No one can appreciate Spenser without some reflection on the nature of

allegorical writing. The mere etymological meaning of the word,

allegory,--to talk of one thing and thereby convey another,--is too

wide. The true sense is this,--the employment of one set of agents and

images to convey in disguise a moral meaning, with a likeness to the

imagination, but with a difference to the understanding,--those agents

and images being so combined as to form a homogeneous whole. This

distinguishes it from metaphor, which is part of an allegory. But

allegory is not properly distinguishable from fable, otherwise than as

the first includes the second, as a genus its species; for in a fable

there must be nothing but what is universally known and acknowledged,

but in an allegory there may be that which is new and not previously

admitted. The pictures of the great masters, especially of the Italian

schools, are genuine allegories. Amongst the classics, the multitude of

their gods either precluded allegory altogether, or else made every

thing allegory, as in the Hesiodic Theogonia; for you can scarcely

distinguish between power and the personification of power. The 'Cupid

and Psyche' of, or found in, Apuleius, is a phenomenon. It is the

Platonic mode of accounting for the fall of man. The 'Battle of the

Soul' [1] by Prudentius is an early instance of Christian allegory.

Narrative allegory is distinguished from mythology as reality from

symbol; it is, in short, the proper intermedium between person and

personification. Where it is too strongly individualized, it ceases to

be allegory; this is often felt in the 'Pilgrim's Progress', where the

characters are real persons with nick names. Perhaps one of the most

curious warnings against another attempt at narrative allegory on a

great scale, may be found in Tasso's account of what he himself intended

in and by his 'Jerusalem Delivered'.

As characteristic of Spenser, I would call your particular attention in

the first place to the indescribable sweetness and fluent projection of

his verse, very clearly distinguishable from the deeper and more inwoven

harmonies of Shakspeare and Milton. This stanza is a good instance of

what I mean:--

Yet she, most faithfull ladie, all this while

Forsaken, wofull, solitarie mayd,

Far from all peoples preace, as in exile,

In wildernesse and wastfull deserts strayd

To seeke her knight; who, subtily betrayd

Through that late vision which th' enchaunter wrought,

Had her abandond; she, of nought affrayd,

Through woods and wastnes wide him daily sought,

Yet wished tydinges none of him unto her brought.

F. Qu. B. I. c. 3. st. 3.

2. Combined with this sweetness and fluency, the scientific construction

of the metre of the 'Faery Queene' is very noticeable. One of Spenser's

arts is that of alliteration, and he uses it with great effect in

doubling the impression of an image:--

In _w_ildernesse and _w_astful deserts,--

Through _w_oods and _w_astnes _w_ilde,--

They passe the bitter _w_aves of Acheron,

Where many soules sit _w_ailing _w_oefully,

And come to _fi_ery _fl_ood of _Ph_legeton,

Whereas the damned ghosts in torments _f_ry,

And with _sh_arp _sh_rilling _sh_rieks doth bootlesse cry,--&c.

He is particularly given to an alternate alliteration, which is,

perhaps, when well used, a great secret in melody:--

A _r_amping lyon _r_ushed suddenly,--

And _s_ad to _s_ee her _s_orrowful constraint,--

And on the grasse her _d_aintie _l_imbes _d_id _l_ay,--&c.

You cannot read a page of the Faery Queene, if you read for that

purpose, without perceiving the intentional alliterativeness of the

words; and yet so skilfully is this managed, that it never strikes any

unwarned ear as artificial, or other than the result of the necessary

movement of the verse.

3. Spenser displays great skill in harmonizing his descriptions of

external nature and actual incidents with the allegorical character and

epic activity of the poem. Take these two beautiful passages as

illustrations of what I mean:--

By this the northerne wagoner had set

His sevenfol teme behind the stedfast starre

That was in ocean waves yet never wet,

But firme is fixt, and sendeth light from farre

To all that in the wide deepe wandring arre;

And chearefull chaunticlere with his note shrill

Had warned once, that Phoebus' fiery carre

In hast was climbing up the easterne hill,

Full envious that Night so long his roome did fill;

_When_ those accursed messengers of hell,

That feigning dreame, and that faire-forged spright

Came, &c.

B. I. c. 2. st. 1.

...

At last, the golden orientall gate

Of greatest Heaven gan to open fayre;

And Phoebus, fresh as brydegrome to his mate,

Came dauncing forth, shaking his deawie hayre;

And hurld his glistring beams through gloomy ayre.

Which when the wakeful Elfe perceiv'd, streightway

He started up, and did him selfe prepayre

In sunbright armes and battailons array;

For with that Pagan proud he combat will that day.

Ib. c. 5. st. 2.

Observe also the exceeding vividness of Spenser's descriptions. They are

not, in the true sense of the word, picturesque; but are composed of a

wondrous series of images, as in our dreams. Compare the following

passage with any thing you may remember 'in pari materia' in Milton or

Shakspeare:--

His haughtie helmet, horrid all with gold,

Both glorious brightnesse and great terrour bredd

For all the crest a dragon did enfold

With greedie pawes, and over all did spredd

His golden winges; his dreadfull hideous hedd,

Close couched on the bever, seemd to throw

From flaming mouth bright sparkles fiery redd,

That suddeine horrour to faint hartes did show;

And scaly tayle was stretcht adowne his back full low.

Upon the top of all his loftie crest

A bounch of haires discolourd diversly,

With sprinkled pearle and gold full richly drest,

Did shake, and seemd to daunce for jollitie;

Like to an almond tree ymounted hye

On top of greene Selinis all alone,

With blossoms brave bedecked daintily,

Whose tender locks do tremble every one

At everie little breath that under heaven is blowne.

Ib. c. 7. st. 31-2.

4. You will take especial note of the marvellous independence and true

imaginative absence of all particular space or time in the Faery Queene.

It is in the domains neither of history or geography; it is ignorant of

all artificial boundary, all material obstacles; it is truly in land of

Faery, that is, of mental space. The poet has placed you in a dream, a

charmed sleep, and you neither wish, nor have the power, to inquire

where you are, or how you got there. It reminds me of some lines of my

own:--

Oh! would to Alla!

The raven or the sea-mew were appointed

To bring me food!--or rather that my soul

Might draw in life from the universal air!

It were a lot divine in some small skiff

Along some ocean's boundless solitude

To float for ever with a careless course

And think myself the only being alive!

Remorse, Act iv. sc. 3.

Indeed Spenser himself, in the conduct of his great poem, may be

represented under the same image, his symbolizing purpose being his

mariner's compass:--

As pilot well expert in perilous wave,

That to a stedfast starre his course hath bent,

When foggy mistes or cloudy tempests have

The faithfull light of that faire lampe yblent,

And coverd Heaven with hideous dreriment;

Upon his card and compas firmes his eye,

The maysters of his long experiment,

And to them does the steddy helme apply,

Bidding his winged vessell fairely forward fly.

B. II. c. 7. st. 1.

So the poet through the realms of allegory.

5. You should note the quintessential character of Christian chivalry in

all his characters, but more especially in his women. The Greeks,

except, perhaps, in Homer, seem to have had no way of making their women

interesting, but by unsexing them, as in the instances of the tragic

Medea, Electra, &c. Contrast such characters with Spenser's Una, who

exhibits no prominent feature, has no particularization, but produces

the same feeling that a statue does, when contemplated at a distance:--

From her fayre head her fillet she undight,

And layd her stole aside: her angels face,

As the great eye of Heaven, shyned bright,

And made a sunshine in the shady place;

Did never mortal eye behold such heavenly grace.

B. I. c. 3. st. 4.

6. In Spenser we see the brightest and purest form of that nationality

which was so common a characteristic of our elder poets. There is

nothing unamiable, nothing contemptuous of others, in it. To glorify

their country--to elevate England into a queen, an empress of the

heart--this was their passion and object; and how dear and important an

object it was or may be, let Spain, in the recollection of her Cid,

declare! There is a great magic in national names. What a damper to all

interest is a list of native East Indian merchants! Unknown names are

non-conductors; they stop all sympathy. No one of our poets has touched

this string more exquisitely than Spenser; especially in his chronicle

of the British Kings (B. II. c. 10.), and the marriage of the Thames

with the Medway (B. IV. c. 11.), in both which passages the mere names

constitute half the pleasure we receive. To the same feeling we must in

particular attribute Spenser's sweet reference to Ireland:--

Ne thence the Irishe rivers absent were;

Sith no lesse famous than the rest they be, &c.

Ib.

...

And Mulla mine, whose waves I whilom taught to weep.

Ib.

And there is a beautiful passage of the same sort in the Colin Clout's

'Come Home Again':--

"One day," quoth he, "I sat, as was my trade, Under the foot of Mole,"

&c.

Lastly, the great and prevailing character of Spenser's mind is fancy

under the conditions of imagination, as an ever present but not always

active power. He has an imaginative fancy, but he has not imagination,

in kind or degree, as Shakspeare and Milton have; the boldest effort of

his powers in this way is the character of Talus.[2] Add to this a

feminine tenderness and almost maidenly purity of feeling, and above

all, a deep moral earnestness which produces a believing sympathy and

acquiescence in the reader, and you have a tolerably adequate view of

Spenser's intellectual being.

[Footnote 1: 'Psychomachia'. Ed.]

[Footnote 2: B. 5. 'Legend of Artegall'. Ed.]

LECTURE VII.

BEN JONSON, BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, AND MASSINGER.

A contemporary is rather an ambiguous term, when applied to authors. It

may simply mean that one man lived and wrote while another was yet

alive, however deeply the former may have been indebted to the latter as

his model. There have been instances in the literary world that might

remind a botanist of a singular sort of parasite plant, which rises

above ground, independent and unsupported, an apparent original; but

trace its roots, and you will find the fibres all terminating in the

root of another plant at an unsuspected distance, which, perhaps, from

want of sun and genial soil, and the loss of sap, has scarcely been able

to peep above the ground.--Or the word may mean those whose compositions

were contemporaneous in such a sense as to preclude all likelihood of

the one having borrowed from the other. In the latter sense I should

call Ben Jonson a contemporary of Shakspeare, though he long survived

him; while I should prefer the phrase of immediate successors for

Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger, though they too were Shakspeare's

contemporaries in the former sense.

BEN JONSON. [1] Born, 1574.--Died, 1637.

Ben Jonson is original; he is, indeed, the only one of the great

dramatists of that day who was not either directly produced, or very

greatly modified, by Shakspeare. In truth, he differs from our great

master in every thing--in form and in substance--and betrays no tokens

of his proximity. He is not original in the same way as Shakspeare is

original; but after a fashion of his own, Ben Jonson is most truly

original.

The characters in his plays are, in the strictest sense of the term,

abstractions. Some very prominent feature is taken from the whole man,

and that single feature or humour is made the basis upon which the

entire character is built up. Ben Jonson's 'dramatis personae' are

almost as fixed as the masks of the ancient actors; you know from the

first scene--sometimes from the list of names--exactly what every one of

them is to be. He was a very accurately observing man; but he cared only

to observe what was external or open to, and likely to impress, the

senses. He individualizes, not so much, if at all, by the exhibition of

moral or intellectual differences, as by the varieties and contrasts of

manners, modes of speech and tricks of temper; as in such characters as

Puntarvolo, Bobadill, &c.

I believe there is not one whim or affectation in common life noted in

any memoir of that age which may not be found drawn and framed in some

corner or other of Ben Jonson's dramas; and they have this merit, in

common with Hogarth's prints, that not a single circumstance is

introduced in them which does not play upon, and help to bring out, the

dominant humour or humours of the piece. Indeed I ought very

particularly to call your attention to the extraordinary skill shown by

Ben Jonson in contriving situations for the display of his characters.

In fact, his care and anxiety in this matter led him to do what scarcely

any of the dramatists of that age did--that is, invent his plots. It is

not a first perusal that suffices for the full perception of the

elaborate artifice of the plots of the Alchemist and the Silent

Woman;--that of the former is absolute perfection for a necessary

entanglement, and an unexpected, yet natural, evolution.

Ben Jonson exhibits a sterling English diction, and he has with great

skill contrived varieties of construction; but his style is rarely sweet

or harmonious, in consequence of his labour at point and strength being

so evident. In all his works, in verse or prose, there is an

extraordinary opulence of thought; but it is the produce of an amassing

power in the author, and not of a growth from within. Indeed a large

proportion of Ben Jonson's thoughts may be traced to classic or obscure

modern writers, by those who are learned and curious enough to follow

the steps of this robust, surly, and observing dramatist.

[Footnote: 1: From Mr. Green's note. 'Ed.']

Beaumont. Born, 1586.--Died, 1616.

Fletcher. Born, 1576.--Died, 1625.

Mr. Weber, to whose taste, industry, and appropriate erudition we owe, I

will not say the best, (for that would be saying little,) but a good,

edition of Beaumont and Fletcher, has complimented the Philaster, which

he himself describes as inferior to the Maid's Tragedy by the same

writers, as but little below the noblest of Shakspeare's plays, Lear,

Macbeth, Othello, &c. and consequently implying the equality, at least,

of the Maid's Tragedy;--and an eminent living critic,--who in the manly

wit, strong sterling sense, and robust style of his original works, had

presented the best possible credentials of office as 'chargé d'affaires'

of literature in general,--and who by his edition of Massinger--a work

in which there was more for an editor to do, and in which more was

actually well done, than in any similar work within my knowledge--has

proved an especial right of authority in the appreciation of dramatic

poetry, and hath potentially a double voice with the public in his own

right and in that of the critical synod, where, as 'princeps senatus',

he possesses it by his prerogative,--has affirmed that Shakspeare's

superiority to his contemporaries rests on his superior wit alone, while

in all the other, and, as I should deem, higher excellencies of the

drama, character, pathos, depth of thought, &c. he is equalled by

Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, and Massinger! [1]

Of wit I am engaged to treat in another Lecture. It is a genus of many

species; and at present I shall only say, that the species which is

predominant in Shakspeare, is so completely Shakspearian, and in its

essence so interwoven with all his other characteristic excellencies,

that I am equally incapable of comprehending, both how it can be

detached from his other powers, and how, being disparate in kind from

the wit of contemporary dramatists, it can be compared with theirs in

degree. And again--the detachment and the practicability of the

comparison being granted--I should, I confess, be rather inclined to

concede the contrary;--and in the most common species of wit, and in the

ordinary application of the term, to yield this particular palm to

Beaumont and Fletcher, whom here and hereafter I take as one poet with

two names,--leaving undivided what a rare love and still rarer

congeniality have united. At least, I have never been able to

distinguish the presence of Fletcher during the life of Beaumont, nor

the absence of Beaumont during the survival of Fletcher.

But waiving, or rather deferring, this question, I protest against the

remainder of the position in 'toto'. And indeed, whilst I can never, I

trust, show myself blind to the various merits of Jonson, Beaumont and

Fletcher, and Massinger, or insensible to the greatness of the merits

which they possess in common, or to the specific excellencies which give

to each of the three a worth of his own,--I confess, that one main

object of this Lecture was to prove that Shakspeare's eminence is his

own, and not that of his age;--even as the pine-apple, the melon, and

the gourd may grow on the same bed;--yea, the same circumstances of

warmth and soil may be necessary to their full development, yet do not

account for the golden hue, the ambrosial flavour, the perfect shape of

the pine-apple, or the tufted crown on its head. Would that those, who

seek to twist it off, could but promise us in this instance to make it

the germ of an equal successor!

What had a grammatical and logical consistency for the ear,--what could

be put together and represented to the eye--these poets took from the

ear and eye, unchecked by any intuition of an inward impossibility;--

just as a man might put together a quarter of an orange, a quarter of an

apple, and the like of a lemon and a pomegranate, and make it look like

one round diverse-coloured fruit. But nature, which works from within by

evolution and assimilation according to a law, cannot do so, nor could

Shakspeare; for he too worked in the spirit of nature, by evolving the

germ from within by the imaginative power according to an idea. For as

the power of seeing is to light, so is an idea in mind to a law in

nature. They are correlatives, which suppose each other.

The plays of Beaumont and Fletcher are mere aggregations without unity;

in the Shakspearian drama there is a vitality which grows and evolves

itself from within,--a key note which guides and controls the harmonies

throughout. What is Lear?--It is storm and tempest--the thunder at first

grumbling in the far horizon, then gathering around us, and at length

bursting in fury over our heads,--succeeded by a breaking of the clouds

for a while, a last flash of lightning, the closing in of night, and the

single hope of darkness! And Romeo and Juliet?--It is a spring day,

gusty and beautiful in the morn, and closing like an April evening with

the song of the nightingale;--whilst Macbeth is deep and

earthy,--composed to the subterranean music of a troubled conscience,

which converts every thing into the wild and fearful!

Doubtless from mere observation, or from the occasional similarity of

the writer's own character, more or less in Beaumont and Fletcher, and

other such writers will happen to be in correspondence with nature, and

still more in apparent compatibility with it. But yet the false source

is always discoverable, first by the gross contradictions to nature in

so many other parts, and secondly, by the want of the impression which

Shakspeare makes, that the thing said not only might have been said, but

that nothing else could be substituted, so as to excite the same sense

of its exquisite propriety. I have always thought the conduct and

expressions of Othello and Iago in the last scene, when Iago is brought

in prisoner, a wonderful instance of Shakspeare's consummate judgment:--

'Oth.' I look down towards his feet;--but that's a fable. If that thou

be'st a devil, I cannot kill thee.

'Iago.' I bleed, Sir; but not kill'd.

'Oth.' I am not sorry neither.

Think what a volley of execrations and defiances Beaumont and Fletcher

would have poured forth here!

Indeed Massinger and Ben Jonson are both more perfect in their kind than

Beaumont and Fletcher; the former in the story and affecting incidents;

the latter in the exhibition of manners and peculiarities, whims in

language, and vanities of appearance.

There is, however, a diversity of the most dangerous kind here.

Shakspeare shaped his characters out of the nature within; but we cannot

so safely say, out of his own nature as an individual person. No! this

latter is itself but a 'natura naturata',--an effect, a product, not a

power. It was Shakspeare's prerogative to have the universal, which is

potentially in each particular, opened out to him, the 'homo generalis',

not as an abstraction from observation of a variety of men, but as the

substance capable of endless modifications, of which his own personal

existence was but one, and to use this one as the eye that beheld the

other, and as the tongue that could convey the discovery. There is no

greater or more common vice in dramatic writers than to draw out of

themselves. How I--alone and in the self-sufficiency of my study, as all

men are apt to be proud in their dreams--should like to be talking

'king'! Shakspeare, in composing, had no 'I', but the 'I'

representative. In Beaumont and Fletcher you have descriptions of

characters by the poet rather than the characters themselves; we are

told, and impressively told, of their being; but we rarely or never feel

that they actually are.

Beaumont and Fletcher are the most lyrical of our dramatists. I think

their comedies the best part of their works, although there are scenes

of very deep tragic interest in some of their plays. I particularly

recommend Monsieur Thomas for good pure comic humor.

There is, occasionally, considerable license in their dramas; and this

opens a subject much needing vindication and sound exposition, but which

is beset with such difficulties for a Lecturer, that I must pass it by.

Only as far as Shakspeare is concerned, I own, I can with less pain

admit a fault in him than beg an excuse for it. I will not, therefore,

attempt to palliate the grossness that actually exists in his plays by

the customs of his age, or by the far greater coarseness of all his

contemporaries, excepting Spenser, who is himself not wholly blameless,

though nearly so;--for I place Shakspeare's merit on being of no age.

But I would clear away what is, in my judgment, not his, as that scene

of the Porter [2] in Macbeth, and many other such passages, and abstract

what is coarse in manners only, and all that which from the frequency of

our own vices, we associate with his words. If this were truly done,

little that could be justly reprehensible would remain. Compare the vile

comments, offensive and defensive, on Pope's

Lust thro' some gentle strainers, &c.

with the worst thing in Shakspeare, or even in Beaumont and Fletcher;

and then consider how unfair the attack is on our old dramatists;

especially because it is an attack that cannot be properly answered in

that presence in which an answer would be most desirable, from the

painful nature of one part of the position; but this very pain is almost

a demonstration of its falsehood!

[Footnote 1: See Mr. Gifford's introduction to his edition of Massinger.

Ed.]

[Footnote 2: Act ii. sc. 3.]

MASSINGER.

Born at Salisbury, 1584.--Died, 1640.

With regard to Massinger, observe,

1. The vein of satire on the times; but this is not as in Shakspeare,

where the natures evolve themselves according to their incidental

disproportions, from excess, deficiency, or mislocation, of one or more

of the component elements; but is merely satire on what is attributed to

them by others.

2. His excellent metre--a better model for dramatists in general to

imitate than Shakspeare's,--even if a dramatic taste existed in the

frequenters of the stage, and could be gratified in the present size and

management, or rather mismanagement, of the two patent theatres. I do

not mean that Massinger's verse is superior to Shakspeare's or equal to

it. Far from it; but it is much more easily constructed and may be more

successfully adopted by writers in the present day. It is the nearest

approach to the language of real life at all compatible with a fixed

metre. In Massinger, as in all our poets before Dryden, in order to make

harmonious verse in the reading, it is absolutely necessary that the

meaning should be understood;--when the meaning is once seen, then the

harmony is perfect. Whereas in Pope and in most of the writers who

followed in his school, it is the mechanical metre which determines the

sense.

3. The impropriety, and indecorum of demeanour in his favourite

characters, as in Bertoldo in the Maid of Honour, who is a swaggerer,

talking to his sovereign what no sovereign could endure, and to

gentlemen what no gentleman would answer without pulling his nose.

4. Shakspeare's Ague-cheek, Osric, &c. are displayed through others, in

the course of social intercourse, by the mode of their performing some

office in which they are employed; but Massinger's 'Sylli' come forward

to declare themselves fools 'ad arbitrium auctoris,' and so the diction

always needs the 'subintelligitur' ('the man looks as if he thought so

and so,') expressed in the language of the satirist, and not in that of

the man himself:--

'Sylli.' You may, madam,

Perhaps, believe that I in this use art

To make you dote upon me, by exposing

My more than most rare features to your view;

But I, as I have ever done, deal simply,

A mark of sweet simplicity, ever noted

In the family of the Syllis. Therefore, lady,

Look not with too much contemplation on me;

If you do, you are in the suds.

'Maid of Honour', act i. sc. 2.

The author mixes his own feelings and judgments concerning the presumed

fool; but the man himself, till mad, fights up against them, and

betrays, by his attempts to modify them, that he is no fool at all, but

one gifted with activity and copiousness of thought, image and

expression, which belong not to a fool, but to a man of wit making

himself merry with his own character.

5. There is an utter want of preparation in the decisive acts of

Massinger's characters, as in Camiola and Aurelia in the Maid of Honour.

Why? Because the 'dramatis personae' were all planned each by itself.

Whereas in Shakspeare, the play is 'syngenesia;' each character has,

indeed, a life of its own, and is an 'individuum' of itself, but yet an

organ of the whole, as the heart in the human body. Shakspeare was a

great comparative anatomist.

Hence Massinger and all, indeed, but Shakspeare, take a dislike to their

own characters, and spite themselves upon them by making them talk like

fools or monsters; as Fulgentio in his visit to Camiola, (Act ii. sc.

2.) Hence too, in Massinger, the continued flings at kings, courtiers,

and all the favourites of fortune, like one who had enough of intellect

to see injustice in his own inferiority in the share of the good things

of life, but not genius enough to rise above it, and forget himself.

Beaumont and Fletcher have the same vice in the opposite pole, a

servility of sentiment and a spirit of partizanship with the monarchical

faction.

6. From the want of a guiding point in Massinger's characters, you never

know what they are about. In fact they have no character.

7. Note the faultiness of his soliloquies, with connectives and

arrangements, that have no other motive but the fear lest the audience

should not understand him.

8. A play of Massinger's produces no one single effect, whether arising

from the spirit of the whole, as in the As You Like It; or from any one

indisputably prominent character as Hamlet. It is just "which you like

best, gentlemen!"

9. The unnaturally irrational passions and strange whims of feeling

which Massinger delights to draw, deprive the reader of all sound

interest in the characters;--as in Mathias in the Picture, and in other

instances.

10. The comic scenes in Massinger not only do not harmonize with the

tragic, not only interrupt the feeling, but degrade the characters that

are to form any part in the action of the piece, so as to render them

unfit for any tragic interest. At least, they do not concern, or act

upon, or modify, the principal characters. As when a gentleman is

insulted by a mere blackguard,--it is the same as if any other accident

of nature had occurred, a pig run under his legs, or his horse thrown

him. There is no dramatic interest in it.

I like Massinger's comedies better than his tragedies, although where

the situation requires it, he often rises into the truly tragic and

pathetic. He excells in narration, and for the most part displays his

mere story with skill. But he is not a poet of high imagination; he is

like a Flemish painter, in whose delineations objects appear as they do

in nature, have the same force and truth, and produce the same effect

upon the spectator. But Shakspeare is beyond this;--he always by

metaphors and figures involves in the thing considered a universe of

past and possible experiences; he mingles earth, sea and air, gives a

soul to every thing, and at the same time that he inspires human

feelings, adds a dignity in his images to human nature itself:--

Full many a glorious morning have I seen

Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye;

Kissing with golden face the meadows green,

Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchymy, &c.

(33rd Sonnet.)

'Note.'--Have I not over-rated Gifford's edition of Massinger?--Not,--if

I have, as but just is, main reference to the restitution of the text;

but yes, perhaps, if I were talking of the notes. These are more often

wrong than right. In the Maid of Honour, Act i. sc. 5. Astutio describes

Fulgentio as "A gentleman, yet no lord." Gifford supposes a

transposition of the press for "No gentleman, yet a lord." But this

would have no connection with what follows; and we have only to

recollect that "lord" means a lord of lands, to see that the after lines

are explanatory. He is a man of high birth, but no landed property;--as

to the former, he is a distant branch of the blood royal;--as to the

latter, his whole rent lies in a narrow compass, the king's ear! In the

same scene the text stands:

'Bert'. No! they are useful

For your 'imitation;'--I remember you, &c.;--

and Gifford condemns Mason's conjecture of 'initiation' as void of

meaning and harmony. Now my ear deceives me if 'initiation' be not the

right word. In fact,'imitation' is utterly impertinent to all that

follows. Bertoldo tells Antonio that he had been initiated in the

manners suited to the court by two or three sacred beauties, and that a

similar experience would be equally useful for his initiation into the

camp. Not a word of his imitation. Besides, I say the rhythm requires

'initiation,' and is lame as the verse now stands.

LECTURE VIII.

'DON QUIXOTE'.

CERVANTES.

Born at Madrid, 1547;-Shakspeare, 1564; both put off mortality on the

same day, the 23rd of April, 1616,--the one in the sixty-ninth, the

other in the fifty-second, year of his life. The resemblance in their

physiognomies is striking, but with a predominance of acuteness in

Cervantes, and of reflection in Shakspeare, which is the specific

difference between the Spanish and English characters of mind.

I. The nature and eminence of Symbolical writing;--

II. Madness, and its different sorts, (considered without pretension to

medical science);--

To each of these, or at least to my own notions respecting them, I must

devote a few words of explanation, in order to render the after critique

on Don Quixote, the master work of Cervantes' and his country's genius

easily and throughout intelligible. This is not the least valuable,

though it may most often be felt by us both as the heaviest and least

entertaining portion of these critical disquisitions: for without it, I

must have foregone one at least of the two appropriate objects of a

Lecture, that of interesting you during its delivery, and of leaving

behind in your minds the germs of after-thought, and the materials for

future enjoyment. To have been assured by several of my intelligent

auditors that they have reperused Hamlet or Othello with increased

satisfaction in consequence of the new points of view in which I had

placed those characters--is the highest compliment I could receive or

desire; and should the address of this evening open out a new source of

pleasure, or enlarge the former in your perusal of Don Quixote, it will

compensate for the failure of any personal or temporary object.

I. The Symbolical cannot, perhaps, be better defined in distinction from

the Allegorical, than that it is always itself a part of that, of the

whole of which it is the representative.--"Here comes a sail,"--(that

is, a ship) is a symbolical expression. "Behold our lion!" when we speak

of some gallant soldier, is allegorical. Of most importance to our

present subject is this point, that the latter (the allegory) cannot be

other than spoken consciously;--whereas in the former (the symbol) it

is very possible that the general truth represented may be working

unconsciously in the writer's mind during the construction of the

symbol;--and it proves itself by being produced out of his own mind,--as

the Don Quixote out of the perfectly sane mind of Cervantes, and not by

outward observation, or historically. The advantage of symbolical

writing over allegory is, that it presumes no disjunction of faculties,

but simple predominance.

II. Madness may be divided as--

1. hypochondriasis; or, the man is out of his senses.

2. derangement of the understanding; or, the man is out of his wits.

3. loss of reason.

4. frenzy, or derangement of the sensations.

Cervantes's own preface to Don Quixote is a perfect model of the gentle,

every where intelligible, irony in the best essays of the Tatler and the

Spectator. Equally natural and easy, Cervantes is more spirited than

Addison; whilst he blends with the terseness of Swift, an exquisite flow

and music of style, and above all, contrasts with the latter by the

sweet temper of a superior mind, which saw the follies of mankind, and

was even at the moment suffering severely under hard mistreatment;[1]

and yet seems every where to have but one thought as the undersong--

"Brethren! with all your faults I love you still!"--or as a mother that

chides the child she loves, with one hand holds up the rod, and with the

other wipes off each tear as it drops!

Don Quixote was neither fettered to the earth by want, nor holden in its

embraces by wealth;--of which, with the temperance natural to his

country, as a Spaniard, he had both far too little, and somewhat too

much, to be under any necessity of thinking about it. His age too,

fifty, may be well supposed to prevent his mind from being tempted out

of itself by any of the lower passions;--while his habits, as a very

early riser and a keen sportsman, were such as kept his spare body in

serviceable subjection to his will, and yet by the play of hope that

accompanies pursuit, not only permitted, but assisted, his fancy in

shaping what it would. Nor must we omit his meagerness and entire

featureliness, face and frame, which Cervantes gives us at once: "It is

said that his surname was 'Quixada' or 'Quesada,'" &c.--even in this

trifle showing an exquisite judgment;--just once insinuating the

association of 'lantern-jaws' into the reader's mind, yet not retaining

it obtrusively like the names in old farces and in the Pilgrim's

Progress,--but taking for the regular appellative one which had the no

meaning of a proper name in real life, and which yet was capable of

recalling a number of very different, but all pertinent, recollections,

as old armour, the precious metals hidden in the ore, &c. Don Quixote's

leanness and featureliness are happy exponents of the excess of the

formative or imaginative in him, contrasted with Sancho's plump

rotundity, and recipiency of external impression.

He has no knowledge of the sciences or scientific arts which give to the

meanest portions of matter an intellectual interest, and which enable

the mind to decypher in the world of the senses the invisible

agency--that alone, of which the world's phenomena are the effects and

manifestations,--and thus, as in a mirror, to contemplate its own

reflex, its life in the powers, its imagination in the symbolic forms,

its moral instincts in the final causes, and its reason in the laws of

material nature: but--estranged from all the motives to observation from

self-interest--the persons that surround him too few and too familiar to

enter into any connection with his thoughts, or to require any

adaptation of his conduct to their particular characters or relations to

himself--his judgment lies fallow, with nothing to excite, nothing to

employ it. Yet,--and here is the point, where genius even of the most

perfect kind, allotted but to few in the course of many ages, does not

preclude the necessity in part, and in part counterbalance the craving

by sanity of judgment, without which genius either cannot be, or cannot

at least manifest itself,--the dependency of our nature asks for some

confirmation from without, though it be only from the shadows of other

men's fictions.

Too uninformed, and with too narrow a sphere of power and opportunity to

rise into the scientific artist, or to be himself a patron of art, and

with too deep a principle and too much innocence to become a mere

projector, Don Quixote has recourse to romances:--

His curiosity and extravagant fondness herein arrived at that pitch,

that he sold many acres of arable land to purchase books of

knight-errantry, and carried home all he could lay hands on of that

kind! (C.I.)

The more remote these romances were from the language of common life,

the more akin on that very account were they to the shapeless dreams and

strivings of his own mind;--a mind, which possessed not the highest

order of genius which lives in an atmosphere of power over mankind, but

that minor kind which, in its restlessness, seeks for a vivid

representative of its own wishes, and substitutes the movements of that

objective puppet for an exercise of actual power in and by itself. The

more wild and improbable these romances were, the more were they akin to

his will, which had been in the habit of acting as an unlimited monarch

over the creations of his fancy! Hence observe how the startling of the

remaining common sense, like a glimmering before its death, in the

notice of the impossible-improbable of Don Belianis, is dismissed by Don

Quixote as impertinent:--

'He had some doubt' [2] as to the dreadful wounds which Don Belianis

gave and received: for he imagined, that notwithstanding the most

expert surgeons had cured him, his face and whole body must still be

full of seams and scars. 'Nevertheless' [3] he commended in his author

the concluding his book with a promise of that unfinishable adventure!

C. 1.

Hence also his first intention to turn author; but who, with such a

restless struggle within him, could content himself with writing in a

remote village among apathists and ignorants? During his colloquies with

the village priest and the barber surgeon, in which the fervour of

critical controversy feeds the passion and gives reality to its

object--what more natural than that the mental striving should become an

eddy?--madness may perhaps be denned as the circling in a stream which

should be progressive and adaptive: Don Quixote grows at length to be a

man out of his wits; his understanding is deranged; and hence without

the least deviation from the truth of nature, without losing the least

trait of personal individuality, he becomes a substantial living

allegory, or personification of the reason and the moral sense, divested

of the judgment and the understanding. Sancho is the converse. He is the

common sense without reason or imagination; and Cervantes not only shows

the excellence and power of reason in, Don Quixote, but in both him and

Sancho the mischiefs resulting from a severance of the two main

constituents of sound intellectual and moral action. Put him and his

master together, and they form a perfect intellect; but they are

separated and without cement; and hence each having a need of the other

for its own completeness, each has at times a mastery over the other.

For the common sense, although it may see the practical inapplicability

of the dictates of the imagination or abstract reason, yet cannot help

submitting to them. These two characters possess the world, alternately

and interchangeably the cheater and the cheated. To impersonate them,

and to combine the permanent with the individual, is one of the highest

creations of genius, and has been achieved by Cervantes and Shakspeare,

almost alone.

Observations on particular passages,

(B. I. c. 1.)

But not altogether approving of his having broken it to pieces with so

much ease, to secure himself from the like danger for the future, he

made it over again, fencing it with small bars of iron within, in such

a manner, 'that he rested satisfied of its strength; and without

caring to make a fresh experiment on it, he approved and looked upon

it as a most excellent helmet.'

His not trying his improved scull-cap is an exquisite trait of human

character, founded on the oppugnancy of the soul in such a state to any

disturbance by doubt of its own broodings. Even the long deliberation

about his horse's name is full of meaning;--for in these day-dreams the

greater part of the history passes and is carried on in words, which

look forward to other words as what will be said of them.

(Ib.)

Near the place where he lived, there dwelt a very comely country lass,

with whom he had formerly been in love; though, as it is supposed, she

never knew it, nor troubled herself about it.

The nascent love for the country lass, but without any attempt at

utterance, or an opportunity of knowing her, except as the hint--the

[Greek (transliterated): oti esti]--of the inward imagination, is

happily conceived in both parts;--first, as confirmative of the

shrinking back of the mind on itself, and its dread of having a

cherished image destroyed by its own judgment; and secondly, as showing

how necessarily love is the passion of novels. Novels are to love as

fairy tales to dreams. I never knew but two men of taste and feeling who

could not understand why I was delighted with the Arabian Nights' Tales,

and they were likewise the only persons in my knowledge who scarcely

remembered having ever dreamed. Magic and war--itself a magic--are the

day-dreams of childhood; love is the day-dream of youth and early

manhood.

(C. 2.)

"Scarcely had ruddy Phoebus spread the golden tresses of his beauteous

hair over the face of the wide and spacious earth; and scarcely had

the little painted birds, with the sweet and mellifluous harmony of

their forked tongues, saluted the approach of rosy Aurora, who,

quitting the soft couch of her jealous husband, disclosed herself to

mortals through the gates of the Mauchegan horizon; when the renowned

Don Quixote," &c.

How happily already is the abstraction from the senses, from

observation, and the consequent confusion of the judgment, marked in

this description! The knight is describing objects immediate to his

senses and sensations without borrowing a single trait from either.

Would it be difficult to find parallel descriptions in Dryden's plays

and in those of his successors?

(C. 3.)

The host is here happily conceived as one who from his past life as a

sharper, was capable of entering into and humouring the knight, and so

perfectly in character, that he precludes a considerable source of

improbability in the future narrative, by enforcing upon Don Quixote the

necessity of taking money with him.

(C. 3.)

"Ho, there, whoever thou art, rash knight, that approachest to touch

the arms of the most valorous adventurer that ever girded sword," &c.

Don Quixote's high eulogiums on himself--"the most valorous

adventurer!"--but it is not himself that he has before him, but the idol

of his imagination, the imaginary being whom he is acting. And this,

that it is entirely a third person, excuses his heart from the otherwise

inevitable charge of selfish vanity; and so by madness itself he

preserves our esteem, and renders those actions natural by which he, the

first person, deserves it.

(C. 4.)

Andres and his master. The manner in which Don Quixote redressed this

wrong, is a picture of the true revolutionary passion in its first

honest state, while it is yet only a bewilderment of the understanding.

You have a benevolence limitless in its prayers, which are in fact

aspirations towards omnipotence; but between it and beneficence the

bridge of judgment--that is, of measurement of personal

power--intervenes, and must be passed. Otherwise you will be bruised by

the leap into the chasm, or be drowned in the revolutionary river, and

drag others with you to the same fate.

(C. 4.)

Merchants of Toledo.

When they were come so near as to be seen and heard, Don Quixote

raised his voice, and with arrogant air cried out: "Let the whole

world stand; if the whole world does not confess that there is not in

the whole world a damsel more beautiful than," &c.

Now mark the presumption which follows the self-complacency of the last

act! That was an honest attempt to redress a real wrong; this is an

arbitrary determination to enforce a Brissotine or Rousseau's ideal on

all his fellow creatures.

Let the whole world stand!

'If there had been any experience in proof of the excellence of our

code, where would be our superiority in this enlightened age?'

"No! the business is that without seeing her, you believe, confess,

affirm, swear, and maintain it; _and if not, I challenge you all to

battle_." [4]

Next see the persecution and fury excited by opposition however

moderate! The only words listened to are those, that without their

context and their conditionals, and transformed into positive

assertions, might give some shadow of excuse for the violence shown!

This rich story ends, to the compassion of the men in their senses, in a

sound rib-roasting of the idealist by the muleteer, the mob. And happy

for thee, poor knight! that the mob were against thee! For had they been

with thee, by the change of the moon and of them, thy head would have

been off.

(C. 5.) first part--The idealist recollects the causes that had been

accessary to the reverse and attempts to remove them--too late. He is

beaten and disgraced.

(C. 6.) This chapter on Don Quixote's library proves that the author did

not wish to destroy the romances, but to cause them to be read as

romances--that is, for their merits as poetry.

(C. 7.)

Among other things, Don Quixote told him, he should dispose himself to

go with him willingly;--for some time or other such an adventure might

present, that an island might be won, in the turn of a hand, and he be

left governor thereof.

At length the promises of the imaginative reason begin to act on the

plump, sensual, honest common sense accomplice,--but unhappily not in

the same person, and without the 'copula' of the judgment,--in hopes of

the substantial good things, of which the former contemplated only the

glory and the colours.

(C. 7.)

Sancho Panza went riding upon his ass, like any patriarch, with his

wallet and leathern bottle, and with a vehement desire to find himself

governor of the island which his master had promised him.

The first relief from regular labour is so pleasant to poor Sancho!

(C. 8.)

"I no gentleman! I swear by the great God, thou liest, as I am a

Christian. Biscainer by land, gentleman by sea, gentleman for the

devil, and thou liest: look then if thou hast any thing else to say."

This Biscainer is an excellent image of the prejudices and bigotry

provoked by the idealism of a speculator. This story happily detects the

trick which our imagination plays in the description of single combats:

only change the preconception of the magnificence of the combatants, and

all is gone.

(B. II. c. 2.)

"Be pleased, my lord Don Quixote, to bestow upon me the government of

that island," &c.

Sancho's eagerness for his government, the nascent lust of actual

democracy, or isocracy!

(C. 2.)

"But tell me, on your life, have you ever seen a more valorous knight

than I, upon the whole face of the known earth? Have you read in story

of any other, who has, or ever had, more bravery in assailing, more

breath in holding out, more dexterity in wounding, or more address in

giving a fall?"--"The truth is," answered Sancho, "that I never read

any history at all; for I can neither read nor write; but what I dare

affirm is, that I never served a bolder master," &c.

This appeal to Sancho, and Sancho's answer are exquisitely humorous. It

is impossible not to think of the French bulletins and proclamations.

Remark the necessity under which we are of being sympathized with, fly

as high into abstraction as we may, and how constantly the imagination

is recalled to the ground of our common humanity! And note a little

further on, the knight's easy vaunting of his balsam, and his quietly

deferring the making and application of it.

(C. 3.) The speech before the goatherds:

"Happy times and happy ages," &c. [5]

Note the rhythm of this, and the admirable beauty and wisdom of the

thoughts in themselves, but the total want of judgment in Don Quixote's

addressing them to such an audience.

(B. III. c. 3.) Don Quixote's balsam, and the vomiting and consequent

relief; an excellent hit at 'panacea nostrums', which cure the patient

by his being himself cured of the medicine by revolting nature.

(C. 4.)

"Peace! and have patience; the day will come," &c.

The perpetual promises of the imagination!

(Ib.)

"Your Worship," said Sancho, "would make a better preacher than knight

errant!"

Exactly so. This is the true moral.

(C. 6.)

The uncommon beauty of the description in the commencement of this

chapter. In truth, the whole of it seems to put all nature in its

heights and its humiliations, before us.

(Ib.) Sancho's story of the goats:

"Make account, he carried them all over," said Don Quixote, "and do

not be going and coming in this manner; for at this rate, you will not

have done carrying them over in a twelvemonth." "How many are passed

already?" said Sancho, &c.

Observe the happy contrast between the all-generalizing mind of the mad

knight, and Sancho's all-particularizing memory. How admirable a symbol

of the dependence of all 'copula' on the higher powers of the mind, with

the single exception of the succession in time and the accidental

relations of space. Men of mere common sense have no theory or means of

making one fact more important or prominent than the rest; if they lose

one link, all is lost. Compare Mrs. Quickly and the Tapster. [6] And

note also Sancho's good heart, when his master is about to leave him.

Don Quixote's conduct upon discovering the fulling-hammers, proves he

was meant to be in his senses. Nothing can be better conceived than his

fit of passion at Sancho's laughing, and his sophism of

self-justification by the courage he had shown.

Sancho is by this time cured, through experience, as far as his own

errors are concerned; yet still is he lured on by the unconquerable awe

of his master's superiority, even when he is cheating him.

(C. 8.)

The adventure of the Galley-slaves. I think this is the only passage of

moment in which Cervantes slips the mask of his hero, and speaks for

himself.

(C. 9.)

Don Quixote desired to have it, and bade him take the money, and keep

it for himself. Sancho kissed his hands for the favour, &c.

Observe Sancho's eagerness to avail himself of the permission of his

master, who, in the war sports of knight-errantry, had, without any

selfish dishonesty, overlooked the 'meum' and 'tuum.' Sancho's

selfishness is modified by his involuntary goodness of heart, and Don

Quixote's flighty goodness is debased by the involuntary or unconscious

selfishness of his vanity and self-applause.

(C. 10.)

Cardenio is the madman of passion, who meets and easily overthrows for

the moment the madman of imagination. And note the contagion of madness

of any kind, upon Don Quixote's interruption of Cardenio's story.

(C. 11.)

Perhaps the best specimen of Sancho's proverbializing is this:

"And I (Don Q.) say again, they lie, and will lie two hundred times

more, all who say, or think her so." "I neither say, nor think so,"

answered Sancho: "let those who say it, eat the lie, and swallow it

with their bread: whether they were guilty or no, they have given an

account to God before now: I come from my vineyard, I know nothing; I

am no friend to inquiring into other men's lives; 'for' he that buys

and lies shall find the lie left in his purse behind; 'besides,' naked

was I born, and naked I remain; I neither win nor lose; if they were

guilty, what is that to me? Many think to find bacon, where there is

not so much as a pin to hang it on: 'but' who can hedge in the cuckoo?

'Especially,' do they spare God himself?"

(Ib.)

"And it is no great matter, if it be in another hand; for by what I

remember, Dulcinea can neither write nor read," &c.

The wonderful twilight of the mind! and mark Cervantes's courage in

daring to present it, and trust to a distant posterity for an

appreciation of its truth to nature.

(P. II. B. III. c. 9.)

Sancho's account of what he had seen on Clavileno is a counterpart in

his style to Don Quixote's adventures in the cave of Montesinos. This

last is the only impeachment of the knight's moral character; Cervantes

just gives one instance of the veracity failing before the strong

cravings of the imagination for something real and external; the picture

would not have been complete without this; and yet it is so well

managed, that the reader has no unpleasant sense of Don Quixote having

told a lie. It is evident that he hardly knows whether it was a dream or

not; and goes to the enchanter to inquire the real nature of the

adventure.

[Footnote 1: 'Bien como quien se engendrò en una carcel, donde toda

incomodidad tiene su assiento, y todo triste ruido hace su

habitacion.' Like one you may suppose born in a prison, where every

inconvenience keeps its residence, and every dismal sound its

habitation. Pref. Jarvis's Tr. Ed.]

[Footnote 2: 'No estaba muy bien con'. Ed.]

[Footnote 3: Pero con todo. Ed.]

[Footnote 4: 'Donde no, conmigo sois en batalla, gente descomunal!'

Ed.]

[Footnote 5: 'Dichosa edad y siglos dichosos aquellos, &c.' Ed.]

[Footnote 6: See the 'Friend', vol. iii. p. 138. Ed.]

SUMMARY ON CERVANTES.

A Castilian of refined manners; a gentleman, true to religion, and true

to honour.

A scholar and a soldier, and fought under the banners of Don John of

Austria, at Lepanto, lost his arm and was captured.

Endured slavery not only with fortitude, but with mirth; and by the

superiority of nature, mastered and overawed his barbarian owner.

Finally ransomed, he resumed his native destiny, the awful task of

achieving fame; and for that reason died poor and a prisoner, while

nobles and kings over their goblets of gold gave relish to their

pleasures by the charms of his divine genius. He was the inventor of

novels for the Spaniards, and in his Persilis and Sigismunda, the

English may find the germ of their Robinson Crusoe.

The world was a drama to him. His own thoughts, in spite of poverty and

sickness, perpetuated for him the feelings of youth. He painted only

what he knew and had looked into, but he knew and had looked into much

indeed; and his imagination was ever at hand to adapt and modify the

world of his experience. Of delicious love he fabled, yet with stainless

virtue.

LECTURE IX.

ON THE DISTINCTIONS OF THE WITTY, THE DROLL, THE ODD, AND THE HUMOUROUS;

THE NATURE AND CONSTITUENTS OF HUMOUR;--RABELAIS--SWIFT--STERNE.

I. Perhaps the most important of our intellectual operations are those

of detecting the difference in similar, and the identity in dissimilar,

things. Out of the latter operation it is that wit arises; and it,

generically regarded, consists in presenting thoughts or images in an

unusual connection with each other, for the purpose of exciting pleasure

by the surprise. This connection may be real; and there is in fact a

scientific wit; though where the object, consciously entertained, is

truth, and not amusement, we commonly give it some higher name. But in

wit popularly understood, the connection may be, and for the most part

is, apparent only, and transitory; and this connection may be by

thoughts, or by words, or by images. The first is our Butler's especial

eminence; the second, Voltaire's; the third, which we oftener call

fancy, constitutes the larger and more peculiar part of the wit of

Shakspeare. You can scarcely turn to a single speech of Falstaff's

without finding instances of it. Nor does wit always cease to deserve

the name by being transient, or incapable of analysis. I may add that

the wit of thoughts belongs eminently to the Italians, that of words to

the French, and that of images to the English.

II. Where the laughable is its own end, and neither inference, nor moral

is intended, or where at least the writer would wish it so to appear,

there arises what we call drollery. The pure, unmixed, ludicrous or

laughable belongs exclusively to the understanding, and must be

presented under the form of the senses; it lies within the spheres of

the eye and the ear, and hence is allied to the fancy. It does not

appertain to the reason or the moral sense, and accordingly is alien to

the imagination. I think Aristotle has already excellently defined the

laughable,[Greek (transliterated): tho geloion], as consisting of, or

depending on, what is out of its proper time and place, yet without

danger or pain. Here th'impropriety'--[Greek (transliterated): tho

ahtopon]--is the positive qualification; the 'dangerlessness'--[Greek

(transliterated): tho akindunon]--the negative. Neither the understanding

without an object of the senses, as for example, a mere notional error,

or idiocy;--nor any external object, unless attributed to the

understanding, can produce the poetically laughable. Nay, even in

ridiculous positions of the body laughed at by the vulgar, there is a

subtle personification always going on, which acts on the, perhaps,

unconscious mind of the spectator as a symbol of intellectual character.

And hence arises the imperfect and awkward effect of comic stories of

animals; because although the understanding is satisfied in them, the

senses are not. Hence too, it is, that the true ludicrous is its own

end. When serious satire commences, or satire that is felt as serious,

however comically drest, free and genuine laughter ceases; it becomes

sardonic. This you experience in reading Young, and also not

unfrequently in Butler. The true comic is the blossom of the nettle.

III. When words or images are placed in unusual juxta-position rather

than connection, and are so placed merely because the juxta-position is

unusual--we have the odd or the grotesque; the occasional use of which

in the minor ornaments of architecture, is an interesting problem for a

student in the psychology of the Fine Arts.

IV. In the simply laughable there is a mere disproportion between a

definite act and a definite purpose or end, or a disproportion of the

end itself to the rank or circumstances of the definite person; but

humour is of more difficult description. I must try to define it in the

first place by its points of diversity from the former species. Humour

does not, like the different kinds of wit, which is impersonal, consist

wholly in the understanding and the senses. No combination of thoughts,

words, or images will of itself constitute humour, unless some

peculiarity of individual temperament and character be indicated

thereby, as the cause of the same. Compare the comedies of Congreve with

the Falstaff in Henry IV. or with Sterne's Corporal Trim, Uncle Toby,

and Mr. Shandy, or with some of Steele's charming papers in the Tatler,

and you will feel the difference better than I can express it. Thus

again, (to take an instance from the different works of the same

writer), in Smollett's Strap, his Lieutenant Bowling, his Morgan the

honest Welshman, and his Matthew Bramble, we have exquisite

humour,--while in his Peregrine Pickle we find an abundance of drollery,

which too often degenerates into mere oddity; in short, we feel that a

number of things are put together to counterfeit humour, but that there

is no growth from within. And this indeed is the origin of the word,

derived from the humoral pathology, and excellently described by Ben

Jonson:

So in every human body,

The choler, melancholy, phlegm, and blood,

By reason that they flow continually

In some one part, and are not continent,

Receive the name of humours. Now thus far

It may, by metaphor, apply itself

Unto the general disposition:

As when some one peculiar quality

Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw

All his effects, his spirits, and his powers,

In their confluctions, all to run one way,

This may be truly said to be a humour. [1]

Hence we may explain the congeniality of humour with pathos, so

exquisite in Sterne and Smollett, and hence also the tender feeling

which we always have for, and associate with, the humours or

hobby-horses of a man. First, we respect a humourist, because absence of

interested motive is the ground-work of the character, although the

imagination of an interest may exist in the individual himself, as if a

remarkably simple-hearted man should pride himself on his knowledge of

the world, and how well he can manage it:--and secondly, there always is

in a genuine humour an acknowledgement of the hollowness and farce of the

world, and its disproportion to the godlike within us. And it follows

immediately from this, that whenever particular acts have reference to

particular selfish motives, the humourous bursts into the indignant and

abhorring; whilst all follies not selfish are pardoned or palliated. The

danger of this habit, in respect of pure morality, is strongly

exemplified in Sterne.

This would be enough, and indeed less than this has passed, for a

sufficient account of humour, if we did not recollect that not every

predominance of character, even where not precluded by the moral sense,

as in criminal dispositions, constitutes what we mean by a humourist, or

the presentation of its produce, humour. What then is it? Is it

manifold? Or is there some one humorific point common to all that can be

called humourous?--I am not prepared to answer this fully, even if my

time permitted; but I think there is;--and that it consists in a certain

reference to the general and the universal, by which the finite great is

brought into identity with the little, or the little with the finite

great, so as to make both nothing in comparison with the infinite. The

little is made great, and the great little, in order to destroy both;

because all is equal in contrast with the infinite. "It is not without

reason, brother Toby, that learned men write dialogues on long

noses."[2] I would suggest, therefore, that whenever a finite is

contemplated in reference to the infinite, whether consciously or

unconsciously, humour essentially arises. In the highest humour, at

least, there is always a reference to, and a connection with, some

general power not finite, in the form of some finite ridiculously

disproportionate in our feelings to that of which it is, nevertheless,

the representative, or by which it is to be displayed. Humourous

writers, therefore, as Sterne in particular, delight, after much

preparation, to end in nothing, or in a direct contradiction.

That there is some truth in this definition, or origination of humour,

is evident; for you cannot conceive a humourous man who does not give

some disproportionate generality, or even a universality to his

hobby-horse, as is the case with Mr. Shandy; or at least there is an

absence of any interest but what arises from the humour itself, as in my

Uncle Toby, and it is the idea of the soul, of its undefined capacity

and dignity, that gives the sting to any absorption of it by any one

pursuit, and this not in respect of the humourist as a mere member of

society for a particular, however mistaken, interest, but as a man.

The English humour is the most thoughtful, the Spanish the most

etherial--the most ideal--of modern literature. Amongst the classic

ancients there was little or no humour in the foregoing sense of the

term. Socrates, or Plato under his name, gives some notion of humour in

the Banquet, when he argues that tragedy and comedy rest upon the same

ground. But humour properly took its rise in the middle ages; and the

Devil, the Vice of the mysteries, incorporates the modern humour in its

elements. It is a spirit measured by disproportionate finites. The Devil

is not, indeed, perfectly humourous; but that is only because he is the

extreme of all humour.

[Footnote 1: Every Man Out Of His Humour. Prologue.]

[Footnote 2: Trist. Sh. Vol. iii. c. 37.]

RABELAIS. [1]

Born at Chinon, 1483-4.--Died 1553.

One cannot help regretting that no friend of Rabelais, (and surely

friends he must have had), has left an authentic account of him. His

buffoonery was not merely Brutus' rough stick, which contained a rod of

gold; it was necessary as an amulet against the monks and bigots. Beyond

a doubt, he was among the deepest as well as boldest thinkers of his

age. Never was a more plausible, and seldom, I am persuaded, a less

appropriate line than the thousand times quoted,

Rabelais laughing in his easy chair--

of Mr. Pope. The caricature of his filth and zanyism proves how fully he

both knew and felt the danger in which he stood. I could write a

treatise in proof and praise of the morality and moral elevation of

Rabelais' work which would make the church stare and the conventicle

groan, and yet should be the truth and nothing but the truth. I class

Rabelais with the creative minds of the world, Shakspeare, Dante,

Cervantes, &c.

All Rabelais' personages are phantasmagoric allegories, but Panurge

above all. He is throughout the [Greek (transliterated):

panourgia],--the wisdom, that is, the cunning of the human animal,--the

understanding, as the faculty of means to purposes without ultimate

ends, in the most comprehensive sense, and including art, sensuous

fancy, and all the passions of the understanding. It is impossible to

read Rabelais without an admiration mixed with wonder at the depth and

extent of his learning, his multifarious knowledge, and original

observation beyond what books could in that age have supplied him with.

(B. III. c. 9.)

How Panurge asketh counsel of Pantagruel, whether he should marry, yea

or no.

Note this incomparable chapter. Pantagruel stands for the reason as

contradistinguished from the understanding and choice, that is, from

Panurge; and the humour consists in the latter asking advice of the

former on a subject in which the reason can only give the inevitable

conclusion, the syllogistic 'ergo', from the premisses provided by the

understanding itself, which puts each case so as of necessity to

predetermine the verdict thereon. This chapter, independently of the

allegory, is an exquisite satire on the spirit in which people commonly

ask advice.

[Footnote 1: No note remains of that part of this Lecture which treated

of Rabelais. This seems, therefore, a convenient place for the reception

of some remarks written by Mr. C. in Mr. Gillman's copy of Rabelais,

about the year 1825. See Table Talk, vol. i. p. 177. Ed.]

SWIFT. [1]

Born in Dublin, 1667.--Died 1745.

In Swift's writings there is a false misanthropy grounded upon an

exclusive contemplation of the vices and follies of mankind, and this

misanthropic tone is also disfigured or brutalized by his obtrusion of

physical dirt and coarseness. I think Gulliver's Travels the great work

of Swift. In the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag he displays the

littleness and moral contemptibility of human nature; in that to the

Houyhnhnms he represents the disgusting spectacle of man with the

understanding only, without the reason or the moral feeling, and in his

horse he gives the misanthropic ideal of man--that is, a being virtuous

from rule and duty, but untouched by the principle of love.

[Footnote 1: From Mr. Green's note. Ed.]

STERNE.

Born at Clonmel, 1713.--Died 1768.

With regard to Sterne, and the charge of licentiousness which presses so

seriously upon his character as a writer, I would remark that there is a

sort of knowingness, the wit of which depends--1st, on the modesty it

gives pain to; or, 2dly, on the innocence and innocent ignorance over

which it triumphs; or, 3dly, on a certain oscillation in the

individual's own mind between the remaining good and the encroaching

evil of his nature--a sort of dallying with the devil--a fluxionary act

of combining courage and cowardice, as when a man snuffs a candle with

his fingers for the first time, or better still, perhaps, like that

trembling daring with which a child touches a hot tea urn, because it

has been forbidden; so that the mind has in its own white and black

angel the same or similar amusement, as may be supposed to take place

between an old debauchee and a prude,--she feeling resentment, on the

one hand, from a prudential anxiety to preserve appearances and have a

character, and, on the other, an inward sympathy with the enemy. We have

only to suppose society innocent, and then nine-tenths of this sort of

wit would be like a stone that falls in snow, making no sound because

exciting no resistance; the remainder rests on its being an offence

against the good manners of human nature itself.

This source, unworthy as it is, may doubtless be combined with wit,

drollery, fancy, and even humour, and we have only to regret the

misalliance; but that the latter are quite distinct from the former, may

be made evident by abstracting in our imagination the morality of the

characters of Mr. Shandy, my Uncle Toby, and Trim, which are all

antagonists to this spurious sort of wit, from the rest of Tristram

Shandy, and by supposing, instead of them, the presence of two or three

callous debauchees. The result will be pure disgust. Sterne cannot be

too severely censured for thus using the best dispositions of our nature

as the panders and condiments for the basest.

The excellencies of Sterne consist--

1. In bringing forward into distinct consciousness those minutiae of

thought and feeling which appear trifles, yet have an importance for the

moment, and which almost every man feels in one way or other. Thus is

produced the novelty of an individual peculiarity, together with the

interest of a something that belongs to our common nature. In short,

Sterne seizes happily on those points, in which every man is more or

less a humourist. And, indeed, to be a little more subtle, the

propensity to notice these things does itself constitute the humourist,

and the superadded power of so presenting them to men in general gives

us the man of humour. Hence the difference of the man of humour, the

effect of whose portraits does not depend on the felt presence of

himself, as a humourist, as in the instances of Cervantes and

Shakspeare--nay, of Rabelais too; and of the humourist, the effect of

whose works does very much depend on the sense of his own oddity, as in

Sterne's case, and perhaps Swift's; though Swift again would require a

separate classification.

2. In the traits of human nature, which so easily assume a particular

cast and colour from individual character. Hence this excellence and the

pathos connected with it quickly pass into humour, and form the ground

of it. See particularly the beautiful passage, so well known, of Uncle

Toby's catching and liberating the fly:

"Go,"--says he, one day at dinner, to an overgrown one which had

buzzed about his nose, and tormented him cruelly all dinner-time, and

which, after infinite attempts, he had caught at last, as it flew by

him;--"I'll not hurt thee," says my Uncle Toby, rising from his chair,

and going across the room, with the fly in his hand,--"I'll not hurt a

hair of thy head:--Go," says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his

hand as he spoke, to let it escape;--"go, poor devil, get thee gone,

why should I hurt thee? This world is surely wide enough to hold both

thee and me." (Vol. ii. ch. 12.)

Observe in this incident how individual character may be given by the

mere delicacy of presentation and elevation in degree of a common good

quality, humanity, which in itself would not be characteristic at all.

3. In Mr. Shandy's character,--the essence of which is a craving for

sympathy in exact proportion to the oddity and unsympathizability of

what he proposes;--this coupled with an instinctive desire to be at

least disputed with, or rather both in one, to dispute and yet to

agree--and holding as worst of all--to acquiesce without either

resistance or sympathy. This is charmingly, indeed, profoundly

conceived, and is psychologically and ethically true of all Mr.

Shandies. Note, too, how the contrasts of character, which are always

either balanced or remedied, increase the love between the brothers.

4. No writer is so happy as Sterne in the unexaggerated and truly

natural representation of that species of slander, which consists in

gossiping about our neighbours, as whetstones of our moral

discrimination; as if they were conscience-blocks which we used in our

apprenticeship, in order not to waste such precious materials as our own

consciences in the trimming and shaping of ourselves by

self-examination:--

Alas o'day!--had Mrs. Shandy (poor gentlewoman!) had but her wish in

going up to town just to lie in and come down again; which, they say,

she begged and prayed for upon her bare knees, and which, in my

opinion, considering the fortune which Mr. Shandy got with her, was no

such mighty matter to have complied with, the lady and her babe might

both of them have been alive at this hour. (Vol. i. c. 18.)

5. When you have secured a man's likings and prejudices in your favour,

you may then safely appeal to his impartial judgment. In the following

passage not only is acute sense shrouded in wit, but a life and a

character are added which exalt the whole into the dramatic:--

"I see plainly, Sir, by your looks" (or as the case happened) my

father would say--"that you do not heartily subscribe to this opinion

of mine--which, to those," he would add, "who have not carefully

sifted it to the bottom,--I own has an air more of fancy than of solid

reasoning in it; and yet, my dear Sir, if I may presume to know your

character, I am morally assured, I should hazard little in stating a

case to you, not as a party in the dispute, but as a judge, and

trusting my appeal upon it to your good sense and candid disquisition

in this matter; you are a person free from as many narrow prejudices

of education as most men; and, if I may presume to penetrate farther

into you, of a liberality of genius above bearing down an opinion,

merely because it wants friends. Your son,--your dear son,--from whose

sweet and open temper you have so much to expect,--your Billy, Sir!--

would you, for the world, have called him JUDAS? Would you, my dear

Sir," he would say, laying his hand upon your breast, with the

genteelest address,--and in that soft and irresistible 'piano' of

voice which the nature of the 'argumentum ad hominem' absolutely

requires,--"Would you, Sir, if a 'Jew' of a godfather had proposed the

name for your child, and offered you his purse along with it, would

you have consented to such a desecration of him? O my God!" he would

say, looking up, "if I know your temper rightly, Sir, you are

incapable of it;--you would have trampled upon the offer;--you would

have thrown the temptation at the tempter's head with abhorrence. Your

greatness of mind in this action, which I admire, with that generous

contempt of money, which you show me in the whole transaction, is

really noble;--and what renders it more so, is the principle of

it;--the workings of a parent's love upon the truth and conviction of

this very hypothesis, namely, that were your son called Judas,--the

sordid and treacherous idea, so inseparable from the name, would have

accompanied him through life like his shadow, and in the end made a

miser and a rascal of him, in spite, Sir, of your example." (Vol. i.

c. 19.)

6. There is great physiognomic tact in Sterne. See it particularly

displayed in his description of Dr. Slop, accompanied with all that

happiest use of drapery and attitude, which at once give reality by

individualizing and vividness by unusual, yet probable, combinations:--

Imagine to yourself a little squat, uncourtly figure of a Doctor Slop,

of about four feet and a half perpendicular height, with a breadth of

back, and a sesquipedality of belly, which might have done honour to a

serjeant in the horseguards. ... Imagine such a one;--for such I say,

were the outlines of Dr. Slop's figure, coming slowly along, foot by

foot, waddling through the dirt upon the 'vertebræ' of a little

diminutive pony, of a pretty colour--but of strength,--alack! scarce

able to have made an amble of it, under such a fardel, had the roads

been in an ambling condition;--they were not. Imagine to yourself

Obadiah mounted upon a strong monster of a coach-horse, pricked into a

full gallop, and making all practicable speed the adverse way. (Vol.

ii. c. 9.)

7. I think there is more humour in the single remark, which I have

quoted before--"Learned men, brother Toby, don't write dialogues upon

long noses for nothing!"--than in the whole Slawkenburghian tale that

follows, which is mere oddity interspersed with drollery.

8. Note Sterne's assertion of, and faith in, a moral good in the

characters of Trim, Toby, &c. as contrasted with the cold scepticism of

motives which is the stamp of the Jacobin spirit. Vol. v. c. 9.

9. You must bear in mind, in order to do justice to Rabelais and Sterne,

that by right of humoristic universality each part is essentially a

whole in itself. Hence the digressive spirit is not mere wantonness, but

in fact the very form and vehicle of their genius. The connection, such

as was needed, is given by the continuity of the characters.

Instances of different forms of wit, taken largely:

1. "Why are you reading romances at your age?"--"Why, I used to be fond

of history, but I have given it up,--it was so grossly improbable."

2. "Pray, sir, do it!--although you have promised me."

3. The Spartan mother's--

"Return with, or on, thy shield."

"My sword is too short!"--"Take a step forwarder."

4. The Gasconade:--

"I believe you, Sir! but you will excuse my repeating it on account of

my provincial accent."

5. Pasquil on Pope Urban, who had employed a committee to rip up the old

errors of his predecessors.

Some one placed a pair of spurs on the heels of the statue of St. Peter,

and a label from the opposite statue of St. Paul, on the same bridge;--

'St. Paul.' "Whither then are you bound?"

'St. Peter.' "I apprehend danger here;-they'll soon call me in

question for denying my Master."

'St. Paul.' "Nay, then, I had better be off too; for they'll question

me for having persecuted the Christians, before my conversion."

6. Speaking of the small German potentates, I dictated the

phrase,--'officious for equivalents.' This my amanuensis

wrote,--'fishing for elephants;'--which, as I observed at the time, was

a sort of Noah's angling, that could hardly have occurred, except at the

commencement of the Deluge.

LECTURE X.

DONNE--DANTE--MILTON--PARADISE LOST.

DONNE.[1]

Born in London, 1573.--Died, 1631.

I.

With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots,

Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots;

Rhyme's sturdy cripple, fancy's maze and clue,

Wit's forge and fire-blast, meaning's press and screw.

II

See lewdness and theology combin'd,--

A cynic and a sycophantic mind;

A fancy shar'd party per pale between

Death's heads and skeletons and Aretine!--

Not his peculiar defect or crime,

But the true current mintage of the time.

Such were the establish'd signs and tokens given

To mark a loyal churchman, sound and even,

Free from papistic and fanatic leaven.

The wit of Donne, the wit of Butler, the wit of Pope, the wit of

Congreve, the wit of Sheridan--how many disparate things are here

expressed by one and the same word, Wit!--Wonder-exciting vigour,

intenseness and peculiarity of thought, using at will the almost

boundless stores of a capacious memory, and exercised on subjects, where

we have no right to expect it--this is the wit of Donne! The four others

I am just in the mood to describe and inter-distinguish;--what a pity

that the marginal space will not let me!

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,

And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;

Where can we--find two fitter hemispheres

Without sharp north, without declining west?

'Good-Morrow', v. 15, &c.

The sense is;--Our mutual loves may in many respects be fitly compared

to corresponding hemispheres; but as no simile squares ('nihil simile

est idem'), so here the simile fails, for there is nothing in our loves

that corresponds to the cold north, or the declining west, which in two

hemispheres must necessarily be supposed. But an ellipse of such length

will scarcely rescue the line from the charge of nonsense or a bull.

'January,' 1829.

Woman's constancy.

A misnomer. The title ought to be--

Mutual Inconstancy.

Whether both th' Indias of spice and 'mine', &c.

'Sun Rising', v. 17.

And see at night thy western land of 'mine', &c.

'Progress of the Soul', 1 Song, 2. st.

This use of the word mine specifically for mines of gold, silver, or

precious stones, is, I believe, peculiar to Donne.

[Footnote 1: Nothing remains of what was said on Donne in this Lecture.

Here, therefore, as in previous like instances, the gap is filled up

with some notes written by Mr. Coleridge in a volume of Chalmers's

'Poets', belonging to Mr. Gillman. Ed.]

[Footnote 2: The verses were added in pencil to the collection of

commendatory lines; No. I. is Mr. C.'s; the publication of No. II. I

trust the all-accomplished author will, under the circumstances, pardon.

Numerous and elaborate notes by Mr. Coleridge on Donne's Sermons are in

existence, and will be published hereafter. Ed.]

DANTE.

Born at Florence, 1265.--Died, 1321.

As I remarked in a former Lecture on a different subject (for subjects

the most diverse in literature have still their tangents), the Gothic

character, and its good and evil fruits, appeared less in Italy than in

any other part of European Christendom. There was accordingly much less

romance, as that word is commonly understood; or, perhaps, more truly

stated, there was romance instead of chivalry. In Italy, an earlier

imitation of, and a more evident and intentional blending with, the

Latin literature took place than elsewhere. The operation of the feudal

system, too, was incalculably weaker, of that singular chain of

independent interdependents, the principle of which was a confederacy

for the preservation of individual, consistently with general, freedom.

In short, Italy, in the time of Dante, was an afterbirth of eldest

Greece, a renewal or a reflex of the old Italy under its kings and first

Roman consuls, a net-work of free little republics, with the same

domestic feuds, civil wars, and party spirit,--the same vices and

virtues produced on a similarly narrow theatre,--the existing state of

things being, as in all small democracies, under the working and

direction of certain individuals, to whose will even the laws were

swayed;--whilst at the same time the singular spectacle was exhibited

amidst all this confusion of the flourishing of commerce, and the

protection and encouragement of letters and arts. Never was the

commercial spirit so well reconciled to the nobler principles of social

polity as in Florence. It tended there to union and permanence and

elevation,--not as the overbalance of it in England is now doing, to

dislocation, change and moral degradation. The intensest patriotism

reigned in these communities, but confined and attached exclusively to

the small locality of the patriot's birth and residence; whereas in the

true Gothic feudalism, country was nothing but the preservation of

personal independence. But then, on the other hand, as a counterbalance

to these disuniting elements, there was in Dante's Italy, as in Greece,

a much greater uniformity of religion common to all than amongst the

northern nations.

Upon these hints the history of the republican aeras of ancient Greece

and modern Italy ought to be written. There are three kinds or stages of

historic narrative: 1. that of the annalist or chronicler, who deals

merely in facts and events arranged in order of time, having no

principle of selection, no plan of arrangement, and whose work properly

constitutes a supplement to the poetical writings of romance or heroic

legends: 2. that of the writer who takes his stand on some moral point,

and selects a series of events for the express purpose of illustrating

it, and in whose hands the narrative of the selected events is modified

by the principle of selection;--as Thucydides, whose object was to

describe the evils of democratic and aristocratic partizanships;--or

Polybius, whose design was to show the social benefits resulting from

the triumph and grandeur of Rome, in public institutions and military

discipline;--or Tacitus, whose secret aim was to exhibit the pressure

and corruptions of despotism;--in all which writers and others like

them, the ground-object of the historian colours with artificial lights

the facts which he relates: 3. and which in idea is the grandest-the

most truly, founded in philosophy--there is the Herodotean history,

which is not composed with reference to any particular causes, but

attempts to describe human nature itself on a great scale as a portion

of the drama of providence, the free will of man resisting the destiny

of events,--for the individuals often succeeding against it, but for the

race always yielding to it, and in the resistance itself invariably

affording means towards the completion of the ultimate result. Mitford's

history is a good and useful work; but in his zeal against democratic

government, Mitford forgot, or never saw, that ancient Greece was not,

nor ought ever to be considered, a permanent thing, but that it existed,

in the disposition of providence, as a proclaimer of ideal truths, and

that everlasting proclamation being made, that its functions were

naturally at an end.

However, in the height of such a state of society in Italy, Dante was

born and flourished; and was himself eminently a picture of the age in

which he lived. But of more importance even than this, to a right

understanding of Dante, is the consideration that the scholastic

philosophy was then at its acme even in itself; but more especially in

Italy, where it never prevailed so exclusively as northward of the Alps.

It is impossible to understand the genius of Dante, and difficult to

understand his poem, without some knowledge of the characters, studies,

and writings of the schoolmen of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth

centuries. For Dante was the living link between religion and

philosophy; he philosophized the religion and christianized the

philosophy of Italy; and, in this poetic union of religion and

philosophy, he became the ground of transition into the mixed Platonism

and Aristotelianism of the Schools, under which, by numerous minute

articles of faith and ceremony, Christianity became a craft of

hair-splitting, and was ultimately degraded into a complete 'fetisch'

worship, divorced from philosophy, and made up of a faith without

thought, and a credulity directed by passion. Afterwards, indeed,

philosophy revived under condition of defending this very superstition;

and, in so doing, it necessarily led the way to its subversion, and that

in exact proportion to the influence of the philosophic schools. Hence

it did its work most completely in Germany, then in England, next in

France, then in Spain, least of all in Italy. We must, therefore, take

the poetry of Dante as christianized, but without the further Gothic

accession of proper chivalry. It was at a somewhat later period, that

the importations from the East, through the Venetian commerce and the

crusading armaments, exercised a peculiarly strong influence on Italy.

In studying Dante, therefore, we must consider carefully the differences

produced, first, by allegory being substituted for polytheism; and

secondly and mainly, by the opposition of Christianity to the spirit of

pagan Greece, which receiving the very names of its gods from Egypt,

soon deprived them of all that was universal. The Greeks changed the

ideas into finites, and these finites into 'anthropomorphi,' or forms of

men. Hence their religion, their poetry, nay, their very pictures,

became statuesque. With them the form was the end. The reverse of this

was the natural effect of Christianity; in which finites, even the human

form, must, in order to satisfy the mind, be brought into connexion

with, and be in fact symbolical of, the infinite; and must be considered

in some enduring, however shadowy and indistinct, point of view, as the

vehicle or representative of moral truth.

Hence resulted two great effects; a combination of poetry with doctrine,

and, by turning the mind inward on its own essence instead of letting it

act only on its outward circumstances and communities, a combination of

poetry with sentiment. And it is this inwardness or subjectivity, which

principally and most fundamentally distinguishes all the classic from

all the modern poetry. Compare the passage in the 'Iliad' (Z. vi.

119-236.) in which Diomed and Glaucus change arms,--

[Greek (transliterated): Cheiras t'allilon labetin kai pistosanto]

They took each other by the hand, and pledged friendship--

with the scene in 'Ariosto' (Orlando Furioso, c. i. st. 20-22.), where

Rinaldo and Ferrauto fight and afterwards make it up:--

Al Pagan la proposta non dispiacque:

Così fu differita la tenzone;

E tal tregua tra lor subito nacque,

Sì l' odio e l' ira va in oblivïone,

Che 'l Pagano al partir dalle fresche acque

Non lasciò a piede il buon figliuol d' Amone:

Con preghi invita, e al fin lo toglie in groppa,

E per l' orme d' Angelica galoppa.

Here Homer would have left it. But the Christian poet has his own

feelings to express, and goes on:--

Oh gran bontà de' cavalieri antiqui!

Eran rivali, eran di fè diversi,

E si sentían degli aspri colpi iniqui

Per tutta la persona anco dolersi;

E pur per selve oscure e calli obbliqui

Insieme van senza sospetto aversi!

And here you will observe, that the reaction of Ariosto's own feelings

on the image or act is more fore-grounded (to use a painter's phrase)

than the image or act itself.

The two different modes in which the imagination is acted on by the

ancient and modern poetry, may be illustrated by the parallel effects

caused by the contemplation of the Greek or Roman-Greek architecture,

compared with the Gothic. In the Pantheon, the whole is perceived in a

perceived harmony with the parts which compose it; and generally you

will remember that where the parts preserve any distinct individuality,

there simple beauty, or beauty simply, arises; but where the parts melt

undistinguished into the whole, there majestic beauty, or majesty, is

the result. In York Minster, the parts, the grotesques, are in

themselves very sharply distinct and separate, and this distinction and

separation of the parts is counterbalanced only by the multitude and

variety of those parts, by which the attention is bewildered;--whilst

the whole, or that there is a whole produced, is altogether a feeling in

which the several thousand distinct impressions lose themselves as in a

universal solvent. Hence in a Gothic cathedral, as in a prospect from a

mountain's top, there is, indeed, a unity, an awful oneness;--but it is,

because all distinction evades the eye. And just such is the distinction

between the 'Antigone' of Sophocles and the 'Hamlet' of Shakespeare.

The 'Divina Commedia' is a system of moral, political, and theological

truths, with arbitrary personal exemplifications, which are not, in my

opinion, allegorical. I do not even feel convinced that the punishments

in the Inferno are strictly allegorical. I rather take them to have been

in Dante's mind 'quasi'-allegorical, or conceived in analogy to pure

allegory.

I have said, that a combination of poetry with doctrines, is one of the

characteristics of the Christian muse; but I think Dante has not

succeeded in effecting this combination nearly so well as Milton.

This comparative failure of Dante, as also some other peculiarities of

his mind, in 'malam partem', must be immediately attributed to the state

of North Italy in his time, which is vividly represented in Dante's

life; a state of intense democratical partizanship, in which an

exaggerated importance was attached to individuals, and which whilst it

afforded a vast field for the intellect, opened also a boundless arena

for the passions, and in which envy, jealousy, hatred, and other

malignant feelings, could and did assume the form of patriotism, even to

the individual's own conscience.

All this common, and, as it were, natural partizanship, was aggravated

arid coloured by the Guelf and Ghibelline factions; and, in part

explanation of Dante's adherence to the latter, you must particularly

remark, that the Pope had recently territorialized his authority to a

great extent, and that this increase of territorial power in the church,

was by no means the same beneficial movement for the citizens of free

republics, as the parallel advance in other countries was for those who

groaned as vassals under the oppression of the circumjacent baronial

castles. [1]

By way of preparation to a satisfactory perusal of the 'Divina

Commedia', I will now proceed to state what I consider to be Dante's

chief excellences as a poet. And I begin with:

I. Style--the vividness, logical connexion, strength and energy of which

cannot be surpassed. In this I think Dante superior to Milton; and his

style is accordingly more imitable than Milton's, and does to this day

exercise a greater influence on the literature of his country. You

cannot read Dante without feeling a gush of manliness of thought within

you. Dante was very sensible of his own excellence in this particular,

and speaks of poets as guardians of the vast armory of language, which

is the intermediate something between matter and spirit:--

Or se' tu quel Virgilio, e quella fonte,

Che spande di parlar sì largo fiume?

Risposi lui con vergognosa fronte.

O degli altri poeti onore e lume,

Vagliami 'l lungo studio e 'l grande amore,

Che m' han fatto cercar lo tuo volume.

Tu se' lo mio maestro, e 'l mio autore:

_Tu se' solo colui, da cu' io tolsi

Lo bello stile, che m' ha fatto onore._

('Inf'. c. 1. v. 79.)

"And art thou then that Virgil, that well-spring,

From which such copious floods of eloquence

Have issued?" I, with front abash'd, replied:

"Glory and light of all the tuneful train!

May it avail me, that I long with zeal

Have sought thy volume, and with love immense

Have conn'd it o'er. My master, thou, and guide!

'Thou he from whom I have alone deriv'd

That style, which for its beauty into fame

Exalts me.'"

(Cary. [his translation--text Ed.])

Indeed there was a passion and a miracle of words in the twelfth and

thirteenth centuries, after the long slumber of language in barbarism,

which gave an almost romantic character, a virtuous quality and power,

to what was read in a book, independently of the thoughts or images

contained in it. This feeling is very often perceptible in Dante.

II. The Images in Dante are not only taken from obvious nature, and are

all intelligible to all, but are ever conjoined with the universal

feeling received from nature, and therefore affect the general feelings

of all men. And in this respect, Dante's excellence is very great, and

may be contrasted with the idiosyncracies of some meritorious modern

poets, who attempt an eruditeness, the result of particular feelings.

Consider the simplicity, I may say plainness, of the following simile,

and how differently we should in all probability deal with it at the

present day:

Quale i fioretti dal notturno gelo

Chinati e chiusi, poi che 'l sol gl' imbianca,

Si drizzan tutti aperti in loro stelo,--

Fal mi fec' io di mia virtute stanca;

('Inf.' c. 2. v. 127.)

As florets, by the frosty air of night

Bent down and clos'd, when day has blanch'd their leaves,

Rise all unfolded on their spiry stems,--

So was my fainting vigour new restor'd.

(Cary. [2])

III. Consider the wonderful profoundness of the whole third canto of the

'Inferno'; and especially of the inscription over Hell gate:

Per me si va, &c.--

which can only be explained by a meditation on the true nature of

religion; that is,--reason 'plus' the understanding. I say profoundness

rather than sublimity; for Dante does not so much elevate your thoughts

as send them down deeper. In this canto all the images are distinct, and

even vividly distinct; but there is a total impression of infinity; the

wholeness is not in vision or conception, but in an inner feeling of

totality, and absolute being.

IV. In picturesqueness, Dante is beyond all other poets, modern or

ancient, and more in the stern style of Pindar, than of any other.

Michel Angelo is said to have made a design for every page of the

'Divina Commedia'. As superexcellent in this respect, I would note the

conclusion of the third canto of the 'Inferno':

Ed ecco verso noi venir per nave

Un vecchio bianco per antico pelo

Gridando: guai a voi anime prave: &c. ...

(Ver. 82. &c.)

And lo! toward us in a bark

Comes on an old man, hoary white with eld,

Crying, "Woe to you wicked spirits!" ...

(CARY.)

Caron dimonio con occhi di bragia

Loro accennando, tutte le raccoglie:

Batte col remo qualunque s' adagia.

Come d' autunno si levan le foglie

L' una appresso dell altra, infin che 'l ramo

Rende alia terra tutte le sue spoglie;

Similemente il mal seme d' Adamo,

Gittansi di quel lito ad una ad una

Per cenni, com' augel per suo richiamo.

(Ver. 100, &c.)

--Charon, demoniac form,

With eyes of burning coal, collects them all,

Beck'ning, and each that lingers, with his oar

Strikes. As fall off the light autumnal leaves,

One still another following, till the bough

Strews all its honours on the earth beneath;--

E'en in like manner Adam's evil brood

Cast themselves one by one down from the shore

Each at a beck, as falcon at his call.

(CARY.)

And this passage, which I think admirably picturesque:

Ma poco valse, che l' ale al sospetto

Non potero avanzar: quegli andò sotto,

E quei drizzò, volando, suso il petto.

Non altrimenti l' anitra di botto,

Quando 'l falcon s' appressa, giù s' attuffa,

Ed ei ritorna su crucciato e rotto.

Irato Calcabrina della buffa,

Volando dietro gli tenne, invaghito,

Che quei campasse, per aver la zuffa:

E come 'l barattier fu disparito,

Cosi volse gli artigli al suo compagno,

E fu con lui sovra 'l fosso ghermito.

Ma l' altro fu bene sparvier grifagno

Ad artigliar ben lui, e amedue

Cadder nel mezzo del bollente stagno.

Lo caldo sghermidor subito fue:

Ma però di levarsi era niente,

Si aveano inviscate l' ale sue.

('Infer.' c. xxii. ver. 127, &c.)

But little it avail'd: terror outstripp'd

His following flight: the other plung'd beneath,

And he with upward pinion rais'd his breast:

E'en thus the water-fowl, when she perceives

The falcon near, dives instant down, while he

Enrag'd and spent retires. That mockery

In Calcabrina fury stirr'd, who flew

After him, with desire of strife inflam'd;

And, for the barterer had 'scap'd, so turn'd

His talons on his comrade. O'er the dyke

In grapple close they join'd; but th' other prov'd

A goshawk, able to rend well his foe;

And in the boiling lake both fell. The heat

Was umpire soon between them, but in vain

To lift themselves they strove, so fast were glued

Their pennons.

(CARY.)

V. Very closely connected with this picturesqueness, is the topographic

reality of Dante's journey through Hell. You should note and dwell on

this as one of his great charms, and which gives a striking peculiarity

to his poetic power. He thus takes the thousand delusive forms of a

nature worse than chaos, having no reality but from the passions which

they excite, and compels them into the service of the permanent. Observe

the exceeding truth of these lines:

Noi ricidemmo 'l cerchio all' altra riva,

Sovr' una fonte che bolle, e riversa,

Per un fossato che da lei diriva.

L' acqua era buja molto più che persa:

E noi in compagnia dell' onde bige

Entrammo giù per una via diversa.

Una palude fa, ch' ha nome Stige,

Questo tristo ruscel, quando è disceso

Al piè delle maligne piagge grige.

Ed io che di mirar mi stava inteso,--

Vidi genti fangose in quel pantano

Ignude tutte, e con sembiante offeso.

Questi si percotean non pur con mano,

Ma con la testa, e col petto, e co' piedi,

Troncandosi co' denti a brano a brano. ...

Così girammo della lorda pozza

Grand' arco tra la ripa secca e 'l mezzo,

Con gli occhi volti a chi del fango ingozza:

'Venimmo appi d' una torre al dassezzo'.

(C. vii. ver. 100 and 127.)

--We the circle cross'd

To the next steep, arriving at a well,

That boiling pours itself down to a foss

Sluic'd from its source. Far murkier was the wave

Than sablest grain: and we in company

Of th' inky waters, journeying by their side,

Enter'd, though by a different track, beneath.

Into a lake, the Stygian nam'd, expands

The dismal stream, when it hath reach'd the foot

Of the grey wither'd cliffs. Intent I stood

To gaze, and in the marish sunk, descried

A miry tribe, all naked, and with looks

Betok'ning rage. They with their hands alone

Struck not, but with the head, the breast, the feet,

Cutting each other piecemeal with their fangs. ...

--Our route

Thus compass'd, we a segment widely stretch'd

Between the dry embankment and the cove

Of the loath'd pool, turning meanwhile our eyes

Downward on those who gulp'd its muddy lees;

_Nor stopp'd, till to a tower's low base we came._

(CARY.)