THE
COLLECTED WORKS OF WILLIAM HAZLITT
IN TWELVE VOLUMES
VOLUME ONE
_All rights reserved_
[Illustration:
_William Hazlitt._
_Aged 13.
from a Miniature on Ivory
Painted by his Brother._
]
THE COLLECTED WORKS OF
WILLIAM HAZLITT
EDITED BY A. R. WALLER AND ARNOLD GLOVER
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
W. E. HENLEY
❦
The Round Table
Characters of Shakespear’s Plays
A Letter to William Gifford, Esq.
❦
1902
LONDON: J. M. DENT & CO.
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.: NEW YORK
Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, (late) Printers to Her Majesty
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION BY WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY vii
EDITORS’ PREFACE xxvii
THE ROUND TABLE xxix
CHARACTERS OF SHAKESPEAR’S PLAYS, 165
A LETTER TO WILLIAM GIFFORD, ESQ., 363
NOTES 415
INTRODUCTION
Hazlitt’s father, a minister in the Unitarian Church, was the son of an
Antrim dissenter, who had removed to Tipperary; Hazlitt’s mother was the
daughter of a Cambridgeshire yeoman; so that there is small room for
wonder if Hazlitt were all his life distinguished by a fine
pugnaciousness of mind, a fiery courage, an excellent doggedness of
temper, and (not to crack the wind of the poor metaphor) a brilliancy in
the use of his hands unequalled in his time, and since his time, by any
writing Englishman. Of course, he was very much else; or this monument
to his genius would scarce be building, this draft to his credit would
have been drawn for To-Morrow on To-Day. But, while he lived, his
fighting talent was the sole thing in his various and splendid gift that
was evident to the powers that were; and, inasmuch as he loved nothing
so dearly as asserting himself to the disadvantage of certain
superstitions which the said powers esteemed the very stuff of life,
they did their utmost to dissemble his uncommon merits, and to present
him to the world at large as a person whose morals were deplorable,
whose nose was pimpled, whose mind was lewd, whose character would no
more bear inspection than his English, whose heart and soul and taste
were irremediable, and who, as he persisted in regarding ‘the Corsican
fiend’ as a culmination of human genius and character, must for that
reason especially—(but there were many others)—be execrated as a public
enemy, and stuck in the pillory whenever, in the black malice of his
corrupt and poisonous heart, he sought, by feigning an affection for
Shakespeare, or an interest in metaphysics, to recommend his vulgar,
mean, pernicious personality to the attention of a loyal, God-fearing,
church-going, tax-paying, Pope-and-Pretender-hating British Public. I
cannot say that I regret the very scandalous attacks that were made on
Hazlitt: since, if they had not been, we should have lacked some
admirable pages in the _Political Essays_ and _The Spirit of the Age_,
nor should we now be privileged to rejoice in the dignified and splendid
savagery of the _Letter to William Gifford_. And, if I do not regret
them for myself and the many who think with me, still less can I wish
them wanting for Hazlitt’s sake; for if they had been, who shall say how
dull and how profitless, how weary and flat and stale, some years of
what he described, in his last words to his kind, as ‘a happy life’—how
mean and beggarly may not some days in these years have seemed? But
there is, after all, a reason for being rather sorry than not that
Hazlitt’s polemic was so brilliant, his young conviction so unalterably
constant, his example so detestable as it seemed to the magnificent
ruffian in _Blackwood_ and the infinitely spiteful underling in _The
Quarterly_. The British Public of those days was a good, hard-hitting,
hard-drinking, hard-living lot; and, in the matter of letters, there was
no guile in it. It read its Campbell, its Rogers, its Moore, its Hook
and Egan and Jon Bee; it accepted its convinced and pedantic sycophant
in Southey, its gay, light-hearted protestant in Leigh Hunt; it nibbled
at its Wordsworth, knew not what to make of its Coleridge, swallowed its
Cobbett (that prince of pugilists) as its morning rasher and toast; it
made much of Hone, yet was far from contemptuous of Westmacott; it laid
itself open to its Scott and its Byron, Michael and Satan, the Angel of
Acceptance and the Angel of Revolt. Withal it was essentially a Tory
Public: a public long practised in fearing God and honouring the King;
with half an ear for Major Cartwright and his like, and a whole mind for
the story of Randal and Cribb; honestly and jovially proud of Nelson and
‘The Duke,’ but neither loving the Emperor nor seeking to understand
him. Now, to Hazlitt the Revolution was humanity _in excelsis_, while
the Emperor, being democracy incarnate, and so a complete expression of
character and human genius, was as his god. Gifford, then, and Wilson,
had small difficulty in blasting Hazlitt’s fame, and in so far ruining
Hazlitt’s chance that ’tis but now, after some seventy years, that he
takes his place in literary history as the hero of a Complete Edition.
In the meanwhile he has had praise, and praise again. But it has come
ever from the few, and he has yet to be considered of the general as a
critic of many elements in human activity, a master of his
mother-tongue, and one, and that one not the least, in an epoch
illustrious in the achievement of Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth, the
inimitable Cobbett, Byron and Sir Walter, Coleridge, the Arch-Potency
(who, ‘prone on the flood’ of failure, ever ‘lies floating many a
rood’), and the thrice-beloved Lamb.
I
The elder Hazlitt was trained in Glasgow. A man of spirit and
understanding, an active and a vigilant minister, he married Grace
Loftus, the Wisbech yeoman’s daughter, in 1766; and in 1778 (he being
much older than she), the last of their children, their son William, was
born to them at Maidstone. Five years later this son accompanied his
parents to Philadelphia. There the elder Hazlitt preached and lectured
for some fifteen months; but in 1786–87, having meanwhile established
the earliest Unitarian church in America, he returned to England, and
settled at Wem, in Shropshire, which was practically Hazlitt’s first
taste of native earth. A precocious youngster, well grounded by his
father, himself a man of parts and reading,[1] he was responsible as
early as 1792 for a _New Theory of Criminal and Civil Jurisprudence_,
and at fifteen he went to the Unitarian College at Hackney, there to
study for the ministry. But his mind changed. In the meantime he learned
something of literature, something of metaphysics, something of
painting, something (I doubt not) of life; the Revolution blazed out,
Bonaparte fell falconwise upon Austrian Italy, and approved himself the
greatest captain since Marlborough; there was a strong unrest in time
and the destiny of man; the ambitions of life were changed, the
possibilities and conditions of life transformed. The skies thrilled
with the dawn of a new day, and Hazlitt: already, it is fair to
conjecture, at grips with that potent and implacable devil of sex which
possessed him so vigorously for so many years; already, too, the devout
and militant Radical, the fanatic of Bonaparte, he remained till the
end: was no longer for the pulpit. And at this moment existence was
transfigured for him also. In the January of 1798, Coleridge, that
embodied Inspiration, visited the elder Hazlitt at Wem, and preached his
last (Unitarian) sermon in the chapel there. He was at his best, his
freshest, his most copious, his most expressive and persuasive; he had
the poet’s eye, the poet’s mouth, the poet’s voice, impulse, authority,
style; he had already ‘fed on honey-dew, and drunk the milk of
Paradise’; and he carried Hazlitt clean off his legs. To the sombre,
personal, scarce lettered but very thoughtful youth this voluble and
affecting Apparition was the bearer of a revelation. He listened to
Coleridge as to a John Baptist. He dared to talk metaphysics, and was so
far rewarded for his valour as to be encouraged to persevere.[2] What
was of vastly greater importance, he was asked to Stowey in the spring
of the same year: an event from which he dated the true beginnings of
his intellectual life.
In that centre of enchantment he stayed three weeks. It was a Golden
Year. Hazlitt was drunk throughout with what I should like to call
Neophytism. Coleridge was magnificent—elusive, archimagian,
irresistible; Wordsworth was opinionated but sublime; at intervals, as
in Sir Richard Burton’s _Thousand Nights and a Night_, they ‘repeated
the following verses.’ It was a time—O, but it was a time! A time of
ecstasy: ‘When proud-pied April was in all his trim,’ and even ‘heavy
Saturn’ must have laughed, if only to keep his yoke-fellow, Wordsworth,
in company; Wordsworth with his thick airs, and his luminous Belt, and
his dull but steady-going group of Moons! A time of gold, I say; yet had
it a most strange outcome. In 1798 Coleridge and Wordsworth were
Revolutionaries in everything: they looked to France for liberty, for
change, for a shining and enduring example. Hazlitt was with them now
and here: his also was a revolutionary soul, he also was of a mind with
Danton, he also looked to France for leading and light, he also held the
assault delivered upon France for an assault against Freedom. But
Coleridge and Wordsworth changed their minds, and readjusted their
points of view; and he did not. They loved not Bonaparte; and he did.
And the end of it was that, so far as I know, he never wrote with so
ripe and sensual a gust: not even, to my mind, when he was merely
annihilating Gifford: as when, long years after Nether-Stowey, he broke
in upon the strong, solid hold of Wordsworth’s egotism, and tore to
tatters—tatters which he flung upon the wind—the old, greasy prophet’s
mantle,[3] which Coleridge had sported to so little purpose for so many
years. To Hazlitt, the dissenter born, the deeply brooding, the
inflexible—to Hazlitt, I say, these Twin-Stars of the Romantic Movement
were common turn-coats; and he dealt with them on occasion as he thought
fit. But he never lost his interest in them; and when it comes to a
comparison between Wordsworth, the renegade, and Byron, the leader of
storming-parties, the captain of forlorn-hopes, then is his idiosyncrasy
revealed. He hacks and stabs, he jibes and sneers and denies, till there
is no Byron left, and the sole poet of the century is the ‘gentlemanly
creature—reads nothing but his own poetry, I believe,’—whose best
passages, in a moment of supreme geniality, he once likened, not to
their advantage, to those of ‘the classic Akenside.’
II
It was from Nether-Stowey that Hazlitt dated his regard for poetry. But
if literature came late to him, as (his father’s office and his own
metaphysical inklings aiding) it did, he ever cherished a pure and
ardent passion for it, once it had come. Yet he was by no means widely
read, and in his last years seldom finished a new book. First and last,
indeed, he was a man of few books and fewer authors. Shakespeare, Burke,
Cervantes, Rabelais, Milton, the _Decameron_, the _Nouvelle Héloïse_ and
the _Confessions_, Richardson’s epics of the parlour and Fielding’s
epics of the road—these things and their kind he read intensely; and,
when it pleased him to speak of them, it was ever in the terms of
understanding and regard. Yet it was long ere he had any thought of
writing; and it was necessity alone that made him a man of letters. In
the beginning, the Pulpit proving impossible, he turned to painting for
a career, and, after certain studies, presumably under his elder brother
John,[4] and possibly under Northcote, he went to the Paris of the First
Consul, and painted there for some four months in a Louvre which the
thrift of Bonaparte had stored with the choicest plunder in Italian Art.
I know not whether or no he could ever have been a painter. Haydon, who
neither loved nor understood him, and was, besides, a man who could
greatly dare and ‘toil terribly’—Haydon says that he was at once too
lazy and too timid ever to succeed in painting: an art in which, as
Haydon showed, and as Millet was presently to say, ‘You must flay
yourself alive, and give your skin.’[5] I do not think that Hazlitt was
daunted by what may be called the painfulness of painting; for in
letters he was soon enough to prove that he had in him to face a world
in arms, and to tincture his writings, if need were, with the best blood
of his heart. In any case, after divers essays at copying in the
Louvre,[6] and certain attempts at portraiture on his return to
England,[7] he found that he could not excel; that, in fact, he was
neither Titian nor Rembrandt, nor could he even be Sir Joshua. So he
painted no more, but went on _reading_ certain painters: very much, I
assume, as he went on taking certain authors; because he loved them for
themselves, and found emotions—and not only emotions, but
sensations[8]—in them.
His ideals are Claude, Rembrandt, Raphael, Poussin, Titian; he gives you
very gentlemanly and intelligent estimates of Watteau and Velasquez; he
has an eye—a right one—for Rubens and Van Dyck; he exults in Jan Steen,
has words of worth for Ruysdael and Hobbima, and gives Turner as neat a
_croc-en-jambe_ as you could wish to see. But, despite his training and
his gift, he is no more in advance of his age than the best of us here
and now. To him the Carraccis and Salvator are _sommités_ of a kind; if,
so far as I remember, he will have nought to do with Carlo Dolci, he
will not do without his Guido; I have read no word of his on Lawrence,
no word of his on Constable, none on Morland; on Hogarth he is chiefly
literary, on Turner not much more than diabolically ingenious. Wisely or
not, he took pictures as he took books: they might be few, but they must
be good; and, not only good but, of (as he believed) the best. If they
were not, or if they were new, he drew them not to his heart, nor
adorned the chambers of his mind with them. Those chambers were filled
with good things long since done. To him, then, what were the best
things doing? It was his habit to take the good thing on; savour its
excellences to their last sucket; meditate it strictly, jealously,
privily, longingly; say, if it must be so, a few last words about
it—some for the painter, more for the man of letters;[9] and then...?
Well, then he accepted the situation. I do not know that he cared much
for Keats; I do know that he found Shelley impossible, that he was never
an exalted Wordsworthian, and that he hesitated—(ever so little, but he
hesitated!)—even at Charles Lamb. Politics and all, in truth, he was a
prophet who adored the past, and had but an infidel eye for the promise
of the years. He was interested only in the highest achievement; and to
be the highest even that must lie behind him. Thus, Fielding was good,
and Rubens; Sir Joshua was good, and so were Richardson and Smollett;
so, likewise, Shakespeare was good, and Raphael and Titian were
good—these with Milton and Rembrandt, and Burke and Rousseau and
Boccaccio; and it was well. Well with them, and well—especially
well!—with him: they had achieved, and here was he, the perfect lover,
to whom their achievement was as an enchanted garden, a Prospero’s
Island abounding in romantic and inspiring chances, unending marvels,
miracles of vision and solace and pure, perennial delight. And if these,
the ‘Thrones, Dominations, Powers,’ had done their work, and were
venerable in it, so also in their degrees and sorts had Congreve and
Watteau, Sir Thomas Browne and Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Wycherley and
Jordaens; so had even Salvator and John Buncle. In dealing with
painters, and with purely painters’ pictures, Hazlitt generally strikes
a right note.[10] But the man of letters in him is inevitably first; and
’tis not insignificant that some of the ‘crack passages’ in his writings
about pictures are rhapsodies about places—Burleigh or Oxford—or pieces
of pure literature like that very human and ingenious essay ‘On the
Pleasures of Painting,’ which is one of the best good things in _Table
Talk_.
III
So Hazlitt the painter was gathered to his fathers, and in his stead a
Hazlitt reigned about whom the world knows little worth the telling: a
Hazlitt who abridged philosophers, and made grammars, and compiled
anthologies; a married and domesticated Hazlitt; a Hazlitt with a son
and heir, and a wife who seems to have cared as little for his works and
him as, in the long run, he assuredly cared for her company and her. The
lady’s name was Stoddart; she was a brisk, inconsequent, unsexual sort
of person—a friend of Mary Lamb; and, like the only Mrs. Pecksniff, ‘she
had a small property.’ It was situate at Winterslow, certain miles from
Salisbury, and Hazlitt, who loved the neighbourhood, and clung to it
till the end, has so far illustrated the name that, if there could ever
be a Hazlitt Cult, the place would instantly become a shrine. It was a
cottage, within easy walking distance of Wilton and Stonehenge; and in
1812 the Hazlitts, who were made one in 1808, departed it—it and the
well-beloved woods of Norman Court—for 19 York Street, Westminster.[11]
Hence it was that he issued to deliver his first course of lectures;[12]
and here it was that he entertained those friends he had, made himself a
reputation by writing in papers and magazines, drank hard, and cured
himself of drinking, and long ere the end came found his wife
insufferable. In the beginning he worked in the Reporters’ Gallery,
where he made notes (in long hand) for _The Morning Chronicle_, and
learned to take more liquor than was good for him.[13] In this same
journal he printed some of his best political work, and broke ground as
a critic of acting; and he left it only because he could not help
quarrelling with its proprietors.
Another stand-by of his was _The Champion_, to his work in which he owed
a not unprofitable connexion with _The Edinburgh_; yet another, _The
Examiner_, to which, with much dramatic criticism, he contributed, at
Leigh Hunt’s suggestion, the set of essays reprinted as _The Round
Table_, and in which he may therefore be said to have discovered his
avocation, and given the measure of his best quality. Then, in 1817, he
published his _Characters of Shakespeare_, which he dedicated to Charles
Lamb; in 1818 he reprinted a series of lectures (at the Surrey
Institute) on the English poets;[14] in 1819–20 he delivered from the
same platform two courses more—on the Comic Writers and the Age of
Elizabeth. He wrote for _The Liberal_, _The Yellow Dwarf_, _The London
Magazine_—(to which he may very well have introduced the unknown
Elia)—_Colburn’s New Monthly_; he returned to the _Chronicle_ in 1824;
in 1825 he published _The Spirit of the Age_, in 1826 _The Plain
Speaker_, the _Boswell Redivivus_ in 1827; and in this last year he set
to work, at Winterslow, on a life of Napoleon. That was the beginning of
the end. He had no turn for history, nor none for research; his methods
were personal, his results singular and brief; he was as it were an
accidental writer, whose true material was in himself. His health broke,
and worsened; his publishers went bankrupt; he lost the best part of the
£500 which he had hoped to earn by his work; and though, consulting none
but anti-English authorities, he lived to complete a book containing
much strong thinking and not a few striking passages, it was a thing
foredoomed to failure: a matter in which the nation, still hating its
tremendous enemy, and still rejoicing in the man and the battle which
had brought him to the ground, would not, and could not take an
interest. Two volumes were published in 1828 (Sir Walter’s _Napoleon_
appeared in 1827), and two more in 1830; but the work of writing them
killed the writer.[15] His digestion, always feeble, was ruined; and in
the September of 1830 he died. He was largely, I should say, a sacrifice
to tea, which he drank, in vast quantities, of extraordinary strength.
However this be, his ending was (as he’d have loved to put it) ‘as a
Chrissom child’s.’[16]
IV
Thus much, thus all-too little, of his course in print. For his life,
despite his many ‘bursts of confidence,’ the admissions of his grandson,
and the discoveries of such friends as Patmore, the half of it, I think,
has to be told to us. This was not his fault, for he was in no sense
secretive: he would no more lie about himself than he would lie about
Southey or Gifford. His trick of drinking was, while it lasted, public;
he proclaimed with all his lungs his frank and full approval of the
fundamentals of the Revolution and his preference of Bonaparte before
all the Kings in Europe; he despised Shelley the politician, and
rejected Shelley the poet, and he cherished and made the most he could
of his resentment against Coleridge and Wordsworth, though his disdain
for concealment perilled his friendship with Lamb, and well nigh cost
him the far more facile regard of Leigh Hunt; while, as for Byron, he so
bitterly resented the ‘noble Lord’s’ pre-eminency that he made no
difference, strongly as he contemned the Laureate, between the
Laureate’s _Vision of Judgment_, a piece of English verse immortal by
the sheer force of its absurdity, and that other _Vision of Judgment_,
which is one of the great things in English poetry. ’Twas much the same
in life. Poor Mrs. Hazlitt, though she was well-read, of no account as
an housekeeper, ‘fond of incongruous finery,’ and capable of
child-bearing withal, was, one may take for granted, not distinguished
as a woman. Now, her husband, thinker as he approved himself, was very
much of a male. Who runs may read of his early loves—Miss Railton and
the rest; ’tis history—at any rate ’tis history according to
Wordsworth[17]—that once, in Lakeland, he so dealt with the local beauty
that he came very near to tasting of the local pond; when Patmore walked
home with him to Westminster, after his first lecture in the Surrey
Institute, the wayside nymphs flocked to his encounter, and—(so Patmore
says)—he knew them all;[18] he has himself recorded the confession that
in the matter of mob-caps and black stockings and red elbows—in fact, on
the score of your maid-servant—he could flourish a list as long, or
thereabouts, as Leporello’s. I know not whether he lied or spoke the
truth;[19] but I can scarce believe that he lied. I should rather opine
that on this point, as on others, Hazlitt, a gross and extravagant
admirer (be it remembered) of J.-J. Rousseau, was, and is, entirely
credible. We may take it that his veracity is beyond reproach. But ’tis
another matter with his taste; and for that I can say no more than that
I have listened to so many confidences:
From some we loved, the loveliest and the best
That from his Vintage rolling Time has pressed:
that I hold it for merely unessential.
But the man who habitually hugs his housemaid is, whether he boast of it
or not, no more superior to consequences than another: especially if he
have, as Hazlitt had, an ardent imagination and a teeming waste of
sentiment. And so Hazlitt found. About 1819 he ceased from consorting
with his wife; and in 1820 he lodged with a tailor, one Walker, in
Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane. Walker, a most respectable man,
had daughters, and one of these, a girl well broken-in, it would seem,
to the ways of ‘gentlemen’—a girl with a dull eye, a ‘sinuous gait,’ and
a habit of sitting on the knees of ‘gentlemen’; a girl, in fine, who is
only to be described by an old and sane and homely but unquotable
designation—this poor half-harlot took on our Don Juan of the area, and
brought him to utter grief. He looked at passion, as embodied in Sarah
Walker, until it grew to be the world to him; he went about like a man
drunken and dazed, telling the story of his slighted love to anybody
that would listen to it;[20] now he raved and was rampant, now was he
soul-stricken and heart-broken; he swore he’d marry Walker whether she
would or not, and to this end he persuaded his wife to follow him to
Edinburgh, and there divorce him—_pour cause_, as the lady and her legal
adviser had every reason to believe;[21] and having achieved a divorce,
which was no divorce in law, and been finally refused by the young woman
in Southampton Buildings, he set to work assiduously to coin his madness
into drachmas, and wrote, always with Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his eye,
that _Liber Amoris_ which the unknowing reader will find in our Second
Volume. It is a book by no means bad—if you can at all away with it.
Indeed, it is unique in English, and the hundred guineas Hazlitt got for
it were uncommonly well earned. But to away with it at all—that is the
difficulty; and, as it varies with the temperaments of them that read
the book, I shall discourse no more of it, but content myself with
noting that, in writing the _Liber Amoris_, Hazlitt wrote off Sarah
Walker.[22] He had been in love with a housemaid, but he had been very
much more in love with his love; and, having wearied all he knew with
descriptions of his feelings, he wrote those feelings down, cleared his
system, and became himself again. ’Twas Goethe’s way, I believe—his and
many another’s; the world will scarce get disaccustomed to it while
there are women and writing men. What distinguishes Hazlitt from a whole
wilderness of self-chroniclers is the fulness of his revelation. It is
extraordinary; but, even so, Rousseau had shown him the way. And perhaps
the simple truth about the _Liber_ is that it is the best Rousseau—the
best and the nearest to the _Confessions_—done since Rousseau died.
Sarah Hazlitt married no more; but her husband did. In 1824 he took to
wife a certain Mrs. Bridgewater. She was Scots by birth, had lived much
abroad, had married and buried a Colonel Bridgewater, was of excellent
repute, and had about £300 a year; and with her new husband and his son
by Sarah Stoddart—(who had an idea that his mother had been wronged, and
seems to have been a most uncomfortable travelling companion)—she toured
it awhile in France and Italy. On the return journey the Hazlitts left
her in Paris; and when the elder, writing from London, asked her when
she purposed to come home to him, she replied that she did not purpose
to come home to him: that, in fact, she had done with him, and he would
see her no more. So far as I know, he never did; so that, as his
grandson says, this second marriage was but ‘an episode.’ Apparently it
was the last in his life; for neither Mrs. Hazlitt attended him in his
mortal illness, nor was there any woman at his bed’s head when he
passed.
V
It is told of him that he was dark-eyed and dark-haired, slim in figure,
rather slovenly in his habit; that he valued himself on his effect in
evening dress; that his manners were rather ceremonious than easy; that
he had a wonderfully eloquent face, with a mouth as expressive as
Kean’s, and a frown like the Giaour’s own[23]—that Giaour whom he did
not love. He worshipped women, but was awkward and afraid with them; he
played a good game of fives, and would walk his forty to fifty miles a
day; he would lie a-bed till two in the afternoon, then rise, dally with
his breakfast until eight without ever moving from his tea-pot and his
chair, and go to a theatre, a bite at the Southampton, and talk till two
in the morning.[24] That he excelled in talk is beyond all doubt.
Witness after witness is here to his wit, his insight, his grip on
essentials, his beautiful trick of paradox, his brilliancy in attack,
his desperate defence, his varying, far-glancing, inextinguishable
capacity for expression. And he was himself—Hazlitt: a man who borrowed
nobody’s methods, set no limits to the field of discussion, nor made
other men wonder if this were no talk but a lecture. He bore no likeness
to that ‘great but useless genius,’ Coleridge: who, beginning well as
few begin, lived ever after ‘on the sound of his own voice’; none to
Wordsworth, whose most inspiring theme was his own poetry; none to
Sheridan, who ‘never oped his mouth but out there flew’ a jest; none to
Lamb, who——But no; I cannot imagine Lamb in talk. Hazlitt himself has
plucked out only a tag or two of Lamb’s mystery; and I own that, even in
the presence of the notes in which he sets down Lamb as Lamb was to his
intimates, I am divided in appreciation between the pair. Lamb for the
unexpected, the incongruous, the profound, the jest that bred
seriousness, the pun that was that and a light upon dark places, a touch
of the dread, the all-disclosing Selene, besides; Hazlitt for none of
these but for himself; and what that was I have tried to show. Well;
Lamb, Coleridge, Sheridan, Hazlitt, Hunt, Wordsworth—all are dead, tall
men of their tongues as they were. And dead is Burke, and Fox is dead,
and Byron, most quizzical of lords! And of them all there is nothing
left but their published work; and of those that have told us most about
some of them, ‘in their habit as they lived,’ the best and the
strictest-seeing, the most eloquent and the most persuasive, is
assuredly Hazlitt. And, being something of an expert in talk,[25] I
think that, if I could break the grave and call the great ghosts back to
earth for a spell of their mortal fury, I would begin and end with Lamb
and Hazlitt: Lamb as he always was;[26] Hazlitt in one of his high and
mighty moods, sweeping life, and letters, and the art of painting, and
the nature of man, and the curious case of woman (especially the curious
case of woman!) into a rapture of give-and-take, a night-long series of
achievements in consummate speech.
VI
Many men, as Coleridge, have written well, and yet talked better than
they wrote. I have named Coleridge, though his talk, prodigious as it
was, in the long run ended in ‘Om-m-mject’ and ‘Sum-m-mject,’ and
though, some enchanting and undying verses apart, his writing, save when
it is merely critical, is nowadays of small account. But, in truth, I
have in my mind, rather, two friends, both dead, of whom one, an artist
in letters, lived to conquer the English-speaking world, while the
second, who should, I think, have been the greater writer, addicted
himself to another art, took to letters late in life, and, having the
largest and the most liberal utterance I have known, was constrained by
the very process of composition so to produce himself that scarce a
touch of his delightful, apprehensive, all-expressing spirit appeared
upon his page. I take these two cases because both are excessive. In the
one you had both speech and writing; in the other you found a rarer
brain, a more fanciful and daring humour, a richer gusto, perhaps a
wider knowledge, in any event a wider charity. And at one point the two
met, and that point was talk. Therein each was pre-eminent, each
irresistible, each a master after his kind, each endowed with a full
measure of those gifts that qualify the talker’s temperament: as voice
and eye and laugh, look and gesture, humour and fantasy, audacity and
agility of mind, a lively and most impudent invention, a copious
vocabulary, a right gift of foolery, a just, inevitable sense of
conversational right and wrong. Well; one wrote like an angel, the other
like poor Poll; and both so far excelled in talk that I can take it on
me to say that they who know them only in print scarce know them at all.
’Twas thus, I imagine, with Hazlitt. He wrote the best he could; but I
see many reasons to believe that he was very much more brilliant and
convincing at the Southampton than he is in the most convincing and the
most brilliant of his Essays. He was a full man; he had all the talker’s
gifts; he exulted in all kinds of oral opportunities; what more is there
to say? Sure ’tis the case of all that are born to talk as well as
write. They live their best in talk, and what they write is but a sop
for posterity: a last dying speech and confession (as it were) to show
that not for nothing were they held rare fellows in their day.
This is not to say that Hazlitt was not an admirable man of letters. His
theories were many, for he was a reality among men, and so had many
interests, and there was none on which he did not write forcibly,
luminously, arrestingly. He had the true sense of his material, and used
the English language as a painter his pigments, as a musician the
varying and abounding tonalities that constitute a symphonic scheme. His
were a beautiful and choice vocabulary, an excellent ear for cadence, a
notable gift of expression. In fact, when Stevenson was pleased to
declare that ‘we are mighty fine fellows, but we cannot write like
William Hazlitt,’ he said no more than the truth. Whether or not we are
mighty fine fellows is a Great Perhaps; but that none of us, from
Stevenson down, can as writers come near to Hazlitt—this, to me, is
merely indubitable. To note that he now and then writes blank verse is
to note that he sometimes writes impassioned prose;[27] he misquoted
habitually; he was a good hater, and could be monstrous unfair; he was
given to thinking twice, and his second thoughts were not always better
than his first; he repeated himself as seemed good to him. But in the
criticism of politics, the criticism of letters, the criticism of
acting, the criticism and expression of life,[28] there is none like
him. His politics are not mine; I think he is ridiculously mistaken when
he contrasts the Wordsworth of the best things in _The Excursion_ with
the ‘classic Akenside’; his _Byron_ is the merest petulance; his _Burke_
(when he is in a bad temper with Burke), his _Fox_, his _Pitt_, his
_Bonaparte_—these are impossible. Also, I never talk art or life with
him but I disagree. But I go on reading him, all the same; and I find
that technically and spiritually I am always the better for the bout.
Where outside Boswell is there better talk than in Hazlitt’s _Boswell
Redivivus_—his so-called _Conversations with Northcote_? And his _Age of
Elizabeth_, and his _Comic Writers_, and his _Spirit of the Age_—where
else to look for such a feeling for differences, such a sense of
literature, such an instant, such a masterful, whole-hearted interest in
the marking and distinguishing qualities of writers? And _The Plain
Speaker_—is it not at least as good reading as (say) _Virginibus
Puerisque_ and the discoursings of the late imperishable Mr. Pater! His
_Political Essays_ is readable after—how many years? His notes on Kean
and the Siddons are as novel and convincing as when they were penned. In
truth, he is ever a solace and a refreshment. As a critic of letters he
lacks the intense, immortalising vision, even as he lacks, in places,
the illuminating and inevitable style of Lamb. But if he be less
savoury, he is also more solid, and he gives you phrases, conclusions,
splendours of insight and expression, high-piled and golden essays in
appreciation: as the _Wordsworth_ and the _Coleridge_ of the _Political
Essays_, the character of Hamlet, the note on Shakespeare’s style, the
_Horne Tooke_, the _Cervantes_, the _Rousseau_, the _Sir Thomas Browne_,
the _Cobbet_: that must ever be rated high among the possessions of the
English mind.
As a writer, therefore, it is with Lamb that I would bracket him: they
are dissimilars, but they go gallantly and naturally together—_par
nobile fratrum_.[29] Give us these two, with some ripe Cobbett, a volume
of Southey, some Wordsworth, certain pages of Shelley, a great deal of
the Byron who wrote letters, and we get the right prose of the time. The
best of it all, perhaps, is the best of Lamb. But Hazlitt’s, for
different qualities, is so imminent and shining a second that I hesitate
as to the pre-eminency. Probably the race is Lamb’s. But Hazlitt is ever
Hazlitt; and at his highest moments Hazlitt is hard to beat, and has not
these many years been beaten.
W. E. H.
-----
Footnote 1:
Hazlitt has glanced at him in his notes on dissenters and dissent in
the _Political Essays_, and has given a further taste of him in that
very notable and gracious piece, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets.’
Footnote 2:
In 1805 he produced his essay on the Principles of Human Action. Being
no metaphysician, I have never read this work; but Mr. Leslie Stephen,
who is a very competent person in these matters, I am told, assures me
(_D. N. B._) that it is ‘scrupulously dry,’ though ‘showing great
acuteness.’ This, I take leave to say—this is Hazlitt all over. None
has written of the workaday elements in life and time with a rarer
taste, a finer relish, a stronger confidence in himself and them. Yet,
in dealing with absolutes in life and time, he is ‘scrupulously dry.’
This, I take it, is to be a man of letters.
Footnote 3:
Or rather bedgown: unction-soiled and laudanum-stained.
Footnote 4:
John Hazlitt had been a pupil of Reynolds, and his miniatures were
welcome at the Academy.
Footnote 5:
Dans l’art il faut donner sa peau.
Footnote 6:
He had a painter in him, whether imperfectly developed or not; for he
would condescend upon none but Guido, Raphael, Titian.
Footnote 7:
One was a likeness of his father, of which he has written in eloquent
and engaging terms; another, a _Wordsworth_, which he destroyed; a
third, the picture of Elia, ‘as a Venetian senator,’ now in the
National Portrait Gallery; yet another, the presentment of an Old
Woman, which is likened to a Rembrandt. Having seen none of these
things, all I can say about them is that Hazlitt seems to have been
passionately interested in colour; that he loved a picture because it
was a piece of painting; and, if he knew not always bad (or rather
third and fourth rate) work when he saw it, was as contemptuous of it,
when he realised its status, as Fuseli himself.
Footnote 8:
There is an immense, even an insuperable difference between the two
sorts of sensualists. To take an immediate instance: Lamb loved
Hogarth, and found emotions in him, because he (Hogarth) was a
novelist in paint; while Titian’s _Bacchus and Ariadne_ touched his
sense of letters, and, as Mr. Ainger has noted, suggested to him so
much literature, or, at all events, so many literary possibilities,
that Titian could not but be an arch-painter. Hazlitt felt his painter
first, and thought not of the man-of-letters in his painter till his
interest in his painter’s painting was—I won’t say extinguished
but—allayed.
Footnote 9:
‘The point in debate,’ he says, ‘the worth or the bad quality of the
painting ... I am as well able to decide upon as any who ever
brandished a pallette.’ I doubt not that he spoke the truth; yet the
residuum of his criticisms of pictures, their after-taste, is mostly
literary. And, as he was finally a man of letters, what else could one
expect?
Footnote 10:
Leigh Hunt said that he was the best art critic that ever lived: that
to read him was like seeing a picture through stained glass, and so
forth. But Leigh Hunt knew not much more about pictures than Coleridge
knew about the books he talked of, but had not read.
Footnote 11:
The house had been the abode of Milton; for certain months it had
harboured the eminent James Mill; it belonged to the celebrated Jeremy
Bentham: so that in the matter of associations Hazlitt, a
thorough-paced dissenter, was as well off as he could hope to be.
Footnote 12:
Ten in number: on ‘The Rise and Progress of Modern Philosophy,’ as
illustrated in the works of Hobbes, Locke and his followers, Hartley,
Helvétius, and others. The lectures, Mr. Stephen says, were in part a
reproduction of the _Principles of Human Action_.
Footnote 13:
Haydon says that Waterloo made him drunk for weeks. Then he pulled
himself together, and for the rest of his life drank nothing but
strong tea. He had, however, no sort of sympathy with those who held
the ‘social glass’ to be Man’s safest introduction to the Pit. He only
said that liquor did not agree with him, and looked on cheerfully
while his friends—Lamb was as close as any—drank as they pleased.
Footnote 14:
Both the _Characters_ and the _English Poets_ were reviewed by Gifford
in the _Quarterly_. The style of these ‘reviews’ is abject; the
inspiration venal; the matter the very dirt of the mind. Gifford hated
Hazlitt for his politics, and set out to wither Hazlitt’s repute as a
man of letters. For the tremendous reprisal with which he was visited,
the reader is referred to the _Letter to William Gifford, Esq._, in
the first volume of the present Edition. If he find it over-savage:
probably, being of to-day, he will: let him turn to his _Quarterly_,
and consider, if he have the stomach, Gifford and the matter of
offence.
Footnote 15:
He lived to rejoice in the Revolution of July; but of the great
movement in the arts—of _Henri Trois et sa Cour_ and _Hernani_, of
Delacroix and Barye, of Géricault and Bonington and de Vigny, and the
rest of its heroes—he seems to have known nothing. That was his way.
The new did not exist for him. A dissenter by birth and conviction, he
yet cared only for the past, and the elder ‘glories of our blood and
state’ were to him, not shadows but, the sole substantial things he
could keep room for in the kingdom of his mind.
Footnote 16:
’Tis a pleasure to remember that Lamb was with him to the end—was in
his death-chamber in the very article of mortality. We have all read
Carlyle on Lamb. The everlasting pity is that we shall never read
Hazlitt on Carlyle.
Footnote 17:
Him Shelley calls ‘a solemn and unsexual man.’
Footnote 18:
Much as years afterwards, according to a certain Nicolardot, the
expertest of their kind were ‘on the list’ of old Ste.-Beuve.
Footnote 19:
His grandson describes him as ‘physically incapable’ of any but a
transient fidelity to anybody.
Footnote 20:
He confessed that one day he told it half a dozen times or so to
persons he had never seen before: once, twice over to the same
listener.
Footnote 21:
It cost Hazlitt a crown, perhaps less; and he arranged—apparently with
Mrs. Hazlitt—to be taken in the act! After this the knowledge that Mr.
and Mrs. Hazlitt took tea together, _pendente lite_, and that then and
after his second espousals Hazlitt supplied this very reasonable woman
with money, astonishes no more, but comes as a kind of anticlimax.
Footnote 22:
That damsel presently married in her station. She seems to have been a
decent woman according to her lights, and to have lived up honestly to
her ideals, such as they were.
Footnote 23:
There was a laughing devil in his sneer
That raised emotions both of rage and fear;
And where his frown of hatred darkly fell,
Hope, withering, fled—and Mercy sighed farewell.
Footnote 24:
These details are Patmore’s, and, even if they be true, are not the
whole truth. Hazlitt loved solitude and the country, had to write for
a living, wrote with difficulty, and left no inconsiderable body of
work.
Footnote 25:
What I mean is, that I have heard the best, as I believe, the last of
the old century and the first of the new have shown.
Footnote 26:
‘He always made the best pun and the best remark in the course of the
evening. His serious conversation, like his serious writing, is his
best. No one ever stammered out such fine, piquant, deep, eloquent
things in half a dozen half-sentences as he does. His jests scald like
tears: and he probes a question with a play upon words. What a keen,
laughing, hare-brained vein of home-felt truth! What choice venom!’
Footnote 27:
It filled the valley like a mist,
And still poured out its endless chant,
And still it swells upon the ear,
And wraps me in a golden trance,
Drowning the noisy tumult of the world.
. . . . . .
Like sweetest warblings from a sacred grove ...
Contending with the wild winds as they roar ...
And the proud places of the insolent
And the oppressor fell ...
Such and so little is the mind of Man!
Footnote 28:
His summary of the fight between Hickman and Bill Neate is alone in
literature, as also in the annals of the Ring. Jon Bee was an
intelligent creature of his kind, and knew a very great deal more
about pugilism than Hazlitt knew; but to contrast the two is to learn
much. Badcock (which is Jon Bee) had seen (and worshipped) Jem
Belcher, and had reported fights with an extreme contempt for Pierce
Egan, the illiterate ass who gave us _Boxiana_. Hazlitt, however,
looked on at the proceedings of Neate and the Gaslight Man exactly as
he had looked on at divers creations of Edmund Kean. He saw the
essentials in both expressions of human activity, and his treatment of
both is fundamentally the same. In both he ignores the trivial: here
the acting (in its lowest sense), there the hits that did not count.
And thus, as he gives you only the vital touches, you know how and why
Neate beat Hickman, and can tell the exact moment at which Hickman
began to be a beaten man. ’Tis the same with his panegyric on
Cavanagh, the fives-player. For a blend of gusto with understanding I
know but one thing to equal with this: the note on Dr. Grace, which
appeared in _The National Observer_; and the night that that was
written, I sent the writer back to Hazlitt’s _Cavanagh_, and said to
him ——! On the whole the _Dr. Grace_ is the better of the two. But it
has scarce the incorruptible fatness of the _Cavanagh_. Gusto, though,
is Hazlitt’s special attribute: he glories in what he likes, what he
reads, what he feels, what he writes. He triumphed in his Kean, his
Shakespeare, his Bill Neate, his Rousseau, his coffee-and-cream and
_Love for Love_ in the inn-parlour at Alton. He relished things; and
expressed them with a relish. That is his ‘note.’ Some others have
relished only the consummate expression of nothing.
Footnote 29:
Listen, else, to Lamb himself: ‘Protesting against much that he has
written, and some things which he chooses to do; judging him by his
conversation which I enjoyed so long, and relished so deeply; or by
his books, in those places where no clouding passion intervenes, I
should belie my own conscience if I said less than that I think W. H.
to be, in his natural and healthy state, one of the wisest and finest
spirits breathing. So far from being ashamed of that intimacy which
was betwixt us, it is my boast that I was able for so many years to
have preserved it entire; and I think I shall go to my grave without
finding or expecting to find such another companion.’ Thus does one
Royalty celebrate the kingship and enrich the immortality of another.
EDITORS’ PREFACE
Two previous editions of Hazlitt’s works have been published: the
Templeman edition, edited by the author’s son, and the seven volume
edition in Bohn’s Library, edited by the author’s grandson, Mr. W. Carew
Hazlitt. Valuable as these editions are from the exceptional advantages
enjoyed by the respective editors, neither of them professes to be, or
is, complete, and the aim of the present edition is to give for the
first time an accurate text of the complete collected writings of
Hazlitt with the exception of his _Life of Napoleon_.
In the case of works published in book form by Hazlitt himself the
latest edition published in his lifetime is here reprinted. Some obvious
errors of the press have been corrected, but no attempt has been made to
modernise or improve Hazlitt’s orthography or punctuation. He himself
expressed contempt for ‘the collating of points and commas,’ and was
probably a careless proof reader. He did not plume himself, as Boswell
did, upon a deliberately adopted orthography, and his punctuation and
use of italics were perhaps rather his printers’ fancy than his own.
However that may be, the Editors feel that there is no justification for
any tampering with his text. Essays not republished by Hazlitt himself
are printed from the periodical or other publication in which they first
appeared.
It has been found impossible to avoid a good deal of repetition. All
readers of Hazlitt know that he repeated not only phrases and sentences,
but paragraphs and pages, as, _e.g._, in the case of the essay on ‘The
Character of Pitt’ (see note to p. 125). A few of such cases might have
been dealt with by means of cross references, but they are so numerous
that the cross references would have become tiresome if only one of the
identical or nearly identical passages had been printed.
The notes chiefly contain bibliographical matter, concise biographical
details of some of the persons mentioned by Hazlitt, and references to
quotations. They also include several passages which Hazlitt omitted
from his essays when he came to republish them in book form. Some of
these are in themselves worthy of preservation; some help to explain the
ferocity of certain contemporary allusions; and it is at any rate
interesting to compare what he rejected with what he retained in moments
of reflection.
One word is necessary here as to the course which has been adopted with
Hazlitt’s very numerous and very inaccurate quotations. In many cases
his quotations are simply and unintentionally inaccurate, but very often
he misquotes (if so it can be called) on purpose. That is to say, in his
masterful way he presses quotations into his service, and if they are
not exactly serviceable as they stand, he makes them so by changing a
word here and there, or by blending two or more quotations together. He
sometimes quotes (or misquotes) without using quotation marks, and the
Editors would fain believe that he sometimes uses quotation marks to
round off some unusually happy phrase of his own. The variations between
Hazlitt and his original are given in the notes where it seemed
desirable that they should be given, but in no case have his quotations
been corrected or altered in the _text_.
It has been a pleasure to the Editors to have the sympathy and
co-operation of Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt, and they desire to thank him for
his valuable assistance. At the same time they accept entire
responsibility for the errors and failings which may be found in their
work.
A. R. W.
A. G.
THE ROUND TABLE
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
_The Round Table_ was published in two 12mo volumes in 1817. The
title-page runs as follows: ‘The Round Table: A Collection of Essays
on Literature, Men, and Manners, By William Hazlitt. Edinburgh:
Printed for Archibald Constable and Co. And Longman, Hurst, Rees,
Orme, and Brown, London, 1817.’ Twelve of the fifty-two numbers were
by Leigh Hunt, as the Advertisement explains. The essays consisted
for the most part, but not entirely, of papers contributed to _The
Examiner_ under the title of ‘The Round Table’ between January 1,
1815, and January 5, 1817. Hazlitt, however, included several essays
taken from other columns of _The Examiner_ and from _The Morning
Chronicle_ and other sources, and did not include the whole of his
contributions to the Round Table series. A ‘third’ edition, edited
by the author’s son, was published in one 12mo volume in 1841. In
this edition many essays were omitted which had appeared, or were
intended to appear, in the series of Hazlitt’s works then being
published by Templeman; three essays contributed by Hazlitt to _The
Liberal_ in 1822 were added; and Leigh Hunt’s essays were retained.
Hazlitt’s essays as published in the two volumes of 1817 were
restored, and Leigh Hunt’s essays were for the first time omitted in
a later edition (8vo, 1871) edited by the author’s grandson, Mr. W.
C. Hazlitt. The present edition is an exact reproduction of
Hazlitt’s essays from the edition of 1817, except that a few obvious
printer’s errors have been corrected. Of the contributions made by
Hazlitt to the Round Table series in _The Examiner_ and not included
in the two volumes of 1817 some were used by him in other
publications, _Characters of Shakespear’s Plays_ (1817) and
_Political Essays_ (1819), some were published in the posthumous
_Winterslow_ (1850), and some have not been hitherto republished.
The source of each of the following essays is indicated in the
Notes. Gifford’s review of _The Round Table_ in _The Quarterly
Review_ for April 1817 is dealt with by the author in _A Letter to
William Gifford, Esq._, which is included in this volume.
ADVERTISEMENT TO THE EDITION OF 1817
The following work falls somewhat short of its title and original
intention. It was proposed by my friend, Mr. Hunt, to publish a series
of papers in the Examiner, in the manner of the early periodical
Essayists, the Spectator and Tatler. These papers were to be contributed
by various persons on a variety of subjects; and Mr. Hunt, as the
Editor, was to take the characteristic or dramatic part of the work upon
himself. I undertook to furnish occasional Essays and Criticisms; one or
two other friends promised their assistance; but the essence of the work
was to be miscellaneous. The next thing was to fix upon a title for it.
After much doubtful consultation, that of THE ROUND TABLE was agreed
upon as most descriptive of its nature and design. But our plan had been
no sooner arranged and entered upon, than Buonaparte landed at Frejus,
_et voila la Table Ronde dissoute_. Our little congress was broken up as
well as the great one; Politics called off the attention of the Editor
from the _Belles Lettres_; and the task of continuing the work fell
chiefly upon the person who was least able to give life and spirit to
the original design. A want of variety in the subjects and mode of
treating them, is, perhaps, the least disadvantage resulting from this
circumstance. All the papers, in the two volumes here offered to the
public, were written by myself and Mr. Hunt, except a letter
communicated by a friend in the seventeenth number. Out of the fifty-two
numbers, twelve are Mr. Hunt’s, with the signatures L. H. or H. T. For
all the rest I am answerable.
W. HAZLITT.
_January 5, 1817._
CONTENTS
PAGE
On the Love of Life 1
On Classical Education 4
On the Tatler 7
On Modern Comedy 10
On Mr. Kean’s Iago 14
On the Love of the Country 17
On Posthumous Fame.—Whether Shakspeare was influenced by a Love
of it? 21
On Hogarth’s Marriage a-la-mode 25
The Subject continued 28
On Milton’s Lycidas 31
On Milton’s Versification 36
On Manner 41
On the Tendency of Sects 47
On John Buncle 51
On the Causes of Methodism 57
On the Midsummer Night’s Dream 61
On the Beggar’s Opera 65
On Patriotism—A Fragment 67
On Beauty 68
On Imitation 72
On _Gusto_ 77
On Pedantry 80
The same Subject continued 84
On the Character of Rousseau 88
On Different Sorts of Fame 93
Character of John Bull 97
On Good-Nature 100
On the Character of Milton’s Eve 105
Observations on Mr. Wordsworth’s Poem The Excursion 111
The same Subject continued 120
Character of the late Mr. Pitt 125
On Religious Hypocrisy 128
On the Literary Character 131
On Common-place Critics 136
On the Catalogue Raisonné of the British Institution 140
The same Subject continued 146
On Poetical Versatility 151
On Actors and Acting 153
On the Same 156
Why the Arts are not Progressive: A Fragment 160
THE ROUND TABLE
NO. 1.] ON THE LOVE OF LIFE [JAN. 15, 1815.
It is our intention, in the course of these papers, occasionally to
expose certain vulgar errors, which have crept into our reasonings on
men and manners. Perhaps one of the most interesting of these, is that
which relates to the source of our general attachment to life. We are
not going to enter into the question, whether life is, on the whole, to
be regarded as a blessing, though we are by no means inclined to adopt
the opinion of that sage, who thought ‘that the best thing that could
have happened to a man was never to have been born, and the next best to
have died the moment after he came into existence.’ The common argument,
however, which is made use of to prove the value of life, from the
strong desire which almost every one feels for its continuance, appears
to be altogether inconclusive. The wise and the foolish, the weak and
the strong, the lame and the blind, the prisoner and the free, the
prosperous and the wretched, the beggar and the king, the rich and the
poor, the young and the old, from the little child who tries to leap
over his own shadow, to the old man who stumbles blindfold on his grave,
all feel this desire in common. Our notions with respect to the
importance of life, and our attachment to it, depend on a principle,
which has very little to do with its happiness or its misery.
The love of life is, in general, the effect not of our enjoyments, but
of our passions. We are not attached to it so much for its own sake, or
as it is connected with happiness, as because it is necessary to action.
Without life there can be no action—no objects of pursuit—no restless
desires—no tormenting passions. Hence it is that we fondly cling to
it—that we dread its termination as the close, not of enjoyment, but of
hope. The proof that our attachment to life is not absolutely owing to
the immediate satisfaction we find in it, is, that those persons are
commonly found most loth to part with it who have the least enjoyment of
it, and who have the greatest difficulties to struggle with, as losing
gamesters are the most desperate. And farther, there are not many
persons who, with all their pretended love of life, would not, if it had
been in their power, have melted down the longest life to a few hours.
‘The school-boy,’ says Addison, ‘counts the time till the return of the
holidays; the minor longs to be of age; the lover is impatient till he
is married.’—‘Hope and fantastic expectations spend much of our lives;
and while with passion we look for a coronation, or the death of an
enemy, or a day of joy, passing from fancy to possession without any
intermediate notices, we throw away a precious year’ (Jeremy Taylor). We
would willingly, and without remorse, sacrifice not only the present
moment, but all the interval (no matter how long) that separates us from
any favourite object. We chiefly look upon life, then, as the means to
an end. Its common enjoyments and its daily evils are alike disregarded
for any idle purpose we have in view. It should seem as if there were a
few green sunny spots in the desert of life, to which we are always
hastening forward: we eye them wistfully in the distance, and care not
what perils or suffering we endure, so that we arrive at them at last.
However weary we may be of the same stale round—however sick of the
past—however hopeless of the future—the mind still revolts at the
thought of death, because the fancied possibility of good, which always
remains with life, gathers strength as it is about to be torn from us
for ever, and the dullest scene looks bright compared with the darkness
of the grave. Our reluctance to part with existence evidently does not
depend on the calm and even current of our lives, but on the force and
impulse of the passions. Hence that indifference to death which has been
sometimes remarked in people who lead a solitary and peaceful life in
remote and barren districts. The pulse of life in them does not beat
strong enough to occasion any violent revulsion of the frame when it
ceases. He who treads the green mountain turf, or he who sleeps beneath
it, enjoys an almost equal quiet. The death of those persons has always
been accounted happy, who had attained their utmost wishes, who had
nothing left to regret or to desire. Our repugnance to death increases
in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain—to the
violence of our efforts, and the keenness of our disappointments—and to
our earnest desire to find in the future, if possible, a rich amends for
the past. We may be said to nurse our existence with the greatest
tenderness, according to the pain it has cost us; and feel at every step
of our varying progress the truth of that line of the poet—
‘An ounce of sweet is worth a pound of sour.’
The love of life is in fact the sum of all our passions and of all our
enjoyments; but these are by no means the same thing, for the vehemence
of our passions is irritated, not less by disappointment than by the
prospect of success. Nothing seems to be a match for this general
tenaciousness of existence, but such an extremity either of bodily or
mental suffering as destroys at once the power both of habit and
imagination. In short, the question, whether life is accompanied with a
greater quantity of pleasure or pain, may be fairly set aside as
frivolous, and of no practical utility; for our attachment to life
depends on our interest in it; and it cannot be denied that we have more
interest in this moving, busy scene, agitated with a thousand hopes and
fears, and checkered with every diversity of joy and sorrow, than in a
dreary blank. To be something is better than to be nothing, because we
can feel no interest in _nothing_. Passion, imagination, self-will, the
sense of power, the very consciousness of our existence, bind us to
life, and hold us fast in its chains, as by a magic spell, in spite of
every other consideration. Nothing can be more philosophical than the
reasoning which Milton puts into the mouth of the fallen angel:—
‘And that must end us, that must be our cure,
To be no more; Sad cure: For who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallow’d up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night,
Devoid of sense and motion?’
Nearly the same account may be given in answer to the question which has
been asked, _Why so few tyrants kill themselves?_ In the first place,
they are never satisfied with the mischief they have done, and cannot
quit their hold of power, after all sense of pleasure is fled. Besides,
they absurdly argue from the means of happiness placed within their
reach to the end itself; and, dazzled by the pomp and pageantry of a
throne, cannot relinquish the persuasion that they _ought_ to be happier
than other men. The prejudice of opinion, which attaches us to life, is
in them stronger than in others, and incorrigible to experience. The
Great are life’s fools—dupes of the splendid shadows that surround them,
and wedded to the very mockeries of opinion.
Whatever is our situation or pursuit in life, the result will be much
the same. The strength of the passion seldom corresponds to the pleasure
we find in its indulgence. The miser ‘robs himself to increase his
store’; the ambitious man toils up a slippery precipice only to be
tumbled headlong from its height: the lover is infatuated with the
charms of his mistress, exactly in proportion to the mortifications he
has received from her. Even those who succeed in nothing, who, as it has
been emphatically expressed—
‘Are made desperate by too quick a sense
Of constant infelicity; cut off
From peace like exiles, on some barren rock,
Their life’s sad prison, with no more of ease,
Than sentinels between two armies set’;
are yet as unwilling as others to give over the unprofitable strife:
their harassed feverish existence refuses rest, and frets the languor of
exhausted hope into the torture of unavailing regret. The exile, who has
been unexpectedly restored to his country and to liberty, often finds
his courage fail with the accomplishment of all his wishes, and the
struggle of life and hope ceases at the same instant.
We once more repeat, that we do not, in the foregoing remarks, mean to
enter into a comparative estimate of the value of human life, but merely
to shew that the strength of our attachment to it is a very fallacious
test of its happiness.
W. H.
NO. 2.] ON CLASSICAL EDUCATION [FEB. 12, 1815.
The study of the Classics is less to be regarded as an exercise of the
intellect, than as ‘a discipline of humanity.’ The peculiar advantage of
this mode of education consists not so much in strengthening the
understanding, as in softening and refining the taste. It gives men
liberal views; it accustoms the mind to take an interest in things
foreign to itself; to love virtue for its own sake; to prefer fame to
life, and glory to riches; and to fix our thoughts on the remote and
permanent, instead of narrow and fleeting objects. It teaches us to
believe that there is something really great and excellent in the world,
surviving all the shocks of accident and fluctuations of opinion, and
raises us above that low and servile fear, which bows only to present
power and upstart authority. Rome and Athens filled a place in the
history of mankind, which can never be occupied again. They were two
cities set on a hill, which could not be hid; all eyes have seen them,
and their light shines like a mighty sea-mark into the abyss of time.
‘Still green with bays each ancient altar stands,
Above the reach of sacrilegious hands;
Secure from flames, from envy’s fiercer rage,
Destructive war, and all-involving age.
Hail, bards triumphant, born in happier days,
Immortal heirs of universal praise!
Whose honours with increase of ages grow,
As streams roll down, enlarging as they flow!’
It is this feeling, more than anything else, which produces a marked
difference between the study of the ancient and modern languages, and
which, from the weight and importance of the consequences attached to
the former, stamps every word with a monumental firmness. By conversing
with the _mighty dead_, we imbibe sentiment with knowledge; we become
strongly attached to those who can no longer either hurt or serve us,
except through the influence which they exert over the mind. We feel the
presence of that power which gives immortality to human thoughts and
actions, and catch the flame of enthusiasm from all nations and ages.
It is hard to find in minds otherwise formed, either a real love of
excellence, or a belief that any excellence exists superior to their
own. Everything is brought down to the vulgar level of their own ideas
and pursuits. Persons without education certainly do not want either
acuteness or strength of mind in what concerns themselves, or in things
immediately within their observation; but they have no power of
abstraction, no general standard of taste, or scale of opinion. They see
their objects always near, and never in the horizon. Hence arises that
egotism which has been remarked as the characteristic of self-taught
men, and which degenerates into obstinate prejudice or petulant
fickleness of opinion, according to the natural sluggishness or activity
of their minds. For they either become blindly bigoted to the first
opinions they have struck out for themselves, and inaccessible to
conviction; or else (the dupes of their own vanity and shrewdness) are
everlasting converts to every crude suggestion that presents itself, and
the last opinion is always the true one. Each successive discovery
flashes upon them with equal light and evidence, and every new fact
overturns their whole system. It is among this class of persons, whose
ideas never extend beyond the feeling of the moment, that we find
partizans, who are very honest men, with a total want of principle, and
who unite the most hardened effrontery, and intolerance of opinion, to
endless inconsistency and self-contradiction.
A celebrated political writer of the present day, who is a great enemy
to classical education, is a remarkable instance both of what can and
what cannot be done without it.
It has been attempted of late to set up a distinction between the
education _of words_, and the education _of things_, and to give the
preference in all cases to the latter. But, in the first place, the
knowledge of things, or of the realities of life, is not easily to be
taught except by things themselves, and, even if it were, is not so
absolutely indispensable as it has been supposed. ‘The world is too much
with us, early and late’; and the fine dream of our youth is best
prolonged among the visionary objects of antiquity. We owe many of our
most amiable delusions, and some of our superiority, to the grossness of
mere physical existence, to the strength of our associations with words.
Language, if it throws a veil over our ideas, adds a softness and
refinement to them, like that which the atmosphere gives to naked
objects. There can be no true elegance without taste in style. In the
next place, we mean absolutely to deny the application of the principle
of utility to the present question. By an obvious transposition of
ideas, some persons have confounded a knowledge of useful things with
useful knowledge. Knowledge is only useful in itself, as it exercises or
gives pleasure to the mind: the only knowledge that is of use in a
practical sense, is professional knowledge. But knowledge, considered as
a branch of general education, can be of use only to the mind of the
person acquiring it. If the knowledge of language produces pedants, the
other kind of knowledge (which is proposed to be substituted for it) can
only produce quacks. There is no question, but that the knowledge of
astronomy, of chemistry, and of agriculture, is highly useful to the
world, and absolutely necessary to be acquired by persons carrying on
certain professions: but the practical utility of a knowledge of these
subjects ends there. For example, it is of the utmost importance to the
navigator to know exactly in what degree of longitude and latitude such
a rock lies: but to us, sitting here about our Round Table, it is not of
the smallest consequence whatever, whether the map-maker has placed it
an inch to the right or to the left; we are in no danger of running
against it. So the art of making shoes is a highly useful art, and very
proper to be known and practised by some body: that is, by the
shoemaker. But to pretend that every one else should be thoroughly
acquainted with the whole process of this ingenious handicraft, as one
branch of useful knowledge, would be preposterous. It is sometimes
asked, What is the use of poetry? and we have heard the argument carried
on almost like a parody on _Falstaff’s_ reasoning about Honour. ‘Can it
set a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No.
Poetry hath no skill in surgery then? No.’ It is likely that the most
enthusiastic lover of poetry would so far agree to the truth of this
statement, that if he had just broken a leg, he would send for a
surgeon, instead of a volume of poems from a library. But, ‘they that
are whole need not a physician.’ The reasoning would be well founded, if
we lived in an hospital, and not in the world.
W. H.
NO. 3.] ON THE TATLER [MARCH 5, 1815.
Of all the periodical Essayists, (our ingenious predecessors), the
_Tatler_ has always appeared to us the most accomplished and agreeable.
Montaigne, who was the father of this kind of personal authorship among
the moderns, in which the reader is admitted behind the curtain, and
sits down with the writer in his gown and slippers, was a most
magnanimous and undisguised egotist; but Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq. was the
more disinterested gossip of the two. The French author is contented to
describe the peculiarities of his own mind and person, which he does
with a most copious and unsparing hand. The English journalist,
good-naturedly, lets you into the secret both of his own affairs and
those of his neighbours. A young lady, on the other side of Temple Bar,
cannot be seen at her glass for half a day together, but Mr. Bickerstaff
takes due notice of it; and he has the first intelligence of the
symptoms of the _belle_ passion appearing in any young gentleman at the
west end of the town. The departures and arrivals of widows with
handsome jointures, either to bury their grief in the country, or to
procure a second husband in town, are regularly recorded in his pages.
He is well acquainted with the celebrated beauties of the last age at
the Court of Charles II. and the old gentleman often grows romantic in
recounting the disastrous strokes which his youth suffered from the
glances of their bright eyes and their unaccountable caprices. In
particular, he dwells with a secret satisfaction on one of his
mistresses who left him for a rival, and whose constant reproach to her
husband, on occasion of any quarrel between them, was,—‘I, that might
have married the famous Mr. Bickerstaff, to be treated in this manner!’
The club at the _Trumpet_ consists of a set of persons as entertaining
as himself. The cavalcade of the justice of the peace, the knight of the
shire, the country squire, and the young gentleman, his nephew, who
waited on him at his chambers, in such form and ceremony, seem not to
have settled the order of their precedence to this hour; and we should
hope the Upholsterer and his companions in the Green Park stand as fair
a chance for immortality as some modern politicians. Mr. Bickerstaff
himself is a gentleman and a scholar, a humourist and a man of the
world; with a great deal of nice easy _naïveté_ about him. If he walks
out and is caught in a shower of rain, he makes us amends for this
unlucky accident, by a criticism on the shower in Virgil, and concludes
with a burlesque copy of verses on a city-shower. He entertains us, when
he dates from his own apartment, with a quotation from Plutarch or a
moral reflection; from the Grecian coffeehouse with politics; and from
Will’s or the Temple with the poets and players, the beaux and men of
wit and pleasure about town. In reading the pages of the _Tatler_, we
seem as if suddenly transported to the age of Queen Anne, of toupees and
full-bottomed periwigs. The whole appearance of our dress and manners
undergoes a delightful metamorphosis. We are surprised with the rustling
of hoops and the glittering of paste buckles. The beaux and the belles
are of a quite different species; we distinguish the dappers, the
smarts, and the pretty fellows, as they pass; we are introduced to
Betterton and Mrs. Oldfield behind the scenes; are made familiar with
the persons of Mr. Penkethman and Mr. Bullock; we listen to a dispute at
a tavern on the merits of the Duke of Marlborough or Marshal Turenne; or
are present at the first rehearsal of a play by Vanbrugh, or the reading
of a new poem by Mr. Pope.—The privilege of thus virtually transporting
ourselves to past times, is even greater than that of visiting distant
places. London, a hundred years ago, would be better worth seeing than
Paris at the present moment.
It may be said that all this is to be found, in the same or a greater
degree, in the _Spectator_. We do not think so; or, at least, there is
in the last work a much greater proportion of common-place matter. We
have always preferred the _Tatler_ to the _Spectator_. Whether it is
owing to our having been earlier or better acquainted with the one than
the other, our pleasure in reading the two works is not at all in
proportion to their comparative reputation. The _Tatler_ contains only
half the number of volumes, and we will venture to say, at least an
equal quantity of sterling wit and sense. ‘The first sprightly runnings’
are there: it has more of the original spirit, more of the freshness and
stamp of nature. The indications of character and strokes of humour are
more true and frequent, the reflections that suggest themselves arise
more from the occasion, and are less spun out into regular
dissertations. They are more like the remarks which occur in sensible
conversation, and less like a lecture. Something is left to the
understanding of the reader. Steele seems to have gone into his closet
only to set down what he observed out-of-doors; Addison seems to have
spun out and wire-drawn the hints, which he borrowed from Steele, or
took from nature, to the utmost. We do not mean to depreciate Addison’s
talents, but we wish to do justice to Steele, who was, upon the whole, a
less artificial and more original writer. The descriptions of Steele
resemble loose sketches or fragments of a comedy; those of Addison are
ingenious paraphrases on the genuine text. The characters of the club,
not only in the _Tatler_, but in the _Spectator_, were drawn by Steele.
That of Sir Roger de Coverley is among them. Addison has gained himself
eternal honour by his manner of filling up this last character. Those of
Will Wimble and Will Honeycomb are not a whit behind it in delicacy and
felicity. Many of the most exquisite pieces in the _Tatler_ are also
Addison’s, as the Court of Honour, and the Personification of Musical
Instruments. We do not know whether the picture of the family of an old
acquaintance, in which the children run to let Mr. Bickerstaff in at the
door, and the one that loses the race that way turns back to tell the
father that he is come,—with the nice gradation of incredulity in the
little boy, who is got into _Guy of Warwick_ and _The Seven Champions_,
and who shakes his head at the veracity of _Æsop’s Fables_,—is Steele’s
or Addison’s.[30] The account of the two sisters, one of whom held her
head up higher than ordinary, from having on a pair of flowered garters,
and of the married lady who complained to the _Tatler_ of the neglect of
her husband, are unquestionably Steele’s. If the _Tatler_ is not
inferior to the _Spectator_ in manners and character, it is very
superior to it in the interest of many of the stories. Several of the
incidents related by Steele have never been surpassed in the
heart-rending pathos of private distress. We might refer to those of the
lover and his mistress when the theatre caught fire, of the bridegroom
who, by accident, kills his bride on the day of their marriage, the
story of Mr. Eustace and his wife, and the fine dream about his own
mistress when a youth. What has given its superior popularity to the
_Spectator_, is the greater gravity of its pretensions, its moral
dissertations and critical reasonings, by which we confess we are less
edified than by other things. Systems and opinions change, but nature is
always true. It is the extremely moral and didactic tone of the
_Spectator_ which makes us apt to think of Addison (according to
Mandeville’s sarcasm) as ‘a parson in a tie-wig.’ Some of the moral
essays are, however, exquisitely beautiful and happy. Such are the
reflections in Westminster Abbey, on the Royal Exchange, and some very
affecting ones on the death of a young lady. These, it must be allowed,
are the perfection of elegant sermonising. His critical essays we do not
think quite so good. We prefer Steele’s occasional selection of
beautiful poetical passages, without any affectation of analysing their
beauties, to Addison’s fine-spun theories. The best criticism in the
_Spectator_, that on the _Cartoons_ of Raphael, is by Steele. We owed
this acknowledgment to a writer who has so often put us in good humour
with ourselves and every thing about us, when few things else could.[31]
W. H.
NO. 4.] ON MODERN COMEDY [AUG. 20, 1815.
The question which has often been asked, _Why there are so few good
modern Comedies?_ appears in a great measure to answer itself. It is
because so many excellent Comedies have been written, that there are
none written at present. Comedy naturally wears itself out—destroys the
very food on which it lives; and by constantly and successfully exposing
the follies and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves
itself nothing worth laughing at. It holds the mirror up to nature; and
men, seeing their most striking peculiarities and defects pass in gay
review before them, learn either to avoid or conceal them. It is not the
criticism which the public taste exercises upon the stage, but the
criticism which the stage exercises upon public manners, that is fatal
to comedy, by rendering the subject-matter of it tame, correct, and
spiritless. We are drilled into a sort of stupid decorum, and forced to
wear the same dull uniform of outward appearance; and yet it is asked,
why the Comic Muse does not point, as she was wont, at the peculiarities
of our gait and gesture, and exhibit the picturesque contrast of our
dress and costume, in all that graceful variety in which she delights.
The genuine source of comic writing,
‘Where it must live, or have no life at all,’
is undoubtedly to be found in the distinguishing peculiarities of men
and manners. Now, this distinction can subsist, so as to be strong,
pointed, and general, only while the manners of different classes are
formed immediately by their particular circumstances, and the characters
of individuals by their natural temperament and situation, without being
everlastingly modified and neutralised by intercourse with the world—by
knowledge and education. In a certain stage of society, men may be said
to vegetate like trees, and to become rooted to the soil in which they
grow. They have no idea of anything beyond themselves and their
immediate sphere of action; they are, as it were, circumscribed, and
defined by their particular circumstances; they are what their situation
makes them, and nothing more. Each is absorbed in his own profession or
pursuit, and each in his turn contracts that habitual peculiarity of
manners and opinions, which makes him the subject of ridicule to others,
and the sport of the Comic Muse. Thus the physician is nothing but a
physician, the lawyer is a mere lawyer, the scholar degenerates into a
pedant, the country squire is a different species of being from the fine
gentleman, the citizen and the courtier inhabit a different world, and
even the affectation of certain characters, in aping the follies or
vices of their betters, only serves to show the immeasurable distance
which custom or fortune has placed between them. Hence the early comic
writers, taking advantage of this mixed and solid mass of ignorance,
folly, pride, and prejudice, made those deep and lasting incisions into
it,—have given those sharp and nice touches, that bold relief to their
characters,—have opposed them in every variety of contrast and
collision, of conscious self-satisfaction and mutual antipathy, with a
power which can only find full scope in the same rich and inexhaustible
materials. But in proportion as comic genius succeeds in taking off the
mask from ignorance and conceit, as it teaches us to
‘See ourselves as others see us,’—
in proportion as we are brought out on the stage together, and our
prejudices clash one against the other, our sharp angular points wear
off; we are no longer rigid in absurdity, passionate in folly, and we
prevent the ridicule directed at our habitual foibles, by laughing at
them ourselves.
If it be said, that there is the same fund of absurdity and prejudice in
the world as ever—that there are the same unaccountable perversities
lurking at the bottom of every breast,—I should answer, be it so: but at
least we keep our follies to ourselves as much as possible—we palliate,
shuffle, and equivocate with them—they sneak into by-corners, and do
not, like _Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims_, march along the highroad, and
form a procession—they do not entrench themselves strongly behind custom
and precedent—they are not embodied in professions and ranks in
life—they are not organised into a system—they do not openly resort to a
standard, but are a sort of straggling nondescripts, that, like _Wart_,
‘present no mark to the foeman.’ As to the gross and palpable
absurdities of modern manners, they are too shallow and barefaced, and
those who affect, are too little _serious_ in them, to make them worth
the detection of the Comic Muse. They proceed from an idle, impudent
affectation of folly in general, in the dashing _bravura_ style, not
from an infatuation with any of its characteristic modes. In short, the
proper object of ridicule is _egotism_; and a man cannot be a very great
egotist who every day sees himself represented on the stage. We are
deficient in Comedy, because we are without characters in real life—as
we have no historical pictures, because we have no faces proper for
them.
It is, indeed, the evident tendency of all literature to generalise and
_dissipate_ character, by giving men the same artificial education, and
the same common stock of ideas; so that we see all objects from the same
point of view, and through the same reflected medium;—we learn to exist,
not in ourselves, but in books;—all men become alike mere
readers—spectators, not actors in the scene, and lose all proper
personal identity. The templar, the wit, the man of pleasure, and the
man of fashion, the courtier and the citizen, the knight and the squire,
the lover and the miser—_Lovelace_, _Lothario_, _Will Honeycomb_, and
_Sir Roger de Coverley_, _Sparkish_ and _Lord Foppington_, _Western_ and
_Tom Jones_, _My Father_, and _My Uncle Toby_, _Millamant_ and _Sir
Sampson Legend_, _Don Quixote_ and _Sancho_, _Gil Blas_ and _Guzman
d’Alfarache_, _Count Fathom_ and _Joseph Surface_,—have all met, and
exchanged common-places on the barren plains of the _haute
littérature_—toil slowly on to the Temple of Science, seen a long way
off upon a level, and end in one dull compound of politics, criticism,
chemistry, and metaphysics!
We cannot expect to reconcile opposite things. If, for example, any of
us were to put ourselves into the stage-coach from Salisbury to London,
it is more than probable we should not meet with the same number of odd
accidents, or ludicrous distresses on the road, that befell _Parson
Adams_; but why, if we get into a common vehicle, and submit to the
conveniences of modern travelling, should we complain of the want of
adventures? Modern manners may be compared to a modern stage-coach: our
limbs may be a little cramped with the confinement, and we may grow
drowsy; but we arrive safe, without any very amusing or very sad
accident, at our journey’s end.
Again, the alterations which have taken place in conversation and dress
in the same period, have been by no means favourable to Comedy. The
present prevailing style of conversation is not _personal_, but critical
and analytical. It consists almost entirely in the discussion of general
topics, in dissertations on philosophy or taste: and Congreve would be
able to derive no better hints from the conversations of our toilettes
or drawing-rooms, for the exquisite raillery or poignant repartee of his
dialogues, than from a deliberation of the Royal Society. In the same
manner, the extreme simplicity and graceful uniformity of modern dress,
however favourable to the arts, has certainly stript Comedy of one of
its richest ornaments and most expressive symbols. The sweeping pall and
buskin, and nodding plume, were never more serviceable to Tragedy, than
the enormous hoops and stiff stays worn by the belles of former days
were to the intrigues of Comedy. They assisted wonderfully in
heightening the mysteries of the passion, and adding to the intricacy of
the plot. Wycherley and Vanbrugh could not have spared the dresses of
Vandyke. These strange fancy-dresses, perverse disguises, and
counterfeit shapes, gave an agreeable scope to the imagination. ‘That
sevenfold fence’ was a sort of foil to the lusciousness of the dialogue,
and a barrier against the sly encroachments of _double entendre_. The
greedy eye and bold hand of indiscretion were repressed, which gave a
greater licence to the tongue. The senses were not to be gratified in an
instant. Love was entangled in the folds of the swelling handkerchief,
and the desires might wander for ever round the circumference of a
quilted petticoat, or find a rich lodging in the flowers of a damask
stomacher. There was room for years of patient contrivance, for a
thousand thoughts, schemes, conjectures, hopes, fears, and wishes. There
seemed no end of difficulties and delays; to overcome so many obstacles
was the work of ages. A mistress was an angel concealed behind
whalebone, flounces, and brocade. What an undertaking to penetrate
through the disguise! What an impulse must it give to the blood, what a
keenness to the invention, what a volubility to the tongue! ‘Mr. Smirk,
you are a brisk man,’ was then the most significant commendation. But
now-a-days—a woman can be _but undressed_!
The same account might be extended to Tragedy. Aristotle has long since
said, that Tragedy purifies the mind by terror and pity; that is,
substitutes an artificial and intellectual interest for real passion.
Tragedy, like Comedy, must therefore defeat itself; for its patterns
must be drawn from the living models within the breast, from feeling or
from observation; and the materials of Tragedy cannot be found among a
people, who are the habitual spectators of Tragedy, whose interests and
passions are not their own, but ideal, remote, sentimental, and
abstracted. It is for this reason chiefly, we conceive, that the highest
efforts of the Tragic Muse are in general the earliest; where the strong
impulses of nature are not lost in the refinements and glosses of art;
where the writers themselves, and those whom they saw about them, had
‘warm hearts of flesh and blood beating in their bosoms, and were not
embowelled of their natural entrails, and stuffed with paltry blurred
sheets of paper.’ Shakspeare, with all his genius, could not have
written as he did, if he had lived in the present times. Nature would
not have presented itself to him in the same freshness and vigour; he
must have seen it through all the refractions of successive dullness,
and his powers would have languished in the dense atmosphere of logic
and criticism. ‘Men’s minds,’ he somewhere says, ‘are parcel of their
fortunes’; and his age was necessary to him. It was this which enabled
him to grapple at once with Nature, and which stamped his characters
with her image and superscription.
W. H.
NO. 5.] ON MR. KEAN’S IAGO [JULY 24, 1814.
We certainly think Mr. Kean’s performance of the part of Iago one of the
most extraordinary exhibitions on the stage. There is no one within our
remembrance who has so completely foiled the critics as this celebrated
actor: one sagacious person imagines that he must perform a part in a
certain manner,—another virtuoso chalks out a different path for him;
and when the time comes, he does the whole off in a way that neither of
them had the least conception of, and which both of them are therefore
very ready to condemn as entirely wrong. It was ever the trick of genius
to be thus. We confess that Mr. Kean has thrown us out more than once.
For instance, we are very much inclined to adopt the opinion of a
contemporary critic, that his _Richard_ is not gay enough, and that his
_Iago_ is not grave enough. This he may perhaps conceive to be the mere
caprice of idle criticism; but we will try to give our reasons, and
shall leave them to Mr. Kean’s better judgment. It is to be remembered,
then, that _Richard_ was a princely villain, borne along in a sort of
triumphal car of royal state, buoyed up with the hopes and privileges of
his birth, reposing even on the sanctity of religion, trampling on his
devoted victims without remorse, and who looked out and laughed from the
high watch-tower of his confidence and his expectations on the
desolation and misery he had caused around him. He held on his way,
unquestioned, ‘hedged in with the divinity of kings,’ amenable to no
tribunal, and abusing his power _in contempt of mankind_. But as for
_Iago_, we conceive differently of him. He had not the same natural
advantages. He was a mere adventurer in mischief, a pains-taking
plodding knave, without patent or pedigree, who was obliged to work his
up-hill way by wit, not by will, and to be the founder of his own
fortune. He was, if we may be allowed a vulgar allusion, a sort of
prototype of modern Jacobinism, who thought that talents ought to decide
the place,—a man of ‘morbid sensibility,’ (in the fashionable phrase),
full of distrust, of hatred, of anxious and corroding thoughts, and who,
though he might assume a temporary superiority over others by superior
adroitness, and pride himself in his skill, could not be supposed to
assume it as a matter of course, as if he had been entitled to it from
his birth. We do not here mean to enter into the characters of the two
men, but something must be allowed to the difference of their
situations. There might be the same insensibility in both as to the end
in view, but there could not well be the same security as to the success
of the means. _Iago_ had to pass through a different ordeal: he had no
appliances and means to boot; no royal road to the completion of his
tragedy. His pretensions were not backed by authority; they were not
baptized at the font; they were not holy-waterproof. He had the whole to
answer for in his own person, and could not shift the responsibility to
the heads of others. Mr. Kean’s _Richard_ was, therefore, we think,
deficient in something of that regal jollity and reeling triumph of
success which the part would bear; but this we can easily account for,
because it is the traditional commonplace idea of the character, that he
is to ‘play the dog—to bite and snarl.’—The extreme unconcern and
laboured levity of his _Iago_, on the contrary, is a refinement and
original device of the actor’s own mind, and therefore deserves
consideration. The character of _Iago_, in fact, belongs to a class of
characters common to Shakspeare, and at the same time peculiar to
him—namely, that of great intellectual activity, accompanied with a
total want of moral principle, and therefore displaying itself at the
constant expence of others, making use of reason as a pander to
will—employing its ingenuity and its resources to palliate its own
crimes and aggravate the faults of others, and seeking to confound the
practical distinctions of right and wrong, by referring them to some
overstrained standard of speculative refinement.—Some persons, more nice
than wise, have thought the whole of the character of _Iago_ unnatural.
Shakspeare, who was quite as good a philosopher as he was a poet,
thought otherwise. He knew that the love of power, which is another name
for the love of mischief, was natural to man. He would know this as well
or better than if it had been demonstrated to him by a logical diagram,
merely from seeing children paddle in the dirt, or kill flies for sport.
We might ask those who think the character of _Iago_ not natural, why
they go to see it performed, but from the interest it excites, the
sharper edge which it sets on their curiosity and imagination? Why do we
go to see tragedies in general? Why do we always read the accounts in
the newspapers of dreadful fires and shocking murders, but for the same
reason? Why do so many persons frequent executions and trials, or why do
the lower classes almost universally take delight in barbarous sports
and cruelty to animals, but because there is a natural tendency in the
mind to strong excitement, a desire to have its faculties roused and
stimulated to the utmost? Whenever this principle is not under the
restraint of humanity, or the sense of moral obligation, there are no
excesses to which it will not of itself give rise, without the
assistance of any other motive, either of passion or self-interest.
_Iago_ is only an extreme instance of the kind; that is, of diseased
intellectual activity, with an almost perfect indifference to moral good
or evil, or rather with a preference of the latter, because it falls
more in with his favourite propensity, gives greater zest to his
thoughts, and scope to his actions.—Be it observed, too, (for the sake
of those who are for squaring all human actions by the maxims of
Rochefoucault), that he is quite or nearly as indifferent to his own
fate as to that of others; that he runs all risks for a trifling and
doubtful advantage; and is himself the dupe and victim of his ruling
passion—an incorrigible love of mischief—an insatiable craving after
action of the most difficult and dangerous kind. Our ‘Ancient’ is a
philosopher, who fancies that a lie that kills has more point in it than
an alliteration or an antithesis; who thinks a fatal experiment on the
peace of a family a better thing than watching the palpitations in the
heart of a flea in an air-pump; who plots the ruin of his friends as an
exercise for his understanding, and stabs men in the dark to prevent
_ennui_. Now this, though it be sport, yet it is dreadful sport. There
is no room for trifling and indifference, nor scarcely for the
appearance of it; the very object of his whole plot is to keep his
faculties stretched on the rack, in a state of watch and ward, in a sort
of breathless suspense, without a moment’s interval of repose. He has a
desperate stake to play for, like a man who fences with poisoned
weapons, and has business enough on his hands to call for the whole
stock of his sober circumspection, his dark duplicity, and insidious
gravity. He resembles a man who sits down to play at chess, for the sake
of the difficulty and complication of the game, and who immediately
becomes absorbed in it. His amusements, if they are amusements, are
severe and saturnine—even his wit blisters. His gaiety arises from the
success of his treachery; his ease from the sense of the torture he has
inflicted on others. Even, if other circumstances permitted it, the part
he has to play with _Othello_ requires that he should assume the most
serious concern, and something of the plausibility of a confessor. ‘His
cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o’ Bedlam.’ He is
repeatedly called ‘honest _Iago_,’ which looks as if there were
something suspicious in his appearance, which admitted a different
construction. The tone which he adopts in the scenes with _Roderigo_,
_Desdemona_, and _Cassio_, is only a relaxation from the more arduous
business of the play. Yet there is in all his conversation an inveterate
misanthropy, a licentious keenness of perception, which is always
sagacious of evil, and snuffs up the tainted scent of its quarry with
rancorous delight. An exuberance of spleen is the essence of the
character. The view which we have here taken of the subject (if at all
correct) will not therefore justify the extreme alteration which Mr.
Kean has introduced into the part. Actors in general have been struck
only with the wickedness of the character, and have exhibited an
assassin going to the place of execution. Mr. Kean has abstracted the
wit of the character, and makes _Iago_ appear throughout an excellent
good fellow, and lively bottle-companion. But though we do not wish him
to be represented as a monster, or fiend, we see no reason why he should
instantly be converted into a pattern of comic gaiety and good-humour.
The light which illumines the character should rather resemble the
flashes of lightning in the mirky sky, which make the darkness more
terrible. Mr. Kean’s _Iago_ is, we suspect, too much in the sun. His
manner of acting the part would have suited better with the character of
_Edmund_ in _King Lear_, who, though in other respects much the same,
has a spice of gallantry in his constitution, and has the favour and
countenance of the ladies, which always gives a man the smug appearance
of a bridegroom!
W. H.
NO. 6.] ON THE LOVE OF THE COUNTRY [NOV. 27, 1814.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE ROUND TABLE.
SIR,—I do not know that any one has ever explained satisfactorily the
true source of our attachment to natural objects, or of that soothing
emotion which the sight of the country hardly ever fails to infuse into
the mind. Some persons have ascribed this feeling to the natural beauty
of the objects themselves, others to the freedom from care, the silence
and tranquillity which scenes of retirement afford—others to the healthy
and innocent employments of a country life—others to the simplicity of
country manners—and others to different causes; but none to the right
one. All these causes may, I believe, have a share in producing this
feeling; but there is another more general principle, which has been
left untouched, and which I shall here explain, endeavouring to be as
little sentimental as the subject will admit.
Rousseau, in his Confessions, (the most valuable of all his works),
relates, that when he took possession of his room at Annecy, at the
house of his beloved mistress and friend, he found that he could see ‘a
little spot of green’ from his window, which endeared his situation the
more to him, because, he says, it was the first time he had had this
object constantly before him since he left Boissy, the place where he
was at school when a child.[32] Some such feeling as that here described
will be found lurking at the bottom of all our attachments of this sort.
Were it not for the recollections habitually associated with them,
natural objects could not interest the mind in the manner they do. No
doubt, the sky is beautiful; the clouds sail majestically along its
bosom; the sun is cheering; there is something exquisitely graceful in
the manner in which a plant or tree puts forth its branches; the motion
with which they bend and tremble in the evening breeze is soft and
lovely; there is music in the babbling of a brook; the view from the top
of a mountain is full of grandeur; nor can we behold the ocean with
indifference. Or, as the Minstrel sweetly sings—
‘Oh how can’st thou renounce the boundless store
Of charms which Nature to her votary yields!
The warbling woodland, the resounding shore,
The pomp of groves, and garniture of fields;
All that the genial ray of morning gilds,
And all that echoes to the song of even,
All that the mountain’s sheltering bosom shields,
And all the dread magnificence of heaven,
Oh how can’st thou renounce, and hope to be forgiven!’
It is not, however, the beautiful and magnificent alone that we admire
in Nature; the most insignificant and rudest objects are often found
connected with the strongest emotions; we become attached to the most
common and familiar images as to the face of a friend whom we have long
known, and from whom we have received many benefits. It is because
natural objects have been associated with the sports of our childhood,
with air and exercise, with our feelings in solitude, when the mind
takes the strongest hold of things, and clings with the fondest interest
to whatever strikes its attention; with change of place, the pursuit of
new scenes, and thoughts of distant friends: it is because they have
surrounded us in almost all situations, in joy and in sorrow, in
pleasure and in pain; because they have been one chief source and
nourishment of our feelings, and a part of our being, that we love them
as we do ourselves.
There is, generally speaking, the same foundation for our love of Nature
as for all our habitual attachments, namely, association of ideas. But
this is not all. That which distinguishes this attachment from others is
the transferable nature of our feelings with respect to physical
objects; the associations connected with any one object extending to the
whole class. My having been attached to any particular person does not
make me feel the same attachment to the next person I may chance to
meet; but, if I have once associated strong feelings of delight with the
objects of natural scenery, the tie becomes indissoluble, and I shall
ever after feel the same attachment to other objects of the same sort. I
remember when I was abroad, the trees, and grass, and wet leaves,
rustling in the walks of the Thuilleries, seemed to be as much English,
to be as much the same trees and grass, that I had always been used to,
as the sun shining over my head was the same sun which I saw in England;
the faces only were foreign to me. Whence comes this difference? It
arises from our always imperceptibly connecting the idea of the
individual with man, and only the idea of the class with natural
objects. In the one case, the external appearance or physical structure
is the least thing to be attended to; in the other, it is every thing.
The springs that move the human form, and make it friendly or adverse to
me, lie hid within it. There is an infinity of motives, passions, and
ideas contained in that narrow compass, of which I know nothing, and in
which I have no share. Each individual is a world to himself, governed
by a thousand contradictory and wayward impulses. I can, therefore, make
no inference from one individual to another; nor can my habitual
sentiments, with respect to any individual, extend beyond himself to
others. But it is otherwise with respect to Nature. There is neither
hypocrisy, caprice, nor mental reservation in her favours. Our
intercourse with her is not liable to accident or change, interruption
or disappointment. She smiles on us still the same. Thus, to give an
obvious instance, if I have once enjoyed the cool shade of a tree, and
been lulled into a deep repose by the sound of a brook running at its
feet, I am sure that wherever I can find a tree and a brook, I can enjoy
the same pleasure again. Hence, when I imagine these objects, I can
easily form a mystic personification of the friendly power that inhabits
them, Dryad or Naiad, offering its cool fountain or its tempting shade.
Hence the origin of the Grecian mythology. All objects of the same kind
being the same, not only in their appearance, but in their practical
uses, we habitually confound them together under the same general idea;
and, whatever fondness we may have conceived for one, is immediately
placed to the common account. The most opposite kinds and remote trains
of feeling gradually go to enrich the same sentiment; and in our love of
Nature, there is all the force of individual attachment, combined with
the most airy abstraction. It is this circumstance which gives that
refinement, expansion, and wild interest to feelings of this sort, when
strongly excited, which every one must have experienced who is a true
lover of Nature. The sight of the setting sun does not affect me so much
from the beauty of the object itself, from the glory kindled through the
glowing skies, the rich broken columns of light, or the dying streaks of
day, as that it indistinctly recalls to me numberless thoughts and
feelings with which, through many a year and season, I have watched his
bright descent in the warm summer evenings, or beheld him struggling to
cast a ‘farewel sweet’ through the thick clouds of winter. I love to see
the trees first covered with leaves in the spring, the primroses peeping
out from some sheltered bank, and the innocent lambs running races on
the soft green turf; because, at that birth-time of Nature, I have
always felt sweet hopes and happy wishes—which have not been fulfilled!
The dry reeds rustling on the side of a stream,—the woods swept by the
loud blast,—the dark massy foliage of autumn,—the grey trunks and naked
branches of the trees in winter,—the sequestered copse and wide extended
heath,—the warm sunny showers, and December snows,—have all charms for
me; there is no object, however trifling or rude, that has not, in some
mood or other, found the way to my heart; and I might say, in the words
of the poet,
‘To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’
Thus Nature is a kind of universal home, and every object it presents to
us an old acquaintance with unaltered looks.
——‘Nature did ne’er betray
The heart that lov’d her, but through all the years
Of this our life, it is her privilege
To lead from joy to joy.’
For there is that consent and mutual harmony among all her works, one
undivided spirit pervading them throughout, that, if we have once knit
ourselves in hearty fellowship to any of them, they will never
afterwards appear as strangers to us, but, which ever way we turn, we
shall find a secret power to have gone out before us, moulding them into
such shapes as fancy loves, informing them with life and sympathy,
bidding them put on their festive looks and gayest attire at our
approach, and to pour all their sweets and choicest treasures at our
feet. For him, then, who has well acquainted himself with Nature’s
works, she wears always one face, and speaks the same well-known
language, striking on the heart, amidst unquiet thoughts and the tumult
of the world, like the music of one’s native tongue heard in some
far-off country.
We do not connect the same feelings with the works of art as with those
of nature, because we refer them to man, and associate with them the
separate interests and passions which we know belong to those who are
the authors or possessors of them. Nevertheless, there are some such
objects, as a cottage, or a village church, which excite in us the same
sensations as the sight of nature, and which are, indeed, almost always
included in descriptions of natural scenery.
‘Or from the mountain’s sides
View wilds and swelling floods,
And hamlets brown, and dim-discover’d spires,
And hear their simple bell.’
Which is in part, no doubt, because they are surrounded with natural
objects, and, in a populous country, inseparable from them; and also
because the human interest they excite relates to manners and feelings
which are simple, common, such as all can enter into, and which,
therefore, always produce a pleasing effect upon the mind.
A.
NO. 7.] ON POSTHUMOUS FAME,—WHETHER [MAY 22, 1814.
SHAKSPEARE WAS INFLUENCED BY A LOVE
OF IT?
It has been much disputed whether Shakspeare was actuated by the love of
fame, though the question has been thought by others not to admit of any
doubt, on the ground that it was impossible for any man of great genius
to be without this feeling. It was supposed, that that immortality,
which was the natural inheritance of men of powerful genius, must be
ever present to their minds, as the reward, the object, and the
animating spring, of all their efforts. This conclusion does not appear
to be well founded, and that for the following reasons:
First, The love of fame is the offspring of taste, rather than of
genius. The love of fame implies a knowledge of its existence. The men
of the greatest genius, whether poets or philosophers, who lived in the
first ages of society, only just emerging from the gloom of ignorance
and barbarism, could not be supposed to have much idea of those long
trails of lasting glory which they were to leave behind them, and of
which there were as yet no examples. But, after such men, inspired by
the love of truth and nature, have struck out those lights which become
the gaze and admiration of after times,—when those who succeed in
distant generations read with wondering rapture the works which the
bards and sages of antiquity have bequeathed to them,—when they
contemplate the imperishable power of intellect which survives the
stroke of death and the revolutions of empire,—it is then that the
passion for fame becomes an habitual feeling in the mind, and that men
naturally wish to excite the same sentiments of admiration in others
which they themselves have felt, and to transmit their names with the
same honours to posterity. It is from the fond enthusiastic veneration
with which we recal the names of the celebrated men of past times, and
the idolatrous worship we pay to their memories, that we learn what a
delicious thing fame is, and would willingly make any efforts or
sacrifices to be thought of in the same way. It is in the true spirit of
this feeling that a modern writer exclaims—
‘Blessings be with them, and eternal praise,
The poets—who on earth have made us heirs
Of truth and pure delight in deathless lays!
Oh! might my name be number’d among theirs,
Then gladly would I end my mortal days!’
The love of fame is a species of emulation; or, in other words, the love
of admiration is in proportion to the admiration with which the works of
the highest genius have inspired us, to the delight we have received
from their habitual contemplation, and to our participation in the
general enthusiasm with which they have been regarded by mankind. Thus
there is little of this feeling discoverable in the Greek writers, whose
ideas of posthumous fame seem to have been confined to the glory of
heroic actions; whereas the Roman poets and orators, stimulated by the
reputation which their predecessors had acquired, and having those
exquisite models constantly before their eyes, are full of it. So
Milton, whose capacious mind was imbued with the rich stores of sacred
and of classic lore, to whom learning opened her inmost page, and whose
eye seemed to be ever bent back to the great models of antiquity, was,
it is evident, deeply impressed with a feeling of lofty emulation, and a
strong desire to produce some work of lasting and equal reputation:—
——‘Nor sometimes forget
Those other two, equall’d with me in fate,
So were I equall’d with them in renown,
Blind Thamyris and blind Mæonides,
And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old.’[33]
Spenser, who was a man of learning, had a high opinion of the regard due
to ‘famous poets’ wit’; and Lord Bacon, whose vanity is as well known as
his excessive adulation of that of others, asks, in a tone of proud
exultation, ‘Have not the poems of Homer lasted five-and-twenty hundred
years, and not a syllable of them is lost?’ Chaucer seems to have
derived his notions of fame more immediately from the reputation
acquired by the Italian poets, his contemporaries, which had at that
time spread itself over Europe; while the latter, who were the first to
unlock the springs of ancient learning, and who slaked their thirst of
knowledge at that pure fountain-head, would naturally imbibe the same
feeling from its highest source. Thus, Dante has conveyed the finest
image that can perhaps be conceived of the power of this principle over
the human mind, when he describes the heroes and celebrated men of
antiquity as ‘serene and smiling,’ though in the shades of death,
——‘Because on earth their names
In Fame’s eternal volume shine for aye.’
But it is not so in Shakspeare. There is scarcely the slightest trace of
any such feeling in his writings, nor any appearance of anxiety for
their fate, or of a desire to perfect them or make them worthy of that
immortality to which they were destined. And this indifference may be
accounted for from the very circumstance, that he was almost entirely a
man of genius, or that in him this faculty bore sway over every other:
he was either not intimately conversant with the productions of the
great writers who had gone before him, or at least was not much indebted
to them: he revelled in the world of observation and of fancy; and
perhaps his mind was of too prolific and active a kind to dwell with
intense and continued interest on the images of beauty or of grandeur
presented to it by the genius of others. He seemed scarcely to have an
individual existence of his own, but to borrow that of others at will,
and to pass successively through ‘every variety of untried being,’—to be
now _Hamlet_, now _Othello_, now _Lear_, now _Falstaff_, now _Ariel_. In
the mingled interests and feelings belonging to this wide range of
imaginary reality, in the tumult and rapid transitions of this waking
dream, the author could not easily find time to think of himself, nor
wish to embody that personal identity in idle reputation after death, of
which he was so little tenacious while living. To feel a strong desire
that others should think highly of us, it is, in general, necessary that
we should think highly of ourselves. There is something of egotism, and
even pedantry, in this sentiment; and there is no author who was so
little tinctured with these as Shakspeare. The passion for fame, like
other passions, requires an exclusive and exaggerated admiration of its
object, and attaches more consequence to literary attainments and
pursuits than they really possess. Shakspeare had looked too much abroad
into the world, and his views of things were of too universal and
comprehensive a cast, not to have taught him to estimate the importance
of posthumous fame according to its true value and relative proportions.
Though he might have some conception of his future fame, he could not
but feel the contrast between that and his actual situation; and,
indeed, he complains bitterly of the latter in one of his sonnets.[34]
He would perhaps think, that, to be the idol of posterity, when we are
no more, was hardly a full compensation for being the object of the
glance and scorn of fools while we are living; and that, in truth, this
universal fame so much vaunted, was a vague phantom of blind enthusiasm;
for what is the amount even of Shakspeare’s fame? That, in that very
country which boasts his genius and his birth, perhaps not one person in
ten has ever heard of his name, or read a syllable of his writings!
We will add another observation in connection with this subject, which
is, that men of the greatest genius produce their works with too much
facility (and, as it were, spontaneously) to require the love of fame as
a stimulus to their exertions, or to make them seem deserving of the
admiration of mankind as their reward. It is, indeed, one characteristic
mark of the highest class of excellence to appear to come naturally from
the mind of the author, without consciousness or effort. The work seems
like inspiration—to be the gift of some God or of the Muse. But it is
the sense of difficulty which enhances the admiration of power, both in
ourselves and in others. Hence it is that there is nothing so remote
from vanity as true genius. It is almost as natural for those who are
endowed with the highest powers of the human mind to produce the
miracles of art, as for other men to breathe or move. Correggio, who is
said to have produced some of his divinest works almost without having
seen a picture, probably did not know that he had done anything
extraordinary.
Z.
NO. 8.] ON HOGARTH’S MARRIAGE A-LA-MODE [JUNE 5, 1814.
The superiority of the pictures of Hogarth, which we have seen in the
late collection at the British Institution, to the common prints, is
confined chiefly to the _Marriage a-la-Mode_. We shall attempt to
illustrate a few of their most striking excellencies, more particularly
with reference to the expression of character. Their merits are indeed
so prominent, and have been so often discussed, that it may be thought
difficult to point out any new beauties; but they contain so much truth
of nature, they present the objects to the eye under so many aspects and
bearings, admit of so many constructions, and are so pregnant with
meaning, that the subject is in a manner inexhaustible.
Boccacio, the most refined and sentimental of all the novel-writers, has
been stigmatised as a mere inventor of licentious tales, because readers
in general have only seized on those things in his works which were
suited to their own taste, and have reflected their own grossness back
upon the writer. So it has happened that the majority of critics having
been most struck with the strong and decided expression in Hogarth, the
extreme delicacy and subtle gradations of character in his pictures have
almost entirely escaped them. In the first picture of the _Marriage
a-la-Mode_, the three figures of the young Nobleman, his intended Bride,
and her inamorato, the Lawyer, shew how much Hogarth excelled in the
power of giving soft and effeminate expression. They have, however, been
less noticed than the other figures, which tell a plainer story and
convey a more palpable moral. Nothing can be more finely managed than
the differences of character in these delicate personages. The Beau sits
smiling at the looking-glass, with a reflected simper of
self-admiration, and a languishing inclination of the head, while the
rest of his body is perked up on his high heels with a certain air of
tiptoe elevation. He is the Narcissus of the reign of George II., whose
powdered peruke, ruffles, gold lace, and patches, divide his self-love
unequally with his own person,—the true Sir Plume of his day;
‘Of amber-lidded snuff-box justly vain,
And the nice conduct of a clouded cane.’
There is the same felicity in the figure and attitude of the Bride,
courted by the Lawyer. There is the utmost flexibility, and yielding
softness in her whole person, a listless languor and tremulous suspense
in the expression of her face. It is the precise look and air which Pope
has given to his favourite Belinda, just at the moment of the _Rape of
the Lock_. The heightened glow, the forward intelligence, and loosened
soul of love in the same face, in the assignation scene before the
masquerade, form a fine and instructive contrast to the delicacy,
timidity, and coy reluctance expressed in the first. The Lawyer in both
pictures is much the same—perhaps too much so—though even this unmoved,
unaltered appearance may be designed as characteristic. In both cases he
has ‘a person, and a smooth dispose, framed to make woman false.’ He is
full of that easy good-humour and easy good opinion of himself, with
which the sex are delighted. There is not a sharp angle in his face to
obstruct his success, or give a hint of doubt or difficulty. His whole
aspect is round and rosy, lively and unmeaning, happy without the least
expense of thought, careless and inviting; and conveys a perfect idea of
the uninterrupted glide and pleasing murmur of the soft periods that
flow from his tongue.
The expression of the Bride in the Morning Scene is the most highly
seasoned, and at the same time the most vulgar in the series. The
figure, face, and attitude of the Husband are inimitable. Hogarth has
with great skill contrasted the pale countenance of the husband with the
yellow whitish colour of the marble chimney-piece behind him, in such a
manner as to preserve the fleshy tone of the former. The airy splendour
of the view of the inner room in this picture is probably not exceeded
by any of the productions of the Flemish School.
The Young Girl in the third picture, who is represented as the victim of
fashionable profligacy, is unquestionably one of the artist’s
_chef-d’œuvres_. The exquisite delicacy of the painting is only
surpassed by the felicity and subtlety of the conception. Nothing can be
more striking than the contrast between the extreme softness of her
person, and the hardened indifference of her character. The vacant
stillness, the docility to vice, the premature suppression of youthful
sensibility, the doll-like mechanism of the whole figure, which seems to
have no other feeling but a sickly sense of pain,—shew the deepest
insight into human nature, and into the effects of those refinements in
depravity by which it has been good-naturedly asserted, that ‘vice loses
half its evil in losing all its grossness.’ The story of this picture is
in some parts very obscure and enigmatical. It is certain that the
Nobleman is not looking straightforward to the Quack, whom he seems to
have been threatening with his cane, but that his eyes are turned up
with an ironical leer of triumph to the Procuress. The commanding
attitude and size of this woman, the swelling circumference of her
dress, spread out like a turkey-cock’s feathers,—the fierce,
ungovernable, inveterate malignity of her countenance, which hardly
needs the comment of the clasp-knife to explain her purpose, are all
admirable in themselves, and still more so, as they are opposed to the
mute insensibility, the elegant negligence of the dress, and the
childish figure of the girl, who is supposed to be her _protégée_. As
for the Quack, there can be no doubt entertained about him. His face
seems as if it were composed of salve, and his features exhibit all the
chaos and confusion of the most gross, ignorant, and impudent
empiricism.
The gradations of ridiculous affectation in the Music Scene are finely
imagined and preserved. The preposterous, overstrained admiration of the
Lady of Quality, the sentimental, insipid, patient delight of the Man
with his hair in papers and sipping his tea,—the pert, smirking,
conceited, half-distorted approbation of the figure next to him, the
transition to the total insensibility of the round face in profile, and
then to the wonder of the Negro-boy at the rapture of his Mistress, form
a perfect whole. The sanguine complexion and flame-coloured hair of the
female Virtuoso throw an additional light on the character. This is lost
in the print. The continuing the red colour of the hair into the back of
the chair has been pointed out as one of those instances of alliteration
in colouring, of which these pictures are everywhere full. The gross
bloated appearance of the Italian Singer is well relieved by the hard
features of the instrumental performer behind him, which might be carved
of wood. The Negro-boy, holding the chocolate, both in expression,
colour, and execution, is a master-piece. The gay, lively derision of
the other Negro boy, playing with the Actæon, is an ingenious contrast
to the profound amazement of the first. Some account has already been
given of the two lovers in this picture. It is curious to observe the
infinite activity of mind which the artist displays on every occasion.
An instance occurs in the present picture. He has so contrived the
papers in the hair of the Bride, as to make them look almost like a
wreath of half-blown flowers, while those which he has placed on the
head of the musical Amateur very much resemble a _cheveux-de-frise_ of
horns, which adorn and fortify the lack-lustre expression and mild
resignation of the face beneath.
The Night Scene is inferior to the rest of the series. The attitude of
the Husband, who is just killed, is one in which it would be impossible
for him to stand or even to fall. It resembles the loose pasteboard
figures they make for children. The characters in the last picture, in
which the Wife dies, are all masterly. We would particularly refer to
the captious, petulant self-sufficiency of the Apothecary, whose face
and figure are constructed on exact physiognomical principles, and to
the fine example of passive obedience and non-resistance in the Servant,
whom he is taking to task, and whose coat of green and yellow livery is
as long and melancholy as his face. The disconsolate look, the haggard
eyes, the open mouth, the comb sticking in the hair, the broken, gapped
teeth, which, as it were, hitch in an answer—every thing about him
denotes the utmost perplexity and dismay. The harmony and gradations of
colour in this picture are uniformly preserved with the greatest nicety,
and are well worthy the attention of the artist.
NO. 9.] THE SUBJECT CONTINUED [JUNE 19, 1814.
It has been observed, that Hogarth’s pictures are exceedingly unlike any
other representations of the same kind of subjects—that they form a
class, and have a character, peculiar to themselves. It may be worth
while to consider in what this general distinction consists.
In the first place, they are, in the strictest sense, _Historical_
pictures; and if what Fielding says be true, that his novel of _Tom
Jones_ ought to be regarded as an epic prose-poem, because it contained
a regular developement of fable, manners, character, and passion, the
compositions of Hogarth will, in like manner, be found to have a higher
claim to the title of Epic Pictures than many which have of late
arrogated that denomination to themselves. When we say that Hogarth
treated his subjects historically, we mean that his works represent the
manners and humours of mankind in action, and their characters by varied
expression. Every thing in his pictures has life and motion in it. Not
only does the business of the scene never stand still, but every feature
and muscle is put into full play; the exact feeling of the moment is
brought out, and carried to its utmost height, and then instantly seized
and stamped on the canvass for ever. The expression is always taken _en
passant_, in a state of progress or change, and, as it were, at the
salient point. Besides the excellence of each individual face, the
reflection of the expression from face to face, the contrast and
struggle of particular motives and feelings in the different actors in
the scene, as of anger, contempt, laughter, compassion, are conveyed in
the happiest and most lively manner. His figures are not like the
back-ground on which they are painted: even the pictures on the wall
have a peculiar look of their own. Again, with the rapidity, variety,
and scope of history, Hogarth’s heads have all the reality and
correctness of portraits. He gives the extremes of character and
expression, but he gives them with perfect truth and accuracy. This is,
in fact, what distinguishes his compositions from all others of the same
kind, that they are equally remote from caricature, and from mere still
life. It of course happens in subjects from common life, that the
painter can procure real models, and he can get them to sit as long as
he pleases. Hence, in general, those attitudes and expressions have been
chosen which could be assumed the longest; and in imitating which, the
artist, by taking pains and time, might produce almost as complete
fac-similes as he could of a flower or a flower-pot, of a damask
curtain, or a china vase. The copy was as perfect and as uninteresting
in the one case as in the other. On the contrary, subjects of drollery
and ridicule affording frequent examples of strange deformity and
peculiarity of features, these have been eagerly seized by another class
of artists, who, without subjecting themselves to the laborious drudgery
of the Dutch School and their imitators, have produced our popular
caricatures, by rudely copying or exaggerating the casual irregularities
of the human countenance. Hogarth has equally avoided the faults of both
these styles, the insipid tameness of the one, and the gross vulgarity
of the other, so as to give to the productions of his pencil equal
solidity and effect. For his faces go to the very verge of caricature,
and yet never (we believe in any single instance) go beyond it: they
take the very widest latitude, and yet we always see the links which
bind them to nature: they bear all the marks and carry all the
conviction of reality with them, as if we had seen the actual faces for
the first time, from the precision, consistency, and good sense, with
which the whole and every part is made out. They exhibit the most
uncommon features with the most uncommon expressions, but which are yet
as familiar and intelligible as possible, because with all the boldness
they have all the truth of nature. Hogarth has left behind him as many
of these memorable faces, in their memorable moments, as perhaps most of
us remember in the course of our lives, and has thus doubled the
quantity of our observation.
We have, in a former paper, attempted to point out the fund of
observation, physical and moral, contained in one set of these pictures,
the _Marriage a-la-Mode_. The rest would furnish as many topics to
descant upon, were the patience of the reader as inexhaustible as the
painter’s invention. But as this is not the case, we shall content
ourselves with barely referring to some of those figures in the other
pictures, which appear the most striking, and which we see not only
while we are looking at them, but which we have before us at all other
times. For instance, who having seen can easily forget that exquisite
frost-piece of religion and morality, the antiquated Prude in the
Morning Scene; or that striking commentary on the _good old times_, the
little wretched appendage of a Foot-boy, who crawls half famished and
half frozen behind her? The French Man and Woman in the Noon are the
perfection of flighty affectation and studied grimace; the amiable
_fraternisation_ of the two old Women saluting each other is not enough
to be admired; and in the little Master, in the same national group, we
see the early promise and personification of that eternal principle of
wondrous self-complacency, proof against all circumstances, and which
makes the French the only people who are vain even of being cuckolded
and being conquered! Or shall we prefer to this the outrageous distress
and unmitigated terrors of the Boy, who has dropped his dish of meat,
and who seems red all over with shame and vexation, and bursting with
the noise he makes? Or what can be better than the good housewifery of
the Girl underneath, who is devouring the lucky fragments, or than the
plump, ripe, florid, luscious look of the Servant-wench, embraced by a
greasy rascal of an Othello, with her pye-dish tottering like her
virtue, and with the most precious part of its contents running over?
Just—no, not quite—as good is the joke of the Woman over-head, who,
having quarrelled with her husband, is throwing their Sunday’s dinner
out of the window, to complete this chapter of accidents of
baked-dishes. The Husband in the Evening Scene is certainly as meek as
any recorded in history; but we cannot say that we admire this picture,
or the Night Scene after it. But then, in the Taste in High Life, there
is that inimitable pair, differing only in sex, congratulating and
delighting one another by ‘all the mutually reflected charities’ of
folly and affectation, with the young Lady coloured like a rose,
dandling her little, black, pug-faced, white-teethed, chuckling
favourite, and with the portrait of Mons. Des Noyers in the back-ground,
dancing in a grand ballet, surrounded by butterflies. And again, in the
Election Dinner, is the immortal Cobler, surrounded by his Peers, who,
‘frequent and full,’—
‘In _loud_ recess and _brawling_ conclave sit’:—
the Jew in the second picture, a very Jew in grain—innumerable fine
sketches of heads in the Polling for Votes, of which the Nobleman
overlooking the caricaturist is the best; and then the irresistible
tumultuous display of broad humour in the Chairing the Member, which is,
perhaps, of all Hogarth’s pictures, the most full of laughable incidents
and situations—the yellow, rusty-faced thresher, with his swinging
flail, breaking the head of one of the Chairmen, and his redoubted
antagonist, the Sailor, with his oak-stick, and stumping wooden leg, a
supplemental cudgel—the persevering ecstasy of the hobbling Blind
Fiddler, who, in the fray, appears to have been trod upon by the
artificial excrescence of the honest Tar—Monsieur, the Monkey, with
piteous aspect, speculating the impending disaster of the triumphant
candidate, and his brother Bruin, appropriating the paunch—the
precipitous flight of the Pigs, souse over head into the water, the fine
Lady fainting, with vermilion lips, and the two Chimney-sweepers,
satirical young rogues! We had almost forgot the Politician who is
burning a hole through his hat with a candle in reading the newspaper;
and the Chickens, in the _March to Finchley_, wandering in search of
their lost dam, who is found in the pocket of the Serjeant. Of the
pictures in the _Rake’s Progress_ in this collection, we shall not here
say any thing, because we think them, on the whole, inferior to the
prints, and because they have already been criticised by a writer, to
whom we could add nothing, in a paper which ought to be read by every
lover of Hogarth and of English genius.[35]
W. H.
NO. 10.] ON MILTON’S LYCIDAS [AUG. 6, 1815.
‘At last he rose, and twitch’d his mantle blue:
To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.’
Of all Milton’s smaller poems, _Lycidas_ is the greatest favourite with
us. We cannot agree to the charge which Dr. Johnson has brought against
it, of pedantry and want of feeling. It is the fine emanation of
classical sentiment in a youthful scholar—‘most musical, most
melancholy.’ A certain tender gloom overspreads it, a wayward
abstraction, a forgetfulness of his subject in the serious reflections
that arise out of it. The gusts of passion come and go like the sounds
of music borne on the wind. The loss of the friend whose death he
laments seems to have recalled, with double force, the reality of those
speculations which they had indulged together; we are transported to
classic ground, and a mysterious strain steals responsive on the ear
while we listen to the poet,
‘With eager thought warbling his Doric lay.’
We shall proceed to give a few passages at length in support of our
opinion. The first we shall quote is as remarkable for the truth and
sweetness of the natural descriptions as for the characteristic elegance
of the allusions:
‘Together both, ere the high lawns appear’d
Under the opening eye-lids of the morn,
We drove a-field; and both together heard
What time the gray-fly winds her sultry horn,
Battening our flocks with the fresh dews of night,
Oft till the star that rose at evening bright
Towards Heaven’s descent had sloped his westering wheel.
Meanwhile the rural ditties were not mute,
Temper’d to the oaten flute:
Rough satyrs danced, and fauns with cloven heel
From the glad sound would not be absent long,
And old Dametas loved to hear our song.
But oh the heavy change, now thou art gone,
Now thou art gone, and never must return!
Thee, shepherd, thee the woods and desert caves
With wild thyme and the gadding vine o’ergrown,
And all their echoes mourn.
The willows and the hazel copses green
Shall now no more be seen
Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays.
As killing as the canker to the rose,
Or taint-worm to the weanling herds that graze,
Or frost to flowers that their gay wardrobe wear,
When first the white-thorn blows;
Such, Lycidas, thy loss to shepherd’s ear!’
After the fine apostrophe on Fame which Phœbus is invoked to utter, the
poet proceeds:
‘Oh fountain Arethuse, and thou honour’d flood,
Smooth-sliding Mincius, crown’d with vocal reeds,
That strain I heard was of a higher mood;
But now my oat proceeds,
And listens to the herald of the sea
That came in Neptune’s plea.
He ask’d the waves, and ask’d the felon winds,
What hard mishap hath doom’d this gentle swain?
And question’d every gust of rugged winds
That blows from off each beaked promontory.
They knew not of his story:
And sage Hippotades their answer brings,
That not a blast was from his dungeon stray’d,
The air was calm, and on the level brine
Sleek Panope with all her sisters play’d.’
If this is art, it is perfect art; nor do we wish for anything better.
The measure of the verse, the very sound of the names, would almost
produce the effect here described. To ask the poet not to make use of
such allusions as these, is to ask the painter not to dip in the colours
of the rainbow, if he could. In fact, it is the common cant of criticism
to consider every allusion to the classics, and particularly in a mind
like Milton’s, as pedantry and affectation. Habit is a second nature;
and, in this sense, the pedantry (if it is to be called so) of the
scholastic enthusiast, who is constantly referring to images of which
his mind is full, is as graceful as it is natural. It is not affectation
in him to recur to ideas and modes of expression, with which he has the
strongest associations, and in which he takes the greatest delight.
Milton was as conversant with the world of genius before him as with the
world of nature about him; the fables of the ancient mythology were as
familiar to him as his dreams. To be a pedant, is to see neither the
beauties of nature nor of art. Milton saw both; and he made use of the
one only to adorn and give new interest to the other. He was a
passionate admirer of nature; and, in a single couplet of his,
describing the moon,—
‘Like one that had been led astray
Through the heaven’s wide pathless way,’—
there is more intense observation, and intense feeling of nature (as if
he had gazed himself blind in looking at her), than in twenty volumes of
descriptive poetry. But he added to his own observation of nature the
splendid fictions of ancient genius, enshrined her in the mysteries of
ancient religion, and celebrated her with the pomp of ancient names.
‘Next Camus, reverend sire, went footing slow,
His mantle hairy and his bonnet sedge,
Inwrought with figures dim, and on the edge
Like to that sanguine flower inscrib’d with woe.
Oh! who hath reft (quoth he) my dearest pledge?
Last came, and last did go,
The pilot of the Galilean lake.’
There is a wonderful correspondence in the rhythm of these lines to the
idea which they convey. This passage, which alludes to the clerical
character of _Lycidas_, has been found fault with, as combining the
truths of the Christian religion with the fictions of the heathen
mythology. We conceive there is very little foundation for this
objection, either in reason or good taste. We will not go so far as to
defend Camoens, who, in his _Lusiad_, makes Jupiter send Mercury with a
dream to propagate the Catholic religion; nor do we know that it is
generally proper to introduce the two things in the same poem, though we
see no objection to it here; but of this we are quite sure, that there
is no inconsistency or natural repugnance between this poetical and
religious faith in the same mind. To the understanding, the belief of
the one is incompatible with that of the other; but in the imagination,
they not only may, but do constantly co-exist. We will venture to go
farther, and maintain, that every classical scholar, however orthodox a
Christian he may be, is an honest Heathen at heart. This requires
explanation. Whoever, then, attaches a reality to any idea beyond the
mere name, has, to a certain extent, (though not an abstract), an
habitual and practical belief in it. Now, to any one familiar with the
names of the personages of the Heathen mythology, they convey a positive
identity beyond the mere name. We refer them to something out of
ourselves. It is only by an effort of abstraction that we divest
ourselves of the idea of their reality; all our involuntary prejudices
are on their side. This is enough for the poet. They impose on the
imagination by all the attractions of beauty and grandeur. They come
down to us in sculpture and in song. We have the same associations with
them, as if they had really been; for the belief of the fiction in
ancient times has produced all the same effects as the reality could
have done. It was a reality to the minds of the ancient Greeks and
Romans, and through them it is reflected to us. And, as we shape towers,
and men, and armed steeds, out of the broken clouds that glitter in the
distant horizon, so, throned above the ruins of the ancient world,
Jupiter still nods sublime on the top of blue Olympus, Hercules leans
upon his club, Apollo has not laid aside his bow, nor Neptune his
trident; the sea-gods ride upon the sounding waves, the long procession
of heroes and demi-gods passes in endless review before us, and still we
hear
——‘The Muses in a ring
Aye round about Jove’s altar sing:
. . . . .
Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea,
And hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.’
If all these mighty fictions had really existed, they could have done no
more for us! We shall only give one other passage from _Lycidas_; but we
flatter ourselves that it will be a treat to our readers, if they are
not already familiar with it. It is the passage which contains that
exquisite description of the flowers:
‘Return, Alpheus; the dread voice is past
That shrunk thy streams; return, Sicilian Muse,
And call the vales, and bid them hither cast
Their bells, and flow’rets of a thousand hues.
Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use
Of shades and wanton winds and gushing brooks,
On whose fresh lap the swart star sparely looks,
Throw hither all your quaint enamell’d eyes,
That on the green turf suck the honied showers,
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers;
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,
The white pink, and the pansy freak’d with jet,
The glowing violet,
The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine,
With cowslips wan, that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears;
Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,
And daffadillies fill their cups with tears,
To strew the laureat hearse where Lycid lies.
For so to interpose a little ease
Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.
Ay me! Whilst thee the shores and sounding seas
Waft far away, where’er thy bones are hurl’d,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit’st the bottom of the monstrous world,
Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied,
Sleep’st by the fable of Bellerus old,
Where the great vision of the guarded mount
Looks towards Namancos and Bayona’s hold,
Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth,
And, O ye Dolphins, waft the hapless youth.’
Dr. Johnson is very much offended at the introduction of these Dolphins;
and indeed, if he had had to guide them through the waves, he would have
made much the same figure as his old friend Dr. Burney does, swimming in
the _Thames_ with his wig on, with the water-nymphs, in the picture by
Barry at the Adelphi.
There is a description of flowers in the _Winter’s Tale_, which we shall
give as a parallel to Milton’s. We shall leave it to the reader to
decide which is the finest; for we dare not give the preference.
_Perdita_ says,
——‘Here’s flowers for you,
Hot lavender, mints, savoury, marjoram,
The marygold, that goes to bed with the sun,
And with him rises weeping; these are flowers
Of middle summer, and I think, they’re given
To men of middle age. Y’are welcome.
‘_Camillo._ I should leave grazing, were I of your flock,
And only live by gazing.
‘_Perdita._ Out, alas!
You’d be so lean, that blasts of January
Would blow you through and through. Now, my fairest friend,
I would I had some flowers o’ th’ spring, that might
Become your time of day: O Proserpina,
For the flowers now, that, frighted, you let fall
From Dis’s waggon! Daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes,
Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses,
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phœbus in his strength, a malady
Most incident to maids; bold oxlips, and
The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds,
The flower de lis being one. O, these I lack
To make you garlands of, and my sweet friend,
To strew him o’er and o’er.’
Dr. Johnson’s general remark, that Milton’s genius had not room to show
itself in his smaller pieces, is not well-founded. Not to mention
_Lycidas_, the _Allegro_, and _Penseroso_, it proceeds on a false
estimate of the merits of his great work, which is not more
distinguished by strength and sublimity than by tenderness and beauty.
The last were as essential qualities of Milton’s mind as the first. The
battle of the angels, which has been commonly considered as the best
part of the _Paradise Lost_, is the worst.
W. H.
NO. 11.] ON MILTON’S VERSIFICATION [AUG. 20, 1815.
Milton’s works are a perpetual invocation to the Muses; a hymn to Fame.
His religious zeal infused its character into his imagination; and he
devotes himself with the same sense of duty to the cultivation of his
genius, as he did to the exercise of virtue, or the good of his country.
He does not write from casual impulse, but after a severe examination of
his own strength, and with a determination to leave nothing undone which
it is in his power to do. He always labours, and he almost always
succeeds. He strives to say the finest things in the world, and he does
say them. He adorns and dignifies his subject to the utmost. He
surrounds it with all the possible associations of beauty or grandeur,
whether moral, or physical, or intellectual. He refines on his
descriptions of beauty, till the sense almost aches at them, and raises
his images of terror to a gigantic elevation, that ‘makes Ossa like a
wart.’ He has a high standard, with which he is constantly comparing
himself, and nothing short of which can satisfy him:
——‘Sad task, yet argument
Not less but more heroic than the wrath
Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued,
If answerable stile I can obtain.
——Unless an age too late, or cold
Climate, or years, damp my intended wing.’
Milton has borrowed more than any other writer; yet he is perfectly
distinct from every other writer. The power of his mind is stamped on
every line. He is a writer of centos, and yet in originality only
inferior to Homer. The quantity of art shews the strength of his genius;
so much art would have overloaded any other writer. Milton’s learning
has all the effect of intuition. He describes objects of which he had
only read in books, with the vividness of actual observation. His
imagination has the force of nature. He makes words tell as pictures:
‘Him followed Rimmon, whose delightful seat
Was fair Damascus, on the fertile banks
Of Abbana and Pharphar, _lucid_ streams.’
And again:
‘As when a vulture on Imaus bred,
Whose snowy ridge the roving Tartar bounds,
Dislodging from a region scarce of prey
To gorge the flesh of lambs or yearling kids
On hills where flocks are fed, _flies towards the springs
Of Ganges or Hydaspes, Indian streams;
But in his way lights on the barren plains
Of Sericana, where Chineses drive
With sails and wind their cany waggons light_.’
Such passages may be considered as demonstrations of history. Instances
might be multiplied without end. There is also a decided tone in his
descriptions, an eloquent dogmatism, as if the poet spoke from thorough
conviction, which Milton probably derived from his spirit of
partisanship, or else his spirit of partisanship from the natural
firmness and vehemence of his mind. In this Milton resembles Dante, (the
only one of the moderns with whom he has anything in common), and it is
remarkable that Dante, as well as Milton, was a political partisan. That
approximation to the severity of impassioned prose which has been made
an objection to Milton’s poetry, is one of its chief excellencies. It
has been suggested, that the vividness with which he describes visible
objects, might be owing to their having acquired a greater strength in
his mind after the privation of sight; but we find the same palpableness
and solidity in the descriptions which occur in his early poems. There
is, indeed, the same depth of impression in his descriptions of the
objects of the other senses. Milton had as much of what is meant by
_gusto_ as any poet. He forms the most intense conceptions of things,
and then embodies them by a single stroke of his pen. Force of style is
perhaps his first excellence. Hence he stimulates us most in the
reading, and less afterwards.
It has been said that Milton’s ideas were musical rather than
picturesque, but this observation is not true, in the sense in which it
was meant. The ear, indeed, predominates over the eye, because it is
more immediately affected, and because the language of music blends more
immediately with, and forms a more natural accompaniment to, the
variable and indefinite associations of ideas conveyed by words. But
where the associations of the imagination are not the principal thing,
the individual object is given by Milton with equal force and beauty.
The strongest and best proof of this, as a characteristic power of his
mind, is, that the persons of Adam and Eve, of Satan, etc., are always
accompanied, in our imagination, with the grandeur of the naked figure;
they convey to us the ideas of sculpture. As an instance, take the
following:
——‘He soon
Saw within ken a glorious Angel stand,
The same whom John saw also in the sun:
His back was turned, but not his brightness hid;
Of beaming sunny rays a golden tiar
Circled his head, nor less his locks behind
Illustrious on his shoulders fledged with wings
Lay waving round; on some great charge employ’d
He seem’d, or fix’d in cogitation deep.
Glad was the spirit impure, as now in hope
To find who might direct his wand’ring flight
To Paradise, the happy seat of man,
His journey’s end, and our beginning woe.
But first he casts to change his proper shape,
Which else might work him danger or delay:
And now a stripling cherub he appears,
Not of the prime, yet such as in his face
Youth smiled celestial, and to every limb
Suitable grace diffus’d, so well he feign’d:
Under a coronet his flowing hair
In curls on either cheek play’d; wings he wore
Of many a colour’d plume sprinkled with gold,
His habit fit for speed succinct, and held
Before his decent steps a silver wand.’
The figures introduced here have all the elegance and precision of a
Greek statue.
Milton’s blank verse is the only blank verse in the language (except
Shakspeare’s) which is readable. Dr. Johnson, who had modelled his ideas
of versification on the regular sing-song of Pope, condemns the
_Paradise Lost_ as harsh and unequal. We shall not pretend to say that
this is not sometimes the case; for where a degree of excellence beyond
the mechanical rules of art is attempted the poet must sometimes fail.
But we imagine that there are more perfect examples in Milton of musical
expression, or of an adaptation of the sound and movement of the verse
to the meaning of the passage, than in all our other writers, whether of
rhyme or blank verse, put together, (with the exception already
mentioned). Spenser is the most harmonious of our poets, and Dryden is
the most sounding and varied of our rhymists. But in neither is there
anything like the same ear for music, the same power of approximating
the varieties of poetical to those of musical rhythm, as there is in our
great epic poet. The sound of his lines is moulded into the expression
of the sentiment, almost of the very image. They rise or fall, pause or
hurry rapidly on, with exquisite art, but without the least trick or
affectation, as the occasion seems to require.
The following are some of the finest instances:
——‘His hand was known
In Heaven by many a tower’d structure high;
Nor was his name unheard or unador’d
In ancient Greece: and in the Ausonian land
Men called him Mulciber: and how he fell
From Heav’n, they fabled, thrown by angry Jove
Sheer o’er the crystal battlements; from morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,
A summer’s day; and with the setting sun
Dropt from the zenith like a falling star
On Lemnos, the Ægean isle: this they relate,
Erring.’
——‘But chief the spacious hall
Thick swarm’d, both on the ground and in the air,
Brush’d with the hiss of rustling wings. As bees
In spring time, when the sun with Taurus rides,
Pour forth their populous youth about the hive
In clusters; they among fresh dews and flow’rs
Fly to and fro: or on the smoothed plank,
The suburb of their straw-built citadel,
New rubb’d with balm, expatiate and confer
Their state affairs. So thick the airy crowd
Swarm’d and were straiten’d; till the signal giv’n,
Behold a wonder! They but now who seem’d
In bigness to surpass earth’s giant sons,
Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room
Throng numberless, like that Pygmean race
Beyond the Indian mount, or fairy elves,
Whose midnight revels by a forest side
Or fountain, some belated peasant sees,
Or dreams he sees, while over-head the moon
Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth
Wheels her pale course: they on their mirth and dance
Intent, with jocund music charm his ear;
At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds.’
We can only give another instance; though we have some difficulty in
leaving off. ‘What a pity,’ said an ingenious person of our
acquaintance, ‘that Milton had not the pleasure of reading _Paradise
Lost_!’—
‘Round he surveys (and well might, where he stood
So high above the circling canopy
Of night’s extended shade) from eastern point
Of Libra to the fleecy star that bears
Andromeda far off Atlantic seas
Beyond th’ horizon: then from pole to pole
He views in breadth, and without longer pause
Down right into the world’s first region throws
His flight precipitant, and winds with ease
Through the pure marble air his oblique way
Amongst innumerable stars that shone
Stars distant, but nigh hand seem’d other worlds;
Or other worlds they seem’d or happy isles,’ etc.
The verse, in this exquisitely modulated passage, floats up and down as
if it had itself wings. Milton has himself given us the theory of his
versification.
‘In many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out.’
Dr. Johnson and Pope would have converted his vaulting Pegasus into a
rocking-horse. Read any other blank verse but Milton’s,—Thomson’s,
Young’s, Cowper’s, Wordsworth’s,—and it will be found, from the want of
the same insight into ‘the hidden soul of harmony,’ to be mere lumbering
prose.
W. H.
_To the President of The Round Table._
SIR,—It is somewhat remarkable, that in _Pope’s Essay on Criticism_
(not a very long poem) there are no less than half a score couplets
rhyming to the word _sense_.
‘But of the two, less dangerous is the offence,
To tire our patience than mislead our sense.’—_lines_ 3, 4.
‘In search of wit these lose their common sense,
And then turn critics in their own defence.’—_l._ 28, 29.
‘Pride, where wit fails, steps in to our defence,
And fills up all the mighty void of sense.’—_l._ 209, 10.
‘Some by old words to fame have made pretence,
Ancients in phrase, mere moderns in their sense.’—_l._ 324, 5.
‘’Tis not enough no harshness gives offence;
The sound must seem an echo to the sense.’—_l._ 364, 5.
‘At every trifle scorn to take offence;
That always shews great pride or little sense.’—_l._ 386, 7.
‘Be silent always, when you doubt your sense,
And speak, though sure, with seeming diffidence.’—_l._ 566, 7.
‘Be niggards of advice on no pretence,
For the worst avarice is that of sense.’—_l._ 578, 9.
‘Strain out the last dull dropping of their sense,
And rhyme with all the rage of impotence.’—_l._ 608, 9.
‘Horace still charms with graceful negligence,
And without method talks us into sense.’—_l._ 653, 4.
I am, Sir, your humble servant,
A SMALL CRITIC.
NO. 12.] ON MANNER [AUG. 27, 1815.
[SEP. 3, 1815.
It was the opinion of Lord Chesterfield, that _manner_ is of more
importance than _matter_. This opinion seems at least to be warranted by
the practice of the world; nor do we think it so entirely without
foundation as some persons of more solid than showy pretensions would
make us believe. In the remarks which we are going to make, we can
scarcely hope to have any party very warmly on our side; for the most
superficial coxcomb would be thought to owe his success to sterling
merit.
What any person says or does is one thing; the mode in which he says or
does it is another. The last of these is what we understand by _manner_.
In other words, manner is the involuntary or incidental expression given
to our thoughts and sentiments by looks, tones, and gestures. Now, we
are inclined in many cases to prefer this latter mode of judging of what
passes in the mind to more positive and formal proof, were it for no
other reason than that it is involuntary. ‘Look,’ says Lord
Chesterfield, ‘in the face of the person to whom you are speaking, if
you wish to know his real sentiments; for he can command his words more
easily than his countenance.’ We may perform certain actions from
design, or repeat certain professions by rote: the manner of doing
either will in general be the best test of our sincerity. The mode of
conferring a favour is often thought of more value than the favour
itself. The actual obligation may spring from a variety of questionable
motives, vanity, affectation, or interest: the cordiality with which the
person from whom you have received it asks you how you do, or shakes you
by the hand, does not admit of misinterpretation. The manner of doing
any thing, is that which marks the degree and force of our internal
impressions; it emanates most directly from our immediate or habitual
feelings; it is that which stamps its life and character on any action;
the rest may be performed by an automaton. What is it that makes the
difference between the best and the worst actor, but the manner of going
through the same part? The one has a perfect idea of the degree and
force with which certain feelings operate in nature, and the other has
no idea at all of the workings of passion. There would be no difference
between the worst actor in the world and the best, placed in real
circumstances, and under the influence of real passion. A writer may
express the thoughts he has borrowed from another, but not with the same
force, unless he enters into the true spirit of them. Otherwise he will
resemble a person reading what he does not understand, whom you
immediately detect by his wrong emphasis. His illustrations will be
literally exact, but misplaced and awkward; he will not gradually warm
with his subject, nor feel the force of what he says, nor produce the
same effect on his readers. An author’s style is not less a criterion of
his understanding than his sentiments. The same story told by two
different persons shall, from the difference of the manner, either set
the table in a roar, or not relax a feature in the whole company. We
sometimes complain (perhaps rather unfairly) that particular persons
possess more vivacity than wit. But we ought to take into the account,
that their very vivacity arises from their enjoying the joke; and their
humouring a story by drollery of gesture or archness of look, shews only
that they are acquainted with the different ways in which the sense of
the ludicrous expresses itself. It is not the mere dry jest, but the
relish which the person himself has of it, with which we sympathise. For
in all that tends to pleasure and excitement, the capacity for enjoyment
is the principal point. One of the most pleasant and least tiresome
persons of our acquaintance is a humourist, who has three or four quaint
witticisms and proverbial phrases, which he always repeats over and
over; but he does this with just the same vivacity and freshness as
ever, so that you feel the same amusement with less effort than if he
had startled his hearers with a succession of original conceits. Another
friend of ours, who never fails to give vent to one or two real
_jeu-d’esprits_ every time you meet him, from the pain with which he is
delivered of them, and the uneasiness he seems to suffer all the rest of
the time, makes a much more interesting than comfortable companion. If
you see a person in pain for himself, it naturally puts you in pain for
him. The art of pleasing consists in being pleased. To be amiable is to
be satisfied with one’s self and others. Good-humour is essential to
pleasantry. It is this circumstance, among others, that renders the wit
of Rabelais so much more delightful than that of Swift, who, with all
his satire, is ‘as dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage.’ In
society, good-temper and animal spirits are nearly everything. They are
of more importance than sallies of wit, or refinements of understanding.
They give a general tone of cheerfulness and satisfaction to the
company. The French have the advantage over us in external manners. They
breathe a lighter air, and have a brisker circulation of the blood. They
receive and communicate their impressions more freely. The interchange
of ideas costs them less. Their constitutional gaiety is a kind of
natural intoxication, which does not require any other stimulus. The
English are not so well off in this respect; and _Falstaff’s_
commendation on sack was evidently intended for his countrymen,—whose
‘learning is often a mere hoard of gold kept by a devil, till wine
commences it, and sets it in act and use.’[36] More undertakings fail
for want of spirit than for want of sense. Confidence gives a fool the
advantage over a wise man. In general, a strong passion for any object
will ensure success, for the desire of the end will point out the means.
We apprehend that people usually complain, without reason, of not
succeeding in various pursuits according to their deserts. Such persons,
we will grant, may have great merit in all other respects; but in that
in which they fail, it will almost invariably hold true, that they do
not deserve to succeed. For instance, a person who has spent his life in
thinking will acquire a habit of reflection; but he will neither become
a dancer nor a singer, rich nor beautiful. In like manner, if any one
complains of not succeeding in affairs of gallantry, we will venture to
say, it is because he is not gallant. He has mistaken his talent—that’s
all. If any person of exquisite sensibility makes love awkwardly, it is
because he does not feel it as he should. One of these disappointed
sentimentalists may very probably feel it upon reflection, may brood
over it till he has worked himself up to a pitch of frenzy, and write
his mistress the finest love-letters in the world, in her absence; but,
be assured, he does not feel an atom of this passion in her presence.
If, in paying her a compliment, he frowns with more than usual severity,
or, in presenting her with a bunch of flowers, seems as if he was going
to turn his back upon her, he can only expect to be laughed at for his
pains; nor can he plead an excess of feeling as an excuse for want of
common sense. She may say, ‘It is not with me you are in love, but with
the ridiculous chimeras of your own brain. You are thinking of _Sophia
Western_, or some other heroine, and not of me. Go and make love to your
romances.’
Lord Chesterfield’s character of the Duke of Marlborough is a good
illustration of his general theory. He says, ‘Of all the men I ever knew
in my life, (and I knew him extremely well), the late Duke of
Marlborough possessed the graces in the highest degree, not to say
engrossed them; for I will venture (contrary to the custom of profound
historians, who always assign deep causes for great events) to ascribe
the better half of the Duke of Marlborough’s greatness and riches to
those graces. He was eminently illiterate; wrote bad English, and spelt
it worse. He had no share of what is commonly called parts; that is, no
brightness, nothing shining in his genius. He had most undoubtedly an
excellent good plain understanding with sound judgment. But these alone
would probably have raised him but something higher than they found him,
which was page to King James II.‘s Queen. There the Graces protected and
promoted him; for while he was Ensign of the Guards, the Duchess of
Cleveland, then favourite mistress of Charles II., struck by these very
graces, gave him £5000, with which he immediately bought an annuity of
£500 a year, which was the foundation of his subsequent fortune. His
figure was beautiful, but his manner was irresistible by either man or
woman. It was by this engaging, graceful manner, that he was enabled,
during all his wars, to connect the various and jarring powers of the
grand alliance, and to carry them on to the main object of the war,
notwithstanding their private and separate views, jealousies, and
wrongheadedness. Whatever court he went to (and he was often obliged to
go himself to some resty and refractory ones), he as constantly
prevailed, and brought them into his measures.’[37]
Grace in women has more effect than beauty. We sometimes see a certain
fine self-possession, an habitual voluptuousness of character, which
reposes on its own sensations, and derives pleasure from all around it,
that is more irresistible than any other attraction. There is an air of
languid enjoyment in such persons, ‘in their eyes, in their arms, and
their hands, and their faces,’ which robs us of ourselves, and draws us
by a secret sympathy towards them. Their minds are a shrine where
pleasure reposes. Their smile diffuses a sensation like the breath of
spring. Petrarch’s description of Laura answers exactly to this
character, which is indeed the Italian character. Titian’s portraits are
full of it: they seem sustained by sentiment, or as if the persons whom
he painted sat to music. There is one in the Louvre (or there was) which
had the most of this expression we ever remember. It did not look
downward; ‘it looked forward, beyond this world.’ It was a look that
never passed away, but remained unalterable as the deep sentiment which
gave birth to it. It is the same constitutional character (together with
infinite activity of mind) which has enabled the greatest man in modern
history to bear his reverses of fortune with gay magnanimity, and to
submit to the loss of the empire of the world with as little
discomposure as if he had been playing a game at chess.
Grace has been defined as the outward expression of the inward harmony
of the soul. Foreigners have more of this than the English,—particularly
the people of the southern and eastern countries. Their motions appear
(like the expression of their countenances) to have a more immediate
communication with their feelings. The inhabitants of the northern
climates, compared with these children of the sun, are like hard
inanimate machines, with difficulty set in motion. A strolling gipsy
will offer to tell your fortune with a grace and an insinuation of
address that would be admired in a court.[38] The Hindoos that we see
about the streets are another example of this. They are a different race
of people from ourselves. They wander about in a luxurious dream. They
are like part of a glittering procession,—like revellers in some gay
carnival. Their life is a dance, a measure; they hardly seem to tread
the earth, but are borne along in some more genial element, and bask in
the radiance of brighter suns. We may understand this difference of
climate by recollecting the difference of our own sensations at
different times, in the fine glow of summer, or when we are pinched and
dried up by a northeast wind. Even the foolish Chinese, who go about
twirling their fans and their windmills, shew the same delight in them
as the children they collect around them. The people of the East make it
their business to sit and think and do nothing. They indulge in endless
reverie; for the incapacity of enjoyment does not impose on them the
necessity of action. There is a striking example of this passion for
castle-building in the story of the glass-man in the Arabian Nights.
After all, we would not be understood to say that manner is every thing.
Nor would we put Euclid or Sir Isaac Newton on a level with the first
_petit-maître_ we might happen to meet. We consider _Æsop’s Fables_ to
have been a greater work of genius than Fontaine’s translation of them;
though we doubt whether we should not prefer Fontaine, for his style
only, to Gay, who has shewn a great deal of original invention. The
elegant manners of people of fashion have been objected to us to shew
the frivolity of external accomplishments, and the facility with which
they are acquired. As to the last point, we demur. There is no class of
people who lead so laborious a life, or who take more pains to cultivate
their minds as well as persons, than people of fashion. A young lady of
quality, who has to devote so many hours a day to music, so many to
dancing, so many to drawing, so many to French, Italian, etc., certainly
does not pass her time in idleness; and these accomplishments are
afterwards called into action by every kind of external or mental
stimulus, by the excitements of pleasure, vanity, and interest. A
Ministerial or Opposition lord goes through more drudgery than half a
dozen literary hacks; nor does a reviewer by profession read half the
same number of productions as a modern fine lady is obliged to labour
through. We confess, however, we are not competent judges of the degree
of elegance or refinement implied in the general tone of fashionable
manners. The successful experiment made by _Peregrine Pickle_, in
introducing his strolling mistress into genteel company, does not
redound greatly to their credit. In point of elegance of external
appearance, we see no difference between women of fashion and women of a
different character, who dress in the same style.
T. T.
NO. 13.] ON THE TENDENCY OF SECTS [SEP. 10, 1815.
There is a natural tendency in sects to narrow the mind.
The extreme stress laid upon differences of minor importance, to the
neglect of more general truths and broader views of things, gives an
inverted bias to the understanding; and this bias is continually
increased by the eagerness of controversy, and captious hostility to the
prevailing system. A party-feeling of this kind once formed will
insensibly communicate itself to other topics; and will be too apt to
lead its votaries to a contempt for the opinions of others, a jealousy
of every difference of sentiment, and a disposition to arrogate all
sound principle as well as understanding to themselves, and those who
think with them. We can readily conceive how such persons, from fixing
too high a value on the practical pledge which they have given of the
independence and sincerity of their opinions, come at last to entertain
a suspicion of every one else as acting under the shackles of prejudice
or the mask of hypocrisy. All those who have not given in their
unqualified protest against received doctrines and established
authority, are supposed to labour under an acknowledged incapacity to
form a rational determination on any subject whatever. Any argument, not
having the presumption of singularity in its favour, is immediately set
aside as nugatory. There is, however, no prejudice so strong as that
which arises from a fancied exemption from all prejudice. For this last
implies not only the practical conviction that it is right, but the
theoretical assumption that it cannot be wrong. From considering all
objections as in this manner ‘null and void,’ the mind becomes so
thoroughly satisfied with its own conclusions, as to render any further
examination of them superfluous, and confounds its exclusive pretensions
to reason with the absolute possession of it. Those who, from their
professing to submit everything to the test of reason, have acquired the
name of rational Dissenters, have their weak sides as well as other
people: nor do we know of any class of disputants more disposed to take
their opinions for granted, than those who call themselves Freethinkers.
A long habit of objecting to every thing establishes a monopoly in the
right of contradiction; a prescriptive title to the privilege of
starting doubts and difficulties in the common belief, without being
liable to have our own called in question. There cannot be a more
infallible way to prove that we must be in the right, than by
maintaining roundly that every one else is in the wrong! Not only the
opposition of sects to one another, but their unanimity among
themselves, strengthens their confidence in their peculiar notions. They
feel themselves invulnerable behind the double fence of sympathy with
themselves, and antipathy to the rest of the world. Backed by the
zealous support of their followers, they become equally intolerant with
respect to the opinions of others, and tenacious of their own. They
fortify themselves within the narrow circle of their new-fangled
prejudices; the whole exercise of their right of private judgment is
after a time reduced to the repetition of a set of watchwords, which
have been adopted as the Shiboleth of the party; and their extremest
points of faith pass as current as the beadroll and legends of the
Catholics, or St. Athanasius’s Creed, and the Thirty-nine Articles. We
certainly are not going to recommend the establishment of articles of
faith, or implicit assent to them, as favourable to the progress of
philosophy; but neither has the spirit of opposition to them this
tendency, as far as relates to its immediate effects, however useful it
may be in its remote consequences. The spirit of controversy substitutes
the irritation of personal feeling for the independent exertion of the
understanding; and when this irritation ceases, the mind flags for want
of a sufficient stimulus to urge it on. It discharges all its energy
with its spleen. Besides, this perpetual cavilling with the opinions of
others, detecting petty flaws in their arguments, calling them to a
literal account for their absurdities, and squaring their doctrines by a
pragmatical standard of our own, is necessarily adverse to any great
enlargement of mind, or original freedom of thought.[39] The constant
attention bestowed on a few contested points, by at once flattering our
pride, our prejudices, and our indolence, supersedes more general
inquiries; and the bigoted controversialist, by dint of repeating a
certain formula of belief, shall not only convince himself that all
those who differ from him are undoubtedly wrong on that point, but that
their knowledge on all others must be comparatively slight and
superficial. We have known some very worthy and well-informed biblical
critics, who, by virtue of having discovered that one was not three, or
that the same body could not be in two places at once, would be disposed
to treat the whole Council of Trent, with Father Paul at their head,
with very little deference, and to consider Leo X. with all his court,
as no better than drivellers. Such persons will hint to you, as an
additional proof of his genius, that Milton was a non-conformist, and
will excuse the faults of Paradise Lost, as Dr. Johnson magnified them,
because the author was a republican. By the all-sufficiency of their
merits in believing certain truths which have been ‘hid from ages,’ they
are elevated, in their own imagination, to a higher sphere of intellect,
and are released from the necessity of pursuing the more ordinary tracks
of inquiry. Their faculties are imprisoned in a few favourite dogmas,
and they cannot break through the trammels of a sect. Hence we may
remark a hardness and setness in the ideas of those who have been
brought up in this way, an aversion to those finer and more delicate
operations of the intellect, of taste and genius, which require greater
flexibility and variety of thought, and do not afford the same
opportunity for dogmatical assertion and controversial cabal. The
distaste of the Puritans, Quakers, etc. to pictures, music, poetry, and
the fine arts in general, may be traced to this source as much as to
their affected disdain of them, as not sufficiently spiritual and remote
from the gross impurity of sense.[40]
We learn from the interest we take in things, and according to the
number of things in which we take an interest. Our ignorance of the real
value of different objects and pursuits, will in general keep pace with
our contempt for them. To set out with denying common sense to every one
else, is not the way to be wise ourselves; nor shall we be likely to
learn much, if we suppose that no one can teach us any thing worth
knowing. Again, a contempt for the habits and manners of the world is as
prejudicial as a contempt for their opinions. A puritanical abhorrence
of every thing that does not fall in with our immediate prejudices and
customs, must effectually cut us off, not only from a knowledge of the
world and of human nature, but of good and evil, of vice and virtue; at
least, if we can credit the assertion of Plato, (which, to some degree,
we do), that the knowledge of every thing implies the knowledge of its
opposite. ‘There is some soul of goodness in things evil.’ A most
respectable sect among ourselves (we mean the Quakers) have carried this
system of negative qualities nearly to perfection. They labour
diligently, and with great success, to exclude all ideas from their
minds which they might have in common with others. On the principle that
evil communications corrupt good manners, they retain a virgin purity of
understanding, and laudable ignorance of all liberal arts and sciences;
they take every precaution, and keep up a perpetual quarantine against
the infection of other people’s vices—or virtues; they pass through the
world like figures cut out of pasteboard or wood, turning neither to the
right nor the left; and their minds are no more affected by the example
of the follies, the pursuits, the pleasures, or the passions of mankind,
than the clothes which they wear. Their ideas want _airing_; they are
the worse for not being used: for fear of soiling them, they keep them
folded up and laid by in a sort of mental clothes-press, through the
whole of their lives. They take their notions on trust from one
generation to another, (like the scanty cut of their coats), and are so
wrapped up in these traditional maxims, and so pin their faith on them,
that one of the most intelligent of this class of people, not long ago,
assured us that ‘war was a thing that was going quite out of fashion’!
This abstract sort of existence may have its advantages, but it takes
away all the ordinary sources of a moral imagination, as well as
strength of intellect. Interest is the only link that connects them with
the world. We can understand the high enthusiasm and religious devotion
of monks and anchorites, who gave up the world and its pleasures to
dedicate themselves to a sublime contemplation of a future state. But
the sect of the Quakers, who have transplanted the maxims of the desert
into manufacturing towns and populous cities, who have converted the
solitary cells of the religious orders into counting-houses, their beads
into ledgers, and keep a regular debtor and creditor account between
this world and the next, puzzle us mightily! The Dissenter is not vain,
but conceited: that is, he makes up by his own good opinion for the want
of the cordial admiration of others. But this often stands their
self-love in so good stead that they need not envy their dignified
opponents who repose on lawn sleeves and ermine. The unmerited obloquy
and dislike to which they are exposed has made them cold and reserved in
their intercourse with society. The same cause will account for the
dryness and general homeliness of their style. They labour under a sense
of the want of public sympathy. They pursue truth, for its own sake,
into its private recesses and obscure corners. They have to dig their
way along a narrow under-ground passage. It is not their object to
shine; they have none of the usual incentives of vanity, light, airy,
and ostentatious. Archiepiscopal Sees and mitres do not glitter in their
distant horizon. They are not wafted on the wings of fancy, fanned by
the breath of popular applause. The voice of the world, the tide of
opinion, is not with them. They do not therefore aim at _éclat_, at
outward pomp and shew. They have a plain ground to work upon, and they
do not attempt to embellish it with idle ornaments. It would be in vain
to strew the flowers of poetry round the borders of the Unitarian
controversy.
There is one quality common to all sectaries, and that is, a principle
of strong fidelity. They are the safest partisans, and the steadiest
friends. Indeed, they are almost the only people who have any idea of an
abstract attachment either to a cause or to individuals, from a sense of
duty, independently of prosperous or adverse circumstances, and in spite
of opposition.[41]
Z.
NO. 14.] ON JOHN BUNCLE [SEPT. 17, 1815.
_John Buncle_ is the English _Rabelais_. This is an author with whom,
perhaps, many of our readers are not acquainted, and whom we therefore
wish to introduce to their notice. As most of our countrymen delight in
English Generals and in English Admirals, in English Courtiers and in
English Kings, so our great delight is in English authors.
The soul of Francis Rabelais passed into John Amory, the author of _The
Life and Adventures of John Buncle_. Both were physicians, and enemies
of too much gravity. Their great business was to enjoy life. Rabelais
indulges his spirit of sensuality in wine, in dried neats’ tongues, in
Bologna sausages, in botargos. John Buncle shews the same symptoms of
inordinate satisfaction in tea and bread and butter. While Rabelais
roared with Friar John and the Monks, John Buncle gossiped with the
ladies; and with equal and uncontrolled gaiety. These two authors
possessed all the insolence of health, so that their works give a fillip
to the constitution; but they carried off the exuberance of their
natural spirits in different ways. The title of one of Rabelais’
chapters (and the contents answer to the title) is—‘How they chirped
over their cups.’ The title of a corresponding chapter in John Buncle
would run thus: ‘The author is invited to spend the evening with the
divine Miss Hawkins, and goes accordingly, with the delightful
conversation that ensued.’ Natural philosophers are said to extract
sun-beams from ice: our author has performed the same feat upon the
cold, quaint subtleties of theology. His constitutional alacrity
overcomes every obstacle. He converts the thorns and briars of
controversial divinity into a bed of roses. He leads the most refined
and virtuous of their sex through the mazes of inextricable problems
with the air of a man walking a minuet in a drawing-room; mixes up in
the most natural and careless manner the academy of compliments with the
rudiments of algebra; or passes with rapturous indifference from the
First of St. John and a disquisition on the Logos, to the no less
metaphysical doctrines of the principle of self-preservation, or the
continuation of the species. _John Buncle_ is certainly one of the most
singular productions in the language; and herein lies its peculiarity.
It is a Unitarian romance; and one in which the soul and body are
equally attended to. The hero is a great philosopher, mathematician,
anatomist, chemist, philologist, and divine, with a good appetite, the
best spirits, and an amorous constitution, who sets out on a series of
strange adventures to propagate his philosophy, his divinity, and his
species, and meets with a constant succession of accomplished females,
adorned with equal beauty, wit, and virtue, who are always ready to
discuss all kinds of theoretical and practical points with him. His
angels (and all his women are angels) have all taken their degrees in
more than one science: love is natural to them. He is sure to find
‘A mistress and a saint in every grove.’
Pleasure and business, wisdom and mirth, take their turns with the most
agreeable regularity. _A jocis ad seria, in seriis vicissim ad jocos
transire._ After a chapter of calculations in fluxions, or on the
descent of tongues, the lady and gentleman fall from Platonics to
hoydening, in a manner as truly edifying as anything in the scenes of
Vanbrugh or Sir George Etherege. No writer ever understood so well the
art of relief. The effect is like travelling in Scotland, and coming all
of a sudden to a spot of habitable ground. His mode of making love is
admirable. He takes it quite easily, and never thinks of a refusal. His
success gives him confidence, and his confidence gives him success. For
example: in the midst of one of his rambles in the mountains of
Cumberland, he unexpectedly comes to an elegant country-seat, where,
walking on the lawn with a book in her hand, he sees a most enchanting
creature, the owner of the mansion: our hero is on fire, leaps the ha-ha
which separates them, presents himself before the lady with an easy but
respectful air, begs to know the subject of her meditation, they enter
into conversation, mutual explanations take place, a declaration of love
is made, and the wedding-day is fixed for the following Tuesday. Our
author now leads a life of perfect happiness with his beautiful Miss
Noel, in a charming solitude, for a few weeks; till, on his return from
one of his rambles in the mountains, he finds her a corpse. He ‘_sits
with his eyes shut for seven days_,’ absorbed in silent grief; he then
bids adieu to melancholy reflections, not being one of that sect of
philosophers who think that ‘man was made to mourn,’—takes horse and
sets out for the nearest watering-place. As he alights at the first inn
on the road, a lady dressed in a rich green riding-habit steps out of a
coach, John Buncle hands her into the inn, they drink tea together, they
converse, they find an exact harmony of sentiment, a declaration of love
follows as a matter of course, and that day week they are married.
Death, however, contrives to keep up the ball for him; he marries seven
wives in succession, and buries them all. In short, John Buncle’s
gravity sat upon him with the happiest indifference possible. He danced
the hays with religion and morality with the ease of a man of fashion
and of pleasure. He was determined to see fair-play between grace and
nature, between his immortal and his mortal part, and in case of any
difficulty, upon the principle of ‘first come, first served,’ made sure
of the present hour. We sometimes suspect him of a little hypocrisy, but
upon a closer inspection, it appears to be only an affectation of
hypocrisy. His fine constitution comes to his relief, and floats him
over the shoals and quicksands that lie in his way, ‘most dolphin-like.’
You see him from mere happiness of nature chuckling with inward
satisfaction in the midst of his periodical penances, his grave
grimaces, his death’s-heads, and _memento moris_.
——‘And there the antic sits
Mocking his state, and grinning at his pomp.’
As men make use of olives to give a relish to their wine, so John Buncle
made use of philosophy to give a relish to life. He stops in a ball-room
at Harrowgate to moralise on the small number of faces that appeared
there out of those he remembered some years before: all were gone whom
he saw at a still more distant period; but this casts no damper on his
spirits, and he only dances the longer and better for it. He suffers
nothing unpleasant to remain long upon his mind. He gives, in one place,
a miserable description of two emaciated valetudinarians whom he met at
an inn, supping a little mutton-broth with difficulty, but he
immediately contrasts himself with them in fine relief. ‘While I beheld
things with astonishment, the servant,’ he says, ‘brought in dinner—a
pound of rump-steaks and a quart of green peas, two cuts of bread, a
tankard of strong beer, and a pint of port-wine; _with a fine appetite,
I soon despatched my mess, and over my wine, to help digestion, began to
sing the following lines_!’ The astonishment of the two strangers was
now as great as his own had been.
We wish to enable our readers to judge for themselves of the style of
our whimsical moralist, but are at a loss what to chuse—whether his
account of his man O’Fin; or of his friend Tom Fleming; or of his being
chased over the mountains by robbers, ‘whisking before them like the
wind away,’ as if it were high sport; or his address to the Sun, which
is an admirable piece of serious eloquence; or his character of six
Irish gentlemen, Mr. Gollogher, Mr. Gallaspy, Mr. Dunkley, Mr. Makins,
Mr. Monaghan, and Mr. O’Keefe, the last ‘descended from the Irish kings,
and first cousin to the great O’Keefe, who was buried not long ago in
Westminster Abbey.’ He professes to give an account of these Irish
gentlemen, ‘for the honour of Ireland, and as they were curiosities of
the human kind.’ Curiosities, indeed, but not so great as their
historian!
‘Mr. Makins was the only one of the set who was not tall and handsome.
He was a very low, thin man, not four feet high, and had but one eye,
with which he squinted most shockingly. But as he was matchless on the
fiddle, sung well, and chatted agreeably, he was a favourite with the
ladies. They preferred ugly Makins (as he was called) to many very
handsome men. He was a Unitarian.’
‘Mr. Monaghan was an honest and charming fellow. This gentleman and Mr.
Dunkley married ladies they fell in love with at Harrowgate Wells;
Dunkley had the fair Alcmena, Miss Cox of Northumberland; and Monaghan,
Antiope with haughty charms, Miss Pearson of Cumberland. They lived very
happy many years, and their children, I hear, are settled in Ireland.’
Gentle reader, here is the character of Mr. Gallaspy:
‘Gallaspy was the tallest and strongest man I have ever seen, well made,
and very handsome: had wit and abilities, sung well, and talked with
great sweetness and fluency, but was so extremely wicked that it were
better for him if he had been a natural fool. By his vast strength and
activity, his riches and eloquence, few things could withstand him. He
was the most profane swearer I have known: fought every thing, whored
every thing, and drank seven in hand: that is, seven glasses so placed
between the fingers of his right hand, that, in drinking, the liquor
fell into the next glasses, and thereby he drank out of the first glass
seven glasses at once. This was a common thing, I find from a book in my
possession, in the reign of Charles II., in the madness that followed
the restoration of that profligate and worthless prince.[42] But this
gentleman was the only man I ever saw who could or would attempt to do
it; and he made but one gulp of whatever he drank. He did not swallow a
fluid like other people, but if it was a quart, poured it in as from
pitcher to pitcher. When he smoked tobacco, he always blew two pipes at
once, one at each corner of his mouth, and threw the smoke out at both
his nostrils. He had killed two men in duels before I left Ireland, and
would have been hanged, but that it was his good fortune to be tried
before a judge who never let any man suffer for killing another in this
manner. (This was the late Sir John St. Leger.) He debauched all the
women he could, and many whom he could not corrupt....’ The rest of this
passage would, we fear, be too rich for the Round Table, as we cannot
insert it, in the manner of Mr. Buncle, in a sandwich of theology.
Suffice it to say, that the candour is greater than the candour of
Voltaire’s _Candide_, and the modesty equal to Colley Cibber’s.
To his friend Mr. Gollogher, he consecrates the following irresistible
_petit souvenir_:
‘He might, if he had pleased, have married any one of the most
illustrious and richest women in the kingdom; but he had an aversion to
matrimony, and could not bear the thoughts of a wife. Love and a bottle
were his taste: he was, however, the most honourable of men in his
amours, and never abandoned any woman in distress, as too many men of
fortune do, when they have gratified desire. All the distressed were
ever sharers in Mr. Gollogher’s fine estate, and especially the girls he
had taken to his breast. He provided happily for them all, and left
nineteen daughters he had by several women, a thousand pounds each. This
was acting with a temper worthy of a man; _and to the memory of the
benevolent Tom Gollogher, I devote this memorandum_.’
Lest our readers should form rather a coarse idea of our author from the
foregoing passages, we will conclude with another list of friends in a
different style:
‘The Conniving-house (as the gentlemen of Trinity called it in my time,
and long after) was a little public-house, kept by Jack Macklean, about
a quarter of a mile beyond Rings-end, on the top of the beach, within a
few yards of the sea. Here we used to have the finest fish at all times;
and, in the season, green peas, and all the most excellent vegetables.
The ale here was always extraordinary, and everything the best; which,
with its delightful situation, rendered it a delightful place of a
summer’s evening. Many a delightful evening have I passed in this pretty
thatched house with the famous Larry Grogan, who played on the bagpipes
extremely well; dear Jack Lattin, matchless on the fiddle, and the most
agreeable of companions; that ever-charming young fellow, Jack Wall, the
most worthy, the most ingenious, the most engaging of men, the son of
Counsellor Maurice Wall; and many other delightful fellows, who went in
the days of their youth to the shades of eternity. When I think of them
and their evening songs—‘_We will go to Johnny Macklean’s, to try if his
ale be good or no_,’ etc. and that years and infirmities begin to
oppress me—What is life!’
We have another English author, very different from the last mentioned
one, but equal in _naïveté_, and in the perfect display of personal
character; we mean Isaac Walton, who wrote the _Complete Angler_. That
well-known work has an extreme simplicity, and an extreme interest,
arising out of its very simplicity. In the description of a fishing
tackle you perceive the piety and humanity of the author’s mind. This is
the best pastoral in the language, not excepting Pope’s or Philips’s. We
doubt whether Sannazarius’s _Piscatory Eclogues_ are equal to the scenes
described by Walton on the banks of the River Lea. He gives the feeling
of the open air. We walk with him along the dusty roadside, or repose on
the banks of the river under a shady tree, and in watching for the finny
prey, imbibe what he beautifully calls ‘the patience and simplicity of
poor, honest fishermen.’ We accompany them to their inn at night, and
partake of their simple but delicious fare, while Maud, the pretty
milkmaid, at her mother’s desire, sings the classical ditties of Sir
Walter Raleigh. Good cheer is not neglected in this work, any more than
in _John Buncle_, or any other history which sets a proper value on the
good things of life. The prints in the _Complete Angler_ give an
additional reality and interest to the scenes it describes. While
Tottenham Cross shall stand, and longer, thy work, amiable and happy old
man, shall last![43]
W. H.
NO. 15.] ON THE CAUSES OF METHODISM [OCT. 22, 1815.
The first Methodist on record was David. He was the first eminent person
we read of, who made a regular compromise between religion and morality,
between faith and good works. After any trifling peccadillo in point of
conduct, as a murder, adultery, perjury, or the like, he ascended with
his harp into some high tower of his palace; and having chaunted, in a
solemn strain of poetical inspiration, the praises of piety and virtue,
made his peace with heaven and his own conscience. This extraordinary
genius, in the midst of his personal errors, retained the same lofty
abstract enthusiasm for the favourite objects of his contemplation; the
character of the poet and the prophet remained unimpaired by the vices
of the man—
‘Pure in the last recesses of the mind’;
and the best test of the soundness of his principles and the elevation
of his sentiments, is, that they were proof against his practice. The
Gnostics afterwards maintained, that it was no matter what a man’s
actions were, so that his understanding was not debauched by them—so
that his opinions continued uncontaminated, and _his heart_, as the
phrase is, _right towards God_. Strictly speaking, this sect (whatever
name it might go by) is as old as human nature itself; for it has
existed ever since there was a contradiction between the passions and
the understanding—between what we are, and what we desire to be. The
principle of Methodism is nearly allied to hypocrisy, and almost
unavoidably slides into it: yet it is not the same thing; for we can
hardly call any one a hypocrite, however much at variance his
professions and his actions, who really wishes to be what he would be
thought.
The Jewish bard, whom we have placed at the head of this class of
devotees, was of a sanguine and robust temperament. Whether he chose ‘to
sinner it or saint it,’ he did both most royally, with a fulness of
gusto, and carried off his penances and his _faux-pas_ in a style of
oriental grandeur. This is by no means the character of his followers
among ourselves, who are a most pitiful set. They may rather be
considered as a collection of religious invalids; as the refuse of all
that is weak and unsound in body and mind. To speak of them as they
deserve, they are not well in the flesh, and therefore they take refuge
in the spirit; they are not comfortable here, and they seek for the life
to come; they are deficient in steadiness of moral principle, and they
trust to grace to make up the deficiency; they are dull and gross in
apprehension, and therefore they are glad to substitute faith for
reason, and to plunge in the dark, under the supposed sanction of
superior wisdom, into every species of mystery and jargon. This is the
history of Methodism, which may be defined to be religion with its
slobbering-bib and go-cart. It is a bastard kind of Popery, stripped of
its painted pomp and outward ornaments, and reduced to a state of
pauperism. ‘The whole need not a physician.’ Popery owed its success to
its constant appeal to the senses and to the weaknesses of mankind. The
Church of England deprives the Methodists of the pride and pomp of the
Romish Church; but it has left open to them the appeal to the indolence,
the ignorance, and the vices of the people; and the secret of the
success of the Catholic faith and evangelical preaching is the same—both
are a religion by proxy. What the one did by auricular confession,
absolution, penance, pictures, and crucifixes, the other does, even more
compendiously, by grace, election, faith without works, and words
without meaning.
In the first place, the same reason makes a man a religious enthusiast
that makes a man an enthusiast in any other way, an uncomfortable mind
in an uncomfortable body. Poets, authors, and artists in general, have
been ridiculed for a pining, puritanical, poverty-struck appearance,
which has been attributed to their real poverty. But it would perhaps be
nearer the truth to say, that their being poets, artists, etc. has been
owing to their original poverty of spirit and weakness of constitution.
As a general rule, those who are dissatisfied with themselves, will seek
to go out of themselves into an ideal world. Persons in strong health
and spirits, who take plenty of air and exercise, who are ‘in favour
with their stars,’ and have a thorough relish of the good things of this
life, seldom devote themselves in despair to religion or the Muses.
Sedentary, nervous, hypochondriacal people, on the contrary, are forced,
for want of an appetite for the real and substantial, to look out for a
more airy food and speculative comforts. ‘Conceit in weakest bodies
strongest works.’ A journeyman sign-painter, whose lungs have imbibed
too great a quantity of the effluvia of white-lead, will be seized with
a fantastic passion for the stage; and _Mawworm_, tired of standing
behind his counter, was eager to mount a tub, mistaking the suppression
of his animal spirits for the communication of the Holy Ghost![44] If
you live near a chapel or tabernacle in London, you may almost always
tell, from physiognomical signs, which of the passengers will turn the
corner to go there. We were once staying in a remote place in the
country, where a chapel of this sort had been erected by the force of
missionary zeal; and one morning, we perceived a long procession of
people coming from the next town to the consecration of this same
chapel. Never was there such a set of scarecrows. Melancholy tailors,
consumptive hair-dressers, squinting cobblers, women with child or in
the ague, made up the forlorn hope of the pious cavalcade. The pastor of
this half-starved flock, we confess, came riding after, with a more
goodly aspect, as if he had ‘with sound of bell been knolled to church,
and sat at good men’s feasts.’ He had in truth lately married a thriving
widow, and been pampered with hot suppers to strengthen the flesh and
the spirit. We have seen several of these ‘round fat oily men of God,
“That shone all glittering with ungodly dew.”’
They grow sleek and corpulent by getting into better pasture, but they
do not appear healthy. They retain the original sin of their
constitution, an atrabilious taint in their complexion, and do not put a
right-down, hearty, honest, good-looking face upon the matter, like the
regular clergy.
Again, Methodism, by its leading doctrines, has a peculiar charm for all
those, who have an equal facility in sinning and repenting,—in whom the
spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,—who have neither fortitude to
withstand temptation, nor to silence the admonitions of conscience,—who
like the theory of religion better than the practice, and who are
willing to indulge in all the raptures of speculative devotion, without
being tied down to the dull, literal performance of its duties. There is
a general propensity in the human mind (even in the most vicious) to pay
virtue a distant homage; and this desire is only checked by the fear of
condemning ourselves by our own acknowledgments. What an admirable
expedient then in ‘that burning and shining light,’ Whitefield, and his
associates, to make this very disposition to admire and extol the
highest patterns of goodness, a substitute for, instead of an obligation
to, the practice of virtue, to allow us to be quit for ‘the vice that
most easily besets us,’ by canting lamentations over the depravity of
human nature, and loud hosannahs to the Son of David! How comfortably
this doctrine must sit on all those who are loth to give up old habits
of vice, or are just tasting the sweets of new ones; on the withered hag
who looks back on a life of dissipation, or the young devotee who looks
forward to a life of pleasure; the knavish tradesman retiring from
business or entering on it; the battered rake; the sneaking politician,
who trims between his place and his conscience, wriggling between heaven
and earth, a miserable two-legged creature, with sanctified face and
fawning gestures; the maudling sentimentalist, the religious prostitute,
the disinterested poet-laureate, the humane war-contractor, or the
Society for the Suppression of Vice! This scheme happily turns morality
into a sinecure, takes all the practical drudgery and trouble off your
hands, ‘and sweet religion makes a rhapsody of words.’ Its proselytes
besiege the gates of heaven, like sturdy beggars about the doors of the
great, lie and bask in the sunshine of divine grace, sigh and groan and
bawl out for mercy, expose their sores and blotches to excite
commiseration, and cover the deformities of their nature with a garb of
borrowed righteousness!
The jargon and nonsense which are so studiously inculcated in the
system, are another powerful recommendation of it to the vulgar. It does
not impose any tax upon the understanding. Its essence is to be
unintelligible. It is _carte blanche_ for ignorance and folly! Those,
‘numbers without number,’ who are either unable or unwilling to think
connectedly or rationally on any subject, are at once released from
every obligation of the kind, by being told that faith and reason are
opposed to one another, and the greater the impossibility, the greater
the merit of the faith. A set of phrases which, without conveying any
distinct idea, excite our wonder, our fear, our curiosity and desires,
which let loose the imagination of the gaping multitude, and confound
and baffle common sense, are the common stock-in-trade of the
conventicle. They never stop for the distinctions of the understanding,
and have thus got the start of other sects, who are so hemmed in with
the necessity of giving reasons for their opinions, that they cannot get
on at all. ‘Vital Christianity’ is no other than an attempt to lower all
religion to the level of the capacities of the lowest of the people. One
of their favourite places of worship combines the noise and turbulence
of a drunken brawl at an ale-house, with the indecencies of a bagnio.
They strive to gain a vertigo by abandoning their reason, and give
themselves up to the intoxications of a distempered zeal, that
‘Dissolves them into ecstasies,
And brings all heaven before their eyes.’
Religion, without superstition, will not answer the purposes of
fanaticism, and we may safely say, that almost every sect of
Christianity is a perversion of its essence, to accommodate it to the
prejudices of the world. The Methodists have greased the boots of the
Presbyterians, and they have done well. While the latter are weighing
their doubts and scruples to the division of a hair, and shivering on
the narrow brink that divides philosophy from religion, the former
plunge without remorse into hell-flames, soar on the wings of divine
love, are carried away with the motions of the spirit, are lost in the
abyss of unfathomable mysteries,—election, reprobation,
predestination,—and revel in a sea of boundless nonsense. It is a gulf
that swallows up every thing. The cold, the calculating, and the dry,
are not to the taste of the many; religion is an anticipation of the
preternatural world, and it in general requires preternatural
excitements to keep it alive. If it takes a definite consistent form, it
loses its interest: to produce its effect it must come in the shape of
an apparition. Our quacks treat grown people as the nurses do
children;—terrify them with what they have no idea of, or take them to a
puppet-show.
W. H.
NO. 16.] ON THE MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM [NOV. 26, 1815.
Bottom the weaver is a character that has not had justice done him. He
is the most romantic of mechanics. And what a list of companions he
has—_Quince_ the carpenter, _Snug_ the joiner, _Flute_ the
bellows-mender, _Snout_ the tinker, _Starveling_ the tailor; and then,
again, what a group of fairy attendants, _Puck_, _Peaseblossom_,
_Cobweb_, _Moth_, and _Mustard-seed_! It has been observed that
Shakspeare’s characters are constructed upon deep physiological
principles; and there is something in this play which looks very like
it. _Bottom_ the weaver, who takes the lead of
‘This crew of patches, rude mechanicals,
That work for bread upon Athenian stalls,’
follows a sedentary trade, and he is accordingly represented as
conceited, serious, and fantastical. He is ready to undertake any thing
and every thing, as if it was as much a matter of course as the motion
of his loom and shuttle. He is for playing the tyrant, the lover, the
lady, the lion. ‘He will roar that it shall do any man’s heart good to
hear him’; and this being objected to as improper, he still has a
resource in his good opinion of himself, and ‘will roar you an ‘twere
any nightingale.’ _Snug_ the joiner is the moral man of the piece, who
proceeds by measurement and discretion in all things. You see him with
his rule and compasses in his hand. ‘Have you the lion’s part written?
Pray you, if it be, give it me, for I am slow of study.’ ‘You may do it
extempore,’ says _Quince_, ‘for it is nothing but roaring.’ _Starveling_
the tailor keeps the peace, and objects to the lion and the drawn sword:
‘I believe we must leave the killing out, when all’s done.’
_Starveling_, however, does not start the objections himself, but
seconds them when made by others, as if he had not spirit to express his
fears without encouragement. It is too much to suppose all this
intentional: but it very luckily falls out so. Nature includes all that
is implied in the most subtle and analytical distinctions; and the same
distinctions will be found in Shakspeare. _Bottom_, who is not only
chief actor, but stage-manager for the occasion, has a device to obviate
the danger of frightening the ladies: ‘Write me a prologue, and let the
prologue seem to say, we will do him no harm with our swords, and that
Pyramus is not killed indeed; and for better assurance, tell them that
I, Pyramus, am not Pyramus, but Bottom the weaver; this will put them
out of fear.’ _Bottom_ seems to have understood the subject of dramatic
illusion at least as well as any modern essayist. If our holiday
mechanic rules the roast among his fellows, he is no less at home in his
new character of an ass, ‘with amiable cheeks and fair large ears.’ He
instinctively acquires a most learned taste, and grows fastidious in the
choice of dried peas and bottled hay. He is quite familiar with his new
attendants, and assigns them their parts with all due gravity. ‘Monsieur
_Cobweb_, good Monsieur, get your weapon in your hand, and kill me a
red-hipt humble bee on the top of a thistle, and good Monsieur, bring me
the honey-bag.’ What an exact knowledge is shewn here of natural
history!
_Puck_ or _Robin Goodfellow_ is the leader of the fairy band. He is the
_Ariel_ of the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_; and yet as unlike as can be to
the _Ariel_ in the _Tempest_. No other poet could have made two such
different characters out of the same fanciful materials and situations.
_Ariel_ is a minister of retribution, who is touched with a sense of
pity at the woes he inflicts. _Puck_ is a mad-cap sprite, full of
wantonness and mischief, who laughs at those whom he misleads: ‘Lord,
what fools these mortals be!’ _Ariel_ cleaves the air, and executes his
mission with the zeal of a winged messenger: _Puck_ is borne along on
his fairy errand, like the light and glittering gossamer before the
breeze. He is, indeed, a most Epicurean little gentleman, dealing in
quaint devices, and faring in dainty delights. _Prospero_ and his world
of spirits are a set of moralists: but with _Oberon_ and his fairies we
are launched at once into the empire of the butterflies. How beautifully
is this race of beings contrasted with the men and women actors in the
scene, by a single epithet which _Titania_ gives to the latter, ‘the
human mortals’! It is astonishing that Shakspeare should be considered,
not only by foreigners, but by many of our own critics, as a gloomy and
heavy writer, who painted nothing but ‘Gorgons and Hydras and Chimeras
dire.’ His subtlety exceeds that of all other dramatic writers, insomuch
that a celebrated person of the present day said, that he regarded him
rather as a metaphysician than a poet. His delicacy and sportive gaiety
are infinite. In the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_ alone, we should imagine,
there is more sweetness and beauty of description than in the whole
range of French poetry put together. What we mean is this, that we will
produce out of that single play ten passages, to which we do not think
any ten passages in the works of the French poets can be opposed,
displaying equal fancy and imagery. Shall we mention the remonstrance of
_Helena_ to _Hermia_, or _Titania’s_ description of her fairy train, or
her disputes with _Oberon_ about the Indian boy, or _Puck’s_ account of
himself and his employments, or the Fairy Queen’s exhortation to the
elves to pay due attendance upon her favourite _Bottom_,[45] or
_Hippolyta’s_ description of a chace, or _Theseus’s_ answer? The two
last are as heroical and spirited, as the others are full of luscious
tenderness. The reading of this play is like wandering in a grove by
moonlight: the descriptions breathe a sweetness like odours thrown from
beds of flowers.
Shakspeare is almost the only poet of whom it may be said, that
‘Age cannot wither, nor custom stale
His infinite variety.’
His nice touches of individual character, and marking of its different
gradations, have been often admired; but the instances have not been
exhausted, because they are inexhaustible. We will mention two which
occur to us. One is where _Christopher Sly_ expresses his approbation of
the play, by saying, ‘’Tis a good piece of work, would ‘twere done,’ as
if he were thinking of his Saturday night’s job. Again, there cannot
well be a finer gradation of character than that in Henry IV. between
_Falstaff_ and _Shallow_, and _Shallow_ and _Silence_. It seems
difficult to fall lower than the Squire; but this fool, great as he is,
finds an admirer and humble foil in his cousin _Silence_. Vain of his
acquaintance with _Sir John_, who makes a butt of him, he exclaims,
‘Would, cousin _Silence_, that thou had’st seen that which this Knight
and I have seen!’ ‘Aye, master _Shallow_, we have heard the chimes at
midnight,’ says _Sir John_. The true spirit of humanity, the thorough
knowledge of the stuff we are made of, the practical wisdom with the
seeming fooleries, in the whole of this exquisite scene, and afterwards
in the dialogue on the death of old _Double_, have no parallel anywhere
else.
It has been suggested to us, that the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_ would do
admirably to get up as a Christmas after-piece; and our prompter
proposes that Mr. Kean should play the part of _Bottom_, as worthy of
his great talents. He might offer to play the lady like any of our
actresses that he pleased, the lover or the tyrant like any of our
actors that he pleased, and the lion like ‘the most fearful wild fowl
living.’ The carpenter, the tailor, and joiner, would hit the galleries.
The young ladies in love would interest the side-boxes, and _Robin
Goodfellow_ and his companions excite a lively fellow-feeling in the
children from school. There would be two courts, an empire within an
empire, the Athenian and the Fairy King and Queen, with their
attendants, and with all their finery. What an opportunity for
processions, for the sound of trumpets, and glittering of spears! What a
fluttering of urchins’ painted wings; what a delightful profusion of
gauze clouds, and airy spirits floating on them! It would be a complete
English fairy tale.
W. H.
NO. 17.] ON THE BEGGAR’S OPERA [JUNE 18, 1815.
We have begun this Essay on a very coarse sheet of damaged foolscap, and
we find that we are going to write it, whether for the sake of contrast,
or from having a very fine pen, in a remarkably nice hand. Something of
a similar process seems to have taken place in Gay’s mind, when he
composed his _Beggar’s Opera_. He chose a very unpromising ground to
work upon, and he has prided himself in adorning it with all the graces,
the precision and brilliancy of style. It is a vulgar error to call this
a vulgar play. So far from it, that we do not scruple to declare our
opinion that it is one of the most refined productions in the language.
The elegance of the composition is in exact proportion to the coarseness
of the materials: by ‘happy alchemy of mind,’ the author has extracted
an essence of refinement from the dregs of human life, and turns its
very dross into gold. The scenes, characters, and incidents are, in
themselves, of the lowest and most disgusting kind: but, by the
sentiments and reflections which are put into the mouths of highwaymen,
turnkeys, their mistresses, wives, or daughters, he has converted this
motley group into a set of fine gentlemen and ladies, satirists and
philosophers. He has also effected this transformation without once
violating probability, or ‘o’erstepping the modesty of nature.’ In fact
Gay has turned the tables on the critics; and by the assumed licence of
the mock-heroic style, has enabled himself to _do justice to nature_,
that is, to give all the force, truth, and locality of real feeling to
the thoughts and expressions, without being called to the bar of false
taste and affected delicacy. The extreme beauty and feeling of the song,
‘Woman is like the fair flower in its lustre,’ is only equalled by its
characteristic propriety and _naïveté_. It may be said that this is
taken from Tibullus; but there is nothing about Covent Garden in
Tibullus. _Polly_ describes her lover going to the gallows with the same
touching simplicity, and with all the natural fondness of a young girl
in her circumstances, who sees in his approaching catastrophe nothing
but the misfortunes and the personal accomplishments of the object of
her affections. ‘I see him sweeter than the nosegay in his hand: the
admiring crowd lament that so lovely a youth should come to an untimely
end:—even butchers weep, and Jack Ketch refuses his fee rather than
consent to tie the fatal knot.’ The preservation of the character and
costume is complete. It has been said by a great authority, ‘There is
some soul of goodness in things evil’: and the _Beggar’s Opera_ is a
good-natured but instructive comment on this text. The poet has thrown
all the gaiety and sunshine of the imagination, all the intoxication of
pleasure, and the vanity of despair, round the short-lived existence of
his heroes; while _Peachum_ and _Lockitt_ are seen in the back-ground,
parcelling out their months and weeks between them. The general view
exhibited of human life, is of the most masterly and abstracted kind.
The author has, with great felicity, brought out the good qualities and
interesting emotions almost inseparable from the lowest conditions; and
with the same penetrating glance has detected the disguises which rank
and circumstances lend to exalted vice. Every line in this sterling
comedy sparkles with wit, and is fraught with the keenest sarcasm. The
very wit, however, takes off from the offensiveness of the satire; and
we have seen great statesmen, very great statesmen, heartily enjoying
the joke, laughing most immoderately at the compliments paid to them as
not much worse than pickpockets and cut-throats in a different line of
life, and pleased, as it were, to see themselves humanised by some sort
of fellowship with their kind. Indeed, it may be said that the moral of
the piece is to show the _vulgarity_ of vice; and that the same
violations of integrity and decorum, the same habitual sophistry in
palliating their want of principle, are common to the great and
powerful, with the lowest and most contemptible of the species. What can
be more convincing than the arguments used by these would-be
politicians, to shew that in hypocrisy, selfishness, and treachery, they
do not come up to many of their betters? The exclamation of _Mrs.
Peachum_, when her daughter marries _Macheath_, ‘Hussey, hussey, you
will be as ill used, and as much neglected, as if you had married a
lord,’ is worth all Miss Hannah More’s laboured invectives on the laxity
of the manners of high life![46]
W. H.
NO. 18.] ON PATRIOTISM.—A FRAGMENT [JAN. 5, 1814.
Patriotism, in modern times, and in great states, is and must be the
creature of reason and reflection, rather than the offspring of physical
or local attachment. Our country is a complex, abstract existence,
recognised only by the understanding. It is an immense riddle,
containing numberless modifications of reason and prejudice, of thought
and passion. Patriotism is not, in a strict or exclusive sense, a
natural or personal affection, but a law of our rational and moral
nature, strengthened and determined by particular circumstances and
associations, but not born of them, nor wholly nourished by them. It is
not possible that we should have an individual attachment to sixteen
millions of men, any more than to sixty millions. We cannot be
_habitually_ attached to places we never saw, and people we never heard
of. Is not the name of Englishman a general term, as well as that of
man? How many varieties does it not combine within it? Are the opposite
extremities of the globe our native place, because they are a part of
that geographical and political denomination, our country? Does natural
affection expand in circles of latitude and longitude? What personal or
instinctive sympathy has the English peasant with the African
slave-driver, or East Indian Nabob? Some of our wretched bunglers in
metaphysics would fain persuade us to discard all general humanity, and
all sense of abstract justice, as a violation of natural affection, and
yet do not see that the love of our country itself is in the list of our
general affections. The common notions of patriotism are transmitted
down to us from the savage tribes, where the fate and condition of all
was the same, or from the states of Greece and Rome, where the country
of the citizen was the town in which he was born. Where this is no
longer the case,—where our country is no longer contained within the
narrow circle of the same walls,—where we can no longer behold its
glimmering horizon from the top of our native mountains—beyond these
limits, it is not a natural but an artificial idea, and our love of it
either a deliberate dictate of reason, or a cant term. It was said by an
acute observer, and eloquent writer (Rousseau) that the love of mankind
was nothing but the love of justice: the same might be said, with
considerable truth, of the love of our country. It is little more than
another name for the love of liberty, of independence, of peace, and
social happiness. We do not say that other indirect and collateral
circumstances do not go to the superstructure of this sentiment (as
language,[47] literature, manners, national customs), but this is the
broad and firm basis.
NO. 19.] ON BEAUTY [FEB. 4, 1816.
It is about sixty years ago that Sir Joshua Reynolds, in three papers
which he wrote in the _Idler_, advanced the notion, which has prevailed
very much ever since, that Beauty was entirely dependent on custom, or
on the conformity of objects to a given standard. Now, we could never
persuade ourselves that custom, or the association of ideas, though a
very powerful, was the only principle of the preference which the mind
gives to certain objects over others. Novelty is surely one source of
pleasure; otherwise we cannot account for the well-known epigram,
beginning—
‘Two happy things in marriage are allowed,’ etc.
Nor can we help thinking, that, besides custom, or the conformity of
certain objects to others of the same general class, there is also a
certain conformity of objects to themselves, a symmetry of parts, a
principle of proportion, gradation, harmony (call it what you will),
which makes certain things naturally pleasing or beautiful, and the want
of it the contrary.
We will not pretend to define what Beauty is, after so many learned
authors have failed; but we shall attempt to give some examples of what
constitutes it, to shew that it is in some way inherent in the object,
and that if custom is a second nature, there is another nature which
ranks before it. Indeed, the idea that all pleasure and pain depend on
the association of ideas is manifestly absurd: there must be something
in itself pleasurable or painful, before it could become possible for
the feelings of pleasure or pain to be transferred by association from
one object to another.
Regular features are generally accounted handsome; but regular features
are those, the outlines of which answer most nearly to each other, or
undergo the fewest abrupt changes. We shall attempt to explain this idea
by a reference to the Greek and African face; the first of which is
beautiful, because it is made up of lines corresponding with or melting
into each other: the last is not so, because it is made up almost
entirely of contradictory lines and sharp angular projections.
The general principle of the difference between the two heads is this:
the forehead of the Greek is square and upright, and, as it were,
overhangs the rest of the face, except the nose, which is a continuation
of it almost in an even line. In the Negro or African, the tip of the
nose is the most projecting part of the face; and from that point the
features retreat back, both upwards towards the forehead, and downwards
to the chin. This last form is an approximation to the shape of the head
of the animal, as the former bears the strongest stamp of humanity.
The Grecian nose is regular, the African irregular. In other words, the
Grecian nose seen in profile forms nearly a straight line with the
forehead, and falls into the upper lip by two curves, which balance one
another: seen in front, the two sides are nearly parallel to each other,
and the nostrils and lower part form regular curves, answering to one
another, and to the contours of the mouth. On the contrary, the African
pug-nose is more ‘like an ace of clubs.’ Whichever way you look at it,
it presents the appearance of a triangle. It is narrow, and drawn to a
point at top, broad and flat at bottom. The point is peaked, and recedes
abruptly to the level of the forehead or the mouth, and the nostrils are
as if they were drawn up with hooks towards each other. All the lines
cross each other at sharp angles. The forehead of the Greeks is flat and
square, till it is rounded at the temples; the African forehead, like
the ape’s, falls back towards the top, and spreads out at the sides, so
as to form an angle with the cheek-bones. The eyebrows of the Greeks are
either straight, so as to sustain the lower part of the tablet of the
forehead, or gently arched, so as to form the outer circle of the curves
of the eyelids. The form of the eyes gives all the appearance of orbs,
full, swelling, and involved within each other; the African eyes are
flat, narrow at the corners, in the shape of a tortoise, and the
eyebrows fly off slantwise to the sides of the forehead. The idea of the
superiority of the Greek face in this respect is admirably expressed in
Spenser’s description of Belphœbe:
‘Her ivory forehead, full of bounty brave,
Like a broad table did itself dispread,
For love therein his triumphs to engrave,
And write the battles of his great Godhead.
. . . . .
Upon her eyelids many Graces sat
Under the shadow of her even brows.’
The head of the girl in the _Transfiguration_ (which Raphael took from
the _Niobe_) has the same correspondence and exquisite involution of the
outline of the forehead, the eyebrows, and the eyes (circle within
circle) which we here speak of. Every part of that delightful head is
blended together, and every sharp projection moulded and softened down,
with the feeling of a sculptor, or as if nothing should be left to
offend the _touch_ as well as eye. Again, the Greek mouth is small, and
little wider than the lower part of the nose: the lips form waving
lines, nearly answering to each other; the African mouth is twice as
wide as the nose, projects in front, and falls back towards the ears—is
sharp and triangular, and consists of one protruding and one distended
lip. The chin of the Greek face is round and indented, curled in,
forming a fine oval with the outline of the cheeks, which resemble the
two halves of a plane parallel with the forehead, and rounded off like
it. The Negro chin falls inwards like a dew-lap, is nearly bisected in
the middle, flat at bottom, and joined abruptly to the rest of the face,
the whole contour of which is made up of jagged cross-grained lines. The
African physiognomy appears, indeed, splitting in pieces, starting out
in every oblique direction, and marked by the most sudden and violent
changes throughout: the whole of the Grecian face blends with itself in
a state of the utmost harmony and repose.[48] There is a harmony of
expression as well as a symmetry of form. We sometimes see a face
melting into beauty by the force of sentiment—an eye that, in its liquid
mazes, for ever expanding and for ever retiring within itself, draws the
soul after it, and tempts the rash beholder to his fate. This is,
perhaps, what Werter meant, when he says of Charlotte, ‘Her full dark
eyes are ever before me, like a sea, like a precipice.’ The historical
in expression is the consistent and harmonious,—whatever in thought or
feeling communicates the same movement, whether voluptuous or
impassioned, to all the parts of the face, the mouth, the eyes, the
forehead, and shews that they are all actuated by the same spirit. For
this reason it has been observed, that all intellectual and impassioned
faces are historical,—the heads of philosophers, poets, lovers, and
madmen.
Motion is beautiful as it implies either continuity or gradual change.
The motion of a hawk is beautiful, either returning in endless circles
with suspended wings, or darting right forward in one level line upon
its prey. We have, when boys, often watched the glittering down of the
thistle, at first scarcely rising above the ground, and then, mingling
with the gale, borne into the upper sky with varying fantastic motion.
How delightful, how beautiful! All motion is beautiful that is not
contradictory to itself,—that is free from sudden jerks and shocks,—that
is either sustained by the same impulse, or gradually reconciles
different impulses together. Swans resting on the calm bosom of a lake,
in which their image is reflected, or moved up and down with the heaving
of the waves, though by this the double image is disturbed, are equally
beautiful. Homer describes Mercury as flinging himself from the top of
Olympus, and skimming the surface of the ocean. This is lost in Pope’s
translation, who suspends him on the incumbent air. The beauty of the
original image consists in the idea which it conveys of smooth,
uninterrupted speed, of the evasion of every let or obstacle to the
progress of the God.[49] Awkwardness is occasioned by a difficulty in
moving, or by disjointed movements, that distract the attention and
defeat each other. Grace is the absence of every thing that indicates
pain or difficulty, or hesitation or incongruity. The only graceful
dancer we ever saw was Deshayes, the Frenchman. He came on bounding like
a stag. It was not necessary to have seen good dancing before to know
that this was really fine. Whoever has seen the sea in motion, the
branches of a tree waving in the air, would instantly perceive the
resemblance. Flexibility and grace are to be found in nature as well as
at the opera. Mr. Burke, in his Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, has
very admirably described the bosom of a beautiful woman, almost entirely
with reference to the ideas of motion. Those outlines are beautiful
which describe pleasant motions. A fine use is made of this principle by
one of the apocryphal writers, in describing the form of the rainbow.
‘He hath set his bow in the heavens, and his hands have bended it.’
Harmony in colour has not been denied to be a natural property of
objects, consisting in the gradations of intermediate colours. The
principle appears to be here the same as in some of the former
instances. The effect of colour in Titian’s Bath of Diana, at the
Marquis of Stafford’s, is perhaps the finest in the world, made up of
the richest contrasts, blended together by the most masterly gradations.
Harmony of sound depends apparently on the same principle as harmony of
colour. Rhyme depends on the pleasure derived from a recurrence of
similar sounds, as symmetry of features does on the correspondence of
the different outlines. The prose style of Dr. Johnson originated in the
same principle. The secret consisted in rhyming on the sense, and
balancing one half of the sentence uniformly and systematically against
the other. The Hebrew poetry was constructed in the same manner.
W.
NO. 20.] ON IMITATION [FEB. 18, 1816.
Objects in themselves disagreeable or indifferent, often please in the
imitation. A brick-floor, a pewter-plate, an ugly cur barking, a Dutch
boor smoking or playing at skittles, the inside of a shambles, a
fishmonger’s or a greengrocer’s stall, have been made very interesting
as pictures by the fidelity, skill, and spirit, with which they have
been copied. One source of the pleasure thus received is undoubtedly the
surprise or feeling of admiration, occasioned by the unexpected
coincidence between the imitation and the object. The deception,
however, not only pleases at first sight, or from mere novelty; but it
continues to please upon farther acquaintance, and in proportion to the
insight we acquire into the distinctions of nature and of art. By far
the most numerous class of connoisseurs are the admirers of pictures of
_still life_, which have nothing but the elaborateness of the execution
to recommend them. One chief reason, it should seem then, why imitation
pleases, is, because, by exciting curiosity, and inviting a comparison
between the object and the representation, it opens a new field of
inquiry, and leads the attention to a variety of details and
distinctions not perceived before. This latter source of the pleasure
derived from imitation has never been properly insisted on.
The anatomist is delighted with a coloured plate, conveying the exact
appearance of the progress of certain diseases, or of the internal parts
and dissections of the human body. We have known a Jennerian Professor
as much enraptured with a delineation of the different stages of
vaccination, as a florist with a bed of tulips, or an auctioneer with a
collection of Indian shells. But in this case, we find that not only the
imitation pleases,—the objects themselves give as much pleasure to the
professional inquirer, as they would pain to the uninitiated. The
learned amateur is struck with the beauty of the coats of the stomach
laid bare, or contemplates with eager curiosity the transverse section
of the brain, divided on the new Spurzheim principles. It is here, then,
the number of the parts, their distinctions, connections, structure,
uses; in short, an entire new set of ideas, which occupies the mind of
the student, and overcomes the sense of pain and repugnance, which is
the only feeling that the sight of a dead and mangled body presents to
ordinary men. It is the same in art as in science. The painter of still
life, as it is called, takes the same pleasure in the object as the
spectator does in the imitation; because by habit he is led to perceive
all those distinctions in nature, to which other persons never pay any
attention till they are pointed out to them in the picture. The vulgar
only see nature as it is reflected to them from art; the painter sees
the picture in nature, before he transfers it to the canvass. He
refines, he analyses, he remarks fifty things, which escape common eyes;
and this affords a distinct source of reflection and amusement to him,
independently of the beauty or grandeur of the objects themselves, or of
their connection with other impressions besides those of sight. The
charm of the Fine Arts, then, does not consist in any thing peculiar to
imitation, even where only imitation is concerned, since _there_, where
art exists in the highest perfection, namely, in the mind of the artist,
the object excites the same or greater pleasure, before the imitation
exists. Imitation renders an object, displeasing in itself, a source of
pleasure, not by repetition of the same idea, but by suggesting new
ideas, by detecting new properties, and endless shades of difference,
just as a close and continued contemplation of the object itself would
do. Art shows us nature, divested of the medium of our prejudices. It
divides and decompounds objects into a thousand curious parts, which may
be full of variety, beauty, and delicacy in themselves, though the
object to which they belong may be disagreeable in its general
appearance, or by association with other ideas. A painted marigold is
inferior to a painted rose only in form and colour: it loses nothing in
point of smell. Yellow hair is perfectly beautiful in a picture. To a
person lying with his face close to the ground in a summer’s day, the
blades of spear-grass will appear like tall forest trees, shooting up
into the sky; as an insect seen through a microscope is magnified into
an elephant. Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit
as the other does the sight; and converts every object into a little
universe in itself.[50] Art may be said to draw aside the veil from
nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued
with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.
The pursuit of art is liable to be carried to a contrary excess, as
where it produces a rage for the _picturesque_. You cannot go a step
with a person of this class, but he stops you to point out some choice
bit of landscape, or fancied improvement, and teazes you almost to death
with the frequency and insignificance of his discoveries!
It is a common opinion, (which may be worth noticing here), that the
study of physiognomy has a tendency to make people satirical, and the
knowledge of art to make them fastidious in their taste. Knowledge may,
indeed, afford a handle to ill-nature; but it takes away the principal
temptation to its exercise, by supplying the mind with better resources
against _ennui_. Idiots are always mischievous; and the most superficial
persons are the most disposed to find fault, because they understand the
fewest things. The English are more apt than any other nation to treat
foreigners with contempt, because they seldom see anything but their own
dress and manners; and it is only in petty provincial towns that you
meet with persons who pride themselves on being satirical. In every
country place in England there are one or two persons of this
description who keep the whole neighbourhood in terror. It is not to be
denied that the study of the _ideal_ in art, if separated from the study
of nature, may have the effect above stated, of producing
dissatisfaction and contempt for everything but itself, as all
affectation must; but to the genuine artist, truth, nature, beauty, are
almost different names for the same thing.
Imitation interests, then, by exciting a more intense perception of
truth, and calling out the powers of observation and comparison:
wherever this effect takes place the interest follows of course, with or
without the imitation, whether the object is real or artificial. The
gardener delights in the streaks of a tulip, or ‘pansy freak’d with
jet’; the mineralogist in the varieties of certain strata, because he
understands them. Knowledge is pleasure as well as power. A work of art
has in this respect no advantage over a work of nature, except inasmuch
as it furnishes an additional stimulus to curiosity. Again, natural
objects please in proportion as they are uncommon, by fixing the
attention more steadily on their beauties or differences. The same
principle of the effect of novelty in exciting the attention, may
account, perhaps, for the extraordinary discoveries and lies told by
travellers, who, opening their eyes for the first time in foreign parts,
are startled at every object they meet.
Why the excitement of intellectual activity pleases, is not here the
question; but that it does so, is a general and acknowledged law of the
human mind. We grow attached to the mathematics only from finding out
their truth; and their utility chiefly consists (at present) in the
contemplative pleasure they afford to the student. Lines, points,
angles, squares, and circles are not interesting in themselves; they
become so by the power of mind exerted in comprehending their properties
and relations. People dispute for ever about Hogarth. The question has
not in one respect been fairly stated. The merit of his pictures does
not so much depend on the nature of the subject, as on the knowledge
displayed of it, on the number of ideas they excite, on the fund of
thought and observation contained in them. They are to be looked on as
works of science; they gratify our love of truth; they fill up the void
of the mind: they are a series of plates of natural history, and also of
that most interesting part of natural history, the history of man. The
superiority of high art over the common or mechanical consists in
combining truth of imitation with beauty and grandeur of subject. The
historical painter is superior to the flower-painter, because he
combines or ought to combine human interests and passions with the same
power of imitating external nature; or, indeed, with greater, for the
greatest difficulty of imitation is the power of imitating expression.
The difficulty of copying increases with our knowledge of the object;
and that again with the interest we take in it. The same argument might
be applied to shew that the poet and painter of imagination are superior
to the mere philosopher or man of science, because they exercise the
powers of reason and intellect combined with nature and passion. They
treat of the highest categories of the human soul, pleasure and pain.
From the foregoing train of reasoning, we may easily account for the too
great tendency of art to run into pedantry and affectation. There is ‘a
pleasure in art which none but artists feel.’ They see beauty where
others see nothing of the sort, in wrinkles, deformity, and old age.
They see it in Titian’s Schoolmaster as well as in Raphael’s Galatea; in
the dark shadows of Rembrandt as well as in the splendid colours of
Rubens; in an angel’s or in a butterfly’s wings. They see with different
eyes from the multitude. But true genius, though it has new sources of
pleasure opened to it, does not lose its sympathy with humanity. It
combines truth of imitation with effect, the parts with the whole, the
means with the end. The mechanic artist sees only that which nobody else
sees, and is conversant only with the technical language and
difficulties of his art. A painter, if shewn a picture, will generally
dwell upon the academic skill displayed in it, and the knowledge of the
received rules of composition. A musician, if asked to play a tune, will
select that which is the most difficult and the least intelligible. The
poet will be struck with the harmony of versification, or the
elaborateness of the arrangement in a composition. The conceits in
Shakspeare were his greatest delight; and improving upon this perverse
method of judging, the German writers, Goethe and Schiller, look upon
Werter and The Robbers as the worst of all their works, because they are
the most popular. Some artists among ourselves have carried the same
principle to a singular excess.[51] If professors themselves are liable
to this kind of pedantry, connoisseurs and dilettanti, who have less
sensibility and more affectation, are almost wholly swayed by it. They
see nothing in a picture but the execution. They are proud of their
knowledge in proportion as it is a secret. The worst judges of pictures
in the United Kingdom are, first, picture-dealers; next, perhaps, the
Directors of the British Institution; and after them, in all
probability, the Members of the Royal Academy.
T. T.
NO. 21.] ON _GUSTO_ [MAY 26, 1816.
Gusto in art is power or passion defining any object. It is not so
difficult to explain this term in what relates to expression (of which
it may be said to be the highest degree) as in what relates to things
without expression, to the natural appearances of objects, as mere
colour or form. In one sense, however, there is hardly any object
entirely devoid of expression, without some character of power belonging
to it, some precise association with pleasure or pain: and it is in
giving this truth of character from the truth of feeling, whether in the
highest or the lowest degree, but always in the highest degree of which
the subject is capable, that gusto consists.
There is a gusto in the colouring of Titian. Not only do his heads seem
to think—his bodies seem to feel. This is what the Italians mean by the
_morbidezza_ of his flesh-colour. It seems sensitive and alive all over;
not merely to have the look and texture of flesh, but the feeling in
itself. For example, the limbs of his female figures have a luxurious
softness and delicacy, which appears conscious of the pleasure of the
beholder. As the objects themselves in nature would produce an
impression on the sense, distinct from every other object, and having
something divine in it, which the heart owns and the imagination
consecrates, the objects in the picture preserve the same impression,
absolute, unimpaired, stamped with all the truth of passion, the pride
of the eye, and the charm of beauty. Rubens makes his flesh-colour like
flowers; Albano’s is like ivory; Titian’s is like flesh, and like
nothing else. It is as different from that of other painters, as the
skin is from a piece of white or red drapery thrown over it. The blood
circulates here and there, the blue veins just appear, the rest is
distinguished throughout only by that sort of tingling sensation to the
eye, which the body feels within itself. This is gusto. Vandyke’s
flesh-colour, though it has great truth and purity, wants gusto. It has
not the internal character, the living principle in it. It is a smooth
surface, not a warm, moving mass. It is painted without passion, with
indifference. The hand only has been concerned. The impression slides
off from the eye, and does not, like the tones of Titian’s pencil, leave
a sting behind it in the mind of the spectator. The eye does not acquire
a taste or appetite for what it sees. In a word, gusto in painting is
where the impression made on one sense excites by affinity those of
another.
Michael Angelo’s forms are full of gusto. They everywhere obtrude the
sense of power upon the eye. His limbs convey an idea of muscular
strength, of moral grandeur, and even of intellectual dignity: they are
firm, commanding, broad, and massy, capable of executing with ease the
determined purposes of the will. His faces have no other expression than
his figures, conscious power and capacity. They appear only to think
what they shall do, and to know that they can do it. This is what is
meant by saying that his style is hard and masculine. It is the reverse
of Correggio’s, which is effeminate. That is, the gusto of Michael
Angelo consists in expressing energy of will without proportionable
sensibility, Correggio’s in expressing exquisite sensibility without
energy of will. In Correggio’s faces as well as figures we see neither
bones nor muscles, but then what a soul is there, full of sweetness and
of grace—pure, playful, soft, angelical! There is sentiment enough in a
hand painted by Correggio to set up a school of history painters.
Whenever we look at the hands of Correggio’s women or of Raphael’s, we
always wish to touch them.
Again, Titian’s landscapes have a prodigious gusto, both in the
colouring and forms. We shall never forget one that we saw many years
ago in the Orleans Gallery of Acteon hunting. It had a brown, mellow,
autumnal look. The sky was of the colour of stone. The winds seemed to
sing through the rustling branches of the trees, and already you might
hear the twanging of bows resound through the tangled mazes of the wood.
Mr. West, we understand, has this landscape. He will know if this
description of it is just. The landscape back-ground of the St. Peter
Martyr is another well known instance of the power of this great painter
to give a romantic interest and an appropriate character to the objects
of his pencil, where every circumstance adds to the effect of the
scene,—the bold trunks of the tall forest trees, the trailing ground
plants, with that tall convent spire rising in the distance, amidst the
blue sapphire mountains and the golden sky.
Rubens has a great deal of gusto in his Fauns and Satyrs, and in all
that expresses motion, but in nothing else. Rembrandt has it in
everything; everything in his pictures has a tangible character. If he
puts a diamond in the ear of a burgomaster’s wife, it is of the first
water; and his furs and stuffs are proof against a Russian winter.
Raphael’s gusto was only in expression; he had no idea of the character
of anything but the human form. The dryness and poverty of his style in
other respects is a phenomenon in the art. His trees are like sprigs of
grass stuck in a book of botanical specimens. Was it that Raphael never
had time to go beyond the walls of Rome? That he was always in the
streets, at church, or in the bath? He was not one of the Society of
Arcadians.[52]
Claude’s landscapes, perfect as they are, want gusto. This is not easy
to explain. They are perfect abstractions of the visible images of
things; they speak the visible language of nature truly. They resemble a
mirror or a microscope. To the eye only they are more perfect than any
other landscapes that ever were or will be painted; they give more of
nature, as cognisable by one sense alone; but they lay an equal stress
on all visible impressions. They do not interpret one sense by another;
they do not distinguish the character of different objects as we are
taught, and can only be taught, to distinguish them by their effect on
the different senses. That is, his eye wanted imagination: it did not
strongly sympathise with his other faculties. He saw the atmosphere, but
he did not feel it. He painted the trunk of a tree or a rock in the
foreground as smooth—with as complete an abstraction of the gross,
tangible impression, as any other part of the picture. His trees are
perfectly beautiful, but quite immovable; they have a look of
enchantment. In short, his landscapes are unequalled imitations of
nature, released from its subjection to the elements, as if all objects
were become a delightful fairy vision, and the eye had rarefied and
refined away the other senses.
The gusto in the Greek statues is of a very singular kind. The sense of
perfect form nearly occupies the whole mind, and hardly suffers it to
dwell on any other feeling. It seems enough for them _to be_, without
acting or suffering. Their forms are ideal, spiritual. Their beauty is
power. By their beauty they are raised above the frailties of pain or
passion; by their beauty they are deified.
The infinite quantity of dramatic invention in Shakspeare takes from his
gusto. The power he delights to show is not intense, but discursive. He
never insists on anything as much as he might, except a quibble. Milton
has great gusto. He repeats his blows twice; grapples with and exhausts
his subject. His imagination has a double relish of its objects, an
inveterate attachment to the things he describes, and to the words
describing them.
——‘Or where Chineses drive
With sails and wind their _cany_ waggons _light_.’
. . . . .
‘Wild above rule or art, _enormous_ bliss.’
There is a gusto in Pope’s compliments, in Dryden’s satires, and Prior’s
tales; and among prose writers Boccacio and Rabelais had the most of it.
We will only mention one other work which appears to us to be full of
gusto, and that is the _Beggar’s Opera_. If it is not, we are altogether
mistaken in our notions on this delicate subject.
W. H.
NO. 22.] ON PEDANTRY [MARCH 3, 1816.
The power of attaching an interest to the most trifling or painful
pursuits, in which our whole attention and faculties are engaged, is one
of the greatest happinesses of our nature. The common soldier mounts the
breach with joy; the miser deliberately starves himself to death; the
mathematician sets about extracting the cube-root with a feeling of
enthusiasm; and the lawyer sheds tears of admiration over Coke upon
Littleton. It is the same through human life. He who is not in some
measure a pedant, though he may be a wise, cannot be a very happy man.
The chief charm of reading the old novels is from the picture they give
of the egotism of the characters, the importance of each individual to
himself, and his fancied superiority over every one else. We like, for
instance, the pedantry of Parson Adams, who thought a schoolmaster the
greatest character in the world, and that he was the greatest
schoolmaster in it. We do not see any equivalent for the satisfaction
which this conviction must have afforded him in the most nicely
graduated scale of talents and accomplishments to which he was an utter
stranger. When the old-fashioned Scotch pedagogue turns Roderick Random
round and round, and surveys him from head to foot with such infinite
surprise and laughter, at the same time breaking out himself into
gestures and exclamations still more uncouth and ridiculous, who would
wish to have deprived him of this burst of extravagant self-complacency?
When our follies afford equal delight to ourselves and those about us,
what is there to be desired more? We cannot discover the vast advantage
of ‘seeing ourselves as others see us.’ It is better to have a contempt
for any one than for ourselves!
One of the most constant butts of ridicule, both in the old comedies and
novels, is the professional jargon of the medical tribe. Yet it cannot
be denied that this jargon, however affected it may seem, is the natural
language of apothecaries and physicians, the mother-tongue of pharmacy!
It is that by which their knowledge first comes to them, that with which
they have the most obstinate associations, that in which they can
express themselves the most readily and with the best effect upon their
hearers; and though there may be some assumption of superiority in all
this, yet it is only by an effort of circumlocution that they could
condescend to explain themselves in ordinary language. Besides, there is
a delicacy at bottom; as it is the only language in which a nauseous
medicine can be decorously administered, or a limb taken off with the
proper degree of secrecy. If the most blundering coxcombs affect this
language most, what does it signify, while they retain the same
dignified notions of themselves and their art, and are equally happy in
their knowledge or their ignorance? The ignorant and pretending
physician is a capital character in Moliere: and, indeed, throughout his
whole plays the great source of the comic interest is in the fantastic
exaggeration of blind self-love, in letting loose the habitual
peculiarities of each individual from all restraint of conscious
observation or self-knowledge, in giving way to that specific levity of
impulse which mounts at once to the height of absurdity, in spite of the
obstacles that surround it, as a fluid in a barometer rises according to
the pressure of the external air! His characters are almost always
pedantic, and yet the most unconscious of all others. Take, for example,
those two worthy gentlemen, Monsieur Jourdain and Monsieur
Pourceaugnac.[53]
Learning and pedantry were formerly synonymous; and it was well when
they were so. Can there be a higher satisfaction than for a man to
understand Greek, and to believe that there is nothing else worth
understanding? Learning is the knowledge of that which is not generally
known. What an ease and a dignity in pretensions, founded on the
ignorance of others! What a pleasure in wondering, what a pride in being
wondered at! In the library of the family where we were brought up,
stood the _Fratres Poloni_; and we can never forget or describe the
feeling with which not only their appearance, but the names of the
authors on the outside inspired us. Pripscovius, we remember, was one of
the easiest to pronounce. The gravity of the contents seemed in
proportion to the weight of the volumes; the importance of the subjects
increased with our ignorance of them. The trivialness of the remarks, if
ever we looked into them,—the repetitions, the monotony, only gave a
greater solemnity to the whole, as the slowness and minuteness of the
evidence adds to the impressiveness of a judicial proceeding. We knew
that the authors had devoted their whole lives to the production of
these works, carefully abstaining from the introduction of any thing
amusing or lively or interesting. In ten folio volumes there was not one
sally of wit, one striking reflection. What, then, must have been their
sense of the importance of the subject, the profound stores of knowledge
which they had to communicate! ‘From all this world’s encumbrance they
did themselves assoil.’ Such was the notion we then had of this learned
lumber; yet we would rather have this feeling again for one half-hour
than be possessed of all the acuteness of Bayle or the wit of Voltaire!
It may be considered as a sign of the decay of piety and learning in
modern times, that our divines no longer introduce texts of the original
Scriptures into their sermons. The very sound of the original Greek or
Hebrew would impress the hearer with a more lively faith in the sacred
writers than any translation, however literal or correct. It may be even
doubted whether the translation of the Scriptures into the vulgar tongue
was any advantage to the people. The mystery in which particular points
of faith were left involved, gave an awe and sacredness to religious
opinions: the general purport of the truths and promises of revelation
was made known by other means; and nothing beyond this general and
implicit conviction can be obtained, where all is undefined and
infinite.
Again, it may be questioned whether, in matters of mere human reasoning,
much has been gained by the disuse of the learned languages. Sir Isaac
Newton wrote in Latin; and it is perhaps one of Bacon’s fopperies that
he translated his works into English. If certain follies have been
exposed by being stripped of their formal disguise, others have had a
greater chance of succeeding, by being presented in a more pleasing and
popular shape. This has been remarkably the case in France, (the least
pedantic country in the world), where the women mingle with everything,
even with metaphysics, and where all philosophy is reduced to a set of
phrases for the toilette. When books are written in the prevailing
language of the country, every one becomes a critic who can read. An
author is no longer tried by his peers. A species of universal suffrage
is introduced in letters, which is only applicable to politics. The good
old Latin style of our forefathers, if it concealed the dullness of the
writer, at least was a barrier against the impertinence, flippancy, and
ignorance of the reader. However, the immediate transition from the
pedantic to the popular style in literature was a change that must have
been very delightful at the time. Our illustrious predecessors, the
_Tatler_ and _Spectator_, were very happily off in this respect. They
wore the public favour in its newest gloss, before it had become
tarnished and common—before familiarity had bred contempt. It was the
honey-moon of authorship. Their Essays were among the first instances in
this country of learning sacrificing to the graces, and of a mutual
understanding and good-humoured equality between the writer and the
reader. This new style of composition, to use the phraseology of Mr.
Burke, ‘mitigated authors into companions, and compelled wisdom to
submit to the soft collar of social esteem.’ The original papers of the
_Tatler_, printed on a half sheet of common foolscap, were regularly
served up at breakfast-time with the silver tea-kettle and thin slices
of bread and butter; and what the ingenious Mr. Bickerstaff wrote
overnight in his easy chair, he might flatter himself would be read the
next morning with elegant applause by the fair, the witty, the learned,
and the great, in all parts of this kingdom, in which civilisation had
made any considerable advances. The perfection of letters is when the
highest ambition of the writer is to please his readers, and the
greatest pride of the reader is to understand his author. The
satisfaction on both sides ceases when the town becomes a club of
authors, when each man stands with his manuscript in his hand waiting
for his turn of applause, and when the claims on our admiration are so
many, that, like those of common beggars, to prevent imposition they can
only be answered with general neglect. Our self-love would be quite
bankrupt, if critics by profession did not come forward as beadles to
keep off the crowd, and to relieve us from the importunity of these
innumerable candidates for fame, by pointing out their faults and
passing over their beauties. In the more auspicious period just alluded
to an author was regarded by the better sort as a man of genius, and by
the vulgar, as a kind of prodigy; insomuch that the Spectator was
obliged to shorten his residence at his friend Sir Roger de Coverley’s,
from his being taken for a conjuror. Every state of society has its
advantages and disadvantages. An author is at present in no danger of
being taken for a conjuror!
NO. 23.] THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED [MARCH 10, 1816.
Life is the art of being well deceived; and in order that the deception
may succeed, it must be habitual and uninterrupted. A constant
examination of the value of our opinions and enjoyments, compared with
those of others, may lessen our prejudices, but will leave nothing for
our affections to rest upon. A multiplicity of objects unsettles the
mind, and destroys not only all enthusiasm, but all sincerity of
attachment, all constancy of pursuit; as persons accustomed to an
itinerant mode of life never feel themselves at home in any place. It is
by means of habit that our intellectual employments mix like our food
with the circulation of the blood, and go on like any other part of the
animal functions. To take away the force of habit and prejudice
entirely, is to strike at the root of our personal existence. The
book-worm, buried in the depth of his researches, may well say to the
obtrusive shifting realities of the world, ‘Leave me to my repose!’ We
have seen an instance of a poetical enthusiast, who would have passed
his life very comfortably in the contemplation of _his own idea_, if he
had not been disturbed in his reverie by the Reviewers; and for our own
parts, we think we could pass our lives very learnedly and classically
in one of the quadrangles at Oxford, without any idea at all, vegetating
merely on the air of the place. Chaucer has drawn a beautiful picture of
a true scholar in his Clerk of Oxenford:
‘A Clerk ther was of Oxenforde also,
That unto logik, hadde longe ygo.
As lene was his hors as is a rake,
And he was not right fat, I undertake;
But loked holwe, and thereto soberly.
Ful thredbare was his overest courtepy,
For he hadde geten him yit no benefice,
Ne was nought worldly to have an office.
For him was lever have at his beddes hed
A twenty bokes, clothed in blak or red,
Of Aristotle and his philosophie,
Then robes riche, or fidel, or sautrie.
But all be that he was a philosophre,
Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre,
But al that he might of his frendes hente,
On bokes and on lerning he it spente,
And besily gan for the soules praie
Of hem, that gave him wherwith to scolaie.
Of studie toke he moste care and hede.
Not a word spake he more than was nede;
And that was said in forme and reverence,
And short, and quike, and full of high sentence.
Sowning in moral vertue was his speche,
And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.’
If letters have profited little by throwing down the barrier between
learned prejudice and ignorant presumption, the arts have profited still
less by the universal diffusion of accomplishment and pretension. An
artist is no longer looked upon as any thing, who is not at the same
time ‘chemist, statesman, fiddler, and buffoon.’ It is expected of him
that he should be well-dressed, and he is poor; that he should move
gracefully, and he has never learned to dance; that he should converse
on all subjects, and he understands but one; that he should be read in
different languages, and he only knows his own. Yet there is one
language, the language of Nature, in which it is enough for him to be
able to read, to find everlasting employment and solace to his thoughts—
‘Tongues in the trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.’
He will find no end of his labours or of his triumphs there; yet still
feel all his strength not more than equal to the task he has begun—his
whole life too short for art. Rubens complained, that just as he was
beginning to understand his profession, he was forced to quit it. It was
a saying of Michael Angelo, that ‘painting was jealous, and required the
whole man to herself.’ Is it to be supposed that Rembrandt did not find
sufficient resources against the spleen in the little cell, where
mystery and silence hung upon his pencil, or the noon-tide ray
penetrated the solemn gloom around him, without the aid of modern
newspapers, novels, and reviews? Was he not more wisely employed, while
devoted solely to his art—married to that immortal bride! We do not
imagine Sir Joshua Reynolds was much happier for having written his
lectures, nor for the learned society he kept, friendship apart; and
learned society is not necessary to friendship. He was evidently, as far
as conversation was concerned, little at his ease in it; and he was
always glad, as he himself said, after he had been entertained at the
houses of the great, to get back to his painting-room again. Any one
settled pursuit, together with the ordinary alternations of leisure,
exercise, and amusement, and the natural feelings and relations of
society, is quite enough to take up the whole of our thoughts, time, and
affections; and any thing beyond this will, generally speaking, only
tend to dissipate and distract the mind. There is no end of
accomplishments, of the prospect of new acquisitions of taste or skill,
or of the uneasiness arising from the want of them, if we once indulge
in this idle habit of vanity and affectation. The mind is never
satisfied with what it is, but is always looking out for fanciful
perfections, which it can neither attain nor practise. Our failure in
any one object is fatal to our enjoyment of all the rest; and the
chances of disappointment multiply with the number of our pursuits. In
catching at the shadow, we lose the substance. No man can thoroughly
master more than one art or science. The world has never seen a perfect
painter. What would it have availed for Raphael to have aimed at
Titian’s colouring, or for Titian to have imitated Raphael’s drawing,
but to have diverted each from the true bent of his natural genius, and
to have made each sensible of his own deficiencies, without any
probability of supplying them? Pedantry in art, in learning, in every
thing, is the setting an extraordinary value on that which we can do,
and that which we understand best, and which it is our business to do
and understand. Where is the harm of this? To possess or even understand
all kinds of excellence equally, is impossible; and to pretend to admire
that to which we are indifferent, as much as that which is of the
greatest use, and which gives the greatest pleasure to us, is not
liberality, but affectation. Is an artist, for instance, to be required
to feel the same admiration for the works of Handel as for those of
Raphael? If he is sincere, he cannot: and a man, to be free from
pedantry, must be either a coxcomb or a hypocrite. Vestris was so far in
the right, in saying that Voltaire and he were the two greatest men in
Europe. Voltaire was so in the public opinion, and he was so in his own.
Authors and literary people have been unjustly accused for arrogating an
exclusive preference to letters over other arts. They are justified in
doing this, because words are the most natural and universal language,
and because they have the sympathy of the world with them. Poets, for
the same reason, have a right to be the vainest of authors. The
prejudice attached to established reputation is, in like manner,
perfectly well founded, because that which has longest excited our
admiration and the admiration of mankind, is most entitled to
admiration, on the score of habit, sympathy, and deference to public
opinion. There is a sentiment attached to classical reputation, which
cannot belong to new works of genius, till they become old in their
turn.
There appears to be a natural division of labour in the ornamental as
well as the mechanical arts of human life. We do not see why a nobleman
should wish to shine as a poet, any more than to be dubbed a knight, or
to be created Lord Mayor of London. If he succeeds, he gains nothing;
and then if he is damned, what a ridiculous figure he makes! The great,
instead of rivalling them, should keep authors, as they formerly kept
fools,—a practice in itself highly laudable, and the disuse of which
might be referred to as the first symptom of the degeneracy of modern
times, and dissolution of the principles of social order! But of all the
instances of a profession now unjustly obsolete, commend us to the
alchemist. We see him sitting fortified in his prejudices, with his
furnace, his diagrams, and his alembics; smiling at disappointments as
proofs of the sublimity of his art, and the earnest of his future
success: wondering at his own knowledge and the incredulity of others;
fed with hope to the last gasp, and having all the pleasures without the
pain of madness. What is there in the discoveries of modern chemistry
equal to the very names of the ELIXIR VITÆ and the AURUM POTABILE!
In _Froissard’s Chronicles_ there is an account of a reverend Monk who
had been a robber in the early part of his life, and who, when he grew
old, used feelingly to lament that he had ever changed his profession.
He said, ‘It was a goodly sight to sally out from his castle, and to see
a troop of jolly friars coming riding that way, with their mules well
laden with viands and rich stores, to advance towards them, to attack
and overthrow them, returning to the castle with a noble booty.’ He
preferred this mode of life to counting his beads and chaunting his
vespers, and repented that he had ever been prevailed on to relinquish
so laudable a calling. In this confession of remorse, we may be sure
that there was no hypocrisy.
The difference in the character of the gentlemen of the present age and
those of the old school, has been often insisted on. The character of a
gentleman is a _relative term_, which can hardly subsist where there is
no marked distinction of persons. The diffusion of knowledge, of
artificial and intellectual equality, tends to level this distinction,
and to confound that nice perception and high sense of honour, which
arises from conspicuousness of situation, and a perpetual attention to
personal propriety and the claims of personal respect. The age of
chivalry is gone with the improvements in the art of war, which
superseded the exercise of personal courage; and the character of a
gentleman must disappear with those general refinements in manners,
which render the advantages of rank and situation accessible almost to
every one. The bag-wig and sword naturally followed the fate of the
helmet and the spear, when these outward insignia no longer implied
acknowledged superiority, and were a distinction without a difference.
The spirit of chivalrous and romantic love proceeded on the same
exclusive principle. It was an enthusiastic adoration, an idolatrous
worship paid to sex and beauty. This, even in its blindest excess, was
better than the cold indifference and prostituted gallantry of this
philosophic age. The extreme tendency of civilisation is to dissipate
all intellectual energy, and dissolve all moral principle. We are
sometimes inclined to regret the innovations on the Catholic religion.
It was a noble charter for ignorance, dullness, and prejudice of all
kinds, (perhaps, after all, ‘the sovereign’st things on earth’), and put
an effectual stop to the vanity and restlessness of opinion. ‘It wrapped
the human understanding all round like a blanket.’ Since the
Reformation, altars, unsprinkled by holy oil, are no longer sacred; and
thrones, unsupported by the divine right, have become uneasy and
insecure.
W. H.
NO. 24.] ON THE CHARACTER OF ROUSSEAU [APRIL 14, 1816.
Madame de Stael, in her Letters on the Writings and Character of
Rousseau, gives it as her opinion, ‘that the imagination was the first
faculty of his mind, and that this faculty even absorbed all the
others.’[54] And she farther adds, ‘Rousseau had great strength of
reason on abstract questions, or with respect to objects, which have no
reality but in the mind.’[55] Both these opinions are radically wrong.
Neither imagination nor reason can properly be said to have been the
original predominant faculties of his mind. The strength both of
imagination and reason, which he possessed, was borrowed from the excess
of another faculty; and the weakness and poverty of reason and
imagination, which are to be found in his works, may be traced to the
same source, namely, that these faculties in him were artificial,
secondary, and dependant, operating by a power not theirs, but lent to
them. The only quality which he possessed in an eminent degree, which
alone raised him above ordinary men, and which gave to his writings and
opinions an influence greater, perhaps, than has been exerted by any
individual in modern times, was extreme sensibility, or an acute and
even morbid feeling of all that related to his own impressions, to the
objects and events of his life. He had the most intense consciousness of
his own existence. No object that had once made an impression on him was
ever after effaced. Every feeling in his mind became a passion. His
craving after excitement was an appetite and a disease. His interest in
his own thoughts and feelings was always wound up to the highest pitch;
and hence the enthusiasm which he excited in others. He owed the power
which he exercised over the opinions of all Europe, by which he created
numberless disciples, and overturned established systems, to the tyranny
which his feelings, in the first instance, exercised over himself. The
dazzling blaze of his reputation was kindled by the same fire that fed
upon his vitals.[56] His ideas differed from those of other men only in
their force and intensity. His genius was the effect of his temperament.
He created nothing, he demonstrated nothing, by a pure effort of the
understanding. His fictitious characters are modifications of his own
being, reflections and shadows of himself. His speculations are the
obvious exaggerations of a mind, giving a loose to its habitual
impulses, and moulding all nature to its own purposes. Hence his
enthusiasm and his eloquence, bearing down all opposition. Hence the
warmth and the luxuriance, as well as the sameness of his descriptions.
Hence the frequent verboseness of his style; for passion lends force and
reality to language, and makes words supply the place of imagination.
Hence the tenaciousness of his logic, the acuteness of his observations,
the refinement and the inconsistency of his reasoning. Hence his keen
penetration, and his strange want of comprehension of mind: for the same
intense feeling which enabled him to discern the first principles of
things, and seize some one view of a subject in all its ramifications,
prevented him from admitting the operation of other causes which
interfered with his favourite purpose, and involved him in endless
wilful contradictions. Hence his excessive egotism, which filled all
objects with himself, and would have occupied the universe with his
smallest interest. Hence his jealousy and suspicion of others; for no
attention, no respect or sympathy, could come up to the extravagant
claims of his self-love. Hence his dissatisfaction with himself and with
all around him; for nothing could satisfy his ardent longings after
good, his restless appetite of being. Hence his feelings, overstrained
and exhausted, recoiled upon themselves, and produced his love of
silence and repose, his feverish aspirations after the quiet and
solitude of nature. Hence in part also his quarrel with the artificial
institutions and distinctions of society, which opposed so many barriers
to the unrestrained indulgence of his will, and allured his imagination
to scenes of pastoral simplicity or of savage life, where the passions
were either not excited or left to follow their own impulse,—where the
petty vexations and irritating disappointments of common life had no
place,—and where the tormenting pursuits of arts and sciences were lost
in pure animal enjoyment, or indolent repose. Thus he describes the
first savage wandering for ever under the shade of magnificent forests,
or by the side of mighty rivers, smit with the unquenchable love of
nature!
The best of all his works is the _Confessions_, though it is that which
has been least read, because it contains the fewest set paradoxes or
general opinions. It relates entirely to himself; and no one was ever so
much at home on this subject as he was. From the strong hold which they
had taken of his mind, he makes us enter into his feelings as if they
had been our own, and we seem to remember every incident and
circumstance of his life as if it had happened to ourselves. We are
never tired of this work, for it everywhere presents us with pictures
which we can fancy to be counterparts of our own existence. The passages
of this sort are innumerable. There is the interesting account of his
childhood, the constraints and thoughtless liberty of which are so well
described; of his sitting up all night reading romances with his father,
till they were forced to desist by hearing the swallows twittering in
their nests; his crossing the Alps, described with all the feelings
belonging to it, his pleasure in setting out, his satisfaction in coming
to his journey’s end, the delight of ‘coming and going he knew not
where’; his arriving at Turin; the figure of Madame Basile, drawn with
such inimitable precision and elegance; the delightful adventure of the
Chateau de Toune, where he passed the day with Mademoiselle G**** and
Mademoiselle Galley; the story of his Zulietta, the proud, the charming
Zulietta, whose last words, ‘_Va Zanetto, e studia la Matematica_,’ were
never to be forgotten; his sleeping near Lyons in a niche of the wall,
after a fine summer’s day, with a nightingale perched above his head;
his first meeting with Madame Warens, the pomp of sound with which he
has celebrated her name, beginning ‘_Louise Eleonore de Warens étoit une
demoiselle de la Tour de Pil, noble et ancienne famille de Vevai, ville
du pays de Vaud_’ (sounds which we still tremble to repeat); his
description of her person, her angelic smile, her mouth of the size of
his own; his walking out one day while the bells were chiming to
vespers, and anticipating in a sort of waking dream the life he
afterwards led with her, in which months and years, and life itself
passed away in undisturbed felicity; the sudden disappointment of his
hopes; his transport thirty years after at seeing the same flower which
they had brought home together from one of their rambles near Chambery;
his thoughts in that long interval of time; his suppers with Grimm and
Diderot after he came to Paris; the first idea of his prize dissertation
on the savage state; his account of writing the _New Eloise_, and his
attachment to Madame d’Houdetot; his literary projects, his fame, his
misfortunes, his unhappy temper; his last solitary retirement in the
lake and island of Bienne, with his dog and his boat; his reveries and
delicious musings there; all these crowd into our minds with
recollections which we do not chuse to express. There are no passages in
the _New Eloise_ of equal force and beauty with the best descriptions in
the _Confessions_, if we except the excursion on the water, Julia’s last
letter to St. Preux, and his letter to her, recalling the days of their
first loves. We spent two whole years in reading these two works; and
(gentle reader, it was when we were young) in shedding tears over them
——‘As fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinal gums.’
They were the happiest years of our life. We may well say of them, sweet
is the dew of their memory, and pleasant the balm of their recollection!
There are, indeed, impressions which neither time nor circumstances can
efface.[57]
Rousseau, in all his writings, never once lost sight of himself. He was
the same individual from first to last. The spring that moved his
passions never went down, the pulse that agitated his heart never ceased
to beat. It was this strong feeling of interest, accumulating in his
mind, which overpowers and absorbs the feelings of his readers. He owed
all his power to sentiment. The writer who most nearly resembles him in
our own times is the author of the _Lyrical Ballads_. We see no other
difference between them, than that the one wrote in prose and the other
in poetry; and that prose is perhaps better adapted to express those
local and personal feelings, which are inveterate habits in the mind,
than poetry, which embodies its imaginary creations. We conceive that
Rousseau’s exclamation, ‘_Ah, voila de la pervenche_,’ comes more home
to the mind than Mr. Wordsworth’s discovery of the linnet’s nest ‘with
five blue eggs,’ or than his address to the cuckoo, beautiful as we
think it is; and we will confidently match the Citizen of Geneva’s
adventures on the Lake of Bienne against the Cumberland Poet’s floating
dreams on the Lake of Grasmere. Both create an interest out of nothing,
or rather out of their own feelings; both weave numberless recollections
into one sentiment; both wind their own being round whatever object
occurs to them. But Rousseau, as a prose-writer, gives only the habitual
and personal impression. Mr. Wordsworth, as a poet, is forced to lend
the colours of imagination to impressions which owe all their force to
their identity with themselves, and tries to paint what is only to be
felt. Rousseau, in a word, interests you in certain objects by
interesting you in himself: Mr. Wordsworth would persuade you that the
most insignificant objects are interesting in themselves, because he is
interested in them. If he had met with Rousseau’s favourite periwinkle,
he would have _translated_ it into the most beautiful of flowers. This
is not imagination, but want of sense. If his jealousy of the sympathy
of others makes him avoid what is beautiful and grand in nature, why
does he undertake elaborately to describe other objects? _His_ nature is
a mere Dulcinea del Toboso, and he would make a Vashti of her. Rubens
appears to have been as extravagantly attached to his three wives, as
Raphael was to his Fornarina; but their faces were not so classical. The
three greatest egotists that we know of, that is, the three writers who
felt their own being most powerfully and exclusively, are Rousseau,
Wordsworth, and Benvenuto Cellini. As Swift somewhere says, we defy the
world to furnish out a fourth.
W. H.
NO. 25.] ON DIFFERENT SORTS OF FAME [APRIL 21, 1816.
There is a half serious, half ironical argument in Melmoth’s
_Fitz-Osborn’s Letters_, to shew the futility of posthumous fame, which
runs thus: ‘The object of any one who is inspired with this passion is
to be remembered by posterity with admiration and delight, as having
been possessed of certain powers and excellences which distinguished him
above his contemporaries. But posterity, it is said, can know nothing of
the individual but from the memory of these qualities which he has left
behind him. All that we know of Julius Cæsar, for instance, is that he
was the person who performed certain actions, and wrote a book called
his _Commentaries_. When, therefore, we extol Julius Cæsar for his
actions or his writings, what do we say but that the person who
performed certain things did perform them; that the author of such a
work was the person who wrote it; or, in short, that Julius Cæsar was
Julius Cæsar? Now this is a mere truism, and the desire to be the
subject of such an identical proposition must, therefore, be an evident
absurdity.’ The sophism is a tolerably ingenious one, but it is a
sophism, nevertheless. It would go equally to prove the nullity, not
only of posthumous fame, but of living reputation; for the good or the
bad opinion which my next-door neighbour may entertain of me is nothing
more than his conviction that such and such a person having certain good
or bad qualities is possessed of them; nor is the figure, which a
Lord-Mayor elect, a prating demagogue, or popular preacher, makes in the
eyes of the admiring multitude—_himself_, but an image of him reflected
in the minds of others, in connection with certain feelings of respect
and wonder. In fact, whether the admiration we seek is to last for a day
or for eternity, whether we are to have it while living or after we are
dead, whether it is to be expressed by our contemporaries or by future
generations, the principle of it is the same—_sympathy with the feelings
of others_, and the necessary tendency which the idea or consciousness
of the approbation of others has to strengthen the suggestions of our
self-love.[58] We are all inclined to think well of ourselves, of our
sense and capacity in whatever we undertake; but from this very desire
to think well of ourselves, we are (as _Mrs. Peachum_ says) ‘_bitter_
bad judges’ of our own pretensions; and when our vanity flatters us
most, we ought in general to suspect it most. We are, therefore, glad to
get the good opinion of a friend, but that may be partial; the good word
of a stranger is likely to be more sincere, but he may be a blockhead;
the multitude will agree with us, if we agree with them; accident, the
caprice of fashion, the prejudice of the moment, may give a fleeting
reputation; our only certain appeal, therefore, is to posterity; the
voice of fame is alone the voice of truth. In proportion, however, as
this award is final and secure, it is remote and uncertain. Voltaire
said to some one, who had addressed an Epistle to Posterity, ‘I am
afraid, my friend, this letter will never be delivered according to its
direction.’ It can exist only in imagination; and we can only presume
upon our claim to it, as we prefer the hope of lasting fame to every
thing else. The love of fame is almost another name for the love of
excellence; or it is the ambition to attain the highest excellence,
sanctioned by the highest authority, that of time. Vanity, and the love
of fame, are quite distinct from each other; for the one is voracious of
the most obvious and doubtful applause, whereas the other rejects or
overlooks every kind of applause but that which is purified from every
mixture of flattery, and identified with truth and nature itself. There
is, therefore, something disinterested in this passion, inasmuch as it
is abstracted and ideal, and only appeals to opinion as a standard of
truth; it is this which ‘makes ambition virtue.’ Milton had as fine an
idea as any one of true fame; and Dr. Johnson has very beautifully
described his patient and confident anticipations of the success of his
great poem in the account of _Paradise Lost_. He has, indeed, done the
same thing himself in _Lycidas_:
‘Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious days;
But the fair Guerdon when we hope to find,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind Fury with th’ abhorred shears,
And slits the thin-spun life. But not the praise,
Phœbus replied, and touch’d my trembling ears.’
None but those who have sterling pretensions can afford to refer them to
time; as persons who live upon their means cannot well go into Chancery.
No feeling can be more at variance with the true love of fame than that
impatience which we have sometimes witnessed to ‘pluck its fruits,
unripe and crude,’ before the time, to make a little echo of popularity
mimic the voice of fame, and to convert a prize-medal or a
newspaper-puff into a passport to immortality.
When we hear any one complaining that he has not the same fame as some
poet or painter who lived two hundred years ago, he seems to us to
complain that he has not been dead these two hundred years. When his
fame has undergone the same ordeal, that is, has lasted as long, it will
be as good, if he really deserves it. We think it equally absurd, when
we sometimes find people objecting, that such an acquaintance of theirs,
who has not an idea in his head, should be so much better off in the
world than they are. But it is for this very reason; they have preferred
the indulgence of their ideas to the pursuit of realities. It is but
fair that he who has no ideas should have something in their stead. If
he who has devoted his time to the study of beauty, to the pursuit of
truth, whose object has been to govern opinion, to form the taste of
others, to instruct or to amuse the public, succeeds in this respect, he
has no more right to complain that he has not a title or a fortune, than
he who has not purchased a ticket, that is, who has taken no means to
the end, has a right to complain that he has not a prize in the lottery.
In proportion as men can command the immediate and vulgar applause of
others, they become indifferent to that which is remote and difficult of
attainment. We take pains only when we are compelled to do it. Little
men are remarked to have courage; little women to have wit; and it is
seldom that a man of genius is a coxcomb in his dress. Rich men are
contented not to be thought wise; and the Great often think themselves
well off, if they can escape being the jest of their acquaintance.
Authors were actuated by the desire of the applause of posterity, only
so long as they were debarred of that of their contemporaries, just as
we see the map of the gold-mines of Peru hanging in the room of
Hogarth’s _Distressed Poet_. In the midst of the ignorance and
prejudices with which they were surrounded, they had a sort of _forlorn
hope_ in the prospect of immortality. The spirit of universal criticism
has superseded the anticipation of posthumous fame, and instead of
waiting for the award of distant ages, the poet or prose-writer receives
his final doom from the next number of the _Edinburgh_ or _Quarterly
Review_. According as the nearness of the applause increases, our
impatience increases with it. A writer in a weekly journal engages with
reluctance in a monthly publication: and again, a contributor to a daily
paper sets about his task with greater spirit than either of them. It is
like prompt payment. The effort and the applause go together. We,
indeed, have known a man of genius and eloquence, to whom, from a habit
of excessive talking, the certainty of seeing what he wrote in print the
next day was too remote a stimulus for his imagination, and who
constantly laid aside his pen in the middle of an article, if a friend
dropped in, to finish the subject more effectually aloud, so that the
approbation of his hearer, and the sound of his own voice might be
co-instantaneous. Members of Parliament seldom turn authors, except to
print their speeches when they have not been distinctly heard or
understood; and great orators are generally very indifferent writers,
from want of sufficient inducement to exert themselves, when the
immediate effect on others is not perceived, and the irritation of
applause or opposition ceases.
There have been in the last century two singular examples of literary
reputation, the one of an author without a name, and the other of a name
without an author. We mean the author of _Junius’s Letters_, and the
translator of the mottos to the _Rambler_, whose name was Elphinstone.
The _Rambler_ was published in the year 1750, and the name of
Elphinstone prefixed to each paper is familiar to every literary reader,
since that time, though we know nothing more of him. We saw this
gentleman, since the commencement of the present century, looking over a
clipped hedge in the country, with a broad-flapped hat, a venerable
countenance, and his dress cut out with the same formality as his
ever-greens. His name had not only survived half a century in
conjunction with that of Johnson, but he had survived with it, enjoying
all the dignity of a classical reputation, and the ease of a literary
sinecure, on the strength of his mottos. The author of _Junius’s
Letters_ is, on the contrary, as remarkable an instance of a writer who
has arrived at all the public honours of literature, without being known
by name to a single individual, and who may be said to have realised all
the pleasure of posthumous fame, while living, without the smallest
gratification of personal vanity. An anonymous writer may feel an acute
interest in what is said of his productions, and a secret satisfaction
in their success, because it is not the effect of personal
considerations, as the overhearing any one speak well of us is more
agreeable than a direct compliment. But this very satisfaction will
tempt him to communicate his secret. This temptation, however, does not
extend beyond the circle of his acquaintance. With respect to the
public, who know an author only by his writings, it is of little
consequence whether he has a real or a fictitious name, or a signature,
so that they have some clue by which to associate the works with the
author. In the case of _Junius_, therefore, where other personal
considerations of interest or connections might immediately counteract
and set aside this temptation, the triumph over the mere vanity of
authorship might not have cost him so dear as we are at first inclined
to imagine. Suppose it to have been the old Marquis of ——? It is quite
out of the question that he should keep his places and not keep his
secret. If ever the King should die, we think it not impossible that the
secret may out. Certainly the _accouchement_ of any princess in Europe
would not excite an equal interest. ‘And you, then, Sir, are the author
of _Junius_!’ What a recognition for the public and the author! That
between Yorick and the Frenchman was a trifle to it.
We have said that we think the desire to be known by name as an author
chiefly has a reference to those to whom we are known personally, and is
strongest with regard to those who know most of our persons and least of
our capacities. We wish to _subpœna_ the public to our characters. Those
who, by great services or great meannesses, have attained titles, always
take them from the place with which they have the earliest associations,
and thus strive to throw a veil of importance over the insignificance of
their original pretensions, or the injustice of fortune. When Lord
Nelson was passing over the quay at Yarmouth, to take possession of the
ship to which he had been appointed, the people exclaimed, ‘Why make
that little fellow a captain?’ He thought of this when he fought the
battles of the Nile and Trafalgar. The same sense of personal
insignificance which made him great in action made him a fool in love.
If Bonaparte had been six inches higher, he never would have gone on
that disastrous Russian expedition, nor ‘with that addition’ would he
ever have been Emperor and King. For our own parts, one object which we
have in writing these Essays, is to send them in a volume to a person
who took some notice of us when children, and who augured, perhaps,
better of us than we deserved. In fact, the opinion of those who know us
most, who are a kind of second self in our recollections, is a sort of
second conscience; and the approbation of one or two friends is all the
immortality _we_ pretend to.
A.
NO. 26.] CHARACTER OF JOHN BULL [MAY 19, 1816.
In a late number of a respectable publication, there is the following
description of the French character:—
‘Extremes meet. This is the only way of accounting for that enigma, the
French character. It has often been remarked, that this ingenious nation
exhibits more striking contradictions than any other that ever existed.
They are the gayest of the gay, and the gravest of the grave. Their very
faces pass at once from an expression of the most lively animation, when
they are in conversation or in action, to a melancholy blank. They are
the lightest and most volatile, and at the same time the most plodding,
mechanical, and laborious people in Europe. They are one moment the
slaves of the most contemptible prejudices, and the next launch out into
all the extravagance of the most abstract speculations. In matters of
taste they are as inexorable as they are lax in questions of morality;
they judge of the one by rules, of the other by their inclinations. It
seems at times as if nothing could shock them, and yet they are offended
at the merest trifles. The smallest things make the greatest impression
on them. From the facility with which they can accommodate themselves to
circumstances, they have no fixed principles or real character. They are
always that which gives them least pain, or costs them least trouble.
They easily disentangle their thoughts from whatever causes the
slightest uneasiness, and direct their sensibility to flow in any
channels they think proper. Their whole existence is more theatrical
than real—their sentiments put on or off like the dress of an actor.
Words are with them equivalent to things. They say what is agreeable,
and believe what they say. Virtue and vice, good and evil, liberty and
slavery, are matters almost of indifference. Their natural
self-complacency stands them in stead of all other advantages.’
The foregoing account is pretty near the truth; we have nothing to say
against it; but we shall here endeavour to do a like piece of justice to
our countrymen, who are too apt to mistake the vices of others for so
many virtues in themselves.
If a Frenchman is pleased with every thing, John Bull is pleased with
nothing, and that is a fault. He is, to be sure, fond of having his own
way, till you let him have it. He is a very headstrong animal, who
mistakes the spirit of contradiction for the love of independence, and
proves himself to be in the right by the obstinacy with which he
stickles for the wrong. You cannot put him so much out of his way as by
agreeing with him. He is never in such good-humour as with what gives
him the spleen, and is most satisfied when he is sulky. If you find
fault with him, he is in a rage; and if you praise him, suspects you
have a design upon him. He recommends himself to another by affronting
him, and if that will not do, knocks him down to convince him of his
sincerity. He gives himself such airs as no mortal ever did, and wonders
at the rest of the world for not thinking him the most amiable person
breathing. John means well too, but he has an odd way of showing it, by
a total disregard of other people’s feelings and opinions. He is
sincere, for he tells you at the first word he does not like you; and
never deceives, for he never offers to serve you. A civil answer is too
much to expect from him. A word costs him more than a blow. He is silent
because he has nothing to say, and he looks stupid because he is so. He
has the strangest notions of beauty. The expression he values most in
the human countenance is an appearance of roast beef and plum-pudding;
and if he has a red face and round belly, thinks himself a great man. He
is a little purse-proud, and has a better opinion of himself for having
made a full meal. But his greatest delight is in a bugbear. This he must
have, be the consequence what it may. Whoever will give him that, may
lead him by the nose, and pick his pocket at the same time. An idiot in
a country town, a Presbyterian parson, a dog with a cannister tied to
his tail, a bull-bait, or a fox-hunt, are irresistible attractions to
him. The Pope was formerly his great aversion, and latterly, a cap of
liberty is a thing he cannot abide. He discarded the Pope, and defied
the Inquisition, called the French a nation of slaves and beggars, and
abused their _Grand Monarque_ for a tyrant, cut off one king’s head, and
exiled another, set up a Dutch Stadtholder, and elected a Hanoverian
Elector to be king over him, to shew he would have his own way, and to
teach the rest of the world what they should do: but since other people
took to imitating his example, John has taken it into his head to hinder
them, will have a monopoly of rebellion and regicide to himself, has
become sworn brother to the Pope, and stands by the Inquisition,
restores his old enemies, the Bourbons, and reads _a great moral lesson_
to their subjects, persuades himself that the Dutch Stadtholder and the
Hanoverian Elector came to reign over him by divine right, and does all
he can to prove himself a beast to make other people slaves. The truth
is, John was always a surly, meddlesome, obstinate fellow, and of late
years his _head_ has not been quite right! In short, John is a great
blockhead and a great bully, and requires (what he has been long
labouring for) a hundred years of slavery to bring him to his senses. He
will have it that he is a great patriot, for he hates all other
countries; that he is wise, for he thinks all other people fools; that
he is honest, for he calls all other people whores and rogues. If being
in an ill-humour all one’s life is the perfection of human nature, then
John is very near it. He beats his wife, quarrels with his neighbours,
damns his servants, and gets drunk to kill the time and keep up his
spirits, and firmly believes himself the only unexceptionable,
accomplished, moral, and religious character in Christendom. He boasts
of the excellence of the laws, and the goodness of his own disposition;
and yet there are more people hanged in England than in all Europe
besides: he boasts of the modesty of his countrywomen, and yet there are
more prostitutes in the streets of London than in all the capitals of
Europe put together. He piques himself on his comforts, because he is
the most uncomfortable of mortals; and because he has no enjoyment in
society, seeks it, as he says, at his fireside, where he may be stupid
as a matter of course, sullen as a matter of right, and as ridiculous as
he chuses without being laughed at. His liberty is the effect of his
self-will; his religion owing to the spleen; his temper to the climate.
He is an industrious animal, because he has no taste for amusement, and
had rather work six days in the week than be idle one. His awkward
attempts at gaiety are the jest of other nations. ‘They,’ (the English),
says Froissard, speaking of the meeting of the Black Prince and the
French King, ‘amused themselves sadly, according to the custom of their
country,’—_se rejouissoient tristement, selon la coutume de leur pays_.
Their patience of labour is confined to what is repugnant and
disagreeable in itself, to the drudgery of the mechanic arts, and does
not extend to the fine arts; that is, they are indifferent to pain, but
insensible to pleasure. They will stand in a trench, or march up to a
breach, but they cannot bear to dwell long on an agreeable object. They
can no more submit to regularity in art than to decency in behaviour.
Their pictures are as coarse and slovenly as their address. John boasts
of his great men, without much right to do so; not that he has not had
them, but because he neither knows nor cares anything about them but to
swagger over other nations. That which chiefly hits John’s fancy in
Shakspeare is that he was a deer-stealer in his youth; and, as for
Newton’s discoveries, he hardly knows to this day that the earth is
round. John’s oaths, which are quite characteristic, have got him the
nickname of _Monsieur God-damn-me_. They are profane, a Frenchman’s
indecent. One swears by his vices, the other by their punishment. After
all John’s blustering, he is but a dolt. His habitual jealousy of others
makes him the inevitable dupe of quacks and impostors of all sorts; he
goes all lengths with one party out of spite to another; his zeal is as
furious as his antipathies are unfounded; and there is nothing half so
absurd or ignorant of its own intentions as an English mob.
Z.
NO. 27.] ON GOOD-NATURE [JUNE 9, 1816.
Lord Shaftesbury somewhere remarks, that a great many people pass for
very good-natured persons, for no other reason than because they care
about nobody but themselves; and, consequently, as nothing annoys them
but what touches their own interest, they never irritate themselves
unnecessarily about what does not concern them, and seem to be made of
the very milk of human kindness.
Good-nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of
all the virtues: it is nine times out of ten mere indolence of
disposition. A good-natured man is, generally speaking, one who does not
like to be put out of his way; and as long as he can help it, that is,
till the provocation comes home to himself, he will not. He does not
create fictitious uneasiness out of the distresses of others; he does
not fret and fume, and make himself uncomfortable about things he cannot
mend, and that no way concern him, even if he could: but then there is
no one who is more apt to be disconcerted by what puts him to any
personal inconvenience, however trifling; who is more tenacious of his
selfish indulgences, however unreasonable; or who resents more violently
any interruption of his ease and comforts, the very trouble he is put to
in resenting it being felt as an aggravation of the injury. A person of
this character feels no emotions of anger or detestation, if you tell
him of the devastation of a province, or the massacre of the inhabitants
of a town, or the enslaving of a people; but if his dinner is spoiled by
a lump of soot falling down the chimney, he is thrown into the utmost
confusion, and can hardly recover a decent command of his temper for the
whole day. He thinks nothing can go amiss, so long as he is at his ease,
though a pain in his little finger makes him so peevish and quarrelsome,
that nobody can come near him. Knavery and injustice in the abstract are
things that by no means ruffle his temper, or alter the serenity of his
countenance, unless he is to be the sufferer by them; nor is he ever
betrayed into a passion in answering a sophism, if he does not think it
immediately directed against his own interest.
On the contrary, we sometimes meet with persons who regularly heat
themselves in an argument, and get out of humour on every occasion, and
make themselves obnoxious to a whole company about nothing. This is not
because they are ill-tempered, but because they are in earnest.
Good-nature is a hypocrite: it tries to pass off its love of its own
ease and indifference to everything else for a particular softness and
mildness of disposition. All people get in a passion, and lose their
temper, if you offer to strike them, or cheat them of their money, that
is, if you interfere with that which they are really interested in.
Tread on the heel of one of these good-natured persons, who do not care
if the whole world is in flames, and see how he will bear it. If the
truth were known, the most disagreeable people are the most amiable.
They are the only persons who feel an interest in what does not concern
them. They have as much regard for others as they have for themselves.
They have as many vexations and causes of complaint as there are in the
world. They are general righters of wrongs, and redressers of
grievances. They not only are annoyed by what they can help, by an act
of inhumanity done in the next street, or in a neighbouring country by
their own countrymen, they not only do not claim any share in the glory,
and hate it the more, the more brilliant the success,—but a piece of
injustice done three thousand years ago touches them to the quick. They
have an unfortunate attachment to a set of abstract phrases, such as
_liberty_, _truth_, _justice_, _humanity_, _honour_, which are
continually abused by knaves, and misunderstood by fools, and they can
hardly contain themselves for spleen. They have something to keep them
in perpetual hot water. No sooner is one question set at rest than
another rises up to perplex them. They wear themselves to the bone in
the affairs of other people, to whom they can do no manner of service,
to the neglect of their own business and pleasure. They tease themselves
to death about the morality of the Turks, or the politics of the French.
There are certain words that afflict their ears, and things that
lacerate their souls, and remain a plague-spot there forever after. They
have a fellow-feeling with all that has been done, said, or thought in
the world. They have an interest in all science and in all art. They
hate a lie as much as a wrong, for truth is the foundation of all
justice. Truth is the first thing in their thoughts, then mankind, then
their country, last themselves. They love excellence, and bow to fame,
which is the shadow of it. Above all, they are anxious to see justice
done to the dead, as the best encouragement to the living, and the
lasting inheritance of future generations. They do not like to see a
great principle undermined, or the fall of a great man. They would
sooner forgive a blow in the face than a wanton attack on acknowledged
reputation. The contempt in which the French hold Shakspeare is a
serious evil to them; nor do they think the matter mended, when they
hear an Englishman, who would be thought a profound one, say that
Voltaire was a man without wit. They are vexed to see genius playing at
Tom Fool, and honesty turned bawd. It gives them a cutting sensation to
see a number of things which, as they are unpleasant to see, we shall
not here repeat. In short, they have a passion for truth; they feel the
same attachment to the idea of what is right, that a knave does to his
interest, or that a good-natured man does to his ease; and they have as
many sources of uneasiness as there are actual or supposed deviations
from this standard in the sum of things, or as there is a possibility of
folly and mischief in the world.
Principle is a passion for truth; an incorrigible attachment to a
general proposition. Good-nature is humanity that costs nothing. No
good-natured man was ever a martyr to a cause, in religion or politics.
He has no idea of striving against the stream. He may become a good
courtier and a loyal subject; and it is hard if he does not, for he has
nothing to do in that case but to consult his ease, interest, and
outward appearances. The Vicar of Bray was a good-natured man. What a
pity he was but a vicar! A good-natured man is utterly unfit for any
situation or office in life that requires integrity, fortitude, or
generosity,—any sacrifice, except of opinion, or any exertion, but to
please. A good-natured man will debauch his friend’s mistress, if he has
an opportunity; and betray his friend, sooner than share disgrace or
danger with him. He will not forego the smallest gratification to save
the whole world. He makes his own convenience the standard of right and
wrong. He avoids the feeling of pain in himself, and shuts his eyes to
the sufferings of others. He will put a malefactor or an innocent person
(no matter which) to the rack, and only laugh at the uncouthness of the
gestures, or wonder that he is so unmannerly as to cry out. There is no
villainy to which he will not lend a helping hand with great coolness
and cordiality, for he sees only the pleasant and profitable side of
things. He will assent to a falsehood with a leer of complacency, and
applaud any atrocity that comes recommended in the garb of authority. He
will betray his country to please a Minister, and sign the death-warrant
of thousands of wretches, rather than forfeit the congenial smile, the
well-known squeeze of the hand. The shrieks of death, the torture of
mangled limbs, the last groans of despair, are things that shock his
smooth humanity too much ever to make an impression on it: his
good-nature sympathizes only with the smile, the bow, the gracious
salutation, the fawning answer: vice loses its sting, and corruption its
poison, in the oily gentleness of his disposition. He will not hear of
any thing wrong in Church or State. He will defend every abuse by which
any thing is to be got, every dirty job, every act of every Minister. In
an extreme case, a very good-natured man indeed may try to hang twelve
honester men than himself to rise at the Bar, and forge the seal of the
realm to continue his colleagues a week longer in office. He is a slave
to the will of others, a coward to their prejudices, a tool of their
vices. A good-natured man is no more fit to be trusted in public
affairs, than a coward or a woman is to lead an army. Spleen is the soul
of patriotism and of public good. Lord Castlereagh is a good-natured
man, Lord Eldon is a good-natured man, Charles Fox was a good-natured
man. The last instance is the most decisive. The definition of a true
patriot is _a good hater_.
A king, who is a good-natured man, is in a fair way of being a great
tyrant. A king ought to feel concern for all to whom his power extends;
but a good-natured man cares only about himself. If he has a good
appetite, eats and sleeps well, nothing in the universe besides can
disturb him. The destruction of the lives or liberties of his subjects
will not stop him in the least of his caprices, but will concoct well
with his bile, and ‘good digestion wait on appetite, and health on
both.’ He will send out his mandate to kill and destroy with the same
indifference or satisfaction that he performs any natural function of
his body. The consequences are placed beyond the reach of his
imagination, or would not affect him if they were not, for he is a fool,
and good-natured. A good-natured man hates more than any one else
whatever thwarts his will, or contradicts his prejudices; and if he has
the power to prevent it, depend upon it, he will use it without remorse
and without control.
There is a lower species of this character which is what is usually
understood by a _well-meaning man_. A well-meaning man is one who often
does a great deal of mischief without any kind of malice. He means no
one any harm, if it is not for his interest. He is not a knave, nor
perfectly honest. He does not easily resign a good place. Mr. Vansittart
is a well-meaning man.
The Irish are a good-natured people; they have many virtues, but their
virtues are those of the heart, not of the head. In their passions and
affections they are sincere, but they are hypocrites in understanding.
If they once begin to calculate the consequences, self-interest
prevails. An Irishman who trusts to his principles, and a Scotchman who
yields to his impulses, are equally dangerous. The Irish have wit,
genius, eloquence, imagination, affections: but they want coherence of
understanding, and consequently have no standard of thought or action.
Their strength of mind does not keep pace with the warmth of their
feelings, or the quickness of their conceptions. Their animal spirits
run away with them: their reason is a jade. There is something crude,
indigested, rash, and discordant, in almost all that they do or say.
They have no system, no abstract ideas. They are ‘everything by starts,
and nothing long.’ They are a wild people. They hate whatever imposes a
law on their understandings, or a yoke on their wills. To betray the
principles they are most bound by their own professions and the
expectations of others to maintain, is with them a reclamation of their
original rights, and to fly in the face of their benefactors and
friends, an assertion of their natural freedom of will. They want
consistency and good faith. They unite fierceness with levity. In the
midst of their headlong impulses, they have an under-current of
selfishness and cunning, which in the end gets the better of them. Their
feelings, when no longer excited by novelty or opposition, grow cold and
stagnant. Their blood, if not heated by passion, turns to poison. They
have a rancour in their hatred of any object they have abandoned,
proportioned to the attachment they have professed to it. Their zeal,
converted against itself, is furious. The late Mr. Burke was an instance
of an Irish patriot and philosopher. He abused metaphysics, because he
could make nothing out of them, and turned his back upon liberty, when
he found he could get nothing more by her.[59]—See to the same purpose
the winding up of the character of _Judy_ in Miss Edgeworth’s _Castle
Rackrent_.
T. T.
NO. 28.] ON THE CHARACTER OF MILTON’S EVE [JULY 21, 1816.
The difference between the character of _Eve_ in Milton and Shakspeare’s
female characters is very striking, and it appears to us to be this:
Milton describes _Eve_ not only as full of love and tenderness for
_Adam_, but as the constant object of admiration in herself. She is the
idol of the poet’s imagination, and he paints her whole person with a
studied profusion of charms. She is the wife, but she is still as much
as ever the mistress, of _Adam_. She is represented, indeed, as devoted
to her husband, as twining round him for support ‘as the vine curls her
tendrils,’ but her own grace and beauty are never lost sight of in the
picture of conjugal felicity. _Adam’s_ attention and regard are as much
turned to her as hers to him; for ‘in that first garden of their
innocence,’ he had no other objects or pursuits to distract his
attention; she was both his business and his pleasure. Shakspeare’s
females, on the contrary, seem to exist only in their attachment to
others. They are pure abstractions of the affections. Their features are
not painted, nor the colour of their hair. Their hearts only are laid
open. We are acquainted with _Imogen_, _Miranda_, _Ophelia_, or
_Desdemona_, by what they thought and felt, but we cannot tell whether
they were black, brown, or fair. But Milton’s _Eve_ is all of ivory and
gold. Shakspeare seldom tantalises the reader with a luxurious display
of the personal charms of his heroines, with a curious inventory of
particular beauties, except indirectly, and for some other purpose, as
where _Jachimo_ describes _Imogen_ asleep, or the old men in the
_Winter’s Tale_ vie with each other in invidious praise of _Perdita_.
Even in _Juliet_, the most voluptuous and glowing of the class of
characters here spoken of, we are reminded chiefly of circumstances
connected with the physiognomy of passion, as in her leaning with her
cheek upon her arm, or which only convey the general impression of
enthusiasm made on her lover’s brain. One thing may be said, that
Shakspeare had not the same opportunities as Milton: for his women were
clothed, and it cannot be denied that Milton took _Eve_ at a
considerable disadvantage in this respect. He has accordingly described
her in all the loveliness of nature, tempting to sight as the fruit of
the Hesperides guarded by that Dragon old, herself the fairest among the
flowers of Paradise!
The figures both of _Adam_ and _Eve_ are very prominent in this poem. As
there is little action in it, the interest is constantly kept up by the
beauty and grandeur of the images. They are thus introduced:
‘Two of far nobler shape, erect and tall,
Godlike erect, with native honour clad,
In naked majesty seemed lords of all,
And worthy seemed; for in their looks divine
The image of their glorious Maker shone:
. . . . .
——Though both
Not equal, as their sex not equal seem’d;
For contemplation he and valour form’d,
For softness she and sweet attractive grace;
He for God only, she for God in him.
His fair large front and eye sublime declar’d
Absolute rule; and hyacinthine locks
Round from his parted forelock manly hung
Clust’ring, but not beneath his shoulders broad;
She as a veil down to the slender waist
Her unadorned golden tresses wore
Dishevell’d, but in wanton ringlets wav’d
As the vine curls her tendrils, which implied
Subjection, but required with gentle sway,
And by her yielded, by him best receiv’d,
Yielded with coy submission, modest pride,
And sweet reluctant amorous delay.’
_Eve_ is not only represented as beautiful, but with conscious beauty.
Shakspeare’s heroines are almost insensible of their charms, and wound
without knowing it. They are not coquets. If the salvation of mankind
had depended upon one of them, we don’t know—but the Devil might have
been baulked. This is but a conjecture! _Eve_ has a great idea of
herself, and there is some difficulty in prevailing on her to quit her
own image, the first time she discovers its reflection in the water. She
gives the following account of herself to _Adam_:
‘That day I oft remember, when from sleep
I first awak’d, and found myself repos’d
Under a shade on flow’rs, much wond’ring where
And what I was, whence thither brought and how.
Not distant far from thence a murmuring sound
Of waters issued from a cave, and spread
Into a liquid plain, then stood unmov’d
Pure as the expanse of Heav’n; I thither went
With unexperienc’d thought, and laid me down
On the green bank, to look into the clear
Smooth lake, that to me seem’d another sky.
As I bent down to look, just opposite
A shape within the watery gleam appear’d,
Bending to look on me; I started back,
It started back; but pleas’d I soon return’d,
Pleas’d it return’d as soon with answ’ring looks
Of sympathy and love.’...
The poet afterwards adds:
‘So spake our general mother, and with eyes
Of conjugal attraction unreprov’d,
And meek surrender, half-embracing lean’d
On our first father; half her swelling breast
Naked met his under the flowing gold
Of her loose tresses hid: he in delight
Both of her beauty and submissive charms;
Smil’d with superior love, as Jupiter
On Juno smiles, when he impregns the clouds
That shed May flowers.’
The same thought is repeated with greater simplicity, and perhaps even
beauty, in the beginning of the Fifth Book:
——‘So much the more
His wonder was to find unawaken’d Eve
With tresses discompos’d and glowing cheek,
As through unquiet rest: he on his side
Leaning half-rais’d, with looks of cordial love
Hung over her enamour’d, and beheld
Beauty, which whether waking or asleep
Shot forth peculiar graces; then, with voice
Mild, as when Zephyrus on Flora breathes,
Her hand soft touching, whisper’d thus. Awake
My fairest, my espous’d, my latest found,
Heav’n’s last best gift, my ever new delight,
Awake’....
The general style, indeed, in which _Eve_ is addressed by _Adam_, or
described by the poet, is in the highest strain of compliment:
‘When Adam thus to Eve. Fair consort, the hour
Of night approaches.’...
‘To whom thus Eve, with perfect beauty adorn’d.’
‘To whom our general ancestor replied,
Daughter of God and Man, accomplish’d Eve.’
_Eve_ is herself so well convinced that these epithets are her due, that
the idea follows her in her sleep, and she dreams of herself as the
paragon of nature, the wonder of the universe:
——‘Methought
Close at mine ear one call’d me forth to walk,
With gentle voice, I thought it thine; it said,
Why sleep’st thou, Eve? Now is the pleasant time,
The cool, the silent, save where silence yields
To the night-warbling bird, that now awake
Tunes sweetest his love-labour’d song; now reigns
Full-orb’d the moon, and with more pleasing light
Shadowy sets off the face of things; in vain,
If none regard; Heav’n wakes with all his eyes,
Whom to behold but thee, Nature’s desire?
In whose sight all things joy, with ravishment
Attracted by thy beauty still to gaze.’
This is the very topic, too, on which the Serpent afterwards enlarges
with so much artful insinuation and fatal confidence of success. ‘So
talked the spirited sly snake.’ The conclusion of the foregoing scene,
in which _Eve_ relates her dream and _Adam_ comforts her, is such an
exquisite piece of description, that, though not to our immediate
purpose, we cannot refrain from quoting it:
‘So cheer’d he his fair spouse, and she was cheer’d;
But silently a gentle tear let fall
From either eye, and wip’d them with her hair;
Two other precious drops that ready stood,
Each in their crystal sluice, he ere they fell
Kiss’d, as the gracious signs of sweet remorse
And pious awe, that fear’d to have offended.’
The formal eulogy on _Eve_ which _Adam_ addresses to the Angel, in
giving an account of his own creation and hers, is full of elaborate
grace:
‘Under his forming hands a creature grew,
. . . . . so lovely fair,
That what seem’d fair in all the world, seem’d now
Mean, or in her summ’d up, in her contained
And in her looks, which from that time infus’d
Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before,
And into all things from her air inspir’d
The spirit of love and amorous delight.’
That which distinguishes Milton from the other poets, who have pampered
the eye and fed the imagination with exuberant descriptions of female
beauty, is the moral severity with which he has tempered them. There is
not a line in his works which tends to licentiousness, or the impression
of which, if it has such a tendency, is not effectually checked by
thought and sentiment. The following are two remarkable instances:
——‘In shadier bower
More secret and sequester’d, though but feign’d,
Pan or Sylvanus never slept, nor Nymph,
Nor Faunus haunted. Here in close recess,
With flowers, garlands, and sweet-smelling herbs,
Espoused Eve deck’d first her nuptial bed,
And heavenly quires the hymenœan sung,
What day the genial Angel to our sire
Brought her in naked beauty more adorn’d,
More lovely than Pandora, whom the Gods
Endow’d with all their gifts, and O too like
In sad event, when to th’ unwiser son
Of Japhet brought by Hermes, she ensnar’d
Mankind by her fair looks, to be aveng’d
On him who had stole Jove’s authentic fire.’
The other is a passage of extreme beauty and pathos blended. It is the
one in which the Angel is described as the guest of our first ancestors:
——‘Meanwhile at table Eve
Minister’d naked, and their flowing cups
With pleasant liquors crown’d: O innocence
Deserving Paradise! if ever, then,
Then had the sons of God excuse to have been
Enamour’d at that sight; but in those hearts
Love unlibidinous reigned, nor jealousy
Was understood, the injur’d lover’s Hell.’
The character which a living poet has given of Spenser, would be much
more true of Milton:
——‘Yet not more sweet
Than pure was he, and not more pure than wise;
High Priest of all the Muses’ mysteries.’
Spenser, on the contrary, is very apt to pry into mysteries which do not
belong to the Muses. Milton’s voluptuousness is not lascivious or
sensual. He describes beautiful objects for their own sakes. Spenser has
an eye to the consequences, and steeps everything in pleasure, often not
of the purest kind. The want of passion has been brought as an objection
against Milton, and his _Adam_ and _Eve_ have been considered as rather
insipid personages, wrapped up in one another, and who excite but little
sympathy in any one else. We do not feel this objection ourselves: we
are content to be spectators in such scenes, without any other
excitement. In general, the interest in Milton is essentially epic, and
not dramatic; and the difference between the epic and the dramatic is
this, that in the former the imagination produces the passion, and in
the latter the passion produces the imagination. The interest of epic
poetry arises from the contemplation of certain objects in themselves
grand and beautiful: the interest of dramatic poetry from sympathy with
the passions and pursuits of others; that is, from the practical
relations of certain persons to certain objects, as depending on
accident or will.
The Pyramids of Egypt are epic objects; the imagination of them is
necessarily attended with passion; but they have no dramatic interest,
till circumstances connect them with some human catastrophe. Now, a poem
might be constructed almost entirely of such images, of the highest
intellectual passion, with little dramatic interest; and it is in this
way that Milton has in a great measure constructed his poem. That is not
its fault, but its excellence. The fault is in those who have no idea
but of one kind of interest. But this question would lead to a longer
discussion than we have room for at present. We shall conclude these
extracts from Milton with two passages, which have always appeared to us
to be highly affecting, and to contain a fine discrimination of
character:
‘O unexpected stroke, worse than of Death!
Must I thus leave thee, Paradise? thus leave
Thee, native soil, these happy walks and shades,
Fit haunt of Gods? Where I had hope to spend,
Quiet, though sad, the respite of that day
That must be mortal to us both? O flowers,
That never will in other climate grow,
My early visitation and my last
At even, which I bred up with tender hand
From the first opening bud, and gave ye names,
Who now shall rear ye to the sun, or rank
Your tribes, and water from th’ ambrosial fount?
Thee, lastly, nuptial bow’r, by me adorn’d
With what to sight or smell was sweet, from thee
How shall I part, and whither wander down
Into a lower world, to this obscure
And wild? how shall we breathe in other air
Less pure, accustom’d to immortal fruits?’
This is the lamentation of _Eve_ on being driven out of Paradise. Adam’s
reflections are in a different strain, and still finer. After expressing
his submission to the will of his Maker, he says:
‘This most afflicts me, that departing hence
As from his face I shall be hid, depriv’d
His blessed countenance; here I could frequent
With worship place by place where he vouchsaf’d
Presence divine, and to my sons relate,
On this mount he appeared, under this tree
Stood visible, among these pines his voice
I heard, here with him at this fountain talk’d:
So many grateful altars I would rear
Of grassy turf, and pile up every stone
Of lustre from the brook, in memory
Or monument to ages, and thereon
Offer sweet-smelling gums and fruits and flow’rs:
In yonder nether world where shall I seek
His bright appearances or footstep trace?
For though I fled him angry, yet recall’d
To life prolong’d and promis’d race, I now
Gladly behold though but his utmost skirts
Of glory, and far off his steps adore.’
W. H.
NO. 29.] OBSERVATIONS ON MR. WORDSWORTH’S POEM [AUG. 21, 28,
THE EXCURSION 1814.
The poem of The _Excursion_ resembles that part of the country in which
the scene is laid. It has the same vastness and magnificence, with the
same nakedness and confusion. It has the same overwhelming, oppressive
power. It excites or recalls the same sensations which those who have
traversed that wonderful scenery must have felt. We are surrounded with
the constant sense and superstitious awe of the collective power of
matter, of the gigantic and eternal forms of nature, on which, from the
beginning of time, the hand of man has made no impression. Here are no
dotted lines, no hedge-row beauties, no box-tree borders, no gravel
walks, no square mechanic inclosures; all is left loose and irregular in
the rude chaos of aboriginal nature. The boundaries of hill and valley
are the poet’s only geography, where we wander with him incessantly over
deep beds of moss and waving fern, amidst the troops of red-deer and
wild animals. Such is the severe simplicity of Mr. Wordsworth’s taste,
that we doubt whether he would not reject a druidical temple, or
time-hallowed ruin as too modern and artificial for his purpose. He only
familiarises himself or his readers with a stone, covered with lichens,
which has slept in the same spot of ground from the creation of the
world, or with the rocky fissure between two mountains caused by
thunder, or with a cavern scooped out by the sea. His mind is, as it
were, coëval with the primary forms of things; his imagination holds
immediately from nature, and ‘owes no allegiance’ but ‘to the elements.’
The _Excursion_ may be considered as a philosophical pastoral poem,—as a
scholastic romance. It is less a poem on the country, than on the love
of the country. It is not so much a description of natural objects, as
of the feelings associated with them; not an account of the manners of
rural life, but the result of the poet’s reflections on it. He does not
present the reader with a lively succession of images or incidents, but
paints the outgoings of his own heart, the shapings of his own fancy. He
may be said to create his own materials; his thoughts are his real
subject. His understanding broods over that which is ‘without form and
void,’ and ‘makes it pregnant.’ He sees all things in himself. He hardly
ever avails himself of remarkable objects or situations, but, in
general, rejects them as interfering with the workings of his own mind,
as disturbing the smooth, deep, majestic current of his own feelings.
Thus his descriptions of natural scenery are not brought home distinctly
to the naked eye by forms and circumstances, but every object is seen
through the medium of innumerable recollections, is clothed with the
haze of imagination like a glittering vapour, is obscured with the
excess of glory, has the shadowy brightness of a waking dream. The image
is lost in the sentiment, as sound in the multiplication of echoes.
‘And visions, as prophetic eyes avow,
Hang on each leaf, and cling to every bough.’
In describing human nature, Mr. Wordsworth equally shuns the common
‘vantage-grounds of popular story, of striking incident, or fatal
catastrophe, as cheap and vulgar modes of producing an effect. He scans
the human race as the naturalist measures the earth’s zone, without
attending to the picturesque points of view, the abrupt inequalities of
surface. He contemplates the passions and habits of men, not in their
extremes, but in their first elements; their follies and vices, not at
their height, with all their embossed evils upon their heads, but as
lurking in embryo,—the seeds of the disorder inwoven with our very
constitution. He only sympathises with those simple forms of feeling,
which mingle at once with his own identity, or with the stream of
general humanity. To him the great and the small are the same; the near
and the remote; what appears, and what only is. The general and the
permanent, like the Platonic ideas, are his only realities. All
accidental varieties and individual contrasts are lost in an endless
continuity of feeling, like drops of water in the ocean-stream! An
intense intellectual egotism swallows up every thing. Even the dialogues
introduced in the present volume are soliloquies of the same character,
taking different views of the subject. The recluse, the pastor, and the
pedlar, are three persons in one poet. We ourselves disapprove of these
‘interlocutions between Lucius and Caius’ as impertinent babbling, where
there is no dramatic distinction of character. But the evident scope and
tendency of Mr. Wordsworth’s mind is the reverse of dramatic. It resists
all change of character, all variety of scenery, all the bustle,
machinery, and pantomime of the stage, or of real life,—whatever might
relieve, or relax, or change the direction of its own activity, jealous
of all competition. The power of his mind preys upon itself. It is as if
there were nothing but himself and the universe. He lives in the busy
solitude of his own heart; in the deep silence of thought. His
imagination lends life and feeling only to ‘the bare trees and mountains
bare’; peoples the viewless tracts of air, and converses with the silent
clouds!
We could have wished that our author had given to his work the form of a
didactic poem altogether, with only occasional digressions or allusions
to particular instances. But he has chosen to encumber himself with a
load of narrative and description, which sometimes hinders the progress
and effect of the general reasoning, and which, instead of being inwoven
with the text, would have come in better in plain prose as notes at the
end of the volume. Mr. Wordsworth, indeed, says finely, and perhaps as
truly as finely:
‘Exchange the shepherd’s frock of native grey
For robes with regal purple tinged; convert
The crook into a sceptre; give the pomp
Of circumstance; and here the tragic Muse
Shall find apt subjects for her highest art.
Amid the groves, beneath the shadowy hills,
The generations are prepared; the pangs,
The internal pangs, are ready; the dread strife
Of poor humanity’s afflicted will
Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny.’
But he immediately declines availing himself of these resources of the
rustic moralist: for the priest, who officiates as ‘the sad historian of
the pensive plain’ says in reply:
‘Our system is not fashioned to preclude
That sympathy which you for others ask:
And I could tell, not travelling for my theme
Beyond the limits of these humble graves,
Of strange disasters; but I pass them by,
Loth to disturb what Heaven hath hushed to peace.’
There is, in fact, in Mr. Wordsworth’s mind an evident repugnance to
admit anything that tells for itself, without the interpretation of the
poet,—a fastidious antipathy to immediate effect,—a systematic
unwillingness to share the palm with his subject. Where, however, he has
a subject presented to him, ‘such as the meeting soul may pierce,’ and
to which he does not grudge to lend the aid of his fine genius, his
powers of description and fancy seem to be little inferior to those of
his classical predecessor, Akenside. Among several others which we might
select we give the following passage, describing the religion of ancient
Greece:
‘In that fair clime, the lonely herdsman, stretch’d
On the soft grass through half a summer’s day,
With music lulled his indolent repose:
And in some fit of weariness, if he,
When his own breath was silent, chanced to hear
A distant strain, far sweeter than the sounds
Which his poor skill could make, his fancy fetch’d,
Even from the blazing chariot of the sun,
A beardless youth, who touched a golden lute,
And filled the illumined groves with ravishment.
The nightly hunter, lifting up his eyes
Towards the crescent moon, with grateful heart
Called on the lovely wanderer, who bestowed
That timely light, to share his joyous sport:
And hence, a beaming Goddess with her Nymphs
Across the lawn and through the darksome grove,
(Nor unaccompanied with tuneful notes
By echo multiplied from rock or cave),
Swept in the storm of chase, as moon and stars
Glance rapidly along the clouded heavens,
When winds are blowing strong. The traveller slaked
His thirst from rill, or gushing fount, and thanked
The Naiad. Sun beams, upon distant hills
Gliding apace, with shadows in their train,
Might, with small help from fancy, be transformed
Into fleet Oreads, sporting visibly.
The zephyrs fanning as they passed their wings
Lacked not for love fair objects, whom they wooed
With gentle whisper. Withered boughs grotesque,
Stripped of their leaves and twigs by hoary age,
From depth of shaggy covert peeping forth
In the low vale, or on steep mountain side:
And sometimes intermixed with stirring horns
Of the live deer, or goat’s depending beard;
These were the lurking satyrs, a wild brood
Of gamesome Deities! or Pan himself,
The simple shepherd’s awe-inspiring God.’
The foregoing is one of a succession of splendid passages equally
enriched with philosophy and poetry, tracing the fictions of Eastern
mythology to the immediate intercourse of the imagination with Nature,
and to the habitual propensity of the human mind to endow the outward
forms of being with life and conscious motion. With this expansive and
animating principle, Mr. Wordsworth has forcibly, but somewhat severely,
contrasted the cold, narrow, lifeless spirit of modern philosophy:
‘How, shall our great discoverers obtain
From sense and reason less than these obtained,
Though far misled? Shall men for whom our age
Unbaffled powers of vision hath prepared,
To explore the world without and world within,
Be joyless as the blind? Ambitious souls—
Whom earth at this late season hath produced
To regulate the moving spheres, and weigh
The planets in the hollow of their hand;
And they who rather dive than soar, whose pains
Have solved the elements, or analysed
The thinking principle—shall they in fact
Prove a degraded race? And what avails
Renown, if their presumption make them such?
Inquire of ancient wisdom; go, demand
Of mighty nature, if ’twas ever meant
That we should pry far off, yet be unraised;
That we should pore, and dwindle as we pore,
Viewing all objects unremittingly
In disconnection dead and spiritless;
And still dividing and dividing still
Break down all grandeur, still unsatisfied
With the perverse attempt, while littleness
May yet become more little; waging thus
An impious warfare with the very life
Of our own souls! And if indeed there be
An all-pervading spirit, upon whom
Our dark foundations rest, could he design,
That this magnificent effect of power,
The earth we tread, the sky which we behold
By day, and all the pomp which night reveals,
That these—and that superior mystery,
Our vital frame, so fearfully devised,
And the dread soul within it—should exist
Only to be examined, pondered, searched,
Probed, vexed, and criticised—to be prized
No more than as a mirror that reflects
To proud Self-love her own intelligence?’
From the chemists and metaphysicians our author turns to the laughing
sage of France, Voltaire. ‘Poor gentleman, it fares no better with him,
for he’s a wit.’ We cannot, however, agree with Mr. Wordsworth that
_Candide_ is _dull_. It is, if our author pleases, ‘the production of a
scoffer’s pen,’ or it is any thing but dull. It may not be proper in a
grave, discreet, orthodox, promising young divine, who studies his
opinions in the contraction or distension of his patron’s brow, to allow
any merit to a work like _Candide_; but we conceive that it would have
been more manly in Mr. Wordsworth, nor do we think it would have hurt
the cause he espouses, if he had blotted out the epithet, after it had
peevishly escaped him. Whatsoever savours of a little, narrow,
inquisitorial spirit, does not sit well on a poet and a man of genius.
The prejudices of a philosopher are not natural. There is a frankness
and sincerity of opinion, which is a paramount obligation in all
questions of intellect, though it may not govern the decisions of the
spiritual courts, who may, however, be safely left to take care of their
own interests. There is a plain directness and simplicity of
understanding, which is the only security against the evils of levity,
on the one hand, or of hypocrisy on the other. A speculative bigot is a
solecism in the intellectual world. We can assure Mr. Wordsworth, that
we should not have bestowed so much serious consideration on a single
voluntary perversion of language, but that our respect for his character
makes us jealous of his smallest faults!
With regard to his general philippic against the contractedness and
egotism of philosophical pursuits, we only object to its not being
carried further. We shall not affirm with Rousseau (his authority would
perhaps have little weight with Mr. Wordsworth)—‘_Tout homme reflechi
est mechant_‘; but we conceive that the same reasoning which Mr.
Wordsworth applies so eloquently and justly to the natural philosopher
and metaphysician may be extended to the moralist, the divine, the
politician, the orator, the artist, and even the poet. And why so?
Because wherever an intense activity is given to any one faculty, it
necessarily prevents the due and natural exercise of others. Hence all
those professions or pursuits, where the mind is exclusively occupied
with the ideas of things as they exist in the imagination or
understanding, as they call for the exercise of intellectual activity,
and not as they are connected with practical good or evil, must check
the genial expansion of the moral sentiments and social affections; must
lead to a cold and dry abstraction, as they are found to suspend the
animal functions, and relax the bodily frame. Hence the complaint of the
want of natural sensibility and constitutional warmth of attachment in
those persons who have been devoted to the pursuit of any art or
science,—of their restless morbidity of temperament, and indifference to
every thing that does not furnish an occasion for the display of their
mental superiority and the gratification of their vanity. The
philosophical poet himself, perhaps, owes some of his love of nature to
the opportunity it affords him of analyzing his own feelings, and
contemplating his own powers,—of making every object about him a whole
length mirror to reflect his favourite thoughts, and of looking down on
the frailties of others in undisturbed leisure, and from a more
dignified height.
One of the most interesting parts of this work is that in which the
author treats of the French Revolution, and of the feelings connected
with it, in ingenuous minds, in its commencement and its progress. The
_solitary_,[60] who, by domestic calamities and disappointments, had
been cut off from society, and almost from himself, gives the following
account of the manner in which he was roused from his melancholy:
‘From that abstraction I was roused—and how?
Even as a thoughtful shepherd by a flash
Of lightning, startled in a gloomy cave
Of these wild hills. For, lo! the dread Bastile,
With all the chambers in its horrid towers,
Fell to the ground: by violence o’erthrown
Of indignation; and with shouts that drowned
The crash it made in falling! From the wreck
A golden palace rose, or seemed to rise,
The appointed seat of equitable law
And mild paternal sway. The potent shock
I felt; the transformation I perceived,
As marvellously seized as in that moment,
When, from the blind mist issuing, I beheld
Glory—beyond all glory ever seen,
Dazzling the soul! Meanwhile prophetic harps
In every grove were ringing, “War shall cease:
Did ye not hear that conquest is abjured?
Bring garlands, bring forth choicest flowers, to deck
The tree of liberty!”—My heart rebounded:
My melancholy voice the chorus joined.
Thus was I reconverted to the world;
Society became my glittering bride,
And airy hopes my children. From the depths
Of natural passion seemingly escaped,
My soul diffused itself in wide embrace
Of institutions and the forms of things.
——If with noise
And acclamation, crowds in open air
Expressed the tumult of their minds, my voice
There mingled, heard or not. And in still groves,
Where wild enthusiasts tuned a pensive lay
Of thanks and expectation, in accord
With their belief, I sang Saturnian rule
Returned—a progeny of golden years
Permitted to descend, and bless mankind.
. . . . .
Scorn and contempt forbid me to proceed!
But history, time’s slavish scribe, will tell
How rapidly the zealots of the cause
Disbanded—or in hostile ranks appeared:
Some, tired of honest service; these outdone,
Disgusted, therefore, or appalled by aims
Of fiercer zealots. So confusion reigned,
And the more faithful were compelled to exclaim,
As Brutus did to virtue, “Liberty,
I worshipped thee, and find thee but a shade!”
SUCH RECANTATION HAD FOR ME NO CHARM,
NOR WOULD I BEND TO IT.’
The subject is afterwards resumed, with the same magnanimity and
philosophical firmness:
——‘For that other loss,
The loss of confidence in social man,
By the unexpected transports of our age
Carried so high, that every thought which looked
Beyond the temporal destiny of the kind—
To many seemed superfluous; as no cause
For such exalted confidence could e’er
Exist; so, none is now for such despair.
The two extremes are equally remote
From truth and reason; do not, then, confound
One with the other, but reject them both;
And choose the middle point, whereon to build
Sound expectations. This doth he advise
Who shared at first the illusion. At this day,
When a Tartarian darkness overspreads
The groaning nations; when the impious rule,
By will or by established ordinance,
Their own dire agents, and constrain the good
To acts which they abhor; though I bewail
This triumph, yet the pity of my heart
Prevents me not from owning that the law,
By which mankind now suffers, is most just.
For by superior energies; more strict
Affiance in each other; faith more firm
In their unhallowed principles, the bad
Have fairly earned a victory o’er the weak,
The vacillating, inconsistent good.’
In the application of these memorable lines, we should, perhaps, differ
a little from Mr. Wordsworth; nor can we indulge with him in the fond
conclusion afterwards hinted at, that one day _our_ triumph, the triumph
of humanity and liberty, may be complete. For this purpose, we think
several things necessary which are impossible. It is a consummation
which cannot happen till the nature of things is changed, till the many
become as united as the _one_, till romantic generosity shall be as
common as gross selfishness, till reason shall have acquired the
obstinate blindness of prejudice, till the love of power and of change
shall no longer goad man on to restless action, till passion and will,
hope and fear, love and hatred, and the objects proper to excite them,
that is, alternate good and evil, shall no longer sway the bosoms and
businesses of men. All things move, not in progress, but in a ceaseless
round; our strength lies in our weakness; our virtues are built on our
vices; our faculties are as limited as our being; nor can we lift man
above his nature more than above the earth he treads. But though we
cannot weave over again the airy, unsubstantial dream, which reason and
experience have dispelled,
‘What though the radiance, which was once so bright,
Be now for ever taken from our sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of glory in the grass, of splendour in the flower’:—
yet we will never cease, nor be prevented from returning on the wings of
imagination to that bright dream of our youth; that glad dawn of the
day-star of liberty; that spring-time of the world, in which the hopes
and expectations of the human race seemed opening in the same gay career
with our own; when France called her children to partake her equal
blessings beneath her laughing skies; when the stranger was met in all
her villages with dance and festive songs, in celebration of a new and
golden era; and when, to the retired and contemplative student, the
prospects of human happiness and glory were seen ascending like the
steps of Jacob’s ladder, in bright and never-ending succession. The dawn
of that day was suddenly overcast; that season of hope is past; it is
fled with the other dreams of our youth, which we cannot recal, but has
left behind it traces, which are not to be effaced by Birth-day and
Thanks-giving odes, or the chaunting of _Te Deums_ in all the churches
of Christendom. To those hopes eternal regrets are due; to those who
maliciously and wilfully blasted them, in the fear that they might be
accomplished, we feel no less what we owe—hatred and scorn as lasting!
NO. 30.] THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED [OCT. 2, 1814.
Mr. Wordsworth’s writings exhibit all the internal power, without the
external form of poetry. He has scarcely any of the pomp and decoration
and scenic effect of poetry: no gorgeous palaces nor solemn temples awe
the imagination; no cities rise ‘with glistering spires and pinnacles
adorned’; we meet with no knights pricked forth on airy steeds; no
hair-breadth ‘scapes and perilous accidents by flood or field. Either
from the predominant habit of his mind not requiring the stimulus of
outward impressions, or from the want of an imagination teeming with
various forms, he takes the common every-day events and objects of
nature, or rather seeks those that are the most simple and barren of
effect; but he adds to them a weight of interest from the resources of
his own mind, which makes the most insignificant things serious and even
formidable. All other interests are absorbed in the deeper interest of
his own thoughts, and find the same level. His mind magnifies the
littleness of his subject, and raises its meanness; lends it his
strength, and clothes it with borrowed grandeur. With him, a mole-hill,
covered with wild thyme, assumes the importance of ‘the great vision of
the guarded mount’: a puddle is filled with preternatural faces, and
agitated with the fiercest storms of passion.
The extreme simplicity which some persons have objected to in Mr.
Wordsworth’s poetry, is to be found only in the subject and the style:
the sentiments are subtle and profound. In the latter respect, his
poetry is as much above the common standard or capacity, as in the other
it is below it. His poems bear a distant resemblance to some of
Rembrandt’s landscapes, who, more than any other painter, created the
medium through which he saw nature, and out of the stump of an old tree,
a break in the sky, and a bit of water, could produce an effect almost
miraculous.
Mr. Wordsworth’s poems in general are the history of a refined and
contemplative mind, conversant only with itself and nature. An intense
feeling of the associations of this kind is the peculiar and
characteristic feature of all his productions. He has described the love
of nature better than any other poet. This sentiment, inly felt in all
its force, and sometimes carried to an excess, is the source both of his
strength and of his weakness. However we may sympathise with Mr.
Wordsworth in his attachment to groves and fields, we cannot extend the
same admiration to their inhabitants, or to the manners of country life
in general. We go along with him, while he is the subject of his own
narrative, but we take leave of him when he makes pedlars and ploughmen
his heroes and the interpreters of his sentiments. It is, we think,
getting into low company, and company, besides, that we do not like. We
take Mr. Wordsworth himself for a great poet, a fine moralist, and a
deep philosopher; but if he insists on introducing us to a friend of
his, a parish clerk, or the barber of the village, who is as wise as
himself, we must be excused if we draw back with some little want of
cordial faith. We are satisfied with the friendship which subsisted
between _Parson Adams_ and _Joseph Andrews_. The author himself lets out
occasional hints that all is not as it should be amongst these northern
Arcadians. Though, in general, he professes to soften the harsher
features of rustic vice, he has given us one picture of depraved and
inveterate selfishness, which we apprehend could only be found among the
inhabitants of these boasted mountain districts. The account of one of
his heroines concludes as follows:
‘A sudden illness seiz’d her in the strength
Of life’s autumnal season. Shall I tell
How on her bed of death the matron lay,
To Providence submissive, so she thought;
But fretted, vexed, and wrought upon—almost
To anger, by the malady that griped
Her prostrate frame with unrelaxing power,
As the fierce eagle fastens on the lamb.
She prayed, she moaned—her husband’s sister watched
Her dreary pillow, waited on her needs;
And yet the very sound of that kind foot
Was anguish to her ears! “And must she rule
Sole mistress of this house when I am gone?
Sit by my fire—possess what I possessed—
Tend what I tended—calling it her own!”
Enough;—I fear too much. Of nobler feeling
Take this example:—One autumnal evening,
While she was yet in prime of health and strength,
I well remember, while I passed her door,
Musing with loitering step, and upward eye
Turned tow’rds the planet Jupiter, that hung
Above the centre of the vale, a voice
Roused me, her voice;—it said, “That glorious star
In its untroubled element will shine
As now it shines, when we are laid in earth,
And safe from all our sorrows.” She is safe,
And her uncharitable acts, I trust,
And harsh unkindnesses, are all forgiven;
Though, in this vale, remembered with deep awe!’
We think it is pushing our love of the admiration of natural objects a
good deal too far, to make it a set-off against a story like the
preceding.
All country people hate each other. They have so little comfort, that
they envy their neighbours the smallest pleasure or advantage, and
nearly grudge themselves the necessaries of life. From not being
accustomed to enjoyment, they become hardened and averse to it—stupid,
for want of thought—selfish, for want of society. There is nothing good
to be had in the country, or, if there is, they will not let you have
it. They had rather injure themselves than oblige any one else. Their
common mode of life is a system of wretchedness and self-denial, like
what we read of among barbarous tribes. You live out of the world. You
cannot get your tea and sugar without sending to the next town for it:
you pay double, and have it of the worst quality. The small-beer is sure
to be sour—the milk skimmed—the meat bad, or spoiled in the cooking. You
cannot do a single thing you like; you cannot walk out or sit at home,
or write or read, or think or look as if you did, without being subject
to impertinent curiosity. The apothecary annoys you with his
complaisance; the parson with his superciliousness. If you are poor, you
are despised; if you are rich, you are feared and hated. If you do any
one a favour, the whole neighbourhood is up in arms; the clamour is like
that of a rookery; and the person himself, it is ten to one, laughs at
you for your pains, and takes the first opportunity of shewing you that
he labours under no uneasy sense of obligation. There is a perpetual
round of mischief-making and backbiting for want of any better
amusement. There are no shops, no taverns, no theatres, no opera, no
concerts, no pictures, no public-buildings, no crowded streets, no noise
of coaches, or of courts of law,—neither courtiers nor courtesans, no
literary parties, no fashionable routs, no society, no books, or
knowledge of books. Vanity and luxury are the civilisers of the world,
and sweeteners of human life. Without objects either of pleasure or
action, it grows harsh and crabbed: the mind becomes stagnant, the
affections callous, and the eye dull. Man left to himself soon
degenerates into a very disagreeable person. Ignorance is always bad
enough; but rustic ignorance is intolerable. Aristotle has observed,
that tragedy purifies the affections by terror and pity. If so, a
company of tragedians should be established at the public expence, in
every village or hundred, as a better mode of education than either
Bell’s or Lancaster’s. The benefits of knowledge are never so well
understood as from seeing the effects of ignorance, in their naked,
undisguised state, upon the common country people. Their selfishness and
insensibility are perhaps less owing to the hardships and privations,
which make them, like people out at sea in a boat, ready to devour one
another, than to their having no idea of anything beyond themselves and
their immediate sphere of action. They have no knowledge of, and
consequently can take no interest in, anything which is not an object of
their senses, and of their daily pursuits. They hate all strangers, and
have generally a nickname for the inhabitants of the next village. The
two young noblemen in Guzman d’Alfarache, who went to visit their
mistresses only a league out of Madrid, were set upon by the peasants,
who came round them calling out, ‘_A wolf_.’ Those who have no enlarged
or liberal ideas, can have no disinterested or generous sentiments.
Persons who are in the habit of reading novels and romances, are
compelled to take a deep interest in, and to have their affections
strongly excited by, fictitious characters and imaginary situations;
their thoughts and feelings are constantly carried out of themselves, to
persons they never saw, and things that never existed: history enlarges
the mind, by familiarising us with the great vicissitudes of human
affairs, and the catastrophes of states and kingdoms; the study of
morals accustoms us to refer our actions to a general standard of right
and wrong; and abstract reasoning, in general, strengthens the love of
truth, and produces an inflexibility of principle which cannot stoop to
low trick and cunning. Books, in Lord Bacon’s phrase, are ‘a discipline
of humanity.’ Country people have none of these advantages, nor any
others to supply the place of them. Having no circulating libraries to
exhaust their love of the marvellous, they amuse themselves with
fancying the disasters and disgraces of their particular acquaintance.
Having no hump-backed _Richard_ to excite their wonder and abhorrence,
they make themselves a bugbear of their own, out of the first obnoxious
person they can lay their hands on. Not having the fictitious distresses
and gigantic crimes of poetry to stimulate their imagination and their
passions, they vent their whole stock of spleen, malice, and invention,
on their friends and next-door neighbours. They get up a little pastoral
drama at home, with fancied events, but real characters. All their spare
time is spent in manufacturing and propagating the lie for the day,
which does its office, and expires. The next day is spent in the same
manner. It is thus that they embellish the simplicity of rural life! The
common people in civilised countries are a kind of domesticated savages.
They have not the wild imagination, the passions, the fierce energies,
or dreadful vicissitudes of the savage tribes, nor have they the
leisure, the indolent enjoyments and romantic superstitions, which
belonged to the pastoral life in milder climates, and more remote
periods of society. They are taken out of a state of nature, without
being put in possession of the refinements of art. The customs and
institutions of society cramp their imaginations without giving them
knowledge. If the inhabitants of the mountainous districts described by
Mr. Wordsworth are less gross and sensual than others, they are more
selfish. Their egotism becomes more concentrated, as they are more
insulated, and their purposes more inveterate, as they have less
competition to struggle with. The weight of matter which surrounds them,
crushes the finer sympathies. Their minds become hard and cold, like the
rocks which they cultivate. The immensity of their mountains makes the
human form appear little and insignificant. Men are seen crawling
between Heaven and earth, like insects to their graves. Nor do they
regard one another more than flies on a wall. Their physiognomy
expresses the materialism of their character, which has only one
principle—rigid self-will. They move on with their eyes and foreheads
fixed, looking neither to the right nor to the left, with a heavy slouch
in their gait, and seeming as if nothing would divert them from their
path. We do not admire this plodding pertinacity, always directed to the
main chance. There is nothing which excites so little sympathy in our
minds, as exclusive selfishness. If our theory is wrong, at least it is
taken from pretty close observation, and is, we think, confirmed by Mr.
Wordsworth’s own account.
Of the stories contained in the latter part of the volume, we like that
of the Whig and Jacobite friends, and of the good knight, Sir Alfred
Irthing, the best. The last reminded us of a fine sketch of a similar
character in the beautiful poem of _Hart Leap Well_. To conclude,—if the
skill with which the poet had chosen his materials had been equal to the
power which he has undeniably exerted over them, if the objects (whether
persons or things) which he makes use of as the vehicle of his
sentiments, had been such as to convey them in all their depth and
force, then the production before us might indeed ‘have proved a
monument,’ as he himself wishes it, worthy of the author, and of his
country. Whether, as it is, this very original and powerful performance
may not rather remain like one of those stupendous but half-finished
structures, which have been suffered to moulder into decay, because the
cost and labour attending them exceeded their use or beauty, we feel
that it would be presumptuous in us to determine.
NO. 31.] CHARACTER OF THE LATE MR. PITT[61]
The character of Mr. Pitt was, perhaps, one of the most singular that
ever existed. With few talents, and fewer virtues, he acquired and
preserved, in one of the most trying situations, and in spite of all
opposition, the highest reputation for the possession of every moral
excellence, and as having carried the attainments of eloquence and
wisdom as far as human abilities could go. This he did (strange as it
may appear) by a negation (together with the common virtues) of the
common vices of human nature, and by the complete negation of every
other talent that might interfere with the only ones which he possessed
in a supreme degree, and which, indeed, may be made to include the
appearance of all others,—an artful use of words, and a certain
dexterity of logical arrangement. In these alone his power consisted;
and the defect of all other qualities, which usually constitute
greatness, contributed to the more complete success of these. Having no
strong feelings, no distinct perceptions,—his mind having no link, as it
were, to connect it with the world of external nature, every subject
presented to him nothing more than a _tabula rasa_, on which he was at
liberty to lay whatever colouring of language he pleased; having no
general principles, no comprehensive views of things, no moral habits of
thinking, no system of action, there was nothing to hinder him from
pursuing any particular purpose by any means that offered; having never
any plan, he could not be convicted of inconsistency, and his own pride
and obstinacy were the only rules of his conduct. Without insight into
human nature, without sympathy with the passions of men, or apprehension
of their real designs, he seemed perfectly insensible to the
consequences of things, and would believe nothing till it actually
happened. The fog and haze in which he saw every thing communicated
itself to others; and the total indistinctness and uncertainty of his
own ideas tended to confound the perceptions of his hearers more
effectually than the most ingenious misrepresentation could have done.
Indeed, in defending his conduct, he never seemed to consider himself as
at all responsible for the success of his measures, or to suppose that
future events were in our own power; but that, as the best-laid schemes
might fail, and there was no providing against all possible
contingencies, this was sufficient excuse for our plunging at once into
any dangerous or absurd enterprise without the least regard to
consequences. His reserved logic confined itself solely to the
_possible_ and the _impossible_, and he appeared to regard the
_probable_ and _improbable_, the only foundation of moral prudence or
political wisdom, as beneath the notice of a profound statesman; as if
the pride of the human intellect were concerned in never entrusting
itself with subjects, where it may be compelled to acknowledge its
weakness. Nothing could ever drive him out of his dull forms, and naked
generalities; which, as they are susceptible neither of degree nor
variation, are therefore equally applicable to every emergency that can
happen: and in the most critical aspect of affairs, he saw nothing but
the same flimsy web of remote possibilities and metaphysical
uncertainty. In his mind, the wholesome pulp of practical wisdom and
salutary advice was immediately converted into the dry chaff and husks
of a miserable logic. From his manner of reasoning, he seemed not to
have believed that the truth of his statements depended on the reality
of the facts, but that the facts themselves depended on the order in
which he arranged them in words: you would not suppose him to be
agitating a serious question, which had real grounds to go upon, but to
be declaiming upon an imaginary thesis, proposed as an exercise in the
schools. He never set himself to examine the force of the objections
that were brought against him, or attempted to defend his measures upon
clear, solid grounds of his own; but constantly contented himself with
first gravely stating the logical form, or dilemma to which the question
reduced itself; and then, after having declared his opinion, proceeded
to amuse his hearers by a series of rhetorical common-places, connected
together in grave, sonorous, and elaborately constructed periods,
without ever shewing their real application to the subject in dispute.
Thus, if any member of the opposition disapproved of any measure, and
enforced his objections by pointing out the many evils with which it was
fraught, or the difficulties attending its execution, his only answer
was, ‘that it was true there might be inconveniences attending the
measure proposed, but we were to remember, that every expedient that
could be devised might be said to be nothing more than a choice of
difficulties, and that all that human prudence could do, was to consider
on which side the advantages lay; that, for his part, he conceived that
the present measure was attended with more advantages and fewer
disadvantages than any other that could be adopted; that it we were
diverted from our object by every appearance of difficulty, the wheels
of government would be clogged by endless delays and imaginary
grievances; that most of the objections made to the measure appeared to
him to be trivial, others of them unfounded and improbable; or that, if
a scheme, free from all these objections, could be proposed, it might,
after all, prove inefficient; while, in the meantime, a material object
remained unprovided for, or the opportunity of action was lost.’ This
mode of reasoning is admirably described by Hobbes, in speaking of the
writings of some of the schoolmen, of whom he says that ‘they had
learned the trick of imposing what they list upon their readers, and
declining the force of true reason by verbal forks, that is,
distinctions, which signify nothing, but serve only to astonish the
multitude of ignorant men.’ That what we have here stated comprehends
the whole force of his mind, which consisted solely in this evasive
dexterity and perplexing formality, assisted by a copiousness of words
and common-place topics, will, we think, be evident to any one who
carefully looks over his speeches, undazzled by the reputation or
personal influence of the speaker. It will be in vain to look in them
for any of the common proofs of human genius or wisdom. He has not left
behind him a single memorable saying,—not one profound maxim,—one solid
observation,—one forcible description,—one beautiful thought,—one
humorous picture,—one affecting sentiment. He has made no addition
whatever to the stock of human knowledge. He did not possess any one of
those faculties which contribute to the instruction and delight of
mankind,—depth of understanding, imagination, sensibility, wit,
vivacity, clear and solid judgment. But it may be asked, If these
qualities are not to be found in him, where are we to look for them? and
we may be required to point out instances of them. We shall answer then,
that he had none of the abstract, legislative wisdom, refined sagacity,
or rich, impetuous, high-wrought imagination of Burke; the manly
eloquence, exact knowledge, vehemence, and natural simplicity of Fox;
the ease, brilliancy, and acuteness of Sheridan. It is not merely that
he had not all these qualities in the degree that they were severally
possessed by his rivals, but he had not any of them in any remarkable
degree. His reasoning is a technical arrangement of unmeaning
common-places, his eloquence rhetorical, his style monotonous and
artificial. If he could pretend to any one excellence more than another,
it was to taste in composition. There is certainly nothing low, nothing
puerile, nothing far-fetched or abrupt in his speeches; there is a kind
of faultless regularity pervading them throughout; but in the confined,
formal, passive mode of eloquence which he adopted, it seemed rather
more difficult to commit errors than to avoid them. A man who is
determined never to move out of the beaten road cannot lose his way.
However, habit, joined to the peculiar mechanical memory which he
possessed, carried this correctness to a degree which, in an
extemporaneous speaker, was almost miraculous; he, perhaps, hardly ever
uttered a sentence that was not perfectly regular and connected. In this
respect, he not only had the advantage over his own contemporaries, but
perhaps no one that ever lived equalled him in this singular faculty.
But for this, he would always have passed for a common man; and to this
the constant sameness, and, if we may so say, vulgarity of his ideas,
must have contributed not a little, as there was nothing to distract his
mind from this one object of his unintermitted attention; and as, even
in his choice of words, he never aimed at any thing more than a certain
general propriety and stately uniformity of style. His talents were
exactly fitted for the situation in which he was placed; where it was
his business not to overcome others, but to avoid being overcome. He was
able to baffle opposition, not from strength or firmness, but from the
evasive ambiguity and impalpable nature of his resistance, which gave no
hold to the rude grasp of his opponents: no force could bind the loose
phantom, and his mind (though ‘not matchless, and his pride humbled by
such rebuke’) soon rose from defeat unhurt,
‘And in its liquid texture, mortal wound
Receiv’d no more than can the fluid air.’
NO. 32.] ON RELIGIOUS HYPOCRISY [OCT. 9, 1814.
Religion either makes men wise and virtuous, or it makes them set up
false pretences to both. In the latter case, it makes them hypocrites to
themselves as well as others. Religion is, in grosser minds, an enemy to
self-knowledge. The consciousness of the presence of an all-powerful
Being, who is both the witness and judge of every thought, word, and
action, where it does not produce its proper effect, forces the
religious man to practise every mode of deceit upon himself with respect
to his real character and motives; for it is only by being wilfully
blind to his own faults, that he can suppose they will escape the eye of
Omniscience. Consequently, the whole business of a religious man’s life,
if it does not conform to the strict line of his duty, may be said to be
to gloss over his errors to himself, and to invent a thousand shifts and
palliations, in order to hoodwink the Almighty. While he is sensible of
his own delinquency, he knows that it cannot escape the penetration of
his invisible Judge; and the distant penalty annexed to every offence,
though not sufficient to make him desist from the commission of it, will
not suffer him to rest easy, till he has made some compromise with his
own conscience as to his motives for committing it. As far as relates to
this world, a cunning knave may take a pride in the imposition he
practises upon others; and, instead of striving to conceal his true
character from himself, may chuckle with inward satisfaction at the
folly of those who are not wise enough to detect it. ‘But ’tis not so
above.’ This shallow, skin-deep hypocrisy will not serve the turn of the
religious devotee, who is ‘compelled to give in evidence against
himself,’ and who must first become the dupe of his own imposture,
before he can flatter himself with the hope of concealment, as children
hide their eyes with their hands, and fancy that no one can see them.
Religious people often pray very heartily for the forgiveness of a
‘multitude of trespasses and sins,’ as a mark of their humility, but we
never knew them admit any one fault in particular, or acknowledge
themselves in the wrong in any instance whatever. The natural jealousy
of self-love is in them heightened by the fear of damnation, and they
plead _Not Guilty_ to every charge brought against them, with all the
conscious terrors of a criminal at the bar. It is for this reason that
the greatest hypocrites in the world are religious hypocrites.
This quality, as it has been sometimes found united with the clerical
character, is known by the name of _Priestcraft_. The Ministers of
Religion are perhaps more liable to this vice than any other class of
people. They are obliged to assume a greater degree of sanctity, though
they have it not, and to screw themselves up to an unnatural pitch of
severity and self-denial. They must keep a constant guard over
themselves, have an eye always to their own persons, never relax in
their gravity, nor give the least scope to their inclinations. A single
slip, if discovered, may be fatal to them. Their influence and
superiority depend on their pretensions to virtue and piety; and they
are tempted to draw liberally on the funds of credulity and ignorance
allotted for their convenient support. All this cannot be very friendly
to downright simplicity of character. Besides, they are so accustomed to
inveigh against the vices of others, that they naturally forget that
they have any of their own to correct. They see vice as an object always
out of themselves, with which they have no other concern than to
denounce and stigmatise it. They are only reminded of it _in the third
person_. They as naturally associate sin and its consequences with their
flocks as a pedagogue associates a false concord and flogging with his
scholars. If we may so express it, they serve as conductors to the
lightning of divine indignation, and have only to point the thunders of
the law at others. They identify themselves with that perfect system of
faith and morals, of which they are the professed teachers, and regard
any imputation on their conduct as an indirect attack on the function to
which they belong, or as compromising the authority under which they
act. It is only the head of the Popish church who assumes the title of
_God’s Vicegerent upon Earth_; but the feeling is nearly common to all
the oracular interpreters of the will of Heaven—from the successor of
St. Peter down to the simple, unassuming Quaker, who, disclaiming the
imposing authority of title and office, yet fancies himself the
immediate organ of a preternatural impulse, and affects to speak only as
the spirit moves him.
There is another way in which the formal profession of religion aids
hypocrisy, by erecting a secret tribunal, to which those who affect a
more than ordinary share of it can (in case of need) appeal from the
judgments of men. The religious impostor, reduced to his last shift, and
having no other way left to avoid the most ‘open and apparent shame,’
rejects the fallible decisions of the world, and thanks God that there
is one who knows the heart. He is amenable to a higher jurisdiction, and
while all is well with Heaven, he can pity the errors, and smile at the
malice of his enemies! Whatever cuts men off from their dependence on
common opinion or obvious appearances, must open a door to evasion and
cunning, by setting up a standard of right and wrong in every one’s own
breast, of the truth of which nobody can judge but the person himself.
There are some fine instances in the old plays and novels (the best
commentaries on human nature) of the effect of this principle, in giving
the last finishing to the character of duplicity. Miss Harris, in
Fielding’s _Amelia_, is one of the most striking. Molière’s _Tartuffe_
is another instance of the facility with which religion may be perverted
to the purposes of the most flagrant hypocrisy. It is an impenetrable
fastness, to which this worthy person, like so many others, retires
without the fear of pursuit. It is an additional disguise, in which he
wraps himself up like a cloak. It is a stalking-horse, which is ready on
all occasions,—an invisible conscience, which goes about with him,—his
good genius, that becomes surety for him in all difficulties,—swears to
the purity of his motives,—extricates him out of the most desperate
circumstances,—baffles detection, and furnishes a plea to which there is
no answer.
The same sort of reasoning will account for the old remark, that persons
who are stigmatised as non-conformists to the established religion,
Jews, Presbyterians, etc., are more disposed to this vice than their
neighbours. They are inured to the contempt of the world, and steeled
against its prejudices: and the same indifference which fortifies them
against the unjust censures of mankind, may be converted, as occasion
requires, into a screen for the most pitiful conduct. They have no
cordial sympathy with others, and, therefore, no sincerity in their
intercourse with them. It is the necessity of concealment, in the first
instance, that produces, and is, in some measure, an excuse for, the
habit of hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy, as it is connected with cowardice, seems to imply weakness of
body or want of spirit. The impudence and insensibility which belong to
it, ought to suppose robustness of constitution. There is certainly a
very successful and formidable class of sturdy, jolly, able-bodied
hypocrites, the Friar Johns of the profession. Raphael has represented
Elymas the Sorcerer, with a hard iron visage, and large uncouth figure,
made up of bones and muscles; as one not troubled with weak nerves or
idle scruples—as one who repelled all sympathy with others—who was not
to be jostled out of his course by their censures or suspicions—and who
could break with ease through the cobweb snares which he had laid for
the credulity of others, without being once entangled in his own
delusions. His outward form betrays the hard, unimaginative, self-willed
understanding of the sorcerer.
A.
NO. 33.] ON THE LITERARY CHARACTER [OCT. 28, 1813.
The following remarks are prefixed to the account of Baron Grimm’s
Correspondence in a late number of a celebrated Journal:-
‘There is nothing more exactly painted in these graphical volumes, than
the character of M. Grimm himself; and the beauty of it is, that, as
there is nothing either natural or peculiar about it, it may stand for
the character of all the wits and philosophers he frequented. He had
more wit, perhaps, and more sound sense and information, than the
greatest part of the society in which he lived; but the leading traits
belong to the whole class, and to all classes, indeed, in similar
situations, in every part of the world. Whenever there is a very large
assemblage of persons who have no other occupation but to amuse
themselves, there will infallibly be generated acuteness of intellect,
refinement of manners, and good taste in conversation; and, with the
same certainty, all profound thought, and all serious affection, will be
discarded from their society.
‘The multitude of persons and things that force themselves on the
attention in such a scene, and the rapidity with which they succeed each
other, and pass away, prevent any one from making a deep or permanent
impression; and the mind, having never been tasked to any course of
application, and long habituated to this lively succession and variety
of objects, comes at last to require the excitement of perpetual change,
and to find a multiplicity of friends as indispensable as a multiplicity
of amusements. Thus the characteristics of large and polished society
come almost inevitably to be, wit and heartlessness—acuteness and
perpetual derision. The same impatience of uniformity, and passion for
variety, which give so much grace to their conversation, by excluding
all tediousness and pertinacious wrangling, make them incapable of
dwelling for many minutes on the feelings and concerns of any one
individual; while the constant pursuit of little gratifications, and the
weak dread of all uneasy sensations, render them equally averse from
serious sympathy and deep thought.
‘The whole style and tone of this publication affords the most striking
illustration of these general remarks. From one end of it to the other,
it is a display of the most complete heartlessness, and the most
uninterrupted levity. It chronicles the deaths of half the author’s
acquaintance, and makes jests upon them all; and is much more serious in
discussing the merits of an opera-dancer, than in considering the
evidence for the being of a God, or the first foundations of morality.
Nothing, indeed, can be more just or conclusive than the remark that is
forced from M. Grimm himself, upon the utter carelessness, and instant
oblivion, that followed the death of one of the most distinguished,
active, and amiable members of his coterie: “Tant il est vrai que ce que
nous appelons _la société_, est ce qu’il y a de plus léger, plus ingrat,
et de plus frivole au monde!”’
These remarks, though shrewd and sensible in themselves, apply rather to
the character of M. Grimm and his friends as men of the world, after
their initiation into the refined society of Paris and the great world,
than as mere men of letters. There is, however, a character which every
man of letters has before he comes into society, and which he carries
into the world with him, which we shall here attempt to describe.
The weaknesses and vices that arise from a constant intercourse with
books, are in certain respects the same with those which arise from
daily intercourse with the world; yet each has a character and operation
of its own, which may either counteract or aggravate the tendency of the
other. The same dissipation of mind, the same listlessness, languor, and
indifference, may be produced by both, but they are produced in
different ways, and exhibit very different appearances. The defects of
the literary character proceed, not from frivolity and voluptuous
indolence, but from the overstrained exertion of the faculties, from
abstraction and refinement. A man without talents or education might
mingle in the same society, might give in to all the gaiety and foppery
of the age, might see the same ‘multiplicity of persons and things,’ but
would not become a wit and a philosopher for all that. As far as the
change of actual objects, the real variety and dissipation goes, there
is no difference between M. Grimm and a courtier of Francis I.—between
the consummate philosopher and the giddy girl—between Paris, amidst the
barbaric refinements of the middle of the eighteenth century, and any
other metropolis at any other period. It is in the _ideal_ change of
objects, in the _intellectual_ dissipation of literature and of literary
society, that we are to seek for the difference. The very same languor
and listlessness which, in fashionable life, are owing to the rapid
‘succession of persons and things,’ may be found, and even in a more
intense degree, in the most recluse student, who has no knowledge
whatever of the great world, who has never been present at the sallies
of a _petit souper_, or complimented a lady on presenting her with a
bouquet. It is the province of literature to anticipate the dissipation
of real objects, and to increase it. It creates a fictitious
restlessness and craving after variety, by creating a fictitious world
around us, and by hurrying us, not only through all the mimic scenes of
life, but by plunging us into the endless labyrinths of imagination.
Thus the common indifference produced by the distraction of successive
amusements, is superseded by a general indifference to surrounding
objects, to real persons and things, occasioned by the disparity between
the world of our imagination and that without us. The scenes of real
life are not got up in the same style of magnificence; they want
dramatic illusion and effect. The high-wrought feelings require all the
concomitant and romantic circumstances which fancy can bring together to
satisfy them, and cannot find them in any given object. M. Grimm was
not, by his own account, _born_ a lover; but even supposing him to have
been, in gallantry of temper, a very Amadis, would it have been
necessary that the enthusiasm of a philosopher and a man of genius
should have run the gauntlet of all the _bonnes fortunes_ of Paris to
evaporate into insensibility and indifference? Would not a Clarissa, a
new Eloise, a Cassandra, or a Berenice, have produced the same
mortifying effects on a person of his great critical and acumen and
virtù? Where, O where would he find the rocks of Meillerie in the
precincts of the Palais Royal, or on what lips would Julia’s kisses
grow? Who, after wandering with Angelica, or having seen the heavenly
face of Una, might not meet with impunity a whole circle of literary
ladies? Cowley’s mistresses reigned by turns in the poet’s fancy, and
the beauties of King Charles II. perplex the eye in the preference of
their charms as much now as they ever did. One trifling coquette only
drives out another; but Raphael’s Galatea kills the whole race of
pertness and vulgarity at once. After ranging in dizzy mazes, through
the regions of imaginary beauty, the mind sinks down, breathless and
exhausted, on the earth. In common minds, indifference is produced by
mixing with the world. Authors and artists bring it into the world with
them. The disappointment of the ideal enthusiast is indeed greatest at
first, and he grows reconciled to his situation by degrees; whereas the
mere man of the world becomes more dissatisfied and fastidious, and more
of a misanthrope, the longer he lives.
It is much the same in friendships founded on literary motives. Literary
men are not attached to the persons of their friends, but to their
minds. They look upon them in the same light as on the books in their
library, and read them till they are tired. In casual acquaintances
friendship grows out of habit. Mutual kindnesses beget mutual
attachment; and numberless little local occurrences in the course of a
long intimacy, furnish agreeable topics of recollection, and are almost
the only sources of conversation among such persons. They have an
immediate pleasure in each other’s company. But in literature nothing of
this kind takes place. Petty and local circumstances are beneath the
dignity of philosophy. Nothing will go down but wit or wisdom. The mind
is kept in a perpetual state of violent exertion and expectation, and as
there cannot always be a fresh supply of stimulus to excite it, as the
same remarks or the same _bon mots_ come to be often repeated, or others
so like them, that we can easily anticipate the effect, and are no
longer surprised into admiration, we begin to relax in the frequency of
our visits, and the heartiness of our welcome. When we are tired of a
book we can lay it down, but we cannot so easily put our friends on the
shelf when we grow weary of their society. The necessity of keeping up
appearances, therefore, adds to the dissatisfaction on both sides, and
at length irritates indifference into contempt.
By the help of arts and science, everything finds an ideal level. Ideas
assume the place of realities, and realities sink into nothing. Actual
events and objects produce little or no effect on the mind, when it has
been long accustomed to draw its strongest interest from constant
contemplation. It is necessary that it should, as it were, recollect
itself—that it should call out its internal resources, and refine upon
its own feelings—place the object at a distance, and embellish it at
pleasure. By degrees all things are made to serve as hints, and
occasions for the exercise of intellectual activity. It was on this
principle that the sentimental Frenchman left his Mistress, in order
that he might think of her. Cicero ceased to mourn for the loss of his
daughter, when he recollected how fine an opportunity it would afford
him to write an eulogy to her memory; and Mr. Shandy lamented over the
death of Master Bobby much in the same manner. The insensibility of
Authors, etc., to domestic and private calamities has been often carried
to a ludicrous excess, but it is less than it appears to be. The genius
of philosophy is not yet _quite_ understood. For instance, the man who
might seem at the moment undisturbed by the death of a wife or mistress,
would perhaps never walk out on a fine evening as long as he lived,
without recollecting her; and a disappointment in love that ‘heaves no
sigh and sheds no tear,’ may penetrate to the heart, and remain fixed
there ever after. _Hæret lateri lethalis arundo._ The blow is felt only
by reflection, the rebound is fatal. Our feelings become more ideal; the
impression of the moment is less violent, but the effect is more general
and permanent. Those whom we love best, take nearly the same rank in our
estimation as the heroine of a favourite novel! Indeed, after all,
compared with the genuine feelings of nature, ‘clad in flesh and blood,’
with real passions and affections, conversant about real objects, the
life of a mere man of letters and sentiment appears to be at best but a
living death; a dim twilight existence: a sort of wandering about in an
Elysian fields of our own making; a refined, spiritual, disembodied
state, like that of the ghosts of Homer’s heroes, who, we are told,
would gladly have exchanged situations with the meanest peasant upon
earth![62]
The moral character of men of letters depends very much upon the same
principles. All actions are seen through that general medium which
reduces them to individual insignificance. Nothing fills or engrosses
the mind—nothing seems of sufficient importance to interfere with our
present inclination. Prejudices, as well as attachments, lose their hold
upon us, and we palter with our duties as we please. Moral obligations,
by being perpetually refined upon, and discussed, lose their force and
efficacy, become mere dry distinctions of the understanding,
‘Play round the head, but never reach the heart.’
Opposite reasons and consequences balance one another, while appetite or
interest turns the scale. Hence the severe sarcasm of Rousseau, ‘_Tout
homme reflechi est mechant_.’ In fact, it must be confessed, that, as
all things produce their extremes, so excessive refinement tends to
produce equal grossness. The tenuity of our intellectual desires leaves
a void in the mind which requires to be filled up by coarser
gratification, and that of the senses is always at hand. They alone
always retain their strength. There is not a greater mistake than the
common supposition, that intellectual pleasures are capable of endless
repetition, and physical ones not so. The one, indeed, may be spread out
over a greater surface, they may be dwelt upon and kept in mind at will,
and for that very reason they wear out, and pall by comparison, and
require perpetual variety. Whereas the physical gratification only
occupies us at the moment, is, as it were, absorbed in itself, and
forgotten as soon as it is over, and when it returns is _as good as
new_. No one could ever read the same book for any length of time
without being tired of it, but a man is never tired of his meals,
however little variety his table may have to boast. This reasoning is
equally true of all persons who have given much of their time to study
and abstracted speculations. Grossness and sensuality have been marked
with no less triumph in the religious devotee than in the professed
philosopher. The perfect joys of heaven do not satisfy the cravings of
nature; and the good Canon in Gil Blas might be opposed with effect to
some of the portraits in M. Grimm’s Correspondence.
T. T.
NO. 34.] ON COMMON-PLACE CRITICS [NOV. 24, 1816.
‘Nor can I think what thoughts they can conceive.’
We have already given some account of common-place people; we shall in
this number attempt a description of another class of the community, who
may be called (by way of distinction) common-place critics. The former
are a set of people who have no opinions of their own, and do not
pretend to have any; the latter are a set of people who have no opinions
of their own, but who affect to have one upon every subject you can
mention. The former are a very honest, good sort of people, who are
contented to pass for what they are; the latter are a very pragmatical,
troublesome sort of people, who would pass for what they are not, and
try to put off their common-place notions in all companies and on all
subjects, as something of their own. They are of both species, the grave
and the gay; and it is hard to say which is the most tiresome.
A common-place critic has something to say upon every occasion, and he
always tells you either what is not true, or what you knew before, or
what is not worth knowing. He is a person who thinks by proxy, and talks
by rote. He differs with you, not because he thinks you are in the
wrong, but because he thinks somebody else will think so. Nay, it would
be well if he stopped here; but he will undertake to misrepresent you by
anticipation, lest others should misunderstand you, and will set you
right, not only in opinions which you have, but in those which you may
be supposed to have. Thus, if you say that _Bottom_ the weaver is a
character that has not had justice done to it, he shakes his head, is
afraid you will be thought extravagant, and wonders you should think the
_Midsummer Night’s Dream_ the finest of all Shakspeare’s plays. He
judges of matters of taste and reasoning as he does of dress and
fashion, by the prevailing tone of good company; and you would as soon
persuade him to give up any sentiment that is current there, as to wear
the hind part of his coat before. By the best company, of which he is
perpetually talking, he means persons who live on their own estates, and
other people’s ideas. By the opinion of the world, to which he pays and
expects you to pay great deference, he means that of a little circle of
his own, where he hears and is heard. Again, _good sense_ is a phrase
constantly in his mouth, by which he does not mean his own sense or that
of anybody else, but the opinions of a number of persons who have agreed
to take their opinions on trust from others. If any one observes that
there is something better than common sense, viz., _uncommon_ sense, he
thinks this a bad joke. If you object to the opinions of the majority,
as often arising from ignorance or prejudice, he appeals from them to
the sensible and well-informed; and if you say there may be other
persons as sensible and well informed as himself and his friends, he
smiles at your presumption. If you attempt to prove anything to him, it
is in vain, for he is not thinking of what you say, but of what will be
thought of it. The stronger your reasons, the more incorrigible he
thinks you; and he looks upon any attempt to expose his gratuitous
assumptions as the wandering of a disordered imagination. His notions
are like plaster figures cast in a mould, as brittle as they are hollow;
but they will break before you can make them give way. In fact, he is
the representative of a large part of the community, the shallow, the
vain, and indolent, of those who have time to talk, and are not bound to
think: and he considers any deviation from the select forms of
common-place, or the accredited language of conventional impertinence,
as compromising the authority under which he acts in his diplomatic
capacity. It is wonderful how this class of people agree with one
another; how they herd together in all their opinions; what a tact they
have for folly; what an instinct for absurdity; what a sympathy in
sentiment; how they find one another out by infallible signs, like
Freemasons! The secret of this unanimity and strict accord is, that not
any one of them ever admits any opinion that can cost the least effort
of mind in arriving at, or of courage in declaring it. Folly is as
consistent with itself as wisdom: there is a certain level of thought
and sentiment, which the weakest minds, as well as the strongest, find
out as best adapted to them; and you as regularly come to the same
conclusions, by looking no farther than the surface, as if you dug to
the centre of the earth! You know beforehand what a critic of this class
will say on almost every subject the first time he sees you, the next
time, the time after that, and so on to the end of the chapter. The
following list of his opinions may be relied on:—It is pretty certain
that before you have been in the room with him ten minutes, he will give
you to understand that Shakspeare was a great but irregular genius.
Again, he thinks it a question whether any one of his plays, if brought
out now for the first time, would succeed. He thinks that _Macbeth_
would be the most likely, from the music which has been since introduced
into it. He has some doubts as to the superiority of the French School
over us in tragedy, and observes, that Hume and Adam Smith were both of
that opinion. He thinks Milton’s pedantry a great blemish in his
writings, and that _Paradise Lost_ has many prosaic passages in it. He
conceives that genius does not always imply taste, and that wit and
judgment are very different faculties. He considers Dr. Johnson as a
great critic and moralist, and that his Dictionary was a work of
prodigious erudition and vast industry; but that some of the anecdotes
of him in Boswell are trifling. He conceives that Mr. Locke was a very
original and profound thinker. He thinks Gibbon’s style vigorous but
florid. He wonders that the author of _Junius_ was never found out. He
thinks Pope’s translation of the _Iliad_ an improvement on the
simplicity of the original, which was necessary to fit it to the taste
of modern readers. He thinks there is a great deal of grossness in the
old comedies; and that there has been a great improvement in the morals
of the higher classes since the reign of Charles II. He thinks the reign
of Queen Anne the golden period of our literature, but that, upon the
whole, we have no English writer equal to Voltaire. He speaks of
Boccacio as a very licentious writer, and thinks the wit in Rabelais
quite extravagant, though he never read either of them. He cannot get
through Spenser’s _Fairy Queen_, and pronounces all allegorical poetry
tedious. He prefers Smollett to Fielding, and discovers more knowledge
of the world in _Gil Blas_ than in _Don Quixote_. Richardson he thinks
very minute and tedious. He thinks the French Revolution has done a
great deal of harm to the cause of liberty; and blames Buonaparte for
being so ambitious. He reads the _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly Reviews_,
and thinks as they do. He is shy of having an opinion on a new actor or
a new singer; for the public do not always agree with the newspapers. He
thinks that the moderns have great advantages over the ancients in many
respects. He thinks Jeremy Bentham a greater man than Aristotle. He can
see no reason why artists of the present day should not paint as well as
Raphael or Titian. For instance, he thinks there is something very
elegant and classical in Mr. Westall’s drawings. He has no doubt that
Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Lectures were written by Burke. He considers Horne
Tooke’s account of the conjunction _That_ very ingenious, and holds that
no writer can be called elegant who uses the present for the subjunctive
mood, who says _If it is_ for _If it be_. He thinks Hogarth a great
master of low, comic humour; and Cobbett a coarse, vulgar writer. He
often talks of men of liberal education, and men without education, as
if that made much difference. He judges of people by their pretensions;
and pays attention to their opinions according to their dress and rank
in life. If he meets with a fool, he does not find him out; and if he
meets with any one wiser than himself, he does not know what to make of
him. He thinks that manners are of great consequence to the common
intercourse of life. He thinks it difficult to prove the existence of
any such thing as original genius, or to fix a general standard of
taste. He does not think it possible to define what wit is. In religion,
his opinions are liberal. He considers all enthusiasm as a degree of
madness, particularly to be guarded against by young minds; and believes
that truth lies in the middle, between the extremes of right and wrong.
He thinks that the object of poetry is to please; and that astronomy is
a very pleasing and useful study. He thinks all this, and a great deal
more, that amounts to nothing. We wonder we have remembered one half of
it—
‘For true no-meaning puzzles more than wit.’
Though he has an aversion to all new ideas, he likes all new plans and
matters-of-fact: the new Schools for All, the Penitentiary, the new
Bedlam, the new Steam-Boats, the Gas-Lights, the new Patent Blacking;
every thing of that sort but the Bible Society. The Society for the
Suppression of Vice he thinks a great nuisance, as every honest man
must.
In a word, a common-place critic is the pedant of polite conversation.
He refers to the opinion of Lord M. or Lady G. with the same air of
significance that the learned pedant does to the authority of Cicero or
Virgil; retails the wisdom of the day, as the anecdote-monger does the
wit; and carries about with him the sentiments of people of a certain
respectability in life, as the dancing-master does their air, or their
valets their clothes.
Z.
NO. 35.] ON THE CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ OF THE [NOV. 10, 1816.
BRITISH INSTITUTION
The Catalogue Raisonné of the pictures lately exhibited at the British
Institution is worthy of notice, both as it is understood to be a
declaration of the views of the Royal Academy, and as it contains some
erroneous notions with respect to art prevalent in this country. It sets
out with the following passages:—
‘The first resolution ever framed by the noblemen and gentlemen who met
to establish the British Institution, consists of the following
sentence, viz.:
‘“The _object_ of the establishment is to facilitate, by a Public
Exhibition, the _Sale_ of the productions of _British_ artists.”
‘Now, if the Directors had not felt quite certain as to the result of
the present Exhibition, (of the Flemish School), if they had not
perfectly satisfied themselves, that, instead of affording any, even the
least means of promoting _unfair and invidious comparisons, it would
produce abundant matter for exaltation to the living Artist_, can we
possibly imagine they, the foster-parents of British Art, would ever
have suffered such a display to have taken place? Certainly not. If they
had not foreseen and fully provided against _all such injurious
results_, by the deep and masterly manœuvre alluded to in our former
remarks, is it conceivable that the Directors would have acted in a way
so counter, so diametrically in opposition to this their fundamental and
leading principle? No, No! It is a position which all sense of respect
for their consistency will not suffer us to admit, which all feelings of
respect for their views forbid us to allow.
‘Is it at all to be wondered at, that, in an Exhibition such as this,
where nothing _like a patriotic desire_ to uphold the arts of their
country can possibly have place in the minds of the Directors, we should
attribute to them the desire of _holding up the old Masters to
derision_, inasmuch as good policy would allow? Is it to be wondered at,
that, when the Directors have the three-fold prospect, by so doing, of
estranging the silly and ignorant Collector from his false and senseless
infatuation for the _Black Masters_, of turning his _unjust preference_
from Foreign to British Art, and, by affording the living painters a
just encouragement, teach them to feel that becoming confidence in their
powers, which an acknowledgment of their merits entitles them to? Is it
to be wondered at, we say, that a little duplicity should have been
practised upon this occasion, that some of our ill-advised Collectors
and second-rate picture Amateurs should have been singled out as sheep
for the sacrifice, and _thus ingeniously_ made to pay unwilling homage
_to the talents of their countrymen_, through that very medium by which
they had previously been induced _to depreciate them_?’—‘If, in our wish
to please the Directors, we should, without mercy, damn all that
deserves damning, and effectually hide our admiration for those pieces
and passages which are truly entitled to admiration, it must be placed
entirely to that _patriotic sympathy_, which we feel in common with the
Directors, of holding up to the public, as the first and great object,
THE PATRONAGE OF MODERN ART.’
Once more:
‘Who does not perceive (except those whose eyes are not made for seeing
more than they are told by others) that Vandyke’s portraits, by the
brilliant colour of the velvet hangings, are made to look as if they had
been newly fetched home from the clear-starcher, with a double portion
of blue in their ruffs? Who does not see, that the angelic females in
Rubens’s pictures (particularly in that of the Brazen Serpent) labour
under a fit of the bile, twice as severe as they would do, if they were
not suffering on red velvet? Who does not see, from the same cause, that
the landscapes by the same Master are converted into _brown studies_,
and that Rembrandt’s ladies and gentlemen of fashion look as if they had
been on duty for the whole of last week in the Prince Regent’s new
sewer? _And who, that has any penetration, that has any gratitude, does
not see, in seeing all this, the anxious and benevolent solicitude of
the Directors to keep the old masters under?_’
So, then, this Writer would think it a matter of lively gratitude, and
of exultation in the breasts of living Artists, if the Directors, ‘in
their anxious and benevolent desire to keep the old Masters under,’ had
contrived to make Vandyke’s pictures look like starch and blue: if they
had converted Rubens’s pictures into brown studies, or a fit of the
bile; or had dragged Rembrandt’s through the Prince Regent’s new sewers.
It would have been a great gain, a great triumph to the Academy and to
the Art, to have nothing left of all the pleasure or admiration which
those painters had hitherto imparted to the world, to find all the
excellences which their works had been supposed to possess, and all
respect for them in the minds of the public destroyed, and converted
into sudden loathing and disgust. This is, according to the
Catalogue-writer and his friends, a consummation devoutly to be wished
for themselves and for the Art. All that is taken from the old Masters
is so much added to the moderns; the marring of Art is the making of the
Academy. This is the kind of patronage and promotion of the Fine Arts on
which he insists as necessary to keep up the reputation of living
Artists, and to ensure the sale of their works. There is nothing then in
common between the merits of the old Masters and the doubtful claims of
the new: _those_ are not ‘the scale by which we can ascend to the love’
of these. The excellences of the latter are of their own making and of
their own seeing; we must take their own word for them; and not only so,
but we must sacrifice all established principles and all established
reputation to their upstart pretensions, because, if the old pictures
are not totally worthless, their own can be good for nothing. The only
chance, therefore, for the moderns, if the Catalogue-writer is to be
believed, is to decry all the _chef-d’œuvres_ of the Art, and to hold up
all the great names in it to derision. If the public once get to relish
the style of the old Masters, they will no longer tolerate theirs. But
so long as the old Masters can be _kept under_, the coloured caricatures
of the moderns, like _Mrs. Peachum’s_ coloured handkerchiefs, ‘will be
of sure sale at their warehouse at Redriff.’ The Catalogue-writer thinks
it necessary, in order to raise the Art in this country, to depreciate
all Art in all other times and countries. He thinks that the way to
excite an enthusiastic admiration of genius in the public is by setting
the example of a vulgar and malignant hatred of it in himself. He thinks
to inspire a lofty spirit of emulation in the rising generation, by
shutting his eyes to the excellences of all the finest models, or by
pouring out upon them the overflowings of his gall and envy, to
disfigure them in the eyes of others; so that they may see nothing in
Raphael, in Titian, in Rubens, in Rembrandt, in Vandyke, in Claude
Lorraine, in Leonardo da Vinci, but the low wit and dirty imagination of
a paltry scribbler; and come away from the greatest monuments of human
capacity, without one feeling of excellence in art, or of beauty or
grandeur in nature. Nay, he would persuade us that this is a great
public and private benefit, _viz._, that there is no such thing as
excellence, as genius, as true fame, except what he and his anonymous
associates arrogate to themselves, with all the profit and credit of
this degradation of genius, this ruin of Art, this obloquy and contempt
heaped on great and unrivalled reputation. He thinks it a likely mode of
producing confidence in the existence and value of Art, to prove that
there never was any such thing, till the last annual Exhibition of the
Royal Academy. He would encourage a disinterested love of Art, and a
liberal patronage of it in the great and opulent, by shewing that the
living Artists have no regard, but the most sovereign and reckless
contempt for it, except as it can be made a temporary stalking-horse to
their pride and avarice. The writer may have a _patriotic sympathy_ with
the sale of modern works of Art, but we do not see what sympathy there
can be between the buyers and sellers of these works, except in the love
of the Art itself. When we find that these patriotic persons would
destroy the Art itself to promote the sale of their pictures, we know
what to say to them. We are obliged to the zeal of our critic for having
set this matter in so clear a light. The public will feel little
sympathy with a body of Artists who disclaim all sympathy with all other
Artists. They will doubt their pretensions to genius who have no feeling
of respect for it in others; they will consider them as bastards, not
children of the Art, who would destroy their parent. The public will
hardly consent, when the proposition is put to them in this tangible
shape, to give up the cause of liberal art and of every liberal
sentiment connected with it, and enter, with their eyes open, into a
pettifogging cabal to keep the old Masters under, or hold their names up
to derision ‘as good sport,’ merely to gratify the selfish importunity
of a gang of sturdy beggars, who demand public encouragement and
support, with a claim of settlement in one hand, and a forged
certificate of merit in the other. They can only deserve well of the
public by deserving well of the Art. Have we taken these men from the
plough, from the counter, from the shop-board, from the tap-room and the
stable-door, to raise them to fortune, to rank, and distinction in life,
for the sake of Art, to give them a chance of doing something in Art
like what had been done before them, of promoting and refining the
public taste, of setting before them the great models of Art, and by a
pure love of truth and beauty, and by patient and disinterested
aspirations after it, of rising to the highest excellence, and of making
themselves ‘a name great above all names’; and do they now turn round
upon us, and because they have neglected these high objects of their
true calling for pitiful cabals and filling their pockets, insist that
we shall league with them in crushing the progress of Art, and the
respect attached to all its great efforts? There is no other country in
the world in which such a piece of impudent quackery could be put
forward with impunity, and still less in which it could be put forward
in the garb of patriotism. This is the effect of our gross island
manners. The Catalogue-writer carries his bear-garden notions of this
virtue into the Fine Arts, and would set about destroying Dutch or
Italian pictures as he would Dutch shipping or Italian liberty. He goes
up to the Rembrandts with the same swaggering Jack-tar airs as he would
to a battery of nine-pounders, and snaps his fingers at Raphael as he
would at the French. Yet he talks big about the Elgin Marbles, because
Mr. Payne Knight has made a slip on that subject; though, to be
consistent, he ought to be for pounding them in a mortar, should get his
friend the Incendiary to set fire to the room building for them at the
British Museum, or should get Mr. Soane to build it. Patriotism and the
Fine Arts have nothing to do with one another—because patriotism relates
to exclusive advantages, and the advantages of the Fine Arts are not
exclusive, but communicable. The physical property of one country cannot
be shared without loss by another: the physical force of one country may
destroy that of another. These, therefore, are objects of national
jealousy and fear of encroachment: for the interests or rights of
different countries may be compromised in them. But it is not so in the
Fine Arts, which depend upon taste and knowledge. We do not consume the
works of Art as articles of food, of clothing, or fuel; but we brood
over their _idea_, which is accessible to all, and may be multiplied
without end, ‘with riches fineless.’ Patriotism is ‘beastly; subtle as
the fox for prey; like warlike as the wolf for what it eats’; but Art is
ideal, and therefore liberal. The knowledge or perfection of Art in one
age or country is the cause of its existence or perfection in another.
Art is the cause of art in other men. Works of genius done by a Dutchman
are the cause of genius in an Englishman—are the cause of taste in an
Englishman. The patronage of foreign Art is, not to prevent, but to
promote Art in England. It does not prevent, but promote taste in
England. Art subsists by communication, not by exclusion. The light of
art, like that of nature, shines on all alike; and its benefit, like
that of the sun, is in being seen and felt. The spirit of art is not the
spirit of trade: it is not a question between the grower or consumer of
some perishable and personal commodity: but it is a question between
human genius and human taste, how much the one can produce for the
benefit of mankind, and how much the other can enjoy. It is ‘the link of
peaceful commerce ‘twixt dividable shores.’ To take from it this
character is to take from it its best privilege, its humanity. Would any
one, except our Catalogue-virtuoso, think of destroying or concealing
the monuments of Art in past ages, as inconsistent with the progress of
taste and civilisation in the present? Would any one find fault with the
introduction of the works of Raphael into this country, as if their
being done by an Italian confined the benefit to a foreign country, when
all the benefit, all the great and lasting benefit, (except the
purchase-money, the lasting burden of the Catalogue, and the great test
of the value of Art in the opinion of the writer), is instantly
communicated to all eyes that behold, and all hearts that can feel them?
It is many years ago since we first saw the prints of the Cartoons hung
round the parlour of a little inn on the great north road. We were then
very young, and had not been initiated into the principles of taste and
refinement of the _Catalogue Raisonné_. We had heard of the fame of the
Cartoons, but this was the first time that we had ever been admitted
face to face into the presence of those divine works. ‘How were we then
uplifted!’ Prophets and Apostles stood before us, and the Saviour of the
Christian world, with his attributes of faith and power; miracles were
working on the walls; the hand of Raphael was there, and as his pencil
traced the lines, we saw god-like spirits and lofty shapes descend and
walk visibly the earth, but as if their thoughts still lifted them above
the earth. There was that figure of St. Paul, pointing with noble
fervour to ‘temples not made with hands, eternal in the heavens,’ and
that finer one of Christ in the boat, whose whole figure seems sustained
by meekness and love, and that of the same person, surrounded by the
disciples, like a flock of sheep listening to the music of some divine
shepherd. We knew not how enough to admire them. If from this transport
and delight there arose in our breasts a wish, a deep aspiration of
mingled hope and fear, to be able one day to do something like them,
that hope has long since vanished; but not with it the love of Art, nor
delight in works of Art, nor admiration of the genius which produces
them, nor respect for fame which rewards and crowns them! Did we suspect
that in this feeling of enthusiasm for the works of Raphael we were
deficient in patriotic sympathy, or that, in spreading it as far as we
could, we did an injury to our country or to living Art? The very
feeling shewed that there was no such distinction in Art, that her
benefits were common, that the power of genius, like the spirit of the
world, is everywhere alike present. And would the harpies of criticism
try to extinguish this common benefit to their country from a pretended
exclusive attachment to their countrymen? Would they rob their country
of Raphael to set up the credit of their professional little-goes and E.
O. tables—‘cutpurses of the Art, that from the shelf the precious diadem
stole, and put it in their pockets’? Tired of exposing such folly, we
walked out the other day, and saw a bright cloud resting on the bosom of
the blue expanse, which reminded us of what we had seen in some picture
in the Louvre. We were suddenly roused from our reverie, by recollecting
that till we had answered this catchpenny publication we had no right,
without being liable to a charge of disaffection to our country or
treachery to the Art, to look at nature, or to think of any thing like
it in Art, not of British growth and manufacture!
NO. 36.] THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED [NOV. 10, 17,
1816.
The Catalogue-writer nicknames the Flemish painters ‘the Black Masters.’
Either this means that the works of Rubens and Vandyke were originally
black pictures, that is, deeply shadowed like those of Rembrandt, which
is false, there being no painter who used so little shadow as Vandyke,
or so much colour as Rubens; or it must mean that their pictures have
turned darker with time, that is, that the art itself is a black art. Is
this a triumph for the Academy? Is the defect and decay of Art a subject
of exultation to the national genius? Then there is no hope (in this
country at least) ‘that a great man’s memory may outlive him half a
year!’ Do they calculate that the decomposition and gradual
disappearance of the standard works of Art will quicken the demand, and
facilitate the sale of modern pictures? Have they no hope of immortality
themselves, that they are glad to see the inevitable dissolution of all
that has long flourished in splendour and in honour? They are pleased to
find, that at the end of near two hundred years, the pictures of Vandyke
and Rubens have suffered half as much from time as those of their late
President have done in thirty or forty, or their own in the last ten or
twelve years. So that the glory of painting is that it does not last for
ever: it is this which puts the ancients and the moderns on a level.
They hail with undisguised satisfaction the approaches of the slow
mouldering hand of time in those works which have lasted longest, not
anticipating the premature fate of their own. Such is their
short-sighted ambition. A picture is with them like the frame it is in,
_as good as new_; and the best picture, that which was last painted.
They make the weak side of Art the test of its excellence; and though a
modern picture of two years standing is hardly fit to be seen, from the
general ignorance of the painter in the mechanical as well as other
parts of the Art, yet they are sure at any time to get the start of
Rubens or Vandyke, by painting a picture against the day of exhibition.
We even question whether they would wish to make their own pictures last
if they could, and whether they would not destroy their own works as
well as those of others, (like chalk figures on the floors), to have new
ones bespoke the next day. The Flemish pictures then, except those of
Rembrandt, were not originally black; they have not faded in proportion
to the length of time they have been painted. All that comes then of the
nickname in the Catalogue is, that the pictures of the old Masters have
lasted longer than those of the present members of the Royal Academy,
and that the latter, it is to be presumed, do not wish their works to
last so long, lest they should be called the _Black Masters_. With
respect to Rembrandt, this epitaph may be literally true. But, we would
ask, whether the style of _chiaroscuro_, in which Rembrandt painted, is
not one fine view of nature and of art? Whether any other painter
carried it to the same height of perfection as he did? Whether any other
painter ever joined the same depth of shadow with the same clearness?
Whether his tones were not as fine as they were true? Whether a more
thorough master of his art ever lived? Whether he deserved for this to
be nicknamed by the Writer of the Catalogue, or to have his works ‘kept
under, or himself held up to derision,’ by the Patrons and Directors of
the British Institution for the support and encouragement of the Fine
Arts?
But we have heard it said by a disciple and commentator on the
Catalogue, (one would think it was hardly possible to descend lower than
the writer himself), that the Directors of the British Institution
assume a consequence to themselves, hostile to the pretensions of modern
professors, out of the reputation of the old Masters, whom they affect
to look upon with wonder, to worship as something preternatural;—that
they consider the bare possession of an old picture as a title to
distinction, and the respect paid to Art as the highest pretension of
the owner. And is this then a subject of complaint with the Academy,
that genius is thus thought of, when its claims are once fully
established? That those high qualities, which are beyond the estimate of
ignorance and selfishness while living, receive their reward from
distant ages? Do they not ‘feel the future in the instant’? Do they not
know, that those qualities which appeal neither to interest nor passion
can only find their level with time, and would they annihilate the only
pretensions they have? Or have they no conscious affinity with true
genius, no claim to the reversion of true fame, no right of succession
to this lasting inheritance and final reward of great exertions, which
they would therefore destroy, to prevent others from enjoying it? Does
all their ambition begin and end in their _patriotic sympathy_ with the
sale of modern works of Art, and have they no fellow-feeling with the
hopes and final destiny of human genius? What poet ever complained of
the respect paid to Homer as derogatory to himself? The envy and
opposition to established fame is peculiar to the race of modern
Artists; and it is to be hoped it will remain so. It is the fault of
their education. It is only by a liberal education that we learn to feel
respect for the past, or to take an interest in the future. The
knowledge of Artists is too often confined to their art, and their views
to their own interest. Even in this they are wrong:—in all respects they
are wrong. As a mere matter of trade, the prejudice in favour of old
pictures does not prevent but assist the sale of modern works of Art. If
there was not a prejudice in favour of old pictures, there could be a
prejudice in favour of none, and none would be sold. The professors seem
to think, that for every old picture not sold, one of their own would
be. This is a false calculation. The contrary is true. For every old
picture not sold, one of their own (in proportion) would _not_ be sold.
The practice of buying pictures is a habit, and it must begin with those
pictures which have a character and name, and not with those which have
none. ‘Depend upon it,’ says Mr. Burke in a letter to Barry, ‘whatever
attracts public attention to the Arts, will in the end be for the
benefit of the Artists themselves.’ Again, do not the Academicians know,
that it is a contradiction in terms, that a man should enjoy the
advantages of posthumous fame in his lifetime? Most men cease to be of
any consequence at all when they are dead; but it is the privilege of
the man of genius to survive himself. But he cannot in the nature of
things anticipate this privilege—because in all that appeals to the
general intellect of mankind, this appeal is strengthened, as it spreads
wider and is acknowledged; because a man cannot unite in himself
personally the suffrages of distant ages and nations; because
popularity, a newspaper puff, cannot have the certainty of lasting fame;
because it does not carry the same weight of sympathy with it; because
it cannot have the same interest, the same refinement or grandeur. If
Mr. West was equal to Raphael, (which he is not), if Mr. Lawrence was
equal to Vandyke or Titian, (which he is not), if Mr. Turner was equal
to Claude Lorraine, (which he is not), if Mr. Wilkie was equal to
Teniers, (which he is not), yet they could not, nor ought they to be
thought of in the same manner, because there could not be the same proof
of it, nor the same confidence in the opinion of a man and his friends,
or of any one generation, as in that of successive generations and the
voice of posterity. If it is said that we pass over the faults of the
one, and severely scrutinise the excellences of the other; this is also
right and necessary, because the one have passed their trial, and the
others are upon it. If we forgive or overlook the faults of the
ancients, it is because they have dearly earned it at our hands. We
ought to have some objects to indulge our enthusiasm upon; and we ought
to indulge it upon the highest, and those that are surest of deserving
it. Would one of our Academicians expect us to look at his new house in
one of the new squares with the same veneration as at Michael Angelo’s,
which he built with his own hands, as at Tully’s villa, or at the tomb
of Virgil? We have no doubt they would, but we cannot. Besides, if it
were possible to transfer our old prejudices to new candidates, the way
to effect this is not by destroying them. If we have no confidence in
all that has gone before us, in what has received the sanction of time
and the concurring testimony of disinterested judges, are we to believe
all of a sudden that excellence has started up in our own times, because
it never existed before: are we to take the Artists’ own word for their
superiority to their predecessors? There is one other plea made by the
moderns, ‘that they must live,’ and the answer to it is, that they do
live. An Academician makes his thousand a-year by portrait-painting, and
complains that the encouragement given to foreign Art deprives him of
the means of subsistence, and prevents him from indulging his genius in
works of high history,—‘playing at will his virgin fancies wild.’
As to the comparative merits of the ancients and the moderns, it does
not admit of a question. The odds are too much in favour of the former,
because it is likely that more good pictures were painted in the last
three hundred than in the last thirty years. Now, the old pictures are
the best remaining out of all that period, setting aside those of living
Artists. If they are bad, the Art itself is good for nothing; for they
are the best that ever were. They are not good, because they are old;
but they have become old, because they are good. The question is not
between this and any other generation, but between the present and all
preceding generations, whom the Catalogue-writer, in his misguided zeal,
undertakes to vilify and ‘to keep under, or hold up to derision.’ To say
that the great names which have come down to us are not worth any thing,
is to say that the mountain-tops which we see in the farthest horizon
are not so high as the intervening objects. If there had been any
greater painters than Vandyke or Rubens, or Raphael or Rembrandt, or N.
Poussin or Claude Lorraine, we should have heard of them, we should have
seen them in the Gallery, and we should have read a patriotic and
disinterested account of them in the _Catalogue Raisonné_. Waiving the
unfair and invidious comparison between all former excellence and the
concentrated essence of it in the present age, let us ask who, in the
last generation of painters, was equal to the old masters? Was it
Highmore, or Hayman, or Hudson, or Kneller? Who was the English Raphael,
or Rubens, or Vandyke, of that day, to whom the Catalogue-critic would
have extended his patriotic sympathy and damning patronage? Kneller, we
have been told, was thought superior to Vandyke by the persons of
fashion whom he painted. So St. Thomas Apostle seems higher than St.
Paul’s while you are close under it; but the farther off you go the
higher the mighty dome aspires into the skies. What is become of all
those great men who flourished in our own time—‘like flowers in men’s
caps, dying or ere they sicken’—Hoppner, Opie, Shee, Loutherbourg,
Rigaud, Romney, Barry, the painters of the Shakspeare Gallery? ‘Gone to
the vault of all the Capulets,’ and their pictures with them, or before
them! Shall we put more faith in their successors? Shall we take the
words of their friends for their taste and genius? No, we will stick to
what we know will stick to us, the ‘heirlooms’ of the Art, the Black
Masters. The picture, for instance, of Charles I. on horseback, which
our critic criticises with such heavy drollery, is worth all the
pictures that were ever exhibited at the Royal Academy (from the time of
Sir Joshua to the present time inclusive) put together. It shews more
knowledge and feeling of the Art, more skill and beauty, more sense of
what it is in objects that gives pleasure to the eye, with more power to
communicate this pleasure to the world. If either this single picture,
or all the lumber that has ever appeared at the Academy, were to be
destroyed, there could not be a question which, with any Artist or with
any judge or lover of Art. So stands the account between ancient and
modern Art! By this we may judge of all the rest. The Catalogue-writer
makes some strictures in the second part on the Waterloo Exhibition,
which he does not think what it ought to be. We wonder he had another
word to say on modern Art after seeing it. He should instantly have
taken the resolution of _Iago_, ‘From this time forth I never will speak
more.’
The writer of the _Catalogue Raisonné_ has fallen foul of two things
which ought to be sacred to Artists and lovers of Art—Genius and Fame.
If they are not sacred to them, we do not know to whom they will be
sacred. A work such as the present shews that the person who could write
it must either have no knowledge or taste for Art, or must be actuated
by a feeling of unaccountable malignity towards it. It shews that any
body of men by whom it could be set on foot or encouraged are not an
Academy of Art. It shews that a country in which such a publication
could make its appearance is not the country of the Fine Arts. Does the
writer think to prove the genius of his countrymen for Art by
proclaiming their utter insensibility and flagitious contempt for all
beauty and excellence in the art, except in their own works? No! it is
very true that the English are a shopkeeping nation; and the _Catalogue
Raisonné_ is the proof of it.
Finally, the works of the moderns are not, like those of the Old
Masters, a second nature. Oh Art, true likeness of nature, ‘balm of hurt
minds, great nature’s second course, chief nourisher in life’s feast,’
of what would our Catalogue-mongers deprive us in depriving us of thee
and of thy glories, of the lasting works of the great Painters, and of
their names no less magnificent, grateful to our hearts as the sound of
celestial harmony from other spheres, waking around us (whether heard or
not) from youth to age, the stay, the guide and anchor of our purest
thoughts; whom, having once seen, we always remember, and who teach us
to see all things through them; without whom life would be to begin
again, and the earth barren; of Raphael, who lifted the human form half
way to heaven; of Titian, who painted the mind in the face, and unfolded
the soul of things to the eye; of Rubens, around whose pencil gorgeous
shapes thronged numberless, startling us by the novel accidents of form
and colour, putting the spirit of motion into the universe, and weaving
a gay fantastic round and Bacchanalian dance with nature; of thee, too,
Rembrandt, who didst redeem one half of nature from obloquy, from the
nickname in the Catalogue, ‘smoothing the raven down of darkness till it
smiled,’ and tinging it with a light like streaks of burnished ore; of
these, and more, of whom the world is scarce worthy; and what would they
give us in return? Nothing.
W. H.
NO. 37.] ON POETICAL VERSATILITY [DEC. 22, 1816.
The spirit of poetry is in itself favourable to humanity and liberty:
but, we suspect, not when its aid is most wanted. The spirit of poetry
is not the spirit of mortification or of martyrdom. Poetry dwells in a
perpetual Utopia of its own, and is for that reason very ill calculated
to make a Paradise upon earth, by encountering the shocks and
disappointments of the world. Poetry, like law, is a fiction, only a
more agreeable one. It does not create difficulties where they do not
exist; but contrives to get rid of them, whether they exist or not. It
is not entangled in cobwebs of its own making, but soars above all
obstacles. It cannot be ‘constrained by mastery.’ It has the range of
the universe; it traverses the empyrean, and looks down on nature from a
higher sphere. When it lights upon the earth, it loses some of its
dignity and its use. Its strength is in its wings; its element the air.
Standing on its feet, jostling with the crowd, it is liable to be
overthrown, trampled on, and defaced; for its wings are of a dazzling
brightness, ‘heaven’s own tinct,’ and the least soil upon them shews to
disadvantage. Sullied, degraded as we have seen it, we shall not insult
over it, but leave it to Time to take out the stains, seeing it is a
thing immortal as itself. ‘Being so majestical, we should do it wrong to
offer it the show of violence.’ But the best things, in their abuse,
often become the worst; and so it is with poetry when it is diverted
from its proper end. Poets live in an ideal world, where they make
everything out according to their wishes and fancies. They either find
things delightful or make them so. They feign the beautiful and grand
out of their own minds, and imagine all things to be, not what they are,
but what they ought to be. They are naturally inventors, creators of
truth, of love, and beauty: and while they speak to us from the sacred
shrine of their own hearts, while they pour out the pure treasures of
thought to the world, they cannot be too much admired and applauded: but
when, forgetting their high calling, and becoming tools and puppets in
the hands of power, they would pass off the gewgaws of corruption and
love-tokens of self-interest as the gifts of the Muse, they cannot be
too much despised and shunned. We do not like novels founded on facts,
nor do we like poets turned courtiers. Poets, it has been said, succeed
best in fiction: and they should for the most part stick to it.
Invention, not upon an imaginary subject, is a lie: the varnishing over
the vices or deformities of actual objects is hypocrisy. Players leave
their finery at the stage-door, or they would be hooted; poets come out
into the world with all their bravery on, and yet they would pass for
_bona fide_ persons. They lend the colours of fancy to whatever they
see: whatever they touch becomes gold, though it were lead. With them
every Joan is a lady; and kings and queens are human. Matters of fact
they embellish at their will, and reason is the plaything of their
passions, their caprice, or their interest. There is no practice so base
of which they will not become the panders: no sophistry of which their
understanding may not be made the voluntary dupe. Their only object is
to please their fancy. Their souls are effeminate, half man and half
woman:—they want fortitude, and are without principle. If things do not
turn out according to their wishes, they will make their wishes turn
round to things. They can easily overlook whatever they do not like, and
make an idol of any thing they please. The object of poetry is to
please: this art naturally gives pleasure, and excites admiration.
Poets, therefore, cannot do well without sympathy and flattery. It is
accordingly very much against the grain that they remain long on the
unpopular side of the question. They do not like to be shut out when
laurels are to be given away at Court—or places under Government to be
disposed of, in romantic situations in the country. They are happy to be
reconciled on the first opportunity to prince and people, and to
exchange their principles for a pension. They have not always strength
of mind to think for themselves, nor courage enough to bear the unjust
stigma of the opinions they have taken upon trust from others. Truth
alone does not satisfy their pampered appetites without the sauce of
praise. To prefer truth to all other things, it requires that the mind
should have been at some pains in finding it out, and that we should
feel a severe delight in the contemplation of truth, seen by its own
clear light, and not as it is reflected in the admiring eyes of the
world. A philosopher may perhaps make a shift to be contented with the
sober draughts of reason: a poet must have the applause of the world to
intoxicate him. Milton was, however, a poet, and an honest man; he was
Cromwell’s secretary.
T. T.
NO. 38.] ON ACTORS AND ACTING [JAN. 5, 1817.
Players are ‘the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time’; the motley
representatives of human nature. They are the only honest hypocrites.
Their life is a voluntary dream; a studied madness. The height of their
ambition is to be _beside themselves_. To-day kings, to-morrow beggars,
it is only when they are themselves, that they are nothing. Made up of
mimic laughter and tears, passing from the extremes of joy or woe at the
prompter’s call, they wear the livery of other men’s fortunes; their
very thoughts are not their own. They are, as it were, train-bearers in
the pageant of life, and hold a glass up to humanity, frailer than
itself. We see ourselves at second-hand in them: they shew us all that
we are, all that we wish to be, and all that we dread to be. The stage
is an epitome, a bettered likeness of the world, with the dull part left
out: and, indeed, with this omission, it is nearly big enough to hold
all the rest. What brings the resemblance nearer is, that, as _they_
imitate us, we, in our turn, imitate them. How many fine gentlemen do we
owe to the stage? How many romantic lovers are mere Romeos in
masquerade? How many soft bosoms have heaved with Juliet’s sighs? They
teach us when to laugh and when to weep, when to love and when to hate,
upon principle and with a good grace! Wherever there is a play-house,
the world will go on not amiss. The stage not only refines the manners,
but it is the best teacher of morals, for it is the truest and most
intelligible picture of life. It stamps the image of virtue on the mind
by first softening the rude materials of which it is composed, by a
sense of pleasure. It regulates the passions by giving a loose to the
imagination. It points out the selfish and depraved to our detestation,
the amiable and generous to our admiration; and if it clothes the more
seductive vices with the borrowed graces of wit and fancy, even those
graces operate as a diversion to the coarser poison of experience and
bad example, and often prevent or carry off the infection by inoculating
the mind with a certain taste and elegance. To shew how little we agree
with the common declamations against the immoral tendency of the stage
on this score, we will hazard a conjecture, that the acting of the
Beggar’s Opera a certain number of nights every year since it was first
brought out, has done more towards putting down the practice of highway
robbery, than all the gibbets that ever were erected. A person, after
seeing this piece is too deeply imbued with a sense of humanity, is in
too good humour with himself and the rest of the world, to set about
cutting throats or rifling pockets. Whatever makes a jest of vice,
leaves it too much a matter of indifference for any one in his senses to
rush desperately on his ruin for its sake. We suspect that just the
contrary effect must be produced by the representation of George
Barnwell, which is too much in the style of the Ordinary’s sermon to
meet with any better success. The mind, in such cases, instead of being
deterred by the alarming consequences held out to it, revolts against
the denunciation of them as an insult offered to its free-will, and, in
a spirit of defiance, returns a practical answer to them, by daring the
worst that can happen. The most striking lesson ever read to levity and
licentiousness, is in the last act of the Inconstant, where young
Mirabel is preserved by the fidelity of his mistress, Orinda, in the
disguise of a page, from the hands of assassins, into whose power he has
been allured by the temptations of vice and beauty. There never was a
rake who did not become in imagination a reformed man, during the
representation of the last trying scenes of this admirable comedy.
If the stage is useful as a school of instruction, it is no less so as a
source of amusement. It is the source of the greatest enjoyment at the
time, and a never-failing fund of agreeable reflection afterwards. The
merits of a new play, or of a new actor, are always among the first
topics of polite conversation. One way in which public exhibitions
contribute to refine and humanise mankind, is by supplying them with
ideas and subjects of conversation and interest in common. The progress
of civilisation is in proportion to the number of common-places current
in society. For instance, if we meet with a stranger at an inn or in a
stage-coach, who knows nothing but his own affairs, his shop, his
customers, his farm, his pigs, his poultry, we can carry on no
conversation with him on these local and personal matters: the only way
is to let him have all the talk to himself. But if he has fortunately
ever seen Mr. Liston act, this is an immediate topic of mutual
conversation, and we agree together the rest of the evening in
discussing the merits of that inimitable actor, with the same
satisfaction as in talking over the affairs of the most intimate friend.
If the stage thus introduces us familiarly to our contemporaries, it
also brings us acquainted with former times. It is an interesting
revival of past ages, manners, opinions, dresses, persons, and
actions,—whether it carries us back to the wars of York and Lancaster,
or half way back to the heroic times of Greece and Rome, in some
translation from the French, or quite back to the age of Charles II. in
the scenes of Congreve and of Etherege, (the gay Sir George!)—happy age,
when kings and nobles led purely ornamental lives; when the utmost
stretch of a morning’s study went no further than the choice of a
sword-knot, or the adjustment of a side-curl; when the soul spoke out in
all the pleasing eloquence of dress; and beaux and belles, enamoured of
themselves in one another’s follies, fluttered like gilded butterflies
in giddy mazes through the walks of St. James’s Park!
A good company of comedians, a Theatre-Royal judiciously managed, is
your true Herald’s College; the only Antiquarian Society, that is worth
a rush. It is for this reason that there is such an air of romance about
players, and that it is pleasanter to see them, even in their own
persons, than any of the three learned professions. We feel more respect
for John Kemble in a plain coat, than for the Lord Chancellor on the
woolsack. He is surrounded, to our eyes, with a greater number of
imposing recollections: he is a more reverend piece of formality; a more
complicated tissue of costume. We do not know whether to look upon this
accomplished actor as Pierre or King John or Coriolanus or Cato or
Leontes or the Stranger. But we see in him a stately hieroglyphic of
humanity; a living monument of departed greatness, a sombre comment on
the rise and fall of kings. We look after him till he is out of sight,
as we listen to a story of one of Ossian’s heroes, to ‘a tale of other
times!’
One of the most affecting things we know is to see a favourite actor
take leave of the stage. We were present not long ago when Mr. Bannister
quitted it. We do not wonder that his feelings were overpowered on the
occasion: ours were nearly so too. We remembered him, in the first
heyday of our youthful spirits, in the _Prize_, in which he played so
delightfully with that fine old croaker Suett, and Madame Storace,—in
the farce of _My Grandmother_, in the _Son-in-Law_, in _Autolycus_, and
in _Scrub_, in which our satisfaction was at its height. At that time,
King and Parsons, and Dodd, and Quick, and Edwin were in the full vigour
of their reputation, who are now all gone. We still feel the vivid
delight with which we used to see their names in the play-bills, as we
went along to the Theatre. Bannister was one of the last of these that
remained; and we parted with him as we should with one of our oldest and
best friends. The most pleasant feature in the profession of a player,
and which, indeed, is peculiar to it, is that we not only admire the
talents of those who adorn it, but we contract a personal intimacy with
them. There is no class of society whom so many persons regard with
affection as actors. We greet them on the stage; we like to meet them in
the streets; they almost always recall to us pleasant associations; and
we feel our gratitude excited, without the uneasiness of a sense of
obligation. The very gaiety and popularity, however, which surround the
life of a favourite performer, make the retiring from it a very serious
business. It glances a mortifying reflection on the shortness of human
life, and the vanity of human pleasures. Something reminds us, that ‘all
the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.’
NO. 39.] ON THE SAME [JAN. 5, 1817.
It has been considered as the misfortune of first-rate talents for the
stage, that they leave no record behind them except that of vague
rumour, and that the genius of a great actor perishes with him, ‘leaving
the world no copy.’ This is a misfortune, or at least an unpleasant
circumstance, to actors; but it is, perhaps, an advantage to the stage.
It leaves an opening to originality. The stage is always beginning anew;
the candidates for theatrical reputation are always setting out afresh,
unencumbered by the affectation of the faults or excellences of their
predecessors. In this respect, we should imagine that the average
quantity of dramatic talent remains more nearly the same than that in
any other walk of art. In no other instance do the complaints of the
degeneracy of the moderns seem so unfounded as in this; and Colley
Cibber’s account of the regular decline of the stage, from the time of
Shakspeare to that of Charles II., and from the time of Charles II. to
the beginning of George II. appears quite ridiculous. The stage is a
place where genius is sure to come upon its legs, in a generation or two
at farthest. In the other arts, (as painting and poetry), it has been
contended that what has been well done already, by giving rise to
endless vapid imitations, is an obstacle to what might be done well
hereafter: that the models or _chef-d’œuvres_ of art, where they are
accumulated, choke up the path to excellence; and that the works of
genius, where they can be rendered permanent and handed down from age to
age, not only prevent, but render superfluous, future productions of the
same kind. We have not, neither do we want, two Shakspeares, two
Miltons, two Raphaels, any more than we require two suns in the same
sphere. Even Miss O’Neill stands a little in the way of our
recollections of Mrs. Siddons. But Mr. Kean is an excellent substitute
for the memory of Garrick, whom we never saw. When an author dies, it is
no matter, for his works remain. When a great actor dies, there is a
void produced in society, a gap which requires to be filled up. Who does
not go to see Kean? Who, if Garrick were alive, would go to see him? At
least one or the other must have quitted the stage. We have seen what a
ferment has been excited among our living artists by the exhibition of
the works of the old Masters at the British Gallery. What would the
actors say to it, if, by any spell or power of necromancy, all the
celebrated actors, for the last hundred years could be made to appear
again on the boards of Covent Garden and Drury-Lane, for the last time,
in all their most brilliant parts? What a rich treat to the town, what a
feast for the critics, to go and see Betterton, and Booth, and Wilks,
and Sandford, and Nokes, and Leigh, and Penkethman, and Bullock, and
Estcourt, and Dogget, and Mrs. Barry, and Mrs. Montfort, and Mrs.
Oldfield, and Mrs. Bracegirdle, and Mrs. Cibber, and Cibber himself, the
prince of coxcombs, and Macklin, and Quin, and Rich, and Mrs. Clive, and
Mrs. Pritchard, and Mrs. Abington, and Weston, and Shuter, and Garrick,
and all the rest of those who ‘gladdened life, and whose deaths eclipsed
the gaiety of nations’! We should certainly be there. We should buy a
ticket for the season. We should enjoy _our hundred days_ again. We
should not lose a single night. We would not, for a great deal, be
absent from Betterton’s Hamlet or his Brutus, or from Booth’s Cato, as
it was first acted to the contending applause of Whigs and Tories. We
should be in the first row when Mrs. Barry (who was kept by Lord
Rochester, and with whom Otway was in love) played Monimia or Belvidera;
and we suppose we should go to see Mrs. Bracegirdle (with whom all the
world was in love) in all her parts. We should then know exactly whether
Penkethman’s manner of picking a chicken, and Bullock’s mode of
devouring asparagus, answered to the ingenious account of them in the
Tatler; and whether Dogget was equal to Dowton—whether Mrs. Montfort[63]
or Mrs. Abington was the finest lady—whether Wilks or Cibber was the
best Sir Harry Wildair—whether Macklin was really ‘the Jew that
Shakspeare drew,’ and whether Garrick was, upon the whole, so great an
actor as the world have made him out! Many people have a strong desire
to pry into the secrets of futurity: for our own parts, we should be
satisfied if we had the power to recall the dead, and live the past over
again as often as we pleased! Players, after all, have little reason to
complain of their hard-earned, short-lived popularity. One thunder of
applause from pit, boxes, and gallery, is equal to a whole immortality
of posthumous fame: and when we hear an actor, whose modesty is equal to
his merit, declare, that he would like to see a dog wag his tail in
approbation, what must he feel when he sees the whole house in a roar!
Besides, Fame, as if their reputation had been entrusted to her alone,
has been particularly careful of the renown of her theatrical
favourites: she forgets one by one, and year by year, those who have
been great lawyers, great statesmen, and great warriors in their day;
but the name of Garrick still survives with the works of Reynolds and of
Johnson.
Actors have been accused, as a profession, of being extravagant and
dissipated. While they are said to be so as a piece of common cant, they
are likely to continue so. But there is a sentence in Shakspeare which
should be stuck as a label in the mouths of our beadles and whippers-in
of morality: ‘The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill
together: our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not: and
our vices would despair if they were not cherished by our virtues.’ With
respect to the extravagance of actors, as a traditional character, it is
not to be wondered at. They live from hand to mouth: they plunge from
want into luxury; they have no means of making money _breed_, and all
professions that do not live by turning money into money, or have not a
certainty of accumulating it in the end by parsimony, spend it.
Uncertain of the future, they make sure of the present moment. This is
not unwise. Chilled with poverty, steeped in contempt, they sometimes
pass into the sunshine of fortune, and are lifted to the very pinnacle
of public favour; yet even there cannot calculate on the continuance of
success, but are, ‘like the giddy sailor on the mast, ready with every
blast to topple down into the fatal bowels of the deep!’ Besides, if the
young enthusiast, who is smitten with the stage, and with the public as
a mistress, were naturally a close _hunks_, he would become or remain a
city clerk, instead of turning player. Again, with respect to the habit
of convivial indulgence, an actor, to be a good one, must have a great
spirit of enjoyment in himself, strong impulses, strong passions, and a
strong sense of pleasure: for it is his business to imitate the
passions, and to communicate pleasure to others. A man of genius is not
a machine. The neglected actor may be excused if he drinks oblivion of
his disappointments; the successful one, if he quaffs the applause of
the world, and enjoys the friendship of those who are the friends of the
favourites of fortune, in draughts of nectar. There is no path so steep
as that of fame: no labour so hard as the pursuit of excellence. The
intellectual excitement, inseparable from those professions which call
forth all our sensibility to pleasure and pain, requires some
corresponding physical excitement to support our failure, and not a
little to allay the ferment of the spirits attendant on success. If
there is any tendency to dissipation beyond this in the profession of a
player, it is owing to the prejudices entertained against them, to that
spirit of bigotry which in a neighbouring country would deny actors
Christian burial after their death, and to that cant of criticism,
which, in our own, slurs over their characters, while living, with a
half-witted jest.
A London engagement is generally considered by actors as the _ne plus
ultra_ of their ambition, as ‘a consummation devoutly to be wished,’ as
the great prize in the lottery of their professional life. But this
appears to us, who are not in the secret, to be rather the prose
termination of their adventurous career: it is the provincial
commencement that is the poetical and truly enviable part of it. After
that, they have comparatively little to hope or fear. ‘The wine of life
is drunk, and but the lees remain.’ In London, they become gentlemen,
and the King’s servants: but it is the romantic mixture of the hero and
the vagabond that constitutes the essence of the player’s life. It is
the transition from their real to their assumed characters, from the
contempt of the world to the applause of the multitude, that gives its
zest to the latter, and raises them as much above common humanity at
night, as in the daytime they are depressed below it. ‘Hurried from
fierce extremes, by contrast made more fierce,’—it is rags and a
flock-bed which give their splendour to a plume of feathers and a
throne. We should suppose, that if the most admired actor on the London
stage were brought to confession on this point, he would acknowledge
that all the applause he had received from ‘brilliant and overflowing
audiences,’ was nothing to the light-headed intoxication of unlooked-for
success in a barn. In town, actors are criticised: in country-places,
they are wondered at, or hooted at: it is of little consequence which,
so that the interval is not too long between. For ourselves, we own that
the description of the strolling player in Gil Blas, soaking his dry
crusts in the well by the roadside, presents to us a perfect picture of
human felicity.
W. H.
NO. 40.] WHY THE ARTS ARE NOT PROGRESSIVE?—A [JAN. 11, 15;
FRAGMENT SEP. 11, 1814.
It is often made a subject of complaint and surprise, that the arts in
this country, and in modern times, have not kept pace with the general
progress of society and civilisation in other respects, and it has been
proposed to remedy the deficiency by more carefully availing ourselves
of the advantages which time and circumstances have placed within our
reach, but which we have hitherto neglected, the study of the antique,
the formation of academies, and the distribution of prizes.
First, the complaint itself, that the arts do not attain that
progressive degree of perfection which might reasonably be expected from
them, proceeds on a false notion, for the analogy appealed to in support
of the regular advances of art to higher degrees of excellence, totally
fails; it applies to science, not to art. Secondly, the expedients
proposed to remedy the evil by adventitious means are only calculated to
confirm it. The arts hold immediate communication with nature, and are
only derived from that source. When that original impulse no longer
exists, when the inspiration of genius is fled, all the attempts to
recal it are no better than the tricks of galvanism to restore the dead
to life. The arts may be said to resemble Antæus in his struggle with
Hercules, who was strangled when he was raised above the ground, and
only revived and recovered his strength when he touched his mother
earth.
Nothing is more contrary to the fact than the supposition that in what
we understand by the _fine arts_, as painting and poetry, relative
perfection is only the result of repeated efforts, and that what has
been once well done constantly leads to something better. What is
mechanical, reducible to rule, or capable of demonstration, is
progressive, and admits of gradual improvement: what is not mechanical
or definite, but depends on genius, taste, and feeling, very soon
becomes stationary or retrograde, and loses more than it gains by
transfusion. The contrary opinion is, indeed, a common error, which has
grown up, like many others, from transferring an analogy of one kind to
something quite distinct, without thinking of the difference in the
nature of the things, or attending to the difference of the results. For
most persons, finding what wonderful advances have been made in biblical
criticism, in chemistry, in mechanics, in geometry, astronomy,
etc.—_i.e._, in things depending on mere inquiry and experiment, or on
absolute demonstration, have been led hastily to conclude, that there
was a general tendency in the efforts of the human intellect to improve
by repetition, and in all other arts and institutions to grow perfect
and mature by time. We look back upon the theological creed of our
ancestors, and their discoveries in natural philosophy, with a smile of
pity; science, and the arts connected with it, have all had their
infancy, their youth, and manhood, and seem to have in them no principle
of limitation or decay; and, inquiring no farther about the matter, we
infer, in the height of our self-congratulation, and in the intoxication
of our pride, that the same progress has been, and will continue to be,
made in all other things which are the work of man. The fact, however,
stares us so plainly in the face, that one would think the smallest
reflection must suggest the truth, and overturn our sanguine theories.
The greatest poets, the ablest orators, the best painters, and the
finest sculptors that the world ever saw, appeared soon after the birth
of these arts, and lived in a state of society which was, in other
respects, comparatively barbarous. Those arts, which depend on
individual genius and incommunicable power, have always leaped at once
from infancy to manhood, from the first rude dawn of invention to their
meridian height and dazzling lustre, and have in general declined ever
after. This is the peculiar distinction and privilege of each, of
science and of art; of the one, never to attain its utmost summit of
perfection, and of the other, to arrive at it almost at once. Homer,
Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Dante, and Ariosto (Milton alone was of a
later age, and not the worse for it), Raphael, Titian, Michael Angelo,
Correggio, Cervantes, and Boccaccio—all lived near the beginning of
their arts—perfected, and all but created them. These giant sons of
genius stand, indeed, upon the earth, but they tower above their
fellows, and the long line of their successors does not interpose any
thing to obstruct their view, or lessen their brightness. In strength
and stature they are unrivalled, in grace and beauty they have never
been surpassed. In after-ages, and more refined periods, (as they are
called), great men have arisen one by one, as it were by throes and at
intervals: though in general the best of these cultivated and artificial
minds were of an inferior order, as Tasso and Pope among poets, Guido
and Vandyke among painters. But in the earliest stages of the arts, when
the first mechanical difficulties had been got over, and the language as
it were acquired, they rose by clusters and in constellations, never to
rise again.
The arts of painting and poetry are conversant with the world of thought
within us, and with the world of sense without us—with what we know, and
see, and feel intimately. They flow from the sacred shrine of our own
breasts, and are kindled at the living lamp of nature. The pulse of the
passions assuredly beat as high, the depths and soundings of the human
heart were as well understood three thousand years ago, as they are at
present; the face of nature and ‘the human face divine,’ shone as bright
then as they have ever done. It is this light, reflected by true genius
on art, that marks out its path before it, and sheds a glory round the
Muses’ feet, like that which ‘circled Una’s angel face,
‘And made a sunshine in the shady place.’
Nature is the soul of art. There is a strength in the imagination that
reposes entirely on nature, which nothing else can supply. There is in
the old poets and painters a vigour and grasp of mind, a full possession
of their subject, a confidence and firm faith, a sublime simplicity, an
elevation of thought, proportioned to their depth of feeling, an
increasing force and impetus, which moves, penetrates, and kindles all
that comes in contact with it, which seems, not theirs, but given to
them. It is this reliance on the power of nature which has produced
those master-pieces by the Prince of Painters, in which expression is
all in all, where one spirit, that of truth, pervades every part, brings
down heaven to earth, mingles cardinals and popes with angels and
apostles, and yet blends and harmonises the whole by the true touches
and intense feeling of what is beautiful and grand in nature. It was the
same trust in nature that enabled Chaucer to describe the patient sorrow
of Griselda; or the delight of that young beauty in the Flower and the
Leaf, shrouded in her bower, and listening, in the morning of the year,
to the singing of the nightingale, while her joy rises with the rising
song, and gushes out afresh at every pause, and is borne along with the
full tide of pleasure, and still increases and repeats and prolongs
itself, and knows no ebb. It is thus that Boccaccio, in the divine story
of the Hawk, has represented Frederigo Alberigi steadily contemplating
his favourite Falcon (the wreck and remnant of his fortune), and glad to
see how fat and fair a bird she is, thinking what a dainty repast she
would make for his Mistress, who had deigned to visit him in his low
cell. So Isabella mourns over her pot of Basile, and never asks for any
thing but that. So Lear calls out for his poor fool, and invokes the
heavens, for they are old like him. So Titian impressed on the
countenance of that young Neapolitan nobleman in the Louvre, a look that
never passed away. So Nicolas Poussin describes some shepherds wandering
out in a morning of the spring, and coming to a tomb with this
inscription, ‘I ALSO WAS AN ARCADIAN.’
In general, it must happen in the first stages of the Arts, that as none
but those who had a natural genius for them would attempt to practise
them, so none but those who had a natural taste for them would pretend
to judge of or criticise them. This must be an incalculable advantage to
the man of true genius, for it is no other than the privilege of being
tried by his peers. In an age when connoisseurship had not become a
fashion; when religion, war, and intrigue, occupied the time and
thoughts of the great, only those minds of superior refinement would be
led to notice the works of art, who had a real sense of their
excellence; and in giving way to the powerful bent of his own genius,
the painter was most likely to consult the taste of his judges. He had
not to deal with pretenders to taste, through vanity, affectation, and
idleness. He had to appeal to the higher faculties of the soul; to that
deep and innate sensibility to truth and beauty, which required only a
proper object to have its enthusiasm excited; and to that independent
strength of mind, which, in the midst of ignorance and barbarism, hailed
and fostered genius, wherever it met with it. Titian was patronised by
Charles V., Count Castiglione was the friend of Raphael. These were true
patrons, and true critics; and as there were no others, (for the world,
in general, merely looked on and wondered), there can be little doubt,
that such a period of dearth of factitious patronage would be the most
favourable to the full developement of the greatest talents, and the
attainment of the highest excellence.
The diffusion of taste is not the same thing as the improvement of
taste; but it is only the former of these objects that is promoted by
public institutions and other artificial means. The number of candidates
for fame, and of pretenders to criticism, is thus increased beyond all
proportion, while the quantity of genius and feeling remains the same;
with this difference, that the man of genius is lost in the crowd of
competitors, who would never have become such but from encouragement and
example; and that the opinion of those few persons whom nature intended
for judges, is drowned in the noisy suffrages of shallow smatterers in
taste. The principle of universal suffrage, however applicable to
matters of government, which concern the common feelings and common
interests of society, is by no means applicable to matters of taste,
which can only be decided upon by the most refined understandings. The
highest efforts of genius, in every walk of art, can never be properly
understood by the generality of mankind: There are numberless beauties
and truths which lie far beyond their comprehension. It is only as
refinement and sublimity are blended with other qualities of a more
obvious and grosser nature, that they pass current with the world. Taste
is the highest degree of sensibility, or the impression made on the most
cultivated and sensible of minds, as genius is the result of the highest
powers both of feeling and invention. It may be objected, that the
public taste is capable of gradual improvement, because, in the end, the
public do justice to works of the greatest merit. This is a mistake. The
reputation ultimately, and often slowly affixed to works of genius is
stamped upon them by authority, not by popular consent or the common
sense of the world. We imagine that the admiration of the works of
celebrated men has become common, because the admiration of their names
has become so. But does not every ignorant connoisseur pretend the same
veneration, and talk with the same vapid assurance of Michael Angelo,
though he has never seen even a copy of any of his pictures, as if he
had studied them accurately,—merely because Sir Joshua Reynolds has
praised him? Is Milton more popular now than when the Paradise Lost was
first published? Or does he not rather owe his reputation to the
judgment of a few persons in every successive period, accumulating in
his favour, and overpowering by its weight the public indifference? Why
is Shakspeare popular? Not from his refinement of character or
sentiment, so much as from his power of telling a story, the variety and
invention, the tragic catastrophe and broad farce of his plays. Spenser
is not yet understood. Does not Boccaccio pass to this day for a writer
of ribaldry, because his jests and lascivious tales were all that caught
the vulgar ear, while the story of the Falcon is forgotten!
W. H.
End of THE ROUND TABLE.
-----
Footnote 30:
It is Steele’s; and the whole paper (No. 95) is in his most delightful
manner. The dream about the mistress, however, is given to Addison by
the Editors, and the general style of that number is his; though, from
the story being related personally of Bickerstaff, who is also
represented as having been at that time in the army, we conclude it to
have originally come from Steele, perhaps in the course of
conversation. The particular incident is much more like a story of his
than of Addison’s.—H. T.
Footnote 31:
We had in our hands the other day an original copy of the _Tatler_,
and a list of the subscribers. It is curious to see some names there
which we should hardly think of, (that of Sir Isaac Newton is among
them), and also to observe the degree of interest excited by those of
the different persons, which is not adjusted according to the rules of
the Heralds’ College.
Footnote 32:
Pope also declares that he had a particular regard for an old post
which stood in the court-yard before the house where he was brought
up.
Footnote 33:
See also the passage in his prose works relating to the first design
of _Paradise Lost_.
Footnote 34:
‘Oh! for my sake do you with fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmless deeds,
That did not better for my life provide,
Than public means which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.’
At another time, we find him ‘desiring this man’s art, and that man’s
scope’: so little was Shakspeare, as far as we can learn, enamoured of
himself!
Footnote 35:
See an Essay on the genius of Hogarth, by C. Lamb, published in a
periodical work, called the _Reflector_.
Footnote 36:
‘A good sherris-sack hath a twofold operation in it; it ascends me
into the brain, dries me there all the foolish, dull, and crudy
vapours which environ it; and makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive,
full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes, which, delivered over to
the tongue, becomes excellent wit,’ etc.—_Second Part of Henry IV._
Footnote 37:
We have an instance in our own times of a man, equally devoid of
understanding and principle, but who manages the House of Commons by
his _manner_ alone.
Footnote 38:
Mr. Wordsworth, who has written a sonnet to the King on the good that
he has done in the last fifty years, has made an attack on a set of
gipsies for having done nothing in four and twenty hours. ‘The stars
had gone their rounds, but they had not stirred from their place.’ And
why should they, if they were comfortable where they were? We did not
expect this turn from Mr. Wordsworth, whom we had considered as the
prince of poetical idlers, and patron of the philosophy of indolence,
who formerly insisted on our spending our time ‘in a wise
passiveness.’ Mr. W. will excuse us if we are not converts to his
recantation of his original doctrine; for he who changes his opinion
loses his authority. We did not look for this Sunday-school philosophy
from him. What had he himself been doing in these four and twenty
hours? Had he been admiring a flower, or writing a sonnet? We hate the
doctrine of utility, even in a philosopher, and much more in a poet:
for the only real utility is that which leads to enjoyment, and the
end is, in all cases, better than the means. A friend of ours from the
North of England proposed to make Stonehenge of some use, by building
houses with it. Mr. W.’s quarrel with the gipsies is an improvement on
this extravagance, for the gipsies are the only living monuments of
the first ages of society. They are an everlasting source of thought
and reflection on the advantages and disadvantages of the progress of
civilisation: they are a better answer to the cotton manufactories
than Mr. W. has given in the _Excursion_. ‘They are a grotesque
ornament to the civil order.’ We should be sorry to part with Mr.
Wordsworth’s poetry, because it amuses and interests us: we should be
still sorrier to part with the tents of our old friends, the Bohemian
philosophers, because they amuse and interest us more. If any one goes
a journey, the principal event in it is his meeting with a party of
gipsies. The pleasantest trait in the character of Sir Roger de
Coverley, is his interview with the gipsy fortune-teller. This is
enough.
Footnote 39:
The Dissenters in this country (if we except the founders of sects,
who fall under a class by themselves) have produced only two
remarkable men, Priestley and Jonathan Edwards. The work of the latter
on the Will is written with as much power of logic, and more in the
true spirit of philosophy, than any other metaphysical work in the
language. His object throughout is not to perplex the question, but to
satisfy his own mind and the reader’s. In general, the principle of
dissent arises more from want of sympathy and imagination, than from
strength of reason. The spirit of contradiction is not the spirit of
philosophy.
Footnote 40:
The modern Quakers come as near the mark in these cases as they can.
They do not go to plays, but they are great attenders of
spouting-clubs and lectures. They do not frequent concerts, but run
after pictures. We do not know exactly how they stand with respect to
the circulating libraries. A Quaker poet would be a literary
phenomenon.
Footnote 41:
We have made the above observations, not as theological partisans, but
as natural historians. We shall some time or other give the reverse of
the picture; for there are vices inherent in establishments and their
thorough-paced adherents, which well deserve to be distinctly pointed
out.
Footnote 42:
Is all this a rhodomontade, or literal matter of fact, not credible in
these degenerate days?
Footnote 43:
One of the most interesting traits of the amiable simplicity of
Walton, is the circumstance of his friendship for Cotton, one of the
‘swash-bucklers’ of the age. Dr. Johnson said there were only three
works which the reader was sorry to come to the end of, _Don Quixote_,
_Robinson Crusoe_, and the _Pilgrim’s Progress_. Perhaps Walton’s
_Angler_ might be added to the number.
Footnote 44:
Oxberry’s manner of acting this character is a very edifying comment
on the text: he flings his arms about, like those of a figure pulled
by strings, and seems actuated by a pure spirit of infatuation, as if
one blast of folly had taken possession of his whole frame,
‘And filled up all the mighty void of sense.’
Footnote 45:
The following lines are remarkable for a certain cloying sweetness in
the repetition of the rhymes:
_Titania._ Be kind and courteous to this gentleman;
Hop in his walks, and gambol in his eyes;
Feed him with apricocks and dewberries,
With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries;
The honey-bags steal from the humble bees,
And for night tapers crop their waxen thighs,
And light them at the fiery glow-worm’s eyes,
To have my love to bed, and to arise:
And pluck the wings from painted butterflies,
To fan the moon beams from his sleeping eyes;’
Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies.’
Footnote 46:
The late ingenious Baron Grimm, of acute critical memory, was up to
the merit of the _Beggar’s Opera_. In his Correspondence, he says, ‘If
it be true that the nearer a writer is to Nature, the more certain he
is of pleasing, it must be allowed that the English, in their dramatic
pieces, have greatly the advantage over us. There reigns in them an
inestimable tone of nature, which the timidity of our taste has
banished from French pieces. M. Patu has just published, in two
volumes, _A selection of smaller dramatic pieces, translated from the
English_, which will eminently support what I have advanced. The
principal one among this selection is the celebrated _Beggar’s Opera_
of Gay, which has had such an amazing run in England. We are here in
the very worst company imaginable; the _Dramatis Personæ_ are robbers,
pickpockets, gaolers, prostitutes, and the like; yet we are highly
amused, and in no haste to quit them; and why? Because there is
nothing in the world more original or more natural. There is no
occasion to compare our most celebrated comic operas with this, to see
how far we are removed from truth and nature, and this is the reason
that, notwithstanding our wit, we are almost always flat and insipid.
Two faults are generally committed by our writers, which they seem
incapable of avoiding. They think they have done wonders if they have
only faithfully copied the dictionaries of the personages they bring
upon the stage, forgetting that the great art is to chuse the moments
of character and passion in those who are to speak, since it is those
moments alone that render them interesting. For want of this
discrimination, the piece necessarily sinks into insipidity and
monotony. Why do almost all M. Vade’s pieces fatigue the audience to
death? Because all his characters speak the same language; because
each is a perfect resemblance of the other. Instead of this, in the
_Beggar’s Opera_, among eight or ten girls of the town, each has her
separate character, her peculiar traits, her peculiar modes of
expression, which give her a marked distinction from her
companions.’—Vol. i. p. 185.
Footnote 47:
He who speaks two languages has no country. The French, when they made
their language the common language of the Courts of Europe, gained
more than by all their subsequent conquests.
Footnote 48:
There is, however, in the African physiognomy a grandeur and a force,
arising from this uniform character of violence and abruptness. It is
consistent with itself throughout. Entire deformity can only be found
where the features have not only no symmetry or softness in
themselves, but have no connection with one another, presenting every
variety of wretchedness, and a jumble of all sorts of defects, such as
we see in Hogarth or in the streets of London; for instance, a large
bottle-nose, with a small mouth twisted awry.
Footnote 49:
The following version, communicated by a classical friend, is exact
and elegant:
‘He said; and strait the herald Argicide
Beneath his feet his winged sandals tied,
Immortal, golden, that his flight could bear
O’er seas and lands, like waftage of the air.
His rod too, that can close the eyes of men
In balmy sleep, and open them again,
He took, and holding it in hand, went flying:
Till, from Pieria’s top the sea descrying,
Down to it sheer he dropp’d; and scour’d away
Like the wild gull, that, fishing o’er the bay,
Flaps on, with pinions dipping in the brine;—
So went on the far sea the shape divine.’
_Odyssey_, book v.
——‘That was Arion crown’d:—
So went he playing on the wat’ry plain.’
_Faerie Queen._
There is a striking description in Mr. Burke’s Reflections of the late
Queen of France, whose charms had left their poison in the heart of
this Irish orator and patriot, and set the world in a ferment sixteen
years afterwards. ‘And surely never lighted on this orb, which she
hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision.’ The idea is in Don
Quixote, where the Duenna speaks of the air with which the Duchess
‘treads, or rather seems to disdain the ground she walks on.’ We have
heard the same account of the gracefulness of Marie Antoinette from an
artist, who saw her at Versailles much about the same time that Mr.
Burke did. He stood in one corner of a little antechamber, and as the
doors were narrow, she was obliged to pass sideways with her hoop. She
glided by him in an instant, as if borne on a cloud.
Footnote 50:
In a fruit or flower-piece by Vanhuysum, the minutest details acquire
a certain grace and beauty from the delicacy with which they are
finished. The eye dwells with a giddy delight on the liquid drops of
dew, on the gauze wings of an insect, on the hair and feathers of a
bird’s nest, the streaked and speckled egg-shells, the fine legs of
the little travelling caterpillar. Who will suppose that the painter
had not the same pleasure in detecting these nice distinctions in
nature, that the critic has in tracing them in the picture?
Footnote 51:
We here allude particularly to Turner, the ablest landscape painter
now living, whose pictures are, however, too much abstractions of
aerial perspective, and representations not so properly of the objects
of nature as of the medium through which they are seen. They are the
triumph of the knowledge of the artist, and of the power of the pencil
over the barrenness of the subject. They are pictures of the elements
of air, earth, and water. The artist delights to go back to the first
chaos of the world, or to that state of things when the waters were
separated from the dry land, and light from darkness, but as yet no
living thing nor tree bearing fruit was seen upon the face of the
earth. All is ‘without form and void.’ Some one said of his landscapes
that they were _pictures of nothing, and very like_.
Footnote 52:
Raphael not only could not paint a landscape; he could not paint
people in a landscape. He could not have painted the heads or the
figures, or even the dresses, of the St. Peter Martyr. His figures
have always an _in-door_ look, that is, a set, determined, voluntary,
dramatic character, arising from their own passions, or a watchfulness
of those of others, and want that wild uncertainty of expression,
which is connected with the accidents of nature and the changes of the
elements. He has nothing _romantic_ about him.
Footnote 53:
A good-natured man will always have a smack of pedantry about him. A
lawyer, who talks about law, _certioraris_, _noli prosequis_, and silk
gowns, though he may be a blockhead, is by no means dangerous. It is a
very bad sign (unless where it arises from singular modesty) when you
cannot tell a man’s profession from his conversation. Such persons
either feel no interest in what concerns them most, or do not express
what they feel. ‘Not to admire any thing’ is a very unsafe rule. A
London apprentice, who did not admire the Lord Mayor’s coach, would
stand a good chance of being hanged. We know but one person absurd
enough to have formed his whole character on the above maxim of
Horace, and who affects a superiority over others from an uncommon
degree of natural and artificial stupidity.
Footnote 54:
‘Je crois que l’imagination étoit la première de ses facultés, et
qu’elle absorboit même toutes les autres.’—P. 80.
Footnote 55:
‘Il avoit une grande puissance de raison sur les matieres abstraites,
sur les objets qui n’ont de réalité que dans la pensée,’ etc.—P. 81.
Footnote 56:
He did more towards the French Revolution than any other man.
Voltaire, by his wit and penetration, had rendered superstition
contemptible, and tyranny odious: but it was Rousseau who brought the
feeling of irreconcilable enmity to rank and privileges, _above
humanity_, home to the bosom of every man,—identified it with all the
pride of intellect, and with the deepest yearnings of the human heart.
Footnote 57:
We shall here give one passage as an example, which has always
appeared to us the very perfection of this kind of personal and local
description. It is that where he gives an account of his being one of
the choristers at the Cathedral at Chambery: ‘On jugera bien que la
vie de la maîtrise toujours chantante et gaie, avec les Musiciens et
les Enfans de chœur, me plaisoit plus que celle du Séminaire avec les
Peres de S. Lazare. Cependant, cette vie, pour être plus libre, n’en
étoit pas moins égale et réglée. J’étois fait pour aimer
l’indépendance et pour n’en abuser jamais. Durant six mois entiers, je
ne sortis pas une seule fois, que pour aller chez Maman ou à l’Église,
et je n’en fus pas même tenté. Cette intervalle est un de ceux où j’ai
vécu dans le plus grand calme, et que je me suis rappelé avec le plus
de plaisir. Dans les situations diverses où je me suis trouvé,
quelques uns out été marqués par un tel sentiment de bien-être, qu’en
les remémorant j’en suis affecté comme si j’y étois encore. Non
seulement je me rappelle les tems, les lieux, les personnes, mais tous
les objets environnans, la température de l’air, son odeur, sa
couleur, une certaine impression locale qui ne s’est fait sentir que
là, et dont le souvenir vif m’y transporte de nouveau. Par exemple,
tout ce qu’on répétait a la maîtrise, tout ce qu’on chantoit au chœur,
tout ce qu’on y faisoit, le bel et noble habit des Chanoines, les
hasubles des Prêtres, les mitres des Chantres, la figure des
Musiciens, un vieux Charpentier boiteux qui jouoit de la contrebasse,
un petit Abbé biondin qui jouoit du violon, le lambeau de soutane
qu’après avoir posé son épée, M. le Maître endossoit par-dessus son
habit laïque, et le beau surplis fin dont il en couvrait les loques
pour aller au chœur; l’orgueil avec lequel j’allois, tenant ma petite
flûte à bec, m’établir dans l’orchestre, à la tribune, pour un petit
bout de récit que M. le Maître avoit fait exprès pour moi: le bon
diner qui nous attendoit ensuite, le bon appétit qu’on y portoit:—ce
concours d’objets vivement retracé m’a cent fois charmé dans ma
mémoire, autant et plus que dans la realité. J’ai gardé toujours une
affection tendre pour un certain air du _Conditor alme syderum_ qui
marche par iambes; parce qu’un Dimanche de l’Avent j’entendis de mon
lit chanter cette hymne, avant le jour, sur le perron de la
Cathédrale, selon un rite de cette eglise là. Mlle. _Merceret_, femme
de chambre de Maman, savoit un peu de musique; je n’oublierai jamais
un petit motet _afferte_, que M. le Maître me fit chanter avec elle,
et que sa maîtresse écoutait avec tant de plaisir. Enfin tout, jusqu’à
la bonne servante _Perrine_, qui étoit si bonne fille, et que les
enfans de chœur faisoient tant endêver—tout dans les souvenirs de ces
tems de bonheur et d’innocence revient souvent me ravir et
m’attrister.’—_Confessions_, LIV. iii. p. 283.
Footnote 58:
Burns, when about to sail for America after the first publication of
his poems, consoled himself with ‘the delicious thought of being
regarded as a clever fellow, though on the other side of the
Atlantic.’
Footnote 59:
This man (Burke) who was a half poet and a half philosopher, has done
more mischief than perhaps any other person in the world. His
understanding was not competent to the discovery of any truth, but it
was sufficient to palliate a falsehood; his reasons, of little weight
in themselves, thrown into the scale of power, were dreadful. Without
genius to adorn the beautiful, he had the art to throw a dazzling veil
over the deformed and disgusting; and to strew the flowers of
imagination over the rotten carcass of corruption, not to prevent, but
to communicate the infection. His jealousy of Rousseau was one chief
cause of his opposition to the French Revolution. The writings of the
one had changed the institutions of a kingdom; while the speeches of
the other, with the intrigues of his whole party, had changed nothing
but the _turnspit of the King’s kitchen_. He would have blotted out
the broad pure light of Heaven, because it did not first shine in at
the little Gothic windows of St. Stephen’s Chapel. The genius of
Rousseau had levelled the towers of the Bastile with the dust; our
zealous reformist, who would rather be doing mischief than nothing,
tried, therefore, to patch them up again, by calling that loathsome
dungeon the King’s castle, and by fulsome adulation of the virtues of
a Court strumpet. This man,—but enough of him here.
Footnote 60:
This word is not English.
Footnote 61:
Written in 1806.
Footnote 62:
Plato’s cave, in which he supposes a man to be shut up all his life
with his back to the light, and to see nothing of the figures of men,
or other objects that pass by, but their shadows on the opposite wall
of his cell, so that when he is let out and sees the real figures, he
is only dazzled and confounded by them, seems an ingenious satire on
the life of a book-worm.
Footnote 63:
The following lively description of this actress is given by Cibber in
his Apology:—
‘What found most employment for her whole various excellence at once,
was the part of Melantha, in Marriage-à-la-mode. Melantha is as
finished an impertinent as ever fluttered in a drawing-room, and seems
to contain the most complete system of female foppery that could
possibly be crowded into the tortured form of a fine lady. Her
language, dress, motion, manners, soul, and body, are in a continual
hurry to be something more than is necessary or commendable. And
though I doubt it will be a vain labour to offer you a just likeness
of Mrs. Montfort’s action, yet the fantastic impression is still so
strong in my memory, that I cannot help saying something, though
fantastically, about it. The first ridiculous airs that break from her
are upon a gallant never seen before, who delivers her a letter from
her father, recommending him to her good graces as an honourable
lover. Here now, one would think she might naturally shew a little of
the sex’s decent reserve, though never so slightly covered! No, sir;
not a tittle of it; modesty is the virtue of a poor-soul’d country
gentlewoman: she is too much a court-lady, to be under so vulgar a
confusion: she reads the letter, therefore, with a careless, dropping
lip, and an erected brow, humming it hastily over, as if she were
impatient to outgo her father’s commands, by making a complete
conquest of him at once: and that the letter might not embarrass her
attack, crack! she crumbles it at once into her palm, and pours upon
him her whole artillery of airs, eyes, and motion; down goes her
dainty, diving body to the ground, as if she were sinking under the
conscious load of her own attractions; then launches into a flood of
fine language and compliment, still playing her chest forward in fifty
falls and risings, like a swan upon waving water; and, to complete her
impertinence, she is so rapidly fond of her own wit, that she will not
give her lover leave to praise it: Silent assenting bows, and vain
endeavours to speak, are all the share of the conversation he is
admitted to, which at last he is relieved from, by her engagement to
half a score visits, which she _swims_ from him to make, with a
promise to return in a twinkling.’—_The Life of Colley Cibber_, p.
138.
CHARACTERS OF SHAKESPEAR’S PLAYS
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The first edition of the _Characters of Shakespear’s Plays_ (5½ in. × 9
in.) was published in 1817. The imprint reads thus:—London: | Printed by
C. H. Reynell, 21, Piccadilly, | for R. Hunter, successor to Mr.
Johnson, | in St. Paul’s Church-yard; | and C. and J. Ollier, |
Welbeck-street, Cavendish-square. | 1817. The second edition was issued
in the following year, and the imprint is:—London: | Printed for Taylor
and Hessey, | 93, Fleet Street. | 1818. There are several verbal
alterations in the second edition, and one curious _erratum_: ‘In
_Lear_, p. 173 [p. 269 present edition] dele line “Not an hour more nor
less.’” In the text of the play these words occur between ‘Fourscore and
upward’ and ‘And, to deal plainly.’ The second edition also was printed
by C. H. Reynell, Broad-street, Golden-square. No further edition was
published in Hazlitt’s lifetime, and the present issue has consequently
been printed from a copy of the second edition: the proofs, however,
have been read with a copy of the first edition, and one or two
misprints thereby corrected. In 1818 a pirated American edition was
published at Boston.
A contemporary criticism of the volume may be found in the _Edinburgh
Review_, 1817, by Francis Jeffrey. See also E. L. Bulwer’s _Some
Thoughts on the Genius of Hazlitt_. One hundred pounds was paid to
Hazlitt by C. H. Reynell for the copyright, and the first edition, at
half a guinea, was sold in six weeks: an adverse criticism by William
Gifford in the _Quarterly Review_ (No. 36, January 1818) spoiled the
sale of the second edition.
The following announcement appears on the back of the half-title of the
second edition:—‘This day is published, Lectures on the English Poets,
delivered at the Surry Institution, By William Hazlitt. In one vol. 8vo.
price 10s. 6d.’
TO
CHARLES LAMB, ESQ.
THIS VOLUME IS INSCRIBED, AS A MARK OF
OLD FRIENDSHIP
AND LASTING ESTEEM,
BY THE AUTHOR.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface 171
Cymbeline 179
Macbeth 186
Julius Cæsar 195
Othello 200
Timon of Athens 210
Coriolanus 214
Troilus and Cressida 221
Antony and Cleopatra 228
Hamlet 232
The Tempest 238
The Midsummer Night’s Dream 244
Romeo and Juliet 248
Lear 257
Richard II. 272
Henry IV. in Two Parts 277
Henry V. 285
Henry VI. in Three Parts 292
Richard III. 298
Henry VIII. 303
King John 306
Twelfth Night; or, What You Will 313
The Two Gentlemen of Verona 318
The Merchant of Venice 320
The Winter’s Tale 324
All’s Well that Ends Well 329
Love’s Labour’s Lost 332
Much Ado About Nothing 335
As You Like It 338
The Taming of the Shrew 341
Measure for Measure 345
The Merry Wives of Windsor 349
The Comedy of Errors 351
Doubtful Plays of Shakespear 353
Poems and Sonnets 357
PREFACE
It is observed by Mr. Pope, that
‘If ever any author deserved the name of an _original_, it was
Shakespear. Homer himself drew not his art so immediately from the
fountains of nature; it proceeded through Ægyptian strainers and
channels, and came to him not without some tincture of the learning,
or some cast of the models, of those before him. The poetry of
Shakespear was inspiration indeed: he is not so much an imitator, as
an instrument of nature; and it is not so just to say that he speaks
from her, as that she speaks through him.
‘His _characters_ are so much nature herself, that it is a sort of
injury to call them by so distant a name as copies of her. Those of
other poets have a constant resemblance, which shows that they
received them from one another, and were but multipliers of the same
image: each picture, like a mock-rainbow, is but the reflection of a
reflection. But every single character in Shakespear, is as much an
individual, as those in life itself; it is as impossible to find any
two alike; and such, as from their relation or affinity in any
respect appear most to be twins, will, upon comparison, be found
remarkably distinct. To this life and variety of character, we must
add the wonderful preservation of it; which is such throughout his
plays, that had all the speeches been printed without the very names
of the persons, I believe one might have applied them with certainty
to every speaker.’
The object of the volume here offered to the public, is to illustrate
these remarks in a more particular manner by a reference to each play. A
gentleman of the name of Mason, the author of a Treatise on Ornamental
Gardening (not Mason the poet), began a work of a similar kind about
forty years ago, but he only lived to finish a parallel between the
characters of Macbeth and Richard III. which is an exceedingly ingenious
piece of analytical criticism. Richardson’s Essays include but a few of
Shakespear’s principal characters. The only work which seemed to
supersede the necessity of an attempt like the present was Schlegel’s
very admirable Lectures on the Drama, which give by far the best account
of the plays of Shakespear that has hitherto appeared. The only
circumstances in which it was thought not impossible to improve on the
manner in which the German critic has executed this part of his design,
were in avoiding an appearance of mysticism in his style, not very
attractive to the English reader, and in bringing illustrations from
particular passages of the plays themselves, of which Schlegel’s work,
from the extensiveness of his plan, did not admit. We will at the same
time confess, that some little jealousy of the character of the national
understanding was not without its share in producing the following
undertaking, for ‘we were piqued’ that it should be reserved for a
foreign critic to give ‘reasons for the faith which we English have in
Shakespear.’ Certainly no writer among ourselves has shown either the
same enthusiastic admiration of his genius, or the same philosophical
acuteness in pointing out his characteristic excellences. As we have
pretty well exhausted all we had to say upon this subject in the body of
the work, we shall here transcribe Schlegel’s general account of
Shakespear, which is in the following words:—
‘Never, perhaps, was there so comprehensive a talent for the
delineation of character as Shakespear’s. It not only grasps the
diversities of rank, sex, and age, down to the dawnings of infancy;
not only do the king and the beggar, the hero and the pickpocket,
the sage and the idiot speak and act with equal truth; not only does
he transport himself to distant ages and foreign nations, and
pourtray in the most accurate manner, with only a few apparent
violations of costume, the spirit of the ancient Romans, of the
French in their wars with the English, of the English themselves
during a great part of their history, of the Southern Europeans (in
the serious part of many comedies) the cultivated society of that
time, and the former rude and barbarous state of the North; his
human characters have not only such depth and precision that they
cannot be arranged under classes, and are inexhaustible, even in
conception:—no—this Prometheus not merely forms men, he opens the
gates of the magical world of spirits; calls up the midnight ghost;
exhibits before us his witches amidst their unhallowed mysteries;
peoples the air with sportive fairies and sylphs:—and these beings,
existing only in imagination, possess such truth and consistency,
that even when deformed monsters like Caliban, he extorts the
conviction, that if there should be such beings, they would so
conduct themselves. In a word, as he carries with him the most
fruitful and daring fancy into the kingdom of nature,—on the other
hand, he carries nature into the regions of fancy, lying beyond the
confines of reality. We are lost in astonishment at seeing the
extraordinary, the wonderful, and the unheard of, in such intimate
nearness.
‘If Shakespear deserves our admiration for his characters, he is
equally deserving of it for his exhibition of passion, taking this
word in its widest signification, as including every mental
condition, every tone from indifference or familiar mirth to the
wildest rage and despair. He gives us the history of minds; he lays
open to us, in a single word, a whole series of preceding
conditions. His passions do not at first stand displayed to us in
all their height, as is the case with so many tragic poets, who, in
the language of Lessing, are thorough masters of the legal style of
love. He paints, in a most inimitable manner, the gradual progress
from the first origin. “He gives,” as Lessing says, “a living
picture of all the most minute and secret artifices by which a
feeling steals into our souls; of all the imperceptible advantages
which it there gains; of all the stratagems by which every other
passion is made subservient to it, till it becomes the sole tyrant
of our desires and our aversions.” Of all poets, perhaps, he alone
has pourtrayed the mental diseases,—melancholy, delirium,
lunacy,—with such inexpressible, and, in every respect, definite
truth, that the physician may enrich his observations from them in
the same manner as from real cases.
‘And yet Johnson has objected to Shakespear, that his pathos is not
always natural and free from affectation. There are, it is true,
passages, though, comparatively speaking, very few, where his poetry
exceeds the bounds of true dialogue, where a too soaring
imagination, a too luxuriant wit, rendered the complete dramatic
forgetfulness of himself impossible. With this exception, the
censure originates only in a fanciless way of thinking, to which
everything appears unnatural that does not suit its own tame
insipidity. Hence, an idea has been formed of simple and natural
pathos, which consists in exclamations destitute of imagery, and
nowise elevated above every-day life. But energetical passions
electrify the whole of the mental powers, and will, consequently, in
highly favoured natures, express themselves in an ingenious and
figurative manner. It has been often remarked, that indignation
gives wit; and, as despair occasionally breaks out into laughter, it
may sometimes also give vent to itself in antithetical comparisons.
‘Besides, the rights of the poetical form have not been duly
weighed. Shakespear, who was always sure of his object, to move in a
sufficiently powerful manner when he wished to do so, has
occasionally, by indulging in a freer play, purposely moderated the
impressions when too painful, and immediately introduced a musical
alleviation of our sympathy. He had not those rude ideas of his art
which many moderns seem to have, as if the poet, like the clown in
the proverb, must strike twice on the same place. An ancient
rhetorician delivered a caution against dwelling too long on the
excitation of pity; for nothing, he said, dries so soon as tears;
and Shakespear acted conformably to this ingenious maxim, without
knowing it.
‘The objection, that Shakespear wounds our feelings by the open
display of the most disgusting moral odiousness, harrows up the mind
unmercifully, and tortures even our senses by the exhibition of the
most insupportable and hateful spectacles, is one of much greater
importance. He has never, in fact, varnished over wild and
bloodthirsty passions with a pleasing exterior,—never clothed crime
and want of principle with a false show of greatness of soul; and in
that respect he is every way deserving of praise. Twice he has
pourtrayed downright villains; and the masterly way in which he has
contrived to elude impressions of too painful a nature, may be seen
in Iago and Richard the Third. The constant reference to a petty and
puny race must cripple the boldness of the poet. Fortunately for his
art, Shakespear lived in an age extremely susceptible of noble and
tender impressions, but which had still enough of the firmness
inherited from a vigorous olden time not to shrink back with dismay
from every strong and violent picture. We have lived to see
tragedies of which the catastrophe consists in the swoon of an
enamoured princess. If Shakespear falls occasionally into the
opposite extreme, it is a noble error, originating in the fulness of
a gigantic strength: and yet this tragical Titan, who storms the
heavens, and threatens to tear the world from off its hinges; who,
more terrible than Æschylus, makes our hair stand on end, and
congeals our blood with horror, possessed, at the same time, the
insinuating loveliness of the sweetest poetry. He plays with love
like a child; and his songs are breathed out like melting sighs. He
unites in his genius the utmost elevation and the utmost depth; and
the most foreign, and even apparently irreconcileable properties
subsist in him peaceably together. The world of spirits and nature
have laid all their treasures at his feet. In strength a demi-god,
in profundity of view a prophet, in all-seeing wisdom a protecting
spirit of a higher order, he lowers himself to mortals, as if
unconscious of his superiority: and is as open and unassuming as a
child.
‘Shakespear’s comic talent is equally wonderful with that which he
has shown in the pathetic and tragic: it stands on an equal
elevation, and possesses equal extent and profundity. All that I
before wished was, not to admit that the former preponderated. He is
highly inventive in comic situations and motives. It will be hardly
possible to show whence he has taken any of them; whereas, in the
serious part of his drama, he has generally laid hold of something
already known. His comic characters are equally true, various, and
profound, with his serious. So little is he disposed to caricature,
that we may rather say many of his traits are almost too nice and
delicate for the stage, that they can only be properly seized by a
great actor, and fully understood by a very acute audience. Not only
has he delineated many kinds of folly; he has also contrived to
exhibit mere stupidity in a most diverting and entertaining
manner.’—Vol. ii. p. 145.
We have the rather availed ourselves of this testimony of a foreign
critic in behalf of Shakespear, because our own countryman, Dr. Johnson,
has not been so favourable to him. It may be said of Shakespear, that
‘those who are not for him are against him’: for indifference is here
the height of injustice. We may sometimes, in order ‘to do a great
right, do a little wrong.’ An overstrained enthusiasm is more pardonable
with respect to Shakespear than the want of it; for our admiration
cannot easily surpass his genius. We have a high respect for Dr.
Johnson’s character and understanding, mixed with something like
personal attachment: but he was neither a poet nor a judge of poetry. He
might in one sense be a judge of poetry as it falls within the limits
and rules of prose, but not as it is poetry. Least of all was he
qualified to be a judge of Shakespear, who ‘alone is high fantastical.’
Let those who have a prejudice against Johnson read Boswell’s Life of
him; as those whom he has prejudiced against Shakespear should read his
Irene. We do not say that a man to be a critic must necessarily be a
poet: but to be a good critic, he ought not to be a bad poet. Such
poetry as a man deliberately writes, such, and such only will he like.
Dr. Johnson’s Preface to his edition of Shakespear looks like a
laborious attempt to bury the characteristic merits of his author under
a load of cumbrous phraseology, and to weigh his excellences and defects
in equal scales, stuffed full of ‘swelling figures and sonorous
epithets.’ Nor could it well be otherwise; Dr. Johnson’s general powers
of reasoning overlaid his critical susceptibility. All his ideas were
cast in a given mould, in a set form: they were made out by rule and
system, by climax, inference, and antithesis:—Shakespear’s were the
reverse. Johnson’s understanding dealt only in round numbers: the
fractions were lost upon him. He reduced everything to the common
standard of conventional propriety; and the most exquisite refinement or
sublimity produced an effect on his mind, only as they could be
translated into the language of measured prose. To him an excess of
beauty was a fault; for it appeared to him like an excrescence; and his
imagination was dazzled by the blaze of light. His writings neither
shone with the beams of native genius, nor reflected them. The shifting
shapes of fancy, the rainbow hues of things, made no impression on him:
he seized only on the permanent and tangible. He had no idea of natural
objects but ‘such as he could measure with a two-foot rule, or tell upon
ten fingers’: he judged of human nature in the same way, by mood and
figure: he saw only the definite, the positive, and the practical, the
average forms of things, not their striking differences—their classes,
not their degrees. He was a man of strong common sense and practical
wisdom, rather than of genius or feeling. He retained the regular,
habitual impressions of actual objects, but he could not follow the
rapid flights of fancy, or the strong movements of passion. That is, he
was to the poet what the painter of still life is to the painter of
history. Common sense sympathises with the impressions of things on
ordinary minds in ordinary circumstances: genius catches the glancing
combinations presented to the eye of fancy, under the influence of
passion. It is the province of the didactic reasoner to take cognizance
of those results of human nature which are constantly repeated and
always the same, which follow one another in regular succession, which
are acted upon by large classes of men, and embodied in received
customs, laws, language, and institutions; and it was in arranging,
comparing, and arguing on these kind of general results, that Johnson’s
excellence lay. But he could not quit his hold of the common-place and
mechanical, and apply the general rule to the particular exception, or
shew how the nature of man was modified by the workings of passion, or
the infinite fluctuations of thought and accident. Hence he could judge
neither of the heights nor depths of poetry. Nor is this all; for being
conscious of great powers in himself, and those powers of an adverse
tendency to those of his author, he would be for setting up a foreign
jurisdiction over poetry, and making criticism a kind of Procrustes’ bed
of genius, where he might cut down imagination to matter-of-fact,
regulate the passions according to reason, and translate the whole into
logical diagrams and rhetorical declamation. Thus he says of
Shakespear’s characters, in contradiction to what Pope had observed, and
to what every one else feels, that each character is a species, instead
of being an individual. He in fact found the general species or
_didactic_ form in Shakespear’s characters, which was all he sought or
cared for; he did not find the individual traits, or the _dramatic_
distinctions which Shakespear has engrafted on this general nature,
because he felt no interest in them. Shakespear’s bold and happy flights
of imagination were equally thrown away upon our author. He was not only
without any particular fineness of organic sensibility, alive to all the
‘mighty world of ear and eye,’ which is necessary to the painter or
musician, but without that intenseness of passion, which, seeking to
exaggerate whatever excites the feelings of pleasure or power in the
mind, and moulding the impressions of natural objects according to the
impulses of imagination, produces a genius and a taste for poetry.
According to Dr. Johnson, a mountain is sublime, or a rose is beautiful;
for that their name and definition imply. But he would no more be able
to give the description of Dover cliff in _Lear_, or the description of
flowers in _The Winter’s Tale_, than to describe the objects of a sixth
sense; nor do we think he would have any very profound feeling of the
beauty of the passages here referred to. A stately common-place, such as
Congreve’s description of a ruin in the _Mourning Bride_, would have
answered Johnson’s purpose just as well, or better than the first; and
an indiscriminate profusion of scents and hues would have interfered
less with the ordinary routine of his imagination than Perdita’s lines,
which seem enamoured of their own sweetness—
——‘Daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes,
Or Cytherea’s breath.’—
No one who does not feel the passion which these objects inspire can go
along with the imagination which seeks to express that passion and the
uneasy sense of delight accompanying it by something still more
beautiful, and no one can feel this passionate love of nature without
quick natural sensibility. To a mere literal and formal apprehension,
the inimitably characteristic epithet, ‘violets _dim_,’ must seem to
imply a defect, rather than a beauty; and to any one, not feeling the
full force of that epithet, which suggests an image like ‘the sleepy eye
of love,’ the allusion to ‘the lids of Juno’s eyes’ must appear
extravagant and unmeaning. Shakespear’s fancy lent words and images to
the most refined sensibility to nature, struggling for expression: his
descriptions are identical with the things themselves, seen through the
fine medium of passion: strip them of that connection, and try them by
ordinary conceptions and ordinary rules, and they are as grotesque and
barbarous as you please!—By thus lowering Shakespear’s genius to the
standard of common-place invention, it was easy to show that his faults
were as great as his beauties; for the excellence, which consists merely
in a conformity to rules, is counterbalanced by the technical violation
of them. Another circumstance which led to Dr. Johnson’s indiscriminate
praise or censure of Shakespear, is the very structure of his style.
Johnson wrote a kind of rhyming prose, in which he was as much compelled
to finish the different clauses of his sentences, and to balance one
period against another, as the writer of heroic verse is to keep to
lines of ten syllables with similar terminations. He no sooner
acknowledges the merits of his author in one line than the periodical
revolution of his style carries the weight of his opinion completely
over to the side of objection, thus keeping up a perpetual alternation
of perfections and absurdities. We do not otherwise know how to account
for such assertions as the following:—
‘In his tragic scenes, there is always something wanting, but his
comedy often surpasses expectation or desire. His comedy pleases by
the thoughts and the language, and his tragedy, for the greater
part, by incident and action. His tragedy seems to be skill, his
comedy to be instinct.’
Yet after saying that ‘his tragedy was skill,’ he affirms in the next
page,
‘His declamations or set speeches are commonly cold and weak, _for
his power was the power of nature_: when he endeavoured, like other
tragic writers, to catch opportunities of amplification, and instead
of inquiring what the occasion demanded, to shew how much his stores
of knowledge could supply, he seldom escapes without the pity or
resentment of his reader.’
Poor Shakespear! Between the charges here brought against him, of want
of nature in the first instance, and of want of skill in the second, he
could hardly escape being condemned. And again,
‘But the admirers of this great poet have most reason to complain
when he approaches nearest to his highest excellence, and seems
fully resolved to sink them in dejection, or mollify them with
tender emotions by the fall of greatness, the danger of innocence,
or the crosses of love. What he does best, he soon ceases to do. He
no sooner begins to move than he counteracts himself; and terror and
pity, as they are rising in the mind, are checked and blasted by
sudden frigidity.’
In all this, our critic seems more bent on maintaining the equilibrium
of his style than the consistency or truth of his opinions.—If Dr.
Johnson’s opinion was right, the following observations on Shakespear’s
Plays must be greatly exaggerated, if not ridiculous. If he was wrong,
what has been said may perhaps account for his being so, without
detracting from his ability and judgment in other things.
It is proper to add, that the account of the _Midsummer’s Night’s Dream_
has appeared in another work.[64]
_April 15, 1817._
CHARACTERS OF SHAKESPEAR’S PLAYS
CYMBELINE
CYMBELINE is one of the most delightful of Shakespear’s historical
plays. It may be considered as a dramatic romance, in which the most
striking parts of the story are thrown into the form of a dialogue, and
the intermediate circumstances are explained by the different speakers,
as occasion renders it necessary. The action is less concentrated in
consequence; but the interest becomes more aerial and refined from the
principle of perspective introduced into the subject by the imaginary
changes of scene, as well as by the length of time it occupies. The
reading of this play is like going a journey with some uncertain object
at the end of it, and in which the suspense is kept up and heightened by
the long intervals between each action. Though the events are scattered
over such an extent of surface, and relate to such a variety of
characters, yet the links which bind the different interests of the
story together are never entirely broken. The most straggling and
seemingly casual incidents are contrived in such a manner as to lead at
last to the most complete developement of the catastrophe. The ease and
conscious unconcern with which this is effected only makes the skill
more wonderful. The business of the plot evidently thickens in the last
act: the story moves forward with increasing rapidity at every step; its
various ramifications are drawn from the most distant points to the same
centre; the principal characters are brought together, and placed in
very critical situations; and the fate of almost every person in the
drama is made to depend on the solution of a single circumstance—the
answer of Iachimo to the question of Imogen respecting the obtaining of
the ring from Posthumus. Dr. Johnson is of opinion that Shakespear was
generally inattentive to the winding-up of his plots. We think the
contrary is true; and we might cite in proof of this remark not only the
present play, but the conclusion of _Lear_, of _Romeo and Juliet_, of
_Macbeth_, of _Othello_, even of _Hamlet_, and of other plays of less
moment, in which the last act is crowded with decisive events brought
about by natural and striking means.
The pathos in CYMBELINE is not violent or tragical, but of the most
pleasing and amiable kind. A certain tender gloom overspreads the whole.
Posthumus is the ostensible hero of the piece, but its greatest charm is
the character of Imogen. Posthumus is only interesting from the interest
she takes in him; and she is only interesting herself from her
tenderness and constancy to her husband. It is the peculiar excellence
of Shakespear’s heroines, that they seem to exist only in their
attachment to others. They are pure abstractions of the affections. We
think as little of their persons as they do themselves, because we are
let into the secrets of their hearts, which are more important. We are
too much interested in their affairs to stop to look at their faces,
except by stealth and at intervals. No one ever hit the true perfection
of the female character, the sense of weakness leaning on the strength
of its affections for support, so well as Shakespear—no one ever so well
painted natural tenderness free from affectation and disguise—no one
else ever so well shewed how delicacy and timidity, when driven to
extremity, grow romantic and extravagant; for the romance of his
heroines (in which they abound) is only an excess of the habitual
prejudices of their sex, scrupulous of being false to their vows, truant
to their affections, and taught by the force of feeling when to forego
the forms of propriety for the essence of it. His women were in this
respect exquisite logicians; for there is nothing so logical as passion.
They knew their own minds exactly; and only followed up a favourite
purpose, which they had sworn to with their tongues, and which was
engraven on their hearts, into its untoward consequences. They were the
prettiest little set of martyrs and confessors on record.—Cibber, in
speaking of the early English stage, accounts for the want of prominence
and theatrical display in Shakespear’s female characters from the
circumstance, that women in those days were not allowed to play the
parts of women, which made it necessary to keep them a good deal in the
back-ground. Does not this state of manners itself, which prevented
their exhibiting themselves in public, and confined them to the
relations and charities of domestic life, afford a truer explanation of
the matter? His women are certainly very unlike stage-heroines; the
reverse of tragedy-queens.
We have almost as great an affection for Imogen as she had for
Posthumus; and she deserves it better. Of all Shakespear’s women she is
perhaps the most tender and the most artless. Her incredulity in the
opening scene with Iachimo, as to her husband’s infidelity, is much the
same as Desdemona’s backwardness to believe Othello’s jealousy. Her
answer to the most distressing part of the picture is only, ‘My lord, I
fear, has forgot Britain.’ Her readiness to pardon Iachimo’s false
imputations and his designs against herself, is a good lesson to prudes;
and may shew that where there is a real attachment to virtue, it has no
need to bolster itself up with an outrageous or affected antipathy to
vice. The scene in which Pisanio gives Imogen his master’s letter,
accusing her of incontinency on the treacherous suggestions of Iachimo,
is as touching as it is possible for anything to be:—
‘_Pisanio._ What cheer, Madam?
_Imogen._ False to his bed! What is it to be false?
To lie in watch there, and to think on him?
To weep ‘twixt clock and clock? If sleep charge nature,
To break it with a fearful dream of him,
And cry myself awake? That’s false to ‘s bed, is it?
_Pisanio._ Alas, good lady!
_Imogen._ I false? thy conscience witness, Iachimo,
Thou didst accuse him of incontinency,
Thou then look’dst like a villain: now methinks,
Thy favour’s good enough. Some Jay of Italy,
Whose mother was her painting, hath betray’d him:
Poor I am stale, a garment out of fashion,
And for I am richer than to hang by th’ walls,
I must be ript; to pieces with me. Oh,
Men’s vows are women’s traitors. All good seeming
By thy revolt, oh husband, shall be thought
Put on for villainy: not born where ‘t grows,
But worn a bait for ladies.
_Pisanio._ Good Madam, hear me—
_Imogen._ Talk thy tongue weary, speak:
I have heard I am a strumpet, and mine ear,
Therein false struck, can take no greater wound,
Nor tent to bottom that.’——
When Pisanio, who had been charged to kill his mistress, puts her in a
way to live, she says,
‘Why, good fellow,
What shall I do the while? Where bide? How live?
Or in my life what comfort, when I am
Dead to my husband?’
Yet when he advises her to disguise herself in boy’s clothes, and
suggests ‘a course pretty and full in view,’ by which she may ‘happily
be near the residence of Posthumus,’ she exclaims—
‘Oh, for such means,
Though peril to my modesty, not death on ‘t,
I would adventure.’
And when Pisanio, enlarging on the consequences, tells her she must
change
——‘Fear and niceness,
The handmaids of all women, or more truly,
Woman its pretty self, into a waggish courage,
Ready in gibes, quick-answer’d, saucy, and
As quarrellous as the weazel’——
she interrupts him hastily—
‘Nay, be brief;
I see into thy end, and am almost
A man already.’
In her journey thus disguised to Milford-Haven, she loses her guide and
her way; and unbosoming her complaints, says beautifully—
——‘My dear lord,
Thou art one of the false ones; now I think on thee,
My hunger’s gone; but even before, I was
At point to sink for food.’
She afterwards finds, as she thinks, the dead body of Posthumus, and
engages herself as a footboy to serve a Roman officer, when she has done
all due obsequies to him whom she calls her former master—
——‘And when
With wild wood-leaves and weeds I ha’ strew’d his grave,
And on it said a century of pray’rs,
Such as I can, twice o’er, I ‘ll weep and sigh,
And leaving so his service, follow you,
So please you entertain me.’
Now this is the very religion of love. She all along relies little on
her personal charms, which she fears may have been eclipsed by some
painted Jay of Italy; she relies on her merit, and her merit is in the
depth of her love, her truth and constancy. Our admiration of her beauty
is excited with as little consciousness as possible on her part. There
are two delicious descriptions given of her, one when she is asleep, and
one when she is supposed dead. Arviragus thus addresses her—
——‘With fairest flowers,
While summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele,
I’ll sweeten thy sad grave; thou shalt not lack
The flow’r that’s like thy face, pale primrose, nor
The azur’d hare-bell, like thy veins, no, nor
The leaf of eglantine, which not to slander,
Out-sweeten’d not thy breath.’
The yellow Iachimo gives another thus, when he steals into her
bedchamber:—
——‘Cytherea,
How bravely thou becom’st thy bed! Fresh lily,
And whiter than the sheets! That I might touch—
But kiss, one kiss—’Tis her breathing that
Perfumes the chamber thus: the flame o’ th’ taper
Bows toward her, and would under-peep her lids
To see th’ enclosed lights now canopied
Under the windows, white and azure, laced
With blue of Heav’n’s own tinct—on her left breast
A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops
I’ th’ bottom of a cowslip.’
There is a moral sense in the proud beauty of this last image, a rich
surfeit of the fancy,—as that well-known passage beginning, ‘Me of my
lawful pleasure she restrained, and prayed me oft forbearance,’ sets a
keener edge upon it by the inimitable picture of modesty and
self-denial.
The character of Cloten, the conceited, booby lord, and rejected lover
of Imogen, though not very agreeable in itself, and at present obsolete,
is drawn with much humour and quaint extravagance. The description which
Imogen gives of his unwelcome addresses to her—‘Whose love-suit hath
been to me as fearful as a siege’—is enough to cure the most ridiculous
lover of his folly. It is remarkable that though Cloten makes so poor a
figure in love, he is described as assuming an air of consequence as the
Queen’s son in a council of state, and with all the absurdity of his
person and manners, is not without shrewdness in his observations. So
true is it that folly is as often owing to a want of proper sentiments
as to a want of understanding! The exclamation of the ancient critic—Oh
Menander and Nature, which of you copied from the other! would not be
misapplied to Shakespear.
The other characters in this play are represented with great truth and
accuracy, and as it happens in most of the author’s works, there is not
only the utmost keeping in each separate character; but in the casting
of the different parts, and their relation to one another, there is an
affinity and harmony, like what we may observe in the gradations of
colour in a picture. The striking and powerful contrasts in which
Shakespear abounds could not escape observation; but the use he makes of
the principle of analogy to reconcile the greatest diversities of
character and to maintain a continuity of feeling throughout, has not
been sufficiently attended to. In CYMBELINE, for instance, the principal
interest arises out of the unalterable fidelity of Imogen to her husband
under the most trying circumstances. Now the other parts of the picture
are filled up with subordinate examples of the same feeling, variously
modified by different situations, and applied to the purposes of virtue
or vice. The plot is aided by the amorous importunities of Cloten, by
the persevering determination of Iachimo to conceal the defeat of his
project by a daring imposture: the faithful attachment of Pisanio to his
mistress is an affecting accompaniment to the whole; the obstinate
adherence to his purpose in Bellarius, who keeps the fate of the young
princes so long a secret in resentment for the ungrateful return to his
former services, the incorrigible wickedness of the Queen, and even the
blind uxorious confidence of Cymbeline, are all so many lines of the
same story, tending to the same point. The effect of this coincidence is
rather felt than observed; and as the impression exists unconsciously in
the mind of the reader, so it probably arose in the same manner in the
mind of the author, not from design, but from the force of natural
association, a particular train of thought suggesting different
inflections of the same predominant feeling, melting into, and
strengthening one another, like chords in music.
The characters of Bellarius, Guiderius, and Arviragus, and the romantic
scenes in which they appear, are a fine relief to the intrigues and
artificial refinements of the court from which they are banished.
Nothing can surpass the wildness and simplicity of the descriptions of
the mountain life they lead. They follow the business of huntsmen, not
of shepherds; and this is in keeping with the spirit of adventure and
uncertainty in the rest of the story, and with the scenes in which they
are afterwards called on to act. How admirably the youthful fire and
impatience to emerge from their obscurity in the young princes is
opposed to the cooler calculations and prudent resignation of their more
experienced counsellor! How well the disadvantages of knowledge and of
ignorance, of solitude and society, are placed against each other!
‘_Guiderius._ Out of your proof you speak: we poor unfledg’d
Have never wing’d from view o’ th’ nest; nor know not
What air’s from home. Haply this life is best,
If quiet life is best; sweeter to you
That have a sharper known; well corresponding
With your stiff age: but unto us it is
A cell of ignorance; travelling a-bed,
A prison for a debtor, that not dares
To stride a limit.
_Arviragus._ What should we speak of
When we are old as you? When we shall hear
The rain and wind beat dark December! How,
In this our pinching cave, shall we discourse
The freezing hours away? We have seen nothing.
We are beastly; subtle as the fox for prey,
Like warlike as the wolf for what we eat:
Our valour is to chase what flies; our cage
We make a quire, as doth the prison’d bird,
And sing our bondage freely.’
The answer of Bellarius to this expostulation is hardly satisfactory;
for nothing can be an answer to hope, or the passion of the mind for
unknown good, but experience.—The forest of Arden in _As You Like It_
can alone compare with the mountain scenes in CYMBELINE: yet how
different the contemplative quiet of the one from the enterprising
boldness and precarious mode of subsistence in the other! Shakespear not
only lets us into the minds of his characters, but gives a tone and
colour to the scenes he describes from the feelings of their supposed
inhabitants. He at the same time preserves the utmost propriety of
action and passion, and gives all their local accompaniments. If he was
equal to the greatest things, he was not above an attention to the
smallest. Thus the gallant sportsmen in CYMBELINE have to encounter the
abrupt declivities of hill and valley: Touchstone and Audrey jog along a
level path. The deer in CYMBELINE are only regarded as objects of prey,
‘The game’s a-foot,’ etc.—with Jaques they are fine subjects to moralise
upon at leisure, ‘under the shade of melancholy boughs.’
We cannot take leave of this play, which is a favourite with us, without
noticing some occasional touches of natural piety and morality. We may
allude here to the opening of the scene in which Bellarius instructs the
young princes to pay their orisons to heaven:
——‘See, boys! this gate
Instructs you how t’ adore the Heav’ns; and bows you
To morning’s holy office.
_Guiderius._ Hail, Heav’n!
_Arviragus._ Hail, Heav’n!
_Bellarius._ Now for our mountain-sport, up to yon hill.’
What a grace and unaffected spirit of piety breathes in this passage! In
like manner, one of the brothers says to the other, when about to
perform the funeral rites to Fidele,
‘Nay, Cadwall, we must lay his head to the east;
My Father hath a reason for ‘t’—
—as if some allusion to the doctrines of the Christian faith had been
casually dropped in conversation by the old man, and had been no farther
inquired into.
Shakespear’s morality is introduced in the same simple, unobtrusive
manner. Imogen will not let her companions stay away from the chase to
attend her when sick, and gives her reason for it—
‘Stick to your journal course; _the breach of custom
Is breach of all_!’
When the Queen attempts to disguise her motives for procuring the poison
from Cornelius, by saying she means to try its effects on ‘creatures not
worth the hanging,’ his answer conveys at once a tacit reproof of her
hypocrisy, and a useful lesson of humanity—
——‘Your Highness
Shall from this practice but make hard your heart.’
MACBETH
‘The poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.’
MACBETH and _Lear_, _Othello_ and _Hamlet_, are usually reckoned
Shakespear’s four principal tragedies. _Lear_ stands first for the
profound intensity of the passion; MACBETH for the wildness of the
imagination and the rapidity of the action; _Othello_ for the
progressive interest and powerful alternations of feeling; _Hamlet_ for
the refined developement of thought and sentiment. If the force of
genius shewn in each of these works is astonishing, their variety is not
less so. They are like different creations of the same mind, not one of
which has the slightest reference to the rest. This distinctness and
originality is indeed the necessary consequence of truth and nature.
Shakespear’s genius alone appeared to possess the resources of nature.
He is ‘your only _tragedy-maker_.’ His plays have the force of things
upon the mind. What he represents is brought home to the bosom as a part
of our experience, implanted in the memory as if we had known the
places, persons, and things of which he treats. MACBETH is like a record
of a preternatural and tragical event. It has the rugged severity of an
old chronicle with all that the imagination of the poet can engraft upon
traditional belief. The castle of Macbeth, round which ‘the air smells
wooingly,’ and where ‘the temple-haunting martlet builds,’ has a real
subsistence in the mind; the Weïrd Sisters meet us in person on ‘the
blasted heath’; the ‘air-drawn dagger’ moves slowly before our eyes; the
‘gracious Duncan,’ the ‘blood-boultered Banquo’ stand before us; all
that passed through the mind of Macbeth passes, without the loss of a
tittle, through ours. All that could actually take place, and all that
is only possible to be conceived, what was said and what was done, the
workings of passion, the spells of magic, are brought before us with the
same absolute truth and vividness—Shakespear excelled in the openings of
his plays: that of MACBETH is the most striking of any. The wildness of
the scenery, the sudden shifting of the situations and characters, the
bustle, the expectations excited, are equally extraordinary. From the
first entrance of the Witches and the description of them when they meet
Macbeth,
——‘What are these
So wither’d and so wild in their attire,
That look not like the inhabitants of th’ earth
And yet are on’t?’
the mind is prepared for all that follows.
This tragedy is alike distinguished for the lofty imagination it
displays, and for the tumultuous vehemence of the action; and the one is
made the moving principle of the other. The overwhelming pressure of
preternatural agency urges on the tide of human passion with redoubled
force. Macbeth himself appears driven along by the violence of his fate
like a vessel drifting before a storm: he reels to and fro like a
drunken man; he staggers under the weight of his own purposes and the
suggestions of others; he stands at bay with his situation; and from the
superstitious awe and breathless suspense into which the communications
of the Weïrd Sisters throw him, is hurried on with daring impatience to
verify their predictions, and with impious and bloody hand to tear aside
the veil which hides the uncertainty of the future. He is not equal to
the struggle with fate and conscience. He now ‘bends up each corporal
instrument to the terrible feat’; at other times his heart misgives him,
and he is cowed and abashed by his success. ‘The deed, no less than the
attempt, confounds him.’ His mind is assailed by the stings of remorse,
and full of ‘preternatural solicitings.’ His speeches and soliloquies
are dark riddles on human life, baffling solution, and entangling him in
their labyrinths. In thought he is absent and perplexed, sudden and
desperate in act, from a distrust of his own resolution. His energy
springs from the anxiety and agitation of his mind. His blindly rushing
forward on the objects of his ambition and revenge, or his recoiling
from them, equally betrays the harassed state of his feelings.—This part
of his character is admirably set off by being brought in connection
with that of Lady Macbeth, whose obdurate strength of will and masculine
firmness give her the ascendancy over her husband’s faltering virtue.
She at once seizes on the opportunity that offers for the accomplishment
of all their wished-for greatness, and never flinches from her object
till all is over. The magnitude of her resolution almost covers the
magnitude of her guilt. She is a great bad woman, whom we hate, but whom
we fear more than we hate. She does not excite our loathing and
abhorrence like Regan and Gonerill. She is only wicked to gain a great
end; and is perhaps more distinguished by her commanding presence of
mind and inexorable self-will, which do not suffer her to be diverted
from a bad purpose, when once formed, by weak and womanly regrets, than
by the hardness of her heart or want of natural affections. The
impression which her lofty determination of character makes on the mind
of Macbeth is well described where he exclaims,
——‘Bring forth men children only;
For thy undaunted mettle should compose
Nothing but males!’
Nor do the pains she is at to ‘screw his courage to the sticking-place,’
the reproach to him, not to be ‘lost so poorly in himself,’ the
assurance that ‘a little water clears them of this deed,’ show anything
but her greater consistency in depravity. Her strong-nerved ambition
furnishes ribs of steel to ‘the sides of his intent’; and she is herself
wound up to the execution of her baneful project with the same
unshrinking fortitude in crime, that in other circumstances she would
probably have shown patience in suffering. The deliberate sacrifice of
all other considerations to the gaining ‘for their future days and
nights sole sovereign sway and masterdom,’ by the murder of Duncan, is
gorgeously expressed in her invocation on hearing of ‘his fatal entrance
under her battlements’:—
——‘Come all you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here:
And fill me, from the crown to th’ toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty; make thick my blood,
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it. Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murthering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief. Come, thick night!
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heav’n peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry, hold, hold!’——
When she first hears that ‘Duncan comes there to sleep’ she is so
overcome by the news, which is beyond her utmost expectations, that she
answers the messenger, ‘Thou’rt mad to say it’: and on receiving her
husband’s account of the predictions of the Witches, conscious of his
instability of purpose, and that her presence is necessary to goad him
on to the consummation of his promised greatness, she exclaims—
——‘Hie thee hither,
That I may pour my spirits in thine ear,
And chastise with the valour of my tongue
All that impedes thee from the golden round,
Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem
To have thee crowned withal.’
This swelling exultation and keen spirit of triumph, this uncontroulable
eagerness of anticipation, which seems to dilate her form and take
possession of all her faculties, this solid, substantial flesh and blood
display of passion, exhibit a striking contrast to the cold, abstracted,
gratuitous, servile malignity of the Witches, who are equally
instrumental in urging Macbeth to his fate for the mere love of
mischief, and from a disinterested delight in deformity and cruelty.
They are hags of mischief, obscene panders to iniquity, malicious from
their impotence of enjoyment, enamoured of destruction, because they are
themselves unreal, abortive, half-existences—who become sublime from
their exemption from all human sympathies and contempt for all human
affairs, as Lady Macbeth does by the force of passion! Her fault seems
to have been an excess of that strong principle of self-interest and
family aggrandisement, not amenable to the common feelings of compassion
and justice, which is so marked a feature in barbarous nations and
times. A passing reflection of this kind, on the resemblance of the
sleeping king to her father, alone prevents her from slaying Duncan with
her own hand.
In speaking of the character of Lady Macbeth, we ought not to pass over
Mrs. Siddons’s manner of acting that part. We can conceive of nothing
grander. It was something above nature. It seemed almost as if a being
of a superior order had dropped from a higher sphere to awe the world
with the majesty of her appearance. Power was seated on her brow,
passion emanated from her breast as from a shrine; she was tragedy
personified. In coming on in the sleeping-scene, her eyes were open, but
their sense was shut. She was like a person bewildered and unconscious
of what she did. Her lips moved involuntarily—all her gestures were
involuntary and mechanical. She glided on and off the stage like an
apparition. To have seen her in that character was an event in every
one’s life, not to be forgotten.
The dramatic beauty of the character of Duncan, which excites the
respect and pity even of his murderers, has been often pointed out. It
forms a picture of itself. An instance of the author’s power of giving a
striking effect to a common reflection, by the manner of introducing it,
occurs in a speech of Duncan, complaining of his having been deceived in
his opinion of the Thane of Cawdor, at the very moment that he is
expressing the most unbounded confidence in the loyalty and services of
Macbeth.
‘There is no art
To find the mind’s construction in the face:
He was a gentleman, on whom I built
An absolute trust.
O worthiest cousin, (_addressing himself to Macbeth_.)
The sin of my ingratitude e’en now
Was great upon me,’ etc.
Another passage to show that Shakespear lost sight of nothing that could
in any way give relief or heightening to his subject, is the
conversation which takes place between Banquo and Fleance immediately
before the murder-scene of Duncan.
‘_Banquo._ How goes the night, boy?
_Fleance._ The moon is down: I have not heard the clock.
_Banquo._ And she goes down at twelve.
_Fleance._ I take’t, ’tis later, Sir.
_Banquo._ Hold, take my sword. There’s husbandry in heav’n,
Their candles are all out.—
A heavy summons lies like lead upon me,
And yet I would not sleep: Merciful Powers,
Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature
Gives way to in repose.’
In like manner, a fine idea is given of the gloomy coming on of evening,
just as Banquo is going to be assassinated.
‘Light thickens and the crow
Makes wing to the rooky wood.’
. . . . .
‘Now spurs the lated traveller apace
To gain the timely inn.’
MACBETH (generally speaking) is done upon a stronger and more systematic
principle of contrast than any other of Shakespear’s plays. It moves
upon the verge of an abyss, and is a constant struggle between life and
death. The action is desperate and the reaction is dreadful. It is a
huddling together of fierce extremes, a war of opposite natures which of
them shall destroy the other. There is nothing but what has a violent
end or violent beginnings. The lights and shades are laid on with a
determined hand; the transitions from triumph to despair, from the
height of terror to the repose of death, are sudden and startling; every
passion brings in its fellow-contrary, and the thoughts pitch and jostle
against each other as in the dark. The whole play is an unruly chaos of
strange and forbidden things, where the ground rocks under our feet.
Shakespear’s genius here took its full swing, and trod upon the farthest
bounds of nature and passion. This circumstance will account for the
abruptness and violent antitheses of the style, the throes and labour
which run through the expression, and from defects will turn them into
beauties. ‘So fair and foul a day I have not seen,’ etc. ‘Such welcome
and unwelcome news together.’ ‘Men’s lives are like the flowers in their
caps, dying or ere they sicken.’ ‘Look like the innocent flower, but be
the serpent under it.’ The scene before the castle-gate follows the
appearance of the Witches on the heath, and is followed by a midnight
murder. Duncan is cut off betimes by treason leagued with witchcraft,
and Macduff is ripped untimely from his mother’s womb to avenge his
death. Macbeth, after the death of Banquo, wishes for his presence in
extravagant terms, ‘To him and all we thirst,’ and when his ghost
appears, cries out, ‘Avaunt and quit my sight,’ and being gone, he is
‘himself again.’ Macbeth resolves to get rid of Macduff, that ‘he may
sleep in spite of thunder’; and cheers his wife on the doubtful
intelligence of Banquo’s taking-off with the encouragement—‘Then be thou
jocund: ere the bat has flown his cloistered flight; ere to black
Hecate’s summons the shard-born beetle has rung night’s yawning peal,
there shall be done—a deed of dreadful note.’ In Lady Macbeth’s speech
‘Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done’t,’ there is
murder and filial piety together; and in urging him to fulfil his
vengeance against the defenceless king, her thoughts spare the blood
neither of infants nor old age. The description of the Witches is full
of the same contradictory principle; they ‘rejoice when good kings
bleed,’ they are neither of the earth nor the air, but both; ‘they
should be women, but their beards forbid it’; they take all the pains
possible to lead Macbeth on to the height of his ambition, only to
betray him ‘in deeper consequence,’ and after showing him all the pomp
of their art, discover their malignant delight in his disappointed
hopes, by that bitter taunt, ‘Why stands Macbeth thus amazedly?’ We
might multiply such instances every where.
The leading features in the character of Macbeth are striking enough,
and they form what may be thought at first only a bold, rude, Gothic
outline. By comparing it with other characters of the same author we
shall perceive the absolute truth and identity which is observed in the
midst of the giddy whirl and rapid career of events. Macbeth in
Shakespear no more loses his identity of character in the fluctuations
of fortune or the storm of passion, than Macbeth in himself would have
lost the identity of his person. Thus he is as distinct a being from
Richard III. as it is possible to imagine, though these two characters
in common hands, and indeed in the hands of any other poet, would have
been a repetition of the same general idea, more or less exaggerated.
For both are tyrants, usurpers, murderers, both aspiring and ambitious,
both courageous, cruel, treacherous. But Richard is cruel from nature
and constitution. Macbeth becomes so from accidental circumstances.
Richard is from his birth deformed in body and mind, and naturally
incapable of good. Macbeth is full of ‘the milk of human kindness,’ is
frank, sociable, generous. He is tempted to the commission of guilt by
golden opportunities, by the instigations of his wife, and by prophetic
warnings. Fate and metaphysical aid conspire against his virtue and his
loyalty. Richard on the contrary needs no prompter, but wades through a
series of crimes to the height of his ambition from the ungovernable
violence of his temper and a reckless love of mischief. He is never gay
but in the prospect or in the success of his villainies: Macbeth is full
of horror at the thoughts of the murder of Duncan, which he is with
difficulty prevailed on to commit, and of remorse after its
perpetration. Richard has no mixture of common humanity in his
composition, no regard to kindred or posterity, he owns no fellowship
with others, he is ‘himself alone.’ Macbeth is not destitute of feelings
of sympathy, is accessible to pity, is even made in some measure the
dupe of his uxoriousness, ranks the loss of friends, of the cordial love
of his followers, and of his good name, among the causes which have made
him weary of life, and regrets that he has ever seized the crown by
unjust means, since he cannot transmit it to his posterity—
‘For Banquo’s issue have I fil’d my mind—
For them the gracious Duncan have I murther’d,
To make them kings, the seed of Banquo kings.’
In the agitation of his mind, he envies those whom he has sent to peace.
‘Duncan is in his grave; after life’s fitful fever he sleeps well.’—It
is true, he becomes more callous as he plunges deeper in guilt,
‘direness is thus rendered familiar to his slaughterous thoughts,’ and
he in the end anticipates his wife in the boldness and bloodiness of his
enterprises, while she for want of the same stimulus of action, ‘is
troubled with thick-coming fancies that rob her of her rest,’ goes mad
and dies. Macbeth endeavours to escape from reflection on his crimes by
repelling their consequences, and banishes remorse for the past by the
meditation of future mischief. This is not the principle of Richard’s
cruelty, which displays the wanton malice of a fiend as much as the
frailty of human passion. Macbeth is goaded on to acts of violence and
retaliation by necessity; to Richard, blood is a pastime.—There are
other decisive differences inherent in the two characters. Richard may
be regarded as a man of the world, a plotting, hardened knave, wholly
regardless of every thing but his own ends, and the means to secure
them.—Not so Macbeth. The superstitions of the age, the rude state of
society, the local scenery and customs, all give a wildness and
imaginary grandeur to his character. From the strangeness of the events
that surround him, he is full of amazement and fear; and stands in doubt
between the world of reality and the world of fancy. He sees sights not
shown to mortal eye, and hears unearthly music. All is tumult and
disorder within and without his mind; his purposes recoil upon himself,
are broken and disjointed; he is the double thrall of his passions and
his evil destiny. Richard is not a character either of imagination or
pathos, but of pure self-will. There is no conflict of opposite feelings
in his breast. The apparitions which he sees only haunt him in his
sleep; nor does he live like Macbeth in a waking dream. Macbeth has
considerable energy and manliness of character; but then he is ‘subject
to all the skyey influences.’ He is sure of nothing but the present
moment. Richard in the busy turbulence of his projects never loses his
self-possession, and makes use of every circumstance that happens as an
instrument of his long-reaching designs. In his last extremity we can
only regard him as a wild beast taken in the toils: while we never
entirely lose our concern for Macbeth; and he calls back all our
sympathy by that fine close of thoughtful melancholy—
‘My way of life is fallen into the sear,
The yellow leaf; and that which should accompany old age,
As honour, troops of friends, I must not look to have;
But in their stead, curses not loud but deep,
Mouth-honour, breath, which the poor heart
Would fain deny, and dare not.’
We can conceive a common actor to play Richard tolerably well; we can
conceive no one to play Macbeth properly, or to look like a man that had
encountered the Weïrd Sisters. All the actors that we have ever seen,
appear as if they had encountered them on the boards of Covent-garden or
Drury-lane, but not on the heath at Fores, and as if they did not
believe what they had seen. The Witches of MACBETH indeed are ridiculous
on the modern stage, and we doubt if the Furies of Æschylus would be
more respected. The progress of manners and knowledge has an influence
on the stage, and will in time perhaps destroy both tragedy and comedy.
Filch’s picking pockets in the _Beggar’s Opera_ is not so good a jest as
it used to be: by the force of the police and of philosophy, Lillo’s
murders and the ghosts in Shakespear will become obsolete. At last,
there will be nothing left, good nor bad, to be desired or dreaded, on
the theatre or in real life.—A question has been started with respect to
the originality of Shakespear’s Witches, which has been well answered by
Mr. Lamb in his notes to the ‘Specimens of Early Dramatic Poetry.’
‘Though some resemblance may be traced between the charms in
MACBETH, and the incantations in this play (the Witch of Middleton),
which is supposed to have preceded it, this coincidence will not
detract much from the originality of Shakespear. His Witches are
distinguished from the Witches of Middleton by essential
differences. These are creatures to whom man or woman plotting some
dire mischief might resort for occasional consultation. Those
originate deeds of blood, and begin bad impulses to men. From the
moment that their eyes first meet with Macbeth’s, he is spell-bound.
That meeting sways his destiny. He can never break the fascination.
These Witches can hurt the body; those have power over the
soul.—Hecate in Middleton has a son, a low buffoon: the hags of
Shakespear have neither child of their own, nor seem to be descended
from any parent. They are foul anomalies, of whom we know not whence
they are sprung, nor whether they have beginning or ending. As they
are without human passions, so they seem to be without human
relations. They come with thunder and lightning, and vanish to airy
music. This is all we know of them.—Except Hecate, they have no
names, which heightens their mysteriousness. The names, and some of
the properties which Middleton has given to his hags, excite smiles.
The Weïrd Sisters are serious things. Their presence cannot co-exist
with mirth. But, in a lesser degree, the Witches of Middleton are
fine creations. Their power too is, in some measure, over the mind.
They raise jars, jealousies, strifes, _like a thick scurf o’er
life_.’
JULIUS CÆSAR
JULIUS CÆSAR was one of three principal plays by different authors,
pitched upon by the celebrated Earl of Hallifax to be brought out in a
splendid manner by subscription, in the year 1707. The other two were
the _King and No King_ of Fletcher, and Dryden’s _Maiden Queen_. There
perhaps might be political reasons for this selection, as far as regards
our author. Otherwise, Shakespear’s JULIUS CÆSAR is not equal as a
whole, to either of his other plays taken from the Roman history. It is
inferior in interest to _Coriolanus_, and both in interest and power to
_Antony and Cleopatra_. It however abounds in admirable and affecting
passages, and is remarkable for the profound knowledge of character, in
which Shakespear could scarcely fail. If there is any exception to this
remark, it is in the hero of the piece himself. We do not much admire
the representation here given of Julius Cæsar, nor do we think it
answers to the portrait given of him in his Commentaries. He makes
several vapouring and rather pedantic speeches, and does nothing.
Indeed, he has nothing to do. So far, the fault of the character is the
fault of the plot.
The spirit with which the poet has entered at once into the manners of
the common people, and the jealousies and heart-burnings of the
different factions, is shown in the first scene, where Flavius and
Marullus, tribunes of the people, and some citizens of Rome, appear upon
the stage.
‘_Flavius._ Thou art a cobler, art thou?
_Cobler._ Truly, Sir, _all_ that I live by, is the _awl_. I
meddle with no tradesman’s matters, nor woman’s matters, but
_with-al_, I am indeed, Sir, a surgeon to old shoes; when they
are in great danger, I recover them.
_Flavius._ But wherefore art not in thy shop to-day?
Why dost thou lead these men about the streets?
_Cobler._ Truly, Sir, to wear out their shoes, to get myself
into more work. But indeed, Sir, we make holiday to see Cæsar,
and rejoice in his triumph.’
To this specimen of quaint low humour immediately follows that
unexpected and animated burst of indignant eloquence, put into the mouth
of one of the angry tribunes.
‘_Marullus._ Wherefore rejoice!—What conquest brings he home?
What tributaries follow him to Rome,
To grace in captive-bonds his chariot-wheels?
Oh you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome!
Knew you not Pompey? Many a time and oft
Have you climb’d up to walls and battlements,
To towers and windows, yea, to chimney-tops,
Your infants in your arms, and there have sat
The live-long day with patient expectation,
To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome:
And when you saw his chariot but appear,
Have you not made an universal shout,
That Tyber trembled underneath his banks
To hear the replication of your sounds,
Made in his concave shores?
And do you now put on your best attire?
And do you now cull out an holiday?
And do you now strew flowers in his way
That comes in triumph over Pompey’s blood?
Begone——
Run to your houses, fall upon your knees,
Pray to the Gods to intermit the plague,
That needs must light on this ingratitude.’
The well-known dialogue between Brutus and Cassius, in which the latter
breaks the design of the conspiracy to the former, and partly gains him
over to it, is a noble piece of high-minded declamation. Cassius’s
insisting on the pretended effeminacy of Cæsar’s character, and his
description of their swimming across the Tiber together, ‘once upon a
raw and gusty day,’ are among the finest strokes in it. But perhaps the
whole is not equal to the short scene which follows, when Cæsar enters
with his train:—
‘_Brutus._ The games are done, and Cæsar is returning.
_Cassius._ As they pass by, pluck Casca by the sleeve,
And he will, after his sour fashion, tell you
What has proceeded worthy note to day.
_Brutus._ I will do so; but look you, Cassius—
The angry spot doth glow on Cæsar’s brow,
And all the rest look like a chidden train.
Calphurnia’s cheek is pale; and Cicero
Looks with such ferret and such fiery eyes,
As we have seen him in the Capitol,
Being crost in conference by some senators.
_Cassius._ Casca will tell us what the matter is.
_Cæsar._ Antonius——
_Antony._ Cæsar?
_Cæsar._ Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep a-nights:
Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look,
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.
_Antony._ Fear him not, Cæsar, he’s not dangerous:
He is a noble Roman, and well given.
_Cæsar._ Would he were fatter; but I fear him not:
Yet if my name were liable to fear,
I do not know the man I should avoid
So soon as that spare Cassius. He reads much;
He is a great observer; and he looks
Quite through the deeds of men. He loves no plays,
As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music:
Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort,
As if he mock’d himself, and scorn’d his spirit,
That could be mov’d to smile at any thing.
Such men as he be never at heart’s ease,
Whilst they behold a greater than themselves;
And therefore are they very dangerous.
I rather tell thee what is to be fear’d
Than what I fear; for always I am Cæsar.
Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf,
And tell me truly what thou think’st of him.’
We know hardly any passage more expressive of the genius of Shakespear
than this. It is as if he had been actually present, had known the
different characters and what they thought of one another, and had taken
down what he heard and saw, their looks, words, and gestures, just as
they happened.
The character of Mark Antony is farther speculated upon where the
conspirators deliberate whether he shall fall with Cæsar. Brutus is
against it—
‘And for Mark Antony, think not of him:
For he can do no more than Cæsar’s arm,
When Cæsar’s head is off.
_Cassius._ Yet I do fear him:
For in th’ ingrafted love he bears to Cæsar——
_Brutus._ Alas, good Cassius, do not think of him:
If he love Cæsar, all that he can do
Is to himself, take thought, and die for Cæsar:
And that were much, he should; for he is giv’n
To sports, to wildness, and much company.
_Trebonius._ There is no fear in him; let him not die:
For he will live, and laugh at this hereafter.’
They were in the wrong; and Cassius was right.
The honest manliness of Brutus is however sufficient to find out the
unfitness of Cicero to be included in their enterprise, from his
affected egotism and literary vanity.
‘O, name him not: let us not break with him;
For he will never follow anything,
That other men begin.’
His scepticism as to prodigies and his moralising on the weather—‘This
disturbed sky is not to walk in’—are in the same spirit of refined
imbecility.
Shakespear has in this play and elsewhere shown the same penetration
into political character and the springs of public events as into those
of every-day life. For instance, the whole design of the conspirators to
liberate their country fails from the generous temper and overweening
confidence of Brutus in the goodness of their cause and the assistance
of others. Thus it has always been. Those who mean well themselves think
well of others, and fall a prey to their security. That humanity and
honesty which dispose men to resist injustice and tyranny render them
unfit to cope with the cunning and power of those who are opposed to
them. The friends of liberty trust to the professions of others, because
they are themselves sincere, and endeavour to reconcile the public good
with the least possible hurt to its enemies, who have no regard to any
thing but their own unprincipled ends, and stick at nothing to
accomplish them. Cassius was better cut out for a conspirator. His heart
prompted his head. His watchful jealousy made him fear the worst that
might happen, and his irritability of temper added to his inveteracy of
purpose, and sharpened his patriotism. The mixed nature of his motives
made him fitter to contend with bad men. The vices are never so well
employed as in combating one another. Tyranny and servility are to be
dealt with after their own fashion: otherwise, they will triumph over
those who spare them, and finally pronounce their funeral panegyric, as
Antony did that of Brutus.
‘All the conspirators, save only he,
Did that they did in envy of great Cæsar:
He only in a general honest thought
And common good to all, made one of them.’
The quarrel between Brutus and Cassius is managed in a masterly way. The
dramatic fluctuation of passion, the calmness of Brutus, the heat of
Cassius, are admirably described; and the exclamation of Cassius on
hearing of the death of Portia, which he does not learn till after their
reconciliation, ‘How ‘scaped I killing when I crost you so?’ gives
double force to all that has gone before. The scene between Brutus and
Portia, where she endeavours to extort the secret of the conspiracy from
him, is conceived in the most heroical spirit, and the burst of
tenderness in Brutus—
‘You are my true and honourable wife;
As dear to me as are the ruddy drops
That visit my sad heart’—
is justified by her whole behaviour. Portia’s breathless impatience to
learn the event of the conspiracy, in the dialogue with Lucius, is full
of passion. The interest which Portia takes in Brutus and that which
Calphurnia takes in the fate of Cæsar are discriminated with the nicest
precision. Mark Antony’s speech over the dead body of Cæsar has been
justly admired for the mixture of pathos and artifice in it: that of
Brutus certainly is not so good.
The entrance of the conspirators to the house of Brutus at midnight is
rendered very impressive. In the midst of this scene, we meet with one
of those careless and natural digressions which occur so frequently and
beautifully in Shakespear. After Cassius has introduced his friends one
by one, Brutus says—
‘They are all welcome.
What watchful cares do interpose themselves
Betwixt your eyes and night?
_Cassius._ Shall I entreat a word? (_They whisper._)
_Decius._ Here lies the east: doth not the day break here?
_Casca._ No.
_Cinna._ O pardon, Sir, it doth; and yon grey lines,
That fret the clouds, are messengers of day.
_Casca._ You shall confess, that you are both deceiv’d:
Here, as I point my sword, the sun arises,
Which is a great way growing on the south,
Weighing the youthful season of the year.
Some two months hence, up higher toward the north
He first presents his fire, and the high east
Stands as the Capitol, directly here.’
We cannot help thinking this graceful familiarity better than all the
fustian in the world.—The truth of history in JULIUS CÆSAR is very ably
worked up with dramatic effect. The councils of generals, the doubtful
turns of battles, are represented to the life. The death of Brutus is
worthy of him—it has the dignity of the Roman senator with the firmness
of the Stoic philosopher. But what is perhaps better than either, is the
little incident of his boy, Lucius, falling asleep over his instrument,
as he is playing to his master in his tent, the night before the battle.
Nature had played him the same forgetful trick once before on the night
of the conspiracy. The humanity of Brutus is the same on both occasions.
——‘It is no matter:
Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber.
Thou hast no figures nor no fantasies,
Which busy care draws in the brains of men.
Therefore thou sleep’st so sound.’
OTHELLO
It has been said that tragedy purifies the affections by terror and
pity. That is, it substitutes imaginary sympathy for mere selfishness.
It gives us a high and permanent interest, beyond ourselves, in humanity
as such. It raises the great, the remote, and the possible to an
equality with the real, the little and the near. It makes man a partaker
with his kind. It subdues and softens the stubbornness of his will. It
teaches him that there are and have been others like himself, by showing
him as in a glass what they have felt, thought, and done. It opens the
chambers of the human heart. It leaves nothing indifferent to us that
can affect our common nature. It excites our sensibility by exhibiting
the passions wound up to the utmost pitch by the power of imagination or
the temptation of circumstances; and corrects their fatal excesses in
ourselves by pointing to the greater extent of sufferings and of crimes
to which they have led others. Tragedy creates a balance of the
affections. It makes us thoughtful spectators in the lists of life. It
is the refiner of the species; a discipline of humanity. The habitual
study of poetry and works of imagination is one chief part of a
well-grounded education. A taste for liberal art is necessary to
complete the character of a gentleman. Science alone is hard and
mechanical. It exercises the understanding upon things out of ourselves,
while it leaves the affections unemployed, or engrossed with our own
immediate, narrow interests.—OTHELLO furnishes an illustration of these
remarks. It excites our sympathy in an extraordinary degree. The moral
it conveys has a closer application to the concerns of human life than
that of almost any other of Shakespear’s plays. ‘It comes directly home
to the bosoms and business of men.’ The pathos in _Lear_ is indeed more
dreadful and overpowering: but it is less natural, and less of every
day’s occurrence. We have not the same degree of sympathy with the
passions described in _Macbeth_. The interest in _Hamlet_ is more remote
and reflex. That of OTHELLO is at once equally profound and affecting.
The picturesque contrasts of character in this play are almost as
remarkable as the depth of the passion. The Moor Othello, the gentle
Desdemona, the villain Iago, the good-natured Cassio, the fool Roderigo,
present a range and variety of character as striking and palpable as
that produced by the opposition of costume in a picture. Their
distinguishing qualities stand out to the mind’s eye, so that even when
we are not thinking of their actions or sentiments, the idea of their
persons is still as present to us as ever. These characters and the
images they stamp upon the mind are the farthest asunder possible, the
distance between them is immense: yet the compass of knowledge and
invention which the poet has shown in embodying these extreme creations
of his genius is only greater than the truth and felicity with which he
has identified each character with itself, or blended their different
qualities together in the same story. What a contrast the character of
Othello forms to that of Iago! At the same time, the force of conception
with which these two figures are opposed to each other is rendered still
more intense by the complete consistency with which the traits of each
character are brought out in a state of the highest finishing. The
making one black and the other white, the one unprincipled, the other
unfortunate in the extreme, would have answered the common purposes of
effect, and satisfied the ambition of an ordinary painter of character.
Shakespear has laboured the finer shades of difference in both with as
much care and skill as if he had had to depend on the execution alone
for the success of his design. On the other hand, Desdemona and Æmilia
are not meant to be opposed with anything like strong contrast to each
other. Both are, to outward appearance, characters of common life, not
more distinguished than women usually are, by difference of rank and
situation. The difference of their thoughts and sentiments is however
laid open, their minds are separated from each other by signs as plain
and as little to be mistaken as the complexions of their husbands.
The movement of the passion in Othello is exceedingly different from
that of Macbeth. In Macbeth there is a violent struggle between opposite
feelings, between ambition and the stings of conscience, almost from
first to last: in Othello, the doubtful conflict between contrary
passions, though dreadful, continues only for a short time, and the
chief interest is excited by the alternate ascendancy of different
passions, by the entire and unforeseen change from the fondest love and
most unbounded confidence to the tortures of jealousy and the madness of
hatred. The revenge of Othello, after it has once taken thorough
possession of his mind, never quits it, but grows stronger and stronger
at every moment of its delay. The nature of the Moor is noble,
confiding, tender, and generous; but his blood is of the most
inflammable kind; and being once roused by a sense of his wrongs, he is
stopped by no considerations of remorse or pity till he has given a
loose to all the dictates of his rage and his despair. It is in working
his noble nature up to this extremity through rapid but gradual
transitions, in raising passion to its height from the smallest
beginnings and in spite of all obstacles, in painting the expiring
conflict between love and hatred, tenderness and resentment, jealousy
and remorse, in unfolding the strength and the weakness of our nature,
in uniting sublimity of thought with the anguish of the keenest woe, in
putting in motion the various impulses that agitate this our mortal
being, and at last blending them in that noble tide of deep and
sustained passion, impetuous but majestic, that ‘flows on to the
Propontic, and knows no ebb,’ that Shakespear has shown the mastery of
his genius and of his power over the human heart. The third act of
OTHELLO is his finest display, not of knowledge or passion separately,
but of the two combined, of the knowledge of character with the
expression of passion, of consummate art in the keeping up of
appearances with the profound workings of nature, and the convulsive
movements of uncontroulable agony, of the power of inflicting torture
and of suffering it. Not only is the tumult of passion in Othello’s mind
heaved up from the very bottom of the soul, but every the slightest
undulation of feeling is seen on the surface, as it arises from the
impulses of imagination or the malicious suggestions of Iago. The
progressive preparation for the catastrophe is wonderfully managed from
the Moor’s first gallant recital of the story of his love, of ‘the
spells and witchcraft he had used,’ from his unlooked-for and romantic
success, the fond satisfaction with which he dotes on his own happiness,
the unreserved tenderness of Desdemona and her innocent importunities in
favour of Cassio, irritating the suspicions instilled into her husband’s
mind by the perfidy of Iago, and rankling there to poison, till he loses
all command of himself, and his rage can only be appeased by blood. She
is introduced, just before Iago begins to put his scheme in practice,
pleading for Cassio with all the thoughtless gaiety of friendship and
winning confidence in the love of Othello.
‘What! Michael Cassio?
That came a wooing with you, and so many a time,
When I have spoke of you dispraisingly,
Hath ta’en your part, to have so much to do
To bring him in?—Why this is not a boon:
’Tis as I should intreat you wear your gloves,
Or feed on nourishing meats, or keep you warm;
Or sue to you to do a peculiar profit
To your person. Nay, when I have a suit,
Wherein I mean to touch your love indeed,
It shall be full of poise, and fearful to be granted.’
Othello’s confidence, at first only staggered by broken hints and
insinuations, recovers itself at sight of Desdemona; and he exclaims
‘If she be false, O then Heav’n mocks itself:
I’ll not believe it.’
But presently after, on brooding over his suspicions by himself, and
yielding to his apprehensions of the worst, his smothered jealousy
breaks out into open fury, and he returns to demand satisfaction of Iago
like a wild beast stung with the envenomed shaft of the hunters. ‘Look
where he comes,’ etc. In this state of exasperation and violence, after
the first paroxysms of his grief and tenderness have had their vent in
that passionate apostrophe, ‘I felt not Cassio’s kisses on her lips,’
Iago, by false aspersions, and by presenting the most revolting images
to his mind,[65] easily turns the storm of passion from himself against
Desdemona, and works him up into a trembling agony of doubt and fear, in
which he abandons all his love and hopes in a breath.
‘Now do I see ’tis true. Look here, Iago,
All my fond love thus do I blow to Heav’n. ’Tis gone.
Arise black vengeance from the hollow hell;
Yield up, O love, thy crown and hearted throne
To tyrannous hate! Swell bosom with thy fraught;
For ’tis of aspicks’ tongues.’
From this time, his raging thoughts ‘never look back, ne’er ebb to
humble love,’ till his revenge is sure of its object, the painful
regrets and involuntary recollections of past circumstances which cross
his mind amidst the dim trances of passion, aggravating the sense of his
wrongs, but not shaking his purpose. Once indeed, where Iago shows him
Cassio with the handkerchief in his hand, and making sport (as he
thinks) of his misfortunes, the intolerable bitterness of his feelings,
the extreme sense of shame, makes him fall to praising her
accomplishments and relapse into a momentary fit of weakness, ‘Yet, oh
the pity of it, Iago, the pity of it!’ This returning fondness however
only serves, as it is managed by Iago, to whet his revenge, and set his
heart more against her. In his conversations with Desdemona, the
persuasion of her guilt and the immediate proofs of her duplicity seem
to irritate his resentment and aversion to her; but in the scene
immediately preceding her death, the recollection of his love returns
upon him in all its tenderness and force; and after her death, he all at
once forgets his wrongs in the sudden and irreparable sense of his loss.
‘My wife! My wife! What wife? I have no wife.
Oh insupportable! Oh heavy hour!’
This happens before he is assured of her innocence; but afterwards his
remorse is as dreadful as his revenge has been, and yields only to fixed
and death-like despair. His farewell speech, before he kills himself, in
which he conveys his reasons to the senate for the murder of his wife,
is equal to the first speech in which he gave them an account of his
courtship of her, and ‘his whole course of love.’ Such an ending was
alone worthy of such a commencement.
If any thing could add to the force of our sympathy with Othello, or
compassion for his fate, it would be the frankness and generosity of his
nature, which so little deserve it. When Iago first begins to practise
upon his unsuspecting friendship, he answers—
——‘’Tis not to make me jealous,
To say my wife is fair, feeds well, loves company,
Is free of speech, sings, plays, and dances well;
Where virtue is, these are most virtuous.
Nor from my own weak merits will I draw
The smallest fear or doubt of her revolt,
For she had eyes and chose me.’
This character is beautifully (and with affecting simplicity) confirmed
by what Desdemona herself says of him to Æmilia after she has lost the
handkerchief, the first pledge of his love to her.
‘Believe me, I had rather have lost my purse
Full of cruzadoes. And but my noble Moor
Is true of mind, and made of no such baseness,
As jealous creatures are, it were enough
To put him to ill thinking.
_Æmilia._ Is he not jealous?
_Desdemona._ Who he? I think the sun where he was born
Drew all such humours from him.’
In a short speech of Æmilia’s, there occurs one of those
side-intimations of the fluctuations of passion which we seldom meet
with but in Shakespear. After Othello has resolved upon the death of his
wife, and bids her dismiss her attendant for the night, she answers,
‘I will, my Lord.
_Æmilia._ How goes it now? _He looks gentler than he did._’
Shakespear has here put into half a line what some authors would have
spun out into ten set speeches.
The character of Desdemona is inimitable both in itself, and as it
appears in contrast with Othello’s groundless jealousy, and with the
foul conspiracy of which she is the innocent victim. Her beauty and
external graces are only indirectly glanced at: we see ‘her visage in
her mind’; her character every where predominates over her person.
‘A maiden never bold:
Of spirit so still and quiet, that her motion
Blush’d at itself.’
There is one fine compliment paid to her by Cassio, who exclaims
triumphantly when she comes ashore at Cyprus after the storm,
‘Tempests themselves, high seas, and howling winds,
As having sense of beauty, do omit
Their mortal natures, letting safe go by
The divine Desdemona.’
In general, as is the case with most of Shakespear’s females, we lose
sight of her personal charms in her attachment and devotedness to her
husband. ‘She is subdued even to the very quality of her lord’; and to
Othello’s ‘honours and his valiant parts her soul and fortunes
consecrates.’ The lady protests so much herself, and she is as good as
her word. The truth of conception, with which timidity and boldness are
united in the same character, is marvellous. The extravagance of her
resolutions, the pertinacity of her affections, may be said to arise out
of the gentleness of her nature. They imply an unreserved reliance on
the purity of her own intentions, an entire surrender of her fears to
her love, a knitting of herself (heart and soul) to the fate of another.
Bating the commencement of her passion, which is a little fantastical
and headstrong (though even that may perhaps be consistently accounted
for from her inability to resist a rising inclination[66]) her whole
character consists in having no will of her own, no prompter but her
obedience. Her romantic turn is only a consequence of the domestic and
practical part of her disposition; and instead of following Othello to
the wars, she would gladly have ‘remained at home a moth of peace,’ if
her husband could have staid with her. Her resignation and angelic
sweetness of temper do not desert her at the last. The scenes in which
she laments and tries to account for Othello’s estrangement from her are
exquisitely beautiful. After he has struck her, and called her names,
she says,
——‘Alas, Iago,
What shall I do to win my lord again?
Good friend, go to him; for by this light of heaven,
I know not how I lost him. Here I kneel;
If e’er my will did trespass ‘gainst his love,
Either in discourse, or thought, or actual deed,
Or that mine eyes, mine ears, or any sense
Delighted them on any other form;
Or that I do not, and ever did,
And ever will, though he do shake me off
To beggarly divorcement, love him dearly,
Comfort forswear me. Unkindness may do much,
And his unkindness may defeat my life,
But never taint my love.
_Iago._ I pray you be content: ’tis but his humour.
The business of the state does him offence.
_Desdemona._ If ‘twere no other!——
The scene which follows with Æmilia and the song of the Willow, are
equally beautiful, and show the author’s extreme power of varying the
expression of passion, in all its moods and in all circumstances.
‘_Æmilia._ Would you had never seen him.
_Desdemona._ So would not I: my love doth so approve him,
That even his stubbornness, his checks, his frowns,
Have grace and favour in them,’ etc.
Not the unjust suspicions of Othello, not Iago’s unprovoked treachery,
place Desdemona in a more amiable or interesting light than the
conversation (half earnest, half jest) between her and Æmilia on the
common behaviour of women to their husbands. This dialogue takes place
just before the last fatal scene. If Othello had overheard it, it would
have prevented the whole catastrophe; but then it would have spoiled the
play.
The character of Iago is one of the supererogations of Shakespear’s
genius. Some persons, more nice than wise, have thought this whole
character unnatural, because his villainy is _without a sufficient
motive_. Shakespear, who was as good a philosopher as he was a poet,
thought otherwise. He knew that the love of power, which is another name
for the love of mischief, is natural to man. He would know this as well
or better than if it had been demonstrated to him by a logical diagram,
merely from seeing children paddle in the dirt or kill flies for sport.
Iago in fact belongs to a class of character, common to Shakespear and
at the same time peculiar to him; whose heads are as acute and active as
their hearts are hard and callous. Iago is to be sure an extreme
instance of the kind; that is to say, of diseased intellectual activity,
with the most perfect indifference to moral good or evil, or rather with
a decided preference of the latter, because it falls more readily in
with his favourite propensity, gives greater zest to his thoughts and
scope to his actions. He is quite or nearly as indifferent to his own
fate as to that of others; he runs all risks for a trifling and doubtful
advantage; and is himself the dupe and victim of his ruling passion—an
insatiable craving after action of the most difficult and dangerous
kind. ‘Our ancient’ is a philosopher, who fancies that a lie that kills
has more point in it than an alliteration or an antithesis; who thinks a
fatal experiment on the peace of a family a better thing than watching
the palpitations in the heart of a flea in a microscope; who plots the
ruin of his friends as an exercise for his ingenuity, and stabs men in
the dark to prevent _ennui_. His gaiety, such as it is, arises from the
success of his treachery; his ease from the torture he has inflicted on
others. He is an amateur of tragedy in real life; and instead of
employing his invention on imaginary characters, or long-forgotten
incidents, he takes the bolder and more desperate course of getting up
his plot at home, casts the principal parts among his nearest friends
and connections, and rehearses it in downright earnest, with steady
nerves and unabated resolution. We will just give an illustration or
two.
One of his most characteristic speeches is that immediately after the
marriage of Othello.
‘_Roderigo._ What a full fortune does the thick lips owe,
If he can carry her thus!
_Iago._ Call up her father:
Rouse him (_Othello_) make after him, poison his delight,
Proclaim him in the streets, incense her kinsmen,
And tho’ he in a fertile climate dwell,
Plague him with flies: tho’ that his joy be joy,
Yet throw such changes of vexation on it,
As it may lose some colour.’
In the next passage, his imagination runs riot in the mischief he is
plotting, and breaks out into the wildness and impetuosity of real
enthusiasm.
‘_Roderigo._ Here is her father’s house: I’ll call aloud.
_Iago._ Do, with like timourous accent and dire yell
As when, by night and negligence, the fire
Is spied in populous cities.’
One of his most favourite topics, on which he is rich indeed, and in
descanting on which his spleen serves him for a Muse, is the
disproportionate match between Desdemona and the Moor. This is a clue to
the character of the lady which he is by no means ready to part with. It
is brought forward in the first scene, and he recurs to it, when in
answer to his insinuations against Desdemona, Roderigo says,
‘I cannot believe that in her—she’s full of most blest conditions.
_Iago._ Bless’d fig’s end. The wine she drinks is made of grapes. If
she had been blest, she would never have married the Moor.’
And again with still more spirit and fatal effect afterwards, when he
turns this very suggestion arising in Othello’s own breast to her
prejudice.
‘_Othello._ And yet how nature erring from itself—
_Iago._ Ay, there’s the point;—as to be bold with you,
Not to affect many proposed matches
Of her own clime, complexion, and degree,’ etc.
This is probing to the quick. Iago here turns the character of poor
Desdemona, as it were, inside out. It is certain that nothing but the
genius of Shakespear could have preserved the entire interest and
delicacy of the part, and have even drawn an additional elegance and
dignity from the peculiar circumstances in which she is placed.—The
habitual licentiousness of Iago’s conversation is not to be traced to
the pleasure he takes in gross or lascivious images, but to his desire
of finding out the worst side of everything, and of proving himself an
over-match for appearances. He has none of ‘the milk of human kindness’
in his composition. His imagination rejects every thing that has not a
strong infusion of the most unpalatable ingredients; his mind digests
only poisons. Virtue or goodness or whatever has the least ‘relish of
salvation in it,’ is, to his depraved appetite, sickly and insipid: and
he even resents the good opinion entertained of his own integrity, as if
it were an affront cast on the masculine sense and spirit of his
character. Thus at the meeting between Othello and Desdemona, he
exclaims—‘Oh, you are well tuned now: but I’ll set down the pegs that
make this music, _as honest as I am_‘—his character of _bonhomme_ not
sitting at all easy upon him. In the scenes, where he tries to work
Othello to his purpose, he is proportionably guarded, insidious, dark,
and deliberate. We believe nothing ever came up to the profound
dissimulation and dextrous artifice of the well-known dialogue in the
third act, where he first enters upon the execution of his design.
‘_Iago._ My noble lord.
_Othello._ What dost thou say, Iago?
_Iago._ Did Michael Cassio,
When you woo’d my lady, know of your love?
_Othello._ He did from first to last.
Why dost thou ask?
_Iago._ But for a satisfaction of my thought,
No further harm.
_Othello._ Why of thy thought, Iago?
_Iago._ I did not think he had been acquainted with it.
_Othello._ O yes, and went between us very oft—
_Iago._ Indeed!
_Othello._ Indeed? Ay, indeed. Discern’st thou aught of that?
Is he not honest?
_Iago._ Honest, my lord?
_Othello._ Honest? Ay, honest.
_Iago._ My lord, for aught I know.
_Othello._ What do’st thou think?
_Iago._ Think, my lord!
_Othello._ Think, my lord! Alas, thou echo’st me,
As if there was some monster in thy thought
Too hideous to be shewn.’—
The stops and breaks, the deep workings of treachery under the mask of
love and honesty, the anxious watchfulness, the cool earnestness, and if
we may so say, the _passion_ of hypocrisy, marked in every line, receive
their last finishing in that inconceivable burst of pretended
indignation at Othello’s doubts of his sincerity.
‘O grace! O Heaven forgive me!
Are you a man? Have you a soul or sense?
God be wi’ you; take mine office. O wretched fool,
That lov’st to make thine honesty a vice!
Oh monstrous world! Take note, take note, O world!
To be direct and honest, is not safe.
I thank you for this profit, and from hence
I’ll love no friend, since love breeds such offence.’
If Iago is detestable enough when he has business on his hands and all
his engines at work, he is still worse when he has nothing to do, and we
only see into the hollowness of his heart. His indifference when Othello
falls into a swoon, is perfectly diabolical.
‘_Iago._ How is it, General? Have you not hurt your head?
_Othello._ Do’st thou mock me?
_Iago._ I mock you not, by Heaven,’ etc.
The part indeed would hardly be tolerated, even as a foil to the virtue
and generosity of the other characters in the play, but for its
indefatigable industry and inexhaustible resources, which divert the
attention of the spectator (as well as his own) from the end he has in
view to the means by which it must be accomplished.—Edmund the Bastard
in _Lear_ is something of the same character, placed in less prominent
circumstances. Zanga is a vulgar caricature of it.
TIMON OF ATHENS
TIMON OF ATHENS always appeared to us to be written with as intense a
feeling of his subject as any one play of Shakespear. It is one of the
few in which he seems to be in earnest throughout, never to trifle nor
go out of his way. He does not relax in his efforts, nor lose sight of
the unity of his design. It is the only play of our author in which
spleen is the predominant feeling of the mind. It is as much a satire as
a play: and contains some of the finest pieces of invective possible to
be conceived, both in the snarling, captious answers of the cynic
Apemantus, and in the impassioned and more terrible imprecations of
Timon. The latter remind the classical reader of the force and swelling
impetuosity of the moral declamations in _Juvenal_, while the former
have all the keenness and caustic severity of the old Stoic
philosophers. The soul of Diogenes appears to have been seated on the
lips of Apemantus. The churlish profession of misanthropy in the cynic
is contrasted with the profound feeling of it in Timon, and also with
the soldier-like and determined resentment of Alcibiades against his
countrymen, who have banished him, though this forms only an incidental
episode in the tragedy.
The fable consists of a single event;—of the transition from the highest
pomp and profusion of artificial refinement to the most abject state of
savage life, and privation of all social intercourse. The change is as
rapid as it is complete; nor is the description of the rich and generous
Timon, banqueting in gilded palaces, pampered by every luxury, prodigal
of his hospitality, courted by crowds of flatterers, poets, painters,
lords, ladies, who—
‘Follow his strides, his lobbies fill with tendance,
Rain sacrificial whisperings in his ear;
And through him drink the free air’—
more striking than that of the sudden falling off of his friends and
fortune, and his naked exposure in a wild forest digging roots from the
earth for his sustenance, with a lofty spirit of self-denial, and bitter
scorn of the world, which raise him higher in our esteem than the
dazzling gloss of prosperity could do. He grudges himself the means of
life, and is only busy in preparing his grave. How forcibly is the
difference between what he was, and what he is, described in Apemantus’s
taunting questions, when he comes to reproach him with the change in his
way of life!
——‘What, think’st thou,
That the bleak air, thy boisterous chamberlain,
Will put thy shirt on warm? will these moist trees
That have outlived the eagle, page thy heels,
And skip when thou point’st out? will the cold brook,
Candied with ice, caudle thy morning taste
To cure thy o’er-night’s surfeit? Call the creatures,
Whose naked natures live in all the spight
Of wreakful heav’n, whose bare unhoused trunks,
To the conflicting elements expos’d,
Answer mere nature, bid them flatter thee.’
The manners are every where preserved with distinct truth. The poet and
painter are very skilfully played off against one another, both
affecting great attention to the other, and each taken up with his own
vanity, and the superiority of his own art. Shakespear has put into the
mouth of the former a very lively description of the genius of poetry
and of his own in particular.
——‘A thing slipt idly from me.
Our poesy is as a gum, which issues
From whence ’tis nourish’d. The fire i’ th’ flint
Shews not till it be struck: our gentle flame
Provokes itself—and like the current flies
Each bound it chafes.’
The hollow friendship and shuffling evasions of the Athenian lords,
their smooth professions and pitiful ingratitude, are very
satisfactorily exposed, as well as the different disguises to which the
meanness of self-love resorts in such cases to hide a want of generosity
and good faith. The lurking selfishness of Apemantus does not pass
undetected amidst the grossness of his sarcasms and his contempt for the
pretensions of others. Even the two courtezans who accompany Alcibiades
to the cave of Timon are very characteristically sketched; and the
thieves who come to visit him are also ‘true men’ in their way.—An
exception to this general picture of selfish depravity is found in the
old and honest steward Flavius, to whom Timon pays a full tribute of
tenderness. Shakespear was unwilling to draw a picture ‘_ugly all over
with hypocrisy_.’ He owed this character to the good-natured
solicitations of his Muse. His mind might well have been said to be the
‘sphere of humanity.’
The moral sententiousness of this play equals that of Lord Bacon’s
Treatise on the Wisdom of the Ancients, and is indeed seasoned with
greater variety. Every topic of contempt or indignation is here
exhausted; but while the sordid licentiousness of Apemantus, which turns
every thing to gall and bitterness, shews only the natural virulence of
his temper and antipathy to good or evil alike, Timon does not utter an
imprecation without betraying the extravagant workings of disappointed
passion, of love altered to hate. Apemantus sees nothing good in any
object, and exaggerates whatever is disgusting: Timon is tormented with
the perpetual contrast between things and appearances, between the
fresh, tempting outside and the rottenness within, and invokes mischiefs
on the heads of mankind proportioned to the sense of his wrongs and of
their treacheries. He impatiently cries out, when he finds the gold,
‘This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions; bless the accurs’d;
Make the hoar leprosy ador’d; place thieves,
And give them title, knee, and approbation,
With senators on the bench; this is it,
That makes the wappen’d widow wed again;
She, whom the spital-house
Would cast the gorge at, _this embalms and spices
To th’ April day again_.’
One of his most dreadful imprecations is that which occurs immediately
on his leaving Athens.
‘Let me look back upon thee, O thou wall,
That girdlest in those wolves! Dive in the earth,
And fence not Athens! Matrons, turn incontinent;
Obedience fail in children; slaves and fools
Pluck the grave wrinkled senate from the bench,
And minister in their steads. To general filths
Convert o’ th’ instant green virginity!
Do ‘t in your parents’ eyes. Bankrupts, hold fast;
Rather than render back, out with your knives,
And cut your trusters’ throats! Bound servants, steal:
Large-handed robbers your grave masters are
And pill by law. Maid, to thy master’s bed:
Thy mistress is o’ th’ brothel. Son of sixteen,
Pluck the lin’d crutch from thy old limping sire,
And with it beat his brains out! Fear and piety,
Religion to the Gods, peace, justice, truth,
Domestic awe, night-rest, and neighbourhood,
Instructions, manners, mysteries and trades,
Degrees, observances, customs and laws,
Decline to your confounding contraries;
And let confusion live!—Plagues, incident to men,
Your potent and infectious fevers heap
On Athens, ripe for stroke! Thou cold sciatica,
Cripple our senators, that their limbs may halt
As lamely as their manners! Lust and liberty
Creep in the minds and marrows of our youth,
That ‘gainst the stream of virtue they may strive,
And drown themselves in riot! Itches, blains,
Sow all th’ Athenian bosoms; and their crop
Be general leprosy: breath infect breath,
That their society (as their friendship) may
Be merely poison!’
Timon is here just as ideal in his passion for ill as he had been before
in his belief of good, Apemantus was satisfied with the mischief
existing in the world, and with his own ill-nature. One of the most
decisive intimations of Timon’s morbid jealousy of appearances is in his
answer to Apemantus, who asks him,
‘What things in the world can’st thou nearest compare with thy
flatterers?
_Timon._ Women nearest: but men, men are the things themselves.’
Apemantus, it is said, ‘loved few things better than to abhor himself.’
This is not the case with Timon, who neither loves to abhor himself nor
others. All his vehement misanthropy is forced, up-hill work. From the
slippery turns of fortune, from the turmoils of passion and adversity,
he wishes to sink into the quiet of the grave. On that subject his
thoughts are intent, on that he finds time and place to grow romantic.
He digs his own grave by the sea-shore; contrives his funeral ceremonies
amidst the pomp of desolation, and builds his mausoleum of the elements.
‘Come not to me again; but say to Athens,
Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beached verge of the salt flood;
Which once a-day with his embossed froth
The turbulent surge shall cover.—Thither come,
And let my grave-stone be your oracle.’
And again, Alcibiades, after reading his epitaph, says of him,
‘These well express in thee thy latter spirits:
Though thou abhorred’st in us our human griefs,
Scorn’d’st our brain’s flow, and those our droplets, which
From niggard nature fall; yet rich conceit
Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye
On thy low grave’——
thus making the winds his funeral dirge, his mourner the murmuring
ocean; and seeking in the everlasting solemnities of nature oblivion of
the transitory splendour of his life-time.
CORIOLANUS
Shakespear has in this play shewn himself well versed in history and
state-affairs. CORIOLANUS is a storehouse of political common-places.
Any one who studies it may save himself the trouble of reading Burke’s
Reflections, or Paine’s Rights of Man, or the Debates in both Houses of
Parliament since the French Revolution or our own. The arguments for and
against aristocracy or democracy, on the privileges of the few and the
claims of the many, on liberty and slavery, power and the abuse of it,
peace and war, are here very ably handled, with the spirit of a poet and
the acuteness of a philosopher. Shakespear himself seems to have had a
leaning to the arbitrary side of the question, perhaps from some feeling
of contempt for his own origin; and to have spared no occasion of
baiting the rabble. What he says of them is very true: what he says of
their betters is also very true, though he dwells less upon it.—The
cause of the people is indeed but little calculated as a subject for
poetry: it admits of rhetoric, which goes into argument and explanation,
but it presents no immediate or distinct images to the mind, ‘no jutting
frieze, buttress, or coigne of vantage’ for poetry ‘to make its pendant
bed and procreant cradle in.’ The language of poetry naturally falls in
with the language of power. The imagination is an exaggerating and
exclusive faculty: it takes from one thing to add to another: it
accumulates circumstances together to give the greatest possible effect
to a favourite object. The understanding is a dividing and measuring
faculty: it judges of things not according to their immediate impression
on the mind, but according to their relations to one another. The one is
a monopolising faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of present
excitement by inequality and disproportion; the other is a distributive
faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of ultimate good, by justice
and proportion. The one is an aristocratical, the other a republican
faculty. The principle of poetry is a very anti-levelling principle. It
aims at effect, it exists by contrast. It admits of no medium. It is
every thing by excess. It rises above the ordinary standard of
sufferings and crimes. It presents a dazzling appearance. It shows its
head turreted, crowned, and crested. Its front is gilt and
blood-stained. Before it ‘it carries noise, and behind it leaves tears.’
It has its altars and its victims, sacrifices, human sacrifices. Kings,
priests, nobles, are its train-bearers, tyrants and slaves its
executioners.—‘Carnage is its daughter.’—Poetry is right-royal. It puts
the individual for the species, the one above the infinite many, might
before right. A lion hunting a flock of sheep or a herd of wild asses is
a more poetical object than they; and we even take part with the lordly
beast, because our vanity or some other feeling makes us disposed to
place ourselves in the situation of the strongest party. So we feel some
concern for the poor citizens of Rome when they meet together to compare
their wants and grievances, till Coriolanus comes in and with blows and
big words drives this set of ‘poor rats,’ this rascal scum, to their
homes and beggary before him. There is nothing heroical in a multitude
of miserable rogues not wishing to be starved, or complaining that they
are like to be so: but when a single man comes forward to brave their
cries and to make them submit to the last indignities, from mere pride
and self-will, our admiration of his prowess is immediately converted
into contempt for their pusillanimity. The insolence of power is
stronger than the plea of necessity. The tame submission to usurped
authority or even the natural resistance to it has nothing to excite or
flatter the imagination: it is the assumption of a right to insult or
oppress others that carries an imposing air of superiority with it. We
had rather be the oppressor than the oppressed. The love of power in
ourselves and the admiration of it in others are both natural to man:
the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave. Wrong dressed out in
pride, pomp, and circumstance, has more attraction than abstract
right.—Coriolanus complains of the fickleness of the people: yet, the
instant he cannot gratify his pride and obstinacy at their expense, he
turns his arms against his country. If his country was not worth
defending, why did he build his pride on its defence? He is a conqueror
and a hero; he conquers other countries, and makes this a plea for
enslaving his own; and when he is prevented from doing so, he leagues
with its enemies to destroy his country. He rates the people ‘as if he
were a God to punish, and not a man of their infirmity.’ He scoffs at
one of their tribunes for maintaining their rights and franchises: ‘Mark
you his absolute _shall_?’ not marking his own absolute _will_ to take
every thing from them, his impatience of the slightest opposition to his
own pretensions being in proportion to their arrogance and absurdity. If
the great and powerful had the beneficence and wisdom of Gods, then all
this would have been well: if with a greater knowledge of what is good
for the people, they had as great a care for their interest as they have
themselves, if they were seated above the world, sympathising with the
welfare, but not feeling the passions of men, receiving neither good nor
hurt from them, but bestowing their benefits as free gifts on them, they
might then rule over them like another Providence. But this is not the
case. Coriolanus is unwilling that the senate should shew their ‘cares’
for the people, lest their ‘cares’ should be construed into ‘fears,’ to
the subversion of all due authority; and he is no sooner disappointed in
his schemes to deprive the people not only of the cares of the state,
but of all power to redress themselves, than Volumnia is made madly to
exclaim,
‘Now the red pestilence strike all trades in Rome,
And occupations perish.’
This is but natural: it is but natural for a mother to have more regard
for her son than for a whole city; but then the city should be left to
take some care of itself. The care of the state cannot, we here see, be
safely entrusted to maternal affection, or to the domestic charities of
high life. The great have private feelings of their own, to which the
interests of humanity and justice must courtesy. Their interests are so
far from being the same as those of the community, that they are in
direct and necessary opposition to them; their power is at the expense
of _our_ weakness; their riches of _our_ poverty; their pride of _our_
degradation; their splendour of _our_ wretchedness; their tyranny of
_our_ servitude. If they had the superior knowledge ascribed to them
(which they have not) it would only render them so much more formidable;
and from Gods would convert them into Devils. The whole dramatic moral
of CORIOLANUS is that those who have little shall have less, and that
those who have much shall take all that others have left. The people are
poor; therefore they ought to be starved. They are slaves; therefore
they ought to be beaten. They work hard; therefore they ought to be
treated like beasts of burden. They are ignorant; therefore they ought
not to be allowed to feel that they want food, or clothing, or rest,
that they are enslaved, oppressed, and miserable. This is the logic of
the imagination and the passions; which seek to aggrandize what excites
admiration and to heap contempt on misery, to raise power into tyranny,
and to make tyranny absolute; to thrust down that which is low still
lower, and to make wretches desperate: to exalt magistrates into kings,
kings into gods; to degrade subjects to the rank of slaves, and slaves
to the condition of brutes. The history of mankind is a romance, a mask,
a tragedy, constructed upon the principles of _poetical justice_; it is
a noble or royal hunt, in which what is sport to the few is death to the
many, and in which the spectators halloo and encourage the strong to set
upon the weak, and cry havoc in the chase though they do not share in
the spoil. We may depend upon it that what men delight to read in books,
they will put in practice in reality.
One of the most natural traits in this play is the difference of the
interest taken in the success of Coriolanus by his wife and mother. The
one is only anxious for his honour; the other is fearful for his life.
‘_Volumnia._ Methinks I hither hear your husband’s drum:
I see him pluck Aufidius down by th’ hair:
Methinks I see him stamp thus—and call thus—
Come on, ye cowards; ye were got in fear
Though you were born in Rome; his bloody brow
With his mail’d hand then wiping, forth he goes
Like to a harvest man, that’s task’d to mow
Or all, or lose his hire.
_Virgilia._ His bloody brow! Oh Jupiter, no blood.
_Volumnia._ Away, you fool; it more becomes a man
Than gilt his trophy. The breast of Hecuba,
When she did suckle Hector, look’d not lovelier
Than Hector’s forehead, when it spit forth blood
At Grecian swords contending.’
When she hears the trumpets that proclaim her son’s return, she says in
the true spirit of a Roman matron,
‘These are the ushers of Martius: before him
He carries noise, and behind him he leaves tears.
Death, that dark spirit, in ‘s nervy arm doth lie,
Which being advanc’d, declines, and then men die.’
Coriolanus himself is a complete character: his love of reputation, his
contempt of popular opinion, his pride and modesty, are consequences of
each other. His pride consists in the inflexible sternness of his will;
his love of glory is a determined desire to bear down all opposition,
and to extort the admiration both of friends and foes. His contempt for
popular favour, his unwillingness to hear his own praises, spring from
the same source. He cannot contradict the praises that are bestowed upon
him; therefore he is impatient at hearing them. He would enforce the
good opinion of others by his actions, but does not want their
acknowledgments in words.
‘Pray now, no more: my mother,
Who has a charter to extol her blood,
When she does praise me, grieves me.’
His magnanimity is of the same kind. He admires in an enemy that courage
which he honours in himself; he places himself on the hearth of Aufidius
with the same confidence that he would have met him in the field, and
feels that by putting himself in his power, he takes from him all
temptation for using it against him.
In the title-page of CORIOLANUS, it is said at the bottom of the
_Dramatis Personæ_, ‘The whole history exactly followed, and many of the
principal speeches copied from the life of Coriolanus in Plutarch.’ It
will be interesting to our readers to see how far this is the case. Two
of the principal scenes, those between Coriolanus and Aufidius and
between Coriolanus and his mother, are thus given in Sir Thomas North’s
Translation of Plutarch, dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, 1579. The first
is as follows:—
‘It was even twilight when he entered the city of Antium, and many
people met him in the streets, but no man knew him. So he went
directly to Tullus Aufidius’ house, and when he came thither, he got
him up straight to the chimney-hearth, and sat him down, and spake
not a word to any man, his face all muffled over. They of the house
spying him, wondered what he should be, and yet they durst not bid
him rise. For ill-favouredly muffled and disguised as he was, yet
there appeared a certain majesty in his countenance and in his
silence: whereupon they went to Tullus, who was at supper, to tell
him of the strange disguising of this man. Tullus rose presently
from the board, and coming towards him, asked him what he was, and
wherefore he came. Then Martius unmuffled himself, and after he had
paused awhile, making no answer, he said unto himself, If thou
knowest me not yet, Tullus, and seeing me, dost not perhaps believe
me to be the man I am indeed, I must of necessity discover myself to
be that I am. “I am Caius Martius, who hath done to thyself
particularly, and to all the Volces generally, great hurt and
mischief, which I cannot deny for my surname of Coriolanus that I
bear. For I never had other benefit nor recompence of the true and
painful service I have done, and the extreme dangers I have been in,
but this only surname: a good memory and witness of the malice and
displeasure thou shouldest bear me. Indeed the name only remaineth
with me; for the rest, the envy and cruelty of the people of Rome
have taken from me, by the sufferance of the dastardly nobility and
magistrates, who have forsaken me, and let me be banished by the
people. This extremity hath now driven me to come as a poor suitor,
to take thy chimney-hearth, not of any hope I have to save my life
thereby. For if I had feared death, I would not have come hither to
put myself in hazard; but pricked forward with desire to be revenged
of them that thus have banished me, which now I do begin, in putting
my person into the hands of their enemies. Wherefore if thou hast
any heart to be wrecked of the injuries thy enemies have done thee,
speed thee now, and let my misery serve thy turn, and so use it as
my service may be a benefit to the Volces: promising thee, that I
will fight with better good will for all you, than I did when I was
against you, knowing that they fight more valiantly who know the
force of the enemy, than such as have never proved it. And if it be
so that thou dare not, and that thou art weary to prove fortune any
more, then am I also weary to live any longer. And it were no wisdom
in thee to save the life of him who hath been heretofore thy mortal
enemy, and whose service now can nothing help, nor pleasure thee.”
Tullus hearing what he said, was a marvellous glad man, and taking
him by the hand, he said unto him: “Stand up, O Martius, and be of
good cheer, for in proffering thyself unto us, thou doest us great
honour: and by this means thou mayest hope also of greater things at
all the Volces’ hands.” So he feasted him for that time, and
entertained him in the honourablest manner he could, talking with
him of no other matter at that present: but within few days after,
they fell to consultation together in what sort they should begin
their wars.’
The meeting between Coriolanus and his mother is also nearly the same as
in the play.
‘Now was Martius set then in the chair of state, with all the
honours of a general, and when he had spied the women coming afar
off, he marvelled what the matter meant: but afterwards knowing his
wife which came foremost, he determined at the first to persist in
his obstinate and inflexible rancour. But overcome in the end with
natural affection, and being altogether altered to see them, his
heart would not serve him to tarry their coming to his chair, but
coming down in haste, he went to meet them, and first he kissed his
mother, and embraced her a pretty while, then his wife and little
children. And nature so wrought with him, that the tears fell from
his eyes, and he could not keep himself from making much of them,
but yielded to the affection of his blood, as if he had been
violently carried with the fury of a most swift-running stream.
After he had thus lovingly received them, and perceiving that his
mother Volumnia would begin to speak to him, he called the chiefest
of the council of the Volces to hear what she would say. Then she
spake in this sort: “If we held our peace, my son, and determined
not to speak, the state of our poor bodies, and present sight of our
raiment, would easily betray to thee what life we have led at home,
since thy exile and abode abroad; but think now with thyself, how
much more unfortunate than all the women living, we are come hither,
considering that the sight which should be most pleasant to all
others to behold, spiteful fortune had made most fearful to us:
making myself to see my son, and my daughter here her husband,
besieging the walls of his native country: so as that which is the
only comfort to all others in their adversity and misery, to pray
unto the Gods, and to call to them for aid, is the only thing which
plungeth us into most deep perplexity. For we cannot, alas, together
pray, both for victory to our country, and for safety of thy life
also: but a world of grievous curses, yea more than any mortal enemy
can heap upon us, are forcibly wrapped up in our prayers. For the
bitter sop of most hard choice is offered thy wife and children, to
forego one of the two: either to lose the person of thyself, or the
nurse of their native country. For myself, my son, I am determined
not to tarry till fortune in my lifetime do make an end of this war.
For if I cannot persuade thee rather to do good unto both parties,
than to overthrow and destroy the one, preferring love and nature
before the malice and calamity of wars, thou shalt see, my son, and
trust unto it, thou shalt no sooner march forward to assault thy
country, but thy foot shall tread upon thy mother’s womb, that
brought thee first into this world. And I may not defer to see the
day, either that my son be led prisoner in triumph by his natural
countrymen, or that he himself do triumph of them, and of his
natural country. For if it were so, that my request tended to save
thy country, in destroying the Volces, I must confess, thou wouldest
hardly and doubtfully resolve on that. For as to destroy thy natural
country, it is altogether unmeet and unlawful, so were it not just
and less honourable to betray those that put their trust in thee.
But my only demand consisteth, to make a goal delivery of all evils,
which delivereth equal benefit and safety, both to the one and the
other, but most honourable for the Volces. For it shall appear, that
having victory in their hands, they have of special favour granted
us singular graces, peace and amity, albeit themselves have no less
part of both than we. Of which good, if so it came to pass, thyself
is the only author, and so hast thou the only honour. But if it
fail, and fall out contrary, thyself alone deservedly shalt carry
the shameful reproach and burthen of either party. So, though the
end of war be uncertain, yet this notwithstanding is most certain,
that if it be thy chance to conquer, this benefit shalt thou reap of
thy goodly conquest, to be chronicled the plague and destroyer of
thy country. And if fortune overthrow thee, then the world will say,
that through desire to revenge thy private injuries, thou hast for
ever undone thy good friends, who did most lovingly and courteously
receive thee.” Martius gave good ear unto his mother’s words,
without interrupting her speech at all, and after she had said what
she would, he held his peace a pretty while, and answered not a
word. Hereupon she began again to speak unto him, and said: “My son,
why dost thou not answer me? Dost thou think it good altogether to
give place unto thy choler and desire of revenge, and thinkest thou
it not honesty for thee to grant thy mother’s request in so weighty
a cause? Dost thou take it honourable for a nobleman to remember the
wrongs and injuries done him, and dost not in like case think it an
honest nobleman’s part to be thankful for the goodness that parents
do shew to their children, acknowledging the duty and reverence they
ought to bear unto them? No man living is more bound to shew himself
thankful in all parts and respects than thyself; who so universally
shewest all ingratitude. Moreover, my son, thou hast sorely taken of
thy country, exacting grievous payments upon them, in revenge of the
injuries offered thee; besides, thou hast not hitherto shewed thy
poor mother any courtesy. And therefore, it is not only honest but
due unto me, that without compulsion I should obtain my so just and
reasonable request of thee. But since by reason I cannot persuade
thee to it, to what purpose do I defer my last hope.” And with these
words, herself, his wife and children, fell down upon their knees
before him: Martius seeing that, could refrain no longer, but went
straight and lifted her up, crying out, “Oh mother, what have you
done to me?” And holding her hard by the hand, “Oh mother,” said he,
“you have won a happy victory for your country, but mortal and
unhappy for your son: for I see myself vanquished by you alone.”
These words being spoken openly, he spake a little apart with his
mother and wife, and then let them return again to Rome, for so they
did request him; and so remaining in the camp that night, the next
morning he dislodged, and marched homeward unto the Volces’ country
again.’
Shakespear has, in giving a dramatic form to this passage, adhered very
closely and properly to the text. He did not think it necessary to
improve upon the truth of nature. Several of the scenes in _Julius
Cæsar_, particularly Portia’s appeal to the confidence of her husband by
shewing him the wound she had given herself, and the appearance of the
ghost of Cæsar to Brutus, are in like manner, taken from the history.
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA
This is one of the most loose and desultory of our author’s plays: it
rambles on just as it happens, but it overtakes, together with some
indifferent matter, a prodigious number of fine things in its way.
Troilus himself is no character: he is merely a common lover: but
Cressida and her uncle Pandarus are hit off with proverbial truth. By
the speeches given to the leaders of the Grecian host, Nestor, Ulysses,
Agamemnon, Achilles, Shakespear seems to have known them as well as if
he had been a spy sent by the Trojans into the enemy’s camp—to say
nothing of their affording very lofty examples of didactic eloquence.
The following is a very stately and spirited declamation:
‘_Ulysses._ Troy, yet upon her basis, had been down,
And the great Hector’s sword had lack’d a master,
But for these instances.
The specialty of rule hath been neglected.
. . . . .
The heavens themselves, the planets, and this center,
Observe degree, priority, and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office, and custom, in all line of order:
And therefore is the glorious planet, Sol,
In noble eminence, enthron’d and spher’d
Amidst the other, whose med’cinable eye
Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil,
And posts, like the commandment of a king,
Sans check, to good and bad. But, when the planets,
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues, and what portents? what mutinies?
What raging of the sea? shaking of the earth?
Commotion in the winds? frights, changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixture! O, when degree is shaken,
(Which is the ladder to all high designs)
The enterprize is sick! How could communities,
Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenitive and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
(But by degree) stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy. The bounded waters
Would lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe:
Strength would be the lord of imbecility,
And the rude son would strike his father dead:
Force would be right; or rather right and wrong
(Between whose endless jar Justice resides)
Would lose their names, and so would Justice too.
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite (an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power)
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself. Great Agamemnon,
This chaos, when degree is suffocate,
Follows the choking:
And this neglection of degree it is,
That by a pace goes backward, in a purpose
It hath to climb. The general’s disdained
By him one step below; he, by the next;
That next, by him beneath: so every step,
Exampled by the first pace that is sick
Of his superior, grows to an envious fever
Of pale and bloodless emulation;
And ’tis this fever that keeps Troy on foot,
Not her own sinews. To end a tale of length,
Troy in our weakness lives, not in her strength.’
It cannot be said of Shakespear, as was said of some one, that he was
‘without o’erflowing full.’ He was full, even to o’erflowing. He gave
heaped measure, running over. This was his greatest fault. He was only
in danger ‘of losing distinction in his thoughts’ (to borrow his own
expression)
‘As doth a battle when they charge on heaps
The enemy flying.’
There is another passage, the speech of Ulysses to Achilles, shewing him
the thankless nature of popularity, which has a still greater depth of
moral observation and richness of illustration than the former. It is
long, but worth the quoting. The sometimes giving an entire argument
from the unacted plays of our author may with one class of readers have
almost the use of restoring a lost passage; and may serve to convince
another class of critics, that the poet’s genius was not confined to the
production of stage effect by preternatural means.—
‘_Ulysses._ Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for Oblivion;
A great-siz’d monster of ingratitudes:
Those scraps are good deeds past,
Which are devour’d as fast as they are made,
Forgot as soon as done. Persev`rance, dear my lord,
Keeps Honour bright: to have done, is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mockery. Take the instant way;
For Honour travels in a strait so narrow,
Where one but goes abreast; keep then the path,
For Emulation hath a thousand sons,
That one by one pursue; if you give way,
Or hedge aside from the direct forth right,
Like to an entered tide, they all rush by,
And leave you hindmost;——
Or, like a gallant horse fall’n in first rank,
O’er-run and trampled on: then what they do in present,
Tho’ less than yours in past must o’ertop yours:
For Time is like a fashionable host,
That slightly shakes his parting guest by th’ hand,
And with his arms outstretch’d, as he would fly,
Grasps in the comer: the welcome ever smiles,
And farewell goes out sighing. O, let not virtue seek
Remuneration for the thing it was; for beauty, wit,
High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
To envious and calumniating time:
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
That all with one consent praise new-born gauds,
Tho’ they are made and moulded of things past.
The present eye praises the present object.
Then marvel not, thou great and complete man,
That all the Greeks begin to worship Ajax;
Since things in motion sooner catch the eye,
Than what not stirs. The cry went out on thee,
And still it might, and yet it may again,
If thou wouldst not entomb thyself alive,
And case thy reputation in thy tent.’
The throng of images in the above lines is prodigious; and though they
sometimes jostle against one another, they every where raise and carry
on the feeling, which is intrinsically true and profound. The debates
between the Trojan chiefs on the restoring of Helen are full of
knowledge of human motives and character. Troilus enters well into the
philosophy of war, when he says in answer to something that falls from
Hector,
‘Why there you touch’d the life of our design:
Were it not glory that we more affected,
Than the performance of our heaving spleens,
I would not wish a drop of Trojan blood
Spent more in her defence. But, worthy Hector,
She is a theme of honour and renown,
A spur to valiant and magnanimous deeds.’
The character of Hector, in a few slight indications which appear of it,
is made very amiable. His death is sublime, and shews in a striking
light the mixture of barbarity and heroism of the age. The threats of
Achilles are fatal; they carry their own means of execution with them.
‘Come here about me, you my myrmidons,
Mark what I say.—Attend me where I wheel:
Strike not a stroke, but keep yourselves in breath;
And when I have the bloody Hector found,
Empale him with your weapons round about,
In fellest manner execute your arms.
Follow me, sirs, and my proceeding eye.’
He then finds Hector and slays him, as if he had been hunting down a
wild beast. There is something revolting as well as terrific in the
ferocious coolness with which he singles out his prey: nor does the
splendour of the achievement reconcile us to the cruelty of the means.
The characters of Cressida and Pandarus are very amusing and
instructive. The disinterested willingness of Pandarus to serve his
friend in an affair which lies next his heart is immediately brought
forward. ‘Go thy way, Troilus, go thy way; had I a sister were a grace,
or a daughter were a goddess, he should take his choice. O admirable
man! Paris, Paris is dirt to him, and I warrant Helen, to change, would
give money to boot.’ This is the language he addresses to his niece: nor
is she much behindhand in coming into the plot. Her head is as light and
fluttering as her heart. ‘It is the prettiest villain, she fetches her
breath so short as a new-ta’en sparrow.’ Both characters are originals,
and quite different from what they are in Chaucer. In Chaucer, Cressida
is represented as a grave, sober, considerate personage (a widow—he
cannot tell her age, nor whether she has children or no) who has an
alternate eye to her character, her interest, and her pleasure:
Shakespear’s Cressida is a giddy girl, an unpractised jilt, who falls in
love with Troilus, as she afterwards deserts him, from mere levity and
thoughtlessness of temper. She may be wooed and won to any thing and
from any thing, at a moment’s warning; the other knows very well what
she would be at, and sticks to it, and is more governed by substantial
reasons than by caprice or vanity. Pandarus again, in Chaucer’s story,
is a friendly sort of go-between, tolerably busy, officious, and forward
in bringing matters to bear: but in Shakespear he has ‘a stamp exclusive
and professional’: he wears the badge of his trade; he is a regular
knight of the game. The difference of the manner in which the subject is
treated arises perhaps less from intention, than from the different
genius of the two poets. There is no _double entendre_ in the characters
of Chaucer: they are either quite serious or quite comic. In Shakespear
the ludicrous and ironical are constantly blended with the stately and
the impassioned. We see Chaucer’s characters as they saw themselves, not
as they appeared to others or might have appeared to the poet. He is as
deeply implicated in the affairs of his personages as they could be
themselves. He had to go a long journey with each of them, and became a
kind of necessary confidant. There is little relief, or light and shade
in his pictures. The conscious smile is not seen lurking under the brow
of grief or impatience. Every thing with him is intense and continuous—a
working out of what went before.—Shakespear never committed himself to
his characters. He trifled, laughed, or wept with them as he chose. He
has no prejudices for or against them; and it seems a matter of perfect
indifference whether he shall be in jest or earnest. According to him
‘the web of our lives is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.’ His
genius was dramatic, as Chaucer’s was historical. He saw both sides of a
question, the different views taken of it according to the different
interests of the parties concerned, and he was at once an actor and
spectator in the scene. If any thing, he is too various and flexible:
too full of transitions, of glancing lights, of salient points. If
Chaucer followed up his subject too doggedly, perhaps Shakespear was too
volatile and heedless. The Muse’s wing too often lifted him from off his
feet. He made infinite excursions to the right and the left.
——‘He hath done
Mad and fantastic execution,
Engaging and redeeming of himself
With such a careless force and forceless care,
As if that luck in very spite of cunning
Bad him win all.’
Chaucer attended chiefly to the real and natural, that is, to the
involuntary and inevitable impressions on the mind in given
circumstances; Shakespear exhibited also the possible and the
fantastical,—not only what things are in themselves, but whatever they
might seem to be, their different reflections, their endless
combinations. He lent his fancy, wit, invention, to others, and borrowed
their feelings in return. Chaucer excelled in the force of habitual
sentiment; Shakespear added to it every variety of passion, every
suggestion of thought or accident. Chaucer described external objects
with the eye of a painter, or he might be said to have embodied them
with the hand of a sculptor, every part is so thoroughly made out, and
tangible:—Shakespear’s imagination threw over them a lustre
—‘Prouder than when blue Iris bends.’
Every thing in Chaucer has a downright reality. A simile or a sentiment
is as if it were given in upon evidence. In Shakespear the commonest
matter-of-fact has a romantic grace about it; or seems to float with the
breath of imagination in a freer element. No one could have more depth
of feeling or observation than Chaucer, but he wanted resources of
invention to lay open the stores of nature or the human heart with the
same radiant light that Shakespear has done. However fine or profound
the thought, we know what is coming, whereas the effect of reading
Shakespear is ‘like the eye of vassalage at unawares encountering
majesty.’ Chaucer’s mind was consecutive, rather than discursive. He
arrived at truth through a certain process; Shakespear saw every thing
by intuition. Chaucer had a great variety of power, but he could do only
one thing at once. He set himself to work on a particular subject. His
ideas were kept separate, labelled, ticketed and parcelled out in a set
form, in pews and compartments by themselves. They did not play into one
another’s hands. They did not re-act upon one another, as the blower’s
breath moulds the yielding glass. There is something hard and dry in
them. What is the most wonderful thing in Shakespear’s faculties is
their excessive sociability, and how they gossiped and compared notes
together.
We must conclude this criticism; and we will do it with a quotation or
two. One of the most beautiful passages in Chaucer’s tale is the
description of Cresseide’s first avowal of her love.
‘And as the new abashed nightingale,
That stinteth first when she beginneth sing,
When that she heareth any herde’s tale,
Or in the hedges any wight stirring,
And, after, sicker doth her voice outring;
Right so Cresseide, when that her dread stent,
Opened her heart, and told him her intent.’
See also the two next stanzas, and particularly that divine one
beginning—
‘Her armes small, her back both straight and soft,’ etc.
Compare this with the following speech of Troilus to Cressida in the
play:—
‘O, that I thought it could be in a woman;
And if it can, I will presume in you,
To feed for aye her lamp and flame of love,
To keep her constancy in plight and youth,
Out-living beauties outward, with a mind
That doth renew swifter than blood decays.
Or, that persuasion could but thus convince me,
That my integrity and truth to you
Might be affronted with the match and weight
Of such a winnow’d purity in love;
How were I then uplifted! But alas,
I am as true as Truth’s simplicity,
And simpler than the infancy of Truth.’
These passages may not seem very characteristic at first sight, though
we think they are so. We will give two, that cannot be mistaken.
Patroclus says to Achilles,
——‘Rouse yourself; and the weak wanton Cupid
Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold,
And like a dew-drop from the lion’s mane,
Be shook to air.’
Troilus, addressing the God of Day on the approach of the morning that
parts him from Cressida, says with much scorn,
‘What! proffer’st thou thy light here for to sell?
Go sell it them that smallé selés grave.’
If nobody but Shakespear could have written the former, nobody but
Chaucer would have thought of the latter.—Chaucer was the most literal
of poets, as Richardson was of prose-writers.
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
This is a very noble play. Though not in the first class of Shakespear’s
productions, it stands next to them, and is, we think, the finest of his
historical plays, that is, of those in which he made poetry the organ of
history, and assumed a certain tone of character and sentiment, in
conformity to known facts, instead of trusting to his observations of
general nature or to the unlimited indulgence of his own fancy. What he
has added to the actual story, is upon a par with it. His genius was, as
it were, a match for history as well as nature, and could grapple at
will with either. The play is full of that pervading comprehensive power
by which the poet could always make himself master of time and
circumstances. It presents a fine picture of Roman pride and Eastern
magnificence: and in the struggle between the two, the empire of the
world seems suspended, ‘like the swan’s down-feather,
‘That stands upon the swell at full of tide,
And neither way inclines.’
The characters breathe, move, and live. Shakespear does not stand
reasoning on what his characters would do or say, but at once _becomes_
them, and speaks and acts for them. He does not present us with groups
of stage-puppets or poetical machines making set speeches on human life,
and acting from a calculation of problematical motives, but he brings
living men and women on the scene, who speak and act from real feelings,
according to the ebbs and flows of passion, without the least tincture
of pedantry of logic or rhetoric. Nothing is made out by inference and
analogy, by climax and antithesis, but every thing takes place just as
it would have done in reality, according to the occasion.—The character
of Cleopatra is a master-piece. What an extreme contrast it affords to
Imogen! One would think it almost impossible for the same person to have
drawn both. She is voluptuous, ostentatious, conscious, boastful of her
charms, haughty, tyrannical, fickle. The luxurious pomp and gorgeous
extravagance of the Egyptian queen are displayed in all their force and
lustre, as well as the irregular grandeur of the soul of Mark Antony.
Take only the first four lines that they speak as an example of the
regal style of love-making.
‘_Cleopatra._ If it be love indeed, tell me how much?
_Antony._ There’s beggary in the love that can be reckon’d.
_Cleopatra._ I’ll set a bourn how far to be belov’d.
_Antony._ Then must thou needs find out new heav’n, new earth.’
The rich and poetical description of her person beginning—
‘The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,
Burnt on the water; the poop was beaten gold,
Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that
The winds were love-sick’—
seems to prepare the way for, and almost to justify the subsequent
infatuation of Antony when in the sea-fight at Actium, he leaves the
battle, and ‘like a doating mallard’ follows her flying sails.
Few things in Shakespear (and we know of nothing in any other author
like them) have more of that local truth of imagination and character
than the passage in which Cleopatra is represented conjecturing what
were the employments of Antony in his absence—‘He’s speaking now, or
murmuring—_Where’s my serpent of old Nile?_’ Or again, when she says to
Antony, after the defeat at Actium, and his summoning up resolution to
risk another fight—‘It is my birthday; I had thought to have held it
poor; but since my lord is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra.’ Perhaps
the finest burst of all is Antony’s rage after his final defeat when he
comes in, and surprises the messenger of Cæsar kissing her hand—
‘To let a fellow that will take rewards,
And say God quit you, be familiar with,
My play-fellow, your hand; this kingly seal,
And plighter of high hearts.’
It is no wonder that he orders him to be whipped; but his low condition
is not the true reason: there is another feeling which lies deeper,
though Antony’s pride would not let him shew it, except by his rage; he
suspects the fellow to be Cæsar’s proxy.
Cleopatra’s whole character is the triumph of the voluptuous, of the
love of pleasure and the power of giving it, over every other
consideration. Octavia is a dull foil to her, and Fulvia a shrew and
shrill-tongued. What a picture do those lines give of her—
‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom steal
Her infinite variety. Other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies.’
What a spirit and fire in her conversation with Antony’s messenger who
brings her the unwelcome news of his marriage with Octavia! How all the
pride of beauty and of high rank breaks out in her promised reward to
him—
——‘There’s gold, and here
My bluest veins to kiss!’—
She had great and unpardonable faults, but the grandeur of her death
almost redeems them. She learns from the depth of despair the strength
of her affections. She keeps her queen-like state in the last disgrace,
and her sense of the pleasurable in the last moments of her life. She
tastes a luxury in death. After applying the asp, she says with
fondness—
‘Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,
That sucks the nurse asleep?
As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle.
Oh Antony!’
It is worth while to observe that Shakespear has contrasted the extreme
magnificence of the descriptions in this play with pictures of extreme
suffering and physical horror, not less striking—partly perhaps to place
the effeminate character of Mark Antony in a more favourable light, and
at the same time to preserve a certain balance of feeling in the mind.
Cæsar says, hearing of his rival’s conduct at the court of Cleopatra,
——‘Antony,
Leave thy lascivious wassels. When thou once
Wert beaten from Mutina, where thou slew’st
Hirtius and Pansa, consuls, at thy heel
Did famine follow, whom thou fought’st against,
Though daintily brought up, with patience more
Than savages could suffer. Thou did’st drink
The stale of horses, and the gilded puddle
Which beast would cough at. Thy palate then did deign
The roughest berry on the rudest hedge,
Yea, like the stag, when snow the pasture sheets,
The barks of trees thou browsed’st. On the Alps,
It is reported, thou didst eat strange flesh,
Which some did die to look on: and all this,
It wounds thine honour, that I speak it now,
Was borne so like a soldier, that thy cheek
So much as lank’d not.’
The passage after Antony’s defeat by Augustus, where he is made to say—
‘Yes, yes; he at Philippi kept
His sword e’en like a dancer; while I struck
The lean and wrinkled Cassius, and ’twas I
That the mad Brutus ended’—
is one of those fine retrospections which show us the winding and
eventful march of human life. The jealous attention which has been paid
to the unities both of time and place has taken away the principle of
perspective in the drama, and all the interest which objects derive from
distance, from contrast, from privation, from change of fortune, from
long-cherished passion; and contrasts our view of life from a strange
and romantic dream, long, obscure, and infinite, into a smartly
contested, three hours’ inaugural disputation on its merits by the
different candidates for theatrical applause.
The latter scenes of ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA are full of the changes of
accident and passion. Success and defeat follow one another with
startling rapidity. Fortune sits upon her wheel more blind and giddy
than usual. This precarious state and the approaching dissolution of his
greatness are strikingly displayed in the dialogue of Antony with Eros.
‘_Antony._ Eros, thou yet behold’st me?
_Eros._ Ay, noble lord.
_Antony._ Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish,
A vapour sometime, like a bear or lion,
A towered citadel, a pendant rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon’t, that nod unto the world
And mock our eyes with air. Thou hast seen these signs,
They are black vesper’s pageants.
_Eros._ Ay, my lord.
_Antony._ That which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct
As water is in water.
_Eros._ It does, my lord.
_Antony._ My good knave, Eros, now thy captain is
Even such a body,’ etc.
This is, without doubt, one of the finest pieces of poetry in
Shakespear. The splendour of the imagery, the semblance of reality, the
lofty range of picturesque objects hanging over the world, their
evanescent nature, the total uncertainty of what is left behind, are
just like the mouldering schemes of human greatness. It is finer than
Cleopatra’s passionate lamentation over his fallen grandeur, because it
is more dim, unstable, unsubstantial. Antony’s headstrong presumption
and infatuated determination to yield to Cleopatra’s wishes to fight by
sea instead of land, meet a merited punishment; and the extravagance of
his resolutions, increasing with the desperateness of his circumstances,
is well commented upon by Œnobarbus.
——‘I see men’s judgments are
A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward
Do draw the inward quality after them
To suffer all alike.’
The repentance of Œnobarbus after his treachery to his master is the
most affecting part of the play. He cannot recover from the blow which
Antony’s generosity gives him, and he dies broken-hearted, ‘a
master-leaver and a fugitive.’
Shakespear’s genius has spread over the whole play a richness like the
overflowing of the Nile.
HAMLET
This is that Hamlet the Dane, whom we read of in our youth, and whom we
may be said almost to remember in our after-years; he who made that
famous soliloquy on life, who gave the advice to the players, who
thought ‘this goodly frame, the earth, a steril promontory, and this
brave o’er-hanging firmament, the air, this majestical roof fretted with
golden fire, a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours’; whom ‘man
delighted not, nor woman neither’; he who talked with the grave-diggers,
and moralised on Yorick’s skull; the school-fellow of Rosencraus and
Guildenstern at Wittenberg; the friend of Horatio; the lover of Ophelia;
he that was mad and sent to England; the slow avenger of his father’s
death; who lived at the court of Horwendillus five hundred years before
we were born, but all whose thoughts we seem to know as well as we do
our own, because we have read them in Shakespear.
Hamlet is a name; his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the
poet’s brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own
thoughts. Their reality is in the reader’s mind. It is _we_ who are
Hamlet. This play has a prophetic truth, which is above that of history.
Whoever has become thoughtful and melancholy through his own mishaps or
those of others; whoever has borne about with him the clouded brow of
reflection, and thought himself ‘too much i’ th’ sun’; whoever has seen
the golden lamp of day dimmed by envious mists rising in his own breast,
and could find in the world before him only a dull blank with nothing
left remarkable in it; whoever has known ‘the pangs of despised love,
the insolence of office, or the spurns which patient merit of the
unworthy takes’; he who has felt his mind sink within him, and sadness
cling to his heart like a malady, who has had his hopes blighted and his
youth staggered by the apparitions of strange things; who cannot be well
at ease, while he sees evil hovering near him like a spectre; whose
powers of action have been eaten up by thought, he to whom the universe
seems infinite, and himself nothing; whose bitterness of soul makes him
careless of consequences, and who goes to a play as his best resource to
shove off, to a second remove, the evils of life by a mock
representation of them—this is the true Hamlet.
We have been so used to this tragedy that we hardly know how to
criticise it any more than we should know how to describe our own faces.
But we must make such observations as we can. It is the one of
Shakespear’s plays that we think of the oftenest, because it abounds
most in striking reflections on human life, and because the distresses
of Hamlet are transferred, by the turn of his mind, to the general
account of humanity. Whatever happens to him we apply to ourselves,
because he applies it so himself as a means of general reasoning. He is
a great moraliser; and what makes him worth attending to is, that he
moralises on his own feelings and experience. He is not a common-place
pedant. If _Lear_ is distinguished by the greatest depth of passion,
HAMLET is the most remarkable for the ingenuity, originality, and
unstudied developement of character. Shakespear had more magnanimity
than any other poet, and he has shewn more of it in this play than in
any other. There is no attempt to force an interest: every thing is left
for time and circumstances to unfold. The attention is excited without
effort, the incidents succeed each other as matters of course, the
characters think and speak and act just as they might do, if left
entirely to themselves. There is no set purpose, no straining at a
point. The observations are suggested by the passing scene—the gusts of
passion come and go like sounds of music borne on the wind. The whole
play is an exact transcript of what might be supposed to have taken
place at the court of Denmark, at the remote period of time fixed upon,
before the modern refinements in morals and manners were heard of. It
would have been interesting enough to have been admitted as a by-stander
in such a scene, at such a time, to have heard and witnessed something
of what was going on. But here we are more than spectators. We have not
only ‘the outward pageants and the signs of grief’; but ‘we have that
within which passes shew.’ We read the thoughts of the heart, we catch
the passions living as they rise. Other dramatic writers give us very
fine versions and paraphrases of nature; but Shakespear, together with
his own comments, gives us the original text, that we may judge for
ourselves. This is a very great advantage.
The character of Hamlet stands quite by itself. It is not a character
marked by strength of will or even of passion, but by refinement of
thought and sentiment. Hamlet is as little of the hero as a man can well
be: but he is a young and princely novice, full of high enthusiasm and
quick sensibility—the sport of circumstances, questioning with fortune
and refining on his own feelings, and forced from the natural bias of
his disposition by the strangeness of his situation. He seems incapable
of deliberate action, and is only hurried into extremities on the spur
of the occasion, when he has no time to reflect, as in the scene where
he kills Polonius, and again, where he alters the letters which
Rosencraus and Guildenstern are taking with them to England, purporting
his death. At other times, when he is most bound to act, he remains
puzzled, undecided, and sceptical, dallies with his purposes, till the
occasion is lost, and finds out some pretence to relapse into indolence
and thoughtfulness again. For this reason he refuses to kill the King
when he is at his prayers, and by a refinement in malice, which is in
truth only an excuse for his own want of resolution, defers his revenge
to a more fatal opportunity, when he shall be engaged in some act ‘that
has no relish of salvation in it.’
‘He kneels and prays,
And now I’ll do’t, and so he goes to heaven,
And so am I reveng’d: _that would be scann’d_.
He kill’d my father, and for that,
I, his sole son, send him to heaven.
Why this is reward, not revenge.
Up sword and know thou a more horrid time,
When he is drunk, asleep, or in a rage.’
He is the prince of philosophical speculators; and because he cannot
have his revenge perfect, according to the most refined idea his wish
can form, he declines it altogether. So he scruples to trust the
suggestions of the ghost, contrives the scene of the play to have surer
proof of his uncle’s guilt, and then rests satisfied with this
confirmation of his suspicions, and the success of his experiment,
instead of acting upon it. Yet he is sensible of his own weakness, taxes
himself with it, and tries to reason himself out of it.
‘How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast; no more.
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To rust in us unus’d. Now whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th’ event,—
A thought which quarter’d, hath but one part wisdom,
And ever three parts coward;—I do not know
Why yet I live to say, this thing’s to do;
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do it. Examples gross as earth exhort me:
Witness this army of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff’d,
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell. ’Tis not to be great
Never to stir without great argument;
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw,
When honour’s at the stake. How stand I then,
That have a father kill’d, a mother stain’d,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep, while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain?—O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth.’
Still he does nothing; and this very speculation on his own infirmity
only affords him another occasion for indulging it. It is not from any
want of attachment to his father or of abhorrence of his murder that
Hamlet is thus dilatory, but it is more to his taste to indulge his
imagination in reflecting upon the enormity of the crime and refining on
his schemes of vengeance, than to put them into immediate practice. His
ruling passion is to think, not to act: and any vague pretext that
flatters this propensity instantly diverts him from his previous
purposes.
The moral perfection of this character has been called in question, we
think, by those who did not understand it. It is more interesting than
according to rules; amiable, though not faultless. The ethical
delineations of ‘that noble and liberal casuist’ (as Shakespear has been
well called) do not exhibit the drab-coloured Quakerism of morality. His
plays are not copied either from The Whole Duty of Man, or from The
Academy of Compliments! We confess we are a little shocked at the want
of refinement in those who are shocked at the want of refinement in
Hamlet. The neglect of punctilious exactness in his behaviour either
partakes of the ‘licence of the time,’ or else belongs to the very
excess of intellectual refinement in the character, which makes the
common rules of life, as well as his own purposes, sit loose upon him.
He may be said to be amenable only to the tribunal of his own thoughts,
and is too much taken up with the airy world of contemplation to lay as
much stress as he ought on the practical consequences of things. His
habitual principles of action are unhinged and out of joint with the
time. His conduct to Ophelia is quite natural in his circumstances. It
is that of assumed severity only. It is the effect of disappointed hope,
of bitter regrets, of affection suspended, not obliterated, by the
distractions of the scene around him! Amidst the natural and
preternatural horrors of his situation, he might be excused in delicacy
from carrying on a regular courtship. When ‘his father’s spirit was in
arms,’ it was not a time for the son to make love in. He could neither
marry Ophelia, nor wound her mind by explaining the cause of his
alienation, which he durst hardly trust himself to think of. It would
have taken him years to have come to a direct explanation on the point.
In the harassed state of his mind, he could not have done much otherwise
than he did. His conduct does not contradict what he says when he sees
her funeral,
‘I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers
Could not with all their quantity of love
Make up my sum.’
Nothing can be more affecting or beautiful than the Queen’s apostrophe
to Ophelia on throwing the flowers into the grave.
——‘Sweets to the sweet, farewell.
I hop’d thou should’st have been my Hamlet’s wife:
I thought thy bride-bed to have deck’d, sweet maid,
And not have strew’d thy grave.’
Shakespear was thoroughly a master of the mixed motives of human
character, and he here shews us the Queen, who was so criminal in some
respects, not without sensibility and affection in other relations of
life.—Ophelia is a character almost too exquisitely touching to be dwelt
upon. Oh rose of May, oh flower too soon faded! Her love, her madness,
her death, are described with the truest touches of tenderness and
pathos. It is a character which nobody but Shakespear could have drawn
in the way that he has done, and to the conception of which there is not
even the smallest approach, except in some of the old romantic
ballads.[67] Her brother, Laertes, is a character we do not like so
well: he is too hot and choleric, and somewhat rhodomontade. Polonius is
a perfect character in its kind; nor is there any foundation for the
objections which have been made to the consistency of this part. It is
said that he acts very foolishly and talks very sensibly. There is no
inconsistency in that. Again, that he talks wisely at one time and
foolishly at another; that his advice to Laertes is very excellent, and
his advice to the King and Queen on the subject of Hamlet’s madness very
ridiculous. But he gives the one as a father, and is sincere in it; he
gives the other as a mere courtier, a busy-body, and is accordingly
officious, garrulous, and impertinent. In short, Shakespear has been
accused of inconsistency in this and other characters, only because he
has kept up the distinction which there is in nature, between the
understandings and the moral habits of men, between the absurdity of
their ideas and the absurdity of their motives. Polonius is not a fool,
but he makes himself so. His folly, whether in his actions or speeches,
comes under the head of impropriety of intention.
We do not like to see our author’s plays acted, and least of all,
HAMLET. There is no play that suffers so much in being transferred to
the stage. Hamlet himself seems hardly capable of being acted. Mr.
Kemble unavoidably fails in this character from a want of ease and
variety. The character of Hamlet is made up of undulating lines; it has
the yielding flexibility of ‘a wave o’ th’ sea.’ Mr. Kemble plays it
like a man in armour, with a determined inveteracy of purpose, in one
undeviating straight line, which is as remote from the natural grace and
refined susceptibility of the character, as the sharp angles and abrupt
starts which Mr. Kean introduces into the part. Mr. Kean’s Hamlet is as
much too splenetic and rash as Mr. Kemble’s is too deliberate and
formal. His manner is too strong and pointed. He throws a severity,
approaching to virulence, into the common observations and answers.
There is nothing of this in Hamlet. He is, as it were, wrapped up in his
reflections, and only _thinks aloud_. There should therefore be no
attempt to impress what he says upon others by a studied exaggeration of
emphasis or manner; no _talking at_ his hearers. There should be as much
of the gentleman and scholar as possible infused into the part, and as
little of the actor. A pensive air of sadness should sit reluctantly
upon his brow, but no appearance of fixed and sullen gloom. He is full
of weakness and melancholy, but there is no harshness in his nature. He
is the most amiable of misanthropes.
THE TEMPEST
There can be little doubt that Shakespear was the most universal genius
that ever lived. ‘Either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral,
pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, scene individable or poem
unlimited, he is the only man. Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus
too light for him.’ He has not only the same absolute command over our
laughter and our tears, all the resources of passion, of wit, of
thought, of observation, but he has the most unbounded range of fanciful
invention, whether terrible or playful, the same insight into the world
of imagination that he has into the world of reality; and over all there
presides the same truth of character and nature, and the same spirit of
humanity. His ideal beings are as true and natural as his real
characters; that is, as consistent with themselves, or if we suppose
such beings to exist at all, they could not act, speak, or feel
otherwise than as he makes them. He has invented for them a language,
manners, and sentiments of their own, from the tremendous imprecations
of the Witches in _Macbeth_, when they do ‘a deed without a name,’ to
the sylph-like expressions of Ariel, who ‘does his spiriting gently’;
the mischievous tricks and gossipping of Robin Goodfellow, or the
uncouth gabbling and emphatic gesticulations of Caliban in this play.
The TEMPEST is one of the most original and perfect of Shakespear’s
productions, and he has shewn in it all the variety of his powers. It is
full of grace and grandeur. The human and imaginary characters, the
dramatic and the grotesque, are blended together with the greatest art,
and without any appearance of it. Though he has here given ‘to airy
nothing a local habitation and a name,’ yet that part which is only the
fantastic creation of his mind, has the same palpable texture, and
coheres ‘semblably’ with the rest. As the preternatural part has the air
of reality, and almost haunts the imagination with a sense of truth, the
real characters and events partake of the wildness of a dream. The
stately magician, Prospero, driven from his dukedom, but around whom (so
potent is his art) airy spirits throng numberless to do his bidding; his
daughter Miranda (‘worthy of that name’) to whom all the power of his
art points, and who seems the goddess of the isle; the princely
Ferdinand, cast by fate upon the haven of his happiness in this idol of
his love; the delicate Ariel; the savage Caliban, half brute, half
demon; the drunken ship’s crew—are all connected parts of the story, and
can hardly be spared from the place they fill. Even the local scenery is
of a piece and character with the subject. Prospero’s enchanted island
seems to have risen up out of the sea; the airy music, the tempest-tost
vessel, the turbulent waves, all have the effect of the landscape
background of some fine picture. Shakespear’s pencil is (to use an
allusion of his own) ‘like the dyer’s hand, subdued to what it works
in.’ Every thing in him, though it partakes of ‘the liberty of wit,’ is
also subjected to ‘the law’ of the understanding. For instance, even the
drunken sailors, who are made reeling-ripe, share, in the disorder of
their minds and bodies, in the tumult of the elements, and seem on shore
to be as much at the mercy of chance as they were before at the mercy of
the winds and waves. These fellows with their sea-wit are the least to
our taste of any part of the play: but they are as like drunken sailors
as they can be, and are an indirect foil to Caliban, whose figure
acquires a classical dignity in the comparison.
The character of Caliban is generally thought (and justly so) to be one
of the author’s master-pieces. It is not indeed pleasant to see this
character on the stage any more than it is to see the god Pan personated
there. But in itself it is one of the wildest and most abstracted of all
Shakespear’s characters, whose deformity whether of body or mind is
redeemed by the power and truth of the imagination displayed in it. It
is the essence of grossness, but there is not a particle of vulgarity in
it. Shakespear has described the brutal mind of Caliban in contact with
the pure and original forms of nature; the character grows out of the
soil where it is rooted, uncontrouled, uncouth and wild, uncramped by
any of the meannesses of custom. It is ‘of the earth, earthy.’ It seems
almost to have been dug out of the ground, with a soul instinctively
superadded to it answering to its wants and origin. Vulgarity is not
natural coarseness, but conventional coarseness, learnt from others,
contrary to, or without an entire conformity of natural power and
disposition; as fashion is the common-place affectation of what is
elegant and refined without any feeling of the essence of it. Schlegel,
the admirable German critic on Shakespear, observes that Caliban is a
poetical character, and ‘always speaks in blank verse.’ He first comes
in thus:
‘_Caliban._ As wicked dew as e’er my mother brush’d
With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen,
Drop on you both: a south-west blow on ye,
And blister you all o’er!
_Prospero._ For this, be sure, to-night thou shalt have cramps,
Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up; urchins
Shall for that vast of night that they may work,
All exercise on thee: thou shalt be pinched
As thick as honey-combs, each pinch more stinging
Than bees that made them.
_Caliban._ I must eat my dinner.
This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother,
Which thou tak’st from me. When thou camest first,
Thou stroak’dst me, and mad’st much of me; would’st give me
Water with berries in ‘t; and teach me how
To name the bigger light and how the less
That burn by day and night; and then I lov’d thee,
And shew’d thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle,
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile:
Curs’d be I that I did so! All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Who first was mine own king; and here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest o’ th’ island.’
And again, he promises Trinculo his services thus, if he will free him
from his drudgery.
‘I’ll shew thee the best springs; I’ll pluck thee berries,
I’ll fish for thee, and get thee wood enough.
I pr’ythee let me bring thee where crabs grow,
And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts:
Shew thee a jay’s nest, and instruct thee how
To snare the nimble marmozet: I’ll bring thee
To clust’ring filberds; and sometimes I’ll get thee
Young scamels from the rock.’
In conducting Stephano and Trinculo to Prospero’s cell, Caliban shews
the superiority of natural capacity over greater knowledge and greater
folly; and in a former scene, when Ariel frightens them with his music,
Caliban to encourage them accounts for it in the eloquent poetry of the
senses.
—‘Be not afraid, the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twanging instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices,
That if I then had waked after long sleep,
Would make me sleep again; and then in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and shew riches
Ready to drop upon me; when I wak’d,
I cried to dream again.’
This is not more beautiful than it is true. The poet here shews us the
savage with the simplicity of a child, and makes the strange monster
amiable. Shakespear had to paint the human animal rude and without
choice in its pleasures, but not without the sense of pleasure or some
germ of the affections. Master Barnardine in _Measure for Measure_, the
savage of civilized life, is an admirable philosophical counterpart to
Caliban.
Shakespear has, as it were by design, drawn off from Caliban the
elements of whatever is ethereal and refined, to compound them in the
unearthly mould of Ariel. Nothing was ever more finely conceived than
this contrast between the material and the spiritual, the gross and
delicate. Ariel is imaginary power, the swiftness of thought
personified. When told to make good speed by Prospero, he says, ‘I drink
the air before me.’ This is something like Puck’s boast on a similar
occasion, ‘I’ll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes.’
But Ariel differs from Puck in having a fellow feeling in the interests
of those he is employed about. How exquisite is the following dialogue
between him and Prospero!
‘_Ariel._ Your charm so strongly works ‘em,
That if you now beheld them, your affections
Would become tender.
_Prospero._ Dost thou think so, spirit?
_Ariel._ Mine would, sir, were I human.
_Prospero._ And mine shall.
Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling
Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,
One of their kind, that relish all as sharply,
Passion’d as they, be kindlier moved than thou art?’
It has been observed that there is a peculiar charm in the songs
introduced in Shakespear, which, without conveying any distinct images,
seem to recall all the feelings connected with them, like snatches of
half-forgotten music heard indistinctly and at intervals. There is this
effect produced by Ariel’s songs, which (as we are told) seem to sound
in the air, and as if the person playing them were invisible. We shall
give one instance out of many of this general power.
‘_Enter_ FERDINAND; _and_ ARIEL _invisible, playing and singing_.
ARIEL’S SONG.
Come unto these yellow sands,
And then take hands;
Curt’sied when you have, and kiss’d,
(The wild waves whist;)
Foot it featly here and there;
And sweet sprites the burden bear.
[_Burden dispersedly._
Hark, hark! bowgh-wowgh: the watch-dogs bark,
Bowgh-wowgh.
_Ariel._ Hark, hark! I hear
The strain of strutting chanticleer
Cry cock-a-doodle-doo.
_Ferdinand._ Where should this music be? i’ the air or the earth?
It sounds no more: and sure it waits upon
Some god o’ th’ island. Sitting on a bank
Weeping against 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 I have follow’d it,
Or it hath drawn me rather:—but ’tis gone.—
No, it begins again.
ARIEL’S SONG.
Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change,
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell—
Hark! now I hear them, ding-dong bell.
[_Burden ding-dong._
_Ferdinand._ 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.’—
The courtship between Ferdinand and Miranda is one of the chief beauties
of this play. It is the very purity of love. The pretended interference
of Prospero with it heightens its interest, and is in character with the
magician, whose sense of preternatural power makes him arbitrary,
tetchy, and impatient of opposition.
The TEMPEST is a finer play than the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_, which
has sometimes been compared with it; but it is not so fine a poem. There
are a greater number of beautiful passages in the latter. Two of the
most striking in the TEMPEST are spoken by Prospero. The one is that
admirable one when the vision which he has conjured up disappears,
beginning ‘The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,’ etc., which
has been so often quoted, that every school-boy knows it by heart; the
other is that which Prospero makes in abjuring his art.
‘Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves,
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi-puppets, that
By moon-shine do the green sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew, by whose aid
(Weak masters tho’ ye be) I have be-dimm’d
The noon-tide sun, call’d forth the mutinous winds,
And ‘twixt the green sea and the azur’d vault
Set roaring war; to the dread rattling thunder
Have I giv’n fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-bas’d promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs pluck’d up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have wak’d their sleepers; oped, and let ‘em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure; and when I have requir’d
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
(To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for) I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fadoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound,
I’ll drown my book.’—
We must not forget to mention among other things in this play, that
Shakespear has anticipated nearly all the arguments on the Utopian
schemes of modern philosophy.
‘_Gonzalo._ Had I the plantation of this isle, my lord—
_Antonio._ He’d sow it with nettle-seed.
_Sebastian._ Or docks or mallows.
_Gonzalo._ And were the king on’t, what would I do?
_Sebastian._ ‘Scape being drunk, for want of wine.
_Gonzalo._ I’ the commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things: for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; wealth, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation, all men idle, all,
And women too; but innocent and pure:
No sovereignty.
_Sebastian._ And yet he would be king on ‘t.
_Antonio._ The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the
beginning.
_Gonzalo._ All things in common nature should produce
Without sweat or endeavour. Treason, felony,
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine
Would I not have; but nature should bring forth,
Of its own kind, all foizon, all abundance
To feed my innocent people!
_Sebastian._ No marrying ‘mong his subjects?
_Antonio._ None, man; all idle; whores and knaves.
_Gonzalo._ I would with such perfection govern, sir,
To excel the golden age.
_Sebastian._ Save his majesty!’
THE MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
Bottom the Weaver is a character that has not had justice done him. He
is the most romantic of mechanics. And what a list of companions he
has—Quince the Carpenter, Snug the Joiner, Flute the Bellows-mender,
Snout the Tinker, Starveling the Tailor; and then again, what a group of
fairy attendants, Puck, Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustard-seed! It
has been observed that Shakespear’s characters are constructed upon deep
physiological principles; and there is something in this play which
looks very like it. Bottom the Weaver, who takes the lead of
‘This crew of patches, rude mechanicals,
That work for bread upon Athenian stalls,’
follows a sedentary trade, and he is accordingly represented as
conceited, serious, and fantastical. He is ready to undertake any thing
and every thing, as if it was as much a matter of course as the motion
of his loom and shuttle. He is for playing the tyrant, the lover, the
lady, the lion. ‘He will roar that it shall do any man’s heart good to
hear him’; and this being objected to as improper, he still has a
resource in his good opinion of himself, and ‘will roar you an ‘twere
any nightingale.’ Snug the Joiner is the moral man of the piece, who
proceeds by measurement and discretion in all things. You see him with
his rule and compasses in his hand. ‘Have you the lion’s part written?
Pray you, if it be, give it me, for I am slow of study.’ ‘You may do it
extempore,’ says Quince, ‘for it is nothing but roaring.’ Starveling the
Tailor keeps the peace, and objects to the lion and the drawn sword. ‘I
believe we must leave the killing out when all’s done.’ Starveling,
however, does not start the objections himself, but seconds them when
made by others, as if he had not spirit to express his fears without
encouragement. It is too much to suppose all this intentional: but it
very luckily falls out so. Nature includes all that is implied in the
most subtle analytical distinctions; and the same distinctions will be
found in Shakespear. Bottom, who is not only chief actor, but
stage-manager for the occasion, has a device to obviate the danger of
frightening the ladies: ‘Write me a prologue, and let the prologue seem
to say, we will do no harm with our swords, and that Pyramus is not
killed indeed; and for better assurance, tell them that I, Pyramus, am
not Pyramus, but Bottom the Weaver: this will put them out of fear.’
Bottom seems to have understood the subject of dramatic illusion at
least as well as any modern essayist. If our holiday mechanic rules the
roast among his fellows, he is no less at home in his new character of
an ass, ‘with amiable cheeks, and fair large ears.’ He instinctively
acquires a most learned taste, and grows fastidious in the choice of
dried peas and bottled hay. He is quite familiar with his new
attendants, and assigns them their parts with all due gravity. ‘Monsieur
Cobweb, good Monsieur, get your weapon in your hand, and kill me a
red-hipt humble bee on the top of a thistle, and, good Monsieur, bring
me the honey-bag.’ What an exact knowledge is here shewn of natural
history!
Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, is the leader of the fairy band. He is the
Ariel of the MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM; and yet as unlike as can be to the
Ariel in _The Tempest_. No other poet could have made two such different
characters out of the same fanciful materials and situations. Ariel is a
minister of retribution, who is touched with the sense of pity at the
woes he inflicts. Puck is a mad-cap sprite, full of wantonness and
mischief, who laughs at those whom he misleads—‘Lord, what fools these
mortals be!’ Ariel cleaves the air, and executes his mission with the
zeal of a winged messenger; Puck is borne along on his fairy errand like
the light and glittering gossamer before the breeze. He is, indeed, a
most Epicurean little gentleman, dealing in quaint devices, and faring
in dainty delights. Prospero and his world of spirits are a set of
moralists: but with Oberon and his fairies we are launched at once into
the empire of the butterflies. How beautifully is this race of beings
contrasted with the men and women actors in the scene, by a single
epithet which Titania gives to the latter, ‘the human mortals!’ It is
astonishing that Shakespear should be considered, not only by
foreigners, but by many of our own critics, as a gloomy and heavy
writer, who painted nothing but ‘gorgons and hydras, and chimeras dire.’
His subtlety exceeds that of all other dramatic writers, insomuch that a
celebrated person of the present day said that he regarded him rather as
a metaphysician than a poet. His delicacy and sportive gaiety are
infinite. In the MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM alone, we should imagine, there
is more sweetness and beauty of description than in the whole range of
French poetry put together. What we mean is this, that we will produce
out of that single play ten passages, to which we do not think any ten
passages in the works of the French poets can be opposed, displaying
equal fancy and imagery. Shall we mention the remonstrance of Helena to
Hermia, or Titania’s description of her fairy train, or her disputes
with Oberon about the Indian boy, or Puck’s account of himself and his
employments, or the Fairy Queen’s exhortation to the elves to pay due
attendance upon her favourite, Bottom; or Hippolita’s description of a
chace, or Theseus’s answer? The two last are as heroical and spirited as
the others are full of luscious tenderness. The reading of this play is
like wandering in a grove by moonlight: the descriptions breathe a
sweetness like odours thrown from beds of flowers.
Titania’s exhortation to the fairies to wait upon Bottom, which is
remarkable for a certain cloying sweetness in the repetition of the
rhymes, is as follows:—
‘Be kind and courteous to this gentleman.
Hop in his walks, and gambol in his eyes,
Feed him with apricocks and dewberries,
With purple grapes, green figs and mulberries;
The honey-bags steal from the humble bees,
And for night tapers crop their waxen thighs,
And light them at the fiery glow-worm’s eyes,
To have my love to bed, and to arise:
And pluck the wings from painted butterflies,
To fan the moon-beams from his sleeping eyes;
Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies.’
The sounds of the lute and of the trumpet are not more distinct than the
poetry of the foregoing passage, and of the conversation between Theseus
and Hippolita.
‘_Theseus._ Go, one of you, find out the forester,
For now our observation is perform’d;
And since we have the vaward of the day,
My love shall hear the music of my hounds.
Uncouple in the western valley, go,
Dispatch, I say, and find the forester.
We will, fair Queen, up to the mountain’s top,
And mark the musical confusion
Of hounds and echo in conjunction.
_Hippolita._ I was with Hercules and Cadmus once,
When in a wood of Crete they bay’d the bear
With hounds of Sparta; never did I hear
Such gallant chiding. For besides the groves,
The skies, the fountains, every region near
Seem’d all one mutual cry. I never heard
So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.
_Theseus._ My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind,
So flew’d, so sanded, and their heads are hung
With ears that sweep away the morning dew;
Crook-knee’d and dew-lap’d, like Thessalian bulls.
Slow in pursuit, but matched in mouth like bells,
Each under each. A cry more tuneable
Was never halloo’d to, nor cheer’d with horn,
In Crete, in Sparta, nor in Thessaly:
Judge when you hear.’—
Even Titian never made a hunting-piece of a _gusto_ so fresh and lusty,
and so near the first ages of the world as this.—
It had been suggested to us, that the MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM would do
admirably to get up as a Christmas after-piece; and our prompter
proposed that Mr. Kean should play the part of Bottom, as worthy of his
great talents. He might, in the discharge of his duty, offer to play the
lady like any of our actresses that he pleased, the lover or the tyrant
like any of our actors that he pleased, and the lion like ‘the most
fearful wild-fowl living.’ The carpenter, the tailor, and joiner, it was
thought, would hit the galleries. The young ladies in love would
interest the side-boxes; and Robin Goodfellow and his companions excite
a lively fellow-feeling in the children from school. There would be two
courts, an empire within an empire, the Athenian and the Fairy King and
Queen, with their attendants, and with all their finery. What an
opportunity for processions, for the sound of trumpets and glittering of
spears! What a fluttering of urchins’ painted wings; what a delightful
profusion of gauze clouds and airy spirits floating on them!
Alas the experiment has been tried, and has failed; not through the
fault of Mr. Kean, who did not play the part of Bottom, nor of Mr.
Liston, who did, and who played it well, but from the nature of things.
The MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, when acted, is converted from a delightful
fiction into a dull pantomime. All that is finest in the play is lost in
the representation. The spectacle was grand: but the spirit was
evaporated, the genius was fled.—Poetry and the stage do not agree well
together. The attempt to reconcile them in this instance fails not only
of effect, but of decorum. The _ideal_ can have no place upon the stage,
which is a picture without perspective; everything there is in the
foreground. That which was merely an airy shape, a dream, a passing
thought, immediately becomes an unmanageable reality. Where all is left
to the imagination (as is the case in reading) every circumstance, near
or remote, has an equal chance of being kept in mind, and tells
according to the mixed impression of all that has been suggested. But
the imagination cannot sufficiently qualify the actual impressions of
the senses. Any offence given to the eye is not to be got rid of by
explanation. Thus Bottom’s head in the play is a fantastic illusion,
produced by magic spells: on the stage it is an ass’s head, and nothing
more; certainly a very strange costume for a gentleman to appear in.
Fancy cannot be embodied any more than a simile can be painted; and it
is as idle to attempt it as to personate _Wall_ or _Moonshine_. Fairies
are not incredible, but fairies six feet high are so. Monsters are not
shocking, if they are seen at a proper distance. When ghosts appear at
mid-day, when apparitions stalk along Cheapside, then may the MIDSUMMER
NIGHT’S DREAM be represented without injury at Covent Garden or at Drury
Lane. The boards of a theatre and the regions of fancy are not the same
thing.
ROMEO AND JULIET
ROMEO AND JULIET is the only tragedy which Shakespear has written
entirely on a love-story. It is supposed to have been his first play,
and it deserves to stand in that proud rank. There is the buoyant spirit
of youth in every line, in the rapturous intoxication of hope, and in
the bitterness of despair. It has been said of ROMEO AND JULIET by a
great critic, that ‘whatever is most intoxicating in the odour of a
southern spring, languishing in the song of the nightingale, or
voluptuous in the first opening of the rose, is to be found in this
poem.’ The description is true; and yet it does not answer to our idea
of the play. For if it has the sweetness of the rose, it has its
freshness too; if it has the languor of the nightingale’s song, it has
also its giddy transport; if it has the softness of a southern spring,
it is as glowing and as bright. There is nothing of a sickly and
sentimental cast. Romeo and Juliet are in love, but they are not
love-sick. Every thing speaks the very soul of pleasure, the high and
healthy pulse of the passions: the heart beats, the blood circulates and
mantles throughout. Their courtship is not an insipid interchange of
sentiments lip-deep, learnt at second-hand from poems and plays,—made up
of beauties of the most shadowy kind, of ‘fancies wan that hang the
pensive head,’ of evanescent smiles, and sighs that breathe not, of
delicacy that shrinks from the touch, and feebleness that scarce
supports itself, an elaborate vacuity of thought, and an artificial
dearth of sense, spirit, truth, and nature! It is the reverse of all
this. It is Shakespear all over, and Shakespear when he was young.
We have heard it objected to ROMEO AND JULIET, that it is founded on an
idle passion between a boy and a girl, who have scarcely seen and can
have but little sympathy or rational esteem for one another, who have
had no experience of the good or ills of life, and whose raptures or
despair must be therefore equally groundless and fantastical. Whoever
objects to the youth of the parties in this play as ‘too unripe and
crude’ to pluck the sweets of love, and wishes to see a first-love
carried on into a good old age, and the passions taken at the rebound,
when their force is spent, may find all this done in the _Stranger_ and
in other German plays, where they do things by contraries, and transpose
nature to inspire sentiment and create philosophy. Shakespear proceeded
in a more strait-forward, and, we think, effectual way. He did not
endeavour to extract beauty from wrinkles, or the wild throb of passion
from the last expiring sigh of indifference. He did not ‘gather grapes
of thorns nor figs of thistles.’ It was not his way. But he has given a
picture of human life, such as it is in the order of nature. He has
founded the passion of the two lovers not on the pleasures they had
experienced, but on all the pleasures they had _not_ experienced. All
that was to come of life was theirs. At that untried source of promised
happiness they slaked their thirst, and the first eager draught made
them drunk with love and joy. They were in full possession of their
senses and their affections. Their hopes were of air, their desires of
fire. Youth is the season of love, because the heart is then first
melted in tenderness from the touch of novelty, and kindled to rapture,
for it knows no end of its enjoyments or its wishes. Desire has no limit
but itself. Passion, the love and expectation of pleasure, is infinite,
extravagant, inexhaustible, till experience comes to check and kill it.
Juliet exclaims on her first interview with Romeo—
‘My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep.’
And why should it not? What was to hinder the thrilling tide of
pleasure, which had just gushed from her heart, from flowing on without
stint or measure, but experience which she was yet without? What was to
abate the transport of the first sweet sense of pleasure, which her
heart and her senses had just tasted, but indifference which she was yet
a stranger to? What was there to check the ardour of hope, of faith, of
constancy, just rising in her breast, but disappointment which she had
not yet felt! As are the desires and the hopes of youthful passion, such
is the keenness of its disappointments, and their baleful effect. Such
is the transition in this play from the highest bliss to the lowest
despair, from the nuptial couch to an untimely grave. The only evil that
even in apprehension befalls the two lovers is the loss of the greatest
possible felicity; yet this loss is fatal to both, for they had rather
part with life than bear the thought of surviving all that had made life
dear to them. In all this, Shakespear has but followed nature, which
existed in his time, as well as now. The modern philosophy, which
reduces the whole theory of the mind to habitual impressions, and leaves
the natural impulses of passion and imagination out of the account, had
not then been discovered; or if it had, would have been little
calculated for the uses of poetry.
It is the inadequacy of the same false system of philosophy to account
for the strength of our earliest attachments, which has led Mr.
Wordsworth to indulge in the mystical visions of Platonism in his Ode on
the Progress of Life. He has very admirably described the vividness of
our impressions in youth and childhood, and how ‘they fade by degrees
into the light of common day,’ and he ascribes the change to the
supposition of a pre-existent state, as if our early thoughts were
nearer heaven, reflections of former trails of glory, shadows of our
past being. This is idle. It is not from the knowledge of the past that
the first impressions of things derive their gloss and splendour, but
from our ignorance of the future, which fills the void to come with the
warmth of our desires, with our gayest hopes, and brightest fancies. It
is the obscurity spread before it that colours the prospect of life with
hope, as it is the cloud which reflects the rainbow. There is no
occasion to resort to any mystical union and transmission of feeling
through different states of being to account for the romantic enthusiasm
of youth; nor to plant the root of hope in the grave, nor to derive it
from the skies. Its root is in the heart of man: it lifts its head above
the stars. Desire and imagination are inmates of the human breast. The
heaven ‘that lies about us in our infancy’ is only a new world, of which
we know nothing but what we wish it to be, and believe all that we wish.
In youth and boyhood, the world we live in is the world of desire, and
of fancy: it is experience that brings us down to the world of reality.
What is it that in youth sheds a dewy light round the evening star? That
makes the daisy look so bright? That perfumes the hyacinth? That embalms
the first kiss of love? It is the delight of novelty, and the seeing no
end to the pleasure that we fondly believe is still in store for us. The
heart revels in the luxury of its own thoughts, and is unable to sustain
the weight of hope and love that presses upon it.—The effects of the
passion of love alone might have dissipated Mr. Wordsworth’s theory, if
he means any thing more by it than an ingenious and poetical allegory.
_That_ at least is not a link in the chain let down from other worlds;
‘the purple light of love’ is not a dim reflection of the smiles of
celestial bliss. It does not appear till the middle of life, and then
seems like ‘another morn risen on mid-day.’ In this respect the soul
comes into the world ‘in utter nakedness.’ Love waits for the ripening
of the youthful blood. The sense of pleasure precedes the love of
pleasure, but with the sense of pleasure, as soon as it is felt, come
thronging infinite desires and hopes of pleasure, and love is mature as
soon as born. It withers and it dies almost as soon!
This play presents a beautiful _coup-d’œil_ of the progress of human
life. In thought it occupies years, and embraces the circle of the
affections from childhood to old age. Juliet has become a great girl, a
young woman since we first remember her a little thing in the idle
prattle of the nurse. Lady Capulet was about her age when she became a
mother, and old Capulet somewhat impatiently tells his younger visitors,
——‘I’ve seen the day,
That I have worn a visor, and could tell
A whispering tale in a fair lady’s ear,
Such as would please: ’tis gone, ’tis gone, ’tis gone.’
Thus one period of life makes way for the following, and one generation
pushes another off the stage. One of the most striking passages to show
the intense feeling of youth in this play is Capulet’s invitation to
Paris to visit his entertainment.
‘At my poor house, look to behold this night
Earth-treading stars that make dark heav’n light;
Such comfort as do lusty young men feel
When well-apparel’d April on the heel
Of limping winter treads, even such delight
Among fresh female-buds shall you this night
Inherit at my house.’
The feelings of youth and of the spring are here blended together like
the breath of opening flowers. Images of vernal beauty appear to have
floated before the author’s mind, in writing this poem, in profusion.
Here is another of exquisite beauty, brought in more by accident than by
necessity. Montague declares of his son smit with a hopeless passion,
which he will not reveal—
‘But he, his own affection’s counsellor,
Is to himself so secret and so close,
So far from sounding and discovery,
As is the bud bit with an envious worm,
Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air,
Or dedicate his beauty to the sun.’
This casual description is as full of passionate beauty as when Romeo
dwells in frantic fondness on ‘the white wonder of his Juliet’s hand.’
The reader may, if he pleases, contrast the exquisite pastoral
simplicity of the above lines with the gorgeous description of Juliet
when Romeo first sees her at her father’s house, surrounded by company
and artificial splendour.
‘What lady’s that which doth enrich the hand
Of yonder knight?
O she doth teach the torches to burn bright;
Her beauty hangs upon the cheek of night,
Like a rich jewel in an Æthiop’s ear.’
It would be hard to say which of the two garden scenes is the finest,
that where he first converses with his love, or takes leave of her the
morning after their marriage. Both are like a heaven upon earth; the
blissful bowers of Paradise let down upon this lower world. We will give
only one passage of these well known scenes to shew the perfect
refinement and delicacy of Shakespear’s conception of the female
character. It is wonderful how Collins, who was a critic and a poet of
great sensibility, should have encouraged the common error on this
subject by saying—‘But stronger Shakespear felt for man alone.’
The passage we mean is Juliet’s apology for her maiden boldness.
‘Thou know’st the mask of night is on my face;
Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek
For that which thou hast heard me speak to-night.
Fain would I dwell on form, fain, fain deny
What I have spoke—but farewel compliment:
Dost thou love me? I know thou wilt say, ay,
And I will take thee at thy word—Yet if thou swear’st,
Thou may’st prove false; at lovers’ perjuries
They say Jove laughs. Oh gentle Romeo,
If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully;
Or if thou think I am too quickly won,
I’ll frown and be perverse, and say thee nay,
So thou wilt woo: but else not for the world.
In truth, fair Montague, I am too fond;
And therefore thou may’st think my ‘haviour light;
But trust me, gentleman, I’ll prove more true
Than those that have more cunning to be strange.
I should have been more strange, I must confess
But that thou over-heard’st, ere I was ware,
My true love’s passion; therefore pardon me,
And not impute this yielding to light love,
Which the dark night hath so discovered.’
In this and all the rest, her heart, fluttering between pleasure, hope,
and fear, seems to have dictated to her tongue, and ‘calls true love
spoken simple modesty.’ Of the same sort, but bolder in virgin
innocence, is her soliloquy after her marriage with Romeo.
‘Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,
Towards Phœbus’ mansion; such a waggoner
As Phaëton would whip you to the west,
And bring in cloudy night immediately.
Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night;
That run-aways’ eyes may wink; and Romeo
Leap to these arms, untalked of, and unseen!——
Lovers can see to do their amorous rites
By their own beauties: or if love be blind,
It best agrees with night.—Come, civil night,
Thou sober-suited matron, all in black,
And learn me how to lose a winning match,
Play’d for a pair of stainless maidenhoods:
Hold my unmann’d blood bating in my cheeks,
With thy black mantle; till strange love, grown bold,
Thinks true love acted, simple modesty.
Come night!—Come, Romeo! come, thou day in night;
For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night
Whiter than new snow on a raven’s back.——
Come, gentle night; come, loving, black-brow’d night,
Give me my Romeo: and when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine,
That all the world shall be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun.——
O, I have bought the mansion of a love,
But not possess’d it; and though I am sold,
Not yet enjoy’d: so tedious is this day,
As is the night before some festival
To an impatient child, that hath new robes,
And may not wear them.’
We the rather insert this passage here, inasmuch as we have no doubt it
has been expunged from the Family Shakespear. Such critics do not
perceive that the feelings of the heart sanctify, without disguising,
the impulses of nature. Without refinement themselves, they confound
modesty with hypocrisy. Not so the German critic, Schlegel. Speaking of
ROMEO AND JULIET, he says, ‘It was reserved for Shakespear to unite
purity of heart and the glow of imagination, sweetness and dignity of
manners and passionate violence, in one ideal picture.’ The character is
indeed one of perfect truth and sweetness. It has nothing forward,
nothing coy, nothing affected or coquettish about it;—it is a pure
effusion of nature. It is as frank as it is modest, for it has no
thought that it wishes to conceal. It reposes in conscious innocence on
the strength of its affections. Its delicacy does not consist in
coldness and reserve, but in combining warmth of imagination and
tenderness of heart with the most voluptuous sensibility. Love is a
gentle flame that rarifies and expands her whole being. What an idea of
trembling haste and airy grace, borne upon the thoughts of love, does
the Friar’s exclamation give of her, as she approaches his cell to be
married—
‘Here comes the lady. Oh, so light of foot
Will ne’er wear out the everlasting flint:
A lover may bestride the gossamer,
That idles in the wanton summer air,
And yet not fall, so light is vanity.’
The tragic part of this character is of a piece with the rest. It is the
heroic founded on tenderness and delicacy. Of this kind are her
resolution to follow the Friar’s advice, and the conflict in her bosom
between apprehension and love when she comes to take the sleeping
poison. Shakespear is blamed for the mixture of low characters. If this
is a deformity, it is the source of a thousand beauties. One instance is
the contrast between the guileless simplicity of Juliet’s attachment to
her first love, and the convenient policy of the nurse in advising her
to marry Paris, which excites such indignation in her mistress. ‘Ancient
damnation! oh most wicked fiend,’ etc.
Romeo is Hamlet in love. There is the same rich exuberance of passion
and sentiment in the one, that there is of thought and sentiment in the
other. Both are absent and self-involved, both live out of themselves in
a world of imagination. Hamlet is abstracted from every thing; Romeo is
abstracted from every thing but his love, and lost in it. His ‘frail
thoughts dally with faint surmise,’ and are fashioned out of the
suggestions of hope, ‘the flatteries of sleep.’ He is himself only in
his Juliet; she is his only reality, his heart’s true home and idol. The
rest of the world is to him a passing dream. How finely is this
character pourtrayed where he recollects himself on seeing Paris slain
at the tomb of Juliet!—
‘What said my man, when my betossed soul
Did not attend him as we rode? I think
He told me Paris should have married Juliet.’
And again, just before he hears the sudden tidings of her death—
‘If I may trust the flattery of sleep,
My dreams presage some joyful news at hand;
My bosom’s lord sits lightly on his throne,
And all this day an unaccustom’d spirit
Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts.
I dreamt my lady came and found me dead,
(Strange dream! that gives a dead man leave to think)
And breath’d such life with kisses on my lips,
That I reviv’d and was an emperour.
Ah me! how sweet is love itself possess’d,
When but love’s shadows are so rich in joy!’
Romeo’s passion for Juliet is not a first love: it succeeds and drives
out his passion for another mistress, Rosaline, as the sun hides the
stars. This is perhaps an artifice (not absolutely necessary) to give us
a higher opinion of the lady, while the first absolute surrender of her
heart to him enhances the richness of the prize. The commencement,
progress, and ending of his second passion are however complete in
themselves, not injured if they are not bettered by the first. The
outline of the play is taken from an Italian novel; but the dramatic
arrangement of the different scenes between the lovers, the more than
dramatic interest in the progress of the story, the developement of the
characters with time and circumstances, just according to the degree and
kind of interest excited, are not inferior to the expression of passion
and nature. It has been ingeniously remarked among other proofs of skill
in the contrivance of the fable, that the improbability of the main
incident in the piece, the administering of the sleeping-potion, is
softened and obviated from the beginning by the introduction of the
Friar on his first appearance culling simples and descanting on their
virtues. Of the passionate scenes in this tragedy, that between the
Friar and Romeo when he is told of his sentence of banishment, that
between Juliet and the Nurse when she hears of it, and of the death of
her cousin Tybalt (which bear no proportion in her mind, when passion
after the first shock of surprise throws its weight into the scale of
her affections) and the last scene at the tomb, are among the most
natural and overpowering. In all of these it is not merely the force of
any one passion that is given, but the slightest and most unlooked-for
transitions from one to another, the mingling currents of every
different feeling rising up and prevailing in turn, swayed by the
master-mind of the poet, as the waves undulate beneath the gliding
storm. Thus when Juliet has by her complaints encouraged the Nurse to
say, ‘Shame come to Romeo,’ she instantly repels the wish, which she had
herself occasioned, by answering—
‘Blister’d be thy tongue
For such a wish! He was not born to shame.
Upon his brow shame is ashamed to sit,
For ’tis a throne where honour may be crown’d
Sole monarch of the universal earth!
O, what a beast was I to chide him so?
_Nurse._ Will you speak well of him that kill’d your cousin?
_Juliet._ Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband?
Ah my poor lord, what tongue shall smooth thy name,
When I, thy three-hours’ wife, have mangled it?’
And then follows on the neck of her remorse and returning fondness, that
wish treading almost on the brink of impiety, but still held back by the
strength of her devotion to her lord, that ‘father, mother, nay, or both
were dead,’ rather than Romeo banished. If she requires any other
excuse, it is in the manner in which Romeo echoes her frantic grief and
disappointment in the next scene at being banished from her.—Perhaps one
of the finest pieces of acting that ever was witnessed on the stage, is
Mr. Kean’s manner of doing this scene and his repetition of the word,
_Banished_. He treads close indeed upon the genius of his author.
A passage which this celebrated actor and able commentator on Shakespear
(actors are the best commentators on the poets) did not give with equal
truth or force of feeling was the one which Romeo makes at the tomb of
Juliet, before he drinks the poison.
——‘Let me peruse this face—
Mercutio’s kinsman! noble county Paris!
What said my man, when my betossed soul
Did not attend him as we rode? I think,
He told me Paris should have married Juliet:
Said he not so? or did I dream it so?
Or am I mad, hearing him talk of Juliet,
To think it was so?——O, give me thy hand,
One writ with me in sour misfortune’s book!
I’ll bury thee in a triumphant grave——
For here lies Juliet.
. . . . .
——O, my love! my wife!
Death that hath suck’d the honey of thy breath,
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty:
Thou art not conquer’d; beauty’s ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips, and in thy cheeks,
And Death’s pale flag is not advanced there.——
Tybalt, ly’st thou there in thy bloody sheet?
O, what more favour can I do to thee,
Than with that hand that cut thy youth in twain,
To sunder his that was thine enemy?
Forgive me, cousin! Ah, dear Juliet,
Why art thou yet so fair! Shall I believe
That unsubstantial death is amorous;
And that the lean abhorred monster keeps
Thee here in dark to be his paramour!
For fear of that, I will stay still with thee;
And never from this palace of dim night
Depart again: here, here will I remain
With worms that are thy chamber-maids; O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest;
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh.—Eyes, look your last!
Arms, take your last embrace! and lips, O you,
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death!—
Come, bitter conduct, come unsavoury guide!
Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on
The dashing rocks my sea-sick weary bark!
Here’s to my love!—[_Drinks._] O, true apothecary!
Thy drugs are quick.—Thus with a kiss I die.’
The lines in this speech, describing the loveliness of Juliet, who is
supposed to be dead, have been compared to those in which it is said of
Cleopatra after her death, that she looked ‘as she would take another
Antony in her strong toil of grace’; and a question has been started
which is the finest, that we do not pretend to decide. We can more
easily decide between Shakespear and any other author, than between him
and himself.—Shall we quote any more passages to shew his genius or the
beauty of ROMEO AND JULIET? At that rate, we might quote the whole. The
late Mr. Sheridan, on being shewn a volume of the Beauties of
Shakespear, very properly asked—‘But where are the other eleven?’ The
character of Mercutio in this play is one of the most mercurial and
spirited of the productions of Shakespear’s comic muse.
LEAR
We wish that we could pass this play over, and say nothing about it. All
that we can say must fall far short of the subject; or even of what we
ourselves conceive of it. To attempt to give a description of the play
itself or of its effect upon the mind, is mere impertinence; yet we must
say something.—It is then the best of all Shakespear’s plays, for it is
the one in which he was the most in earnest. He was here fairly caught
in the web of his own imagination. The passion which he has taken as his
subject is that which strikes its root deepest into the human heart; of
which the bond is the hardest to be unloosed; and the cancelling and
tearing to pieces of which gives the greatest revulsion to the frame.
This depth of nature, this force of passion, this tug and war of the
elements of our being, this firm faith in filial piety, and the giddy
anarchy and whirling tumult of the thoughts at finding this prop failing
it, the contrast between the fixed, immoveable basis of natural
affection, and the rapid, irregular starts of imagination, suddenly
wrenched from all its accustomed holds and resting-places in the soul,
this is what Shakespear has given, and what nobody else but he could
give. So we believe.—The mind of Lear, staggering between the weight of
attachment and the hurried movements of passion, is like a tall ship
driven about by the winds, buffetted by the furious waves, but that
still rides above the storm, having its anchor fixed in the bottom of
the sea; or it is like the sharp rock circled by the eddying whirlpool
that foams and beats against it, or like the solid promontory pushed
from its basis by the force of an earthquake.
The character of Lear itself is very finely conceived for the purpose.
It is the only ground on which such a story could be built with the
greatest truth and effect. It is his rash haste, his violent
impetuosity, his blindness to every thing but the dictates of his
passions or affections, that produces all his misfortunes, that
aggravates his impatience of them, that enforces our pity for him. The
part which Cordelia bears in the scene is extremely beautiful: the story
is almost told in the first words she utters. We see at once the
precipice on which the poor old king stands from his own extravagant and
credulous importunity, the indiscreet simplicity of her love (which, to
be sure, has a little of her father’s obstinacy in it) and the
hollowness of her sisters’ pretensions. Almost the first burst of that
noble tide of passion, which runs through the play, is in the
remonstrance of Kent to his royal master on the injustice of his
sentence against his youngest daughter—‘Be Kent unmannerly, when Lear is
mad!’ This manly plainness, which draws down on him the displeasure of
the unadvised king, is worthy of the fidelity with which he adheres to
his fallen fortunes. The true character of the two eldest daughters,
Regan and Gonerill (they are so thoroughly hateful that we do not even
like to repeat their names) breaks out in their answer to Cordelia who
desires them to treat their father well—‘Prescribe not us our
duties’—their hatred of advice being in proportion to their
determination to do wrong, and to their hypocritical pretensions to do
right. Their deliberate hypocrisy adds the last finishing to the
odiousness of their characters. It is the absence of this detestable
quality that is the only relief in the character of Edmund the Bastard,
and that at times reconciles us to him. We are not tempted to exaggerate
the guilt of his conduct, when he himself gives it up as a bad business,
and writes himself down ‘plain villain.’ Nothing more can be said about
it. His religious honesty in this respect is admirable. One speech of
his is worth a million. His father, Gloster, whom he has just deluded
with a forged story of his brother Edgar’s designs against his life,
accounts for his unnatural behaviour and the strange depravity of the
times from the late eclipses in the sun and moon. Edmund, who is in the
secret, says when he is gone—‘This is the excellent foppery of the
world, that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeits of our own
behaviour) we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars:
as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion;
knaves, thieves, and treacherous by spherical predominance; drunkards,
liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence;
and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable
evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition on the
charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon’s
tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major: so that it follows, I am
rough and lecherous. Tut! I should have been what I am, had the
maidenliness star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardising.’—The
whole character, its careless, light-hearted villainy, contrasted with
the sullen, rancorous malignity of Regan and Gonerill, its connection
with the conduct of the under-plot, in which Gloster’s persecution of
one of his sons and the ingratitude of another, form a counterpart to
the mistakes and misfortunes of Lear,—his double amour with the two
sisters, and the share which he has in bringing about the fatal
catastrophe, are all managed with an uncommon degree of skill and power.
It has been said, and we think justly, that the third act of _Othello_
and the three first acts of LEAR, are Shakespear’s great master-pieces
in the logic of passion: that they contain the highest examples not only
of the force of individual passion, but of its dramatic vicissitudes and
striking effects arising from the different circumstances and characters
of the persons speaking. We see the ebb and flow of the feeling, its
pauses and feverish starts, its impatience of opposition, its
accumulating force when it has time to recollect itself, the manner in
which it avails itself of every passing word or gesture, its haste to
repel insinuation, the alternate contraction and dilatation of the soul,
and all ‘the dazzling fence of controversy’ in this mortal combat with
poisoned weapons, aimed at the heart, where each wound is fatal. We have
seen in _Othello_, how the unsuspecting frankness and impetuous passions
of the Moor are played upon and exasperated by the artful dexterity of
Iago. In the present play, that which aggravates the sense of sympathy
in the reader, and of uncontroulable anguish in the swoln heart of Lear,
is the petrifying indifference, the cold, calculating, obdurate
selfishness of his daughters. His keen passions seem whetted on their
stony hearts. The contrast would be too painful, the shock too great,
but for the intervention of the Fool, whose well-timed levity comes in
to break the continuity of feeling when it can no longer be borne, and
to bring into play again the fibres of the heart just as they are
growing rigid from overstrained excitement. The imagination is glad to
take refuge in the half-comic, half-serious comments of the Fool, just
as the mind under the extreme anguish of a surgical operation vents
itself in sallies of wit. The character was also a grotesque ornament of
the barbarous times, in which alone the tragic ground-work of the story
could be laid. In another point of view it is indispensable, inasmuch as
while it is a diversion to the too great intensity of our disgust, it
carries the pathos to the highest pitch of which it is capable, by
shewing the pitiable weakness of the old king’s conduct and its
irretrievable consequences in the most familiar point of view. Lear may
well ‘beat at the gate which let his folly in,’ after, as the Fool says,
‘he has made his daughters his mothers.’ The character is dropped in the
third act to make room for the entrance of Edgar as Mad Tom, which well
accords with the increasing bustle and wildness of the incidents; and
nothing can be more complete than the distinction between Lear’s real
and Edgar’s assumed madness, while the resemblance in the cause of their
distresses, from the severing of the nearest ties of natural affection,
keeps up a unity of interest. Shakespear’s mastery over his subject, if
it was not art, was owing to a knowledge of the connecting links of the
passions, and their effect upon the mind, still more wonderful than any
systematic adherence to rules, and that anticipated and outdid all the
efforts of the most refined art, not inspired and rendered instinctive
by genius.
One of the most perfect displays of dramatic power is the first
interview between Lear and his daughter, after the designed affronts
upon him, which till one of his knights reminds him of them, his
sanguine temperament had led him to overlook. He returns with his train
from hunting, and his usual impatience breaks out in his first words,
‘Let me not stay a jot for dinner; go, get it ready.’ He then encounters
the faithful Kent in disguise, and retains him in his service; and the
first trial of his honest duty is to trip up the heels of the officious
Steward who makes so prominent and despicable a figure through the
piece. On the entrance of Gonerill the following dialogue takes place:—
‘_Lear._ How now, daughter? what makes that frontlet on?
Methinks, you are too much of late i’ the frown.
_Fool._ Thou wast a pretty fellow, when thou had’st no need to care
for her frowning; now thou art an O without a figure: I am better
than thou art now; I am a fool, thou art nothing.——Yes, forsooth, I
will hold my tongue; [_To Gonerill_], so your face bids me, though
you say nothing. Mum, mum.
He that keeps nor crust nor crum,
Weary of all, shall want some.——
That’s a sheal’d peascod! [_Pointing to Lear._
_Gonerill._ Not only, sir, this your all-licens’d fool,
But other of your insolent retinue
Do hourly carp and quarrel; breaking forth
In rank and not-to-be-endured riots.
I had thought, by making this well known unto you,
To have found a safe redress; but now grow fearful,
By what yourself too late have spoke and done,
That you protect this course, and put it on
By your allowance; which if you should, the fault
Would not ‘scape censure, nor the redresses sleep,
Which in the tender of a wholesome weal,
Might in their working do you that offence,
(Which else were shame) that then necessity
Would call discreet proceeding.
_Fool._ For you trow, nuncle,
The hedge sparrow fed the cuckoo so long,
That it had its head bit off by its young.
So out went the candle, and we were left darkling.
_Lear._ Are you our daughter?
_Gonerill._ Come, sir,
I would, you would make use of that good wisdom
Whereof I know you are fraught; and put away
These dispositions, which of late transform you
From what you rightly are.
_Fool._ May not an ass know when the cart draws the horse?
——Whoop, Jug, I love thee.
_Lear._ Does any here know me?—Why, this is not Lear:
Does Lear walk thus? speak thus?—Where are his eyes?
Either his notion weakens, or his discernings
Are lethargy’d——Ha! waking?—’Tis not so.——
Who is it that can tell me who I am?—Lear’s shadow?
I would learn that: for by the marks
Of sov’reignty, of knowledge, and of reason,
I should be false persuaded I had daughters.——
Your name, fair gentlewoman?
_Gonerill._ Come, sir:
This admiration is much o’ the favour
Of other your new pranks. I do beseech you
To understand my purposes aright:
As you are old and reverend, you should be wise:
Here do you keep a hundred knights and squires;
Men so disorder’d, so debauch’d, and bold,
That this our court, infected with their manners,
Shews like a riotous inn: epicurism and lust
Make it more like a tavern, or a brothel,
Than a grac’d palace. The shame itself doth speak
For instant remedy: be then desir’d
By her, that else will take the thing she begs,
A little to disquantity your train;
And the remainder, that shall still depend,
To be such men as may besort your age,
And know themselves and you.
_Lear._ Darkness and devils!——
Saddle my horses; call my train together.——
Degenerate bastard! I’ll not trouble thee;
Yet have I left a daughter.
_Gonerill._ You strike my people; and your disorder’d rabble
Make servants of their betters.
_Enter_ ALBANY.
_Lear._ Woe, that too late repents—O, sir, are you come?
Is it your will? speak, sir.—Prepare my horses.—— [_To Albany._
Ingratitude! thou marble-hearted fiend,
More hideous, when thou shew’st thee in a child,
Than the sea-monster!
_Albany._ Pray, sir, be patient.
_Lear._ Detested kite! thou liest. [_To Gonerill._
My train are men of choice and rarest parts,
That all particulars of duty know;
And in the most exact regard support
The worships of their name.——O most small fault,
How ugly didst thou in Cordelia shew!
Which, like an engine, wrench’d my frame of nature
From the fixt place; drew from my heart all love,
And added to the gall. O Lear, Lear, Lear!
Beat at the gate, that let thy folly in, [_Striking his head._
And thy dear judgment out!——Go, go, my people!
_Albany._ My lord, I am guiltless, as I am ignorant
Of what hath mov’d you.
_Lear._ It may be so, my lord——
Hear, nature, hear! dear goddess, hear!
Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend
To make this creature fruitful!
Into her womb convey sterility;
Dry up in her the organs of increase;
And from her derogate body never spring
A babe to honour her! If she must teem,
Create her child of spleen: that it may live,
To be a thwart disnatur’d torment to her!
Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth;
With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks;
Turn all her mother’s pains, and benefits,
To laughter and contempt; that she may feel
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
To have a thankless child!——Away, away! [_Exit._
_Albany._ Now, gods, that we adore, whereof comes this?
_Gonerill._ Never afflict yourself to know the cause;
But let his disposition have that scope
That dotage gives it.
_Re-enter_ LEAR.
_Lear._ What, fifty of my followers at a clap!
Within a fortnight!
_Albany._ What’s the matter, sir?
_Lear._ I’ll tell thee; life and death! I am asham’d
That thou hast power to shake my manhood thus: [_To Gonerill._
That these hot tears, which break from me perforce,
Should make thee worth them.——Blasts and fogs upon thee!
The untented woundings of a father’s curse
Pierce every sense about thee!——Old fond eyes
Beweep this cause again, I’ll pluck you out;
And cast you, with the waters that you lose,
To temper clay.——Ha! is it come to this?
Let it be so:——Yet have I left a daughter,
Who, I am sure, is kind and comfortable;
When she shall hear this of thee, with her nails
She’ll flea thy wolfish visage. Thou shalt find,
That I’ll resume the shape, which thou dost think
I have cast off for ever. [_Exeunt Lear, Kent, and Attendants._’
This is certainly fine: no wonder that Lear says after it, ‘O let me not
be mad, not mad, sweet heavens,’ feeling its effects by anticipation;
but fine as is this burst of rage and indignation at the first blow
aimed at his hopes and expectations, it is nothing near so fine as what
follows from his double disappointment, and his lingering efforts to see
which of them he shall lean upon for support and find comfort in, when
both his daughters turn against his age and weakness. It is with some
difficulty that Lear gets to speak with his daughter Regan, and her
husband, at Gloster’s castle. In concert with Gonerill they have left
their own home on purpose to avoid him. His apprehensions are first
alarmed by this circumstance, and when Gloster, whose guests they are,
urges the fiery temper of the Duke of Cornwall as an excuse for not
importuning him a second time, Lear breaks out—
‘Vengeance! Plague! Death! Confusion!——
Fiery? What quality? Why, Gloster, Gloster,
I’d speak with the Duke of Cornwall, and his wife.’
Afterwards, feeling perhaps not well himself, he is inclined to admit
their excuse from illness, but then recollecting that they have set his
messenger (Kent) in the stocks, all his suspicions are roused again, and
he insists on seeing them.
‘_Enter_ CORNWALL, REGAN, GLOSTER, _and Servants_.
_Lear._ Good-morrow to you both.
_Cornwall._ Hail to your grace! [_Kent is set at liberty._
_Regan._ I am glad to see your highness.
_Lear._ Regan, I think you are; I know what reason
I have to think so: if thou should’st not be glad,
I would divorce me from thy mother’s tomb,
Sepulch’ring an adultress.——O, are you free? [_To Kent._
Some other time for that.——Beloved Regan,
Thy sister’s naught: O Regan, she hath tied
Sharp-tooth’d unkindness, like a vulture, here——
[_Points to his heart._
I can scarce speak to thee; thou’lt not believe,
Of how deprav’d a quality——O Regan!
_Regan._ I pray you, sir, take patience; I have hope
You less know how to value her desert,
Than she to scant her duty.
_Lear._ Say, how is that?
_Regan._ I cannot think my sister in the least
Would fail her obligation; if, sir, perchance,
She have restrain’d the riots of your followers,
’Tis on such ground, and to such wholesome end,
As clears her from all blame.
_Lear._ My curses on her!
_Regan._ O, sir, you are old;
Nature in you stands on the very verge
Of her confine: you should be rul’d, and led
By some discretion, that discerns your state
Better than you yourself: therefore, I pray you,
That to our sister you do make return;
Say, you have wrong’d her, sir.
_Lear._ Ask her forgiveness?
Do you but mark how this becomes the use?
_Dear daughter, I confess that I am old_;
_Age is unnecessary; on my knees I beg,
That you’ll vouchsafe me raiment, bed, and food._
_Regan._ Good sir, no more; these are unsightly tricks:
Return you to my sister.
_Lear._ Never, Regan:
She hath abated me of half my train;
Look’d blank upon me; struck me with her tongue,
Most serpent-like, upon the very heart:——
All the stor’d vengeances of heaven fall
On her ungrateful top! Strike her young bones,
You taking airs, with lameness!
_Cornwall._ Fie, sir, fie!
_Lear._ You nimble lightnings, dart your blinding flames
Into her scornful eyes! Infect her beauty,
You fen-suck’d fogs, drawn by the powerful sun,
To fall, and blast her pride!
_Regan._ O the blest gods!
So will you wish on me, when the rash mood is on.
_Lear._ No, Regan, thou shalt never have my curse;
Thy tender-hefted nature shall not give
Thee o’er to harshness; her eyes are fierce, but thine
Do comfort, and not burn: ’Tis not in thee
To grudge my pleasures, to cut off my train,
To bandy hasty words, to scant my sizes,
And, in conclusion, to oppose the bolt
Against my coming in: thou better know’st
The offices of nature, bond of childhood,
Effects of courtesy, dues of gratitude;
Thy half o’ the kingdom thou hast not forgot,
Wherein I thee endow’d.
_Regan._ Good sir, to the purpose. [_Trumpets within._
_Lear._ Who put my man i’ the stocks?
_Cornwall._ What trumpet’s that?
_Enter Steward._
_Regan._ I know’t, my sister’s: this approves her letter,
That she would soon be here.—Is your lady come?
_Lear._ This is a slave, whose easy-borrow’d pride
Dwells in the fickle grace of her he follows:——
Out, Varlet, from my sight!
_Cornwall._ What means your grace?
_Lear._ Who stock’d my servant? Regan, I have good hope
Thou did’st not know on’t.——Who comes here? O heavens,
_Enter_ GONERILL.
If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
Allow obedience, if yourselves are old,
Make it your cause; send down, and take my part!—
Art not asham’d to look upon this beard?— [_To Gonerill._
O, Regan, wilt thou take her by the hand?
_Gonerill._ Why not by the hand, sir? How have I offended?
All’s not offence, that indiscretion finds,
And dotage terms so.
_Lear._ O, sides, you are too tough!
Will you yet hold?—How came my man i’ the stocks?
_Cornwall._ I set him there, sir: but his own disorders
Deserv’d much less advancement.
_Lear._ You! did you?
_Regan._ I pray you, father, being weak, seem so.
If, till the expiration of your month,
You will return and sojourn with my sister,
Dismissing half your train, come then to me;
I am now from home, and out of that provision
Which shall be needful for your entertainment.
_Lear._ Return to her, and fifty men dismiss’d?
No, rather I abjure all roofs, and choose
To be a comrade with the wolf and owl——
To wage against the enmity o’ the air,
Necessity’s sharp pinch!——Return with her!
Why, the hot-blooded France, that dowerless took
Our youngest born, I could as well be brought
To knee his throne, and squire-like pension beg
To keep base life afoot.——Return with her!
Persuade me rather to be slave and sumpter
To this detested groom. [_Looking on the Steward._
_Gonerill._ At your choice, sir.
_Lear._ Now, I pr’ythee, daughter, do not make me mad;
I will not trouble thee, my child; farewell:
We’ll no more meet, no more see one another:——
But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter;
Or, rather, a disease that’s in my flesh,
Which I must needs call mine: thou art a bile,
A plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle,
In my corrupted blood. But I’ll not chide thee;
Let shame come when it will, I do not call it:
I did not bid the thunder-bearer shoot,
Nor tell tales of thee to high-judging Jove:
Mend when thou canst; be better, at thy leisure:
I can be patient; I can stay with Regan,
I, and my hundred knights.
_Regan._ Not altogether so, sir;
I look’d not for you yet, nor am provided
For your fit welcome: Give ear, sir, to my sister;
For those that mingle reason with your passion
Must be content to think you old, and so——
But she knows what she does.
_Lear._ Is this well spoken now?
_Regan._ I dare avouch it, sir: What, fifty followers?
Is it not well? What should you need of more?
Yea, or so many? Sith that both charge and danger
Speak ‘gainst so great a number? How, in one house,
Should many people, under two commands,
Hold amity? ’Tis hard; almost impossible.
_Gonerill._ Why might not you, my lord, receive attendance
From those that she calls servants, or from mine?
_Regan._ Why not, my lord? If then they chanc’d to slack you,
We would controul them: if you will come to me
(For now I spy a danger) I entreat you
To bring but five-and-twenty; to no more
Will I give place, or notice.
_Lear._ I gave you all——
_Regan._ And in good time you gave it.
_Lear._ Made you my guardians, my depositaries;
But kept a reservation to be follow’d
With such a number: what, must I come to you
With five-and-twenty, Regan! said you so?
_Regan._ And speak it again, my lord: no more with me.
_Lear._ Those wicked creatures yet do look well-favour’d,
When others are more wicked; not being the worst,
Stands in some rank of praise:——I’ll go with thee; [_To Gonerill._
Thy fifty yet doth double five-and-twenty,
And thou art twice her love.
_Gonerill._ Hear me, my lord;
What need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five,
To follow in a house, where twice so many
Have a command to tend you?
_Regan._ What need one?
_Lear._ O, reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous:
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life is cheap as beast’s: thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st;
Which scarcely keeps thee warm.——But, for true need——
You heavens, give me that patience which I need!
You see me here, you gods; a poor old man,
As full of grief as age; wretched in both!
If it be you that stir these daughters’ hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger!
O, let no woman’s weapons, water-drops,
Stain my man’s cheeks!——No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both,
That all the world shall——I will do such things——
What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think, I’ll weep:
No, I’ll not weep:——
I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,
Or e’er I’ll weep:——O, fool, I shall go mad!——
[_Exeunt Lear, Gloster, Kent, and Fool._’
If there is any thing in any author like this yearning of the heart,
these throes of tenderness, this profound expression of all that can be
thought and felt in the most heart-rending situations, we are glad of
it; but it is in some author that we have not read.
The scene in the storm, where he is exposed to all the fury of the
elements, though grand and terrible, is not so fine, but the moralising
scenes with Mad Tom, Kent, and Gloster, are upon a par with the former.
His exclamation in the supposed trial-scene of his daughters, ‘See the
little dogs and all, Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart, see they bark at me,’
his issuing his orders, ‘Let them anatomize Regan, see what breeds about
her heart,’ and his reflection when he sees the misery of Edgar,
‘Nothing but his unkind daughters could have brought him to this,’ are
in a style of pathos, where the extremest resources of the imagination
are called in to lay open the deepest movements of the heart, which was
peculiar to Shakespear. In the same style and spirit is his interrupting
the Fool who asks ‘whether a madman be a gentleman or a yeoman,’ by
answering ‘A king, a king.—
The indirect part that Gloster takes in these scenes where his
generosity leads him to relieve Lear and resent the cruelty of his
daughters, at the very time that he is himself instigated to seek the
life of his son, and suffering under the sting of his supposed
ingratitude, is a striking accompaniment to the situation of Lear.
Indeed, the manner in which the threads of the story are woven together
is almost as wonderful in the way of art as the carrying on the tide of
passion, still varying and unimpaired, is on the score of nature. Among
the remarkable instances of this kind are Edgar’s meeting with his old
blind father; the deception he practises upon him when he pretends to
lead him to the top of Dover-cliff—‘Come on, sir, here’s the place,’ to
prevent his ending his life and miseries together; his encounter with
the perfidious Steward whom he kills, and his finding the letter from
Gonerill to his brother upon him which leads to the final catastrophe,
and brings the wheel of Justice ‘full circle home’ to the guilty
parties. The bustle and rapid succession of events in the last scenes is
surprising. But the meeting between Lear and Cordelia is by far the most
affecting part of them. It has all the wildness of poetry, and all the
heart-felt truth of nature. The previous account of her reception of the
news of his unkind treatment, her involuntary reproaches to her sisters,
‘Shame, ladies, shame,’ Lear’s backwardness to see his daughter, the
picture of the desolate state to which he is reduced, ‘Alack, ’tis he;
why he was met even now, as mad as the vex’d sea, singing aloud,’ only
prepare the way for and heighten our expectation of what follows, and
assuredly this expectation is not disappointed when through the tender
care of Cordelia he revives and recollects her.
‘_Cordelia._ How does my royal lord? How fares your majesty!
_Lear._ You do me wrong, to take me out o’ the grave:
Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead.
_Cordelia._ Sir, do you know me?
_Lear._ You are a spirit I know: when did you die?
_Cordelia._ Still, still, far wide!
_Physician._ He’s scarce awake; let him alone awhile.
_Lear._ Where have I been? Where am I?—Fair daylight?——
I am mightily abus’d.—I should even die with pity,
To see another thus.—I know not what to say.——
I will not swear these are my hands:—let’s see;
I feel this pin prick. ‘Would I were assured
Of my condition.
_Cordelia._ O, look upon me, sir,
And hold your hands in benediction o’er me:——
No, sir, you must not kneel.
_Lear._ Pray, do not mock me:
I am a very foolish fond old man,
Fourscore and upward;
And, to deal plainly,
I fear, I am not in my perfect mind.
Methinks, I shou’d know you, and know this man;
Yet I am doubtful: for I am mainly ignorant
What place this is; and all the skill I have
Remembers not these garments; nor I know not
Where I did lodge last night: do not laugh at me;
For, as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child Cordelia.
_Cordelia._ And so I am, I am!’
Almost equal to this in awful beauty is their consolation of each other
when, after the triumph of their enemies, they are led to prison.
‘_Cordelia._ We are not the first,
Who, with best meaning, have incurr’d the worst.
For thee, oppressed king, am I cast down;
Myself could else out-frown false fortune’s frown.—
Shall we not see these daughters, and these sisters?
_Lear._ No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too—
Who loses, and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;—
And take upon us the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon.
_Edmund._ Take them away.
_Lear._ Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,
The gods themselves throw incense.’
The concluding events are sad, painfully sad; but their pathos is
extreme. The oppression of the feelings is relieved by the very interest
we take in the misfortunes of others, and by the reflections to which
they give birth. Cordelia is hanged in prison by the orders of the
bastard Edmund, which are known too late to be countermanded, and Lear
dies broken-hearted, lamenting over her.
‘_Lear._ And my poor fool is hang’d! No, no, no life:
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? O, thou wilt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!——
Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.’
He dies, and indeed we feel the truth of what Kent says on the occasion—
‘Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass! he hates him,
That would upon the rack of this rough world
Stretch him out longer.’
Yet a happy ending has been contrived for this play, which is approved
of by Dr. Johnson and condemned by Schlegel. A better authority than
either, on any subject in which poetry and feeling are concerned, has
given it in favour of Shakespear, in some remarks on the acting of Lear,
with which we shall conclude this account:
‘The LEAR of Shakespear cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery
with which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more
inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements than any
actor can be to represent Lear. The greatness of Lear is not in
corporal dimension, but in intellectual; the explosions of his
passions are terrible as a volcano: they are storms turning up and
disclosing to the bottom that rich sea, his mind, with all its vast
riches. It is his mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and
blood seems too insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself
neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities
and weakness, the impotence of rage—while we read it, we see not
Lear, but we are Lear;—we are in his mind; we are sustained by a
grandeur, which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the
aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of
reasoning, immethodised from the ordinary purposes of life, but
exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at will on
the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What have looks or tones to
do with that sublime identification of his age with that of _the
heavens themselves_, when in his reproaches to them for conniving at
the injustice of his children, he reminds them that “they themselves
are old!” What gesture shall we appropriate to this? What has the
voice or the eye to do with such things? But the play is beyond all
art, as the tamperings with it shew: it is too hard and stony: it
must have love-scenes, and a happy ending. It is not enough that
Cordelia is a daughter, she must shine as a lover too. Tate has put
his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan, for Garrick and his
followers, the shew-men of the scene, to draw it about more easily.
A happy ending!—as if the living martyrdom that Lear had gone
through,—the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair
dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him. If
he is to live and be happy after, if he could sustain this world’s
burden after, why all this pudder and preparation—why torment us
with all this unnecessary sympathy? As if the childish pleasure of
getting his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over
again his misused station,—as if at his years and with his
experience, any thing was left but to die.’[68]
Four things have struck us in reading LEAR:
1. That poetry is an interesting study, for this reason, that it relates
to whatever is most interesting in human life. Whoever therefore has a
contempt for poetry, has a contempt for himself and humanity.
2. That the language of poetry is superior to the language of painting;
because the strongest of our recollections relate to feelings, not to
faces.
3. That the greatest strength of genius is shewn in describing the
strongest passions: for the power of the imagination, in works of
invention, must be in proportion to the force of the natural
impressions, which are the subject of them.
4. That the circumstance which balances the pleasure against the pain in
tragedy is, that in proportion to the greatness of the evil, is our
sense and desire of the opposite good excited; and that our sympathy
with actual suffering is lost in the strong impulse given to our natural
affections, and carried away with the swelling tide of passion, that
gushes from and relieves the heart.
RICHARD II.
RICHARD II. is a play little known compared with _Richard III._ which
last is a play that every unfledged candidate for theatrical fame chuses
to strut and fret his hour upon the stage in; yet we confess that we
prefer the nature and feeling of the one to the noise and bustle of the
other; at least, as we are so often forced to see it acted. In RICHARD
II. the weakness of the king leaves us leisure to take a greater
interest in the misfortunes of the man. After the first act, in which
the arbitrariness of his behaviour only proves his want of resolution,
we see him staggering under the unlooked-for blows of fortune, bewailing
his loss of kingly power, not preventing it, sinking under the aspiring
genius of Bolingbroke, his authority trampled on, his hopes failing him,
and his pride crushed and broken down under insults and injuries, which
his own misconduct had provoked, but which he has not courage or
manliness to resent. The change of tone and behaviour in the two
competitors for the throne according to their change of fortune, from
the capricious sentence of banishment passed by Richard upon
Bolingbroke, the suppliant offers and modest pretensions of the latter
on his return to the high and haughty tone with which he accepts
Richard’s resignation of the crown after the loss of all his power, the
use which he makes of the deposed king to grace his triumphal progress
through the streets of London, and the final intimation of his wish for
his death, which immediately finds a servile executioner, is marked
throughout with complete effect and without the slightest appearance of
effort. The steps by which Bolingbroke mounts the throne are those by
which Richard sinks into the grave. We feel neither respect nor love for
the deposed monarch; for he is as wanting in energy as in principle: but
we pity him, for he pities himself. His heart is by no means hardened
against himself, but bleeds afresh at every new stroke of mischance, and
his sensibility, absorbed in his own person, and unused to misfortune,
is not only tenderly alive to its own sufferings, but without the
fortitude to bear them. He is, however, human in his distresses; for to
feel pain, and sorrow, weakness, disappointment, remorse and anguish, is
the lot of humanity, and we sympathize with him accordingly. The
sufferings of the man make us forget that he ever was a king.
The right assumed by sovereign power to trifle at its will with the
happiness of others as a matter of course, or to remit its exercise as a
matter of favour, is strikingly shewn in the sentence of banishment so
unjustly pronounced on Bolingbroke and Mowbray, and in what Bolingbroke
says when four years of his banishment are taken off, with as little
reason.
‘How long a time lies in one little word!
Four lagging winters and four wanton springs
End in a word: such is the breath of kings.’
A more affecting image of the loneliness of a state of exile can hardly
be given than by what Bolingbroke afterwards observes of his having
‘sighed his English breath in foreign clouds’; or than that conveyed in
Mowbray’s complaint at being banished for life.
‘The language I have learned these forty years,
My native English, now I must forego;
And now my tongue’s use is to me no more
Than an unstringed viol or a harp,
Or like a cunning instrument cas’d up,
Or being open, put into his hands
That knows no touch to tune the harmony.
I am too old to fawn upon a nurse,
Too far in years to be a pupil now.’—
How very beautiful is all this, and at the same time how very _English_
too!
RICHARD II. may be considered as the first of that series of English
historical plays, in which ‘is hung armour of the invincible knights of
old,’ in which their hearts seem to strike against their coats of mail,
where their blood tingles for the fight, and words are but the
harbingers of blows. Of this state of accomplished barbarism the appeal
of Bolingbroke and Mowbray is an admirable specimen. Another of these
‘keen encounters of their wits,’ which serve to whet the talkers’
swords, is where Aumerle answers in the presence of Bolingbroke to the
charge which Bagot brings against him of being an accessory in Gloster’s
death.
‘_Fitzwater._ If that thy valour stand on sympathies,
There is my gage, Aumerle, in gage to thine;
By that fair sun that shows me where thou stand’st,
I heard thee say, and vauntingly thou spak’st it,
That thou wert cause of noble Gloster’s death.
If thou deny’st it twenty times thou liest,
And I will turn thy falsehood to thy heart
Where it was forged, with my rapier’s point.
_Aumerle._ Thou dar’st not, coward, live to see the day.
_Fitzwater._ Now, by my soul, I would it were this hour.
_Aumerle._ Fitzwater, thou art damn’d to hell for this.
_Percy._ Aumerle, thou liest; his honour is as true,
In this appeal, as thou art all unjust;
And that thou art so, there I throw my gage
To prove it on thee, to the extremest point
Of mortal breathing. Seize it, if thou dar’st.
_Aumerle._ And if I do not, may my hands rot off,
And never brandish more revengeful steel
Over the glittering helmet of my foe.
Who sets me else? By heav’n, I’ll throw at all.
I have a thousand spirits in my breast,
To answer twenty thousand such as you.
_Surry._ My lord Fitzwater, I remember well
The very time Aumerle and you did talk.
_Fitzwater._ My lord, ’tis true: you were in presence then:
And you can witness with me, this is true.
_Surry._ As false, by heav’n, as heav’n itself is true.
_Fitzwater._ Surry, thou liest.
_Surry._ Dishonourable boy,
That lie shall lye so heavy on my sword,
That it shall render vengeance and revenge,
Till thou the lie-giver and that lie rest
In earth as quiet as thy father’s skull.
In proof whereof, there is mine honour’s pawn:
Engage it to the trial, if thou dar’st.
_Fitzwater._ How fondly dost thou spur a forward horse:
If I dare eat or drink, or breathe or live,
I dare meet Surry in a wilderness,
And spit upon him, whilst I say he lies,
And lies, and lies: there is my bond of faith,
To tie thee to thy strong correction.
As I do hope to thrive in this new world,
Aumerle is guilty of my true appeal.’
The truth is, that there is neither truth nor honour in all these noble
persons: they answer words with words, as they do blows with blows, in
mere self defence: nor have they any principle whatever but that of
courage in maintaining any wrong they dare commit, or any falsehood
which they find it useful to assert. How different were these noble
knights and ‘barons bold’ from their more refined descendants in the
present day, who, instead of deciding questions of right by brute force,
refer everything to convenience, fashion, and good breeding! In point of
any abstract love of truth or justice, they are just the same now that
they were then.
The characters of old John of Gaunt and of his brother York, uncles to
the King, the one stern and foreboding, the other honest, good-natured,
doing all for the best, and therefore doing nothing, are well kept up.
The speech of the former, in praise of England, is one of the most
eloquent that ever was penned. We should perhaps hardly be disposed to
feed the pampered egotism of our countrymen by quoting this description,
were it not that the conclusion of it (which looks prophetic) may
qualify any improper degree of exultation.
‘This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle,
This earth of Majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-Paradise,
This fortress built by nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war;
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house
Against the envy of less happy lands:
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear’d for their breed and famous for their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
(For Christian service and true chivalry)
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry
Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s son;
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leas’d out (I die pronouncing it)
Like to a tenement or pelting farm.
England bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious surge
Of wat’ry Neptune, is bound in with shame,
With inky-blots and rotten parchment bonds.
That England that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.’
The character of Bolingbroke, afterwards Henry IV. is drawn with a
masterly hand:—patient for occasion, and then steadily availing himself
of it, seeing his advantage afar off, but only seizing on it when he has
it within his reach, humble, crafty, bold, and aspiring, encroaching by
regular but slow degrees, building power on opinion, and cementing
opinion by power. His disposition is first unfolded by Richard himself,
who however is too self-willed and secure to make a proper use of his
knowledge.
‘Ourself and Bushy, Bagot here and Green,
Observed his courtship of the common people:
How he did seem to dive into their hearts,
With humble and familiar courtesy,
What reverence he did throw away on slaves;
Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smiles,
And patient under-bearing of his fortune,
As ‘twere to banish their affections with him.
Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench;
A brace of draymen bid God speed him well,
And had the tribute of his supple knee,
With thanks my countrymen, my loving friends;
As were our England in reversion his,
And he our subjects’ next degree in hope.’
Afterwards, he gives his own character to Percy, in these words:
‘I thank thee, gentle Percy, and be sure
I count myself in nothing else so happy,
As in a soul rememb’ring my good friends;
And as my fortune ripens with thy love,
It shall be still thy true love’s recompense.’
We know how he afterwards kept his promise. His bold assertion of his
own rights, his pretended submission to the king, and the ascendancy
which he tacitly assumes over him without openly claiming it, as soon as
he has him in his power, are characteristic traits of this ambitious and
politic usurper. But the part of Richard himself gives the chief
interest to the play. His folly, his vices, his misfortunes, his
reluctance to part with the crown, his fear to keep it, his weak and
womanish regrets, his starting tears, his fits of hectic passion, his
smothered majesty, pass in succession before us, and make a picture as
natural as it is affecting. Among the most striking touches of pathos
are his wish ‘O that I were a mockery king of snow to melt away before
the sun of Bolingbroke,’ and the incident of the poor groom who comes to
visit him in prison, and tells him how ‘it yearned his heart that
Bolingbroke upon his coronation-day rode on Roan Barbary.’ We shall have
occasion to return hereafter to the character of Richard II. in speaking
of Henry VI. There is only one passage more, the description of his
entrance into London with Bolingbroke, which we should like to quote
here, if it had not been so used and worn out, so thumbed and got by
rote, so praised and painted; but its beauty surmounts all these
considerations.
‘_Duchess._ My lord, you told me you would tell the rest,
When weeping made you break the story off
Of our two cousins coming into London.
_York._ Where did I leave?
_Duchess._ At that sad stop, my lord,
Where rude misgovern’d hands, from window tops,
Threw dust and rubbish on king Richard’s head.
_York._ Then, as I said, the duke, great Bolingbroke,
Mounted upon a hot and fiery steed,
Which his aspiring rider seem’d to know,
With slow, but stately pace, kept on his course,
While all tongues cried—God save thee, Bolingbroke!
You would have thought the very windows spake,
So many greedy looks of young and old
Through casements darted their desiring eyes
Upon his visage; and that all the walls,
With painted imag’ry, had said at once—
Jesu preserve thee! welcome, Bolingbroke!
Whilst he, from one side to the other turning,
Bare-headed, lower than his proud steed’s neck,
Bespake them thus—I thank you, countrymen:
And thus still doing thus he pass’d along.
_Duchess._ Alas, poor Richard! where rides he the while?
_York._ As in a theatre, the eyes of men,
After a well-grac’d actor leaves the stage,
Are idly bent on him that enters next,
Thinking his prattle to be tedious:
Even so, or with much more contempt, men’s eyes
Did scowl on Richard; no man cried God save him!
No joyful tongue gave him his welcome home:
But dust was thrown upon his sacred head!
Which with such gentle sorrow he shook off—
His face still combating with tears and smiles,
The badges of his grief and patience—
That had not God, for some strong purpose, steel’d
The hearts of men, they must perforce have melted,
And barbarism itself have pitied him.’
HENRY IV
IN TWO PARTS
If Shakespear’s fondness for the ludicrous sometimes led to faults in
his tragedies (which was not often the case) he has made us amends by
the character of Falstaff. This is perhaps the most substantial comic
character that ever was invented. Sir John carries a most portly
presence in the mind’s eye; and in him, not to speak it profanely, ‘we
behold the fulness of the spirit of wit and humour bodily.’ We are as
well acquainted with his person as his mind, and his jokes come upon us
with double force and relish from the quantity of flesh through which
they make their way, as he shakes his fat sides with laughter, or ‘lards
the lean earth as he walks along.’ Other comic characters seem, if we
approach and handle them, to resolve themselves into air, ‘into thin
air’; but this is embodied and palpable to the grossest apprehension: it
lies ‘three fingers deep upon the ribs,’ it plays about the lungs and
the diaphragm with all the force of animal enjoyment. His body is like a
good estate to his mind, from which he receives rents and revenues of
profit and pleasure in kind, according to its extent, and the richness
of the soil. Wit is often a meagre substitute for pleasurable sensation;
an effusion of spleen and petty spite at the comforts of others, from
feeling none in itself. Falstaff’s wit is an emanation of a fine
constitution; an exuberance of good-humour and good-nature; an
overflowing of his love of laughter and good-fellowship; a giving vent
to his heart’s ease, and over-contentment with himself and others. He
would not be in character, if he were not so fat as he is; for there is
the greatest keeping in the boundless luxury of his imagination and the
pampered self-indulgence of his physical appetites. He manures and
nourishes his mind with jests, as he does his body with sack and sugar.
He carves out his jokes, as he would a capon or a haunch of venison,
where there is _cut and come again_; and pours out upon them the oil of
gladness. His tongue drops fatness, and in the chambers of his brain ‘it
snows of meat and drink.’ He keeps up perpetual holiday and open house,
and we live with him in a round of invitations to a rump and dozen.—Yet
we are not to suppose that he was a mere sensualist. All this is as much
in imagination as in reality. His sensuality does not engross and
stupify his other faculties, but ‘ascends me into the brain, clears away
all the dull, crude vapours that environ it, and makes it full of
nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes.’ His imagination keeps up the ball
after his senses have done with it. He seems to have even a greater
enjoyment of the freedom from restraint, of good cheer, of his ease, of
his vanity, in the ideal exaggerated description which he gives of them,
than in fact. He never fails to enrich his discourse with allusions to
eating and drinking, but we never see him at table. He carries his own
larder about with him, and he is himself ‘a tun of man.’ His pulling out
the bottle in the field of battle is a joke to shew his contempt for
glory accompanied with danger, his systematic adherence to his Epicurean
philosophy in the most trying circumstances. Again, such is his
deliberate exaggeration of his own vices, that it does not seem quite
certain whether the account of his hostess’s bill, found in his pocket,
with such an out-of-the-way charge for capons and sack with only one
halfpenny-worth of bread, was not put there by himself as a trick to
humour the jest upon his favourite propensities, and as a conscious
caricature of himself. He is represented as a liar, a braggart, a
coward, a glutton, etc. and yet we are not offended but delighted with
him; for he is all these as much to amuse others as to gratify himself.
He openly assumes all these characters to shew the humourous part of
them. The unrestrained indulgence of his own ease, appetites, and
convenience, has neither malice nor hypocrisy in it. In a word, he is an
actor in himself almost as much as upon the stage, and we no more object
to the character of Falstaff in a moral point of view than we should
think of bringing an excellent comedian, who should represent him to the
life, before one of the police offices. We only consider the number of
pleasant lights in which he puts certain foibles (the more pleasant as
they are opposed to the received rules and necessary restraints of
society) and do not trouble ourselves about the consequences resulting
from them, for no mischievous consequences do result. Sir John is old as
well as fat, which gives a melancholy retrospective tinge to the
character; and by the disparity between his inclinations and his
capacity for enjoyment, makes it still more ludicrous and fantastical.
The secret of Falstaff’s wit is for the most part a masterly presence of
mind, an absolute self-possession, which nothing can disturb. His
repartees are involuntary suggestions of his self-love; instinctive
evasions of every thing that threatens to interrupt the career of his
triumphant jollity and self-complacency. His very size floats him out of
all his difficulties in a sea of rich conceits; and he turns round on
the pivot of his convenience, with every occasion and at a moment’s
warning. His natural repugnance to every unpleasant thought or
circumstance, of itself makes light of objections, and provokes the most
extravagant and licentious answers in his own justification. His
indifference to truth puts no check upon his invention, and the more
improbable and unexpected his contrivances are, the more happily does he
seem to be delivered of them, the anticipation of their effect acting as
a stimulus to the gaiety of his fancy. The success of one adventurous
sally gives him spirits to undertake another: he deals always in round
numbers, and his exaggerations and excuses are ‘open, palpable,
monstrous as the father that begets them.’ His dissolute carelessness of
what he says discovers itself in the first dialogue with the Prince.
‘_Falstaff._ By the lord, thou say’st true, lad; and is not mine
hostess of the tavern a most sweet wench?
_P. Henry._ As the honey of Hibla, my old lad of the castle; and is
not a buff-jerkin a most sweet robe of durance?
_Falstaff._ How now, how now, mad wag, what in thy quips and thy
quiddities? what a plague have I to do with a buff-jerkin?
_P. Henry._ Why, what a pox have I to do with mine hostess of the
tavern?’
In the same scene he afterwards affects melancholy, from pure
satisfaction of heart, and professes reform, because it is the farthest
thing in the world from his thoughts. He has no qualms of conscience,
and therefore would as soon talk of them as of anything else when the
humour takes him.
‘_Falstaff._ But Hal, I pr’ythee trouble me no more with vanity. I
would to God thou and I knew where a commodity of good names were to
be bought: an old lord of council rated me the other day in the
street about you, sir; but I mark’d him not, and yet he talked very
wisely, and in the street too.
_P. Henry._ Thou didst well, for wisdom cries out in the street, and
no man regards it.
_Falstaff._ O, thou hast damnable iteration, and art indeed able to
corrupt a saint. Thou hast done much harm unto me, Hal; God forgive
thee for it. Before I knew thee, Hal, I knew nothing, and now I am,
if a man should speak truly, little better than one of the wicked. I
must give over this life, and I will give it over, by the lord; an I
do not, I am a villain. I’ll be damn’d for never a king’s son in
Christendom.
_P. Henry._ Where shall we take a purse to-morrow, Jack?
_Falstaff._ Where thou wilt, lad, I’ll make one; an I do not, call
me villain, and baffle me.
_P. Henry._ I see good amendment of life in thee, from praying to
purse-taking.
_Falstaff._ Why, Hal, ’tis my vocation, Hal. ’Tis no sin for a man
to labour in his vocation.’
Of the other prominent passages, his account of his pretended resistance
to the robbers, ‘who grew from four men in buckram into eleven’ as the
imagination of his own valour increased with his relating it, his
getting off when the truth is discovered by pretending he knew the
Prince, the scene in which in the person of the old king he lectures the
prince and gives himself a good character, the soliloquy on honour, and
description of his new-raised recruits, his meeting with the chief
justice, his abuse of the Prince and Poins, who overhear him, to Doll
Tearsheet, his reconciliation with Mrs. Quickly who has arrested him for
an old debt, and whom he persuades to pawn her plate to lend him ten
pounds more, and the scenes with Shallow and Silence, are all
inimitable. Of all of them, the scene in which Falstaff plays the part,
first, of the King, and then of Prince Henry, is the one that has been
the most often quoted. We must quote it once more in illustration of our
remarks.
‘_Falstaff._ Harry, I do not only marvel where thou spendest thy
time, but also how thou art accompanied: for though the camomile,
the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows, yet youth, the more
it is wasted, the sooner it wears. That thou art my son, I have
partly thy mother’s word, partly my own opinion; but chiefly, a
villainous trick of thine eye, and a foolish hanging of thy nether
lip, that doth warrant me. If then thou be son to me, here lies the
point;——Why, being son to me, art thou so pointed at? Shall the
blessed sun of heaven prove a micher, and eat blackberries? A
question not to be ask’d. Shall the son of England prove a thief,
and take purses? a question not to be ask’d. There is a thing,
Harry, which thou hast often heard of, and it is known to many in
our land by the name of pitch: this pitch, as ancient writers do
report, doth defile; so doth the company thou keepest: for, Harry,
now I do not speak to thee in drink, but in tears; not in pleasure,
but in passion; not in words only, but in woes also:—and yet there
is a virtuous man, whom I have often noted in thy company, but I
know not his name.
_P. Henry._ What manner of man, an it like your majesty?
_Falstaff._ A goodly portly man, i’faith, and a corpulent; of a
cheerful look, a pleasing eye, and a most noble carriage; and, as I
think, his age some fifty, or, by’r-lady, inclining to threescore;
and now I do remember me, his name is Falstaff: if that man should
be lewdly given, he deceiveth me; for, Harry, I see virtue in his
looks. If then the fruit may be known by the tree, as the tree by
the fruit, then peremptorily I speak it, there is virtue in that
Falstaff: him keep with, the rest banish. And tell me now, thou
naughty varlet, tell me, where hast thou been this month?
_P. Henry._ Dost thou speak like a king? Do thou stand for me, and
I’ll play my father.
_Falstaff._ Depose me? if thou dost it half so gravely, so
majestically, both in word and matter, hang me up by the heels for a
rabbit-sucker, or a poulterer’s hare.
_P. Henry._ Well, here I am set.
_Falstaff._ And here I stand:—judge, my masters.
_P. Henry._ Now, Harry, whence come you?
_Falstaff._ My noble lord, from Eastcheap.
_P. Henry._ The complaints I hear of thee are grievous.
_Falstaff._ S’blood, my lord, they are false:—nay, I ‘ll tickle ye
for a young prince, i’faith.
_P. Henry._ Swearest thou, ungracious boy? henceforth ne’er look on
me. Thou art violently carried away from grace: there is a devil
haunts thee, in the likeness of a fat old man; a tun of man is thy
companion. Why dost thou converse with that trunk of humours, that
bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swoln parcel of dropsies, that
huge bombard of sack, that stuft cloak-bag of guts, that roasted
Manning-tree ox with the pudding in his belly, that reverend vice,
that grey iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in years?
wherein is he good, but to taste sack and drink it? wherein neat and
cleanly, but to carve a capon and eat it? wherein cunning, but in
craft? wherein crafty, but in villainy? wherein villainous, but in
all things? wherein worthy, but in nothing?
_Falstaff._ I would, your grace would take me with you; whom means
your grace?
_P. Henry._ That villainous, abominable mis-leader of youth,
Falstaff, that old white-bearded Satan.
_Falstaff._ My lord, the man I know.
_P. Henry._ I know thou dost.
_Falstaff._ But to say, I know more harm in him than in myself, were
to say more than I know. That he is old (the more the pity) his
white hairs do witness it: but that he is (saving your reverence) a
whore-master, that I utterly deny. If sack and sugar be a fault, God
help the wicked! if to be old and merry be a sin, then many an old
host that I know is damned: if to be fat be to be hated, then
Pharaoh’s lean kine are to be loved. No, my good lord; banish Peto,
banish Bardolph, banish Poins: but for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind
Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and
therefore more valiant, being as he is, old Jack Falstaff, banish
not him thy Harry’s company; banish plump Jack, and banish all the
world.
_P. Henry._ I do, I will.
[_Knocking; and Hostess and Bardolph go out._
_Re-enter_ BARDOLPH, _running_.
_Bardolph._ O, my lord, my lord; the sheriff, with a most monstrous
watch, is at the door.
_Falstaff._ Out, you rogue! play out the play: I have much to say in
the behalf of that Falstaff.’
One of the most characteristic descriptions of Sir John is that which
Mrs. Quickly gives of him when he asks her ‘What is the gross sum that I
owe thee?’
‘_Hostess._ Marry, if thou wert an honest man, thyself, and the
money too. Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting
in my Dolphin-chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire on
Wednesday in Whitsun-week, when the prince broke thy head for
likening his father to a singing man of Windsor; thou didst swear to
me then, as I was washing thy wound, to marry me, and make me my
lady thy wife. Canst thou deny it? Did not goodwife Keech, the
butcher’s wife, come in then, and call me gossip Quickly? coming in
to borrow a mess of vinegar; telling us, she had a good dish of
prawns; whereby thou didst desire to eat some; whereby I told thee,
they were ill for a green wound? And didst thou not, when she was
gone down stairs, desire me to be no more so familiarity with such
poor people; saying, that ere long they should call me madam? And
didst thou not kiss me, and bid me fetch thee thirty shillings? I
put thee now to thy book-oath; deny it, if thou canst.’
This scene is to us the most convincing proof of Falstaff’s power of
gaining over the good will of those he was familiar with, except indeed
Bardolph’s somewhat profane exclamation on hearing the account of his
death, ‘Would I were with him, wheresoe’er he is, whether in heaven or
hell.’
One of the topics of exulting superiority over others most common in Sir
John’s mouth is his corpulence and the exterior marks of good living
which he carries about him, thus ‘turning his vices into commodity.’ He
accounts for the friendship between the Prince and Poins, from ‘their
legs being both of a bigness’; and compares Justice Shallow to ‘a man
made after supper of a cheese-paring.’ There cannot be a more striking
gradation of character than that between Falstaff and Shallow, and
Shallow and Silence. It seems difficult at first to fall lower than the
squire; but this fool, great as he is, finds an admirer and humble foil
in his cousin Silence. Vain of his acquaintance with Sir John, who makes
a butt of him, he exclaims, ‘Would, cousin Silence, that thou had’st
seen that which this knight and I have seen!’—‘Aye, Master Shallow, we
have heard the chimes at midnight,’ says Sir John. To Falstaff’s
observation ‘I did not think Master Silence had been a man of this
mettle,’ Silence answers, ‘Who, I? I have been merry twice and once ere
now.’ What an idea is here conveyed of a prodigality of living? What
good husbandry and economical self-denial in his pleasures? What a stock
of lively recollections? It is curious that Shakespear has ridiculed in
Justice Shallow, who was ‘in some authority under the king,’ that
disposition to unmeaning tautology which is the regal infirmity of later
times, and which, it may be supposed, he acquired from talking to his
cousin Silence, and receiving no answers.
‘_Falstaff._ You have here a goodly dwelling, and a rich.
_Shallow._ Barren, barren, barren; beggars all, beggars all, Sir
John: marry, good air. Spread Davy, spread Davy. Well said, Davy.
_Falstaff._ This Davy serves you for good uses.
_Shallow._ A good varlet, a good varlet, a very good varlet. By the
mass, I have drank too much sack at supper. A good varlet. Now sit
down, now sit down. Come, cousin.’
The true spirit of humanity, the thorough knowledge of the stuff we are
made of, the practical wisdom with the seeming fooleries in the whole of
the garden-scene at Shallow’s country-seat, and just before in the
exquisite dialogue between him and Silence on the death of old Double,
have no parallel any where else. In one point of view, they are
laughable in the extreme; in another they are equally affecting, if it
is affecting to shew _what a little thing is human life_, what a poor
forked creature man is!
The heroic and serious part of these two plays founded on the story of
Henry IV. is not inferior to the comic and farcical. The characters of
Hotspur and Prince Henry are two of the most beautiful and dramatic,
both in themselves and from contrast, that ever were drawn. They are the
essence of chivalry. We like Hotspur the best upon the whole, perhaps
because he was unfortunate.—The characters of their fathers, Henry IV.
and old Northumberland, are kept up equally well. Henry naturally
succeeds by his prudence and caution in keeping what he has got;
Northumberland fails in his enterprise from an excess of the same
quality, and is caught in the web of his own cold, dilatory policy. Owen
Glendower is a masterly character. It as bold and original as it is
intelligible and thoroughly natural. The disputes between him and
Hotspur are managed with infinite address and insight into nature. We
cannot help pointing out here some very beautiful lines, where Hotspur
describes the fight between Glendower and Mortimer.
——‘When on the gentle Severn’s sedgy bank,
In single opposition hand to hand,
He did confound the best part of an hour
In changing hardiment with great Glendower:
Three times they breath’d, and three times did they drink,
Upon agreement, of swift Severn’s flood;
Who then affrighted with their bloody looks,
Ran fearfully among the trembling reeds,
And hid his crisp head in the hollow bank,
Blood-stained with these valiant combatants.’
The peculiarity and the excellence of Shakespear’s poetry is, that it
seems as if he made his imagination the hand-maid of nature, and nature
the plaything of his imagination. He appears to have been all the
characters, and in all the situations he describes. It is as if either
he had had all their feelings, or had lent them all his genius to
express themselves. There cannot be stronger instances of this than
Hotspur’s rage when Henry IV. forbids him to speak of Mortimer, his
insensibility to all that his father and uncle urge to calm him, and his
fine abstracted apostrophe to honour, ‘By heaven methinks it were an
easy leap to pluck bright honour from the moon,’ etc. After all,
notwithstanding the gallantry, generosity, good temper, and idle freaks
of the mad-cap Prince of Wales, we should not have been sorry, if
Northumberland’s force had come up in time to decide the fate of the
battle at Shrewsbury; at least, we always heartily sympathise with Lady
Percy’s grief, when she exclaims,
‘Had my sweet Harry had but half their numbers,
To-day might I (hanging on Hotspur’s neck)
Have talked of Monmouth’s grave.’
The truth is, that we never could forgive the Prince’s treatment of
Falstaff; though perhaps Shakespear knew what was best, according to the
history, the nature of the times, and of the man. We speak only as
dramatic critics. Whatever terror the French in those days might have of
Henry V. yet, to the readers of poetry at present, Falstaff is the
better man of the two. We think of him and quote him oftener.
HENRY V.
HENRY V. is a very favourite monarch with the English nation, and he
appears to have been also a favourite with Shakespear, who labours hard
to apologise for the actions of the king, by shewing us the character of
the man, as ‘the king of good fellows.’ He scarcely deserves this
honour. He was fond of war and low company:—we know little else of him.
He was careless, dissolute, and ambitious;—idle, or doing mischief. In
private, he seemed to have no idea of the common decencies of life,
which he subjected to a kind of regal licence; in public affairs, he
seemed to have no idea of any rule of right or wrong, but brute force,
glossed over with a little religious hypocrisy and archiepiscopal
advice. His principles did not change with his situation and
professions. His adventure on Gadshill was a prelude to the affair of
Agincourt, only a bloodless one; Falstaff was a puny prompter of
violence and outrage, compared with the pious and politic Archbishop of
Canterbury, who gave the king _carte blanche_, in a genealogical tree of
his family, to rob and murder in circles of latitude and longitude
abroad—to save the possessions of the church at home. This appears in
the speeches in Shakespear, where the hidden motives that actuate
princes and their advisers in war and policy are better laid open than
in speeches from the throne or woolsack. Henry, because he did not know
how to govern his own kingdom, determined to make war upon his
neighbours. Because his own title to the crown was doubtful, he laid
claim to that of France. Because he did not know how to exercise the
enormous power, which had just dropped into his hands, to any one good
purpose, he immediately undertook (a cheap and obvious resource of
sovereignty) to do all the mischief he could. Even if absolute monarchs
had the wit to find out objects of laudable ambition, they could only
‘plume up their wills’ in adhering to the more sacred formula of the
royal prerogative, ‘the right divine of kings to govern wrong,’ because
will is only then triumphant when it is opposed to the will of others,
because the pride of power is only then shewn, not when it consults the
rights and interests of others, but when it insults and tramples on all
justice and all humanity. Henry declares his resolution ‘when France is
his, to bend it to his awe, or break it all to pieces’—a resolution
worthy of a conqueror, to destroy all that he cannot enslave; and what
adds to the joke, he lays all the blame of the consequences of his
ambition on those who will not submit tamely to his tyranny. Such is the
history of kingly power, from the beginning to the end of the
world;—with this difference, that the object of war formerly, when the
people adhered to their allegiance, was to depose kings; the object
latterly, since the people swerved from their allegiance, has been to
restore kings, and to make common cause against mankind. The object of
our late invasion and conquest of France was to restore the legitimate
monarch, the descendant of Hugh Capet, to the throne: Henry V. in his
time made war on and deposed the descendant of this very Hugh Capet, on
the plea that he was a usurper and illegitimate. What would the great
modern catspaw of legitimacy and restorer of divine right have said to
the claim of Henry and the title of the descendants of Hugh Capet? Henry
V. it is true, was a hero, a King of England, and the conqueror of the
king of France. Yet we feel little love or admiration for him. He was a
hero, that is, he was ready to sacrifice his own life for the pleasure
of destroying thousands of other lives: he was a king of England, but
not a constitutional one, and we only like kings according to the law;
lastly, he was a conqueror of the French king, and for this we dislike
him less than if he had conquered the French people. How then do we like
him? We like him in the play. There he is a very amiable monster, a very
splendid pageant. As we like to gaze at a panther or a young lion in
their cages in the Tower, and catch a pleasing horror from their
glistening eyes, their velvet paws, and dreadless roar, so we take a
very romantic, heroic, patriotic, and poetical delight in the boasts and
feats of our younger Harry, as they appear on the stage and are confined
to lines of ten syllables; where no blood follows the stroke that wounds
our ears, where no harvest bends beneath horses’ hoofs, no city flames,
no little child is butchered, no dead men’s bodies are found piled on
heaps and festering the next morning—in the orchestra!
So much for the politics of this play; now for the poetry. Perhaps one
of the most striking images in all Shakespear is that given of war in
the first lines of the Prologue.
‘O for a muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars, and _at his heels
Leash’d in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire
Crouch for employment_.’
Rubens, if he had painted it, would not have improved upon this simile.
The conversation between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of
Ely, relating to the sudden change in the manners of Henry V. is among
the well-known _Beauties_ of Shakespear. It is indeed admirable both for
strength and grace. It has sometimes occurred to us that Shakespear, in
describing ‘the reformation’ of the Prince, might have had an eye to
himself—
‘Which is a wonder how his grace should glean it,
Since his addiction was to courses vain,
His companies unletter’d, rude and shallow,
His hours fill’d up with riots, banquets, sports;
And never noted in him any study,
Any retirement, any sequestration
From open haunts and popularity.
_Ely._ The strawberry grows underneath the nettle,
And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best
Neighbour’d by fruit of baser quality:
And so the prince obscur’d his contemplation
Under the veil of wildness, which no doubt
Grew like the summer-grass, fastest by night,
Unseen, yet crescive in his faculty.’
This at least is as probable an account of the progress of the poet’s
mind as we have met with in any of the Essays on the Learning of
Shakespear.
Nothing can be better managed than the caution which the king gives the
meddling Archbishop, not to advise him rashly to engage in the war with
France, his scrupulous dread of the consequences of that advice, and his
eager desire to hear and follow it.
‘And God forbid, my dear and faithful lord,
That you should fashion, wrest, or bow your reading,
Or nicely charge your understanding soul
With opening titles miscreate, whose right
Suits not in native colours with the truth.
For God doth know how many now in health
Shall drop their blood, in approbation
Of what your reverence shall incite us to.
Therefore take heed how you impawn your person,
How you awake our sleeping sword of war;
We charge you in the name of God, take heed.
For never two such kingdoms did contend
Without much fall of blood, whose guiltless drops
Are every one a woe, a sore complaint
‘Gainst him, whose wrong gives edge unto the swords
That make such waste in brief mortality.
Under this conjuration, speak, my lord;
For we will hear, note, and believe in heart,
That what you speak, is in your conscience wash’d,
As pure as sin with baptism.’
Another characteristic instance of the blindness of human nature to
every thing but its own interests, is the complaint made by the king of
‘the ill neighbourhood’ of the Scot in attacking England when she was
attacking France.
‘For once the eagle England being in prey,
To her unguarded nest the weazel Scot
Comes sneaking, and so sucks her princely eggs.’
It is worth observing that in all these plays, which give an admirable
picture of the spirit of the _good old times_, the moral inference does
not at all depend upon the nature of the actions, but on the dignity or
meanness of the persons committing them. ‘The eagle England’ has a right
‘to be in prey,’ but ‘the weazel Scot’ has none ‘to come sneaking to her
nest,’ which she has left to pounce upon others. Might was right,
without equivocation or disguise, in that heroic and chivalrous age. The
substitution of right for might, even in theory, is among the
refinements and abuses of modern philosophy.
A more beautiful rhetorical delineation of the effects of subordination
in a commonwealth can hardly be conceived than the following:—
‘For government, though high and low and lower,
Put into parts, doth keep in one consent,
Congruing in a full and natural close,
Like music.
——Therefore heaven doth divide
The state of man in divers functions,
Setting endeavour in continual motion;
To which is fixed, as an aim or butt,
Obedience: for so work the honey-bees;
Creatures that by a rule in nature, teach
The art of order to a peopled kingdom.
They have a king, and officers of sorts:
Where some, like magistrates, correct at home;
Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad;
Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings,
Make boot upon the summer’s velvet buds;
Which pillage they with merry march bring home
To the tent-royal of their emperor;
Who, busied in his majesty, surveys
The singing mason building roofs of gold;
The civil citizens kneading up the honey;
The poor mechanic porters crowding in
Their heavy burthens at his narrow gate;
The sad-eyed justice, with his surly hum,
Delivering o’er to executors pale
The lazy yawning drone. I this infer,—
That many things, having full reference
To one consent, may work contrariously:
As many arrows, loosed several ways,
Come to one mark;
As many ways meet in one town;
As many fresh streams meet in one salt sea;
As many lines close in the dial’s centre;
So may a thousand actions, once a-foot,
End in one purpose, and be all well borne
Without defeat.’
HENRY V. is but one of Shakespear’s second-rate plays. Yet by quoting
passages, like this, from his second-rate plays alone, we might make a
volume ‘rich with his praise,’
‘As is the oozy bottom of the sea
With sunken wrack and sumless treasuries.’
Of this sort are the king’s remonstrance to Scroop, Grey, and Cambridge,
on the detection of their treason, his address to the soldiers at the
siege of Harfleur, and the still finer one before the battle of
Agincourt, the description of the night before the battle, and the
reflections on ceremony put into the mouth of the king.
‘O hard condition; twin-born with greatness,
Subjected to the breath of every fool,
Whose sense no more can feel but his own wringing!
What infinite heart’s ease must kings neglect,
That private men enjoy; and what have kings,
That privates have not too, save ceremony?
Save general ceremony?
And what art thou, thou idol ceremony?
What kind of God art thou, that suffer’st more
Of mortal griefs, than do thy worshippers?
What are thy rents? what are thy comings-in?
O ceremony, shew me but thy worth!
What is thy soul, O adoration?
Art thou aught else but place, degree, and form,
Creating awe and fear in other men?
Wherein thou art less happy, being feared,
Than they in fearing.
What drink’st thou oft, instead of homage sweet,
But poison’d flattery? O, be sick, great greatness,
And bid thy ceremony give thee cure!
Think’st thou, the fiery fever will go out
With titles blown from adulation?
Will it give place to flexure and low bending?
Can’st thou, when thou command’st the beggar’s knee,
Command the health of it? No, thou proud dream,
That play’st so subtly with a king’s repose,
I am a king, that find thee: and I know,
’Tis not the balm, the sceptre, and the ball,
The sword, the mace, the crown imperial,
The enter-tissu’d robe of gold and pearl,
The farsed title running ‘fore the king,
The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp
That beats upon the high shore of this world,
No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony,
Not all these, laid in bed majestical,
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave;
Who, with a body fill’d, and vacant mind,
Gets him to rest, cramm’d with distressful bread,
Never sees horrid night, the child of hell:
But like a lacquey, from the rise to set,
Sweats in the eye of Phœbus, and all night
Sleeps in Elysium; next day, after dawn,
Doth rise, and help Hyperion to his horse;
And follows so the ever-running year
With profitable labour, to his grave:
And, but for ceremony, such a wretch,
Winding up days with toil, and nights with sleep,
Has the forehand and vantage of a king.
The slave, a member of the country’s peace,
Enjoys it; but in gross brain little wots,
What watch the king keeps to maintain the peace,
Whose hours the peasant best advantages.’
Most of these passages are well known: there is one, which we do not
remember to have seen noticed, and yet it is no whit inferior to the
rest in heroic beauty. It is the account of the deaths of York and
Suffolk.
‘_Exeter._ The duke of York commends him to your majesty.
_K. Henry._ Lives he, good uncle? thrice within this hour,
I saw him down; thrice up again, and fighting;
From helmet to the spur all blood he was.
_Exeter._ In which array (brave soldier) doth he lie,
Larding the plain: and by his bloody side
(Yoke-fellow to his honour-owing wounds)
The noble earl of Suffolk also lies.
Suffolk first died: and York, all haggled o’er,
Comes to him, where in gore he lay insteep’d,
And takes him by the beard; kisses the gashes,
That bloodily did yawn upon his face;
And cries aloud—_Tarry, dear cousin Suffolk!
My soul shall thine keep company to heaven:
Tarry, sweet soul, for mine, then fly a-breast;
As, in this glorious and well-foughten field,
We kept together in our chivalry!_
Upon these words I came, and cheer’d him up:
He smil’d me in the face, raught me his hand,
And, with a feeble gripe, says—_Dear my lord,
Commend my service to my sovereign_.
So did he turn, and over Suffolk’s neck
He threw his wounded arm, and kiss’d his lips;
And so, espous’d to death, with blood he seal’d
A testament of noble-ending love.’
But we must have done with splendid quotations. The behaviour of the
king, in the difficult and doubtful circumstances in which he is placed,
is as patient and modest as it is spirited and lofty in his prosperous
fortune. The character of the French nobles is also very admirably
depicted; and the Dauphin’s praise of his horse shews the vanity of that
class of persons in a very striking point of view. Shakespear always
accompanies a foolish prince with a satirical courtier, as we see in
this instance. The comic parts of HENRY V. are very inferior to those of
_Henry IV._ Falstaff is dead, and without him, Pistol, Nym, and
Bardolph, are satellites without a sun. Fluellen the Welchman is the
most entertaining character in the piece. He is good-natured, brave,
choleric, and pedantic. His parallel between Alexander and Harry of
Monmouth, and his desire to have ‘some disputations’ with Captain
Macmorris on the discipline of the Roman wars, in the heat of the
battle, are never to be forgotten. His treatment of Pistol is as good as
Pistol’s treatment of his French prisoner. There are two other
remarkable prose passages in this play: the conversation of Henry in
disguise with the three centinels on the duties of a soldier, and his
courtship of Katherine in broken French. We like them both exceedingly,
though the first savours perhaps too much of the king, and the last too
little of the lover.
HENRY VI.
IN THREE PARTS
During the time of the civil wars of York and Lancaster, England was a
perfect bear-garden, and Shakespear has given us a very lively picture
of the scene. The three parts of HENRY VI. convey a picture of very
little else; and are inferior to the other historical plays. They have
brilliant passages; but the general ground-work is comparatively poor
and meagre, the style ‘flat and unraised.’ There are few lines like the
following:—
‘Glory is like a circle in the water;
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,
Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought.’
The first part relates to the wars in France after the death of Henry V.
and the story of the Maid of Orleans. She is here almost as scurvily
treated as in Voltaire’s Pucelle. Talbot is a very magnificent sketch:
there is something as formidable in this portrait of him, as there would
be in a monumental figure of him or in the sight of the armour which he
wore. The scene in which he visits the Countess of Auvergne, who seeks
to entrap him, is a very spirited one, and his description of his own
treatment while a prisoner to the French not less remarkable.
‘_Salisbury._ Yet tell’st thou not how thou wert entertain’d.
_Talbot._ With scoffs and scorns, and contumelious taunts.
In open market-place produced they me,
To be a public spectacle to all.
Here, said they, is the terror of the French,
The scarecrow that affrights our children so.
Then broke I from the officers that led me,
And with my nails digg’d stones out of the ground,
To hurl at the beholders of my shame.
My grisly countenance made others fly,
None durst come near for fear of sudden death.
In iron walls they deem’d me not secure:
So great a fear my name amongst them spread,
That they suppos’d I could rend bars of steel,
And spurn in pieces posts of adamant.
Wherefore a guard of chosen shot I had:
They walk’d about me every minute-while;
And if I did but stir out of my bed,
Ready they were to shoot me to the heart.’
The second part relates chiefly to the contests between the nobles
during the minority of Henry, and the death of Gloucester, the good Duke
Humphrey. The character of Cardinal Beaufort is the most prominent in
the group: the account of his death is one of our author’s
master-pieces. So is the speech of Gloucester to the nobles on the loss
of the provinces of France by the King’s marriage with Margaret of
Anjou. The pretensions and growing ambition of the Duke of York, the
father of Richard III. are also very ably developed. Among the episodes,
the tragi-comedy of Jack Cade, and the detection of the impostor Simcox
are truly edifying.
The third part describes Henry’s loss of his crown: his death takes
place in the last act, which is usually thrust into the common acting
play of _Richard III._ The character of Gloucester, afterwards King
Richard, is here very powerfully commenced, and his dangerous designs
and long-reaching ambition are fully described in his soliloquy in the
third act, beginning, ‘Aye, Edward will use women honourably.’ Henry VI.
is drawn as distinctly as his high-spirited Queen, and notwithstanding
the very mean figure which Henry makes as a King, we still feel more
respect for him than for his wife.
We have already observed that Shakespear was scarcely more remarkable
for the force and marked contrasts of his characters than for the truth
and subtlety with which he has distinguished those which approached the
nearest to each other. For instance, the soul of Othello is hardly more
distinct from that of Iago than that of Desdemona is shewn to be from
Æmilia’s; the ambition of Macbeth is as distinct from the ambition of
Richard III. as it is from the meekness of Duncan; the real madness of
Lear is as different from the feigned madness of Edgar[69] as from the
babbling of the fool; the contrast between wit and folly in Falstaff and
Shallow is not more characteristic though more obvious than the
gradations of folly, loquacious or reserved, in Shallow and Silence; and
again, the gallantry of Prince Henry is as little confounded with that
of Hotspur as with the cowardice of Falstaff, or as the sensual and
philosophic cowardice of the Knight is with the pitiful and cringing
cowardice of Parolles. All these several personages were as different in
Shakespear as they would have been in themselves: his imagination
borrowed from the life, and every circumstance, object, motive, passion,
operated there as it would in reality, and produced a world of men and
women as distinct, as true and as various as those that exist in nature.
The peculiar property of Shakespear’s imagination was this truth,
accompanied with the unconsciousness of nature: indeed, imagination to
be perfect must be unconscious, at least in production; for nature is
so.—We shall attempt one example more in the characters of Richard II.
and Henry VI.
The characters and situations of both these persons were so nearly
alike, that they would have been completely confounded by a common-place
poet. Yet they are kept quite distinct in Shakespear. Both were kings,
and both unfortunate. Both lost their crowns owing to their
mismanagement and imbecility; the one from a thoughtless, wilful abuse
of power, the other from an indifference to it. The manner in which they
bear their misfortunes corresponds exactly to the causes which led to
them. The one is always lamenting the loss of his power which he has not
the spirit to regain; the other seems only to regret that he had ever
been king, and is glad to be rid of the power, with the trouble; the
effeminacy of the one is that of a voluptuary, proud, revengeful,
impatient of contradiction, and inconsolable in his misfortunes; the
effeminacy of the other is that of an indolent, good-natured mind,
naturally averse to the turmoils of ambition and the cares of greatness,
and who wishes to pass his time in monkish indolence and
contemplation.—Richard bewails the loss of the kingly power only as it
was the means of gratifying his pride and luxury; Henry regards it only
as a means of doing right, and is less desirous of the advantages to be
derived from possessing it than afraid of exercising it wrong. In
knighting a young soldier, he gives him ghostly advice—
‘Edward Plantagenet, arise a knight,
And learn this lesson, draw thy sword in right.’
Richard II. in the first speeches of the play betrays his real
character. In the first alarm of his pride, on hearing of Bolingbroke’s
rebellion, before his presumption has met with any check, he exclaims—
‘Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords:
This earth shall have a feeling, and these stones
Prove armed soldiers, ere her native king
Shall faulter under proud rebellious arms.
. . . . . .
Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm from an anointed king;
The breath of worldly man cannot depose
The Deputy elected by the Lord.
For every man that Bolingbroke hath prest,
To lift sharp steel against our golden crown,
Heaven for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel; then if angels fight,
Weak men must fall; for Heaven still guards the right.’
Yet, notwithstanding this royal confession of faith, on the very first
news of actual disaster, all his conceit of himself as the peculiar
favourite of Providence vanishes into air.
‘But now the blood of twenty thousand men
Did triumph in my face, and they are fled.
All souls that will be safe fly from my side;
For time hath set a blot upon my pride.’
Immediately after, however, recollecting that ‘cheap defence’ of the
divinity of kings which is to be found in opinion, he is for arming his
name against his enemies.
‘Awake, thou coward Majesty, thou sleep’st;
Is not the King’s name forty thousand names?
Arm, arm, my name: a puny subject strikes
At thy great glory.’
King Henry does not make any such vapouring resistance to the loss of
his crown, but lets it slip from off his head as a weight which he is
neither able nor willing to bear; stands quietly by to see the issue of
the contest for his kingdom, as if it were a game at push-pin, and is
pleased when the odds prove against him.
When Richard first hears of the death of his favourites, Bushy, Bagot,
and the rest, he indignantly rejects all idea of any further efforts,
and only indulges in the extravagant impatience of his grief and his
despair, in that fine speech which has been so often quoted:—
‘_Aumerle._ Where is the duke my father, with his power?
_K. Richard._ No matter where: of comfort no man speak:
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs,
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow in the bosom of the earth!
Let’s chuse executors, and talk of wills:
And yet not so—for what can we bequeath,
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke’s,
And nothing can we call our own but death,
And that small model of the barren earth,
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For heaven’s sake let us sit upon the ground,
And tell sad stories of the death of Kings:
How some have been depos’d, some slain in war;
Some haunted by the ghosts they dispossess’d;
Some poison’d by their wives, some sleeping kill’d;
All murder’d:—for within the hollow crown,
That rounds the mortal temples of a king,
Keeps death his court: and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state, and grinning at his pomp!
Allowing him a breath, a little scene
To monarchize, be fear’d, and kill with looks;
Infusing him with self and vain conceit—
As if this flesh, which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable; and, humour’d thus,
Comes at the last, and, with a little pin,
Bores through his castle wall, and—farewell king!
Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence; throw away respect,
Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live on bread like you, feel want, taste grief,
Need friends, like you;—subjected thus,
How can you say to me—I am a king?’
There is as little sincerity afterwards in his affected resignation to
his fate, as there is fortitude in this exaggerated picture of his
misfortunes before they have happened.
When Northumberland comes back with the message from Bolingbroke, he
exclaims, anticipating the result,—
‘What must the king do now? Must he submit?
The king shall do it: must he be depos’d?
The king shall be contented; must he lose
The name of king? O’ God’s name let it go.
I’ll give my jewels for a set of beads;
My gorgeous palace for a hermitage;
My gay apparel for an alms-man’s gown;
My figur’d goblets for a dish of wood;
My sceptre for a palmer’s walking staff;
My subjects for a pair of carved saints,
And my large kingdom for a little grave—
A little, little grave, an obscure grave.’
How differently is all this expressed in King Henry’s soliloquy, during
the battle with Edward’s party:—
‘This battle fares like to the morning’s war,
When dying clouds contend with growing light,
What time the shepherd blowing of his nails,
Can neither call it perfect day or night.
Here on this mole-hill will I sit me down;
To whom God will, there be the victory!
For Margaret my Queen and Clifford too
Have chid me from the battle, swearing both
They prosper best of all when I am thence.
Would I were dead, if God’s good will were so.
For what is in this world but grief and woe?
O God! methinks it were a happy life
To be no better than a homely swain,
To sit upon a hill as I do now,
To carve out dials quaintly, point by point,
Thereby to see the minutes how they run:
How many make the hour full complete,
How many hours bring about the day,
How many days will finish up the year,
How many years a mortal man may live.
When this is known, then to divide the times;
So many hours must I tend my flock,
So many hours must I take my rest,
So many hours must I contemplate,
So many hours must I sport myself;
So many days my ewes have been with young,
So many weeks ere the poor fools will yean,
So many months ere I shall shear the fleece:
So many minutes, hours, weeks, months, and years
Past over, to the end they were created,
Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave.
Ah! what a life were this! how sweet, how lovely!
Gives not the hawthorn bush a sweeter shade
To shepherds looking on their silly sheep,
Than doth a rich embroidered canopy
To kings that fear their subjects’ treachery?
O yes it doth, a thousand fold it doth.
And to conclude, the shepherds’ homely curds,
His cold thin drink out of his leather bottle,
His wonted sleep under a fresh tree’s shade,
All which secure and sweetly he enjoys,
Is far beyond a prince’s delicates,
His viands sparkling in a golden cup,
His body couched in a curious bed,
When care, mistrust, and treasons wait on him.’
This is a true and beautiful description of a naturally quiet and
contented disposition, and not, like the former, the splenetic effusion
of disappointed ambition.
In the last scene of _Richard II._ his despair lends him courage: he
beats the keeper, slays two of his assassins, and dies with imprecations
in his mouth against Sir Pierce Exton, who ‘had staggered his royal
person.’ Henry, when he is seized by the deer-stealers, only reads them
a moral lecture on the duty of allegiance and the sanctity of an oath;
and when stabbed by Gloucester in the tower, reproaches him with his
crimes, but pardons him his own death.
RICHARD III.
RICHARD III. may be considered as properly a stage-play: it belongs to
the theatre, rather than to the closet. We shall therefore criticise it
chiefly with a reference to the manner in which we have seen it
performed. It is the character in which Garrick came out: it was the
second character in which Mr. Kean appeared, and in which he acquired
his fame. Shakespear we have always with us: actors we have only for a
few seasons; and therefore some account of them may be acceptable, if
not to our cotemporaries, to those who come after us, if ‘that rich and
idle personage, Posterity,’ should deign to look into our writings.
It is possible to form a higher conception of the character of Richard
than that given by Mr. Kean: but we cannot imagine any character
represented with greater distinctness and precision, more perfectly
_articulated_ in every part. Perhaps indeed there is too much of what is
technically called execution. When we first saw this celebrated actor in
the part, we thought he sometimes failed from an exuberance of manner,
and dissipated the impression of the general character by the variety of
his resources. To be complete, his delineation of it should have more
solidity, depth, sustained and impassioned feeling, with somewhat less
brilliancy, with fewer glancing lights, pointed transitions, and
pantomimic evolutions.
The Richard of Shakespear is towering and lofty; equally impetuous and
commanding; haughty, violent, and subtle; bold and treacherous;
confident in his strength as well as in his cunning; raised high by his
birth, and higher by his talents and his crimes; a royal usurper, a
princely hypocrite, a tyrant, and a murderer of the house of
Plantagenet.
‘But I was born so high:
Our aery buildeth in the cedar’s top,
And dallies with the wind, and scorns the sun.’
The idea conveyed in these lines (which are indeed omitted in the
miserable medley acted for RICHARD III.) is never lost sight of by
Shakespear, and should not be out of the actor’s mind for a moment. The
restless and sanguinary Richard is not a man striving to be great, but
to be greater than he is; conscious of his strength of will, his power
of intellect, his daring courage, his elevated station; and making use
of these advantages to commit unheard-of crimes, and to shield himself
from remorse and infamy.
If Mr. Kean does not entirely succeed in concentrating all the lines of
the character, as drawn by Shakespear, he gives an animation, vigour,
and relief to the part which we have not seen equalled. He is more
refined than Cooke; more bold, varied, and original than Kemble in the
same character. In some parts he is deficient in dignity, and
particularly in the scenes of state business, he has by no means an air
of artificial authority. There is at times an aspiring elevation, an
enthusiastic rapture in his expectations of attaining the crown, and at
others a gloating expression of sullen delight, as if he already
clenched the bauble, and held it in his grasp. The courtship scene with
Lady Anne is an admirable exhibition of smooth and smiling villainy. The
progress of wily adulation, of encroaching humility, is finely marked by
his action, voice and eye. He seems, like the first Tempter, to approach
his prey, secure of the event, and as if success had smoothed his way
before him. The late Mr. Cooke’s manner of representing this scene was
more vehement, hurried, and full of anxious uncertainty. This, though
more natural in general, was less in character in this particular
instance. Richard should woo less as a lover than as an actor—to shew
his mental superiority, and power of making others the playthings of his
purposes. Mr. Kean’s attitude in leaning against the side of the stage
before he comes forward to address Lady Anne, is one of the most
graceful and striking ever witnessed on the stage. It would do for
Titian to paint. The frequent and rapid transition of his voice from the
expression of the fiercest passion to the most familiar tones of
conversation was that which gave a peculiar grace of novelty to his
acting on his first appearance. This has been since imitated and
caricatured by others, and he himself uses the artifice more sparingly
than he did. His bye-play is excellent. His manner of bidding his
friends ‘Good night,’ after pausing with the point of his sword, drawn
slowly backward and forward on the ground, as if considering the plan of
the battle next day, is a particularly happy and natural thought. He
gives to the two last acts of the play the greatest animation and
effect. He fills every part of the stage; and makes up for the
deficiency of his person by what has been sometimes objected to as an
excess of action. The concluding scene in which he is killed by Richmond
is the most brilliant of the whole. He fights at last like one drunk
with wounds; and the attitude in which he stands with his hands
stretched out, after his sword is wrested from him, has a preternatural
and terrific grandeur, as if his will could not be disarmed, and the
very phantoms of his despair had power to kill.—Mr. Kean has since in a
great measure effaced the impression of his Richard III. by the superior
efforts of his genius in Othello (his master-piece), in the murder-scene
in Macbeth, in Richard II., in Sir Giles Overreach, and lastly in
Oroonoko; but we still like to look back to his first performance of
this part, both because it first assured his admirers of his future
success, and because we bore our feeble but, at that time, not useless
testimony to the merits of this very original actor, on which the town
was considerably divided for no other reason than because they _were_
original.
The manner in which Shakespear’s plays have been generally altered or
rather mangled by modern mechanists, is a disgrace to the English stage.
The patch-work RICHARD III. which is acted under the sanction of his
name, and which was manufactured by Cibber, is a striking example of
this remark.
The play itself is undoubtedly a very powerful effusion of Shakespear’s
genius. The ground-work of the character of Richard, that mixture of
intellectual vigour with moral depravity, in which Shakespear delighted
to shew his strength—gave full scope as well as temptation to the
exercise of his imagination. The character of his hero is almost every
where predominant, and marks its lurid track throughout. The original
play is however too long for representation, and there are some few
scenes which might be better spared than preserved, and by omitting
which it would remain a complete whole. The only rule, indeed, for
altering Shakespear is to retrench certain passages which may be
considered either as superfluous or obsolete, but not to add or
transpose any thing. The arrangement and developement of the story, and
the mutual contrast and combination of the _dramatis personæ_, are in
general as finely managed as the developement of the characters or the
expression of the passions.
This rule has not been adhered to in the present instance. Some of the
most important and striking passages in the principal character have
been omitted, to make room for idle and misplaced extracts from other
plays; the only intention of which seems to have been to make the
character of Richard as odious and disgusting as possible. It is
apparently for no other purpose than to make Gloucester stab King Henry
on the stage, that the fine abrupt introduction of the character in the
opening of the play is lost in the tedious whining morality of the
uxorious king (taken from another play);—we say _tedious_, because it
interrupts the business of the scene, and loses its beauty and effect by
having no intelligible connection with the previous character of the
mild, well-meaning monarch. The passages which the unfortunate Henry has
to recite are beautiful and pathetic in themselves, but they have
nothing to do with the world that Richard has to ‘bustle in.’ In the
same spirit of vulgar caricature is the scene between Richard and Lady
Anne (when his wife) interpolated without any authority, merely to
gratify this favourite propensity to disgust and loathing. With the same
perverse consistency, Richard, after his last fatal struggle, is raised
up by some Galvanic process, to utter the imprecation, without any
motive but pure malignity, which Shakespear has so properly put into the
mouth of Northumberland on hearing of Percy’s death. To make room for
these worse than needless additions, many of the most striking passages
in the real play have been omitted by the foppery and ignorance of the
prompt-book critics. We do not mean to insist merely on passages which
are fine as poetry and to the reader, such as Clarence’s dream, etc. but
on those which are important to the understanding of the character, and
peculiarly adapted for stage-effect. We will give the following as
instances among several others. The first is the scene where Richard
enters abruptly to the queen and her friends to defend himself:—
‘_Gloucester._ They do me wrong, and I will not endure it.
Who are they that complain unto the king,
That I forsooth am stern, and love them not?
By holy Paul, they love his grace but lightly,
That fill his ears with such dissentious rumours:
Because I cannot flatter and look fair,
Smile in men’s faces, smooth, deceive, and cog,
Duck with French nods, and apish courtesy,
I must be held a rancorous enemy.
Cannot a plain man live, and think no harm,
But thus his simple truth must be abus’d
With silken, sly, insinuating Jacks?
_Gray._ To whom in all this presence speaks your grace?
_Gloucester._ To thee, that hast nor honesty nor grace;
When have I injur’d thee, when done thee wrong?
Or thee? or thee? or any of your faction?
A plague upon you all!’
Nothing can be more characteristic than the turbulent pretensions to
meekness and simplicity in this address. Again, the versatility and
adroitness of Richard is admirably described in the following ironical
conversation with Brakenbury:—
‘_Brakenbury._ I beseech your graces both to pardon me.
His majesty hath straitly given in charge,
That no man shall have private conference,
Of what degree soever, with your brother.
_Gloucester._ E’en so, and please your worship, Brakenbury.
You may partake of any thing we say:
We speak no treason, man—we say the king
Is wise and virtuous, and his noble queen
Well strook in years, fair, and not jealous.
We say that Shore’s wife hath a pretty foot,
A cherry lip,
A bonny eye, a passing pleasing tongue;
That the queen’s kindred are made gentlefolks.
How say you, sir? Can you deny all this?
_Brakenbury._ With this, my lord, myself have nought to do.
_Gloucester._ What, fellow, naught to do with mistress Shore?
I tell you, sir, he that doth naught with her,
Excepting one, were best to do it secretly alone.
_Brakenbury._ What one, my lord?
_Gloucester._ Her husband, knave—would’st thou betray me?’
The feigned reconciliation of Gloucester with the queen’s kinsmen is
also a master-piece. One of the finest strokes in the play, and which
serves to shew as much as any thing the deep, plausible manners of
Richard, is the unsuspecting security of Hastings, at the very time when
the former is plotting his death, and when that very appearance of
cordiality and good-humour on which Hastings builds his confidence
arises from Richard’s consciousness of having betrayed him to his ruin.
This, with the whole character of Hastings, is omitted.
Perhaps the two most beautiful passages in the original play are the
farewell apostrophe of the queen to the Tower, where the children are
shut up from her, and Tyrrel’s description of their death. We will
finish our quotations with them.
‘_Queen._ Stay, yet look back with me unto the Tower;
Pity, you ancient stones, those tender babes,
Whom envy hath immured within your walls;
Rough cradle for such little pretty ones,
Rude, rugged nurse, old sullen play-fellow,
For tender princes!’
The other passage is the account of their death by Tyrrel:—
‘Dighton and Forrest, whom I did suborn
To do this piece of ruthless butchery,
Albeit they were flesh’d villains, bloody dogs,—
Melting with tenderness and mild compassion,
Wept like to children in their death’s sad story:
O thus! quoth Dighton, lay the gentle babes;
Thus, thus, quoth Forrest, girdling one another
Within their innocent alabaster arms;
Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,
And in that summer beauty kissed each other;
A book of prayers on their pillow lay,
Which once, quoth Forrest, almost changed my mind:
But oh the devil!—there the villain stopped;
When Dighton thus told on—we smothered
The most replenished sweet work of nature,
That from the prime creation ere she framed.’
These are some of those wonderful bursts of feeling, done to the life,
to the very height of fancy and nature, which our Shakespear alone could
give. We do not insist on the repetition of these last passages as
proper for the stage: we should indeed be loth to trust them in the
mouth of almost any actor: but we should wish them to be retained in
preference at least to the fantoccini exhibition of the young princes,
Edward and York, bandying childish wit with their uncle.
HENRY VIII.
This play contains little action or violence of passion, yet it has
considerable interest of a more mild and thoughtful cast, and some of
the most striking passages in the author’s works. The character of Queen
Katherine is the most perfect delineation of matronly dignity,
sweetness, and resignation, that can be conceived. Her appeals to the
protection of the king, her remonstrances to the cardinals, her
conversations with her women, shew a noble and generous spirit
accompanied with the utmost gentleness of nature. What can be more
affecting than her answer to Campeius and Wolsey, who come to visit her
as pretended friends.
——‘Nay, forsooth, my friends,
They that must weigh out my afflictions,
They that my trust must grow to, live not here;
They are, as all my comforts are, far hence,
In mine own country, lords.’
Dr. Johnson observes of this play, that ‘the meek sorrows and virtuous
distress of Katherine have furnished some scenes, which may be justly
numbered among the greatest efforts of tragedy. But the genius of
Shakespear comes in and goes out with Katherine. Every other part may be
easily conceived and easily written.’ This is easily said; but with all
due deference to so great a reputed authority as that of Johnson, it is
not true. For instance, the scene of Buckingham led to execution is one
of the most affecting and natural in Shakespear, and one to which there
is hardly an approach in any other author. Again, the character of
Wolsey, the description of his pride and of his fall, are inimitable,
and have, besides their gorgeousness of effect, a pathos, which only the
genius of Shakespear could lend to the distresses of a proud, bad man,
like Wolsey. There is a sort of child-like simplicity in the very
helplessness of his situation, arising from the recollection of his past
overbearing ambition. After the cutting sarcasms of his enemies on his
disgrace, against which he bears up with a spirit conscious of his own
superiority, he breaks out into that fine apostrophe—
‘Farewell, a long farewell, to all my greatness!
This is the state of man; to-day he puts forth
The tender leaves of hope, to-morrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honours thick upon him;
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost;
And—when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
His greatness is a ripening—nips his root,
And then he falls, as I do. I have ventur’d,
Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
These many summers in a sea of glory;
But far beyond my depth: my high-blown pride
At length broke under me; and now has left me,
Weary and old with service, to the mercy
Of a rude stream, that must for ever hide me.
Vain pomp and glory of the world, I hate ye!
I feel my heart new open’d: O how wretched
Is that poor man, that hangs on princes’ favours!
There is betwixt that smile we would aspire to,
That sweet aspect of princes, and our ruin,
More pangs and fears than war and women have;
And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer,
Never to hope again!’—
There is in this passage, as well as in the well-known dialogue with
Cromwell which follows, something which stretches beyond commonplace;
nor is the account which Griffiths gives of Wolsey’s death less
Shakespearian; and the candour with which Queen Katherine listens to the
praise of ‘him whom of all men while living she hated most’ adds the
last graceful finishing to her character.
Among other images of great individual beauty might be mentioned the
description of the effect of Ann Boleyn’s presenting herself to the
crowd at her coronation.
——‘While her grace sat down
To rest awhile, some half an hour or so,
In a rich chair of state, opposing freely
The beauty of her person to the people.
Believe me, sir, she is the goodliest woman
That ever lay by man. Which when the people
Had the full view of, _such a noise arose
As the shrouds make at sea in a stiff tempest,
As loud and to as many tunes_.’
The character of Henry VIII. is drawn with great truth and spirit. It is
like a very disagreeable portrait, sketched by the hand of a master. His
gross appearance, his blustering demeanour, his vulgarity, his
arrogance, his sensuality, his cruelty, his hypocrisy, his want of
common decency and common humanity, are marked in strong lines. His
traditional peculiarities of expression complete the reality of the
picture. The authoritative expletive, ‘Ha!’ with which he intimates his
indignation or surprise, has an effect like the first startling sound
that breaks from a thunder-cloud. He is of all the monarchs in our
history the most disgusting: for he unites in himself all the vices of
barbarism and refinement, without their virtues. Other kings before him
(such as Richard III.) were tyrants and murderers out of ambition or
necessity: they gained or established unjust power by violent means:
they destroyed their enemies, or those who barred their access to the
throne or made its tenure insecure. But Henry VIII.‘s power is most
fatal to those whom he loves: he is cruel and remorseless to pamper his
luxurious appetites: bloody and voluptuous; an amorous murderer; an
uxorious debauchee. His hardened insensibility to the feelings of others
is strengthened by the most profligate self-indulgence. The religious
hypocrisy, under which he masks his cruelty and his lust, is admirably
displayed in the speech in which he describes the first misgivings of
his conscience and its increasing throes and terrors, which have induced
him to divorce his queen. The only thing in his favour in this play is
his treatment of Cranmer: there is also another circumstance in his
favour, which is his patronage of Hans Holbein.—It has been said of
Shakespear—‘No maid could live near such a man.’ It might with as good
reason be said—‘No king could live near such a man.’ His eye would have
penetrated through the pomp of circumstance and the veil of opinion. As
it is, he has represented such persons to the life—his plays are in this
respect the glass of history—he has done them the same justice as if he
had been a privy counsellor all his life, and in each successive reign.
Kings ought never to be seen upon the stage. In the abstract, they are
very disagreeable characters: it is only while living that they are ‘the
best of kings.’ It is their power, their splendour, it is the
apprehension of the personal consequences of their favour or their
hatred that dazzles the imagination and suspends the judgment of their
favourites or their vassals; but death cancels the bond of allegiance
and of interest; and seen _as they were_, their power and their
pretensions look monstrous and ridiculous. The charge brought against
modern philosophy as inimical to loyalty is unjust, because it might as
well be brought against other things. No reader of history can be a
lover of kings. We have often wondered that Henry VIII. as he is drawn
by Shakespear, and as we have seen him represented in all the bloated
deformity of mind and person, is not hooted from the English stage.
KING JOHN
KING JOHN is the last of the historical plays we shall have to speak
of; and we are not sorry that it is. If we are to indulge our
imaginations, we had rather do it upon an imaginary theme; if we are
to find subjects for the exercise of our pity and terror, we prefer
seeking them in fictitious danger and fictitious distress. It gives a
_soreness_ to our feelings of indignation or sympathy, when we know
that in tracing the progress of sufferings and crimes, we are treading
upon real ground, and recollect that the poet’s dream ‘_denoted a
foregone conclusion_‘—irrevocable ills, not conjured up by fancy, but
placed beyond the reach of poetical justice. That the treachery of
King John, the death of Arthur, the grief of Constance, had a real
truth in history, sharpens the sense of pain, while it hangs a leaden
weight on the heart and the imagination. Something whispers us that we
have no right to make a mock of calamities like these, or to turn the
truth of things into the puppet and plaything of our fancies. ‘To
consider thus’ may be ‘to consider too curiously’; but still we think
that the actual truth of the particular events, in proportion as we
are conscious of it, is a drawback on the pleasure as well as the
dignity of tragedy.
KING JOHN has all the beauties of language and all the richness of the
imagination to relieve the painfulness of the subject. The character of
King John himself is kept pretty much in the background; it is only
marked in by comparatively slight indications. The crimes he is tempted
to commit are such as are thrust upon him rather by circumstances and
opportunity than of his own seeking: he is here represented as more
cowardly than cruel, and as more contemptible than odious. The play
embraces only a part of his history. There are however few characters on
the stage that excite more disgust and loathing. He has no intellectual
grandeur or strength of character to shield him from the indignation
which his immediate conduct provokes: he stands naked and defenceless,
in that respect, to the worst we can think of him: and besides, we are
impelled to put the very worst construction on his meanness and cruelty
by the tender picture of the beauty and helplessness of the object of
it, as well as by the frantic and heart-rending pleadings of maternal
despair. We do not forgive him the death of Arthur, because he had too
late revoked his doom and tried to prevent it; and perhaps because he
has himself repented of his black design, our _moral sense_ gains
courage to hate him the more for it. We take him at his word, and think
his purposes must be odious indeed, when he himself shrinks back from
them. The scene in which King John suggests to Hubert the design of
murdering his nephew is a master-piece of dramatic skill, but it is
still inferior, very inferior to the scene between Hubert and Arthur,
when the latter learns the orders to put out his eyes. If any thing ever
was penned, heart-piercing, mixing the extremes of terror and pity, of
that which shocks and that which soothes the mind, it is this scene. We
will give it entire, though perhaps it is tasking the reader’s sympathy
too much.
‘_Enter_ HUBERT _and Executioner_.
_Hubert._ Heat me these irons hot, and look you stand
Within the arras; when I strike my foot
Upon the bosom of the ground, rush forth
And bind the boy, which you shall find with me,
Fast to the chair: be heedful: hence, and watch.
_Executioner._ I hope your warrant will bear out the deed.
_Hubert._ Uncleanly scruples! fear not you; look to’t.—
Young lad, come forth; I have to say with you.
_Enter_ ARTHUR.
_Arthur._ Good morrow, Hubert.
_Hubert._ Morrow, little Prince.
_Arthur._ As little prince (having so great a title
To be more prince) as may be. You are sad.
_Hubert._ Indeed I have been merrier.
_Arthur._ Mercy on me!
Methinks no body should be sad but I;
Yet I remember when I was in France,
Young gentlemen would be as sad as night,
Only for wantonness. By my Christendom,
So were I out of prison, and kept sheep,
I should be merry as the day is long.
And so I would be here, but that I doubt
My uncle practises more harm to me.
He is afraid of me, and I of him.
Is it my fault that I was Geoffrey’s son?
Indeed it is not, and I would to heav’n
I were your son, so you would love me, Hubert.
_Hubert._ If I talk to him, with his innocent prate
He will awake my mercy, which lies dead;
Therefore I will be sudden, and dispatch. [_Aside._
_Arthur._ Are you sick, Hubert? you look pale to-day?
In sooth, I would you were a little sick,
That I might sit all night and watch with you.
Alas, I love you more than you do me.
_Hubert._ His words do take possession of my bosom.
Read here, young Arthur— [_Shewing a paper._
How now, foolish rheum, [_Aside._
Turning dis-piteous torture out of door!
I must be brief, lest resolution drop
Out at mine eyes in tender womanish tears.—
Can you not read it? Is it not fair writ?
_Arthur._ Too fairly, Hubert, for so foul effect.
Must you with irons burn out both mine eyes?
_Hubert._ Young boy, I must.
_Arthur._ And will you?
_Hubert._ And I will.
_Arthur._ Have you the heart? When your head did but ache,
I knit my handkerchief about your brows,
(The best I had, a princess wrought it me)
And I did never ask it you again;
And with my hand at midnight held your head;
And like the watchful minutes to the hour,
Still and anon chear’d up the heavy time,
Saying, what lack you? and where lies your grief?
Or, what good love may I perform for you?
Many a poor man’s son would have lain still,
And ne’er have spoke a loving word to you;
But you at your sick service had a prince.
Nay, you may think my love was crafty love,
And call it cunning. Do, and if you will:
If heav’n be pleas’d that you must use me ill,
Why then you must——Will you put out mine eyes?
These eyes, that never did, and never shall,
So much as frown on you?
_Hubert._ I’ve sworn to do it;
And with hot irons must I burn them out.
_Arthur._ Oh if an angel should have come to me,
And told me Hubert should put out mine eyes,
I would not have believ’d a tongue but Hubert’s.
_Hubert._ Come forth; do as I bid you. [_Stamps, and the men enter._
_Arthur._ O save me, Hubert, save me! my eyes are out
Ev’n with the fierce looks of these bloody men.
_Hubert._ Give me the iron, I say, and bind him here.
_Arthur._ Alas, what need you be so boist’rous rough?
I will not struggle, I will stand stone-still.
For heav’n’s sake, Hubert, let me not be bound!
Nay, hear me, Hubert! drive these men away,
And I will sit as quiet as a lamb:
I will not stir, nor wince, nor speak a word,
Nor look upon the iron angrily:
Thrust but these men away, and I’ll forgive you,
Whatever torment you do put me to.
_Hubert._ Go, stand within; let me alone with him.
_Executioner._ I am best pleas’d to be from such a deed. [_Exit._
_Arthur._ Alas, I then have chid away my friend.
He hath a stern look, but a gentle heart;
Let him come back, that his compassion may
Give life to yours.
_Hubert._ Come, boy, prepare yourself.
_Arthur._ Is there no remedy?
_Hubert._ None, but to lose your eyes.
_Arthur._ O heav’n! that there were but a mote in yours,
A grain, a dust, a gnat, a wand’ring hair,
Any annoyance in that precious sense!
Then, feeling what small things are boist’rous there,
Your vile intent must needs seem horrible.
_Hubert._ Is this your promise? go to, hold your tongue.
_Arthur._ Let me not hold my tongue; let me not, Hubert;
Or, Hubert, if you will, cut out my tongue,
So I may keep mine eyes. O spare mine eyes!
Though to no use, but still to look on you.
Lo, by my troth, the instrument is cold,
And would not harm me.
_Hubert._ I can heat it, boy.
_Arthur._ No, in good sooth, the fire is dead with grief,
Being create for comfort, to be us’d
In undeserv’d extremes; see else yourself,
There is no malice in this burning coal;
The breath of heav’n hath blown its spirit out,
And strew’d repentant ashes on its head.
_Hubert._ But with my breath I can revive it, boy.
_Arthur._ All things that you shall use to do me wrong,
Deny their office; only you do lack
That mercy which fierce fire and iron extend,
Creatures of note for mercy-lacking uses.
_Hubert._ Well, see to live; I will not touch thine eyes
For all the treasure that thine uncle owns:
Yet I am sworn, and I did purpose, boy,
With this same very iron to burn them out.
_Arthur._ O, now you look like Hubert. All this while
You were disguised.
_Hubert._ Peace; no more. Adieu,
Your uncle must not know but you are dead.
I’ll fill these dogged spies with false reports:
And, pretty child, sleep doubtless and secure,
That Hubert, for the wealth of all the world,
Will not offend thee.
_Arthur._ O heav’n! I thank you, Hubert.
_Hubert._ Silence, no more; go closely in with me;
Much danger do I undergo for thee. [_Exeunt._’
His death afterwards, when he throws himself from his prison walls,
excites the utmost pity for his innocence and friendless situation, and
well justifies the exaggerated denunciations of Falconbridge to Hubert,
whom he suspects wrongfully of the deed.
‘There is not yet so ugly a fiend of hell
As thou shalt be, if thou did’st kill this child.
—If thou did’st but consent
To this most cruel act, do but despair:
And if thou want’st a cord, the smallest thread
That ever spider twisted from her womb
Will strangle thee; a rush will be a beam
To hang thee on: or would’st thou drown thyself,
Put but a little water in a spoon,
And it shall be as all the ocean,
Enough to stifle such a villain up.’
The excess of maternal tenderness, rendered desperate by the fickleness
of friends and the injustice of fortune, and made stronger in will, in
proportion to the want of all other power, was never more finely
expressed than in Constance. The dignity of her answer to King Philip,
when she refuses to accompany his messenger, ‘To me and to the state of
my great grief, let kings assemble,’ her indignant reproach to Austria
for deserting her cause, her invocation to death, ‘that love of misery,’
however fine and spirited, all yield to the beauty of the passage,
where, her passion subsiding into tenderness, she addresses the Cardinal
in these words:—
‘Oh father Cardinal, I have heard you say
That we shall see and know our friends in heav’n:
If that be, I shall see my boy again,
For since the birth of Cain, the first male child,
To him that did but yesterday suspire,
There was not such a gracious creature born.
But now will canker-sorrow eat my bud,
And chase the native beauty from his cheek,
And he will look as hollow as a ghost,
As dim and meagre as an ague’s fit,
And so he’ll die; and rising so again,
When I shall meet him in the court of heav’n,
I shall not know him; therefore never, never
Must I behold my pretty Arthur more.
_K. Philip._ You are as fond of grief as of your child.
_Constance._ Grief fills the room up of my absent child:
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me;
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts;
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.
Then have I reason to be fond of grief.’
The contrast between the mild resignation of Queen Katherine to her own
wrongs, and the wild, uncontroulable affliction of Constance for the
wrongs which she sustains as a mother, is no less naturally conceived
than it is ably sustained throughout these two wonderful characters.
The accompaniment of the comic character of the Bastard was well chosen
to relieve the poignant agony of suffering, and the cold cowardly policy
of behaviour in the principal characters of this play. Its spirit,
invention, volubility of tongue and forwardness in action, are
unbounded. _Aliquando sufflaminandus erat_, says Ben Jonson of
Shakespear. But we should be sorry if Ben Jonson had been his licenser.
We prefer the heedless magnanimity of his wit infinitely to all Jonson’s
laborious caution. The character of the Bastard’s comic humour is the
same in essence as that of other comic characters in Shakespear; they
always run on with good things and are never exhausted; they are always
daring and successful. They have words at will, and a flow of wit like a
flow of animal spirits. The difference between Falconbridge and the
others is that he is a soldier, and brings his wit to bear upon action,
is courageous with his sword as well as tongue, and stimulates his
gallantry by his jokes, his enemies feeling the sharpness of his blows
and the sting of his sarcasms at the same time. Among his happiest
sallies are his descanting on the composition of his own person, his
invective against ‘commodity, tickling commodity,’ and his expression of
contempt for the Archduke of Austria, who had killed his father, which
begins in jest but ends in serious earnest. His conduct at the siege of
Angiers shews that his resources were not confined to verbal
retorts.—The same exposure of the policy of courts and camps, of kings,
nobles, priests, and cardinals, takes place here as in the other plays
we have gone through, and we shall not go into a disgusting repetition.
This, like the other plays taken from English history, is written in a
remarkably smooth and flowing style, very different from some of the
tragedies, _Macbeth_, for instance. The passages consist of a series of
single lines, not running into one another. This peculiarity in the
versification, which is most common in the three parts of _Henry VI._
has been assigned as a reason why those plays were not written by
Shakespear. But the same structure of verse occurs in his other
undoubted plays, as in _Richard II._ and in KING JOHN. The following are
instances:—
‘That daughter there of Spain, the lady Blanch,
Is near to England; look upon the years
Of Lewis the dauphin, and that lovely maid.
If lusty love should go in quest of beauty,
Where should he find it fairer than in Blanch?
If zealous love should go in search of virtue,
Where should he find it purer than in Blanch?
If love ambitious sought a match of birth,
Whose veins bound richer blood than lady Blanch?
Such as she is, in beauty, virtue, birth,
Is the young dauphin every way complete:
If not complete of, say he is not she;
And she again wants nothing, to name want,
If want it be not, that she is not he.
He is the half part of a blessed man,
Left to be finished by such as she;
And she a fair divided excellence,
Whose fulness of perfection lies in him.
O, two such silver currents, when they join,
Do glorify the banks that bound them in:
And two such shores to two such streams made one,
Two such controuling bounds, shall you be, kings,
To these two princes, if you marry them.’
Another instance, which is certainly very happy as an example of the
simple enumeration of a number of particulars, is Salisbury’s
remonstrance against the second crowning of the king.
‘Therefore to be possessed with double pomp,
To guard a title that was rich before;
To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice, to add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper light
To seek the beauteous eye of heav’n to garnish;
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.’
TWELFTH NIGHT; OR, WHAT YOU WILL
This is justly considered as one of the most delightful of Shakespear’s
comedies. It is full of sweetness and pleasantry. It is perhaps too
good-natured for comedy. It has little satire, and no spleen. It aims at
the ludicrous rather than the ridiculous. It makes us laugh at the
follies of mankind, not despise them, and still less bear any ill-will
towards them. Shakespear’s comic genius resembles the bee rather in its
power of extracting sweets from weeds or poisons, than in leaving a
sting behind it. He gives the most amusing exaggeration of the
prevailing foibles of his characters, but in a way that they themselves,
instead of being offended at, would almost join in to humour; he rather
contrives opportunities for them to shew themselves off in the happiest
lights, than renders them contemptible in the perverse construction of
the wit or malice of others.—There is a certain stage of society in
which people become conscious of their peculiarities and absurdities,
affect to disguise what they are, and set up pretensions to what they
are not. This gives rise to a corresponding style of comedy, the object
of which is to detect the disguises of self-love, and to make reprisals
on these preposterous assumptions of vanity, by marking the contrast
between the real and the affected character as severely as possible, and
denying to those, who would impose on us for what they are not, even the
merit which they have. This is the comedy of artificial life, of wit and
satire, such as we see it in Congreve, Wycherley, Vanbrugh, etc. To this
succeeds a state of society from which the same sort of affectation and
pretence are banished by a greater knowledge of the world or by their
successful exposure on the stage; and which by neutralising the
materials of comic character, both natural and artificial, leaves no
comedy at all—but _the sentimental_. Such is our modern comedy. There is
a period in the progress of manners anterior to both these, in which the
foibles and follies of individuals are of nature’s planting, not the
growth of art or study; in which they are therefore unconscious of them
themselves, or care not who knows them, if they can but have their whim
out; and in which, as there is no attempt at imposition, the spectators
rather receive pleasure from humouring the inclinations of the persons
they laugh at, than wish to give them pain by exposing their absurdity.
This may be called the comedy of nature, and it is the comedy which we
generally find in Shakespear.—Whether the analysis here given be just or
not, the spirit of his comedies is evidently quite distinct from that of
the authors above mentioned, as it is in its essence the same with that
of Cervantes, and also very frequently of Molière, though he was more
systematic in his extravagance than Shakespear. Shakespear’s comedy is
of a pastoral and poetical cast. Folly is indigenous to the soil, and
shoots out with native, happy, unchecked luxuriance. Absurdity has every
encouragement afforded it; and nonsense has room to flourish in. Nothing
is stunted by the churlish, icy hand of indifference or severity. The
poet runs riot in a conceit, and idolises a quibble. His whole object is
to turn the meanest or rudest objects to a pleasurable account. The
relish which he has of a pun, or of the quaint humour of a low
character, does not interfere with the delight with which he describes a
beautiful image, or the most refined love. The clown’s forced jests do
not spoil the sweetness of the character of Viola; the same house is big
enough to hold Malvolio, the Countess, Maria, Sir Toby, and Sir Andrew
Ague-cheek. For instance, nothing can fall much lower than this last
character in intellect or morals: yet how are his weaknesses nursed and
dandled by Sir Toby into something ‘high fantastical,’ when on Sir
Andrew’s commendation of himself for dancing and fencing, Sir Toby
answers—‘Wherefore are these things hid? Wherefore have these gifts a
curtain before them? Are they like to take dust like mistress Moll’s
picture? Why dost thou not go to church in a galliard, and come home in
a coranto? My very walk should be a jig! I would not so much as make
water but in a cinque-pace. What dost thou mean? Is this a world to hide
virtues in? I did think by the excellent constitution of thy leg, it was
framed under the star of a galliard!’—How Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and the
Clown afterwards _chirp over their cups_, how they ‘rouse the night-owl
in a catch, able to draw three souls out of one weaver!’ What can be
better than Sir Toby’s unanswerable answer to Malvolio, ‘Dost thou
think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and
ale?’—In a word, the best turn is given to every thing, instead of the
worst. There is a constant infusion of the romantic and enthusiastic, in
proportion as the characters are natural and sincere: whereas, in the
more artificial style of comedy, every thing gives way to ridicule and
indifference, there being nothing left but affectation on one side, and
incredulity on the other.—Much as we like Shakespear’s comedies, we
cannot agree with Dr. Johnson that they are better than his tragedies;
nor do we like them half so well. If his inclination to comedy sometimes
led him to trifle with the seriousness of tragedy, the poetical and
impassioned passages are the best parts of his comedies. The great and
secret charm of TWELFTH NIGHT is the character of Viola. Much as we like
catches and cakes and ale, there is something that we like better. We
have a friendship for Sir Toby; we patronise Sir Andrew; we have an
understanding with the Clown, a sneaking kindness for Maria and her
rogueries; we feel a regard for Malvolio, and sympathise with his
gravity, his smiles, his cross garters, his yellow stockings, and
imprisonment in the stocks. But there is something that excites in us a
stronger feeling than all this—it is Viola’s confession of her love.
‘_Duke._ What’s her history?
_Viola._ _A blank, my lord, she never told her love_:
She let concealment, like a worm i’ th’ bud,
Feed on her damask cheek: she pin’d in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy,
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. _Was not this love indeed?_
We men may say more, swear more, but indeed,
Our shews are more than will; for still we prove
Much in our vows, but little in our 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;—and yet I know not.’—
Shakespear alone could describe the effect of his own poetry.
‘Oh, it came o’er the ear like the sweet south
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour.’
What we so much admire here is not the image of Patience on a monument,
which has been generally quoted, but the lines before and after it.
‘They give a very echo to the seat where love is throned.’ How long ago
it is since we first learnt to repeat them; and still, still they
vibrate on the heart, like the sounds which the passing wind draws from
the trembling strings of a harp left on some desert shore! There are
other passages of not less impassioned sweetness. Such is Olivia’s
address to Sebastian, whom she supposes to have already deceived her in
a promise of marriage.
‘Blame not this haste of mine: if you mean well,
Now go with me and with this holy man
Into the chantry by: there before him,
And underneath that consecrated roof,
Plight me the full assurance of your faith,
_That my most jealous and too doubtful soul
May live at peace_.’
We have already said something of Shakespear’s songs. One of the most
beautiful of them occurs in this play, with a preface of his own to it.
‘_Duke._ O fellow, come, the song we had last night.
Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain;
The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,
And the free maids that weave their thread with bones,
Do use to chaunt it: it is silly sooth,
And dallies with the innocence of love,
Like the old age.
SONG.
Come away, come away, death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid;
Fly away, fly away, breath;
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
O prepare it;
My part of death no one so true
Did share it.
Not a flower, not a flower sweet,
On my black coffin let there be strewn;
Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown:
A thousand thousand sighs to save,
Lay me, O! where
Sad true-love never find my grave,
To weep there.’
Who after this will say that Shakespear’s genius was only fitted for
comedy? Yet after reading other parts of this play, and particularly the
garden-scene where Malvolio picks up the letter, if we were to say that
his genius for comedy was less than his genius for tragedy, it would
perhaps only prove that our own taste in such matters is more saturnine
than mercurial.
‘_Enter_ MARIA.
_Sir Toby._ Here comes the little villain:—How now, my nettle of
India?
_Maria._ Get ye all three into the box-tree: Malvolio’s coming down
this walk: he has been yonder i’ the sun, practising behaviour to
his own shadow this half hour: observe him, for the love of mockery;
for I know this letter will make a contemplative idiot of him.
Close, in the name of jesting! Lie thou there; for here come’s the
trout that must be caught with tickling.
[_They hide themselves. Maria throws down a letter, and Exit._
_Enter_ MALVOLIO.
_Malvolio._ ’Tis but fortune; all is fortune. Maria once told me,
she did affect me; and I have heard herself come thus near, that,
should she fancy, it should be one of my complexion. Besides, she
uses me with a more exalted respect than any one else that follows
her. What should I think on’t?
_Sir Toby._ Here’s an over-weening rogue!
_Fabian._ O, peace! Contemplation makes a rare turkey-cock of him;
how he jets under his advanced plumes!
_Sir Andrew._ ‘Slight, I could so beat the rogue:—
_Sir Toby._ Peace, I say.
_Malvolio._ To be count Malvolio;—
_Sir Toby._ Ah, rogue!
_Sir Andrew._ Pistol him, pistol him.
_Sir Toby._ Peace, peace!
_Malvolio._ There is example for’t; the lady of the Strachy married
the yeoman of the wardrobe.
_Sir Andrew._ Fie on him, Jezebel!
_Fabian._ O, peace! now he’s deeply in; look, how imagination blows
him.
_Malvolio._ Having been three months married to her, sitting in my
chair of state,——
_Sir Toby._ O for a stone bow, to hit him in the eye!
_Malvolio._ Calling my officers about me, in my branch’d velvet
gown; having come from a day-bed, where I have left Olivia sleeping.
_Sir Toby._ Fire and brimstone!
_Fabian._ O peace, peace!
_Malvolio._ And then to have the humour of state: and after a demure
travel of regard,——telling them, I know my place, as I would they
should do theirs,—to ask for my kinsman Toby.——
_Sir Toby._ Bolts and shackles!
_Fabian._ O, peace, peace, peace! now, now.
_Malvolio._ Seven of my people, with an obedient start, make out for
him; I frown the while; and, perchance, wind up my watch, or play
with some rich jewel. Toby approaches; curtsies there to me.
_Sir Toby._ Shall this fellow live?
_Fabian._ Though our silence be drawn from us with cares, yet peace.
_Malvolio._ I extend my hand to him thus, quenching my familiar
smile with an austere regard to controul.
_Sir Toby._ And does not Toby take you a blow o’ the lips then?
_Malvolio._ Saying—Cousin Toby, my fortunes having cast me on your
niece, give me this prerogative of speech;—
_Sir Toby._ What, what?
_Malvolio._ You must amend your drunkenness.
_Fabian._ Nay, patience, or we break the sinews of our plot.
_Malvolio._ Besides, you waste the treasure of your time with a
foolish knight—
_Sir Andrew._ That’s me, I warrant you.
_Malvolio._ One Sir Andrew——
_Sir Andrew._ I knew, ’twas I; for many do call me fool.
_Malvolio._ What employment have we here? [_Taking up the letter._’
The letter and his comments on it are equally good. If poor Malvolio’s
treatment afterwards is a little hard, poetical justice is done in the
uneasiness which Olivia suffers on account of her mistaken attachment to
Cesario, as her insensibility to the violence of the Duke’s passion is
atoned for by the discovery of Viola’s concealed love of him.
THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA
This is little more than the first outlines of a comedy loosely sketched
in. It is the story of a novel dramatised with very little labour or
pretension; yet there are passages of high poetical spirit, and of
inimitable quaintness of humour, which are undoubtedly Shakespear’s, and
there is throughout the conduct of the fable a careless grace and
felicity which marks it for his. One of the editors (we believe Mr.
Pope) remarks in a marginal note to the TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA—
‘It is observable (I know not for what cause) that the style of this
comedy is less figurative, and more natural and unaffected than the
greater part of this author’s, though supposed to be one of the
first he wrote.’
Yet so little does the editor appear to have made up his mind upon this
subject, that we find the following note to the very next (the second)
scene.
‘This whole scene, like many others in these plays (some of which I
believe were written by Shakespear, and others interpolated by the
players) is composed of the lowest and most trifling conceits, to be
accounted for only by the gross taste of the age he lived in:
_Populo ut placerent_. I wish I had authority to leave them out, but
I have done all I could, set a mark of reprobation upon them,
throughout this edition.’
It is strange that our fastidious critic should fall so soon from
praising to reprobating. The style of the familiar parts of this comedy
is indeed made up of conceits—low they may be for what we know, but then
they are not poor, but rich ones. The scene of Launce with his dog (not
that in the second, but that in the fourth act) is a perfect treat in
the way of farcical drollery and invention; nor do we think Speed’s
manner of proving his master to be in love deficient in wit or sense,
though the style may be criticised as not simple enough for the modern
taste.
‘_Valentine._ Why, how know you that I am in love?
_Speed._ Marry, by these special marks: first, you have learned,
like Sir Protheus, to wreathe your arms like a malcontent, to relish
a love-song like a robin-red-breast, to walk alone like one that had
the pestilence, to sigh like a school-boy that had lost his ABC, to
weep like a young wench that had buried her grandam, to fast like
one that takes diet, to watch like one that fears robbing, to speak
puling like a beggar at Hallowmas. You were wont, when you laughed,
to crow like a cock; when you walked, to walk like one of the lions;
when you fasted, it was presently after dinner; when you looked
sadly, it was for want of money; and now you are metamorphosed with
a mistress, that when I look on you, I can hardly think you my
master.’
The tender scenes in this play, though not so highly wrought as in some
others, have often much sweetness of sentiment and expression. There is
something pretty and playful in the conversation of Julia with her maid,
when she shews such a disposition to coquetry about receiving the letter
from Protheus; and her behaviour afterwards and her disappointment, when
she finds him faithless to his vows, remind us at a distance of Imogen’s
tender constancy. Her answer to Lucetta, who advises her against
following her lover in disguise, is a beautiful piece of poetry.
‘_Lucetta._ I do not seek to quench your love’s hot fire,
But qualify the fire’s extremest rage,
Lest it should burn above the bounds of reason.
_Julia._ The more thou damm’st it up, the more it burns;
The current that with gentle murmur glides,
Thou know’st, being stopp’d, impatiently doth rage;
But when his fair course is not hindered,
He makes sweet music with th’ enamell’d stones,
Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge
He overtaketh in his pilgrimage:
And so by many winding nooks he strays,
With willing sport, to the wild ocean.[70]
Then let me go, and hinder not my course;
I’ll be as patient as a gentle stream,
And make a pastime of each weary step,
Till the last step have brought me to my love;
And there I’ll rest, as after much turmoil,
A blessed soul doth in Elysium.’
If Shakespear indeed had written only this and other passages in the TWO
GENTLEMEN OF VERONA, he would _almost_ have deserved Milton’s praise of
him—
‘And sweetest Shakespear, Fancy’s child,
Warbles his native wood-notes wild.’
But as it is, he deserves rather more praise than this.
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
This is a play that in spite of the change of manners and prejudices
still holds undisputed possession of the stage. Shakespear’s malignant
has outlived Mr. Cumberland’s benevolent Jew. In proportion as Shylock
has ceased to be a popular bugbear, ‘baited with the rabble’s curse,’ he
becomes a half-favourite with the philosophical part of the audience,
who are disposed to think that Jewish revenge is at least as good as
Christian injuries. Shylock is _a good hater_; ‘a man no less sinned
against than sinning.’ If he carries his revenge too far, yet he has
strong grounds for ‘the lodged hate he bears Anthonio,’ which he
explains with equal force of eloquence and reason. He seems the
depositary of the vengeance of his race; and though the long habit of
brooding over daily insults and injuries has crusted over his temper
with inveterate misanthropy, and hardened him against the contempt of
mankind, this adds but little to the triumphant pretensions of his
enemies. There is a strong, quick, and deep sense of justice mixed up
with the gall and bitterness of his resentment. The constant
apprehension of being burnt alive, plundered, banished, reviled, and
trampled on, might be supposed to sour the most forbearing nature, and
to take something from that ‘milk of human kindness,’ with which his
persecutors contemplated his indignities. The desire of revenge is
almost inseparable from the sense of wrong; and we can hardly help
sympathising with the proud spirit, hid beneath his ‘Jewish gaberdine,’
stung to madness by repeated undeserved provocations, and labouring to
throw off the load of obloquy and oppression heaped upon him and all his
tribe by one desperate act of ‘lawful’ revenge, till the ferociousness
of the means by which he is to execute his purpose, and the pertinacity
with which he adheres to it, turn us against him; but even at last, when
disappointed of the sanguinary revenge with which he had glutted his
hopes, and exposed to beggary and contempt by the letter of the law on
which he had insisted with so little remorse, we pity him, and think him
hardly dealt with by his judges. In all his answers and retorts upon his
adversaries, he has the best not only of the argument but of the
question, reasoning on their own principles and practice. They are so
far from allowing of any measure of equal dealing, of common justice or
humanity between themselves and the Jew, that even when they come to ask
a favour of him, and Shylock reminds them that ‘on such a day they spit
upon him, another spurned him, another called him dog, and for these
curtesies request he’ll lend them so much monies’—Anthonio, his old
enemy, instead of any acknowledgment of the shrewdness and justice of
his remonstrance, which would have been preposterous in a respectable
Catholic merchant in those times, threatens him with a repetition of the
same treatment—
‘I am as like to call thee so again,
To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too.’
After this, the appeal to the Jew’s mercy, as if there were any common
principle of right and wrong between them, is the rankest hypocrisy, or
the blindest prejudice; and the Jew’s answer to one of Anthonio’s
friends, who asks him what his pound of forfeit flesh is good for, is
irresistible—
To bait fish withal; if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my
revenge. He hath disgrac’d me, and hinder’d me of half a million,
laughed at my losses, mock’d at my gains, scorn’d my nation,
thwarted my bargains, cool’d my friends, heated mine enemies; and
what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes; hath not a Jew
hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same
diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same
winter and summer that a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not
bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we
not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like
you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a
Christian, what is his humility? revenge. If a Christian wrong a
Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? why
revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go
hard but I will better the instruction.’
The whole of the trial-scene, both before and after the entrance of
Portia, is a master-piece of dramatic skill. The legal acuteness, the
passionate declamations, the sound maxims of jurisprudence, the wit and
irony interspersed in it, the fluctuations of hope and fear in the
different persons, and the completeness and suddenness of the
catastrophe, cannot be surpassed. Shylock, who is his own counsel,
defends himself well, and is triumphant on all the general topics that
are urged against him, and only fails through a legal flaw. Take the
following as an instance:—
‘_Shylock._ What judgment shall I dread, doing no wrong?
You have among you many a purchas’d slave,
Which like your asses, and your dogs, and mules,
You use in abject and in slavish part,
Because you bought them:—shall I say to you,
Let them be free, marry them to your heirs?
Why sweat they under burdens? let their beds
Be made as soft as yours, and let their palates
Be season’d with such viands? you will answer,
The slaves are ours:—so do I answer you:
The pound of flesh, which I demand of him,
Is dearly bought, is mine, and I will have it:
If you deny me, fie upon your law!
There is no force in the decrees of Venice:
I stand for judgment: answer; shall I have it?’
The keenness of his revenge awakes all his faculties; and he beats back
all opposition to his purpose, whether grave or gay, whether of wit or
argument, with an equal degree of earnestness and self-possession. His
character is displayed as distinctly in other less prominent parts of
the play, and we may collect from a few sentences the history of his
life—his descent and origin, his thrift and domestic economy, his
affection for his daughter, whom he loves next to his wealth, his
courtship and his first present to Leah, his wife! ‘I would not have
parted with it’ (the ring which he first gave her) ‘for a wilderness of
monkies!’ What a fine Hebraism is implied in this expression!
Portia is not a very great favourite with us; neither are we in love
with her maid, Nerissa. Portia has a certain degree of affectation and
pedantry about her, which is very unusual in Shakespear’s women, but
which perhaps was a proper qualification for the office of a ‘civil
doctor,’ which she undertakes and executes so successfully. The speech
about Mercy is very well; but there are a thousand finer ones in
Shakespear. We do not admire the scene of the caskets: and object
entirely to the Black Prince, Morocchius. We should like Jessica better
if she had not deceived and robbed her father, and Lorenzo, if he had
not married a Jewess, though he thinks he has a right to wrong a Jew.
The dialogue between this newly-married couple by moonlight, beginning
‘On such a night,’ etc. is a collection of classical elegancies.
Launcelot, the Jew’s man, is an honest fellow. The dilemma in which he
describes himself placed between his ‘conscience and the fiend,’ the one
of which advises him to run away from his master’s service and the other
to stay in it, is exquisitely humourous.
Gratiano is a very admirable subordinate character. He is the jester of
the piece: yet one speech of his, in his own defence, contains a whole
volume of wisdom.
‘_Anthonio._ I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano,
A stage, where every one must play his part;
And mine a sad one.
_Gratiano._ Let me play the fool:
With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come;
And let my liver rather heat with wine,
Than my heart cool with mortifying groans.
Why should a man, whose blood is warm within,
Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster?
Sleep when he wakes? and creep into the jaundice
By being peevish? I tell thee what, Anthonio—
I love thee, and it is my love that speaks;—
There are a sort of men, whose visages
Do cream and mantle like a standing pond:
And do a wilful stillness entertain,
With purpose to be drest in an opinion
Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit;
As who should say, _I am Sir Oracle,
And when I ope my lips, let no dog bark_!
O, my Anthonio, I do know of these,
That therefore only are reputed wise,
For saying nothing; who, I am very sure,
If they should speak, would almost damn those ears,
Which hearing them, would call their brothers, fools.
I’ll tell thee more of this another time:
But fish not with this melancholy bait,
For this fool’s gudgeon, this opinion,’
Gratiano’s speech on the philosophy of love, and the effect of habit in
taking off the force of passion, is as full of spirit and good sense.
The graceful winding up of this play in the fifth act, after the tragic
business is despatched, is one of the happiest instances of Shakespear’s
knowledge of the principles of the drama. We do not mean the pretended
quarrel between Portia and Nerissa and their husbands about the rings,
which is amusing enough, but the conversation just before and after the
return of Portia to her own house, beginning ‘How sweet the moonlight
sleeps upon this bank,’ and ending ‘Peace! how the moon sleeps with
Endymion, and would not be awaked.’ There is a number of beautiful
thoughts crowded into that short space, and linked together by the most
natural transitions.
When we first went to see Mr. Kean in Shylock, we expected to see, what
we had been used to see, a decrepid old man, bent with age and ugly with
mental deformity, grinning with deadly malice, with the venom of his
heart congealed in the expression of his countenance, sullen, morose,
gloomy, inflexible, brooding over one idea, that of his hatred, and
fixed on one unalterable purpose, that of his revenge. We were
disappointed, because we had taken our idea from other actors, not from
the play. There is no proof there that Shylock is old, but a single
line, ‘Bassanio and _old_ Shylock, both stand forth,’—which does not
imply that he is infirm with age—and the circumstance that he has a
daughter marriageable, which does not imply that he is old at all. It
would be too much to say that his body should be made crooked and
deformed to answer to his mind, which is bowed down and warped with
prejudices and passion. That he has but one idea, is not true; he has
more ideas than any other person in the piece; and if he is intense and
inveterate in the pursuit of his purpose, he shews the utmost
elasticity, vigour, and presence of mind, in the means of attaining it.
But so rooted was our habitual impression of the part from seeing it
caricatured in the representation, that it was only from a careful
perusal of the play itself that we saw our error. The stage is not in
general the best place to study our author’s characters in. It is too
often filled with traditional common-place conceptions of the part,
handed down from sire to son, and suited to the taste of _the great
vulgar and the small_.—‘’Tis an unweeded garden: things rank and gross
do merely gender in it!’ If a man of genius comes once in an age to
clear away the rubbish, to make it fruitful and wholesome, they cry,
‘’Tis a bad school: it may be like nature, it may be like Shakespear,
but it is not like us.’ Admirable critics!
THE WINTER’S TALE
We wonder that Mr. Pope should have entertained doubts of the
genuineness of this play. He was, we suppose, shocked (as a certain
critic suggests) at the Chorus, Time, leaping over sixteen years with
his crutch between the third and fourth act, and at Antigonus’s landing
with the infant Perdita on the sea-coast of Bohemia. These slips or
blemishes however do not prove it not to be Shakespear’s; for he was as
likely to fall into them as any body; but we do not know any body but
himself who could produce the beauties. The _stuff_ of which the tragic
passion is composed, the romantic sweetness, the comic humour, are
evidently his. Even the crabbed and tortuous style of the speeches of
Leontes, reasoning on his own jealousy, beset with doubts and fears, and
entangled more and more in the thorny labyrinth, bears every mark of
Shakespear’s peculiar manner of conveying the painful struggle of
different thoughts and feelings, labouring for utterance, and almost
strangled in the birth. For instance:—
‘Ha’ not you seen, Camillo?
(But that’s past doubt; you have, or your eye-glass
Is thicker than a cuckold’s horn) or heard,
(For to a vision so apparent, rumour
Cannot be mute) or thought (for cogitation
Resides not within man that does not think)
My wife is slippery? If thou wilt, confess,
Or else be impudently negative,
To have nor eyes, nor ears, nor thought.’—
Here Leontes is confounded with his passion, and does not know which way
to turn himself, to give words to the anguish, rage, and apprehension,
which tug at his breast. It is only as he is worked up into a clearer
conviction of his wrongs by insisting on the grounds of his unjust
suspicions to Camillo, who irritates him by his opposition, that he
bursts out into the following vehement strain of bitter indignation: yet
even here his passion staggers, and is as it were oppressed with its own
intensity.
‘Is whispering nothing?
Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses?
Kissing with inside lip? stopping the career
Of laughter with a sigh? (a note infallible
Of breaking honesty!) horsing foot on foot?
Skulking in corners? wishing clocks more swift?
Hours, minutes? the noon, midnight? and all eyes
Blind with the pin and web, but theirs; theirs only,
That would, unseen, be wicked? is this nothing?
Why then the world, and all that’s in’t, is nothing,
The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia’s nothing,
My wife is nothing!’
The character of Hermione is as much distinguished by its saintlike
resignation and patient forbearance, as that of Paulina is by her
zealous and spirited remonstrances against the injustice done to the
queen, and by her devoted attachment to her misfortunes. Hermione’s
restoration to her husband and her child, after her long separation from
them, is as affecting in itself as it is striking in the representation.
Camillo, and the old shepherd and his son, are subordinate but not
uninteresting instruments in the developement of the plot, and though
last, not least, comes Autolycus, a very pleasant, thriving rogue; and
(what is the best feather in the cap of all knavery) he escapes with
impunity in the end.
THE WINTER’S TALE is one of the best-acting of our author’s plays. We
remember seeing it with great pleasure many years ago. It was on the
night that King took leave of the stage, when he and Mrs. Jordan played
together in the after-piece of the Wedding-day. Nothing could go off
with more _éclat_, with more spirit, and grandeur of effect. Mrs.
Siddons played Hermione, and in the last scene acted the painted statue
to the life—with true monumental dignity and noble passion; Mr. Kemble,
in Leontes, worked himself up into a very fine classical phrensy; and
Bannister, as Autolycus, roared as loud for pity as a sturdy beggar
could do who felt none of the pain he counterfeited, and was sound of
wind and limb. We shall never see these parts so acted again; or if we
did, it would be in vain. Actors grow old, or no longer surprise us by
their novelty. But true poetry, like nature, is always young; and we
still read the courtship of Florizel and Perdita, as we welcome the
return of spring, with the same feelings as ever.
‘_Florizel._ Thou dearest Perdita,
With these forc’d thoughts, I pr’ythee, darken not
The mirth o’ the feast: or, I’ll be thine, my fair,
Or not my father’s: for I cannot be
Mine own, nor any thing to any, if
I be not thine. To this I am most constant,
Tho’ destiny say, No. Be merry, gentle;
Strangle such thoughts as these, with any thing
That you behold the while. Your guests are coming:
Lift up your countenance; as it were the day
Of celebration of that nuptial, which
We two have sworn shall come.
_Perdita._ O lady fortune,
Stand you auspicious!
_Enter Shepherd, Clown_, MOPSA, DORCAS, _Servants; with_ POLIXENES,
_and_ CAMILLO, _disguised_.
_Florizel._ See, your guests approach.
Address yourself to entertain them sprightly,
And let’s be red with mirth.
_Shepherd._ Fie, daughter! when my old wife liv’d, upon
This day, she was both pantler, butler, cook;
Both dame and servant: welcom’d all, serv’d all:
Would sing her song, and dance her turn: now here
At upper end o’ the table, now i’ the middle:
On his shoulder, and his: her face o’ fire
With labour; and the thing she took to quench it
She would to each one sip. You are retir’d,
As if you were a feasted one, and not
The hostess of the meeting. Pray you, bid
These unknown friends to us welcome; for it is
A way to make us better friends, more known.
Come, quench your blushes; and present yourself
That which you are, mistress o’ the feast. Come on,
And bid us welcome to your sheep-shearing,
As your good flock shall prosper.
_Perdita._ Sir, welcome! [_To Polixenes and Camillo._
It is my father’s will I should take on me
The hostess-ship o’ the day: you’re welcome, sir!
Give me those flowers there, Dorcas.—Reverend sirs,
For you there’s rosemary and rue; these keep
Seeming, and savour, all the winter long:
Grace and remembrance be unto you both,
And welcome to our shearing!
_Polixenes._ Shepherdess,
(A fair one are you) well you fit our ages
With flowers of winter.
_Perdita._ Sir, the year growing ancient,
Not yet on summer’s death, nor on the birth
Of trembling winter, the fairest flowers o’ the season
Are our carnations, and streak’d gilly-flowers,
Which some call nature’s bastards: of that kind
Our rustic garden’s barren; and I care not
To get slips of them.
_Polixenes._ Wherefore, gentle maiden,
Do you neglect them?
_Perdita._ For I have heard it said
There is an art, which, in their piedness, shares
With great creating nature.
_Polixenes._ Say, there be:
Yet nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean: so, o’er that art
Which you say, adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scyon to the wildest stock;
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art
Which does mend nature, change it rather: but
The art itself is nature.
_Perdita._ So it is.[71]
_Polixenes._ Then make your garden rich in gilly-flowers,
And do not call them bastards.
_Perdita._ I’ll not put
The dibble in earth, to set one slip of them;[71]
No more than, were I painted, I would wish
This youth should say, ‘twere well; and only therefore
Desire to breed by me.—Here’s flowers for you;
Hot lavender, mints, savoury, marjoram;
The marigold, that goes to bed with the sun,
And with him rises, weeping: these are flowers
Of middle summer, and, I think, they are given
To men of middle age. You are very welcome.
_Camillo._ I should leave grazing, were I of your flock,
And only live by gazing.
_Perdita._ Out, alas!
You’d be so lean, that blasts of January
Would blow you through and through. Now my fairest friends,
I would I had some flowers o’ the spring, that might
Become your time of day; and your’s, and your’s,
That wear upon your virgin branches yet
Your maiden-heads growing: O Proserpina,
For the flowers now, that, frighted, thou let’st fall
From Dis’s waggon! daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty: violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes,
Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses,
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phœbus in his strength (a malady
Most incident to maids); bold oxlips, and
The crown-imperial; lilies of all kinds,
The fleur-de-lis being one! O, these I lack
To make you garlands of; and my sweet friend
To strow him o’er and o’er.
_Florizel._ What, like a corse?
_Perdita._ No, like a bank, for love to lie and play on;
Not like a corse; or if—not to be buried,
But quick, and in mine arms. Come take your flowers;
Methinks, I play as I have seen them do
In Whitsun pastorals: sure this robe of mine
Does change my disposition.
_Florizel._ What you do,
Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet,
I’d have you do it ever: when you sing,
I’d have you buy and sell so; so, give alms;
Pray, so; and for the ordering your affairs,
To sing them too. When you do dance, I wish you
A wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that: move still, still so,
And own no other function. Each your doing,
So singular in each particular,
Crowns what you’re doing in the present deeds,
That all your acts are queens.
_Perdita._ O Doricles,
Your praises are too large; but that your youth
And the true blood, which peeps forth fairly through it,
Do plainly give you out an unstained shepherd;
With wisdom I might fear, my Doricles,
You woo’d me the false way.
_Florizel._ I think you have
As little skill to fear, as I have purpose
To put you to’t. But come, our dance, I pray:
Your hand, my Perdita: so turtles pair,
That never mean to part.
_Perdita._ I’ll swear for ‘em.
_Polixenes._ This is the prettiest low-born lass that ever
Ran on the green-sward; nothing she does, or seems,
But smacks of something greater than herself,
Too noble for this place.
_Camillo._ He tells her something
That makes her blood look out: good sooth she is
The queen of curds and cream.’
This delicious scene is interrupted by the father of the prince
discovering himself to Florizel, and haughtily breaking off the intended
match between his son and Perdita. When Polixenes goes out, Perdita
says,
‘Even here undone:
I was not much afraid; for once or twice
I was about to speak; and tell him plainly,
The self-same sun that shines upon his court,
Hides not his visage from our cottage, but
Looks on’t alike. Wilt please you, sir, be gone? [_To Florizel._
I told you what would come of this. Beseech you,
Of your own state take care: this dream of mine,
Being now awake, I’ll queen it no inch farther,
But milk my ewes and weep.’
As Perdita, the supposed shepherdess, turns out to be the daughter of
Hermione, and a princess in disguise, both feelings of the pride of
birth and the claims of nature are satisfied by the fortunate event of
the story, and the fine romance of poetry is reconciled to the strictest
court-etiquette.
ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL
ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL is one of the most pleasing of our author’s
comedies. The interest is however more of a serious than of a comic
nature. The character of Helen is one of great sweetness and delicacy.
She is placed in circumstances of the most critical kind, and has to
court her husband both as a virgin and a wife: yet the most scrupulous
nicety of female modesty is not once violated. There is not one thought
or action that ought to bring a blush into her cheeks, or that for a
moment lessens her in our esteem. Perhaps the romantic attachment of a
beautiful and virtuous girl to one placed above her hopes by the
circumstances of birth and fortune, was never so exquisitely expressed
as in the reflections which she utters when young Roussillon leaves his
mother’s house, under whose protection she has been brought up with him,
to repair to the French king’s court.
‘_Helena._ Oh, were that all—I think not on my father,
And these great tears grace his remembrance more
Than those I shed for him. What was he like?
I have forgot him. My imagination
Carries no favour in it, but Bertram’s.
I am undone, there is no living, none
If Bertram be away. It were all one
That I should love a bright particular star,
And think to wed it; he is so above me:
In his bright radiance and collateral light
Must I be comforted, not in his sphere.
Th’ ambition in my love thus plagues itself;
The hind that would be mated by the lion,
Must die for love. ’Twas pretty, tho’ a plague,
To see him every hour, to sit and draw
His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls
In our heart’s table: heart too capable
Of every line and trick of his sweet favour.
But now he’s gone, and my idolatrous fancy
Must sanctify his relics.’
The interest excited by this beautiful picture of a fond and innocent
heart is kept up afterwards by her resolution to follow him to France,
the success of her experiment in restoring the king’s health, her
demanding Bertram in marriage as a recompense, his leaving her in
disdain, her interview with him afterwards disguised as Diana, a young
lady whom he importunes with his secret addresses, and their final
reconciliation when the consequences of her stratagem and the proofs of
her love are fully made known. The persevering gratitude of the French
king to his benefactress, who cures him of a languishing distemper by a
prescription hereditary in her family, the indulgent kindness of the
Countess, whose pride of birth yields, almost without a struggle, to her
affection for Helen, the honesty and uprightness of the good old lord
Lafeu, make very interesting parts of the picture. The wilful
stubbornness and youthful petulance of Bertram are also very admirably
described. The comic part of the play turns on the folly, boasting, and
cowardice of Parolles, a parasite and hanger-on of Bertram’s, the
detection of whose false pretensions to bravery and honour forms a very
amusing episode. He is first found out by the old lord Lafeu, who says,
‘The soul of this man is in his clothes’; and it is proved afterwards
that his heart is in his tongue, and that both are false and hollow. The
adventure of ‘the bringing off of his drum’ has become proverbial as a
satire on all ridiculous and blustering undertakings which the person
never means to perform: nor can any thing be more severe than what one
of the bye-standers remarks upon what Parolles says of himself, ‘Is it
possible he should know what he is, and be that he is?’ Yet Parolles
himself gives the best solution of the difficulty afterwards when he is
thankful to escape with his life and the loss of character; for, so that
he can live on, he is by no means squeamish about the loss of
pretensions, to which he had sense enough to know he had no real claim,
and which he had assumed only as a means to live.
‘_Parolles._ Yet I am thankful: if my heart were great,
‘Twould burst at this. Captain I’ll be no more,
But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft
As captain shall. Simply the thing I am
Shall make me live: who knows himself a braggart,
Let him fear this; for it shall come to pass,
That every braggart shall be found an ass.
Rust sword, cool blushes, and Parolles live
Safest in shame; being fool’d, by fool’ry thrive;
There’s place and means for every man alive.
I’ll after them.’
The story of ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL, and of several others of
Shakespear’s plays, is taken from Boccacio. The poet has dramatised the
original novel with great skill and comic spirit, and has preserved all
the beauty of character and sentiment without _improving upon_ it, which
was impossible. There is indeed in Boccacio’s serious pieces a truth, a
pathos, and an exquisite refinement of sentiment, which is hardly to be
met with in any other prose writer whatever. Justice has not been done
him by the world. He has in general passed for a mere narrator of
lascivious tales or idle jests. This character probably originated in
his obnoxious attacks on the monks, and has been kept up by the
grossness of mankind, who revenged their own want of refinement on
Boccacio, and only saw in his writings what suited the coarseness of
their own tastes. But the truth is, that he has carried sentiment of
every kind to its very highest purity and perfection. By sentiment we
would here understand the habitual workings of some one powerful
feeling, where the heart reposes almost entirely upon itself, without
the violent excitement of opposing duties or untoward circumstances. In
this way, nothing ever came up to the story of Frederigo Alberigi and
his Falcon. The perseverance in attachment, the spirit of gallantry and
generosity displayed in it, has no parallel in the history of heroical
sacrifices. The feeling is so unconscious too, and involuntary, is
brought out in such small, unlooked-for, and unostentatious
circumstances, as to show it to have been woven into the very nature and
soul of the author. The story of Isabella is scarcely less fine, and is
more affecting in the circumstances and in the catastrophe. Dryden has
done justice to the impassioned eloquence of the Tancred and Sigismunda;
but has not given an adequate idea of the wild preternatural interest of
the story of Honoria. Cimon and Iphigene is by no means one of the best,
notwithstanding the popularity of the subject. The proof of unalterable
affection given in the story of Jeronymo, and the simple touches of
nature and picturesque beauty in the story of the two holiday lovers,
who were poisoned by tasting of a leaf in the garden at Florence, are
perfect master-pieces. The epithet of Divine was well bestowed on this
great painter of the human heart. The invention implied in his different
tales is immense: but we are not to infer that it is all his own. He
probably availed himself of all the common traditions which were
floating in his time, and which he was the first to appropriate. Homer
appears the most original of all authors—probably for no other reason
than that we can trace the plagiarism no farther. Boccacio has furnished
subjects to numberless writers since his time, both dramatic and
narrative. The story of Griselda is borrowed from his Decameron by
Chaucer; as is the Knight’s Tale (Palamon and Arcite) from his poem of
the Theseid.
LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST
If we were to part with any of the author’s comedies, it should be this.
Yet we should be loth to part with Don Adriano de Armado, that mighty
potentate of nonsense, or his page, that handful of wit; with Nathaniel
the curate, or Holofernes the schoolmaster, and their dispute after
dinner on ‘the golden cadences of poesy’; with Costard the clown, or
Dull the constable. Biron is too accomplished a character to be lost to
the world, and yet he could not appear without his fellow courtiers and
the king: and if we were to leave out the ladies, the gentlemen would
have no mistresses. So that we believe we may let the whole play stand
as it is, and we shall hardly venture to ‘set a mark of reprobation on
it.’ Still we have some objections to the style, which we think savours
more of the pedantic spirit of Shakespear’s time than of his own genius;
more of controversial divinity, and the logic of Peter Lombard, than of
the inspiration of the Muse. It transports us quite as much to the
manners of the court, and the quirks of courts of law, as to the scenes
of nature or the fairy-land of his own imagination. Shakespear has set
himself to imitate the tone of polite conversation then prevailing among
the fair, the witty, and the learned, and he has imitated it but too
faithfully. It is as if the hand of Titian had been employed to give
grace to the curls of a full-bottomed periwig, or Raphael had attempted
to give expression to the tapestry figures in the House of Lords.
Shakespear has put an excellent description of this fashionable jargon
into the mouth of the critical Holofernes ‘as too picked, too spruce,
too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it’;
and nothing can be more marked than the difference when he breaks loose
from the trammels he had imposed on himself, ‘as light as bird from
brake,’ and speaks in his own person. We think, for instance, that in
the following soliloquy the poet has fairly got the start of Queen
Elizabeth and her maids of honour:—
‘_Biron._ O! and I forsooth in love,
I that have been love’s whip;
A very beadle to an amorous sigh:
A critic; nay, a night-watch constable,
A domineering pedant o’er the boy,
Than whom no mortal more magnificent.
This wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy,
This signior Junio, giant dwarf, Dan Cupid,
Regent of love-rhymes, lord of folded arms,
Th’ anointed sovereign of sighs and groans:
Liege of all loiterers and malecontents,
Dread prince of plackets, king of codpieces,
Sole imperator, and great general
Of trotting parators (O my little heart!)
And I to be a corporal of his field,
And wear his colours like a tumbler’s hoop?
What? I love! I sue! I seek a wife!
A woman, that is like a German clock,
Still a repairing; ever out of frame;
And never going aright, being a watch,
And being watch’d, that it may still go right?
Nay, to be perjur’d, which is worst of all:
And among three to love the worst of all,
A whitely wanton with a velvet brow,
With two pitch balls stuck in her face for eyes;
Ay, and by heav’n, one that will do the deed,
Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard;
And I to sigh for her! to watch for her!
To pray for her! Go to; it is a plague
That Cupid will impose for my neglect
Of his almighty dreadful little might.
Well, I will love, write, sigh, pray, sue, and groan:
Some men must love my lady, and some Joan.’
The character of Biron drawn by Rosaline and that which Biron gives of
Boyet are equally happy. The observations on the use and abuse of study,
and on the power of beauty to quicken the understanding as well as the
senses, are excellent. The scene which has the greatest dramatic effect
is that in which Biron, the king, Longaville, and Dumain, successively
detect each other and are detected in their breach of their vow and in
their profession of attachment to their several mistresses, in which
they suppose themselves to be overheard by no one. The reconciliation
between these lovers and their sweethearts is also very good, and the
penance which Rosaline imposes on Biron, before he can expect to gain
her consent to marry him, full of propriety and beauty.
‘_Rosaline._ Oft have I heard of you, my lord Biron,
Before I saw you: and the world’s large tongue
Proclaims you for a man replete with mocks;
Full of comparisons, and wounding flouts;
Which you on all estates will execute,
That lie within the mercy of your wit.
To weed this wormwood from your faithful brain;
And therewithal to win me, if you please,
(Without the which I am not to be won)
You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day
Visit the speechless sick, and still converse
With groaning wretches; and your task shall be,
With all the fierce endeavour of your wit,
T’ enforce the pained impotent to smile.
_Biron._ To move wild laughter in the throat of death?
It cannot be: it is impossible:
Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.
_Rosaline._ Why, that’s the way to choke a gibing spirit,
Whose influence is begot of that loose grace,
Which shallow laughing hearers give to fools:
A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear
Of him that hears it; never in the tongue
Of him that makes it: then, if sickly ears,
Deaf’d with the clamours of their own dear groans,
Will hear your idle scorns, continue then,
And I will have you, and that fault withal;
But, if they will not, throw away that spirit,
And I shall find you empty of that fault,
Right joyful of your reformation.
_Biron._ A twelvemonth? Well, befall what will befall,
I’ll jest a twelvemonth in an hospital.’
The famous cuckoo-song closes the play: but we shall add no more
criticisms: ‘the words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.’
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
This admirable comedy used to be frequently acted till of late years.
Mr. Garrick’s Benedick was one of his most celebrated characters; and
Mrs. Jordan, we have understood, played Beatrice very delightfully. The
serious part is still the most prominent here, as in other instances
that we have noticed. Hero is the principal figure in the piece, and
leaves an indelible impression on the mind by her beauty, her
tenderness, and the hard trial of her love. The passage in which Claudio
first makes a confession of his affection towards her, conveys as
pleasing an image of the entrance of love into a youthful bosom as can
well be imagined.
‘Oh, my lord,
When you went onward with this ended action,
I look’d upon her with a soldier’s eye,
That lik’d, but had a rougher task in hand
Than to drive liking to the name of love;
But now I am return’d, and that war-thoughts
Have left their places vacant; in their rooms
Come thronging soft and delicate desires,
All prompting me how fair young Hero is,
Saying, I lik’d her ere I went to wars.’
In the scene at the altar, when Claudio, urged on by the villain Don
John, brings the charge of incontinence against her, and as it were
divorces her in the very marriage-ceremony, her appeals to her own
conscious innocence and honour are made with the most affecting
simplicity.
‘_Claudio._ No, Leonato,
I never tempted her with word too large,
But, as a brother to his sister, shew’d
Bashful sincerity, and comely love.
_Hero._ And seem’d I ever otherwise to you?
_Claudio._ Out on thy seeming, I will write against it:
You seem to me as Dian in her orb,
As chaste as is the bud ere it be blown;
But you are more intemperate in your blood
Than Venus, or those pamper’d animals
That rage in savage sensuality.
_Hero._ Is my lord well, that he doth speak so wide?
_Leonato._ Are these things spoken, or do I but dream?
_John._ Sir, they are spoken, and these things are true.
_Benedick._ This looks not like a nuptial.
_Hero._ True! O God!’
The justification of Hero in the end, and her restoration to the
confidence and arms of her lover, is brought about by one of those
temporary consignments to the grave of which Shakespear seems to have
been fond. He has perhaps explained the theory of this predilection in
the following lines:—
‘_Friar._ She dying, as it must be so maintain’d,
Upon the instant that she was accus’d,
Shall be lamented, pity’d, and excus’d,
Of every hearer: for it so falls out,
That what we have we prize not to the worth,
While we enjoy it; but being lack’d and lost,
Why then we rack the value; then we find
The virtue, that possession would not shew us
Whilst it was ours.—So will it fare with Claudio;
When he shall hear she dy’d upon his words,
The idea of her love shall sweetly creep
Into his study of imagination;
And every lovely organ of her life
Shall come apparel’d in more precious habit,
More moving, delicate, and full of life,
Into the eye and prospect of his soul,
Than when she liv’d indeed.’
The principal comic characters in MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, Benedick and
Beatrice, are both essences in their kind. His character as a
woman-hater is admirably supported, and his conversion to matrimony is
no less happily effected by the pretended story of Beatrice’s love for
him. It is hard to say which of the two scenes is the best, that of the
trick which is thus practised on Benedick, or that in which Beatrice is
prevailed on to take pity on him by overhearing her cousin and her maid
declare (which they do on purpose) that he is dying of love for her.
There is something delightfully picturesque in the manner in which
Beatrice is described as coming to hear the plot which is contrived
against herself—
‘For look where Beatrice, like a lapwing, runs
Close by the ground, to hear our conference.’
In consequence of what she hears (not a word of which is true) she
exclaims when these good-natured informants are gone,
‘What fire is in mine ears? Can this be true?
Stand I condemn’d for pride and scorn so much?
Contempt, farewell! and maiden pride adieu!
No glory lives behind the back of such.
And, Benedick, love on, I will requite thee;
Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand;
If thou dost love, my kindness shall incite thee
To bind our loves up in an holy band:
For others say thou dost deserve; and I
Believe it better than reportingly.’
And Benedick, on his part, is equally sincere in his repentance with
equal reason, after he has heard the grey-beard, Leonato, and his
friend, ‘Monsieur Love,’ discourse of the desperate state of his
supposed inamorata.
‘This can be no trick; the conference was sadly borne.—They have the
truth of this from Hero. They seem to pity the lady; it seems her
affections have the full bent. Love me! why, it must be requited. I
hear how I am censur’d: they say, I will bear myself proudly, if I
perceive the love come from her; they say too, that she will rather
die than give any sign of affection.—I did never think to marry: I
must not seem proud:—happy are they that hear their detractions, and
can put them to mending. They say, the lady is fair; ’tis a truth, I
can bear them witness: and virtuous;—’tis so, I cannot reprove it:
and wise—but for loving me:—by my troth it is no addition to her
wit;—nor no great argument of her folly, for I will be horribly in
love with her.—I may chance to have some odd quirks and remnants of
wit broken on me, because I have rail’d so long against marriage:
but doth not the appetite alter? A man loves the meat in his youth,
that he cannot endure in his age.—Shall quips, and sentences, and
these paper bullets of the brain, awe a man from the career of his
humour? No: the world must be peopled. When I said, I would die a
bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were marry’d.—Here
comes Beatrice: by this day, she’s a fair lady: I do spy some marks
of love in her.
The beauty of all this arises from the characters of the persons so
entrapped. Benedick is a professed and staunch enemy to marriage, and
gives very plausible reasons for the faith that is in him. And as to
Beatrice, she persecutes him all day with her jests (so that he could
hardly think of being troubled with them at night) she not only turns
him but all other things into jest, and is proof against everything
serious.
‘_Hero._ Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes,
Misprising what they look on; and her wit
Values itself so highly, that to her
All matter else seems weak: she cannot love,
Nor take no shape nor project of affection,
She is so self-endeared.
_Ursula._ Sure, I think so;
And therefore, certainly, it were not good
She knew his love, lest she make sport at it.
_Hero._ Why, you speak truth: I never yet saw man,
How wise, how noble, young, how rarely featur’d,
But she would spell him backward: if fair-fac’d,
She’d swear the gentleman should be her sister;
If black, why, nature, drawing of an antick,
Made a foul blot: if tall, a lance ill-headed;
If low, an agate very vilely cut:
If speaking, why, a vane blown with all winds;
If silent, why, a block moved with none.
So turns she every man the wrong side out;
And never gives to truth and virtue that
Which simpleness and merit purchaseth.’
These were happy materials for Shakespear to work on, and he has made a
happy use of them. Perhaps that middle point of comedy was never more
nicely hit in which the ludicrous blends with the tender, and our
follies, turning round against themselves in support of our affections,
retain nothing but their humanity.
Dogberry and Verges in this play are inimitable specimens of quaint
blundering and misprisions of meaning; and are a standing record of that
formal gravity of pretension and total want of common understanding,
which Shakespear no doubt copied from real life, and which in the course
of two hundred years appear to have ascended from the lowest to the
highest offices in the state.
AS YOU LIKE IT
SHAKESPEAR has here converted the forest of Arden into another Arcadia,
where they ‘fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world.’
It is the most ideal of any of this author’s plays. It is a pastoral
drama, in which the interest arises more out of the sentiments and
characters than out of the actions or situations. It is not what is
done, but what is said, that claims our attention. Nursed in solitude,
‘under the shade of melancholy boughs,’ the imagination grows soft and
delicate, and the wit runs riot in idleness, like a spoiled child, that
is never sent to school. Caprice and fancy reign and revel here, and
stern necessity is banished to the court. The mild sentiments of
humanity are strengthened with thought and leisure; the echo of the
cares and noise of the world strikes upon the ear of those ‘who have
felt them knowingly,’ softened by time and distance. ‘They hear the
tumult, and are still.’ The very air of the place seems to breathe a
spirit of philosophical poetry: to stir the thoughts, to touch the heart
with pity, as the drowsy forest rustles to the sighing gale. Never was
there such beautiful moralising, equally free from pedantry or
petulance.
‘And this their life, exempt from public haunts,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.’
Jaques is the only purely contemplative character in Shakespear. He
thinks, and does nothing. His whole occupation is to amuse his mind, and
he is totally regardless of his body and his fortunes. He is the prince
of philosophical idlers; his only passion is thought; he sets no value
upon any thing but as it serves as food for reflection. He can ‘suck
melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs’; the motley fool, ‘who
morals on the time,’ is the greatest prize he meets with in the forest.
He resents Orlando’s passion for Rosalind as some disparagement of his
own passion for abstract truth; and leaves the Duke, as soon as he is
restored to his sovereignty, to seek his brother out who has quitted it,
and turned hermit.
—‘Out of these convertites
There is much matter to be heard and learnt.’
Within the sequestered and romantic glades of the forest of Arden, they
find leisure to be good and wise, or to play the fool and fall in love.
Rosalind’s character is made up of sportive gaiety and natural
tenderness: her tongue runs the faster to conceal the pressure at her
heart. She talks herself out of breath, only to get deeper in love. The
coquetry with which she plays with her lover in the double character
which she has to support is managed with the nicest address. How full of
voluble, laughing grace is all her conversation with Orlando—
—‘In heedless mazes running
With wanton haste and giddy cunning.’
How full of real fondness and pretended cruelty is her answer to him
when he promises to love her ‘For ever and a day!’
‘Say a day without the ever: no, no, Orlando, men are April when
they woo, December when they wed: maids are May when they are maids,
but the sky changes when they are wives: I will be more jealous of
thee than a Barbary cock-pigeon over his hen; more clamorous than a
parrot against rain; more new-fangled than an ape; more giddy in my
desires than a monkey; I will weep for nothing like Diana in the
fountain, and I will do that when you are disposed to be merry; I
will laugh like a hyen, and that when you are inclined to sleep.
_Orlando._ But will my Rosalind do so?
_Rosalind._ By my life she will do as I do.’
The silent and retired character of Celia is a necessary relief to the
provoking loquacity of Rosalind, nor can anything be better conceived or
more beautifully described than the mutual affection between the two
cousins:—
—‘We still have slept together,
Rose at an instant, learn’d, play’d, eat together,
And wheresoe’r we went, like Juno’s swans,
Still we went coupled and inseparable.’
The unrequited love of Silvius for Phebe shews the perversity of this
passion in the commonest scenes of life, and the rubs and stops which
nature throws in its way, where fortune has placed none. Touchstone is
not in love, but he will have a mistress as a subject for the exercise
of his grotesque humour, and to shew his contempt for the passion, by
his indifference about the person. He is a rare fellow. He is a mixture
of the ancient cynic philosopher with the modern buffoon, and turns
folly into wit, and wit into folly, just as the fit takes him. His
courtship of Audrey not only throws a degree of ridicule on the state of
wedlock itself, but he is equally an enemy to the prejudices of opinion
in other respects. The lofty tone of enthusiasm, which the Duke and his
companions in exile spread over the stillness and solitude of a country
life, receives a pleasant shock from Touchstone’s sceptical
determination of the question.
‘_Corin._ And how like you this shepherd’s life, Mr. Touchstone?
_Clown._ Truly, shepherd, in respect of itself, it is a good life;
but in respect that it is a shepherd’s life, it is naught. In
respect that it is solitary, I like it very well; but in respect
that it is private, it is a very vile life. Now in respect it is in
the fields, it pleaseth me well; but in respect it is not in the
court, it is tedious. As it is a spare life, look you, it fits my
humour; but as there is no more plenty in it, it goes much against
my stomach.’
Zimmerman’s celebrated work on Solitude discovers only _half_ the sense
of this passage.
There is hardly any of Shakespear’s plays that contains a greater number
of passages that have been quoted in books of extracts, or a greater
number of phrases that have become in a manner proverbial. If we were to
give all the striking passages, we should give half the play. We will
only recall a few of the most delightful to the reader’s recollection.
Such are the meeting between Orlando and Adam, the exquisite appeal of
Orlando to the humanity of the Duke and his company to supply him with
food for the old man, and their answer, the Duke’s description of a
country life, and the account of Jaques moralising on the wounded deer,
his meeting with Touchstone in the forest, his apology for his own
melancholy and his satirical vein, and the well-known speech on the
stages of human life, the old song of ‘Blow, blow, thou winter’s wind,’
Rosalind’s description of the marks of a lover and of the progress of
time with different persons, the picture of the snake wreathed round
Oliver’s neck while the lioness watches her sleeping prey, and
Touchstone’s lecture to the shepherd, his defence of cuckolds, and
panegyric on the virtues of ‘an If.’—All of these are familiar to the
reader: there is one passage of equal delicacy and beauty which may have
escaped him, and with it we shall close our account of AS YOU LIKE IT.
It is Phebe’s description of Ganimed at the end of the third act.
‘Think not I love him, tho’ I ask for him;
’Tis but a peevish boy, yet he talks well;—
But what care I for words! yet words do well,
When he that speaks them pleases those that hear:
It is a pretty youth; not very pretty;
But sure he’s proud, and yet his pride becomes him;
He’ll make a proper man; the best thing in him
Is his complexion; and faster than his tongue
Did make offence, his eye did heal it up:
He is not very tall, yet for his years he’s tall;
His leg is but so so, and yet ’tis well;
There was a pretty redness in his lip,
A little riper, and more lusty red
Than that mix’d in his cheek; ’twas just the difference
Betwixt the constant red and mingled damask.
There be some women, Silvius, had they mark’d him
In parcels as I did, would have gone near
To fall in love with him: but for my part
I love him not, nor hate him not; and yet
I have more cause to hate him than to love him;
For what had he to do to chide at me?’
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW is almost the only one of Shakespear’s comedies
that has a regular plot, and downright moral. It is full of bustle,
animation, and rapidity of action. It shews admirably how self-will is
only to be got the better of by stronger will, and how one degree of
ridiculous perversity is only to be driven out by another still greater.
Petruchio is a madman in his senses; a very honest fellow, who hardly
speaks a word of truth, and succeeds in all his tricks and impostures.
He acts his assumed character to the life, with the most fantastical
extravagance, with complete presence of mind, with untired animal
spirits, and without a particle of ill humour from beginning to end.—The
situation of poor Katherine, worn out by his incessant persecutions,
becomes at last almost as pitiable as it is ludicrous, and it is
difficult to say which to admire most, the unaccountableness of his
actions, or the unalterableness of his resolutions. It is a character
which most husbands ought to study, unless perhaps the very audacity of
Petruchio’s attempt might alarm them more than his success would
encourage them. What a sound must the following speech carry to some
married ears!
‘Think you a little din can daunt my ears?
Have I not in my time heard lions roar?
Have I not heard the sea, puff’d up with winds,
Rage like an angry boar, chafed with sweat?
Have I not heard great ordnance in the field?
And heav’n’s artillery thunder in the skies?
Have I not in a pitched battle heard
Loud larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets clang?
And do you tell me of a woman’s tongue,
That gives not half so great a blow to hear,
As will a chesnut in a farmer’s fire?’
Not all Petruchio’s rhetoric would persuade more than ‘some dozen
followers’ to be of this heretical way of thinking. He unfolds his
scheme for the _Taming of the Shrew_, on a principle of contradiction,
thus:—
‘I’ll woo her with some spirit when she comes.
Say that she rail, why then I’ll tell her plain
She sings as sweetly as a nightingale;
Say that she frown, I’ll say she looks as clear
As morning roses newly wash’d with dew;
Say she be mute, and will not speak a word,
Then I’ll commend her volubility,
And say she uttereth piercing eloquence:
If she do bid me pack, I’ll give her thanks,
As though she bid me stay by her a week;
If she deny to wed, I’ll crave the day,
When I shall ask the banns, and when be married?’
He accordingly gains her consent to the match, by telling her father
that he has got it; disappoints her by not returning at the time he has
promised to wed her, and when he returns, creates no small consternation
by the oddity of his dress and equipage. This, however, is nothing to
the astonishment excited by his mad-brained behaviour at the marriage.
Here is the account of it by an eye-witness:—
‘_Gremio._ Tut, she’s a lamb, a dove, a fool to him:
I’ll tell you, Sir Lucentio; when the priest
Should ask if Katherine should be his wife?
Ay, by gogs woons, quoth he; and swore so loud,
That, all amaz’d, the priest let fall the book;
And as he stooped again to take it up,
This mad-brain’d bridegroom took him such a cuff,
That down fell priest and book, and book and priest.
Now take them up, quoth he, if any list.
_Tranio._ What said the wench when he rose up again?
_Gremio._ Trembled and shook; for why, he stamp’d and swore,
As if the vicar meant to cozen him.
But after many ceremonies done,
He calls for wine; a health, quoth he; as if
He’ad been aboard carousing with his mates
After a storm; quaft off the muscadel,
And threw the sops all in the sexton’s face;
Having no other cause but that his beard
Grew thin and hungerly, and seem’d to ask
His sops as he was drinking. This done, he took
The bride about the neck, and kiss’d her lips
With such a clamourous smack, that at their parting
All the church echoed: and I seeing this,
Came thence for very shame; and after me,
I know, the rout is coming;—
Such a mad marriage never was before.’
The most striking and at the same time laughable feature in the
character of Petruchio throughout, is the studied approximation to the
intractable character of real madness, his apparent insensibility to all
external considerations, and utter indifference to every thing but the
wild and extravagant freaks of his own self-will. There is no contending
with a person on whom nothing makes any impression but his own purposes,
and who is bent on his own whims just in proportion as they seem to want
common sense. With him a thing’s being plain and reasonable is a reason
against it. The airs he gives himself are infinite, and his caprices as
sudden as they are groundless. The whole of his treatment of his wife at
home is in the same spirit of ironical attention and inverted gallantry.
Every thing flies before his will, like a conjuror’s wand, and he only
metamorphoses his wife’s temper by metamorphosing her senses and all the
objects she sees, at a word’s speaking. Such are his insisting that it
is the moon and not the sun which they see, etc. This extravagance
reaches its most pleasant and poetical height in the scene where, on
their return to her father’s, they meet old Vincentio, whom Petruchio
immediately addresses as a young lady:—
‘_Petruchio._ Good morrow, gentle mistress, where away?
Tell me, sweet Kate, and tell me truly too,
Hast thou beheld a fresher gentlewoman?
Such war of white and red within her cheeks;
What stars do spangle heaven with such beauty,
As those two eyes become that heav’nly face?
Fair lovely maid, once more good day to thee:
Sweet Kate, embrace her for her beauty’s sake.
_Hortensio._ He’ll make the man mad to make a woman of him.
_Katherine._ Young budding virgin, fair and fresh and sweet,
Whither away, or where is thy abode?
Happy the parents of so fair a child;
Happier the man whom favourable stars
Allot thee for his lovely bed-fellow.
_Petruchio._ Why, how now, Kate, I hope thou art not mad:
This is a man, old, wrinkled, faded, wither’d,
And not a maiden, as thou say’st he is.
_Katherine._ Pardon, old father, my mistaken eyes
That have been so bedazed with the sun
That everything I look on seemeth green.
Now I perceive thou art a reverend father.’
The whole is carried off with equal spirit, as if the poet’s comic Muse
had wings of fire. It is strange how one man could be so many things;
but so it is. The concluding scene, in which trial is made of the
obedience of the new-married wives (so triumphantly for Petruchio) is a
very happy one.—In some parts of this play there is a little too much
about music-masters and masters of philosophy. They were things of
greater rarity in those days than they are now. Nothing however can be
better than the advice which Tranio gives his master for the prosecution
of his studies:—
‘The mathematics, and the metaphysics,
Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you:
No profit grows, where is no pleasure ta’en:
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.’
We have heard the _Honey-Moon_ called ‘an elegant Katherine and
Petruchio.’ We suspect we do not understand this word _elegant_ in the
sense that many people do. But in our sense of the word, we should call
Lucentio’s description of his mistress elegant.
‘Tranio, I saw her coral lips to move,
And with her breath she did perfume the air:
Sacred and sweet was all I saw in her.’
When Biondello tells the same Lucentio for his encouragement, ‘I knew a
wench married in an afternoon as she went to the garden for parsley to
stuff a rabbit, and so may you, sir’—there is nothing elegant in this,
and yet we hardly know which of the two passages is the best.
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW is a play within a play. It is supposed to be a
play acted for the benefit of Sly the tinker, who is made to believe
himself a lord, when he wakes after a drunken brawl. The character of
Sly and the remarks with which he accompanies the play are as good as
the play itself. His answer when he is asked how he likes it,
‘Indifferent well; ’tis a good piece of work, would ‘twere done,’ is in
good keeping, as if he were thinking of his Saturday night’s job. Sly
does not change his tastes with his new situation, but in the midst of
splendour and luxury still calls out lustily and repeatedly ‘for a pot
o’ the smallest ale.’ He is very slow in giving up his personal identity
in his sudden advancement.—‘I am Christophero Sly, call not me honour
nor lordship. I ne’er drank sack in my life: and if you give me any
conserves, give me conserves of beef: ne’er ask me what raiment I’ll
wear, for I have no more doublets than backs, no more stockings than
legs, nor no more shoes than feet, nay, sometimes more feet than shoes,
or such shoes as my toes look through the over-leather.—What, would you
make me mad? Am not I Christophero Sly, old Sly’s son of Burton-heath,
by birth a pedlar, by education a card-maker, by transmutation a
bear-herd, and now by present profession a tinker? Ask Marian Hacket,
the fat alewife of Wincot, if she know me not; if she say I am not
fourteen-pence on the score for sheer ale, score me up for the lying’st
knave in Christendom.’
This is honest. ‘The Slies are no rogues,’ as he says of himself. We
have a great predilection for this representative of the family; and
what makes us like him the better is, that we take him to be of kin (not
many degrees removed) to Sancho Panza.
MEASURE FOR MEASURE
This is a play as full of genius as it is of wisdom. Yet there is an
original sin in the nature of the subject, which prevents us from taking
a cordial interest in it. ‘The height of moral argument’ which the
author has maintained in the intervals of passion or blended with the
more powerful impulses of nature, is hardly surpassed in any of his
plays. But there is in general a want of passion; the affections are at
a stand; our sympathies are repulsed and defeated in all directions. The
only passion which influences the story is that of Angelo; and yet he
seems to have a much greater passion for hypocrisy than for his
mistress. Neither are we greatly enamoured of Isabella’s rigid chastity,
though she could not act otherwise than she did. We do not feel the same
confidence in the virtue that is ‘sublimely good’ at another’s expense,
as if it had been put to some less disinterested trial. As to the Duke,
who makes a very imposing and mysterious stage-character, he is more
absorbed in his own plots and gravity than anxious for the welfare of
the state; more tenacious of his own character than attentive to the
feelings and apprehensions of others. Claudio is the only person who
feels naturally; and yet he is placed in circumstances of distress which
almost preclude the wish for his deliverance. Mariana is also in love
with Angelo, whom we hate. In this respect, there may be said to be a
general system of cross-purposes between the feelings of the different
characters and the sympathy of the reader or the audience. This
principle of repugnance seems to have reached its height in the
character of Master Barnardine, who not only sets at defiance the
opinions of others, but has even thrown off all self-regard,—‘one that
apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep; careless,
reckless, and fearless of what’s past, present, and to come.’ He is a
fine antithesis to the morality and the hypocrisy of the other
characters of the play. Barnardine is Caliban transported from
Prospero’s wizard island to the forests of Bohemia or the prisons of
Vienna. He is the creature of bad habits as Caliban is of gross
instincts. He has however a strong notion of the natural fitness of
things, according to his own sensations—‘He has been drinking hard all
night, and he will not be hanged that day’—and Shakespear has let him
off at last. We do not understand why the philosophical German critic,
Schlegel, should be so severe on those pleasant persons, Lucio, Pompey,
and Master Froth, as to call them ‘wretches.’ They appear all mighty
comfortable in their occupations, and determined to pursue them, ‘as the
flesh and fortune should serve.’ A very good exposure of the want of
self-knowledge and contempt for others, which is so common in the world,
is put into the mouth of Abhorson, the jailor, when the Provost proposes
to associate Pompey with him in his office—‘A bawd, sir? Fie upon him,
he will discredit our mystery.’ And the same answer will serve in nine
instances out of ten to the same kind of remark, ‘Go to, sir, you weigh
equally; a feather will turn the scale.’ Shakespear was in one sense the
least moral of all writers; for morality (commonly so called) is made up
of antipathies; and his talent consisted in sympathy with human nature,
in all its shapes, degrees, depressions, and elevations. The object of
the pedantic moralist is to find out the bad in everything: his was to
shew that ‘there is some soul of goodness in things evil.’ Even Master
Barnardine is not left to the mercy of what others think of him; but
when he comes in, speaks for himself, and pleads his own cause, as well
as if counsel had been assigned him. In one sense, Shakespear was no
moralist at all: in another, he was the greatest of all moralists. He
was a moralist in the same sense in which nature is one. He taught what
he had learnt from her. He shewed the greatest knowledge of humanity
with the greatest fellow-feeling for it.
One of the most dramatic passages in the present play is the interview
between Claudio and his sister, when she comes to inform him of the
conditions on which Angelo will spare his life.
‘_Claudio._ Let me know the point.
_Isabella._ O, I do fear thee, Claudio: and I quake,
Lest thou a feverous life should’st entertain,
And six or seven winters more respect
Than a perpetual honour. Dar’st thou die?
The sense of death is most in apprehension;
And the poor beetle, that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.
_Claudio._ Why give you me this shame?
Think you I can a resolution fetch
From flowery tenderness; if I must die,
I will encounter darkness as a bride,
And hug it in mine arms.
_Isabella._ There spake my brother! there my father’s grave
Did utter forth a voice! Yes, thou must die:
Thou art too noble to conserve a life
In base appliances. This outward-sainted deputy—
Whose settled visage and deliberate word
Nips youth i’ the head, and follies doth emmew,
As faulcon doth the fowl—is yet a devil.
_Claudio._ The princely Angelo?
_Isabella._ Oh, ’tis the cunning livery of hell,
The damned’st body to invest and cover
In princely guards! Dost thou think, Claudio,
If I would yield him my virginity,
Thou might’st be freed?
_Claudio._ Oh, heavens! it cannot be.
_Isabella._ Yes, he would give it thee, for this rank offence,
So to offend him still: this night’s the time
That I should do what I abhor to name,
Or else thou dy’st to-morrow.
_Claudio._ Thou shalt not do’t.
_Isabella._ Oh, were it but my life,
I’d throw it down for your deliverance
As frankly as a pin.
_Claudio._ Thanks, dear Isabel.
_Isabella._ Be ready, Claudio, for your death to-morrow.
_Claudio._ Yes.—Has he affections in him,
That thus can make him bite the law by the nose?
When he would force it, sure it is no sin;
Or of the deadly seven it is the least.
_Isabella._ Which is the least?
_Claudio._ If it were damnable, he, being so wise,
Why would he for the momentary trick
Be perdurably fin’d? Oh, Isabel!
_Isabella._ What says my brother?
_Claudio._ Death is a fearful thing.
_Isabella._ And shamed life a hateful.
_Claudio._ Aye, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world; or to be worse than worst
Of those, that lawless and incertain thoughts
Imagine howling!—’tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life,
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise
To what we fear of death.
_Isabella._ Alas! alas!
_Claudio._ Sweet sister, let me live:
What sin you do to save a brother’s life,
Nature dispenses with the deed so far,
That it becomes a virtue.’
What adds to the dramatic beauty of this scene and the effect of
Claudio’s passionate attachment to life is, that it immediately follows
the Duke’s lecture to him, in the character of the Friar, recommending
an absolute indifference to it.
—‘Reason thus with life,—
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing,
That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art,
Servile to all the skyey influences
That do this habitation, where thou keep’st,
Hourly afflict; merely, thou art death’s fool;
For him thou labour’st by thy flight to shun,
And yet run’st toward him still: thou art not noble;
For all the accommodations, that thou bear’st,
Are nurs’d by baseness: thou art by no means valiant;
For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork
Of a poor worm: thy best of rest is sleep,
And that thou oft provok’st; yet grossly fear’st
Thy death, which is no more. Thou art not thyself;
For thou exist’st on many a thousand grains
That issue out of dust: happy thou art not;
For what thou hast not, still thou striv’st to get;
And what thou hast, forget’st: thou art not certain;
For thy complexion shifts to strange effects,
After the moon: if thou art rich, thou art poor;
For, like an ass, whose back with ingots bows
Thou bear’st thy heavy riches but a journey,
And death unloads thee: friend thou hast none;
For thy own bowels, which do call thee sire,
The mere effusion of thy proper loins,
Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum,
For ending thee no sooner; thou hast nor youth, nor age;
But, as it were, an after-dinner’s sleep,
Dreaming on both: for all thy blessed youth
Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms
Of palsied eld; and when thou art old, and rich,
Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty,
To make thy riches pleasant. What’s yet in this,
That bears the name of life? Yet in this life
Lie hid more thousand deaths; yet death we fear,
That makes these odds all even.’
THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR
THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR is no doubt a very amusing play, with a great
deal of humour, character, and nature in it: but we should have liked it
much better, if any one else had been the hero of it, instead of
Falstaff. We could have been contented if Shakespear had not been
‘commanded to shew the knight in love.’ Wits and philosophers, for the
most part, do not shine in that character; and Sir John himself, by no
means, comes off with flying colours. Many people complain of the
degradation and insults to which Don Quixote is so frequently exposed in
his various adventures. But what are the unconscious indignities which
he suffers, compared with the sensible mortifications which Falstaff is
made to bring upon himself? What are the blows and buffetings which the
Don receives from the staves of the Yanguesian carriers or from Sancho
Panza’s more hard-hearted hands, compared with the contamination of the
buck-basket, the disguise of the fat woman of Brentford, and the horns
of Herne the hunter, which are discovered on Sir John’s head? In reading
the play, we indeed wish him well through all these discomfitures, but
it would have been as well if he had not got into them. Falstaff in the
MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR is not the man he was in the two parts of _Henry
IV._ His wit and eloquence have left him. Instead of making a butt of
others, he is made a butt of by them. Neither is there a single particle
of love in him to excuse his follies: he is merely a designing,
bare-faced knave, and an unsuccessful one. The scene with Ford as Master
Brook, and that with Simple, Slender’s man, who comes to ask after the
Wise Woman, are almost the only ones in which his old intellectual
ascendancy appears. He is like a person recalled to the stage to perform
an unaccustomed and ungracious part; and in which we perceive only ‘some
faint sparks of those flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the
hearers in a roar.’ But the single scene with Doll Tearsheet, or Mrs.
Quickly’s account of his desiring ‘to eat some of housewife Reach’s
prawns,’ and telling her ‘to be no more so familiarity with such
people,’ is worth the whole of the MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR put together.
Ford’s jealousy, which is the main spring of the comic incidents, is
certainly very well managed. Page, on the contrary, appears to be
somewhat uxorious in his disposition; and we have pretty plain
indications of the effect of the characters of the husbands on the
different degrees of fidelity in their wives. Mrs. Quickly makes a very
lively go-between, both between Falstaff and his Dulcineas, and Anne
Page and her lovers, and seems in the latter case so intent on her own
interest as totally to overlook the intentions of her employers. Her
master, Dr. Caius, the Frenchman, and her fellow-servant Jack Rugby, are
very completely described. This last-mentioned person is rather quaintly
commended by Mrs. Quickly as ‘an honest, willing, kind fellow, as ever
servant shall come in house withal, and I warrant you, no tell-tale, nor
no breed-bate; his worst fault is, that he is given to prayer; he is
something peevish that way; but nobody but has his fault.’ The Welch
Parson, Sir Hugh Evans (a title which in those days was given to the
clergy) is an excellent character in all respects. He is as respectable
as he is laughable. He has ‘very good discretions, and very odd
humours.’ The duel-scene with Caius gives him an opportunity to shew his
‘cholers and his tremblings of mind,’ his valour and his melancholy, in
an irresistible manner. In the dialogue, which at his mother’s request
he holds with his pupil, William Page, to shew his progress in learning,
it is hard to say whether the simplicity of the master or the scholar is
the greatest. Nym, Bardolph, and Pistol, are but the shadows of what
they were; and Justice Shallow himself has little of his consequence
left. But his cousin, Slender, makes up for the deficiency. He is a very
potent piece of imbecility. In him the pretensions of the worthy
Gloucestershire family are well kept up, and immortalised. He and his
friend Sackerson and his book of songs and his love of Anne Page and his
having nothing to say to her can never be forgotten. It is the only
first-rate character in the play: but it is in that class. Shakespear is
the only writer who was as great in describing weakness as strength.
THE COMEDY OF ERRORS
This comedy is taken very much from the Menæchmi of Plautus, and is not
an improvement on it. Shakespear appears to have bestowed no great pains
on it, and there are but a few passages which bear the decided stamp of
his genius. He seems to have relied on his author, and on the interest
arising out of the intricacy of the plot. The curiosity excited is
certainly very considerable, though not of the most pleasing kind. We
are teazed as with a riddle, which notwithstanding we try to solve. In
reading the play, from the sameness of the names of the two Antipholises
and the two Dromios, as well from their being constantly taken for each
other by those who see them, it is difficult, without a painful effort
of attention, to keep the characters distinct in the mind. And again, on
the stage, either the complete similarity of their persons and dress
must produce the same perplexity whenever they first enter, or the
identity of appearance which the story supposes, will be destroyed. We
still, however, having a clue to the difficulty, can tell which is
which, merely from the practical contradictions which arise, as soon as
the different parties begin to speak; and we are indemnified for the
perplexity and blunders into which we are thrown by seeing others thrown
into greater and almost inextricable ones.—This play (among other
considerations) leads us not to feel much regret that Shakespear was not
what is called a classical scholar. We do not think his _forte_ would
ever have lain in imitating or improving on what others invented, so
much as in inventing for himself, and perfecting what he invented,—not
perhaps by the omission of faults, but by the addition of the highest
excellencies. His own genius was strong enough to bear him up, and he
soared longest and best on unborrowed plumes.—The only passage of a very
Shakespearian cast in this comedy is the one in which the Abbess, with
admirable characteristic artifice, makes Adriana confess her own
misconduct in driving her husband mad.
‘_Abbess._ How long hath this possession held the man?
_Adriana._ This week he hath been heavy, sour, sad,
And much, much different from the man he was;
But, till this afternoon, his passion
Ne’er brake into extremity of rage.
_Abbess._ Hath he not lost much wealth by wreck at sea?
Bury’d some dear friend? Hath not else his eye
Stray’d his affection in unlawful love?
A sin prevailing much in youthful men,
Who give their eyes the liberty of gazing.
Which of these sorrows is he subject to?
_Adriana._ To none of these, except it be the last:
Namely, some love, that drew him oft from home.
_Abbess._ You should for that have reprehended him.
_Adriana._ Why, so I did.
_Abbess._ But not rough enough.
_Adriana._ As roughly as my modesty would let me.
_Abbess._ Haply, in private.
_Adriana._ And in assemblies too.
_Abbess._ Aye, but not enough.
_Adriana._ It was the copy of our conference:
In bed, he slept not for my urging it;
At board, he fed not for my urging it;
Alone it was the subject of my theme;
In company, I often glanc’d at it;
Still did I tell him it was vile and bad.
_Abbess._ And therefore came it that the man was mad:
The venom’d clamours of a jealous woman
Poison more deadly than a mad dog’s tooth.
It seems, his sleeps were hinder’d by thy railing:
And therefore comes it that his head is light.
Thou say’st his meat was sauc’d with thy upbraidings:
Unquiet meals make ill digestions,
Therefore the raging fire of fever bred:
And what’s a fever but a fit of madness?
Thou say’st his sports were hinder’d by thy brawls:
Sweet recreation barr’d, what doth ensue,
But moody and dull melancholy,
Kinsman to grim and comfortless despair;
And, at her heels, a huge infectious troop
Of pale distemperatures, and foes to life?
In food, in sport, and life-preserving rest
To be disturb’d, would mad or man or beast:
The consequence is then, thy jealous fits
Have scar’d thy husband from the use of wits.
_Luciana._ She never reprehended him but mildly,
When he demeaned himself rough, rude, and wildly.—
Why bear you these rebukes, and answer not?
_Adriana._ She did betray me to my own reproof.’
Pinch the conjuror is also an excrescence not to be found in Plautus. He
is indeed a very formidable anachronism.
‘They brought one Pinch, a hungry lean-fac’d villain,
A meer anatomy, a mountebank,
A thread-bare juggler and a fortune-teller;
A needy, hollow-ey’d, sharp-looking wretch,
A living dead man.’
This is exactly like some of the Puritanical portraits to be met with in
Hogarth.
DOUBTFUL PLAYS OF SHAKESPEAR
We shall give for the satisfaction of the reader what the celebrated
German critic, Schlegel, says on this subject, and then add a very few
remarks of our own.
‘All the editors, with the exception of Capell, are unanimous in
rejecting _Titus Andronicus_ as unworthy of Shakespear, though they
always allow it to be printed with the other pieces, as the
scape-goat, as it were, of their abusive criticism. The correct
method in such an investigation is first to examine into the
external grounds, evidences, etc. and to weigh their worth; and then
to adduce the internal reasons derived from the quality of the work.
The critics of Shakespear follow a course directly the reverse of
this; they set out with a preconceived opinion against a piece, and
seek, in justification of this opinion, to render the historical
grounds suspicious, and to set them aside. _Titus Andronicus_ is to
be found in the first folio edition of Shakespear’s works, which it
was known was conducted by Heminge and Condell, for many years his
friends and fellow-managers of the same theatre. Is it possible to
persuade ourselves that they would not have known if a piece in
their repertory did or did not actually belong to Shakespear? And
are we to lay to the charge of these honourable men a designed fraud
in this single case, when we know that they did not shew themselves
so very desirous of scraping everything together which went by the
name of Shakespear, but, as it appears, merely gave those plays of
which they had manuscripts in hand? Yet the following circumstance
is still stronger: George Meres, a contemporary and admirer of
Shakespear, mentions _Titus Andronicus_ in an enumeration of his
works, in the year 1598. Meres was personally acquainted with the
poet, and so very intimately, that the latter read over to him his
Sonnets before they were printed. I cannot conceive that all the
critical scepticism in the world would be sufficient to get over
such a testimony.
‘This tragedy, it is true, is framed according to a false idea of
the tragic, which by an accumulation of cruelties and enormities
degenerates into the horrible, and yet leaves no deep impression
behind: the story of Tereus and Philomela is heightened and
overcharged under other names, and mixed up with the repast of
Atreus and Thyestes, and many other incidents. In detail there is no
want of beautiful lines, bold images, nay, even features which
betray the peculiar conception of Shakespear. Among these we may
reckon the joy of the treacherous Moor at the blackness and ugliness
of his child begot in adultery; and in the compassion of Titus
Andronicus, grown childish through grief, for a fly which had been
struck dead, and his rage afterwards when he imagines he discovers
in it his black enemy, we recognize the future poet of _Lear_. Are
the critics afraid that Shakespear’s fame would be injured, were it
established that in his early youth he ushered into the world a
feeble and immature work? Was Rome the less the conqueror of the
world because Remus could leap over its first walls? Let any one
place himself in Shakespear’s situation at the commencement of his
career. He found only a few indifferent models, and yet these met
with the most favourable reception, because men are never difficult
to please in the novelty of an art before their taste has become
fastidious from choice and abundance. Must not this situation have
had its influence on him before he learned to make higher demands on
himself, and, by digging deeper in his own mind, discovered the
richest veins of a noble metal? It is even highly probable that he
must have made several failures before getting into the right path.
Genius is in a certain sense infallible, and has nothing to learn;
but art is to be learned, and must be acquired by practice and
experience. In Shakespear’s acknowledged works we find hardly any
traces of his apprenticeship, and yet an apprenticeship he certainly
had. This every artist must have, and especially in a period where
he has not before him the example of a school already formed. I
consider it as extremely probable, that Shakespear began to write
for the theatre at a much earlier period than the one which is
generally stated, namely, not till after the year 1590. It appears
that, as early as the year 1584, when only twenty years of age, he
had left his paternal home and repaired to London. Can we imagine
that such an active head would remain idle for six whole years
without making any attempt to emerge by his talents from an
uncongenial situation? That in the dedication of the poem of Venus
and Adonis he calls it, ‘the first heir of his invention,’ proves
nothing against the supposition. It was the first which he printed;
he might have composed it at an earlier period; perhaps, also, he
did not include theatrical labours, as they then possessed but
little literary dignity. The earlier Shakespear began to compose for
the theatre, the less are we enabled to consider the immaturity and
imperfection of a work as a proof of its spuriousness in opposition
to historical evidence, if we only find in it prominent features of
his mind. Several of the works rejected as spurious, may still have
been produced in the period betwixt _Titus Andronicus_, and the
earliest of the acknowledged pieces.
‘At last, Steevens published seven pieces ascribed to Shakespear in
two supplementary volumes. It is to be remarked, that they all
appeared in print in Shakespear’s life-time, with his name prefixed
at full length. They are the following:—
‘1. _Locrine._ The proofs of the genuineness of this piece are not
altogether unambiguous; the grounds for doubt, on the other hand,
are entitled to attention. However, this question is immediately
connected with that respecting _Titus Andronicus_, and must be at
the same time resolved in the affirmative or negative.
‘2. _Pericles, Prince of Tyre._ This piece was acknowledged by
Dryden, but as a youthful work of Shakespear. It is most undoubtedly
his, and it has been admitted into several of the late editions. The
supposed imperfections originate in the circumstance, that
Shakespear here handled a childish and extravagant romance of the
old poet Gower, and was unwilling to drag the subject out of its
proper sphere. Hence he even introduces Gower himself, and makes him
deliver a prologue entirely in his antiquated language and
versification. This power of assuming so foreign a manner is at
least no proof of helplessness.
‘3. _The London Prodigal._ If we are not mistaken, Lessing
pronounced this piece to be Shakespear’s, and wished to bring it on
the German stage.
‘4. _The Puritan; or, the Widows of Watling Street._ One of my
literary friends, intimately acquainted with Shakespear, was of
opinion that the poet must have wished to write a play for once in
the style of Ben Jonson, and that in this way we must account for
the difference between the present piece and his usual manner. To
follow out this idea however would lead to a very nice critical
investigation.
‘5. _Thomas, Lord Cromwell._
‘6. _Sir John Oldcastle—First Part._
‘7. _A Yorkshire Tragedy._
‘The three last pieces are not only unquestionably Shakespear’s, but
in my opinion they deserve to be classed among his best and maturest
works.—Steevens admits at last, in some degree, that they are
Shakespear’s, as well as the others, excepting _Locrine_, but he
speaks of all of them with great contempt, as quite worthless
productions. This condemnatory sentence is not however in the
slightest degree convincing, nor is it supported by critical acumen.
I should like to see how such a critic would, of his own natural
suggestion, have decided on Shakespear’s acknowledged master-pieces,
and what he would have thought of praising in them, had the public
opinion not imposed on him the duty of admiration. _Thomas, Lord
Cromwell_, and _Sir John Oldcastle_, are biographical dramas, and
models in this species: the first is linked, from its subject, to
_Henry the Eighth_, and the second to _Henry the Fifth_. The second
part of _Oldcastle_ is wanting; I know not whether a copy of the old
edition has been discovered in England, or whether it is lost. _The
Yorkshire Tragedy_ is a tragedy in one act, a dramatised tale of
murder: the tragical effect is overpowering, and it is extremely
important to see how poetically Shakespear could handle such a
subject.
‘There have been still farther ascribed to him:—1st. _The Merry
Devil of Edmonton_, a comedy in one act, printed in Dodsley’s old
plays. This has certainly some appearances in its favour. It
contains a merry landlord, who bears a great similarity to the one
in the _Merry Wives of Windsor_. However, at all events, though an
ingenious, it is but a hasty sketch. 2d. _The Accusation of Paris._
3d. _The Birth of Merlin._ 4th. _Edward the Third._ 5th. _The Fair
Emma._ 6th. _Mucedorus._ 7th. _Arden of Feversham._ I have never
seen any of these, and cannot therefore say anything respecting
them. From the passages cited, I am led to conjecture that the
subject of _Mucedorus_ is the popular story of Valentine and Orson;
a beautiful subject which Lope de Vega has also taken for a play.
_Arden of Feversham_ is said to be a tragedy on the story of a man,
from whom the poet was descended by the mother’s side. If the
quality of the piece is not too directly at variance with this
claim, the circumstance would afford an additional probability in
its favour. For such motives were not foreign to Shakespear: he
treated Henry the Seventh, who bestowed lands on his forefathers for
services performed by them, with a visible partiality.
‘Whoever takes from Shakespear a play early ascribed to him, and
confessedly belonging to his time, is unquestionably bound to
answer, with some degree of probability, this question: who has then
written it? Shakespear’s competitors in the dramatic walk are pretty
well known, and if those of them who have even acquired a
considerable name, a Lilly, a Marlow, a Heywood, are still so very
far below him, we can hardly imagine that the author of a work,
which rises so high beyond theirs, would have remained
unknown.’—_Lectures on Dramatic Literature_, vol. ii. page 252.
We agree to the truth of this last observation, but not to the justice
of its application to some of the plays here mentioned. It is true that
Shakespear’s best works are very superior to those of Marlow, or
Heywood, but it is not true that the best of the doubtful plays above
enumerated are superior or even equal to the best of theirs. _The
Yorkshire Tragedy_, which Schlegel speaks of as an undoubted production
of our author’s, is much more in the manner of Heywood than of
Shakespear. The effect is indeed overpowering, but the mode of producing
it is by no means poetical. The praise which Schlegel gives to _Thomas,
Lord Cromwell_, and to _Sir John Oldcastle_, is altogether exaggerated.
They are very indifferent compositions, which have not the slightest
pretensions to rank with _Henry V._ or _Henry VIII._ We suspect that the
German critic was not very well acquainted with the dramatic
contemporaries of Shakespear, or aware of their general merits; and that
he accordingly mistakes a resemblance in style and manner for an equal
degree of excellence. Shakespear differed from the other writers of his
age not in the mode of treating his subjects, but in the grace and power
which he displayed in them. The reason assigned by a literary friend of
Schlegel’s for supposing _The Puritan; or, the Widow of Watling Street_,
to be Shakespear’s, viz. that it is in the style of Ben Jonson, that is
to say, in a style just the reverse of his own, is not very satisfactory
to a plain English understanding. _Locrine_, and _The London Prodigal_,
if they were Shakespear’s at all, must have been among the sins of his
youth. _Arden of Feversham_ contains several striking passages, but the
passion which they express is rather that of a sanguine temperament than
of a lofty imagination; and in this respect they approximate more nearly
to the style of other writers of the time than to Shakespear’s. _Titus
Andronicus_ is certainly as unlike Shakespear’s usual style as it is
possible. It is an accumulation of vulgar physical horrors, in which the
power exercised by the poet bears no proportion to the repugnance
excited by the subject. The character of Aaron the Moor is the only
thing which shews any originality of conception; and the scene in which
he expresses his joy ‘at the blackness and ugliness of his child begot
in adultery,’ the only one worthy of Shakespear. Even this is worthy of
him only in the display of power, for it gives no pleasure. Shakespear
managed these things differently. Nor do we think it a sufficient answer
to say that this was an embryo or crude production of the author. In its
kind it is full grown, and its features decided and overcharged. It is
not like a first imperfect essay, but shews a confirmed habit, a
systematic preference of violent effect to everything else. There are
occasional detached images of great beauty and delicacy, but these were
not beyond the powers of other writers then living. The circumstance
which inclines us to reject the external evidence in favour of this play
being Shakespear’s is, that the grammatical construction is constantly
false and mixed up with vulgar abbreviations, a fault that never occurs
in any of his genuine plays. A similar defect, and the halting measure
of the verse are the chief objections to _Pericles of Tyre_, if we
except the far-fetched and complicated absurdity of the story. The
movement of the thoughts and passions has something in it not unlike
Shakespear, and several of the descriptions are either the original
hints of passages which Shakespear has ingrafted on his other plays, or
are imitations of them by some contemporary poet. The most memorable
idea in it is in Marina’s speech, where she compares the world to ‘a
lasting storm, hurrying her from her friends.’
POEMS AND SONNETS
Our idolatry of Shakespear (not to say our admiration) ceases with his
plays. In his other productions, he was a mere author, though not a
common author. It was only by representing others, that he became
himself. He could go out of himself, and express the soul of Cleopatra;
but in his own person, he appeared to be always waiting for the
prompter’s cue. In expressing the thoughts of others, he seemed
inspired; in expressing his own, he was a mechanic. The licence of an
assumed character was necessary to restore his genius to the privileges
of nature, and to give him courage to break through the tyranny of
fashion, the trammels of custom. In his plays, he was ‘as broad and
casing as the general air’: in his poems, on the contrary, he appears to
be ‘cooped, and cabined in’ by all the technicalities of art, by all the
petty intricacies of thought and language, which poetry had learned from
the controversial jargon of the schools, where words had been made a
substitute for things. There was, if we mistake not, something of
modesty, and a painful sense of personal propriety at the bottom of
this. Shakespear’s imagination, by identifying itself with the strongest
characters in the most trying circumstances, grappled at once with
nature, and trampled the littleness of art under his feet: the rapid
changes of situation, the wide range of the universe, gave him life and
spirit, and afforded full scope to his genius; but returned into his
closet again, and having assumed the badge of his profession, he could
only labour in his vocation, and conform himself to existing models. The
thoughts, the passions, the words which the poet’s pen, ‘glancing from
heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,’ lent to others, shook off the
fetters of pedantry and affectation; while his own thoughts and
feelings, standing by themselves, were seized upon as lawful prey, and
tortured to death according to the established rules and practice of the
day. In a word, we do not like Shakespear’s poems, because we like his
plays: the one, in all their excellencies, are just the reverse of the
other. It has been the fashion of late to cry up our author’s poems, as
equal to his plays: this is the desperate cant of modern criticism. We
would ask, was there the slightest comparison between Shakespear, and
either Chaucer or Spenser, as mere poets? Not any.—The two poems of
Venus and Adonis and of Tarquin and Lucrece appear to us like a couple
of ice-houses. They are about as hard, as glittering, and as cold. The
author seems all the time to be thinking of his verses, and not of his
subject,—not of what his characters would feel, but of what he shall
say; and as it must happen in all such cases, he always puts into their
mouths those things which they would be the last to think of, and which
it shews the greatest ingenuity in him to find out. The whole is
laboured, up-hill work. The poet is perpetually singling out the
difficulties of the art to make an exhibition of his strength and skill
in wrestling with them. He is making perpetual trials of them as if his
mastery over them were doubted. The images, which are often striking,
are generally applied to things which they are the least like: so that
they do not blend with the poem, but seem stuck upon it, like splendid
patch-work, or remain quite distinct from it, like detached substances,
painted and varnished over. A beautiful thought is sure to be lost in an
endless commentary upon it. The speakers are like persons who have both
leisure and inclination to make riddles on their own situation, and to
twist and turn every object or incident into acrostics and anagrams.
Everything is spun out into allegory; and a digression is always
preferred to the main story. Sentiment is built up upon plays of words;
the hero or heroine feels, not from the impulse of passion, but from the
force of dialectics. There is besides a strange attempt to substitute
the language of painting for that of poetry, to make us _see_ their
feelings in the faces of the persons; and again, consistently with this,
in the description of the picture in Tarquin and Lucrece, those
circumstances are chiefly insisted on, which it would be impossible to
convey except by words. The invocation to opportunity in the Tarquin and
Lucrece is full of thoughts and images, but at the same time it is
overloaded by them. The concluding stanza expresses all our objections
to this kind of poetry:—
‘Oh! idle words, servants to shallow fools;
Unprofitable sounds, weak arbitrators;
Busy yourselves in skill-contending schools;
Debate when leisure serves with dull debaters;
To trembling clients be their mediators:
For me I force not argument a straw,
Since that my case is past all help of law.’
The description of the horse in Venus and Adonis has been particularly
admired, and not without reason:—
‘Round hoof’d, short jointed, fetlocks shag and long,
Broad breast, full eyes, small head, and nostril wide,
High crest, short ears, strait legs, and passing strong,
Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide,
Look what a horse should have, he did not lack,
Save a proud rider on so proud a back.’
Now this inventory of perfections shews great knowledge of the horse;
and is good matter-of-fact poetry. Let the reader but compare it with a
speech in the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_ where Theseus describes his
hounds—
‘And their heads are hung
With ears that sweep away the morning dew’—
and he will perceive at once what we mean by the difference between
Shakespear’s own poetry, and that of his plays. We prefer the Passionate
Pilgrim very much to the Lover’s Complaint. It has been doubted whether
the latter poem is Shakespear’s.
Of the Sonnets we do not well know what to say. The subject of them
seems to be somewhat equivocal; but many of them are highly beautiful in
themselves, and interesting as they relate to the state of the personal
feelings of the author. The following are some of the most striking:—
CONSTANCY
‘Let those who are in favour with their stars,
Of public honour and proud titles boast,
Whilst I, whom fortune of such triumph bars,
Unlook’d for joy in that I honour most.
Great princes’ favourites their fair leaves spread,
But as the marigold in the sun’s eye;
And in themselves their pride lies buried,
For at a frown they in their glory die.
The painful warrior famous’d for fight,
After a thousand victories once foil’d,
Is from the book of honour razed quite,
And all the rest forgot for which he toil’d:
Then happy I, that love and am belov’d,
Where I may not remove, nor be remov’d.’
LOVE’S CONSOLATION
‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my out-cast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least:
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,—and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d, such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.’
NOVELTY
‘My love is strengthen’d, though more weak in seeming
I love not less, though less the show appear:
That love is merchandis’d, whose rich esteeming
The owner’s tongue doth publish everywhere.
Our love was new, and then but in the spring,
When I was wont to greet it with my lays:
As Philomel in summer’s front doth sing,
And stops his pipe in growth of riper days:
Not that the summer is less pleasant now
Than when her mournful hymns did hush the night,
But that wild music burdens every bough,
And sweets grown common lose their dear delight.
Therefore, like her, I sometime hold my tongue,
Because I would not dull you with my song.’
LIFE’S DECAY
‘That time of year thou may’st in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day,
As after sun-set fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.’
In all these, as well as in many others, there is a mild tone of
sentiment, deep, mellow, and sustained, very different from the
crudeness of his earlier poems.
End of THE CHARACTERS OF SHAKESPEAR’S PLAYS.
-----
Footnote 64:
A few alterations and corrections have been inserted in the present
edition.
[Note by W. H. to Second Edition.]
Footnote 65:
See the passage, beginning—‘It is impossible you should see this, were
they as prime as goats,’ etc.
Footnote 66:
‘_Iago._ Ay, too gentle.
_Othello._ Nay, that’s certain.’
Footnote 67:
In the account of her death, a friend has pointed out an instance of
the poet’s exact observation of nature:—
‘There is a willow growing o’er a brook,
That shews its hoary leaves i’ th’ glassy stream.’
The inside of the leaves of the willow, next the water, is of a
whitish colour, and the reflection would therefore be ‘hoary.’
Footnote 68:
See an article, called _Theatralia_, in the second volume of the
_Reflector_, by Charles Lamb.
Footnote 69:
There is another instance of the same distinction in Hamlet and
Ophelia. Hamlet’s pretended madness would make a very good real
madness in any other author.
Footnote 70:
The river wanders at its own sweet will.—WORDSWORTH.
Footnote 71:
The lady, we here see, gives up the argument, but keeps her mind.
A LETTER TO WILLIAM GIFFORD, ESQ.
[The title-page of the original edition is as follows: _A Letter to
William Gifford, Esq. From William Hazlitt, Esq. ‘Fit pugil, et
medicum urget.’ London: Printed for John Miller, Burlington Arcade,
Piccadilly. 1819. Price Three Shillings._ A so-called ‘second
edition’ of 1820 consisted of the unsold copies with a fresh
title-page: _London: Printed for Robert Stodart, 81 Strand. 1820._]
A LETTER TO WILLIAM GIFFORD, ESQ.
Sir,—You have an ugly trick of saying what is not true of any one you do
not like; and it will be the object of this letter to cure you of it.
You say what you please of others: it is time you were told what you
are. In doing this, give me leave to borrow the familiarity of your
style:—for the fidelity of the picture I shall be answerable.
You are a little person, but a considerable cat’s-paw; and so far worthy
of notice. Your clandestine connexion with persons high in office
constantly influences your opinions, and alone gives importance to them.
You are the _Government Critic_, a character nicely differing from that
of a government spy—the invisible link, that connects literature with
the police. It is your business to keep a strict eye over all writers
who differ in opinion with his Majesty’s Ministers, and to measure their
talents and attainments by the standard of their servility and meanness.
For this office you are well qualified. Besides being the Editor of the
Quarterly Review, you are also paymaster of the band of Gentlemen
Pensioners; and when an author comes before you in the one capacity,
with whom you are not acquainted in the other, you know how to deal with
him. You have your cue beforehand. The distinction between truth and
falsehood you make no account of: you mind only the distinction between
Whig and Tory. Accustomed to the indulgence of your mercenary virulence
and party-spite, you have lost all relish as well as capacity for the
unperverted exercises of the understanding, and make up for the obvious
want of ability by a bare-faced want of principle. The same set of
thread-bare common-places, the same second-hand assortment of abusive
nicknames, the same assumption of little magisterial airs of
superiority, are regularly repeated; and the ready convenient lie comes
in aid of the dearth of other resources, and passes off, with impunity,
in the garb of religion and loyalty. If no one finds it out, why then
there is no harm done, _snug’s the word_; or if it should be detected,
it is a good joke, shews spirit and invention in proportion to its
grossness and impudence, and it is only a pity that what was so well
meant in so good a cause, should miscarry! The end sanctifies the means;
and you keep no faith with heretics in religion or government. You are
under the protection of the _Court_; and your zeal for your king and
country entitles you to say what you chuse of every public writer who
does not do all in his power to pamper the one into a tyrant, and to
trample the other into a herd of slaves. You derive your weight with the
great and powerful from the very circumstance that takes away all real
weight from your authority, _viz._ that it is avowedly, and upon every
occasion, exerted for no one purpose but to hold up to hatred and
contempt whatever opposes in the slightest degree and in the most
flagrant instances of abuse their pride and passions. You dictate your
opinions to a party, because not one of your opinions is formed upon an
honest conviction of the truth or justice of the case, but by collusion
with the prejudices, caprice, interest or vanity of your employers. The
mob of well-dressed readers who consult the Quarterly Review, know that
_there is no offence in it_. They put faith in it because they are aware
that it is ‘false and hollow, but will please the ear’; that it will
tell them nothing but what they would wish to believe. Your reasoning
comes under the head of Court-news; your taste is a standard of the
prevailing _ton_ in certain circles, like Ackerman’s dresses for May.
When you damn an author, one knows that he is not a favourite at Carlton
House. When you say that an author cannot write common sense or English,
you mean that he does not believe in the doctrine of _divine right_. Of
course, the clergy and gentry will not read such an author. Your praise
or blame has nothing to do with the merits of a work, but with the party
to which the writer belongs, or is in the inverse _ratio_ of its merits.
The dingy cover that wraps the pages of the Quarterly Review does not
contain a concentrated essence of taste and knowledge, but is a
receptacle for the scum and sediment of all the prejudice, bigotry,
ill-will, ignorance, and rancour, afloat in the kingdom. This the fools
and knaves who pin their faith on you know, and it is on this account
they pin their faith on you. They come to you for a scale not of
literary talent but of political subserviency. They want you to set your
mark of approbation on a writer as a thorough-paced tool, or of
reprobation as an honest man. Your fashionable readers, Sir, are
hypocrites as well as knaves and fools; and the watch-word, the
practical intelligence they want, must be conveyed to them without
implied offence to their candour and liberality, in the _patois_ and
gibberish of fraud of which you are a master. When you begin to jabber
about common sense and English, they know what to be at, shut up the
book, and wonder that any respectable publisher can be found to let it
lie on his counter, as much as if it were a Petition for Reform. Do you
suppose, Sir, that such persons as the Rev. Gerard Valerian Wellesley
and the Rev. Weeden Butler would not be glad to ruin what they call a
Jacobin author as well as a Jacobin stationer?[72] Or that they will not
thank you for persuading them that their doing so in the former case is
a proof of their taste and good sense, as well as loyalty and religion?
You know very well that if a particle of truth or fairness were to find
its way into a single number of your publication, another Quarterly
Review would be set up to-morrow for the express purpose of depriving
every author, in prose or verse, of his reputation and livelihood, who
is not a regular hack of the vilest cabal that ever disgraced this or
any other country.
There is something in your nature and habits that fits you for the
situation into which your good fortune has thrown you. In the first
place, you are in no danger of exciting the jealousy of your patrons by
a mortifying display of extraordinary talents, while your sordid
devotion to their will and to your own interest at once ensures their
gratitude and contempt. To crawl and lick the dust is all they expect of
you, and all you can do. Otherwise they might fear your power, for they
could have no dependence on your fidelity: but they take you with safety
and fondness to their bosoms; for they know that if you cease to be a
tool, you cease to be anything. If you had an exuberance of wit, the
unguarded use of it might sometimes glance at your employers; if you
were sincere yourself, you might respect the motives of others; if you
had sufficient understanding, you might attempt an argument, and fail in
it. But luckily for yourself and your admirers, you are but the dull
echo, ‘the tenth transmitter’ of some hackneyed jest: the want of all
manly and candid feeling in yourself only excites your suspicion and
antipathy to it in others, as something at which your nature recoils:
your slowness to understand makes you quick to misrepresent; and you
infallibly make nonsense of what you cannot possibly conceive. What seem
your wilful blunders are often the felicity of natural parts, and your
want of penetration has all the appearance of an affected petulance!
Again, of an humble origin yourself, you recommend your performances to
persons of fashion by always abusing _low people_, with the smartness of
a lady’s waiting woman, and the independent spirit of a travelling
tutor. Raised from the lowest rank to your present despicable eminence
in the world of letters, you are indignant that any one should attempt
to rise into notice, except by the same regular trammels and servile
gradations, or should go about to separate the stamp of merit from the
badge of sycophancy. The silent listener in select circles, and menial
tool of noble families, you have become the oracle of Church and State.
The purveyor to the prejudices or passions of a private patron succeeds,
by no other title, to regulate the public taste. You have felt the
inconveniences of poverty, and look up with base and groveling
admiration to the advantages of wealth and power: you have had to
contend with the mechanical difficulties of a want of education, and you
see nothing in learning but its mechanical uses. A self-taught man
naturally becomes a pedant, and mistakes the means of knowledge for the
end, unless he is a man of genius; and you, Sir, are not a man of
genius. From having known nothing originally, you think it a great
acquisition to know anything now, no matter what or how small it is—nay,
the smaller and more insignificant it is, the more curious you seem to
think it, as it is farther removed from common sense and human nature.
The collating of points and commas is the highest game your literary
ambition can reach to, and the squabbles of editors are to you
infinitely more important than the meaning of an author. You think more
of the letter than the spirit of a passage; and in your eagerness to
show your minute superiority over those who have gone before you,
generally miss both. In comparing yourself with others, you make a
considerable mistake. You suppose the common advantages of a liberal
education to be something peculiar to yourself, and calculate your
progress beyond the rest of the world from the obscure point at which
you first set out. Yet your overweening self-complacency is never easy
but in the expression of your contempt for others; like a conceited
mechanic in a village ale-house, you would set down every one who
differs from you as an ignorant blockhead; and very fairly infer that
any one who is beneath yourself must be nothing. You have been well
called an Ultra-Crepidarian critic. From the difficulty you yourself
have in constructing a sentence of common grammar, and your frequent
failures, you instinctively presume that no author who comes under the
lash of your pen can understand his mother-tongue: and again, you
suspect every one who is not your ‘very good friend’ of knowing nothing
of the Greek or Latin, because you are surprised to think how you came
by your own knowledge of them. There is an innate littleness and
vulgarity in all you do. In combating an opinion, you never take a broad
and liberal ground, state it fairly, allow what there is of truth or an
appearance of truth, and then assert your own judgment by exposing what
is deficient in it, and giving a more masterly view of the subject. No:
this would be committing your powers and pretensions where you dare not
trust them. You know yourself better. You deny the meaning altogether,
misquote or misapply, and then plume yourself on your own superiority to
the absurdity you have created. Your triumph over your antagonists is
the triumph of your cunning and mean-spiritedness over some nonentity of
your own making; and your wary self-knowledge shrinks from a comparison
with any but the most puny pretensions, as the spider retreats from the
caterpillar into its web.
There cannot be a greater nuisance than a dull, envious, pragmatical,
low-bred man, who is placed as you are in the situation of the Editor of
such a work as the Quarterly Review. Conscious that his reputation
stands on very slender and narrow grounds, he is naturally jealous of
that of others. He insults over unsuccessful authors; he hates
successful ones. He is angry at the faults of a work; more angry at its
excellences. If an opinion is old, he treats it with supercilious
indifference; if it is new, it provokes his rage. Everything beyond his
limited range of inquiry, appears to him a paradox and an absurdity: and
he resents every suggestion of the kind as an imposition on the public,
and an imputation on his own sagacity. He cavils at what he does not
comprehend, and misrepresents what he knows to be true. Bound to go
through the nauseous task of abusing all those who are not like himself
the abject tools of power, his irritation increases with the number of
obstacles he encounters, and the number of sacrifices he is obliged to
make of common sense and decency to his interest and self-conceit. Every
instance of prevarication he wilfully commits makes him more in love
with hypocrisy, and every indulgence of his hired malignity makes him
more disposed to repeat the insult and the injury. His understanding
becomes daily more distorted, and his feelings more and more callous.
Grown old in the service of corruption, he drivels on to the last with
prostituted impotence and shameless effrontery; salves a meagre
reputation for wit, by venting the driblets of his spleen and
impertinence on others; answers their arguments by confuting himself;
mistakes habitual obtuseness of intellect for a particular acuteness,
not to be imposed upon by shallow appearances; unprincipled rancour for
zealous loyalty; and the irritable, discontented, vindictive, peevish
effusions of bodily pain and mental imbecility for proofs of refinement
of taste and strength of understanding.
Such, Sir, is the picture of which you have sat for the outline:—all
that remains is to fill up the little, mean, crooked, dirty details. The
task is to me no very pleasant one; for I can feel very little ambition
to follow you through your ordinary routine of pettifogging objections
and barefaced assertions, the only difficulty of making which is to
throw aside all regard to truth and decency, and the only difficulty in
answering them is to overcome one’s contempt for the writer. But you are
a nuisance, and should be abated.
I shall proceed to shew, first, your want of common honesty, in speaking
of particular persons; and, secondly, your want of common capacity, in
treating of any general question. It is this double negation of
understanding and principle that makes you all that you are.—As an
instance of the summary manner in which you dispose of any author who is
not to your taste, you began your account of the first work of mine you
thought proper to notice (the Round Table), with a paltry and deliberate
falsehood. I need not be at much pains to shew that your opinion on the
merits of a work is not of much value, after I have shewn that your word
is not to be taken with respect to the author. The charges which you
brought against me as the writer of that work, were chiefly these
four:—1st, That I pretended to have written a work in the manner of the
Spectator; I answer, this is a falsehood. The Advertisement to that work
is written expressly to disclaim any such idea, and to apologise for the
work’s having fallen short of the original intention of the projector
(Mr. Leigh Hunt), from its execution having devolved almost entirely
upon me, who had undertaken merely to furnish a set of essays and
criticisms, which essays and criticisms were here collected together.—2.
That I was not only a professed imitator of Addison, but a great coiner
of new words and phrases: I answer, this is also a deliberate and
contemptible falsehood. You have filled a paragraph with a catalogue of
these new words and phrases, which you attribute to me, and single out
as the particular characteristics of my style, not any one of which I
have used. This you knew.—3. You say I write eternally about
washerwomen. I answer, no such thing. There is indeed one paper in the
Round Table on this subject, and I think a very agreeable one. I may say
so, for it is not my writing.—4. You say that ‘I praise my own
chivalrous eloquence’: and I answer, that’s a falsehood; and that you
knew that I had not applied these words to myself, because you knew that
it was not I who had used them. The last paragraph of the article in
question is true: for as if to obviate the detection of this tissue of
little, lying, loyal, catchpenny frauds, it contains a cunning, tacit
acknowledgment of them; but says, with equal candour and modesty, that
it is not the business of the writer to distinguish (in such trifling
cases) between truth and falsehood. That may be; but I cannot think that
for the editor of the Quarterly Review to want common veracity, is any
disgrace to me. It is necessary, Sir, to go into the details of this
fraudulent transaction, this Albemarle-street hoax, that the public may
know, once for all, what to think of you and me. The first paragraph of
the Review is couched in the following terms.
‘Whatever may have been the preponderating feelings with which we closed
these volumes, we will not refuse our acknowledgments to Mr. Hazlitt for
a few mirthful sensations,’ (that they were very few, I can easily
believe,) ‘which he has enabled us to mingle with the rest, by the hint
that his Essays were meant to be “in the manner of the Spectator and
Tatler.” The passage in which this is conveyed, happened to be nearly
the last to which we turned; and we were about to rise from the Round
Table, heavily oppressed with a recollection of vulgar descriptions,
silly paradoxes, flat truisms, misty sophistry, broken English, ill
humour, and rancorous abuse, when we were first informed of the modest
pretensions of our host. Our thoughts then reverted with an eager
impulse to the urbanity of Addison, his unassuming tone, and clear
simplicity; to the ease and softness of his style, to the chearful
benevolence of his heart. The playful gaiety too, and the tender
feelings of his coadjutor, poor Steele, came forcibly to our memory. The
effect of the ludicrous contrast thus presented to us, it would be
somewhat difficult to describe. We think that it was akin to what we
have felt from the admirable _nonchalance_ with which Liston, in the
complex character of a weaver and an ass, seems to throw away all doubt
of his being the most accomplished lover in the universe, and receives,
as if they were merely his due, the caresses of the fairy
queen.’—Quarterly Review, No. xxxiii. p. 154.
The advertisement prefixed to the Round Table, in which the hint is
conveyed which afforded you ‘a few mirthful sensations,’ stood thus.—
‘The following work falls somewhat short of its title and original
intention. It was proposed by my friend Mr. Hunt, to publish a series of
papers in the Examiner, in the manner of the early periodical essayists,
the Spectator and Tatler. These papers were to be contributed by various
persons on a variety of subjects; and Mr. Hunt, as the editor, was to
take the characteristic or dramatic part of the work upon himself. I
undertook to furnish occasional essays and criticisms; one or two other
friends promised their assistance; but the essence of the work was to be
miscellaneous. The next thing was to fix upon a title for it. After much
doubtful consultation, that of THE ROUND TABLE was agreed upon, as most
descriptive of its nature and design. But our plan had been no sooner
arranged and entered upon, than Buonaparte landed at Frejus, _et voila
la Table Ronde dissoute_. Our little Congress was broken up as well as
the great one. Politics called off the attention of the Editor from the
belles lettres; and the task of continuing the work fell chiefly upon
the person who was least able to give life and spirit to the original
design. A want of variety in the subjects, and mode of treating them,
is, perhaps, the least disadvantage resulting from this circumstance.
All the papers in the two volumes here offered to the public, were
written by myself and Mr. Hunt, except a letter communicated by a friend
in the sixteenth number. Out of the fifty-two numbers, twelve are Mr.
Hunt’s, with the signatures L. H. or H. T. For all the rest I am
answerable. W. HAZLITT.’
Such, Sir, is the passage to which you allude, with so much hysterical
satisfaction, as having let you into the secret that I fancied myself to
have produced a work ‘in the manner of the Spectator and Tatler’; and as
having relieved you from the extreme uneasiness you had felt in reading
through the ‘vulgar descriptions, silly paradoxes, flat truisms, misty
sophistry, broken English, ill humour, and rancorous abuse,’ contained
in the Round Table. If I had indeed given myself out for a second Steele
or Addison, I should have made a very ludicrous mistake. As it is, it is
you have made a wilful misstatement. Your oppression, Sir, in rising
from the Round Table, must have been great to put you upon so desperate
an expedient to divert your chagrin, as that of affecting to suppose
that I had said just the contrary of what I did say, in order that you
might affect ‘a few mirthful sensations’ at my expence. I cannot say
that I envy you the little voluntary revulsion which your feelings
underwent, at the ludicrous comparison which you fancy me to make
between myself and Addison, on purpose to indulge the suggestions of
your spleen and prejudice. These are among the last refinements, the
_menus plaisirs_ of hypocrisy, of which I must remain in ignorance. I
will not require you to retract the assertion you have made, but I will
take care before I have done, that any assertion you may make with
respect to me shall not be taken as current. As to your praise of the
Tatler and Spectator, I must at all times agree to it: but as far as it
was meant as a tacit reproof to my vanity in comparing myself with these
authors, it appears to have been unnecessary. You say elsewhere,
speaking of some passage of mine—‘Addison never wrote anything so
fine!’—and again that I fancy myself a finer writer than Addison. By
your uneasy jealousy of the self-conceit of other people, it should seem
that you are in the habit of drawing comparisons, ‘secret, sweet, and
precious,’ between yourself and your ‘illustrious predecessors’ not much
to their advantage. As you have here thought proper to tell me what I do
not think, I will tell you what I do think, which is, that you could not
have written the passage in question, _On the Progress of Arts_, because
you never felt half the enthusiasm for what is fine.
2. After stating the pretensions of the work, you proceed to the style
in which it is written.—‘There is one merit which this author possesses
besides that of successful imitation—he is a very eminent creator of
words and phrases. Amongst a vast variety which have newly started up we
notice “firesider”—“kitcheny”—“to smooth up”—“to do off”—and “to tiptoe
down.” To _this_ we add a few of the author’s new-born phrases, which
bear sufficient marks of a kindred origin to entitle them to a place by
_their_ side. Such is the assertion that Spenser “was dipt in poetic
luxury”; the description of “a minute coil which clicks in the baking
coal”—of “a numerousness scattering an individual gusto”—and of “curls
that are ripe with sun shine.” _Our readers are perhaps by this time as
much acquainted with the style of this author as they have any desire to
be_,’ etc.
I have nothing to do at present with the merits of the words or phrases,
which you here attribute to me, and make the test of my general style,
as if your readers truly if they persisted would find only a constant
repetition of them in my writings. I say that they are not mine at all;
that they are not characteristic of my style, that you knew this
perfectly, and also that there were reasons which prevented me from
pointing out this petty piece of chicanery; and farther, I say that I am
so far from being ‘a very eminent creator of words and phrases,’ that I
do not believe you can refer to an instance in anything I have written
in which there is a single new word or phrase. In fact, I am as
tenacious on this score of never employing any new words to express my
ideas, as you, Sir, are of never expressing any ideas that are not
perfectly thread-bare and commonplace. My style is as old as your
matter. This is the fault you at other times find with it, mistaking the
common idiom of the language for ‘broken English.’
3. You say that ‘I write eternally about washerwomen’; and pray, if I
did, what is that to you, Sir? There is a littleness in your objections
which makes even the answers to them ridiculous, and which would make it
impossible to notice them, were you not the Government-Critic. You say
yourself indeed afterwards that ‘It is he’ (Mr. Hunt) ‘who devotes _ten
or twelve pages_ to a dissertation on washerwomen.’ Good: what you say
on this subject is a fair specimen of your mind and manners. The playing
at fast-and-loose with the matter-of-fact may be passed over as a matter
of course in your hypercritical lucubrations. There is but one half
paper on this interdicted subject in the Round Table:—you have filled
one page out of five of the article in the Review with a ridicule of
this paper on account of the vulgarity of the subject, which offends you
exceedingly; you recur to it twice afterwards _en passant_, and end your
performance (somewhat in the style of a quack-doctor aping his own
merry-andrew) with ‘two or three conclusive digs in the side at it.’
There is something in the subject that makes a strong impression on your
mind. You seem ‘to hate it with a perfect hatred.’[73] Now I would ask
where is the harm of this dissertation on washerwomen inserted in the
Round Table, any more than those of Dutch and Flemish kitchen-pieces,
the glossy brilliancy and high finishing of which must have become
familiar to your eye in the collections of Earl Grosvenor, Lord
Mulgrave, and the Marquis of Stafford? What has Mr. Hunt done in this
never-to-be forgiven paper to betray the lowness of his breeding or
sentiments, or to shew that he who wrote it is ‘the droll or merry
fellow of the piece,’ and that I who _did not write it_ am ‘a sour
Jacobin, who hate everything but washerwomen’? Would Addison or Steele,
‘poor Steele’ as you call him, have brought this as a capital charge
against their ‘imitators’? Did they instinctively direct their
speculations or limit their views of human life to ‘remarks on gentlemen
and gentlewomen’? They often enough treated of low people and familiar
life without any consciousness of degradation. ‘Their gorge did not
rise’ at the humble worth or homely enjoyments of their
fellow-creatures, like your’s. A coronet or a mitre were not the only
things that caught their jaundiced eye, or soothed their rising gall.
They who are always talking of high and low people are generally of a
vulgar origin themselves, and of an inherent meanness of disposition
which nothing can overcome. Besides, there is a want of good faith, as
well as of good taste, in your affected fastidiousness on this point.
‘You assume a vice, though you have it not,’ or not to the degree, which
your petulance and servility would have us suppose. A short time before
you wrote this uncalled-for tirade against Mr. Hunt as an exclusive
patroniser of that class of females, ycleped ‘washerwomen,’ he had
quoted with praise in the Examiner, and as a mark of tender and humane
feelings in the author, in spite of appearances to the contrary, the
following epitaph from the Gentleman’s Magazine.
‘EPITAPH BY WILLIAM GIFFORD, ESQ.
‘We are no friends, publicly speaking, to the author of the following
epitaph. We differ much with his politics, and with the cast of his
satire; and do not think him, properly speaking, a poet, as many do. But
we always admired the spirit that looked forth from his account of his
own life, and the touching copy of verses on a departed friend, that are
to be found in the notes to one of his satires; and there are feelings
and circumstances in this world, before which politics and satire, and
poetry, are of little importance’—(_How little knew’st thou of
Calista!_)—‘feelings, that triumph over infirmity and distaste of every
sort, and only render us anxious, in our respect for them, to be thought
capable of appreciating them ourselves. The world, with all its hubbub,
slides away from before one on such occasions; and we only see humanity
in all its better weakness, and let us add, in all its beauty.
‘The author will think what he pleases of this effusion of ours. It is
an interval in the battle, during which we only wish to show ourselves
fellow-men with him. Afterwards, he may resume his hostilities, if he
has any, and we will draw our swords as before.
_For the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine.’ Dec. 18, 1815._
‘Mr. Urban,—I am one of those who love to contemplate the “frail
memorials” of the dead, and do not, therefore, count the solitary
hours, occasionally spent in a church-yard, among the most
melancholy ones of my life. But in London, this is a gratification
rarely to be found; for, either through caution, or some less worthy
motive, the cemeteries are closed against the stranger. I have been
in the practice of passing by the chapel in South Audley Street,
Grosvenor Square, almost every day, for several weeks, yet never saw
the door of the burying-ground open till yesterday. I did not
neglect the opportunity thus offered, but walked in. I found it far
more spacious and airy than I expected; but I met with nothing very
novel or interesting till I came to a low tomb, plain but neat,
where I was both pleased and surprised by the following inscription,
which, I believe, has never yet appeared in print, and which seems
not unworthy of your miscellany.
M. D.
Here lies the Body
of ANN DAVIES,
(for more than twenty years)
Servant to William Gifford.[74]
She died February 6, 1815,
in the forty-third year of her age,
of a tedious and painful malady,
which she bore
with exemplary patience and resignation.
Her deeply-afflicted master
erected this stone to her memory,
as a faithful testimony
of her uncommon worth,
and of his perpetual gratitude,
respect and affection,
for her long and meritorious services.
Though here unknown, dear Ann, thy ashes rest,
Still lives thy memory in one grateful breast,
That traced thy course through many a painful year,
And marked thy humble hope, thy pious fear.—
O! when this frame, which yet, while life remained,
Thy duteous love, with trembling hand, sustained,
Dissolves (as soon it must) may that Bless’d Pow’r
Who beamed on thine, illume my parting hour!
So shall I greet thee, where no ills annoy,
And what was sown in grief, is reap’d in joy;
Where worth, obscured below, bursts into day,
And those are paid, whom Earth could never pay.’[75]
It seems then, you can extract the pathetic though not the humorous, out
of persons who are not ‘gentlemen or gentlewomen.’ It was the amiable
weakness thus noticed, that made you take such pains to do away the
suspicion of a particular partiality for low people. You could not
afford ‘the frail memorial’ of your private virtues to get beyond the
inscription on a tomb-stone, or the poet’s corner of the Gentleman’s
Magazine. The natural sympathies of the undoubted translator of Juvenal
might be a prejudice to the official character of the anonymous editor
of the Quarterly Review. You were determined to hear no more of this
epitaph, and ‘other such dulcet diseases’[76] of yours.—You perhaps
recollect, Sir, that the columns of the Examiner newspaper, which gave
you such a premature or posthumous credit for some ‘compunctious
visitings of nature,’ also contained the first specimen of the Story of
Rimini. You seem to have said on that occasion with Iago, ‘You are well
tuned now,—but I’ll set down the pegs that make this music, _as honest
as I am_.’—That Mr. Hunt should have supposed it possible for a moment,
that a government automaton was accessible to anything like a liberal
concession, is one of those deplorable mistakes which constantly put men
who are ‘made of penetrable stuff,’ at the mercy of those who are not.
The amiable and elegant author of Rimini thought he was appealing to
something human in your breast, in the recollection of your ‘Dear Ann
Davies’; he touched the springs, and found them ‘stuffed with paltry
blurred sheets’ of the Quarterly Review, with notes from Mr. Murray, and
directions how to proceed with the author, from the Admiralty Scribe.
You retorted his sympathy with ‘one whom earth could never pay,’ by
laughing to scorn his honest laborious ‘tub-tumbling viragos,’ whose red
elbows and coarse fists prevented so inelegant a contrast to the pining
and sickly form whose loss you deplore. Is there anything in your nature
and disposition that draws to it only the infirm in body and oppressed
in mind; or that, while it clings to power for support, seeks
consolation in the daily soothing spectacle of physical malady or morbid
sensibility? The air you breathe seems to infect; and your friendship to
be a canker-worm that blights its objects with unwholesome and premature
decay. You are enamoured of suffering, and are at peace only with the
dead.—Even if you had been accessible to remorse as a political critic,
Mr. Hunt had committed himself with you (past forgiveness) in your
character of a pretender to poetry about town. The following lines in
his Feast of the Poets, must have occasioned you ‘a few mirthful
sensations,’ which you have not yet acknowledged, except by deeds.—
‘A hem was then heard, consequential and snapping,
And a sour little gentleman walked with a rap in.
He bow’d, look’d about him, seem’d cold, and sat down,
And said,[77] “I’m surpris’d that you’ll visit this town:—
To be sure, there are one or two of us who know you,
But as for the rest, they are all much below you.
So stupid, in general, the natives are grown,
They really prefer Scotch reviews to their own;
So that what with their taste, their reformers, and stuff,
They have sicken’d myself and my friends long enough.”
“Yourself and your friends!” cried the God in high glee;
“And pray my frank visitor, who may you be?”
“Who be?” cried the other; “why really—this tone—
William Gifford’s a name, I think pretty well known.”
“Oh—now I remember,” said Phœbus;—“ah true—
My thanks to that name are undoubtedly due:
The rod, that got rid of the Cruscas and Lauras,
—That plague of the butterflies—sav’d me the horrors;
The Juvenal too stops a gap in one’s shelf,
At least in what Dryden has not done himself;
And there’s something, which even distaste must respect,
In the self-taught example, that conquer’d neglect.
But not to insist on the recommendations
Of modesty, wit, and a small stock of patience,
My visit just now is to poets alone,
And not to small critics, however well known.”
So saying, he rang, to leave nothing in doubt,
And the sour little gentleman bless’d himself out.’
_Thus painters write their names at Co._ For this passage and the
temperate and judicious note which accompanies it, it is no wonder that
you put the author—of Rimini, in Newgate, without the Sheriff’s warrant.
In order to give as favourable an impression of that poem as you could,
you began your account of it by saying that it had been composed in
Newgate, though you knew that it had not; but you also knew that the
name of Newgate would sound more grateful to certain ears, to pour
flattering poison into which is the height of your abject ambition. In
this courtly inuendo which ushered in your wretched verbal criticism (it
is the more disgusting to see such gross and impudent prevarication
combined with such petty captiousness) you were guided not by a regard
to truth, but to your own ends; and yet you say somewhere, very
oracularly, out of contradiction to me, that ‘not to prefer the true to
the agreeable, where they are inconsistent, is folly.’ You have mistaken
the word: it is not folly, but knavery.[78]
4. You say you have no objection to my ‘praising my own chivalrous
eloquence’; and I say that the insinuation is impertinent and untrue.
The paper in which that phrase occurs is written by Mr. Hunt, as you
know, and is an answer to some observations of mine on the poetical
temperament in a preceding number _On the Causes of Methodism_. Mr.
Hunt’s having taken upon him ‘to praise my chivalrous eloquence,’
without consulting you, appeared no doubt a great piece of presumption;
and you punished me by magnifying this indiscretion into the enormity of
my having praised myself. I might as well say that Mr. Canning had made
a fulsome eulogy on his own private virtues and public principles in
your dedication of the edition of Ben Jonson to him.—You say indeed in
the last paragraph of your criticism that ‘you understand some of the
papers to be by Mr. Hunt; that it is he who is the droll or merry fellow
of the piece; who has shocked you by writing eternally about
washerwomen, etc. but that you cannot stay to distinguish between us,
and that we must divide our respective share of merit between
ourselves.’ The share of merit in that work may indeed be so small that
it is of little consequence who has the reversion of any part of it, but
I will take care that a cat’s-paw shall not be put on the pannel of my
_quantum meruit_, nor take measure of my capacity with a mechanic rule,
marked by ignorance and servility, nor turn the scale of public opinion
by throwing in false weights as he pleases, nor make both of us
ridiculous, by attributing to each the peculiarities of the other, with
whatever exaggerated interpretation he chuses to put upon them. By this
transposition of persons, which is not a matter of indifference as you
pretend, you gain this advantage which you have no right to gain. You
can at any time apply to me or Mr. Hunt the obnoxious points in your
account of either, and improve upon them, as it suits your purpose. By
combining the extremes of individual character, you make a very strange
and wilful compound of your own. It is the same person, and yet it is
not one person but two persons, according to the critical creed you
would establish, who is a merry fellow, and a sour Jacobin; who is all
gaiety and all gloom; a person who rails at poets, and yet is himself a
poet; a hater of cats, and of cat’s-paws;[79] a reviler of Mr. Pitt, and
a panegyrist upon washerwomen. If, Sir, your friend, Mr. Hoppner, of
whom, as you tell us[80] you discreetly said nothing, while he was
struggling with obscurity, lest it should be imputed to the partiality
of friendship, but whom you praised and dedicated to, as soon as he
became popular, to shew your disinterestedness and deference to public
opinion, if even this artist, whom you celebrate as a painter of
flattering likenesses, had undertaken to unite in one piece the most
striking features and characteristic expression of his and your common
friends, had improved your lurking archness of look into Mr. Murray’s
gentle, downcast obliquity of vision; had joined Mr. Canning’s drooping
nose to Mr. Croker’s aspiring chin, the clear complexion (the _splendida
bilis_) of the one, to the candid self-complacent aspect of the other;
had forced into the same preposterous medley, the invincible _hauteur_
and satanic pride of Mr. Pitt’s physiognomy, with the dormant meaning
and admirable nonchalance of Lord Castlereagh’s features, the manly
sleekness of Charles Long, and the monumental outline of John
Kemble—what mortal would have owned the likeness!—I too, Sir, must claim
the privilege of the _principium individuationis_, for myself as well as
my neighbours; I will sit for no man’s picture but my own, and not to
you for that; I am not desirous to play so many parts as Bottom, and as
to his ass’s head which you would put upon my shoulders, it will do for
you to wear the next time you shew yourself in Mr. Murray’s shop, or for
your friend Mr. Southey to take with him, whenever he appears at Court.
As to the difference of political sentiment between the writer of the
Round Table and the writer of the article in the Review, which forms the
heavy burthen of your flippant censure, I cannot consider that as an
accusation. You have many other objections to make: such as that,
because Mr. Addison wrote some very pleasing papers on the Pleasures of
the Imagination, I am not willing to fall short of ‘my illustrious
predecessor’; and ‘accordingly,’ you say, ‘we hear much of poetry and of
painting, and of music and of _gusto_.’ Is this the only reason you can
conceive why any one should take an interest in such things; or did you
write your Baviad and Mæviad that you might not fall short of Pope, your
translation of Juvenal that you might surpass Dryden, or did you turn
commentator on the poets, that you might be on a par with ‘your
illustrious predecessors’—‘from slashing Bentley down to piddling
Theobalds’? Of Hogarth you make me say, quoting from your favourite
treatise on washerwomen, that ‘he is too apt to perk morals and
sentiments in your face.’ You cannot comprehend my definition of
_gusto_, which you do not ascribe to any defect in yourself. My account
of Titian and Vandyke’s colouring, appears to you very odd, because it
is like the things described, and you have no idea of the things
described. If I had described the style of these two painters in terms
applicable to them both, and to all other painters, you would have
thought the precision of the style equal to the justness of the
sentiment. A distinction without a difference satisfies you, for you can
understand or repeat a common-place. It is the pointing out the real
differences of things that offends you, for you have no idea of what is
meant; and a writer who gets at all below the surface of a question,
necessarily gets beyond your depth, and you can hardly contain your
wonder at his presumption and shallowness. You quote half a dozen
detached sentences of mine, as ‘convincing instances of affectation and
paradox,’ (such as, _The definition of a true patriot is a good hater—He
who speaks two languages has no country_, etc.) and which taken from the
context to which they belong, and of which they are brought as extreme
illustrations, may be so, but which you cannot answer in the connection
in which they stand, and which you detach from the general speculation
with which you dare not cope, to bring them more into the focus of your
microscopic vision, and that you may deal with them more at ease and in
safety on your old ground of literal and verbal quibbling.
You do not like the subjects of my Essays in general. You complain in
particular of ‘my eager vituperation of good nature and good-natured
people’; and yet with this you have, as I should take it, nought to do:
you object to my sweeping abuse of poets, as (with the exception of
Milton) dishonest men,[81] with which you have as little to do; you are
no poet, and of course, honest! You do not like my abuse of the Scotch
at which the Irish were delighted, nor my abuse of the Irish at which
the Scotch were not displeased, nor my abuse of the English, which I can
understand; but I wonder you should not like my abuse of the French. You
say indeed that ‘no abuse which is directed against whole classes of men
is of much importance,’ and yet you and your Anti-Jacobin friends have
been living upon this sort of abuse for the last twenty years. You add
with characteristic ‘no meaning’—‘_If undeserved_, it is utterly
impotent and may be well utterly despised.’ The last part of the
proposition may be true, but abuse is not without effect, because
undeserved, nor is a thing utterly impotent because it is thoroughly
despicable. You, Sir, have power which is considerable, in proportion as
it is despicable!
I confess, Sir, the Round Table did not take; ‘it was _Caveare_ to the
multitude,’ but the reason, I think, was not that the abuse in it was
undeserved, but that I have there spoken the truth of too many persons
and things. In writing it, I preferred the true to the agreeable, which
I find to be an unpardonable fault. Yet I am not aware of any sentiment
in the work which ought to give offence to an honest and inquiring mind,
for I think there is none that does not evidently proceed from a
conviction of its truth and a bias to what is right. My object in
writing it was to set down such observations as had occurred to me from
time to time on different subjects, and as appeared to be any ways worth
preserving. I wished to make a sort of _Liber Veritatis_, a set of
studies from human life. As my object was not to flatter, neither was it
to offend or contradict others, but to state my own feelings or opinions
such as they really were, but more particularly of course when this had
not been done before, and where I thought I could throw any new light
upon a subject. In doing so, I endeavoured to fix my attention only on
the thing I was writing about, and which had struck me in some
particular manner, which I wished to point out to others, with the best
reasons or explanations I could give. I was not the slave of prejudices;
nor do I think I was the dupe of my own vanity. To repeat what has been
said a thousand times is common-place: to contradict it because it has
been so said, is not originality. A truth is, however, not the worse but
the better for being new. I did not try to think with the multitude nor
to differ with them, but to think for myself; and the having done this
with some boldness and some effect is the height of my offending. I
wrote to the public with the same sincerity and want of disguise as if I
had been making a register of my private thoughts; and this has been
construed by some into a breach of decorum. The affectation I have been
accused of was merely my sometimes stating a thing in an extreme point
of view for fear of not being understood; and my love of paradox may, I
think, be accounted for from the necessity of counteracting the
obstinacy of prejudice. If I have been led to carry a remark too far, it
was because others would not allow it to have any force at all. My
object was to shew the latent operation of some unsuspected principle,
and I therefore took only some one view of that particular subject. I
was chiefly anxious that the germ of thought should be true and
original; that I should put others in possession of what I meant, and
then left it to find its level in the operation of common sense, and to
have its excesses corrected by other causes. The principle will be found
true, even where the application is extravagant or partial. I have not
been wedded to my particular speculations with the spirit of a partisan.
I wrote for instance an Essay on Pedantry, to qualify the extreme
contempt into which it has fallen, and to shew the necessary advantages
of an absorption of the whole mind in some favourite study, and I wrote
an Essay on the Ignorance of the Learned to lessen the undue admiration
of Learning, and to shew that it is not everything. I gained very few
converts to either of these opinions. You reproach me with the cynical
turn of many of my Essays, which are in fact prose-satires; but when you
say I hate every thing but washerwomen, you forget what you had before
said that I was a great imitator of Addison, and wrote much about
‘poetry and painting, and music and _gusto_.’ You make no mention of my
character of Rousseau, or of the paper on Actors and Acting. You also
forget my praise of John Buncle! As to my style, I thought little about
it. I only used the word which seemed to me to signify the idea I wanted
to convey, and I did not rest till I had got it. In seeking for truth, I
sometimes found beauty. As to the facility of which you, Sir, and others
accuse me, it has not been acquired at once nor without pains. I was
eight years in writing eight pages, under circumstances of inconceivable
and ridiculous discouragement. As to my figurative and gaudy
phraseology, you reproach me with it because you never heard of what I
had written in my first dry manner. I afterwards found a popular mode of
writing necessary to convey subtle and difficult trains of reasoning,
and something more than your meagre vapid style, to force attention to
original observations, which did not restrict themselves to making a
parade of the discovery of a worm-eaten date, or the repetition of an
obsolete prejudice. You say that it is impossible to remember what I
write after reading it:—One remembers to have read what you
write—_before_! In that you have the advantage of me, to be sure. You in
vain endeavour to account for the popularity of some of my writings,
from the trick of arranging words in a variety of forms without any
correspondent ideas, like the newly-invented optical toy. You have not
hit upon the secret, nor will you be able to avail yourself of it when I
tell you. It is the old story—_that I think what I please, and say what
I think_. This accounts, Sir, for the difference between you and me in
so many respects. I think only of the argument I am defending; you are
only thinking whether you write grammar. My opinions are founded on
reasons which I try to give; yours are governed by motives which you
keep to yourself. It has been my business all my life to get at the
truth as well as I could, merely to satisfy my own mind: it has been
yours to suppress the evidence of your senses and the dictates of your
understanding, if you ever found them at variance with your convenience
or the caprices of others. I do not suppose you ever in your life took
an interest in any abstract question for its own sake, or have a
conception of the possibility of any one else doing so. If you had, you
would hardly insist on my changing characters with you. Yet you make
this the condition of my receiving any favour or lenity at your hands.
It is no matter, Sir: I will try to do without it.
It appears by your own account, that all the other offences of the Round
Table would hardly have roused your resentment, had it not been that I
have spoken of Mr. Pitt and Mr. Burke, not in the hackneyed terms of a
treasury underling. It was this that filled up the measure of my
iniquity, and the storm burst on my devoted head. After quoting one or
two half sentences from the character of Mr. Pitt,[82] in which I
ascribe the influence of his oratory almost entirely to a felicitous and
imposing arrangement of words, and the whole of a short note on Mr.
Burke’s political apostacy, which I had fancifully ascribed to his
jealousy of Rousseau, you add with great sincerity:—‘We are far from
intending to write a single word in answer to this loathsome trash’—(it
would have been well if you had made and kept the same resolution in
other cases,) ‘but we confess that these passages chiefly excited us to
take the trouble of noticing the work. The author might have described
washerwomen for ever; complimented himself unceasingly on his own
“chivalrous eloquence”; prosed interminably about Chaucer; written, if
possible, in a more affected, silly, confused, ungrammatical style, and
believed, as he now believes, that he was surpassing Addison, we should
not have meddled with him; but if the creature, in his endeavours to
crawl into the light, must take his way over the tombs of illustrious
men, disfiguring the records of their greatness with the slime and filth
which marks his track, it is right to point him out that he may be flung
back to the situation in which nature designed that he should grovel’ p.
159. And this, Sir, from you who wrote or procured to be inserted in the
Quarterly Review, that nefarious attack on the character of Mr. Fox,
which was distinguished and is still remembered among the slime and
filth which has marked its track into day, over the characters and
feelings of the living and the dead. If I, Sir, had written that ‘foul
and vulgar invective’ against an individual whom you did not choose to
let ‘rest in his grave,’ if I had been ‘such a thing’ as the writer of
that article, I might, (as you say,) have described washerwomen for
ever, and have fancied myself a better writer than ‘the courtly
Addison,’ and you, Sir, would have encouraged me in the delusion, for I
should have been a court-tool, _your_ tool. But you state the thing
clearly and unanswerably. I was not a court-tool, your tool, and
therefore I was to be made your victim. There is a difference of
political opinion between you and me; therefore you undertake not only
to condemn that opinion, but to proscribe the writer. Do you do this on
your own authority, or on Mr. Croker’s, or on whose? As I did not
consider it as sacrilege to criticise the style and the opinions of the
two great men who have contributed to make this country what it is, a
fief held by a junto, of which men like you are the organs, in trust and
for the benefit of the common cause of despotism throughout Europe, I,
and every other writer like me, professing or maintaining anything like
independence of spirit or consistency of opinion, is ‘to be flung back
into his original obscurity, and stifled in the filth and slime’ of the
Quarterly Review, or its drain, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. You
began the experiment upon the Round Table; you have tried it twice
since, and for the last time.
If any doubts could ever have been entertained on the subject of your
motives and views, you have taken care to remove them. Thus you conclude
your account of the characters of Shakespear’s plays with saying, that
you should not have condescended to notice the senseless and wicked
sophistry of the work at all, but that ‘you conceived it might not be
unprofitable to shew how small a portion of talent and literature is
necessary to carry on the trade of sedition.’ I should think it requires
as much talent and literature to carry on my trade as yours. This
acknowledgment of yours is ‘remarkable for its truth and _naiveté_.’ It
is a pledge from your own mouth of your impartiality and candour. With
this object in view, ‘you have selected a few specimens of my ethics and
criticism,’ (they are very few, and of course you would select no
others,) just sufficient, (with your garbling and additions,) to prove
‘that my knowledge of Shakespear and the English language is exactly on
a par with the purity of my morals, and the depth of my understanding.’
But did it not occur to you in making this officious declaration, or
would it not occur to any one else in reading it, that this undertaking
of yours might be no less ‘profitable’ and acceptable, even supposing
the portion of talent displayed by the author not to be small but great?
Would it not be more necessary in this case to do away the scandal that
there was any talent or literature on the side of ‘sedition’? The
greater the shock given to the complacency of servility and corruption,
by an opinion getting abroad that there was any knowledge of Shakespear
or the English language except on the minister’s side of the question,
would it not be the more absolutely incumbent on you as the head of the
literary police, to arrest such an opinion in the outset, to crush it
before it gathered strength, and to produce the article in question as
your warrant? Why, what a disgrace to literature and to loyalty, if
owing to the neglect and supineness of the editor of the Quarterly
Review, a work written without an atom of cant or hypocrisy, and of
course with a very small portion of talent and literature, should, in
the space of three months get into a second edition, and be fast
advancing to a third, be noticed in the Edinburgh Review, and be talked
of by persons who never looked into the Examiner; and how necessary
without loss of time, to counteract the mischievous inference from all
this, restore the taste of the public to its legitimate tone, and
satisfy the courteous reader, who ‘was well affected to the constitution
in church and state as now established,’ that in future he must look for
a knowledge of Shakespear only in the editor of Ben Jonson, of the
English language in the private tutor of Lord Grosvenor, for purity of
morals in the translator of Juvenal, and for depth of understanding in
the notes to the Baviad and Mæviad! Your employers, Mr. Gifford, do not
pay their hirelings for nothing—for condescending to notice weak and
wicked sophistry; for pointing out to contempt what excites no
admiration; for cautiously selecting a few specimens of bad taste and
bad grammar, where nothing else is to be found. They want your
invincible pertness, your mercenary malice, your impenetrable dulness,
your barefaced impudence, your pragmatical self-sufficiency, your
hypocritical zeal, your pious frauds to stand in the gap of their
prejudices and pretensions, to fly-blow and taint public opinion, to
defeat independent efforts, to apply not the sting of the scorpion but
the touch of the torpedo to youthful hopes, to crawl and leave the slimy
track of sophistry and lies over every work that does not ‘dedicate its
sweet leaves’ to some luminary of the Treasury Bench, or is not fostered
in the hot-bed of corruption. This is your office; ‘this is what is
looked for at your hands, and this you do not baulk’—to sacrifice what
little honesty, and prostitute what little intellect you possess to any
dirty job you are commissioned to execute. ‘They keep you as an ape does
an apple, in the corner of his jaw, first mouthed to be last swallowed.’
You are, by appointment, literary toad-eater to greatness, and taster to
the court. You have a natural aversion to whatever differs from your own
pretensions, and an acquired one for what gives offence to your
superiors. Your vanity panders to your interest, and your malice
truckles only to your love of power. If your instinctive or premeditated
abuse of your enviable trust were found wanting in a single instance; if
you were to make a single slip in getting up your select Committee of
Inquiry and Green Bag Report of the State of Letters, your occupation
would be gone. You would never after obtain a squeeze of the hand from a
great man, or a smile from a punk of quality. The great and powerful
(whom you call the wise and good) do not like to have the privacy of
their self-love startled by the obtrusive and unmanageable claims of
literature and philosophy, except through the intervention of persons
like you, whom, if they have common penetration, they soon find out to
be without any superiority of intellect; or, if they do not, whom they
can despise for their meanness of soul. You ‘have the office opposite to
St. Peter.’ You ‘keep a corner in the public mind, for foul prejudice
and corrupt power to knot and gender in’; you volunteer your services to
people of quality to ease scruples of mind and qualms of conscience; you
‘lay the flattering unction’ of venal prose and laurelled verse to their
souls. You persuade them that there is neither purity of morals, nor
depth of understanding, except in themselves and their hangers-on; and
would prevent the unhallowed names of liberty and humanity from being
ever whispered in ears polite! You, Sir, do you not do all this? I cry
you mercy then: I took you for the Editor of the Quarterly Review!
In general, you wisely avoid committing yourself upon any question,
farther than to hint a difference of opinion, and to assume an air of
self-importance upon it. Thus you say, after quoting some remarks of
mine, not very respectful to Henry VIII. ‘We need not answer this
gabble,’ as if you were offended at its absurdity, not at its truth; and
were yourself ready to assert (were it worth while) that Henry VIII. was
an estimable character, or that he had not his minions and creatures
about him in his life-time, who were proud to hail him as the best of
kings. If so, you have the authority of Mr. Burke against you, who
indulges himself in a very Jacobinical strain of invective against this
bloated pattern of royalty, and brute-image of the Divinity. Do you mean
to say, that the circumstances of external pomp and unbridled power,
which I have pointed out in ‘the gabble you will not answer’ as
determining the character of kings, do not make them what for the most
part they are, feared in their life-time and scorned by after-ages? If
so, you must think Quevedo a libeller and incendiary, who makes his
guide to the infernal regions, on being asked ‘if there were no more
kings,’ answer emphatically—‘Here are all that ever lived!’ You say that
‘the mention of a court or of a king always throws me into a fit of
raving.’ Do you then really admire those plague spots of history, and
scourges of human nature, Richard II., Richard III., King John, and
Henry VIII.? Do you with Mr. Coleridge, in his late Lectures, contend
that not to fall down in prostration of soul before the abstract majesty
of kings as it is seen in the diminished perspective of centuries,
argues an inherent littleness of mind? Or do you extend the moral of
your maxim—‘Speak not of the imputed weaknesses of the Great’—beyond the
living to the dead, thus passing an attainder on history, and proving
‘truth to be a liar’ from the beginning? ‘Speak out, Grildrig!’
You do well to confine yourself to the hypocrite; for you have too
little talent for the sophist. Yet in two instances you have attempted
an answer to an opinion I had expressed; and in both you have shewn how
little you can understand the commonest question. The first is as
follows:—‘In his remarks upon Coriolanus, which contain the concentrated
venom of his malignity, he has libelled our great poet as a friend of
arbitrary power, in order that he may introduce an invective against
human nature. “Shakspeare himself seems to have had a leaning to the
arbitrary side of the question, perhaps from some feeling of contempt
for his own origin; and to have spared no occasion of baiting the
rabble.”’
How do you prove that he did not? By shewing with a little delicate
insinuation how he would have done just what I say he did.—‘Shall we not
be dishonouring the gentle Shakspeare by answering such calumny, when
every page of his works supplies its refutation?’[83]—‘Who has painted
with more cordial feelings the tranquil innocence of humble life?’
[True.] ‘Who has furnished more instructive lessons to the great upon
“the insolence of office”—“the oppressor’s wrong”—or the abuses of brief
authority’—[which you would hallow through all time]—‘or who has more
severely stigmatised those “who crook the pregnant hinges of the knee
where thrift may follow fawning?”’ [Granted, none better.] ‘It is true
he was not actuated by an envious hatred of greatness’—[so that to
stigmatise servility and corruption does not always proceed from envy
and a love of mischief]—‘he was not at all likely, had he lived in our
time, to be an orator in Spa-fields or the editor of a seditious Sunday
newspaper’—[To have delivered Mr. Coleridge’s _Conciones ad Populum_, or
to have written Mr. Southey’s Wat Tyler]—‘he knew what discord would
follow if degree were taken away’—[As it did in France from the taking
away the degree between the tyrant and the slave, and those little
convenient steps and props of it, the Bastile, Lettres de Cachet, and
Louis XV.‘s _Palais aux cerfs_]—‘And _therefore_, with the wise and good
of every age, he pointed out the injuries that must arise to society
from a turbulent rabble instigated to mischief by men not much more
enlightened, and infinitely more worthless than themselves.’
So that it would appear by your own account that Shakspeare had a
discreet leaning to the arbitrary side of the question, and, had he
lived in our time, would probably have been a writer in the Courier, or
a contributor to the Quarterly Review! It is difficult to know which to
admire most in this, the weakness or the cunning. I have said that
Shakspeare has described both sides of the question, and you ask me very
wisely, ‘Did he confine himself to one?’ No, I say that he did not: but
I suspect that he had a leaning to one side, and has given it more
quarter than it deserved. My words are: ‘_Coriolanus_ is a storehouse of
political common-places. The arguments for and against aristocracy and
democracy, on the privileges of the few and the claims of the many, on
liberty and slavery, power and the abuse of it, peace and war, are here
very ably handled, with the spirit of a poet and the acuteness of a
philosopher. Shakspeare himself seems to have had a leaning to the
arbitrary side of the question, perhaps from some feeling of contempt
for his own origin, and to have spared no occasion of baiting the
rabble. _What he says of them is very true: what he says of their
betters is also very true, though he dwells less upon it._’
I then proceed to account for this by shewing how it is that ‘the cause
of the people is but little calculated for a subject for poetry; or that
the language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power.’ I
affirm, Sir, that poetry, that the imagination, generally speaking,
delights in power, in strong excitement, as well as in truth, in good,
in right, whereas, pure reason and the moral sense approve only of the
true and good. I proceed to shew that this general love or tendency to
immediate excitement or theatrical effect, no matter how produced, gives
a bias to the imagination often inconsistent with the greatest good,
that in poetry it triumphs over principle, and bribes the passions to
make a sacrifice of common humanity. You say that it does not, that
there is no such original sin in poetry, that it makes no such sacrifice
or unworthy compromise between poetical effect and the still small voice
of reason. And how do you prove that there is no such principle giving a
bias to the imagination, and a false colouring to poetry? Why by asking
in reply to the instances where this principle operates, and where no
other can, with much modesty and simplicity—‘But are these the only
topics that afford delight in poetry, etc.’ No; but these objects do
afford delight in poetry, and they afford it in proportion to their
strong and often tragical effect, and not in proportion to the good
produced, or their desirableness in a moral point of view. ‘Do we read
with more pleasure of the ravages of a beast of prey, than of the
shepherd’s pipe upon the mountain?’ No; but we do read with pleasure of
the ravages of a beast of prey, and we do so on the principle I have
stated, namely, from the sense of power abstracted from the sense of
good; and it is the same principle that makes us read with admiration
and reconciles us in fact to the triumphant progress of the conquerors
and mighty hunters of mankind, who come to stop the shepherd’s pipe upon
the mountains, and sweep away his listening flock. Do you mean to deny
that there is anything imposing to the imagination in power, in
grandeur, in outward shew, in the accumulation of individual wealth and
luxury, at the expense of equal justice and the common weal? Do you deny
that there is anything in ‘the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious
war, that makes ambition virtue,’ in the eyes of admiring multitudes? Is
this a new theory of the Pleasures of the Imagination, which says that
the pleasures of the imagination do not take rise solely in the
calculations of the understanding? Is it a paradox of my making, that
‘one murder makes a villain, millions a hero!’ Or is it not true that
here, as in other cases, the enormity of the evil overpowers and makes a
convert of the imagination by its very magnitude? You contradict my
reasoning, because you know nothing of the question, and you think that
no one has a right to understand what you do not. My offence against
purity in the passage alluded to, ‘which contains the concentrated venom
of my malignity,’ is, that I have admitted that there are tyrants and
slaves abroad in the world; and you would hush the matter up, and
pretend that there is no such thing, in order that there may be nothing
else. Farther, I have explained the cause, the subtle sophistry of the
human mind, that tolerates and pampers the evil, in order to guard
against its approaches; you would conceal the cause in order to prevent
the cure, and to leave the proud flesh about the heart to harden and
ossify into one impenetrable mass of selfishness and hypocrisy, that we
may not ‘sympathise in the distresses of suffering virtue’ in any case,
in which they come in competition with the factitious wants and ‘imputed
weaknesses of the great.’ You ask ‘are we gratified by the cruelties of
Domitian or Nero?’ No, not we—they were too petty and cowardly to strike
the imagination at a distance; but the Roman Senate tolerated them,
addressed their perpetrators, exalted them into Gods, the Fathers of
their people; they had pimps and scribblers of all sorts in their pay,
their Senecas, etc. till a turbulent rabble thinking that there were no
injuries to society greater than the endurance of unlimited and wanton
oppression, put an end to the farce, and abated the nuisance as well as
they could. Had you and I lived in those times, we should have been what
we are now, I ‘a sour mal-content,’ and you ‘a sweet courtier.’ Your
reasoning is ill put together; it wants sincerity, it wants ingenuity.
To prove that I am wrong in saying that the love of power and heartless
submission to it extend beyond the tragic stage to real life, to prove
that there has been nothing heard but the shepherd’s pipe upon the
mountain, and that the still sad music of humanity has never filled up
the pauses to the thoughtful ear, you bring in illustration the
cruelties of Domitian and Nero, whom you suppose to have been without
flatterers, train-bearers, or executioners, and ‘the crimes of
revolutionary France of a still blacker die,’ (a sentence which alone
would have entitled you to a post of honour and secrecy under Sejanus,)
which you suppose to have been without aiders or abettors. You speak of
the horrors of Robespierre’s reign; (there you tread on velvet;) do you
mean that these atrocities excited nothing but horror in revolutionary
France, in undelivered France, in Paris, the centre and focus of anarchy
and crime; or that the enthusiasm and madness with which they were acted
and applauded, was owing to nothing but a long-deferred desire for truth
and justice, and the collected vengeance of the human race? You do not
mean this, for you never mean anything that has even an approximation to
unfashionable truth in it. You add, ‘We cannot recollect, however, that
these crimes were heard of with much satisfaction in this country.’ Then
you have forgotten the years 1793 and 94, you have forgotten the
addresses against republicans and levellers, you have forgotten Mr.
Burke and his 80,000 incorrigible Jacobins.—‘Nor had we the misfortune
to know any individual, (though we will not take upon us to deny that
Mr. Hazlitt may have been of that description,)’ (I will take upon me to
deny that) ‘who cried havoc, and enjoyed the atrocities of Robespierre
and Carnot.’ Then at that time, Sir, you had not the good fortune to
know Mr. Southey.[84]
To return, you find fault with my toleration of those pleasant persons,
Lucio, Pompey, and Master Froth, in Measure for Measure, and with my use
of the word ‘natural morality.’ And yet, ‘the word is a good word, being
whereby a man may be accommodated.’ If Pompey was a common bawd, you,
Sir, are a court pimp. That is artificial morality. ‘Go to, a feather
turns the scale of your avoir-du-pois.’ I have also, it seems, erred in
using the term _moral_ in a way not familiar to you, as opposed to
_physical_; and in that sense have applied it to the description of the
mole on Imogen’s neck, ‘cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops i’ th’
bottom of a cowslip.’ I have stated that there is more than a
physical—there is a moral beauty in this image, and I think so still,
though you may not comprehend how.
You assert roundly that there is no such person as the black prince
Morocchius,[85] in the Merchant of Venice. ‘He, (Mr. Hazlitt,) objects
entirely to a personage of whom we never heard before, the black Prince
Marocchius. With this piece of blundering ignorance, _which, with_ a
thousand similar instances of his intimate acquaintance with the poet,
clearly _prove_ that his enthusiasm for Shakespear is all affected, we
conclude what we have to say of his folly; it remains to say a few words
of his mischief.’ Vol. xxxiv. p. 463. I could not at first, Sir,
comprehend your drift in this passage, and I can scarcely believe it
yet. But I perceive that in Chalmers’s edition, the tawny suitor of
Portia, who is called Morocchius in my common edition, goes by the style
and title of Morocco. This important discovery proves, according to you,
that my admiration of Shakespear is all affected, and that I can know
nothing of the poet or his characters. So that the only title to
admiration in Shakespear, not only in the Merchant of Venice, but in his
other plays, all knowledge of his beauties, or proof of an intimate
acquaintance with his genius, is confined to the alteration which Mr.
Chalmers has adopted in the termination of the two last syllables of the
name of this blackamoor, and his reading Morocco for Morocchius.
Admirable grammarian, excellent critic! I do not wonder you think
nothing of my Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, when I see what it is
that you really admire and think worth the study in them. No, no, Mr.
Gifford, you shall not persuade me by your broken English and
‘red-lattice phrases,’ that the only thing in Shakespear worth knowing,
was the baptismal name of this Prince of Morocco, or that no one can
admire the author’s plays out of Mr Chalmers’s edition, or find anything
to admire even there, except the new nomenclature of the _dramatis
personæ_. If this is not your meaning in the passage here quoted, I do
not know what it is; if it is not, I have done you great injustice in
supposing that it is, for I am sure it cannot mean anything else so
foolish and contemptible. You had begun this curious paragraph by
saying, that ‘I had run through my set of phrases, and was completely at
a stand’; and you bring as a damning proof of this, a repetition of two
phrases. Do you believe that I had filled 300 pages with the repetition
of two phrases? ‘Go, go, you’re a censorious ill man.’
The deliberate hypocrisy of Regan and Gonerill, of which I spoke, I had
explained in the sentence before by a periphrasis to mean their
‘hypocritical pretensions to virtue.’ If I had no right to use the word
hastily in this absolute sense, you had still less to confound the
meaning of a whole passage. Edmund is indeed ‘a hypocrite to his father;
he is a hypocrite to his brother, and to Regan and Gonerill’; but he is
not a hypocrite to himself. This is that consummation of hypocrisy of
which I spoke, and of which you ought to know something.
I have commenced my observations on Lear, you say, with ‘an
acknowledgment remarkable for its _naiveté_ and its truth’; the import
of which remarkable acknowledgment is, that I find myself incompetent to
do justice to this tragedy, by any criticism upon it. This you construe
into a ‘determination on my part to write nonsense’; you seem, Sir, to
have sat down with a determination to write something worse than
nonsense. As a proof of my having fulfilled the promise, (which I had
_not_ made,) you cite these words, ‘It is then the best of all
Shakespear’s plays, for it is the one in which he was _most in
earnest_‘; and add significantly, ‘Macbeth and Othello were mere _jeux
d’esprit_, we presume.’ You may presume so, but not from what I have
said. You only aim at being a word-catcher, and fail even in that. In
like manner, you say, ‘If this means that we sympathise so much with the
feelings and sentiments of Hamlet, that we identify ourselves with the
character, we have to accuse Mr. Hazlitt of strangely misleading us a
few pages back. “The moral of _Othello_ comes directly home to the
business and bosoms of men; the interest in _Hamlet_ is more _remote_
and reflex.” And yet it is we who are Hamlet.’—Yes, because we
sympathise with Hamlet, in the way I have explained, and which you ought
to have endeavoured at least to understand, as reflecting and moralising
on the general distresses of human life, and not as particularly
affected by those which come home to himself, as we see in Othello. You
accuse me of stringing words together without meaning, and it is you who
cannot connect two ideas together.
You call me ‘a poor cankered creature,’ ‘a trader in sedition,’ ‘a
wicked sophist,’ and yet you would have it believed that I am
‘principally distinguished by an _indestructible_ love of flowers and
odours, and dews and clear waters, and soft airs and sounds and bright
skies, and woodland solitudes and moonlight bowers.’[86] I do not
understand how you reconcile such ‘welcome and unwelcome things,’ but
anything will do to feed your spleen at another’s expence, when it is
the person and not the thing you dislike. Thus you complain of my style,
that it is at times figurative, at times poetical, at times familiar,
not always the same flat dull thing that you would have it. You point
out the omission of a line in a quotation from a well-known passage in
Shakespear. You do not however think the detection of this omission is a
sufficient proof of your sagacity, but you proceed to assign as a motive
for it, ‘That I do it to improve the metre,’ which is ridiculous. You
say I conjure up objections to Shakespear which nobody ever thought of,
in order to answer them. The objection to Romeo and Juliet, which I have
answered, was made by the late Mr. Curran, as well as the objection to
the want of interest and action in Paradise Lost, which I have answered
in another place.—‘Thus he endeavours to convince one class of critics,
that the poet’s genius was not confined to the production of stage
effect by supernatural means. In another place he expresses his
astonishment that Shakespear should be considered as a gloomy writer,
who painted nothing but gorgons, hydras, and chimeras dire.’ One of
these classes of critics which, you say, ‘are phantoms of my own
creating,’ comprehends the whole French nation, and the other the
greatest part of the English with Dr. Johnson at their head, who in his
Preface, ‘one of the most perfect pieces of criticism since the days of
Quintilian’ (and which might have been written in the days of Quintilian
just as well as in ours) has neglected to expatiate on Shakespear’s
‘_indestructible_ love of flowers and odours, and woodland solitudes and
moonlight bowers.’ You know nothing of Shakespear, nor of what is
thought about him: you mind only the text of the commentators. With
respect to Mr. Wordsworth’s Ode, which I have dragged into my account of
Romeo and Juliet, I did not quarrel with the poetical conceit, but with
the metaphysical doctrine founded upon it by his school. There is a
difference between ‘ends of verse and sayings of philosophers.’ If
Shakespear had been a great German transcendental philosopher (either at
the first or second hand) his talking of the music of the spheres might
have rendered him suspected. You compare my account of Hamlet to the
dashing style of a showman: I think the showman’s speech is proper to a
show, and mine to Hamlet. You, Sir, have no sympathy in common with
Hamlet; nothing to make him seem ever ‘present to your mind’s eye’; no
feeling to produce such an hallucination in your mind, nor to make you
tolerate it in others. You are an Ultra-Crepidarian critic.
You laugh at my theory, that ‘Filch’s picking of pockets has ceased to
be so good a jest as formerly,’ from the degeneracy of the age, that is,
from the diminution of the practice, as at variance with the Police
Report. Shortly after I had hazarded this piece of conjectural
criticism, the Beggar’s Opera was hooted off the stage in
America—because they have no Police Report there. I may have been
premature in applying this conclusion from a highly advanced state of
civilization, or from the degeneracy of the age we live in, to our own
country.
What you say of my remarks on the use which Shakespear makes of the
principal analogy in Cymbeline, and of contrast in Macbeth is beneath an
answer. You should confine yourself to mere matters of verbal criticism.
Thus you object to my use of the term ‘logical diagrams’ as
unprecedented and barbarous: yet we talk of syllogising in mode and
figure, and besides, the word has been made pretty malleable by Mr.
Burke. What do you say to his talking of ‘the geometricians and chemists
of France, bringing the one from the dry bones of their diagrams, and
the other from the soot of their furnaces, dispositions worse than
indifferent to common feelings and habitudes.’ Would you call this
‘slip-slop absurdity’? But to talk of _the dry bones of diagrams_, and
escape with impunity from the censure of small critics, a man must
assert that the king of this country ‘holds his crown in contempt of the
choice of the people.’
I am obliged to you for informing me of the real name of the person who
wrote the ingenious parallel between Richard the Third and Macbeth.
The article in the last Review on my Lectures on English Poetry,
requires a very short notice.—You would gladly retract what you have
said, but you dare not. You are a coward to public opinion and to your
own. You begin by observing, ‘Mr. Hazlitt seems to have bound himself
like Hannibal to wage everlasting war, not indeed against Rome, but
against accurate reasoning, just observation, and precise, or even
intelligible language.’ This might be true, if the opinion of the
Quarterly Review were synonymous with accurate reasoning, just
observation, and knowledge of language. ‘We have traced him in his two
former predatory excursions on taste and common sense. Had he written on
any other subject, we should scarcely have thought of watching his
movements.’ You were ‘principally excited to notice’ the Round Table by
some political heresies which had crept into it: you ‘condescended to
notice’ the Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, ‘to shew how small a
portion of talent and literature was necessary to carry on the trade of
sedition.’ You have been tempted to watch my movements in the present
work to shew how little talent and literature is necessary to write a
popular work on poetry. ‘But though his book is dull, his theme is
pleasing, and interests in spite of the author. As we read, we forget
Mr. Hazlitt, to think of those concerning whom he writes.’ Do you think,
Sir, that a higher compliment could come from you?
It would neither be for my credit nor your own, that I should follow you
in detail through your abortive attempts to deny me exactly those
qualifications which you feel conscious that I possess, or afraid that
others will ascribe to me. You are already bankrupt of your word, nor
can I be admitted as an evidence in my own case. You say that I am
utterly without originality, without a power of illustration, or
language to make myself understood!—I shall leave it to the public to
judge between us. There is one objection however which you make to me
which is singular enough: viz. that I quote Shakespear. I can only
answer, that ‘I would not change that vice for your best virtue.’ ‘If a
trifling thing is to be told, he will not mention it in common language:
he must give it, if possible, in words which the Bard of Avon has
_somewhere_ used. Were _the beauty of the applications conspicuous_, we
might forget or at least forgive, _the deformity_ produced _by the
constant stitching in of these patches_‘—[_i.e._ by the beauty of the
applications]. ‘Unfortunately, however, the phrases thus obtruded upon
us _seem_ to be selected, not on account of _any intrinsic beauty_, but
merely because they are _fantastic and unlike what would naturally occur
to an ordinary writer_.’ Certainly, Sir, your style is very different
from Shakespear’s. I observe in your notes to the Baviad and Mæviad, you
diversify your matter by frequently quoting Greek.—Now it appears to me
that these quotations of your’s add to the wit only by varying the type.
If these learned patches ‘plagued the Cruscas and Lauras,’ my quotations
have given other people ‘the horrors’!
You quote my definition of poetry, and say that it is not a definition
of anything, because it is completely unintelligible. To prove this, you
take one word which occurs in it, and is no way important, the word
_sympathy_, which you tell us has two significations, one anatomical,
and the other moral; and poetry, according to you, ‘has no skill in
surgery or ethics.’ I do not think this shews a want of clearness in my
definition, but a want of good faith or understanding in you.
You say that I get at a number of extravagant conclusions ‘by means
sufficiently simple and common. He employs the term poetry in three
distinct meanings, and his legerdemain consists in substituting one of
these for the other. Sometimes it is the general appellation of a
certain class of compositions, as when he says that poetry is graver
than history. Secondly, it denotes the talent by which these
compositions are produced; and it is in this sense that he calls poetry
that fine particle within us, which produces in our being rarefaction,
expansion, elevation and purification.’ [This is Mr. Gifford’s academic
style, not mine.] ‘Thirdly, it denotes the subjects of which these
compositions treat. It is in this meaning that he uses the term, when he
says that all that is worth remembering in life is the poetry of it;
that fear is poetry, that hope is poetry, that love is poetry; and in
the very same sense he might assert that fear is sculpture and painting
and music; that the crimes of Verres are the eloquence of Cicero, and
the poetry of Milton the criticism of Mr. Hazlitt.’ It is true I have
used the word poetry in the three senses above imputed to me, and I have
done so, because the word has these three _distinct_ meanings in the
English language, that is, it signifies the composition produced, the
state of mind or faculty producing it, and, in certain cases, the
subject-matter proper to call forth that state of mind. Your objection
amounts to this, that in reasoning on a difficult question I write
common English, and this is the whole secret of my extravagance and
obscurity.—Do you mean that the distinguishing between the compositions
of poetry, the talent for poetry, or the subject-matter of poetry, would
have told us what _poetry_ is? This is what you would say, or you have
no meaning at all. I have expressly treated the subject according to
this very division, and I have endeavoured to define that common
something which belongs to these several views of it, and determines us
in the application of the same common name, viz. an unusual vividness in
external objects or in our immediate impressions, exciting a movement of
imagination in the mind, and leading by natural association or
_sympathy_ to harmony of sound and the modulation of verse in expressing
it. This is what you, Sir, cannot understand. I could not ‘assert in the
same sense that fear is sculpture and painting, etc.’ because this would
be an abuse of the English language: we talk of the _poetry of
painting_, etc. which could not be, if poetry was confined to the
technical sense of ‘lines in ten syllables.’ The crimes of Verres, I
also grant, were not the same thing as the eloquence of Cicero, though I
suspect you confound the crimes of revolutionary France with Mr. Pitt’s
speeches; and as to Milton’s poetry and my criticisms, there is almost
as much difference between them as between Milton’s poetry and your
verses. You say, ‘the principal subjects of which poetry treats, are the
passions and affections of mankind; we are all under the influence of
our passions and affections, that is, in Mr. Hazlitt’s new language, we
all act on the principles of poetry, and are in truth all poets. We all
exert our muscles and limbs, therefore we are anatomists and surgeons;
we have teeth which we employ in chewing, therefore we are dentists,’
etc. Not at all; we are all poets, inasmuch as we are under the
influence of the passions and imagination, that is, as we have certain
common feelings, and undergo the same process of mind with the poet, who
only expresses in a particular manner what he and all feel alike; but in
exerting our muscles, we do not dissect them; in chewing with our teeth,
we do not perform the part of dentists, etc. There is nothing parallel
in the two cases. ‘You anticipate,’ you say, ‘these brilliant
conclusions for me’; and do not perceive the difference between the
extension of a logical principle, and an abuse of common language.—You
proceed, ‘As another specimen of his definitions, we may take the
following. “Poetry does not define the limits of sense, nor analyse the
distinctions of the understanding, but signifies the excess of the
imagination beyond the actual or ordinary impression of any object or
feeling.” Poetry was at the beginning of the book asserted to be _an
impression_; it is now _the excess of the imagination beyond an
impression_; what this excess is we cannot tell, but at least it must be
something very unlike an impression.’ Poetry at the beginning of the
book was asserted to be not simply an impression, ‘but an impression _by
its vividness exciting an involuntary movement of the imagination_: now,
you say it is _the excess of the imagination beyond an impression_; and
you bring this as a proof of a contradiction in terms. An impression, by
its vividness exciting a movement of the imagination, you discover, must
be something very unlike an impression, and as to the imagination
itself, you cannot tell what it is; it is an unknown power in your
poetical creed. What is most extraordinary is, that you had quoted the
very passage which you here represent as a total contradiction to the
latter, only two pages before. What, Sir, do you think of your readers?
What must they think of you!—‘Though the _total want of meaning_,’ you
add, ‘is the weightiest objection to such writing, yet _the abuse_ which
it involves of _particular words and phrases_’ (in addition to a total
want of meaning) ‘is very remarkable,’ (it must be so,) ‘and will not be
overlooked by those who are aware of the inseparable connexion between
justness of thought and precision of language.’ (You are not aware that
there is no precise measure of thought or expression.) ‘What, in strict
reasoning, can be meant by the impression of a feeling?’ (The impression
which it makes on the mind, as distinct from some other to which it
gives birth, is what I meant.) ‘How can _actual_ and _ordinary_ be used
as synonymous?’ (They are not.) ‘Every impression must be an actual
impression’; (there is then no such thing as an imaginary impression;)
‘and the use of that epithet annihilates the limitations which Mr.
Hazlitt meant’ (in the total want of all meaning,) ‘to guard his
proposition.’ _We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us._
You say, ‘you have not the faintest conception of what I mean by the
heavenly bodies returning on the squares of the distances or on Dr.
Chalmers’s Discourses.’ Nor will I tell you what I meant. _A knavish
speech sleeps in a fool’s ear._ ‘As to the assertion that there can
never be another Jacob’s dream, we see no reason why dreams should be
scientific.’ Shakespear says, that dreams ‘_denote a foregone
conclusion_.’ You quote what I say of Swift, and misrepresent it. ‘Mr.
Hazlitt’s doctrine, therefore, is, that the inability to become mad, is
very likely to drive a man mad.’ My doctrine is, that the inability to
get rid of a favourite idea, when constantly thwarted, or of the
impression of any object, however painful, merely because it is true, is
likely to drive a man mad. It is this tenaciousness on a particular
point that almost always destroys the general coherence of the
understanding. I do not say that the inability to get rid of the
distinction between right and wrong continued in Swift’s mind after he
was mad—I say it contributed to drive him mad. I mean that a sense of
great injustice often produces madness in individual cases, and that a
strong sense of general injustice, and an abstracted view of human
nature such as it is, compared with what it ought to be, is likely to
produce the same effect in a mind like that of the author of Gulliver’s
Travels. Do you understand yet? You do not go into my general character
of Swift, which might have drawn you into something of a wider field of
speculation; and you pick out a straggling sentence or two to cavil at
in my account of Pope, of Chaucer, of Milton, and Shakespear, on which
you are glad to discharge the gall that has been accumulating in your
mind for several pages. If you think by this means, to put me or the
public out of conceit with my writings, you have mistaken the matter
entirely. You can only put down my arguments by meeting them fairly, or
my style, by writing better than you do.
‘We occasionally,’ you proceed, ‘discover a faint semblance of connected
thinking in Mr. Hazlitt’s pages; but wherever this is the case, his
reasoning is for the most part incorrect.’ This is a curious inference.
‘This faint semblance of connected thinking,’ is, it appears, when I
maintain some opinion, which is ‘a sprout from some popular doctrine’;
but if I push it a little farther than you were aware of, my reasoning
becomes incorrect. Thus it has been a popular doctrine with some
critics, (which yet you do not admit)—‘That the progress of science is
unfavourable to the culture of the imagination. It is no doubt true,
that the individual who devotes his labour to the investigation of
abstract truth, must acquire habits of thought very different from those
which the exercise of the fancy demands.’ You add in italics, ‘_the
cause lies in the exclusive appropriation of his time to reasoning, and
not in the logical accuracy with which he reasons_.’ Whenever I have any
discovery to communicate, which I think you cannot comprehend, I will in
future put it in italics, to make it equally profound and clear. It
appears by you, that the incompatibility between the successful pursuit
of different studies does not arise from anything incompatible in the
studies themselves, but from the time devoted to each. The mind is
equally incapacitated from passing from one to the other, whether they
are the most opposite or the most alike. The dreams of alchemy, and the
schemes of astrology, the traditional belief in the doctrine of ghosts
and fairies, though made up almost entirely of imagination, self-will,
superstition and romance, were not a jot more favourable to the caprices
and fanciful exaggerations of poetry, either in the public mind, or in
that of individuals, than the modern system which excludes (both by the
logical accuracy with which it proceeds, and a constant appeal to
demonstrable facts), every alloy of passion, and all exercise of the
imagination. You should never put your thoughts in italics. If I were to
attempt a character of verbal critics, I should be apt to say, that
their habits of mind disqualify them for general reasoning or fair
discussion: that they are furious about trifles, because they have
nothing else to interest them; that they have no way of giving dignity
to their insignificant discoveries, but by treating those who have
missed them with contempt; that they are dogmatical and conceited, in
proportion as they have little else to guide them in their quaint
researches but caprice and accident; that the want of intellectual
excitement gives birth to increasing personal irritability, and endless
petty altercation. You, Sir, would make all this self-evident, by the
help of italics, and say, that _the cause lies not in anything in the
nature of verbal criticism, but the exclusive appropriation of their
time to it_.
You next run foul of my account of the pleasure derived from tragedy.
You are afraid to understand what I say on any subject, and it is not
therefore likely you should ever detect what is erroneous in it. I have
shewn by a reference to facts, and to the authority of Mr. Burke (whom
you would rather contradict than believe me) that the objects which are
supposed to please only in fiction, please in reality; that ‘if there
were known to be a public execution of some state criminal in the next
street, the theatre would soon be empty’—that therefore the pleasure
derived from tragedy is not anything peculiar to it, as poetry or
fiction; but has its ground in the common love of strong excitement. You
say, I have misstated the fact, to give a false view of the question,
which, according to you, is ‘why that which is painful in itself,
pleases in works of fiction.’ I answer, I have shewn that this is not a
fair statement of the question, by stating the fact, that what is
painful in itself, pleases not the sufferer indeed, but the spectator,
in reality as well as in works of fiction. The common proverb proves
it—‘What is sport to one, is death to another.’
You observe, that ‘Some lines I have quoted from Chaucer, are very
pleasing—
——“Emelie that fayrer was to sene
Than is the lilie upon his stalke grene,
And fresher than the May with floures newe:
For with the rose-colour strove hire hewe;
I n’ot which was the finer of hem too.”
‘But surely the beauty does not lie in the last line, though it is with
this that Mr. Hazlitt is chiefly struck. “This scrupulousness” he
observes, “about the literal preference, as if some question of matter
of fact were at issue, is remarkable.”’
That is, I am not chiefly struck with the beauty of the last line, but
with its peculiarity as characteristic of Chaucer. The beauty of the
former lines might be in Spenser: the scrupulous exactness of the latter
could be found nowhere but in Chaucer. I had said just before, that this
poet ‘introduces a sentiment or a simile, as if it were given in upon
evidence.’ I bring this simile as an instance in point, and you say I
have not brought it to prove something else.
You charge me with misrepresenting Longinus, and prove that I have not.
The word ἐναγώνιον signifies not as you are pleased to paraphrase it
‘vehemently energetic,’ but simply ‘full of contests.’ Must the Greek
language be new-fangled, to prove that I am ignorant of it?
The only mistake you are able to point out, is a slip of the pen, which
you will find to have been corrected long ago in the second
edition.—Your pretending to say that Dr. Johnson was an admirer of
Milton’s blank verse, is not a slip of the pen—you know he was not.
There is as little sincerity in your concluding paragraph. You would
ascribe what little appearance of thought there is in my writings to a
confusion of images, and what appearance there is of imagination to a
gaudy phraseology. If I had neither words nor ideas, I should be a
profound philosopher and critic. How fond you are of reducing every one
else to your own standard of excellence!
I have done what I promised. You complain of the difficulty of
remembering what I write; possibly this Letter will prove an exception.
There is a train of thought in your own mind, which will connect the
links together: and before you again undertake to run down a writer for
no other reason, than that he is of an opposite party to yourself, you
will perhaps recollect that your wilful artifices and shallow cunning,
though they pass undetected, will hardly screen you from your own
contempt, nor, when once exposed, will the gratitude of your employers
save you from public scorn.
Your conduct to me is no new thing: it is part of a system which has
been regularly followed up for many years. Mr. Coleridge, in his
Literary Life, has the following passage to shew the treatment which he
and his friends received from your predecessor, the editor of the
Anti-Jacobin Review.—‘I subjoin part of a note from the Beauties of the
Anti-Jacobin, in which having previously informed the public that I had
been dishonoured at Cambridge for preaching Deism, at a time when for my
youthful ardour in defence of Christianity I was decried as a bigot by
the proselytes of French philosophy, the writer concludes with these
words—“_Since this time he has left his native country, commenced
citizen of the world, left his poor children fatherless, and his wife
destitute. Ex hoc disce his friends, Lamb and Southey._” With severest
truth,’ continues Mr. Coleridge, ‘it may be asserted that it would not
be easy to select two men more exemplary in their domestic affections
than those whose names were thus printed at full length, as in the same
rank of morals with a denounced infidel and fugitive, who had left his
children fatherless, and his wife destitute! _Is it surprising that many
good men remained longer than perhaps they otherwise would have done,
adverse to a party which encouraged and openly rewarded the authors of
such atrocious calumnies?_’
With me, I confess, the wonder does not lie there:—all I am surprised at
is, that the objects of these atrocious calumnies were ever reconciled
to the authors of them and their patrons. Doubtless, they had powerful
arts of conversion in their hands, who could with impunity and in
triumph take away by atrocious calumnies the characters of all who
disdained to be their tools; and rewarded with honours, places, and
pensions all those who were. It is in this manner, Sir, that some of my
old friends have become your new allies and associates.—They have
changed sides, not I; and the proof that I have been true to the
original ground of quarrel is, that I have you against me. Your
consistency is the undeniable pledge of their tergiversation. The
instinct of self-interest and meanness of servility are infallible and
safe; it is speculative enthusiasm and disinterested love of public
good, that being the highest strain of humanity, are apt to falter, and
‘dying, make a swan-like end.’ This tendency to change was, in the case
of our poetical reformists, precipitated by another cause. The spirit of
poetry is, as I believe, favourable to liberty and humanity, but not
when its aid is most wanted, in encountering the shocks and
disappointments of the world. Poetry may be described as having the
range of the universe; it traverses the empyrean, and looks down on
nature from a higher sphere. When it lights upon the earth, it loses
some of its dignity and its use. Its strength is in its wings; its
element is the air. Standing on its feet, jostling with the crowd, it is
liable to be overthrown, trampled on, and defaced; for its wings are of
a dazzling brightness, ‘sky-tinctured,’ and the least soil upon them
shews to disadvantage. Sullied, degraded as I have seen it, I shall not
here insult over it, but leave it to Time to take out the stains, seeing
it is a thing immortal as itself. ‘Being so majestical, I should do it
wrong to offer it but the shew of violence.’—The reason why I have not
changed my principles with some of the persons here alluded to, is, that
I had a natural inveteracy of understanding which did not bend to
fortune or circumstances. I was not a poet, but a metaphysician; and I
suspect that the conviction of an abstract principle is alone a match
for the prejudices of absolute power. The love of truth is the best
foundation for the love of liberty. In this sense, I might have
repeated—
‘Love is not love that alteration finds:
Oh! no, it is an everfixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.’
Besides, I had another reason. I owed something to truth, for she had
done something for me. Early in life I had made (what I thought) a
metaphysical discovery; and after that, it was too late to think of
retracting. My pride forbad it: my understanding revolted at it. I could
not do better than go on as I had begun. I too, worshipped at no
unhallowed shrine, and served in no mean presence. I had laid my hand on
the ark, and could not turn back! I have been called ‘a writer of
third-rate books.’ For myself, there is no work of mine which I should
rate so high, except one, which I dare say you never heard of—An Essay
on the Principles of Human Action. I do not think the worse of it on
that account; nor though you might not be able to understand it, could
you attribute this to the gaudiness of the phraseology, nor the want of
thought. I will here, Sir, explain the nature of the argument as clearly
and in as few words as I can.
The object of that Essay (and I have written this Letter partly to
introduce it through you to the notice of the reader) is to leave free
play to the social affections, and to the cultivation of the more
disinterested and generous principles of our nature, by removing a
stumbling-block which has been thrown in their way, and which turns the
very idea of virtue or humanity into a fable, viz. the metaphysical
doctrine of the innate and necessary selfishness of the human mind. Do
you understand so far? The question I propose to examine is not the
practical question, how far man is more or less selfish or social in the
actual sum-total of his habits and affections, nor the moral or
political question, to what degree of perfection he can be advanced
still further in the one, or weaned from the other; but my intention is
to state and answer the previous question, whether there is, as it has
been contended, a total incapacity and physical impossibility in the
human mind, of feeling an interest in anything beyond itself, so that
both the common feelings of compassion, natural affection, friendship,
etc. and the more refined and abstracted ones of the love of justice, of
country, or of kind, are, and must be a delusion, believed in only by
fools, and turned to their advantage by knaves. This doctrine which has
been sedulously and confidently maintained by the French and English
metaphysicians of the two last centuries, by Hobbes, Mandeville,
Rochefoucault, Helvetius and others, and is a principal corner-stone of
what is called the modern philosophy, I think tends to, and has done a
great deal of mischief, and I believe I have found out a view of the
subject, which gets rid of it unanswerably and for ever, in manner and
form following. I conceive, that to establish the doctrine of exclusive
and absolute selfishness on a metaphysical basis, that is to say, on the
original and impassable distinction of the faculties of the human mind,
it is necessary to make it appear, that there is some peculiar and
abstracted principle which gives it an immediate, mechanical, and
irresistible interest in whatever relates to itself, and which by the
same rule shuts out and is a bar to the very possibility of our feeling
not an equal, but any kind or degree of interest whatever, at any moment
of our lives, in the history and fate of others. This is so far from
being true, that the contrary is demonstrable. Thus, Sir, My
self-interest in anything signifies (by the statement) the particular
manner in which whatever relates to myself affects me, so as to create
an anxiety about it, and be a motive to action. Now the same word,
_self_, is indifferently applied to the whole of my being, past,
present, and to come; and it is supposed from the use of language and
the habitual association of ideas, that this self is _one thing_ as well
as one word, and my interest in it all along the same necessary,
identical interest. That a man must love himself as such, seems a
self-evident and simple proposition. The idea appears like an absolute
truth, and resists every attempt at analysis, like an element in nature.
Some persons, who formerly took the pains to read this work, imagined
(do not be alarmed, Sir!) that I wanted to argue them out of their own
existence, merely because I endeavoured to define the nature and meaning
of this word, self; to take in pieces, by metaphysical aid, this fine
illusion of the brain and forgery of language, and to shew what there is
real, and what false in it. The word denotes, by common consent, three
different selves, my past, my present, and my future self. Now it is
taken for granted by some, and insisted upon by others, that I must have
the same unavoidable interest in all these, because they are all equally
myself. But that is impossible; for in truth my personal identity is
founded only on my personal consciousness, and that does not extend
beyond the present moment.—It must be maintained, on the other side of
the question, that my past, my present, and my future self are
inseparably linked together, equally identified by an intimate communion
of transferable thoughts and feelings in one metaphysical principle of
self-interest, before they can be equally myself, the same identical
thing, to any purpose of sentiment or for any motive of action. It will
easily be seen how far this is the case, and how far it is not. I have a
peculiar, exclusive self-interest or sympathy (never mind the word,
Sir,) with my present self, by means of sensation (or consciousness),
and with my past self, by means of memory, which I have not, and cannot
have with the past or present feelings or interests of others; for this
reason that these faculties are exclusive, peculiar, and confined to
myself. But I have no exclusive, or peculiar, or independent faculty,
like sensation or memory, giving me the same absolute, unavoidable,
instinctive interest in my own future sensations, and none at all in
those of others. This ideal self is then nominally the same, but
strictly different; composed of distinct and unequal parts; bound
together by laws and principles which have no parity of relation to each
other. By shewing how personal identity produces self-interest as far as
it goes, we shall see exactly when and how it ceases.—If I touch a
burning coal, this gives me a present sensation differing in kind and
degree from any impression I can receive from the same sensation being
inflicted on another: there is no communication between another’s nerves
and my brain producing a correspondent jar and magnetic sympathy of
frame. Again, if I have suffered a pain of this sort in time past, this
leaves traces in my mind, by my continued identity with myself, or by
means of memory, of a kind totally distinct from any conception I can
form of the same pain inflicted a year ago (for instance) on another.
These two important faculties then give me an appropriate and exclusive
interest only in what happens or has happened to myself. So far as the
operation of these two faculties goes, I am strictly a selfish being, I
am necessarily cut off from all knowledge of or sympathy with the
feelings of any one but myself. But if I am to undergo a certain pain at
a future time, the next year or the next moment, however near or remote,
I have no faculty impressing this feeling intuitively and with
mechanical force and certainty on my mind beforehand, as my present or
past impressions are stamped upon it by means of sensation and memory. I
have no principle of thought or sentiment in the original conformation
of my mind, projecting me forward into my future being, giving me a
present unavoidable consciousness of it, and removed from all cognisance
of what happens to others; I have no faculty identifying my future
interests inseparably with my present feelings, and therefore I have no
exclusive, mechanical and proper self-interest in them, merely because
they are mine: for that which is _mine_, is that which touches me by
secret springs, and in a way in which what relates to others can take no
hold of me. The only faculty by which I can anticipate what is to befal
myself in future, is the same common and disposable faculty in kind and
in mode of operation, by which I can, I do, and must anticipate in
degree, and more or less according to circumstances, the feelings and
thoughts of others, and take a proportionable interest in them, viz. the
Imagination. To suppose that there is a principle of self-interest in
the mind, without a faculty of self-interest, is an absurdity and a
contradiction. This idea of an abstract, exclusive, metaphysical
self-interest in my own being generally, is taken (by a gross and blind
prejudice) from the manner in which the faculties of sensation and
memory affect me, and applied to a part of my being, where I have no
such interest in myself, because I have no such faculty giving it me.
What proves that there is no mechanical sympathy identifying my future
with my present being, is, that I am for the most part, indifferent to,
ignorant of what is to happen to myself hereafter. There is no
presentiment in the case. If the house is about to fall on my head, this
occasions no uneasiness to my self-love, unless there are circumstances
to alarm my imagination beforehand. To suppose, that besides the ideal
or rational interest I have in the event, I have another _real_
metaphysical interest in it, without object or consciousness, is as if I
should say, that I have a particular interest in the past, without
remembering it, or in the present without feeling it.—But the future is
the only subject of action, that is, of a practical or rational interest
at all, either of self-love or benevolence. All voluntary action, that
is, all action undertaken with a view to produce a certain event or the
contrary, must relate to the future. The primary, essential motive of
the volition of anything must be the _idea_ of that thing, and the idea
solely. For the thing itself, which is the object of desire and pursuit,
is by the supposition a nonentity. It is _willed_ for that very reason,
that it is supposed not to exist. If it did exist, or had existed, it
would be absurd to will it to exist or not to exist; and as a thing
which does not exist, but which we will to be or not to be, it is a mere
fiction of the mind, and can exert no power over the thoughts, nor
influence the will or the affections in any way, except through the
imagination. The future, whether as it relates to myself or others,
exists only in the mind; and in the mind, not by memory, not by
sensation, which are exclusive and selfish faculties, but by the
imagination, which is not a limited, narrow faculty, but common,
discursive, and social. If my sympathy with others is not a sensible
substantial mechanical interest, neither is my self-interest anything
but an imaginary and ideal one, I am bound to my future interest only by
the same fine links of fancy and reason, which give that of others a
hold on my affections. As a voluntary agent, I am necessarily, and in
the first instance, that is, in the metaphysical sense of the question,
a disinterested one. I could not love myself, if I were not so formed,
as to be capable of loving others. I have no solid, material, gross,
actual self-interest in my own future welfare, and I therefore can only
have the same airy, notional, hypothetical interest in it, which I must
have in kind, though not in degree, in the pleasures and pains of
others, which I get at the knowledge of and sympathise with in the same
way. There is then no exclusive ground of self-interest, incompatible
with sympathy, and rendering it a chimera; self-love and sympathy both
rest on the same general ground of reason, of imagination, and of common
sense.—It may be said, that my own future interests have a reality
beyond the mere idea. So have the interests of others, and the only
question is, whether the sympathy, the motive to action, is not equally
imaginary in both cases. It may be said, that I shall become my future
self, but that is no reason why I should take a particular interest in
it till I do. If a pin pricks me in any part of my body, I am instantly
apprised of it, and feel an interest in removing it; but my future self
does not find any means of apprising me of its sensations, in which I
can feel no interest, except from previous apprehension. Lastly, it may
be said that I do feel an interest in myself and my future welfare,
which I do not, and cannot feel in that of others. This I grant; but
that does not prove a metaphysical antecedent self-interest, precluding
the possibility of all interest in others, (for the social affections
are as much a matter of fact, as the influence of self-love) but a
practical self-interest, arising out of habit and circumstances, and
more or less consistent with other disinterested and humane feelings,
according to habit, opinion, and circumstances. I love myself better
than my neighbour, for the same reason (and for no other) that I love my
child better than a stranger’s—from having my thoughts more fixed upon
its welfare, my time more taken up in providing for it, and from my
knowing better by experience, what its wants and wishes are. People have
accounted for natural affection as an innate idea, as they have for
self-love. According to the metaphysical doctrine of selfishness, my own
child or a stranger’s, and every one else, are equally and perfectly
indifferent to me, as much as if they were mere machines. As to a
paramount universal abstract notion of personal identity, impelling and
overruling all my actions, thoughts, feelings, etc. to one sole object,
and centre of self-interest, there is no such thing in nature. It
requires almost as much pains and discipline, to make us attentive to
our own real and permanent happiness, as to that of others. Is it not
the constant theme of moralists and divines, that man is the sport of
impulse, and the creature of habit? I would ask, whether the
convivialist is deterred from indulging in his love of the bottle, by
any consideration of the ruin of his health or business? Is the
debauchee restrained in the career of his passions, any more by
reflecting on the disgrace or probable diseases he is bringing on
himself, than on the injury he does to others? It would be as hard a
task to make the spendthrift prudent, as the miser generous. Man is
governed by his passions, and not by his interest.—The selfish theory is
founded on mixing up vulgar prejudices, and scholastic distinctions; and
by being insisted on, tends to debase the mind, and not at all promote
the cause of truth.
I do not think I should illustrate the foregoing reasoning so well by
anything I could add on the subject, as by relating the manner in which
it first struck me. I remember I had been reading a speech which
Mirabaud (the author of the work, called the System of Nature) has put
into the mouth of a supposed infidel at the day of Judgment; and was
afterwards led on by some means or other, to consider the question,
whether it could properly be said to be an act of virtue in any one to
sacrifice his own final happiness to that of any other person, or number
of persons, if it were possible for the one ever to be made the price of
the other. Suppose it be my own case—that it were in my power to save
twenty other persons, by voluntarily consenting to suffer for them, why
should I not do a generous thing, and never trouble myself about what
might be the consequences to myself thousands of years hence? Now the
reason, I thought, why a man should prefer his own future welfare to
that of others, was, that he has a necessary, or abstract interest in
the one, which he cannot have in the other, and this again is the
consequence of his being always the same individual, of his continued
identity with himself. The distinction is this, that however insensible
I may be to my own interest at any future period, yet when the time
comes, I shall feel very differently about it. I shall then judge of it
from the actual impression of the object, that is, truly and certainly;
and as I shall still be conscious of my past feelings, and shall
bitterly repent my own folly and insensibility, I ought, as a rational
agent, to be determined now by what I shall then wish I had done, when I
shall feel the consequences of my actions most deeply and sensibly. It
is this continued consciousness of my own feelings which gives me an
immediate interest in whatever relates to my future welfare, and makes
me at all times accountable to myself for my own conduct. As therefore
this consciousness will be renewed in me after death, if I exist again
at all—But stop——As I must be conscious of my past feelings to be
myself, and as this conscious being will be myself, how, if that
consciousness should be transferred to some other being? How am I to
know that I am not imposed upon by a false claim of identity? But that
is impossible, because I shall have no other self than that which arises
from this very consciousness. Why then, if so, this self may be
multiplied in as many different beings as the Deity may think proper to
endue with the same consciousness, which, if it can be renewed by an act
of omnipotence in any one instance, may clearly be so in a hundred
others. Am I to regard all these as equally myself? Am I equally
interested in the fate of all? Or if I must fix upon some one of them in
particular as my representative and other self, how am I to be
determined in my choice?——Here then I saw an end to my speculations
about absolute self-interest and personal identity. I saw plainly, that
the consciousness of my own feelings, which is made the foundation of my
continued interest in them, could not extend to what had never been, and
might never be, that my identity with myself must be confined to the
connection between my past and present being, that with respect to my
future feelings and interests they could have no communication with, or
influence over my present feelings and interests, merely because they
were future, that I shall be hereafter affected by the recollection of
my former feelings and actions, and my remorse be equally heightened by
reflecting on my past folly, and late-earned wisdom, whether I am really
the same thinking being, or have only the same consciousness renewed in
me; but that to suppose that this remorse can re-act in the reverse
order on my present feelings, or create an immediate interest in my
future feelings before it exists, is an express contradiction. For, how
can this pretended unity of consciousness which is only reflected from
the past, which makes me so little acquainted with the future, that I
cannot even tell for a moment how long it will be continued, whether it
will be entirely interrupted by, or renewed in me after death, and which
might be multiplied in I don’t know how many different beings, and
prolonged by complicated sufferings, without my being any the wiser for
it; how, I ask, can a principle of this sort transfuse my present into
my future being, and make me as much a participator in what does not at
all affect me as if it were actually impressed upon my senses? I cannot,
therefore, have a principle of active self-interest arising out of the
connexion between my future and present being, for no such connexion
exists or is possible. I am what I am in spite of the future. My
feelings, actions, and interests are determined by causes already
existing and acting, and cannot depend on anything else, without a
complete transposition of the order in which effects follow one another
in nature.
In this manner, Sir, may a man learn to distinguish the limits which
circumscribe his identity with himself, and the frail tenure on which he
holds his fleeting existence. Here indeed, ‘on this bank and shoal of
time,’ we give ourselves credit for a few years, and so far make sure of
our continued identity—as far as we can see the horizon before us, while
the same busy scene exists, while the same objects, passions, and
pursuits engross our attention, we seem to grasp the realities of
things; they are incorporated with our imagination and take hold of our
affections, and we cannot doubt of our interest in them. Farther than
this, we do not go with the same confidence; the indistinctness of
another state of being takes away its reality, and we lose the abstract
idea of self for want of objects to attach it to. But the reasoning is
the same in both cases. The next year, the next hour, the next moment is
but a creation of the mind; in all that we hope or fear, love or hate,
in all that is nearest and dearest to us, we but mistake the strength of
illusion for certainty, and follow the mimic shews of things and catch
at a shadow and live in a waking dream. Everything before us exists in
an ideal world. The future is a blank and dreary void, like sleep or
death, till the imagination brooding over it with wings outspread,
impregnates it with life and motion. The forms and colours it assumes
are but the pictures reflected on the eye of fancy, the unreal mockeries
of future events. The solid fabric of time and nature moves on, but the
future always flies before it. The present moment stands on the brink of
nothing. We cannot pass the dread abyss, or make a broad and beaten way
over it, or construct a real interest in it, or identify ourselves with
what is not, or have a being, sense, and motion, where there are none.
Our interest in the future, our identity with it, cannot be substantial;
that self which we project before us into it is like a shadow in the
water, a bubble of the brain. In becoming the blind and servile drudges
of self-interest, we bow down before an idol of our own making, and are
spell-bound by a name. Those objects to which we are most attached, make
no part of our present sensations or real existence; they are fashioned
out of nothing, and rivetted to our self-love by the force of a
reasoning imagination, (the privilege of our intellectual nature)—and it
is the same faculty that carries us out of ourselves as well as beyond
the present moment, that pictures the thoughts, passions and feelings of
others to us, and interests us in them, that clothes the whole possible
world with a borrowed reality, that breathes into all other forms the
breath of life, and endows our sympathies with vital warmth, and
diffuses the soul of morality through all the relations and sentiments
of our social being.
Such, Sir, is the metaphysical discovery of which I spoke; and which I
made many years ago. From that time I felt a certain weight and
tightness about my heart taken off, and cheerful and confident thoughts
springing up in the place of anxious fears and sad forebodings. The
plant I had sown and watered with my tears, grew under my eye; and the
air about it was wholesome and pleasant. For this cause it is, that I
have gone on little discomposed by other things, by good or adverse
fortune, by good or ill report, more hurt by public disappointments than
my own, and not thrown into the hot or cold fits of a tertian ague; as
the Edinburgh or Quarterly Review damps or raises the opinion of the
town in my favour. I have some love of fame, of the fame of a Pascal, a
Leibnitz, or a Berkeley (none at all of popularity) and would rather
that a single inquirer after truth should pronounce my name, after I am
dead, with the same feelings that I have thought of theirs, than be
puffed in all the newspapers, and praised in all the reviews, while I am
living. I myself have been a thinker; and I cannot but believe that
there are and will be others, like me. If the few and scattered sparks
of truth, which I have been at so much pains to collect, should still be
kept alive in the minds of such persons, and not entirely die with me, I
shall be satisfied.
I am, Sir,
Yours, etc.
WILLIAM HAZLITT.
End of A LETTER TO WILLIAM GIFFORD.
-----
Footnote 72:
See the Examiner, Feb. 9.
Footnote 73:
‘I hated my profession’ (the business of a shoemaker, to which he was
bound prentice) ‘with a perfect hatred.’ See _Mr. Gifford’s Life of
Himself prefixed to his Juvenal_. He seems to have liked few things
else better from that day to this. He tells us in the same work
(though this is hardly what I should call being ‘a good hater’) that
he did not much like his father, and was not sorry when he died. This
candid and amiable personage always overflowed with ‘the milk of human
kindness.’
Footnote 74:
‘Undoubtedly the translator of Juvenal.’
Footnote 75:
‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for
a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.’ Mr. Gifford here seems to
exclude his band of gentlemen-pensioners, whom he pays on earth, from
bursting with obscure worth into the realms of day. It is thus that
Jacobin sentiments sprout from the commonest sympathy, and are even
unavoidable in a government critic, when the common claims of humanity
touch his pity or his self-love.
Footnote 76:
A quotation of Mr. Gifford’s from Shakespeare. Yet he reproaches me
with quoting from Shakespeare.
Footnote 77:
To Apollo.
Footnote 78:
Humanity stands as little in this author’s way as truth when his
object is to please. It was in the same spirit of unmanly adulation
that he struck at Mrs. Robinson’s lameness and ‘her crutches,’ with a
hand, that ought to have been withered in the attempt by the lightning
of public indignation and universal scorn. Mr. Sheridan once spoke of
certain politicians in his day who ‘skulked behind the throne, and
made use of the sceptre as a conductor to carry off the lightning of
national indignation which threatened to consume them.’ There are
certain small critics and poetasters who have always been trying to do
the same thing.
Footnote 79:
This word is not very choice English: the character is not English.
Footnote 80:
See the Mæviad, l. 365, etc.:—
‘I too, whose voice no claims _but truth’s e’er mov’d_,
Who long have seen thy merits, long have lov’d;
Yet lov’d in silence, lest the rout should say,
Too partial friendship tun’d the applausive lay;
Now, now, that all conspire thy name to raise,
May join the shout of unsuspected praise.’
Footnote 81:
‘To be honest as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten
thousand.’—SHAKSPEARE.
Footnote 82:
This character, (which has not been relished,) appeared originally in
a small pamphlet in 1806, called Free Thoughts on Public Affairs, with
a note acknowledging my obligations for the leading ideas to an
article of Mr. Coleridge’s, in the Morning Post, Feb. 1800.
Footnote 83:
This extreme tenderness, it is to be observed, is felt by a person who
in his Life of Ben Jonson, hopes that God will forgive Shakspeare for
having written his plays!
Footnote 84:
It was a phrase, (I have understood,) common in this gentleman’s
mouth, that Robespierre, by destroying the lives of thousands, saved
the lives of millions. Or, as Mr. Wordsworth has lately expressed the
same thought with a different application, ‘Carnage is the daughter of
humanity.’
Footnote 85:
You have spelt it wrong (Marocchius), on purpose for what I know.
Footnote 86:
Quoted from the _Edinburgh Review_, No. 56.
NOTES
THE ROUND TABLE
ON THE LOVE OF LIFE
This essay formed No. 3 of the Round Table series, the first two having
been contributed by Leigh Hunt. To numbers 2, 3, 4 the following motto
was prefixed: ‘Sociali fœdere mensa. _Milton._ A Table in a social
compact joined.’
PAGE
1. _That sage._ Hazlitt perhaps refers to Bacon’s lines—
‘What then remains, but that we still should cry
For being born, or being born, to die?’
which are taken from an epigram in the Greek Anthology.
2. ‘_The school-boy_,’ says _Addison._ See _The Spectator_, No. 93.
‘_Hope and fantastic expectations_,’ _etc._ Jeremy Taylor’s _Holy
Dying_, Chap. i. § 3, par. 4.
‘_An ounce of sweet_,’ _etc._ ‘A dram of sweete is worth a pound
of sowre.’ _The Faerie Queene_, Book I. Canto iii. 30. This
line formed the motto of Leigh Hunt’s _Indicator_.
3. ‘_And that must end us_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, II. 145–151. In
_The Examiner_ Hazlitt publishes the following passage as a
note to this quotation: ‘Many persons have wondered how
Bonaparte was able to survive the shock of that tremendous
height of power from which he fell. But it was that very height
which still rivetted his backward gaze, and made it impossible
for him to take his eye from it, more than from a hideous
spectre. The sun of Austerlitz still rose upon his imagination,
and could not set. The huge fabric of glory which he had
raised, still “mocked his eyes with air.”[87] He who had felt
his existence so intensely could not consent to lose it!’
4. ‘_Are made desperate_,’ _etc._ Wordsworth’s _Excursion_, Book VI.
The following note is appended to this essay in _The Examiner_:
‘It is proper to notice that an extract from this article
formerly appeared in another publication. A series of
Criticisms on the principal English Poets will shortly be
commenced, and till concluded, will appear alternately with the
other subjects of the Round Table.’ The publication referred to
was _The Morning Chronicle_ for September 4, 1813, where, under
the heading ‘Common Places,’ the substance of the paragraph
beginning ‘The love of life is, in general, the effect,’ and
the following paragraph will be found. The plan for criticisms
of the English Poets was not adhered to. Hazlitt shortly
afterwards (1818) delivered a course of Lectures on the English
Poets which was published in the same year.
ON CLASSICAL EDUCATION
This essay formed the greater part of No. 7 of the Round Table series.
The first three paragraphs are from one of Hazlitt’s ‘Common Places’ in
_The Morning Chronicle_, September 25, 1813.
PAGE
4. ‘_A discipline of humanity._’ Bacon’s _Essays_, Of Marriage and
Single Life.
‘_Still green with bays_,’ _etc._ Pope’s _Essay on Criticism_,
181–188.
5. _A celebrated political writer._ Probably Cobbett, of whom
Hazlitt says in another place: ‘He is a self-taught man, and
has the faults as well as excellences of that class of persons
in their most striking and glaring excess.’ (_Table Talk_,
Character of Cobbett.)
6. ‘_The world is too much with us_,’ _etc._ Misquoted from
Wordsworth’s Sonnet.
_Falstaff’s reasoning about honour._ See _1 Henry IV._ Act V.
Scene 1.
‘_They that are whole_,’ _etc._ _St. Matthew_, ix. 12.
In _The Examiner_ this essay concluded with the following
passage: ‘We do not think a classical education proper for
women. It may pervert their minds, but it cannot elevate them.
It has been asked, Why a woman should not learn the dead
languages as well as the modern ones? For this plain reason,
that the one are still spoken, and have immediate associations
connected with them, and the other not. A woman may have a
lover who is a Frenchman, or an Italian, or a Spaniard; and it
is well to be provided against every contingency in that way.
But what possible interest can she feel in those old-fashioned
persons, the Greeks and Romans, or in what was done two
thousand years ago? A modern widow would doubtless prefer
Signor Tramezzani[88] to Æneas, and Mr. Conway would be a
formidable rival to Paris. No young lady in our days, in
conceiving an idea of Apollo, can go a step beyond the image of
her favourite poet: nor do we wonder that our old friend, the
Prince Regent, passes for a perfect Adonis in the circles of
beauty and fashion. Women in general have no ideas, except
personal ones. They are mere egotists. They have no passion for
truth, nor any love of what is purely ideal. They hate to
think, and they hate every one who seems to think of anything
but themselves. Everything is to them a perfect nonentity which
does not touch their senses, their vanity, or their interest.
Their poetry, their criticism, their politics, their morality,
and their divinity, are downright affectation. That line in
Milton is very striking—
“He for God only, she for God in him.”[89]
Such is the order of nature and providence; and we should be
sorry to see any fantastic improvements on it. Women are what
they were meant to be; and we wish for no alteration in
their bodies or their minds. They are the creatures of
the circumstances in which they are placed, of sense, of
sympathy and habit. They are exquisitely susceptible of the
passive impressions of things: but to form an idea of pure
understanding or imagination, to feel an interest in _the true_
and _the good_ beyond themselves, requires an effort of which
they are incapable. They want principle, except that which
consists in an adherence to established custom; and this is the
reason of the severe laws which have been set up as a barrier
against every infringement of decorum and propriety in women.
It has been observed by an ingenious writer of the present day,
that women want imagination. This requires explanation. They
have less of that imagination which depends on intensity of
passion, on the accumulation of ideas and feelings round one
object, on bringing all nature and all art to bear on a
particular purpose, on continuity and comprehension of mind;
but for the same reason, they have more fancy, that is greater
flexibility of mind, and can more readily vary and separate
their ideas at pleasure. The reason of that greater presence of
mind which has been remarked in women is, that they are less in
the habit of speculating on what is best to be done, and the
first suggestion is decisive. The writer of this article
confesses that he never met with any woman who could reason,
and with but one reasonable woman. There is no instance of a
woman having been a great mathematician or metaphysician or
poet or painter: but they can dance and sing and act and write
novels and fall in love, which last quality alone makes more
than angels of them. Women are no judges of the characters of
men, except _as men_. They have no real respect for men, or
they never respect them for those qualities, for which they are
respected by men. They in fact regard all such qualities as
interfering with their own pretensions, and creating a
jurisdiction different from their own. Women naturally wish to
have their favourites all to themselves, and flatter their
weaknesses to make them more dependent on their own good
opinion, which, they think, is all that they want. We have,
indeed, seen instances of men, equally respectable and amiable,
equally admired by the women and esteemed by the men, but who
have been ruined by an excess of virtues and accomplishments.’
Leigh Hunt replied to these remarks in the following number of
the Round Table series (February 19, 1815), where he makes
interesting reference to Hazlitt’s appearance and powers.
ON THE TATLER
This essay formed No. 10 of the Round Table series. The substance of it
was repeated by Hazlitt in his volume of _Lectures on the English Comic
Writers_ (1819). (See the Lecture on ‘The Periodical Essayists.’)
PAGE
7. ‘_The disastrous strokes which his youth suffered._’ ‘Some
distressful stroke that my youth suffered.’ _Othello_, Act I.
Scene 3.
_He dwells with a secret satisfaction._ _The Tatler_, No. 107.
_The club at the ‘Trumpet.’_ _The Tatler_, No. 132.
_The cavalcade of the justice_, _etc._ _The Tatler_, No. 86.
_The upholsterer and his companions._ See _The Tatler_, Nos. 155,
160, and 178.
_A burlesque copy of verses._ _The Tatler_, No. 238. The verses
are by Swift.
8. _Betterton and Mrs. Oldfield._ See p. 157. Betterton is
frequently mentioned in _The Tatler_. See especially No. 167.
_Mr. Penkethman and Mr. Bullock._ See _The Tatler_, No. 88, and
p. 157 of this volume.
‘_The first sprightly runnings._’ Dryden’s _Aurengzebe_, Act IV.
Scene 1.
9. _The Court of Honour._ Addison, in _The Tatler_, No. 250, created
the Court of Honour. He and Steele together wrote the later
papers (Nos. 253, 256, 259, 262, 265) in which the proceedings
of the Court are recorded.
_The Personification of Musical Instruments._ _The Spectator_,
Nos. 153 and 157.
Note. This note is by Leigh Hunt. The authorship of the anonymous
paper (_The Spectator_, No. 95) is uncertain.
_The account of the two sisters._ _The Tatler_, No. 151.
_The married lady._ _The Tatler_, No. 104.
9. _The lover and his mistress._ _The Tatler_, No. 94.
_The bridegroom._ _The Tatler_, No. 82.
_Mr. Eustace and his wife._ _The Tatler_, No. 172.
_The fine dream._ _The Tatler_, No. 117.
_Mandeville’s sarcasm._ Bernard Mandeville (_d._ 1733), author of
_The Fable of the Bees_.
_Westminster Abbey._ _The Spectator_, No. 26.
_Royal Exchange._ _The Spectator_, No. 69.
_The best criticism._ _The Spectator_, No. 226.
10. Note. _An original copy of the ‘Tatler.’_ The octavo edition of
1710–11.
ON MODERN COMEDY
This essay did not form one of the Round Table series, but was published
in _The Examiner_ for August 20, 1815, under the heading ‘Theatrical
Examiner.’ It was substantially repeated in the _Lectures on the English
Comic Writers_ (Lecture VIII., ‘on the Comic Writers of the Last
Century’), and was republished _verbatim_ in the posthumous volume
entitled _Criticisms and Dramatic Essays on the English Stage_ (1851).
The essay is practically a reprint of the first of two letters which
Hazlitt wrote to _The Morning Chronicle_ (September 25 and October 15,
1813). The second of these letters has not been republished.
PAGE
10. ‘_Where it must live, or have no life at all._’ _Othello_, Act.
II. Scene 4.
11. ‘_See ourselves as others see us._’ Burns, ‘To a Louse.’
_Wart._ He means Shadow. See _2 Henry IV._, Act III. Scene 2.
12. _Lovelace_, _etc._ Nearly all these characters are discussed in
the _English Comic Writers_. Sparkish is in Wycherley’s
_Country Wife_, Lord Foppington in Vanbrugh’s _Relapse_,
Millamant in Congreve’s _Way of the World_, Sir Sampson Legend
in Congreve’s _Love for Love_.
_We cannot expect_, _etc._ This paragraph appeared originally in
_The Morning Chronicle_, October 15, 1813.
13. ‘_That sevenfold fence._’ ‘The seven-fold shield of Ajax cannot
keep the battery from my heart.’ _Antony and Cleopatra_, Act
IV. Scene 14. This passage is taken by Hazlitt from his own
_Reply to Malthus_ (1807).
‘_Mr. Smirk, you are a brisk man._’ Foote’s _Minor_, Act II.
_Aristotle._ In the _Poetics_.
‘_Warm hearts of flesh and blood_,’ _etc._ Quoted, with omissions
and variations, from a passage in Burke’s _Reflections on the
Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, ii. 101).
14. ‘_Men’s minds are parcel of their fortunes._’ _Antony and
Cleopatra_, Act III. Scene 13.
ON MR. KEAN’S IAGO
Republished with a few variations from _The Examiner_ of July 24, 1814.
Hazlitt afterwards published the original article in _A View of the
English Stage_ (1818), and borrowed from it in _Characters of
Shakespear’s Plays_ (See _ante_, pp. 206–7).
PAGE
14. _A contemporary critic._ This was Hazlitt himself who made this
criticism of Kean in an article in _The Morning Chronicle_ (May
9, 1814), reprinted in _A View of the English Stage_.
‘_Hedged in with the divinity of kings._’ From _Hamlet_, Act IV.
Scene 5.
15. _Play the dog_, _etc._ _3 Henry VI._, Act V. Scene 6.
16. ‘_His cue is villainous melancholy_,’ _etc._ _King Lear_, Act I.
Scene 2.
ON THE LOVE OF THE COUNTRY
This essay was one of a series called Common-places (No. III.) and
appeared in _The Examiner_ on November 27, 1814, before the Round Table
series commenced. It was not, therefore, addressed, as it purports to
be, ‘to the editor of the “Round Table.”’ The greater part of it was
repeated in the _Lectures on the English Poets_ (1818) at the end of
Lecture V. on Thomson and Cowper.
PAGE
17. _Rousseau in his ‘Confessions.’_ Partie I. Livre III.
18. _The minstrel._ See Beattie’s _Minstrel_, Book I. st. 9.
20. ‘_A farewell sweet._’
‘If chance the radiant sun, with farewell sweet,
Extend his evening beam,’ etc.
_Paradise Lost_, II. 492.
‘_To me the meanest flower_,’ _etc._ Wordsworth’s Ode,
_Intimations of Immortality_.
‘_Nature did ne’er betray_,’ _etc._ Wordsworth’s _Lines composed
a few miles above Tintern Abbey_.
21. ‘_Or from the mountain’s sides._’ Collins’s _Ode to Evening_,
stanzas 9 and 10.
ON POSTHUMOUS FAME
This essay is not one of the Round Table series. It appeared in _The
Examiner_ on May 22, 1814.
PAGE
22. ‘_Blessings be with them_’ _etc._ Wordsworth’s _Personal Talk_,
stanza 4.
‘_Nor sometimes forget_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, III. 33 _et
seq._
Note. A part of the passage here referred to (from _The Reason of
Church Government urged against Prelacy_) is quoted by Hazlitt
in his _Lectures on the English Poets_ (on Shakspeare and
Milton).
23. ‘_Famous poets’ wit._’ See _The Faerie Queene, Verses addressed
by the author_, No. 2. ‘_Have not the poems of Homer_,’ _etc._
_The Advancement of Learning_, First Book, VIII. 6.
‘_Because on Earth_,’ _etc._ See Dante’s _Inferno_, Canto iv. Cf.
‘On Fames eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled.’ _The Faerie
Queene_, Book IV. Canto ii. st. 32.
‘_Every variety of untried being._’
‘Through what variety of untried being,
Through what new scenes and changes must we pass!’
Addison’s _Cato_, Act V. Scene 1.
24. Note. ‘_Oh! for my sake_,’ _etc._ Sonnet No. III. ‘_Desiring this
man’s art_,’ _etc._ Sonnet No. 29.
ON HOGARTH’S ‘MARRIAGE À LA MODE’
This essay (from _The Examiner_, June 5, 1814) and the next one (June
19, 1814) continuing the same subject, were (in substance) republished
in the _English Comic Writers_ (see the Lecture VII. on the works of
Hogarth) and also in _Sketches of the Principal Picture-Galleries in
England_, _etc._ (1824).
PAGE
25. _The late collection._ In 1814.
‘_Of amber-lidded snuff-box._’ Pope’s _Rape of the Lock_, IV.
123.
26. ‘_A person, and a smooth dispose_,’ _etc._ _Othello_, Act I.
Scene 3.
‘_Vice loses half its evil in losing all its grossness._’ Burke’s
_Reflections on the Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed.
Payne, ii. 89).
THE SUBJECT CONTINUED
28. _What Fielding says._ See _Tom Jones_, Book IV. Chap. i.
30. ‘_All the mutually reflected charities._’ Burke’s _Reflections on
the Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, ii. 40).
‘_Frequent and full_,’ _etc._ See _Paradise Lost_, III. 795–797.
31. Note. _The ‘Reflector.’_ For 1811. The essay is included in
_Poems, Plays and Miscellaneous Essays of Charles Lamb_ (ed.
Ainger).
ON MILTON’S LYCIDAS
No. 15 of the Round Table series.
PAGE
31. ‘_At last he rose_,’ _etc._ _Lycidas_, 192–193.
_Dr. Johnson._ See his Life of Milton (_Works_, Oxford ed., vii.
119).
‘_Most musical, most melancholy._’ _Il Penseroso_, l. 62.
‘_With eager thought warbling his Doric lay._’ _Lycidas_, l. 189.
32. ‘_Together both_,’ _etc._ _Lycidas_, ll. 25 _et seq._
‘_Oh fountain Arethuse_,’ _etc._ _Lycidas_, ll. 85 _et seq._
33. ‘_Like one that had been led astray_,’ _etc._ _Il Penseroso_, ll.
69–70.
‘_Next Camus_,’ _etc._ _Lycidas_, ll. 103 _et seq._
_Has been found fault with._ By Dr. Johnson in his Life of Milton
(_Works_, Oxford ed., vii. 120).
_Camoens, who, in his ‘Lusiad.’_ See _The Lusiads_, Canto ii.
stanzas 56 _et seq._
34. ‘_The muses in a ring_,’ _etc._ _Il Penseroso_, ll. 47–48.
‘_Have sight of Proteus_,’ _etc._ Wordsworth’s Sonnet, ‘The world
is too much with us.’
‘_Return, Alphaeus_,’ _etc._ _Lycidas_, ll. 132 _et seq._
35. _Dr. Johnson._ Johnson does not seem to have been offended by the
dolphins in particular.
_The picture by Barry._ ‘The triumph of the Thames,’ number 4 of
the six pictures painted by James Barry (1741–1806) for the
Society of Arts. Johnson’s friend, Dr. Charles Burney
(1726–1814) figures as one of the renowned dead.
‘_Here’s flowers for you_’ _etc._ _Winter’s Tale_, Act. IV. Scene
4.
36. _Dr. Johnson’s ‘general remark_,’ _etc._ See his Life of Milton
(_Works_, Oxford ed., vii. 119, 131), and Boswell’s _Life of
Johnson_ (ed. G. B. Hill), iv. 305.
ON MILTON’S VERSIFICATION
No. 16 of the Round Table series. Hazlitt drew largely on this essay for
his lecture on Shakspeare and Milton. See _Lectures on the English
Poets_.
PAGE
37. ‘_Makes Ossa like a wart._’ _Hamlet_, Act V. Scene 1.
‘_Sad task, yet argument_,’ _etc._ Quoted, with omissions, from
_Paradise Lost_, IX. 13–45.
37. ‘_Him followed Rimmon_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, I. 467–469.
‘_As when a vulture_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, III. 431–439.
38. _It has been said_, _etc._ Hazlitt probably refers to Coleridge.
See his _Lectures on Shakspeare_ (Bell’s ed., p. 526).
‘_He soon saw within ken_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, III. 621–634.
39. _Dr. Johnson._ Hazlitt somewhat exaggerates Johnson’s strictures
on Milton. See _The Rambler_, Nos. 86, 88, and 90.
‘_His hand was known_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, I. 732–747.
‘_But chief the spacious hall_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, I.
762–788. In _The Examiner_ Hazlitt has a note to the words
‘brush’d with the hiss of rustling wings,’ pointing out that it
was one of Dr. Johnson’s speculations, that all imitative sound
is merely fanciful. He refers probably to _The Rambler_, No.
94.
40. ‘_Round he surveys_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, III. 555–567.
‘_In many a winding bout_,’ _etc._ _L’Allegro_, ll. 139–140.
41. ‘_The hidden soul of harmony._’ _L’Allegro_, l. 144.
Note. Hazlitt quoted these couplets again in his _Lectures on the
English Poets_. See Lecture IV. on Dryden and Pope.
ON MANNER
This essay is compounded of two papers in the Round Table series, Nos.
17 and 18.| Hazlitt, however, omitted the greater part of No. 18, at the
beginning of which he discussed Dryden’s version of _The Flower and the
Leaf_. No. 18 was published in _Winterslow_ (1839) under the title of
_Matter and Manner_.
PAGE
42. _Says Lord Chesterfield._ ‘Observe the looks and countenances of
those who speak, which is often a surer way of discovering the
truth than what they say.’ _Letters to his Son_, No. cxxx.
_Than his sentiments._ In _The Examiner_ appears the following
note on this passage: ‘We find persons who write what may be
called an _impracticable_ style; and their ideas are just as
impracticable. They have as little tact of what is going on in
the world as of the habitual meaning of words. Other writers
betray their natural disposition by affectation, dryness, or
levity of style. Style is the adaptation of words to things.
Dr. Johnson had no style, that is, no scale of words answering
to the differences of his subject. He always translated his
ideas into the highest and most imposing form of expression, or
more properly, into Latin words with English terminations.
Goldsmith said to him, “If you had to write a fable, and to
introduce little fishes speaking, you would make them talk like
great whales.” It is a satire on this kind of taste that the
most ignorant pretenders are in general what is generally
understood by the finest writers. Women generally write a good
style, because they express themselves according to the
impression which things make upon them, without the affectation
of authorship. They have besides more sense of propriety than
men.’ For the story of Goldsmith see Boswell’s _Life of
Johnson_ (ed. G. B. Hill), ii. 231.
43. _One of the most pleasant_, _etc._ It is evident from a passage
in _Table Talk_ (on Coffee-House Politicians) that this friend
is Leigh Hunt, and that ‘another friend’ is Lamb.
‘_As dry as the remainder biscuit_,’ _etc._ _As You Like It_, Act
II. Scene 7.
‘_Learning is often_,’ _etc._ _2 Henry IV._, Act IV. Scene 3.
44. _Lord Chesterfield’s character of the Duke of Marlborough._
_Letters to his Son_, No. clxviii.
45. Note 1. It appears from a MS. note in a copy of the 1817 edition
that Hazlitt here refers to Lord Castlereagh.
_The greatest man_, _etc._ Napoleon. Cf. _Table Talk_ (on Great
and Little Things) and _Life of Napoleon_, Chap. lvii.
Note 2. _A sonnet to the King._ This must be the sonnet
beginning—
‘Now that all hearts are glad, all faces bright’
to which Hazlitt referred again in _Political Essays_
(‘Illustrations of _The Times_ Newspaper’). Wordsworth’s attack
on a set of gipsies was in the poem entitled ‘Gipsies’ (1807).
‘_In a wise passiveness._’ _Expostulation and Reply_ (1798).
_In the ‘Excursion’._ Book VIII.
_‘They are a grotesque ornament,’ etc._ ‘Nobility is a graceful
ornament to the civil order.’ Burke’s _Reflections on the
Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, ii. 164).
_This is enough._ In _The Examiner_ Hazlitt adds: ‘We really have
a very great contempt for any one who differs from us on this
point.’
46. _The Story of the glass-man._ The Barber’s story of his Fifth
Brother.
_That manner is everything._ ‘Sheer impudence answers almost the
same purpose. “Those impenetrable whiskers have confronted
flames.” Many persons, by looking big and talking loud, make
their way through the world without any one good quality. We
have here said nothing of mere personal qualifications, which
are another set-off against sterling merit. Fielding was of
opinion that “the more solid pretensions of virtue and
understanding vanish before perfect beauty.” “A certain lady of
a manor” (says _Don Quixote_[90] in defence of his attachment
to _Dulcinea_, which however was quite of the Platonic kind),
“had cast the eyes of affection on a certain squat, brawny
lay-brother of a neighbouring monastery, to whom she was lavish
of her favours. The head of the order remonstrated with her on
this preference shown to one whom he represented as a very low,
ignorant fellow, and set forth the superior pretensions of
himself, and his more learned brethren. The lady having heard
him to an end made answer: All that you have said may be very
true; but know, that in those points which I admire, Brother
Chrysostom is as great a philosopher, nay greater than
Aristotle himself!” So the _Wife of Bath_:[91]—
“To church was mine husband borne on the morrow
With neighbours that for him maden sorrow,
And Jenkin our clerk was one of tho:
As help me God, when that I saw him go
After the bier, methought he had a pair
Of legs and feet, so clean and fair,
That all my heart I gave unto his hold.”
“All which, though we most potently believe, yet we hold it not
honesty to have it thus set down.”’[92]—Note by Hazlitt in _The
Examiner_, September 3, 1815.
Note. _Sir Roger de Coverley._ _The Spectator_, No. 130.
47. _The successful experiment._ See _Peregrine Pickle_, Chap,
lxxxvii.
ON THE TENDENCY OF SECTS
No. 19 of the Round Table series.
PAGE
49. Note 1. The _Freedom of the Will_ of Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758)
was published in 1754. Edwards was, of course, an American, as
Flower reminded Hazlitt in his letter referred to below (49,
note 2).
‘_Hid from ages._’ _Colossians_, i. 26.
Note 2. Benjamin Flower, in a reply which he wrote to this essay
(_The Examiner_, October 8, 1815), pointed out the ‘phenomenon’
of a Quaker poet ‘appeared about thirty years since, Mr. Scott
of Amwell, whose volume of poetry obtained the marked
approbation of our acknowledged best critics.’ Johnson said of
John Scott of Amwell’s (1730–1783) _Elegies_, ‘they are very
well; but such as twenty people might write’ (Boswell’s _Life
of Johnson_, ed. G. B. Hill, ii. 351). Another correspondent,
signing himself ‘B. B.,’ wrote a letter to _The Examiner_
(September 24, 1815), protesting against Hazlitt’s sketch of
Quakerism. This was no doubt Bernard Barton (1784–1849),
another Quaker poet, and afterwards the friend of Lamb.
50. ‘_There is some soul of goodness_,’ _etc._ _Henry V._, Act IV.
Scene 1.
‘_Evil communications_,’ _etc._ _1 Corinthians_, xv. 33.
ON JOHN BUNCLE
No. 20 of the Round Table series.
_The Life of John Buncle, Esq._, by Thomas (not John) Amory
(1691?-1788), was published in two volumes, 1756–1766. A new edition in
three volumes was published in 1825, very likely on Hazlitt’s
recommendation. See _Memoirs of William Hazlitt_, ii. 198. A quotation
from the present essay faces the title-page of the new edition (vol.
i.). A volume containing the most readable parts of the book, and
happily entitled ‘The Spirit of Buncle,’ was published in 1823. The book
was a great favourite of Lamb’s as well as of Hazlitt’s.
PAGE
52. _Botargos._ ‘Hard roes of mullet called botargos.’ Urquhart’s
Rabelais, I. xxi.
53. ‘_Man was made to mourn._’
‘Who breathes, must suffer; and who thinks, must mourn.’
Prior, _Solomon on the Vanity of the World_, III. 240.
_He danced the Hays._
‘I will play on the tabor to the worthies, and let them dance the hay.’
_Love’s Labour’s Lost_, Act V. Scene 1.
_A mistress and a saint in every grove._ Goldsmith’s _Traveller_,
152.
‘_Most dolphin-like._’ _Antony and Cleopatra_, Act V. Scene 2.
‘_And there the antic sits_,’ _etc._ _Richard II._, Act III.
Scene 2.
56. _Philips’s._ The Pastorals of Pope and Ambrose Philips
(1675?-1749) appeared in Tonson’s _Miscellany_ (1709).
_Sannazarius._ An English translation of the Piscatory Eclogues
of Jacopo Sannazario was published in 1726.
‘_What he beautifully calls_,’ _etc._ See _The Complete Angler_,
Part I. Chap. i.
‘_We accompany them_,’ _etc._ _The Complete Angler_, Part I.
Chap. iv. The milkmaid sang ‘Come live with me, and be my
love.’ That ‘smooth song’ (says Walton) ‘which was made by Kit
Marlowe, now at least fifty years ago.
And the milkmaid’s mother sung an answer to it, which was made by
Sir _Walter Raleigh_ in his younger days.’
57. _Tottenham Cross._ The subject of one of the prints.
Note. _His friendship for Cotton._ Charles Cotton (1630–1687),
the translator of Montaigne (1685).
Note. _Dr. Johnson said._ See Mrs. Piozzi’s _Anecdotes_
(_Johnsonian Miscellanies_, ed. G. B. Hill, i. 332).
ON THE CAUSES OF METHODISM
No. 22 of the Round Table series. Leigh Hunt discussed this article in
No. 24 of the series, republished in the 1817 edition of the _Round
Table_, and entitled ‘On the Poetical Character.’ On the subject of
Methodism Hunt had already spoken his mind in a series of articles in
_The Examiner_, which he republished in 1809 under the title of _An
Attempt to shew the folly and danger of Methodism_.
PAGE
58. ‘_To sinner it or saint it._’ Pope’s _Moral Essays_, Ep. II. l.
15.
‘_The whole need not a physician._’ _St. Matthew_, ix. 12.
‘_Conceit in weakest_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Scene 4.
59. _Mawworm._ In Isaac Bickerstaffe’s _Hypocrite_, altered from
Colley Cibber’s _Nonjuror_, which was itself ‘a comedy threshed
out of Molière’s _Tartuffe_.’ See the Lecture on the Comic
Writers of the Last Century in _English Comic Writers_. For
Oxberry’s acting of the part see _A View of the English Stage_.
‘_With sound of bell_,’ _etc._ _As You Like It_, Act II. Scene 7.
‘_Round fat oily men of God_,’ _etc._ Thomson’s _Castle of
Indolence_, stanza 69.
‘_That burning and shining light._’ _St. John_, v. 35.
Note. ‘_And filled up all the mighty void of sense._’ Pope’s
_Essay on Criticism_, l. 210.
60. ‘_The vice_,’ _etc._ _Hebrews_, xii. 1.
‘_The Society for the Suppression of Vice._’ Founded in 1802.
Sydney Smith criticised its methods in one of his _Edinburgh
Review_ articles (Jan. 1809). Hazlitt refers to it again. See
_ante_, p. 139.
‘_And sweet religion_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Scene 4.
‘_Numbers without number._’ _Paradise Lost_, III. 346.
61. ‘_Dissolves them_,’ _etc._ _Il Penseroso_, ll. 165–166.
ON THE MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
No. 26 of the Round Table series. The essay was in substance republished
in _Characters of Shakespear’s Plays_. See _ante_, pp. 244–248, and the
notes thereon.
PAGE
64. ‘_Age cannot wither_,’ _etc._ _Antony and Cleopatra_, Act II.
Scene 2.
‘_’Tis a good piece of work_,’ _etc._ _The Taming of the Shrew_,
Act I. Scene 2.
‘_Would, cousin Silence_,’ _etc._ _2 Henry IV._, Act III. Scene
2. The dialogue on the death of old Double occurs earlier in
the same scene.
‘_The most fearful wild-fowl living._’ _Midsummer Night’s Dream_,