Thomas Otway. Thomas Otway
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Don Sebastian is one of our most remarkable tragedies. The scene between Dorax and Sebastian is unsurpassed in Shakespeare. It presents a credible, though marvellous transformation of a proud, injured, embittered man to love and loyalty. Every word tells, every word is right. Here in one wonderful epitome we have conversion in the line of vital growth. It is no mere incredible and arbitrary dislocation of character, as of some puppet manipulated by a conjurer, which so often arouses our surprise in the pre-rebellion drama—for instance, in Massinger's Duke of Milan, and (dare I add?) in the Richard III. of Shakespeare. All for Love, again, is a splendid picture of the absorbing and enervating power of one great sensual passion; while the interview between Ventidius and Antony rivals that between Dorax and Sebastian.
Lee is an inferior Otway, but a man of true dramatic genius, with flashes of real poetry. His Rival Queens is one of our excellent tragedies. Southerne has produced at least one genuinely affecting act in his well-constructed drama, The Fatal Marriage, akin to Otway, though distinctly inferior. Crowne too was a poet, as is evident from Thyestes, in spite of repulsiveness and rant. Thyestes seems to me finer than the Œdipus of Dryden and Lee, which indeed appears to have been written to show how much worse a play than that of Sophocles could be written on the same tremendous theme. But the Fair Penitent and Mourning Bride, tragedies by Rowe and Congreve, are surely merely creditable academic exercises, destitute of fire and inspiration. In a lighter vein, Otway could only write some bustling, occasionally funny, dirty, rollicking farces. To call them comedies would be to insult the shades of Shakespeare, Jonson, Fletcher, Congreve, and Sheridan.
On the whole, then, while there is less inexhaustible prodigality, and force of unfettered genius in the Restoration than in the Elizabethan drama, we have still left dramatic energy of high enduring quality, which became, however, nearly extinct in the reigns immediately succeeding. Under Charles, what was good in the romantic movement was still retained; the shifting, many-coloured sheen of vigorous life is yet there, the sun-and-shadow chequer of grave and gay; but classic exemplars have moderated, and moulded the work to finer, more regular form. There is less of exceptional extravagance in the story, less of inconceivable and sudden metamorphosis or distortion in the characters, the unpleasant and bewildering effect in earlier plays being almost as when an acrobat proceeds to walk with long, lithe, serpentine body round his own head; less also of the over-elaborated, misplaced, unveracious ingenuity of so-called poetic diction. One may generously attribute all this to the extravagance of national and literary youth, but the drama of Spain and Italy ought possibly to bear some of the responsibility. At any rate, these are grave defects.
I will illustrate what I mean. It is surely with a shudder of incredulous aversion that we find an apparently kind and cordial king, in Fletcher's Maid's Tragedy, insisting upon a pure-hearted, generous, young courtier, Amintor, who adored him with superstitious reverence, breaking off his engagement to Aspatia, a noble maiden, and marrying the king's mistress, Evadne, in order the better to conceal, and carry on with more security his own guilty intrigue with her, and father his own bastards upon this loyal friend. Our incredulous aversion is, if possible, intensified when Amintor assents to his own dishonour, because it is the king who has compassed it. Not all the poetry put into the mouth of "lost Aspatia," nor all the knowledge of human nature displayed by the poet in the seeming inconsistency of this evil woman's mongrel repentance at the bidding of her brother, and conversion from cruel looseness to equally cruel respectability, and base desire to vindicate her own damaged reputation even by the treacherous murder of her royal lover, can condone for this initial, radical vice of unnatural motive. No lovely tropes and phrases, nor harmonies of verbal measure may condone this. It is with equally incredulous aversion that we find Massinger's Duke of Milan bidding his creature Francisco kill the Duchess, who is devoted to him, and to whom he is devoted, should she happen to survive him—which, as Hazlitt says, seems a start of frenzy rather than a dictate of passion—then veering idiotically from love to murderous hatred upon the mere assertion of this same creature, Francisco, that his long proved and virtuous wife has solicited him, Francisco, dishonourably, he in fact having solicited her unsuccessfully. With some difficulty we accept the mercurial and hotheaded gullibility of Othello, played upon by so cunning a devil as Iago; but we revolt from so poor and pinchbeck a copy as this.
The early drama, in its poetic beauty of individual passages, and frequent verisimilitude in the working out of given motives, now and again reminds me of the character attributed to madmen, that they are persons who reason logically, but on absurd or mistaken premises. And surely Hazlitt, not Lamb, is right about that celebrated scene in Ford's Broken Heart, where Calantha dances on, apparently indifferent, while messengers come successively to tell her of misfortune upon misfortune, death upon death; then, when the revel is over, dies suddenly from pent-up emotion. "This appears to me to be tragedy in masquerade, the true false gallop of sentiment; anything more artificial or mechanical I cannot conceive." That a woman should thus silence the voice of humanity, not from necessity, or for some great purpose, but out of regard to mere outward decorum of behaviour, for the mere effect and éclat of the thing, is not fortitude but affectation. It often seems as if the Elizabethan and Caroline poets wrote their plays for the sake of working up to some striking and effective situation, and as if it were of little consequence to them how difficult or impossible the way that led thither might be, so long as they could hew their path there. Even the splendid scenes in Cyril Tourneur's Revenger's Tragedy, where the brothers assume a disguise in order to tempt their sister to unchastity, and procure their mother's consent to it, then threaten to kill their mother for consenting, appear to be open to the same objection.[2]
But I wish to emphasize the fact that the drama of Otway, whatever its shortcomings, is, in this respect of sobriety and truth to nature, superior on the whole to that of his illustrious forerunners. And surely a good deal of cant is now uttered about the academic insipidity and coldness of Corneille and Racine, who influenced our later drama, and who powerfully moved the men of their own day. What can be nobler than Athalie, Britannicus, or The Cid? Academic coldness is hardly the phrase that rises to one's lips when one is watching Sarah Bernhardt in Phèdre; while no comedy is superior to Molière's. If these men moved in golden fetters, they were strong enough to wear them as ornaments, rather than sink under them as impediments. Under the kid glove you feel the iron thews.
None of this incredulous aversion of which I spoke do we feel in reading Otway's Venice Preserved. Dryden averred that he could not move the feelings as could Otway, who, while inferior in reflection, poetic expression, and versification, was a greater master of pathos and passion. On the latter acts of Venice Preserved we are hurried breathlessly, as by the impetus of a mighty wave, shaken to the very depths—yet not, I think, unendurably, as by the hideous and gratuitous cruelty of Ferdinand exercised upon a little-offending sister in Webster's Duchess of Malfi, where horror upon horror is accumulated upon her head, to thrill and harrow us; and so powerful is the poet that only those can experience the pleasure which art should extract from pain, who enjoy the sight of an execution, or sniff gladly in a torture-chamber the fumes of spilt blood. We begin to breathe freely only when the monster, having filled up the measure of his unnatural malice, utters the fine line that first shows a faint relenting toward humanity:
Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle: she died young.
The Elizabethans were superior to their successors in isolated passages, and for the most part incomparably so in their lyrics. Therefore, they are well represented in the "Dramatic specimens" of Charles Lamb. Otway could not be so represented; his excellence lies in the noble organic harmony and sanity of his whole creation, as in its emotional intensity, from which little can be detached that shall be admirable out of its own vital relation. I do not say that Dryden and Otway never attempt to enlist interest illegitimately in their tragedies by relying upon strained situations, and abnormal traits of character; but I believe they do so less than their predecessors. And I hardly think Mr. Symonds' excuse for the Elizabethans a valid one, when he urges that the men and women of that time were really as inconsistent as the playwrights represent them. I do not know that we have any historical instance of just that queer kind of inconsistency which we find in their pages, though I admit that not only history,