Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

we think of a society, which in one formulary declares baptism to be 'generally necessary to salvation,' and in another pronounces the reverse? and of what respect is a spiritual body worthy, which thunders forth its anathemas and excommunications, knowing all the while, that it possesses no power to enforce the penalties incur red by its sentence ?" These, we do assure the Heads of the Church, are the arguments employed by the Dissenters; and what can the clergy urge against them? Absolutely nothing. The mouths of the clergy are shut, and so Dissent increases.

[ocr errors]

We mistake the matter much, if there be not on the Episcopal bench, at the present moment, more than one enlightened prelate who feels the truth of all that we have been saying. To name names is, we are aware, invidious; but one we would select from that proud throng," because he is, as he deserves to be, one of the most popular and influential bishops whom modern times have seen. We call upon Dr Bloomfield to come forward at the present crisis, and to fight the Church's battles in a field where she stands even more in need of his aid than against the Roman Catholics. Against Catholicism a whole host of able champions are enrolled. We have the Chancellor and Lord Liverpool among the Peers; Mr Peel and many others in the Commons; whilst out of doors, not the members of the Church only, but all classes of Dissenters, Socinians alone excepted, are with us. But who is there to stand up for the Church? Who, except ourselves, has ventured to speak the truth, or to declare the reason

why the Church has lost ground, and the Dissenters gained it? No one. Timidity, or a worse principle, has hitherto kept men silent: We trust it shall not be always so.

What, then, do we desire? In the first place, to see the Convocation once more established in a state of as perfect independence as may be compatible with the political welfare of the empire. Secondly, to behold all the canons, formularies, creeds, and ceremonies of the Church, subjected to a close scrutiny, and made suitable to the times in which we live. Is it not a standing reproach against the Church, that she continues to this hour under the dominion of the spirit of the dark ages? Are we not told, on all hands, that the temper of the Church is to persecute those without her pale, and that she is prevented from indulging that humour, only by the humane interference of the civil government? It is in vain for us to answer, that the canons quoted a few pages ago have all become obsolete; and that they are virtually abrogated, or, at least, that the feelings which dictated their compilation have changed with the change of times. Prejudiced men either do not, or will not, believe us; and hence a thousand things are alleged concerning us, of which we know ourselves to be innocent, but in the matter of which we find it utterly impossible to prove our innocence, for our laws are quoted against us; and what can we say in reply to them!

We have not yet half exhausted our subject; but fearful lest we exhaust the patience of any of our readers, we lay it down till next month.

Modern Comic Drama.

MODERN COMIC DRAMA.

LOVE'S VICTORY; OR, THE SCHOOL FOR PRIDE.*

FEW things connected with the public taste are so remarkable as the change which has taken place in late years, both as to audiences, actors, and writers in the comic drama. There seems to be a gradual decay in the relish for pure comedy; in lieu of which the public are regaled with five-act farces, and two act prodigies, which are neither Farce, Comedy, nor Tragedy. Even when Comedy presents her decent person, she is so distorted from her natural orderly shape, and made to cut such antic capers, that her most faithful lovers can scarcely recognise her. Life and Nature are no longer the staple subjects of imitation on the stage. The drama has so far advanced in invention, that its persons are not the representatives of anything which the living world holds, but the genuine and undisputed offspring of the authors' brains. In short, the Comic Muse, and her friends the players, have entered into a grand confederacy against the shaking sides and aching jaws of the whole play-going public; and provided shouts of laughter attest their triumph, care nothing for the still small voice of reflecting criticism.

Our most popular comic performers (with, doubtless, two or three most respectable exceptions) are those who excel in broad farce, and who carry the largest share of its rant, grimace, and buffoonery into the higher department of the comic drama. The well-bred gentlemen and graceful ladies, who were deemed by our fathers and mothers such good company, as to give to the pieces in which they bore a part, the name of genteel comedy, appear, indeed, under the same appellations, and speak the same language; but they have forgotten their old-fashioned good manners, and seem only to remember that it is easier to provoke laughter, than to excite interest or admiration.

A good comedy, well acted, is perhaps as great a treat as can be presented to a cultivated mind. Indeed, if we consider the true objects of the imitative arts, it will appear that the dra

[Jan.

Sculpture and

than any of the others. The purpose ma approaches nearer to perfection the senses or the imagination copies or common to them all is, to place before combinations of originals which exist in the works of nature or of art; and gest share of pleasure, which gives that imitation is productive of the larnals as possess, in themselves, most the most faithful copy of such origidignity or interest. single posture, usually of a single perpainting are restricted, the one to a son-the other to a single point of acthey furnish copies merely of the lower tion where several are grouped. When animals, or of inanimate things, they effect all that art can accomplish in that kind of imitation; but when they rise to the representation of man, his passions, his sympathies, or his actions, so far are they from succeeding in the attempt, that our pleasure in witnessing from a sense of wonder, that even a the result of it arises in a great degree difficult to perform anything. When little has been done, where it seems so astonishment, at the Magdalen of Cawe gaze with admiration, mixed with preaching at Athens, we see Penitence nova, or at Raphael's Cartoon of Paul personified in the worn figure of a beaurished sorrows, or we witness the tritiful woman emaciated by long cheumphs of eloquence more than human, attested by the looks of a various, ignorant, and impassioned crowd; but in both it is a glance at only one moment of existence, giving, indeed, from that very narrowness of representation, an impulse to the fancy, but yet being, son, unsatisfactory and imperfect. as a representation, for the same rea

But to poetry, all that man can do, flowery field, in which subjects of reor feel, or suffer, is but one wide and presentation may be culled and combined; and of all kinds of poetry, the dramatic possesses the largest means of presenting faithful copies from real tion, the reader has to fashion out, in existence. In other works of invenhis own imagination, the forms and the situations which are not exhibited,

Love's Victory; or, The School for Pride, a Comedy in five acts, founded on the Spanish of Don Augustin Moreto.. By George Hyde. First performed at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, on Wednesday, Nov. 16, 1825. London: Hurst, Robinson, and Co.; Constable and Co. Edinburgh.

How

but described, and is left to make such suppositions as he may, of the looks and gestures and tones of those whom the poet makes to act and to suffer. But that mysterious and impressive language which nature addresses, not to the ear, but the eye, is spoken in the drama alone. Nothing nearer to reality can be conceived in imitation; and, accordingly, that imitative quality which is found in man at every period of society, and at every stage of his existence, from his cradle to his grave, has made dramatic representations, in almost every nation, one of the earliest contrivances for public entertainment. Of the two grand divisions of the drama, Comedy is undoubtedly best calculated to afford that species of pleasure which arises from successful imitation. In Tragedy, the characters are taken chiefly from a class of which the individuals are imperfectly and indistinctly known to us. lively soever are the sympathies they excite, these sympathies are for ever checked by the consciousness, that as they belong to a state of existence which can never be ours, their joys or their sorrows are such that we can scarcely ever hope or fear to share them. But in Comedy, the persons are taken, as it were, from among ourselves. We see upon the stage, if it be true and genuine Comedy, the virtues and the vices, the follies, levities, and humours, the littlenesses and intricacies, that engage, and interest, and engross us in real life; our sympathies are roused in proportion to the closeness of the copy-and in that proportion we are pleased. It is a pleasure which, in common with that afforded by all the elegant arts, is of a quiet and gentle kind,—not leading to boisterous mirth, -but mixing smiles with reflection. What it wants, however, in intensity, is made up in duration. The plays of Sheridan, Farquhar, Vanburgh, Goldsmith, and Coleman, never tire us in repetition. The copy is as delightful at its tenth, as at its first presentation. It is like those wonders of the painter and the statuary above noticed, on which we can gaze again and again, not finding out new beauties, as some pedants say they can, but feasting still with undiminished appetite on those which we have often relished.

But it is most true that a taste for this kind of gratification, though it is deeply seated in our nature, is susceptible of various changes, and as it may be cultivated and improved, so it may

be not only rendered dull and languid, but made almost wholly to yield to a relish for meaner pleasures. Numerous are the instances of a total revolution wrought in the course of a few generations, in the taste of a whole people. Shakspeare was in England once banished from the stage; and there was a period when Lucan was at Rome as popular as Virgil. The time seems fast approaching with us, when the imitation of ordinary life in legitimate comedy will yield its place upon the stage to exhibitions which gratify, not by the fidelity with which they copy life, but by exciting astonishment and laughter at the ingenious and successful efforts they display, in the invention of beings and incidents which could be furnished by no conceivable state of human existence. The fondness for excitement is so much stronger than a love for the more refined and placid pleasures derived from the elegant arts, that novelties and wonders will, with the crowd, be always more popular on the stage, than representations of life, manners, and nature. The popularity will indeed be transient, for the same thing cannot be twice the subject of wonder, and but seldom even of laughter; but while a farce or a melo-drame is new, and is capable of exciting mirth or astonishment, it will continue to be attractive to the multitude. The frequent gratification of this propensity, not only tends to confirm and enhance it, but is sure to diminish the desire for those less boisterous pleasures to which it is in its nature so opposite. It is in this way that as Farce advances, Comedy retires; writers and players create and increase a power to which they in turn must yield; and in the framing of new plays, and in the acting of old ones, the caterers of public amusement regulate their talents and exertions according to the inclinations of an audience, who yawn and grow dull when they are not kept in successive roars of laughter. It is in the very nature of performances of this kind to be fraught with puerilities and absurdities, which produce in cultivated minds not amusement, but contempt; and which among the luxurious classes of society, whose temper and habits unfit or disincline them for strong excitement, afford little or no entertainment. Hence, when such exhibitions prevail, though the higher classes do not desert the theatres-and though they may occasionally even encourage these

extravagancies, yet they gradually, and perhaps unconsciously, fall off in their attendance at places of public entertainment, where they find the representations adapted for the noisy mirth of the multitude, in which they cannot sympathize.

Such seems to be at present, with us, the condition of the comic drama. Most of our late comedies have been written upon the plan of those compositions which O'Keeffe and the artists of his school invented, or improved in extravagance, to destroy the illusions which Siddons and Kemble had raised, and enable the audience to take vengeance for the distresses they had been made to endure, by laughing Tragedy out of countenance. Had Farce remained confined within its proper province, whatever critics may say of it, it would have had its claims to a respectable place in the literature of Britain. It is certainly a plant of indigenous growth, and though wild, is not without its virtue. It may be, and it has been, made the medium of keen and effective satire, and in the hands of a writer of genius, though it may want the truth, may yet serve many of the purposes of Comedy. A folly or a foible is often best corrected by showing it in its most ludicrous and extravagant excesses, and if the characters are only well marked as individuals, though they be such as could never have had a real existence, they may combine a moral with amusement. Whoever has seen Munden, (shall we ever see anything like him?) in that most genuine of farces, Modern Antiques, must have borne in his recollections, for one year at least, a complete antidote against the infectious bite of an antiquary.

The ascendancy, however, which Farce has gained, and which is strengthening daily, seems likely to lead at last to the total expulsion of legitimate Comedy from the stage. But this is not the only symptom which seems to mark the decline and fall of the once brilliant empire of Comedy in England. Authors appear to have for some time past abandoned all thoughts of working with British materials. The scene and the characters are from Spain, or Italy, or Sicily, and real life at home seems too dull or too difficult for imitation. Why the old staple of the British drama,-the humours, the passions, and the foibles of British originals, has been thrown aside, we

have not just now space to inquire; but it would be easy to show, that this has not happened from the cause which some have chosen to assign-progress of refinement, and the general assimilation of manners. There is not yet, and there probably never will be with us, such sameness of character as existed in France, when Moliere carried Comedy to a pitch of excellence never rivalled but in England. We have amongst us at this day, a fund of peculiar and strongly marked character, which it is needless to say exceeds, both in its variety and in its capability of being copied for the stage, all that our next neighbours on the Continent have had for ages. There is stamped upon the very nature of an Englishman an individuality, which is unknown in the country where, even at this day, Comedy flourishes in fertility and vigour. The humours of the French, whether on or off the stage, are the humours of classes, not of individuals. They have not, and they never had, their Sir Peter Teazles, their Lord Oglebys, or their Job Thornberrys. These are the genuine growth of Great Britain, and they still exist among us in rich abundance, requiring but the eye and the touch of genius to select and combine them for the drama. Passion has indeed retired as civilization has gone forward. Tragedy, and the more sober kinds of poetry which delight by the excitement of strong emotion, are in these quieter and happier times losing the materials which were furnished when society was ruder. But the peculiarities which amuse and instruct by ridicule, and from which Comedy draws all its choicest stores, whether for mirth or for moral, are with us nearly as various and as fresh as ever.

It will be readily supposed, when we announce, that the play we are about to notice is in its scene, plot, and character, wholly Spanish, that we do not assign it a very high_rank in British Comedy. To British Comedy, indeed, it can be hardly said to belong. There is nothing in it English but the language. And yet it is impossible to read half-a-dozen pages of any part of it, without perceiving that the author, or adapter, is a man of taste and genius, and has studied, with considerable effect, those peculiarities, so little attended to by most of our modern playwrights, which distinguish dramatic dialogue from all other styles of written English. This

is no mean praise; but the piece has other qualities, which make us regret that Mr Hyde did not apply himself to a task better suited to his own powers, than that of adapting to the British stage a foreign production, which, whatever be its merits in its native language, no genius in the translator or compiler could dress up to a rank higher than that of respectable mediocrity.

But before observing farther on its merits, we must begin to give some account of the plot. We premise, however, that with the Spanish original, or the German version of it, to both which Mr Hyde with great candour acknowledges his obligations, we have nothing whatever to do. It is seldom fair criticism to make comparisons between imitations and originals in the drama, when the claim to originality is honestly and formally abandoned. The writer is entitled, in common justice, to have the piece which he offers for our amusement tried upon its own merits, and by a re ference to its avowed purpose; and in estimating the claims of "Love's Victory" upon our favour, we shall not travel out of the comedy as it now lies before us.

The plot may be easily told. It has the advantage of simplicity; and is, indeed, not very uncommon either in the general design or in its details. The Princess Diana, only child of the Duke of Barcelona, is in the predicament of all rich heiresses,-beset by a multitude of suitors. She has, however, very early imbibed certain "maxims which she holds as dearly as her life," but which are generally supposed, both by poets and by the world, not to be very common with her sex. One of these maxims, and that which forms the pivot of the drama, is, (we like to give a lady's sentiments in her own words,) "that she regards the choice between marriage and death with perfect indifference." And so far does she carry this sentiment into actual practice, that again somewhat differing from the reputed propensities of her sex-she not only presents a front of awful coldness to her admirers, but even to Donna Laura and Donna Louisa, her cousins and intimates,-nay, to Donna Floretta, her maid of honour, she holds the same appearance of inflexible Platonism. The following is a specimen.

VOL. XIX.

ACT I. SCENE III.

The Princess's Apartment, decorated with paintings, sculpture, &c. Donnas LavRA and LOUISA, sitting at a table with books. Donna FLORETTA and the Princess DIANA.

P. Dia. Read me that passage again, Floretta; I like the story much. D. Flor. (reads.)

"In vain Apollo woo'd the maid,-
That peerless daughter of the stream;
Daphne implored Diana's aid,

And gave the laurel deathless fame."
P. Dia. It is admirable.

D. Flor. I think it very dull.

D. Lau. It seems to me rather af fected.

P. Dia. The language, I confess, is somewhat elevated; but it befits the subject.

D. Lou. It really does sound a little pompous.

P. Dia. Granted. It is the poet's task to raise our feelings above the ordinary grovelling occupations of the common

world.

D. Lou. (sighing) Well.

P. Dia. What means that exclamation? D. Lou. It may be all very true; but I'm sure it must be very cruel, and wicked too, to hate love, or anything else, without knowing what it is.

P. Dia. Then you would be so much a child as to burn yourself before you shunned the fire?

D. Lou. Perhaps I might only get scorched, and the risk may not be so great as

P. Dia. As what?

D. Lou. As the pleasure of trying it.

P. Dia. (angrily) What do I hear? Is this spoken in my presence? Donna Louisa, you must make your election between these sentiments and my society.

Cold and stern beauties have been, time out of mind, privileged to inflict the hottest pains of the most feverish of passions; and Don Cesar, Don Luis, Don Gaston, (all princes, be it remembered,) and a certain Don Pedro, an old courtier and superannuated beau, are rivals for this fair prize. Don Cesar, however, being the most deeply smitten, is of course at once the most desponding and the most persevering of them all. Very early in the piece, we find him planning, at the instance of Perin, the Princess's secretary, a scheme for overcoming the pride and obstinacy of her seemingly cold and unyielding temper. The dialogue in which this most justifiable conspiracy is plotted may be Q

« AnteriorContinuar »