by Thomas Otway
In Otway development of character, moreover, is little found; indeed, if “the unities” be observed as much as possible, that is not easy to compass; yet for knowledge of character in its labyrinthine recesses, and unexpected, though intelligible developments under the moulding pressure of circumstance, or commerce with other natures, as for nervous and appropriate poetic diction, Dryden’s 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 incom
parably 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, but our own experience also, furnishes very strange examples of self-contradiction. Yet one can only say that the examples of it in the older drama are not, for the most part, rendered credible and probable to us. And, so far, therefore, this is not a drama which can be always and universally interesting, except in the supreme examples. In the same way Otway’s and Wycherley’s indecencies would hardly (one supposes) interest a Victorian audience. The intellectual, or ethical, atmosphere must not be too unfamiliar and alien.
We are not incredulous when Jaffier, the weak, affectionate, impulsive hero of Venice Preserved, maddened by the persecution of his adored bride, Belvidera, on the part of her implacable father, who is also a senator, suddenly, and without counting the cost, from motives of revenge and hope of better fortune, consents to take part in a conspiracy against the State, persuaded by his dearest friend, Pierre, a man of sterner and more homogeneous fibre. Nor are we incredulous when, realising with his tender heart what hideous consequences are likely to ensue in the disturbance of domestic peace, and the slaughter of so many innocent people, he allows himself, however reluctantly, to be over-persuaded by Belvidera, who comprehends that the murder of her father, with all the other senators, is intended; or when, thus over-persuaded, he renounces his purpose, and betrays his fellow-conspirators, including even his well-beloved friend, to the Doge and Senate. We are not incredulous when we see Jaffier, on his way to the Senate, walking as in a dream under spell of his adored Belvidera’s more powerful will, and hear him say in some of the most beautiful lines the poet wrote:
Come, lead me forward now, like a tame lamb, To sacrifice: thus in his fatal garlands Decked fine, and pleased the wanton skips and plays, Trots by the enticing flattering priestess’ side, And much transported with his little pride, Forgets his dear companions of the plain; Till by her bound he’s on the altar lain; Yet then he hardly bleats, such pleasure’s in the pain.
The catastrophe we feel inevitably to follow from the given elements in their fusion and entanglement, the cruel injustice of the father, the weak and foolish impulsiveness of the hero, together with his ardent affection both to bride and friend, and the co-existent corruption in the State, which made that sinister intrigue against the Republic possible.
I cannot agree with Dr. Garnett that the interest of Otway’s plays arises from the situation only, not from the characters. It appears to me that the humanity of the characters is strongly realised, and that we are made to sympathise with them profoundly. As to Addison’s remark that the characters are mostly wicked, I hardly know what to say. The heroines are ideally good, and the others are neither better nor worse than average men and women. If Shakespeare has given us types — though these are also individuals — of ambition, jealousy, revengeful avarice, unpractical genius, showing us the natural issues and eventuations of these, Otway has given us one type, equally individual, of weak, but absorbing, and passionate affection, showing us the natural issues of this. As Johnson says, he “consulted nature in his own breast.”
Having then revealed the intended treason, after extorting an oath from the Senate to spare the lives of his coadjutors, Jaffier is confronted with Pierre and the rest. Then follows a tremendous scene, in which Jaffier almost abjectly implores Pierre for pardon, and the latter spurns him as one proved unworthy the friendship of an honest man, finally striking and hurling Jaffier from him. The words he uses to his former friend are worse even than the blow; their venom can never cease to rankle. The blunt, open and magnanimous, though reckless and desperate character of Pierre is finely contrasted with that of Jaffier, luxuriously feminine in its sensibility. Jaffier urges that he has at least saved Pierre’s life, to which his old friend makes the terrible reply:
I scorn it more because preserved by thee.
When Belvidera was delivered by Jaffier, in pledge of his own good faith, into the hands of the conspirators, he gave them a dagger, charging them to despatch her, should he prove traitor, The Senate, false to their oath, condemned the rebels to death with torture; indeed the latter had refused to accept their lives with bondage at the hands of the Republic. Belvidera tells Jaffier this, and then he feels tempted to slay with that dagger her who has incited him to compass the ruin of his beloved friend. This is another tremendous scene. Prevented by the returning and overwhelming tide of love from executing his purpose, Jaffier bids her go to her father, and from him as senator beg the life of Pierre. She does so, and the old man, relenting at the sight of his yet beloved child kneeling in agony before him, grants her prayer. This part also is very beautiful. But his attempt to save Pierre comes too late. In their final most moving interview Jaffier tells Belvidera that he will not survive his friend. He commends his beloved to Heaven, calling down every blessing upon her. But when she understands that they are to part for ever she exclaims:
Oh! call back Your cruel blessing; stay with me and curse me! * * * Leave thy dagger with me. Bequeath me something — Not one kiss at parting? * * * Another, sure another, For that poor little one you’ve taken care of; I’ll give it him truly.
Then her mind gives way, and in the fearful soliloquy that follows, Otway reminds us of the power shown by Shakespeare in dealing with minds unhinged. Jaffier being allowed to take leave of Pierre on the scaffold, Pierre forgives him, but requests, as a last favour, that his friend will save him from the dishonour of public torture by killing him at the last moment. Jaffier promises, and does so, stabbing himself immediately after. In the last scene, Belvidera enters distracted:
Come, come, come, come, nay come to bed, Pr’ythee my love! The winds! Hark how they whistle, And the rain beats; oh! how the weather shrinks me! You’re angry now; who cares? * * * [Jaffier’s ghost rises. Are you returned? See, father, here he’s come again! Am I to blame to love him? Oh, the dear one! [Ghost sinks. Why do you fly me? Are you angry still then? Father, where art thou? Father, why do you do thus? Stand off. Don’t hide him from me. He’s here somewhere.
The apparitions of Jaffier and Pierre rise again bleeding. When they sink, she vows passionately that she will dig for them till she find them; and, imagining that they are drawing her downward, she dies.
Though nearly all authorities have objected vehemently to the gross quasi-comic scenes with which Otway has lightened the intense gloom of his tragedy, I am not sure that the illustrious French critic, Taine, is not right in his approval of them. However ghastly, they give some relief. Though coarse and disgusting, they do stand out distinctly in the memory. The conspirators met at the house of one Aquilina, a Greek courtesan, who had private motives for favouring their cause. The old senator, Antonio (intended for a caricature of the debauched Shaftesbury), had robbed Pierre of this mistress, which was one of his main incentives to plotting against the State. Taine’s comment on the picture is striking: “Comme l’homme est prompt à s’avilir, quand, échappé de son rôle, il revient à lui-même!” He thinks that Otway alone in that epoch reproduced the tragedy of Shakespeare: “Il ne lui manque que de naître cent ans plus tôt.” Perhaps; only his form might then have suffered.
And now as to Otway’s diction. There is nothing convulsive about it; in him, to borrow a simile from Lowell, “ever
y word does not seem to be underlined, like those of a school girl’s letter.” In the eyes of those to whom expression is good in proportion as it foregoes its function of expressing, in favour of a bedizenment, as of some window so prettily daubed that it lets in no light, the diction of Dryden, Otway, Goldsmith, Byron may appear poor. Otway speaks the language of nature and passion. Still, I admit that Otway’s diction often does want distinction, and his metre rhythmical quality. He has not always the right word ready. But his language has certainly the merit of doing more justice to his subject than that of his euphuistic predecessors. Take, for instance, an example from that portion of the fine play, entitled The Two Noble Kinsmen, on good grounds attributed to Shakespeare. A queen, the body of whose slain lord remains unburied by order of a cruel king, implores redress from one able to grant it in these terms:
Oh, my petition was Set down in ice, which by hot grief uncandied Melts into drops * * * he that will fish For my least minnow, let him lead his line To catch one at my heart.
Another queen, making a similar request, assures Theseus that they are —
Rinsing our holy begging in our eyes To make petition clear.
Can these ladies, whose sorrow must have been much mitigated by their successful invention of such “precious” hyperboles, stand in need of much commiseration from us? Otway’s expression at its best is simple, germane to the situation, vigorous, pregnant with the speaker’s emotion, and therefore well calculated to impregnate us with it.
