Графични страници
PDF файл
ePub

amidst the horrible devotion of his foes. The whole scene is, we think, without an equal in the conceptions which dramatic power has been able to imbody. Its startling unexpectedness, yet its perfect probability to the imagination-the high tone and wild enthusiasm of character in the murderers-the sacrificial cast of their intended deed in their own raised and perverted thoughts-the fearful view given to the bodily senses of their prisoner of his remaining moments by the segment of the circle yet to be traversed by the finger of the clock before him, enable us to participate in the workings of his own dizzy soul, as he stands "awaiting till the sword destined to slay him crept out of its scabbard gradually, and, as it were by straw-breadths," and condemned to drink the bitterness of death "drop by drop," while his destined executioners seem "to alter their forms and features like the spectres in a feverish dream; their features become larger and their faces more disturbed;" until the beings around him appear actually demons, the walls seem to drop with blood, and "the light tick of the clock thrills on his ear with such loud, painful distinctness, as if each sound were the prick of a bodkin inflicted on the naked nerve of the organ." The effect is even retrospectively heightened by the heroic deaths of the Covenanters immediately succeeding, which give a dignity and a consecration to their late terrific design. The trial and execution of Fergus Mac Ivor are also, in the most exalted sense of the term, tragical. They are not only of breathless interest from the external circumstances, nor of moral grandeur from the heroism of Fergus and his follower, but of poetic dignity from that power of imagination which renders for a time the rules of law sublime as well as fearful, and gives to all the formalities of a trial more than a judicial majesty. It is seldom, indeed, that the terrors of our author offend or shock us, because they are accompanied by that reconciling power which softens without breaking the current of our sympathies. But there are some few instances of unrelieved horror-or of anguish, which overmasters fantasy-as the strangling of Glossin by Dirk Haiteraich, the administering of the torture to Macbriar, and the bloody bridal of Lammermuir. If we compare these with the terrors of Burley in his cave-where with his naked sword in one hand and his Bible in the other, he wrestles with his own remorse, believing it, in the spirit of his faith, a fiend of Satan-and with the sinking of Ravenswood in the sands; we shall feel how the grandeur of religious thought in the first instance, and the stately scenery of nature and the air of the supernatural in the last, ennoble agony, and render horrors grateful to the soul.

ness-to present it to us in the noblest masses; yet to make us spectators of each individual circumstance of interest in the field, may excite the envy of a painter. We know of nothing resembling those delineations in history or romance, except the descriptions given by Thucydides of the blockade of Platea, of the Corcyræan massacres, of the attempt to retake Epipolæ in the night of the great naval action before Syracuse, of all the romantic events of the Sicilian war, and the varied miseries of the Athenian army in their retreat under Nicias. In the life and spirit, and minuteness of the details-in the intermingling of allusions to the scenery of the contests-and in the general fervour breathed over the whole, there is a remarkable resemblance between these passages of the Greek historian, and the narratives of Scottish contests by the author of Waverley. There is, too, the same patriotic zeal in both; though the feeling in the former is of a more awful and melancholy cast, and that of the latter more light and cheerful. The Scottish novelist may, like the noblest historians, boast that he has given to his country "Konμ & ”—a possession for ever!

It remains that we should say a word on the use made of the supernatural in these romances. There is, in the mode of its employment, more of gusto more that approaches to an actual belief in its wonders, than in the works of any other author of these incredulous times. Even Shakspeare himself, in his remote age, does not appear to have drank in so deeply the spirit of superstition as our novelist of the nineteenth century. He treats, indeed, all the fantasies of his countrymen with that spirit of allowance and fond regard with which he always touches on human emotions. But he does not seem to have heartily partaken in them as awful realities. His witches have power to excite wonder, but little to chill men's bloods. Ariel, the visions of Prospero's enchanted isle, the “quaint fairies and the dapper elves" of the Midsummer Night's Dream glitter on the fancy, in a thousand shapes of dainty loveliness, but never affect us otherwise than as creations of the poet's brain. Even the ghost in Hamlet does not appal us half so fearfully as many a homely tale which has nothing to recommend it but the earnest belief of its tremulous reciter. There is little magic in the web of life, notwithstanding all the variety of its shades, as Shakspeare has drawn it. Not so is it with our author; his spells have manifest hold on himself, and, therefore, they are very potent with the spirits of his readers. No prophetic intimation in his works is ever suffered to fail. The spirit which appears to Fergus-the astronomical predictions of Guy Mannering-the eloquent curses, and more We must not pass over, without due ac- eloquent blessings, of Meg Merrilies-the dying knowledgment, the power of our author in the denunciation of Mucklewrath-the old prodescription of battles, as exhibited in his pic-phecy in the Bride of Lammermuir-all are tures of the engagement at Preston Pans, of the first skirmish with the Covenanters, in which they overcome Claverhouse, and of the battle in which they were, in turn, defeated. The art by which he contrives at once to give the mortal contest in all its breadth and vast

fulfilled to the very letter. The high and joyous spirits of Kennedy are observed by one of the bystanders as intimations of his speedy fate. We are far from disapproving of these touches of the super-human, for they are made to blend harmoniously with the freshest

GODWIN.

We shall avoid the fruitless task of dwelling on the defects of this author, or the general insipidity of his lovers, on the want of skill in the development of his plots, on the clumsiness of his prefatory introductions, or the impotence of many of his conclusions. He has done his country and his nature no

hues of life, and without destroying its native colouring, give to it a more solemn tinge. But we cannot extend our indulgence to the seer in the Legend of Montrose, or the Lady of Avenel, in the Monastery; where the spirits of another world do not cast their shadowings on this, but stalk forth in open light, and "in form as palpable" as any of the mortal cha-ordinary service. He has brought romance racters. In works of passion, fairies and ghosts can scarcely be "simple products of the common day," without destroying all harmony in our perceptions, and bringing the whole into discredit with the imagination as well as the feelings. Fairy tales are among the most exquisite things in the world, and so are delineations of humanity like those of our author; but they can never be blended without debasing the former into chill substances, or refining the latter into airy nothings.

almost into our own times, and made the nobleness of humanity familiar to our daily thoughts. He has enriched history to us by opening such varied and delicious vistas to our gaze, beneath the range of its loftier events and more public characters. May his intellectual treasury prove exhaustless as the purse of Fortunatus, and may he dip into it unsparingly for the delight and the benefit of his species!

GODWIN.

[NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.]

moveless grandeur which never could spring from mere fantasy. His works are not like those which a man, who is endued with a deep sense of beauty, or a rare faculty of observation, or a sportive wit, or a breathing eloquence, may fabricate as the "idle business" of his life, as the means of profit or of fame. They have more in them of acts than of writings. They are the living and the immortal deeds of a man who must have been a great political adventurer had he not been an author. There is in "Caleb Williams" alone the material-the real burning energy-which might have animated a hundred schemes for the weal or wo of the species.

MR. GODWIN is the most original-not only | of living novelists-but of living writers in prose. There are, indeed very few authors of any age who are so clearly entitled to the praise of having produced works, the first perusal of which is a signal event in man's internal history. His genius is by far the most extraordinary, which the great shaking of nations and of principles-the French revolution-impelled and directed in its progress. English literature, at the period of that marvellous change, had become sterile; the rich luxuriance which once overspread its surface, had gradually declined into thin and scattered productions of feeble growth and transient No writer of fictions has ever succeeded so duration. The fearful convulsion which agitated the world of politics and of morals, strikingly as Mr. Godwin, with so little adtore up this shallow and exhausted surface- ventitious aid. His works are neither gay disclosed vast treasures which had been con- creatures of the element, nor pictures of excealed for centuries-burst open the secret ternal life-they derive not their charm from springs of imagination and of thought—and the delusions of fancy, or the familiarities of left, instead of the smooth and weary plain, a daily habitude-and are as destitute of the region of deep valleys and of shapeless hills, fascinations of light satire and felicitous deof new cataracts and of awful abysses, of lineation of society, as they are of the magic spots blasted into everlasting barrenness, and of the Arabian Tales. His style has no regions of deepest and richest soil. Our figures and no fantasies," but is simple and author partook in the first enthusiasms of the austere. Yet his novels have a power which so enthralls us, that we half doubt, when we spirit-stirring season-in "its pleasant exercise of hope and joy”-in much of its specu- read them in youth, whether all our experilative extravagance, but in none of its practi-ence is not a dream, and these the only realiHe was roused not into action ties. He lays bare to us the innate might and He takes the simplest and cal excesses. but into thought; and the high and undying majesty of man. energies of his soul, unwasted on vain efforts most ordinary emotions of our nature, and for the actual regeneration of man, gathered makes us feel the springs of delight or of strength in those pure fields of meditation to agony which they contain, the stupendous force which they were limited. The power which which lies hid within them, and the sublime might have ruled the disturbed nations with mysteries with which they are connected. He the wildest, directed only to the creation of exhibits the naked wrestle of the passions in high theories and of marvellous tales, im- a vast solitude, where no object of material parted to its works a stern reality, and al beauty disturbs our attention from the august

186

presses us with the immortality of virtue; and while he leaves us painfully to regret the stains which the most gifted and energetic characters contract amidst the pollutions of time, he inspires us with hope that these shall pass away for ever. We drink in unshaken confidence the good and the true, which is ever of more value than hatred or contempt for the evil!

"Caleb Williams," the earliest, is also the most popular of our author's romances, not because his latter works have been less rich in sentiment and passion, but because they are, for the most part, confined to the development of single characters; while in this there is the opposition and death grapple of two beings, each endowed with poignant sensibilities and

spectacle, and where the least beating of the heart is audible in the depth of the stillness. His works endow the abstractions of life with more of real presence, and make us more intensely conscious of existence than any others with which we are acquainted. They give us a new feeling of the capacity of our nature for action or for suffering, make the currents of our blood mantle within us, and our bosoms heave with indistinct desires for the keenest excitements and the strangest perils. We feel as though we could live years in moments of energetic life, while we sympathize with his breathing characters. In things which before appeared indifferent, we discern sources of the fullest delight or of the most intense anguish. The healthful breathings of the common air seem instinct with an unspeaka-quenchless energy. There is no work of ficble rapture. The most ordinary habits which link one season of life to another become the awakeners of thoughts and of remembrances "which do often lie too deep for tears." The nicest disturbances of the imagination make the inmost fibres of the being quiver with agonies. Passions which have not usually been thought worthy to agitate the soul, now first seem to have their own ardent beatings, and their tumultuous joys. We seem capable of a more vivid life than we have ever before felt or dreamed of, and scarcely wonder that he who could thus give us a new sense of our own vitality, should have imagined that mind might become omnipotent over matter, and that he was able, by an effort of the will, to become corporeally immortal!

tion which more rivets the attention-no tragedy which exhibits a struggle more sublime, or sufferings more intense, than this; yet to produce the effect, no complicated machinery is employed, but the springs of action are few and simple. The motives are at once common and elevated, and are purely intellectual, without appearing for an instant inadequate to their mighty issues. Curiosity, for instance, which generally seems a low and ignoble motive for scrutinizing the secrets of a man's life, here seizes with strange fascination on a gentle and ingenuous spirit, and supplies it with excitement as fervid, and snatches of delight as precious and as fearful, as those feelings create which we are accustomed to regard as alone worthy to enrapture or to agitate. The The intensity of passion which is manifested involuntary recurrence by Williams to the in the novels of Godwin is of a very different string of phrensy in the soul of one whom he kind from that which burns in the poems of a would die to serve-the workings of his tornoble bard, whom he has been sometimes er- tures on the heart of Falkland till they wring roneously supposed to resemble. The former confidence from him-and the net thenceforth sets before us mightiest realities in clear vi- spread over the path of the youth like an invi sion; the latter imbodies the phantoms of a sible spell by his agonized master, surprising as feverish dream. The strength of Godwin is they are, arise from causes so natural and so adethe pure energy of unsophisticated nature; that quate, that the imagination at once owns them of Lord Byron is the fury of disease. The as authentic. The mild beauty of Falkland's grandeur of the last is derived from its transi- natural character, contrasted with the guilt he toriness; that of the first from its eternal es- has incurred, and his severe purpose to lead a sence. The emotion in the poet receives no long life of agony and crime, that his fame inconsiderable part of its force from its rebound may be preserved spotless, is affecting almost from the dark rocks and giant barriers which without example. There is a rude grandeur seem to confine its rage within narrow bound-even in the gigantic oppressor Tyrel, which all aries; the feeling of the novelist is in its own his disgusting enormities cannot destroy. Innatural current deep and resistless. The per- dependently of the master-spring of interest, sons of the bard feel intensely, because they there are in this novel individual passages soon shall feel no more; those of the novelist which can never be forgotten. Such are the glow, and kindle, and agonize, because they fearful flight of Emily with her ravisher-the shall never perish. In the works of both, guilt escape of Caleb Williams from prison, and his is often associated with sublime energy; but enthusiastic sensations on the recovery of his how dissimilar are the impressions which they freedom, though wounded and almost dying leave on the spirit! Lord Byron strangely without help-and the scenes of his peril blends the moral degradation with the intellec-among the robbers. Perhaps this work is the tual majesty so that goodness appears tame, and crime only is honoured and exalted. Godwin, on the other hand, only teaches us bitterly to mourn the evil which has been cast on a noble nature, and to regard the energy of the character not as inseparably linked with vice, but as destined ultimately to subdue it. He makes us everywhere feel that crime is not the native heritage, but the accident, of the species, of which we are members. He im

grandest ever constructed out of the simple elements of humanity, without any extrinsic aid from imagination, wit, or memory.

In "St. Leon," Mr. Godwin has sought the stores of the supernatural;—but the "metaphysical aid" which he has condescended to accept is not adapted to carry him farther from nature, but to ensure a more intimate and wide communion with its mysteries. His hero does not acquire the philosopher's stone and the

elixir of immortality to furnish out for himself | hour; but it is ever the peculiar power of Mr a dainty solitude, where he may dwell, soothed Godwin to make us feel that there is something with the music of his own undying thoughts, within us which cannot perish! and rejoicing in his severance from his frail and transitory fellows. Apart from those among whom he moves, his yearnings for sympathy become more intense as it eludes him, and his perceptions of the mortal lot of his species become more vivid and more fond, as he looks on it from an intellectual eminence which is alike unassailable to death and to joy. Even in this work, where the author has to conduct a perpetual miracle, his exceeding earnestness makes it difficult to believe him a fabulist. Listen to his hero, as he expatiates in the first consciousness of his high preroga-trifler; he cannot work in these frail and low tives:

"Fleetwood" has less of our author's characteristic energy than any other of his works. The earlier parts of it, indeed, where the formation of the hero's character, in free rovings amidst the wildest of nature's scenery, is traced, have a deep beauty which reminds us of some of the holiest imaginations of Wordsworth. But when the author would follow him into the world-through the frolics of college, the dissipations of Paris, and the petty disquietudes of matrimonial life-we feel that he has condescended too far. He is no graceful

materials. There is, however, one scene in this novel most wild and fearful. This is where Fleetwood, who has long brooded in anguish over the idea of his wife's falsehood, keeps strange festival on his wedding-daywhen, having procured a waxen image of her whom he believes perfidious, and dressed a frightful figure in a uniform to represent her imagined paramour, he locks himself in an apartment with these horrid counterfeits, a supper of cold meats, and a barrel-organ, on which he plays the tunes often heard from the pair he believes guilty, till his silent agony gives place to delirium, he gazes around with glassy eyes, sees strange sights and dallies with frightful mockeries, and at last tears the dreadful spectacle to atoms, and is seized with furious madness. We do not remember, even in the works of our old dramatists, any thing of its kind comparable to this voluptuous fantasy of despair.

"I surveyed my limbs, all the joints and articulations of my frame, with curiosity and astonishment. What! exclaimed I, these limbs, this complicated but brittle frame shall last for ever! No disease shall attack it; no pain shall seize it; death shall withhold from it for ever his abhorred grasp! Perpetual vigour, perpetual activity, perpetual youth, shall take up their abode with me! Time shall generate in me no decay, shall not add a wrinkle to my brow, or convert a hair of my head to gray! This body was formed to die; this edifice to crumble into dust; the principles of corruption and mortality are mixed up in every atom of my frame. But for me the laws of nature are suspended, the eternal wheels of the universe roll backward; I am destined to be triumphant over Fate and Time! Months, years, cycles, centuries! To me these are but as indivisible moments. I shall never become old; I shall always be, as it were, in the porch "Mandeville" has all the power of its auand infancy of existence; no lapse of years thor's earliest writings; but its main subjectshall subtract any thing from my future dura- the development of an engrossing and maddention. I was born under Louis the Twelfth; ing hatred-is not one which can excite the life of Francis the First now threatens a human sympathy. There is, however, a bright speedy termination; he will be gathered to his relief to the gloom of the picture, in the angelic fathers, and Henry, his son, will succeed him. disposition of Clifford, and the sparkling loveBut what are princes, and kings, and genera-liness of Henrietta, who appears "full of life, tions of men to me! I shall become familiar with the rise and fall of empires; in a little while the very name of France, my country, will perish from off the face of the earth, and men will dispute about the situation of Paris, as they dispute about the site of ancient Nineveh, and Babylon, and Troy. Yet I shall still be young. I shall take my most distant posterity by the hand; I shall accompany them in their career; and, when they are worn out and exhausted, shall shut up the tomb over them, and set forward."

This is a strange tale, but it tells like a true one! When we first read it, it seemed as though it had itself the power of alchemy to steal into our veins, and render us capable of resisting death and age. For a short-too short! a space, all time seemed open to our personal view-we felt no longer as of yes terday; but the grandest parts of our knowledge of the past seemed mightiest recollections of a far-off childhood.

"The wars we too remembered of King Nine, And old Assaracus, and Ibycus divine."

and splendour, and joy." All Mr. Godwin's female heroines have a certain airiness and radiance—a visionary grace, peculiar to them, which may at first surprise by their contrast to the robustness of his masculine creations. But it will perhaps be found that the more deeply man is conversant with the energies of his own heart, the more will he seek for opposite qualities in woman.

Of all Mr. Godwin's writings the choicest in point of style is a little essay "on Sepulchres." Here his philosophic thought, subdued and sweetened by the contemplation of mortality, is breathed forth in the gentlest tone. His "Political Justice," with all the extravagance of its first edition, or with all the inconsistencies of its last, is a noble work, replete with lofty principle and thought, and often leading to the most striking results by a process of the severest reasoning. Man, indeed, cannot and ought not to act universally on its leading doctrine that we should in all things seek only the greatest amount of good without favour or affection; but it is at least better than the low selfishness of the world. It breathes also a

This was the happy extravagance of an mild and cheerful faith in the progressive ad

vances and the final perfection of the species. | ness his success. To our minds, indeed, he

It was this good hope for humanity which excited Mr. Malthus to affirm, that there is in the constitution of man's nature a perpetual barrier to any extensive improvement in his earthly condition. After a long interval, Mr. Godwin has announced a reply to this popular systema system which reduces man to an animal, governed by blind instinct, and destitute of reason, sentiment, imagination, and hope, whose most mysterious instincts are matter of calculation to be estimated by rules of geometrical series!—Most earnestly do we desire to wit

sufficiently proves the falsehood of his adversary's doctrines by his own intellectual character. His works are, in themselves, evidences that there is power and energy in man which have never yet been fully brought into action, and which were not given to the species in vain. He has lived himself in the soft and mild light of those peaceful years, which he believes shall hereafter bless the world, when force and selfishness shall disappear, and love and joy shall be the unerring lights of the species.

MATURIN.

[NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.]

twine with the heart-strings, and which keep their hold until the golden chords of our sensi

THE author of Montorio and of Bertram is unquestionably a person gifted with no ordinary powers. He has a quick sensibility-ability and imagination themselves are broken. penetrating and intuitive acuteness-and an unrivalled vigour and felicity of language, which enable him at one time to attain the happiest condensation of thought, and at others to pour forth a stream of eloquence, rich, flowing, and deep, checkered with images of delicate loveliness, or darkened by broad shadows cast from objects of stern and adamantine majesty. Yet, in common with many other potent spirits of the present time, he fails to excite within us any pure and lasting sympathy. We do not, on reading his works, feel that we have entered on a precious and imperishable treasure. They dazzle, they delight, they surprise, and they weary us-we lay them down with a vague admiration for the author, and try to shake off their influence as we do the impressions of a feverish dream. It is not thus that we receive the productions of genuine and holy bards-of Shakspeare, of Milton, of Spenser, or of Wordsworth-whose farreaching imaginations come home to our hearts, who become the companions of our sweetest moods, and with whom we long to

"se'

They pass by us sometimes like gorgeous phantoms, sometimes like "horrible shadows and unreal mockeries," which seem to elude us because they are not of us. When we follow him closest, he introduces us into a region where all is unsatisfactory and unreal-the chaos of principles, fancies, and passionswhere mightiest elements are yet floating without order, where appearances between substance and shadow perpetually harass us, where visionary forms beckon us through painful avenues, and, on approach, sink into despicable realities; and pillars which looked ponderous and immovable at a distance, melt at the touch into air, and are found to be only masses of vapour and of cloud. He neither raises us to the skies, nor "brings his angels down," but astonishes by a phantasmagoria of strange appearances, sometimes scarcely distinguishable in member, joint, or limb, but which, when most clearly defined, come not near us, nor claim kindred by a warm and living touch. This chill remoteness from humanity is attended by a general want of harmony and proportion in the whole-by a wild excursiveness of sensibility and thought— which add to its ungenial influence, and may be traced to the same causes.

p our everlasting rest." Their creations are often nearest to our hearts when they are farthest removed from the actual experience of our lives. We travel on the bright tracks which their genius reveals to us as safely and If we were disposed to refer these defects to with as sure and fond a tread as along the one general source, we should attribute them broad highway of the world. When the re- to the want of an imagination proportionate to gions which they set before us are the most sensibility and to mastery of language in the distant from our ordinary perceptions, we yet writer's mind, or to his comparative neglect of seem at home in them, their wonders are that most divine of human faculties. It is edistrangely familiar to us, and the scene, over-fying to observe how completely the nature of spread with a consecrating and lovely lustre, breaks on us, not as a wild fantastic novelty, but as a revived recollection of some holier life, which the soul rejoices thus delightfully to recognise.

this power is mistaken by many who profess to decide on matters of taste. They regard it as something wild and irregular, the reverse of truth, nature, and reason, which is divided from insanity only by "a thin partition," Not thus do the works of Mr. Maturin-ori- and which, uncontrolled by sterner powers, ginal and surprising as they often are-affect forms the essence of madness. They think it us. They have no fibres in them which en-abounds in speeches crowded with tawdry and

« ПредишнаНапред »