Book I, St. vii, viii, and ix.

Will it be contended on the one side, that these lines are mean and

senseless? Or on the other, that they are not prosaic, and for that

reason unpoetic? This poet's well-merited epithet is that of the

'_well-languaged Daniel_'; but likewise, and by the consent of his

contemporaries no less than of all succeeding critics, the 'prosaic

Daniel.' Yet those, who thus designate this wise and amiable writer,

from the frequent incorrespondency of his diction to his metre in the

majority of his compositions, not only deem them valuable and

interesting on other accounts, but willingly admit that there are to

be found throughout his poems, and especially in his _Epistles_ and in

his _Hymen's Triumph_, many and exquisite specimens of that style

which, as the neutral ground of prose and verse, is common to both. A

fine and almost faultless extract, eminent, as for other beauties, so

for its perfection in these species of diction, may be seen in Lamb's

_Dramatic Specimens_, &c., a work of various interest from the nature

of the selections themselves, (all from the plays of Shakespeare's

contemporaries), and deriving a high additional value from the notes,

which are full of just and original criticism, expressed with all the

freshness of originality.

Among the possible effects of practical adherence to a theory that

aims to identify the style of prose and verse,--(if it does not indeed

claim for the latter a yet nearer resemblance to the average style of

men in the viva voce intercourse of real life)--we might anticipate

the following as not the least likely to occur. It will happen, as I

have indeed before observed, that the metre itself, the sole

acknowledged difference, will occasionally become metre to the eye

only. The existence of prosaisms, and that they detract from the

merit of a poem, must at length be conceded, when a number of

successive lines can be rendered, even to the most delicate ear,

unrecognizable as verse, or as having even been intended for verse, by

simply transcribing them as prose; when if the poem be in blank verse,

this can be effected without any alteration, or at most by merely

restoring one or two words to their proper places, from which they

have been transplanted[5] for no assignable cause or reason but that

of the author's convenience; but if it be in rhyme, by the mere

exchange of the final word of each line for some other of the same

meaning, equally appropriate, dignified and euphonic.

[5] As the ingenious gentleman under the influence of the

Tragic Muse contrived to dislocate, 'I wish you a good

morning, Sir! Thank you, Sir, and I wish you the same,' into

two blank-verse heroics:--

To you a good morning, good Sir! I wish.

You, Sir! I thank: to you the same wish I.

In those parts of Mr. Wordsworth's works which I have

thoroughly studied, I find fewer instances in which this

would be practicable than I have met in many poems, where an

approximation of prose has been sedulously and on system

guarded against. Indeed excepting the stanzas already quoted

from _The Sailor's Mother_, I can recollect but one instance:

viz. a short passage of four or five lines in _The Brothers_,

that model of English pastoral, which I never yet read with

unclouded eye.--'James, pointing to its summit, over which

they had all purposed to return together, informed them that

he would wait for them there. They parted, and his comrades

passed that way some two hours after, but they did not find

him at the appointed place, _a circumstance of which they

took no heed_: but one of them, going by chance into the

house, which at this time was James's house, learnt _there_,

that nobody had seen him all that day.' The only change which

has been made is in the position of the little word _there_

in two instances, the position in the original being clearly

such as is not adopted in ordinary conversation. The other

words printed in _italics_ were so marked because, though

good and genuine English, they are not the phraseology of

common conversation either in the word put in apposition, or

in the connexion by the genitive pronoun. Men in general

would have said, 'but that was a circumstance they paid no

attention to, or took no notice of;' and the language is, on

the theory of the preface, justified only by the narrator's

being the _Vicar_. Yet if any ear _could_ suspect, that these

sentences were ever printed as metre, on those very words

alone could the suspicion have been grounded.

The answer or objection in the preface to the anticipated remark 'that

metre paves the way to other distinctions', is contained in the

following words. 'The distinction of rhyme and metre is voluntary and

uniform, and not, like that produced by (what is called) poetic

diction, arbitrary, and subject to infinite caprices, upon which no

calculation whatever can be made. In the one case the reader is

utterly at the mercy of the poet respecting what imagery or diction he

may choose to connect with the passion.' But is this a poet, of whom a

poet is speaking? No surely! rather of a fool or madman: or at best of

a vain or ignorant phantast! And might not brains so wild and so

deficient make just the same havoc with rhymes and metres, as they are

supposed to effect with modes and figures of speech? How is the reader

at the mercy of such men? If he continue to read their nonsense, is it

not his own fault? The ultimate end of criticism is much more to

establish the principles of writing, than to furnish rules how to pass

judgement on what has been written by others; if indeed it were

possible that the two could be separated. But if it be asked, by what

principles the poet is to regulate his own style, if he do not adhere

closely to the sort and order of words which he hears in the market,

wake, high-road, or plough-field? I reply; by principles, the

ignorance or neglect of which would convict him of being no poet, but

a silly or presumptuous usurper of the name! By the principles of

grammar, logic, psychology! In one word, by such a knowledge of the

facts, material and spiritual, that most appertain to his art, as, if

it have been governed and applied by good sense, and rendered

instinctive by habit, becomes the representative and reward of our

past conscious reasonings, insights, and conclusions, and acquires the

name of TASTE. By what rule that does not leave the reader at the

poet's mercy, and the poet at his own, is the latter to distinguish

between the language suitable to suppressed, and the language, which

is characteristic of indulged, anger? Or between that of rage and that

of jealousy? Is it obtained by wandering about in search of angry or

jealous people in uncultivated society, in order to copy their words?

Or not far rather by the power of imagination proceeding upon the all

in each of human nature? By meditation, rather than by observation?

And by the latter in consequence only of the former? As eyes, for

which the former has pre-determined their field of vision, and to

which, as to its organ, it communicates a microscopic power? There is

not, I firmly believe, a man now living, who has, from his own inward

experience, a clearer intuition than Mr. Wordsworth himself, that the

last mentioned are the true sources of genial discrimination. Through

the same process and by the same creative agency will the poet

distinguish the degree and kind of the excitement produced by the very

act of poetic composition. As intuitively will he know, what

differences of style it at once inspires and justifies; what

intermixture of conscious volition is natural to that state; and in

what instances such figures and colours of speech degenerate into mere

creatures of an arbitrary purpose, cold technical artifices of

ornament or connexion. For, even as truth is its own light and

evidence, discovering at once itself and falsehood, so is it the

prerogative of poetic genius to distinguish by parental instinct its

proper offspring from the changelings, which the gnomes of vanity or

the fairies of fashion may have laid in its cradle or called by its

names. Could a rule be given from without, poetry would cease to be

poetry, and sink into a mechanical art. It would be [Greek:

morphôsis], not [Greek: poiêsis]. The rules of the IMAGINATION are

themselves the very powers of growth and production. The words to

which they are reducible, present only the outlines and external

appearance of the fruit. A deceptive counterfeit of the superficial

form and colours may be elaborated; but the marble peach feels cold

and heavy, and children only put it to their mouths. We find no

difficulty in admitting as excellent, and the legitimate language of

poetic fervour self-impassioned, Donne's apostrophe to the Sun in the

second stanza of his _Progress of the Soul_.

Thee, eye of heaven! this great soul envies not;

By thy male force is all, we have, begot.

In the first East thou now beginn'st to shine,

Suck'st early balm and island spices there,

And wilt anon in thy loose-rein'd career

At Tagus, Po, Seine, Thames, and Danow dine,

And see at night this western world of mine:

Yet hast thou not more nations seen than she,

Who before thee one day began to be,

And, thy frail light being quench'd, shall long, long outlive thee!

Or the next stanza but one:

Great destiny, the commissary of God,

That hast mark'd out a path and period

For ev'ry thing! Who, where we offspring took,

Our way and ends see'st at one instant: thou

Knot of all causes! Thou, whose changeless brow

Ne'er smiles nor frowns! O! vouchsafe thou to look,

And show my story in thy eternal book, &c.

As little difficulty do we find in excluding from the honours of

unaffected warmth and elevation the madness prepense of pseudo-poesy,

or the startling hysteric of weakness over-exerting itself, which

bursts on the unprepared reader in sundry odes and apostrophes to

abstract terms. Such are the Odes to Jealousy, to Hope, to Oblivion,

and the like, in Dodsley's collection and the magazines of that day,

which seldom fail to remind me of an Oxford copy of verses on the two

Suttons, commencing with

INOCULATION, heavenly maid! descend!

It is not to be denied that men of undoubted talents, and even poets

of true, though not of first-rate, genius, have from a mistaken theory

deluded both themselves and others in the opposite extreme. I once

read to a company of sensible and well-educated women the introductory

period of Cowley's preface to his _Pindaric Odes, written in imitation

of the style and manner of the odes of Pindar_. 'If (says Cowley) a

man should undertake to translate Pindar, word for word, it would be

thought that one madman had translated another: as may appear, when

he, that understands not the original, reads the verbal traduction of

him into Latin prose, than which nothing seems more raving.' I then

proceeded with his own free version of the second Olympic, composed

for the charitable purpose of rationalizing the Theban Eagle.

Queen of all harmonious things,

Dancing words and speaking strings,

What God, what hero, wilt thou sing?

What happy man to equal glories bring?

Begin, begin thy noble choice,

And let the hills around reflect the image of thy voice.

Pisa does to Jove belong,

Jove and Pisa claim thy song.

The fair first-fruits of war, th' Olympic games,

Alcides offer'd up to Jove;

Alcides too thy strings may move!

But, oh! what man to join with these can worthy prove?

Join Theron boldly to their sacred names;

Theron the next honour claims;

Theron to no man gives place,

Is first in Pisa's and in Virtue's race;

Theron there, and he alone,

Ev'n his own swift forefathers has outgone.

One of the company exclaimed, with the full assent of the rest, that

if the original were madder than this, it must be incurably mad. I

then translated the ode from the Greek, and as nearly as possible,

word for word; and the impression was, that in the general movement of

the periods, in the form of the connexions and transitions, and in the

sober majesty of lofty sense, it appeared to them to approach more

nearly, than any other poetry they had heard, to the style of our

Bible in the prophetic books. The first strophe will suffice as a

specimen:

Ye harp-controling hymns! (or) ye hymns the sovereigns of harps!

What God? what Hero?

What Man shall we celebrate?

Truly Pisa indeed is of Jove,

But the Olympiad (or the Olympic games) did Hercules establish,

The first-fruits of the spoils of war.

But Theron for the four-horsed car,

That bore victory to him,

It behoves us now to voice aloud:

The Just, the Hospitable,

The Bulwark of Agrigentum,

Of renowned fathers

The Flower, even him

Who preserves his native city erect and safe.

But are such rhetorical caprices condemnable only for their deviation

from the language of real life? and are they by no other means to be

precluded, but by the rejection of all distinctions between prose and

verse, save that of metre? Surely good sense, and a moderate insight

into the constitution of the human mind, would be amply sufficient to

prove, that such language and such combinations are the native produce

neither of the fancy nor of the imagination; that their operation

consists in the excitement of surprise by the juxtaposition and

apparent reconciliation of widely different or incompatible things. As

when, for instance, the hills are made to reflect the image of a

voice. Surely, no unusual taste is requisite to see clearly, that this

compulsory juxtaposition is not produced by the presentation of

impressive or delightful forms to the inward vision, nor by any

sympathy with the modifying powers with which the genius of the poet

had united and inspirited all the objects of his thought; that it is

therefore a species of wit, a pure work of the will, and implies a

leisure and self-possession both of thought and of feeling,

incompatible with the steady fervour of a mind possessed and filled

with the grandeur of its subject. To sum up the whole in one sentence.

When a poem, or a part of a poem, shall be adduced, which is evidently

vicious in the figures and contexture of its style, yet for the

condemnation of which no reason can be assigned, except that it

differs from the style in which men actually converse, then, and not

till then, can I hold this theory to be either plausible, or

practicable, or capable of furnishing either rule, guidance, or

precaution, that might not, more easily and more safely, as well as

more naturally, have been deduced in the author's own mind from

considerations of grammar, logic, and the truth and nature of things,

confirmed by the authority of works, whose fame is not of ONE country

nor of ONE age.

WILLIAM BLAKE

1757-1827

THE CANTERBURY PILGRIMS (1809)

SIR GEFFREY CHAUCER AND THE NINE-AND-TWENTY PILGRIMS ON THEIR JOURNEY

TO CANTERBURY[6]

[6] From _A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures_.

The time chosen is early morning, before sunrise, when the jolly

company are just quitting the Tabarde Inn. The Knight and Squire with

the Squire's Yeoman lead the Procession; next follow the youthful

Abbess, her Nun, and three Priests; her greyhounds attend her:

Of small hounds had she that she fed

With roast flesh, milk, and wastel bread.

Next follow the Friar and Monk; then the Tapiser, the Pardoner, and

the Sompnour and Manciple. After these 'Our Host', who occupies the

centre of the cavalcade, directs them to the Knight as the person who

would be likely to commence their task of each telling a tale in their

order. After the Host follow the Shipman, the Haberdasher, the Dyer,

the Franklin, the Physician, the Ploughman, the Lawyer, the Poor

Parson, the Merchant, the Wife of Bath, the Miller, the Cook, the

Oxford Scholar, Chaucer himself; and the Reeve comes as Chaucer has

described:

And ever he rode hinderest of the rout.

These last are issuing from the gateway of the Inn the Cook and the

Wife of Bath are both taking their morning's draught of comfort.

Spectators stand at the gateway of the Inn, and are composed of an old

Man, a Woman, and Children.

The Landscape is an eastward view of the country, from the Tabarde Inn

in Southwark, as it may be supposed to have appeared in Chaucer's

time, interspersed with cottages and villages. The first beams of the

Sun are seen above the horizon; some buildings and spires indicate the

situation of the Great City. The Inn is a Gothic building, which

Thynne in his Glossary says was the lodging of the Abbot of Hyde, by

Winchester. On the Inn is inscribed its title, and a proper advantage

is taken of this circumstance to describe the subject of the Picture.

The words written over the gateway of the Inn are as follow: 'The

Tabarde Inn, by Henry Baillie, the lodgynge-house for Pilgrims who

journey to Saint Thomas's Shrine at Canterbury.'

The characters of Chaucer's Pilgrims are the characters which compose

all ages and nations. As one age falls, another rises, different to

mortal sight, but to immortals only the same; for we see the same

characters repeated again and again, in animals, vegetables, minerals,

and in men. Nothing new occurs in identical existence; Accident ever

varies, Substance can never suffer change nor decay.

Of Chaucer's characters, as described in his _Canterbury Tales_, some

of the names or titles are altered by time, but the characters

themselves for ever remain unaltered; and consequently they are the

physiognomies or lineaments of universal human life, beyond which

Nature never steps. Names alter, things never alter. I have known

multitudes of those who would have been monks in the age of monkery,

who in this deistical age are deists. As Newton numbered the stars,

and as Linnaeus numbered the plants, so Chaucer numbered the classes

of men.

The Painter has consequently varied the heads and forms of his

personages into all Nature's varieties; the horses he has also varied

to accord to their riders; the costume is correct according to

authentic monuments.

The Knight and Squire with the Squire's Yeoman lead the Procession, as

Chaucer has also placed them first in his Prologue. The Knight is a

true Hero, a good, great and wise man; his whole-length portrait on

horseback, as written by Chaucer, cannot be surpassed. He has spent

his life in the field, has ever been a conqueror, and is that species

of character which in every age stands as the guardian of man against

the oppressor. His son is like him, with the germ of perhaps greater

perfection still, as he blends literature and the arts with his

warlike studies. Their dress and their horses are of the first rate,

without ostentation, and with all the true grandeur that unaffected

simplicity when in high rank always displays. The Squire's Yeoman is

also a great character, a man perfectly knowing in his profession:

And in his hand he bare a mighty bow.

Chaucer describes here a mighty man, one who in war is the worthy

attendant on noble heroes.

The Prioress follows these with her female Chaplain:

Another Nonne also with her had she,

That was her Chaplaine, and Priests three.

This Lady is described also as of the first rank, rich and honoured.

She has certain peculiarities and little delicate affectations, not

unbecoming in her, being accompanied with what is truly grand and

really polite; her person and face Chaucer has described with

minuteness; it is very elegant, and was the beauty of our ancestors

till after Elizabeth's time, when voluptuousness and folly began to be

accounted beautiful.

Her companion and her three Priests were no doubt all perfectly

delineated in those parts of Chaucer's work which are now lost; we

ought to suppose them suitable attendants on rank and fashion.

The Monk follows these with the Friar. The Painter has also grouped

with these the Pardoner and the Sompnour and the Manciple, and has

here also introduced one of the rich citizens of London--characters

likely to ride in company, all being above the common rank in life, or

attendants on those who were so.

For the Monk is described by Chaucer, as a man of the first rank in

society, noble, rich, and expensively attended; he is a leader of the

age, with certain humorous accompaniments in his character, that do

not degrade, but render him an object of dignified mirth, but also

with other accompaniments not so respectable.

The Friar is a character of a mixed kind:

A friar there was, a wanton and a merry;

but in his office he is said to be a 'full solemn man'; eloquent,

amorous, witty and satirical; young, handsome and rich; he is a

complete rogue, with constitutional gaiety enough to make him a

master of all the pleasures of the world:

His neck was white as the flour de lis,

Thereto strong he was as a champioun.

It is necessary here to speak of Chaucer's own character, that I may

set certain mistaken critics right in their conception of the humour

and fun that occur on the journey. Chaucer is himself the great

poetical observer of men, who in every age is born to record and

eternize its acts. This he does as a master, as a father and superior,

who looks down on their little follies from the Emperor to the Miller,

sometimes with severity, oftener with joke and sport.

Accordingly Chaucer has made his Monk a great tragedian, one who

studied poetical art. So much so that the generous Knight is, in the

compassionate dictates of his soul, compelled to cry out:

'Ho,' quoth the Knyght, 'good Sir, no more of this;

That ye have said is right ynough, I wis,

And mokell more; for little heaviness

Is right enough for much folk, as I guesse.

I say, for me, it is a great disease,

Whereas men have been in wealth and ease,

To heare of their sudden fall, alas!

And the contrary is joy and solas.'

The Monk's definition of tragedy in the proem to his tale is worth

repeating:

Tragedie is to tell a certain story,

As old books us maken memory,

Of hem that stood in great prosperity,

And be fallen out of high degree,

Into miserie, and ended wretchedly.

Though a man of luxury, pride and pleasure, he is a master of art and

learning, though affecting to despise it. Those who can think that

the proud huntsman and noble housekeeper, Chaucer's Monk, is intended

for a buffoon or burlesque character, know little of Chaucer.

For the Host who follows this group, and holds the centre of the

cavalcade, is a first-rate character, and his jokes are no trifles;

they are always, though uttered with audacity, and equally free with

the Lord and the Peasant--they are always substantially and weightily

expressive of knowledge and experience; Henry Baillie, the keeper of

the greatest Inn of the greatest City, for such was the Tabarde Inn in

Southwark near London, our Host, was also a leader of the age.

By way of illustration I instance Shakespeare's Witches in _Macbeth_.

Those who dress them for the stage, consider them as wretched old

women, and not, as Shakespeare intended, the Goddesses of Destiny;

this shows how Chaucer has been misunderstood in his sublime work.

Shakespeare's Fairies also are the rulers of the vegetable world, and

so are Chaucer's; let them be so considered, and then the poet will be

understood, and not else.

But I have omitted to speak of a very prominent character, the

Pardoner, the Age's Knave, who always commands and domineers over the

high and low vulgar. This man is sent in every age for a rod and

scourge, and for a blight, for a trial of men, to divide the classes

of men; he is in the most holy sanctuary, and he is suffered by

Providence for wise ends, and has also his great use, and his grand

leading destiny.

His companion the Sompnour is also a Devil of the first magnitude,

grand, terrific, rich, and honoured in the rank of which he holds the

destiny. The uses to society are perhaps equal of the Devil and of the

Angel; their sublimity who can dispute?

In daunger had he at his own gise,

The young girls of his diocese,

And he knew well their counsel, &c.

The principal figure in the next group is the Good Parson; an Apostle,

a real Messenger of Heaven, sent in every age for its light and its

warmth. This man is beloved and venerated by all, and neglected by

all: he serves all, and is served by none. He is, according to

Christ's definition, the greatest of his age: yet he is a Poor Parson

of a town. Read Chaucer's description of the Good Parson, and bow the

head and the knee to Him, Who in every age sends us such a burning and

a shining light. Search, O ye rich and powerful, for these men and

obey their counsel; then shall the golden age return. But alas! you

will not easily distinguish him from the Friar or the Pardoner; they

also are 'full solemn men', and their counsel you will continue to

follow.

I have placed by his side the Sergeant-at-Lawe, who appears delighted

to ride in his company, and between him and his brother the Ploughman;

as I wish men of law would always ride with them, and take their

counsel, especially in all difficult points. Chaucer's Lawyer is a

character of great venerableness, a Judge and a real master of the

jurisprudence of his age.

The Doctor of Physic is in this group; and the Franklin, the

voluptuous country gentleman, contrasted with the Physician, and, on

his other hand, with two Citizens of London. Chaucer's characters

live age after age. Every age is a Canterbury Pilgrimage; we all pass

on, each sustaining one of these characters; nor can a child be born

who is not one or other of these characters of Chaucer. The Doctor of

Physic is described as the first of his profession, perfect, learned,

completely Master and Doctor in his art. Thus the reader will observe

that Chaucer makes every one of his characters perfect in his kind;

every one is an Antique Statue, the image of a class and not of an

imperfect individual.

This group also would furnish substantial matter, on which volumes

might be written. The Franklin is one who keeps open table, who is the

genius of eating and drinking, the Bacchus; as the Doctor of Physic is

the Aesculapius, the Host is the Silenus, the Squire is the Apollo,

the Miller is the Hercules, &c. Chaucer's characters are a description

of the eternal Principles that exist in all ages. The Franklin is

voluptuousness itself, most nobly portrayed:

It snewed in his house of meat and drink.

The Ploughman is simplicity itself, with wisdom and strength for its

stamina. Chaucer has divided the ancient character of Hercules between

his Miller and his Ploughman. Benevolence is the Ploughman's great

characteristic; he is thin with excessive labour, and not with old age

as some have supposed:

He would thresh, and thereto dike and delve,

For Christe's sake, for every poore wight,

Withouten hire, if it lay in his might.

Visions of these eternal principles or characters of human life appear

to poets in all ages; the Grecian gods were the ancient Cherubim of

Phoenicia; but the Greeks, and since them the Moderns, have neglected

to subdue the gods of Priam. These gods are visions of the eternal

attributes, or divine names, which, when erected into gods, become

destructive to humanity. They ought to be the servants, and not the

masters of man or of society. They ought to be made to sacrifice to

man, and not man compelled to sacrifice to them; for, when separated

from man or humanity, who is Jesus the Saviour, the Vine of Eternity?

They are thieves and rebels, they are destroyers.

The Ploughman of Chaucer is Hercules in his supreme Eternal State,

divested of his Spectrous Shadow, which is the Miller, a terrible

fellow, such as exists in all times and places for the trial of men,

to astonish every neighbourhood with brutal strength and courage, to

get rich and powerful, to curb the pride of Man.

The Reeve and the Manciple are two characters of the most consummate

worldly wisdom. The Shipman, or Sailor, is a similar genius of

Ulyssean art, but with the highest courage superadded.

The Citizens and their Cook are each leaders of a class. Chaucer has

been somehow made to number four citizens, which would make his whole

company, himself included, thirty-one. But he says there was but

nine-and-twenty in his company:

Full nine and twenty in a company.

The Webbe, or Weaver, and the Tapiser, or Tapestry Weaver, appear to

me to be the same person; but this is only an opinion, for 'full nine

and twenty' may signify one more or less. But I daresay that Chaucer

wrote 'A Webbe Dyer', that is a Cloth Dyer:

A Webbe Dyer and a Tapiser.

The Merchant cannot be one of the Three Citizens, as his dress is

different, and his character is more marked, whereas Chaucer says of

his rich citizens:

All were yclothed in o liverie.

The characters of Women Chaucer has divided into two classes, the Lady

Prioress and the Wife of Bath. Are not these leaders of the ages of

men? The Lady Prioress in some ages predominates; and in some the Wife

of Bath, in whose character Chaucer has been equally minute and exact;

because she is also a scourge and a blight. I shall say no more of

her, nor expose what Chaucer has left hidden; let the young reader

study what he has said of her: it is useful as a scarecrow. There are

of such characters born too many for the peace of the world.

I come at length to the Clerk of Oxenford. This character varies from

that of Chaucer, as the contemplative philosopher varies from the

poetical genius. There are always these two classes of learned sages,

the poetical and the philosophical. The Painter has put them side by

side, as if the youthful clerk had put himself under the tuition of

the mature poet. Let the Philosopher always be the servant and scholar

of Inspiration, and all will be happy.

CHARLES LAMB

1775-1834

ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE,

CONSIDERED WITH REFERENCE TO THEIR FITNESS FOR STAGE REPRESENTATION

(1811)

Taking a turn the other day in the Abbey, I was struck with the

affected attitude of a figure, which I do not remember to have seen

before, and which upon examination proved to be a whole-length of the

celebrated Mr. Garrick. Though I would not go so far with some good

Catholics abroad as to shut players altogether out of consecrated

ground, yet I own I was not a little scandalized at the introduction

of theatrical airs and gestures into a place set apart to remind us of

the saddest realities. Going nearer, I found inscribed under this

harlequin figure the following lines:

To paint fair Nature, by divine command,

Her magic pencil in his glowing hand,

A Shakespeare rose: then, to expand his fame

Wide o'er this breathing world, a Garrick came.

Though sunk in death the forms the Poet drew,

The Actor's genius bade them breathe anew;

Though, like the bard himself, in night they lay,

Immortal Garrick call'd them back to day:

And till Eternity with power sublime

Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary Time,

Shakespeare and Garrick like twin-stars shall shine,

And earth irradiate with a beam divine.

It would be an insult to my readers' understandings to attempt

anything like a criticism on this farrago of false thoughts and

nonsense. But the reflection it led me into was a kind of wonder, how,

from the days of the actor here celebrated to our own, it should have

been the fashion to compliment every performer in his turn, that has

had the luck to please the town in any of the great characters of

Shakespeare, with the notion of possessing a _mind congenial with the

poet's_: how people should come thus unaccountably to confound the

power of originating poetical images and conceptions with the faculty

of being able to read or recite the same when put into words;[7] or

what connexion that absolute mastery over the heart and soul of man,

which a great dramatic poet possesses, has with those low tricks upon

the eye and ear, which a player by observing a few general effects,

which some common passion, as grief, anger, &c. usually has upon the

gestures and exterior, can so easily compass. To know the internal

workings and movements of a great mind, of an Othello or a Hamlet for

instance, the _when_ and the _why_ and the _how far_ they should be

moved; to what pitch a passion is becoming; to give the reins and to

pull in the curb exactly at the moment when the drawing in or the

slackening is most graceful; seems to demand a reach of intellect of a

vastly different extent from that which is employed upon the bare

imitation of the signs of these passions in the countenance or

gesture, which signs are usually observed to be most lively and

emphatic in the weaker sort of minds, and which signs can after all

but indicate some passion, as I said before, anger, or grief,

generally; but of the motives and grounds of the passion, wherein it

differs from the same passion in low and vulgar natures, of these the

actor can give no more idea by his face or gesture than the eye

(without a metaphor) can speak, or the muscles utter intelligible

sounds. But such is the instantaneous nature of the impressions which

we take in at the eye and ear at a playhouse, compared with the slow

apprehension oftentimes of the understanding in reading, that we are

apt not only to sink the play-writer in the consideration which we pay

to the actor, but even to identify in our minds in a perverse manner,

the actor with the character which he represents. It is difficult for

a frequent playgoer to disembarrass the idea of Hamlet from the person

and voice of Mr. K. We speak of Lady Macbeth, while we are in reality

thinking of Mrs. S. Nor is this confusion incidental alone to

unlettered persons, who, not possessing the advantage of reading, are

necessarily dependent upon the stage-player for all the pleasure which

they can receive from the drama, and to whom the very idea of _what an

author is_ cannot be made comprehensible without some pain and

perplexity of mind: the error is one from which persons otherwise not

meanly lettered, find it almost impossible to extricate themselves.

[7] It is observable that we fall into this confusion only in

_dramatic_ recitations. We never dream that the gentleman who

reads Lucretius in public with great applause, is therefore a

great poet and philosopher; nor do we find that Tom Davies,

the bookseller, who is recorded to have recited the _Paradise

Lost_ better than any man in England in his day (though I

cannot help thinking there must be some mistake in this

tradition), was therefore, by his intimate friends, set upon

a level with Milton.

Never let me be so ungrateful as to forget the very high degree of

satisfaction which I received some years back from seeing for the

first time a tragedy of Shakespeare performed, in which these two

great performers sustained the principal parts. It seemed to embody

and realize conceptions which had hitherto assumed no distinct shape.

But dearly do we pay all our life after for this juvenile pleasure,

this sense of distinctness. When the novelty is past, we find to our

cost that instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and

brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood. We have

let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance.

How cruelly this operates upon the mind, to have its free conceptions

thus crampt and pressed down to the measure of a strait-lacing

actuality, may be judged from that delightful sensation of freshness

with which we turn to those plays of Shakespeare which have escaped

being performed, and to those passages in the acting plays of the same

writer which have happily been left out in performance. How far the

very custom of hearing anything _spouted_, withers and blows upon a

fine passage, may be seen in those speeches from _Henry the Fifth_,

&c. which are current in the mouths of school-boys from their being to

be found in _Enfield Speakers_, and such kind of books. I confess

myself utterly unable to appreciate that celebrated soliloquy in

_Hamlet_, beginning 'To be or not to be', or to tell whether it be

good, bad, or indifferent, it has been so handled and pawed about by

declamatory boys and men, and torn so inhumanly from its living place

and principle of continuity in the play, till it is become to me a

perfect dead member.

It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the

plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage,

than those of almost any other dramatist whatever. Their distinguished

excellence is a reason that they should be so. There is so much in

them, which comes not under the province of acting, with which eye,

and tone, and gesture, have nothing to do.

The glory of the scenic art is to personate passion, and the turns of

passion; and the more coarse and palpable the passion is, the more

hold upon the eyes and ears of the spectators the performer obviously

possesses. For this reason, scolding scenes, scenes where two persons

talk themselves into a fit of fury, and then in a surprising manner

talk themselves out of it again, have always been the most popular

upon our stage. And the reason is plain, because the spectators are

here most palpably appealed to, they are the proper judges in this war

of words, they are the legitimate ring that should be formed round

such 'intellectual prize-fighters'. Talking is the direct object of

the imitation here. But in all the best dramas, and in Shakespeare

above all, how obvious it is, that the form of _speaking_, whether it

be in soliloquy or dialogue, is only a medium, and often a highly

artificial one, for putting the reader or spectator into possession of

that knowledge of the inner structure and workings of mind in a

character, which he could otherwise never have arrived at _in that

form of composition_ by any gift short of intuition. We do here as we

do with novels written in the _epistolary form_. How many

improprieties, perfect solecisms in letter-writing, do we put up with

in _Clarissa_ and other books, for the sake of the delight which that

form upon the whole gives us.

But the practice of stage representation reduces everything to a

controversy of elocution. Every character, from the boisterous

blasphemings of Bajazet to the shrinking timidity of womanhood, must

play the orator. The love-dialogues of Romeo and Juliet, those

silver-sweet sounds of lovers' tongues by night; the more intimate and

sacred sweetness of nuptial colloquy between an Othello or a Posthumus

with their married wives, all those delicacies which are so delightful

in the reading, as when we read of those youthful dalliances in

Paradise

As beseem'd

Fair couple link'd in happy nuptial league

Alone:

by the inherent fault of stage representation, how are these things

sullied and turned from their very nature by being exposed to a large

assembly; when such speeches as Imogen addresses to her lord, come

drawling out of the mouth of a hired actress, whose courtship, though

nominally addressed to the personated Posthumus, is manifestly aimed

at the spectators, who are to judge of her endearments and her returns

of love.

The character of Hamlet is perhaps that by which, since the days of

Betterton, a succession of popular performers have had the greatest

ambition to distinguish themselves. The length of the part may be one

of their reasons. But for the character itself, we find it in a play,

and therefore we judge it a fit subject of dramatic representation.

The play itself abounds in maxims and reflections beyond any other,

and therefore we consider it as a proper vehicle for conveying moral

instruction. But Hamlet himself--what does he suffer meanwhile by

being dragged forth as a public schoolmaster, to give lectures to the

crowd! Why, nine parts in ten of what Hamlet does, are transactions

between himself and his moral sense, they are the effusions of his

solitary musings, which he retires to holes and corners and the most

sequestered parts of the palace to pour forth; or rather, they are the

silent meditations with which his bosom is bursting, reduced to _words_

for the sake of the reader, who must else remain ignorant of what is

passing there. These profound sorrows, these light-and-noise-abhorring

ruminations, which the tongue scarce dares utter to deaf walls and

chambers, how can they be represented by a gesticulating actor, who

comes and mouths them out before an audience, making four hundred

people his confidants at once? I say not that it is the fault of the

actor so to do; he must pronounce them _ore rotundo_, he must

accompany them with his eye, he must insinuate them into his auditory

by some trick of eye, tone, or gesture, or he fails. _He must be

thinking all the while of his appearance, because he knows that all

the while the spectators are judging of it._ And this is the way to

represent the shy, negligent, retiring Hamlet.

It is true that there is no other mode of conveying a vast quantity of

thought and feeling to a great portion of the audience, who otherwise

would never earn it for themselves by reading, and the intellectual

acquisition gained this way may, for aught I know, be inestimable; but

I am not arguing that Hamlet should not be acted, but how much Hamlet

is made another thing by being acted. I have heard much of the wonders

which Garrick performed in this part; but as I never saw him, I must

have leave to doubt whether the representation of such a character

came within the province of his art. Those who tell me of him, speak

of his eye, of the magic of his eye, and of his commanding voice:

physical properties, vastly desirable in an actor, and without which

he can never insinuate meaning into an auditory,--but what have they

to do with Hamlet? what have they to do with intellect? In fact, the

things aimed at in theatrical representation, are to arrest the

spectator's eye upon the form and the gesture, and so to gain a more

favourable hearing to what is spoken: it is not what the character is,

but how he looks; not what he says, but how he speaks it. I see no

reason to think that if the play of _Hamlet_ were written over again

by some such writer as Banks or Lillo, retaining the process of the

story, but totally omitting all the poetry of it, all the divine

features of Shakespeare, his stupendous intellect; and only taking

care to give us enough of passionate dialogue, which Banks or Lillo

were never at a loss to furnish; I see not how the effect could be

much different upon an audience, nor how the actor has it in his power

to represent Shakespeare to us differently from his representation of

Banks or Lillo. Hamlet would still be a youthful accomplished prince,

and must be gracefully personated; he might be puzzled in his mind,

wavering in his conduct, seemingly-cruel to Ophelia, he might see a

ghost, and start at it, and address it kindly when he found it to be

his father; all this in the poorest and most homely language of the

servilest creeper after nature that ever consulted the palate of an

audience; without troubling Shakespeare for the matter: and I see not

but there would be room for all the power which an actor has, to

display itself. All the passions and changes of passion might remain:

for those are much less difficult to write or act than is thought, it

is a trick easy to be attained, it is but rising or falling a note or

two in the voice, a whisper with a significant foreboding look to

announce its approach, and so contagious the counterfeit appearance of

any emotion is, that let the words be what they will, the look and

tone shall carry it off and make it pass for deep skill in the

passions.

It is common for people to talk of Shakespeare's plays being _so

natural_; that everybody can understand him. They are natural indeed,

they are grounded deep in nature, so deep that the depth of them lies

out of the reach of most of us. You shall hear the same persons say

that George Barnwell is very natural, and Othello is very natural,

that they are both very deep; and to them they are the same kind of

thing. At the one they sit and shed tears, because a good sort of

young man is tempted by a naughty woman to commit _a trifling

peccadillo_, the murder of an uncle or so, that is all, and so comes

to an untimely end, which is _so moving_; and at the other, because a

blackamoor in a fit of jealousy kills his innocent white wife: and the

odds are that ninety-nine out of a hundred would willingly behold the

same catastrophe happen to both the heroes, and have thought the rope

more due to Othello than to Barnwell. For of the texture of Othello's

mind, the inward construction marvellously laid open with all its

strengths and weaknesses, its heroic confidences and its human

misgivings, its agonies of hate springing from the depths of love,

they see no more than the spectators at a cheaper rate, who pay their

pennies a-piece to look through the man's telescope in Leicester-fields,

see into the inward plot and topography of the moon. Some dim thing or

other they see, they see an actor personating a passion, of grief, or

anger, for instance, and they recognize it as a copy of the usual

external effects of such passions; for at least as being true to _that

symbol of the emotion which passes current at the theatre for it_, for

it is often no more than that: but of the grounds of the passion, its

correspondence to a great or heroic nature, which is the only worthy

object of tragedy,--that common auditors know any thing of this, or

can have any such notions dinned into them by the mere strength of an

actor's lungs,--that apprehensions foreign to them should be thus

infused into them by storm, I can neither believe, nor understand how

it can be possible.

We talk of Shakespeare's admirable observation of life, when we should

feel, that not from a petty inquisition into those cheap and every-day

characters which surrounded him, as they surround us, but from his own

mind, which was, to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson's, the very 'sphere

of humanity', he fetched those images of virtue and of knowledge, of

which every one of us recognizing a part, think we comprehend in our

natures the whole; and oftentimes mistake the powers which he

positively creates in us, for nothing more than indigenous faculties

of our own minds which only waited the action of corresponding virtues

in him to return a full and clear echo of the same.

To return to Hamlet.--Among the distinguishing features of that

wonderful character, one of the most interesting (yet painful) is that

soreness of mind which makes him treat the intrusions of Polonius

with harshness, and that asperity which he puts on in his interviews

with Ophelia. These tokens of an unhinged mind (if they be not mixed

in the latter case with a profound artifice of love, to alienate

Ophelia by affected discourtesies, so to prepare her mind for the

breaking off of that loving intercourse, which can no longer find a

place amidst business so serious as that which he has to do) are parts

of his character, which to reconcile with our admiration of Hamlet,

the most patient consideration of his situation is no more than

necessary; they are what we _forgive afterwards_, and explain by the

whole of his character, but _at the time_ they are harsh and

unpleasant. Yet such is the actor's necessity of giving strong blows

to the audience, that I have never seen a player in this character,

who did not exaggerate and strain to the utmost these ambiguous

features,--these temporary deformities in the character. They make him

express a vulgar scorn at Polonius which utterly degrades his

gentility, and which no explanation can render palatable; they make

him show contempt, and curl up the nose at Ophelia's father,--contempt

in its very grossest and most hateful form; but they get applause by

it: it is natural, people say; that is, the words are scornful, and

the actor expresses scorn, and that they can judge of: but why so much

scorn, and of that sort, they never think of asking.

So to Ophelia.--All the Hamlets that I have ever seen, rant and rave

at her as if she had committed some great crime, and the audience are

highly pleased, because the words of the part are satirical, and they

are enforced by the strongest expression of satirical indignation of

which the face and voice are capable. But then, whether Hamlet is

likely to have put on such brutal appearances to a lady whom he loved

so dearly, is never thought on. The truth is, that in all such deep

affections as had subsisted between Hamlet and Ophelia, there is a

stock of _supererogatory love_, (if I may venture to use the

expression) which in any great grief of heart, especially where that

which preys upon the mind cannot be communicated, confers a kind of

indulgence upon the grieved party to express itself, even to its

heart's dearest object, in the language of a temporary alienation; but

it is not alienation, it is a distraction purely, and so it always

makes itself to be felt by that object: it is not anger, but grief

assuming the appearance of anger,--love awkwardly counterfeiting hate,

as sweet countenances when they try to frown: but such sternness and

fierce disgust as Hamlet is made to show, is no counterfeit, but the

real face of absolute aversion,--of irreconcilable alienation. It may

be said he puts on the madman; but then he should only so far put on

this counterfeit lunacy as his own real distraction will give him

leave; that is, incompletely, imperfectly; not in that confirmed

practised way, like a master of his art, or, as Dame Quickly would

say, 'like one of those harlotry players.'

I mean no disrespect to any actor, but the sort of pleasure which

Shakespeare's plays give in the acting seems to me not at all to

differ from that which the audience receive from those of other

writers; and, _they being in themselves essentially so different from

all others_, I must conclude that there is something in the nature of

acting which levels all distinctions. And in fact, who does not speak

indifferently of the _Gamester_ and of _Macbeth_ as fine stage

performances, and praise the Mrs. Beverley in the same way as the Lady

Macbeth of Mrs. S.? Belvidera, and Calista, and Isabella, and

Euphrasia, are they less liked than Imogen, or than Juliet, or than

Desdemona? Are they not spoken of and remembered in the same way? Is

not the female performer as great (as they call it) in one as in the

other? Did not Garrick shine, and was not he ambitious of shining in

every drawling tragedy that his wretched day produced,--the

productions of the Hills and the Murphys and the Browns,--and shall he

have that honour to dwell in our minds for ever as an inseparable

concomitant with Shakespeare? A kindred mind! O who can read that

affecting sonnet of Shakespeare which alludes to his profession as a

player:

Oh for my sake do you with Fortune chide,

The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,

That did not better for my life provide

Than public means which public custom breeds--

Thence comes it that my name receives a brand;

And almost thence my nature is subdued

To what it works in, like the dyer's hand--

Or that other confession:

Alas! 'tis true, I have gone here and there,

And made myself a motley to thy view,

Gor'd mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear--

Who can read these instances of jealous self-watchfulness in our sweet

Shakespeare, and dream of any congeniality between him and one that,

by every tradition of him, appears to have been as mere a player as

ever existed; to have had his mind tainted with the lowest players'

vices,--envy and jealousy, and miserable cravings after applause; one

who in the exercise of his profession was jealous even of the

women-performers that stood in his way; a manager full of managerial

tricks and stratagems and finesse: that any resemblance should be

dreamed of between him and Shakespeare,--Shakespeare who, in the

plenitude and consciousness of his own powers, could with that noble

modesty, which we can neither imitate nor appreciate, express himself

thus of his own sense of his own defects:

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featur'd like him, like him with friends possest;

Desiring _this man's art, and that man's scope_.

I am almost disposed to deny to Garrick the merit of being an admirer

of Shakespeare. A true lover of his excellences he certainly was not;

for would any true lover of them have admitted into his matchless

scenes such ribald trash as Tate and Cibber, and the rest of them,

that

With their darkness durst affront his light,

have foisted into the acting plays of Shakespeare? I believe it

impossible that he could have had a proper reverence for Shakespeare,

and have condescended to go through that interpolated scene in Richard

the Third, in which Richard tries to break his wife's heart by telling

her he loves another woman, and says, 'if she survives this she is

immortal.' Yet I doubt not he delivered this vulgar stuff with as much

anxiety of emphasis as any of the genuine parts; and for acting, it is

as well calculated as any. But we have seen the part of Richard lately

produce great fame to an actor by his manner of playing it, and it

lets us into the secret of acting, and of popular judgements of

Shakespeare derived from acting. Not one of the spectators who have

witnessed Mr. C.'s exertions in that part, but has come away with a

proper conviction that Richard is a very wicked man, and kills little

children in their beds, with something like the pleasure which the

giants and ogres in children's books are represented to have taken in

that practice; moreover, that he is very close and shrewd and devilish

cunning, for you could see that by his eye.

But is in fact this the impression we have in reading the Richard of

Shakespeare? Do we feel anything like disgust, as we do at that

butcher-like representation of him that passes for him on the stage? A

horror at his crimes blends with the effect which we feel, but how is

it qualified, how is it carried off, by the rich intellect which he

displays, his resources, his wit, his buoyant spirits, his vast

knowledge and insight into characters, the poetry of his part,--not an

atom of all which is made perceivable in Mr. C.'s way of acting it.

Nothing but his crimes, his actions, is visible; they are prominent

and staring; the murderer stands out, but where is the lofty genius,

the man of vast capacity,--the profound, the witty, accomplished

Richard?

The truth is, the Characters of Shakespeare are so much the objects of

meditation rather than of interest or curiosity as to their actions,

that while we are reading any of his great criminal characters,--Macbeth,

Richard, even Iago,--we think not so much of the crimes which they

commit, as of the ambition, the aspiring spirit, the intellectual

activity, which prompts them to overleap those moral fences. Barnwell

is a wretched murderer; there is a certain fitness between his neck

and the rope; he is the legitimate heir to the gallows; nobody who

thinks at all can think of any alleviating circumstances in his case

to make him a fit object of mercy. Or to take an instance from the

higher tragedy, what else but a mere assassin is Glenalvon! Do we

think of anything but of the crime which he commits, and the rack

which he deserves? That is all which we really think about him.

Whereas in corresponding characters in Shakespeare so little do the

actions comparatively affect us, that while the impulses, the inner

mind in all its perverted greatness, solely seems real and is

exclusively attended to, the crime is comparatively nothing. But when

we see these things represented, the acts which they do are

comparatively everything, their impulses nothing. The state of sublime

emotion into which we are elevated by those images of night and horror

which Macbeth is made to utter, that solemn prelude with which he

entertains the time till the bell shall strike which is to call him to

murder Duncan,--when we no longer read it in a book, when we have

given up that vantage-ground of abstraction which reading possesses

over seeing, and come to see a man in his bodily shape before our eyes

actually preparing to commit a murder, if the acting be true and

impressive, as I have witnessed it in Mr. K.'s performance of that

part, the painful anxiety about the act, the natural longing to

prevent it while it yet seems unperpetrated, the too close pressing

semblance of reality, give a pain and an uneasiness which totally

destroy all the delight which the words in the book convey, where the

deed doing never presses upon us with the painful sense of presence:

it rather seems to belong to history,--to something past and

inevitable, if it has anything to do with time at all. The sublime

images, the poetry alone, is that which is present to our minds in the

reading.

So to see Lear acted--to see an old man tottering about the stage with

a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy

night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want

to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling

which the acting of Lear ever produced in me. But the Lear of

Shakespeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they

mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to

represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to

represent Lear: they might more easily propose to personate the Satan

of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures.

The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in

intellectual: the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano:

they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his

mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare.

This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on;

even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but

corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we

read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear,--we are in his mind, we are

sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and

storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty

irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary purposes

of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth,

at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What have looks,

or tones, to do with that sublime identification of his age with that

of the _heavens themselves_, when in his reproaches to them for

conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them that 'they

themselves are old'. What gesture shall we appropriate to this? What

has the voice or the eye to do with such things? But the play is

beyond all art, as the tamperings with it show: it is too hard and

stony; it must have love-scenes, and a happy ending. It is not enough

that Cordelia is a daughter, she must shine as a lover too. Tate has

put his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan, for Garrick and his

followers, the showmen of the scene, to draw the mighty beast about

more easily. A happy ending!--as if the living martyrdom that Lear had

gone through,--the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair

dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him. If

he is to live and be happy after, if he could sustain this world's

burden after, why all this pudder and preparation,--why torment us

with all this unnecessary sympathy? As if the childish pleasure of

getting his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over

again his misused station,--as if at his years, and with his

experience, anything was left but to die.

Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage. But how

many dramatic personages are there in Shakespeare, which though more

tractable and feasible (if I may so speak) than Lear, yet from some

circumstance, some adjunct to their character, are improper to be

shown to our bodily eye. Othello for instance. Nothing can be more

soothing, more flattering to the nobler parts of our natures, than to

read of a young Venetian lady of highest extraction, through the force

of love and from a sense of merit in him whom she loved, laying aside

every consideration of kindred, and country, and colour, and wedding

with _a coal-black Moor_--(for such he is represented, in the

imperfect state of knowledge respecting foreign countries in those

days, compared with our own, or in compliance with popular notions,

though the Moors are now well enough known to be by many shades less

unworthy of a white woman's fancy)--it is the perfect triumph of

virtue over accidents, of the imagination over the senses. She sees

Othello's colour in his mind. But upon the stage, when the imagination

is no longer the ruling faculty, but we are left to our poor

unassisted senses, I appeal to every one that has seen Othello played,

whether he did not, on the contrary, sink Othello's mind in his

colour; whether he did not find something extremely revolting in the

courtship and wedded caresses of Othello and Desdemona; and whether

the actual sight of the thing did not over-weigh all that beautiful

compromise which we make in reading;--and the reason it should do so

is obvious, because there is just so much reality presented to our

senses as to give a perception of disagreement, with not enough of

belief in the internal motives--all that which is unseen--to overpower

and reconcile the first and obvious prejudices.[8] What we see upon a

stage is body and bodily action; what we are conscious of in reading

is almost exclusively the mind, and its movements: and this I think

may sufficiently account for the very different sort of delight with

which the same play so often affects us in the reading and the seeing.

[8] The error of supposing that because Othello's colour does

not offend us in the reading, it should also not offend us in

the seeing, is just such a fallacy as supposing that an Adam

and Eve in a picture shall affect us just as they do in the

poem. But in the poem we for a while have Paradisaical senses

given us, which vanish when we see a man and his wife without

clothes in the picture. The painters themselves feel this, as

is apparent by the awkward shifts they have recourse to, to

make them look not quite naked; by a sort of prophetic

anachronism, antedating the invention of fig-leaves. So in

the reading of the play, we see with Desdemona's eyes; in the

seeing of it, we are forced to look with our own.

It requires little reflection to perceive, that if those characters in

Shakespeare which are within the precincts of nature, have yet

something in them which appeals too exclusively to the imagination, to

admit of their being made objects to the senses without suffering a

change and a diminution,--that still stronger the objection must lie

against representing another line of characters, which Shakespeare has

introduced to give a wildness and a supernatural elevation to his

scenes, as if to remove them still farther from that assimilation to

common life in which their excellence is vulgarly supposed to consist.

When we read the incantations of those terrible beings the Witches in

_Macbeth_, though some of the ingredients of their hellish composition

savour of the grotesque, yet is the effect upon us other than the most

serious and appalling that can be imagined? Do we not feel spell-bound

as Macbeth was? Can any mirth accompany a sense of their presence? We

might as well laugh under a consciousness of the principle of Evil

himself being truly and really present with us. But attempt to bring

these beings on to a stage, and you turn them instantly into so many

old women, that men and children are to laugh at. Contrary to the old

saying, that 'seeing is believing', the sight actually destroys the

faith; and the mirth in which we indulge at their expense, when we see

these creatures upon a stage, seems to be a sort of indemnification

which we make to ourselves for the terror which they put us in when

reading made them an object of belief,--when we surrendered up our

reason to the poet, as children, to their nurses and their elders; and

we laugh at our fears, as children who thought they saw something in

the dark, triumph when the bringing in of a candle discovers the

vanity of their fears. For this exposure of supernatural agents upon a

stage is truly bringing in a candle to expose their own delusiveness.

It is the solitary taper and the book that generates a faith in these

terrors: a ghost by chandelier light, and in good company, deceives no

spectators,--a ghost that can be measured by the eye, and his human

dimensions made out at leisure. The sight of a well-lighted house, and

a well-dressed audience, shall arm the most nervous child against any

apprehensions: as Tom Brown says of the impenetrable skin of Achilles

with his impenetrable armour over it, 'Bully Dawson would have fought

the devil with such advantages.'

Much has been said, and deservedly, in reprobation of the vile mixture

which Dryden has thrown into the _Tempest_: doubtless without some

such vicious alloy, the impure ears of that age would never have sate

out to hear so much innocence of love as is contained in the sweet

courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda. But is the _Tempest_ of

Shakespeare at all a subject for stage representation? It is one thing

to read of an enchanter, and to believe the wondrous tale while we are

reading it; but to have a conjurer brought before us in his

conjuring-gown, with his spirits about him, which none but himself and

some hundred of favoured spectators before the curtain are supposed to

see, involves such a quantity of the _hateful incredible_, that all

our reverence for the author cannot hinder us from perceiving such

gross attempts upon the senses to be in the highest degree childish

and inefficient. Spirits and fairies cannot be represented, they

cannot even be painted,--they can only be believed. But the elaborate

and anxious provision of scenery, which the luxury of the age demands,

in these cases works a quite contrary effect to what is intended. That

which in comedy, or plays of familiar life, adds so much to the life

of the imitation, in plays which appeal to the higher faculties,

positively destroys the illusion which it is introduced to aid. A

parlour or a drawing-room,--a library opening into a garden,--a garden

with an alcove in it,--a street, or the piazza of Covent Garden, does

well enough in a scene; we are content to give as much credit to it as

it demands; or rather, we think little about it,--it is little more

than reading at the top of a page, 'Scene, a Garden;' we do not

imagine ourselves there, but we readily admit the imitation of

familiar objects. But to think by the help of painted trees and

caverns, which we know to be painted, to transport our minds to

Prospero, and his island and his lonely cell;[9] or by the aid of a

fiddle dexterously thrown in, in an interval of speaking, to make us

believe that we hear those supernatural noises of which the isle was

full:--the Orrery Lecturer at the Haymarket might as well hope, by his

musical glasses cleverly stationed out of sight behind his apparatus,

to make us believe that we do indeed hear the chrystal spheres ring

out that chime, which if it were to inwrap our fancy long, Milton

thinks,

Time would run back and fetch the age of gold,

And speckled vanity

Would sicken soon and die,

And leprous Sin would melt from earthly mould;

Yea Hell itself would pass away,

And leave its dolorous mansions to the peering day.

The Garden of Eden, with our first parents in it, is not more

impossible to be shown on a stage, than the Enchanted Isle, with its

no less interesting and innocent first settlers.

[9] It will be said these things are done in pictures. But

pictures and scenes are very different things. Painting is a

world of itself, but in scene-painting there is the attempt

to deceive; and there is the discordancy, never to be got

over, between painted scenes and real people.

The subject of Scenery is closely connected with that of the Dresses,

which are so anxiously attended to on our stage. I remember the last

time I saw Macbeth played, the discrepancy I felt at the changes of

garment which he varied--the shiftings and re-shiftings, like a Romish

priest at mass. The luxury of stage-improvements, and the importunity

of the public eye, require this. The coronation robe of the Scottish

monarch was fairly a counterpart to that which our king wears when he

goes to the Parliament-house,--just so full and cumbersome, and set

out with ermine and pearls. And if things must be represented, I see

not what to find fault with in this. But in reading, what robe are we

conscious of? Some dim images of royalty--a crown and sceptre, may

float before our eyes, but who shall describe the fashion of it? Do we

see in our mind's eye what Webb or any other robe-maker could pattern?

This is the inevitable consequence of imitating everything, to make

all things natural. Whereas the reading of a tragedy is a fine

abstraction. It presents to the fancy just so much of external

appearances as to make us feel that we are among flesh and blood,

while by far the greater and better part of our imagination is

employed upon the thoughts and internal machinery of the character.

But in acting, scenery, dress, the most contemptible things, call upon

us to judge of their naturalness.

Perhaps it would be no bad similitude, to liken the pleasure which we

take in seeing one of these fine plays acted, compared with that quiet

delight which we find in the reading of it, to the different feelings

with which a reviewer, and a man that is not a reviewer, reads a fine

poem. The accursed critical habit,--the being called upon to judge and

pronounce, must make it quite a different thing to the former. In

seeing these plays acted, we are affected just as judges. When Hamlet

compares the two pictures of Gertrude's first and second husband, who

wants to see the pictures? But in the acting, a miniature must be

lugged out; which we know not to be the picture, but only to show how

finely a miniature may be represented. This showing of everything,

levels all things: it makes tricks, bows, and curtesies, of

importance. Mrs. S. never got more fame by anything than by the

manner in which she dismisses the guests in the banquet-scene in

_Macbeth_: it is as much remembered as any of her thrilling tones or

impressive looks. But does such a trifle as this enter into the

imaginations of the readers of that wild and wonderful scene? Does not

the mind dismiss the feasters as rapidly as it can? Does it care about

the gracefulness of the doing it? But by acting, and judging of

acting, all these non-essentials are raised into an importance,

injurious to the main interest of the play.

I have confined my observations to the tragic parts of Shakespeare. It

would be no very difficult task to extend the inquiry to his comedies;

and to show why Falstaff, Shallow, Sir Hugh Evans, and the rest, are

equally incompatible with stage representation. The length to which

this essay has run, will make it, I am afraid, sufficiently

distasteful to the Amateurs of the Theatre, without going any deeper

into the subject at present.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

1792-1822

A DEFENCE OF POETRY (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: 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: 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

quantities 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 the 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

Aeolian 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';[10] 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.

[10] _De Augment. Scient._, cap. i, lib. iii.

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 Aeschylus, 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.

Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits of action, are

all the instruments and materials of poetry; they may be called poetry

by that figure of speech which considers the effect as a synonym of

the cause. But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those

arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are

created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the

invisible nature of man. And this springs from the nature itself of

language, which is a more direct representation of the actions and

passions of our internal being, and is susceptible of more various and

delicate combinations, than colour, form, or motion, and is more

plastic and obedient to the control of that faculty of which it is the

creation. For language is arbitrarily produced by the imagination, and

has relation to thoughts alone; but all other materials, instruments,

and conditions of art, have relations among each other, which limit

and interpose between conception and expression. The former is as a

mirror which reflects, the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, the

light of which both are mediums of communication. Hence the fame of

sculptors, painters, and musicians, although the intrinsic powers of

the great masters of these arts may yield in no degree to that of

those who have employed language as the hieroglyphic of their

thoughts, has never equalled that of poets in the restricted sense of

the term; as two performers of equal skill will produce unequal

effects from a guitar and a harp. The fame of legislators and founders

of religions, so long as their institutions last, alone seems to

exceed that of poets in the restricted sense; but it can scarcely be a

question, whether, if we deduct the celebrity which their flattery of

the gross opinions of the vulgar usually conciliates, together with

that which belonged to them in their higher character of poets, any

excess will remain.

We have thus circumscribed the word poetry within the limits of that

art which is the most familiar and the most perfect expression of the

faculty itself. It is necessary, however, to make the circle still

narrower, and to determine the distinction between measured and

unmeasured language; for the popular division into prose and verse is

inadmissible in accurate philosophy.

Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and

towards that which they represent, and a perception of the order of

those relations has always been found connected with a perception of

the order of the relations of thoughts. Hence the language of poets

has ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of

sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less

indispensable to the communication of its influence, than the words

themselves, without reference to that peculiar order. Hence the vanity

of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that

you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as

seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a

poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no

flower--and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.

An observation of the regular mode of the recurrence of harmony in the

language of poetical minds, together with its relation to music,

produced metre, or a certain system of traditional forms of harmony

and language. Yet it is by no means essential that a poet should

accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that the

harmony, which is its spirit, be observed. The practice is indeed

convenient and popular, and to be preferred, especially in such

composition as includes much action: but every great poet must

inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the exact

structure of his peculiar versification. The distinction between poets

and prose writers is a vulgar error. The distinction between

philosophers and poets has been anticipated. Plato was essentially a

poet--the truth and splendour of his imagery, and the melody of his

language, are the most intense that it is possible to conceive. He

rejected the measure of the epic, dramatic, and lyrical forms, because

he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts divested of shape and

action, and he forbore to invent any regular plan of rhythm which

would include, under determinate forms, the varied pauses of his

style. Cicero sought to imitate the cadence of his periods, but with

little success. Lord Bacon was a poet.[11] His language has a sweet

and majestic rhythm, which satisfies the sense, no less than the

almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it

is a strain which distends, and then bursts the circumference of the

reader's mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the

universal element with which it has perpetual sympathy. All the

authors of revolutions in opinion are not only necessarily poets as

they are inventors, nor even as their words unveil the permanent

analogy of things by images which participate in the life of truth;

but as their periods are harmonious and rhythmical, and contain in

themselves the elements of verse; being the echo of the eternal music.

Nor are those supreme poets, who have employed traditional forms of

rhythm on account of the form and action of their subjects, less

capable of perceiving and teaching the truth of things, than those who

have omitted that form. Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton (to confine

ourselves to modern writers) are philosophers of the very loftiest

power.

[11] See the _Filum Labyrinthi_, and the Essay on Death

particularly.

A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There

is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a

catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connexion than time,

place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of

actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as

existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all

other minds. The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period

of time, and a certain combination of events which can never again

recur; the other is universal, and contains within itself the germ of

a relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible

varieties of human nature. Time, which destroys the beauty and the use

of the story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should

invest them, augments that of poetry, and for ever develops new and

wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains. Hence

epitomes have been called the moths of just history; they eat out the

poetry of it. A story of particular facts is as a mirror which

obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: poetry is a

mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

The parts of a composition may be poetical, without the composition as

a whole being a poem. A single sentence may be considered as a whole,

though it may be found in the midst of a series of unassimilated

portions: a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable

thought. And thus all the great historians, Herodotus, Plutarch, Livy,

were poets; and although the plan of these writers, especially that of

Livy, restrained them from developing this faculty in its highest

degree, they made copious and ample amends for their subjection, by

filling all the interstices of their subjects with living images.

Having determined what is poetry, and who are poets, let us proceed to

estimate its effects upon society.

Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it

falls open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its

delight. In the infancy of the world, neither poets themselves nor

their auditors are fully aware of the excellence of poetry: for it

acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and above

consciousness; and it is reserved for future generations to

contemplate and measure the mighty cause and effect in all the

strength and splendour of their union. Even in modern times, no living

poet ever arrived at the fullness of his fame; the jury which sits in

judgement upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be

composed of his peers: it must be impanelled by Time from the

selectest of the wise of many generations. A poet is a nightingale,

who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet

sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen

musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not

whence or why. The poems of Homer and his contemporaries were the

delight of infant Greece; they were the elements of that social system

which is the column upon which all succeeding civilization has

reposed. Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human

character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verses were

awakened to an ambition of becoming like to Achilles, Hector, and

Ulysses: the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism, and

persevering devotion to an object, were unveiled to the depths in

these immortal creations: the sentiments of the auditors must have

been refined and enlarged by a sympathy with such great and lovely

impersonations, until from admiring they imitated, and from imitation

they identified themselves with the objects of their admiration. Nor

let it be objected, that these characters are remote from moral

perfection, and that they can by no means be considered as edifying

patterns for general imitation. Every epoch, under names more or less

specious, has deified its peculiar errors; Revenge is the naked idol

of the worship of a semi-barbarous age; and Self-deceit is the veiled

image of unknown evil, before which luxury and satiety lie prostrate.

But a poet considers the vices of his contemporaries as a temporary

dress in which his creations must be arrayed, and which cover without

concealing the eternal proportions of their beauty. An epic or

dramatic personage is understood to wear them around his soul, as he

may the ancient armour or the modern uniform around his body; whilst

it is easy to conceive a dress more graceful than either. The beauty

of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental

vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to

the very disguise, and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in

which it is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions will express

themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume. Few poets

of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their

conceptions in its naked truth and splendour; and it is doubtful

whether the alloy of costume, habit, &c., be not necessary to temper

this planetary music for mortal ears.

The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry rests upon a

misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral

improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry

has created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and

domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men

hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one

another. But poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and

enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand

unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the

hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they

were not familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the

impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the

minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that

gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and

actions with which it coexists. The great secret of morals is love; or

a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with

the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively;

he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the

pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great

instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to

the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference

of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new

delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their

own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and

interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens

the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same

manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A poet therefore would do ill

to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually

those of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which

participate in neither. By this assumption of the inferior office of

interpreting the effect, in which perhaps after all he might acquit

himself but imperfectly, he would resign a glory in a participation in

the cause. There was little danger that Homer, or any of the eternal

poets, should have so far misunderstood themselves as to have

abdicated this throne of their widest dominion. Those in whom the

poetical faculty, though great, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan,

Tasso, Spenser, have frequently affected a moral aim, and the effect

of their poetry is diminished in exact proportion to the degree in

which they compel us to advert to this purpose.

Homer and the cyclic poets were followed at a certain interval by the

dramatic and lyrical poets of Athens, who flourished contemporaneously

with all that is most perfect in the kindred expressions of the

poetical faculty; architecture, painting, music, the dance, sculpture,

philosophy, and, we may add, the forms of civil life. For although the

scheme of Athenian society was deformed by many imperfections which

the poetry existing in chivalry and Christianity has erased from the

habits and institutions of modern Europe; yet never at any other

period has so much energy, beauty, and virtue, been developed; never

was blind strength and stubborn form so disciplined and rendered

subject to the will of man, or that will less repugnant to the

dictates of the beautiful and the true, as during the century which

preceded the death of Socrates. Of no other epoch in the history of

our species have we records and fragments stamped so visibly with the

image of the divinity in man. But it is poetry alone, in form, in

action, or in language, which has rendered this epoch memorable above

all others, and the storehouse of examples to everlasting time. For

written poetry existed at that epoch simultaneously with the other

arts, and it is an idle inquiry to demand which gave and which

received the light, which all, as from a common focus, have scattered

over the darkest periods of succeeding time. We know no more of cause

and effect than a constant conjunction of events: poetry is ever found

to co-exist with whatever other arts contribute to the happiness and

perfection of man. I appeal to what has already been established to

distinguish between the cause and the effect.

It was at the period here adverted to, that the drama had its birth;

and however a succeeding writer may have equalled or surpassed those

few great specimens of the Athenian drama which have been preserved to

us, it is indisputable that the art itself never was understood or

practised according to the true philosophy of it, as at Athens. For

the Athenians employed language, action, music, painting, the dance,

and religious institutions, to produce a common effect in the

representation of the highest idealisms of passion and of power; each

division in the art was made perfect in its kind by artists of the

most consummate skill, and was disciplined into a beautiful proportion

and unity one towards the other. On the modern stage a few only of the

elements capable of expressing the image of the poet's conception are

employed at once. We have tragedy without music and dancing; and music

and dancing without the highest impersonations of which they are the

fit accompaniment, and both without religion and solemnity. Religious

institution has indeed been usually banished from the stage. Our

system of divesting the actor's face of a mask, on which the many

expressions appropriated to his dramatic character might be moulded

into one permanent and unchanging expression, is favourable only to a

partial and inharmonious effect; it is fit for nothing but a

monologue, where all the attention may be directed to some great

master of ideal mimicry. The modern practice of blending comedy with

tragedy, though liable to great abuse in point of practice, is

undoubtedly an extension of the dramatic circle; but the comedy should

be as in _King Lear_, universal, ideal, and sublime. It is perhaps the

intervention of this principle which determines the balance in favour

of _King Lear_ against the _Oedipus Tyrannus_ or the _Agamemnon_, or,

if you will, the trilogies with which they are connected; unless the

intense power of the choral poetry, especially that of the latter,

should be considered as restoring the equilibrium. _King Lear_, if it

can sustain this comparison, may be judged to be the most perfect

specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world; in spite of the

narrow conditions to which the poet was subjected by the ignorance of

the philosophy of the drama which has prevailed in modern Europe.

Calderon, in his religious _Autos_, has attempted to fulfil some of

the high conditions of dramatic representation neglected by

Shakespeare; such as the establishing a relation between the drama and

religion, and the accommodating them to music and dancing; but he

omits the observation of conditions still more important, and more is

lost than gained by the substitution of the rigidly-defined and

ever-repeated idealisms of a distorted superstition for the living

impersonations of the truth of human passion.

But I digress.--The connexion of scenic exhibitions with the

improvement or corruption of the manners of men, has been universally

recognized: in other words, the presence or absence of poetry in its

most perfect and universal form, has been found to be connected with

good and evil in conduct or habit. The corruption which has been

imputed to the drama as an effect, begins, when the poetry employed in

its constitution ends: I appeal to the history of manners whether the

periods of the growth of the one and the decline of the other have not

corresponded with an exactness equal to any example of moral cause and

effect.

The drama at Athens, or wheresoever else it may have approached to its

perfection, ever co-existed with the moral and intellectual greatness

of the age. The tragedies of the Athenian poets are as mirrors in

which the spectator beholds himself, under a thin disguise of

circumstance, stript of all but that ideal perfection and energy which

every one feels to be the internal type of all that he loves, admires,

and would become. The imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains

and passions so mighty, that they distend in their conception the

capacity of that by which they are conceived; the good affections are

strengthened by pity, indignation, terror, and sorrow; and an exalted

calm is prolonged from the satiety of this high exercise of them into

the tumult of familiar life: even crime is disarmed of half its horror

and all its contagion by being represented as the fatal consequence

of the unfathomable agencies of nature; error is thus divested of its

wilfulness; men can no longer cherish it as the creation of their

choice. In a drama of the highest order there is little food for

censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.

Neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon

that which it resembles. The drama, so long as it continues to express

poetry, is as a prismatic and many-sided mirror, which collects the

brightest rays of human nature and divides and reproduces them from

the simplicity of these elementary forms, and touches them with

majesty and beauty, and multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it

with the power of propagating its like wherever it may fall.

But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizes with

that decay. Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the form of the great

masterpieces of antiquity, divested of all harmonious accompaniment of

the kindred arts; and often the very form misunderstood, or a weak

attempt to teach certain doctrines, which the writer considers as

moral truths; and which are usually no more than specious flatteries

of some gross vice or weakness, with which the author, in common with

his auditors, are infected. Hence what has been called the classical

and domestic drama. Addison's _Cato_ is a specimen of the one; and

would it were not superfluous to cite examples of the other! To such

purposes poetry cannot be made subservient. Poetry is a sword of

lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would

contain it. And thus we observe that all dramatic writings of this

nature are unimaginative in a singular degree; they affect sentiment

and passion, which, divested of imagination, are other names for

caprice and appetite. The period in our own history of the grossest

degradation of the drama is the reign of Charles II, when all forms in

which poetry had been accustomed to be expressed became hymns to the

triumph of kingly power over liberty and virtue. Milton stood alone

illuminating an age unworthy of him. At such periods the calculating

principle pervades all the forms of dramatic exhibition, and poetry

ceases to be expressed upon them. Comedy loses its ideal universality:

wit succeeds to humour; we laugh from self-complacency and triumph,

instead of pleasure; malignity, sarcasm, and contempt, succeed to

sympathetic merriment; we hardly laugh, but we smile. Obscenity, which

is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, becomes, from the

very veil which it assumes, more active if less disgusting: it is a

monster for which the corruption of society for ever brings forth new

food, which it devours in secret.

The drama being that form under which a greater number of modes of

expression of poetry are susceptible of being combined than any other,

the connexion of poetry and social good is more observable in the

drama than in whatever other form. And it is indisputable that the

highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded with the

highest dramatic excellence; and that the corruption or the extinction

of the drama in a nation where it has once flourished, is a mark of a

corruption of manners, and an extinction of the energies which sustain

the soul of social life. But, as Machiavelli says of political

institutions, that life may be preserved and renewed, if men should

arise capable of bringing back the drama to its principles. And this

is true with respect to poetry in its most extended sense: all

language, institution and form, require not only to be produced but to

be sustained: the office and character of a poet participates in the

divine nature as regards providence, no less than as regards creation.

Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal predominance first of the

Macedonian, and then of the Roman arms, were so many symbols of the

extinction or suspension of the creative faculty in Greece. The

bucolic writers, who found patronage under the lettered tyrants of

Sicily and Egypt, were the latest representatives of its most glorious

reign. Their poetry is intensely melodious; like the odour of the

tuberose, it overcomes and sickens the spirit with excess of

sweetness; whilst the poetry of the preceding age was as a meadow-gale

of June, which mingles the fragrance of all the flowers of the field,

and adds a quickening and harmonizing spirit of its own, which endows

the sense with a power of sustaining its extreme delight. The bucolic

and erotic delicacy in written poetry is correlative with that

softness in statuary, music, and the kindred arts, and even in manners

and institutions, which distinguished the epoch to which I now refer.

Nor is it the poetical faculty itself, or any misapplication of it, to

which this want of harmony is to be imputed. An equal sensibility to

the influence of the senses and the affections is to be found in the

writings of Homer and Sophocles: the former, especially, has clothed

sensual and pathetic images with irresistible attractions. Their

superiority over these succeeding writers consists in the presence of

those thoughts which belong to the inner faculties of our nature, not

in the absence of those which are connected with the external: their

incomparable perfection consists in a harmony of the union of all. It

is not what the erotic poets have, but what they have not, in which

their imperfection consists. It is not inasmuch as they were poets,

but inasmuch as they were not poets, that they can be considered with

any plausibility as connected with the corruption of their age. Had

that corruption availed so as to extinguish in them the sensibility to

pleasure, passion, and natural scenery, which is imputed to them as an

imperfection, the last triumph of evil would have been achieved. For

the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility to

pleasure; and, therefore, it is corruption. It begins at the

imagination and the intellect as at the core, and distributes itself

thence as a paralysing venom, through the affections into the very

appetites, until all become a torpid mass in which hardly sense

survives. At the approach of such a period, poetry ever addresses

itself to those faculties which are the last to be destroyed, and its

voice is heard, like the footsteps of Astraea, departing from the

world. Poetry ever communicates all the pleasure which men are capable

of receiving: it is ever still the light of life; the source of

whatever of beautiful or generous or true can have place in an evil

time. It will readily be confessed that those among the luxurious

citizens of Syracuse and Alexandria, who were delighted with the poems

of Theocritus, were less cold, cruel, and sensual than the remnant of

their tribe. But corruption must utterly have destroyed the fabric of

human society before poetry can ever cease. The sacred links of that

chain have never been entirely disjoined, which descending through

the minds of many men is attached to those great minds, whence as from

a magnet the invisible effluence is sent forth, which at once

connects, animates, and sustains the life of all. It is the faculty

which contains within itself the seeds at once of its own and of

social renovation. And let us not circumscribe the effects of the

bucolic and erotic poetry within the limits of the sensibility of

those to whom it was addressed. They may have perceived the beauty of

those immortal compositions, simply as fragments and isolated

portions: those who are more finely organized, or born in a happier

age, may recognize them as episodes to that great poem, which all

poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up

since the beginning of the world.

The same revolutions within a narrower sphere had place in ancient

Rome; but the actions and forms of its social life never seem to have

been perfectly saturated with the poetical element. The Romans appear

to have considered the Greeks as the selectest treasuries of the

selectest forms of manners and of nature, and to have abstained from

creating in measured language, sculpture, music, or architecture,

anything which might bear a particular relation to their own

condition, whilst it should bear a general one to the universal

constitution of the world. But we judge from partial evidence, and we

judge perhaps partially. Ennius, Varro, Pacuvius, and Accius, all

great poets, have been lost. Lucretius is in the highest, and Virgil

in a very high sense, a creator. The chosen delicacy of expressions of

the latter, are as a mist of light which conceal from us the intense

and exceeding truth of his conceptions of nature. Livy is instinct

with poetry. Yet Horace, Catullus, Ovid, and generally the other great

writers of the Virgilian age, saw man and nature in the mirror of

Greece. The institutions also, and the religion of Rome were less

poetical than those of Greece, as the shadow is less vivid than the

substance. Hence poetry in Rome seemed to follow, rather than

accompany, the perfection of political and domestic society. The true

poetry of Rome lived in its institutions; for whatever of beautiful,

true, and majestic, they contained, could have sprung only from the

faculty which creates the order in which they consist. The life of

Camillus, the death of Regulus; the expectation of the senators, in

their godlike state, of the victorious Gauls: the refusal of the

republic to make peace with Hannibal, after the battle of Cannae, were

not the consequences of a refined calculation of the probable personal

advantage to result from such a rhythm and order in the shows of life,

to those who were at once the poets and the actors of these immortal

dramas. The imagination beholding the beauty of this order, created it

out of itself according to its own idea; the consequence was empire,

and the reward everliving fame. These things are not the less poetry

_quia carent vate sacro_. They are the episodes of that cyclic poem

written by Time upon the memories of men. The Past, like an inspired

rhapsodist, fills the theatre of everlasting generations with their

harmony.

At length the ancient system of religion and manners had fulfilled the

circle of its revolutions. And the world would have fallen into utter

anarchy and darkness, but that, there were found poets among the

authors of the Christian and chivalric systems of manners and

religion, who created forms of opinion and action never before

conceived; which, copied into the imaginations of men, become as

generals to the bewildered armies of their thoughts. It is foreign to

the present purpose to touch upon the evil produced by these systems:

except that we protest, on the ground of the principles already

established, that no portion of it can be attributed to the poetry

they contain.

It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job, David, Solomon, and

Isaiah, had produced a great effect upon the mind of Jesus and his

disciples. The scattered fragments preserved to us by the biographers

of this extraordinary person, are all instinct with the most vivid

poetry. But his doctrines seem to have been quickly distorted. At a

certain period after the prevalence of a system of opinions founded

upon those promulgated by him, the three forms into which Plato had

distributed the faculties of mind underwent a sort of apotheosis, and

became the object of the worship of the civilized world. Here it is to

be confessed that 'Light seems to thicken', and

The crow makes wing to the rooky wood,

Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,

And night's black agents to their preys do rouse.

But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust and blood of

this fierce chaos! how the world, as from a resurrection, balancing

itself on the golden wings of knowledge and of hope, has reassumed its

yet unwearied flight into the heaven of time. Listen to the music,

unheard by outward ears, which is as a ceaseless and invisible wind,

nourishing its everlasting course with strength and swiftness.