boring process began. In so small an object it was impossible to detect the exact nature of the action, though a slight quivering motion was perceptible. As the instrument began to perforate the pulp of the gall, the sheath remained on the outside resting on the surface, but holding the "drill" in position. The result of this was that a naked portion of the drill (ovipositor) began to show at the arc of the circle (the sheath) in the form of a straight line, giving the appearance of a strung bow. As the boring continued the bow-like segment increased in size until the string (so to speak) was at right angles with the extremity of the abdomen. It did not stop here, however, but continued to come away from under the body of the insect up to the junction of the body with the thorax; thence resting in a perpendicularly straight line from the base of the abdomen to the core of the apple: at the same time held by the extreme tip of the now empty sheath. At this juncture the egg of the ichneumon would be passed down the ovipositor (which, though so slender, is nevertheless a tube) into the grub below. This description may give some idea of what minute proportions the ovum itself must be. The egg has not only to be passed through the tube, but must be planted in the larva of the gall-fly, a very small object compared to the size of the oak-apple with which the ichneumon has to cope. The whole of this act did not occupy more than two minutes. The withdrawal of the ovipositor was effected very quickly. Coming out in the same bowed form, it appeared to snap back into its sheath as the insect flew off. On further inspection I noted several more of the flies flitting about and occasionally settling on oak-apples. This led me to cut open and investigate some old shrivelled up apples of the previous year, for I strongly suspected that the ichneumons had recently issued from these; which, indeed, turned out to be the case. For in a section of one of them, I discovered two flies of the species in the act of making their way out through the dried pulp. Both were males of the same blue color, but, of course, minus the ovipositor arrangement. I have dwelt somewhat lengthily on the case of ichneumons, because it seems to me, that with regard to instinct, we observe in this class the faculty most perfectly developed; perhaps more so than in any other division of animal life. It would be useless to speculate as to the exact means by which such ultimate perfection has been arrived at; but that it has resulted through the same system of very gradual evolution, there can be little doubt. We have now followed the action and ways of instinct as manifested in animals, birds, and insects, and noted that as the scale descends the more marked becomes the faculty. As intelligence decreases so, in a proportionate degree, does instinct take its place. There fore, man as the most intelligent animal possesses it least of all; but still, he is not without a trace of instinct. For though he may not be able to find his way out of the forest, the man continues at least to walk instinctively. When once his legs are set in motion the action becomes purely mechanical and unless deciding to accelerate or diminish speed, or to stop altogether, he does not think about it at all: in the meanwhile he is breathing without knowing it. Should our wanderer, however, come to a deep stream, never having learnt to swim, he is for a moment at a loss and, in this respect, is the inferior of the dog. But on reflecting he surmounts the difficulty by throwing a pole across the stream and stepping over it. The crash of a falling tree instantly brings the traveller to a standstill when at the same time his eyes close automatically (instinctively); it is all over before he has had time to think. These are some examples of instinctinherited instinct-obtaining in man. As intelligence has evolved instinct, as no longer needful, has degenerated until almost extinct. However, it may be noted that a savage has this power more developed than his intellectual brother; and, in consequence, he would have a better chance when astray in a dense forest of finding his way. But, The Monthly Review. again, the savage is a long way inferior to the pigeon in this respect, though possibly that may be because from his low position he cannot see the landmarks. In conclusion, I would ask: How does a cuckoo know to place its eggs in the nest of a bird belonging to a different species; and by what means does the young cuckoo find its way from Africa after leaving its foster-parents behind? Can it be by landmarks; or is it by instinct? C. Bingham Newland. SHAKESPEARE, IBSEN and Mr. BERNARD SHAW. What is it that has happened of late people, with whom alone we are at years to the Shakespearian drama? The answer that first suggests itself is: "Mr. Beerbohm Tree"; and certainly Mr. Tree is not altogether negligible. To substitute upholstery for drama, prose for poetry, and Mr. Tree himself for Shakespeare's whole gallery of portraits, is a feat not inconsiderable. The great actor-manager, no doubt, was assisted by a certain ripeness in his audience. He had to deal with people already averse from literature, and prepared by all the conditions of their hurried and worried lives for a form of tragedy subtly analogous to the pantomime. Still, however favorable the circumstances, an acknowledgment is due to Mr. Tree. The feat has been accomplished, and accomplished by his genius. Nor is it likely that the thousands who have passed through his school will ever again lapse into a comprehension of Shakespeare. Mr. Beerbohm Tree, however, important though he be, is not the whole answer to our question. There is another kind of audience, that which attends at the Court rather than at the Haymarket, and cultivates, not Shakespeare, but Ibsen and Mr. Bernard Shaw. These present concerned, probably read Shakespeare in the original. Yet probably also, like Mr. Shaw himself, they prefer Mr. Shaw's drama. Why? What is it that has happened between Shakespeare's time and ours? It is hardly enough to say simply that the form of society has changed. Society, it is true, in the sixteenth century was more picturesque than it is now; nobles and kings were more important; war was more constant and closer at the doors; there were more insecurity, more violence, more ungoverned passion. Such conditions, no doubt, helped to determine the form of the drama. But the mere change in conditions is hardly enough to account for the dramatic change. After all, if Shakespeare had liked, he could have written in prose. He could have made Doll Tearsheets and Pistol, instead of Lady Macbeth and Hamlet, the central figures of his plays. Why didn't he? And again, why did not Ibsen put on the stage Napoleon or Garibaldi, instead of Hialmar Ekdal and Hedda Gabler? Shakespeare, it may be suggested, was a poet, and Ibsen was not. But that is not true. Ibsen was a poet, though certainly not of the calibre of Shakespeare. The interesting thing about him is precisely that having begun with poetic drama of the Shakespearian type, he passed, through Brand and Peer Gynt, to his amazing prosedramas of modern life. Yet, even in these, the poet in him is always peeping through, threatening to transform his drawing-rooms into castles and sorcerers' caves, and his middle-class men and women into wizards, witches, and ghosts. That there was something driving this poet into the drama called realistic, is precisely the point in which we are interested. Some Perhaps the key may seem to be given in the word "realistic." Mr. Bernard Shaw maintains that Shakespeare could not, or would not, grapple with reality. In the last resort, he insists, he ran away from it, and poeticized; whereas Ibsen faced the truth. But this is to beg the question about reality. Not that I complain of any man for begging the question; I merely insist on my right to beg it myself in my own way. People call those things, and that view of things, real, with which they are most conversant. people see one thing and some another; and all see what they see through different temperamental glasses. Shakespeare saw the world, broadly, as Eschylus saw it. He saw Man more than human set against a background of storm. He saw him great and heroic, but in the grip of Something greater than himself. What that Something was to him, a Fate or a Providence, a Power good or indifferent or bad, is, and will always be, matter of controversy. But, in any case, he saw Man over against the universe; and, for that reason, he instinctively selected types and characters where that antagonism is most vividly presented. He could, of course, and he did, with his inexhaustible knowledge and sympathy, create any kind of person in any kind of situationa Falstaff or a Dame Quickly as readily as a Richard the Second or an Anthony. But when he writes tragedy, he turns to great men in great positions. Why? Because there is presented, in the most striking form, the issue between Man and the Universe. To say that this is not reality, is confusion or ignorance. True, it is not the reality with which most people are conversant in their daily life. But then, don't they wish it were! Besides, that is not the point. Men are more than they are. Great actions and great sufferings appeal to them, not merely as a spectacle, but as a challenge. There need be no sophistication in this, no sense of vicarious virtue. They are not heroes; but they are heroes in embryo. And, even if a hero had never existed--a preposterous opinion only held by valets--it might be urged, without paradox, that the hero is more real than any one who has existed. If then our more intelligent and gifted dramatists have turned away from Shakespearian tragedy, there must be some reason other than the quest for Reality. The reason, I believe, is, that they have a different vision of life, determined by the circumstances of our` age. What that vision is, one may gather from the development of Ibsen's drama. He began, as we have noticed, with Shakespearian tragedy, the great man and the great crisis. Emperor and Galilean, for example, is a world-tragedy, on the scale of Julius Cæsar or Antony and Cleopatra. But already, it is clear, the dramatist is preoccupied with a problem, the problem of will. "Is my hero sound?" he seems to be asking. And the question grows more and more urgent, until it becomes an obsession. Brand and Peer Gynt are sermons on the text: "He that would save his life must lose it." Brand throws away the world to save his own soul; Peer Gynt, because he has no In soul, cannot even win the world. these dramas, and in all his later work, the poet is fascinated by the problem of the sick will. It is as though Shakespeare had become so possessed by the idea of Hamlet, that he could no longer conceive any other type. In all Ibsen's later plays, there is hardly, I think, a man-there are several women -who is not divided against himself. But the problem of the sick will is bound up with the problem of society; and upon society Ibsen fastens, as a pathologist upon a disease. Business, professions, marriage he finds a taint in everything. "The ship," he says in one of his letters, "carries a corpse in the hold." Living men are haunted by ghosts. Dead ideas, dead habits, dead institutions, overlie and smother the free soul. Or, in another of his metaphors, the modern man is like a wild duck shot in the wing, who has dived down and "bitten itself fast in the sea weed." Such men are not heroes; they do not confront Fate; they are not even aware of Fate, unless it be in the form of hereditary disease. They cannot stir the ocean-roll of verse, or kinIdle it with the light of rhetoric. They speak as we speak, live as we live, in rooms and streets and churches and conventicles. That Ibsen has shown them living so, with such consummate art, is his title to fame as a dramatist. No plays hold a modern audience as these do. They hold it as dramas; but they hold it also as problem-plays. Sick men and women are there, contemplating their own sick world. And they leave the theatre, not indeed "urged by pity and fear"-that is the work of the poetic drama-but racked with self-questioning, tortured with regret, perplexed, despairing, or enraged. Now, that the development exemplified by Ibsen is not peculiar to him, seems to be shown by the general trend of the best modern drama. Witness, for example, Sudermann in Germany and Mr. Bernard Shaw in England. This kind of drama somehow belongs to this age, just as Socialism does; and for the same reason. There is a very general, very profound and constantly increasing sense, that our social institutions are wrong; and this sense is preoccupying all our best intelligence. There was no such sense in the age of Shakespeare, nor in the age of Eschylus. Both those poets, indeed, give abundant expression to a sense of injustice and cruelty in the world. But this is part of their general sense of the Tragic. They conceive it as Fate, or as individual guilt; but the modern dramatist conceives it as social evil. He sees man involved in injustice, of which he is himself the author. He sees him the creator and perpetuator of the very system by which he is destroyed. He sees him vicious, not guilty; contemptible, not sublime. Pitiful victims and mean oppressors creep across the stage. Strength disgusts; weakness exasperates. Men and women are cracked and flawed, like the system in which they live. They make it; and it mars them. Drama of this kind is revolutionary. It leaves a man saying, not: "How tragic, and yet how great, is Man"; but: "How mean and how intolerable is Society!" It is, of course, just because Ibsen is revolutionary that Mr. Bernard Shaw places him among the prophets, along with Bunyan, and Hogarth, and Blake, and Nietzsche. But he can hardly deserve a place among these if his work be simply negative. A prophet is a prophet, not by what he denounces, but by what he affirms. What then does Ibsen affirm? Does he affirm anything? His ideal, of course, is the free man with the sound will. But does he believe in this ideal, and make us believe in it, as a thing not only desirable but possible, nay, necessary? Has he faith in Man? On that question, I suppose, his claim to be a philosopher, in Mr. Shaw's sense, must turn. Different people, perhaps, will answer it differently. But, for my own part, what I feel in Ibsen is a progressive disillusionment. The Wild Duck and When We Dead Awaken are Mephistophelian commentaries on Brand and The Master Builder. More and more the plays seem to become pathological demonstrations; less and less a challenge to healthy life. The high mountains luring us in the background dissolve in the universal illusion. Man is a mean creature, with a broken will. That seems to me to be the last message of this poet. It is otherwise with Shakespeare. Him Mr. Shaw will not count among the prophets, for reasons which I appreciate. I am inclined to agree that he had no positive view of the world; that, in many of his moods, "he saw no sense in living at all." But I deny that that is the effect produced by his tragedies. On the contrary, even those in which the tragedy is most unredeemed, even Lear, and Hamlet, and Othello, leave one with a sense of the tremendous worth-whileness of life. "Yet do I not repent me:" it is the characters of Shakespeare, not of Ibsen, that one can imagine using those great words. His tragedies do somehow deliver, and elate, and inspire. Why? Not because he has shown us a purpose in the world; but because he has shown us Man "noble in reason, infinite in faculty, in form and moving express and The Independent Review. admirable, in action like an angel, in apprehension like a god;" and has hung above and about him "this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire." It is not he, it is Ibsen, who reduces Man to a "quintessence of dust," and Heaven to "a pestilent congregation of vapors." After seeing Othello, we feel: "So it was, and so it is well that it was"; after seeing The Wild Duck, we feel: "Would that it had never been!" All this has nothing to do with the question of religion, in the sense in which Mr. Shaw uses the word. I can imagine a greater than Shakespeare seeing all he saw, and yet seeing a purpose and meaning in the world. But I know, and need not imagine, so many lesser men who have seen a purpose so inadequate. Shakespeare could never have been contented with the religion of Dante, still less with that of Bunyan, or of Nietzsche. Ought he to have found a religion that would have been greater than theirs, in proportion as his vision was wider and deeper? Such "oughts" do not help us. Shakespeare was a poet, not a prophet. But what a poet! We need not complain that our modern dramatists are not poets too. But neither need we count it to them as a merit. Their drama is social criticism; and we need social criticism. But we need poetry too; and without it we shall not make much of the new society to which we are moving. G. Lowes Dickinson. |