Quid quod praefatione praemunierim libellum, qua conor omnem offendiculi
ansam praecidere? [79] Neque quicquam addubito, quin ea candidis omnibus
faciat satis. Quid autem facias istis, qui vel ob ingenii pertinaciam
sibi satisfieri nolint, vel stupidiores sint, quam ut satisfactionem
intelligant? Nam quemadmodum Simonides dixit, Thessalos hebetiores esse,
quam ut possint a se decipi, ita quosdam videas stupidiores, quam ut
placari queant. Adhaec, non mirum est invenire quod calumnietur,
qui nihil aliud quaerit, nisi quod calumnietur. ERASMUS ad Dorpium,
Theologum.
In the rifacimento of THE FRIEND, I have inserted extracts from the
CONCIONES AD POPULUM, printed, though scarcely published, in the year
1795, in the very heat and height of my anti-ministerial enthusiasm:
these in proof that my principles of politics have sustained no
change.--In the present chapter, I have annexed to my Letters
from Germany, with particular reference to that, which contains a
disquisition on the modern drama, a critique on the Tragedy of BERTRAM,
written within the last twelve months: in proof, that I have been as
falsely charged with any fickleness in my principles of taste.--The
letter was written to a friend: and the apparent abruptness with which
it begins, is owing to the omission of the introductory sentences.
You remember, my dear Sir, that Mr. Whitbread, shortly before his death,
proposed to the assembled subscribers of Drury Lane Theatre, that the
concern should be farmed to some responsible individual under certain
conditions and limitations: and that his proposal was rejected,
not without indignation, as subversive of the main object, for the
attainment of which the enlightened and patriotic assemblage of
philodramatists had been induced to risk their subscriptions. Now this
object was avowed to be no less than the redemption of the British stage
not only from horses, dogs, elephants, and the like zoological rarities,
but also from the more pernicious barbarisms and Kotzebuisms in morals
and taste. Drury Lane was to be restored to its former classical renown;
Shakespeare, Jonson, and Otway, with the expurgated muses of Vanbrugh,
Congreve, and Wycherley, were to be reinaugurated in their rightful
dominion over British audiences; and the Herculean process was to
commence, by exterminating the speaking monsters imported from the banks
of the Danube, compared with which their mute relations, the emigrants
from Exeter ’Change, and Polito (late Pidcock’s) show-carts, were tame
and inoffensive. Could an heroic project, at once so refined and so
arduous, be consistently entrusted to, could its success be rationally
expected from, a mercenary manager, at whose critical quarantine the
lucri bonus odor would conciliate a bill of health to the plague in
person? No! As the work proposed, such must be the work-masters. Rank,
fortune, liberal education, and (their natural accompaniments, or
consequences) critical discernment, delicate tact, disinterestedness,
unsuspected morals, notorious patriotism, and tried Maecenasship, these
were the recommendations that influenced the votes of the proprietary
subscribers of Drury Lane Theatre, these the motives that occasioned the
election of its Supreme Committee of Management. This circumstance alone
would have excited a strong interest in the public mind, respecting the
first production of the Tragic Muse which had been announced under such
auspices, and had passed the ordeal of such judgments: and the tragedy,
on which you have requested my judgment, was the work on which the great
expectations, justified by so many causes, were doomed at length to
settle.
But before I enter on the examination of BERTRAM, or THE CASTLE OF ST.
ALDOBRAND, I shall interpose a few words, on the phrase German Drama,
which I hold to be altogether a misnomer. At the time of Lessing, the
German stage, such as it was, appears to have been a flat and servile
copy of the French. It was Lessing who first introduced the name and the
works of Shakespeare to the admiration of the Germans; and I should not
perhaps go too far, if I add, that it was Lessing who first proved to
all thinking men, even to Shakespeare’s own countrymen, the true nature
of his apparent irregularities. These, he demonstrated, were deviations
only from the accidents of the Greek tragedy; and from such accidents as
hung a heavy weight on the wings of the Greek poets, and narrowed
their flight within the limits of what we may call the heroic opera. He
proved, that, in all the essentials of art, no less than in the truth of
nature, the Plays of Shakespeare were incomparably more coincident
with the principles of Aristotle, than the productions of Corneille
and Racine, notwithstanding the boasted regularity of the latter. Under
these convictions were Lessing’s own dramatic works composed. Their
deficiency is in depth and imagination: their excellence is in the
construction of the plot; the good sense of the sentiments; the sobriety
of the morals; and the high polish of the diction and dialogue. In
short, his dramas are the very antipodes of all those which it has been
the fashion of late years at once to abuse and enjoy, under the name of
the German drama. Of this latter, Schiller’s ROBBERS was the earliest
specimen; the first fruits of his youth, (I had almost said of his
boyhood), and as such, the pledge, and promise of no ordinary genius.
Only as such, did the maturer judgment of the author tolerate the Play.
During his whole life he expressed himself concerning this production
with more than needful asperity, as a monster not less offensive to good
taste, than to sound morals; and, in his latter years, his indignation
at the unwonted popularity of the ROBBERS seduced him into the contrary
extremes, viz. a studied feebleness of interest, (as far as the interest
was to be derived from incidents and the excitement of curiosity);
a diction elaborately metrical; the affectation of rhymes; and the
pedantry of the chorus.
But to understand the true character of the ROBBERS, and of the
countless imitations which were its spawn, I must inform you, or at
least call to your recollection, that, about that time, and for some
years before it, three of the most popular books in the German language
were, the translations Of YOUNG’S NIGHT THOUGHTS, HERVEY’S MEDITATIONS,
and RICHARDSON’S CLARISSA HARLOW. Now we have only to combine the
bloated style and peculiar rhythm of Hervey, which is poetic only on
account of its utter unfitness for prose, and might as appropriately
be called prosaic, from its utter unfitness for poetry; we have only,
I repeat, to combine these Herveyisms with the strained thoughts, the
figurative metaphysics and solemn epigrams of Young on the one hand; and
with the loaded sensibility, the minute detail, the morbid consciousness
of every thought and feeling in the whole flux and reflux of the mind,
in short the self-involution and dreamlike continuity of Richardson on
the other hand; and then to add the horrific incidents, and mysterious
villains, (geniuses of supernatural intellect, if you will take the
authors’ words for it, but on a level with the meanest ruffians of
the condemned cells, if we are to judge by their actions and
contrivances)--to add the ruined castles, the dungeons, the trap-doors,
the skeletons, the flesh-and-blood ghosts, and the perpetual moonshine
of a modern author, (themselves the literary brood of the CASTLE OF
OTRANTO, the translations of which, with the imitations and improvements
aforesaid, were about that time beginning to make as much noise in
Germany as their originals were making in England),--and as the compound
of these ingredients duly mixed, you will recognize the so-called German
drama. The olla podrida thus cooked up, was denounced, by the best
critics in Germany, as the mere cramps of weakness, and orgasms of a
sickly imagination on the part of the author, and the lowest provocation
of torpid feeling on that of the readers. The old blunder, however,
concerning the irregularity and wildness of Shakespeare, in which the
German did but echo the French, who again were but the echoes of our own
critics, was still in vogue, and Shakespeare was quoted as authority for
the most anti-Shakespearean drama. We have indeed two poets who wrote as
one, near the age of Shakespeare, to whom, (as the worst characteristic
of their writings), the Coryphaeus of the present drama may challenge
the honour of being a poor relation, or impoverished descendant. For
if we would charitably consent to forget the comic humour, the wit, the
felicities of style, in other words, all the poetry, and nine-tenths of
all the genius of Beaumont and Fletcher, that which would remain becomes
a Kotzebue.
The so-called German drama, therefore, is English in its origin, English
in its materials, and English by re-adoption; and till we can prove that
Kotzebue, or any of the whole breed of Kotzebues, whether dramatists or
romantic writers, or writers of romantic dramas, were ever admitted
to any other shelf in the libraries of well-educated Germans than were
occupied by their originals, and apes’ apes in their mother country,
we should submit to carry our own brat on our own shoulders; or rather
consider it as a lack-grace returned from transportation with such
improvements only in growth and manners as young transported convicts
usually come home with.
I know nothing that contributes more to a clearer insight into the true
nature of any literary phaenomenon, than the comparison of it with some
elder production, the likeness of which is striking, yet only apparent,
while the difference is real. In the present case this opportunity is
furnished us, by the old Spanish play, entitled Atheista Fulminato,
formerly, and perhaps still, acted in the churches and monasteries of
Spain, and which, under various names (Don Juan, the Libertine,
etc.) has had its day of favour in every country throughout Europe. A
popularity so extensive, and of a work so grotesque and extravagant,
claims and merits philosophical attention and investigation. The first
point to be noticed is, that the play is throughout imaginative.
Nothing of it belongs to the real world, but the names of the places and
persons. The comic parts, equally with the tragic; the living, equally
with the defunct characters, are creatures of the brain; as little
amenable to the rules of ordinary probability, as the Satan Of PARADISE
LOST, or the Caliban of THE TEMPEST, and therefore to be understood
and judged of as impersonated abstractions. Rank, fortune, wit, talent,
acquired knowledge, and liberal accomplishments, with beauty of person,
vigorous health, and constitutional hardihood,--all these advantages,
elevated by the habits and sympathies of noble birth and national
character, are supposed to have combined in Don Juan, so as to give him
the means of carrying into all its practical consequences the doctrine
of a godless nature, as the sole ground and efficient cause not only of
all things, events, and appearances, but likewise of all our thoughts,
sensations, impulses and actions. Obedience to nature is the only
virtue: the gratification of the passions and appetites her only
dictate: each individual’s self-will the sole organ through which nature
utters her commands, and
“Self-contradiction is the only wrong!
For, by the laws of spirit, in the right
Is every individual character
That acts in strict consistence with itself.”
That speculative opinions, however impious and daring they may be, are
not always followed by correspondent conduct, is most true, as well as
that they can scarcely in any instance be systematically realized, on
account of their unsuitableness to human nature and to the institutions
of society. It can be hell, only where it is all hell: and a separate
world of devils is necessary for the existence of any one complete
devil. But on the other hand it is no less clear, nor, with the
biography of Carrier and his fellow atheists before us, can it be denied
without wilful blindness, that the (so called) system of nature (that
is, materialism, with the utter rejection of moral responsibility, of
a present Providence, and of both present and future retribution)
may influence the characters and actions of individuals, and even of
communities, to a degree that almost does away the distinction between
men and devils, and will make the page of the future historian resemble
the narration of a madman’s dreams. It is not the wickedness of Don
Juan, therefore, which constitutes the character an abstraction, and
removes it from the rules of probability; but the rapid succession of
the correspondent acts and incidents, his intellectual superiority,
and the splendid accumulation of his gifts and desirable qualities, as
co-existent with entire wickedness in one and the same person. But this
likewise is the very circumstance which gives to this strange play its
charm and universal interest. Don Juan is, from beginning to end, an
intelligible character: as much so as the Satan of Milton. The poet asks
only of the reader, what, as a poet, he is privileged to ask: namely,
that sort of negative faith in the existence of such a being, which we
willingly give to productions professedly ideal, and a disposition
to the same state of feeling, as that with which we contemplate the
idealized figures of the Apollo Belvidere, and the Farnese Hercules.
What the Hercules is to the eye in corporeal strength, Don Juan is
to the mind in strength of character. The ideal consists in the happy
balance of the generic with the individual. The former makes the
character representative and symbolical, therefore instructive; because,
mutatis mutandis, it is applicable to whole classes of men. The latter
gives it living interest; for nothing lives or is real, but as definite
and individual. To understand this completely, the reader need only
recollect the specific state of his feelings, when in looking at a
picture of the historic (more properly of the poetic or heroic) class,
he objects to a particular figure as being too much of a portrait;
and this interruption of his complacency he feels without the least
reference to, or the least acquaintance with, any person in real life
whom he might recognise in this figure. It is enough that such a figure
is not ideal: and therefore not ideal, because one of the two factors
or elements of the ideal is in excess. A similar and more powerful
objection he would feel towards a set of figures which were mere
abstractions, like those of Cipriani, and what have been called Greek
forms and faces, that is, outlines drawn according to a recipe. These
again are not ideal; because in these the other element is in excess.
“Forma formans per formam formatam translucens,” [80] is the definition
and perfection of ideal art.
This excellence is so happily achieved in the Don Juan, that it is
capable of interesting without poetry, nay, even without words, as in
our pantomime of that name. We see clearly how the character is formed;
and the very extravagance of the incidents, and the super-human
entireness of Don Juan’s agency, prevents the wickedness from shocking
our minds to any painful degree. We do not believe it enough for this
effect; no, not even with that kind of temporary and negative belief or
acquiescence which I have described above. Meantime the qualities of his
character are too desirable, too flattering to our pride and our wishes,
not to make up on this side as much additional faith as was lost on
the other. There is no danger (thinks the spectator or reader) of my
becoming such a monster of iniquity as Don Juan! I never shall be an
atheist! I shall never disallow all distinction between right and wrong!
I have not the least inclination to be so outrageous a drawcansir in my
love affairs! But to possess such a power of captivating and enchanting
the affections of the other sex!--to be capable of inspiring in a
charming and even a virtuous woman, a love so deep, and so entirely
personal to me!--that even my worst vices, (if I were vicious), even
my cruelty and perfidy, (if I were cruel and perfidious), could not
eradicate the passion!--to be so loved for my own self, that even with a
distinct knowledge of my character, she yet died to save me!--this, sir,
takes hold of two sides of our nature, the better and the worse. For the
heroic disinterestedness, to which love can transport a woman, can
not be contemplated without an honourable emotion of reverence towards
womanhood: and, on the other hand, it is among the miseries, and abides
in the dark ground-work of our nature, to crave an outward confirmation
of that something within us, which is our very self, that something,
not made up of our qualities and relations, but itself the supporter and
substantial basis of all these. Love me, and not my qualities, may be
a vicious and an insane wish, but it is not a wish wholly without a
meaning.
Without power, virtue would be insufficient and incapable of revealing
its being. It would resemble the magic transformation of Tasso’s heroine
into a tree, in which she could only groan and bleed. Hence power is
necessarily an object of our desire and of our admiration. But of all
power, that of the mind is, on every account, the grand desideratum of
human ambition. We shall be as Gods in knowledge, was and must have been
the first temptation: and the coexistence of great intellectual lordship
with guilt has never been adequately represented without exciting
the strongest interest, and for this reason, that in this bad and
heterogeneous co-ordination we can contemplate the intellect of man more
exclusively as a separate self-subsistence, than in its proper state
of subordination to his own conscience, or to the will of an infinitely
superior being.
This is the sacred charm of Shakespeare’s male characters in general.
They are all cast in the mould of Shakespeare’s own gigantic intellect;
and this is the open attraction of his Richard, Iago, Edmund, and others
in particular. But again; of all intellectual power, that of superiority
to the fear of the invisible world is the most dazzling. Its influence
is abundantly proved by the one circumstance, that it can bribe us into
a voluntary submission of our better knowledge, into suspension of all
our judgment derived from constant experience, and enable us to peruse
with the liveliest interest the wildest tales of ghosts, wizards,
genii, and secret talismans. On this propensity, so deeply rooted in our
nature, a specific dramatic probability may be raised by a true poet, if
the whole of his work be in harmony: a dramatic probability, sufficient
for dramatic pleasure, even when the component characters and incidents
border on impossibility. The poet does not require us to be awake and
believe; he solicits us only to yield ourselves to a dream; and this
too with our eyes open, and with our judgment perdue behind the curtain,
ready to awaken us at the first motion of our will: and meantime,
only, not to disbelieve. And in such a state of mind, who but must be
impressed with the cool intrepidity of Don john on the appearance of his
father’s ghost:
“GHOST.--Monster! behold these wounds!
“D. JOHN.--I do! They were well meant and well performed, I see.
“GHOST.------Repent, repent of all thy villanies.
My clamorous blood to heaven for vengeance cries,
Heaven will pour out his judgments on you all.
Hell gapes for you, for you each fiend doth call,
And hourly waits your unrepenting fall.
You with eternal horrors they’ll torment,
Except of all your crimes you suddenly repent. (Ghost sinks.)
“D. JOHN.--Farewell, thou art a foolish ghost. Repent, quoth he!
what could this mean? Our senses are all in a mist sure.
“D. ANTONIO.--(one of D. Juan’s reprobate companions.) They are not!
’Twas a ghost.
“D. LOPEZ.--(another reprobate.) I ne’er believed those foolish tales
before.
“D. JOHN.--Come! ’Tis no matter. Let it be what it will, it must be
natural.
“D. ANT.--And nature is unalterable in us too.
“D. JOHN.--’Tis true! The nature of a ghost can not change our’s.”
Who also can deny a portion of sublimity to the tremendous consistency
with which he stands out the last fearful trial, like a second
Prometheus?
“Chorus of Devils.
“STATUE-GHOST.--Will you not relent and feel remorse?
“D. JOHN.--Could’st thou bestow another heart on me I might. But
with this heart I have, I can not.
“D. LOPEZ.--These things are prodigious.
“D. ANTON.--I have a sort of grudging to relent, but something holds
me back.
“D. LOP.--If we could, ’tis now too late. I will not.
“D. ANT.--We defy thee!
“GHOST.--Perish ye impious wretches, go and find the punishments laid
up in store for you!
(Thunder and lightning. D. Lop. and D. Ant. are swallowed up.)
“GHOST To D. JOHN.--Behold their dreadful fates, and know that thy
last moment’s come!
“D. JOHN.--Think not to fright me, foolish ghost; I’ll break your
marble body in pieces and pull down your horse.
(Thunder and lightning--chorus of devils, etc.)
“D. JOHN.--These things I see with wonder, but no fear.
Were all the elements to be confounded,
And shuffled all into their former chaos;
Were seas of sulphur flaming round about me,
And all mankind roaring within those fires,
I could not fear, or feel the least remorse.
To the last instant I would dare thy power.
Here I stand firm, and all thy threats contemn.
Thy murderer (to the ghost of one whom he had murdered)
Stands here! Now do thy worst!”
(He is swallowed up in a cloud of fire.)
In fine the character of Don John consists in the union of every thing
desirable to human nature, as means, and which therefore by the well
known law of association becomes at length desirable on their own
account. On their own account, and, in their own dignity, they are here
displayed, as being employed to ends so unhuman, that in the effect,
they appear almost as means without an end. The ingredients too are
mixed in the happiest proportion, so as to uphold and relieve each
other--more especially in that constant interpoise of wit, gaiety,
and social generosity, which prevents the criminal, even in his most
atrocious moments, from sinking into the mere ruffian, as far at least,
as our imagination sits in judgment. Above all, the fine suffusion
through the whole, with the characteristic manners and feelings, of a
highly bred gentleman gives life to the drama. Thus having invited the
statue-ghost of the governor, whom he had murdered, to supper, which
invitation the marble ghost accepted by a nod of the head, Don John has
prepared a banquet.
“D. JOHN.--Some wine, sirrah! Here’s to Don Pedro’s ghost--he should
have been welcome.
“D. LOP.--The rascal is afraid of you after death.
(One knocks hard at the door.)
“D. JOHN.--(to the servant)--Rise and do your duty.
“SERV.--Oh the devil, the devil! (Marble ghost enters.)
“D. JOHN.--Ha! ’tis the ghost! Let’s rise and receive him! Come,
Governour, you are welcome, sit there; if we had thought you would
have come, we would have staid for you.
* * * * * *
Here, Governour, your health! Friends, put it about! Here’s
excellent meat, taste of this ragout. Come, I’ll help you, come
eat, and let old quarrels be forgotten. (The ghost threatens him
with vengeance.)
“D. JOHN.--We are too much confirmed--curse on this dry discourse.
Come, here’s to your mistress, you had one when you were living:
not forgetting your sweet sister. (devils enter.)
“D. JOHN.--Are these some of your retinue? Devils, say you? I’m
sorry I have no burnt brandy to treat ’em with, that’s drink fit
for devils,” etc.
Nor is the scene from which we quote interesting, in dramatic
probability alone; it is susceptible likewise of a sound moral; of a
moral that has more than common claims on the notice of a too numerous
class, who are ready to receive the qualities of gentlemanly courage,
and scrupulous honour, (in all the recognised laws of honour,) as the
substitutes of virtue, instead of its ornaments. This, indeed, is the
moral value of the play at large, and that which places it at a world’s
distance from the spirit of modern jacobinism. The latter introduces
to us clumsy copies of these showy instrumental qualities, in order to
reconcile us to vice and want of principle; while the Atheista Fulminato
presents an exquisite portraiture of the same qualities, in all their
gloss and glow, but presents them for the sole purpose of displaying
their hollowness, and in order to put us on our guard by demonstrating
their utter indifference to vice and virtue, whenever these and the like
accomplishments are contemplated for themselves alone.
Eighteen years ago I observed, that the whole secret of the modern
jacobinical drama, (which, and not the German, is its appropriate
designation,) and of all its popularity, consists in the confusion and
subversion of the natural order of things in their causes and effects:
namely, in the excitement of surprise by representing the qualities of
liberality, refined feeling, and a nice sense of honour (those things
rather which pass amongst us for such) in persons and in classes where
experience teaches us least to expect them; and by rewarding with all
the sympathies which are the due of virtue, those criminals whom law,
reason, and religion have excommunicated from our esteem.
This of itself would lead me back to BERTRAM, or the CASTLE OF ST.
ALDOBRAND; but, in my own mind, this tragedy was brought into connection
with THE LIBERTINE, (Shadwell’s adaptation of the Atheista Fulminato to
the English stage in the reign of Charles the Second,) by the fact, that
our modern drama is taken, in the substance of it, from the first scene
of the third act of THE LIBERTINE. But with what palpable superiority of
judgment in the original! Earth and hell, men and spirits are up in arms
against Don John; the two former acts of the play have not only prepared
us for the supernatural, but accustomed us to the prodigious. It is,
therefore, neither more nor less than we anticipate when the Captain
exclaims: “In all the dangers I have been, such horrors I never knew.
I am quite unmanned:” and when the Hermit says, that he had “beheld the
ocean in wildest rage, yet ne’er before saw a storm so dreadful, such
horrid flashes of lightning, and such claps of thunder, were never in
my remembrance.” And Don John’s burst of startling impiety is equally
intelligible in its motive, as dramatic in its effect.
But what is there to account for the prodigy of the tempest at Bertram’s
shipwreck? It is a mere supernatural effect, without even a hint of any
supernatural agency; a prodigy, without any circumstance mentioned that
is prodigious; and a miracle introduced without a ground, and ending
without a result. Every event and every scene of the play might have
taken place as well if Bertram and his vessel had been driven in by a
common hard gale, or from want of provisions. The first act would have
indeed lost its greatest and most sonorous picture; a scene for the sake
of a scene, without a word spoken; as such, therefore, (a rarity without
a precedent), we must take it, and be thankful! In the opinion of not a
few, it was, in every sense of the word, the best scene in the play.
I am quite certain it was the most innocent: and the steady, quiet
uprightness of the flame of the wax-candles, which the monks held
over the roaring billows amid the storm of wind and rain, was really
miraculous.
The Sicilian sea coast: a convent of monks: night: a most portentous,
unearthly storm: a vessel is wrecked contrary to all human expectation,
one man saves himself by his prodigious powers as a swimmer, aided by
the peculiarity of his destination--
“PRIOR.------All, all did perish
FIRST MONK.--Change, change those drenched weeds--
PRIOR.--I wist not of them--every soul did perish--
Enter third Monk hastily.
“THIRD MONK.--No, there was one did battle with the storm
With careless desperate force; full many times
His life was won and lost, as tho’ he recked not--
No hand did aid him, and he aided none--
Alone he breasted the broad wave, alone
That man was saved.”
Well! This man is led in by the monks, supposed dripping wet, and to
very natural inquiries he either remains silent, or gives most brief and
surly answers, and after three or four of these half-line courtesies,
“dashing off the monks” who had saved him, he exclaims in the true
sublimity of our modern misanthropic heroism--
“Off! ye are men--there’s poison in your touch.
But I must yield, for this” (what?) “hath left me strengthless.”
So end the three first scenes. In the next (the Castle of St.
Aldobrand,) we find the servants there equally frightened with this
unearthly storm, though wherein it differed from other violent storms we
are not told, except that Hugo informs us, page 9--
“PIET.--Hugo, well met. Does e’en thy age bear
Memory of so terrible a storm?
HUGO.--They have been frequent lately.
PIET.--They are ever so in Sicily.
HUGO.--So it is said. But storms when I was young
Would still pass o’er like Nature’s fitful fevers,
And rendered all more wholesome. Now their rage,
Sent thus unseasonable and profitless,
Speaks like the threats of heaven.”
A most perplexing theory of Sicilian storms is this of old Hugo! and
what is very remarkable, not apparently founded on any great familiarity
of his own with this troublesome article. For when Pietro asserts the
“ever more frequency” of tempests in Sicily, the old man professes to
know nothing more of the fact, but by hearsay. “So it is said.”--But why
he assumed this storm to be unseasonable, and on what he grounded
his prophecy, (for the storm is still in full fury), that it would be
profitless, and without the physical powers common to all other violent
sea-winds in purifying the atmosphere, we are left in the dark; as
well concerning the particular points in which he knew it, during its
continuance, to differ from those that he had been acquainted with in
his youth. We are at length introduced to the Lady Imogine, who,
we learn, had not rested “through” the night; not on account of the
tempest, for
“Long ere the storm arose, her restless gestures
Forbade all hope to see her blest with sleep.”
Sitting at a table, and looking at a portrait, she informs us--First,
that portrait-painters may make a portrait from memory,
“The limner’s art may trace the absent feature.”
For surely these words could never mean, that a painter may have a
person sit to him who afterwards may leave the room or perhaps the
country? Secondly, that a portrait-painter can enable a mourning lady
to possess a good likeness of her absent lover, but that the
portrait-painter cannot, and who shall--
“Restore the scenes in which they met and parted?”
The natural answer would have been--Why the scene-painter to be sure!
But this unreasonable lady requires in addition sundry things to be
painted that have neither lines nor colours--
“The thoughts, the recollections, sweet and bitter,
Or the Elysian dreams of lovers when they loved.”
Which last sentence must be supposed to mean; when they were present,
and making love to each other.--Then, if this portrait could speak, it
would “acquit the faith of womankind.” How? Had she remained constant?
No, she has been married to another man, whose wife she now is. How
then? Why, that, in spite of her marriage vow, she had continued to
yearn and crave for her former lover--
“This has her body, that her mind:
Which has the better bargain?”
The lover, however, was not contented with this precious arrangement, as
we shall soon find. The lady proceeds to inform us that during the many
years of their separation, there have happened in the different parts of
the world, a number of “such things;” even such, as in a course of
years always have, and till the Millennium, doubtless always will happen
somewhere or other. Yet this passage, both in language and in metre, is
perhaps amongst the best parts of the play. The lady’s love companion
and most esteemed attendant, Clotilda, now enters and explains this love
and esteem by proving herself a most passive and dispassionate listener,
as well as a brief and lucky querist, who asks by chance, questions that
we should have thought made for the very sake of the answers. In short,
she very much reminds us of those puppet-heroines, for whom the
showman contrives to dialogue without any skill in ventriloquism. This,
notwithstanding, is the best scene in the Play, and though crowded with
solecisms, corrupt diction, and offences against metre, would possess
merits sufficient to out-weigh them, if we could suspend the moral
sense during the perusal. It tells well and passionately the preliminary
circumstances, and thus overcomes the main difficulty of most first
acts, to wit, that of retrospective narration. It tells us of her having
been honourably addressed by a noble youth, of rank and fortune vastly
superior to her own: of their mutual love, heightened on her part
by gratitude; of his loss of his sovereign’s favour; his disgrace;
attainder; and flight; that he (thus degraded) sank into a vile ruffian,
the chieftain of a murderous banditti; and that from the habitual
indulgence of the most reprobate habits and ferocious passions, he had
become so changed, even in appearance, and features,
“That she who bore him had recoiled from him,
Nor known the alien visage of her child,
Yet still she (Imogine) lov’d him.”
She is compelled by the silent entreaties of a father, perishing with
“bitter shameful want on the cold earth,” to give her hand, with a heart
thus irrecoverably pre-engaged, to Lord Aldobrand, the enemy of her
lover, even to the very man who had baffled his ambitious schemes, and
was, at the present time, entrusted with the execution of the sentence
of death which had been passed on Bertram. Now, the proof of “woman’s
love,” so industriously held forth for the sympathy, if not for the
esteem of the audience, consists in this, that, though Bertram had
become a robber and a murderer by trade, a ruffian in manners, yea, with
form and features at which his own mother could not but “recoil,” yet
she (Lady Imogine) “the wife of a most noble, honoured Lord,” estimable
as a man, exemplary and affectionate as a husband, and the fond father
of her only child--that she, notwithstanding all this, striking her
heart, dares to say to it--
“But thou art Bertram’s still, and Bertram’s ever.”
A Monk now enters, and entreats in his Prior’s name for the wonted
hospitality, and “free noble usage” of the Castle of St. Aldobrand for
some wretched shipwrecked souls, and from this we learn, for the
first time, to our infinite surprise, that notwithstanding the
supernaturalness of the storm aforesaid, not only Bertram, but the whole
of his gang, had been saved, by what means we are left to conjecture,
and can only conclude that they had all the same desperate swimming
powers, and the same saving destiny as the hero, Bertram himself. So
ends the first act, and with it the tale of the events, both those with
which the tragedy begins, and those which had occurred previous to
the date of its commencement. The second displays Bertram in disturbed
sleep, which the Prior, who hangs over him, prefers calling a “starting
trance,” and with a strained voice, that would have awakened one of the
seven sleepers, observes to the audience--
“How the lip works! How the bare teeth do grind!
And beaded drops course [81] down his writhen brow!”
The dramatic effect of which passage we not only concede to the admirers
of this tragedy, but acknowledge the further advantages of preparing the
audience for the most surprising series of wry faces, proflated mouths,
and lunatic gestures that were ever “launched” on an audience to “sear
the sense.” [82]
“PRIOR.--I will awake him from this horrid trance. This is no
natural sleep! Ho, wake thee, stranger!”
This is rather a whimsical application of the verb reflex we must
confess, though we remember a similar transfer of the agent to the
patient in a manuscript tragedy, in which the Bertram of the piece,
prostrating a man with a single blow of his fist, exclaims--“Knock me
thee down, then ask thee if thou liv’st.” Well; the stranger obeys, and
whatever his sleep might have been, his waking was perfectly natural;
for lethargy itself could not withstand the scolding Stentorship of
Mr. Holland, the Prior. We next learn from the best authority, his own
confession, that the misanthropic hero, whose destiny was incompatible
with drowning, is Count Bertram, who not only reveals his past fortunes,
but avows with open atrocity, his Satanic hatred of Imogine’s lord, and
his frantick thirst of revenge; and so the raving character raves, and
the scolding character scolds--and what else? Does not the Prior act?
Does he not send for a posse of constables or thief-takers to handcuff
the villain, or take him either to Bedlam or Newgate? Nothing of the
kind; the author preserves the unity of character, and the scolding
Prior from first to last does nothing but scold, with the exception
indeed of the last scene of the last act, in which, with a most
surprising revolution, he whines, weeps, and kneels to the condemned
blaspheming assassin out of pure affection to the high-hearted man, the
sublimity of whose angel-sin rivals the star-bright apostate, (that
is, who was as proud as Lucifer, and as wicked as the Devil), and, “had
thrilled him,” (Prior Holland aforesaid), with wild admiration.
Accordingly in the very next scene, we have this tragic Macheath, with
his whole gang, in the Castle of St. Aldobrand, without any attempt
on the Prior’s part either to prevent him, or to put the mistress and
servants of the Castle on their guard against their new inmates; though
he (the Prior) knew, and confesses that he knew, that Bertram’s “fearful
mates” were assassins so habituated and naturalized to guilt, that--
“When their drenched hold forsook both gold and gear,
They griped their daggers with a murderer’s instinct;”
and though he also knew, that Bertram was the leader of a band whose
trade was blood. To the Castle however he goes, thus with the holy
Prior’s consent, if not with his assistance; and thither let us follow
him.
No sooner is our hero safely housed in the Castle of St. Aldobrand, than
he attracts the notice of the lady and her confidante, by his “wild and
terrible dark eyes,” “muffled form,” “fearful form,” [83] “darkly wild,”
“proudly stern,” and the like common-place indefinites, seasoned by
merely verbal antitheses, and at best, copied with very slight change,
from the Conrade of Southey’s JOAN OF ARC. The lady Imogine, who has
been, (as is the case, she tells us, with all soft and solemn spirits,)
worshipping the moon on a terrace or rampart within view of the Castle,
insists on having an interview with our hero, and this too tete-a-tete.
Would the reader learn why and wherefore the confidante is excluded, who
very properly remonstrates against such “conference, alone, at night,
with one who bears such fearful form;” the reason follows--“why,
therefore send him!” I say, follows, because the next line, “all things
of fear have lost their power over me,” is separated from the former
by a break or pause, and besides that it is a very poor answer to the
danger, is no answer at all to the gross indelicacy of this wilful
exposure. We must therefore regard it as a mere after-thought, that a
little softens the rudeness, but adds nothing to the weight, of that
exquisite woman’s reason aforesaid. And so exit Clotilda and enter
Bertram, who “stands without looking at her,” that is, with his lower
limbs forked, his arms akimbo, his side to the lady’s front, the whole
figure resembling an inverted Y. He is soon however roused from the
state surly to the state frantick, and then follow raving, yelling,
cursing, she fainting, he relenting, in runs Imogine’s child, squeaks
“mother!” He snatches it up, and with a “God bless thee, child! Bertram
has kissed thy child,”--the curtain drops. The third act is short, and
short be our account of it. It introduces Lord St. Aldobrand on his road
homeward, and next Imogine in the convent, confessing the foulness of
her heart to the Prior, who first indulges his old humour with a fit
of senseless scolding, then leaves her alone with her ruffian paramour,
with whom she makes at once an infamous appointment, and the curtain
drops, that it may be carried into act and consummation.
I want words to describe the mingled horror and disgust with which I
witnessed the opening of the fourth act, considering it as a melancholy
proof of the depravation of the public mind. The shocking spirit of
jacobinism seemed no longer confined to politics. The familiarity with
atrocious events and characters appeared to have poisoned the taste,
even where it had not directly disorganized the moral principles, and
left the feelings callous to all the mild appeals, and craving alone for
the grossest and most outrageous stimulants. The very fact then present
to our senses, that a British audience could remain passive under such
an insult to common decency, nay, receive with a thunder of applause, a
human being supposed to have come reeking from the consummation of this
complex foulness and baseness, these and the like reflections so pressed
as with the weight of lead upon my heart, that actor, author, and
tragedy would have been forgotten, had it not been for a plain elderly
man sitting beside me, who, with a very serious face, that at once
expressed surprise and aversion, touched my elbow, and, pointing to
the actor, said to me in a half-whisper--“Do you see that little fellow
there? he has just been committing adultery!” Somewhat relieved by the
laugh which this droll address occasioned, I forced back my attention
to the stage sufficiently to learn, that Bertram is recovered from a
transient fit of remorse by the information, that St. Aldobrand was
commissioned (to do, what every honest man must have done without
commission, if he did his duty) to seize him and deliver him to the
just vengeance of the law; an information which, (as he had long known
himself to be an attainted traitor and proclaimed outlaw, and not only
a trader in blood himself, but notoriously the Captain of a gang of
thieves, pirates, and assassins), assuredly could not have been new to
him. It is this, however, which alone and instantly restores him to
his accustomed state of raving, blasphemy, and nonsense. Next follows
Imogine’s constrained interview with her injured husband, and his sudden
departure again, all in love and kindness, in order to attend the feast
of St. Anselm at the convent. This was, it must be owned, a very strange
engagement for so tender a husband to make within a few minutes after so
long an absence. But first his lady has told him that she has “a vow
on her,” and wishes “that black perdition may gulf her perjured
soul,”--(Note: she is lying at the very time)--if she ascends his bed,
till her penance is accomplished. How, therefore, is the poor husband to
amuse himself in this interval of her penance? But do not be distressed,
reader, on account of the St. Aldobrand’s absence! As the author has
contrived to send him out of the house, when a husband would be in his,
and the lover’s way, so he will doubtless not be at a loss to bring him
back again as soon as he is wanted. Well! the husband gone in on the one
side, out pops the lover from the other, and for the fiendish purpose of
harrowing up the soul of his wretched accomplice in guilt, by announcing
to her, with most brutal and blasphemous execrations, his fixed and
deliberate resolve to assassinate her husband; all this too is for no
discoverable purpose on the part of the author, but that of introducing
a series of super-tragic starts, pauses, screams, struggling,
dagger-throwing, falling on the ground, starting up again wildly,
swearing, outcries for help, falling again on the ground, rising again,
faintly tottering towards the door, and, to end the scene, a most
convenient fainting fit of our lady’s, just in time to give Bertram an
opportunity of seeking the object of his hatred, before she alarms the
house, which indeed she has had full time to have done before, but that
the author rather chose she should amuse herself and the audience by the
above-described ravings and startings. She recovers slowly, and to her
enter, Clotilda, the confidante and mother confessor; then commences,
what in theatrical language is called the madness, but which the author
more accurately entitles, delirium, it appearing indeed a sort of
intermittent fever with fits of lightheadedness off and on, whenever
occasion and stage effect happen to call for it. A convenient return
of the storm, (we told the reader before-hand how it would be), had
changed--
“The rivulet, that bathed the convent walls,
Into a foaming flood: upon its brink
The Lord and his small train do stand appalled.
With torch and bell from their high battlements
The monks do summon to the pass in vain;
He must return to-night.”
Talk of the Devil, and his horns appear, says the proverb and sure
enough, within ten lines of the exit of the messenger, sent to stop him,
the arrival of Lord St. Aldobrand is announced. Bertram’s ruffian band
now enter, and range themselves across the stage, giving fresh cause for
Imogine’s screams and madness. St. Aldobrand, having received his mortal
wound behind the scenes, totters in to welter in his blood, and to die
at the feet of this double-damned adultress.
Of her, as far as she is concerned in this fourth act, we have two
additional points to notice: first, the low cunning and Jesuitical trick
with which she deludes her husband into words of forgiveness, which he
himself does not understand; and secondly, that everywhere she is made
the object of interest and sympathy, and it is not the author’s fault,
if, at any moment, she excites feelings less gentle, than those we are
accustomed to associate with the self-accusations of a sincere religious
penitent. And did a British audience endure all this?--They received
it with plaudits, which, but for the rivalry of the carts and hackney
coaches, might have disturbed the evening-prayers of the scanty week
day congregation at St. Paul’s cathedral.
Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.
Of the fifth act, the only thing noticeable, (for rant and nonsense,
though abundant as ever, have long before the last act become things of
course,) is the profane representation of the high altar in a chapel,
with all the vessels and other preparations for the holy sacrament. A
hymn is actually sung on the stage by the chorister boys! For the
rest, Imogine, who now and then talks deliriously, but who is always
light-headed as far as her gown and hair can make her so, wanders about
in dark woods with cavern-rocks and precipices in the back-scene; and a
number of mute dramatis personae move in and out continually, for
whose presence, there is always at least this reason, that they afford
something to be seen, by that very large part of a Drury Lane audience
who have small chance of hearing a word. She had, it appears, taken her
child with her, but what becomes of the child, whether she murdered
it or not, nobody can tell, nobody can learn; it was a riddle at the
representation, and after a most attentive perusal of the Play, a riddle
it remains.
“No more I know, I wish I did,
And I would tell it all to you;
For what became of this poor child
There’s none that ever knew.”
Our whole information [84] is derived from the following words--
“PRIOR.--Where is thy child?
CLOTIL.--(Pointing to the cavern into which she has looked)
Oh he lies cold within his cavern-tomb!
Why dost thou urge her with the horrid theme?
PRIOR.--(who will not, the reader may observe, be disappointed of
his dose of scolding)
It was to make (query wake) one living cord o’ th’ heart,
And I will try, tho’ my own breaks at it.
Where is thy child?
IMOG.--(with a frantic laugh) The forest fiend hath snatched him--
He (who? the fiend or the child?) rides the night-mare thro’ the
wizard woods.”
Now these two lines consist in a senseless plagiarism from the
counterfeited madness of Edgar in Lear, who, in imitation of the
gypsy incantations, puns on the old word mair, a hag; and the no less
senseless adoption of Dryden’s forest fiend, and the wisard stream by
which Milton, in his Lycidas, so finely characterizes the spreading
Deva, fabulosus amnis. Observe too these images stand unique in the
speeches of Imogine, without the slightest resemblance to anything she
says before or after. But we are weary. The characters in this act
frisk about, here, there, and every where, as teasingly as the Jack
o’ Lantern-lights which mischievous boys, from across a narrow street,
throw with a looking-glass on the faces of their opposite neighbours.
Bertram disarmed, outheroding Charles de Moor in the Robbers, befaces
the collected knights of St. Anselm, (all in complete armour) and so, by
pure dint of black looks, he outdares them into passive poltroons. The
sudden revolution in the Prior’s manners we have before noticed, and
it is indeed so outre, that a number of the audience imagined a great
secret was to come out, viz.: that the Prior was one of the many
instances of a youthful sinner metamorphosed into an old scold, and that
this Bertram would appear at last to be his son. Imogine re-appears at
the convent, and dies of her own accord. Bertram stabs himself, and dies
by her side, and that the play may conclude as it began, to wit, in
a superfetation of blasphemy upon nonsense, because he had snatched
a sword from a despicable coward, who retreats in terror when it is
pointed towards him in sport; this felo de se, and thief-captain--this
loathsome and leprous confluence of robbery, adultery, murder, and
cowardly assassination,--this monster, whose best deed is, the having
saved his betters from the degradation of hanging him, by turning Jack
Ketch to himself; first recommends the charitable Monks and holy Prior
to pray for his soul, and then has the folly and impudence to exclaim--
“I die no felon’s death,
A warriour’s weapon freed a warriour’s soul!”