Читать книгу: «Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 097, January, 1876», страница 17

T.A.T.

A STATE GOVERNOR IN THE RÔLE OF ENOCH ARDEN

The conventional romance of the long-lost husband returning home just in time to interrupt the second nuptials of his wife is told of Samuel Cranston, governor of Rhode Island, who died in 1727, after being elected to that office thirty-two times in succession.

It appears that when quite a young man Mr. Cranston married Mary, a granddaughter of Roger Williams. Soon after the marriage he went to sea, was captured by pirates and carried to some country—Algiers, it is supposed—where he was detained for several years without being able to communicate with his family. Meanwhile, Mrs. Cranston, believing him to be dead, accepted an offer of marriage, and was on the eve of the nuptial ceremonies when her first husband arrived in Boston. There he heard the news of the proposed marriage, but there being no such thing then as telegraphs or railroads, he started for home by means of post-horses as fast as they could carry him. When he reached Howland's Ferry, just before night, he learned that his wife was to be married that very evening. "With increased speed he flew to Newport, but not until the wedding-guests had begun to assemble. She was called by a servant into the kitchen, 'a person being there who wished to speak with her.' A man in sailor's habit advanced and informed her that her husband had arrived in Boston, and requested him to inform her that he was on his way to Newport." It does not appear that the hero of this romance made any attempt to find out if his wife had become more attached to his rival, with the purpose of remaining incognito should he find this to be the fact. On the contrary, after being questioned very closely by her, he advanced toward her, "raised his cap, and pointing to a scar on his forehead, said, 'Do you recollect that scar?'" Whereupon she at once recognized him, though the romance is marred by the absence of the assurance that she "flew into his arms." This may be inferred, however, for the returned wanderer became the hero of the evening, entertaining the wedding-guests with an account of his adventures and sufferings among the pirates.

THE PALATINE LIGHT

This phenomenon appeared off the northern coast of Block Island about 1720, and reappeared at irregular intervals down to the year 1832, since which it has not been seen. A common impression of those seeing it for the first time was that it was a light on board of some ship, or a ship on fire when very bright. Arnold, in his History of Rhode Island, gives an account of it, and also of the tradition which assigned to it a strange origin. "This light," he remarks, "has been the theme of much learned discussion within the present century, and, while the superstition connected with it is of course rejected, science has failed thus far in giving it a satisfactory explanation." Dr. Aaron C. Willey, a resident physician of Block Island, wrote a careful account of the phenomenon in 1811, which was published at the time in the Parthenon, whatever that may have been. He says: "Its appellation originated from that of a ship called the Palatine, which was designedly cast away at this place in the beginning of the last century, in order to conceal, as tradition reports, the inhuman treatment and murder of some of its unfortunate passengers." This was an emigrant ship bound from Holland to Pennsylvania. Some seventeen of the survivors were landed on the island, but they all died except three. One lady, it was said, having "much gold and silver plate on board," refused to land. The ship floated off the rocks, and soon after disappeared for ever. Dr, Willey says he saw this light in February, 1810. "It was twilight, and the light was then large and greatly lambent, very bright, broad at the bottom and terminating acutely upward. From each side seemed to issue rays of faint light similar to those perceptible in any blaze placed in the open air at night. It continued about fifteen minutes from the time I first observed it, then gradually became smaller and more dim until it was entirely extinguished." The same gentleman saw it again in the following December, when he thought it was a light on board of some vessel until undeceived. It moved along apparently parallel to the shore on this occasion, after a time falling behind the doctor, who was riding along the coast. Finally, it stopped, then moved off some rods and stopped again. The same authority declares that he had been told by a gentleman living near the sea that it had often been so bright as to "illuminate considerably the walls of his room through the windows." This happened only when the light was within half a mile from the shore, for it was "often seen blazing at six or seven miles' distance, and strangers supposed it to be a vessel on fire."

M.H.

NOTES

It is not very extraordinary that printers' ink is a poor pigment for painting sunsets or sunrises. The strange thing is that travelers and sentimentalizers obstinately ignore the fact, and hang their paper walls with more scenery of that description than any other. What a gallery of alpine, arctic and marine sunsets we have, and how blank an impression do they all produce! From any of them, done with a clever pen by one who undertakes to describe what he has freshly seen, we gather that the spectacle must have been very fine, and must have deeply delighted the spectator. We can even catch some tints here and there, but they are fugitive, and each escapes the eye before it grasps the next one. If we shut our eyes on Tennyson's page we may realize a glimpse of Mont Blanc blushing through "a thousand shadowy penciled valleys," and have a momentary pleasure; but the poet's picture does not abide with us. Some one devotes a couple of pages to mapping out the infinitude of half-tints that composed a summer's evening view looking seaward from the North Cape—a good subject faithfully gone into, but still not a satisfactory sketch even of the reality. The pen and type will outline and shade, but cannot color. They give us some fair landscapes made up of form and effect; they can compass a cavernous bit of Rembrandt, a curtain of fog or shower, or a staircase of wood and rock climbing into the distance, just as they can sometimes faintly depict the infinite chiaroscuro of the Miserere in St. Peter's; but the monochrome, in music as in painting, is their limit.

Has photography dealt hardly with portrait-painting as a branch of art, or has it benefited it by weeding out the feeble? The Memorial Exhibition will assist in determining. It will, we hope, allow the best living painters in this department to be fully represented by the side of their predecessors. We shall then see if the Inmans, Neagles, and Sullys are an extinct species, and if the ranks of their pupils have melted away before the cannon-like camera. We cannot believe that the sun, always exaggerating perspective except when rectified by the stereoscope, and more or less falsifying light and shade by the chemical effect of different rays, is to be the only limner of faces. Thus imperfect even in mechanical execution, it seems impossible that he should supersede future Vandycks. As Webster used to say to young lawyers, there is plenty of room up stairs. Painters may fearlessly aim to get above the sun. Take one of Sully's women and compare it with the smoothest print softened into inanity by the dots of the retoucher of negatives—the representative of the element of art in the process. A difference exists equivalent to that between brain and no brain. No woman, "primp" herself for the sitting as she may, can present her soul to the dapper gentleman under the canopy of black velvet as Sully saw it. She does not know herself, as reflected in her lineaments, as he did; and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the knight of the tripod does not know her at all.

The same is true of John Neagle as a perpetuator of character with the pencil. Men were his best subjects. In individualizing them he has had no superior, if an equal, among American artists. His finish was not always good, and his coloring for that reason occasionally crude. In female heads he was less happy: character-painters generally are. Stuart's women are equally defective, but in a rather different way, being hard and angular in drawing.

England is determined not to shrink from the solution of the time-honored problem of the result of the meeting between an irresistible force and an impregnable target. Her iron-clads have piled pellicle on pellicle of iron till two feet thick has become their normal shell. Everything thinner has been punctured, and now an eighty-ton gun, to cost sixty thousand pounds, is getting ready to perforate that. There must be a stopping-point for all this somewhere. Perhaps the fate of armor afloat may soon be settled finally by the torpedo, as its efficiency on land was disposed of by the bullet, and the men-at-arms of the sea no longer lord it over hosts of wooden yeomanry. Happy the nation that can look on with its hands firmly in its pockets while others lavish their treasure in seeking the new philosopher's stone!

LITERATURE OF THE DAY

Nero: An Historical Play. By W.W. Story. Edinburgh and London: Wm. Blackwood & Sons; New York: Scribner, Welford & Armstrong,

The fashion of so-called historical dramas is spreading, but the standard is lowering. When Mr. Swinburne wrote Chastelard, whatever its faults, it was entitled to the name of drama: last year he published Bothwell, which, whatever its beauties, does not deserve to be so ranked. Tennyson's Queen Mary followed during the past summer, and many similar attempts may be expected from less illustrious pens. It is an unfortunate direction for dramatic and poetic composition to have taken, tending to impair the excellence of both styles, while fulfilling the exigencies of neither. Bothwell and Queen Mary are not historical dramas, but versified chronicles, a certain number of pages of the annals of Scotland and England in metre, divided into acts and scenes and distributed into parts. Such a production, be it called what it may, must necessarily lack the essential qualities of the true drama, while it introduces into a branch of literature which belongs to the imagination the realism against which art is struggling. The latest specimen of this new school is Mr. Story's Nero, for, although by his preface it appears that the publication did not follow the writing for several years, it comes to the world in the wake of the aforementioned works. It is to be remembered that Mr. Story's pen is as versatile as his talent is various. He has given the public two law-books, commonly attributed to his eminent father; the delightful Roba di Roma, which embodies the actual animate beauty and interest of Roman life; a volume of poems, Graffiti d'Italia, full of fine dramatic fragments and studies of character in the manner of Browning, descriptions which are pictures, and sweet verses which live in the heart; and a number of essays in the pleasantest style of table-talk. Moreover, we are to bear in mind that this gentleman is not an author by profession, but one of the most distinguished living sculptors. But the very merit of his productions subjects them to a code of criticism more severe than that by which amateur performances are usually judged, and the faults one finds are by comparison with a standard which makes fault-finding flattery. In the first place, one cannot turn over a few pages of Mr. Story's Nero without perceiving that he is imbued with the knowledge of classical things and times, and with the study of Shakespeare and the old English playwrights. The turn of the phrases and the march of the passages recall those best models, though without imitation. As in them, there is less beauty than vigor and spirit: the dialogue is strewn with expressions as striking as they are simple. Speaking of Claudius's murder, Burrhus says:

 
And Agrippina, startled, pushed him down
The dark declivity to death.
 

Agrippina herself to Nero:

 
Oh what a day it was
When, with a shout that seemed to rend the air,
The army hailed you Cæsar! My poor heart
Shook like the standards straining to the breeze
With that great cheer of triumph.
 

The finest portions of the play are those in which Agrippina has the principal part, and, notwithstanding some flaws and inconsistencies in the character, which is evidently meant to be complete and homogeneous, the whole impression is very forcible and single. Her final menace (Act ii., Scene 5) when Nero defies her, the terrible scene in which she tries to regain her failing influence by kindling unholy fire in his blood, her rage at the inaction and ignorance of her forced retirement, her monologue when she knows that her last hour has come, are all of a piece and exceedingly well sustained. The dramatic ends of the play would have been better answered if she and her son had been the central figures, and the tragedy had ended with her death. Poppæa is closely studied: her petty, feline personality contrasts well with the large, imperial presence of Agrippina. Nero himself is not so successful as a whole: his puerility in the first part is overdone, though as the play goes on the creation takes definite shape, and becomes at once more complex and more distinct. The invariable recurrence of his vanity at the most tremendous moments is admirably managed: it is like an unconscious trick of look or gesture for which we watch. In his first outburst of grief at Poppæa's death he cries:

 
How still she lies!
How perfect in her calm! No more distress,
No agitations more, no joy, no pain.
I'll keep her as she is. Fire shall not burn
That lovely shape; but it shall sleep embalmed—
Thus, thus for ever in the Julian tomb,
And she shall be enrolled among the gods.
A splendid temple shall be raised to her,
A public funeral be hers, and I
The funeral eulogy myself will speak.
 

There are some impressive dramatic situations, the finest of which is at the close of the second act, after the murder of Britannicus, the result of a threat from Agrippina to dethrone her refractory son in behalf of the rightful heir:

 
Nero. How is Britannicus?
Agrip. Dead.
Nero. Are you sure?
Agrip. Go see his corpse there, and assure yourself.
Nero. Dead? Poor Britannicus! who might have sat
Upon this very throne instead of me!
Agrip. Nero!
Nero. My mother!
Agrip. Ah! I understand.
Nero. Take him and make him emperor—if you can.
 

This has what the French call the coup de fouet. But the power and progress of the play are clogged by two faults—defective construction and a curious diffuseness and lack of concentration in many of the scenes and speeches. The action is sadly impeded, for instance, by the author's not making one business of Seneca's death, but spinning it out through four scenes of going and coming, as also with Poppæa's, and even more with Nero's, where the intercalation of long conversations with changes of places and personages is hurtful, almost destructive, to the effect. This appears to be the result of too close an adherence to fact, which brings us back to our original grievance against dramatizing history. The loss of force from lack of concentration probably arises from carelessness, haste or want of revision. From the same causes may spring, too, sundry anachronisms of expression, such as "For God's sake;" vulgarisms like "Leave me alone" for "Let me alone;" extraordinary commonplaces, as in the comparison of popular favor to a weathercock, and of woman's love to a flower worn, then thrown aside; and a constant lapsing from the energy and spirit of the dialogue into flatness, familiarity and triviality. There is an occasional not unwholesome coarseness which recalls Mr. Story's Elizabethan masters, as in the following passage:

 
What a crew is this
Which just have fled! Foul suckers that drop off
When they no more can on their victims gorge!
This Tigellinus....
Within his sunshine basked and buzzed and stung;
And, now the shadow comes, off, like a fly—
A pestilent and stinking fly—he goes!
 

But it is unpardonable to make even Nero say, "I have to rinse my mouth after her kiss."

The fine qualities of the composition give the blemishes relief, and the material deserved that Mr. Story should work it up to its utmost possible perfection.

Autobiography of Mrs. Fletcher. With Letters and other Family Memorials. Edited by the Survivor of her Family. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

There are in this work several elements of a gentle but unfailing interest, such as generally attaches to the class of books to which it belongs. It gives us some delineations of bygone manners and social changes, glimpses of many more or less notable persons, and above all the record of a life which, without being in the usual sense of these terms eventful or distinguished, stands forth as one in a great degree self-determined and bearing a strong impress of individuality. Mrs Fletcher was one of those women who easily become the central figures of the circles in which they move, and who owe this position, not to any transcendent qualities, but to the combined and irresistible influence of great personal charms, a high degree of mental vivacity, and those sympathetic and harmonizing qualities which it is so difficult to define, but which are equally distinct from mere amiability on the one hand and intense self-devotion on the other. There seems to be in such characters a hint of heroic possibilities that would only be narrowed and despoiled of some of their charm if put to the test of action. Lord Brougham compared Mrs. Fletcher to Madame Roland, but she had neither the soaring intellect nor the self-assertive tendencies that mark the representative of a cause. Principle, however, counted for much more with her than with the sex generally, and one can easily believe that her tenacity in adhering to it would have been proof against any ordeal whether of persecution or persuasion. This trait was not more strikingly illustrated by the strength and fervency of her Whiggism amid the reactionary tide produced by the excesses of the French Revolution than by the circumstances of her marriage. The only child of a small landed proprietor in Yorkshire, she had no lack of opportunities for gratifying her father's ambition by marrying in a rank far above her own. Nor was it her ardent affection for the man of her choice that made her strong against entreaties and reproaches. She would probably have been capable of any sacrifice of feeling imposed by her sense of duty, but it was this latter sentiment that forbade the sacrifice. "I was not, perhaps," she writes, "what in the language of romance is called in love with Mr. Fletcher, but I was deeply and tenderly attached to him. He had inspired a confidence and regard I had never felt for any other man. I could not bear the thought of marrying in opposition to my father's will, but I was resolved on principle never to marry so long as Mr. Fletcher remained single." He was twenty years her senior, without fortune, and hindered, instead of aided, in his struggle at the Scottish bar by his prominence as an advocate of reform. These, she admits, were "sound and rational objections," and could she have prevailed on Mr. Fletcher to release her from the engagement, this solution, she confesses, would have been less painful to her than offending her father. But her lover remaining firm, she decided after two years, having come of age in the interval, to take the step dictated by honor as well as inclination, and which the event proved to have been, as she anticipated, "best for the interest and happiness of all parties."

Her married life lasted thirty-seven years, and she survived her husband nearly thirty more, dying in 1858 at the age of eighty-seven. Her career was, on the whole, one of singular happiness and prosperity, made so in part by fortunate circumstances, but in a still greater degree by her sunny temperament, her power of attracting and retaining friends, her unflagging interest in public affairs and her unshaken belief in human progress. Jeffrey and Brougham were among her earliest friends, Carlyle and Mazzini among her latest, and there have been few Englishmen of note in the present century whose names do not appear in the list. Unfortunately, they appear for the most part as names only. They occur incidentally in a record intended not for the public, but for the writer's own family, whose interest in her personal history needed no stimulant and called for no extraneous details. Here and there we find a passage calculated to whet if not to satisfy a more general curiosity, such as the account of a conversation with Wordsworth after his return from Italy in 1837, and some letters from Mazzini written soon after his first arrival in England, But even these belong not to the memoir itself, but to the editor's additions. The book is therefore not to be judged by a mere literary standard, or read with expectations founded on a general knowlege of the writer's position and associations. On all with whom she came in contact Mrs. Fletcher produced the impression of a character singularly round and complete. Something of the same influence is felt in the perusal of her unaffected narrative, and with readers of a reflective turn may prove a sufficient compensation for the lack of more ordinary attractions.