tion of sentiment, that heaves no sigh, and sheds no tear; an icicle upon the bust of Tragedy. With all his faults, he has powers and faculties which no one else on the stage has; why then does he not avail himself of them, instead of throwing himself upon the charity of criticism? Mr. Kemble has given the public great, incalculable pleasure; and does he know so little of the gratitude of the world as to trust to their generosity? [He must be sent to Coventry—or St. Helena!] BERTRAM. [Drury Lane] May 19, 1816. THE new tragedy of Bertram' at Drury-Lane Theatre has entirely succeeded, and it has sufficient merit to deserve the success it has met with. We had read it before we saw it, and it on the whole disappointed us in the representation. Its beauties are rather those of language and sentiment than of action or situation. The interest flags very much during the last act, where the whole plot is known and inevitable. What it has of stage-effect is scenic and extraneous, as the view of the sea in a storm, the chorus of knights, etc., instead of arising out of the business of the play. We also object to the trick of introducing the little child twice to untie the knot of the catastrophe. One of these fantoccini exhibitions in the course of a tragedy is quite enough. The general fault of this tragedy, and of other modern tragedies that we could mention, is, that it is a tragedy without business. Aristotle, we believe, defines tragedy to be the representation of a serious action. Now here there is 1 Bertram; or, The Castle of St. Aldobrand, by the Rev. C. R. Maturin, produced May 9. 2 Poetics, chap. vi. no action: there is neither cause nor effect. There is a want of that necessary connection between what happens, what is said, and what is done, in which we take the essence of dramatic invention to consist. It is a sentimental drama, it is a romantic drama, but it is not a tragedy, in the best sense of the word. That is to say, the passion described does not arise naturally out of the previous circumstances, nor lead necessarily to the consequences that follow. Mere sentiment is voluntary, fantastic, self-created, beginning and ending in itself; true passion is natural, irresistible, produced by powerful causes, and impelling the will to determinate actions. The old tragedy, if we understand it, is a display of the affections of the heart and the energies of the will; the modern romantic tragedy is a mixture of fanciful exaggeration and indolent sensibility; the former is founded on real calamities and real purposes; the latter courts distress, affects horror, indulges in all the luxury of woe, and nurses its languid thoughts and dainty sympathies, to fill up the void of action. As the opera is filled with a sort of singing people, who translate every thing into music, the modern. drama is filled with poets and their mistresses, who translate every thing into metaphor and sentiment. Bertram falls under this censure. It is a Winter's Tale, a Midsummer Night's Dream, but it is not Lear or Macbeth. The poet does not describe what his characters would feel in given circumstances, but lends them his own thoughts and feelings out of his general reflections on human nature, or general observation of certain objects. In a word, we hold for a truth, that a thoroughly good tragedy is an impossibility in a state of manners and literature where the poet and philosopher have got the better of the man; where the reality does not mould the imagination, but the imagination glosses over the reality; and where the unexpected stroke of true calamity, the biting edge of true passion, is blunted, sheathed, and lost, amidst the flowers of poetry strewed over unreal, unfelt distress, and the flimsy topics of artificial humanity prepared beforehand for all occasions. We are tired of this long-spun analysis; take an example: "SCENE V. A Gothic Apartment. Imogine discovered sitting at a Table looking at a Picture. Imogine. Yes, The limner's art may trace the absent feature, And give the eye of distant weeping faith To view the form of its idolatry; But oh! the scenes 'mid which they met and parted— The thoughts, the recollections sweet and bitter-- Less lovely are the fugitive clouds of eve, And not more vanishing—if thou couldst speak, Yea, mothers have with desperate hands wrought harm But woman still hath loved-if that indeed This is very beautiful and affecting writing. The reader would suppose that it related to events woven into the web of the history; but no such thing. It is a purely voluntary or poetical fiction of possible calamity, arising out of the experience of the author, not of the heroine. The whole of the character of Clotilda, her confidante, who enters immediately after, is superfluous. She merely serves for the heroine to vent the moods of her own mind upon, and to break her enthusiastic soliloquies into the appearance of a dialogue. There is no reason in the world for the confidence thus reposed in Clotilda, with respect to her love for the outlawed Bertram, but the eternal desire of talk 1 Bertram, I, V. ing. Neither does she at all explain the grounds of her marriage to Aldobrand, who her father was, or how his distresses induced her to renounce her former lover. The whole is an effusion of tender sentiments, sometimes very good and fine, but of which we neither know the origin, the circumstances, nor the object; for her passion for Bertram does not lead to any thing but the promise of an interview to part for ever, which promise is itself broken. Among other fine lines describing the situation of Imogine's mind, are the following: "And yet some sorcery was wrought on me, Perhaps these lines would be more natural if spoken of the lady than by her. The descriptive style will allow things to be supposed or said of others, which cannot so well be believed or said by them. There is also a want of dramatic decorum in Bertram's description of a monastic life addressed to the Prior. It should be a solitary reflection. "Yea, thus they live, if this may life be called, That part of the play where the chief interest should`lie, namely, in the scenes preceding the death of Aldobrand, is without any interest at all, from the nature of the plot; for there is nothing left either to hope or to fear; and not only is there no possibility of good, but there is not even a choice of evils. The struggle of Imogine is a mere alternation of senseless exclamations. Her declaring of her husband, "By heaven and all its host, he shall not perish," is downright rant. She has no power to prevent his death; she has no 2 Ibid., III, ii. 1 Bertram, I, v. 3 3 Ibid., IV, ii. power even to will his safety, for he is armed with what she deems an unjust power over the life of Bertram, and the whole interest of the play centres in her love for this Bertram. Opposite interests destroy one another in the drama, like opposite forces in mechanics. The situation of Belvidera in Venice Preserved, where the love to her father or her husband must be sacrificed,' is quite different, for she not only hopes to reconcile them, but actually does reconcile them. The speech of Bertram to the Knights after he has killed Aldobrand, and his drawing off the dead body,2 to contemplate it alone, have been much admired, and there is certainly something grand and impressive in the first suggestion of the idea; but we do not believe it is in nature. We will venture a conjecture, that it is formed on a false analogy to two other ideas, viz. to that of a wild beast carrying off its prey with it to its den, and to the story which Fuseli has painted, of a man sitting over the corpse of his murdered wife. Now we can conceive that a man might wish to feast his eyes on the dead body of a person whom he had loved, and conceive that there was no one else "but they two left alone in the world," but not that any one would have this feeling with respect to an enemy whom he had killed. 4 Mr. Kean as Bertram did several things finely; what we liked most was his delivery of the speech, "The wretched have no country."3 Miss Somerville as Imogine was exceedingly interesting; she put us in mind of Hogarth's Sigismunda. She is tall and elegant, and her face is good, with some irregularities. Her voice is powerful, and her tones romantic. Her mode of repeating the line, "Th' Elysian dreams of lovers, when they loved," & 1 Venice Preserved, V, 3 Ibid., II, iii. Margaret Agnes Somerville (1799-1883), who was announced as a young lady," made her first appearance on any stage on this occasion. She married Alfred Bunn in 1819. 66 5 66 ‘Sigismonda and Guiscardo” (1759), now in the National Gallery. 6 Bertram, I, V. |