Literary Remains, Vol. 2
by
Coleridge

Part 1 out of 7







Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Clytie Siddall
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team




THE LITERARY REMAINS

OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE



COLLECTED AND EDITED BY

HENRY NELSON COLERIDGE, ESQ. M.A.


VOLUME THE SECOND





CONTENTS


VOL. II.



LITERARY REMAINS.



Extract from a Letter written by Mr. Coleridge, in February, 1818, to a
Gentleman who attended the Course of Lectures given in the Spring of
that Year.

Extract from a Letter to J. Britton, Esq.


SHAKSPEARE, WITH INTRODUCTORY MATTER ON POETRY, THE DRAMA, AND THE STAGE
Definition of Poetry
Greek Drama
Progress of the Drama
The Drama generally, and Public Taste
Shakspeare, a Poet generally
Shakspeare's Judgment equal to his Genius
Recapitulation, and Summary of the Characteristics of Shakspeare's Dramas
Order of Shakspeare's Plays
Notes on the Tempest
Love's Labour's Lost
Midsummer Night's Dream
Comedy of Errors
As You Like It
Twelfth Night
All's Well that Ends Well
Merry Wives of Windsor
Measure for Measure
Cymbeline
Titus Andronicus
Troilus and Cressida
Coriolanus
Julius Caesar
Antony and Cleopatra
Timon of Athens
Romeo and Juliet
Shakspeare's English Historical Plays
King John
Richard II.
Henry IV. Part I.
Henry IV. Part II.
Henry V.
Henry VI. Part I.
Richard III.
Lear
Hamlet
Notes on Macbeth
Notes on the Winter's Tale
Notes on Othello

NOTES ON BEN JONSON
Whalley's Preface
Whalley's Life of Jonson
Every Man out of His Humour
Poetaster
Fall of Sejanus
Volpone
Epicene
The Alchemist
Catiline's Conspiracy
Bartholomew Fair
The Devil is an Ass
The Staple of News
The New Inn

NOTES ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER
Harris's Commendatory Poem on Fletcher
Life of Fletcher in Stockdale's Edition. 1811
Maid's Tragedy
A King and no King
The Scornful Lady
The Custom of the Country
The Elder Brother
The Spanish Curate
Wit Without Money
The Humorous Lieutenant
The Mad Lover
The Loyal Subject
Rule a Wife and have a Wife
The Laws of Candy
The Little French Lawyer
Valentinian
Rollo
The Wildgoose Chase
A Wife for a Month
The Pilgrim
The Queen of Corinth
The Noble Gentleman
The Coronation
Wit at Several Weapons
The Fair Maid of the Inn
The Two Noble Kinsmen
The Woman Hater

On the 'Prometheus' of AEschylus

Note on Chalmers's 'Life of Daniel'

Bishop Corbet Notes on Selden's 'Table Talk'

Note on Theological Lectures of Benjamin Wheeler, D.D.

Note on a Sermon on the Prevalence of Infidelity and Enthusiasm, by
Walter Birch, B. D.

Fenelon on Charity

Change of the Climates

Wonderfulness of Prose

Notes on Tom Jones

Jonathan Wild

Barry Cornwall

The Primitive Christian's Address to the Cross

Fuller's Holy State

Fuller's Profane State

Fuller's Appeal of Injured Innocence

Fuller's Church History

Asgill's Argument

Introduction to Asgill's Defence upon his Expulsion from the House of
Commons.

Notes on Sir Thomas Browne's 'Religio Medici'

Notes on Sir Thomas Browne's Garden of Cyrus

Notes on Sir Thomas Browne's Vulgar Errors





LITERARY REMAINS





Extract from a Letter written by Mr. Coleridge, in February, 1818, to a
gentleman who attended the course of Lectures given in the spring of
that year.

See the 'Canterbury Magazine', September, 1834. Ed.


My next Friday's lecture will, if I do not grossly flatter-blind myself,
be interesting, and the points of view not only original, but new to the
audience. I make this distinction, because sixteen or rather seventeen
years ago, I delivered eighteen lectures on Shakspeare, at the Royal
Institution; three-fourths of which appeared at that time startling
paradoxes, although they have since been adopted even by men, who then
made use of them as proofs of my flighty and paradoxical turn of mind;
all tending to prove that Shakspeare's judgment was, if possible, still
more wonderful than his genius; or rather, that the contradistinction
itself between judgment and genius rested on an utterly false theory.
This, and its proofs and grounds have been--I should not have said
adopted, but produced as their own legitimate children by some, and by
others the merit of them attributed to a foreign writer, whose lectures
were not given orally till two years after mine, rather than to their
countryman; though I dare appeal to the most adequate judges, as Sir
George Beaumont, the Bishop of Durham, Mr. Sotheby, and afterwards to
Mr. Rogers and Lord Byron, whether there is one single principle in
Schlegel's work (which is not an admitted drawback from its merits),
that was not established and applied in detail by me. Plutarch tells us,
that egotism is a venial fault in the unfortunate, and justifiable in
the calumniated, &c. ...






Extract from a Letter to J. Britton, Esq.


28th Feb., 1819, Highgate.

Dear Sir,

--First permit me to remove a very natural, indeed almost inevitable,
mistake, relative to my lectures; namely, that I 'have' them, or that
the lectures of one place or season are in any way repeated in another.
So far from it, that on any point that I had ever studied (and on no
other should I dare discourse--I mean, that I would not lecture on any
subject for which I had to 'acquire' the main knowledge, even though a
month's or three months' previous time were allowed me; on no subject
that had not employed my thoughts for a large portion of my life since
earliest manhood, free of all outward and particular purpose)--on any
point within my habit of thought, I should greatly prefer a subject I
had never lectured on, to one which I had repeatedly given; and those
who have attended me for any two seasons successively will bear witness,
that the lecture given at the London Philosophical Society, on the
'Romeo and Juliet', for instance, was as different from that given at
the Crown and Anchor, as if they had been by two individuals who,
without any communication with each other, had only mastered the same
principles of philosophic criticism. This was most strikingly evidenced
in the coincidence between my lectures and those of Schlegel; such, and
so close, that it was fortunate for my moral reputation that I had not
only from five to seven hundred ear witnesses that the passages had been
given by me at the Royal Institution two years before Schlegel commenced
his lectures at Vienna, but that notes had been taken of these by
several men and ladies of high rank. The fact is this; during a course
of lectures, I faithfully employ all the intervening days in collecting
and digesting the materials, whether I have or have not lectured on the
same subject before, making no difference. The day of the lecture, till
the hour of commencement, I devote to the consideration, what of the
mass before me is best fitted to answer the purposes of a lecture, that
is, to keep the audience awake and interested during the delivery, and
to leave a sting behind, that is, a disposition to study the subject
anew, under the light of a new principle. Several times, however, partly
from apprehension respecting my health and animal spirits, partly from
the wish to possess copies that might afterwards be marketable among the
publishers, I have previously written the lecture; but before I had
proceeded twenty minutes, I have been obliged to push the MS. away, and
give the subject a new turn. Nay, this was so notorious, that many of my
auditors used to threaten me, when they saw any number of written papers
on my desk, to steal them away; declaring they never felt so secure of a
good lecture as when they perceived that I had not a single scrap of
writing before me. I take far, far more pains than would go to the set
composition of a lecture, both by varied reading and by meditation; but
for the words, illustrations, &c., I know almost as little as any one of
the audience (that is, those of anything like the same education with
myself) what they will be five minutes before the lecture begins. Such
is my way, for such is my nature; and in attempting any other, I should
only torment myself in order to disappoint my auditors--torment myself
during the delivery, I mean; for in all other respects it would be a
much shorter and easier task to deliver them from writing. I am anxious
to preclude any semblance of affectation; and have therefore troubled
you with this lengthy preface before I have the hardihood to assure you,
that you might as well ask me what my dreams were in the year 1814, as
what my course of lectures was at the Surrey Institution.

'Fuimus Troes.'






SHAKSPEARE,

WITH INTRODUCTORY MATTER ON POETRY, THE DRAMA, AND THE STAGE.


DEFINITION OF POETRY.

Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is
opposed to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object
of science is the acquirement, or communication, of truth; the proper
and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate
pleasure. This definition is useful; but as it would include novels and
other works of fiction, which yet we do not call poems, there must be
some additional character by which poetry is not only divided from
opposites, but likewise distinguished from disparate, though similar,
modes of composition. Now how is this to be effected? In animated prose,
the beauties of nature, and the passions and accidents of human nature,
are often expressed in that natural language which the contemplation of
them would suggest to a pure and benevolent mind; yet still neither we
nor the writers call such a work a poem, though no work could deserve
that name which did not include all this, together with something else.
What is this? It is that pleasurable emotion, that peculiar state and
degree of excitement, which arises in the poet himself in the act of
composition;--and in order to understand this, we must combine a more
than ordinary sympathy with the objects, emotions, or incidents
contemplated by the poet, consequent on a more than common sensibility,
with a more than ordinary activity of the mind in respect of the fancy
and the imagination. Hence is produced a more vivid reflection of the
truths of nature and of the human heart, united with a constant activity
modifying and correcting these truths by that sort of pleasurable
emotion, which the exertion of all our faculties gives in a certain
degree; but which can only be felt in perfection under the full play of
those powers of mind, which are spontaneous rather than voluntary, and
in which the effort required bears no proportion to the activity
enjoyed. This is the state which permits the production of a highly
pleasurable whole, of which each part shall also communicate for itself
a distinct and conscious pleasure; and hence arises the definition,
which I trust is now intelligible, that poetry, or rather a poem, is a
species of composition, opposed to science, as having intellectual
pleasure for its object, and as attaining its end by the use of language
natural to us in a state of excitement,--but distinguished from other
species of composition, not excluded by the former criterion, by
permitting a pleasure from the whole consistent with a consciousness of
pleasure from the component parts;--and the perfection of which is, to
communicate from each part the greatest immediate pleasure compatible
with the largest sum of pleasure on the whole. This, of course, will
vary with the different modes of poetry;--and that splendour of
particular lines, which would be worthy of admiration in an impassioned
elegy, or a short indignant satire, would be a blemish and proof of vile
taste in a tragedy or an epic poem.

It is remarkable, by the way, that Milton in three incidental words has
implied all which for the purposes of more distinct apprehension, which
at first must be slow-paced in order to be distinct, I have endeavoured
to develope in a precise and strictly adequate definition. Speaking of
poetry, he says, as in a parenthesis, "which is simple, sensuous,
passionate." How awful is the power of words!--fearful often in their
consequences when merely felt, not understood; but most awful when both
felt and understood!--Had these three words only been properly
understood by, and present in the minds of, general readers, not only
almost a library of false poetry would have been either precluded or
still-born, but, what is of more consequence, works truly excellent and
capable of enlarging the understanding, warming and purifying the heart,
and placing in the centre of the whole being the germs of noble and
manlike actions, would have been the common diet of the intellect
instead. For the first condition, simplicity,--while, on the one hand,
it distinguishes poetry from the arduous processes of science, labouring
towards an end not yet arrived at, and supposes a smooth and finished
road, on which the reader is to walk onward easily, with streams
murmuring by his side, and trees and flowers and human dwellings to make
his journey as delightful as the object of it is desirable, instead of
having to toil, with the pioneers and painfully make the road on which
others are to travel,--precludes, on the other hand, every affectation
and morbid peculiarity;--the second condition, sensuousness, insures
that framework of objectivity, that definiteness and articulation of
imagery, and that modification of the images themselves, without which
poetry becomes flattened into mere didactics of practice, or evaporated
into a hazy, unthoughtful, daydreaming; and the third condition,
passion, provides that neither thought nor imagery shall be simply
objective, but that the _passio vera_ of humanity shall warm and animate
both.

To return, however, to the previous definition, this most general and
distinctive character of a poem originates in the poetic genius itself;
and though it comprises whatever can with any propriety be called a
poem, (unless that word be a mere lazy synonyme for a composition in
metre,) it yet becomes a just, and not merely discriminative, but full
and adequate, definition of poetry in its highest and most peculiar
sense, only so far as the distinction still results from the poetic
genius, which sustains and modifies the emotions, thoughts, and vivid
representations of the poem by the energy without effort of the poet's
own mind,--by the spontaneous activity of his imagination and fancy, and
by whatever else with these reveals itself in the balancing and
reconciling of opposite or discordant qualities, sameness with
difference, a sense of novelty and freshness with old or customary
objects, a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order,
self-possession and judgment with enthusiasm and vehement feeling,--and
which, while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial,
still subordinates art to nature, the manner to the matter, and our
admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the images, passions,
characters, and incidents of the poem:-


Doubtless, this could not be, but that she turns
Bodies to _spirit_ by sublimation strange,
As fire converts to fire the things it burns--
As we our food into our nature change!

From their gross matter she abstracts _their_ forms,
And draws a kind of quintessence from things,
Which to her proper nature she transforms
To bear them light on her celestial wings!

_Thus_ doth she, when from _individual states_
She doth abstract the universal kinds,
_Which then reclothed in diverse names and fates
Steal access thro' our senses to our minds._ [1]


[Footnote 1: Sir John Davies on the Immortality of the Soul, sect. iv.
The words and lines in italics (_between_) are substituted to apply
these verses to the poetic genius. The greater part of this latter
paragraph may be found adopted, with some alterations, in the 'Biographia
Literaria', vol. ii. c. 14; but I have thought it better in this
instance and some others, to run the chance of bringing a few passages
twice over to the recollection of the reader, than to weaken the force
of the original argument by breaking the connection. Ed.]





GREEK DRAMA.

It is truly singular that Plato,--whose philosophy and religion were but
exotic at home, and a mere opposition to the finite in all things,
genuine prophet and anticipator as he was of the Protestant Christian
aera,--should have given in his Dialogue of the Banquet, a justification
of our Shakspeare. For he relates that, when all the other guests had
either dispersed or fallen asleep, Socrates only, together with
Aristophanes and Agathon, remained awake, and that, while he continued
to drink with them out of a large goblet, he compelled them, though most
reluctantly, to admit that it was the business of one and the same
genius to excel in tragic and comic poetry, or that the tragic poet
ought, at the same time, to contain within himself the powers of comedy.
[1] Now, as this was directly repugnant to the entire theory of the
ancient critics, and contrary to all their experience, it is evident
that Plato must have fixed the eye of his contemplation on the innermost
essentials of the drama, abstracted from the forms of age or country. In
another passage he even adds the reason, namely, that opposites
illustrate each other's nature, and in their struggle draw forth the
strength of the combatants, and display the conqueror as sovereign even
on the territories of the rival power.

Nothing can more forcibly exemplify the separative spirit of the Greek
arts than their comedy as opposed to their tragedy. But as the immediate
struggle of contraries supposes an arena common to both, so both were
alike ideal; that is, the comedy of Aristophanes rose to as great a
distance above the ludicrous of real life, as the tragedy of Sophocles
above its tragic events and passions;--and it is in this one point, of
absolute ideality, that the comedy of Shakspeare and the old comedy of
Athens coincide. In this also alone did the Greek tragedy and comedy
unite; in every thing else they were exactly opposed to each other.
Tragedy is poetry in its deepest earnest; comedy is poetry in unlimited
jest. Earnestness consists in the direction and convergence of all the
powers of the soul to one aim, and in the voluntary restraint of its
activity in consequence; the opposite, therefore, lies in the apparent
abandonment of all definite aim or end, and in the removal of all bounds
in the exercise of the mind,--attaining its real end, as an entire
contrast, most perfectly, the greater the display is of intellectual
wealth squandered in the wantonness of sport without an object, and the
more abundant the life and vivacity in the creations of the arbitrary
will.

The later comedy, even where it was really comic, was doubtless likewise
more comic, the more free it appeared from any fixed aim.
Misunderstandings of intention, fruitless struggles of absurd passion,
contradictions of temper, and laughable situations there were; but still
the form of the representation itself was serious; it proceeded as much
according to settled laws, and used as much the same means of art,
though to a different purpose, as the regular tragedy itself. But in the
old comedy the very form itself is whimsical; the whole work is one
great jest, comprehending a world of jests within it, among which each
maintains its own place without seeming to concern itself as to the
relation in which it may stand to its fellows. In short, in Sophocles,
the constitution of tragedy is monarchical, but such as it existed in
elder Greece, limited by laws, and therefore the more venerable,--all
the parts adapting and submitting themselves to the majesty of the
heroic sceptre:--in Aristophanes, comedy, on the contrary, is poetry in
its most democratic form, and it is a fundamental principle with it,
rather to risk all the confusion of anarchy, than to destroy the
independence and privileges of its individual constituents,--place,
verse, characters, even single thoughts, conceits, and allusions, each
turning on the pivot of its own free will.

The tragic poet idealizes his characters by giving to the spiritual part
of our nature a more decided preponderance over the animal cravings and
impulses, than is met with in real life: the comic poet idealizes his
characters by making the animal the governing power, and the
intellectual the mere instrument. But as tragedy is not a collection of
virtues and perfections, but takes care only that the vices and
imperfections shall spring from the passions, errors, and prejudices
which arise out of the soul;--so neither is comedy a mere crowd of vices
and follies, but whatever qualities it represents, even though they are
in a certain sense amiable, it still displays them as having their
origin in some dependence on our lower nature, accompanied with a defect
in true freedom of spirit and self-subsistence, and subject to that
unconnection by contradictions of the inward being, to which all folly
is owing.

The ideal of earnest poetry consists in the union and harmonious melting
down, and fusion of the sensual into the spiritual,--of man as an animal
into man as a power of reason and self-government. And this we have
represented to us most clearly in the plastic art, or statuary; where
the perfection of outward form is a symbol of the perfection of an
inward idea; where the body is wholly penetrated by the soul, and
spiritualized even to a state of glory, and like a transparent
substance, the matter, in its own nature darkness, becomes altogether a
vehicle and fixure of light, a mean of developing its beauties, and
unfolding its wealth of various colors without disturbing its unity, or
causing a division of the parts. The sportive ideal, on the contrary,
consists in the perfect harmony and concord of the higher nature with
the animal, as with its ruling principle and its acknowledged regent.
The understanding and practical reason are represented as the willing
slaves of the senses and appetites, and of the passions arising out of
them. Hence we may admit the appropriateness to the old comedy, as a
work of defined art, of allusions and descriptions, which morality can
never justify, and, only with reference to the author himself, and only
as being the effect or rather the cause of the circumstances in which he
wrote, can consent even to palliate.

The old comedy rose to its perfection in Aristophanes, and in him also
it died with the freedom of Greece. Then arose a species of drama, more
fitly called, dramatic entertainment than comedy, but of which,
nevertheless, our modern comedy (Shakspeare's altogether excepted) is
the genuine descendant. Euripides had already brought tragedy lower down
and by many steps nearer to the real world than his predecessors had
ever done, and the passionate admiration which Menander and Philemon
expressed for him, and their open avowals that he was their great
master, entitle us to consider their dramas as of a middle species,
between tragedy and comedy,--not the tragi-comedy, or thing of
heterogeneous parts, but a complete whole, founded on principles of its
own. Throughout we find the drama of Menander distinguishing itself from
tragedy, but not, as the genuine old comedy, contrasting with, and
opposing, it. Tragedy, indeed, carried the thoughts into the mythologic
world, in order to raise the emotions, the fears, and the hopes, which
convince the inmost heart that their final cause is not to be discovered
in the limits of mere mortal life, and force us into a presentiment,
however dim, of a state in which those struggles of inward free will
with outward necessity, which form the true subject of the tragedian,
shall be reconciled and solved;--the entertainment or new comedy, on the
other hand, remained within the circle of experience. Instead of the
tragic destiny, it introduced the power of chance; even in the few
fragments of Menander and Philemon now remaining to us, we find many
exclamations and reflections concerning chance and fortune, as in the
tragic poets concerning destiny. In tragedy, the moral law, either as
obeyed or violated, above all consequences--its own maintenance or
violation constituting the most important of all consequences--forms the
ground; the new comedy, and our modern comedy in general, (Shakspeare
excepted as before) lies in prudence or imprudence, enlightened or
misled self-love. The whole moral system of the entertainment exactly
like that of fable, consists in rules of prudence, with an exquisite
conciseness, and at the same time an exhaustive fulness of sense. An old
critic said that tragedy was the flight or elevation of life, comedy
(that of Menander) its arrangement or ordonnance.

Add to these features a portrait-like truth of character,--not so far
indeed as that a 'bona fide' individual should be described or imagined,
but yet so that the features which give interest and permanence to the
class should be individualized. The old tragedy moved in an ideal
world,--the old comedy in a fantastic world. As the entertainment, or
new comedy, restrained the creative activity both of the fancy and the
imagination, it indemnified the understanding in appealing to the
judgment for the probability of the scenes represented. The ancients
themselves acknowledged the new comedy as an exact copy of real life.
The grammarian, Aristophanes, somewhat affectedly exclaimed:--"O Life
and Menander! which of you two imitated the other?" In short the form of
this species of drama was poetry; the stuff or matter was prose. It was
prose rendered delightful by the blandishments and measured motions of
the muse. Yet even this was not universal. The mimes of Sophron, so
passionately admired by Plato, were written in prose, and were scenes
out of real life conducted in dialogue. The exquisite Feast of Adonis
([Greek (transliterated): Surakousiai ae Ad'oniazousai]) in Theocritus,
we are told, with some others of his eclogues, were close imitations of
certain mimes of Sophron--free translations of the prose into
hexameters.

It will not be improper, in this place, to make a few remarks on the
remarkable character and functions of the chorus in the Greek tragic
drama.

The chorus entered from below, close by the orchestra, and there, pacing
to and fro during the choral odes, performed their solemn measured
dance. In the centre of the 'orchestra', directly over against the
middle of the 'scene', there stood an elevation with steps in the shape
of a large altar, as high as the boards of the 'logeion' or moveable
stage. This elevation was named the 'thymele', ([Greek (transliterated):
thumelae]) and served to recall the origin and original purpose of the
chorus, as an altar-song in honour of the presiding deity. Here, and on
these steps, the persons of the chorus sate collectively, when they were
not singing; attending to the dialogue as spectators, and acting as
(what in truth they were) the ideal representatives of the real
audience, and of the poet himself in his own character, assuming the
supposed impressions made by the drama, in order to direct and rule
them. But when the chorus itself formed part of the dialogue, then the
leader of the band, the foreman or 'coryphaeus', ascended, as some
think, the level summit of the 'thymele' in order to command the stage,
or, perhaps, the whole chorus advanced to the front of the orchestra,
and thus put themselves in ideal connection, as it were, with the
'dramatis personae' there acting. This 'thymele' was in the centre of the
whole edifice, all the measurements were calculated, and the semi-circle
of the amphitheatre was drawn, from this point. It had a double use, a
twofold purpose; it constantly reminded the spectators of the origin of
tragedy as a religious service, and declared itself as the ideal
representative of the audience by having its place exactly in the point,
to which all the radii from the different seats or benches converged. In
this double character, as constituent parts, and yet at the same time as
spectators, of the drama, the chorus could not but tend to enforce the
unity of place;--not on the score of any supposed improbability, which
the understanding or common sense might detect in a change of
place;--but because the senses themselves put it out of the power of any
imagination to conceive a place coming to, and going away from the
persons, instead of the persons changing their place. Yet there are
instances, in which, during the silence of the chorus, the poets have
hazarded this by a change in that part of the scenery which represented
the more distant objects to the eye of the spectator--a demonstrative
proof, that this alternately extolled and ridiculed unity (as ignorantly
ridiculed as extolled) was grounded on no essential principle of reason,
but arose out of circumstances which the poet could not remove, and
therefore took up into the form of the drama, and co-organized it with
all the other parts into a living whole.

The Greek tragedy may rather be compared to our serious opera than to
the tragedies of Shakspeare; nevertheless, the difference is far greater
than the likeness. In the opera all is subordinated to the music, the
dresses and the scenery;--the poetry is a mere vehicle for articulation,
and as little pleasure is lost by ignorance of the Italian language, so
is little gained by the knowledge of it. But in the Greek drama all was
but as instruments and accessaries to the poetry; and hence we should
form a better notion of the choral music from the solemn hymns and
psalms of austere church music than from any species of theatrical
singing. A single flute or pipe was the ordinary accompaniment; and it
is not to be supposed, that any display of musical power was allowed to
obscure the distinct hearing of the words. On the contrary, the evident
purpose was to render the words more audible, and to secure by the
elevations and pauses greater facility of understanding the poetry. For
the choral songs are, and ever must have been, the most difficult part
of the tragedy; there occur in them the most involved verbal compounds,
the newest expressions, the boldest images, the most recondite
allusions. Is it credible that the poets would, one and all, have been
thus prodigal of the stores of art and genius, if they had known that in
the representation the whole must have been lost to the audience,--at a
time too, when the means of after publication were so difficult, and
expensive, and the copies of their works so slowly and narrowly
circulated?

The masks also must be considered--their vast variety and admirable
workmanship. Of this we retain proof by the marble masks which
represented them; but to this in the real mask we must add the thinness
of the substance and the exquisite fitting on to the head of the actor;
so that not only were the very eyes painted with a single opening left
for the pupil of the actor's eye, but in some instances, even the iris
itself was painted, when the colour was a known characteristic of the
divine or heroic personage represented.

Finally, I will note down those fundamental characteristics which
contradistinguish the ancient literature from the modern generally, but
which more especially appear in prominence in the tragic drama. The
ancient was allied to statuary, the modern refers to painting. In the
first there is a predominance of rhythm and melody, in the second of
harmony and counterpoint. The Greeks idolized the finite, and therefore
were the masters of all grace, elegance, proportion, fancy, dignity,
majesty--of whatever, in short, is capable of being definitely conveyed
by defined forms or thoughts: the moderns revere the infinite, and
affect the indefinite as a vehicle of the infinite;--hence their
passions, their obscure hopes and fears, their wandering through the
unknown, their grander moral feelings, their more august conception of
man as man, their future rather than their past--in a word, their
sublimity.


[Footnote 1: Greek (transliterated): exegromenos de idein tous men
allous katheudontas kai oichomenous, Agath'ona de kai Aristophanaen kai
S'okratae eti monous egraegorenai, kai pinein ek phialaes megalaes
epidexia ton oun S'okratae autois dialegesthai kai ta men alla ho
Aristodaemos ouk ephae memnaesthai ton logon (oute gar ex archaes
paragenesthai, uponustazein te) to mentoi kethalaion ethae,
prosanagkazein ton S'okratae omologein autous tou autou andros einai
k'om'odian kai trag'odian epistasthai poiein, kai ton technae
trag'odopoion onta, kai k'om'odopoion einai. Symp. sub fine.]





PROGRESS OF THE DRAMA.

Let two persons join in the same scheme to ridicule a third, and either
take advantage of, or invent, some story for that purpose, and mimicry
will have already produced a sort of rude comedy. It becomes an inviting
treat to the populace, and gains an additional zest and burlesque by
following the already established plan of tragedy; and the first man of
genius who seizes the idea, and reduces it into form,--into a work of
art,--by metre and music, is the Aristophanes of the country.

How just this account is will appear from the fact that in the first or
old comedy of the Athenians, most of the 'dramatis personae' were living
characters introduced under their own names; and no doubt, their
ordinary dress, manner, person and voice were closely mimicked. In less
favourable states of society, as that of England in the middle ages, the
beginnings of comedy would be constantly taking place from the mimics
and satirical minstrels; but from want of fixed abode, popular
government, and the successive attendance of the same auditors, it would
still remain in embryo. I shall, perhaps, have occasion to observe that
this remark is not without importance in explaining the essential
differences of the modern and ancient theatres.

Phaenomena, similar to those which accompanied the origin of tragedy and
comedy among the Greeks, would take place among the Romans much more
slowly, and the drama would, in any case, have much longer remained in
its first irregular form from the character of the people, their
continual engagements in wars of conquest, the nature of their
government, and their rapidly increasing empire. But, however this might
have been, the conquest of Greece precluded both the process and the
necessity of it; and the Roman stage at once presented imitations or
translations of the Greek drama. This continued till the perfect
establishment of Christianity. Some attempts, indeed, were made to adapt
the persons of Scriptural or ecclesiastical history to the drama; and
sacred plays, it is probable, were not unknown in Constantinople under
the emperors of the East. The first of the kind is, I believe, the only
one preserved,--namely, the [Greek (transliterated): Christos Paschon],
or "Christ in his sufferings," by Gregory Nazianzen,--possibly written
in consequence of the prohibition of profane literature to the
Christians by the apostate Julian. [1] In the West, however, the
enslaved and debauched Roman world became too barbarous for any
theatrical exhibitions more refined than those of pageants and
chariot-races; while the spirit of Christianity, which in its most
corrupt form still breathed general humanity, whenever controversies of
faith were not concerned, had done away the cruel combats of the
gladiators, and the loss of the distant provinces prevented the
possibility of exhibiting the engagements of wild beasts.

I pass, therefore, at once to the feudal ages which soon succeeded,
confining my observation to this country; though, indeed, the same
remark with very few alterations will apply to all the other states,
into which the great empire was broken. Ages of darkness
succeeded;--not, indeed, the darkness of Russia or of the barbarous
lands unconquered by Rome; for from the time of Honorius to the
destruction of Constantinople and the consequent introduction of ancient
literature into Europe, there was a continued succession of individual
intellects;--the golden chain was never wholly broken, though the
connecting links were often of baser metal. A dark cloud, like another
sky, covered the entire cope of heaven,--but in this place it thinned
away, and white stains of light showed a half eclipsed star behind
it,--in that place it was rent asunder, and a star passed across the
opening in all its brightness, and then vanished. Such stars exhibited
themselves only; surrounding objects did not partake of their light.
There were deep wells of knowledge, but no fertilizing rills and
rivulets. For the drama, society was altogether a state of chaos, out of
which it was, for a while at least, to proceed anew, as if there had
been none before it.

And yet it is not undelightful to contemplate the eduction of good from
evil. The ignorance of the great mass of our countrymen, was the
efficient cause of the reproduction of the drama; and the preceding
darkness and the returning light were alike necessary in order to the
creation of a Shakspeare.

The drama re-commenced in England, as it first began in Greece, in
religion. The people were not able to read,--the priesthood were
unwilling that they should read; and yet their own interest compelled
them not to leave the people wholly ignorant of the great events of
sacred history. They did that, therefore, by scenic representations,
which in after ages it has been attempted to do in Roman Catholic
countries by pictures. They presented Mysteries, and often at great
expense; and reliques of this system still remain in the south of
Europe, and indeed throughout Italy, where at Christmas the convents and
the great nobles rival each other in the scenic representation of the
birth of Christ and its circumstances. I heard two instances mentioned
to me at different times, one in Sicily and the other in Rome, of noble
devotees, the ruin of whose fortunes was said to have commenced in the
extravagant expense which had been incurred in presenting the 'praesepe'
or manger. But these Mysteries, in order to answer their design, must
not only be instructive, but entertaining; and as, when they became so,
the people began to take pleasure in acting them themselves--in
interloping,--(against which the priests seem to have fought hard and
yet in vain) the most ludicrous images were mixed with the most awful
personations; and whatever the subject might be, however sublime,
however pathetic, yet the Vice and the Devil, who are the genuine
antecessors of Harlequin and the Clown, were necessary component parts.
I have myself a piece of this kind, which I transcribed a few years ago
at Helmstadt, in Germany, on the education of Eve's children, in which
after the fall and repentance of Adam, the offended Maker, as in proof
of his reconciliation, condescends to visit them, and to catechise the
children,--who with a noble contempt of chronology are all brought
together from Abel to Noah. The good children say the ten Commandments,
the Belief and the Lord's Prayer; but Cain and his rout, after he had
received a box on the ear for not taking off his hat, and afterwards
offering his left hand, is prompted by the devil so to blunder in the
Lord's Prayer as to reverse the petitions and say it backward! [2]

Unaffectedly I declare I feel pain at repetitions like these, however
innocent. As historical documents they are valuable; but I am sensible
that what I can read with my eye with perfect innocence, I cannot
without inward fear and misgivings pronounce with my tongue.

Let me, however, be acquitted of presumption if I say that I cannot
agree with Mr. Malone, that our ancestors did not perceive the ludicrous
in these things, or that they paid no separate attention to the serious
and comic parts. Indeed his own statement contradicts it. For what
purpose should the Vice leap upon the Devil's back and belabour him, but
to produce this separate attention? The people laughed heartily, no
doubt. Nor can I conceive any meaning attached to the words "separate
attention," that is not fully answered by one part of an exhibition
exciting seriousness or pity, and the other raising mirth and loud
laughter. That they felt no impiety in the affair is most true. For it
is the very essence of that system of Christian polytheism, which in all
its essentials is now fully as gross in Spain, in Sicily and the south
of Italy, as it ever was in England in the days of Henry VI.--(nay, more
so; for a Wicliffe had then not appeared only, but scattered the good
seed widely,) it is an essential part, I say, of that system to draw the
mind wholly from its own inward whispers and quiet discriminations, and
to habituate the conscience to pronounce sentence in every case
according to the established verdicts of the church and the casuists. I
have looked through volume after volume of the most approved
casuists,--and still I find disquisitions whether this or that act is
right, and under what circumstances, to a minuteness that makes
reasoning ridiculous, and of a callous and unnatural immodesty, to which
none but a monk could harden himself, who has been stripped of all the
tender charities of life, yet is goaded on to make war against them by
the unsubdued hauntings of our meaner nature, even as dogs are said to
get the 'hydrophobia' from excessive thirst. I fully believe that our
ancestors laughed as heartily, as their posterity do at Grimaldi;--and
not having been told that they would be punished for laughing, they
thought it very innocent;--and if their priests had left out murder in
the catalogue of their prohibitions (as indeed they did under certain
circumstances of heresy,) the greater part of them,--the moral instincts
common to all men having been smothered and kept from
development,--would have thought as little of murder. However this may
be, the necessity of at once instructing and gratifying the people
produced the great distinction between the Greek and the English
theatres;--for to this we must attribute the origin of tragi-comedy, or
a representation of human events more lively, nearer the truth, and
permitting a larger field of moral instruction, a more ample exhibition
of the recesses of the human heart, under all the trials and
circumstances that most concern us, than was known or guessed at by
AEschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides;--and at the same time we learn to
account for, and--relatively to the author--perceive the necessity of,
the Fool or Clown or both, as the substitutes of the Vice and the Devil,
which our ancestors had been so accustomed to see in every exhibition of
the stage, that they could not feel any performance perfect without
them. Even to this day in Italy, every opera--(even Metastasio obeyed
the claim throughout)--must have six characters, generally two pairs of
cross lovers, a tyrant and a confidant, or a father and two confidants,
themselves lovers;--and when a new opera appears, it is the universal
fashion to ask--which is the tyrant, which the lover? &c.

It is the especial honour of Christianity, that in its worst and most
corrupted form it cannot wholly separate itself from morality;--whereas
the other religions in their best form (I do not include Mohammedanism,
which is only an anomalous corruption of Christianity, like
Swedenborgianism,) have no connection with it. The very impersonation of
moral evil under the name of Vice, facilitated all other impersonations;
and hence we see that the Mysteries were succeeded by Moralities, or
dialogues and plots of allegorical personages. Again, some character in
real history had become so famous, so proverbial, as Nero for instance,
that they were introduced instead of the moral quality, for which they
were so noted;--and in this manner the stage was moving on to the
absolute production of heroic and comic real characters, when the
restoration of literature, followed by the ever-blessed Reformation, let
in upon the kingdom not only new knowledge, but new motive. A useful
rivalry commenced between the metropolis on the one hand, the residence,
independently of the court and nobles, of the most active and stirring
spirits who had not been regularly educated, or who, from mischance or
otherwise, had forsaken the beaten track of preferment,--and the
universities on the other. The latter prided themselves on their closer
approximation to the ancient rules and ancient regularity--taking the
theatre of Greece, or rather its dim reflection, the rhetorical
tragedies of the poet Seneca, as a perfect ideal, without any critical
collation of the times, origin, or circumstances;--whilst, in the mean
time, the popular writers, who could not and would not abandon what they
had found to delight their countrymen sincerely, and not merely from
inquiries first put to the recollection of rules, and answered in the
affirmative, as if it had been an arithmetical sum, did yet borrow from
the scholars whatever they advantageously could, consistently with their
own peculiar means of pleasing.

And here let me pause for a moment's contemplation of this interesting
subject.

We call, for we see and feel, the swan and the dove both transcendantly
beautiful. As absurd as it would be to institute a comparison between
their separate claims to beauty from any abstract rule common to both,
without reference to the life and being of the animals themselves,--or
as if, having first seen the dove, we abstracted its outlines, gave them
a false generalization, called them the principles or ideal of
bird-beauty, and then proceeded to criticise the swan or the eagle;--not
less absurd is it to pass judgment on the works of a poet on the mere
ground that they have been called by the same class-name with the works
of other poets in other times and circumstances, or on any ground,
indeed, save that of their inappropriateness to their own end and being,
their want of significance, as symbols or physiognomy.

O! few have there been among critics, who have followed with the eye of
the imagination the imperishable yet ever wandering spirit of poetry
through its various metempsychoses, and consequent metamorphoses;--or
who have rejoiced in the light of clear perception at beholding with
each new birth, with each rare 'avatar', the human race frame to itself
a new body, by assimilating materials of nourishment out of its new
circumstances, and work for itself new organs of power appropriate to
the new sphere of its motion and activity!

I have before spoken of the Romance, or the language formed out of the
decayed Roman and the Northern tongues; and comparing it with the Latin,
we find it less perfect in simplicity and relation--the privileges of a
language formed by the mere attraction of homogeneous parts;--but yet
more rich, more expressive and various, as one formed by more obscure
affinities out of a chaos of apparently heterogeneous atoms. As more
than a metaphor,--as an analogy of this, I have named the true genuine
modern poetry the romantic; and the works of Shakspeare are romantic
poetry revealing itself in the drama. If the tragedies of Sophocles are
in the strict sense of the word tragedies, and the comedies of
Aristophanes comedies, we must emancipate ourselves from a false
association arising from misapplied names, and find a new word for the
plays of Shakspeare. For they are, in the ancient sense, neither
tragedies nor comedies, nor both in one,--but a different 'genus',
diverse in kind, and not merely different in degree. They may be called
romantic dramas, or dramatic romances.

A deviation from the simple forms and unities of the ancient stage is an
essential principle, and, of course, an appropriate excellence, of the
romantic drama. For these unities were to a great extent the natural
form of that which in its elements was homogeneous, and the
representation of which was addressed pre-eminently to the outward
senses;--and though the fable, the language and the characters appealed
to the reason rather than to the mere understanding, inasmuch as they
supposed an ideal state rather than referred to an existing
reality,--yet it was a reason which was obliged to accommodate itself to
the senses, and so far became a sort of more elevated understanding. On
the other hand, the romantic poetry--the Shakspearian drama--appealed to
the imagination rather than to the senses, and to the reason as
contemplating our inward nature, and the workings of the passions in
their most retired recesses. But the reason, as reason, is independent
of time and space; it has nothing to do with them; and hence the
certainties of reason have been called eternal truths. As for
example--the endless properties of the circle:--what connection have
they with this or that age, with this or that country?--The reason is
aloof from time and space;--the imagination is an arbitrary controller
over both;--and if only the poet have such power of exciting our
internal emotions as to make us present to the scene in imagination
chiefly, he acquires the right and privilege of using time and space as
they exist in imagination, and obedient only to the laws by which the
imagination itself acts. These laws it will be my object and aim to
point out as the examples occur, which illustrate them. But here let me
remark what can never be too often reflected on by all who would
intelligently study the works either of the Athenian dramatists, or of
Shakspeare, that the very essence of the former consists in the sternest
separation of the diverse in kind and the disparate in the degree,
whilst the latter delights in interlacing by a rainbow-like transfusion
of hues the one with the other.

And here it will be necessary to say a few words on the stage and on
stage-illusion.

A theatre, in the widest sense of the word, is the general term for all
places of amusement through the ear or eye, in which men assemble in
order to be amused by some entertainment presented to all at the same
time and in common. Thus, an old Puritan divine says:--"Those who attend
public worship and sermons only to amuse themselves, make a theatre of
the church, and turn God's house into the devil's. 'Theatra aedes
diabololatricae'." The most important and dignified species of this genus
is, doubtless, the stage, ('res theatralis histrionica'), which, in
addition to the generic definition above given, may be characterized in
its idea, or according to what it does, or ought to, aim at, as a
combination of several or of all the fine arts in an harmonious whole,
having a distinct end of its own, to which the peculiar end of each of
the component arts, taken separately, is made subordinate and
subservient,--that, namely, of imitating reality--whether external
things, actions, or passions--under a semblance of reality. Thus, Claude
imitates a landscape at sunset, but only as a picture; while a
forest-scene is not presented to the spectators as a picture, but as a
forest; and though, in the full sense of the word, we are no more
deceived by the one than by the other, yet are our feelings very
differently affected; and the pleasure derived from the one is not
composed of the same elements as that afforded by the other, even on the
supposition that the 'quantum' of both were equal. In the former, a
picture, it is a condition of all genuine delight that we should not be
deceived; in the latter, stage-scenery, (inasmuch as its principal end
is not in or for itself, as is the case in a picture, but to be an
assistance and means to an end out of itself) its very purpose is to
produce as much illusion as its nature permits. These, and all other
stage presentations, are to produce a sort of temporary half-faith,
which the spectator encourages in himself and supports by a voluntary
contribution on his own part, because he knows that it is at all times
in his power to see the thing as it really is. I have often observed
that little children are actually deceived by stage-scenery, never by
pictures; though even these produce an effect on their impressible
minds, which they do not on the minds of adults. The child, if strongly
impressed, does not indeed positively think the picture to be the
reality; but yet he does not think the contrary. As Sir George Beaumont
was shewing me a very fine engraving from Rubens, representing a storm
at sea without any vessel or boat introduced, my litte boy, then about
five years old, came dancing and singing into the room, and all at once
(if I may so say) 'tumbled in' upon the print. He instantly started,
stood silent and motionless, with the strongest expression, first of
wonder and then of grief in his eyes and countenance, and at length
said, "And where is the ship? But that is sunk, and the men are all
drowned!" still keeping his eyes fixed on the print. Now what pictures
are to little children, stage-illusion is to men, provided they retain
any part of the child's sensibility; except, that in the latter
instance, the suspension of the act of comparison, which permits this
sort of negative belief, is somewhat more assisted by the will, than in
that of a child respecting a picture.

The true stage-illusion in this and in all other things consists--not in
the mind's judging it to be a forest, but, in its remission of the
judgment that it is not a forest. And this subject of stage-illusion is
so important, and so many practical errors and false criticisms may
arise, and indeed have arisen, either from reasoning on it as actual
delusion, (the strange notion, on which the French critics built up
their theory, and on which the French poets justify the construction of
their tragedies), or from denying it altogether, (which seems the end of
Dr. Johnson's reasoning, and which, as extremes meet, would lead to the
very same consequences, by excluding whatever would not be judged
probable by us in our coolest state of feeling, with all our faculties
in even balance), that these few remarks will, I hope, be pardoned, if
they should serve either to explain or to illustrate the point. For not
only are we never absolutely deluded--or any thing like it, but the
attempt to cause the highest delusion possible to beings in their senses
sitting in a theatre, is a gross fault, incident only to low minds,
which, feeling that they cannot affect the heart or head permanently,
endeavour to call forth the momentary affections. There ought never to
be more pain than is compatible with co-existing pleasure, and to be
amply repaid by thought.

Shakspeare found the infant stage demanding an intermixture of ludicrous
character as imperiously as that of Greece did the chorus, and high
language accordant. And there are many advantages in this;--a greater
assimilation to nature, a greater scope of power, more truths, and more
feelings;-the effects of contrast, as in Lear and the Fool; and
especially this, that the true language of passion becomes sufficiently
elevated by your having previously heard, in the same piece, the lighter
conversation of men under no strong emotion. The very nakedness of the
stage, too, was advantageous,--for the drama thence became something
between recitation and a re-presentation; and the absence or paucity of
scenes allowed a freedom from the laws of unity of place and unity of
time, the observance of which must either confine the drama to as few
subjects as may be counted on the fingers, or involve gross
improbabilities, far more striking than the violation would have caused.
Thence, also, was precluded the danger of a false ideal,--of aiming at
more than what is possible on the whole. What play of the ancients, with
reference to their ideal, does not hold out more glaring absurdities
than any in Shakspeare? On the Greek plan a man could more easily be a
poet than a dramatist; upon our plan more easily a dramatist than a
poet.


[Footnote 1: A. D. 363. But I believe the prevailing opinion amongst
scholars now is, that the [Greek: Christos Paschon] is not genuine. Ed.]

[Footnote 2: See vol. i. p. 76, where this is told more at length and
attributed to Hans Sachs. Ed.]





THE DRAMA GENERALLY, AND PUBLIC TASTE.

Unaccustomed to address such an audience, and having lost by a long
interval of confinement the advantages of my former short schooling, I
had miscalculated in my last Lecture the proportion of my matter to my
time, and by bad economy and unskilful management, the several heads of
my discourse failed in making the entire performance correspond with the
promise publicly circulated in the weekly annunciation of the subjects,
to be treated. It would indeed have been wiser in me, and perhaps better
on the whole, if I had caused my Lectures to be announced only as
continuations of the main subject. But if I be, as perforce I must be,
gratified by the recollection of whatever has appeared to give you
pleasure, I am conscious of something better, though less flattering, a
sense of unfeigned gratitude for your forbearance with my defects. Like
affectionate guardians, you see without disgust the awkwardness, and
witness with sympathy the growing pains, of a youthful endeavour, and
look forward with a hope, which is its own reward, to the contingent
results of practice--to its intellectual maturity.

In my last address I defined poetry to be the art, or whatever better
term our language may afford, of representing external nature and human
thoughts, both relatively to human affections, so as to cause the
production of as great immediate pleasure in each part, as is compatible
with the largest possible sum of pleasure on the whole. Now this
definition applies equally to painting and music as to poetry; and in
truth the term poetry is alike applicable to all three. The vehicle
alone constitutes the difference; and the term 'poetry' is rightly
applied by eminence to measured words, only because the sphere of their
action is far wider, the power of giving permanence to them much more
certain, and incomparably greater the facility, by which men, not
defective by nature or disease, may be enabled to derive habitual
pleasure and instruction from them. On my mentioning these
considerations to a painter of great genius, who had been, from a most
honourable enthusiasm, extolling his own art, he was so struck with
their truth, that he exclaimed, "I want no other arguments;--poetry,
that is, verbal poetry, must be the greatest; all that proves final
causes in the world, proves this; it would be shocking to think
otherwise!"--And in truth, deeply, O! far more than words can express,
as I venerate the Last Judgment and the Prophets of Michel Angelo
Buonaroti,--yet the very pain which I repeatedly felt as I lost myself
in gazing upon them, the painful consideration that their having been
painted in 'fresco' was the sole cause that they had not been
abandoned to all the accidents of a dangerous transportation to a
distant capital, and that the same caprice, which made the Neapolitan
soldiery destroy all the exquisite master-pieces on the walls of the
church of the 'Trinitado Monte', after the retreat of their
antagonist barbarians, might as easily have made vanish the rooms and
open gallery of Raffael, and the yet more unapproachable wonders of the
sublime Florentine in the Sixtine Chapel, forced upon my mind the
reflection; How grateful the human race ought to be that the works of
Euclid, Newton, Plato, Milton, Shakspeare, are not subjected to similar
contingencies,--that they and their fellows, and the great, though
inferior, peerage of undying intellect, are secured;--secured even from
a second irruption of Goths and Vandals, in addition to many other
safeguards, by the vast empire of English language, laws, and religion
founded in America, through the overflow of the power and the virtue of
my country;-and that now the great and certain works of genuine fame can
only cease to act for mankind, when men themselves cease to be men, or
when the planet on which they exist, shall have altered its relations,
or have ceased to be. Lord Bacon, in the language of the gods, if I may
use an Homeric phrase, has expressed a similar thought:--


Lastly, leaving the vulgar arguments, that by learning man excelleth man
in that wherein man excelleth beasts; that by learning man ascendeth to
the heavens and their motions, where in body he cannot come, and the
like; let us conclude with the dignity and excellency of knowledge and
learning in that whereunto man's nature doth most aspire, which is,
immortality or continuance: for to this tendeth generation, and raising
of houses and families; to this tend buildings, foundations, and
monuments; to this tendeth the desire of memory, fame, and celebration,
and in effect the strength of all other human desires. We see then how
far the monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the
monuments of power, or of the hands. For have not the verses of Homer
continued twenty-five hundred years, or more, without the loss of a
syllable or letter; during which time infinite palaces, temples,
castles, cities, have been decayed and demolished? It is not possible to
have the true pictures or statues of Cyrus, Alexander, Caesar; no, nor
of the kings or great personages of much later years; for the originals
cannot last, and the copies cannot but lose of the life and truth. But
the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from
the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they
fitly to be called images, because they generate still, and cast their
seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and
opinions in succeeding ages: so that, if the invention of the ship was
thought so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from place to
place, and consociateth the most remote regions in participation of
their fruits; how much more are letters to be magnified, which, as ships
pass through the vast seas of time, and make ages so distant to
participate of the wisdom, illuminations, and inventions, the one of the
other? [1]


But let us now consider what the drama should be. And first, it is not a
copy, but an imitation, of nature. This is the universal principle of
the fine arts. In all well laid out grounds what delight do we feel from
that balance and antithesis of feelings and thoughts! How natural! we
say;--but the very wonder that caused the exclamation, implies that we
perceived art at the same moment. We catch the hint from nature itself.
Whenever in mountains or cataracts we discover a likeness to any thing
artificial which yet we know is not artificial--what pleasure! And so
it is in appearances known to be artificial, which appear to be natural.
This applies in due degrees, regulated by steady good sense, from a
clump of trees to the Paradise Lost or Othello. It would be easy to
apply it to painting and even, though with greater abstraction of
thought, and by more subtle yet equally just analogies--to music. But
this belongs to others;--suffice it that one great principle is common
to all the fine arts,--a principle which probably is the condition of
all consciousness, without which we should feel and imagine only by
discontinuous moments, and be plants or brute animals instead of men;--I
mean that ever-varying balance, or balancing, of images, notions, or
feelings, conceived as in opposition to each other;--in short, the
perception of identity and contrariety; the least degree of which
constitutes likeness, the greatest absolute difference; but the infinite
gradations between these two form all the play and all the interest of
our intellectual and moral being, till it leads us to a feeling and an
object more awful than it seems to me compatible with even the present
subject to utter aloud, though I am most desirous to suggest it. For
there alone are all things at once different and the same; there alone,
as the principle of all things, does distinction exist unaided by
division; there are will and reason, succession of time and unmoving
eternity, infinite change and ineffable rest!--


Return Alpheus! the dread voice is past
Which shrunk thy streams!--Thou honour'd flood,
Smooth-'flowing' Avon, crown'd with vocal reeds,
That strain I heard, was of a higher mood!--
But now my 'voice' proceeds.


We may divide a dramatic poet's characteristics before we enter into the
component merits of any one work, and with reference only to those
things which are to be the materials of all, into language, passion, and
character; always bearing in mind that these must act and react on each
other,--the language inspired by the passion, and the language and the
passion modified and differenced by the character. To the production of
the highest excellencies in these three, there are requisite in the mind
of the author;--good sense; talent; sensibility; imagination;--and to
the perfection of a work we should add two faculties of lesser
importance, yet necessary for the ornaments and foliage of the column
and the roof--fancy and a quick sense of beauty.

As to language;--it cannot be supposed that the poet should make his
characters say all that they would, or that, his whole drama considered,
each scene, or paragraph should be such as, on cool examination, we can
conceive it likely that men in such situations would say, in that order,
or with that perfection. And yet, according to my feelings, it is a very
inferior kind of poetry, in which, as in the French tragedies, men are
made to talk in a style which few indeed even of the wittiest can be
supposed to converse in, and which both is, and on a moment's reflection
appears to be, the natural produce of the hot-bed of vanity, namely, the
closet of an author, who is actuated originally by a desire to excite
surprise and wonderment at his own superiority to other men,--instead of
having felt so deeply on certain subjects, or in consequence of certain
imaginations, as to make it almost a necessity of his nature to seek for
sympathy,--no doubt, with that honorable desire of permanent action
which distinguishes genius.--Where then is the difference?--In this that
each part should be proportionate, though the whole may be perhaps
impossible. At all events, it should be compatible with sound sense and
logic in the mind of the poet himself.

It is to be lamented that we judge of books by books, instead of
referring what we read to our own experience. One great use of books is
to make their contents a motive for observation. The German tragedies
have in some respects been justly ridiculed. In them the dramatist often
becomes a novelist in his directions to the actors, and thus degrades
tragedy into pantomime. Yet still the consciousness of the poet's mind
must be diffused over that of the reader or spectator; but he himself,
according to his genius, elevates us, and by being always in keeping,
prevents us from perceiving any strangeness, though we feel great
exultation. Many different kinds of style may be admirable, both in
different men, and in different parts of the same poem.

See the different language which strong feelings may justify in Shylock,
and learn from Shakspeare's conduct of that character the terrible force
of very plain and calm diction, when known to proceed from a resolved
and impassioned man.

It is especially with reference to the drama, and its characteristics in
any given nation, or at any particular period, that the dependence of
genius on the public taste becomes a matter of the deepest importance. I
do not mean that taste which springs merely from caprice or fashionable
imitation, and which, in fact, genius can, and by degrees will, create
for itself; but that which arises out of wide-grasping and
heart-enrooted causes, which is epidemic, and in the very air that all
breathe. This it is which kills, or withers, or corrupts. Socrates,
indeed, might walk arm and arm with Hygeia, whilst pestilence, with a
thousand furies running to and fro, and clashing against each other in a
complexity and agglomeration of horrors, was shooting her darts of fire
and venom all around him. Even such was Milton; yea, and such, in spite
of all that has been babbled by his critics in pretended excuse for his
damning, because for them too profound, excellencies,--such was
Shakspeare. But alas! the exceptions prove the rule. For who will dare
to force his way out of the crowd,--not of the mere vulgar,--but of the
vain and banded aristocracy of intellect, and presume to join the almost
supernatural beings that stand by themselves aloof?

Of this diseased epidemic influence there are two forms especially
preclusive of tragic worth. The first is the necessary growth of a sense
and love of the ludicrous, and a morbid sensibility of the assimilative
power,--an inflammation produced by cold and weakness,--which in the
boldest bursts of passion will lie in wait for a jeer at any phrase,
that may have an accidental coincidence in the mere words with something
base or trivial. For instance,--to express woods, not on a plain, but
clothing a hill, which overlooks a valley, or dell, or river, or the
sea,--the trees rising one above another, as the spectators in an
ancient theatre,--I know no other word in our language, (bookish and
pedantic terms out of the question,) but 'hanging' woods, the 'sylvae
superimpendentes' of Catullus [2]; yet let some wit call out in a slang
tone,--"the gallows!" and a peal of laughter would damn the play. Hence
it is that so many dull pieces have had a decent run, only because
nothing unusual above, or absurd below, mediocrity furnished an
occasion,--a spark for the explosive materials collected behind the
orchestra. But it would take a volume of no ordinary size, however
laconically the sense were expressed, if it were meant to instance the
effects, and unfold all the causes, of this disposition upon the moral,
intellectual, and even physical character of a people, with its
influences on domestic life and individual deportment. A good document
upon this subject would be the history of Paris society and of French,
that is, Parisian, literature from the commencement of the latter half
of the reign of Louis XIV. to that of Buonaparte, compared with the
preceding philosophy and poetry even of Frenchmen themselves.

The second form, or more properly, perhaps, another distinct cause, of
this diseased disposition is matter of exultation to the philanthropist
and philosopher, and of regret to the poet, the painter, and the
statuary alone, and to them only as poets, painters, and
statuaries;--namely, the security, the comparative equability, and ever
increasing sameness of human life. Men are now so seldom thrown into
wild circumstances, and violences of excitement, that the language of
such states, the laws of association of feeling with thought, the starts
and strange far-flights of the assimilative power on the slightest and
least obvious likeness presented by thoughts, words, or objects,--these
are all judged of by authority, not by actual experience,--by what men
have been accustomed to regard as symbols of these states, and not the
natural symbols, or self-manifestations of them.

Even so it is in the language of man, and in that of nature. The sound
'sun', or the figures 's', 'u', 'n', are purely arbitrary modes of
recalling the object, and for visual mere objects they are not only
sufficient, but have infinite advantages from their very nothingness
'per se'. But the language of nature is a subordinate 'Logos', that was
in the beginning, and was with the thing it represented, and was the
thing it represented.

Now the language of Shakspeare, in his Lear for instance, is a something
intermediate between these two; or rather it is the former blended with
the latter,--the arbitrary, not merely recalling the cold notion of the
thing, but expressing the reality of it, and, as arbitrary language is
an heir-loom of the human race, being itself a part of that which it
manifests. What shall I deduce from the preceding positions? Even
this,--the appropriate, the never to be too much valued advantage of the
theatre, if only the actors were what we know they have been,--a
delightful, yet most effectual, remedy for this dead palsy of the public
mind. What would appear mad or ludicrous in a book, when presented to
the senses under the form of reality, and with the truth of nature,
supplies a species of actual experience. This is indeed the special
privilege of a great actor over a great poet. No part was ever played in
perfection, but nature justified herself in the hearts of all her
children, in what state soever they were, short of absolute moral
exhaustion, or downright stupidity. There is no time given to ask
questions or to pass judgments; we are taken by storm, and, though in
the histrionic art many a clumsy counterfeit, by caricature of one or
two features, may gain applause as a fine likeness, yet never was the
very thing rejected as a counterfeit. O! when I think of the
inexhaustible mine of virgin treasure in our Shakspeare, that I have
been almost daily reading him since I was ten years old,--that the
thirty intervening years have been unintermittingly and not fruitlessly
employed in the study of the Greek, Latin, English, Italian, Spanish and
German 'belle lettrists', and the last fifteen years in addition, far
more intensely in the analysis of the laws of life and reason as they
exist in man,--and that upon every step I have made forward in taste, in
acquisition of facts from history or my own observation, and in
knowledge of the different laws of being and their apparent exceptions,
from accidental collision of disturbing forces,--that at every new
accession of information, after every successful exercise of meditation,
and every fresh presentation of experience, I have unfailingly
discovered a proportionate increase of wisdom and intuition in
Shakspeare;--when I know this, and know too, that by a conceivable and
possible, though hardly to be expected, arrangement of the British
theatres, not all, indeed, but a large, a very large, proportion of this
indefinite all--(round which no comprehension has yet drawn the line of
circumscription, so as to say to itself, 'I have seen the whole')--might
be sent into the heads and hearts--into the very souls of the mass of
mankind, to whom, except by this living comment and interpretation, it
must remain for ever a sealed volume, a deep well without a wheel or a
windlass;--it seems to me a pardonable enthusiasm to steal away from
sober likelihood, and share in so rich a feast in the faery world of
possibility! Yet even in the grave cheerfulness of a circumspect hope,
much, very much, might be done; enough, assuredly, to furnish a kind and
strenuous nature with ample motives for the attempt to effect what may
be effected.


[Footnote: 'Advancement of Learning, book 1. 'sub fine.']

[Footnote 2: Confestim Peneos adest, viridantia Tempe, Tempe, quae
cingunt sylvae superimpendentes. 'Epith. Pel. et. Th.' 286.]





SHAKSPEARE, A POET GENERALLY.


Clothed in radiant armour, and authorized by titles sure and manifold,
as a poet, Shakspeare came forward to demand the throne of fame, as the
dramatic poet of England. His excellencies compelled even his
contemporaries to seat him on that throne, although there were giants in
those days contending for the same honor. Hereafter I would fain
endeavour to make out the title of the English drama as created by, and
existing in, Shakspeare, and its right to the supremacy of dramatic
excellence in general. But he had shown himself a poet, previously to
his appearance as a dramatic poet; and had no Lear, no Othello, no Henry
IV., no Twelfth Night ever appeared, we must have admitted that
Shakspeare possessed the chief, if not every, requisite of a poet,--deep
feeling and exquisite sense of beauty, both as exhibited to the eye in
the combinations of form, and to the ear in sweet and appropriate
melody; that these feelings were under the command of his own will; that
in his very first productions he projected his mind out of his own
particular being, and felt, and made others feel, on subjects no way
connected with himself, except by force of contemplation and that
sublime faculty by which a great mind becomes that, on which it
meditates. To this must be added that affectionate love of nature and
natural objects, without which no man could have observed so steadily,
or painted so truly and passionately, the very minutest beauties of the
external world:--


When them hast on foot the purblind hare,
Mark the poor wretch; to overshoot his troubles,
How he outruns the wind, and with what care,
He cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles;
The many musits through the which he goes
Are like a labyrinth to amaze his foes.

Sometimes he runs among the flock of sheep,
To make the cunning hounds mistake their smell;
And sometime where earth-delving conies keep,
To stop the loud pursuers in their yell;
And sometime sorteth with a herd of deer:
Danger deviseth shifts, wit waits on fear.

For there his smell with others' being mingled,
The hot scent-snuffing hounds are driven to doubt,
Ceasing their clamorous cry, till they have singled,
With much ado, the cold fault cleanly out,
Then do they spend their mouths; echo replies,
As if another chase were in the skies.

By this poor Wat far off, upon a hill,
Stands on his hinder legs with listening ear,
To hearken if his foes pursue him still:
Anon their loud alarums he doth hear,
And now his grief may be compared well
To one sore-sick, that hears the passing bell.

Then shalt thou see the dew-bedabbled wretch
Turn, and return, indenting with the way:
Each envious briar his weary legs doth scratch.
Each shadow makes him stop, each murmur stay.
For misery is trodden on by many,
And being low, never relieved by any.

'Venus and Adonis'.


And the preceding description:-


But, lo! from forth a copse that neighbours by,
A breeding jennet, lusty, young and proud, &c.


is much more admirable, but in parts less fitted for quotation.

Moreover Shakspeare had shown that he possessed fancy, considered as the
faculty of bringing together images dissimilar in the main by some one
point or more of likeness, as in such a passage as this:-


Full gently now she takes him by the hand,
A lily prisoned in a jail of snow,
Or ivory in an alabaster band:
So white a friend ingirts so white a foe!

'Ib.'


And still mounting the intellectual ladder, he had as unequivocally
proved the indwelling in his mind of imagination, or the power by which
one image or feeling is made to modify many others, and by a sort of
fusion to force many into one;--that which afterwards showed itself in
such might and energy in Lear, where the deep anguish of a father
spreads the feeling of ingratitude and cruelty over the very elements of
heaven;--and which, combining many circumstances into one moment of
consciousness, tends to produce that ultimate end of all human thought
and human feeling, unity, and thereby the reduction of the spirit to its
principle and fountain, who is alone truly one. Various are the workings
of this the greatest faculty of the human mind, both passionate and
tranquil. In its tranquil and purely pleasurable operation, it acts
chiefly by creating out of many things, as they would have appeared in
the description of an ordinary mind, detailed in unimpassioned
succession, a oneness, even as nature, the greatest of poets, acts upon
us, when we open our eyes upon an extended prospect. Thus the flight of
Adonis in the dusk of the evening:-


Look! how a bright star shooteth from the sky;
So glides he in the night from Venus' eye!


How many images and feelings are here brought together without effort
and without discord, in the beauty of Adonis, the rapidity of his
flight, the yearning, yet hopelessness, of the enamored gazer, while a
shadowy ideal character is thrown over the whole! Or this power acts by
impressing the stamp of humanity, and of human feelings, on inanimate or
mere natural objects:-


Lo! here the gentle lark, weary of rest,
From his moist cabinet mounts up on high,
And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast
The sun ariseth in his majesty,
Who doth the world so gloriously behold,
The cedar-tops and hills seem burnish'd gold.


Or again, it acts by so carrying on the eye of the reader as to make him
almost lose the consciousness of words,--to make him see every thing
flashed, as Wordsworth has grandly and appropriately said,-


_Flashed_ upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude;-


and this without exciting any painful or laborious attention, without
any anatomy of description, (a fault not uncommon in descriptive
poetry)-but with the sweetness and easy movement of nature. This energy
is an absolute essential of poetry, and of itself would constitute a
poet, though not one of the highest class;--it is, however, a most
hopeful symptom, and the Venus and Adonis is one continued specimen of
it.

In this beautiful poem there is an endless activity of thought in all
the possible associations of thought with thought, thought with feeling,
or with words, of feelings with feelings, and of words with words.


Even as the sun, with purple-colour'd face,
Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn,
Rose-cheek'd Adonis hied him to the chase:
Hunting he loved, but love he laughed to scorn.
Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him,
And like a bold-faced suitor 'gins to woo him.


Remark the humanizing imagery and circumstances of the first two lines,
and the activity of thought in the play of words in the fourth line. The
whole stanza presents at once the time, the appearance of the morning,
and the two persons distinctly characterized, and in six simple verses
puts the reader in possession of the whole argument of the poem.


Over one arm the lusty courser's rein,
Under the other was the tender boy,
Who blush'd and pouted in a dull disdain,
With leaden appetite, unapt to toy,
She red and hot, as coals of glowing fire,
He red for shame, but frosty to desire:-


This stanza and the two following afford good instances of that poetic
power, which I mentioned above, of making every thing present to the
imagination--both the forms, and the passions which modify those forms,
either actually, as in the representations of love, or anger, or other
human affections; or imaginatively, by the different manner in which
inanimate objects, or objects unimpassioned themselves, are caused to be
seen by the mind in moments of strong excitement, and according to the
kind of the excitement,--whether of jealousy, or rage, or love, in the
only appropriate sense of the word, or of the lower impulses of our
nature, or finally of the poetic feeling itself. It is, perhaps, chiefly
in the power of producing and reproducing the latter that the poet
stands distinct.

The subject of the Venus and Adonis is unpleasing; but the poem itself
is for that very reason the more illustrative of Shakspeare. There are
men who can write passages of deepest pathos and even sublimity on
circumstances personal to themselves and stimulative of their own
passions; but they are not, therefore, on this account poets. Read that
magnificent burst of woman's patriotism and exultation, Deborah's song
of victory; it is glorious, but nature is the poet there. It is quite
another matter to become all things and yet remain the same,--to make
the changeful god be felt in the river, the lion and the flame;--this it
is, that is the true imagination. Shakspeare writes in this poem, as if
he were of another planet, charming you to gaze on the movements of
Venus and Adonis, as you would on the twinkling dances of two vernal
butterflies.

Finally, in this poem and the Rape of Lucrece, Shakspeare gave ample
proof of his possession of a most profound, energetic, and philosophical
mind, without which he might have pleased, but could not have been a
great dramatic poet. Chance and the necessity of his genius combined to
lead him to the drama his proper province; in his conquest of which we
should consider both the difficulties which opposed him, and the
advantages by which he was assisted.





SHAKSPEARE'S JUDGMENT EQUAL TO HIS GENIUS.

Thus then Shakspeare appears, from his Venus and Adonis and Rape of
Lucrece alone, apart from all his great works, to have possessed all the
conditions of the true poet. Let me now proceed to destroy, as far as
may be in my power, the popular notion that he was a great dramatist by
mere instinct, that he grew immortal in his own despite, and sank below
men of second or third-rate power, when he attempted aught beside the
drama--even as bees construct their cells and manufacture their honey
to admirable perfection; but would in vain attempt to build a nest. Now
this mode of reconciling a compelled sense of inferiority with a feeling
of pride, began in a few pedants, who having read that Sophocles was the
great model of tragedy, and Aristotle the infallible dictator of its
rules, and finding that the Lear, Hamlet, Othello and other
master-pieces were neither in imitation of Sophocles, nor in obedience
to Aristotle,--and not having (with one or two exceptions) the courage
to affirm, that the delight which their country received from generation
to generation, in defiance of the alterations of circumstances and
habits, was wholly groundless,--took upon them, as a happy medium and
refuge, to talk of Shakspeare as a sort of beautiful 'lusus naturae', a
delightful monster,--wild, indeed, and without taste or judgment, but
like the inspired idiots so much venerated in the East, uttering, amid
the strangest follies, the sublimest truths. In nine places out of ten
in which I find his awful name mentioned, it is with some epithet of
'wild', 'irregular,' 'pure child of nature,' &c. If all this be true, we
must submit to it; though to a thinking mind it cannot but be painful to
find any excellence, merely human, thrown out of all human analogy, and
thereby leaving us neither rules for imitation, nor motives to
imitate;--but if false, it is a dangerous falsehood;--for it affords a
refuge to secret self-conceit,--enables a vain man at once to escape his
reader's indignation by general swoln panegyrics, and merely by his
'ipse dixit' to treat, as contemptible, what he has not intellect enough
to comprehend, or soul to feel, without assigning any reason, or
referring his opinion to any demonstrative principle;--thus leaving
Shakspeare as a sort of grand Lama, adored indeed, arid his very
excrements prized as relics, but with no authority or real influence. I
grieve that every late voluminous edition of his works would enable me
to substantiate the present charge with a variety of facts one tenth of
which would of themselves exhaust the time allotted to me. Every critic,
who has or has not made a collection of black letter books--in itself a
useful and respectable amusement,--puts on the seven-league boots of
self-opinion, and strides at once from an illustrator into a supreme
judge, and blind and deaf, fills his three-ounce phial at the waters of
Niagara; and determines positively the greatness of the cataract to be
neither more nor less than his three-ounce phial has been able to
receive.

I think this a very serious subject. It is my earnest desire--my
passionate endeavour,--to enforce at various times and by various
arguments and instances the close and reciprocal connexion of just taste
with pure morality. Without that acquaintance with the heart of man, or
that docility and childlike gladness to be made acquainted with it,
which those only can have, who dare look at their own hearts--and that
with a steadiness which religion only has the power of reconciling with
sincere humility;--without this, and the modesty produced by it, I am
deeply convinced that no man, however wide his erudition, however
patient his antiquarian researches, can possibly understand, or be
worthy of understanding, the writings of Shakspeare.

Assuredly that criticism of Shakspeare will alone be genial which is
reverential. The Englishman, who without reverence, a proud and
affectionate reverence, can utter the name of William Shakspeare, stands
disqualified for the office of critic. He wants one at least of the very
senses, the language of which he is to employ, and will discourse at
best, but as a blind man, while the whole harmonious creation of light
and shade with all its subtle interchange of deepening and dissolving
colours rises in silence to the silent 'fiat' of the uprising Apollo.
However inferior in ability I may be to some who have followed me, I own
I am proud that I was the first in time who publicly demonstrated to the
full extent of the position, that the supposed irregularity and
extravagancies of Shakspeare were the mere dreams of a pedantry that
arraigned the eagle because it had not the dimensions of the swan. In
all the successive courses of lectures delivered by me, since my first
attempt at the Royal Institution, it has been, and it still remains, my
object, to prove that in all points from the most important to the most
minute, the judgment of Shakspeare is commensurate with his
genius,--nay, that his genius reveals itself in his judgment, as in its
most exalted form. And the more gladly do I recur to this subject from
the clear conviction, that to judge aright, and with distinct
consciousness of the grounds of our judgment, concerning the works of
Shakspeare, implies the power and the means of judging rightly of all
other works of intellect, those of abstract science alone excepted.

It is a painful truth that not only individuals, but even whole nations,
are ofttimes so enslaved to the habits of their education and immediate
circumstances, as not to judge disinterestedly even on those subjects,
the very pleasure arising from which consists in its disinterestedness,
namely, on subjects of taste and polite literature. Instead of deciding
concerning their own modes and customs by any rule of reason, nothing
appears rational, becoming, or beautiful to them, but what coincides
with the peculiarities of their education. In this narrow circle,
individuals may attain to exquisite discrimination, as the French
critics have done in their own literature; but a true critic can no more
be such without placing himself on some central point, from which he may
command the whole, that is, some general rule, which, founded in reason,
or the faculties common to all men, must therefore apply to each,--than
an astronomer can explain the movements of the solar system without
taking his stand in the sun. And let me remark, that this will not tend
to produce despotism, but, on the contrary, true tolerance, in the
critic. He will, indeed, require, as the spirit and substance of a work,
something true in human nature itself, and independent of all
circumstances; but in the mode of applying it, he will estimate genius
and judgment according to the felicity with which the imperishable soul
of intellect shall have adapted itself to the age, the place, and the
existing manners. The error he will expose, lies in reversing this, and
holding up the mere circumstances as perpetual to the utter neglect of
the power which can alone animate them. For art cannot exist without, or
apart from, nature; and what has man of his own to give to his
fellow-man, but his own thoughts and feelings, and his observations so
far as they are modified by his own thoughts or feelings?

Let me, then, once more submit this question to minds emancipated alike
from national, or party, or sectarian prejudice:--Are the plays of
Shakspeare works of rude uncultivated genius, in which the splendour of
the parts compensates, if aught can compensate, for the barbarous
shapelessness and irregularity of the whole?--Or is the form equally
admirable with the matter, and the judgment of the great poet, not less
deserving our wonder than his genius?--Or, again, to repeat the question
in other words:--Is Shakspeare a great dramatic poet on account only of
those beauties and excellencies which he possesses in common with the
ancients, but with diminished claims to our love and honour to the full
extent of his differences from them?--Or are these very differences
additional proofs of poetic wisdom, at once results and symbols of
living power as contrasted with lifeless mechanism--of free and rival
originality as contradistinguished from servile imitation, or, more
accurately, a blind copying of effects, instead of a true imitation of
the essential principles?--Imagine not that I am about to oppose genius
to rules. No! the comparative value of these rules is the very cause to
be tried. The spirit of poetry, like all other living powers, must of
necessity circumscribe itself by rules, were it only to unite power with
beauty. It must embody in order to reveal itself; but a living body is
of necessity an organized one; and what is organization but the
connection of parts in and for a whole, so that each part is at once end
and means?--This is no discovery of criticism;--it is a necessity of the
human mind; and all nations have felt and obeyed it, in the invention of
metre, and measured sounds, as the vehicle and 'involucrum' of
poetry--itself a fellow-growth from the same life,--even as the bark is
to the tree!

No work of true genius dares want its appropriate form, neither indeed
is there any danger of this. As it must not, so genius cannot, be
lawless; for it is even this that constitutes it genius--the power of
acting creatively under laws of its own origination. How then comes it
that not only single 'Zoili', but whole nations have combined in
unhesitating condemnation of our great dramatist, as a sort of African
nature, rich in beautiful monsters,--as a wild heath where islands of
fertility look the greener from the surrounding waste, where the
loveliest plants now shine out among unsightly weeds, and now are choked
by their parasitic growth, so intertwined that we cannot disentangle the
weed without snapping the flower?--In this statement. I have had no
reference to the vulgar abuse of Voltaire [1], save as far as his
charges are coincident with the decisions of Shakspeare's own
commentators and (so they would tell you) almost idolatrous admirers.
The true ground of the mistake lies in the confounding mechanical
regularity with organic form. The form is mechanic, when on any given
material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out
of the properties of the material;--as when to a mass of wet clay we
give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic
form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes, as it developes, itself
from within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with
the perfection of its outward form. Such as the life is, such is the
form. Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers,
is equally inexhaustible in forms;--each exterior is the physiognomy of
the being within,--its true image reflected and thrown out from the
concave mirror;--and even such is the appropriate excellence of her
chosen poet, of our own Shakspeare,--himself a nature humanized, a
genial understanding directing self-consciously a power and an implicit
wisdom deeper even than our consciousness.

I greatly dislike beauties and selections in general; but as proof
positive of his unrivalled excellence, I should like to try Shakspeare
by this criterion. Make out your amplest catalogue of all the human
faculties, as reason or the moral law, the will, the feeling of the
coincidence of the two (a feeling 'sui generis et demonstratio
clemontrationum') called the conscience, the understanding or prudence,
wit, fancy, imagination, judgment,--and then of the objects on which
these are to be employed, as the beauties, the terrors, and the seeming
caprices of nature, the realities and the capabilities, that is, the
actual and the ideal, of the human mind, conceived as an individual or
as a social being, as in innocence or in guilt, in a play-paradise, or
in a war-field of temptation;--and then compare with Shakspeare under
each of these heads all or any of the writers in prose and verse that
have ever lived! Who, that is competent to judge, doubts the
result?--And ask your own hearts,--ask your own common-sense--to
conceive the possibility of this man being--I say not, the drunken
savage of that wretched sciolist, whom Frenchmen, to their shame, have
honoured before their elder and better worthies,--but the anomalous, the
wild, the irregular, genius of our daily criticism! What! are we to have
miracles in sport?--Or, I speak reverently, does God choose idiots by
whom to convey divine truths to man?


[Footnote 1: Take a slight specimen of it.

Je suis bien loin assurement de justifier en tout la tragedie
d'Hamlet; _c'est une piece grossiere et barbare, qui ne serait pas
supportee par la plus vile populace de la France et de l'Italie._
Hamlet y devient fou au second acte, et sa maitresse folle au
troisieme; le prince tue le pere de sa maitresse, feignant de tuer un
rat, et I'heroeine se jette dans la riviere. On fait sa fosse sur le
theatre; des fossoyeurs disent des _quolibets_ dignes d'eux, en tenant
dans leurs mains des tetes de morts; le prince Hamlet repond a leurs
'grossieretes abominables par des folies non moins degoutantes._
Pendant ce temps-la, un des acteurs fait la conquete de la Pologne.
_Hamlet, sa mere, et son beau-pere boivent ensemble sur le theatre; on
chante a table, on s'y querelle, on se bat, on se tue: on croirait que
cet ouvrage est le fruit de I'imagination d'un sauvage ivre._

(Dissertation before Semiramis.) This is not, perhaps, very like Hamlet;
but nothing can be more like Voltaire. Ed.]






RECAPITULATION, AND SUMMARY OF THE CHARACTERISTICS OF SHAKSPEARE's
DRAMAS. [1]

In lectures, of which amusement forms a large part of the object, there
are some peculiar difficulties. The architect places his foundation out
of sight, and the musician tunes his instrument before he makes his
appearance; but the lecturer has to try his chords in the presence of
the assembly; an operation not likely, indeed, to produce much pleasure,
but yet indispensably necessary to a right understanding of the subject
to be developed.

Poetry in essence is as familiar to barbarous as to civilized nations.
The Laplander and the savage Indian are cheered by it as well as the
inhabitants of London and Paris;--its spirit takes up and incorporates
surrounding materials, as a plant clothes itself with soil and climate,
whilst it exhibits the working of a vital principle within independent
of all accidental circumstances. And to judge with fairness of an
author's works, we ought to distinguish what is inward and essential
from what is outward and circumstantial. It is essential to poetry that
it be "simple" and appeal to the elements and primary laws of our
nature; that it be "sensuous" and by its imagery elicit truth at a
flash; that it be "impassioned," and be able to move our feelings and
awaken our affections. In comparing different poets with each other, we
should inquire which have brought into the fullest play our imagination
and our reason, or have created the greatest excitement and produced the
completest harmony. If we consider great exquisiteness of language and
sweetness of metre alone, it is impossible to deny to Pope the character
of a delightful writer; but whether he be a poet, must depend upon our
definition of the word; and, doubtless, if every thing that pleases be
poetry, Pope's satires and epistles must be poetry. This, I must say,
that poetry, as distinguished from other modes of composition, does not
rest in metre, and that it is not poetry, if it make no appeal to our
passions or our imagination. One character belongs to all true poets,
that they write from a principle within, not originating in any thing
without; and that the true poet's work in its form, its shapings, and
its modifications, is distinguished from all other works that assume to
belong to the class of poetry, as a natural from an artificial flower,
or as the mimic garden of a child from an enamelled meadow. In the
former the flowers are broken from their stems and stuck into the
ground; they are beautiful to the eye and fragrant to the sense, but
their colours soon fade, and their odour is transient as the smile of
the planter;--while the meadow may be visited again and again with
renewed delight, its beauty is innate in the soil, and its bloom is of
the freshness of nature.

The next ground of critical judgment, and point of comparison, will be
as to how far a given poet has been influenced by accidental
circumstances. As a living poet must surely write, not for the ages
past, but for that in which he lives, and those which are to follow, it
is, on the one hand, natural that he should not violate, and on the
other, necessary that he should not depend on, the mere manners and
modes of his day. See how little does Shakspeare leave us to regret that
he was born in his particular age! The great aera in modern times was
what is called the Restoration of Letters;-the ages preceding it are
called the dark ages; but it would be more wise, perhaps, to call them
the ages in which we were in the dark. It is usually overlooked that the
supposed dark period was not universal, but partial and successive, or
alternate; that the dark age of England was not the dark age of Italy,
but that one country was in its light and vigour, whilst another was in
its gloom and bondage. But no sooner had the Reformation sounded through
Europe like the blast of an archangel's trumpet, than from king to
peasant there arose an enthusiasm for knowledge; the discovery of a
manuscript became the subject of an embassy; Erasmus read by moonlight,
because he could not afford a torch, and begged a penny, not for the
love of charity, but for the love of learning. The three great points of
attention were religion, morals, and taste; men of genius as well as men
of learning, who in this age need to be so widely distinguished, then
alike became copyists of the ancients; and this, indeed, was the only
way by which the taste of mankind could be improved, or their
understandings informed. Whilst Dante imagined himself a humble follower
of Virgil, and Ariosto of Homer, they were both unconscious of that
greater power working within them, which in many points carried them
beyond their supposed originals. All great discoveries bear the stamp of
the age in which they are made;--hence we perceive the effects of the
purer religion of the moderns, visible for the most part in their lives;
and in reading their works we should not content ourselves with the mere
narratives of events long since passed, but should learn to apply their
maxims and conduct to ourselves.

Having intimated that times and manners lend their form and pressure to
genius, let me once more draw a slight parallel between the ancient and
modern stage, the stages of Greece and of England. The Greeks were
polytheists; their religion was local; almost the only object of all
their knowledge, art and taste, was their gods; and, accordingly, their
productions were, if the expression may be allowed, statuesque, whilst
those of the moderns are picturesque. The Greeks reared a structure,
which in its parts, and as a whole, fitted the mind with the calm and
elevated impression of perfect beauty and symmetrical proportion. The
moderns also produced a whole, a more striking whole; but it was by
blending materials and fusing the parts together. And as the Pantheon is
to York Minster or Westminster Abbey, so is Sophocles compared with
Shakspeare; in the one a completeness, a satisfaction, an excellence, on
which the mind rests with complacency; in the other a multitude of
interlaced materials, great and little, magnificent and mean,
accompanied, indeed, with the sense of a falling short of perfection,
and yet, at the same time, so promising of our social and individual
progression, that we would not, if we could, exchange it for that repose
of the mind which dwells on the forms of symmetry in the acquiescent
admiration of grace.

This general characteristic of the ancient and modern drama might be
illustrated by a parallel of the ancient and modern music;--the one
consisting of melody arising from a succession only of pleasing
sounds,--the modern embracing harmony also, the result of combination
and the effect of a whole.

I have said, and I say it again, that great as was the genius of
Shakspeare, his judgment was at least equal to it. Of this any one will
be convinced, who attentively considers those points in which the dramas
of Greece and England differ, from the dissimilitude of circumstances by
which each was modified and influenced. The Greek stage had its origin
in the ceremonies of a sacrifice, such as of the goat to Bacchus, whom
we most erroneously regard as merely the jolly god of wine;--for among
the ancients he was venerable, as the symbol of that power which acts
without our consciousness in the vital energies of nature,--the 'vinum
mundi',--as Apollo was that of the conscious agency of our intellectual
being. The heroes of old under the influence of this Bacchic enthusiasm
performed more than human actions;--hence tales of the favorite
champions soon passed into dialogue. On the Greek stage the chorus was
always before the audience; the curtain was never dropped, as we should
say; and change of place being therefore, in general, impossible, the
absurd notion of condemning it merely as improbable in itself was never
entertained by any one. If we can believe ourselves at Thebes in one
act, we may believe ourselves at Athens in the next. If a story lasts
twenty-four hours or twenty-four years, it is equally improbable. There
seems to be no just boundary but what the feelings prescribe. But on the
Greek stage where the same persons were perpetually before the audience,
great judgment was necessary in venturing on any such change. The poets
never, therefore, attempted to impose on the senses by bringing places
to men, but they did bring men to places, as in the well known instance
in the 'Eumenides', where during an evident retirement of the chorus
from the orchestra, the scene is changed to Athens, and Orestes is first
introduced in the temple of Minerva, and the chorus of Furies come in
afterwards in pursuit of him. [2]

In the Greek drama there were no formal divisions into scenes and acts;
there were no means, therefore, of allowing for the necessary lapse of
time between one part of the dialogue and another, and unity of time in
a strict sense was, of course, impossible. To overcome that difficulty
of accounting for time, which is effected on the modern stage by
dropping a curtain, the judgment and great genius of the ancients
supplied music and measured motion, and with the lyric ode filled up the
vacuity. In the story of the Agamemnon of AEschylus, the capture of Troy
is supposed to be announced by a fire lighted on the Asiatic shore, and
the transmission of the signal by successive beacons to Mycene. The
signal is first seen at the 2lst line, and the herald from Troy itself
enters at the 486th, and Agamemnon himself at the 783rd line. But the
practical absurdity of this was not felt by the audience, who, in
imagination stretched minutes into hours, while they listened to the
lofty narrative odes of the chorus which almost entirely fill up the
interspace. Another fact deserves attention here, namely, that regularly
on the Greek stage a drama, or acted story, consisted in reality of
three dramas, called together a trilogy, and performed consecutively in
the course of one day. Now you may conceive a tragedy of Shakspeare's as
a trilogy connected in one single representation. Divide Lear into three
parts, and each would be a play with the ancients; or take the three
AEschylean dramas of Agamemnon, and divide them into, or call them, as
many acts, and they together would be one play. The first act would
comprise the usurpation of AEgisthus, and the murder of Agamemnon; the
second, the revenge of Orestes, and the murder of his mother; and the
third, the penance and absolution of Orestes;--occupying a period of
twenty-two years.

The stage in Shakspeare's time was a naked room with a blanket for a
curtain; but he made it a field for monarchs. That law of unity, which
has its foundations, not in the factitious necessity of custom, but in
nature itself, the unity of feeling, is every where and at all times
observed by Shakspeare in his plays. Read 'Romeo and Juliet';--all is
youth and spring;--youth with its follies, its virtues, its
precipitancies;--spring with its odours, its flowers, and its
transiency; it is one and the same feeling that commences, goes through,
and ends the play. The old men, the Capulets and the Montagues, are not
common old men; they have an eagerness, a heartiness, a vehemence, the
effect of spring; with Romeo, his change of passion, his sudden
marriage, and his rash death, are all the effects of youth;--whilst in
Juliet love has all that is tender and melancholy in the nightingale,
all that is voluptuous in the rose, with whatever is sweet in the
freshness of spring; but it ends with a long deep sigh like the last
breeze of the Italian evening. This unity of feeling and character
pervades every drama of Shakspeare.

It seems to me that his plays are distinguished from those of all other
dramatic poets by the following characteristics:

1. Expectation in preference to surprise. It is like the true reading of
the passage;--'God said, Let there be light, and there was
_light_;'--not there _was_ light. As the feeling with which we startle
at a shooting star, compared with that of watching the sunrise at the
pre-established moment, such and so low is surprise compared with
expectation.

2. Signal adherence to the great law of nature, that all opposites tend
to attract and temper each other. Passion in Shakspeare generally
displays libertinism, but involves morality; and if there are exceptions
to this, they are, independently of their intrinsic value, all of them
indicative of individual character, and, like the farewell admonitions
of a parent, have an end beyond the parental relation. Thus the
Countess's beautiful precepts to Bertram, by elevating her character,
raise that of Helena her favorite, and soften down the point in her
which Shakspeare does not mean us not to see, but to see and to forgive,
and at length to justify. And so it is in Polonius, who is the
personified memory of wisdom no longer actually possessed. This
admirable character is always misrepresented on the stage. Shakspeare
never intended to exhibit him as a buffoon; for although it was natural
that Hamlet,--a young man of fire and genius, detesting formality, and
disliking Polonius on political grounds, as imagining that he had
assisted his uncle in his usurpation,--should express himself
satirically,--yet this must not be taken as exactly the poet's
conception of him. In Polonius a certain induration of character had
arisen from long habits of business; but take his advice to Laertes, and
Ophelia's reverence for his memory, and we shall see that he was meant
to be represented as a statesman somewhat past his faculties,--his
recollections of life all full of wisdom, and showing a knowledge of
human nature, whilst what immediately takes place before him, and
escapes from him, is indicative of weakness.

But as in Homer all the deities are in armour, even Venus; so in
Shakspeare all the characters are strong. Hence real folly and dullness
are made by him the vehicles of wisdom. There is no difficulty for one
being a fool to imitate a fool; but to be, remain, and speak like a wise


 


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