Chapter VI: Part 6

Other books followed on the same side, of which Bekker's, published about a century later, was the most important. It is well reasoned, learned, and tedious to a masterly degree. But though the belief in witchcraft might be shaken, it still had the advantage of being on the whole orthodox and respectable. Wise men, as usual, insisted on regarding superstition as of one substance with faith, and objected to any scouring of the shield of religion, lest, like that of Cornelius Scriblerus, it should suddenly turn out to be nothing more than "a paltry old sconce with the nozzle broke off." The Devil continued to be the only recognized Minister Resident of God upon earth. When we remember that one man's accusation on his death-bed was enough to constitute grave presumption of witchcraft, it might seem singular that dying testimonies were so long of no avail against the common credulity. But it should be remembered that men are mentally no less than corporeally gregarious, and that public opinion, the fetish even of the nineteenth century, makes men, whether for good or ill, into a mob, which either hurries the individual judgment along with it, or runs over and tramples it into insensibility. Those who are so fortunate as to occupy the philosophical position of spectators _ab extra_ are very few in any generation.

There were exceptions, it is true, but the old cruelties went on. In 1610 a case came before the tribunal of the _Tourelle_, and when the counsel for the accused argued at some length that sorcery was ineffectual, and that the Devil could not destroy life, President Seguier told him that he might spare his breath, since the court had long been convinced on those points. And yet two years later the grand-vicars of the Bishop of Beauvais solemnly summoned Beelzebuth, Satan, Motelu, and Briffaut, with the four legions under their charge, to appear and sign an agreement never again to enter the bodies of reasonable or other creatures, under pain of excommunication! If they refused, they were to be given over to "the power of hell to be tormented and tortured more than was customary, three thousand years after the judgment." Under this proclamation they all came in, like reconstructed rebels, and signed whatever document was put before them. Toward the middle of the seventeenth century, the safe thing was still to believe, or at any rate to profess belief. Sir Thomas Browne, though he had written an exposure of "Vulgar Errors," testified in court to his faith in the possibility of witchcraft. Sir Kenelm Digby, in his "Observations on the Religio Medici," takes, perhaps, as advanced ground as any, when he says: "Neither do I deny there are witches; I only reserve my assent till I meet with stronger motives to carry it." The position of even enlightened men of the world in that age might be called semi-sceptical. La Bruyère, no doubt, expresses the average of opinion: "Que penser de la magie et du sortilége? La théorie en est obscurcie, les principes vagues, incertains, et qui approchent du visionnaire; mais il y a des faits embarrassants, affirmés par des hommes graves qui les ont vus; les admettre tous, ou les nier tous, paraît un égal inconvénient, et j'ose dire qu'en cela comme en toutes les choses extraordinaires et qui sorteut des communes règles, il y a un parti à trouver entre les âmes crédules et les esprits forts."[117] Montaigne, to be sure, had long before declared his entire disbelief, and yet the Parliament of Bourdeaux, his own city, condemned a man to be burned as a _noüeur d'aiguillettes_ so lately as 1718. Indeed, it was not, says Maury, till the first quarter of the eighteenth century that one might safely publish his incredulity in France. In Scotland, witches were burned for the last time in 1722. Garinet cites the case of a girl near Amiens possessed by three demons,--Mimi, Zozo, and Crapoulet,--in 1816.

The two beautiful volumes of Mr. Upham are, so far as I know, unique in their kind. It is, in some respects, a clinical lecture on human nature, as well as on the special epidemical disease under which the patient is laboring. He has written not merely a history of the so-called Salem Witchcraft, but has made it intelligible by a minute account of the place where the delusion took its rise, the persons concerned in it, whether as actors or sufferers, and the circumstances which led to it. By deeds, wills, and the records of courts and churches, by plans, maps, and drawings, he has recreated Salem Village as it was two hundred years ago, so that we seem wellnigh to talk with its people and walk over its fields, or through its cart-tracks and bridle-roads. We are made partners in parish and village feuds, we share in the chimney-corner gossip, and learn for the first time how many mean and merely human motives, whether consciously or unconsciously, gave impulse and intensity to the passions of the actors in that memorable tragedy which dealt the death-blow in this country to the belief in Satanic compacts. Mr. Upham's minute details, which give us something like a photographic picture of the in-door and out-door scenery that surrounded the events he narrates, help us materially to understand their origin and the course they inevitably took. In this respect his book is original and full of new interest. To know the kind of life these people led, the kind of place they dwelt in, and the tenor of their thought, makes much real to us that was conjectural before. The influences of outward nature, of remoteness from the main highways of the world's thought, of seclusion, as the foster-mother of traditionary beliefs, of a hard life and unwholesome diet in exciting or obscuring the brain through the nerves and stomach, have been hitherto commonly overlooked in accounting for the phenomena of witchcraft. The great persecutions for this imaginary crime have always taken place in lonely places, among the poor, the ignorant, and, above all, the ill-fed.

One of the best things in Mr. Upham's book is the portrait of Parris, the minister of Salem Village, in whose household the children who, under the assumed possession of evil spirits, became accusers and witnesses, began their tricks. He is shown to us pedantic and something of a martinet in church discipline and ceremony, somewhat inclined to magnify his office, fond of controversy as he was skilful and rather unscrupulous in the conduct of it, and glad of any occasion to make himself prominent. Was he the unconscious agent of his own superstition, or did he take advantage of the superstition of others for purposes of his own? The question is not an easy one to answer. Men will sacrifice everything, sometimes even themselves, to their pride of logic and their love of victory. Bodin loses sight of humanity altogether in his eagerness to make out his case, and display his learning in the canon and civil law. He does not scruple to exaggerate, to misquote, to charge his antagonists with atheism, sorcery, and insidious designs against religion and society, that he may persuade the jury of Europe to bring in a verdict of guilty.[118] Yet there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his belief. Was Parris equally sincere? On the whole, I think it likely that he was. But if we acquit Parris, what shall we say of the demoniacal girls? The probability seems to be that those who began in harmless deceit found themselves at length involved so deeply, that dread of shame and punishment drove them to an extremity where their only choice was between sacrificing themselves, or others to save themselves. It is not unlikely that some of the younger girls were so far carried along by imitation or imaginative sympathy as in some degree to "credit their own lie." Any one who has watched or made experiments in animal magnetism knows how easy it is to persuade young women of nervous temperaments that they are doing that by the will of another which they really do by an obscure volition of their own, under the influence of an imagination adroitly guided by the magnetizer. The marvellous is so fascinating, that nine persons in ten, if once persuaded that a thing is possible, are eager to believe it probable, and at last cunning in convincing themselves that it is proven. But it is impossible to believe that the possessed girls in this case did not know how the pins they vomited got into their mouths. Mr. Upham has shown, in the case of Anne Putnam, Jr., an hereditary tendency to hallucination, if not insanity. One of her uncles had seen the Devil by broad daylight in the novel disguise of a blue boar, in which shape, as a tavern sign, he had doubtless proved more seductive than in his more ordinary transfigurations. A great deal of light is let in upon the question of whether there was deliberate imposture or no, by the narrative of Rev. Mr. Turell of Medford, written in 1728, which gives us all the particulars of a case of pretended possession in Littleton, eight years before. The eldest of three sisters began the game, and found herself before long obliged to take the next in age into her confidence. By and by the youngest, finding her sisters pitied and caressed on account of their supposed sufferings while she was neglected, began to play off the same tricks. The usual phenomena followed. They were convulsed, they fell into swoons, they were pinched and bruised, they were found in the water, on the top of a tree or of the barn. To these places they said they were conveyed through the air, and there were those who had seen them flying, which shows how strong is the impulse which prompts men to conspire with their own delusion, where the marvellous is concerned. The girls did whatever they had heard or read that was common in such cases. They even accused a respectable neighbor as the cause of their torments. There were some doubters, but "so far as I can learn," says Turell, "the greater number believed and said they were under the evil hand, or possessed by Satan." But the most interesting fact of all is supplied by the confession of the elder sister, made eight years later under stress of remorse. Having once begun, they found returning more tedious than going o'er. To keep up their cheat made life a burden to them, but they could not stop. Thirty years earlier, their juggling might have proved as disastrous as that at Salem Village. There, parish and boundary feuds had set enmity between neighbors, and the girls, called on to say who troubled them, cried out upon those whom they had been wont to hear called by hard names at home. They probably had no notion what a frightful ending their comedy was to have; but at any rate they were powerless, for the reins had passed out of their hands into the sterner grasp of minister and magistrate. They were dragged deeper and deeper, as men always are by their own lie.

The proceedings at the Salem trials are sometimes spoken of as if they were exceptionally cruel. But, in fact, if compared with others of the same kind, they were exceptionally humane. At a time when Baxter could tell with satisfaction of a "_reading_ parson" eighty years old, who, after being kept awake five days and nights, confessed his dealings with the Devil, it is rather wonderful that no mode of torture other than mental was tried at Salem. Nor were the magistrates more besotted or unfair than usual in dealing with the evidence. Now and then, it is true, a man more sceptical or intelligent than common had exposed some pretended demoniac. The Bishop of Orléans, in 1598, read aloud to Martha Brossier the story of the Ephesian Widow, and the girl, hearing Latin, and taking it for Scripture, went forthwith into convulsions. He found also that the Devil who possessed her could not distinguish holy from profane water. But that there were deceptions did not shake the general belief in the reality of possession. The proof in such cases could not and ought not to be subjected to the ordinary tests. "If many natural things," says Bodin, "are incredible and some of them incomprehensible, _a fortiori_ the power of supernatural intelligences and the doings of spirits are incomprehensible. But error has risen to its height in this, that those who have denied the power of spirits and the doings of sorcerers have wished to dispute physically concerning supernatural or metaphysical things, which is a notable incongruity." That the girls were really possessed, seemed to Stoughton and his colleagues the most rational theory,--a theory in harmony with the rest of their creed, and sustained by the unanimous consent of pious men as well as the evidence of that most cunning and least suspected of all sorcerers, the Past,--and how confront or cross-examine invisible witnesses, especially witnesses whom it was a kind of impiety to doubt? Evidence that would have been convincing in ordinary cases was of no weight against the general prepossession. In 1659 the house of a man in Brightling, Sussex, was troubled by a demon, who set it on fire at various times, and was continually throwing things about. The clergy of the neighborhood held a day of fasting and prayer in consequence. A maid-servant was afterwards detected as the cause of the missiles. But this did not in the least stagger Mr. Bennet, minister of the parish, who merely says: "There was a _seeming blur_ cast, though not on the whole, yet upon some part of it, for their servant-girl was at last found throwing some things," and goes off into a eulogium on the "efficacy of prayer."

In one respect, to which Mr. Upham first gives the importance it deserves, the Salem trials were distinguished from all others. Though some of the accused had been terrified into confession, yet not one persevered in it, but all died protesting their innocence, and with unshaken constancy, though an acknowledgment of guilt would have saved the lives of all. This martyr proof of the efficacy of Puritanism in the character and conscience may be allowed to outweigh a great many sneers at Puritan fanaticism. It is at least a testimony to the courage and constancy which a profound religious sentiment had made common among the people of whom these sufferers were average representatives. The accused also were not, as was commonly the case, abandoned by their friends. In all the trials of this kind there is nothing so pathetic as the picture of Jonathan Cary holding up the weary arms of his wife during her trial, and wiping away the sweat from her brow and the tears from her face. Another remarkable fact is this, that while in other countries the delusion was extinguished by the incredulity of the upper classes and the interference of authority, here the reaction took place among the people themselves, and here only was an attempt made at some legislative restitution, however inadequate. Mr. Upham's sincere and honest narrative, while it never condescends to a formal plea, is the best vindication possible of a community which was itself the greatest sufferer by the persecution which its credulity engendered.

If any lesson may be drawn from the tragical and too often disgustful history of witchcraft, it is not one of exultation at our superior enlightenment or shame at the shortcomings of the human intellect. It is rather one of charity and self-distrust. When we see what inhuman absurdities men in other respects wise and good have clung to as the corner-stone of their faith in immortality and a divine ordering of the world, may we not suspect that those who now maintain political or other doctrines which seem to us barbarous and unenlightened, may be, for all that, in the main as virtuous and clear-sighted as ourselves? While we maintain our own side with an honest ardor of conviction, let us not forget to allow for mortal incompetence in the other. And if there are men who regret the Good Old Times, without too clear a notion of what they were, they should at least be thankful that we are rid of that misguided energy of faith which justified conscience in making men unrelentingly cruel. Even Mr. Leckie softens a little at the thought of the many innocent and beautiful beliefs of which a growing scepticism has robbed us in the decay of supernaturalism. But we need not despair; for, after all, scepticism is first cousin of credulity, and we are not surprised to see the tough doubter Montaigne hanging up his offerings in the shrine of our Lady of Loreto. Scepticism commonly takes up the room left by defect of imagination, and is the very quality of mind most likely to seek for sensual proof of supersensual things. If one came from the dead, it could not believe; and yet it longs for such a witness, and will put up with a very dubious one. So long as night is left and the helplessness of dream, the wonderful will not cease from among men. While we are the solitary prisoners of darkness, the witch seats herself at the loom of thought, and weaves strange figures into the web that looks so familiar and ordinary in the dry light of every-day. Just as we are flattering ourselves that the old spirit of sorcery is laid, behold the tables are tipping and the floors drumming all over Christendom. The faculty of wonder is not defunct, but is only getting more and more emancipated from the unnatural service of terror, and restored to its proper function as a minister of delight. A higher mode of belief is the best exorciser, because it makes the spiritual at one with the actual world instead of hostile, or at best alien. It has been the grossly material interpretations of spiritual doctrine that have given occasion to the two extremes of superstition and unbelief. While the resurrection of the body has been insisted on, that resurrection from the body which is the privilege of all has been forgotten. Superstition in its baneful form was largely due to the enforcement by the Church of arguments that involved a _petitio principii_, for it is the miserable necessity of all false logic to accept of very ignoble allies. Fear became at length its chief expedient for the maintenance of its power; and as there is a beneficent necessity laid upon a majority of mankind to sustain and perpetuate the order of things they are born into, and to make all new ideas manfully prove their right, first, to be at all, and then to be heard, many even superior minds dreaded the tearing away of vicious accretions as dangerous to the whole edifice of religion and society. But if this old ghost be fading away in what we regard as the dawn of a better day, we may console ourselves by thinking that perhaps, after all, we are not so _much_ wiser than our ancestors. The rappings, the trance mediums, the visions of hands without bodies, the sounding of musical instruments without visible fingers, the miraculous inscriptions on the naked flesh, the enlivenment of furniture,--we have invented none of them, they are all heirlooms. There is surely room for yet another schoolmaster, when a score of seers advertise themselves in Boston newspapers. And if the metaphysicians can never rest till they have taken their watch to pieces and have arrived at a happy positivism as to its structure, though at the risk of bringing it to a no-go, we may be sure that the majority will always take more satisfaction in seeing its hands mysteriously move on, even if they should err a little as to the precise time of day established by the astronomical observatories.

Footnotes:

[98] Salem Witchcraft, with an Account of Salem Village, and a
History of Opinions on Witchcraft and Kindred Subjects. By Charles W.
Upham. Boston: Wiggin and Lunt. 1867. 2 vols.

Ioannis Wieri de praestigiis daemonum, et incantationibus ac
veneficiis libri sex, postrema editione sexta aucti et recogniti.
Accessit liber apologeticus et pseudomonarchia daemonum. Cum rerum et
verborum copioso indice. Cum Caes. Maiest. Regisq: Galliarum gratia
et privelegio. Basiliae ex officina Oporiniani, 1583.

Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft: proving the common opinions of
Witches contracting with Divels, Spirits, or Familiars; and their
power to kill, torment, and consume the bodies of men, women, and
children, or other creatures by diseases or otherwise; their flying
in the Air, &c.; To be but imaginary Erronious conceptions and
novelties; Wherein also the lewde, unchristian practises of
Witchmongers, upon aged, melancholy, ignorant and superstitious
people in extorting confessions by inhumane terrors and Tortures, is
notably detected. Also The knavery and confederacy of Conjurors. The
impious blasphemy of Inchanters. The imposture of Soothsayers, and
infidelity of Atheists. The delusion of Pythonists, Figure-casters,
Astrologers, and vanity of Dreamers. The fruitlesse beggarly art of
Alchimistry. The horrible art of Poisoning and all the tricks and
conveyances of juggling and lieger-demain are fully deciphered. With
many other things opened that have long lain hidden: though very
necessary to be known for the undeceiving of Judges, Justices, and
Juries, and for the preservation of poor, aged, deformed, ignorant
people; frequently taken, arraigned, condemned and executed for
Witches, when according to a right understanding, and a good
conscience, Physick, Food, and necessaries should be administered to
him. Whereunto is added a treatise upon the nature and substance of
Spirits and Divels &c., all written and published in Anno 1584. By
Reginald Scot, Esquire. Printed by R.C. and are to be sold by Giles
Calvert dwelling at the Black Spread-Eagle, at the West-End of Pauls,
1651.

De la Demonomanie des Sorciers. A Monseigneur M. Chrestofe De Thou,
Chevalier, Seigneur de Coeli, premier President en la Cour de
Parlement et Conseiller du Roy en son privé Conseil. Reveu, Corrigé,
et augmenté d'une grande partie. Par I. Bodin Angevin. A Paris: Chez
Iacques Du Puys, Libraire Iuré, á la Samaritaine. M.D.LXXXVII. Avec
privilege du Roy.

Magica, seu mirabilium historiarum de Spectris et Apparitionibus
spirituum: Item, de magicis et diabolicis incantationibus. De
Miraculis, Oraculis, Vaticiniis, Divinationibus, Praedictionibus,
Revelationibus et aliis eiusmodi multis ac varijs praestigijs,
ludibrijs et imposturis malorum Daemonum. Libri II. Ex probatis et
fide dignis historiarum scriptoribus diligenter collecti. Islebiae,
cura, Typis et sumptibus Henningi Grossij Bibl. Lipo. 1597. Cum
privilegio.

The displaying of supposed Witchcraft wherein is affirmed that there
are many sorts of Deceivers and Impostors, and divers persons under a
passive delusion of Melancholy and Fancy. But that there is a
corporeal league made betwixt the Devil and the Witch, or that he
sucks on the Witch's body, has carnal copulation, or that Witches are
turned into Cats, Dogs, raise Tempests or the like is utterly denied
and disproved. Wherein is also handled, The existence of Angels and
Spirits, the truth of Apparitions, the Nature of Astral and Sydereal
Spirits, the force of Charms and Philters; with other abstruse
matters. By John Webster, Practitioner in Physick. Falsa etenim
opiniones Hominum non solum surdos sed et coecos faciunt, ita ut
videre nequeant quae aliis perspicua apparent. Galen. lib. 8, de
Comp. Med. London: Printed by I.M. and are to be sold by the
booksellers in London. 1677.

Sadducismus Triumphatus: or Full and Plain Evidence concerning
Witches and Apparitions. In two Parts. The First treating of their
Possibility; the Second of their Real Existence. By Joseph Glanvil,
late Chaplain in Ordinary to His Majesty, and Fellow of the Royal
Society. The third edition. The advantages whereof above the former,
the Reader may understand out of Dr H. More's Account prefixed
therunto. With two Authentick, but wonderful Stories of certain
Swedish Witches. Done into English by A. Horneck DD. London, Printed
for S.L. and are to be sold by Anth. Baskerville at the Bible, the
corner of Essex-street, without Temple-Bar. M.DCLXXXIX.

Demonologie ou Traitte des Demons et Sorciers: De leur puissance et
impuissance: Par Fr. Perraud. Ensemble L'Antidemon de Mascon, ou
Histoire Veritable de ce qu'un Demon a fait et dit, il y a quelques
années en la maison dudit Sr. Perreaud a Mascon. I. Jacques iv. 7, 8.
"Resistez au Diable, et il s'enfuira de vous. Approchez vous de Dieu,
et il s'approchera de vous." A Geneve, chez Pierre Aubert. M,DC,LIII.

The Wonders of the Invisible World. Being an account of the tryals of
several witches lately executed in New-England. By Cotton Mather,
D.D. To which is added a farther account of the tryals of the New
England Witches. By Increase Mather, D.D., President of Harvard
College. London: John Russell Smith, Soho Square. 1862. (First
printed in Boston, 1692.)

I.N.D.N.J.C. Dissertatio Juridica de Lamiis earumque processu
criminali, _Von Hexen und dem Peinl. Proceß wider dieselben_, Quam,
auxiliante Divina Gratia, Consensu et Authoritate Magnifici JCtorum
Ordinis in illustribus Athenis Salanis sub praesidio Magnifici,
Nobilissimi, Amplissimi, Consultissimi, atque Excellentissimi Dn.
Ernesti Frider. _Schroeter_ hereditarii in _Wickerstädt_, JCti et
Antecessoris hujus Salanae Famigeratissimi, Consiliarii Saxonici,
Curiae Provincialis, Facultatis Juridicae, et Scabinatus Assessoris
longe Gravissimi, Domini Patroni Praeceptoris et Promotoris sui nullo
non honoris et observantiae cultu sanctè devenerandi, colendi,
publicae Eruditorum censurae subjicit Michael Paris _Walburger_,
Groebzigâ Anhaltinus, in Acroaterio JCtorum ad diem 1. Maj. A. 1670.
Editio Tertia. Jenae, Typis Pauli Ehrichii, 1707.

Histoire de Diables de Loudun, ou de la Possession des Religieuses
Ursulines, et de la condemnation et du suplice d'Urbain Grandier,
Curé de la même ville. Cruels effets de la Vengeance du Cardinal de
Richelieu. A Amsterdam Aux depens de la Compagnie. M.DCC.LII.

A view of the Invisible World, or General History of Apparitions.
Collected from the best Authorities, both Antient and Modern, and
attested by Authors of the highest Reputation and Credit. Illustrated
with a Variety of Notes and parallel Cases; in which some Account of
the Nature and Cause of Departed Spirits visiting their former
Stations by returning again into the present World, is treated in a
Manner different to the prevailing Opinions of Mankind. And an
Attempt is made from Rational Principles to account for the Species
of such supernatural Appearances, when they may be suppos'd
consistent with the Divine Appointment in the Government of the
World. With the sentiments of Monsieur Le Clerc, Mr. Locke, Mr.
Addison, and Others on this important Subject. In which some humorous
and diverting instances are remark'd, in order to divert that Gloom
of Melancholy that naturally arises in the Human Mind, from reading
or meditating on such Subjects Illustrated with suitable Cuts.
London: Printed in the year M,DCC,LII. [Mainly from DeFoe's "History
of Apparitions."]

Satan's Invisible World discovered; or, a choice Collection of Modern
Relations, proving evidently, against the Atheists of this present
Age, that there are Devils, Spirits, Witches and Apparitions, from
Authentic Records, Attestations of Witnesses, and undoubted Verity.
To which is added that marvellous History of Major Weir and his
Sister, the Witches of Balgarran, Pittenweem and Calder, &c. By
George Sinclair, late Professor of Philosophy in Glasgow. No man
should be vain that he can injure the merit of a Book; for the
meanest rogue may burn a City or kill a Hero; whereas he could never
build the one, or equal the other. Sir George M'Kenzie, Edinburgh:
Sold by P. Anderson, Parliament Square. M.DCC.LXXX.

La Magie et l'Astrologie dans I'Antiquité et au Moyen Age, ou Étude
sur les superstitions païennes qui se sont perpétuées jusqu'a nos
jours. Par L.F. Alfred Maury. Troisième Edition revue et corrigée.
Paris: Didier. 1864.

[99] Lucian, in his "Liars," puts this opinion into the mouth of
Arignotus. The theory by which Lucretius seeks to explain
apparitions, though materialistic, seems to allow some influence also
to the working of imagination. It is hard otherwise to explain how
his _simulacra_, (which are not unlike the _astral spirits_ of later
times) should appear in dreams.

Quae simulacra....
.... nobis vigilantibus obvia mentes
terrificant atque in somnis, cum saepe figuras
contuimur miras simulacraque luce carentum
quae nos horrifice languentis saepe sopore
excierunt.

_De Rer. Nat._ IV. 33-37, ed. Munro.

[100] Pliny's Letters, VII. 27. Melmoth's translation.

[101] Something like this is the speech of Don Juan, after the statue
of Don Gonzales has gone out:

"Pero todas son ideas
Que da a la imaginacion
El temor; y temer muertos
Es muy villano temor.
Que si un cuerpo noble, vivo,
Con potencias y razon
Y con alma no se tema,
¿Quien cuerpos muertos temió?"

_El Burlador de Sevilla_, A. iii. s. 15.

[102] Théatre Français au Moyen Age (Monmerqué et Michel), pp. 139,
140.

[103]
"There sat Auld Nick in shape o' beast,
A towzy tyke, black, grim, an' large,
To gie them music was his charge."

[104] Hence, perhaps, the name Valant applied to the Devil, about the
origin of which Grimm is in doubt.

[105] One foot of the Greek Empusa was an ass's hoof.

[106] Salt was forbidden at these witch-feasts.

[107] De Lamiis, p. 59 _et seq_.

[108] If the _Blokula_ of the Swedish witches be a reminiscence of
this, it would seem to point back to remote times and heathen
ceremonies. But it is so impossible to distinguish what was put into
the mind of those who confessed by their examining torturers from
what may have been there before, the result of a common superstition,
that perhaps, after all, the meeting on mountains may have been
suggested by what Pliny says of the dances of Satyrs on Mount Atlas.

[109] Wierus, whose book was published not long after Faust's death,
apparently doubted the whole story, for he alludes to it with an _ut
fertur,_ and plainly looked on him as a mountebank.

[110] See Grimm's D.M., under _Hexenfart, Wutendes Heer_, &c.

[111] Some Catholics, indeed, affirmed that he himself was the son of
a demon who lodged in his father's house under the semblance of a
merchant. Wierus says that a bishop preached to that effect in 1565,
and gravely refutes the story.

[112] Footnote: Melancthon, however, used to tell of a possessed girl
in Italy who knew no Latin, but the Devil in her, being asked by
Bonaroico, a Bolognese professor, what was the best verse in Virgil,
answered at once:--

"Discite justitiam moniti, et non temnere divos,"--

a somewhat remarkable concession on the part of a fallen angel.

[113] This story seems mediaeval and Gothic enough, but is hardly
more so than bringing the case of the Furies _v._ Orestes before the
Areopagus, and putting Apollo in the witness-box, as Aeschylus has
done. The classics, to be sure, are always so classic! In the
_Eumenides_, Apollo takes the place of the good angel. And why not?
For though a demon, and a lying one, he has crept in to the calendar
under his other nnme of Helios as St. Hellas. Could any of his
oracles have foretold this?

[114] Mr. Leckie, in his admirable chapter on Witchcraft, gives a
little more credit to the enlightenment of the Church of England in
this matter than it would seem fairly to deserve. More and Glanvil
were faithful sons of the Church; and if the persecution of witches
was especially rife during the ascendency of the Puritans, it was
because they happened to be in power while there was a reaction
against Sadducism. All the convictions were under the statute of
James I., who was no Puritan. After the restoration, the reaction was
the other way, and Hobbism became the fashion. It is more
philosophical to say that the age believes this and that, than that
the particular men who live in it do so.

[115] I have no means of ascertaining whether he did or not. He was
more probably charged with it by the inquisitors. Mr. Leckie seems to
write of him only upon hearsay, for he calls him Peter "of Apono,"
apparently translating a French translation of the Latin "Aponus."
The only book attributed to him that I have ever seen is itself a
kind of manual of magic.

[116] "With the names and surnames," says Bodin, indignantly, "of
seventy-two princes, and of seven million four hundred and five
thousand nine hundred and twenty-six devils, _errors excepted_."

[117] Cited by Maury, p. 221, note 4.

[118] There is a kind of compensation in the fact that he himself
lived to be accused of sorcery and Judaism.

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE.

It may be doubted whether any language be rich enough to maintain more than one truly great poet,--and whether there be more than one period, and that very short, in the life of a language, when such a phenomenon as a great poet is possible. It may be reckoned one of the rarest pieces of good-luck that ever fell to the share of a race, that (as was true of Shakespeare) its most rhythmic genius, its acutest intellect, its profoundest imagination, and its healthiest understanding should have been combined in one man, and that he should have arrived at the full development of his powers at the moment when the material in which he was to work--that wonderful composite called English, the best result of the confusion of tongues--was in its freshest perfection. The English-speaking nations should build a monument to the misguided enthusiasts of the Plain of Shinar; for, as the mixture of many bloods seems to have made them the most vigorous of modern races, so has the mingling of divers speeches given them a language which is perhaps the noblest vehicle of poetic thought that ever existed.

Had Shakespeare been born fifty years earlier, he would have been cramped by a book-language not yet flexible enough for the demands of rhythmic emotion, not yet sufficiently popularized for the natural and familiar expression of supreme thought, not yet so rich in metaphysical phrase as to render possible that ideal representation of the great passions which is the aim and end of Art, not yet subdued by practice and general consent to a definiteness of accentuation essential to ease and congruity of metrical arrangement. Had he been born fifty years later, his ripened manhood would have found itself in an England absorbed and angry with the solution of political and religious problems, from which his whole nature was averse, instead of in that Elizabethan social system, ordered and planetary in functions and degrees as the angelic hierarchy of the Areopagite, where his contemplative eye could crowd itself with various and brilliant picture, and whence his impartial brain--one lobe of which seems to have been Normanly refined and the other Saxonly sagacious--could draw its morals of courtly and worldly wisdom, its lessons of prudence and magnanimity. In estimating Shakespeare, it should never be forgotten, that, like Goethe, he was essentially observer and artist, and incapable of partisanship. The passions, actions, sentiments, whose character and results he delighted to watch and to reproduce, are those of man in society as it existed; and it no more occurred to him to question the right of that society to exist than to criticise the divine ordination of the seasons. His business was with men as they were, not with man as he ought to be,--with the human soul as it is shaped or twisted into character by the complex experience of life, not in its abstract essence, as something to be saved or lost. During the first half of the seventeenth century, the centre of intellectual interest was rather in the other world than in this, rather in the region of thought and principle and conscience than in actual life. It was a generation in which the poet was, and felt himself, out of place. Sir Thomas Browne, out most imaginative mind since Shakespeare, found breathing-room, for a time, among the "_O altitudines!_" of religious speculation, but soon descended to occupy himself with the exactitudes of science. Jeremy Taylor, who half a century earlier would have been Fletcher's rival, compels his clipped fancy to the conventual discipline of prose, (Maid Marian turned nun,) and waters his poetic wine with doctrinal eloquence. Milton is saved from making total shipwreck of his large-utteranced genius on the desolate Noman's Land of a religious epic only by the lucky help of Satan and his colleagues, with whom, as foiled rebels and republicans, he cannot conceal his sympathy. As purely poet, Shakespeare would have come too late, had his lot fallen in that generation. In mind and temperament too exoteric for a mystic, his imagination could not have at once illustrated the influence of his epoch and escaped from it, like that of Browne; the equilibrium of his judgment, essential to him as an artist, but equally removed from propagandism, whether as enthusiast or logician, would have unfitted him for the pulpit; and his intellectual being was too sensitive to the wonder and beauty of outward life and Nature to have found satisfaction, as Milton's could, (and perhaps only by reason of his blindness,) in a world peopled by purely imaginary figures. We might fancy him becoming a great statesman, but he lacked the social position which could have opened that career to him. What we mean when we say _Shakespeare_, is something inconceivable either during the reign of Henry the Eighth, or the Commonwealth, and which would have been impossible after the Restoration.

All favorable stars seem to have been in conjunction at his nativity. The Reformation had passed the period of its vinous fermentation, and its clarified results remained as an element of intellectual impulse and exhilaration; there were small signs yet of the acetous and putrefactive stages which were to follow in the victory and decline of Puritanism. Old forms of belief and worship still lingered, all the more touching to Fancy, perhaps, that they were homeless and attainted; the light of sceptic day was baffled by depths of forest where superstitious shapes still cowered, creatures of immemorial wonder, the raw material of Imagination. The invention of printing, without yet vulgarizing letters, had made the thought and history of the entire past contemporaneous; while a crowd of translators put every man who could read in inspiring contact with the select souls of all the centuries. A new world was thus opened to intellectual adventure at the very time when the keel of Columbus had turned the first daring furrow of discovery in that unmeasured ocean which still girt the known earth with a beckoning horizon of hope and conjecture, which was still fed by rivers that flowed down out of primeval silences, and which still washed the shores of Dreamland. Under a wise, cultivated, and firm-handed monarch also, the national feeling of England grew rapidly more homogeneous and intense, the rather as the womanhood of the sovereign stimulated a more chivalric loyalty,--while the new religion, of which she was the defender, helped to make England morally, as it was geographically, insular to the continent of Europe.

If circumstances could ever make a great national poet, here were all the elements mingled at melting-heat in the alembic, and the lucky moment of projection was clearly come. If a great national poet could ever avail himself of circumstances, this was the occasion,--and, fortunately, Shakespeare was equal to it. Above all, we may esteem it lucky that he found words ready to his use, original and untarnished,--types of thought whose sharp edges were unworn by repeated impressions. In reading Hakluyt's Voyages, we are almost startled now and then to find that even common sailors could not tell the story of their wanderings without rising to an almost Odyssean strain, and habitually used a diction that we should be glad to buy back from desuetude at any cost. Those who look upon language only as anatomists of its structure, or who regard it as only a means of conveying abstract truth from mind to mind, as if it were so many algebraic formulae, are apt to overlook the fact that its being alive is all that gives it poetic value. We do not mean what is technically called a living language,--the contrivance, hollow as a speaking-trumpet, by which breathing and moving bipeds, even now, sailing o'er life's solemn main, are enabled to hail each other and make known their mutual shortness of mental stores,--but one that is still hot from the hearts and brains of a people, not hardened yet, but moltenly ductile to new shapes of sharp and clear relief in the moulds of new thought. So soon as a language has become literary, so soon as there is a gap between the speech of books and that of life, the language becomes, so far as poetry is concerned, almost as dead as Latin, and (as in writing Latin verses) a mind in itself essentially original becomes in the use of such a medium of utterance unconsciously reminiscential and reflective, lunar and not solar, in expression and even in thought. For words and thoughts have a much more intimate and genetic relation, one with the other, than most men have any notion of; and it is one thing to use our mother-tongue as if it belonged to us, and another to be the puppets of an overmastering vocabulary. "Ye know not," says Ascham, "what hurt ye do to Learning, that care not for Words, but for Matter, and so make a Divorce betwixt the Tongue and the Heart." _Lingua Toscana in bocca Romana_ is the Italian proverb; and that of poets should be, _The tongue of the people in the mouth of the scholar_. I imply here no assent to the early theory, _or,_ at any rate, practice, of Wordsworth, who confounded plebeian modes of thought with rustic forms of phrase, and then atoned for his blunder by absconding into a diction more Latinized than that of any poet of his century.

Shakespeare was doubly fortunate. Saxon by the father and Norman by the mother, he was a representative Englishman. A country boy, he learned first the rough and ready English of his rustic mates, who knew how to make nice verbs and adjectives courtesy to their needs. Going up to London, he acquired the _lingua aulica_ precisely at the happiest moment, just as it was becoming, in the strictest sense of the word, _modern,_--just as it had recruited itself, by fresh impressments from the Latin and Latinized languages, with new words to express the new ideas of an enlarging intelligence which printing and translation were fast making cosmopolitan,--words which, in proportion to their novelty, and to the fact that the mother-tongue and the foreign had not yet wholly mingled, must have been used with a more exact appreciation of their meaning.[119] It was in London, and chiefly by means of the stage, that a thorough amalgamation of the Saxon, Norman, and scholarly elements of English was brought about. Already, Puttenham, in his "Arte of English Poesy," declares that the practice of the capital and the country within sixty miles of it was the standard of correct diction, the _jus et norma loquendi._ Already Spenser had almost re-created English poetry,--and it is interesting to observe, that, scholar as he was, the archaic words which he was at first overfond of introducing are often provincialisms of purely English original. Already Marlowe had brought the English unrhymed pentameter (which had hitherto justified but half its name, by being always blank and never verse) to a perfection of melody, harmony, and variety which has never been surpassed. Shakespeare, then, found a language already to a certain extent _established_, but not yet fetlocked by dictionary and grammar mongers,--a versification harmonized, but which had not yet exhausted all its modulations, nor been set in the stocks by critics who deal judgment on refractory feet, that will dance to Orphean measures of which their judges are insensible. That the language was established is proved by its comparative uniformity as used by the dramatists, who wrote for mixed audiences, as well as by Ben Jonson's satire upon Marston's neologisms; that it at the same time admitted foreign words to the rights of citizenship on easier terms than now is in good measure equally true. What was of greater import, no arbitrary line had been drawn between high words and low; vulgar then meant simply what was common; poetry had not been aliened from the people by the establishment of an Upper House of vocables, alone entitled to move in the stately ceremonials of verse, and privileged from arrest while they forever keep the promise of meaning to the ear and break it to the sense. The hot conception of the poet had no time to cool while he was debating the comparative respectability of this phrase or that; but he snatched what word his instinct prompted, and saw no indiscretion in making a king speak as his country nurse might have taught him.[120] It was Waller who first learned in France that to talk in rhyme alone comported with the state of royalty. In the time of Shakespeare, the living tongue resembled that tree which Father Huc saw in Tartary, whose leaves were languaged,--and every hidden root of thought, every subtilest fibre of feeling, was mated by new shoots and leafage of expression, fed from those unseen sources in the common earth of human nature.

The Cabalists had a notion, that whoever found out the mystic word for anything attained to absolute mastery over that thing. The reverse of this is certainly true of poetic expression; for he who is thoroughly possessed of his thought, who imaginatively conceives an idea or image, becomes master of the word that shall most amply and fitly utter it. Heminge and Condell tell us, accordingly, that there was scarce a blot in the manuscripts they received from Shakespeare; and this is the natural corollary from the fact that such an imagination as his is as unparalleled as the force, variety, and beauty of the phrase in which it embodied itself.[121] We believe that Shakespeare, like all other great poets, instinctively used the dialect which he found current, and that his words are not more wrested from their ordinary meaning than followed necessarily from the unwonted weight of thought or stress of passion they were called on to support. He needed not to mask familiar thoughts in the weeds of unfamiliar phraseology; for the life that was in his mind could transfuse the language of every day with an intelligent vivacity, that makes it seem lambent with fiery purpose, and at each new reading a new creation. He could say with Dante, that "no word had ever forced him to say what he would not, though he had forced many a word to say what _it_ would not,"--but only in the sense that the mighty magic of his imagination had conjured out of it its uttermost secret of power or pathos. When I say that Shakespeare used the current language of his day, I mean only that he habitually employed such language as was universally comprehensible,--that he was not run away with by the hobby of any theory as to the fitness of this or that component of English for expressing certain thoughts or feelings. That the artistic value of a choice and noble diction was quite as well understood in his day as in ours is evident from the praises bestowed by his contemporaries on Drayton, and by the epithet "well-languaged" applied to Daniel, whose poetic style is as modern as that of Tennyson; but the endless absurdities about the comparative merits of Saxon and Norman-French, vented by persons incapable of distinguishing one tongue from the other, were as yet unheard of. Hasty generalizers are apt to overlook the fact, that the Saxon was never, to any great extent, a literary language. Accordingly, it held its own very well in the names of common things, but failed to answer the demands of complex ideas, derived from them. The author of "Piers Ploughman" wrote for the people,--Chaucer for the court. We open at random and count the Latin[122] words in ten verses of the "Vision" and ten of the "Romaunt of the Rose," (a translation from the French,) and find the proportion to be seven in the former and five in the latter.

The organs of the Saxon have always been unwilling and stiff in learning languages. He acquired only about as many British words as we have Indian ones, and I believe that more French and Latin was introduced through the pen and the eye than through the tongue and the ear. For obvious reasons, the question is one that must be decided by reference to prose-writers, and not poets; and it is, we think, pretty well settled that more words of Latin original were brought into the language in the century between 1550 and 1650 than in the whole period before or since,--and for the simple reason, that they were absolutely needful to express new modes and combinations of thought.[123] The language has gained immensely, by the infusion, in richness of synonyme and in the power of expressing nice shades of thought and feeling, but more than all in light-footed polysyllables that trip singing to the music of verse. There are certain cases, it is true, where the vulgar Saxon word is refined, and the refined Latin vulgar, in poetry,--as in _sweat_ and _perspiration_; but there are vastly more in which the Latin bears the bell. Perhaps there might be a question between the old English _again-rising_ and _resurrection;_ but there can be no doubt that _conscience_ is better than _inwit_, and _remorse_ than _again-bite_. Should we translate the title of Wordsworth's famous ode, "Intimations of Immortality," into "Hints of Deathlessness," it would hiss like an angry gander. If, instead of Shakespeare's

"Age cannot wither her,
Nor custom stale her infinite variety,"

we should say, "her boundless manifoldness," the sentiment would suffer in exact proportion with the music. What homebred English could ape the high Roman fashion of such togated words as

"The multitudinous sea incarnadine,"--

where the huddling epithet implies the tempest-tossed soul of the speaker, and at the same time pictures the wallowing waste of ocean more vividly than the famous phrase of Aeschylus does its rippling sunshine? Again, _sailor_ is less poetical than _mariner_, as Campbell felt, when he wrote,

"Ye mariners of England,"

and Coleridge, when he chose

"It was an ancient mariner,"

rather than

"It was an elderly seaman";

for it is as much the charm of poetry that it suggest a certain remoteness and strangeness as familiarity; and it is essential not only that we feel at once the meaning of the words in themselves, but also their melodic meaning in relation to each other, and to the sympathetic variety of the verse. A word once vulgarized can never be rehabilitated. We might say now a _buxom_ lass, or that a chambermaid was _buxom_, but we could not use the term, as Milton did, in its original sense of _bowsome_,--that is, _lithe, gracefully bending_.[124]

But the secret of force in writing lies not so much in the pedigree of nouns and adjectives and verbs, as in having something that you believe in to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it. It is when expression becomes an act of memory, instead of an unconscious necessity, that diction takes the place of warm and hearty speech. It is not safe to attribute special virtues (as Bosworth, for example, does to the Saxon) to words of whatever derivation, at least in poetry. Because Lear's "oak-cleaving thunderbolts," and "the all-dreaded thunder-stone" in "Cymbeline" are so fine, we would not give up Milton's Virgilian "fulmined over Greece," where the verb in English conveys at once the idea of flash and reverberation, but avoids that of riving and shattering. In the experiments made for casting the great bell for the Westminster Tower, it was found that the superstition which attributed the remarkable sweetness and purity of tone in certain old bells to the larger mixture of silver in their composition had no foundation in fact It was the cunning proportion in which the ordinary metals were balanced against each other, the perfection of form, and the nice gradations of thickness, that wrought the miracle. And it is precisely so with the language of poetry. The genius of the poet will tell him what word to use (else what use in his being poet at all?); and even then, unless the proportion and form, whether of parts or whole, be all that Art requires and the most sensitive taste finds satisfaction in, he will have failed to make what shall vibrate through all its parts with a silvery unison,--in other words, a poem.