From The Saturday Review.
ST. CLEMENT'S EVE.*

high order. The lasting popularity of Philip Van Artevelde is as much owing to its pure and vigorous style as to the fusion of historical interest and creative ingenuity in the construction of the plot.

NEARLY thirty years have passed since Mr. Henry Taylor published a work which, in some respects, stands alone in modern English literature. Although the interest of the story is rather epic than dramatic, Philip Van Artevelde is the best historical play of the last two centuries, and the best historical romance since the days of Scott. The subject was selected with admirable judgment, and the story is told with a felicitous clearness which successfully conceals the skilful treatment of the narrative. Not one reader in a hundred is familiar with the Flemish history of the fourteenth century, and yet the drama from beginning to end requires neither commentary nor explanation. Thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the age which he reproduces, the dramatist nevertheless keeps himself wholly free from the affectation of medieval simplicity. His characters, while they belong to their own time, are on the intellectual level of the present day, and, consequently, they act and speak like rational beings in the midst of feudal revolutions and wars. The difficulty and the merit of avoiding in historical fiction an intrusive display of the author's consciousness is best illustrated by the partial failure of many considerable writers. Fouqué's impressive romances are uniformly disfigured by an ostentatious earnestness on the part of the narrator, which provokes incredulity, like the fraud of a conjuror when he pretends to be a medium or a magician.enet neighbors, the Valois Princes at least In Notre Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo is were not remarkably distinguished by that above assuming the mask of a contemporary Christian simplicity which may have adorned chronicler, but he falls into the opposite er- the gentle Philip Augustus, and the unambiror of betraying his real character as a som- tious Philip the Fair. In St. Clement's Eve, bre moral satirist. Sir E. B. Lytton in his Mr. Taylor has sagaciously discerned the draearly English romance is too much of a pro-matic elements of one of the darkest periods fessor or antiquarian. Mr. Taylor, in Philip in the history of the ill-omened dynasty. Van Artevelde, keeps the machinery of composition out of sight with an instinctive taste which would not have been unworthy of Sir Walter Scott. The same excellence has been not less perfectly attained in Vitet's dramas on French history in the last days of the house of Valois; but the Barricades and the States of Blois are written in prose, while Mr. Taylor is not only a powerful writer of fiction, but an original poet of a

During a long interval, mainly occupied by official labors, Mr. Taylor has produced two or three dramas which have not become generally popular. Although his composition is always manly, scholar-like, and thoughtful, his invention seems to require the stimulus of a history which is in itself picturesque and exciting. It was useless to seek inspiration in the hopelessly dull annals of England before the Conquest. Mr. Kemble's learned and unreadable work on Anglo-Saxon history, with its average of one proper name in fifty pages, represents the romantic capabilities of England in its embryo condition. Grave historians report that the national language and laws were formed by some mysterious process during the obscure period of indigenous dulness; but life and movement, as far as the careless and ordinary reader can discern, came in with the Normans, and experience at least teaches that Adelgithas, Ediths, and Ethelreds, are not attractive personages in fiction. On the whole, perhaps, French feuds, conspiracies, and murders are more exciting even than legitimate English history. Although Michelet asserts that in the medieval drama, the gentle and pious kings of France played the part of "Le Bon Dieu" to the devil as performed by their fierce Norman and Plantag

St. Clement's Eve. A Play. By Henry Taylor. Chapman and Hall.

Charles VI., the gay and careless boy-king of Philip Van Artevelde, has become in the present story an object of pity and reverence to his countrymen, under the infliction of insanity, with lucid intervals which alone relieve by glimpses of hope the public anarchy and misery. It was on St. Clement's Eve that his brother, Louis, Duke of Orleans, was murdered by John the Fearless, of Burgundy. The subsequent assassination of the criminal in the presence of the dauphin at the Bridge of Montereau, was a principal

cause of the English conquest of France by historians have displayed a high order of Henry V., and of the long foreign and civil creative genius. Fiction also gives opporwar which reduced the country to the lowest tunities, by the aid of episodes and underpitch of wretchedness. The commencement plots, for illustrating characteristic peculiarof the cycle of crime and misfortune has fur-ities which find no place in a sustained nished Mr. Taylor with the subject of a play narrative of great events. which deserves to be placed on a level with St. Clement's Eve is more dramatic in its Philip Van Artevelde. His long interrup- form than Philip Van Artevelde, and it even tion of poetical activity has in no degree approaches to an observance of the unities weakened his powers of dramatic construc- of place and time. The story occupies only tion, and mature experience seems even to two or three days, and it is entirely transhave enlarged his command of language, and acted inside the walls of Paris. Even the to have refined still further a style which murder, which is the catastrophe of the plot, was always idiomatic, simple, and mascu- is accounted for by relations and events line. which begin and end within the compass or the drama. At the outset, Burgundy is supposed not to have formed any design on the life of Orleans, although the feud of the rival princes has, during the king's illness, reduced France to the lowest state of misery. The anarchy of the kingdom is described with extraordinary force and eloquence by a religious enthusiast, Robert the Hermit, in an address to the Council, where Charles himself is presiding during a lucid interval. The chivalrous Duke of Orleans, moved by the hermit's appeal, proposes a reconciliation, and the Duke of Burgundy accepts the offer. In the mean time, the mob, at the instigation of two rascally monks, is proceeding to burn Passac, the king's barber, on the charge of having caused his master's derangement by his sorceries. The rescue of the victim by the Duke of Orleans prepares the way for a subsequent plot of the villanous Bastard of Montargis, who is preparing, with the aid of the monks, to carry off the novice, Iolande de Saint Remy, from the convent of the Celestines. In defeating the attempt of Montargis, Orleans incurs his enmity, and at the same time, in violation of his duty to his wife, he falls in love with Iolande, who returns his affection until she discovers his name and rank. Subdued by her purity and by the devotional excitement of her language, the duke withdraws his suit, and only entreats her to cure his brother by the application of a relic which required the ministry of a sinless maiden. Montargis, after his discomfiture, prepares an am

Although it is, perhaps, more difficult to adapt history to the purposes of fiction than to invent a story, the advantage of a subject not altogether imaginary is as great as that which a landscape gardener derives from natural wood and from an undulating surface. Elaborate plantations, and little hills excavated from artificial lakes produce a comparatively imperfect illusion. The motives and incidents which suit the scheme of the poet are more readily taken for granted when it is undeniable that the hero and the assassin at some time existed, and that the murder was actually committed. The manager who formerly advertised the "real water" with which his nautical effects were produced, understood the natural sources of human interest. If he could further have alleged that his lake or his cataract connected itself with the current of the Thames, he would have made the spectacle still more attractive. A portion of history, even when it has been taken to pieces and re-adjusted into a tragedy or a novel, stands out in stronger relief than any fanciful composition. Nothing can seem more unaccountably capricious than the alteration and inversion of events in Quentin Durward, and yet Scott has reproduced, with curious fidelity, the very spirit of Philip of Comines. His personages and their adventures might perhaps command attention if they had been fabulous princes and knights of, Arcadia; but Louis XI., in the castle of Charles the Bold not only rouses the imagination, but renders a portion of history intelligible, however lit-bush of armed men to murder his enemy, tle the dates and circumstances may coincide with the researches of the conscientious antiquary. Poets are better portrait-painters than mere annalists, although some great

and he also suborns the monks to accuse Orleans of sorcery, threatening them with the duke's vengeance, which they might be supposed to have incurred in the matter of

the rescued barber. The monks, on prefer- | leading actor would scarcely be satisfied with ring the charge before the king and council, the courtly grace of Orleans or with the poare summarily gagged and hanged; but etical eloquence of his speeches. Iolande, Montargis persuades Burgundy that Orleans with her Madonna-like enthusiasm and sadwill hold his ancient rival responsible for a ness, might have found an admirable reprecalumny which he had in fact never devised. sentative if she had come into existence beWith more successful cunning the villain of fore Miss Helen Faucit retired from the the story leads his patron to believe that the stage. Whatever may in this respect be the Duke of Orleans has intrigued with the destiny of his work, Mr. Henry Taylor has Duchess of Burgundy, and on this provoca- surpassed all contemporary rivals as a true tion the long-prepared murder of St. Clem- dramatic poet. With a genius of equally ent's Eve is sanctioned, and afterwards car-high order, and notwithstanding an extraorried out by Montargis and his accomplices. dinary power of representing various perIn a striking and beautiful scene Iolande sonalities, Mr. Browning, despite his remarkattempts to complete the cure of the king, able faculty of creating distinct character, but the immediate recurrence of his malady has always hitherto indulged himself in obbrings her within the purview of a decree of scurities which mar the perfection of his art. the council, by which Burgundy had pro- From the beginning of St. Clement's Eve to vided that any unsuccessful experiment on the end there is not a single puzzle, and there the king's health should be punished by death is also not a single interruption of the abat the stake. Attributing her failure to the sorbing interest of the story. guilt of her transient feeling towards the Duke of Orleans, Iolande is disposed to rec-its construction, it would well deserve popognize the justice of a sentence which the mob of Paris seems likely to anticipate. Orleans, on his way to defend her at the council, is murdered by Montargis in the old Street of the Temple. The Duke of Burgundy, in accordance with the true history of the time, avows his guilt at the council board, and then rides in defiant security out of Paris. Montargis is slain by a private enemy, and Iolande by a chance arrow from the crowd, and Robert the Hermit winds up the cycle of horrors in a speech of prophetic gloom, after the manner of the chorus of an old Athenian tragedy.

If the drama had been less remarkable in

ularity as a poem. Mr. Taylor's command over language and metre is always completer in dialogue than either in descriptive and reflective poetry, or even in speeches which are in the nature of soliloquies. His poetical rhetoric, with its picturesque plainness, and its preference of the shortest words and the simplest phrases, is the very opposite of the stilted style of composition which may be called rhetorical poetry or verse. His interlocutors speak persuasively, eloquently, or simply, as the occasion requires. In all cases, they attain the object of their discourse by speaking intelligibly. The speech of Robert the Hermit is in itself a singularly poetical passage, but the images and language are primarily adapted to rouse the attention of the delinquent princes, and not to excite the admiration of the modern reader. In a vision at sea, the hermit saw the body of a woman lying on the waters, representing France in the contending clutches of Orleans and Burgundy :

It would be unfair to delineate the mere skeleton of a story which is filled up with extraordinary art, except for the purpose of showing how skilfully every incident is subordinated to the general design of the play. The historical groundwork is laid out at the commencement with masterly brevity, and with striking effect, and the subsidiary events are at once appropriate to the time, and indispensable to the full development of the plot. It may be doubted whether, in the absence of any marked and pre-eminent character, the drama would be adapted for the modern theatre. Mr. Macready, as Philip Van Artevelde, by his constant pres- This the right breast, and that the left, and each ence on the stage, gave a certain harmony To tear the body. Then there came a cry Fought with the other, nor for that they ceased to a composition which was undeniably want-Piercing the storm-Woe, woe for France; ing in dramatic union of construction. A

"Thereupon were perched Two birds, a falcon and a kite, whose heads Bore each a crown, and each [both ?] had bloody And blood was on the claws of each, which clasped

beaks,

woe, woe,

The effective simplicity of Mr. Taylor's language may furnish a useful lesson to students, and to maturer critics. In thirty-five lines, quoted above, if the compound adverbs hereafter" and "thereupon " are omitted, there are only four words of more than two syllables, and the monosyllables exceed the dissyllables in the proportion of seven or eight to one. The most familiar and elementary forms of the English language are best suited to the expression of earnest feeling, especially in a popular address. In calmer passages, Mr. Taylor uses simple polysyllables less sparingly; but he never admits a merely bookish word, and there are, perhaps, not a dozen abstract

terms to be found in the entire drama. The accumulation of sesquipedalian circumlocutions in fiction, in rhetoric, and in verse, is characteristic of Americans, of Scotchmen who pride themselves on cultivating provincial pedantry, and more especially of halfeducated literary Londoners. In argumentative treatises long words of foreign extraction sometimes furnish the most condensed expression of complex notions or generalizations. Abstract reasoning requires corresponding phrases, while untaught nature and consummate refinement concur in using the plainest forms of speech in giving vent to excitement and to passion. The language of Robert the Hermit, and of Iolande, is as

The rapidity of association which properly free from affectation of simplicity as from accompanies imaginative excitement is hap-vulgar and tawdry amplification. Many pily exemplified in the transition from the portions of the Eve of St. Clement might be narrative to the concluding appeal. The selected as specimens of poetic feeling and hermit trembled when he saw a pine and an expression, and yet their highest value conash struck by lightning, "for ye are they; "sists in the dramatic fitness which is disand yet the thunder-stricken trees are not the symbols which he recalls, as he unconsciously recurs to the earlier vision of the falcon and the kite: "For ye are they that

turbed when any passage is displaced from its natural position. Among living English poets Mr. Taylor stands alone in the power of constructing a story.