"Walked hesitating, all his frame instinct With high-born spirit never used to dread, In fact, this reluctant and deceitful poetic form always seems to seek unfair advantages over the author's thoughts, and to get them where, as it appears to us, prose would be entirely subject to her will. We cannot suppose, for example, that if she had not been writing the first lines of the poem in verse, she would have permitted any such tumult of images as now appears in them : "Tis the warm South, where Europe spreads her Like fretted leaflets breathing on the deep: We can hardly, however, attribute to unfamiliarity with metrical expression the following very surprising lyric: "Day is dying! Float, O song, "Pierced by shafts of Time he bleeds, Through the river and the sky, "All the long-drawn earthy banks Slow between them drifts the swan, Neck and breast as virgin's pure, — "Day is dying! Float, O swan, Follow, song, in requiem To the mighty Giver." - we are not sure, of the lyrics, which May stick to things and seem like qualities." "Do you know Sometimes when we sit silent, and the air And Don Silva answers: "Yes, dearest, it is true. We recall fine effects in the poem, though none of them owe their success to the poetic form, and one of the best is in prose. It is a good scene, where the people of Don Silva's household attend the old soldier as he reads from the book of Alfonso the Wise, that "a noble is more dishonored than other men if he does aught dishonorable"; and the page who doubts and disputes the precept puts it in a question to Don Silva, at that moment entering with a purpose of treason in his heart. It is also fine where Don Silva, having renounced rank and creed and country, and turned Gypsy for love's sake, is tormented by his own remorse, and by the suspicion of those fierce adoptive brothers of his, as they chant around their camp-fire the curse which shall fall upon the recreant to their tribe. Usually, however, the best points to the poem are in the descriptions; and though descriptive poetry is of the same grade in art as landscape-painting, yet it is poetry, and it includes about all that can be so called in The Spanish Gypsy. It is great praise to say of the picture of the mountebank's performance in the plaza at Bedmar, (where the scene of the drama for the most part is,) that it is not surpassed by anything in Miss Evans's romances; and we think any reader who has known a This is the worst, we think, though southern evening of summer, and has seen The winged life that pausing seems a gem From o'er the roofs And from the shadowed pátios cool, there spreads The breath of flowers and aromatic leaves Soothing the sense with bliss indefinite, A baseless hope, a glad presentiment, Fold their round arms below the kerchief full; The winged sounds exalt the thick-pressed crowd The sun's ranged outposts, luminous message spread, And still the light is changing: high above Good as this is, there is a picture of Juan the poet, with his audience at the inn, which is equally good, with like richness of color, and like felicity of drawing : "While Juan sang, all round the tavern court With arms that might have pillowed Hercules Thin Alda's face, sad as a wasted passion, It is the sort of people here pictured with whom we think Miss Evans has her only success with character in her poem, and they are true both to the sixteenth century and to human nature, which is not the case with their betters. We desire nothing racier, more individual, than the talk of Blasco, the Arrogonese silversmith, and that new-baptized Christian, the jolly host of the inn, as well as some of their interlocutors, leaving out Juan the poet, who is not much better when he talks than when he sings. We imagine that these characters, so strongly and so distinctively Spanish, as well as the happy local color of the descriptions, are the suggestion of that visit which the author made to Spain after the story of the poem was written. The Middle Ages linger yet in Spain, and the scenes in the plaza and inn, though so enchanting as pictures of the past, must have been in great part painted from life in our own time, and Blasco, Lopez, the Host, Roldan and Roldan's monkey, remodelled if not created from actual knowledge of Spanish men and manners. But admirable as these characters are in themselves and in association, they do nothing to advance the action of the story, and they belong to that promise of interest which dwindles rapidly after the first books of the poem, and is never wholly fulfilled. There is grandeur in the conception of the work. The intention of representing a conflict between national religions and prejudices and personal passions and aspirations, which should interpret the life of a period so marvellous and important as the close of the fifteenth century, was a great one, and Miss Evans has indicated it almost worthily in the prologue of the first book of her poem, recurring to it with something of like strength in the prologues of each succeeding book. In these we are aware of the far-reaching imagination and fine synthetic power which are so notable in the proem to "Romola"; and in those minor characters of the drama which we have mentioned we recognize success not inferior to that which delights in the people of the great romance. But nothing could be in sharper contrast than the distinct impression left upon the mind by the chief ideas and personages of Romola, and by the painfully recollected intent and the figures which develop it in The Spanish Gypsy. In either case the author deals with a distant period, and with people and conditions equally strange to her experience and observation. In either case it is a psychical problem she proposes to solve or at least to consider. In either case the chief characters about which the action revolves appear as human beings, with positive, personal desires and purposes. But while in Romola they retain this personal entity to the last, with the hold which nothing else can keep upon the reader's sympathies, and ineffaceably imprint the lesson of their lives in his memory, in The Spanish Gypsy the personal principle is soon removed, and they all disappear from us, dry, rattling assemblages of moral attributes and inevitable results. It is especially to this effect that poets never work, and Miss Evans docs not attain it by creating new and original characters. On the contrary, she adopts dresses and figures more or less familiar in romance, and evolves allegoric circumstances and actions from a plot smelling curiously of the dust of libraries and the smoke of foot-lights. We have the daughter of a Gypsy chief stolen in earliest childhood by the Spaniards, and bred in ignorance of her origin, who becomes the affianced of a Spanish grandee; we have a monkish inquisitor, fierce with the pride of family and of faith, who hates this Fedalma both as a new Christian and as the accomplice of his cousin the grandee in the purpose of an ignoble marriage, and who arranges for her seizure by the holy office on the eve of her marriage; then we have Zarca, Fedalma's father, who escapes the same night from Christian captivity, and who, revealing himself to his daughter, persuades her to fly with him, and share his aspirations and labors for the redemption of the Gypsy race. Her lover, desiring to win her back, applies to his friend, a Jewish physician, who knows enough of astrology to doubt it, as a learned and liberal-minded Jew of the Middle Ages naturally would. We are not so clear of any positive part this Hebrew has in the drama, as of the contrast to the inquisitor which he forms; and doubtless the author values the two less as persons than as the opposite principles of liberal science working to truth, and pitiless faith constituting itself a divine purpose. But for this use, Sephardo, whose talk is rather like a criticism and explanation of his attributive character than an expression of character, might with his speculative and philosophical turn be more naturally employed in writing for the reviews. In Zarca we have a modern reformer a little restricted and corrected at first by costume and tradition, as all his fellowcharacters are, but early declaring himself a principle and not a person, as all his fellow-characters do. He appears as an embodiment of those aspirations for independent national existence, which now more than ever before are stirring the true peoples, but which probably existed in all ages; and if he does not act very wisely, nor discourse very entertainingly, perhaps it is because men of one idea are very apt to be shortsighted and tedious, unless skilfully managed, in fiction as in real life. Morally, Zarca comes to be a theatrical kind of Hollingsworth, though we imagine nothing could be farther from the author's consciousness than such a development. It is doubtful whether a purpose and grandeur such as his are predicable of the Gypsy race in any age; but in his daughter's case we must grant even more to the author with less effect. In Fedalma is portrayed the conflict which would arise in the nature of a woman held to her betrothed by love, and identity of civilization and social custom, and drawn toward her father by the attraction of kindred, and race, and by vague sympathy with a devoted and heroic pur pose; and in accounting for her desertion of her lover Don Silva, all is confided to the supposition that these remote instincts and sudden sympathies are stronger than the use of a lifetime. Fedalma is a Gypsy by birth; and it is poctic, if not probable, that, yielding to the wild motions of her ancestral blood, she should wander with her duenna through the streets of Bedmar, and, forgetting the jealous decorums of her station, and the just claims of her lover's pride, should dance in the circle drawn about the mountebank, that lovely evening in the plaza. At any rate, this escapade wins us the fine effect of her encounter with Zarca, her father, before whom she pauses, touched by some mysterious influence, as he passes through the circle with the other captive Gypsies. Yet this scarcely prepares us for her renunciation, at her father's bidding, of Don Silva, Spain, and Christianity; nor is the act sufficiently accounted for by the fact that if she had remained, she would have been seized by the Inquisition, for she did not know this; or by the other fact that, as is afterwards intimated, she never was true Spaniard or quite Christian. True lover she was, and believed in love, and she never believed in the purpose for which she sacrificed love. That she should act as she did was woman's weakness, perhaps, the weakness of Miss Evans. The reader cannot help resenting that the author throws the whole burden of remorse for the ensuing calamities and crimes upon Don Silva, who is at least faithful to love when he forsakes his command at Bedmar, follows Fedalma to the Gypsy camp, and, to win her from her father, renounces everything, and becomes himself a Gypsy. He is also true at least to Spanish and human nature of the fifteenth century when, tortured by the cruel sight of his slaughtered friends, on re-entering Bedmar with its Gypsy captors, he asks of Zarca the life of his cousin, the Inquisitor, and, being denied it, stabs Zarca to death, — who, remembering his duty to the nineteenth century, commands with his dying breath that Den Silva shall go unharmed. He accordingly goes unharmed-towards Rome, willing to assume any penance which may be laid upon him for his sins; and the poor soul, who never loses our sympathy, has a kind of sublimity in his honest recognition of his crimes and his honest remorse for them; while Fedalma, bidding him adieu in solemn impertinences that betray much doubt and regret, but dim sense of error, is a very unedifying spectacle. As she departs with the Gypsies whom she distrusts, to fulfil a purpose which she never thought possible, her last care is explicitly to state the poem's insufficiency of motive, and to put in the wrong the chief good that was in her by saying to Don Silva: THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY. A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics. VOL. XXII.-OCTOBER, 1868. NO. CXXXII. INEBRIATE ASYLUMS, AND A VISIT TO ONE. THERE HERE are two kinds of drunkards, the Regular and the Occasional. Of each of these two classes there are several varieties, and, indeed, there are no two cases precisely alike; but every drunkard in the world is either a person who has lost the power to refrain from drinking a certain large quantity of alcoholic liquor every day, or he is one who has lost the power to refrain from drinking an uncertain enormous quantity now and then. Few get drunk habitually who can refrain. If they could refrain, they would; for to no creatures is drunkenness so loathsome and temperance so engaging, as to seven tenths of the drunkards. There are a few very coarse men, of heavy, stolid, animal organization, who almost seem formed by nature to absorb alcohol, and in whom there is not enough of manhood to be ashamed of its degradation. These Dr. Albert Day, the superintendent of the New York State Inebriate Asylum, sometimes calls Natural Drunkards. They like strong drink for its own sake; they have a kind of sulky enjoyment of its muddling effect upon such brains as they happen to have; and when once the habit is fixed, nothing can deliver them except stone walls and iron bars. There are also a few drunkards of very light calibre, trifling persons, incapable of serious reflection or of a serious purpose, their very terrors being trivial and transitory, who do not care for the ruin in which they are involved. Generally speaking, however, drunkards hate the servitude into which they have had the misfortune to fall; they long to escape from it, have often tried to escape, and if they have given up, it is only after having so many times slidden back into the abyss, that they feel it would be of no use to climb again. As Mrs. H. B. Stowe remarks, with that excellent charity of hers, which is but another name for refined justice, "Many a drunkard has expended more virtue in vain endeavors to break his chain than suffices to carry an ordinary Christian to heaven." The daily life of one of the steady drunkards is like this: upon getting up in the morning, after a heavy, restless, drunkard's sleep, he is miserable beyond expression, and almost helpless. In very bad cases, he will see Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by TICKNOR AND FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. |