This principle, rightly understood, does not debar the poet from any

grace of composition. There is no style in which some man may not, under

some circumstances, express himself. There is therefore no style which

the drama rejects, none which it does not occasionally require. It is

in the discernment of place, of time, and of person, that the inferior

artists fail. The fantastic rhapsody of Mercutio, the elaborate

declamation of Antony, are, where Shakspeare has placed them, natural

and pleasing. But Dryden would have made Mer-cutio challenge Tybalt in

hyperboles as fanciful as those in which he describes the chariot of

Mab. Corneille would have represented Antony as scolding and coaxing

Cleopatra with all the measured rhetoric of a funeral oration. {295}No

writers have injured the Comedy of England so deeply as Congreve and

Sheridan. Both were men of splendid wit and polished taste. Unhappily,

they made all their characters in their own likeness. Their works bear

the same relation to the legitimate drama, which a transparency bears to

a painting. There are no delicate touches, no hues imperceptibly fading

into each other: the whole is lighted up with an universal glare.

Outlines and tints are forgotten in the common blaze whicli illuminates

all. The flowers and fruits of the intellect abound; but it is the

abundance of a jungle, not of a garden, unwholesome, bewildering,

unprofitable from its very plenty, rank from its very fragrance. Every

fop, every boor, every valet, is a man of wit. The very butts and dupes,

Tattle, Witwould, Puff, Acres, outshine the whole Hotel of Rambouillet.

To prove the whole system of this school erroneous, it is only necessary

to apply the test which dissolved the enchanted Florimel, to place the

true by the false Thalia, to contrast the most celebrated characters

which have been drawn by the writers of whom we speak with the Bastard

in King John, or the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. It was not surely from

want of wit that Shakspeare adopted so different a manner. Benedick

and Beatrice throw Mirabel and Millamant into the shade. All the good

sayings of the facetious houses of Absolute and Surface might have been

clipped from the single character of Falstaff without being missed. It

would have been easy for that fertile mind to have given Bardolph and

Shallow as much wit as Prince Hal, and to have made Dogberry and Verges

retort on each other in sparkling epigrams. But he knew that such

indiscriminate prodigality was, to use his own admirable language, “from

the purpose of playing, whose end, {296}both at the first and now, was,

and is, to hold, as it were, the mirror up to Nature.”

This digression will enable our readers to understand what we mean when

we say that in the Mandragola, Machiavelli has proved that he completely

understood the nature of the dramatic art, and possessed talents which

would have enabled him to excel in it. By the correct and vigorous

delineation of human nature, it produces interest without a pleasing or

skilful plot, and laughter without the least ambition of wit. The lover,

not a very delicate or generous lover, and his adviser the parasite, are

drawn with spirit. The hypocritical confessor is an admirable portrait.

He is, if we mistake not, the original of Father Dominic, the best comic

character of Dryden. But old Nicias is the glory of the piece. We cannot

call to mind any thing that resembles him. The follies which Molière

ridicules are those of affectation, not those of fatuity. Coxcombs and

pedants, not absolute simpletons, are his game. Shakspeare has indeed a

vast assortment of fools; but the precise species of which we speak is

not, if we remember right, to be found there. Shallow is a fool. But

his animal spirits supply, to a certain degree, the place of cleverness.

His talk is to that of Sir John what soda water is to champagne. It has

the effervescence though not the body or the flavour. Slender and Sir

Andrew Aguecheek are fools, troubled with an uneasy consciousness of

their folly, which, in the latter produces meekness and docility, and in

the former, awkwardness, obstinacy, and confusion. Cloten is an arrogant

fool, Osric a foppish fool, Ajax a savage fool; but Nicias is, as

Thersites says of Patroclus, a fool positive. His mind is occupied by no

strong feeling; it takes every character, and retains none; its aspect

is {297}diversified, not by passions, but by faint and transitory

semblances of passion, a mock joy, a mock fear, a mock love, a mock

pride, which chase each other like shadows over its surface, and vanish

as soon as they appear. He is just idiot enough to be an object, not

of pity or horror, but of ridicule. He bears some resemblance to poor

Calandrino, whose mishaps, as recounted by Boccaccio, have made all

Europe merry for more than four centuries. He perhaps resembles still

more closely Simon da Villa, to whom Bruno and Buffalmacco promised

the love of the Countess Civilian. Nicias is, like Simon, of a learned

profession; and the dignity with which he wears the doctoral fur,

renders his absurdities infinitely more grotesque. The old Tuscan is the

very language for such a being. Its peculiar simplicity gives even to

the most forcible reasoning and the most brilliant wit an infantine

air, generally delightful, but to a foreign reader sometimes a little

ludicrous. Heroes and statesmen seem to lisp when they use it. It

becomes Nicias incomparably, and renders all his silliness infinitely

more silly.

We may add, that the verses with which the Man-dragola is interspersed,

appear to us to be the most spirited and correct of all that Machiavelli

has written in metre. He seems to have entertained the same opinion; for

he has introduced some of them in other places. The contemporaries of

the author were not blind to the merits of this striking piece. It was

acted at Florence with the greatest success. Leo the Tenth was among its

admirers, and by his order it was represented at Rome. (1)

(1) Nothing can be more evident than that Paulus Jovius

designates the Mandragola under the name of the Nicias. We

should not have noticed what is so perfectly obvious, were

it not that this natural and palpable misnomer has led the

sagacious and industrious Bayle into a gross error.

{298}The Clizia is an imitation of the Casina of Plautus, which is

itself an imitation of the lost (work) of Diphilus. Plautus was,

unquestionably, one of the best Latin writers; but the Casina is by no

means one of his best plays; nor is it one which offers great facilities

to an imitator. The story is as alien from modern habits of life, as the

manner in which it is developed from the modern fashion of composition.

The lover remains in the country and the heroine in her chamber during

the whole action, leaving; their fate to be decided by a foolish

father, a cunning mother, and two knavish servants. Machiavelli has

executed his task with judgment and taste. He has accommodated the plot

to a different state of society, and has very dexterously connected it

with the history of his own times. The relation of the trick put on

the doting old lover is exquisitely humorous. It is far superior to the

corresponding passage in the Latin comedy, and scarcely yields to the

account which Falstaff gives of his ducking.

Two other comedies without titles, the one in prose, the other in verse,

appear among the works of Machiavelli. The former is very short, lively

enough, but of no great value. The latter we can scarcely believe to

be genuine. Neither its merits nor its defects remind us of the reputed

author. It was first printed in 1796, from a manuscript discovered in

the celebrated library of the Strozzi. Its genuineness, if we have been

rightly informed, is established solely by the comparison of hands.

Our suspicions are strengthened by the circumstance, that the same

manuscript contained a description of the plague of 1527, which has

also, in consequence, been added to the works of Machiavelli. Of this

last composition, the strongest {299}external evidence would scarcely

induce us to believe him guilty. Nothing was ever written more

detestable in matter and manner. The narrations, the reflections, the

jokes, the lamentations, are all the very worst of their respective

kinds, at once trite and affected, threadbare tinsel from the Rag Fairs

and Monmouth Streets of literature. A foolish schoolboy might write

such a piece, and, after he had written it, think it much finer than the

incomparable introduction of the Decameron. But that a shrewd statesman,

whose earliest works are characterised by manliness of thought and

language, should, at near sixty years of age, descend to such puerility,

is utterly inconceivable.

The little novel of Belphegor is pleasantly conceived, and pleasantly

told. But the extravagance of the satire in some measure injures its

effect. Machiavelli was unhappily married; and his wish to avenge his

own cause and that of his brethren in misfortune, carried him beyond

even the licence of fiction. Jonson seems to have combined some hints

taken from this tale, with others from Boccaccio, in the plot of The

Devil is an Ass, a play which, though not the most highly finished of

his compositions, is perhaps that which exhibits the strongest proofs of

genius.

The political correspondence of Machiavelli, first published in 1767, is

unquestionably genuine, and highly valuable. The unhappy circumstances

in which his country was placed during the greater part of his public

life gave extraordinary encouragement to diplomatic talents. From

the moment that Charles the Eighth descended from the Alps, the whole

character of Italian politics was changed. The governments of the

Peninsula ceased to form an independent system. Drawn from their old

orbit by the attraction of the {300}larger bodies which now approached

them, they became mere satellites of France and Spain. All their

disputes, internal and external, were decided by foreign influence. The

contests of opposite factions were carried on, not as formerly in the

senate-house or in the market-place, but in the antechambers of Louis

and Ferdinand. Under these circumstances, the prosperity of the Italian

States depended far more on the ability of their foreign agents, than

on the conduct of those who were intrusted with the domestic

administration. The ambassador had to discharge functions far more

delicate than transmitting orders of knighthood, introducing tourists,

or presenting his brethren with the homage of his high consideration. He

was an advocate to whose management the dearest interests of his clients

were intrusted, a spy clothed with an inviolable character. Instead of

consulting, by a reserved manner and ambiguous style, the dignity of

those whom he represented, he was to plunge into all the intrigues of

the court at which he resided, to discover and flatter every weakness

of the prince, and of the favourite who governed the prince, and of the

lacquey who governed the favourite. He was to compliment the mistress

and bribe the confessor, to panegyrize or supplicate, to laugh or weep,

to accommodate himself to every caprice, to lull every suspicion, to

treasure every hint, to be every thing, to observe every thing, to

endure every thing. High as the art of political intrigue had been

carried in Italy, these were times which required it all.

On these arduous errands Machiavelli was frequently employed. He

was sent to treat with the King of the Romans and with the Duke of

Valentinois. He was twice ambassador at the Court of Rome, and thrice

at {301}that of France. In these missions, and in several others of

inferior importance, he acquitted himself with great dexterity. His

despatches form one of the most amusing and instructive collections

extant. The narratives are clear and agreeably written; the remarks on

men and things clever and judicious. The conversations are reported in

a spirited and characteristic manner. We find ourselves introduced into

the presence of the men who, during twenty eventful years, swayed the

destinies of Europe. Their wit and their folly, their fretfulness and

their merriment, are exposed to us. We are admitted to overhear their

chat, and to watch their familiar gestures. It is interesting and

curious to recognise, in circumstances which elude the notice of

historians, the feeble violence and shallow cunning of Louis the

Twelfth; the bustling insignificance of Maximilian, cursed with an

impotent pruriency for renown, rash yet timid, obstinate yet fickle,

always in a hurry, yet always too late; the fierce and haughty energy

which gave dignity to the eccentricities of Julius; the soft and

graceful manners which masked the insatiable ambition and the implacable

hatred of Cæsar Borgia.

We have mentioned Cæsar Borgia. It is impossible not to pause for a

moment on the name of a man in whom the political morality of Italy was

so strongly personified, partially blended with the sterner lineaments

of the Spanish character. On two important occasions Machiavelli was

admitted to his society; once, at the moment when Cæsar’s splendid

villany achieved its most signal triumph, when he caught in one snare

and crushed at one blow all his most formidable rivals; and again when,

exhausted by disease and overwhelmed by misfortunes, which no human

prudence {302}could have averted, he was the prisoner of the deadliest

enemy of his house. These interviews between the greatest speculative

and the greatest practical statesmen of the age are folly described in

the Correspondence, and form perhaps the most interesting part of it.

From some passages in The Prince, and perhaps also from some indistinct

traditions, several writers have supposed a connection between those

remarkable men much closer than ever existed. The Envoy has even been

accused of prompting the crimes of the artful and merciless tyrant. But

from the official documents it is clear that their intercourse, though

ostensibly amicable, was in reality hostile. It cannot be doubted,

however, that the imagination of Machiavelli was strongly impressed, and

his speculations on government coloured, by the observations which he

made on the singular character and equally singular fortunes of a man

who under such disadvantages had achieved such exploits; who, when

sensuality, varied through innumerable forms, could no longer stimulate

his sated mind, found a more powerful and durable excitement in the

intense thirst of empire and revenge; who emerged from the sloth and

luxury of the Roman purple the first prince and general of the age; who,

trained in an unwarlike profession, formed a gallant army out of the

dregs of an unwarlike people; who, after acquiring sovereignty by

destroying his enemies, acquired popularity by destroying his tools; who

had begun to employ for the most salutary ends the power which he had

attained by the most atrocious means; who tolerated within the sphere of

his iron despotism no plunderer or oppressor but himself; and who fell

at last amidst the mingled curses and regrets of a people of whom his

genius had been the wonder, and might {303}have been the salvation. Some

of those crimes of Borgia which to ns appear the most odious would not,

from causes which we have already considered, have struck an Italian of

the fifteenth century with equal horror. Patriotic feeling also might

induce Machiavelli to look with some indulgence and regret on the o o

memory of the only leader who could have defended the independence of

Italy against the confederate spoilers of Cambray.

On this subject Machiavelli felt most strongly. Indeed the expulsion of

the foreign tyrants, and the restoration of that golden age which had

preceded the irruption of Charles the Eighth, were projects which, at

that time, fascinated all the master-spirits of Italy. The magnificent

vision delighted the great but ill-regulated mind of Julius. It divided

with manuscripts and sauces, painters and falcons, the attention of the

frivolous Leo. It prompted the generous treason of Morone. It imparted

a transient energy to the feeble mind and body of the last Sforza. It

excited for one moment an honest ambition in the false heart of

Pescara. Ferocity and insolence were not among the vices of the national

character. To the discriminating Cruelties of politicians, committed

for great ends on select victims, the moral code of the Italians was

too indulgent. But though they might have recourse to barbarity as an

expedient, they did not require it as a stimulant. They turned with

loathing from the atrocity of the strangers who seemed to love blood

for its own sake, who, not content with subjugating, were impatient to

destroy, who found a fiendish pleasure in razing magnificent cities,

cutting the throats of enemies who cried for quarter, or suffocating

an unarmed population by thousands in the caverns to which it had fled

{304}for safety. Such were the cruelties which daily excited the terror

and disgust of a people among whom, till lately, the worst that a

soldier had to fear in a pitched battle was the loss of his horse and

the expense of his ransom. The swinish intemperance of Switzerland,

the wolfish avarice of Spain, the gross licentiousness of the French,

indulged in violation of hospitality, of decency, of love itself, the

wanton inhumanity which was common to all the invaders, had made them

objects of deadly hatred to the inhabitants of the Peninsula. The wealth

which had been accumulated during centuries of prosperity and repose

was rapidly melting away. The intellectual superiority of the oppressed

people only rendered them more keenly sensible of their political

degradation. Literature and taste, indeed, still disguised with a flush

of hectic loveliness and brilliancy the ravages of an incurable decay.

The iron had not yet entered into the soul. The time was not yet come

when eloquence was to be gagged, and reason to be hoodwinked, when the

harp of the poet was to be hung on the willows of Arno, and the right

hand of the painter to forget its cunning. Yet a discerning eye might

even then have seen that genius and learning would not long survive the

state of things from which they had sprung, and that the great men whose

talents gave lustre to that melancholy period had been formed under the

influence of happier days, and would leave no successors behind them.

The times which shine with the greatest splendour in literary history

are not always those to which the human mind is most indebted. Of this

we may be convinced, by comparing the generation which follows them with

that which had preceded them. The first fruits which are reaped under

a bad system often spring from seed {305}sown under a good one. Thus it

was, in some measure, with the Augustan age. Thus it was with the age of

Raphael and Ariosto, of Aldus and Vida.

Machiavelli deeply regretted the misfortunes of his country, and clearly

discerned the cause and the remedy. It was the military system of the

Italian people which had extinguished their valor and discipline, and

left their wealth an easy prey to every foreign plunderer. The Secretary

projected a scheme alike honourable to his heart and to his intellect,

for abolishing the use of mercenary troops, and for organizing a

national militia.

The exertions which he made to effect this great object ought alone to

rescue his name from obloquy. Though his situation and his habits were

pacific, he studied with intense assiduity the theory of war. He made

himself master of all its details. The Florentine government entered

into his views. A council of war was appointed. Levies were decreed. The

indefatigable minister flew from place to place in order to superintend

the execution of his design. The times were, in some respects,

favourable to the experiment. The system of military tactics had

undergone a great revolution. The cavalry was no longer considered as

forming the strength of an army. The hours which a citizen could

spare from his ordinary employments, though by no means sufficient to

familiarise him with the exercise of a man-at-arms, might render him an

useful foot-soldier. The dread of a foreign yoke, of plunder, massacre,

and conflagration, might have conquered that repugnance to military

pursuits which both the industry and the idleness of great towns

commonly generate. For a time the scheme promised well. The new troops

acquitted themselves respectably in the {306}field. Machiavelli looked

with parental rapture on the success of his plan, and began to hope that

the arms of Italy might once more be formidable to the barbarians of

the Tagus and the Rhine. But the tide of misfortune came on before

the barriers which should have withstood it were prepared. For a time,

indeed, Florence might be considered as peculiarly fortunate. Famine

and sword and pestilence had devastated the fertile plains and stately

cities of the Po. All the curses denounced of old against Tyre seemed to

have fallen on Venice. Her merchants already stood afar off, lamenting

for their great city. The time seemed near when the sea-weed should

overgrow her silent Rialto, and the fisherman wash his nets in her

deserted arsenal. Naples had been four times conquered and reconquered

by tyrants equally indifferent to its welfare, and equally greedy

for its spoils. Florence, as yet, had only to endure degradation and

extortion, to submit to the mandates of foreign powers, to buy over and

over again, at an enormous price, what was already justly her own, to

return thanks for being wronged, and to ask pardon for being in the

right. She was at length deprived of the blessings even of this infamous

and servile repose. Her military and political institutions were swept

away together. The Medici returned, in the train of foreign invaders,

from their long exile. The policy of Machiavelli was abandoned; and his

public services were requited with poverty, imprisonment, and torture.

The fallen statesman still clung to his project with unabated ardour.

With the view of vindicating it from some popular objections and of

refuting some prevailing errors on the subject of military science, he

wrote his seven books on the Art of War. This excellent {307}work is

in the form of a dialogue. The opinions of the writer are put into the

mouth of Fabrizio Colonna, a powerful nobleman of the Ecclesiastical

State, and an officer of distinguished merit in the service of the King

of Spain. Colonna visits Florence on his way from Lombardy to his own

domains. He is invited to meet some friends at the house of Cosimo

Rucellai, an amiable and accomplished young man, whose early death

Machiavelli feelingly deplores. After partaking of an elegant

entertainment, they retire from the heat into the most shady recesses

of the garden. Fabrizio is struck by the sight of some uncommon plants.

Cosimo says that, though rare, in modern days, they are frequently

mentioned by the classical authors, and that his grandfather, like many

other Italians, amused himself with practising the ancient methods of

gardening. Fabrizio expresses his regret that those who, in later times,

affected the manners of the old Romans should select for imitation the

most trifling pursuits. This leads to a conversation on the decline

of military discipline and on the best means of restoring it. The

institution of the Florentine militia is ably defended; and several

improvements are suggested in the details.

The Swiss and the Spaniards were, at that time, regarded as the best

soldiers in Europe. The Swiss battalion consisted of pikemen, and bore a

close resemblance to the Greek phalanx. The Spaniards, like the soldiers

of Rome, were armed with the sword and the shield. The victories of

Flamininus and Æmilius over the Macedonian kings seem to prove the

superiority of the weapons used by the legions. The same experiment had

been recently tried with the same result at the battle of Ravenna, one

of those {308}tremendous days into which human folly and wickedness

compress the whole devastation of a famine or a plague. In that

memorable conflict, the infantry of Arragon, the old companions of

Gonsalvo, deserted by all their allies, hewed a passage through the

thickest of the imperial pikes, and effected an unbroken retreat, in the

face of the gendarmerie of De Foix, and the renowned artillery of Este.

Fabrizio, or rather Machiavelli, proposes to combine the two systems,

to arm the foremost lines with the pike for the purpose of repulsing

cavalry, and those in the rear with the sword, as being a weapon

better adapted for every other purpose. Throughout the work, the author

expresses the highest admiration of the military science of the ancient

Romans, and the greatest contempt for the maxims which had been in vogue

amongst the Italian commanders of the preceding generation. He prefers

infantry to cavalry, and fortified camps to fortified towns. He is

inclined to substitute rapid movements and decisive engagements for

the languid and dilatory operations of his countrymen. He attaches very

little importance to the invention of gunpowder. Indeed he seems to

think that it ought scarcely to produce any change in the mode of arming

or of disposing troops. The general testimony of historians, it must

be allowed, seems to prove that the ill-constructed and ill-served

artillery of those times, though useful in a siege, was of little value

on the field of battle.

Of the tactics of Machiavelli we will not venture to give an opinion:

but we are certain that his book is most able and interesting. As a

commentary on the history of his times, it is invaluable. The ingenuity,

the grace, and the perspicuity of the style, and the {309}eloquence and

animation of particular passages, must give pleasure even to readers who

take no interest in the subject.

The Prince and the Discourses on Livy were written after the fall of the

Republican Government. The former was dedicated to the Young Lorenzo de’

Medici. This circumstance seems to have disgusted the contemporaries of

the writer far more than the doctrines which have rendered the name of

the work odious in later times. It was considered as an indication

of political apostasy. The fact however seems to have been that

Machiavelli, despairing of the liberty of Florence, was inclined to

support any government which might preserve her independence. The

interval which separated a democracy and a despotism, Soderini and

Lorenzo, seemed to vanish when compared with the difference between

the former and the present state of Italy, between the security, the

opulence, and the repose which she had enjoyed under its native rulers,

and the misery in which she had been plunged since the fatal year in

which the first foreign tyrant had descended from the Alps. The noble

and pathetic exhortation with which The Prince concludes shows how

strongly the writer felt upon this subject.

The Prince traces the progress of an ambitious man, the Discourses the

progress of an ambitious people. The same principles on which, in the

former work, the elevation of an individual is explained, are applied

in the latter, to the longer duration and more complex interest of a

society. To a modern statesman the form of the Discourses may appear to

be puerile. In truth Livy is not an historian on whom implicit reliance

can be placed, even in cases where he must have possessed considerable

means of {310}information. And the first Decade, to which Machiavelli

has confined himself, is scarcely entitled to more credit than our

Chronicle of British Kings who reigned before the Roman invasion. But

the commentator is indebted to Livy for little more than a few texts

which he might as easily have extracted from the Vulgate or the

Decameron. The whole train of thought is original.

On the peculiar immorality which has rendered The Prince unpopular, and

which is almost equally discernible in the Discourses, we have already

given our opinion at length. We have attempted to show that it belonged

rather to the age than to the man, that it was a partial taint, and by

no means implied general depravity. We cannot however deny that it is a

great blemish, and that it considerably diminishes the pleasure which,

in other respects, those works must afford to every intelligent mind.

It is, indeed, impossible to conceive a more healthful and vigorous

constitution of the understanding than that which these works indicate.

The qualities of the active and the contemplative statesman appear to

have been blended in the mind of the writer into a rare and exquisite

harmony. His skill in the details of business had not been acquired at

the expense of his general powers. It had not rendered his mind less

comprehensive; but it had served to correct his speculations, and

to impart to them that vivid and practical character which so

widely distinguishes them from the vague theories of most political

philosophers.

Every man who has seen the world knows that nothing is so useless as

a general maxim. If it be very moral and very true, it may serve for a

copy to a charity-boy. If, like those of Rochefoucault, it be sparkling

and whimsical, it may make an excellent {311}motto for an essay. But few

indeed of the many wise apophthegms which have been uttered, from

the time of the Seven Sages of Greece to that of Poor Richard, have

prevented a single foolish action. We give the highest and the most

peculiar praise to the precepts of Machiavelli when we say that they

may frequently be of real use in regulating conduct, not so much because

they are more just or more profound than those which might be culled

from other authors, as because they can be more readily applied to the

problems of real life.

There are errors in these works. But they are errors which a writer,

situated like Machiavelli, could scarcely avoid. They arise, for the

most part, from a single defect which appears to us to pervade his

whole system. In his political scheme, the means had been more deeply

considered than the ends. The great principle, that societies and laws

exist only for the purpose of increasing the sum of private happiness,

is not recognised with sufficient clearness. The good of the body,

distinct from the good of the members, and sometimes hardly compatible

with the good of the members, seems to be the object which he proposes

to himself. Of all political fallacies, this has perhaps had the widest

and the most mischievous operation. The state of society in the little

commonwealths of Greece, the close connection and mutual dependence of

the citizens, and the severity of the laws of war, tended to encourage

an opinion which, under such circumstances, could hardly be called

erroneous. The interests of every individual were inseparably bound

up with those of the state. An invasion destroyed his corn-fields and

vineyards, drove him from his home, and compelled him to encounter all

the hardships of a military {312}life. A treaty of peace restored him

to security and comfort. A victory doubled the number of his slaves.

A defeat perhaps made him a slave himself. When Pericles, in the

Peloponnesian war, told the Athenians, that, if their country triumphed,

their private losses would speedily be repaired, but that, if their

arms failed of success, every individual amongst them would probably

be ruined, he spoke no more than the truth. He spoke to men whom the

tribute of vanquished cities supplied with food and clothing, with

the luxury of the bath and the amusements of the theatre, on whom the

greatness of their country conferred rank, and before whom the members

of less prosperous communities trembled; to men who, in case of a change

in the public fortunes, would, at least, be deprived of every comfort

and every distinction which they enjoyed. To be butchered on the smoking

ruins of their city, to be dragged in chains to a slave-market, to see

one child torn from them to dig in the quarries of Sicily, and another

to guard the harems of Per-sepolis, these were the frequent and probable

consequences of national calamities. Hence, among the Greeks, patriotism

became a governing principle, or rather an ungovernable passion.

Their legislators and their philosophers took it for granted that, in

providing for the strength and greatness of the state, they sufficiently

provided for the happiness of the people. The writers of the Roman

empire lived under despots, into whose dominion a hundred nations

were melted down, and whose gardens would have covered the little

commonwealths of Plilius and Platæa. Yet they continued to employ the

same language, and to cant about the duty of sacrificing every thing to

a country to which they owed nothing. {313}Causes similar to those which

had influenced the disposition of the Greeks operated powerfully on the

less vigorous and daring character of the Italians. The Italians, like

the Greeks, were members of small communities. Every man was deeply

interested in the welfare of the society to which he belonged, a

partaker in its wealth and its poverty, in its glory and its shame. In

the age of Machiavelli this was peculiarly the case. Public events had

produced an immense sum of misery to private citizens. The Northern

invaders had brought want to their boards, infamy to their beds, fire to

their roofs, and the knife to their throats. It was natural that a man

who lived in times like these should overrate the importance of those

measures by which a nation is rendered formidable to its neighbours, and

undervalue those which make it prosperous within itself.

Nothing is more remarkable in the political treatises of Machiavelli

than the fairness of mind which they indicate. It appears where the

author is in the wrong, almost as strongly as where he is in the right.

He never advances a false opinion because it is new or splendid,

because he can clothe it in a happy phrase, or defend it by an ingenious

sophism. His errors are at once explained by a reference to the

circumstances in which he was placed. They evidently were not sought

out; they lay in his way, and could scarcely be avoided. Such mistakes

must necessarily be committed by early speculators in every science.

In this respect it is amusing to compare The Prince and the Discourses

with the Spirit of Laws. Montesquieu enjoys, perhaps, a wider celebrity

than any political writer of modern Europe. Something he doubtless owes

to his merit, but much more to his fortune. {314}He had the good luck of

a Valentine. He caught the eye of the French nation, at the moment when

it was waking from the long sleep of political and religious bigotry;

and, in consequence, he became a favourite. The English, at that time,

considered a Frenchman who talked about constitutional checks and

fundamental laws as a prodigy not less astonishing than the learned

pig or the musical infant. Specious but shallow, studious of effect,

indifferent to truth, eager to build a system, but careless of

collecting those materials out of which alone a sound and durable system

can be built, the lively President constructed theories as rapidly

and as slightly as card-houses, no sooner projected than completed, no

sooner completed than blown away, no sooner blown away than forgotten.

Machiavelli errs only because his experience, acquired in a very

peculiar state of society, could not always enable him to calculate the

effect of institutions differing from those of which he had observed the

operation. Montesquieu errs, because he has a fine thing to say, and is

resolved to say it. If the phænomena which lie before him will not suit

his purpose, all history must be ransacked. If nothing established by

authentic testimony can be racked or chipped to suit his Procrustean

hypothesis, he puts up with some monstrous fable about Siam, or Bantam,

or Japan, told by writers compared with whom Lucian and Gulliver were

veracious, liars by a double right, as travellers and as Jesuits.

Propriety of thought, and propriety of diction, are commonly found

together. Obscurity and affectation are the two greatest faults of

style. Obscurity of expression generally springs from confusion

of ideas; and the same wish to dazzle at any cost which produces

affectation in the manner of a writer, is likely to produce

{315}sophistry in his reasonings. The judicious and candid mind of

Machiavelli shows itself in his luminous, manly, and polished language.

The style of Montesquieu, on the other hand, indicates in every page a

lively and ingenious, but an unsound mind. Every trick of expression,

from the mysterious conciseness of an oracle to the flippancy of a

Parisian coxcomb, is employed to disguise the fallacy of some positions,

and the triteness of others. Absurdities are brightened into epigrams;

truisms are darkened into enigmas. It is with difficulty that

the strongest eye can sustain the glare with which some parts are

illuminated, or penetrate the shade in which others are concealed.

The political works of Machiavelli derive a peculiar interest from the

mournful earnestness which he manifests whenever he touches on topics

connected with the calamities of his native land. It is difficult to

conceive any situation more painful than that of a great man, condemned

to watch the lingering agony of an exhausted country, to tend it

during the alternate fits of stupefaction and raving which precede its

dissolution, and to see the symptoms of vitality disappear one by one,

till nothing is left but coldness, darkness, and corruption. To this

joyless and thankless duty was Machiavelli called. In the energetic

language of the prophet, he was “mad for the sight of his eyes which

he saw,” disunion in the council, effeminacy in the camp, liberty

extinguished, commerce decaying, national honour sullied, an enlightened

and flourishing people given over to the ferocity of ignorant savages.

Though his opinions had not escaped the contagion of that political

immorality which was common among his: countrymen, his natural

disposition seems to have been {316}rather stern and impetuous than

pliant and artful. When the misery and degradation of Florence and the

foul outrage which he had himself sustained recur to his mind the smooth

craft of his profession and his nation is exchanged for the honest

bitterness of scorn and anger. He speaks like one sick of the calamitous

times and abject people among whom his lot is cast. He pines for the

strength and glory of ancient Rome, for the fasces of Brutus and the

sword of Scipio, the gravity of the curule chair, and the bloody pomp

of the triumphal sacrifice. He seems to be transported back to the days

when eight hundred thousand Italian warriors sprung to arms at the rumor

of a Gallic invasion. He breathes all the spirit of those intrepid and

haughty senators who forgot the dearest ties of nature in the claims of

public duty, who looked with disdain on the elephants and on the gold of

Pyrrhus, and listened with unaltered composure to the tremendous tidings

of Cannae. Like an ancient temple deformed by the barbarous architecture

of a later age, his character acquires an interest from the very

circumstances which debase it. The original proportions are rendered

more striking by the contrast which they present to the mean and

incongruous additions.

The influence of the sentiments which we have described was not apparent

in his writings alone. His enthusiasm, barred from the career which it

would have selected for itself, seems to have found a vent in desperate

levity. He enjoyed a vindictive pleasure in outraging the opinions of

a society which he despised. He became careless of the decencies which

were expected from a man so highly distinguished in the literary and

political world. The sarcastic bitterness {317}of his conversation

disgusted those who were more inclined to accuse his licentiousness than

their own degeneracy, and who were unable to conceive the strength of

those emotions which are concealed by the jests of the wretched, and by

the follies of the wise.

The historical works of Machiavelli still remain to be considered. The

life of Castruccio Castracani will occupy us for a very short time, and

would scarcely have demanded our notice, had it not attracted a much

greater share of public attention than it deserves. Few books, indeed,

could be more interesting than a careful and judicious account, from

such a pen, of the illustrious Prince of Lucca, the most eminent of

those Italian chiefs, who like Pisistratus and Gelon, acquired a power

felt rather than seen, and resting, not on law or on prescription, but

on the public favour and on their great personal qualities. Such a work

would exhibit to us the real nature of that species of sovereignty,

so singular and so often misunderstood, which the Greeks denominated

tyranny, and which, modified in some degree by the feudal system,

reappeared in the commonwealths of Lombardy and Tuscany. But this

little composition of Machiavelli is in no sense a history. It has

no pretensions to fidelity. It is a trifle, and not a very successful

trifle. It is scarcely more authentic than the novel of Belphegor, and

is very much duller.

The last great work of this illustrious man was the history of his

native city. It was written by command of the Pope, who, as chief of the

house of Medici, was at that time sovereign of Florence. The characters

of Cosmo, of Piero, and of Lorenzo, are, however, treated with a freedom

and impartiality equally honourable {318}to the writer and to the

patron. The miseries and humiliations of dependence, the bread which

is more bitter than every other food, the stairs which are more painful

than every other ascent, had not broken the spirit of Machiavelli. The

most corrupting post in a corrupting profession had not depraved the

generous heart of Clement.

The History does not appear to be the fruit of much industry or

research. It is unquestionably inaccurate. But it is elegant, lively,

and picturesque, beyond any other in the Italian language. The reader,

we believe, carries away from it a more vivid and a more faithful

impression of the national character and manners than from more correct

accounts. The truth is, that the book belongs rather to ancient than to

modern literature. It is in the style, not of Davila and Clarendon, but

of Herodotus and Tacitus. The classical histories may almost be

called romances founded in fact. The relation is, no doubt, in all its

principal points, strictly true. But the numerous little incidents which

heighten the interest, the words, the gestures, the looks, are evidently

furnished by the imagination of the author. The fashion of later times

is different. A more exact narrative is given by the writer. It may be

doubted whether more exact notions are conveyed to the reader. The

best portraits are perhaps those in which there is a slight mixture

of caricature, and we are not certain, that the best histories are not

those in which a little of the exaggeration of fictitious narrative is

judiciously employed. Something is lost in accuracy; but much is gained

in effect. The fainter lines are neglected; but the great characteristic

features are imprinted on the mind for ever.

The History terminates with the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici.

{319}Machiavelli had, it seems, intended to continue his narrative to a

later period. But his death prevented the execution of his design;

and the melancholy task of recording the desolation and shame of Italy

devolved on Guicciardini.

Machiavelli lived long enough to see the commencement of the last

struggle for Florentine liberty. Soon after his death monarchy was

finally established, not such a monarchy as that of which Cosmo had laid

the foundations deep in the institutions and feelings of his countrymen,

and which Lorenzo had embellished with the trophies of every science and

every art; but a loathsome tyranny, proud and mean, cruel and feeble,

bigotted and lascivious. The character of Machiavelli was hateful to

the new masters of Italy; and those parts of his theory which were in

strict accordance with their own daily practice afforded a pretext for

blackening his memory. His works were misrepresented by the learned,

misconstrued by the ignorant, censured by the church, abused with all

the rancour of simulated virtue, by the tools of a base government, and

the priests of a baser superstition. The name of the man whose genius

had illuminated all the dark places of policy, and to whose patriotic

wisdom an oppressed people had owed their last chance of emancipation

and revenge, passed into a proverb of infamy. For more than two hundred

years his bones lay undistinguished. At length, an English nobleman paid

the last honours to the greatest statesman of Florence. In the church of

Santa Croce a monument was erected to his memory, which is contemplated

with reverence by all who can distinguish the virtues of a great

mind through the corruptions of a degenerate age, and which will be

approached with still deeper homage when the object to {320}which his

public life was devoted shall be attained, when the foreign yoke shall

be broken, when a second Procida shall avenge the wrongs of Naples, when

a happier Rienzi shall restore the good estate of Rome, when the streets

of Florence and Bologna shall again resound with their ancient war-cry,

_Popolo; popolo; muoano i tiranni!_

JOHN DRYDEN. (1)

{321}(_Edinburgh Review_, January 1828.)

The public voice has assigned to Dryden the first place in the

second rank of our poets,--no mean station in a table of intellectual

precedency so rich in illustrious names. It is allowed that, even of

the few who were his superiors in genius, none has exercised a more

extensive or permanent influence on the national habits of thought and

expression. His life was commensurate with the period during which

a great revolution in the public taste was effected; and in that

revolution he played the part of Cromwell. By unscrupulously taking the

lead in its wildest excesses, he obtained the absolute guidance of it.

By trampling on laws, he acquired the authority of a legislator. By

signalising himself as the most daring and irreverent of rebels, he

raised himself to the dignity of a recognised prince. He commenced his

career by the most frantic outrages. He terminated it in the repose of

established sovereignty,--the author of a new code, the root of a new

dynasty.

Of Dryden, however, as of almost every man who has been distinguished

either in the literary or in the political world, it may be said that

the course which he

(1) _The Poetical Works of_ John Dryden. In 2 volumes.

University Edition. London, 1826.

{322}pursued, and the effect which he produced, depended less on his

personal qualities than on the circumstances in which he was placed.

Those who have read history with discrimination know the fallacy of

those panegyrics and invectives which represent individuals as effecting

great moral and intellectual revolutions, subverting established

systems, and imprinting a new character on their age. The difference

between one man and another is by no means so great as the superstitious

crowd supposes. But the same feelings which in ancient Rome produced the

apotheosis of a popular emperor, and in modern Rome the canonisation of

a devout prelate, led men to cherish an illusion which furnishes them

with something to adore. By a law of association, from the operation of

which even minds the most strictly regulated by reason are not wholly

exempt, misery disposes us to hatred, and happiness to love, although

there may be no person to whom our misery or our happiness can be

ascribed. The peevishness of an invalid vents itself even on those who

alleviate his pain. The good humour of a man elated by success often

displays itself towards enemies. In the same manner, the feelings of

pleasure and admiration, to which the contemplation of great events

gives birth, make an object where they do not find it. Thus, nations

descend to the absurdities of Egyptian idolatry, and worship stocks and

reptiles--Sacheverells and Wilkeses. They even fall prostrate before a

deity to which they have themselves given the form which commands their

veneration, and which, unless fashioned by them, would have remained a

shapeless block. They persuade themselves that they are the creatures of

what they have themselves created. For, in fact, it is the age that

forms the man, not the man that {323}forms the age. Great minds do

indeed only pay with interest what they have received. We extol Bacon

and sneer at Aquinas. But, if their situations had been changed, Bacon

might have been the Angelical Doctor, the most subtle Aristotelian of

the schools; the Dominican might have led forth the sciences from their

house of bondage. If Luther had been born in the tenth century, he would

have effected no reformation. If he had never been born at all, it is

evident that the sixteenth century could not have elapsed without a

great schism in the church. Voltaire, in the days of Louis the

Fourteenth, would probably have been, like most of the literary men of

that time, a zealous Jansenist, eminent among the defenders of

efficacious grace, a bitter assailant of the lax morality of the Jesuits

and the unreasonable decisions of the Sorbonne. If Pascal had entered on

his literary career when intelligence was more general, and abuses at

the same time more flagrant, when the church was polluted by the

Iscariot Dubois, the court disgraced by the orgies of Canillac, and the

nation sacrificed to the juggles of Law, if he had lived to see a

dynasty of harlots, an empty treasury and a crowded harem, an army

formidable only to those whom it should have protected, a priesthood

just religious enough to be intolerant, he might possibly, like every

man of genius in France, have imbibed extravagant prejudices against

monarchy and Christianity. The wit which blasted the sophisms of

Escobar--the impassioned eloquence which defended the sisters of Port

Royal--the intellectual hardihood which was not beaten down even by

Papal authority--might have raised him to the Patriarchate of the

Philosophical {324}Church. It was long disputed whether the honour of

inventing the method of Fluxions belonged to Newton or to Leibnitz. It

is now generally allowed that these great men made the same discovery at

the same time. Mathematical science, indeed, had then reached such a

point that, if neither of them had ever existed, the principle must

inevitably have occurred to some person within a few years. So in our

own time the doctrine of rent, now universally received by political

economists, was propounded, almost at the same moment, by two writers

unconnected with each other. Preceding speculators had long been

blundering round about it; and it could not possibly have been missed

much longer by the most heedless inquirer. We are inclined to think

that, with respect to every great addition which has been made to the

stock of human knowledge, the case has been similar; that without

Copernicus we should have been Copernicans,--that without Columbus

America would have been discovered,--that without Locke we should have

possessed a just theory of the origin of human ideas. Society indeed has

its great men and its little men, as the earth has its mountains and its

valleys. But the inequalities of intellect, like the inequalities of the

surface of our globe, bear so small a proportion to the mass, that, in

calculating its great revolutions, they may safely be neglected. The sun

illuminates the hills, while it is still below the horizon; and truth is

discovered by the highest minds a little before it becomes manifest to

the multitude. This is the extent of their superiority. They are the

first to catch and reflect a light, which, without their assistance,

must, in a short time, be visible to those who lie far beneath them.

{325}The same remark will apply equally to the fine arts. The laws on

which depend the progress and decline of poetry, painting, and

sculpture, operate with little less certainty than those which regulate

the periodical returns of heat and cold, of fertility and barrenness.

Those who seem to lead the public taste are, in general, merely

outrunning it in the direction which it is spontaneously pursuing.

Without a just apprehension of the laws to which we have alluded, the

merits and defects of Dryden can be but imperfectly understood. We will,

therefore, state what we conceive them to be.

The ages in which the master-pieces of imagination have been produced

have by no means been those in which taste has been most correct. It

seems that the creative faculty, and the critical faculty, cannot exist

together in their highest perfection. The causes of this phenomenon it

is not difficult to assign.

It is true that the man who is best able to take a machine to pieces,

and who most clearly comprehends the manner in which all its wheels and

springs conduce to its general effect, will be the man most competent to

form another machine of similar power. In all the branches of physical

and moral science which admit of perfect analysis, he who can resolve

will be able to combine. But the analysis which criticism can effect

of poetry is necessarily imperfect. One element must for ever elude its

researches; and that is the very element by which poetry is poetry. In

the description of nature, for example, a judicious reader will easily

detect an incongruous image. But he will find it impossible to explain

in what consists the art of a writer who, in a few words, brings some

spot before him so vividly that he shall know it as if he had lived

there from childhood; while another, employing the {326}same materials,

the same verdure, the same water, and the same flowers, committing

no inaccuracy, introducing nothing which can be positively pronounced

superfluous, omitting nothing which can be positively pronounced

necessary, shall produce no more effect than an advertisement of a

capital residence and a desirable pleasure-ground. To take another

example: the great features of the character of Hotspur are obvious to

the most superficial reader. We at once perceive that his courage is

splendid, his thirst of glory intense, his animal spirits high, his

temper careless, arbitrary, and petulant; that he indulges his own

humour without caring whose feelings he may wound, or whose enmity he

may provoke, by his levity. Thus far criticism will go. But something

is still wanting. A man might have all those qualities, and every other

quality which the most minute examiner can introduce into his catalogue

of the virtues and faults of Hotspur, and yet he would not be Hotspur.

Almost everything that we have said of him applies equally to Falcon

bridge. Yet in the mouth of Falconbridge most of his speeches would seem

out of place. In real life this perpetually occurs. We are sensible of

nude differences between men whom, if we were required to describe them,

we should describe in almost the same terms. If we were attempting to

draw elaborate characters of them, we should scarcely be able to

point out any strong distinction; yet we approach them with feelings

altogether dissimilar. We cannot conceive of them as using the

expressions or the gestures of each other. Let us suppose that a

zoologist should attempt to give an account of some animal, a porcupine

for instance, to people who had never seen it. The porcupine, he might

say, is of the genus mammalia, and the order {327}glires. There are

whiskers on its face; it is two feet long; it has four toes before, five

behind, two fore teeth, and eight grinders. Its body is covered with

hair and quills. And, when all this had been said, would any one of the

auditors have formed a just idea of a porcupine? Would any two of

them have formed the same idea? There might exist innumerable races of

animals, possessing all the characteristics which have been mentioned,

yet altogether unlike to each other. What the description of our

naturalist is to a real porcupine, the remarks of criticism are to the

images of poetry. What it so imperfectly decomposes it cannot perfectly

re-construct. It is evidently as impossible to produce an Othello or a

Macbeth by reversing an analytical process so defective, as it would

be for an anatomist to form a living man out of the fragments of his

dissecting-room. In both cases the vital principle eludes the finest

instruments, and vanishes in the very instant in which its seat is

touched. Hence those who, trusting to their critical skill, attempt to

write poems give us, not images of things, but catalogues of qualities.

Their characters are allegories; not good men and bad men, but cardinal

virtues and deadly sins. We seem to have fallen among the acquaintances

of our old friend Christian: sometimes we meet Mistrust and Timorous;

sometimes Mr. Hate-good and Mr. Love-lust; and then again Prudence,

Piety, and Charity.

That critical discernment is not sufficient to make men poets, is

generally allowed. Why it should keep them from becoming poets, is not

perhaps equally evident: but the fact is, that poetry requires not an

examining but a believing frame of mind. Those feel it most, and

write it best, who forget that it is a work {328}of art; to whom its

imitations, like the realities from which they are taken, are subjects,

not for connoisseur-ship, but for tears and laughter, resentment and

affection; who are too much under the influence of the illusion to

admire the genius which has produced it; who are too much frightened for

Ulysses in the cave of Polyphemus to care whether the pun about Outis be

good or bad; who forget that such a person as Shakspeare ever existed,

while they weep and curse with Lear. It is by giving faith to the

creations of the imagination that a man becomes a poet. It is by

treating those creations as deceptions, and by resolving them, as nearly

as possible, into their elements, that he becomes a critic. In the

moment in which the skill of the artist is perceived, the spell of the

art is broken.

These considerations account for the absurdities into which the greatest

writers have fallen, when they have attempted to give general rules for

composition, or to pronounce judgment on the works of others. They are

unaccustomed to analyse what they feel; they, therefore, perpetually

refer their emotions to causes which have not in the slightest degree

tended to produce them. They feel pleasure in reading a book. They

never consider that this pleasure may be the effect of ideas which

some unmeaning expression, striking on the first link of a chain of

associations, may have called up in their own minds--that they have

themselves furnished to the author the beauties which they admire.

Cervantes is the delight of all classes of readers. Every school-boy

thumbs to pieces the most wretched translations of his romance, and

knows the lantern jaws of the Knight Errant, and the broad cheeks of

the Squire, as well as the faces of his own playfellow’s. {329}The most

experienced and fastidious judges are amazed at the perfection of that

art which extracts inextinguishable laughter from the greatest of human

calamities without once violating the reverence due to it; at that

discriminating delicacy of touch which makes a character exquisitely

ridiculous, without impairing its worth, its grace, or its dignity. In

Don Quixote are several dissertations on the principles of poetic and

dramatic writing. No passages in the whole work exhibit stronger marks

of labour and attention; and no passages in any work with which we

are acquainted are more worthless and puerile. In our time they would

scarcely obtain admittance into the literary department of the Morning

Post. Every reader of the Divine Comedy must be struck by the veneration

which Dante expresses for writers far inferior to himself. He will not

lift up his eyes from the ground in the presence of Brunetto, all whose

works are not worth the worst of his own hundred cantos. He does

not venture to walk in the same line with the bombastic Statius. His

admiration of Virgil is absolute idolatry. If indeed it had been excited

by the elegant, splendid, and harmonious diction of the Roman poet,

it would not have been altogether unreasonable; but it is rather as an

authority on all points of philosophy, than as a work of imagination,

that he values the Æneid. The most trivial passages he regards as

oracles of the highest authority, and of the most recondite meaning. He

describes his conductor as the sea of all wisdom--the sun which heals

every disordered sight. As he judged of Virgil, the Italians of the

fourteenth century judged of him; they were proud of him; they praised

him; they struck medals bearing his head; they quarrelled {330}for the

honour of possessing his remains; they maintained professors to expound

his writings. But what they admired was not that mighty imagination

which called a new world into existence, and made all its sights and

sounds familiar to the eye and ear of the mind. They said little of

those awful and lovely creations on which later critics delight to

dwell--Farinata lifting his haughty and tranquil brow from his couch of

everlasting fire--the lion-like repose of Sordello--or the light which

shone from the celestial smile of Beatrice. They extolled their great

poet for his smattering of ancient literature and history; for his

logic and his divinity; for his absurd physics, and his more absurd

metaphysics; for everything but that in which he preeminently excelled.

Like the fool in the story, who ruined his dwelling by digging for gold,

which, as he had dreamed, was concealed under its foundations, they laid

waste one of the noblest works of human genius, by seeking in it

for buried treasures of wisdom which existed only in their own wild

reveries. The finest passages were little valued till they had been

debased into some monstrous allegory. Louder applause was given to

the lecture on fate and free-will, or to the ridiculous astronomical

theories, than to those tremendous lines which disclose the secrets

of the tower of hunger, or to that half-told tale of guilty love, so

passionate and so full of tears.

We do not mean to say that the contemporaries of Dante read with less

emotion than their descendants of Ugolino groping among the wasted

corpses of his children, or of Francesca starting at the tremulous kiss

and dropping the fatal volume. Far from it. We believe that they admired

these things less than ourselves, but that they felt them more. We

should perhaps {331}say that they felt them too much to admire them. The

progress of a nation from barbarism to civilisation produces a change

similar to that which takes place during the progress of an individual

from infancy to mature age. What man does not remember with regret the

first time that he read Robinson Crusoe? Then, indeed, he was unable

to appreciate the powers of the writer; or, rather, he neither knew nor

cared whether the book had a writer at all. He probably thought it not

half so fine as some rant of Macpherson about dark-browed Foldath, and

white-bosomed Strinadona.

He now values Fingal and Temora only as showing with how little evidence

a story may be believed, and with how little merit a book may be

popular. Of the romance of Defoe he entertains the highest opinion. He

perceives the hand of a master in ten thousand touches which formerly he

passed by without notice. But, though he understands the merits of the

narrative better than formerly, he is far less interested by it. Xury

and Friday, and pretty Poll, the boat with the shoulder-of-mutton sail,

and the canoe which could not be brought down to the water edge, the

tent with its hedge and ladders, the preserve of kids, and the den where

the old goat died, can never again be to him the realities which

they were. The days when his favourite volume set him upon making

wheel-barrows and chairs, upon digging caves and fencing huts in the

garden, can never return. Such is the law of our nature. Our judgment

ripens; our imagination decays. We cannot at once enjoy the flowers of

the spring of life and the fruits of its autumn, the pleasures of close

investigation and those of agreeable error. We cannot sit at once in

the front of the stage and behind the scenes. We cannot be under the

illusion of the {332}spectacle, while we are watching the movements of

the ropes and pulleys which dispose it.

The chapter in which Fielding describes the behaviour of Partridge at

the theatre affords so complete an illustration of our proposition, that

we cannot refrain from quoting some parts of it.

“Partridge gave that credit to Mr. Garrick which he had denied to Jones,

and fell into so violent a trembling that his knees knocked against each

other. Jones asked him what was the matter, and whether he was afraid of

the warrior npon the stage?--‘O, la, sir,’ said he, ‘I perceive now it

is what you told me. I am not afraid of anything, for I know it is but

a play; and if it was really a ghost, it could do one no harm at such a

distance and in so much company; and yet, if I was frightened, I am not

the only person.’--‘Why, who,’ cries Jones, ‘dost thou take to be such

a coward here besides thyself?’--‘Nay, you may call me a coward if you

will; but if that little man there npon the stage is not frightened, I

never saw any man frightened in my life.’.... He sat with his eyes fixed

partly on the ghost and partly on Hamlet, and with his mouth open; the

same passions which succeeded each other in Hamlet, succeeding likewise

in him.......

“Little more worth remembering occurred during the play, at the end of

which Jones asked him which of the players he liked best. To this he

answered, with some appearance of indignation at the question, ‘The

King, without doubt.’--‘Indeed, Mr. Partridge,’ says Mrs. Miller, ‘you

are not of the same opinion with the town; for they are all agreed that

Hamlet is acted by the best player who was ever on the stage.’ ‘He the

best player!’ cries Partridge, with a contemptuous sneer; ‘why I could

act as well as he myself. I am sure, if I had seen a ghost, I should

have looked in the very same manner, and done just as he did. And then,

to be sure, in that scene, as you called it, between him and his mother,

where you told me he acted so fine, why, any man, that is, any good man,

that had such a mother, would have done exactly the same. I know you are

only joking with me; but indeed, madam, though I never was at a play in

London, yet I have seen acting before in the country, and the King, for

my money, he speaks all his words distinctly, and half as loud again

as the other. Anybody may see he is an actor.’” {333}In this excellent

passage Partridge is represented as a very bad theatrical critic. But

none of those who laugh at him possess the tithe of his sensibility to

theatrical excellence. He admires in the wrong place; but he trembles

in the right place. It is indeed because he is so much excited by the

acting of Garrick, that he ranks him below the strutting, mouthing

performer, who personates the King. So, we have heard it said that,

in some parts of Spain and Portugal, an actor who should represent a

depraved character finely, instead of calling down the applauses of the

audience, is hissed and pelted without mercy. It would be the same

in England, if we, for one moment, thought that Shylock or Iago was

standing before us. While the dramatic art was in its infancy at Athens,

it produced similar effects on the ardent and imaginative spectators.

It is said that they blamed Æschylus for frightening them into fits

with his Furies. Herodotus tells us that, when Phrynichus produced

his tragedy on the fall of Miletus, they fined him in a penalty of

a thousand drachmas for torturing their feelings by so pathetic an

exhibition. They did not regard him as a great artist, but merely as

a man who had given them pain. When they woke from the distressing

illusion, they treated the author of it as they would have treated a

messenger who should have brought them fatal and alarming tidings which

turned out to be false. In the same manner, a child screams with terror

at the sight of a person in an ugly mask. He has perhaps seen the

mask put on. But his imagination is too strong for his reason; and he

intreats that it may be taken off.

We should act in the same manner if the grief and horror produced in us

by works of the imagination amounted to real torture. But in us these

emotions are {334}comparatively languid. They rarely affect our appetite

or our sleep. They leave us sufficiently at ease to trace them to their

causes, and to estimate the powers which produce them. Our attention is

speedily diverted from the images which call forth our tears to the art

by which those images have been selected and combined. We applaud the

genius of the writer. We applaud our own sagacity and sensibility; and

we are comforted.

Yet, though, we think that in the progress of nations towards refinement

the reasoning powers are improved at the expense of the imagination, we

acknowledge that to this rule there are many apparent exceptions. We

are not, however, quite satisfied that they are more than apparent. Men

reasoned better, for example, in the time of Elizabeth than in the time

of Egbert; and they also wrote better poetry. But we must distinguish

between poetry as a mental act, and poetry as a species of composition.

If we take it in the latter sense, its excellence depends, not solely on

the vigour of the imagination, but partly also on the instruments which

the imagination employs. Within certain limits, therefore, poetry may he

improving while the poetical faculty is decaying. The vividness of the

picture presented to the reader is not necessarily proportioned to the

vividness of the prototype which exists in the mind of the writer. In

the other arts we see this clearly. Should a man, gifted by nature with

all the genius of Canova, attempt to carve a statue without instruction

as to the management of his chisel, or attention to the anatomy of

the human body, he would produce something compared with which the

Highlander at the door of a snuff shop would deserve admiration. If an

uninitiated Raphael were to attempt {335}a painting, it would be a mere

daub; indeed, the connoisseurs say that the early works of Raphael are

little better. Yet, who can attribute this to want of imagination? Who

can doubt that the youth of that great artist was passed amidst an

ideal world of beautiful and majestic forms? Or, who will attribute

the difference which appears between his first rude essays and his

magnificent Transfiguration to a change in the constitution of his

mind? In poetry, as in painting and sculpture, it is necessary that

the imitator should be well acquainted with that which he undertakes to

imitate, and expert in the mechanical part of his art. Genius will not

furnish him with a vocabulary: it will not teach him what word most

exactly corresponds to his idea, and will most fully convey it to

others: it will not make him a great descriptive poet, till he has

looked with attention on the face of nature; or a great dramatist,

till he has felt and witnessed much of the influence of the passions.

Information and experience are, therefore, necessary; not for the

purpose of strengthening the imagination, which is never so strong as in

people incapable of reasoning--savages, children, madmen, and

dreamers; but for the purpose of enabling the artist to communicate his

conceptions to others.

In a barbarous age the imagination exercises a despotic power. So strong

is the perception of what is unreal that it often overpowers all the

passions of the mind and all the sensations of the body. At first,

indeed, the phantasm remains undivulged, a hidden treasure, a wordless

poetry, an invisible painting, a silent music, a dream of which the

pains and pleasures exist to the dreamer alone, a bitterness which the

heart only knoweth, a joy with which a stranger intermeddleth not. The

machinery, by which ideas are to be conveyed {336}from one person to

another, is as yet rude and defective. Between mind and mind there is

a great gulf. The imitative arts do not exist, or are in their lowest

state. But the actions of men amply prove that the faculty which gives

birth to those arts is morbidly active. It is not yet the inspiration of

poets and sculptors; but it is the amusement of the day, the terror of

the night, the fertile source of wild superstitions. It turns the clouds

into gigantic shapes, and the winds into doleful voices. The belief

which springs from it is more absolute and undoubting than any which can

be derived from evidence. It resembles the faith which we repose in our

own sensations. Thus, the Arab, when covered with wounds, saw nothing

but the dark eyes and the green kerchief of a beckoning Houri. The

Northern warrior laughed in the pangs of death when he thought of the

mead of Valhalla.

The first works of the imagination are, as we have said, poor and rude,

not from the want of genius, but from the want of materials. Phidias

could have done nothing with an old tree and a fish-bone, or Homer with

the language of New Holland.

Yet the effect of these early performances, imperfect as they must

necessarily be, is immense. All deficiencies are supplied by the

susceptibility of those to whom they are addressed. We all know what

pleasure a wooden doll, which may be bought for sixpence, will afford

to a little girl. She will require no other company. She will nurse it,

dress it, and talk to it all day. No grown-up man takes half so much

delight in one of the incomparable babies of Chantrey. In the same

manner, savages are more affected by the rude compositions of their

bards than nations more advanced in civilisation by the greatest

master-pieces of poetry. {337}In process of time, the instruments by

which the imagination works are brought to perfection. Men have not more

imagination than their rude ancestors. We strongly suspect that they

have much less. But they produce better works of imagination. Thus, up

to a certain period, the diminution of the poetical powers is far more

than compensated by the improvement of all the appliances and means

of which those powers stand in need. Then comes the short period of

splendid and consummate excellence. And then, from causes against

which it is vain to struggle, poetry begins to decline. The progress

of language, which was at first favourable, becomes fatal to it, and,

instead of compensating for the decay of the imagination, accelerates

that decay, and renders it more obvious. When the adventurer in the

Arabian tale anointed one of his eyes with the contents of the magical

box, all the riches of the earth, however widely dispersed, however

sacredly concealed, became visible to him. But, when he tried the

experiment on both eyes, he was struck with blindness. What the

enchanted elixir was to the sight of the body, language is to the sight

of the imagination. At first it calls up a world of glorious illusions;

but, when it becomes too copious, it altogether destroys the visual

power.

As the development of the mind proceeds, symbols, instead of being

employed to convey images, are substituted for them. Civilised men think

as they trade, not in kind, but by means of a circulating medium. In

these circumstances, the sciences improve rapidly, and criticism among

the rest; but poetry, in the highest sense of the word, disappears. Then

comes the dotage of the fine arts, a second childhood, as feeble as the

former, and far more, hopeless. This is the age of {338}critical poetry,

of poetry by courtesy, of poetry to which the memory, the judgment, and

the wit contribute far more than the imagination. We readily allow that

many works of this description are excellent: we will not contend with

those who think them more valuable than the great poems of an earlier

period. We only maintain that they belong to a different species of

composition, and are produced by a different faculty.

It is some consolation to reflect that this critical school of poetry

improves as the science of criticism improves; and that the science

of criticism, like every other science, is constantly tending towards

perfection. As experiments are multiplied, principles are better

understood.

In some countries, in our own, for example, there has been an interval

between the downfall of the creative school and the rise of the

critical, a period during which imagination has been in its decrepitude,

and taste in its infancy. Such a revolutionary interregnum as this will

be deformed by every species of extravagance.

The first victory of good taste is over the bombast and conceits which

deform such times as these. But criticism is still in a very imperfect

state. What is accidental is for a long time confounded with what is

essential. General theories are drawn from detached facts. How many

hours the action of a play may be allowed to occupy,--how many similes

an Epic Poet may introduce into his first book,--whether a piece, which

is acknowledged to have a beginning and an end, may not be without a

middle, and other questions as puerile as these, formerly occupied the

attention of men of letters in France, and even in this country. Poets,

in such circumstances as these, exhibit all the {339}narrowness and

feebleness of the criticism by which their manner has been fashioned.

From outrageous absurdity they are preserved indeed by their timidity.

But they perpetually sacrifice nature and reason to arbitrary canons

of taste. In their eagerness to avoid the _mala prohibita_ of a foolish

code, they are perpetually rushing on the _mala in se_. Their great

predecessors, it is true, were as bad critics as themselves, or perhaps

worse: but those predecessors, as we have attempted to show, were

inspired by a faculty independent of criticism, and, therefore, wrote

well while they judged ill.

In time men begin to take more rational and comprehensive views of

literature. The analysis of poetry, which, as we have remarked, must at

best be imperfect, approaches nearer and nearer to exactness. The merits

of the wonderful models of former times are justly appreciated. The

frigid productions of a later age are rated at no more than their proper

value. Pleasing and ingenious imitations of the manner of the great

masters appear. Poetry has a partial revival, a Saint Martin’s Summer,

which, after a period of dreariness and decay, agreeably reminds us

of the splendour of its June. A second harvest is gathered in; though,

growing on a spent soil, it has not the heart of the former. Thus, in

the present age, Monti has successfully imitated the style of Dante;

and something of the Elizabethan inspiration has been caught by several

eminent countrymen of our own. But never will Italy produce another

Inferno, or England another Hamlet. We look on the beauties of the

modern imitations with feelings similar to those with which we see

flowers disposed in vases, to ornament the drawing-rooms of a capital.

We doubtless regard {340}them with pleasure, with greater pleasure,

perhaps, because, in the midst of a place ungenial to them, they

remind us of the distant spots on which they flourish in spontaneous

exuberance. But we miss the sap, the freshness and the bloom. Or, if

we may borrow another illustration from Queen Scheherezade, we would

compare the writers of this school to the jewellers who were employed to

complete the unfinished window of the palace of Aladdin. Whatever skill

or-cost could do was done. Palace and bazaar were ransacked for precious

stones. Yet the artists, with all their dexterity, with all their

assiduity, and with all their vast means, were unable to produce

anything comparable to the wonders which a spirit of a higher order had

wrought in a single night.

The history of every literature with which we are acquainted confirms,

we think, the principles which we have laid down. In Greece we see

the imaginative school of poetry gradually fading into the critical.

Æschylus and Pindar were succeeded by Sophocles, Sophocles by Euripides,

Euripides by the Alexandrian versifiers. Of these last, Theocritus

alone has left compositions which deserve to be read. The splendour and

grotesque fairyland of the Old Comedy, rich with such gorgeous hues,

peopled with such fantastic shapes, and vocal alternately with the

sweetest peals of music and the loudest bursts of elvish laughter,

disappeared for ever. The master-pieces of the New Comedy are known

to us by Latin translations of extraordinary merit. From these

translations, and from the expressions of the ancient critics, it is

clear that the original compositions were distinguished by grace and

sweetness, that they sparkled with wit, and abounded with pleading

sentiment; but that the creative power was {341}gone. Julius Cæsar

called Terence a half Menander,--a sure proof that Menander was not a

quarter Aristophanes.

The literature of the Romans was merely a continuation of the literature

of the Greeks. The pupils started from the point at which their masters

had, in the course of many generations, arrived. They thus almost wholly

missed the period of original invention. The only Latin poets whose

writings exhibit much vigour of imagination are Lucretius and Catullus.

The Augustan age produced nothing equal to their finer passages.

In France, that licensed jester, whose jingling cap and motley coat

concealed more genius than ever mustered in the saloon of Ninon or of

Madame Géoffrin, was succeeded by writers as decorous and as tiresome as

gentlemen-ushers.

The poetry of Italy and of Spain has undergone the same change. But

nowhere has the revolution been more complete and violent than in

England. The same person, who, when a boy, had clapped his thrilling

hands at the first representation of the Tempest might, without

attaining to a marvellous longevity, have lived to read the earlier

works of Prior and Addison. The change, we believe, must, sooner or

later, have taken place. But its progress was accelerated, and its

character modified, by the political occurrences of the times, and

particularly by two events, the closing of the theatres under the

commonwealth, and the restoration of the House of Stuart.

We have said that the critical and poetical faculties are not only

distinct, but almost incompatible. The state of our literature during

the reigns of Elizabeth and James the First is a strong confirmation of

this {342}remark. The greatest works of imagination that the world

has ever seen were produced at that period. The national taste, in

the meantime, was to the last degree detestable. Alliterations,

puns, antithetical forms of expression lavishly employed where no

corresponding opposition existed between the thoughts expressed,

strained allegories, pedantic allusions, everything, in short, quaint

and affected, in matter and manner, made up what was then considered

as fine writing. The eloquence of the bar, the pulpit, and the

council-board, was deformed by conceits which would have disgraced

the rhyming shepherds of an Italian academy. The king quibbled on the

throne. We might, indeed, console ourselves by reflecting that his

majesty was a fool. But the chancellor quibbled in concert from the

wool-sack: and the chancellor was Francis Bacon. It is needless to

mention Sidney and the whole tribe of Euphuists; for Shakspeare himself,

the greatest poet that ever lived, falls into the same fault whenever he

means to be particularly fine. While he abandons himself to the impulse

of his imagination, his compositions are not only the sweetest and the

most sublime, but also the most faultless, that the world has ever seen.

But, as soon as his critical powers come into play, he sinks to the

level of Cowley; or rather he does ill what Cowley did well. All that

is bad in his works is bad elaborately, and of malice aforethought. The

only thing wanting to make them perfect was, that he should never have

troubled himself with thinking whether they were good or not. Like the

angels in Milton, he sinks “with compulsion and laborious flight.” His

natural tendency is upwards. That he may soar, it is only necessary that

he should not struggle to fall. He resembles an American {343}Cacique,

who, possessing in unmeasured abundance the metals which in polished

societies are esteemed the most precious, was utterly unconscious of

their value, and gave up treasures more valuable than the imperial

crowns of other countries, to secure some gaudy and far-fetched but

worthless bauble, a plated button, or a necklace of coloured glass.

We have attempted to show that, as knowledge is extended and as the

reason developes itself, the imitative arts decay. We should, therefore,

expect that the corruption of poetry would commence in the educated

classes of society. And this, in fact, is almost constantly the case.

The few great works of imagination which appear in a critical age are,

almost without exception, the works of uneducated men. Thus, at a

time when persons of quality translated French romances, and when the

universities celebrated royal deaths in verses about tritons and fauns,

a preaching tinker produced the Pilgrim’s Progress. And thus a ploughman

startled a generation which had thought Hayley and Beattie great poets,

with the adventures of Tam O’Shanter. Even in the latter part of the

reign of Elizabeth the fashionable poetry had degenerated. It retained

few vestiges of the imagination of earlier times. It had not yet been

subjected to the rules of good taste. Affectation had completely tainted

madrigals and sonnets. The grotesque conceits and the tuneless numbers

of Donne were, in the time of James, the favourite models of composition

at Whitehall and at the Temple. But, though the literature of the Court

was in its decay, the literature of the people was in its perfection.

The Muses had taken sanctuary in the theatres, the haunts of a class

whose taste was not better than that of the Right Honourables and

{344}singular good Lords who admired metaphysical love-verses, but whose

imagination retained all its freshness and vigour; whose censure and

approbation might be erroneously bestowed, but whose tears and laughter

were never in the wrong. The infection which had tainted lyric and

didactic poetry had but slightly and partially touched the drama. While

the noble and the learned were comparing eyes to burning-glasses, and

tears to terrestrial globes, coyness to an enthymeme, absence to a pair

of compasses, and an unrequited passion to the fortieth remainder-man in

an entail, Juliet leaning from the balcony, and Miranda smiling over the

chess-board, sent home many spectators, as kind and simple-hearted

as the master and mistress of Fletcher’s Ralpho, to cry themselves to

sleep.

No species of fiction is so delightful to us as the old English drama.

Even its inferior productions possess a charm not to be found in any

other kind of poetry. It is the most lucid mirror that ever was held up

to nature. The creations of the great dramatists of Athens produce the

effect of magnificent sculptures, conceived by a mighty imagination,

polished with the utmost delicacy, embodying ideas of ineffable majesty

and beauty, but cold, pale, and rigid, with no bloom on the check, and

no speculation in the eye. In all the draperies, the figures, and the

faces, in the lovers and the tyrants, the Bacchanals and the Furies,

there is the same marble chillness and deadness. Most of the characters

of the French stage resemble the waxen gentlemen and ladies in the

window of a perfumer, rouged, curled, and bedizened, but fixed in

such stiff attitudes, and staring with eyes expressive of such utter

unmeaningness, that they cannot produce an illusion for a single

moment. In the English plays alone is to {345}be found the warmth, the

mellowness, and the reality of painting. We know the minds of the men

and women, as we know the faces of the men and women of Vandyke.

The excellence of these works is in a great measure the result of

two peculiarities, which the critics of the French school consider as

defects,--from the mixture of tragedy and comedy, and from the length

and extent of the action. The former is necessary to render the drama a

just representation of a world in which the laughers and the weepers are

perpetually jostling each other,--in which every event has its

serious and ludicrous side. The latter enables us to form an intimate

acquaintance with characters with which we could not possibly become

familiar during the few hours to which the unities restrict the poet.

In this respect, the works of Shakspeare, in particular, are miracles

of art. In a piece, which may be read aloud in three hours, we see a

character gradually unfold all its recesses to us. We see it change with

the change of circumstances. The petulant youth rises into the politic

and warlike sovereign. The profuse and courteous philanthropist sours

into a hater and scorn er of his kind. The tyrant is altered, by the

chastening of affliction, into a pensive moralist. The veteran general,

distinguished by coolness, sagacity, and self-command, sinks under a

conflict between love strong as death, and jealousy cruel as the grave.

The brave and loyal subject passes, step by step, to the extremities

of human depravity. We trace his progress, from the first dawnings of

unlawful ambition to the cynical melancholy of his impenitent remorse.

Yet, in these pieces, there are no unnatural transitions. Nothing is

omitted: nothing is crowded. Great as are the changes, narrow as is

{346}the compass within which they are exhibited, they shock us as

little as the gradual alterations of those familiar faces which we see

every evening and every morning. The magical skill of the poet resembles

that of the Dervise in the Spectator, who condensed all the events of

seven years into the single moment during which the king held his head

under the water.

It is deserving of remark, that, at the time of which we speak, the

plays even of men not eminently distinguished by genius,--such, for

example, as Jonson,--were far superior to the best works of imagination

in other departments. Therefore, though we conceive that, from causes

which we have already investigated, our poetry must necessarily have

declined, we think that, unless its fate had been accelerated by

external attacks, it might have enjoyed an euthanasia, that genius might

have been kept alive by the drama till its place could, in some degree,

be supplied by taste,--that there would have been scarcely any interval

between the age of sublime invention and that of agreeable imitation.

The works of Shakspeare, which were not appreciated with any degree of

justice before the middle of the eighteenth century, might then have

been the recognized standards of excellence during the latter part of

the seventeenth; and he and the great Elizabethan writers might have

been almost immediately succeeded by a generation of poets similar to

those who adorn our own times.

But the Puritans drove imagination from its last asylum. They prohibited

theatrical representations, and stigmatised the whole race of dramatists

as enemies of morality and religion. Much that is objectionable may be

found in the writers whom they reprobated; but whether they took the

best measures for stopping {347}the evil appears to us very doubtful,

and must, we think, have appeared doubtful to themselves, when, after

the lapse of a few years, they saw the unclean spirit whom they had cast

out return to his old haunts, with seven others fouler than himself.

By the extinction of the drama, the fashionable school of poetry,--a

school without truth of sentiment or harmony of versification,--without

the powers of an earlier, or the correctness of a later age,--was left

to enjoy undisputed ascendency. A vicious ingenuity, a morbid quickness

to perceive resemblances and analogies between things apparently

heterogeneous, constituted almost its only claim to admiration. Suckling

was dead. Milton was absorbed in political and theological controversy.

If Waller differed from the Cow-lei an sect of writers, he differed for

the worse. He had as little poetry as they, and much less wit; nor is

the languor of his verses less offensive than the ruggeedness of theirs.

In Dedham alone the faint dawn of a better manner was discernible.

But, low as was the state of our poetry during the civil war and the

Protectorate, a still deeper fall was at hand. Hitherto our literature

had been idiomatic. In mind as in situation we had been islanders. The

revolutions in our taste, like the revolutions in our government, had

been settled without the interference of strangers. Had this state of

things continued, the same just principles of reasoning which, about

this time, were applied with unprecedented success to every part of

philosophy would soon have conducted our ancestors to a sounder code of

criticism. There were already strong signs of improvement. Our prose

had at length worked itself clear from those quaint conceits which

still deformed almost every metrical composition. {348}The parliamentary

debates, and the diplomatic correspondence of that eventful period,

had contributed much to this reform. In such bustling times, it was

absolutely necessary to speak and write to the purpose. The absurdities

of Puritanism had, perhaps, done more. At the time when that odious

style, which deforms the writings of Hall and of Lord Bacon, was almost

universal, had appeared that stupendous work, the English Bible,--a

book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would

alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power. The

respect which the translators felt for the original prevented them from

adding any of the hideous decorations then in fashion. The ground-work

of the version, indeed, was of an earlier age. The familiarity with

which the Puritans, on almost every occasion, used the Scriptural

phrases was no doubt very ridiculous; but it produced good effects. It

was a cant; but it drove out a cant far more offensive.

The highest kind of poetry is, in a great measure, independent of those

circumstances which regulate the style of composition in prose. But with

that inferior species of poetry which succeeds to it the case is widely

different. In a few years, the good sense and good taste which had

weeded out affectation from moral and political treatises would, in the

natural course of things, have effected a similar reform in the sonnet

and the ode. The rigour of the victorious sectaries had relaxed.

A dominant religion is never ascetic. The Government connived at

theatrical representations. The influence of Shakspeare was once more

felt. But darker days were approaching. A foreign yoke was to be imposed

on our literature. Charles, surrounded by the companions of his long

exile, returned to govern {349}a nation which ought never to have cast

him out or never to have received him back. Every year which he

had passed among strangers had rendered him more unfit to rule his

countrymen. In France he had seen the refractory magistracy humbled, and

royal prerogative, though exercised by a foreign priest in the name of

a child, victorious over all opposition. This spectacle naturally

gratified a prince to whose family the opposition of Parliaments had

been so fatal. Politeness was his solitary good quality. The insults

which he had suffered in Scotland had taught him to prize it. The

effeminacy and apathy of his disposition fitted him to excel in it. The

elegance and vivacity of the French manners fascinated him. With the

political maxims and the social habits of his favourite people, he

adopted their taste in composition, and, when seated on the throne, soon

rendered it fashionable, partly by direct patronage, but still more by

that contemptible policy which, for a time, made England the last of the

nations, and raised Louis the Fourteenth to a height of power and fame,

such as no French sovereign had ever before attained.

It was to please Charles that rhyme was first introduced into our plays.

Thus, a rising blow, which would at any time have been mortal, was

dealt to the English Drama, then just recovering from its languishing

condition. Two detestable manners, the indigenous and the imported, were

now in a state of alternate conflict and amalgamation. The bombastic

meanness of the new style was blended with the ingenious absurdity of

the old; and the mixture produced something which the world had never

before seen, and which, we hope, it will never see again,--something, by

the side of which the worst nonsense of all other ages {350}appears to

advantage,--something, which those who have attempted to caricature it

have, against their will, been forced to flatter,--of which the tragedy

of Bayes is a very favourable specimen. What Lord Dorset observed

to Edward Howard might have been addressed to almost all his

contemporaries:--

“As skilful divers to the bottom fall

Swifter than those who cannot swim at all;

So, in this way of writing without thinking,

Thou hast a strange alacrity in sinking.”

From this reproach some clever men of the world must be excepted, and

among them Dorset himself. Though by no means great poets, or even good

versifiers, they always wrote with meaning, and sometimes with wit.

Nothing indeed more strongly shows to what a miserable state literature

had fallen, than the immense superiority which the occasional rhymes,

carelessly thrown on paper by men of this class, possess over the

elaborate productions of almost all the professed authors. The reigning

taste was so bad, that the success of a writer was in inverse proportion

to his labour, and to his desire of excellence. An exception must be

made for Butler, who had as much wit and learning as Cowley, and who

knew, what Cowley never knew, how to use them. A great command of good

homely English distinguishes him still more from the other writers of

the time. As for Gondibert, those may criticise it who can read

it. Imagination was extinct. Taste was depraved. Poetry, driven from

palaces, colleges, and theatres, had found an asylum in the obscure

dwelling where a Great Man, born out of due season, in disgrace, penury,

pain, and blindness, still kept uncontaminated a character and a genius

worthy of a better age. {351}Everything about Milton is wonderful; but

nothing is so wonderful as that, in an age so unfavourable to poetry, he

should have produced the greatest of modern epic poems. We are not sure

that this is not in some degree to be attributed to his want of sight.

The imagination is notoriously most active when the external world

is shut out. In sleep its illusions are perfect. They produce all the

effect of realities. In darkness its visions are always more distinct

than in the light. Every person who amuses himself with what is called

building castles in the air must have experienced this. We know artists

who, before they attempt to draw a face from memory, close their eyes,

that they may recall a more perfect image of the features and the

expression. We are therefore inclined to believe that the genius

of Milton may have been preserved from the influence of times so

unfavourable to it by his infirmity. Be this as it may, his works at

first enjoyed a very small share of popularity. To be neglected by his

contemporaries was the penalty which he paid for surpassing them.

His great poem was not generally studied or admired till writers far

inferior to him had, by obsequiously cringing to the public taste,

acquired sufficient favour to reform it.

Of these, Dryden was the most eminent. Amidst the crowd of authors who,

during the earlier years of Charles the Second, courted notoriety

by every species of absurdity and affectation, he speedily became

conspicuous. No man exercised so much influence on the age. The reason

is obvious. On no man did the age exercise so much influence. He was

perhaps the greatest of those whom we have designated as the critical

poets; and his literary career exhibited, on a reduced scale, the whole

history of the school to which {352}he belonged,--the rudeness and

extravagance of its infancy,--the propriety, the grace, the dignified

good sense, the temperate splendour of its maturity. His imagination

was torpid, till it was awakened by his judgment. He began with quaint

parallels and empty mouthing. He gradually acquired the energy of the

satirist, the gravity of the moralist, the rapture of the lyric poet.

The revolution through which English literature has been passing, from

the time of Cowley to that of Scott, may be seen in miniature within the

compass of his volumes.

His life divides itself into two parts. There is some debatable ground

on the common frontier; but the line may be drawn with tolerable

accuracy. The year 1678 is that on which we should be inclined to fix

as the date of a great change in his manner. During the preceding period

appeared some of his courtly panegyrics,--his Annus Mirabilis, and

most of his plays; indeed, all his rhyming tragedies. To the subsequent

period belong his best dramas,--All for Love, The Spanish Friar, and

Sebastian,--his satires, his translations, his didactic poems, his

fables, and his odes.

Of the small pieces which were presented to chancellors and princes it

would scarcely be fair to speak. The greatest advantage which the Fine

Arts derive from the extension of knowledge is, that the patronage of

individuals becomes unnecessary. Some writers still affect to regret the

age of patronage. None but bad writers have reason to regret it. It is

always an age of general ignorance. Where ten thousand readers are eager

for the appearance of a book, a small contribution from each makes up

a splendid remuneration for the author. Where literature is a

luxury, confined to few, each of them must pay high. If the Empress

{353}Catherine, for example, wanted an epic poem, she must have wholly

supported the poet;--just as, in a remote country village, a man who

wants a mutton-chop is sometimes forced to take the whole sheep;--a

thing which never happens where the demand is large. But men who pay

largely for the gratification of their taste will expect to have it

united with some gratification to their vanity. Flattery is carried to a

shameless extent; and the habit of flattery almost inevitably introduces

a false taste into composition. Its language is made up of hyperbolical

common-places,--offensive from their triteness,--still more offensive

from their extravagance. In no school is the trick of overstepping the

modesty of nature so speedily acquired. The writer, accustomed to find

exaggeration acceptable and necessary on one subject, uses it on all. It

is not strange, therefore, that the early panegyrical verses of Dryden

should be made up of meanness and bombast. They abound with the conceits

which his immediate predecessors had brought into fashion. But his

language and his versification were already far superior to their’s.

The Annus Mirabilis shows great command of expression, and a fine ear

for heroic rhyme. Here its merits end. Not only has it no claim to be

called poetry, but it seems to be the work of a man who could never, by

any possibility, write poetry. Its affected similes are the best part

of it. Gaudy weeds present a more encouraging spectacle than utter

barrenness. There is scarcely a single stanza in this long work to which

the imagination seems to have contributed anything. It is produced, not

by creation, but by construction. It is made up, not of pictures, but

of inferences. We will give a single instance, and {354}certainly a

favourable instance,--a quatrain which Johnson has praised. Dryden is

describing the sea-fight with the Dutch.--

“Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball;

And now their odours armed against them fly.

Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall.

And some by aromatic splinters die."

The poet should place his readers, as nearly as possible, in the

situation of the sufferers or the spectators. His narration ought to

produce feelings similar to those which would be excited by the event

itself. Is this the case here? Who, in a sea-fight, ever thought of the

price of the china which beats out the brains of a sailor; or of the

odour of the splinter which shatters his leg? It is not by an act of the

imagination, at once calling up the scene before the interior eye, but

by painful meditation,--by turning the subject round and round,--by

tracing out facts into remote consequences,--that these incongruous

topics are introduced into the description. Homer, it is true,

perpetually uses epithets which are not peculiarly appropriate.

Achilles is the-swift-footed, when he is sitting still. Ulysses is the

much-enduring, when he has nothing to endure. Every spear casts a long

shadow, every ox has crooked horns, and every woman a high bosom, though

these particulars may be quite beside the purpose. In our old ballads a

similar practice prevails. The gold is always red, and the ladies always

gay, though nothing whatever may depend on the hue of the gold, or the

temper of the ladies. But these adjectives are mere customary additions.

They merge in the substantives to which they are attached. If they at

all colour the idea, it is with a tinge so slight as in no respect to

alter the general effect. In the {355}passage which we have quoted from

Dryden the case is very different.._Preciously_ and _aromatic_ divert

our whole attention to themselves, and dissolve the image of the battle

in a moment. The whole poem reminds us of Lucan, and of the worst parts

of Lucan,--the sea-fight in the Bay of Marseilles, for example. The

description of the two fleets during the night is perhaps the only

passage which ought to be exempted from this censure. If it was from

the Annus Mirabilis that Milton formed his opinion, when he pronounced

Dryden a good rhymer but no poet, he certainly judged correctly. But

Dryden was, as we have said, one of those writers in whom the period of

imagination does not precede, but follow, the period of observation and

reflection.

His plays, his rhyming plays in particular, are admirable subjects for

those who wish to study the morbid anatomy of the drama. He was utterly

destitute of the power of exhibiting real human beings. Even in the far

inferior talent of composing characters out of those elements into

which the imperfect process of our reason can resolve them, he was very

deficient. His men are not even good personifications; they are not

well-assorted assemblages of qualities. Now and then, indeed, he seizes

a very coarse and marked distinction, and gives us, not a likeness, but

a strong caricature, in which a single peculiarity is protruded, and

everything else neglected; like the Marquis of Granby at an inn-door,

whom we know by nothing but his baldness; or Wilkes, who is Wilkes only

in his squint. These are the best specimens of his skill. For most of

his pictures seem, like Turkey carpets, to have been expressly designed

not to resemble anything in the heavens above, in the earth beneath, or

in the waters under the earth. {356}The latter manner he practises

most frequently in his tragedies, the former in his comedies. The comic

characters are, without mixture, loathsome and despicable. The men of

Etherege and Vanbrugh are bad enough. Those of Smollett are perhaps

worse. But they do not approach to the Celadons, the Wildbloods, the

Woodalls, and the Rhodophils of Dryden. The vices of these last are

set off by a certain fierce hard impudence, to which we know nothing

comparable. Their love is the appetite of beasts; their friendship the

confederacy of knaves. The ladies seem to have been expressly created to

form helps meet for such gentlemen. In deceiving and insulting their

old fathers they do not perhaps exceed the license which, by im memorial

prescription, has been allowed to heroines. But they also cheat at

cards, rob strong boxes, put up their favours to auction, betray their

friends, abuse their rivals in the style of Billingsgate, and

invite their lovers in the language of the Piazza. These, it must be

remembered, are not the valets and waiting-women, the Mascarilles and

Nerines, but the recognised heroes and heroines, who appear as the

representatives of good society, and who, at the end of the fifth act,

marry and live very happily ever after. The sensuality, baseness, and

malice of their natures is unredeemed by any quality of a different

description,--by any touch of kindness,--or even by any honest burst of

hearty hatred and revenge. We are in a world where there is no humanity,

no veracity, no sense of shame,--a world for which any good-natured man

would gladly take in exchange the society of Milton’s devils. But, as

soon as we enter the regions of Tragedy, we find a great change. There

is no lack of fine sentiment there. Metastasio is surpassed {357}in his

own department. Scuderi is out-scuderied. We are introduced to people

whose proceedings we can trace to no motive,--of whose feelings we

can form no more idea than of a sixth sense. We have left a race of

creatures, whose love is as delicate and affectionate as the passion

which an alderman feels for a turtle. We find ourselves among being’s,

whose love is a purely disinterested emotion,--a loyalty extending to

passive obedience,--a religion, like that of the Quietists, unsupported

by any sanction of hope or fear. We see nothing but despotism without

power, and sacrifices without compensation.

We will give a few instances. In Aurengzebe, Arimant, governor of Agra,

falls in love with his prisoner Indamora. She rejects his suit with

scorn; but assures him that she shall make great use of her power over

him. He threatens to be angry. She answers, very coolly:

“Do not: your anger, like your love, is vain:

Whene’er I please, you must be pleased again.

Knowing what power I have your will to bend,

I’ll use it; for I need just such a friend."