網頁圖片
PDF
ePub 版

be in a gondola awaiting you. Do not shrink at this bold proposal. Timplore you read on. Your noble spirit shudders at this apparent escapade, you think it would disgrace your father's fame. Your father's, Lelia, is a sacred name, revered by all generous Italian hearts, and you are the true daughter of such a man; for I, too, can appreciate his worth. Yes, dearest, in Vienna I had an interview with him. Was it through disinterestedness? I dare not answer. Your fond name was mentioned -hallowed by a father's affection-as a reason for his remaining, and yet I urged his I had wronged not tell him I knew you-how flight. I dared you-I trembled before him. Your father, after a thousand perils, has left Austria, and is, before this (God willing), in America, with my own father, in my own dear home. There, Lelia, you have my secret; one I would have withheld. I should have awaited until your father's own hand had informed you of his escape. But believe me, the present danger which awaits you, Lelia, I would not impose upon your womanly fears -alas! I have certain information, that the imperial government, incensed at their prey having eluded them, believe you to have plotted his escape, and intend you as their next victim. This alone may excuse my announcing that which I daro to hope may but prove the affection and respect in which I hold you and yours."

"Now, Zambetto," hurriedly said his master, "take this, and swear to give it to the signorina." Zambetto, scared by the earnestness of his manner, dropped on his knee, uncovered his head, and swore a solemn oath-for once he was thoroughly sincere.

"You must find means to come here by twelve o'clock to-night."

"If I have to jump out of the window in the canal, I will be here," and, from the earnestness of his manner, it was probable he would have done so; then, relapsing into his old style, he inquired, "does your honor take the rest of this play in his own hands?"

"Yes," was the short, decisive answer; his master was in no playful mood.

"I still have a part on the other side that of an idiot," Zambetto put on an asinine expression-"and now I must be off," and, rapidly putting on his old clothes, Zambetto made a Voyage in zig-zag, for the opposite side. At twelve o'clock, Zambetto returned to his first master. He had managed to smuggle the note to the signorina, by means of Sancho. She had not appeared at dinner-this he had from the servants, whose confidence he had gained as Nina's cousin. He had had great difficulties in slipping out; but having made love to the cook, she had loaned him the key of the VOL. IX.-10

[blocks in formation]

46

[ocr errors]

"now

They

'My master," interrupted Zambetto. "I see I understand," and he looked disappointed; "if there is anything that breaks my heart, it is this-you have exactly stolen from me the very plan I was concocting. Two cousins of mine are famous oarsmen. have carried away many a prize at the Christmas races. They are now engaged in the foreign importation, that is to say, without permission of the dogana. This is just the time I can find them; for, like honest men, they are asleep with their wives and children."

"They must be stationed in the neighborhood at half-past nine o'clock to-morrow. Can they be depended upon ?"

"I tell you they are my mother's nephews," said Zambetto with pride. "you will know the gondola-an old one, and rusty, my cap will hang over the iron-beak."

"I put all trust in you-give them this," and he gave the stripling a purse containing a little Venetian fortune.

"I am off," cried Zambetto.

"Stop. Poor Zambetto," and his master took his hand; "I have not done with you, this is for yourself," and he gave Zambetto what made his eyes glisten-enough money to allow him to be lazy for the remainder of his days.

"You must manage to make your escape to-night."

"I most humbly beg to differ. Did I leave the scene so soon, it would be a false sortie-and all is lost. I must return to my master, I have other plans, leave to-morrow to me-and now, addio!"

"Zambetto, you may not see me again." Zambetto paused a moment, then burst into tears; fumbling in his bosom, he drew out two things, one an amulet, carefully sewn up in a bit of silk, worn and dirty; the other was a thin blade of steel, sharp as a needle, pliant as an osier, corded around one end, to serve as a handle. "Take these," he said, "this is a boly relic,"

he kissed the charm, "it will protect you-keep off the evil eye; as to this. Ahem! Should an accident happen with it, why, kiss the relic afterwards." "Zambetto, will you come with

me?"

[ocr errors]

Impossible! Yours is a land of black men; how you became white is a miracle to me. You have no canals, no gondolas, no Punchinello, no soft music on the water, no glorious sun, no mellow moon, no inspiration, your dialect would spoil my teeth. No carnival, not an intrigue, not even laziness! I could never succeed there; you do not even understand the Lazzis! I must be gone. I shall pray for you, addio! addio!" and he glided out.

V.

NEXT morning, Venice was dull and gloomy. The cornices, mouldings, and balustrades of its many palaces looked damp and black in the pouring rain. There is always a sufficiency of water in Venice, but, during one of these never-ceasing storms, that frequently occur (rendering the queen of the seas the most unwholesome of cities), water seems a melancholy superfluity.

"Ah, scum of the earth, thou art there at last," said the ecuyer, as Zambetto stood before him, chocolate tray in hand.

[ocr errors]

Yes, your grace," replied Zambetto, "I have dared to bring up my most magnificent master's morning meal-' Zambetto always dashed into the alliterative, when he got a chance. "I have made it myself, which may account for my not having as yet answered my commander's call. At the same time, allow me to remind you, that we have an engagement this morning." Just then, the chamber clock struck nine.

"True," said the officer, blowing at his chocolate; "scoundrel, how hot this is! Hast seen Nina?"

"Yes, your grace. She is overcome, I am overcome, all are, at your gentle forgiveness, your sweetness of temper."

66

Hold thy tongue and bring me my boots," and he got up and neared the window; in a second, Zambetto was back with a pair of high military boots, adorned with gorgeous cavalry spurs.

"Thou idiot, is a horse necessary to cross over the way with?" and he threw them at Zambetto's head. The latter's object was attained, the ecuy

er's attention was withdrawn from the window, and bestowed on himself. At last the Austrian was booted, and, wrapping himself in his military cloak, bidding Zambetto precede him, they went out, and crossed the bridge, some half-dozen houses lower down.

"This way, your signore, this is the road," officiously cried Zambetto, as loud as he could, as he led the officer a slippery walk, along the six-inch path skirting the small canal leading to the back of Vandyke's house.

[ocr errors][merged small]

What a chance to tumble him over," thought Zambetto, but no." He opened a small door. "Fellow, thou art taking me up the servants' entrance."

46

Is there any other? I know but this," and he proceeded to walk up stairs with the officer at his heels; the narrow stairs joined the landing of the third story. Vandyke's door was on the jar, Zambetto stumbled against it, and closed it.

"Awkward booby! Is it to the top of the house thou art taking me?"

"To the first story, counting downwards. Are your excellency's illustrious legs tired? Here we are at last." They had come to one of those strange old attics of a Venetian house, all cobwebbed and begrimed with the dust of years.

66

It is dark here."

[blocks in formation]

66

Exactly. Now, your highness, I will go first and announce; for these poor devils of artists, in raw, weather like this, stay abed all day, to save fuel;" and, with a knock at the door, which had no answer, Zambette, appa rently, ventured to open it on the crack and slide in.

A minute elapsed, and the ecuyer began to storm with impatience; five minutes passed, and, with no little difficulty, he burst into the room, upset ting a barricade of old pictures which Zambetto had improvised. Zambetto was before an old easel, engaged, with a piece of charcoal, making a rough

sketch upon the back of an antiquated picture. The ecuyer looked around him, and, seeing no painter, cried, "Thou hound-thou traitor, thou hast deceived me, thou shalt rot in prison for this," and, foaming with rage, he made towards Zambetto, who, eluding him as quick as thought, shut to the door, locked it, and threw the key out of the window.

"Thou shalt have the cavaletto!* I will have thee scourged to death!" and he made at him; the room (Vandyke's lumber room) was large, and Zambetto easily escaped him, flying about with the agility of a deer, fumbling, at the same time, in his breast, as if for something. "It is well for thee, pig, that I have given away my stiletto, or I would flesh my maiden coup in thy fat," retorted Zambetto, throwing off all disguise. "Is it thou, vile butcher, carrion devourer, miller,† that feed on the flour of ground women and children's bones, that would think to catch me? I was apprenticed five years to a montibanco, an honester craft than thine; and thou couldst not touch me if thou didst thy best; thou hast sucked so much blood that thou art as elastic as a gorged leech. Thou old pantalone, how thou blowest," here Zambetto, just dodging a powerful blow made at him, with the heavy easel, went through the flutter of feet of the arlecchino. "That is not in our game of tag, thou pudding kaiserlich; see thy portrait, thou hast tumbled it down-thy picture with ass's ears-and I am thy artist, thou blood clot of sgherri." Zambetto's caricature was neither a Gavarni nor a Leach, though displaying some artistic merit. Zambetto then commenced describing circles around him, like the eastern hero in the Talisman; he was, however, gradually getting cornered-the officer having changed his tactics by means of the easel, holding it like a bar before him ; he was driving his agile enemy to the wall. "There, vile slave," cried the officer, "it is well for thee that, for the

• Cavaletto-an infamous bastinado.

first time in Venice, I have mislaid my pistols."

"They heated thy chocolate, brute," responded Zambetto, giving an anxious glance at the door; then, tightening the strap around his waist and crouching under the approaching bar, with nimble feet he suddenly sprang upwards, and disappeared like an antelope through the small oriole window over the door.

"Ouff!" he cried, as he landed on all fours, and, clutching at the banister, just prevented a fall of some hundred feet on the marble pavement below."Not even a blanket to catch me in; what a jump; Pierrot has surpassed himself, and, at last, I am up to the character, though it partook more of the nature of a melo-drama than I cared for. Pound on, thou fat bloodhound, it will take thee an hour to burst open the door;" and, overcoming the immense desire of climbing up to the window and uttering some other parting politeness, he sped down stairs. His master's room was empty, he rushed to the canal, and, far off through the mist, his experienced eye saw a gondola just emerging into the Canale della Giudecca.

"By all the saints, they are off. I regret I have not had the time to inform them that at last," he said this with evident satisfaction, as if there was something off his mind, "at last I have got my drubbing; for, in the excitement of the moment, I believe the gentleman up stairs has given me more bruises than any lackey, in the whole repository of funny farces, ever received for the amusement of the most exacting of audiences; and now for the wax taper I have promised to San Pantaleone," and, with a merry laugh, he disappeared.

The sudden departure of a Smyrna brig, taking advantage of the thick weather, regardless of the customary port formalities, happened about this time. A week afterwards, three people landed at Marseilles. Lelia, Brown, and Nina; we forget, there was a little dog.

↑ Miller. The lower classes call the Austrians millers, from their white uniform. ↑ Sgherri-cut-throat.

A NATIONAL DRAMA.

WE TE are eminently a people of action; we are fond of shows, processions, and all organized spectacles; we are so much more imitative than our British cousins, that, without limiting its appeals to the mimetic files of fashion, the ungentlemanly theory of a Simian descent for man might find support in the features of our general life. To complete the large compound of qualities that are required, in order that an emulous people give birth to a drama, one is yet wanting; but that one is not merely the most important of all, but is the one which lifts the others into dramatic importance. Are we poetical? Ask any number of continental Europeans, whether the English are a poetical people. A loud, unanimous, derisive no would be the answer. And yet, there is Shakespeare! and around him, back to Chaucer and forward to Tennyson, a band of such poets, that this prosaic nation has the richest poetic literature in Christendom. Especially in this matter are appearances delusive, and hasty inferences liable to be illogical. From the prosers that one hears in pulpits, legislatures, lecture-rooms, at morning calls and well-appointed dinner-tables in Anglo-America, let no man infer against our poetic endowment. Shakespeare, and Milton, and Burns, and Wordsworth are of our stock; and what we have already done in poetry and the plastic arts, while yet, as a nation, hardly out of swaddlingclothes, is an earnest of a creative future. We are to have a national literature and a national drama. What is a national drama? Premising, that as little in their depth as in their length will our remarks be commensurate with the dimensions of this great theme, we will say a few words thereon.

To

A literature is the expression of what is warmest and deepest in the heart of a people. Good books are the crystallization of thoughts and feelings. have a literature-that is, a body of enduring books-implies vigor and depth. Such books are the measure of the mental vitality in a people. Those peoples that have the best books will be found to be at the top of the scale of humanity; those that have none, at the bottom. Good books, once brought forth, exhale ever after both fragrance and nourish

ment. They educate while they delight many generations.

Good books are the best thoughts of the best men. They issue out of deep hearts and strong heads; and where there are deep hearts and strong heads such books are sure to come to life. The mind, like the body, will reproduce itself: the mind, too, is procreative, transmitting itself to a remote posterity.

The best books are the highest products of human effort. Themselves the evidence of creative power, they kindle and nourish power. Consider what a spring of life to the world have been the books of the Hebrews. What so precious treasure has England as Shakespeare?

To be good, books must be generic. They may be, in subject, in tone, and in color, national, but in substance they must be so universally human, that other cognate nations can imbibe and be nourished by them. Not that, in their fashioning, this fitness for foreign minds is to be a conscious aim; but to be thus attractive and assimilative, is a proof of their breadth and depth-of their high humanity.

The peoples who earliest reached the state of culture which is needed to bring forth books, each standing by itself, each necessarily sang and wrote merely of itself. Thus did the Hebrews and the Greeks. But already the Romans went out of themselves, and Virgil takes a Trojan for his hero. This appropriation of foreign material shows, that the aim of high books is, to ascend to the sphere of ideas and feelings that are independent of time and place. Thence, when, by multiplication of Christian nations, the world had become vastly enlarged, embracing in one bond of oulture, not only all modern civilized peoples, but also the three great ancient ones, the poets-especially the dramatic, for reasons that will be presently stated -looked abroad and afar for the framework and corporeal stuff of their writings.

The most universal of all writers, ancient or modern, he who is most generio in his thought, Shakespeare, embodied his transcendent conceptions for the most part in foreign personages. Of Shakespeare's fourteen comedies, the scene of only one is laid in England;

and that one, the Merry Wives of Windsor-the only one not written chiefly or largely in verse-is a Shakespearean farce. Of the tragedies (except the series of the ten historical ones) only two, Lear and Macbeth, stand on British ground. Is Hamlet on that score less English than Lear, or Othello than Macbeth? Does Italy count Juliet among her trophies, or Desdemona?

Of Milton's two dramas-to confine myself here to the dramatic domainthe tragedy (Sampson Agonistes), like his epics, is Biblical; the comedy (Comus) has its home in a sphere

"Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot Which men call earth."

Of the numerous athletic corps of dramatists, contemporary with Shakespeare and Milton, few have left works pithy enough and so poetically complete as to withstand the wear of time and keep fresh to each successive generation. But if you inspect the long list from which Charles Lamb took his "Specimens," you will find few British

names.

Casting our eyes on the dramatic efforts of the recent English poetic celebrities, we perceive that Byron, Coleridge and Shelley, all abandoned, in every instance, native ground. The only dramatic work of a great modern, the scene of which is laid within the British limits, is "The Borderers," of Wordsworth, which, though having the poetic advantage of remoteness in time being thrown back to the reign of Henry III. -is, in strictness, neither a drama nor a poem, Wordsworth's deficiency in dramatic gifts being so signal as to cause, by the impotent struggle in an uncongenial element, a partial paralysis even of his high poetic genius.

Glance now across the Channel. French poetic tragedy is in its subjects almost exclusively ancient-Greek, Roman, and Biblical. In the works of the great comic genius of France, Molière, we have a salient exception to the prac tice of all other eminent dramatists. The scene of his plays is Paris; the time is the year in which each was written.

Let us look for the cause of this remarkable isolation.

Molière was the manager of a theatrical company in the reign of Louis XIV.; and he wrote, as he himself declares, to please the king and amuse the

Parisians. But deeper than this; Molière was by nature a great satirist. I call him a great satirist, because of the affluence of inward substance that fed his satiric appetite-namely, a clear, moral sensibility, distinguishing by instinct the true from the false, rare intellectual nimbleness, homely common sense, shrewd insight into men, a keen wit, with vivid perception of the comic and absurd. For a satirist so variously endowed, the stage was the best field, and for Molière especially, gifted as he was with histrionic genius. The vices and abuses, the follies and absurdities, the hypocrisies and superficialities of civilized life, these were the game for his faculties. The interior of Paris households he transferred to the stage with biting wit, doubling the attractiveness of his pictures by comic hyperbole. His portraits are caricatures, not because they exaggerate vices or foibles, but because they so bloat out a single personage with one vice or one folly as to make him a lop-sided deformity. Characters he did not seek to draw, but he made a personage the medium of incarnating a quality. Harpagon is not a miser; he is avarice speaking and doing. Alceste is not a person; he is misanthropy personified.

This fundamental exaggeration led to and facilitated the caricature of relations and juxtapositions. With laughable unscrupulousness Molière multiplies im probable blunders and conjunctions. All verisimilitude is sacrificed to scenic vivacity. Hence, the very highest of his comedies are farce-like, even Tartuffe.

There is in Molière little dramatic growth going on before the spectator's eye. His personages are not, by successive touches, broad or fine, gradually built up. They do not evolve themselves chiefly by collision with others: in the first act they come on the stage unfolded. The action and plot advance rapidly, but not through the unrolling of the persons represented. Hence his most important personages are prosaic and finite. They interest you more as agents for the purpose in hand than as men and women. They are subordinate rather to the action than creative of action.

Molière is a most thorough realist, and herein is his strength. In him the comic is a vehicle for satire; and the satire gives pungency and body to the

« 上一頁繼續 »