There is, for instance, that of "The Two Travellers," which is
profoundly moving in conception, although by no means as well written as
some others. In this, one of the two, fearfully frost-bitten, saves his
life out of the snow at the cost of all that was comely in his body;
just as, long before, the other, who has now quietly resigned himself to
death, had violently freed himself from Love at the cost of all that was
finest and fairest in his character. Very graceful and sweet is the
fable (if so it should be called) in which the author sings the praises
of that "kindly perspective," which lets a wheat-stalk near the eye
cover twenty leagues of distant country, and makes the humble circle
about a man's hearth more to him than all the possibilities of the
external world. The companion fable to this is also excellent. It tells
us of a man who had, all his life through, entertained a passion for
certain blue hills on the far horizon, and had promised himself to
travel thither ere he died, and become familiar with these distant
friends. At last, in some political trouble, he is banished to the very
place of his dreams. He arrives there overnight, and, when he rises and
goes forth in the morning, there sure enough are the blue hills, only
now they have changed places with him, and smile across to him, distant
as ever, from the old home whence he has come. Such a story might have
been very cynically treated; but it is not so done, the whole tone is
kindly and consolatory, and the disenchanted man submissively takes the
lesson, and understands that things far away are to be loved for their
own sake, and that the unattainable is not truly unattainable, when we
can make the beauty of it our own. Indeed, throughout all these two
volumes, though there is much practical scepticism, and much irony on
abstract questions, this kindly and consolatory spirit is never absent.
There is much that is cheerful and, after a sedate, fireside fashion,
hopeful. No one will be discouraged by reading the book; but the ground
of all this hopefulness and cheerfulness remains to the end somewhat
vague. It does not seem to arise from any practical belief in the future
either of the individual or the race, but rather from the profound
personal contentment of the writer. This is, I suppose, all we must look
for in the case. It is as much as we can expect, if the fabulist shall
prove a shrewd and cheerful fellow-wayfarer, one with whom the world
does not seem to have gone much amiss, but who has yet laughingly
learned something of its evil. It will depend much, of course, upon our
own character and circumstances, whether the encounter will be agreeable
and bracing to the spirits, or offend us as an ill-timed mockery. But
where, as here, there is a little tincture of bitterness along with the
good-nature, where it is plainly not the humour of a man cheerfully
ignorant, but of one who looks on, tolerant and superior and smilingly
attentive, upon the good and bad of our existence, it will go hardly if
we do not catch some reflection of the same spirit to help us on our
way. There is here no impertinent and lying proclamation of peace--none
of the cheap optimism of the well-to-do; what we find here is a view of
life that would be even grievous, were it not enlivened with this
abiding cheerfulness, and ever and anon redeemed by a stroke of pathos.
It is natural enough, I suppose, that we should find wanting in this
book some of the intenser qualities of the author's work; and their
absence is made up for by much happy description after a quieter
fashion. The burst of jubilation over the departure of the snow, which
forms the prelude to "The Thistle," is full of spirit and of pleasant
images. The speech of the forest in "Sans Souci" is inspired by a
beautiful sentiment for nature of the modern sort, and pleases us more,
I think, as poetry should please us, than anything in "Chronicles and
Characters." There are some admirable felicities of expression here and
there; as that of the hill, whose summit
"Did print
The azure air with pines."
Moreover, I do not recollect in the author's former work any symptom of
that sympathetic treatment of still life, which is noticeable now and
again in the fables; and perhaps most noticeably, when he sketches the
burned letters as they hover along the gusty flue, "Thin, sable veils,
wherein a restless spark Yet trembled." But the description is at its
best when the subjects are unpleasant, or even grisly. There are a few
capital lines in this key on the last spasm of the battle before alluded
to. Surely nothing could be better, in its own way, than the fish in
"The Last Cruise of the Arrogant," "the shadowy, side-faced, silent
things," that come butting and staring with lidless eyes at the sunken
steam-engine. And although, in yet another, we are told, pleasantly
enough, how the water went down into the valleys, where it set itself
gaily to saw wood, and on into the plains, where it would soberly carry
grain to town; yet the real strength of the fable is when it deals with
the shut pool in which certain unfortunate raindrops are imprisoned
among slugs and snails, and in the company of an old toad. The sodden
contentment of the fallen acorn is strangely significant; and it is
astonishing how unpleasantly we are startled by the appearance of her
horrible lover, the maggot.
And now for a last word, about the style. This is not easy to criticise.
It is impossible to deny to it rapidity, spirit, and a full sound; the
lines are never lame, and the sense is carried forward with an
uninterrupted, impetuous rush. But it is not equal. After passages of
really admirable versification, the author falls back upon a sort of
loose, cavalry manner, not unlike the style of some of Mr. Browning's
minor pieces, and almost inseparable from wordiness, and an easy
acceptation of somewhat cheap finish. There is nothing here of that
compression which is the note of a really sovereign style. It is unfair,
perhaps, to set a not remarkable passage from Lord Lytton side by side
with one of the signal masterpieces of another, and a very perfect poet;
and yet it is interesting, when we see how the portraiture of a dog,
detailed through thirty odd lines, is frittered down and finally almost
lost in the mere laxity of the style, to compare it with the clear,
simple, vigorous delineation that Burns, in four couplets, has given us
of the ploughman's collie. It is interesting, at first, and then it
becomes a little irritating; for when we think of other passages so much
more finished and adroit, we cannot help feeling, that with a little
more ardour after perfection of form, criticism would have found nothing
left for her to censure. A similar mark of precipitate work is the
number of adjectives tumultuously heaped together, sometimes to help out
the sense, and sometimes (as one cannot but suspect) to help out the
sound of the verses. I do not believe, for instance, that Lord Lytton
himself would defend the lines in which we are told how Laocoon
"Revealed to _Roman_ crowds, now _Christian_ grown, That _Pagan_ anguish
which, in _Parian_ stone, the _Rhodian_ artist," and so on. It is not
only that this is bad in itself; but that it is unworthy of the company
in which it is found; that such verses should not have appeared with the
name of a good versifier like Lord Lytton. We must take exception, also,
in conclusion, to the excess of alliteration. Alliteration is so liable
to be abused that we can scarcely be too sparing of it; and yet it is a
trick that seems to grow upon the author with years. It is a pity to see
fine verses, such as some in "Demos," absolutely spoiled by the
recurrence of one wearisome consonant.
II
SALVINI'S MACBETH
Salvini closed his short visit to Edinburgh by a performance of
_Macbeth_. It was, perhaps, from a sentiment of local colour that he
chose to play the Scottish usurper for the first time before Scotsmen;
and the audience were not insensible of the privilege. Few things,
indeed, can move a stronger interest than to see a great creation taking
shape for the first time. If it is not purely artistic, the sentiment is
surely human. And the thought that you are before all the world, and
have the start of so many others as eager as yourself, at least keeps
you in a more unbearable suspense before the curtain rises, if it does
not enhance the delight with which you follow the performance and see
the actor "bend up each corporal agent" to realise a masterpiece of a
few hours' duration. With a player so variable as Salvini, who trusts
to the feelings of the moment for so much detail, and who, night after
night, does the same thing differently but always well, it can never be
safe to pass judgment after a single hearing. And this is more
particularly true of last week's _Macbeth_; for the whole third act was
marred by a grievously humorous misadventure. Several minutes too soon
the ghost of Banquo joined the party, and after having sat helpless a
while at a table, was ignominiously withdrawn. Twice was this ghostly
Jack-in-the-box obtruded on the stage before his time; twice removed
again; and yet he showed so little hurry when he was really wanted,
that, after an awkward pause, Macbeth had to begin his apostrophe to
empty air. The arrival of the belated spectre in the middle, with a jerk
that made him nod all over, was the last accident in the chapter, and
worthily topped the whole. It may be imagined how lamely matters went
throughout these cross purposes.
In spite of this, and some other hitches, Salvini's Macbeth had an
emphatic success. The creation is worthy of a place beside the same
artist's Othello and Hamlet. It is the simplest and most unsympathetic
of the three; but the absence of the finer lineaments of Hamlet is
redeemed by gusto, breadth, and a headlong unity. Salvini sees nothing
great in Macbeth beyond the royalty of muscle, and that courage which
comes of strong and copious circulation. The moral smallness of the man
is insisted on from the first, in the shudder of uncontrollable jealousy
with which he sees Duncan embracing Banquo. He may have some northern
poetry of speech, but he has not much logical understanding. In his
dealings with the supernatural powers he is like a savage with his
fetich, trusting them beyond bounds while all goes well, and whenever he
is crossed, casting his belief aside and calling "fate into the list."
For his wife, he is little more than an agent, a frame of bone and sinew
for her fiery spirit to command. The nature of his feeling towards her
is rendered with a most precise and delicate touch. He always yields to
the woman's fascination; and yet his caresses (and we know how much
meaning Salvini can give to a caress) are singularly hard and unloving.
Sometimes he lays his hand on her as he might take hold of any one who
happened to be nearest to him at a moment of excitement. Love has fallen
out of this marriage by the way, and left a curious friendship. Only
once--at the very moment when she is showing herself so little a woman
and so much a high-spirited man--only once is he very deeply stirred
towards her; and that finds expression in the strange and horrible
transport of admiration, doubly strange and horrible on Salvini's
lips--"Bring forth men-children only!"
The murder scene, as was to be expected, pleased the audience best.
Macbeth's voice, in the talk with his wife, was a thing not to be
forgotten; and when he spoke of his hangman's hands he seemed to have
blood in his utterance. Never for a moment, even in the very article of
the murder, does he possess his own soul. He is a man on wires. From
first to last it is an exhibition of hideous cowardice. For, after all,
it is not here, but in broad daylight, with the exhilaration of
conflict, where he can assure himself at every blow he has the longest
sword and the heaviest hand, that this man's physical bravery can keep
him up; he is an unwieldy ship, and needs plenty of way on before he
will steer.
In the banquet scene, while the first murderer gives account of what he
has done, there comes a flash of truculent joy at the "twenty trenched
gashes" on Banquo's head. Thus Macbeth makes welcome to his imagination
those very details of physical horror which are so soon to turn sour in
him. As he runs out to embrace these cruel circumstances, as he seeks to
realise to his mind's eye the reassuring spectacle of his dead enemy, he
is dressing out the phantom to terrify himself; and his imagination,
playing the part of justice, is to "commend to his own lips the
ingredients of his poisoned chalice." With the recollection of Hamlet
and his father's spirit still fresh upon him, and the holy awe with
which that good man encountered things not dreamt of in his philosophy,
it was not possible to avoid looking for resemblances between the two
apparitions and the two men haunted. But there are none to be found.
Macbeth has a purely physical dislike for Banquo's spirit and the
"twenty trenched gashes." He is afraid of he knows not what. He is
abject, and again blustering. In the end he so far forgets himself, his
terror, and the nature of what is before him, that he rushes upon it as
he would upon a man. When his wife tells him he needs repose, there is
something really childish in the way he looks about the room, and,
seeing nothing, with an expression of almost sensual relief, plucks up
heart enough to go to bed. And what is the upshot of the visitation? It
is written in Shakespeare, but should be read with the commentary of
Salvini's voice and expression:--"_O! siam nell' opra ancor
fanciulli_,"--"We are yet but young in deed." Circle below circle. He is
looking with horrible satisfaction into the mouth of hell. There may
still be a prick to-day; but to-morrow conscience will be dead, and he
may move untroubled in this element of blood.
In the fifth act we see this lowest circle reached; and it is Salvini's
finest moment throughout the play. From the first he was admirably made
up, and looked Macbeth to the full as perfectly as ever he looked
Othello. From the first moment he steps upon the stage you can see this
character is a creation to the fullest meaning of the phrase; for the
man before you is a type you know well already. He arrives with Banquo
on the heath, fair and red-bearded, sparing of gesture, full of pride
and the sense of animal wellbeing, and satisfied after the battle like a
beast who has eaten his fill. But in the fifth act there is a change.
This is still the big, burly, fleshly, handsome-looking Thane; here is
still the same face which in the earlier acts could be superficially
good-humoured and sometimes royally courteous. But now the atmosphere
of blood, which pervades the whole tragedy, has entered into the man and
subdued him to its own nature; and an indescribable degradation, a
slackness and puffiness, has overtaken his features. He has breathed the
air of carnage, and supped full of horrors. Lady Macbeth complains of
the smell of blood on her hand: Macbeth makes no complaint--he has
ceased to notice it now; but the same smell is in his nostrils. A
contained fury and disgust possesses him. He taunts the messenger and
the doctor as people would taunt their mortal enemies. And, indeed, as
he knows right well, every one is his enemy now, except his wife. About
her he questions the doctor with something like a last human anxiety;
and, in tones of grisly mystery, asks him if he can "minister to a mind
diseased." When the news of her death is brought him, he is staggered
and falls into a seat; but somehow it is not anything we can call grief
that he displays. There had been two of them against God and man; and
now, when there is only one, it makes perhaps less difference than he
had expected. And so her death is not only an affliction, but one more
disillusion; and he redoubles in bitterness. The speech that follows,
given with tragic cynicism in every word, is a dirge, not so much for
her as for himself. From that time forth there is nothing human left in
him, only "the fiend of Scotland," Macduff's "hell-hound," whom, with a
stern glee, we see baited like a bear and hunted down like a wolf. He is
inspired and set above fate by a demoniacal energy, a lust of wounds and
slaughter. Even after he meets Macduff his courage does not fail; but
when he hears the Thane was not born of woman, all virtue goes out of
him; and though he speaks sounding words of defiance, the last combat is
little better than a suicide.
The whole performance is, as I said, so full of gusto and a headlong
unity; the personality of Macbeth is so sharp and powerful; and within
these somewhat narrow limits there is so much play and saliency that, so
far as concerns Salvini himself, a third great success seems
indubitable. Unfortunately, however, a great actor cannot fill more than
a very small fraction of the boards; and though Banquo's ghost will
probably be more seasonable in his future apparitions, there are some
more inherent difficulties in the piece. The company at large did not
distinguish themselves. Macduff, to the huge delight of the gallery,
out-Macduff'd the average ranter. The lady who filled the principal
female part has done better on other occasions, but I fear she has not
metal for what she tried last week. Not to succeed in the sleep-walking
scene is to make a memorable failure. As it was given, it succeeded in
being wrong in art without being true to nature.
And there is yet another difficulty, happily easy to reform, which
somewhat interfered with the success of the performance. At the end of
the incantation scene the Italian translator has made Macbeth fall
insensible upon the stage. This is a change of questionable propriety
from a psychological point of view; while in point of view of effect it
leaves the stage for some moments empty of all business. To remedy this,
a bevy of green ballet-girls came forth and pointed their toes about the
prostrate king. A dance of High Church curates, or a hornpipe by Mr. T.
P. Cooke, would not be more out of the key; though the gravity of a
Scots audience was not to be overcome, and they merely expressed their
disapprobation by a round of moderate hisses, a similar irruption of
Christmas fairies would most likely convulse a London theatre from pit
to gallery with inextinguishable laughter. It is, I am told, the Italian
tradition; but it is one more honoured in the breach than the
observance. With the total disappearance of these damsels, with a
stronger Lady Macbeth, and, if possible, with some compression of those
scenes in which Salvini does not appear, and the spectator is left at
the mercy of Macduffs and Duncans, the play would go twice as well, and
we should be better able to follow and enjoy an admirable work of
dramatic art.
III
BAGSTER'S "PILGRIM'S PROGRESS"
I have here before me an edition of the "Pilgrim's Progress," bound in
green, without a date, and described as "illustrated by nearly three
hundred engravings, and memoir of Bunyan." On the outside it is lettered
"Bagster's Illustrated Edition," and after the author's apology, facing
the first page of the tale, a folding pictorial "Plan of the Road" is
marked as "drawn by the late Mr. T. Conder," and engraved by J. Basire.
No further information is anywhere vouchsafed; perhaps the publishers
had judged the work too unimportant; and we are still left ignorant
whether or not we owe the woodcuts in the body of the volume to the same
hand that drew the plan. It seems, however, more than probable. The
literal particularity of mind which, in the map, laid down the
flower-plots in the devil's garden, and carefully introduced the
court-house in the town of Vanity, is closely paralleled in many of the
cuts; and in both, the architecture of the buildings and the disposition
of the gardens have a kindred and entirely English air. Whoever he was,
the author of these wonderful little pictures may lay claim to be the
best illustrator of Bunyan.[43] They are not only good illustrations,
like so many others; but they are like so few, good illustrations of
Bunyan. Their spirit, in defect and quality, is still the same as his
own. The designer also has lain down and dreamed a dream, as literal, as
quaint, and almost as apposite as Bunyan's; and text and pictures
make but the two sides of the same homespun yet impassioned story. To
do justice to the designs, it will be necessary to say, for the
hundredth time, a word or two about the masterpiece which they adorn.
All allegories have a tendency to escape from the purpose of their
creators; and as the characters and incidents become more and more
interesting in themselves, the moral, which these were to show forth,
falls more and more into neglect. An architect may command a wreath of
vine-leaves round the cornice of a monument; but if, as each leaf came
from the chisel, it took proper life and fluttered freely on the wall,
and if the vine grew, and the building were hidden over with foliage and
fruit, the architect would stand in much the same situation as the writer
of allegories. The "Faery Queen" was an allegory, I am willing to
believe; but it survives as an imaginative tale in incomparable verse.
The case of Bunyan is widely different; and yet in this also Allegory,
poor nymph, although never quite forgotten, is sometimes rudely thrust
against the wall. Bunyan was fervently in earnest; with "his fingers in
his ears, he ran on," straight for his mark. He tells us himself, in the
conclusion to the first part, that he did not fear to raise a laugh;
indeed, he feared nothing, and said anything; and he was greatly served
in this by a certain rustic privilege of his style, which, like the talk
of strong uneducated men, when it does not impress by its force, still
charms by its simplicity. The mere story and the allegorical design
enjoyed perhaps his equal favour. He believed in both with an energy of
faith that was capable of moving mountains. And we have to remark in him,
not the parts where inspiration fails and is supplied by cold and merely
decorative invention, but the parts where faith has grown to be
credulity, and his characters become so real to him that he forgets the
end of their creation. We can follow him step by step into the trap which
he lays for himself by his own entire good faith and triumphant
literality of vision, till the trap closes and shuts him in an
inconsistency. The allegories of the Interpreter and of the Shepherds of
the Delectable Mountains are all actually performed, like stage-plays,
before the pilgrims. The son of Mr. Great-grace visibly "tumbles hills
about with his words." Adam the First has his condemnation written
visibly on his forehead, so that Faithful reads it. At the very instant
the net closes round the pilgrims, "the white robe falls from the black
man's body." Despair "getteth him a grievous crab-tree cudgel"; it was in
"sunshiny weather" that he had his fits; and the birds in the grove about
the House Beautiful, "our country birds," only sing their little pious
verses "at the spring, when the flowers appear and the sun shines warm."
"I often," says Piety, "go out to hear them; we also ofttimes keep them
tame on our house." The post between Beulah and the Celestial City sounds
his horn, as you may yet hear in country places. Madam Bubble, that
"tall, comely dame, something of a swarthy complexion, in very pleasant
attire, but old," "gives you a smile at the end of each sentence"--a real
woman she; we all know her. Christiana dying "gave Mr. Stand-fast a
ring," for no possible reason in the allegory, merely because the touch
was human and affecting. Look at Great-heart, with his soldierly ways,
garrison ways, as I had almost called them; with his taste in weapons;
his delight in any that "he found to be a man of his hands"; his
chivalrous point of honour, letting Giant Maul get up again when he was
down, a thing fairly flying in the teeth of the moral; above all, with
his language in the inimitable tale of Mr. Fearing: "I thought I should
have lost my man"--"chicken-hearted"--"at last he came in, and I will say
that for my lord, he carried it wonderful lovingly to him." This is no
Independent minister; this is a stout, honest, big-busted ancient,
adjusting his shoulder-belts, twirling his long moustaches as he speaks.
Last and most remarkable, "My sword," says the dying Valiant-for-Truth,
he in whom Great-heart delighted, "my sword I give to him that shall
succeed me in my pilgrimage, _and my courage and skill to him that can
get it_." And after this boast, more arrogantly unorthodox than was ever
dreamed of by the rejected Ignorance, we are told that "all the trumpets
sounded for him on the other side."