Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 67, No. 416, June 1850

We are unable, nor is it necessary, individually to criticise all the members of the Italian company now performing at her Majesty's Theatre, and which, in all respects, is excellent and most effective. There is one other singer, however, who must have a word of mention, were it only that he was the indirect means of making the English public acquainted with Jenny Lind. Belletti was formerly engaged at the opera at Stockholm, and was a great favourite with the late king, Bernadotte. Jenny Lind heard him, and his admirable method and acting at once revealed to her the treasures of the Italian school. She saw that she had much to acquire, and departed for Paris to study. But Belletti has a claim to other than second-hand gratitude. His singing and acting are alike first-rate. Nothing can be better than his Figaro; in less important characters he is equally careful and efficient. His forte is in buffo parts, where his rich mellow voice and contagious merriment are greatly relished. He will probably become – we will not say popular, for that he already is in the highest degree, but an indispensable member of the London company. We regret to learn that he is shortly to accompany Miss Lind to America, and trust his absence will not be of long duration.

Can we close this enumeration without a word of our old acquaintance, Luigi Lablache? Surely a small corner may be found for the great man, who flourishes in unabated vigour, in spite of accumulating years and, as we fancy, annually increasing bulk. There is a geniality and a joviality about this long-standing pillar of the opera, which never fails of its effect upon his public. Probably no foreign actor ever enlisted so uniformly and heartily the goodwill of an English audience; and his popularity, although of course augmented by his vocal merits, is by no means dependent on them. We lately somewhere encountered a hypercritical comment upon his acting, in which he was accused of condescending to buffoonery. Never was charge more unfounded and absurd. One of the most remarkable characteristics of Lablache is the extreme skill with which he draws the line between humour and vulgarity; the perfect good taste distinguishing his drolleries and occasional deviations from the letter of his part. The practice of now and then introducing a French or English word or sentence in an Italian opera, for the purpose of producing a comic effect, is one that certainly should only be indulged with great discretion; but in this, and in all other respects, we may be sure that any dereliction from correct taste would promptly be detected and reproved by so sensitive an audience as that of her Majesty's Theatre. But from his first appearance in London, in 1829, to the present day, an instance, we believe, was never known of a sally of Lablache not obtaining at least a smile – far oftener a hearty laugh. In him the rich Italian humour of the buffo Napolitano, the droll of the San Carlino, still exists, happily tempered and modified by the gentlemanly tact of the experienced comedian. Long may the colossus of bassos preserve his voice and his good humour! His loss would be sorely felt, and his place be hard to fill. Who, after him, shall dare undertake Dulcamara and Pasquale? One thing certain is, that, whenever fulness of years or pocket may detach him from the stage he has so long adorned, to bask away his old age, with dignity and ease, in some sunny Italian town, the public of London and Paris, accustomed to his annual presence amongst them, will regret, in Lablache, not less the accomplished actor than the amiable and kind-hearted man.

We have not room for any particular review of the operas that have been this year performed; and, for the same reason, we can give but a few words to the chief novelty announced. We refer to the forthcoming opera of the Tempest, whose composition devolved, after the death of Mendelssohn, upon Halévy, the youngest, and one of the most distinguished, of living French composers. Scribe has supplied the poem. Upon his merits as a librettist it were superfluous to expatiate; it were perhaps more necessary, did it come within the scope of this paper, to correct the popular error that, compared with the music, the libretto of an opera is of little or no consequence. That kind of poetry has certainly been much degraded by the incapacity of many who have presumptuously undertaken it. Good writers of librettos are even more rare than good composers. Since Metastasio's day, those who alone can fairly claim a place in the first rank are Romani, Da Ponte, (the librettist of Don Giovanni,) and Scribe, that able and indefatigable purveyor of the stage, to whom English managers and playwrights owe so heavy a debt of gratitude – a debt which they are not always very prompt to acknowledge. Mendelssohn, when he agreed to compose an opera on the Tempest, stipulated that the libretto should be confided to Scribe, who willingly undertook it, and afterwards declared that he knew few subjects so well adapted for music. This opinion, proceeding from a man who, amongst the various classes of theatrical composition in which he has succeeded, is considered to have been especially successful in that of libretti – so much so, indeed, that it has been asserted he owed more than one vote, at his election as member of the French Academy, to their excellence alone – is of no slight weight. Nor were it reasonable to doubt that the composer of the Juive and of Guido et Ginevra, who seems to have caught, especially in the last-named opera, no feeble spark of the inspiration of his brother Israelite, the great Meyerbeer, will have succeeded in clothing the verse of Scribe in music correspondingly worthy.

We must conclude without even touching upon the ballet. It needs no praise from us: the names alone of Carlotta Grisi, Marie Taglioni, and Amalia Ferraris, are sufficient guarantee of its excellence. Perhaps upon some future day we may be able to discuss its merits.

THE GREEN HAND

A "SHORT" YARN

PART X

As soon as you near St Helena by a few miles, the trade-wind falls light; and making the rock, as you do from the South Atlantic, a good deal to leeward of the harbour, 'twould be pretty slow work beating round to north-east, but for the breeze always coming off the height, with the help of which one can coast easy enough along. Captain Wallis said no more than to bid the first lieutenant make the brig's number at her mast-head, while she still bore in direct upon the breast of the land, as much out of soundings as the day before; the smooth heavy swell seeming to float the island up in one huge lump ahead of us, till you saw it rolling in to the very foot, with a line of surf, as if it all rose sheer out of the bottom of the sea; as grim and hard as a block of iron, too, and a good deal the same colour. By noon, it hung fairly as it were over our mast-heads, the brig looking by comparison as tiny and as ticklish as a craft made of glass; she coasting away round, with yards braced first one way then another, and opening point after point from three hundred to two thousand feet high; while at times she would go stealing in with a faint ripple at her bows, near enough to hear the deep sound of the sea plunging slowly to the face of the rock, where the surf rose white against it without a break. There wasn't so much as a weed to be seen, the rocks getting redder and more coppery, sending out the light like metal, till you'd have thought they tingled all over with the heat. Then as you opened another bulge in the line, the sharp sugar-loaf hills, far away up, with the ragged cliffs and crags, shot over against the bare white sky in all sort of shapes; and after a good long spell of the sea, there was little fancy needed to give one the notion they were changing into these, as we passed ahead, to mock you. There was one peak for all the world like the top of St Paul's, and no end of church spires and steeples, all lengths and ways; then big bells and trumpets, mixed with wild-beasts' heads, grinning at each other across some split in the blue beyond, and soldier's helmets – not to speak of one huge block, like a Nigger's face with a cowl behind it, hanging far out over the water. Save for the colour of it all, in fact, St Helena reminds one more of a tremendous iceberg than an island, and not the less that it looks ready in some parts to topple over and show a new face; while the sea working round it, surging into the hollows below water-mark, and making the air groan inside of them, keeps up a noise the like of which you wouldn't wish to cruise alongside of every day. The strangest thing about it, however, was that now and then, as you came abreast of some deep gully running up inland, a sudden blast of wind would rush out of it, sufficient to make the Podargus reel – with a savage thundering roar, too, like the howl out of a lion's mouth; while you looked far up a narrow, bare black glen, closing into a hubbub of red rocks, or losing itself up a grey hill-side in a white thread of a water-course; then the rough shell of the island shut in again, as still as before, save the light breeze and the deep hum of the surf along its foot. Curiously enough in a latitude like St Helena's, the island seems, as it were, a perfect bag of air. What with the heat of the rock, its hollow inside, the high peaks of it catching the clouds, and the narrow outlets it has, 'tis always brewing wind, you may say, to ventilate that part of the tropics – just as one may keep up cold draughts through and through a wet heap of loose stones, no matter how hot the weather is, as long as he pleases. As for a landing-place, though, there wasn't one of the gullies that didn't yawn over without falling to the sea; and not to mention the surf underneath, where the dark swell came in unbroken from deep water without a shoal to soften it, why, watching it from the brig's side, I shouldn't have said a cat would scramble up or down the steep slopes and the wreck of stones, from the water's edge to the jaws of the easiest gully you saw.

Once or twice, standing further off, we caught sight of Diana's Peak over the shoulder of a hill, with the light haze melting about it; at last you noticed a large gun mounted against the sky on a lofty peak, where it looked like a huge telescope; and on clearing another headland, a beautiful frigate came in between us and the burst of light to seaward, cruising to windward under easy sail. She bore up and stood towards the brig-of-war, just as the line of wall was to be seen winding round the middle of Sugar-Loaf Point, where the sentry's bayonet glittered near his watch-box, and the soldiers' red coats could be seen moving through the covered passage to the batteries. Five minutes after, the Podargus swept round the breast of Rupert's Hill into the bay, in sight of James Town and the ships lying off the harbour; cluing up her sails and ready to drop anchor, as the frigate hove to not far astern.

You can fancy land heaving in sight after thrice as many weeks as you've been at sea, ladies; or the view of a ship to a man that's been long laid up in bed ashore; or a gulp of fresh water in a sandy desert, – but I question if any of them matches your first glimpse of James Town from the roadstead, like a bright piece of fairy-work in the mouth of the narrow brown valley, after seeing desolation enough to make you wish for a clear horizon again. More especially this time, when all the while one couldn't help bringing to mind one's notion of the French Emperor, how, not long ago, the sight of the French coast, or a strange frigate over the Channel swell, used to make us think of him far ashore, with half the earth for his own, and millions of soldiers. We reefers down in the cockpit would save our grog to drink confusion to Napoleon, and in a rough night near a lee-shore, it was look alive aloft, or choose betwixt cold brine and the clutch of a gendarme hauling you to land. I do believe we looked upon him as a sort of god, as Captain Wallis did in the Temple; every ship or gun-boat we saw taken, or had a hand in the mauling of, why, 'twas for the sheer sake of the thing, and scarce by way of harm to Boney; while nothing like danger, from breakers on the lee-bow to a November gale, but had seemingly a taste of him. None of us any more thought of bringing him to this, than we did of his marching into London, or of a French frigate being able to rake our old Pandora in a set-to on green water or blue, with us to handle her.

But there was the neat little cluster of houses, white, yellow, and green, spreading down close together in the bottom of the valley, and out along the sea's edge; the rough brown cliffs sloping up on each side, with the ladder-like way to the fort on the right, mounting, as it were, out of the very street, to the flag-staff on the top, and dotted with red-coats going up and down; a bright line of a pier and a wall before the whole, the Government House dazzling through a row of spreading trees, and a little square church tower to be seen beyond. 'Twas more like a scene in a play, than aught else; what with the suddenness of it all, the tiny look of it betwixt the huge rocks, the greenness of the trees and bushes, and patches of garden struggling up as far as they could go into the stone, and the gay little toys of cottages, with scarce flat enough to stand upon: save for the blue swell of the sea plunging lazily in through the bit of a bay, and the streak of air behind, that let you in high over the head of the hollow, up above one height and another, to a flat-headed blue rise in the distance, where Longwood could be seen from the main-cross-trees I had gone to as the sails were furled. The sunlight, striking from both the red sides of the ravine, made the little village of a place, trees and all, glitter in a lump together, out of it, like no spot in the rest of the world; while elsewhere there wasn't so much as a weed to be seen hanging from the rock, nor the sign of another human habitation, saving the bare batteries on each hand, with a few sheds and warehouses over the beach along the landing-place. Once or twice the same sudden gust as before would come slap down through the valley into the brig's bare rigging, hot as the air was, with a howling kind of a sigh you took some time to get accustomed to, lest there was a hurricane to follow: in fact one didn't well know whether it was the wild look of it outside, or the lovely spot in its grim mouth of a landing-place, but the whole island gave you the notion of a thing you couldn't be long sure of, without fancying it would give a shake some day or other again; or else spout fire, as no doubt it had done before, if there wasn't more fear of Napoleon getting back somehow to France, and wreaking bloody vengeance on the kings that shut him up in St Helena.

There was apparently a busy scene ashore, however, both in the little town, which has scarce more than a single street, and along the quay, full of residents, as well as passengers from two Indiamen lying in-shore of us, while the Government esplanade seemed to be crowded with ladies, listening to the regimental band under the trees. The Newcastle frigate, with Sir Dudley Aldcombe's flag hoisted at her mizen, was at anchor out abreast at Ladder Hill; and our first lieutenant had scarce pulled aboard of the Hebe, which was hove-to off the brig's quarter, before I noticed the Admiral's barge lying alongside the Hebe. Seeing Mr Aldridge on his way back shortly after, I came down the rigging, more anxious than ever to have my own matter settled; indeed, Captain Wallis no sooner caught sight of my face, uncomfortable as I daresay it looked, than he told me he was going to wait on the Admiral aboard the Hebe, and would take me with him at once, if I chose. For my part, I needed nothing but the leave, and in ten minutes time I found myself, no small mark of curiosity, betwixt the waist and the quarterdeck of the Hebe, where the officers eyed me with as little appearance of rudeness as they could help, and I overhauled the spars and rigging aloft as coolly as I could, waiting to be sent for below. The Hebe, in fact, was the very beauty of a twenty-eight; taking the shine, and the wind, too, clean out of everything even at Plymouth, where I had seen her once a year or two before: our poor dear old Iris herself had scarce such a pattern of a hull, falling in, as it did, from the round swell of her bilge, to just under the plank-sheer, and spreading out again with her bright black top-sides, till where the figurehead shot over the cut-water, and out of her full pair of bows, like a swan's neck out of its breast. As for the Iris, our boatswain himself one day privately confessed to me, almost with tears in his eyes, that she tumbled home a thought too much just in front of the fore-chains, and he'd tried to get it softened off with dead planking and paint, but it wouldn't do; everybody saw through them. The truth was, to feel this fine ship under one, with her loose topsails hanging high against the gloom of the red gully towards Longwood, and the gay little town peeping just over her larboard bow, a mile away, it somehow or other cleared one's mind of a load. I was thinking already how, if one had the command of such a craft, to do something with her at sea – hang it! but surely that old Judge couldn't be too proud to give him a fair hearing. By Jove! thought I – had one only wild enough weather, off the Cape, say – if I wouldn't undertake to bother even a seventy-four a whole voyage through, till she struck her flag; in which case a fellow might really venture to hold his head up and speak his mind, lovely as Violet Hyde would be in Calcutta. But then, again, there was St Helena towering red and rough over the ships, with the grand French Emperor hidden in it hard and fast, and all the work he used to give us at an end!

Just at the moment, happening to catch sight of the American mate's sallow black visage over the brig-of-war's hammock-cloths, peering as he did from the cliffs to the lofty spars of the frigate, while his Negro shipmates were to be made out nearer the bows – somehow or other the whole affair of their being burnt out and picked up started into my mind again, along with our late queer adventures in the Indiaman. Not to mention Captain Wallis's story, it flashed upon me all at once, for the first time, that the strange schooner was after some scheme as regarded the island; and a man more likely to try something uncommon than the Frenchman, I never had seen yet. The truth was, but for my thoughts being otherwise taken up, I'd have wondered at my own confounded stupidity in not fathoming the thing sooner; whereas now, I'm not going to deny it, I half began actually to wish him good success, or else a close miss of it, where either way one couldn't well fail having a share in the squall. At any rate, I saw it was cunningly enough gone about; this same burnt barque of the Yankee's, I perceived in a moment, was part of the plot; though as for meddling in it till I saw more, 'twas likely to spoil the whole; let alone making an ass of one's-self in case of mistake. I was eyeing the shipwrecked mate, indeed, when one of the lieutenants told me politely the Admiral wanted to see me in the cabin below.

Not being much accustomed to admirals' society, as a little white-haired fellow-reefer of mine once said at a tea-party ashore, I came in at the door with rather an awkward bow, no doubt; for Sir Dudley, who was sitting on the sofa with his cocked hat and sword beside him, talking to Captain Wallis, turned his head at the captain's word, as if he were trying to keep in a smile. A tall, fine-looking man he was, and few seamen equal to him for handling a large fleet, as I knew, though his manners were finished enough to have made him easy in a king's court. As for the captain of the Hebe, he was leaning out of an open stern-window, seemingly a young man, but who he might be I didn't know at the moment. The Admiral had only a question or two to put, before he looked back to Captain Wallis again, remarking it was clear he had brought away the wrong man. "I didn't think you were so dull in the Podargus," said he, smiling, "as to let an Indiaman play off such a trick on you – eh, Captain Wallis!" Captain Wallis glanced round the cabin, and then sideways down at Sir Dudley's cocked hat, in a funny enough way, as much as to say he took all the blame on himself; and it struck me more than ever what a kind heart the man had in him – if you only set aside his hatred to Buonaparte, which in fact was nothing else but a twisted sort of proof of the same thing. "Pooh, pooh, Wallis," continued Sir Dudley, "we can't do anything in the matter; though, if the service were better than it really is at present, I should certainly incline to question a smart young fellow like this, that has held His Majesty's commission, for idling in an Indiaman after the lady passengers! I am afraid, sir," said he to me, "you've lost your passage, though, – unless the captain of the Hebe will give you his second berth here, to make amends." "You need not be afraid, Lord Frederick!" added he, looking toward the captain of the frigate, and raising his voice; "you do not know him, after all, I suppose!" The captain drew in his head, saying he had been doubtful about one of the pivots of the rudder, then turned full round and looked uneasily at me, on which his face brightened immediately, and he said, "No, Sir Dudley, I do not!" I was still in ignorance for a moment or so, myself, who this titled young post-captain might be, though I had certainly seen him before; till all at once I recollected him, with a start as pleasant to me as his seemed to him at not knowing me. Both Westwood and I had been midshipmen together for a while in the Orion, fifty-gun ship, where he was second lieutenant, several years before. As for me, I was too fond of a frigate to stay longer in her than I could help; but I remembered my being a pest to the second lieutenant, and Tom's being a favourite of his, so that he staid behind me, and got master's mate as soon as he was 'passed.' The Honourable Frederick Bury he was then, and the handsomest young fellow in the squadron, as well as the best-natured aboard. I don't believe he knew how to splice in a dead-eye, and any of the masters'-mates could take charge of the ship better in a rough night, I daresay; but for a gallant affair in the way of hard knocks, with management to boot, there wasn't his match. He never was known to fail when he took a thing in hand; lost fewer men, too, than any one else did; and whenever there turned up anything ticklish for the boats, it was always "Mr Bury will lead." "The honourable Bury," we used to call him, and "Fighting Free-the-deck." Westwood was one of his school, whereas I had learnt from Jacobs in a merchantman's forecastle; and many a time did we play off such tricks on the second lieutenant as coming gravely aft to him during the watch, three or four of us together, me carrying a bit of rope where a "turk's-head" or a "mouse" was be worked, while I asked him innocently to show us the way. Or else it was some dispute we contrived beforehand, as to the best plan of sending up new topmasts at sea, or running out of a "round" gale in the Indian Ocean, on which the men forward would be all ready to break out laughing; and the second lieutenant, after thinking a moment, would quietly pitch upon me to go aloft, and study the point for two hours at the mast-head.

"What is your name then, young man?" inquired Sir Dudley Aldcombe of me. The instant I told him, Lord Frederick Bury gave me another look, then a smile. "What?" said he, "Collins that was in the Orion?" "Yes, Lord Frederick," said I, "the same; I was third in the Iris off the West African coast, since then." "Why," said he, "I recollect you quite well, Mr Collins, although you have grown a foot, I think, sir – but your eye reminds me of sundry pranks you used to play on board! What nickname was it your mess-mates called you, by the bye?" "Something foolish enough, I suppose, my lord," replied I, biting my lip; "but I remember clearly having the honour to steer the second cutter in shore one dark night near Dunkirk, when your lordship carried the Dutch brig and the two French chasse-marées – " "'Faith," broke in the captain of the Hebe, "you've a better memory than I have – I do not recollect any chasse-marées at all, that time, Mr Collins!" "Why," said I, "I got a knock on the head from a fellow in a red shirt – that always kept me in mind." "Oh," remarked the Admiral to Captain Wallis, laughing, "Lord Frederick Bury must have had so many little parties of the kind, that his memory can't be expected to be very nice! However, I shall go ashore at present, gentlemen, leaving the Hebe and you to dispose of this runaway lieutenant in someway or other. Only you'd better settle it before Admiral Plampin arrives!" "Have you seen the – the – Longwood lately, Sir Dudley?" asked the captain of the Podargus, carelessly. "Yes, not many days ago I had an interview," said the Admiral gravely; "proud as ever, and evidently resolved not to flinch from his condition. 'Tis wonderful the command that man has over himself, Wallis – he speaks of the whole world and its affairs like one that sees into them, and had them still nearly under his foot! All saving those miserable squabbles with Plantation House, which – but, next time, I shall take my leave, and wash my hands of the whole concern, I am glad to think!" Lord Frederick was talking to me meanwhile at the other end of the cabin, but I was listening in spite of myself to Sir Dudley Aldcombe, and noticed that Captain Wallis made no answer. "By the way, Wallis," continued the Admiral, "'tis curious that he seemed anxious more than once to know what you think of him – I believe he would like to see you!" "To see me!" said the commander of the Podargus, suddenly. "At last, does he! No, Sir Dudley, he and I never will meet; he ought to have thought of it twelve years sooner! God knows," he went on, "the commander of a ten-gun brig is too small a man to see the Emperor Napoleon a prisoner – but in ten years of war, Sir Dudley, what mightn't one have been, instead of being remembered after as only plain John Wallis, whom Buonaparte kept all that time in prison, and who was sent, in course of time, to cruise off St Helena!" Here the Admiral said something about a British sailor not keeping malice, and Captain Wallis looked up at him gravely. "No," replied he; "no, Sir Dudley, I shouldn't have chosen the thing; but in the mean time I'm only doing my duty. There's a gloomy turn in my mind by this time, no doubt; but you've no idea, Sir Dudley, how the thought of other people comes into one's head when he's years shut up – so I may stand for many a one Buonaparte will never see more than myself, that'll ring him round surer than those rocks there, though they're dead and in their graves, Sir Dudley!" The Admiral shook his head, observing that Napoleon was no common man, and oughtn't to be judged as such. "Too many victories in that eye of his, I suspect, Captain Wallis," said he, "for either Plantation House or his own conscience to break his spirit!" "Ay, ay sir," answered the captain respectfully, "excuse me, Sir Dudley, but there it is – so long as he's got his victories to fall back upon, he can't see how, if he'd regarded common men more, with all belonging to them, he wouldn't have been here! Why did Providence shut him up in a dead volcano, with blue water round it, Sir Dudley, if it wasn't to learn somehow or other he was a man after all?" Sir Dudley Aldcombe shrugged his shoulders and looked to Lord Frederick, upon which he rose, and the two captains followed him out of the cabin; in five minutes I heard the side piped for the Admiral's leaving, and soon after the captain of the Hebe came below again.