Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

The prints the irons had made in his flesh
Still ulcerous; but all that I had done,
My benefits, in sand or water written,

As they had never been, no more remember'd!

And on what ground but his ambitious hopes

To gain the Duchess' favor?"

But when Bertoldo sees his meanness and confesses it, at once the old tenderness of feeling for him reasserts itself:

"This compunction

For the wrong that you have done me, though you should

Fix here, and your true sorrow move no further,

Will, in respect I loved once, make these eyes
Two springs of sorrow for you."

But she bids him hope no further, and tells him she has resolved upon another marriage,-to heaven,-and before she leaves with her confessor has the satisfaction of seeing Bertoldo reassume the white cross of his Order.

Now, does the treatment of the story, as we have briefly and imperfectly set it out, or do the extracts from the play that are given, seem to any ordinary reader "hard and crabbed" ?

Again, take the scene between Octavio, Maria and Alonzo, and between Hortensio and Matilda, in "The Bashful Lover;" the beautiful defence of Charolois before the Court in "The Fatal Dowry;" the speech of Grimaldi, when he has been touched with a sense of his sins, or Paris's defence of his profession, in "The Roman Actor." But it is needless to multiply examples. Take up Massinger, read him, and say whether you do not find yourself reading with interest in the story and in the characters, and whether the diction does not carry you easily along,-in most cases without any conscious effort,-and see whether the impression produced on you is that you are reading a hard and crabbed writer.

The second charge of Mr. Hazlitt is little more than a repetition of the first, except that it acknowledges the success of this hardness and crabbedness, and the same answer may be given to this refinement of the first charge, as to the first charge itself. One can hardly consider the way in which Camiola, Adorni, Paris, Hortensio, Marcelia, Maria, et hoc genus omne, are presented, as making an impression by hardness and repulsiveness of manner. If Mr. Hazlitt refers to the repulsiveness of Massinger's villains, why, how else should villains make an impression upon a reader who, unlike

the dramatis persona, is permitted to have an insight into the very secret springs of character? Should the villain be presented as a most estimable, alluring character, even when we know his villainy? It would be hard to cause a villain, his villainy known, to appear anything else but repulsive to a person of correct moral ideas. If he attracts at all, it must be by that strange fascination which evil sometimes exercises when joined to great intellectual power, or sometimes when joined to strength of purpose merely. To what else does that prince of villains, Iago, owe his impression but to his repulsiveness,-to qualities repellant themselves when conjoined to the object aimed at,-to the very prostitution of intellectual power? If Mr. Hazlitt means this, we must agree with him, but at the same time consider it no fault in Massinger; but if he does not mean this, and we think he does not,-we must differ. Power of expression is not hardness and repulsive

ness of manner.

[ocr errors]

The third charge, that Massinger's characters act in a purely arbitrary manner, Mr. Hazlitt does support by argument, and the example he chooses is Francisco, in the " Duke of Milan," of whom he says: He is a person whose actions we are at a loss to explain till the conclusion of the piece, when the attempt to account for them from motives originally amiable and generous only produces a double sense of incongruity, and instead of satisfying the mind renders it totally incredulous. He endeavors to seduce the wife of his benefactor; he then (failing,) attempts her death, slanders her foully, and wantonly causes her to be slain by the hand of her husband, and has him poisoned by a nefarious stratagem; and all this to appease a high sense of injured honor that felt a stain like a wound, and from a tender overflowing of fraternal affection, his sister having, it appears, been formerly betrothed to, and afterwards deserted by, the Duke of Milan." In other words, he regards Francisco as unnatural because he performs enormities from an insufficient motive. In the first place, let us pause to notice that Hazlitt misstates the facts. Sforza's crime against Eugenia was of a deeper, blacker dye than that of merely breaking plighted troth, as seems to be plainly shown by Eugenia's speech in Act V., Scene I. But, casting that out of the question, let us see whether a character is entirely unnatural because its revenge goes far beyond its wrongs, and its deeds are disproportioned to the provocation.

In the first place, I think we may take for granted that there are people who seem to love wickedness, if not for wickedness' self, for the intellectual activity which it involves, the excitement and, in some cases, the sense of power accompanying it; and this has been shown very forcibly by Professor Henry Reed in his magnificent lecture on "Othello." Nay, we need not lay down Hazlitt to find this maintained; for Hazlitt, in his remarks on Iago, says :* "Some persons, more nice than wise, have thought this whole character unnatural because his villainy is without a sufficient motive." (The italics are Hazlitt's.) Shakespeare, who was as good a philosopher, as he was a poet, thought otherwise. He knew that the love of power, which is another name for the love of mischief, is natural to man.

[ocr errors]

Why do so many persons frequent trials and executions, or why do the lower classes almost universally take delight in barbarous sports and cruelty to animals, but because there is a natural tendency in the mind to strong excitement,-a desire to have the faculties raised and stimulated to the utmost? Whenever this principle is not under the restraint of human ity or the sense of moral obligation, there are no excesses to which it will not of itself give rise without the assistance of any other motive, either of passion as well as of self-interest." Now, if we may imagine a being so uncontrolled by moral principle that he will be guilty of unprovoked villainy, à fortiori may we imagine a being who will carry provoked villainy far beyond all bounds, and especially if we imagine the being in the latter case to be one who, without the cause, would have been a villain at any rate; for in that case the wrong inflicted serves to his mind, perhaps, as an excuse to still the slight motions of conscience which will have place even in such a man, or perhaps he may use the wrong simply to justify his conduct in the eyes of the more superficial observers in the world, and so increase and prolong his power of doing ill. But, further, is it impossible that the two conditions should be combined? Cannot a wrong, and a very great one, be done even to a villain; Again, in many men the evil principle seems for a long time to lie dormant until called into active existence by some real or fancied injury, and then the whole character of the man seems to be trans

Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, p. 36.

[ocr errors]

formed, the very devils of hell seem to possess him,-while in truth his genuine, true nature is only being revealed. Applying these thoughts both to Iago and Francisco, do they not equally apply in each case, so that the characters stand or fall together in the critic's judgment, so that, if we approve Iago as a villain without a motive, (though I do not for my part agree with Professor Reed as to the refusal of the lieutenancy being a fable, this fact of the refusal seems to me confirmed by a later speech of Othello;) we cannot refuse our approval to Francisco as a villain with an inadequate one? And here, at least, Hazlitt's charge of an arbitrary action of characters is without weight, since the argumentist's duty is to hold the mirror up to nature," and, if such beings exist, as Hazlitt himself says they do, Francisco is a natural character, and hence acts naturally. This seems to be the principal instance that Hazlitt relies on in support of both his third and fifth heads, and, indeed, the two are so closely allied that we have fallen into treating them together. But we will not leave this charge here, for to our mind the most striking characteristic of Massinger is his development of character, and a character consistent in itself can hardly be well developed and yet act arbitrarily and without motive; and in fact few characters can be found anywhere whose actions seem to flow more naturally one from the other, and whose natures are more consistent with those actions and with themselves, as they are gradually displayed to us, than many of Massinger's creations. Take Charolois mourning for his father, begging the Court to free his father's body, seized for debt, rudely repulsed, his petition to the Court refused, succeeding finally in having himself consigned to prison, and his father buried; then, suddenly redeemed from captivity by the good Rochfort, who marries him to his heart's darling, his only child, of whose ill practices he is ignorant, as is Charolois; Beaumelle's treachery, at first disbelieved by her husband, though his informant is his oldest friend and tried follower; conviction forced home upon him, he kills the seducer, and afterwards his wife, after a species of trial before her father. Is there here, except, perhaps, in the trial, anything to carp at as an unnatural action ? At any rate, there is not enough to brand the character as acting arbitrarily or as a monster. We might continue and take up character after character; but it is easier to make sweeping assertions than to give them general disproof, and we may

properly call on the accuser to prove his charges, and, where he does not, refuse to acknowledge their truth with perfect propriety.

For the first division of Hazlitt's fourth point, it depends very much on the individual heart to be touched, (I have seen creatures laugh when Lear fell over the senseless form of Cordelia;) and Massinger, although his strength does not mainly lie in the pathetic, is by no means destitute of ability to create touching situations, take the grief of Rochfort for his guilty child, or Ascanio watching Alonzo, or the remorse of Sforza. For the second head, it is true that Massinger rarely kindles the fancy, if we take fancy in the highest sense; he was generally too much in earnest to gather the flowers of fancy; his imagination was of a more sombre cast; but still we do find in his pages here and there bits of fancy; for example, this from a song in "The Guardian: "

"Welcome, thrice welcome to this shady green,

66

Our long-wished Cynthia, the forests' queen.
The trees begin to bud, the glad birds sing,
In winter, changed by her into the spring.

"We know no night.

Perpetual light

Dawns from your eye;

You being near,

We cannot fear,

Though Death stood by.

From you our swords take edge, our hearts grow bold;
From you in fee their lives your liegemen hold;

These groves your kingdom, and your law your will,
Smile and we spare, but if you frown we kill."

Here we will stop; this paper is a species of supplement to the former article on Massinger, and its excuse for existence is that, of all the critics of the drama, there is none, probably, more read than is Hazlitt, whose attractive style, beauty of thought, and generally hearty sympathy with his subject, naturally give him a powerful influence over readers, and, therefore, it is a service to literature to point out a particular instance in which we conceive him to have erred, lest his opinion should lead many to unknowingly deny themselves the pleasure obtainable from the works of a great author. HENRY BUDD, JR.

« VorigeDoorgaan »