The Deformed Transformed; A DRAMA. (1) ADVERTISEMENT. THIS production is founded partly on the story of a novel called The Three Brothers, (2) published many years ago, from which M. G. Lewis's Wood Demon was also taken-and partly on the Faust of the great Goethe. The present publication contains the two first Parts only, and the opening chorus of the third. The rest may perhaps appear hereafter. DRAMATIS PERSONE. STRANGER, afterwards CÆSAR. ARNOLD. BOURBON. PHILIBERT. CELLINI. BERTIA. OLIMPIA. Spirits, Soldiers, Citizens of Rome, Priests, Peasants, etc. (1) This drama was begun at Pisa in 18214, but was not published till January, 1824. Capt. Medwin says, "On my calling on Lord Byron one morning, he produced the Deformed Transformed. Handing it to Shelley, as he was in the habit of doing his daily compositions, he said-'Shelly, I have been writing a Faustish kind of drama: tell me what you think of it. After reading it attentively, Shelley returned it. 'Well,' said Lord B., 'how do you like it?' 'Least,' replied he, 'of any thing I ever saw of yours. It is a bad imitation of Faust; and besides, there are two entire lines of Southey's in it.' Lord Byron changed colour immediately, and asked hastily, 'What lines?' Shelley repeated, And water shall see thee. And fear thee, and flee thee." They are in the Curse of Kehama. His Lordship instantly threw the poem into the fire. He seemed to feel no chagrin at seeing it consume-at least his countenance betrayed none, and his conversation became more gay and lively than usual. Whether it was hatred of Southey, or respect for Shelley's opinion, which made him commit the act that I considered a sort of suicide, was always doubtful to me. I was never more surprised than to see, two years afterwards, The Deformed Transformed announced (supposing it to have perished at Pisa); but it seems that he must have had another copy of the manuscript, or that he had rewritten it perhaps, without changing a word, except omitting the Kehama lines. His memory was remarkably retentive of his own writings. I believe he could have quoted almost every line he ever wrote." Mrs. Shelley, whose copy of The Deformed Transformed lies before us, has written as follows on the fly-leaf: rised, or that he studied for ideas, and wrote with difficulty. Thus, he gave Shelley Aikin's edition of the British Poets, that it might not be found in his house by some English lounger, and reported home: thus, too, he always dated when he began and when he ended a poem, to prove hereafter how quickly it was done. I do not think that he altered a line in this drama after he had once written it down. He composed and corrected in his mind. I do not know how he meant to finish it; but he said himself that the whole conduct of the story was already conceived. It was at this time that a brutal paragraph alluding to his lameness appeared, which he repeated to me, lest I should hear it first from some one else. -No action of Lord Byron's life-scarce a line he has written-but was influenced by his personal defect.”—E. (2) "The Three Brothers is a romance, published in 1805, the work of a Joshua Pickersgill, junior. It is one of those highflown histories, in which "terror petrific or annihilative" (we use Mr. P.'s own phraseology) waylays us at every page. The present story is that of a misshapen youth, who acquires beauty and strength by a compact with the enemy of mankind. The tenure by which he holds these gifts is bloodshed, to be perpetrated on some occasion not yet disclosed, for the drama is unfinished. In some points of character and situation he is not wholly unlike the Black Dwarf of Mucklestane Moor, and we could almost suspect that the painter of that personage had condescended, like Lord Byron, to adopt a thought from the forgotten legend of the Three Brothers." Croly. (3) A clever anonymous critic thus sarcastically opens his no "The Black Dwarf I have read with great pleasure, and perIfectly understand now why my sister and aunt are so very positive in the very erroneous persuasion that it must have been written by me. If you knew me as well as they do, you would have fallen, perhaps, into the same mistake." Lord Byron to Mr. M. "This had long been a favourite subject with Lord Byron. think that he mentioned it also in Switzerland. I copied it-he sending a portion of it at a time, as it was finished, to me. At this time he had a great horror of its being said that he plagia The ideal being who is here presented as residing in soli. Save you, in nature, can love aught like me. Berl. Yes-1 nursed thee, Because thou wert my first-born, and I knew not If there would be another unlike thee, My labour for the day is over now. At home-What home? I have no home, no kin, That monstrous sport of nature. (1) But get hence, To share their sports or pleasures. Must! bleed too And gather wood! Arn. I will: but when I bring it, Speak to me kindly. Though my brothers are As the free chase they follow, do not spurn me: [me! Like them? Oh that each drop which falls to earth Bert. [ARNOLD goes to a spring, and stoops to wash [must do tice of this poem :-"The reader has, no doubt, often heard of the Devil and Dr. Faustus: this is but a new birth of the same unrighteous couple, who are christened, however, by the noble hierophant who presides over the infernal ceremony, Julius Cæsar and Count Arnold. The drama opens with a scene between the latter, who is to all appearance a well disposed young man, of a very deformed person, and his mother: this good lady, with somewhat less maternal piety about her than adorns the mother-ape in the fable, turns her dutiful incubus of a son out of doors to gather wood. Arnold, upon this, proceeds incontinently to kill himself, by falling, after the manner of Brutus, on his wood-knife: he is, however, piously dissuaded from this guilty act, by-whom, does the reader think? A monk, perhaps, or a methodist preacher? no;—but by the Devil himself, in the shape of a tall black man, who rises, like an African water-god, out of a fountain. To this stranger, after the exchange of a few siuister compliments, Arnold, without more ado, sells his soul, for the privilege of wearing the beautiful form of Achilles. In the midst of all this absurdity, we still, however recognise the master, mind of our great poet: his bold and beautiful spirit flashes at intervals through the surrounding horrors, into which he has chosen to plunge after Goethe, his magnus Apollo.”—E. "The Deformed Transformed, though confessedly an imitation of Goethe's Faust, is substantially an original work. In the opini n of Mr. Moore, it probably owes something to the author's painful sensibility to the defect in his own foot-an accident that must, from the acuteness with which he felt it, have essentially contributed to enable him to comprehend and to express the envy of those afflicted with irremediable exceptions to the ordinary course of fortune, or who have been amerced by nature of their fair proportions." Galt. They are right; and Nature's mirror shows me, Unto what brought me into life! Thou blood, pages of the memoir which related to his early days was where in speaking of his own sensitiveness on the subject of his deformed foot, he described the feelings of horror and humiliation that came over him, when his mother, in one of her fits of passion, called him a lame brat.' As all that he had felt strongly through life was, in some shape or other, reproduced in his poetry, it was not likely that an expression such as this should fail of being recorded." Referring to the opening of The Deformed Transformed, where Bertha taunts her offspring with his personal defect, Moore adds:-"It may be questioned indeed, whether the whole drama was not indebted for its origin to this single recollection." Amongst anecdotes in Moore's Life, tending to prove now keenly Byron must have felt the mortifications to which his lameness occasionally exposed him, is one which he felt with peculiar anguish. In the course of his ill-fated attachment to Miss Chaworth, he either was told of, or overheard, that lady saying to her maid, "Do you think I could care any thing for that lame boy?" "This speech," says Moore, as he himself described it, was like a shot through his heart. Though late at night when he heard it, be instantly darted out of the house, and, scarcely knowing whither he ran, never stopped till he found himself at Newstead."-E. (4) "Lord Byron's own mother, when in ill humour with him, used to make the deformity in his foot the subject of taunts and reproaches. She would (we quote from a letter written by one of her relations in Scotland) pass from passionate caresses to the repulsion of actual disgust; then devour him with kisses again, and swear his eyes were as beautiful as his father's." Quar. Rev. -E. (2) This is now generally believed to be a vulgar error; the smallness of the animal's mouth rendering it incapable of the Moore says:-"One of the most striking passages in the few mischief laid to its charge.-E. tude, and haunted by a consciousness of his own deformity, and a slate quarries of Strobo, and must have been born in the misshapen suspicion of his being generally subjected to the scorn of his fellow-form which he exhibited, though he sometimes imputed it to ill men, is not altogether imaginary. An individual existed many years since, under the author's observation, which suggested such a character. This poor unfortunate man's name was David Ritchie, a native of Tweed-dale. He was the son of a labourer in the usage when in infancy. He was a brushmaker at Edinburgh, and had wandered to several places, working at his trade, from all which he was chased by the disagreeable attention which his hideous singularity of form and face attracted wherever he came." Scott. Which flowest so freely from a scratch, let me And make a world for myriads of new worms! [ARNOLD places the knife in the ground, with Cloven foot of thine, or the swift dromedary the point upwards. Now 't is set, And I call fall upon it. Yet one glance Now, knife, stand firmly, as I vain would fall! (1) The fountain moves without a wind: but shall [A cloud comes from the fountain. He stands Spirit or man? Stran. Say both in one? What would you? Speak As man is both, why not You have interrupted me. Stran. What is that resolution which can c'er Be interrupted? IfI be the devil With thy sublime of humps, the animals The gifts which are of others upon man. Arn.Give me the strength then of the buffalo's foot, Arn. (with surprise.) Thou canst? Perhaps. Would you aught else? Not I. Why should I mock What all are mocking? That's poor sport, methinks. To talk to thee in human language (for Thou canst not yet speak mine), the forester Hunts not the wretched coney, but the boar, Or wolf, or lion, leaving paltry game To petty burghers, who leave once a-1 ear Their walls, to fill their household caldrons with Such scullion prey. The meanest gibe at thee,Now I can mock the mightiest. Shapes with you, if you will, since yours so irks you; You deem, a single moment would have made you Or form you to your wish in any shape. Arn. Oh! then you are indeed the demon, for Nought else would wittingly wear mine. I'll show thee Stran. Sawyer in Ford's Witch of Edmonton, rather than the consuming discontent and vague aspirations of Faust, he prepares for self destruction. The great force of the scenes which ensue lies in the Devil's comments and repartees." Croly. I will fight too, You see his aspect-choose it, or reject. When love is not less in the eye than heart. [The Phantom of Julius Cæsar disappears. Stran. There you err. His substance Left graves enough, and woes enough, and fame Arn. Behold another! [A second phantom passes. Who is he? (2) In one of Lord Byron's MS. Diaries we find the following passage:-"Alcibiades is said to have been succesful in all his battles'-but what battles? Name them! If you mention Cæsar, or Hannibal, or Napoleon, you at once rush upon Pharsalia, Munda, Alesia, Cannæ, Thrasimene, Trebia, Lodi, Marengo, Jena, Austerlitz, Friedland, Wagram, Moskwa: but it is less easy to pitch upon the victories of Alcibiades; though they may be named too, though not so readily as the Leuetra and Mantinæa Stran. Such was the curled son of Clinias, [The shade of Alcibiades disappears. Stran. With the wide nostrils and Šilenus' aspect, To promise that; but you may try, and find it Arn. No. I was not born for philosophy, Be air, thou hemlock-drinker! [The shadow of Socrates disappears: another rises. Arn. Who is this? Arn. What's here? whose broad brow and whose Emanation of a thing more glorious still. And manly aspect look like Hercules, of Epaminondas, the Marathon of Miltiades, the Salamis of Themistocles, and the Thermopyla of Leonidas. Yet, upon the whole, it may be doubted whether there be a name of antiquity which comes down with such a general charm as that of Alcibiades. Why? I cannot answer. Who can?"—E. (1) "The outside of Socrates was that of a satyr and buffoon, but his soul was all virtue, and from within him came such divine and pathetic things, as pierced the heart, and drew tears from the hearers." Plato.-E. (2) "His face was as the heavens; and therein stuck A sun and moon; which kept their course, and lighted Ilis legs bestrid the ocean: his rear'd arm *One cannot help being struck with Lord Byron's choice of a favourite among the heroic names of antiquity. The man who was educated by Pericles, and who commanded the admiration as well as the affection of Socrates; whose gallantry and boldness were always as undisputed as the pre-eminent graces of his person and manners who died at forty-five, after having been successively the delight and hero of Athens, of Sparta, of Persia ;-this most versatile of great men has certainly left to the world a very splendid reputation. But his fame is stained with the recollections of a most profligate and debauched course of private life, and of the most complete and flagrant contempt of public principle; and it is to be hoped that there are not many men who could gravely give to the mame of Alcibiades a preference, on the whole, over such a one as that of an Epaminondas or a Leonidas, or even of a Miltiades or Hannibal, But the career of Alcibiades was romantic: Let the earth speak, Walk'd crowns, and crownets; realms and islands were Nature warts stuff every great event in which he had a share has the air of a personal adventure; and, whatever might be said of his want of principle, moral and political, nobody ever doubted the greatness of his powers and the brilliancy of his accomplishments. By the gift of nature, the handsomest creature of his time, and the possessor of a very extraordinary zenius, he was, by accidents or by fits, a soldier, a hero,-an orator,-and even, it should seem, a philosopher; but he played these parts only because he wished it to be thought that there was no part which he could not play He thought of nothing but himself. His vanity entirely commanded the direction of his genius, and could even make him abandon occasionally his voluptuousness for the very opposite extreme; whic last circumstance, by the way, was probably one of those that bad hit Lord Byron's fancy-as indeed it may be suspected to have influenced his behaviour." Lockhart, |