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Awakening at the inspired strain,

Deem'd their own Shakspeare lived again!"

Yet not only must the peculiar excellence of her tragedies, but the state of English dramatic literature at the time when they made their appearance, be taken into the account, when we would appreciate the genius of Joanna Baillie. At any time she must have commanded high admiration by her masculine vigour both of conception and language, tempered with feminine grace and tenderness; by the bold grappling with the strongest passions of human nature; by the fearless confidence in her own invention in the construction and development of her plots; by the constant, and frequently successful, attempt to give character to all the inferior incidents and personages of her drama; by the language, if not always perfectly pure or free from inversion, yet in its simpler flow, as well as in its imagery, peculiarly her own; even by the versification, which shook off at once the artificial and monotonous stateliness in which English tragedy had spoken since the days of Rowe. But, when these dramas first flashed across the poetic atmosphere-what was, what had long been the state of the English tragic drama? We are unwilling to disturb the slumbers of the dead: if, as Ariosto imagined, there be a limbo in the heavenly regions for things lost on earth, we cannot suppose that the tragic writers of that age can be much nearer to the sun, or inhabit a more genial climate than the planet Saturn. If these works were yet on earth we should recommend a consignment in the next Arctic expedition; they would, no doubt, be very stirring and effective translated into the Esquimaux tongue. Seriously speaking, when Miss Baillie first wrote, the drama, throughout Europe, seemed expiring, never to revive. Voltaire had long exhausted himself in his Zaire, his Mahomet, and his Tancrede. Alfieri, if any of his dramas had been published, had not been heard of in this country. Schiller, if known, was known only by his earlier and wilder plays. In England, the only tragedy of vigour and originality (Horace Walpole's Mysterious Mother) was interdicted from the theatre, and indeed from the library of more scrupulous readers, by the repulsive nature of the subject, in our opinion rendered more revolting by the misconception of the author. Walpole imagined that he made the horrible crime, on which his tragedy was founded, less improbable, by representing it as perpetrated at the time when the mother's mind was unhinged by the recent loss of her husband. To the calmer reason this might be true, but tragedy appeals not to the reason, but to the moral sentiment; perhaps metaphysically right, he was dramatically wrong in this first conception of his plot. Among the other serious dramas of this period, Douglas alone,

from

from the romantic interest of the story, and the opportunity for fine acting in the part of Lady Randolph, maintains its place on the stage. The rest, monotonous alike in plot, in character, in lan guage, in versification, are perhaps best known by Sheridan's humorous satire in the Critic, which is no less true than it is comic.' From this thraldom English dramatic poetry was at once emancipated, and by a young and meek woman. It cannot be denied that, notwithstanding her manly tone of originality both in thought and expression, the influence of her sex is still manifest in the works of Miss Baillie. Her range, both of events, and of the passions which she exhibits in their fiercer workings, is in some degree limited; and no female writer ever submitted to these natural restrictions with so much dignity and grace as Joanna Baillie. There is none of that artificial prudery and delicacy which is ever watching itself lest it should be betrayed into indecorous warmth, lest passion should break through the rigid boundaries of propriety: it is the inborn and native modesty of a pure mind, too virtuous to condescend to the display of virtue, too inwardly sensitive of the becoming to parade any studied and fastidious nicety. Throughout Miss Baillie's writings there is the constant charm of a simplicity of character which disdains to strain after effect. This straining, we are almost ungallant enough to say, is the common fault of female writers. She never labours to produce stronger emotion than naturally arises out of the incident; her tenderness (and in the expression of the softer affections she is often a consummate mistress) never degenerates into sentimentality; her playfulness-the innocent and cheerful coquetry with which she delights in enlivening her younger female characters-is easy and unstudied; her moral sentiments arise naturally out of her situations; these are never pompously enunciated, as though they were philosophical discoveries: always on the side of virtue, she does not think it necessary to lecture upon it. She lays out all her strength in being a powerful and pleasing dramatist, but never ventures out of her own province. Even her religion is in the same quiet and harmonious tone-the motive is always in its place -and the feeling, when it necessarily finds its way into the language, is as easy and unaffected as the rest; it has the force and authority of perfect sincerity; it is more impressive, because it makes no display.

Still, highly as this kind of native feminine sense of propriety enhances, in some respects, our admiration of Miss Baillie's works, it confines her within a narrower sphere of poetic conception. She cannot-it is contrary to her nature-assert perfect freedom in ranging through all the infinite varieties of human nature, which form the great and inexhaustible treasure-house for tragic poetry. There are some of its darker and more retired

cells

cells which are closed against her. There are passions which she must develope with a trembling hand. Among the most singular endowments indeed of our nature, is the power possessed by minds of true genius of embodying passions utterly foreign to their own disposition; of passing, as it were, into the persons of others, and expressing the genuine language of grief, which they never felt, of jealousy, to which they have never been subject, of ambition, which has no real hold upon their hearts. How is the link-boy in the street-who rose by degrees into an actor of no very splendid success, whose knowledge of human nature was obtained in his disorderly frolics in Warwickshire, in the streets of then circumscribed London, or the convivial meetings at the Mitre, perhaps occasionally in the hospitable hall of Lord Southampton-how is this Proteus of the imagination by turns the delicate maiden, the haughty Roman, the blood-stained usurper, the misanthropic Athenian, the blind old banished King, Miranda, and Coriolanus, and Macbeth, and Timon, and Lear? Of all passions, hatred, we venture to assert, is that which is most opposite to the nature of Joanna Baillie. It is a feeling with which it is impossible that experience should have given her the slightest acquaintance; yet with what terrific energy, with what awful truth, has she developed its secret workings, its subtle irritability, its intense madness! Still, though thus possessing a command over emotions so totally alien from her own disposition-with such an intuitive perception of the manner in which certain events would work on minds of the most strange and peculiar temperament—able to place the persons of her drama in the most trying situations, and to make them act and speak with the force and the truth of naturein woman there yet appear some limitations to the exercise of this wonderful and comprehensive faculty. There are depths in the human heart which her imagination must shrink from exploringnot those alone which the sense of propriety would interdict, but the agitations of some of the fiercer and more stormy emotions, the concentrated vehemence, the whirlwind of certain passionsat least in their strongest development.

Above all, some larger acquaintance with human life seems essential to that infinite variety of incident, that rich multiplicity of character, which belongs to Shakspeare and his school. It is singular how many of Miss Baillie's plays-especially in the volumes before us-turn on the crime of murder; it is with her the great source of strong emotion-her tragic Decalogue seems confined to the sixth commandment. The consciousness of the power with which she pourtrays the irresolution, the terror, the agony, the desperate frenzy, before the first commission of the horrid act the remorse, the prostration of spirit, the deep ineradicable despondency, after the perpetration of the crime

has

has been no doubt the overpowering temptation to the authoress, and may be admitted as ample justification to the reader, for the frequent recurrence of the same sort of interest. We mention the fact merely in illustration of our position as to the somewhat limited means of agitating and harrowing the mind, at the command even of so great a female writer as Miss Baillie. There are two points, however, which must be remembered in the course of these observations. We are comparing Miss Baillie-when we speak of the wider range of character and incident, the greater freedom and boldness with which every phase of human life is exhibited, the fearless energy, the unshrinking fidelity, with which every fierce and tumultuous emotion, which thrills and rends the heart of man, is exhibited, the infinite diversity with which every scene of many-coloured life is drawn-with Shakspeare and the school of Shakspeare. Miss Baillie's plays were indeed written before the admiration of these latter splendid writers, which has operated so powerfully on most of the other successful dramatists of the present day, had been revived; there are no indications in her writings of familiarity with the works of Massinger, Ford, or Fletcher. It is only as contrasted with this inimitable race of Poets that we find some want of variety in her conceptions, of copiousness in her language-we must add, as no less certain indications of a female hand, with all the force and picturesqueness of her style, occasionally the most whimsical inaccuracy, and anything rather than the correctness of a well-educated scholar.

But there is another consideration, which we must never lose sight of in estimating the powers and the fulness of Miss Baillie's imagination: she has almost always trusted entirely to her own invention for the conception both of her plot and of her characters. Except Constantine Palæologus, we do not remember any one of her plays which she has founded upon history; nor has she, like our old dramatists, or even the prince of our dramatists, freely laid under contribution the novel, the poem, the chronicler, the older play, whatever could furnish a background ready sketched out for the introduction of their own. groupes of figures. No dramatist has borrowed so little: we do not presume to venture within the sanctuary of her study, but few writers could be proved out of their own works to have read so little as Miss Baillie. In short, the wonder is not that a female, and a female placed aloof by her own virtues and her position of life from the misfortunes, the miseries, the follies, the vices, which sometimes unhappily and fatally familiarize her sex with the more stirring varieties of human life, which occasionally give even them a melancholy acquaintance with, if not an experience of, the workings and the effects of the most violent passions--the marvellous

part

part of her compositions is not that such a female should not have done more, but rather that she should have done so much. We will only appeal farther in favour of our position to the manner in which Miss Baillie has usually drawn her own sex. If we except the proud Elburga in Ethwald, and Annabel in the play of Witchcraft, in the collection before us, (a character we think very imperfectly and by no means pleasingly developed,) her females are never under the influence of bad or even violent emotions. They are sometimes invested in a kind of ideal dignity, a superiority to all the ordinary weaknesses of their sex, or even of their nature, like Jane de Montfort; we may perhaps add Valeria in Constantine Palæologus. But almost invariably they are gentle, modest, affectionate; loving, but with a pure, a holy, and a tempered passion. She delights in a kind of meek cheerfulness of disposition, an innocent gaiety of heart; but modesty and the sense of duty are constantly softening off and subduing the inward passions; the authoress is chary of the dignity, the modesty of her sex; she treats it with a kind of reverential and sisterly respect; her females are not looked upon, as Shakspeare beautifully says of his own Isabella, Like things enskyed and sainted'

but they are never desecrated by real guilt. It may be said, that in this respect she has done no more than the manly taste and feeling of her great master did before her: to one Lady Macbeth we have Miranda and Imogene, Ophelia, and Desdemona, and Isabella, Portia, and Volumnia, and Constance, and Catharine of Arragon. Still we must be permitted to recognise the personality of the authoress in this peculiar characteristic of her dramas. Baillie, we are sure, will pardon us if we consider her still a woman, since we most unfeignedly esteem her as equalled by none of her own sex, in any age and country, in the powers which she has displayed throughout the most difficult, as well as the noblest walk of poetic genius.

Miss

It is time, however, that we pass to the more immediate consideration of her present publication. It is remarkable, that in several plays contained in these volumes we find her peculiarly strong in that part in which we cannot but admit the deficiency of her former dramas. Beautiful as these were as reading, they were scarcely acting plays; they were wanting in that suspended, that stirring interest, which awakens and rivets the attention of an audience; they had not enough dramatic effect constantly to revive and quicken the failing emotions of hearers. With the exception of the Family Legend, they were never, we believe, brought upon the stage-at least repeated. De Montfort was produced at its first appearance, but without success. It is not difficult to account for its failure. De Montfort is peculiarly de

ficient

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