first by a successful career and then by ad- | Reposes self-included at the base. verse fortune, was a great dramatic prob- But this thou know'st." * lem. We cannot better illustrate either the character of Philip or that of the stormy times amid which his lot is cast than by the following extracts from a scene in which he discusses the events of the day with Father John of Heda, his counsellor and friend, and formerly his preceptor; "Artevelde. I never look'd that he should live so long. He was a man of that unsleeping spirit, A smaller tally, of the singular few B yet a temperate will and keep the peace. The world knows nothing of its greatest men. Father John. Had Launoy lived, he might have pass'd for great, But not by conquests in the Franc of, Bruges. The sphere, the scale of circumstances, is all Which makes the wonder of the many. Still An ardent soul was Launoy's, and his deeds Were such as dazzled many a Flemish dime. There'll some bright eyes in Ghent be dimm'd for him. Artevelde. They will be dim and then be bright again. All is in busy, stirring, stormy motion, blinks As fleets the rack, but look again, and lo! Philip has won, almost without, seeking them, the affections of a beautiful but unprotected young Flemish heiress, the friend of his sister, Clara van Artevelde. In an interview, in which the confiding grace, ingenuousness, and devotedness of the Lady Adriana are more striking than any chivalrous ardour on her lover's part, he gains the promise of her hand. She has had a less fortunate admirer in the Lord of Occo; and the rejected suitor is stimulated by jealousy, as well as by his political interests, to conspire against his rival. The Earl of Flanders has sent two emissaries, Sir Guisebert Grutt and Sir Simon Bette, to traffic with traitors in the Flemish camp. To divide his enemies, he has also offered an amnesty, on condition that three hundred citizens are delivered up to his justice. A meeting is convened at the Stadt-house; and the Lord of Occo promises to attend it, having first resolved on the assassination of Philip. Fearing, however, that his conspiracy has been discovered, he stays away at the critical moment. For a time the two emissaries are successful with the people; but the moment it becomes Artevelle's turn to speak, their intrigue begins to unravel. His harangue carries the people with him as a storm carries dead leaves. He reminds them of their past achievements, and of the remorseless cruelties practised on them by the earl. He demands who can tell that his own name is not included among the three hundred to be delivered up to torments and death; and at the moment that he finds himself the master of his audience he turns on the delegates, denounces them as traitors, and stabbs Grutt to the heart, while Van den Bosch slays Bette. The scabbard thrown away, the warparty is at once in the ascendant; and the wealthy burghers are taught that their young chief has left his books, and become such a man of action as may not be trifled with. The Lord of Occo makes his escape, and succeeds also in carrying off Adriana, of whose broad lands he proposes to become heiress. The scene changes to a banquetthe master by a forced marriage with the ing-hall at Bruges, where the Earl of Flanders is magnificently entertained by the mayor and citizens. There is a song on the approaching fall of Ghent, * Vol. i. p. 21. "God help them! the man. If my accounts be true, the life he's led D'Arlon, although a faithful adherent of his liege lord, the Earl of Flanders, has contracted not only an inviolable friendship with Artevelde, but also a love-troth with Clara. Fortunately for the Lady Adriana, it is in his house at Bruges that Occo and his captive are domiciled by the earl's command. She makes her complaint to the young knight, who at once defies Occo to deadly combat. The following brief conversation between D'Arlon and Gilbert Matthew, one of the earl's counsellors, is a graphic sketch of that stormy time: I knew by that his highness was not happy. In such brief and interstitial scenes as the one we have quoted the hand of a true mas ter of dramatic art is seen as much as in passages of the most high-wrought pathos. Genius, even when not essentially dramatic, will often in the most interesting portions of a play produce what is so profound in sentiment or eloquent in expression, that in our enjoyment of it as poetry we forget to ask whether it be dramatic or not. True dra matic genius includes, besides a philosophic insight into character, a certain careless felicity in dealing with externals. This fact is a thing which we always find among our dramatists in the reigns of Elizabeth and James the First, and which in our modern drama — the tradition having been broken we almost always lack. The well may be deep and the water pure, but it is commonly without life. The soundest philosophic analysis will not serve as a substitute for a shrewd sharp observation, and that vividness of handling analogous to a hasty sketch by a great painter. This is the great defect of the German drama, Characters are sometimes nobly conceived, and a plot is laboriously devised capable of illustrating them; but the unconscious skill and imita "Gilbert. No sooner had his highness reached tive instinct which ought to mediate be the palace Than he sends back for me. D'Arlon. And me the same. Gilbert. His highness is not happy. He sends for me. such times tween the world of abstract conception and outward illustration is wanting. We miss the electric vitality of true art. The distinction is that between the drama taken from life and that drawn from books. England has long been the land of action, and Germany that of thought. In England, moreover, the drama grew up at a time when the passions expressed themselves freely, and when, as among children and races in an early stage of development, the impulses were stronger from having never known restraint or disguise. In Germany *Vol. i. p. 86. the drama arose at a period of convention- Second Part. For a long period Artevelde alities and respectabilities as well as of has enjoyed unquestioned power; but the theories. It was a philosophical imitation, storm breaks on him at last. The counnot a living tradition; and with all its mer- sellors of the youthful King of France, its, it shares the defect of Germany's mod- alarmed by the outbreak of popular revolt ern school of religious painters, in which in many parts of Europe, resolve to deprive the highest æsthetic science, directed by the the movement-party of the encouragement noblest aims, cannot make up for the want it derives from the success of the revolt in of inspiration and of popular sympathy. Flanders. The boy-king rejoices in the opportunity of proving his chivalry and aiding his exiled cousin. Artevelde sends Father John of Heda to England, in hopes of winning the alliance of Richard II. For him there has been a change worse than any political event can bring. His wife is dead, and his hearth has long been desolate. A change has taken place in his own character likewise; and it is with a consummate art that the dramatist indicates the effect of time and success on such a character. He has grown more imperious and less scrupulous. Accustomed to see all men bow before him, his own will, guided mainly by considerations of public expediency, has been his main law of action. When warned by Father John that since his elevation he has not been unvisited by worldly pride and its attendant passions, he replies: The revived English drama has had some of the same refrigerating influences to contend with. It is to Mr. Taylor's keen appreciation of the early English dramatists, evinced by his happy use of a language analogous to theirs, that he owes in no small degree his superiority. His style has been also not a little in his favour. The importance of style is wholly overlooked by those who regard it as but the outward garment of thought. It has more analogy to the skin than to the clothes. It fits closely, adapts itself to every movement, and is quickened by the instinct of life. There is in it a power even beyond its own intention. Style is doubtless in the main the result of a man's intellectual constitution, but it reacts largely on that which has produced it. A style like Mr. Taylor's, with its sharp precision and lightness combined with strength, is incompatible with the feeble, the languid, or the false in conception. It is a To proceed with our analysis of Philip van Artevelde. The Earl of Flanders is advised by Gilbert Matthew to starve Ghent into surrender; and he succeeds in cutting off all supplies from the place. Famine sets in, and pestilence follows. But the desperate situation suggests a desperate remedy. Artevelde proposes that five thousand of the bravest and strongest citizens should be supplied with what food still remains, and accompany him on a march to Bruges, the earl's capital. The small but resolute band arrive there a little before sunset. festival; the inhabitants of Bruges have been making merry; and half of them rush out in a state of intoxication to encounter an enemy whom they despise. The setting sun shines in their faces; the archers of Ghent bewilder them with their arrows; the townspeople fall into an ambush; a total rout ensues. Artevelde enters Bruges with the flying troops, and the Earl with difficulty escapes. Gilbert Matthew and the Lord of Occo are taken prisoners, and immediately condemned to death; and the First Part ends with the words, Say they so? And business will not wait. Such as I am, For better or for worse, the world must take For I must hasten on. Perhaps the state I have drunk deeper of ambition's cup, *Vol. i. p. 177. First, of my father: had he lived to know Are to men's ears importunately common sion ? An outcast long in dole not undeserved, And died dependent: there the history ends; two, And broad highway to power, that ever then Whom innocent? - the free are only they In luxury and lewdness Is to despise, whose aspects put to scorn alas! Poor innocency lies where four roads meet, For who is innocent that cares to live? For this the hour is come, the sword is drawn, France, From Germany and Flanders and Navarre, Shall stand against them like a beast at bay. The blood that they have shed will hide no longer In the blood-sloken soil, but cries to heaven. Their cruelties and wrongs against the poor Shall quicken into Swarms of venomous snakes, And hiss through all the earth, till o'er the earth, That ceases then from hissings and from For these their sins the nations cast them out; HENRY TAYLOR. pass From small beginnings, because God is just." The love-story of Part II. is wholly unlike that of Part I.: with it is closely connected the poetic justice of the play. The love is a guilty love, and conduces in a large degree both to the fall of Artevelde and to his death. Between the two parts of the play a lyrical interlude is interposed, entitled the "Lay of Elena." It is a modified specimen of that poetry abounding in romantic sentiment, imagery, and figure, which, in the body of his work, Mr. Taylor has discarded. It records the fortunes of a beautiful Italian, who, after being betrayed and deserted, has lived for some time with the Duke de Bourbon, one of the French king's uncles, the object of a silly and selfish but passionate love on his part, which she has but feebly returned. Mortified at finding that his devotion to his mistress has made him an object of ridicule, the duke has vented on her his spleen in many a caprice, and spoken of her in insulting terms. On the capture of a Flemish city, Elena has fallen into the hands of the Regent. He protects her, and places a safeguard at her disposal, in case she should wish to return to France. She is in no hurry to return. With all the energy of her wild and wilful nature, the imaginative and melancholy woman, who had looked on love but with selfreproach and despair, fixes her affections on the Regent, still with self-reproach, but no longer in despair. He can hardly be said to return such love as hers; but he has wearied of unhappiness, and to love, as a social need, he is still accessible. But for this disastrous tie peace was still possible. The Duke of Bourbon has despatched Sir Fleureant of Heurlée to the Regent's camp with a request that he would send back Elena, and an implied promise that in return the king shall be prevented, through his influence, from going to war in defence of the Earl of Flanders. We shall now give an extract from a scene in which the Regent describes his lost wife and his own desolation. It is an illustration of Mr. Taylor's poetry in its more impassioned vein. There is about it a sad rich colouring as of a dusky day in autumn. The character of both the speakers is painted with a lavish hand, and the long * Vol. i. pp. 172-5. and melancholy cadences of the metre echo the sadness of a new love which has grown up among omens of woe, and has too much self-reproach about it to promise, almost to desire, happiness. The scene displeases while it charms, and it instructs us while it displeases. Thus to have spoken of his wife to her rival—a rival so unlike her in all save devotedness is what Artevelde would have shrunk from (as we may imagine) in his youth. But his character is in decline; and neither love, nor the memory of love, wears for him any purer light than that of common day. He admires and he deplores the grace and goodness lost; but the "beautiful regards" turned back on him from the land of shadows do not trouble his heart: "Artevelde. She was a creature framed by For mortal love to muse a life away therein See but his own serenity reflected These are but words. Ele a. My lord, they're full of meaning. Artevelde. No, they mean nothing. that Sinks into silence; 'tis what none can know charms Living or dead. seen her Elena. I wish I had, my lord; Well, well, Pain and grief And I have tamed my sorrow. were, Yet they do leave us. You behold me here |