VII
OLD-WORLD ROMANCE AND NEW-WORLD SATIRE THE BRAVO, THE HEIDENMAUER, THE HEADSMAN, HOMEWARD BOUND, HOME AS FOUND
The Bravo was the first of a group of stories on themes suggested to their author during his stay on the Continent. It deals with Venetian life during the decline of the Republic. Jacopo Frontoni, the reputed bravo, becomes party to the iniquitous system which conceals crimes committed in the interest of the oligarchy, by throwing the suspicion on himself, all to the end that he may save his aged father, unjustly imprisoned by the state. Under this odium Jacopo lives until life becomes unendurable. At the moment he is meditating flight he is himself enmeshed in the toils and dies by the hand of the public executioner. A power which holds that it can do no wrong has a short way with servants who might betray its tortuous policy.
Jacopo comes too near to being a saint. He would have been more lifelike had he been guilty of one at least of the twenty-five murders laid at his door. Even a hired assassin of the Fifteenth Century might show filial piety.
His fate more or less involves that of the old fisherman of the lagoons, Antonio, a representative of that helpless, oppressed class which is without rights save the right of being punished if it does not obey. Antonio is a nobly pathetic character, one of the finest to which Cooper’s imagination has given being. His patience, his love for the grandchild taken from him by the state to serve in the galleys, his courage in pleading before the Doge and even in the dread presence of the Council of Three that the boy may be given back to him until he has been formed in habits of virtue, are strong and beautiful traits.
Violetta and Don Camillo furnish the love motive, without which a romance of Venice were barren. We sympathize with them and rejoice in their escape. More than this the author could not ask.
That the story contains anachronisms admits of no doubt. It may be that the arraignment of the oligarchy is too unrelieved. On the other hand, the virtues of the narrative are many. The movement is rapid, the sentences clear, the various strands of interest artfully woven, and the conclusion inevitable and dramatic.
The Heidenmauer deals with the manners and the antagonisms of the time when the schism of Luther was undermining the Church. Far less engrossing than its predecessor and weighted with a cumbrous style, the book has its right valiant warriors and militant churchmen, its burghers, peasants, and other dramatis personæ of German romance. There are characters like Gottlob and old Ilse whose speech is always fresh and agreeable. The French abbé is voluble and might have been wittier. That one does not sit down to a table spread with an intellectual feast like that served in The Monastery or The Abbot, is no reason for disdaining the fare served in The Heidenmauer.
In The Headsman we follow the story of a highborn girl who has given her heart to a young soldier of fortune only to discover in him the son of that most loathed of beings, the official executioner of Berne. The office is hereditary, and were the youth’s real condition known the odious duties would in time fall on him. It is a foregone conclusion that Sigismund shall be found to be of noble birth, and Adelheid’s reward proportioned to the greatness of her soul. This is but one thread of a fairly complicated and romantic plot. The interest of the narrative is well sustained and the denouement unanticipated. None of these three romances is, strictly speaking, a novel of purpose, and the least attractive deserves friendlier critical treatment than is commonly accorded it.
In the same group may be placed Mercedes of Castile, which, if it cannot hold the attention by reason of the loves of Don Luis de Bobadilla and Mercedes, and the fate of the unfortunate Ozema, may be read (by whoever can take history well diluted with fiction) for the story of Columbus’s first voyage.
The Monikins contrasts the ways of men with the ways of monkeys, much to the disadvantage of men. Really it is no duller than some of the professed satire of the present day; it is merely longer and more desperately serious.