And now, in pity to an afflicted parent, hear for a while his
offspring's Roscian capabilities. First of all, however, (and you know
how I rejoice in all things preliminary,) let me clear my road by
explanations: we must pioneer away a titular objection, "in seven
scenes," and an assumed merit, in the term "classical." I abhor
scene-shifters; at least, their province lies more among pantomimes,
farces, and comedies, than in the region of the solemn tragic muse; her
incidents should rather partake of the sculpture-like dignity of
_tableaux_. My unfashionable taste approves not of a serious story being
cut up into a vast number of separate and shuffled sections; and the
whistle and sliding panels detract still more from the completeness of
illusion: I incline as much as is possible to the Classic unities of
time, place, and circumstances, wishing, moreover, every act to be a
scene, and every scene an act; with a comfortable green curtain, that
cool resting-place for the haggard eye, to be the grass-like drop,
mildly alternating with splendid crime and miserable innocence: away
with those gaudy intermediates, and, still worse, some intruded ballet;
bring back Garrick's baize, and crush the dynasty of head-aches.
But onward: let me further extenuate the term, seven scenes; the
utterance seven "acts" would sound horrific, full of extremities of
weariness; but my meaning actually is none other than seven acts of one
scene each: for the number seven, there always have been decent reasons,
and ours may best appear as we proceed, less than a brief seven seeming
insufficient, and more, superfluous; again, so mystical a number has a
staid propriety, and a due double climax of rise and fall. Now, as to
our adjective "classical:" Why not, in heroic drama, have something
a-kin to the old Greek chorus, with its running comment upon motives and
moralities, somewhat as the mighty-master has set forth in his truly
patriotic '_Henry the Fifth?_'--However, taking other grounds, the
epithet is justified, both by the subject and the proposed unmodern
method of its treatment: but of all this enough, for, on second
thoughts, perhaps we may do without the chorus.
It is obvious that no historical play can strictly preserve the true
unity of time; cause and effect move slower in the actual machinery of
life, than the space of some three hours can allow for: we must
unavoidably clump them closer; and so long as a circumstance might as
well have happened at one time as at another, I consider that the poet
is justified in crowding prior events as near as he may please towards
the goal of their catastrophe. If then any slight inaccuracy as to dates
arrests your critical ken, believe that it is not ignorantly careless,
but learnedly needful. One other objection, and I have done. No man is
an utter inexcusable, irremediable villain; there is a spot of light,
however hidden, somewhere; and, notwithstanding the historian's picture,
it may charitably be doubted whether we have made due allowance for his
most reasonable prejudice even in Nero's case. Human nature has produced
many monsters; but, amongst a thousand crimes, there has proverbially
lingered in each some one seedling of a virtue; and when we consider the
corruption of manners in old Rome, the idolatrous flatteries hemming in
the prince, the universal lie that hid all things from his better
perceptions, we can fancy some slight extenuation for his mad career.
Not that it ever was my aim, in modern fashion, to excuse villany, or to
gild the brass brow of vice; and verily, I have not spared my odious
hero; nevertheless, in selecting so unamiable a subject, (or rather
emperor,) I wished not to conceal that even in the worst of men there is
a soil for hope and charity; and that if despotism has high
prerogatives, its wealth and state are desperate temptations, whose
dangers mightily predominate, and whose necessary influences, if quite
unbiased, tend to utter misery.
Now to introduce our _dramatis personae_, with their "cast,"--for better
effect--rather unreasonably presumed. _Nero_--(Macready, who would
impersonate him grandly, and who, moreover, whether complimented or not
by the likeness, wears a head the very counterpart of Nero's, as every
Numismatist will vouch,)--a naturally noble spirit, warped by sensuality
and pride into a very tyrant; liberal in gifts, yet selfish in passion;
not incapable of a higher sort of love, yet liable to sudden changes,
and at times tempestuously cruel. _Nattalis_--(say Vandenhoff,)--his
favourite and evil genius, originally a Persian slave, and still wearing
the Eastern costume: a sort of Iago, spiriting up the willing Nero to
all varieties of wickedness, getting him deified, and otherwise
mystifying the poor besotted prince with all kinds of pleasure and
glory, to subserve certain selfish ends of rapine, power, and
licentiousness, and to avenge, perhaps, the misfortunes of his own
country on the chief of her destroyers. _Marcus Manlius_--(who better
than Charles Kean?--supposing these artistic combinations not to be
quite impossible,)--a fine young soldier, of course loving the heroine,
captain of Nero's body-guard, chivalrous, honourable, noble, and
faithful to his bad master amid conflicting trials. _Publius
Dentatus_--(any _bould_ speaker; besides, it would be rather too much to
engage all the actors yet awhile;)--a worthy old Roman, father of the
heroine. _Galba_, the chief mover in the catastrophe, as also the opener
of its causes, an intriguing and fierce, but well-intentioned patriot,
who ultimately becomes the next emperor. With _Curtius_ a tribune,
senators, conspirators, soldiers, priests, flamens, &c. And so, after
the ungallant fashion of theatrical play-wrights, as to a class inferior
to the very &c. of masculines--(of less intention withal than one of
those &cs. of crabbed Littleton, like an old shoe fricasseed into
savourings of all things by its inimitable Coke,)--come we to the
women-kind. _Agrippina_, (one of the school of Siddons,) empress-mother,
a strong-minded, Lady-Macbeth sort of woman, and the only person in the
world who can awe her amiable son. _Lucia,_ (_you_ cannot be spared
here, clever Helen Faucit)--the heroine, secretly a Christian affianced
to Manlius; a character of martyr's daring and woman's love. _Rufa_, a
haggard old sibyl, with both private and public reasons for detesting
Nero and Nattalis: and all the fitting female attendants to conclude the
list.
Each scene, in which each act will be included, should be pictorially,
so to speak, a _tableau_ in the commencement, and a _tableau_ of
situation in the end. Let us draw up upon scene _the first_.
Back-ground, Rome burning; in front, ruins of fine Tuscan villa, still
smoking; and a terminal altar in the garden. Plebs. running to and fro,
full of conventional little speeches, with goods, parents, penates, and
other lumber, rescued from the flames; till a tribune, (hight Curtius,)
in a somewhat incendiary oration concerning poor men's calamities, and
against the powers that be, sends them to the capital with a procession
of flamines Diales and vestals, dirging solemnly a Roman hymn [some "_Ad
Capitolium, Ad Jovis solium_," and so forth] to good music. At the
end of the train come in Publius and Lucia, to whom from opposite
hurriedly walks Galba, full of talk of omens, direful doings, patriotism,
and old Rome's ruin. To these let there be added--to speak
mathematically--open-hearted Manlius; and let there follow certain
disceptatious converse about Nero, Manlius excusing him, extenuating his
vices by his temptations, giving military anecdotes of his earlier
virtues, and in fact striving to make the most of him, a very gentle
monster: Galba throwing in, sarcastically, blacker shadows. After
disputation, the father and lovers walk off, leaving Galba alone for a
moment's soliloquy; and, from behind the terminal altar, unseen Sibyl
hails him Caesar; he, astonished at the airy voice so coincident with his
own feelings, thinks it ideal, chides his babbling thoughts, and so
forth: then enter to him suddenly chance-met noble citizens, burnt out
of house and home, who declaim furiously against Nero. Sibyl, still
unseen from behind the altar, again hails Galba as future Caesar; who, no
longer doubting his ears, and all present taking the omen, they conspire
at the altar with drawn swords, and as the Sibyl suddenly
presides--_tableau_--and down drops the soft green baize. This first
act, you perceive, is stirring, introductory of many characters; and the
picture of the seven-hilled city, seen in a transparent blaze, might
give the followers of Stanfield a triumph.
_Second_: The senate scene, producing another monstrous crime of Nero's,
also inaccurately dated. In the full august assembly, Nero discovered
enthroned, not unmajestic in deportment, yet effeminately chapleted, and
holding a lyre: suppose him just returned from Elis, a pancratist, the
world's acknowledged champion. Nattalis, ever foremost in flatteries,
after praising the prince's exploits in Greece, avows that, like Paris
in Troy, and Alexander at Persepolis, Nero _had_ gloriously fired Rome;
he found it wood, and wished to leave it marble; (so, the catafalque at
the Invalides of the twice-buried Corsican;) in destroying, as well as
blessing, he had asserted his divinity; any after due allusions to
Phoenixes, and fire-kingships, and _coups-de-soliel_ falling from the
same Apollo so great upon the guitar, Nattalis moves that Nero should be
worshipped, and calls on the priest of Jupiter to set a good example.
None dare refuse, and the senate bend before him; whereupon enter, in
clerical procession, augurs, and diviners, men at arms with pole-axes,
and coronaled white bulls, paraded before sacrifice: all this pandering
to present love of splendour and picturesque effect. In the midst of
these classical preparations, enters, with a bevy of attendants, the
haughty queen-like Agrippina, whom Nero, having sent for to complete his
triumph, commands to bend too; but she stoutly refusing, and taking him
fiercely to task, objurgating likewise Rome's degenerate
gray-beards--great bustle--senate broken up hurriedly--and she, with a
"_feri ventrem_," dragged off to be killed by her son's order. Nero
alone with Nattalis by imperial command; his momentary compunction
nullified by the wily Iago, who turns off the subject smoothly to a new
object of desire: Publius was the only senator not in his place, and
Publius has a daughter, the fairest in Rome, Lucia--had not the emperor
noticed her among Agrippina's women? Nero, charmed with any scheme of
novelty that may change remorseful thoughts, is induced, nothing loth,
to attempt the subtle abduction of the heroine; a body-guard, headed as
always by Manlius, ready in the vestibule to escort him, and exit.
Nattalis, alone for a minute, betrays his own selfish schemes concerning
Lucia, who had refused him before, and alludes to his secret reasons for
urging on the maddened Nero to the worst excesses.
_Third scene_ (or part, or _act_, if it must be so), expounds, in
fitting contrast to the foregoing, the tender loves of Lucia and
Manlius; a gentle home-scene, a villa and its terraced gardens: also, as
Lucia is a Christian, we have, poetically, and not puritanically, an
insight into her scruples of conscience as to the heathenism of her
lover: and also into _his_ consistent nobility of character, not willing
to surrender the religion of his fathers unconvinced. To them rushes in
Publius, who has been warned by friend Galba of the near approach of
Nattalis and a guard, to seize Lucia for disreputable Nero: no possible
escape, and all urge Lucia to imitate Virginia, Lucretia, and others of
like Dian fame, by cowardly self-murder; she is high-principled, and
won't: then they--the father and lover--request leave to kill her;
conflicting passions and considerable stage effect; Lucia, who with calm
courage derides the dastard sacrifice, standing unharmed between those
loving thirsty swords: in a grand speech, she makes her quiet departure
a test of Manlius' love, and her ultimate deliverance to be a proof to
him that her God is the true God, the God who guards the innocent.
Manlius, struck with her martyr-like constancy, professes that if indeed
she is saved out of this great trouble, he will embrace her faith,
renounce his own, and so break down the of wealth and rank, are alike
thrown away upon Publius; at last, the prince promises; and when
Publius, after a burst of earnest eloquence, proclaims the new pleasure
to consist in _showing mercy_, Nero's utter wrath, his hurricane of
hate, revoking that hasty promise, and hurrying away old Publius to die
at the same stake with his daughter.
_Seventh_: the catastrophe scene lies in the Coliseum amphitheatre; (I
mean the older one, anterior to Vespasian's:) bloody games pictured
behind, and those "human torches" at fiery intervals. Nero, enthroned in
side front, surrounded by a brilliant court, amongst whom are some of
the conspirators: at other side Publius and Lucia, tied at one stake in
white robes, back to back, to die before Nero's eyes, Manlius and
soldiers guarding them: he, Manlius, having nobly resolved to test
miraculous assistance to the last, but now tremblingly believing the
chance of a Providence interfering, since Lucia's escape from Nero at
the golden house. Just as the emperor, after a sarcastic speech,
characteristically interlarded with courtier conversation, is commanding
the fagot to be lighted, and Lucia's constant faith has bade Manlius _do
it_--a rush of Nattalis with attendant conspirators and Rufa the Sibyl,
up to Nero; Nattalis strikes him, but the sword breaks short off on the
hidden armour; Nero's majestic rising for a moment, asserting himself
Caesar still, the inviolable majesty;--suddenly stopped by a centripetal
rush of the conspirators; who kill him, (after he has vainly attempted
in despair to kill himself,) and Galba sits on the throne, while Nero,
unpitied and unhelped, gasps out in the middle his dying speech.
Meanwhile, at the other side, Manlius has killed Nattalis for his
treachery, cut the bonds of Publius and Lucia, and all ends in moral
justice for the triumph of good, and the defeat of evil; Manlius and
Lucia, hand in hand, Publius with white head and upraised hands blessing
them, Nero, a mangled corpse, Nattalis in his dying agonies persecuted
by the vindictive Rufa, and Galba hailed as Caesar by the assembled
Romans. So, upon a magnificent _tableau_, slowly falls the lawny
curtain.
Patient reader, what think you of my long-winded tragedy? No quibbling
about Nero having really died in a drain, four years after the murder of
Aggrippina; no learned disquisitions, if you please, as to his innocence
of Rome's fire, a counterpart to our slander on the Papacy in the matter
of London's; spare me, I pray you, learned pundit, your suspicions about
Galba's too probable _alibi_ in Spain. Tell me rather this: do I falsify
history in any thing more important than mere accidental anachronisms
and anatopisms? do I make an untrue delineation of character, blackening
the good, or white-washing the wicked? Do I not, by introducing Nero's
three greatest crimes so near upon his assassination, merely accelerate
the interval between causes and effect? And is not tragic dignity
justified in varnishing, with other compost than the dregs of Rome, the
exit of the last true Caesar of the Augustan family? For all the rest,
good manager, provide me actors, and I am even now uncertain--such is my
weakness--whether this skeleton might not at some time be clad with
flesh and skin, and a decent Roman toga. I fear it will yet haunt me as
a '_Midsummer Night's Dream_,' destroying my quiet with involuntary
shreds and patches of long-metred blank; the notion is still vivacious,
albeit scotched: Alexandrine though the synopsis appear, it must not be
thrown on the highroad as a dead snake; nay, let me cherish it yet on my
hearth, and not hurl it away like a _bonum waviatum_; a little more
boiling up of Roman messes in my brain, and my tragedy might flow forth
spontaneously as lava. What if this book be, after all, a sort of
pilot-balloon, to show my huge Nassau the way the wind blows--a feeler
as to which and which may please? Whether or not this be so, I will
still confess on, emptying my brain of booklets, and, if by happy
possibility I can keep my secret, shall hear unsuspected, friend, _your_
verdict.
* * * * *
I must rather hope, than expect, that my next bit of possible authorship
is not like the last, a subject forestalled. Scribbling as I find myself
for very listlessness in a dull country-house, there's not a publisher's
index within thirty miles; so, for lack of evidence to the contrary, I
may legitimately, for at least a brief period of self-delusion, imagine
the intoxicating field my own. And yet so fertile, important,
interesting a subject, cannot have been quite overlooked by the corps of
professed literary labourer's: the very title-page would insure five
thousand readers (especially with a Brunswicker death's-head and
marrow-bones added underneath).