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VIII.

OULITA THE SERF.*

HIS volume has no preface, and no notes save two or three of a line's length each. Its titlepage bears nothing beyond the words, Oulita the Serf; Tragedy. But the advertisements which foretold its publication added a fact which made us open the book with a very different feeling from that with which we should have taken up an ordinary anonymous play,—a fact which at once excited high expectations, and which, we doubt not, has already introduced Oulita to a wide circle of readers, each prepared to gauge its merits by a very severe test and a very high standard. The forthcoming volume was announced as Oulita the Serf; a Tragedy: by the Author of Friends in Council.'

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The disguise of the author of that work is becoming ragged. We have found, in more than one library, where a special glory of binding was bestowed upon the book and its charming sequel, that, though the title-page bore no name, the volumes were marked

* Oulita the Serf. A Tragedy. London: 1858.

with a name which is well and honourably known. And indeed there are few books which are so calculated as Friends in Council to make the reader wish to know who is the author whom he has learned to revere and love and surely the language has none which, in its gentle playfulness, its intense honesty, its comprehensive sympathy, its earnestness so tempered with the desire to do justice to all, affords its writer less reason for seeking any disguise. Yet it is not for us to add the author's name to a title-page which the author has chosen to send nameless into the world: though we may be permitted to say that, whoever may be the writer of the works to which we have been alluding, though we never exchanged words with him, and never saw him, still, in common with an increasing host of readers, we cannot think of him as other than a kind and sympathetic friend.

Accordingly, we expected a great deal from this new work. We were not entirely taken by surprise, indeed, when we saw it announced: for Ellesmere, in Friends in Council, makes several quotations from the works of a certain obscure dramatist,' which are likely to set the thoughtful reader inquiring. And whoever shall carefully collate the advertisements of the late Mr. Pickering's publications will discover that the author of Oulita published a good many years ago an historical drama entitled King Henry the Second, and a tragedy entitled Catherine Douglas, whose heroine is the stronghearted Scottish maiden who thrust her arm into the staple of a door from which the bolt had been removed, in the desperate hope of thus retarding for a moment

the entrance of the conspirators who murdered James the First. But these plays are comparatively unknown; and probably very many readers who have been delighted by that graceful, unaffected prose, were quite unaware that its writer was endowed with the faculty of verse. We could not fail, indeed, to discern in his prose works the wide, genial sympathy, the deep thoughtfulness, the delicate sensitiveness, of the true poet. And his talent, we could also discover from these, is essentially dramatic. The characters in Friends in Council have each their marked individuality; while yet that individuality is maintained and brought out, not by coarse caricature, but by those delicate and natural touches which make us feel that we are conversing with real human beings, and not with mere names in a book. It is an extremely easy thing to make us recognise a character when he reappears upon the stage, by making him perpetually repeat some silly and vulgar phrase. Smith is the man who never enters without roaring 'It's all serene:' Jones is the individual who always says Not to put too fine a point upon it.' Nor is it difficult for an author to tell us that his hero is a great man, a philanthropist, a thinker, an actor: it is quite another matter to make him speak and act so that we shall find that out for ourselves. Many characters in modern works need to be labelled ;—like the sign-painter's lion, which no one would have guessed was a lion but for the words This is a lion written beneath it.

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Let us say at once that this tragedy has surpassed our expectation. It is a noble and beautiful work.

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It is strongly marked with the same characteristics. which distinguish its author's former writings. Its power and excellence are mainly in thoughtfulness, pathos, humour. There is a certain subtlety of thought, -a capacity gradually to surround the reader with an entire world and a complete life: we feel how heartily the writer has thrown himself into the state of things he describes, half believing the tale he tells, and using gently and tenderly the characters he draws. We have a most interesting story: we see before us beings of actual flesh and blood. We do not know whether the gentle, yet resolute Oulita, the Princess Marie, that spoiled child of fortune, now all wild ferocity, and now all soft relenting, the Count von Straubenheim, that creature of passion so deep, yet so slow, so calm upon the surface, yet so impetuous in its under-currents, -ever lived save in the fancy of the poet but to us they are a reality,-far more a reality than half the men who have lived and died in fact, but who live on the page of history the mere bloodless life of a word and an abstraction. We find in this tragedy the sharp knowledge of life and human nature for which we were prepared a certain tinge of sadness and resignation which did not surprise us: a kindly yet sorrowful feeling towards the very worst, which we are persuaded comes with the longer and fuller experience of the strange mixture of the loveable and the hateful which is woven into the constitution of the race. Here and there we find the calm, self-possessed order of thought with which we have elsewhere grown familiar gradually rise into eloquent energy and vigour of expression

which startles. But the hero is not one who raves and stamps. And indeed the fastidious taste of the writer, shrinking instinctively from the least trace of coarseness or extravagance, has perhaps resulted in a little want of the terrible passion of tragedy: for we can well believe that many an expression, and many a sentiment, which, heard just for once from eloquent lips, would thrill even the most refined, would be struck out by the remorseless pen, or at least toned down, when calmly, critically, and repeatedly read over by such an author as ours, when the fever of creative inspiration was past. We remark, as a characteristic of the plot, and a circumstance vitally affecting the order of its interest, that the catastrophe is involved in the characters of the actors. It is not by the arbitrary appointment of the author that things run in the course they do. There is something of the old Greek sense of the inevitable. We feel from the beginning that the end is fixed as fate. Like Frankenstein, the poet has bodied out beings whom he has not at his command: and not without essentially changing their natures could he materially modify what they say and do, or materially alter the path along which they advance to the precipice in the distance. Given such beings, placed in Russian life and under Russian government and not without a jarring sacrifice of truthfulness could the story advance or end otherwise than as it does.

The language of the tragedy is such as might have been expected from its author. There is not a phrase, not a word from first to last, to which the most fasti

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