Various
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 70, No. 433, November 1851
"Artev. You, Father John,
I blame not, nor myself will justify;
But call my weakness what you will, the time
Is past for reparation. Now to cast off
The partner of my sin were further sin;
'Twere with her first to sin, and then against her.
And for the army, if their trust in me
Be sliding, let it go: I know my course;
And be it armies, cities, people, priests,
That quarrel with my love – wise men or fools,
Friends, foes, or factions – they may swear their oaths,
And make their murmur – rave and fret and fear,
Suspect, admonish – they but waste their rage,
Their wits, their words, their counsel: here I stand,
Upon the deep foundations of my faith
To this fair outcast plighted; and the storm
That princes from their palaces shake out,
Though it should turn and head me, should not strain
The seeming silken texture of this tie."
And now disaster follows disaster; town after town manifests symptoms of treachery to his cause. His temper no longer retains its wonted calmness, and the quick glance and rapid government of affairs seems about to desert him. Note this little trait: —
"Artev. Whither away, Vauclaire?
Vauclaire. You'll wish, my lord, to have the scouts, and others
That are informed, before you.
Artev. 'Twere well."
It is something new that another should anticipate the necessary orders to be given. The decisive battle approaches, and is fought. This time it is lost. Our hero does not even fall in the field; an assassin stabs him in the back. The career of Artevelde ends thus; and that public cause with which his life was connected has at the same time an inglorious termination: "the wheel has come full circle."
The catastrophe is brought about by Sir Fleureant of Heurlée. This man's character undergoes, in the course of the drama, a complete transformation. We do not say that the change is unnatural, or that it is not accounted for; but the circumstances which bring it about are only vaguely and incidentally narrated, so that the reader is not prepared for this change. A gay, thoughtless, reckless young, knight, who rather gains upon us at his first introduction, is converted into a dark, revengeful assassin. It would, we think, have improved the effect of the plot, if we had been able to trace out more distinctly the workings of the mind of one who was destined to take so prominent a part in the drama.
The character of Lestovet is admirably sustained, and is manifestly a favourite with the author. But we must now break away from Philip Van Artevelde, to notice the other dramas of Mr Taylor. Edwin the Fair next claims our attention. Here also we shall make no quotations merely for the sake of their beauty; and we shall limit ourselves to an analysis of the principal character, Dunstan, on which, perhaps, a word or two of explanation may not be superfluous.
Let us suppose a dramatic writer sitting down before such a character as this of Dunstan, and contemplating the various aspects it assumes, with the view of selecting one for the subject of his portraiture. In the first place, he is aware that, although, as a historical student, he may, and perhaps must, continue to doubt as to the real character of this man – how much is to be given to pride, to folly, to fanaticism, to genuine piety, or to the love of power – yet that, the moment he assumes the office of dramatic poet, he must throw all doubt entirely aside. The student of history may hesitate to the last; the poet is presumed to have from the beginning the clearest insight into the recesses of the mind, and the most unquestionable authority for all that he asserts. A sort of mimic omniscience is ascribed to the poet. Has he not been gifted, from of old, with an inspiration, by means of which he sees the whole character and every thought of his hero, and depicts and reveals them to the world? To him doubt would be fatal. If he carries into his drama the spirit of historical criticism, he will raise the same spirit in his reader, and all faith in the imaginary creation he offers them is gone for ever. Manifest an error as this may be, we think we could mention some instances, both in the drama and the novel, in which it has been committed.
But such a character as Dunstan's is left uncertain in the light of history, and our dramatist has to choose between uncertainties. He will be guided in his selection partly by what he esteems the preponderating weight of evidence, and partly, and perhaps still more, by the superior fitness of any one phase of the character for the purpose he has in view, or the development of his own peculiar powers. In this case, three interpretations present themselves. The first, which has little historical or moral probability, and offers little attraction to the artist, is, that Dunstan was a hypocrite, seeking by show of piety to compass some ambitious end, or win the applause of the vulgar. Undoubted hypocrites history assuredly presents us with – as where the ecclesiastical magnate degenerates into the merely secular prince. There have been luxurious and criminal popes and cardinals, intriguing bishops and lordly abbots, whom the most charitable of men, and the most pious of Catholics, must pronounce to have been utterly insincere in their professions of piety. But a hypocrite who starves and scourges himself – who digs a damp hole in the earth, and lives in it – seems to us a mere creature of the imagination. Such men, at all events, either begin or end with fanaticism. The second and more usual interpretation is, that Dunstan was a veritable enthusiast, and a genuine churchman after the order of Hildebrand, capable, perhaps, of practising deceit or cruelty for his great purpose, but entirely devoted to that purpose – one of those men who sincerely believe that the salvation of the world and the predominance of their order are inseparably combined. There would be no error in supposing a certain mixture of pride and ambition. Nor, in following this interpretation, would there be any great violation of probability in attributing to Dunstan, though he lived in so rude an age, all those arguments by which the philosopher-priest is accustomed to uphold the domination of his order. The thinking men of every age more nearly resemble each other in these great lines of thought and argument, than is generally supposed. The third interpretation is that which the historical student would probably favour. It is that Dunstan was, in truth, partially insane– a man of fervent zeal, and of great natural powers, but of diseased mind. The very ability and knowledge which he possessed, combined with the strange forms which his asceticism took, lead to this supposition. Such men, we know, exist, and sometimes pass through a long career before they are accurately understood. Exhibiting itself in the form of fanaticism, and in a most ignorant and superstitious age, a partial insanity might easily escape detection, or even add to the reputation of the saint.
This last is the rendering of the character which Mr Taylor has selected. It is evidently the most difficult to treat. Perhaps the difficulty and novelty of the task it presented, as well as its greater fidelity to history, induced him to accept this interpretation. That second and more popular one which we have mentioned would appear, to a mind like Mr Taylor's, too facile and too trite. Any high-churchman of almost any age – any bishop, if you inflate the lawn sleeves, or even any young curate, whose mind dwells too intensely on the power of the keys– would present the rudiments of the character. However that may be, Mr Taylor undertook the bold and difficult task of depicting the strong, shrewd, fervent mind, saint and politician both, but acting with the wild and irregular force of insanity. How, we may ask ourselves, would such a mind display itself? Not, we way be sure, in a tissue of weakness or of wildness. We should often see the ingenious reasoner, more cunning than wise, the subtle politician, or even the deep moraliser upon human life; but whenever the fatal chords were touched – the priestly power, the priestly mission, the intercourse with the world of spirits – there we should see symptoms of insanity and delusion. Such is the character which Mr Taylor has portrayed.
Earl Leolf, calm and intelligent, and the perfect gentleman (those who remember the play will feel the truth of this last expression,) gives us at the very commencement the necessary explanation —
"Leolf. How found you the mid-counties?
Athulf. Oh! monk-ridden;
Raving of Dunstan.
Leolf. 'Tis a raving time:
Mad monks, mad peasants; Dunstan is not sane,
And madness that doth least declare itself
Endangers most, and ever most infects
The unsound many. See where stands the man,
And where this people: thus compute the peril
To one and all. When force and cunning meet
Upon the confines of one cloudy mind,
When ignorance and knowledge halve the mass,
When night and day stand at an equinox,
Then storms are rife."
No justice, it is plain, can be done to Mr Taylor's drama, unless the intimation here given us be kept in view. Yet we suspect, from the remarks sometimes made upon this play, that it has been overlooked, or not sufficiently attended to. Passages have been censured as crude or extravagant which, in themselves, could be no otherwise, since they were intended to portray this half-latent and half-revealed insanity. The arrogance of Dunstan, and his communings with the spiritual world, not often have the air of sublimity, for they arise from the disorder and hallucination of his mind. When he tells the Queen Mother not to sit in his presence, as well as when he boasts of his intercourse with angels and demons, we see the workings of a perturbed spirit: —
"Queen Mother. Father, I am faint,
For a strange terror seized me by the way.
I pray you let me sit.
Dunstan. I say, forbear!
Thou art in a Presence that thou wot'st not of,
Wherein no mortal may presume to sit.
If stand thou canst not, kneel.
(She falls on her knees.)
Queen Mother. Oh, merciful Heaven'
Oh, sinner that I am!
Dunstan. Dismiss thy fears;
Thine errand is acceptable to Him
Who rules the hour, and thou art safer here
Than in thy palace. Quake not, but be calm,
And tell me of the wretched king, thy son.
This black, incestuous, unnatural love
Of his blood-relative – yea, worse, a seed
That ever was at enmity with God —
His cousin of the house of Antichrist!
It is as I surmised?
Queen Mother. Alas! lost boy!
Dunstan. Yes, lost for time and for eternity,
If he should wed her. But that shall not be.
Something more lofty than a boy's wild love
Governs the course of kingdoms. From beneath
This arching umbrage step aside; look up;
The alphabet of Heaven is o'er thy head,
The starry literal multitude. To few,
And not in mercy, is it given to read
The mixed celestial cipher."
How skilfully the last passage awakes in the reader a feeling of sympathy with Dunstan! When he has given his instructions to the Queen Mother, the scene closes thus: —
"Queen Mother. Oh, man of God!
Command me always.
Dunstan. Hist! I hear a spirit!
Another – and a third. They're trooping up.
Queen Mother. St Magnus shield us!
Dunstan. Thou art safe; but go;
The wood will soon be populous with spirits.
The path thou cam'st retread. Who laughs in the air?"
Dunstan believes all along that he is marked out from the ordinary roll of men – that he has a peculiar intercourse with, and a peculiar mission from, Heaven; but he nevertheless practises on the credulity of others. This mixture of superstition and cunning does not need insanity to explain, but it is seen here in very appropriate company. He says to Grumo —
"Go, get thee to the hollow of yon tree,
And bellow there as is thy wont.
Grumo. How long?
Dunstan. Till thy lungs crack. Get hence.
[Exit Grumo.
And if thou bellowest otherwise than Satan,
It is not for the lack of Satan's sway
'Stablished within thee.
(Strange howls are heard from the tree.")
With the same crafty spirit, and by a trick as gross, he imposes on the Synod, contriving that a voice shall appear to issue from the crucifix. These frauds, however, would have availed nothing of themselves; it is the spirit of fanaticism bearing down all opposition by which he works his way. This spirit sustains him in his solitude —
"I hear your call!
A radiance and a resonance from Heaven
Surrounds me, and my soul is breaking forth
In strength, as did the new-created Sun
When Earth beheld it first on the fourth day.
God spake not then more plainly to that orb
Than to my spirit now."
It sustains him in his solitude, and mark how triumphantly it carries him through in the hour of action. Odo the archbishop, Ricola the king's chaplain, as well as king and courtiers, all give way before this inexorable, unreasoning fanaticism, a fanaticism which is as complete a stranger to fear as it is to reason —
"Dunstan (to Elgiva.) Fly hence,
Pale prostitute! Avaunt, rebellious fiend,
Which speakest through her.
Elgiva. I am thy sovereign mistress and thy queen.
Dunstan. … Who art thou?
I see thee, and I know thee – yea, I smell thee!
Again, 'tis Satan meets me front to front;
Again I triumph! Where, and by what rite,
And by what miscreant minister of God,
And rotten member, was this mockery,
That was no marriage, made to seem a marriage?
Ricola. Lord Abbot, by no —
Dunstan. What then, was it thou?
The Church doth cut thee off and pluck thee out!
A Synod shall be summoned! Chains for both!
Chains for that harlot, and for this dog-priest!
Oh wall of Jezreel!"
And forthwith Elgiva, in spite of the king's resistance, is carried out a captive. The king, too, is imprisoned in the Tower, and here ensues a scene which brings out another aspect of the mind of Dunstan. It was the object of the crafty priest to induce Edwin to resign the crown; he had, therefore, made his imprisonment as painful as possible. He now visits him in the Tower, and in this interview we see, underneath the mad zealot and the subtle politician, something of the genuine man. Dunstan had not been always, and only, the priest; he understood the human life he trampled on —
"Dunstan. What makes you weak? Do you not like your food?
Or have you not enough?
Edwin. Enough is brought;
But he that brings it drops what seems to say
That it is mixed with poison – some slow drug;
So that I scarce dare eat, and hunger always.
Dunstan. Your food is poisoned by your own suspicions.
'Tis your own fault. —
But thus it is with kings; suspicions haunt,
And dangers press around them all their days;
Ambition galls them, luxury corrupts,
And wars and treasons are their talk at table.
Edwin. This homily you should read to prosperous kings;
It is not needed for a king like me.
Dunstan. Who shall read homilies to a prosperous king!
… To thy credulous ears
The world, or what is to a king the world,
The triflers of thy court, have imaged me
As cruel, and insensible to joy,
Austere, and ignorant of all delights
That arts can minister. Far from the truth
They wander who say thus. I but denounce
Loves on a throne, and pleasures out of place.
I am not old; not twenty years have fled
Since I was young as thou; and in my youth
I was not by those pleasures unapproached
Which youth converses with.
Edwin. No! wast thou not?
How came they in thy sight?
Dunstan. When Satan first
Attempted me, 'twas in a woman's shape;
Such shape as may have erst misled mankind,
When Greece or Rome upreared with Pagan rites
Temples to Venus…
… 'Twas Satan sang,
Because 'twas sung to me, whom God had called
To other pastime and severer joys.
But were it not for this, God's strict behest
Enjoined upon me – had I not been vowed
To holiest service rigorously required,
I should have owned it for an angel's voice,
Nor ever could an earthly crown, or toys
And childishness of vain ambition, gauds
And tinsels of the world, have lured my heart
Into the tangle of those mortal cares
That gather round a throne. What call is thine
From God or man, what voice within bids thee
Such pleasures to forego, such cares confront?
… Unless thou by an instant act
Renounce the crown, Elgiva shall not live.
The deed is ready, to which thy name affixed
Discharges from restraint both her and thee.
Say wilt thou sign?
Edwin. I will not.
Dunstan. Be advised.
What hast thou to surrender? I look round;
This chamber is thy palace court, and realm.
I do not see the crown – where is it hidden?
Is that thy throne? – why, 'tis a base joint-stool;
Or this thy sceptre? – 'tis an ashen stick
Notched with the days of thy captivity.
Such royalties to abdicate, methinks,
Should hardly hold thee long. Nay, I myself,
That love not ladies greatly, would give these
To ransom whom I loved."
These feelings of humanity, in part indeed simulated, do not long keep at bay the cruelty and insane rage or the priest. Edwin persists in his refusal; Dunstan leaves him for a moment, but shortly after returns holding the deed in his hand, and followed by his tool Grumo.
"Dunstan. Thy signature to this.
Edwin. I will not sign.
Dunstan. Thou wilt not! wilt thou that thy mistress die?
Edwin. Insulting abbot! she is not my mistress;
She is my wife, my queen.
Dunstan. Predestinate pair!
He knoweth who is the Searcher of our hearts,
That I was ever backward to take life,
Albeit at His command. Still have I striven
To put aside that service, seeking still
All ways and shifts that wit of man could scheme,
To spare the cutting off your wretched souls
In unrepented sin. But tendering here
Terms of redemption, it is thou, not I,
The sentence that deliverest.
Edwin. Our lives
Are in God's hands.
Dunstan. Sot, liar, miscreant, No!
God puts them into mine! and may my soul
In tortures howl away eternity,
If ever again it yield to that false fear
That turned me from the shedding of thy blood!
Thy blood, rash traitor to thy God, thy blood!
Thou delicate Agag, I will spill thy blood!"
We believe we have done justice to all the aspects in which the character of Dunstan is here represented to us, but it would require a much larger space than we have at command to do justice to the whole drama of Edwin the Fair. The canvass is crowded with figures, almost every one of which has been a careful study, and will repay the study of a critical reader; and if the passages of eloquent writing are not so numerous as in his previous work, there is no deficiency of them, and many are the pungent, if not witty sayings, that might be extracted. The chief fault which seems to us to pervade this drama, is, indeed, that there is too much apparent study – that too much is seen of the artist. Speaking generally of Mr Taylor, and regarding him as a dramatic poet, we could desire more life and passion, more abandonment of himself to the characters he is portraying. But we feel this more particularly in Edwin the Fair. We seem to see the artist sorting and putting together again the elements of human nature. His Wulfstan, the ever absent sage, his tricksy Emma, and her very silly lover, Ernway, are dramatic creations which may probably be defended point by point; but, for all that, they do not look like real men and women. As to his monks, the satellites of Dunstan, it may be said that they could not have been correctly drawn if they had borne the appearance of being real men. We do not like them notwithstanding.
In the edition which lies before us, bound up with Edwin the Fair is the republication of an early drama, Isaac Comnenus. It excited, we are told in the preface, little attention in its first appearance. We ourselves never saw it till very lately. Though inferior to his subsequent productions, it is not without considerable merit, but it will probably gather its chief interest as the forerunner of Philip Van Artevelde, and from the place it will occupy in the history of the author's mind. A first performance, which was allowed to pass unnoticed by the public, might be expected to be altogether different in kind from its fortunate successors. The author, in his advance out of obscurity into the full light of success, might be supposed to have thrown aside his first habits of thought and expression. It is not so here. We have much the same style, and there is the same combination of shrewd observation with a philosophic melancholy, the same gravity, and the same sarcasm. It is curious to notice how plainly there is the germ of Philip Van Artevelde in Isaac Comnenus. The hero of Ghent is far more sagacious, more serious, and more tender; but he looks on life with a lingering irony, and a calm cynicism: to him it is a sad and disenchanted vision. In Isaac Comnenus the same elements are combined in a somewhat different proportion: there is more of the irony and a more bitter cynicism; less of the grave tenderness and the practical sagacity. Artevelde is Isaac Comnenus living over life again – the same man, but with the advantage of a life's experience. Indeed Artevelde, if we may venture to jest with so grave a personage, has something of the air of one who had been in the world before, who was not walking along its paths for the first time: he treads with so sure a footstep, and seems to have no questions to ask, and nothing to learn of experience.
Happily it has not been necessary hitherto to say a word about the plot of Mr Taylor's dramas. This of Isaac Comnenus, being less known, may require a word of preliminary introduction. The scene is laid at Constantinople, at the close of the eleventh century; Nicephorus is the reigning emperor. We may call to mind that the government of the Byzantine monarchy, for a long time, maintained this honourable peculiarity, that, though in form a despotism, the emperor was expected to administer the law as it had descended to it from the genius of Rome. Dynasties changed, but the government remained substantially the same. It was an Oriental despotism with a European administration. Whilst, therefore, we have in the play before us a prince dethroned, and a revolution accomplished, we hear nothing of liberty and oppression, the cause of freedom, and the usual topics of patriotic conspiracy. The brothers Isaac and Alexius Comnenus are simply too powerful to be trusted as subjects; an attempt has been already made to poison the elder brother Isaac, the hero of the drama. He finds himself in a manner constrained to push forward to the throne, as his only place of safety. This ambitious course is thrust upon him. Meanwhile he enters on it with no soft-heartedness. He takes up his part, and goes bravely through with it; bravely, but coldly – with a sneer ever on his lip. With the church, too, he has contrived to make himself extremely unpopular, and the Patriarch is still more rancorously opposed to him than the Emperor.
Before we become acquainted with him, he has loved and lost by death his gentle Irene. This renders the game of ambition still more contemptible in his eyes. It renders him cold also to the love of a certain fair cousin, Anna Comnena. Love, or ambition, approaches him also in the person of Theodora, the daughter of the emperor. She is willing to desert her father's cause, and ally herself and all her hopes to Isaac Comnenus. Comnenus declines her love. The rejected Theodora brings about the catastrophe of the piece. The Emperor Nicephorus is deposed; Isaac is conqueror in the strife, but he gives over the crown he has won to his brother Alexius. Then does Theodora present herself disguised as some humble petitioner to Isaac Comnenus. Armed with a dagger, she forces her way into an inner chamber where he is; a groan is heard, and the following stage direction closes the play —
"All rush into the inner chamber, whilst Theodora, passing out from it, crosses the stage, holding in her hand a dagger covered with blood. The curtain falls."
This scanty outline will be sufficient to make the following characteristic quotations intelligible to those who may not have read the play. Eudocia, his sister, thus describes Comnenus: —
– "He
Is nothing new to dangers nor to life —
His thirty years on him have nigh told double,
Being doubly loaden with the unlightsome stuff
That life is made of. I have often thought
How nature cheats this world in keeping count:
There's some men pass for old men who ne'er lived —
These monks, to wit: they count the time, not spend it;
They reckon moments by the tick of beads,
And ring the hours with psalmody: clocks, clocks;
If one of these had gone a century,
I would not say he'd lived. My brother's age
Has spanned the matter of too many lives;
He's full of years though young."
Comnenus, we have said, is on ill terms with the church. Speaking of the sanctuary he says: —
"I have a safer refuge. Mother church
Hath no such holy precinct that my blood
Would not redeem all sin and sacrilege
Of slaughter therewithin. But there's a spot
Within the circle my good sword describes,
Which by God's grace is sanctified for me."
On quitting his cousin Anna, she says: —
"Go, and good angels guard thee is my prayer.
Comnenus.– Good soldiers, Anna. In the arm of flesh
Are we to trust. The Mother of the Gods,
Prolific Mother, holiest Mother church,
Hath banded heaven upon the side opposed.
No matter, when such supplicants as thou
Pray for us, other angels need we none."
It is plain that we have no dutiful son of the Church here; and that her hostility, in this instance, is not altogether without cause. We find that his scepticism has gone farther than to dispute the miraculous virtues of the holy image of St Basil, the eye of which he is reputed to have knocked out with his lance: —
"Just as you came
I moralised the matter of that change
Which theologians call – how aptly, say —
The quitting of a tenement."
And his moralising is overcast with the shadow of doubt. The addresses, for such they are, of Theodora, the daughter of the emperor, he receives and declines with the greatest calmness, though they are of that order which it is manifestly as dangerous to reject as to accept.
"Germanus. My noble lord, the Cæsarissa waits
With infinite impatience to behold you:
She bids me say so. Ah! most noble count!
A fortunate man – the sunshine is upon you —
Comnenus. Ay, sir, and wonderfully warm it makes me.
Tell her I'm coming, sir, with speed."
With speed, however, he does not go, nor makes a better excuse for his delay than that he was "sleeping out the noontide." In the first interview he escapes from her confidence, and when subsequently she will not be misunderstood, he says —
"Nor now, nor ever,
Will I make bargains for a lady's love."
In a dialogue with his brother Alexius, his temper and way of thinking, and the circumstance which has mainly produced them, are more fully developed. We make a few extracts without attempting very closely to connect them. Alexius has been remarking the change in Comnenus since they last met.
"Comnenus. Change is youth's wonder:
Such transmutations have I seen on man
That fortune seemed a slow and stedfast power
Compared with nature.
Alexius. There is nought thou'st seen
More altered than art thou.
I speak not of thy change in outward favour,
But thou art changed in heart.
Comnenus. Ay, hearts change too:
Mine has grown sprightly, has it not, and hard?
I ride it now with spurs; else, else, Alexius —
Well is it said the best of life is childhood.
Life is a banquet where the best's first served,
And when the guest is cloyed comes oil and garlick.
Alexius. Hast thou forgotten how it was thy wont
To muse the hours away along this shore —
These very rippled sands?
Comnenus. The sands are here,
But not the foot-prints. Wouldst thou trace them now?
A thousand tides and storms have dashed them out.
… I have no care for beauty.
Seest thou yon rainbow based and glassed on ocean?
I look on that as on a lovely thing,
But not a thing of promise."
Comnenus has wandered with his brother unawares to a spot which of all others on earth was the most dear or the most painful to him – the spot where his Irene had been buried. He recognises it whilst he is in the full tide of his cynicism: —
"Alexius. What is this carved upon the rock?
Comnenus. I know not:
But Time has ta'en it for a lover's scrawl;
He's razed it, razed it.
Alexius. No, not quite; look here.
I take it for a lover's.
Comnenus. What! there's some talk
Of balmy breath, and hearts pierced through and through
With eyes' miraculous brightness – vows ne'er broken,
Until the church had sealed them – charms loved madly,
Until it be a sin to love them not —
And kisses ever sweet, till they be innocent —
But that your lover's not put down?
Alexius. No, none of it.
There are but two words.
Comnenus. That's succinct; what are they?
Alexius. 'Alas, Irene!' Why thy looks are now —
Comnenus parries the question of his brother, contrives to dismiss him, and remains alone upon the spot.
"This is the very earth that covers her,
And lo! we trample it like common clay!
… When I last stood here
Disguised, to see a lowly girl laid down
Into her early grave, there was such light
As now doth show it, but a bleaker air,
Seeing it was December. 'Tis most strange;
I can remember now each circumstance
Which then I scarce was conscious of; like words
That leave upon the still susceptive sense
A message undelivered till the mind
Awakes to apprehensiveness and takes it.
'Twas o'er – the muttered unattended rite,
And the few friends she had beside myself
Had risen and gone; I had not knelt, but stood
With a dull gaze of stupor as the mould
Was shovelled over, and the broken sods
Fitted together. Then some idle boys,
Who had assisted at the covering in,
Ran off in sport, trailing the shovels with them,
Rattling upon the gravel; and the sexton
Flattened the last sods down, and knocked his spade
Against a neighbouring tombstone to shake off
The clinging soil, – with a contented air,
Even as a ditcher who has done his work.
… Oh Christ!
How that which was the life's life of our being
Can pass away, and we recall it thus!"
Whilst reading this play of Isaac Comnenus we seemed to perceive a certain Byronian vein, which came upon us rather unexpectedly. Not that there is any very close resemblance between Comnenus and the heroes of Lord Byron; but there is a desperate wilfulness, a tone of scepticism, and a caustic view of human life, which occasionally recall them to mind. We turned to the preface to Philip Van Artevelde, where there is a criticism upon the poetry of Byron, not unjust in the faults it detects, but cold and severe, as it seems to us, in the praise that it awards; and we found there an intimation which confirmed our suspicion that Isaac Comnenus had been written whilst still partially under the influence of that poetry – written in what we may describe as a transition state. He says there of Lord Byron's poetry, "It will always produce a powerful impression upon very young readers, and I scarcely think that it can have been more admired by any than myself, when I was included in that category." And have we not here some explanation of the severity and coldness of that criticism itself? Did not the maturer intellect a little resent in that critical judgment the hallucinations of the youth?