BLIND ALLEYS OF HISTORY.*
Mn. LANG has attempted a bold task, no less than to find a light to some of the very darkest alleys in history. In most cases he has only deepened the mystery; but then he has shown us that the farthing-dips of other inquirers are worse than use- less, and if he can give no clear solution of the puzzles, he at least has narrowed them down and pointed out the very corner where the insoluble difficulty lurks. The twelve essays in the volume are delightful reading, for with a gaiety which is almost flippancy the author cross-examines the obscure dead, and rides with rough shoes over venerable fictions. As proofs of this or that theory they are less satisfactory, for Mr. Lang has an irritating habit of wrapping up his argument in a maze of detail, and putting no proper emphasis on salient points. His method is too staccato, his arguments trip on each other's heels with a conversational ease, so that in the retrospect the reader's mind is apt to be a little confused. He is sure that he has been vastly entertained, but be is vague as to what the author has been driving at.
The first and profoundest mystery is that unfortunate hero, the Man in the Iron Mask (the mask, by the way, was of velvet). Speculation has identified him with many strange people, from the genuine Louis XIV., who was also the ancestor of Napoleon, to such comparatively prosaic figures as discredited Italian plotters and Huguenot malcontents. Voltaire thought he was a son of Anne of Austria and Mazarin, while others supposed him the Duke of Monmouth or a son of Oliver Cromwell. Mr. Lang shows that the more likely hypothesis is that he was a very humble valet, called Martin, who was mixed up with the intrigues of his master in England, a Huguenot schemer called Marsilly, decoyed to France, and kept in jealous confinement for the rest of his life. Had he any secret ? If so, it is difficult to see how it did not leak out, seeing that at one time be had means of communication in prison with Fouquet and Lauzun. It may be that the French Court believed he had a secret connected in some way with the English Treaty; or it may be that his confinement was an elaborate blind. At any rate, the lesser officials believed in him, and Martin, or Danger (to give him his prison name), was never out of their thoughts. It is an odd tale, and with the story of Marshy, the valet's master, gives us a glimpse into the murky places of old France, when a possibly harmless servant, probably innocent of any guilty knowledge, could masquerade for years as a State prisoner and die a hero of a hundred wild romances.
How Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey came by his death is another puzzle which in its day sent many honest men to the scaffold. Here, too, we must remain in the dark. Was he murdered by the Jesuits to conceal certain Catholic secrets ? It may be so ; but Mr. Lang shows that there is no evidence against the Jesuits, and that it is difficult to imagine what portentous secret Sir Edmund could have possessed. He may have committed suicide, being of a melancholy temperament and implicated in a political tangle ; but the surgical evidence at the inquest is against the theory. On the whole, suicide seems likely to be the solution, for surgery in the days of Charles II. was scarcely an exact science. "The False Jeanne d'Arc " is a story of a remarkable impostor who five years after the Maid's death turned up in Orleans, and was accepted by the Maid's brothers and by many ,good people who no doubt were predisposed to believe in her. This is not an in- soluble mystery, for the fraud was exposed ; but that the woman should have won recognition at all is a curious com- mentary upon popular loyalty. In "The Mystery, of Amy Robsart " Mr. Lang makes it clear that Dudley had no part • The Val;t's Tregedy, and other Si aim By Andrew Lang. London: Long mans and Co. 112a. 6d. net.] in his wife's death; but whether the poor lady fell downstairs by accident and broke her neck, or whether she was murdered by some too-zealous partisan of her lord, must remain obscure till we learn what was the verdict of the Curnnor jury and the mysterious burglary which Elizabeth mentioned. "Junius and Lord Lyttelton's Ghost" j a well-authenticated tale of a man who was "fey." The "wicked Lord Lyttel- ton " woke one night and saw a bird entering his window, which changed at once to the likeness of a young woman and warned him that he must die at 12 o'clock two nights later. After the orthodox fashion of rakes, his Lordship spent the last evening carousing with some of his lady friends, retired to his bedroom, and died punctually on the stroke of 12. A certain Mr. Coulton once wrote an article in the Quarterly Review in which he maintained that Lyttelton was Junius, and that he died by his own hand, having invented the ghost-story as a last practical joke. The " Junius " evidence is inconsiderable, but there have been few better authenticated ghost-stories, for the story of the ghostly warning seems to have been known to Lord Lyttelton's friends during the two days intervening between the warning and his death. Dr. Johnson believed the story implicitly, and set it down as another piece of evidence of the spiritual world.
The remaining studies deal with curiosities of biography and literary history. There is an interesting discussion on the " daemon " of Jeanne d'Arc, those mysterious voices which were her enemies' proof of witchcraft. Mr. Lang argues with great probability that hers was "an advanced case of the mental and bodily constitution exemplified by the relatively small proportion of people, the sane seers of visual hallucina-
tions and hearers of unreal voices. In the case of Jeanne d'Arc, as of Socrates, the mind communicated knowledge not in the conscious everyday intelligence of the Athenian and of la Pucelle. This information, in Jeanne's case, was presented in the shape of hallucinations of eye and ear. It was sane, wise, noble, veracious, and concerned not with trifles, but with great affairs. We are not encouraged to suppose that saints or angels made themselves audible and visible. But, by the mechanism of such appearances to the senses, that which was divine in the Maid—in all of us, if we follow St. Paul—that 4 in which we live and move and have our being,' made itself intelligible to her ordinary consciousness, her workaday self, and led her to the fulfilment of a task which seemed im- possible to men." In the interesting discussion of the story of "Lord Bateman" Mr. Lang shows that Thackeray and Cruikshank had got hold of a vulgarised pot-house form of an old ballad, the tale of Gilbert Becket, of which he quotes many variants. It is a typical case of the fate of folk-songs : first, the popular tale of the return of the old true love ; then about 1300 a particular man, Becket, is made the hero ; and finally the story goes back to oral recitation again, and a dozen tavern versions arise. Lastly, we would mention "The Shakespeare-Bacon Imbroglio." If there is any believer left in this odd heresy, we would be curious to know if his faith survives Mr. Lang's witty and scholarly exposure.
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