Mas. Too impatiently, Perchance, they seek me: but I'll quiet them At once. (Goes into the balcony and speaks to the people.) Alive and free: 'Tis peace. People (without). Peace! Peace! Duke. And now, Come Masaniello, and, in ancient usage, Drink with me to the welfare of the people, And to our union. With the king's own goblet, I know to give his due; and heaven's to heaven : Gen. (as before). His choice has fixed his fate. Mas. Naples for ever! Peace with our good viceroy! (drinks.) I'll show you how obedient is this people, How loyal. (To the people) Long live Philip, King of Spain! And long may Naples' loyal sons live free! People. Long life to all, longest to Masaniello! Mas. Now not a word more! Each man to his business! (Lays his finger on his lips, with a gesture of dismissal.) I most admire, or thine unbounded power Most good thou canst effect. Myself have seen Thy wisdom and thy skill in government, Shown when the infamous banditti swarm Was swept away. But on thy laurels now The viceregal blandishments are interrupted by a burst of frenzy on the part of his visiter, wrought by the Jesuit's drugs, and henceforward until his assassination he is constantly insane. All that need be added is, that the Jesuit is caught in his own toils. The viceroy declares his horror of a crime of which he avers utter ignorance, and the baffled intriguer is killed by the surgeon's washing a slight wound he has received from the frantic Masaniello with one of his own poisons, which, after wetting the bullets to be used against the fisherman, he had left in the basin, where it looked like clean water. We have now only to notice the collection of poems: these minor pieces, especially the graver kind, are decidedly inferior in merit to the narrative; the strain, however Teutonic, seeming less congenial to our northern Scald's temperament. One specimen of his sportive mood we must however give, and, as his happiest effort, from the prologue to the volume. After painting the swallow's delight in building her nest under the roof of lovers, the poet thus concludes: "Thou, who to my Progne giv'st shelter and shade, Ob, hear what she fain would say. 'I was born, a little unfortunate maid, 6 Before my birth's proper day. 'Now am I a bird, rather black than white, 'But how many Junes shall I come Again to thy cottage home? Receive me then as a kindly guest, 'When thou sittest in mournful guise; 'Allow me to chirrup, I'll chirrup my best, 'While rain-clouds darken the skies: 'When shines the sun, and the lark carols gay, 'Or thou seekest the grove at the close of day And hearest the nightingale ; 'Then hushed be the swallow's wail.'' We cannot enter into minute criticism regarding the confusion of Progne with her unfortunate sister Philomela. From the works before us we look upon Ingemann as endowed with very considerable poetic powers; and especially the talent of conceiving, and graphically delineating the past, of Scandinavian times at least, as they existed both internally and externally, in matter and also in mind. He writes with great spirit, though he does not always know when to stop; and, in fact, his faults of long-windedness and bad or deficient taste are precisely those which are generic and inherent in Teutonic nations, and require for their correction a long course of practical, rather than meditative refinement, and a mixture of bloods and natures from intercourse, accidental, and other collisions, such as has composed that of England: we do not find the same defects in Chaucer and Shakspeare. What we call want of taste in these master-spirits is in fact merely the coarseness of manner incidental to their age; and not the deficient or false intellectual taste, evincing the want of correct judgment that eternally deforms almost the best productions of Germany. ART. IX.-Pérégrinations d'une Paria (1833-1834); par M.me Flora Tristan. (The Peregrinations of a Pariah (18331-834;) by Madame Flora Tristan.) 2 vols. 8vo. Paris, 1838. THE world has gone wrong from the beginning of time! Five thousand years have elapsed since it began; and in all that long interval of centuries, and systems, and creeds, that wide expanse of nature, society, and civilization, common-sense has never existed, wisdom never found a voice, until lately! In all the families into which the human race has been divided; in all the quarters of the globe into which they have spread; in all the languages that have breathed the boundless diversity of thought, and borne to answering hearts the warmest utterance of the heart, not a trace of reason can be found! The great divisions, the single families of mankind, have lived and died; their numbers are computed to rival the gigantic mass of Arthurs-Seat at Edinburgh; their tongues, such as have not died away into utter oblivion, still preserve and develope the institutes of their actual experience;but all this, with themselves, is wrong. Three thousand four hundred languages exist at this moment, living shrines of the judgment of as many nations: every state, every people, every tribe, of even semi-civilization, in closest intercourse or widest separation, has brought in these 3400 tongues one uniform and universal result from each distinct and isolated specimen, to reverence the sanctity of marriage and uphold its institution. The yearnings of self-love to keep its own undisturbed; the principle of society, to abstain from the property of others; the ties of nature, clinging to its offspring; the pulse of affection, claiming to distinguish and cherish the very breath of its own being, to guard and guide the infant ray of its own spirit: the legislator's institute to fence the weak with paternal care, and guard the strong from the violence of their own overpowering passion; nay, the law of Heaven that enjoined the rite, and denounced wrath and woe on its violator:-All are wrong!-A young French lady has had a quarrel with her husband; and society must be unhinged, and the world remodelled, and human happiness and divine command be alike trampled under foot, that Madame Flora Tristan may become a Miss. To attain due fulfilment of her ardent desires being obviously a matter of the greatest interest and importance to the whole human race, mankind might in their ignorant perversity have differed upon and contested the right mode of proceeding, had it not pleased the fair illuminator of our moral darkness to point it out herself for the general benefit of society, and of her own sex in especial. "There is not a place in the most civilized countries," says this accurate and well-informed lady, "where numerous "classes of individuals have not to undergo legal oppression. "The peasants in Russia, the Jews in Rome, sailors in England, "women everywhere: yes," she magnanimously exclaims, "wherever the cessation of that mutual consent, necessary to the "formation of marriage, does not suffice to break it, woman is in "servitude:" and, it seems, divorce obtainable at the will of one of the parties can alone place her on the same level as man in regard to civil rights: "Therefore,"-proceeds the same conclusive authority, and doubtless with good reasons for the objection -"to publish the amours of women is to expose them to oppression." 66 66 The remedy for such manifold evils could only have been derived from direct inspiration: we know not in truth from what quarter, but suspect that at any rate it was not from M. Arthur Bertrand, our gentle Saint Simonienne's doubtless very respectable publisher. "Let the women whose lives have been agitated by great misfortunes render their griefs eloquent; let them expose the troubles they have experienced owing to the position "in which laws have placed them, and to the prejudices with "which they are enchained." ** "Let every individual, in fine, "who has seen and suffered, who has had to struggle with Men "and Things, make a duty of relating in all their variety the events they have shared in or witnessed, and specify by name those "who are to be blamed or eulogized." 66 This simple and efficacious device, to be performed after the fashion of their prototype, Madame Flora, at first sight appears likely to afford amusement enough. The exposure by name of the Men and Things with which the sex have struggled might gratify the inherent love of scandal in our nature, if it did not overwhelm it; but if every married woman were to write two volumes octavo of what occurred to her in the years 1833-1834 alone,-take only Paris, where the married couples are recently estimated at 97,000, and the number of the contented couples at 13, and what a sensation would it not produce! Every husband in France would be bound to read, and of course answer these outbreaks of conjugal affection; and M. Arthur Bertrand himself, for ought we know, be compelled to write his own private history instead of publishing for others. As the example spread, not only the European and Asiatic, the Hollander, the Laplander, the Mug and the Thug, but Esquimaux and Choctaw, Iroquois, Catabaws, and Chickasaws, wives in short and squaws of every denomination with all their thousand tongues would be filling the grand diapason of griefs through every octave and chord, tone, and semitone, quavers with their subdivisions of demi, demi-semi, and shakes; from the turkey*-like pectoral of Arabia, the goose-like sibilation of England, and the Tuscant eagle-scream, to the hen-clucking of southern Africa, and the hawked aspirations of the Peruvian. Coptic, Zend, and Sanscrit might be wakened and explored for lamentations, and interminable sorrows pour forth from Hottentot, Japanese, Chinese and Cherokees, which last have just invented an alphabet in time for the operation. Two hundred millions, the actual computed stock of the married, in couples, trios, quartets, or ad infinita, might thus be usefully occupied in writing each an octavo volume per annum, to praise themselves, and abuse the Beloved of their Souls, by name. The rabble-rout and mass of a past period, "those luckless brains Who, to the wrong side leaning," from forty to fifty years since delighted to doat upon the peremptory superficialities of Paine and the dull platitudes of Godwin; in whom northern second-sight itself could discern nothing but foggy mists resembling elevations; that "rascaille rabble" could alone, we believe, have tolerated in their excited ignorance the vague impertinencies of Helen Maria Williams and Mary Wolstoncroft. These miserable quacks of womanhood have long since, thank Heaven! died away in England; and amongst our fair neighbours across the Channel the race does not seem to meet with encouragement at present, even though a second Goddess of Reason comes forward to qualify herself for the office by vindicating and imitating the process that established her predecessor's claim. We judge of her by her own words, quoted above and hereafter. Nor does her shameless praise of the gross and licentious novels of Madame Dudevant, alias George Sand, induce the French public, any more than our own, to regard that ingenious Epicene, the sensuality of both sexes, in any other light than degrading the manhood she vainly assumes and disgracing the softer sex that justly repudiates her. We must not do France the injustice to imagine, because her children love excitement and are something less scrupulous than ourselves as to the means, that therefore those printed abominations form the real taste of the people. The unsettled state of French literature makes all novelty desirable, and, like every other fluctuating scene, conceals in part their monstrosity. But the incessant jest and sparkling sneer indicate, no less strongly than our graver remonstrances at home, a contemptuous estimation of the writer and her crew; and France is satisfied, instead of objurgating, to hold * Malcolm's Anecdotes of Persia. + Porphyry. |