Biographia Literaria
homeward, and next Imogine in the convent, confessing the foulness of
her heart to the Prior, who first indulges his old humour with a fit
of senseless scolding, then leaves her alone with her ruffian paramour,
with whom she makes at once an infamous appointment, and the curtain
drops, that it may be carried into act and consummation.
I want words to describe the mingled horror and disgust with which I
witnessed the opening of the fourth act, considering it as a melancholy
proof of the depravation of the public mind. The shocking spirit of
jacobinism seemed no longer confined to politics. The familiarity with
atrocious events and characters appeared to have poisoned the taste,
even where it had not directly disorganized the moral principles, and
left the feelings callous to all the mild appeals, and craving alone for
the grossest and most outrageous stimulants. The very fact then present
to our senses, that a British audience could remain passive under such
an insult to common decency, nay, receive with a thunder of applause, a
human being supposed to have come reeking from the consummation of this
complex foulness and baseness, these and the like reflections so pressed
as with the weight of lead upon my heart, that actor, author, and
tragedy would have been forgotten, had it not been for a plain elderly
man sitting beside me, who, with a very serious face, that at once
expressed surprise and aversion, touched my elbow, and, pointing to
the actor, said to me in a half-whisper--“Do you see that little fellow
there? he has just been committing adultery!” Somewhat relieved by the
laugh which this droll address occasioned, I forced back my attention
to the stage sufficiently to learn, that Bertram is recovered from a
transient fit of remorse by the information, that St. Aldobrand was
commissioned (to do, what every honest man must have done without
commission, if he did his duty) to seize him and deliver him to the
just vengeance of the law; an information which, (as he had long known
himself to be an attainted traitor and proclaimed outlaw, and not only
a trader in blood himself, but notoriously the Captain of a gang of
thieves, pirates, and assassins), assuredly could not have been new to
him. It is this, however, which alone and instantly restores him to
his accustomed state of raving, blasphemy, and nonsense. Next follows
Imogine’s constrained interview with her injured husband, and his sudden
departure again, all in love and kindness, in order to attend the feast
of St. Anselm at the convent. This was, it must be owned, a very strange
engagement for so tender a husband to make within a few minutes after so
long an absence. But first his lady has told him that she has “a vow
on her,” and wishes “that black perdition may gulf her perjured
soul,”--(Note: she is lying at the very time)--if she ascends his bed,
till her penance is accomplished. How, therefore, is the poor husband to
amuse himself in this interval of her penance? But do not be distressed,
reader, on account of the St. Aldobrand’s absence! As the author has
contrived to send him out of the house, when a husband would be in his,
and the lover’s way, so he will doubtless not be at a loss to bring him
back again as soon as he is wanted. Well! the husband gone in on the one
side, out pops the lover from the other, and for the fiendish purpose of
harrowing up the soul of his wretched accomplice in guilt, by announcing
to her, with most brutal and blasphemous execrations, his fixed and
deliberate resolve to assassinate her husband; all this too is for no
discoverable purpose on the part of the author, but that of introducing
a series of super-tragic starts, pauses, screams, struggling,
dagger-throwing, falling on the ground, starting up again wildly,
swearing, outcries for help, falling again on the ground, rising again,
faintly tottering towards the door, and, to end the scene, a most
convenient fainting fit of our lady’s, just in time to give Bertram an
opportunity of seeking the object of his hatred, before she alarms the
house, which indeed she has had full time to have done before, but that
the author rather chose she should amuse herself and the audience by the
above-described ravings and startings. She recovers slowly, and to her
enter, Clotilda, the confidante and mother confessor; then commences,
what in theatrical language is called the madness, but which the author
more accurately entitles, delirium, it appearing indeed a sort of
intermittent fever with fits of lightheadedness off and on, whenever
occasion and stage effect happen to call for it. A convenient return
of the storm, (we told the reader before-hand how it would be), had
changed--
“The rivulet, that bathed the convent walls,
Into a foaming flood: upon its brink
The Lord and his small train do stand appalled.
With torch and bell from their high battlements
The monks do summon to the pass in vain;
He must return to-night.”
Talk of the Devil, and his horns appear, says the proverb and sure
enough, within ten lines of the exit of the messenger, sent to stop him,
the arrival of Lord St. Aldobrand is announced. Bertram’s ruffian band
now enter, and range themselves across the stage, giving fresh cause for
Imogine’s screams and madness. St. Aldobrand, having received his mortal
wound behind the scenes, totters in to welter in his blood, and to die
at the feet of this double-damned adultress.
Of her, as far as she is concerned in this fourth act, we have two
additional points to notice: first, the low cunning and Jesuitical trick
with which she deludes her husband into words of forgiveness, which he
himself does not understand; and secondly, that everywhere she is made
the object of interest and sympathy, and it is not the author’s fault,
if, at any moment, she excites feelings less gentle, than those we are
accustomed to associate with the self-accusations of a sincere religious
penitent. And did a British audience endure all this?--They received
it with plaudits, which, but for the rivalry of the carts and hackney
coaches, might have disturbed the evening-prayers of the scanty week
day congregation at St. Paul’s cathedral.
Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.
Of the fifth act, the only thing noticeable, (for rant and nonsense,
though abundant as ever, have long before the last act become things of
course,) is the profane representation of the high altar in a chapel,
with all the vessels and other preparations for the holy sacrament. A
hymn is actually sung on the stage by the chorister boys! For the
rest, Imogine, who now and then talks deliriously, but who is always
light-headed as far as her gown and hair can make her so, wanders about
in dark woods with cavern-rocks and precipices in the back-scene; and a
number of mute dramatis personae move in and out continually, for
whose presence, there is always at least this reason, that they afford
something to be seen, by that very large part of a Drury Lane audience
who have small chance of hearing a word. She had, it appears, taken her
child with her, but what becomes of the child, whether she murdered
it or not, nobody can tell, nobody can learn; it was a riddle at the
representation, and after a most attentive perusal of the Play, a riddle
it remains.
“No more I know, I wish I did,
And I would tell it all to you;
For what became of this poor child
There’s none that ever knew.”
Our whole information [84] is derived from the following words--
“PRIOR.--Where is thy child?
CLOTIL.--(Pointing to the cavern into which she has looked)
Oh he lies cold within his cavern-tomb!
Why dost thou urge her with the horrid theme?
PRIOR.--(who will not, the reader may observe, be disappointed of
his dose of scolding)
It was to make (query wake) one living cord o’ th’ heart,
And I will try, tho’ my own breaks at it.
Where is thy child?
IMOG.--(with a frantic laugh) The forest fiend hath snatched him--
He (who? the fiend or the child?) rides the night-mare thro’ the
wizard woods.”
Now these two lines consist in a senseless plagiarism from the
counterfeited madness of Edgar in Lear, who, in imitation of the
gypsy incantations, puns on the old word mair, a hag; and the no less
senseless adoption of Dryden’s forest fiend, and the wisard stream by
which Milton, in his Lycidas, so finely characterizes the spreading
Deva, fabulosus amnis. Observe too these images stand unique in the
speeches of Imogine, without the slightest resemblance to anything she
says before or after. But we are weary. The characters in this act
frisk about, here, there, and every where, as teasingly as the Jack
o’ Lantern-lights which mischievous boys, from across a narrow street,
throw with a looking-glass on the faces of their opposite neighbours.
Bertram disarmed, outheroding Charles de Moor in the Robbers, befaces
the collected knights of St. Anselm, (all in complete armour) and so, by
pure dint of black looks, he outdares them into passive poltroons. The
sudden revolution in the Prior’s manners we have before noticed, and
it is indeed so outre, that a number of the audience imagined a great
secret was to come out, viz.: that the Prior was one of the many
instances of a youthful sinner metamorphosed into an old scold, and that
this Bertram would appear at last to be his son. Imogine re-appears at
the convent, and dies of her own accord. Bertram stabs himself, and dies
by her side, and that the play may conclude as it began, to wit, in
a superfetation of blasphemy upon nonsense, because he had snatched
a sword from a despicable coward, who retreats in terror when it is
pointed towards him in sport; this felo de se, and thief-captain--this
loathsome and leprous confluence of robbery, adultery, murder, and
cowardly assassination,--this monster, whose best deed is, the having
saved his betters from the degradation of hanging him, by turning Jack
Ketch to himself; first recommends the charitable Monks and holy Prior
to pray for his soul, and then has the folly and impudence to exclaim--
“I die no felon’s death,
A warriour’s weapon freed a warriour’s soul!”
CHAPTER XXIV
CONCLUSION
It sometimes happens that we are punished for our faults by incidents,
in the causation of which these faults had no share: and this I have
always felt the severest punishment. The wound indeed is of the same
dimensions; but the edges are jagged, and there is a dull underpain
that survives the smart which it had aggravated. For there is always a
consolatory feeling that accompanies the sense of a proportion between
antecedents and consequents. The sense of Before and After becomes both
intelligible and intellectual when, and only when, we contemplate the
succession in the relations of Cause and Effect, which, like the two
poles of the magnet manifest the being and unity of the one power by
relative opposites, and give, as it were, a substratum of permanence, of
identity, and therefore of reality, to the shadowy flux of Time. It is
Eternity revealing itself in the phaenomena of Time: and the perception
and acknowledgment of the proportionality and appropriateness of the
Present to the Past, prove to the afflicted Soul, that it has not yet
been deprived of the sight of God, that it can still recognise the
effective presence of a Father, though through a darkened glass and a
turbid atmosphere, though of a Father that is chastising it. And for
this cause, doubtless, are we so framed in mind, and even so organized
in brain and nerve, that all confusion is painful. It is within the
experience of many medical practitioners, that a patient, with strange
and unusual symptoms of disease, has been more distressed in mind, more