The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [1058]
The third point has reference to the words — “You are now no more a Gipsy.” The thesis of this drama, as we have already said, is love disregarding the prejudices of caste, and in the development of this thesis, the powers of the dramatist have been engaged, or should have been engaged, during the whole of the three acts of the play. The interest excited lies in our admiration of the sacrifice, and of the love that could make it; but this interest immediately and disagreeably subsides when we find that the sacrifice has been made to no purpose. “You are no more a Gipsy” dissolves the charm, and obliterates the whole impression which the author has been at so much labour to convey. Our romantic sense of the hero’s chivalry declines into a complacent satisfaction with his fate. We drop our enthusiasm, with the enthusiast, and jovially shake by the hand the mere man of good luck. But is not the latter feeling the more comfortable of the two? Perhaps so; but “comfortable” is not exactly the word Mr. Longfellow might wish applied to the end of his drama, and then why be at the trouble of building up an effect through a hundred and eighty pages, merely to knock it down at the end of the hundred and eighty-first?
We have already given, at some length, our conceptions of the nature of plot — and of that of “The Spanish Student”, it seems almost superfluous to speak at all. It has nothing of construction about it. Indeed there is scarcely a single incident which has any necessary dependence upon any one other. Not only might we take away two-thirds of the whole without ruin — but without detriment — indeed with a positive benefit to the mass. And, even as regards the mere order of arrangement, we might with a very decided chance of improvement, put the scenes in a bag, give them a shake or two by way of shuffle, and tumble them out. The whole mode of collocation — not to speak of the feebleness of the incidents in themselves — evinces, on the part of the author, an utter and radical want of the adapting or constructive power which the drama so imperatively demands.
Of the unoriginality of the thesis we have already spoken; and now, to the unoriginality of the events by which the thesis is developed, we need do little more than alude. What, indeed, could we say of such incidents as the child stolen by Gipsies — as her education as a danseuse — as her betrothal to a Gipsy — as her preference for a gentleman — as the rumours against her purity — as her persecution by a roue — as the irruption of the roue into her chamber — as the consequent misunderstanding between her and her lover — as the duel — as the defeat of the roue — as the receipt of his life from the hero — as his boasts of success with the girl — as the ruse of the duplicate ring — as the field, in consequence, abandoned by the lover- as the assassination of Lara while scaling the girl’s bed-chamber — as the disconsolate peregrination of Victorian — as the equivoque scene with Preciosa - as the offering to purchase the ring and the refusal to part with it — as the “news from court,” telling of the Gipsy’s true parentage — what could we say of all these ridiculous things, except that we have met them, each and all, some two or three hundred times before, and that they have formed, in a great or less degree, the staple material of every Hop-O’My-Thumb tragedy since the flood? There is not an incident, from the first page of “The Spanish Student” to the last and most satisfactory, which we would not undertake to find bodily, at ten minutes’ notice, in some one of the thousand and