CHAPTER XIII.

I was sent for the other morning to the assistance of a gentleman,

who had been wounded in a duel,--and his wounds by unskilful

treatment had been brought to a dangerous crisis.

The uncommonness of the name, which was _Matravis_, suggested to me,

that this might possibly be no other than Allan's old enemy. Under

this apprehension, I did what I could to dissuade Allan from

accompanying me--but he seemed bent upon going, and even pleased

himself with the notion, that it might lie within his ability to do

the unhappy man some service. So he went with me.

When we came to the house, which was in Soho-square, we discovered

that it was indeed the man--the identical Matravis, who had done all

that mischief in times past--but not in a condition to excite any

other sensation than pity in a heart more hard than Allan's.

Intense pain had brought on a delirium--we perceived this on first

entering the room--for the wretched man was raving to

himself--talking idly in mad unconnected sentences--that yet seemed,

at times, to have reference to _past facts_.

One while he told us his dream. "He had lost his way on a great

heath, to which there seemed no end--it was cold, cold, cold,--and

dark, very dark--an old woman in leading-strings, _blind_, was

groping about for a guide"--and then he frightened me,--for he seemed

disposed to be _jocular_, and sang a song about "an old woman clothed

in gray," and said "he did not believe in a devil."

Presently he bid us "not tell Allan Clare."--Allan was hanging over

him at that very moment, sobbing.--I could not resist the impulse,

but cried out, "_This_ is Allan Clare--Allan Clare is come to see

you, my dear Sir."--The wretched man did not hear me, I believe, for

he turned his head away, and began talking of _charnel-houses_, and

_dead men_, and "whether they knew anything that passed in their

coffins."

Matravis died that night.

* * * * *

ESSAYS.

RECOLLECTIONS OF CHRIST'S HOSPITAL.

To comfort the desponding parent with the thought that, without

diminishing the stock which is imperiously demanded to furnish the

more pressing and homely wants of our nature, he has disposed of one

or more perhaps out of a numerous offspring, under the shelter of a

care scarce less tender than the paternal, where not only their

bodily cravings shall be supplied, but that mental _pabulum_ is also

dispensed, which HE hath declared to be no less necessary to our

sustenance, who said, that, "not by bread alone man can live": for

this Christ's Hospital unfolds her bounty. Here neither, on the one

hand, are the youth lifted up above their family, which we must

suppose liberal, though reduced; nor on the other hand, are they

liable to be depressed below its level by the mean habits and

sentiments which a common charity-school generates. It is, in a word,

an Institution to keep those who have yet held up their heads in the

world, from sinking; to keep alive the spirit of a decent household,

when poverty was in danger of crushing it; to assist those who are

the most willing, but not always the most able, to assist themselves;

to separate a child from his family for a season, in order to render

him back hereafter, with feelings and habits more congenial to it,

than he could even have attained by remaining at home in the bosom of

it. It is a preserving and renovating principle, an antidote for the

_res angusta domi_, when it presses, as it always does, most heavily

upon the most ingenuous natures.

This is Christ's Hospital; and whether its character would be

improved by confining its advantages to the very lowest of the

people, let those judge who have witnessed the looks, the gestures,

the behavior, the manner of their play with one another, their

deportment towards strangers, the whole aspect and physiognomy of

that vast assemblage of boys on the London foundation, who freshen

and make alive again with their sports the else mouldering cloisters

of the old Grey Friars--which strangers who have never witnessed, if

they pass through Newgate Street, or by Smithfield, would do well to

go a little out of their way to see.

For the Christ's Hospital boy feels that he is no charity-boy; he

feels it in the antiquity and regality of the foundation to which he

belongs; in the usage which he meets with at school, and the

treatment he is accustomed to out of its bounds; in the respect and

even kindness, which his well-known garb never fails to procure him

in the streets of the metropolis; he feels it in his education, in

that measure of classical attainments, which every individual at that

school, though not destined to a learned profession, has it in his

power to procure, attainments which it would be worse than folly to

put it in the reach of the laboring classes to acquire: he feels it

in the numberless comforts, and even magnificences, which surround

him; in his old and awful cloisters, with their traditions; in his

spacious school-rooms, and in the well-ordered, airy, and lofty rooms

where he sleeps; in his stately dining-hall, hung round with

pictures, by Verrio, Lely, and others, one of them surpassing in size

and grandeur almost any other in the kingdom;[1] above all, in the

very extent and magnitude of the body to which he belongs, and the

consequent spirit, the intelligence, and public conscience, which is

the result of so many various yet wonderfully combining members.

Compared with this last-named advantage, what is the stock of

information (I do not here speak of book-learning, but of that

knowledge which boy receives from boy), the mass of collected

opinions, the intelligence in common, among the few and narrow

members of an ordinary boarding-school?

[Footnote 1: By Verrio, representing James the Second on his throne,

surrounded by his courtiers,(all curious portraits,) receiving the

mathematical pupils at their annual presentation: a custom still kept

up on New-year's-day at Court.]

The Christ's Hospital or Blue-coat boy, has a distinctive character

of his own, as far removed from the abject qualities of a common

charity-boy as it is from the disgusting forwardness of a lad brought

up at some other of the public schools. There is _pride_ in it,

accumulated from the circumstances which I have described, as

differencing him from the former; and there is _a restraining

modesty_ from a sense of obligation and dependence, which must ever

keep his deportment from assimilating to that of the latter. His very

garb, as it is antique and venerable, feeds his self-respect; as it

is a badge of dependence, it restrains the natural petulance of that

age from breaking out into overt acts of insolence. This produces

silence and a reserve before strangers, yet not that cowardly shyness

which boys mewed up at home will feel; he will speak up when spoken

to, but the stranger must begin the conversation with him. Within his

bounds he is all fire and play; but in the streets he steals along

with all the self-concentration of a young monk. He is never known to

mix with other boys; they are a sort of laity to him. All this

proceeds, I have no doubt, from the continual consciousness which he

carries about him, of the difference of his dress from that of the

rest of the world; with a modest jealousy over himself, lest, by

overhastily mixing with common and secular playfellows, he should

commit the dignity of his cloth. Nor let any one laugh at this; for,

considering the propensity of the multitude, and especially of the

small multitude, to ridicule anything unusual in dress--above all,

where such peculiarity may be construed by malice into a mark of

disparagement--this reserve will appear to be nothing more than a

wise instinct in the Blue-coat boy. That it is neither pride nor

rusticity, at least that it has none of the offensive qualities of

either, a stranger may soon satisfy himself, by putting a question to

any of these boys: he may be sure of an answer couched in terms of

plain civility, neither loquacious nor embarrassed. Let him put the

same question to a parish-boy, or to one of the trencher-caps in the

---- cloisters, and the impudent reply of the one shall not fail to

exasperate any more than the certain servility, and mercenary eye to

reward, which he will meet with in the other, can fail to depress and

sadden him.

The Christ's Hospital boy is a religions character. His school is

eminently a religious foundation; it has its peculiar prayers, its

services at set times, its graces, hymns, and anthems, following each

other in an almost monastic closeness of succession. This religious

character in him is not always untinged with superstition. That is

not wonderful, when we consider the thousand tales and traditions

which must circulate, with undisturbed credulity, amongst so many

boys, that have so few checks to their belief from any intercourse

with the world at large; upon whom their equals in age must work so

much, their elders so little. With this leaning towards an

over-belief in matters of religion, which will soon correct itself

when he comes out into society, may be classed a turn for romance

above most other boys. This is to be traced in the same manner to

their excess of society with each other, and defect of mingling with

the world. Hence the peculiar avidity with which such books as the

"Arabian Nights' Entertainments," and others of a still wilder cast,

are, or at least were in my time, sought for by the boys. I remember

when some half-dozen of them set off from school, without map, card,

or compass, on a serious expedition to find out _Philip Quarll's

Island_.

The Christ's Hospital boy's sense of right and wrong is peculiarly

tender and apprehensive. It is even apt to run out into ceremonial

observances, and to impose a yoke upon itself beyond the strict

obligations of the moral law. Those who were contemporaries with me

at that school thirty years ago, will remember with what more than

Judaic rigor the eating of the fat of certain boiled meats[1] was

interdicted. A boy would have blushed as at the exposure of some

heinous immorality, to have been detected eating that forbidden

portion of his allowance of animal food, the whole of which, while he

was in health, was little more than sufficient to allay his hunger.

The same, or even greater, refinement was shown in the rejection of

certain kinds of sweet-cake. What gave rise to these supererogatory

penances, these self-denying ordinances, I could never learn;[2] they

certainly argue no defect of the conscientious principle. A little

excess in that article is not undesirable in youth, to make allowance

for the inevitable waste which comes in maturer years. But in the

less ambiguous line of duty, in those directions of the moral

feelings which cannot be mistaken or depreciated, I will relate what

took place in the year 1785, when Mr. Perry, the steward, died. I

must be pardoned for taking my instances from my own times. Indeed,

the vividness of my recollections, while I am upon this subject,

almost bring back those times; they are present to me still. But I

believe that in the years which have elapsed since the period which I

speak of, the character of the Christ's Hospital boy is very little

changed. Their situation in point of many comforts is improved; but

that which I ventured before to term the _public conscience_ of the

school, the pervading moral sense, of which every mind partakes and

to which so many individual minds contribute, remains, I believe,

pretty much the same as when I left it. I have seen, within this

twelvemonth almost, the change which has been produced upon a boy of

eight or nine years of age, upon being admitted into that school;

how, from a pert young coxcomb, who thought that all knowledge was

comprehended within his shallow brains, because a smattering of two

or three languages and one or two sciences were stuffed into him by

injudicious treatment at home, by a mixture with the wholesome

society of so many school-fellows, in less time than I have spoken

of, he has sunk to his own level, and is contented to be carried on

in the quiet orbit of modest self-knowledge in which the common mass

of that unpresumptuous assemblage of boys seem to move: from being a

little unfeeling mortal, he has got to feel and reflect. Nor would it

be a difficult matter to show how, at a school like this, where the

boy is neither entirely separated from home, nor yet exclusively

under its influence, the best feelings, the filial for instance, are

brought to a maturity which they could not have attained under a

completely domestic education; how the relation of a parent is

rendered less tender by unremitted association, and the very

awfulness of age is best apprehended by some sojourning amidst the

comparative levity of youth; how absence, not drawn out by too great

extension into alienation or forgetfulness, puts an edge upon the

relish of occasional intercourse, and the boy is made the better

_child_ by that which keeps the force of that relation from being

felt as perpetually pressing on him; how the substituted paternity,

into the care of which he is adopted, while in everything substantial

it makes up for the natural, in the necessary omission of individual

fondnesses and partialities, directs the mind only the more strongly

to appreciate that natural and first tie, in which such weaknesses

are the bond of strength, and the appetite which craves after them

betrays no perverse palate. But these speculations rather belong to

the question of the comparative advantages of a public over a private

education in general. I must get back to my favorite school; and to

that which took place when our old and good steward died.

[Footnote 1: Under the denomination of _gage_.]

[Footnote 2: I am told that the late steward [Mr. Hathaway], who

evinced on many occasions a most praiseworthy anxiety to promote the

comfort of the boys, had occasion for all his address and

perseverance to eradicate the first of these unfortunate prejudices,

in which he at length happily succeeded, and thereby restored to one

half of the animal nutrition of the school those honors which painful

superstition and blind zeal had so long conspired to withhold from

it.]

And I will say that when I think of the frequent instances which I

have met with in children, of a hard-heartedness, a callousness, and

insensibility to the loss of relations, even of those who have begot

and nourished them, I cannot but consider it as a proof of something

in the peculiar conformation of that school, favorable to the

expansion of the best feelings of our nature, that at the period

which I am noticing, out of five hundred boys there was not a dry eye

to be found among them, nor a heart that did not beat with genuine

emotion. Every impulse to play, until the funeral day was past,

seemed suspended throughout the school; and the boys, lately so

mirthful and sprightly, were seen pacing their cloisters alone, or in

sad groups standing about, few of them without some token, such as

their slender means could provide, a black riband or something, to

denote respect and a sense of their loss. The time itself was a time

of anarchy, a time in which all authority (out of school hours) was

abandoned. The ordinary restraints were for those days superseded;

and the gates, which at other times kept us in, were left without

watchers. Yet, with the exception of one or two graceless boys at

most, who took advantage of that suspension of authorities to _skulk

out_, as it was called, the whole body of that great school kept

rigorously within their bounds, by a voluntary self-imprisonment; and

they who broke bounds, though they escaped punishment from any

master, fell into a general disrepute among us, and, for that which

at any other time would have been applauded and admired as a mark of

spirit, were consigned to infamy and reprobation; so much _natural

government_ have gratitude and the principles of reverence and love,

and so much did a respect to their dead friend prevail with these

Christ's Hospital boys, above any fear which his presence among them

when living could ever produce. And if the impressions which were

made on my mind so long ago are to be trusted, very richly did their

steward deserve this tribute. It is a pleasure to me even now to call

to mind his portly form, the regal awe which he always contrived to

inspire, in spite of a tenderness and even weakness of nature that

would have enfeebled the reins of discipline in any other master; a

yearning of tenderness towards those under his protection, which

could make five hundred boys at once feel towards him each as to

their individual father. He had faults, with which we had nothing to

do; but, with all his faults, indeed, Mr. Perry was a most

extraordinary creature. Contemporary with him and still living,

though he has long since resigned his occupation, will it be

impertinent to mention the name of our excellent upper

grammar-master, the Rev. James Boyer? He was a disciplinarian,

indeed, of a different stamp from him whom I have just described;

but, now the terrors of the rod, and of a temper a little too hasty

to leave the more nervous of us quite at our ease to do justice to

his merits in those days, are long since over, ungrateful were we if

we should refuse our testimony to that unwearied assiduity with which

he attended to the particular improvement of each of us. Had we been

the offspring of the first gentry in the land, he could not have been

instigated by the strongest views of recompense and reward to have

made himself a greater slave to the most laborious of all occupations

than he did for us sons of charity, from whom, or from our parents,

he could expect nothing. He has had his reward in the satisfaction of

having discharged his duty, in the pleasurable consciousness of

having advanced the respectability of that institution to which, both

man and boy, he was attached; in the honors to which so many of his

pupils have successfully aspired at both our Universities; and in the

staff with which the Governors of the Hospital, at the close of his

hard labors, with the highest expressions of the obligations the

school lay under to him, unanimously voted to present him.

I have often considered it among the felicities of the constitution

of this school, that the offices of steward and school-master are

kept distinct; the strict business of education alone devolving upon

the latter, while the former has the charge of all things out of

school, the control of the provisions, the regulation of meals, of

dress, of play, and the ordinary intercourse of the boys. By this

division of management, a superior respectability must attach to the

teacher, while his office is unmixed with any of these lower

concerns. A still greater advantage over the construction of common

boarding-schools is to be found in the settled salaries of the

masters, rendering them totally free of obligation to any individual

pupil, or his parents. This never fails to have its effect at schools

where each boy can reckon up to a hair what profit the master derives

from him, where he views him every day in the light of a caterer, a

provider for the family, who is to get so much by him in each of his

meals. Boys will see and consider these things; and how much must the

sacred character of preceptor suffer in their minds by these

degrading associations! The very bill which the pupil carries home

with him at Christmas, eked out, perhaps, with elaborate though

necessary minuteness, instructs him that his teachers have other ends

than the mere love to learning, in the lessons which they give him;

and though they put into his hands the fine sayings of Seneca or

Epictetus, yet they themselves are none of those disinterested

pedagogues to teach philosophy _gratis_. The master, too, is sensible

that he is seen in this light; and how much this must lessen that

affectionate regard to the learners which alone can sweeten the

bitter labor of instruction, and convert the whole business into

unwelcome and uninteresting task-work, many preceptors that I have

conversed with on the subject are ready, with a sad heart, to

acknowledge. From this inconvenience the settled salaries of the

masters of this school in great measure exempt them; while the happy

custom of choosing masters (indeed every officer of the

establishment) from those who have received their education there,

gives them an interest in advancing the character of the school, and

binds them to observe a tenderness and a respect to the children, in

which a stranger, feeling that independence which I have spoken of,

might well be expected to fail.

In affectionate recollections of the place where he was bred up, in

hearty recognitions of old school-fellows met with again after the

lapse of years, or in foreign countries, the Christ's Hospital boy

yields to none; I might almost say, he goes beyond most other boys.

The very compass and magnitude of the school, its thousand bearings,

the space it takes up in the imagination beyond the ordinary schools,

impresses a remembrance, accompanied with an elevation of mind, that

attends him through life. It is too big, too affecting an object, to

pass away quickly from his mind. The Christ's Hospital boy's friends

at school are commonly his intimates through life. For me, I do not

know whether a constitutional imbecility does not incline me too

obstinately to cling to the remembrances of childhood; in an inverted

ratio to the usual sentiments of mankind, nothing that I have been

engaged in since seems of any value or importance compared to the

colors which imagination gave to everything then. I belong to no

_body corporate_ such as I then made a part of.--And here, before I

close, taking leave of the general reader, and addressing myself

solely to my old school-fellows, that were contemporaries with me

from the year 1782 to 1789, let me have leave to remember some of

those circumstances of our school, which they will not be unwilling

to have brought back to their minds.

And first, let us remember, as first in importance in our childish

eyes, the young men (as they almost were) who, under the denomination

of _Grecians_, were waiting the expiration of the period when they

should be sent, at the charges of the Hospital, to one or other of

our universities, but more frequently to Cambridge. These youths,

from their superior acquirements, their superior age and stature, and

the fewness of their numbers (for seldom above two or three at a time

were inaugurated into that high order), drew the eyes of all, and

especially of the younger boys, into a reverent observance and

admiration. How tall they used to seem to us! how stately would they

pace along the cloisters! while the play of the lesser boys was

absolutely suspended, or its boisterousness at least allayed, at

their presence! Not that they ever beat or struck the boys--that

would have been to have demeaned themselves--the dignity of their

persons alone insured them all respect. The task of blows, of

corporal chastisement, they left to the common monitors, or heads of

wards, who, it must be confessed, in our time had rather too much

license allowed them to oppress and misuse their inferiors; and the

interference of the Grecian, who may be considered as the spiritual

power, was not unfrequently called for, to mitigate by its mediation

the heavy unrelenting arm of this temporal power, or monitor. In

fine, the Grecians were the solemn Muftis of the school. Eras were

computed from their time;--it used to be said, such or such a thing

was done when S---- or T---- was Grecian.

As I ventured to call the Grecians, the Muftis of the school, the

King's boys,[1] as their character then was, may well pass for the

Janissaries. They were the terror of all the other boys; bred up

under that hardy sailor, as well as excellent mathematician and

conavigator with Captain Cook, William Wales. All his systems were

adapted to fit them for the rough element which they were destined to

encounter. Frequent and severe punishments which were expected to be

borne with more than Spartan fortitude, came to be considered less as

inflictions of disgrace than as trials of obstinate endurance. To

make his boys hardy, and to give them early sailor-habits, seemed to

be his only aim; to this everything was subordinate. Moral

obliquities, indeed, were sure of receiving their full recompense,

for no occasion of laying on the lash was ever let slip; but the

effects expected to be produced from it were something very different

from contrition or mortification. There was in William Wales a

perpetual fund of humor, a constant glee about him, which, heightened

by an inveterate provincialism of north-country dialect, absolutely

took away the sting from his severities. His punishments were a game

at patience, in which the master was not always worst contented when

he found himself at times overcome by his pupil. What success this

discipline had, or how the effects of it operated upon the

after-lives of these King's boys, I cannot say: but I am sure that,

for the time, they were absolute nuisances to the rest of the school.

Hardy, brutal, and often wicked, they were the most graceless lump in

the whole mass; older and bigger than the other boys, (for, by the

system of their education they were kept longer at school by two or

three years than any of the rest, except the Grecians,) they were a

constant terror to the younger part of the school; and some who may

read this, I doubt not, will remember the consternation into which

the juvenile fry of us were thrown, when the cry was raised in the

cloisters, that _the First Order was coming_--for so they termed the

first form or class of those boys. Still these sea-boys answered some

good purposes, in the school. They were the military class among the

boys, foremost in athletic exercises, who extended the fame of the

prowess of the school far and near; and the apprentices in the

vicinage, and sometimes the butchers' boys in the neighboring market,

had sad occasion to attest their valor.

[Footnote 1: The mathematical pupils, bred up to the sea, on the

foundation of Charles the Second.]

The time would fail me if I were to attempt to enumerate all those

circumstances, some pleasant, some attended with some pain, which,

seen through the mist of distance, come sweetly softened to the

memory. But I must crave leave to remember our transcending

superiority in those invigorating sports, leap-frog, and basting the

bear; our delightful excursions in the summer holidays to the New

River, near Newington, where, like otters, we would live the long day

in the water, never caring for dressing ourselves, when we had once

stripped; our savory meals afterwards, when we came home almost

famished with staying out all day without our dinners; our visits at

other times to the Tower, where, by ancient privilege, we had free

access to all the curiosities; our solemn procession through the City

at Easter, with the Lord Mayor's largess of buns, wine, and a

shilling, with the festive questions and civic pleasantries of the

dispensing Aldermen, which were more to us than all the rest of the

banquet; our stately suppings in public, where the well-lighted hall

and the confluence of well-dressed company who came to see us, made

the whole look more like a concert or assembly, than a scene of a

plain bread and cheese collation; the annual orations upon St.

Matthew's day, in which the senior scholar, before he had done,

seldom failed to reckon up, among those who had done honor to our

school by being educated in it, the names of those accomplished

critics and Greek scholars, Joshua Barnes and Jeremiah Markland (I

marvel they left out Camden while they were about it). Let me have

leave to remember our hymns and anthems, and well-toned organ; the

doleful tune of the burial anthem chanted in the solemn cloisters,

upon the seldom-occurring funeral of some school-fellow; the

festivities at Christmas, when the richest of us would club our stock

to have a gaudy day, sitting round the fire, replenished to the

height with logs, and the penniless, and he that could contribute

nothing, partook in all the mirth, and in some of the

substantialities of the feasting; the carol sung by night at that

time of the year, which, when a young boy, I have so often lain awake

to hear from seven (the hour of going to bed) till ten, when it was

sung by the older boys and monitors, and have listened to it, in

their rude chanting, till I have been transported in fancy to the

fields of Bethlehem, and the song which was sung at that season, by

angels' voices to the shepherds.

Nor would I willingly forget any of those things which administered

to our vanity. The hem-stitched bands and town-made shirts, which

some of the most fashionable among us wore; the town-girdles, with

buckles of silver, or shining stone; the badges of the sea-boys; the

cots, or superior shoestrings, of the monitors; the medals of the

markers; (those who were appointed to hear the Bible read in the

wards on Sunday morning and evening,) which bore on their obverse in

silver, as certain parts of our garments carried, in meaner metal,

the countenance of our Founder, that godly and royal child, King

Edward the Sixth, the flower of the Tudor name--the young flower that

was untimely cropt, as it began to fill our land with its early

odors--the boy-patron of boys--the serious and holy child who walked

with Cranmer and Bidley--fit associate, in those tender years, for

the bishops, and future martyrs of our Church, to receive, or, (as

occasion sometimes proved,) to give instruction.

"But, ah! what means the silent tear?

Why, e'en 'mid joy, my bosom heave?

Ye long-lost scenes, enchantments dear!

Lo! now I linger o'er your grave.

"--Fly, then, ye hours of rosy hue,

And bear away the bloom of years!

And quick succeed, ye sickly crew

Of doubts and sorrows, pains and fears!

"Still will I ponder Fate's unaltered plan,

Nor, tracing back the child, forget that I am man."[1]

[Footnote 1: Lines meditated in the cloisters of Christ's Hospital,

in the "Poetics," of Mr. George Dyer.]

* * * * *

ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPEARE.

CONSIDERED WITH REFERENCE TO THEIR FITNESS FOR STAGE-REPRESENTATION.

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 Shakspeare 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 called them back to day:

And till Eternity with power sublime

Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary Time,

Shakspeare 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

Shakspeare, 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;[1]or

what connection 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 playwriter 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 play-goer 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.

[Footnote 1: 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 Davis, 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 those 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 cramped 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 Shakspeare which have escaped

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

same writer which have happily been left out in the 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's Speaker_, 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 Shakspeare are less calculated for performance on a stage,

than those of almost any other dramatist whatever. Their

distinguishing 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

Shakspeare 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 the 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 favorable 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 Shakspeare,

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

Shakspeare 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 Shakspeare 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 Shakspeare'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[1] 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 apiece 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; or 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 anything 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.

[Footnote 1: If this note could hope to meet the eye of any of the

Managers, I would entreat and beg of them, in the name of both the

Galleries, that this insult upon the morality of the common people of

London should cease to be eternally repeated in the holiday weeks.

Why are the 'Prentices of this famous and well-governed city, instead

of an amusement, to be treated over and over again with a nauseous

sermon of George Barnwell? Why _at the end of their vistas_ are we to

place the _gallows_? Were I an uncle, I should not much like a

nephew of mine to have such an example placed before his eyes. It is

really making uncle-murder too trivial to exhibit it as done upon

such slight motives;--it is attributing too much to such characters

as Millwood:--it is putting things into the heads of good young men,

which they would never otherwise have dreamed of. Uncles that think

anything of their lives, should fairly petition the Chamberlain

against it.]

We talk of Shakspeare's admirable observations 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

application 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

Shakspeare'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 he not 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 honor to dwell in our minds forever

as an inseparable concomitant with Shakspeare? A kindred mind! O who

can read that affecting sonnet of Shakspeare which alludes to his

profession as a player:--

"Oh for my sake do you with Fortune chide,

The guilty goddess of my harmless 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,

Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear--"

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

sweet Shakspeare, 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 Shakspeare,--Shakspeare, 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,

Featured 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 Shakspeare? 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 Shakspeare? I believe it

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

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

judgments of Shakspeare 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 Shakspeare? Do we feel anything like disgust, as we do at that

butcherlike 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 Shakspeare 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

these 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 Shakspeare, 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

Shakspeare 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 Shakspeare, 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 the 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 color, 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 color 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 color; 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 overweigh 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.[1] 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.

[Footnote 1: The error of supposing that because Othello's color 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 Paradisiacal 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 Shakspeare 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 Shakspeare

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 savor of the grotesque, yet is the effect upon us other

than the most serious and appalling that can be imagined? Do we not

feel spellbound 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 things 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 armor 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

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

sweet courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda. But is the tempest of

Shakspeare 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 favored 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 parlor 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;[1] 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 crystal spheres ring out that chime, which if

it were to enwrap 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."

[Footnote 1: 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 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.

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 reshiftings, 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

curtseys, 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 Shakspeare. 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.

* * * * *

CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS,

CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEAKE.

* * * * *

When I selected for publication, in 1808, "Specimens of English

Dramatic Poets" who lived about the time of Shakspeare, the kind of

extracts which I was anxious to give were not so much passages of wit

and humor, though the old plays are rich in such, as scenes of

passion, sometimes of the deepest quality, interesting situations,

serious descriptions, that which is more nearly allied to poetry than

to wit, and to tragic rather than to comic poetry. The plays which I

made choice of were, with few exceptions, such as treat of human life

and manners, rather than masques and Arcadian pastorals, with their

train of abstractions, unimpassioned deities, passionate

mortals--Claius, and Medorus, and Amintas, and Amaryllis. My leading

design was to illustrate what may be called the moral sense of our

ancestors. To show in what manner they felt when they placed

themselves by the power of imagination in trying circumstances, in

the conflicts of duty and passion, or the strife of contending

duties; what sort of loves and enmities theirs were; how their griefs

were tempered, and their full-swoln joys abated: how much of

Shakspeare shines in the great men his contemporaries, and how far in

his divine mind and manners he surpassed them and all mankind. I was

also desirous to bring together some of the most admired scenes of

Fletcher and Massinger, in the estimation of the world the only

dramatic poets of that age entitled to be considered after

Shakspeare, and, by exhibiting them in the same volume with the more

impressive scenes of old Marlowe, Heywood, Tourneur, Webster, Ford,

and others, to show what we had slighted, while beyond all proportion

we had been crying up one or two favorite names. From the desultory

criticisms which accompanied that publication, I have selected a few

which I thought would best stand by themselves, as requiring least

immediate reference to the play or passage by which they were

suggested.

* * * * *

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE.

_Lust's Dominion, or the Lascivious Queen_.--This tragedy is in King

Cambyses' vein; rape, and murder, and superlatives; "huffing braggart

puft lines," such as the play-writers anterior to Shakspeare are full

of, and Pistol but coldly imitates.

_Tamburlaine the Great, or the Scythian Shepherd_.--The lunes of

Tamburlaine are perfect midsummer madness. Nebuchadnezzar's are mere

modest pretensions compared with the thundering vaunts of this

Scythian Shepherd. He comes in drawn by conquered kings, and

reproaches these _pampered jades of Asia_ that they can _draw but

twenty miles a day_. Till I saw this passage with my own eyes, I

never believed that it was anything more than a pleasant burlesque of

mine Ancient's. But I can assure my readers that it is soberly set

down in a play, which their ancestors took to be serious.

_Edward the Second_.--In a very different style from mighty

Tamburlaine is the Tragedy of Edward the Second. The reluctant pangs

of abdicating royalty in Edward furnished hints, which Shakspeare

scarcely improved in his Richard the Second; and the death-scene of

Marlowe's king moves pity and terror beyond any scene ancient or

modern with which I am acquainted.

_The Rich Jew of Malta_.--Marlowe's Jew does not approach so near to

Shakspeare's, as his Edward the Second does to Richard the Second.

Barabas is a mere monster brought in with a large painted nose to

please the rabble. He kills in sport, poisons whole nunneries,

invents infernal machines. He is just such an exhibition as a century

or two earlier might have been played before the Londoners "by the

royal command," when a general pillage and massacre of the Hebrews

had been previously resolved on in the cabinet. It is curious to see

a superstition wearing out. The idea of a Jew, which our pious

ancestors contemplated with so much horror, has nothing in it now

revolting. We have tamed the claws of the beast, and pared its nails,

and now we take it to our arms, fondle it, write plays to flatter it;

it is visited by princes, affects a taste, patronizes the arts, and

is the only liberal and gentlemanlike thing in Christendom.

_Doctor Faustus_.--The growing horrors of Faustus's last scene are

awfully marked by the hours and half hours as they expire, and bring

him nearer and nearer to the exactment of his dire compact. It is

indeed an agony and a fearful colluctation. Marlowe is said to have

been tainted with atheistical positions, to have denied God and the

Trinity. To such a genius the history of Faustus must have been

delectable food: to wander in fields where curiosity is forbidden to

go, to approach the dark gulf, near enough to look in, to be busied

in speculations which are the rottenest part of the core of the fruit

that fell from the tree of knowledge.[1] Barabas the Jew, and Faustus

the conjurer, are offsprings of a mind which at least delighted to

dally with interdicted subjects. They both talk a language which a

believer would have been tender of putting into the mouth of a

character though but in fiction. But the holiest minds have sometimes

not thought it reprehensible to counterfeit impiety in the person of

another, to bring Vice upon the stage speaking her own dialect; and,

themselves being armed with an unction of self-confident impunity,

have not scrupled to handle and touch that familiarly which would be

death to others. Milton, in the person of Satan, has started

speculations hardier than any which the feeble armory of the atheist

ever furnished; and the precise, strait-laced Richardson has

strengthened Vice, from the mouth of Lovelace, with entangling

sophistries and abstruse pleas against her adversary Virtue, which

Sedley, Villiers, and Rochester wanted depth of libertinism enough to

have invented.

[Footnote 1: Error, entering into the world with Sin among us poor

Adamites, may be said to spring from the tree of knowledge itself,

and from the rotten kernels of that fatal apple.--_Howell's

Letters_.]

* * * * *

THOMAS DECKER.

_Old Fortunatus_.--The humor of a frantic lover in the scene where

Orleans to his friend Galloway defends the passion with which

himself, being a prisoner in the English king's court, is enamored to

frenzy of the king's daughter Agripyna, is done to the life. Orleans

is as passionate an inamorato as any which Shakspeare ever drew. He

is just such another adept in Love's reasons. The sober people of the

world are with him,

"A swarm of fools

Crowding together to be counted wise."

He talks "pure Biron and Romeo;" he is almost as poetical as they,

quite as philosophical, only a little madder. After all, Love's

sectaries are a reason unto themselves. We have gone retrograde to

the noble heresy, since the days when Sidney proselyted our nation to

this mixed health and disease: the kindliest symptom, yet the most

alarming crisis, in the ticklish state of youth; the nourisher and

the destroyer of hopeful wits; the mother of twin births, wisdom and

folly, valor and weakness; the servitude above freedom; the gentle

mind's religion; the liberal superstition.

_The Honest Whore_.--There is in the second part of this play, where

Bellafront, a reclaimed harlot, recounts some of the miseries of her

profession, a simple picture of honor and shame, contrasted without

violence, and expressed without immodesty; which is worth all the

_strong lines_ against the harlot's profession, with which both parts

of this play are offensively crowded. A satirist is always to be

suspected, who, to make vice odious, dwells upon all its acts and

minutest circumstances with a sort of relish and retrospective

fondness. But so near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective,

that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer

against sin. The same high-seasoned descriptions, which in his

unregenerate state served but to inflame his appetites, in his new

province of a moralist will serve him, a little turned, to expose the

enormity of those appetites in other men. When Cervantes, with such

proficiency of fondness dwells upon the Don's library, who sees not

that he has been a great reader of books of knight-errantry--perhaps

was at some time of his life in danger of falling into those very

extravagances which he ridiculed so happily in his hero!

* * * * *

JOHN MARSTON.

_Antonio and Mellida_.--The situation of Andrugio and Lucio, in the

first part of this tragedy,--where Andrugio, Duke of Genoa, banished

his country, with the loss of a son supposed drowned, is cast upon

the territory of his mortal enemy the Duke of Venice, with no

attendants but Lucio, an old nobleman, and a page--resembles that of

Lear and Kent, in that king's distresses. Andrugio, like Lear,

manifests a king-like impatience, a turbulent greatness, an affected

resignation. The enemies which he enters lists to combat, "Despair

and mighty Grief and sharp Impatience," and the forces which he

brings to vanquish them, "cornets of horse," &c., are in the boldest

style of allegory. They are such a "race of mourners" as the

"infection of sorrows loud" in the intellect might beget on some

"pregnant cloud" in the imagination. The prologue to the second part,

for its passionate earnestness, and for the tragic note of

preparation which it sounds, might have preceded one of those old

tales of Thebes or Pelops' line, which Milton has so highly

commended, as free from the common error of the poets in his day, of

"intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity, brought in

without discretion corruptly to gratify the people." It is as solemn

a preparative as the "warning voice which he who saw the Apocalypse

heard cry."

_What You Will_.--_O I shall ne'er forget how he went cloath'd_. Act

1. Scene 1.--To judge of the liberality of these notions of dress, we

must advert to the days of Gresham, and the consternation which a

phenomenon habited like the merchant here described would have

excited among the flat round caps, and cloth stockings upon 'Change,

when those "original arguments or tokens of a citizen's vocation were

in fashion, not more for thrift and usefulness than for distinction

and grace." The blank uniformity to which all professional

distinctions in apparel have been long hastening is one instance of

the decay of symbols among us, which, whether it has contributed or

not to make us a more intellectual, has certainly made us a less

imaginative people. Shakespeare knew the force of signs: a "malignant

and turbaned Turk." This "meal-cap miller," says the author of God's

Revenge against Murder, to express his indignation at an atrocious

outrage committed by the miller Pierot upon the person of the fair

Marieta.

* * * * *

AUTHOR UNKNOWN.

_The Merry Devil of Edmonton_.--The scene in this delightful comedy,

in which Jerningham, "with the true feeling of a zealous friend,"

touches the griefs of Mounchensey, seems written to make the reader

happy. Few of our dramatists or novelists have attended enough to

this. They torture and wound us abundantly. They are economists only

in delight. Nothing can be finer, more gentlemanlike, and nobler,

than the conversation and compliments of these young men. How

delicious is Raymond Mounchensey's forgetting, in his fears, that

Jerningham has a "Saint in Essex;" and how sweetly his friend reminds

him! I wish it could be ascertained, which there is some grounds for

believing, that Michael Drayton was the author of this piece. It

would add a worthy appendage to the renown of that Panegyrist of my

native Earth; who has gone over her soil, in his Polyolbion, with the

fidelity of a herald, and the painful love of a son; who has not left

a rivulet, so narrow that it may be stepped over, without honorable

mention; and has animated hills and streams with life and passion

beyond the dreams of old mythology.

* * * * *

THOMAS HEYWOOD.

_A Woman Killed with Kindness_.--Heywood is a sort of _prose_

Shakspeare. His scenes are to the full as natural and affecting. But

we miss _the poet_, that which in Shakspeare always appears out and

above the surface of _the nature_. Heywood's characters, in this

play, for instance, his country gentlemen, &c., are exactly what we

see, but of the best kind of what we see in life. Shakspeare makes us

believe, while we are among his lovely creations, that they are

nothing but what we are familiar with, as in dreams new things seem

old; but we awake, and sigh for the difference.

_The English Traveller_.--Heywood's preface to this play is

interesting, as it shows the heroic indifference about the opinion of

posterity, which some of these great writers seem to have felt. There

is a magnanimity in authorship, as in everything else. His ambition

seems to have been confined to the pleasure of hearing the players

speak his lines while he lived. It does not appear that he ever

contemplated the possibility of being read by after-ages. What a

slender pittance of fame was motive sufficient to the production of

such plays as the English Traveller, the Challenge for Beauty, and

the Woman Killed with Kindness! Posterity is bound to take care that

a writer loses nothing by such a noble modesty.

* * * * *

THOMAS MIDDLETON AND WILLIAM ROWLEY.

_A Fair Quarrel_.--The insipid levelling morality to which the modern

stage is tied down, would not admit of such admirable passions as

these scenes are filled with. A puritanical obtuseness of sentiment,

a stupid infantile goodness, is creeping among us, instead of the

vigorous passions, and virtues clad in flesh and blood, with which

the old dramatists present us. Those noble and liberal casuists could

discern in the differences, the quarrels, the animosities of men, a

beauty and truth of moral feeling, no less than in the everlastingly

inculcated duties of forgiveness and atonement. With us, all is

hypocritical meekness. A reconciliation-scene, be the occasion never

so absurd, never fails of applause. Our audiences come to the theatre

to be complimented on their goodness. They compare notes with the

amiable characters in the play, and find a wonderful sympathy of

disposition between them. We have a common stock of dramatic

morality, out of which a writer may be supplied without the trouble

of copying it from originals within his own breast. To know the

boundaries of honor, to be judiciously valiant, to have a temperance

which shall beget a smoothness in the angry swellings of youth, to

esteem life as nothing when the sacred reputation of a parent is to

be defended, yet to shake and tremble under a pious cowardice when

that ark of an honest confidence is found to be frail and tottering,

to feel the true blows of a real disgrace blunting that sword which

the imaginary strokes of a supposed false imputation had put so keen

an edge upon but lately; to do, or to imagine this done, in a feigned

story, asks something more of a moral sense, somewhat a greater

delicacy of perception in questions of right and wrong, than goes to

the writing of two or three hackneyed sentences about the laws of

honor as opposed to the laws of the land, or a commonplace against

duelling. Yet such things would stand a writer now-a-days in far

better stead than Captain Agar and his conscientious honor; and he

would be considered as a far better teacher of morality than old

Rowley or Middleton, if they were living.

* * * * *

WILLIAM ROWLEY.

_A New Wonder; a Woman never Vext_.--The old play-writers are

distinguished by an honest boldness of exhibition,--they show

everything without being ashamed. If a reverse in fortune is to be

exhibited, they fairly bring us to the prison-grate and the

alms-basket. A poor man on our stage is always a gentleman; he may be

known by a peculiar neatness of apparel, and by wearing black. Our

delicacy, in fact, forbids the dramatizing of distress at all. It is

never shown in its essential properties; it appears but as the

adjunct of some virtue, as something which is to be relieved, from

the approbation of which relief the spectators are to derive a

certain soothing of self-referred satisfaction. We turn away from the

real essences of things to hunt after their relative shadows, moral

duties; whereas, if the truth of things were fairly represented, the

relative duties might be safely trusted to themselves, and moral

philosophy lose the name of a science.

* * * * *

THOMAS MIDDLETON.

_The Witch_.--Though some resemblance may be traced between the

charms in Macbeth and the incantations in this play, which is

supposed to have preceded it, this coincidence will not detract much

from the originality of Shakspeare. His witches are distinguished

from the witches of Middleton by essential differences. These are

creatures to whom man or woman, plotting some dire mischief, might

resort for occasional consultation. Those originate deeds of blood,

and begin bad impulses to men. From the moment that their eyes first

meet with Macbeth's, he is spellbound. That meeting sways his

destiny. He can never break the fascination. These witches can hurt

the body; those have power over the soul. Hecate in Middleton has a

son, a low buffoon: the hags of Shakspeare have neither child of

their own, nor seem to be descended from any parent. They are foul

anomalies, of whom we know not whence they are sprung, nor whether

they have beginning or ending. As they are without human passions, so

they seem to be without human relations. They come with thunder and

lightning, and vanish to airy music. This is all we know of them.

Except Hecate, they have no _names_; which heightens their

mysteriousness. The names, and some of the properties which the other

author has given to his hags, excite smiles. The Weïrd Sisters are

serious things. Their presence cannot coexist with mirth. But in a

lesser degree, the witches of Middleton are fine creations. Their

power, too, is, in some measure, over the mind. They raise jars,

jealousies, strifes, "like a thick scurf" over life.

* * * * *

WILLIAM ROWLEY,--THOMAS DECKER,--JOHN FORD, ETC.

_The Witch of Edmonton_.--Mother Sawyer, in this wild play, differs

from the hags of both Middleton and Shakspeare. She is the plain,

traditional old woman witch of our ancestors; poor, deformed, and

ignorant; the terror of villages, herself amenable to a justice. That

should he a hardy sheriff, with the power of the county at his heels,

that would lay hands on the Weïrd Sisters. They are of another

jurisdiction. But upon the common and received opinion, the author

(or authors) have engrafted strong fancy. There is something

frightfully earnest in her invocations to the Familiar.

* * * * *

CYRIL TOURNEUR.

_The Revenger's Tragedy_.--The reality and life of the dialogue, in

which Vindici and Hippolito first tempt their mother, and then

threaten her with death for consenting to the dishonor of their

sister, passes any scenical illusion I ever felt. I never read it but

my ears tingle, and I feel a hot blush overspread my cheeks, as if I

were presently about to proclaim such malefactions of myself, as the

brothers here rebuke in their unnatural parent, in words more keen

and dagger-like than those which Hamlet speaks to his mother. Such

power has the passion of shame truly personated, not only to strike

guilty creatures unto the soul, but to "appall" even those that are

"free."

* * * * *

JOHN WEBSTER.

_The Duchess of Malfy_.--All the several parts of the dreadful

apparatus with which the death of the Duchess is ushered in, the

waxen images which counterfeit death, the wild masque of madmen, the

tomb-maker, the bellman, the living person's dirge, the mortification

by degrees,--are not more remote from the conceptions of ordinary

vengeance, than the strange character of suffering which they seem to

bring upon their victim is out of the imagination of ordinary poets.

As they are not like inflictions of this life, so her language seems

not of this world. She has lived among horrors till she is become

"native and endowed unto that element." She speaks the dialect of

despair; her tongue has a smatch of Tartarus and the souls in bale.

To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon

fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is

ready to drop, and then step in with mortal instruments to take its

last forfeit: this only a Webster can do. Inferior geniuses may "upon

horror's head horrors accumulate," but they cannot do this. They

mistake quantity for quality; they "terrify babes with painted

devils;" but they know not how a soul is to be moved. Their terrors

want dignity, their affrightments are without decorum.

_The White Devil_, _or Vittoria Corombona_.--This White Devil of

Italy sets off a bad cause so speciously, and pleads with such an

innocence-resembling boldness, that we seem to see that matchless

beauty of her face which inspires such gay confidence into her, and

are ready to expect, when she has done her pleadings, that her very

judges, her accusers, the grave ambassadors who sit as spectators,

and all the court, will rise and make proffer to defend her, in spite

of the utmost conviction of her guilt; as the Shepherds in Don

Quixote make proffer to follow the beautiful Shepherdess Marcela,

"without making any profit of her manifest resolution made there in

their hearing."

"So sweet and lovely does she make the shame,

Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose,

Does spot the beauty of her budding name!"

I never saw anything like the funeral dirge in this play for the

death of Marcello, except the ditty which reminds Ferdinand of his

drowned father in the Tempest. As that is of the water, watery; so

this is of the earth, earthy. Both have that intenseness of feeling,

which seems to resolve itself into the element which it contemplates.

In a note on the Spanish Tragedy in the Specimens, I have said that

there is nothing in the undoubted plays of Jonson which would

authorize us to suppose that he could have supplied the additions to

Hieronymo. I suspected the agency of some more potent spirit. I

thought that Webster might have furnished them. They seemed full of

that wild, solemn, preternatural cast of grief which bewilders us in

the Duchess of Malfy. On second consideration, I think this a hasty

criticism. They are more like the overflowing griefs and talking

distraction of Titus Andronicus. The sorrows of the Duchess set

inward; if she talks, it is little more than soliloquy imitating

conversation in a kind of bravery.

* * * * *

JOHN FORD.

_The Broken Heart_.--I do not know where to find, in any play, a

catastrophe so grand, so solemn, and so surprising, as in this. This

is indeed, according to Milton, to describe high passions and high

actions. The fortitude of the Spartan boy, who let a beast gnaw out

his bowels till he died, without expressing a groan, is a faint

bodily image of this dilaceration of the spirit, and exenteration of

the inmost mind, which Calantha, with a holy violence against her

nature, keeps closely covered, till the last duties of a wife and a

queen are fulfilled. Stories of martyrdom are but of chains and the

stake; a little bodily suffering. These torments

"On the purest spirits prey,

As on entrails, joints, and limbs,

With answerable pains, but more intense."

What a noble thing is the soul, in its strengths and in its

weaknesses! Who would be less weak than Calantha? Who can be so

strong? The expression of this transcendent scene almost bears us in

imagination to Calvary and the Cross; and we seem to perceive some

analogy between the scenical suffering which we are here

contemplating and the real agonies of that final completion to which

we dare no more than hint a reference. Ford was of the first order of

poets. He sought for sublimity, not by parcels, in metaphors or

visible images, but directly where she has her full residence, in the

heart of man; in the actions and sufferings of the greatest minds.

There is a grandeur of the soul, above mountains, seas, and the

elements. Even in the poor perverted reason of Giovanni and

Annabella, in the play[1] which stands at the head of the modern

collection of the works of this author, we discern traces of that

fiery particle, which, in the irregular starting from out the road of

beaten action, discovers something of a right line even in obliquity,

and shows hints of an improvable greatness in the lowest descents and

degradations of our nature.

[Footnote: "'Tis Pity she's a Whore."]

* * * * *

FULKE GREVILLE, LORD BROOKE.

_Alaham, Mustapha_.--The two tragedies of Lord Brooke, printed among

his poems, might with more propriety have been termed political

treatises than plays. Their author has strangely contrived to make

passion, character, and interest, of the highest order, subservient

to the expression of state dogmas and mysteries. He is in nine parts

Machiavel and Tacitus, for one part Sophocles or Seneca. In this

writer's estimate of the powers of the mind, the understanding must

have held a most tyrannical preeminence. Whether we look into his

plays or his most passionate love-poems, we shall find all frozen and

made rigid with intellect. The finest movements of the human heart,

the utmost grandeur of which the soul is capable, are essentially

comprised in the actions and speeches of Cælica and Camena.

Shakspeare, who seems to have had a peculiar delight in contemplating

womanly perfection, whom for his many sweet images of female

excellence all women are in an especial manner bound to love, has not

raised the ideal of the female character higher than Lord Brooke, in

these two women, has done. But it requires a study equivalent to the

learning of a new language to understand their meaning when they

speak. It is indeed hard to hit:

"Much like thy riddle, Samson, in one day

Or seven though one should musing sit."

It is as if a being of pure intellect should take upon him to express

the emotions of our sensitive natures. There would be all knowledge,

but sympathetic expressions would be wanting.

* * * * *

BEN JONSON.

_The Case is Altered_.--The passion for wealth has worn out much of

its grossness in tract of time. Our ancestors certainly conceived of

money as able to confer a distinct gratification in itself, not

considered simply as a symbol of wealth. The old poets, when they

introduce a miser, make him address his gold as his mistress; as

something to be seen, felt, and hugged; as capable of satisfying two

of the senses at least. The substitution of a thin, unsatisfying

medium in the place of the good old tangible metal, has made avarice

quite a Platonic affection in comparison with the seeing, touching,

and handling pleasures of the old Chrysophilites. A bank-note can no

more satisfy the touch of a true sensualist in this passion, than

Creusa could return her husband's embrace in the shades. See the Cave

of Mammon in Spenser; Barabas's contemplation of his wealth, in the

Rich Jew of Malta; Luke's raptures in the City Madam; the idolatry

and absolute gold-worship of the miser Jaques in this early comic

production of Ben Jonson's. Above all, hear Guzman, in that excellent

old translation of the Spanish Rogue, expatiate on the "ruddy cheeks

of your golden ruddocks, your Spanish pistolets, your plump and

full-faced Portuguese, and your clear-skinned pieces-of-eight of

Castile," which he and his fellows the beggars kept secret to

themselves, and did privately enjoy in a plentiful manner. "For to

have them to pay them away is not to enjoy them; to enjoy them is to

have them lying by us; having no other need of them than to use them

for the clearing of the eyesight, and the comforting of our senses.

These we did carry about with us, sewing them in some patches of our

doublets near unto the heart, and as close to the skin as we could

handsomely quilt them in, holding them to be restorative."

_Poetaster_.--This Roman play seems written to confute those enemies

of Ben in his own days and ours, who have said that he made a

pedantical use of his learning. He has here revived the whole Court

of Augustus, by a learned spell. We are admitted to the society of

the illustrious dead. Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Tibullus, converse in our

own tongue more finely and poetically than they were used to express

themselves in their native Latin. Nothing can be imagined more

elegant, refined, and court-like, than the scenes between this Louis

the Fourteenth of antiquity and his literati. The whole essence and

secret of that kind of intercourse is contained therein. The

economical liberality by which greatness, seeming to waive some part

of its prerogative, takes care to lose none of the essentials; the

prudential liberties of an inferior, which flatter by commanded

boldness and soothe with complimentary sincerity;--these, and a

thousand beautiful passages from his New Inn, his Cynthia's Revels,

and from those numerous court-masques and entertainments, which he

was in the daily habit of furnishing, might be adduced to show the

poetical fancy and elegance of mind of the supposed rugged old bard.

_Alchemist_.--The judgment is perfectly overwhelmed by the torrent of

images, words, and book-knowledge, with which Epicure Mammon (Act

ii., Scene 2) confounds and stuns his incredulous hearer. They come

pouring out like the successive falls of Nilus. They "doubly redouble

strokes upon the foe." Description outstrides proof. We are made to

believe effects before we have testimony for their causes. If there

is no one image which attains the height of the sublime, yet the

confluence and assemblage of them all produces a result equal to the

grandest poetry. The huge Xerxean army countervails against single

Achilles. Epicure Mammon is the most determined offspring of its

author. It has the whole "matter and copy of the father--eye, nose,

lip, the trick of his frown." It is just such a swaggerer as

contemporaries have described old Ben to be. Meercraft, Bobadil, the

Host of the New Inn, have all his image and superscription. But

Mammon is arrogant pretension personified. Sir Samson Legend, in Love

for Love, is such another lying, overbearing character, but he does

not come up to Epicure Mammon. What a "towering bravery" there is in

his sensuality! he affects no pleasure under a Sultan. It is as if

"Egypt with Assyria strove in luxury."

* * * * *

GEORGE CHAPMAN.

_Bussy D'Ambois_, _Byron's Conspiracy_, _Byron's Tragedy_, &c.

&c.--Webster has happily characterized the "full and heightened

style" of Chapman, who, of all the English play-writers, perhaps

approaches nearest to Shakspeare in the descriptive and didactic, in

passages which are less purely dramatic. He could not go out of

himself, as Shakspeare could shift at pleasure, to inform and animate

other existences, but in himself he had an eye to perceive and a soul

to embrace all forms and modes of being. He would have made a great

epic poet, if indeed he has not abundantly shown himself to be one;

for his Homer is not so properly a translation as the stories of

Achilles and Ulysses rewritten. The earnestness and passion which he

has put into every part of these poems would be incredible to a

reader of mere modern translations. His almost Greek zeal for the

glory of his heroes can only be paralleled by that fierce spirit of

Hebrew bigotry, with which Milton, as if personating one of the

zealots of the old law, clothed himself when he sat down to paint the

acts of Samson against the uncircumcised. The great obstacle to

Chapman's translations being read, is their unconquerable quaintness.

He pours out in the same breath the most just and natural, and the

most violent and crude expressions. He seems to grasp at whatever

words come first to hand while the enthusiasm is upon him, as if all

other must be inadequate to the divine meaning. But passion (the all

in all in poetry) is everywhere present, raising the low, dignifying

the mean, and putting sense into the absurd. He makes his readers

glow, weep, tremble, take any affection which he pleases, be moved by

words, or in spite of them, be disgusted, and overcome their disgust.

* * * * *

FRANCIS BEAUMONT.--JOHN FLETCHER.

_Maid's Tragedy_.--One characteristic of the excellent old poets is,

their being able to bestow grace upon subjects which naturally do not

seem susceptible of any. I will mention two instances. Zelmane in the

Arcadia of Sidney, and Helena in the All's Well that Ends Well of

Shakspeare. What can be more unpromising, at first sight, than the

idea of a young man disguising himself in woman's attire, and passing

himself off for a woman among women; and that for a long space of

time? Yet Sir Philip has preserved so matchless a decorum, that

neither does Pyrocles' manhood suffer any stain for the effeminacy of

Zelmane, nor is the respect due to the princesses at all diminished

when the deception comes to be known. In the sweetly-constituted mind

of Sir Philip Sidney, it seems as if no ugly thought or unhandsome

meditation could find a harbor. He turned all that he touched into

images of honor and virtue. Helena in Shakspeare is a young woman

seeking a man in marriage. The ordinary rules of courtship are

reversed, the habitual feelings are crossed. Yet with such exquisite

address this dangerous subject is handled, that Helena's forwardness

loses her no honor; delicacy dispenses with its laws in her favor,

and nature, in her single case, seems content to suffer a sweet

violation. Aspatia, in the Maid's Tragedy, is a character equally

difficult with Helena, of being managed with grace. She too is a

slighted woman, refused by the man who had once engaged to marry her.

Yet it is artfully contrived, that while we pity we respect her, and

she descends without degradation. Such wonders true poetry and

passion can do, to confer dignity upon subjects which do not seem

capable of it. But Aspatia must not be compared at all points with

Helena; she does not so absolutely predominate over her situation but

she suffers some diminution, some abatement of the full lustre of the

female character, which Helena never does. Her character has many

degrees of sweetness, some of delicacy; but it has weakness, which,

if we do not despise, we are sorry for. After all, Beaumont and

Fletcher were but an inferior sort of Shakspeares and Sidneys.

_Philaster_.--The character of Bellario must have been extremely

popular in its day. For many years after the date of Philaster's

first exhibition on the stage, scarce a play can be found without one

of these women-pages in it, following in the train of some

pre-engaged lover, calling on the gods to bless her happy rival (his

mistress), whom no doubt she secretly curses in her heart, giving

rise to many pretty _equivoques_ by the way on the confusion of sex,

and either made happy at last by some surprising turn of fate, or

dismissed with the joint pity of the lovers and the audience. Donne

has a copy of verses to his mistress, dissuading her from a

resolution, which she seems to have taken up from some of these

scenical representations, of following him abroad as a page. It is so

earnest, so weighty, so rich in poetry, in sense, in wit, and pathos,

that it deserves to be read as a solemn close in future to all such

sickly fancies as he there deprecates.

* * * * *

JOHN FLETCHER.

_Thierry and Theodoret_.--The scene where Ordella offers her life a

sacrifice, that the king of France may not be childless, I have

always considered as the finest in all Fletcher, and Ordella to be

the most perfect notion of the female heroic character, next to

Calantha in the Broken Heart. She is a piece of sainted nature. Yet,

noble as the whole passage is, it must be confessed that the manner

of it, compared with Shakspeare's finest scenes, is faint and

languid. Its motion is circular, not progressive. Each line revolves

on itself in a sort of separate orbit. They do not join into one

another like a running-hand. Fletcher's ideas moved slow; his

versification, though sweet, is tedious, it stops at every turn; he

lays line upon line, making up one after the other, adding image to

image so deliberately, that we see their junctures. Shakspeare

mingles everything, runs line into line, embarrasses sentences and

metaphors; before one idea has burst its shell, another is hatched

and clamorous for disclosure. Another striking difference between

Fletcher and Shakspeare is the fondness of the former for unnatural

and violent situations. He seems to have thought that nothing great

could be produced in an ordinary way. The chief incidents in some of

his most admired tragedies show this.[1] Shakspeare had nothing of

this contortion in his mind, none of that craving after violent

situations, and flights of strained and improbable virtue, which I

think always betrays an imperfect moral sensibility. The wit of

Fletcher is excellent,[2] like his serious scenes, but there is

something strained and far-fetched in both. He is too mistrustful of

Nature, he always goes a little on one side of her.--Shakspeare chose

her without a reserve: and had riches, power, understanding, and

length of days, with her for a dowry.

[Footnote 1: Wife for a Month, Cupid's Revenge, Double Marriage, &c.]

[Footnote 2: Wit without Money, and his comedies generally.]

_Faithful Shepherdess_.--If all the parts of this delightful pastoral

had been in unison with its many innocent scenes and sweet lyric

intermixtures, it had been a poem fit to vie with Comus or the

Arcadia, to have been put into the hands of boys and virgins, to have

made matter for young dreams, like the loves of Hermia and Lysander.

But a spot is on the face of this Diana. Nothing short of infatuation

could have driven Fletcher upon mixing with this "blessedness" such

an ugly deformity as Chloe, the wanton shepherdess! If Chloe was

meant to set off Clorin by contrast, Fletcher should have known that

such weeds by juxtaposition do not set off, but kill sweet flowers.

* * * * *

PHILIP MASSINGER.--THOMAS DECKER.

_The Virgin Martyr_.--This play has some beauties of so very high an

order, that with all my respect for Massinger, I do not think he had

poetical enthusiasm capable of rising up to them. His associate

Decker who wrote Old Fortunatus, had poetry enough for anything. The

very impurities which obtrude themselves among the sweet pieties of

this play, like Satan among the Sons of Heaven, have a strength of

contrast, a raciness, and a glow, in them, which are beyond

Massinger. They are to the religion of the rest what Caliban is to

Miranda.

* * * * *

PHILIP MASSINGER.--THOMAS MIDDLETON.--WILLIAM ROWLEY.

_Old Law_.--There is an exquisiteness of moral sensibility, making

one's eyes to gush out tears of delight, and a poetical strangeness

in the circumstances of this sweet tragicomedy, which are unlike

anything in the dramas which Massinger wrote alone. The pathos is of

a subtler edge. Middleton and Rowley, who assisted in it, had both of

them finer geniuses than their associate.

* * * * *

JAMES SHIRLEY

Claims a place amongst the worthies of this period, not so much for

any transcendent talent in himself, as that he was the last of a

great race, all of whom spoke nearly the same language, and had a set

of moral feelings and notions in common. A new language, and quite a

new turn of tragic and comic interest, came in with the Restoration.

* * * * *

SPECIMENS FROM THE WRITINGS OF FULLER,

THE CHURCH HISTORIAN.

The writings of Fuller are usually designated by the title of quaint,

and with sufficient reason; for such was his natural bias to

conceits, that I doubt not upon most occasions it would have been

going out of his way to have expressed himself out of them. But his

wit is not always a _lumen siccum_, a dry faculty of surprising; on

the contrary, his conceits are oftentimes deeply steeped in human

feeling and passion. Above all, his way of telling a story, for its

eager liveliness, and the perpetual running commentary of the

narrator happily blended with the narration, is perhaps unequalled.

As his works are now scarcely perused but by antiquaries, I thought

it might not be unacceptable to my readers to present them with some

specimens of his manner, in single thoughts and phrases; and in some

few passages of greater length, chiefly of a narrative description. I

shall arrange them as I casually find them in my book of extracts,

without being solicitous to specify the particular work from which

they are taken.

_Pyramids_.--"The Pyramids themselves, doting with age, have

forgotten the names of their founders."

_Virtue in a Short Person_.--"His soul had but a short diocese to

visit, and therefore might the better attend the effectual informing

thereof."

_Intellect in a very Tall One_.--"Ofttimes such who are built four

stories high, are observed to have little in their cockloft."

_Naturals_.--"Their heads sometimes so little, that there is no room

for wit; sometimes so long, that there is no wit for so much room."

_Negroes_.--"The image of God cut in ebony."

_School-Divinity_.--"At the first it will be as welcome to thee as a

prison, and their very solutions will seem knots unto thee."

_Mr. Perkins the Divine_.--"He had a capacious head, with angles

winding and roomy enough to lodge all controversial intricacies."

_The same_.--"He would pronounce the word _Damn_ with such an

emphasis as left a doleful echo in his auditors' ears a good while

after."

_Judges in Capital Cases_.--"O let him take heed how he strikes that

hath a dead hand."

_Memory_.--"Philosophers place it in the rear of the head, and it

seems the mine of memory lies there, because there men naturally dig

for it, scratching it when they are at a loss."

_Fancy_.--"It is the most boundless and restless faculty of the soul;

for while the Understanding and the Will are kept, as it were, _in

libera custodia_ to their objects of _verum et bonum_, the Fancy is

free from all engagements: it digs without spade, sails without ship,

flies without wings, builds without charges, fights without

bloodshed; in a moment striding from the centre to the circumference

of the world; by a kind of omnipotency creating and annihilating

things in an instant; and things divorced in Nature are married in

Fancy as in a lawless place."

_Infants_.--"Some, admiring what motives to mirth infants meet with

in their silent and solitary smiles, have resolved, how truly I know

not, that then they converse with angels; as indeed such cannot among

mortals find any fitter companions."

_Music_.--"Such is the sociableness of music, it conforms itself to

all companies both in mirth and mourning; complying to improve that

passion with which it finds the auditors most affected. In a word, it

is an invention which might have beseemed a son of Seth to have been

the father thereof: though better it was that Cain's great-grandchild

should have the credit first to find it, than the world the

unhappiness longer to have wanted it."

_St. Monica_.--"Drawing near her death, she sent most pious thoughts

as harbingers to heaven, and her soul saw a glimpse of happiness

through the chinks of her sickness-broken body."[1]

[Footnote 1:

"The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd,

Lets in new lights through chinks which time has made."

WALLER.]

_Mortality_.--"To smell to a turf of fresh earth is wholesome for the

body, no less are thoughts of mortality cordial to the soul."

_Virgin_.--"No lordling husband shall at the same time command her

presence and distance; to be always near in constant attendance, and

always to stand aloof in awful observance."

_Elder Brother_.--"Is one who made haste to come into the world to

bring his parents the first news of male posterity, and is well

rewarded for his tidings."

_Bishop Fletcher_.--"His pride was rather on him than in him, as only

gait and gesture deep, not sinking to his heart, though causelessly

condemned for a proud man, as who was a _good hypocrite_, and far

more humble than he appeared."

_Masters of Colleges_.--"A little allay of dulness in a Master of a

College makes him fitter to manage secular affairs."

_The Good Yeoman_.--"Is a gentleman in ore, whom the next age may see

refined."

_Good Parent_.--"For his love, therein like a well-drawn picture, he

eyes all his children alike."

_Deformity in Children_.--"This partiality is tyranny, when parents

despise those that are deformed; _enough to break those whom God had

bowed before_."

_Good Master_.--"In correcting his servant he becomes not a slave to

his own passion. Not cruelly making new _indentures_ of the flesh of

his apprentice. He is tender of his servant in sickness and age. If

crippled in his service, his house is his hospital. Yet how many

throw away those dry bones, out of the which themselves have sucked

the marrow!"

_Good Widow_.--"If she can speak but little good of him [her dead

husband] she speaks but little of him. So handsomely folding up her

discourse, that his virtues are shown outwards, and his vices wrapt

up in silence; as counting it barbarism to throw dirt on his memory,

who hath mould cast on his body."

_Horses_.--"These are men's wings, wherewith they make such speed. A

generous creature a horse is, sensible in some sort of honor; and

made most handsome by that which deforms men most--pride."

_Martyrdom_.--"Heart of oak hath sometimes warped a little in the

scorching heat of persecution. Their want of true courage herein

cannot be excused. Yet many censure them for surrendering up their

forts after a long siege, who would have yielded up their own at the

first summons.--Oh! there is more required to make one valiant, than

to call Cranmer or Jewel coward; as if the fire in Smithfield had

been no hotter than what is painted in the Book of Martyrs."

_Text of St. Paul_.--"St. Paul saith, Let not the sun go down on your

wrath, to carry news to the antipodes in another world of thy

revengeful nature. Yet let us take the Apostle's meaning rather than

his words, with all possible speed to depose our passion; not

understanding him so literally, that we may take leave to be angry

till sunset: then might our wrath lengthen with the days; and men in

Greenland, where the day lasts above a quarter of a year, have

plentiful scope for revenge."[1]

[Footnote 1: This whimsical prevention of a consequence which no one

would have thought of deducing,--setting up an absurdum on purpose to

hunt it down,--placing guards as it were at the very outposts of

possibility,--gravely giving out laws to insanity and prescribing

moral fences to distempered intellects, could never have entered into

a head less entertainingly constructed than that of Fuller or Sir

Thomas Browne, the very air of whose style the conclusion of this

passage most aptly imitates.]

_Bishop Brownrig_.--"He carried learning enough _in numerato_ about

him in his pockets for any discourse, and had much more at home in

his chests for any serious dispute."

_Modest Want_.--"Those that with diligence fight against poverty,

though neither conquer till death makes it a drawn battle, expect not

but prevent their craving of thee: for God forbid the heavens should

never rain, till the earth first opens her mouth; seeing _some

grounds will sooner burn than chap_."

_Death-bed Temptations_.--"The devil is most busy on the last day of

his term; and a tenant to be ousted cares not what mischief he doth."

_Conversation_.--"Seeing we are civilized Englishmen, let us not be

naked savages in our talk."

_Wounded Soldier_.--"Halting is the stateliest march of a soldier;

and 'tis a brave sight to see the flesh of an ancient as torn as his

colors."

_Wat Tyler_.--"A _misogrammatist_; if a good Greek word may be given

to so barbarous a rebel."

_Heralds_.--"Heralds new mould men's names--taking from them, adding

to them, melting out all the liquid letters, torturing mutes to make

them speak, and making vowels dumb,--to bring it to a fallacious

_homonomy_ at the last, that their names may be the same with those

noble houses they pretend to."

_Antiquarian Diligence_.--"It is most worthy observation, with what

diligence he [Camden] inquired after ancient places, making hue and

cry after many a city which was run away, and by certain marks and

tokens pursuing to find it; as by the situation on the Roman

highways, by just distance from other ancient cities, by some

affinity of name, by tradition of the inhabitants, by Roman coins

digged up, and by some appearance of ruins. A broken urn is a whole

evidence; or an old gate still surviving, out of which the city is

run out. Besides, commonly some new spruce town not far off is grown

out of the ashes thereof, which yet hath so much natural affection as

dutifully to own those reverend ruins for her mother."

_Henry de Essex_.--"He is too well known in our English Chronicles,

being Baron of Raleigh, in Essex, and Hereditary Standard Bearer of

England. It happened in the reign of this king [Henry II.] there was

a fierce battle fought in Flintshire, at Coleshall, between the

English and Welsh, wherein this Henry de Essex _animum et signum

simul abjecit_, betwixt traitor and coward, cast away both his

courage and banner together, occasioning a great overthrow of

English. But he that had the baseness to do, had the boldness to deny

the doing of so foul a fact; until he was challenged in combat by

Robert de Momford, a knight, eye-witness thereof, and by him overcome

in a duel. Whereupon his large inheritance was confiscated to the

king, and he himself, _partly thrust, partly going into a convent,

hid his head in a cowl, under which, betwixt shame and sanctity, he

blushed out the remainder of his life_."[1]--_Worthies_, article

_Bedfordshire_.

[Footnote 1: The fine imagination of Fuller has done what might have

been pronounced impossible. It has given an interest, and a holy

character to coward infamy. Nothing can be more beautiful than the

concluding account of the last days, and expiatory retirement, of

poor Henry de Essex. The address with which the whole of this little

story is told is most consummate; the charm of it seems to consist in

a perpetual balance of antithesis not too violently opposed, and the

consequent activity of mind in which the reader is kept:--"Betwixt

traitor and coward"--"baseness to do, boldness to deny"--"partly

thrust, partly going, into a convent"--"betwixt shame and sanctity."

The reader by this artifice is taken into a kind of partnership with

the writer,--his judgment is exercised in settling the

preponderance,--he feels as if he were consulted as to the issue. But

the modern historian flings at once the dead weight of his own

judgment into the scale, and settles the matter.]

_Sir Edward Harwood, Knt._--"I have read of a bird, which hath a face

like, and yet will prey upon, a man: who coming to the water to

drink, and finding there by reflection, that he had killed one like

himself, pineth away by degrees, and never afterwards enjoyeth

itself.[1] Such is in some sort the condition of Sir Edward. This

accident, that he had killed one in a private quarrel, put a period

to his carnal mirth, and was a covering to his eyes all the days of

his life. No possible provocations could afterwards tempt him to a

duel; and no wonder that one's conscience loathed that whereof he had

surfeited. He refused all challenges with more honor than others

accepted them; it being well known that he would set his foot as far

in the face of his enemy as any man alive."--_Worthies_, article

_Lincolnshire_.

[Footnote 1: I do not know where Fuller read of this bird; but a more

awful and affecting story, and moralizing of a story, in Natural

History, or rather in that Fabulous Natural History where poets and

mythologists found the Phoenix and the Unicorn and "other strange

fowl," is nowhere extant. It is a fable which Sir Thomas Browne, if

he had heard of it, would have exploded among his Vulgar Errors; but

the delight which he would have taken in the discussing of its

probabilities, would have shown that the _truth of the fact_, though

the avowed object of his search was not so much the motive which put

him upon the investigation, as those hidden affinities and poetical

analogies,--those _essential verities_ in the application of strange

fable, which made him linger with such reluctant delay among the last

fading lights of popular tradition; and not seldom to conjure up a

superstition, that had been long extinct, from its dusty grave, to

inter it himself with greater ceremonies and solemnities of burial.]

_Decayed Gentry_.--"It happened in the reign of King James, when

Henry Earl of Huntingdon was Lieutenant of Leicestershire, that a

laborer's son in that country was pressed into the wars; as I take

it, to go over with Count Mansfield. The old man at Leicester

requested his son might be discharged, as being the only staff of his

age, who by his industry maintained him and his mother. The Earl

demanded his name, which the man for a long time was loath to tell

(as suspecting it a fault for so poor a man to confess the truth); at

last he told his name was Hastings. 'Cousin Hastings,' said the Earl,

'we cannot all be top branches of the tree, though we all spring from

the same root; your son, my kinsman, shall not be pressed.' So good

was the meeting of modesty in a poor, with courtesy in an honorable

person, and gentry I believe in both. And I have reason to believe,

that some who justly own the surnames and blood of Bohuns, Mortimers,

and Plantagenets (though ignorant of their own extractions), are hid

in the heap of common people, where they find that under a thatched

cottage which some of their ancestors could not enjoy in a leaded

castle--contentment, with quiet and security."--_Worthies_, article

_Of Shire-Reeves or Shiriffes_.

_Tenderness of Conscience in a Tradesman_.--"Thomas Curson, born in

Allhallows, Lombard Street, armorer, dwelt without Bishopsgate. It

happened that a stage-player borrowed a rusty musket, which had lain

long leger in his shop: now though his part were comical, he

therewith acted an unexpected tragedy, killing one of the

standers-by, the gun casually going off on the stage, which he

suspected not to be charged. O the difference of divers men in the

tenderness of their consciences! some are scarce touched with a

wound, whilst others are wounded with a touch therein. This poor

armorer was highly afflicted therewith, though done against his will,

yea, without his knowledge, in his absence, by another, out of mere

chance. Hereupon he resolved to give all his estate to pious uses: no

sooner had he gotten a round sum, but presently he posted with it in

his apron to the Court of Aldermen, and was in pain till by their

direction he had settled it for the relief of poor in his own and

other parishes, and disposed of some hundreds of pounds accordingly,

as I am credibly informed by the then churchwardens of the said

parish. Thus, as he conceived himself casually (though at a great

distance) to have occasioned the death of one, he was the immediate

and direct cause of giving a comfortable living to many."

_Burning of Wickliffe's Body by Order of the Council of

Constance_.--"Hitherto [A.D. 1428] the corpse of John Wickliffe had

quietly slept in his grave about forty-one years after his death,

till his body was reduced to bones, and his bones almost to dust. For

though the earth in the chancel of Lutterworth, in Leicestershire,

where he was interred, hath not so quick a digestion with the earth

of Aceldama, to consume flesh in twenty-four hours, yet such the

appetite thereof, and all other English graves, to leave small

reversions of a body after so many years. But now such the spleen of

the Council of Constance, as they not only cursed his memory as dying

an obstinate heretic, but ordered that his bones (with this

charitable caution,--if it may be discerned from the bodies of other

faithful people) be taken out of the ground, and thrown far off from

any Christian burial. In obedience hereunto, Richard Fleming, Bishop

of Lincoln, Diocesan of Lutterworth, sent his officers (vultures with

a quick sight, scent, at a dead carcass) to ungrave him. Accordingly

to Lutterworth they come, Sumner, Commissary, Official, Chancellor,

Proctors, Doctors, and their servants, (so that the remnant of the

body would not hold out a bone amongst so many hands,) take what was

left out of the grave, and burnt them to ashes, and cast them into

Swift, a neighboring brook, running hard by. _Thus this brook has

conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn into the

narrow seas, they into the main ocean; and thus the ashes of

Wickliffe are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all

the world over._"[1]--Church History.

[Footnote 1: The concluding period of this most lively narrative I

will not call a conceit: it is one of the grandest conceptions I ever

met with. One feels the ashes of Wickliffe gliding away out of the

reach of the Sumners, Commissaries, Officials, Proctors, Doctors, and

all the puddering rout of executioners of the impotent rage of the

baffled Council: from Swift into Avon, from Avon into Severn, from

Severn into the narrow seas, from the narrow seas into the main

ocean, where they become the emblem of his doctrine, "dispersed all

the world over." Hamlet's tracing the body of Cæsar to the clay that

stops a beer-barrel is a no less curious pursuit of "ruined

mortality;" but it is in an inverse ratio to this: it degrades and

saddens us, for one part of our nature at least; but this expands the

whole of our nature, and gives to the body a sort of ubiquity,--a

diffusion as far as the actions of its partner can have reach or

influence.

I have seen this passage smiled at, and set down as a quaint conceit

of old Fuller. But what is not a conceit to those who read it in a

temper different from that in which the writer composed it? The most

pathetic parts of poetry to cold tempers seem and are nonsense, as

divinity was to the Greeks foolishness. When Richard II., meditating

on his own utter annihilation as to royalty, cries out,

"O that I were a mockery king of snow,

To melt before the sun of Bolingbroke,"

if we had been going on pace for pace with the passion before, this

sudden conversion of a strong-felt metaphor into something to be

actually realized in nature, like that of Jeremiah, "Oh! that my head

were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears," is strictly and

strikingly natural; but come unprepared upon it, and it is a conceit:

and so is a "head" turned into "waters."]

* * * * *

ON THE

GENIUS AND CHARACTER OF HOGARTH;

WITH SOME REMARKS ON A PASSAGE IN THE WRITINGS OF THE

LATE MR. BARRY.

* * * * *

One of the earliest and noblest enjoyments I had when a boy, was in

the contemplation of those capital prints by Hogarth, the _Harlot's_

and _Rake's Progresses_, which, along with some others, hung upon the

walls of a great hall in an old-fashioned house in ----shire, and

seemed the solitary tenants (with myself) of that antiquated and

life-deserted apartment.

Recollection of the manner in which those prints used to affect me

has often made me wonder, when I have heard Hogarth described as a

mere comic painter, as one of those whose chief ambition was to

_raise a laugh_. To deny that there are throughout the prints which I

have mentioned circumstances introduced of a laughable tendency,

would be to run counter to the common notions of mankind; but to

suppose that in their _ruling character_ they appeal chiefly to the

risible faculty, and not first and foremost to the very heart of man,

its best and most serious feelings, would be to mistake no less

grossly their aim and purpose. A set of severer Satires (for they are

not so much Comedies, which they have been likened to, as they are

strong and masculine Satires) less mingled with anything of mere fun,

were never written upon paper, or graven upon copper. They resemble

Juvenal, or the satiric touches in Timon of Athens.

I was pleased with the reply of a gentleman, who being asked which

book he esteemed most in his library, answered,--"Shakspeare:" being

asked which he esteemed next best, replied, "Hogarth." His graphic

representations are indeed books: they have the teeming, fruitful,

suggestive meaning of _words_. Other pictures we look at,--his prints

we read.

In pursuance of this parallel, I have sometimes entertained myself

with comparing the _Timon of Athens_ of Shakespeare (which I have

just mentioned) and Hogarth's _Rake's Progress_ together. The story,

the moral, in both is nearly the same. The wild course of riot and

extravagance, ending in the one with driving the Prodigal from the

society of men into the solitude of the deserts, and in the other

with conducting the Rake through his several stages of dissipation

into the still more complete desolations of the mad-house, in the

play and in the picture, are described with almost equal force and

nature. The levee of the Rake, which forms the subject of the second

plate in the series, is almost a transcript of Timon's levee in the

opening scene of that play. We find a dedicating poet, and other

similar characters, in both.

The concluding scene in the _Rake's Progress_ is perhaps superior to

the last scenes of _Timon_. If we seek for something of kindred

excellence in poetry, it must be in the scenes of Lear's beginning

madness, where the King and the Fool and the Tom-o'-Bedlam conspire

to produce such a medley of mirth checked by misery, and misery

rebuked by mirth; where the society of those "strange bedfellows"

which misfortunes have brought Lear acquainted with, so finely sets

forth the destitute state of the monarch; while the lunatic bans of

the one, and the disjointed sayings and wild but pregnant allusions

of the other, so wonderfully sympathize with that confusion, which

they seem to assist in the production of, in the senses of that

"child-changed father."

In the scene in Bedlam, which terminates the _Rake's Progress_, we

find the same assortment of the ludicrous with the terrible. Here is

desperate madness, the overturning of originally strong thinking

faculties, at which we shudder, as we contemplate the duration and

pressure of affliction which it must have asked to destroy such a

building;--and here is the gradual hurtless lapse into idiocy, of

faculties, which at their best of times never having been strong, we

look upon the consummation of their decay with no more of pity than

is consistent with a smile. The mad tailor, the poor driveller that

has gone out of his wits (and truly he appears to have had no great

journey to go to get past their confines) for the love of _Charming

Betty Careless_,--. these half-laughable, scarce-pitiable objects,

take off from the horror which the principal figure would of itself

raise, at the same time that they assist the feeling of the scene by

contributing to the general notion of its subject:--

"Madness, thou chaos of the brain,

What art, that pleasure giv'st and pain?

Tyranny of Fancy's reign!

Mechanic Fancy, that can build

Vast labyrinths and mazes wild,

With rule disjointed, shapeless measure,

Fill'd with horror, fill'd with pleasure!

Shapes of horror, that would even

Cast doubts of mercy upon heaven;

Shapes of pleasure, that but seen,

Would split the shaking sides of Spleen."[1]

[Footnote 1: Lines inscribed under the plate]

Is it carrying the spirit of comparison to excess to remark, that in

the poor kneeling weeping female who accompanies her seducer in his

sad decay, there is something analogous to Kent, or Caius, as he

delights rather to be called, in _Lear_,--the noblest pattern of

virtue which even Shakspeare has conceived,--who follows his royal

master in banishment, that had pronounced _his_ banishment, and

forgetful at once of his wrongs and dignities, taking on himself the

disguise of a menial, retains his fidelity to the figure, his loyalty

to the carcass, the shadow, the shell, and empty husk of Lear?

In the perusal of a book, or of a picture, much of the impression

which we receive depends upon the habit of mind which we bring with

us to such perusal. The same circumstance may make one person laugh,

which shall render another very serious; or in the same person the

first impression may be corrected by after-thought. The misemployed

incongruous characters at the _Harlot's Funeral_, on a superficial

inspection, provoke to laughter; but when we have sacrificed the

first emotion to levity, a very different frame of mind succeeds, or

the painter has lost half his purpose. I never look at that wonderful

assemblage of depraved beings, who, without a grain of reverence or

pity in their perverted minds, are performing the sacred exteriors of

duty to the relics of their departed partner in folly, but I am as

much moved to sympathy from the very want of it in them, as I should

be by the finest representation of a virtuous death-bed surrounded by

real mourners, pious children, weeping friends,--perhaps more by the

very contrast. What reflections does it not awake, of the dreadful

heartless state in which the creature (a female too) must have lived,

who in death wants the accompaniment of one genuine tear. That wretch

who is removing the lid of the coffin to gaze upon the corpse with a

face which indicates a perfect negation of all goodness or

womanhood--the hypocrite parson and his demure partner--all the

fiendish group--to a thoughtful mind present a moral emblem more

affecting than if the poor friendless carcass had been depicted as

thrown out to the woods, where wolves had assisted at its obsequies,

itself furnishing forth its own funeral banquet.

It is easy to laugh at such incongruities as are met together in this

picture,--incongruous objects being of the very essence of

laughter,--but surely the laugh is far different in its kind from

that thoughtless species to which we are moved by mere farce and

grotesque. We laugh when Ferdinand Count Fathom, at the first sight

of the white cliffs of Britain, feels his heart yearn with filial

fondness towards the land of his progenitors, which he is coming to

fleece and plunder,--we smile at the exquisite irony of the

passage,--but if we are not led on by such passages to some more

salutary feeling than laughter, we are very negligent perusers of

them in book or picture.

It is the fashion with those who cry up the great Historical School

in this country, at the head of which Sir Joshua Reynolds is placed,

to exclude Hogarth from that school, as an artist of an inferior and

vulgar class. Those persons seem to me to confound the painting of

subjects in common or vulgar life with the being a vulgar artist. The

quantity of thought which Hogarth crowds into every picture would

alone _unvulgarize_ every subject which he might choose. Let us take

the lowest of his subjects, the print called _Gin Lane_. Here is

plenty of poverty, and low stuff to disgust upon a superficial view;

and accordingly a cold spectator feels himself immediately disgusted

and repelled. I have seen many turn away from it, not being able to

bear it. The same persons would perhaps have looked with great

complacency upon Poussin's celebrated picture of the _Plague at

Athens_[1] Disease and Death and bewildering Terror, in _Athenian

garments_, are endurable, and come, as the delicate critics express

it, within the "limits of pleasurable sensation." But the scenes of

their own St. Giles's, delineated by their own countryman, are too

shocking to think of. Yet if we could abstract our minds from the

fascinating colors of the picture, and forget the coarse execution

(in some respects) of the print, intended as it was to be a cheap

plate, accessible to the poorer sort of people, for whose instruction

it was done, I think we could have no hesitation in conferring the

palm of superior genius upon Hogarth, comparing this work of his with

Poussin's picture. There is more of imagination in it--that power

which draws all things to one,--which makes things animate and

inanimate, beings with their attributes, subjects, and their

accessories, take one color and serve to one effect. Everything in

the print, to use a vulgar expression, _tells_. Every part is full of

"strange images of death." It is perfectly amazing and astounding to

look at. Not only the two prominent figures, the woman and the

half-dead man, which are as terrible as anything which Michael Angelo

ever drew, but everything else in the print, contributes to bewilder

and stupefy,--the very houses, as I heard a friend of mine express

it, tumbling all about in various directions, seem drunk--seem

absolutely reeling from the effect of that diabolical spirit of

frenzy which goes forth over the whole composition. To show the

poetical and almost prophetical conception in the artist, one little

circumstance may serve. Not content with the dying and dead figures,

which he has strewed in profusion over the proper scene of the

action, he shows you what (of a kindred nature) is passing beyond it.

Close by the shell, in which, by direction of the parish beadle, a

man is depositing his wife, is an old wall, which, partaking of the

universal decay around it, is tumbling to pieces. Through a gap in

this wall are seen three figures, which appear to make a part in some

funeral procession which is passing by on the other side of the wall,

out of the sphere of the composition. This extending of the interest

beyond the bounds of the subject could only have been conceived by a

great genius. Shakspeare, in his description of the painting of the

Trojan War, in his _Tarquin and Lucrece_, has introduced a similar

device, where the painter made a part stand for the whole:--

"For much imaginary work was there,

Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind,

That for Achilles' image stood his spear,

Grip'd in an armed hand; himself behind

Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind:

A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head,

Stood for the whole to be imagined."

[Footnote 1: At the late Mr. Hope's, in Cavendish Square]

This he well calls _imaginary work_, where the spectator must meet

the artist in his conceptions half way; and it is peculiar to the

confidence of high genius alone to trust so much to spectators or

readers. Lesser artists show everything distinct and full, as they

require an object to be made out to themselves before they can

comprehend it.