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inferior, and, in truth, often insupportably dull. His dialogue is a jargon mixed up of scraps and expressions from old plays or quaint tracts, such as no man on earth ever did speak, and which it is only surprising a man of his sagacity should have supposed they ever could. The same defect is more signally conspicuous in the dialogue of several of the historical romances of James.

It is the accurate and faithful picture of national character from real life, joined to the poetical interest of his Indian warriors, and his incomparable powers of natural description, which has given Cooper his great and well-deserved reputation. In many of the essential qualities of a novelist, he is singularly defective. His story is often confused, and awkwardly put together. Unity of interest is seldom thought of. He has no conception of the refined manners and chivalrous feelings of European society: though he has of late years seen much of it in many countries, he has never been able to become familiar with its ideas, or imbibe its spirit. His heroes, among the white men at least, are never anything above American skippers, or English subalterns or post-captains his heroines have in general the insipidity which is, we hope unjustly, ascribed, with great personal charms, to the fair sex on the other side of the Atlantic. But in the forest, or on the wave, he is superb. His Last of the Mohicans and The Prairie are noble productions, to be matched with any in the world for the delineation of lofty and elevated character-the more interesting that they belong to a race, like the heroic age, now wellnigh extinct. He paints the adventures, the life, the ideas, the passions, the combined pride and indolence, valour and craft, heroism and meanness of the Red men, with the hand of a master. Equally admirable is his delineation of the white man on the frontier of civilisation-Hawkeye or Leather-stocking, with his various other denominations-who is the precursor, as it were, of European invasion, who plunges into the forest far ahead of his more tardy followers, and leads the roaming life of the Indian, but with the advantage of the arms, the arts, and the perseverance of the Anglo-Saxon. But he is strictly a national writer. It is in the delineation of Transatlantic character, scenes of the forest, or naval adventures, that his great powers are shown; when he comes to paint

the manners, or lay the seat of his conceptions in Europe, he at once falls to mediocrity, and sometimes becomes ridiculous.

Manzoni is an author of the highest excellence, whose celebrity has been derived from the same faithful delineation, from real life, of national manners. He has written but one novel, the Promessi Sposi; though various other works, some religious, some historical, have proceeded from his pen. But that one novel has given him a European reputation. It is wholly different in composition and character from any other historical romance in existence; it has no affinity either with Scott or Cooper, Bulwer or James. The scene, laid in 1628, at the foot of the mountains which shut in the lake of Como, transports us back two centuries in point of time, and to the south of the Alps in point of scene. As might be expected, the ideas, characters, and incidents of such a romance differ widely from those of northern climes and Protestant realms. That is one of its great charms. We are transported, as it were, into a new world; and yet a world so closely connected with our own, by the manners and ideas of chivalry, our once common Catholic faith, and the associations which every person of education has with Italian scenes and images, that we feel, in traversing it, the pleasure of novelty without the ennui of a strange land. No translation could give an idea of the peculiar beauties and excellences of the original. As might be expected, the feudal baron and the Catholic church enter largely into the compositions of the story. The lustful passions, savage violence, and unbridled license of the former, strong in his men-at-arms, castle battlements, and retainers; the disinterested benevolence, charitable institutions, and paternal beneficence of the latter, resting on the affections and experienced benefits of mankind, are admirably depicted. His descriptions of the plague, famine, and popular revolt at Milan, are masterpieces which never were excelled. The saintlike character of Cardinal Borromeo, strong in the sway of religion, justice, and charity, in the midst of the vehemence of worldly passion and violence with which he is surrounded, is peculiarly striking. It is fitted, like Guizot's Lectures on History, to illustrate the incalculable advantage which arose, in ages of general rapine and unsettled govern

ment, from the sway, the disinterestedness, and even the superstitions of religion.

But the greatest merit of the work is to be found in the admirable delineation of the manners, ideas, hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, of humble life with which it abounds. The hero of the piece is a silk-weaver named Renzo, near Lecco, on the lake of Como; the heroine Lucia, his betrothed, the daughter of a poor widow in the same village; and the story is founded on the stratagems and wiles of an unbridled baron in the vicinity, whose passions had been excited by Lucia's beauty, first to prevent her marriage, then to obtain possession of her person. In the conception of such a piece is to be seen decisive evidence of the vast change in human affairs, since the days when Tasso and Ariosto poured forth to an admiring age, in the same country, the loves of high-born damsels, the combats of knights, the manners, the pride, and the exclusiveness of chivalry. In its execution, Manzoni is singularly felicitous. He is minute without being tedious, graphic but not vulgar, characteristic and yet never offensive. His pictures of human life, though placed two centuries back, are evidently drawn from nature in these times the peasants whom he introduces are those of the plains of Lombardy at this time; but though he paints them with the fidelity of an artist, it is yet with the feelings of a gentleman. His details are innumerable his finishing is minute; but it is the minute finishing of Albert Durer or Leonardo da Vinci, not of Teniers or Ostade. In this respect he offers a striking contrast to the modern romance writers of France, Victor Hugo, Janin, Madame Dudevant, and Sue, by whom vice and licentiousness are exhibited with vast power, but in more than their native undisguised colours.

THE BRITISH THEATRE

[DUBLIN UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE, Nov. AND DEC. 1846]

IF the drama is the branch of composition which, by the common consent of man, requires the greatest effort of genius and intellectual power, scarcely less wonderful is the blending of the mental and physical qualities which the part of the performer requires. Acting, in its highest branches, is not merely a fine art-it is the combination of them all. The soul of poetry is its very essence; it is a thorough perception not merely of the obvious meaning, but of the secret spirit of the divine inspiration, which is its foundation. The mind of the actor must be sympathetic with that of the author-it must be cast in the same mould, and developed in some degree in the same proportions. Hence the remarkable force and beauty with which nearly all distinguished actors read poetry, and the extraordinary addition which their accent and intonation make to the effect of the most beautiful and best-known verses. When we hear the most familiar poetry read by a great performer, we feel as if we never understood it before, so vast is the impulse given, by the modulation of his voice, to its pathos and expression. A thorough acquaintance with the human heart, alike in its outward expression and inmost recesses, is not less indispensable: it is the knowledge of that which constitutes his chief power; it is its exhibition which gives rise to his greatest triumphs. The eye of a painter, the conceptions of a sculptor, are the basis of all that highly important part of the art which depends on the exhibition of external beauty, the arrangement of drapery, the exhibition of grace, the display of the witchery of expression and gesture. But vain is every such attempt,

if nature has not given to the performer the physical advantages which are the basis on which they must all rest; if the countenance has not the beauty which the eye of man never ceases to desire in woman; if the figure have not the proportions which the common consent of nations has stamped as the perfection of form. Even if all this rare combination is found in the same individual, their effect would be lost if an additional quality is wanting; for grace is the very soul of beauty on the stage, and it is its inexpressible charm-partly the gift of nature, partly the acquisition of study-which forms the chief element in the cestus which encircles the fascinating actress. The author rests on genius or intellectual power alone, and, strong in their might, he needs not the aid of physical qualities; but the stage, even more than oratory, requires the union of both for its greatest triumphs, and in its most perfect masters exhibits that rare combination of mental and bodily perfection which has ever formed the dream of ideal imagination, but is so rarely to be met with in actual life

"The youngest of the sister arts

Where all their beauty blends.

For ill can Poetry express

Full many a tone of thought sublime,
And Painting, mute and motionless,

Steals but a glance of time.

But by the mighty actor wrought,
Illusion's perfect triumphs come;
Verse ceases to be airy thought,
And Sculpture to be dumb."

It is the extreme rarity of such a combination, either in man or woman, which is the cause of so few really great performers ever appearing on the stage of any country. England, in her long period of intellectual activity and success, can boast only three or four; France or Italy can hardly point to a greater number. Like the other fine arts, greatness on the stage generally appears in more than one individual at the same time, or nearly so; and the lustre of this constellation is succeeded by a long night of mediocrity or decline. It would appear to be a law of nature, to which there is no exception in the mysterious regulation of the life of nations, that the highest productions of genius can only be created by them once; that the

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