Like a pale martyr in his shirt of fire.
Growing older is an opportunity for you to increase your value and competence as the neural connections in your hippocampus and throughout your brain increase, weaving into your brain and body the wisdom of a life well lived, which allows you to stop living out of fear of disappointing others and being imperfect. Ageless living is courageous living. It means being undistracted by the petty dramas of life because you have enough experience to know what’s not worth worrying about and what ought to be your priorities.
A poem round and perfect as a star.
When the Divine in the outward world has once been fully recognised, there can be nothing more or less divine, nothing more or less miraculous, either in nature or in history. Those who assign a divine and miraculous character to certain consecrated events only in the history of the world, are in great danger of desecrating thereby the whole drama of history, and of making it, not only profane, but godless. It is easy to call this a pantheistic view of the world. It is pantheistic, in the best sense of the word, so much so that any other view would soon become atheistic. Even the Greeks suspected the omnipresence of the Divine, when, as early as the time of Thales, they declared that _all_ is full of the gods. The choice here lies really between Pantheism and Atheism. If anything, the greatest or the smallest, can ever happen without the will of God, then God is no longer God. To distinguish between a direct and indirect influence of the Divine, to admit a general and a special providence, is like a relapse into polytheism, a belief in one and many gods.
So long as we look on the history of the human race as something that might or might not have been, we cannot wonder that the student of religion should prefer to form his opinions of the nature of religion and the laws of its growth from the masterpiece of Thomas Aquinas, the _Summa Sacræ Theologiæ_, rather than from the _Sacred Books of the East_. But when we have learnt to recognise in history the realisation of a rational purpose, when we have learnt to look upon it as in the truest sense of the word a Divine Drama, the plot revealed in it ought to assume in the eyes of a philosopher also, a meaning and a value far beyond the speculations of even the most enlightened and logical theologians.
In winter, when the dismal rain Comes down in slanting lines, And Wind, that grand old harper, smote His thunder-harp of pines.
Ageless living is courageous living. It means being undistracted by the petty dramas of life because you have enough experience to know what’s not worth worrying about and what ought to be your priorities.
Whence? O Heavens, whither? Sense knows not; faith knows not; only that it is through mystery to mystery, from God to God.
The motive of the drama of human life is the necessity, laid upon every man who comes into the world, of discovering the mean between self-assertion and self-restraint suited to his character and his circumstances. And the eternally tragic aspect of the drama lies in this: that the problem set before us is one the elements of which can be but imperfectly known, and of which even an approximately right solution rarely presents itself, until that stern critic, aged experience, has been furnished with ample justification for venting his sarcastic humour upon the irreparable blunders we have already made.
The facts which we are about to relate belong to that dramatic and living reality, which the historian sometimes neglects for lack of time and space. There, nevertheless, we insist upon it, is life, palpitation, human tremor. Petty details, as we think we have already said, are, so to speak, the foliage of great events, and are lost in the distance of history. The epoch, surnamed "of the riots," abounds in details of this nature. Judicial inquiries have not revealed, and perhaps have not sounded the depths, for another reason than history. We shall therefore bring to light, among the known and published peculiarities, things which have not heretofore been known, about facts over which have passed the forgetfulness of some, and the death of others. The majority of the actors in these gigantic scenes have disappeared; beginning with the very next day they held their peace; but of what we shall relate, we shall be able to say: "We have seen this." We alter a few names, for history relates and does not inform against, but the deed which we shall paint will be genuine. In accordance with the conditions of the book which we are now writing, we shall show only one side and one episode, and certainly, the least known at that, of the two days, the 5th and the 6th of June, 1832, but we shall do it in such wise that the reader may catch a glimpse, beneath the gloomy veil which we are about to lift, of the real form of this frightful public adventure.
"Amusing, certainly," replied the young man, "inasmuch as, instead of shedding tears as at the fictitious tale of woe produced at a theatre, you behold in a law-court a case of real and genuine distress--a drama of life. The prisoner whom you there see pale, agitated, and alarmed, instead of--as is the case when a curtain falls on a tragedy--going home to sup peacefully with his family, and then retiring to rest, that he may recommence his mimic woes on the morrow,--is removed from your sight merely to be reconducted to his prison and delivered up to the executioner. I leave you to judge how far your nerves are calculated to bear you through such a scene. Of this, however, be assured, that should any favorable opportunity present itself, I will not fail to offer you the choice of being present."
This stern cloister was not so well walled off, however, but that the life of the passions of the outside world, drama, and even romance, did not make their way in. To prove this, we will confine ourselves to recording here and to briefly mentioning a real and incontestable fact, which, however, bears no reference in itself to, and is not connected by any thread whatever with the story which we are relating. We mention the fact for the sake of completing the physiognomy of the convent in the reader's mind.
Marius had had a furnace in his brain all day long; now it was a whirlwind. This whirlwind which was within him, produced on him the effect of being outside of him and of bearing him away. It seemed to him that he was already at an immense distance from life. His two luminous months of joy and love, ending abruptly at that frightful precipice, Cosette lost to him, that barricade, M. Mabeuf getting himself killed for the Republic, himself the leader of the insurgents,--all these things appeared to him like a tremendous nightmare. He was obliged to make a mental effort to recall the fact that all that surrounded him was real. Marius had already seen too much of life not to know that nothing is more imminent than the impossible, and that what it is always necessary to foresee is the unforeseen. He had looked on at his own drama as a piece which one does not understand.
"Freely depicted in his own vocation, gentlemen, the Canaller would make a fine dramatic hero, so abundantly and picturesquely wicked is he. Like Mark Antony, for days and days along his green-turfed, flowery Nile, he indolently floats, openly toying with his red-cheeked Cleopatra, ripening his apricot thigh upon the sunny deck. But ashore, all this effeminacy is dashed. The brigandish guise which the Canaller so proudly sports; his slouched and gaily-ribboned hat betoken his grand features. A terror to the smiling innocence of the villages through which he floats; his swart visage and bold swagger are not unshunned in cities. Once a vagabond on his own canal, I have received good turns from one of these Canallers; I thank him heartily; would fain be not ungrateful; but it is often one of the prime redeeming qualities of your man of violence, that at times he has as stiff an arm to back a poor stranger in a strait, as to plunder a wealthy one. In sum, gentlemen, what the wildness of this canal life is, is emphatically evinced by this; that our wild whale-fishery contains so many of its most finished graduates, and that scarce any race of mankind, except Sydney men, are so much distrusted by our whaling captains. Nor does it at all diminish the curiousness of this matter, that to many thousands of our rural boys and young men born along its line, the probationary life of the Grand Canal furnishes the sole transition between quietly reaping in a Christian corn-field, and recklessly ploughing the waters of the most barbaric seas.
Belated, and not innocently, one bitter winter's midnight, on the road running between two country towns, the blacksmith half-stupidly felt the deadly numbness stealing over him, and sought refuge in a leaning, dilapidated barn. The issue was, the loss of the extremities of both feet. Out of this revelation, part by part, at last came out the four acts of the gladness, and the one long, and as yet uncatastrophied fifth act of the grief of his life's drama.
The plays of Lope, and those of the national Spanish drama in general, are divided into classes which it is naturally not always easy, and which there is no reason to suppose him always to have intended, to keep distinct from one another. After in his early youth composing eclogues, pastoral plays, and allegorical moralities in the old style, he began his theatrical activity at Madrid about 1590, and the plays which he thenceforth produced have been distributed under the following heads. The _comedias_, all of which are in verse, include (1) the so-called _c. de capa y espada_--not comedies proper, but dramas in which the principal personages are taken from the class of society that wears cloak and sword. Gallantry is their main theme, an interesting and complicated, but well-constructed and perspicuous intrigue their chief feature; and this is usually accompanied by an underplot in which the _gracioso_ plays his part. Their titles are frequently taken from the old proverbs or proverbial phrases of the people[52] upon the theme suggested, by which the plays often (as G. H. Lewes admirably expresses it) constitute a kind of gloss (_glosa_) in action. This is the favourite species of the national Spanish theatre; and to the plots of the plays belonging to it the drama of other nations owes a debt almost incalculable in extent. (2) The _c. heróicas_ are distinguished by some of their personages being of royal or very high rank, and by their themes being often historical and largely[53] (though not invariably[54]) taken from the national annals, or founded on contemporary or recent events.[55] Hence they exhibit a greater gravity of tone; but in other respects there is no difference between them and the cloak-and-sword comedies with which they share the element of comic underplots. Occasionally Lope condescended in the opposite direction, to (3) plays of which the scene is laid in common life, but for which no special name appears to have existed.[56] Meanwhile, both he and his successors were too devoted sons of the church not to acknowledge in some sort her claim to influence the national drama. This claim she had never relinquished, even when she could no longer retain an absolute control over the stage. For a time, indeed, she was able to reassert even this; for the exhibition of all secular plays was in 1598 prohibited by the dying Philip II., and remained so for two years; and Lope with his usual facility proceeded to supply religious plays of various kinds. After a few dramas on scriptural subjects he turned to the legends of the saints; and the _comedias de santos_, of which he wrote a great number, became an accepted later Spanish variety of the miracle-play. True, however, to the popular instincts of his genius, he threw himself with special zeal and success into the composition of another kind of religious plays--a development of the Corpus Christi pageants, in honour of which all the theatres had to close their doors for a month. These were the famous _autos sacramentales_ (i.e. solemn "acts" or proceedings in honour of the Sacrament), which were performed in the open air by actors who had filled the cars of the sacred procession. Of these Lope wrote about 400. These entertainments were arranged on a fixed scheme, comprising a prologue in dialogue between two or more actors in character (_loa_), a farce (_entremes_), and the _auto_ proper, an allegorical scene of religious purport, as an example of which Ticknor cites the _Bridge of the World_,--in which the Prince of Darkness in vain seeks to defend the bridge against the Knight of the Cross, who finally leads the Soul of Man in triumph across it. Not all the _entremeses_ of Lope and others were, however, composed for insertion in these _autos_. This long-lived popular species, together with the old kind of dramatic dialogue called _eclogues_, completes the list of the varieties of his dramatic works. Entry: 11
The decline of dramatic composition of the higher class, perceptible in the history of the English theatre about the beginning of the 19th century, was justly attributed by Sir Walter Scott to the wearing out of the French model that had been so long wrought upon; but when he asserted that the new impulse which was sought in the dramatic literature of Germany was derived from some of its worst, instead of from its noblest, productions--from Kotzebue rather than from Lessing, Schiller and Goethe--he showed a very imperfect acquaintance with a complicated literary movement which was obliquely reflected in the stage-plays of Iffland and his contemporaries. The change which was coming over English literature was in truth of a wider and deeper nature than it was possible for even one of its chief representatives to perceive. As that literature freed itself from the fetters so long worn by it as indispensable ornaments, and threw aside the veil which had so long obscured both the full glory of its past and the lofty capabilities of its future, it could not resort except tentatively to a form which like the dramatic is bound by a hundred bonds to the life of the age itself. Soon, the poems with which Scott and Byron, and the unrivalled prose fictions with which Scott, both satisfied and stimulated the imaginative demands of the public, diverted the attention of the cultivated classes from dramatic literature, which was unable to escape, with the light foot of verse or prose fiction, into "the new, the romantic land." New themes, new ideas, new forms occupied a new generation of writers and readers; nor did the drama readily lend itself as a vessel into which to pour so many fermenting elements. In Byron the impressions produced upon a mind not less open to impulses from without than subjective in its way of recasting them, called forth a series of dramatic attempts betraying a more or less wilful ignorance of the demands of dramatic compositions; his beautiful _Manfred_, partly suggested by Goethe's _Faust_, and his powerful _Cain_, have but the form of plays; his tragedies on Italian historical subjects show some resemblance in their political rhetoric to the contemporary works of Alfieri; his _Sardanapalus_, autobiographically interesting, fails to meet the demands of the stage; his _Werner_ (of which the authorship has been ascribed to the duchess of Devonshire) is a hastily dramatized sensation novel. To Coleridge (1772-1834), who gave to English literature a splendidly loose translation of Schiller's _Wallenstein_, the same poet's _Robbers_ (to which Wordsworth's only dramatic attempt, the _Borderers_, is likewise indebted) had probably suggested the subject of his tragedy of _Osorio_, afterwards acted under the title of _Remorse_. Far superior to this is his later drama of _Zapolya_, a genuine homage to Shakespeare, out of the themes of two of whose plays it is gracefully woven. Scott, who in his earlier days had translated Goethe's _Götz von Berlichingen_, gained no reputation by his own dramatic compositions. W. S. Landor, apart from those _Imaginary Conversations_ upon which he best loved to expend powers of observation and characterization such as have been given to few playwrights, cast in a formally dramatic mould studies of character of which the value is far from being confined to their wealth in beauties of detail. Of these the magnificent, but in construction altogether undramatic, _Count Julian_, is the most noteworthy. Shelley's _The Cenci_, on the other hand, is not only a poem of great beauty, but a drama of true power, abnormally revolting indeed in theme, but singularly pure and delicate in treatment. A humbler niche in the temple of dramatic literature belongs to some of the plays of C. R. Maturin,[261] Sir T. N. Talfourd,[262] and Dean Milman.[263] Entry: P
The mask (or masque) was a more elastic kind of composition, mixing in varying proportions its constituent elements of declamation and dialogue, music and dancing, decoration and scenery. In its least elaborate literary form--which, of course, externally was the most elaborate--it closely approached the pageant; in other instances the distinctness of its characters or the fulness of the action introduced into its scheme, brought it nearer to the regular drama. A frequent ornament of Queen Elizabeth's progresses, it was cultivated with increased assiduity in the reign of James I., and in that of his successor outshone, by the favour it enjoyed with court and nobility, the attractions of the regular drama itself. Most of the later Elizabethan dramatists contributed to this species, upon which Shakespeare expended the resources of his fancy only incidentally in the course of his dramas; but by far the most successful writer of masks was Ben Jonson, of whose numerous compositions of this kind many hold a permanent place in English poetic literature, and "next" whom, in his own judgment, "only Fletcher and Chapman could write a mask." From a poetic point of view, however, they were at least rivalled by Dekker and Ford; in productivity and favour T. Campion, who was equally eminent as poet and as musician, seems for a time to have excelled. Inasmuch, however, as the history of the mask in England is to a great extent that of "painting and carpentry" and of Inigo Jones, and as, moreover, this kind of piece, while admitting dramatic elements, is of its nature occasional, it need not further be pursued here. The _Microcosmus_ of T. Nabbes (printed 1637), which is very like a morality, seems to have been the first mask brought upon the public stage. It was the performance of a mask by Queen Henrietta Maria and her ladies at Whitehall which had some years previously (1632) been thought to have supplied to the invective of _Histrio-Mastix_ against the stage the occasion for disloyal innuendo; and it was for the performance of a mask in a great nobleman's castle that Milton--a Puritan of a very different cast--not long afterwards (1634) wrote one of the loftiest and loveliest of English poems. _Comus_ has been judged and condemned as a drama--unjustly, for the dramatic qualities of a mask are not essential to it as a species. Yet its history in England remains inseparably connected with that of the Elizabethan drama. In later times the mask merged into the opera, or continued a humble life of its own apart from contact with higher literary effort. It is strange that later English poets should have done so little to restore to its nobler uses, and to invest with a new significance, a form so capable of further development as the poetic mask. Entry: P
The first place among the National or Popular epics belongs to the _Nibelungenlied_, which received its present form in Austria about the turn of the 12th and 13th centuries. Combining, as it does, elements from various cycles of sagas--the lower Rhenish legend of Siegfried, the Burgundian saga of Gunther and Hagen, the Gothic saga of Dietrich and Etzel--it stands out as the most representative epic of German medieval life. And in literary power, dramatic intensity and singleness of purpose its eminence is no less unique. The vestiges of gradual growth--of irreconcilable elements imperfectly welded together--may not have been entirely effaced, but they in no way lessen the impression of unity which the poem leaves behind it; whoever the welder of the sagas may have been, he was clearly a poet of lofty imagination and high epic gifts (see NIBELUNGENLIED). Less imposing as a whole, but in parts no less powerful in its appeal to the modern mind, is the second of the German national epics, _Gudrun_, which was written early in the 13th century. This poem, as it has come down to us, is the work of an Austrian, but the subject belongs to a cycle of sagas which have their home on the shores of the North Sea. It seems almost a freak of chance that Siegfried, the hero of the Rhineland, should occupy so prominent a position in the _Nibelungenlied_, whereas Dietrich von Bern (i.e. of Verona), the name under which Theodoric the Great had been looked up to for centuries by the German people as their national hero, should have left the stamp of his personality on no single epic of the intrinsic worth of the _Nibelungenlied_. He appears, however, more or less in the background of a number of romances--_Die Rabenschlacht_, _Dietrichs Flucht_, _Alpharts Tod_, _Biterolf und Dietlieb_, _Laurin_, &c.--which make up what is usually called the _Heldenbuch_. It is tempting, indeed, to see in this very unequal collection the basis for what, under more favourable circumstances, might have developed into an epic even more completely representative of the German nation than the _Nibelungenlied_. Entry: II
GOMEZ DE AVELLANEDA, GERTRUDIS (1814-1873), Spanish dramatist and poet, was born at Puerto Príncipe (Cuba) on the 23rd of March 1814, and removed to Spain in 1836. Her _Poesías líricas_ (1841), issued with a laudatory preface by Gallego, made a most favourable impression and were republished with additional poems in 1850. In 1846 she married a diplomatist named Pedro Sabater, became a widow within a year, and in 1853 married Colonel Domingo Verdugo. Meanwhile she had published _Sab_ (1839), _Guatimozín_ (1846), and other novels of no great importance. She obtained, however, a series of successes on the stage with _Alfonso Munio_ (1844), a tragedy in the new romantic manner; with _Saúl_ (1849), a biblical drama indirectly suggested by Alfieri; and with _Baltasar_ (1858), a piece which bears some resemblance to Byron's _Sardanapalus_. Her commerce with the world had not diminished her natural piety, and, on the death of her second husband, she found so much consolation in religion that she had thoughts of entering a convent. She died at Madrid on the 2nd of February 1873, full of mournful forebodings as to the future of her adopted country. It is impossible to agree with Villemain that "le génie de don Luis de Léon et de sainte Thérèse a reparu sous le voile funèbre de Gomez de Avellaneda," for she has neither the monk's mastery of poetic form nor the nun's sublime simplicity of soul. She has a grandiose tragical vision of life, a vigorous eloquence rooted in pietistic pessimism, a dramatic gift effective in isolated acts or scenes; but she is deficient in constructive power and in intellectual force, and her lyrics, though instinct with melancholy beauty, or the tenderness of resigned devotion, too often lack human passion and sympathy. The edition of her _Obras literarias_ (5 vols., 1869-1871), still incomplete, shows a scrupulous care for minute revision uncommon in Spanish writers; but her emendations are seldom happy. But she is interesting as a link between the classic and romantic schools of poetry, and, whatever her artistic shortcomings, she has no rivals of her own sex in Spain during the 19th century. Entry: GOMEZ