criticism. They are literary FACINORA. No rational account--no theory of
them can be given. There they are--melancholy, but instructive facts. They
express the revolution of the national spirit, on the upper degrees of the
social scale. That which thirty, twenty, ten years before was impossible,
happens. The hewing in pieces of Shakspeare, to throw him into the magical
caldron, to reproduce him, not in youth but in dotage, shows a death, but
not yet the consequent life. Stupendous and sweet Nature whom we
possessed, has vanished--fled heavenward--resolved into a dew--gone, into
the country. At least, she is no longer in town! It may safely be averred,
that no straining of the human intellect can compute the interval
overleaped betwixt those originals, and these transcriptions. It is no
translation, paraphrase, metaphrase. It is as if we should catch a
confused and misapprehending glimpse of something that is going on in
Jupiter. It is a transference from one order of beings to another; who
have some intellectual processes in common, but are allied by no sympathy.
The sublime is gone! The beautiful is gone! The rational is gone! The
loving is gone! The divine is not here! Nor the angelical! Nor the human!
Alas! not even the diabolical! All is corrupted! banished! obliterated!
We have seen Dryden complaining of Shakspeare's language and style--of the
language as antiquated from the understanding of an audience in his own
day--of the whole style as being "so pestered with the figurative
expressions, that it is as affected as it is obscure." And we were aware
of the modest self-attribution, "_I have refined the language_," in
Drydenising Troilus and Cressida, "which before was _obsolete_." And
Samuel Johnson corroborates and enlarges the self-praise. "Dryden was the
first who _refined the language of poetry_."
At this day, such expressions fill the younger votary--creative or
critical--of our vernacular muse with astonishment and perplexity, and set
an older one upon thinking. Such assertions, it must be said, are
"_unintelligible_" now, because a nobler unfolding of time, a happy return
of our educated mind to the old and to the natural, has "_antiquated_" the
literary sentiment, which Dryden and Johnson shared, and which they so
confidently proposed to fitly-prepared readers.
Shakspeare obsolete! There is not a writer of to-day--whose WORDS are
_nearer to our hearts_. OUR OWN _are hardly as intimate there, as_ HIS
_are_--
"You are my true and honourable wife,
_As dear to me as are the ruddy drops
That visit my sad heart_,"
says the troubled Brutus to Portia, who has expressed a misdoubting of his
true and clear affection for her.
Is this "_antiquated_" English, and thence "_unintelligible_?"
"_Viola._--My father had a daughter loved a man,
As it might be, perhaps, WERE I A WOMAN,
I should your lordship.
_Duke._--_And what's her history?_
_Viola._--_A blank, my lord. She never told her love._
* * * * *
_Duke._--But died thy sister of her love, my boy?
_Viola._--I am all the daughters of my father's house,
And all the brothers, too."
"_Miranda._--I am a fool
To weep at what I am glad of.
_Ferdinand._--Where should this music be?
I' th' air?--or th' earth?
It sounds no more; and sure it waits upon
Some god o' th' island. Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the king my father's wreck,
This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air. Thence have I follow'd it,
Or it hath drawn me, rather. But 'tis gone--
No! it begins again.
* * * * *
The ditty does remember my drown'd father.
This is no mortal business, nor no sound
That the earth owes.--I hear it now above me."
Here we have an "_antiquated_" touch or two of what would have distressed
Dryden. "PASSION" is used in the old strong general sense of powerful,
possessing emotion--in this example, filial sorrow; and lower down, we
have the obsolete "OWES" for the modern "OWNS," which two vitiating
reliques of antiquity, along with that "pestering," "affected," and
"obscure" figure, "_crept by me_ upon the waters," would explain, without
doubt, the impossibility which the reader feels himself under, of deriving
any pleasure from the passage, and, to speak strictly, of discovering any
signification in it!!
Assuredly we do not design transcribing whole Shakspeare, in order to
contradicting a rash word of Dryden's. It might not be politic, either;
for we should now and then meet with hard sentences, which might seem,
like unlucky witnesses, to give evidence against the party that brings
them before the tribunal. They would not. It is not in twenty places, or
not in a hundred, that the obsoleteness of a word or phrase makes
Shakspeare hard, nor any thing in the world but his wit, his intellect in
excess, that occasionally runs away with him, and wraps up his meaning in
a phraseology of his own creating; enigmas that are embarrassing to
disinvolve again--which might, indeed, be an antiquated manner of his age,
but not an obsolete dictionary and grammar. Neither is it required of us
to convince the reader, by copious extracts, that _he_ really understands
Shakspeare, one or other of whose volumes he has always in his pocket, and
whose English he sits hearing by the hour, lisped, mouthed, and
legitimately spoken upon the stage, and still fancying that he understands
what he hears. But it seemed not altogether out of place, when the
criticism of style is moved, and Shakspeare's English challenged, to
recall into the liveliest consciousness of the reader, for a moment, the
principal feature of the case, which is, without doubt, that Shakspeare
is, in all our literature, the writer in whom this highest art of
writing--namely--start not, good, innocent reader! for it must one day be
said--THE ART OF SIMPLICITY--reaches its height; that magical art of
steeping the words and idioms that fall from every lip at every minute, in
music, and beauty, and pathos, and power, so that the familiar sound slips
along the well-known inlets into the soul, and we are--"took ere we are
'ware."
Otherwise, for the general fact, that he, the reader of 1845, does
understand, without much difficulty, the dramatic poet whom, in 1665, the
gulf of years and the mutations of speech from father to son had rendered
"unintelligible"--for the general verity of this unforeseen and
improbable, but indisputable fact, the reader's recollection of his own
personal history since he was eight or ten years old, may be left
satisfactorily to vouch.
Neither was it, perhaps, unreasonable to snatch the occasion of alleging
and manifesting the momentous and instructive truth--_that the intenser
working of the mind finds out, in every age, the perpetuities of a
language_.
Let us take our place for a moment in the Age of our poetry, which began
with Dryden inclusive, and ended, or began ending, with Cowper exclusive.
It was the UNCREATIVE age of our poetry; or, if you insist upon a
denomination positively grounded, the IMITATIVE; or it was the
_unimpassioned_, or it was the _rational_. Only the stage--losing passion,
and not being the place for reason--went mad; as with Nat Lee. However, it
retained something like a creative energy in Otway--and, moreover, Cato
was really and afflictingly a _rational_ play.--The mere musical flow of
the verse took the place of ever varying expression; and the name used as
nearly equivalent with a good verse, at least for describing that which a
verse should ordinarily be, is a _smooth_ verse. Concurrent in time and
cause was the invasion of the ten syllabled rhymed couplet, which, in
place of the old diversified measures, took possession--off the stage--of
our poetry. With all this went a transformation of the language accepted
in verse; a severing and setting apart, as if a consecrating of the
Parnassian dialect, which formerly was always caught up fresh from the lap
of nature, at the risk, no doubt, of pulling weeds amongs the flowers.
In the incidental enunciations of criticism, we may easily gather notices
of the movement this way, in the double matter of the language and the
verse. In both, it receives, as it should do, the same name and
description. It is the disengaging of REFINEMENT--its birth from the bosom
of BARBARISM--distinct as mother and daughter. Shakspeare and Milton are
the two great barbarous kings with a numerous court. If we try to give
ourselves account of this Refinement and to vindicate for it the title,
we are at a loss for names and notions. A Refinement which places the
sluts of Dryden and his contemporaries above Imogen and Miranda, and above
Eve. One hangs down the head in shame and perplexity. The history of
England affords us a key in the name of Charles II. The Court, the Town,
and Life-in-doors, are the words that resolve the mystery. The Muses that
were Powers of Fell, and Flood, and Forest, and Field, that went with man
wherever he went--in cottage and palace, in divan and in dungeon, in the
student's or the miser's chamber, on the battle-plain, and at the dance of
bacchanals--and when and wheresoever man spoke, heard their own
mother-tongue, they were beguiled and imprisoned within the pale of
artificial society and of high life. They had to learn the breeding of the
drawing-room. Their auditors, in short, were gentlemen and ladies, who
never forgot that they were such in the sudden overpowering consciousness
of their being men and women.
There was therefore not only a denaturation, but an enervation of our
poetry. There grew a dainty, fastidious, easily-loathing taste, betokening
that the robust health of the older day--its healthy hunger, and its blood
glowing and bounding like a forester's--was gone by. Never to come again?
No! not so bad as that. We mark main lines. We have not room for the
filling-up. The last century closing, opened another Age, and we of to-day
renovate and reinvigorate ourselves the best we may.
England surely did not bring up the Heroic Tragedy on its unsown soil. It
was foreign falsehood that overcame English truth and sincerity. A
factitious excitement that induced a false pitch throughout. On the old
French stage, there were these two eminent characteristics of tragedy:
Whatever the subject--if OEdipus, and the Plague raging--there must be a
love-tale; and the most impassioned persons most continually dissert.
Generally, Dryden's heroic plays have these two marks--both disnaturings
of tragedy. We conceive in Dryden's age, and in himself as participant, a
pampered taste that cannot relish the wholesome simple meats which Nature,
"good cateress," provides for her beloved, healthy, naturally-living
children. That is to say, a vitiation of taste, by indulged excesses; the
wine and high feasting of their own theatre--which really made them unapt
for understanding Shakspeare. For in such things men understand by force
of delight, and if delight deserts them intelligence does too. The
writings of the great creative poets--of Homer, Dante, Chaucer, and the
rest--always give you the impression that they possessed nature by
observation and sympathy--outward nature and man's nature--that this, as
it were, stood in their soul--the great perpetually-present original--from
which they drew fancifully varied portraiture. It is there as their
standard of reference, when they read other poets. In Dryden, it is not
so. You know neither what he draws from, nor to what he refers in those
extraordinary heroic tragedies which resemble nothing--no men and no
women, that were, are, or shall be. The impossible hero, the impossible
heroine, and their extravagant sentiments, afford scope for a strife and a
torture of thought, which is an inseparable medley of wit and
argumentation; wit reasoning, and logic jesting; a strange confusion of
mental actions, with an unfavourable result; for this result is neither
TRUTH nor MIRTH; but very CHIMERA--changing colour like the
chameleon--shape like the clouds, and substance like the contents of an
alchemist's crucible. Wit that to nonsense nearly is allied, if the thin
partitions are not often actually broken down. Where you should have the
living blood that flows through the living heart--the affections, the
passions, and the actions that mould man and his world--you find sporting
and rejoicing in their own elastic vigour, their adroitness and buoyancy,
and in their wonderful starts and capricious bounds, aimless flights and
aerial gambols--the bold, the keen, the nimble, the strenuous faculties,
summoned together to compose the masculine, ranging, intrepid, various,
piercing, and comprehensive INTELLECT--long the acknowledged
sovereign-master of that high literature, which Milton had now left, and
which Pope did not yet occupy.
Dryden dealt in the same incomprehensible way with Milton as with
Shakspeare. In that famous falsifying epigram, the poet of _Paradise Lost_
is greater than Homer and Virgil rolled into one; and his name is
frequently mentioned with seeming reverence in those off-hand Prefaces.
Yet even in such critical passages there is no just approbation of his
genius. Thus, in the preface to "The State of Innocence," he says--"The
original being undoubtedly one of the greatest, most noble, and most
sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced." _This age!
One of the greatest_, &c.! The age of Charles II.! And what has become of
the _other_ great, noble, and sublime, poems which that age has produced?
These wavering words were written the year Milton died; and Dennis, or
some one else, tells us that, twenty years after, Dryden confessed that he
had not then been sensible of half the extent of his excellence. But what,
twenty years after, does he say?--
"As for Mr Milton, whom we all admire with so much justice, his
subject is not of an heroic poem, properly so called. His design is
the losing of our happiness; his event is not prosperous like that of
all other epic works; his heavenly machines are many, and human
persons are but two. But I will not take Mr Rhymer's work out of his
hands; he has promised the world a critique on that author, wherein,
though he will not allow his poem for heroic, I hope he will grant us
that his thoughts are elevated, his words sounding, and that no man
has so happily copied the manner of Homer, or so copiously translated
his Grecisms, and the Latin elegancies of Virgil. It is true he runs
into a flat of thoughts, sometimes for a hundred lines together, but
it is when he has got into a track of Scripture. His antiquated words
were his choice, not his necessity; for therein he imitated Spenser,
as Spenser did Chaucer. And though, perhaps, the love of their master
may have transported both too far in the frequent use of them, yet,
in my opinion, obsolete words may there be laudably revived, when
either they are more sounding or more significant than those in
practice; and when their obscurity is taken away, by joining other
words to them which clear the sense, according to the rule of Horace,
for the admission of new words. But, in both cases, a moderation is
to be observed in the use of them: for unnecessary coinage, as well
as unnecessary revival, runs into affectation; a fault to be avoided
on either hand. Neither will I justify Milton for his blank verse,
though I may excuse him, by the example of Hannibal Caro, and other
Italians, who have used it; for whatever causes he alleges for the
abolishing of rhyme, (which I have not now the leisure to examine,)
his own particular reason is plainly this, that rhyme was not his
talent; he had neither the ease of doing it, nor the graces of it;
which is manifest in his 'Juvenilia,' or verses written in his youth,
where his rhyme is always constrained and forced, and comes hardly
from him, at an age when the soul is most pliant, and the passion of
love makes almost every man a rhymer though not a poet."
The general effect of this captious passage is far from pleasant. It
leaves us in doubt of the sincerity of Courts, and Towns, and Dryden's
admiration of Mr Milton. "His subject is not that of a heroic poem,
properly so called." Milton did not call it a heroic poem. But it is an
epic poem, and a divine. "The event is not prosperous." Assuredly not. For
that matter, neither, to our minds, is that of the Iliad. It seems not a
little unreasonable to complain that in Paradise Lost, the "human persons
are but two." Dryden "will not take Mr Rhymer's work out of his hands, who
has promised us a critique on that author;" and he hopes Mr Rhymer _will
grant_ so and so--look pray again at what Dryden hopes Mr Rhymer will
grant to Mr Milton. Mr Rhymer had promised to favour the public "with some
reflections on that Paradise Lost of Milton, which some are pleased to
call a poem." But this promise, says best Sir Walter, "he never filled up
the measure of his presumption by attempting to fulfil." Milton running on
a flat of thought for a hundred lines together on a track of Scripture! In
his poem, by unnecessary coinage of new, and unnecessary revival of old
words, running into _affectation_! Milton not to be _justified_ for his
blank verse, no not even by the example of the illustrious and immortal
Hannibal Caro! Then he took to it in despair, for rhyme was not his
talent! His rhyme forced and constrained in the Hymn on the Nativity--in
Lycidas--in L'Allegro--in Il Penseroso!
In the same Essay on Satire--Dryden talks, not very intelligibly, about
"the _beautiful turns of words and thoughts_, which are as requisite in
this as in heroic poetry itself;" but with which he confesses himself to
have been unacquainted till about twenty years before, when "that noble
wit of Scotland," Sir George Mackenzie, asked him why he did not imitate
"_the turns_ of Mr Waller and Sir John Denham, of which he repeated many
to me." The memory of that "noble wit of Scotland" is far from being
honoured--nay, it is execrated by his countrymen--by the common people we
mean--and, in the long run, they are no bad judges of merit. He was, we
believe, no great shakes as a lawyer, either within or without the bar;
and, like many other well-born, weak-minded men, had a taste for elegant
literature and vulgar blood. Of his "voluminous works, historical and
juridical," we know less than nothing; but his "Essays on several moral
subjects," have more than once fallen out of our hands. Sir Walter says,
"he was an accomplished scholar, of lively talents, and ready elocution,
and very well deserved the appellation of a 'noble wit of Scotland.'" "The
Bluidy Mackenyie," reciting to Dryden many "beautiful turns" from Waller
and Denham--and Dryden calling the poetasters "those two fathers of our
English poetry," in the same page where he is writing of Milton! At Sir
George's behest, in Cowley, even in his "Davideis," an heroic poem, he
sought in vain for "elegant turns, either on the word or on the thought;"
and his search was equally fruitless in the "Paradise Lost"--for, as
Milton "endeavours every where to express Homer, whose age had not yet
arrived to that fineness, I found in him a true sublimity, lofty thoughts,
which were clothed with admirable Grecisms, and ancient words which he had
been digging from the mines of Chaucer and Spenser; and which, with all
their rusticity, had somewhat of venerable in them. But I found not there
neither, that for which I looked." His search through Spenser and Tasso is
more fortunate; Virgil and Ovid are the two principal fountains of them in
Latin poetry; and "the French, at this day, are so fond of them, that they
judge them to be first beauties; _delicate et bien tourne_, are the
highest commendations which they bestow on somewhat which they think a
masterpiece."
This sort of explicit criticism, in a small way, is rather unsatisfactory;
so let us look at a specimen of implicit on Milton. In Todd's edition are
detailed the names of the translators of "Paradise Lost" into rhyme and
prose. "We must not" says Sir Walter, "confound with these effusions of
gratuitous folly an alteration or imitation planned and executed by John
Dryden." We must not; therefore let "his gratuitous folly" stand aloof
from theirs, and be judged of in itself. "The State of Innocence" is AN
OPERA! "Had the subject been of a nature which admitted its being actually
represented, we might conceive that Dryden, who was under engagements to
the theatre, with which it was not always easy to comply, might have been
desirous to shorten his own labour _by adopting the story, sentiments, and
language of a poem_" (how kind and cool) "which he so highly esteemed, and
which might probably have been new to the generality of his audience. But
the _costume_ of our first parents, had there been no other objection,
must have excluded 'The State of Innocence' from the stage; and,
accordingly, it was certainly never intended for representation." One
cannot well help agreeing with Sir Walter in this pleasant passage;
nevertheless, might not the opera have been indited with a view to
representation? With what more _rational_ purpose could it have been
"planned and executed"? The stage directions are full and minute; and, if
meant for perusal only, and to be part of the poem, they are beyond the
ridiculous. As, for example--
"Scene I. represents a chaos, or a confused mass of matter; the stage is
almost wholly dark. A symphony of warlike music is heard for some time;
then from the heavens (which are opened) fall the rebellious angels,
wheeling in air, and seeming transfixed with thunderbolts. The bottom of
the stage being opened, receives the angels, who fall out of sight. Tunes
of victory are played, and an hymn sung; angels discovered alone,
brandishing their swords. The music ceasing, and the heavens being closed,
the scene shifts, and, on a sudden, represents hell. Part of the scene is
a lake of brimstone or rolling fire; the earth of a burnt colour. The
fallen angels appear on the lake, lying prostrate; a tune of horror and
lamentation is heard."