeyman.31 A part that the Ottomans in particular played to horrendous
perfection on many occasions, but never as much, at least in the eyes of
public opinion, as when independence movements broke out in the
Balkans. The climax came with the outburst of moral outrage which shook
England in 1876 after the press had eagerly revealed the atrocities
perpetrated by the Turks in Bulgaria. What erupted then were those
feelings of revulsion at “the willingness of zealous Turks to persecute and
murder Christians”32 that had already got hold of British people in the days
of the Greek War of Independence, if not before.33

29
Henri Pirenne, Mahomet et Charlemagne (Paris: Le Club du meilleur livre,
1961), 115-116.
30
Edward Said, Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the Orient (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1995), 71.
31
Ibid., 59-60.
32
G. D. Clayton, Britain and the Eastern Question. Missolonghi to Gallipoli
(London: University of London Press, 1971), 93.
33
Many Victorian travellers, on the other hand, were often favourably impressed
by the Turks they encountered. Very dignified, they “appeared to belong to an
earlier, nobler civilization” [Rheinhold Schiffer, Oriental Panorama. British
Travellers in Nineteenth Century Turkey (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 243]. But as
Roderick Cavaliero shows in his Ottomania. The Romantics and the Myth of the
Islamic Orient (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010) writers and travellers could then be
both fascinated by a mythical Orient of the one-thousand-and-one-night type and
be repelled by Oriental despotism. Northerners of the Enlightenment Age were
usually more severe. In Germany one could see “recurrent recourse to stereotypical
scenes of Oriental decadence, violence, despotism, and sexuality in eighteenth-
century representation of the Turks” [Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism
xxii Introduction

The Bulgarian atrocities are today, for the layman, indissolubly linked
with Gladstone’s pamphlet, The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of
the East, and his speeches against what Carlyle then called “the
unspeakable Turk.”34 What Jean-Claude Sergeant’s “When Gladstone
and W. T. Stead Campaigned against the ‘Bulgarian Horrors’”
establishes, however, is that in reality Gladstone, initially dragging his
feet, was more follower than leader and that it was not his “pamphlets (sic)
and oratory on the issue [that] gradually built up moral indignation in a
previously indifferent electorate.”35 The protests in Britain had started
before Gladstone, realizing that the masses were morally aroused, decided
that the best he could do was to place himself at their head. This
chronology enables Sergeant to do justice to Stead as one of the true
fomenters of the anti-Turk agitation in the country, and to shed more light
on an episode of his life as journalist and reformer that is too often put in
the shade by his later campaign against child prostitution.
From the ferocity of Turkish repression to the conclusion that all
aspects of Ottoman culture were equally barbarous, it was just a short step
that some did not hesitate to take in the intellectual climate of late-
Victorian England which took for proven the existence of a descending
order of races, the degradation increasing the further south one went. This
was the kind of “positional superiority” that a century later allowed
Edward Said to postulate that “every European, in what he could say about
the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally
ethnocentric.”36 In his quest for damning evidence, Said cites Alexander
Kinglake who believed that “the Arabian Nights is too lively and inventive
a work to have been created by a ‘mere Oriental, who, for creative
purposes, is a thing dead and dry’.”37 It is a similar story that Francesca
Vanke tells in “‘So Apathetic and Semi-Barbarous a Nation.’ The
Ottoman Empire and Questions of Art and Race in Nineteenth-Century
Britain.” Although her conclusions are more cautious than those often

in the Age of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 15]. Ann
Thompson makes the same point about English Orientalists. See “L’Empire
ottoman, symbole du despotism oriental?” in Rêver d’Orient, connaître l’Orient:
visions de l’Orient dans l’art et la littérature britanniques, ed. Isabelle Gadoin et
Marie-Elise Palmier-Chatelain (Lyon: ENS éditions, 2008), 177.
34
In a public letter on the Balkan crisis published in The Times on November 28,
1876.
35
The quotation is by a no-ordinary layman, Bamber Gascoigne, in his
Encyclopedia of Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 258.
36
Said, Orientalism, 7, 204.
37
Ibid., 193.
 Southern Horrors: Northern Visions of the Mediterranean World xxiii

found in critiques of Orientalism, she suspects that if Iznik ceramics, one

of the most popular and admired types of pottery known in western Europe
in the late Victorian age, remained wrongly attributed to other peoples
than the Turks, it probably was because throughout the second half of the
nineteenth century the Turks were consistently ranked the lowest of all
Eastern races. As contemporary Northern opinion connected race and
artistic ability, it followed that Turks could by no means be artists.
This was not the opinion of Marmaduke Pickthall, the subject of Alice
Salvatore’s chapter: “‘Southern Horrors’ in a Turcophile’s Writings:
The Case of Marmaduke Pickthall.” In an article cited by Salvatore he
emphasized that the Turks “are mentally capable of attaining to the highest
civilisation.” Pickthall was certainly one of those “colourful eccentrics,
those adventurous souls who are prepared to abandon insularity and throw
themselves into a love of Turks, or of Balkan or Arab peoples.”38 Now
critics prefer to classify him more grandly as a “counter-Orientalist,” one
of a small band of people who, in the Victorian age and early twentieth
century, developed “pro-Islamic, partly anti-imperialist positions.”39 One
wonders what Said would have made of Marmaduke Pickthall who gets
only a passing mention as a “minor writer” of “exotic fiction”40 in his
book. Undeniably he was one of those “western voices” which tried “to
challenge the negative and chauvinistic pronouncements of those who
denigrated Islam,”41 and which proclaimed that all the ills of the Balkans
and the Near East were to be put down to the Powers’ malign interference
and to the fractiousness of the Eastern Christians. For Pickthall “the House
of War,”42 the Dar al-Harb, was not the non-Islamic world, those
countries which Muslims have war with, but on the contrary the Muslim
world itself, the target of rapacious Western nations. However, as
Salvatore’s study of Pickthall’s literary and political discourse shows, he
could not thoroughly rid himself of his culture of origin and the
assumptions that went with it. Instances of common orientalist stereotypes
can easily be garnered in his early novels. His articles are solidly pro-Turk
and form a long carefully articulated case for the preservation of the
Ottoman Empire, but the arguments are those a British imperialist might
have used: the country is a savage land, its peoples mostly benighted or
barbaric. Only the Turks, as a “white” race, can control, organize,

38
Clayton, Britain and the Eastern Question, 125.
39
Geoffrey Nash, From Empire to Orient. Travellers to the Middle East, 1830-
1926 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 4. Nash has a chapter on Pickthall.
40
Said, Orientalism, 252.
41
Nash, From Empire to Orient, 7.
42
The title of one of his novels published in 1916.
xxiv Introduction

improve. Pickthall may have felt that he must use arguments his English
readers could understand. However the fact that he could denounce
Southern horrors having their true origin in the North and defend the
Turkish and Islamic cause only by first devalorizing the Orient and
speaking the language of cultural and racial essentialism is symptomatic of
a mindset still “more than half-wedded to an imperial world view” as
Geoffrey Nash puts it.43
During the First World War, while Pickthall was doing his iconoclastic
best to exculpate the Turks from the Armenian atrocities, other horrors
were unfolding in another corner of the Ottoman Empire. Tylor Brand’s
“Years of Horror: The American Experience of the Famine of World
War I in Lebanon and Western Syria,” is a meticulous and perceptive
exploration of the deeds, thoughts and feelings of a little group of men and
women almost cut off from the outside world, looked upon with distrust
by the Turkish authorities, dismayed by the harrowing scenes they had to
witness day in day out, tormented by their inability to have the slightest
impact on the catastrophe, finally sinking into fatalism, but all the time
never ceasing to do their utmost to relieve the sufferings of a starving
population. Reading about them, one is tempted to copy Curzon and
conclude that in Lebanon those Americans had found “the call to duty, and
the means of service to mankind.”
Although cultural echoes of the preceding chapters are clearly audible
in the last two essays in this collection, these approach Southern horrors
principally with some of the tools of literary criticism. In “Configuring
Italian Horrors. From Context to Intertext in Two Novels by Ann
Radcliffe: A Sicilian Romance and The Italian,” Françoise Lapraz-
Severino analyses the characteristic features of Radcliffe’s narrative
approach to a land she had never visited and to a culture not her own
which she believed conditioned by a mostly repellent religion. Focusing
first on her handling of the largely imagined foreign context, Lapraz
assesses the evolution in Radcliffe’s treatment of the Mediterranean
“horrendous” dimension between A Sicilian Romance (1790) and The
Italian (1797). The latter closely followed the publication of Lewis’s The
Monk, and was the last of Radcliffe’s published works. Lapraz sifts
through The Italian to detect the more or less disguised impact of The
Monk on it and adds her voice to the long-running debate on whether
Lewis’s novel was instrumental in Radcliffe’s decision to (almost) stop
writing.

43
Nash, From Empire to Orient, 203.
 Southern Horrors: Northern Visions of the Mediterranean World xxv

In “Horror and Melancholia in Romantic Greece: British Reviews of

John Keats’s Lamia and John Polidori’s The Vampyre,” Susan Oliver
brings us back to the Balkans, but neither in Keats nor in Polidori have
horrors anything to do with Ottoman occupation. Oliver explores early-
nineteenth century counter-Hellenistic perspectives of Greece as a site of
fearfulness, a land infected with decay. However, as Oliver points out,
Keats and Polidori did not only draw on ancient Greek mythology; they
also retrieved horror and monstrosity from the farther eastern locations
that they inhabited in much of romantic literature and brought tales of
demonic transformation that had become popular through the Arabian
Nights back onto southern European soil. In the second half of her paper
Oliver dissects the reception of Lamia and The Vampyre by the review
press, somewhat startled but also sufficiently impressed to immediately
use this Mediterranean vampire, not over-sympathetically though, as a
metaphor to define the condition of the romantic poet, the workings of his
imagination and the treatment of his subjects. It emerges that British
reviewers, even at the height of romanticism, preferred their Greece
classical and radiant rather than Gothicized and sombre, and were more
than a little tinged with almost Victorian prudishness. Some of them,
however, had enough sensibility (and commercial sense) to respond to
(and titillate their readers with) the sensationalism, sensuality, not to say
eroticism, in which the two texts were bathed.
The last words of the inordinately long subtitle44 of Francis Sacheverell
Darwin’s travelogue, Travels in Spain and the East, 1808-1810, guarantee
that the reader will find “murder and adventure on every page.” They
could pass for an apt summary of what will be read in the following
chapters. This book, no doubt, is far from exhausting the subject of
Southern horrors in the modern age. However it compiles enough of them
to take the reader on an eventful and virtual Grand Tour à la Sacheverell
Darwin both of the Mediterranean world and of the Northern mind. So
that, while journeying through this “litany of horrors” which Roderick
Cavaliero relentlessly covers in his prologue , he will also wonder about
the values, assurances, phobias of the men and women who, in the
societies of the North, thought, wrote or fantasized about them.

Gilbert Bonifas
Martine Monacelli

44
“An intrepid and eventful Grand Tour of the Mediterranean. Constant danger
due to war, piracy, plague make this a thrilling read, with murder and adventure on
every page.”
 PROLOGUE

TRAVELS THROUGH DARKNESS

RODERICK CAVALIERO

This conference has taken as its starting date the capture of Constantinople
by the Osmanli Turks; it ends with the Spanish Civil War, thus embracing
what one might call the centuries of Graeco-Roman spiritual, if not
physical, domination of the Mediterranean world. Other countries, other
histories, other cultures that barely know Greece or Rome, have now taken
over, leaving to tourists the former world empire, which according to
Gibbon took over a thousand years to decline and fall from apogee to
zonk. To many, it is divine retribution for hubris in thinking the lessons of
Greece and Rome had a perennial validity, to others it is the beginning of a
new era free from both. If we are to ponder on the horrors of the south, as
opposed to the equal horrors of north, west and east, we may ask how
much this is a protest at the undue respect medieval, Renaissance and early
modern man paid to Greece and Rome, or whether it is owing to some
deeper resentment.
The intellectual thraldom of the Graeco-Roman past did not, as we
know, vanish with the fall of Constantinople. Even as Constantinople was
falling, Flavio Biondo began his massive Roma Triumphans, a collection
of documents to show that Rome had been the high point of civilisation for
the contemporary Christian world.1 But with the conquest of half the
Mediterranean littoral by invasive Islam, and the emergence of nation
states sustained by ocean trade, the former Graeco-Roman Empire became
contested land between nations that might have a Mediterranean coast line,
but whose strength and wealth came from the north and across the
Atlantic. The Mediterranean no longer represented the centre of European
interest; for all that it had a claim to be the heartland of our civilisation.
Indeed there was resentment that the modern Grecians and Romans were,

1
F. Muecke, “‘Ante oculos ponere’: Vision and Imagination in Flavio Biondo’s
Roma Triumphans,” Papers of the British School at Rome 79 (2011): 276.
2 Prologue

in the eyes of enlightened Europe, scarcely worthy of their classical past

and scarcely likely to become worthy of it. Though their subjection to
foreign domination was regretted, they had, by not being ancient Greeks or
Romans, brought it on themselves.
Even after Constantinople had fallen it was impossible to shrug off a
cultural legacy that had dominated Europe for a millennium, but it became
easier to look upon it with more dubious eyes. Even though the newly
discovered Arcadias í and the respected authorities, Strabo, Diodorus
Siculus, Ptolemy and Pliny, had promised that they must exist somewhere
in the world í turned out to be anything but Earthly Paradises (their more
civilised inhabitants practising human sacrifice, and their more primitive
anthropophagy), they prompted students of that ancient world to ask
whether it had been such a cradle of civilisation after all. Had its heirs
much to boast of? In what way, one of the most enlightened students of
that ancient world, Michel de Montaigne, asked, could the native
American cannibals be called barbaric? They only roasted and ate dead
men; unlike civilised men, who “mangle by tortures and torments a body
full of lively sense, to roast him in peeces, to make dogges and swine to
gnawe and teare him in mammockes.” This, Montaigne observed, was the
practice in his life-time in France under pretence of piety and religion.2
Were piety and religion, then, the civilisation that Greece and Rome
had given the world? Or were they only a pretence of it? As new texts and
translations of hitherto hidden texts from the ancient world rolled off the
presses, people began to wonder just how civilised that world had been.
The sins of the great Empire in particular, and the sheer awfulness of
Roman political, social and dynastic life, were frankly too appalling to
deserve any seal of divine approval, which it was deemed to have received
when the son of God consented to be born into it. When Marlowe’s
Machiavel asked “what right had Caesar to the empery” in the world, it
was a rhetorical question implying, to his Elizabethan audience, not
much.3 No region of the world had a monopoly of horrors, but those that
took place in the former lands of the Empire seemed worse than
elsewhere, as things should, with all its privileges of climate, wealth,
intelligence, and even divine sanction, have been better.
Partly it was a form of schadenfreude, satisfaction that the proud
empire should be humbled by the disasters now revealed as existing in its
empery, but it was also a realisation that, as Yeats was to say, if the

2
Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes, trans. John Florio (Menston, England: The
Scolar Press, 1969), 1: 104.
3
Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta (1633 [written 1589?]), prologue to act
1, line 19. Modern editions usually have empire instead of empery.
 Travels through Darkness 3

“centre cannot hold, / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” 4 First the
centre had not held against the entry into the inner sea of a power almost
as fearsome as had been the Mongols of earlier centuries. The Ottoman
Empire may have become the Byzantine Roman Empire islamised, run,
financed and built by foreigners, but these foreigners were converted and
brainwashed for a Holy War that pressed relentlessly on into Europe and
the central Mediterranean. Ruthless military success created the legend,
still held as late as 1817, that the Turks were a “saintly murderous brood /
To carnage and the Koran given / Who think through unbelievers’ blood /
Lies their directest path to heaven.”5 In the spirit of the Crusades, which
had held Islam off for several centuries, the Christian maritime powers
adopted their own form of jehad, a perpetual war that gave no quarter. The
atrocities of this war, on both sides, were horrendous, waged as it was by
followers of religions whose founders had both preached peace. When the
Ottomans in 1565 finally reduced the fortress that controlled the two
harbours in Malta, they floated the bodies of crucified knights across to the
besieged on the other side of the bay, who immediately decapitated their
prisoners of war and catapulted their heads back to the besieging army in
return. No doubt the victims of both sides were immediately admitted to
their respective heavens.
From the last Ottoman push into the central Mediterranean, until the
end of the Napoleonic Wars, this conflict was waged with only occasional
truces negotiated by maritime states on both sides of the Mediterranean.
Prisoners in both camps slaved for their captors until death, unless they
were ransomed or apostatized. An unofficial Geneva Convention was
gradually evolved by threats of reciprocal treatment, but most of those
captives, too poor to raise ransoms, died in bondage and in misery. The
effects of this perpetual war on trade and development were disastrous,
principally for the Barbary Regencies. There the easy gains from religious
piracy and the flow of ransom money rendered their rulers too idle to
improve their fiefdoms, while the northern Mediterranean littoral lived in
daily fear of Ottoman attack. Though France early established trading
relations with the Ottomans and by extension the Regencies, Spain, the
Italian states and many of the maritime Christian ports never put an end to
this war of attrition. France could easily have done so, but she tolerated its
continuation, largely because the frigates and galleys, particularly of
Malta, provided an excellent naval college for French naval officers, three

4
W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming,” lines 3-4, in Collected Poems (London:
Macmillan, 1950), 211.
5
Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance, in The Poetical Works of
Thomas Moore (London: John Dicks, 1870), 29.
4 Prologue

Knights of Malta rising to the rank of admiral in the French navy.6 It took
two northern powers, the United States and Britain, to put an end to it by
clobbering Tripoli (1805) and Algiers (1817) into submission.
The centre did not hold elsewhere, too, for the horrors of the religious
and territorial war in the eastern Mediterranean as Ottoman expansion was
resisted were compounded by an equally ferocious war between Christians
in the west. For the Catholic South, heresy was and had always been an
error to be expunged for the safety of souls. For the Protestant North, the
greater errors of Rome and of the papacy had to be shown as not only
false, but also wicked, and the reliance on the popular cult of saints,
shrines, relics, pardons and pilgrimages as all part of a religion of trickery.
Good Protestants were regaled with woodcuts that showed, at the
triumphant feet of Truth, a dragon of lies, wearing the triple tiara of the
Pope, surrounded by demons masquerading as angels. The behaviour of
the late fifteenth-century Popes did little to modify this picture. The
falseness of the papacy, for centuries hiding under a fraudulent Donatio
from the Emperor Constantine, the damaging schism that divided Europe
into warring parties and the eventual recovery of wealth and power for
“the popedom,” as Elizabeth Barrett Browning called it,7 by engaging in
the geo-politics of power in Renaissance Italy, all constituted an
abdication from divinely appointed authority. When a Pope’s son showed
the face of a ruthless and unprincipled tyrant, it endorsed the belief that
southern Catholicism was to be confronted as malevolent.
Cesare Borgia is recognised by common legend as about the wickedest
man of his time, a legend largely promoted by Niccolò Machiavelli who
dedicated The Prince to him. The Prince may now be recognised as a
pragmatic, morally neutral blue-print for the absolute ruler, whom
Machiavelli sought to represent as the only logically effective one for the
general good of the state, but it endowed its author with the attributes of
that quintessence of evil, Old Nick himself. Marlowe’s Machiavel counted
“religion but a childish toy.”8 Protestants may have elevated conscience
above precept, but the clash of precept and conscience, the battleground of
the Counter-Reformation, suggested that neither would always triumph.
What was conscience? “If ‘twere a kibe / ‘Twould put me to my slipper,”
says Antonio in The Tempest: “I feel not / This deity in my bosom.

6
The three admirals were François l’Ollivier de Tronjoly, François Joseph Paul,
comte de Grasse and Pierre André de Suffren.
7
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Casa Guidi Windows, part 1, st. 15, line 900, in The
Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Marjorie Stone and Beverly Taylor, vol.
2 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010).
8
Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, prologue to act 1, line 14.
 Travels through Darkness 5

Twenty consciences / That stand ‘twixt me and Milan, candied be they, /

And melt, ere they molest.”9 The banishment of conscience in pursuit of
political and personal gain became a theme particularly attractive to
northern playwrights, who saw no offending deity but an often impersonal
fate, ready to strike the offenders down.
Though all Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists by no means sought to
locate this amorality solely in a corrupted Mediterranean world, the most
sensational did. Iago is no more a painted devil than Richard III (his
nihilistic credo in the opera, the summation of his wickedness, is not by
Shakespeare but Arrigo Boito, Verdi’s librettist). Angelo (Measure for
Measure) is not a more corrupted villain than King Claudius (Hamlet). But
Webster wove his picture of hell into a Mediterranean tapestry of corrupt
prelates, lustful ambition, deceit, murder and slaughter of mega-
Shakespearian proportions. The southern, Machiavellian villain had
appeared in full fig. Clothed originally in antinomian terms, which freed
the Elect, whatever their actions, from sin and judgment, new villains now
materialized, found particularly in the Society of Jesus, whose casuistry
supported the belief that you did not have to be among the predestined
Elect to justify actions of which Machiavelli would have approved. You
were covered by divine ordinance. Mediterranean man was expected to
show himself false, treacherous, and venal.
It followed, then, that assassins, political intriguers, mountebanks,
sinister monks, malignant nuns, and sexual adventurers became the
standard litany among those who wrote about the Mediterranean,
particularly Italian, South. By the eighteenth century wickedness had
become the chief spice of the Gothic “shudder” novels of a whole coterie
of novelists, Ann Radcliffe, Mathew (Monk) Lewis, Charles Maturin, even
the two Shelleys (Mary, the author at age 18 of perhaps the best,
Frankenstein, of them and Percy Bysshe, aged 17, of perhaps, in Zastrozzi,
the worst) as well as many Germans infected by the worst excesses of
Romanticism and whose novels, in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey,
formed the reading of Isabella Thorpe in Bath. By the time they were
written, horror had slipped from being theological and antinomian to a
mixture of necrophilia and the supernatural. The Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794), the supreme “shudder novel,” was in fact actually free of both but,
though intended to be entertainment, it still agitated a well-brought up girl
like Isabella Thorpe’s friend, Catherine Morland. The southern horrors
that stalked the pages of Ann Radcliffe’s novels were no more alarming

9
William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987),
2.1.274-278.
6 Prologue

than those found in the Scottish novels of Sir Walter Scott, but careful
parents did not want their sons to marry daughters who had “gone the
round of Italy” and been exposed to its “loose morals and the Catholic
religion.”10 In 1821, as one guide-book writer complained:

Was a scene of lewdness and debauchery to be introduced into Romance?

It is placed in an Italian convent. Is an assassin wanted to terrify a London
mob on the stage? An Italian appears, a monk or friar, with a dose of
poison in one hand and a dagger in the other.11

Even when this image had been reduced to absurdity, and villains had
learned charm, if they were Mediterranean people they were sinister and
Machiavellian, with a hint of political skulduggery, like Count Fosco in
The Woman in White, and with more than a hint of devilishness like
Rigaud in Dickens’s Little Dorrit.
The very dedication to classical lore, which sent young men out on the
Grand Tour, was largely responsible for the fact that the “shudder novel”
was so often set in Mediterranean lands. Under the influence of the
Romantic predilection for the strange, unexpected, irrational and
mysterious, the Mediterranean world assumed, for many, the aspect of a
divided Arcadia, beautiful by day, sinister by night. Daylight was time for
music and dancing, and admiring the beauties of the human form and of
nature. Night was the envelope for murder, seduction, forbidden rituals
and wickedness generally. A mock Mediterranean night covered the
escapades of pornographers, antiquarians and young bloods. Francis
Dashwood and his Hellfire Club in Medmenham Abbey, on the Thames,
celebrated “Southern Horrors” in fake grottoes, with obscene parodies of
Catholic ritual. When nineteenth-century composers grew tired of the
measured monotonies of Metastasio, they snatched at poets who produced
sagas of wickedness from the cornucopia of southern horrors: jealous
husband and Machiavellian villain in Verdi’s Otello, inflamed psychopath
in Verdi’s Il Trovatore, tortured lovers in Bellini’s I Capuleti e I
Montecchi, jealous lovers in Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, wronged
women in Bellini’s Beatrice di Tenda, macabre apparitions in Rossini’s
Armida, Gothic daggers in Mercadante’s Il Bravo, and doomed Byronic
heroes in Verdi’s Il Corsaro and I Due Foscari. It is fair to say that a
similarly representative list could be produced from French and German

10
C. P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics. The Italianate Fashion in Early
Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 24.
11
J. C. Eustace, A Classical Tour through Italy, an. MDCCCII (London: J.
Mawman, 1821), 4: 293-294.
 Travels through Darkness 7

composers of the time, but the Italian opera world hugged its own
melodramatic history to its bosom, and its northern audiences felt that their
prejudices were reinforced.
To the fevered imaginations of Romance, malaria stalked by night,
plots were hatched, the devil was worshipped, witches flew, succubi
visited, bandits roamed, danger, physical, spiritual and moral was abroad.
None of these phenomena were peculiar to the Mediterranean world. But
there, the spirits of the dead seemed nearer at night, for the Mediterranean
world was so thickly peopled, so resonant with history, so crowded with
souls requiring the propitiation of candle smoke and the chants of the Dies
Irae, so littered with gibbets still bearing corpses and stakes with impaled
bodies, as to be one huge necropolis. This was a fine quarry for dabblers in
diableries and the sinister. Exhalations were lethal: Henry James’s Daisy
Miller went off to the Colosseum in 1879 alone with a man by night and
the “little American flirt” was dead within hours of a malignant fever. Evil
influences travelled far. In 1895 that ecclesiastical antiquarian, John
Meade Falkner, wrote an account (The Lost Stradivarius) of devilish
music and diabolic possession imported to Oxford from Italy. The
assassin’s dagger was omnipresent: when Lucy Honeychurch (in Room
with a View, 1908) witnessed a stabbing in Florence she was shocked but
not surprised. The myth of the horrendous South died hard.
Along with this image of dangerous wickedness, one omnipresent, if
rare, danger haunted the folk tales of the North until well into the
eighteenth century, and that was the abduction of a Christian woman into a
Muslim harem. This was believed to be the fate of any woman taken by
Barbary or Moroccan pirates, or by Ottoman soldiery penetrating deep into
Europe. Few records of violation exist í hardly surprising as few women
who were likely to be captured into a harem were able to report their
experiences, but one, Elizabeth Marsh, did in The Female Captive (1769).
She described how she was taken by Moroccan pirates, well treated, never
sexually abused, and claimed to have refused an offer of marriage from a
Moroccan prince. But from the hidden fear of what went on in the harem
grew the stories of sexual exploitation and despotism, of “the sack” in
which unsatisfactory wives and concubines were drowned, and of instant
and horrible death for anyone who interfered with disposal arrangements.
Most of these stories were inventions. Byron may never, as he claimed,
have rescued a girl at pistol point from being consigned to the Bosphorus
in a sack, and it is true that Thackeray, visiting Constantinople in the
1840s, kept an expectant eye on the waters of the Straits, but saw no signs
of any body disposal. A hundred years earlier, Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu met a Spanish lady in Istanbul who, on being captured (and
8 Prologue

raped), negotiated a very generous marriage contract with her captor who
“never took any other wife.”12 But this seemed like bucking the trend.
James Morier, who knew his Islam, had a prominent Muslim say:
“Women are . . . counted as nothing. We put no trust in them. We look
upon them as entirely devoted to the use of man and you might as well
expect the tiger to do homage to the lamb, as to see a Persian submit to be
ruled by a woman.”13 Most Europeans believed him.
The myth of the harem derived from, or even may have anticipated, the
myth of the Muslim despot, both imperial and domestic. Byron, who
mocked the institution of the haremlik in Don Juan, saw little to
distinguish the horrors of Muslim treatment of women from those of the
Christian moral centaurdom of marriage. Criticism of the behaviour of a
neighbouring theocracy, however, had become a useful way to find fault
with the institutions of the home countries in the North and West, without
incurring censorship. Thomas Moore’s lyric fantasy into the Orient, Lalla
Rookh, hid a disguised comment on British rule in Ireland. Treatment of
crime or dissent in the West or North was, for most of history, no better
than in the East or South. The practice of Ottoman impalement was no
worse than the European practise of breaking on the wheel, but
“enlightened” Europeans were shamed more quickly into finding less
brutal means to bolster authority than the Ottomans. The treatment of
rebellious Greece became a spectacular own goal for the Ottomans.
Atrocity for atrocity, the Greek rebels matched their Ottoman overlords,
but though the Greeks were about as close to ancient Greeks as Italians
were to ancient Romans, the brutal suppression by an insensate tyranny of
the fabled creators of civic freedoms and rule by democracy, was greeted
as a moral outrage affecting the whole civilised world. Delacroix’s
Massacre at Chios (1824) became a blast against oppression as powerful
as later was to be Picasso’s Guernica. There was not much fellowship
between Greek Orthodox Christians and northern Protestants but at least
the Greeks were not Catholics and devotees of a backward papacy.
Ottoman repression, as the incarnation of horror, had by this time all
the marks of a regime in retreat. Alexander Kinglake in the 1840s, about to
leave Hungarian for Ottoman domains, was given a lugubrious farewell by
the Austrian frontier guard as if he was about to enter a country of
desolation. The officer asked “once more if we had done with the civilised
world, (and) held forth his hand.” The two frontiers were a gunshot apart

12
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters (London: David Campbell, 1992), 170
[letter to the Countess of ***, May 1718].
13
James Morier, The Adventures of Hajji Baba in England (London: John Murray,
1828), 1: 29-30.
 Travels through Darkness 9

but it was as though there were fifty broad provinces that lay in the gulf
between them.14 The enduring impression of the Europeans who were the
first to invade a land wholly for centuries under Muslim rule, Egypt, was
one of desolation, silence, “no fandangos, siguriyas, gitanas or
sevillanas,”15 no passion to know, to learn, to excavate, to speculate. The
mighty Roman cities of North Africa and the Levant had been reduced to
ruins inhabited by nomads, the huge Pharaonic monuments lay under a
sepulture of sand. To a generation for whom classical learning was still the
principal attribute of civilised man, this was Atrocity itself. It was also an
incentive to get in and stir it all up, create centres of research and learning,
flood the Ottoman world with scholars, scientists, archaeologists, and
rescue the area from barbarism by intellectual colonisation. By the time
Pierre Loti wrote Les Désenchantées in 1911, he was delighted to claim
that the young women of Constantinople, despite their protected lives,
were now reading Dante, Byron and Shakespeare, and were enthusiastic
for the music of Gluck, César Franck and Wagner.
Just as visitors to the Ottoman world in the nineteenth century were
sometimes surprised to discover a society gracefully self-contained,
depicted by artists like the Maltese Amadeo Preziosi (1816-82), visitors to
the European South were equally surprised and shocked to find that the
lands of the Grand Tour were little better than Kinglake’s impressions of
the Ottoman world. The gulf between East and West that he had observed
was not apparent to Charles Dickens, the apostle of middle-class comforts,
who approached Rome in 1844 across what he thought was a virtual
desert. Twenty years earlier Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, well used to
the poverty of Ireland, was appalled by the capital of an Italian provincial
despotism, populated by “monks, friars, soldiers, chained galley-slaves
and begging nuns.”16 How different was this from the Ottoman lands?
Mediterranean roads were infested by bandits, more often urban poor
organised into farmer’s protection rackets than highwaymen, though some
were criminal psychopaths. Fra Diavolo (Michele Pezza, 1760-1806),
eponymous hero/villain of Auber’s opera, was in fact so called by his
school teacher for his childish pranks, not a devil at all, but part resistance
fighter against the French and only part brigand. As a brigand he was
hanged by the French occupiers of Naples in the uniform of a Neapolitan
general, which rank he had once held as a partisan. In the world of rural

14
Alexander Kinglake, Eothen (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press,
1970), 6.
15
Words used by Sacheverell Sitwell, Arabesques and Honeycombs (London:
Robert Hale, 1957), 194.
16
Lady Sydney Morgan, Italy (London: H. Colburn, 1821), 1: 293.
10 Prologue

poverty there were many Fra Diavolos of various degrees of ferocity and
pathos. They were more of a nuisance than a menace to travellers. The fact
that many were fervent if superstitious members of the Roman Catholic
Church, and some were even in minor orders, added to the general feeling
among Northern visitors that little could be done with them or their
Church. The transmogrification of rural protection to urban protection in
the shape of the Mafia and Camorra, assisted by modern drug trafficking,
while almost economically inevitable in a land ravaged by centuries of
conflict, exploitation and neglect by foreigners (including North Italians),
has just added to the Mediterranean litany of horrors.17
In the twentieth century another country ravaged by backwardness,
caudillismo, religious torpor, and a people set claustrophobically in their
past, gave a new horror to the Mediterranean. The Spanish Civil War
between 1936 and 1939 was to make notorious what W. H. Auden called
“the necessary murder.” He originally coined the phrase in his poem Spain
1937. “On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot / Africa,
soldered so crudely to inventive Europe,” today would be “the inevitable
increase in the chances of death; / The conscious acceptance of guilt in the
necessary murder.” Auden later replaced the phrase “necessary murder” by
“the fact of murder” but murder it was. Hitler and Stalin might have called
it “liquidation” or “elimination” but these were only justificatory
euphemisms.18 The “necessary murder” of comrade by comrade, of
political ally by political ally, not out of enmity, ambition, lust or revenge
but on the say-so of political expediency was a new phenomenon. In this
dress rehearsal for the brutal war that followed, atrocities that had not been
seen since the Spanish war against Napoleonic France were to become all
too common. They were multiplied elsewhere in the years that followed.
For “yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek; / The fall of the
curtain upon the death of a hero;” today the necessary murder, the
invention of a neologism of war.19
That brings me back to where I started. Yesterday, piety, religion and
civilisation had been what marked the Mediterranean from the age of
Pericles to that of Giambattista Vico, Antonio Gramsci and Benedetto

17
By a curious irony, banditry was largely eliminated in Neapolitan lands by
General Sir Richard Church, a free-lance British officer who later (1827) became
generalissimo of the insurgent Greek forces in their war of independence.
18
W. H. Auden, “Spain 1937,” st. 17 & 21, in The English Auden: Poems, Essays
and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and
Faber, 1977), 212. The initial version can be found in Bernard Crick, George
Orwell: A Life (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980), 207.
19
Ibid., st. 6, 211.
 Travels through Darkness 11

Croce. Today, the shadows have closed on that Graeco-Romano, Judaeo-

Christian world, beset by its own failings and inconsistencies. New
ideologies prevail. That world is undergoing the onslaught of hedonism,
tourism, relativism, scientism, fatalism, fundamentalism and all the other
-isms in the twenty-first century Syllabus of Errors. In this ollapodrida
(the Spanish dish that strikes a Northerner as a culinary horror, but which
is to natives the supreme national dish), in this ollapodrida of papers we
have a pot pourri – forgive my descent into Mediterraneanism – of horrors.
All I can say is what the surtitles in the Hong Kong opera house rendered
as the brindisi in Verdi’s La Traviata: Enjoy.
 CHAPTER ONE

THE HORRORS OF CATHOLICISM

IN MATTHEW GREGORY LEWIS’S THE MONK,
WILLIAM HENRY IRELAND’S THE ABBESS
AND EDWARD MONTAGUE’S
THE DEMON OF SICILY

CÉLINE RODENAS

Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1795) depicts the fall of Father
Ambrosio, a Capuchin abbot, who commits many crimes in order to fulfil
his sexual desires. The Abbess (1799), written four years after The Monk,
is William Henry Ireland’s first Gothic novel and is sometimes presented
as “the female counterpart to Matthew Lewis’s . . . The Monk,” 1 a fact
which seemed attested by its very title. It features an evil abbess whose
character bears many similarities to that of Ambrosio. Edward Montague’s
The Demon of Sicily (1807) betrays even more extensively and directly the
influence of The Monk, since the story itself echoes Lewis’s novel. Father
Bernardo’s fate is indeed strikingly similar to Ambrosio’s.
These three novels are typical examples of the English Gothic novel,
and as is usually the case for Gothic novels, they are all set in southern
Europe and depict those foreign countries in an unflattering light. The
Monk is located in Spain while The Abbess and The Demon of Sicily both
take place in Italy. They all lay particular emphasis on Catholicism and
choose to focus on its negative sides, its excesses and its horrors,
sometimes depicting extensively what is only hinted at in the novels of
Radcliffe and most writers belonging to what is generally known as the
“female Gothic.”

1
See the Zittaw Press edition blurb for the novel [William Henry Ireland, The
Abbess (Camarillo: Zittaw Press, 2006)].
14 Chapter One

The insistence on the evils of Catholicism is of course not specific to

these three novels. It is indeed rooted in two traditions. First of all, sinister
monks and nuns are a trope of the Gothic novel. They had of course been
present in English literature at large for several centuries as anti-Catholic
feelings had been vivid ever since Henry VIII’s break with Rome in 1534.
In the eighteenth century anti-Catholicism was still rife as it was a reaction
to the dangers of powerful Catholic France, of Catholic Spain, of the
Jacobites, and of the enterprises of the Jesuits in the colonies between the
sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The struggles for political and
economic supremacy, within Europe but also overseas, therefore
heightened the religious tensions between Catholics and Anglicans.
Furthermore, the other Protestant denominations in England, though not
always on the best of terms with Anglicans, shared their anti-Catholic
views. Those tensions were echoed in British literature and anti-
Catholicism was often to be found in the major works of the eighteenth
century. In fact, it seems that whenever they travelled through Catholic
countries, in continental Europe, the heroes of English novels never failed
to encounter a despicable member of the “Romish” Church.
When depicting Catholic institutions and relating the deeds of their
members, Lewis, Ireland and Montague were bound to be influenced by
this tradition, an inheritance which they both used and adapted to their
own purposes and preoccupations.

“Such deeds of horror:”2 A little gallery

of the horrors of Catholicism
Many Gothic novels take place in foreign countries, and more precisely
in France, in Italy or in Spain. The choice of a foreign setting constituted a
quasi-unavoidable step for Gothic writers at the time. As they depicted this
foreign setting to their English readers, Gothic authors would always add
elements that were particular to these countries, thus giving local colour to
their works: the heroes had what were meant to be typical Italian or
Spanish names or called each other conte, donna, or signor. All those
elements were intended to give an impression of exoticism to the English
reader. To some extent the references to Catholicism – monasteries and
convents to begin with í had the same function. They were here to
indicate that the reader had entered a foreign territory with different rules
and customs.

2
Edward Montague, The Demon of Sicily (Chicago: Valancourt Books, 2007
[1807]), 142.
 The Horrors of Catholicism 15

Religious buildings and their inhabitants are referred to right from the
beginning of the three novels, sometimes even in their very titles: The
Monk, The Abbess. In the first sentences they write Lewis and Montague
refer to the religious setting of their stories.3 These first lines pointedly
signal a change of scenery – cultural as well as topographical í to the
English reader. In this respect, the start of The Abbess is an excellent
example since Ireland manages to mention the city, its Italian-named
characters and supplies references to the religious environment:

It was the convent of Santa Maria del Nova, at Florence, that contained the
lovely Maddalena Rosa; and it was to the church of that convent that the
Conte Marcello Porta came, on the morning of the Annunciation of the
blessed Virgin, to witness the pomp and grandeur with which it was
solemnized.4

However informed Gothic readers know that these references should

by no means be seen as an indication that religion will be the primary
focus. Such elements are chiefly a guarantee that the book they are about
to read will give them their fair share of mysteries and horrors. They
assume that the monks of the Gothic novels are villains and that the walls
of monasteries hide many heinous deeds. In Northanger Abbey (1818,
written c. 1798), Jane Austen’s parody of the Gothic novel, young
Catherine Morland, a true admirer of the Gothic novel, is thrilled to learn
that her friend lives in an old abbey, convinced that many adventures await
her there. Her representation of this religious building is quite telling of
the tropes at work in these novels: “Its long, damp passages, its narrow
cells and ruined chapel were to be within her daily reach and she could not
entirely subdue the hope of some traditional legends, some awful
memories of an injured and ill-fated nun.”5 Mention of the abbey
necessarily makes her think of “injured and ill-fated” nuns and of the
excesses of Catholicism. In a Gothic novel, entering a religious building
means entering a world apart where ordinary rules no longer apply and
where excess and transgression reign loose.

3
Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995
[1796]), 11: “Scarcely had the abbey-bell tolled for five minutes, and already was
the church of the Capuchins thronged with auditors;” Montague, The Demon of
Sicily, 3: “The clock of the monastery had told in iron notes the midnight hour.”
4
Ireland, The Abbess, 45.
5
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003 [1818]),
102. Emphasis added.
16 Chapter One

Despite the numerous references to the religious backdrop, there are

several allusions to the fact that faith itself is not really important in those
novels, and more particularly for the characters themselves. In The Monk,
Lewis informs his reader that those people are not gathered in the church
for religious reasons:

Do not encourage the idea that the crowd was assembled either from
motives of piety or thirst of information. But very few were influenced by
those reasons; and in a city where superstition reigns with such despotic
sway as in Madrid, to seek for true devotion would be a fruitless attempt.6

Instead, there are several references to sexual desire in the first pages
of these novels. Lewis tells us that people were in the church because “the
women came to show themselves, the men to see the women.”7 Similarly,
in the opening scene of The Demon of Sicily, Padre Bernardo is gazing at a
painting of Santa Catherina, but he admires the physical charms of the
Saint more than the values she is meant to represent.8 In The Abbess, the
reader can wonder whether the main character, Marcello Porta, chooses his
place in the church out of religious motives, since he places himself “so
that he might . . . have a more perfect view of the nuns.”9 Religion is
eroticized right from the beginning of these novels, which is part of the
Anti-Catholic agenda at work in them.
Monks and nuns of the Gothic novels belong mostly to two categories.
First of all, there are ambitious abbots or abbesses using their powers to
further their own interests. This is the case for Padre Grimaldi (The Demon
of Sicily), Girolamo (The Abbess) and the Prioress of the convent of St.
Clare (The Monk). Then there are lecherous monks and licentious nuns
driven by lust: Ambrosio (The Monk), Sister Agatha and Father Bernardo
(The Demon of Sicily). Some even belong to both categories as is the case
for Vittoria Bracciano (The Abbess). In both cases, Catholicism is always
used as an element of fear since the authors lay stress on the horrors
perpetrated within the walls of churches, monasteries and convents.
There are several examples of deeds of violence committed by monks
or nuns in Gothic fiction, and our three novels are no exception. In The
Demon of Sicily, for example, Father Grimaldi imprisons and kills the

6
Lewis, The Monk, 11.
7
Ibid., 5.
8
Montague, The Demon of Sicily, 3: “What a lovely face: . . . Sure no earthly
woman can possess such charms . . . Lovely painting, how hast thou caused my
mind to stray, my passions too.”
9
Ireland, The Abbess, 45. Emphasis added.
 The Horrors of Catholicism 17

Marchesa Theodora at the request of her husband who wants to remarry.10

Parallel to the acts of violence committed by one individual only, those
novels depict acts of violence emanating from a whole religious
community, and which are often legitimized by referring to the principles
of religion. In The Monk, for example, Agnes is imprisoned under the
vaults of St. Clare for a long period, because the prioress wishes to punish
her for breaking her vows of chastity, a crime she says she highly
disapproves of. However, her next words show that she does not really act
to enforce a religious principle she deeply believes in, but to punish Agnes
for disgracing the reputation of the convent in front of Ambrosio: “How
despicable must I have appeared to the reverend Abbot! . . . I can never
forgive the insult . . . Tomorrow Agnes shall be made a terrible example of
my justice and resentment.”11 Interestingly, the prioress concludes her
speech by stating that Agnes will be made an example of “her justice” –
the implication being that the institutions supposed to render justice can be
easily subverted to fulfil the interests of some individuals.
There are other examples of such abuses of power in these novels
which often depict the excesses of the Inquisition. When Ambrosio is
arrested and tortured, Lewis describes the proceedings of the tribunal quite
precisely and evokes the tortures inflicted upon him.12 The Inquisition is
undoubtedly used as a source of terror in the Gothic novel. This is
particularly true for The Abbess since William Henry Ireland dwells more
than Lewis on the cruelty of the inquisitors in particularly long and
detailed descriptions of the sufferings they inflict on their prisoners.13 The
tribunal’s violence may appear even more arbitrary and shocking to the
readers since Marcello Porta, unlike Ambrosio, is innocent. The
Inquisition is indeed used both by Vittoria Bracciano and Girolamo to
wreak personal vengeance. By showing that individuals in a position of
power subvert it to their own ends, Gothic novelists question the
hierarchical structure of the Church. Catholic countries appear to be the
realm of injustice, violence and misuse of power.
Furthermore, the monks and nuns themselves are emphatically
portrayed as far from devout. Licentious monks (or nuns) in particular í a
variation on the figure of the greedy and drunken monk that is to be found
in other novels such as Radcliffe’s Sicilian Romance (1790)14 í play key

10
Montague, The Demon of Sicily, 107.
11
Lewis, The Monk, 230. Emphasis added.
12
Ibid., 424
13
Ireland, The Abbess, 182-92.
14
Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993
[1790]), 90.
18 Chapter One

roles in our three novels. In Gothic fiction, convents and monasteries are
often located next to each other, sometimes sharing a chapel or a cemetery.
Secret passages and doors enable access from one to the other, thus
facilitating encounters between men and women. In The Demon of Sicily,
monks and nuns share a common burial ground where Father Bernardo
and Sister Agatha meet for their secret rendezvous.15 Similarly, the
monastery and the convent in The Monk are adjoining and the reader is
told that “the abbey of the Capuchins was only separated from the convent
by the garden and cemetery.”16 What is more, the burying-place is
common to the Capuchins and the sisterhood of St. Clare, something
which was very unlikely to happen in reality.17 This geographical
proximity thus functions as a metaphor for the monks’ and nuns’ assumed
licentiousness.
In these novels, the cells, vaults and gardens of monastic buildings are
the places where sexual encounters take place. Sister Agatha meets her
lover, Ferdinando, in the chapel.18 Marcello Porta sees the abbess within
the walls of the convent and Ambrosio gives in to Matilda in her cell.19
Indeed, the latter has managed to gain access to the monastery by
disguising herself as a young novice named Rosario.20 The monastic
setting is thus associated with sexual promiscuity. This is not specific to
the Gothic novel, as evidenced by the dual meaning of “nunnery” during
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries í both “convent” and “brothel.”
Besides, the idea of a woman entering a monastery disguised as a novice
had already been treated in English anti-Catholic erotica. Love in all its
Shapes (1734), for example, related the sexual adventures of Jesuits with
prostitutes who got into the monastery as disguised novices. This
eroticization of religion is therefore to be understood as a continuation of
English anti-Catholic literature.

Anti-Catholicism and the eroticization of religion

In The Monk, Agnes is amazed to see that those who torture her are
supposed to defend religion and that their actions contradict the tenets of
their faith: “And they are God’s servants, who make me suffer thus! They

15
Ibid., 224.
16
Lewis, The Monk, 346.
17
Ibid., 225.
18
Montague, The Demon of Sicily, 127-128.
19
Ireland, The Abbess, 86.
20
Lewis, The Monk, 90-91.
 The Horrors of Catholicism 19

think themselves holy, while they torture me like fiends.”21 But readers of
the Gothic novel expected such behaviour ; this is made obvious in a
parody of Gothic fiction written by Bellin de la Liborlière in 1799: “Mon
père . . . je suis fâché d’être obligé de vous le dire, mais quand on est
italien, qu’on est moine, et qu’on a un nom en –oni, on est inévitablement
un coquin”22 í not only because this is one of the tropes of the Gothic
novel, but also because those evil deeds are often said to be caused by
some of the principles of Catholicism itself.
Criticism of Catholicism focussed on some particular points, such as
monastic vows, and more particularly vows of celibacy which were
abolished in 1553 in the Anglican Church. According to Mary Muriel
Tarr, many Protestant writers thought that there was little merit in being
virtuous by avoiding temptation.23 This opinion was commonly expressed
by Gothic writers, as when Agnes questions Ambrosio’s merit: “And
where is the merit of your boasted virtue? What temptations have you
vanquished? Coward! You have fled from it, not opposed seduction.”24
Besides, vows of chastity were often deemed unnatural. When Matilda
tries to convince Ambrosio to yield to her she asserts: “Unnatural were
your vows of Celibacy; Man was not created for such a state.”25 In The
Demon of Sicily, Father Bernardo’s reflections echo this conviction: “Why
were such feelings given us, if they are not to be indulged?”26 The devil
then tries to convince him by using the same argument, again echoing
Matilda: “Thou art right, Padre, man was not formed to live alone.”27
Similarly, in The Abbess, Vittoria Bracciano explains that she cannot abide
by her vows, for “this life of celibacy was a human ordinance, pure nature
shuddered at the dreadful act,”28 and she warns that this repression of

21
Ibid., 370.
22
“Father, I am sorry to have to tell you, but when one is Italian, is a monk and has
a name ending in -oni, one is bound to be a villain” [Bellin de La Liborlière, La
Nuit anglaise ; ou, Les aventures jadis un peu extraordinaires, mais aujourd’hui
toutes simples et très communes, de M. Dabaud, marchand de la Rue St. Honoré à
Paris (Toulouse: Anacharsis, 2006 [1799]), 103]. My translation.
23
Mary Muriel Tarr, Catholicism in Gothic Fiction (New York: Garland
Publishing, 1979), 47-48.
24
Lewis, The Monk, 49. A view also expressed by Louis La Motte in Radcliffe’s
The Romance of the Forest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 [1791]), 73:
“Here . . . are probably deposited the ashes of some ancient monk . . . Peace be to
his soul but did he think a life of mere negative virtue deserved an eternal reward?”
25
Ibid., 224.
26
Montague, The Demon of Sicily, 3.
27
Ibid., 4.
28
Ireland, The Abbess, 91.
Discovering Diverse Content Through
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 voluminous and mighty herbal of Besler of Noremberge; wherein
almost every plant is to his own bignesse. To see birds, beasts, and
fishes of the sea, spiders, gnats, serpents, flies, etc., all creatures
set out by the same art, and truly expressed in lively colours, with
an exact description of their natures, vertues, qualities, etc., as
hath been accurately performed by Ælian, Gesner, Ulysses
Aldrovandus, Bellonius, Rondoletius, Hippolytus Salvianus, etc."
[381]

He is never-ending; words, phrases, overflow, are heaped up, overlap

each other, and flow on, carrying the reader along, deafened, stunned,
half drowned, unable to touch ground in the deluge. Burton is
inexhaustible. There are no ideas which he does not iterate under fifty
forms: when he has exhausted his own, he pours out upon us other
men's—the classics, the rarest authors, known only by savants—
authors rarer still, known only to the learned; he borrows from all.
Underneath these deep caverns of erudition and science, there is one
blacker and more unknown than all the others, filled with forgotten
authors, with crackjaw names, Besler of Nuremberg, Adricomius,
Linschoten, Brocarde, Bredenbachius. Amidst all these antediluvian
monsters, bristling with Latin terminations, he is at his ease; he sports
with them, laughs, skips from one to the other, drives them all abreast.
He is like old Proteus, the sturdy rover, who in one hour, with his team
of hippopotami, makes the circuit of the ocean.
What subject does he take? Melancholy, his own individual mood; and
he takes it like a schoolman. None of St. Thomas Aquinas's treatises is
more regularly constructed than his. This torrent of erudition flows in
geometrically planned channels, turning off at right angles without
deviating by a line. At the head of every part you will find a synoptical
and analytical table, with hyphens, brackets, each division begetting its
subdivisions, each subdivision its sections, each section its subsections:
of the malady in general, of melancholy in particular, of its nature, its
seat, its varieties, causes, symptoms, prognosis; of its cure by
permissible means, by forbidden means, by dietetic means, by
pharmaceutical means. After the scholastic process, he descends from
the general to the particular, and disposes each emotion and idea in its
labelled case. In this framework, supplied by the Middle Ages, he heaps
up the whole, like a man of the Renaissance—the literary description of
passions and the medical description of madness, details of the hospital
with a satire on human follies, physiological treatises side by side with
personal confidences, the recipes of the apothecary with moral
counsels, remarks on love with the history of evacuations. The
discrimination of ideas has not yet been effected; doctor and poet, man
of letters and savant, he is all at once; for want of dams, ideas pour like
different liquids into the same vat, with strange spluttering and
bubbling, with an unsavory smell and odd effect. But the vat is full, and
from this admixture are produced potent compounds which no
preceding age has known.

SECTION IV.—Sir Thomas Browne

For in this mixture there is an effectual leaven, the poetic sentiment,

which stirs up and animates the vast erudition, which will not be
confined to dry catalogues; which, interpreting every fact, every object,
disentangles or divines a mysterious soul within it, and agitates the
whole mind of man, by representing to him the restless world within
and without him as a grand enigma. Let us conceive a kindred mind to
Shakespeare's, a scholar and an observer instead of an actor and a
poet, who in place of creating is occupied in comprehending, but who,
like Shakespeare, applies himself to living things, penetrates their
internal structure, puts himself in communication with their actual laws,
imprints in himself fervently and scrupulously the smallest details of
their outward appearance; who at the same time extends his
penetrating surmises beyond the region of observation, discerns behind
visible phenomena some world obscure yet sublime, and trembles with
a kind of veneration before the vast, indistinct, but peopled darkness on
whose surface our little universe hangs quivering. Such a one is Sir
Thomas Browne, a naturalist, a philosopher, a scholar, a physician, and
a moralist, almost the last of the generation which produced Jeremy
Taylor and Shakespeare. No thinker bears stronger witness to the
wandering and inventive curiosity of the age. No writer has better
displayed the brilliant and sombre imagination of the North. No one has
spoken with a more eloquent emotion of death, the vast night of
forgetfulness, of the all-devouring pit, of human vanity, which tries to
create an ephemeral immortality out of glory or sculptured stones. No
one has revealed, in more glowing and original expressions, the poetic
sap which flows through all the minds of the age.

"But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals
with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.
Who can but pity the founder of the pyramids? Herostratus lives
that burnt the temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it. Time
hath spared the epitaph of Adrian's horse, confounded that of
himself. In vain we compute our felicities by the advantage of our
good names, since bad have equal duration; and Thersites is like to
live as long as Agamemnon. Who knows whether the best of men
be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons
forgot than any that stand remembered in the known account of
time? Without the favour of the everlasting register, the first man
had been as unknown as the last, and Methuselah's long life had
been his only chronicle.
"Oblivion is not to be hired. The greater part must be content to be
as though they had not been, to be found in the register of God,
not in the record of man. Twenty-seven names make up the first
story before the flood, and the recorded names ever since contain
not one living century. The number of the dead long exceedeth all
that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who
knows when was the equinox? Every hour adds unto the current
arithmetick which scarce stands one moment. And since death
must be the Lucina of life, and even Pagans could doubt, whether
thus to live were to die; since our longest sun sets at right
declensions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot
be long before we lie down in darkness, and have our light in
ashes; since the brother of death daily haunts us with dying
mementos, and time, that grows old in itself, bids us hope no long
duration;—diuturnity is a dream, and folly of expectation.
"Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares
with memory a great part even of our living beings; we slightly
remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of affliction leave
 but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and
sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables.
Afflictions induce callosities; miseries are slippery, or fall like snow
upon us, which notwithstanding is no unhappy stupidity. To be
ignorant of evils to come, and forgetful of evils past, is a merciful
provision of nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our few and
evil days; and our delivered senses not relapsing into cutting
remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of
repetitions.... All was vanity, feeding the wind, and folly. The
Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice
now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise, Mizraim cures
wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams.... Man is a noble animal,
splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing nativities
and deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in
the infancy of his nature.... Pyramids, arches, obelisks, were but
the irregularities of vain glory, and wild enormities of ancient
magnanimity."[382]

These are almost the words of a poet, and it is just this poet's
imagination which urges him onward into science.[383] Face to face
with the productions of nature he abounds in conjectures, comparisons;
he gropes about, proposing explanations, making trials, extending his
guesses like so many flexible and vibrating feelers into the four corners
of the globe, into the most distant regions, of fancy and truth. As he
looks upon the tree-like and foliaceous crusts which are formed upon
the surface of freezing liquids, he asks himself if this be not a
regeneration of vegetable essences, dissolved in the liquid. At the sight
of curdling blood or milk, he inquires whether there be not something
analogous to the formation of the bird in the egg, or to the coagulation
of chaos which gave birth to our world. In presence of that impalpable
force which makes liquids freeze, he asks if apoplexy and cataract are
not the effects of a like power, and do not indicate also the presence of
a congealing agency. He is in presence of nature as an artist, a man of
letters in presence of a living countenance, marking every feature,
every movement of physiognomy, so as to be able to divine the
passions and the inner disposition, ceaselessly correcting and undoing
his interpretations, kept in agitation by thought of the invisible forces
which operate beneath the visible envelope. The whole of the Middle
Ages and of antiquity, with their theories and imaginations, Platonism,
Cabalism, Christian theology, Aristotle's substantial forms, the specific
forms of the alchemists—all human speculations, entangled and
transformed one with the other, meet simultaneously in his brain, so as
to open up to him vistas of this unknown world. The accumulation, the
pile, the confusion, the fermentation and the inner swarming, mingled
with vapors and flashes, the tumultuous overloading of his imagination
and his mind, oppress and agitate him. In this expectation and emotion
his curiosity takes hold of everything; in reference to the least fact, the
most special, the most obsolete, the most chimerical, he conceives a
chain of complicated investigations, calculating how the ark could
contain all creatures, with their provision of food; how Perpenna, at a
banquet, arranged the guests so as to strike Sertorius; what trees must
have grown on the banks of Acheron, supposing that there were any;
whether quincunx plantations had not their origin in Eden, and whether
the numbers and geometrical figures contained in the lozenge-form are
not met with in all the productions of nature and art. You may
recognize here the exuberance and the strange caprices of an inner
development too ample and too strong. Archæology, chemistry, history,
nature, there is nothing in which he is not passionately interested,
which does not cause his memory and his inventive powers to overflow,
which does not summon up within him the idea of some force, certainly
admirable, possibly infinite. But what completes his picture, what
signalizes the advance of science, is the fact that his imagination
provides a counterbalance against itself. He is as fertile in doubts as he
is in explanations. If he sees a thousand reasons which tend to one
view, he sees also a thousand which tend to the contrary. At the two
extremities of the same fact, he raises up to the clouds, but in equal
piles, the scaffolding of contradictory arguments. Having made a guess,
he knows that it is but a guess; he pauses, ends with a perhaps,
recommends verification. His writings consist only of opinions, given as
such; even his principal work is a refutation of popular errors. In the
main, he proposes questions, suggests explanations, suspends his
judgments, nothing more; but this is enough; when the search is so
eager, when the paths in which it proceeds are so numerous, when it is
so scrupulous in securing its hold, the issue of the pursuit is sure; we
are but a few steps from the truth.

SECTION V.—Francis Bacon

In this band of scholars, dreamers, and inquirers, appears the most

comprehensive, sensible, originative of the minds of the age, Francis
Bacon, a great and luminous intellect, one of the finest of this poetic
progeny, who, like his predecessors, was naturally disposed to clothe
his ideas in the most splendid dress: in this age, a thought did not
seem complete until it had assumed form and color. But what
distinguishes him from the others is, that with him an image only
serves to concentrate meditation. He reflected long, stamped on his
mind all the parts and relations of his subject; he is master of it, and
then, instead of exposing this complete idea in a graduated chain of
reasoning, he embodies it in a comparison so expressive, exact, lucid,
that behind the figure we perceive all the details of the idea, like liquor
in a fine crystal vase. Judge of his style by a single example:

"For as water, whether it be the dew of Heaven or the springs of

the earth, easily scatters and loses itself in the ground, except it be
collected into some receptacle, where it may by union and consort
comfort and sustain itself (and for that cause, the industry of man
hath devised aqueducts, cisterns, and pools, and likewise
beautified them with various ornaments of magnificence and state,
as well as for use and necessity); so this excellent liquor of
knowledge, whether it descend from divine inspiration or spring
from human sense, would soon perish and vanish into oblivion, if it
were not preserved in books, traditions, conferences, and
especially in places appointed for such matters as universities,
colleges, and schools, where it may have both a fixed habitation,
and means and opportunity of increasing and collecting itself."[384]
"The greatest error of all the rest, is the mistaking or misplacing of
the last or farthest end of knowledge: for men have entered into a
desire of learning and knowledge, sometimes upon a natural
 curiosity and inquisitive appetite; sometimes to entertain their
minds with variety and delight; sometimes for ornament and
reputation; and sometimes to enable them to victory of wit and
contradiction; and most times for lucre and profession; and seldom
sincerely to give a true account of their gift of reason, to the
benefit and use of men: as if there were sought in knowledge a
couch whereupon to rest a searching and restless spirit; or a
terrace, for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down
with a fair prospect; or a tower of state, for a proud mind to raise
itself upon; or a fort or commanding ground, for strife and
contention; or a shop, for profit or sale; and not a rich storehouse,
for the glory of the Creator, and the relief of man's estate."[385]

This is his mode of thought, by symbols, not by analysis; instead of

explaining his idea, he transposes and translates it—translates it entire,
to the smallest details, enclosing all in the majesty of a grand period, or
in the brevity of a striking sentence. Thence springs a style of
admirable richness, gravity, and vigor, now solemn and symmetrical,
now concise and piercing, always elaborate, and full of color.[386] There
is nothing in English prose superior to his diction.
Thence is derived also his manner of conceiving things. He is not a
dialectician, like Hobbes or Descartes, apt in arranging ideas, in educing
one from another, in leading his reader from the simple to the complex
by an unbroken chain. He is a producer of conceptions and of
sentences. The matter being explored, he says to us: "Such it is; touch
it not on that side; it must be approached from the other." Nothing
more; no proof, no effort to convince: he affirms, and does nothing
more; he has thought in the manner of artists and poets, and he
speaks after the manner of prophets and seers. Cogitata et visa this
title of one of his books might be the title of all. The most admirable,
the "Novum Organum," is a string of aphorisms—a collection, as it
were, of scientific decrees, as of an oracle who foresees the future and
reveals the truth. And to make the resemblance complete, he expresses
them by poetical figures, by enigmatic abbreviations, almost in Sibylline
verses: Idola specûs, Idola tribûs, Idola fori, Idola theatri, everyone will
recall these strange names, by which he signifies the four kinds of
illusions to which man is subject.[387] Shakespeare and the seers do
not contain more vigorous or expressive condensations of thought,
more resembling inspiration, and in Bacon they are to be found
everywhere. On the whole, his process is that of the creators; it is
intuition, not reasoning. When he has laid up his store of facts, the
greatest possible, on some vast subject, on some entire province of the
mind, on the whole anterior philosophy, on the general condition of the
sciences, on the power and limits of human reason, he casts over all
this a comprehensive view, as it were a great net, brings up a universal
idea, condenses his idea into a maxim, and hands it to us with the
words, "Verify and profit by it."
There is nothing more hazardous, more like fantasy, than this mode of
thought, when it is not checked by natural and good strong sense. This
common-sense, which is a kind of natural divination, the stable
equilibrium of an intellect always gravitating to the true, like the needle
to the pole, Bacon possesses in the highest degree. He has a pre-
eminently practical, even an utilitarian mind, such as we meet with later
in Bentham, and such as their business habits were to impress more
and more upon the English. At the age of sixteen, while at the
university, he was dissatisfied with Aristotle's philosophy,[388] not that
he thought meanly of the author, whom, on the contrary, he calls a
great genius; but because it seemed to him of no practical utility,
incapable of producing works which might promote the well-being of
men. We see that from the outset he struck upon his dominant idea; all
else comes to him from this; a contempt for antecedent philosophy, the
conception of a different system, the entire reformation of the sciences
by the indication of a new goal, the definition of a distinct method, the
opening up of unsuspected anticipations.[389] It is never speculation
which he relishes, but the practical application of it. His eyes are turned
not to heaven, but to earth; not to things abstract and vain, but to
things palpable and solid; not to curious, but to profitable truths. He
seeks to better the condition of men, to labor for the welfare of
mankind, to enrich human life with new discoveries and new resources,
to equip mankind with new powers and new instruments of action, His
philosophy itself is but an instrument, organum, a sort of machine or
lever constructed to enable the intellect to raise a weight, to break
through obstacles, to open up vistas, to accomplish tasks, which had
hitherto surpassed its power. In his eyes, every special science, like
science in general, should be an implement. He invites mathematicians
to quit their pure geometry, to study numbers only with a view to
natural philosophy, to seek formulas only to calculate real quantities
and natural motions. He recommends moralists to study the soul, the
passions, habits, temptations, not merely in a speculative way, but with
a view to the cure or diminution of vice, and assigns to the science of
morals as its goal the amelioration of morals. For him, the object of
science is always the establishment of an art; that is, the production of
something of practical utility; when he wished to describe the
efficacious nature of his philosophy by a tale, he delineated in the "New
Atlantis," with a poet's boldness and the precision of a seer, almost
employing the very terms in use now, modern applications, and the
present organization of the sciences, academies, observatories, air-
balloons, submarine vessels, the improvement of land, the
transmutation of species, regenerations, the discovery of remedies, the
preservation of food. The end of our foundation, says his principal
personage, is the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things,
and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of
all things possible. And this "possible" is infinite.
How did this grand and just conception originate? Doubtless common-
sense and genius, too, were necessary to its production; but neither
common-sense nor genius was lacking to men: there had been more
than one who, observing, like Bacon, the progress of particular
industries, could, like him, have conceived of universal industry, and
from certain limited ameliorations have advanced to unlimited
amelioration. Here we see the power of connection; men think they do
everything by their individual thought, and they can do nothing without
the assistance of the thoughts of their neighbors; they fancy that they
are following the small voice within them, but they only hear it because
it is swelled by the thousand buzzing and imperious voices, which,
issuing from all surrounding or distant circumstances, are confounded
with it in an harmonious vibration. Generally they hear it, as Bacon did,
from the first moment of reflection; but it had become inaudible among
the opposing sounds which came from without to smother it. Could this
confidence in the infinite enlargement of human power, this glorious
idea of the universal conquest of nature, this firm hope in the continual
increase of well-being and happiness, have germinated, grown,
occupied an intelligence entirely, and thence have struck its roots, been
propagated and spread over neighboring intelligences, in a time of
discouragement and decay, when men believed the end of the world at
hand, when things were falling into ruin about them, when Christian
mysticism, as in the first centuries, ecclesiastical tyranny, as in the
fourteenth century, were convincing them of their impotence, by
perverting their intellectual efforts and curtailing their liberty. On the
contrary, such hopes must then have seemed to be outbursts of pride,
or suggestions of the carnal mind. They did seem so; and the last
representatives of ancient science, and the first of the new, were exiled
or imprisoned, assassinated or burned. In order to be developed an
idea must be in harmony with surrounding civilization; before man can
expect to attain the dominion over nature, or attempts to improve his
condition, amelioration must have begun on all sides, industries have
increased, knowledge have been accumulated, the arts expanded, a
hundred thousand irrefutable witnesses must have come incessantly to
give proof of his power and assurance of his progress. The "masculine
birth of the time" (temporis partus masculus) is the title which Bacon
applies to his work, and it is a true one. In fact, the whole age co-
operated in it; by this creation it was finished. The consciousness of
human power and prosperity gave to the Renaissance its first energy,
its ideal, its poetic materials, its distinguishing features; and now it
furnishes it with its final expression, its scientific doctrine, and its
ultimate object.
We may add also, its method. For, the end of a journey once
determined, the route is laid down, since the end always determines
the route; when the point to be reached is changed, the path of
approach is changed, and science, varying its object, varies also its
method. So long as it limited its effort to the satisfying an idle curiosity,
opening out speculative vistas, establishing a sort of opera in
speculative minds, it could launch out any moment into metaphysical
abstractions and distinctions: it was enough for it to skim over
experience; it soon quitted it, and came all at once upon great words,
quiddities, the principle of individuation, final causes. Half proofs
sufficed science; at bottom it did not care to establish a truth, but to
get an opinion; and its instrument, the syllogism, was serviceable only
for refutations, not for discoveries; it took general laws for a starting-
point instead of a point of arrival; instead of going to find them, it
fancied them found. The syllogism was good in the schools, not in
nature; it made disputants, not discoverers. From the moment that
science had art for an end, and men studied in order to act, all was
transformed; for we cannot act without certain and precise knowledge.
Forces, before they can be employed, must be measured and verified;
before we can build a house, we must know exactly the resistance of
the beams, or the house will collapse; before we can cure a sick man,
we must know with certainty the effect of a remedy, or the patient will
die. Practice makes certainty and exactitude a necessity to science,
because practice is impossible when it has nothing to lean upon but
guesses and approximations. How can we eliminate guesses and
approximations? How introduce into science, solidity and precision? We
must imitate the cases in which science, issuing in practice, has proved
to be precise and certain, and these cases are the industries. We must,
as in the industries, observe, essay, grope about, verify, keep our mind
fixed on sensible and particular things, advance to general rules only
step by step; not anticipate experience, but follow it; not imagine
nature, but interpret it. For every general effect, such as heat,
whiteness, hardness, liquidity, we must seek a general condition, so
that in producing the condition we may produce the effect. And for this
it is necessary, by fit rejections and exclusions, to extract the condition
sought from the heap of facts in which it lies buried, construct the table
of cases from which the effect is absent, the table where it is present,
the table where the effect is shown in various degrees, so as to isolate
and bring to light the condition which produced it.[390] Then we shall
have, not useless universal axioms, but efficacious mediate axioms,
true laws from which we can derive works, and which are the sources
of power in the same degree as the sources of light.[391] Bacon
described and predicted in this modern science and industry, their
correspondence, method, resources, principle; and after more than two
centuries it is still to him that we go even at the present day to look for
the theory of what we are attempting and doing.
 CHOICE EXAMPLES OF EARLY PRINTING AND
ENGRAVING.
Fac-similes from Rare and Curious Books.

THE NEW PSALTER OF THE VIRGIN MARY.

The "Novum Beatæ Mariæ Virginis Psalterium" was

printed by the Cistercians monks of the monastery
of Sienna, in the duchy of Magdeburg, near
Wittemberg, in 1492. The present illustration shows
the page of dedication, in which mention is made of
the Emperor Frederick, whose arms, the double-
headed eagle, appears in the border. The book was
printed in the year before the emperor died. The
border is an easy and flowing design of roses,
which are always considered an emblem of the
Virgin. The volume is a remarkable production, rare
and much prized by collectors.
Beyond this great view, he has discovered nothing. Cowley, one of his
admirers, rightly said that, like Moses on Mount Pisgah, he was the first
to announce the promised land; but he might have added quite as
justly, that, like Moses, he did not enter there. He pointed out the
route, but did not travel it; he taught men how to discover natural laws,
but discovered none. His definition of heat is extremely imperfect. His
"Natural History" is full of fanciful explanations.[392] Like the poets, he
peoples nature with instincts and desires; attributes to bodies an actual
voracity, to the atmosphere a thirst for light, sounds, odors, vapors
which it drinks in; to metals a sort of haste to be incorporated with
acids. He explains the duration of the bubbles of air which float on the
surface of liquids, by supposing that air has a very small or no appetite
for height. He sees in every quality, weight, ductility, hardness, a
distinct essence which has its special cause; so that when a man knows
the cause of every quality of gold, he will be able to put all these
causes together, and make gold. In the main, with the alchemists,
Paracelsus and Gilbert, Kepler himself, with all the men of his time, men
of imagination, nourished on Aristotle, he represents nature as a
compound of secret and living energies, inexplicable and primordial
forces, distinct and indecomposable essences, adapted each by the will
of the Creator to produce a distinct effect. He almost saw souls
endowed with latent repugnances and occult inclinations, which aspire
to or resist certain directions, certain mixtures, and certain localities. On
this account also he confounds everything in his researches in an
undistinguishable mass, vegetative and medicinal properties,
mechanical and curative, physical and moral, without considering the
most complex as depending on the simplest, but each on the contrary
in itself, and taken apart, as an irreducible and independent existence.
Obstinate in this error, the thinkers of the age mark time without
advancing. They see clearly with Bacon the wide field of discovery, but
they cannot enter upon it. They want an idea, and for want of this idea
they do not advance. The disposition of mind which but now was a
lever, is become an obstacle: it must be changed, that the obstacle may
be got rid of. For ideas, I mean great and efficacious ones, do not come
at will nor by chance, by the effort of an individual, or by a happy
accident. Methods and philosophies, as well as literatures and religions,
arise from the spirit of the age; and this spirit of the age makes them
potent or powerless. One state of public intelligence excludes a certain
kind of literature; another, a certain scientific conception. When it
happens thus, writers and thinkers labor in vain, the literature is
abortive, the conception does not make its appearance. In vain they
turn one way and another, trying to remove the weight which hinders
them; something stronger than themselves paralyzes their hands and
frustrates their endeavors. The central pivot of the vast wheel on which
human affairs move must be displaced one notch, that all may move
with its motion. At this moment the pivot was moved, and thus a
revolution of the great wheel begins, bringing round a new conception
of nature, and in consequence that part of the method which was
lacking. To the diviners, the creators, the comprehensive and
impassioned minds who seized objects in a lump and in masses,
succeeded the discursive thinkers, the systematic thinkers, the
graduated and clear logicians, who, disposing ideas in continuous
series, lead the hearer gradually from the simple to the most complex
by easy and unbroken paths. Descartes superseded Bacon; the classical
age obliterated the Renaissance; poetry and lofty imagination gave way
before rhetoric, eloquence, and analysis. In this transformation of mind,
ideas were transformed. Everything was drained dry and simplified. The
universe, like all else, was reduced to two or three notions; and the
conception of nature, which was poetical, became mechanical. Instead
of souls, living forces, repugnances, and attractions, we have pulleys,
levers, impelling forces. The world, which seemed a mass of instinctive
powers, is now like a mere machinery of cog-wheels. Beneath this
adventurous supposition lies a large and certain truth; that there is,
namely, a scale of facts, some at the summit very complex, others at
the base very simple; those above having their origin in those below, so
that the lower ones explain the higher; and that we must seek the
primary laws of things in the laws of motion. The search was made,
and Galileo found them. Thenceforth the work of the Renaissance,
outstripping the extreme point to which Bacon had pushed it, and at
which he had left it, was able to proceed onward by itself, and did so
proceed, without limit.

[265]See, at Bruges, the pictures of Hemling (fifteenth century). No

paintings enable us to understand so well the ecclesiastical piety of
the Middle Ages, which was altogether like that of the Buddhists.
[266]The first carriage was in 1564. It caused much astonishment.
Some said that it was "a great sea-shell brought from China"; others,
"that it was a temple in which cannibals worshipped the devil."
[267]For a picture of this state of things, see Fenn's "Paston Letters."
[268]Louis XI in France, Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain, Henry VII
in England. In Italy the feudal regime ended earlier, by the
establishment of republics and principalities.
[269]1488, Act of Parliament on Enclosures.
[270]A "Compendious Examination," 1581, by William Strafford. Act
of Parliament, 1541.
[271]Between 1377 and 1588 the increase was from two and a half
to five millions.
[272]In 1585; Ludovic Guicciardini.
[273]Henry VIII at the beginning of his reign had but one ship of
war. Elizabeth sent out one hundred and fifty against the Armada. In
1553 was founded a company to trade with Russia. In 1578 Drake
circumnavigated the globe. In 1600 the East India Company was
founded.
[274]Nathan Drake, "Shakespeare and his Times," 1817, I. V. 72 et
passim.
[275]Nathan Drake, "Shakespeare and his Times," I. V. 102.
[276]This was called the Tudor style. Under James I, in the hands of
Inigo Jones, it became entirely Italian, approaching the antique.
[277]Burton, "Anatomy of Melancholy," 12th ed. 1821. Stubbes,
"Anatomie of Abuses," ed. Turnbull, 1836.
[278]Nathan Drake, "Shakespeare and his Times," II. 6, 87.
[279]Holinshed (1586), 1808, 6 vols. III. 763 et passim.
[280]Ibid., Reign of Henry VII "Elizabeth and James Progresses," by
Nichols.
[281]Laneham's Entertainment at Killingworth Castle, 1575. Nichols's
"Progresses," vol. I. London, 1788.
[282]Ben Jonson's works, ed. Gifford, 1816, 9 vols. "Masque of
Hymen," vol. VII. 76.
[283]Certain private letters also describe the court of Elizabeth as a
place where there was little piety or practice of religion, and where
all enormities reigned in the highest degree.
[284]Nathan Drake, "Shakespeare and his Times," chap. V. and VI.
[285]Stubbes, "Anatomie of Abuses," p. 168 et passim.
[286]Hentzner's "Travels in England" (Bentley's translation). He
thought that the figure carried about in the Harvest Home
represented Ceres.
[287]Warton, vol. II. sec. 35. Before 1600 all the great poets were
translated into English, and between 1550 and 1616 all the great
historians of Greece and Rome. Lyly in 1500 first taught Greek in
public.
[288]Ascham, "The Scholemaster" (1570), ed. Arber, 1870, first
book, 78 et passim.
[289]Ma il vero e principal ornemento dell' animo in ciascuno penso
io che siano le lettere, benche i Franchesi solamente conoscano la
nobilita dell'arme... et tutti i litterati tengon per vilissimi huomini.
Castiglione "Il Cortegiano," ed. 1585, p. 112.
[290]See Burchard (the Pope's Steward) account of the festival at
which Lucretia Borgia was present. Letters of Aretinus, "Life of
Cellini," etc.
[291]See his sketches at Oxford, and those of Fra Bartolomeo at
Florence. See also the Martyrdom of St. Laurence, by Baccio
Bandinelli.
[292]Benvenuto Cellini, "Principles of the Art of Design."
[293]"Life of Cellini." Compare also these exercises which Castiglione
prescribes for a well-educated man, in his "Cortegiano," ed. 1585, p.
55: "Peró voglio che il nostro cortegiano sia perfetto cavaliere d'ogni
sella.... Et perche degli Italiani è peculiar laude il cavalcare bene alia
brida, il maneggiar con raggione massimamente cavalli aspri, il corre
lance, il giostare, sia in questo de meglior Italiani.... Nel torneare,
teper un passo, combattere una sbarra, sia buono tra il miglior
francesi.... Nel giocare a canne, correr torri, lanciar haste e dardi, sia
tra Spagnuoli eccelente.... Conveniente è ancor sapere saltare, e
correre;... ancor nobile exercitio il gioco di palla.... Non di minor
laude estimo il voltegiar a cavallo."
[294]Puttenham, "The Arte of English Poesie," ed. Arber, 1869, book
I. ch. 31, p. 74.
[295]Surrey's "Poems," Pickering, 1831, p. 17.
[296]Ibid. "The faithful lover declareth his pains and his uncertain
joys, and with only hope recomforteth his woful heart," p. 53.
[297]Ibid. "Description of Spring, wherein everything renews, save
only the lover," p. 2.
[298]Ibid. p. 50.
[299]Syrrey's "Poems. A description of the restless state of the lover
when absent from the mistress of his heart," p. 78
[300]In another piece, "Complaint on the Absence of her Lover
being upon the Sea," he speaks in direct terms of his wife, almost as
affectionately.
[301]Greene, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Shakespeare, Ford,
Otway, Richardson, De Foe, Fielding, Dickens, Thackeray, etc.
[302]"The Frailty and Hurtfulness of Beauty."
[303]"Description of Spring. A Vow to Love Faithfully."
[304]"Complaint of the Lover Disdarned."
[305]Surrey, ed. Nott.
[306]The Speaker's address to Charles II on his restoration.
Compare it with the speech of M. de Fontanes under the Empire. In
each case it was the close of a literary epoch. Read for illustration
the speech before the University of Oxford, "Athenæ Oxonienses," I.
193.
[307]His second work, "Euphues and his England," appeared in
1581.
[308]See Shakespeare's young men, Mercutio especially.
[309]"The Maid her Metamorphosis."
[310]Two French novels of the age of Louis XIV, each in ten
volumes, and written by Mademoiselle de Scudéry.—Tr.
[311]Celadon, a rustic lover in "Astrée," a French novel in five
volumes, named after the heroine, and written by d'Urfé (d. 1625).—
Tr.
[312]"Arcadia," ed. fol. 1629, p. 117.
[313]"Arcadia," ed. fol. 1629, p. 114.
[314]"The Defence of Poesie," ed. fol. 1629, p. 558: "I dare
undertake, that Orlando Furioso, or honest King Arthur, will never
displease a soldier: but the quidditie of Ens and prima materia, will
hardly agree with a Corselet." See also, in the same book, the very
lively and spirited personification of History and Philosophy, full of
genuine talent.
[315]"The Defence of Poesie," ed. fol. 1629, p. 553.
[316]Ibid. p. 550.
[317]Ibid. p. 552.
[318]Ibid. p. 560. Here and there we find also verse as spirited as
this:
"Or Pindar's Apes, flaunt they in
phrases fine,
Enam'ling with pied flowers their
thoughts of gold."—p. 568.
[319]"Astrophel and Stella," ed. fol. 1629, 101st sonnet, p. 613.
[320]Ibid. 8th song, p. 603.
[321]"Astrophel and Stella" (1629), 8th song, 604.
[322]Ibid. 10th song, p. 610.
[323]Ibid, sonnet 69, p. 555.
[324]"Astrophel and Stella" (1629), sonnet 102, p. 614.
[325]Ibid. p. 525: this sonnet is headed E. D. Wood, in his "Athen.
Oxon." i., says it was written by Sir Edward Dyer, Chancellor of the
Most noble Order of the Garter.—Tr.
[326]Ibid, sonnet 43, p. 545.
[327]"Astrophel and Stella" (1629), sonnet 18, p. 573.
[328]Ibid, last sonnet, p. 539.
[329]Nathan Drake, "Shakspeare and his Times," I. Part 2, ch. 2, 3,
4. Among these 233 poets the authors of isolated pieces are not
reckoned, but only those who published or collected their works.
[330]Drayton's "Polyolbion," ed. 1622, 13th song, p. 214.
[331]Shakespeare's "Tempest," act IV. 1.
[332]Ibid, act IV. 2.
[333]Greene's Poems, ed. Bell, "Eurymachus in Laudem Mirimidæ,"
p. 73.
[334]Ibid. Melicertus's description of his Mistress, p. 38.
[335]Spenser's Works, ed. Todd, 1863, "The Faërie Queene," I. c. II,
st. 51.
[336]Ben Jonson's Poems, ed. R. Bell. Celebration of Charis; her
Triumph, p. 125.
[337]"Cupid's Pastime," unknown author, ab. 1621.
[338]Ibid.
[339]"Rosalind's Madrigal."
[340]Greene's Poems, ed. R. Bell, Menaphon's Eclogue, p. 41.
[341]Ibid., Melicertus's Eclogue, p. 43.
[342]"As you Like It."
[343]"The Sad Shepherd." See also Beaumont and Fletcher, "The
Faithful Shepherdess."
[344]This poem was, and still is, frequently attributed to
Shakespeare. It appears as his in Knight's edition, published a few
years ago. Izaak Walton, however, writing about fifty years after
Marlowe's death, attributes it to him. In Palgrave's "Golden
Treasury," it is also ascribed to the same author. As a confirmation,
let us state that Ithamore, in Marlowe's "Jew of Malta," says to the
courtesan (Act IV. Sc. 4):
"Thou in those groves, by Dis above,
Shalt live with me, and be my love."—Tr.
[345]Chalmers's "English Poets"; William Warner, "Fourth Book of
Albion's England," ch. XX. p. 551.
[346]Chalmers's "English Poets," M. Drayton's "Fourth Eclogue," IV.
p. 436.
[347]M. Jourdain is the hero of Molière's comedy, "Le Bourgeois
Gentilhomme," the type of a vulgar and successful upstart;
Mamamouchi is a mock title.—Tr.
[348]Lulli, a celebrated Italian composer of the time of Molière.—Tr.
[349]It is very doubtful whether Spenser was so poor as he is
generally believed to have been.—Tr.
[350]"He died for want of bread, in King Street." Ben Jonson, quoted
by Drummond.
[351]"Hymns of Love and Beauty"; Of Heavenly Love and Beauty.
[352]"A Hymne in Honour of Beautie," lines 92-105.
[353]"A Hymne in Honour of Love," lines 176-182.
[354]"The Faërie Queene," I. c. 8, stanzas 22, 23.
[355]"The Shepherd's Calendar, Amoretti, Sonnets, Prothalamion,
Epithalamion, Muiopotmos, Vergil's Gnat, The Ruines of Time, The
Teares of the Muses," etc.
[356]Published in 1580: dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney.
[357]"Prothalamion," lines 19-54.
[358]"Astrophel and Stella," lines 181-192.
[359]Words attributed to him by Lodowick Bryskett, "Discourse of
Civil Life," ed. 1606, p. 26.
[360]Ariosto, 1474-1533. Tasso, 1544-1595. Cervantes, 1547-1616.
Rabelais, 1483-1553.
[361]"The Faërie Queene," II. c. 3, stanzas 22-30.
[362]Ibid. III. c. 5, stanza 51.
[363]"The Faërie Queene," III. c. 6, stanzas 6 and 7.
[364]Ibid, stanzas 17 and 18.
[365]"The Faërie Queene," IV. c. 1, stanza 13.
[366]Clorinda, the heroine of the infidel army in Tasso's epic poem,
"Jerusalem Delivered"; Marfisa, an Indian Queen, who figures in
Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso," and also, in Boyardo's "Orlando
Innamorato."—Tr.
[367]"The Faërie Queene," III. c. 4, stanza 33.
[368]"The Faërie Queene," II. c. 7, stanzas 28-46.
[369]"The Faërie Queene," II. c. 12, stanzas 53-78.
[370]"Nugæ Antiquæ," I. 349 et passim.
[371] "Some asked me where the Rubies grew,
And nothing I did say;
But with my finger pointed to
The lips of Julia.
Some ask'd how Pearls did grow, and where;
Then spake I to my girle,
To part her lips, and shew me there
The quarelets of Pearl.
One ask'd me where the roses grew;
I bade him not go seek;
But forthwith bade my Julia show
A bud in either cheek."
—Herrick's "Hesperides," ed. Walford, 1859; The Rock of Rubies, p.
32.

"About the sweet bag of a bee,

Two Cupids fell at odds;
And whose the pretty prize shu'd be,
They vow'd to ask the Gods.
Which Venus hearing, thither came,
And for their boldness stript them;
And taking thence from each his flame,
With rods of mirtle whipt them.
Which done, to still their wanton cries,
When quiet grown sh'ad seen them.
She kist and wip'd their dove-like eyes,
And gave the bag between them."
—Herrick, Ibid. The Bag of the Bee, p. 42.

"Why so pale and wan, fond lover?

Pr'ythee, why so pale?
Will, when looking well can't move her,
Looking ill prevail?
Pr'ythee, why so pale?
Why so dull and mute, young sinner?
Pr'ythee, why so mute?
Will, when speaking well can't win her,
Saying nothing do't?
Pr'ythee, why so mute?
Quit, quit for shame; this will not move,
This cannot take her;
If of herself she will not love,
 Nothing can make her.
The devil take her!"
—Sir John Suckling's Works, ed. A. Suckling, 1836, p. 70.

"As when a lady, walking Flora's bower,

Picks here a pink, and there a gilly-flower,
Now plucks a violet from her purple bed,
And then a primrose, the year's maidenhead,
There nips the brier, here the lover's pansy,
Shifting her dainty pleasures with her fancy,
This on her arms, and that she lists to wear
Upon the borders of her curious hair;
At length a rose-bud (passing all the rest)
She plucks, and bosoms in her lily breast."—Quarles, Stanzas.
[372]See, in particular, his satire against courtiers. The following is
against imitators:
"But he is worst, who (beggarly) doth chaw
Others wit's fruits, and in his ravenous maw
Rankly digested, doth those things out-spew,
As his owne things; and they 're his owne, 't is true,
For if one eate my meate, though it be knowne
The meat was mine, th' excrement is his owne."
—Donne's "Satires," 1639. Satire II. p. 128.
[373] "When I behold a stream, which from the spring
Doth with doubtful melodious murmuring,
Or in a speechless slumber calmly ride
Her wedded channel's bosom, ana there chide
And bend her brows, and swell, if any bough
Does but stoop down to kiss her utmost brow;
Yet if her often gnawing kisses win
The traiterous banks to gape and let her in,
She rusheth violently and doth divorce
Her from her native and her long-kept course,
And roares, and braves it, and in gallant scorn
In flatt'ring eddies promising return,
She flouts her channel, which thenceforth is dry.
Then say I: That is she, and this am I."—Donne, Elegy VI.
[374]Donne's Poems, 1639, "A Feaver," p. 15.
[375]Ibid. "The Flea," p. 1.
[376]A valet in Molière's "Les Précieuses Ridicules," who apes and
exaggerates his master's manners and style, and pretends to be a
marquess. He also appears in "L'Etourdi" and "Le dépit Amoureux,"
by the same author.—Tr.
[377]1608-1667. I refer to the eleventh edition, of 1710.
[378] "The Spring" ("The Mistress," I. 72).
[379]See in Shakespeare, "The Tempest, Measure for Measure,
Hamlet"; in Beaumont and Fletcher, "Thierry and Theodoret," Act IV;
Webster, passim.
[380]"Anatomy of Melancholy," 12th ed. 1821, 2 vols; Democritus to
the Reader, I. 4.
[381]"Anatomy of Melancholy," I. part 2, sec. 2, Mem. 4, p. 420 et
passim.
[382]"The Works of Sir Thomas Browne," ed. Wilkin, 1852, 3 vols.
"Hydriotaphia," III. ch. V. 14 et passim.
[383]See Milsand, Étude sur Sir Thomas Browne, in the "Revue des
Deux Mondes," 1858.
[384]Bacon's Works. Translation of the "De Augmentis Scientiarum,"
Book II; To the King.
[385]Ibid. Book I. The true end of learning mistaken.
[386]Especially in the Essays.
[387]See also "Novum Organum," Books I and II; the twenty-seven
kinds of examples, with their metaphorical names: Instantiæ crucis,
divortii januæ, Instantiæ innuentes, polychrestæ, magicæ, etc.
[388]"The Works of Francis Bacon," London, 1824, vol. VII. p. 2.
"Latin Biography," by Rawley.
[389]This point is brought out by the review of Lord Macaulay.
"Critical and Historical Essays," vol. III.
[390]"Novum Organum," II. 15 and 16.
[391]Ibid. I. I. 3.
[392]"Natural History," 800, 24, etc. "De Augmentis," III. 1.

CHAPTER SECOND

The Theatre
We must look at this world more closely, and beneath the ideas which
are developed seek for the living men; it is the theatre especially which
is the original product of the English Renaissance, and it is the theatre
especially which will exhibit the men of the English Renaissance. Forty
poets, amongst them ten of superior rank, as well as one, the greatest
of all artists who have represented the soul in words; many hundreds of
pieces, and nearly fifty masterpieces; the drama extended over all the
provinces of history, imagination, and fancy—expanded so as to
embrace comedy, tragedy, pastoral and fanciful literature—to represent
all degrees of human condition, and all the caprices of human invention
—to express all the perceptible details of actual truth, and all the
philosophic grandeur of general reflection; the stage disencumbered of
all precept and freed from all imitation, given up and appropriated in
the minutest particulars to the reigning taste and public intelligence; all
this was a vast and manifold work, capable by its flexibility, its
greatness, and its form, of receiving and preserving the exact imprint of
the age and of the nation.[393]

SECTION I.—The Public and the Stage

Let us try, then, to set before our eyes this public, this audience, and
this stage—all connected with one another, as in every natural and
living work; and if ever there was a living and natural work, it is here.
There were already seven theatres in London, in Shakespeare's time, so
brisk and universal was the taste for dramatic representations. Great
and rude contrivances, awkward in their construction, barbarous in
their appointments; but a fervid imagination readily supplied all that
they lacked, and hardy bodies endured all inconveniences without
difficulty. On a dirty site, on the banks of the Thames, rose the principal
theatre, the Globe, a sort of hexagonal tower, surrounded by a muddy
ditch, on which was hoisted a red flag. The common people could enter
as well as the rich: there were sixpenny, twopenny, even penny seats;
but they could not see it without money. If it rained, and it often rains
in London, the people in the pit, butchers, mercers, bakers, sailors,
apprentices, receive the streaming rain upon their heads. I suppose
they did not trouble themselves about it; it was not so long since they
began to pave the streets of London; and when men, like these, have
had experience of sewers and puddles, they are not afraid of catching
cold. While waiting for the piece, they amuse themselves after their
fashion, drink beer, crack nuts, eat fruit, howl, and now and then resort
to their lists; they have been known to fall upon the actors, and turn
the theatre upside down. At other times they were dissatisfied and
went to the tavern to give the poet a hiding, or toss him in a blanket;
they were coarse fellows, and there was no month when the cry of
"Clubs" did not call them out of their shops to exercise their brawny
arms. When the beer took effect, there was a great upturned barrel in
the pit, a peculiar receptacle for general use. The smell rises, and then
comes the cry, "Burn the juniper!" They burn some in a plate on the
stage, and the heavy smoke fills the air. Certainly the folk there
assembled could scarcely get disgusted at anything, and cannot have
had sensitive noses. In the time of Rabelais there was not much
cleanliness to speak of. Remember that they were hardly out of the
Middle Ages and that in the Middle Ages man lived on a dunghill.
Above them, on the stage, were the spectators able to pay a shilling,
the elegant people, the gentlefolk. These were sheltered from the rain,
and if they chose to pay an extra shilling, could have a stool. To this
were reduced the prerogatives of rank and the devices of comfort: it
often happened that there were not stools enough; then they lie down
on the ground: this was not a time to be dainty. They play cards,
smoke, insult the pit, who gave it them back without stinting, and
throw apples at them into the bargain. They also gesticulate, swear in
Italian, French, English;[394] crack aloud jokes in dainty, composite,
high-colored words: in short, they have the energetic, original, gay
manners of artists, the same humor, the same absence of constraint,
and, to complete the resemblance, the same desire to make themselves
singular, the same imaginative cravings, the same absurd and
picturesque devices, beards cut to a point, into the shape of a fan, a
spade, the letter T, gaudy and expensive dresses, copied from five or
six neighboring nations, embroidered, laced with gold, motley,
continually heightened in effect or changed for others: there was, as it
were, a carnival in their brains as well as on their backs.
With such spectators illusions could be produced without much trouble:
there were no preparations or perspectives; few or no movable scenes:
their imaginations took all this upon them. A scroll in big letters
announced to the public that they were in London or Constantinople;
and that was enough to carry the public to the desired place. There
was no trouble about probability. Sir Philip Sidney writes:

"You shall have Asia of the one side, and Africke of the other, and
so many other under-kingdomes, that the Plaier when hee comes
in, must ever begin with telling where hee is, or else the tale will
not be conceived. Now shall you have three Ladies walke to gather
flowers, and then wee must beleeve the stage to be a garden. By
and by wee heare newes of shipwracke in the same place, then
wee are to blame if we accept it not for a rocke;... while in the
meane time two armies flie in, represented with foure swordes and
bucklers, and then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched
field? Now of time they are much more liberall. For ordinary it is,
that two young Princes fall in love, after many traverses, shee is
got with childe, delivered of a faire boy, hee is lost, groweth a
man, falleth in love, and is readie to get another childe; and all this
in two hours space."[395]

Doubtless these enormities were somewhat reduced under

Shakespeare; with a few hangings, crude representations of animals,
towers, forests, they assisted somewhat the public imagination. But
after all, in Shakespeare's plays, as in all others, the imagination from
within is chiefly drawn upon for the machinery; it must lend itself to all,
substitute all, accept for a queen a young man who has just been
shaved, endure in one act ten changes of place, leap suddenly over
twenty years or five hundred miles,[396] take half a dozen
supernumeraries for forty thousand men, and to have represented by
the rolling of the drums all the battles of Caesar, Henry V, Coriolanus,
Richard III. And imagination, being so overflowing and so young,
accepts all this. Recall your own youth; for my part, the deepest
emotions I have ever felt at a theatre were given to me by a strolling
bevy of four young girls, playing comedy and tragedy on a stage in a
coffee-house; true, I was eleven years old. So in this theatre, at this
moment, their souls were fresh, as ready to feel everything as the poet
was to dare everything.
 SECTION II.—Manners of the Sixteenth Century

These are but externals; let us try to advance further, to observe the
passions, the bent of mind, the inner man: it is this inner state which
raised and modelled the drama, as everything else; invisible inclinations
are everywhere the cause of visible works, and the interior shapes the
exterior. What are these townspeople, courtiers, this public, whose
taste fashions the theatre? what is there peculiar in the structure and
condition of their minds? The condition must needs be peculiar; for the
drama flourishes all of a sudden, and for sixty years together, with
marvellous luxuriance, and at the end of this time is arrested so that no
effort could ever revive it. The structure must be peculiar; for of all
theatres, old and new, this is distinct in form, and displays a style,
action, characters, an idea of life, which are not found in any age or
any country beside. This particular feature is the free and complete
expansion of nature.
What we call nature in men is, man such as he was before culture and
civilization had deformed and reformed him. Almost always, when a
new generation arrives at manhood and consciousness, it finds a code
of precepts impose on it with all the weight and authority of antiquity. A
hundred kinds of chains, a hundred thousand kinds of ties, religion,
morality, good breeding, every legislation which regulates sentiments,
morals, manners, fetter and tame the creature of impulse and passion
which breathes and frets within each of us. There is nothing like that
here. It is a regeneration, and the curb of the past is wanting to the
present. Catholicism, reduced to external ceremony and clerical
chicanery, had just ended; Protestantism, arrested in its first gropings
after truth, or straying into sects, had not yet gained the mastery; the
religion of discipline was grown feeble, and the religion of morals was
not yet established; men ceased to listen to the directions of the clergy,
and has not yet spelled out the law of conscience. The church was
turned into an assembly-room, as in Italy; the young fellows came to
St. Paul's to walk, laugh, chatter, display their new cloaks; the thing had
even passed into a custom. They paid for the noise they made with
their spurs, and this tax was a source of income to the canons;[397]
pickpockets, loose girls, came there by crowds; these latter struck their
bargains while service was going on. Imagine, in short, that the
scruples of conscience and the severity of the Puritans were at that
time odious and ridiculed on the stage, and judge of the difference
between this sensual, unbridled England, and the correct, disciplined,
stiff England of our own time. Ecclesiastical or secular, we find no signs
of rule. In the failure of faith, reason had not gained sway, and opinion
is as void of authority as tradition. The imbecile age, which has just
ended, continues buried in scorn, with its ravings, its verse-makers, and
its pedantic text-books; and out of the liberal opinions derived from
antiquity, from Italy, France, and Spain, everyone could pick and choose
as it pleased him, without stooping to restraint or acknowledging a
superiority. There was no model imposed on them, as nowadays;
instead of affecting imitation, they affected originality.[398] Each strove
to be himself, with his own oaths, peculiar ways, costumes, his
specialties of conduct and humor, and to be unlike everyone else. They
said not, "So and so is done," but "I do so and so." Instead of
restraining, they gave free vent to themselves. There was no etiquette
of society; save for an exaggerated jargon of chivalresque courtesy,
they are masters of speech and action on the impulse of the moment.
You will find them free from decorum, as of all else. In this outbreak
and absence of fetters, they resemble fine strong horses let loose in the
meadow. Their inborn instincts have not been tamed, nor muzzled, nor
diminished.
On the contrary, they have been preserved intact by bodily and military
training; and escaping as they were from barbarism, not from
civilization, they had not been acted upon by the innate softening and
hereditary tempering which are new transmitted with the blood, and
civilize a man from the moment of his birth. This is why man, who for
three centuries has been a domestic animal, was still almost a savage
beast, and the force of his muscles and the strength of his nerves
increased the boldness and energy of his passions. Look at these
uncultivated men, men of the people, how suddenly the blood warms
and rises to their face; their fists double, their lips press together, and
those vigorous bodies rush at once into action. The courtiers of that
age were like our men of the people. They had the same taste for the
exercise of their limbs, the same indifference toward the inclemencies
of the weather, the same coarseness of language, the same
undisguised sensuality. They were carmen in body and gentlemen in
sentiment, with the dress of actors and the tastes of artists. "At
fourtene," says John Hardyng, "a lordes sonnes shalle to felde hunte
the dere, and catch an hardynesse. For dere to hunte and slea, and see
them blede, ane hardyment gyffith to his courage.... At sextene yere, to
werray and to wage, to juste and ryde, and castels to assayle... and
every day his armure to assay in fete of armes with some of his
meyne."[399] When ripened to manhood, he is employed with the bow,
in wrestling, leaping, vaulting. Henry VII's court, in its noisy merriment,
was like a village fair. The king, says Holinshed, exercised himself "dailie
in shooting, singing, dancing, wrestling, casting of the barre, plaieing at
the recorders, flute, virginals, in setting of songs, and making of
ballads." He leaps the moats with a pole, and was once within an ace of
being killed. He is so fond of wrestling, that publicly, on the field of the
Cloth of Gold, he seized Francis I in his arms to try a throw with him.
This is how a common soldier or a bricklayer nowadays tries a new
comrade. In fact, they regarded gross jests and brutal buffooneries as
amusements, as soldiers and bricklayers do now. In every nobleman's
house there was a fool, whose business it was to utter pointed jests, to
make eccentric gestures, horrible faces, to sing licentious songs, as we
might hear now in a beer-house. They thought insults and obscenity a
joke. They were foul-mouthed, they listened to Rabelais's words
undiluted, and delighted in conversation which would revolt us. They
had no respect for humanity; the rules of proprieties and the habits of
good breeding began only under Louis XIV, and by imitation of the
French; at this time they all blurted out the word that fitted in, and that
was most frequently a coarse word. You will see on the stage, in
Shakespeare's "Pericles," the filth of a haunt of vice.[400] The great
lords, the well-dressed ladies, speak billingsgate. When Henry V pays
his court to Catherine of France, it is with the coarse bearing of a sailor
who may have taken a fancy to a sutler; and like the tars who tattoo a
heart on their arms to prove their love for the girls they left behind
them, there were men who "devoured sulphur and drank urine"[401] to
win their mistress by a proof of affection. Humanity is as much lacking
as decency.[402] Blood, suffering, does not move them. The court
frequents bear and bull baitings, where dogs are ripped up and chained
beasts are sometimes beaten to death, and it was, says an officer of
the palace, "a charming entertainment."[403] No wonder they used their
arms like clodhoppers and gossips. Elizabeth used to beat her maids of
honor, "so that these beautiful girls could often be heard crying and
lamenting in a piteous manner." One day she spat upon Sir Mathew's
fringed coat; at another time, when Essex, whom she was scolding,
turned his back, she gave him a box on the ear. It was then the
practice of great ladies to beat their children and their servants. Poor
Jane Grey was sometimes so wretchedly "boxed, struck, pinched, and
ill-treated in other manners which she dare not relate," that she used to
wish herself dead. Their first idea is to come to words, to blows, to
have satisfaction. As in feudal times, they appeal at once to arms, and
retain the habit of taking the law in their own hands, and without delay.
"On Thursday laste," writes Gilbert Talbot to the Earl and Countess of
Shrewsbury, "as my Lorde Rytche was rydynge in the streates, there
was one Wyndam that stode in a dore, and shotte a dagge at him,
thynkynge to have slayne him. ... The same daye, also, as Sr John
Conway was goynge in the streetes, Mr. Lodovyke Grevell came sodenly
upon him, and stroke him on the hedd wth a sworde.... I am forced to
trouble yor Honors wth thes tryflynge matters, for I know no greater."
[404] No one, not even the queen, is safe among these violent

dispositions.[405] Again, when one man struck another in the precincts

of the court, his hand was cut off, and the arteries stopped with a red-
hot iron. Only such atrocious imitations of their own crimes, and the
painful image of bleeding and suffering flesh, could tame their
vehemence and restrain the uprising of their instincts. Judge now what
materials they furnish to the theatre, and what characters they look for
at the theatre. To please the public, the stage cannot deal too much in
open lust and the strongest passions; it must depict man attaining the
limit of his desires, unchecked, almost mad, now trembling and rooted
before the white palpitating flesh which his eyes devour, now haggard
and grinding his teeth before the enemy whom he wishes to tear to
pieces, now carried beyond himself and overwhelmed at the sight of
the honors and wealth which he covets, always raging and enveloped in