ficient in that varied and vivid incident which alone commands the attention of a vast and crowded theatre. It consists in the development of one character under the influence of a passion, however described with tremendous force, yet the most repulsive, the most remote from our common sympathies, to which human nature is subject. We incline to the opinion, that in the original design of the Plays on the Passions, Miss Baillie put unnecessary trammels on her own genius; instead of surrendering herself to that free and unbounded inspiration which seizes every event as it unfolds itself, and all the mingling and crossing and conflicting of various motives and feelings, which form the reality of life, she set herself as it were a task. Her master passion, in Pope's words, Like Aaron's serpent swallowed up the rest.' We It thus gave a kind of monotony to the whole design, which was especially the case in the delineation of the most unamiable of all human feelings. De Montfort was the one dark figure on the wide canvass; instinct, indeed, with all the sombre grandeur of Spagnolet, but still insufficient to occupy or to give life to the whole space. The noble Lady Jane is described rather than set in action; when she speaks, she speaks most nobly, but she has little to do with the plot; the supposed pretensions of Rezenvelt to her hand goad the moody mind of De Montfort to more furious madness, but still she stands aloof, as it were, in her dignity, from the general business of the scene. We have always thought that, if we could select our own performers and our own audience, Basil might be made one of the most delightful of scenic exhibitions. must, however, previously imbue a whole company of professional performers with that high refinement, that gentlemanly bearing, scarcely ever attained in perfection in our day but by the Kemble family; or we must impart the ease and practised powers of representation, possessed only by professional actors, to some of our distinguished amateurs. Above all, we must command an aristocratical audience-our readers will do us the justice to suppose that we do not mean the vulgar aristocracy of birth or wealthbut that of high and cultivated minds, of feelings open to all noble and generous sentiments, and keenly alive to the subtlest workings of delicacy and honour. For the whole conception, the language itself of Basil is too highly toned, too chivalrous, too finely romantic to catch the popular ear in a modern theatre; the least coarseness in the execution would mar its effect on the more refined part of the audience, while the touches would be too soft and evanescent to fix the attention of those who demand stronger excitement. The total absence of noise, and bustle, and effect, would disappoint all who are of less imaginative, more imperfectly cultivated temperament, and who indeed would have the best ex cuse cuse for their want of power to appreciate the finer beauties of poetry, in the distance by which its machinery is divided from their sight, and the indistinctness with which, in the remoter parts of our large theatres, its language is conveyed to their ears. The most remarkable characteristic of several of the dramas contained in these volumes is, as we have said, that they excel in that one great point in which Miss Baillie's former plays were wanting. In these volumes, Henriquez and the Separation, and in rather an inferior class the Homicide, are acting plays of the highest order. As poems they do not perhaps equal, but as dramas they far surpass her former works. We cannot select scattered passages of equal beauty with some of the single scenes in Basil and Ethwald,-the one exquisitely pathetic part of Rayner; or Mahomet, in Constantine Palæologus, listening to the murmurs of the slumbering and fated city. But for deep, for riveting, for absorbing interest of plot, for the simple and inartificial, yet most skilful, subordination of all the incidents to the main impression,— that single unity, which is worthy of preservation, and, in fact, is alone preserved by great dramatists,-for opportunities, above all, of displaying the powers of great actors, we have read nothing for some time which, in our estimation, promises so highly for theatric representation as these dramas. To commence our task with something of regularity, we must express our regret that the tragedy of Romiero is placed in the van, as it were, of the present publication. It is, in our opinion, the play the least happily conceived, and the least effectively executed in the whole series. It is intended to illustrate the passion of jealousy. But Miss Baillie has not, we think, quite clearly perceived that the passion of jealousy may co-exist with the noblest qualities of our nature. It may madden the high honour of man into vindictiveness; it may turn the milk of woman's kindness into gall; the more intense the other feelings, valour, generosity, love, the more dreadful will be the state of that mind when those feelings are outraged and wrought into wild and undiscerning frenzy by this overpowering feeling. But a jealous disposition, and such seems that of Romiero, is something in itself mean and degrading; it is almost impossible to make it assume that dignity which is necessary to high tragic interest. Look to the great commentator on human life, the master who possessed the key to the heart of man. Othello is anything rather than a jealous character; his inflammable nature, once kindled, burns with the most desolating fury; the Moorish blood boils at once to the fiercest fever-heat; but it requires all the devilish art of lago to work him up to madness; and even then it is indignation, it is stern resentment at the abuse of his passionate and confiding nature, the feeling of his utter desolation, that where he had garnered up his heart,' he should be robbed of his one hoarded treasure, Desdemona's love; -it is revenge against her, not hatred against Cassio, which is the predominant, the absorbing feeling, and prepares us for the harrowing catastrophe. On the other hand, Leontes, in the Winter's Tale, in whom jealousy lies, as it were, in the constitutional temperament, is no doubt somewhat dignified to our imagination by his kingly rank. But Leontes is not made the hero of a tragedy. Had he murdered Hermione with his own hand, the effect upon the mind would have been revolting rather than terrific. So Romiero, who is determined to find his wife dishonoured, and, when one cause of suspicion is removed, instantly grasps at another, awakens no generous sympathy; he would be detestable if he were not despicable; the skill and vigour of the authoress have been lavished in vain, in the attempt to dignify the character, or to reconcile the mind to the fatal catastrophe. We have not been wrought up to murder-pitch-the scene of bloodshed finds us cold and passive. We pass on with eager haste to Henriquez, a work of a far higher order. It is equally happy in conception and in execution. In the enthralling interest of the plot, and the skilful development of character and of action, it surpasses all Miss Baillie's earlier and perhaps more poetic dramas. Henriquez turns also upon the passion of jealousy, but it is jealousy forced by strong and pregnant circumstances upon a generous and confiding spirit. Henriquez at first rejects with scornful disdain the imputation on the honour of his wife, and thus enlists in his favour all those emotions of compassion and sympathy which we refuse to the man of a suspicious temper. In the jealous disposition there is a want of self-respect, and where that is wanting no one commands the respect of others. Henriquez commands and receives both. The first act of this tragedy is occupied in the gradual working up of Henriquez to this passion so foreign to his nature, and perhaps for that very reason, when once excited, becoming a temporary, an uncontrollable madness. Henriquez, the favourite general of the King Alonzo, is returning in triumph from the Moors into the bosom of his family. He is met, as it were, on the threshold of his castle by suspicious circumstances, which he dismisses with contempt. Gradually they thicken and darken around him. He finds, at length, that the object of all that suspicion, his dearest friend Don Juen, whom he supposed from his own letter to be at his own northern seat,' at a considerable distance, is to be at nightfall at a 'private door to the grove.' In his paroxysm he fiercely exclaims'Night falls on some who never see the morn.' 2 K VOL. LV. NO. CX, There There may be readers who will consider, after all, that these circumstances are not quite damning and conclusive enough to account for the desperate deed of Henriquez. The plot may be thought not worked up with sufficient art and preparation for the dire catastrophe. Our objection, if we should venture to suggest one, would be of a different nature. It is a canon of great importance in tragic writing, that whatever conduces to an appalling and guilty close, should flow directly from the will of some of the personages in the drama. Our moral sense requires, as it were, some victim on which to wreak its just indignation. Where a generous spirit is perverted, and almost excusably perverted, into crime-where the very noblest qualities of his being are abused, as in those of Henriquez, into a deed so alien to the hightoned temper of his mind,-we are not content to be thrown back upon chance. Mistake and accident are not legitimate means for bringing about a terrific catastrophe: Othello has his Iago. Even where no crime is committed, but where the utmost extreme of misery is heaped upon a guiltless head, we require the known agency of man. Lear would be insupportable without Goneril and Regan. We cannot but feel that he is suffering a harsh and unmerited doom-a strong and almost indignant sense of injustice rises up within the mind. But if there be no human agent against whom we can vent our resentment, or at least our dissatisfaction, against what higher-what sacred power is it almost of necessity thrown back? We cannot take refuge in the mystery that hangs over real life, where we submit in constrained resignation to our ignorance of the true causes which bring about such events. For the poet is in the secret of all those causes which influence the fate of his tragic characters, particularly if they are purely imaginary; and we have a right to demand that he should not place our moral feeling in this unpleasant dilemma. He must not leave the impression that a good man is forced into guilt by unavoidable circumstances, over which neither he nor any other human being has any control. Nor must innocence be involved in calamity which we cannot treat as probationary, unless there be some one whom we can call to account without presumption and without impiety. It has been often said that the sublimity of the Greek tragedy depends on the struggle of a great and noble mind with inexorableunconquerable fate. Notwithstanding the high authority on which this opinion rests, we entertain great doubts of its justice. We deny that the fatalism of the Greeks is arbitrary and irrespective. It is, in almost every drama, Nemesis, Ate, an avenging power for the hereditary, the voluntary guilt of some ancient house, not a mere stern Necessity, which causes crime and inflicts misery. It is, in fact, the visitation of the sins of the fathers upon the children. The crimes of Pelops, the Thyestean banquets, devote the whole Argive house, till its extinction in Orestes, to guilt and ruin. Edipus stands alone; but independent of the solemn moral announced by the poet himself, that the wisest of mankind may be the most miserable, *Ος τὰ κλείν' αἰνίγματ ̓ ἤδη, καὶ κράτιστος ἦν ἀνὴρ, Εἰς ὅσον κλύδωνα δεινῆς ξυμφορᾶς ἐλήλυθεν we must always remember that the dipus Coloneus was a part of that great trilogy. The magnificent close of that play (if we remember right, M. Schlegel himself alludes to it) may be considered as a kind of tardy vindication of the Divine justice. The blind old man has a summons from the world by a special messenger from the Gods-and the mysterious wonder which attaches to his departure not merely heightens the general tragic effect of his history, but is a kind of promise of splendid retribution for his awful fate. We hope to renew this controversy on some future opportunity, but we have digressed, we hardly know where, from Miss Baillie and her Henriquez. At the opening of the second Act the dreadful deed has been perpetrated : • Enter HENRIQUEZ with a sword in his hand, which he lays on the table in the light, shrinking back as he looks at it. HEN. The blood!-this blood! -his blood! -O dismal change! When rose the sun of this sad day, how gladly Would I have shed mine own to have saved one drop Of what was then so dear! (Pushing it into the shade.) Be from my sight. It wrings my heart; and yet so black a stream, So base, so treacherous, did never stain The sword of holy justice. (After sitting down, and gazing some time on the ground) This is a pause of rest from the first act, The needful act, of righteous retribution. Oh! is it rest? The souls that fell from light Into the dark profound, cut off from bliss, Had rest like this. (Pressing his temples tightly with both hands.) Be still! be still! there's more behind to do; HEN. What dost thou want? VOICE (without).-The banquet is prepared, the guests assembled, Your grooms are waiting, and your vestments ready. Will you not please, my Lord, to let them enter? HEN. (to himself). The guests assembled! Vile bewildering dream! I had forgot all this. I must appear. 2 K 2 VOICE |
