_Coleridge's Christabel and Byron's Lara_ (No. 17. p. 262.).--What
Christabel saw is plain enough. The lady was a being like Duessa, a
Spenser; a horrible-looking witch, who could, to a certain degree, put
on an appearance of beauty. The difference is, that this lady had both
forms at once; the one in her face, the other concealed. This is quite
plain from the very words of Coleridge.
The lifting her over the sill seems to be something like the same
superstition that we have in Scott's _Eve of St. John_:--
"But I had not had pow'r to come to thy bow'r,
If Though had'st not charm'd me so."
I have no doubt that Lara is the Corsair; and Kaled Gulnare, from the
Corsair: the least inspection is enough to show this. Ezzelin must also
be Seyd; but that does not answer quite so well. All that there is to
prepare it is, that Seyd is only left for dead, in a great hurry, and
therefore might recover; and that he drank wine, and therefore might be
of Christian extraction. In Lara he is described as dark; but his
appearance is rather confusedly related, as if he never appeared but
once, and yet Otho knows him, and he has a dwelling. The shriek is more
difficult. There could be no meeting, then, between Ezzelin and Lara,
because Ezzelin is surprised by meeting him at Otho's. Whether the
shriek may not be owing to a meeting between Kaled and Ezzelin, is in
not so clear. From the splendid description of her looking down upon
him, it is not proved that she there saw him first; and Ezzelin never
sees her at all there.
Nothing is more interesting than these mysteries left in narrative
fictions. The story of Gertude, in that first of romances, the _Promessi
Sposi_, is a very great instance; and the bad taste, of bringing her up
again to the subject of a story by another writer, is so extreme, that I
never could look into the book. That Mazoni has left the character, whom
he calls the _Innominato_, in mystery, is historical, and not of his own
contrivance.
I used to think that Scott had left the part of Clara, in _St. Ronan's
Well_, intentionally mysterious, as to a most important circumstance;
but we learn, from his _Life_, that he meant to have made that
circumstance a part of the story, but was prevented by the publisher. It
is natural that the altered novel, therefore, should retain some
impressions of it. I refer particularly to the latter part of the
communications between her and her brother. But the meeting between her
and Tyrell in the woods, and their conversation there, I now think,
forbid the reader to suspect any thing like what I speak of. In such
cases I do not myself wish to know too much about the matter. Sometimes
the author wishes you to have the pleasure of guessing, as I think, in
Lara; sometimes he means to be more mysterious; sometimes he does not
know himself. It would have been idle to have asked Johnson where Ajeet
went to.