Biographia Literaria
“Off! ye are men--there’s poison in your touch.
But I must yield, for this” (what?) “hath left me strengthless.”
So end the three first scenes. In the next (the Castle of St.
Aldobrand,) we find the servants there equally frightened with this
unearthly storm, though wherein it differed from other violent storms we
are not told, except that Hugo informs us, page 9--
“PIET.--Hugo, well met. Does e’en thy age bear
Memory of so terrible a storm?
HUGO.--They have been frequent lately.
PIET.--They are ever so in Sicily.
HUGO.--So it is said. But storms when I was young
Would still pass o’er like Nature’s fitful fevers,
And rendered all more wholesome. Now their rage,
Sent thus unseasonable and profitless,
Speaks like the threats of heaven.”
A most perplexing theory of Sicilian storms is this of old Hugo! and
what is very remarkable, not apparently founded on any great familiarity
of his own with this troublesome article. For when Pietro asserts the
“ever more frequency” of tempests in Sicily, the old man professes to
know nothing more of the fact, but by hearsay. “So it is said.”--But why
he assumed this storm to be unseasonable, and on what he grounded
his prophecy, (for the storm is still in full fury), that it would be
profitless, and without the physical powers common to all other violent
sea-winds in purifying the atmosphere, we are left in the dark; as
well concerning the particular points in which he knew it, during its
continuance, to differ from those that he had been acquainted with in
his youth. We are at length introduced to the Lady Imogine, who,
we learn, had not rested “through” the night; not on account of the
tempest, for
“Long ere the storm arose, her restless gestures
Forbade all hope to see her blest with sleep.”
Sitting at a table, and looking at a portrait, she informs us--First,
that portrait-painters may make a portrait from memory,
“The limner’s art may trace the absent feature.”
For surely these words could never mean, that a painter may have a
person sit to him who afterwards may leave the room or perhaps the
country? Secondly, that a portrait-painter can enable a mourning lady
to possess a good likeness of her absent lover, but that the
portrait-painter cannot, and who shall--
“Restore the scenes in which they met and parted?”
The natural answer would have been--Why the scene-painter to be sure!
But this unreasonable lady requires in addition sundry things to be
painted that have neither lines nor colours--
“The thoughts, the recollections, sweet and bitter,
Or the Elysian dreams of lovers when they loved.”
Which last sentence must be supposed to mean; when they were present,
and making love to each other.--Then, if this portrait could speak, it
would “acquit the faith of womankind.” How? Had she remained constant?
No, she has been married to another man, whose wife she now is. How
then? Why, that, in spite of her marriage vow, she had continued to
yearn and crave for her former lover--
“This has her body, that her mind:
Which has the better bargain?”
The lover, however, was not contented with this precious arrangement, as
we shall soon find. The lady proceeds to inform us that during the many
years of their separation, there have happened in the different parts of
the world, a number of “such things;” even such, as in a course of
years always have, and till the Millennium, doubtless always will happen
somewhere or other. Yet this passage, both in language and in metre, is
perhaps amongst the best parts of the play. The lady’s love companion
and most esteemed attendant, Clotilda, now enters and explains this love
and esteem by proving herself a most passive and dispassionate listener,
as well as a brief and lucky querist, who asks by chance, questions that
we should have thought made for the very sake of the answers. In short,
she very much reminds us of those puppet-heroines, for whom the
showman contrives to dialogue without any skill in ventriloquism. This,
notwithstanding, is the best scene in the Play, and though crowded with
solecisms, corrupt diction, and offences against metre, would possess
merits sufficient to out-weigh them, if we could suspend the moral
sense during the perusal. It tells well and passionately the preliminary
circumstances, and thus overcomes the main difficulty of most first
acts, to wit, that of retrospective narration. It tells us of her having
been honourably addressed by a noble youth, of rank and fortune vastly
superior to her own: of their mutual love, heightened on her part
by gratitude; of his loss of his sovereign’s favour; his disgrace;
attainder; and flight; that he (thus degraded) sank into a vile ruffian,
the chieftain of a murderous banditti; and that from the habitual
indulgence of the most reprobate habits and ferocious passions, he had
become so changed, even in appearance, and features,
“That she who bore him had recoiled from him,
Nor known the alien visage of her child,
Yet still she (Imogine) lov’d him.”
She is compelled by the silent entreaties of a father, perishing with
“bitter shameful want on the cold earth,” to give her hand, with a heart
thus irrecoverably pre-engaged, to Lord Aldobrand, the enemy of her
lover, even to the very man who had baffled his ambitious schemes, and
was, at the present time, entrusted with the execution of the sentence
of death which had been passed on Bertram. Now, the proof of “woman’s
love,” so industriously held forth for the sympathy, if not for the
esteem of the audience, consists in this, that, though Bertram had
become a robber and a murderer by trade, a ruffian in manners, yea, with
form and features at which his own mother could not but “recoil,” yet
she (Lady Imogine) “the wife of a most noble, honoured Lord,” estimable
as a man, exemplary and affectionate as a husband, and the fond father
of her only child--that she, notwithstanding all this, striking her
heart, dares to say to it--
“But thou art Bertram’s still, and Bertram’s ever.”
A Monk now enters, and entreats in his Prior’s name for the wonted
hospitality, and “free noble usage” of the Castle of St. Aldobrand for
some wretched shipwrecked souls, and from this we learn, for the
first time, to our infinite surprise, that notwithstanding the
supernaturalness of the storm aforesaid, not only Bertram, but the whole
of his gang, had been saved, by what means we are left to conjecture,
and can only conclude that they had all the same desperate swimming
powers, and the same saving destiny as the hero, Bertram himself. So
ends the first act, and with it the tale of the events, both those with
which the tragedy begins, and those which had occurred previous to
the date of its commencement. The second displays Bertram in disturbed
sleep, which the Prior, who hangs over him, prefers calling a “starting
trance,” and with a strained voice, that would have awakened one of the
seven sleepers, observes to the audience--
“How the lip works! How the bare teeth do grind!
And beaded drops course [81] down his writhen brow!”
The dramatic effect of which passage we not only concede to the admirers
of this tragedy, but acknowledge the further advantages of preparing the
audience for the most surprising series of wry faces, proflated mouths,
and lunatic gestures that were ever “launched” on an audience to “sear
the sense.” [82]
“PRIOR.--I will awake him from this horrid trance. This is no
natural sleep! Ho, wake thee, stranger!”
This is rather a whimsical application of the verb reflex we must
confess, though we remember a similar transfer of the agent to the
patient in a manuscript tragedy, in which the Bertram of the piece,
prostrating a man with a single blow of his fist, exclaims--“Knock me
thee down, then ask thee if thou liv’st.” Well; the stranger obeys, and
whatever his sleep might have been, his waking was perfectly natural;
for lethargy itself could not withstand the scolding Stentorship of
Mr. Holland, the Prior. We next learn from the best authority, his own
confession, that the misanthropic hero, whose destiny was incompatible
with drowning, is Count Bertram, who not only reveals his past fortunes,
but avows with open atrocity, his Satanic hatred of Imogine’s lord, and
his frantick thirst of revenge; and so the raving character raves, and
the scolding character scolds--and what else? Does not the Prior act?
Does he not send for a posse of constables or thief-takers to handcuff
the villain, or take him either to Bedlam or Newgate? Nothing of the
kind; the author preserves the unity of character, and the scolding
Prior from first to last does nothing but scold, with the exception
indeed of the last scene of the last act, in which, with a most
surprising revolution, he whines, weeps, and kneels to the condemned
blaspheming assassin out of pure affection to the high-hearted man, the
sublimity of whose angel-sin rivals the star-bright apostate, (that
is, who was as proud as Lucifer, and as wicked as the Devil), and, “had
thrilled him,” (Prior Holland aforesaid), with wild admiration.
Accordingly in the very next scene, we have this tragic Macheath, with
his whole gang, in the Castle of St. Aldobrand, without any attempt
on the Prior’s part either to prevent him, or to put the mistress and
servants of the Castle on their guard against their new inmates; though
he (the Prior) knew, and confesses that he knew, that Bertram’s “fearful
mates” were assassins so habituated and naturalized to guilt, that--
“When their drenched hold forsook both gold and gear,
They griped their daggers with a murderer’s instinct;”
and though he also knew, that Bertram was the leader of a band whose
trade was blood. To the Castle however he goes, thus with the holy
Prior’s consent, if not with his assistance; and thither let us follow
him.
No sooner is our hero safely housed in the Castle of St. Aldobrand, than
he attracts the notice of the lady and her confidante, by his “wild and
terrible dark eyes,” “muffled form,” “fearful form,” [83] “darkly wild,”
“proudly stern,” and the like common-place indefinites, seasoned by
merely verbal antitheses, and at best, copied with very slight change,
from the Conrade of Southey’s JOAN OF ARC. The lady Imogine, who has
been, (as is the case, she tells us, with all soft and solemn spirits,)
worshipping the moon on a terrace or rampart within view of the Castle,
insists on having an interview with our hero, and this too tete-a-tete.
Would the reader learn why and wherefore the confidante is excluded, who
very properly remonstrates against such “conference, alone, at night,
with one who bears such fearful form;” the reason follows--“why,
therefore send him!” I say, follows, because the next line, “all things
of fear have lost their power over me,” is separated from the former
by a break or pause, and besides that it is a very poor answer to the
danger, is no answer at all to the gross indelicacy of this wilful
exposure. We must therefore regard it as a mere after-thought, that a
little softens the rudeness, but adds nothing to the weight, of that
exquisite woman’s reason aforesaid. And so exit Clotilda and enter
Bertram, who “stands without looking at her,” that is, with his lower
limbs forked, his arms akimbo, his side to the lady’s front, the whole
figure resembling an inverted Y. He is soon however roused from the
state surly to the state frantick, and then follow raving, yelling,
cursing, she fainting, he relenting, in runs Imogine’s child, squeaks
“mother!” He snatches it up, and with a “God bless thee, child! Bertram
has kissed thy child,”--the curtain drops. The third act is short, and
short be our account of it. It introduces Lord St. Aldobrand on his road