of bona fide pirates and buccaneers. One of these ruins bears the name of Blue Beard's, the other of Black Beard's, Tower. This New World Blue Beard, however, unlike, so far, to his namesake of European or, as some say, of Asiatic celebrity, has left behind him no record by which he can be identified- not so much as a fairy legend; no Sister Anne climbed to the top of his tower to proclaim to her hastening brothers the dark mysteries within its walls; and we are free to conjecture not seven, but if we like, seventy decapitated wives, and horrors compared with which those of the famous blood-stained closet were gentle matrimonial endearments.

More, or perhaps less, fortunate in this respect, Black Beard has found authentic chroniclers of his deeds, private as well as public. A native of Bristol, Captain Trench-to give him the name by which he started in life—was one of the many brave sea-ruling Britons who in the seventeenth century developed by a ready course of natural selection, and a pre-Darwinian struggle for life, from privateers into pirates.

Our hero's short but glorious career was run between Jamaica and the Virginian coast. St. Thomas lies midway, and the innumerable creeks, inlets, and bays that indent its bush-lined shore may well have afforded shelter and concealment to Black Beard as well as to others of this trade. And certainly when attired in his favourite full-dress style, and with his beard (which we are assured covered his whole face, eyes and nose probably excepted) twisted into a hundred curls, each curl dandily tied up in a bow of red ribbon, and illuminated by twenty burning matches stuck, ten of a side, under the brim of his hat, the Captain must have produced quite a sensation among the inhabitants-Carib, negro, Dutch, or Daneof the little island. Indeed the "flaming ministers" of his toilet seem to have proved for West Indian fair ones not less attractive than lighted tapers commonly are for evening moths; and we read that fourteen wivessuccessive or simultaneous, the story says not-were drawn by their rays, and entangled in the mazes of that ribboned beard. Unfortunately the human butterflies seem to have paid not less dearly for their folly than is ordinarily the case with their insect prototypes, since Black Beard, unless much maligned, was a very Blue Beard in domestic life.

"A cross between Puck and Moloch " is the title given by the shrewd historical estimate of Macaulay to one of the pet monarch heroes of an eccentricity-loving writer of our own day. What the father of the Great Frederick was in his own family and Court, that and more was Captain Trench among his crew-a hero after Mr. Carlyle's own heart, and not less worthy of a place in the Pantheon of his worship than Friedrich Wilhelm or Governor Eyre himself. Indeed the choicest diversions of Potsdam or Morant Bay seem tame when compared with Black Beard's practical fun. "Let us make a little hell of our own, and try who can bear it longest," said, one day, the gallant Captain, as he forced some choice spirits of his crew to descend with him into the ship's hold. When all were below, Black Beard carefully closed the hatches on the company and himself; VOL. XXX, No. 176.

9.

and then proceeded to set on fire several pots which he had previously arranged, ready filled with shavings and sulphur. His companions, almost suffocated, soon cried out for mercy; but Black Beard's lungs, as well as his heart, were made of sterner stuff, and he did not let them out of his imitation hell till they had almost exchanged the trial for the reality. Thinking them, however, it seems, sufficiently prepared by this experiment for the latter, he soon after took measures for sending one or two of them there at short notice. To this end he invited his comrades one evening to a sociable merry-making in his cabin; and, while they sat drinking there, he suddenly blew out the light, crossed his hands, in each of which was a loaded and a ready-cocked pistol, and cheerfully fired across the table. Sad to say, his praiseworthy intentions were frustrated of their accomplishment; only wounds, and not death, following upon this "merry jest." But to do the bearded Captain justice, when not his own men, but prisoners from another ship, were before him, he seldom failed to take better aim. How much the unhanged survivors of his crew, not to mention his fourteen disconsolate widows, bewailed his loss, when Lieutenant Maynard, R.N., sailed into the harbour of Virginia with this worthy's head, beard ribbons, matches, and all, suspended from his bowsprit, history has left unrecorded.

Whether Black Beard really built, and, while on shore-taking refuge from his pursuers, or recruiting supplies for fresh exploits at sea-actually dwelt in the thick-walled round tower that now crowns the highly respectable summit of Government Hill, is, however, uncertain; here, as in the case of so many other heroic memorials, it is merely tradition versus want of evidence. Old ship-cannon have indeed been dug out of the neighbouring soil; and a huge oblong mass of brickwork, close by the tower itself, is said to cover alike the remains-headless, I supposeand the ill-gotten riches of the pirate. But from one or other motive— chiefly, perhaps, from the listless indifference that characterises the white population of the West Indian settlements in general-nobody has taken the trouble to settle, by a few strokes of the mattock, the truth, or, more probably still, the falsehood, of the legend.

"Requiescat in pace," if peace there be for such, along with the great Captains Kidd, Avory, Low, and other kindred sea-heroes, "all of them fallen, slain by the sword, who caused their terror in the land of the living." Hell-twins, piracy and slavery-they have both, after centuries of blood and crime, been well nigh exorcised from the New-World coasts, or only linger under the appropriate flags of Spain and Holy Church, the flags of Alva and Pizarro, of Torquemada and the Inquisition. It is "the glory, far above all else on earth," of England to have first pronounced their exorcism; the final consummation of that sentence on the ill remnants of Cuba may, though delayed awhile, be yet executed by England's eldest child, the great American Republic. The work is a good work: honour to those who complete it, of whatever nationality they be !

W. G. P.

179

Victor Hugo's Romances.

Après le roman pittoresque mais prosaïque de Walter Scott il restera un autre roman à créer, plus beau et plus complet encore selon nous. C'est le roman, à la fois drame et épopée, pittoresque mais poétique, réel mais idéal, vrai mais grand, qui enchâssera Walter Scott dans Homère.-Victor Hugo on Quentin Durward.

VICTOR HUGO's romances occupy an important position in the history of literature; many innovations, timidly made elsewhere, have in them been. carried boldly out to their last consequences; much that was indefinite in literary tendencies has attained to definite maturity; many things have come to a point and been distinguished one from the other; and it is only in the last romance of all, Quatre Vingt Treize, that this culmination is most perfect. This is in the nature of things. Men who are in any way typical of a stage of progress may be compared more justly to the hand upon the dial of the clock, which continues to advance as it indicates, than to the stationary milestone, which is only the measure of what is past. The movement is not arrested. That significant something by which the work of such a man differs from that of his predecessors, goes on disengaging itself and becoming more and more articulate and cognisable. The same principle of growth that carried his first book beyond the books of previous writers, carries his last book beyond his first. And just as the most imbecile production of any literary age gives us sometimes the very clue to comprehension we have sought long and vainly in contemporary masterpieces, so it may be the very weakest of an author's books that, coming in the sequel of many others, enables us at last to get hold of what underlies the whole of them,-of that spinal marrow of significance that unites the work of his life into something organic and rational. This is what has been done by Quatre Vingt Treize for the earlier romances of Victor Hugo, and through them, for a whole division of modern literature. We have here the legitimate continuation of a long and living literary tradition; and hence, so far, its explanation. When many lines diverge from each other in direction so slightly as to confuse the eye, we know that we have only to produce them to make the chaos plain: this is continually so in literary history; and we shall best understand the importance of Victor Hugo's romances if we think of them as some such prolongation of one of the main lines of literary tendency.

When we compare the novels of Walter Scott with those of the man of genius who preceded him and whom he delighted to honour as a

master in the art-I mean Henry Fielding-we shall be somewhat puzzled, at the first moment, to explain the difference that there is between these two. Fielding has as much human science; has a far firmer hold upon the tiller of his story; has a keen sense of character, which he draws (and Scott often does so too) in a rather abstract and academical manner; and finally, is quite as humorous and quite as good-humoured as the great Scotchman. With all these points of resemblance between the men, it is astonishing that their work should be so different. The fact is, that the English novel was looking one way and seeking one set of effects in the hands of Fielding; and in the hands of Scott it was looking eagerly in all ways and searching for all the effects that by any possibility it could utilise. The difference between these two men marks a great enfranchisement. With Scott the Romantic movement, the movement of an extended curiosity and an enfranchised imagination has begun. This is a trite thing to say; but trite things are often very indefinitely comprehended and this enfranchisement, in as far as it regards the technical change that came over modern prose romance, has never perhaps been explained with any clearness.

To do so, it will be necessary roughly to compare the two sets of conventions upon which plays and romances are respectively based. The purposes of these two arts are so much alike, and they deal so much with the same passions and interests, that we are apt to forget the fundamental opposition of their methods. And yet such a fundamental opposition exists. In the drama the action is developed in great measure by means of things that remain outside of the art; by means of real things, that is, and not artistic conventions for things. This is a sort of realism, that is not to be confounded with that realism in painting of which we hear so much. The realism in painting is a thing of purposes; this, that we have to indicate in the drama, is an affair of method. We have heard a story, indeed, of a painter in France who, when he wanted to paint a sea-beach, carried realism from his ends to his means and plastered real sand upon his canvas; and that is precisely what is done in the drama. The dramatic author has to paint his beaches with real sand: real live men and women move about the stage; we hear real voices; what is feigned merely puts an edge upon what is; we do actually see a woman go behind a screen as Lady Teazle, and, after a certain interval, we do actually see her very shamefully produced again. Now all these things, that remain as they were in life, and are not transmuted into any artistic convention, are terribly stubborn and difficult to deal with; and hence there are for the dramatist many resultant limitations in time and space. These limitations in some sort approximate towards those of painting: the dramatic author is tied down, not indeed to a moment, but to the duration of each scene or act; he is confined to the stage, almost as the painter is confined within his frame. But the great restriction is this, that a dramatic author must deal with his actors, and with his actors alone. Certain moments of suspense, cortain significant dispositions of personages, a certain logical advance of

fable, these are the only means at the disposal of the playwright. It is true that, with the assistance of the scene-painter, the costumier and the conductor of the orchestra, he may add to this something of pageant, something of sound and fury; but these are, for the dramatic writer, beside the mark, and do not come under the vivifying touch of his genius. When we turn to romance, we find this no longer. Here nothing is reproduced to our senses directly. Not only the main conception of the work, but the scenery, the appliances, the mechanism by which this conception is brought home to us, have been put through the crucible of another man's mind, and come out again, one and all, in the form of written words. With the loss of every degree of such realism as we have described, there is for art a clear gain of liberty and largeness of competence. Thus, painting, in which the round outlines of things are thrown on to a flat board, is far more free than sculpture, in which their solidity is preserved. It is by giving up these childish identities that art gains true strength. And so in the case of novels as compared with the stage. Continuous narration is the flat board on to which the novelist throws everything. And from this, there results for him a great loss of vividness, but a great compensating gain in his power over the subject; so that he can now subordinate one thing to another in importance, and introduce all manner of very subtle detail, to a degree that was before impossible. He can render just as easily the flourish of trumpets before a victorious emperor and the gossip of country market women, the gradual decay of forty years of a man's life and the gesture of a passionate moment. He finds himself equally unable, if he looks at it from one point of viewequally able, if he looks at it from another point of view-to reproduce a colour, a sound, an outline, a logical argument, a physical action. He can show his readers, behind and around the personages that for the moment occupy the foreground of his story, the continual suggestion of the landscape; the turn of the weather that will turn with it men's lives and fortunes, dimly foreshadowed on the horizon; the fatality of distant events, the stream of national tendency, the grand salient framework of causation. And all this thrown upon the flat board-all this entering, naturally and smoothly, into the texture of continuous intelligent narration.

This touches the difference between Fielding and Scott. In the work of the latter, true to his character of a modern and a romantic, we become suddenly conscious of the background. Fielding, on the other hand, although he had recognised that the novel was nothing else than an epic in prose, wrote in the spirit not of the epic, but of the drama. This is not, of course, to say that the drama was in any way incapable of a regeneration similar in kind to that of which I am now speaking with regard to the novel. The notorious contrary fact is sufficient to guard the reader against such a misconstruction. All that is meant is, that Fielding remained ignorant of certain capabilities which the novel possesses over the drama; or, at least, neglected and did not develope them. To the end he continued to see things as a playwright sees them. The