‘He best can paint them, who can feel them most,’
the creator of Monimia and Belvidera must have been endowed with a heart tender in no common degree. ‘He was,’ we are told, ‘of middle size, inclinable to corpulency, had thoughtful, yet lively, and as it were speaking eyes.’
Otway’s reputation rests entirely on his two great performances, The Orphan and Venice Preserved. His other plays deserve no special notice, although Don Carlos, which is said to have for many years attracted larger audiences than either of his masterpieces, might have been a good play if it had not been written in rhyme. The action is highly dramatic, and the characters, though artless, are not ineffective; but the pathos in which the poet excelled is continually disturbed by the bombastic couplets, ever trembling on the brink of the ridiculous. The remorse of Philip after the murder of his wife and son is as grotesque an instance of the forcible feeble as could easily be found, and is a melancholy instance indeed of the declension of the English drama, when contrasted with the demeanour of Othello in similar circumstances. Otway, however, was yet to show that his faults were rather his age’s than his own. The fashion of rhyme must have had much to do with the bombast of Don Carlos, for in The Orphan, his next effort in serious tragedy, there is hardly any rant, even when the situation might have seemed to have excused the exaggerated expression of emotion. The central incident of this admirable tragedy—the deception of a maiden beloved by two brothers, through the personation of the favoured one by his rival—seems now to be held to exclude it from the stage. The objection would probably prove to be imaginary, for the play was performed as late as 1819, when no less an actress than Miss O’Neill represented Monimia, and the diction is in general of quite exemplary propriety for a play of the period. Its principal defect as a work of art is that the pathos springs almost solely from the situation, and that the personages have hardly any hold upon our sympathies except as sufferers from an unhappy fatality. So powerful is the situation, nevertheless, that the sorrows of Castalio and Monimia can never fail to move; the poet’s language, too, is at its best, simpler and more remote from extravagance than even in Venice Preserved. The description of the old hag is justly celebrated:
‘I spied a wrinkled hag, with age grown double,
Picking dry sticks, and mumbling to herself;
Her eyes with scalding rheum were galled and red;
Cold palsy shook her head, her hands seemed withered,
And on her crooked shoulders had she wrapt
The tattered remnant of an old striped hanging,
Which served to keep her carcase from the cold;
So there was nothing of a piece about her;
Her lower weeds were all o’er coarsely patched
With different coloured rags, black, red, white, yellow,
And seemed to speak variety of wretchedness.’
There are also delightful touches of poetry:
‘Oh, thou art tender all:
Gentle and kind as sympathizing nature!
When a sad story has been told, I’ve seen
Thy little breasts, with soft compassion swelled,
Shove up and down and heave like dying birds.’
The opening speech of act iv., sc. 2, also reveals a feeling for nature unusual in Restoration poetry, and may be taken to symbolize Otway’s regrets for the country. The items of the description are in no way conventional, and would not have occurred to one without experience of rural life:
‘Wished morning’s come! And now upon the plains
And distant mountains, where they feed their flocks,
The happy shepherds leave their homely huts,
And with their pipes proclaim the new-born day.
The lusty swain comes with his well-filled scrip
Of healthful viands, which, when hunger calls,
With much content and appetite he eats,
To follow in the fields his daily toil,
And dress the grateful glebe that yields him fruits.
The beasts that under the warm hedges slept,
And weathered out the cold bleak night, are up,
And looking towards the neighbouring pastures, raise
Their voice, and bid their fellow-brutes good-morrow.
The cheerful birds, too, on the tops of trees
Assemble all in quires, and with their notes
Salute and welcome up the rising sun.
There’s no condition here so cursed as mine.’
Venice Preserved, Otway’s most memorable work, though inferior in mere poetry and unstudied simplicity to The Orphan, surpasses it in tragic grandeur, in variety of action, and in intensity of interest. It has the further great advantage that the interest does not entirely arise from the situation, but that at least one of the characters is a skilful piece of painting from the life, and very probably from the author. In Jaffier we have a vivid portrait of the man who is entirely governed by the affections, and who sways from ardent resolution to a weakness hardly distinguishable from treachery, as friendship and love alternately incline him. The little we know of Otway warrants the impression that he was such a man, and assuredly he could not have excited such warm interest in a character so feeble in his offence, so abject in his repentance, and in general so perilously verging on the despicable, without a keen sympathy with the subject of his portrait. Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner. Pierre, though an imposing figure, is much less subtly painted than his friend; and Belvidera, her husband’s evil genius, interests only through her sorrows. The ‘despicable scenes of low farce’ which eke the drama out, are a grievous blot upon it. M. Taine may be right in deeming some comic relief allowable, but such trash is neither relief nor comedy. The language of the serious portion of the play, however, is in general dignified and tragic. Perhaps the best conducted, as it is the best known, is that in which Pierre spurns the remorseful Jaffier: