its authenticity are guided not by knowledge but by the strange ill-will they bear the poet. They declare, what is perfectly true, that the monument as it exists bears little resemblance to the ill-drawn representation of it printed in Dugdale's 'Warwickshire.' Wherefore, they argue, the monument, like the man whom it portrays, is a sham. The truth cannot be so easily stated as that. Or, to quote Mr Spielmann, "as the Shakespeare monument we know does not agree with Dugdale, it has been innocently assumed and asserted in fact by persons unfamiliar with the ways of the earlier engravers, that the Stratford monument as we know it is another, a different monument, and not the original -inasmuch as the proportions, as well as the details, are wholly different, and the bust presents no similarity whatever. This belief pathetically recalls the peasant's faith in the printed word, and because it is in the papers.' In other words, they accept Dugdale as infallible. The bust at Stratford, as it may be seen to-day, does not resemble the drawing in Dugdale's history. Therefore, the bust is a comparatively recent forgery. It It does not occur to them that the draughtsman employed by Dugdale may himself have been at fault. Now Dugdale was a man of his time. He was industrious, accurate in the loose fashion of the age, and pains taking. He employed the best engravers he could come by, among them Hollar, a man of genius, and he has left us many a record, drawn and written, for which the world will ever owe him a debt of gratitude. But he and his staff knew nothing, fortunately, as we think, of photographic accuracy. They did not travel with cameras. They depended for the effect which they produced on their skill and their memory, and in skill and memory they were sometimes deficient. We are ready to believe even that the beautiful views of London which Hollar drew for Lord Arundel are not precise and exact in their delineation. Their precision does not matter greatly. They possess a beauty to which no photograph can ever attain, and they do not give us the less pleasure because they might not be put in as infallible evidence in a court of law. Mr. Spielmann, then, is perfectly justified in giving examples of gross inaccuracy in the engravers of the time, and he may justly conclude that the drawing in Dugdale's 'Warwickshire' cannot be used to throw a doubt upon the authenticity of Shakespeare's monument. Here is his own description of it: "We see at once the lamentable properties of the monument as here misrepresented, while the style inclines to Baroque-a style some twenty or thirty years later than Shakespeare's death, but already sprung into exist "This Figure, that thou here seest put, His face, the Print would then surpass But, since he cannot, Reader, look ence when the 'Warwickshire' friend. It is well to recall was published. It therefore them once moregives itself the lie. We see the poor design of the shield and mounting, the ridiculous boys cut off their mounds and perched insecurely on the edge As well in brass, as he hath hit of the cornice, little architectural in sentiment - the one holding aloft a spade, the other an hour-glass, as shown, totally unsculptural in effect. The arch is of a different form, perhaps to allow the wide space necessary for the unauthentic stuck-out elbows of the figure. The portrait is no portrait at all; it shows us a sickly decrepit old gentleman, with a falling moustache, much more than fifty-two years old." Such as it is, it has served as a model to many bungling engravers, and has remained for many a long year-in travesty-the familiar portrait of Shakespeare. However, Mr Spielmann has at last proved, by illustration, the faulty methods of the engravers of the seventeenth century, and the inaccuracy of the antiquaries, and we cannot think that Dugdale's drawing will any longer bring comfort to the haters and baiters of Shakespeare. So we arrive at Droeshout's portrait, which has also aroused hostile critics to mirth, but which cannot wholly please those for whom Stratford is a word of obloquy. The verses which stand beneath the portrait are written by Ben Jonson, who was Shakespeare's These lines are written in scorn neither of the poet nor of his portrait. The " gentle Shakespeare "receives his meed of praise, and so does Droeshout. shout. And though Ben Jonson was not upon oath when he wrote "the Graver had a strife With Nature, to outdo the life,' Droeshout's portrait of Shakespeare has been most unjustly decried. It is the work of a young man not the master of his craft, and there is a certain clumsiness in the drawing. But we are content to believe that it gives us something of the aspect and the character of Shakespeare. Some good judges at any rate have praised it. A. van Huelle, for instance, quoted by Mr Spielmann in his life of Houbraken, while highly praising the Dutch engraver's plate in the Chandos Shakespeare, says: "I greatly prefer to this romanticised bust the engraving of Martin Droeshout. There indeed we find the features which characterise the author of 'Romeo' as well as of him who wrote 'Julius Cæsar.' What nobility in that forehead! With what feeling is rendered the pensive and penetrating expression of the affirmed, with genuine if whimeyes and of the smile, of sical sincerity, he is exactly which the irony is softened like the old engraving which by the sweetness of soul!" is said to be a bad one. I That praise is ungrudging, and think it very good.' Blake (as we think) deserved. Nor thought it very good, and does it stand alone. When when Shakespeare appeared to Stéphane Mallarmé, the dis- him in a vision, it was in the tinguished French poet, first guise of Droeshout's portrait. saw Droeshout's portrait of So of So we need not despair of Shakespeare, he exclaimed: recapturing a living image of Quelle securité ! " A sound Shakespeare, with the 1ast at criticism of both poet and Stratford and Droeshout's porportrait. trait to help us-and Mr Spielmann assures that the bony structure is the same in bust and and portrait; nor need we be shaken in our confidence by those who believe in Dugdale's drawing as the simpleminded believe in print, or by the rash critics who find Droeshout's portrait "puddingfaced." 66 There remains the testimony of Blake, who, when at Felpham, saw in a vision "the sands peopled by a host of souls-majestic shadows." Some of them he paintedHomer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante; and "claimed," as Mr Spielmann says, "to have had converse with Shakespeare, and Printed in Great Britain by IN the long roll of the celebrated captains of war, few careers have been so overlooked by military historians as that of Maurice, Count of Saxony, better known perhaps as Marshal Saxe. This omission is the more curious, because Saxe lives not only in his deeds but in his words; for as a military thinker and prophet his outlook was so original, his expression so unfettered by convention, that his writings enjoy a perennial freshness and appeal to the modern spirit of scientific inquiry. The reasons for the neglect are probably twofold: first, that the wider political interest of Frederick the Great's almost contemporary career focussed on the latter the attention of the general historian; second, that the historical sections of " 1 the Continental General Staffs, blinded by the brilliance of Napoleon, regarded his first campaign of 1796 as the year one of modern military history, and affected a contempt for all his predecessors because of the contrast between their less decisive methods and the "absolute war" waged by Napoleon. In a world exhausted-like France in 1815-through the attempt to copy slavishly the Napoleonic method, the present may be a fitting moment to revive the study of a commander in some respects so akin to that great master, and in others so strongly contrasting. In its human interest, few careers and fewer minds are more arresting than that of this natural son of Augustus II. of Saxony, for Saxe was 1 'Maga,' May 1924. VOL. CCXVI. NO. MOOCVI. F a man built on the large scale-in his physique, in his intellect, in his outlook, and in his excesses. A year after his birth, in 1696, his father was elected King of Poland, but owing to the unsettled state of the country, Saxe spent his youth mainly in other lands. At the tender age of twelve he was present at Malplaquet with the army of Prince Eugene, and two years later his impetuous courage was so reckless as to call upon him the friendly reproof of this famous leader. In 1711 he received the formal recognition of his father and the rank of count. After serving under Peter the Great against the Swedes, and later against the Turks, he went, when twentythree, to Paris to study mathematics, and there took a commission in the French Army. Brilliant service here, temporarily interrupted by an adventure in Courland, found him a lieutenant-general when the War of the Austrian Succession opened in 1741. His night surprise and capture of Prague made him famous, and the fact of his exploits being the only redeeming feature of this unsuccessful invasion of Austria led to his being made Marshal of France. After being appointed in 1744 to command the expedition intended to invade England on behalf of the Young Pretender, which, however, was abortive, he turned to the Netherlands, where he won his memorable victory over the British and their allies at Fontenoy. An un Seven years after, his 'Reveries on the Art of War' were published posthumously a military classic that forms the subject of this study. The reader may judge whether Carlyle's extraordinary criticism of it as "a strange military farrago, dictated, as I should think, under opium," has any justification. That Marshal de Saxe was very different in outlook to that type of traditional soldier who regards his profession as a sacred mystery, beyond the lay comprehension, is well shown by his Preface, in which he declares with regard to war as a science that " custom and prejudice, confirmed by ignorance, are its sole foundation and support. All other sciences are established upon fixed principles... while this alone remains destitute." Nearly two centuries have passed since he wrote this, and yet it is only since the Great War that our official Field Service Regulations have, for the first time, attempted to define what are the principles of war-and even then with the sketchiness and dubiousness that denote the ploughing of virgin soil. Writers on war |