restrain him. They see all the details, the tides that sway a man, one from without, another from within, one through another, one within another, both together without faltering and without ceasing. And what is this insight but sympathy, an imitative sympathy, which puts us in another's place, which carries over their agitations to our own breasts, which makes our life a little world, able to reproduce the How did they succeed, and what is this new art which tramples on all or dinary rules? It is an art for all that, since it is natural; a great art, since it embraces more things, and that more deeply than others do, like the art of Rembrandt and Rubens; but like theirs, it is a Teutonic art, and one contrast with great one in abstract? Like the char-whose every step is in conhe Greeks acters they imagine, poets and spectators make gestures, raise their voices, act. No speech or story can show their inner mood, but it is the scenic effect which can manifest it. As some men invent a language for their ideas, so these act and mimic them; theatrical imitation and figured representation is their genuine speech: all other expression, the lyrical song of Eschylus, the reflective symbolism of Goethe, the oratorical development of Racine, would be impossible for them. Involuntarily, instantaneously, without forecast, they cut life into scenes, and carry it piecemeal on the boards; this goes so far, that often a mere character becomes an actor,* playing a part within a part; the scenic faculty is the natural form of their mind. Beneath the effort of this instinct, all the accessory parts of the drama come before the footlights and expand before our eyes. A battle has been fought; instead of relating it, they bring it before the public, trumpets and drums, pushing crowds, slaughtering combatants. A shipwreck happens; straightway the ship is before the spectator, with the sailors' oaths, the technical orders of the pilot. Of all the details of human life,† tavern-racket and statesmen's councils, scullion's talk and court processions, domestic tenderness and pandering,none is too small or too lofty: these things exist in life-let them exist on the stage, each in full, in the rough, atrocious, or absurd, just as they are, no matter how. Neither in Greece, nor Italy, nor Spain, nor France, has an art been seen which tried so boldly to *Falstaff in Shakspeare; the queen in London, by Greene and Decker; Rosalind in Shakspeare. In Webster's Duchess of Malfi there is an admirable accouchement scene. those of classical art. and Romans, the originators of the latter, sought in every thing, was charm and order. Monuments, statues, and paintings, the theatre, eloquence and poetry, from Sophocles to Racine, they shaped all their work in the same mould, and attained beauty by the same method. In the infinite entanglement and complexity of things, they grasped a small number of simple ideas, which they embraced in a small number of simple representations, so that the vast confused vegetation of life is presented to the mind from that time forth, pruned and reduced, and perhaps easily embraced at a single glance. A square of walls with rows of columns all alike; a symmetrical group of draped or undraped forms; a young man standing up and raising one arm; a wounded warrior who will not return to the camp, though they beseech him: this, in their noblest epoch, was their architecture, their painting, their sculpture, and their theatre. No poetry but a few sentiments not very intricate, always natural, not toneď down, intelligible to all; no eloquence but a con tinuous argument, a limited vocabulary, the loftiest ideas brought down to their sensible origin, so that children can understand such eloquence and fee! such poetry; and in this sense they are classical. In the hands of Frenchmen, the last inheritors of the simple art, these great legacies of antiquity undergo no change. If poetic genius is less, the structure of mind has not altered. Racine puts on the stage a sole action, This is, in fact, the English view of the French mind, which is doubtless a refinement, many times refined, of the classical spirit. But M. Taine has seemingly not taken into account such products as the Medea on the one hand, and the works of Aristophanes and the Latin sensualists on the other.-TR. whose details he adjusts, and whose | progressive and individual action. Two course he regulates; no incident, noth- or three actions connected endwise, ov ing unforeseen, no appendices or in- entangled one with another, wo or congruities; no secondary intrigue. three incomplete endings badly con The subordinate parts are effaced; at trived, and opened up again; no ma the most four or five principal charac- chinery but death, scattered right and ters, the fewest possible; the rest, re- left and unforeseen: such is the logic duced to the condition of confidants, of their method. The fact is, that ou take the tone of their masters, and mere- logic, the Latin, fails then. Their ly reply to them. All the scenes are mind does not march by the smooth on.ected, and flow insensibly one into and straightforward paths of rhetoric he other; and every scene, like the en- and eloquence. It reaches the same tire piece, has its order and progress. end, but by other approaches. It is at The tragedy stands out symmetrically once more comprehensive and less regand clear in the midst of human life, ular than ours. It demands a concep like a complete and solitary temple tion more complete, but less consecuwhich limns its regular outline on the tive. It proceeds, not as with us, by a luminous azure of the sky. In England line of uniform steps, but by sudden all is different. All that the French leaps and long pauses. It does not rest call proportion and fitness is wanting; satisfied with a simple idea drawn from Englishmen do not trouble themselves a complex fact, but demands the comabout them, they do not need them. plex fact entire, with its numberless There is no unity; they leap suddenly particularities, its interminable ramifiover twenty years, or five hundred cations. It sees in man not a general leagues. There are twenty scenes in passion-ambition, anger, or love; not act-we stumble without prepara- a pure quality happiness, avarice, tion from one to the other, from tragedy folly; but a character, that is, the imto buffoonery; usually it appears as print, wonderfully complicated, which though the action gained no ground; inheritance, temperament, education, the different personages waste their calling, age, society, conversation, time in conversation, dreaming, dis- habits, have stamped on every man ; playing their character. We were an incommunicable and individual immoved, anxious for the issue, and here print, which, once stamped in a man, they bring us in quarrelling servants, is not found again in any other. It sees lovers making poetry. Even the dia- in the hero not only the hero, but the logue and speeches, which we would individual, with his manner of walking, think ought particularly to be of a drinking, swearing, blowing his nose; regular and continuous flow of engross- with the tone of his voice, whether he ng ideas, remain stagnant, or are is thin or fat; * and thus plunges to the scattered in windings and deviations. bottom of things, with every look, as At first sight we fancy we are not ad- by a miner's deep shaft. This sunk, it vancing, we do not feel at every phrase little cares whether the second shaft be that we have made a step. There are two paces or a hundred from the first; none of those solid pleadings, none of enough that it reaches the same depth, those conclusive discussions, which and serves equally well to display the every moment add reason to reason, inner and invisible layer. Logic is here bject on to objection; people might from beneath, not from above. It is an - ay that the different personages only the unity of a character which binds knew how to scold, to repeat them selves, and to mark time. And the disorder is as great in general as in particular things. They heap a whole reign, a complete war, an entire novel, into a drama; they cut up into scenes an English chronicle or an Italian novel: this is all their art; the events matter little; whatever they are, they accept them. They have no idea of the two the personage, as the unity of an impression connects the two scenes of a drama. To speak exactly, the spectator is like a man whom we should lead along a wall pierced at separate intervals with little windows at every window he catches for an in queen in Hamlet (v. 2) says: stant a glimpse of a new landscape, | poisoning himself, and with the deathwith its million details: the walk over, rattle in his throat, is brought to his if he is of Latin race and training, he enemy's side, to give him a foretaste of finds a medley of images jostling in his agony. Queen Brunhalt has panders head, and asks for a map that he may with her on the stage, and causes her recollect himself; if he is of German two sons to slay each other. Death race and training, he perceives as a everywhere; at the close of every play, whole, by natural concentration, the all the great people wade in blood: wide country which he has only seen with slaughter and butcheries, the stage piece-meal. Such a conception, by the becomes a field of battle or a church multitude of details which it combines, yard.* Shall I describe a few of these and by the depth of the vistas which it tragedies? In the Duke of Milan embraces, is a half-vision which shakes Francesco, to avenge his sister, who the whole soul. What its works are has been seduced, wishes to seduce in about to show us is, with what energy, his turn the Duchess Marcella, wife of what disdain of contrivance, what Sforza, the seducer; he desires her, he vehemence of truth, it dares to coin will have her; he says to her, with and hammer the human medal; with cries of love and rage: what liberty it is able to reproduce in full prominence worn out characters, and the extreme flights of virgin nature. VI. Let us consider the different personages which this art, so suited to depict real manners, and so apt to paint the living soul, goes in search of amidst the real manners and the living souls of its time and country. They are of two kinds, as befits the nature of the drama: one which produces terror, the other which moves to pity; these graceful and feminine, those manly and violent. All the differences of sex, all the extremes of life, all the resources of the stage, are embraced in this contrast; and if ever there was a complete contrast, it is here. The reader must study for himself some of these pieces, or he will have no idea of the fury into which the stage is hurled; force and transport are driven every instant to the point of atrocity, and further still, if there be any further. Assassinations, poisonings, tortures, outcries of madness and rage; no passion and no suffering are too extreme for their energy or their effort. Anger is with them a madness, ambition a frenzy, love a delirium. Hippolyto, who has lost his mistress, says, "Were thine eyes clear as mine, thou might'st behold her, watching upon yon battlements of stars, how I observe them."* Aretus, to be avenged on Valentinian, poisons him after * Middleton, The Honest Whore, part i. iv.1. "For with this arm I'll swim through seas of Or make a bridge, arch'd with the bones of men, For he wishes to strike the duke 'I'll follow him to hell, but I will find him, Thierry and Theodoret. Duke of Milan, v. 2. husband; Webster and Ford, a son who assassinates his mother; Ford, the incestuous loves of a brother and sister.* Irresistible love overtakes then; the ancient love of Pasiphaë and Myrrha, a kind of madness-like enchantment, and beneath which the will entirely gives way. Giovanni Bays: "Lost! I am Yst! My fates have doom'd my death! he more I stive, I love; the more I love, The less I hope: I see my ruin certain.. I have even wearied heaven with pray❜rs, dried up The spring of my continual tears, even starv'd What transports follow! what fierce Harlot, rare, notable harlot, That with thy brazen face maintain'st thy sin, Was there no man in Parma to be bawd To your loose cunning whoredom else but I? Must your hot itch and plurisy of lust, The heyday of your luxury, be fed Up to a surfeit, and could none but I Be pick'd out to be cloak to your close tricks, Your belly-sports?-Now I must be the dad To all that gallimaufry that is stuffed In thy corrupted bastard-bearing womb? Say, must I? Arnabella. Beastly man? why, 'tis thy fate. I si'd not to thee. S. Tell me by whom." She gets excited, feels and cares fo nothing more, refuses to tell the name of her lover, and praises him in the following words. This praise in the midst of danger is like a rose she has plucked, and of which the odor intoxicates her: S. Dost thou laugh? ... Come, whore, tell me your lover, or, by truth I'll hew thy flesh to shreds; who is't?" * She laughs; the excess of shame and terror has given her courage; she insults him, she sings; so like a woman! "A. (Sings) Che morte piu dolce che morire per amore. S. Thus will I pull thy hair, and thus I'll drag Thy lust be-leper'd body through the dust.... (Hales her up and down, Be a gallant hangman. A. I leave revenge behind, and thou shalt feel 't. (To Vasquez.) Pish, do not beg for me, I prize my life As nothing; if the man will needs be mad, In the end all is discovered, and the two lovers know they must die. For the last time, they see each other in Annabella's chamber, listening to the noise of the feast below which shal serve for their funeral-feast. Gio vanni, who has made his resolve like: madman, sees Annabella richly dressed, dazzling. He regards her in silence, and remembers the past. He weeps and says: "These are the funeral tears, Shed on your grave; these furrow-up my When first I lov'd and knew not how to woo... cheeks Give me your hand: how sweetly life doth ran He then stabs her, enters the banquet ing room, with her heart upon his dag ger : ↑ Ibid. v. §. 1 Soranzo see this heart, which was thy wife's. | are worse than the body's. He send He kills him, and casting himself on thur. 66 But it did go further; for if these are melodramas, they are sincere, composed, not like those of to-day, by Grub Street writers for peaceful citízens, but by impassioned men, expeenced in tragical arts, for a violent, over-fed melancholy race. From Shakspeare to Milton, Swift, Hogarth, no race has been more glutted with coarse expressions and horrors, and its poets supply them plentifully; Ford less so than Webster; the latter a sombre man, whose thoughts seem incessantly to be haunting tombs and charnel-houses. "Places in court," he says, are but like beds in the hospital, where this man's head lies at that man's foot, and so lower and lower." † Such are his images. No one has equalled Webster in creating desperate characters, utter wretches, bitter misanthropes, in blackening and blaspheming human life, above all, in depicting the shameless depravity and refined ferocity of Italian manners The Duchess of Malfi has secretly married her steward Antonio, and her brother learns that she has children; almost mad || with rage and wounded pride, he remains silent, waiting until he knows the name of the father; then he arrives all of a sudden, means to kill her, but so that she shall taste the lees of death. She must suffer much, but above all, she must not die too quickly! She must suffer in mind; these griefs Tis pity she's a Whore, v. t. t Webster's Works, ed. Dyce, 1857, Duchess f Malfi, i. 1. The characters of Bosola, Flaminio. See Stendhal Chronicles of Italy, The Cenci, The Duchess of Palliano, and all the biographies of the time; of the Borgias, of Bianca Capello, of Vittoria Accoramboni. Ferdinand, one of the brothers, says (ii. 5): "I would have their bodies Burnt in a coal-pit with the ventage stopp'd, That their curs'd smoke might not ascend to heaven; Or dip the sheets they lie in in pitch or sulphur, Wrap them in't, and then light them as a match; Or else to-boil their bastard to a cullis, And give't his lecherous father to renew The sin of his back." assassins to kill Antonio, and mean while comes to her in the dark, with affectionate words; pretends to be reconciled, and suddenly shows her waxen figures, covered with wounds, whom she takes for her slaughtered husband and children. She stagger? under the blow, and remains in gloor without crying out. Then she says: "Good comfortable fellow, Persuade a wretch that's broke upon a wheel To have all his bones new set; entreat him live To be executed again. Who must despatch me? Bosola. Come, be of comfort, I will save your life. Duchess. Indeed, I have not leisure to tend B. Now, by my life, I pity you. Ts waste thy pity on a thing so wretched As cannot pity itself. I am full of daggers."* Slow words, spoken in a whisper, as in a dream, or as if she were speaking of a third person. Her brother sends to her a company of madmen, who leap Cariola. What think you of, madam? When I muse thus, I sleep. C. Like a madman, with your eyes open D. Dost thou think we shall know one another In the other world? C. Yes, out of question. D. O that it were possible we might But hold some two days' conference with the dead! From them I should learn somewhat, I am sure, I never shall know here. I'll tell thee a miracle ; I am not mad yet, to my cause of sorrow: The heaven o'er my head seems made of mo ten brass, The earth of flaming sulphur, yet I am no mad. I am acquainted with sad misery In this state, the limbs, like those of one who has been newly executed, stil quiver, but the sensibility is worn out the miserable body only stirs mechani *Duchess of Malfi, 'v. 1. + Ibid. iv. a. |
