CHAPTER XII
The Great Plague of London, which reached its height in 1665, has left an abundant aftermath both in literature and art. The main story of its ravages is too well known to call for repetition.
There were still some ready to see in the plague, as they were in the case of the fire, evidence of the handiwork of malevolent Jews. Since their expulsion from England by Edward I, the Jews had never yet obtained the legal right of re-entry, their open petition to Cromwell having failed. With the restoration of Charles II to the throne, they seem to have taken the matter into their own hands and found their way quietly back, so that at the time of the plague there were many resident in London, to the great advantage of trade and to the relief of an ever-needy Government. But three centuries of plague, punctuated by fierce outbreaks at regularly recurring intervals, had served to unravel much of the mystery of pestilence, and the people had learnt that it was not to be exorcised by a holocaust of Jews, or by the brutal murder of imaginary poisoners.
Celestial portents were not lacking to presage the plague. A blazing comet appeared for several months before the plague. Men affected to see, in its dull colour and slow solemn movement, a prediction of the heavy punishment of pestilence; whereas that which preceded the fire was swift and flaming and foretold a rapid retribution.
Superstition raked up images afresh from the scrap-heap of discarded fancies. Women saw flaming swords in the heavens, some even saw angels brandishing them over their heads. Astrologers had strange tales ofmalignant conjunctions of the planets. Medical opinion was still divided along the same lines of cleavage, as it had been for 2,000 years before. There were those who referred the disease to some occult poison, and those who referred it to an excess of some manifest quality, such as heat, or cold, or moisture, in each case corrupting the body humours. Speculation was rife as to the nature of the causal poison. Some, as Lucretius had done, conceived it to be pestiferous corpuscles of atomic character, outside the range of human vision, generated either in the heavens by a malignant conjunction of planets, or in the soil, and so often liberated by the agency of earthquakes. These poisons, however generated, found their way into the human body through the medium of the distempered atmosphere.
Some had noticed an unusual absence of birds before the epidemic, as Thucydides and Livy had done in their times. Boyle observed a great diminution of flies in 1665, Boghurst a superabundance of flies and ants in 1664. Sir George Ent and others attributed the disease to minute invisible insects, but Blackmore conceived these to be rather a consequence than a cause.
Insects, so-called, had been vaguely associated with pestilence from remote antiquity, more especially flies, lice, and locusts; but in the medical literature of the sixteenth century and after they are assigned a much more definite role. Mercurialis[182]states that huge numbers of caterpillars paraded the streets of Venice during the plague of 1576. Goclenus[183]mentions swarms of spiders during the plague of Hesse in 1612, and Hildanus swarms of flies and caterpillars this same year in plague-stricken Lausanne. Bacon speaks of flies and locusts, as characteristic of pestilential years, and Diemerbroeck[184]of flies, gnats, butterflies, beetles, grasshoppers, and hornets in the sameconnexion. Gottwald[185]reported the presence of multitudes of spiders during the plague of Dantzig in 1709. Arabian physicians considered the putrefaction of swarms of dead locusts an important cause of pestilence. Hancock,[186]as late as 1821, argued that locusts caused famine by destroying the crops, and so prepared the way for human pestilence.
Talismans, amulets, reliquaries, and all the stock-in-trade of magic were in brisk demand among the populace. Quack vendors of antipestilential remedies innumerable effectively replaced physicians, most of whom took refuge in flight. All honour to those who stood fast at their posts and reclaimed for medicine what Galen had renounced, the captaincy of its own soul. These are the men who had no fear for ‘the pestilence that walketh in darkness or the arrow that flieth by day’:
And yet a few beside these, whose names are inscribed on no humandocument, but whose deeds are imprinted in imperishable type on the deathless record of righteous human endeavour.
Nathaniel Hodges[187]shows us something of the daily life of a physician in the course of this plague. He himself rose early, took his antipestilential dose, attended to the affairs of his household, and then repaired to his consulting room, where crowds awaited him. Some, who were sick, he treated, others he reassured and sent away. Breakfast followed, then visits to patients at their homes. On entering a house he would vaporize some aromatic disinfectant on a charcoal brazier: if he arrived out of breath, he would rest a while, and then place a lozenge in his mouth, before proceeding to the examination of his patients. After a round of several hours’ duration, he would return home, drink a glass of sack, and then dine on roast meat and pickles or some similar condiments, all of which were reputed antidotal. More wine followed the preliminary curtain-raiser. Afternoon and evening, till eight or nine o’clock, were devoted to a second round of visits. His late hours he spent at home, a stranger to noxious fumes of tobacco, quaffing sack, to ensure cheerfulness and certainty of sleep. Twice the fatal infection seemed to have slipped past his outposts, but Hodges had still his remedy: he merely doubled the dose.
Of all the literature of pestilence none has been more widely read than Defoe’sJournal of the Plague Year: all later records take their colour from Defoe. Nevertheless, a careful study and comparison of other contemporary accounts leaves little room for doubt that Defoe’s picture does not accurately represent the general state of London during the plague. His picture is far more true of Marseilles in 1720 than of London in 1665, and in this connexion one should remember that he had sedulously collected materials for a diary of the plague of Marseilles, which have been printed in some editions of his works.These can hardly have failed to colour hisJournal, which was not submitted to the public till 1722, two years after the plague of Marseilles.
Defoe himself was but six years old at the time of the plague, so that his own childish memories can have aided him but little in his task. He will have had, at most, a dim recollection of some hideous catastrophe, round which ranged tales of parents and friends in his boyhood. To these he will have added facts and incidents borrowed from the chief records available in print. Intrinsic evidence goes to show that these were three: London’sDreadful Visitation, Hodges’sLoimologia, and Vincent’sGod’s Terrible Voice in the City. The first of these will have given him the Bills of Mortality and other general information: the second, the aspect of the plague from a physician’s point of view: the third, a vision of the plague as it appealed to popular imagination.
That Defoe intended to write history and not fiction, there is no reason to doubt. Judged only by the accuracy of his facts it is history, but it is in the facts that he omits, just because he had never heard of them, that he unconsciously lapses into fiction. Comparison of details and incidents with the unimpeachable record of Pepys confirms his accuracy, but it shows also that, by separating incidents from their surroundings and by compressing his description to the exclusion of all but selected incidents, the picture, as a whole, does not accurately represent the aspect of the city, as it was. Pepys, who was an actual eye-witness, has noted not only the most striking events but those of everyday commonplace interest, so that his narrative is far more true to life. Defoe, on the other hand, has removed his picture from its setting. Pepys shows us that, though the spectre of plague was everywhere, everyday life went on, though in subdued fashion. Defoe would have us believe that all activity was paralysed.
For all this, however, as one reads theJournalthe narrative has such an air of verisimilitude, that one instinctively pictures the writer as describing what he has seen with his own eyes, so perfect is the illusion. Mead, indeed, himself an authority on the plague and so soon after the event, believed that theJournalwas the authentic record of an eye-witness. Defoe’s faculty of visualizing what he has not seen is inferior only to the vividness with which he describes what he has visualized.
What is the secret of this vividness? More than all else, extreme simplicity of language. The simple style was Defoe’s natural style, and for that reason his use of it is fluent and easy, and knowing this he fitly puts his story into the mouth of a simple saddler. Defoe wrote for a growing class of readers of a lowly social order. He is the apostle of the common people: that is why he imitates their way of speaking. Not only is his narrative colloquial, but it deliberately affects the language a saddler would use in reciting to his intimates the memories of what he had lived through. There is no striving for dramatic effect, no drawing of lurid pictures, no literary artifice, but always the same sustained simplicity of diction, even in describing the most appalling occurrences. There must be no chance of missing the smallest point, so he even does such thinking as is necessary by running comments on his own story.
The educated reader, particularly in these days, when even literature is administered in tabloid form, must needs be wearied by the prolixity, and irritated by the redundancy of the narrative. But again it must be pleaded in extenuation that these very defects are deliberate. Constant repetition, as every teacher knows, sooner or later penetrates the densest brain.
But theJournalis something more than a mere chronicle, vivid enough at that, of what happened, and how men behaved, during the plague.Defoe regards the plague as the judgement of God, and this attitude imparts a strong moral purpose to the work. This is why he dwells so much on the mental and moral effects of the catastrophe, inculcating his lesson without the appearance of undue insistence. Pepys, as we know, could find heart to make merry during the plague, just as Boccaccio depicted his company of Florentines: to Defoe the mere idea of merriment is revolting. Pepys, on New Year’s Eve, as he looked back over the abomination of desolation, could make this entry in hisDiary:
‘December 31, 1665. I have never lived so merrily (besides that I never got so much) as I have done this plague time ... and great store of dancings we have had at my cost (which I am willing to indulge myself and wife) at my lodgings. The great evil of this year, and the only one indeed, is the fall of my Lord of Sandwich, whose mistake about the prizes hath undone him.’
Pepys was a stranger to imagination: his pleasures and his griefs were things of the surface and matters of the moment. His creed is egoistic hedonism in all its naked brutishness. He is far more concerned over the fire, where there is a chance of losing his property, than over the plague where the chance is of losing his life. His New Year’s Eve retrospect is not the only glimpse he gives us of callous indifference to the horrors of the plague. Look at September 30, 1665, when the fiercest spell was only just past:
‘So to sleep with a good deal of content, and saving only this night and a day or two about the same business a month or six weeks ago, I do end this month with the greatest content, and may say that these three months, for joy, health, and profit, have been much the greatest that ever I received in all my life, having nothing upon me but the consideration of the sicklinesse of the season during this great plague to mortify mee. For all which the Lord God be praised!’
It was not that Pepys was unconscious of the terrible scenes ofsuffering around him, only that he was unmoved by them. Into one short letter to Lady Cartaret, at the height of the plague, he compresses all the grim details that fill a volume for Defoe.
Historians frequently lay it down that the fire of London swept away the plague. As a fact it probably had little to do with its departure. Several English towns were as hard hit as London, and yet in the absence of any conflagration subsidence and disappearance of plague followed the same course as in London. At Salonica,[188]abouta.d.1500, a fire which destroyed 8,000 houses was actually followed by an outbreak of plague. It was a common contemporary belief that the departure of plague from London was hastened by the coming of pit-coal into general use, so that the atmosphere was constantly permeated by sulphurous fumes.
Records in art of the Great Plague of London, though numerous, are mostly unimportant. Generally artists have been content to illustrate its copious literature. In 1863 Frederic Shields commenced an intended series of illustrations of theJournalof Defoe. Ruskin lavished great praise on the woodcuts, for their imaginative power and for the superlative excellence of the design. Proofs of six of these woodcuts were to be seen at the Memorial Exhibition of the works of Shields (Alpine Club, September-October 1911). The set of six comprised the following scenes:
1.The Decision of FaithA man is seated at a table, on which lies a Bill of Mortality, with his Bible open before him. He says to himself, ‘Well I know not what to do, Lord direct me.’ His finger points to the answer in the open Bible: ‘Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation: there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.’2.The Death of the First-bornA youth lies in convulsions on a bed, while a woman kneels beside it. In the background are bearers carrying away a corpse: both are smoking pipes. On the ground lies an hour-glass.3.Solomon Eagle warning the ImpenitentSolomon Eagle stands with a brazier of live coals on his head in a fierce preaching attitude before a group of lewd young women at an open window.4.The End of a RefugeeA man with a long hooked pole is dragging a corpse along. Beside him stands a grave-digger with spade, dog, and dinner-basket.5.The Plague-PitBodies are being shot from a cart into a pit by the light of a torch, which a man is holding.6.Escape of an Imprisoned FamilyThe door of a house has been hacked down, and is lying on a dead body.
1.The Decision of Faith
A man is seated at a table, on which lies a Bill of Mortality, with his Bible open before him. He says to himself, ‘Well I know not what to do, Lord direct me.’ His finger points to the answer in the open Bible: ‘Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation: there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.’
2.The Death of the First-born
A youth lies in convulsions on a bed, while a woman kneels beside it. In the background are bearers carrying away a corpse: both are smoking pipes. On the ground lies an hour-glass.
3.Solomon Eagle warning the Impenitent
Solomon Eagle stands with a brazier of live coals on his head in a fierce preaching attitude before a group of lewd young women at an open window.
4.The End of a Refugee
A man with a long hooked pole is dragging a corpse along. Beside him stands a grave-digger with spade, dog, and dinner-basket.
5.The Plague-Pit
Bodies are being shot from a cart into a pit by the light of a torch, which a man is holding.
6.Escape of an Imprisoned Family
The door of a house has been hacked down, and is lying on a dead body.
George Cruickshank contributed four plates to Brayley’s edition of theJournal of the Plague Year. Three of them, the ‘Dead Cart’, the ‘Great Pit in Aldgate’, and ‘Solomon Eagle’ are vivid and powerful; the fourth, ‘The Water-man’s Wife’, feeble and commonplace.
The preaching of Solomon Eagle is the subject of a picture by P. F. Poole, R.A., in the Mappin Gallery at Sheffield. The scene depicted is taken from Harrison Ainsworth’s novelOld Saint Paul’s. It shows Solomon Eagle, with the brazier of live coals on his head, nude but for a loin-cloth; and discoursing to the terrified citizens outside old St Paul’s Cathedral, during the plague. All around are strewn bodies of dead and dying: a house displays the damning red cross and the words ‘Lord have mercy upon us’. In the background bearers are carrying away a corpse to burial.
An incident, that Pepys describes in hisDiaryunder September 3, 1665, as follows, is represented in a modern picture by Miss Florence Reason.
‘Among other stories, one was very passionate, methought, of a complaint brought against a man in the towne for taking a child from London from an infected house. Alderman Hooker told us it was the child of a very able citizen in Gracious Street, a saddler, who had buried all the rest of his children of the plague, and himself and his wife now being shut up and in despair of escaping, did desire only to save the life of this little child: and so prevailed to have it received stark-naked into the arms of a friend, who brought it (having put it into new fresh clothes) to Greenwich; where, upon hearing the story, we did agree it should be permitted to be received and kept in the towne.’
In 1679 a terrible epidemic of plague broke out in Vienna, then an opulent city, with a population of some 210,000, and the seat of Leopold, the Holy Roman Emperor. Our chief knowledge of the visitation is derived from Sorbait (Consilium medicum oder freundliches Gespräch), Abraham a St. Clara (Merk’sWien), and Fuhrmann (Alt- und Neu-Wien). The disease was preceded by an epidemic of the ‘Hot Sickness’, (Hitzige Krankheit), which was very fatal. Bubonic plague followed in its wake and Vienna presented the spectacle of one huge lazaretto for the sick, one gigantic plague-pit for the dead. Convicts, as at Naples, were employed both to nurse the sick and bury the dead. Clothing, furniture, and bedding lay littered in the streets mixed with the dead and dying. When carts failed, the bodies were thrown into the Danube. A Plague Committee strove in vain to shut up all infected houses and segregate the inmates in lazarettos and stations of quarantine. Death by public hanging was the penalty of disobedience. Some of the royal princes, and foremost among them Prince Ferdinand of Schwartzenburg, together with many of the nobility, devoted themselves courageously to fighting the plague, undertaking even the most menial duties. But many of the citizens and the Emperor himself fled. Leopold conceived his obligations to his people discharged by a pilgrimage to Maria-Zell to pray for cessation of the plague. Then he moved his court to Prague, whence plague drove him to Linz.
During the plague the Viennese set up a wooden column, to which frequent processions were made, observing the ancient ritual of the Flagellants. At the end of the plague Leopold made a vow at St. Stephan’s to replace it by a marble column, which was duly erected in the Graben between 1687-93.
An incident of this plague, the story of the street-singer Augustin, who was thrown alive, but drunk, into the plague-pit, but escaped none the worse for his experience, recalls the like occurrence in Defoe. The man is said to have composed the familiar ‘O du lieber Augustin’ in a beer-house on the very night he was thrown into the plague-pit.
Amulets of various kinds were extensively employed in the seventeenth century. In South Germany a common form was the so-called Pest Penny. These had on one face, as a rule, the figure of St. Benedict or St. Zacharias, and on the reverse some formula of exorcism.
Vienna[189]fell a victim to outbreak after outbreak of plague, but the experience gained in the visitation of 1679 enabled the authorities to stamp out the infection in 1691 and 1709, before it had grown out of hand. But in 1713 all preventive measures failed to check its spread. Then, in the month of May, processions and litanies were organized to the plague column. The Emperor Charles VI remained in Vienna, and pronounced a solemn vow in St. Stephan’s, that if the plague ceased he would erect a church as a thank-offering. Such was the origin of the Karlskirche. This church is a rich square edifice with a huge dome. It is thechef-d’œuvreof J. B. Fischer von Erlach, commenced in 1715. The ravages of the plague are portrayed in relief, by Stanetti, in the tympanum. Flanking the portico are two domed belfries, resemblingTrajan’s column, 108 feet high, with reliefs from the life of S. Carlo Borromeo by Mader and Schletter. In March 1714, when the plague died out after a total mortality of 120,000, a thanksgivingTe Deumwas sung in St. Stephan’s, at which the emperor was present. Two series of memorial coins were struck, the one showing the votive column, the other the church dedicated to S. Carlo Borromeo.
The Plague Regulations, published in separate form at Vienna at the time of this epidemic, give a good idea of current popular opinion as to the nature of plague. There was no lack of adherents for each belief of every preceding period. There were those who regarded it as a signal evidence of God’s displeasure. There were those who attributed it to poison in the air or food, generated in the stars and spread by the malice of grave-diggers for their own purposes. Even the Jews were incriminated. There were those who read its origin in the conjunction of certain stars. Others ascribed it to famines, to poisonous fumes set free by earthquakes, to comets, and even to dry seasons through the multiplication of insects. Come how it might, clouds taking the form of biers and funeral processions, noises in churchyards, and dreary sounds in the air foretold its coming. On infected bodies the virus was often visible as blue sulphurous fumes. There were clearly also some who conceived a natural origin. A doctor, named Gregorovius, dissected three dead bodies in search of the cause, but failed to find it. His intrepid zeal was duly rewarded by the Emperor and by the Faculty of Medicine in Vienna.
Conformably with the varying conceptions of cause, remedies were varied and multifarious. Some pinned their faith to a devout life, aided by processions and penitential sermons. Some lit fires to cleanse the air, at times adding sulphur. A host of herbs, chief among them Angelica, enjoyed repute as antipestilential remedies. The simple life appealed to some, purgatives and blood-letting to others.
But side by side with this ill-assorted medley of measures, a code of sanitary precautions had slowly grown up. Early notification by the doctors, quarantine of suspects and segregation of the sick, cleanliness and disinfection were all recommended and sedulously executed, and supplied in embryo the essential principles of modern sanitary science. Doctors were enjoined to keep sober, to fumigate themselves, and to wear silk or taffetas, to which the virus would not cling. We have arrived indeed at the parting of the ways, and henceforth the stream of medical science, polluted less and less by the surface waters of superstition, flows on clear and full in its appointed channel. The sun of science emerges at length from its protracted winter solstice.