Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846

The more impassioned mind and vehement passions of Alfieri disdained those trammels by which the French and Italian stages had so long been fettered. Gifted by nature with an ardent imagination, impetuous feelings, deep and lasting emotions, he early saw that the modern drama, founded on, and fettered by, the strict observance of the Greek unities, and yet discarding its broken and rapid diction, its profound knowledge of the human heart, its vehement expression of passion, had departed far from the real object of the art, and could not be brought back to it but by a total change of system. He has himself told us, in his most interesting life, that when he read the tragedies of Racine and Corneille, the book fell from his hands. They conveyed no idea whatever of reality; they had no resemblance to the ardent feelings which he felt burning in his own breast. Anxiously seeking vent for passions too fierce to be controlled, he found it in the study of the Greek drama. The wrath of Medea, the heroism of Antigone, the woes of Andromache, the love of Phædra, found a responsive echo in his bosom; they combined every thing he could desire, they represented every thing that he felt. He saw what Tragedy had been – what it ought to be. His taste was immediately formed on the true model. When he came to write tragedies himself, he composed them on the plan of Sophocles. He did more. He made the language as brief, the voice of passion as powerful, the plot as simple; but he brought even fewer characters on the stage. He trusted entirely to the force of passion the wail of suffering, the accents of despair. Immense was the effect of this recurrence to unsophisticated feeling, in a luxurious and effeminate society. It was like the burst of admiration with which the picture of the human heart was at the same time hailed in France, drawn by the magic hand of Rousseau; or, in the next age, the fierce passions of the melodramatic corsairs of Byron were received in the artificial circles of London society. Nature was something new; they had never heard her voice before.

Had Alfieri, with this ardent mind and clear perception of the true end of the drama, been endowed with that general knowledge of the human heart, and of human character in all its bearings, which the Greek dramatists possessed he would have formed the greatest tragedian of modern continental Europe. But in these vital particulars he was very deficient. His position in society, character, and habits, precluded him from acquiring it. The dissipated, heartless nobleman, who flew from one devoted passion to another, without the slightest compunction as to their effects on the objects of his adoration; who fought Lord Ligonier in the Park, in pursuance of an intrigue with his lady; and stole from the Pretender his queen, when age and dissipation had wellnigh brought him to the grave; who traversed, post-haste, France and Italy with fourteen blood-horses, which he wore out in his impetuous course, was not likely either to feel the full force of the generous, or paint the real features of the selfish passion. He did not mingle with the ordinary world on a footing of equality. This it is which ever makes aristocratic and high-bred authors ignorant of the one thing needful in history or the drama – a knowledge of human nature. No man ever learned that, who had not been practically brought into collision with men in all ranks, from the highest to the lowest. Hence his characters are almost all overdrawn. Vice and virtue are exhibited in too undisguised colours; the malignity of the wicked is laid too bare to the reader. He makes the depraved admit they are bad, but yet persevere in their crimes; a certain proof that he did not know the human heart. He knew it better who said, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." Napoleon knew it better when he said to Talma, after seeing his representation of Nero in Britannicus– "You are quite wrong in your idea of Nero; you should conceal the tyrant. No man admits he was guilty either to himself or others." Alfieri himself is a proof of it: he recounts, in his life, many criminal acts he committed, but never with the slightest allusion to their having been wrong. He admitted, later in life, that he had been ignorant of human nature in the great body of mankind; for he said, on recounting the horrors of the 10th August, which he had witnessed at Paris – "Je connais bien les grands, mais je ne connais pas les petits."

It is hard to say whether Schiller belongs to the Greek or Romantic school in the drama. His subjects are in great part chosen from the latter class: he changes the scene, and did not hold himself bound by the rules of Aristotle. But in his mode of treating these subjects, he approaches more nearly to the tragedians of antiquity. He utterly discarded the limited range of subjects, and measured pomp of the French drama; he felt that the world had grown old since the days of Euripides, and that it was time for tragedy to embrace a wider range of subjects than the family disasters which followed the return of the Greeks from the siege of Troy. He knew that it was not in stately rhyme or measured cadences, that passion finds vent from the human breast. He was essentially historical in his ideas. The past with its vast changes and endless variety of events, lay open before him. And he availed himself of all its riches. He is unequalled in the ability with which he threw himself into his subject, identified himself, not merely with the characters, but the periods in which they arose, and brought before the mind of the spectators the ideas, interests, passions, and incidents, the collision of which produced the catastrophe which formed the immediate subject of his piece. The best informed English or Scottish historians will have something to learn on the history of Queen Mary, from the incomparable summary of arguments for and against her detention in captivity by Queen Elizabeth, in the two first acts of his noble tragedy of Mary Stuart. The learned Spaniard will find himself transported to the palace of the Escurial, and the frightful tragedies of its bigoted court, in his terrible tragedy of Don Carlos. Schiller rivals Shakspeare himself in the energy with which, by a word or an epithet, he paints the fiercest or tenderest passions of the heart: witness the devoted love of Thekla for Max in Wallenstein; or the furious jealousy of the Queen in Don Carlos. He has not the grotesque of Shakspeare; we do not see in his tragedies that mixture of the burlesque and the sublime which is so common in the Bard of Avon, and is not infrequent with the greatest minds, who play, as it were, with the thunderbolts, and love to show how they can master them. Hence, in reading at least, his dramas produce a more uniform and unbroken impression than those of the great Englishman, and will, with foreign nations, command a more general admiration. But the great charm in Schiller is the romantic turn of mind, the noble elevation of sentiment, the truly heroic spirit, with which his tragedies abound. In reading them, we feel that a new intellectual soil has been turned up in the Fatherland; the human soul, in its pristine purity and beauty, comes forth from beneath his hand; it reappears like the exquisite remains of Grecian statuary, which, buried for ages in superincumbent ruins, emerge pure and unstained in virgin snow, when a renewal of cultivation has again exposed them to the light. If he were equally great at all times, he would have been the most perfect dramatist of modern times. But he is far from being so. At times he is tedious; often dull; it is his great scenes, such as the last sacrament of Queen Mary, which have gained for him his colossal reputation, and produce an indelible impression on the mind of his reader.

We have exhausted, perhaps exceeded, our limits and we have only got through half our subject. A noble theme remains: Shakspeare, with the Romantic drama, will be treated in the Number which is to follow; and the causes considered which have brought the school, created by such a master, into the state of comparative mediocrity in which, with some brilliant exceptions, it is now placed.

MY COLLEGE FRIENDS

No. IIIMr W. Wellington Hurst

It would probably puzzle Mr William Wellington Hurst, as much as any man, to find out on what grounds I placed him on the list of my College friends; for certainly our intimacy was hardly sufficient to warrant such a liberty; and he was one of those happy individuals who would never have suspected that it could be out of gratitude for much amusement afforded me by sundry of his sayings and doings. But so it is; and it happens, that while the images of many others of my companions – very worthy good sort of fellows, whom I saw more or less of nearly every day – have vanished from my memory, or only flit across occasionally, like shadows, the full-length figure of Mr W. Wellington Hurst, exactly as he turned out, after a satisfactory toilet, in the patent boots and scarf of many colours, stands fixed there like a daguerreotype – more faithful than flattering.

My first introduction to him was by running him down in a skiff, when I was steering the College eight – not less to his astonishment than our own gratification. It is perfectly allowable, by the laws of the river, if, after due notice, these small craft fail to get out of your way; but it is not very easy to effect. However, in this instance, we went clean over him, very neatly indeed. The men helped him into our boat, just as his own sunk from under him; and he accepted a seat by my side in the stern-sheets, with many apologies for being so wet, appearing considerably impressed with a sense of my importance, and still more of my politeness. When we reached Sandford, I prescribed a stiff tumbler of hot brandy and water, and advised him to run all the way home, to warm himself, and avoid catching cold; and, from that time, I believe he always looked upon me as a benefactor. The claim, on my part, certainly rested on a very small foundation originally; it was strengthened afterwards by a less questionable act of patronage. Like many other under-graduates of every man's acquaintance, Hurst laboured under the delusion, that holding two sets of reins in a very confused manner, and flourishing a long whip, was driving; and that to get twenty miles out of Oxford in a "team," without an upset, or an imposition from the proctor, was an opus operatum of the highest possible merit. To do him justice, he laboured diligently in the only exercise which he seemed to consider strictly academical – he spent an hour every morning, standing upon a chair, "catching flies," as he called it, and occasionally flicking his scout with a tandem whip, and practised incessantly upon tin horns of all lengths, with more zeal than melody, until he got the erysipelas in his lower lip, and a hint of rustication from the tutors. Yet he was more ambitious than successful. His reputation on the road grew worse and worse every day. He had a knack of shaving turnpike gates, and cutting round corners on one wheel, and getting his horses into every possible figure but a straight line, which made every mile got over without an accident almost a miracle. At last, after taking a four-in-hand over a narrow bridge, at the bottom of a hill, pretty much in the Olympic fashion – all four abreast – men got rather shy of any expeditions of the kind in his company. There was little credit in it, and a good deal of danger. First, he was reduced to soliciting the company of freshmen, who were flattered by any proposal that sounded fast. But they, too, grew shy, after one or two ventures; and poor Hurst soon found a difficulty in getting a companion at all. He was a liberal fellow enough, and not pushed for a guinea when his darling science was concerned: so he used to offer to "sport the train" himself; but even when he condescended to the additional self-devotion of standing a dinner and champagne, he found that the closest calculators among his sporting acquaintance had as much regard for their necks as their pockets.

To this inglorious position was his fame as a charioteer reduced, when Horace Leicester and myself, early in his third term, had determined somewhat suddenly to go to see a steeple-chase about twelve miles off, where Leicester had some attraction beside the horses, in the shape of a pretty cousin; (two, he told me, and bribed me with the promise of an introduction to "the other," but she did not answer to sample at all.) We had engaged a very nice mare and stanhope, which we knew we could depend upon, when, the day before the race, the chestnut was declared lame, and not a presentable four-legged animal was to be hired in Oxford. Hurst had engaged his favourite pair of greys (which would really go very well with any other driver) a week beforehand, but had been canvassing the last batch of freshmen in vain for an occupant of the vacant seat. A huge red-headed north-country man, who had never seen a tandem in his life, but who, as far as pluck went, would have ridden postilion to Medea's dragons, was listening with some apparent indecision to Hurst's eloquence upon the delights of driving, just as we came up after a last unsuccessful search through the livery stables; and the pair were proceeding out of college arm in arm, probably to look at the greys, when Leicester, to my amusement, stepped up with – "Hurst, who's going with you to B – ?"

"I – why, I hardly know yet; I think Sands here will, if" —

"I'll go with you then, if you like; and if you've got a cart, Hawthorne can come too, and it will be very jolly."

If the university had announced their intention of creating him a B.A. by diploma, without examination, Hurst could hardly have looked more surprised and delighted. Leicester, it should be borne in mind, was one of the most popular men in the college – a sort of arbiter elegantiarum in the best set. Hurst knew very little of him, but was no doubt highly flattered by his proposal. From coaxing freshmen to come out by the bribe of paying all expenses, to driving to B – steeple-chase side by side with Horace, (my modesty forbids me to include myself,) was a step at once from the ridiculous to the sublime of tandemizing. For this advancement in life, he always, I fancy, considered himself indebted to me, as I had originally introduced him to Leicester's acquaintance; and when we both accepted an invitation, which he delivered himself of with some hesitation, to breakfast in his rooms on the morning of the expedition, his joy and gratitude appeared to know no bounds. It is not usual, be it remembered, for a junior man in college to ask a senior to a party from whom he has never received an invitation himself; but hunting and tandem-driving are apt occasionally to set ordinary etiquette at defiance. "Don't ask a lot of men, that's all – there's a good fellow," said Horace, whose good-natured smile, and off-hand and really winning manner, enabled him to carry off, occasionally, a degree of impudence which would not have been tolerated from others – "I hate a large formal breakfast party of all things; it disgusts me to see a score of men jostling each other over tough beefsteaks."

"I asked Sands yesterday," apologised Hurst. "I thought perhaps he would come out with me; but I dare say I can put him off, if" —

"Oh! on no account whatever; you mean the carroty freshman I saw you with just now? Have him by all means; it will be quite refreshing to meet any man so regularly green. So there will be just four of us; eight o'clock, I suppose? it won't do to be much later."

And Horace walked off, having thus arranged matters to his own satisfaction and his host's. I was an interested party in the business, however, and had my own terms to make. "You've disposed of me rather coolly," said I; "you don't surely imagine, that at my time of life I'm going to trust my neck to that fellow's furious driving?"

"Make your mind easy, Frank; William Wellington sha'n't finger a riband."

"Nonsense, Leicester; you can't treat a man in that kind of way – not to let him drive his own team. Hurst is a bit of an ass, certainly; but you can't with any decency first ask a man for a seat, and then refuse to give him up the reins."

"Am I in the habit, sir, of doing things in the very rude and ungentlemanly style you insinuate?" And Horace looked at me with mock dignity for a second or two, and then burst into a laugh. "Leave it to me, Hawthorne, and I'll manage it to the satisfaction of all parties: I'll manage that Hurst shall have a capital day's fun, and your valuable neck shall be as safe as if you were tried by a Welsh jury."

With this indefinite assurance I was obliged to be content; and accordingly, at half-past eight the next morning, after a very correct breakfast, we mounted the tandem-cart at the college back-gates, got the leader hitched on, as usual, a mile out of the city, for fear of proctors, and were bowling merrily along, in the slight frost of an autumn morning, towards B – . Leicester took the driving first, by Hurst's special request, after one or two polite but faint refusals, the latter sitting by his side; while I occupied, for the present, the queer little box which in those days was stuck on behind, (the more modern carts, which hold four, are an improvement introduced into the University since my driving days.) With wonderful gravity and importance did Leicester commence his lectures on the whip to his admiring companion: I almost think he began in the approved style, with a slight allusion to the Roman biga, and deduced the progress of the noble science from Ericthonius down to "Peyton and Ward." I have a lively recollection of a comparison between Automedon of the Homeric times, and "Black Will" of Oxford celebrity – the latter being decided as only likely to be less immortal, because there was no Homer among the contemporary under-graduates. A good deal was lost to me, no doubt, from my position behind; but Hurst seemed to suck it all in with every disposition to be edified. From the history of his subject, Horace proceeded, in due course, to the theory, from theory to facts, from facts to illustrations. In the practical department, Horace, I suspect, like many other lecturers, was on his weakest ground; for his own driving partook of the under-graduate character.

"You throw the lash out so – you see – and bring it back sharp, so – no, not so exactly – so – hang the thing, I can't do it now; but that's the principle, you understand – and then you take up your double thong, so – pshaw, I did it very well just now – to put it into the wheeler, so – ah, I missed it then, but that's the way to do it."

He put me considerably in mind of a certain professor of chemistry, whose lectures on light and heat I once was rash enough to attend, who, after a long dry disquisition which had nearly put us all to sleep, used to arouse our attention to the "beautiful effects" produced by certain combinations, which he would proceed to illustrate, as he said, by a "little experiment." But, somehow or other, these little experiments always, or nearly always, failed: and after the room had been darkened, perhaps, for five minutes or so, in order to give the exhibition full effect, the result would be, a fizz or two, a faint blue light, and a stink, varying according to circumstances, but always abominable. "It's very odd, John," the discomfited operator used to exclaim to his assistant; "very odd; and we succeeded so well this morning, too: it's most unaccountable: I'm really very sorry, gentlemen, but I can assure you, this very same experiment we tried to-day with the most beautiful result; didn't we, John?" "We did, sir," was John's invariably dutiful reply: and so the audience took John's word for it, and the experiment was considered to have been, virtually, successful.

So we rattled on to the ground: Leicester occasionally putting the reins into his companion's hand, teaching him to perform some impossible movement with his third finger, and directing his attention to non-existent flies, which he professed to remove from the leader, out of sheer compassion, with the point of the whip.

"You are sure you wouldn't like to take the reins now? Well, you'll drive home then, of course? Hawthorne, will you try your hand now? Hurst's going to take up the tooling when we come back."

"No, thank you," said I; "I won't interfere with either of your performances." – "And if Hurst does drive home," was my mental determination, expressed to Leicester as far as a nod can do it, "I'll walk."

There was no difficulty in finding out the localities: the field in which the winning-flag was fixed was not far from the turnpike road, and conspicuous enough by the crowd already collected. Of course, pretty nearly all the sporting characters among the gownsmen were there, the distance from the University being so trifling. Mounted on that seedy description of animal peculiar to Oxford livery-stables, which can never by any possibility be mistaken for any thing but a hired affair, but will generally go all day, and scramble through almost any thing; with showily mounted jockey-whips in their hands, bad cigars (at two guineas a-pound) in their mouths, bright blue scarfs, or something equivalent, round their necks – their neat white cords and tops (things which they do turn out well in Oxford) being the only really sportsmanlike article about them; flattering themselves they looked exceedingly knowing, and, in nine cases out of ten, being deceived therein most lamentably; clustered together in groups of four or five, discussing the merits of the horses, or listening, as to an oracle, to the opinion of some Oxford horse-dealer, delivered with insolent familiarity – here were the men who drunk out of a fox's head, and recounted imaginary runs with the Heythrop. Happy was he amongst them, and a positive hero for the day, who could boast a speaking acquaintance with any of those anomalous individuals, at present enshrouded in great-coats, but soon to appear in all the varieties of jockey costume, known by the style and title of "gentlemen riders;" who could point out, confidentially, to his admiring companions, "Jack B – ," and "Little M – ," and announce, from authority, how many ounces under weight one was this morning, and how many blankets were put upon the other the night before, to enable him to come to the scales at all. Here and there, more plainly dressed, moving about quickly on their own thorough-breds, or talking to some neighbouring squire who knew the ground, were the few really sporting-men belonging to the university; who kept hunters in Oxford, simply because they were used to keep them at home, and had been brought up to look upon fox-hunting as their future vocation. Lolling on their saddles, probably voting it all a bore, were two or three tufts, and their "tail;" and stuck into all sorts of vehicles, lawful and unlawful, buggies, drags, and tandems, were that ignoble herd, who, like myself, had come to the steeple-chase, just because it was the most convenient idleness at hand, and because other men were going. There were all sorts of people there besides, of course: carriages of all grades of pretension, containing pretty bonnets and ugly faces, in the usual proportion; "all the beauty and fashion of the neighbourhood," nevertheless, as the county paper assured us; and as I may venture to add, from personal observation, a very fair share of its disrespectability and blackguardism besides.

After wandering for a short time among these various groups, Leicester halted us at last in front of one of those old-fashioned respectable-looking barouches, which one now so seldom sees, in which were seated a party, who turned out to consist of an uncle and aunt, and the pair of cousins before alluded to. Hurst and I were duly introduced; a ceremony which, for my own part, I could have very readily excused, when I discovered that the only pair of eyes in the party worth mentioning bestowed their glances almost exclusively on Horace, and any attempt at cutting into the conversation in that quarter was as hopeless, apparently, as ungracious. Our friend's taste in the article of cousins was undeniably correct; Flora Leicester was a most desirable person to have for a cousin; very pretty, very good-humoured, and (I am sure she was, though I pretend to no experience of the fact) very affectionate. If one could have put in any claim of kindred, even in the third or fourth degree, it would have been a case in which to stickle hard for the full privileges of relationship. As matters stood, it was trying to the sensibilities of us unfortunate bystanders, whose cousins were either ugly or at a distance; for the rest of our new acquaintances were not interesting. The younger sister was shy and insipid; the squire like ninety-nine squires in every hundred; and the lady-mother in a perpetual state of real or affected nervous agitation, to which her own family were happily insensible, but which taxed a stranger's polite sympathies pretty heavily. Though constantly in the habit, as she assured me, of accompanying her husband to run courses, and enjoying the sport, she was always on the look-out for an accident, and was always having, as she said, narrow escapes; some indeed so very narrow, that, according to her own account, they ought to have had, by every rule of probability, fatal terminations. In fact, her tone might have led one to believe that she looked upon herself as an ill-used woman, in getting off so easily – at least she was exceedingly angry when the younger daughter ventured to remark, en pendant to one of her most thrilling adventures, that "there was no great danger of an upset when the wheel stuck fast." Not content with putting her head out of the carriage every five minutes, to see if her own well-trained bays were standing quiet, as they always did, there was not a restive horse or awkward rider on the ground but attracted the good lady's ever watchful sense of danger. "He'll be thrown! I'm sure he will! foolish man, why don't he get off!" "Oh, oh! there they go! they're off, those horrid horses! they'll never stop 'em!" Such were the interjections, accompanied with extraordinary shudderings and drawings of the breath, with which Mrs John Leicester, her eyes fixed on some distant point, occasionally broke in upon the general conversation, sometimes with a vehemence that startled even her nephew and eldest daughter, though, to do them justice, they paid very little attention to any of us.