Luigi Lablache? Surely a small corner may be found for the great man,
who flourishes in unabated vigour, in spite of accumulating years
and, as we fancy, annually increasing bulk. There is a geniality
and a joviality about this long-standing pillar of the opera, which
never fails of its effect upon his public. Probably no foreign actor
ever enlisted so uniformly and heartily the goodwill of an English
audience; and his popularity, although of course augmented by his
vocal merits, is by no means dependent on them. We lately somewhere
encountered a hypercritical comment upon his acting, in which he
was accused of condescending to buffoonery. Never was charge more
unfounded and absurd. One of the most remarkable characteristics of
Lablache is the extreme skill with which he draws the line between
humour and vulgarity; the perfect good taste distinguishing his
drolleries and occasional deviations from the letter of his part.
The practice of now and then introducing a French or English word or
sentence in an Italian opera, for the purpose of producing a comic
effect, is one that certainly should only be indulged with great
discretion; but in this, and in all other respects, we may be sure
that any dereliction from correct taste would promptly be detected
and reproved by so sensitive an audience as that of her Majesty's
Theatre. But from his first appearance in London, in 1829, to the
present day, an instance, we believe, was never known of a sally of
Lablache not obtaining at least a smile--far oftener a hearty laugh.
In him the rich Italian humour of the _buffo Napolitano_, the droll
of the San Carlino, still exists, happily tempered and modified
by the gentlemanly tact of the experienced comedian. Long may the
colossus of bassos preserve his voice and his good humour! His loss
would be sorely felt, and his place be hard to fill. Who, after him,
shall dare undertake Dulcamara and Pasquale? One thing certain is,
that, whenever fulness of years or pocket may detach him from the
stage he has so long adorned, to bask away his old age, with dignity
and ease, in some sunny Italian town, the public of London and
Paris, accustomed to his annual presence amongst them, will regret,
in Lablache, not less the accomplished actor than the amiable and
kind-hearted man.
We have not room for any particular review of the operas that have
been this year performed; and, for the same reason, we can give
but a few words to the chief novelty announced. We refer to the
forthcoming opera of the _Tempest_, whose composition devolved,
after the death of Mendelssohn, upon Halévy, the youngest, and
one of the most distinguished, of living French composers. Scribe
has supplied the poem. Upon his merits as a librettist it were
superfluous to expatiate; it were perhaps more necessary, did it
come within the scope of this paper, to correct the popular error
that, compared with the music, the libretto of an opera is of
little or no consequence. That kind of poetry has certainly been
much degraded by the incapacity of many who have presumptuously
undertaken it. Good writers of librettos are even more rare than good
composers. Since Metastasio's day, those who alone can fairly claim
a place in the first rank are Romani, Da Ponte, (the librettist of
Don Giovanni,) and Scribe, that able and indefatigable purveyor of
the stage, to whom English managers and playwrights owe so heavy a
debt of gratitude--a debt which they are not always very prompt to
acknowledge. Mendelssohn, when he agreed to compose an opera on the
_Tempest_, stipulated that the libretto should be confided to Scribe,
who willingly undertook it, and afterwards declared that he knew few
subjects so well adapted for music. This opinion, proceeding from
a man who, amongst the various classes of theatrical composition
in which he has succeeded, is considered to have been especially
successful in that of libretti--so much so, indeed, that it has been
asserted he owed more than one vote, at his election as member of the
French Academy, to their excellence alone--is of no slight weight.
Nor were it reasonable to doubt that the composer of the _Juive_ and
of _Guido et Ginevra_, who seems to have caught, especially in the
last-named opera, no feeble spark of the inspiration of his brother
Israelite, the great Meyerbeer, will have succeeded in clothing the
verse of Scribe in music correspondingly worthy.
We must conclude without even touching upon the ballet. It needs no
praise from us: the names alone of Carlotta Grisi, Marie Taglioni,
and Amalia Ferraris, are sufficient guarantee of its excellence.
Perhaps upon some future day we may be able to discuss its merits.
THE GREEN HAND.
A "SHORT" YARN.
PART X.
As soon as you near St Helena by a few miles, the trade-wind falls
light; and making the rock, as you do from the South Atlantic, a
good deal to leeward of the harbour, 'twould be pretty slow work
beating round to north-east, but for the breeze always coming off
the height, with the help of which one can coast easy enough along.
Captain Wallis said no more than to bid the first lieutenant make the
brig's number at her mast-head, while she still bore in direct upon
the breast of the land, as much out of soundings as the day before;
the smooth heavy swell seeming to float the island up in one huge
lump ahead of us, till you saw it rolling in to the very foot, with a
line of surf, as if it all rose sheer out of the bottom of the sea;
as grim and hard as a block of iron, too, and a good deal the same
colour. By noon, it hung fairly as it were over our mast-heads, the
brig looking by comparison as tiny and as ticklish as a craft made
of glass; she coasting away round, with yards braced first one way
then another, and opening point after point from three hundred to
two thousand feet high; while at times she would go stealing in with
a faint ripple at her bows, near enough to hear the deep sound of
the sea plunging slowly to the face of the rock, where the surf rose
white against it without a break. There wasn't so much as a weed to
be seen, the rocks getting redder and more coppery, sending out the
light like metal, till you'd have thought they tingled all over with
the heat. Then as you opened another bulge in the line, the sharp
sugar-loaf hills, far away up, with the ragged cliffs and crags, shot
over against the bare white sky in all sort of shapes; and after a
good long spell of the sea, there was little fancy needed to give one
the notion they were changing into these, as we passed ahead, to mock
you. There was one peak for all the world like the top of St Paul's,
and no end of church spires and steeples, all lengths and ways; then
big bells and trumpets, mixed with wild-beasts' heads, grinning
at each other across some split in the blue beyond, and soldier's
helmets--not to speak of one huge block, like a Nigger's face with a
cowl behind it, hanging far out over the water. Save for the colour
of it all, in fact, St Helena reminds one more of a tremendous
iceberg than an island, and not the less that it looks ready in some
parts to topple over and show a new face; while the sea working
round it, surging into the hollows below water-mark, and making
the air groan inside of them, keeps up a noise the like of which
you wouldn't wish to cruise alongside of every day. The strangest
thing about it, however, was that now and then, as you came abreast
of some deep gully running up inland, a sudden blast of wind would
rush out of it, sufficient to make the Podargus reel--with a savage
thundering roar, too, like the howl out of a lion's mouth; while you
looked far up a narrow, bare black glen, closing into a hubbub of red
rocks, or losing itself up a grey hill-side in a white thread of a
water-course; then the rough shell of the island shut in again, as
still as before, save the light breeze and the deep hum of the surf
along its foot. Curiously enough in a latitude like St Helena's, the
island seems, as it were, a perfect bag of air. What with the heat
of the rock, its hollow inside, the high peaks of it catching the
clouds, and the narrow outlets it has, 'tis always brewing wind, you
may say, to ventilate that part of the tropics--just as one may keep
up cold draughts through and through a wet heap of loose stones,
no matter how hot the weather is, as long as he pleases. As for a
landing-place, though, there wasn't one of the gullies that didn't
yawn over without falling to the sea; and not to mention the surf
underneath, where the dark swell came in unbroken from deep water
without a shoal to soften it, why, watching it from the brig's side,
I shouldn't have said a cat would scramble up or down the steep
slopes and the wreck of stones, from the water's edge to the jaws of
the easiest gully you saw.
Once or twice, standing further off, we caught sight of Diana's Peak
over the shoulder of a hill, with the light haze melting about it;
at last you noticed a large gun mounted against the sky on a lofty
peak, where it looked like a huge telescope; and on clearing another
headland, a beautiful frigate came in between us and the burst of
light to seaward, cruising to windward under easy sail. She bore up
and stood towards the brig-of-war, just as the line of wall was to be
seen winding round the middle of Sugar-Loaf Point, where the sentry's
bayonet glittered near his watch-box, and the soldiers' red coats
could be seen moving through the covered passage to the batteries.
Five minutes after, the Podargus swept round the breast of Rupert's
Hill into the bay, in sight of James Town and the ships lying off the
harbour; cluing up her sails and ready to drop anchor, as the frigate
hove to not far astern.
You can fancy land heaving in sight after thrice as many weeks as
you've been at sea, ladies; or the view of a ship to a man that's
been long laid up in bed ashore; or a gulp of fresh water in a sandy
desert,--but I question if any of them matches your first glimpse of
James Town from the roadstead, like a bright piece of fairy-work in
the mouth of the narrow brown valley, after seeing desolation enough
to make you wish for a clear horizon again. More especially this
time, when all the while one couldn't help bringing to mind one's
notion of the French Emperor, how, not long ago, the sight of the
French coast, or a strange frigate over the Channel swell, used to
make us think of him far ashore, with half the earth for his own,
and millions of soldiers. We reefers down in the cockpit would save
our grog to drink confusion to Napoleon, and in a rough night near a
lee-shore, it was look alive aloft, or choose betwixt cold brine and
the clutch of a gendarme hauling you to land. I do believe we looked
upon him as a sort of god, as Captain Wallis did in the Temple; every
ship or gun-boat we saw taken, or had a hand in the mauling of, why,
'twas for the sheer sake of the thing, and scarce by way of harm to
Boney; while nothing like danger, from breakers on the lee-bow to a
November gale, but had seemingly a taste of him. None of us any more
thought of bringing him to this, than we did of his marching into
London, or of a French frigate being able to rake our old Pandora in
a set-to on green water or blue, with us to handle her.
But _there_ was the neat little cluster of houses, white, yellow, and
green, spreading down close together in the bottom of the valley, and
out along the sea's edge; the rough brown cliffs sloping up on each
side, with the ladder-like way to the fort on the right, mounting,
as it were, out of the very street, to the flag-staff on the top,
and dotted with red-coats going up and down; a bright line of a pier
and a wall before the whole, the Government House dazzling through
a row of spreading trees, and a little square church tower to be
seen beyond. 'Twas more like a scene in a play, than aught else;
what with the suddenness of it all, the tiny look of it betwixt the
huge rocks, the greenness of the trees and bushes, and patches of
garden struggling up as far as they could go into the stone, and the
gay little toys of cottages, with scarce flat enough to stand upon:
save for the blue swell of the sea plunging lazily in through the
bit of a bay, and the streak of air behind, that let you in high
over the head of the hollow, up above one height and another, to a
flat-headed blue rise in the distance, where Longwood could be seen
from the main-cross-trees I had gone to as the sails were furled. The
sunlight, striking from both the red sides of the ravine, made the
little village of a place, trees and all, glitter in a lump together,
out of it, like no spot in the rest of the world; while elsewhere
there wasn't so much as a weed to be seen hanging from the rock, nor
the sign of another human habitation, saving the bare batteries on
each hand, with a few sheds and warehouses over the beach along the
landing-place. Once or twice the same sudden gust as before would
come slap down through the valley into the brig's bare rigging, hot
as the air was, with a howling kind of a sigh you took some time to
get accustomed to, lest there was a hurricane to follow: in fact
one didn't well know whether it was the wild look of it outside, or
the lovely spot in its grim mouth of a landing-place, but the whole
island gave you the notion of a thing you couldn't be long sure of,
without fancying it would give a shake some day or other again; or
else spout fire, as no doubt it had done before, if there wasn't more
fear of Napoleon getting back somehow to France, and wreaking bloody
vengeance on the kings that shut him up in St Helena.
There was apparently a busy scene ashore, however, both in the little
town, which has scarce more than a single street, and along the quay,
full of residents, as well as passengers from two Indiamen lying
in-shore of us, while the Government esplanade seemed to be crowded
with ladies, listening to the regimental band under the trees. The
Newcastle frigate, with Sir Dudley Aldcombe's flag hoisted at her
mizen, was at anchor out abreast at Ladder Hill; and our first
lieutenant had scarce pulled aboard of the Hebe, which was hove-to
off the brig's quarter, before I noticed the Admiral's barge lying
alongside the Hebe. Seeing Mr Aldridge on his way back shortly after,
I came down the rigging, more anxious than ever to have my own matter
settled; indeed, Captain Wallis no sooner caught sight of my face,
uncomfortable as I daresay it looked, than he told me he was going
to wait on the Admiral aboard the Hebe, and would take me with him
at once, if I chose. For my part, I needed nothing but the leave,
and in ten minutes time I found myself, no small mark of curiosity,
betwixt the waist and the quarterdeck of the Hebe, where the officers
eyed me with as little appearance of rudeness as they could help,
and I overhauled the spars and rigging aloft as coolly as I could,
waiting to be sent for below. The Hebe, in fact, was the very beauty
of a twenty-eight; taking the shine, and the wind, too, clean out of
everything even at Plymouth, where I had seen her once a year or two
before: our poor dear old Iris herself had scarce such a pattern of
a hull, falling in, as it did, from the round swell of her bilge, to
just under the plank-sheer, and spreading out again with her bright
black top-sides, till where the figurehead shot over the cut-water,
and out of her full pair of bows, like a swan's neck out of its
breast. As for the Iris, our boatswain himself one day privately
confessed to me, almost with tears in his eyes, that she tumbled home
a thought too much just in front of the fore-chains, and he'd tried
to get it softened off with dead planking and paint, but it wouldn't
do; everybody saw through them. The truth was, to feel this fine ship
under one, with her loose topsails hanging high against the gloom of
the red gully towards Longwood, and the gay little town peeping just
over her larboard bow, a mile away, it somehow or other cleared one's
mind of a load. I was thinking already how, if one had the command of
such a craft, to do something with her at sea--hang it! but surely
that old Judge couldn't be too proud to give him a fair hearing. By
Jove! thought I--had one only wild enough weather, off the Cape,
say--if I wouldn't undertake to bother even a seventy-four a whole
voyage through, till she struck her flag; in which case a fellow
might really venture to hold his head up and speak his mind, lovely
as Violet Hyde would be in Calcutta. But then, again, _there_ was St
Helena towering red and rough over the ships, with the grand French
Emperor hidden in it hard and fast, and all the work he used to give
us at an end!
Just at the moment, happening to catch sight of the American mate's
sallow black visage over the brig-of-war's hammock-cloths, peering
as he did from the cliffs to the lofty spars of the frigate, while
his Negro shipmates were to be made out nearer the bows--somehow
or other the whole affair of their being burnt out and picked up
started into my mind again, along with our late queer adventures in
the Indiaman. Not to mention Captain Wallis's story, it flashed upon
me all at once, for the first time, that the strange schooner was
after some scheme as regarded the island; and a man more likely to
try something uncommon than the Frenchman, I never had seen yet. The
truth was, but for my thoughts being otherwise taken up, I'd have
wondered at my own confounded stupidity in not fathoming the thing
sooner; whereas now, I'm not going to deny it, I half began actually
to wish him good success, or else a close miss of it, where either
way one couldn't well fail having a share in the squall. At any rate,
I saw it was cunningly enough gone about; this same burnt barque of
the Yankee's, I perceived in a moment, was part of the plot; though
as for meddling in it till I saw more, 'twas likely to spoil the
whole; let alone making an ass of one's-self in case of mistake. I
was eyeing the shipwrecked mate, indeed, when one of the lieutenants
told me politely the Admiral wanted to see me in the cabin below.
Not being much accustomed to admirals' society, as a little
white-haired fellow-reefer of mine once said at a tea-party ashore,
I came in at the door with rather an awkward bow, no doubt; for
Sir Dudley, who was sitting on the sofa with his cocked hat and
sword beside him, talking to Captain Wallis, turned his head at the
captain's word, as if he were trying to keep in a smile. A tall,
fine-looking man he was, and few seamen equal to him for handling
a large fleet, as I knew, though his manners were finished enough
to have made him easy in a king's court. As for the captain of the
Hebe, he was leaning out of an open stern-window, seemingly a young
man, but who he might be I didn't know at the moment. The Admiral
had only a question or two to put, before he looked back to Captain
Wallis again, remarking it was clear he had brought away the wrong
man. "I didn't think you were so dull in the Podargus," said he,
smiling, "as to let an Indiaman play off such a trick on you--eh,
Captain Wallis!" Captain Wallis glanced round the cabin, and then
sideways down at Sir Dudley's cocked hat, in a funny enough way, as
much as to say he took all the blame on himself; and it struck me
more than ever what a kind heart the man had in him--if you only set
aside his hatred to Buonaparte, which in fact was nothing else but
a twisted sort of proof of the same thing. "Pooh, pooh, Wallis,"
continued Sir Dudley, "we can't do anything in the matter; though,
if the service were better than it really is at present, I should
certainly incline to question a smart young fellow like this, that
has held His Majesty's commission, for idling in an Indiaman after
the lady passengers! I am afraid, sir," said he to me, "you've lost
your passage, though,--unless the captain of the Hebe will give you
his second berth here, to make amends." "You need not be afraid, Lord
Frederick!" added he, looking toward the captain of the frigate, and
raising his voice; "you do not know him, after all, I suppose!" The
captain drew in his head, saying he had been doubtful about one of
the pivots of the rudder, then turned full round and looked uneasily
at me, on which his face brightened immediately, and he said, "No,
Sir Dudley, I do not!" I was still in ignorance for a moment or so,
myself, who this titled young post-captain might be, though I had
certainly seen him before; till all at once I recollected him, with
a start as pleasant to me as his seemed to him at _not_ knowing me.
Both Westwood and I had been midshipmen together for a while in the
Orion, fifty-gun ship, where _he_ was second lieutenant, several
years before. As for me, I was too fond of a frigate to stay longer
in her than I could help; but I remembered my being a pest to the
second lieutenant, and Tom's being a favourite of his, so that he
staid behind me, and got master's mate as soon as he was 'passed.'
The Honourable Frederick Bury he was then, and the handsomest young
fellow in the squadron, as well as the best-natured aboard. I
don't believe he knew how to splice in a dead-eye, and any of the
masters'-mates could take charge of the ship better in a rough night,
I daresay; but for a gallant affair in the way of hard knocks, with
management to boot, there wasn't his match. He never was known to
fail when he took a thing in hand; lost fewer men, too, than any one
else did; and whenever there turned up anything ticklish for the
boats, it was always "Mr Bury will lead." "The honourable Bury," we
used to call him, and "Fighting Free-the-deck." Westwood was one of
his school, whereas _I_ had learnt from Jacobs in a merchantman's
forecastle; and many a time did we play off such tricks on the second
lieutenant as coming gravely aft to him during the watch, three or
four of us together, me carrying a bit of rope where a "turk's-head"
or a "mouse" was be worked, while I asked him innocently to show us
the way. Or else it was some dispute we contrived beforehand, as to
the best plan of sending up new topmasts at sea, or running out of
a "round" gale in the Indian Ocean, on which the men forward would
be all ready to break out laughing; and the second lieutenant, after
thinking a moment, would quietly pitch upon me to go aloft, and study
the point for two hours at the mast-head.