been no indistinct shadowy warmth, no breath of surrounding beauty:
his delineation would have been cold, distinct, chiselled like the urn
itself. The use which such a poet as Keats makes of ancient mythology is
exactly similar. He owes his fame to the inexplicable art with which he
has breathed a soft tint over the marble forms of gods and goddesses,
enhancing their beauty without impairing their chasteness. The naked
kind of imagination is not peculiar to a mythological age. The growth of
civilisation, at least in Greece, rather increased than diminished the
imaginative bareness of the poetical art. It seems to attain its height
in Sophocles. If we examine any of his greater passages, a principal
beauty is their reserved simplicity. A modern reader almost necessarily
uses them as materials for fancy: we are too used to little circumstance
to be able to do without it. Take the passage in which Œdipus contrasts
the conduct of his sons with that of his daughters:
ὦ πάντ’ ἐκείνω τοῖς ἐν Αἰγύπτῳ νόμοις
φύσιν κατεικασθέντε καὶ βίου τροφάς.
ἐκεῖ γὰρ οἱ μὲν ἄρσενες κατὰ στέγας
θακοῦσιν ἱστουργοῦντες, αἱ δὲ σύννομοι
τἄξω βίου τροφεῖα πορσύνουσ’ ἀεί.
σφῷν δ’, ὦ τέκν’, οὓς μὲν εἰκὸς ἦν πονεῖν τάδε,
κατ’ οἶκον οἰκουροῦσιν ὥστε παρθένοι,
σφὼ δ’ ἀντ’ ἐκείνων τἀμὰ δυστήνου κακὰ
ὑπερπονεῖτον. ἡ μέν ἐξ ὅτου νέας
τροφῆς ἔληξε καὶ κατίσχυσεν δέμας,
ἀεὶ μεθ’ ἡμῶν δύσμορος πλανωμένη
γερονταγωγεῖ, πολλὰ μὲν κατ’ ἀγρίαν
ὕλην ἄσιτος νηλίπους τ’ ἀλωμένη,
πολλοῖσι δ’ ὄμβροις ἡλίου τε καύμασι
μοχθοῦσα τλήμων, δεύτερ’ ἡγεῖται τὰ τῆς
οἴκοι διαίτης, εἰ πατὴρ τροφὴν ἔχοι.
What a contrast to the ravings of Lear! What a world of detail
Shakespeare would have put into the passage! What talk of ‘sulphurous and
thought-executing fires,’ ‘simulars of virtue,’ ‘pent-up guilts,’ and
‘the thick rotundity of the world!’ Decorum is the principal thing in
Sophocles. The conception of Œdipus is not
‘Crowned with rank fumiter and furrow weeds,
With harlocks, hemlock, nettle, and cuckoo-flowers.’
There are no ‘idle weeds’ among the ‘sustaining corn.’ The conception of
Lear is that of an old gnarled oak, gaunt and quivering in the stormy
sky, with old leaves and withered branches tossing in the air, and
all the complex growth of a hundred years creaking and nodding to its
fall. That of Œdipus is the peak of Teneriffe, as we fancied it in our
childhood, by itself and snowy, above among the stormy clouds, heedless
of the angry winds and the desolate waves,—single, ascending, and alone.
Or, to change the metaphor to one derived from an art where the same
qualities of mind have produced kindred effects, ancient poetry is
like a Grecian temple, with pure form and rising columns,—created, one
fancies, by a single effort of an originative nature: modern literature
seems to have sprung from the involved brain of a Gothic architect,
and resembles a huge cathedral—the work of the perpetual industry of
centuries—complicated and infinite in details; but by their choice
and elaboration producing an effect of unity which is not inferior to
that of the other, and is heightened by the multiplicity through which
it is conveyed. And it is this warmth of circumstance—this profusion
of interesting detail—which has caused the name ‘romantic’ to be
perseveringly applied to modern literature.
We need only to open Shelley, to show how essentially classical in its
highest efforts his art is. Indeed, although nothing can be further
removed from the staple topics of the classical writers than the abstract
lyric, yet their treatment is nearly essential to it. We have said, its
sphere is in what the Germans call the unconditioned—in the unknown,
immeasurable, and untrodden. It follows from this that we cannot know
much about it. We cannot know detail in tracts we have never visited;
the infinite has no form; the immeasurable no outline: that which is
common to all worlds is simple. There is therefore no scope for the
accessory fancy. With a single soaring effort imagination may reach her
end; if she fail, no fancy can help her; if she succeed, there will
be no petty accumulations of insensible circumstance in a region far
above all things. Shelley’s excellence in the abstract lyric is almost
another phrase for the simplicity of his impulsive imagination.—He shows
it on other subjects also. We have spoken of his bare treatment of the
ancient mythology. It is the same with his treatment of nature. In the
description of the celestial regions quoted before—one of the most
characteristic passages in his writings—the details are few, the air
thin, the lights distinct. We are conscious of an essential difference
if we compare the ‘Ode to the Nightingale,’ in Keats, for instance—such
verses as
‘I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs:
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild,
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine,
Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves,
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath:
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy.
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.’
—with the conclusion of the ode ‘To a Skylark’—
‘Yet if we could scorn
Hate, and pride, and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.
Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!
Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know;
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow,
The world should listen then, as I am listening now.’
We can hear that the poetry of Keats is a rich, composite, voluptuous
harmony; that of Shelley a clear single ring of penetrating melody.
Of course, however, this criticism requires limitation. There is an
obvious sense in which Shelley is a fanciful, as contra-distinguished
from an imaginative poet. These words, being invented for the popular
expression of differences which can be remarked without narrow
inspection, are apt to mislead us when we apply them to the exact results
of a near and critical analysis. Besides the use of the word ‘fancy’ to
denote the power which adorns and amplifies the product of the primitive
imagination, we also employ it to denote the weaker exercise of the
faculty which itself creates those elementary products. We use the word
‘imaginative’ only for strong, vast, imposing, interesting conceptions:
we use the word ‘fanciful’ when we have to speak of smaller and weaker
creations, which amaze us less at the moment and affect us more slightly
afterwards. Of course, metaphysically speaking, it is not likely that
there will be found to be any distinction; the faculty which creates the
most attractive ideas is doubtless the same as that which creates the
less attractive. Common language marks the distinction, because common
people are impressed by the contrast between what affects them much and
what affects them little; but it is no evidence of the entire difference
of the latent agencies. Speech, as usual, refers to sensations, and not
to occult causes. Of fancies of this sort Shelley is full: whole poems—as
the ‘Witch of Atlas’—are composed of nothing else. Living a good deal in,
and writing a great deal about, the abstract world, it was inevitable
that he should often deal in fine subtleties, affecting very little the
concrete hearts of real men. Many pages of his are, in consequence,
nearly unintelligible, even to good critics of common poetry. The air
is too rarefied for hardy and healthy lungs: these like, as Lord Bacon
expressed it, ‘to work upon stuff.’ From his habitual choice of slight
and airy subjects, Shelley may be called a fanciful, as opposed to an
imaginative, poet; from his bare delineations of great objects, his keen
expression of distinct impulses, he should be termed an imaginative,
rather than a fanciful one.
Some of this odd combination of qualities Shelley doubtless owed to
the structure of his senses. By one of those singular results which
constantly meet us in metaphysical inquiry, the imagination and fancy are
singularly influenced by the bodily sensibility. One might have fancied
that the faculty by which the soul soars into the infinite, and sees
what it cannot see with the eye of the body, would have been peculiarly
independent of that body. But the reverse is the case. Vividness of
sensation seems required to awaken, delicacy to define, copiousness to
enrich, the visionary faculty. A large experience proves that a being
who is blind to this world will be blind to the other; that a coarse
expectation of what is not seen will follow from a coarse perception of
what is seen. Shelley’s sensibility was vivid but peculiar. Hazlitt used
to say, ‘he had seen him; and did not like his looks.’ He had the thin
keen excitement of the fanatic student; not the broad, natural, energy
which Hazlitt expected from a poet. The diffused life of genial enjoyment
which was common to Scott and to Shakespeare, was quite out of his way.
Like Mr. Emerson, he would have wondered they could be content with a
‘mean and jocular life.’ In consequence, there is no varied imagery from
human life in his poetry. He was an abstract student, anxious about
deep philosophies; and he had not that settled, contemplative, allotted
acquaintance with external nature which is so curious in Milton, the
greatest of studious poets. The exact opposite, however, to Shelley, in
the nature of his sensibility, is Keats. That great poet used to pepper
his tongue, ‘to enjoy in all its grandeur the cool flavour of delicious
claret.’ When you know it, you seem to read it in his poetry. There is
the same luxurious sentiment; the same poise on fine sensation. Shelley
was the reverse of this; he was a waterdrinker; his verse runs quick
and chill, like a pure crystal stream. The sensibility of Keats was
attracted too by the spectacle of the universe; he could not keep his
eye from seeing, or his ears from hearing, the glories of it. All the
beautiful objects of nature reappear by name in his poetry. On the other
hand, the abstract idea of beauty is for ever celebrated in Shelley; it
haunted his soul. But it was independent of special things; it was the
general surface of beauty which lies upon all things. It was the smile of
the universe and the expression of the world; it was not the vision of
a land of corn and wine. The nerves of Shelley quivered at the idea of
loveliness; but no coarse sensation obtruded particular objects upon him.
He was left to himself with books and reflection.
So far, indeed, from Shelley having a peculiar tendency to dwell on and
prolong the sensation of pleasure, he has a perverse tendency to draw out
into lingering keenness the torture of agony. Of his common recurrence
to the dizzy pain of mania we have formerly spoken; but this is not the
only pain. The nightshade is commoner in his poems than the daisy. The
nerve is ever laid bare; as often as it touches the open air of the real
world, it quivers with subtle pain. The high intellectual impulses which
animated him are too incorporeal for human nature; they begin in buoyant
joy, they end in eager suffering.
In style, said Mr. Wordsworth—in workmanship, we think his expression
was—Shelley is one of the best of us. This too, we think, was the second
of the peculiarities to which Lord Macaulay referred when he said that
Shelley had, more than any recent poet, some of the qualities of the
great old masters. The peculiarity of his style is its intellectuality;
and this strikes us the more from its contrast with his impulsiveness.
He had something of this in life. Hurried away by sudden desires, as
he was in his choice of ends, we are struck with a certain comparative
measure and adjustment in his choice of means. So in his writings; over
the most intense excitement, the grandest objects, the keenest agony,
the most buoyant joy, he throws an air of subtle mind. His language is
minutely and acutely searching; at the dizziest height of meaning the
keenness of the words is greatest. As in mania, so in his descriptions
of it, the acuteness of the mind seems to survive the mind itself.
It was from Plato and Sophocles, doubtless, that he gained the last
perfection in preserving the accuracy of the intellect when treating of
the objects of the imagination; but in its essence it was a peculiarity
of his own nature. As it was the instinct of Byron to give in glaring
words the gross phenomena of evident objects, so it was that of Shelley
to refine the most inscrutable with the curious nicety of an attenuating
metaphysician. In the wildest of ecstasies his self-anatomising intellect
is equal to itself.
There is much more which might be said, and which ought to be said, of
Shelley; but our limits are reached. We have not attempted a complete
criticism; we have only aimed to show how some of the peculiarities of
his works and life may be traced to the peculiarity of his nature.
_SHAKESPEARE—THE MAN._[27]
(1853.)
The greatest of English poets, it is often said, is but a name. ‘No
letter of his writing, no record of his conversation, no character of
him drawn with any fulness by a contemporary,’ have been extracted by
antiquaries from the piles of rubbish which they have sifted. Yet of
no person is there a clearer picture in the popular fancy. You seem to
have known Shakespeare—to have seen Shakespeare—to have been friends
with Shakespeare. We would attempt a slight delineation of the popular
idea which has been formed, not from loose tradition or remote research;
not from what some one says some one else said that the poet said, but
from data, which are at least undoubted, from the sure testimony of his
certain works.
Some extreme sceptics, we know, doubt whether it is possible to deduce
anything as to an author’s character from his works. Yet surely people
do not keep a tame steam-engine to write their books; and if those books
were really written by a man, he must have been a man who could write
them; he must have had the thoughts which they express, have acquired the
knowledge they contain, have possessed the style in which we read them.
The difficulty is a defect of the critics. A person who knows nothing of
an author he has read, will not know much of an author whom he has seen.
First of all, it may be said, that Shakespeare’s works could only be
produced by a first-rate imagination working on a first-rate experience.
It is often difficult to make out whether the author of a poetic
creation is drawing from fancy, or drawing from experience; but for art
on a certain scale, the two must concur. Out of nothing, nothing can
be created. Some plastic power is required, however great may be the
material. And when such a work as ‘Hamlet’ or ‘Othello,’ still more, when
both of them and others not unequal have been created by a single mind,
it may be fairly said, that not only a great imagination, but a full
conversancy with the world was necessary to their production. The whole
powers of man under the most favourable circumstances, are not too great
for such an effort. We may assume that Shakespeare had a great experience.
To a great experience one thing is essential, an experiencing nature.
It is not enough to have opportunity, it is essential to feel it. Some
occasions come to all men; but to many they are of little use, and to
some they are none. What, for example, has experience done for the
distinguished Frenchman, the name of whose essay is prefixed to this
paper. M. Guizot is the same man that he was in 1820, or, we believe as
he was in 1814. Take up one of his lectures, published before he was
a practical statesman; you will be struck with the width of view, the
amplitude and the solidity of the reflections; you will be amazed that
a mere literary teacher could produce anything so wise; but take up
afterwards an essay published since his fall—and you will be amazed to
find no more. Napoleon the First is come and gone—the Bourbons of the old
_régime_ have come and gone—the Bourbons of the new _régime_ have had
their turn. M. Guizot has been first minister of a citizen king; he has
led a great party; he has pronounced many a great _discours_ that was
well received by the second elective assembly in the world. But there
is no trace of this in his writings. No one would guess from them that
their author had ever left the professor’s chair. It is the same, we
are told, with small matters: when M. Guizot walks the street, he seems
to see nothing; the head is thrown back, the eye fixed, and the mouth
working. His mind is no doubt at work, but it is not stirred by what is
external. Perhaps it is the internal activity of mind that overmasters
the perceptive power. Anyhow there might have been an _émeute_ in the
street and he would not have known it; there have been revolutions in his
life and he is scarcely the wiser. Among the most frivolous and fickle of
civilised nations he is alone. They pass from the game of war to the game
of peace, from the game of science to the game of art, from the game of
liberty to the game of slavery, from the game of slavery to the game of
licence; he stands like a schoolmaster in the play-ground, without sport
and without pleasure, firm and sullen, slow and awful.
A man of this sort is a curious mental phenomenon. He appears to get
early—perhaps to be born with, a kind of dry schedule or catalogue of the
universe; he has a ledger in his head, and has a title to which he can
refer any transaction; nothing puzzles him, nothing comes amiss to him,
but he is not in the least the wiser for anything. Like the book-keeper,
he has his heads of account, and he knows them, but he is no wiser for
the particular items. After a busy day, and after a slow day, after a
few entries, and after many, his knowledge is exactly the same: take his
opinion of Baron Rothschild, he will say, ‘Yes, he keeps an account with
us;’ of Humphrey Brown, ‘Yes, we have that account, too.’ Just so with
the class of minds which we are speaking of, and in greater matters. Very
early in life they come to a certain and considerable acquaintance with
the world; they learn very quickly all they can learn, and naturally
they never, in any way, learn any more. Mr. Pitt is, in this country,
the type of the character. Mr. Alison, in a well-known passage, makes it
a matter of wonder that he was fit to be a Chancellor of the Exchequer
at twenty-three, and it _is_ a great wonder. But it is to be remembered
that he was no more fit at forty-three. As somebody said, he did not
grow, he was cast. Experience taught him nothing, and he did not believe
that he had anything to learn. The habit of mind in smaller degrees is
not very rare, and might be illustrated without end. Hazlitt tells a
story of West, the painter, that is in point: When some one asked him if
he had ever been to Greece, he answered, ‘No, I have read a descriptive
catalogue of the principal objects in that country, and I believe I am as
well conversant with them as if I had visited it.’ No doubt he was just
as well conversant, and so would be any _doctrinaire_.
But Shakespeare was not a man of this sort. If he walked down a street,
he knew what was in that street. His mind did not form in early life
a classified list of all the objects in the universe, and learn no
more about the universe ever after. From a certain fine sensibility of
nature, it is plain that he took a keen interest not only in the general
and coarse outlines of objects, but in their minutest particulars and
gentlest gradations. You may open Shakespeare and find the clearest
proofs of this; take the following:—
‘When last the young Orlando parted from you,
He left a promise to return again
Within an hour; and, pacing through the forest,
Chewing the food of sweet and bitter fancy,
Lo, what befel! he threw his eye aside,
And, mark, what object did present itself!
Under an oak, whose boughs were moss’d with age,
And high top bald with dry antiquity,
A wretched ragged man, o’ergrown with hair,
Lay sleeping on his back: about his neck
A green and gilded snake had wreath’d itself,
Who with her head, nimble in threats, approach’d
The opening of his mouth; but suddenly
Seeing Orlando, it unlink’d itself,
And with indented glides did slip away
Into a bush: under which bush’s shade
A lioness, with udders all drawn dry,
Lay crouching, head on ground, with cat-like watch,
When that the sleeping man should stir; for ’tis
The royal disposition of that beast,
To prey on nothing that doth seem as dead:
This seen,’ &c. &c.
Or the more celebrated description of the hunt:—
‘And when thou hast on foot the purblind hare,
Mark the poor wretch, to overshoot his troubles,
How he outruns the wind, and with what care
He cranks and crosses, with a thousand doubles:
The many musits through the which he goes
Are like a labyrinth to amaze his foes.
‘Sometimes he runs among a flock of sheep,
To make the cunning hounds mistake their smell,
And sometime where earth-delving conies keep,
To stop the loud pursuers in their yell;
And sometime sorteth with a herd of deer;
Danger deviseth shifts; wit waits on fear:
‘For there his smell with others being mingled,
The hot scent-snuffing hounds are driven to doubt,
Ceasing their clamorous cry, till they have singled,
With much ado, the cold fault cleanly out;
Then do they spend their mouths: Echo replies,
As if another chase were in the skies.
‘By this, poor Wat, far off, upon a hill,
Stands on his hinder legs with listening ear,
To hearken if his foes pursue him still;
Anon their loud alarums he doth hear;
And now his grief may be compared well
To one sore sick that hears the passing bell.
‘Then thou shalt see the dew-bedabbled wretch
Turn and return, indenting with the way;
Each envious briar his weary legs doth scratch,
Each shadow makes him stop, each murmur stay:
For misery is trodden on by many,
And being low, never relieved by any.’
It is absurd, by the way, to say we know _nothing_ about the man who
wrote that; we know that he had been after a hare. It is idle to allege
that mere imagination would tell him that a hare is apt to run among a
flock of sheep, or that its so doing disconcerts the scent of hounds.
But no single citation really represents the power of the argument. Set
descriptions may be manufactured to order, and it does not follow that
even the most accurate or successful of them was really the result of a
thorough and habitual knowledge of the object. A man who knows little
of Nature may write one excellent delineation, as a poor man may have
one bright guinea. Real opulence consists in having many. What truly
indicates excellent knowledge, is the habit of constant, sudden, and
almost unconscious allusion, which implies familiarity, for it can
arise from that alone,—and this very species of incidental, casual,
and perpetual reference to ‘the mighty world of eye and ear,’ is the
particular characteristic of Shakespeare.
In this respect Shakespeare had the advantage of one whom, in many
points, he much resembled—Sir Walter Scott. For a great poet, the
organisation of the latter was very blunt; he had no sense of smell,
little sense of taste, almost no ear for music (he knew a few, perhaps
three, Scotch tunes, which he avowed that he had learnt in sixty years,
by hard labour and mental association), and not much turn for the minutiæ
of nature in any way. The effect of this may be seen in some of the best
descriptive passages of his poetry, and we will not deny that it does
(although proceeding from a sensuous defect), in a certain degree, add
to their popularity. He deals with the main outlines and great points of
nature, never attends to any others, and in this respect he suits the
comprehension and knowledge of many who know only those essential and
considerable outlines. Young people, especially, who like big things, are
taken with Scott, and bored by Wordsworth, who knew too much. And after
all, the two poets are in proper harmony, each with his own scenery. Of
all beautiful scenery the Scotch is the roughest and barest, as the
English is the most complex and cultivated. What a difference is there
between the minute and finished delicacy of Rydal Water and the rough
simplicity of Loch Katrine. It is the beauty of civilisation beside the
beauty of barbarism. Scott has himself pointed out the effect of this on
arts and artists.