We need not quote any of the repulsive scene between the king and the courtesan; the unhappy daughter consents to her father's plan of vengeance, but she displays so much weakness that her sire sends her out of the way. She returns just as a hired assassin is about to murder the king, offers her innocent bosom to the knife, and saves her perjured lover by the sacrifice of her heart's blood. In the fifth act the unhappy father enters, beholds the corpse, mistakes it for the king, triumphs in his imagined vengeance, resolves to wash his hands in the blood, and stooping down, discovers his daughter. This may be regarded as the germ of the play, such as it first presented itself to the mind of the poet, and there are few who will not confess that it might form the sub Your sister a glass. ject of a noble tragedy. But the original conception was a mere possibility, the artistic skill of the poet was necessary to convert it into a probability. In almost every step of the process Victor Hugo has signally failed. His first blunder is the baptism of the characters; he names the king Francis I., a prince of many and great faults, but surely not liable to the imputation of heartlessness. But what is far worse, indeed almost inconceivable, he makes the noble father, the very model of paternal love, to be none other than Triboulet, the Court Jester, the pander to his master's lusts, the villain that most frequently stimulated the monarch's desires, and prompted his debauchery. Let us look at one of the scenes between this Roman father and his sovereign. TRIBOULET. What! make love in the city? KING. And why not? TRIBOULET. Have a care, Of husbands and wives in the city, beware! If he makes any noise, send him out of the land— Of his fate there is no one will dare to complain, When we'll swear that he plotted with Rome or with Spain. Whose mountain back might well be said is a court-jester, wearing a chain like a But the author has a right to be heard in his own defence, and he must state his own conception of Triboulet. "Triboulet is deformed, he is sickly, he is the buffoon of the court, and this triple misery renders him depraved. Triboulet hates the king, because he is a king; the lords, because they are lords; and all mankind, because all men have not humped backs. His only delight is constantly to knock the king and the lords against each other, breaking the weaker against the stronger. He depraves, corrupts, and brutalizes the king; he urges him to tyranny, to ignorance, to vice: he lets him loose against every noble family, incessantly pointing out to him a wife to seduce, a sister to steal, a daughter to dishonour. The king, in Triboulet's hands, is but the Punch of a puppet-show, breaking every doll against which his force is directed by the juggler behind the curtain. One day, in the midst of a feast, at the very moment when Triboulet is urging the king to carry off the Countess de Cossè, M. de St. Vallier forces his way into the king's presence, and sternly reproaches him for the dishonour of his daughter Diana de Poitiers. Triboulet rallies and insults the hapless complainant. The father raises his arm and pronounces a malediction on Triboulet. From this the entire action of the drama is derived. The true subject of the drama is the curse of St. Vallier." The existence of such a monster of depravity as Victor Hugo describes, is barely possible; but we doubt whether the most licentious buffoon of the most licentious court would, under the circumstances, have insulted St. Vallier as Triboulet is described to have done. A short specimen will suffice. The charge of his answer, my liege, let me claim, (turns to St. Vallier, and continues in a pompous theatrical tone.) My lord; you were guilty of treason, your head Was forfeit to law, the just sentence was said, But your merciful monarch restor'd you to life; So far good. Now, what causes this rage and this strife? Have you lost all your sense, are you mad, are you wild, To wish for a grandson, your son-in-law's child? Your son-in-law's frightful, misshapen, ill-made, Of his visage no painter could tell you the tints, Pale, yellow, and brown; it is said too he squints: He's pot-bellied, just like my friend whom you see (points to M. Cossè), Were your daughter once seen with such man by her side, The world would yourself and your daughter deride; It was merely through kindness to check this appearance, That led our good king to make his interference. He felt quite reluctant your grandsons should be, In the front like to him (pointing to Cossè), in the back like to me. Every mortal who saw them; you're rid of that stock; We say that this ribaldry is extravagant and unnatural; but whatever doubt may be on that point, we are sure that every one will be persuaded that the utterer of such scurril jest could not himself be a tender father, jealous almost to insanity of his daughter's honour; guarding her purity with a watchful zeal, such as the most sublime virtue alone could inspire. But Victor Hugo does not even suspect this incongruity; he exaggerates the virtue as he had exaggerated the vice, and ascribes to the miserable jester a poetic and profound melancholy such as can only be rivalled in the Thoughts of Pascal and the poems of Byron. Blanche is a more perfect character, though her sorrow for the seduction is blended with too large a portion of love for the seducer. It is easy to conceive that despair might drive her to wish for death, because there is no longer any thing left for which she can dare to hope. But assuredly it is going too far to represent her purposely placing herself in the assassin's path, and sacrificing life to save the author of her wrongs. We think that most of our readers will agree with us after this brief analysis of Victor Hugo's most celebrated drama, that he has violated the truth of humanity as flagrantly as he confesses that he has outraged the truth of history. He has made his work purely a creation of fancy; his fictions are generalisations of his own thoughts, not of realities, and great as is their power, they are necessarily destitute of verisimilitude. There is one redeeming characteristic of the drama we have contemplated which formed no part of the original conception, but which becomes evolved in the development; it is the transforming power of one noble sentiment. While we read the father's tender effusions, we feel as if paternal love had rendered the hunch-back lovely and the miscreant noble. We venture to translate a part of Triboulet's address to the senseless body, after he has recognised his child. (Triboulet takes the body in his arms as a mother holds an infant, and turns to the bystanders). (Takes a napkin from one of the spectators.) I have murder'd my child—I have murder'd my child. It was manifestly an after-thought that led Victor Hugo to rest his defence of this drama on the purifying influences of paternal love; but the idea once presented to his imagination, held its sway and sug gested a still more singular drama. Victor Hugo resolved to display maternal tenderness, redeeming and ennobling the most atrocious crimes, the most consummate turpitude. We need not enter into the general question of examining how far a drama can be legitimately applied to the solution of a psychological problem, but assuredly neither the subject of Lucretia Borgia, nor the manner in which it is treated, are calculated to inspire us with any favourable impressions of the author's artistic skill. A heroine polluted by incest, murder, adultery, encircled by an atmosphere of depravity, to whom crime is as necessary as food, retains the feelings of a mother: it is possible, for the tigress loves her cubs; but is scarcely within the limits of credibility, that the object of her affection should be the offspring of incestuous intercourse, the living witness of the most revolting crime in nature; and it is utterly impossible that her affection should be of that holy and pure nature which alone is worthy of poetry. We might have endured the moral anomalies of Victor Hugo's earlier plays; it is possible that the bandit Hernani may have preserved the chivalrous feelings of a Spanish noble, and that the courtesan Marion de l'Orme may be capable of pure love; but it is utterly impossible that Lucretia Borgia should have room in her polluted soul for any feeling that could interest humanity. It was a flagrant error to make such a moral monster the heroine of a drama. What would be said of the sculptor that sought his models in the charnel or the lazar house, that wrought representations of revolting decay, or still more revolting deformity, to shew that there was some single minute feature in the human frame which resisted the disgusting effects of death or pestilence? But Hugo has gone beyond this: never was there in life or in death any thing more shocking, more horrifying, and more sickening than his portraiture of Lucretia Borgia; and the attempt to relieve the picture by traits of maternal love merely superadds incredulity to disgust. Yet it was received with applause on the very stage whence Hernani and Marion de l'Orme had been hissed and hooted: such is the influence of perseverance in producing the toleration of splendid error. Victor Hugo has told us the secret of the peculiarities of Lucretia Borgia; it is simply the development of an idea of his own consciousness-maternal love in a vicious bosom-the characters have derived nothing from history but their baptism, and he demands that they should be tried, not by the conventional standard of any stage of society, but by the general laws of human nature. The demand is unfair; but even if we yield to it, what law of nature would justify maternal love redeeming not one vice, but every crime which the tongue can speak or the mind conceive? We have not room to enter into any analysis of Angelo, the tyrant of Padua ; it is, in fact, a mere revival of Hernani and Marion de l'Orme; there are a scoundrel and a courtesan, each with a single virtue, pictures undoubtedly from the dark room and imperfect glass, creatures of Hugo's imagination, whose archetypes could not be found in the world of reality. But our old acquaintance, Bloody Queen Mary, must not be dismissed so summarily; she is made the heroine of a drama, or rather she is made the form in which the author developes one of the most whimsical ideas of his consciousness. The psychological discovery which the drama was formed to propound, is contained in the following speech of Lemon Renard :— 66 My Lord Chandos, when a woman is our ruler, caprice is our ruler. Politics are regulated, not by calculation, but chance. We are no longer able to count upon any thing. To-morrow will not be a logical inference from to-day. Affairs of state cease to be a game of chess, and become a game of cards." Now while we deny that this aphorism can be received either as an absolute or general truth, we assert, that if the entire annals of history were searched for a refutation, no more striking instance could be found than Mary Tudor. She was not capricious, but as steady a bigot as ever the church of Rome produced, and as inflexible a despot as either her father or sister. The politics of her reign might have been calculated on from the outset with more certainty than Finlayson's long annuities. The politicians of her day could count upon every thing. The to-morrow of her time might be read in the yesterday; and the affairs of state were only a game of cards, because the chief player could sauter la coupe and hold all the honours. This drama is, indeed, Victor Hugo's most flagrant sin against historical verity; his partisans tell us that he had a right to baptize his own idea, but we say that by such baptism he did by implication"promise |