the rival of other artists, or the head of any school. No morbid anxieties for his own fame intrude into the serene heaven of invention, in which his calm spirit ever movés. Quietly and surely he works on, finishing every year some exquisite picture, which alone would be enough to carry his name to other generations, as one of the most illustrious artists of the present. He is known and reverenced by all the rising artists of his country, and envied by none. Happy the man of genius, whose rare good fortune it is, not merely to outdo all his contemporaries in the beauty and excellence of his works, but to pass through a long career without feeling a breath of envy, or a lisp of reproach, upon his fair fame! Mr. Allston's genius is understood as well, perhaps better, abroad. Many of his best pictures were painted in England. In Italy his abilities were fully appreciated by the young artists, who were his contemporaries in the Eternal City, and some of whom stand now at the head of the rising school of German art. One of the most distinguished critics of art in Germany, Karl Platner, has recently declared, that Mr. Allston approaches, in coloring, nearer the old masters of the best ages in Italian art, than any other modern painter. This opinion is expressed in the chapter on modern art in Rome, in the great work on Rome, published by the accomplished Prussian minister, Karl Bunsen, the successor of Niebuhr the historian; and, when we reflect that the opinion was formed upon the earlier works of Mr. Allston, the splendid productions of his matured genius never having been seen by the German critic, we cannot help regarding it as a most gratifying tribute to the surpassing excellence of Mr. Allston's style. As he himself said on a late occasion of the prophetic raven, Platner only spoke for posterity when he uttered that memorable judgment. The moment Mr. Allston's name is written in the great book of the departed, — God grant it may be many years first! - that moment his name will be taken out of the catalogue of painters belonging to the present age; the distinctions of time will be forgotten; and he will be placed side by side with the great brotherhood who have made the name of Italy illustrious as the home of the arts through all time. His works will be sought out and purchased at enormous prices, by curious collectors, and pilgrimages will be made by lovers and students of painting, to spots hallowed by the presence of some masterpiece of his genius. But it is not our purpose, in the present paper, to speak at any length of Mr. Allston, the painter. He comes before us now in the new character of a prose writer. No little curiosity was felt by the public, when it was announced that Allston, the poet and painter, was on the point of appearing as a novelist and some anxiety was mingled with the curiosity, that he might not fail in this untried career. At length the book appeared, after having been laid aside more than twenty years, more than double the time prescribed by the respectable but neglected old saw of Horace. It was written, it seems, for a periodical work, edited by a friend of the artist, - The Idle Man" of Mr. Dana, we presume, a work which manifested great genius and invention, but, not striking the public taste, was not well supported, and was discontinued by the editor before Mr. Allston's Tale could be published. The manuscript was then thrown aside, and slept, like Rip Van Winkle, undisturbed more than twenty years. - The story of Monaldi turns upon jealousy. This passion is the least respectable of all the methods taken by foolish men to make themselves miserable. We have never had a strong liking for tales of distress, founded upon jealousy. From that blackamoor Othello down, we never read tale, novel, or play, where this was the mainspring of the plot, without feeling that a grain of common-sense would have put an end to the trouble, or, rather, would have prevented the trouble altogether. When the silly scoundrel smothers Desdemona, we have no feeling of pity for him as the victim of another's villany, but we despise him for his weakness, and hate him for his cruelty, and could see him hanged with perfect complacency. Something like this feeling, we confess, mingles with our pleasure, in reading Monaldi. It seems as if a man of his genius and exquisite moral character, -united to a woman whose every thought was purity, whose every act one of the most delicate and tender love for him, and between whom and himself existed the most intimate blending of taste and soul, could never be brought, by any entanglement of devilish arts, to believe his wife a polluted hypocrite, and to aim the assassin's dagger at her defenceless bosom. But such anomalies doubtless exist in nature. The warmth of the Italian temperament, and the unfortunate peculiarities that have existed in times past in Italian society, probably render them more frequent there, than in our colder clime. To our less lively imaginations, the changes of character in such a story as Monaldi, seem, at first, too abrupt and startling. It appears an impossibility, that such a moral hurricane can spring up in a moment, and turn to a dreary desert, regions where all was but just now so smiling and serene. It shocks us to think, that the fierce bolt of human passions can, with the force and speed of lightning, blast and sear a happiness that was so deeply rooted, so blooming, and so full of delicious promise but a moment before. And yet it may be so. At any rate, upon a second and third reading of Monaldi, the improbability diminishes, and nearly disappears. At first we hurry over the pages, swept away by an irresistible interest in the fortunes of the personages with whom we sympathize so deeply. Many characteristic circumstances we pass by unnoticed; many minute but important touches fail to have their due effect, until our curiosity is satisfied by a hasty reading, and we have time to turn back and dwell longer upon the details, than we were able to do at first. Mr. Allston has wrought into this tale materials enough for two or three common novels; and we are not sure that he would not have done better to draw out the varied passions of the story at greater length; to paint with greater minuteness, and in a fuller style, the scenes and events through which his characters are made to pass; to soften somewhat the suddenness of the transitions, and thus to explain and justify, more completely than he has done, the overwhelming catastrophe, in which virtue, genius, beauty, and fame are swallowed up. Many hints and intimations, which the observing reader notices in a second perusal, do this for the few; but the great mass of readers, who never take up a book but once, will remain discontented with the manner in which the destinies of Monaldi and Rosalia Landi are wrought out. The great artist, studying as he does the effects of particular moments,—working up striking historical or tragic crises, and trusting to the imagination of the spectator to supply what goes before or follows; presenting, as the very conditions and materials of his art force him to do, the passions, attitudes, groups, of a single second only to the senses, is apt to apply the same methods, and use the same principles, when he passes from art to literature, from the canvass or the marble to the printed page. Art and literature, it is true, rest upon the same essential principles of taste, upon the same deep and everlasting foundations of nature. But they differ in methods and materials. The artist has the great advantage of addressing himself to the mind and heart through the senses; of presenting to the spectator forms, that all but live, and move, and breathe; that speak in feature, look, and action, of the passions which their author meant to impress upon them. The poet, and the novelist, on the contrary, have to trust to the more vague and uncertain medium of words, phrases, sounds. To affect a reader, is a subtler and perhaps more difficult process, than to move the feelings of a spectator. The impressions made by words must, from the very nature of the case, be less defined and distinct, than those made by forms, attitudes, action, color. But then the writer has an excellent set-off to this superiority of the artist, in the interest of continued narrative. He can gradually excite our sympathy, by putting forward, in a striking light, event after event, distress after distress, and perplexity after perplexity. He can work us up to an agony of hope or fear, by the skilful arrangement of a thousand details scattered along a succession of passionate and agitating moments; and he can round off the fictitious life he has created, by letting the passions sink to repose in the consciousness that poetic justice has been dealt among those whose joys and woes, whose virtues and crimes, have by turns soothed and roused the reader's mind. In the conduct of his story, we think we see that Mr. Allston has been true to the artist's character. And though, as we have said before, hints and intimations are sufficiently thrown in to guide the careful reader to the right conclusion, yet the intervals between the great moments are not sufficiently filled out for a novel. We have no doubt this passionate story exists in his mind in the form of a series of pictures; at least it would afford half a dozen glorious subjects for his pencil. It is not necessary, at this time, to give an analysis of the plot. Most readers are familiar with it long before this. A few remarks of a general nature, and some illustrative extracts, will embrace all that is requisite to be said at present. We perceive the artist, not only in the respects we have above alluded to, but in the able delineation and skilful contrast of characters. The two leading personages, Maldura and Monaldi, are of equal excellence, and are brought out with the greater effect by being set off against each other with such admirable judgment. They are traced from the first traits and impulses of schoolboy days, to the finished characters of the matured men; and we cannot help admiring the delicate and subtile manner in which the diverging motives and influences, under which the two are gradually formed to such perfect opposites, are from time to time brought to light. How nobly is the mind of the true artist drawn in the generous Monaldi. Unconsciously the writer sketched the lovely picture from himself. In all, except the whirlwind passions roused by a villain's arts, we recognise the well-known and venerated genius, whose presence among us is a benediction. With what vigor are the fearful consequences of boundless and irregular literary ambition portrayed in the gloomy character and horrible destiny of Maldura. The lesson is a startling but a necessary one. Literary ambition, the desire, not to excel for the sake of excellence, and through an unmixed and unselfish love of letters, is one of the most baneful passions that can agitate the breast of man. What envyings and backbitings, what uncharitable construction of motives, and what malice of disparaging innuendo, have in all ages disgraced the conversations of literary men, too morbidly alive to what they are pleased to call their literary fame, to bear with patience the praises bestowed upon another, or to enjoy freely and heartily the intellectual delights which literary intercourse lays open before them. The lesson was never more forcibly taught than by the promising youth ending in the blasted manhood; the great abilities turned to the most wretched purposes; the apparent friendship sinking into the most revolting crime, and then into bitter but unavailing repentance, -that mark the unhappy career of Maldura. The sensual villain, Count Fialto, is a remarkable and welldrawn figure, necessary to the purposes of the plot, and strongly contrasting with the intellectual profligacy of his employer. But the character which sheds a divine charm over the dark picture, and harmonizes all its terrible elements into a serene and heavenly beauty, is that of Rosalia Landi. The delineation of a perfect woman with natural traits, without exaggeration; the blending of all these ingredients of character in just proportion; the gentleness without weakness, and the firmness free from masculine hardness; the soft com |