Mary of Burgundy; or, The Revolt of Ghent. G. P. R. James

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       G. P. R. James

      Mary of Burgundy; or, The Revolt of Ghent

      Published by Good Press, 2019

       [email protected]

      EAN 4064066169411

Table of Contents

       MARY OF BURGUNDY

       THE REVOLT OF GHENT.

       WOODFALL AND KINDER PRINTERS, LONG ACRE, LONDON.

      INTRODUCTION.

      George Payne Rainsford James, Historiographer Royal to King William IV., was born in London in the first year of the nineteenth century, and died at Venice in 1860. His comparatively short life was exceptionally full and active. He was historian, politician and traveller, the reputed author of upwards of a hundred novels, the compiler and editor of nearly half as many volumes of letters, memoirs, and biographies, a poet and a pamphleteer, and, during the last ten years of his life, British Consul successively in Massachusetts, Norfolk (Virginia), and Venice. He was on terms of friendship with most of the eminent men of his day. Scott, on whose style he founded his own, encouraged him to persevere in his career as a novelist; Washington Irving admired him, and Walter Savage Landor composed an epitaph to his memory. He achieved the distinction of being twice burlesqued, by Thackeray, and two columns are devoted to an account of him in the new "Dictionary of National Biography." Each generation follows its own gods, and G. P. R. James was, perhaps, too prolific an author to maintain the popularity which made him "in some ways the most successful novelist of his time." But his work bears selection and revival. It possesses the qualities of seriousness and interest; his best historical novels are faithful in setting and free in movement. His narrative is clear, his history conscientious, and his plots are well-conceived. English learning and literature are enriched by the work of this writer, who made vivid every epoch in the world's history by the charm of his romance.

      The great passage in this book is so magnificently dramatic that James feels it due to his conscience as an historian to apologise for its excellence in a footnote. "It may be necessary," he writes at the foot of page 234, "to inform those who are not deeply read in the chronicles of France that this fact is minutely accurate." We are glad of the reminder, for without it the reader might have thought that here was something fictitious, or at least exaggerated and 'worked-up,' so intense and true is the tragic setting of the scene. But if Mary of Burgundy's bearing at the execution of the Lord of Imbercourt, and her grand historical utterance, recorded on page 305, "You have banished my best friends, and slain my wisest counsellors, and now what can I do to deliver you?" if these public appearances of the heiress of Charles the Bold, and the love which she cherished for the husband who was chosen for her on political grounds, justify James in raising her to the title-role in this romance, it must be conceded that the real hero is Albert Maurice, citizen of Ghent, a noble mediæval prototype of the citoyens of the French Revolution, Whatever defects in character-study have been ascribed to James, no one can deny that in Albert Maurice his skill was equal to its material. The figure of the young President is firmly and consistently drawn, and the conception touches considerable heights of human daring and aspiration. Albert Maurice at the time of his fall was many years younger than Wolsey, but he could say as genuinely as the Cardinal, "I charge thee, fling away ambition!" In his story we realize to the full the tragic import of that warning. His splendid dream of patriotism was fulfilled by blunders and crimes, committed per se or per alios, for which he felt the responsibility, and at the end the people of Ghent discovered the ancient truth, that worse than the tyranny of tyrants is the tyranny of tyrannicides. But by that time Maurice was dead; the victim of self-delusion would not survive his disappointment; in the sudden knowledge that his goal was unattainable, he became aware that his steps to it had been unjust. This romance of the fifteenth century--Mary of Burgundy was married in 1477--is in what Matthew Arnold called the "grand style," and it is therefore singularly free from faults of diction and false notes of any kind. It has a certain attractive naturalness from beginning to end, and it is one of the best, as it is one of the earliest, of the series of novels in which James went for his plots to the French Chroniclers of the Middle Ages.

MARY OF BURGUNDY:

       Table of Contents

      OR,

      THE REVOLT OF GHENT.

       Table of Contents

      CHAPTER I.

      It was on the evening of a beautiful day in the beginning of September, 1456--one of those fair autumn days that wean us, as it were, from the passing summer, with the light as bright, and the sky as full of rays, as in the richest hours of June; and with nothing but a scarce perceptible shade of yellow in the woods to tell that it is not the proudest time of the year's prime. It was in the evening, as I have said; but nothing yet betokened darkness. The sun had glided a considerable way on his descent down the bright arch of the western sky, yet without one ray being shadowed, or any lustre lost. He had reached that degree of declination alone, at which his beams, pouring from a spot a little above the horizon, produced, as they streamed over forest and hill, grand masses of light and shade, with every here and there a point of dazzling brightness, where the clear evening rays were reflected from stream or lake.

      It was in the heart of a deep forest, too, whose immemorial trees, worn away by time, or felled by the axe, left in various places wide open spaces of broken ground and turf, brushwood and dingle,--and amidst whose deep recesses a thousand spots rich in woodland beauty lay hidden from the eye of man. Those were not, indeed, times when taste and cultivation had taught the human race to appreciate fully all the charms and magnificence wherewith nature's hand has robed the globe which we inhabit; and the only beings that then trod the deeper glades of the forest were the woodman, the hunter, or those less fortunate persons who--as we see them represented by the wild pencil of Salvator Rosa--might greatly increase the picturesque effect of the scenes they frequented; but, probably, did not particularly feel it themselves. But there is, nevertheless, in the heart of man, a native sense of beauty, a latent sympathy, a harmony with all that is lovely on the earth, which makes him unconsciously seek out spots of peculiar sweetness, not only for his daily dwelling, but also for both his temporary resting place, and for the mansion of his long repose, whether the age or the country be rude or not.

      Look at the common cemetery of a village, and you will generally find that it is pitched in the most picturesque spot to be found in the neighbourhood. If left to his free will, the peasant will almost always--without well knowing why--build his cottage where he may have something fair or bright before his eyes; and the very herd, while watching his cattle or his sheep, climbs up the face of the crag, to sit and gaze over the fair expanse of Nature's face.

      It was in the heart of a deep forest, then, at the distance of nearly twenty miles from Louvain, that a boy, of about twelve years of age, was seen sleeping by the side of a small stream; which, dashing over a high rock hard by, gathered its bright waters in a deep basin at the foot, and then rushed, clear and rapidly, through the green turf beyond. The old trees of the wood were scattered abroad from the stream, as if to let the little waterfall sparkle at its will in the sunshine. One young ash tree, alone, self-sown by the side of the river, waved over the boy's head, and cast