Biographia Literaria

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"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
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 wretched, from the fact of being
unintelligible to himself and others, than from the pain or danger of
the disease: nay, that the patient has received the most solid
comfort, and resumed a genial and enduring cheerfulness, from some new
symptom or product, that had at once determined the name and nature of
his complaint, and rendered it an intelligible effect of an
intelligible cause: even though the discovery did at the same moment
preclude all hope of restoration. Hence the mystic theologians, whose
delusions we may more confidently hope to separate from their actual
intuitions, when we condescend to read their works without the
presumption that whatever our fancy, (always the ape, and too often
the adulterator and counterfeit of our memory,) has not made or cannot
make a picture of, must be nonsense,--hence, I say, the Mystics have
joined in representing the state of the reprobate spirits as a
dreadful dream in which there is no sense of reality, not even of the
pangs they are enduring--an eternity without time, and as it were
below it--God present without manifestation of his presence. But these
are depths, which we dare not linger over. Let us turn to an instance
more on a level with the ordinary sympathies of mankind. Here then,
and in this same healing influence of Light and distinct Beholding, we
may detect the final cause of that instinct which, in the great
majority of instances, leads, and almost compels the Afflicted to
communicate their sorrows. Hence too flows the alleviation that
results from "opening out our griefs: "which are thus presented in
distinguishable forms instead of the mist, through which whatever is
shapeless becomes magnified and (literally) enormous. Casimir, in the
fifth Ode of his third Book, has happily [85] expressed this thought.

Me longus silendi
Edit amor, facilesque luctus
Hausit medullas. Fugerit ocyus,
Simul negantem visere jusseris
Aures amicorum, et loquacem
Questibus evacuaris iram.

Olim querendo desinimus queri,
Ipsoque fletu lacryma perditur
Nec fortis [86] aeque, si per omnes
Cura volat residetque ramos.

Vires amicis perdit in auribus,
Minorque semper dividitur dolor,
Per multa permissus vagari
Pectora.--

I shall not make this an excuse, however, for troubling my readers
with any complaints or explanations, with which, as readers, they have
little or no concern. It may suffice, (for the present at least,) to
declare, that the causes that have delayed the publication of these
volumes for so long a period after they had been printed off, were not
connected with any neglect of my own; and that they would form an
instructive comment on the chapter concerning authorship as a trade,
addressed to young men of genius in the first volume of this work. I
remember the ludicrous effect produced on my mind by the fast sentence
of an auto-biography, which, happily for the writer, was as meagre in
incidents as it is well possible for the life of an individual to be--
"The eventful life which I am about to record, from the hour in which
I rose into existence on this planet, etc." Yet when, notwithstanding
this warning example of self-importance before me, I review my own
life, I cannot refrain from applying the same epithet to it, and with
more than ordinary emphasis--and no private feeling, that affected
myself only, should prevent me from publishing the same, (for write it
I assuredly shall, should life and leisure be granted me,) if
continued reflection should strengthen my present belief, that my
history would add its contingent to the enforcement of one important
truth, to wit, that we must not only love our neighbours as ourselves,
but ourselves likewise as our neighbours; and that we can do neither
unless we love God above both.

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