SCHILLER'S BRIDE OF MESSINA.

A coon translation of the Bride of Messina would be an acqui- sition to English literature. Taken in connexion with those translations of his other works which already exist, it would go far to furnish the mere English reader with a tolerably complete and correct notion of the character of SCHILLER'S genius. The minds of GiiTHE and SCHILLER were so essentially dif- ferent, that the best way to convey an accurate impression of the one, to such as are unacquainted, or only partially acquainted, with their writings, is to contrast him with the other. Nature predisposed them to be the antipodes of each other, and ci cum: stances corroborated this predisposition.

The natural temperament of Mims was equable and hilarious. He was not unsusceptible of stormy emotion, but it soon worked itself off, leaving his mind pure and serene as before. His mind

was more disposed to observe what was external to itself than to reflect upon its own operations. He was endowed with a delicate apprehension of sensuous beauty. He sympathized with every kind of intellectual exertion ; and the untiring activity which this communicated to his mind increased its natural elasticity. His

aversion to prolonged passionate excitement, and his keen relish of the beautiful, lent form to his moral system, and regulated all his social relations. The character of which we have thus hastily attempted to indicate the more prominent features, impelled him to devote his life to literature and art, when his father wished him to become a lawyer ; and led him to prefer a residence at the intellec- tual court of Weimar, to distinction as a citizen in his native free-

town of Frankfort. Passing his early years in atHuence in the tran- quil routine of a city life, or in the cheerful rural districts of South-

ern Germany, and the greater part of his riper years in easy cir-

cumstances at the court of which he was the cherished ornament, his native cheerfulness of disposition was never depressed. G6THE'S poetry is a pure mirror, in which nature is reflected in its exact forms and hues: its morality is lenient and tolerant : the

itnpression it leaves upon us is pleasing and encouraging.

SCHILLER, on the other hand, was animated by one of those minds which have a natural tendency to study their own operations. His passions were powerful, and for the time absorbed, as they shook, his whole being. In minds with his self-scrutinizing turn and engrossing consciousness of their own emotions, we ge- nerally find the sense of the beautiful in external objects more or less obliterated by stronger impulses; and this was the case with SCHILLER. The beauty which fell upon his gaze from every side, was the original stimulant of poetry in Game : in SCHILLER, his early poetry was the expression of his internal emotions—he had to still the audible beatings of his own heart by an effort, before he could hear the soft music of the world with- out. The usual concomitant of such a disposition is a melancholic temperament —a constitutional tendency to low spirits, and anxious apprehensions of the future. The circumstances of his early life were of a nature to strengthen these peculiar inclina- tions, vital and intellectual. The passionate and wayward boy was fed on the dry husks of knowledge conveyed in a military school, and checked and fretted by its mechanical discipline. His favourite pursuits were discouraged; he was enslaved to soul- less, and (to him) repulsive tasks ; and he bitterly felt that this was owing to his being poor and friendless. When first thrown loose upon the world, he experienced those difficulties, that neglect, which is always the lot of him who has to work his way into society, instead of being insensibly introduced into it as part of a large family connexion. In his case the difficulty was increased by his being one of those who are gifted with the wealth of genius and proudly conscious of it, yet at first unable to communicate their secret to the world. The earliest eff its of a mind thus constituted and thus nurtured, were, of course. more powerful than pleasing— it was the voice of a strong man, but of a strong man in agony. He judged the world by his own sufferings : he hated what had been to him the cause of suffering : he longed to rend and trample upon the bonds of society, whet' he felt to be galling chains ; and, powerless to do this in reality, he embodied his wishes in his poetry. There is a morbid and unhealthy tone about his earlier productions : the impression they leave upon the reader is pain- ful and depressing in the extreme : we feel that there is genius in them, but we "believe and tremble." But wherever there is true genius, it purifies and raises itself by its own efforts. The strong mind of Scut LLER could not be permanently bent ; and it was to him a standard to show the aberrations of his emotional nature. There was too much stamina in him to admit of his sinking into a mere puling misanthrope : by a strong effort of his will, he raised himself from his desponding mood ; and by a vigorous and persevering intellectual exertion, he restored strength, vigour, in short, health, to his mind. The productions of his matured genius are characterized by that cheerful, hoping inclination, which is the endowment of all truly great minds. All his efforts, however, could not give him that buoyant equanimity of temperament which was GiiTHE'S by nature, any more than gymnastic exer- cises can give him who has once known prolonged sickness the perfect, and therefore unconscious, unintermitting succession of pleasurable sensations, which fall to the lot of those happy con- stitutions which seem exempted from the hereditary curse. Event in his healthiest, happiest moods, brief pangs shoot across him, reminding him of preceding valetudinarianism. But, from this very circumstance, if he is less constantly exhilirating than GoTHE, he touches our sympathies more deeply. Again, if SCHILLER is less universal than his great compeer, his greater concentration of purpose renders him more powerful. Giirne's mind, attracted in every direction, active in every sphere, is apt to lose itself amid the multiplicity of objects. SCHILLER, under the necessity of making an effort when he would go out of him- self, is less easy, but not unfrequently more effective. GUTFIE , is more spontaneous, more uniformly and universally pleasing. SCHILLER has loftier aims, and touches more powerfully the in- most emotions of the heart. GoTHE is the eagle dallying in the sunbeam: SCHILLER is the eagle striking his quarry. Both, however, if their writings be carefully studied, may serve to dispel the error that the true literature of Germany is necessarily mystical and lachrymose,—a mistake natural enough, considering

the trash with which the majority of our peddlers in German letters have naturally sympathized.

Among the works which SCHILLER has left us, we find some the products of all his stages of intellectual development. Every step almost may be traced—some work or other is sure to bear the impress of the fresh emotions awakened by each new field of literature that opened on his view. But in particular, three great stages may be noted. The first is that in which he produced the Robbers. Cabal and Love, and others of the same stamp ; in all of which we recognize the strength but also the harshness of the immature wine. The third is that in which he produced his Wallensteth and his Bride of Messina ; that mature development of his powers in which he had discovered the true aim of art, and in which ripe experience and long study enabled him to make the graceful forms of his imagination ponderous with the wealth of thought fused into them. The best example of his intermediate state of mind is his Don Carlos, and the series of critical letters which he appended to it. The original conception of the drama belongs to his first stage; its completion falls in the commence- ment of the third. There is an uncertainty of purpose in it—an inequality of execution, which betrays want of confidence in the artist. The letters in particular, rich though they be in thought, are curiously inconsistent : the end contradicts the beginning : the author arrives at his conclusion less by a process of reasoning than by an effort of the will.

The Bride of Messina, by Mr. IRVINE'S attempt to translate which we have been tempted to digress into this retrospect, is, as a work of art, perfect, when tried by the only correct standard of a poem—its own aim. It will not answer the demands English- men are accustomed to make upon a drama: we shall not, there- fore, insist upon their admitting that it is dramatic—we only ask them to admit its merits as a poem. It is framed upon the classi- cal model—a drama with choruses. There is e.n essential difference between a poem of' this kind and an English (or, more properly speaking, modern European) drama. The origin of the classical drama was a narrative song : by degrees attempts came to be made to lend variety to the entertainment, by introducing a mimic representation of some incidents in the tale: at last this mimetic portion grew to be looked upon as indispensable, and had separate performers allotted to it, who appeared dressed in character amid scenic representations of the locality where the events were sup- posed to occur. Even in the most finished state of the classical drama, however, the chorus, with its acompaniments of music and pantomimic dancing, continued to be regarded as the principal

part of the entertainment—as that which gave law and form to the rest. In the modern drama it is otherwise : from the very first, mimetic representation was its one sole object. It under-

takes the diflicult task of developing the story in action. It was originally an acted romance for the benefit of those Who could not read : it does not, like the old drama, present one incident in a

man's life—it grapples, in a manner, with his whole history. In the modern drama, the chorus is an alien excrescence—a sucker of uncongenial nature, which may be grafted, but can never grow

on the original stock. Each kind of drama has its peculiar ad- vantages and disadvantages : each addresses itself to the peculiar

taste of different people. It would be in vain to hope to interest Englishmen, who desiderate startlingly unexpected incident and intense reality of personation, in a drama which seeks to charm by a combination of instruction, statuesque grace, and the charms of music. Perhaps our drama goes more home to the sympathies : the classical elevates those who can relish it, more into the ideal world—liberates them more from the teasing and depressing reali- ties of life. As a scenic representation, it would be more difficult to do justice to the common run of classical dramas; while the difficulty is greater of finding an actor adequate to the almost real characters of the modern. When presented to us in the form of a book, the dramas of either class must be judged by their own intrinsic merits as poems; neither can fairly be made a standard for the other.

It would not be fair, therefore, to try the Bride of Messina by the standard of King Lear: it is a poem of an entirely different class. The characters of the personee are rather indicated by a

few bold touches than carefully developed. The poem works upon us by the glow of passion, heightened by imagination in the

dramatic parts, and by the weight of reflection, similarly en- forced, in the choruses. The story is simple, and even familiar. A doom is suspended over a princely house by the father's curse on his son, who has robbed him of his bride; soothsayers terrify the pair subjected to the curse, by prophesying that the daughter shall destroy the two sons; the mother saves the infant doomed by its frightened father to death, and, by breeding it in secret, occa- sions the fulfilment of the prophecy. The scene is laid in Messina, shortly after the Norman conquest, while the princes were yet aliens living among their slaves: we are thus made to feel that the discord of the brothers involves the sufferings of a nation, and yet not necessitated to lose the individuality of the prince in the abstraction of the state. The simplicity of the manners enables the poet to lend simplicity of passion to his characters; while the subjects forming the choruses naturally dwell on reflections of a general and comprehensive nature. SCHILLER'S language is always nervous and full of meaning; but in this poem he has ex- celled himself. There is not a word in it which does not tell; and the poet seems to have concentrated in his verses all the pas- sions which had at any time agitated himself, and all the wisdom with which his observation and study had stored his mind. The imagery is luxuriant and characteristic. The place has inspired SCHILLER'S imagination with the glowing beauty of a Southern climate ; the time, with the thoughts and fancies called up by the conflict of the fading relics of old Heathenism with the inroads of Mahominedanism on one hand and of the equivocal Christianity of the sensual Sicilians or the iron Norsemen on the other. A vein of subdued melancholy runs through the whole, softening the over-buoyant spirits without depressing them; yet, on the whole, the tone of the poem is elevating and cheering. The subject is such as might have pleased young SCHILLER in the wildness of his untamed mood ; the handling is that of one whom years and experience have mellowed into the sage.

It would be in vain to seek for any of these characteristics in the translation now before us. The author is evidently very im- perfectly acquainted with the German language, and not a very great master of his own. His grammar is frequently at fault ; and he not seldom assigns a meaning to SCHILLER'S words very different from the real one. His lines are duly counted off—ten syllables to each—on his fingers, but he is rather deficient in his attention to the accent. It is a constant practice with him to eke out his lines by introducing epithets; thus introducing a diffuse- ness most unlike SCHILLER. Besides, his epithets are frequently at variance with the sentiment of the passage. In some instances he has treated us to passages of perfect nonsense, for which he alone, not his author, is responsible. In short, the translation of the Bride of Messina is a task yet to be accomplished. We could almost fancy that SCHILLER had penned the following stanza under the influence of a prophetic vision of such a travestie- "Gleich Geist von einem Chemicus

Durch das Retort getrieben, Zum Teufel ist der Spiritus- Das Phlegma ist gebliehen."

As we do not profess to be translators of poetry, but only critics of translations, we do not interpret, but exhort Mr. IRVINE to the task : when he has succeeded in translating these lines, he may take the English for his pains.