BOOKS.

THE HOUSE OF RAVENSBURG.*

Teen conception of this drama is a very fine one, and is tragic in, the truest sense ; but the finer the conception, the more difficult,. necessarily, is the execution, and we cannot say that the picture of the burden of an inheritance of evil habits and dark passions. in their conflict with better elements of nature and of destiny, is in general embodied here with anything like the force reached in particular passages, and required by the author's subject. The' intention is to give a picture of the tragic doom overhanging particular families, not from the Greek point of view of a mere shadow of adverse destiny, but from the truer and more modern point of view that such adverse destinies are but the products of elements of evil—half voluntary and half involuntary—which are transmitted from father to son, and exert their malignant in- fluence on each in succession. To give the reader a better im- pression of the play, we will extract the whole of Mr. Noel's short and modest "prefatory note ":— " I have taken some liberties with the history of that partrof Switzer- land in which the scene of my tragedy is principally laid, but I believe I am justified in regarding this as excusable in the case of a drama not primarily historical. The liberties I have taken, moreover, are not of great importance. I have suppressed the historical Bishop of Cairo, and blended the revolt against the Abbot of St. Gall with the revolt against him. As regards the Peasants' War, Rudolph of Wordeiaberg did indeed play the part I have assigned to Ralph ; but I must confess, that .2Esohylus and rhododendrons were probably not known at that particular moment and place. The incident of the Sub-Prier's visit of remonstrance to Sigismund was suggested, partly by a similar one in the life of Bockford, the author of Vathek; which was related to me when I was a boy by some of the people near Beckford's place, Fonthill Abbey, and partly by the doings at Medmenham Abbey, in the last century. The revellers at that time were infidel, as well as reok]ess livers ; but their creed was the materialism of their epoch. The ideas and sentiments of my Knight are similarly impious ; tinged, however,. rather with that peculiar colour which so often charaoterised the specu- lative and practical impiety of the Middle Ages. I need only allude to the tenets of certain Gnostics, Sufis, and Beguins ; as also to the lives and opinions of Vanini, Cardan, Bruno, or Ezzelin the Monk? Sigismund is a philosophical Tannhatiser (ouch men as Beckford, Byron, and De Musset are not unlike him, perhaps, in character), who suffers retribution, and the arrogant impiety of whose philosophy suffers rebuke, in accordance with the law, known alike to Hebrew, Greek, and recent science, that the sins qf the fathers are visited upon the children.' I have thought it in accordance, however, with modern taste to leave somewhat undefined the specific nature of the crimes committed by members of the guilty race, such specific explanation not being essential to the development of my plot. Moreover, what our own experience and our own science teach us about life in this respect may wear an appearance slightly different from that which the same law wore of old. What we now perceive is the fact of half evil, half insane tendencies— unrestrained, or unsuccessfully resisted—transmitted from generation * The Bou.so of Ravoosbutv, By the lion. Roden Noel. London: Daddy, lebister,. and Co. to generation, and bearing thoir, bitter fruit of multiform sin, sorrow, pain' yet not without hope of salvation and Divine deliverance. Of the, three 'unities,' I have only sought to observe that of action ; but although a unity of motive pervades the whole composition, it may in some sense also be regarded as a &avg."

When we say that this is an ambitious aim, we do not mean to deprecate it, for poetry must be ambitious to be poetry at all, —and unless a man's aim be high, he hardly deserves the name of a poet. But unquestionably it is a difficult conception to work

out, needing a great affluence of poetical vitality,—a large power of giving dramatic life to a considerable variety of figures,

and awful significance to many situations, in order to do it justice. 'Goethe, we.believe,—looking to his splendid mediteval pictures in Goetz von Berlichinyen, and his splendid pictures of diablerie in Faust—.might have succeeded with such a subject, in his youth, but we doubt whether any now living poet could succeed with it ; and it is no disparagement to Mr. Roden Noel that having conceived so great a tragedy, and executed particular passages with much power, he has, in a considerable number of the

scenes of his play, not risen to the height of the exi- gency of which he himself has given us the standard. The scene, for instance, referred to in the "prefatory note," in which the Sub-Prior waits on Sigismund to remonstrate with him on his

blasphemies and sorceries, is a very feeble one, at least as regards all that the Sub-Prior himself says. One hardly knows what Mr.

Noel's conception a this priest is. At times, and especially in

the close of the scene, he seems possessed by a genuine moral fervour, which indeed could alone account for his forcing himself 'on Count Sigismund at all ; but in other parts of the scene he

appears to take a purely class view of the issues between the people and the priests, and not to have any deep sympathy with -the people's miseries and wrongs. The whole scene, therefore, fails to affect us, and is especially wanting in dramatic force.

Till towards its close, the Sub-Prior seems intended to be no snatch at all for Sigismund, but then suddenly stumbles on an illustration which strikes home, and which he could hardly have used without a knowledge of the heart and a sympathy with

the domestic life of the people such as was in no way suggested by his previous speeches. And this is only one of many speci- mens of what seems to us a failure in the vitality of the tragedy. The subject,requiree the delineation of all sorts of life in affluent sneasure—life evil and good, spiritual and superstitious, pas- .sionaksa and pure, tyrannic and liberty-loving. But excepting ,Sigismtuid, himself—and not excepting his son—and excepting

one fine democratic address from the leader of the Swiss peasants, this affluence of life is by no means visible. The

women arc a little pale and shadowy ; and the secondary figures—the figures on which so much depend for making the whole dramatic situation real and vivid—are feebly conceived. Again, to give reality to this tale, Lady Blanche,—the evil love of Sigismund,—should be a most careful and splendid picture, as

careful, at least, as Goethe painted in Adelheid lu the earliest form of Goetz von Berlichingen. But Lady Blanche is hardly painted at all, except physically in one or two apostrophes of Sigismund's, and mentally in the long sneer at his English wife

and the argument addressed to his ambition which she rashes into .so abruptly in almost the first scene in which she appears. For

the second character of the play,—second, we mean, in dramatic importance,—the picture of Lady Blanche strikes one as fatally faint and poor. And Sigismund appears more evil even than he need be, from the poet's entire failure to make Lady Blanche's fascinations life-like. But perhaps the worst dramatic fault in the play is the failure to reproduce for us in the picture of Sigis. mund's heir, Ralph, the legacy of conflict he had inherited from his father. We find him, indeed, forcing-on a duel with his own half-brother,—whom, however, he does not know to be akin to him at all,—for an evil and selfish, purpose, namely, to screen himself from the consequence of former ; but this duel excepted, which gives no real opportunity for the delineation of inward life, Ralph is painted only in the victorious stage of conflict over the avil passions he had inherited ; and in bulk and mass of char- acter he seems a rather inadequate representative of the evil louse of Ravensburg. There is none of the largeness and rude- ness and force of Sigismund in. Ralph, and no glimmer even of the vein of quasi-insanity which is meant to play a considerable part in Sigismund himself.

Hence we cannot say that as a drama we regard the House of Ravensburg as a success. There are a few characteristic, powerful, and rugged passages in it, but a great deal that is pale, indistinct,

and blurred. And in dealing with so great a subject, it is hardly possible not to feel anything like faintness and indistinctness almost fatal. At the same time, the poem contains some very fine elements ; and taken as a whole, the picture of Sigismund both before and after death,—Mr. Noel assumes Shakespeare's licence, and brings Sigismund back to us from the other world, and, even bolder than Shakespeare, undertakes to show us his character still undergoing change in that world,—seeme to us one of very considerable power. The following passage, for instance, spoken by Sigismund the disembodied, and presenting the central idea of the play with great fire, seems to us a noble one

Even as in life, in death I fool the curse That weighs upon the creature ; and with flame Of doom more terrible, more swift—with blows Thundering, thicker, surer—emites and blasts The fated roof-tree of one house forlorn, Leaving another prosperous awhile.

And yet I feel how in the abysmal Past was; in yen dim Future / shall be.

While I and my forefathers, and my seed— Yea, all the panorama of the world—

Are one man, shadowed by one awful guilt, One suffering, one freedom charged with doom Unfathomable, more righteous than our right, Than wisdom wiser, loving more than love.

All we name Nature sundereth evermore From her All-Father ; re-absorbed for ever,

Abideth reconciled; yet ours the sin,

That must be purged and punished ere the end. But I rebel. I writhe impaled I Yea, curse,

Accuse thee, Heaven Why visit upon hina.

The sins of his forefathers, and my own? . . .

I moan ; I grope in blindness! Tot I know

The award for justice, and embrace nay pain! . . .

I hoped my son, the son of Innocence, (Who, while she folded her white wings on earth A Moment, was called Constance,) my sweet child,

Nurtured in shrines of holiness and love, Would soar in spirit from our earth to heaven, Dwelling there in pure light above us all!

I may not even clasp thee in mine arms For consolation; in me there is none!

Ill's instrument, I am unprofitable

For any good! Ala, could I speak one word Of what any soul desires to him I yearn

Over the child in vain! 0 Saviour, Christ 1"

Again, there are one or two beautiful songs, and at least one

very fine picture of a mountain sunset, but too often Mr. Noel's

imagery is unclear and a little strained. One extract will give both one of the most beautiful of the songs, and also thoughts of Sigisinund's upon it which illustrate our last remark :—

[Somas IL—The Child's Sleeping-room. Constanee singing to the

child in his cot, who, half asleep, also sings at intervals. The door ajar. Sigismund listening and looking from outside.]

Cons. (sings).—"Pause awhile, my lovely child,

Ere thou fly away from me i The world is traitorous and wild,

No warm wing to shelter thee.

Pause awhile!

Weave white flowers in a chain; Pebble fables of a fairy; Infant moments feel no stain, Woven to a garland airy; Weave white flowers I Linger here in a dewy dale;

()limb not under a hot noon;

Cull pure lilies of the vale;

Darling, do not leave rne soon! Linger here."

"Sig.—She singoth him to sloop; and with one foot In dreamland, ho, too, followeth her singing,

Floating his wavering bright waifs of song, To follow in the wake of her full sail;

So water flames through twilight of stirred leaves,

At intervals; or mallow melody Of bees awakens in sweet summer time, Between their dives in dimlit flower-bolls, So, a child may follow one along a path, Now in the open, now in corn-poppies, Immersed in watery greenness of slim corn.

Lo I he bath soon her shadow on the wall, Large-looming in a warm glow of faint fire,

F:ulTt o' e rt Iec

olliaginhis mind

Int:oswiiLmefavouritetales of fay,

And wondrous giant ; until, half afraid, Onee more he passes wholly from the realm Of misty slumber into waking-world."

The images here are, to our minds, very confusing. Why does water " flaming" through "twilight of stirred leaves at intervals" seem at all an apt image of a mother's song awakening, at inter-.

vale through half-sleep, the mind of the child? if it only means, that as the leaves of trees shutting out water lit up by the sun, are sometimes blown aside to admit a glimpse of it, so sleep which shuts out the mother's song is sometimes interrupted to

open the child's ears to it, the thought is graceful, but would be

just as true if anything else were seen through these stirred leaves, and the reader is puzzled by its being water, and sun-lit water, rather than cloud or light, which is thus seen, especially as the two next images suggest nothing but alternate hearing and failing to hear, alternate seeing and failing to see. This is small criticism, of course, but in a drama it is certainly a mistake to puzzle the reader with fanciful, but emphasised, detail, distracting his attention from the development of character. For another instance, take this description of a Cornish beach

Bertha (so1.)-0b, what delicious shells ! the ye/low shore,

All little shells, or whole, or mutilate, White rose-petals, curled cowries, palmer-shells, Orange and crimson, small patellas, veined With ultramarine ; bow delicate, fairylike!

Each one a happy, innocent life °vanished While, with delicious splashing, the clear wave, Green as live emerald, falls : white lace of foam Falls with it, blown, like cirrus, from the crest Of joy's own fluctuant crystal, in the blue I How do they leap, the billows, heaving, laughing, Along dark crimson marble, and moss-green

Of cliff sea-sculptured, or lone ; Whispering in low caves, where Shadow dwells, With her penumbra, a thin water-froth! The sand is all =footed, save by elves, Or feet of toying wavelets, to loose lines Rippling the paleness in their tidal dance. Nay, yonder by the cave behold a dint Of some small foot ; a single line of dints."

The analogy suggested here for the foam, that it is blown "like cirrus from the crest of joy's own fluctuant crystal in the blue," is still more obscure. And we submit that to call the line of white foam round the shadow of a cave the " penumbra " of that shadow is poetically as well as physically a mistake ; poetically it does not suggest half-shadow any more than it resembles it phy- sically. This rather strained fancy injures a drama conceived on such broad lines as Mr. Noel's, and is indeed, we suspect, an index of the imaginative deficiencies which rendered it hardly possible for Mr. Noel to work out his idea with consistent power.

But we have cavilled too much, and will end with one short passage presenting a Swiss scene with true poetic feeling :—

[Sigismund, with a little boy, named Rudolph, the son of one of his

tenants.]

Sig. (now to himself, now to Budolph).—Come, Rudolph,

let us rest beneath the pine! . . . to you love the music of the wind therein ?

Dark, prophet-like, it broods above the abyss, Murmuring mystic sounds oracular! . . .

My damned old castle's hidden in the mist. . . .

The grapes I know they swung right temptingly

Against your lips, as we were sauntering Among the trellised vines; but what will those Who own them say ? their bloom is like yen bloom Of dueking hills and vales—the torrent roars,

Thundering to the gorge! How lovely I See,

A snow-peak flushed as from still fire within! Purple abide the storm-rent rugged crests Of kingly mountains: hearken ! far-off bells Of lowing herds descending—there an eagle Screams, as he wheels, now dark, now luminous, Gloaming by rocky steeps of pine ; illumed

In violet air between them—there is storm

Impending I viewless winds are marshalling Clouds in battalions, ominous, ash-pale, Fire-tinet, dusk waves of some inverted sea From lonely tams the storm-spirit bath spoken."

That is very fine verse, and the readers of this imperfect but powerfully-conceived drama will find much in it which is equally fine, and much, too, of far higher meaning.