"Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain top with sovereign eye;
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face;
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with his disgrace;
Even so my sun one early morn did shine,
With all triumphant splendor on my brow;
But out, alack! he was but one hour mine;
The region cloud hath masked him from me now;
Yet him, for this, my love no whit disdaineth,
Suns of this world may stain, when heaven's sun staineth."
From Shakespeare, the marvel of dramatic genius, turn to Milton, and we
find the opposite tendency unfolded.
The "Paradise Lost" is indeed dramatic in form, with different
characters and dialogues, in hell, on earth, and in heaven. But in
essence it is undramatic. Milton is never for a moment lost in his
characters; his grand and noble soul is always appearing. Every one
speaks as Milton would have spoken had Milton been in the same place,
and looked at things from the same point of view. Sin and Satan, for
example, both talk like John Milton. Sin is very conscientious, and
before she will unlock the gate of hell she is obliged to argue herself
into a conviction that it is right to do so. Satan, she says, is her
father, and children ought to obey their parents; so, since he tells
her to unlock the gate, she ought to do so. Death reproaches Satan, in
good set terms, for his treason against the Almighty; and Satan, as we
all know, utters the noblest sentiments, and talks as Milton would have
talked, had Milton been in Satan's position.[1]
Coming down nearer to our own time, we find a duad of great English
poets, usually associated in our minds,--Byron and Scott.
Scott was almost the last of the dramatic poets of England, using the
word dramatic in its large sense. His plays never amounted to much; but
his stories in verse and in prose are essentially dramatic. In neither
does he reveal himself. In all his poetry you scarcely find a reference
to his personal feelings. In the L'Envoi to the "Lady of the Lake"
there is a brief allusion of this sort, touching because so unusual,
and almost the only one I now recall. Addressing the "Harp of the
North" he says:--
"Much have I owed thy strains through life's long way,
Through secret woes the world has never known,
When on the weary night dawned wearier day,
And bitterer was the grief devoured alone;
That I o'erlive such woes, Enchantress! is thine own."
Scott, like Chaucer, brings before us a long succession of characters,
from many classes, countries, and times. Scotch barons and freebooters,
English kings, soldiers, gentlemen, crusaders, Alpine peasants,
mediæval counts, serfs, Jews, Saxons,--brave, cruel, generous,--all
sweep past us, in a long succession of pictures; but of Scott himself
nothing appears except the nobleness and purity of the tone which
pervades all. He is therefore eminently a dramatic or objective writer.
But Byron is the exact opposite. The mighty exuberance of his genius,
which captivated his age, and the echoes of which thrill down to
ours, in all its vast overflow of passion, imagination, wit,--ever
sounded but one strain,--himself. His own woes, his own wrongs are
the ever-recurring theme. Though he wrote many dramas, he was more
undramatic than Milton. Every character in every play is merely a
thinly disguised Byron. It was impossible for him to get away from
himself. If Tennyson's lovely line tells the truth when he says,--
"Love took up the harp of life and smote on all its chords with
might;
Smote the chord of self, that, trembling, passed in music out of
sight:"
then Byron never really loved; for in his poetry the chord of self
never passes out of sight.
In his plays the principal characters are Byron undiluted--as Manfred,
Sardanapalus, Cain, Werner, Arnold. All the secondary characters are
Byron more or less diluted,--Byron and water, may we say? Never, since
the world began, has there been a poet so steeped in egotism, so sick
of self-love as he; and the magnificence of his genius appears in the
unfailing interest which he can give to this monotonous theme.
But he was the example of a spirit with which the whole age was filled
to saturation. Almost all the nineteenth century poets of England are
subjective, giving us their own experience, sentiments, reflections,
philosophies. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, revolve in this
enchanted and enchanting circle. Keats and Coleridge seem capable of
something different. So, in the double star, made up of Wordsworth
and Coleridge, the first is absolutely personal and lyric, the second
sometimes objective and dramatic. And in that other double star of
Shelley and Keats the same difference may be noted.
A still more striking instance of the combination of these antagonisms
is to be found in our time, in Robert Browning and his wife. Mrs.
Browning is wholly lyric, like a bird which sings its own tender song
of love and hope and faith till "that wild music burdens every bough;"
and those "mournful hymns" hush the night to listening sympathy.
But in her husband we have a genuine renaissance of the old dramatic
power of the English bards. Robert Browning is _so_ dramatic that
he forgets himself and his readers too, in his characters and their
situations. To study the varieties of men and women is his joy; to
reproduce them unalloyed, his triumph.
One curious instance of this self-oblivious immersion in the creations
of his mind occurs to me. In one of his early poems called "In a
Gondola"--as it first appeared--two lovers are happily conversing,
until in a moment, we know not why, the tone becomes one of despair,
and they bid each other an eternal farewell. Why this change of tone
there is no explanation. In a later edition he condescends to inform
us, inserting a note to this effect: "He is surprised and stabbed."
This is the opposite extreme to Milton's angels carefully explaining to
each other that they possess a specific levity which enables them to
drop upward.
If we think of our own poets whose names are usually
connected,--Longfellow and Lowell, for instance,--we shall easily see
which is dramatic and which lyric. But the only man of truly dramatic
faculty whom we have possessed was one in whom the quality never fully
ripened,--I mean Edgar Allan Poe.
In foreign literature we may trace the same tendency of men of genius
to arrange themselves in couplets. Take, for instance, in Italy,
Dante and Petrarch; in France, Voltaire and Rousseau; in Germany,
Goethe and Schiller. Dante is dramatic, losing himself in his stern
subject, his dramatic characters; his awful pictures of gloomy destiny.
Petrarch is lyrical, personal, singing forever his own sad and sweet
fate. Again, Voltaire is essentially dramatic,--immersed in things,
absorbed in life, a man reveling in all human accident and adventure,
and aglow with faith in an earthly paradise. The sad Rousseau goes
apart, away from men; standing like Byron, among them, but not of them;
in a cloud of thoughts that are not their thoughts. And, once more,
though Goethe resembles Shakespeare in this, that some of his works
are subjective, and others objective,--though, in the greatness of his
mind he reconciles all the usual antagonisms of thought,--yet the fully
developed Goethe, like the fully developed Shakespeare, disappears
in his characters and theme. Life to him, in all its forms, was so
intensely interesting that his own individual and subjective sentiments
are left out of sight. But Schiller stands opposed to Goethe, as being
a dramatist devoid of dramatic genius, but full of personal power;
so grand in his nobleness of soul, so majestic in the aspirations of
his sentiment, so full of patriotic ardor and devotion to truth and
goodness, that he moves all hearts as he walks through his dramas,--the
great poet visible in every scene and every line. As his tried and
noble friend says of him in an equally undying strain:--
"Burned in his cheek, with ever-deepening fire,
The spirit's youth, which never passes by;
The courage, which though worlds in hate conspire,
Conquers at last their dull hostility;
The lofty faith, which ever, mounting higher,
Now presses on, now waiteth patiently;
By which the good tends ever to its goal--
By which day lights at last the generous soul."
Goethe's characters and stories covered the widest range: Faust, made
sick with too much thought, and seeking outward joy as a relief;
Werther, a self-absorbed sentimentalist; Tasso, an Italian man of
genius, a mixture of imagination, aspiration, sensitive self-distrust;
susceptible to opinion, sympathetic; Iphigenia, a picture of antique
calm, simplicity, purity, classic repose, like that of a statue;
Hermann and Dorothea, a sweet idyl of modern life, in a simple-minded
German village with an opinionated, honest landlord, a talkative
apothecary, a motherly landlady, a sensible and good pastor, and the
two young lovers.
This law of duality, or reaction of genius on genius, will also be
found to apply to artists, philosophers, historians, orators. These
also come in pairs, manifesting the same antagonistic qualities.
Some artists are lyric; putting their own souls into every face, every
figure, making even a landscape alive with their own mood; adding--
"A gleam
Of lustre known to neither sea nor land
But borrowed from the poet-painter's dream."
In every landscape of Claude we find the soul of Claude; in every
rugged rock-defile of Salvator we read his mood. These artists are
lyric; but there are also great dramatic painters, who give you, not
themselves, but men and women; so real, so differentiated, characters
so full of the variety and antagonism of nature, that the whole life of
a period springs into being at their touch.
Take for instance two names, which always go together, standing side
by side at the summit of Italian art,--Michael Angelo and Raphael.
Though Raphael was a genius of boundless exuberance, and poured on the
wall and canvas a flood of forms, creating as nature creates, without
pause or self-repetition, yet there is a tone in all which irresistibly
speaks of the artist's own soul. He created a world of Raphaels. Grace,
sweetness, and tenderness went into all his work. Every line has the
same characteristic qualities.
Turn to the frescoes by Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel. As we
look up at those mighty forms--prophets, sibyls, seers, with multitudes
of subordinate figures--we gradually trace in each prophet, king, or
bard an individual character. Each one is himself. How fully each face
and attitude is differentiated by some inward life. How each--David,
Isaiah, Ezekiel, the Persian and the Libyan sibyl--stands out,
distinct, filled with a power or a tenderness all his own. Michael
Angelo himself is not there, except as a fountain of creative life,
from whose genius all these majestic persons come forth as living
realities.
Hanging on my walls are the well-known engravings of Guido's Aurora and
Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper. One of these is purely lyrical; the
other as clearly dramatic.
The Aurora is so exquisitely lovely, the forms so full of grace, the
movement of all the figures so rapid yet so firm, that I can never pass
it without stopping to enjoy its charms. But variety is absent. The
hours are lovely sisters, as Ovid describes sisters:--
"Facies non omnibus una,
Nec diversa tamen, qualis decet esse sororum."
But when we turn to the Last Supper, we see the dramatic artist at his
best. The subject is such as almost to compel a monotonous treatment,
but there is a wonderful variety in the attitudes and grouping. Each
apostle shows by his attitude, gesture, expression, that he is affected
differently from all the others. Even the feet under the table speak.
Stand before the picture; put yourself into the attitude of each
apostle, and you will immediately understand his state of mind.[2]
The mediæval religious artists were subjective, sentimental, lyrical.
In a scene like the crucifixion, all the characters, whether apostles,
Roman soldiers, or Jewish Pharisees, hang their heads like bulrushes.
But see how Rubens, that great dramatic painter, represents the
scene. The Magdalen, wild with grief, with disheveled hair, has thrown
herself at the foot of the cross, clasping and kissing the feet of
Jesus. On the other faces are terror, dismay, doubt, unbelief, mockery,
curiosity, triumph, despair,--according to each person's character and
attitude toward the event. Meantime the Roman centurion, seated on his
splendid horse, is deliberately and carefully striking his spear into
the side of the sufferer. His face expresses only that he has a duty to
perform and means to fulfill it perfectly.
As Rubens is greatly dramatic, his pupil and follower, Vandyke, is a
great lyrical artist, whose noble aspiration and generous sentiment
shows itself in all his work.
The school of Venice, with Titian and Tintoretto at its head, is
grandly dramatic and objective. The school of Florence, with Guido and
Domenichino at its head, eminently lyrical and subjective.
If we had time, we might show that the two masters of Greek philosophy,
Plato and Aristotle, are, the one lyrical, and intensely subjective,
platonizing the universe; and the other as evidently objective,
immersed in the study of things; rejoicing in their variety, their
individuality, their persistence of type.
The two masters of Greek history, Herodotus and Thucydides, stand
opposed to each other in the same way. Herodotus is the story-teller,
the dramatic raconteur, whose charming tales are as entertaining as the
"Arabian Nights." Thucydides is the personal historian who puts himself
into his story, and determines its meaning and moral according to his
own theories and convictions.
We have another example in Livy and Tacitus.
The two great American orators most frequently mentioned together are
Webster and Clay. Though you would smile if I were to call either of
them a lyric or a dramatic speaker, yet the essential distinction we
have been considering may be clearly seen in them. Clay's inspiration
was personal, his influence, personal influence. His theme was nothing;
his treatment of it everything. But Webster rose or fell with the
magnitude and importance of the occasion and argument. When on the
wrong side, he failed, for his intellect would not work well except in
the service of reality and truth. But Clay was perhaps greatest when
arguing against all facts and all reason. Then he summoned all his
powers,--wit, illustration, analogy, syllogisms, appeals to feeling,
prejudice, and passion; and so swept along his confused and blinded
audience to his conclusions.
I think that subjective writers are loved more than dramatic. We admire
the one and we love the other. We admire Shakespeare and love Milton;
we admire Chaucer and love Spenser; we admire Dante and love Petrarch;
we admire Goethe and love Schiller; and if Byron had not been so
selfish a man, we should have loved him too. We admire Michael Angelo
and love Raphael; we admire Rubens and love Vandyke; we admire Robert
Browning and love Mrs. Browning. In short, we care more for the man who
gives us himself than for the man who gives us the whole outside world.
I have been able to give you only a few hints of this curious
distinction in art and literature. But if we carry it in our mind, we
shall find it a key by which many doors may be unlocked. It will enable
us to classify authors, and understand them better.