Biographia Literaria
dropped; when reprieve! reprieve! is heard from behind the scenes:
and in comes Prince Somebody, pardons the Count, and the wife is still
frantic, only with joy; that was all!
O dear lady! this is one of the cases, in which laughter is followed
by melancholy: for such is the kind of drama, which is now substituted
every where for Shakespeare and Racine. You well know, that I offer
violence to my own feelings in joining these names. But however meanly
I may think of the French serious drama, even in its most perfect
specimens; and with whatever right I may complain of its perpetual
falsification of the language, and of the connections and transitions
of thought, which Nature has appropriated to states of passion; still,
however, the French tragedies are consistent works of art, and the
offspring of great intellectual power. Preserving a fitness in the
parts, and a harmony in the whole, they form a nature of their own,
though a false nature. Still they excite the minds of the spectators to
active thought, to a striving after ideal excellence. The soul is not
stupefied into mere sensations by a worthless sympathy with our
own ordinary sufferings, or an empty curiosity for the surprising,
undignified by the language or the situations which awe and delight the
imagination. What, (I would ask of the crowd, that press forward to
the pantomimic tragedies and weeping comedies of Kotzebue and his
imitators), what are you seeking? Is it comedy? But in the comedy of
Shakespeare and Moliere the more accurate my knowledge, and the more
profoundly I think, the greater is the satisfaction that mingles with
my laughter. For though the qualities which these writers pourtray are
ludicrous indeed, either from the kind or the excess, and exquisitely
ludicrous, yet are they the natural growth of the human mind and such
as, with more or less change in the drapery, I can apply to my own
heart, or at least to whole classes of my fellow-creatures. How often
are not the moralist and the metaphysician obliged for the happiest
illustrations of general truths and the subordinate laws of human
thought and action to quotations, not only from the tragic characters,
but equally from the Jaques, Falstaff, and even from the fools and
clowns of Shakespeare, or from the Miser, Hypochondriast, and Hypocrite,
of Moliere! Say not, that I am recommending abstractions: for these
class-characteristics, which constitute the instructiveness of a
character, are so modified and particularized in each person of the
Shakesperian Drama, that life itself does not excite more distinctly
that sense of individuality which belongs to real existence. Paradoxical
as it may sound, one of the essential properties of geometry is not
less essential to dramatic excellence, and, (if I may mention his name
without pedantry to a lady,) Aristotle has accordingly required of
the poet an involution of the universal in the individual. The chief
differences are, that in geometry it is the universal truth itself,
which is uppermost in the consciousness, in poetry the individual form
in which the truth is clothed. With the ancients, and not less with the
elder dramatists of England and France, both comedy and tragedy were
considered as kinds of poetry. They neither sought in comedy to make
us laugh merely, much less to make us laugh by wry faces, accidents of
jargon, slang phrases for the day, or the clothing of commonplace morals
in metaphors drawn from the shops or mechanic occupations of their
characters; nor did they condescend in tragedy to wheedle away the
applause of the spectators, by representing before them fac-similes
of their own mean selves in all their existing meanness, or to work on
their sluggish sympathies by a pathos not a whit more respectable than
the maudlin tears of drunkenness. Their tragic scenes were meant to
affect us indeed, but within the bounds of pleasure, and in union with
the activity both of our understanding and imagination. They wished to
transport the mind to a sense of its possible greatness, and to implant
the germs of that greatness during the temporary oblivion of the
worthless “thing, we are” and of the peculiar state, in which each man
happens to be; suspending our individual recollections and lulling them
to sleep amid the music of nobler thoughts.
Hold!--(methinks I hear the spokesman of the crowd reply, and we will
listen to him. I am the plaintiff, and he the defendant.)
DEFENDANT. Hold! are not our modern sentimental plays filled with the
best Christian morality?
PLAINTIFF. Yes! just as much of it, and just that part of it, which
you can exercise without a single Christian virtue--without a single
sacrifice that is really painful to you!--just as much as flatters you,
sends you away pleased with your own hearts, and quite reconciled to
your vices, which can never be thought very ill of, when they keep
such good company, and walk hand in hand with so much compassion and
generosity; adulation so loathsome, that you would spit in the man’s
face who dared offer it to you in a private company, unless you
interpreted it as insulting irony, you appropriate with infinite
satisfaction, when you share the garbage with the whole stye, and gobble
it out of a common trough. No Caesar must pace your boards--no Antony,
no royal Dane, no Orestes, no Andromache!
D. No: or as few of them as possible. What has a plain citizen of
London, or Hamburg, to do with your kings and queens, and your old
school-boy Pagan heroes? Besides, every body knows the stories; and what
curiosity can we feel----
P. What, Sir, not for the manner?--not for the delightful language
of the poet?--not for the situations, the action and reaction of the
passions?
D. You are hasty, Sir! the only curiosity, we feel, is in the story: and
how can we be anxious concerning the end of a play, or be surprised by
it, when we know how it will turn out?
P. Your pardon, for having interrupted you! we now understand each
other. You seek then, in a tragedy, which wise men of old held for the
highest effort of human genius, the same gratification, as that you
receive from a new novel, the last German romance, and other dainties of
the day, which can be enjoyed but once. If you carry these feelings to
the sister art of Painting, Michael Angelo’s Sixtine Chapel, and the
Scripture Gallery of Raphael can expect no favour from you. You know
all about them beforehand; and are, doubtless, more familiar with the
subjects of those paintings, than with the tragic tales of the historic
or heroic ages. There is a consistency, therefore, in your preference of
contemporary writers: for the great men of former times, those at least
who were deemed great by our ancestors, sought so little to gratify this
kind of curiosity, that they seemed to have regarded the story in a not
much higher light, than the painter regards his canvass: as that on, not
by, which they were to display their appropriate excellence. No work,
resembling a tale or romance, can well show less variety of invention
in the incidents, or less anxiety in weaving them together, than the DON
QUIXOTE of Cervantes. Its admirers feel the disposition to go back and
re-peruse some preceding chapter, at least ten times for once that they
find any eagerness to hurry forwards: or open the book on those parts
which they best recollect, even as we visit those friends oftenest whom
we love most, and with whose characters and actions we are the most
intimately acquainted. In the divine Ariosto, (as his countrymen call
this, their darling poet,) I question whether there be a single tale of
his own invention, or the elements of which, were not familiar to the
readers of “old romance.” I will pass by the ancient Greeks, who thought
it even necessary to the fable of a tragedy, that its substance should
be previously known. That there had been at least fifty tragedies with
the same title, would be one of the motives which determined Sophocles
and Euripides, in the choice of Electra as a subject. But Milton--
D. Aye Milton, indeed!--but do not Dr. Johnson and other great men tell
us, that nobody now reads Milton but as a task?
P. So much the worse for them, of whom this can be truly said! But why
then do you pretend to admire Shakespeare? The greater part, if not
all, of his dramas were, as far as the names and the main incidents are
concerned, already stock plays. All the stories, at least, on which they
are built, pre-existed in the chronicles, ballads, or translations of
contemporary or preceding English writers. Why, I repeat, do you pretend
to admire Shakespeare? Is it, perhaps, that you only pretend to admire
him? However, as once for all, you have dismissed the well-known events
and personages of history, or the epic muse, what have you taken in
their stead? Whom has your tragic muse armed with her bowl and dagger?
the sentimental muse I should have said, whom you have seated in the
throne of tragedy? What heroes has she reared on her buskins?
D. O! our good friends and next-door neighbours--honest tradesmen,
valiant tars, high-spirited half-pay officers, philanthropic Jews,
virtuous courtezans, tender-hearted braziers, and sentimental
rat-catchers!--(a little bluff or so, but all our very generous,
tender-hearted characters are a little rude or misanthropic, and all
our misanthropes very tender-hearted.)
P. But I pray you, friend, in what actions great or interesting, can
such men be engaged?
D. They give away a great deal of money; find rich dowries for young
men and maidens who have all other good qualities; they brow-beat
lords, baronets, and justices of the peace, (for they are as bold as
Hector!)--they rescue stage coaches at the instant they are falling down
precipices; carry away infants in the sight of opposing armies; and some
of our performers act a muscular able-bodied man to such perfection,
that our dramatic poets, who always have the actors in their eye, seldom
fail to make their favourite male character as strong as Samson. And
then they take such prodigious leaps!! And what is done on the stage is
more striking even than what is acted. I once remember such a deafening
explosion, that I could not hear a word of the play for half an act
after it: and a little real gunpowder being set fire to at the same
time, and smelt by all the spectators, the naturalness of the scene was
quite astonishing!
P. But how can you connect with such men and such actions that
dependence of thousands on the fate of one, which gives so lofty an
interest to the personages of Shakespeare, and the Greek Tragedians? How
can you connect with them that sublimest of all feelings, the power of
destiny and the controlling might of heaven, which seems to elevate the
characters which sink beneath its irresistible blow?
D. O mere fancies! We seek and find on the present stage our own wants
and passions, our own vexations, losses, and embarrassments.
P. It is your own poor pettifogging nature then, which you desire to
have represented before you?--not human nature in its height and vigour?
But surely you might find the former with all its joys and sorrows, more
conveniently in your own houses and parishes.
D. True! but here comes a difference. Fortune is blind, but the poet has
his eyes open, and is besides as complaisant as fortune is capricious.
He makes every thing turn out exactly as we would wish it. He gratifies
us by representing those as hateful or contemptible whom we hate and
wish to despise.
P. (aside.) That is, he gratifies your envy by libelling your superiors.
D. He makes all those precise moralists, who affect to be better than
their neighbours, turn out at last abject hypocrites, traitors, and
hard-hearted villains; and your men of spirit, who take their girl and