Sleuthing in the Stacks [Reprint 2013 ed.] 9780674280052, 9780674730526

Citation preview

Sleuthing

in the Stacks

LONDON : HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Hayy Carving the Body of his Foster Dam From Simon Ockley, The Improvement of Human Reason, London: Powell, 1708

Sleuthing in the Stacks

BY R U D O L P H A L T R O C C H I Professor of Italian The University of California

H A R V A R D U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1944

COPYRIGHT,

I944

B Y T H E PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE

T Y P O G R A P H Y B Y MARGARET B . EVANS

PRINTED AT T H E HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRINTING OFFICE CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, U.S.A.

Gratefully to Julia Comrade in Lije and Letters

CONTENTS Threshold of Inquiry I. Handwriting in Search of an Author

xi 3

II. Lust and Leprosy

23

III. The Wea\er Sex

50

IV. Ancestors of Tarzan

74

V. Where There's No Will, There's a Way VI. Feather Duster in the Cathedral VII. God and Darwin Reconciled

125 184 227

Notes

243

Index of Names

271

ILLUSTRATIONS Hayy Carving the Body of his Foster DamFrontispiece Sample of the Mysterious Annotations Michelino's

18

Dante

Print of Michelino's Fifteenth-Century

194 Picture Print of Michelino's

195 Picture

Detail of so-called Chain Map of Florence

210 211

Threshold of Inquiry

T

H E first question for the detective is : What is the crime ?

In this case, a book. Where was it committed? In the dark, solitary aisles of library bookstacks. Why was it committed ? The motive is always a more complicated question. W h y does a writer write ? Probably because he must, just as a bird must sing and a frog croak. And if the writer happens to be a professor, he must also burrow, like a mole. Rather composite animal, the writer; homo allegedly sapiens, by instinct scribally articulate. But in the case of this book there is another reason, for which there is no parallel in nature. The research scholar who has lots of f u n in his bookish hunting also wishes to share this fun. Although he does his happy hunting, his sleuthing, alone, he wants to share his game. For he knows that there are people who may enjoy the results of his work, assuming, as one must, that we are all interested in life, and that books interpret life. And the bookish bypaths all reflect our never quite understandable human nature. The book herewith submitted inevitably involves some learning, besides detective work. The author has tried, however, to avoid technical jargon — another crime all too frequently committed by professors. And not by them only, for every profession, like every trade, from statesman to ragpicker, from astronomer to garage mechanic, has its special vocabulary. And he has avoided even adumbrations of pontifical solemnity — a sin of which professors are too often accused. In fact, he did not hesitate to thrust into his style little dashes of laughter — or at least, he tried. Some might say that in this time of global war literary

xii

Sleuthing in the Stacks

research acquires, by comparison, a petty significance. That may well be so. But it also acquires the value of "escape." The author hopes that this book may be a jolly, bookish escape to readers as it was to him. Since sleuthing requires method, which in scholarship goes under the grim and prickly name of apparatus criticus, and since, among the much desired readers, there might be colleagues who exact evidence of method, the author has placed before them his tools, his sources of information. These shall, he hopes, satisfy their erudite curiosity as well as his sense of honesty. But in order not to clog the flow (or unflow) of his prose, he has placed all footnotes at the end of the book. Thus the reader may consult or skip them to his mind's content. It is customary in a preface to thank for assistance received and to take all blame for errors committed. This grateful author thanks ever so gladly and abundantly all his helpful friends, including libraries, and among the latter especially those of the University of California and of Harvard. The names of these benefactors will be found in the Notes, under the specific question to which they kindly contributed. If any names have been accidentally omitted, he apologizes. He also wishes to express his thanks to the editors of periodicals in which four of these studies, now entirely rewritten, first found hospitality, for permission to reprint. Chapter II first appeared, in abbreviated form, in The Drama (now defunct) ; Chapter V in the Publications of the Modern Language Association; Chapter VI in Speculum·, Chapter VII in La Cultura. This last Italian periodical, by the way, having died soon after (post hoc, non propter hoc!) under the ruthless axe of tyrant Mussolini, its editor was unfindable. As to errors — there must be some, alas, in spite of laborious and repeated revisions. Because the author, modestly claiming to be human, is consequently fallible; because the

Sleuthing in the Stacks

xiii

errorless book, we are told, never existed; and because in consulting hundreds, literally hundreds of books, some slip is bound to occur. For any such errors he takes all responsibility and begs to be forgiven. In fact he will be glad to be corrected — moderately glad, at least very willing. But he hopes that the reader's meticulosity may be tempered with gallant indulgence. R. A.

Berkeley, California December, 1943

SLEUTHING IN THE STACKS

"Le devoir des savants est de travailler non pas seulement au perfectionnement, mais encore a l'expansion — je ríoserais dire à la vulgarisation — de la science." — Paul Meyer {Discourse in memory of Gaston Paris) "Pereant illi qui ante nos nostra dixerunt." — Donatus "Those whom the gods hate they make professors"/ — Ancient Saying

·Ι·

Handwriting in Search of an Author O W mistaken those people are who think the scholar's life is nothing more than a monotonous grind ! There are adventures for the literary sleuth as for the much more frequently exalted private detective, adventures in books as thrilling as adventures in life. Indeed, what are books if not records of adventures in life ? Even the most imaginative of books ? A n d some old volumes have stories, quite apart from those told in the printed page, stories full of mystery, romance, even crime. These adventures reveal themselves only to the booky explorer, the research scholar. They are his material, his privilege and pleasure; in his harmless life, he loves to become vicariously involved even in crime, and with modern, scientific methods try to solve the mystery. It happened quite by accident, or by that strange element of coincidence on which both scholars and detectives have learned to rely, that a little book fell into my hands, whose strange story I am now going to tell. In the summer of 1930, while in Rome, I dropped into the famous old-book store of Mr. Olschki, just to browse around. For is there anything more interesting than browsing around a dusty old bookshop, especially in Italy? Browsolatry is, in fact, the first step in bookish adventure. Having had occasion before to become interested in the famous and most unhappy Italian writer of the sixteenth

H

4

Sleuthing in the Stacks

century, Torquato Tasso, and knowing that this poet and very learned man very often wrote annotations on the books he read ("even as you and I"), I casually asked young Dr. Aldo Olschki if he happened to have any old books containing Tasso annotations. "I have just exactly what you want," he exclaimed, and after having disappeared in the recesses of his store, he returned and handed me a small, unbound, insignificant octavo volume containing the poems of Monsignor Giovanni della Casa (Rime et Prose, Florence: Giunti, 1564). The book was interesting in itself, because, to us Americans, books of that vintage are not often accessible, and because of the nature of the poems and the interesting life of the author. Della Casa (1503-1556) was a Florentine who, after having spent a very gay youth, entered the clergy, later was made archbishop, and even Secretary of State under Pope Paul IV. Somehow he just failed to obtain the much desired Cardinal's hat. Perhaps this failure was due to his licentious verse — and life — although in most cases that does not seem, in the gay Renaissance, to have been a serious hindrance. In his most famous work, the Galateo, he enumerates social proprieties with the expertness of one thoroughly familiar with both proprieties and improprieties, which is quite proper, for to write about virtue one must, of course, have known sin. O h from m y sweet failings bitter pain,

he cries in one of his sonnets, which may show pangs of at least poetic conscience. On the whole, however, his sonneteering exercises, much admired in his time, leave us cold.1 His too cleverly turned phrases, his too carefully arranged effects, his obvious imitation of Petrarch — which was the fashion — sound artificial. And although he was a priest, as an imitator of the Great Bewailer of Laura he too had to sing, more or less tearfully, of Love, adding to his lyric sobs

Handwriting

in Search of an Author

5

the burden of erudition and classical allusion that was also typical of his time, that glorious time that devoted itself to beauty or beautiful decorativeness sometimes not at all pertinent, as might be proved, for example, by the very unecclesiastical façade of Saint Peter's.2 But the one thing that thrilled me in this little volume was that, sure enough, many of its pages were crammed with marginal remarks in ink, of that peculiar reddish color that black ink attains after a few centuries. "Don't you think that's Tasso's writing?" Dr. Olschki asked me, and added: "I know it is." With that caution which characterizes us professors, plus that reticence (probably inherited from my wily New England ancestors) which prevents a prospective buyer from showing too much reliance in a purchasable thing, I replied: "The handwriting does look just like Tasso's, but I should have to study it carefully before committing myself." "Well, take it along," he kindly offered, though he had already said that the price was $200. I hesitated to take the responsibility and remarked, casually: "What if my ship should go to the bottom of the ocean and the little book with me?" His reply was the most gratifying this professor ever received: "If the ship should sink," he said, "I should regret your demise more than that of the book!" Although I am no mathematician, it did not take very complicated calculating for me to reach the very flattering conclusion that even to a quasi-stranger my life might be worth more than $200. This reflection so swelled me with pride that I at once accepted his generous offer and brought the precious book with me to California. Later, when I had completed my study, I had the book bought by the University of Cali-

6

Sleuthing in the Stacks

fornia Library, in one of whose locked cases it now safely reposes. I was familiar with Tasso's writing and even with his marginalia, having had occasion to study a Tasso-annotated volume which is one of the proudest possessions of the library of Brown University.3 And surely, as I read and studied the thickly annotated pages of the Della Casa book, I was convinced that they looked authentic. But mere appearances and opinions are hardly reliable; I set out to test, in every possible way, the genuineness of these marginalia, for I felt in all conscience bound to give a full report to Olschki, as well as to the University Library, before I could attempt to gauge the value of the book and recommend or not its purchase. And now my own curiosity was worked up, for the problem was a challenge to my detective propensities. Let us take a look at the book. It is a thin octavo of 112 pages, only the first fifty-six of which contain Delia Casa's poems, two per page in the case of sonnets, a longer space being required for the canzoni. The rest of the pages (and they even have a separate frontispiece) contain a rime-index. Of the first fifty-six pages of poetry, only twenty-four are partially or wholly filled with annotations.4 So much, at present, for the inside. From its outer appearance two things struck me at once as mysterious. Judging from tiny fragments of dark leather still clinging to the back, it seemed clear that the book had formerly had a black leather binding. Had it come off accidentally, through age and wear and tear, or had it been violently removed? And if so, why? No explanation was apparent. Another peculiar sign I found on the frontispiece, at the bottom of the right corner: a circle, the exact size of a nickel, obviously stamped, enclosing the letters P.G.N. What could that mean ? These signs pointed to the first line of investigation, the

Handwriting in Search of an Author

7

provenience of the book. According to my experience, provenience is usually difficult to trace, and even when discovered, frequently not illuminating, but, for the sake of that thoroughness to which we are all slaves, this investigation too must be tried.

The most direct manner of approach was to ask Dr. Olschki where he had found it. I did this with hesitation, because book-dealers have their own secrets; sometimes they are even bound to secrecy. But Dr. Olschki wrote at once telling me all he knew. He had bought it in 1929, he assured me, from a Mr. Gerardo D'Andrea, who in turn had it from one Enrico Magrini, who inherited it from his father in 1899 — all gentlemen of whom I had never heard. From 1564, the date of publication, to 1899, there is a stretch of 355 years; is it possible that through those three and a half centuries this little book travelled incognito? But although there is no record of its travel, we may at least surmise its provenience, assuming that this was one of many documents really or allegedly by Tasso. Some documents, for instance, were in the hands of Guarini even before Tasso's death; they then descended to Guarini's son, from whom they passed to one of the Strozzi family, who sold them to Count Foppa, who also purchased others from Cardinal Aldobrandini. In the eighteenth century they were in the hands of Prince Falconieri, from whom they were purchased by a certain Count Alberti, who offered them for sale to Ferdinand III, Grand Duke of Tuscany. Which brings us up to the nineteenth century. This is the generally ac-

8

Sleuthing in the Stacks

cepted provenience; our little book might have taken that route. But this side-trip into the provenience of the volume did not prove anything. I decided, therefore, to work on two much more interesting and fruitful lines of investigation: the handwriting and the contents of the annotations. Here indeed are more solid grounds for research, which should yield some clues. Now somebody might ask : Why question the authenticity of it at all ? Why go to so much trouble ? Have I not Dr. Olschki's assurance that this was a genuine Tasso manuscript? More than that, Dr. Olschki sent me a copy of a receipt, dated at Rome, May 23, 1928, in which the above mentioned former owner of this very book, Mr. Enrico Magrini, "fully guarantees its authenticity." I have, then, both Dr. Olschki's and Mr. Magrini's assurances. The answer is very simple. There are too many cases of forged handwriting. This is particularly true of Tasso. And I knew it. There are, in certain Italian libraries, chiefly in Ferrara and Modena, many autographs of Tasso; there is at least one autograph in this country, in the Brown Library (as I said before), and there are probably others; we have in books many facsimiles of Tasso's handwriting.5 And then there are, floating around bookstores and in private collections (I have seen them; I even own one), many documents and books containing writings allegedly by Tasso, which are not by Tasso at all. There has always been a market for autographs; a market creates a demand; a demand inevitably creates forgeries. It is like bootlegging, though in a subtler, literary form. It will always exist. In the case of Tasso there was at least one known forger of his writings. He was discovered almost a hundred years ago. Hence my suspicions. Was this his handiwork ? Could it be proved ? It was to seek this evidence or disprove it that

Handwriting

in Search of an Author

9

I undertook my investigation. It was because I knew of this old forger that I had hesitated from the beginning to assert at sight that this was a genuine Tasso autograph. So, before attacking the paleography of our annotations, I must step back and tell of this forger. Then we shall investigate whether he was at all involved in the marginal remarks of our little book. His name was Mariano Alberti; he was a Count and a Captain in the Pope's Guard. Very little is known of his life; he seems to have been a fine chap whose avocation it was to counterfeit Tasso's handwriting. Of course he did it for money. It would seem that even then noblemen were often "broke" and that the army was inadequately paid. When off military duty, he was wont to shut himself up in his apartment and, driven by fanatic admiration for the unhappy bard of Ferrara, he studied and studied his Tasso, especially Tasso's handwriting, and, by dint of patient practice, became such an adept in imitation, that it is now almost impossible to tell Tasso's original from Count Alberti's imitation. Not only for cash, however, did the Count use his skill, but for glory, literary glory, and this was fatal. H e wanted to publish some hitherto unpublished, of course because manufactured, writings of Tasso. A n d this is where trouble began. For some reasons not divulged, the authorities of Rome, Florence, and other cities refused permission to publish. It was then that, in his eagerness to splash into the literary world, he did a very foolish thing, though consistent with his standards of honesty. H e made contracts for publication with two publishing houses, one in Lucca and the other in Naples, to print the very same documents. Result: the Lucca publisher printed them,® the Naples publisher found it out and sued him for breach of contract. From this suit the whole falsification leaked out. A n d it was quite a literary scandal in those Roman days

io

Sleuthing in the Stackj

of the eighteen forties. The Count was arrested; his apartment was raided ; the corpora delicti were assembled, by the dozen; experts were engaged to study them; the Count was found guilty and sentenced to seven years in Castel Sant'Angelo, the most picturesque and romantic prison in the world, no doubt, but nevertheless a stiff and hard prison. Moreover, the records of the trial were published in magnificent folio volumes7 (oh the grandeur of those Papal days), three of them, totaling more than 1200 pages. In vol. I, page 120, among the many corpora delicti confiscated from the property of the honorable Count Mariano Alberti, appears the title of the little volume in question.8 It is recognizable because it had, on the title page, that stamped circle with the mysterious initials P.G.N., and, at that time, a black leather binding.9 By the way, we have now traced those initials back a hundred years, and the binding. "Well, then," somebody might say, "why worry further? It's false, it's a forgery by Alberti and that's all there is to it." The cautious professor does not so hastily take for granted either truth or falseness. As a matter of fact, the records of the trial say practically nothing about our document. It was almost overlooked. Although there is no question of Alberti's guilt in general, and although, I repeat, this particular book was herded in among dozens of incriminating pieces, we have no proof positive that our little volume contained forgery. Just suspicions. And on the other hand, what about the assurances of its authenticity by both Magrini and Olschki ? And what about the eloquent arguments of the lawyers for the defense ? Furthermore, we have strong evidence, personal and legal, in favor of the Count, and it comes to us from an American, whom I must now introduce. Richard Henry Wilde (1789-1847), a gentleman of Irish birth, first lived in Baltimore, then moved to Augusta, where he was admitted to the bar in 1809 and became later a con-

Handwriting in Search of an Author

11

gressman and attorney general of Georgia, while developing his literary avocation. He went to Europe in 1834 and remained there until 1840, spending most of his time in Italy, devoting himself to the study of his favorite Italian poet, Tasso. And so he found himself thrust into the controversy. He met Alberti, heard the Count discuss his Tasso documents, was very much impressed by the extremely agreeable and honest personality of the man and by the evidence in favor of the authenticity of the documents and wrote a long essay in admiration and defense of the much maligned Count. 10 All of which is very convincing, for we can entertain no doubts as to the honesty and acumen of Mr. Wilde, both as man and lawyer, and we should be inclined to trust the judgment of such a man who knew his Tasso thoroughly and was so personally familiar with Alberti and the whole affair. With such variance of verdicts, we must decide for ourselves, via direct investigation. The main suspicion of forgery is based upon a rather peculiar twist, so to speak, which is not a feeble argument. It seems that the resourceful Count, though primarily interested in documents penned by Tasso ( ! ) , did not stop there, but sold pictures, embroidered pillows, and assorted bric-a-brac, all of which he claimed to have been once the private property of Tasso. He did even more: he wrote documents to corroborate the authenticity of the bric-a-brac; for example, a letter from Tasso accompanying the gift of a picture, and the subsequent letter of thanks. He thought that such Unkings of things and documents would be mutually reënforcing proof of authenticity. Little did he realize that, on the contrary, if one link failed, the whole fabrication would collapse. One such collapsible link was discovered in our little book. The marginal annotations to Sonnet 32 refer to a picture of Eleonora d'Esté, the sister of Tasso's patron at Ferrara. For centuries popular fancy linked this excellent, though sickly

12

Sleuthing in the Stacks

lady with Tasso's hopeless love — a romantic story which was extremely popular in the romantic era, but is now totally exploded.11 The court experts having decreed the picture a fraud, they further decreed that the annotation referring to it must consequently be a fraud too. The reference to the picture, in our document, is very vague, however; in fact it only says "my lady," not naming Eleonora at all, so that, as a proof of forgery, it is very weak. In short, so far as this little book is concerned, authenticity or falseness remains to be proved. And then, to my mind, more than that is involved. I am interested, as always in literary studies, in technique. If these annotations were authentic, they would certainly throw new light on Tasso, on his very personality, for they would represent his private, unofficial reactions to his reading; if they were false, they would represent an interesting technique in forgery. I wanted, therefore, to pursue my sleuthing, by minute examination of the handwriting and the context of our intriguing annotations. Handwriting includes many things, as all those know who have made special studies of it. They know that a man's handwriting changes with age; that certain mannerisms of youth disappear after a few years; and that certain mannerisms of old age are not present in the youthful hand. Even personal characteristics, however, may be unreliable, for no man, so to speak, ever writes the same letter in precisely the same way, the movements of his hand being somewhat variable even in a very characteristic writing and at the very same moment. Not only the shape of the letters must be studied, but the stroke of the pen, the direction of the lines, abbreviations, etc.; the quality of the ink is an item of major importance. The writer's usage of words, etc., comes under context. The simplest way of making an accurate comparison of

Handwriting

in Search of an Author

13

these two handwritings was to take a sheet of tracing paper and with a pencil trace several examples of every available letter from A to Z, both small and capital, first from documents unquestionably written by Tasso; then do the same for our annotations. With patience and meticulous care I did this and, after having compared these letters, even making due allowances for natural variations, I found the two handwritings to be so nearly identical as to make it impossible for me to assert that forgery had been committed. The writing in our little book seemed, moreover, to be that of the mature Tasso, that is, the poet in his forties (he died at fifty-one). The one letter that proved this point was the capital N, which the youthful Tasso made with two vertical strokes followed by a transversal stroke from the top of the left to the bottom of the right initial strokes. But later, as Tasso's hand grew older and more careless, the third stroke took more and more a quasi-horizontal direction, until his capital Ν looked just like a capital H. 1 2 And of course in such a word as the negative NON, which is likely to appear frequently in critical annotations, the initial tells the tale, for there is no such word as HON. Since in our marginal annotations just such an Ν appears (on p. 24), these notes, if written by Tasso, must be ascribed to his latter years, about the 1580's. At once the question arose: Do we know anything about when Tasso read Delia Casa's poems, which were published, in this edition, when he was twenty ? First of all we might surmise that he would hardly be likely to wait fifteen or twenty years after the appearance of a book of famous poems to read them and append his remarks; in the second place we know positively that he greatly admired Delia Casa's poems and must have read them long before the eighties. In fact he gave a lecture to a learned academy on those poems. Also, he wrote an essay on one of the sonnets; 13 and these

14

Sleuthing in the Stacks

studies must have been done in Tasso's youth, certainly before 1570.14 But, if this were the very volume used by Tasso in his early twenties, how could he, at that time, make an Ν in a manner characteristic of his late forties? This was, to me, the first suspicious intimation, indeed the only one, gathered from the examination of the handwriting. It was slight, to be sure, but significant. By no means had I exhausted the paléographie examination, but I decided, at this point, to abandon momentarily this line and proceed to attack the context of the annotations. There was a subtle reason for this shift, as will be seen later. If my examination of the substance should yield incriminating evidence, I should then return for further corroboration to the handwriting. In all cases involving handwritten annotations the first thing to do, of course, is to transcribe them. This task was comparatively easy, because I am familiar with Tasso's hand, which, even at its worst, is not illegible. The transcription filled only a few pages, for only a few of Delia Casa's poems had marginal comments.15 Now, what is the nature of these comments? They are, of course, critical; in spots they praise the beauty of a poem or a line, in others condemn the inadequate expression; in one case they even audaciously propose a better wording. The outstanding quality of these remarks, however, is their erudition. When the author of these annotations takes pains to mention not only Italian writers up to and including Tasso's times, such as Dante, Cino, Petrarch, Bembo, Trissino, and others, but also parades before us references to such classical authors as Lucretius, Catullus, Horace, Propertius, Plato, Virgil, Tibullus, Seneca, Terence, Ovid, Callimacus, Theocritus, Demetrius, and Aristotle, we get the impression that he must have been very learned. That Tasso was very learned, we know. As to Count Alberti's erudition, offhand

Handwriting

in Search of an Author

15

we should doubt it. For we only have one witness, a Mr. Giuseppe Galletti, fellow prisoner in Castel Sant'Angelo, who, narrating his own prison life, testified to the Count's erudition. He wrote that, dodging the jail-guard, he used to converse through a peep-hole with the Count, and that "his vast erudition made pleasant our conversation which never lagged." 16 But this man's testimony is hardly sufficient. Although our Count must have become familiar, for very professional reasons, with Tasso lore, when it comes to, shall we say, more abstruse erudition, we may well entertain doubts. And then a man suspected of having falsified the handwriting must also be suspected of being willing and able to falsify the substance of his annotations, which would have been easier. For it is always easier to borrow information (or cash) than to produce it. In short, we are now suspicious of everything concerning our captain, and, in an argument, we should feel on the safer side if we took no chances. In literary studies as in certain problems of mathematics — and in certain detective work — it sometimes pays to establish, as a basis for further assumptions, a hypothesis; then, if these assumptions prove to be correct, they will, in turn, prove the correctness of the hypothesis. This is a perfectly legitimate method and one that in our problem may perhaps lead to results. At this point I am reminded of an old story which fits into our case very neatly. It is my favorite story of the village idiot. It seems that a horse had been lost and for days nobody in the village had been able to locate it. Suddenly one day the village idiot walked into Main Street leading the long-lost horse. He was at once surrounded and asked: "Well, Bill, how on earth did you find the horse ?" To which Bill replied: "Well, I says to myself, says I, if I was a horse, where would I go and what would I do ? And I went there and he had!"

i6

Sleuthing in the Stacks

The sleuth must sometimes interpret his criminal in just such terms. If I were the burglar or the murderer, where would I go and what would I do ? If I were Count Alberti and wanted very erudite remarks to write on the margins of Delia Casa's sonnets, as if they came from Tasso's learning, where would I go for them — of course in such a way as not to be discovered? One answer might be this: I would hunt up some now very obscure commentator of Delia Casa's poems, some old professor and pedantic critic known in his time and now completely forgotten (as most professors are, immediately after their death, often long before!). Following this hypothetical lead it did not take me long to discover that the finest commentated edition of Delia Casa's works was published in Venice in 1728,17 in five handsome volumes, a second edition, "revised and with many additions" (as usual), of one which appeared in 1707. In these five volumes, containing the oppressive total of 2018 pages, besides poems, essays, etc. by Della Casa and innumerable prefaces, introductions, biographies, letters dedicatory, etc. etc., there are long, extremely long, minute, extremely minute, comments by Ménage, Anton Maria Salvini, Michele Lazzari, Aurelio Severino, Sertorio Quattromani and Giovambattista Casotti. The first two gentlemen I had met before, Giles M. Ménage (1613-1692) especially because of his Menagiana, a most interesting hodgepodge of tales, episodes, and folklore, and Salvini as a very scholarly Florentine priest and librarian. The others were, I confess, utterly unknown to me. For some obscure psychological reason, or perhaps because of the peculiarity of his name, I had a mysterious hunch (even to scholars hunches are permissible) that Quattromani (Mr. Fourhands), a nobleman from Cosenza and a tip-topper in erudition, might prove the most fruitful. But I examined the others too, except one Gregorio Caloprese (also an alluringly strange name) whose commentary, not in-

Handwriting in Search of an Author

17

eluded in these volumes (although his life is), I was unable to secure. At once I set out to make a minute comparison of our annotations and the learned lucubrations of the above mentioned long-vanished scholars. My complete tabulation of comparisons fills some forty pages. The most accurate, though the longest way of making such a tabulation is to copy, in parallel vertical columns, the remark of each man on each poem, of course including our manuscript annotations, then underline in red all sentences or words identical with those used in our manuscript, and in broken red lines those that, though not identical, are sufficiently similar to permit a fair assumption of derivation. Now, when several people undertake to criticize in detail the same poems, and especially if these people belong to the same time and to the same trend of thought, it is quite natural that frequently they should give vent to similar ideas, similarly expressed; when, however, exactly the same remarks, in almost exactly the same words, appear repeatedly, one must become more than suspicious, practically certain that plain copying has occurred. It did not take me long to notice an overwhelming prevalence of bright red underlinings in the comments of noble Professor Quattromani.18 Roughly I should say that 75 per cent of the annotations in our Delia Casa volume were copied, in exactly the same or very recognizably analogous words, from the pedantic remarks of the four-handed professor, which remarks, separately and together with those of brother Severino, fill a grand, devastating total of 487 pages of stuff so arid as to make even the most conscientious scholar yearn tearfully for the charms of the Nevada desert. Perhaps Alberti too got very tired of such long-windedness and hence only wrote comments to a few of the poems. This seems a very plausible explanation of the fact that his annotating of the book was incomplete.

i8

Sleuthing in the Stacks

But somebody might say: "Even by proving the unquestionable similarity between Quattromani's comment and our manuscript annotations you really have not at all proved that our marginal annotations were copied from Quattromani. If the former were by Tasso, why could not Sir Quattromani have got hold of this very little volume and copied them ? Or why could not Tasso have copied from Quattromani?" These objections I can easily refute — it is mostly a matter of chronology. First of all, Quattromani's commentary first appeared in 1616, twenty-one years after Tasso's death. 19 It seems, then, rather unlikely that Tasso could have copied the work of the Cosenza professor, so long after his own demise! And this even if Tasso could be suspected of resorting to such underhanded means, which he cannot. T o the argument that Quattromani may have copied, in his commentary, the handwritten remarks of our little book, there are two answers. First, since the latter are partial, and the former complete, it seems unlikely. But a far stronger argument is this: some of the marginal remarks are quotations from the Latin. In these quotations I found thirteen variants in spelling, at least ten of which are grammatical errors.20 N o such errors appear in Quattromani's book. Indeed it is hardly conceivable that such a learned professor should make errors in Latin. Almost all his books were written in Latin. It is just as inconceivable to suspect of Latin grammatical errors as learned a man as Tasso. Far easier is it to suspect that it was the Captain of the Pope's Guard who copied erroneously, forgetting his school-day declensions. For Latin in the nineteenth century was by no means as prevalently and as thoroughly known as in the sixteenth or seventeenth. Furthermore, still examining my tabulation, I discovered that some of our marginal comments derived not from Quattromani but from Ménage (1613-1692) and from our friend

^

-S -C

·< . - - s j λ

o « κ

-ς

« "i

Handwriting

in Search of an Author

19

Marcus Aurelius Severino (1580-1656). The latter, a famous surgeon, was only fifteen years old when Tasso died, and wrote his work on Della Casa, one of the very few not written in Latin, towards the end of his life. 21 In short the fact that plain copying was done from all three of these erudite gentlemen, makes it quite clear that the person who borrowed material for our annotations must have had under his eyes this very edition of 1727, in which the comments of Quattromani, Ménage, and Severino are given conveniently together. I now felt that I had proved to my satisfaction that suspicions of the Count's honesty were well founded, and that, very humanly, he had taken the easier way, had plagiarized in order to give to his marginal annotations an erudite flavor which might suggest Tasso, and which he could not provide by himself. But I was not satisfied, because of the almost negative results given by my previous paleographical study. This aspect, temporarily abandoned in the beginning, I now resolved to take up again, in order to obtain, if possible, from the evidence of the handwriting, corroboration for the copying proved by the substance of the notes. And, as I said before, I wanted to examine this handwriting with modern, scientific methods. To do this I had to resort to a friend of mine, a real detective, indeed a consulting expert in criminology and a legal chemist, Mr. Edward Oscar Heinrich, of Berkeley, nationally known for his scientific sleuthing. For he would have both the science and the necessary instruments. By the use of ultra-violet rays and a high-powered microscope he might discover secrets hidden from the scholar's naked eye. I must here go a step backward and reveal one interesting item discovered by the experts at the time of the trial.22 When they accompanied the police who raided the Count's apartment, they were at first very much puzzled to find, in his

20

Sleuthing in the Stacks

elaborate laboratory, a plain glass containing water in which plain nails were quietly rusting. But elsewhere they found an explanatory recipe: how to make reddish ink that looks archaic, as if faded by centuries! The Count had discovered that it was necessary to add to this solution a dash of gum, to make it "stick" better.23 So the first thing I told Dr. Heinrich was to examine the ink with his scientific devices and see whether, even after all these years, it did not show metallic derivation. After a few minutes of microscopic study my friend the chemical sleuth gave this report: "The ink used is not ink in the true sense, but a form of water paint. It contained no nut-gall, common to the inks of either the purported period (Tasso's) or the actual period of writing (Alberti's). It consisted of a suspension of one of the red compounds of iron, probably the hydroxide, in water and gum. This, within a very short time after the writing, became pure iron rust or hydrated iron oxide — the form in which the pigment now appears." And, for good measure, he added even more chemical details: "There is no evidence in the ink stroke that the ink was acid in character. The indications are that it was neutral or alkaline. Such an ink could be manufactured easily by allowing iron to rust in a somewhat acid solution, then adding ammonia to neutralize the acid and produce the rusty colored pigment in suspension. The effect is similar to old writings done with carbon water and gum. Time has produced no diffusion effects with this sophisticated ink. The edges of the stroke are as clear cut today as when written. This is additional evidence that the ink used contained only the rusty iron compound in suspension. N o portion of it was in solution, nor did it contain any salts in solution to diffuse into the paper after the manner normal to true iron-gallate inks of the period. The pigment was lost through failure of the gum to hold it to the paper after drying and through subsequent handling."

Handwriting in Search of an Author

21

I could hardly have expected more complete corroboration! But there was more to come, and more damaging — details which had been entirely overlooked by the experts at the trial a hundred years ago. As I watched Dr. Heinrich poring over his microscope in a dark corner of his basement laboratory I could hear him mumble: "Oh lovely; lovely." After having again asked me the dates of the alleged Tasso documents and those of Alberti, "Do you realize," he said, "that Tasso must of course have written with a quill; that the traces left by the pressure of a quill are totally different from those left by a metal pen; that the traces in these annotations were unquestionably made by a metal pen, and, finally, that such pens were not in use before 1803? This cannot have been written before that date!" I here want to thank Dr. Heinrich again for his scientific help. Without it I could not have had the final corroboration I needed. And it was final. The substance of the annotations in our little volume had been simply "lifted" from comments found in the Della Casa edition of 1727; the archaic-looking ink had been manufactured for the purpose; the use of a metal pen proved conclusively that these notes could not possibly have been written by Tasso two hundred and eight years after his death! Count Alberti is irrefutably accused of forgery. A rigid moralist such as Dante, had he known of the wily captain, would have relegated his soul to the eighth circle of Hell, where falsifiers of words are consumed for eternity by acute fever. In the looser morality of our days, in spite of our strict, uncompromising condemnation of such rank dishonesty as we found at the basis of Count Alberti's avocation, there sneaks into our verdict a particle of amused admiration. As the famous Italian novelist Manzoni said: "We all like to do what we know how to do." Alberti was a selfmade artist in forgery. Although he ultimately did not "get

22

Sleuthing in the Stacks

away with it," he must have had for years the satisfaction, primitive though it is, and though still so prevalent, of "putting it over," and consequently of enjoying, for a time at least, a superiority complex. And again we may note, as we often do about certain of our American criminals, that had the Count applied such cleverness to legitimate pursuits, might he not have achieved much ? At least a general's commission in the Papal army! Certainly he would have avoided the scandal, the humiliation of being caught, and the privations of those years in prison. But then I would not have had the fun of proving him guilty! It is said that the Count took his imprisonment with great serenity, first of all, as he remarked, because he was proud to spend seven years in retirement, the very same number that his literary hero (and victim) Tasso had been obliged "to do" in Sant'Anna at Ferrara (though Tasso was confined not for dishonesty, of course, but for insanity). And then because, being a philosophical character, he believed in taking affliction serenely. In the peace of Castel Sant'Angelo, which once had enclosed within its massive walls another old scoundrel, Benvenuto Cellini, the Count spent his days of seclusion. It seems that in 1851 he was pardoned; we do not know when he died, probably not much later. May his rascally soul and his clever, extremely clever hand rest in peace.

·ΙΙ·

Lust and Leprosy HIS is one of the many works that I will never write," said D'Annunzio in a letter to his publisher 1 — and enclosed the manuscript! Which unwritten book was published four times ; 2 I have before me the third edition of 1920. Incongruities of the great, you may say. But if incongruity is an essential element of humor, here we catch the most humorless of writers unconsciously funny. Mildly funny, to be sure, or rather, absurd; but wait until you hear the absurdity of the tale told by this little book. Gird your literary loins with fortitude, and listen. * . It is a mere scenario, drawn from the inspired jottings of this writer. For of course from such a great poet even a hastily dashed "hello" is of transcendental significance — according to him. "Even little things have their destiny," says he,3 and how could we deny it, who are ever at the mercy of pernicious germs, some of them, alas, literary. But the fame of D'Annunzio does make the statement at least partly true. D'Annunzio was the most spectacular writer of yesterday, and though not so good as a dramatist and novelist, a real poet — and even the most peculiar vagaries of a real poet have more than a literary interest. Indeed, such vagaries in a D'Annunzio may give us an insight not merely into the mysterious psychology of mankind, but of supermankind. The booklet in question is entitled The Crusade of the Innocent (La crociata degli Innocenti), a mystery in four

T

24

Sleuthing in the Stacks

acts. The very title, then, indicates religious drama, therefore to be perused in genuflectent piety. But the piety it exhales has, this time, certain libidinous admixtures. When these appear, the reader should rise from his genuflectent posture. By so reacting, this reading will be equivalent to the "daily dozen." How could D'Annunzio, the notorious roué, the realistic portrayer, as he has been frequently called, of the corrupt society of Rome in the gay nineties, the poet par excellence of Blood and Lust, suddenly go mystic ? And by the way, it was he who mated those luscious words by placing them as the motto of one of his best plays, Francesca da Rimini, which he sub-titled "Drama of Blood and Lust." Although I am glad to be able to call D'Annunzio a great poet,4 I would add that the three basic adjective-colors on his poetic palette are: bloody, lecherous, putrid. Suddenly he adds: sacred. Why ? How ? And will it mix with the others ? That is the "Mystery" of "Gabriel the Archangel" 5 which we shall now try to expose and explain. For just as it is the business of the detective not merely to find the criminal and bring about his apprehension, but to discover the motives of his crime and the peculiar manner of committing it, thus the literary sleuth is always hunting for the why and wherefore of art and plots. And this hunt is his main sport. Of course to ask why an artist treated a certain topic is futile, the answer being that he was so impelled by his creative urge. He sensed in a certain subject a vision of art and proceeded to give it form. Yet it is not futile to investigate how he did it, what peculiar influences swayed him, especially when a work, such as this one, might seem otherwise inexplicable. The processes of art, the selection of material and its transformation through craftsmanship, the ways of the imagination, even its maddest deviations, are always the province of learning and of criticism. What did D'Annunzio try to do? Did he succeed?

Lust and Leprosy

25

If so, how ? If not, why not ? These are the problems of the reader. Let us apply our questions to The Crusade of the Innocent. The first whiff of inspiration shall come from a synopsis of the play. Now synopses are always unfair, for they must omit the form of art, and form is essential. But in this case, since D'Annunzio's original is itself a formless synopsis, it will not matter so much. And to make known his message of mediaeval sanctity is in itself a pious act. Here, then, is the plot.8 The dramatis personae are five, with names sonorous and pregnant with symbolical significance: Odimondo (Hatethe-World), a young man; Novella (New-Girl), his passive adorer; Gaietta (the Cheerful One), his infant sister; The Mother, anonymous genitrix of Odimondo and Gaietta; Vanna la Vampa (Johanna-the-Blaze or, shall we say, the Vamp), the contaminated, but ever-pure-at-heart enchantress; a mysterious Pilgrim, plus a Celestial Chorus and White Voices. Even in the list of characters one must make allowances for poetic imagery. Act. I. Place: A dismal swamp, in which rises (geological license) a huge rock full of cavernous recesses; at right, a church (architectural license) ; in "a breath of gold" — which is the miasma rising from the dismal swamp — are heard the noises of innumerable birds, the dirge of snipes "which whimper like juvenile gnats" (insectile license), and the twitter of "divine buzzards" (ornithological license). Time: That melancholy, crepuscular hour, you know, Saturday before Palm Sunday, 1212. New-Girl is doomfully sitting in the swamp by a cattletrough which, as always in Italy, is a Roman sarcophagus. (Why a watering-trough in the midst of water? But don't ask embarrassing questions.) Enters Hate-the-World, carrying a horribly heavy little bundle of olive sprigs. The bundle is heavy, as New-Girl soon discovers by thrusting into it her

26

Sleuthing in the Stacks

hand, which collides with an icy little foot, because it contains the corpse of the Cheerful One. For Hate-the-World has just cut the throat of his infant sister, fortunately before the rising of the curtain. His carrying of her little corpse in a bundle of olive twigs obviously symbolizes the burden of his conscience in the surrounding peace of Palm-Sunday world. But what occasioned the murder? D'Annunzio's motivation is ingenious and genteel. It seems that in a nearby tower, of course ruined and desolate, there lived a female leper, the banished courtesan of local barons and princes; that Hatethe-World, though affianced to a milk-white virgin, had been lured by the still beautiful, though sorely lepered courtesan who is none other than Johanna-the-Vamp; that he had been duly leperized ; and finally that, according to the customs of local gentle-folk, the only way to cure himself was to suck the blood of an innocent child: "Just three drops of the hot blood!" Naturally Hate-the-World proceeded at once, "in Pasqual Sacrifice," to cut the innocent jugular vein of his baby sister, the Cheerful One, since she happened to be, at that moment, the only minor on the stage. Or was he inspired only by fraternal solicitude? The details of the gentle deed are confessed "in tragical ardor" and with much pseudobiblical blattering to his Mother, who, quite unconcerned about her baby daughter's total undoing, loudly bewails the possible consequences of her dear boy's peculiar act. "The feeling of the scene," says the author, intoxicated with his own skill, "reaching the climax of horror, exhales itself into a sort of alternated lamentation as in a legend of the people" (whatever that may mean). Then Hate-the-World vows he will depart this earth in penance and staggers into the night; New-Girl vows eternal chastity, and forsakes the watering trough; and while the Celestial Chorus sings dulcet strains of Palm Sunday forgiveness, suddenly, amid a throng of spotless

Lust and Leprosy

27

lambs, aerially gamboling out of a cavern in the swamp, there appears the Ever Cheerful One, resurrected. Here endeth Act One. Act II. Dewy sunrise, though the "bluish darkness is as silent as at the bottom of the sea." The mysterious Pilgrim, emerging from the thick timber, approaches the doomful tower and instinctively makes for Johanna, the still muchlepered Vamp. " A shiver of terror rushes suddenly through her softness" (says Gabriel), while she, thinking him Hatethe-World, tries to relure him "saying lovers' words, intimate and warm as if uttered from a pillow," and he, unlurable, hops into the tower, filling it with fire like a furnace. Standing unscathed, in fact laughingly in the fire, he invites her to share his "bed of flame." Here takes place "in the most vivacious lyric manner," says the inspired Archangel, "the episode of the strumpet related in The Little Flowers of St. Francis," the strumpet who was, as Johanna-the-Vamp, "most fair of body but foul in soul." 7 So she hastens to step into the flames where, picking up a lute casually left by one of her former paramours, she sings the canticle: "Oh Jesus, burning furnace." As soon as she emerges, uncremated, from the conflagration, indeed "purified and transfigured," there occurs a chaste reunion with Hate-the-World, "a scene of the purest ideal essence," while in the pink of dawn reappears the Cheerful and apparently Indestructible One, heading an endless throng of infants. In the meantime everything is explosively joyous: Night bursts into day, the shrubs burst into leafage, the grass bursts into flowers, the babes burst into song. Here endeth Act Two. Act III. Front stage : One of the many boat loads of mystic infants sailing on their voyage to the Holy Land. They are packed "as a herd doomed to slaughter" and though tortured by hunger, seasickness, and vermin, they are full of heroic fortitude and still singing. With them are peculiar disheveled

28

Sleuthing in the Stac\s

women "who seem insane." (They too!) On all the masts roost innumerable chirping swallows. The wretched children, we are told, had been cheated by the mean organizers of the Crusade, who, with the pretense of taking them to the Holy Sepulchre, intend instead to sell them to the cruel Cailifï. The wicked men on deck are of course, as always with stage mariners, drinking, swearing, and shooting craps. Johanna-theVamp, now spiritually converted and, we hope, epidermally cured, who is the poet's choice for curator of the devoutly vagrant babes, attends to them, between slightly meretricious prayers. But Hate-the-World, who happens, for no reason at all, to be on deck too, has been lashed to the mainmast by the jealous sailors for casting amorous glances at the still beautiful, though pure, ex-leprous enchantress. They intend to sell him too in Palestine. Of course Johanna-the-Vamp is also destined to become their prey, in order to be reconverted, this time into cold cash. Nearby is New-Girl, still the passive adorer of Hate-the-World, holding on her lap the immortal Cheerful One, now consumed, not by death, which tried in vain, but by a mysterious fever. " A pernicious wistfulness oppresses all hearts," remarks the intuitive author, with words singularly applicable to any possible audience. Hate-theWorld is perhaps the most vexed, noting that the spots of leprosy which have disappeared from Johanna the leper«·, are still clinging to him, the lepers?. Wherefore from the crow's nest a voice shouts forth: "All's well." Soon the intoxicated sailors proceed to make advances upon Johannathe-Vamp, who, in her newly-acquired purity, threatens, if approached, to jump overboard. Her frantic lover, who craves to come chivalrously to the rescue of the maltreated maiden, beseeches the other maiden, New-Girl, in frenzied whispers, to cut the ropes that bind him. But here is a mighty conflict: Shall New-Girl free her lover so that he may flee to her rival ? New-Girl hesitates. Her hesitation is also due to

Lust and Leprosy

29

the unfortunate fact that she has neither knife nor scissors with which to sever the stout ropes — only her bare nails and teeth. Making, however, resourceful use of these God-given tools, and with frenzied efforts, she frees Hate-the-World, who flees to slaughter the sailors. In fact in his impetuousness he callously steps right on the body of his infant sister, who whimpers and is taken up by the otherwise empty-handed New-Girl. Hate-the-World is about to hurl himself against the assembled drunkards and demolish them all when a voice, coming from the one sailor who, during the more perilous action of the drama had remained prudently perched in the crow's nest, roars forth: "The Cross, The Cross, The Madonna!" At this opportune apparition all the infants, seasick, moribund, or dead, burst forth into a lusty hymn of praise. Then there appears in the maritime offing the ghost of Saint Francis, roosting on the mast of a ship. Here endeth Act Three. Act IV. Two of the infant-laden vessels are wrecked on the rocky shore of a deserted island. The shore, the decks, the sea as far as naked eye can penetrate, everything is bestrewn with innumerable defunct babes. Hate-the-World is again carrying the heavy corpse of his infant sister, the Cheerful One. "It seems," says the uncertain author, "that in his delirium he has sacrificed her once more." He was pure again and now he is again guilty, so, according to this subtle symbolism, he must again carry the heavy burden, and Sister must again have that wicked wound in her intermittently molested jugular vein. New-Girl is dead; vanished in the deep; probably jumped overboard when she saw that the Vamp hadn't. Johanna-the-Vamp is there, too (meaning somewhere on the stage), "stooping under a horror and a sadness greater than the horror of the sea and the sadness of land." Hate-the-World is again quite insane, as he was that night near the watering-trough. "The scene," utters the poet,

30

Sleuthing in the Stacks

"from word to word, from gesture to gesture rises to the highest and nudest summit of pathos." As Hate-the-World with his little corpse staggers once more, and this time definitively, into the night and towards the waters which are to bring back New-Girl's corpse, Johanna-the-Vamp cries out in her magnanimity: "God forgive you again, brother." "Assuredly," declares the Poet, "a light is now kindled within her, a divine pity radiates from her," for the last tiny dead crusaders are joining the mortuary pageant from the wilderness and wafting toward her with the song: "Innocent ones, Innocent ones, your glance is like unto the glance of Jesus and here, between the two cliffs, is the Gate of Eternity." Here endeth Act Four. What wilderness? That remained in the poet's mind. What two cliffs ? Doubtless the two cliffs on the nude summit of pathos! Verily this is a Mystery. Now that we know the plot we are convinced. Setting, action, motivation, characters — all is mystery. But let us see if by careful scrutiny we cannot explain at least some of the strange aspects of this delirious extravaganza. It seems to call for an explanation. In all justice to the author I should say that this immorality play was originally composed for the movies, or rather, it was first intended to be a libretto, to be set to music by Puccini (in whom, apparently, it failed to arouse lyric inspiration), and then was arranged for the movies.8 Of course there is a difference between cinematographic and literary technique. We are told, believe it or not, that this movie was actually filmed and presented in Italy almost thirty years ago. I wonder how, in the graphic realism of the screen, such scenes as the poet created could have been filmed. Certain technical difficulties suggest themselves at once. Since sound-pictures did not exist then, we may overlook the difficulty of producing "the whimper of gnats" and "the lyric twitter of buzzards,"

Lust and Leprosy

31

but how could the staging of the fourth act, for example, be effected, with its ocean bestrewn with thousands of baby corpses? And if it could be produced, how did it pass the censorship and how could it be tolerated by the public ? Be that as it may, since this work has been published four times, and even included in the poet's magnificent opera omnia, we are justified in thinking that he meant it as literature. Now, if it were a normal piece of literature, we should first examine the form and the spirit of the finished product. Odious as the terms romanticism, realism, and other -isms are, we might feel prompted to see into which category this composition might fit. Probably it would not fit into any, for it is in a class by itself, for which we should have to invent a new -ism, possibly deliriumism or celestial leprosism. But this sort of stuff got its original nourishment from the crumbs that fell from the mad Nietzsche's table. For it was Nietzsche who nobly said: "every wicked thing, terrible, tyrannical, resembling a savage animal and a serpent, contributes to the elevation of the species man as much as its opposite." 9 And D'Annunzio was a disciple of Nietzsche. After having so pigeonholed this play, we should proceed to discover the source material, to appraise the poetic transformation of mere history or legend, which is the skeleton of fiction, into poetry and drama, which is the flesh added on by the artist.10 But since this is only a scenario, it has, as I said before, hardly a form. The poet divides it into acts and scenes, to be sure, and here and there, intoxicated with his own scaffoldings, bursts into half a dozen lines of verse, but never does this rise above versified sketchiness or lyricized melodrama. We may let this pass, however, assuming that in movie scenario technique the poet need only suggest the effects which the producer will pictorialize. But, as I said before, we must also examine this composition as literature, for D'Annunzio's every word, he knows, is literature !

32

Sleuthing in the Stacks

D'Annunzio's literary manner is renowned for extraordinary beauty of diction, or "verbal orchestration,"11 always linked to a corrupt plot. In a mere scenario the former has hardly an opportunity of exhibiting itself, except fragmentarily; the latter is certainly present. He is also known to be deprived, in his manipulation of humans, of humor and pity. The only humor in this play is unintentional; it is the humor of over-stressed melodrama which overflows into the false and therefore ludicrous. But, after all, it would be unfair to expect humor in sacred drama as well as in tragedy. Humor, which is the result of intellectual detachment, is inconsistent with high emotion. And he must have been convinced, judging from his words, that this play was full of high emotion. Emotion without restraint, and that is the trouble, without that artistic restraint which Dante called "il fren dell'arte," and Babbitt "the inner check." D'Annunzio was far more interested in another kind of check. As to pity, this is perhaps D'Annunzio's most pitiless book — and that is saying a great deal. Perhaps my synopsis too was pitiless; if so, this was but a natural reaction to his temperament. In this play, more than elsewhere in D'Annunzio's works, I feel that he lays on his brutality thickly and does it with sadistic enjoyment. It is the primitive in him and the decadent. Let us go so far as to admit that, to some extent, we are all primitive and decadent. But though few of us may have placed upon our instinctive primitiveness so rich a layer of cultural polish as has this poet, few of us also so love to uncover it, and still fewer of us are so fashioned as to find any artistic satisfaction in the interplay of such foul motifs as lechery, leprosy, and fratricide ; few of us can visualize without gastric repulsion an ocean bestrewn with innumerable baby corpses. In D'Annunzio's imagination, instead, corpses are among his favorite bric-a-brac, especially bloody ones,12 and still more so if, before death, they are presented as richly

Lust and Leprosy

33

sprinkled with diseases, and accompanied by degenerates, courtesans, homicidal maniacs and other brutally pathological cases. With most of us, thank God, a little of this goes a long way. We prefer to consider sadism as an attribute which, if present (and it does not have to be), should be squelched, instead of being flaunted. And this not for reasons of prudery alone. A morality play need no more be moral, let us grant, than a comedy comical, but for reasons of art. It does not make for artistic enjoyment; it leaves us cold, and we therefore not only cease sharing with the dramatist but are also repelled. In this Crusade more than elsewhere in D'Annunzio's erratic writings, horrors are accumulated; he spares nobody, neither his characters nor his audience, not even the most defenceless of his victims, the property man. We, at least, can laugh or "take a walk"; he cannot. In connection with humor and pity, neither of these qualities is consistent with sadistic pleasure. Sensuality and cruelty, however, are good bed comrades. Furthermore, we cannot even say that this poet is interested in the tragedy of the flesh rather than of the spirit, for even the catastrophes of the body must have, in the drama, some sort of motivation, a motivation plausible to the audience, even if mysterious to the personages involved. The audience or reader also fails to be inspired with pity for the sufferings portrayed, when these are not so plausibly motivated as to force him to share them. He sees with amazement or horror occurrences due to abnormal folly and his only reaction, to the plight of the personages, besides disgust, is: It served them right. For all too often passion is, in D'Annunzio, more intentional, if I may say so, than consequent. It is not the inevitable result of circumstances beyond the control of the humans involved, nor the result of their normally unwise actions; rather, it is the result of the mania in pathological personages to attain abnormal pleasure, a quest which, pressed to extremes,

34

Sleuthing

in the Stacks

becomes exhaustion, which in turn translates itself into bestial folly and communal disaster. Surely, in the psychological jargon of today D'Annunzio's heroes would be called, at the very least, anti-social; we used to call them, more simply, swine. Passion impels the hero to commit a foul act; recurring waves of more passion reimpel him to recommit it or another crime, ad nauseam, until he is satiated; then he kills, but not himself, alas, which would be a laudable and highly deserved dénouement. N o , it never occurs to D'Annunzio's profligate hero to demolish himself and thus put his dear readers out of their misery; invariably he prefers to slay an entirely innocent person, a young woman, w h o happened to bfe born lovable, or still better, a child. This repeated twist in this poet's plots is monotonously annoying. In The Dead. City {La città morta), for example, the hero w h o remains for hours in the throes of incestuous temptations (incest is another of D ' A n nunzio's favorite themes), prefers to slay his pure sister; in The Innocent (L'Innocente), a man slays the son, by another man, of his concubine, by exposing it cruelly to freezing weather, thus destroying the only guiltless party in the dirty story. Incidentally, w h y did this poet try so many times to portray the innocent? Is it because "like cures like"? ("Like," as Wordsworth said, "but oh how different.") These general defects of D'Annunzio's imagination and of his interpretations of life are found in doses altogether too profuse in The Crusade of the Innocent, which, in a jumble of mediaevalism, religiosity, and impossible nature, presents a plot devoid of real emotions universally felt, driving inevitably to catastrophe. It merely sketches nasty crimes, puffed up to look like the results of passion overwhelming. Instead of leaving us terror-stricken, they leave us cold. Indeed, overstressed as they are, they make us laugh, when we are not too nauseated — a reaction most disastrous to tragedy.

Lust and Leprosy

35

Terror, of course, is a quality expected in tragedy. Does this Crusade inspire terror? My answer would be: horror, yes, but not terror. And the horror is of a physical kind; disgust, not emotional horror, since we are not stirred. That terror which leaves us appalled at the blind persecutions of the gods or of life, is not evoked by this play in which, I repeat, the catastrophe is gratuitous and absurd. In short, instead of drama, we have melodrama, or rather, sheer folly, and instead of poetry, rhetoric, or rather, hallucination. To think that Manzoni was supposed to have "extirpated from Italian letters, or from the brain of Italy the most ancient cancer of rhetoric." 13 And, alas, more than a hundred years later, we had Mr. Mussolini bellowing taurinely from the Seven Capital Hills while the Archangel pompously yodeled on the Seven Capital Sins ! 1 4 # # # # # # # # #

Judged by normal standards then, this so-called play is a failure. It remains as a literary curiosity, as a freakish, subnormal child of genius. And aside from the usual Dannunzian ailments, it seems to have peculiar ones that excite our sleuthing propensity. Let us ferret them out; the hunt will take us far afield, to historical and literary pastures that at first we had not even suspected. Let us pluck out the separate motifs of the wretched tale, link them up with the ways of life and letters and endeavor to discover their raison d'être. The play is historical. That is, there certainly was such a thing as the Children's Crusade and it occurred, as the poet says, in 1212, between Easter and Pentecost. The records we have of it are extremely fragmentary and unreliable.15 There seem to have been two migrations of children, one from Northern France, the other from Germany, probably from the Rhine region. The truth seems to be that in both cases

36

Sleuthing in the Stacks

these motley mobs of devout youngsters, after tramping with much pious singing and in great disorder toward the south, returned ignominiously home — that is, except the many who starved, got lost, or were otherwise unaccounted for. Legend makes many of them go as far as Genoa and embark there for the Holy Land under the guidance of mercenary merchants bent on betraying them. The promoter-guides were one Hugo Ferreus (Hugh the Ironlike) and Guilielmus Porcus (William the Hog) — singularly appropriate names for these scoundrels and as sonorous as any invented by D'Annunzio. Among legendary details there are some that must have fired the imagination of our poet in search of historical material and elegiac inspiration. T w o of the ships were wrecked and all the children drowned (see Act IV) ; many of the youthful crusaders, with their older companions, male and female (read: mostly females, young and beautiful) sailing in other ships were sold as slaves to the Saracens; plunder and vice were prevalent (how that word "vice" must have stirred the poet's viscera) ; many of the girls were forced by violence or starvation into prostitution (here indeed was savory stuff). Such details must have induced the author to elaborate dramatically an historical event so far hardly exploited. With such plurally luscious data an intricate plot was superfluous. History, with its bountiful hand, had provided abundant depravity. For good measure our poet borrowed sacrilegiously from Dante, or says he did : "Then the whole forest resounds with the marvelous hymn [of D'Annunzio, but unwritten] which resembles the paradisal one of the blessed infants in the Celestial Rose." 18 D'Annunzio overlooked the minor detail that Dante mentions no such hymn. But a poet cannot be bothered with petty accuracies. Still more sacrilegiously he borrowed from the holiest, purest of saints, Saint Francis, overlooking the minor detail

Lust and Leprosy

37

that, sincc The Little Flowers was the story of the Saint's life and miracles, this book could hardly have been known in 1212, fourteen years before the Saint's death, and that since the legend in question, told in chapter xxiv of The Little Flowers, concerns the Saint's sojourn among the Saracens, which certainly took place later than 1313, it could hardly be used for action occurring in 1212. 17 But a poet cannot be bothered by such petty things as mere anachronisms.18 Presumably from Saint Francis, then, comes the leitmotif of the rehabilitated strumpet. Oh that from the Saint's naïve and sweet flowers should come such malodor! Such a leitmotif, however, is so common in literature that it would be futile to seek for a special source. Of course the theme is as old as the hills, flourishing even before Mary Magdalen and ubiquitously since. It was also, as everybody knows, exploited in countless romantic novels, plays, and librettos, which established the type of lady who gave such an ominous aroma to "Camelias" and her many sisters in transgression and tuberculosis whose sentimental demise has wrung tears from countless eyes. But since D'Annunzio's play was mediaeval, he had to make it allegorical. For isn't mediaeval literature always allegorical? D'Annunzio had manipulated allegorically the glorified concubine before, for example in Basiliola, the heroine of The Ship (La Nave). Instead of tuberculosis, which was the fashionable scourge of romanticism, he selected a more mediaevally prevalent and, at the same time, more picturesque and dainty disease, leprosy, which has, as we shall see, allegorical significance. Also, by adding leprosy to concubinage, his heroine could glitter with doubly alluring charm. Now, leprosy is a very ancient theme. One may find it in the Bible, where Naaman, so stricken, came to Elisha, who told him to "go and wash in the Jordan seven times" in order to recover his cleanliness of flesh.19 And some malicious in-

38

Sleuthing

in the Stacks

terpreters of the Bible have suspected that when Satan "smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto his crown," 2 0 these were symptoms of leprosy. Let us give poor Job the benefit of the doubt; his patience was sufficiently tried without that additional affliction. Leprosy flourished in ancient Egypt, was k n o w n to Greece (though not mentioned by Hippocrates) and to Rome, and was discussed by Aristotle, Pliny, and others 2 1 w h o called it elephantiasis. It probably came from the East and ran amuck throughout Europe especially during the unhygienic Dark Ages. These matters of common historical knowledge D ' A n n u n z i o must have known. If he had happened to glance, for instance, at Michaud's History of the Crusades, one of many books on the subject, he would have found that in France alone, where at least part of the Children's Crusade began, "there were two thousand hospitals for lepers." 2 2 Since leprosy thus became (what, fortunately, it is not n o w ) a common experience, it entered history and literature many times; it has been a motif for centuries, though too horrible to have produced artistic masterpieces. 23 T o this aspect I shall return in a minute. But what was the cure for leprosy ? " A n established cure for leprosy, from ancient Egypt down into the Middle Ages, was the blood-bath," 2 4 and such blood had to be pure, therefore from an innocent person, preferably a child or a virgin. 25 T o fill a bathtub it was necessary to slay many children, anywhere from ten to fifty. This was the long established custom. A t this point I confess having done Mr. D ' A n n u n z i o , in the early part of this essay, an unpardonable injustice, for far from his overdoing the bloody in this story, he showed extraordinary restraint in making the cure of his leper consist of the drinking of only "three little drops of blood" from the innocent Cheerful One, instead of insisting on a tubful. I humbly beg his pardon for so misrepresenting him. T h e cure for leprosy, either by drinking blood or bathing

Lust and Leprosy

39

in it, accompanies the story of the disease in literature, which notion branches out into religious rituals and superstition. To cite a modern example of the latter, in Pernambuco, Brazil, it was noised about as recently as 1889 that a dozen missing children had been kidnapped "to be killed for the benefit of lepers" ! And this report has trimmings — or shall I say hors d'oeuvres — for not only was the blood-bath to be used, but the sick were to "eat heart, liver and kidneys of a young, healthy child" ! Which caused a panic in Pernambuco, as it does to our stomachs.26 Although, if I may borrow a line from Leopardi (with a slight variation) : It will be sweet to drown in such a sea, 2 7

we shall not allow ourselves to drown — either in Folklore or in tubs of blood. For, in this case, we can pick up at once a legend to cling to, which will lead us to the foothold of literature. The motif we are exploring penetrates literature to such an extent, with so many subterranean ramifications, that all I can do here, to keep myself within reasonable limits of pertinence, is to point out a few outstanding examples of literary leprosy and bloody cure.28 One of the earliest legends of leprosy cures concerns Emperor Constantine who, thus afflicted, was told that he must bathe in the blood of children. Though still a heathen, he decided that it would be far better for him to retain the disease than to sacrifice innocent lives.29 It is strange to note that with far less Christian charity than Constantine's, a similarly horrible cure was actually suggested, as late as the end of the fifteenth century, by such a blessed personage as Pope Innocent VIII! I mention the Constantinian legend because it shows a new motif, that of Christian charity, which became part of the European story and will in turn develop into another motive, that of miraculous healing, as a gift of God, after the human sacrifice has been rejected by the leper.

40

Sleuthing in the Stacks

A mediaeval example of this form of the story is to be found in Germanic lore, in the sad tale of The Poor Henry (Der arme Heinrich) by Hartmann von Aiie,30 a poet from Swabia. Incidentally let us note that since he lived between 1170 and 1220, his life coincides with the period of The Children's Crusade (1212). This Germanic tale and its subsequent elaborations have no direct relation, I suspect, with The Crusade of the Innocent. To prove the correctness of this suspicion, however, I must tell, at least very briefly, the story. Hartmann von Aiie, who claimed to be retelling an old legend (and he probably was), relates how a knightly and very virtuous nobleman, Heinrich, was accidentally stricken with the foul plague. Having consulted many physicians, only one of them, from the famous medical school of Salerno, had been able to suggest a cure, the blood bath. The daughter of Henry's tenant, a most pure, in fact saintly little girl who was mysteriously infatuated with Henry, insisted, even against the wishes of Henry, of her parents, and of the physician, on offering herself for the sacrifice. She accompanies Heinrich to Salerno; she is placed upon the block — or shall we say, the operating table; the doctor sharpens his knife, but Henry, who was peeping through a crack in the door, seeing her lovely, naked body, bursts in and forbids the slaughter. Her willingness to sacrifice her blood — and blood means life — to purge Henry of disease, verily as Christ had done to purge man of sin, so appeals to God that Henry is miraculously healed. They return to Germany and eventually marry. This version adds still another motif to the story: the sensual element. In fact, had it not been for Heinrich's peep-hole admiration of the young girl's lovely body, her bleeding to death would, alas, have taken place. The miraculous cure by God is here, we might suggest, more as a reward for the young girl, so ready and eager to sacrifice herself for her fellow-man (as Christ sacrificed himself, I repeat), than for

Lust and Leprosy

41

Heinrich, virtuous though he had been and patient in his dreadful ordeal. Now, the lack of kinship between von Aiie's plot and D'Annunzio's is obvious. The fact that the Italian poet did not introduce into his play a scene in which a young girl's nudity prompted the dénouement seems sufficient proof. For could D'Annunzio possibly have resisted such a scene, so appropriate, besides, to the movies ? That is why I shall not follow any farther this Germanic story that has been told so many times,31 except to mention that it was also taken up by our Longfellow in his Golden Legend, by Rossetti, and, in more recent times, by Gerhardt Hauptmann in his Oer Arme Heinrich (1902), a play more poetic than dramatic, far better fit to be read than acted. But I should at least mention one other instance of leprosy in literature: Le lépreux de la cité d'Aoste, by Xavier de Maistre, first published in St. Petersburg in 1811. It is not really fiction, for all de Maistre did was to analyze fictitiously the desperate solitude of a wretched man, Pierre-Bernard Guasco, who died in 1803 in a tower in the city of Aosta, now in Piedmont, where he had been relegated for thirtytwo years as "unclean." Sainte-Beuve praised de Maistre's account most highly, even comparing him to Mérimée; today it reads like a very naïve, all too simple dialogue; although very sentimental, it is in spots, touching. It was imitated and falsely enlarged by a Madame Olympe Cottu in 1824.32 Let me now return to the symbolic aspect, mentioned above, of the motif of flame, which is related to leprosy. Though it was pulled in by D'Annunzio in a haphazard way, it has its significance. For at least ever since the Old Testament, leprosy has symbolized sin, uncleanness of the flesh allegorizing uncleanness of the soul. Wasn't it our own New England divine and expert in witchcraft, Cotton Mather, who said: "Sickness is in fact the whip of God for the sins of

42

. Sleuthing in the Stacks

man" ? It is quite logical that leprosy, the disease of death, as it was frequently called, should be cured by blood, which is life-giving (compare our modern blood banks), and by the blood of the pure, which is purifying. It is also logical that leprosy, in its symbolical significance, as sin, should incur God's wrath, which is always symbolized by fire. Furthermore, fire is also the traditional punishment of sin, and more especially of the sin of lust. In Dante's Hell, as everybody knows, fire is one of the means of punishment; in his Purgatory, it is used in the seventh ledge to purge the lustful. Dante, who was himself guilty of this sin, had to walk through flame so hot that, as he says, he would gladly "have thrown himself into moulten glass to cool off." 33 Since Johanna-the-Vamp was lustful by profession, the proper punishment for her sin was flame. Here too, then, D'Annunzio, with his conflagrations, did not invent anything; he merely used traditional material. One might even go farther and say that, in D'Annunzio's so-called philosophy, excessive pursuit of pleasure is inevitably followed by exhaustion and crime and that the purifying consequence of consequent grief justifies the pleasure. Lust followed by leprosy, followed by fire, represent pleasure followed by grief, followed by purification. Hate-the-World's intermittent slitting of his baby sister's jugular vein is a little more difficult to explain, even symbolically. Her death, as a result of the blood-cure for leprosy, was not necessary. "Three drops" of her pure blood could easily have been removed, even in the thirteenth century, for her brother's healing, without causing her demise. Even savages know how to perform such an operation.34 And this is one of the places in which D'Annunzio's motivation is faulty. But the poor little girl, on the other hand, had a double function, as she lay in the dreadfully heavy bundle of olive twigs. She was not only the lamb offered for the bloody

Lust and Leprosy

43

sacrifice; she was the heaviness, for the poet forced upon her the role of symbolizing her brother's heavy sin — as if leprosy were not a sufficient symbol. Even if her neck had, perchance, not been fatally punctured, the poor child would have been crushed to death under the weight of symbolism. It is still more difficult to explain why she should die and be resurrected with such persistent intermittency. Yet the answer is clear; in fact I can imagine several answers. First of all, since passion comes in repetitive waves, every time one of these waves struck her blood-thirsty brother, he had to kill. Secondly, since, according to ritualistic superstition he had to kill an innocent person, that is a child or a virgin, and since she was the only child available at the beginning of the play, and the only virgin, he simply had to kill her. Then, since her dying depended on her dear brother's fluctuations between sin and remorse, at every swing of his conscience's pendulum, so to speak, she either had to die or be resurrected ! This is logical. And finally, let us be generous: why not give Hate-the-World the salutary satisfaction of killing his little sister again and again ? Had he not been parsimonious enough in exacting "only three drops" of his sister's blood ? It is not his fault if, after such a trivial bleeding, she insisted on dying. That such rapid changes should have produced in the frail flesh of the Cheerful One a "mysterious fever," is, at first sight, not astonishing; although it is puzzling to understand why she should become more feverish after being bled. But a miracle play must, perforce, be full of miracles; and they are miracles precisely because they cannot be explained! The miraculous, accompanied by mystic visions, is, of course, a necessary ingredient of the miracle play, just as quotations from the Bible are and the singing of hymns. This is not the first time that D'Annunzio decorated his canvas with the tinsel of religiosity and combined it with more pagan in-

44

Sleuthing in the Stacks

gredients, especially lust and brutality. Not to mention again The Ship, in which play the accumulation of horrors caused it to be this dramatist's most spectacular fiasco; there was much lechery mingled with sanctimoniousness in another pseudo-miracle play of his, The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian ( 1 9 1 1 ) . Here the author super-glorified the carnal beauty of the wretched martyr, topping off the picture with delicate intimations of sodomy.35 And the list might be continued. There is, of course, a well known relation between sensuality and religiosity, especially in primitive folkways. What Sumner called "sacral harlotry" 36 was a primtive rite, which later became, with the advance of civilization, mere prostitution. D'Annunzio shows in this play what Santayana so felicitously phrased as "the corrupt desire of being primitive." 37 But he failed to convey the naïve and the mystic, essential qualities of the mediaeval miracle play. The miraculous, overdone, becomes delirium; the naively primitive becomes savagery. As such it dangerously approaches what the French call une pièce rosse, or une douche écossaise de terreur, which genres belong to the Grand Guignol. Indeed I remember seeing in that Parisian theatre, several years ago, an admirable penny-shocker based on the leitmotif of leprosy.38 Verily when D'Annunzio first attempted a miracle play, with his Saint Sebastian, "he lost his way," as an Italian critic put it; 3 9 when he wrote his Crusade, he was more lost than ever, bogged in the swamp of his own imaginings. # # # # # # # # # Having thus attempted to dissect the wild plot of this scenario, there still remains in our inquisitive minds an unanswered question: Why was D'Annunzio moved, in the year of our Lord 1912, to commit The Crusade of the Innocenti Why this particular exploitation of a miracle play theme at this time ? Was it merely in this writer "free from all bonds

Lust and Leprosy

45

of morality and religion . . . an aesthetic gesture," 4 0 or was there some prodding circumstance ? Of course he might have just read or reread some old Italian miracle plays. In fact he quotes from one of them at the beginning of his booklet, The Representation of Abraham and Isaac.*1 But this morality play has nothing in common with our Crusade. I shall venture a more plausible reply, conjectural, yet suggestive. A n d this last little problem will force us to peep, for a moment, into D'Annunzio's life at that period. D ' A n n u n z i o had been living in his villa at Settignano, neat Florence, where he wrote his most beautiful poetry, his Praises . . . (Laudi . . .). But he was heavily in debt; his creditors were as numerous as they were insistent ( h o w unreasonable!). O f course by rights the Italian people and the Italian government owed it to their greatest living poet to support him in the "elegant supermannism" 4 2 which his artistic genius craved and needed. But those heartless Italians would not pay his bills. In fact, to cause his immediate solvency, they went so far as to promote a vulgar auction of his chattels. T h e poet, indignant at such manifest injustice, packed up in a rage and went off into "voluntary" exile. T o put it bluntly, he fled to Paris. One malicious critic even goes so far as to suggest that by so doing D ' A n n u n z i o wanted to establish one more link, though superfluous, between himself and Dante, both poet-exiles from those vile Florentines w h o did not have sense enough to appreciate them. 43 N o w the idea of Paris does not connote, in most of us, visions of mystic revivals. A l t h o u g h that city was the center of theological studies in the Middle Ages, it is better known, in our times, for other attractions. W h e n Oliver Wendell Holmes said, in his Autocrat (quoting Thomas Gold Appleton), "Good Americans, w h e n they die, go to Paris," was he thinking of theology? W h y is it then that, paradoxically, D'Annunzio's sojourn in Paris should have inspired him to

φ

Sleuthing in the Stacks

exploit piety, even though with leprous and lecherous trimmings? Not that his Parisian life was pious; au contraire.44 In fact, his greatest Parisian inspiration was Mademoiselle Ida Rubinstein, she of the beautiful legs, who inspired and interpreted his Saint Sebastian. But here is a peculiar coincidence: It was just at that time in Paris that a revival of old morality plays was occurring. And the instigator, one might so call him, of this pious revival in the drama was the most mystic of our contemporary French poets, Paul Claudel, who was recently Ambassador to the United States. He is not merely a good Roman Catholic, but by heartfelt conviction a real mystic.45 The mysticism of the Middle Ages, therefore, naturally found in him a true interpreter, whose devout sincerity was unmingled with alien emotions, though remaining thoroughly human. The coincidence is emphasized by the fact that one of Claudel's mystic plays, L'Annonce faite à Marie, has several elements in common with The Crusade of the Innocent, and also appeared in 1912. Excluding such things as miracles, prayers, hymns, holy apparitions, which are of the very pattern of a miracle play, here are the motifs which we find also in Claudel's plot. In Act I there is a leper, Pierre de Craon, who is in love with the heroine, Violaine, to whom, in her innocence, he has passed "the silver flower of leprosy." 46 She is thereby forced to live in seclusion for eight years in a dark forest (not a swamp), where she becomes blind. Seclusion, solitude, shame are always the first sacrifices exacted by leprosy. In both plays all the characters have names, except one, and this one is simply called The Mother. In both plays the crusade-motif is used ; in Claudel's no particular crusade, for the author wisely wished to be vague in his setting and placed the whole action "à la fin d'un Moyen-Age de convention." The irresistible desire of Violaine's father to forsake all and hie himself to the Holy Land is part of crusade psy-

Lust and Leprosy

47

chology, which devoutness Claudel condensed in one individual, while D'Annunzio placed it in a mob of children. In Act III Claudel even has a fagot on the stage and a fiery furnace, genuinely symbolical, not ludicrously diathermal. Also in Act III the corpse of a child is introduced, the child of Violaine's sister Mara, and the motif of resurrection creeps in when Mara implores her sister, saintly though leprous, to bring back the baby to life. Why should Violaine have this miraculous power ? Because she had been saved, by leprosy, from amorous sin; because she symbolizes Christlike selfimmolation. Murder is common to both plays, for Mara, intensely jealous of her far more attractive though leprous sister, kills her — because both loved the same man — as the only means of achieving her own lover's complete devotion. There are even "voices of angels," corresponding to D'Annunzio's "white voices." Some of the differences between these two morality plays are due to temperament and technique. Claudel's symbolism is plausible, his verse is poetry, his piety is genuine. There is passion in his story, but it is real, whether spiritual, as in Violaine, or worldly, as in Mara; there are universal human emotions in tragical conflict, which bring about the inevitable catastrophe. Although Claudel's can hardly be classed (in my humble opinion) as a great play, or even a great morality play, it is effective because sincere. In D'Annunzio we have merely the "mad frenzy of the senses." 47 His characters are not motivated by passion, but by lechery, of a rather hysterical variety; they are not inevitably driven to action, they seem to indulge at random in preposterous antics. Their faith is not true, it is tinsel. His characters are suffering from what I should punfully call chronic tinselitis! It is probably only fortuitous that these two plays, of the same theatrical kin, written about the same time,48 though as different in treatment as the authors are in temperament, should have ele-

48

Sleuthing in the Stacks

ments in common. It is impossible that Claudel should have got his initial prompting from D'Annunzio, because L'Annonce faite à Marie is the third version of a play first written in 1902, and first called La jeune fille Violaine, though published after JJ Annonce·,49 and it is improbable that D'Annunzio should have tried to imitate Claudel. I realize that even if I had suggested such a derivation I should not be paying a great compliment either to Claudel or to D'Annunzio. And why should not two similar plants sprout simultaneously, but independently in the same soil? As the French say: "C'est imiter quelqu'un que de planter des choux." From observation and reading, from hidden springs of feeling and imagination, mingled within the poet in an occult omnium gatherum, he plucks and then transforms, often quite unconscious of his sources. If his transformation of the raw material culminates in a work of art, we applaud, whether it is partly taken from others or not, for the world is full of excellent material, so far poorly treated, which shouts for transformation into masterful finality of form. If, as in the Crusade, the poet fails, we condemn, again regardless of sources. The strange thing is that D'Annunzio, who never hesitated to appropriate material from others,50 and who usually knew how to make it his own and beautiful, especially in his poems, this time, wherever he found the seed, ideas should have failed utterly. It is strange that a splendid poet, endowed, in certain ways, with such exquisite taste, should this time exhibit such abysmal lack of artistic wisdom. Perhaps such a lacuna, making him appear as so fallible, may present him as more human. If Mr. D'Annunzio were alive today, and if he had the wit of Dr. Johnson, he might say: "Homer has his style; I have mine." And yet he would have to explain a picture of distorted humanity. And if Oliver Wendell Holmes had read D'Annunzio's verbal salad

Lust and Leprosy

49

of lechery and disease, he would have called the mad Archangel "the Voltaire of pelvic literature" ! D'Annunzio's Crusade of the Innocent appeared in 1912, still-born, and though, like the Cheerful One, it was miraculously resurrected, and perhaps performed its lurid function in the movies, in literature its defunction seems permanent. Except for one immortal touch, in the staging of the first act: The dirge of snipes "which whimper like juvenile gnats." Here, if nowhere else, D'Annunzio unquestionably reached "the highest and nudest summit of pathos" !

III·

The Weaker Sex F course short stories also suffer under the tyranny of shifting fashions, so that our youngsters may now overlook or not admire as much as we oldsters did, and still do, the masterpieces of Maupassant and Kipling on which we were raised. But these remain, nevertheless, masterpieces. Among the writers of some fifty years ago, now somewhat forgotten, is an American who deserves a very high place as a short story artist, Frederic Jesup Stimson. His pseudonym was J. S. of Dale. He is a very old gentleman now, for he was born in 1855. He has had a very rich, versatile life. He was graduated from Harvard in '76, got his law degree in '78, became a prominent lawyer in Boston, a prosecuting attorney and judge; he was Ambassador to two South American republics and wrote several books, some of which are on government and on quesions of law, and some of which are fiction. Since he has written his autobiography, let me refer, for further details, to his My United States (New York: Scribner's, 1931) an informing and delightfully straightforward book. Of his several short stories, two stand out as superb dramatic examples, not to be forgotten. Let us analyze them. The Weaker Sex is the title of the first, which appeared in the Atlantic in 19οι. 1 The story is told in the first person by the District Attorney of Boston, a very humane poet-lawyer whose hobby is to

O

The Weaker Sex

51

work in the slums. One night he goes into Dempsey's saloon, where he sees three men at the bar, two of them apparently "ineffable cutthroats," imposing their will upon a rather impotent third. Enter a woman, the wife of the weak one, Wentworth, who drags him home. The author is at once interested in this fine, sad woman, obviously the stronger mate. Enter Barstow, a priest who goes about the slums in civilian clothes, a noble, impersonal man, who devotes his whole soul and life to philanthropy, and is the patron saint of Cheese-it-Alley. The author discovers that Wentworth, unemployed, having lost his job in a bank, is taking to drink, under the influence of the two ruffians, who are using him for their own criminal purposes. And he is also developing a mean animosity towards his devoted wife who is trying to save him, and towards Barstow, the preacher, who is trying to help her. The husband, unaware that this man is a priest and a most earnest slum-worker, resents, especially when he is drunk, the presence of this fellow in the company of his wife. The ruffians are discovered, by the prosecuting attorney-author, to be counterfeiters who want to use Wentworth as a fence, or worse. Such a weak man is putty in their hands, especially as he is more than ready to drink in order to forget his disappointments in a job. Enter a young Russian Jew, Stepan, also devoted to Mrs. Wentworth; he is used by the attorney to spy on the ruffians. He discovers their secret cellar, which is now to be raided. The priest warns the woman to keep her husband at home that night, but the fool sneaks out and is arrested, together with one of the counterfeiters. When the tenderfoot husband is released, he goes home, where he finds his wife with the disguised priest. When the police arrive to investigate Wentworth, they hear a loud altercation, then the sound of a shot and the thud of a body. They find Wentworth drunk, with

52

Sleuthing in the Stacks

a smoking revolver in his hand, while Barstow the priest is holding him under the arms, too late. The wife, shot right through the breast, is lying unconscious on the floor. Suddenly, the sight of his wounded wife sobers Wentworth who, aware of the enormity of his act, falls in sobs over her. It turns out that the ruffians had made Wentworth drink and, urged by their hatred for his wife who stood in their way, had suggested to him that if he went home he would find Barstow making love to Mrs. Wentworth. The doctor's report leaves a little hope that the woman may recover. When the police come to arrest Wentworth, "Ken," as the author says, "I heard the cry of a lost soul." The desperate husband implores, "in the name of Christ," that the police leave him by his wife; the prosecuting attorney guarantees him to the police, and he is not arrested. For days and nights that distracted husband watches his wife. "Wentworth would have bartered immortality for one more mortal moment with her." Easter morning, several days later, the woman is still living; the doctor had not dared to probe for the deep bullet. She and her husband have a talk alone. Then she asks to speak to the attorney. In the depth of her eyes he sees that her husband had told her everything — in short, that he still adored her. "Never had I seen her look so happy. By heaven, I have never seen such happiness in any woman's face. I am a bachelor; but I should make a good husband, for I would confess my love after marriage." (It is by such warm, personal touches that the story is made intimate.) "For this was what she wanted to say to me : that he loved her . . . ; that he was wholly hers ; that he fired the shot in a moment of insane jealousy. Now he was himself again, — forever. And hers, — now really hers . . . would they prosecute him?" The attorney is bound to tell her that if she dies "within a year and a day," her husband will be in for murder. " 'By

The Weaker Sex

53

heaven,' said Barstow [the priest] when I told him this that night, Ί believe she would like to die, while he loves her so.' " For some days she seemed to get better. She asked for Stepan, the Jewish boy, and spoke to him alone. The next day she again sent for the lawyer, wishing to see him alone. " Y o u see I'm getting well," she said, and again enquired about the law, about "a year and a day." She begged that her husband should not be prosecuted, if she did not live. She knew that the two ruffians had worked up his jealousy, but that he had loved her all along. Really not murder at all, she thought, but a sudden, mad jealous impulse. He had always carried a revolver, as a bank clerk. He was drunk. Then she adds: " A t least, it could not be murder if I lived a year and a day. A n d it would not be murder, would it, if I died from something else?" She asks to be reassured on the latter case. She begs the lawyer to promise to help her husband. As the attorney leaves the room, she draws a revolver from beneath her pillow and fires at her wounded breast. Stepan, rushing in, gives an agonized cry. She had, that very morning, persuaded him to bring her a revolver. The doctor admits that upon her pleadings he had told her she could not survive. The police move to arrest the husband, who begs, in his desperate anguish, that they wait until after the funeral. " 'Not then,' " says the district attorney, " 'not now. Inspector, you may go. It is no longer murder; only assault, which is bailable; his bullet did not kill her. It was suicide. It is the law. For the Commonwealth, inspector, I discharge you from this case.' We knelt by the bedside of the dead woman with her husband whose life she had saved at peril of her soul." "What do you think he will do ?" said the attorney-author to Barstow, pointing to Wentworth.

54

Sleuthing in the Stacks

"I do not know. He has had a good woman live for him, — and die for him. He has had his chance." # # # # # # # # #

Even through a synopsis, which necessarily ruins the flow of the story, one may feel the tremendous power of this superdramatic situation. Telling remarks by the author make poignantly clear the interrelations of the characters and work for a logical, avalanche-like inevitability of dénouement. A superb story, I repeat, full of essential humanity and told by a sensitive, fine spirit. The legal question at the very end might puzzle us. Indeed it is a very puzzling question, even to some of the personages involved. In fact, after the funeral, the attorney is asked if he is really sure of his law. His answer gives us the source of the story. He replies, "There is a case: People against Lewis — that quite settles it." And Mr. Stimson wrote to me stating that his inspiration had come directly from a famous legal case which occurred in California. We must now, therefore, look into that. Since I am entirely innocent of all legal lore, I asked my old friend Ralph H. Lachmund, a prominent San Francisco lawyer, to help me find the case, and I found it: The People vs. Franks A. Lewis? Synopsis of the crime: The defendant, Frank A. Lewis, and the deceased, William H. Farrell, both of Shasta County, were brothers-in-law, on speaking terms, but hardly friendly, because of certain pecuniary relations and some gossip. One day (July 13,1895) when Farrell was in Lewis's house (note this detail) they engaged in a violent altercation, started by Farrell and endured by Lewis until threatened. Farrell, in fact, in a fit of fury, had grabbed an "iron-mounted singletree" and challenged Lewis to come out into the yard and get his head mauled. At that, losing all patience, Lewis took

The Weaker Sex

55

hold of a rifle and shot Farrell in the abdomen. Farrell fell, was dragged by his sister, Mrs. Lewis, upon a bed, and a few minutes later, made desperate by physical anguish, he pulled out a knife, slashed his throat and died almost immediately. Since his sister had just left the room, the only witness to this last act was a young son of Lewis, nephew of the deceased. Medical authorities decreed that Farrell's demise was certainly accelerated by the knife wound, which was the immediate cause of his death, but that the rifle bullet having gone through his intestine into the spine would doubtless have caused death in a very short time. From the legal point of view, as my legal ignorance can attempt to understand it, two questions seem to be involved: Whether Lewis shot in self defence; whether Farrell's death was the result of murder or suicide. As to the first question, Lewis, in his own house, was threatened with bodily violence; he had a right to defend himself and his home; he was insulted and challenged; he shot. Although my personal sympathy is entirely with Lewis, I must drop this irrelevant question and move to the next point, which parallels the Stimson story. An exposition of this legal dilemma is given in the second appeal of the case, after Lewis had been twice convicted of manslaughter. Since it will throw some light on our plot, I shall copy it verbatim: 3 "Now, it is contended that this is a case where one languishing from a mortal wound is killed by an intervening cause, and, therefore, deceased was not killed by Lewis. To constitute manslaughter, the defendant must have killed some one [this much even I can grasp!], and if, though mortally wounded by the defendant, Farrell actually died from an independent, intervening cause, Lewis, at the most, could only be guilty of a felonious attempt. He was as effectually prevented from killing as he would have been if some

56

Sleuthing in the Stacks

obstacle had turned aside the bullet from its course and left Farrell unwounded." (This sounds quite illogical to me.) And they contend that the intervening act was the cause of death, if it shortened the life of Farrell for any period whatsoever. But in spite of such arguments, Lewis was again convicted, for the third time. The judge's instructions to the jury in that second appeal are interesting, even though they seem to me to go still farther in befuddling the issue : "If you believe from the evidence that it is impossible to tell whether Will Farrell [the familiar diminutive for emotional effect!] died from the wound in the throat, or the wound in the abdomen, you are bound to acquit." One may well imagine the bewilderment of an average jury. But here again this instruction was refused and the original conviction sustained. In short, Mr. Frank A . Lewis, defendant, was convicted for the third and last time of manslaughter and thereafter went definitively to serve his sentence. T o my unfortunately unlegalistic cerebellum this whole trial, I repeat, seems like a simple crime surrounded by thrice manufactured clouds of artificial smoke. Perhaps it appeared so also to Mr. Stimson, who, besides seeing, as an astute scholar in the law, the fine points which I miss, saw the drama of a situation in which the verdict would go the other way. With his sympathetic imagination he saw how suicide, on the part of one mortally wounded, might be not a cowardly act by one who is incapable of enduring physical pain, but a supremely noble act by one who wishes to take the blame of death in order to save the murderer. That supreme sacrifice would suggest supreme devotion, all the more ironically dramatic if placed upon one who is un-

The Wea\er Sex

57

worthy. At this point of his elaborations our author quite naturally imagined a splendid woman devoted to an unworthy husband. Wisely he emphasized the unworthiness, piling on the circumstances : inability to hold a job or to find another, weakness of character seen in a man prone to drinking and stupidly influenced by plotting ruffians. A n d what is the most logical occasion for conjugal shooting ? Of course, jealousy, fanned by the ruffians for their own purposes, because the excellent wife endeavored to counteract their influence. The drama is enriched by the very impossibility in fact of their insinuations made to a husband whose already feeble mind is enfeebled by whiskey : a love affair with a priest. A t first sight, the insinuations of the villains that this fine woman allowed a priest to make love to her, would seem a bit strange. Remember, however, that this young priest was traveling incognito, in civilian clothes, in the slums, where he was known simply as Barstow. If I may intrude a parenthesis here: Can Roman Catholic priests go around in civilian clothes? The answer, which I obtained from a pupil of mine who is a priest, is that they certainly can, for special purposes and with the permission of their bishop. There is here, therefore, no fault to be found in Mr. Stimson's stratagem. The plot would, indeed, have been possible, though not so plausible, even if the priest had worn his ecclesiastical vestments. It is perhaps more unlikely that a woman should fall in love with an official priest, but it cannot be excluded as impossible. Priests involved in love affairs are not at all uncommon in literature, from Boccaccio on. Finally, in the story we are examining, there was no love affair at all, of course, it was just a malicious insinuation by the shrewd villains to a feeble man, made still feebler by drink, for their own foul purposes. And Barstow, working in the Boston slums, among Jews, Protestants, Catholics, and people from many lands, thought,

58

Sleuthing in the Stacks

quite wisely, that he might obtain the best results if he did not visibly represent any special creed. He was right; and so was the author. Furthermore, his action enhances the drama. It brings into the plot a motivator of crime who is not merely innocent, but beneficent. When not mere innocence, but beneficence occasions crime, then the reader, or the audience in the theatre, is indeed affected by the mystery of life and the inescapability from tragedy. For if even the most virtuous of actions cause crime, then we must all throw up the sponge, so to speak, and wonder how on earth we should act. The reader is consequently filled with horror at the injustice of human events and with pity for those who are not merely passively innocent, but actively good. Horror and pity, the essentials of tragedy. A superb story, I repeat. And I am not alone in my judgment, for, as Mr. Stimson wrote to me, the editor of the Atlantic said to him: "That is the best story you ever wrote." If I am not mistaken, the editor was Bliss Perry (whom I am proud to call teacher and friend). All will agree that Bliss Perry had an extraordinary flair for good writing and could also produce it, as his autobiography delightfully proves. The fact that Mr. Stimson took his plot from the law suggests another remark, by another famous teacher of English and writer, Br ander Matthews (under whom, too, I studied), who, in speaking of laws, said: "It is literature which cases these bare bones in flesh and blood." 4 Perhaps Mr. Matthews did not know that he was echoing a remark made a century earlier by the greatest novelist in Italian literature, Alessandro Manzoni, who, in discussing the historical novel and its basis in historical facts, said: "You wish me, in a certain way, to provide the flesh for that heap of bones which, to a certain extent, history is." 5 Surely Mr. Stimson, the writer, provided

The Weaker Sex

59

the flesh of life to a forgotten legal case which Mr. Stimson, the lawyer, had found in the records of the California Supreme Court. # # # # # # # # #

Mr. Stimson is the author of another and more famous story, which has, however, a colorless title and a quirk in its fame: Mrs. Knotty s. It is strange that such a talented and astute writer should not have been able to concoct a more subtly suggestive title, but, after all, titles alone do not make literature, any more than a surname makes a man. Is not Madame Bovary a masterpiece? As to the fame of Mrs. Knollys, many who remember the story, and it is indeed unforgettable, forget its author; I have heard this story attributed to Maupassant — which is no small bouquet to Mr. Stimson. Mrs. Knollys first appeared in the Century in 1883; it was translated into many languages, and later appeared in one of Mr. Stimson's books.6 Again let me attempt to condense the plot, before I proceed to a critical discussion. The condensation will be easier in this case, because, as you will see, the situation contains but two actions, which enclose, however, intense drama. Mr. and Mrs. Knollys, a very young English couple, are on their honeymoon in the Austrian Alps. He is a young clerk, she a lovely girl of eighteen. They take walks in the snowy mountains; they are madly in love. Three days after they have reached their Alpine retreat and are in blissful high heaven, while walking along a glacier, he slips into a bottomless crevasse. Irretrievably gone, her beautiful young husband, her happiness, all her hopes, everything. The guides assure her that nothing whatsoever can be done. Enter upon the scene a professor, a geologist, who is devoting his life to the study of glaciers and their action. He is

6o

Sleuthing in the Stacks

a caricature, even less human than the average caricatured professor because, besides being an ultra-scientist, Dr. Zimmermann is an ultra-German. The accident which annihilates the very life of Mrs. Knollys is to him only a laboratory phenomenon, all the more thrilling because it occurs just at the right moment to help the ice-blooded savant to prove his own pet theory about glaciers. He surmises, with scientific and only scientific interest, that, because of the gradual and measurable downsliding of glaciers, the body of the young husband should reappear at the bottom of the glacier in about forty-five years. Since the scientist is still young, he patiently looks forward to the reappearance of that body as final proof positive of his pet theory. Every summer these two people, in their dramatic juxtaposition, visit the glacier: The anguished, lovable widow, the coldly observant and detestable professor, both watching the glacier, both growing old. Hers is an anguished life, to be sure, but a plucky one. Although ever filled with the vision of her young husband and the fatal wreckage of her life, she devotes herself with Christian kindness to charity, to relatives, to friends ; she becomes the patron saint of her English corner. Very skilfully the author brings out, with a detailed description, her everremembering sorrow and her noble years, as they drag along in England, interrupted every summer by a tragically reminiscent trip to the Alps. Gradually Mrs. Knollys is transformed from the girl widow to an old woman. Forty-two summers later, when she and the tenacious professor are visiting their Alps, surely enough the body of her lover issues out of the lower reaches of the glacier. This is the second and last episode in the story: She, a withered old lady, finds again her husband, still young, utterly unchanged from that fatal day two and forty years ago. She is sixty, he

The Wea\er Sex

61

is still twenty. And the geologist's theory finds final corroboration. Soon after this climax, Mrs. Knollys dies. A superb short story. But notice the technical difficulty it must have presented, with its two potent actions, separated by an inactive stretch of forty-two years. This middle stage of the tale is made vibrant, however, with a sketch of the widow's personality, which not only holds but also enhances our sympathy, while the recurrent professor excites our contempt, our silent derision. Since derision is a form of humor, we have here a dramatic contrast even in the actionless middle part of the story. If one wanted to be hypercritical, one might question the motivation at the very end. Why did the poor widow die? Certainly not of grief, which she had nobly endured for forty-two years. And only the meanest kind of critic could say: Because, the story being ended, her presence was no longer needed. But the author makes her die of sheer old age, at sixty! Surely he must have been young so to gauge the lethal effect of three score years. In fact, he was only twentyeight when the story was published. How remote and decrepit sixty looks at twenty-eight! The story reveals, without further data, the author's youth. One might also question another detail, rather macabre. Would a man's body, after a sojourn of forty-two years in ice, which must at times be moist, remain entirely unchanged? Would the dead lover's face still retain the beloved beauty of the young groom ? In spite of my innocence in matters concerning both glaciers and cadavers, I would venture to answer: No. I shall soon try to prove this unromantic, but practical point. It is hardly necessary to add, in the meantime, that a more scientifically accurate picture of the husband, after his prolonged infrigidation, would have ruined the story, aesthetically. Bodily decay does not go with

62

Sleuthing in the Stacks

romance; the final thrust of the story depended entirely on the contrast between her person, withered, gray-haired, and his, with the unchanged complexion of youth. * * * * * * * * *

The literary scholar enjoys, at least as much as any reader, the artistic merits of a beautiful short story and is as much moved by its emotional force. That is, unless he is of the caricatured geological-glacial species. But the research sleuth wishes to go farther by asking the usual question: Whence came the story? Nor is this a petty or futile question, because from the answer will perhaps come intimations of the miraculous ways of art, first the discovery of malleable raw material (inspiration) and then the transformation of that raw material into beauty (artistic craftsmanship). Mr. Stimson had firsthand familiarity with glaciers. In his autobiography (pp. 57-59) he describes his ascent of the "great Glockner" in Carinthia in 1876 — an alpine expedition that involved the seeing and even the crossing of glaciers. With a mind like Mr. Stimson's, prone to the dramatic interpretation of people, places, and things, such spots, with their doomful perils, must have suggested tragedy; they might have been sufficient to inspire a story, even years later. But by a peculiar coincidence (and coincidence is so often, of course, the accidental pollen of art, scholarship, and life) an event occurred to fertilize Mr. Stimson's personal experience. "An unliterary cousin in New York," as he wrote to me, told him of reading in a newspaper about "a lost husband in a glacier." Mere accident had added the kernel of a plot to the milieu already in Mr. Stimson's fictional mind. But that was not quite enough; he needed scientific data from the literature and folklore of Alpine peaks, and their catastrophes. Since the most perilous aspect of eternal snows is the crevasse, he must have sought information about it, and he must

The Weaker Sex

63

have found a lot of material on the subject. Indeed there is a whole literature and folklore not only on mountains in general or on the Alps but also on the arch-devil of the Alps, Mont Blanc. Mr. Stimson could not have consulted the book on Mont Blanc by Mathews,7 because it was published seventeen years after the appearance of Mrs. Knotty s. In this book, however, the Bibliography of Mont Blanc, which contains almost three hundred titles, includes many which Mr. Stimson could have consulted, two or three among them very pertinently. For in the chapter devoted to "fatalities" are enumerated the lives taken by that most deadly of Alpine peaks, and these stories, which occurred in fact and in print long before 1883, throw some light on the catastrophe of Mrs. Knollys. For example, the story of the Russian, Dr. Hamel. He tried the ascent in 1820, for scientific purposes; he and his party were caught by an avalanche which carried three guides into a deep crevasse. Death and scientific investigation were combined in that catastrophe. For people began to wonder when the bodies might be surrendered by the glacier. A scientist, James David Forbes, had come to the conclusion, after careful calculations, that the rate of a glacier's motion was roughly two feet per day, and therefore predicted that the bodies of Dr. Hamel and his companions might well turn up after a lapse of about forty years. "Forbes was right. From the crevasse at the foot of the Rochers Rouges to the base of the Glacier des Bossons is a distance of about six miles, and there on the fifteenth of August, 1861, Forbes' bold prediction was verified and the ice gave up the dead" Many relics such as gloves, instruments, "a cooked leg of mutton" were found and pieces of bodies; "the head of one of the unfortunate victims was actually identified after an entombment of forty-three years" (All italics mine.) Here, then, is a catastrophe whose details come very close to matching those of Mrs. Knollys.

64

Sleuthing in the Stacks

Some such episode, possibly this very one, provided Mr. Stimson with the theories of Professor Zimmermann and with details about the finding, some forty years later, of the body. With such material the author of Mrs. Knollys could surely go ahead by himself in the construction of his story. I might add here that James David Forbes (born in 1809, that extraordinarily fruitful year that produced Darwin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edward Fitzgerald, Edgar Allan Poe, Giusti, Tennyson, Gladstone and Lincoln!) was a Scottish physicist and geologist who wrote several books, in the forties and fifties, two of them on the Alps, one of them entitled: Travels through the Alps of Savoy and Other Parts of the Pennine Chain, With Observations on the Phenomena of Glaciers (1843). I suspect, with all due respect to this Scottish scientist, that he is the putative literary father of Professor Zimmermann. And now we may, with still more impertinent curiosity, peep into the even more intimate fictional physiology of our story. Given, as the three initial starters of the plot, Mr. Stimson's familiarity with the Alps, which provided the scenery and intimations of doom; the hint dropped by his "unliterary cousin," which suggested the very tragedy, the theories of Forbes, which clearly adumbrate the German professor, and the details regarding the finding, after some forty years, of objects intact and bodies — how were the details elaborated by the author's imagination? Let us try to conjecture how. He was trying to heighten the drama, of course. Naturally, then, he adopted the tragedy of a husband suddenly killed by falling into a crevasse, and placed the wife's bereavement in the most poignant light by selecting, for this fatal separation, the moment when husband and wife are most blissfully inseparable: their honeymoon. To relieve the horror of this

The Weaker Sex

65

situation and achieve contrast, he introduced the Forbesian Professor Zimmermann and made a caricature of him. This man, all intellect and cold facts, contrasted dramatically with the poor widow, all emotion. Her desperately shattered dreams against his happily corroborated theories. And these two people are brought together every summer for forty-two years. To engage our further sympathy for the womaa, the author portrayed her not only as disconsolate and alone, through those long years, but also animated by heroic fortitude — a combination calculated to make her irresistibly lovable. Through the actionless description of those intervening years, the scientific expectation that the husband's body will be recovered keeps up her hope, the professor's, and builds up, in the reader, growing suspense. The surprise element in the climax of the story, the dramatic punch at the end, so typical of short story technique, is provided by the finding of the body absolutely unchanged. It corresponds with her vision of her young lover, idealized for forty-two years. Then the story is ended — whether she dies at once or not. # # # # # # # # # Someone may ask : "But, in all critical fairness, do you not find any defects at all, in these superb stories?" Yes, I do, one defect: A bit of discursiveness which, here and there, delays the stories. This defect, barely noticeable in these two stories which are, also in the author's opinion, his two best, appears abundantly in his other stories: Our Consul at Carlsruhe, The Three Achievements of Eileen, A Daughter of Spain, etc. A discursiveness which builds up atmosphere, to be sure, and gives us glimpses of the author's lovable and interesting personality, but is, artistically, an obstacle to the flow, the should-be-incessant flow of the plot. Maupassant and Kipling, whose fictional ghosts, if extant and if at all human,

66

Sleuthing in the Stacks

must envy Mr. Stimson's discovery and elaboration of those two superb plots, would have treated them with a little more laconic directness. #

#

#

#

#

#

#

#

#

I mentioned a moment ago the element of coincidence. Let me now return to Mrs. Knotty s and present an extraordinary example of literary coincidence. It seems such to me, for I cannot otherwise account for it. Two years after the publication of Mrs. Knottys, Tennyson wrote a poem, Tomorrow, with practically the very same plot. The setting is different, as well as the literary approach, in more ways than one, but the central motifs are identical. It concerns, again, two young lovers, this time unmarried, not English, but Irish: Molly Magee and Danny O'Roon. The story is told in conversational Irish brogue, in a pathetic-comic style quite un-Tennysonian, yet remarkably powerful. Although Tomorrow is, or should be, well known, let me summarize the plot and quote a few lines, to show the similarity with Mrs. Knollys and the difference. The poet reports the story as told to him by an Irishman in great need of a "dhrink"; who has just seen him talking to an old, demented woman: Her, that yer Honour was spakin' to?

...

What did they call her, yer Honour? They call'd her Molly Magee. But there's rason in all things, yer Honour, for Molly was out of her mind.

One evening, long ago, the lovers met "be the sthrame"; " 'an whin will ye meet me agin?' " she says. "I'll meet you agin tomorra," says he, "be the chapel-door." An' Dan stood there for a minute, an' thin wint into the dark.

The Weaker Sex

67

A storm occurred that night. The next day Molly waited but "Danny was not to be foun'," For the divil a Danny was there, yer Honour, for forty year.

The girl's mother had objected to Danny's suit; the Irishman who is telling the story makes love to Molly, as well as Shamus O'Shea, but all in vain, for "she put thim all to the door," . . . for "Molly, begorrah, 'ud listhen to naither at all at all." Her neighbors tell her that she will never see Danny again; that he's gone to the States, But Molly says, "I'd his hand-promise, an' shure he'll meet me agin."

With this fixed idea Molly gradually began to talk to herself, and for years repeated her refrain, "Tomorra, Tomorra." But her wits wor dead, an' her hair was as white as the snow on a grave. Arrah now, here last month they wor diggin' the bog, an they foun' Dhrownded in black bog-wather a corp lyin' undher groun'.

The body is laid on the grass by the chapel door; nobody recognizes it. But Molly kem limpin' up wid her stick, she was lamed av a knee, Thin a slip of a gossoon call'd, "Div ye know him, Molly Magee?" A n ' she stood up straight as the Queen of the world — she lifted her head — " H e said he would meet me tomorra!" an' dhropt down dead an the dead. Thin his Riverence buried thim both in wan grave be the dead boortree, The young man Danny O'Roon wid his ould woman, Molly Magee.

Obviously, the tragedy is the same as in Mrs. Knottys: Lovers' tryst; he (but not in her presence) falls into a peatbog, in which his body is preserved for forty years, as in a

68

Sleuthing in the Stacks

glacier; when it is discovered, he is still the young man, unchanged, she a white-haired old woman, who had waited for forty years for his return; (therefore, about sixty years old). Love, hopelessness, had made her insane, but she had found her lover at last. In both Mrs. Knollys and Molly Magee love burns eternal; in both stories the tragedy is leavened with humor, though of different origins. The humor of Mrs. Knollys is all in the caricatured professor; in Tomorrow, it is in the Irish teller, so that there is more of it, for it runs through the whole narrative. Tennyson adds one more dramatic element, Molly's insanity, which, however, makes her not at all insensible, for she alone recognizes, forty years later, her lover, and the sight kills her. •Β*

"Tv*

χ

*7r

*7r

"fr

*7v*

Tp

*7i*

Now, where did Tennyson find his plot? Tennyson tells us himself: In fact, his son-editor remarks: 8 "Of 'Tomorrow' he [the poet] writes that Aubrey de Vere had told him this story: 'The body of a young man was laid out on the grass by the door of a Chapel in the West of Ireland, and an old woman came, and recognized it as that of her young lover, who had been lost in a peat bog many years before: the peat having kept him fresh and fair as when she last saw him.' " And Tennyson's son adds an interesting remark : "Tennyson could not have written that intensely dramatic poem, had he not been deeply sensible of the tragic side of Irish peasant life, as he saw it with his own eyes so shortly after the potato famine." 9 Since the potato famine occurred in 1845-46, the reference must be to the second of Tennyson's three trips to Ireland, that is, in 1848. His first visit was in 1842; his last in 1878. Furthermore, the 1848 trip was made on the invitation of Aubrey de Vere, whom Tennyson visited. De Vere says: "He passed five weeks with us at Curragh Chase . . . he was shocked at the poverty of the peasantry, and the marks of

The Weaker Sex

69

havoc wrought through the country by the great potatofamine." It seems most plausible, then, that De Vere should have told Tennyson, during that visit (in 1848), the story in question. But the poem was first published in Tiresias, and other Poems, in 1885. Why a lapse of thirty-seven years between what we may assume to be the inspiration and the publication Ρ At this point two general remarks suggest themselves, which are applicable to studies in literary genealogy. First, similarity does not necessarily imply derivation. The scholarsleuth must always remember this, lest he discover sources which do not exist. An example is at hand concerning Tennyson, who certainly did not know, when he wrote Enoch Arden, that Adelaide Procter had written a poem on a similar subject.10 Secondly, that a lapse of time between inspiration and publication, even between inspiration and the actual writing, is quite natural. Sometimes this lapse extends over many years. In art the processes of gestation do not and cannot take place in a definite number of months; sometimes they take minutes, sometimes years. Someone might say that if the poet allowed his inspiration to cool off for years, his poem would be cold. The answer is, I believe, that we know nothing about poetic gestation; it may be as capricious as the mystery of genital genes. But one might add that if a poet can, in his art, arouse a deep emotion in us, he could also rearouse it in himself, even many years after its original impact. But the literary sleuth can hardly salve his deficiencies, so to speak, with such generalizations; he must pursue his search no matter how hopeless and indiscreet. And if he cannot find the solution, perhaps he can at least discover why he did not discover it. The idea that De Vere told this story to the poet during the latter's visit in 1848 seems fairly well established by the poet's son quoting his father. But it is based only on recol-

70

Sleuthing in the Stacks

lection — and memory sometimes plays odd tricks. Its truth, however, is supported by the fact that, as De Vere says, he and Lord Tennyson spent long evenings in Curragh Castle, County Limerick, discussing Irish conditions. It is nevertheless possible that De Vere might have told Tennyson that Irish tale at any time from the day when they first met, which Ward places in 1845-46, and others as early as 1840 or 1842, until 1885, the publication date of Tomorrow. For I find no record of this poem having been published in any periodical before it appeared in Tiresias and other Poems. On the other hand a Tennyson scholar, Professor Walter Graham, of the University of Illinois (whom I here thank), told me that Tennyson frequently wrote a poem and then laid it aside. And the poet's grandson, Charles Bruce Locker Tennyson, who is a student of his grandfather's works and to whom I am indebted for a very gracious letter, said about Tomorrow. "I don't believe there is any definite clue to its date. I don't remember ever seeing the manuscript of it and just now [1941] all my own manuscripts are in a strong room underground. However, I myself have no doubt it was composed not long before the date of publication." In spite of these discouragingly indefinite replies from two experts, I continued to hunt for actual data or for reasons why such data should be unfindable. I ransacked several libraries, Tennysoniana of special collectors, such as the Huntington and the J. P. Morgan collections, etc., all in vain. With particular zest I hunted through the writings of Aubrey de Vere. The fact that he had inspired one of Tennyson's poems should, I thought, be recorded somewhere, most probably by himself. No trace of the subject in any of his writings, not even in his Recollections or in his biography by Ward. 11 Why? To this question I think I can venture an answer. De Vere explained in his Preface why he called his book

The Wea\er Sex

71

Recollections rather than "Autobiography": "We have seen persons and places which have amused or interested us, and it occurs to us that if accurately described they might amuse or interest others also; but this is a very different thing from writing one's biography, with which the world has little concern. Moreover, Self is a dangerous personage to let into one's book. He is sure to claim a larger place than he deserves in it and to leave less space than their due for worthier company." A most salutary principle, which ought to be remembered by all those middle-aged or senile people who, thrilled by their own life, feel impelled to write a self-emphasizing autobiography. But De Vere was perhaps too modest. "The horror of self-advertisement," says his biographer, "and the shrinking from publicity which marked Mr. De Vere's character and formed part of its charm, led him deliberately to avoid making his Recollections in any sense an Autobiography; and they are, so far, as Mr. Gosse says . . . 'the play of Hamlet, with the character of the Prince of Denmark omitted.' " 1 2 De Vere's very modesty and self-cancellation would, then, quite probably have made him refrain from mentioning the prideful fact that he had been responsible for one of Tennyson's poems. He might also simply have forgotten that episode. There were, however, two general reasons why such personal details would h^ve been naturally omitted from his book: the Irish troubles, from the potato famine on, which absorbed him immensely, and his own spiritual problems, which led him to his conversion to Catholicism in 1851 and to all-absorbing meditation and pious devotion thereafter. On both topics he wrote abundantly in ever so many of his letters and in his Recollections. As his niece, Mrs. Monsell, said to his biographer, concerning the Recollections, the writing of which he had so long postponed (they appeared when De Vere was eighty-three, less than four years before his

72

Sleuthing in the Stacks

death) : "he had always other tasks, which he regarded as worth more than anything relating to himself or his own life." 1 3 From our selfish point of view, that dear old gentleman was most inconveniently super-shrinking. One more chronological conjecture. At whatever moment De Vere may have told the story, Tennyson could not have written his poem immediately after. In fact, as Walters says, discussing Tomorrow.14 "It is the only poem of the Laureate's in Irish dialect," and in Tennyson's collected Wor\s15 a note, doubtless by the poet's son and editor, adds: "He corrected his Irish from Carleton's admirable Truths [sic] of the Irish Peasantry." The real title of this book, by the way, is not Truths, but Traits (probably typographical error) and Stories of the Irish Peasantry. The first series seems to have been published in Dublin in 1830; it has been reprinted many times.16 Now, even a hasty perusal of this extraordinarily rich collection of Irish portraits and folklore, of Irish humor and Irish combativeness (Carleton was called: "Not only Irish, but thoroughly Irish, intensely Irish, exclusively Irish"), 17 shows many dialectal expressions that occur in Tomorrow. It must have taken Tennyson at least a little time, after the telling of the story, to collect from this large book and perhaps others the dialectal locutions which he used. In short, Tomorrow was not written after a sudden inspiration, overnight. Perhaps my failure in lifting the veil that conceals the date of composition serves me right. Literature, like life, is alluringly full of unsolved riddles, and the technique of poetry has its secrets, its pudeur de l'âme. As De Vere himself said, in a letter of January 16, 1863, to Coventry Patmore: "The Muse, if wise, no more admits us to her dressing-room than any other lady." 18 My indiscreet intrusion has been duly punished. I apologize. But can sleuthing be always discreet ? The fun of such research is in the hunting, whether we bag

The Weaker Sex

73

the game or not. And think of the grand old gentlemen with whom we have become a little better acquainted: Stimson, the versatile jurist, diplomat, and artist in the short story; Tennyson, the great poet; and De Vere, minor poet and Irish saint. 19

IV·

Ancestors of Tarzan

O

NCE upon a time, in that dear old Golden Age when oak-trees exuded honey, nymphs gamboled around with shepherds innocently day and night, etc., there was a daughter of a king, a maiden of course young and beautiful, who happened to be lured by Cupid. In other words, she was seduced — an accident which, I am told, occurs also in our far from golden times, and even in the best families, for love and transgression are twin perennials. This slight indiscretion was to remain a secret, but unfortunately after a few months its turgid results began to reveal themselves so visibly that the peccant princess had to make a clean breast of it to her royal and much distressed papa and mama. In order to keep this scandal within the family, the parents ordered everything for a secret delivery, taking into their confidence only a trusted servant. To this man, as soon as the concrete issue was born, they gave the difficult task of disposing of it. The current fashion then was simply to abandon the baby in some solitary spot and let exposure, starvation and wild animals do their bit; or possibly to drop it into the sea, if, as in this case, the sea was at hand. So the trusted servant took the child that very night into a boat, which drifted off with the winds. Hesitating to throw the chubby child overboard, the servant finally reached an island, unknown to men; he landed and looked for an appropriate nook in which to set the ill-starred baby, a nook which, he thought, would soon

Ancestors of Tarzan

75

be the baby's permanent resting place. Finding under a bush an abandoned lair, he placed the tiny baby in it and tearfully praying God that he might be forgiven for this dutiful crime, he returned home. N o w that lair happened to be the home, as the story goes, of a poor doe which had just lost her little one and was pasturing with her udder painfully full. W h e n she returned and found in her sleeping quarters this screeching little creature, she lay beside him. T h e baby, groping around for his mother's breast, found the full udder of the doe, began to suck and thus gave much relief to himself and the doe. This relief she obtained daily, and so became quite attached to the baby. When finally this doe's udder ran dry, it so happened that another doe, also bereaved of her young one, came to seek consolation in this very lair, so that the baby, finding her full udder, again sucked, giving again relief to himself and doe-wet-nurse number two. Thus it was, the story assures us, that with these two does, alternatingly pregnant, bereaved and full-papped, the child (it's a boy!) reached the age of five, at which time he was quite able to vary his diet by plucking fruits and herbs and by sipping from fresh-water springs. By this time he had developed long nails "in the guise of cannibals," had long hair flowing over his little shoulders and, of course not knowing any spoken word, "howled and bellowed." A n d so he reached the age of twenty-one. But inasmuch as he came of noble stock, he was precociously observant and resourceful. In early childhood he noticed the changes of the seasons; he came to the conclusion that the sun was responsible and therefore worshipped it as the Lord of the universe. Further observation having made him aware of the fact that animals were protected from the weather by fur or feathers, while he was not, he proceeded to clothe himself in summer with leaves and in winter, with more logic than comfort, with

76

Sleuthing in the Stacks

tree-bark. Nature, moreover, came to the rescue and soon covered his whole body with thick black hair. His ancestral intelligence took him even farther. For one day he noticed that his foster mother became motionless, indeed rigid, and no longer provided that warmth to which he had been accustomed. He concluded that some vital element must have forsaken her. He was quite convinced that said element had decided not to return to her when his olfactory nerves sensed the first intimations of putrefaction. At this he wept bitterly. It was at this time that four scientists, who had just returned from "the lofty marvels of Egypt," happened to land on the island and noticed this wild creature. The more they tried to entice him with words and gestures, the faster he fled. Finally, however, they captured him and recognizing that, though wild and hairy, he was a man, they began to wonder how he could happen to be on this uninhabited island. On which question they indulged in "very subtle arguments." Since earth, two of the scientists thought, never before "offended by the plough," gathers unto itself a certain substance which, gradually "tumefying" or molding, then struck and re-struck by the Sun, produces fungi, grass, bugs and animals, why should it not, they concluded, eventually produce man ? The other two scientists considered such a theory ridiculous and maintained that this creature must have been "exposed" or disposed of on the island as a baby, though they could not make out how he could have been nourished. By mere coincidence, however, just at this moment there happened on the scene the trusted servant, now very old, sent by the princess, who by this time expected the episode to have been completely forgotten. The old servant at once guessed the hairy lad to be the baby he had abandoned there twentyone years ago, fell on his knees to thank God, who had miraculously cleared him of murder, and told the secret story

Ancestors of Tarzan

77

to the scientists. The lad was taken home, where the princess placed him under the tutelage of the four scientists who, developing the virtues "potentially asleep" within him, soon transformed the hairy boy into a most accomplished gentleman. # # # # # # # # #

Such is the story that I found in a very obscure little sixteenth-century Italian book, written by an equally obscure man of Lucca, one Nicholas Granucci. The book, entitled The Pleasant Night and Happy Day1 (which title, I should explain, involves no tactless reference to the lucky child, nor much less to his unceremonious mother!), was printed in Venice in 1574 and is very rare.2 The story is told quite abruptly and for no reason in particular, merely as an anecdote calculated to interrupt — and how felicitously needed the interruption was — the most arid, interminable discussion of valor, piety, nobility, digestion, and other elevating topics. Italy was then overflowing with such books in which sermonizing was interlarded with story-telling. Although the author is, I repeat, very obscure, we do know something about him. 3 Born in Lucca in 1521 or 1522, in 1557 he almost lost a leg and had to spend a whole year in bed. He suffered two other catastrophes: for some reason in his thirties he was sued for damages and spent almost a year in jail before he was acquitted ; for twelve years he was in love, presumably with the same adamant lady. He spent the winter of 1558-59 in Florence. He wrote three or four books, between calamities, and died in 1603. His work is decidedly mediocre. But the literary researcher, although inclined, and properly, to focus his studies upon masterpieces, must also give some of his attention to minor works, to achieve through comparison a broader literary perspective, and also because these minor works turn out to be richer hunting grounds.

yS

Sleuthing in the Stacks

The story, as a story, is poorly told. In all modesty, I told it no worse than did the original author. The plot is not pregnant with novelty or artistic suspense. It contains, nevertheless, two matters into which curiosity tempts us to inquire, in an effort to connect this particular yarn with the life and lore of that time and other times. The leitmotif of seduction, with its usual result, need not detain us. It is too common. But the disposal of the innocent little bastard — and bastards are always innocent — and the arguments of the scientists who found the hairy boy may well hold us for a few moments. As I said before, the method adopted by the trusted servant of disposing of the corpus delicti was quite common, indeed it is the most ancient of methods. But if applied to the epoch at which the story is told, the author's emphasis on such secret disposal would seem just a bit unnecessary. In the Renaissance, in fact, illegitimate children were so frequent, especially in the best families, as to be more flaunted than concealed. Just for example, paternity doubly illegitimate was openly admitted by such a lofty personage as Pope Innocent VIII (his name is his exculpation!), whose son Francis Cybo married in 1488 Madeline, youngest daughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Apparently the latter's moral magnificence made him overlook such a trivial matter as mere bastardy, in view of the political advantages to be derived from a family alliance with the Holy Father. Pope Clement VII was a bastard himself. The list might be prolonged indefinitely, backward and forward through time. The great historian of Florence, Robert Davidsohn, asserts that a certain glorification of bastards was a Florentine fashion which started about Dante's time. In all humility I am inclined to disagree, because so many predantesque heroes of mediaeval legend were bastards, such as Arthur (begotten, if not born, out of wedlock, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth), Merlin, Galahad,

Ancestors of Tarzan

79

Roland, etc. A far more plausible explanation, once suggested by such a revered scholar as Gaston Paris, is that, since all marriages, at least in the higher classes, were arranged, usually for financial or political reasons, not much love was wasted between married couples and love-children were taken for granted. And this must have been a very old story in the Middle Ages, for even at the time of the founding of Rome, as Plutarch reports, the patricians were so called because they were the fathers of lawful children! Which suggests that such children were in the important minority. (Should anybody have the scientific curiosity of knowing more about famous bastards, let me refer him to an old tome, conveniently written in Latin, by Christian Weiss, De spuriis in Ecclesia et re litteraría, Leipzig, 1693.) But in our Granucci story, if the baby had not been illegitimate he would not have been exposed, and then there would not have been any story. Little did the wretched, doe-suckled infant know, when he was putting up such a plucky struggle to survive, that he was laboring not for his paltry life, but for literature! To prove that this method of disposing of babes was not only usual but also famous, all I need to say is that it has acquired, at the hands of scholars in folklore, a special name: Aryan Exposure, and that our hairy baby shared abandonment and consequent hardships with many historical celebrities. Among these I may mention Perseus, Telephus, Paris, Aegystus, Herakles, Oedipus, Theseus, Semiramis, Cyrus, Romulus and Remus, and several lesser heroes. In fact a chart has been made, though it is not at all complete, of the most celebrated among these abandoned babes.4 They seem to have been usually illegitimate, but that was not obligatory. Quite legitimate were, for example, Oedipus and Cyrus. These babes sometimes survived through the miraculous intervention of a wandering shepherd ; more often they were

8o

Sleuthing in the Stacks

suckled by animals. Such bestial wet-nurses vary. A t times it was a humanitarian bitch, as with Cyrus, at others a tenderbreasted she-wolf, as with the twins, Leucastus and Parrhasius, and with the far more famous twins, Romulus and Remus. Somehow, she-wolves seem to have had a weakness for twins! In other legends we may find, as a nourishing savior of the abandoned baby, almost any animal. In certain stories it was a green woodpecker or what is now called a French pie, which bird not being equipped by nature with mammallar facilities, was a dry-nurse and fed the new-born baby with seeds or stolen cheese. (Which indigestible diet would suggest today the baby's immediate demise.) In other tales it was a she-bear, or a lioness or a wild mare, more rarely a cow, sometimes a sow or a she-fox. More often the quadrupedal wet-nurse was a she-goat or a gazelle, which animal might be called, by a layman in zoology, a distant cousin of a doe.B One is here tempted to quote Shakespeare ( Winter's Tale, II, 3,1. 184ÎÏ.), who placed in the mouth of Antigonus: Come on, poor babe: Some powerful spirit instruct the kites and ravens T o be thy nurses! Wolves and bears, they say, Casting their savageness aside have done Like offices of pity.

In at least one case, which we find mentioned in Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum,e Rustum's father, "the snowhair'd Zal," who had also been exposed, survived via the merciful attentions of a griffin. I assume that this supernatural she-animal, half eagle and half lion, had, in the lioness portion of its body, the opportune apparatus to nurse the poor child. In some stories, mostly Oriental, although the babe is nursed by a human foster-mother, the supernatural element is retained through the fact that this woman, who is either very aged or a spinster, suddenly develops, in such an emergency, gushing breasts! This dairy element, if I may so ir-

Ancestors of Tarzan

8ι

reverently call it, reaches even loftier heights of fantasy. When St. Albe was snatched from his cradle by a she-wolf and taken into the fields, two maidens who passed that way found the child and took pity on him. One of the girls yearned for milk to nurse the poor waif; immediately her virginal breasts swelled with milk. And as she nursed the child, her companion, coveting such a privilege, had it bestowed upon her. St. Kenneth, son of a Welsh prince, born in sin and cast adrift in an osier coracle, was lifted out of his perilous environment by seagulls, with their talons and beaks. They took him to a ledge and made a bed for him with their breastfeathers (bird-breasts not being amenable to nursing). After nine days an angel brought a bell for the babe to suck from, and every day a doe came to the edge of the cliff and squirted milk right into the bell! When the Irish St. Berach was taken from his mother to be raised by a bishop, the baby screamed for his mother's breast; his uncle gave the starving darling the lobe of his ear to suck, from which convenient appendage flowed an abundant supply of honey.7 As to does, our Italian youngster shared the doe-suckling act with several other hero-babies, among whom are Aegystus, the incestuous son of Thyestes, and the Saxon Siegfried. In many cases the child being the issue of a prominent maiden, as in our story, its disposal was entrusted in great secrecy to a faithful servant, whose doom was usually to be slain for his faithfulness, so that the secret might really remain a secret. "Buried men bite not" seems to be one of the oldest bits of human prudence. Didn't Molière refer to the extraordinary "discretion" of the dead ? (Le médecin malgré lui, III, ι.) In short, the motif of an illegitimate child, therefore unwanted, or a child whose survival might otherwise constitute a threat to the living and powerful, one abandoned to perish in the woods or some other deserted, lethal spot and then miraculously nurtured via the solicitude of an animal foster-

82

Sleuthing in the Stacks

mother, opportunely bereaved of her young, is an old story, certainly three thousand years old. I shall not include, among abandoned youngster stories, the one of Moses in the blessed bulrushes (Exodus, 2) or the legend of Judas Iscariot, because these cases were quite different, although both infants were tucked into baskets and delivered to the waters. Innumerable babies have thus been launched into life — or death. Moses was made to float on the side-waters of the Nile, however, not to get rid of him, but, on the contrary, to save him. He was deliberately placed where Pharaoh's daughter would be sure to find him; his sister was right there to help Pharaoh's daughter to get the basket out of the bulrushes, and to suggest, as a wet-nurse, the baby's own mother. As to Judas, his scandalous early life is quite another story. But in all such tales the motif of exposure, with subsequent complications, often survival via animal nurses, seems to go back not to ancient Greece, but farther, to India, the ultimate motherland of so much fantastic lore. Indeed, if it is true that there are in the world only thirty-six dramatic situations,81 would strongly vote to give this one first place, both for reasons of antiquity and human naturalness. And then it is bound to be the very first dramatic situation — for the poor baby! Whose motto ought to be, if I may adopt a saying of an old California stagecoach driver, quoted to me by my friend Benjamin Kurtz: "When you're born, you're done for!" But let me return to our pet baby. It is needless to point out the hardly plausible element of our story which makes our abandoned baby survive for five years only because of alternating full-uddered does. The story need not be questioned in terms of plausibility any more than a fairy tale. If it is entertaining, who cares if, again as Shakespeare said (Macbeth, I, 3), it Stands not within the prospect of belief.

Ancestors of Tarzan

83

At least in one abandoned-baby case, the most famous of all, that of Romulus and Remus, the historians' mania for rationalizing almost ruined the good old legend by surmising that the she-wolf (Lupa) was only the name of a shepherdess. In some cases one might, if so inclined, endeavor to interpret the she-animal in allegorical terms. As in the case of the griffin, which animal was often used in the Middle Ages as a symbol of Christ, as in Dante's Purgatory. But our story does not call for any such interpretation. Brother Granucci belonged to the Renaissance, which had largely abandoned the mediaeval mania for allegorical interpretation. But should you insist on an instructive interpretation of animal foster-motherhood, you might find several in ancient books, conveniently gathered together by an Italian astrologer, one Giovan Battista della Porta (1540-1615), whose Latin treatise entitled Coelestis Physiognomoniae Libri Sex (Naples, 1603), was reduced to tabular views by one Francesco Stelluti in 1937. With a wealth of references to such monuments of erudition as Aristotle and to such fossils of sanctity as Saint Justin, Martyr, we are given some ludicrous interpretations. Since Cyrus was nursed by a bitch, he became very warlike, and acted very much like a mastiff; since Leucastus and Parrhasius, as well as the other twins, Romulus and Remus, were suckled by a she-wolf, they became rapacious and preyed on all the world. The little fellow who was fed by a she-goat later became as lustful as a ram, skipped around on all fours, and could not see a tree without chewing off the bark. Finally one, described by Michael Scotus, who had the malodorous privilege of being nourished by a sow, could never, in adult age, pass a mud hole without hurling himself into it and wallowing in the slime ! Now, at the risk of digressing let me strike again, if only for a moment, the Romulus and Remus myth. The digression

84

Sleuthing in the Stacks

is pertinent because, although it is a far cry indeed from Romulus to our own hairy boy, the Roman story may throw some preliminary light on this legendary theme, before our investigations take us much farther. The Romulus and Remus legend, as historians assure us, was probably transmitted to Rome by Greece. Variants of this tale were told about Tyro, the beautiful nymph seduced by Neptune and mother of twins, Pelias and Neleus, whose story was given by Homer, Pindar, and many others, including Sophocles.9 Again a left-handed love affair, that is, adultery, if indeed the gods so called it. For was it not more of an honor than a dishonor to be selected for seduction by a god ? As wise old Molière said ( Amphitrion, II, 3) : Un partage avec Jupiter N'a rien du tout qui déshonore.

There followed the exposure of the unwelcome children, who were saved by shepherds and grew to usurp the kingdom of the monarch who was their mother's husband but not their father. It seems that in Greece it was quite common to explain the origin of a city, of a people or of a dynasty by telling how it was founded by one descended from the gods, or a child aided by the gods, via a totem or sacred animal, delegated by the gods to lead the child. Hence the introduction of an animal, and naturally of a she-animal, full-uddered and thus provided with the ways and means of lacteal salvation. That the child was abandoned was owing to the fact that it was the forbidden or at least unwanted baby of a vestal or other variety of virgin. He was destined by the gods to survive precisely because he was to found a city or people, or at least become the head of his clan. And the story grew naturally also because the exposure of children was a common practice among primitive people, and in Greece was sanctioned by law. 10 This custom was, in fact, the predecessor of our foundling asylums.

Ancestors of Tarzan

85

Even in ancient times "foundlings collapsed by platoons," as Mark Twain expressed it. The prevalence of exposure in Greece, then, explains the frequency with which this motif appears in Milesian tales, such as that of the child found beneath a tree by Mnesarchus, and Greek romances. The she-animal which became the favorite, it seems, in such old legends was the doe or the shegoat. That often twins entered into the story was to provide either two collaborators in a predestined task, or two rivals, one of whom should show his precocious prowess by slaying the other, as was the case with Romulus and Remus. And these brothers inevitably remind us, skipping sundry thousands of years, of Cain and Abel. The latter lads, however, were neither twins nor abandoned, nor was their foster mother a goat ! God forbid ! And since their parents are our ancestors, we had better assume, for reasons of propriety and family pride, that all was quite legitimate. But we have more specific information about Romulus and Remus. Their legend was already current in 296 B.C. Even the already mentioned suspicion that Lupa was merely the name of a shepherdess goes no farther back than to Caius Licinius Macro, about 73 B.C., namely the time of Cicero and Virgil, some seven centuries after the event. Herodotus had similarly rationalized, more than three centuries earlier, the legend of Cyrus, interpreting the bitch as a shepherdess called Χπάκα (Spaka), Median for Kuvá, bitch. 11 Which is natural because, in the variants of such tales, there is often confusion, some attributing the salvation of the child or the twins to shepherds, others to one or another animal. The interpretation of the name of Laurentia, wife of the shepherd Faustulus, as Lupa, endearing nickname for prostitute, is reported as common by Dionysius of Halicarnassus. There seems to be no doubt that lupa had that sense, for it is found in various Latin authors, and this word explains the modern lupanar,

86

Sleuthing in the Stacks

brothel. The Golden Legend, in the story of St. James of Campostella, mentions a Spanish queen, Lupa, "so called by name and by operation of life." 12 Even in modern Italian we have a play by Giovanni Verga, La lupa, published in 1896, in which the heroine is a lady so supersexed that finally the man whom she persecutes is driven to take an axe to her. Thus legend or literature, like history, is ever repeating itself. Not to mention life. For our Roman twins historians go even farther in their conclusions or conjectures. They are not sure whether Mars or Hercules was the god involved in the escapade, as Neptune had been for Pelias and Neleus. The pagan he-gods seem to have been prone to rape. The union of a god and a vestal would allegorize the joining together of the two great cults of the time. And here is a peculiar mythological coincidence: the wolf was not merely, as I said before, the sacred animal of the early Romans, but the very symbol of Mars, as was also the woodpecker. Not Mars the god of war, but more appropriately Mars Sylvanus, the deity of the forests.13 And Silvia, as her names tells us, was the forest-woman.14 It was, we might add, a woodsy affair, not to say shady! And there is still another embellishment to the story: "It is said that in the house of the King of Alba a flame of a mysterious shape hung over the hearth for many days. Learning from an oracle that a virgin should conceive by this phantom and bear a son of great valour and renown, the King ordered one of his daughters to take the fiery apparition for her husband, but she disdained to do so and sent her handmaid instead."15 Was such a flame a symbol of immaculate conception? Or of phallic worship ? Or was it not, more probably, the emblem of that incubus, or that magically invisible lover, which Geoffrey of Monmouth supposes to be the case in the Cupid and Psyche story, and which accounts, in the Middle Ages, for the parenthood of Merlin "ab incubo genitus" ? A magi-

Ancestors of Tarzan

87

cally invisible lover! W h a t a convenient stratagem! A s a matter of fact that very flame appears in other stories, as, for instance in a fantastic Italian romance as late as the eighteenth century, entitled Florismondo,16 One might add two other curious details. First of all, in primitive times, there was a great popular horror of the abnormal, and twins were considered abnormal. But they were also considered illegitimate, or at least one of them was, because, obviously, one father could only produce one child. Twins, therefore, were proof positive of adultery! Hence the dire punishment of the adulteress and the destruction, via exposure, of the corpus delicti. Usually such crimes were more properly expiated by burning the mother alive. 17 T h e fact that a handmaid or slave should, by mistake, become the mysterious mother of a predestined great man, suggests a scandal, with consequent exposure of the child and the reintervention of the gods, now in the form of an animal nurse. Let no facetiously inclined critic question w h y , in such clandestine affairs, exposure should be the logical method of preventing — exposure! One of the variants of the Romulus and Remus story, by the way, comes to us from Plutarch, w h o claimed to have it from Promathion. Let us notice at once that in such variants there are certain other elements which concern us. T h e twin babies, conceived by a "male figure out of the hearthe" and a serving maid, are placed into the hands of a man w h o is commanded to destroy them. H e hesitates, however, to commit this act, and instead places them not in the sea, but in a small trough by the river side, where not only a she-wolf suckles them, but birds of various sorts, preferably woodpeckers, feed them constantly, "these creatures being esteemed holy to the god Mars." A god, then, was the putative father. Unless it were, if we want to be more realistic, the naughty uncle of the twins, Amulius, dressed up in armor to look like

88

Sleuthing in the Stacks

Mars, so as to fool his niece, which interpretation would neatly add incest to injury. And incest, by the way, was also a reoccurring leitmotif, as in the story of Aegystus, whose mother was also his half-sister. Or else, as Ser Giovanni Fiorentino maliciously suggests in his well known collection of more or less scandalous tales called (nobody knows why), Il Pecorone ( The Big Sheep or The Fool), X, 2, it may have been the high priests of the Temple of Mars who did the damage and then accused their own god of the crime. A very utilitarian exploitation of religion, one might say. The story of Romulus and Remus, which is a descendant of the Cyrus story, shows, then, several elements in common with our Granucci yarn. Τ Ρ Τ Ρ Ι Ρ Φ Ι Γ Τ Γ Ι Τ Φ Ι Ρ

An explanation now suggests itself for the variety of animals involved in this type of legend. First of all the myth often adopted a sacred animal, as the dog, sacred to the Persians as the wolf or woodpecker was to the Romans, in the story of Cyrus as told by Herodotus, or rather, in one of the four stories given us by Herodotus about the birth of Cyrus. In the second place, the animal is changed according to the region and climate in which the legend evolved. Obviously we should not expect a Greek or Roman legend to bring in polar bears, or a European story to adopt such typically tropical beasts as a rhinoceros or an elephant. These mammals, moreover, might turn out to be a bit unwieldy, even in the tropics, for the babe-suckling act! The weight of their dignity (as Boccaccio would have put it) might have been crushing! On the other hand, geographical logic does not always apply in imaginative literature. I could mention a heroic knight of the Middle Ages who quite glibly encountered and slaughtered lions in Scotland! (Which would suggest, by the way, an infiltration of tropical material into

Ancestors of Tarzan

89

Scottish lore.) And the great Tasso, in his Jerusalem Delivered (XII, 3 1 ) , mentions a poor babe nursed by a tiger! But in general it is logical that the wolf, which must have been an abundant pest in primitive Italy, deified because a source of fear, should enter into the Romulus and Remus fable, and that the deer should be more common in countries where that animal abounds. Likewise, as we shall soon see, in a Moroccan version the deer changes to a she-goat or gazelle, both common animals in northern Africa. ^ί* ^

if* ΊΙ*

^

Now, before delving farther into the antecedents of this tale, let us return to our friend Granucci, even if only to find fault with him. For if, instead of repeating in his own words an old story, he had had a richer imagination, he might have seen the opportunities that it offered for interesting elaboration. A shrewder story-teller would have seen that, as usual, the most absorbing part of the story lay in the details, in the exploitation of the solitary child's adventures for survival in the wilderness. This opportunity, in a similar topic, was seen and seized, for example, by some of our contemporary AngloSaxon writers, chief among them, if I may now skip centuries and come to the present, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Not that he knew Mr. Granucci's story; surely he never heard of it. Nevertheless his celebrated Tarzan, out of whose adventures Mr. Burroughs made and is still making a fortune, belongs to the abandoned baby and hairy-man type of fiction. His Tarzan has now become the most famous of hairy-men, one whom all of us know, for even if we have prudently not taken time to read the endless series of Tarzan stories, we have hardly been able to miss them in the movies or the newspaper "comics," at least for the entertainment of our children. Tarzan's weird yell, the victory cry of the bull-ape, is now a commonplace among the most cacophonous noises of street

90

Sleuthing in the Stacks

urchins; his antics as he swings from tree to tree via neatly interwoven, Hollywood-jungle ropes are not only the cinematographic stunt of Johnny Weissmuller or his successor but also the modern realization of the hairy-man's acrobatic procedure throughout legend. Again we must explain the astounding success of a book not through originality of subject matter, but through appealing treatment, even if the appeal in this case is of the lower order. The first of the Tarzan books, Tarzan of the Apes, was written in 1912 and appeared in 1914. Let me tell the story, briefly, to show what it has in common with our Granucci theme. Tarzan, as a baby, was abandoned in the African wilderness, not intentionally, but accidentally, because his parents were killed. He was mothered by an animal, a she-ape, to which Burroughs gives the more or less Congoesque name of Kala. This very humane simian nurse takes care of the baby, not necessarily nursing him, into advanced childhood, until she too, like Granucci's doe-mother, dies. But the ape-mother is killed, which event gives her precocious adopted child the opportunity of asserting his prowess by slaying the killer and becoming at a tender age, even as historical heroes, a celebrated "killer." Tarzan too comes of good stock, for he is the son of an English lord; he too notices that his fellow animals have fur or feathers and with his innate resourcefulness applies his wits to protect himself against the weather; he too grows up into a wild, hairy man. His life, when he has reached manhood, is intruded upon by a relative, his uncle, accompanied by scientists. These Mr. Burroughs used for comic relief — as usual, the ridiculous professor, a wizard in zoology who, of course, does not know enough to come in when it rains. Tarzan too knows no language and utters strange bellowings. Finally, he too is rescued, educated, and takes his inherited position in society. These are the elements

Ancestors of Tarzan

91

that the two stories have in common, even though, let me repeat, Tarzan cannot possibly derive from our Italian fellow. Both Granucci and Burroughs, though four hundred years apart, helped themselves to existent material, the latter far more cleverly. Such material we must now investigate. It belongs, first of all, not merely to ancient legends and modern fiction ; it has a solid basis in actual life. That abandoned, hairy boys, and even girls, have been found is a matter of scientific record. The celebrated Swedish naturalist Linnaeus (1707-1778) records ten instances, between 1544 and 1731, of what he calls homo ferus, as distinguished from homo sapiens. Such wild boys were probably unwanted, either because feeble-minded or otherwise defective; or possibly the defectiveness was in the moral or financial situation of the parents. As we read in the Hexameron (Homilía, viii): "Paupertatis pretextu infantes exponunt." Poverty is probably the reason for the exposure which, I am told, is still occurring in China. There chiefly female babes are so treated, for "the female of the species is more useless than the male," if I may so irreverently paraphrase Kipling. And, after all, the elimination of "children of sin" happens frequently enough in our own country right now. Linnaeus' abandoned children are comparable to the socalled "wolf-children" of India. Whether the existence of these "wolf-children" is authoritatively attested or not, they have been mentioned and described so many times, in the last half century, that we are justified in suspecting the possibility of their existence, as my friend Professor G. M. Stratton, who is an expert in the subject, would put it.18 And not only in India today but also in South Africa such legends, if they are only legends, are current of abandoned children who, adopted by apes, as the Indian children were by wolves, become entirely bestial. I could cite several examples taken

92

Sleuthing in the Stacks

from the Johannesburg Sunday Times, as recently as from 1932 to 1937, and elsewhere even more recently. The best known, fairly modern, and authoritatively attested sample of an abandoned boy is "The Wild Boy of Aveyron," 19 whom Dr. Itard endeavored with science and saintly patience to reform, but without success, in the beginning of the last century. This doctor's failure helped to prove, among other things, that when heredity presents a pathological case, environment alone is almost helpless. For such boys usually seem to be congenitally subnormal, and therefore not amenable to intelligence or civilized manners. Mr. Burroughs, on the contrary, made his vagrant baby super-normal, unbelievably so, for it certainly is unbelievable that a child quite alone in the jungle, no matter how atavistically brilliant, even though he found some books, could possibly learn to read and write. This is more than a matter of intelligent resourcefulness. It is a miracle. But, as we shall soon see, this miraculous auto-didacticism is also a traditional element in a certain branch of forsaken-babe stories. Which stories base their appeal to the throngs on the exploitation of the marvelous, of the wildly adventurous, and, at the same time, stimulate in us a covetous titillation for aboriginal life, a sort of subconscious nostalgia for our common arboreal ancestry ! As to literary backgrounds, the Burroughs kind of fantastic yarn goes back, in general, to that artistic exploitation of virile resourcefulness in wild surroundings first exemplified masterfully by Robinson Crusoe. And Defoe's novel, as everybody knows, is supposed to be based on a true record of a shipwrecked sailor, Alexander Selkirk. The novel was so successful that it had countless descendants in various languages, so much so that these have given rise to the word "Robinsonades." This great book appeared most opportunely at a time when both geographical exploration and scientific discovery were making great strides and when new regions of land and

Ancestors of Tarzan

93

mind were revealing themselves to very effete, citified people. Defoe's book was known by Rousseau, who, of course, exploited, shall we say more philosophically, the trend toward Nature in the wild, and based upon such a concept a whole theory of life. Whether one is a Rousseauist or not, one cannot deny the validity, as a human instinct among city-dwelling people, of the "Call of the Wild." Such exotic tendencies later brought forth a whole literature flaunting the "Noble Savage." 20 Such literature is even today fertile and appealing, though the appeal is now more realistic and therefore not inclined to glorify, for instance, the benevolent savage or the North American Indian. Which Indian, killed off or driven out, seems still to be relegated, long after James Fenimore Cooper, to the historical novel. The land of the Indian now being civilized, and therefore romantically speaking ruined, the one remaining continent for exploitation is Africa, where wild nature is, at least in spots, still at its wildest. And in the African continent the most luring and lurid region seems to be the Congo. Wilderness versus metropolitanism, whether it is a Romantic theme or not, remains a very fruitful one. Mr. Burroughs saw that it could be again exploited; he was shrewd and most successful. But probably he did not know anything about Rousseau either. For Mr. Burroughs, and he has himself admitted it, came accidentally into the writing profession without training, without even an adequate education. He may well have known his Robinson Crusoe, but this book does not seem to have any ancestral claims at all on Tarzan. What, then, were the sources of Mr. Burroughs ? For his story did not spring full-grown from his imagination, no matter how fertile this may be. Indeed he frankly admitted his sources in two letters to me. 21 First of all, as he says, he was always interested in my-

94

Sleuthing in the Stacks

thology. Now, as we have seen, the abandoned-child motif, which was fastened on to so many ancient heroic personages, belongs distinctly to mythology. Indeed I venture to say that Mr. Burroughs could hardly have delved even superficially into mythology without encountering many times that type of tale. It must have made, perhaps unconsciously, an impression on his prehensile mind. Secondly, he admits having been influenced by Kipling who, in his two Jungle Boo\s (1894-95), developed most entertainingly the life of a boy, Mowgli, lost in the jungle, who fantastically hobnobbed with wild animals. The main difference between Kipling and Burroughs, of course, is a question of art. Kipling had the art of making of Mowgli's jungle adventures an undisguised fable in which, as always in fables, animals are made to talk and behave as humans, or better. Thus the fantastic story became truer, because frankly untrue, while in Tarzan the author by trying to describe "an orgy of terrible happenings" became false, even morbidly false. Both books are aimed, of course, at children, and readers who enjoy childish literature. Or, shall I say, which is particularly true of Tarzan, at adult readers who have the mental caliber of children. In this order of personal reflections let me note one strange, or rather, natural result: I was unable to find the Tarzan books in the public library of my city (Berkeley), because, I was told, they were suspected of having a pernicious influence on the young, tending to incite them to run away from home, to seek wild adventures and thus escape the boresome amenities of civilized decorum! Finally, Kipling, as everybody knows, wrote well. Both in his forthright fabulousness and in his correct and vigorous English Kipling made, even with this book which is not his best, a contribution to literature. That cannot be said of Mr. Burroughs, in spite of his astounding financial success, a success that caused his almost interminable continuation of

Ancestors of Tarzan

95

the Tarzan yarns, as interminable, though not as sentimental, as the much-traveled, nauseating Pollyanna! Pessimistically speaking one would be tempted to conclude, from the enormous success of two such books, that all too often there is an ominous relation between poor literature and rich sales. Mr. Burroughs also admitted that he browsed in the Chicago Public Library for books which would give him exotic flora and fauna, probably modern accounts of African adventure. He might also have run into The Little Savage by Captain Marryat, who thought, in 1848, that he was the very first to tell the story "of a boy being left alone upon an uninhabited island." Which is a strange remark because the boy was not left alone; he had a very ornery, hard-drinking companion, from whom he learned, among many other things, how to read. In other respects the adventures of Marryat's boy, exhibiting that resourcefulness which is always the essential attribute of stranded people, are less plausible than Tarzan's and boresomely mingled with sermonizing, especially in the latter part of the book, which was written after Captain Marryat's death in 1848, probably by his far less skillful son Frank S.22 There was another source for Tarzan. Somewhere, perhaps in some magazine and certainly before 1912, Mr. Burroughs read a story about a sailor who, as the only surviver of a shipwreck, landed on the coast of Africa. There he tried to make the best of a difficult situation, à la Robinson Crusoe. During this forced sojourn in the jungle, a she-ape, which he had tamed, became so enamored of him that when he was finally rescued, she followed him into the surf and hurled her baby after him. This modern story I have been unable to find.23 As a matter of fact, Mr. Burroughs would not even have needed to read such a story, because it is in oral tradition. It

φ

Sleuthing in the Stacks

seems to have been told, for example, among French Canadians. A version has come to me from Mrs. E. R. Burnett, of North Adams, Massachusetts,24 who heard the story from her mother, who had heard it from her mother, which sets this oral tradition about a hundred years back. Quite naturally the tale was localized. A young girl was walking in the Canadian woods; a gorilla appeared, grabbed her and made off with her. He never let her out of his sight; finally she had a child by him. While the child was still a baby, she made her escape. She tramped to the ocean; a passing ship rescued her just in time, for the gorilla, crazy with jealous anger, came after her with their baby and, unable to follow the boat, dashed the child's brains out on a rock. The very fact that this oral tale has a gorilla promenading in the Canadian woods proves that it was imported from Africa, in fact from West African forests, for there only is the natural habitat of that anthropoid ape. And this story is obviously related to the one read or possibly heard by Mr. Burroughs. The only little differences are that in one there is a man and a she-ape, in the other a woman and a he-ape — equal mésalliances', in one the offspring is dashed upon the rocks, in the other hurled into the sea, in either case the violent demise of the ill-parented progeny. Such variants are common in stories. The hurling of the baby into the sea seems to be, however, its favorite exit; it was, I might say, an inherited climax, as is proved by putative ancestors of the two tales. It would be natural for the French Canadian version to have French ancestry. I found, in fact, a similar story in a French novel of adventure of the seventeenth century, L'Amelinte, by the Sieur de Claireville, published in Paris in 1635, a rare book now (the only copy in this country is in the Library of Congress), although it was probably a dime novel of the time.25 Here is the tale. A storm takes the ship of some adventurous sailors to the

Ancestors of Tarzan

97

West Indies where they discover the Island of Monkeys, uninhabited by humans. But suddenly they see a signal; they send a boat to shore, where they find a woman "quasi effroyable," with dishevelled locks, naked to the waist, covered with hair, in terrible condition. In Portuguese she beseeches them, in the name of God, to take her away immediately, for she is in great danger of being strangled. She jumps into their boat, which is rowed away rapidly. It gets barely "ten steps away from the shore" when they see a huge ape rushing towards them uttering frightful cries. It follows them into the surf, carrying in its arms a monstrosity, half ape and half child. Unable to reach the boat the ape hurls the semi-ape child into the water. When the woman reaches the ship, she tells her story. On her way to Peru with her husband, a Portuguese nobleman and captain of a vessel, they were attacked by pirates who killed off the men and left her alone and naked on this island. She sought shelter in a cave, where an ape found her, brought her food and began to annoy her with his attentions. After a month of his crescendo caresses, she allowed him, in her terror, to seduce her. He loved her still more when she had given birth to the ape-child, with human head and arms, and an ape-body. This baby filled her with such horror that her life became more and more unendurable, hence her daily hope of being rescued. Now that she was safe she begged to be taken to Lisbon. I suspect that the Sieur de Claireville might have got the idea of this episode — only one of a series of innumerable adventures in his two-volume novel — from an Italian book, written in Latin a few years earlier. It is by Brother Francesco Maria Guazzo, of the order of St. Ambrose of Milan, and is entitled Compendium maleficarum,ze which title might be roughly translated as "Summary Account of Witches." It seems that Brother Guazzo was the local superintendent and prosecutor of witches, devils, etc. The book appeared in 1608.

98

Sleuthing in the Stacks

It is among Guazzo's examples of pernicious witchcraft, vampirism, and miscellaneous deviltry that he tells his ape story. Note the similarity with the French novel and the French Canadian version. A woman was deported for some crime to a desert island full of apes (Monkey Island ?). One of them, larger than the rest, led her into a cave (same cave) and brought her plenty of fruit (same attentions). "Finally she was forced into foul sin with the ape, and so continued for many days until she gave birth to two children by the animal. The wretched woman lived in this way for some years, until God took pity upon her and sent a ship there from Portugal." The woman implored the sailors to "set her free from her criminal and disastrous servitude." But behold, the ape then appeared calling (same beach approach) with extravagant gestures and groans to his wife, who was not his wife. And when he saw the sails set for departure (very humanly observing ape), he quickly ran to the beach and held up one of her offspring, threatening to drown it, if she did not come back. In short, he drowned infant number one, rushed back to the cave, grabbed infant number two and drowned him, then swam after the boat until he too was drowned. And the author adds: "This story became the talk of all Portugal; and the woman was condemned by the King of Lisbon to be burned." Her sentence, however, was commuted to life imprisonment. "Does this surprise you, reader?" exclaims the pious author, who implies being skeptical himself; he concludes that only an "Incubus desire," functioning via the ape, could have produced such results. (Same old incubus as in the scandal of Romulus and Remus?) Let us note that both the French novel and the Guazzo story refer to Portugal. W h y ? The reason is, I suspect, that the Portuguese were then the greatest explorers of the time, there-

Ancestors of Tarzan

99

fore more likely to encounter, in actual experience, which was soon mingled with fiction, strange islands of adventure. This observation led me to hunt for earlier sources in Portuguese books of travel, such as that of De Barros, and in all sorts of exploration accounts, from the fifteenth century to today. Although I found no further trace of our ape-plot,27 I did find many episodes of miscegenation — and I mean only miscegenation between man and ape. Indeed this element is so frequent as to have become a commonplace, for instance, in books of African exploration. From Du Chaillu's Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, which goes back to 1861, and Henry M. Stanley's In Darkest Africa, the famous account of his search for David Livingstone, which occurred between 1869 and 1872, to our contemporary William B. Seabrook, whose Jungle Ways appeared in 1930, the yarn about a negress being snatched by a he-gorilla and carried into the jungle for his own lustful purposes repeats itself constantly. It is a legend, and accordingly could be traced 'way back into antiquity. Let me merely say that certain treatises that try to explain mythological creatures or monstrosities which seem to be mixtures of two animals, or, in the case of the centaur, half horse and half man, express the naughty suspicion that the satyr might well have been either a lustful shepherd clothed in wild skins to frighten and seduce shepherdesses or actually some sort of ape. A t least as far back as the Greek Pausanias, not the general of the fifth century A.D. but the historian of the second, it was reported that one Euphemus once saw coming toward him "some kinds of savage men, covered with hair, with tails, who wanted to seize their womenfolk with fury." 28 Probably Mr. Euphemus did not know that apes existed, or he would have known that they have no tail. Citations might be taken from Plutarch, Pomponius Mela, and even from Saint Anthony, but we must return to more modern ape echoes.

ioo

Sleuthing in the Stacks

A very apt one appears in an old book which cannot be found in this country: Alletz, Histoire des singes et autres animaux curieux, of 1752, where the author tells the story of an ape "who was the lover of a Spanish woman and had by her two children." 29 This old yarn seems to be closely related to the one told by Brother Guazzo, because in both there is dual progeny. Such miscegenation had been mentioned by the explorer Le Blanc in 1748.30 J. A. MacCulloch in The Mythology of AU Races relates an East African tale according to which "the Baboons, tired of being driven away from people's gardens, chose one of their number, cut off his tail (by way of disguise) and sent him to settle in the nearest village, directing him to marry a woman of the place and then cultivate seven gardens, of which five were to be left for his relations, while he and his wife were to live on the other two. The arrangement worked well for a time ; but at last, the wife grew tired of working so hard, hoeing for those apes only" ! (Similar complaints must be frequent in Reno!) Mr. MacCulloch refers also to Velten's Prosa und poesie der Swahili (1897, p. 7 1 ) where there is a "geschickte von Sultanssohn der ein Aßen\ind heiratete." It is not surprizing to find that the omniscient Voltaire also mentioned such ape-man miscegenation. He presents two charming naked damsels pursued by apes, which Candide shoots and kills, thinking he had delivered the pastoral maidens from great peril. But they, instead, threw themselves in tears upon the two ape corpses, uttering shrieks of bereavement, at which his faithful valet Cacambo says: "Fine stunt you've done, Master, you killed the two lovers of those girls." Voltaire did not, I assume, know Persian. Even if he had known that language, he could not have read the following ape-story, because it is in a Persian manuscript dated 1830, fifty-two years after the great Frenchman's demise, and was published eighty years after that, in 1910. But stories, espe-

Ancestors of Tarzan

ιοί

cially the Oriental, circulated for centuries before achieving publication. At that, it is quite unlikely that Voltaire had heard it; nor did he need to know it. In this incredibly fantastic tale of Mussulman superadventures, the hero reaches, in his mad wanderings, a forest where thousands of apes dwell. He is introduced to a young, white she-ape, the fair daughter of the simian emperor, and that evening "dallies with her" (as the Puritanic phrase has it). In due time she bears a child. Much embarrassed by the carnal results of his dalliance, the unhappy father tries to flee, but is pursued by the ape-wife carrying his babe. When she becomes convinced that he is determined to forsake them, in rage (or is it righteous indignation?) she steps on the babe, thereby cutting it into two pieces, throws one half after the base father and withdraws with the other half. Half a baby gives us only half of our old motive, but again we have ape-man miscegenation (or, as a friend of mine aptly pronounced it, miscenegation!). Man and female ape, instead of woman and male ape — the result is the same. For the wretched child, to be stepped on and cut in twain, instead of being drowned, does not substantially alter his luck. Some terrible punster might note the modernistic motive and remark that the babe-climax moves faster by "stepping on it," but this profound observation is not essential.81 I might give other examples; I selected the most picturesque and idyllic. Is such miscegenation possible ? I shall lean for an answer on two or three rather authoritative statements. Trader Horn pooh-poohed the whole thing. "Excuse me laughing," he says, "at this bit of newspaper rant All this fancy narrative about having a human being captive with them [the gorillas] doesn't impress me. A gorilla's not feeling any enthusiasm for the human woman. He'll not look at her. Aye, I know what I'm talking about. When R— caged

102

Sleuthing in the Stacks

up a slave girl with a big gorilla — we'll not mention any names — think of his poor relations — there was no mating. . . . The monkey sulked in a corner while the poor girl cried herself sick in another corner. Been all the same if she'd been a princess — he wasn't interested. Some of us traders caught R— and shot him in the early morning "! ! 32 I don't know whether Trader Horn, in his glib tone, was telling the truth. He made a mistake in referring to a gorilla as a monkey. That much I know, for I was once corrected by a gorilla authority, Richard Lynch Garner, who did much scientific hobnobbing with gorillas some thirty years ago. He went so far as to tell me that there was more difference between an ape and a monkey than between an ape and man. Obviously a biological question is here involved: Could apes and men interbreed ? To clear this question I consulted Professor Earnest Albert Hooton, of Harvard, the famed anthropologist, who replied that we do not know the answer for sure, simply because the thing has never been tried. To my mad suggestion that it might be the subject of scientific experiment, of course by artificial insemination, he replied that such an experiment, besides presenting certain scientific difficulties, would encounter heavy obstacles in the protests it would arouse, if discovered, especially from religious groups. In my scientific innocence I had not thought of that. But then I remembered with terror Trader Horn's warning, that his R—, who tried it, was shot the very next morning! Sic semper . . . innovatoribus (If there ever was such a Latin word). In spite of such peril, however, the experiment was tried. The first intimation of it came to me from my colleague Charles A. Kofoid, who admitted having "a vague recollection that some one in recent years . . . tried the fertilization of a female ape with human sperm." Another eminent zo-

Ancestors of Tarzan

103

ologist, Professor Carl G. Hartman, of the University of Illinois, added: "The experiment in attempted hybridization of man and ape was done by the elder Iwanow (I believe, assisted by his son) at the West African yellow fever station of the Pasteur Institute, where a large colony of chimpanzees had been assembled. The newspapers heralded a pregnancy in a chimpanzee impregnated with human sperm, but this proved to be misplaced enthusiasm on the part of a newspaper." And, so far as I know, neither the experimenter nor the reporter was shot at runrise! A moralist might perhaps append this pertinent question: Is not man sufficiently brutal in his untampered species without our grafting into his stock the additional brutality of the ape? Our wars give us the answer, irrefutably. Of course scientific improbability, or even impossibility, never held back writers of fantastic fiction, or literary sleuths. The ape and man kinship is obvious; opportunities for pertinent analogies are before us all the time, even away from Africa or from a zoo. Wherefore it is bound to be exploited in that mirror of humanity which is literature, especially in satirical fiction. Let me give a couple of modern simian examples. In a very entertaining and crazy French novel by Champsaur, entitled Nora — la guenon devenue femme (Paris, 1929), which is more caricature than satire, the "she-ape who became a woman" is a colored dancer who made a hit in Paris, a few years ago, at the Folies Bergère. Other real persons absurdly roped in are Clemenceau, Voronoff, and, alas, poor old Anatole France, who, in his very ripe age, falls in love with Nora, direct descendant of an ape! He then undergoes, at the hands of Dr. Voronofï, a glandular operation to reacquire virile vigor and . . . but I won't give away the climax of this utterly mad but clever yarn. It is conceivable that the initial germ of this novel may have

104

Sleuthing in the Stacks

come to Mr. Champsaur, for his ape-man miscegenation, from a story by Flaubert, written when this genius was only sixteen, in 1837. It is called Quidquid volueris (was Flaubert out of titles?). It involves a couple married two years ago, their baby and, as the silent but volcanic third member of the triangle, Djalioh, who is the hideous scion of a Brazilian negress and an orangoutang. This monstrosity, with human emotions, indeed with a romantic "passion intime," plus bestial impulses, finally slays the baby, criminally assaults the beautiful lady of his dreams, who consequently dies and, thank God, dashes his simian brains against the marble mantelpiece. A terrible but superbly told tale.33 A very modern English novel is similarly apish. It is by John Collier (the Britisher, not the American) and has the captivating title: My Monkey Wife, or Married to a Chimp (London, 1931). Again "monkey" is slanderously misused, for the chimpanzee is also a respected member of the ape clan. This novel is even more absurd than the French one, though saved by a very clever satire against women. The hero, Mr. Fatigay (fatigué?) is engaged to an English girl; he spends two years in the African jungle where he hobnobs, innocently enough, with a she-chimp who acts as his housekeeper. When he returns to England he brings her along; he calls on his fiancée in London but finds her frigidly unresponsive. Nevertheless, with the good sportsmanship of a Britisher, he sticks to his bargain; arrangements for the wedding proceed. But at the church service, an evening ceremony, suddenly the lights go out, confusion reigns, the bride faints out of the picture, the chimp steps into her place and in the dark is legally married to Mr. Fatigay! This episode somewhat challenges all concepts of verisimilitude, to be sure, but it is told as a farce and perhaps has intimations of poetic justice. For our hero returns to Africa and happily

Ancestors of Tarzan

105

discovers that in spite of all sorts of trying vicissitudes his chimp-bride proves adamantly faithful and unfrigidly cooperative. I am told by my colleague Alexander K a u n that there is also a Russian novel with the unslavicly suave title of Pao-Pao, by one Salvinsky, which tells the story of an orangoutang (third and last ape) which not only turned human, but almost Marxian. (Some ultra conservatives might call it a reversion to type.) A n d very recently I saw a movie, "Captive W i l d W o m a n , " filmed by the Universal Pictures Company on a script by T e d Fithian and Neil Varnick, in which story the grafting of gorilla blood into a girl produces peculiar dramatic results. But I can no longer pursue my man-ape chase through all the vagaries of all fantastic literatures; I must stop "slinging the monkey" — pardon me, the ape — and return to our poor, forsaken, hairy boy. if·

^ ^ ^ ·)(* *1ί·

O u r search for literary relatives of Mr. Granucci's forsaken baby has taken us far afield, pilgrimaging, in our pursuit of the hairy waif, all the way from Homer to Edgar Rice Burroughs — a pretty distance indeed, greater even than the geographical distance from Greece to California. Although we are not at all through with this wretchedly belabored baby, let us now tackle the second problem raised by the Granucci story and see where that will lead us. Eventually the two problems, as in his story, will meet. It concerns, you remember, the strange conclusion reached by two of the scientists who, while exploring the uninhabited island, ran into the hairy creature. T h e y surmised that he might have sprung up from the soil. In short, they voiced the theory of abiogenesis or spontaneous generation.

io6

Sleuthing in the Stacks

Now, this too is a very ancient idea. A t the time of Granucci it was fully two thousand years old. It too must take us back to ancient Greece, and farther. Aside from the fact that spontaneous generation was believed in by the ancient Egyptians, the most ancient Greek philosopher to conceive that living beings arose from lifeless matter seems to have been Thaïes (c. 639-c. 548 B . C . ) , one of the seven wise men of Greece, who may well have got his theories of spontaneous generation while residing in Egypt. Then came Anaximander (c. 611-c. 547), whose pupil, Anaximenes (c. 588-c. 524), developed the idea, as Osborn tells us,34 "of primordial terrestrial slime, a mixture of earth and water, from which, under the influence of the sun's heat, plants, animals and human beings were directly produced, in the abiogenetic fashion." (The Granucci story echoed this very theory.) Then came Xenophanes, Parmenides, Democritus, and all too finally "the master of those who know," as Dante called him, Aristotle, who was convinced that eels came from the mud of rivers. It is well known and sometimes regretted that the authoritativeness of this genius so dominated the world of learning as to retard for two thousand years the further advancement of science. As Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, in his Autocrat: "There was Aristotle . . . a philosopher, in short, whom it took centuries to learn, centuries to unlearn, and is now going to take a generation or more to learn over again." Or, as an Italian writer put it (I give a free translation) : Because he's Aristotle, all defying W e must believe him, even when he's lying!

Aristotle thought that frogs, snakes, and eels were produced by mud. In Rome Virgil thought that bees could be born from the putrefying flesh of an ox, just as Goethe, so many centuries later, made his Faustian homunculi derive from

Ancestors of Tarzan

107

putrefied material, as my old friend Archer Taylor reminds me {Faust, Part II, 11. 6684-7004). And Goethe got his idea from his contemporary J. J. Wagner. Ovid mentioned "prolem sine matre creatam" and Lucretius in his De rerum natura beautifully poetized some such ideas, mostly taken from the Greeks, later to be amply refuted by early Christians, such as Lactantius. It was perhaps Lucretius's belief in spontaneous generation that made him talk so insistently of "Mother Earth." This idea was, of course, not at all new in his time, for it may be traced back to Homer, to the Rig-Veda, "the most ancient document of Indian literature," as Max Müller says, and to the Bible (Ecclesiasticus 40: i). 35 A contemporary of Lucretius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c. 50-7 B.C.), stated as "the proud boast of the Athenians" that they were "autochtones, namely sprung from the land itself." One reason for the survival of abiogenesis through the Middle Ages was the fact that it could be reconciled, we are told, with Christian dogma. To put the matter all too simply, and not to get involved in abstruse theological discussions, this theory seems to have supplied certain explanations for questions that arose out of a literal interpretation of Genesis. For instance, when Cain was "cursed from the Earth" (Genesis 4), left his family, went "East of Eden," and "knew his wife," the obvious question and perhaps the oldest interrogation mark in the world was: Whom did he marry? His sister ? This was one interpretation, the one generally adopted. For the notion of incest and its impropriety is rather modern, as the history of human scandals goes. Byron did not mind making Cain marry his own sister; he even made her a twin sister, Adah, and he was an expert on the subject! But another answer to the ancient question was that Cain married a she-creature named Zob, who "was sprung out of the ground." 36 Abiogenesis coming to the rescue of the Cainraised problem!

io8

Sleuthing in the Stacks

A question far more important than Cain's nuptial strategy, however, and one that must logically take precedence, was the problem of creation, followed by the problem of Noah's A r k and of the extent of his menagerie. A t times even to the pious Middle Ages the story that in the limited space of the ark should be collected two specimens of all the millions of different quadrupeds, birds, bugs and beetles, presented to many an unbelievable, almost a ludicrous picture: The animals went in two by two, Hurrah, Hurrah!

It was much easier to explain that God's creation goes on all the time, that living creatures do not necessarily originate from parental activity, but through constant, direct creation by God from the soil. Thus it was that Saint Augustine could adopt some of the Aristotelian notions of spontaneous generation, and that we may find echoes of them, for example, in the masterpiece of the greatest and most dogmatic of Christian poets, Dante. 37 H e did not apply it to humans, to be sure, but to the vegetation of the Golden A g e (that same Golden A g e used by Granucci), when neither seed nor labor was necessary for the birth of plants in his Terrestrial Paradise on the top of the Island of Purgatory, in short, in the Garden of Eden. Let us remember this spot, for we shall soon have occasion to return to it. A n d although, even in Dante's fourteenth century, experimental science had begun to operate again, in a timid way and when it did not conflict with allpowerful dogma or Aristotle, the world had to wait for its first refutation of spontaneous generation until the seventeenth century. T h e first man to prove by experiment that creatures cannot be born without parental seed was an Italian from Arezzo, Francesco Redi (1626-1698). Although he is better known as a minor poet, because of his versatility as a

Ancestors of Tarzan

109

physician, biologist, naturalist, and writer, in short, artist and scientist, he might be classed, though on a much lower plane, with such universal spirits of the Renaissance as Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo, and Galileo. Redi experimented with jars of variously selected putrefying meat and discovered that maggots and the like could not be produced if the meat were protected against egg-laying insects. The results of his careful experiments were published in 1668.38 And in England William Harvey (1578-1657) had already asserted, in 1651, his "omne vivum ex ovo." One might be tempted to say that the ancient idea of spontaneous generation, which now seems so absurd to us, died hard. Such great thinkers as Buffon and Needham believed in its possibility — in certain cases. Against them rose an Italian, Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729-1799). As recently as the middle of the nineteenth century a French scientist, Pouchet, wrote a large treatise on spontaneous generation (1859), claiming to prove irrefutably its existence. That idea did die hard. But that is hardly a fair, comprehensive verdict. Would it not be more correct to say that it never died at all ? Because, although the scientific problem of the origin of life has not yet been solved, how could life have originated except from matter? That is, of course, excluding all religious explanations. The only explanation which science is able to give is this: In the waters that once covered the earth (plus air and matter), millions of years ago, there certainly were present certain chemical substances which in certain combinations may have formed a nucleus equivalent to the vis Vitalis or life. But science must insist on clear definitions. What is the vis vitalis? What is the difference between life and non-life? That is the essence of the problem. All that can be said is that there is an infinite series of transitions, each shading off into the other, between non-life and life.

no

Sleuthing in the Stacks

Matter used to be considered indestructible. But if, as contemporary physicists tell us, it can be transformed into energy, why should not some form of primordial energy have been transformed into matter, and eventually matter into life? Since science has not solved the problem, of course metaphysics tackled it, with results more or less umbrageous, sometimes mystical, spiritistic, etc., in an effort to try, as the colored preacher said, "to unscrew the unscrutable." If and when the ultimate answer is discovered, then we petty mortals, or immortals, shall have the ineffable satisfaction of knowing, at long last, just when, how, and perhaps even why all this human fracas came to be.39 Let us note that the so-called Aristotelian theory of spontaneous generation, of which Granucci gives us a narrative variant, contained an indirect, dim, but none the less true, adumbration of evolutionary processes. But the theory of evolution came more than two thousand years after Aristotle, and fully three hundred after our obscure story-teller Granucci, to achieve its world-shaking developments with its most noted and valiant champion, Darwin. Likewise the use of steam for motive power, discovered, we are told, by Hero of Alexandria (c. 100 B.C.), had to wait for complete exploitation until the nineteenth century. Abandoned-baby story and theory of spontaneous generation, how aptly they combine. Malicious conclusion on my part perhaps, I admit, but would not spontaneous generation be the perfect excuse for the birth of a child whose true generation could not properly be revealed in respectable society ? No wonder that this stratagem was amply used. It was inevitable. It was bound to be resorted to innumerable times in all ages. Even the mother of the great Mogul conqueror, Genghis Khan, who was a widow, explained the birth of her heroic son by asserting that she had been fertilized by the rays of the Sun.

Ancestors of Tarzan

in

Now Granucci knew his Aristotle; he knew his Herodotus. Indeed he tells Herodotus's story of the birth of Cyrus. In fact this man of Lucca was, judging from his two books, a typically cultured gentleman of the Renaissance, familiar with his Greek and Roman classics, as well as Italian, old and contemporary. Eager to flaunt his learning, he drew freely from this literary, philosophical, and theological equipment. Could he not have found in his country and time the ingredients of the abandoned-baby story? This seems a fair surmise also because, judging from Granucci's stories, he never showed inventiveness; on the contrary, he proved to be a constant plagiarist, a crafty purveyor of secondhand lore. Let us see if, among the forsaken babies brutally scattered through history and legend, we may not find one more closely accessible to Mr. Granucci than those of antiquity. This final quest will launch us into two dangerous actions: We shall have to do a little, just a little, peeping into the vast ocean of Oriental folklore, with its philosophical islands ; and then we shall have to impose upon our much travailed and super-exposed baby. In fact, adding injury to insult, we may even have to go so far as to split our baby into two different, though still abandoned, babies. Fortunately, Solomonic vivisection is painless, especially when literary, and performed several centuries post mortem. There are, for our purposes, two kinds of forsaken infants. Those who were merely exposed (they must have been innumerable) and who simply died, do not interest us. Nor do we care for those who were saved by humans, usually shepherds. We are interested only in those who, after their exposure, were nurtured by an animal foster mother, showed extraordinary resourcefulness in their jungly habitat and not only survived but also developed intelligently. And even these may be divided into two categories, according to variants in the story of their adventures. One of these variants, de-

112

Sleuthing in the Stacks

prived of certain embellishments that do not concern us, runs about as follows: Once upon a time there was an omnipotent king who ruled over most of the earth. One day he undertook a tour of his Empire and finally reached Ceylon, "which is the centre of the world, where the days and nights are of equal length, the climate changeless, and the people the healthiest and most intelligent." (California had not yet been heard of!) There he saw the mountain Sarandib, on which Adam fell. Let me interrupt the story right here to say that Ceylon, according to old legend, was the original Garden of Eden, as the mention of Adam here suggests, and that it has something in common, therefore, with Dante's Island of Purgatory, at the top of which is his Terrestrial Paradise. But let me continue the tale. After seeing many prodigious things, the great king discovered a little coffer, made of emerald, about which a story was told him by a hermit, who had heard it from his father, who in turn had heard it from his grandfather.... Again once-upon-a-timing, there was a most rich and powerful king, whose only trouble was that he had an only child, a daughter, about whom astrologers had foretold dire catastrophes, adding that she would bear a son, the hero of great adventures. To avoid unplanned, generative complications, her prudent father had a palace built for her of various hard stones and metals and absolutely inaccessible, guarded by a thousand servants. The daughter was put into this palace as a baby, with nurses on the watch day and night. The princess grew to great beauty and when adult was seized, as the story assures us, "by the inexorable forces of sexual desire and lascivious appetite, . . . which is already a spiritual energy"! One day she spied in the distance from a window a group of knights, among them a particularly handsome one who, she was told, was the son of the Prime Minister

Ancestors of Tarzan

113

and was called "Sun." (Note the allegorical significance of his name.) The princess, inflamed by passion "which had taken hold of her ears and eyes," took to the way of perdition. Like one suddenly demented, she sent her nurse, in spite of all prohibitions, to invite the young man into the impregnable castle. "He asked for delay" (poor fellow, so abruptly vamped!) until a witness should be present and a token be available, but the impatient princess answered that God would be witness and that for a token his sword and seal would do. The brave knight capitulated (they always do) and the inevitable happened. As soon as the princess became aware that she was pregnant, with loud lamentations she withdrew to a hermitage. She stole her father's jacinth, made an anklet of gold for the prospective baby and also a wooden ark. When the baby was born, (again, it's a boy!) she placed him in the ark, with the jacinth around his neck and the golden anklet around his ankle, and, with prayers and sobbing (as with Mr. Granucci's faithful servant), launched the little ark into the sea. After a while this ark drifted to an uninhabited island (same old island) and was flung on the beach. The child, crying for nourishment, was heard by a gazelle who had just been bereaved of her little one. "With the help of God the child found her rich udder and appeased its thirst." (Same providential-bosom motif.) So nourished, he reached boyhood and began to observe things, especially his fellowanimals (remember Granucci's hairy boy), among which the stronger always killed and ate the smaller and weaker one. By these sights the character of the child was hardened; he learned to shed blood to obtain his own nourishment (remember Tarzan, the Killer). At this point the elaborations of the story in the spoken relations of the child with various animals became fable-like (remember Kipling's fabular style). The conclusion of the

114

Sleuthing in the Stacks

tale, as may well be surmised, narrates the eventual finding of the child and his identification via his grandfather's lost jacinth and his mother's gold-wrought anklet. And all ends happily. Now this tale, obviously Oriental, penetrated several times into European lore. It was, for instance, a part of the famous Amadis de Gaula story, "prototype and model," as my friend Professor Morley says, "of all those libros de caballería which flooded Spain up to the Quijote." 40 The "Amadis question," as it is called by Hispanists, is so complicated that a layman in Spanish literature does not dare enter it.41 And then it would entail another, and too long, digression. Let me merely state that the extant version of the story seems to have been composed about 1492, by one Montalvo, but that the original story was probably written by one Lobeira, probably a Portuguese, in the thirteenth century. Scholars have amply proved how widely he snatched material from French romances, like Launcelot and Tristan, not to mention Arabic sources, to which I shall soon drift. To prove that some of the same motifs that we have been treating occur in the Amadis story, I must tell at least the first incidents. I can conveniently take them from Robert Southey's translation (London, edition of 1872). Elisena, a very pious young woman, indeed a recluse, happens one day to see King Perion and is "taken with great and incurable love for him" (same sudden amorous frenzy), as he is for her. Her faithful damsel Darioleta acts as the gobetween, elicits from King Perion a solemn vow that he will take Lady Elisena to wife and arranges the tryst. Elisena receives the King's sword and one of two similar rings. (Similar trinkets for eventual identification.) In due time she has a baby; and of course it's a boy. Darioleta, knowing that a woman discovered with an illegitimate baby was condemned to death, had planned a secret delivery and had even

Ancestors of Tarzan

115

built an ark, that is, a box of boards calked with bitumen and large enough to contain both the baby and the knightly sword. (Same old box.) The child is placed in the ark, with rich garments, the paternal ring and a parchment saying: "This is A m a d i s . . . . " The ark floats down the river, is carried to sea, where it is picked up by a Scottish Knight, whose wife had also just given birth to a son. The two children are suckled by the same breast and brought up together. When still but a boy Amadis begins a series of interminable deeds of chivalry, which form the main story. Let us remember the main motifs of this story, for we shall encounter them significantly again. But let us also note that the Amadis story lacks several details about the boy's resourcefulness in the woods, which Granucci emphasized. Now let us ask this question: Could not Granucci have known the Amadis story? He certainly could. First of all, it was very popular among the Spaniards who, in his time, had possession of a great part of Italy. Secondly, it was popular also among Italians, especially in literary circles, as is proved by the fact that it was known, for instance, by the Venetian writer Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) as early as 1512, was referred to by Castiglione (1478-1529) in his famous Courtier (II Cortegiano was completed in 1524; first published in 1528), and even mentioned by the greatest Italian poet of the Renaissance, Ariosto. Furthermore, the story was taken up at length by Bernardo Tasso, father of the more famous Torquato, in a long heroic epic, his Amadigi, which was first published in 1560, when Granucci was about thirtynine. The Amadigi, of course, is derived from the Spanish Amadis. In his poem Bernardo tells the fantastic abandonedbaby episode. It would be very strange if this tale, so easily available both through popular and literary media, had not reached Granucci. The abandoned-baby episode in the Amadis Cycle is of

1x6

Sleuthing in the Stacks

Oriental origin. The main source is to be found in a far less accessible quarter, in Arabic literature. It has come down to us in perfect condition and in the form of a novel of the twelfth century by an Arab philosopher and physician. The two pursuits often went together among the learned mediaeval Arabs. The blessed name of the author, barring negligible abbreviations, was Abou Bekr Mohammed ben Abd-ElMelik Ibn Thofail al-Guisi! For the sake of glottal economy let us henceforth refer to him simply as Thofail, or still better, Tufail. This opulently patronymical Arab lived between 1105 and 1185; he was greatly honored at the court of the second Caliph of the Almohades (1163-1184); he wrote two books on medicine. But his greatest claim to fame was the fact that it was he who introduced to the King, who wanted him to make an Arabic treatise on Aristotle, Ibn-Roshd, that is, the great Averroes, who, as Dante says, "made the great comment" {Inf. IV, 144). Towards the end of his life, Tufail, who had felt himself unable, in his old age, to tackle Aristotle, composed a most remarkable didactic novel, entitled Hayy ibn Yaqzan, to which I shall refer simply as Hayy. The title, translated into our vernacular, means Alive, Son of Awake, or possibly Alive, Son of the Vigilant, a very suggestive title and pregnant with significance. I shall not give a synopsis of the whole novel, but dwell mainly on those elements pertinent to our investigation and now familiar to us. Here again the author begins by setting forth that there is, in the Indian Ocean, an island "where men come into the world spontaneously without the help of Father and Mother." Not far off lay another, larger island, governed by a Prince whose sister, extremely beautiful, was jealously guarded. But one day (or night) she succumbed to the charms of a near relation, Yaqzan by name, who "married her privately according to the rites of matrimony" — in short the familiar

Ancestors of Tarzan

117

unceremonious solution. When in due time the illegitimate baby, again a boy, was born, the terrified princess placed the baby in an ark and, with prayers and sobbing, entrusted it to the sea. The currents took the ark to the shore of the other island, where a gazelle, searching for her young one, found the baby and suckled h i m . . . . In short, here is the Granucci theme. But this is the version of the sceptics, Tufail assures us, who are not willing to believe that a man can be produced without father or mother. Really the child was born "from the earth in travail," and the gazelle, hearing its cries, became its foster mother. Here we have, then, in the Arabic tale of the twelfth century, two motifs of our Granucci story : spontaneous generation and animal foster-motherhood. But there is an even closer parallelism in the details of the story. Let me continue the Arabic version. The child led at first, perforce, an animal existence. But he soon noticed his weakness and nakedness and realized that he was not as well equipped as other animals for defense against weather and attack. H e cleverly endeavored to make up for such deficiencies by clothing himself with leaves (remember our Granucci boy) and later with feathers, and by adopting certain weapons, sticks, stones, horns. H e was particularly chagrined (and this is the only humorous element in this very serious story) by the fact that other animals had certain parts modestly concealed by a tail, of which apparatus he was immodestly deprived. At once he manufactured out of feathers this instinctively required posterior appendage. (See frontispiece.) One day his gazelle-mother suddenly became motionless, rigid, cold, depriving him of her help and warmth. (As in Granucci.) This change troubled him, also because he was unable to explain it. With a most precocious spirit of scientific research he decided to investigate what had caused this change. H e was logically convinced that something had gone

ii8

Sleuthing in the Stacks

from the gazelle that had been there, most usefully, before. And to complicate an inexplicable situation, his olfactory sense was now offended by a most repulsive odor, which was certainly occasioned by this very change in his beloved gazelle. (As in Granucci.) Determined to discover what was wrong, he proceeded to cut her open. (Here it is the surgeonauthor talking, describing what may well be the first autopsy in Arabic literature.) It is at this point of the tale that the auto-didacticism, to which I referred above, begins. The boy learns by his anatomical experiment all the secrets of the body and explains to his own satisfaction the mystery of death — a feat quite as wondrous as that of Tarzan in learning by himself to read and write. In the meantime, however, this solitary young fellow applies his wits to providing all available necessities of life and even a few clever conveniences such as weapons, a dwelling, domesticated animals, etc., quite à la Robinson Crusoe.42 At the age of twenty-one, well established, he commences his deep meditations upon the essence of life and the cause of all things, and through prolonged, careful deductions finally discovers the one true everlasting God, in His creations. That is why the subtitle of this book is The Self-Taught Philosopher. In the forty odd years that this savage-born man inhabits the lonesome islands, he is able to reconstruct not only the whole of creation but also a complete pantheistic philosophy, which is, of course, none other than that of the author. With arguments that have the polish of logic, even though often giving us moderns the impression of medieval sophistry, the author accompanied this inspired discoverer until (if I may borrow from Gilgames h, an Oriental work translated by William Ellery Leonard) : All things he saw, even to the ends of the earth, He underwent all, learned to know all.

Ancestors of Tarzan

119

H e peered through all secrets, Through wisdom's mande that veileth all. W h a t was hidden he saw, W h a t was covered he undid.

The author's purpose was to establish an agreement between reason and revealed religion, and so to construct a philosophic theory as to reconcile Aristotelian and Platonic philosophies with Mohammedan and even Christian religions. Indeed we might go farther and find in it the very seeds of Quietism and ultimately of Quakerism, as Pastor says. But we cannot pursue its philosophical ramifications at the risk of re-abandoning our abandoned baby. The story was, alas, not original with our Arab writer of the twelfth century, Tufail. He took from another Arab physician-philosopher, Ibn-Sina, that is, Avicenna (980-1037), also mentioned by Dante, the idea of spontaneous generation, the names of his two characters, and certain mystical ideas. For Avicenna had written, many years before Tufail, a somewhat similar story about Salaman and Absal. Tufail probably also took some material from a story, the original of which is now lost, but about which we know something indirectly, by Ibn Bajjah, that is Avempace, a compatriot and contemporary, though not personally known to Tufail. Perhaps the most direct source of Tufail, as pointed out by Garcia Gomez, is still another Arabic tale which this Spanish scholar discovered in a manuscript of the Escorial, entitled, in its Spanish translation, Historia de Dülcarnain Abumarátsid el Himyarí y cuento del ídolo y del rey y su hija, a story undated and anonymous.43 Which story was later taken up by a Spanish author of the seventeenth century, the Aragonian Jesuit Baltasar Gracian y Morales, in his El Criticón, a book mentioned by Addison three times in The Spectator and called by Schopenhauer "one of the best books in the world."

120

Sleuthing in the Stacks

Without excursioning farther into all conceivable roots and ramifications, let me state that the story of Tufail is certainly of Oriental origin. It came to Spain from the Arabs, to them from India through Persia, becoming one of the many "migratory birds of literature." For in India there is a whole cycle of stories of a baby abandoned in a box which floats on the sea or down a mysterious river, finally landing where he is nursed, not necessarily by an animal, but by a magical wetnurse (the old lady or spinster mentioned before, who, in this emergency, evolves gushing breasts). And this child is often the offspring of the Sun, as in spontaneous generation. There are half a dozen such motifs treated in the Mahabharata alone ; the story was exploited as far as Java by immigrant Mohammedans. Probably it was from Oriental sources that the legend of Cyrus's babyhood came; and Cyrus begat (legendarily) Romulus and Remus, etc. For the she-wolf nurse and the bitch-nurse, not to mention bird-nurses, are found in old Indian legends, and in an Arab story of Egypt we have as wet-nurse our friend the gazelle.44 ι ρ ι γ ι ρ τ γ τ γ τ Ρ Ι Ρ Τ Ρ

Of the two related Oriental versions I have given, which has more resemblance with our Italian tale? The answer seems to be: the second one, the story of Hayy. In fact, several important motives that occur in the first one are not mentioned at all by Granucci: The imprisonment of the mother, to keep her chaste ; her enamorment with the knight; the trinkets placed by the mother with the child which result in his ultimate identification; the launching of a box into the ocean, etc. And several motifs emphasized in Tufail's story are also emphasized by Granucci: The spontaneous generation of the baby, the animal foster-motherhood, his imitation of animals in procuring apparel, his atavistic talent, which occasions his auto-didacticism, etc. In

Ancestors of Tarzan

121

short it looks as if the Tufail version were the closer ancestor of Granucci's yarn.45 I must now, then, follow the fortune of Hayy in European literature. Hayy was not generally known in Europe until the seventeenth century and then first in England. A translation, from the Arabic into Latin, was the Philosophus autodidactus of Edward Pocock (or Pococke), the Younger, done in 1661, which seems to be related to subsequent translations into English, such as those by George Keith (of Quaker fame), c. 1674, by George Ashwell in 1686, and by Simon Ockley in 1708. About 1722 an abridged translation of Hayy appeared in London : The Life and Surprising Adventures of Don Juliani de Trezz, reissued in 1761 and 1766, with a somewhat altered title, Don Juliani de Trezz having become Don Antonio de Trezzanio. Then in 1736 came the first of the free adaptations of the story, The History of Autonous, anonymous, "containing A Relation how that Young Nobleman was accidentally left alone, in his Infancy [like Tarzan] upon a desolate Island." This version was adopted and augmented by the Reverend John Kirkby (1705-54) in The Capacity and Extent of Human Understanding, in 1745, and had several editions. Gibbon said that in this story Kirkby had blended the history of Robinson Crusoe with the Arabian Romance of Hai ΕΓη Yockdan, an opinion which was not shared by an anonymous writer in The Retrospective Review (Vol. X, 1, 1824, pp. 78-88), who thought it borrowed directly from the Latin translation of Hayy by Pocock or the English by Ashwell. Also derived from Hayy is a Dutch story, De Walchersche Robinson, published in Rotterdam in 1752. These works stress the auto-didactic element that I mentioned before. They even go farther, for according to a French scholar, Paul Dottin,48 such auto-didacticism via nature presages theories which were to find "their complete expression in Rous-

122

Sleuthing in the Stacks

seau's Émile" of 1762. And Dottin calls the hero of those yarns an "ancestor of Mowgli," who in turn, as we have seen, surely was an ancestor, indeed the literary semi-parent, of Tarzan. But Pocock's was by no means the first translation of Hayy. The very first seems to have been made by Maître Vidal, a Jew whose other name was Moses of Narbonne, in 1349, two hundred years before Granucci.47 Whether or not this translation was known in Granucci's circle, the original Arabic certainly was. Not generally, for the tale is not generally known even now, but in the erudite Florentine circles of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Quite unfairly we always think of medieval or Renaissance Jews as Shylocks, mere money-lenders engaged in a sordid profession. We should remember, however, that especially in the fifteenth century there were among the Jews many very learned men, teachers, bibliophiles, as there are now. Their learning admitted them to university chairs and gave them entry into the most exclusive Renaissance circles, for example into the group that clustered around Lorenzo the Magnificent, in which tolerant group their erudition was fully appreciated. (Which fact shows Italy of the Renaissance as far more broad-minded and enlightened than under Mr. Mussolini, namely, under Hitler.) The one Italian humanist of this group who seems to have had closest contacts with learned Jews was one of the most fascinating characters of the fascinating Italian Renaissance, Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494). As a philosopher his lofty goal was to reconcile Aristotelian and Platonic philosophies not only with Christian and even Hebrew religion but also with the mysticism of cabalistic theories. In such an attempt at religious and philosophical reconciliations he was one of many, among whom quite prominently had stood, much earlier, Tufail. Pico was such

Ancestors of Tarzan

123

an extraordinary student and linguist that no branch of knowledge seemed inaccessible to him. In a few months of heroic application he mastered Hebrew and even Arabic. His first teacher, at the University of Padua, had been a Jew, Elia del Medigo; in Florence his teacher was another Jew, Jochanan Alemanno, John the German (though really of French origin), who not only was familiar with the novel of Tufail, but owned a copy of it, loved it, and probably annotated a manuscript version of it.48 Pico was also a great student of Arab philosophers such as Avempace, of whom Tufail was the follower, and Averroes, whom Tufail introduced, as we have seen, to the Moroccan Caliph, and who took Tufail's place at the court, and Avicenna, from whom Tufail gathered the motive of spontaneous generation. It was probably on account of Pico's friendship and admiration for Jochanan that he translated into Latin his Hebrew teacher's favorite book, the Hayy ibn Yaqzan, the novel of Tufail. It seems apparent, then, that Tufail's novel had been known in the erudite circles of the Florentine Renaissance for more than half a century when Granucci struck Florence in 1558 and it is very likely, therefore, that our literary prowler Granucci should have encountered it either in manuscript form, or possibly in oral tradition, through his contacts with the thinkers and writers of the following generation. Just how and from whom he obtained it, we shall never know; but the similarity between his story and Tufail's is undeniable; the looseness with which Granucci told it might suggest oral tradition rather than a written source. Of course in those days there was no such notion as plagiarism. As friend Vincent Starrett puts it (in his delightful Books Alive, p. 122) : "until fairly recent times, the history of plagiarism was the history of literature." And he quotes from Milton: "Borrowing without beautifying is a plagiary" (which is what Brother Granucci did), and from the cocky Dumas: "I

124

Sleuthing in the Stacks

do not steal — I conquer." Which I should like to call lootism. (Would some wicked reader confuse lootism with sleuthing?!) But although mediocre Granucci did not tell his story well, and, as I said before, failed to exploit the adventurous opportunities of this fantastic motive, he unwittingly forged an important link in the theme-chain that bound the ancient Oriental story to its modern descendants. And so it was by accidental renderings that the perennially abandoned child born out of the ground, the result of adultery or the scion of nobility, exposed in all sorts of wildernesses, rivers and seas, from Ceylon to the Congo, from mysterious islands to Rome, nurtured by all sorts of shebeasts, and exceptionally resourceful, managed to survive to our own days as the ever re-exploitable hairy waif and hero of legend and exotic story. It survived not because of casual animal foster-mothers, but by virtue of its essential humanity. Young maidens who succumb to passion; secret fruit of their transgression exposed and saved by miracle, surviving through coincidence and adventure for heroic accomplishments in history or philosophy — this is of the very tissue of life, at all times and in all places, and therefore also of literature.

• γ .

Where there's no Will\ there's a Way E all love villains, when they are clever and amusing and when their wiles do not come too close — that is, in literature or in life comfortably remote. I therefore take great pleasure in introducing now a multiple villain who, for your entertainment, will make many appearances, through seven centuries, bobbing up from Italy to Ireland, from Sicily to Germany, England, and America, with prolonged, buffoonish sojourns in France. We shall follow him from deathbed to law court, from monasteries to dark closets, even into his definitive residence in the depths of hell.

W

I must first apologize to my seven readers (including three members of my immediate family and four enthusiastic relatives) if, for a moment, I wax personal. For the origin of this chapter is in a personal experience. And even professors, after all, may have interesting experiences. In 1911 when I was, for my sins, instructor in Columbia University, I had, in common with 90 per cent of those who suffer from cacoeth.es scribendi, velleities, leanings, unsuppressed desires for dramatic composition. In this I was often aided and abetted by an old friend and classmate, Karl Schmidt, who had made quite a study of dramatic technique. So one fine evening at the Harvard Club of New York City, over several inspiring steins, we decided to write a play. He would furnish the technique, I the plot; we would write it together and offer it in the contest announced by the Har-

I2Ó

Sleuthing in the Stacks

vard Dramatic Club, and of course it would win the prize. Accordingly, we did; but it didn't! Some weeks later I happened to meet dear old Professor George Pierce Baker in Harvard Square. I reminded him of our intrusion into the realms of Thalia, to put it colloquially, and, quite accepting the negative result, asked him what was the matter with our play. "First of all," he said, "your play was loosely knit together, but we might have helped you to tighten it up. The main trouble was that we accepted and presented, two years ago, a play with the very same plot. Yours was entitled Ά Shearer of Sheep'; the other 'The Heart of the Irishman,' by Leonard Hatch; the plots are identical." What's in a title? Putting one and one together I saw that, since my plot had a literary source, the other play must have the same source. And so I decided at once that, having failed to exploit the material dramatically, I would exploit it from the scholarly point of view. Thus I launched myself into research. After prolonged scholarly gestation I published a monograph,1 and then for years continued to scrape up additional material. Here is, then, the final result of my happy hunting, which began for the stage and ends on a page, in fact several pages. I might find my most appropriate motto in Browning's The Ring and The Boo^ (1. 464), "Fancy with fact is just one fact the more," and add to it La Fontaine's famous, "Nous Talions prouver tout à l'heure." Let us see how fact and fancy have mingled, in literature and actual life, and, with sauces differently appetizing, have been presented for six hundred years to literary and popular appetites. Our jolly tale entered literature most auspiciously with Dante who placed in his Hell, among the fraudulent who desperately and furiously rush around biting their fellowdamned, an obscure sinner by the name of Gianni Schicchi for having impersonated another obscure, but rich man, one

Where there's no Will, there's a Way

127

Buoso Donati, and dictated a false will in Donati's name. This trick Gianni did: Per guadagnar la donna della torma, 2

that is, "to secure the leader of the herd," a most handsome she-mule or brood-mare. Since Dante refers to this matter very briefly, for the story we must go to his commentators. Out of the first dozen, therefore the nearest to Dante's time, I take the liberty of selecting the one who gives us the best story, a Florentine who, however, travelled incognito and is only known as the Anonimo fiorentino. All we know about him is that he wrote about 1390-1400, that he was keen on local history, and that he did not hesitate to take any and all information from his preceding commentators, especially when he got tired, as through Purgatory and still more in Paradise, where he honestly stole from Della Lana. 3 Which suggests, first of all, the known fact that in the Middle Ages and later it was considered quite proper to steal from any authors, and, secondly, as wise old Montaigne said, that "there is more ado about interpreting interpretations than things, and more books are written on books than on any other subject." (I plead guilty.) The fact is that Sir Anonymous, wherever he may have plucked this story, gives it certain embellishments which are both amusing and important, as we shall see, in its future developments. And his story was the putative parent of our stillborn dramatic baby: "The Shearer of Sheep." Here is the Anonimo's version, in close translation. Note that the villain's name, Gianni Schicchi, is here given as Sticchi (Johnny Sticky!). "It is said of this Gianni, who was of the Cavalcanti family of Florence, that Messer Buoso Donati being ill with a mortal infirmity, wanted to make a will, because he thought he had much to return to others. His son Simon argued that he should not do it, and argued so long that the old man died.

128

Sleuthing in the Stacks

Simon concealed his death, fearing that his father had not made a will while in good health and sound mind, but all the neighbors said he had made a will. Simon, not knowing what to do, asked council of Gianni. This Gianni knew how to mimic anybody, both with voice and action, and especially Messer Buoso, with whom he had been on familiar terms. He said to Simon: 'Summon a notary and say that Messer Buoso wishes to make his will; I will enter into his bed, we shall thrust him behind, I will bandage myself carefully, put on his night-cap, and I will make the will as you desire. It is true that I wish to profit by it.' Simon agreed to the scheme. Gianni got into the bed and appeared in pain ; he imitated the voice of Messer Buoso so perfectly that he actually seemed Buoso, and began to testify and say: Ί leave twenty sous to the church of Santa Reparata, and five francs to the Franciscan Friars, and five to the Dominicans,' and so he went on distributing for God, but very little money. This was in Simon's interest. 'And I leave,' added Gianni, 'five hundred florins to Gianni Sticchi.' Says Simon to Messer Buoso : 'This you must not put into the will: I will give it to him according to your bequest.' " 'Simon, you shall let me do as I wish with my own money; I will leave you so well off that you must be contented.' Simon, out of fear, was silent. "Gianni continued : 'And I bequeath to Gianni Sticchi my mule mare' (for Buoso had the best mule mare in Tuscany). " 'Oh, Messer Buoso,' exclaimed Simon, 'he does not care for that mule at all.' " Ί know better than you what Gianni cares for!' Simon began to be angry and to burn up within, but out of fear he kept silent. "Gianni Sticchi continued: 'And I leave to Gianni Sticchi one hundred florins, due me from a certain neighbor; and for the rest I leave Simon my universal heir, with this provi-

Where there's no Will, there's a Way

129

sion, that every one of my bequests be executed within fifteen days, otherwise, that all my estate shall go to the Franciscan Friars of the Monastery of Santa Croce.' And the will having been completed, all present went away. Gianni got out of the bed, Buoso was thrust into it again, and they began bewailing loudly the old man's sudden death." Those of us who are not militant moralists as Dante was see the joke of this story; he only saw the fraud. But he may also have had another reason, perhaps subconscious, for putting this particular villain in hell. Let us see who the personages were. There were in Florence in the thirteenth century two Buosos; the one in this story died about 1250, fifteen years before Dante's birth. This may well account for the fact that Dante barely mentions the incident, for, when Dante was writing his Inferno, this story had been known for more than fifty years. The old man could not have been the Buoso who died in 1285, some five years after the death of Gianni Schicchi, the villain essential to the story. Scholars also argue that this being a youthful prank, it could not have occurred when Gianni was old. Furthermore, Buoso I (as we may call him) had no living brothers, but a nephew; Buoso II had brothers who would have been much interested in his will. The Simon in the story, then, was not the son, but the nephew of the old man, Buoso I. Notice that these worthies belonged to two of the leading families of Florence: Schicchi of the Cavalcanti family must have been related to Guido Cavalcanti, whom Dante called, in his youthful Vita Nuova ( X X X ) , his "first friend," a family that aparently had one "bad egg," as customary in the very best families. Simon must have been the father of Forese Donati, who was Dante's companion in youthful dissipation, as we gather from their conversation when Dante finds him in Purgatory, on the ledge of the gluttons, and from a series of scurrilous sonnets

130

Sleuthing in the Stacks

exchanged between them "in blackguard jest," as Professor Grandgent said. Simon must also have been the father of Forese's brother Corso, black leader of the Florentine Blacks, one of Dante's most virulent enemies. Was it also because of this latter relationship that Dante mentioned this fraud ? Indeed Dante had already mentioned Buoso as one of the five Florentine thieves who were perpetually transformed into nasty snakes and vice versa (Inf., X X V ) . Two of the three personages in the story, then, are in hell, both among the fraudulent, though in different varieties of torment. Our Buoso, who was already a widower in 1214, died childless about 1250. That our jolly scoundrel Gianni actually lived is proved by the fact that he is mentioned in historical documents; since he was already dead in 1280, he may well have been, in 1250, young enough to play this macabre, yet comical trick. As to the Anonimo's mistake in calling Simon the old man's son, instead of nephew, it is easily explained by the obvious misreading, in old manuscripts, of pater, father, for patruus, uncle.4 The will begins with the customary bequests to the church, "Thus distributing for God, but very little," which suggests that Buoso may have been not merely a thief, but a usurer. In both of these vocations he would, as the Anonimo remarked, have "thought he had much to return to others." Such bequests were the natural deathbed palliatives to the old rascal's conscience, as realistically interpreted by the other rascal, the fake testator, and were, besides, customary.6 Notice also the wily details of the fraud, the callous thrusting of the old man's body "behind somewhere," out of the way, the bandaging of the testator's head, the nightcap, the mean joke on Simon when Gianni bequeaths so generously to himself and his partner in fraud is forced "for fear to be silent." It seems probable, then, that this was not an invented story, but, now presented with embellishments, the account of an

Where there's no Will, there's a Way

131

actual fact. 6 It has the earmarks of actuality, and certainly has no literary sources, so far as anybody knows. I am not talking in general of falsified wills, they must have been innumerable, often coming into literature, nor of cases of mistaken identity, which have occasioned comedies and tales countless times, but of this particular kind of fraud in which the fake testator not only impersonates a dead old man, but takes this excellent opportunity of bequeathing abundantly to himself, thus cheating his cheating partner, the main legatee. Nevertheless, let me mention a couple of ancient items of somewhat similar rascality. In Suetonius's Lives of the Caesars I find, under Nero, a law mentioned to the effect that "no person writing a will for another should include any legacy whatsoever for himself." 7 Such a law would point to an abuse that needed prohibition. A n d here is a far more ancient case, an attractive old scandal. Antiochus Theos, king of Syria, born in 286 B.C., was first married to Laodice, by w h o m he had two sons, then repudiated her in order to marry, for reasons of state and pulchritude, Berenice, daughter of the king of Egypt, with which country he had been at war. Incidentally, Antiochus seems to have been a steady drunkard, or "merrybibulous" (if I may adopt a jolly word used by Saint Augustine). W i f e number one was so offended by her spouse's sudden repudiation that she poisoned him and suborned Artemon, whose features were very similar to the defunct king's, to impersonate him. T h e faker, following the instructions of the righteously indignant and criminally resourceful Laodice, pretended to be indisposed, and as king, having called into session all his ministers, recommended Seleucus, son of Laodice, as his royal successor. " A f t e r this ridiculous imposture, it was made public that the K i n g had died a natural death." Laodice thus placed her son on the throne and, to make a

132

Sleuthing in the Stacks

clean sweep of all possible impedimenta, "dispatched Berenice and her son." 8 Although such dastardly tricks may well have happened, in some form, a thousand years before Buoso's times, the protagonist of our story surely knew nothing about them. That similar events actually occurred later, we shall soon see. Returning to our scoundrel friend Gianni, let us note some minor embellishments provided by other commentators, because they are picturesque, showing how the sense of fiction always embellishes fact, and then because we shall find some of these details repeated later, when the story gathers momentum. One commentator emphasizes Gianni's "tremulous voice and weak as if he were very ill," while dictating, and says that the brood mare was well worth 200 florins. Roughly placing the value of the gold florin at $2.50, we have the exorbitant sum of $500. She must indeed have been a valiant she-mule or a very fecund brood mare, "pulcherrima equa." Another writer gives her name: Madonna Tonina, which might be translated as Lady Antoinette, no more foolish than the names we give to race horses. Another states that Simon and Gianni, angry because Buoso had already made a will unfavorable to them, destroyed it and then strangled the old man. This seems to be an unnecessary aggravation and, though it comes from the commentary of Dante's son Peter, hardly plausible. In fact, if Dante had thought of Gianni as a murderer, he would have placed his damned soul among those of killers, not under the lesser sin of fraudulent impersonation. Still another commentator suggests that, during the dictation, Buoso's body was hidden under the bed, where we shall soon find it again. An old recorder, somewhat less fastidious, speaks of it as being just pushed under the sheets, so that Gianni was lying next to the corpse — which seems to overdo the discomforts of the situation. One document

Where there's no Will, there's a Way

133

refers to Gianni as "istrio"; he surely must have been a good actor, even in a bad act. The so-called false Boccaccio has the prank originate not with Gianni but with Simon, which is not artistically probable, Gianni being by far the shrewder villain, as the will proves. Of course we wish Boccaccio could have given us this story; unfortunately illness prevented this superb story teller and first lecturer on Dante from commentating Hell farther than Canto X V I . Dante's commentator Buti adds a few neat details: that Buoso, a very rich man, either had neglected to make a will or had been prevented by his thoughtful nephew — who wished it drawn just so; that during the act the windows or blinds were closed and that the notaries were kept "somewhat far" from the bed.9 Let us now see what happened to this first harvest of the weird yarn. I find two echoes of it, both undated and undatable, one in legend, the other in proverbial form. The legend is glibly told by that most delightful American, but most irritating of amateur scholars, Charles Godfrey Leland, in his Legends of Florence.10 In this version popular fancy attributes the histrionic skill of the protagonist to witchcraft and places the event, at random, at the time "when Berta spun and owls wore silk cloaks." Berthe au grand pied was, of course, the storied mother of Charlemagne; that ostentatious owl is not so easy to spot. In short, "once upon a time," there lived Signor Nannincino {sic, but I would say Nannicino, a lesser diminutive of Giovanni than Gianni) who owned an estate called "la mula a Quinto." (Here a mule trots in again, not as a quadruped, but as a place.) Since all his relatives and friends yearned for this estate, "like wolves for a fat sheep," Nannincino secretly promised it to each one of them, who consequently supped and dined him with generously expectant kindness for years. Then he died without leaving a will. Consternation. So six of his most devotedly expectant rela-

134

Sleuthing in the Stacks

tives assembled and resolved to secure the property. After having invoked the devil, they appealed to a certain scamp, Giano (other variant of Gianni) di Selva, "who somewhat resembled the departed," and he, calling in a witch to help, "was made by sorcery to look as much like the deceased as two beads of the same rosary." The old man was removed (from the deathbed, we assume) and Giano put in his place, "where he lay still for an hour, and then began to show signs of life." Then he called for a notary. He first bequeathed "his house to one, his sword to another," until he came to the coveted estate. "And who shall have the Mula a Quinto, dear good uncle ?" asked a nephew. (Usual nephew.) "That," replied the dying man, "I leave to my good friend, the only true friend I ever had, the noblest of men. . . ." "But what is his name?" asked the impatient nephew. "Giano di Selva," gasped the old man. And it was written down by the notary, and the will was signed, and the signer died immediately after. All their shaking could not revive him. Then Leland adds: "The tale ends with these words: E così ingannati gli ingannatori, rimase Giano Erede del podere. And thus the biters being bit, d' ye see, Giano took a handsome property." Which is Leland's free and flip translation of the proverbial ending : The deceiver being deceived, Giano remained heir to the farm. The rest of Leland's remarks are irrelevant. One never knows how much he embellished such a legend. The intrusion of witches might conceivably point to the sixteenth or seventeenth century, when they became very popular, but that is a mere guess. This version provides a couple of new details, such as the wily promising, on the part of the old man, of his coveted estate to each of his relatives and friends, so as to be generously supped and dined for years

Where there's no Will, there's a Way

135

(what an old, but excellent idea!), and the fake testator's silent meditation in bed for an hour before giving "signs of life." (Comic suspense.) Bequests to the Church are omitted, but, as in the original tale, minor bequests precede the climax. The most comical retort is also omitted: "I know better than you what he (Gianni Schicchi or here Giano) wants." The verbal confusion in names suggests popular manipulation of the story. As to the proverbial remark, which obviously derives from the story, 11 it is to be found in what is probably the oldest collection of Italian proverbs, that of Pescetti (Venice, 1598), where the story is again told. But the proverb is ever so ancient and is to be found in some form in many languages. "Fraus in auctorem recidit," said Publilius Syrus, a mediocre poet of Syrian birth who was popular in Rome at the time of Caesar and Augustus ; and an echo of such a maxim may be found in Petrarch's Triumph of Love (after 1350), where he refers to Theseus deceived by Phaedra, in two lines that I take the liberty of translating: For he who takes delight in using fraud Cannot complain if others him deceive.

Indeed, one might trace the idea back to the biblical tit-fortat theory: "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth." (Exodus, 21:24), upon which are based, by the way, the punishments of Dante's Hell. But I must drop this side-branch and return to our friend Hans Breitmann, alias Leland. The famous folklorist Wesselski asserted that it was doubtless in Pescetti that Leland found his story, but I am not so positive. The story gave rise to still another proverb, more closely related to the original story: "Far Nanni Schicchi," to act the part of Nanni Schicchi, a phrase revealed to me by Wesselski himself, who unearthed it in a manuscript collection of proverbs in the Laurentian Library. 12 Now, to pro-

136

Sleuthing in the Stacks

duce two proverbial phrases a story must have become very popular, in which case Leland could easily have heard it from the sort of old Tuscan gossip with whom he loved to hobnob. He says as much in his Preface. That delightful, Rabelaisian folklorist never did give his sources, the wretch. And so this tale entered into folklore. It is found again in Sicilian lore, again undatable, and is subtitled: "The Will of the Prince." 1 3 It is in dialect; here is an abbreviated translation. A rich prince, who had a son, was very ill and dying. Some Jesuits called and said: "Prince, make your will and if you wish to do well by your soul, leave all to the Church." The Prince answered: "Yes, Sir." A notary and two witnesses were called; the Jesuits started the will; the Prince was too ill to complete it ; they completed it for him ; the son was entirely left out. In the house was a shoemaker, who heard everything; he called the son and said: "Your father has left everything to the Jesuits, leaving you poor and crazy" (sic). "What shall I do?" said the son. "Leave it to me," replied the shoemaker. "This is what we'll do: we'll remove your father from the bed; I will put on his clothes and you will call the notary saying that your father wishes to make a will." A t once the notary came. Said the shoemaker, with a voice very similar to that of the Prince: "Notary, write. I annul the will I made to the Jesuit Fathers, and I leave two thousand pounds to the master shoemaker who lives in my house ; I leave my son universal heir, who shall pay for my funeral." The notary departs. The shoemaker gets out of bed, the dead Prince is placed back in it, then they put him in a coffin and bury him. Three days later the Jesuits come to the house; they say to the son: "You know that your father made a will and left all his goods to the holy Church, so get out, for we are the owners." The son replies: "Holy fathers, you are mis-

Where there's no Will, there's a Way

137

taken; here is the will of my father; get out yourselves, or I'll kick you out and hurl you down the stairs." Pitrè adds a variant, in which the wife of the Prince, having heard of the will forced on her husband by the Jesuits, appeals to Cecco the shoemaker. He goes through the usual impersonation and dictates a will by which he bequeaths half of the princely property to the Princess, and half, "the better half," to himself. The Jesuits, not knowing this, give the old Prince a grand funeral. Three days later they come to throw the Princess out of the house that they thought theirs, but are hooted off. The Princess marries the shoemaker. In this type of folk-tale version four new elements have been introduced: The Jesuits (watch them; they will soon appear again), a shoemaker, the marriage of the impersonating ruffian to the person (here a Princess) whom he has cheated, but who inherits most of the property, the derision of the culprits. And let us notice how such a popular version does two contrary things: It omits certain details, that drop out in the telling, and adds certain embellishments common to folklore, as here the Princess. All "once upon a time" tales must have a Princess. Three of the embellishments of the versions cited we shall soon meet again. The shoemaker and the wife, for example, we find in a Welsh folk tale and in a French one. How old or modern the Welsh is, we cannot tell. It was given me by Professor O. H. Fynes-Clinton,14 of University College, Bangor, England, who had heard it, in both English and Welsh, from his father-in-law, the Reverend William Hughes (1849-1920). He related it of a shoemaker who lived in Llandrillo-yr Rhos, by the name of John Roberts. In the story the husband was actually dead and the wife got the neighbor to impersonate him. Among his legacies he left one hundred pounds "to my dear friend John Roberts." That's all that Mr. FynesClinton could remember. It is certainly the same old trick.

138

Sleuthing in the Stacks

We hope that this merry widow also married the shoemaker who had enriched himself at her expense, and so gave herself a chance to get even with him. More detailed and better told is the French version involving a widow and a cobbler in England (somehow cobbler sounds more picturesque than shoemaker). The tale is found in a very rare anecdotal hodgepodge entitled Encyclopédiana (Paris, 1857). An old man suddenly died in England without leaving a will. His widow, aware that she was thus about to lose her inheritance, thought of a device by which she might retain it. She concealed the death of her husband and engaged an old cobbler, her neighbor (same old cobbler), who somewhat resembled the old man, to go to bed in her house. (Sounds, at first, scandalous, but there is nothing erotic about that detail.) "In that position" he was to dictate a will and bequeath all to her. The notary is summoned. Upon his arrival the lady is "all in tears and plunged in profound grief at the sight of the danger incurred by her beloved spouse." She addresses the necessary questions to the "pretending sick" man so that he might express his final will. The old cobbler, sighing deeply and screwing up his face in the manner of a man who is about to give up the ghost, replied in a feeble voice : "It is my intention to leave half of all my property to my wife, and the other half to the poor old cobbler who lives across the street, a fine man, with a large family, who deserves help and has been such a good neighbor." At these words the widow was struck as by a bolt of lightning; nevertheless, she dared not breathe a word, in the fear of losing all (same old forced silence), and so she found herself obliged to share with that wily rascal of a cobbler the stratagem through which she had hoped to obtain everything for herself. There is an obvious relationship between the Sicilian folk tales, especially the second version, and the two English ver-

Where there's no Will, there's a Way

139

sions, one from Wales and the other told in French about an English case. The strange thing, though perhaps natural, in the tracing of this crime story is that beginning, as we have seen, from probable fact, that is, from life, it enters fiction, then folklore and seems, later and more than once, to re-enter life. Of course it is often impossible to tell truth from fiction. Here is a curious example, which takes us again to England. 15 It happened, we are told, in 1567. I shall give it in its very words, longwinded, unpunctuated, but quaint. This old record talks about one Edward Grevill, who died on December 24, 2 Elizabeth (1560) and continues: "He was succeeded by his son and Heir Lodowick then twenty two years of age, who being an ambitious man, purchased licence from Queen Elizabeth in the ninth year of her reign to build a Castle at Miscote in Warw. and to call it Mount Grevill, which he accordingly sett about on the top of the Hill, above a quarter of a mile southwards from the old Mannor House, as is visible by part of the fabric yet standing, and therefore the better to support his greatness, though he had very fair possessions in this and other countys, he very much desired the estate of one. . . . Webb, a rich Batchelour, who had been his servant, and was then tenant to him at Drayton, to this end he contrived his murder, and forged a will (as it is credibly reported) in favour of himself: to accomplish this execrable design he invited him to his house in a Christmas, or Easter season, to make merry, which was then at Seasoncote Glos., here he hired two of his servants to strangle him in his bed, which being effected, he gave out in the house, that the old man was very sick, and not likely to live, upon which the minister was sent for to write his will, and one of the murderers conveyed into the bed with the dead body, about whom the curtains were close drawn, and

140

Sleuthing in the Stacks

he dolefully groaning as almost gone, so that being in this seemingly weak condition, and unable to give any directions how the will should be drawn, all that he was supposed to say was by answers to questions put to him viz : how and to whom his Estate should be disposed of to? [ « c ] which, in short, was to his master Lodowicke Grevill, excepting one legacy to an Attorney in Banbury, to stop his mouth, none else would expect anything, or at least not pretend to question the will, all this done, and the company desired to depart the room, that the sick man might repose himself a little, the news of his death was soon after spread about the House, upon which, people were called up, who finding him dead in the bed took care of his interment. And now all this pageantry was over, and Mr. Grevill thought himself secure enough of his large legacy, but that we may see how divine vengeance is incessant in prosecuting such bloody actions though carried on with the greatest privacy and cunning, this wicked murder was not long after brought to light after this manner, one of the assassinates being in his cups at Stratford, Warw, dropt out some words among his Pott companions that it lay in his power to hang his master, which being related to the other murderer by an earwitness then standing by, he presently acquainted Mr. Grevill with it, who upon this resolving to prevent the danger of any more like talk, contrived that he should privately be made away with, to the accomplishment of this, shortly after, he sent them both out in the night upon some pretended business, by which the other took his advantage to dispatch him, and threw his body into a pitt of water, which afterwards floating was discovered by some passengers, and upon a strict enquiry when, and with whom he had been last seen, the Villain was questioned and immediately confessed the whole affair, thereby defeating his master throughout, for this they both had their tryalls at Warwick, where Mr. Grevill, to prevent the loss of his estate,

Where there's no Will, there's a Way

14 χ

stood mute, upon which he received sentence to be pressed, and suffered accordingly that death." Not a happy ending and hardly a good story. Also too breathless. It has too many elements in common with our familiar plot not to seem plausibly related to it, and yet the main trick is missing, for the forger of the will leaves the property of the deceased Webb to Lodowick, nothing to himself. Then, one murder leads to another until we have the main villain, Lodowick, executed, which provides the moral sermonette in excellent British moral tradition. Another characteristically British detail, this time legal, is that the accused Lodowick, "to prevent the loss of his estate, stood mute," as was his right according to British law. 18 Let us check it up in Lodowick's favor and give him credit for this last-minute good sportsmanship. By the way, I cannot resist the temptation of digressing here to enlarge on Grevill's more than good love of sheer sport and his — playful temperament. The same document reports that one fine day Grevill's younger son Edward, nonchalantly shooting an arrow upright from a long bow, it happened to fall upon his elder brother's head and killed him. Upon which the father, our Lodowick, shouted to Edward: "That's the best shot you ever made in your life."! Jolly folks, those Grevills! But let us observe this document. It was discovered and published by a very peculiar Oxford antiquarian, Anthony à Wood ( 1632-1695). H e was a lusty old bachelor and a congenital bookworm, or rather, codex-worm, whose only relaxations were music and bell-ringing. W e cannot go into his curiously anchoretic, archival life, which has been most amply recorded, but we may, I believe, take it for granted that he transcribed accurately, even though the enemies he made accused him of saying "many things ridiculously false." Notice that the wording is cautious, for the narrator says "as it

142

Sleuthing in the Stacks

is credibly reported." He too, then, took the story with a grain of salt, as a first cousin of rumor. Which suggests that the tale may have been already in circulation, as we suspect it was. One might even take the liberty of pushing our suspicions farther, and say that the author of this episode might have been familiar with Cicero's Pro Cluentio, which has a couple of criminal elements in common with the Grevill story. For people knew their classics in those blessed days and Cicero's legal speeches were indeed an "omnibus of crime," including, in the Cluentius affair, a falsified will, a murder, followed by rumor and confessions.17 At the time of à Wood's writing, the Grevill episode, if true, was only about a century old and so was Lodowick's castle. Rather strange that à Wood should mention "part of the fabric still standing," as if it were already in ruins. Perhaps in Lodowick's castle there were some fissures, as in his life. Note the recurring details of the scene: "the curtains . . . close drawn," the fake testator so sick and "dolefully groaning as almost gone," reminiscent of the very words used by Dante commentators. The placing of the villain in the bed of the deceased, indeed "with the dead body," echoes an item given by an old Florentine manuscript. And though strangulation must have been a convenient device of gentle humanity for many thousands of years, let us note the coincidence that it was included, in just such a story, in the commentary of Dante's son Peter. Given such a scene, these are rather obvious precautionary measures; thus they become the traditional accompaniment of the story and repeat themselves. For fiction repeats itself fully as much as history. Quod est demonstrandum. And now let us return to literary fiction.

Where there s no Will, there's a Way

143

Where would one most expect to find this originally Italian story in literary form? Obviously, among the hundreds of Italian tales told more or less in imitation of Boccaccio's Decameron in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But not one of the best story-tellers mentions it. 18 T o find it one must seek in the obscure collections of two very obscure Italian writers. Let us see what they did with it. The first is Marco Cademosto. We know very little about him. He was born in Lodi, a charming old city about forty miles south of Milan, we don't know when, but probably about the end of the fifteenth century; he seems to have resided at length in Rome, where he held some sort of ecclesiastical office and endeared himself, because of his good humor, to Popes Leo X and Clement VII. He wrote two or three books of no value, one of which, with an absurdly long title,19 contains six stories. They are rather thin and told in such a mediocre way that we need not shed any tears over Cademosto's statement that twenty seven others were lost during the sack of Rome (1527). Very discerning sack, literarily speaking; while it was functioning, why didn't it remove them all? Probably for the benefit of this study! For the sixth and last story is our stuff. This time the old man, whose unappetizing name was Scipione Sanguinaccio (Mr. Scipio Blood-pudding), a lifelong usurer (as usual), finding himself in "extreme old age" and wishing "to placate the wrath of God," decides to make a will leaving most of his ill-gotten goods to "churches, hospitals, and other pious places," leaving his two sons out in the cold. These, scenting the imminent cash-calamity, try to tell father that really charity begins at home, but to no avail. Then the old gentleman passes out. His faithful old servant, Galeazzo, comes to the rescue of the boys, proposing that "without fracas or the knowledge of anybody, except us

144

Sleuthing in the Stacks

three," they should place the body in another room, that he should enter the bed and that, while the two sons indulged in prayer [excellent detail], he would dictate a will revoking the previous one and "quite contrary to it." With bursts of renewed affection for the faithful servant, the brothers agree and promise to reward him generously. Galeazzo enters the bed "with the windows tight shut and the curtains carefully drawn," "with a large night-cap on his head," with only a tiny oil light burning, and before a notary and two witnesses, in a subdued voice he expresses his great regret at the previous testament. He leaves all to his dear sons, except for a mere bagatelle of two thousand crowns to Galeazzo, to reward "his long services and solicitude, the first half payment to be made by Christmas and the second by Easter." At this bequest the sons, who are eavesdropping, instead of praying, in the next room, rush in and try to reduce the absurd bequest to one thousand. At which the "adventitious father" replies: "Enough, boys; I so will; I cannot fail to reward generously such faithful services throughout twenty-four years as Galeazzo's." When they insist, he adds: "Now, boys, you are about to make me angry; I am liable any minute to take my night-cap off and get out of bed." This silenced them. The author enlarges on the subsequent, inconclusive arguments of the two parties, and ends with the dragged-inby-the-hair moral: "Let all people, therefore, endear themselves to their servants, who may be some day of great service." It seems clear that all Cademosto did was to ring in a few variations on the version of the Anonimo,20 which version may well have come to him through oral tradition, and therefore already with variations. He seems to have tried to inject into the story some additional humor, but very awkwardly, for he overlooked several humorous touches that were in the Anonimo. It detracts rather than adds to the

Where there's no Will, there's a Way

145

humor of the scene to have such elements as two sons, instead of one nephew, to omit the slow enumeration of bequests to pious institutions, the crescendo of bequests by the impersonator to himself, and his remark, when the heirs assert that Gianni Schicchi (Galeazzo) would not be interested in the major bequest: "I know better than you what he wants." Cademosto's moral at the end, about servants, has nothing to do with the story. The crafty servant, by the way, is a stock character in old tales, in the Commedia dell'arte and in countless comedies and farces. Here is a peculiar detail, that has escaped the notice of other Schicchi-ators : Cademosto must have been impressed by the will scene and its details as they appear in this his sixth story, for in his second, which is also poorly told, he brought in, for no discernible reason, another faked will by an even more wholesale rascal, who also dictated in bed, while pretending mortal sickness, "with a feeble and trembling voice, with a large cap pulled over his head to his very eyes, and appearing as if he were holding on to his life with his teeth." A merely verbal variant of our scene, that apparently stuck in his mind. Though this version has the earmarks of barrenness, it begat a child. For Cademosto the imitator was soon imitated by Nicolao Granucci, our old friend of the Tarzan chapter, who, in the collection of sermonizings with interlarded yarns that we mentioned before,21 tells the story in almost identical terms. That Granucci stole the story from Cademosto was practically admitted by himself at the beginning of his book, where he stated that he merely rewrote certain stories told him by a monk near Siena, who handed him, about 1568, a volume containing them — "un compendio co' versi, Sonetti, Capitoli e Stanze . . . " — the very title of Cademosto's booklet.22 From which Granucci, for good measure, also stole another story.23

146

Sleuthing in the Stacks

We may now then establish, in recapitulating, so far, our literary versions, an initial genealogy. Actual Fact c. 1250 Mentioned by Dante c. 1315 Commentary of Anonimo Fiorentino 1375 Cademosto's Story