Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul, Shakspeare has not invested the character of Gertrude with any poetical beauty. There is no idea suggested by her presence but that of feebleness and vice, and as she is addressed by her son she becomes an object of utter disgust. The words in which he describes her course of life are such as make it loathsome to every sense-there is no strain of sentiment sung over her transgression. She is made the subject of unpitying contempt. The audience or the reader turns from her with a fixed aversion, not falling into the death-like trance of compassion, into the Oh lasso! Quanti dolci pensier, quanto desio Menò costoro al doloroso passo, with which Dante is subdued by the celebrated history of the fall of Francesca da Rimini. But Dante was compassionate not without reason. Francesca was the victim of fraud, and cruelty, and strong temptation; the deceived rather than the deceiver-her punishment, the second circle of the Inferno; her revenge, the sympathy of the whole civilized world. No less a sympathy has the poet obtained for her. In the space of eighteen lines hetells the story, and those eighteen lines have been translated into every European tongue. They have been read and quoted till they have been heard even where they could not be read, and the -Nessun maggior dolore, associated with that sad history, may be said to have passed into a proverb. This story is not the finest passage in Dante's work, but it is undoubtedly the most popular; for though not without some exercise of the imagination, some labour of the thought, its essentially poetical characteristics may be duly prized, it bears with it, independently of those, a sentiment and a passion, which are easy to understand. It is, then, not the admirable skill, not the exquisite combinations of the poet in his working out of this scene, that the general reader cares for. He does not pause to analyse; he simply acknowledges the sway of passion and of suffering. Many a frail and foolish woman may have entered in her diary the passionate phrases of Francesca's history without the remotest notion of their true value; and there is no doubt that the effect of the punishment upon the mind is far inferior to that of the passion; the punishment being received as fiction, and the passion recognised as truth. How far the poet is answerable for the moral influences of his work in all its bearings, is a matter of grave consideration, which it would occupy too long a space to discuss here; but it is certain that a kind of moral government is demanded by the reader, and that we require to see the condemnation of crime in the development of the poem. The poet must act as judge, and sentence his criminals, or we are left unsatisfied. He must be the Minos of his own circle. He is not required to point a moral; if he attempts that indeed he ceases to be a poet; but he is required to assume the complete dominion of the world of his own creation, and to let us feel in the final dispensation of events that he is a righteous ruler. Clytemnestra and Medea, Lady Macbeth and Gertrude, Richard, Macbeth, Othello, and Iago, must make the immediate sacrifice for their crimes to their audience; and the sacrifice must be sufficient or the sense of justice is insulted. Tennyson's Guinevere is condemned-the sentence is pronounced. She is cast down from her high estate-she is divided for ever from the object of her sinful love, and renounced by the sovereign lord whom she learns to reverence too late. She embraces the only resource left in life, and enters a convent. A severe fate for such a woman-dull, cold, monotonous-tedious nuns and petty cares. A woman whose nature could not find much delight in prayer, and whose past life must have made the fruits of meditation bitter. We are told that she made a good abbess, but soon died, and it is quite natural that she should die soon. She has no son, like Clytemnestra and Gertrude, to rise and avenge the injured father. But she has disgrace; the walls of the nunnery are not strong enough to shield her from contumely; and the sound of public opinion reaches her through the voice of a little novice at the convent. Afterwards her soul is pierced to its inmost core by the magnanimity of Arthur in the hour of his just wrath. Nothing can be finer than this scene between the two; and the figure of Arthur rises here into sig. nificance and grandeur. Let the reader pause long upon the extracts here given, upon the imperfect repentings of the Queen, the erring thought that even in the hour of 313 penance wanders back to the lawless But help me, heaven, for surely I repent. And ev'n in saying this, Her memory from old habit of the mind Went slipping back upon the golden days In which she saw him first, when Lancelot came, Ambassador, to lead her to his lord Arthur, and led her forth, and far ahead Of his and her retinue moving, they, Rapt in sweet talk or lively, all on love And sport and tilts and pleasure, (for the time Was maytime, and as yet no sin was dream'd,) Rode under groves that look'd a paradise Of blossom, over sheets of hyacinth That seem'd the heavens upbreaking thro' the earth, Beheld at noon in some delicious dale The silk pavilions of King Arthur raised But when the Queen immersed in such a trance, Her journey done, glanc'd at him, thought him cold, Thro' the long gallery from the outer doors Denouncing judgment, but tho' changed the King's. 'Liest thou here so low, the child of one And knowest thou now from whence I come-from him, Who made him knight: but many a knight was slain. Fear not thou shalt be guarded till my death. * I hold that man the worst of public foes Who either for his own or children's sake, Whom he knows false, abide and rule the house : He paused, and in the pause she crept an inch Then waiting by the doors the warhorse neigh'd 'Yet think not that I come to urge thy crimes, I did not come to curse thee, Guinevere, I, whose vast pity almost makes me die The wrath which forced my thoughts on that fierce law, Then she stretch'd out her arms and cried aloud It seems a pity to interrupt such a scene by a comment, and yet we 313 must call upon the reader to consider Gone thro' my sin to slay and to be slain ! No, nor by living can I live it down. The days will grow to weeks, the weeks to months, And mine will ever be a naine of scorn. I must not dwell on that defeat of fame. Let the world be; that is but of the world. What else? what hope? I think there was a hope, Except he mock'd me when he spake of hope; With this extract we may well conclude our notice. As we have proceeded in it, how has our labour been rewarded by an increasing delight; how has the knowledge of the poet, growing with the meditation on his pages, brought with it added sense of beauty; added love. 'Intanto voce fu per me udita; Onorate l'altissimo poeta.' Upon a noble work such should ever be the effect of an attempt at criticism, acting as the glass which directed to the heavens, wins from their far depths new revelations of moving, shining worlds unseen by the common eye. But the same glass will also show the dark spots in the sun. We have endeavoured to use our instrument of observation honestly. Just homage is not servility. Lavish and indiscriminate praise may be grateful to those who can possess little without it; but to the great poet, the most welcome reverence must be the reverence of truth. NOTES ON THE NATIONAL DRAMA OF SPAIN. CHAPTER III. PRINCIPLES. THE HE last chapter having shown some of the outlines of Spanish Comedy, we now proceed to examine what is special in its inner structure, as embodying certain peculiarities, social and and moral. That it gives a view of life widely differing from our own, has already been observed; it will presently be seen to what essential points this difference extends. It has been too much slighted by those who have hitherto written on the subject; and, as I believe, some chief errors, both of those who admire and of those who depreciate, have arisen from not sufficiently regarding it. The former are apt to forget that the sympathies they have acquired cannot be awakened at first sight in those to whom it presents the image of a strange world. The latter, finding it strange, are prone to condemn, as wild or unpleasing, what they would have found alive with spirit and sense, had they first become familiar with the relations, habits, and ideas on which it turns. On every stage, the measure of power and effect is found in conformity with the manners and notions of the time and place to which it belongs. Wherever similar con ditions prevail, everything depends on the ability of the poet; to whom the hearer listens without impediment, standing, as it were, face to face with him. The force of his conceptions, the special character of his genius and fancy, and the art with which he fashions known materials, may be enjoyed as freshly as when they first appeared. Were it thus in the present instance, difference of language alone would be no great obstacle; and we might follow the performance in the closet nearly as well as a Castilian reader, at least, of the seventeenth century. But it is not and cannot be thus. The dramatist does not only speak in a foreign language: his very thoughts, as well as the elements with which he deals, are mostly foreign to us; for every sentence he requires an interpreter. Before we can barely understand, even, we must study the complexion of his ideas: before we can enjoy, we must learn to sympathize with him. And the necessity and difficulty of the process are both in proportion to the distance that separates his world from ours. It has been urged, indeed, that this world of his never had a real prototype. We are to believe that * The all but entire omission of any express reference to what is peculiar in this respect to the Spanish drama, is the only important defect of Von Schack's excellent work. |