Art. III. Marino Faliero, the Doge of Venice. An Historical Tra gedy. In five Acts. With Notes. The Prophecy of Dante; a Poem. By Lord Byron. 8vo. pp. xx. 262. Price 12s. London. 1821.

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F the tragedy which we are proceeding to examine, had been the production of an unknown or obscure author, our notice of it would have been brief. We should have confined ourselves to a rapid outline of its plan, and a few specimens of its execution, have pointed out the inherent defects of both, and then, have dismissed it to that gulf of forgotten things, to which notwithstanding Lord Byron's celebrity, its mediocrity and feebleness seem to have condemned it.

Of a writer, however, who occupies so wide a space in the public eye, every production is entitled to a deliberate trial;— not on the score of justice merely, for to this, all authors have an equal claim. But, when a poet has so long revelled in the sunshine of public patronage, seems on a sudden either wilfully to abdicate his high place, or, by a languid and debilitated effort, to give another instance to the history of letters of the early decay of the inventive faculty,-it becomes the essential duty of those whose province it is to assert and vindicate the principles of taste, to seize the opportunity of impressing by the example of such a failure, the important truth, that those principles are not to be transgressed with impunity.

In his Preface, the noble Author disclaims the idea of the piece having been written for the stage. In its present state,' he remarks,

it is perhaps not a very exalted object of ambition; besides I have been too much behind the scenes to have thought it so at any time. And I cannot conceive any man of irritable feeling putting himself at the mercies of an audience:-the sneering reader, and the loud critic, and the tart review, are scattered and distant calamities; but the trampling of an intelligent or of an ignorant audience on a production, which, be it good or bad, has been a mental labour to the writer, is a palpable and immediate grievance, heightened by a man's doubt of their competency to judge, and his certainty of his own imprudence in electing them his judges. Were I capable of writing a play which would be deemed stage-worthy, success would give me no pleasure, and failure great pain.'

Much of this complaint is unquestionably well founded. A theatrical audience is far from being a fair tribunal: the sentence is carried by acclamation, and the cause is scarcely ever reheard. But, judging it merely as a drama intended for the closet, let us ask the noble Artist, whether he expects us to feel a tragic interest for his story, or for his personages, or to be moved by the griefs, or to swell with the passions of those personages as he has chosen to portray them. The union of these sympathies is the tri

umph of the dramatic bard; but, if the plot is destitute of a genuine and awakening interest, and the characters leave the solicitudes of the reader wholly dormant as to their fate or their sufferings, the play must labour under some deep and incurable defect. If, moreover, the dialogue is unprogressive, and encumbers the march of the action, it evidently fails in another essential requisite.

First, as to the story, which is told in a few words, and is taken from the Venetian history. Marino Faliero, having been elected Doge for important military services rendered to the republic, espouses Angiolina at an advanced period of his life, who had been betrothed to him by her dying father. Filial piety and esteem for his character take place in her bosom of those warmer emotions which generally constitute the loves of the heroines of tragedy. Like Desdemona, she had eyes and 'chose him,' but her attachment has nothing of that exquisite tenderness and heart-felt devotion which entered into Desdemona's affection for the Moor. The Doge is a mighty choleric sort of person. One Michael Steno, a young patrician, having been guilty of some levity or indecorum towards one of Angiolina's female attendants, at a public banquet where that magistrate was present, had been turned out of the company by his order. Sinarting from the indignity, and warmed perhaps with the Tuscan grape, the inconsiderate gallant took an opportunity, when evening came on, of scribbling a kind of pasquinade on the Ducal chair, reflecting upon Angiolina. The ribaldry was soon reported to the Doge, who preferred his complaint against Steno before the Tribunal of Forty. That council, weighing the matter with a compassionate reference to the youth of the offender, rather than the dignity of the accuser, sentenced him to the mild punishment of a month's restraint. So lenient a sentence awakes in the mind of Faliero the wildest passions. Goaded to madness by the wound his honour has received from the unrequited affront cast upon the purity of his wife, he forthwith lends himself to a conspiracy already set on foot by other discontented spirits, to overthrow the commonwealth. The plot, like that of Venice Preserved, is betrayed by one of the accomplices, whose nature, like Jaffier's, is too milky not to sicken at the blood which was destined to flow; and the result is, the apprehension of the Doge and the chief conspirators. The last act ends with bis decapitation.

Out of this incident, the Poet has spun the tissue of his tragedy; and it must be obvious, that so unpromising a subject has imposed upon him two difficulties. The first is, that which is of the very essence of his plot,-the inadequacy of the supposed griev

ance to the storm of passion conjured up in his soul; a storm resembling

ocean into tempest tost To waft a feather or to drown a fly.

The other is, the nature and character of the conspiracy itself, which excites no sympathy; for, however the Writer may endeavour to trick out the raggedness of a most villainous confederacy in the garb of patriotism and public feeling, it is necessarily barren of all sublime emotion, and shews the absolute impossibility of attributing grandeur and elevation to that which is essentially mean and profligate.

With regard to the former difficulty, the Poet is evidently conscious of it. The Doge is for ever dwelling on the affront, as if he were himself conscious that it stood in need of rhetorical heightening.

• Angiolina. To what does this conduct?

• Doge.
To thus much-that
A miscreant's angry breath may blast it all.-
A villain, whom from his unbridled bearing,
Even in the midst of our great festival,
I caused to be conducted forth, and taught
How to demean himself in ducal chambers;
A wretch like this may leave upon the wall
The blighting venom of his sweltering heart,
And this shall spread itself in general poison:
And woman's innocence, man's honour, pass
Into a by-word; and the doubly felon
(Who first insulted virgin modesty
By a gross affront to your attendant damsels
Amidst the noblest of our dames in public)
Requite himself for his most just expulsion
By blackening publicly his sovereign's consort,
And be absolved by his upright compeers.

Angiolina. But he has been condemned into captivity.
Doge. For such as him a dungeon were acquittal;

And his brief term of mock-arrest will pass

Within a palace. But I've done with him;

The rest must be with you.

• Angiolina.

With me, my lord?

Doge. Yes, Angiolina. Do not marvel, I
Have let this prey upon me till I feel

My life cannot be long.
*

*

But never more-oh never, never more

O'er the few days or hours which yet await

The blighted old age of Faliero, shall
Sweet Quiet shed her sunset."

Act II. Scene 1.

How slight and inadequate is the cause of this emotion! Or, as Sir Lucius O'Trigger would express it, what a pity that so much good passion should be wasted!' Othello labouring beneath the unutterable load of the most overwhelming conviction which can press upon the heart,-writhing under the smart of an ardent affection, cankered and corroded by the death-taint of a feverish suspicion, could scarcely have expressed himself with greater emphasis of mental agony. But, while Othello gives speech to the tortures that are rending him, it is nature whose unexaggerated and genuine voice is echoed from his bosom. No tumid phrase of passion, no forced and unnatural sorrows burst from him in tones beyond the precise amount of the suffering. There is an equipoise (and Shakspeare never failed to adjust it by the nicest moral proportion) between the anguish of the soul and the phrase that gives it utterance. And it is from the total absence of this proportion, that we refuse our sympathies to Faliero.

But the other is the most important defect of the subject chosen by Lord Byron ;-we mean the conspiracy on which the action of the drama hinges. It matters little that he has been faithful to history, if the event is destitute of a poetic character. Like Alfieri, to whom in many points his genius approximates, he is fettered by an intractable story, which is wholly remote from the instincts and feelings of mankind. How elevated soever may be his diction, how vivid soever his colouring, a moral truth is wanting;-that charm, so difficult to define, so easy to apprehend, which, diffused over the scene, excites in generous bosoms an exalted enthusiasm for the great interests of humanity. This is the poesy of history. It is the charm of the William Tell of Schiller; it is felt in the awful plot of Brutus, and, to a certain degree, in the conspiracy of Pierre and Jaffier; for the end and purpose of those conspiracies, were, to redeem their country from insult and oppression. But, in Marino Faliero's attempt against the state, we contemplate nothing but the project of a sanguinary ruffian, seeking to grasp unlimited authority, and making, after the established precedents of all usurpers, the wrongs and sufferings of the commonalty his pretence; while, in another aspect of his character, we see him goaded by an imagined injury, into an enterprise which would have inundated Venice with her best blood. Is this a sublime spectacle, calculated to purge the mind, according to the aphorism of Aristotle, by means of terror or pity? The unmixed selfishness of the motives with which he accedes to the Vol. XV. N. S.

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plot, perpetually escapes him. He thus addresses the ducal cap which he has thrown down.

Hollow bauble!

Beset with all the thorns that line a crown,

Without investing the insulted brow

With the all-swaying majesty of kings;

Thou idle, gilded, and degraded toy!

How my brain aches beneath thee! and my temples
Throb feverish under thy dishonest weight.
Could I not turn thee to a diadem?
Could I not shatter the Briarean sceptre
Which in this hundred-handed senate rules,
Making the people nothing, and the prince
A pageant!'

Again.

Act I. Scene 2.

You overrate my power, which is a pageant.
This cap is not the monarch's crown; these robes
Might move compassion, like a beggar's rags;
Nay more, a beggar's are his own, and these
But lent to the poor puppet, who must play
It's part with all its empire in this ermine.'

Ib.

Not that the Doge is wholly untouched by the compunctious 'visitings of nature.' But the fearful unity of such a character is broken by assigning to it the throbbings and the pangs of human feeling, and by making him recoil with affright from slaughter and destruction. In the roar and whirlwind of the mighty passions which precede the acting of a dreadful plot, it is wholly unseasonable and out of keeping, to put into his mouth the sentimental effusions of affectionate pity for his friends, whom he thinks of rather too late to give these touches of remorse and mercy any other character than that of hypocritical whining. The sentiments are certainly good, but lamentably out of time and place, and remind us of Scarron's remark upon the moralizing Phlegyas in the infernal regions.

• Cet sentence est vrai et belle,

Mais dans enfer, de quoi sert elle?'

Yet, though wholly repugnant to dramatic congruity, the passage has great poetic power, and we gladly insert it.

'Doge. And is it then decided? Must they die?

• Israel Bertuccio. Who?

Doge. My own friends by blood and courtesy,

And many deeds and days-the senators!

Israel Bertuccio. You passed their sentence, and it is

a just one.