The first drama is entitled The Poor Scholar,' and shows the demon baffled in his attempt upon a youthful pedagogue, at the point of death, in circumstances of penury and privation. The meditations of the scholar at evening, when his failing frame indicates that he has dismissed his class for the last time, and is about to learn, himself, the solemn lesson of mortality, are very beautiful and touching; as are some portions of his dialogue with the evil spirit, who comes to visit him in the guise of a philosopher. We cannot entirely acquiesce in the moral of this drama. We are not quite sure that we distinctly apprehend the nature of the temptation. In part it is an appeal to the desire of literary honour and of personal comfort. But it seems mainly to relate to the student's faith, which is assailed in certain books and parchments put into his hands by the tempter. Now, if the writer intends that the salvation of the soul would be endangered by the reception of false opinions, and that too while the mind is debilitated by mortal sickness, we protest against her doctrine. Nor do we imagine it to be at all needful or desirable to cherish that horror of the very name of philosophy, which is probably felt by many of the well-meaning, but not very intelligent religious persons, to whom the authorship of this volume may be a sufficient passport even for a drama. To feed their fears is quite superfluous, and worse than carrying coals to Newcastle. We cannot imagine Mary Howitt to wish the religious world more unphilosophical or anti-philosophical than a large portion of it is at the present moment. There is no danger of the fiend's imposing upon them. Their temptations are all the other way; and if it consorted not with her plan to unstop their ears to sounds musical as is Apollo's lute,' she should nevertheless have avoided the semblance of ministering to the purblind horror that tends to alienate religion from the intelligence of the age. In the second drama, Thomas of Torres,' the demon secures his prey by exciting the avarice of a spendthrift who had wasted all his substance. The scenes of this drama are separated by long intervals of time, amounting altogether to twenty-one years, so that opportunity is afforded, and improved, for striking pictures of the descent from one depth to another of crime, down which the most sordid species of the most sordid passion drags the soul. The Pirate' also shows the principle of evil triumphant, and by the agency of avarice also, though differently modified. It acts upon a nobler nature, and kindles up instead of smothering the other passions. Albert Luberg, a young merchant, whose vessel has been wrecked, is induced by the demon to become his partner in what afterwards turns out to be a pirate ship. The voyage is full of beauties and horrors, both of which are powerfully sketched. The Indian isle and the simple Edah are loveliness itself. The plague-ship, and the destruction of its crew, are portrayed with inspiration derived, we can imagine, from the Ancient Mariner.' The miser of the preceding tale grows more and more callous with every crime, till his heart is hard as the nether millstone; but the pirate has feelings which struggle the more, the deeper he plunges, until he is led forth to execution in all the agonies of remorse without hope. The fourth drama, The Old Man,' is of a more gentle and touching character. The trial is to make a paralytic old man, who is ever repining at the loss of his youth and strength, forfeit his hope of heaven by using unhallowed means for their renewal. The proposition recovers his mind to a sense of the duty of resignation to the appointments of heaven. Raymond' depicts the fatal effects of pleasure and unrestrained self-indulgence on a youthful mind full of high aspirations and susceptibility to beauty, but destitute of the energy which moral discipline should have imparted. We extract the opening soliloquy :- How full of joy is life! All things are made For one great scheme of bliss-all things are good, In that exuberant consciousness of life Which nerves my limbs and makes all action pleasure. As pinions to the eagle: and my soul Is as a winged angel, soaring up In its full joy unto the heaven of heavens ; Thank God for life, and for the spirit which gives The fullness of enjoyment unto life! All that the soul desires of good and fair Of the immortal masters will I study; Shall be familiar places: I will seek The Spirit of greatness where the great have dwelt, Am I not young, and filled with high resolves? And I will win them both: pleasure, which crowns Pleasure, that springs from the proud consciousness Ere long, dear mother, thou shalt see thy son I know not how renown shall be achieved; That without power, heaven gives not the desire!' This youth becomes a licentious prodigal; breaks the hearts of his mother and of his betrothed by his desertion and excesses; loses the last remains of his property to a rival, whom he stabs in a paroxysm of revenge and jealousy; and dies by suicide, while a chorus of celestial spirits chant their wail over a soul ' for ever, ever lost !' We question the moral truth of this drama. A spirit which had attained to, and which retained, so much of the sense of good as is ascribed to Raymond could not become the entire and final thrall of evil. There was in it the principle of redemption. Nor is he so much the victim of the tempter's seductions, or his own presumption, as of that erroneous education which had generated an infirmity of purpose not akin to such a nature. The author is partly right and partly wrong on this topic. She says, in the introduction, the most perilous of all conditions is to be the son of a widow.'- the timid, enervating system of female government gives the heart a bias towards pleasure, without strengthening it for resistance, or even enabling it to discriminate between good and evil.' But it is rather the stern and rigorous system of exclusion which produces this moral feebleness. And this is intimated in the drama itself to have been the plan of Raymond's mother : She is a woman who has tried the world Of course her gentle Raymond' is prepared to be imposed upon by the deceit. She had kept the wax soft for the reception of the fiend's seal. This capital mistake should have been more strongly marked. Philip of Maine' is on ambition; a long and bustling drama, but to our taste the least pleasing of the whole. A disappointed young aristocrat becomes a demagogue, and then a despot, and so goes to the devil. The tale is somewhat trite. The series concludes, very beautifully and impressively, with The Sorrow of Theresa,' in which the demon endeavours to make maternal fondness a rack on which to torture a woman into the language of impiety. He is not only foiled of his intended victim, but loses one who was previously in his grasp, the stern and reprobate husband, whose heart is touched and purified by her unconquerable goodness. In conclusion, the spirit of evil, though successful in dragging down to perdition four out of the seven on whom he had tried his temptations, is pronounced, by an angel of truth, to have failed, because the miserable example of those whom he seduced had warned many more of danger, and become the means of their salvation. While we award strong and heartfelt praise to this poem, both in its conception and execution, there are some objections which, regarding it rather as a moral than as a literary production, it is incumbent on us to express. We think it is constructed on too narrow a basis, too limited a view of the struggles, perils, and glories of man's moral nature; that the temptations are too remote from the actual trials of life in the present state of society; and that sometimes the temptation, in order to give it sufficient power, is so framed as to render doubtful the reality of the virtue to which it is opposed. No less than three of the dramas relate entirely to religious faith or trust, the trial of which is also specifically included in a fourth. This is out of proportion for a temptation which must chiefly address itself to weak and ignorant minds. The prevalent modes of teaching religion unhappily keep many minds in that condition, but the knowledge even of history and science throw so much light on the benignity of the providential plan, as to drive the peril very much into that circle within which priesteraft domineers in darkness over feebleness. There might also have been much more touching delineations of the corrupting influences of cupidity, drawn from the existing state of society, than those which are afforded by the crimes of the Miser and the Pirate. The peculiar manifestation is so alien from common life, that it keeps out of sight how thoroughly the vice itself is naturalized. We should like to have seen, traced by such a hand, some display of the ostentation, the servility, the want of sincerity, which are so rife in the world. A young clergyman, entangled into a profession for which he has no vocation, by the prospect of a benefice; reciting prayers which he does not feel, and subscribing articles which he does not believe or a young lawyer gradually disencumbering himself of political and personal veracity as he mounts the ladder of his profession; would have been good subjects for the demon. Or, Achzib might have had interest enough to procure an official appointment for a patriot, only tolerably honest. There is nothing like bringing a moral lesson home to men's business and bosoms. This is what the pulpit rarely does; there seems an implied agreement between preachers and people that the peace is to be kept upon most of the real practical interests of morality; but the press is less restricted, and our author shows no lack of courage. We must also object to the manner in which an alleged inconstancy of affection is set forth as a vice in the dramas of The Pirate,' and Raymond.' Both heroes are introduced to us as betrothed, and both fall in love afterwards. Very wrong, no doubt, if they could help it; but as in both cases, according to Mary Howitt's own showing, it was scarcely possible to be avoided, she acts rather cruelly in predestinating them first to the offence and then to the punishment. It really seems to us that she has made Edah more loveable than Constance, and Clara than Adeline. This counteracts her own purpose. The indictment and the evidence do not correspond. We doubt much whether the nominally second love, in each case, be not really the first. But here was the author's difficulty. Unless the second were made attractive, the conduct of the hero would not have been adequately motived. But in bestowing so much attractiveness and congeniality on the second, the first is reduced to a mere fancy. Had not previous loug familiarity been supposed in the story, we should say that the real viciousness was in the betrothment; or rather in the state of manners and customs which will not allow either man or woman, boy or girl, any real opportunity of knowing a character until after they have pledged themselves always to prize it above all other characters, and not to see or feel that any diversity of it would have been more conducive to happiness. The results of this system probably influenced the writer's mind, although she transferred them to parties supposed to be differently situated. There is a richness in the occasional lyrics of this little volume which we must not forget to remark, and to illustrate by quotation. We do not meet with such songs every day. The sweetness of the first, the simplicity of the second, and the stern majesty of the third, of the three specimens which follow, show that No. 90. 2 F |
