He fancies himself on the battlefield, and already passion carries him away. Such a man is not one to govern men; we cannot master fortune until we have mastered ourselves; this man is only made to belie and destroy himself, and to be veered round alternately by every passion. As soon as he believes Cleopatra faithful, honour, reputation, empires, everything vanishes: 'Ventidius. And what's this toy, In balance with your fortune, honour, fame? Antony. What is't, Ventidius? it outweighs them all. Why, we have more than conquer'd Cæsar now. My queen's not only innocent, but loves me. . . . Down on thy knees, blasphemer as thou art, And ask forgiveness of wrong'd innocence! Ventidius. I'll rather die than take it. Will you go? Antony. Go! Whither? Go from all that's excellent! ... Give, you gods, Give to your boy, your Cæsar, This rattle of a globe to play withal, This gewgaw world; and put him cheaply off: I'll not be pleased with less than Cleopatra.' 2 Dejection follows excess; these souls are only tempered against fear; their courage is but that of the bull and the lion; to be fully themselves, they need bodily action, visible danger; their temperament sustains them; before great moral sufferings they give way. When Antony thinks himself deceived, he despairs, and has nothing left but to die: 'Let him (Cæsar) walk Alone upon't. I'm weary of my part. My torch is out; and the world stands before me, Like a black desert at the approach of night; I'll lay me down, and stray no farther on.' 13 Such verses remind us of Othello's gloomy dreams, of Macbeth, of Hamlet's even; beyond the pile of swelling tirades and characters of painted cardboard, it is as though the poet had touched the ancient drama, and brought its emotion away with him. 1 All for Love, 1. 1. 2 Ibid. 2. 1, end. 3 Ibid. 5. 1. adventurer, By his side another also has felt it, a young man, a poor by turns a student, actor, officer, always wild and always poor, who lived madly and sadly in excess and misery, like the old dramatists, with their inspiration, their fire, and who died at the age of thirty-four, according to some of a fever caused by fatigue, according to others of a prolonged fast, at the end of which he swallowed too quickly a morsel of bread bestowed on him in charity. Through the pompous cloak of the new rhetoric, Thomas Otway now and then reached the passions of the other age. It is plain that the times he lived in marred him, that the oratorical style, the literary phrases, the classical declamation, the wellpoised antitheses, buzzed about him, and drowned his note in their sustained and monotonous hum. Had he but been born a hundred years earlier! In his Orphan and Venice Preserved we encounter the sombre imaginations of Webster, Ford, and Shakspeare, their gloomy idea of life, their atrocities, murders, pictures of irresistible passions, which riot blindly like a herd of savage beasts, and make a chaos of the battlefield, with their yells and tumult, leaving behind them but devastation and heaps of dead. Like Shakspeare, his events are human transports and furies-a brother violating his brother's wife, a husband perjuring himself for his wife; Polydore, Chamont, Jaffier, weak and violent souls, the sport of chance, the prey of temptation, with whom transport or crime, like poison poured into the veins, gradually ascends, envenoms the whole man, is spread on all whom he touches, and contorts and casts them down together in a convulsive delirium. Like Shakspeare, he has found poignant and living words,' which lay bare the depths of humanity, the strange noise of a machine which is getting out of order, the tension of the will stretched to breaking-point, the simplicity of real sacrifice, the humility of exasperated and craving passion, which longs to the end and against all hope for its fuel and its gratification. Like Shakspeare, he has conceived genuine women,— 3 1 Monimia says, in the Orphan (5, end), when dying, 'How my head swims! "Tis very dark; good night.' 2 See the death of Pierre and Jaffier in Venice Preserved (5, last scene). Pierre, stabbed once, bursts into a laugh. 3'Jaffier. Oh, that my arms were rivetted Thus round thee ever! But my friends, my oath! Belvidera. Another, sure another (Kisses her.) For that poor little one you've ta'en such care of; There is jealousy in this last word. 4 'Oh, thou art tender all, Gentle and kind, as sympathizing nature, I'll ever live your most obedient wife, Nor ever any privilege pretend Beyond your will.'—Orphan, 4. 1. Monimia, above all Belvidera, who, like Imogen, has given herself wholly, and is lost as in an abyss of adoration for him whom she has chosen, who can but love, obey, weep, suffer, and who dies like a flower plucked from the stalk, when her arms are torn from the neck around which she has locked them. Like Shakspeare again, he has found, at least once, the large bitter buffoonery, the crude sentiment of human baseness; and he has introduced into his most painful tragedy, an obscene caricature, an old senator, who unbends from his official gravity in order to play at his mistress' house the clown or the valet. How bitter! how true was his conception, in making the busy man eager to leave his robes and his ceremonies! how ready the man is to abase himself, when, escaped from his part, he comes to his real self! how the ape and the dog crop out of him! The senator Antonio comes to his Aquilina, who insults him; he is amused; hard words relieve other compliments; he minces, runs into a falsetto like a zany at a country fair: 'Antonio. Nacky, Nacky, Nacky,-how dost do, Nacky? Hurry, durry. I am come, little Nacky. Past eleven o'clock, a late hour; time in all conscience to go to bed, Nacky.-Nacky did I say? Ay, Nacky, Aquilina, lina, lina, quilina; Aquilina, Naquilina, Acky, Nacky, queen Nacky.-Come, let's to bed. -You fubbs, you pug you-You little puss.-Purree tuzzy—I am a senator. Aquilina. You are a fool, I am sure. Antonio. May be so too, sweet-heart. Never the worse senator for all that. Come, Nacky, Nacky; let's have a game at romp, Nacky!... You won't sit down? Then look you now; suppose me a bull, a Basan-bull, the bull of bulls, or any bull. Thus up I get, and with my brows thus bent-I broo; I say I broo, I broo, I broo. You won't sit down, will you-I broo. . . . Now, I'll be a senator again, and thy lover, little Nicky, Nacky. Ah, toad, toad, toad, toad, spit in my face a little, Nacky; spit in my face, pry'thee, spit in my face, never so little ; spit but a little bit,—spit, spit, spit, spit when you are bid, I say; do pry’thee, spit.-Now, now spit. What, you won't spit, will you? Then I'll be a dog. Aquilina. A dog, my lord! Antonio. Ay, a dog, and I'll give thee this t'other purse to let me be a dogand to use me like a dog a little. Hurry durry, I will-here 'tis. (Gives the purse.)... Now bough waugh waugh, bough, waugh. Aquilina. Hold, hold, sir. If curs bite, they must be kicked, sir. Do you see, kicked thus ? Antonio. Ay, with all my heart. Do, kick, kick on, now I am under the table, kick again,-kick harder-harder yet-bough, waugh, waugh, bough.—Odd, I'll have a snap at thy shins.-Bough, waugh, waugh, waugh, bough—odd, she kicks bravely.' At last she takes a whip, thrashes him soundly, and turns him out of the house. He will return, you may be sure; it has been a pleasant night for him; he rubs his back, but he was amused. In fine, he was but a clown who had missed his vocation, whom chance has given an 1 Venice Preserved, 3. 1. Antonio is meant as a copy of the 'celebrated Earl of Shaftesbury, the lewdness of whose latter years,' says Mr. Thornton in his edition of Otway's Works, 3 vols. 1815, was a subject of general notoriety.'--TR. embroidered silk gown, and who turns out at so much an hour political harlequinades. He feels more natural, more at his ease, playing Punch than aping a statesman. These are but gleams: for the most part Otway is a poet of his time, dull and forced in colour; buried, like the rest, in the heavy, grey, clouded atmosphere, half English, half French, in which the bright lights brought over from France, are snuffed out by the insular fogs. He is a man of his time; like the rest, he writes obscene comedies, The Soldier's Fortune, The Atheist, Friendship in Fashion. He depicts coarse and vicious cavaliers, rogues on principle, as harsh and corrupt as those of Wycherley: Beaugard, who vaunts and practises the maxims of Hobbes; the father, an old, corrupt rascal, who brags of his morality, and whom his son coldly sends to the dogs with a bag of crowns: Sir Jolly Jumble, a kind of base Falstaff, a pander by profession, whom the courtesans call 'papa, daddy,' who, if he sits but at the table with one, he'll be making nasty figures in the napkins:' Sir Davy Dunce, a disgusting animal, who has such a breath, one kiss of him were enough to cure the fits of the mother; 'tis worse than assafœtida. Clean linen, he says, is unwholesome . . . ; he is continually eating of garlic, and chewing tobacco:'2 Polydore, who, enamoured of his father's ward, tries to force her in the first scene, envies the brutes, and makes up his mind to imitate them on the next occasion. Even his heroines he defiles. Truly this society sickens us. They thought 1 The Soldier's Fortune, 1. 1. 3Who'd be that sordid foolish thing called man, It shall be so, I'll yet possess my love, Wait on, and watch her loose unguarded hours: 2 Ibid. Then, when her roving thoughts have been abroad, And brought in wanton wishes to her heart; I' th' very minute when her virtue nods, I'll rush upon her in a storm of love, Beat down her guard of honour all before me, Surfeit on joys, till ev'n desire grow sick; Then by long absence liberty regain, And quite forget the pleasure and the pain.'-The Orphan, 1. 1. It is impossible to see together more moral roguery and literary correctness. 4 Page (to Monimia). In the morning when you call me to you, And by your bed I stand and tell you stories, I am ashamed to see your swelling breasts; It makes me blush, they are so very white. Monimia. Oh men, for flatt'ry and deceit renown'd!' -The Orphan, 1. 1. to cover all their filth with fine correct metaphors, neatly ended poetical periods, a garment of harmonious phrases and noble expressions. They thought to equal Racine by counterfeiting his style. They did not know that in this style visible elegance conceals an admirable justness; that if it is a masterpiece of art, it is also a picture of manners; that the most refined and accomplished in society alone could speak and understand it; that it paints a civilisation, as Shakspeare's does; that each of these lines, which appear so restricted, has its inflection and artifice; that all passions, and every shade of passion, are expressed in them,— not, it is true, wild and entire, as in Shakspeare, but pared down and refined by courtly life; that this is a spectacle as unique as the other; that nature perfectly polished is as complex and as difficult to understand as nature perfectly intact; that as for them, they were as far below the one as above the other; and that, in short, their characters are as much like Racine's as the porter of Mons. de Beauvilliers or the cook of Madame de Sévigné are like Madame de Sévigné or Mons. de Beauvilliers.1 VI. Let us then leave this drama in the obscurity which it deserves, and seek elsewhere, in studied writings, for a happier employment of a fuller talent. This is the true domain of Dryden and of classical reason: :2 pamphlets and dissertations in verse, letters, satires, translations and imitations, this is the field on which logical faculties and the art of writing find their best occupation. Before descending into it, and observing their work, it will be as well to study more closely the man who so wielded them. His was a singularly solid and judicious mind, an excellent reasoner, accustomed to discriminate his ideas, armed with good long-meditated proofs, strong in discussion, asserting principles, establishing his subdivisions, citing authorities, drawing inferences; so that, if we read his prefaces without reading his dramas, we might take him for one of the masters of the dramatic art. He naturally attains a definite prose style; his ideas are unfolded with breadth and clearness; his style is well moulded, exact and simple, free from the affectations and ornaments with which Pope afterwards burdened his own; his expression is, like that of Corneille, ample and periodic, by virtue simply of the internal argumentativeness which unfolds and sustains it. We can see 1 Burns said, after his arrival in Edinburgh, 'Between the man of rustic life and the polite world, I observed little difference. . . . But a refined and accom. plished woman was a being altogether new to me, and of which I had formed but a very inadequate idea.'-(Burns' Works, ed. Cunningham, 1832, 8 vols., i. 207.) * Dryden says, in his Essay on Satire, xiii. 30, 'the stage to which my genius never much inclined me.' |