— — — —
Oh thou, who o’er thy stormy grandeur flingest
A struggling beam that dazzles, awes, and vanishes—
Thou, who dost blend our wonder with our curses—
Why didst thou this?
It is the great fault of Bertram as a dramatic character, that he so poorly upholds the high attitude assigned to him by others, and that his imposing qualities chiefly rest on declamatory effects. As a poetical figure he occasionally becomes, thanks to life antecedents, surrounded with a gloomy splendour exciting the kind of admiration so keenly resented by critics who felt themselves called upon to extend their verdict to the moral side of the question. The heroine was, though unjustly, comprised[78] in the condemnation of the pernicious tendency of the play:—‘it is too much the taste of the present day, to bring forward the guilty passion of a wife for her paramour — — — not, indeed, with direct admiration, but in such a manner, and with such a mixture of virtuous remorse and high-toned feeling, that we cannot hate the crime. Now a heroine who commits adultery certainly was a startling phenomenon on the English stage, and it was the occurrence of this offence which is said[79] finally to have caused Bertram to be put aside. Yet in the play there is no connivance at the frailty of Imogine. When she comes to unburthen her heart to the prior, this arbiter of morals has nothing but harsh words for her; he sees nothing sublime in her guilt, which at the end plunges her into the deepest misery. In the preface to his next play Maturin says, with reference to the shock he had given with the story of Imogine: ‘If Tragedy is not allowed to exhibit crimes and passions, what is left for her to exhibit?—If crime is attended with punishment as its consequence, I conceive the interests of morality are not compromised’—but he was not aware that it is sometimes the criminal more than the crime that the guardians of the interests of morality desire to hate.—Otherwise Imogine is sketched with something of Maturin’s skill at depicting female character, and hers is, as Kean observed, the principal part in the play as far as histrionic powers are concerned. Her reviving passion for Bertram, her misery and repentance are developed in a language comparatively free from the tinge of melodrama, and sometimes pervaded with a deep and natural feeling, like her confession to the prior:
Last night, oh! last night told a dreadful secret—
The moon went down, its sinking ray shut out,
The parting form of one beloved too well.—
The fountain of my heart dried up within me,—