forms the nauseous yet perpetual chit-chat of the narrative. However gross may be the deficiencies of plot, character, style, and language, incident pregnant with devastation and bloodshed is deemed a receipt in full for every excellence; and in proportion as the ordinary standard of human actions is exceeded, the nearer, in the opinion of the author, the piece approaches to perfection. Such a conduct, however, betrays the greatest poverty of expedient, and not unfrequently defeats its own end, by exciting disgust instead of approbation. Nature deals in no such hyperboles; to the credit of herself and the comfort of her creation, she as rarely shows in the moral world, a Nero, a Borgia, a Cromwell, or a Catiline, as she does in the natural, a comet or a hurricane, an earthquake or an inundation. Whoever has cursorily turned over the dramatic works of Lee and Dryden, will acknowledge the justness of this charge. The With uniform and unexampled characters, either of vice or virtue in the extreme, the aggregate of mankind are little affected; as they cannot come under their observation in real life, they have few claims to their notice, and none to their belief, in fictitious representations. Mixed characters alone come home to the minds of the multitude. angelic qualities of a Grandison or a Harlowe are reflected but by the hearts of a few solitary individuals; whilst those of Jones find a never failing mirror in the greater part of mankind: at all events, if it is impossible to avoid verging to one extreme or the other, the side of virtue, it is hoped, is the most probable, and, therefore, the most proper of the two; and wherever we are tempted by a story, peculiarly adapted to the tragic Muse, (carrying with it, at the same time, a sufficiency of the terrible) it is the business of the poet to be most cautious in the selection, and to deal out death and destruction as reluctantly and as seldom as the nature of the incidents will admit; for I cannot help concurring with Jonathan Wild in opinion, that mischief is much too precious a commodity to be squandered. The judiciously blending the lights and shades of a character, so as to make the one necessarily result from, and fall into, the other, constitutes one of the most difficult branches of the art; and in the works of common writers, it is in vain we look for an effect of the kind. To delineate, with exactness, the temporary lapse of the good from virtue to vice, or those peculiar situations in which the wicked man faulters in his career, and blushes to find himself "staggering upon virtue," demands the hand of a master. A character of uninterrupted detestation can scarcely exist; and when it is obtruded upon us, we have a right to question the abilities of him who drew it. The Satan of Milton, though with a heart distended with pride, and rejoicing in disobedience, when marshalling his troops, (all of whom had forfeited heaven in his cause) for the express purpose of confronting the Almighty, betrays emotions almost incompatible with his nature. They are singularly affecting : cruel his eye, but cast Signs of remorse and passion, to behold The fellows of his crime, the followers rather, For ever now to have their lot in pain; Millions of spirits for his fault amerc'd Of heaven, and from eternal splendors flung Thrice he assay'd, and thrice, in spite of scorn, Book i. 604, &c. Nor has Virgil suffered the unnatural and abandoned Mezentius, equally the contemner of the gods, and the enemy of man, to leave us without exciting some pity, however undeserved. The grief with which he hears the death of his amiable son Lausus announced, and the eagerness with which he instantly hastens to revenge it; the magnanimity he discovers in his last words, in reply to the taunts of Æneas; afford a fine relief to that horror and detestation which the former part of his character had previously excited: the whole is a master-piece in its kind.* In the Medea of Euripides, one of the first per formances antiquity has left us, it is the aim of the poet, throughout, to make Medea an object of commiseration; and to this end, he has made a tender and unremitted solicitude for the fate of her children the leading feature of her character; and on comparing the provocation on the one side with the revenge on the other, we shall find them by no See from line 833 to the conclusion of the 10th Æneid. means disproportioned. High-born, impatient, and ardent in her attachment, with a sensibility tremblingly alive to feel her wrongs, and a spirit, to the utmost to revenge them, she is still a tender mother, though no longer a fond wife, and in every respect perfectly human. For Jason, she had forsaken and betrayed her father and her country; killed her brother Absyrtus-through his means she had been insulted by Creon, and banished his kingdom; Creon, the very man, whose daughter Creusa had usurped her bed, and alienated the affections of her husband. Yet every writer, who has employed himself on this subject since the Greek bard, seems widely to have mistaken, or wilfully to have departed, from what should have been their model. Seneca, with some few slight exceptions, has divested her of every claim to pity; Corneille has done the same; and Glover, a poet of our own, has left the blunder as he found it. Whoever is desirous of being made acquainted with some of the most poignant struggles between the desire of re venge and maternal affection, is more particularly referred to this play.* It may not be amiss to conclude these remarks with a few extracts from a most excellent modern performance, where the author has committed an error, (of which he was probably sensible at the time) in order to avoid exceeding, what he seems to have considered the regular boundaries of human depravity. In the last scene of the Revenge, where the dreadful unravelment of the plot takes place, through • See Medea, 1021, 1069, 1244, &c. &c. the immediate agency of Zanga himself, the following circumstances are thus forcibly unfolded : Thy wife is guiltless; that's one transport to me; : By these aggravations of malevolence, the detestation of the audience is worked up to the highest possible pitch in the subsequent part of the scene, Alonzo is racked with a still farther discovery of the reasons that incited Zanga to revenge, from Zanga himself; in an agony of despair, he stabs himself, and dies; and the poet concludes the piece with endeavouring to draw a shade over the character of the Moor, before he leaves him to the mercy of the spectator; and, by one speech, aims at an atonement for him, in opposition to the detestation and disgust he had previously so successfully excited. Zanga approaches the body, and thus speaks : Is this Alonzo? where's his haughty mien ? Is that the hand which smote me? Heavens! how pale! I war not with the dust the great, the proud, A lion preys not upon carcases. This was the only method to subdue me. |