Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 70, No. 433, November 1851

Happily it has not been necessary hitherto to say a word about the plot of Mr Taylor's dramas. This of Isaac Comnenus, being less known, may require a word of preliminary introduction. The scene is laid at Constantinople, at the close of the eleventh century; Nicephorus is the reigning emperor. We may call to mind that the government of the Byzantine monarchy, for a long time, maintained this honourable peculiarity, that, though in form a despotism, the emperor was expected to administer the law as it had descended to it from the genius of Rome. Dynasties changed, but the government remained substantially the same. It was an Oriental despotism with a European administration. Whilst, therefore, we have in the play before us a prince dethroned, and a revolution accomplished, we hear nothing of liberty and oppression, the cause of freedom, and the usual topics of patriotic conspiracy. The brothers Isaac and Alexius Comnenus are simply too powerful to be trusted as subjects; an attempt has been already made to poison the elder brother Isaac, the hero of the drama. He finds himself in a manner constrained to push forward to the throne, as his only place of safety. This ambitious course is thrust upon him. Meanwhile he enters on it with no soft-heartedness. He takes up his part, and goes bravely through with it; bravely, but coldly – with a sneer ever on his lip. With the church, too, he has contrived to make himself extremely unpopular, and the Patriarch is still more rancorously opposed to him than the Emperor.

Before we become acquainted with him, he has loved and lost by death his gentle Irene. This renders the game of ambition still more contemptible in his eyes. It renders him cold also to the love of a certain fair cousin, Anna Comnena. Love, or ambition, approaches him also in the person of Theodora, the daughter of the emperor. She is willing to desert her father's cause, and ally herself and all her hopes to Isaac Comnenus. Comnenus declines her love. The rejected Theodora brings about the catastrophe of the piece. The Emperor Nicephorus is deposed; Isaac is conqueror in the strife, but he gives over the crown he has won to his brother Alexius. Then does Theodora present herself disguised as some humble petitioner to Isaac Comnenus. Armed with a dagger, she forces her way into an inner chamber where he is; a groan is heard, and the following stage direction closes the play —

"All rush into the inner chamber, whilst Theodora, passing out from it, crosses the stage, holding in her hand a dagger covered with blood. The curtain falls."

This scanty outline will be sufficient to make the following characteristic quotations intelligible to those who may not have read the play. Eudocia, his sister, thus describes Comnenus: —

– "HeIs nothing new to dangers nor to life —His thirty years on him have nigh told double,Being doubly loaden with the unlightsome stuffThat life is made of. I have often thoughtHow nature cheats this world in keeping count:There's some men pass for old men who ne'er lived —These monks, to wit: they count the time, not spend it;They reckon moments by the tick of beads,And ring the hours with psalmody: clocks, clocks;If one of these had gone a century,I would not say he'd lived. My brother's ageHas spanned the matter of too many lives;He's full of years though young."

Comnenus, we have said, is on ill terms with the church. Speaking of the sanctuary he says: —

"I have a safer refuge. Mother churchHath no such holy precinct that my bloodWould not redeem all sin and sacrilegeOf slaughter therewithin. But there's a spotWithin the circle my good sword describes,Which by God's grace is sanctified for me."

On quitting his cousin Anna, she says: —

"Go, and good angels guard thee is my prayer.Comnenus.– Good soldiers, Anna. In the arm of fleshAre we to trust. The Mother of the Gods,Prolific Mother, holiest Mother church,Hath banded heaven upon the side opposed.No matter, when such supplicants as thouPray for us, other angels need we none."

It is plain that we have no dutiful son of the Church here; and that her hostility, in this instance, is not altogether without cause. We find that his scepticism has gone farther than to dispute the miraculous virtues of the holy image of St Basil, the eye of which he is reputed to have knocked out with his lance: —

"Just as you cameI moralised the matter of that changeWhich theologians call – how aptly, say —The quitting of a tenement."

And his moralising is overcast with the shadow of doubt. The addresses, for such they are, of Theodora, the daughter of the emperor, he receives and declines with the greatest calmness, though they are of that order which it is manifestly as dangerous to reject as to accept.

"Germanus. My noble lord, the Cæsarissa waitsWith infinite impatience to behold you:She bids me say so. Ah! most noble count!A fortunate man – the sunshine is upon you —Comnenus. Ay, sir, and wonderfully warm it makes me.Tell her I'm coming, sir, with speed."

With speed, however, he does not go, nor makes a better excuse for his delay than that he was "sleeping out the noontide." In the first interview he escapes from her confidence, and when subsequently she will not be misunderstood, he says —

"Nor now, nor ever,Will I make bargains for a lady's love."

In a dialogue with his brother Alexius, his temper and way of thinking, and the circumstance which has mainly produced them, are more fully developed. We make a few extracts without attempting very closely to connect them. Alexius has been remarking the change in Comnenus since they last met.

"Comnenus. Change is youth's wonder:Such transmutations have I seen on manThat fortune seemed a slow and stedfast powerCompared with nature.Alexius. There is nought thou'st seenMore altered than art thou.I speak not of thy change in outward favour,But thou art changed in heart.Comnenus. Ay, hearts change too:Mine has grown sprightly, has it not, and hard?I ride it now with spurs; else, else, Alexius —Well is it said the best of life is childhood.Life is a banquet where the best's first served,And when the guest is cloyed comes oil and garlick.Alexius. Hast thou forgotten how it was thy wontTo muse the hours away along this shore —These very rippled sands?Comnenus. The sands are here,But not the foot-prints. Wouldst thou trace them now?A thousand tides and storms have dashed them out.… I have no care for beauty.Seest thou yon rainbow based and glassed on ocean?I look on that as on a lovely thing,But not a thing of promise."

Comnenus has wandered with his brother unawares to a spot which of all others on earth was the most dear or the most painful to him – the spot where his Irene had been buried. He recognises it whilst he is in the full tide of his cynicism: —

"Alexius. What is this carved upon the rock?Comnenus. I know not:But Time has ta'en it for a lover's scrawl;He's razed it, razed it.Alexius. No, not quite; look here.I take it for a lover's.Comnenus. What! there's some talkOf balmy breath, and hearts pierced through and throughWith eyes' miraculous brightness – vows ne'er broken,Until the church had sealed them – charms loved madly,Until it be a sin to love them not —And kisses ever sweet, till they be innocent —But that your lover's not put down?Alexius. No, none of it.There are but two words.Comnenus. That's succinct; what are they?Alexius. 'Alas, Irene!' Why thy looks are now —

Comnenus parries the question of his brother, contrives to dismiss him, and remains alone upon the spot.

"This is the very earth that covers her,And lo! we trample it like common clay!… When I last stood hereDisguised, to see a lowly girl laid downInto her early grave, there was such lightAs now doth show it, but a bleaker air,Seeing it was December. 'Tis most strange;I can remember now each circumstanceWhich then I scarce was conscious of; like wordsThat leave upon the still susceptive senseA message undelivered till the mindAwakes to apprehensiveness and takes it.'Twas o'er – the muttered unattended rite,And the few friends she had beside myselfHad risen and gone; I had not knelt, but stoodWith a dull gaze of stupor as the mouldWas shovelled over, and the broken sodsFitted together. Then some idle boys,Who had assisted at the covering in,Ran off in sport, trailing the shovels with them,Rattling upon the gravel; and the sextonFlattened the last sods down, and knocked his spadeAgainst a neighbouring tombstone to shake offThe clinging soil, – with a contented air,Even as a ditcher who has done his work.… Oh Christ!How that which was the life's life of our beingCan pass away, and we recall it thus!"

Whilst reading this play of Isaac Comnenus we seemed to perceive a certain Byronian vein, which came upon us rather unexpectedly. Not that there is any very close resemblance between Comnenus and the heroes of Lord Byron; but there is a desperate wilfulness, a tone of scepticism, and a caustic view of human life, which occasionally recall them to mind. We turned to the preface to Philip Van Artevelde, where there is a criticism upon the poetry of Byron, not unjust in the faults it detects, but cold and severe, as it seems to us, in the praise that it awards; and we found there an intimation which confirmed our suspicion that Isaac Comnenus had been written whilst still partially under the influence of that poetry – written in what we may describe as a transition state. He says there of Lord Byron's poetry, "It will always produce a powerful impression upon very young readers, and I scarcely think that it can have been more admired by any than myself, when I was included in that category." And have we not here some explanation of the severity and coldness of that criticism itself? Did not the maturer intellect a little resent in that critical judgment the hallucinations of the youth?

Perhaps we are hardly correct in calling the temper and spirit we have here alluded to Byronian; they are common to all ages and to many minds, though signally developed by that poet, and in our own epoch. Probably the future historian of this period of our literature will attribute much of this peculiar exhibition of bitterness and despondency to the sanguine hopes first excited and then disappointed by the French Revolution. He will probably say of certain regions of our literature, that the whole bears manifest traces of volcanic origin. Pointing to some noble eminence, which seems to have been eternally calm, he will conjecture that it owed its elevation to the same force which raised the neighbouring Ætna. Applying the not very happy language of geology, he may describe it as "a crater of elevation;" which, being interpreted, means no crater at all, but an elevation produced by the like volcanic agency: the crater itself is higher up in the same mountain range.

There still remains one other small volume of Mr Taylor's poetry, which we must not pass over entirely without mentioning. The Eve of the Conquest, and other Poems. The chief piece here is of the nature of a dramatic scene. Harold, the night before the battle of Hastings, converses with his daughter, unfolds some passages of his past life, and vindicates himself in his quarrel with that William the Norman who, on the morrow, was to add the title of Conqueror to his name. But as it will be more agreeable to vary the nature of our quotations, we shall make the few extracts we have space for from the lyric poems which follow.

The "Lago Varese" will be, we suspect, the favourite with most readers. The image of the Italian girl is almost as distinctly reflected in the verse as it would have been in her own native lake.

"And sauntering up a circling cove,I found upon the strandA shallop, and a girl who stroveTo drag it to dry land.I stood to see – the girl looked round – her faceHad all her country's clear and definite grace.She rested with the air of restSo seldom seen, of thoseWhose toil remitted gives a zest,Not languor, to repose.Her form was poised, yet buoyant, firm, though free,And liberal of her bright black eyes was she.The sunshine of the Southern face,At home we have it not;And if they be a reckless race,These Southerns, yet a lotMore favoured, on the chequered earth is theirs;They have life's sorrows, but escape its cares.There is a smile which wit extortsFrom grave and learned men,In whose austere and servile sportsThe plaything is a pen;And there are smiles by shallow worldlings worn,To grace a lie or laugh a truth to scorn:And there are smiles with less alloyOf those who, for the sakeOf some they loved, would kindle joyWhich they cannot partake;But hers was of the kind which simply say,They came from hearts ungovernably gay."

The "Lago Lugano" is a companion picture, written "sixteen summers" after, and on a second visit to Italy. One thing we notice, that in this second poem almost all that is beautiful is brought from the social or political reflections of the writer: it is not the outward scene that lies reflected in the verse. He is thinking more of England than of Italy.

"Sore painsThey take to set Ambition free, and bindThe heart of man in chains."

And the best stanza in the poem is that which is directly devoted to his own country: —

"Oh, England! 'Merry England,' styled of yore!Where is thy mirth? Thy jocund laughter, where?The sweat of labour on the brow of careMake a mute answer – driven from every door!The May-pole cheers the village green no more,Nor harvest-home, nor Christmas mummers rare.The tired mechanic at his lecture sighs;And of the learned, which, with all his lore,Has leisure to be wise?"

With some verses from a poem called "St Helen's-Auckland" we close our extracts. The author revisits the home of his boyhood: —

"How much is changed of what I see,How much more changed am I,And yet how much is left – to meHow is the distant nigh!The walks are overgrown and wild,The terrace flags are green —But I am once again a child,I am what I have been.The sounds that round about me riseAre what none other hears;I see what meets no other eyes,Though mine are dim with tears.In every change of man's estateAre lights and guides allowed;The fiery pillar will not wait,But, parting, sends the cloud.Nor mourn I the less manly partOf life to leave behind;My loss is but the lighter heart,My gain the graver mind."

Poetry is no longer the most popular form of literature amongst us, and the drama is understood to be the least popular form of poetry. If this be the case, Mr Taylor has the additional merit of having won his way to celebrity under singular disadvantages. But, in truth, such poetry as Mr Taylor's could never appeal to the multitude. Literature of any kind which requires of the reader himself to think in order to enjoy, can never be popular. It is impossible to deny that the dramas we have been reviewing demand an effort, in the first instance, on the part of the reader: he must sit down to them with something of the spirit of the student. But, having done this, he will find himself amply repaid. As he advances in the work, he will read with increased pleasure; he will read it the second time with greater delight than the first; and if he were to live twenty years, and were to read such a drama as Philip Van Artevelde every year of his life, he would find in it some fresh source of interest to the last.

As we have not contented ourselves with selecting beautiful passages of writing from Mr Taylor's dramas, but have attempted such an analysis of the three principal characters they portray as may send the reader to their reperusal with additional zest, so neither have we paused to dispute the propriety of particular parts, or to notice blemishes and defects. We would not have it understood that we admire all that Mr Taylor has written. Of whom could we say this? We think, for instance, that, throughout his dramas, from the first to the last, he treats the monks too coarsely. His portraiture borders upon farce. His Father John shows that he can do justice to the character of the intelligent and pious monk. Admitting that this character is rare, we believe that the extremely gross portraiture which we have elsewhere is almost equally rare. This last, however, is so frequently introduced, that it will pass with the reader as Mr Taylor's type of the monkish order. The monks could never have been more ignorant than the surrounding laity, and they were always something better in morals and in true piety. We are quite at a loss, too, to understand Mr Taylor's fondness for the introduction into his dramas of certain songs or ballads, which are not even intended to be poetical. To have made them so, he would probably contend, would have been a dramatic impropriety. Very well; but let us have as few of such things as may be, and as short as possible. In Edwin the Fair they are very numerous; and those which are introduced in Philip Van Artevelde we could gladly dispense with. We could also very willingly have dispensed with the conversation of those burgesses of Bruges who entertained the Earl of Flanders with some of these ballads. We agree with the Earl, that their hospitalities are a sore affliction. Tediousness may be very dramatic, but it is tediousness still – a truth which our writer, intent on the delineations of his character, sometimes forgets. But defects like these it is sufficient merely to have hinted at. That criticism must be very long and ample indeed, of the dramas of Mr Taylor, in which they ought to occupy any considerable space.

A LEGEND OF GIBRALTAR

CHAPTER I

The Governor's residence at Gibraltar was, in days of Spanish domination, a religious house, and still retains the name of the Convent. Two sides of a long quadrangular gallery, traversing the interior of the building, are hung with portraits of officers present at the great siege in 1779-83, executed in a style which proves that Pre-Raphaelite painters existed in those days. One of these portraits represents my grandfather. To judge from a painting of him by Sir Joshua, and a small miniature likeness, both still in possession of the family, he must have been rather a good-looking old gentleman, with an affable, soldierlike air, and very respectable features. The portrait at the Convent is doubtless a strong likeness, but by no means so flattering; it represents him much as he might have appeared in life, if looked at through a cheap opera-glass. A full inch has been abstracted from his forehead, and added to his chin; the bold nose has become a great promontory in the midst of the level countenance; the eyes have gained in ferocity what they have lost in speculation, and would, indeed, go far to convey a disagreeable impression of my ancestor's character, but for the inflexible smile of the mouth. Altogether, the grimness of the air, the buckram rigidity of figure, and the uncompromising hardness of his shirt-frill and the curls of his wig, are such as are to be met with in few works of art, besides the figure-heads of vessels, the signboards of country inns, and the happiest efforts of Messrs Millais and Hunt.

However, my grandfather is no worse off than his compeers. Not far from this one is another larger painting, representing a council of officers held during the siege, where, notwithstanding the gravity of the occasion and the imminence of the danger, not a single face in the intrepid assembly wears the slightest expression of anxiety or fear, or, indeed, of anything else; and though my progenitor, in addition to the graces of the other portrait, is here depicted with a squint, yet he is by no means the most ill-looking individual present. But the illustrious governor, Eliott, has suffered more than anybody at the hands of the artist. Besides figuring in the production aforesaid, a statue of him stands in the Alameda, carved in some sort of wood, unluckily for him, of a durable nature. The features are of a very elevated cast, especially the nose; the little legs seem by no means equal to the task of sustaining the enormous cocked-hat; and the bearing is so excessively military, that it has been found necessary to prop the great commander from behind to prevent him from falling backwards.

My grandfather, John Flinders, joined the garrison of Gibraltar as a major of infantry a few years before the siege. He was then forty-seven years of age, and up to that time had remained one of the most determined old bachelors that ever existed. Not that he ever declaimed against matrimony in the style of some of our young moderns, who fancy themselves too strong-minded to marry; the truth being that they remain single either because they have not been gifted by nature with tastes sufficiently strong to like one woman better than another, or else, because no woman ever took the trouble to lay siege to them. My grandfather had never married, simply, I believe, because matrimony had never entered his head. He seldom ventured, of his own choice, into ladies' society, but, when he did, no man was more emphatically gallant to the sex. One after one, he saw his old friends abandoning the irresponsible ease of bachelorhood for the cares of wedded life; but while he duly congratulated them on their felicity, and officiated as godfather to their progeny, he never seemed to anticipate a similar destiny for himself. All his habits showed that he had been too long accustomed to single harness to go cleverly as one of a pair. He had particular hours of rising, and going to bed; of riding out and returning; of settling himself down for the evening to a book and pipe, which the presence of a helpmate would have materially deranged. And therefore, without holding any Malthusian tenets, without pitying his Benedick acquaintances, or entertaining a thought of the sex which would have been in the least decree derogatory to the character of a De Coverley, his castles in the air were never tenanted by any of his own posterity.

It was fortunate for my grandfather that in his time people did not suffer so much as now from that chronic inflammation of the conscience, which renders them perfectly miserable unless they are engaged in some tangible pursuit – "improving their minds," or "adding to the general stock of information." A more useless, contented person never existed. He never made even a show of employing himself profitably, and never complained of weariness in maintaining the monotonous jog-trot of his simple daily life. He read a good deal, certainly, but it was not to improve his mind, only to amuse himself. Strong-minded books, to stimulate his thinking faculties, would have had no charms for him; he would as soon have thought of getting galvanised for the pleasure of looking at his muscles. And I don't know whether it was not just as well. In systematically cultivating his mind, he would merely have been laying a top-dressing on a thin soil – manuring where there would never have been a crop – and some pleasant old weeds would have been pulled up in the process. A green thistly common, even though a goose could hardly find sustenance there, is nature still, which can hardly be said of a patch of earth covered with guano.

So my grandfather went on enjoying himself without remorse after his own fashion, and never troubled himself to think – an operation that would have been inconvenient to himself, and productive of no great results to the world. He transplanted his English habits to Gibraltar; and, after being two years there, knew nothing more of Spain or Spaniards than the view of the Andaluçian hills from the Rock, and a short constitutional daily ride along the beach beyond the Spanish lines, to promote appetite and digestion, afforded him. And so he might have continued to vegetate during the remainder of his service there, but for a new acquaintance that he made about this time.

Frank Owen, commonly called Garry Owen by his familiars, was one of those joyous spirits whose pleasant faces and engaging manners serve as a perpetual act of indemnity for all breaches of decorum, and trespasses over social and conventional fences, committed by them in the gaiety of their hearts. In reproving his many derelictions of military duty, the grim colonel of the regiment would insensibly exchange his habitual tone of severe displeasure for one of mild remonstrance – influenced, probably, quite as much, in secret, by the popularity of the unrepentant offender, as by any personal regard for him. Captain Hedgehog, who had shot a man through the heart for corking his face one night when he was drunk, and all contact with whose detonating points of honour was as carefully avoided by his acquaintance as if they had been the wires of a spring-gun, sustained Garry's reckless personalities with a sort of warning growl utterly thrown away upon the imperturbable wag, who would still persist, in the innocence of his heart, in playing round the den of this military cockatrice. And three months after his arrival in Gibraltar, being one day detected by a fierce old Spanish lady in the very act of kissing her daughter behind the little señorita's great painted fan, his good-humoured impudence converted the impending storm into a mild drizzle of reproof, ending in his complete restoration to favour.