something to have seen the _School for Scandal_ in its glory. This
comedy grew out of Congreve and Wycherley, but gathered some allays
of the sentimental comedy which followed theirs. It is impossible that
it should be now _acted_, though it continues, at long intervals, to
be announced in the bills. Its hero, when Palmer played it at least,
was Joseph Surface. When I remember the gay boldness, the graceful
solemn plausibility, the measured step, the insinuating voice--to
express it in a word--the downright _acted_ villany of the part, so
different from the pressure of conscious actual wickedness,--the
hypocritical assumption of hypocrisy,--which made Jack so deservedly
a favourite in that character, I must needs conclude the present
generation of playgoers more virtuous than myself, or more dense. I
freely confess that he divided the palm with me with his better brother;
that, in fact, I liked him quite as well. Not but there are
passages,--like that, for instance, where Joseph is made to refuse a
pittance to a poor relation,--incongruities which Sheridan was forced
upon by the attempt to join the artificial with the sentimental comedy,
either of which must destroy the other--but over these obstructions
Jack's manner floated him so lightly, that a refusal from him no more
shocked you, than the easy compliance of Charles gave you in reality
any pleasure; you got over the paltry question as quickly as you could,
to get back into the regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns.
The highly artificial manner of Palmer in this character counteracted
every disagreeable impression which you might have received from the
contrast, supposing them real, between the two brothers. You did not
believe in Joseph with the same faith with which you believed in
Charles. The latter was a pleasant reality, the former a no less
pleasant poetical foil to it. The comedy, I have said, is incongruous;
a mixture of Congreve with sentimental incompatibilities; the gaiety
upon the whole is buoyant; but it required the consummate art of Palmer
to reconcile the discordant elements.
A player with Jack's talents, if we had one now, would not dare to do
the part in the same manner. He would instinctively avoid every turn
which might tend to unrealize, and so to make the character fascinating.
He must take his cue from his spectators, who would expect a bad man
and a good man as rigidly opposed to each other as the deathbeds of
those geniuses are contrasted in the prints, which I am sorry to say
have disappeared from the windows of my old friend Carrington Bowles,
of St. Paul's Churchyard memory--(an exhibition as venerable as the
adjacent cathedral, and almost coeval) of the bad and good man at the
hour of death; where the ghastly apprehensions of the former,--and
truly the grim phantom with his reality of a toasting-fork is not to
be despised,--so finely contrast with the meek complacent kissing of
the rod,--taking it in like honey and butter,--with which the latter
submits to the scythe of the gentle bleeder, Time, who wields his
lancet with the apprehensive finger of a popular young ladies' surgeon.
What flesh, like loving grass, would not covet to meet half-way the
stroke of such a delicate mower?
John Palmer was twice an actor in this exquisite part. He was playing
to you all the while that he was playing upon Sir Peter and his lady.
You had the first intimation of a sentiment before it was on his lips.
His altered voice was meant to you, and you were to suppose that his
fictitious co-flutterers on the stage perceived nothing at all of it.
What was it to you if that half reality, the husband, was overreached
by the puppetry--or the thin thing (Lady Teazle's reputation) was
persuaded it was dying of a plethory? The fortunes of Othello and
Desdemona were not concerned in it. Poor Jack has passed from the stage
in good time, that he did not live to this our age of seriousness. The
pleasant old Teazle _King_, too, is gone in good time. His manner would
scarce have passed current in our day. We must love or hate--acquit
or condemn--censure or pity--exert our detestable coxcombry of moral
judgment upon everything. Joseph Surface, to go down now, must be a
downright revolting villain--no compromise--his first appearance must
shock and give horror--his specious plausibilities, which the
pleasurable faculties of our fathers welcomed with such hearty
greetings, knowing that no harm (dramatic harm even) could come, or
was meant to come, of them, must inspire a cold and killing aversion.
Charles (the real canting person of the scene--for the hypocrisy of
Joseph has its ulterior legitimate ends, but his brother's professions
of a good heart centre in down right self-satisfaction) must be _loved_
and Joseph _hated_. To balance one disagreeable reality with another,
Sir Peter Teazle must be no longer the comic idea of a fretful old
bachelor bridegroom, whose teasings (while King acted it) were evidently
as much played off at you, as they were meant to concern anybody on
the stage,--he must be a real person, capable in law of sustaining an
injury--a person towards whom duties are to be acknowledged--the genuine
crim. con. antagonist of the villainous seducer Joseph. To realize him
more, his sufferings under his unfortunate match must have the downright
pungency of life--must (or should) make you not mirthful but
uncomfortable, just as the same predicament would move you in a
neighbour or old friend.
The delicious scenes which give the play its name and zest, must affect
you in the same serious manner as if you heard the reputation of a
dear female friend attacked in your real presence. Crabtree and Sir
Benjamin--those poor snakes that live but in the sunshine of your
mirth--must be ripened by this hot-bed process of realization into
asps or amphisbaenas; and Mrs. Candour--O! frightful!--become a hooded
serpent. Oh! who that remembers Parsons and Dodd--the wasp and butterfly
of the _School for Scandal_--in those two characters; and charming
natural Miss Pope, the perfect gentle woman as distinguished from the
fine lady of comedy, in the latter part--would forego the true scenic
delight--the escape from life--the oblivion of consequences--the holiday
barring out of the pedant Reflection--those Saturnalia of two or three
brief hours, well won from the world--to sit instead at one of our
modern plays--to have his coward conscience (that forsooth must not
be left for a moment) stimulated with perpetual appeals--dulled rather,
and blunted, as a faculty without repose must be--and his moral vanity
pampered with images of notional justice, notional beneficence, lives
saved without the spectator's risk, and fortunes given away that cost
the author nothing?
No piece was, perhaps, ever so completely cast in all its parts as
this _manager's comedy_. Miss Farren had succeeded to Mrs. Abington
in Lady Teazle; and Smith, the original Charles, had retired when I
first saw it. The rest of the characters, with very slight exceptions,
remained. I remember it was then the fashion to cry down John Kemble,
who took the part of Charles after Smith; but, I thought, very unjustly.
Smith, I fancy, was more airy, and took the eye with a certain gaiety
of person. He brought with him no sombre recollections of tragedy. He
had not to expiate the fault of having pleased beforehand in lofty
declamation. He had no sins of Hamlet or of Richard to atone for. His
failure in these parts was a passport to success in one of so opposite
a tendency. But, as far as I could judge, the weighty sense of Kemble
made up for more personal incapacity than he had to answer for. His
harshest tones in this part came steeped and dulcified in good-humour.
He made his defects a grace. His exact declamatory manner, as he managed
it, only served to convey the points of his dialogue with more
precision. It seemed to head the shafts to carry them deeper. Not one
of his sparkling sentences was lost. I remember minutely how he
delivered each in succession, and cannot by any effort imagine how any
of them could be altered for the better. No man could deliver brilliant
dialogue-the dialogue of Congreve or of Wycherley-because none
understood it-half so well as John Kemble. His Valentine, in _Love for
Love_, was, to my recollection, faultless. He flagged sometimes in the
intervals of tragic passion. He would slumber over the level parts of
an heroic character. His Macbeth has been known to nod. But he always
seemed to me to be particularly alive to pointed and witty dialogue.
The relaxing levities of tragedy have not been touched by any since
him--the playful court-bred spirit in which he condescended to the
players in Hamlet--the sportive relief which he threw into the darker
shades of Richard--disappeared with him. He had his sluggish moods,
his torpors--but they were the halting-stones and resting-place of his
tragedy--politic savings, and fetches of the breath--husbandry of the
lungs, where nature pointed him to be an economist--rather, I think,
than errors of the judgment. They were, at worst, less painful than
the eternal, tormenting, unappeasable vigilance,--the "lidless dragon
eyes", of present fashionable tragedy.
VII.--ON WEBSTER'S _DUCHESS OF MALFI_.
All the several parts of the dreadful apparatus with which the Duchess's
death is ushered in, are not more remote from the conceptions of
ordinary vengeance, than the strange character of suffering which they
seem to bring upon their victims is beyond the imagination of ordinary
poets. As they are not like inflictions _of this life_, so her language
seems _not of this world_. She has lived among horrors till she is
become "native and endowed unto that element". She speaks the dialect
of despair, her tongue has a snatch of Tartarus and the souls in
bale.--What are "Luke's iron crown", the brazen bull of Perillus,
Procrustes' bed, to the waxen images which counterfeit death, to the
wild masque of madmen, the tomb-maker, the bellman, the living person's
dirge, the mortification by degrees! To move a horror skilfully, to
touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear,
to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then step in
with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit--this only a Webster
can do. Writers of an inferior genius may "upon horror's head horrors
accumulate", but they cannot do this. They mistake quantity for quality,
they "terrify babes with painted devils", but they know not how a soul
is capable of being moved; their terrors want dignity, their
affrightments are without decorum.
VIII.--ON FORD'S _BROKEN HEART_.
I do not know where to find in any play a catastrophe so grand, so
solemn, and so surprising as this. This is indeed, according to Milton,
to "describe high passions and high actions". The fortitude of the
Spartan boy who let a beast gnaw out his bowels till he died without
expressing a groan, is a faint bodily image of this dilaceration of
the spirit and exenteration of the inmost mind, which Calantha with
a holy violence against her nature keeps closely covered, till the
last duties of a wife and a queen are fulfilled. Stories of martyrdom
are but of chains and the stake; a little bodily suffering; these
torments
On the purest spirits prey
As on entrails, joints, and limbs,
With answerable pains, but more intense.
What a noble thing is the soul in its strengths and in its weaknesses!
who would be less weak than Calantha? who can be so strong? the
expression of this transcendent scene almost bears me in imagination
to Calvary and the Cross; and I seem to perceive some analogy between
the scenical sufferings which I am here contemplating, and the real
agonies of that final completion to which I dare no more than hint a
reference.
Ford was of the first order of poets. He sought for sublimity, not by
parcels in metaphors or visible images, but directly where she has her
full residence in the heart of man; in the actions and sufferings of
the greatest minds. There is a grandeur of the soul above mountains,
seas, and the elements. Even in the poor perverted reason of Giovanni
and Annabella (in the play which precedes this) we discern traces of
that fiery particle, which in the irregular starting out of the road
of beaten action, discovers something of a right line even in obliquity
and shows hints of an improvable greatness in the lowest descents and
degradations of our nature.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.
(1792-1822)
IX. A DEFENCE OF POETRY.
_The Defence of Poetry_ was written in the early months of 1821, the
year before Shelley's death. Its immediate occasion was an essay on
_The Four Ages of Poetry_ by T L Peacock. But all allusions to Peacock's
work were cut out by John Hunt when he prepared it--in vain, as things
proved--for publication in _The Liberal_, and it remains, as Peacock
said, "a defence without an attack". For all essential purposes, the
_Defence_ can only be said to have gained by shaking off its local and
temporary reference. It expresses Shelley's deepest thoughts about
poetry, and marks, as clearly as any writing of the last hundred years,
the width of the gulf that separates the ideals of recent poetry from
those of the century preceding the French Revolution. It may be compared
with Sidney's _Apologie_ on the one hand, and with Wordsworth's Preface
to the _Lyrical Ballads_, or the more abstract parts of Carlyle's
critical writings upon the other. The fundamental conceptions of Shelley
are the same as those of the Elizabethan critic and of his own great
contemporaries. But he differs from Sidney and Wordsworth, and perhaps
from Carlyle also, in laying more stress upon the outward form, and
particularly the musical element, of poetry, and from Sidney in laying
less stress upon its directly moral associations. He thus attains to
a wider and truer view of his subject, and, while insisting as strongly
as Wordsworth insists upon the kinship between the matter of poetry
and that of truth or science, he also recognizes, as Wordsworth commonly
did not, that there is a harmony between the imaginative conception
of that matter and its outward expression, and that beautiful thought
must necessarily clothe itself in beauty of language and of sound.
There is not in our literature any clearer presentment of the
inseparable connection between the matter and form of poetry, nor of
the ideal element which, under different shapes, is the life and soul
of both. [See Shelley's letters to Peacock and Other of February 15
and 22, and of March 20 and 21, 1821]
According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action,
which are called reason and imagination, the former may be considered
as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another,
however produced; and the latter, as mind acting upon those thoughts
so as to colour them with its own light, and composing from them, as
from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the
principle of its own integrity. The one is the [Greek transliterated:
to poiein], or the principle of synthesis, and has for its objects
those forms which are common to universal nature and existence itself;
the other is the [Greek transliterated: to logizein], or principle of
analysis, and its action regards the relations of things simply as
relations; considering thoughts, not in their integral unity, but as
the algebraical representations which conduct to certain general
results. Reason is the enumeration of qualities already known;
imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities, both
separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and
imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to imagination as the
instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to
the substance.
Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be "the expression of
the imagination": and poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man
is an instrument over which a series of external and internal
impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind
over an Aolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing
melody. But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps
within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and
produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of
the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite
them. It is as if the lyre could accommodate its chords to the motions
of that which strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound; even
as the musician can accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre.
A child at play by itself will express its delight by its voice and
motions; and every inflexion of tone and every gesture will bear exact
relation to a corresponding antitype in the pleasurable impressions
which awakened it; it will be the reflected image of that impression;
and as the lyre trembles and sounds after the wind has died away, so
the child seeks, by prolonging in its voice and motions the duration
of the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of the cause. In relation
to the objects which delight a child, these expressions are what poetry
is to higher objects. The savage (for the savage is to ages what the
child is to years) expresses the emotions produced in him by surrounding
objects in a similar manner; and language and gesture, together with
plastic or pictorial imitation, become the image of the combined effect
of those objects, and of his apprehension of them. Man in society,
with all his passions and his pleasures, next becomes the object of
the passions and pleasures of man; an additional class of emotions
produces an augmented treasure of expressions; and language, gesture,
and the imitative arts become at once the representation and the medium,
the pencil and the picture, the chisel and the statue, the chord and
the harmony. The social sympathies, or those laws from which, as from
its elements, society results, begin to develop themselves from the
moment that two human beings coexist; the future is contained within
the present, as the plant within the seed: and equality, diversity,
unity, contrast, mutual dependence, become the principles alone capable
of affording the motives according to which the will of a social being
is determined to action, inasmuch as he is social; and constitute
pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment, beauty in art, truth in
reasoning, and love in the intercourse of kind. Hence men, even in the
infancy of society, observe a certain order in their words and actions,
distinct from that of the objects and the impressions represented by
them, all expression being subject to the laws of that from which it
proceeds. But let us dismiss those more general considerations which
might involve an inquiry into the principles of society itself, and
restrict our view to the manner in which the imagination is expressed
upon its forms.
In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate natural
objects, observing in these actions, as in all others, a certain rhythm
or order. And, although all men observe a similar, they observe not
the same order, in the motions of the dance, in the melody of the song,
in the combinations of language, in the series of their imitations of
natural objects. For there is a certain order or rhythm belonging to
each of these classes of mimetic representation, from which the hearer
and the spectator receive an intenser and purer pleasure than from any
other: the sense of an approximation to this order has been called
taste by modern writers. Every man in the infancy of art observes an
order which approximates more or less closely to that from which this
highest delight results; but the diversity is not sufficiently marked,
as that its gradations should be sensible, except in those instances
where the predominance of this faculty of approximation to the beautiful
(for so we may be permitted to name the relation between this highest
pleasure and its cause) is very great. Those in whom it exists in
excess are poets, in the most universal sense of the word; and the
pleasure resulting from the manner in which they express the influence
of society or nature upon their own minds, communicates itself to
others, and gathers a sort of reduplication from that community. Their
language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before
unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension,
until the words which represent them, become, through time, signs for
portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral
thoughts; and then, if no new poets should arise to create afresh the
associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead
to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse. These similitudes or
relations are finely said by Lord Bacon to be "the same footsteps of
nature impressed upon the various subjects of the world" [Footnote:
_De Augment. Scient._, cap. I, lib. iii.]--and he considers the faculty
which perceives them as the storehouse of axioms common to all
knowledge. In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a
poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to
apprehend the true and the beautiful; in a word, the good which exists
in the relation subsisting, first between existence and perception,
and secondly between perception and expression. Every original language
near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem: the
copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the
works of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of the
creations of poetry.
But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order,
are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and
architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of
laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts
of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with
the beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension of the agencies
of the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original
religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus,
have a double face of false and true. Poets, according to the
circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called,
in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet
essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not
only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws
according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds
the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower
and the fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets
in the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell the form as
surely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the pretence of
superstition, which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy rather
than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet participates in the
eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his
conceptions, time and place and number are not. The grammatical forms
which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons, and
the distinction of place, are convertible with respect to the highest
poetry without injuring it as poetry; and the choruses of Aschylus,
and the book of Job, and Dante's Paradise, would afford, more than any
other writings, examples of this fact, if the limits of this essay did
not forbid citation. The creations of sculpture, painting, and music
are illustrations still more decisive.