ART. V.—Fugitive Verses. By Joanna Baillie. London. 1840.

IN

Na late article in this Journal on some of the most distinguished living authoresses of our country, we observed that the name of Mrs. Joanna Baillie was designedly omitted. She stood alone and aloof from the rest, and needed neither praise nor notice. The celebrity which fixed the attention of our boyhood

Cui nostra primo paruit auspici
Etas,-

and which has long since ripened into an enduring fame, seemed to wave away the periodical critic from this venerable lady's retirement.

The publication, however, of the present volume is a direct address to us; and we would fain take the opportunity which it affords us to say a few general words on the writings of one whom, as a poet, we scruple not to oppose to every other woman of ancient or modern times, save only that immortal lyrist of the old Greece, whose words breathe and burn, and whose broken snatches are the pulsations of a heroine's heart.

In that entire and wonderful revolution of the public taste in works of imagination, and indeed of literature generally, which contrasts this century with the whole or the latter half of the preceding, and which-while referring to Cowper, and not forgetting ، Lewesdon Hill,' or Mr. Bowles's first two or three publications-we must nevertheless principally, and in the foremost rank, ascribe to the example, the arguments, and the influence of Wordsworth and Coleridge,-in this great movement Joanna Baillie bore a subordinate, but most useful and effective, part. Unversed in the ancient languages and literatures, by no means accomplished in those of her own age, or even her own country, this remarkable woman owed it partly to the simplicity of a Scotch education, partly to the influence of the better portions of Burns's poetry, but chiefly to the spontaneous action of her own forceful genius, that she was able at once, and apparently without effort, to come forth the mistress of a masculine style of thought and diction, which constituted then, as it still constitutes, the characteristic merit of her writings, and which at the time contributed most beneficially to the already commenced reformation of the literary principles of the country. Those only who can now remember the current literature of the end of the last and the beginning of this century; those only who have read Darwin, who have read Hayley, who have read-divitias miseras—or even looked over, or looked at, the mountain of vapid trash which, in

the

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the shapes of epic and lyric, didactic and dramatic, poems, then papered the town, and was worshipped as Parnassus itself; such only can adequately conceive all the merit, or all the effect, of 'De Montfort,' Ethwald,' or Basil.' The Remorse,' though written before, was not given to the public till long afterwards; and Mr. Wordsworth's tragedy was, where it now is-and will, we fear, ever be-in the bottom of a box

'where sweets compacted lie.'

It is true that these dramas have not succeeded on the stage; and the cause of their failure in that respect may be pointed out without much difficulty; but the good service they were to do upon the poetic criticism of the country depended infinitely more on the deliberate perusal of intelligent persons, especially the young, than on the transient and too frequently capricious approbation of a theatrical audience. The Plays on the Passions' were slowly, but in the end extensively, circulated. Many, whose yet unyielded prejudice made them neglect or even ridicule the Lyrical Ballads,' were unconsciously won over to the adoption of the essential principles of the literary reformation then in progress, by works in so different a form, and coming from so opposite a quarter. The very defects of the views and arguments with which the authoress-not herself fully sensible of the part she was in truth acting-accompanied her works, made her less an object of suspicion to those whose literary animosity had been provoked by the determined, unevadeable protest and manifesto of Wordsworth, in his celebrated Preface; and hundreds gradually learned to understand and appreciate the merit of unsophisticated expression and truthful thought and feeling from these entertaining Plays, whom that Preface and Alice Fell'assumed to be an exemplification of its principles-had indisposed to the study and admiration of some of the finest poems in the English language, which were unluckily printed in the same volumes with it.

Mrs. Joanna Baillie's plays have not succeeded on the stage. They never will succeed there-except that perhaps one or two of her comedies, cut down to farces, might possibly pass current with good broad acting. Omitting some subordinate obstacles, we think the one, universal, and sufficient cause of this to be the singular want of skill with which she conducts the interest of the plot. You have little to expect and nothing to see grow in the progress of the action. Your tears flow in the first act, which is half a sign that they will not flow in the last. The cardinal secret of the play is invariably out in the very commencement, and the auxiliary secrets are accordingly deprived of their proper effect. This is a fault decisive on the stage. The most spirited dialogue, the most moving situations in particular parts, can

never countervail it. The popular playwrights of the present day understand the rule perfectly, and very prudently neglect every other consideration in comparison with it. No matter how

trashy the dialogue, they keep up the interest; they very cleverly augment it as they go on, and the adroitest hand amongst them explodes it in the last scene, as from a Leyden jar. He goes off in a flash of fire, and the spectators feel a shock. Whereas, Mrs. Joanna Baillie's electricity escapes; it never accumulates for a discharge.

Fatal as this is on the stage, where curiosity and a craving for stimulus are the almost exclusive emotions, it interferes in a comparatively small degree with the calmer and better founded pleasure of the mere reader. He has time and attention for the separate parts, can feel the merit of lively dialogue, weigh the truth of a general reflection, and muse on the beauty of single images. Who has ever witnessed the representation of those two great tours de force of the master of the Gothic drama-the Merchant of Venice,' and Henry VIII.'-without experiencing a sense of languor during the last act of each? Yet who, again, ever finished the quiet perusal of those same acts without-especially in the latter instance-being steeped in deep, trance-like repose of mind, through which the dark passions of the past action faintly appear like the distant skirts of a broken thunderstorm in an evening of June? Hence it is, that weak and pointless as these Plays on the Passions have appeared when tried on the stage, they are pre-eminently entertaining, if we may venture so to express it, to the leisurely student: the want of that unicity, growth, and consummation of interest, which is essential to the acted drama, is to the reader partly compensated by the diffusion of a gentle and more equal interest throughout all the parts, and partly by the easy vigour and flowing originality of the dialogue. In this lies the peculiar strength of Joanna Baillie; in this she is as unquestionably superior to the present fashionable playwrights as they are to her in producing an effect by striking positions and startling development. The colloquial inaccuracies omittedhow they survived a first edition we cannot conceive-the style of these tragedies is almost faultless. It is never affected, never forced, never stuffed with purple patches of rhetoric; it has no ranting harangues or claptrap epigrams; it is always clear, direct, sensible; it is tender and passionate, grave and dignified, and, rising upon occasion, rises with a natural spring, and soars, like all true passion, but for a moment.

It was no doubt a mistake to set about composing separate plays on separate passions. It is not according to the course of human action: no man in his senses is ever so under the dominion

of

of any one passion or impression as that he can be truly taken to be a permanently embodied representation of it. Such a man, so actuated, is, and is known to be, a monomaniac. We suppose it is not necessary at this time of day to show that Othello' is not a play upon Jealousy any more than upon Slander; whereas Romiero' strikes the reader as something like an exercise upon the given theme. No man that loved as Othello loved could, without miracle, have escaped the trap laid for his soul; whilst Romiero's jealous fury is the self-emanating impotence of a mind that has no real reverence for the object of its affection, and is indeed, towards the conclusion, contemplated as a blind folly by all the other personages of the play. Another ill effect of Mrs. Joanna Baillie's plan is that her principal characters have too much the air of puppets, predestined to a certain precise path of action, and yet undignified by any such dark incumbency of Fate as seems to brood over the noble struggles of the old Greek drama. You know that nothing will be allowed to save the victim in either case; but we are often tempted, in the modern instance, to throw the blame on the sufferer's own head, and exhale our sympathy with 'A wilful man will have his way!' It is indeed the crucial test of first-rate dramatic genius so to reciprocate the action of circumstance and mind, of force and will, as to present a conspicuous and an interesting picture of that which we every one of us exhibit day by day to our neighbours or ourselves in miniature; without which alternate, or rather co-instantaneous, interchange and counter-check, perpetually operating, man in real or scenic life loses the properties of manhood, and becomes an idiot or a maniac. We are far from meaning that Mrs. Joanna Baillie has always failed before this test; but we think she has often so failed, and that the plan upon which she wrote had a natural tendency to make her so fail.

Again, it appears to us that the exigency of her plan has in some instances induced her, for the sake of uniformity, to confound the materials and the limits of tragedy and comedy. It is not true that every passion becomes comic merely because you surround it with a comic apparatus. Farcical it may, perhaps, be-a grim grotesque of tragedy; but that is as alien from the genuine spirit of comedy as a dance of witches from the Mayday sports of rustics on a village green. There was many a blood-besprinkled farce enacted within the shadow of the Paris guillotine, but not one of all who witnessed such, grin as he might, ever thought it comic. Virtue and wickedness are, in eodem genere, unfit for comedy; the mere absence of virtue is no deficiency. Hence vices belong to comedy, crimes to tragedy. It was Congreve's great fault that he introduced directly

wicked characters into his plays. No wit could make Maskwell a fit subject for comedy. And the analogy to the passions is immediate and complete.

Anger may be highly comic; Resentment, also, may be so accompanied and contrasted as to be compatible with the spirit and object of comedy: but Hatred, the settled frame of the mind properly so called, is, if dramatic at all, taken singly by itself, endurable only on the dark background of the tragic scene. You cannot bring Baltimore in any shape nearer to comedy than as a very grave parody on De Montfort. So the mere weakness of the mind or the nerves, which induces overwhelming terror in the presence of danger to life, may be arrayed in circumstances of tragic interest: but the simple imbecility of nature, unaccompanied by any spurious pretensions to courage, is no more fit subject for comedy than epilepsy or the headache. Amorous and La Fool, Parolles, Bessus, and Acres are all, in their different species, highly comic; but Valdemere's boasting is so occasional, so purely defensive, that the mere physical failing is exposed without any of that relief, wanting which such an exhibition possesses no element of comedy in it. Valdemere is simply to be pitied as a weak man, upon whom his cruel friends have, as Antonio says, played an abominable trick.'

But, having freely made these general remarks, let us again express our admiration of the wonderful elasticity and masculine force of mind exhibited in this vast collection of dramas. Unequal as some of them are in merit, there is not one that will not well repay perusal. The writing is sometimes plain; but then we are spared the plaster and Dutch metal of our stage-favourites. Where the line is not poetic it is at least good sense; and the spirit breathing everywhere is a spirit of manly purity and moral uprightness. Few books of entertainment can be placed in the hands of the young so safely and profitably as Mrs. Joanna Baillie's plays, taken generally; and we should have said universally, were it not for the too plain implication in one of them, the Martyr, of the opinions entertained by this excellent lady on an equally awful and fundamental article of the Christian faith, as to which we deeply lament her dissent from the Catholic Church. We have already said that mere curiosity is the craving least gratified by the Plays on the Passions: they appeal to higher aspirations; and we can truly say that, great as our youthful admiration was, a critical re-perusal in middle life has deepened the impression we had always retained of their excellence. Let us, before we pass on, be permitted to quote a part of a scene in De Montfort-familiar to most, but possibly for the first time brought before the eyes of some of our younger readers.