The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 10 (of 12)

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Title: The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 10 (of 12)
Author: Hazlitt, William
Language: English
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HAZLITT, VOL. 10 (OF 12) ***

THE
COLLECTED WORKS OF WILLIAM HAZLITT
IN TWELVE VOLUMES

VOLUME TEN

_All rights reserved_

[Illustration:

_Margaret Hazlitt._
(_1771–1844_)

_From an oil painting by John Hazlitt._
]

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF
WILLIAM HAZLITT

EDITED BY A. R. WALLER
AND ARNOLD GLOVER

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

W. E. HENLEY

❦

Contributions to the Edinburgh Review

❦

1904
LONDON: J. M. DENT & CO.
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.: NEW YORK

Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty

CONTENTS

PAGE
CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE EDINBURGH REVIEW 1

NOTES 403

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE EDINBURGH REVIEW

CONTENTS

PAGE
Dunlop’s History of Fiction 5

Standard Novels and Romances 25

Sismondi’s Literature of the South 44

Schlegel on the Drama 78

Coleridge’s Lay Sermon 120

Coleridge’s Literary Life 135

Letters of Horace Walpole 159

Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds 172

The Periodical Press 202

Landor’s Imaginary Conversations 231

Shelley’s Posthumous Poems 256

Lady Morgan’s Life of Salvator 276

American Literature—Dr. Channing 310

Flaxman’s Letters on Sculpture 330

Wilson’s Life and Times of Daniel Defoe 355

Mr. Godwin 385

Notes 403

Hunt’s Story of Rimini 407

Coleridge’s Christabel 411

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE EDINBURGH REVIEW

DUNLOP’S HISTORY OF FICTION

VOL. XXIV.] [_November 1814._

We are very much of Mr. Dunlop’s opinion,—that ‘life has few things
better, than sitting at the chimney-corner in a winter evening, after a
well-spent day, and reading an interesting romance or novel.’ In fact,
of all the pleasures of the imagination those are by far the most
captivating which are excited by the representation of our
fellow-creatures struggling with great difficulties, and stimulated by
high expectations or formidable alarms. And if the reader or spectator
have no personal interest in the subject, his emotions are but slightly,
if at all, affected by his judgment concerning its authenticity. On the
contrary, the fictions of genius may be rendered far more engaging than
the greater part of real history.

But the invention of interesting narratives is by no means an easy
exercise; and we apprehend that tales entirely and professedly
fictitious are exclusively the production of a civilized age; and are
never introduced into any nation till long after the genuine exploits of
its own heroes have been sung by its bards (who are the first
historians), for the entertainment and information of ruder times. These
journalists may indeed be expected to exaggerate the truth; and, on very
slender evidence, or merely from the warmth of their imagination, to
represent the powers of the invisible world as interposing their mighty
influence in the shape most agreeable to the prevalent superstitions.
But in relating events which passed within the memory of their hearers,
these exaggerations would generally be kept within such bounds as not to
shock the credulity, and consequently be less gratifying to the national
curiosity, and even to the national vanity of their audience: and hence
sagacious historians are able to extract a probable narrative from the
songs of contemporary bards.

Long however before the period of sober and scrutinizing history, the
more ancient of these songs would gradually receive additions and
embellishments from the patriotic fancies of the persons who
successively transmitted them to posterity; of the extent of which some
idea may be formed from the amplifications with which the account of any
surprising event is adorned, even during a short time after its first
promulgation, as it passes from house to house, and from village to
village. A bard also of one generation, gathering information from those
of another, and from the traditionary anecdotes of the aged with whom he
conversed, would be apt to compose a narrative in which a greater
latitude would be assumed for adjusting it to his own views or to the
taste of his countrymen, according to the remoteness of the time to
which it referred, and his security from the examination of critical
inquirers. And we may well suppose that his audience would receive
indulgently, or rather would indispensably require a high colouring of
the marvellous in the accounts of their favourite heroes.

In ruder times, therefore, the fiction would chiefly consist, not so
much in the troublesome task of inventing incidents, as in exaggeration:
And the tendency to exaggerate would act in two ways: it would on the
one hand enlarge the scale and heighten the colours of the natural
objects and real events which were understood to have existed; and on
the other hand it would multiply as well as magnify, and would render
distinctly visible the supernatural interpositions which were suggested
by the popular creed. When Achilles in a pet retired with his myrmidons,
it is probable enough that Diomed was roused to exert himself to the
utmost in the common cause, and performed wonders in the first
engagements after the secession of his great rival. On such an occasion
it would not be unnatural for his brave companions, and still less for
enraptured parasitical bards, to have expressed their admiration by
saying, that they beheld him as if shining with a light from heaven in
the battle; that Minerva was his friend and protector; that under her
guidance he not only slew many of the Trojan chiefs, but completely
routed and made an incredible havock among the throng of the less noble
combatants, who furiously assailed him, led on by the God of war in all
his terrors;—in short, that Diomed was a match for Mars himself. But the
heroes of the Trojan expedition were seen as visions by Homer and his
cotemporaries: And, according to the representation in the fifth book of
the Iliad, Minerva adorns the warrior with a real star-like flame
beaming from the crest of his helmet; she obtains Jupiter’s permission
to assist the Greeks; rouses Diomed’s courage who had been compelled to
retreat; with her own divine hand, she pulls down the charioteer, mounts
into his seat, and drives to where Mars was combating in propriâ
personâ, but who is soon wounded by Diomed in the small guts, νείατον ἐς
κενεῶνα, and sent roaring as loud as nine or ten thousand men to his
father Jupiter on the top of Olympus. Thus the surprising events which
were but moderately hyperbolized at the time, in the relation of the
eyewitnesses, and ascribed to the secret influences of the supernatural
powers, rather than to the agency of their daylight apparitions, are
wonderfully changed in the representation, at no great distance of time.
The real hero slays his tens; the hero of the men-singers and
women-singers slays his thousands and his tens of thousands: The real
hero is large of bone and strong of muscle; the hero of the poet is a
Hercules; and if not a giant, he is much more—like Tom Thumb he is the
conqueror of giants: Those superior Beings, with whom the popular
religion or superstition has peopled heaven and earth and hell, mingle
openly in the fray: they are seen and recognized as distinctly as any
others of the Dramatis Personæ, and act and converse very sensibly,
sometimes very foolishly, not only with each other, but with their
mortal associates. These superior Beings themselves, indeed, frequently
owe their supernatural character, and in some cases, their very
existence, to exaggeration. The heroes in process of time become
demi-gods; and at last are invested with the full honours and emoluments
of Deities acknowledged and established by law;

‘Romulus et Liber pater, et cum Castore Pollux;
Post ingentia facta Deorum in templa recepti.’

The unknown causes which actuate the material world,—the passions which
agitate the human breast,—and even several of those shadows of entity,
the allegorical characters, have been distinctly personified, and many
of them admitted to seats of greater or less dignity in the sacred
college of Divinities.

But in general the most enormous exaggeration would disfigure those
events which were the most ancient in the national traditions;—those
events which bordered upon utter darkness and appeared to be coeval with
the birth of Time. In a period of such dim antiquity, it appears that a
certain Crown Prince of Crete, very enterprising and very unprincipled,
rebelled successfully against his father, seemingly still more
unprincipled than his son, and carried every thing before him. This
worthy young gentleman, after being worshipped by the Cretans during his
life, very much, we suppose, as other successful tyrants are worshipped,
had the astonishing good fortune, in the course of a few centuries after
his death, to be acknowledged as the King of Gods and men throughout all
Greece, and afterwards through the whole extent of the Roman empire. The
abortive insurrection of his kinsmen in Thessaly was in due time
represented as the enterprise of stupendous giants, who heaped mountain
upon mountain to attack the Thunderer in his Olympian Palace. And as
nobody could tell any thing about the parents of these great men, it was
concluded, with a degree of probability amounting to what in the
language of philosophers is with much propriety called moral certainty,
that they had risen out of the ground like mushrooms. The events prior
to his establishment on the throne, appear dimly in the back-ground of
the sacred mythology—involved in all the awful obscurity of mysteries,
not to be profaned by the scrutiny of impious mortals. We are told that
there was a war in heaven of the Titans against Saturn the chief of the
Gods, for not having devoured his son Jupiter. For it would appear that
this good king, in whose reign, according to the poets, all the world,
except the royal family, were virtuous and happy, had cajoled his elder
brother Prince Titan out of his inheritance, under the express condition
of destroying, or, according to the more elegant mystical account, of
eating his male children as soon as they were born. The chief of the
gods was at first defeated and imprisoned by the Titans, but was soon
rescued and restored by Jupiter, the hopeful Crown Prince, who
afterwards expelled his father, and reigned in his stead.

In some such manner real events are represented by the bards of future
generations; with a strange fantastic jumble of hyperbole and allegory,
converted partly or entirely from a figurative to a literal meaning, the
marvels of superstition, childish fancies, and the brilliant conceptions
of poetical genius; while during the whole time there is but little
invention of incident, and far less of any thing like that artificial
fabrication of a continued fiction, which critics like Bossu have
ascribed to Homer so gratuitously, and indeed in such contradiction to
all that is known from experience concerning the progress of the human
mind in any of the arts.

Fictitious incidents would generally be at first introduced by a much
easier method than invention into the narratives of the bards. The
gentlemen of this ancient, itinerant corporation would naturally, in the
course of their peregrinations, become acquainted with many tales, both
foreign and domestic, not generally known to the rest of their
countrymen; and would be tempted to steal the most striking of the
incidents, whether true or false, and transfer them to the characters in
their own histories. Various instances of such pilfering are every day
detected in the story-tellers of society, as well as in authors both
ancient and modern; and hence it sometimes happens that the same
transaction appears in several different associations. Thus, much use
has been made, in various books, of the transaction so well known to the
readers of plays and romances,—the conspiracy for ruining a lady’s
reputation by carrying her friends to a hiding-place from whence they
could spy the improper behaviour of a person who was dressed so as to
resemble her. This clumsy contrivance seems to have been stolen by
Bandello from Ariosto,—and has been employed both by Shakespeare and
Spenser. And when authors endowed with so fertile inventions condescend
to borrow incidents so ill-contrived, (and indeed they sometimes stoop
to still poorer thefts), we cannot doubt that similar plagiarisms must
have been frequent among the inferior practitioners in the trade of
story-making.

In fact, the piracy of incidents may be traced from the most remote
antiquity down to modern times, in the histories both of supernatural
agents and of mortal men. There are strong presumptions that the Grecian
archives of Hercules, and of Jupiter himself, have been enlarged by
plunder both from Egypt and Asia. The Jewish visionaries superadded to
the truths of the sacred Scriptures many curious anecdotes relating to
the celestial principalities,—which they learned from the authentic
records of their Chaldean conquerors. The Romances of chivalry have been
enriched by contributions from various quarters; from the songs of the
Scalds, the bards of the Northern tribes that overran so many provinces
of the Roman empire; from the tales of Arabia, Persia, and other eastern
nations; and also from the fables transmitted by the classics of Greece
and Rome. Mr. Dunlop very properly rejects any theory which would
ascribe the beauties of romantic fiction to any one of these sources
exclusively, and we shall quote his general account of the subject, as a
fair specimen of his style and sagacity.

‘From a view of the character of Arabian and Gothic fiction, it appears
that neither is exclusively entitled to the credit of having given birth
to the wonders of romance. The early framers of the tales of chivalry
may be indebted to the northern bards for those wild and terrible images
congenial to a frozen region, and owe to Arabian invention that
magnificence and splendour, those glowing descriptions and luxuriant
ornaments, suggested by the enchanting scenery of an eastern climate,

“And wonders wild of Arabesque combine
With Gothic imagery of darker shade.”

‘It cannot be denied, and indeed has been acknowledged by Mr. Warton,
that the fictions of the Arabians and Scalds are totally different. The
fables and superstitions of the Northern bards are of a darker shade and
more savage complexion than those of the Arabians. There is something in
their fictions that chills the imagination. The formidable objects of
nature with which they were familiarized in their northern solitudes,
their precipices and frozen mountains and gloomy forests, acted on their
fancy, and gave a tincture of horror to their imagery. Spirits who send
storms over the deep, who rejoice in the shriek of the drowning mariner,
or diffuse irresistible pestilence; spells which preserve from poison,
blunt the weapons of an enemy, or call up the dead from their
tombs—these are the ornaments of northern poetry. The Arabian fictions
are of a more splendid nature; they are less terrible indeed, but
possess more variety and magnificence; they lead us through delightful
forests, and raise up palaces glittering with gold and diamonds.

‘It may also be observed, that, allowing the early Scaldic odes to be
genuine, we find in them no dragons, giants, magic rings, or enchanted
castles. These are only to be met with in the compositions of the bards
who flourished after the native vein of Runic fabling had been enriched
by the tales of the Arabians. But if we look in vain to the early Gothic
poetry for many of those fables which adorn the works of the romancers,
we shall easily find them in the ample field of oriental fiction. Thus
the Asiatic romances and chemical works of the Arabians are full of
enchantments similar to those described in the Spanish, and even in the
French, tales of chivalry. Magical rings were an important part of the
eastern philosophy, and seem to have given rise to those which are of so
much service to the Italian poets. In the Eastern peris, we may trace
the origin of the European fairies in their qualities, and perhaps in
their name. The griffin or hippogriff of the Italian writers, seems to
be the famous Simurgh of the Persians, which makes such a figure in the
epic poems of Sadii and Ferdusii.

‘A great number of these romantic wonders were collected in the East by
that idle and lying horde of pilgrims and palmers who visited the Holy
Land through curiosity, restlessness, or devotion, and who, returning
from so great a distance, imposed every fiction on a believing audience.
They were subsequently introduced into Europe by the Fablers of France,
who took up arms and followed their barons to the conquest of Jerusalem.
At their return, they imported into Europe the wonders they had heard,
and enriched romance with an infinite variety of Oriental fictions.

* * * * *

‘A fourth hypothesis has been suggested, which represents the machinery
and colouring of fiction, the stories of enchanted gardens, monsters,
and winged steeds, which have been introduced into romance, as derived
from the classical and mythological authors; and as being merely the
ancient stories of Greece, grafted on modern manners, and modified by
the customs of the age. The classical authors, it is true, were in the
middle ages scarcely known; but the superstitions they inculcated had
been prevalent for too long a period, and had taken too firm a hold on
the mind, to be easily obliterated. The mythological ideas which still
lingered behind were diffused in a multitude of popular works. In the
travels of Sir John Mandeville, there are many allusions to ancient
fable; and, as Middleton has shown that a great number of the Popish
rites were derived from Pagan ceremonies, it is scarcely to be doubted,
that many classical were converted into romantic fictions. This at least
is certain, that the classical system presents the most numerous and
least exceptionable prototypes of the fables of romance.

‘In many of the tales of chivalry, there is a knight detained from his
guest, by the enticements of a sorceress; and who is nothing more than
the Calypso or Circe of Homer. The story of Andromeda might give rise to
the fable of damsels being rescued by their favourite knight, when on
the point of being devoured by a sea monster. The heroes of the Iliad
and Æneid were both furnished with enchanted armour; and in the story of
Polyphemus, a giant and his cave are exhibited. Herodotus, in his
history, speaks of a race of Cyclops who inhabited the North, and waged
perpetual war with the tribe of Griffons, which was in possession of
mines of gold. The expedition of Jason in search of the golden fleece;
the apples of the Hesperides, watched by a dragon; the king’s daughter
who is an enchantress, who falls in love with and saves the knight,—are
akin to the marvels of romantic fiction—especially of that sort supposed
to have been introduced by the Arabians. Some of the less familiar
fables of classical mythology, as the image in the Theogony of Hesiod,
of the murky prisons in which the Titans were pent up by Jupiter, under
the custody of strong armed giants, bear a striking resemblance to the
more wild sublimity of the Gothic fictions.’ (Vol. 1. p. 135.)

Thus Bayes is not the only poet whose invention is indebted to his
memory or common-place book; and the art of fictitious narrative, like
every other art, seems to have arisen gradually from very humble
beginnings; and to have consisted, at first, not in the invention of
incidents, but in the exaggeration, natural even to eyewitnesses, in
relating any interesting or surprising event; and afterwards, in
borrowing incidents, true or false, from every quarter, whenever such a
license had the chance of escaping detection, or of being favourably
received.

But the licence, whether of exaggerating, of borrowing, or of inventing
incidents, would be more freely assumed by the bard, and more
indulgently admitted by his audience; and indeed the reports of
travellers, who have always enjoyed a peculiar privilege, would provide
the materials of fiction in greater variety, and of a more wonderful
kind, when the scene of the hero’s adventures happened to be in distant
and unknown regions, inhabited by other races of men, enclosed by other
mountains and other seas, subject to the influence of other skies, and
governed by other gods and another order of Nature.—The Odyssey is a
curious example.—If we except the usual interposition of the usual
deities, the history of what passes in Ithaca and Greece seems to
contain little which may not be more easily conceived to have actually
happened, than to have been invented by the poet. But when we accompany
Ulysses to Italy, Sicily and Ogygia, countries so little known in those
early times to the inhabitants of Ionia or Greece, we find ourselves in
another world. We meet with the enchantments of Circe, the mother of a
large family of enchantresses; and the songs of Sirens—whose fascinating
progeny has multiplied still more extensively both in verse and in
prose. We meet with Giants who devoured human flesh, and are manifestly
near of kin to the raw-boned gentlemen against whom not only the
knights-errant of after-times, but also our dearly beloved school-fellow
Jack the Giant-killer exerted his prowess and sagacity—though we have
some pleasure in remarking that the more modern giants are of a finer
breed, and farther removed from the savage state, as they look through
two eyes instead of one, and live in castles instead of caves. What is
more wonderful, we meet with the road to hell; not indeed the broad way
through the wide gate, so well known and so much frequented by men of
all ranks in every age of the world; but the secret path which it
requires mystic rites to open, and by which a hero, a saint, or a poet,
with a proper guide and good interest at court, may not only descend
with all his flesh and blood about him to gratify his curiosity, but
also return safe and sound, to entertain his friends above ground with
the sights he saw below.

It appears, then, in what manner the bards, prompted by patriotism, and
the desire of exciting the wonder of their auditors, might be enabled,
without any great trouble of invention, to adorn with fiction the songs
which recorded the exploits of their own countrymen; and their freedom
in this respect would be the greater, according to the distance of time
or place. But all restraint would be removed, when the hero of the tale
was a foreigner. The historical truth would in this case be indifferent
to the audience, and the narrative would be more acceptable, according
as it was more extraordinary, affecting, and miraculous. Now it is
obvious, that as the bards were indebted to their powers of amusing
company for their estimation in society, and even for their livelihood,
they would be prompted, by vanity and interest, as well as by their
genius and habits, to provide an ample store and variety of tales; and
not to confine themselves to transactions where they must have been
fettered by the national records or traditions, but to adopt also those
other subjects, where they could employ without control all the
materials which were furnished by their experience, memory or fancy. It
is obvious, too, that recourse to foreign subjects would become the more
frequent, according as the nation advanced in knowledge and refinement,
and ceased to depend on their poets for the preservation of their
history. And when the professions of the poets and historians were
completely separated, the former would be fully and for ever invested
with the privilege of fiction, the _quidlibet audendi potestas_, in all
their narratives, whether of foreign or domestic transactions—subject
only to the remonstrances of the critics, not for telling lies, but for
telling ill-contrived or uninteresting lies.

We have dwelt the longer on the origin of fictitious narrative, not only
because the subject has been strangely misrepresented by the critics,
but also because it is entirely overlooked in our author’s history. And
this oversight seems to have produced another very material defect, the
limitation of his plan to fictions _in prose_.

The earliest fictions are obviously entitled to the greatest attention,
on account of the information which may be extracted from them with
regard to the history, manners, and opinions of the nation and age to
which they belong. They are also connected with many of the succeeding
fictions; so that, by a mutual comparison, they are all rendered more
intelligible and agreeable, more valuable both to the antiquary, the
philosopher, and the innocents who read for amusement. But all the early
fictions are composed in verse; and after fiction became less connected
with history, many of the finest specimens of poetry are also the finest
specimens of fictitious narrative. In fact, if we except a very few
Italian tales, and some of the first-rate French and English novels, by
far the best fictitious narratives in existence are poems. And a history
of Mathematics which should exclude Archimedes and Newton, would not be
more extraordinary, than a history of Fiction which excludes Homer,
Hesiod, Virgil, Lucan, Ariosto, Tasso, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Scott,
Campbell and Byron.

The reason alleged for this exclusion appears to us, we will confess,
altogether unsatisfactory.

‘The history of Fiction,’ says our author in his Introduction, ‘becomes
in a considerable degree interesting to the philosopher, and occupies an
important place in the history of the progress of society. By
contemplating the fables of a people, we have a successive delineation
of their prevalent modes of thinking, a picture of their feelings and
tastes and habits. In this respect prose fiction appears to possess
advantages considerably superior either to history or poetry. In history
there is too little individuality; in poetry too much effort, to permit
the poet and historian to pourtray the manners living as they rise.
History treats of man, as it were, in the mass; and the individuals whom
it paints, are regarded merely or principally in a public light, without
taking into consideration their private feelings, tastes, or habits.
Poetry is in general capable of too little detail, while its paintings
at the same time are usually too much forced and exaggerated. But in
Fiction we can discriminate without impropriety, and enter into detail
without meanness. Hence it has been remarked, that it is chiefly in the
fictions of an age that we can discover the modes of living, dress and
manners of the period.’

In the two last sentences it is plain that the author means prose
fictions, and not fictions in general. But we hope he will consider this
matter a little more deliberately. Even though we should grant all that
he has here stated, it would not afford a sufficient reason for
excluding fictitious narratives in verse from the History of Fiction.
But we apprehend that verse is by no means incompatible with accurate
and minute description; for which we may appeal to the finest poems that
have ever yet been published, as well as to the ruder lays of the bards
in the North and West of Europe, which are of such importance both in
the history of Fiction, and in the history of Society. Of the manners
and characters of the Greek in the heroic ages, we find a distinct and
even minute account in the poems of Homer: but it would not be
adviseable to form our ideas of the Greek Shepherds and Shepherdesses in
any age, from a certain prose romance to which our Author has
condescended to afford a conspicuous place in his history—Longus’s
pastoral tale of Daphnis and Chloe. We doubt much if the manners of
chivalry are as correctly represented in the prose of Amadis de Gaul,
and the long train of prose romances to which it gave rise, and which
occupy so great a portion of the present work; as in the Orlando Furioso
and Gerusalemme liberata, under all the fetters of the ottava rima. The
voluminous histories of Astrea and Cleopatra, the accomplished Sir
Philip Sydney’s Arcadia, and various other celebrated romances, which
are admitted into our author’s history on account of their prose, and
which are chiefly deserving of attention, from the difficulty of
discovering how any body could ever have been at the trouble to read
them, describe a state of society which never existed any where but in
the fantastic imaginations of those writers, who may κατ’ ἐξοχήν—be
denominated Prosers. On the other hand, the Lady of the Lake, Gertrude
of Wyoming, the Bride of Abydos and the Corsair, present in the most
harmonious versification and highest colouring of poetry, many details
of national manners which are not surpassed in accuracy by the plain
prose of that most honest of all travellers, Bell of Antermony. We are
far however from wishing to insinuate that any of the prose romances
which we have mentioned should be excluded from the History of Fiction.
On the contrary we are extremely obliged to Mr. Dunlop for his judicious
and elegant accounts of them. But we regret that the mere circumstance
of versification should have excluded so many capital or curious works
which are essentially connected with a philosophical and critical
delineation of the origin and progress of Fiction in general, and
particularly in the West of Europe.

The present publication, however, although it ought only to be entitled
Sketches of the History of Fiction, is still interesting and amusing,
and in general is respectably executed. But we have only to look at the
first chapter, in order to be sensible of the imperfection of the plan.
This chapter gives a view of the Greek romances in prose, and begins
with a work of Antonius Diogenes in the time of Alexander the Great,
entitled Accounts of the incredible things in Thule, τῶν ὑπὲρ Θουλην
ἀπιστῶν λόγοι. It is now, we believe, extant only in the Epitome of
Photius; and is a farrago of absurd and extravagant stories, which its
author acknowledges to have been collected from former writers. We
mention it only to apprise the reader at how recent a period Mr.
Dunlop’s history begins. At this period, the art of composition, both in
prose and verse, had attained a high degree of excellence; the
departments of history and fiction were completely separated,—though
some irregular practices have existed, down to our own days, of
borrowing the ornaments of the latter department to decorate the former;
fiction had been long cultivated on its own account; the tales which
delighted the Milesians, and which probably borrowed many of their
incidents from the neighbouring and civilised nations of Persia, were
then in circulation; and the intercourse which Alexander’s expedition
had opened with the more easterly nations, must have afforded a copious
supply of materials for the story-tellers of Greece. Thus our author’s
history opens, not in the beginning, but in the midst, of things; an
arrangement which, however commendable in an Epic poem, does not appear
so well adapted to sober history,—not even to a history of Fiction. Nor
does our author, like the Epic poets, fall upon any device for carrying
us back in due time to the commencement of the subject; from which
indeed he is precluded by the artificial limits of his plan.

Of the Greek Romances in prose, now extant, of any considerable length
(if we except the Cyropœdia, which is a fiction of a very particular
kind, and not intended for popular amusement), the oldest is not earlier
than the end of the fourth century. It is the history of Theagenes and
Chariclea, written by Heliodorus, Bishop of Tricca in Thessaly, but
before his promotion to the episcopal dignity. It is deserving of notice
chiefly on account of the hints which it has furnished to succeeding
writers of eminence, particularly to Tasso and Guarini; but we mention
it here, chiefly for the purpose of recommending to our author a revisal
of the principles of criticism which he has laid down in his remarks on
this Romance. To us it appears that a story may possess novelty,
probability, and variety in its incidents; that the incidents may be
arranged by the narrator, so as to keep us ignorant of the final issue
till the last; that it may possess all the ornaments which our author
has enumerated—a good style, characters well defined and interesting in
themselves, sentiments as sublime as any in Epictetus, and descriptions
as fine as in the Romance of the Forest, or as correct as in Bell’s
Travels; nay, to crown all, we can even conceive that the story shall be
written in prose;—and yet, that with all these merits, which are all
that our author requires, it shall be a string of events so unimportant
or unimpassioned, that a second perusal would be quite insufferable.
Have we not seen Mr. Cumberland’s novels?

Waiting to be better instructed, we would merely hint at present, that
the proper merit of a Romance consists in Interest and Pathos, including
in Pathos the ludicrous as well as the serious emotions. A romance is
nothing, if it does not preserve alive our anxiety for the fate of the
principal characters, with a constant, though varied, agitation of the
passions. For this purpose, we must be made to conceive the whole action
as passing before us—to hear the conversations of the different
persons—to see their demeanours and looks—to enter into their
thoughts—and to have each of them as distinctly and individually present
to our mind, as the several characters in the Iliad, in Marianne, in Tom
Jones, or in Cecilia. When the characters are striking, either by their
virtues, vices, or follies—and when our imagination is thus occupied by
a succession of scenes in which these qualities are rendered
conspicuous, and in which our sympathies and aversions, our admiration
and laughter, our joy and sorrow, our hopes and fears, are kept in
continual play—we can forgive many improbabilities and even
impossibilities in the story,—as is well known to the readers of Homer,
Ariosto, and Shakespeare: still less are we displeased with borrowed
incidents,—as almost all our dramatic authors can testify. In fact,
there is generally but little merit in the adoption, or even invention
of the simple incident, compared to the genius of the poet, the actor,
or the painter, who bestows upon it life and passion. Chariclea was
appointed by the priest of Apollo to present to Theagenes the lighted
torch for kindling the sacrifice in the temple of Delphi. They first saw
each other upon this occasion, and became mutually and deeply enamoured.
But how feeble is the impression produced by this dry narrative,
compared to what we feel at Raphael’s glowing picture of the scene, or
compared to what we would have felt if Rousseau had described the looks
and thoughts of the enraptured lovers!—When they were flying from Delphi
to Sicily, their ship was captured by the pirate Charinus, whom
Chariclea implored in vain not to separate her from Theagenes. We hear
without emotion the general account of the event; but how affecting is
it to contemplate, in the picture drawn by the same great master, the
attitude and countenance of Chariclea as she is kneeling at the Pirate’s
feet! And how could Otway have wrung the heart by the dramatic
representation of such an interview!

It is amusing to observe, at the end of this chapter, how the author
endeavours to persuade himself that his history opens with the origin of
fictitious narrative in Greece. After some general remarks on the
romances he had been reviewing, he adds, ‘In short, these _early_
fictions are such as might have been expected at the _first_ effort’—as
if the romances produced several centuries after the Christian era, or
even in the time of Alexander the Great, were the first attempts at
fiction in the country of Homer and Hesiod.

In the second chapter, where the author proposes to review the Latin
romances, the principal article is the Ass of Apuleius, which, from its
great popularity, has been called the Golden Ass. It is an improvement
of Lucian’s whimsical tale, entitled Lucius; and relates the adventures
of the author Apuleius during his transformation into an ass. This
misfortune befel him at the house of a female magician in Thessaly with
whom he lodged, and whose maidservant at his request had stolen a box of
ointment from her mistress, by rubbing himself with which Apuleius
expected to be changed into a bird; but as his friend the damsel had by
mistake given him a wrong box, he found himself compelled to bray and
walk on all fours, instead of whistling and flying in the air. He is
informed by her, that the eating of rose leaves is necessary for his
restoration to the human form. One should imagine that roses might be
found as easily in Thessaly as in this country, where an ass of ordinary
observation and address might contrive, without much difficulty, to
regale himself with one, if he liked it as well as a thistle—and much
more, if it were an object of as great importance to him as to Apuleius.
This poor beast, however, went through many adventures, some to be sure
agreeable enough, but in general very unpleasant, before he had it in
his power to taste a rose leaf. At last, having one evening escaped from
his master, he found unexpectedly the termination of his misfortunes. We
shall quote Mr. Dunlop’s account of this happy catastrophe.

‘He fled unperceived to the fields; and having galloped for three
leagues, he came to a retired place on the shore of the sea. The moon
which was in full splendour, and the awful silence of the night,
inspired him with sentiments of devotion. He purified himself in the
manner prescribed by Pythagoras, and addressed a long prayer to the
great goddess Isis. In the course of the night she appeared to him in a
dream; and after giving a strange account of herself, announced to him
the end of his misfortunes; but demanded in return the consecration of
his whole life to her service. On awakening, he feels himself confirmed
in his resolution of aspiring to a life of virtue. On this change of
disposition and conquest over his passions, the author finely represents
all nature as assuming a new face of cheerfulness and gaiety. “Tanta
hilaritate, praeter peculiarem meam, gestire mihi cuncta videbantur, ut
pecua etiam cujuscemodi, et totas domos, et ipsam diem serena facie
gaudere sentirem.”

‘While in this frame of mind, Apuleius perceived an innumerable
multitude approaching the shore to celebrate the festival of Isis. Amid
the crowd of priests, he remarked the sovereign pontiff, with a crown of
roses on his head; and approached to pluck them. The pontiff, yielding
to a secret inspiration, held forth the garland. Apuleius resumed his
former figure, and the promise of the Goddess was fulfilled. He was then
initiated into her rites—returned to Rome, and devoted himself to her
service.... He was finally invited to a more mystic and solemn
initiation by the Goddess herself, who rewarded him for his accumulated
piety, by an abundance of temporal blessings.’—VOL. I. p. 114.

This romance has acquired great celebrity, from having been pressed by
Warburton into the service of Christianity, in his curious argument for
the Divine Legation of Moses—which we trust is defensible upon other
grounds. We cannot go so far as the learned prelate; though we think it
extremely probable that Apuleius had in view the general idea of
representing, on the one hand, by his metamorphosis, the degradation of
human nature in consequence of a voluptuous life; and on the other hand,
the dignity and happiness of virtue, by his restoration and admission to
the mysteries of Isis. The Golden Ass, however, is not calculated to
make converts from pleasure; and is chiefly valuable as a book of
amusement, written very agreeably, but not without affectation, and
containing some beautiful tales and many diverting incidents.

Of the ancient Latin romances very few are extant; and it is probable
that the production of these luxuries was checked in Italy before the
end of the fourth century, though the Greek writers continued for nine
or ten centuries afterwards to compose tales of various kinds both in
prose and verse. But, while the idle people of Constantinople were
amusing themselves with their novels, the western provinces of the Roman
empire were laid waste by barbarous invaders; and a period of extreme
misery was at length succeeded by a new state of society, a new state of
government, manners and opinions, very different from that which had
been subverted in the west, or from that which subsisted in the refined
and effeminate provinces of the east, but far better adapted to rouse
the ardour of a poetical imagination. Hence arose a new and remarkable
class of fictions,—the fictions of Chivalry, which have so long
delighted Britain and France, and Spain and Italy. They are the subject
of the third and three following chapters of our Author’s history.

It is in this portion of his work, particularly, that we have to lament
the unhappy limitation of his plan. The prose romances of Chivalry were
produced for the most part by Bayes’s most expeditious recipe for
original composition, namely, by turning verse into prose,—being
extremely diffuse and languid compilations from the early metrical
tales; and they are in general of little value to the antiquary, as
neither their authors nor their dates can be ascertained. Amadis de Gaul
is one of the most celebrated; and yet it remains undetermined whether
the work now extant under that title has not been greatly altered from
the original; nor can any one tell either who composed the original, or
who manufactured the present work, or at what time either the one or the
other was written. The early metrical tales are far more deserving of
attention as connected with real history; and if we consider the
romances of chivalry merely as amusements to the imagination, the
subject appears better adapted for verse than for prose. The stately and
formal manners of those ages soon grow wearisome in ordinary narrative,
and require to be enlivened by the rapidity and brilliancy of poetical
description: And who does not feel that the marvellous exploits and
supernatural events with which they abound, deserve rather to be sung to
the sound of the harp, tabret, cymbal, and all manner of musical
instruments, than to be detailed in the sober language of truth, which
is absurdly affected by the prose romancers, who generally announce
themselves as authentic historians, and rail at the falsehood of their
metrical predecessors? Accordingly it is among the poets that we are to
look for the finest specimens of the fictions which we are now
considering; and while the romances of Ariosto, and Tasso and Scott, are
read again and again by persons of all descriptions, even Mr. Southey’s
translation of the great Amadis de Gaul, though it is ably executed, and
has much improved its original by abridging it, was never popular, and
is now almost forgotten.

Our author deviates from his plan so far as to give us a slight notice
of a few of the metrical romances which were preserved in the library of
M. de St. Palaye, the learned writer of the Memoirs on Chivalry. But
with this exception, he gratifies his readers with an account of the
prose romances only; of which the most ancient, and perhaps the most
curious, are those which relate to the fabulous history of England.
Amidst the devastation of the Roman empire in the west, this island
suffered far more than its share of the general calamity. The Christian
religion, which had been elsewhere not only spared but embraced by the
conquerors, was exterminated by the idolatrous and unlettered Saxons who
subdued the British province; and if any of the Britons were suffered to
exist within its bounds, they were only poor despised stragglers of the
lower orders; while the remnant of its chiefs, clergy and bards—its
traditions, its records, its literature, its very language—were swept
into the mountains of Wales, or beyond the sea into Britany. In these
circumstances, it is not surprising that the history of England should
be lost in fable, from the time that the Saxons got a footing in it,
about the middle of the fifth century, till the year 600, in which they
began to be converted, and civilized, and instructed in letters, by
Augustine and the other missionaries of Pope Gregory the Great. This
dark period of 150 years, between the entrance of the Saxons under
Hengist, and their conversion to Christianity, was the age of the famous
King Arthur, his friend Merlin the Enchanter, and the Knights of his
illustrious order of the Round Table, who are the great heroes in the
older romances of chivalry. Not that these good people, although they
fought stoutly against the invaders, knew any thing about the etiquette
and parade of chivalry, which was not instituted as an order till long
afterwards: but the romancers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries
chose to dress in the fashion of their own times, the characters whom
they found in the stories of Wales and Britany, or in the chronicle of
Geoffry of Monmouth, who reduced these stories into the form of a
regular authentic history, ascending to Brutus the Trojan, generally
denominated Le Brut by the French, and Brute by the English poets, who
was the great-grandson of Æneas, and the undoubted founder of the
British kingdom;—a fact which is abundantly confirmed, if it needed
confirmation, by the name Britain, quasi Brutain, evidently derived from
Brutus.

The earliest of the prose romances relating to Arthur, is the history of
Merlin the Enchanter, who was the son of a demon and an innocent young
lady, and favourite minister of Uter Pendragon, the British king. It was
this monarch who instituted at Carduel (Carlisle), the order of the
Round Table; at which were seated 50 or 60 of the first nobles of the
country, with an empty place always left for the Sangreal. The Sangreal,
our readers must know, was the most precious of all the Christian
relics: it was the blood which flowed from our Saviour’s wounds,
preserved in the _hanap_ or cup in which he drank with his apostles the
night when he was betrayed. This relic was first in the possession of
Joseph of Arimathea, by whom it was brought to Britain, and afterwards
fell into the hands of king Pecheur, who, by a beautiful ambiguity of
the French language, might have received this name either from being a
great fisher or a great sinner, or both. His nephew, the redoubted
knight Percival, succeeded to his uncle’s kingdom and to the possession
of the Sangreal; which, at the moment of Percival’s death, was in the
presence of his attendants carried up into heaven, and has never since
been seen or heard of. But to return to the romance of Merlin, which is
a favourable specimen of the class to which it belongs—we shall extract
the following account from our author’s history.

‘Soon after this institution (of the Round Table), the king invited all
his barons to the celebration of a great festival, which he proposed
holding annually at Carduel.

‘As the knights had obtained permission from his majesty to bring their
ladies along with them, the beautiful Yguerne accompanied her husband,
the Duke of Tintadiel, to one of these anniversaries. The king became
deeply enamoured of the dutchess, and revealed his passion to Ulsius,
one of his counsellors. Yguerne withstood all the inducements which
Ulsius held forth to prepossess her in favour of his master; and
ultimately disclosed to her husband the attachment and solicitations of
the king. On hearing this, the duke instantly withdrew from court with
Yguerne, and without taking leave of Uter. The king complained of this
want of duty to his council, who decided, that the duke should be
summoned to court, and if refractory, should be treated as a rebel. As
he refused to obey the citation, the king carried war into the estates
of his vassal, and besieged him in the strong castle of Tintadiel, in
which he had shut himself up. Yguerne was confined in a fortress at some
distance, which was still more secure. During the siege, Ulsius informed
his master that he had been accosted by an old man, who promised to
conduct the king to Yguerne, and had offered to meet him for that
purpose on the following morning. Uter proceeded with Ulsius to the
rendezvous. In an old blind man whom they found at the appointed place,
they recognized the enchanter Merlin, who had assumed that appearance.
He bestowed on the king the form of the Duke of Tintadiel, while he
endowed himself and Ulsius with the figures of his grace’s two squires.
Fortified by this triple metamorphosis, they proceeded to the residence
of Yguerne, who, unconscious of the deceit, received the king as her
husband.

‘The fraud of Merlin was not detected, and the war continued to be
prosecuted by Uter with the utmost vigour. At length the Duke was killed
in battle, and the King, by the advice of Merlin, espoused Yguerne. Soon
after the marriage she gave birth to Arthur, whom she believed to be the
son of her former husband, as Uter had never communicated to her the
story of his assumed appearance.

‘After the death of Uter, there was an interregnum in England, as it was
not known that Arthur was his son. This Prince, however, was at length
chosen King, in consequence of having unfixed from a miraculous stone, a
sword which two hundred and one of the most valiant barons in the realm
had been singly unable to extract. At the beginning of his reign, Arthur
was engaged in a civil war; as the mode of his election, however
judicious, was disapproved by some of the Barons, and when he had at
length overcome his domestic enemies, he had long wars to sustain
against the Gauls and Saxons.

‘In all these contests, the art of Merlin was of great service to
Arthur, as he changed himself into a dwarf, a harp player, or a stag, as
the interest of his master required; or at least threw on the bystanders
a spell to fascinate their eyes, and cause them to see the thing that
was not. On one occasion he made an expedition to Rome, entered the
King’s palace in the shape of an enormous stag, and in this character
delivered a formal harangue, to the utter amazement of one called Julius
Cæsar; not the Julius whom the Knight Mars killed in his pavilion, but
him whom Gauvaine slew, because he defied King Arthur.

‘At length this renowned magician disappeared entirely from England. His
voice alone was heard in a forest, where he was enclosed in a bush of
hawthorn: he had been entrapped in this awkward residence by means of a
charm he had communicated to his mistress Viviane, who not believing in
the spell, had tried it on her lover. The lady was sorry for the
accident; but there was no extracting her admirer from his thorny
coverture.

‘The earliest edition of this romance was printed at Paris, in three
volumes folio, 1498.... Though seldom to be met with, the Roman de
Merlin is one of the most curious romances of the class to which it
belongs. It comprehends all the events connected with the life of the
enchanter, from his supernatural birth to his magical disappearance, and
embraces a longer period of interesting fabulous history than most of
the works of chivalry.... The language, which is very old French, is
remarkable for its beauty and simplicity. Indeed the work bears
everywhere the marks of very high antiquity—though it is impossible to
fix the date of its composition: It has been attributed to Robert de
Borron, to whom many other works of this nature have been assigned; but
it is not known at what time this author existed; and indeed he is
believed by many, and particularly by Mr. Ritson, to be entirely a
fictitious personage’ (VOL. I. p. 178).

Our author has given an amusing enough account, not only of the various
prose romances relating to chivalry, but also of those circumstances in
the state of the western nations which gave rise to the singular
institutions and manners of that proud order, and consequently to this
particular species of fiction; and we are moreover instructed in the
origin of the marvels with which these fictions abound. The subject has
been treated so ably, and in such detail, by former writers, that little
new is to be expected; but we have already had occasion to commend our
author’s judgment,—who has not confined himself to any one of the
theories which have been ingeniously and learnedly maintained on the
topic last mentioned, but has shown that they are all founded on truth,
and consistent with each other.

We shall now refer the reader to the work itself, of which we have
produced abundant specimens. Its multifarious nature is indicated by the
title-page; and it contains much curious information, both with regard
to the particular romances which are reviewed, and also with regard to
the transition of stories from age to age, and from the novelist to the
dramatic poet. But we cannot dismiss the subject, without stating
briefly one or two additional remarks, which we submit to our author’s
consideration in the view of another edition.

It is a material defect that his Reviews are so general, and so uniform
in their style, that although we are amused with their pleasantry, they
enable us to form but a very imperfect idea of the original
compositions. The abridgments of some of the narratives are extremely
jejune; and although he has inserted in the Appendix to the first volume
some curious passages from the old French romances, and has even been so
obliging as to furnish a specimen of John Bunyan’s style in the
Pilgrim’s Progress, and of Mrs. Radcliffe’s in the Romance of the
Forest, these favoured writers are almost the only ones whom he allows
to address us in their own persons. Now it is obvious, that even the
detail of all the incidents in a romance would be a very insufficient
ground for judging of its merit. If the narrative is not animated,
interesting, and impassioned, it is deficient in the essential
requisites. But it is Mr. Dunlop who tells all the stories; and he tells
them in his own way. He tells them indeed agreeably, and in many cases,
we believe, more agreeably than the authors. This, however, is not
precisely the entertainment to which we understood ourselves to have
been invited. At another time we shall be happy to listen to Mr.
Dunlop’s uninterrupted lecture; but on this occasion we expected that he
was to introduce us to a great company of literati,—that he was to show
them off and draw them out: Yet though they are all eager to talk,—being
indeed all of them professed story-tellers, he talks the whole talk
himself, and allows very few of the poor gentlemen to put in a word. It
is true that he is doing the honours, and consequently we expect that he
should prepare us in every case for what we are to hear; but still he
should have let the good people speak a little for themselves, and then
we might have formed some guess of their mettle. Mr. Ellis has managed
this matter better in his specimens of the early metrical romances.

We must likewise observe, that our author is not always sufficiently
attentive to make his criticisms intelligible to those who are not
acquainted with the original works. Thus, after giving us an outline of
the Greek story of Clitophon and Leucippe, he remarks (VOL. I. p. 38)
that a number of the incidents are original (how does he know that?) and
well imagined; ‘such as the beautiful incident of the Bee, which has
been adopted by Tasso and D’Urfé:’ of which mysterious bee we do not
hear another syllable either before or afterwards.

The state of Fiction in modern times is by far the finest and most
interesting part of the whole subject; but our author’s account of it is
extremely imperfect indeed, and seems to have been got up in very great
haste, that the contents of his chapters might have some correspondence
with his title-page. In fact, it is so inferior to what he has shown
himself capable of accomplishing, that it would not be fair to advert to
it more particularly.—There is however one incidental circumstance which
we cannot omit. Miss Burney is mentioned, only to suggest that both the
general incidents and the leading characters in Evelina have been
derived from Mrs. Heywood’s stupid history of Betsy Thoughtless. This is
really too much in the style of the schoolboy critics,—who make a
prodigious noise about originality and invention, without attending to
what constitutes the real value of works addressed to the imagination.
Does it derogate from Shakespeare’s genius, that his fables are not his
own? Or does any person now suppose that Homer invented, or would it
have been much to his credit if he had invented, the story of the Trojan
war, or even the principal events in his immortal poems? We will not
however resume this topic, which we had already occasion to consider;
but only observe, that from whatever quarter the author of Evelina may
have derived the hints of her stories and characters, there are but few
novelists who deserve to be compared to her in the capital merit of a
powerful dramatic effect.

We shall conclude with merely suggesting that our author’s history would
be greatly improved if he were careful to trace the connexion between
the variations in the popular fictions of the western nations of Europe,
and the variations in the political, moral, religious and literary state
of those nations since the first establishment of the feudal
governments. There are not wanting materials and helps for such an
investigation; and as Mr. Dunlop is a man of erudition and research, we
have no doubt that he would find it an interesting amusement for his
leisure hours.

Upon the whole, though we wish to see the History of Fiction executed on
a very different plan, and with a greater spirit of philosophical
inquiry and critical acuteness, we recommend the present publication as
an agreeable and curious Miscellany, which discovers uncommon
information and learning.

STANDARD NOVELS AND ROMANCES

VOL. XXIV.] [_February 1815._

There is an exclamation in one of Gray’s letters—‘Be mine to read
eternal new romances of Marivaux and Crebillon!’ If we did not utter
a similar aspiration at the conclusion of the Wanderer, it was not
from any want of affection for the class of writing to which it
belongs; for, without going quite so far as the celebrated French
philosopher, who thought that more was to be learnt from good novels
and romances, than from the gravest treatises on history and
morality, we must confess, that there are few works to which we
oftener turn for profit or delight, than to the standard productions
in this species of composition. With the exception of the violently
satirical, and the violently sentimental specimens of the art, we
find there the closest imitation of men and manners; and are
admitted to examine the very web and texture of society, as it
really exists, and as we meet with it when we come into the world.
If the style of poetry has ‘something more divine in it,’ this
savours more of humanity. We are brought acquainted with an infinite
variety of characters—all a little more amusing, and, for the
greater part, more true to general nature than those which we meet
with in actual life—and have our moral impressions far more
frequently called out, and our moral judgments exercised, than in
the busiest career of existence. As a record of past manners and
opinions, too, such writings afford both more minute and more
abundant information than any other. To give one example only:—We
should really be at a loss where to find, in any authentic documents
of the same period, so satisfactory an account of the general state
of society, and of moral, political and religious feeling, in the
reign of George II. as we meet with in the Adventures of Joseph
Andrews and his friend Mr. Abraham Adams. This work, indeed, we take
to be a perfect piece of statistics in its kind; and do not know
from what other quarter we could have acquired the solid information
it contains, even as to this comparatively recent period. What a
thing it would be to have such a work of the age of Pericles or
Alexander! and how much more would it teach us as to the true
character and condition of the people among whom it was produced,
than all the tragedies and histories, and odes and orations, that
have been preserved of their manufacture! In looking into such grave
and ostentatious performances, we see little but the rigid skeleton
of public transactions—exaggerations of party zeal, and vestiges of
literary ambition; and if we wish really to know what was the state
of manners and of morals, and in what way, and into what forms,
principles and institutions were actually moulded in practice, we
cannot do better than refer to the works of those writers, who,
having no other object than to imitate nature, could only hope for
success from the fidelity of their pictures; and were bound (in
their own defence) to reduce the boasts of vague theorists, and the
exaggerations of angry disputants, to the mortifying standard of
reality.

We will here confess however, that we are a little prejudiced on the
point in question; and that the effect of many fine speculations has
been lost upon us, from an early familiarity with the most striking
passages in the little work to which we have just alluded. Thus, nothing
can be more captivating than the description somewhere given by Mr.
Burke, of the indissoluble connexion between learning and nobility; and
of the respect universally paid by wealth to piety and morals. But the
effect of this splendid representation has always been spoiled to us, by
our recollection of Parson Adams sitting over his cup of ale in Sir
Thomas Booby’s kitchen. Echard ‘On the Contempt of the Clergy,’ in like
manner, is certainly a very good book, and its general doctrine more
just and reasonable; but an unlucky impression of the reality of Parson
Trulliber always checks, in us, the respectful emotions to which it
should give rise: while the lecture which Lady Booby reads to Lawyer
Scout on the expulsion of Joseph and Fanny from the parish, casts an
unhappy shade over the splendid pictures of practical jurisprudence that
are to be found in the works of Blackstone or De Lolme. The most moral
writers, after all, are those who do not pretend to inculcate any moral:
The professed moralist almost unavoidably degenerates into the partisan
of a system; and the philosopher warps the evidence to his own purpose.
But the painter of manners gives the facts of human nature, and leaves
us to draw the inference: If we are not able to do this, or do it ill,
at least it is our own fault.

The first-rate writers in this class are of course few; but those few we
may reckon, without scruple, among the greatest ornaments and the best
benefactors of our kind. There is a certain set of them, who, as it
were, take their rank by the side of reality, and are appealed to as
evidence on all questions concerning human nature. The principal of
these are Cervantes and Le Sage; and, among ourselves, Fielding,
Richardson, Smollett, and Sterne.[1] As this is a department of
criticism which deserves more attention than we have ever yet bestowed
on it, we shall venture to treat it a little in detail; and endeavour to
contribute something towards settling the standard of excellence, both
as to degree and kind, in these several writers.

We shall begin with the renowned history of Don Quixote; who always
presents something more stately, more romantic, and at the same time
more real to our imagination, than any other hero upon record. His
lineaments, his accoutrements, his pasteboard visor, are familiar to us,
as the recollections of our early home. The spare and upright figure of
the hero paces distinctly before our eyes; and Mambrino’s helmet still
glitters in the sun! We not only feel the greatest love and veneration
for the knight himself, but a certain respect for all those connected
with him—the Curate, and Master Nicolas the barber—Sancho and Dapple—and
even for Rosinante’s leanness and his errors! Perhaps there is no work
which combines so much originality with such an air of truth. Its
popularity is almost unexampled; and yet its real merits have not been
sufficiently understood. The story is the least part of them; though the
blunders of Sancho, and the unlucky adventures of his master, are what
naturally catch the attention of ordinary readers. The pathos and
dignity of the sentiments are often disguised under the ludicrousness of
the subject; and provoke laughter when they might well draw tears. The
character of Don Quixote itself is one of the most perfect
disinterestedness. He is an enthusiast of the most amiable kind—of a
nature equally open, gentle and generous; a lover of truth and justice,
and one who had brooded over the fine dreams of chivalry and romance,
till the dazzling visions cheated his brain into a belief of their
reality. There cannot, in our opinion, be a greater mistake than to
consider Don Quixote as a merely satirical work, or an attempt to
explode, by coarse raillery, ‘the long forgotten order of chivalry.’
There could be no need to explode what no longer existed. Besides,
Cervantes himself was a man of the most sanguine and enthusiastic
temperament; and even through the crazed and battered figure of the
knight, the spirit of chivalry shines out with undiminished lustre; and
one might almost imagine that the author had half-designed to revive the
example of past ages, and once more ‘witch the world with noble
horsemanship’; and had veiled the design, in scorn of the degenerate age
to which it was addressed, under this fantastic and imperfect disguise
of romantic and ludicrous exaggeration. However that may be, the spirit
which the book breathes, to those who relish and understand it best, is
unquestionably the spirit of chivalry: nor perhaps is it too much to
say, that, if ever the flame of Spanish liberty is destined to break
forth, wrapping the tyrant and the tyranny in one consuming blaze, it is
owing to Cervantes and his knight of La Mancha, that the spark of
generous sentiment and romantic enterprise from which it must be
kindled, has not been quite extinguished.

The character of Sancho is not more admirable in the execution, than in
the conception, as a relief to that of the knight. The contrast is as
picturesque and striking as that between the figures of Rosinante and
Dapple. Never was there so complete a _partie quarrée_;—they answer to
one another at all points. Nothing can surpass the truth of physiognomy
in the description of the master and man, both as to body and mind;—the
one lean and tall, the other round and short;—the one heroical and
courteous, the other selfish and servile;—the one full of high-flown
fancies, the other a bag of proverbs;—the one always starting some
romantic scheme, the other always keeping to the safe side of tradition
and custom. The gradual ascendancy, too, obtained by Don Quixote over
Sancho, is as finely managed as it is characteristic. Credulity, and a
love of the marvellous, are as natural to ignorance as selfishness and
cunning. Sancho by degrees becomes a kind of lay-brother of the order;
acquires a taste for adventures in his own way, and is made all but an
entire convert, by the discovery of the hundred crowns in one of his
most comfortless journeys. Towards the end, his regret at being forced
to give up the pursuit of knight-errantry, almost equals his master’s;
and he seizes the proposal of Don Quixote to turn shepherds, with the
greatest avidity,—still applying it, however, in his own fashion; for
while the Don is ingeniously torturing the names of his humble
acquaintance into classical terminations, and contriving scenes of
gallantry and song, Sancho exclaims, ‘Oh, what delicate wooden spoons
shall I carve! what crumbs and cream shall I devour!’—forgetting, in his
milk and fruits, the pullets and geese at Camacho’s wedding.

This intuitive perception of the hidden analogies of things, or, as it
may be called, this _instinct of imagination_, is what stamps the
character of genius on the productions of art, more than any other
circumstance: for it works unconsciously, like nature, and receives its
impressions from a kind of inspiration. There is more of this
unconscious power in Cervantes, than in any other author, except
Shakespeare. Something of the same kind extends itself to all the
subordinate parts and characters of the work. Thus we find the curate
confidentially informing Don Quixote, that if he could get the ear of
the government, he has something of considerable importance to propose
for the good of the state; and the knight afterwards meets with a young
gentleman, who is a candidate for poetical honours, with a mad lover, a
forsaken damsel, &c.—all delineated with the same inimitable force,
freedom, and fancy. The whole work breathes that air of romance,—that
aspiration after imaginary good,—that longing after something more than
we possess, that in all places, and in all conditions of life,

——‘still prompts the eternal sigh,
For which we wish to live, or dare to die!’

The characters in Don Quixote are strictly individuals; that is, they do
not belong to, but form a class of themselves. In other words, the
actions and manners of the chief _dramatis personæ_ do not arise out of
the actions and manners of those around them, or the condition of life
in which they are placed, but out of the peculiar dispositions of the
persons themselves, operated upon by certain impulses of imagination and
accident: Yet these impulses are so true to nature, and their operation
so truly described, that we not only recognize the fidelity of the
representation, but recognize it with all the advantages of novelty
superadded. They are unlike any thing we have actually seen—may be said
to be purely ideal—and yet familiarize themselves more readily with our
imagination, and are retained more strongly in memory, than perhaps any
others:—they are never lost in the crowd. One test of the truth of this
ideal painting, is the number of allusions which Don Quixote has
furnished to the whole of civilized Europe—that is to say of appropriate
cases, and striking illustrations of the universal principles of our
nature. The common incidents and descriptions of human life are,
however, quite familiar and natural; and we have nearly the same insight
given us here, into the characters of inn-keepers, bar-maids, ostlers,
and puppet-show men, as in Fielding himself. There is a much greater
mixture, however, of sentiment with _naïveté_, of the pathetic with the
quaint and humorous, than there ever is in Fielding. We might instance
the story of the country man, whom Don Quixote and Sancho met in their
search after Dulcinea, driving his mules to plough at break of day, and
‘singing the ancient ballad of Roncesvalles!’ The episodes which are
introduced, are excellent; but have, upon the whole, been overrated.
Compared with the serious tales in Boccacio, they are trifling. That of
Marcella, the fair shepherdess, is the best. We will only add, that Don
Quixote is an entirely original work in its kind, and that the author
has the highest honour which can belong to one, that of being the
founder of a new style of writing.

There is another Spanish novel, Gusman d’Alfarache, nearly of the same
age as Don Quixote, and of great genius, though it can hardly be ranked
as a novel, or a work of imagination. It is a series of strange
adventures, rather drily told, but accompanied by the most severe and
sarcastic commentary. The satire, the wit, the eloquence, and reasoning,
are of the most powerful kind; but they are didactic, rather than
dramatic. They would suit a sermon or a pasquinade better than a
romance. Still there are in this extraordinary book, occasional sketches
of character, and humorous descriptions, to which it would be difficult
to produce any thing superior. This work, which is hardly known in this
country except by name, has the credit, without any reason, of being the
original of Gil Blas. There is only one incident the same, that of the
supper at the inn. In all other respects, these two works are the very
reverse of each other, both in their excellencies and defects.

Gil Blas is, next to Don Quixote, more generally read and admired than
any other novel—and, in one sense, deservedly so: for it is at the head
of its class, though that class is very different from, and inferior to
the other. There is very little individual character in Gil Blas. The
author is a describer of manners, and not of character. He does not take
the elements of human nature, and work them up into new combinations,
(which is the excellence of Don Quixote); nor trace the peculiar and
striking combinations of folly and knavery as they are to be found in
real life, (like Fielding); but he takes off, as it were, the general,
habitual impression, which circumstances make on certain conditions of
life, and moulds all his characters accordingly. All the persons whom he
introduces, carry about with them the badge of their profession; and you
see little more of them than their costume. He describes men as
belonging to certain classes in society—the highest, generally, and the
lowest, and such as are found in great cities—not as they are in
themselves, or with the individual differences which are always to be
found in nature. His hero, in particular, has no character but that of
the accidental circumstances in which he is placed. His priests are only
described as priests: his valets, his players, his women, his courtiers
and his sharpers, are all the same. Nothing can well exceed the monotony
of the work in this respect;—at the same time that nothing can exceed
the truth and precision with which the general manners of these
different characters are preserved, nor the felicity of the particular
traits by which their leading foibles are brought out to notice. Thus,
the Archbishop of Grenada will remain an everlasting memento of the
weakness of human vanity; and the account of Gil Blas’s legacy, of the
uncertainty of human expectations. This novel is as deficient in the
fable as in the characters. It is not a regularly constructed story; but
a series of adventures told with equal gaiety and good sense, and in the
most graceful style possible.

It has been usual to class our great novelists as imitators of one or
other of these two writers. Fielding, no doubt, is more like Don Quixote
than Gil Blas; Smollett is more like Gil Blas than Don Quixote: but
there is not much resemblance in either case. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy
is a more direct instance of imitation. Richardson can scarcely be
called an imitator of any one; or, if he is, it is of the sentimental
refinement of Marivaux, or the verbose gallantry of the writers of the
seventeenth century.

There is very little to warrant the common idea, that Fielding was an
imitator of Cervantes,—except his own declaration of such an intention,
in the title-page of Joseph Andrews,—the romantic turn of the character
of Parson Adams (the only romantic character in his works),—and the
proverbial humour of Partridge, which is kept up only for a few pages.
Fielding’s novels are, in general, thoroughly his own; and they are
thoroughly English. What they are most remarkable for, is neither
sentiment, nor imagination, nor wit, nor humour, though there is a great
deal of this last quality; but profound knowledge of human nature—at
least of English nature—and masterly pictures of the characters of men
as he saw them existing. This quality distinguishes all his works, and
is shown almost equally in all of them. As a painter of real life, he
was equal to Hogarth: As a mere observer of human nature, he was little
inferior to Shakespeare, though without any of the genius and poetical
qualities of his mind.—His humour is less rich and laughable than
Smollett’s; his wit as often misses as hits;—he has none of the fine
pathos of Richardson or Sterne:—But he has brought together a greater
variety of characters in common life,—marked with more distinct
peculiarities, and without an atom of caricature, than any other novel
writer whatever. The extreme subtility of observation on the springs of
human conduct in ordinary characters, is only equalled by the ingenuity
of contrivance in bringing those springs into play in such a manner as
to lay open their smallest irregularity. The detection is always
complete—and made with the certainty and skill of a philosophical
experiment, and the ease and simplicity of a casual observation. The
truth of the imitation is indeed so great, that it has been argued that
Fielding must have had his materials ready-made to his hands, and was
merely a transcriber of local manners and individual habits. For this
conjecture, however, there seems to be no foundation. His
representations, it is true, are local and individual; but they are not
the less profound and natural. The feeling of the general principles of
human nature operating in particular circumstances, is always intense,
and uppermost in his mind: and he makes use of incident and situation,
only to bring out character.

It is perhaps scarcely necessary to give any illustration of these
remarks. Tom Jones is full of them. The moral of this book has been
objected to, and not altogether without reason—but a more serious
objection has been made to the want of refinement and elegance in the
two principal characters. We never feel this objection, indeed, while we
are reading the book: but at other times, we have something like a
lurking suspicion that Jones was but an awkward fellow, and Sophia a
pretty simpleton. We do not know how to account for this effect, unless
it is that Fielding’s constantly assuring us of the beauty of his hero,
and the good sense of his heroine, at last produces a distrust of both.
The story of Tom Jones is allowed to be unrivalled: and it is this
circumstance, together with the vast variety of characters, that has
given the history of a Foundling so decided a preference over Fielding’s
other novels. The characters themselves, both in Amelia and Joseph
Andrews, are quite equal to any of those in Tom Jones. The account of
Miss Mathews and Ensign Hibbert—the way in which that lady reconciles
herself to the death of her father—the inflexible Colonel Bath, the
insipid Mrs. James, the complaisant Colonel Trent—the demure, sly,
intriguing, equivocal Mrs. Bennet—the lord who is her seducer, and who
attempts afterwards to seduce Amelia by the same mechanical process of a
concert-ticket, a book, and the disguise of a great-coat—his little fat
short-nosed, red-faced, good-humoured accomplice the keeper of the
lodging-house, who having no pretensions to gallantry herself, has a
disinterested delight in forwarding the intrigues and pleasures of
others, (to say nothing of honest Atkinson, the story of the
miniature-picture of Amelia, and the hashed mutton, which are in a
different style), are masterpieces of description. The whole scene at
the lodging-house, the masquerade, &c. in Amelia, is equal in interest
to the parallel scenes in Tom Jones, and even more refined in the
knowledge of character. For instance, Mrs. Bennet is superior to Mrs.
Fitzpatrick in her own way. The uncertainty in which the event of her
interview with her former seducer is left, is admirable. Fielding was a
master of what may be called the _double entendre_ of character, and
surprises you no less by what he leaves in the dark, (hardly known to
the persons themselves), than by the unexpected discoveries he makes of
the real traits and circumstances in a character with which, till then,
you find you were unacquainted. There is nothing at all heroic, however,
in the style of any of his delineations. He never draws lofty characters
or strong passions;—all his persons are of the ordinary stature as to
intellect; and none of them trespass on the angelic nature, by elevation
of fancy, or energy of purpose. Perhaps, after all, Parson Adams is his
finest character. It is equally true to nature, and more ideal than any
of the others. Its unsuspecting simplicity makes it not only more
amiable, but doubly amusing, by gratifying the sense of superior
sagacity in the reader. Our laughing at him does not once lessen our
respect for him. His declaring that he would willingly walk ten miles to
fetch his sermon on vanity, merely to convince Wilson of his thorough
contempt of this vice, and his consoling himself for the loss of his
Æschylus, by suddenly recollecting that he could not read it if he had
it, because it is dark, are among the finest touches of _naïveté_. The
night-adventures at Lady Booby’s with Beau Didapper, and the amiable
Slipslop, are the most ludicrous; and that with the huntsman, who draws
off the hounds from the poor Parson, because they would be spoiled by
following _vermin_, the most profound. Fielding did not often repeat
himself: but Dr. Harrison, in Amelia, may be considered as a variation
of the character of Adams: so also is Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield;
and the latter part of that work, which sets out so delightfully, an
almost entire plagiarism from Wilson’s account of himself, and Adams’s
domestic history.

Smollett’s first novel, Roderick Random, which is also his best,
appeared about the same time as Fielding’s Tom Jones; and yet it has a
much more modern air with it: But this may be accounted for, from the
circumstance that Smollett was quite a young man at the time, whereas
Fielding’s manner must have been formed long before. The style of
Roderick Random, though more scholastic and elaborate, is stronger and
more pointed than that of Tom Jones; the incidents follow one another
more rapidly, (though it must be confessed they never come in such a
throng, or are brought out with the same dramatic facility); the humour
is broader, and as effectual; and there is very nearly, if not quite, an
equal interest excited by the story. What then is it that gives the
superiority to Fielding? It is the superior insight into the springs of
human character, and the constant development of that character through
every change of circumstance. Smollett’s humour often arises from the
situation of the persons, or the peculiarity of their external
appearance, as, from Roderick Random’s carrotty locks, which hung down
over his shoulders like a pound of candles, or Strap’s ignorance of
London, and the blunders that follow from it. There is a tone of
vulgarity about all his productions. The incidents frequently resemble
detached anecdotes taken from a newspaper or magazine; and, like those
in Gil Blas, might happen to a hundred other characters. He exhibits
only the external accidents and reverses to which human life is
liable—not ‘the stuff’ of which it is composed. He seldom probes to the
quick, or penetrates beyond the surface of his characters: and therefore
he leaves no stings in the minds of his readers, and in this respect is
far less interesting than Fielding. His novels always enliven, and never
tire us: we take them up with pleasure, and lay them down without any
strong feeling of regret. We look on and laugh, as spectators of an
amusing though inelegant scene, without closing in with the combatants,
or being made parties in the event. We read Roderick Random as an
entertaining story; for the particular accidents and modes of life which
it describes, have ceased to exist: but we regard Tom Jones as a real
history; because the author never stops short of those essential
principles which lie at the bottom of all our actions, and in which we
feel an immediate interest;—_intus et in cute_.—Smollett excels most as
the lively caricaturist: Fielding as the exact painter and profound
metaphysician. We are far from maintaining, that this account applies
uniformly to the productions of these two writers; but we think that, as
far as they essentially differ, what we have stated is the general
distinction between them. Roderick Random is the purest of Smollett’s
novels; we mean in point of style and description. Most of the incidents
and characters are supposed to have been taken from the events of his
own life; and are therefore truer to nature. There is a rude conception
of generosity in some of his characters, of which Fielding seems to have
been incapable; his amiable persons being merely good-natured. It is
owing to this, we think, that Strap is superior to Partridge; and there
is a heartiness and warmth of feeling in some of the scenes between
Lieutenant Bowling and his nephew, which is beyond Fielding’s power of
impassioned writing. The whole of the scene on ship-board is a most
admirable and striking picture, and, we imagine, very little, if at all
exaggerated, though the interest it excites is of a very unpleasant
kind. The picture of the little profligate French friar, who was
Roderick’s travelling companion, and of whom he always kept to the
windward, is one of Smollett’s most masterly sketches. Peregrine Pickle
is no great favourite of ours, and Launcelot Greaves was not worthy of
the genius of the author.

Humphry Clinker and Count Fathom are both equally admirable in their
way. Perhaps the former is the most pleasant gossipping novel that ever
was written—that which gives the most pleasure with the least effort to
the reader. It is quite as amusing as going the journey could have been,
and we have just as good an idea of what happened on the road, as if we
had been of the party. Humphry Clinker himself is exquisite; and his
sweetheart, Winifred Jenkins, nearly as good. Matthew Bramble, though
not altogether original, is excellently supported, and seems to have
been the prototype of Sir Anthony Absolute in the Rivals. But Lismahago
is the flower of the flock. His tenaciousness in argument is not so
delightful as the relaxation of his logical severity, when he finds his
fortune mellowing with the wintry smiles of Mrs. Tabitha Bramble. This
is the best preserved, and most original of all Smollett’s characters.
The resemblance of Don Quixote is only just enough to make it
interesting to the critical reader, without giving offence to any body
else. The indecency and filth in this novel, are what must be allowed to
all Smollett’s writings. The subject and characters in Count Fathom are,
in general, exceedingly disgusting: the story is also spun out to a
degree of tediousness in the serious and sentimental parts; but there is
more power of writing occasionally shown in it than in any of his works.
We need only refer to the fine and bitter irony of the Count’s address
to the country of his ancestors on landing in England; to the
robber-scene in the forest, which has never been surpassed; to the
Parisian swindler, who personates a raw English country squire, (Western
is tame in the comparison); and to the story of the seduction in the
west of England. We should have some difficulty to point out, in any
author, passages written with more force and nature than these.

It is not, in our opinion, a very difficult attempt to class Fielding or
Smollett;—the one as an observer of the characters of human life, the
other as a describer of its various eccentricities: But it is by no
means so easy to dispose of Richardson, who was neither an observer of
the one, nor a describer of the other; but who seemed to spin his
materials entirely out of his own brain, as if there had been nothing
existing in the world beyond the little shop in which he sat writing.
There is an artificial reality about his works, which is nowhere to be
met with. They have the romantic air of a pure fiction, with the literal
minuteness of a common diary. The author had the strangest
matter-of-fact imagination that ever existed, and wrote the oddest
mixture of poetry and prose. He does not appear to have taken advantage
of any thing in actual nature, from one end of his works to the other:
and yet, throughout all his works (voluminous as they are—and this, to
be sure, is one reason why they are so), he sets about describing every
object and transaction, as if the whole had been given in on evidence by
an eyewitness. This kind of high finishing from imagination is an
anomaly in the history of human genius; and certainly nothing so fine
was ever produced by the same accumulation of minute parts. There is not
the least distraction, the least forgetfulness of the end: every
circumstance is made to tell. We cannot agree that this exactness of
detail produces heaviness; on the contrary, it gives an appearance of
truth, and a positive interest to the story; and we listen with the same
attention as we should to the particulars of a confidential
communication. We at one time used to think some parts of Sir Charles
Grandison rather trifling and tedious, especially the long description
of Miss Harriet Byron’s wedding clothes, till we met with two young
ladies who had severally copied out the whole of that very description
for their own private gratification. After this, we could not blame the
author.

The effect of reading this work, is like an increase of kindred: you
find yourself all of a sudden introduced into the midst of a large
family, with aunts and cousins to the third and fourth generation, and
grandmothers both by the father’s and mother’s side,—and a very odd set
of people too, but people whose real existence and personal identity you
can no more dispute than your own senses,—for you see and hear all that
they do or say. What is still more extraordinary, all this extreme
elaborateness in working out the story, seems to have cost the author
nothing: for it is said, that the published works are mere abridgments.
We have heard (though this, we suppose, must be a pleasant
exaggeration), that Sir Charles Grandison was originally written in
eight and twenty volumes.

Pamela is the first of his productions, and the very child of his brain.
Taking the general idea of the character of a modest and beautiful
country girl, and of the situation in which she is placed, he makes out
all the rest, even to the smallest circumstance, by the mere force of a
reasoning imagination. It would seem as if a step lost would be as fatal
here as in a mathematical demonstration. The development of the
character is the most simple, and comes the nearest to nature that it
can do, without being the same thing. The interest of the story
increases with the dawn of understanding and reflection in the heroine.
Her sentiments gradually expand themselves, like opening flowers. She
writes better every time, and acquires a confidence in herself, just as
a girl would do, writing such letters in such circumstances; and yet it
is certain _that no girl would write such letters in such
circumstances_. What we mean is this. Richardson’s nature is always the
nature of sentiment and reflection, not of impulse or situation. He
furnishes his characters, on every occasion, with the presence of mind
of the author. He makes them act, not as they would from the impulse of
the moment, but as they might upon reflection, and upon a careful review
of every motive and circumstance in their situation. They regularly sit
down to write letters: and if the business of life consisted in
letter-writing, and was carried on by the post (like a Spanish game at
chess), human nature would be what Richardson represents it. All actual
objects and feelings are blunted and deadened by being presented through
a medium which may be true to reason, but is false in nature. He
confounds his own point of view with that of the immediate actors in the
scene; and hence presents you with a conventional and factitious nature,
instead of that which is real. Dr. Johnson seems to have preferred this
truth of reflection to the truth of nature, when he said that there was
more knowledge of the human heart in a page of Richardson than in all
Fielding. Fielding, however, saw more of the practical results, and
understood the principles as well; but he had not the same power of
speculating upon their possible results, and combining them in certain
ideal forms of passion and imagination, which was Richardson’s real
excellence.

It must be observed, however, that it is this mutual good understanding,
and comparing of notes between the author and the persons he describes;
his infinite circumspection, his exact process of ratiocination and
calculation, which gives such an appearance of coldness and formality to
most of his characters,—which makes prudes of his women, and coxcombs of
his men. Every thing is too conscious in his works. Every thing is
distinctly brought home to the mind of the actors in the scene, which is
a fault undoubtedly: but then, it must be confessed, every thing is
brought home in its full force to the mind of the reader also; and we
feel the same interest in the story as if it were our own. Can any thing
be more beautiful or affecting than Pamela’s reproaches to her ‘lumpish
heart’ when she is sent away from her master’s at her own request—its
lightness, when she is sent for back—the joy which the conviction of the
sincerity of his love diffuses in her heart, like the coming-on of
spring—the artifice of the stuff gown—the meeting with lady Davers after
her marriage—and the trial scene with her husband? Who ever remained
insensible to the passion of Lady Clementina, except Sir Charles
Grandison himself, who was the object of it? Clarissa is, however, his
masterpiece, if we except Lovelace. If she is fine in herself, she is
still finer in his account of her. With that foil, her purity is
dazzling indeed: and she who could triumph by her virtue, and the force
of her love, over the regality of Lovelace’s mind, his wit, his person,
his accomplishments and his spirit, conquers all hearts. We should
suppose that never sympathy more deep or sincere was excited than by the
heroine of Richardson’s romance, except by the calamities of real life.
The links in this wonderful chain of interest are not more finely
wrought, than their whole weight is overwhelming and irresistible. Who
can forget the exquisite gradations of her long dying scene, or the
closing of the coffin-lid, when Miss Howe comes to take her last leave
of her friend; or the heart-breaking reflection that Clarissa makes on
what was to have been her wedding-day? Well does a modern writer
exclaim—

‘Books are a real world, both pure and good,
Round which, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness may grow!’

Richardson’s wit was unlike that of any other writer;—his humour was so
too. Both were the effect of intense activity of mind;—laboured, and yet
completely effectual. We might refer to Lovelace’s reception and
description of Hickman, when he calls out Death in his ear, as the name
of the person with whom Clarissa had fallen in love; and to the scene at
the glove shop. What can be more magnificent than his enumeration of his
companions—‘Belton so pert and so pimply—Tourville so fair and so
foppish,’ etc.? In casuistry, he is quite at home; and, with a boldness
greater even than his puritanical severity, has exhausted every topic on
virtue and vice. There is another peculiarity in Richardson, not perhaps
so uncommon, which is, his systematically preferring his most insipid
characters to his finest, though both were equally his own invention,
and he must be supposed to have understood something of their qualities.
Thus he preferred the little, selfish, affected, insignificant Miss
Byron, to the divine Clementina; and again, Sir Charles Grandison, to
the nobler Lovelace. We have nothing to say in favour of Lovelace’s
morality; but Sir Charles is the prince of coxcombs,—whose eye was never
once taken from his own person, and his own virtues; and there is
nothing which excites so little sympathy as his excessive egotism.

It remains to speak of Sterne;—and we shall do it in few words. There is
more of _mannerism_ and affectation in him, and a more immediate
reference to preceding authors;—but his excellencies, where he is
excellent, are of the first order. His characters are intellectual and
inventive, like Richardson’s—but totally opposite in the execution. The
one are made out by continuity, and patient repetition of touches; the
others, by rapid and masterly strokes, and graceful apposition. His
style is equally different from Richardson’s:—it is at times the most
rapid,—the most happy,—the most idiomatic of any of our novel writers.
It is the pure essence of English conversational style. His works
consist only of _morceaux_,—of brilliant passages. His wit is poignant,
though artificial;—and his characters (though the groundwork has been
laid before), have yet invaluable original differences;—and the spirit
of the execution, the master-strokes constantly thrown into them, are
not to be surpassed. It is sufficient to name them—Yorick, Dr. Slop, Mr.
Shandy, my Uncle Toby, Trim, Susanna, and the Widow Wadman: and in these
he has contrived to oppose, with equal felicity and originality, two
characters,—one of pure intellect, and the other of pure good nature, in
my Father and my Uncle Toby. There appears to have been in Sterne a vein
of dry, sarcastic humour, and of extreme tenderness of feeling;—the
latter sometimes carried to affectation, as in the tale of Maria, and
the apostrophe to the recording angel;—but at other times pure, and
without blemish. The story of Le Febre is perhaps the finest in the
English language. My Father’s restlessness, both of body and mind, is
inimitable. It is the model from which all those despicable performances
against modern philosophy ought to have been copied, if their authors
had known any thing of the subject they were writing about. My Uncle
Toby is one of the finest compliments ever paid to human nature. He is
the most unoffending of God’s creatures; or, as the French express
it—_un tel petit bon homme!_ Of his bowling-green,—his sieges,—and his
amours, who would say or think any thing amiss?

It is remarkable that our four best novel writers belong nearly to the
same age. We also owe to the same period, (the reign of George II.), the
inimitable Hogarth, and some of our best writers of the middle style of
comedy. If we were called upon to account for this coincidence, we
should wave the consideration of more general causes, (as, that
imagination naturally descends with the progress of civilization), and
ascribe it at once to the establishment of the Protestant ascendancy,
and the succession of the House of Hanover. These great events appear to
have given a more popular turn to our literature and genius, as well as
to our Government. It was found high time that the people should be
represented in books as well as in parliament. They wished to see some
account of themselves in what they read, and not to be confined always
to the vices, the miseries and frivolities of the great. Our domestic
tragedy, and our earliest periodical works, appeared a little before the
same period. In despotic countries, human nature is not of sufficient
importance to be studied or described. The _canaille_ are objects rather
of disgust than curiosity; and there are no middle classes. The works of
Racine and Moliere are little else than imitations of the verbiage of
the court, before which they were represented; or fanciful caricatures
of the manners of the lowest of the people. But in the period of our
history in question, a security of person and property, and a freedom of
opinion had been established, which made every man feel of some
consequence to himself, and appear an object of some curiosity to his
neighbours; our manners became more domesticated; there was a general
spirit of sturdiness and independence, which made the English character
more truly English than perhaps at any other period—that is, more
tenacious of its own opinions and purposes. The whole surface of society
appeared cut out into square enclosures and sharp angles, which extended
to the dresses of the time, their gravel walks, and clipped hedges. Each
individual had a certain ground-plot of his own to cultivate his
particular humours in, and let them shoot out at pleasure; and a most
plentiful crop they have produced accordingly.

The reign of George II. was, in a word, in an eminent degree, _the age
of hobby-horses_. But since that period, things have taken a different
turn. His present Majesty, during almost the whole of his reign, has
been constantly mounted on a great War-horse; and has fairly driven all
competitors out of the field. Instead of minding our own affairs, or
laughing at each other, the eyes of all his faithful subjects have been
fixed on the career of the Sovereign, and all hearts anxious for the
safety of his person and government. Our pens and our swords have been
drawn alike in their defence; and the returns of killed and wounded, the
manufacture of newspapers and parliamentary speeches, have exceeded all
former example. If we have had little of the blessings of peace, we have
had enough of the glories and calamities of war. His Majesty has indeed
contrived to keep alive the greatest public interest ever known, by his
determined manner of riding his hobby for half a century together, with
the aristocracy—the democracy—the clergy—the landed and monied
interest—and the rabble, in full cry after him! and at the end of his
career, most happily and unexpectedly succeeded—amidst empires lost and
won—kingdoms overturned and created—and the destruction of an incredible
number of lives—in restoring _the divine right of Kings_,—and thus
preventing any further abuse of the example which seated his family on
the throne!

It is not to be wondered, if, amidst the tumult of events crowded into
this period, our literature has partaken of the disorder of the time; if
our prose has run mad, and our poetry grown childish. Among those few
persons who ‘have kept the even tenor of their way,’ the author of
Evelina, Cecilia, and Camilla, holds a distinguished place. Mrs.
Radcliffe’s ‘enchantments drear’ and mouldering castles, derived a part
of their interest, we suppose, from the supposed tottering state of all
old structures at the time; and Mrs. Inchbald’s ‘Nature and Art’ would
not have had the same popularity, but that it fell in (in its two main
characters) with the prevailing prejudice of the moment, that judges and
bishops were not pure abstractions of justice and piety. Miss
Edgeworth’s tales, again, are a kind of essence of common sense, which
seemed to be called for by the prevailing epidemics of audacious paradox
and insane philosophy. The author of the present novel is, however,
quite of the old school, a mere common observer of manners,—and also a
very woman. It is this last circumstance which forms the peculiarity of
her writings, and distinguishes them from those masterpieces which we
have before mentioned. She is unquestionably a quick, lively, and
accurate observer of persons and things; but she always looks at them
with a consciousness of her sex, and in that point of view in which it
is the particular business and interest of women to observe them. We
thus get a kind of supplement and gloss to our original text, which we
could not otherwise have obtained. There is little in her works of
passion or character, or even manners, in the most extended sense of the
word, as implying the sum-total of our habits and pursuits; her _forte_
is in describing the absurdities and affectations of external behaviour,
or _the manners of people in company_. Her characters, which are all
caricatures, are no doubt distinctly marked, and perfectly kept up; but
they are somewhat superficial, and exceedingly uniform. Her heroes and
heroines, almost all of them, depend on the stock of a single phrase or
sentiment; or at least have certain mottoes or devices by which they may
always be known. They are such characters as people might be supposed to
assume for a night at a masquerade. She presents not the whole length
figure, nor even the face, but some prominent feature. In the present
novel, for example, a lady appears regularly every ten pages, to get a
lesson in music for nothing. She never appears for any other purpose;
this is all you know of her; and in this the whole wit and humour of the
character consists. Meadows is the same, who has always the same cue of
being tired, without any other idea, etc. It has been said of
Shakespeare, that you may always assign his speeches to the proper
characters:—and you may infallibly do the same thing with Madame
D’Arblay’s; for they always say the same thing. The Branghtons are the
best. Mr. Smith is an exquisite city portrait.—Evelina is also her best
novel, because it is shortest; that is, it has all the liveliness in the
sketches of character, and exquisiteness of comic dialogue and repartee,
without the tediousness of the story, and endless affectation of the
sentiments.

Women, in general, have a quicker perception of any oddity or
singularity of character than men, and are more alive to every absurdity
which arises from a violation of the rules of society, or a deviation
from established custom. This partly arises from the restraints on their
own behaviour, which turn their attention constantly on the subject, and
partly from other causes. The surface of their minds, like that of their
bodies, seems of a finer texture than ours; more soft, and susceptible
of immediate impression. They have less muscular power,—less power of
continued voluntary attention,—of reason—passion and imagination: But
they are more easily impressed with whatever appeals to their senses or
habitual prejudices. The intuitive perception of their minds is less
disturbed by any general reasonings on causes or consequences. They
learn the idiom of character and manner, as they acquire that of
language, by rote merely, without troubling themselves about the
principles. Their observation is not the less accurate on that account,
as far as it goes; for it has been well said, that ‘there is nothing so
true as habit.’

There is little other power in Miss Burney’s novels, than that of
immediate observation: her characters, whether of refinement or
vulgarity, are equally superficial and confined. The whole is a question
of form, whether that form is adhered to, or violated. It is this
circumstance which takes away dignity and interest from her story and
sentiments, and makes the one so teazing and tedious, and the other so
insipid. The difficulties in which she involves her heroines are indeed
‘Female Difficulties;’—they are difficulties created out of nothing. The
author appears to have no other idea of refinement than that it is the
reverse of vulgarity; but the reverse of vulgarity is fastidiousness and
affectation. There is a true, and a false delicacy. Because a vulgar
country Miss would answer ‘yes’ to a proposal of marriage in the first
page, Mad. d’Arblay makes it a proof of an excess of refinement, and an
indispensable point of etiquette in her young ladies, to postpone the
answer to the end of five volumes, without the smallest reason for their
doing so, and with every reason to the contrary. The reader is led every
moment to expect a denouement, and is as constantly disappointed on some
trifling pretext. The whole artifice of her fable consists in coming to
no conclusion. Her ladies stand so upon the order of their going, that
they do not go at all. They will not abate an ace of their punctilio in
any circumstances, or on any emergency. They would consider it as quite
indecorous to run down stairs though the house were in flames, or to
move off the pavement though a scaffolding was falling. She has formed
to herself an abstract idea of perfection in common behaviour, which is
quite as romantic and impracticable as any other idea of the sort: and
the consequence has naturally been, that she makes her heroines commit
the greatest improprieties and absurdities in order to avoid the
smallest. In contradiction to a maxim in philosophy, they constantly act
from the weakest motive, or rather from pure affectation.

Thus L. S.—otherwise _Ellis_, in the present novel, actually gives
herself up to the power of a man who has just offered violence to her
person, rather than return to the asylum of a farm-house, at which she
has left some friends, because, as she is turning her steps that way,
‘she hears the sounds of rustic festivity and vulgar merriment proceed
from it.’ That is, in order that her exquisite sensibility may not be
shocked by the behaviour of a number of honest country-people making
merry at a dance, this model of female delicacy exposes herself to every
species of insult and outrage from a man whom she hates. In like manner,
she runs from her honourable lover into the power of a ruffian and an
assassin, who claims a right over her person by a forced marriage. The
whole tissue of the fable is, in short, more wild and chimerical than
any thing in Don Quixote, without having any thing of poetical truth or
elevation. Madame D’Arblay has woven a web of difficulties for her
heroine, something like the green silken threads in which the
shepherdess entangled the steed of Cervantes’s hero, who swore, in his
fine enthusiastic way, that he would sooner cut his passage to another
world than disturb the least of those beautiful meshes. The Wanderer
raises obstacles, lighter than ‘the gossamer that idles in the wanton
summer air,’ into insurmountable barriers; and trifles with those that
arise out of common sense, reason, and necessity. Her conduct never
arises directly out of the circumstances in which she is placed, but out
of some factitious and misplaced refinement on them. It is a perpetual
game at cross-purposes. There being a plain and strong motive why she
should pursue any course of action, is a sufficient reason for her to
avoid it; and the perversity of her conduct is in proportion to its
levity—as the lightness of the feather baffles the force of the impulse
that is given to it, and the slightest breath of air turns it back on
the hand from which it is launched. We can hardly consider this as an
accurate description of the perfection of the female character!

We are sorry to be compelled to speak so disadvantageously of the work
of an excellent and favourite writer; and the more so, as we perceive no
decay of talent, but a perversion of it. There is the same admirable
spirit in the dialogues, and particularly in the characters of Mrs.
Ireton, Sir Jasper Herrington, and Mr. Giles Arbe, as in her former
novels. But these do not fill a hundred pages of the work; and there is
nothing else good in it. In the story, which here occupies the attention
of the reader almost exclusively, Madame D’Arblay never excelled.

SISMONDI’S LITERATURE OF THE SOUTH

VOL. XXV.] [_June 1815._

This is another great work from the pen of the celebrated historian of
the Italian Republics: though we think it written, on the whole, with
less force and spirit than that admirable history. The excellent author
has visibly less enthusiasm as a critic than as a politician; and
therefore he interests us less in that character, and at the same time
inspires us rather with less than greater confidence in the accuracy of
his opinions; for there can be no real love of liberty, or admiration of
genius, where there is no enthusiasm—and no one who does not love them,
will ever submit to the labour of a full and fair investigation of their
history and concerns. A cold, calculating indifference in matters of
taste, is generally the effect of want of feeling; as affected
moderation in politics is (nine times out of ten) a cloak for want of
principle. Notwithstanding the very great pleasure we have received from
the work before us, we should have been still more gratified, therefore,
if the author had himself appeared more delighted with his task, and
consequently imparted to it a more decided and original character. In
his Republics, he describes events and characters in the history of
modern Italy with the genuine feelings of an enlightened reasoner,
indignant at the wrongs, the vices, and the degradation of the country
of his ancestors: In judging of its literature, he too often borrows
French rules and German systems of criticism. His practical taste and
speculative principles do not, therefore, always coincide; and,
regarding this work on Literature as an appendage to his History, it is
impossible not to observe, that he is glad, upon all occasions, to slide
into his old and favourite subject; to pass from the professor’s chair
into the rostrum; and to connect, in glowing terms, the rise or fall of
letters with the political independence or debasement of the states in
which they flourished or decayed.

If we were to hazard any other preliminary remark of a general
character, it should be, that the author appears to have a more intimate
acquaintance with, and a great predilection for, the more modern and
immediately popular writers of Italy, than for those who appear to us
objects of greater curiosity and admiration. Thus, he dismisses Dante,
Petrarca and Boccacio, in fewer pages than he devotes to Metastasio
alone—an author whose chief merit he himself defines to be, the happy
adaptation of his pieces to the musical recitative of the opera, and
which, therefore, in a literary point of view, must be comparatively
uninteresting. Again, Ariosto makes, in his hands, a very slender
appearance by the side of Tasso—an appearance by no means proportioned
to the size of the men, or to the interest which is felt in them, or to
the scope for criticism in their different works. The account of the two
modern Italian dramatists, Alfieri and Goldoni, though given much at
length, is not certainly liable to the same kind of objection, as the
information with respect to them is valuable from its novelty.

The present volumes contain a general view of the literature of the
South of Modern Europe,—of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and the Provençal.
The author proposes, in another work, to examine that of the North,
particularly of England and Germany. The publication now before us was
(we are informed in the preface) originally composed to be delivered to
a class of young persons at Geneva: and this circumstance, while it has
added to its value and comprehensiveness as a book of reference, has
made it less entertaining to the general reader. A body of criticism,
like a body of divinity, must contain a great deal of matter less
pleasant than profitable in the perusal. In our account of it, we shall
direct the reader’s attention to what most forcibly arrested our
own—premising merely, that among the writers to whom M. Sismondi is
forward to acknowledge his obligations, are, Professor Boutterwek on
modern literature in general, Millot’s history of the Troubadours,
Tiraboschi and M. Guiguené on the Italian literature, Velasquez on the
Spanish and Portuguese, and William Schlegel for the dramatic literature
of all these nations. It is to this last author that he seems to be
indebted for a great part of his theoretical reasoning and conjectural
criticism on the general principles of taste and the progress of human
genius.

The first volume commences with an account of the Provençal poetry,
which is by no means the least interesting or curious part of this
extensive and elaborate work. We shall endeavour to give some general
idea of it to our readers. The language which prevailed in all the South
of Europe, after the destruction of the Roman empire, was a barbarous
mixture of Latin with the different languages of the Northern invaders.
It was in the south of France that this language first took a consistent
form, and became the vehicle of a gay and original poetry. The causes
which contributed to invest it with this distinction, were, according to
M. Sismondi, 1. The comparative exemption of the Francs from perpetual
successive inroads of barbarous conquerors; and, 2. The collateral
influence of the Moorish or Arabian literature, through the connection
between the kingdoms of Spain and Provence. The description given by the
author of the Arabian literature, which ‘rose like an exhalation,’ and
disappeared almost as soon, is splendid in the extreme. In a hundred and
fifty years, human genius is said to have produced more prodigies in
that prolific region, than it has done in the history of ages in all the
world besides. Arts and sciences had their birth, maturity and
perfection;—almost all the great modern discoveries (as they have been
considered) were anticipated, and again forgotten,—paper, printing, the
mariner’s compass, glass, gunpowder, &c. In the exercise of fancy and
invention, they infinitely surpassed all former or succeeding ages. As
an instance of the prodigious scale on which these matters were
conducted in the East, and of the colossal size to which their
literature had swelled in all its branches, it is stated that the
Thousand and One Stories forming the Arabian Nights’ Entertainment,
constitute only a six-and-thirtieth part of the original collection. We
suspect that there is some exaggeration in all this; though the
brilliant theories of our author have, no doubt, very considerable
foundation in fact. We hope there is none for the eloquent, but
melancholy, reflections he makes on the sudden disappearance of so much
intellectual magnificence from the face of the earth.

‘Such,’ he says, ‘was the lustre with which literature and sciences
shone forth from the ninth to the fourteenth century of our era, in the
vast regions which were subjected to Mahometism. The most melancholy
reflections are attached to the long enumeration of names unknown to us,
and which were nevertheless illustrious,—of works buried in manuscript
in some dusty repositories—which yet for a time had a powerful influence
on the culture of the human mind. What remains then of so much glory?
Five or six persons only can visit the treasures of Arabian manuscripts
shut up in the library of the Escurial; and some few hundreds besides,
scattered over all Europe, have qualified themselves, by obstinate
labour, to dig in the mines of the East—but these persons can only
obtain, with the utmost difficulty, some rare and obscure manuscripts,
and cannot raise themselves high enough to form a judgment on the whole
of a literature of which they never attain but a part. Meantime, the
extended regions where Mahometism reigned, and still reigns, are dead to
all the sciences. Those rich plains of Fez and Morocco, illumined five
centuries ago by so many academies, so many universities, and so many
libraries, are now nothing but deserts of burning sand, for which
tyrants dispute with tigers. All the gay and fertile shore of
Mauritania, where commerce, the arts, and agriculture had been raised to
the highest prosperity, are now the nests of pirates, who spread terror
on the seas, and who relax from their labour in shameful debaucheries,
till the plague, which returns yearly, comes to mark out its victims,
and to avenge offended humanity. Egypt is nearly swallowed in the sands,
which it once fertilized—Syria and Palestine are desolated by wandering
Bedouins, less formidable, however, than the Pasha who oppresses them.
Bagdad, formerly the abode of luxury, of power, and of knowledge, is
ruined; the once celebrated universities of Cufa and Bassora are
shut,—those of Samarcande and of Balch are also destroyed. In this
immense extent of country, twice or three times as large as our
Europe—nothing is found but ignorance, slavery, terror and death. Few of
the inhabitants can read any of the writings of their illustrious
forefathers;—few could comprehend them—none could procure them. The
immense literary riches of the Arabs, of which we have given some
glimpses, exist no more in any of the countries which the Arabs and
Mussulmen rule.—It is not there that we must now seek either the renown
of their great men or their writings. What has been saved of them, is
entirely in the hands of their enemies—in the convents of the monks, or
in the libraries of the Kings of Europe. And yet these countries have
not been conquered. It is not the foreigner who has despoiled them of
their wealth, wasted their population, destroyed their laws, their
morals, and their national spirit. The poison was within them—it
developed itself, and has annihilated all things.

‘Who knows if, some centuries hence, this same Europe, where the reign
of literature and sciences is now transported—which shines with such
lustre—which judges so well of times past—which compares so well the
successive influence of antient literature and morals, may not be
deserted, and wild as the hills of Mauritania, the sands of Egypt, and
the vallies of Anatolia? Who knows whether, in a country entirely new,
perhaps in the high lands where the Oronoko and the Amazon collect their
streams, perhaps in the now impenetrable enclosure of the mountains of
New Holland, there may not be formed nations with other morals, other
languages, other thoughts, other religions,—nations who shall again
renew the human kind, who shall study like ourselves the times past, and
who, seeing with surprise that we have been, and have known what they
shall know—that we have believed like them in durability and glory,
shall pity our impotent efforts, and shall recal the names of Newton, of
Racine, of Tasso, as examples of the vain struggles of man to attain an
immortality of renown which fate denies him?’

The more immediate causes which gave birth to the poetry of the
Provençals, and by consequence to all our modern literature, are
afterwards detailed in the following passage, which is interesting both
in point of fact, and as matter of speculation.

‘In Italy, at the time of the renovation of its language, each province,
each small district, had a particular dialect. This great number of
different _patois_, was owing to two causes; the great number of
barbarous tribes with whom the Romans had successively been confounded
by the frequent invasions of their country, and the great number of
independent sovereignties which had been kept up there. Neither of those
causes operated on the Gauls in the formation of the Romanesque. Three
hordes established themselves there nearly at the same time,—the
Visigoths, the Burgundians, and the Franks; and after the conquest of
these last, no northern barbarians could again form a fixed
establishment there, except the Normans, in a single province; no
mixture of Germans, much less of the Sclavonians and Scythians, came
again to produce a change in language and morals. The Gauls had then
been employed in consolidating themselves into one nation, with one
language, for four ages: during which Italy had been successively the
prey of the Lombards, the Francs, the Hungarians, the Saracens, and the
Germans. The birth of the Romanesque in Gaul, came thus to precede that
of the Italian language. It was divided into two principal dialects:—the
Provençal Romanesque, spoken in all the provinces to the south of the
Loire, which had been originally conquered by the Visigoths and the
Burgundians; and the Walloon Romanesque, in the provinces to the north
of the Loire, where the Franks had the ascendant. The political
divisions remained conformable to this first division of nations and
languages. In spite of the independence of the great feudatories,
northern France always formed one political body; the inhabitants of the
different provinces met in the same national assemblies, and in the same
armies. Southern France, on its side, after having been the inheritance
of some of the successors of Charlemagne, had been raised, in 879, to
the rank of an independent kingdom, by Bozon, who was crowned at Nantes,
under the title of King of Arles or of Provence; and who subjected to
his domination Provence, Dauphiny, Savoy, the Lyonese, and some counties
of Burgundy. The title of kingdom gave place, in 943, to that of
earldom, under Bozon II., without the dismemberment of Provence, or its
separation from the House of Burgundy, of which Bozon I. had been the
founder. This house was extinguished in 1092, in the person of
Gillibert, who left two daughters only, between whom he divided his
states. One, Faydide, married Alphonso, Count of Toulouse; and the
other, Douce, married Raymond Berenger, Count of Barcelona. The union of
Provence during two hundred and thirty years, under a line of princes
who played no very brilliant part beyond their own territory, and who
are almost forgotten by history, but who suffered no invasion; who, by a
paternal administration, augmented the riches, and extended the
population of the state, and favoured commerce, to which their maritime
situation invited them, sufficed to consolidate the laws, the manners,
and the language of the Provençals. It was at this epoch, but in a deep
obscurity, that in the kingdom of Arles, the Provençal Romanesque took
completely the place of the Latin. The latter was still made use of in
the public acts; but the former, which was spoken universally, began
also to be made use of in literature.

‘The succession of the Count of Barcelona, Raymond Berenger, to the
sovereignty of Provence, gave a new turn to the national spirit, by the
mixture of the Catalonians with the Provençals. Of the three Romanesque
languages, which the Christian inhabitants of Spain then spoke, the
Catalonian, the Castillian, and the Gallician, or Portuguese, the first
was almost absolutely like the Provençal; and though it has since been
much removed from it, especially in the kingdom of Valencia, it has
always been called after the name of a French province. The people of
the country call it _Llemosin_ or Limousin. The Catalans, therefore,
could make themselves well understood by the Provençals; and their
intercourse at the same court served to polish the one language by means
of the other. The first of these nations had already been much advanced,
either by their wars and their intercourse with the Moors of Spain, or
by the great activity of the commerce of Barcelona. This city enjoyed
the most ample privileges: the citizens felt their freedom, and made
their princes respect it,—at the same time that the wealth which they
had acquired rendered the taxes more productive, and permitted the court
of the Counts to display a magnificence unknown to other sovereigns.
Raymond Berenger, and his successor, brought into Provence at once the
spirit of liberty and chivalry, the taste of elegance and the arts, and
the sciences of the Arabs. From this union of noble sentiments, arose
the poetry which shone at the same time in Provence, and all the south
of Europe, as if an electric spark had, in the midst of the thickest
darkness, kindled at once in all quarters its brilliant radiance.

‘Chivalry arose with the Provençal poetry; it was in some sort the soul
of every modern literature: and this character, so different from all
that antiquity had known,—that invention, so rich in poetical effects,
is the first subject for observation, which modern literary history
presents us. We must not, however, confound _feudalism_ with _chivalry_.
Feudalism is the real world at this epoch—with its advantages and
disadvantages, its virtues and its vices; chivalry is this world
idealized, such as it has existed only in the invention of the
romancers: its essential character is a devotion to woman, and an
inviolable regard to honour; but the ideas which the poets manifested
then, as to what constituted the perfection of a knight or a lady, were
not entirely of their invention. They existed in the people, without
perhaps being followed by them; and when they had acquired more
consistence in their heroic songs, they reacted in their turn upon the
people, among whom they originated, and thus approximated the real
feudal system to the ideal notions of chivalry.

‘Without doubt, there can be few finer things than the bold and active
kind of life which characterized the feudal times; than the independent
existence of each nobleman in his castle; than the persuasion which he
felt, that God alone was his judge and master; than that confidence in
his own power which made him brave all opposition, and offer an
inviolable asylum to the weak and unfortunate,—which made him share with
his friends the only possessions which they valued, arms and horses,—and
rely on himself alone for his liberty, his honour, and his life. But, at
the same time, the vices of the human character had acquired a
development proportioned to the vigour of men’s minds. Among the
nobility, whom alone the laws seemed to protect, absolute power had
produced its habitual effect,—an intoxication approaching to madness,
and a ferocity of which later times afford no example. The tyranny of a
baron, it is true, extended only a few leagues round his chateau, or the
town which belonged to him: If any one could pass this boundary, he was
safe; but, within these limits, in which he kept his vassals like herds
of deer in a park, he gave himself up, in the plenitude of his power, to
the wildest caprices; and subjected those who displeased him to the most
frightful punishments. His vassals, who trembled before him, were
degraded below the human species; and, in the whole of this class, there
is hardly an instance of any individual displaying, in the course of
ages, a single trait of greatness or virtue. Frankness and good faith,
which are essentially the virtues of chivalry, are indeed, in general,
the consequence of strength and courage; but, in order to render an
adherence to them general, it is indispensable that punishment or shame
should be attached to their violation. But the seignoral lords were
placed in their chateaus above all fear; and opinion had no force in
restraining men who did not feel the relations of social life.
Accordingly, the history of the middle ages furnishes a greater number
of scandalous perfidies than any other period. Lastly, the passion of
love had, it is true, taken a new character, which was much the same in
reality and in the poetry of the time. It was not more passionate or
more tender than among the Greeks and Romans, but it was more
respectful; something mysterious was joined to the sentiment. Some
traces of that religious respect were preserved towards women, which the
Germans felt towards their prophetesses. They were considered as a sort
of angelic beings, rather than as dependants, submitted to the will of
their masters: It was a point of honour to serve and to defend them, as
if they were the organs of the divinity on earth; and at the same time
there was joined to this deference, a warmth of sentiment, a turbulence
of passions and desires, which the Germans had known little of, but
which is characteristic of the people of the South, and of which they
borrowed the expression from the Arabians. In our ideas of chivalry,
love always retains this religious purity of character; but in the
actual feudal system, the disorder was extreme; and the corruption of
manners has left behind it traces more scandalous than in any other
period of society. Neither the _sirventes_ nor the _canzos_ of the
troubadours, nor the fables of the trouveres, nor the romances of
chivalry, can be read without blushing: the gross licentiousness of the
language is equalled only by the profound corruption of the characters,
and the profligacy of the moral. In the South of France, in particular,
peace, riches, and the example of courts, had introduced among the
nobility an extreme dissipation: they might be said to live only for
gallantry. The ladies, who did not appear in the world till after they
were married, prided themselves in the homage which their lovers paid to
their charms: they delighted in being celebrated by their _troubadour_:
they answered in their turn, and expressed their sentiments in the most
tender and passionate verses. They even instituted Courts of Love, where
questions of gallantry were gravely debated, and decided by their
suffrages. In short, they had given to the whole of the South of France
the movement of a carnival, which contrasts singularly with the ideas of
restraint, of virtue, and of modesty, which we connect with the good old
times. The more we study history, the more we shall be convinced that
chivalry is an almost purely poetical invention. We never can arrive by
any authentic documents at the scene where it flourished: it is always
represented at a distance, both in time and place. And while
contemporary historians give us a distinct, detailed, complete idea of
the vices of courts and of the great, of the ferocity or licentiousness
of the nobles, and the degradation of the people; one is astonished to
see, after a lapse of time, the same ages animated by the poets with
fictitious and splendid accounts of virtue, beauty, and loyalty. The
romancers of the twelfth century placed the age of chivalry in the reign
of Charlemagne; Francis I. placed it in their time: We at present
believe we see it flourishing in the persons of Du Guesclin and of
Bayard, at the courts of Charles V. and Francis the I. But when we come
to examine any of these periods, though we find some heroic characters
in all of them, we are soon forced to confess that it is necessary to
remove the age of chivalry three or four centuries before any kind of
reality.’ p. 91.

This, we cannot help thinking, is a little hard on the _good old times_:
though the specimens of their poetry, which are subjoined, go far to
justify this severity. They certainly indicate neither refinement of
sentiment, nor elevation of fancy. They are merely war or love-songs,
relating to the personal feelings or situation of the individual who
composed them. The Provençal poetry, indeed, is in a great measure
lyrical; at least it is certain, that it is neither epic nor dramatic.
The _tensons_ were, indeed, a sort of eclogues, or disputes in verse, in
which two or three persons maintained their favourite opinions on any
given subject; and they appear to have been for the most part
extemporaneous effusions. The following example will give some idea of
the state of manners and literature at this period.

‘Several ladies who assisted at the Courts of Love, as they were called,
used to reply themselves to the verses which their beauty inspired.
There is left but a small portion of their compositions, but they have
almost always the advantage over the troubadours. Poetry did not then
aspire either to creative power, or to sublimity of thought, or to
variety of imagery. Those powerful efforts of genius, which have given
birth at a later period to dramatic and epic poetry, were then unknown;
and in the simple expression of feeling, an inspiration, more tender and
more delicate, would give to the poetry of women a more natural
expression. One of the most pleasing of these compositions is by Clara
d’Anduse: it is left unfinished: but, as far as a prose translation can
convey the impression, which depends so much on the harmony of the
metre, it is as follows.

‘“In what cruel trouble, in what profound sadness, jealous calumniators
have plunged my heart! With what malice these perfidious destroyers of
all pleasure have persecuted me! They have forced you to banish yourself
from me, you whom I love more than life! They have robbed me of the
happiness of seeing you, and of seeing you without ceasing! Ah, I shall
die of grief and rage!

‘“But let calumny arm itself against me: the love with which you inspire
me braves all its shafts: they will never be able to reach my heart:
nothing can increase its tenderness, or give new force to the desires
with which it is inflamed. There is no one, though it were my enemy, who
would not become dear to me, by speaking well of you: but my best friend
would cease to be so, from the moment he dared to reproach you.

‘“No, my sweet friend, no: do not believe that I have a heart
treacherous to you: do not fear that I should ever abandon you for
another, though I should be solicited by all the ladies of the land.
Love, who holds me in his chains, has said, that my heart should be
devoted to you alone; and I swear that it shall always be so. Ah, if I
was as much mistress of my hand, he who now possesses, should never have
obtained it.

‘“Beloved! such is the grief which I feel at being separated from you,
such my despair, that when I wish to sing, I only sigh and weep. I
cannot finish this couplet. Alas! my songs cannot obtain for my heart
what it desires.”’

The poets of this period were almost all of them chevaliers; and it is
in their war-songs, that, according to M. Sismondi, we find most of the
enthusiasm of poetry. Guillaume de St. Gregory, thus chants his love for
war, and seems to be inspired by the very sight of the field of battle.

‘How I love the gay season of the approach of spring, which covers our
fields with leaves and flowers! How I love the sweet warbling of the
birds, which make the woods resound with their songs! But how much more
delightful still it is to see the tents and pavillions pitched in the
meadows! How I feel my courage swell, when I see the armed chevaliers on
their horses, marching in long array!

‘I love to see the cavaliers put to flight,—the common people, who
strive to carry away their most precious effects: I love to see the
thick battalions of soldiers, who advance in pursuit of the fugitives;
and my joy redoubles when I observe the siege laid to the strongest
castles, and hear their battered walls fall with a dreadful crash!’...
‘Yes, I repeat it again, the pleasures of the table, or of love, are not
to be compared, in my mind, with those of the furious fight ... when I
hear the horses neighing on the green meadows, and the cry repeated on
all sides, “To arms, to arms!” when the great and the vulgar load the
earth with their bodies, or roll, dying, into the ditches; and when
large wounds from the blows of the lance mark the victims of honour.’

This poetic rhapsody of the eleventh or twelfth century is not
altogether unworthy of the spirit of the nineteenth; so we shall not
stop to moralize upon it. One of the most heroic and magnanimous
personages of the same period was Bertrand de Born, Vicompte Hautefort.
He was a great maker of war and verses. ‘The most violent,’ says M.
Sismondi, ‘the most impetuous of the French chevaliers, breathing
nothing but war; exciting, inflaming the passions of his neighbours and
his superiors, in order to engage them in hostilities, he troubled the
provinces of Guienne by his arms and his intrigues, during all the
second half of the twelfth century; and the reigns of the Kings of
England, Henry II. and Richard Cœur de Lion. He first stripped his
brother Constantine of his personal inheritance, and made war upon
Richard who protected him. He then attached himself to Henry, the
brother of Richard Cœur de Lion, and afterwards made war upon him, after
having engaged him in a conspiracy against his father. For this last
offence he is put by Dante into his hell. In all his enterprizes, he
encouraged himself by composing _sirventes_, that is, songs in which he
sounded the war-whoop, in the manner of some writers nearer our own
times. Let the reader judge for himself.

‘“What signify to me happy or miserable days? What are weeks or years to
me? At all times my only wish is, to destroy whoever dares to offend me!
Let others, if they please, embellish their houses; let them idly
procure the conveniences of life: but, for myself, to collect lances,
helmets, swords and implements of destruction, shall be the only object
of my life! I am fatigued with advice, and swear never to attend to
it!”’

The historical notice of Richard Cœur de Lion gives a striking and more
favourable picture of the manners of the time. Every one is acquainted
with the story of his deliverance from prison by the fidelity of his
servant Blondel, and of his rescue from the Saracens by the gallant
device of Guillaume de Preaux, who attracted the fury of the assailants
to his own person, by crying out, ‘Spare me; for I am the King of
England!’ M. Sismondi gives the following as the words of the celebrated
song (a little modernized) composed by Richard during the captivity to
which he was treacherously subjected by Leopold of Austria, after his
return from the Holy Land.

Si prisonnier ne dit point sa raison
Sans un grand trouble, et douloureux soupçon,
Pour son consort qu’il fasse une chanson
J’ai prou d’amis, mais bien pauvre est leur don;
Honte ils auront, si faute de rançon,
Je suis deux hivers pris.

Qu’ils sachent bien, mes hommes, mes barons,
Anglais, Normands, Poitevins et Gascons,
Que je n’ai point si pauvres compagnons
Que pour argent n’ouvrisse leurs prisons.
Point ne les veux taxer de trahison,
Mais suis deux hivers pris.

Pour un captif plus d’ami, de parent!
Plus que ses jours ils epargnent l’argent;
Las! que je sens me douloir ce tourment!
Et si je meurs dans mon confinement,
Qui sauvera le renom de ma gent,
Car suis deux hivers pris?

Point au chagrin ne vaudrais succomber!
Le roi françois peut mes terres brûler,
Fausser la paix qu’il jura de garder;
Pourtant mon cœur je sens se rassurer,
Si je l’en crois, mes fers vont se briser,
Mais suis deux hivers pris.

Fiers ennemis, dont le cœur est si vain,
Pour guerrayer, attendez donc la fin
De mes ennemis; me trouverez enfin,
Dites-le leur, Chail et Pensavin,
Chers troubadours, qui me plaignez en vain
Car suis deux hivers pris.

Among the most distinguished troubadours, we find the names of Arnaud de
Marveil, and of Arnaud Daniel, celebrated by Petrarch and Dante, Rambaud
de Vaqueiras, and Pierre Vidal, both warriors and poets, and Pierre
Cardinal, the satirist of Provence. The Provençal literature does not
however appear to have produced any one great genius or lasting work.
Their poetry, indeed, did not aim at immortality; but appears to have
been considered chiefly as an ornamental appendage of courts, as the
indolent amusement of great lords and ladies. It consists, therefore,
entirely of occasional and fugitive pieces. The ambition of the poet
seems never to have reached higher than to express certain habitual
sentiments, or record passing events in agreeable verse, so as to
gratify himself or his immediate employers; and his genius never appears
to have received that high and powerful impulse, which makes the
unrestrained development of its own powers its ruling passion, and which
looks to future ages for its reward.

The Provençal poetry belongs, in its essence as well as form, to the
same class as the Eastern or Asiatic; that is, it has the same
constitutional warmth and natural gaiety, but without the same degree of
magnificence and force. During its most flourishing period, it made no
perceptible progress; and it has left few traces of its influence
behind. The civil wars of the Albigeois, the crusades which made the
Italian known to all the rest of Europe, and the establishment of the
court of Charles of Anjou, the new sovereign of Provence, at Naples,
were fatal to the cultivation of a literature which owed its
encouragement to political and local circumstances, and to the favour of
the great. M. Sismondi compares the effects of the Provençal poetry to
the northern lights, which illumine the darkness of the sky, and spread
their colours almost from pole to pole; but suddenly vanish, and leave
neither light nor heat behind them. After the literature of the
troubadours had disappeared from the country which gave it birth, it
lingered for a while in the kingdoms of Arragon and Catalonia, where it
was cultivated with success by Don Henri of Arragon, Marquis of Villera;
by Ausias, who has been called the Petrarch; and by Jean Martorell, the
Boccacio of the Provençal tongue, and the well-known author of the
history of Tirante the White, which is preserved by Cervantes with such
marks of respect, when Don Quixote’s library is condemned to the flames.

Our author next enters at great length, and with much acuteness, into
the literature of the North of France, or the _Roman Wallon_, which
succeeded the Provençal. The great glory of the writers of this
language, was the invention of the romances of chivalry. M. Sismondi
divides these romances into three classes or periods, and supposes them
all to be of Norman origin, in contradiction to the very general theory
which traces them to the Arabs or Moors. The first class relates to the
exploits of King Arthur, the son of Pendragon, and the last British king
who defended England against the Anglo-Saxons. It is at the court of
this king, and of his wife Geneura, that we meet with the enchanter
Merlin, and the institution of the Round Table, and all the Preux
chevaliers, Tristram de Leonois, Launcelot of the Lake, and many others.
The romance of Launcelot of the Lake was begun by Chretien de Troyes,
and continued, after his death, by Godfrey de Ligny: that of Tristram,
the son of King Meliadus of Leonois, the first that was written in
prose, and which is the most frequently cited by the old authors, was
composed in 1190 by one of the _trouveres_ or Northern troubadours,
whose name is unknown. The second class of chivalrous romances, is that
which commences with Amadis of Gaul, the hero of lovers, of which the
events are more fabulous, and the origin more uncertain. There are
numerous imitations of this work, Amadis of Greece, Florismarte of
Hircania, Galaor, Florestan, Esplandian, which are considered as of
Spanish origin, and which were in their greatest vogue at the time of
the appearance of Don Quixote. The third class considered by our author,
as undoubtedly of French origin, relates to the court of Charlemagne and
his peers. The most antient monument of the marvellous history of
Charlemagne, is the chronicle of Turpin, or Tilpin, Archbishop of
Rheims. Both the name of the author and the date are, however, doubtful.
It relates to the last expedition of Charlemagne into Spain, to which he
had been miraculously invited by St. Jacques of Galicia, and to the wars
of the Christians against the Moors. M. Sismondi is inclined to refer
this composition to the period when Alphonso VI. king of Castile and
Leon, achieved, in the year 1085, the conquest of New Castile and
Toledo.

‘He was followed,’ it is said, ‘in this triumphant expedition, by a
great number of French chevaliers, who passed the Pyrenees to combat the
infidels by the side of a great king, and to see the Cid, the hero of
his age. The war against the Moors in Spain was then undertaken from a
spirit of religious zeal, very different from that which, twelve years
later, kindled the first crusade. Its object professedly was, to carry
succour to neighbours, to brothers who adored the same God, and who
revenged common injuries, of which the romancer seemed to wish to recal
the remembrance: whereas the end of the first crusade was to deliver the
Holy Sepulchre, to recover the inheritance of our Lord, and to bring
assistance to God rather than man, as one of the troubadours expressed
it. This zeal for the Holy Sepulchre, this devotion pointing towards the
East, appears nowhere in the Chronicle of Archbishop Turpin; which,
nevertheless, is animated by a burning fanaticism, and full of all sorts
of miracles. This chronicle, however fabulous, cannot itself be
considered as a romance. It consists alternately of incredible feats of
arms, and of miracles, of monkish superstition and monkish credulity. We
find there several instances of enchantment: the formidable sword of
Roland, Durandal, with every stroke opens a wound: Ferragus is all over
enchanted and invulnerable: the dreadful horn of Roland, which he sounds
at Roncesvalles to call for succour, is heard as far as St. Jean Pied de
Port, where Charlemagne was with his army; but the traitor Ganeton
prevents the monarch from giving assistance to his nephew. Roland,
losing all hope, is himself desirous to break his sword, that it may not
fall into the hands of the infidels, and thus hereafter bathe itself in
the blood of Christians: he strikes it against tall trees, against
rocks—but nothing can resist the enchanted blade, guided by an arm so
powerful; the oaks are overturned, the rocks are shattered in pieces,
and Durandal remains entire. Roland at last thrusts it up to the hilt in
a hard rock, and twisting it with violence, breaks it between his hands.
Then he again sounds his horn, not to demand succour from the
Christians, but to announce to them his last hour; and he blows it with
such violence, that his veins burst, and he dies covered with his own
blood. All this is sufficiently poetical, and indicates a brilliant
imagination; but in order to its being a romance of chivalry, it was
necessary that love and women should be introduced—and there is no
allusion made to one or the other.’ p. 289.

This, we think, is rather an arbitrary decision of our author, and
certainly does not prove that the work is not a romance of any kind. He
concludes this chapter in the following manner.

‘But all these extraordinary facts, which in the Chronicle of Turpin
passed for history, were consigned soon after to the regions of romance,
when the crusades were finished, and had made us acquainted with the
East, at the end of the thirteenth century, and during the reign of
Philip the Hardy. The king at arms of this monarch, Adenez, wrote in
verse the romance of _Berthe-au-grandpied_; the mother of Charlemagne,
that of Ogier the Dane, and Cleomadis. Huon de Villeneuve wrote the
history of Renaud de Montauban. The four sons of Aymon, Huon de
Bourdeaux, Doolin de Mayence, Morgante the giant, Maugis the christian
magician, and several other heroes of this illustrious court, were
celebrated then or afterwards by romancers, who have placed in broad day
all the characters, and all the events of this period of glory, of which
the divine poem of Ariosto has consecrated the mythology.—The creation
of this brilliant romantic chivalry, was completed at the end of the
thirteenth century; all that essentially characterizes it, is to be
found in the romances of Adenez. His chevaliers no longer wandered, like
those of the Round Table, through gloomy forests in a country half
civilized, and which seemed always covered with storms and snow: the
entire universe was expanded before their eyes, The Holy Land was the
grand object of their pilgrimage: but by it they entered into
communication with the fine and rich countries of the East. Their
geography was as confused as all their other knowledge. Their voyages
from Spain to Cathay, from Denmark to Tunis, were made, it is true, with
a facility, a rapidity more astonishing than the enchantments of Maugis
or Morgana: but these fanciful voyages afforded the romance writers the
means of embellishing their recitals with the most brilliant colours.
All the softness and the perfumes of the countries, the most favoured by
nature, were at their disposal: All the pomp and magnificence of
Damascus, of Bagdad, and Constantinople, might be made use of to adorn
the triumph of their heroes; and an acquisition more precious still, was
the imagination itself of the people of the East and South; that
imagination, so brilliant, so various, which was employed to give life
to the sombre mythology of the North. The fairies were no longer hideous
sorceresses, the objects of the fear and hatred of the people, but the
rivals or the friends of those enchanters, who disposed in the east of
Solomon’s ring, and of the genii who were attached to it. To the art of
prolonging life, they had joined that of augmenting its enjoyments: they
were in some sort the priestesses of nature and of its pleasures. At
their voice, magnificent palaces arose in the deserts; enchanted
gardens, groves, perfumed with orange-trees and myrtles, appeared in the
midst of burning sands, or on barren rocks in the middle of the sea.
Gold, diamonds, pearls, covered their garments, or the inside of their
palaces: and their love, far from being reputed sacrilegious, was often
the sweetest recompense of the toils of the warrior. It was thus that
Ogier the Dane, the valiant paladin of Charlemagne, was received by the
fairy Morgana in her castle of Avalon. She placed on his head the fatal
crown of gold, covered with precious stones, and leaves of laurel,
myrtle, and roses, to which was attached the gift of immortal youth,
and, at the same time, the oblivion of every other sentiment than the
love of Morgana. From this moment the hero no longer remembered the
court of Charlemagne; nor the glory which he had acquired in France; nor
the crowns of Denmark, of England, Acre, Babylon, and Jerusalem, which
he had worn in succession; nor all the battles he had fought, nor the
number of giants he had vanquished. He passed two hundred years with
Morgana in the intoxication of love, without being sensible of the
flight of time; and when, by chance, his crown fell off into a fountain,
and his memory was restored, he thought Charlemagne still living, and
demanded with impatience, tidings of the brave paladins, his companions
in arms. In reading this elegant fiction, we easily discover, that it
was written after the Crusades had opened a communication between the
people of the East and those of the West, and had enriched the French
with all the treasures of the Arabian imagination!’

M. Sismondi also justly ascribes the invention of the Mysteries, the
first modern efforts of the dramatic art, to the French; but the
inference which he draws from it, that this was owing to the great
dramatic genius of that people, must excite a smile in many of his
readers. For, certainly, if there ever was a nation utterly and
universally incapable of forming a conception of any other manners or
characters than those which exist among themselves, it is the French.
The learned author is right, however, in saying that the Mystery of the
Passions, and the moralities performed by the French company of players,
laid the foundation of the drama in various parts of Europe, and also
suggested the first probable hint of the plan of the _Divine Comedy_ of
Dante; but it is not right to say that the merit of this last work
consists at all in the design. The design is clumsy, mechanical, and
monotonous; the invention is in the style.

We have hitherto followed M. Sismondi in his account of the progress of
modern literature, before the Italian language had been made the vehicle
of poetical composition, and before the revival of letters. The details
which he gives on the last subject, and the extraordinary picture he
presents of the pains and labour undergone by the scholars of that day
in recovering antient manuscripts, and the remains of antient art, are
highly interesting. It is from this important event, and also from the
work of Dante, the first lasting monument of modern genius, that we
should strictly date the origin of modern literature; and, indeed, it
would not be difficult to show, that it is still the emulation of the
antients, working, indeed, on very different materials, from different
principles, and with very different results, that has been the great
moving spring of the grandest efforts of human genius in our own times.
Our author next follows the progress of the Italian language,
particularly at the court of the Sicilian Monarchs, to the period of
which we are speaking. He thus introduces his account of the first great
name in modern literature.

‘Nevertheless, no poet had as yet powerfully affected the mind, no
philosopher had penetrated the depths of thought and sentiment, when the
greatest of the Italians, the father of their poetry, Dante, appeared,
and showed to the world how a powerful genius is able to arrange the
gross materials prepared for him, in such a manner as to rear from them
an edifice, magnificent as the universe, of which it was the image.
Instead of love songs, addressed to an imaginary mistress,—instead of
madrigals, full of cold conceits,—of sonnets painfully harmonious,—or
allegories false and forced, the only models which Dante had before his
eyes in any modern tongue, he conceived in his mind an image of the
whole invisible world, and unveiled it to the eyes of his astonished
readers. In the country, indeed, of Dante, that is, at Florence, on the
1st of May, 1304,’ (our author says), ‘all the sufferings of hell were
placed before the eyes of the people, at a horrible representation
appointed for a festival day; the first idea of which was no doubt taken
from the Inferno. The bed of the river Arno was to represent the gulf of
hell; and all the variety of torments which the imagination of monks or
of the poet had invented, streams of boiling pitch, flames, ice,
serpents, were inflicted on real persons, whose cries and groans
rendered the illusion complete to the spectators.

‘The subject, then, which Dante chose for his immortal poem, when he
undertook to celebrate the invisible world, and the three kingdoms of
the dead, hell, purgatory, and paradise, was in that age the most
popular of all; at once the most profoundly religious, and the most
closely allied to the love of country, of glory, and of party-feelings,
inasmuch as all the illustrious dead were to appear on this
extraordinary theatre; and in short, by its immensity, the most loftily
sublime of any which the mind of man has ever conceived. The
commentaries on Dante, left us by Boccace and others, furnish a new
proof of the superiority of this great man. We are there astonished to
find his professed admirers unable to appreciate his real grandeur.
Dante himself, as well as his commentators, attaches his excellence to
purity and correctness: yet he is neither pure nor correct; but he is _a
creator_. His characters walk and breathe; his pictures are nature
itself; his language always speaks to the imagination, as well as to the
understanding; and there is scarcely a stanza in his poem, which might
not be represented with the pencil.’

M. Sismondi seems to have understood the great poet of Italy little
better than his other commentators; and indeed the _Divine Comedy_ must
completely baffle the common rules of French criticism, which always
seeks for excellence in the external image, and never in the internal
power and feeling. But Dante is nothing but power, passion, self-will.
In all that relates to the imitative part of poetry, he bears no
comparison with many other poets; but there is a gloomy abstraction in
his conceptions, which lies like a dead-weight upon the mind; a
benumbing stupor from the intensity of the impression; a terrible
obscurity like that which oppresses us in dreams; an identity of
interest which moulds every object to its own purposes, and clothes all
things with the passions and imaginations of the human soul, that make
amends for all other deficiencies. Dante is a striking instance of the
essential excellences and defects of modern genius. The immediate
objects he presents to the mind, are not much in themselves;—they
generally want grandeur, beauty, and order; but they become every thing
by the force of the character which he impresses on them. His mind lends
its own power to the objects which it contemplates, instead of borrowing
it from them. He takes advantage even of the nakedness and dreary
vacuity of his subject. His imagination peoples the shades of death, and
broods over the barren vastnesses of illimitable space. In point of
diction and style, he is the severest of all writers, the most opposite
to the flowery and glittering—who relies most on his own power, and the
sense of power in the reader—who leaves most to the imagination.[2]

Dante’s only object is to interest; and he interests only by exciting
our sympathy with the emotion by which he is himself possessed. He does
not place before us the objects by which that emotion has been excited;
but he seizes on the attention, by showing us the effect they produce on
his feelings; and his poetry accordingly frequently gives us the
thrilling and overwhelming sensation which is caught by gazing on the
face of a person who has seen some object of horror. The improbability
of the events, the abruptness and monotony in the Inferno, are
excessive; but the interest never flags, from the intense earnestness of
the author’s mind. Dante, as well as Milton, appears to have been
indebted to the writers of the old Testament for the gloomy tone of his
mind, for the prophetic fury which exalts and kindles his poetry. But
there is more deep-working passion in Dante, and more imagination in
Milton. Milton, more perhaps than any other poet, elevated his subject,
by combining image with image in lofty gradation. Dante’s great power is
in combining internal feelings with familiar objects. Thus the gate of
Hell, on which that withering inscription is written, seems to be
endowed with speech and consciousness, and to utter its dread warning,
not without a sense of mortal woes. The beauty to be found in Dante is
of the same severe character, or mixed with deep sentiment. The story of
Geneura, to which we have just alluded, is of this class. So is the
affecting apostrophe, addressed to Dante by one of his countrymen, whom
he meets in the other world.

‘Sweet is the dialect of Arno’s vale!
Though half consumed, I gladly turn to hear.’

And another example, even still finer, if any thing could be finer, is
his description of the poets and great men of antiquity, whom he
represents ‘serene and smiling,’ though in the shades of death,

——‘because on earth their names
In fame’s eternal records shine for aye.’

This is the finest idea ever given of the love of fame.

Dante habitually unites the absolutely local and individual with the
greatest wildness and mysticism. In the midst of the obscure and shadowy
regions of the lower world, a tomb suddenly rises up, with this
inscription, ‘I am the tomb of Pope Anastasius the Sixth’:—and half the
personages whom he has crowded into the Inferno are his own
acquaintance. All this tends to heighten the effect by the bold
intermixture of realities, and the appeal, as it were, to the individual
knowledge and experience of the reader. There are occasional striking
images in Dante—but these are exceptions; and besides, they are striking
only from the weight of consequences attached to them. The imagination
of the poet retains and associates the objects of nature, not according
to their external forms, but their inward qualities or powers; as when
Satan is compared to a cormorant. It is not true, then, that Dante’s
excellence consists in natural description or dramatic invention. His
characters are indeed ‘instinct with life’ and sentiment; but it is with
the life and sentiment of the poet. In themselves they have little or no
dramatic variety, except what arises immediately from the historical
facts mentioned; and they afford, in our opinion, very few subjects for
picture. There is indeed one gigantic one, that of Count Ugolino, of
which Michael Angelo made a bas-relief, and which Sir Joshua Reynolds
ought not to have painted. Michael Angelo was naturally an admirer of
Dante, and has left a sonnet to his memory.

The Purgatory and Paradise are justly characterised by our author as ‘a
falling off’ from the Inferno. He however points out a number of
beautiful passages in both these divisions of the poem. That in which
the poet describes his ascent into heaven, completely marks the
character of his mind. He employs no machinery, or supernatural agency,
for this purpose; but mounts aloft ‘by the sole strength of his
desires—fixing an intense regard on the orbit of the sun’! This great
poet was born at Florence in 1265, of the noble family of the
Alighieri—and died at Ravenna, September 14th, 1321. Like Milton, he was
unfortunate in his political connexions, and, what is worse, in those of
his private life. He had a few imitators after his death, but none of
any eminence.

M. Sismondi professes to have a prejudice against Petrarch. In this he
is not, as he supposes, singular; but we suspect that he is wrong. He
seems to have reasoned on a very common, but very false hypothesis, that
because there is a great deal of false wit and affectation in Petrarch’s
style, he is therefore without sentiment. The sentiment certainly does
not consist in the conceits;—but is it not there in spite of them? The
fanciful allusions, and the quaintnesses of style lie on the surface;
and it is sometimes found convenient to make these an excuse for not
seeking after that which lies deeper and is of more value.[3] It has
been well observed, by a contemporary critic, that notwithstanding the
adventitious ornaments with which their style is encumbered, there is
more truth and feeling in Cowley and Sir Philip Sidney, than in a host
of insipid and merely natural writers. It is not improbable, that if
Shakespeare had written nothing but his sonnets and smaller poems, he
would, for the same reason, have been assigned to the class of cold,
artificial writers, who had no genuine sense of nature or passion. Yet,
taking his plays for a guide to our decision, it requires no very great
sagacity or boldness to discover that his other poems contain a rich
vein of thought and sentiment. We apprehend it is the same with
Petrarch. The sentiments themselves are often of the most pure and
natural kind, even where the expression is the most laboured and
far-fetched. Nor does it follow, that this artificial and scholastic
style was the result of affectation in the author. All pedantry is not
affectation. Inveterate habit is not affectation. The technical jargon
of professional men is not affectation in them: for it is the language
with which their ideas have the strongest associations. Milton’s
Classical Pedantry was perfectly involuntary: it was the style in which
he was accustomed to think and feel; and it would have required an
effort to have expressed himself otherwise. The scholastic style is not
indeed the natural style of the passion or sentiment of love; but it is
quite false to argue, that an author did not feel this passion because
he expressed himself in the usual language in which this and all other
passions were expressed, in the particular age and country in which he
lived. On the contrary, the more true and profound the feeling itself
was, the more it might be supposed to be identified with his other
habits and pursuits—to tinge all his thoughts, and to put in requisition
every faculty of his soul—to give additional perversity to his wit,
subtlety to his understanding, and extravagance to his expressions. Like
all other strong passions, it seeks to express itself in exaggerations,
and its characteristic is less to be simple than emphatic. The language
of love was never more finely expressed than in the play of Romeo and
Juliet; and yet assuredly the force or beauty of that language does not
arise from its simplicity. It is the fine rapturous enthusiasm of
youthful sensibility, which tries all ways to express its emotions, and
finds none of them half tender or extravagant enough. The sonnet of
Petrarch lamenting the death of Laura,[4] which is quoted by M.
Sismondi, and of which he complains as having ‘too much wit,’ would be a
justification of these remarks; not to mention numberless others.

M. Sismondi wishes that the connexion between Petrarch and Laura had
been more intimate, and his passion accompanied with more interesting
circumstances. The whole is in better keeping as it is. The love of a
man like Petrarch would have been less in character, if it had been less
ideal. For the purposes of inspiration, a single interview was quite
sufficient. The smile which sank into his heart the first time he ever
beheld her, played round her lips ever after: the look with which her
eyes first met his, never passed away. The image of his mistress still
haunted his mind, and was recalled by every object in nature. Even death
could not dissolve the fine illusion: for that which exists in the
imagination is alone imperishable. As our feelings become more ideal,
the impression of the moment indeed becomes less violent; but the effect
is more general and permanent. The blow is felt only by reflection; it
is the rebound that is fatal. We are not here standing up for this kind
of Platonic attachment; but only endeavouring to explain the way in
which the passions very commonly operate in minds accustomed to draw
their strongest interests from constant contemplation.

Petrarch is at present chiefly remembered for his sonnets, and the
passion which they celebrate: he was equally distinguished in his
lifetime by his Latin poems, and as one of the great restorers of
learning. The following account of him is in many respects interesting.

‘Petrarch, the son of a Florentine who had been exiled as well as Dante,
was born at Arezzo, in the night of the 19th of July 1304, and died at
Arqua, near Padua, the 18th July 1374. He had been, during the century
of which his life occupied three-fourths, the centre of all the Italian
literature. Passionately fond of letters, history, and poetry, and an
enthusiastic admirer of antiquity, he communicated by his discourse, his
writings, and his example, to all his contemporaries, that impulse
towards research and the study of the Latin manuscripts, which so
particularly distinguished the fourteenth century; which preserved the
_chef-d’œuvres_ of the classic writers, at the moment when, perhaps,
they were about to be lost for ever; and which changed, by means of
these admirable models, the whole march of the human mind. Petrarch,
tormented by the passion which has contributed so much to his celebrity,
wishing to fly from himself, or to vary his thoughts by the distraction
of different objects, travelled during almost the whole course of his
life. He explored France, Germany, all the states of Italy: he visited
Spain: and, in a continual activity directed to the discovery of the
monuments of antiquity, he associated himself with all the learned, and
with all the poets and philosophers of his time. From one end of Europe
to the other, he made them concur in this great object; he directed
their pursuits; and his correspondence became the magic chain which for
the first time united the whole literary republic of Europe. The age in
which he lived was that of small states. No sovereign had as yet
established any of those colossal empires, the authority of which makes
itself dreaded by nations of different languages. On the contrary, each
country was divided into a great number of sovereignties; and the
monarch of a small city was without power at a distance of thirty
leagues, and unknown at the distance of a hundred. But the more
political power was circumscribed, the more the glory of letters was
extended: and Petrarch, the friend of Azzo of Correggio, prince of
Parma, of Luchin and of Galeazzi Visconti, princes of Milan, and of
Francis of Carrara, prince of Padua, was better known and more respected
by Europe at large than all these sovereigns. The universal glory which
his great knowledge had procured him, and which he directed to the
service of letters, also frequently called him into the political
career. No man of learning, or poet, has ever been charged with so great
a number of embassies to so many great potentates,—the emperor, the
Pope, the king of France, the senate of Venice, and all the princes of
Italy: and, what is remarkable, is, that Petrarch did not fulfil those
missions as belonging to the state with whose interests he was charged,
but as belonging to all Europe. He received his title from his glory;
and when he treated between different powers, it was almost as an
arbiter whose suffrage each was desirous to secure with posterity. In
fine, he gave to his age that enthusiasm for the beauties of antiquity,
that veneration for learning, which renovated its character, and
determined that of all succeeding times. It was in some sort in the name
of grateful Europe, that Petrarch was crowned in the Capitol by the
senator of Rome, the 8th of April 1341; and this triumph, the most
glorious which has ever been decreed to any one, was not disproportioned
to the influence which this great man has exerted over the ages which
succeeded him.’

Boccacio was also one of the most indefatigable and successful of the
restorers of ancient learning; and is classed by M. Sismondi as one of
the three inventors of modern letters,—having done for Italian prose
what Dante and Petrarch had done for Italian poetry. He was born at
Paris in 1313, the son of a Florentine merchant; and died at Certaldo,
in Tuscany, in the house of his forefathers, 21st December 1375, at the
age of sixty-two years. He wrote epic poems and theology: But his Tales
are his great work.

‘The Decameron,’ says our author, ‘the work to which, in the present
day, Boccacio owes his high celebrity, is a collection of a hundred
novels, which he has arranged in an ingenious manner, by supposing, that
in the dreadful plague in 1348, a society of men and women, who had
retired into the country to avoid the contagion, had imposed on
themselves an obligation, for ten days together, to recite each a novel
a day. The company consisted of ten persons; and the number of novels
is, of course, a hundred. The description of the delicious country round
Florence, where these joyous hermits took up their abode,—that of their
walks—their festivals—their repasts, has given Boccacio an opportunity
to display all the riches of a style the most flexible and graceful. The
novels themselves, which are varied with infinite art, both as to the
subject and manner, from the most touching and tender to the most
playful, and unfortunately also to the most licentious, demonstrate his
talent for recounting in every style and tone. His description of the
plague of Florence, which serves as the introduction, ranks as one of
the finest historical portraits which any age has left us. Finally, that
which constitutes the glory of Boccacio, is the perfect purity of the
language, the elegance, the grace, and above all, the _naïveté_ of the
style, which is the highest merit of this class of writing, and the
peculiar charm of the Italian language.’

All this is true; though it might be said of many other authors: But
what ought to have been said of him is, that there is in Boccacio’s
serious pieces a truth, a pathos, and an exquisite refinement of
sentiment, which is not to be met with in any other prose writer
whatever. We think M. Sismondi has missed a fine opportunity of doing
the author of the Decameron that justice which 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 the early
popularity of his 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 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 masterpieces. 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. Several of
Shakespeare’s plots are taken from Boccacio; and indeed he has furnished
subjects to numberless writers since his time, both dramatic and
narrative. The story of Griselda is borrowed from the Decameron by
Chaucer; as is the knight’s Tale (Palamon and Arcite) from his poem of
the Theseid.

M. Sismondi follows the progress of Italian literature with great
accuracy and judgment, from this period to that of their epic and
romantic writers. Pulci and Boyardo preceded Ariosto and Tasso. It has
been observed that there is a great resemblance between the style of
Pulci’s Morganti Maggiore and that of Voltaire. Thus, one of the
personages in his poem being questioned as to the articles of his faith,
says, that ‘he believes in a fat capon and a bottle of wine.’ His hero
Rolando arriving at the gate of a monastery, on which some giants
showered down fragments of rocks from the neighbouring mountain every
night and morning, is advised by the Abbot to make haste in, ‘for that
the manna is going to fall!’ This kind of levity of allusion, was
characteristic of the literature of the age. One of these giants, to
wit, Morganti, is converted by Orlando; but makes a very indifferent
Christian after all. This writer has a certain familiar sarcastic gaiety
in common with Ariosto, but none of his enthusiasm or elevation. The
Orlando Amoroso of Boyardo, who was governor of Reggio, and one of the
courtiers of Duke Hercules of Ferrara, was the foundation of Ariosto’s
poem.

‘This poem,’ says our author, ‘which is at present known only from the
more modern edition of Berni, who revised it sixty years after, is
superior to that of Pulci, in the variety and novelty of the adventures,
the richness of the colouring, and in the interest it excites. The women
here appear, what they ought to be in a romance, the soul of the work;
Angelica here shows herself in all her charms, and with all her power
over the bravest knights. All those warriors, whether Moors or
Christians, whose names have become almost historical, received from
Boyardo their existence, and the characters which they have preserved
ever since. We are told that he took the names of several, as Gradasso,
Sacripant, Agramant, Mandiscardo, from those of his vassals at his
estate of Scandiano, where these families still remain: but it seems he
wished for a still more sounding name for the most redoubtable of his
Moorish chiefs. While on a hunting party, that of Rodomont came into his
mind. On the instant he returned full gallop to his chateau, and had the
bells rung and the cannon fired in sign of a fete, to the great
astonishment of the peasants, to whom this new saint was quite unknown.
The style of Boyardo did not correspond with the vivacity of his
imagination: It is little laboured; the verse is harsh and tedious; and
it was not without reason that in the following age it was judged proper
to give a new form to his work.’

The account given of Ariosto and Tasso is in general correct as to the
classification of their different styles, and the enumeration of their
particular excellences or defects; but we should be inclined to give the
preference in the contrary way. Ariosto’s excellence is (what it is here
described) infinite grace and gaiety. He has fine animal spirits, an
heroic disposition, sensibility mixed with vivacity, an eye for nature,
great rapidity of narration and facility of style, and, above all, a
genius buoyant, and with wings like the Griffin-horse of Rogero, which
he turns and winds at pleasure. He never labours under his subject;
never pauses; but is always setting out on fresh exploits. Indeed, his
excessive desire not to overdo any thing, has led him to resort to the
unnecessary expedient of constantly breaking off in the middle of his
story, and going on to something else. His work is in this respect worse
than Tristram Shandy; for there the progress of the narrative is
interrupted by some incident, in a dramatic or humorous shape; but here
the whole fault lies with the author. The Orlando Furioso is a tissue of
these separate stories, crossing and jostling one another; and is
therefore very inferior, in the general construction of the plot, to the
Jerusalem Delivered. But the incidents in Ariosto are more lively, the
characters more real, the language purer, the colouring more natural:
even the sentiments show at least as much feeling, with less appearance
of affectation. There is less effort, less display, a less imposing use
made of the common ornaments of style and artifices of composition.
Tasso was the more accomplished writer, Ariosto the greater genius.
There is nothing in Tasso which is not to be found, in the same or a
higher degree, in others: Ariosto’s merits were his own. The perusal of
the one leaves a peculiar and very high relish behind it; there is a
vapidness in the other, which palls at the time, and goes off sooner
afterwards. Tasso indeed sets before us a dessert of melons, mingled
with roses:—but it is not the first time of its being served up:—the
flowers are rather faded, and the fruit has lost its freshness. Ariosto
writes on as it happens, from the interest of his subject, or the
impulse of his own mind. He is intent only on the adventure he has in
hand,—the circumstances which might be supposed to attend it, the
feelings which would naturally arise out of it. He attaches himself to
his characters for their own sakes; and relates their achievements for
the mere pleasure he has in telling them. This method is certainly
liable to great disadvantages; but we on the whole prefer it to the
obtrusive artifices of style shown in the Jerusalem,—where the author
seems never to introduce any character but as a foil to some
other,—makes one situation a contrast to the preceding, and his whole
poem a continued antithesis in style, action, sentiment, and imagery. A
fierce is opposed to a tender, a blasphemous to a pious character. A
lover kills his mistress in disguise, and a husband and wife are
represented defending their lives, by a pretty ambiguity of situation
and sentiment, warding off the blows which are aimed, not at their own
breasts, but at each other’s. The same love of violent effect sometimes
produces grossness of character, as in Armida, who is tricked out with
all the ostentatious trappings of a prostitute. Tasso has more of what
is usually called poetry than Ariosto—that is, more tropes and
ornaments, and a more splendid and elaborate diction. The latter is
deficient in all these:—the figures and comparisons he introduces do not
elevate or adorn that which they are brought to illustrate: they are,
for the most part, mere parallel cases; and his direct description,
simple and striking as it uniformly is, seems to us of a far higher
order of merit than the ingenious allusions of his rival. We cannot,
however, agree with M. Sismondi, that there is a want of sentiment in
Ariosto, or that he excels only as a painter of objects, or a narrator
of events. The instance which he gives from the story of Isabella, is an
exception to his general power. The episodes of Herminia, and of Tancred
and Clorinda, in Tasso, are exquisitely beautiful; but they do not come
up, in romantic interest or real passion, to the loves of Angelica and
Medoro. We might instance, to the same purpose, the character of
Bradamante;—the spirited apostrophe to knighthood, ‘Oh ancient knights
of true and noble heart;’—that to Orlando, Sacripant, and the other
lovers of Angelica—or the triumph of Medoro—the whole progress of
Orlando’s passion, and the still more impressive description of his
sudden recovery from his fatal infatuation, after the restoration of his
senses. Perhaps the finest thing in Tasso is the famous description of
Carthage, as the warriors pass by it in the enchanted bark. ‘Giace
l’alta Cartago,’ &c. This passage, however, belongs properly to the
class of lofty philosophical eloquence; it owes its impressiveness to
the grandeur of the general ideas, and not to the force of individual
feeling, or immediate passion. The speech of Satan to his companions is
said to have suggested the tone of Milton’s character of the Devil. But
we see nothing in common in the fiend of the two poets. Tasso describes
his as a mere deformed monster. Milton was the first poet who had the
magnanimity to paint the devil without horns and a tail; to give him
personal beauty and intellectual grandeur, with only moral deformity.

The life of Tasso is one of the most interesting in the world. Its last
unfortunate events are related thus by our author.—

‘Tasso, admitted into the society of the great, thought himself
sufficiently their equal, to fall in love with women of rank; and found
himself sufficiently their inferior, to suffer from the consequences of
his passion. His writings inform us, that he was attached to a lady of
the name of Leonora: but it would seem that he was alternately in love
with Leonora of Este, sister to the Duke Alphonso; with Leonora of San
Vitale, wife of Julius of Tiena; and with Lucretia Bendidio, one of the
maids of honour to the princess.... It is said, that one day being at
court with the Duke and the Princess Leonora, he was so struck with the
beauty of the lady, that, in a transport of love, he approached her
suddenly, and embraced her in the eyes of the whole assembly. The Duke,
turning coldly to his courtiers, said to them—“What a pity that so great
a man should have gone mad!” and on this pretence, had him confined in
the hospital of St. Anne, a receptacle for lunatics at Ferrara. His
confinement disordered his imagination. His body was enfeebled by the
agitation of his mind; he believed himself by turns poisoned, or
tormented by witchcraft; he fancied that he saw dreadful apparitions,
and passed whole nights in painful watchfulness. He addressed letters of
complaint to all his friends, to all the princes of Italy, to the city
of Bergamo his native place, to the emperor, to the holy office at Rome,
imploring their pity and his liberty. To add to his misfortunes, his
poem was published without his permission, from an imperfect copy. He
remained confined in the hospital seven years; during which, the
numerous writings that proceeded from his pen, could not convince
Alphonso II. that he was in his senses. The princes of Italy in vain
interposed for his release, which the Duke refused to grant, chiefly to
mortify his rivals, the Medici. At length, he was released from his
captivity at the instance of Vincent de Gonzago, Prince of Mantua, on
the occasion of the marriage of the sister of this nobleman with the
unrelenting Alphonso.’

It was during this melancholy interval, that he was seen by Montaigne in
his confinement, who, after some striking reflections on the
vicissitudes of genius, says,—‘I rather envied than pitied him, when I
saw him at Ferrara in so piteous a plight, that he survived himself;
misacknowledging both himself and his labours, which, unwitting to him,
and even to his face, have been published both uncorrected and
maimed!’—Tasso died at Rome in 1599, when he was fifty-one years old.
After the Jerusalem, the most celebrated of his works, is his pastoral
poem of Aminta, on which the Pastor Fido of Guarini is considered by M.
Sismondi as an improvement. He published both comedies and tragedies. He
composed a tragedy, called _Il Torrismondo_, while in prison, and
dedicated it to his liberator, the Prince of Mantua. The concluding
chorus of this tragedy possesses the most profound pathos; and the poet,
in writing it, had evidently an eye to his own misfortunes and his
glory, which he saw, or thought he saw, vanishing from him—‘Like the
swift Alpine torrent, like the sudden lightning in the calm night, like
the passing wind, the melting vapour, or the winged arrow, so vanishes
our fame; and all our glory is but a fading flower. What then can we
hope, or what expect more? After triumphs and palms, all that remains
for the soul, is strife and lamentation, and regret; neither love nor
friendship can avail us aught, but only tears and grief!’

We have thus gone through M. Sismondi’s account of the great Italian
poets; and should now proceed to the consideration of their more modern
brethren of the drama, and of the Spanish and Portuguese writers in
general: But we cannot go on with this splendid catalogue of foreigners,
without feeling ourselves drawn to the native glories of two of our own
writers, who were certainly indebted in a great degree to the early
poets of Italy, and must be considered as belonging to the same
school.—We mean Chaucer and Spenser—who are now, we are afraid, as
little known to the ordinary run of English readers as their tuneful
contemporaries in the South. To those among our own countrymen who agree
with M. Sismondi in considering the reign of Queen Anne as the golden
period of English poetry, it may afford some amusement at least to
accompany us for a little in these antiquarian researches.

Though Spenser was much later than Chaucer, his obligations to preceding
poets were less. He has in some measure borrowed the plan of his poem
from Ariosto; but he has engrafted upon it an exuberance of fancy, and
an endless voluptuousness of sentiment, which are not to be found in the
Italian writer.—Farther, Spenser is even more of an inventor in the
subject-matter. There is a richness and variety in his allegorical
personages and fictions, which almost vies with the splendour of the
ancient mythology. If Ariosto transports us into the regions of romance,
Spenser’s poetry is all fairy-land. In Ariosto, we walk upon the ground,
in a company, gay, fantastic, and adventurous enough; in Spenser, we
wander in another world among ideal beings. The poet takes and lays us
in the lap of a lovelier nature, by the sound of softer streams, among
greener hills, and fairer valleys. He paints nature, not as we find it,
but as we expected to find it; and fulfils the deluding promise of our
youth. He waves his wand of enchantment,—and at once embodies airy
beings, and throws a delicious veil over all actual objects. The two
worlds of reality and of fiction, seem poised on the wings of his
imagination. His ideas indeed seem always more distinct than his
perceptions. He is the painter of abstractions, and describes them with
dazzling minuteness. In the Mask of Cupid, the god of love ‘claps on
high his coloured winges _twain_;’ and it is said of Gluttony in the
procession of the Passions,—

‘In green vine-leaves he was right fitly clad.’

At times he becomes picturesque from his intense love of beauty; as,
where he compares Prince Arthur’s crest to the appearance of the
almond-tree. The love of beauty, however, and not of truth, is the
moving principle of his mind; and his delineations are guided by no
principle but the impulse of an inexhaustible imagination. He luxuriates
equally in scenes of Eastern magnificence, or the still solitude of a
hermit’s cell—in the extremes of sensuality or refinement. With all
this, he neither makes us laugh nor weep. The only jest in his poem is
an allegory. But he has been falsely charged with a want of passion and
of strength. He has both in an immense degree. He has not indeed the
pathos of immediate action or suffering, which is the dramatic; but he
has all the pathos of sentiment and romance,—all that belongs to distant
objects of terror, and uncertain, imaginary distress. His strength, in
like manner, is not coarse and palpable,—but it assumes the character of
vastness and sublimity, seen through the same visionary medium, and
blended with all the appalling associations of preternatural agency. We
will only refer to the Cave of Mammon, and to the description of Celleno
in the Cave of Despair. The three first books of the Faery Queen are
very superior to the others. It is not fair to compare Spenser with
Shakespeare, in point of interest. A fairer comparison would be with
Comus. There is only one book of this allegorical kind which has more
interest than Spenser (with scarcely less imagination); and that is the
Pilgrim’s Progress.

It is not possible for any two writers to be more opposite than Spenser
and Chaucer. Spenser delighted in luxurious enjoyment;—Chaucer in severe
activity of mind. Spenser was, perhaps, the most visionary of all the
poets;—Chaucer the most a man of observation and of the world. He
appealed directly to the bosoms and business of men. He dealt only in
realities; and, relying throughout on facts or common tradition, could
always produce his vouchers in nature. His sentiment is not the
voluntary indulgence of the poet’s fancy, but is founded on the habitual
prejudices and passions of the very characters he introduces. His
poetry, therefore, is essentially picturesque and dramatic: In this he
chiefly differs from Boccacio, whose power was that of sentiment. The
picturesque and the dramatic in Chaucer, are in a great measure the same
thing; for he only describes external objects as connected with
character,—as the symbols of internal passion. The costume and dress of
the Canterbury pilgrims,—of the knight,—the ‘squire,—the gap-toothed
wife of Bath, speak for themselves. Again, the description of the
equipage and accoutrements of the two Kings of Thrace and Inde, in the
Knight’s Tale, are as striking and grand, as the others are lively and
natural. His descriptions of natural scenery are in the same style of
excellence;—their beauty consists in their truth and characteristic
propriety. They have a local freshness about them, which renders them
almost tangible; which gives the very feeling of the air, the coldness
or moisture of the ground. In other words, he describes inanimate
objects from the effect which they have on the mind of the spectator,
and as they have a reference to the interest of the story. One of the
finest parts of Chaucer is of this mixed kind. It is in the beginning of
the Flower and the Leaf, where he describes the delight of that young
beauty, 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. The coolness of the arbour,—its
retirement,—the early time of the day,—the sudden starting up of the
birds in the neighbouring bushes—the eager delight with which they
devour and rend the opening buds and flowers, are expressed with a truth
and feeling, which make the whole seem like the recollection of an
actual scene. Whoever compares this beautiful and simple passage with
Rousseau’s description of the Elisée in the New Eloise, will be able to
see the difference between good writing and fine writing, or between the
actual appearances of nature, and the progress of the feelings they
excite in us, and a parcel of words, images and sentiments thrown
together without meaning or coherence. We do not say this from any
feeling of disrespect to Rousseau, for whom we have a great affection;
but his imagination was not that of the poet or the painter. Severity
and boldness are the characteristics of the natural style: the
artificial is equally servile and ostentatious. Nature, after all, is
the soul of art:—and there is a strength in the imagination which
reposes immediately on nature, which nothing else can supply. It was
this trust in nature, and reliance on his subject, which enabled Chaucer
to describe the grief and patience of Griselda,—the faith of
Constance,—and the heroic perseverance of the little child, who, going
to school through the streets of Jewry,

‘Oh, _Alma redemptoris mater_, loudly sung,’

and who, after his death, still triumphed in his song. Chaucer has more
of this deep, internal, sustained sentiment than any other writer,
except Boccacio, to whom Chaucer owed much, though he did not owe all to
him: for he writes just as well where he did not borrow from that
quarter, as where he did; as in the characters of the Pilgrims,—the Wife
of Bath’s Prologue,—the ‘Squire’s Tale, and in innumerable others. The
poetry of Chaucer has a religious sanctity about it, connected with the
manners of the age. It has all the spirit of martyrdom!

In looking back to the _chef-d’œuvres_ of former times, we are sometimes
disposed to wonder at the little progress which has been made since in
poetry, and the arts of imitation in general. But this, perhaps, is a
foolish wonder. Nothing is more contrary to fact, than the supposition,
that in what we understand by the fine arts, as painting and poetry,
relative perfection is the result of repeated success; and that, what
has been once well done, constantly leads to something better. What is
mechanical, reducible to rule, or capable of demonstration, is indeed
progressive, and admits of gradual improvement: but that which is not
mechanical or definite, but depends on taste, genius, and feeling, very
soon becomes stationary or retrograde, after a certain period, 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 different, 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, &c., _i.e._ in things depending on
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 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, we infer, in the intoxication of our pride, and the height of
our self-congratulation, that the same progress has been made, 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 first birth of these arts, and lived in a state of
society which was in other respects rude and barbarous. Those arts which
depend on individual genius and incommunicable power, have almost 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 science and of art;—of the one, never to arrive at the
summit of perfection at all; and of the other, to arrive at it almost at
once. Homer, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Dante and Ariosto, (Milton
alone was of a later period, and not the worse for it),—Raphael, Titian,
Michael Angelo, Correggio, Cervantes and Boccacio—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
object 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 Poussin among painters. But in the earlier stages of
the arts, when the first mechanical difficulties had been got over, and
the language acquired, they rose by clusters and in constellations—never
so to rise again.

The arts of poetry and painting are conversant with the world of thought
within us, and of the world of sense without us—with what we know and
see and feel intimately. They flow from the living shrine of our own
breasts, and are kindled at the living lamp of Nature: But the pulse of
the passions assuredly beat as high—the depths and soundings of the
human heart were as well understood, three thousand or three hundred
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 since. But it
is their light, reflected by true genius on art, which marks out the
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.’

SCHLEGEL ON THE DRAMA

VOL. XXVI.] [_February 1816._

The work is German; and is to be received with the allowances which that
school of literature generally requires. With these, however, it will be
found a good work: and as we should be sorry to begin our account of it
with an unmeaning sneer, we will explain at once what appears to us to
be the weak side of German literature. In all that they do, it is
evident that they are much more influenced by a desire of distinction
than by any impulse of the imagination, or the consciousness of
extraordinary qualifications. They write, not because they are full of a
subject, but because they think it is a subject upon which, with due
pains and labour, something striking may be written. So they read and
meditate,—and having, at length, devised some strange and paradoxical
view of the matter, they set about establishing it with all their might
and main. The consequence is, that they have no shades of opinion, but
are always straining at a grand systematic conclusion. They have done a
great deal, no doubt, and in various departments; but their pretensions
have always much exceeded their performance. They are universal
undertakers, and complete encyclopedists, in all moral and critical
science. No question can come before them but they have a large
apparatus of logical and metaphysical principles ready to play off upon
it; and the less they know of the subject, the more formidable is the
use they make of their apparatus. In poetry, they have at one time gone
to the utmost lengths of violent effect,—and then turned round, with
equal extravagance, to the laborious production of no effect at all. The
truth is, that they are naturally a slow, heavy people; and can only be
put in motion by some violent and often repeated impulse, under the
operation of which they lose all control over themselves—and nothing can
stop them short of the last absurdity. Truth, in their view of it, is
never what is, but what, according to their system, _ought to be_.
Though they have dug deeply in the mine of knowledge, they have too
often confounded the dross and the ore, and counted their gains rather
by their weight than their quality. They are a little apt, we suspect,
literally to take the will for the deed,—and are not always capable of
distinguishing between effort and success. They are most at home,
accordingly, in matters of fact, and learned inquiries. In art they are
hard, forced, and mechanical; and, generally, they may be said to have
all that depends on strength of understanding and persevering
exertion,—but to want ease, quickness and flexibility. We should not
have made these remarks, if the work before us had formed an absolute
exception to them.

William Schlegel has long been celebrated on the Continent as a
philosophical critic, and as the admirable translator of Shakespear and
Calderon into his native tongue. Madame de Staël acknowledges her
obligations to him, for the insight which he had given her into the
discriminating features of German genius. And M. Sismondi, in his work
on Southern literature, bears the most honourable testimony to his
talents and learning. The present work contains a critical and
historical account of the ancient and modern drama,—the Greek, the
Latin, the Italian, the French, the English, the Spanish, and the
German. The view which the author has taken of the standard productions,
whether tragic or comic, in these different languages, is in general
ingenious and just; and his speculative reasonings on the principles of
taste, are often as satisfactory as they are profound. But he sometimes
carries the love of theory, and the spirit of partisanship, farther than
is at all allowable. His account of Shakespear is admirably
characteristic, and must be highly gratifying to the English reader. It
is indeed by far the best account which has been given of the plays of
that great genius by any writer, either among ourselves, or abroad. It
is only liable to one exception—he will allow Shakespear to have had no
faults. Now, we think he had a great many, and that he could afford to
have had as many more. It shows a distrust of his genius, to be
tenacious of his defects.

Our author thus explains the object of his work—

‘Before I proceed farther, I wish to say a few words respecting the
spirit of my criticism—a study to which I have devoted a great part of
my life. We see numbers of men, and even whole nations, so much fettered
by the habits of their education and modes of living, that nothing
appears natural, proper, or beautiful, which is foreign to their
language, their manners, and their social relations. In this exclusive
mode of seeing and feeling, it is no doubt possible, by means of
cultivation, to attain a great nicety of discrimination in the narrow
circle within which they are circumscribed. But no man can be a true
critic or connoisseur, who does not possess a universality of mind,—who
does not possess that flexibility which, throwing aside all personal
predilections and blind habits, enables him to transport himself into
the peculiarities of other ages and nations,—to feel them as it were
from their proper and central point,—and to recognize and respect
whatever is beautiful and grand under those external circumstances which
are necessary to their existence, and which sometimes even seem to
disguise them. There is no monopoly of poetry for certain ages and
nations; and consequently, that despotism in taste, by which it is
attempted to make those rules universal, which were at first perhaps
arbitrarily established, is a pretension which ought never to be
allowed. Poetry, taken in its widest acceptation, as the power of
creating what is beautiful, and representing it to the eye or ear, is a
universal gift of Heaven; which is even shared to a certain extent by
those whom we call barbarians and savages. Internal excellence is alone
decisive; and where this exists, we must not allow ourselves to be
repelled by external circumstances.

‘It is well known, that, three centuries and a half ago, the study of
ancient literature, by the diffusion of the Greek language (for the
Latin was never extinct) received a new life: The classical authors were
sought after with avidity, and made accessible by means of the press;
and the monuments of ancient art were carefully dug up, and preserved.
All this excited the human mind in a powerful manner, and formed a
decided epoch in the history of our cultivation: the fruits have
extended to our times, and will extend to a period beyond the power of
our calculation. But the study of the ancients was immediately carried
to a most pernicious excess. The learned, who were chiefly in possession
of this knowledge, and who were incapable of distinguishing themselves
by their own productions, yielded an unlimited deference to the
ancients,—and with great appearance of reason, as they are models in
their kind. They maintained, that nothing could be hoped for the human
mind, but in the imitation of the ancients; and they only esteemed, in
the works of the moderns, whatever resembled, or seemed to bear a
resemblance, to those of antiquity. Every thing else was rejected by
them as barbarous and unnatural. It was quite otherwise with the great
poets and artists. However strong their enthusiasm for the ancients, and
however determined their purpose of entering into competition with them,
they were compelled by the characteristic peculiarity of their minds to
proceed in a track of their own,—and to impress upon their productions
the stamp of their own genius. Such was the case with Dante among the
Italians, the father of modern poetry: he acknowledged Virgil for his
instructor; but produced a work, which of all others differs the most
from the Æneid, and _far excels it, in our opinion, in strength, truth,
depth, and comprehension_. It was the same afterwards with Ariosto, who
has been most unaccountably compared to Homer; for nothing can be more
unlike. It was the same in the fine arts with Michael Angelo and
Raphael, who were without doubt well acquainted with the antique. When
we ground our judgment of modern painters merely on their resemblance to
the ancients, we must necessarily be unjust towards them. As the poets
for the most part acquiesced in the doctrines of the learned, we may
observe a curious struggle in them between their natural inclination and
their imagined duty. When they sacrificed to the latter, they were
praised by the learned; but, by yielding to their own inclinations, they
became the favourites of the people. What preserves the heroic poems of
a Tasso or a Camoens to this day alive, in the hearts and on the lips of
their countrymen, is by no means their imperfect resemblance to Virgil
or even to Homer,—but, in Tasso, the tender feeling of chivalrous love
and honour, and in Camoens the glowing inspiration of patriotic
heroism.’

The author next proceeds to unfold that which is the _nucleus_ of the
prevailing system of German criticism, and the foundation of his whole
work, namely, the essential distinction between the peculiar spirit of
the modern or _romantic_ style of art, and the antique or _classical_.
There is in this part of the work a singular mixture of learning,
acuteness and mysticism. We have certain profound suggestions and
distant openings to the light; but, every now and then, we are suddenly
left in the dark, and obliged to grope our way by ourselves. We cannot
promise to find a clue out of the labyrinth; but we will at least
attempt it. The most obvious distinction between the two styles, the
classical and the romantic, is, that the one is conversant with objects
that are grand or beautiful in themselves, or in consequence of obvious
and universal associations; the other, with those that are interesting
only by the force of circumstances and imagination. A Grecian temple,
for instance, is a classical object: it is beautiful in itself, and
excites immediate admiration. But the ruins of a Gothic castle have no
beauty or symmetry to attract the eye; and yet they excite a more
powerful and romantic interest from the ideas with which they are
habitually associated. If, in addition to this, we are told that this is
Macbeth’s castle, the scene of the murder of Duncan, the interest will
be instantly heightened to a sort of pleasing horror. The classical idea
or form of any thing, it may also be observed, remains always the same,
and suggests nearly the same impressions; but the associations of ideas
belonging to the romantic character, may vary infinitely, and take in
the whole range of nature and accident. Antigone, in Sophocles, waiting
near the grove of the Furies—Electra, in Æschylus, offering sacrifice at
the tomb of Agamemnon—are classical subjects, because the circumstances
and the characters have a correspondent dignity, and an immediate
interest, from their mere designation. Florimel, in Spenser, where she
is described sitting on the ground in the Witch’s hut, is not classical,
though in the highest degree poetical and romantic: for the incidents
and situation are in themselves mean and disagreeable, till they are
redeemed by the genius of the poet, and converted, by the very contrast,
into a source of the utmost pathos and elevation of sentiment. Othello’s
handkerchief is not classical, though ‘there was magic in the web;’—it
is only a powerful instrument of passion and imagination. Even Lear is
not classical; for he is a poor crazy old man, who has nothing sublime
about him but his afflictions, and who dies of a broken heart.

Schlegel somewhere compares the Furies of Æschylus to the Witches of
Shakespear—we think without much reason. Perhaps Shakespear has
surrounded the Weird Sisters with associations as terrible, and even
more mysterious, strange, and fantastic than the Furies of Æschylus; but
the traditionary beings themselves are not so petrific. These are of
marble,—their look alone must blast the beholder;—those are of air,
bubbles; and though ‘so withered and so wild in their attire,’ it is
their spells alone which are fatal. They owe their power to
‘metaphysical aid’: but the others contain all that is dreadful in their
corporal figures. In this we see the distinct spirit of the classical
and the romantic mythology. The serpents that twine round the head of
the Furies are not to be trifled with, though they implied no
preternatural power: The bearded Witches in Macbeth are in themselves
grotesque and ludicrous, except as this strange deviation from nature
staggers our imagination, and leads us to expect and to believe in all
incredible things. They appal the faculties by what they say or do;—the
others are intolerable, even to sight.

Our author is right in affirming, that the true way to understand the
plays of Sophocles and Æschylus, is to study them before the groupes of
the Niobe or the Laocoon. If we can succeed in explaining this analogy,
we shall have solved nearly the whole difficulty. For it is certain,
that there are exactly the same powers of mind displayed in the poetry
of the Greeks as in their statues. Their poetry is exactly what their
sculptors might have written. Both are exquisite imitations of nature;
the one in marble, the other in words. It is evident, that the Greek
poets had the same perfect idea of the subjects they described, as the
Greek sculptors had of the objects they represented; and they give as
much of this absolute truth of imitation, as can be given by words. But,
in this direct and simple imitation of nature, as in describing the form
of a beautiful woman, the poet is greatly inferior to the sculptor; It
is in the power of illustration, in comparing it to other things, and
suggesting other ideas of beauty or love, that he has an entirely new
source of imagination opened to him; and of this power, the moderns have
made at least a bolder and more frequent use than the ancients. The
description of Helen in Homer, is a description of what might have
happened and been seen, as ‘that she moved with grace, and that the old
men rose up with reverence as she passed;’ the description of Belphœbe
in Spenser, is a description of what was only visible to the eye of the
poet.

‘Upon her eyelids many graces sat,
Under the shadow of her even brows.’

The description of the soldiers going to battle in Shakespear, ‘all
plumed like estriches, like eagles newly bathed, wanton as goats, wild
as young bulls,’ is too bold, figurative, and profuse of dazzling
images, for the mild, equable tone of classical poetry, which never
loses sight of the object in the illustration. The ideas of the ancients
were too exact and definite, too much attached to the material form or
vehicle in which they were conveyed, to admit of those rapid
combinations, those unrestrained flights of fancy, which, glancing from
heaven to earth, unite the most opposite extremes, and draw the happiest
illustrations from things the most remote. The two principles of
imitation and imagination indeed, are not only distinct, but almost
opposite. For the imagination is that power which represents objects,
not as they are, but as they are moulded according to our fancies and
feelings. Let an object be presented to the senses in a state of
agitation and fear—and the imagination will magnify the object, and
convert it into whatever is most proper to encourage the fear. It is the
same in all other cases in which poetry speaks the language of the
imagination. This language is not the less true to nature because it is
false in point of fact; but so much the more true and natural, if it
conveys the impression which the object under the influence of passion
makes on the mind. We compare a man of gigantic stature to a tower; not
that he is any thing like so large, but because the excess of his size,
beyond what we are accustomed to expect, produces a greater feeling of
magnitude and ponderous strength than an object of ten times the same
dimensions. Things, in short, are equal in the imagination, which have
the power of affecting the mind with an equal degree of terror,
admiration, delight or love. When Lear calls upon the Heavens to avenge
his cause, ‘for they are old like him,’ there is nothing extravagant or
impious in this sublime identification of his age with theirs; for there
is no other image which could do justice to the agonising sense of his
wrongs and his despair!

The great difference, then, which we find between the classical and the
romantic style, between ancient and modern poetry, is, that the one more
frequently describes things as they are interesting in themselves,—the
other for the sake of the associations of ideas connected with them;
that the one dwells more on the immediate impressions of objects on the
senses—the other on the ideas which they suggest to the imagination. The
one is the poetry of form, the other of effect. The one gives only what
is necessarily implied in the subject; the other all that can possibly
arise out of it. The one seeks to identify the imitation with an
external object,—clings to it,—is inseparable from it,—is either that or
nothing; the other seeks to identify the original impression with
whatever else, within the range of thought or feeling, can strengthen,
relieve, adorn or elevate it. Hence the severity and simplicity of the
Greek tragedy, which excluded everything foreign or unnecessary to the
subject. Hence the unities: for, in order to identify the imitation as
much as possible with the reality, and leave nothing to mere
imagination, it was necessary to give the same coherence and consistency
to the different parts of a story, as to the different limbs of a
statue. Hence the beauty and grandeur of their materials; for, deriving
their power over the mind from the truth of the imitation, it was
necessary that the subject which they made choice of, and from which
they could not depart, should be in itself grand and beautiful. Hence
the perfection of their execution; which consisted in giving the utmost
harmony, delicacy, and refinement to the details of a given subject.
Now, the characteristic excellence of the moderns is the reverse of all
this. As, according to our author, the poetry of the Greeks is the same
as their sculpture; so, he says, our own more nearly resembles
painting,—where the artist can relieve and throw back his figures at
pleasure,—use a greater variety of contrasts,—and where light and shade,
like the colours of fancy, are reflected on the different objects. The
Muse of classical poetry should be represented as a beautiful naked
figure: the Muse of modern poetry should be represented clothed, and
with wings. The first has the advantage in point of form; the last in
colour and motion.

Perhaps we may trace this difference to something analogous in physical
organization, situation, religion and manners. First, the natural
organization of the Greeks seems to have been more perfect, more
susceptible of external impressions, and more in harmony with external
nature than ours, who have not the same advantages of climate and
constitution. Born of a beautiful and vigorous race, with quick senses
and a clear understanding, and placed under a mild heaven, they gave the
fullest development to their external faculties: and where all is
perceived easily, every thing is perceived in harmony and proportion. It
is the stern genius of the North which drives men back upon their own
resources, which makes them slow to perceive, and averse to feel, and
which, by rendering them insensible to the single, successive
impressions of things, requires their collective and combined force to
rouse the imagination violently and unequally. It should be remarked,
however, that the early poetry of some of the Eastern nations has even
more of that irregularity, wild enthusiasm, and disproportioned
grandeur, which has been considered as the distinguishing character of
the Northern nations.

Again, a good deal may be attributed to the state of manners and
political institutions. The ancient Greeks were warlike tribes encamped
in cities. They had no other country than that which was enclosed within
the walls of the town in which they lived. Each individual belonged, in
the first instance, to the State; and his relations to it were so close,
as to take away, in a great measure, all personal independence and
free-will. Every one was mortised to his place in society, and had his
station assigned him as part of the political machine, which could only
subsist by strict subordination and regularity. Every man was as it were
perpetually on duty, and his faculties kept constant watch and ward.
Energy of purpose, and intensity of observation, became the necessary
characteristics of such a state of society; and the general principle
communicated itself from this ruling concern for the public, to morals,
to art, to language, to every thing.—The tragic poets of Greece were
among her best soldiers; and it is no wonder that they were as severe in
their poetry as in their discipline. Their swords and their styles
carved out their way with equal sharpness. This state of things was
afterwards continued under the Roman empire. In the ages of chivalry and
romance, which, after a considerable interval, succeeded its
dissolution, and which have stamped their character on modern genius and
literature, all was reversed. Society was again resolved into its
component parts; and the world was, in a manner, to begin anew. The ties
which bound the citizen and the soldier to the State being loosened,
each person was thrown back, as it were, into the circle of the domestic
affections, or left to pursue his doubtful way to fame and fortune
alone. This interval of time might be accordingly supposed to give birth
to all that was constant in attachment, adventurous in action, strange,
wild and extravagant in invention. Human life took the shape of a busy,
voluptuous dream, where the imagination was now lost amidst ‘antres vast
and deserts idle;’ or, suddenly transported to stately palaces, echoing
with dance and song. In this uncertainty of events, this fluctuation of
hopes and fears, all objects became dim, confused and vague. Magicians,
dwarfs, giants, followed in the train of romance; and Orlando’s
enchanted sword, the horn which he carried with him, and which he blew
thrice at Roncesvalles, and Rogero’s winged horse, were not sufficient
to protect them in their unheard-of encounters, or deliver them from
their inextricable difficulties. It was a return to the period of the
early heroic ages; but tempered by the difference of domestic manners,
and the spirit of religion. The marked difference in the relation of the
sexes, arose from the freedom of choice in women, which, from being the
slaves of the will and passions of men, converted them into the arbiters
of their fate, which introduced the modern system of gallantry, and
first made love a feeling of the heart, founded on mutual affection and
esteem. The leading virtues of the Christian religion, self-denial and
generosity, assisted in producing the same effect.—Hence the spirit of
chivalry, of romantic love, and honour!

The mythology of the romantic poetry differed from the received
religion: both differed essentially from the classical. The religion, or
mythology of the Greeks, was nearly allied to their poetry: it was
material and definite. The Pagan system reduced the Gods to the human
form, and elevated the powers of inanimate nature to the same standard.
Statues carved out of the finest marble, represented the objects of
their religious worship in airy porticos, in solemn temples and
consecrated groves. Mercury was seen ‘new-lighted on some heaven-kissing
hill;’ and the Naiad or Dryad came gracefully forth as the personified
genius of the stream or wood. All was subjected to the senses. The
Christian religion, on the contrary, is essentially spiritual and
abstract; it is ‘the evidence of things unseen.’ In the Heathen
mythology, form is everywhere predominant; in the Christian, we find
only unlimited, undefined power. The imagination alone ‘broods over the
immense abyss, and makes it pregnant.’ There is, in the habitual belief
of an universal, invisible Principle of all things, a vastness and
obscurity which confounds our perceptions, while it exalts our piety. A
mysterious awe surrounds the doctrines of the Christian faith: the
Infinite is everywhere before us, whether we turn to reflect on what is
revealed to us of the Divine nature or our own.

History, as well as religion, has contributed to enlarge the bounds of
imagination; and both together, by showing past and future objects at an
interminable distance, have accustomed the mind to contemplate and take
an interest in the obscure and shadowy. The ancients were more
circumscribed within ‘the ignorant present time,’—spoke only their own
language,—were conversant only with their own customs,—were acquainted
only with the events of their own history. The mere lapse of time then,
aided by the art of printing, has served to accumulate for us an endless
mass of mixed and contradictory materials; and, by extending our
knowledge to a greater number of things, has made our particular ideas
less perfect and distinct. The constant reference to a former state of
manners and literature, is a marked feature in modern poetry. We are
always talking of the Greeks and Romans;—_they_ never said any thing of
us. This circumstance has tended to give a certain abstract elevation,
and etherial refinement to the mind, without strengthening it. We are
lost in wonder at what has been done, and dare not think of emulating
it. The earliest modern poets, accordingly, may be conceived to hail the
glories of the antique world, dawning through the dark abyss of time;
while revelation, on the other hand, opened its path to the skies: As
Dante represents himself as conducted by Virgil to the shades below;
while Beatrice welcomes him to the abodes of the blest.

We must now return, however, to our author, whose sketch of the rise and
progress of the Drama, will be interesting to our readers.

‘The invention of the dramatic art, and of a theatre, seem to lie very
near one another. Man has a great disposition to mimicry. When he enters
vividly into the situation, sentiments and passions of others, he even
involuntarily puts on a resemblance to them in his gestures. Children
are perpetually going out of themselves: it is one of their chief
amusements to represent those grown people whom they have had an
opportunity of observing, or whatever comes in their way: And with the
happy flexibility of their imagination, they can exhibit all the
characteristics of assumed dignity in a father, a schoolmaster, or a
king. The sole step which is requisite for the invention of a drama,
namely, the separating and extracting the mimetic elements and fragments
from social life, and representing them collected together into one
mass, has not, however, been taken in many nations. In the very minute
description of ancient Egypt in Herodotus and other writers, I do not
recollect observing the smallest trace of it. The Etrurians, again, who
in many respects resembled the Egyptians, had their theatrical
representations; and, what is singular enough, the Etruscan name for an
actor, _histrio_, is preserved in living languages down to the present
day. The Arabians and Persians, though possessed of a rich poetical
literature, are unacquainted with any sort of drama. It was the same
with Europe in the middle ages. On the introduction of Christianity, the
plays handed down among the Greeks and Romans were abolished, partly
from their reference to Heathen ideas, and partly because they had
degenerated into the most impudent and indecent immorality; and they
were not again revived till after the lapse of nearly a thousand years.
Even in the fourteenth century, we do not find in Boccacio, who,
however, gives us a most accurate picture of the whole constitution of
social life, the smallest trace of plays. In place of them, they had
then only story-tellers, minstrels, and jugglers. On the other hand, we
are by no means entitled to assume, that the invention of the drama has
only once taken place in the world, or that it has always been borrowed
by one people from another. The English navigators mention, that among
the islanders of the South Seas, who, in every mental acquirement, are
in such a low scale of civilization, they yet observed a rude drama, in
which a common event in life was imitated for the sake of diversion. And
to go to the other extreme:—Among the Indians, the people from whom,
perhaps, all the cultivation of the human race has been derived, plays
were known long before they could have experienced any foreign
influence. It has lately been made known to Europe, that they have a
rich dramatic literature, which ascends back for more than two thousand
years. The only specimen of their plays (_nataks_) hitherto known to us,
is the delightful sakontala, which, notwithstanding the colouring of a
foreign climate, bears, in its general structure, such a striking
resemblance to our romantic drama, that we might be inclined to suspect
we owe this resemblance to the predilection for Shakespear entertained
by Jones the English translator, if his fidelity were not confirmed by
other learned Orientalists. In the golden times of India, the
representation of this _natak_ served to delight the splendid imperial
court of Delhi; but it would appear that, from the misery of numberless
oppressions, the dramatic art in that country is now entirely at an end.
The Chinese, again, have their standing national theatre, stationary
perhaps in every sense of the word; and I do not doubt that, in the
establishment of arbitrary rules, and the delicate observance of
insignificant points of decorum, they leave the most correct Europeans
very far behind them. When the new European stage, in the fifteenth
century, had its origin in the allegorical and spiritual pieces called
Moralities and Mysteries, this origin was not owing to the influence of
the ancient dramatists, who did not come into circulation till some time
afterwards. In those rude beginnings lay the germ of the romantic drama
as a peculiar invention.’ p. 28.

The fault of this book is to have too much of every thing, but
especially of Greece; and we cannot help feeling, that the bold and
independent judgment which the author has applied to all other nations,
is somewhat suborned or overawed by his excessive veneration for those
ancient classics. There is a glow and a force, however, in all that he
says upon the subject, that almost persuades us that he is in the
right,—and that there was something incomparably more lofty in the
conceptions of those early times, than the present undignified and
degenerate age can imagine. This imposing and enthusiastic tone
discloses itself in his introductory remarks on the Grecian theatre.

‘When we hear the word theatre,’ he says, ‘we naturally think of what
with us bears the same name; and yet nothing can be more different from
our theatre than the Grecian, in every part of its construction. If, in
reading the Greek pieces, we associate our own stage with them, the
light in which we shall view them must be false in every respect.—The
theatres of the Greeks were quite open above, and their dramas were
always acted in open day, and beneath the canopy of heaven. The Romans,
at an after period, endeavoured by a covering to shelter the audience
from the rays of the sun; but this degree of luxury was hardly ever
enjoyed by the Greeks. Such a state of things appears very inconvenient
to us: But the Greeks had nothing of effeminacy about them; and we must
not forget, too, the beauty of their climate. When they were overtaken
by a storm or a shower, the play was of course interrupted; and they
would much rather expose themselves to an accidental inconvenience,
than, by shutting themselves up in a close and crowded house, entirely
destroy the serenity of a religious solemnity, which their plays
certainly were. To have covered in the scene itself, and imprisoned gods
and heroes in dark and gloomy apartments, imperfectly lighted up, would
have appeared still more ridiculous to them. An action which so nobly
served to establish the belief of the relation with heaven, could only
be exhibited under an unobstructed sky, and under the very eyes of the
gods, as it were, for whom, according to Seneca, the sight of a brave
man struggling with adversity is an attractive spectacle. The theatres
of the ancients were, in comparison with the small scale of ours, of a
colossal magnitude, partly for the sake of containing the whole of the
people, with the concourse of strangers who flocked to the festivals,
and partly to correspond with the majesty of the dramas represented in
them, which required to be seen at a respectful distance.’

One of the most elaborate and interesting parts of this work, is the
account of the Greek tragedians, which is given in the fourth Lecture.
Our extracts from it will be copious, both on account of the importance
of the subject, and the ability with which it is treated.

‘Of the inexhaustible stores possessed by the Greeks in the department
of tragedy, which the public competition at the Athenian festivals
called into being, as the rival poets always contended for a prize, very
little indeed has come down to us. We only possess works of three of
their numerous tragedians, Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; and these
in no proportion to the number of their compositions. The three authors
in question were selected by the Alexandrian critics as the foundation
for the study of ancient Greek literature, not because they alone were
deserving of estimation, but because they afforded the best illustration
of the various styles of tragedy. Of each of the two oldest poets, we
have seven remaining pieces; in these, however, we have, according to
the testimony of the ancients, several of their most distinguished
productions. Of Euripides, we have a much greater number, and we might
well exchange many of them for other works which are now lost; for
example, the Satirical Dramas of Actæus, Æschylus and Sophocles; several
pieces of Phrynichus, for the sake of comparison with Æschylus; or of
Agathon, whom Plato describes as effeminate, but sweet and affecting,
and who was a contemporary of Euripides, though somewhat younger.

‘The tragic style of Æschylus is grand, severe, and not unfrequently
hard. In the style of Sophocles, we observe the most complete proportion
and harmonious sweetness. The style of Euripides is soft and luxuriant:
Extravagant in his easy fulness, he sacrifices the general effect to
brilliant passages.

‘Æschylus is to be considered as the creator of Tragedy, which sprung
from him completely armed, like Pallas from the head of Jupiter. He
clothed it in a state of suitable dignity, and gave it an appropriate
place of exhibition. He was the inventor of scenic pomp; and not only
instructed the chorus in singing and dancing, but appeared himself in
the character of a player. He was the first who gave development to the
dialogue, and limits to the lyrical part of the tragedy, which still
however occupies too much space in his pieces. He draws his characters
with a few bold and strongly marked features. The plans are simple in
the extreme. He did not understand the art of enriching and varying an
action, and dividing its development and catastrophe into parts, bearing
a due proportion to each other. Hence his action often stands still; and
this circumstance becomes still more apparent, from the undue extension
of his choral songs. But all his poetry betrays a sublime and serious
mind. Terror is his element, and not the softer affections: he holds up
the head of Medusa to his astonished spectators. His manner of treating
Fate is austere in the extreme; he suspends it over the heads of mortals
in all its gloomy majesty. The Cothurnus of Æschylus has, as it were, an
iron weight; gigantic figures alone stalk before our eyes. It seems as
if it required an effort in him to condescend to paint mere men to us:
he abounds most in the representation of gods, and seems to dwell with
particular delight in exhibiting the Titans, those ancient gods who
typify the dark powers of primitive nature, and who had long been driven
into Tartarus, beneath a better regulated world. He endeavours to swell
out his language to a gigantic sublimity, corresponding with the
standard of his characters. Hence he abounds in harsh combinations and
overstrained epithets; and the lyrical parts of his pieces are often
obscure in the extreme, from the involved nature of the construction. He
resembles Dante and Shakespeare in the very singular cast of his images
and expressions. These images are nowise deficient in the terrible
graces, which almost all the writers of antiquity celebrate in Æschylus.
He flourished in the very first vigour of the Grecian freedom; was an
eyewitness of the overthrow and annihilation of the Persian hosts under
Darius and Xerxes; and, in one of his pieces—the Persians—describes in
the most vivid and glowing colours the battle of Salamis.’ p. 94.

Such is the general account of Æschylus given by our author. He then
proceeds to give a distinct sketch of each of his tragedies. This, we
will acknowledge, appears to us considerably too rapturous and too
long;—but we must give our readers a specimen of what is perhaps the
most elaborate, if not the most impressive part of the whole
publication. We shall select his account of the Eumenides or Furies, the
most terrible of all this poet’s compositions.

‘The fable of the Eumenides is the justification and absolution of
Orestes from his bloody crime, the murder of Clytemnestra his mother. It
is a trial, but a trial where the gods are accusers and defenders and
judges; and the manner in which the subject is treated, corresponds with
its majesty and importance. The scene itself brought before the eyes of
the Greeks the highest objects of veneration which were known to them.
It opens before the celebrated temple at Delphi, which occupies the
back-ground. The aged Pythia enters in sacerdotal pomp, addresses her
prayers to the gods who preside over the oracle, harangues the assembled
people, and goes into the temple to seat herself on the tripod. She
returns full of consternation, and describes what she has seen in the
temple; a man stained with blood, supplicating protection, surrounded by
sleeping women with serpent hair. She then makes her exit by the same
entrance. Apollo now appears with Orestes in his traveller’s garb, and a
sword and olive branch in his hands. He promises him his farther
protection, commands him to fly to Athens, and recommends him to the
care of the present but invisible Mercury, to whom travellers, and
especially those who were under the necessity of concealing their
journey, were usually consigned. Orestes goes off at the side allotted
to strangers; Apollo re-enters the temple, which remains open, and the
Furies are seen in the interior sleeping on their seats. Clytemnestra
now ascends through the orchestra, and appears on the stage. We are not
to suppose her a haggard skeleton, but a figure with the appearance of
life, though paler, still bearing her wounds in her breast, and shrouded
in ethereal-coloured vestments. She calls repeatedly to the Furies in
the language of vehement reproach; and then disappears. The Furies
awake; and when they no longer find Orestes, they dance in wild
commotion round the stage during the choral song. Apollo returns from
the temple, and expels them from his sanctuary as profanatory beings.
_We may here suppose him appearing with the sublime displeasure of the
Apollo of the Vatican, with bow and quiver, or clothed in his sacred
tunic and chlamys._ The scene now changes; but the back-ground probably
remained unchanged, and had now to represent the temple of Minerva on
the hill of Mars; and the lateral decorations would be converted into
Athens and the surrounding landscape. Orestes comes as from another
land, and embraces as a suppliant the statue of Pallas placed before the
temple. The chorus (who were clothed in black, with purple girdles, and
serpents in their hair), follow him on foot to this place, but remain
throughout the rest of the piece beneath in the orchestra. The Furies
had at first exhibited the rage of beasts of prey at the escape of their
victim; but they now sing with tranquil dignity their high and terrible
office among mortals, claim the head of Orestes as forfeited to them,
and consecrate it with mysterious charms of endless pain. Pallas, the
warlike virgin, appears in a chariot and four at the intercession of the
suppliant. She listens with calm dignity to the mutual complaints of
Orestes and his adversaries, and finally undertakes the office of umpire
at the solicitation of the two parties. The assembled judges take their
seats on the steps of the temple; the herald commands silence among the
people by sound of trumpet, as at an actual tribunal. Apollo advances to
advocate the cause of the youth; the Furies in vain oppose his
interference; and the arguments for and against the deed are gone
through in short speeches. The judges throw their calculi into the urn;
Pallas throws in a white one; all are wrought up to the highest pitch of
expectation; Orestes calls out, full of anguish, to his protector: “_O
Phœbus Apollo, how is the cause decided?_”—The Furies on the other hand,
exclaim—“_O Black Night, mother of all things, dost thou behold this?_”
In the enumeration of the black and white pebbles, they are found equal
in number, and the accused is therefore declared by Pallas acquitted of
the charge. He breaks out into joyful expressions of thanks, while the
Furies declaim against the arrogance of the younger gods, who take such
liberties with the race of Titan. Pallas bears their rage with
equanimity; addresses them in the language of kindness, and even of
veneration; and these beings, so untractable in their general
disposition, are unable to withstand the power of her mild and
convincing eloquence. They promise to bless the land over which she has
dominion; while Pallas assigns them a sanctuary in the Attic territory,
where they are to be called the Eumenides, that is, the Benevolent. The
whole ends with a solemn procession round the theatre, with songs of
invocation; while bands of children, women, and old men, in purple robes
and with torches in their hands, accompany the Furies in their exit.’ p.
104.

The situation of Orestes at the opening of this tragedy, with the Furies
lying asleep on the floor, like aged women, with serpent hair, is
perhaps the most terrible that can be conceived. But yet, in this
situation, dreadful as it is—the sense of power; the representation of
preternatural forms; the sacredness of the place; the momentary suspense
of the action; the death like stillness; the expectation of what is to
come, subdue the spirit to a tone of awful tranquillity, and, from the
depth of despair, produce a lofty grandeur and collectedness of mind.

If this extraordinary play be the most terrible of Æschylus’s works, the
Chained Prometheus is the grandest. It is less a tragedy than an ode. It
does not describe a series of actions, but a succession of visions.
Prometheus, chained to a rock on the verge of the world, holds parley
with the original powers and oldest forms of Nature, with Strength and
Violence, and Oceanus and the race of the Titans. Compared with the
personages introduced in this poem, Jupiter and Mercury, and the rest of
that class, appear mere modern deities; we are thrown back into the
first rude chaos of Nature, where the universe itself seems to rock like
the sea, and the empire of heaven was not yet fixed.

‘Prometheus,’ says our author, ‘is an image of human nature itself;
endowed with a miserable foresight, and bound down to a narrow
existence, without an ally, and with nothing to oppose to the combined
and inexorable powers of Nature, but an unshaken will, and the
consciousness of elevated claims. The other poems of the Greek
tragedians are single tragedies; but this may be called tragedy itself;
its purest spirit is revealed with all the overpowering influence of its
first unmitigated austerity.’

We agree with M. Schlegel, when he says, that ‘there is little external
action in this piece: Prometheus merely suffers and resolves from the
beginning to the end.’ But we cannot assent to his assertion, that ‘the
poet has contrived, in a masterly manner, to introduce variety into that
which was in itself determinate.’ All that is fine in it, is the
abstract conception of the characters: The story is as uninteresting, as
it is inartificial and improbable.

The Seven before Thebes has also a very imperfect dramatic form. It is
for the most part only a narrative or descriptive dialogue passing
between two persons, the King and the Messenger. ‘The description of the
attack with which the city is threatened,’ says our critic, ‘and of the
seven leaders who have sworn its destruction, and who display their
arrogance in the symbols borne on their shields, is an epic subject,
clothed in the pomp of tragedy.’ The Agamemnon and Electra are the two
tragedies of Æschylus, which approach the nearest to the perfection of
the dramatic form, and which will bear an immediate comparison with
those of Sophocles on the same subjects. M. Schlegel has drawn a
detailed and very admirable parallel between the two poets. Sophocles,
he observes, is the more elegant painter of outward forms and manners;
but Æschylus catches most of the enthusiasm of the passion he describes,
and communicates to the reader the lofty impulses of his own mind. In
giving a poetical colouring to objects from the suggestions of his own
genius—in describing not so much things themselves, as the impression
which they make on the imagination in a state of strong excitement, he
more nearly resembles some of the modern poets, than any of his
countrymen. The magnificent opening of the Agamemnon, in which the
watchman describes the appearance of the fires for which he had watched
ten long years, as the signal of the destruction of Troy, might be cited
as an instance of that rich and varied style, which gives something over
the bare description of the subject, and luxuriates in the display of
its own powers. The Ajax of Sophocles comes the nearest to the general
style of Æschylus, both in the nakedness of the subject, and the
poetical interest given to the character.

The account of Sophocles, which is next in order, is one of the most
finished and interesting parts of this work: though it is disfigured by
one extraordinary piece of rhodomontade, too characteristic to be
omitted. After observing that Sophocles lived to be upwards of ninety
years of age, our philosophical German breaks out into the following
mystic strain.

‘It would seem as if the Gods, in return for his dedicating himself at
an early age to Bacchus as the giver of all joy, and the author of the
cultivation of the human race, by the representation of tragical dramas
for his festivals, had wished to confer immortality on him, so long did
they delay the hour of his death; but, as this was impossible, they
extinguished his life at least as gently as possible, that he might
imperceptibly change one immortality for another—the long duration of
his earthly existence for an imperishable name.’ p. 117.

We cannot afford to enter into the detailed critique which M. Schlegel
has here offered upon the several plays of this celebrated author. The
following passage exhibits a more summary view of them. After mentioning
the native sweetness for which he was so celebrated among his
contemporaries, he observes—

‘Whoever is thoroughly imbued with the feeling of this property, may
flatter himself that a sense for ancient art has arisen within him: for
the lovers of the affected sentimentality of the present day would, both
in the representation of bodily sufferings, and in the language and
economy of the tragedies of Sophocles, find much of an insupportable
austerity. When we consider the great fertility of Sophocles, for,
according to some, he wrote a hundred and thirty pieces, and eighty
according to the most moderate account, we cannot help wondering that
seven only should have come down to us. Chance, however, has so far
favoured us, that, in these seven pieces, we find several which were
held by the ancients as his greatest works, Antigone, for example,
Electra, and the two Œdipuses; and these have also come down to us
tolerably free from mutilation and corruption in the text. The first
Œdipus and Philoctetes have been generally, without any good reason,
preferred to all the others by the modern critics: the first, on account
of the artifice of the plot, in which the dreadful catastrophe,
powerfully calculated to excite our curiosity (a rare case in the Greek
tragedies), is brought about inevitably, by a succession of causes, all
dependent on one another: the latter, on account of the masterly display
of character, the beautiful contrast observable in the three leading
individuals, and the simple structure of the piece, in which, with so
few persons, every thing proceeds from the truest motives. But the whole
of the tragedies of Sophocles are conspicuous for their separate
excellences. In Antigone we have the purest display of female heroism;
in Ajax the manly feeling of honour in its whole force; in the
Trachiniæ, the female levity of Dejanira is beautifully atoned for by
her death; and the sufferings of Hercules are pourtrayed with suitable
dignity. Electra is distinguished for energy and pathos; in Œdipus
Coloneus there prevails the mildest emotion, and over the whole piece
there is diffused the utmost sweetness. I will not undertake to weigh
the respective merits of these pieces against each other; but I am free
to confess that I entertain a singular predilection for the last of
them, as it appears to me the most expressive of the personal feelings
of the poet himself. As this piece was written for the very purpose of
throwing a lustre upon Athens, and the spot of his birth more
particularly, he appears to have laboured it with a remarkable degree of
fondness.’ p. 123.

In describing the Œdipus Coloneus, M. Schlegel has strikingly, and, we
think, beautifully, exemplified the distinct genius of Sophocles and
Æschylus, in the use these two poets make of the Furies.

‘In Æschylus,’ he says, ‘before the victim of persecution can be saved,
the hellish horror of the Furies must congeal the blood of the
spectator, and make his hair stand on end; and the whole rancour of
these goddesses of rage must be exhausted. The transition to their
peaceful retreat is therefore the more astonishing: It seems as if the
whole human race were redeemed from their power. In Sophocles, however,
they do not even once make their appearance, but are altogether kept in
the back-ground; and they are not called by their proper name, but made
known to us by descriptions, in which they are a good deal spared. But
even this obscurity and distance, so suitable to these daughters of
Night, is calculated to excite in us a still dread, in which the bodily
senses have no part. The clothing the grove of the Furies with all the
charms of a southern spring, completes the sweetness of the poem: and
were I to select an emblem of the poetry of Sophocles from his
tragedies, I should describe it as a sacred grove of the dark goddesses
of Fate, in which the laurel, the olive, and the vine, display their
luxuriant vegetation, and the song of the nightingale is for ever
heard.’ p. 128.

After all, however, the tragedies of Sophocles, which are the perfection
of the classical style, are hardly tragedies in our sense of the word.
They do not exhibit the extremity of human passion and suffering. The
object of modern tragedy is to represent the soul utterly subdued as it
were, or at least convulsed and overthrown by passion or misfortune.
That of the ancients was to show how the greatest crimes could be
perpetrated with the least remorse, and the greatest calamities borne
with the least emotion. Firmness of purpose, and calmness of sentiment,
are their leading characteristics. Their heroes and heroines act and
suffer as if they were always in the presence of a higher power, or as
if human life itself were a religious ceremony, performed in honour of
the Gods and of the State. The mind is not shaken to its centre; the
whole being is not crushed or broken down. Contradictory motives are not
accumulated; the utmost force of imagination and passion is not
exhausted to overcome the repugnance of the will to crime; the contrast
and combination of outward accidents are not called in to overwhelm the
mind with the whole weight of unexpected calamity. The dire conflict of
the feelings, the desperate struggle with fortune, are seldom there. All
is conducted with a fatal composure. All is prepared and submitted to
with inflexible constancy, as if Nature were only an instrument in the
hands of Fate.

It is for deviating from this ideal standard, and for a nearer
approximation to the frailty of human passion, that our author falls
foul of Euripides without mercy. There is a great deal of affectation
and mysticism in what he says on this subject. Allowing that the
excellences of Euripides are not the same as those of Æschylus and
Sophocles, or even that they are excellences of an inferior order, yet
it does not follow that they are defects. The luxuriance and effeminacy
with which he reproaches the style of Euripides might have been defects
in those writers; but they are essential parts of his system. In fact,
as Æschylus differs from Sophocles in giving greater scope to the
impulses of the imagination, so Euripides differs from him in giving
greater indulgence to the feelings of the heart. The heart is the seat
of pure affection,—of involuntary emotion,—of feelings brooding over and
nourished by themselves. In the dramas of Sophocles, there is no want of
these feelings; but they are suppressed or suspended by the constant
operation of the senses and the will. Beneath the rigid muscles by which
the heart is there braced, there is no room left for those bursts of
uncontrollable feeling, which dissolve it in tenderness, or plunge it
into the deepest woe. In the heroic tragedy, no one dies of a broken
heart,—scarcely a sigh is heaved, or a tear shed. Euripides has relaxed
considerably from this extreme self-possession; and it is on that
account that our critic cannot forgive him. The death of Alcestis alone
might have disarmed his severity.

This play, which is the most beautiful of them all,—the Iphigenia, which
is the next to it,—the Phædra and Medea, which are more objectionable,
both from the nature of the subject, and the inferiority of the
execution, are instances of the occasional use which Euripides made of
the conflict of different passions. Though Antigone, in Sophocles, is in
love with Hæmon, and though there was here an evident opportunity, and
almost a necessity, for introducing a struggle between this passion,
which was an additional motive to attach her to life, and her affection
to the memory of her brother, which led her to sacrifice it, the poet
has carefully avoided taking any advantage of the circumstance. Such is
the spirit of the heroic tragedy, which suffers no other motives to
interfere with the calm determination of the will, and which admits of
nothing complicated in the development, either of the passions or the
story! M. Schlegel decidedly prefers the Hippolytus of Euripides to the
Phædra of Racine. His reasons he gives in another work, which we have
not seen; but we are not at a loss to guess at them. His taste for
poetry is just the reverse of the popular: He has a horror of whatever
obtrudes itself violently on the notice, or tells at first sight; and is
only disposed to admire those retired and recondite beauties which hide
themselves from all but the eye of deep discernment. He relishes most
those qualities in an author which require the greatest sagacity in the
critic to find them out,—as none but connoisseurs are fond of the taste
of olives. We shall say nothing here of the choice of the subject; but
such as it is, Racine has met it more fully and directly: Euripides
exhibits it, for the most part, in the back-ground. The Hippolytus is a
dramatic fragment in which the principal events are given in a narrative
form. The additions which Racine has chiefly borrowed from Seneca to
fill up the outline, are, we think, unquestionable improvements. The
declaration of love, to which our author particularly objects, is,
however, much more gross and unqualified in Racine than in Seneca. The
modern additions to the Iphigenia in Aulis, by Racine, as the love
between Achilles and Iphigenia, and the jealousy of Eriphile, certainly
destroy the propriety of costume, as M. Schlegel has observed, without
heightening the tragic interest. In other respects, the French play is
little more than an elegant, flowing, and somewhat diffuse paraphrase of
the Greek. The most striking example of pathos in it is the ‘_Tu y
seras, ma fille_,’ addressed by Agamemnon to his daughter, in answer to
her wish to be present at the sacrifice, of which she is herself the
destined victim.

Euripides was the model of Racine among the French, as he was of Seneca
among the Romans. The remarks which Schlegel makes on this
last-mentioned author are exceedingly harsh, dogmatical, and intolerant.
They are as bad, and worse, than the sentence pronounced by Cowley on

——‘The dry chips of short-lung’d Seneca.’

Hear what he says of him.

‘But whatever period may have given birth to the tragedies of Seneca,
they are beyond description bombastical and frigid, unnatural in
character and action—revolting, from their violation of every
propriety—and so destitute of every thing like theatrical effect—that I
am inclined to believe they were never destined to leave the rhetorical
schools for the stage. Every tragical common-place is spun out to the
very last; all is phrase; and even the most common remark is delivered
in stilted language. The most complete poverty of sentiment is dressed
out with wit and acuteness. There is even a display of fancy in them,
_or at least a phantom of it_; for they contain an example of the
misapplication of every mental faculty. The author or authors have found
out the secret of being diffuse, even to wearisomeness; and at the same
time so epigrammatically laconic, as to be often obscure and
unintelligible. Their characters are neither ideal nor actual beings,
but gigantic puppets, who are at one time put in motion by the string of
an unnatural heroism, and, at another, by that of passions equally
unnatural, which no guilt nor enormity can appal.’—‘Yet not merely
learned men, without a feeling for art, have judged favourably of them,
nay preferred them to the Greek tragedies, but even poets have accounted
them deserving of their study and imitation. The influence of Seneca on
Corneille’s idea of tragedy cannot be mistaken: Racine, too, in his
Phædra, has condescended to borrow a good deal from him; and, among
other things, nearly the whole of the declaration of love, of all which
we have an enumeration in Brumoy.’

The distaste of our learned critic to Euripides is sanctioned, no doubt,
by the ridicule of Aristophanes, from whom he gives a whole scene, in
which a buffoon comes to the tragic poet, to beg his rags, his
alms-basket, and his water-pitcher, in allusion to the homeliness of
costume, and the outward signs of distress which are sometimes exhibited
in his tragedies. Aristophanes, of course, is an immense favourite with
Schlegel—though it requires all his ingenuity to gloss over and
allegorize his extravagance and indecency.

‘The plays of Peace, the Acharnæ and Lysistrata, will be found to
recommend peace. In the Clouds, he laughs at the metaphysics of the
sophists; in the Wasps, at the rage of the Athenians for hearing and
determining lawsuits. The subject of the Frogs is the decline of the
tragic art; and Plutus is an allegory on the unjust distribution of
wealth. The Birds are, of all his pieces, the one _of which the aim is
the least apparent; and it is on that very account one of the most
diverting_.’ p. 213.

The comedies of Aristophanes, we confess, put the archaism of our taste,
and the soundness of our classic faith to a most severe test. The great
difficulty is not so much to understand their meaning, as to comprehend
their species—to know to what possible class to assign them—of what
nondescript productions of nature or art they are to be considered as
anomalies. According to Schlegel, who might be styled the Œdipus of
criticism, they are the perfection of _the old comedy_. There is much
virtue, we are aware, in that appellation: But to us, we confess, they
appear to be neither comedies, nor farces, nor satires—but monstrous
allegorical pantomimes—enormous practical jokes—far-fetched puns,
represented by ponderous machinery, which staggers the imagination at
its first appearance, and breaks down before it has answered its
purpose. They show, in a more striking point of view than any thing
else, the extreme subtlety of understanding of the ancients, and their
appetite for the gross, the material, and the sensible. Compared with
Aristophanes, Rabelais himself is plain and literal. For example—

‘Peace begins in the most spirited and lively manner. The
tranquilly-disposed Trygæus rides on a dunghill beetle to heaven, in the
manner of Bellerophon: War, a desolating giant, with Tumult his
companion, in place of all the other gods, inhabits Olympus, and pounds
the cities in a great mortar, making use of the celebrated generals as
pestles; Peace lies bound in a deep well, and is dragged up by a rope,
through the united efforts of all the Greek states,’ &c.

Again—

‘It is said of a man addicted to unintelligible reveries, that he is up
in the clouds:—accordingly Socrates, in the play of the _Clouds_, is
actually let down in a basket at his first appearance.’

The comic machinery in Aristophanes, is, for the most part, a parody on
the Greek mythology, and his wit a travestie on Euripides. Whatever we
may think of his talent in this way, the art itself of making sense into
nonsense, and of letting down the sublime into the ludicrous, in general
is rather a cheap one, and implies much more a want of feeling than an
excess of wit.

The account which is given of the _old_, the _middle_, and the _new
comedy_, is very learned and dogmatical. The different styles and
authors rise in value with the critic, in proportion as he knows nothing
of them. He likes that, which some old commentator has praised, better
than what he has read himself; and that still better, which neither he
himself, nor any one else, has read. Diphilus, Philemon, Apollodorus,
Menander, Sophron, and the Sicilian Epicharmus, whose works are lost,
are prodigiously great men; and the author, ‘tries conclusions infinite’
respecting their different possible merits. On the contrary, Terence is
only half a Menander, and Plautus a coarse buffoon. In spite, however,
of this fastidiousness, he cannot deny the elegant humanity of the one,
nor the strong native humour of the other. The style of these writers,
particularly that of Terence, is admirable for a certain conversational
ease, and correct simplicity, exactly in the mid-way between
carelessness and affectation. But M. Schlegel has a mode of doing away
this merit, by observing, that

‘Plautus and Terence were among the most ancient Roman writers, and
belonged to a time when the language of books was hardly yet in
existence, and when every thing was drawn fresh from life. This _naïve_
simplicity had its charms in the eyes of those Romans, who belonged to
the period of learned cultivation; but it was much more a natural gift,
than the fruit of poetical art.’

We shall conclude this part of the subject, with his observations on the
nature and range of the characters introduced into the ancient Comedy.

‘Athens, where the fictitious, as well as the actual scenes, were
generally placed, was the centre of a small territory; and in nowise to
be compared with our great cities, either in extent or population. The
republican equality admitted no marked distinction of ranks: There were
no proper nobility; all were alike citizens, richer or poorer; and, for
the most part, had no other occupation, than that of managing their
properties. Hence the Attic comedy could not well admit of the contrasts
arising from diversity of tone and conversation; it generally continues
in a sort of middle state, and has something citizen-like; nay, if I may
so say, something of the manners of a small town about it, which we do
not see in those comedies, in which the manners of a court, and the
refinement or corruption of monarchial capitals, are pourtrayed.

‘From what has been premised, we may at once see nearly the whole circle
of characters; nay, those which perpetually occur, are so few, that they
may almost all of them be here enumerated. The austere and frugal, or
the mild and yielding father, the latter not unfrequently under the
dominion of his wife, and making common cause with his son; the
housewife, either loving and sensible, or obstinate and domineering, and
proud of the accession brought by her to the family-property; the giddy
and extravagant, but open and amiable, young man, who, even in a
passion, sensual at its very commencement, is capable of true
attachment; the vivacious girl, who is either thoroughly depraved, vain,
cunning and selfish—or well-disposed, and susceptible of higher
emotions; the simple and boorish, or the cunning slave, who assists his
young master to deceive his old father, and obtain money for the
gratification of his passions by all manner of tricks; the flatterer, or
accommodating parasite, who, for the sake of a good meal, is ready to
say or do any thing that may be required of him; the sycophant, a man
whose business it was to set quietly-disposed people by the ears, and
stir up lawsuits, for which he offered his services; the braggart
soldier, who returns from foreign service, generally cowardly and
simple, but who assumes airs from the fame of the deeds performed by him
abroad; and, lastly, a servant, or pretended mother, who preaches up a
bad system of morals to the young girl entrusted to her guidance; and
the slave-dealer, who speculates on the extravagant passions of young
people, and knows no other object than the furtherance of his own
selfish views. The two last characters are to our feelings a blemish in
the new Grecian comedy; but it was impossible, from the manner in which
it was constituted, to dispense with them.’ p. 263.

We must now pass on to modern literature.—Of the Italian drama, which is
the least prolific part of their literature, we shall shortly have to
speak with reference to another work; and shall at present proceed to
our author’s account of the French Theatre, which forms a class by
itself, and which is here most ably analyzed.

‘With respect to the earlier tragical attempts of the French in the last
half of the sixteenth, and the first part of the seventeenth century, we
refer to Fontenelle, La Harpe, the _Melanges Litteraires_ of Suard and
Andre. Our chief object is an examination of the system of tragic art,
practically followed by their later poets; and by them partly, but by
the French critics universally, considered as alone entitled to any
authority, and every deviation from it viewed as a sin against good
taste. If the system is in itself the best, we shall be compelled to
allow that its execution is masterly, perhaps not to be surpassed. But
the great question here is, how far the French tragedy is, in spirit and
inward essence, related to the Greek, and whether it deserves to be
considered as an improvement upon it.

‘Of their first attempts, it is only necessary to observe, that the
endeavour to imitate the ancients displayed itself at a very early
period in France; and that they conceived that the surest method of
succeeding in this endeavour, was to observe the strictest outward
regularity of form, of which they derived their ideas more from
Aristotle, and especially from Seneca, than from an intimate
acquaintance with the Greek models themselves. In the first tragedies
which were represented, the Cleopatra and Dido of Jodelle, a prologue
and chorus were introduced; Jean de la Peruse translated the Medea of
Seneca; Garnier’s pieces are all taken from the Greek tragedies, or from
Seneca; but, in the execution, they bear a much closer examination to
the latter. The writers of that day employed themselves also diligently
on the Sophonisba of Trissino, from a regard for its classic appearance.
Whoever is acquainted with the mode of proceeding of real genius, which
is impelled by the almost unconscious and immediate contemplation of
great and important truths, will be extremely suspicious of all activity
in art, which originates in an abstract theory. But Corneille did not,
like an antiquary, execute his dramas as so many learned school
exercises, on the model of the ancients. Seneca, it is true, led him
astray; but he knew and loved the Spanish theatre; and it had a great
influence on his mind. The first of his pieces with which it is
generally allowed that the classical epoch of French tragedy begins, and
which is certainly one of his best, the _Cid_, is well known to have
been borrowed from the Spanish. It violates, considerably, the unity of
place, if not also that of time, and it is animated throughout by the
spirit of chivalrous love and honour. But the opinion of his
contemporaries, that a tragedy must be framed accurately according to
the rules of Aristotle, was so universally prevalent, that it bore down
all opposition. Corneille, almost at the close of his dramatic career,
began to entertain scruples of conscience; and endeavoured, in a
separate treatise, to prove, that his pieces, in the composition of
which he had never even thought of Aristotle, were, however, all
accurately written according to his rules.

‘It is quite otherwise with Racine: of all the French poets he was,
without doubt, the best acquainted with the ancients, and he did not
merely study them as a scholar; he felt them as a poet. He found,
however, the practice of the theatre already firmly established, and he
did not undertake to deviate from it for the sake of approaching these
models. He only therefore appropriated the separate beauties of the
Greek poets; but, whether from respect for the taste of his age, or from
inclination, he remained faithful to the prevailing gallantry, so
foreign to the Greek tragedy, and for the most part made it the
foundation of the intrigues of his pieces.

‘Such was nearly the state of the French theatre till Voltaire made his
appearance. He possessed but a moderate knowledge of the Greeks, of
whom, however, he now and then spoke with enthusiasm, that on other
occasions he might rank them below the more modern masters of his own
nation, including himself; but yet he always considered himself bound to
preach up the grand severity and simplicity of the Greeks as essential
to tragedy. He censured the deviations of his predecessors as errors,
and insisted on purifying and at the same time enlarging the stage, as,
in his opinion, from the constraint of court manners, it had been almost
straitened to the dimensions of an antichamber. He at first spoke of the
bursts of genius in Shakespear, and borrowed many things from this poet,
at that time altogether unknown to his countrymen; he insisted too on
greater depth in the delineation of passion, on a more powerful
theatrical effect; he demanded a scene ornamented in a more majestic
manner; and lastly, he not unfrequently endeavoured to give to his
pieces a political or philosophical interest altogether foreign to
poetry. His labours have unquestionably been of utility to the French
stage, although it is now the fashion to attack this idol of the last
age, on every point, with the most unrelenting hostility’ p. 323.

M. Schlegel very ably exposes the incongruities which have arisen from
engrafting modern style and sentiments on mythological and classical
subjects in the French writers.

‘In Phædra,’ he says, ‘this princess is to be declared regent for her
son till he comes of age, after the supposed death of Theseus. How could
this be compatible with the relations of the Grecian women of that
day?—It brings us down to the times of a Cleopatra.—When the way of
thinking of two nations is so totally opposite, why will they torment
themselves with attempts to fashion a subject, formed on the manners of
the one to suit the manners of the other?—How unlike the Achilles in
Racine’s Iphigenia to the Achilles of Homer! The gallantry ascribed to
him is not merely a sin against Homer, but it renders the whole story
improbable. Are human sacrifices conceivable among a people, whose
chiefs and heroes are so susceptible of the most tender feelings?’

‘Corneille was in the best way in the world when he brought his Cid on
the stage; a story of the middle ages, which belonged to a kindred
people; a story characterized by chivalrous love and honour, and in
which the principal characters are not even of princely rank. Had this
example been followed, a number of prejudices respecting tragical
ceremony would of themselves have disappeared; tragedy, from its greater
truth, from deriving its motives from a way of thinking still current
and intelligible, would have been less foreign to the heart; the quality
of the objects would of themselves have turned them from the stiff
observation of the rules of the ancients, which they did not understand;
in one word, the French tragedy would have become national and truly
romantic. But I know not what unfortunate star had the ascendant.
Notwithstanding the extraordinary success of his Cid, Corneille did not
go one step farther; and the attempt which he made had no imitators. In
the time of Louis XIV. it was considered as beyond dispute, that the
French, and in general the modern European history was not adapted for
tragedy. They had recourse therefore to the ancient universal history.
Besides the Greeks and Romans, they frequently hunted about among the
Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and Egyptians, for events, which,
however obscure they might often be, they could dress out for the tragic
stage. Racine made, according to his own confession, a hazardous attempt
with the Turks: It was successful; and since that time, the necessary
tragical dignity has been allowed to this barbarous people. But it was
merely the modern, and more particularly the French names, which could
not be tolerated as untragical and unpoetical; for the heroes of
antiquity are, with them, Frenchmen in every thing but the name; and
antiquity was merely used as a thin veil under which the modern French
character could be distinctly recognized. Racine’s Alexander is
certainly not the Alexander of history: but if, under this name, we
imagine to ourselves the great Condé, the whole will appear tolerably
natural.—And who does not suppose Louis XIV. and the Dutchess de la
Valiere represented under Titus and Berenice? Voltaire expresses himself
somewhat strongly, when he says, that, in the tragedies which succeeded
those of Racine, we imagine we are reading the romances of Mademoiselle
Scuderi, which paint citizens of Paris under the names of heroes of
antiquity. He alluded here more particularly to Crebillon. However much
Corneille and Racine were tainted with the way of thinking of their own
nation, they were still at times penetrated with the spirit of true
_objective_ exhibition. Corneille gives us a masterly picture of the
Spaniards in the Cid; and this is conceivable—for he drew his materials
from them. With the exception of the original sin of gallantry, he
succeeded also pretty well with the Romans: Of one part of their
character at least, he had a tolerable conception, their predominating
patriotism, and unyielding pride of liberty, and the magnanimity of
their political sentiments. All this, it is true, is nearly the same as
we find it in Lucan, varnished over with a certain inflation and
self-conscious pomp. The simple republican austerity, the humility of
religion, he could not attain. Racine (in Britannicus) has admirably
painted the corrupt manners of the Romans under the Emperors, and the
timid and dastardly manner in which the tyranny of Nero first began to
display itself. He had Tacitus indeed for a model, as he himself
gratefully acknowledges; but still it is a great merit to translate
history in such an able manner into poetry. He has also shown a just
conception of the general spirit of Hebrew history. He was less
successful with the Turks: Bajazet makes love wholly in the European
manner: The blood-thirsty policy of Eastern despotism is very well
pourtrayed in the Vizier; but the whole resembles Turkey turned upside
down, where the women, instead of being slaves, have contrived to get
possession of the government; and the result is so very revolting, that
we might be inclined to infer, from it, the Turks are really not so much
to blame in keeping their women under lock and key. Neither has
Voltaire, in my opinion, succeeded much better in his Mahomet and Zaire:
the glowing colours of an Oriental fancy are no where to be found.
Voltaire has, however, this great merit, that he insisted on treating
subjects with more historical truth; and further, that he again elevated
to the dignity of the tragical stage the chivalrous and Christian
characters of modern Europe, which, since the time of the Cid, had been
altogether excluded from it. His Lusignan and Nerestan are among his
most true, affecting, and noble creations; his Tancred, although the
invention as a whole is defective in strength, will always gain upon
every heart, like his namesake in Tasso.’ p. 369.

Our author prefers Racine to Corneille, and even seems to think Voltaire
more natural: but he has exhausted all that can be said of French
tragedy in his account of Corneille; and all that he adds upon Racine
and Voltaire, is only a modification of the same general principles. He
has been able to give no general character of either, as distinct from
the original founder of the French dramatic school; Corneille had more
pomp, Racine more tenderness; Voltaire aimed at a stronger effect: But
the essential qualities are the same in all of them; the style is always
French, as much as the language in which they write.

‘It has been often remarked, that, in French tragedy, the poet is always
too easily seen through the discourses of the different personages; that
he communicates to them his own presence of mind; his cool reflection on
their situation; and his desire to shine upon all occasions. When we
accurately examine the most of their tragical speeches, we shall find
that they are seldom such as would be delivered by persons, speaking or
acting by themselves without any restraint; we shall generally discover
in them something which betrays a reference, more or less perceptible,
to the spectator. Rhetoric, and rhetoric in a court dress, prevails but
too much in many French tragedies, especially in those of Corneille,
instead of the suggestions of a noble, but simple and artless nature:
Racine and Voltaire have approximated much nearer to the true conception
of a mind carried away by its sufferings. Whenever the tragic hero is
able to express his pain in antitheses and ingenious allusions, we may
safely dispense with our pity. This sort of conventional dignity is, as
it were, a coat of mail, to prevent the blow from reaching the inward
parts. On account of their retaining this festal pomp, in situations
where the most complete self-forgetfulness would be natural, Schiller
has wittily enough compared the heroes in French tragedy to the kings in
old copperplates, who are seen lying in bed with their mantle, crown,
and sceptre.’ p. 373, &c.

Racine is deservedly the favourite of the French nation; for, besides
the perfection of his style, and a complete mastery over his art,
according to the rules prescribed by the national taste, there is a
certain tenderness of sentiment, a movement of the heart, under all the
artificial pomp by which it is disguised, which cannot fail to interest
the reader. His _Athalie_ is perhaps the most perfect of all his pieces.
Some of the lyrical descriptions are equally delightful, from the beauty
of the rhythm and the imagery. We might mention the chorus in which the
infant Joaz is compared to a young lily on the side of a stream. Poetry
is the union of imagery with sentiment; and yet nothing can be more rare
than this union in French tragedy. Another passage in Racine, which
might be quoted as an exception to their general style, is the speech of
Phædra describing her descent into the other world, which is, however, a
good deal made up from Seneca; and indeed it is the fault of this
author, that he leans too constantly for support on others, and is
rather the accomplished imitator than the original inventor. There is
but one thing wanting to his plays—that they should have been his own.
He can no more be considered as the author of the Iphigenia, for
instance, than La Fontaine can be considered as the inventor of Æsop’s
fables. Voltaire is more original in the choice of his subjects. But the
means by which he seeks to give an interest to them, are of the most
harsh and violent kind; and, even in the variety of his materials, he
shows the monotony of his invention. Four of his principal tragedies
turn entirely on the question of religious apostasy, or on the conflict
between the attachment of supposed orphans to their newly discovered
parents, and their obligations to their old benefactors. As a relief,
however, the scene of these four tragedies is laid in the four opposite
quarters of the globe.

M. Schlegel speaks highly of Racine’s comedy, ‘_Les Plaideurs_‘; and
thinks that if he had cultivated his talents for comedy, he would have
proved a formidable rival of Moliere. He might very probably have
succeeded in imitating the long speeches which Moliere too often
imitated from Racine; but nothing can (we think) be more unlike, than
the real genius of the two writers. In fact, Moliere is almost as much
an English as a French author,—quite a _barbare_, in all in which he
particularly excels. He was unquestionably one of the greatest comic
geniuses that ever lived; a man of infinite wit, gaiety, and
invention,—full of life, laughter, and observation. But it cannot be
denied that his plays are in general mere farces, without nature,
refinement of character, or common probability. Several of them could
not be carried on for a moment without a perfect collusion between the
parties to wink at impossibilities, and act in defiance of all common
sense. For instance, take the _Medecin malgre lui_, in which a common
wood-cutter takes upon himself, and is made to support, through a whole
play, the character of a learned physician, without exciting the least
suspicion; and yet, notwithstanding the absurdity of the plot, it is one
of the most laughable, and truly comic productions, that can well be
imagined. The rest of his lighter pieces, the _Bourgeois Gentilhomme_,
_Monsieur Pourceaugnac_, &c. are of the same description,—gratuitous
fictions, and fanciful caricatures of nature. He indulges in the utmost
license of burlesque exaggeration; and gives a loose to the intoxication
of his animal spirits. With respect to his two most laboured comedies,
the Tartuffe and Misanthrope, we confess that we find them rather hard
to get through. They have the improbability and extravagance of the
rest, united with the endless common-place prosing of French
declamation. What can exceed the absurdity of the Misanthrope, who
leaves his mistress, after every proof of her attachment and constancy,
for no other reason than that she will not submit to the _technical
formality_ of going to live with him in a desert? The characters which
Celimene gives of her friends, near the opening of the play, are
admirable satires, (as good as Pope’s characters of women), but not
comedy. The same remarks apply in a greater degree to the Tartuffe. The
long speeches and reasonings in this play may be very good logic, or
rhetoric, or philosophy, or any thing but comedy. If each of the parties
had retained a special pleader to speak his sentiments, they could not
have appeared more tiresome or intricate. The improbability of the
character of Orgon is wonderful. The _Ecole des Femmes_, from which
Wycherley has borrowed the Country Wife, with the true spirit of
original genius, is, in our judgment, the masterpiece of Moliere. The
set speeches in the original play would not be borne on the English
stage, nor indeed on the French, but that they are carried off by the
verse. The _Critique de L’Ecole des Femmes_, the dialogue of which is
prose, is written in a very different style.

Our author attributes the ambitious loquacity of the French drama to
their characteristic vanity, and the general desire of this nation to
shine on all occasions. But this principle seems itself to require a
prior cause, namely, a facility of shining on all occasions, and a
disposition to admire every thing. It has been remarked, as a general
rule, that the theatrical amusements of a people, which are intended as
a relaxation from their ordinary pursuits and habits, are by no means a
test of the national character; and it is a confirmation of this
opinion, that the French, who are naturally a lively and impatient
people, should be able to sit and hear with such delight their own
dramatic pieces, which abound, for the most part, in sententious maxims
and solemn declamation, and would appear quite insupportable to an
English audience, though the latter are considered as a dull, phlegmatic
people, much more likely to be tolerant of formal descriptions and grave
reflections.

_Extremes meet._ This is the only way of accounting for that enigma, the
French character. It has often been remarked, indeed, that this
ingenious nation exhibits more striking contradictions in its general
deportment 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 action, to a melancholy blank. They are one moment the slaves of the
most contemptible prejudices, and the next launch out into all the
extravagance of the most dangerous 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 can easily disentangle their thoughts from whatever gives them 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 or
slavery, are matters almost of indifference. They are the only people
who were ever vain of being cuckolded, or being conquered. Their natural
self-complacency stands them instead of all other advantages!

The same almost inexplicable contradictions appear in their writings as
in their characters. They excel in all that depends on lightness and
grace of style, on familiar gaiety, on delicate irony, on quickness of
observation, on nicety of tact—in all those things which are done best
with the least effort. Their sallies, their points, their traits, turns
of expression, their tales, their letters, are unrivalled. Witness the
writings of Voltaire, Fontaine, Le Sage. Whence then the long speeches,
the pompous verbosity, the systematic arrangement of their dramatic
productions? It would seem as if they took refuge in this excessive
formality, as a defence against their natural lightness and frivolity:
and that they admitted of no mixed style in poetry, because the least
interruption of their assumed gravity would destroy the whole effect.
The impression has no natural hold of their minds. It is only by
repeated efforts that they work themselves up to the tragic tone, and
their feelings let go their hold with the first opportunity. They
conform, in the most rigid manner, to established rules, because they
have no steadiness to go alone, nor confidence to trust to the strength
of their immediate impulses. The French have no style of their own in
serious art, because they have no real force of character. Their
tragedies are imitations of the Greek dramas, and their historical
pictures a still more servile and misapplied imitation of the Greek
statues. For the same reason, the expression which their artists give to
their faces is affected and mechanical; and the description which their
poets give of the passions, the most laboured, overt and explicit
possible. Nothing is left to be _understood_. Nothing obscure, distant,
imperfect—nothing that is not distinctly made out—nothing that does not
stand, as it were, in the foreground, is admitted in their works of art.

The dark and doubtful views of things, the irregular flights of fancy,
the silent workings of the heart—all these require some effort to enter
into them: They are therefore excluded from French poetry, the language
of which must, above all things, be clear and defined, and not only
intelligible, but intelligible by its previous application. It is
therefore essentially conventional and common-place. It rejects every
thing that is not cast in a given mould—that is not stamped by
custom—that is not sanctioned by authority;—every thing that is not
French. The French, indeed, can conceive of nothing that is not French.
There is something that prevents them from entering into any views which
do not perfectly fall in with their habitual prejudices. In a word, they
are not a people of imagination. They receive their impressions without
trouble or effort, and retain no more of them than they can help. They
are the creatures either of sensation or abstraction. The images of
things, when the objects are no longer present, throw off all their
complexity and distinctions, and are lost in the general class, or name;
so that the words _charming_, _delicious_, _superb_, &c. convey just the
same meaning, and excite just the same emotion in the mind of a
Frenchman, as the most vivid description of real objects and feelings
could do. Hence their poetry is the poetry of abstraction. Yet poetry is
properly the embodying general ideas in individual forms and
circumstances. But the French style excludes all individuality. The true
poet identifies the reader with the characters he represents; the French
poet only identifies him with himself. There is scarcely a single page
of their tragedy which fairly throws nature open to you. It is tragedy
in masquerade. We never get beyond conjecture and reasoning—beyond the
general impression of the situation of the persons—beyond general
reflections on their passions—beyond general descriptions of objects. We
never get at that something more, which is what we are in search of,
namely, what we ourselves should feel in the same situations. The true
poet transports you to the scene—you see and hear what is passing—you
catch, from the lips of the persons concerned, what lies nearest to
their hearts;—the French poet takes you into his closet, and reads you a
lecture upon it. The _chef-d’œuvres_ of their stage, then, are, after
all, only ingenious paraphrases of nature. The dialogue is a tissue of
common-places, of laboured declamations on human life, of learned
casuistry on the passions, on virtue and vice, which any one else might
make just as well as the person speaking; and yet, what the persons
themselves would say, is all we want to know, and all for which the poet
puts them into those situations. It is what constitutes the difference
between the dramatic and the didactic.

All this is differently managed in Shakespear: And accordingly, the
French translations of that author uniformly leave out all the poetry,
or what we consider as such. They generalize the passion, the character,
the thoughts, the images, every thing;—they reduce it to a common topic.
It is then perfect—for it is French. It would be in vain to look, in
these unmeaning paraphrases, where all is made unobjectionable, and
smooth as the palm of one’s hand, for the ‘Not a jot, not a jot,’ in
Othello,—for the ‘Light thickens,’ of Macbeth,—or the picture which the
exclamation of the witches gives us of him, ‘Why stands Macbeth thus
amazedly?’ When Othello kills himself, after that noble characteristic
speech at the end, in which he makes us feel all that passes in his
soul, and runs over the objects and events of his whole life, the blow
strikes not only at him but at us: When Orosman in Zaire, after a speech
which Voltaire has copied from the English poet, does the same thing, he
falls—like a common-place personified. We do not here insist on the
preference to be given to one or other of these two styles; we only say
they are quite different. The French critics contend, we think without
reason, that their own is exclusively good, and all others barbarous.

Not so our author. If Shakespear never found a thorough partisan before,
he has found one now. We have not room for half of his praise. He
defends him at all points. His puns, his conceits, his anachronisms, his
broad allusions, all go, not indeed for nothing, but for so many
beauties. They are not something to be excused by the age, or atoned for
by other qualities; but they are worthy of all acceptation in
themselves. This we do not think it necessary to say. It is no part of
our poetical creed, that genius can do no wrong. As the French show
their allegiance to their kings by crying _Quand meme!_—so we think to
show our respect for Shakespear by loving him in spite of his faults.
Take the whole of these faults, throw them into one scale, heap them up
double, and then double that, and we will throw into the opposite scale
single excellences, single characters, or even single passages, that
shall outweigh them all! All his faults have not prevented him from
showing as much knowledge of human nature, in all possible shapes, as is
to be found in all other poets put together; and that, we conceive, is
quite enough for one writer. Compared with this magical power, his
faults are of just as much consequence as his bad spelling, and to be
accounted for in the same way. In speaking of Shakespear, we do not mean
to make any general comparison between the French and English stage.
There is no other acknowledged English school of tragedy,—or it is
merely a bad imitation of the French. We give them up Addison; but we
must keep Shakespear to ourselves. He had even the advantage of the
Greek tragedians in this respect, that, with all their genius, they seem
to have described only Greek manners and sentiments: whereas he
describes all the people that ever lived. That which distinguishes his
dramatic productions from all others, is this wonderful variety and
perfect individuality. Each of his characters is as much itself, and as
absolutely independent of the rest, as if they were living persons, not
fictions of the mind. The poet appears, for the time, to identify
himself with the character he wishes to represent, and to pass from one
to the other, like the same soul successively animating different
bodies. By an art like that of the ventriloquist, he throws his
imagination out of himself, and makes every word appear to proceed from
the mouth of the person in whose name it is spoken. His plays alone are
expressions of the passions, not descriptions of them. His characters
are real beings of flesh and blood: they speak like men, not like
authors. One might suppose that he had stood by at the time, and
overheard all that passed. As, in our dreams, we hold conversations with
ourselves, make remarks or communicate intelligence, and have no idea of
the answer which we shall receive, and which we ourselves are to make,
till we hear it; so, the dialogues in Shakespear are carried on without
any consciousness of what is to follow, without any appearance of
preparation or premeditation. The gusts of passion come and go like
sounds of music borne on the wind. Nothing is made out by inference and
analogy, by climax and antithesis; all comes immediately from nature.
Each object and circumstance seems to exist in his mind, as it existed
in nature; each several train of thought and feeling goes on of itself
without confusion or effort: In the world of his imagination, every
thing has a life, a place, and being of its own![5]

‘The distinguishing property,’ says our author, ‘of the dramatic poet,
is the capability of transporting himself so completely into every
situation, even the most unusual, that he is enabled, as plenipotentiary
of the whole human race, without particular instructions for each
separate case, to act and speak in the name of every individual. It is
the power of endowing the creatures of his imagination with such
self-existent energy, that they afterwards act in each conjuncture
according to general laws of nature: the poet institutes, as it were,
experiments, which are received with as much authority as if they had
been made on real objects. 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
portray 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 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 portrayed 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 every thing 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 minds 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 blood-thirsty 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 portrayed 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 fruitful 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.’ II. 145.

The observations on Shakespear’s language and versification which
follow, are excellent. We cannot, however, agree with the author in
thinking his rhyme superior to Spenser’s: His excellence is confined to
his blank verse; and in that he is unrivalled by any dramatic writer.
Milton’s alone is equally fine in its way. The objection to Shakespear’s
mixed metaphors is not here fairly got over. They give us no pain from
long custom. They have, in fact, become idioms in the language. We take
the meaning and effect of a well known passage entire, and no more stop
to scan and spell out the particular words and phrases than the
syllables of which they are composed. If our critic’s general
observations on Shakespear are excellent, he has shown still greater
acuteness and knowledge of his author in those which he makes on the
particular plays. They ought, in future, to be annexed to every edition
of Shakespear, to correct the errors of preceding critics. In his
analysis of the historical plays,—of those founded on the Roman
history,—of the romantic comedies, and the fanciful productions of
Shakespear, such as, the Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Tempest, &c., he
has shown the most thorough insight into the spirit of the poet. His
contrast between Ariel and Caliban; the one made up of all that is gross
and earthly, the other of all that is airy and refined, ‘ethereal mould,
sky-tinctured,’—is equally happy and profound. He does not, however,
confound Caliban with the coarseness of common low life. He says of him
with perfect truth—‘Caliban is malicious, cowardly, false and base in
his inclinations; and yet he is essentially different from the vulgar
knaves of a civilized world, as they are occasionally portrayed by
Shakespear. He is rude, but not vulgar. He never falls into the
prosaical and low familiarity of his drunken associates, for he is a
poetical being in his way; he always, too, speaks in verse. But he has
picked up every thing dissonant and thorny in language, of which he has
composed his vocabulary.’

In his account of Cymbeline and other plays, he has done justice to the
sweetness of Shakespear’s female characters, and refuted the idle
assertion made by a critic, who was also a poet and a man of genius,
that

—‘stronger Shakespear felt for man alone.’

Who, indeed, in recalling the names of Imogen, of Miranda, of Juliet, of
Desdemona, of Ophelia and Perdita, does not feel that Shakespear has
expressed the very perfection of the feminine character, existing only
for others, and leaning for support on the strength of its affections?
The only objection to his female characters is, that he has not made
them masculine. They are indeed the very reverse of ordinary
tragedy-queens. In 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 of Juliet was not to be mistaken by
our author. It is one of perfect unconsciousness. It has nothing
forward, nothing coy, nothing affected, nothing coquettish about it:—It
is a pure effusion of nature.

‘Whatever,’ says our critic, ‘is most intoxicating in the odour of a
southern spring, languishing in the song of the nightingale, or
voluptuous on the first opening of the rose, is breathed in this poem.
But, even more rapidly than the earliest blossoms of youth and beauty
decay, it hurries on from the first timid declaration of love and modest
return, to the most unlimited passion—to an irrevocable union; then,
amidst alternating storms of rapture and despair, to the death of the
two lovers, who still appear enviable as their love survives them, and
as, by their death, they have obtained a triumph over every separating
power. The sweetest and the bitterest; love and hatred; festivity and
dark forebodings; tender embraces and sepulchres; the fulness of life
and self-annihilation—are all here brought close to each other: And all
these contrasts are so blended in the harmonious and wonderful work into
a unity of impression, that the echo which the whole leaves behind in
the mind resembles a single but endless sigh.’

In treating of the four principal tragedies, Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet
and Lear, he goes deeper into the poetry and philosophy of those plays
than any of the commentators. But we dare not now encroach on the
patience of our readers with any farther citations.

The remarks on the doubtful pieces of Shakespear are most liable to
objection. We cannot agree, for instance, that Titus Andronicus is in
the spirit of Lear, because in his dotage he mistakes a fly which he has
killed for his black enemy the Moor. Thomas Lord Cromwell, and Sir John
Oldcastle, which he praises highly, are very indifferent. Pericles,
prince of Tyre, is not much to our taste. There is one fine scene in it,
where Marina rouses the prince from his lethargy, by the proofs of her
being his daughter. Yet this is not like Shakespear. The Yorkshire
Tragedy is very good; but decidedly in the manner of Heywood. The
account given by Schlegel, of the contemporaries and immediate
successors of Shakespear is good, though it might have been better. That
of Ben Jonson is particularly happy. He says, that he described not
characters, but ‘humours,’ that is, particular modes of expression,
dress and behaviour in fashion at the time, which have since become
obsolete, and the imitation of them dry and unintelligible. The finest
thing in Ben Jonson (not that it is by any means the only one), is the
scene between Surly and Sir Epicure Mammon, where the latter proves his
possession of the philosopher’s stone, by a pompous display of the
riches, luxuries and pleasures he is to derive from it; and, by a happy
perversion of logic, satisfies himself, though not his hearer, of the
existence of the cause, by a strong imagination of the effects which are
to follow from it. He is also very successful in his character of the
plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. They describe the passions at their
height, not in their progress—the extremes, not the gradations of
feeling. Their plays, however, have great power and great beauty. The
Faithful Shepherdess is the origin of Milton’s Comus. ‘Rule a Wife and
Have a Wife’ is one of the very best comedies that ever was written; and
holds, to this day, undisputed possession of the stage. Yet, as our
critic observes, there is in the general tone of their writings a
certain crudeness and precocity, a heat, a violence of fermentation, a
disposition to carry every thing to excess, which is not pleasant. Their
plays are very much what young noblemen of genius might be supposed to
write in the heyday of youthful blood, the sunshine of fortune, and all
the petulance of self-opinion. They have completely anticipated the
German paradoxes. Schlegel has no mercy on the writers of the age of
Charles II. He compares Dryden himself to ‘a man walking upon stilts in
a morass.’ He justly prefers Otway to Rowe; but we think he is wrong in
supposing, that if Otway had lived longer he would have done better. His
plays are only the ebullitions of a fine, enthusiastic, sanguine
temperament: and his genius would no more have improved with age, than
the beauty of his person. Of our comic writers, Congreve, Wycherley,
Vanburgh, &c., M. Schlegel speaks very contemptuously and superficially.
It is plain that he knows nothing about them, or he would not prefer
Farquhar to all the rest. If, after our earlier dramatists, we have any
class of writers who are excellent, it is our comic writers.

We cannot go into our author’s account of the Spanish drama. The
principal names in it are Cervantes, Calderon, and Lope de Vega. Neither
can we agree in the praises which he lavishes on the dramatic
productions of these authors. They are too flowery, lyrical, and
descriptive. They are pastorals, not tragedies. They have warmth; but
they want vigour.

Our author may be supposed to be at home in German literature; but his
doctrines appear to us to be more questionable there, than upon any
other subject. What the German dramatists really excel in, is the
production of effect: but this is the very thing which their fastidious
countryman most despises and abhors. They really excel all others in
mere effect; and there is no nation that can excel all others in more
than one thing. Werter is, in our opinion, the best of all Goethe’s
works; but because it is the most popular, our author takes an
opportunity to express his contempt for it. Count Egmont, which is here
spoken highly of, seems to us a most insipid and preposterous
composition. The effect of the pathos which is said to lie concealed in
it, is utterly lost upon us. Nathan the Wise, by Lessing, is also a
great favourite of Schlegel; because it is unintelligible except to the
wise. As the French plays are composed of a tissue of common-placs, the
German plays of this stamp are a tissue of paradoxes, which have no
foundation in nature or common opinion,—the pure offspring of the
author’s fantastic brain. For the same reason, Schiller’s Wallenstein is
here preferred to his Robbers. But we cannot so readily give up our old
attachment to the Robbers. The first reading of that play is an event in
every one’s life, which is not to be forgotten.

Madame de Staël has very happily ridiculed this pedantic’s taste in
criticism.

‘By a singular vicissitude in taste, it has happened, that the Germans
at first attacked our dramatic writers, as converting all their heroes
into Frenchmen. They have, with reason, insisted on historic truth as
necessary to contrast the colours, and give life to the poetry. But
then, all at once, they have been weary of their own success in this
way, and have produced abstract representations, in which the relations
of mankind were expressed in a general manner, and in which time, place
and circumstance, passed for nothing. In a drama of this kind by Goethe,
the author calls the different characters the Duke, the King, the
Father, the Daughter, &c., without any other designation.

‘Such a tragedy is only calculated to be acted in the palace of Odin,
where the dead still continue their different occupations on earth;
where the hunter, himself a shade, eagerly pursues the shade of a stag;
and fantastic warriors combat together in the clouds. It should appear,
that Goethe at one period conceived an absolute disgust to all interest
in dramatic compositions. It was sometimes to be met with in bad works;
and he concluded, that it ought to be banished from good ones.
Nevertheless, a man of superior mind ought not to disdain what gives
universal pleasure; he cannot relinquish his resemblance with his kind,
if he wishes to make others feel his own value. Granting that the
tyranny of custom often introduces an artificial air into the best
French tragedies, it cannot be denied that there is the same want of
natural expression in the systematic and theoretical productions of the
German muse. If exaggerated declamation is affected, there is a certain
kind of intellectual calm which is not less so. It is a kind of
arrogated superiority over the affections of the soul, which may accord
very well with philosophy, but is totally out of character in the
dramatic art. Goethe’s works are composed according to different
principles and systems. In the Tasso and Iphigenia, he conceives of
tragedy as a lofty relic of the monuments of antiquity. These works have
all the beauty of form, the splendour and glossy smoothness of
marble;—but they are as cold and as motionless.’

We have, we trust, said enough of this work, to recommend it to the
reader: We ought to add, that the translation appears to be very
respectable.

COLERIDGE’S LAY SERMON

VOL. XXVII.] [_December 1816._

‘The privilege’ (says a certain author) ‘of talking, and even publishing
nonsense, is necessary in a free state; but the more sparingly we make
use of it, the better.’ Mr. Coleridge has here availed himself of this
privilege,—but not sparingly. On the contrary, he has given full scope
to his genius, and laid himself out in absurdity. In this his first Lay
Sermon (for two others are to follow at graceful distances), we meet
with an abundance of ‘fancies and good-nights,’ odd ends of verse, and
sayings of philosophers; with the ricketty contents of his common-place
book, piled up and balancing one another in helpless confusion; but with
not one word to the purpose, or on the subject. An attentive perusal of
this Discourse is like watching the sails of a windmill: his thoughts
and theories rise and disappear in the same manner. Clouds do not shift
their places more rapidly, dreams do not drive one another out more
unaccountably, than Mr. Coleridge’s reasonings try in vain to ‘chase his
fancy’s rolling speed.’ His intended conclusions have always the start
of his premises,—and they keep it: while he himself plods anxiously
between the two, something like a man travelling a long, tiresome road,
between two stage coaches, the one of which is gone out of sight before,
and the other never comes up with him; for Mr. Coleridge himself takes
care of this; and if he finds himself in danger of being overtaken, and
carried to his journey’s end in a common vehicle, he immediately steps
aside into some friendly covert, with the Metaphysical Muse, to prevent
so unwelcome a catastrophe. In his weary quest of truth, he reminds us
of the mendicant pilgrims that travellers meet in the Desert, with their
faces always turned towards Mecca, but who contrive never to reach the
shrine of the Prophet: and he treats his opinions, and his reasons for
them, as lawyers do their clients, and will never suffer them to come
together lest they should join issue, and so put an end to his business.
It is impossible, in short, we find, to describe this strange rhapsody,
without falling a little into the style of it;—and, to do it complete
justice, we must use its very words. ‘_Implicité_, it is without the
COPULA—it wants the possibility—of every position, to which there exists
any correspondence in reality.’

Our Lay-preacher, in order to qualify himself for the office of a guide
to the blind, has not, of course, once thought of looking about for
matters of fact, but very wisely draws a metaphysical bandage over his
eyes, sits quietly down where he was, takes his nap, and talks in his
sleep—but we really cannot say very wisely. He winks and mutters all
unintelligible, and all impertinent things. Instead of inquiring into
the distresses of the manufacturing or agricultural districts, he
ascends to the orbits of the fixed stars, or else enters into the
statistics of the garden plot under his window, and, like Falstaff,
‘babbles of green fields:’ instead of the balance of the three estates,
King, Lords, and Commons, he gives us a theory of the balance of the
powers of the human mind, the Will, the Reason, and—the Understanding:
instead of referring to the tythes or taxes, he quotes the Talmud; and
illustrates the whole question of peace and war, by observing, that ‘the
ideal republic of Plato was, if he judges rightly, to “the history of
the town of Man-Soul” what Plato was to John Bunyan:’—a most safe and
politic conclusion!

Mr. Coleridge is not one of those whom he calls ‘alarmists by trade,’
but rather, we imagine, what Spenser calls ‘a gentle Husher, Vanity by
name.’ If he does not excite apprehension, by pointing out danger and
difficulties where they do not exist, neither does he inspire
confidence, by pointing out the means to prevent them where they do. We
never indeed saw a work that could do less good or less harm; for it
relates to no one object, that any one person can have in view. It tends
to produce a complete _interregnum_ of all opinions; an _abeyance_ of
the understanding; a suspension both of theory and practice; and is
indeed a collection of doubts and moot-points—all hindrances and no
helps. An uncharitable critic might insinuate, that there was more
quackery than folly in all this;—and it is certain, that our learned
author talks as magnificently of his _nostrums_, as any advertising
impostor of them all—and professes to be in possession of all sorts of
morals, religions, and political panaceas, which he keeps to himself,
and expects you to pay for the secret. He is always promising great
things, in short, and performs nothing. The vagaries, whimsies, and
pregnant throes of Joanna Southcote, were sober and rational, compared
with Mr. Coleridge’s qualms and crude conceptions, and promised
deliverance in this Lay Sermon. The true secret of all this, we suspect,
is, that our author has not made up his own mind on any of the subjects
of which he professes to treat, and on which he warns his readers
against coming to any conclusion, without his especial assistance; by
means of which, they may at last attain to ‘that imperative and oracular
form of the understanding,’ of which he speaks as ‘the form of reason
itself in all things purely rational and moral.’ In this state of
voluntary self-delusion, into which he has thrown himself, he mistakes
hallucinations for truths, though he still has his misgivings, and dares
not communicate them to others, except in distant hints, lest the spell
should be broken, and the vision disappear. Plain sense and plain
speaking would put an end to those ‘thick-coming fancies,’ that lull him
to repose. It is in this sort of waking dream, this giddy maze of
opinions, started, and left, and resumed—this momentary pursuit of
truths, as if they were butterflies—that Mr. Coleridge’s pleasure, and,
we believe, his chief faculty, lies. He has a thousand shadowy thoughts
that rise before him, and hold each a glass, in which they point to
others yet more dim and distant. He has a thousand self-created fancies
that glitter and burst like bubbles. In the world of shadows, in the
succession of bubbles, there is no preference but of the most shadowy,
no attachment but to the shortest-lived. Mr. Coleridge accordingly has
no principle but that of being governed entirely by his own caprice,
indolence, or vanity; no opinion that any body else holds, or even he
himself, for two moments together. His fancy is stronger than his
reason; his apprehension greater than his comprehension. He perceives
every thing, but the relations of things to one another. His ideas are
as finely shaded as the rainbow of the moon upon the clouds, as
evanescent, and as soon dissolved. The subtlety of his tact, the
quickness and airiness of his invention, make him perceive every
possible shade and view of a subject in its turn; but this readiness of
lending his imagination to every thing, prevents him from weighing the
force of any one, or retaining the most important in mind. It destroys
the balance and _momentum_ of his feelings; makes him unable to follow
up a principle into its consequences, or maintain a truth in spite of
opposition: it takes away all _will_ to adhere to what is right, and
reject what is wrong; and, with the will, the power to do it, at the
expense of any thing difficult in thought, or irksome in feeling. The
consequence is, that the general character of Mr. Coleridge’s intellect,
is a restless and yet listless dissipation, that yields to every
impulse, and is stopped by every obstacle; an indifference to the
greatest trifles, or the most important truths: or rather, a preference
of the vapid to the solid, of the possible to the actual, of the
impossible to both; of theory to practice, of contradiction to reason,
and of absurdity to common sense. Perhaps it is well that he is so
impracticable as he is; for whenever, by any accident, he comes to
practice, he is dangerous in the extreme. Though his opinions are
neutralized in the extreme levity of his understanding, we are sometimes
tempted to suspect that they may be subjected to a more ignoble bias;
for though he does not ply his oars very strenuously in following the
tide of corruption, or set up his sails to catch the tainted breeze of
popularity, he suffers his boat to drift along with the stream. We do
not pretend to understand the philosophical principles of that anomalous
production, ‘the Friend;’ but we remember that the practical measures
which he there attempted to defend, were the expedition to Copenhagen,
the expedition to Walcheren, and the assassination of Buonaparte, which,
at the time Mr. Coleridge was getting that work into circulation, was a
common topic of conversation, and a sort of _forlorn hope_ in certain
circles. A man who exercises an unlimited philosophical scepticism on
questions of abstract right or wrong, may be of service to the progress
of truth; but a writer who exercises this privilege, with a regular
leaning to the side of power, is a very questionable sort of person.
There is not much of this kind in the present Essay. It has no leaning
any way. All the sentiments advanced in it are ‘like the swan’s down
feather—

‘That stands upon the swell at full of tide,
And neither way inclines.’

We have here given a pretty strong opinion on the merits of this
performance: and we proceed to make it good by extracts from the work
itself; and it is just as well to begin with the beginning.

‘If our whole knowledge and information concerning the Bible had been
confined to the one fact, of its immediate derivation from God, we
should still presume that it contained rules and assistances for all
conditions of men, under all circumstances; and therefore for
communities no less than for individuals. The contents of every work
must correspond to the character and designs of the workmaster; and the
inference in the present case is too obvious to be overlooked, too plain
to be resisted. It requires, indeed, all the might of superstition, to
conceal from a man of common understanding, the further truth, that the
interment of such a treasure, in a dead language, must needs be contrary
to the intentions of the gracious Donor. Apostasy itself dared not
question the _premise_: and, that the practical _consequence_ did not
follow, is conceivable only under a complete _system_ of delusion,
which, from the cradle to the death-bed, ceases not to overawe the will
by obscure fears, while it preoccupies the senses by vivid imagery and
ritual pantomime. But to such a scheme, all forms of sophistry are
native. The very excellence of the Giver has been made a reason for
withholding the gift; nay, the transcendent value of the gift itself
assigned as the motive of its detention. We may be shocked at the
presumption, but need not be surprised at the fact, that a jealous
priesthood should have ventured to represent the applicability of the
Bible to all the wants and occasions of men, as a wax-like pliability to
all their fancies and prepossessions. Faithful guardians of Holy Writ!’
&c.

And after a great deal to the same effect, he proceeds—

‘The humblest and least educated of our countrymen must have wilfully
neglected the inestimable privileges secured to all alike, if he has not
himself found, if he has not from his own personal experience
discovered, the sufficiency of the Scriptures in all knowledge requisite
for a right performance of his duty as a man and a Christian. Of the
labouring classes, who in all countries form the great majority of the
inhabitants, more than this is not demanded, more than this is not
perhaps generally desirable.’—‘They are not sought for in public
counsel, nor need they be found where politic sentences are spoken. It
is enough if every one is wise in the working of his own craft: so best
will they maintain the state of the world.’ p. 7.

Now, if this is all that is necessary or desirable for the people to
know, we can see little difference between the doctrine of the Lay
Sermon, and ‘that complete system of papal imposture, which inters the
Scriptures in a dead language, and commands its vassals to take for
granted what it forbids them to ascertain.’ If a candidate is to start
for infallibility, we, for our parts, shall give our casting vote for
the successor of St. Peter, rather than for Mr. Coleridge. The Bible, we
believe, when rightly understood, contains no set of rules for making
the labouring classes mere ‘workers in brass or in stone,’—‘hewers of
wood or drawers of water,’ each wise in his own craft. Yet it is by
confining their inquiries and their knowledge to such vocations, and
excluding them from any share in politics, philosophy, and theology,
‘that the state of the world is best upheld.’ Such is the exposition of
our Lay-Divine. Such is his application of it. Why then does he blame
the Catholics for acting on this principle—for deducing the _practical
consequence_ from the acknowledged _premise_? Great as is our contempt
for the delusions of the Romish Church, it would have been still
greater, if they had opened the sacred volume to the poor and
illiterate; had told them that it contained the most useful knowledge
for all conditions and for all circumstances of life, public and
private; and had then instantly shut the book in their faces, saying, it
was enough for them to be wise in their own calling and to leave the
study and interpretation of the Scriptures to their betters—to Mr.
Coleridge and his imaginary audience. The Catholic Church might have an
excuse for what it did in the supposed difficulty of understanding the
Scriptures, their doubts and ambiguities, and ‘wax-like pliability to
all occasions and humours.’ But Mr. Coleridge has no excuse; for he
says, they are plain to all capacities, high and low together. ‘The road
of salvation,’ he says, ‘is for us a high road, and the way-farer,
though simple, need not err therein.’ And he accordingly proceeds to
draw up a provisional bill of indictment, and to utter his doubtful
denunciations against us as a nation, for the supposed neglect of the
inestimable privileges, _secured alike to all_, and for the lights held
out to all for ‘maintaining the state’ of their country in the precepts
and examples of Holy Writ; when, all of a sudden, his eye encountering
that brilliant auditory which his pen had conjured up, the Preacher
finds out, that the only use of the study of the Scriptures for the rest
of the people, is to learn that they have no occasion to study them at
all—‘so best shall they maintain the state of the world.’ If Mr.
Coleridge has no meaning in what he writes, he had better not write at
all: if he has any meaning, he contradicts himself. The truth is,
however, as it appears to us, that the whole of this Sermon is written
to sanction the principle of Catholic dictation, and to reprobate that
diffusion of free inquiry—that difference of private, and ascendancy of
public opinion, which has been the necessary consequence, and the great
benefit of the Reformation. That Mr. Coleridge himself is as squeamish
in guarding _his_ Statesman’s Manual from profanation as any Popish
priest can be in keeping the Scriptures from the knowledge of the Laity,
will be seen from the following delicate _morceau_, which occurs, p. 44.

‘When I named this Essay a Sermon, I sought to prepare the inquirers
after it _for the absence of all the usual softenings suggested by
worldly prudence, of all compromise between truth and courtesy_. But not
even as a Sermon would I have addressed the present Discourse _to a
promiscuous audience_; and for this reason I likewise announced it in
the title-page, as exclusively _ad clerum, i.e._ (in the old and wide
sense of the word) to men of _clerkly_ acquirements, of whatever
profession. I would that the greater part of our publications could be
thus _directed_, each to its appropriate class of readers.[6] But this
cannot be! For among other odd burrs and kecksies, the misgrowth of our
luxuriant activity, we have now a READING PUBLIC—as strange a phrase,
methinks, as ever forced a splenetic smile on the staid countenance of
Meditation; and yet no fiction! For our readers have, in good truth,
multiplied exceedingly, and have waxed proud. It would require the
intrepid accuracy of a Colquhoun to venture at the precise number of
that vast company only, whose heads and hearts are dieted at the two
public _ordinaries_ of Literature, the circulating libraries and the
periodical press. But what is the result? Does the inward man thrive on
this regimen? Alas! if the average health of the consumers may be judged
of by the articles of largest consumption; if the secretions may be
conjectured from the ingredients of the dishes that are found best
suited to their palates; from all that I have seen, either of the
banquet or the guests, I shall utter my _Profaccia_ with a desponding
sigh. From a popular philosophy and a philosophic populace, good sense
deliver us!’

If it were possible to be serious after a passage like this, we might
ask, what is to hinder a convert of ‘the church of superstition’ from
exclaiming in like manner, ‘From a popular theology, and a theological
populace, Good Lord deliver us! ‘Mr. Coleridge does not say—will he
say—that as many sects and differences of opinion in religion have not
risen up, in consequence of the Reformation, as in philosophy or
politics, from ‘the misgrowth of our luxuriant activity?’ Can any one
express a greater disgust, (approaching to _nausea_), at every sect and
separation from the Church of England, which he sometimes, by an
hyperbole of affectation, affects to call the Catholic Church? There is
something, then, worse than ‘luxuriant activity,’—the palsy of death;
something worse than occasional error,—systematic imposture; something
worse than the collision of differing opinions,—the suppression of all
freedom of thought and independent love of truth, under the torpid sway
of an insolent and selfish domination, which makes use of truth and
falsehood equally as tools of its own aggrandisement and the debasement
of its vassals, and always must do so, without the exercise of public
opinion, and freedom of conscience, as its control and counter-check.
For what have we been labouring for the last three hundred years? Would
Mr. Coleridge, with impious hand, turn the world ‘twice ten degrees
askance,’ and carry us back to the dark ages? Would he punish the
_reading public_ for their bad taste in reading periodical publications
which he does not like, by suppressing the freedom of the press
altogether, or destroying the art of printing? He does not know what he
means himself. Perhaps we can tell him. He, or at least those whom he
writes to please, and who look ‘with jealous leer malign’ at modern
advantages and modern pretensions, would give us back all the abuses of
former times, without any of their advantages; and impose upon us, by
force or fraud, a complete system of superstition without faith, of
despotism without loyalty, of error without enthusiasm, and all the
evils, without any of the blessings, of ignorance. The senseless jargon
which Mr. Coleridge has let fall on this subject, is the more
extraordinary, inasmuch as he declares, in an early part of his Sermon,
that ‘Religion and Reason are their own evidence;’—a position which
appears to us ‘fraught with _potential infidelity_’ quite as much as
Unitarianism, or the detestable plan for teaching reading and writing,
and a knowledge of the Scriptures, without the creed or the catechism of
the Church of England. The passage in which this sweeping clause is
introduced _en passant_, is worth quoting, both as it is very
nonsensical in itself, and as it is one of the least nonsensical in the
present pamphlet.

‘In the infancy of the world, signs and wonders were requisite, in order
to startle and break down that superstition, idolatrous in itself, and
the source of all other idolatry, which tempts the natural man to seek
the true cause and origin of public calamities in outward circumstances,
persons and incidents: in agents, therefore, that were themselves but
surges of the same tide, passive conductors of the one invisible
influence, under which the total host of billows, in the whole line of
successive impulse, swell and roll shoreward; there finally, each in its
turn, to strike, roar, and be dissipated.

‘But with each miracle worked there was a truth revealed, which
thenceforward was to act as its substitute: And if we think the Bible
less applicable to us on account of the miracles, we degrade ourselves
into mere slaves of sense and fancy; which are, indeed, the appointed
medium between earth and heaven, but for that very cause stand in a
desirable relation to spiritual truth then only, when, as a mere and
passive medium, they yield a free passage to its light. It was only to
overthrow the usurpation exercised in and through the senses, that the
senses were miraculously appealed to. Reason and Religion are their own
evidence. The natural sun is, in this respect, a symbol of the
spiritual. Ere he is fully arisen, and while his glories are still under
veil, he calls up the breeze to chase away the usurping vapours of the
night-season, and thus converts the air itself into the minister of its
own purification: not surely in proof or elucidation of the light from
heaven, but to prevent its interception.’ p. 12.

Here is a very pretty Della Cruscan image: and we really think it a
pity, that Mr. Coleridge ever quitted that school of poetry to grapple
with the simplicity of nature, or to lose himself in the depths of
philosophy. His illustration is pretty, but false. He treats the
miracles recorded in the Scriptures, with more than heretical boldness,
as mere appeals to ‘sense and fancy,’ or to ‘the natural man,’ to
counteract the impressions of sense and fancy. But, for the light of
Heaven to have been like the light of day in this respect, the Sun ought
to have called up other vapours opposite, as mirrors or pageants to
reflect its light, dimmed by the intermediate vapours, instead of
chasing the last away. We criticize the simile, because we are sure
higher authority will object to the doctrine. We might challenge Mr.
Coleridge to point out a single writer, Catholic, Protestant or
Sectarian, whose principles are not regarded as _potential infidelity_
by the rest, that does not consider the miraculous attestation of
certain revealed doctrines as proofs of their truth, independently of
their internal evidence. They are a distinct and additional authority.
Reason and Religion are no more the same in this respect, than ocular
demonstration and oral testimony are the same. Neither are they opposed
to one another, any more. We believe in credible witnesses. We believe
in the word of God, when we have reason to suppose, that we hear his
voice in the thunder of his power: but we cannot, consistently with the
principles of reason or of sound faith, suppose him to utter what is
contrary to reason, though it may be different from it. Revelation
utters a voice in the silence of reason, but does not contradict it: it
throws a light on objects too distant for the unassisted eye to behold.
But it does not pervert our natural organs of vision, with respect to
objects within their reach. Reason and religion are therefore
consistent, but not the same, nor equally self-evident. All this, we
think, is clear and plain. But Mr. Coleridge likes to darken and perplex
every question of which he treats. So, in the passage above quoted, he
affirms that Religion is its own evidence, to confound one class of
readers; and he afterwards asserts that Reason is founded on faith, to
astonish another. He proceeds indeed by the _differential method_ in all
questions; and his chief care, in which he is tolerably successful, is
not to agree with any set of men or opinions. We pass over his Jeremiad
on the French Revolution,—his discovery that the state of public opinion
has a considerable influence on the state of public affairs,
particularly in turbulent times,—his apology for imitating St. Paul by
quoting Shakespear, and many others: for if we were to collect all the
riches of absurdity in this Discourse, we should never have done. But
there is one passage, upon which he has plainly taken so much pains,
that we _must_ give it.

‘A calm and detailed examination of the facts, justifies me to my own
mind, in hazarding the bold assertion, that the fearful blunders of the
late dread Revolution, and all the calamitous mistakes of its opponents,
from its commencement even to the era of loftier principles and wiser
measures (an era, that began with, and ought to be named from, the war
of the Spanish and Portuguese insurgents), every failure, with all its
gloomy results, may be unanswerably deduced, from the neglect of some
maxim or other that had been established by clear reasoning and plain
facts, in the writings of Thucydides, Tacitus, Machiavel, Bacon, or
Harrington. These are red-letter names, even in the almanacks of worldly
wisdom: and yet I dare challenge all the critical benches of infidelity,
to point out any one important truth, any one efficient practical
direction or warning, which did not preexist, and for the most part in a
sounder, more intelligible, and more comprehensive form IN THE BIBLE.’

‘In addition to this, the Hebrew legislator, and the other inspired
poets, prophets, historians and moralists, of the Jewish church, have
two immense advantages in their favour. First, their particular rules
and prescripts flow directly and visibly from universal principles, as
from a fountain: they flow from principles and ideas that are not so
properly said to be confirmed by reason, as to be reason itself!
Principles, in act and procession, disjoined from which, and from the
emotions that inevitably accompany the actual intuition of their truth,
the widest maxims of prudence are like arms without hearts, muscles
without nerves. Secondly, from the very nature of these principles, as
taught in the Bible, they are understood, in exact proportion as they
are believed and felt. The regulator is never separated from the main
spring. For the words of the Apostle are literally and philosophically
true: _We_ (that is the human race) _live by faith_. Whatever we do or
know, that in kind is different from the brute creation, has its origin
in a determination of the reason to have faith and trust in itself.
This, its first act of faith, is scarcely less than identical with its
own being. _Implicité_, it is the copula—it contains the
_possibility_—of every position, to which there exists any
correspondence in reality. It is itself, therefore, the realizing
principle, the spiritual substratum of the whole complex body of truths.
This primal act of faith is enunciated in the word, God: a faith not
derived from experience, but its ground and source; and without which,
the fleeting _chaos of facts_ would no more form experience, than the
dust of the grave can of itself make a living man. The imperative and
oracular form of the inspired Scripture, is _the form of reason itself_,
in all things purely rational and moral.

‘If it be the word of Divine Wisdom, we might anticipate, that it would
in all things be distinguished from other books, as the Supreme Reason,
whose knowledge is creative, and antecedent to the things known, is
distinguished from the understanding, or creaturely mind of the
individual, the acts of which are posterior to the things it records and
arranges. Man alone was created in the image of God: a position
groundless and inexplicable, if _the reason_ in man do not differ from
_the understanding_. For this the inferior animals (many at least)
possess _in degree_: and assuredly the divine image or idea is not a
thing of degrees,’ &c. &c. &c.

There is one short passage, just afterwards, in which the author makes
an easy transition from cant to calumny: and, with equal credit and
safety to himself, insults and traduces the dead. ‘One confirmation of
the latter assertion you may find in the history of our country, written
by the same Scotch Philosopher, who devoted his life to the undermining
of the Christian Religion; and _expended his last breath in a
blasphemous regret, that he had not survived it_!’ This last assertion
is a gratuitous poetical fabrication, as mean as it is malignant. With
respect to Mr. Hume’s History, here spoken of with ignorant petulance,
it is beyond dispute the most judicious, profound, and acute of all
historical compositions, though the friends of liberty may admit, with
the advocate of servility, that it has its defects;—and the scepticism
into which its ingenious and most amiable author was betrayed in matters
of religion, must always be lamented by the lovers of genius and virtue.
The venom of the sting meant to be inflicted on the memory of ‘the
Scotch Philosopher,’ seems to have returned to the writer’s own bosom,
and to have exhausted itself in the following bloated passage.

‘At the annunciation of PRINCIPLES, of IDEAS, the soul of man awakes,
and starts up, as an exile in a far distant land at the unexpected
sounds of his native language, when, after long years of absence, and
almost of oblivion, he is suddenly addressed in his own mother tongue.
He weeps for joy, and embraces the speaker as his brother. _How else can
we explain the fact so honourable to Great Britain,[7] that the poorest
amongst us will contend with as much enthusiasm as the richest for the
rights of property?_ These rights are the spheres and necessary
conditions of free agency. But free agency contains the idea of the free
will; and in this he intuitively knows the sublimity, and the infinite
hopes, fears, and capabilities of his own (English) nature. On what
other ground but the _cognateness of ideas_ and principles to man as
man, does the nameless soldier rush to the combat in defence of the
liberties or _the honour_ of his country? Even men, wofully neglectful
of the principles of religion, will shed their blood for its truth.’ p.
30.

How does this passage agree with Mr. C.’s general contempt of mankind,
and that especial aversion to ‘Mob-Sycophancy’ which has marked him from
the cradle, and which formerly led him to give up the periodical paper
of the Watchman, and to break off in the middle of his ‘_Conciones ad
Populum_?’ A few plain instincts, and a little common sense, are all
that the most popular of our popular writers attribute to the people, or
rely on for their success in addressing them. But Mr. Coleridge, the
mob-hating Mr. Coleridge, here supposes them intuitively to perceive the
cabalistical visions of German metaphysics; and compliments the poorest
peasant, and the nameless soldier, not only on the cognateness of their
ideas and principles to man as man, but on their immediate and joyous
excitation at the mere annunciation of such delightful things as
‘_Principles_ and _Ideas_.’ Our mystic, in a Note, finds a confirmation
of this cognateness of the most important truths to the vulgarest of the
people, in ‘an anecdote told with much humour in one of Goldsmith’s
Essays.’ Poor Goldy! How he would have stared at this transcendental
inference from his humorous anecdote! He would have felt as awkwardly as
Gulliver did, when the monkey at the palace of Brobdignag took him an
airing on the tiles, and almost broke his neck by the honour. Mr.
Coleridge’s patronage is of the same unwieldy kind.—The Preacher next
gives his authorities for reading the Scriptures. They are—Heraclitus
and Horace.—In earnest? In good sooth, and in sad and sober earnest.

‘Or would you wish for authorities?—for great examples?—You may find
them in the writings of Thuanus, of Lord Clarendon, of Sir Thomas More,
of Raleigh; and in the life and letters of the heroic Gustavus Adolphus.
But these, though eminent statesmen, were Christians, and might lie
under the thraldom of habit and prejudice. I will refer you then to
authorities of two great men, both Pagans; but removed from each other
by many centuries, and not more distant in their ages than in their
characters and situations. The first shall be that of Heraclitus, the
sad and recluse philosopher. Πολυμαθιη νοον οὐ διδασκει· Σιβυλλα δε
μαινομενᾳ στόματι αγελαστα και ακαλλωπιστα και αμυριστα φθεγγομενη,
χιλιων ετων εξικνεται τῃ φωνῃ δια τον θεον.[8] Shall we hesitate to
apply to the prophets of God, what could be affirmed of the Sibylls by a
philosopher whom Socrates, the prince of philosophers, venerated for the
profundity of his wisdom?

‘For the other, I will refer you to the darling of the polished court of
Augustus, to the man whose works have been in all ages deemed the models
of good sense, and are still the pocket-companions of those who pride
themselves on uniting the scholar with the gentleman. This accomplished
man of the world has given an account of the subjects of conversation
between the illustrious statesmen who governed, and the brightest
luminaries who then adorned, the empire of the civilized world—

‘Sermo oritur non de villis domibusve alienis
Nec, male, nec ne lepus saltet. Sed quod magis ad nos
Pertinet, et nescire malum est, agitamus: utrumne
Divitiis homines, an sint virtute beati?
Et qua sit natura boni? summumque quid eius?’

It is not easy to conceive any thing better than this;—only the next
passage beats it hollow, and is itself surpassed by the one after it,
‘as Alps o’er Alps arise.’

So far Mr. Coleridge has indulged himself in ‘a preparatory heat,’ and
said nothing about the Bible. But now he girds himself up for his main
purpose, places himself at the helm, and undertakes to conduct the
statesman to his desired haven in Scripture prophecy and history. ‘But
do you require some one or more particular passage from the Bible, that
may at once illustrate and exemplify its applicability to the changes
and fortunes of empires? Of the numerous chapters that relate to the
Jewish tribes, their enemies and allies, before and after their division
into two kingdoms, it would be more difficult to state a single one,
from which some guiding light might _not_ be struck.’ Does Mr. Coleridge
then condescend to oblige us with any one? Nothing can be farther from
his thoughts. He is here off again at a tangent, and does not return to
the subject for the next seven pages. When he does—it is in the
following explicit manner.—‘But I refer to the demand. _Were it my
object to touch on the present state of public affairs in this kingdom,
or on the prospective measures in agitation respecting our sister
island, I would direct your most serious meditations to the latter
period of the reign of Solomon, and to the revolutions in the reign of
Rehoboam, his successor. But I should tread on glowing embers: I will
turn to the causes of the revolution, and fearful chastisement of
France._’ Let the reader turn to the first book of Kings, in which the
parallel passage to our own history at the present crisis stands,
according to our author, so alarmingly conspicuous; and he will not be
surprised that Mr. Coleridge found himself ‘treading on glowing embers.’
The insidious loyalty or covert Jacobinism of this same parallel, which
he declines drawing on account of its extreme applicability, is indeed
beyond our comprehension, and not a less ‘curious specimen of
psychology,’ than the one immediately preceding it, in which he proves
the doctrine of _divine right_ to be revealed in an especial manner in
the Hebrew Scriptures.

We should proceed to notice that part of the Sermon, where the orator
rails at the public praises of Dr. Bell, and abuses Joseph Lancaster,
_con amore_. Nothing more flat and vapid, in wit or argument, was ever
put before the public, which he treats with such contempt. Of the wit,
take the following choice sample.

‘But the phrase of the READING PUBLIC, which occasioned this note,
brings to my mind the mistake of a lethargic Dutch traveller, who
returning highly gratified from a showman’s caravan, which he had been
tempted to enter by the words, THE LEARNED PIG, gilt on the pannels, met
another caravan of a similar shape, with THE READING FLY on it, in
letters of the same size and splendour. “Why, dis is voonders above
voonders!” exclaims the Dutchman; takes his seat as first comer; and,
soon fatigued by waiting, and by the very hush and intensity of his
expectation, gives way to his constitutional somnolence, from which he
is roused by the supposed showman at Hounslow, with a—“_In what name,
Sir! was your place taken? Are you booked all the way for Reading?_”—Now
a Reading Public is (to my mind) more marvellous still, and in the third
tier of “voonders above voonders!”’

Mr. Coleridge’s wit and sentimentality do not seem to have settled
accounts together; for in the very next page after this ‘third tier of
wonders,’ he says—

‘And here my apprehensions point to two opposite errors. The first
consists in a disposition to think, that as the peace of nations has
been disturbed by the diffusion of a false light, it may be
re-established by excluding the people from all knowledge and all
prospect of amelioration. O! never, never! Reflection and stirrings of
mind, with all their restlessness, and all the errors that result from
their imperfection, from the _Too much_, because _Too little_, are come
into the world. The powers that awaken and foster the spirit of
curiosity, are to be found in every village: Books are in every hovel:
The infant’s cries are hushed with _picture_-books: and the Cottager’s
child sheds its first bitter tears over pages, which render it
impossible for the man to be treated or governed as a child. Here, as in
so many other cases, the inconveniences that have arisen from a thing’s
having become too general, are best removed by making it universal.’ p.
49.

And yet, with Mr. Coleridge, a reading public is ‘voonders above
voonders’—a strange phrase, and yet no fiction! The public is become a
reading public, down to the cottager’s child; and he thanks God for
it—for that great moral steam-engine, Dr. Bell’s original and
unsophisticated plan, which he considers as an especial gift of
Providence to the human race—thus about to be converted into one great
reading public; and yet he utters his _Profaccia_ upon it with a
desponding sigh; and proposes, as a remedy, to put this spirit which has
gone forth, under the tutelage of churchwardens, to cant against
‘liberal ideas,’ and ‘the jargon of this enlightened age;’—in other
words, to turn this vast machine against itself, and make it a go-cart
of corruption, servility, superstition and tyranny. Mr. Coleridge’s
first horror is, that there should be a reading public: his next hope is
to prevent them from reaping an atom of benefit from ‘reflection and
stirrings of mind, with all their restlessness.’

The conclusion of this discourse is even more rhapsodical than the
former part of it; and we give the pulpit or rostrum from which Mr.
Coleridge is supposed to deliver it, ‘high enthroned above all height,’
the decided preference over that throne of dulness and of nonsense which
Pope did erst erect for the doubtful merits of Colley and Sir Richard.

The notes are better, and but a little better than the text. We might
select, as specimens of laborious foolery, the passage in which the
writer defends _second sight_, to prove that he has unjustly been
accused of visionary paradox, or hints that a disbelief in ghosts and
witches is no great sign of the wisdom of the age, or that in which he
gives us to understand that Sir Isaac Newton was a great astrologer, or
Mr. Locke no conjurer. But we prefer (for our limits are straitened) the
author’s description of a green field, which he prefaces by observing,
that ‘the book of Nature has been the music of gentle and pious minds in
all ages; and that it is the poetry of all human nature to read it
likewise in a figurative sense, and to find therein correspondences and
symbols of a spiritual nature.’

MR. COLERIDGE’S DESCRIPTION OF A GREEN FIELD.

‘I have at this moment before me, in the flowery meadow on which my eye
is now reposing, one of Nature’s most soothing chapters, in which there
is no lamenting word, no one character of guilt or anguish. For never
can I look and meditate on the vegetable creation, without a feeling
similar to that with which we gaze at a beautiful infant that has fed
itself asleep at its mother’s bosom, and smiles in its strange dream of
obscure yet happy sensations. The same tender and genial pleasure takes
possession of me, and this pleasure is checked and drawn inward by the
like aching melancholy, by the same whispered remonstrance, and made
restless by a similar impulse of aspiration. It seems as if the soul
said to herself—“From this state” (from that of a flowery meadow) “hast
_thou_ fallen! Such shouldst thou still become, thyself all permeable to
a holier power! Thyself at once hidden and glorified by its own
transparency, as the accidental and dividuous in this quiet and
harmonious object is subjected to the life and light of nature which
shines in it, even as the transmitted power, love and wisdom, of God
over all fills, and shines through, Nature! But what the plant _is_, by
an act not its own, and unconsciously—_that_ must thou _make_ thyself to
_become_! must by prayer, and by a watchful and unresisting spirit,
_join_ at least with the preventive and assisting grace to _make_
thyself, in that light of conscience which inflameth not, and with that
knowledge which puffeth not up.”’

This will do. It is well observed by Hobbes, that ‘it is by means of
words only that a man becometh excellently wise or excellently foolish.’

COLERIDGE’S LITERARY LIFE

VOL. XXVIII.] [_August 1817._

There are some things readable in these volumes; and if the learned
author could only have been persuaded to make them a little more
conformable to their title, we have no doubt that they would have been
the most popular of all his productions. Unfortunately, however, this
work is not so properly an account of his Life and Opinions, as an
Apology for them. ‘It will be found,’ says our Auto-Biographer, ‘that
the least of what I have written concerns myself personally.’ What then,
it may be asked, is the work taken up with? With the announcement of an
explanation of the author’s Political and Philosophical creed, to be
contained in another work—with a prefatory introduction of 200 pages to
an Essay on the difference between Fancy and Imagination, which was
intended to form part of this, but has been suppressed, at the request
of a judicious friend, as unintelligible—with a catalogue of Mr.
Southey’s domestic virtues, and author-like qualifications—a candid
defence of the Lyrical Ballads—a critique on Mr. Wordsworth’s
poetry—quotations from the Friend—and attacks on the Edinburgh Review.
There are, in fact, only two or three passages in the work which relate
to the details of the author’s life,—such as the account of his
school-education, and of his setting up the Watchman newspaper. We shall
make sure of the first of these curious documents, before we completely
lose ourselves in the multiplicity of his speculative opinions.

‘At school, I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible,
though at the same time, a very severe master, the Rev. James Bowyer,
many years Head Master of the Grammar-School, Christ’s Hospital. He
early moulded my taste to the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero, of
Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again, of Virgil to Ovid. He
habituated me to compare Lucretius (in such extracts as I then read),
Terence, and, above all, the chaster poems of Catullus, not only with
the Roman poets of the so called silver and brazen ages, but with even
those of the Augustan era; and, on grounds of plain sense, and universal
logic, to see and assert the superiority of the former, in the truth and
nativeness both of their thoughts and diction. At the same time that we
were studying the Greek tragic poets, he made us read Shakespeare and
Milton as lessons: and they were the lessons, too, which required most
time and trouble to _bring up_, so as to escape his censure. I learnt
from him, that Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and, seemingly, that
of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of
science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and
dependent on more, and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets,
he would say, there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but
for the position of every word; and I well remember, that, availing
himself of the synonimes to the Homer of Didymus, he made us attempt to
show, with regard to each, _why_ it would not have answered the same
purpose; and _wherein_ consisted the peculiar fitness of the word in the
original text.

‘I had just entered on my seventeenth year, when the Sonnets of Mr.
Bowles, twenty in number, and just then published in a quarto pamphlet,
were first made known and presented to me, by a school-fellow who had
quitted us for the University, and who, during the whole time that he
was in our first form (or, in our school language, a GRECIAN), had been
my patron and protector. I refer to Dr. Middleton, the truly learned,
and every way excellent Bishop of Calcutta—

‘Qui laudibus amplis
Ingenium celebrare meum, calamumque solebat,
Calcar agens animo validum. Non omnia terræ
Obruta! Vivit amor, vivit dolor! Ora negatur
Dulcia conspicere; at flere et meminisse relictum est.’
_Petr. Ep. Lib. 7. Ep. 1._

‘It was a double pleasure to me, and still remains a tender
recollection, that I should have received from a friend so revered, the
first knowledge of a poet, by whose works, year after year, I was so
enthusiastically delighted and inspired. My earliest acquaintances will
not have forgotten the undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal, with
which I laboured to make proselytes, not only of my companions, but of
all with whom I conversed, of whatever rank, and in whatever place. As
my school finances did not permit me to purchase copies, I made, within
less than a year and an half, more than forty transcriptions, as the
best presents I could offer to those who had in any way won my regard.
And, with almost equal delight, did I receive the three or four
following publications of the same author.

‘Though I have seen and known enough of mankind to be well aware that I
shall perhaps stand alone in my creed, and that it will be well, if I
subject myself to no worse charge than that of singularity; I am not
therefore deterred from avowing, that I regard, and ever have regarded
the obligations of intellect among the most sacred of the claims of
gratitude. A valuable thought, or a particular train of thoughts, gives
me additional pleasure, when I can safely refer and attribute it to the
conversation or correspondence of another. My obligations to Mr. Bowles
were indeed important, and for radical good. _At a very premature age,
even before my fifteenth year, I had bewildered myself in metaphysicks,
and in theological controversy. Nothing else pleased me. History, and
particular facts, lost all interest in my mind._ Poetry (though for a
schoolboy of that age, I was above par in English versification, and had
already produced two or three compositions which, I may venture to say,
without reference to my age, were somewhat above mediocrity, and which
had gained me more credit, than the sound, good sense of my old master
was at all pleased with)—_poetry itself, yea novels and romances, became
insipid to me_. In my friendless wanderings on our _leave-days_, (for I
was an orphan, and had scarcely any connexions in London), highly was I
delighted, if any passenger, especially if he were drest in black, would
enter into conversation with me. For I soon found the means of directing
it to my favourite subjects

Of providence, fore-knowledge, will, and fate,
Fix’d fate, free-will, fore-knowledge absolute,
And found no end in wandering mazes lost.

‘This preposterous pursuit was, beyond doubt, injurious, both to my
natural powers, and to the progress of my education. It would perhaps
have been destructive, had it been continued; but from this I was
auspiciously withdrawn, partly indeed by an accidental introduction to
an amiable family, chiefly however by the genial influence of a style of
poetry, so tender, and yet so manly, so natural and real, and yet so
dignified and harmonious, as the sonnets, &c. of Mr. Bowles! Well were
it for me, perhaps, had I never relapsed into the same mental disease;
if I had continued to pluck the flower, and reap the harvest from the
cultivated surface, instead of delving in the unwholesome quicksilver
mines of metaphysic depths. But if in after-time I have sought a refuge
from bodily pain and mismanaged sensibility, in abstruse researches,
which exercised the strength and subtlety of the understanding, without
awakening the feelings of the heart; still there was a long and blessed
interval, during which my natural faculties were allowed to expand, and
my original tendencies to develop themselves—my fancy, and the love of
nature, and the sense of beauty in forms and sounds.’ p. 17.

Mr. Coleridge seems to us, from this early association, to overrate the
merits of Bowles’s Sonnets, which he prefers to Warton’s, which last we,
in our turn, prefer to Wordsworth’s, and indeed to any Sonnets in the
language. He cannot, however, be said to overrate the extent of the
intellectual obligations which he thinks he owes to his favourite
writer. If the study of Mr. Bowles’s poems could have effected a
permanent cure of that ‘preposterous’ state of mind which he has above
described, his gratitude, we admit, should be boundless: But the
disease, we fear, was in the mind itself; and the study of poetry,
instead of counteracting, only gave force to the original propensity;
and Mr. Coleridge has ever since, from the combined forces of poetic
levity and metaphysic bathos, been trying to fly, not in the air, but
under ground—playing at hawk and buzzard between sense and
nonsense,—floating or sinking in fine Kantean categories, in a state of
suspended animation ’twixt dreaming and awake,—quitting the plain ground
of ‘history and particular facts’ for the first butterfly theory,
fancy-bred from the maggots of his brain,—going up in an air-balloon
filled with fetid gas from the writings of Jacob Behmen and the mystics,
and coming down in a parachute made of the soiled and fashionable leaves
of the Morning Post,—promising us an account of the Intellectual System
of the Universe, and putting us off with a reference to a promised
dissertation on the Logos, introductory to an intended commentary on the
entire Gospel of St. John. In the above extract, he tells us, with a
degree of _naïveté_ not usual with him, that, ‘even before his fifteenth
year, history and particular facts had lost all interest in his mind.’
Yet, so little is he himself aware of the influence which this feeling
still continues to exert over his mind, and of the way in which it has
mixed itself up in his philosophical faith, that he afterwards makes it
the test and definition of a sound understanding and true genius, that
‘the mind is affected by thoughts, rather than by things; and only then
feels the _requisite_ interest even for the most important events and
accidents, when by means of meditation they have passed into
_thoughts_.’ p. 30. We do not see, after this, what right Mr. C. has to
complain of those who say that he is neither the most literal nor
logical of mortals; and the worst that has ever been said of him is,
that he is the least so. If it is the proper business of the philosopher
to dream over theories, and to neglect or gloss over facts, to fit them
to his theories or his conscience; we confess we know of few writers,
ancient or modern, who have come nearer to the perfection of this
character than the author before us.

After a desultory and unsatisfactory attempt (Chap. II.) to account for
and disprove the common notion of the irritability of authors, Mr.
Coleridge proceeds (by what connexion we know not) to a full, true and
particular account of the personal, domestic, and literary habits of his
friend Mr. Southey,—to all which we have but one objection, namely, that
it seems quite unnecessary, as we never heard them impugned,—except
indeed by the Antijacobin writers, here quoted by Mr. Coleridge, who is
no less impartial as a friend, than candid as an enemy. The passage
altogether is not a little remarkable.

‘It is not, however,’ says our author, ‘from grateful recollections
only, that I have been impelled thus to leave these my deliberate
sentiments on record; but in some sense as a debt of justice to the man,
whose name has been so often connected with mine, for evil to which he
is a stranger. As a specimen, 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 his 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?_’ p. 71.

With us, we confess the wonder does not lie there:—all that surprises us
is, that the objects of these atrocious calumnies were _ever_ reconciled
to the authors of them;—for the calumniators were the party itself. The
Cannings, the Giffords, and the Freres, have never made any apology for
the abuse which they then heaped upon every nominal friend of freedom;
and yet Mr. Coleridge thinks it necessary to apologize in the name of
all good men, for having remained so long adverse to a party which
recruited upon such a bounty; and seems not obscurely to intimate that
they had such effectual means of propagating their slanders against
those good men who differed with them, that most of the latter found
there was no other way of keeping their good name but by giving up their
principles, and joining in the same venal cry against all those who did
not become apostates or converts, ministerial Editors, and
‘laurel-honouring Laureates’ like themselves!—What! at the very moment
when this writer is complaining of a foul and systematic conspiracy
against the characters of himself, and his most intimate friends, he
suddenly stops short in his half-finished burst of involuntary
indignation, and ends with a lamentable affectation of surprise at the
otherwise unaccountable slowness of good men in yielding implicit
confidence to a party, who had such powerful arts of conversion in their
hands,—who could with impunity, and triumphantly, 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. This is
pitiful enough, we confess; but it is too painful to be dwelt on.

Passing from the Laureate’s old Antijacobin, to his present
Antiministerial persecutors—‘_Publicly_,’ exclaims Mr. Coleridge, ‘has
Mr. Southey been reviled by men, who (I would fain hope, for the honour
of human nature) hurled fire-brands against a figure of their own
imagination,—_publicly_ have his talents been depreciated, his
principles denounced.’ This is very fine and lofty, no doubt; but we
wish Mr. C. would speak a little plainer. Mr. Southey has come
voluntarily before the public; and all the world has a right to speak of
his publications. It is those only that have been either depreciated or
denounced. We are not aware, at least, of any attacks that have been
made, publicly or privately, on his private life or morality. The charge
is, that he wrote democratical nonsense in his youth; and that he has
not only taken to write against democracy in his maturer age, but has
abused and reviled those who adhere to his former opinions; and accepted
of emoluments from the party which formerly calumniated him, for those
good services. Now, what has Mr. Coleridge to oppose to this? Mr.
Southey’s private character! He evades the only charge brought against
him, by repelling one not brought against him, except by his Antijacobin
patrons—and answers for his friend, as if he was playing at
cross-purposes. Some people say, that Mr. Southey has deserted the cause
of liberty: Mr. Coleridge tells us, that he has not separated from his
wife. They say, that he has changed his opinions: Mr. Coleridge says,
that he keeps his appointments; and has even invented a new word,
_reliability_, to express his exemplariness in this particular. It is
also objected, that the worthy Laureate was as extravagant in his early
writings, as he is virulent in his present ones: Mr. Coleridge answers,
that he is an early riser, and not a late sitter up. It is further
alleged, that he is arrogant and shallow in political discussion, and
clamours for vengeance in a cowardly and intemperate tone: Mr. Coleridge
assures us, that he eats, drinks, and sleeps moderately. It is said that
he must either have been very hasty in taking up his first opinions, or
very unjustifiable in abandoning them for their contraries; and Mr.
Coleridge observes, that Mr. Southey exhibits, in his own person and
family, all the regularity and praiseworthy punctuality of an eight-day
clock. With all this we have nothing to do. Not only have we said
nothing against this gentleman’s private virtues, but we have regularly
borne testimony to his talents and attainments as an author, while we
have been compelled to take notice of his defects. Till this panegyric
of Mr. Coleridge, indeed, we do not know where there was so much praise
of him to be found as in our pages. Does Mr. Coleridge wish to get a
monopoly for criticising the works of his friends? If we had a
particular grudge against any of them, we might perhaps apply to him for
his assistance.

Of Mr. Southey’s prose writings we have had little opportunity to speak;
but we should speak moderately. He has a clear and easy style, and
brings a large share of information to most subjects he handles. But, on
practical and political matters, we cannot think him a writer of any
weight. He has too little sympathy with the common pursuits, the
follies, the vices, and even the virtues of the rest of mankind, to have
any tact or depth of insight into the actual characters or manners of
men. He is in this respect a mere bookworm, shut up in his study, and
too attentive to his literary duty to mind what is passing about him. He
has no humour. His wit is at once scholastic and vulgar. As to general
principles of any sort, we see no traces of any thing like them in any
of his writings. He shows the same contempt for abstract reasoning that
Mr. Coleridge has for ‘history and particular facts.’ Even his intimacy
with the metaphysical author of the ‘Friend,’ with whom he has chimed
in, both in poetry and politics, in verse and prose, in Jacobinism and
Antijacobinism, any time these twenty years, has never inoculated him
with the most distant admiration of Hartley, or Berkeley, or Jacob
Behmen, or Spinosa, or Kant, or Fichte, or Schelling. His essays are in
fact the contents of his common-place-book, strung together with little
thought or judgment, and rendered marketable by their petulant
adaptation to party-purposes—‘full of wise saws and modern
instances’—with assertions for proofs—conclusions that savour more of a
hasty temper than patient thinking—supported by learned authorities that
oppress the slenderness of his materials, and quarrel with one another.
But our business is not with him; and we leave him to his studies.

With chap. IV. begins the formidable ascent of that mountainous and
barren ridge of clouds piled on precipices and precipices on clouds,
from the top of which the author deludes us with a view of the Promised
Land that divides the regions of Fancy from those of the Imagination,
and extends through 200 pages with various inequalities and declensions
to the end of the volume. The object of this long-winding metaphysical
march, which resembles a patriarchal journey, is to point out and settle
the true grounds of Mr. Wordsworth’s claim to originality as a poet;
which, if we rightly understand the deduction, turns out to be, that
there is nothing peculiar about him; and that his poetry, in so far as
it is good for anything at all, is just like any other good poetry. The
learned author, indeed, judiciously observes, that Mr. Wordsworth would
never have been ‘idly and absurdly’ considered as ‘the founder of a
school in poetry,’ if he had not, by some strange mistake, announced the
fact himself in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads. This, it must be
owned, looks as if Mr. Wordsworth thought more of his _peculiar_
pretensions than Mr. Coleridge appears to do, and really furnishes some
excuse for those who took the poet at his word; for which idle and hasty
conclusion, moreover, his friend acknowledges that _there was_ some
little foundation in diverse silly and puerile passages of that
collection, equally unworthy of the poet’s great genius and classical
taste.

We shall leave it to Mr. Wordsworth, however, to settle the relative
worthlessness of these poems with his critical patron, and also to
ascertain whether his commentator has discovered, either his _real_ or
his _probable_ meaning in writing that Preface,—and should now proceed
with Mr. Coleridge up those intricate and inaccessible steeps to which
he invites our steps. ‘It has been hinted,’ says he, with characteristic
simplicity, ‘that metaphysics and psychology have long been my
hobby-horse. But to have a hobby-horse, and to be vain of it, are so
commonly found together, that they pass almost for the same.’ _We own
the soft impeachment_, as Mrs. Malaprop says, and can with difficulty
resist the temptation of accepting this invitation—especially as it is
accompanied with a sort of challenge. ‘Those at least,’ he adds, ‘who
have taken so much pains to render me ridiculous for a perversion of
taste, and have supported the charge by attributing strange notions to
me, on no other authority than their own conjectures, owe it to
themselves as well as to me, not to refuse their attention to my own
statement of the theory which I _do_ acknowledge, or shrink from the
trouble of examining the grounds on which I rest it, or the arguments
which I offer in its justification.’ But, in spite of all this, we must
not give way to temptation—and cannot help feeling, that the whole of
this discussion is so utterly unreadable in Mr. Coleridge, that it would
be most presumptuous to hope that it would become otherwise in our
hands. We shall dismiss the whole of this metaphysical investigation,
therefore, into the law of association and the nature of fancy, by
shortly observing, that we can by no means agree with Mr. C. in refusing
to Hobbes the merit of originality in promulgating that law, with its
consequences—that we agree with him, generally, in his refutation of
Hartley—and that we totally dissent from his encomium on Kant and his
followers.

With regard to the claims of the philosopher of Malmesbury as the first
discoverer of the principle of association, as it is now understood
among metaphysicians, Mr. C. thinks fit to deny it _in toto_, because
Descartes’s work, ‘De Methodo,’ in which there is an intimation of the
same doctrine, preceded Hobbes’s ‘De Natura Humana’ _by a whole
year_.—What an interval to invent and mature a whole system in!—But we
conceive that Hobbes has a strict claim to the merit of originality in
this respect, because he is the first writer who laid down this
principle as _the sole and universal law_ of connexion among our
ideas:—which principle Hartley afterwards illustrated and applied to an
infinite number of particular cases, but did not assert the general
theorem itself more broadly or explicitly. We deny that the statement of
this principle, as _the_ connecting band of our ideas, is to be found in
any of those writers before Hobbes, whom Mr. Coleridge enumerates;
Descartes or Melancthon, or those more ‘illustrious obscure,’ Ammerbach,
or Ludovicus Vives, or even Aristotle. It is not the having remarked,
that association was one source of connexion among certain ideas, that
would anticipate this discovery or the theory of Hartley; but the
asserting, that this principle was alone sufficient to account for every
operation of the human mind, and that there was no other source of
connexion among our ideas,—a proposition which Hobbes was undoubtedly
the first to assert, and by the assertion of which he did certainly
anticipate the system of Hartley; for all that the latter could do, or
has attempted to do, after this, was to prove the proposition in detail,
or to reduce all the phenomena to this one general law. That Hobbes was
in fact the original inventor of the doctrine of Association, and of the
modern system of philosophy in general, is matter of fact and history;
as to which, we are surprised that Mr. C. should profess any doubt, and
which we had gratified ourselves by illustrating by a series of
citations from his greater works,—which nothing but a sense of the
prevailing indifference to such discussions prevents us from laying
before our readers.

As for the great German oracle Kant, we must take the liberty to say,
that his system appears to us the most wilful and monstrous absurdity
that ever was invented. If the French theories of the mind were too
chemical, this is too mechanical:—if the one referred every thing to
nervous sensibility, the other refers every thing to the test of
muscular resistance, and voluntary prowess. It is an enormous heap of
dogmatical and hardened assertions, advanced in contradiction to all
former systems, and all unsystematical opinions and impressions. He has
but one method of getting over difficulties:—when he is at a loss to
account for any thing, and cannot give a reason for it, he turns short
round upon the inquirer, and says that it is self-evident. If he cannot
make good an inference upon acknowledged premises, or known methods of
reasoning, he coolly refers the whole to a new class of ideas, and the
operation of some unknown faculty, which he has invented for the
purpose, and which he assures you _must_ exist,—because there is no
other proof of it. His whole theory is machinery and scaffolding—an
elaborate account of what he has undertaken to do, because no one else
has been able to do it—and an _assumption_ that he has done it, because
he has undertaken it. If the will were to go for the deed, and to be
confident were to be wise, he would indeed be the prince of
philosophers. For example, he sets out with urging the indispensable
necessity of answering Hume’s argument on the origin of our idea of
cause and effect; and because he can find no answer to this argument, in
the experimental philosophy, he affirms, that this idea _must be_ ‘a
self-evident truth, contained in the first forms or categories of the
understanding;’ that is, the thing must be as he would have it, whether
it is so or not. Again, he argues that external objects exist because
they seem to exist; and yet he denies that we know any thing at all
about the matter, further than their appearances. He defines beauty to
be perfection, and virtue to consist in a conformity to our duty; with
other such deliberate truisms; and then represents necessity as
inconsistent with morality, and insists on the existence and certainty
of the free-will as a faculty necessary to explain the _moral sense_,
which could not exist without it. This transcendental philosopher is
also pleased to affirm, in so many words, that we have neither any
possible idea, nor any possible proof of the existence of the Soul, God,
or Immortality, by means of the ordinary faculties of sense,
understanding, or reason; and he therefore (like a man who had been
employed to construct a machine for some particular purpose), invents a
new faculty, for the admission and demonstration of these important
truths, _namely, the practical reason_; in other words, the will or
determination that these things should be infinitely true because they
are infinitely desirable to the human mind,—though he says it is
impossible for the human mind to have any idea whatever of these
objects, either as true or desirable. But we turn gladly from
absurdities that have not even the merit of being amusing; and leave Mr.
Coleridge to the undisturbed adoration of an idol who will have few
other worshippers in this country. His own speculations are, beyond all
comparison, more engaging.

In chap. IX. Mr. Coleridge, taking leave of that ‘sound
book-learnedness’ which he had opposed, in the Lay Sermon, to the
upstart pretensions of modern literature, praises the inspired
ignorance, upward flights, and inward yearnings of Jacob Behmen, George
Fox and De Thoyras, and proceeds to defend himself against the charge of
plagiarism, of which he suspects that he may be suspected by the readers
of Schlegel and Schelling, when he comes to unfold, in fulness of time,
the mysterious laws of the drama and the human mind. And thereafter, the
‘extravagant and erring’ author takes leave of the Pantheism of Spinoza,
of Proclus, and Gemistius Pletho, of the philosopher of Nola, ‘whom the
idolaters of Rome, the predecessors of that good old man, the present
Pope, burnt as an atheist in the year 1660;’ of the _Noumenon_, or Thing
in itself; of Fichte’s ORDO ORDINANS, or exoteric God; of Simon Grynæus,
Barclay’s Argenis, and Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity, from whom the
author ‘cites a cluster of citations, to amuse the reader, as with a
voluntary before a sermon’—to plunge into Chap. X., entitled ‘A Chapter
of Digressions and Anecdotes, as an interlude preceding that on the
Nature and Genesis of the Imagination or Plastic Power!’

As this latter chapter, by the advice of a correspondent, has been
omitted, we must make the most of what is left, and ‘wander down into a
lower world obscure and wild,’ to give the reader an account of Mr.
Coleridge’s setting up the Watchman, which is one of the first things to
which he _digresses_, in the tenth chapter of his Literary Biography.
Out of regard to Mr. C. as well as to our readers, we give our longest
extract from this narrative part of the work—which is more likely to be
popular than any other part—and is, upon the whole, more pleasingly
written. We cannot say much, indeed, either for the wit or the soundness
of judgment it displays. But it is an easy, gossipping, garrulous
account of youthful adventures—by a man sufficiently fond of talking of
himself, and sufficiently disposed to magnify small matters into ideal
importance.

‘Toward the close of the first year from the time that, in an
inauspicious hour, I left the friendly cloysters, and the happy grove of
quiet, ever-honoured, Jesus College, Cambridge, I was persuaded, by
sundry Philanthropists and Antipolemists, to set on foot a periodical
work, entitled THE WATCHMAN, that (according to the general motto of the
work) _all might know the truth, and that the truth might make us free_!
In order to exempt it from the stamp-tax, and likewise to contribute as
little as possible to the supposed guilt of a war against freedom, it
was to be published on every eighth day, thirty-two pages, large octavo,
closely printed, and price only Fourpence. Accordingly, with a flaming
prospectus, _“Knowledge is power,” &c. to try the state of the political
atmosphere_, and so forth, I set off on a tour to the North, from
Bristol to Sheffield, for the purpose of procuring customers; preaching
by the way in most of the great towns, as a hireless volunteer, in a
blue coat and white waistcoat, that not a rag of the woman of Babylon
might be seen on me. For I was at that time, and long after, though a
Trinitarian (_i.e. ad normam Platonis_) in philosophy, yet a zealous
Unitarian in religion; more accurately, I was a _psilanthropist_, one of
those who believe our Lord to have been the real son of Joseph, and who
lay the main stress on the resurrection, rather than on the crucifixion.
O! never can I remember those days with either shame or regret. For I
was most sincere, most disinterested! My opinions were indeed in many
and most important points erroneous; but my heart was single. Wealth,
rank, life itself then seemed cheap to me, compared with the interests
of (what I believed to be) the truth, and the will of my Maker. I cannot
even accuse myself of having been actuated by vanity; for in the
expansion of my enthusiasm, I did not think of _myself_ at all.

‘My campaign commenced at Birmingham; and my first attack was on a rigid
Calvinist, a tallow-chandler by trade. He was a tall dingy man, in whom
length was so predominant over breadth, that he might almost have been
borrowed for a foundery poker. O that face! a face κατέμφασιν! I have it
before me at this moment. The lank, black, twine-like hair,
_pingui-nitescent_, cut in a straight line along the black stubble of
his thin gunpowder-eyebrows, that looked like a scorched _after-math_
from a last week’s shaving. His coat-collar behind in perfect unison,
both of colour and lustre, with the coarse, yet glib cordage, that I
suppose he called his hair, and which, with a _bend_ inward at the nape
of the neck, (the only approach to flexure in his whole figure), slunk
in behind his waistcoat; while the countenance, lank, dark, very _hard_,
and with strong perpendicular furrows, gave me a dim notion of some one
looking at me through a _used_ gridiron, all soot, grease, and iron! But
he was one of the _thoroughbred_, a true lover of liberty; and (I was
informed) had proved to the satisfaction of many, that Mr. Pitt was one
of the horns of the second beast in the Revelation, _that spoke like a
dragon_. A person, to whom one of my letters of recommendation had been
addressed, was my introducer. It was a new event in my life, my first
_stroke_ in the new business I had undertaken, of an author; yea, and of
an author trading on his own account. My companion, after some imperfect
sentences, and a multitude of _hums_ and _haas_, abandoned the cause to
his client; and I commenced an harangue of half an hour to
Phileleutheros the tallow-chandler, varying my notes through the whole
gamut of eloquence, from the ratiocinative to the declamatory, and in
the latter, from the pathetic to the indignant. I argued, I described, I
promised, I prophesied; and, beginning with the captivity of nations, I
ended with the near approach of the millennium; finishing the whole with
some of my own verses, describing that glorious state, out of the
_Religious Musings_.

—‘“Such delights,
As float to earth, permitted visitants!
When in some hour of solemn jubilee
The massive gates of Paradise are thrown
Wide open: and forth come in fragments wild
Sweet echoes of unearthly melodies,
And odours snatched from beds of amaranth,
And they that from the chrystal river of life
Spring up on freshen’d wings, ambrosial gales!”

‘My taper man of lights listened with perseverant and praiseworthy
patience, though (as I was afterwards told on complaining of certain
gales that were not altogether ambrosial) it was a _melting_ day with
him. And what, Sir! (he said, after a short pause) might the cost be?
_Only_ four-pence, (O! how I felt the anti-climax, the abysmal bathos of
that _four-pence_!) _only four-pence, Sir, each Number, to be published
on every eighth day_. That comes to a deal of money at the end of a
year. And how much did you say there was to be for the money?
_Thirty-two pages, Sir! large octavo, closely printed._ Thirty and two
pages? Bless me; why, except what I does in a family way on the Sabbath,
that’s more than I ever reads, Sir! all the year round. I am as great a
one as any man in Brummagem, Sir! for liberty, and truth, and all them
sort of things; but as to this, (no offence, I hope, Sir!) I must beg to
be excused.

‘So ended my first canvass: from causes that I shall presently mention,
I made but one other application in person. This took place at
Manchester, to a stately and opulent wholesale dealer in cottons. He
took my letter of introduction, and having perused it, measured me from
head to foot, and again from foot to head, and then asked if I had any
bill or invoice of the thing. I presented my prospectus to him; he
rapidly skimmed and hummed over the first side, and still more rapidly
the second and concluding page; crushed it within his fingers and the
palm of his hand; then most deliberately and _significantly_ rubbed and
smoothed one part against the other; and lastly, putting it into his
pocket, turned his back on me with an “_overrun_ with these articles!”
and so without another syllable retired into his counting-house—and, I
can truly say, to my unspeakable amusement.

‘This, I have said, was my second and last attempt. On returning baffled
from the first, in which I had vainly essayed to repeat the miracle of
Orpheus with the Brummagem patriot, I dined with the tradesman who had
introduced me to him. After dinner, he importuned me to smoke a pipe
with him, and two or three other illuminati of the same rank. I
objected, both because I was engaged to spend the evening with a
minister and his friends, and because I had never smoked except once or
twice in my lifetime; and then it was herb tobacco, mixed with Oronooko.
On the assurance, however, that the tobacco was equally mild, and seeing
too that it was of a yellow colour, (not forgetting the lamentable
difficulty I have always experienced in saying, No! and in abstaining
from what the people about me were doing), I took half a pipe, filling
the lower half of the bole with salt. I was soon, however, compelled to
resign it, in consequence of a giddiness and distressful feeling in my
eyes, which, as I had drank but a single glass of ale, must, I knew,
have been the effect of the tobacco. Soon after, deeming myself
recovered, I sallied forth to my engagement; but the walk and the fresh
air brought on all the symptoms again; and I had scarcely entered the
minister’s drawing-room, and opened a small packet of letters which he
had received from Bristol for me, ere I sunk back on the sofa, in a sort
of swoon rather than sleep. Fortunately I had found just time enough to
inform him of the confused state of my feelings, and of the occasion.
For here and thus I lay, my face like a wall that is white-washing,
_deathly_ pale, and with the cold drops of perspiration running down it
from my forehead, while, one after another, there dropt in the different
gentlemen, who had been invited to meet and spend the evening with me,
to the number of from fifteen to twenty. As the poison of tobacco acts
but for a short time, I at length awoke from insensibility, and looked
around on the party; my eyes dazzled by the candles which had been
lighted in the interim. By way of relieving my embarrassment, one of the
gentlemen began the conversation with “_Have you seen a paper to-day,
Mr. Coleridge?_”—“Sir! (I replied, rubbing my eyes), I am far from
convinced, that a Christian is permitted[9] to read either newspapers or
any other works of merely political and temporary interest.” This
remark, so ludicrously inapposite to, or rather incongruous with, the
purpose for which I was known to have visited Birmingham, and to assist
me in which they were all then met, produced an involuntary and general
burst of laughter; and seldom, indeed, have I passed so many delightful
hours as I enjoyed in that room, from the moment of that laugh to an
early hour the next morning. Never, perhaps, in so mixed and numerous a
party, have I since heard conversation sustained with such animation,
enriched with such variety of information, and enlivened with such a
flow of anecdote. Both then and afterwards, they all joined in
dissuading me from proceeding with my scheme; assured me, with the most
friendly, and yet most flattering expressions, that the employment was
neither fit for me, nor I fit for the employment. Yet if I had
determined on persevering in it, they promised to exert themselves to
the utmost to procure subscribers, and insisted that I should make no
more applications in person, but carry on the canvass by proxy. The same
hospitable reception, the same dissuasion, and (that failing) the same
kind exertions in my behalf, I met with at Manchester, Derby,
Nottingham, Sheffield, indeed at every place in which I took up my
sojourn. I often recall, with affectionate pleasure, the many
respectable men who interested themselves for me, a perfect stranger to
them, not a few of whom I can still name among my friends. They will
bear witness for me, how opposite, even then, my principles were to
those of Jacobinism, or even of Democracy, and can attest the strict
accuracy of the statement which I have left on record in the 10th and
11th Numbers of _The Friend_.’ p. 174.

We shall not stop at present to dispute with Mr. Coleridge, how far the
principles of the Watchman, and the _Conciones ad Populum_ were or were
not akin to those of the Jacobins. His style, in general, admits of a
convenient latitude of interpretation. But we think we are quite safe in
asserting, that they were still more opposite to those of the
Anti-Jacobins, and the party to which he admits he has gone over.

Our author next gives a somewhat extraordinary account of his having
been set upon with his friend Wordsworth, by a Government spy, in his
retreat at Nether-Stowey—the most lively thing in which is, that the
said spy, who, it seems had a great red nose, and had overheard the
friends discoursing about _Spinosa_, reported to his employers, that he
could make out very little of what they said,—only he was sure they were
aware of his vicinity, as he heard them very often talking of
_Spy-nosy_! If this is not the very highest vein of wit in the world, it
must be admitted at least to be very innocent merriment. Another
excellent joke of the same character is his remark on an Earl of Cork
not paying for his copy of the _Friend_—that he might have been an Earl
of _Bottle_ for him!—We have then some memorandums of his excursion into
Germany, and the conditions on which he agreed, on his return home in
1800, to write for the Morning Post, which was at that time not a very
ministerial paper, if we remember right.

_A propos_ of the Morning Post, Mr. C. takes occasion to eulogise the
writings of Mr. Burke, and observes, that ‘as our very sign-boards give
evidence that there has been a Titian in the world, so the essays and
leading paragraphs of our journals are so many remembrancers of Edmund
Burke.’ This is modest and natural we suppose for a newspaper editor:
But our learned author is desirous of carrying the parallel a little
further,—and assures us, that nobody can doubt of Mr. Burke’s
consistency. ‘Let the scholar,’ says our biographer, ‘who doubts this
assertion, refer only to the speeches and writings of Edmund Burke at
the commencement of the American war, and compare them with his speeches
and writings at the commencement of the French Revolution. He will find
the principles exactly the same, and the deductions the same—but the
practical inferences almost opposite in the one case from those drawn in
the other, yet in both equally legitimate and confirmed by the results.’

It is not without reluctance that we speak of the vices and infirmities
of such a mind as Burke’s: But the poison of high example has by far the
widest range of destruction; and, for the sake of public honour and
individual integrity, we think it right to say, that however it may be
defended upon other grounds, the political career of that eminent
individual has no title to the praise of consistency. Mr. Burke, the
opponent of the American war—and Mr. Burke, the opponent of the French
Revolution, are not the same person, but opposite persons—not opposite
persons only, but deadly enemies. In the latter period, he abandoned not
only all his practical conclusions, but all the principles on which they
were founded. He proscribed all his former sentiments, denounced all his
former friends, rejected and reviled all the maxims to which he had
formerly appealed as incontestable. In the American war, he constantly
spoke of the rights of the people as inherent, and inalienable: After
the French Revolution, he began by treating them with the chicanery of a
sophist, and ended by raving at them with the fury of a maniac. In the
former case, he held out the duty of resistance to oppression, as the
palladium, and only ultimate resource, of natural liberty; in the
latter, he scouted, prejudged, vilified and nicknamed, all resistance in
the abstract, as a foul and unnatural union of rebellion and sacrilege.
In the one case, to answer the purposes of faction, he made it out, that
the people are always in the right; in the other, to answer different
ends, he made it out that they are always in the wrong—lunatics in the
hands of their royal keepers, patients in the sick-wards of an hospital,
or felons in the condemned cells of a prison. In the one, he considered
that there was a constant tendency on the part of the prerogative to
encroach on the rights of the people, which ought always to be the
object of the most watchful jealousy, and of resistance, when necessary:
In the other, he pretended to regard it as the sole occupation and
ruling passion of those in power, to watch over the liberties and
happiness of their subjects. The burthen of all his speeches on the
American war was conciliation, concession, timely reform, as the only
practicable or desirable alternative of rebellion: The object of all his
writings on the French Revolution was, to deprecate and explode all
concession and all reform, as encouraging rebellion, and an
irretrievable step to revolution and anarchy. In the one, he insulted
kings personally, as among the lowest and worst of mankind; in the
other, he held them up to the imagination of his readers as sacred
abstractions. In the one case, he was a partisan of the people, to court
popularity; in the other, to gain the favour of the Court, he became the
apologist of all courtly abuses. In the one case, he took part with
those who were actually rebels against his Sovereign; in the other, he
denounced, as rebels and traitors, all those of his own countrymen who
did not yield sympathetic allegiance to a foreign Sovereign, whom we had
always been in the habit of treating as an arbitrary tyrant.

Judging from plain facts and principles, then, it is difficult to
conceive more ample proofs of inconsistency. But try it by the more
vulgar and palpable test of comparison. Even Mr. Fox’s enemies, we
think, allow _him_ the praise of consistency. _He_ asserted the rights
of the people in the American war, and continued to assert them in the
French Revolution. He remained visibly in his place; and spoke,
throughout, the same principles in the same language. When Mr. Burke
abjured these principles, he left this associate; nor did it ever enter
into the mind of a human being to impute the defection to any change in
Mr. Fox’s sentiments—any desertion by him of the maxims by which his
public life had been guided. Take another illustration, from an opposite
quarter. Nobody will accuse the principles of his present Majesty, or
the general measures of his reign, of inconsistency. If they had no
other merit, they have at least that of having been all along actuated
by one uniform and constant spirit: Yet Mr. Burke at one time vehemently
opposed, and afterwards most intemperately extolled them; and it was for
his recanting his opposition, not for his persevering in it, that he
received his pension. He does not himself mention his flaming speeches
in the American war, as among the public services which had entitled him
to this remuneration.

The truth is, that Burke was a man of fine fancy and subtle reflection;
but not of sound and practical judgment—nor of high or rigid
principles.—As to his understanding, he certainly was not a great
philosopher; for his works of mere abstract reasoning are shallow and
inefficient:—Nor a man of sense and business; for, both in counsel and
in conduct, he alarmed his friends as much at least as his
opponents:—But he was a keen and accomplished pamphleteer—an ingenious
political essayist. He applied the habit of reflection, which he had
borrowed from his metaphysical studies, but which was not competent to
the discovery of any elementary truth in that department, with great
felicity and success, to the mixed mass of human affairs. He knew more
of the political machine than a recluse philosopher; and he speculated
more profoundly on its principles and general results than a mere
politician. He saw a number of fine distinctions and changeable aspects
of things, the good mixed with the ill, the ill mixed with the good; and
with a sceptical indifference, in which the exercise of his own
ingenuity was always the governing principle, suggested various topics
to qualify or assist the judgment of others. But for this very reason he
was little calculated to become a leader or a partisan in any important
practical measure: For the habit of his mind would lead him to find out
a reason for or against any thing: And it is not on speculative
refinements, (which belong to _every_ side of a question), but on a just
estimate of the aggregate mass and extended combinations of objections
and advantages, that we ought to decide and act. Burke had the power,
almost without limit, of throwing true or false weights into the scales
of political casuistry, but not firmness of mind—or, shall we say,
honesty enough—to hold the balance. When he took a side, his vanity or
his spleen more frequently gave the casting vote than his judgment; and
the fieriness of his zeal was in exact proportion to the levity of his
understanding, and the want of conscious sincerity.

He was fitted by nature and habit for the studies and labours of the
closet; and was generally mischievous when he came out;—because the very
subtlety of his reasoning, which, left to itself, would have
counteracted its own activity, or found its level in the common sense of
mankind, became a dangerous engine in the hands of power, which is
always eager to make use of the most plausible pretexts to cover the
most fatal designs. That which, if applied as a general observation on
human affairs, is a valuable truth suggested to the mind, may, when
forced into the interested defence of a particular measure or system,
become the grossest and basest sophistry. Facts or consequences never
stood in the way of this speculative politician. He fitted them to his
preconceived theories, instead of conforming his theories to them. They
were the playthings of his style, the sport of his fancy. They were the
straws of which his imagination made a blaze, and were consumed, like
straws, in the blaze they had served to kindle. The fine things he said
about Liberty and Humanity, in his speech on the Begum’s affairs, told
equally well, whether Warren Hastings was a tyrant or not: Nor did he
care one jot who caused the famine he described, so that he described it
in a way to attract admiration. On the same principle, he represents the
French priests and nobles under the old regime as excellent moral
people, very charitable, and very religious, in the teeth of notorious
facts,—to answer to the handsome things he has to say in favour of
priesthood and nobility in general; and, with similar views, he
falsifies the records of our English Revolution, and puts an
interpretation on the word _abdication_, of which a schoolboy would be
ashamed. He constructed his whole theory of government, in short, not on
rational, but on picturesque and fanciful principles; as if the King’s
crown were a painted gewgaw, to be looked at on gala days; titles an
empty sound to please the ear; and the whole order of society a
theatrical procession. His lamentation over the age of chivalry, and his
projected crusade to restore it, is about as wise as if any one, from
reading the Beggar’s Opera, should take to picking of pockets; or, from
admiring the landscapes of Salvator Rosa, should wish to convert the
abodes of civilized life into the haunts of wild beasts and banditti. On
this principle of false refinement, there is no abuse, nor system of
abuses, that does not admit of an easy and triumphant defence; for there
is something which a merely speculative inquirer may always find out,
good as well as bad, in every possible system, the best or the worst;
and if we can once get rid of the restraints of common sense and
honesty, we may easily prove, by plausible words, that liberty and
slavery, peace and war, plenty and famine, are matters of perfect
indifference. This is the school of politics, of which Mr. Burke was at
the head; and it is perhaps to his example, in this respect, that we owe
the prevailing tone of many of those newspaper paragraphs, which Mr.
Coleridge thinks so invaluable an accession to our political philosophy.

Burke’s literary talents, were, after all, his chief excellence. His
style has all the familiarity of conversation, and all the research of
the most elaborate composition. He says what he wants to say, by any
means, nearer or more remote, within his reach. He makes use of the most
common or scientific terms, of the longest or shortest sentences, of the
plainest and most downright, or of the most figurative modes of speech.
He gives for the most part loose reins to his imagination, and follows
it as far as the language will carry him. As long as the one or the
other has any resources in store to make the reader feel and see the
thing as he has conceived it,—in its nicest shade of difference, in its
utmost degree of force and splendour,—he never disdains, and never fails
to employ them. Yet, in the extremes of his mixed style there is not
much affectation, and but little either of pedantry or of coarseness. He
everywhere gives the image he wishes to give, in its true and
appropriate colouring: and it is the very crowd and variety of these
images that have given to his language its peculiar tone of animation,
and even of passion. It is his impatience to transfer his conceptions
entire, living, in all their rapidity, strength, and glancing variety—to
the minds of others, that constantly pushes him to the verge of
extravagance, and yet supports him there in dignified security—

‘Never so sure our rapture to create,
As when he treads the brink of all we hate.’

He is, with the exception of Jeremy Taylor, the most poetical of prose
writers, and at the same time his prose never degenerates into the mere
glitter or tinkling of poetry; for he always aims at overpowering rather
than at pleasing; and consequently sacrifices beauty and grandeur to
force and vividness. He has invariably a task to perform, a positive
purpose to execute, an effect to produce. His only object is therefore
to strike hard, and in the right place; if he misses his mark, he
repeats his blow; and does not care how ungraceful the action, or how
clumsy the instrument, provided it brings down his antagonist.

Mr. C. enters next into a copious discussion of the merits of his friend
Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry,—which we do not think very remarkable either
for clearness or candour; but as a very great part of it is occupied
with specific inculpations of our former remarks on that ingenious
author, it would savour too much of mere controversy and recrimination,
if we were to indulge ourselves with any observations on the subject.
Where we are parties to any dispute, and consequently to be regarded as
incapable of giving an _impartial_ account of our adversary’s argument,
we shall not pretend to give any account of it at all; and therefore,
though we shall endeavour to give all due weight to Mr. C.’s reasonings,
when we have occasion to consider any new publication from the Lake
school, we must for the present decline any notice of the particular
objections he has here urged to our former judgments on their
productions; and shall pass over all this part of the work before us, by
merely remarking, that with regard to Mr. Wordsworth’s ingenious project
of confining the language of poetry to that which is chiefly in use
among the lower orders of society, and that, from horror or contempt for
the abuses of what has been called poetic diction, it is really
unnecessary to say anything—the truth and common sense of the thing
being so obvious, and, we apprehend, so generally acknowledged, that
nothing but a pitiful affectation of singularity could have raised a
controversy on the subject. There is, no doubt, a simple and familiar
language, common to almost all ranks, and intelligible through many
ages, which is the best fitted for the direct expression of strong sense
and deep passion, and which, consequently, is the language of the best
poetry as well as of the best prose. But it is not the exclusive
language of poetry. There is another language peculiar to this manner of
writing, which has been called _poetic diction_,—those flowers of
speech, which, whether natural or artificial, fresh or faded, are
strewed over the plainer ground which poetry has in common with prose: a
paste of rich and honeyed words, like the candied coat of the auricula;
a glittering tissue of quaint conceits and sparkling metaphors, crusting
over the rough stalk of homely thoughts. Such is the style of almost all
our modern poets; such is the style of Pope and Gray; such, too, very
often, is that of Shakespeare and Milton; and, notwithstanding Mr.
Coleridge’s decision to the contrary, of Spenser’s Faery Queen. Now this
style is the reverse of one made up of _slang_ phrases; for, as they are
words associated only with mean and vulgar ideas, poetic diction is such
as is connected only with the most pleasing and elegant associations;
and _both_ differ essentially from the middle or natural style, which is
a mere transparent medium of the thoughts, neither degrading nor setting
them off by any adventitious qualities of its own, but leaving them to
make their own impression, by the force of truth and nature. Upon the
whole, therefore, we should think this ornamented and coloured style,
most proper to descriptive or fanciful poetry, where the writer has to
lend a borrowed, and, in some sort, meretricious lustre to outward
objects, which he can best do by enshrining them in a language that, by
custom and long prescription, reflects the image of a poetical mind,—as
we think the common or natural style is the truly dramatic style, that
in which he can best give the impassioned, unborrowed, unaffected
thoughts of others. The pleasure derived from poetic diction is the same
as that derived from classical diction. It is in like manner made up of
words dipped in ‘the dew of Castalie,’—tinged with colours borrowed from
the rainbow,—‘sky-tinctured,’ warmed with the glow of genius, purified
by the breath of time,—that soften into distance, and expand into
magnitude, whatever is seen through their medium,—that varnish over the
trite and common-place, and lend a gorgeous robe to the forms of fancy,
but are only an incumbrance and a disguise in conveying the true touches
of nature, the intense strokes of passion. The beauty of poetic diction
is, in short, borrowed and artificial. It is a glittering veil spread
over the forms of things and the feelings of the heart; and is best laid
aside, when we wish to show either the one or the other in their naked
beauty or deformity. As the dialogues in Othello and Lear furnish the
most striking instances of plain, point-blank speaking, or of the real
language of nature and passion, so the Choruses in Samson Agonistes
abound in the fullest and finest adaptations of classic and poetic
phrases to express distant and elevated notions, born of fancy, religion
and learning.

Mr. Coleridge bewilders himself sadly in endeavouring to determine in
what the essence of poetry consists;—Milton, we think, has told it in a
single line—

——‘Thoughts that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers.’

Poetry is the music of language, expressing the music of the mind.
Whenever any object takes such a hold on the mind as to make us dwell
upon it, and brood over it, melting the heart in love, or kindling it to
a sentiment of admiration;—whenever a movement of imagination or passion
is impressed on the mind, by which it seeks to prolong and repeat the
emotion, to bring all other objects into accord with it, and to give the
same movement of harmony, sustained and continuous, to the sounds that
express it,—this is poetry. The musical in sound is the sustained and
continuous; the musical in thought and feeling is the sustained and
continuous also. Whenever articulation passes naturally into intonation,
this is the beginning of poetry. There is no natural harmony in the
ordinary combinations of significant sounds: the language of prose is
not the language of music, or of _passion_: and it is to supply this
inherent defect in the mechanism of language—to make the sound an echo
to the sense, when the sense becomes a sort of echo to itself—to mingle
the tide of verse, ‘the golden cadences of poesy,’ with the tide of
feeling, flowing, and murmuring as it flows—or to take the imagination
off its feet, and spread its wings where it may indulge its own
impulses, without being stopped or perplexed by the ordinary
abruptnesses, or discordant flats and sharps of prose—that poetry was
invented.

As Mr. C. has suppressed his Disquisition on the Imagination as
unintelligible, we do not think it fair to make any remarks on the 200
pages of prefatory matter, which were printed, it seems, in the present
work, before a candid friend apprised him of this little objection to
the appearance of the Disquisition itself. We may venture, however, on
one observation, of a very plain and practical nature, which is forced
upon us by the whole tenor of the extraordinary history before
us.—Reason and imagination are both excellent things; but perhaps their
provinces ought to be kept more distinct than they have lately been.
‘Poets have such seething brains,’ that they are disposed to meddle with
everything, and mar all. Mr. C., with great talents, has, by an ambition
to be everything, become nothing. His metaphysics have been a dead
weight on the wings of his imagination—while his imagination has run
away with his reason and common sense. He might, we seriously think,
have been a very considerable poet—instead of which he has chosen to be
a bad philosopher and a worse politician. There is something, we
suspect, in these studies that does not easily amalgamate. We would not,
with Plato, absolutely banish poets from the commonwealth; but we really
think they should meddle as little with its practical administration as
may be. They live in an ideal world of their own; and it would be,
perhaps, as well if they were confined to it. Their flights and fancies
are delightful to themselves and to every body else; but they make
strange work with matter of fact; and, if they were allowed to act in
public affairs, would soon turn the world upside down. They indulge only
their own flattering dreams or superstitious prejudices, and make idols
or bugbears of what they please, caring as little for ‘history or
particular facts,’ as for general reasoning. They are dangerous leaders
and treacherous followers. Their inordinate vanity runs them into all
sorts of extravagances; and their habitual effeminacy gets them out of
them at any price. Always pampering their own appetite for excitement,
and wishing to astonish others, their whole aim is to produce a dramatic
effect, one way or other—to shock or delight their observers; and they
are as perfectly indifferent to the consequences of what they write, as
if the world were merely a stage for them to play their fantastic tricks
on.—As romantic in their servility as in their independence, and equally
importunate candidates for fame or infamy, they require only to be
distinguished, and are not scrupulous as to the means of distinction.
Jacobins or Antijacobins—outrageous advocates for anarchy and
licentiousness, or flaming apostles of persecution—always violent and
vulgar in their opinions, they oscillate, with a giddy and sickening
motion, from one absurdity to another, and expiate the follies of their
youth by the heartless vices of their advancing age. None so ready as
they to carry every paradox to its most revolting and nonsensical
excess—none so sure to caricature, in their own persons, every feature
of an audacious and insane philosophy:—In their days of innovation,
indeed, the philosophers crept at their heels like hounds, while they
darted on their distant quarry like hawks; stooping always to the lowest
game; eagerly snuffing up the most tainted and rankest scents; feeding
their vanity with the notion of the strength of their digestion of
poisons, and most ostentatiously avowing whatever would most effectually
startle the prejudices of others. Preposterously seeking for the
stimulus of novelty in truth, and the eclat of theatrical exhibition in
pure reason, it is no wonder that these persons at last became disgusted
with their own pursuits, and that, in consequence of the violence of the
change, the most inveterate prejudices and uncharitable sentiments have
rushed in to fill up the _vacuum_ produced by the previous annihilation
of common sense, wisdom, and humanity.

This is the true history of our reformed Antijacobin poets; the life of
one of whom is here recorded. The cant of Morality, like the cant of
Methodism, comes in most naturally to close the scene: and as the
regenerated sinner keeps alive his old raptures and new-acquired
horrors, by anticipating endless ecstasies or endless tortures in
another world; so, our disappointed demagogue keeps up that ‘pleasurable
poetic fervour’ which has been the cordial and the bane of his
existence, by indulging his maudlin egotism and his mawkish spleen in
fulsome eulogies of his own virtues, and nauseous abuse of his
contemporaries[10]—in making excuses for doing nothing himself, and
assigning bad motives for what others have done.—Till he can do
something better, we would rather hear no more of him.

LETTERS OF HORACE WALPOLE

VOL. XXXI.] [_December 1818._

Horace Walpole was by no means a venerable or lofty character:—But he
has here left us another volume of gay and graceful letters, which,
though they indicate no peculiar originality of mind, or depth of
thought, and are continually at variance with good taste and right
feeling, still give a lively and amusing view of the time in which he
lived. He was indeed a garrulous _old_ man nearly all his days; and,
luckily for his gossiping propensities, he was on familiar terms with
the gay world, and set down as a man of genius by the Princess Amelia,
George Selwyn, Mr. Chute, and all persons of the like talents and
importance. His descriptions of court dresses, court revels, and court
beauties, are in the highest style of perfection,—sprightly, fantastic
and elegant: And the zeal with which he hunts after an old portrait or a
piece of broken glass, is ten times more entertaining than if it were
lavished on a worthier object. He is indeed the very prince of
Gossips,—and it is impossible to question his supremacy, when he floats
us along in a stream of bright talk, or shoots with us the rapids of
polite conversation. He delights in the small squabbles of great
politicians and the puns of George Selwyn,—enjoys to madness the strife
of loo with half a dozen bitter old women of quality,—revels in a world
of chests, cabinets, commodes, tables, boxes, turrets, stands, old
printing, and old china,—and indeed lets us loose at once amongst all
the frippery and folly of the last two centuries, with an ease and a
courtesy equally amazing and delightful. His mind, as well as his house,
was piled up with Dresden china, and illuminated through painted glass;
and we look upon his heart to have been little better than a case full
of enamels, painted eggs, ambers, lapis-lazuli, cameos, vases and
rock-crystals. This may in some degree account for his odd and quaint
manner of thinking, and his utter poverty of feeling:—He could not get a
plain thought out of that cabinet of curiosities, his mind and he had no
room for feeling,—no place to plant it in, or leisure to cultivate it.
He was at all times the slave of elegant trifles; and could no more
screw himself up into a decided and solid personage, than he could
divest himself of petty jealousies and miniature animosities. In one
word, every thing about him was in little; and the smaller the object,
and the less its importance, the higher did his estimation and his
praises of it ascend. He piled up trifles to a colossal height—and made
a pyramid of nothings ‘most marvellous to see.’

His political character was a heap of confusion: but the key to it is
easy enough to find. He united an insufferable deal of aristocratical
pretension with Whig professions,—and, under an assumed carelessness and
liberality, he nourished a petty anxiety about court movements and a
degree of rancour towards those who profited by them, which we should
only look for in the most acknowledged sycophants of Government. He held
out austere and barren principles, in short, to the admiration of the
world,—but indemnified himself in practice by the indulgence of all the
opposite ones. He wore his horse-hair shirt as an _outer_ garment; and
glimpses might always be caught of a silken garment within. He was truly
‘of outward show elaborate; of inward less exact.’ But, setting his
political character—or rather the want of it—and some few private
failings, and a good many other questionable peculiarities, aside,—we
find Walpole an amusing companion, and should like to have such a
chronicler of small matters every fifty or sixty years;—or it might be
better, perhaps, if, like the aloe, they should blossom but once in a
century. With what spirit does he speak of the gay and noble visitors at
Strawberry Hill! How finely does he group, in his letters, the high-born
and celebrated beauties of the court, with whom it was his fortune and
his fancy to associate!

‘Strawberry Hill is grown a perfect Paphos; it is the land of beauties.
On Wednesday, the Dutchesses of Hamilton and Richmond, and Lady
Ailesbury, dined there; the two latter staid all night. There never was
so pretty a sight as to see them all sitting in the shell. A thousand
years hence, when I begin to grow old, if that can ever be, I shall talk
of that event, and tell young people how much handsomer the women of my
time were than they will be. Then I shall say, “Women alter now: I
remember Lady Ailesbury looking handsomer than her daughter the pretty
Dutchess of Richmond, as they were sitting in the shell on my terrace,
with the Dutchess of Richmond, one of the famous Gunnings,” &c. &c.
Yesterday, t’other famous Gunning dined there. She has made a friendship
with my charming niece, to disguise her jealousy of the new Countess’s
beauty: there were they two, their Lords, Lord Buckingham, and
Charlotte. You will think that I did not choose men for my parties so
well as women. I don’t include Lord Waldegrave in this bad election.’

All the rest is in the same style: and lords and ladies are shuffled
about the whole work as freely as court cards in a party at Loo. Horace
Walpole, to be sure, is always Pam: but this only makes the interest
greater, and the garrulity more splendid. He is equally sprightly and
facetious, whether he describes a King’s death and funeral, or a quirk
of George Selwyn; and is nearly as amusing when he recounts the follies
and the fashions of the day, as when he affects to be patriotic, or
solemnizes into the sentimental. His style is not a bit less airy when
he deals with ‘the horrid story of Lord Ferrers’s murdering his
steward,’ than when it informs us that ‘Miss Chudleigh has called for
the council books of the subscription concert, and has struck off the
name of Mrs. Naylor.’ He is equally amusing whether he records the death
of the brave Balmerino, or informs us that ‘old Dunch is dead.’

The letters of eminent men make, to our taste, very choice and curious
reading; and, except when their publication becomes a breach of honour
or decorum, we are always rejoiced to meet with them in print. We should
except, perhaps, the letters of celebrated warriors; which, for the most
part, should only be published in the Gazette. But, setting these heroes
aside, whose wits, Pope has informed us, ‘are kept in ponderous vases,’
letters are certainly the honestest records of great minds, that we can
become acquainted with; and we like them the more, for letting us into
the follies and treacheries of high life, the secrets of the gay and the
learned world, and the mysteries of authorship. We are ushered, as it
were, behind the scenes of life; and see gay ladies and learned men, the
wise, the witty, and the ambitious, in all the nakedness, or undress at
least, of their spirits. A poet, in his private letters, seldom thinks
it necessary to keep up the farce of feeling; but casts off the trickery
of sentiment, and glides into the unaffected wit, or sobers quietly into
the honest man. By his published works, we know that an author becomes a
‘Sir John with all Europe;’ and it can only be by his letters that we
discover him to be ‘Jack with his brothers and sisters, and John with
his familiars.’ This it is that makes the private letters of a literary
person so generally entertaining. He is glad to escape from the
austerity of composition, and the orthodoxy of thought; and feels a
relief in easy speculations or ludicrous expressions. The finest,
perhaps, in our language, are eminently of this description—we mean
those of Gray to his friends or literary associates. His poetry is too
scholastic and elaborate, and is too visibly the result of laborious and
anxious study. But, in his letters, he at once becomes an easy, and
graceful, and feeling writer. The composition of familiar letters just
suited his indolence, his taste, and his humour. His remarks on poetry
are nearly as good as poetry itself;—his observations on life are full
of sagacity and fine understanding;—and his descriptions of natural
scenery, or Gothic antiquities, are worth their weight in gold. Pope’s
letters, though extremely elegant, are failures as letters. He wrote
them to the world, not to his friends; and they have therefore very much
the air of universal secrets. Swift has recorded his own sour mind in
many a bitter epistle; and his correspondence remains a stern and brief
chronicle of the time in which he lived. Cowper hath unwittingly
beguiled us of many a long hour, by his letters to Lady Hesketh; and in
them we see the fluctuations of his melancholy nature more plainly, than
in all the biographical dissertations of his affectionate editor.——But
we must not make catalogues,—nor indulge longer in this eulogy on
letter-writing. We take a particular interest, we confess, in what is
thus spoken aside, as it were, and without a consciousness of being
overheard;—and think there is a spirit and freedom in the tone of works
written for the post, which is scarcely ever to be found in those
written for the press. We are much more edified by one letter of Cowper,
than we should be by a week’s confinement and hard labour in the
metaphysical Bridewell of Mr. Coleridge; and a single letter from the
pen of Gray, is worth all the pedlar-reasoning of Mr. Wordsworth’s
Eternal Recluse, from the hour he first squats himself down in the sun
to the end of his preaching. In the first we have the light unstudied
pleasantries of a wit, and a man of feeling;—in the last we are talked
to death by an arrogant old proser, and buried in a heap of the most
perilous stuff and the most dusty philosophy.

But to come back to the work before us.—Walpole evidently formed his
style upon that of Gray, with whom he travelled; and, with his own fund
of pleasantry and sarcasm, we know of no other writer whom he could so
successfully have studied. There are some odd passages on Gray,
scattered up and down the present volume, which speak more for the poet
than for the justice or friendship of Walpole. In one letter he says,

‘The first volume of Spencer is published with prints designed by
Kent;—but the most execrable performance you ever beheld. The graving
not worse than the drawing; awkward knights, scrambling Unas, hills
tumbling down themselves, no variety of prospect, and three or four
perpetual spruce firs.—Our charming Mr. Bentley is doing Mr. Gray as
much more honour as he deserves than Spencer!’ This is indeed a lordly
criticism. We really never saw so much bad taste condensed into so small
a portion of prose. But he next shows us what ladies of the court think
of men of letters, and how lords defend them.

‘My Lady Ailesbury has been much diverted, and so will you too. Gray is
in their neighbourhood. My Lady Carlisle says _he is extremely like me
in his manner_. They went a party to dine on a cold loaf, and passed the
day. Lady A. protests he never opened his lips but once, and then only
said, “Yes, my Lady, I believe so.”

‘I agree with you most absolutely in your opinion about Gray; he is the
worst company in the world. From a melancholy turn, from living
reclusely, and from a little too much dignity, he never converses
easily. All his words are measured and chosen, and formed into
sentences. His writings are admirable. He himself is not agreeable.’

But it is not only to his particular friends that he is thus amiably
candid. Two other great names are dealt with in the same spirit in the
following short sentence.

‘Dr. Young has published a new book, on purpose, he says himself, to
have an opportunity of telling a story that he has known these forty
years. Mr. Addison sent for the young Lord Warwick, as he was dying, to
show him in what peace a Christian could die. Unluckily he died of
brandy. Nothing makes a Christian die in peace like being a maudlin! But
don’t say this in Gath, where you are.’

It is worthy of remark, indeed, that Walpole never speaks with respect
of any man of genius or talent, and, least of all, of those master
spirits who ‘have got the start of this majestic world.’ He envied all
great minds; and shrunk from encountering them, lest his own should
suffer by the comparison. He contrived indeed to quarrel with all his
better-spirited friends. Even the gentleman to whom these epistles were
addressed, a correspondent of three score years’ standing, fell at last
under his displeasure, and was dismissed his friendship. He turned out
the domestics of the heart as easily as those of the house; with little
or no notice, and with threats of giving them a bad character as a
return for their past services. He wished to have genius to wait upon
him; but was always surprised that it would not submit to be a servant
of all work. Poor Bentley, of whom we hear praises ‘high fantastical’ in
the early letters, meets with but scurvy treatment the moment he gets
out of fashion with his half-patron and half-friend. He is all spirit,
goodness and genius, till it falls to his turn to be disliked; and then
the altered patron sneers at his domestic misfortunes, depreciates his
talents, and even chuckles at the failure of a play which the artist’s
necessities required should be successful. The following is the
ill-natured passage to which we allude.

‘No, I shall never cease being a dupe, till I have been undeceived round
by every thing that calls itself a virtue. I came to town yesterday,
through clouds of dust, to see The Wishes, and went actually feeling for
Mr. Bentley, and full of the emotions he must be suffering. What do you
think, in a house crowded, was the first thing I saw? Mr. and Madame
Bentley perched up in the front boxes, and acting audience at his own
play! No, all the impudence of false patriotism never came up to it. Did
one ever hear of an author that had courage to see his own first night
in public? I don’t believe Fielding or Foote himself ever did; and this
was the modest, bashful Mr. Bentley, that died at the thought of being
known for an author even by his own acquaintance! In the stage-box was
Lady Bute, Lord Halifax, and Lord Melcombe. I must say, the two last
entertained the house as much as the play. Your King was prompter, and
called out to the actors every minute to speak louder. The other went
backwards and forwards behind the scenes, fetched the actors into the
box, and was busier than Harlequin. The _curious_ prologue was not
spoken—the whole very ill acted. It turned out just what I remembered
it: the good parts extremely good; the rest very flat and vulgar, &c.’

A poor painter of the name of Müntz is worse off even than Bentley; and
is abused in a very ungenerous way for want of gratitude, and unmerciful
extortion. There is a sad want of feeling and dignity in all this; but
the key to it is, that Walpole was a miser. He loved the arts after a
fashion; but his avarice pinched his affections. He would have had ‘that
which he esteemed the ornament of life,’ but that he ‘lived a coward in
his own esteem.’ The following haggling passage in one of his letters
would disgrace a petty merchant in Duke’s Place, in a bargain for the
reversion of an old pair of trowsers.

‘I am disposed to prefer the younger picture of Madame Grammont by Lely;
but I stumbled at the price; twelve guineas for a copy in enamel is very
dear. Mrs. Vesey tells me his originals cost sixteen, and are not so
good as his copies. I will certainly have none of his originals. His,
what is his name? I would fain resist this copy; I would more fain
excuse myself for having it. I say to myself it would be rude not to
have it, now Lady Kingsland and Mr. Montagu have had so much trouble.
Well—_I think I must have it_, as my Lady Wishfort says, _why does not
the fellow take me?_ Do try if he will take ten;—remember it is the
younger picture.’

Thus did he coquet with his own avarice. Of poor Mason, another of his
dear friends, he speaks thus spitefully—

‘Mr. Mason has published another drama, called Caractacus. There are
some incantations poetical enough, and odes so Greek as to have very
little meaning. But the whole is laboured, uninteresting, and no more
resembling the manners of Britons than of Japanese. It is introduced by
a piping elegy; for Mason, in imitation of Gray, _will cry and roar all
night_, without the least provocation.’

Mason might have endured the paltriness of this remark, if he could have
seen the following pertinent remark on the Cymbeline of Shakespeare.

‘You want news. I must make it if I send it. To change the dulness of
the scene, I went to the play, where I had not been this winter. They
are so crowded, that though I went before six, I got no better place
than a fifth row, where I heard very ill, and was pent for five hours
without a soul near me that I knew. It was Cymbeline; and appeared to me
as long as if every body in it went really to Italy in every act, and
back again. With a few pretty passages and a scene or two, it is so
absurd and tiresome, that I am persuaded Garrick****’

This precious piece of criticism is cut short; whether from the sagacity
of the editor or the prudence of the publishers, we cannot say. But it
is much to be lamented. For it must have been very edifying to have seen
Shakespeare thus pleasantly put down with a dash of the Honourable Mr.
Walpole’s pen—as if he had never written any thing better than the
Mysterious Mother.

A conversation is here recorded between Hogarth and Walpole, which seems
to us very curious and characteristic; though we cannot help smiling a
little at the conclusion, where our author humanely refrains from
erasing the line of praise which he had ‘consecrated’ to Hogarth;—as if
the painter would infallibly have been damned into oblivion by that
portentous erasure. But he is of the stuff that cannot die. With many
defects, he was a person of great and original powers—a true and a
terrific historian of the human heart: and his works will be remembered
and _read_, as long as men and women retain their old habits, passions
and vices. The following is the conversation of which we have spoken.

‘_Hogarth._—I am told you are going to entertain the town with something
in our way. _Walpole._ Not very soon, Mr. Hogarth.—_H._ I wish you would
let me have it to correct; I should be very sorry to have you expose
yourself to censure; we painters must know more of those things than
other people. _W._ Do you think nobody understands painting but
painters? _H._ Oh! so far from it, there’s Reynolds who certainly has
genius; why but t’other day he offered a hundred pounds for a picture
that I would not hang in my cellars; and indeed to say truth, I have
generally found that persons, who had studied painting least, were the
best judges of it; but what I particularly wished to say to you was
about Sir James Thornhill (you know he married Sir James’s daughter); I
would not have you say any thing against him: There was a book published
some time ago, abusing him, and it gave great offence. He was the first
that attempted history in England; and I assure you, some Germans have
said that he was a very great painter. _W._ My work will go no lower
than the year one thousand seven hundred, and I really have not
considered whether Sir J. Thornhill will come into my plan or not: If he
does, I fear you and I shall not agree upon his merits. _H._ I wish you
would let me correct it; besides I am writing something of the same kind
myself—I should be sorry we should clash. _W._ I believe it is not much
known what my work is; very few persons have seen it. _H._ Why it is a
critical history of painting is it not? _W._ No, it is an antiquarian
history of it in England. I bought Mr. Vertue’s MSS. and I believe the
work will not give much offence; besides if it does I cannot help it:
when I publish any thing I give it to the world to think as they please.
_H._ Oh! if it is an antiquarian work we shall not clash; mine is a
critical work; I don’t know whether I shall ever publish it. It is
rather an apology for painters. I think it is owing to the good sense of
the English that they have not painted better. _W._ My dear Mr. Hogarth,
I must take my leave of you; you now grow too wild—and I left him. If I
had staid, there remained nothing but for him to bite me. I give you my
honour this conversation is literal and, perhaps as long as you have
known Englishmen and painters you never met with any thing so
distracted. I had consecrated a line to his genius (I mean for wit) in
my preface; I shall not erase it; but I hope no one will ask me if he is
not mad.’

We do not think he was mad:—But the self-idolatry of fanciful persons
often exhibits similar symptoms. A man of limited genius, accustomed to
contemplate his own conceptions, has long settled his ideas as to every
thing, and every other person existing in the world. He thinks nothing
truly bright that does not reflect his own image back upon
himself;—nothing truly beautiful, that is not made so by the lustre of
his own feelings. He lives in a sort of chaste singleness; and holds
every approach of a stronger power as dangerous to his solitary purity.
He thinks nothing so important as his own thoughts—nothing so low, that
his own fancy cannot elevate into greatness. He sees only ‘himself and
the universe;’ and will ‘admit no discourse to his beauty.’ He is
himself—alone! If such a man had had a voice in the management of the
flood, he would have suffered no creeping thing to enter the ark but
himself; and would have floated about the waters for forty days in
lonely magnificence.

Passages of the kind, we have hitherto instanced, are very plentiful in
all parts of the work; and we are glad they are so numerous,—because
they will set Walpole’s higher pretensions at rest with posterity. Time
is a disinterested personage, and does his work on dull or rash men
fairly and effectually. He knows nothing of criticism but its austerity
and its sarcasm. He cannot feel poetry; and has, therefore, no right to
settle its laws, or imitate its language. His taste in painting was
affected and dogmatical. His conduct to men of genius was a piece of
insolence, which Posterity is bound to resent! The true heirs of fame
are not to be disturbed in the enjoyment of their property, by every
insolent pretender who steps in and affects a claim upon it. The world
is called on ‘to defend the right.’

To come, however, to the better side of our subject.—Walpole is, as we
have said, an inimitable gossip,—a most vivacious garrulous historian of
fair-haired women, and curious blue china. His garrulity, moreover, hath
a genius of its own—and a transparent tea-cup lets in the light of
inspiration upon it, and makes it shine with colours nigh divine. An
inlaid commode is, with him, the mind’s easy chair. We shall select a
few passages from the letters before us, which, for pleasantry, ease and
alertness, are by far the gayest _morceau_ of description we have read
of late. We may begin with a curious anecdote of Fielding, which is
almost as interesting as any thing in the book. Thus it is—

‘Take sentiments out of their pantoufles, and reduce them to the
infirmities of mortality, what a falling off there is! I could not help
laughing in myself t’other day, as I went through Holborn in a very hot
day, at the dignity of human nature. All those foul old-clothes women
panting without handkerchiefs, and mopping themselves all the way down
within their loose jumps. Rigby gave me as strong a picture of nature.
He and Peter Bathurst, t’other night, carried a servant of the latter’s,
who had attempted to shoot him, before Fielding; who, to all his other
vocations, has, by the grace of Mr. Lyttleton, added that of Middlesex
Justice. He sent them word that he was at supper; that they must come
next morning. They did not understand that freedom, and ran up, where
they found him banqueting with a blind man, a w——, and three Irishmen,
on some cold mutton and a bone of ham, both in one dish, and the
dirtiest cloth. He never stirred, nor asked them to sit. Rigby, who had
seen him so often come to beg a guinea of Sir. C. Williams, and
Bathurst, at whose father’s he had lived for victuals, understood that
dignity as little, and pulled themselves chairs,—on which he civilized.’

It is very certain that the writings of men are coloured by their
indolence, their amusements, and their occupations; and this little peep
into Fielding’s private hours, lets us at once into his course of
studies, and is an admirable illustration of his Tom Jones, Jonathan
Wild, and other novels. We are taken into the artist’s workshop, and
shown the models from which he works; or rather, we break in upon him at
a time when he is copying from the _life_. It is a very idle piece of
morality, to lament over Fielding for this low indulgence of his
appetite for character. If he had been found quietly at his tea, he
would never have left behind him the name he has done. There is nothing
of a tea inspiration in any of his novels. They are assuredly the finest
things of the kind in the language; and we are Englishmen enough to
consider them the best in any language. They are indubitably the most
English of all the works of Englishmen.

The descriptions of Lord Ferrers’s fatal murder, and of Balmerino’s
death, are given with considerable spirit—(our author, indeed, is
extremely _piquant_ in matters of life and death); and we are puzzled
which to select for our readers. They are both strongly illustrative of
the times in which Walpole and the heroes of them lived; but we cannot
afford room for them both; and we choose the letter on Lord Ferrers,—not
because it is better written, or that the subject is more interesting,
but because the book before us is open at that part, and because we
would not idly meddle with so heroic a fall as that of the Lord
Balmerino.

‘The extraordinary history of Lord Ferrers is closed: He was executed
yesterday. Madness, that in other countries is a disorder, is here a
systematic character: It does not hinder people from forming a plan of
conduct, and from even dying agreeably to it. You remember how the last
Ratcliffe died with the utmost propriety; so did this horrid lunatic,
coolly and sensibly. His own and his wife’s relations had asserted that
he would tremble at last. No such thing; he shamed heroes. He bore the
solemnity of a pompous and tedious procession of above two hours, from
the Tower to Tyburn, with as much tranquillity as if he was only going
to his own burial, not to his own execution. He even talked of
indifferent subjects in the passage; and if the sheriff and the chaplain
had not thought that they had parts to act too, and had not consequently
engaged him in most particular conversation, he did not seem to think it
necessary to talk on the occasion. He went in his wedding clothes;
marking the only remaining impression on his mind. The ceremony he was
in a hurry to have over. He was stopped at the gallows by a vast crowd;
but got out of his coach as soon as he could, and was but seven minutes
on the scaffold; which was hung with black, and prepared by the
undertaker of his family at their expense. There was a new contrivance
for sinking the stage under him, which did not play well; and he
suffered a little by the delay, but was dead in four minutes. The mob
was decent, and admired him, and almost pitied him; so they would Lord
George, whose execution they are so angry at missing. I suppose every
highwayman will now preserve the blue handkerchief he has about his neck
when he is married, that he may die like a lord. With all his madness,
he was not mad enough to be struck with his aunt Huntingdon’s sermons.
The Methodists have nothing to brag of his conversion; though Whitfield
prayed for him, and preached about him. Even Tyburn has been above their
reach. I have not heard that Lady Fanny dabbled with his soul; but I
believe she is prudent enough to confine her missionary zeal to subjects
where the body may be her perquisite.’

The following is the account of Walpole’s visit to Newsted Abbey,—the
seat of the Byrons.

‘As I returned, I saw Newsted and Althorpe; I like both. The former is
the very abbey. The great east window of the church remains, and
connects with the house; the hall entire, the refectory entire, the
cloister untouch’d, with the ancient cistern of the convent, and their
arms on; It is a private chapel, quite perfect. The park, which is still
charming, has not been so much unprofaned: The present lord has lost
large sums, and paid part in old oaks; five thousand pounds of which
have been cut near the house. In recompense, he has built two baby
forts, to pay his country in castles for damage done to the navy; and
planted a handful of Scotch firs, that look like ploughboys dress’d in
old family liveries for a public day. In the hall is a very good
collection of pictures, all animals; the refectory, now the great
drawing room, is full of Byrons; the vaulted roof remaining, but the
windows have new dresses making for them by a Venetian tailor.’

This is a careless, but happy description, of one of the noblest
mansions in England; and it will _now_ be read with a far deeper
interest than when it was written. Walpole saw the seat of the Byrons,
old, majestic, and venerable;—but he saw nothing of that magic beauty
which Fame sheds over the habitations of Genius, and which now mantles
every turret of Newsted Abbey. He saw it when Decay was doing its work
on the cloister, the refectory, and the chapel, and all its honours
seemed mouldering into oblivion. He could not know that a voice was soon
to go forth from those antique cloisters, that should be heard through
all future ages, and cry, ‘Sleep no more, to all the house.’ Whatever
may be its future fate, Newsted Abbey must henceforth be a memorable
abode. Time may shed its wild flowers on the walls, and let the fox in
upon the courtyard and the chambers. It may even pass into the hands of
unlettered pride or plebian opulence.—But it has been the mansion of a
mighty poet. Its name is associated to glories that cannot perish—and
will go down to posterity in one of the proudest pages of our annals.

Our author is not often pathetic: But there are some touches of this
sort in the account of his visit to Houghton—though the first part is
flippant enough.

‘The surprise the picture gave me is again renewed. Accustomed for many
years to see nothing but wretched daubs and varnished copies at
auctions, I look at these as enchantment. My own description of them
seems poor; but, shall I tell you truly, the majesty of Italian ideas
almost sinks before the warm nature of Flemish colouring. Alas! don’t I
grow old? My young imagination was fired with Guido’s ideas; must they
be plump and prominent as Abishag to warm me now? Does great youth feel
with poetic limbs, as well as see with poetic eyes? In one respect I am
very young; I cannot satiate myself with looking: an incident
contributed to make me feel this more strongly. A party arrived, just as
I did, to see the house; a man, and three women in riding dresses, and
they rode post through the apartments. I could not hurry before them
fast enough; they were not so long in seeing for the first time, as I
could have been in one room, to examine what I knew by heart. I remember
formerly being often diverted with this kind of _seers_; they come—ask
what such a room is called—in which Sir Robert lay—write it down—admire
a lobster or a cabbage in a market piece—dispute whether the last room
was green or purple—and then hurry to the inn for fear the fish should
be over-dressed. How different my sensations! Not a picture here but
recalls a history; not one but I remember in Downing-street or Chelsea,
where queens and crowds admired them,—though seeing them as little as
these travellers!’

There is some appearance of heart, too, in his account of Lady
Waldegrave’s sufferings on the death of her husband. She was a beautiful
woman; and Walpole seems to have been really kind to her.

‘I had not risen from table, when I received an express from Lady Betty
Waldegrave, to tell me that a sudden change had happened; that they had
given him James’s powders, but that they feared it was too late; and
that he probably would be dead before I could come to my niece, for
whose sake she begged I would return immediately. I was indeed too late!
Too late for every thing.—Late as it was given, the powder vomited him
even in the agonies. Had I had power to direct, he should never have
quitted James:—But these are vain regrets!—Vain to recollect how
particularly kind he, who was kind to everybody, was to me! I found Lady
Waldegrave at my brother’s. She weeps without ceasing; and talks of his
virtues and goodness to her in a manner that distracts one. My brother
bears this mortification with more courage than I could have expected
from his warm passions: but nothing struck me more than to see my rough
savage Swiss, Louis, in tears as he opened my chaise.—I have a bitter
scene to come. To-morrow morning I carry poor Lady Waldegrave to
Strawberry. Her fall is great, from that adoration and attention that he
paid her,—from that splendour of fortune, so much of which dies with
him,—and from that consideration which rebounded to her from the great
deference which the world had for his character. Visions, perhaps. Yet
who could expect that they would have passed away even before that
fleeting thing, her beauty!’

This lady seems to have been afflicted nearly beyond the hope of
consolation. Nevertheless, she married again. It is not a bad sign, we
believe, when a widow sets in with a good wet grief: she has the better
chance of a fine day. Philosophers assert, indeed, that it is possible
for a woman to cry a sorrow clean out:—and we must confess, we have now
and then heard of such things.

We must draw to a close now with our quotations—though we wish we had
room for more. For the author is exceedingly amusing in his attempt at
tracing his descent from Chaucer;—in his remarks on old and young
kings,—in his practical and prospective speculations on gout in the feet
and stomach,—and in his picture of himself, ‘with sweet peas stuck in
his hair!’ We should have liked, too, to extract a _bon mot_ or two of
George Selwyn, whose love of puns and executions was equally insatiable;
but they stick too fast in the looser texture of his historian, to be
disengaged with any moderate labour. The following little passage is
very pleasingly written.

‘For what are we taking Belleisle?—I rejoiced at the little loss we had
on landing: For the glory, I leave it to the Common Council. I am very
willing to leave London to them too, and do pass half the week at
Strawberry, where my two passions, lilacs and nightingales, are in full
bloom. I spent Sunday as if it were Apollo’s birth-day; Gray and Mason
were with me, and we listened to the nightingales till one o’clock in
the morning. Gray has translated two noble incantations from the Lord
knows who, a Danish Gray, who lived the Lord knows when. They are to be
enchased in a history of English Bards, which Mason and he are writing,
but of which the former has not written a word yet, and of which the
latter, if he rides Pegasus at his usual foot pace, will finish the
first page two years hence!’

We cannot understand the Editor’s drift in leaving so many names
unprinted. The respect for the living has been carried, we think, to a
most awful extent: for names are continually left blank, which would
visit their sins, if at all, upon the third or fourth generation. In
many instances, too, the allusions are as plain as if the names had been
written at full length. At p. 185, for example, we perceive a delicate
attention of this sort to the family of Northumberland,—though few
readers can be so respectfully uninformed as to be at all perplexed by
the suppression. Chevy Chase has not left the Douglas and the Percy in
such comfortable security. The mystical passage is as follows.

‘Lady R—— P—— pushed her on the birth-night against a bench. The
Dutchess of Grafton asked if it was true that Lady R—— kicked her? “Kick
me, Madam! when did you ever hear of a P——y that took a kick?” I can
tell you another anecdote of that house, that will not divert you less.
Lord March making them a visit this summer at Alnwic Castle, my Lord
received him at the gate and said, “I believe, my Lord, this is the
first time that ever a Douglas and a P——y met here in friendship.” Think
of this from a Smithson to a true Douglas.’

The beauty of the thing too, is, that Smithson (which alone could give
offence) is printed with all the letters—while Percy is delicately left
in initials and finals.

There are some verses in the book, of which, out of regard to the
author’s memory, we shall say nothing. They are very apparently ‘by a
person of quality.’ Pope, we think, has written something like them
under that signature—which rather takes from their originality.——But we
now take our final leave of this lively volume, with our usual protest
against the enormous size into which this collection has been distended.
Book-sellers now-a-days only study how to construct large paper houses
for their little families of letterpress,—and never think of the
taxation to which they thus subject their readers. These Letters might
have been comfortably accommodated in a comely little octavo, and sold
at a reasonable price: Instead of which, they are put forth in a good
stiff quarto,—and are, to use old Marall’s phrase, ‘very chargeable.’ We
hope soon to see them in a more accessible shape.

LIFE OF SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS

VOL. XXXIV.] [_August 1820._

This, with regard to its main object, must certainly be regarded as a
superfluous publication. Forty years after the death of Sir Joshua, Mr.
Farington has found himself called upon to put forth a thin octavo
volume, to revive the recollection of the dispute between their late
President and the Academy, and to correct an error into which Mr. Malone
had fallen, in supposing that Sir Joshua was not entirely to blame in
that business. This is a remarkable instance of the tenaciousness of
corporate bodies with respect to the immaculate purity of their conduct.
It was at first suggested that printed notes might be sufficient, with
references to the pages of Mr. Malone’s account: but it was finally
judged best to give it as a connected narrative—that the vindication of
the Academy might slip in only as a parenthesis or an episode. So we
have a full account of Sir Joshua’s birth and parentage, god-fathers and
god-mothers, with as many repetitions beside as were necessary to give a
colouring to Mr. Farington’s ultimate object. The manner in which the
plot of the publication is insinuated, is curious and characteristic:
But our business at present is with certain more general matters, on
which we have some observations to offer.

‘In the present instance,’ says Mr. F., ‘we see how a character, formed
by early habits of consideration, self-government, and persevering
industry, acquired the highest fame; and made his path through life a
course of unruffled moral enjoyment. Sir Joshua Reynolds, when young,
wrote rules of conduct for himself. One of his maxims was, “that the
great principle of being happy in this world, is, not to mind or be
affected with small things.” To this rule he strictly adhered; and the
constant habit of controlling his mind contributed greatly to that
evenness of temper which enabled him to live pleasantly with persons of
all descriptions. Placability of temper may be said to have been his
characteristic. The happiness of possessing such a disposition was
acknowledged by his friend Dr. Johnson, who said, “Reynolds was the most
invulnerable man he had ever known.”

‘The life of this distinguished artist exhibits a useful lesson to all
those who may devote themselves to the same pursuit. He was not of the
class of such as have been held up, or who have esteemed themselves, to
be heaven-born geniuses. He appeared to think little of such claims. It
will be seen, in the account of his progress to the high situation he
attained in his profession, that at no period was there in him any such
fancied inspiration; on the contrary, every youthful reader of the
Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds may feel assured, that his ultimate
success will be in proportion to the resolution with which he follows
his example.’

This, we believe, is the current morality and philosophy of the present
day; and therefore it is of more consequence to observe, that it appears
to us to be a mere tissue of sophistry and folly. And first, as to
happiness depending on ‘not being affected with small things,’ it seems
plain enough, that a continued flow of pleasurable sensations cannot
depend every moment on great objects. Children are supposed to have a
fair share of enjoyment; and yet this arises chiefly from their being
delighted with trifles—‘pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.’
The reason why we so seldom carry on the happy vivacity of early youth
into maturer age is, that we form to ourselves a higher standard of
enjoyment than we can realize; and that our passions gradually fasten on
certain favourite objects, which, in proportion to their magnitude, are
of rare occurrence, and, for the most part, out of our reach. The
example, too, which suggested these general remarks, actually exposes
their fallacy. Sir Joshua did _not_ owe his happiness to his contempt of
little things, but to his success in great ones—and it was by that
actual success, far more than by the meritorious industry and exertion
which contributed to it, that he was enabled to disregard little
vexations. Was Richardson, for example, who, it is observed afterwards,
‘had merit in his profession, but not of a high order, though he thought
so well on the subject of art, and had practised it so long,’ to feel an
equal moral enjoyment in the want of equal success? Was the idea of that
excellence, which he had so long laboured in vain to realize, to console
him for the loss of that ‘highest fame,’ which is here represented as
the invariable concomitant of persevering industry? Or was he to
disregard his failure as a trifle? Was the consciousness that he had
done his best, to stand him in stead of that ‘unruffled moral enjoyment’
which Sir Joshua owed in no small degree to the coronet-coaches that
besieged his doors, to the great names that sat at his table, to the
beauty that crowded his painting-room, and reflected its loveliness back
from the lucid mirror of his canvas? These things do indeed put a man
above minding little inconveniences, and ‘greatly contribute to that
evenness of temper which enables him to live pleasantly with persons of
all descriptions.’ But was Hudson, Sir Joshua’s master, who had grown
old and rich in the cultivation of his art, and who found himself
suddenly outdone and eclipsed by his pupil, to derive much _unruffled
enjoyment_ from this petty circumstance, or to comfort himself with one
of those maxims which young Reynolds had written out for his conduct in
life? When Sir Joshua himself lost the use of one of his eyes, in the
decline of his life, he became peevish, and did not long survive the
practice of his favourite art. Suppose the same loss to have happened to
him in the meridian of his fame, we fear that all his consciousness of
merit, and all his efforts of industry, would have been insufficient to
have supplied that unruffled felicity which we are here taught to refer
exclusively to these high sources.

The truth is, that those specious maxims, though they may seem at first
sight to minister to content, and to encourage to meritorious exertion,
lead in fact to a wrong estimate of human life, to unreasonable
anticipations of success, and to bitter repinings and regrets at what in
any reverse of fortune we think the injustice of society and the caprice
of nature. We have a very remarkable instance of this process of mental
sophistication, or the setting up a theory against experience, and then
wondering that human nature does not answer to our theory, in what our
author says on this very subject of Hudson, and his more fortunate
scholar afterwards. P. 46. ‘It might be thought that the talents of
Reynolds, to which no degree of ignorance or imbecility in the art could
be insensible, added to his extraordinary reputation, would have
extinguished every feeling of Jealousy or Rivalship in the mind of his
master Hudson; but the malady was so deeply seated as to defy the usual
remedies applied by time and reflection. _Hudson, when at the head of
his art, admired and praised by all, had seen a youth rise up and
annihilate both his Income and his Fame; and he never could divest his
mind of the feelings of mortification caused by the loss he had thus
sustained._’ This Mr. F. actually considers as something quite
extraordinary and unreasonable; and which might have been easily
prevented by a diligent study of Sir Joshua’s admirable aphorisms,
against being affected by small things. Such is our Academician’s
ethical simplicity, and enviable ignorance of the ways of the world!

One would think that the name of Hudson, which occurs frequently in
these pages, might have taught our learned author some little distrust
of that other favourite maxim, that Genius is the effect of education,
encouragement, and practice. It is the basis, however, of his whole
moral and intellectual system; and is thus distinctly announced and
enforced in a very elaborate passage.

‘With respect to his (Sir Joshua’s) early indications of talent for the
art he afterwards professed, it would be idle to dwell upon them as
manifesting any thing more than is common among boys of his age. As an
amusement he probably preferred drawing to any other to which he was
tempted. In the specimens which have been preserved, there is no sign of
premature ingenuity; his history is, in this respect, like what might be
written of very many other artists, perhaps of artists in general. His
attempts were applauded by kind and sanguine friends; and this
encouraged him to persevere till it became a fixed desire in him to make
further proficiency, and continually to request that it might be his
profession. It is said, that his purpose was determined by reading
Richardson’s Treatise on Painting. Possibly it might have been so; his
thoughts having been previously occupied with the subject. Dr. Johnson,
in his Life of Cowley, writes as follows—“In the windows of his mother’s
apartment lay Spenser’s Faery Queen, in which he very early took delight
to read, till by feeling the charms of verse, he became, as he relates,
irrecoverably a poet. Such are the accidents which, sometimes
remembered, and perhaps sometimes forgotten, produce that peculiar
designation of mind, and propensity for some certain science or
employment, which is commonly called Genius. The true genius is a man of
large general powers accidentally determined to some particular
direction. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the great painter of the present age,
had the first fondness for his art excited by the perusal of
Richardson’s Treatise.” In this definition of genius, Reynolds fully
concurred with Dr. Johnson; and he was himself an instance in proof of
its truth. He had a sound natural capacity, and, by observation and
long-continued labour, always discriminating with judgment, he obtained
universal applause, and established his claim to be ranked amongst those
to whom the highest praise is due; for his productions exhibited perfect
originality. No artist ever consulted the works of eminent predecessors
more than Sir Joshua Reynolds. He drew from every possible source
something which might improve his practice; and he resolved the whole of
what he saw in nature, and found in art, into a union, which made his
pictures a singular display of grace, truth, beauty and richness.’

From the time that Mr. Locke exploded _innate ideas_ in the commencement
of the last century, there began to be a confused apprehension in some
speculative heads, that there could be no innate faculties either; and
our half metaphysicians have been floundering about in this notion ever
since: as if, because there are no innate ideas, that is, no actual
impressions existing in the mind without objects, there could be no
peculiar capacity to receive them from objects; or as if there might not
be as great a difference in the capacity itself as in the outward
objects to be impressed upon it. We might as well deny, at once, that
there are organs or faculties to receive impressions, because there are
no innate ideas, as deny that there is an inherent difference in the
organs or faculties to receive impressions of any particular kind. If
the capacity exists (which it must do), there may, nay we should say
there _must_, be a difference in it, in different persons, and with
respect to different things. To allege that there is such a difference,
no more implies the doctrine of innate ideas, than to say that the brain
of a man is more fitted to discern external objects than a block of
marble, imports that there are innate ideas in the brain, or in the
block of marble. The impression, it is true, does not exist in the
sealing-wax till the seal has been applied to it: but there was the
previous capacity to receive the impression; and there may be, and most
probably is, a greater degree of fitness in one piece of sealing-wax
than in another. That the original capacity, the aptitude for certain
impressions or pursuits, should be necessarily the same in different
instances, with the diversity that we see in men’s organs, faculties,
and acquirements of various kinds, is a supposition not only gratuitous,
but absurd. There is the capacity of animals, the capacity of idiots,
and of half idiots and half madmen of various descriptions: there is
capacity, in short, of all sorts and degrees, from an oyster to a
Newton: Yet we are gravely told, that wherever there is a power of
sensation, the genius must be the same, and would, with proper
cultivation, produce the same effects. ‘No,’ say the French
materialists; ‘but in minds commonly well organized (_communement bien
organisés_), the results will, in the same given circumstances, be the
same.’ That is, in the same circumstances, and with the same _average_
capacity, there will be the same average degree of genius or
imbecility—which is just an identical proposition.

To make any sense at all of the doctrine, that circumstances are
everything and natural genius nothing, the result ought at least to
correspond to the aggregate of impressions, determining the mind this
way or that, like so many weights in a scale. But the advocates of this
doctrine allow that the result is not by any means according to the
known aggregate of impressions, but, on the contrary, that one of the
most insignificant, or one not at all perceived, will turn the scale
against the bias and experience of a man’s whole life. The reasoning is
here lame again. These persons wish to get rid of occult causes, to
refer every thing to distinct principles and a visible origin; and yet
they say that they know not how it is, that, in spite of all visible
circumstances, such a one should be an incorrigible blockhead and such
an other an extraordinary genius; but that, no doubt, there was a secret
influence exerted, a by-play in it, in which nature had no hand, but
accident gave a nod, and in a lucky or unlucky minute fixed the destiny
of both for life, by some slight and transient impulse! Now, this is
like the reasoning of the astrologers, who pretend that your whole
history is to be traced to the constellation under which you were born:
and when you object that two men born at the same time have the most
different character and fortune, they answer, that there was _an
imperceptible interval_ between the moment of their births, that made
the whole difference. But if this short interval, of which no one could
be aware, made the whole difference, it also makes their whole science
vain. Besides, the notion of an accidental impulse, a slight turn of the
screws giving a total revulsion to the whole frame of the mind, is only
intelligible on the supposition of an original or previous bias which
falls in with that impression, and catches at the long-wished for
opportunity of disclosing itself:—like combustible matter meeting with
the spark that kindles it into a flame. But it is little less than sheer
nonsense to maintain, while outward impressions are said to be every
thing, and the mind alike indifferent to all, that one single
unconscious impression shall decide upon a man’s whole character,
genius, and pursuits in life,—and all the rest thenceforward go for
nothing.

Again, we hear it said that the difference of understanding or character
is not very apparent at first:—though this is not uniformly true—but
neither is the difference between an oak and a briar very great in the
seed or in the shoot:—yet will any one deny that the germ is there, or
that the soil, culture, the sun and heat alone produce the difference?
So circumstances are necessary to the mind: but the mind is necessary to
circumstances. The ultimate success depends on the joint action of both.
They were fools who believed in innate ideas, or talked of ‘heaven-born
genius’ without any means of developing it. They are greater, because
more learned fools, who assert that circumstances alone can create or
develop genius, where none exists. We may distinguish a stature of the
mind as well as of the body,—a mould, a form, to which it is
predetermined irrevocably. It is true that exercise gives strength to
the faculties both of mind and body; but it is not true that it is the
only source of strength in either case. Exercise will make a weak man
strong, but it will make a strong man stronger. A dwarf will never be a
match for a giant, train him ever so. And are there not dwarfs as well
as giants in intellect? Appearances are for it, and reason is not
against it.

There are, beyond all dispute, persons who have a talent for particular
things, which according to Dr. Johnson’s definition of genius, proceeds
from ‘a greater general capacity accidentally determined to a particular
direction.’ But this, instead of solving, doubles the miracle of genius;
for it leaves entire all the former objections to inherent talent, and
supposes that one man ‘of large general capacity’ is all sorts of genius
at once. This is like admitting that one man may be naturally stronger
than another—but denying that he can be naturally stronger in the legs
or the arms only; and, deserting the ground of original equality, would
drive the theorist to maintain that the inequality which exists must
always be universal, and not particular, although all the instances we
actually meet with are particular only. Now surely we have no right to
give any man credit for genius in more things than he has shown a
particular genius in. In looking round us in the world, it is most
certain that we find men of large general capacity and no particular
talent, and others with the most exquisite turn for some particular
thing, and no general talent. Would Dr. Johnson have made Reynolds or
Goldsmith, Burke, by beginning early and continuing late? We should make
strange havoc by this arbitrary transposition of genius and industry.
Some persons cannot for their lives understand the first proposition in
Euclid. Would they ever make great mathematicians? Or does this
incapacity preclude them from ever excelling in any other art or
mystery? Swift was admitted by special grace to a Bachelor’s Degree at
Dublin College, which, however, did not prevent him from writing
Gulliver’s Travels: and Claude Lorraine was turned away by his master
from the trade of a pastry-cook to which he was apprenticed, for sheer
stupidity. People often fail most in what they set themselves most
diligently about, and discover an unaccountable _knack_ at something
else, without any effort or even consciousness that they possess it. One
great proof and beauty of works of true genius, is the ease, simplicity,
and freedom from conscious effort which pervades them. Not only in
different things is there this difference of skill and aptness
displayed; but in the same thing, to which a man’s attention is
continually directed, how narrow is the sphere of human excellence, how
distinct the line of pursuit which nature has marked out even for those
whom she has most favoured! Thus in painting, Raphael excelled in
drawing, Titian in colouring, Rembrandt in _chiaroscuro_. A small part
of nature was revealed to each by a peculiar felicity of conformation;
and they would have made sad work of it, if each had neglected his own
advantages to go in search of those of others, on the principle that
genius is a large general capacity, transferred, by will or accident, to
some particular channel.

It may be said, that in all these cases it is habit, not nature, that
produces the disqualification for different pursuits. But if the bias
given to the mind, by a particular study, totally unfits it for others,
is it probable that there is something in the nature of those studies
which requires a particular bias and structure of the faculties to excel
in them, from the very first? If genius were, as some pretend, the mere
exercise of general power on a particular subject, without any
difference of organs or subordinate faculties, a man would improve
equally in every thing, and grow wise at all points. But if, besides
mere general power, there is a constant exercise and sharpening of
different organs and faculties required for any particular pursuit, then
a natural susceptibility of those organs and faculties must greatly
assist him in his progress. To argue otherwise, is to shut one’s eyes to
the whole mass of inductive evidence; and to run headlong into a
dogmatical theory, depending wholly on presumption and conjecture. We
would sooner go the whole length of the absurdities of craniology, than
get into this flatting-machine of the original sameness and
indiscriminate tendency of men’s faculties and dispositions. A painter,
of all men, should not give into any such notion. Does he pretend to see
differences in faces, and will he allow none in minds? Or, does he make
the outline of the head the criterion of a corresponding difference of
character, and yet reject all distinction in the original conformation
of the soul? Has he never been struck with _family_ likenesses? And is
there not an inherent, indestructible, and inalienable character to be
found in the individuals of such families answering to this
physiognomical identity, even in remote branches, where there has been
no communication when young, and where the situation, pursuits,
education, and character of the individuals have been totally opposite?
Again, do we not find persons with every external advantage, without any
intellectual superiority; and the greatest prodigies emerge from the
greatest obscurity? What made Shakespeare! Not his education as a
link-boy or a deer-stealer! Have there not been thousands of
mathematicians, educated like Sir Isaac Newton, who have risen to the
rank of Senior Wranglers, and never been heard of afterwards? Did not
Hogarth live in the same age with Hayman? Who will believe that Highmore
could, by any exaggeration of circumstances, have been transformed into
Michael Angelo? That Hudson was another Vandyke _incognito_; or that
Reynolds would, as our author dreads, have learned to paint like his
master, if he had staid to serve out his apprenticeship with him? The
thing was impossible.—Hudson had every advantage, as far as Mr.
Farington’s mechanical theory goes (for he was brought up under
Richardson), to enable him to break through the trammels of custom, and
to raise the degenerate style of art in his day. Why did he not? He had
not original force of mind either to inspire him with the conception, or
to impel him to execute it. Why did Reynolds burst through the cloud
that overhung the region of art, and shine out, like the glorious sun,
upon his native land? Because he had the genius to do it. It was nature
working in him, and forcing its way through all impediments of ignorance
and fashion, till it found its native element in undoubted excellence
and wide-spread fame. His eye was formed to drink in light, and to
absorb the splendid effects of shadowy obscurity; and it gave out what
it took in. He had a strong intrinsic perception of grace and
expression; and he could not be satisfied with the stiff, formal,
inanimate models he saw before him. There are indeed certain minds that
seem formed as conductors to truth and beauty, as the hardest metals
carry off the electric fluid, and round which all examples of
excellence, whether in art or nature, play harmless and ineffectual.
Reynolds was not one of these: but the instant he saw gorgeous truth in
natural objects, or artificial models, his mind ‘darted contagious
fire.’ It is said that he surpassed his servile predecessors by a more
diligent study, and more careful imitation of nature. But how was he
attracted to nature, but by the sympathy of real taste and genius? He
also copied the portraits of Gandy, an obscure but excellent artist of
his native county. A blockhead would have copied his master, and
despised Gandy: but Gandy’s style of painting satisfied and stimulated
his ambition, because he saw nature there. Hudson’s made no impression
on him, because it presented nothing of the kind. Why then did Reynolds
perform what he did? From the force and bias of his genius. Why did he
not do more? Because his natural bias did not urge him farther. As it is
the property of genius to find its true level, so it cannot rise above
it. He seized upon and naturalized the beauties of Rembrandt and Rubens,
because they were connate to his own turn of mind. He did not at first
instinctively admire, nor did he ever, with all his professions, make
any approach to the high qualities of Raphael or Michael Angelo, because
there was an obvious incompatibility between them. Sir Joshua did not,
after all, found a school of his own in general art, because he had not
strength of mind for it. But he introduced a better taste for art in
this country, because he had great taste himself, and sufficient genius
to transplant many of the excellences of others.

Mr. Farington takes the trouble to vindicate Sir Joshua’s title to be
the author of his own Discourses—though this is a subject on which we
have never entertained a doubt; and conceive indeed that a doubt never
could have arisen, but from estimating the talents required for painting
too low in the scale of intellect, as something mechanical and
fortuitous; and from making literature something exclusive and paramount
to all other pursuits. Johnson and Burke were equally unlikely to have
had a principal or considerable hand in the Discourses. They have none
of the pomp, the vigour, or _mannerism_ of the one, nor the boldness,
originality, or extravagance of the other. They have all the internal
evidence of being Sir Joshua’s. They are subdued, mild, unaffected,
thoughtful,—containing sensible observations on which he laid too little
stress, and vague theories which he was not able to master. There is the
same character of mind in what he wrote, as of eye in what he painted.
His style is gentle, flowing, and bland: there is an inefficient
outline, with a mellow, felicitous, and delightful filling-up. In both,
the taste predominates over the genius: the manner over the matter! The
real groundwork of Sir Joshua’s Discourses is to be found in
Richardson’s Essays.

We proceed to Mr. F.’s account of the state of art in this country, a
little more than half a century ago, which is no less accurate than it
is deplorable. It may lead us to form a better estimate of the merits of
Sir Joshua in rescuing it from this lowest point of degradation, and
perhaps assist our conjectures as to its future progress and its present
state.

‘It was the lot of Sir Joshua Reynolds to be destined to pursue the art
of painting at a period when the extraordinary effort he made came with
all the force and effect of novelty. He appeared at a time when the art
was at its lowest ebb. What might be called an English school had never
been formed. All that Englishmen had done was to copy, and endeavour to
imitate, the works of eminent men, who were drawn to England from other
countries by encouragement, which there was no inducement to bestow upon
the inferior efforts of the natives of this island. In the reign of
Queen Elizabeth, Frederigo Zucchero, an Italian, was much employed in
England, as had been Hans Holbein, a native of Basle, in a former reign.
Charles the First gave great employment to Rubens and Vandyke. They were
succeeded by Sir Peter Lely, a native of Soest in Westphalia; and Sir
Godfrey Kneller came from Lubec to be, for a while, Lely’s competitor:
and after his death, he may be said to have had the whole command of the
art in England. He was succeeded by Richardson, the first English
painter that stood at the head of portrait painting in this country.
Richardson had merit in his profession, but not of a high order: and it
was remarkable, that a man who thought so well on the subject of art,
and more especially who practised so long, should not have been able to
do more than is manifested in his works. He died in 1745, aged 80.
Jervais, the friend of Pope, was his competitor, but very inferior to
him. Sir James Thornhill, also, was contemporary with Richardson, and
painted portraits; but his reputation was founded upon his historical
and allegorical compositions. In St. Paul’s cathedral, in the Hospital
at Greenwich, and at Hampton Court, his principal works are to be seen.
As Richardson in portraits, so Thornhill in history painting was the
first native of this island, who stood preeminent in the line of art he
pursued at the period of his practice. He died in 1732, aged 56.

‘Horace Walpole, in his Anecdotes of Painting, observes, that “at the
accession of George the First, the arts were sunk to the lowest state in
Britain.” This was not strictly true. Mr. Walpole, who published at a
later time, should have dated the period of their utmost degradation to
have been in the middle of the last century, when the names of Hudson
and Hayman were predominant. It is true, Hogarth was then well known to
the public; but he was less so as a painter than an engraver, _though
many of his pictures representing subjects of humour and character are
excellent_; and Hayman, as a history painter, could not be compared with
Sir James Thornhill.

‘Thomas Hudson was a native of Devonshire. His name will be preserved
from his having been the artist to whom Sir Joshua Reynolds was
committed for instruction. Hudson was the scholar of Richardson, and
married his daughter; and after the death of his father-in-law,
succeeded to the chief employment in portrait painting. He was in all
respects much below his master in ability; but being esteemed the best
artist of his time, commissions flowed in upon him; and his _business_,
as it might truly be termed, was carried on like that of a manufactory.
To his ordinary heads, draperies were added by painters who chiefly
confined themselves to that line of practice. No time was lost by Hudson
in the study of character, or in the search of variety in the position
of his figures: a few formal attitudes served as models for all his
subjects; and the _display_ of arms and hands, being the more difficult
parts, was managed with great economy, _by all the contrivances of
concealment_.

‘To this scene of imbecile performance, Joshua Reynolds was sent by his
friends. He arrived in London on the 14th of October 1741, and on the
18th of that month he was introduced to his future preceptor. He was
then aged seventeen years and three months. The terms of the agreement
were, that provided Hudson approved him, he was to remain four years:
but might be discharged at pleasure. He continued in this situation two
years and a half, during which time he drew many heads upon paper; and
in his attempts in painting, succeeded so well in a portrait of Hudson’s
cook, as to excite his master’s jealousy. In this temper of mind, Hudson
availed himself of a very trifling circumstance to dismiss him. Having
one evening ordered Reynolds to take a picture to Van Haaken the drapery
painter; but as the weather proved wet he postponed carrying it till
next morning. At breakfast, Hudson demanded why he did not take the
picture the evening before? Reynolds replied, that “he delayed it on
account of the weather; but that the picture was delivered that morning
before Van Haaken rose from bed.” Hudson then said, “You have not obeyed
my orders, and shall not stay in my house.” On this peremptory
declaration, Reynolds urged that he might be allowed time to write to
his father, who might otherwise think he had committed some great crime.
Hudson, though reproached by his own servant for this unreasonable and
violent conduct, persisted in his determination: accordingly, Reynolds
went that day from Hudson’s house to an uncle who resided in the Temple,
and from thence wrote to his father, who, after consulting his neighbour
Lord Edgcumbe, directed him to come down to Devonshire.

‘Thus did our great artist commence his professional career. Two remarks
may be made upon this event. First by quitting Hudson at this early
period, he avoided the danger of having his mind and his hand habituated
to a mean practice of the art, which, when established, is most
difficult to overcome. It has often been observed in the works of
artists who thus began their practice, that though they rose to marked
distinction, there have been but few who could wholly divest themselves
of the bad effects of a long-continued exercise of the eye and the hand
in copying ordinary works. In Hudson’s school, this was fully
manifested. Mortimer and Wright of Derby were his pupils. They were both
men of superior talents; but in Portraits they never succeeded beyond
what would be called mediocre performance. In this line their
productions were tasteless and laboured: fortunately, however, they made
choice of subjects more congenial with their minds. Mortimer, charmed
with the wild spirit of Salvator Rosa, made the exploits of lawless
banditti the chief subjects of his pencil; while Wright devoted himself
to the study of objects viewed by artificial light, and to the beautiful
effects of the moon upon landscape scenery: yet, even in these, though
deserving of great praise, the effects of their early practice were but
too apparent; their pictures being uniformly executed with what artists
call a heavy hand.’ p. 19.

‘This is a humiliating retrospect for the lovers of art, and of their
country. In speculating upon its causes, we are half afraid to hint at
the probable effects of Climate,—so much is it now the fashion to decry
what was once so much overrated. Our theoretical opinions are directed
far more frequently by a spirit of petulant contradiction than of fair
inquiry. We detect errors in received systems, and then run into the
contrary extreme, to show how wise we are. Thus one folly is driven out
by another; and the history of philosophy is little more than an
alternation of blind prejudices and shallow paradoxes. Thus climate was
everything in the days of Montesquieu, and in our day it is nothing. Yet
it was but one of many cooperating causes at first—and it continues to
be one still. In all that relates to the senses, physical causes may be
allowed to operate very materially, without much violence to experience
or probability. ‘Are the _English_ a Musical people?’ is a question that
has been debated at great length, and in all the forms. But whether the
_Italians_ are a musical people, is a question not to be asked, any more
than whether they have a taste for the fine arts in general. Nor does
the subject ever admit of a question, where a faculty or genius for any
particular thing exists in the most eminent degree; for then it is sure
to show itself, and force its way to the light, in spite of all
obstacles. That which no one ever denied to any people, we may be sure
they actually possess: that which is as often denied as allowed them, we
may be sure they do not possess in a very eminent degree. That, to which
we make the angriest claim, and dispute the most about, whatever else
may be, is not our _forte_. The French are allowed by all the world to
be a dancing, talking, cooking people. If the English were to set up the
same pretensions, it would be ridiculous. But then, they say, they have
other excellences; and having these, they would have the former too.
They think it hard to be set down as a dull, plodding people: but is it
not equally hard upon others to be called vain and light? They tell us,
they are the wisest, the freest, and most moral people on the face of
the earth, without the frivolous accomplishments of their neighbours;
but they insist upon having these too, to be upon a par in every thing
with the rest of the world. We have our bards and sages (‘better none’),
our prose writers, our mathematicians, our inventors in useful and
mechanic arts, our legislators, our patriots, our statesmen, and our
fighting-men, in the field and in the ring:—In these we challenge, and
justly, all the world. We are not behind-hand with any people in all
that depends on hard thinking and deep and firm feeling, on long heads
and stout hearts:—But why must we excel also in the reverse of these,—in
what depends on lively perceptions, on quick sensibility, and on a
voluptuous effeminacy of temperament and character? An Englishman does
not ordinarily pretend to combine his own gravity, plainness and
reserve, with the levity, loquacity, grimace, and artificial politeness
(as it is called) of a Frenchman. Why then will he insist upon
engrafting the fine upon the domestic arts, as an indispensable
consummation of the national character? We may indeed cultivate them as
an experiment in natural history, and produce specimens of them, and
exhibit them as rarities in their kind, as we do hot-house plants and
shrubs; but they are not of native growth or origin. They do not spring
up in the open air, but shrink from the averted eye of Heaven, like a
Laplander into his hut. They do not sit as graceful ornaments, but as
excrescences on the English character: they are ‘like flowers in our
caps, dying or ere they sicken:’—they are exotics and aliens to the
soil. We do not import foreigners to dig our canals, or construct our
machines, or solve difficult problems in political economy, or write
Scotch novels for us—but we import our dancing-masters, our milliners,
our Opera-singers, our valets, and our travelling cooks,—as till lately
we did our painters and sculptors.

The English (we take it) are a nation with certain decided features and
predominating traits of character; and if they have any characteristics
at all, this is one of them, that their feelings are internal rather
than external, reflex rather than organic,—and that they are more
inclined to contend with pain than to indulge in pleasure. ‘The stern
genius of the North,’ says Schlegel, ‘throws men back upon
themselves.’—The progress of the Fine Arts has hitherto been slow, and
wavering and unpromising in this country, ‘like the forced pace of a
shuffling nag,’ not like the flight of Pegasus; and their encouragement
has been cold and backward in proportion. They have been wooed and
won—as far as they have been won, which is no further than to a mere
promise of marriage—‘with coy, reluctant, amorous delay.’ They have not
rushed into our embraces, nor been mingled in our daily pastimes and
pursuits. It is two hundred and fifty years since this island was
civilized to all other intellectual purposes: but, till within half a
century, it was a desert and a waste in art. Were there no _terræ filii_
in those days; no brood of giants to spring out of the ground, and
launch the mighty fragments of genius from their hands; to beautify and
enrich the public mind; to hang up the lights of the eye and of the soul
in pictured halls, in airy porticoes, and solemn temples; to illumine
the land, and weave a garland for their own heads, like ‘the crown which
Ariadne wore upon her bridal day,’ and which still shines brighter in
heaven? There were: but ‘their affections did not that way tend.’ They
were of the tribe of Isaachar, and not of Judah. There were two sisters,
Poetry and Painting: one was taken, and the other was left.

Were our ancestors insensible to the charms of nature, to the music of
thought, to deeds of virtue or heroic enterprise? No. But they saw them
in their mind’s eye: they felt them at their heart’s core, and there
only. They did not translate their perceptions into the language of
sense: they did not embody them in visible images, but in breathing
words. They were more taken up with what an object suggested to combine
with the infinite stores of fancy or trains of feeling, than with the
single object itself; more intent upon the moral inference, the tendency
and the result, than the appearances of things, however imposing or
expressive, at any given moment of time. If their first impressions were
less vivid and complete, their after-reflections were combined in a
greater variety of striking resemblances, and thus drew a dazzling veil
over their merely sensitive impressions, which deadened and neutralized
them still more. Will it be denied that there is a wide difference, as
to the actual result, between the mind of a Poet and a Painter? Why then
should not this difference be inherent and original, as it undoubtedly
is in individuals, and, to all appearance, in nations? Or why should we
be uneasy because the same country does not teem with all varieties and
with each extreme of excellence and genius?[11]

In this importunate theory of ours, we misconstrue nature, and tax
Providence amiss. In that short, but delightful season of the year, and
in that part of the country where we now write, there are wild woods and
banks covered with primroses and hyacinths for miles together, so that
you cannot put your foot between, and with a gaudy show ‘empurpling all
the ground,’ and branches loaded with nightingales whose leaves tremble
with their liquid notes: Yet the air does not resound, as in happier
climes, with shepherd’s pipe or roundelay, nor are the village-maids
adorned with wreaths of vernal flowers, ready to weave the braided
dance, or ‘returning with a choral song, when evening has gone down.’
What is the reason? ‘We also are _not_ Arcadians!’ We have not the same
animal vivacity, the same tendency to external delight and show, the
same ear for melting sounds, the same pride of the eye, or
voluptuousness of the heart. The senses and the mind are differently
constituted; and the outward influences of things, climate, mode of
life, national customs and character, have all a share in producing the
general effect. We should say that the eye in warmer climates drinks in
greater pleasure from external sights, is more open and porous to them,
as the ear is to sounds; that the sense of immediate delight is fixed
deeper in the beauty of the object; that the greater life and animation
of character gives a greater spirit and intensity of expression to the
face, making finer subjects for history and portrait; and that the
circumstances in which a people are placed in a genial atmosphere, are
more favourable to the study of nature and of the human form. Claude
could only have painted his landscapes in the open air; and the Greek
statues were little more than copies from living, every-day forms.

Such a natural aptitude and relish for the impressions of sense gives
not only more facility, but leads to greater patience, refinement, and
perfection in the execution of works of art. What our own artists do is
often up-hill work, against the grain:—not persisted in and brought to a
conclusion for the love of the thing; but, after the first dash, after
the subject is got in, and the gross general effect produced, they
grudge all the rest of their labour as a waste of time and pains. Their
object is not to look at nature, but to have their picture _exhibited_
and _sold_. The want of intimate sympathy with, and entire repose on
nature, not only leaves their productions hard, violent, and crude, but
frequently renders them impatient, wavering, and dissatisfied with their
own walk of art, and never easy till they get into a different or higher
one, where they think they can earn more money or fame with less
trouble. By beginning over again, by having the same preliminary ground
to go over, with new subjects or bungling experiments, they seldom
arrive at that nice, nervous point that trembles on perfection. This
last stage, in which art is as it were identified with nature, an
English painter shrinks from with strange repugnance and peculiar
abhorrence. The French style is the reverse of ours: it is all dry
finishing without effect. We see their faults, and, as we conceive,
their general incapacity for art: but we cannot be persuaded to see our
own.

The want of encouragement, which is sometimes set up as an
all-sufficient plea, will hardly account for this slow and irregular
progress of English art. There was no premium offered for the production
of dramatic excellence in the age of Elizabeth: there was no society for
the encouragement of works of wit and humour in the reign of Charles
II.: no committee of taste ever voted Congreve, or Steele, or Swift, a
silver vase, or a gold medal, for their comic vein: Hogarth was not
fostered in the annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy. In plain truth,
that is not the way in which that sort of harvest is produced. The seeds
must be sown in the mind: there is a fulness of the blood, a plethoric
habit of thought, that breaks out with the first opportunity on the
surface of society. Poetry has sprung up indigenously, spontaneously, at
all times of our history, and under all circumstances, with or without
encouragement: it is therefore a rich, natural product of the mind of
the country, unforced, unpampered, unsophisticated. It is obviously and
entirely genuine, ‘the unbought grace of life.’ If it be asked, why
Painting has all this time kept back, has not dared to show its face, or
retired ashamed of its poverty and deformity, the answer is
plain—because it did not shoot out with equal vigour and luxuriance from
the soil of English genius—because it was not the native language and
idiom of the country. Why then are we bound to suppose that it will
shoot up _now_ to an unequalled height—why are we confidently told and
required to predict to others that it is about to produce wonders, when
we see no such thing; when these very persons tell us that there has
been hitherto no such thing, but that it must and shall be revealed in
their time and persons? And though they complain that that public
patronage which they invoke, and which they pretend is alone wanting to
produce the high and palmy state of art to which they would have us look
forward, is entirely and scandalously withheld from it, and likely to be
so!

We turn from this subject to another not less melancholy or
singular,—from the imperfect and abortive attempts at art in this
country formerly, to its present state of degeneracy and decay in Italy.
Speaking of Sir Joshua’s arrival at Rome in the year 1749, Mr. Farington
indulges in the following remarks.

‘On his arrival at Rome, he found Pompeo Battoni, a native of Lucca,
possessing the highest reputation. His name was, indeed, known in every
part of Europe, and was every where spoken of as almost another Raphael;
but in that great school of art, such was the admiration he excited, or
rather such was the degradation of taste, that the students in painting
had no higher ambition than to be his imitators.

‘Battoni had some talent, but his works are dry, cold, and insipid. That
such performances should have been so extolled in the very seat and
centre of the fine arts, seems wonderful. But in this manner has public
taste been operated upon; and from the period when art was carried to
the highest point of excellence known in modern times, it has thus
gradually declined. A succession of artists followed each other, who,
being esteemed the most eminent in their own time, were praised
extravagantly by an ignorant public; and in the several schools they
established, their own productions were the only objects of study.

‘So widely spread was the fame of Battoni, that, before Reynolds left
England, his patron, Lord Edgcumbe, strongly urged the expediency of
placing himself under the tuition of so great a man. This
recommendation, however, on seeing the works of that master, he did not
choose to follow:—which showed that he was then above the level of those
whose professional views all concentrated in the productions of the
popular favourite. Indeed nothing could be more opposite to the spirited
execution, the high relish of colour, and powerful effect, which the
works of Reynolds at that time possessed, than the tame and inanimate
pictures of Pompeo Battoni. Taking a wiser course, therefore, he formed
his own plan, and studied chiefly in the Vatican, from the works of
Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto, with great diligence;
such indeed was his application, that to a severe cold, which he caught
in those apartments, he owed the deafness which continued during the
remainder of his life.’ p. 31.

This account may serve to show that Italy is no longer Italy: why it is
so, is a question of greater difficulty. The soil, the climate, the
religion, the people are the same; and the men and women in the streets
of Rome still look as if they had walked out of Raphael’s pictures; but
there is no Raphael to paint them, nor does any Leo arise to encourage
them. This seems to prove that the perfection of art is the destruction
of art: that the models of this kind, by their accumulation, block up
the path of genius; and that all attempts at distinction lead, after a
certain period, to a mere lifeless copy of what has been done before, or
a vapid, distorted, and extravagant caricature of it. This is but a poor
prospect for those who set out late in art, and who have all the
excellence of their predecessors, and all the fastidious refinements of
their own taste, the temptations of indolence, and the despair of
vanity, to distract and encumber their efforts. The artists who revel in
the luxuries of genius thus prepared by their predecessors, clog their
wings with the honeyed sweets, and get drunk with the intoxicating
nectar. They become servitors and lacqueys to Art, not devoted servants
of Nature;—the fluttering, foppish, lazy retinue of some great name. The
contemplation of unattainable excellence casts a film over their eyes,
and unnerves their hands. They look on, and do nothing. In Italy, it
costs them a month to paint a hand, a year an eye: the feeble pencil
drops from their grasp, while they wonder to see an Englishman make a
hasty copy of the Transfiguration, turn over a portfolio of Piranesi’s
drawings for their next historical design, and read Winckelman on
_virtù_! We do much the same here, in all our collections and
exhibitions of modern or ancient paintings, and of the Elgin marbles, to
boot. A picture-gallery serves very well for a place to lounge in, and
talk about; but it does not make the student go home and set heartily to
work:—he would rather come again and lounge, and talk, the next day, and
the day after that. He cannot do _all_ that he sees there; and less will
not satisfy his expansive and refined ambition. He would be all the
painters that ever were—or none. His indolence combines with his vanity,
like alternate doses of provocatives and sleeping-draughts. He copies,
however, a favourite picture (though he thinks copying bad in
general),—or makes a chalk-drawing of it—or gets some one else to do it
for him.—We might go on: but we have written what many people will call
a lampoon already!

There is another view of the subject more favourable and encouraging to
ourselves, and yet not immeasurably so, when all circumstances are
considered. All that was possible had been formerly done for art in
Italy, so that nothing more was left to be done. That is not the case
with us yet. Perfection is not the insurmountable obstacle to _our_
success: we have enough to do, if we knew how. That is some inducement
to proceed. We can hardly be retrograde in our course. But there is a
difficulty in the way,—no less than our Establishment in Church and
State. Rome was the capital of the Christian and of the civilized world.
Her mitre swayed the sceptres of the earth; and the Servant of Servants
set his foot on the neck of kings, and deposed sovereigns with the
signet of the Fisherman. She was the eye of the world, and her word was
a law. She set herself up, and said, ‘All eyes shall see me, and all
knees shall bow to me.’ She ruled in the hearts of the people by
dazzling their senses, and making them drunk with hopes and fears. She
held in her hands the keys of the other world to open or shut; and she
displayed all the pomp, the trappings, and the pride of this. Homage was
paid to the persons of her ministers; her worship was adorned and made
alluring by every appeal to the passions and imaginations of its
followers. Art was rendered tributary to the support of this grand
engine of power; and Painting was employed, as soon as its fascination
was felt, to aid the devotion, and rivet the faith of the Catholic
believer. Thus religion was made subservient to interest, and art was
called in to aid in the service of this ambitious religion. The
patron-saint of every church stood at the head of his altar: the
meekness of love, the innocence of childhood, ‘amazing brightness,
purity, and truth,’ breathed from innumerable representations of the
Virgin and Child; and the Vatican was covered with the acts and
processions of Popes and Cardinals, of Christ and the Apostles. The
churches were filled with these objects of art and of devotion: the very
walls spoke. ‘A present deity they shout around; a present deity the
walls and vaulted roofs rebound.’ This unavoidably put in requisition
all the strength of genius, and all the resources of enthusiastic
feeling in the country. The spectator sympathized with the artist’s
inspiration. No elevation of thought, no refinement of expression, could
outgo the expectation of the thronging votaries. The fancy of the
painter was but a spark kindled from the glow of public sentiment. This
was a sort of patronage worth having. The zeal and enthusiasm and
industry of native genius was stimulated to works worthy of such
encouragement, and in unison with its own feelings. But by degrees the
tide ebbed: the current was dried up or became stagnant. The churches
were all supplied with altar-pieces: the niches were full, not only with
scriptural subjects, but with the stories of every saint enrolled in the
calendar, or registered in legendary lore. No more pictures were
wanted,—and then it was found that there were no more painters to do
them! The art languished, and gradually disappeared. They could not take
down the Madona of Foligno, or new-stucco the ceiling at Parma, that
other artists might undo what Raphael and Correggio had done. Some of
them, to be sure, did follow this desperate course; and spent their
time, as in the case of Leonardo’s Last Supper at Milan, in painting
over, that is, in defacing the works of their predecessors. Afterwards,
they applied themselves to landscape and classical subjects, with great
success for a time, as we see in Claude and N. Poussin; but the original
_state_ impulse was gone.

What confirms the foregoing account, is, that at Venice, and other
places out of the more immediate superintendence of the Papal See,
though there also sacred subjects were in great request, yet the art
being patronized by rich merchants and nobles, took a more decided turn
to portraits;—magnificent indeed, and hitherto unrivalled, for the
beauty of the costume, the character of the faces, and the marked
pretensions of the persons who sat for them,—but still wildly remote
from that public and national interest that it assumed in the Roman
school. We see, in like manner, that painting in Holland and Flanders
took yet a different direction; was mostly scenic and ornamental, or
confined to local and personal subjects. Rubens’s pictures, for example,
differ from Raphael’s by a total want of religious enthusiasm and
studied refinement of expression, even where the subjects are the same;
and Rembrandt’s portraits differ from Titian’s in the grossness and want
of animation and dignity of his characters. There was an inherent
difference in the look of a Doge of Venice or one of the Medici family,
and that of a Dutch burgomaster. The climate had affected the picture,
through the character of the sitter, as it affected the genius of the
artist (if not otherwise) through the class of subjects he was
constantly called upon to paint. What turn painting has lately taken, or
is likely to take with us, now remains to be seen.

With the Memoirs of Sir Joshua Mr. Farington very properly connects the
history of the institution of the Royal Academy from which he dates the
hopes and origin of all sound art in this country. There is here at
first sight an inversion of the usual order of things. The institution
of Academies in most countries has been coeval with the decline of art:
in ours, it seems, it is the harbinger, and main prop of its success.
Mr. F. thus traces the outline of this part of his subject with the
enthusiasm of an artist, and the fidelity of an historian.

‘At this period (1760) a plan was formed by the artists of the
metropolis to draw the attention of their fellow-citizens to their
ingenious labours; with a view both to an increase of patronage, and the
cultivation of taste. Hitherto works of that kind produced in the
country were seen only by a few; the people in general knew nothing of
what was passing in the arts. Private collections were then
inaccessible, and there were no public ones; nor any casual display of
the productions of genius, except what the ordinary sales by auction
occasionally offered. Nothing, therefore, could exceed the ignorance of
a people who were in themselves learned, ingenious, and highly
cultivated in all things, excepting the arts of design.

‘In consequence of this privation, it was conceived that a Public
Exhibition of the works of the most eminent Artists could not fail to
make a powerful impression; and if occasionally repeated, might
ultimately produce the most satisfactory effects. The scheme was no
sooner proposed than adopted; and being carried into immediate
execution, the result exceeded the most sanguine expectations of the
projectors. All ranks of people crowded to see the delightful novelty;
it was the universal topic of conversation; and a passion for the arts
was excited by that first manifestation of native talent, which,
cherished by the continued operation of the same cause, has ever since
been increasing in strength, and extending its effects through every
part of the Empire.

‘The history of our Exhibitions affords itself the strongest evidence of
their impressive effect upon public taste. At their commencement, though
men of enlightened minds could distinguish and appreciate what was
excellent, the admiration of the _many_ was confined to subjects either
gross or puerile, and commonly to the meanest efforts of intellect;
whereas, at this time, the whole train of subjects most popular in the
earlier exhibitions have disappeared. The loaf and cheese, that could
provoke hunger, the cat and canary-bird, and the dead mackarel on a deal
board, have long ceased to produce astonishment and delight; while truth
of imitation now finds innumerable admirers, though combined with the
high qualities of beauty, grandeur, and taste.

‘To our Public Exhibitions, and to arrangements that followed in
consequence of their introduction, this change must be chiefly
attributed. _The present generation appears to be composed of a new, and
at least, with respect to the arts, a superior order of beings._
Generally speaking, their thoughts, their feelings, and language on
these subjects differ entirely from what they were sixty years ago. No
just opinions were at that time entertained on the merits of ingenious
productions of this kind. The state of the public mind, incapable of
discriminating excellence from inferiority, proved incontrovertibly that
a right sense of art in the spectator can only be acquired by long and
frequent observation; and that, without proper opportunities to improve
the mind and the eye, a nation would continue insensible of the true
value of the fine arts.

‘The first or probationary Exhibition, which opened April 21st, 1760,
was at a large room in the Strand, belonging to the society for the
Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, which had then been
instituted five or six years. It is natural to conclude, that the first
artist in the country was not indifferent to the success of a plan which
promised to be so extensively useful. Accordingly, four of his pictures
were for the first time here placed before the public, with whom, by the
channel now opened, he continued in constant intercourse as long as he
lived.

‘Encouraged by the successful issue of the first experiment, the
_artistical body_ determined that it should be repeated the following
year. Owing, however, to some inconveniences experienced at their former
place of exhibition, and also to a desire to be perfectly independent in
their proceedings, they engaged, for their next public display, a
spacious room near the Spring Gardens’ entrance into the Park; at which
place the second Exhibition opened, May 9th, 1761. Here Reynolds sent
his fine picture of Lord Ligonier on horseback, a portrait of the Rev.
Laurence Sterne, and three others....

‘The artists had now fully proved the efficacy of their plan; and their
income exceeding their expenditure, affording a reasonable hope of a
permanent establishment, they thought they might solicit a Royal Charter
of Incorporation; and having applied to his Majesty for that purpose, he
was pleased to accede to their request. This measure, however, which was
intended to consolidate the body of artists, was of no avail: on the
contrary, it was probably the cause of its dissolution; for in less than
four years a separation took place, which led to the establishment of
the Royal Academy, and finally to the extinction of the incorporated
Society. The charter was dated January 26th, 1765; the secession took
place in October, 1768; and the Royal Academy was instituted December
10th in the same year.’ p. 53.

On this statement we must be allowed to make a few remarks. First, the
four greatest names in English art, Hogarth, Reynolds, Wilson[12] and
West, were not formed by the Academy, but were formed before it; and the
first gave it as his opinion, that it would be a death-blow to the art.
He considered an Academy as a school for servile mediocrity, a hotbed
for cabal and dirty competition, and a vehicle for the display of idle
pretensions and empty parade.

Secondly, we agree with the writer as to the deplorable state of the art
and of the public taste in general, which, at the period in question,
was as gross as it was insipid: but we do not think that it has been
improved so much since, as Mr. Farington is willing to suppose; nor that
the Academy has taken more than _half-measures_ for improving or
refining it.

‘They found it poor at first, and kept it so.’

They have attended to their own interests, and flattered their
customers, while they have neglected or cajoled the public. They may
indeed look back with triumph and pity to ‘the cat and canary-bird, the
dead mackarel and Deal board;’ but they seem to rest satisfied with this
conquest over themselves, and, ‘leaving the things that are behind, have
not pressed forward (with equal ardour) to the things that are before.’
Theirs is a very moderate, not a Radical Reform in this respect. We do
_not_ find, even in the latest Exhibitions at Somerset House,
‘innumerable examples of truth of imitation, combined with the high
qualities of beauty, grandeur, and taste.’ The mass of the pictures
exhibited there are _not_ calculated to give the English people a true
notion, not merely of high art (as it is emphatically called), but of
the genuine objects of art at all. We do not believe—to take a plain
test of the progress we have made—that nine-tenths of the persons who go
there annually, and who go through the Catalogue regularly, would know a
Guido from a daub—the finest picture from one not badly executed
perhaps, but done in the worst taste, and on the falsest principles. The
vast majority of the pictures received there, and hung up in the most
conspicuous places, are pictures painted to please the natural vanity or
fantastic ignorance of the artist’s sitters, their friends and
relations, and to lead to more commissions for half and whole lengths—or
else pictures painted purposely to be seen in the Exhibition, to strike
across the Great Room, to catch attention, and force admiration, in the
distraction and dissipation of a thousand foolish faces and new-gilt
frames, by gaudy colouring and meretricious grace. We appeal to any man
of judgment, whether this is not a brief, but true summary, of ‘the
annual show’ at the Royal Academy? And is this the way to advance the
interests of art, or to fashion the public taste? There is not one head
in ten painted as a study from nature, or with a view to bring out the
real qualities of the mind or countenance. If there is any such
improvident example of unfashionable sincerity, it is put out of
countenance by the prevailing tone of _rouged_ and smiling folly, and
affectation all around it.

The only pictures painted in any quantity as studies from nature, free
from the glosses of sordid art and the tincture of vanity, are
_portraits of places_; and it cannot be denied that there are many of
these that have a true and powerful look of nature: but then, as if this
was a matter of great indifference, and nobody’s business to see to,
they are seldom anything more than bare sketches, hastily got up for the
chance of a purchaser, and left unfinished to save time and trouble.
They are not, in general, lofty conceptions or selections of beautiful
scenery, but mere common out-of-door views, relying for their value on
their literal fidelity; and where, consequently, the exact truth and
perfect identity of the imitation is the more indispensable.—Our own
countryman, Wilkie, in scenes of domestic and familiar life, is equally
deserving of praise for the arrangement of his subjects, and care in the
execution: but we have to lament that he too is in some degree
chargeable with that fickleness and desultoriness in the pursuit of
excellence, which we have noticed above as incident to our native
artists, and which, we think, has kept him stationary, instead of being
progressive, for some years past. He appeared at one time as if he was
near touching the point of perfection in his peculiar department; and he
_may_ do it yet! But how small a part do his works form of the
Exhibition, and how unlike all the rest!

It was the panic-fear that all this daubing and varnishing would be seen
through, and the scales fall off from the eyes of the public, in
consequence of the exhibition of some of the finest specimens of the Old
Masters at the British Institution, that called into clandestine
notoriety that disgraceful production, the _Catalogue Raisonné_. The
concealed authors of that work conceived, that a discerning public would
learn more of the art from the simplicity, dignity, force and truth, of
these admired and lasting models, in a short season or two, than they
had done from the Exhibitions of the Royal Academy for the last fifty
years: that they would see that it did not consist entirely in tints and
varnishes and megilps and washes for the skin, but that all the effects
of colour, and charms of expression, might be united with purity of
tone, with articulate forms, and exquisite finishing. They saw this
conviction rapidly taking place in the public mind, and they shrunk back
from it ‘with jealous leer malign.’ They persuaded themselves, and had
the courage to try to persuade others, that to exhibit approved
specimens of art in general, selected from the works of the most famous
and accomplished masters, was to destroy the germ of native art; was
cruelly to strangle the growing taste and enthusiasm of the public for
art in its very birth; was to blight the well-earned reputation, and
strike at the honest livelihood of the liberal professors of the school
of painting in England. They therefore set to work to decry these
productions as worthless and odious in the sight of the true adept: they
smeared over, with every epithet of low abuse, works and names sacred to
fame, and to generations to come: they spared no pains to heap ridicule
and obloquy on those who had brought these works forward: they did every
thing to disgust and blind the public to their excellence, by showing in
themselves a hatred and a loathing of all high excellence, and of all
established reputation in art, in which their paltry vanity and
mercenary spite were not concerned. They proved, beyond all
contradiction, that to keep back the taste of the town, and the
knowledge of the student, to the point to which _the Academy_ had found
it practicable to conduct it by its example, was the object of a
powerful and active party of professional intriguers in this country. If
the Academy had any hand, directly or indirectly, in this unprincipled
outrage upon taste and decency, they ought to be disfranchised (like
Grampound) to-morrow, as utterly unworthy of the trust reposed in them.

The alarm indeed (in one sense) was not unfounded: for many persons who
had long been dazzled, not illumined, by the glare of the most modern
and fashionable productions, began to open their eyes to the beauties
and loveliness of painting, and to see reflected there as in a mirror
those hues, those expressions, those transient and heavenly glances of
nature, which had often charmed their own minds, but of which they could
find the traces nowhere else, and became true worshippers at the shrine
of genuine art. Whether this taste will spread beyond the immediate
gratification of the moment, or stimulate the rising generation to new
efforts, and to the adoption of a new and purer style, is another
question; with regard to which, for reasons above explained, we are not
very sanguine.

We have a great respect for _high_ art, and an anxiety for its
advancement and cultivation; but we have a greater still for the
advancement and encouragement of _true_ art. That is the first, and the
last step. The knowledge of what is contained in nature is the only
foundation of legitimate art; and the perception of beauty and power, in
whatever objects or in whatever degree they subsist, is the test of real
genius. The principle is the same in painting an archangel’s or a
butterfly’s wing; and the very finest picture in the finest collection
may be one of a very common subject. We speak and think of Rembrandt as
Rembrandt, of Raphael as Raphael, not of the one as a portrait, of the
other as a history painter. Portrait may become history, or history
portrait, as the one or the other gives the soul or the mask of the
face. ‘_That_ is true history,’ said an eminent critic, on seeing
Titian’s picture of Pope Julius II. and his two nephews. He who should
set down Claude as a mere landscape painter, must know nothing of what
Claude was in himself; and those who class Hogarth as a painter of low
life, only show their ignorance of human nature. High art does not
consist in high or epic subjects, but in the manner of treating those
subjects; and that manner among us, as far as we have proceeded, has we
think been false and exceptionable. We appeal from the common cant on
this subject to the Elgin marbles. They are high art, confessedly: But
they are also true art, in our sense of the word. They do not deviate
from truth and nature in order to arrive at a fancied superiority to
truth and nature. They do not represent a vapid abstraction, but the
entire, undoubted, concrete object they profess to imitate. They are
like casts of the finest living forms in the world, taken in momentary
action. They are nothing more: and therefore certain great critics who
had been educated in the ideal school of art, think nothing of them.
They do not conform to a vague, unmeaning standard, made out of the
fastidious likings or dislikings of the artist; they are carved out of
the living, imperishable forms of nature, as the marble of which they
are composed was hewn from its native rock. They contain the truth, the
whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We cannot say so much of the
general style of history-painting in this country, which has proceeded,
as a first principle, on the determined and deliberate dereliction of
living nature, both as means and end. Grandeur was made to depend on
leaving out the details. Ideal grace and beauty were made to consist in
neutral forms, and character and expression. The first could produce
nothing but slovenliness; the second nothing but insipidity. The Elgin
marbles have proved, by oracular demonstration, that the utmost freedom
and grandeur of style is compatible with the minutest details,—the
variety of the subordinate parts not destroying the masses in the
productions of art more than in those of nature. Grandeur without
softness and precision, is only another name for grossness. These
invaluable fragments of antiquity have also proved, beyond dispute, that
ideal beauty and historic truth do not consist in middle or _average_
forms, &c. but in harmonious outlines, in unity of action, and in the
utmost refinement of character and expression. We there see art
following close in the footsteps of nature, and exalted, raised, refined
with it to the utmost extent that either was capable of. With us, all
this has been reversed; and we have discarded nature at first, only to
flounder about, and be lost in a Limbo of Vanity. With them invention
rose from the ground of imitation: with us, the boldness of the
invention was acknowledged in proportion as no traces of imitation were
discoverable. Our greatest and most successful candidates in the epic
walk of art, have been those who founded their pretensions to be
history-painters on their not being portrait-painters. They could not
paint that which they had seen, and therefore they must be qualified to
paint that which they had not seen. There was not any one part of any
one of their pictures good for any thing; and therefore the whole was
grand, and an example of lofty art! There was not, in all probability, a
single head in an acre of canvas, that, taken by itself, was more than a
worthless daub, scarcely fit to be hung up as a sign at an alehouse
door: But a hundred of these bad portraits or wretched caricatures,
made, by numerical addition, an admirable historical picture! The faces,
hands, eyes, feet, had neither beauty nor expression, nor drawing, nor
colouring; and yet the composition and arrangement of these abortive and
crude materials, which might as well or better have been left blanks,
displayed the mind of the great master. Not one tone, one line, one look
for the eye to dwell upon with pure and intense delight, in all this
endless scope of subject and field of canvas.

We cannot say that we in general like very large pictures; for this
reason, that, like overgrown men, they are apt to be bullies and
cowards. They profess a great deal, and perform little. They are often a
contrivance not to display magnificent conceptions to the greatest
advantage, but to throw the spectator to a distance, where it is
impossible to distinguish either gross faults or real beauties.

The late Mr. West’s pictures were admirable for the composition and
grouping. In these respects they could not be better: as we see in the
print of the death of General Wolfe: but for the rest, he might as well
have set up a parcel of figures in wood, and painted them over with a
sign-post brush, and then copied what he saw, and it would have been
just as good. His skill in drawing was confined to a knowledge of
mechanical proportions and measurements, and was not guided in the line
of beauty, or employed to give force to expression. He, however,
laboured long and diligently to advance the interests of art in this his
adopted country; and if he did not do more, it was the fault of the
coldness and formality of his genius, not of the man.—Barry was another
instance of those who scorn nature, and are scorned by her. He could not
make a likeness of any one object in the universe: when he attempted it,
he was like a drunken man on horseback; his eye reeled, his hand refused
its office,—and accordingly he set up for an example of _the great
style_ in art, which, like charity, covers all other defects. It would
be unfair at the same time to deny, that some of the figures and groupes
in his pictures of the Olympic Games in the Adelphi, are beautiful
designs after the antique, as far as outline is concerned. In colour and
expression they are like wild Indians. The other pictures of his there,
are not worthy of notice; except as warnings to the misguided student
who would scale the high and abstracted steep of art, without following
the path of nature. Yet Barry was a man of genius, and an enthusiastic
lover of his art. But he unfortunately mistook his ardent aspiration
after excellence for the power to achieve it; assumed the capacity to
execute the greatest works instead of acquiring it; supposed that ‘the
bodiless creations of his brain’ were to start out from the walls of the
Adelphi like a dream or a fairy tale;—and the result has been, that all
the splendid illusions of his undigested ambition have, ‘like the
baseless fabric of a vision, left not a wreck behind.’ His name is not a
light or beacon, but a by-word and an ill omen in art. What he has left
behind him in writing on the subject, contains much real feeling and
interesting thought.—Mr. Fuseli is another distinguished artist who
complains that nature puts him out. But _his_ distortions and vagaries
are German, and not English: they lie like a night-mare on the breast of
our native art. They are too recondite, obscure, and extravagant for us:
we only want to get over the ground with large, clumsy strides, as fast
as we can; and do not go out of our way in search of absurdity. We
cannot consider his genius as naturalized among us, after the lapse of
more than half a century: and if in saying this we do not pay him a
compliment, we certainly do not intend it as a very severe censure. Mr.
Fuseli has wit and words at will; and, though he had never touched a
pencil, would be a man of extraordinary pretensions and talents.

Mr. Haydon is a young artist of great promise, and much ardour and
energy; and has lately painted a picture which has carried away
universal admiration. Without wishing to detract from that tribute of
deserved applause, we may be allowed to suggest (and with no unfriendly
voice) that he has there, in our judgment, laid in the groundwork, and
raised the scaffolding, of a noble picture; but no more. There is
spirit, conception, force, and effect: but all this is done by the first
going over of the canvas. It is the foundation, not the superstructure
of a first-rate work of art. It is a rude outline, a striking and
masterly sketch.

Milton has given us a description of the growth of a plant—

——‘So from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk; from thence the leaves
More airy; last the bright consummate flower.’

And we think this image might be transferred to the slow and perfect
growth of works of imagination. We have in the present instance the
rough materials, the solid substance and the glowing spirit of art; and
only want the last finishing and patient working up. Does Mr. Haydon
think this too much to bestow on works designed to breathe the air of
immortality, and to shed the fragrance of thought on a distant age? Does
he regard it as beneath him to do what Raphael has done? We repeat it,
here are bold contrasts, distinct grouping, a vigorous hand and striking
conceptions. What remains then, but that he should add to bold contrasts
fine gradations,—to masculine drawing nice inflections,—to vigorous
pencilling those softened and trembling hues which hover like air on the
canvas,—to massy and prominent grouping the exquisite finishing of every
face and figure, nerve and artery, so as to have each part instinct with
life and thought and sentiment, and to produce an impression in the
spectator not only that he can touch the actual substance, but that it
would shrink from the touch? In a word, Mr. Haydon has strength: we
would wish him to add to it refinement. Till he does this, he will not
remove the common stigma on British art. Nor do we ask impossibilities
of him: we only ask him to make that a leading principle in his
pictures, which he has followed so happily in parts. Let him take his
own Penitent Girl as a model,—paint up to this standard through all the
rest of the figures, and we shall be satisfied. His Christ in the
present picture we do not like, though in this we have no less an
authority against us than Mrs. Siddons. Mr. Haydon has gone at much
length into a description of his _idea_ of this figure in the Catalogue,
which is a practice we disapprove: for it deceives the artist himself,
and may mislead the public. In the idea he conveys to us from the
canvas, there can be no deception. Mr. Haydon is a devoted admirer of
the Elgin marbles; and he has taken advantage of their breadth and size
and masses. We would urge him to follow them also into their details,
their involved graces, the texture of the skin, the indication of a vein
or muscle, the waving line of beauty, their calm and motionless
expression; into all, in which they follow nature. But to do this, he
must go to nature and study her more and more, in the greatest and the
smallest things. In short, we wish to see this artist paint a picture
(he has now every motive to exertion and improvement) which shall not
only have a striking and imposing effect in the aggregate, but where the
impression of the whole shall be the joint and irresistible effect of
the value of every part. This is our notion of fine art, which we offer
to him, not by way of disparagement or discouragement, but to do our
best to promote the cause of truth and the emulation of the highest
excellence.

We had quite forgotten the chief object of Mr. Farington’s book, Sir
Joshua’s dispute with the Academy about Mr. Bonomi’s election; and it is
too late to return to it now. We think, however, that Sir Joshua was in
the right, and the Academy in the wrong; but we must refer those who
require our reasons to Mr. Farington’s account; who, though he differs
from us in his conclusion, has given the facts too fairly to justify any
other opinion. He has also some excellent observations on the increasing
respectability of artists in society, from which, and from various other
passages of his work, we are inclined to infer that, on subjects not
relating to the Academy, he would be a sensible, ingenious, and liberal
writer.

THE PERIODICAL PRESS

VOL. XXXVIII.] [_May 1823._

We often hear it asked, _Whether Periodical Criticism is, upon the
whole, beneficial to the cause of literature?_ And this question is
usually followed up by another, which is thought to settle the first,
_Whether Shakespeare could have written as he did, had he lived in the
present day?_ We shall not attempt to answer either of these questions:
But we will be bold to say, that we have at least one author at present,
whose productions spring up free and numberless, in the very hotbed of
criticism—a large and living refutation of the chilling and blighting
effects of such a neighbourhood. ‘But would not the author of Waverley
himself,’ resumes our tritical querist, ‘have written better, if he had
not had the fear of the periodical press before his eyes?’ We answer,
that he has no fear of the periodical press; and that we do not see how,
in any circumstances, he could have written better than he does. ‘But a
single exception does not disprove the rule.’ But he is not a single
exception. Is there not Lord Byron? Are there not many more?—only that
we are too near them to scan the loftiness of their pretensions, or to
guess at their unknown duration. Genius carries on an unequal strife
with Fame; nor will our bare word (if we durst presume to give it) make
the balance even. Time alone can show who are the authors of mortal or
immortal mould; and it is the height of wilful impertinence to
anticipate its award, and assume, because certain living authors are
new, that they never can become old.

Waving, however, any answer to these ingenious questions, we will
content ourselves with announcing a truism on the subject, which, like
many other truisms, is pregnant with deep thought,—_viz. That periodical
criticism is favourable—to periodical criticism_. It contributes to its
own improvement—and its cultivation proves not only that it suits the
spirit of the times, but advances it. It certainly never flourished more
than at present. It never struck its roots so deep, nor spread its
branches so widely and luxuriantly. Is not the proposal of this very
question a proof of its progressive refinement? And what, it may be
asked, can be desired more than to have the perfection of one thing at
any one time? If literature in our day has taken this decided turn into
a critical channel, is it not a presumptive proof that it ought to do
so? Most things find their own level; and so does the mind of man. If
there is a preponderance of criticism at any one period, this can only
be because there are subjects, and because it is the time for it. We
complain that this is a Critical age; and that no great works of Genius
appear, because so much is said and written about them; while we ought
to reverse the argument, and say, that it is because so many works of
genius _have appeared_, that they have left us little or nothing to do,
but to think and talk about them—that if we did not do that, we should
do nothing so good—and if we do this well, we cannot be said to do
amiss!

It has been stated as a kind of anomaly in the history of the Fine Arts,
that periods of the highest civilization are not usually distinguished
by the greatest works of original genius. But, instead of a remote or
doubtful deduction, this, if closely examined, will be found a
self-evident proposition. Take the case, for example, of ancient Greece.
The time of its greatest splendour, was when its first statues,
pictures, temples, tragedies, had been produced, when they existed in
the utmost profusion, and the taste for them had become habitual and
universal. But the time of the greatest Genius was undoubtedly the time
that produced them,—which was necessarily antecedent to the other: So
that if we were to wait till the era of the most general refinement, for
the production of the highest models of excellence, we should never
arrive at them at all; since it is these very models themselves, that,
by being generally studied, and diffused through social life, give birth
to the last degrees of taste and civilization. When the edifice is
raised and finished in all its parts, we have nothing to do but to
admire it; and invention gives place to judicious applause, or,
according to the temper of the observers, to petty cavils. While the
niches are empty, every nerve is strained, every faculty is called into
play, to supply them with the masterpieces of skill or fancy: when they
are full, the mind reposes on what has been done, or amuses itself by
comparing one excellence with another. Hence a masculine boldness and
creative vigour is the character of one age, a fastidious and effeminate
delicacy that of a succeeding one. This seems to be the order of nature:
and why should we repine at it? Why insist on combining all sorts of
advantages (even the most opposite) forcibly together; or refuse to
cultivate those that we possess, because there are others that we think
more highly of, but which are placed out of our reach? ‘We are nothing,
if not critical.’ Be it so: but then let us be critical, or we shall be
nothing.

The demand for works of original genius, the craving after them, the
capacity for inventing them, naturally decay, when we have models of
almost every species of excellence already produced to our hands. When
this is the case, why call out for more? When art is a blank, then we
want genius, enthusiasm, and industry to fill it up: when it is teeming
with beauty and strength, then we want an eye to gaze at it, hands to
point out its striking features, leisure to luxuriate in, and be
enamoured of, its divine spirit. When we have Shakespeare, we do not
want more Shakespeares: one Milton, one Pope or Dryden, is enough. Have
we not plenty of Raphael’s, of Rubens’s, of Rembrandt’s pictures in the
world? _Terra plena nostri laboris_, is almost literally true of them.
Who has seen all the fine pictures, or read all the fine poetry, that
already exists?—and yet till we have done this, what do we want with
more? It is like leaving our own native country unexplored, to travel
into foreign lands. Do we not neglect the standard works to hunt after
mere novelty? This is not wisdom, but affectation or caprice. Learning
becomes, by degrees, an undigested heap, without pleasure or use. We do
not see the absolute necessity why another work should be written, or
another picture painted, till those that we already have are becoming
worm-eaten, or mouldering into decay. We can hardly expect a new harvest
till the old crop is off the ground. If we insist on absolute
originality in living writers or artists, we should begin by destroying
the works of their predecessors. We want another Osmyn to burn and spare
not—and then the work of extermination and the work of regeneration
would go on kindly together. Are we to learn all that is already known,
and, at the same time, to invent more? This would indeed be the ‘large
discourse of reason looking before and after.’ Who is there that can
boast of having read all the books that have been written, and that are
worth reading? Who is there that can read all those with which the
modern press teems, and which, did they not daily disappear and turn to
dust, the world would not be able to contain them? Are we to blame for
despatching the most worthless of these from time to time, or for
abridging the process of getting at the marrow of others, and thus
leaving the learned at leisure to contemplate the time-hallowed relics,
as well as the ephemeral productions, of literature?

To instance in our own language only, is there not many a sterling old
author that lies neglected on solitary, unexplored shelves, or tottering
bookstalls, unknown to, or passed over by, the idle and the diligent,
the republication of which would be the greatest service that could be
performed by the modern man of letters? To master the Old English
Dramatic Writers, the most esteemed novelists, the good old comedies and
periodical works alone, would occupy the leisure of a life devoted to
taste and study. If we look at the rise and progress, the maturity and
decay, of each of these classes of excellence, we shall find that they
were limited in duration, and successive. The deep rich tragic vein of
Shakespeare, Webster, Ford, Deckar, Marlow, Beaumont and Fletcher, was
discovered and worked out in the time of Elizabeth and the two first
Stuarts. All that the heart of man could feel, all that the wit of man
could express on the most striking and interesting occasions, had been
exhausted by half a dozen great writers, who left little to their
successors but pompous turgidity or smooth common-place,—the art of
swelling trifles into importance, or taming rough boldness into
insipidity. But Comedy rose as Tragedy fell; and, in the age of Charles
II. and Queen Anne, Congreve, Wycherley and Vanburgh, were contemporary
with Dryden, Lee and Rowe. Otway, it is true, belonged to the same
period, a straggler from the veteran corps of tragic writers:—as, in a
range of lofty mountains, we generally see one green hill thrown to a
distance from the rest, and breaking the abrupt declivity into the level
plain. But at each of the periods here spoken of, the Tragic or the
Comic Muse was attended by a group of writers such as we can scarcely
hope to see again, and such as we have no right to complain of seeing
unrivalled, while _they_ are themselves suffered to remain undisturbed
in old collections and odd volumes. These probed the follies, as those
unveiled the passions, of men: depicted jealousy, rage, ambition, love,
madness, affectation, ignorance, conceit, in their most striking forms
and picturesque contrasts: took possession of the strongholds, the
‘vantage points of vice or vanity: filled the Stage with the mask of
living manners, or ‘the pomp of elder days:’ shook it with laughter, or
drowned it with tears—poured out the wine of life, the living spirit of
the drama, and left the lees to others. Little could afterwards be made
of the subject, except by resorting to inferior branches of it, or to a
second-hand imitation. No doubt, nature is exceedingly various; but the
capital eminences, the choicest points of view, are limited; and when
these have been once seized upon, we must either follow in the steps of
others, or turn aside to humbler and less practicable subjects. When the
highest places have been occupied, when the happiest strokes have been
anticipated, the ambition of the poet flags: without the stimulus of
novelty, the rapidity or eagerness of his blows ceases; and as soon as
he can avail himself of common-place and conventional artifices, he
shrinks from the task of original invention. Or, if he is bent on trying
his native strength, and adding to the stock of what has been effected
by others, it must be by striking into a new path, and cultivating some
neglected plot of ground. So, the Periodical Essayists, Steele and
Addison, succeeded to our great Comic Writers, and the Novelists,
Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, to these; and each left works superior to
any thing of the kind before, and unrivalled in their way by any thing
since. Thus genius, like the sun, seems not to rise higher and higher,
but from its first dawn to ascend to its meridian, and then decline; and
art, like life, may be said to have its stated periods of infancy,
manhood, and old age. Alas! the miracles of art stand often like proud
monuments in the waste of time. The age of Leo the Tenth is like a rock
rising out of the abyss,—with nothing before it, with nothing behind it!
As art rose high then, so did it sink low afterwards: and the Vatican
overlooks modern Italian art, stagnant, puny, steril, unwholesome,
ague-struck, as Rome itself overlooks the marshes of the Campagna. What
then? Does not the Vatican remain, the wonder of succeeding ages and
surrounding nations? And when it yields (as yield it must) to time’s
destructive rage, and its glories crumble into dust, a new Vatican will
arise, and other Raphaels and Michael Angelos will breathe the
inspiration of genius upon its walls! As fires kindled in the night send
their light to a vast distance, so Taste, an emanation from Genius,
lingers long after it; and when its mild radiance is extinguished, then
comes night and barbarism. Modern art, which took its rise in Italy, was
transplanted indeed elsewhere, and flourished in Holland, Spain, and
Flanders—it never took root in France, nor has it yet done so in
England—but the soil, where it first sprung up, became effete soon
after, and has produced scarcely any thing worth naming since.

Not only are literature and art circumscribed by the limits of nature or
the mind of man, but each age or nation has a standard of its own, which
cannot be trespassed upon with impunity. Tragedy was at its height in
France, when it was on the decline with us; but then it was in a totally
different style of composition, which could never be successfully
naturalized in this country. Popularity can only be insured by the
sympathy of the audience with any given mode of representing nature. The
English genius excludes sententious and sentimental declamations on the
passions; and Shakespeare, were he alive, would be ‘cabin’d, cribbed,
confined,’ to say the least, on that very stage where his plays still
flourish, by the change of feeling and circumstances. He would not have
scope for his fancy: the passion would often seem groundless and
overwrought. To produce any thing new and striking at present, it is
necessary to shift the scene altogether, to take new subjects, an entire
new set of _Dramatis Personæ_,—to pitch the interest in the Heart of
Mid-Lothian, or suspend it in air with the Children of the Mist. We see
what Sir Walter Scott has done in this way, by turning up again to the
day the rich accumulated mould of ancient manners and wild unexplored
scenery of his native land; and we already see what some of his
imitators have done. In a word, literature is confined not only within
certain _natural_, but also within _local_ and _temporary_ limits, which
necessarily have fewer available topics; and when these are exhausted,
it becomes a _caput mortuum_, a shadow of itself. Nothing is easier, for
instance, than to show how, from the alteration of manners, the
brilliant dialogue of the older comedy has gradually disappeared from
the stage. The style of our common conversation has undergone a total
change from the personal and _piquant_ to the critical and didactic;
and, instead of aiming at elegant raillery or pointed repartee, the most
polished circles now discuss general topics, or analyze abstruse
problems. Wit, unless it is exercised on an indiscriminate subject, is
considered as an impertinence in civil life: yet we complain that the
stage is dull and prosaic.

Farther, the Fine Arts, by their spread, interfere with one another, and
hinder the growth of originality. All the greatest things are done by
the division of labour—by the intense concentration of a number of
minds, each on a single and chosen object. But by the progress of
cultivation, different arts and exercises stretch out their arms to
impede, not to assist one another. Politics blend with poetry, painting
with literature; fashion and elegance must be combined with learning and
study: and thus the mind gets a smattering of every thing, and a mastery
in none. The mixing of acquirements, like the _mixing of liquors_, is no
doubt a bad thing, and _muddles_ the brain; but in a certain stage of
society, it is in some degree unavoidable. Rembrandt lived retired in
his cell of gorgeous light and shade. Night and Day waited upon him by
turns, or together: his eye gazed on the dazzling gloom, nor did he ask
for any other object. He existed wholly in this part of his art, which
he has stamped on his canvas with such vast and wondrous power. He was
not distracted or diverted from his favourite study by other things, by
penning a Sonnet, or reading the Morning’s Paper. Had he lived in our
time, or in a state of manners like ours, he would have been a hundred
other things, but not Rembrandt—a polite scholar, an imitator probably
of the antique, a pleasing versifier, ‘a chemist, statesman, fiddler,
and buffoon,’—every thing but what he was, the great master of light and
shade! Michael Angelo, again, had diversity of genius enough, and
grasped more arts than one with hallowed hands. Yet did he not use to
say, that ‘Painting was jealous, and required the whole man to herself?’
How many modern accomplishments would it take to make a Michael Angelo?
Yet perhaps the flutter of idle pretensions, the glitter of fashion, the
cant of criticism, with the sense of his own deficiencies in frivolous
pursuits, might have dismayed the dauntless Youth who, with a blow of
his chisel, repaired the Meleager; who afterwards carved the Moses,
painted the Prophets and Sybils, reared the dome of St. Peter’s, and
fortified his native city against a foreign foe! The little might have
turned aside, in his triple career of renown, him whom the great could
not intimidate.

One effect of the endowment of Institutions for the Fine Arts is, to
make the union of the accidents of fortune and fashion, that is, of the
extrinsic and meretricious, indispensable to the artist. He is violently
taken out of his own sphere, and thrust into one for which he is
qualified neither by nature nor habit. He must be able to make speeches
to assembled multitudes, to hold conversation with Princes. He climbs to
the highest honours of his profession by arts which have nothing to do
with it—by frivolous or servile means. He must have the ear of
committees, the countenance of the great. He takes precedence as a
matter of etiquette or costume. He rises, as he would at college or at
court. The chair of a Royal Academy for the Fine Arts must be filled by
a gentleman and scholar. So Sir Thomas Lawrence (_absit invidia_) is
chosen President, not more because he is the best portrait-painter in
existence, than because he is one of the finest gentlemen of the day.
This is confounding the essential differences of things, and weakening
the solid superstructure of art at its foundations.—A scholar was
formerly another name for a sloven, an artist was known only by his
works. Now, a professional man, who should come into the world, relying
on his genius or learning for his success, without other advantages,
would be looked upon as a pedant, a barbarian, or a poor creature.
‘Though he should have all knowledge, and could speak with the tongues
of angels, yet, without _affectation_, he would be nothing.’ He who is
not acquainted with the topic, who is not fashioned in the mode of the
day, is no better than a brute. We will not have the arts and sciences
‘relegated to obscure cloisters and villages: no, we will have them to
lift up their sparkling front in courts and palaces,’—in drawing-rooms
and booksellers’ shops. ‘The toe of the scholar must tread so close on
the heel of the courtier, that it galls his kibe.’

This is also a consequence of the approximation and amalgamation of
different ranks and pretensions from the more general diffusion of
knowledge. Each takes something of the colour, or borrows some of the
advantages, of its neighbour. A reflected light is thrown on all parts
of society. The polite affect literature: the literary affect to be
polite. Such a state of things, no doubt, produces a great deal of
mock-patronage and mock-gentility. What then? It cannot be prevented:
and is it not better to make the most of this florid and composite style
of manners, than to proscribe and stigmatize it altogether, or insist on
going back to the simple Doric or pure Gothic—to barbaric wealth or
cynical knowledge? ‘Take the good the Gods provide ye’—is our motto, and
our advice. The impulse that sways the human mind cannot be created by a
_fiat_ of captious discontent: it floats on the tide of mighty
CIRCUMSTANCE. By resisting this natural bias, and peevishly struggling
against the stream, we shall only lose the favourable opportunities we
possess, both for enjoyment and for use. It is not sufficient to say,
‘Let there be Shakespeares, and there were Shakespeares:’—but we have
writers in great numbers, respectable in their way, and suited to the
mediocrity of the age we live in: And, by cultivating sound principles
of taste and criticism, we can still point out the beauties of the old
authors, and improve the style of the new. There is a change in the
world, and we must conform to it. Instead of striving to revive the
spirit of old English literature, which is impossible, unless we could
restore the same state of things, and push the world back two centuries
in its course, let us add the last polish and fine finish to the modern
_Belles-Lettres_. Instead of imitating the poets or prose writers of the
age of Elizabeth, let us admire them at a distance. Let us remember,
that there is a great gulf between them and us—the gulf of ever-rolling
years. Let them be something sacred, and venerable to the imagination:
But let us be contented to serve as priests at the shrine of ancient
genius, and not attempt to mount the pedestal ourselves, or disturb the
sanctuary with our unwarranted pretensions.

This is the course dictated no less by modesty than wisdom. Half the
cant of criticism (on the other side of the question) is envy of the
moderns, rather than admiration of the ancients. It is not that we
really wish our contemporaries to rival their predecessors in grandeur,
in force and depth; but that we wish them to fall short of themselves in
elegance, in taste, in ingenuity, and facility. The exclusive outcry in
favour of ancient models, is a _diversion_ to the exercise of modern
talents, and a misdirection to the age. If we cannot produce the great
and lasting works of former times, we may at least improve our knowledge
of the principles on which they were raised, and of the distinguishing
characteristics of each. If we have nothing to show equal to some of
these, let us make it up (to the best of our power) by a taste
susceptible of the beauties of all. If we do not succeed in solid folio,
let us excel in light duodecimo. If we are superficial, let us be
brilliant. If we cannot be profound, let us at least be popular.

Why should we dismiss _the reading public_ with contempt, when we have
so little chance with the next generation? Literature formerly was a
sweet Heremitress, who fed on the pure breath of Fame, in silence and in
solitude; far from the madding strife, in sylvan shade or cloistered
hall, she trimmed her lamp or turned her hourglass, pale with studious
care, and aiming only to ‘make the age to come her own!’ She gave her
life to the perfecting some darling work, and bequeathed it, dying, to
posterity! Vain hope, perhaps; but the hope itself was fruition—calm,
serene, blissful, unearthly! Modern literature, on the contrary, is a
gay Coquette, fluttering, fickle, vain; followed by a train of
flatterers; besieged by a crowd of pretenders; courted, she courts
again; receives delicious praise, and dispenses it; is impatient for
applause; pants for the breath of popularity; renounces eternal fame for
a newspaper puff; trifles with all sorts of arts and sciences; coquettes
with fifty accomplishments—_mille ornatus habet, mille decenter_; is the
subject of polite conversation; the darling of private parties; the
go-between in politics; the directress of fashion; the polisher of
manners; and, like her winged prototype in Spenser,

‘Now this now that, she tasteth tenderly,’

glitters, flutters, buzzes, spawns, dies,—and is forgotten! But the very
variety and superficial polish show the extent and height to which
knowledge has been accumulated, and the general interest taken in
letters.

To dig to the bottom of a subject through so many generations of
authors, is now impossible: the concrete mass is too voluminous and vast
to be contained in any single head; and therefore we must have essences
and samples as substitutes for it. We have collected a superabundance of
raw materials: the grand _desideratum_ now is, to fashion and render
them portable. Knowledge is no longer confined to the few: the object
therefore is, to make it accessible and attractive to the many. The
_Monachism_ of literature is at an end; the cells of learning are thrown
open, and let in the light of universal day. We can no longer be churls
of knowledge, ascetics in pretension. We must yield to the spirit of
change (whether for the better or worse); and ‘to beguile the time, look
like the time.’ A modern author may (without much imputation of his
wisdom) declare for a short life and a merry one. He may be a little
gay, thoughtless, and dissipated. Literary immortality is now let on
short leases, and he must be contented to succeed by rotation. A scholar
of the olden time had resources, had consolations to support him under
many privations and disadvantages. A light (that light which penetrates
the most clouded skies) cheered him in his lonely cell, in the most
obscure retirement: and, with the eye of faith, he could see the
meanness of his garb exchanged for the wings of the Shining Ones, and
the wedding-garment of the Spouse. Again, he lived only in the
contemplation of old books and old events; and the remote and future
became habitually present to his imagination, like the past. He was
removed from low, petty vanity, by the nature of his studies, and could
wait patiently for his reward till after death. WE exist in the bustle
of the world, and cannot escape from the notice of our contemporaries.
We must please to live, and therefore should live to please. We must
look to the public for support. Instead of solemn testimonies from the
learned, we require the smiles of the fair and the polite. If princes
scowl upon us, the broad shining face of the people may turn to us with
a favourable aspect. Is not this life (too) sweet? Would we change it
for the former if we could? But the great point is, that _we cannot_!
Therefore, let Reviews flourish—let Magazines increase and multiply—let
the Daily and Weekly Newspapers live for ever! We are optimists in
literature, and hold, with certain limitations, that, in this respect,
whatever is, is right!

It has been urged as one fatal objection against periodical criticism,
that it is too often made the engine of party-spirit and personal
invective. This is an abuse of it greatly to be lamented; but in fact,
it only shows the extent and importance of this branch of literature, so
that it has become the organ of every thing else, however alien to it.
The current of political and individual obloquy has run into this
channel, because it has absorbed every topic. The bias to miscellaneous
discussion and criticism is so great, that it is necessary to insert
politics in a sort of sandwich of literature, in order to make them at
all palatable to the ordinary taste. The war of political pamphlets, of
virulent pasquinades, has ceased, and the ghosts of Junius and Cato, of
Gracchus and Cincinnatus, no longer ‘squeak and gibber’ in our modern
streets, or torment the air with a hubbub of hoarse noises. A Whig or
Tory _tirade_ on a political question, the abuse of a public character,
now stands side by side in a fashionable Review, with a disquisition on
ancient coins, or is introduced right in the middle of an analysis of
the principles of taste. This is a violation, no doubt, of the rules of
decorum and order, and might well be dispensed with: but the stock of
malice and prejudice in the world is much the same, though it has found
a more classical and agreeable vehicle to vent itself. Mere politics,
mere personal altercation, will not go down without an infusion of the
Belles-Lettres and the Fine Arts. This makes decidedly either for the
refinement or the frivolity of our taste. It is found necessary to
poison or to sour the public mind, by going to the well-head of polite
literature and periodical criticism,—which shows plainly how many drink
at that fountain, and will drink at no other. As a farther example of
this rage for conveying information in an easy and portable form, we
believe that booksellers will often refuse to purchase in a volume, what
they will give a handsome price for, if divided piecemeal, and fitted
for occasional insertion in a newspaper or magazine; so that the only
authors who, as a class, are not starving, are periodical essayists, as
almost the only writers who can keep their reputation above water are
anonymous critics. But we have enlarged sufficiently on the general
question, and shall now proceed to a more particular account of the
state of the Periodical Press. We consider this Article, however, as an
exception to our general rules of criticizing, and protest against its
being turned into a precedent; for if our several contemporaries were to
criticize one author as a constant habit, there would be no end of the
repeated reflections and continually lessening perspective of cavils and
objections, which would resemble nothing in nature but the _Caffée des
Milles Colonnes_!

The staple literature of the Periodical Press may, we presume, be fairly
divided into Newspapers, Magazines, and Reviews; and of each of these,
if we have courage to go through with it, we shall say a word or two in
their order.

The ST. JAMES’S CHRONICLE is, we have understood, the oldest existing
paper in London. We are not quite sure whether it was in this or in
another three-times-a-week paper (the Englishman[13]) that we first met
with some extracts from Mr. Burke’s Letter to a Noble Lord in the year
1796, and on the instant became converts to his familiar, inimitable,
powerful prose style. The richness of Burke showed, indeed, more
magnificent, contrasted with the meagreness of the ordinary style of the
paper into which his invective was thrown. Let any one, indeed, who may
be disposed to disparage modern intellect and modern letters, look over
a file of old newspapers (only thirty or forty years back), or into
those that, by prescription, keep up the old-fashioned style in
accommodation to the habitual dulness of their readers, and compare the
poverty, the meanness, the want of style and matter in their original
paragraphs, with the amplitude, the strength, the point and terseness
which characterize the leading journals of the day, and he will perhaps
qualify the harshness of his censure. We have not a Burke, indeed—we
have not even a Junius; but we have a host of writers, working for their
bread on the spur of the occasion, and whose names are not known, formed
upon the model of the best writers who have gone before them, and
reflecting many of their graces.

Let any one (for instance) compare the St. James’s Chronicle, which is
on the model of the old school, with the MORNING CHRONICLE, which is, or
was at least, at the head of the new. This paper we have been long used
to think the best, both for amusement and instruction, that issued from
the daily press. It is full, but not crowded; and we have
breathing-spaces and openings left to pause upon each subject. We have
plenty and variety. The reader of a morning paper ought not to be
crammed to satiety. He ought to rise from the perusal light and
refreshed. Attention is paid to every topic, but none is overdone. There
is a liberality and decorum. Every class of readers is accommodated with
its favourite articles, served up with taste, and without sparing for
the sharpest sauces.[14] A copy of verses is supplied by one of the
popular poets of the day; a prose essay appears in another page, which,
had it been written two hundred years ago, might still have been read
with admiration; a correction of a disputed reading, in a classical
author, is contributed by a learned correspondent. The politician may
look profound over a grave dissertation on a point of constitutional
history; a lady may smile at a rebus or a charade. Here, Pitt and Fox,
Burke and Sheridan, maintained their nightly combats over again; here
Porson criticized, and Jekyll punned. An appearance of conscious dignity
is kept up, even in the Advertisements, where a principle of proportion
and separate grouping is observed; the announcement of a new work is
kept distinct from the hiring of a servant of all work, or the sailing
of a steam-yacht.

The late Mr. Perry, who raised the Morning Chronicle into its present
consequence, held the office of Editor for nearly forty years; and he
held firm to his party and his principles all that time,—a long term for
political honesty and consistency to last! He was a man of strong
natural sense, some acquired knowledge, a quick tact; prudent,
plausible, and with great heartiness and warmth of feeling. This last
quality was perhaps of more use to him than any other, in the sphere in
which he moved. His cordial voice and sanguine mode of address made
friends, whom his sincerity and gratitude insured. An overflow of animal
spirits, sooner than any thing else, floats a man into the tide of
success. Nothing cuts off sympathy so much as the obvious suppression of
the kindly impulses of our nature. He who takes another slightly by the
hand, will not stick to him long, nor in difficulties. Others perceive
this, and anticipate the defection, or the hostile blow. Among the ways
and means of success in life, if good sense is the first, good nature is
the second. If we wish others to be attached to us, we must not seem
averse or indifferent to them. Perry was more vain than proud. This made
him fond of the society of lords, and them of his. His shining
countenance reflected the honour done him, and the alacrity of his
address prevented any sense of awkwardness or inequality of pretensions.
He was a little of a coxcomb, and we do not think he was a bit the worse
for it. A man who does not think well of himself, generally thinks ill
of others; nor do they fail to return the compliment. Towards the last,
he, to be sure, received visitors in his library at home, something in
the style of the Marquis Marialva in Gil Blas. He affected the scholar.
On occasion of the death of Porson, he observed that ‘_Epithalamia_ were
thrown into his coffin;’ of which there was an awkward correction next
day,—‘For _Epithalamia_ read _Epicedia_!’ The worst of it was, that a
certain consciousness of merit, with a little overweening pretension,
sometimes interfered with the conduct of the paper. Mr. Perry was not
like a contemporary editor, who never writes a sentence himself, and
assigns, as a reason for it, that ‘he has too many interests to manage
as it is, without the addition of his own literary vanity.’ The Editor
of the Morning Chronicle wrote up his own paper; and he had an ambition
to have it thought, that every good thing in it, unless it came from a
lord, or an acknowledged wit, was his own. If he paid for the article
itself, he thought he paid for the credit of it also. This sometimes
brought him into awkward situations. He wished to be head and chief of
his own paper, and would not have any thing behind the editor’s desk,
greater than the desk itself. He was frequently remiss himself, and was
not sanguine that others should make up the deficiency. He possessed a
most tenacious memory, and often, in the hottest periods of
Parliamentary warfare, carried off half a Debate on his own shoulders.
The very first time he was intrusted with the task of reporting speeches
in the House of Commons, a singular lapse of memory occurred to him.
Soon after he had taken his seat in the Gallery, some accident put him
out, and he remained the whole night stupified and disconcerted. When
the House broke up, he returned to the office of the paper for which he
was engaged, in despair, and professing total inability to give a single
word of it. But he was prevailed upon to sit down at the writing-desk.
The sluices of memory, which were not empty, but choked up, began to
open, and they poured on, till he had nearly filled the paper with a
_verbatim_ account of the speech of a Lord Nugent, when his employer,
finding his mistake, told him this would never do, but he must begin
over again, and merely give a general and _historical_ account of what
had passed. Perry snapped his fingers at this release from his terrors;
and it has been observed, that the _historical_ mode of giving a Debate
was his delight ever afterwards. From the time of Woodfall, the Morning
Chronicle was distinguished by its superior excellence in reporting the
proceedings of Parliament. Woodfall himself often filled the whole paper
without any assistance. This, besides the arduousness of the
undertaking, necessarily occasioned delay. At present, several Reporters
take the different speeches in succession—(each remaining an hour at a
time)—go immediately, and transcribe their notes for the press; and, by
this means, all the early part of a debate is actually printed before
the last speaker has risen upon his legs. The public read the next day
at breakfast-time (perhaps), what would make a hundred octavo pages,
every word of which has been spoken, written out, and printed within the
last twelve or fourteen hours!

The TIMES NEWSPAPER is, we suppose, entitled to the character it gives
itself, of being the ‘Leading Journal of Europe,’ and is perhaps the
greatest engine of temporary opinion in the world. Still it is not to
our taste—either in matter or manner. It is elaborate, but heavy; full,
but not readable: it is stuffed up with official documents, with
matter-of-fact details. It seems intended to be deposited in the office
of the Keeper of the Records, and might be imagined to be composed as
well as printed with a steam-engine. It is pompous, dogmatical, and full
of pretensions, but neither light, various, nor agreeable. It sells
more, and contains more, than any other paper; and when you have said
this, you have said all. It presents a most formidable front to the
inexperienced reader. It makes a toil of a pleasure. It is said to be
calculated for persons in business, and yet it is the business of a
whole morning to get through it. Bating voluminous details of what had
better be omitted, the same things are better done in the Chronicle. To
say nothing of poetry (which may be thought too frivolous and attenuated
for the atmosphere of the city), the prose is inferior. No equally
sterling articles can be referred to in it, either for argument or wit.
More, in short, is effected in the Morning Chronicle, without the
formality and without the effort. The Times is not a _classical_ paper.
It is a commercial paper, a paper of business, and it is conducted on
principles of trade and business. It floats with the tide: it sails with
the stream. It has no other principle, as we take it. It is not
ministerial; it is not patriotic; but it is _civic_. It is the lungs of
the British metropolis; the mouthpiece, oracle, and echo of the Stock
Exchange; the representative of the mercantile interest. One would think
so much gravity of style might be accompanied with more steadiness and
weight of opinion. But _the_ TIMES conforms to the changes of the time.
It bears down upon a question, like a first-rate man of war, with
streamers flying and all hands on deck; but if the first broadside does
not answer, turns short upon it, like a triremed galley, firing off a
few paltry squibs to cover its retreat. It takes up no falling cause;
fights no up-hill battle; advocates no great principle; holds out a
helping hand to no oppressed or obscure individual. It is ‘ever strong
upon the stronger side.’ Its style is magniloquent; its spirit is not
magnanimous. It is valiant, swaggering, insolent, with a hundred
thousand readers at its heels; but the instant the rascal rout turn
round with the ‘whiff and wind’ of some fell circumstance, the Times,
the renegade, inconstant Times, turns with them! Let the mob shout, let
the city roar, and the voice of the Times is heard above them all, with
outrageous deafening clamour; but let the vulgar hubbub cease, and no
whisper, no echo of it is ever after heard of in the Times. Like Bully
Bottom in the play, it then ‘aggravates its voice so, as if it were a
singing dove, an it were any nightingale.’ Its coarse ribaldry is turned
to a harmless jest; its swelling rhodomontade sinks to a vapid
common-place; and the editor amuses himself in the interval, before
another great explosion, by collecting and publishing from time to time,
Affidavits of the numbers of his paper sold in the last stormy period of
the press.

The Times rose into notice through its diligence and promptitude in
furnishing Continental intelligence, at a time when foreign news was the
most interesting commodity in the market; but at present it engrosses
every other department. It grew obscene and furious during the
revolutionary war; and the nicknames which Mr. Walter bestowed on the
French Ruler were the counters with which he made his fortune. When the
game of war and madness was over, and the proprietor wished to pocket
his dear-bought gains quietly, he happened to have a writer in his
employ who wanted to roar on, as if any thing more was to be got by his
continued war-whoop, and who scandalized the whole body of disinterested
Jews, contractors, and stock-jobbers, by the din and smithery with
which, in the piping time of peace, he was for rivetting on the chains
of foreign nations. It was found, or thought at least, that this could
not go on. The tide of gold no longer flowed up the river, and the tide
of Billingsgate and blood could no longer flow down it, with any
pretence to decency, morality, or religion. There is a cant of
patriotism in the city: there is a cant of humanity among hackneyed
politicians. The _writer_ of the LEADING ARTICLE, it is true, was a
fanatic; but the _proprietor_ of the LEADING JOURNAL was neither a
martyr nor confessor. The principles gave way to the policy of the
paper; and this was the origin of the NEW TIMES.

This new Morning paper is one which every Tory ought to encourage. If
the friend of the people cannot _away with_ it, the friend of power
ought not to be without it. Nay, it may be of use to the liberal or the
wavering; for it goes all lengths, boggles at no consequences, and
unmasks the features of despotism fearlessly and shamelessly, without
remorse and without pity. The Editor deals in no half measures, in no
half principles; but is a thorough-paced stickler for the modernized
doctrines of passive obedience and non-resistance. Dr. Sacheverel, in
his day, could not go beyond him. He is no flincher, no trimmer; he
‘champions _Legitimacy_ to the outrance.’ There is something in this
spirit, that if it exposes the possessor to hatred, exempts him from
contempt. The present Editor of the New, and late Editor of the Old
Times, whatever we may think of his opinions, must be acknowledged to be
staunch, determined, and consistent in maintaining them. He is a violent
partisan, blind to the blots in his own cause; and, by this means, he
often opens the eyes of others to them. He has no evasion, no disguises.
Let him take up a wrong argument (which he does on principle) and no one
can beat him in pushing it to the _reductio ad absurdum_: let him engage
in a bad cause (which he does by instinct) and no consideration of
prudence or compassion will make him turn back. He is a logician, and
will not bate one ace of his argument. He goes the utmost length of the
spirit, as well as the principles, of his party. If we like the spirit
of despotism, we see it exemplified in his views and sentiments: if we
like the principles, we find them in full perfection, and without any
cowardly drawback in his reasonings. He is the true organ of the
_Ultras_, at home or abroad. It is the creed, we believe, of all
legitimate princes, that the world was made for them; and this sentiment
is stamped, fixed, seared in inverted but indelible characters, on the
mind of the Editor of the New Times, who, we believe, would march to a
stake, in testimony of the opinion that he and all mankind ought to be
held as slaves, in fee and perpetuity, by half a dozen lawful rulers of
the species. He lays it down, for instance, in so many words, that
‘Louis XVIII. has the same undoubted right (in kind and in degree) to
the throne of France, that Mr. Coke has to his estate of Holkham in
Norfolk:’ and from this declaration he never swerves, not even in
thought. Other writers may argue upon the assumption of this principle,
or now and then, in a moment of unexpected triumph, avow it; but he
alone has the glory and the shame of making it the acknowledged,
undisguised basis of all his reasoning. He is fascinated, in short, with
the abstract image of royalty; he has swallowed love-powders from
despotism; he is drunk with the spirit of servility; mad with the hatred
of liberty; flagrant, obscene in the exposure of the shameful parts of
his cause; and his devotion to power amounts to a prostration of all his
faculties. It is strange, as well as lamentable, to see this misguided
enthusiasm, this preposterous pertinacity in wilful degradation. Yet it
is not without its use. Its honesty warns us of the consequences we have
to dread: as its consistency insures us some compensation in some part
or other of the system. There is no pure evil, but hypocrisy. Every
principle (almost) if consistently followed up, leads to some good, by
some reaction on itself. It is only by tergiversation, by tricking, by
being false to all opinion, and picking out the bad of every cause to
suit it to our own interest, that we get a vile compost of intolerable
and opposite abuses. Thus, we should say that superstition, while it was
real, with all its evils, had its redeeming points, in the faith and
zeal of those who were actuated by it, into whatever excesses they might
be hurried: but we object entirely to modern fanaticism, which is the
patchwork product of a perverted intellect, with all the absurdity and
all the mischief, without one particle of sincerity, to justify it.
Despotism even has its advantages; but we see no good in modern
despotism, which has lost its reverence, and retains only the odiousness
of power. The STATE DOCTOR of the NEW TIMES is, however, a perfect
_Preux Chevalier_, compared with some of his hireling contemporaries:
another Peter the Hermit, to preach an everlasting crusade against
Jacobins and Levellers, and to rekindle another Holy War in favour of
_Divine Right_. There is a dramatic interest in the fury of his
exclamations, which induces us to make some allowance for the barbarism
of his creed. He is less mischievous than when he wrote in the OLD
TIMES, which trimmed between power and popularity, and oiled the wheels
of Despotism with the cant of Liberty. He does not now fawn on public
opinion, but sets it at defiance, both in theory and practice. He does
not mix up the grossness of faction with the refinements of sophistry.
He does not uphold the principles, and insult the persons, of the
aristocracy. No one was more bitter against the late queen, or more able
or strenuous in the cause of her enemies; but he maintained a certain
respect for her rank and birth. He did not think that every species of
outrage and indecency, heaped on the daughter of a prince, the consort
of a king, was the most delicate compliment that could be paid to
royalty; but conceived, that when we forget what is due to place and
title, we make a gap in ceremony and outward decorum, through which all
such persons may be assailed with impunity. Perhaps this starched,
pedantic preference of principles to persons, may not, after all, be the
surest road to court favour; but we respect any one who is ever liable
to a frown from a patron, or to be left in a minority by his own party.
There is nothing truly contemptible, but that which is always tacking
and veering before the breath of power.

This naturally leads us to the COURIER; which is a paper of shifts and
expedients, of bare assertions, and thoughtless impudence. It denies
facts on the word of a minister, and dogmatizes by authority. ‘The force
of dulness can no farther go:’—but its pertness keeps pace with its
_dulness_. It sets up a lively pretension to safe common-places and
stale jests; and has an alternate gaiety and gravity of manner:—The
_matter_ is nothing. Compared with the solemn quackery of the Old or New
Times, the ingenious editor is the Merry-Andrew of the political show.
The Courier is intended for country readers, the clergy and gentry, who
do not like to be disturbed with a _reason_ for any thing, but with whom
the self-complacent shallowness of the editor passes for a self-evident
proof that every thing is as it should be. It is a paper that those who
run may read. It asks no thought: it creates no uneasiness. In it the
last quarter’s assessed taxes are always made good: the harvest is
abundant; trade reviving; the Constitution unimpaired; the minister
immaculate, and the Monarch the finest gentleman in his dominions. The
writer has no idea beyond a certain set of cant phrases, which he
repeats by rote, and never puzzles any one by the smallest glimpse of
meaning in what he says. This lacquey to the Treasury, in short, puts
one in mind of those impudent valets at the doors of great houses—sleek,
saucy, empty, and vulgar—who give short answers, and laugh into the
faces of those who come with complaints and grievances to their
masters—think their employers great men, and themselves clever
fellows—eat, drink, sleep, and let the world _slide_!

The SUN is a paper that _appears_ daily, but never _shines_. The editor,
who is an agreeable man, has a sinecure of it; and the public trouble
their heads just as little about it as he does.

The TRAVELLER is not a new, but a newly-conducted evening paper; which,
if it has not much wit or brilliancy, is distinguished by sound
judgment, careful information, and constitutional principles.

We really cannot presume to scan the transcendent merits of the MORNING
POST and FASHIONABLE WORLD—and, in short, the other daily papers must
excuse us for saying nothing about them.

Of the WEEKLY JOURNALISTS, Cobbett stands first in power and popularity.
Certainly he has earned the latter: would that he abused the former
less! We once tried to cast this Antæus to the ground; but the
earth-born rose again, and still staggers on, blind or one-eyed, to his
remorseless, restless purpose,—sometimes running upon posts and
pitfalls—sometimes shaking a country to its centre. It is best to say
little about him, and keep out of his way; for he crushes, by his
ponderous weight, whomsoever he falls upon; and, what is worse, drags to
cureless ruin whatever cause he lays his hands upon to support.

The EXAMINER stands next to Cobbett in talent; and is much before him in
moderation and steadiness of principle. It has also a much greater
variety both of tact and subject. Indeed, an agreeable rambling scope
and freedom of discussion is so much in the author’s way, that the
reader is at a loss under what department of the paper to look for any
particular topic. A literary criticism, perhaps, insinuates itself under
the head of the Political Examiner; and the theatrical critic, or lover
of the Fine Arts, is stultified by a _tirade_ against the Bourbons. If
the dishes are there, it does not much signify in what order they are
placed. With the exception of a little egotism and _twaddle_, and
flippancy and dogmatism about religion or morals, and mawkishness about
firesides and furious Buonapartism, and a vein of sickly sonnet-writing,
we suspect the Examiner must be allowed (whether we look to the design
or execution of the general run of articles in it) to be the ablest and
most respectable of the publications that issue from the weekly press.

The NEWS is also an excellent paper—interspersed with historical and
classical knowledge, written in a good taste, and with an excellent
spirit. Its circulation is next, we believe, to that of the OBSERVER,
which has twice as many murders, assaults, robberies, fires, accidents,
offences, as any other paper, and sells proportionably. Shadows affright
the town as well as substances, and ill news fly fast. We apprehend
these are the chief of the weekly journals. There are others that have
become notorious for qualities that ought to have consigned them long
ago to the hands of the common hangman; and some that, by their tameness
and indecision, have been struggling into existence ever since their
commencement. There is ability, but want of direction, in several of the
last.

As to the Weekly Literary Journals, Gazettes, &c. they are a truly
insignificant race—a sort of flimsy announcements of favoured
publications—insects in letters, that are swallowed up in the larger
blaze of full-orbed criticism, and where

‘Coming _Reviews_ cast their shadows before!’

We cannot condescend to enumerate them. Before we quit this part of our
subject, we must add, that Scotland boasts but one original newspaper,
the SCOTSMAN, and that newspaper but one subject—Political Economy.—The
Editor, however, may be said to be king of it!

Of the _Magazines_, which are a sort of _cater-cousins_ to ourselves, we
would wish to speak with tenderness and respect. There is the
Gentleman’s Magazine, at one extremity of the series, and Mr.
Blackwood’s at the other—and between these there is the European, which
is all abroad,—and the Lady’s, which is all at home,—and the London, and
the Monthly, and the New Monthly—nay, hold; for if all their names were
to be written down, one Article or one Number would hardly contain
them—so many of them are there, and such antipathy do they hold to each
other! For the GENTLEMAN’S MAGAZINE we profess an affection. We like the
name, we like the title of the Editor, (Mr. Sylvanus Urban—what a rustic
civility is there in it!)—we like the frontispiece of St. John’s Gate—a
well-preserved piece of useless antiquity, an emblem of the work—we like
the table of contents, which promises no more than it performs. There we
are sure of finding the last lingering remains of a former age, with the
embryo production of the new—some nine days wonder, some forlorn _Hic
jacet_—all that is forgotten, or soon to be so—an alligator stuffed, a
mermaid, an Egyptian mummy—South-sea inventions, or the last improvement
on the spinning-jenny—an epitaph in Pancras Church-yard, the head of
Memnon, Lord Byron’s Farewell, a Charade by a Young Lady, and Dr.
Johnson’s dispute with Osborn the bookseller! Oh! happy mixture of
indolence and study, of order and disorder! Who, with the Gentleman’s
Magazine held carelessly in his hand, has not passed minutes, hours,
days, in _lackadaisical_ triumph over _ennui_! Who has not taken it up
on parlour window-seats? Who has not ran it slightly through in
reading-rooms? If it has its faults, they are those of an agreeable old
age; and we could almost wish some ill to those who can say any harm of
it.

The MONTHLY MAGAZINE was originally an improvement on the Gentleman’s,
and the model on which succeeding ones have been formed. It was a
literary Miscellany, variously and ably supported—a sort of repository
for the leading topics of conversation of the day; but it has of late
degenerated into a register of patents, and an account of the
proprietor’s philosophy of the universe, in answer to Sir Isaac Newton!
Other publications have succeeded to it, and prevailed. Which of these
is the best, the LONDON or the NEW MONTHLY? We are not the Œdipus to
solve this riddle; and indeed it might be difficult, for we believe many
of the writers are the same in each. But both contain articles, we will
be bold to say, in the form of Essays, Theatrical Criticism,
_Jeux-d’esprit_, which may be considered as the flower and cream of
periodical literature. To those who judge of books in the lump, by the
cubic contents, the binding, or the letters on the back, and who think
that all that is conveyed between blue or yellow or orange-tawny covers,
must be vain and light as the leaves that flutter round it, we would
remark, that many of these fugitive, unowned productions, have been
collected, and met with no unfavourable reception, in solid octavo or
compact duodecimo. Are there not the quaint and grave subtleties of
Elia, the extreme paradoxes of the author of Table Talk, the Confessions
of an Opium-eater, the copious tales of Traditional Literature, all from
one Magazine? We believe, the agreeable lucubrations of Mr. Geoffrey
Crayon also first ventured to meet the public eye in an obscure
publication of the same sort—

‘With a blush,
Modest as morning, when she coldly eyes
The youthful Phœbus!’

To say truth, some such ordeal seems almost necessary as a passport to
literary reputation. The public like to taste works in the sample,
before they swallow them whole. If in the two leading Magazines just
alluded to, we do not meet with any great fund of anecdote, with much
dramatic display of character, with the same number of successful
experiments in the world of letters as at an earlier period of our
history, yet the reader may perhaps think the want of these in a great
measure compensated by a better sustained tone of general reflection, of
mild sentiment, and liberal taste; which we hold, in spite of some
strong exceptions, to be the true characteristics of the age. The fault
of the London Magazine is, that it wants a sufficient unity of direction
and purpose. There is no particular bias or governing spirit,—which
neutralizes the interest. The articles seem thrown into the letter-box,
and to come up like blanks or prizes in the lottery—all is in a
confused, unconcocted state, like the materials of a rich plum-pudding
before it has been well boiled. On the contrary, there may be said to be
too much tampering with the management of the New Monthly, till the
taste and spirit evaporate. A thing, by being overdone, stands a chance
of being insipid—the fastidious may end in languor—the agreeable may
cloy by repetition. The Editor, we are afraid, _pets_ it too much,—and
it is accordingly more remarkable for delicacy than robustness of
constitution, and, by being faultless, loses some of its effect.

Over-refinement, however, cannot be charged as the failing of most of
our periodical publications. Some are full of polemical orthodoxy—some
of methodistical deliration—some inculcate servility, and others preach
up sedition—some creep along in a series of dull truisms and stale
moralities—while others, more ‘lively, audible, and full of vent,’
subsist on the great staple of falsehood and personality, and enjoy all
the advantages that result from an entire contempt for the restraints of
decency, consistency, or candour. There is no pretence, indeed, or
concealment of the principles on which such works are conducted: and the
reader feels almost as if he were admitted to look in on a club of
thorough-going hack authors, in their moments of freedom and exaltation.
There is plenty of _slang-wit_ going, and some shrewd remark. The pipes
and tobacco are laid on the table, with a set-out of oysters and whisky,
and bludgeons and sword-sticks in the corner! A profane parody is
recited, or a libel on an absent member—and songs are sung in mockery of
their former friends and employers. From foul words they get to blows
and broken heads; till, drunk with ribaldry, and stunned with noise,
they proceed to throw open the windows and abuse the passengers in the
street, for their want of religion, morals, and decorum! This is a
modern and an enormous abuse, and requires to be corrected.

The illiberality of the Periodical Press is ‘the sin that most easily
besets it.’ We have already accounted for this from the rank and
importance it has assumed, which have made it a necessary engine in the
hands of party. The abuse, however, has grown to a height that renders
it desirable that it should be crushed, if it cannot be corrected; for
it threatens to overlay, not only criticism and letters, but to root out
all common honesty and common sense from works of the greatest
excellence, upon large classes of society. All character, all decency,
the plainest matters of fact, or deductions of reason, are made the
sport of a nickname, an inuendo, or a bold and direct falsehood. The
continuance of this nuisance rests not with the writers, but with the
public; it is they that pamper it into the monster it is; and, in order
to put an end to the traffic, the best way is to let them see a little
what sort of thing it is which they encourage. Both of the extreme
parties in the State, the Ultra-Whigs as well as the Ultra-Royalists,
have occasionally trespassed on the borders of this enormity: But it is
only the worst part of the Ministerial Press that has had the
temptation, the hardihood, or the cowardice to make literature the mere
tool and creature of party-spirit; and, in the sacredness of the cause
in which it was embarked, to disregard entirely the profligacy of the
means. It was pious and loyal to substitute abuse for argument, and
private scandal for general argument. He who calumniated his neighbour
was a friend to his country. If you could not reply to your opponent’s
objections, you might caricature his person; if you were foiled by his
wit or learning, you might recover your advantage by stabbing his
character. The cry of ‘No Popery,’ or ‘the Constitution is in danger,’
was an answer to all cavils or scruples. Who would hesitate about the
weapons he used to repel an attack on all that was dear and valuable in
civil institutions? He who drew off the public attention from a popular
statement, by alluding to a slip in the private history of an
individual, did well; he who embodied a flying rumour as an undoubted
fact, for the same laudable end, did better; and he who invented a
palpable falsehood, did best of all. He discovered most invention, most
zeal, and most boldness; and received the highest reward for the
sacrifice of his time, character, and principle. If the jest took, it
was gravely supported; if it was found out, it was well intended: To
belie a Whig, a Jacobin, a Republican, or a Dissenter, was doing God and
the king good service; at any rate, whether true or false, detected or
not, the imputation left a stain behind it, and would be ever after
coupled with the name of the individual, so as to disable him, and deter
others from doing farther mischief. Knowledge, writing, the press was
found to be the great engine that governed public opinion; and the
scheme therefore was, to make it recoil upon itself, and act in a
retrograde direction to its natural one. Prejudice and power had a
provocation to this extreme and desperate mode of defence, in their
instinctive jealousy of any opposition to their sentiments or will. They
felt that reason was against them—and therefore it was necessary that
they should be against reason,—they felt, too, that they could extend
impunity to their agents and accomplices, whom they could easily screen
from reprisals. Conscious that they were no match for modern
philosophers and reformers in abstract reasoning, they paid off their
dread of their talents and principles by a proportionable contempt for
their persons, for which no epithets could be too mean or hateful. These
were therefore poured out in profusion by their satellites. The
nicknames, the cant phrases, too, were all in favour of existing
institutions and opinions, and were easily devised in a contest where
victory, not truth, was the object. The warfare was therefore turned
into this channel from the first; and what passion dictated, a cunning
and mercenary policy has continued. The Anti-Jacobin was one of the
first that gave the alarm, that set up the war-whoop of reckless slander
and vulgar abuse. Here is a specimen.

‘Mr. Coleridge having been dishonoured at Cambridge for preaching Deism,
has, since that time, left his native country; commenced citizen of the
world; left his poor children fatherless, and his wife destitute. _Ex
hoc disce omnes_—his friend Southey and others.’

This is the way in which a man of the most exemplary habits and strict
morals was included in the same sentence of reprobation with one of
greater genius, though perhaps of more irregular conduct; while the
imputations in both cases were impudent falsehoods—probably known to be
so, or else founded on some idle report, eagerly caught up and
maliciously exaggerated. What has been the effect? Why, that these very
persons have, in the end, joined that very pack of hunting-tigers that
strove to harass them to death, and now halloo longest and loudest in
the chase of blood. Nor was the result, after all, so unnatural as it
might at first appear. They saw that there was but one royal road to
reputation. The new Temple of Fame was built as an outwork to the rotten
boroughs, and the warders were busy on the top of it, pouring down
scalding lead and horrible filth on all those who approached, and
demanded entrance, without well-attested political credentials. ‘The
manna’ of court favour ‘was falling’; and our pilgrims to the land of
promise, slowly, reluctantly, but perhaps wisely, got out of the way of
it. Who, indeed, was likely to stand, for any length of time, ‘the
pelting of this pitiless storm’—the precipitation of nicknames from such
a height, the thundering down of huge volumes of dirt and rubbish, the
ugly blows at character, the flickering jests on personal defects—with
the complacent smiles of the great, and the angry shouts of the mob, to
say nothing of the Attorney-General’s informations, filed _ex officio_,
and the well-paid depositions of spies and informers? It was a hard
battle to fight. The enemy were well entrenched on the heights of place
and power, and skulked behind their ramparts—those whom they assailed
were exposed, and on the _pavé_. It was the forlorn hope of genius and
independence struggling for fame and bread; and it is no wonder that
many of the candidates _turned tail_, and fled from such fearful odds.

The beauty of it is, that there is generally no reparation or means of
redress. From the nature of the imputations, it is frequently impossible
distinctly to refute them, or to gain a hearing to the refutation. But
if the calumniators are detected and exposed, they plead authority and
the _King’s privilege_! They assume a natural superiority over you, as
if, being of a different party, you were of an inferior species, and
justly liable to be tortured, worried, and hunted to death, like any
other vermin. They have a right to say what they please of you, to
invent or propagate any falsehood or misrepresentation that suits their
turn. The greater falsehood, the more merit; the more barefaced the
imposture, the more pious the fraud. You are a Whig, a reformer—does not
that of itself imply all other crimes and misdemeanours? That being once
granted, they have a clear right to heap every other outrage, every
other indignity, upon you as a matter of course; and you cannot complain
of that which is no more than a commutation of punishment. You are an
enthusiast in the cause of liberty: does it not follow that you must be
a bad poet? You are against Ministers; is it to be supposed that you can
write a line of prose without repeated offences against sense and
grammar? If it be once admitted that you are an opposition writer of
some weight and celebrity, it follows, of course, that the government
scribbler should get a _carte blanche_ to fill up your character and
pretensions, life, parentage, and education. Your mind and morals are,
in justice, _deodands_ to the Crown, and should be handed over to the
court critic to be dissected without mercy, like the body of a condemned
malefactor. The disproportion between the fact and the allegation only
points the _moral_ the more strongly against you; for the odiousness of
your conduct, in differing with men in office and their sycophants, is
such, that no colours can be black enough to paint it; and if you are
not really guilty of all the petty vices and absurdities imputed to you,
it is plain that you ought to be so, to answer to their theory, and as a
_fiction_ in loyalty, for the credit of church and state. You are a bad
subject, they pretend: that you are a bad writer and bad man, is a
self-evident consequence that will be at once admitted by all the
respectable and well-disposed part of the community. You are entitled,
in short, neither to justice nor mercy: and he who _volunteers_ to
deprive you of a livelihood or your good name by any means, however
atrocious or dastardly, is entitled to the thanks of his own country.

One of their most common expedients is, to strew their victim over and
over with epithets of abuse, and to trust to the habitual association
between words and things for the effect of their application. There was
an instance of this, some little time ago, in a well-known paper, with
which we shall exemplify our doctrine. It was in reference to the
assault made on Sir Hudson Lowe by young Las Casas.

‘A French lad, of the name of Las Casas, the son of one of Buonaparte’s
Counts, waylaid Sir Hudson Lowe in the street on Tuesday, and struck
him, because Sir Hudson did his duty properly, as an English Governor,
at St. Helena, and as keeper of the _miscreant_ of whom he had the
charge. The Chronicle put forth yesterday a letter without an address,
said to be from the boy himself, signed Baron ——, something. In this he
confesses the assault, which, in default of other witnesses, will
substantiate the fact, and consign him, _as soon as the thief-takers can
catch him_, no doubt to the pleasing recreation of the tread-mill for a
given time.’

We pass over the terms ‘miscreant,’—‘fellow,’ &c.; but there is a
refinement, in one part of this paragraph, worth notice. It is said, as
if casually, that the ‘thief-takers were after him.’ What! had he been
accused of picking pockets, of shop-lifting, or petty larceny? No; but
though the fact was known to be quite different, the feeling, it was
thought, would be the same. His offence would be transferred, by the
operation of this choice expression, to the class of misdemeanors which
thief-takers are employed to look after; and thus young Las Casas, for
resenting the unworthy treatment of his father and old master, has an
indirect imputation fastened on him, by which he is confounded in the
imagination with felons and housebreakers, and other persons for whom
the ‘tread-mill’ is a suitable punishment! Such is the force of
words—the power of prejudice—and the means of poisoning public opinion.

Take another illustration in a native instance. A man of classical taste
and attainments appears to be editor of an Opposition Journal. He
publishes (it is the fault of his stars) an elegant and pathetic poem.
The first announcement of the work, in a Ministerial publication, sets
out with a statement, that the author has lately been relieved from
Newgate—which gives a felon-like air to the production, and makes it
necessary for the fashionable reader to perform a sort of quarantine
against it, as if it had the gaol-infection. It is declared by another
critic, in the same pay, to be unreadable from its insipidity, and
afterwards, by the same critic, to be highly pernicious and
inflammatory—a slight contradiction, but no matter! This, and fifty
other inconsistencies, would all go down, provided they were equally
malignant and unblushing. The writer may contradict himself as often as
he pleases: if he only speaks _against_ the work, his criticism is sound
and orthodox. Nor is it only obnoxious writers on politics themselves,
but all their friends and acquaintance, or those whom they casually
notice, that come under this sweeping anathema. It is proper to make a
clear stage. The friends of Cæsar must not be suspected of an amicable
intercourse with patriotic and incendiary writers. A young poet comes
forward: an early and favourable notice appears of some boyish verses of
his in the Examiner, independently of all political opinion. That alone
decides his fate; and from that moment he is set upon, pulled in pieces,
and hunted into his grave by the whole venal crew in full cry after him.
It was crime enough that he dared to accept praise from so disreputable
a quarter. He should have thrown back his bounty in the face of the
donor, and come with his manuscript in his hand, to have poetical
justice dealt out to him by the unbiassed author of the Baviad and
Mæviad! His tenderness and beauties would then have been exalted with
_faint_ praise, instead of being mangled and torn to pieces with
ruthless, unfeeling rage; his faults would have been gently hinted at,
and attributed to youth and inexperience; and his profession, instead of
being made the subject of loud ribald jests by vile buffoons, would have
been introduced to enhance the merit of his poetry. But a different fate
awaited poor Keats! His fine fancy and powerful invention were too
obvious to be treated with mere neglect; and as he had not been ushered
into the world with the court-stamp upon him, he was to be crushed as a
warning to genius how it keeps company with honesty, and as a sure means
of inoculating the ingenuous spirit and talent of the country with
timely and systematic servility! We sometimes think that writers are
alarmed at the praises that even _we_ bestow upon them, lest it should
preclude them from the approbation of the authorized sources of fame!

This system thus pursued is intended to amount, and in fact does amount,
to a prohibition to authors to write, and to the public to read any
works that have not the Government mark upon them. The professed object
is to gag the one, and hoodwink the others, and to persuade the world
that all talent, taste, elegance, science, liberality and virtue, are
confined to a few hack-writers and their employers. One would think the
public would resent this gross attempt to impose on their
understandings, and encroach on their liberty of private judgment. When
a gentleman is reading a new work, of which he is beginning to form a
favourable opinion, is it to be borne that he should have it snatched
out of his hands, and tossed into the dirt by a retainer of the
_literary police_? Can he be supposed to pick it up afterwards, either
to read himself, or to lend it to a friend, sullied and disfigured as it
is? But the truth we fear is, that the public, besides their
participation in the same prejudices, are timid, indolent, and easily
influenced by a little swaggering and an air of authority. They like to
amuse their leisure with reading a new work; and if they have more
leisure, have no objection to fill it up with listening to an abuse of
the writer. If they approve of candour and equity in the abstract, they
do not disapprove of a little scandal and tittle-tattle by the by. They
take in a disgusting publication, because it is ‘amusing and
clever’—that is, full of incredible assertions which make them stare,
and of opprobrious epithets applied to high characters, which, by their
smartness and incongruity, operate as a lively stimulus to their
ordinary state of ennui. This happens on the Sunday morning; and the
rest of the week passes in unravelling the imposture, and expressing a
very edifying mixture of wonder and indignation at it. Such a paper was
detected, not long ago, in the fabrication of a low falsehood against a
most respectable gentleman, who was said to have proposed a dinner and
rump and dozen, in triumph over the death of Lord Castlereagh. This was
said to have taken place in a public room, so that the exposure of the
falsehood was immediate and complete. Not long before, it put a leading
question to a popular member for the city, as if some ill-conduct of his
had caused his father’s death: it was shown that this gentleman’s father
had died before he was born! Is it to be supposed that the writer knew
the facts? We should rather think not. He probably neither knew nor
cared any thing about them. It was his vocation to hazard the dark
insinuation, and to trust to chance and the malice of mankind for its
success. The blow was well meant, though it failed. But was it not a
blow to the paper itself? Alas, no; it still blunders on; and the public
gape after it, half in fear half in indignation. It slanders a virtuous
lady; it insults the misfortunes of a Noble House; it rakes up the
infirmities of the dead; it taints (for whatever it touches it
contaminates) the unborn. No matter. They or their family had sinned in
being Whigs—and there are still men in England, it would appear, who
think that this is the way by which differences of opinion should be
revenged or prevented.

It used to be the boast of English gentlemen, that their political
contentions were conducted in a spirit, not merely of perfect fairness,
but of mutual courtesy and urbanity; and that, even among the lower
orders, quarrels were governed by a law of honour and chivalry, which
proscribed all base advantages, and united all the spectators against
him by whom a _foul blow_ was given or attempted. We trust that this
spirit is not yet extinguished among us; and that it will speedily
assert itself, by trampling under foot that base system of mean and
malignant defamation, by which our Periodical Press has recently been
polluted and disgraced. We would avoid naming works that desire nothing
so much as notoriety; but it is but too well known, that the work of
intimidation and deceit, of cruel personality and audacious fabrication,
has been carried on, for several years, in various periodical
publications, daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly,—that it has been
urged with unrelenting eagerness in the metropolis, in spite of the
public discountenance of the leaders of the party which it disgraces by
its pretended support; and then propagated into various parts of the
country, for purposes of local annoyance. It is equally well known and
understood too, that this savage system of bullying and assassination is
no longer pursued from the impulse of angry passions or furious
prejudices, but on a cold-blooded mercenary calculation of the profits
which idle curiosity, and the vulgar appetite for slander, may enable
its authors to derive from it. Where this is to stop, we do not presume
to conjecture,—unless the excess leads to the remedy, and the
distempered appetite of the public be surfeited, and so die. This is by
no means an unlikely, and, we hope, may be a speedy consummation. In the
mean time, the extent and extravagance of the abuse has already had the
effect, not only of making individual attacks less painful or alarming,
but even, in many cases, of pointing out to the judicious the proper
objects of their gratitude and respect. For ourselves, at least, we do
not hesitate to acknowledge, that, when we find an author savagely and
perseveringly attacked by this gang of literary retainers, we
immediately feel assured, not only that he is a good writer, but an
honest man; and if a statesman is once selected as the butt of
outrageous abuse in the same quarter, we consider it as a satisfactory
proof that he has lately rendered some signal service to his country, or
aimed a deadly blow at corruption.

We have put ourselves out of breath with this long lecture on the great
opprobrium of our periodical literature,—and dare not now go on to the
ticklish chapter of _Reviews_. We do not, however, by any means renounce
the design; and hope one day to be enabled to resume it, and to astonish
our readers with a full and ingenuous account of our own merits and
demerits, and those of our rivals.

LANDOR’S IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS

VOL. XL.] [_March 1824._

This work is as remarkable an instance as we have lately met with of the
strength and weakness of the human intellect. It displays considerable
originality, learning, acuteness, terseness of style, and force of
invective—but it is spoiled and rendered abortive throughout by an utter
want of temper, of self-knowledge, and decorum. Mr. Landor’s mind is far
from barren in feeling or in resources; but over the natural, and (what
might be) the useful growth of these, there every where springs up a
luxuriant crop of caprice, dogmatism, extravagance, intolerance,
quaintness, and most ludicrous arrogance,—like the red and blue flowers
in corn, that, however they may dazzle the passenger’s eye, choke up the
harvest, and mock the hopes of the husbandman. We are not ignorant of
the school to which our author belongs; and could name other writers
who, in the course of a laborious life, and in productions numerous and
multiform—some recent and suited to the times, some long and luckily
forgotten,—in odes, inscriptions, madrigals, epics,—in essays, histories
and reviews,—have run into as many absurdities, and as many extremes:
But never did we see, bound up in the same volume, close-packed, and
pointed with all the significance of style, the same number of
contradictions, staring one another in the face, and quarrelling for the
precedence. Mr. Landor’s book is a perfect ‘institute and digest’ of
inconsistency: it is made up of mere antipathies in nature and in
reasoning. It is a _chef-d’œuvre_ of self-opinion and self-will,
strangling whatever is otherwise sound and excellent in principle,
defacing whatever is beautiful in style and matter.

If it be true (as has been said) that

‘Great wits to madness nearly are allied,’

we know few writers that have higher or more unequivocal pretensions in
this way than the author of the ‘Imaginary Conversations.’ Would it be
believed, that, trampling manfully on all history and tradition, he
speaks of Tiberius as a _man of sentiment_, who retired to Capri merely
to indulge a tender melancholy on the death of a beloved wife: and will
have it that Nero was a most humane, amiable, and deservedly popular
character—not arguing the points as doubtful or susceptible of question,
but assuming them, _en passant_, as most absolute and peremptory
conclusions—as if whatever was contrary to common sense and common
feeling carried conviction on the face of it? In the same page he
assures us, with the same oracular tranquillity, that the conflagration
of Rome, and the great fire of London, were both wise and voluntary
measures, arising from the necessity of purifying the cities after
sickness, and leaving no narrow streets in their centres! and on turning
the leaf, it is revealed to us, that ‘there is nothing in Rome, _or in
the world_, equal to—the circus in Bath!’ He spells the words _foreign_
and _sovereign_, ‘foren’ and ‘sovran,’ and would go to the stake, or
send others there, to prove the genuineness of these orthographies,
which he adopts on the authority of Milton; and yet he abuses Buonaparte
for being the ape of Antiquity, and talking about Miltiades. He cries up
Mr. Locke as ‘the most _elegant_ of English prose writers,’ for no other
reason (as we apprehend) than that he has often been considered as the
least so; and compares Dr. Johnson’s style to ‘that article of dress
which the French have lately made peace with’ (a pair of pantaloons),
‘divided into two parts, equal in length, breadth, and substance, with a
protuberance before and behind.’ He pronounces sentence upon the lost
works of two ancient writers, Democritus and Menander, that the former
would be worth all the philosophical remains of antiquity, and the
latter not be worth having,—precisely because he can know nothing about
the matter; the will to decide superseding the necessity of any positive
ground of opinion, and the spirit of contradiction standing him in lieu
of all other conviction. Boileau, according to our critic, had not a
particle of sense, wit, or taste: Pope, to be sure, was of a different
opinion—and we take it to be just possible that Boileau would have
thought himself indemnified by the homage of the one for the scorn of
the other! He speaks of Pitt as a poor creature, who did not see an inch
before him, and of Fox as a charlatan; and says modestly in reference to
some history he is writing, that he trusts ‘Posterity will not confound
him with the Coxes and the Foxes of the age.’ It would be rather too
much in his own manner perhaps to say, that no one who could write this
sentence, will ever write a history—but we hazard the conjecture
notwithstanding—and leave it to time to decide. He announces that
Alfieri was the greatest man in Europe, though his greatness has not yet
been generally acknowledged. This, however, is exactly the reason that
Mr. Landor vouches for it, because whether he was so or not, rests
solely on his _ipse dixit_. It is a fine thing to be one of the oracles
of Fame! With equal modesty and candour he declares literary men to be
as much superior to lords and kings as these last are to the meanest of
their vassals. In a dialogue between Prince Maurocordato and General
Colocotroni, he wishes the Greeks to substitute the bow for the use of
fire-arms; and to this experimental crotchet, we suspect, he would
sacrifice the Greek cause,—or any other. He has a hit at Lord Byron, and
another at Mr. Thomas Moore, and a compliment to Lady Morgan. It is hard
to say which he hates most—the English Government or the French
people—Buonaparte or the Bourbons. He considers Buonaparte as a miracle,
only because no man with so little talent ever gained such an
ascendancy; and certainly with the qualifications our author allows him,
he must have dealt with the Devil to do what he did; and, as if
determined to conciliate no party and have all the world against him, he
takes care to inform the reader at the same time, that in the most
remarkable English victory in the last fifty years, ‘the prudence and
skill of the commander (Wellington) were altogether wanting.’ He brings
it as a proof of Buonaparte’s stupidity, that ‘he knew nothing of
judicial astrology, _which hath certain laws assigned to it_, and
fancied he could unite it with atheism, as easily as the iron crown with
the lilies.’ He tells us, that ‘he did his utmost in pursuing this
tyrant to death, recommending and insisting on nothing less:’ but that
now he is dead, ‘he is sorry for it.’ So hot, indeed, is he on this
scent, that he is for bringing Louis XIV. to life, in order to have him
‘carted to condign punishment in the _Place de Grêve_, or at Tyburn.’ We
cannot understand this coincidence in the proposed fate of two persons
so different; nor how Mr. Landor should call ‘the battle of Waterloo the
most glorious to the victors since that of Leuctra,’ while he recommends
a resort to tyrannicide, and points out its objects, to get rid of the
legitimate consequences of that battle; nor why he should strike ‘his
marble table with his palm,’ or call his country names—‘degenerate
Albion,’—‘recreant slave,’ &c. &c. for not aiding ‘in the cause of
freedom in Greece,’ when she has his thanks and praise for putting down
the principle, at one blow, all over the world! Kings and nations,
however, do not change like whiffling politicians. The one are governed
by their prejudices, the other by their interests;—Mr. Landor and his
friends by the opinion of the moment, by a fit of the spleen, by the
first object that stirs their vanity or their resentment.

The work before us is an edifying example of the spirit of Literary
Jacobinism,—flying at all game, running _a-muck_ at all opinions, and at
continual cross-purposes with its own. To avoid misconstruction,
however, we should add, that we mean by this term, that despotism of the
mind, which only emancipates itself from authority and prejudice, to
grow impatient of every thing like an appearance of opposition, and to
domineer over and dictate its sudden, crude, violent, and varying
opinions, to the rest of the world. This spirit admits neither of equal
nor superior, follower nor precursor: ‘it travels in a road so narrow
where but one goes abreast.’ It claims a monopoly of sense, wit, and
wisdom. To agree with it is an impertinence: to differ from it a crime.
It tramples on old prejudices: it is jealous of new pretensions. It
seizes with avidity on all that is startling or obnoxious in opinions,
and when they are countenanced by any one else, discards them as no
longer fit for its use. Thus persons of this temper affect atheism by
way of distinction; and if they can succeed in bringing it into fashion,
become orthodox again, in order not to be with the vulgar. Their creed
is at the mercy of every one who assents to, or who contradicts it. All
their ambition, all their endeavour is, to seem wiser than the whole
world besides. If they are forced to adopt a _common-place_, they
exaggerate it into a paradox, by their manner of stating it. So, in the
‘Imaginary Conversations,’ we learn, that ‘for every honest Italian,
there are,’ not ten, or a hundred, but ‘a hundred thousand honest
Englishmen.’ They hate whatever falls short of, whatever goes beyond,
their favourite theories. In the one case they hurry on before to get
the start of you; in the other, they suddenly turn back, to hinder you,
and defeat themselves. It is not the love of truth, or of mankind, that
urges them on—but the love of distinction; and they run into every
extreme, and every folly, in order to indulge their overweening
self-complacency and affected singularity.

An inordinate, restless, incorrigible self-love, is the key to all their
actions and opinions, extravagancies, and meannesses, servility and
arrogance. Whatever sooths and pampers this they applaud; whatever
wounds or interferes with it they utterly and vindictively abhor. If an
author is read and admired, they decry him; and if he is obscure or
forgotten, or unintelligible, they extol him to the skies. But if they
should succeed in bringing him into notice, and fixing him in the
firmament of fame, they soon find out that there are spots in the sun,
and draw the cloud of envy over his merits. A general is with them a
hero, if he is unsuccessful or a traitor; if he is a conqueror in the
cause of liberty, or a martyr to it, he is a poltroon. Whatever is
doubtful, remote, visionary in philosophy, or wild and dangerous in
politics, they fasten upon eagerly, ‘recommending and insisting on
nothing less;’—reduce the one to demonstration, the other to practice,
and they turn their backs upon their own most darling schemes, and leave
them in the lurch immediately. With them everything is _in posse_,
nothing _in esse_. The reason is, that they would have others take all
their opinions implicitly from their infallibility: if a thing has
grounds or evidence of its own to rest upon, so that they are no longer
called in like prophets, to vouch for its truth, this is a sufficient
excuse for them to discard it, and to look out for new _terræ incognitæ_
to exercise their quackery and second-sight upon. So they cry up a
_protegé_ of their own, that nobody has ever heard of, as a prodigious
genius, while he does nothing to justify the character they give of him,
and exists only through the breath of their nostrils;—let him come
forward in his own person, encouraged by their applause, and convince
the world that he has something in him, and they immediately set to work
to prove that he has borrowed all his ideas from them,—and is besides a
person of bad moral character! They are of the church-militant; they
pull down, but they will not build up, nor let any one else do it. They
devote themselves to a cause, to a principle while it is in doubt or
struggling for existence;—let it succeed, and they become jealous of it,
and revile and hate the man by whom it has risen, or by whom it stands,
like a triumphal arch over the ruins of barbaric thrones! For any one to
do more for a cause than they have done, to be more talked of than they
are, is a piece of presumption not hastily to be forgiven.

We consider the spirit which we have here attempted to analyze, as
maintained in a state of higher concentration in this work than in any
other we have for some time seen. Some of Mr. Southey’s lucubrations
contain pretty good samples of it; but in him it is ‘dashed and brewed’
with other elements. He has been to court, is one of a _firm_, and mixes
something of the cant of methodism with his effusions. But Mr. Landor
keeps a _private still_ of his own, where the unrectified spirit remains
in its original vigour and purity,—cold indeed, and without the frothy
effervescence of its first running, but unabated in activity, strength
and virulence. We have pointed out what we regard as the ‘damning sin’
of this work; and having thus entered our protest, and guarded the
reader against its mischievous tendency, we hold ourselves at liberty to
extract what amusement or instruction we can from it. We are far from
wishing to represent our author as ‘to every good word and work
reprobate.’ On the contrary, we think he is naturally prone to what is
right, but diverted from it by the infirmity we speak of. He has often
much strength of thought, and vigour and variety of style; and we should
be mortified, indeed, and deserving of mortification, if the petty
provocation he has attempted to give us, could deter us from doing him
that justice. He is excellent, whenever excellence is compatible with
singularity. It is the fault of the school to which he belongs, not that
they are blind to truth, or indifferent to good—but truth to be welcome
must be a rare discovery of their own; they only woo her as a youthful
bride; and are too soon satiated with the possession of what they
desire, out of fickleness, or as the gloss of novelty wears off—or sue
out a divorce from jealousy, and a dread of rivals in the favour of
their former mistress!

This was the reason, whatever might be the pretext, why the same set of
persons raised such an outcry against Buonaparte, and _alone_ insisted
on his assassination. They had no great objection to what he was
doing—but they could not bear to think that he had done more than they
had ever dreamt of. While they were building castles in the air, he gave
law to Europe. He carved out with the sword, what they had only traced
with the pen. ‘Never,’ says Mr. Landor, ‘had been such good laws so well
administered over a considerable portion of Europe. The services he
rendered to society were great, manifold, and extensive.’ But these
services were hateful in their eyes—because he aggrandized himself in
performing them. The power he wielded, the situation he occupied,
excited their envy, much more than the stand he made against the common
enemy, their gratitude. They were ready enough at all times to pull down
kings, but they hated him worse who trampled, by his own might, on their
necks—as more rivals to themselves, as running in the same race, and
going farther in it. Any service, in short, any triumph is odious in
their eyes, be it over whom, or in favour of what it will. Their great
idol now is Washington; but this is because he acted upon comparatively
a narrow theatre, and belongs to a people whose greatness is rather
prospective than present; and also, because there is something in his
mechanical habits and cold formality that appeases their irritable
spleen.

The Dialogues are thirty-six in number, and on a great variety of
curious and interesting topics. The style of the period is sometimes
well imitated, without being mimicked; and a good deal of character, and
sometimes of humour, is thrown into the tone of the different speakers.
We give the following, between Roger Ascham and Lady Jane Gray, as one
of the most pleasing, and as a relief to the severity and harshness of
our introductory speculation.

‘_Ascham._ Thou art going, my dear young lady, into a most awful state:
thou art passing into matrimony and great wealth. God hath willed it so:
submitt[15] in thankfulness. Thy affections are rightly placed and well
distributed. Love is a secondary passion in those who love most, a
primary in those who love least. He who is inspired by it in a great
degree, is inspired by honour in a greater: it never reaches its
plenitude of growth and perfection, but in the most exalted minds....
Alas! alas!

‘_Jane._ What aileth my virtuous Ascham? what is amiss? why do I
tremble?

‘_Ascham._ I see perils on perils which thou dost not see, although thou
art wiser than thy poor old master. And it is not because Love hath
blinded thee, for that surpasseth his supposed omnipotence, but it is
because thy tender heart having always leaned affectionately upon good,
hath felt and known nothing of evil. I once persuaded thee to reflect
much; let me now persuade thee to avoid the habitude of reflection, to
lay aside books, and to gaze carefully and steadfastly on what is under
and before thee.

‘_Jane._ I have well bethought me of all my duties: O how extensive they
are! what a goodly and fair inheritance! But tell me, wouldst thou
command me never more to read Cicero and Epictetus and Polybius? the
others I do resign unto thee: they are good for the arbour and for the
gravel walk: but leave unto me, I beseech thee, my friend and father,
leave unto me, for my fire-side and for my pillow, truth, eloquence,
courage, constancy.

‘_Ascham._ Read them on thy marriage-bed, on thy childbed, on thy
death-bed! Thou spotless, undrooping lily, they have fenced thee right
well! These are the men for men: these are to fashion the bright and
blessed creatures, O Jane, whom God one day shall smile upon in thy
chaste bosom.... Mind thou thy husband.

‘_Jane._ I sincerely love the youth who hath espoused me; I love him
with the fondest, the most solicitous affection. I pray to the Almighty
for his goodness and happiness, and do forget, at times, unworthy
supplicant! the prayers I should have offered for myself. O never fear
that I will disparage my kind religious teacher, by disobedience to my
husband in the most trying duties.

‘_Ascham._ Gentle is he, gentle and virtuous; but time will harden him:
time must harden even thee, sweet Jane! Do thou, complacently and
indirectly, lead him from ambition.

‘_Jane._ He is contented with me and with home.

‘_Ascham._ Ah, Jane, Jane! men of high estate grow tired of
contentedness.

‘_Jane._ He told me he never liked books unless I read them to him. I
will read them to him every evening: I will open new worlds to him,
richer than those discovered by the Spaniard: I will conduct him to
treasures.... O what treasures!... On which he may sleep in innocence
and peace.

‘_Ascham._ Rather do thou walk with him, ride with him, play with him,
be his faery, his page, his every thing that love and poetry have
invented; but watch him well, sport with his fancies; turn them about
like the ringlets round his cheeks; and if ever he meditate on power,
go, toss up thy baby to his brow, and bring back his thoughts into his
heart by the music of thy discourse. Teach him to live unto God and unto
thee: and he will discover that women, like the plants in woods, derive
their softness and tenderness from the shade.’ II. 54.

We must say we think this Dialogue is written _con amore_. It is imbued
with the very spirit of some of those old writers, where ‘all is
conscience and tender heart.’ Mr. Landor’s over-anxious mind reposes on
the innocence of youth and beauty, on the simplicity of his subject, on
the reverence due and willingly paid, because silently exacted, to age
and antiquity! Even the quaintness, the abruptness, the wanderings and
the puerility, are delightful, and happily characteristic. While we are
in good humour with our author, we will extract another conversation of
the same period, and distinguished by the same vein of felicitous
imitation, in the sentiment of which we also go along with him heart and
hand,—that between Elizabeth and Burleigh, on the trite subject of
Spenser’s pension.

‘_Elizabeth._ I advise thee again, Churlish Cecil, how that our Edmund
Spenser, whom thou calledst most uncourteously a whining whelp, hath
good and solid reason for his complaint. God’s blood! shall the lady
that tieth my garter and shuffleth the smock over my head, or the lord
that steddieth my chair’s back while I eat, or the other that looketh to
my buck-hounds lest they be mangy, be holden by me in higher esteem and
estate than he who hath placed me among the bravest of past times, and
will as safely and surely set me down among the loveliest in the future?

‘_Cecil._ Your highness must remember he carouseth fully for such
deserts.... A hundred pounds a year of unclipt monies, and a butt of
canary wine.[16]

‘_Elizabeth._ The monies are not enow to sustain a pair of grooms and a
pair of palfreys, and more wine hath been drunken in my presence at a
feast. The monies are given to such men, that they may not incline nor
be obligated to any vile or lowly occupation; and the canary, that they
may entertain such promising Wits as court their company and converse;
and that in such manner there may be alway in our land a succession of
these heirs of Fame. He hath written, not indeed with his wonted
fancifulness, nor in learned and majestical language, but in homely and
rustic wise, some verses which have moved me; and haply the more so,
inasmuch as they demonstrate to me that his genius hath been dampened by
his adversities. Read them.

‘_Cecil._ How much is lost when neither heart nor eye
Rose-winged Desire or fabling Hope deceives;
When boyhood with quick throb hath ceased to spy
The dubious apple in the yellow leaves;

‘When, springing from the turf where youth reposed,
We find but deserts in the far-sought shore;
When the huge book of Faery-land lies closed,
And those strong brazen clasps will yield no more.

‘_Elizabeth._ The said Edmund hath also furnished unto the weaver at
Arras, John Blaquieres, on my account, a description for some of his
cunningest wenches to work at, supplied by mine own self, indeed as far
as the subject-matter goes, but set forth by him with figures and
fancies, and daintily enough bedecked. I could have wished he had
thereunto joined a fair comparison between Dian ... no matter ... he
might perhaps have fared the better for it ... but poet’s wits, God help
them! when did they ever sit close about them? Read the poesy, not
over-rich, and concluding very awkwardly and meanly.

‘_Cecil._ Where forms the lotus, with its level leaves
And solid blossoms, many floating isles,
What heavenly radiance swift-descending cleaves
The darksome wave! unwonted beauty smiles

‘On its pure bosom, on each bright-eyed flower,
On every nymph, and twenty sate around....
Lo! ’twas Diana ... from the sultry hour
Hither she fled, nor fear’d she sight nor sound.

‘Unhappy youth, whom thirst and quiver-reeds
Drew to these haunts, whom awe forbade to fly,
Three faithful dogs before him rais’d their heads,
And watched and wonder’d at that fixed eye.

‘Forth sprang his favorite ... with her arrow-hand
Too late the Goddess hid what hand may hide,
Of every nymph and every reed complain’d,
And dashed upon the bank the waters wide.

‘On the prone head and sandal’d feet they flew—
Lo! slender hoofs and branching horns appear!
The last marred voice not even the favorite knew,
But bayed and fastened on the upbraiding deer.

‘Far be, chaste Goddess, far from me and mine,
The stream that tempts thee in the summer noon!
Alas, that ‘vengeance dwells with charms divine....

‘_Elizabeth._ Psha! give me the paper: I forwarned thee how it ended ...
pitifully, pitifully.

‘_Cecil._ I cannot think otherwise than that the undertaker of the
aforecited poesy hath choused your Highness; for I have seen painted, I
know not where, the identically same Dian, with full as many nymphs, as
he calls them, and more dogs. So small a matter as a page of poesy shall
never stir my choler, nor twitch my purse-string.

‘_Elizabeth._ I have read in Plinius and Mela of a runlet near Dodona,
which kindled by approximation an unlighted torch, and extinguished a
lighted one. Now, Cecil, I desire no such a jetty to be celebrated as
the decoration of my court: in simpler words, which your gravity may
more easily understand, I would not, from the fountain of Honour, give
lustre to the dull and ignorant, deadening and leaving in ‘cold
obstruction’ the lamp of literature and genius. I ardently wish my reign
to be remembered: if my actions were different from what they are, I
should as ardently wish it to be forgotten. Those are the worst of
suicides, who voluntarily and prepensely stab or suffocate their fame,
when God has commanded them to stand up on high for an ensample. We call
him parricide who destroys the author of his existence: tell me, what
shall we call him who casts forth to the dogs and birds of prey, its
most faithful propagator and most firm support? The parent gives us few
days and sorrowful; the poet many and glorious: the one (supposing him
discreet and kindly) best reproves our faults; the other best
remunerates our virtues. A page of poesy is a little matter—be it so—but
of a truth I do tell thee, Cecil, it shall master full many a bold heart
that the Spaniard cannot trouble—it shall win to it full many a proud
and flighty one, that even chivalry and manly comeliness cannot touch. I
may shake titles and dignities by the dozen from my breakfast-board—but
I may not save those upon whose heads I shake them from rottenness and
oblivion. This year they and their sovran dwell together, next year they
and their beagle. Both have names, but names perishable. The keeper of
my privy seal is an earl—what then? The keeper of my poultry-yard is a
Cæsar. In honest truth, a name given to a man is no better than a skin
given to him: what is not natively his own, falls off and comes to
nothing. I desire in future to hear no contempt of penmen, unless a
depraved use of the pen shall have so cramped them, as to incapacitate
them for the sword and for the council-chamber. If Alexander was the
Great, what was Aristoteles who made him so? who taught him every art
and science he knew, except three, those of drinking, of blaspheming,
and of murdering his bosom-friends. Come along: I will bring thee back
again nearer home. Thou mightest toss and tumble in thy bed many nights,
and never eke out the substance of a stanza; but Edmund, if perchance I
should call upon him for his counsel, would give me as wholesome and
prudent as any of you. We should indemnify such men for the injustice we
do unto them in not calling them about us, and for the mortification
they must suffer at seeing their inferiors set before them. Edmund is
grave and gentle,—he complains of Fortune, not of Elizabeth,—of courts,
not of Cecil. I am resolved, so help me God, he shall have no further
cause for his repining. Go, convey unto him these twelve silver-spoons,
with the apostols on them, gloriously gilded; and deliver into his hand
these twelve large golden pieces, sufficing for the yearly maintenance
of another horse and groom;—besides which, set open before him with due
reverence this bible, wherein he may read the mercies of God towards
those who waited in patience for his blessing; and this pair of cremisin
silken hosen, which thou knowest I have worne only thirteen months,
taking heed that the heelpiece be put into good and sufficient
restauration at my sole charges, by the Italian woman at Charing-Cross.’
I. 91.

We think that this is very pleasant and brave ‘fooling,’ and that our
author has hit off the familiar pedantic tone of the Maiden Queen well.
The sentiment with which Elizabeth seems in the foregoing Dialogue, to
regard the Muses as among her Maids of Honour, and the patronage she is
ready to extend to poets as the most agreeable and permanent class of
court-chroniclers, must be considered as characteristic of the person
and the age, and not attributed to the author. _His_ literary _fierté_
is quite in the tone of the present age, nor can he be suspected of
representing poets as destined to nothing higher than to be danglers
upon the great. He has put his opinion on this subject beyond a doubt.
In a very different style, he makes Salomon, the Florentine Jew, thus
address Alfieri, the tragic poet.

‘Be contented, Signor Conte, with the glory of our first great
dramatist, and neglect altogether any inferior one. Why vex and torment
yourself about the French? They buzz and are troublesome while they are
swarming; but the master will soon hive them. _Is the whole nation worth
the worst of your tragedies?_ All the present race of them, all the
creatures in the world which excite your indignation, will lie in the
grave, while young and old are clapping their hands or beating their
bosoms at your _Bruto Primo_. Consider, to make one step further, that
kings and emperours should, in your estimation, be but as grasshoppers
and beetles,—let them consume a few blades of your clover, without
molesting them, without bringing them to crawl on you and claw you. The
difference between them and men of genius is almost as great, as between
men of genius and those higher Intelligences who act in immediate
subordination to the Almighty. Yes, I assert it, without flattery and
without fear, the Angels are not higher above mortals, than you are
above the proudest that trample on them.’

We think Mr. Landor’s friend, the poet-laureate, cannot do better than
turn this passage into hexameter verse, and present it as his next
Birth-day Ode. The author’s dislike of the French has here inspired him
with a contempt for emperors and kings, and with an admiration for men
of genius. He sets out with a fit of the spleen, rises to the sublime,
and ends in the mock-heroic. We do not soar so high. Without pretending
to settle the precedence between poets and any higher order of
Intelligences, we certainly think they have something better to do than
to varnish over state-puppets, and hold them up to the gaze of
posterity. Yet this menial use of their talents seems to have been the
highest which even persons like Elizabeth formerly contemplated in their
patronage of them. If Spenser had merely distinguished himself by his
flattering and fanciful portraits of his royal mistress, we should think
no more of him now than of ‘the lady that tied on her garter.’ He has
entitled himself to our gratitude, by introducing us into the presence
of his mistress, Fancy, the true Faery Queen, ‘the fairest princess
under sky;’ and showing us the purple lights of Love and Beauty
reflected in his tremulous page, like evening skies in pure and still
waters. What is it that the poets of elder times have indeed done for
us, besides paying awkward compliments and writing fulsome dedications
to their patrons? They spread out a brighter heaven above our heads, a
softer and a greener earth beneath our feet. They do in truth ‘paint the
lily,’ they ‘throw a perfume on the violet, and add another hue unto the
rainbow.’ From them the murmuring stream borrows its thoughtful music;
they steep the mountain’s head in azure, and the nodding grove waves in
visionary grandeur in their page. Solitude becomes more solitary,
silence eloquent, joy extatic; they lend wings to Hope, and put a heart
into all things. Poetry hangs its lamp on high, shedding sweet
influence; and not an object in nature is seen, unaccompanied by the
sound of ‘famous poets’ verse.’ They add another spring to man’s life,
breathe the balm of immortality into the soul, and by their aid, a dream
and a glory is ever around us. Queen Elizabeth ordered Shakespear to
_continue_ Falstaff. He has indeed been _continued_; for he has come
down to us, and is living to this day! Otway would have thought it a
great thing to have had _Venice Preserved_ patronised, and a box taken
by a dutchess on the night of its first appearance. But is this ‘the
spur that the clear spirit doth raise?’ Is it for this that we envy him,
or that so many would have wished like him to live, even though doomed
as the consequence, like him to die? No, but for the sake of those
thousand hearts that have melted with Belvidera’s sorrows, for those
tears that have streamed from bright eyes, and that young and old have
shed so many thousand times over her fate! This is the spur to Fame,
this is the boast of letters, that they are the medium through which
whatever we feel and think (that we take most pride and interest in) is
imparted and lives in the brain, and throbs in the bosoms of a countless
multitude. We breathe the thoughts of others as they breathe ours, like
common air, in spite of the distance of place, and the lapse of time.
Mind converses everywhere with mind, and we drink of knowledge as of a
river. We ourselves (Mr. Landor will excuse the egotism of the
transition) once took shelter from a shower of rain in a ruined hovel in
the Highlands, where we found an old shepherd apparently regardless of
the storm and of his flock, reading a number of the Edinburgh Review!
Need we own that this little incident inspired us with a feeling of
almost poetical vanity? From that time the blue and yellow covers seemed
to take a tinge from the humid arch, that spanned the solitude before
us, and our thoughts were commingled with the elements!

The _Conversation between Oliver Cromwell and Walter Noble_ on the
beheading of Charles I., displays a good deal of the blunt knavery of
old Nol, and a mixture of honour and honesty in the old Roundhead. We
here also find some touches that illustrate Mr. Landor’s political
views. Thus Cromwell is made to say, ‘I abominate and detest
kingship;’—to which Noble answers—‘I abominate and detest hangmanship;
but in certain stages of society, both are necessary. Let them go
together, we want neither now.’ The same dramatic appreciation of the
intellect of the speakers, and of the literary tone of the age, appears
in the _Eighth Conversation, between King James I. and Isaac Casaubon_;
and in many of the others, whether relating to ancient or modern times.
The verisimilitude does not arise from a studied use of peculiar
phrases, or an exaggeration of peculiar opinions, but the writer seems
to be well versed in the productions and characters of the individuals
he brings upon the stage, and the adaptation takes place unconsciously
and without any apparent effort. A remarkable instance of this occurs in
the dialogue between Ann Boleyn and Henry VIII., into which the rough,
boisterous, voluptuous, cruel and yet gamesome character of that
monarch, whose gross and pampered selfishness has but one parallel in
the British annals, is transfused with all the truth and spirit of
history—or of the Author of Waverley! In the _Fourth Dialogue_ ‘between
Professor Porson and Mr. Southey,’ we meet with an assertion which we
think Mr. Landor would hardly have hazarded in the lifetime of the
former, and to which we cannot assent, even to show our candour. ‘Take
up,’ says the Laureate, ‘a poem of Wordsworth’s, _and read it_; I would
rather say, read them all; and knowing that a mind like yours must grasp
closely what comes within it, I will then appeal to you whether any poet
of our country, since Shakespear, has exerted a greater variety of
powers, with less strain and less ostentation.’ Some persons (we do not
know whether the poet himself is of the number) have, we understand,
compared Mr. Wordsworth to Milton; but we did not expect ever to see a
resemblance suggested between him and Shakespeare. If ever two men were
the antipodes of each other, they are so; and even this we think is
paying compliment enough to Mr. Wordsworth. We are also of opinion, in
the very teeth of the _dictum_ of the brother bard, that let his other
merits be what they may, no English writer of any genius has shown
_less_ variety of powers, with _more_ effort and more significance of
pretension. Mr. Southey, in the _Imaginary Conversation_, goes on to lay
before the Professor ‘an unpublished and incomplete poem’ of the same
author, the _Laodamia_, and recites it, but only _in imagination_; after
which some ingenious verbal criticisms are made on one or two particular
passages. This poem has since been published; and we have no hesitation
in saying, that it is a poem the greater part of which might be read
aloud in Elysium, and that the spirits of departed heroes and sages
might gather round and listen to it! It is sweet and solemn; and, though
there is some poorness in the diction, and some indistinctness in the
images, it breathes of purity and tenderness, in very genuine and lofty
measures. We have great pleasure in saying this—but we must be permitted
to add, that we are firmly persuaded Mr. Wordsworth would never have
written this classical and manly composition, but for those remarks on
his former style, for which we have the misfortune to fall under the
lash of Mr. Landor’s pen.

The _Ninth Conversation_ (‘_Marchese Pallavicini and Walter Landor_‘)
contains _scandal_ against the English Government—_Conversation X._
(‘_General Kleber and some French Officers_‘) _scandal_ against the
French—_Conversation XI._ (‘_Buonaparte and the President of the
Senate_’) _scandal_ against good taste and common decency. Let Mr.
Landor cancel it—let his publishers strike their asterisks through it.
It is short, and not sweet. These fabulous stories about the expedition
into Egypt, these low-minded and scurrilous aspersions on Buonaparte,
which the Tories palmed upon the credulity of their gulls, the Jacobin
poets, have been long discarded by the inventors, and linger only in the
pages, rankle only in the hearts of their converts. We would recommend
to Mr. Landor, before he writes on this subject again, to read over the
allegory of his friend Spenser, describing _Occasion_ and _Furor_, and
not to be refreshing his groundless and mischievous resentments every
moment with a ‘Cymocles, oh! I burn!’ It is by no means a sufficient
reason to believe a thing that it provokes our anger, or excites our
disgust; nor is it wise or decorous to bay the moon, and then quarrel
with the echo of our own voice. Mr. Landor keeps up a clamour raised by
the worst men to answer the worst purposes, only to persuade himself, if
possible, that he has not been its dupe. This is the worst of our
author’s style—it continually explodes and _detonates_—one cannot read
him in security, for fear of springing a mine, if any of his prejudices
are touched, or passions roused. He is made of combustible
materials—sits hatching treason, like the Guy Faux of letters, and is
equally ready to blow up a Legitimate Despot, or pounce upon an usurper!
Let us turn to Humphrey Hardcastle and Bishop Burnet,—in which the
garrulous, credulous, acute, vulgar, and yet graphic style of the
latter, is very pleasingly caricatured.

‘_Hardcastle._ The pleasure I have taken in the narration of your
Lordship is for the greater part independent of what concerns my family.
I never knew that my uncle was a poet, and could hardly have imagined
that he approached near enough to Mr. Cowley for jealousy or
competition.

‘_Bishop Burnet._ Indeed, they who discoursed on such matters were of
the same opinion, excepting some few, who see nothing before them, and
every thing behind. These declared that Hum would overtop Abraham, if he
could only drink rather less, think rather more, and feel rather
rightlier; that he had great spunk and spirit, and that not a fan was
left on a lap when any one sang his airs. Poets, like ministers of
state, have their parties; and it is difficult to get at truth upon
questions not capable of demonstration, nor founded on matter of fact.
To take any trouble about them, is an unwise thing: it is like mounting
a wall covered with broken glass: you cut your fingers before you reach
the top, and you only discover at last that it is within a span or two
of equal height on both sides. Who would have imagined that the youth
who was carried to his long home the other day, I mean my Lord
Rochester’s reputed child, Mr. George Nelly, was for several seasons a
great poet? Yet I remember the time when he was so famous an one that he
ran after Mr. Milton up Snow Hill, as the old gentleman was leaning on
his daughter’s arm, from the Poultry, and treading down the heel of his
shoe, called him a rogue and a liar, while another poet sprang out from
a grocer’s shop, clapping his hands, and crying, “_Bravely done! by
Belzebub! the young cock spurs the blind buzzard gallantly._” On some
neighbour representing to Mr. George the respectable character of Mr.
Milton, and the probability that at some future time he might be
considered as among our geniuses, and such as would reflect a certain
portion of credit on his ward, and asking him withal why he appeared to
him a rogue and a liar, he replied, “I have proofs known to few: I
possess a sort of drama by him, entitled Comus, which was composed for
the entertainment of Lord Pembroke, who held an appointment under the
King; and this very John has since changed sides, and written in defence
of the Commonwealth.”—Mr. George began with satirizing his father’s
friends, and confounding the better part of them with all the hirelings
and nuisances of the age, with all the scavengers of lust and all the
linkboys of literature; with Newgate solicitors, the patrons of
adulterers and forgers, who, in the long vocation, turn a penny by
puffing a ballad, and are promised a shilling in silver, for their own
benefit, on crying down a religious tract. He soon became reconciled to
the latter, and they raised him upon their shoulders above the heads of
the wittiest and the wisest. This served a whole winter. Afterwards,
whenever he wrote a bad poem, he supported his sinking fame by some
signal act of profligacy—an elegy by a seduction, an heroic by an
adultery, a tragedy by a divorce. On the remark of a learned man, that
irregularity is no indication of genius, he began to lose ground
rapidly, when on a sudden he cried out at the Haymarket, _There is no
God!_ It was then surmised more generally and more gravely that there
was something in him, and he stood upon his legs almost to the last.
_Say what you will_, once whispered a friend of mine, _there are things
in him strong as poison, and original as sin_. Doubts, however, were
entertained by some, on more mature reflection, whether he earned all
his reputation by that witticism: for soon afterwards he declared at the
cockpit, that he had purchased a large assortment of cutlasses and
pistols, and that, as he was practising the use of them from morning to
night, it would be imprudent in persons who were without them either to
laugh or boggle at the Dutch vocabulary with which he had enriched our
language.... Having had some concern in bringing his reputed father to a
sense of penitence for his offences, I waited on the youth likewise in a
former illness, not without hope of leading him ultimately to a better
way of thinking. I had hesitated too long: I found him far advanced in
his convalescence. My arguments are not worth repeating. He replied
thus: “I change my mistresses as Tom Southern his shirt, from economy. I
cannot afford to keep few: and I am determined not to be forgotten till
I am vastly richer. But I assure you, Dr. Burnet, for your comfort, that
if you imagine I am led astray by lasciviousness, as you call it, and
lust, you are quite as much mistaken as if you called a book of
arithmetic a bawdy book. I calculate on every kiss I give, modest or
immodest, on lip or paper. I ask myself one question only—what will it
bring me?” On my marvelling, and raising up my hands, “You churchmen,”
he added, with a laugh, “are too hot in all your quarters for the calm
and steddy contemplation of this high mystery.” He spake thus loosely,
Mr. Hardcastle, and I confess, I was disconcerted and took my leave of
him. If I gave him any offence at all, it could only be when he said,
“_I should be sorry to die before I have written my life_,” and I
replied, “_Rather say before you have mended it_.”—“But, doctor,”
continued he, “the work I propose may bring me a hundred pounds;”
whereunto I rejoined, “that which I, young gentleman, suggest in
preference will be worth much more to you.” At last he is removed from
among the living: let us hope the best: to wit, that the mercies which
have begun with man’s forgetfulness will be crowned with God’s
forgiveness.’ I. 164.

In the _Conversation between Peter Leopold and the President du Paty_,
there is a good deal of curious local information and sensible remark;
but there is too constant a balance kept up between the arguments in
favour of reform, and the difficulties attending it. Our author is one
of those _cats-cradle_ reasoners who never see a decided advantage in
any thing but indecision, one of those adepts in political Platonics,
who are always in love with the theory of what is right, till it comes
to be put in practice. On the subject of this dialogue, we have but one
remark to repeat, which is, that in such matters to be _nominally_
humane is to be _practically_ so—that where there is a disposition in
governments to lessen the sum of human misery, there is the power,—and
that the spirit of humanity is the great thing wanting to society!

We own we like Mr. Landor best when he introduces the great men of
antiquity upon the carpet. He seems then to throw aside his narrow and
captious prejudices, expands his view with the distance of the objects
he contemplates, and infuses a strength, a severity, a fervour and
sweetness into his style, not unworthy of the admirable models whom he
would be supposed to imitate. Such in great part is the tone of the
observations that pass between Demosthenes and Eubulides.

‘_Eubulides._ In your language, O Demosthenes! there is a resemblance to
the Ilissus, whose waters, as you must have observed, are in most
seasons pure and limpid and equable in their course, yet abounding in
depths, of which when we discern the bottom, we wonder that we discern
it so clearly: the same river at every storm swells into a torrent,
without ford or boundary, and is the stronger and the more impetuous
from resistance.

‘_Demosthenes._ Language is part of a man’s character.

‘_Eubulides._ It is often artificial.

‘_Demosthenes._ Often both are so. I spoke not of such language as that
of Gorgias and Isocrates, and other rhetoricians, but of that which
belongs to eloquence, of that which enters the heart, however closed
against it, of that which pierces like the sword of Perseus, of that
which carries us away upon its point as easily as Medea her children,
and holds the world below in the same suspense and terror.—I had to form
a manner, with great models on one side of me and Nature on the other.
Had I imitated Plato (the writer then most admired) I must have fallen
short of his amplitude and dignity; and his sentences are seldom such as
could be admitted into a popular harangue. Xenophon is elegant, but
unimpassioned, and not entirely free, I think, from affectation.
Herodotus is the most faultless, and perhaps the most excellent of all.
What simplicity! what sweetness! what harmony! not to mention his
sagacity of inquiry and his accuracy of description: he could not,
however, form an orator for the times in which we live. Aristoteles and
Thucydides were before me: I trembled lest they should lead me where I
might raise a recollection of Pericles, whose plainness and conciseness
and gravity they have imitated, not always with success. Laying down
these qualities as the foundation, I have ventured on more solemnity,
more passion: I have also been studious to bring the powers of _action_
into play, that great instrument in exciting the affections, which
Pericles disdained. He and Jupiter could strike my head with their
thunderbolts and stand serene and motionless: I could not.’ I. 233.

The Dialogue in the second volume between Pericles and Sophocles
breathes the spirit of patriotism and of antiquity, perhaps in a still
higher strain, with a bastard allusion, we suspect, to recent politics.
The Conversations between Aristotle and Callisthenes, and between Lord
Chatham and Lord Chesterfield, (also in the second volume), contain an
admirable estimate, equally sound and acute, of the characters of
Aristotle and Plato. Our critic appears to have studied and to have
understood these authors well. In our opinion, he rates Cicero too high;
we do not mean as to style or oratory, but as a thinker. In this
respect, there is little memorable, or new, or profound, in him; and ‘he
was at best’ (as it has been said) ‘but an elegant reporter of the Greek
philosophy.’ Neither can we agree that his historian, Middleton, is so
entirely free from affectation as our author supposes. It is Lord
Chatham who is made to pronounce the panegyric upon Locke, as ‘the most
elegant of English prose writers,’ which, if our author were not a
deliberate paradox-monger, might seem an uncivil irony. His eulogist
does not mend the matter much by his definition of elegance, which one
would think intended as a test of Lord Chesterfield’s politeness. He
makes it to consist in a mean between too much prolixity and too much
conciseness. Now, (supposing this to be intended seriously) Mr. Locke
was certainly one of the most circuitous and diffuse of all writers.
This distinguished person neither excelled in the graces of style,
according to our author’s singular assertion, nor was he (according to
the common opinion) the founder of the modern system of metaphysical
philosophy. The credit of having laid the basis of this system, and of
having completed the great outline of the plan, is beyond all question
due to the philosopher of Malmesbury. Mr. Locke’s real _forte_ was great
practical good sense, a determination to look at every question, free
from prejudice and according to the evidence suggested to him, and a
patient and persevering _doggedness_ of understanding in contending with
difficulties, and finding out and weighing arguments of opposite
tendency. The most valuable parts of his celebrated Essay are those
which relate not to the _nature_ but to the _conduct_ of the
understanding; and on that subject, he often proves himself a most sage
and judicious adviser. Mr. Locke’s Treatise on Education (with all its
defects, and an occasional appearance of pedantry), laid the foundation
of the modern improvements in that important branch of study; and his
book upon Government (written in defence of the Revolution of 1688)
remained unimpeached up to the period of the battle of Waterloo. The
author of the _Essay on Human Understanding_ undoubtedly ranks as the
third name in English philosophy, after Newton and Bacon; yet perhaps
others, as Hobbes, Berkeley, Butler, Hume, Hartley, and, even in our own
times, Horne Tooke, have shown a firmer grasp of mind, as well as
greater originality and subtlety of invention, in the same field of
inquiry. This opinion may, however, be thought by some petulant and
daring, not to say profane; and we may be accused, in forming or
delivering it, of having encroached unawares on the exercise of Mr.
Landor’s exclusive right of private judgment and free inquiry.

The controversy between the Abbé Delille and our author in person, of
which Boileau is the leading subject, is an amusing specimen of verbal
criticism. All that it proves however is, that this kind of criticism
proves nothing but the acuteness of the writer, and also that those
poets who pique themselves on being most exempt from it are the most
liable to it. Pope is an example among ourselves. Those who are in the
habit of attending to the smallest things, do not see the farthest
before them; and, in polishing and correcting one line, they overlook or
fall into some fresh mistake in another. The altering and retouching,
after a lapse of time, or during the probation of Horace’s ‘nine years,’
is sure to lead to inconsistency and partial oversights. Mr. Landor, in
some instances, we imagine, confounds humour with blunders. Thus the
truism in the line—

‘Que, si sous Adam même, _et loin avant Noë_,’

we should consider as a mere piece of _naïveté_, in the manner of La
Fontaine. We will give up, however, without scruple, Boileau’s
mock-heroics, as we would some English ones of later date. But his
satire and his sense we cannot relinquish all at once, though he was a
Frenchman, and, what is still worse, a Frenchman of the age of Louis
XIV.! It is hard that a people who arrogate all perfections to
themselves should possess none; nor can we think that so vast and
magnificent a reputation as their literature has acquired, could be
raised, as Mr. L. would persuade us, without either art or genius? The
Dialogue between Kosciusko and Poniatowski (a subject capable of better
things) is remarkable for nothing but a mawkish philanthropy, and a
problematical defence of General Pichegru for betraying the Republic and
leaguing with the Bourbons. We have nothing to say to this; but, as our
author has dedicated one of these volumes to General Mina, will he
forgive our recommending him to write a third, in order to inscribe it
to Balasteros?

When our literary dramatist attempts common or vulgar humour, he fails
totally, as in the slang Conversation entitled _Cavaliere Punto Michino,
and Mr. Denis Eusebius Talcranagh_. The interview between David Hume and
John Home is another failure, at least in so far as relates to
character. The author represents the latter as a quiet contented parish
minister,—the fact being, that soon after the publication of his play,
he abandoned the clerical profession, and went about a fine gentleman,
with a blue coat and a pigtail. Horne Tooke’s collision with Dr. Johnson
produces only some meagre etymologies and orthographical pedantry, and a
tolerably just and highly pointed character of Junius; that between
Washington and Franklin only a dull recipe for curing the disorders of
Ireland. Prince Maurocordoto and General Colocotroni defend the Greeks,
in the Twelfth Conversation of the second volume, on very new and
learned principles; but as we have no skill in wood craft, nor in
flat-bottomed boats, we pass it over. The last Conversation (supposed to
take place between Marcus Tullius Cicero, and his brother Quintus, on
the night before his death) is full of an eloquent and philosophic
melancholy, which makes it on the whole our favourite:—that between
Lopez Banos and Romero Alpuente, we dare be sworn, is the author’s; at
least it had need, it will be _caviare to the multitude_. _Par example._

‘_Banos._ At length, Alpuente, the saints of the Holy Alliance have
declared war against us.

‘_Alpuente._ I have not heard it until now.

‘_Banos._ They have directed a memorial to the king of France, inviting
him to take such measures as his Majesty, in his wisdom, shall deem
convenient, in order to avert the calamities of war, and the dangers of
discord, from his frontier.

‘_Alpuente._ God forbid that so great a king should fall upon us! O
Lord, save us from our enemy, who would eat us up quick, so despitefully
and hungrily is he set against us.

‘_Banos._ Read the manifesto ... why do you laugh? Is not this a
declaration of hostilities?

‘_Alpuente._ To Spaniards, yes. I laughed at the folly and impudence of
men, who, for the present of a tobacco-box with a fool’s head upon it,
string together these old peeled pearls of diplomatic eloquence, and
foist them upon the world as arguments and truths. Do kings imagine that
they can as easily deceive as they can enslave? and that the mind is as
much under their snaffle, as the body is under their axe and halter?
Show me one of them, Lopez, who has not violated some promise, who has
not usurped some territory, who has not oppressed and subjugated some
neighbour; then I will believe him, then I will obey him, then I will
acknowledge that those literary heralds who trumpet forth his praises
with the newspaper in their hands, are creditable and upright and
uncorrupted. The courage of Spain delivered these wretches from the cane
and drumhead of a Corsican. Which of them did not crouch before him?
which did not flatter him? which did not execute his orders? which did
not court his protection? which did not solicit his favour? which did
not entreat his forbearance? which did not implore his pardon? which did
not abandon and betray him?’

_’Tis a pretty picture_; and did the author suppose, in his blindness to
the past and to the future, that the august personages of whom he
speaks, after escaping from this state of abject degradation and
subjection to that iron scourge, would voluntarily submit to be at the
beck and nod of every puny pretender who sets up an authority over them,
and undertakes to tutor and _cashier_ kings at his discretion? But not
to interrupt the dialogue, which thus continues:—

‘No ties either of blood or of religion, led or restrained these
neophytes in holiness. And now, forsooth, the calamities of war, and the
dangers of discord are to be averted, by arming one part of our
countrymen against the other, by stationing a military force on our
frontier, for the reception of murderers and traitors and incendiaries,
and by pointing the bayonet and cannon in our faces. When we smiled at
the insults of a beaten enemy, they dictated terms and conditions. At
last, his _most Christian Majesty_ tells his army, that the nephew of
Henry the fourth shall march against us ... with his feather!

‘_Banos._ Ah! that weighs more. The French army will march over fields
which cover French armies, and over which the oldest and bravest part of
it fled in ignominy and dismay, before our shepherd boys and hunters.
What the veterans of Napoleon failed to execute, the household of Louis
will accomplish. Parisians! let your comic opera-house lie among its
ruins; it cannot be wanted this season.

‘_Alpuente._ Shall these battalions which fought so many years for
freedom, so many for glory, be supplementary bands to barbarians from
Caucasus and Imaus? Shall they shed the remainder of their blood to
destroy a cause, for the maintenance of which they offered up its first
libation? Time will solve this problem, the most momentous in its
solution that ever lay before man. If we are conquered, of which at
present I have no apprehension, Europe must become the theatre of new
wars, and be divided into three parts, afterwards into two, and the next
generation will see all her states and provinces the property of one
autocrat, and governed by the most ignorant and lawless of her
nations.[17]

‘_Banos._ Never was there a revolution, or material change in
government, effected with so little bloodshed, so little opposition, so
little sorrow or disquietude, as ours. Months had passed away, years
were rolling over us, institutions were consolidating, superstition was
relaxing, ingratitude and perfidy were as much forgotten by us, as our
services and sufferings were forgotten by Ferdinand, when emissaries,
and gold and arms, and FAITH, inciting to discord and rebellion, crossed
our frontier ... and our fortresses were garnished with the bayonets of
France, and echoed with the watchwords of the Vatican. If Ferdinand had
regarded his oath, and had acceded, in _our_ sense of the word _faith_,
to the constitution of his country, from which there was hardly a
dissentient voice among the industrious and the unambitious, among the
peaceable and the wise, would he have eaten one dinner with less
appetite, or have embroidered one petticoat with less taste? Would the
saints along his chapel-walls have smiled upon him less graciously, or
would thy tooth, holy Dominic, have left a less pleasurable impression
on his lips? His most Christian Majesty demands _that Ferdinand the
seventh may give his people those institutions which they can have from
him only_! Yes, these are his expressions, Alpuente; these the
doctrines, for the propagation of which our country is to be invaded
with fire and sword; this is government, this is order, this is faith!
Ferdinand _was_ at liberty to give us his institutions: he gave them:
what were they? The inquisition in all its terrors, absolute and
arbitrary sway, scourges and processions, monks and missionaries, and a
tooth of St. Dominic to crown them all.... To support the throne that
crushes us, and the altar that choaks us, march forward the warlike
Louis and the _preux_ Chateaubriant, known among his friends to be as
firm in belief as Hobbes, Talleyrand, or Spinoza; and behold them
advancing, side by side, against the calm opponents of Roman bulls and
French charts. Although his Majesty be brave as Maximin at a breakfast,
he will find it easier to eat his sixty-four cutlets than to conquer
Spain. I doubt whether the same historian shall have to commemorate both
exploits.

‘_Alpuente._ In wars the least guilty are the sufferers. In these, as in
everything, we should contract as much as possible the circle of human
misery. The deluded and enslaved should be so far spared as is
consistent with security: the most atrocious of murderers and
incendiaries, the purveyors and hirers of them, should be removed at any
expense or hazard. If we show little mercy to the robber who enters a
house by force, and if less ought to be shown to him who should enter it
in the season of distress and desolation, what portion of it ought to be
extended towards those who assail every house in our country? How much
of crime and wretchedness may often be averted, how many years of
tranquillity may sometimes be ensured to the world _by one well-chosen
example_! Is it not better than to witness the grief of the virtuous for
the virtuous, and the extinction of those bright and lofty hopes, for
which the best and wisest of every age contended? Where is the man,
worthy of the name, who would be less affected at the lamentation of one
mother for her son, slain in defending his country, than at _the
extermination of some six or seven usurpers_, commanding or attempting
its invasion? National safety legitimates every mean employed upon it.
Criminals have been punished differently in different countries: but all
enlightened, all honest, all civilised men, must agree _who_ are
criminals. The Athenians were perhaps as well-informed and intelligent
as the people on lake Ladoga: they knew nothing of the _knout_, I
confess; and no family amongst them boasted a succession of _assassins_,
in wives, sons, fathers, and husbands: but he who endangered or injured
his country was condemned to the draught of hemlock! They could punish
the offence in another manner: if any nation cannot, shall that nation
therefore leave it unpunished? And shall the guiltiest of men enjoy
impunity, from a consideration of modes and means? Justice is not to be
neglected, because what is preferable is unattainable. A house-breaker
is condemned to die, a city-breaker is celebrated by an inscription over
the gate. The murder of thousands, soon perpetrated and past, is not the
greatest mischief he does: it is followed by the baseness of millions,
deepening for ages. Every virtuous man in the universe is a member of
that grand Amphictyonic council, which should pass sentence on the too
powerful, and provide that it be duly executed. It is just, and it is
necessary, that those who pertinaciously insist on so unnatural a state
of society, should suffer by the shock things make in recovering their
equipoise.’ II. 269.

We have given this _tirade_, not with any view to comment on the
sentiments it conveys, but to justify what we have said of the
outrageous spirit that so frequently breaks out in the present work, and
that might reasonably ‘condemn the author to the draught of hellebore.’
We believe the attempt to revive the exploded doctrine of tyrannicide is
peculiar to the reformed Jacobins. We remember a long and well-timed
article in the FRIEND, some years ago, on this subject; nor do the
strong allusions to the same remedy, in a celebrated journal, form an
exception to this remark, at a time when a renegado from the same school
directed its attacks upon the Corsican hero. These modern monks and
literary jesuits, who would fain set up their own fanatic notions
against law and reason, and dictate equally to legitimate kings and
revolutionary usurpers, find fault with Napoleon for having thrown his
sword into the scale of opinion; and now, finding the want of it, sooner
than be baulked of their fancy, would (as far as we can understand their
meaning) substitute the dagger. We cannot applaud their expedients; nor
sympathize with that ‘final hope’ which seems ‘flat despair.’ If these
pragmatical persons could have every thing their own way—if they could
confer power and take away the abuse of it—if they could put down
tyrants with the sword, and give the law to conquerors with the pen—we
should not despair of seeing some good result from this new theocracy.
The worst we could fear would be from their fickleness, rashness, and
inconsiderate thirst for novelty; but they would not, by their ill-timed
servility and gratuitous phrensy, help to bring down the iron hand of
power upon us, or enclose us in the dungeons of prejudice and
superstition! As it is, they have contrived to throw open the
flood-gates of despotism—‘to shut exceeds their power:’ they have got
rid of one tyrant, to establish the principle in perpetuity, and to root
out the very name of Freedom. Those of them who are sincere, who are not
bribed to silence by places and pensions obtained by their momentary
complaisance and seeming inconsistency, speak out, and are sorry for the
part they have taken, now that it is too late. They strike ‘the marble
table with their palm’—they call their country recreant and base—they
invoke the shade of Leonidas—they apostrophize the spirit of
Bolivar—they polish their style like a steel breastplate—they point
their sentences like daggers against the bloated apathy of
legitimacy—they publish satires on the constitution, and print libels on
departed ministers in asterisks—they invent new modes of warfare, and
recommend new modes of extermination against despots;—and, in return for
all this, the Holy Allies laugh at them, their credulity, their rage,
their helplessness, and disappointment. There was one man whom they did
not laugh at, but whom they feared and hated; and they persuaded Mr.
Landor and others that what they feared and hated above all other
things, was out of love to Liberty and Humanity!

Mr. Landor has interspersed some pieces of poetry through these volumes.
His muse still retains her _implicit_ and inextricable style. The
author, some five-and-twenty years ago, published a poem under the title
of Gebir, in Latin and English, and equally unintelligible in both, but
of which we have heard two lines quoted by his admirers.

‘Pleas’d they remember their august abodes,
And murmur as the ocean murmurs there.’

This relates to the sound which sea-shells make if placed close to the
ear, and is beautiful and mystic, like something composed in a dream.
His tragedy of Count Julian we have not seen.

SHELLEY’S POSTHUMOUS POEMS

VOL. XL.] [_July 1824._

Mr. Shelley’s style is to poetry what astrology is to natural science—a
passionate dream, a straining after impossibilities, a record of fond
conjectures, a confused embodying of vague abstractions,—a fever of the
soul, thirsting and craving after what it cannot have, indulging its
love of power and novelty at the expense of truth and nature,
associating ideas by contraries, and wasting great powers by their
application to unattainable objects.

Poetry, we grant, creates a world of its own; but it creates it out of
existing materials. Mr. Shelley is the maker of his own poetry—out of
nothing. Not that he is deficient in the true sources of strength and
beauty, if he had given himself fair play (the volume before us, as well
as his other productions, contains many proofs to the contrary): But, in
him, fancy, will, caprice, predominated over and absorbed the natural
influences of things; and he had no respect for any poetry that did not
strain the intellect as well as fire the imagination—and was not
sublimed into a high spirit of metaphysical philosophy. Instead of
giving a language to thought, or lending the heart a tongue, he utters
dark sayings, and deals in allegories and riddles. His Muse offers her
services to clothe shadowy doubts and inscrutable difficulties in a robe
of glittering words, and to turn nature into a brilliant paradox. We
thank him—but we must be excused. Where we see the dazzling
beacon-lights streaming over the darkness of the abyss, we dread the
quicksands and the rocks below. Mr. Shelley’s mind was of ‘too fiery a
quality’ to repose (for any continuance) on the probable or the true—it
soared ‘beyond the visible diurnal sphere,’ to the strange, the
improbable, and the impossible. He mistook the nature of the poet’s
calling, which should be guided by involuntary, not by voluntary
impulses. He shook off, as an heroic and praiseworthy act, the trammels
of sense, custom, and sympathy, and became the creature of his own will.
He was ‘all air,’ disdaining the bars and ties of mortal mould. He
ransacked his brain for incongruities, and believed in whatever was
incredible. Almost all is effort, almost all is extravagant, almost all
is quaint, incomprehensible, and abortive, from aiming to be more than
it is. Epithets are applied, because they do not fit: subjects are
chosen, because they are repulsive: the colours of his style, for their
gaudy, changeful, startling effect, resemble the display of fireworks in
the dark, and, like them, have neither durability, nor keeping, nor
discriminate form. Yet Mr. Shelley, with all his faults, was a man of
genius; and we lament that uncontrollable violence of temperament which
gave it a forced and false direction. He has single thoughts of great
depth and force, single images of rare beauty, detached passages of
extreme tenderness; and, in his smaller pieces, where he has attempted
little, he has done most. If some casual and interesting idea touched
his feelings or struck his fancy, he expressed it in pleasing and
unaffected verse: but give him a larger subject, and time to reflect,
and he was sure to get entangled in a system. The fumes of vanity rolled
volumes of smoke, mixed with sparkles of fire, from the cloudy
tabernacle of his thought. The success of his writings is therefore in
general in the inverse ratio of the extent of his undertakings; inasmuch
as his desire to teach, his ambition to excel, as soon as it was brought
into play, encroached upon, and outstripped his powers of execution.

Mr. Shelley was a remarkable man. His person was a type and shadow of
his genius. His complexion, fair, golden, freckled, seemed transparent
with an inward light, and his spirit within him

——‘so divinely wrought,
That you might almost say his body thought.’

He reminded those who saw him of some of Ovid’s fables. His form,
graceful and slender, drooped like a flower in the breeze. But he was
crushed beneath the weight of thought which he aspired to bear, and was
withered in the lightning-glare of a ruthless philosophy! He mistook the
nature of his own faculties and feelings—the lowly children of the
valley, by which the skylark makes its bed, and the bee murmurs, for the
proud cedar or the mountain-pine, in which the eagle builts its eyry,
‘and dallies with the wind, and scorns the sun.’—He wished to make of
idle verse and idler prose the frame-work of the universe, and to bind
all possible existence in the visionary chain of intellectual beauty—

‘More subtle web Arachne cannot spin,
Nor the fine nets, which oft we woven see
Of scorched dew, do not in th’ air more lightly flee.’

Perhaps some lurking sense of his own deficiencies in the lofty walk
which he attempted, irritated his impatience and his desires; and urged
him on, with winged hopes, to atone for past failures by more arduous
efforts, and more unavailing struggles.

With all his faults, Mr. Shelley was an honest man. His unbelief and his
presumption were parts of a disease, which was not combined in him
either with indifference to human happiness, or contempt for human
infirmities. There was neither selfishness nor malice at the bottom of
his illusions. He was sincere in all his professions; and he practised
what he preached—to his own sufficient cost. He followed up the letter
and the spirit of his theoretical principles in his own person, and was
ready to share both the benefit and the penalty with others. He thought
and acted logically, and was what he professed to be, a sincere lover of
truth, of nature, and of human kind. To all the rage of paradox, he
united an unaccountable candour and severity of reasoning: in spite of
an aristocratic education, he retained in his manners the simplicity of
a primitive apostle. An Epicurean in his sentiments, he lived with the
frugality and abstemiousness of an ascetick. His fault was, that he had
no deference for the opinions of others, too little sympathy with their
feelings (which he thought he had a right to sacrifice, as well as his
own, to a grand ethical experiment)—and trusted too implicitly to the
light of his own mind, and to the warmth of his own impulses. He was
indeed the most striking example we remember of the two extremes
described by Lord Bacon as the great impediments to human improvement,
the love of Novelty, and the love of Antiquity. ‘The first of these
(impediments) is an extreme affection of two extremities, the one
Antiquity, the other Novelty; wherein it seemeth the children of time do
take after the nature and malice of the father. For as he devoureth his
children, so one of them seeketh to devour and suppress the other; while
Antiquity envieth there should be new additions, and Novelty cannot be
content to add, but it must deface. Surely the advice of the Prophet is
the true direction in this matter: _Stand upon the old ways, and see
which is the right and good way, and walk therein_. Antiquity deserveth
that reverence, that men should make a stand thereupon, and discover
what is the best way; but when the discovery is well taken, then to take
progression. And to speak truly, _Antiquitas seculi Juventus mundi_.
These times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not
those which we count ancient, _ordine retrogrado_, by a computation
backwards from ourselves.’ (ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING, Book I. p.
46.)—Such is the text: and Mr. Shelley’s writings are a splendid
commentary on one half of it. Considered in this point of view, his
career may not be uninstructive even to those whom it most offended; and
might be held up as a beacon and warning no less to the bigot than the
sciolist. We wish to speak of the errors of a man of genius with
tenderness. His nature was kind, and his sentiments noble; but in him
the rage of free inquiry and private judgment amounted to a species of
madness. Whatever was new, untried, unheard of, unauthorized, exerted a
kind of fascination over his mind. The examples of the world, the
opinion of others, instead of acting as a check upon him, served but to
impel him forward with double velocity in his wild and hazardous career.
Spurning the world of realities, he rushed into the world of nonentities
and contingencies, like air into a _vacuum_. If a thing was old and
established, this was with him a certain proof of its having no solid
foundation to rest upon: if it was new, it was good and right. Every
paradox was to him a self-evident truth; every prejudice an undoubted
absurdity. The weight of authority, the sanction of ages, the common
consent of mankind, were vouchers only for ignorance, error, and
imposture. Whatever shocked the feelings of others, conciliated his
regard; whatever was light, extravagant, and vain, was to him a
proportionable relief from the dulness and stupidity of established
opinions. The worst of it however was, that he thus gave great
encouragement to those who believe in all received absurdities, and are
wedded to all existing abuses: his extravagance seeming to sanction
their grossness and selfishness, as theirs were a full justification of
his folly and eccentricity. The two extremes in this way often meet,
jostle,—and confirm one another. The infirmities of age are a foil to
the presumption of youth; and ‘there the antics sit,’ mocking one
another—the ape Sophistry pointing with reckless scorn at ‘palsied eld,’
and the bed-rid hag. Legitimacy, rattling her chains, counting her
beads, dipping her hands in blood, and blessing herself from all change
and from every appeal to common sense and reason! Opinion thus
alternates in a round of contradictions: the impatience or obstinacy of
the human mind takes part with, and flies off to one or other of the two
extremes ‘of affection’ and leaves a horrid gap, a blank sense and
feeling in the middle, which seems never likely to be filled up, without
a total change in our mode of proceeding. The martello-towers with which
we are to repress, if we cannot destroy, the systems of fraud and
oppression should not be castles in the air, or clouds in the verge of
the horizon, but the enormous and accumulated pile of abuses which have
arisen out of their continuance. The principles of sound morality,
liberty and humanity, are not to be found only in a few recent writers,
who have discovered the secret of the greatest happiness to the greatest
numbers, but are truths as old as the creation. To be convinced of the
existence of wrong, we should read history rather than poetry: the
levers with which we must work out our regeneration are not the cobwebs
of the brain, but the warm, palpitating fibres of the human heart. It is
the collision of passions and interests, the petulance of party-spirit,
and the perversities of self-will and self-opinion that have been the
great obstacles to social improvement—not stupidity or ignorance; and
the caricaturing one side of the question and shocking the most
pardonable prejudices on the other, is not the way to allay heats or
produce unanimity. By flying to the extremes of scepticism, we make
others shrink back, and shut themselves up in the strongholds of bigotry
and superstition—by mixing up doubtful or offensive matters with
salutary and demonstrable truths, we bring the whole into question,
fly-blow the cause, risk the principle, and give a handle and a pretext
to the enemy to treat all philosophy and all reform as a compost of
crude, chaotic, and monstrous absurdities. We thus arm the virtues as
well as the vices of the community against us; we trifle with their
understandings, and exasperate their self-love; we give to superstition
and injustice all their old security and sanctity, as if they were the
only alternatives of impiety and profligacy, and league the natural with
the selfish prejudices of mankind in hostile array against us. To this
consummation, it must be confessed that too many of Mr. Shelley’s
productions pointedly tend. He makes no account of the opinions of
others, or the consequences of any of his own; but proceeds—tasking his
reason to the utmost to account for every thing, and discarding every
thing as mystery and error for which he cannot account by an effort of
mere intelligence—measuring man, providence, nature, and even his own
heart, by the limits of the understanding—now hallowing high mysteries,
now desecrating pure sentiments, according as they fall in with or
exceeded those limits; and exalting and purifying, with Promethean heat,
whatever he does not confound and debase.

Mr. Shelley died, it seems, with a volume of Mr. Keats’s poetry grasped
with one hand in his bosom! These are two out of four poets, patriots
and friends, who have visited Italy within a few years, both of whom
have been soon hurried to a more distant shore. Keats died young; and
‘yet his infelicity had years too many.’ A canker had blighted the
tender bloom that o’erspread a face in which youth and genius strove
with beauty; the shaft was sped—venal, vulgar, venomous, that drove him
from his country, with sickness and penury for companions, and followed
him to his grave. And yet there are those who could trample on the faded
flower—men to whom breaking hearts are a subject of merriment—who laugh
loud over the silent urn of Genius, and play out their game of venality
and infamy with the crumbling bones of their victims! To this band of
immortals a third has since been added!—a mightier genius, a haughtier
spirit, whose stubborn impatience and Achilles-like pride only Death
could quell. Greece, Italy, the world, have lost their poet-hero; and
his death has spread a wider gloom, and been recorded with a deeper awe,
than has waited on the obsequies of any of the many great who have died
in our remembrance. Even detraction has been silent at his tomb; and the
more generous of his enemies have fallen into the rank of his mourners.
But he set like the sun in his glory; and his orb was greatest and
brightest at the last; for his memory is now consecrated no less by
freedom than genius. He probably fell a martyr to his zeal against
tyrants. He attached himself to the cause of Greece, and dying, clung to
it with a convulsive grasp, and has thus gained a niche in her history;
for whatever _she_ claims as hers is immortal, even in decay, as the
marble sculptures on the columns of her fallen temples!

The volume before us is introduced by an imperfect but touching Preface
by Mrs. Shelley, and consists almost wholly of original pieces, with the
exception of _Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude_, which was out of
print; and the admirable Translation of the _May-day Night_, from
Goethe’s Faustus.

_Julian and Maddalo_ (the first Poem in the collection) is a
Conversation or Tale, full of that thoughtful and romantic humanity, but
rendered perplexing and unattractive by that veil of shadowy or of
glittering obscurity, which distinguished Mr. Shelley’s writings. The
depth and tenderness of his feelings seems often to have interfered with
the expression of them, as the sight becomes blind with tears. A dull,
waterish vapour, clouds the aspect of his philosophical poetry, like
that mysterious gloom which he has himself described as hanging over the
Medusa’s Head of Leonardo da Vinci. The metre of this poem, too, will
not be pleasing to every body. It is in the antique taste of the rhyming
parts of Beaumont and Fletcher and Ben Jonson—blank verse in its freedom
and unbroken flow, falling into rhymes that appear altogether
accidental—very colloquial in the diction—and sometimes sufficiently
prosaic. But it is easier showing than describing it. We give the
introductory passage.

‘I rode one evening with Count Maddalo
Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow
Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand
Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand,
Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,
Such as from earth’s embrace the salt ooze breeds,
Is this: an uninhabited sea-side,
Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried,
Abandons; and no other object breaks
The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes
Broken and unrepaired, and the tide makes
A narrow space of level sand thereon,
Where ’twas our wont to ride while day went down.
This ride was my delight. I love all waste
And solitary places; where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be:
And such was this wide ocean, and this shore
More barren than its billows; and yet more
Than all, with a remember’d friend I love
To ride as then I rode;—for the winds drove
The living spray along the sunny air
Into our faces; the blue heavens were bare,
Stripped to their depths by the awakening North;
And, from the waves, sound like delight broke forth
Harmonising with solitude, and sent
Into our hearts aerial merriment.
So, as we rode, we talked; and the swift thought,
Winging itself with laughter, lingered not,
But flew from brain to brain,—such glee was ours,
Charged with light memories of remembered hours,
None slow enough for sadness: till we came
Homeward, which always makes the spirit tame.’ &c.
‘Meanwhile the sun paused ere it should alight
O’er the horizon of the mountains—Oh!
How beautiful is sunset, when the glow
Of heaven descends upon a land like thee,
Thou paradise of exiles, Italy!
Thy mountains, seas, and vineyards, and the towers
Of cities they encircle!—It was ours
To stand on thee, beholding it: and then,
Just where we had dismounted, the Count’s men
Were waiting for us with the gondola.
As those who pause on some delightful way,
Tho’ bent on pleasant pilgrimage, we stood,
Looking upon the evening and the flood,
Which lay between the city and the shore,
Paved with the image of the sky; the hoar
And aery Alps, towards the North, appeared,
Thro’ mist, an heaven-sustaining bulwark, reared
Between the east and west; and half the sky
Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry,
Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew
Down the steep west into a wondrous hue
Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent
Where the swift sun yet paused in his descent
Among the many-folded hills—they were
Those famous Euganean hills, which bear,
As seen from Lido thro’ the harbour piles,
The likeness of a clump of peaked isles—
And then, as if the earth and sea had been
Dissolv’d into one lake of fire, were seen
Those mountains towering, as from waves of flame,
Around the vaporous sun, from which there came
The inmost purple spirit of light, and made
Their very peaks transparent. “Ere it fade,”
Said my companion, “I will show you soon
A better station.” So, o’er the lagune
We glided; and from that funereal bark
I leaned, and saw the city, and could mark
How from their many isles, in evening’s gleam,
Its temples and its palaces did seem
Like fabrics of enchantment piled to Heaven.
I was about to speak, when—“We are even
Now at the point I meant”—said Maddalo,
And bade the gondolieri cease to row.
“Look, Julian, on the west, and listen well
If you hear not a deep and heavy bell.”
I looked, and saw between us and the sun
A building on an island, such an one
As age to age might add, for uses vile—
A windowless, deformed, and dreary pile;
And on the top an open tower, where hung
A bell, which in the radiance swayed and swung,
We could just hear its hoarse and iron tongue:
The broad sun sank behind it, and it tolled
In strong and black relief. “What you behold
Shall be the madhouse and its belfry tower,”—
Said Maddalo, “and even at this hour,
Those who may cross the water hear that bell,
Which calls the maniacs, each one from his cell,
To vespers,” &c.

‘The broad star
Of day meanwhile had sunk behind the hill;
And the black bell became invisible;
And the red tower looked grey; and all between,
The churches, ships, and palaces, were seen
Huddled in gloom. Into the purple sea
The orange hues of heaven sunk silently.
We hardly spoke, and soon the gondola
Conveyed me to my lodging by the way.’

The march of these lines is, it must be confessed, slow, solemn, sad:
there is a sluggishness of feeling, a dearth of imagery, an unpleasant
glare of lurid light. It appears to us, that in some poets, as well as
in some painters, the organ of colour (to speak in the language of the
adepts) predominates over that of form; and Mr. Shelley is of the
number. We have everywhere a profusion of dazzling hues, of glancing
splendours, of floating shadows, but the objects on which they fall are
bare, indistinct, and wild. There is something in the preceding extract
that reminds us of the arid style and matter of Crabbe’s versification,
or that apes the labour and throes of parturition of Wordsworth’s blank
verse. It is the preface to a story of Love and Madness—of mental
anguish and philosophic remedies—not very intelligibly told, and left
with most of its mysteries unexplained, in the true spirit of the modern
metaphysical style—in which we suspect there is a due mixture of
affectation and meagreness of invention.

This poem is, however, in Mr. Shelley’s best and _least mannered_
manner. If it has less brilliancy, it has less extravagance and
confusion. It is in his stanza-poetry, that his Muse chiefly runs riot,
and baffles all pursuit of common comprehension or critical acumen. The
_Witch of Atlas_, the _Triumph of Life_, and _Marianne’s Dream_, are
rhapsodies or allegories of this description; full of fancy and of fire,
with glowing allusions and wild machinery, but which it is difficult to
read through, from the disjointedness of the materials, the incongruous
metaphors and violent transitions, and of which, after reading them
through, it is impossible, in most instances, to guess the drift or the
moral. They abound in horrible imaginings, like records of a ghastly
dream;—life, death, genius, beauty, victory, earth, air, ocean, the
trophies of the past, the shadows of the world to come, are huddled
together in a strange and hurried dance of words, and all that appears
clear, is the passion and paroxysm of thought of the poet’s spirit. The
poem entitled the _Triumph of Life_, is in fact a new and terrific
_Dance of Death_; but it is thus Mr. Shelley transposes the appellations
of the commonest things, and subsists only in the violence of contrast.
How little this poem is deserving of its title, how worthy it is of its
author, what an example of the waste of power, and of genius ‘made as
flax,’ and devoured by its own elementary ardours, let the reader judge
from the concluding stanzas.

... ‘The grove
Grew dense with shadows to its inmost covers,
The earth was grey with phantoms, and the air
Was peopled with dim forms; as when there hovers

A flock of vampire-bats before the glare
Of the tropic sun, bringing, ere evening,
Strange night upon some Indian vale;—thus were

Phantoms diffused around; and some did fling
Shadows of shadows, yet unlike themselves,
Behind them; some like eaglets on the wing

Were lost in the white day; others like elves
Danced in a thousand unimagined shapes
Upon the sunny streams and grassy shelves;

And others sate chattering shrill like restless apes
On vulgar hands, * * * * *
Some made a cradle of the ermined capes

Of kingly mantles; some across the tire
Of pontiffs rode, like demons; others played
Under the crown which girded with empire

A baby’s or an idiot’s brow, and made
Their nests in it. The old anatomies
Sate hatching their bare broods under the shade

Of demon wings, and laughed from their dead eyes
To reassume the delegated power,
Array’d in which those worms did monarchize,

Who make this earth their charnel. Others more
Humble, like falcons, sate upon the fist
Of common men, and round their heads did soar;

Or like small gnats and flies, as thick as mist
On evening marshes, thronged about the brow
Of lawyers, statesmen, priest and theorist;—

And others, like discoloured flakes of snow,
On fairest bosoms and the sunniest hair,
Fell, and were melted by the youthful glow

Which they extinguished * * * * *

The marble brow of youth was cleft
With care; and in those eyes where once hope shone,
Desire, even like a lioness bereft

Of her last cub, glared ere it died; each one
Of that great crowd sent forth incessantly
These shadows, numerous as the dead leaves blown

In autumn evening from a poplar tree.
Each like himself, and like each other were
At first; but some, distorted, seemed to be

Obscure clouds, moulded by the casual air;
And of this stuff the car’s creative ray
Wrapt all the busy phantoms that were there,

As the sun shapes the clouds, &c.’

Any thing more filmy, enigmatical, discontinuous, unsubstantial than
this, we have not seen; nor yet more full of morbid genius and vivifying
soul. We cannot help preferring _The Witch of Atlas_ to _Alastor, or the
Spirit of Solitude_; for, though the purport of each is equally
perplexing and undefined, (both being a sort of mental voyage through
the unexplored regions of space and time), the execution of the one is
much less dreary and lamentable than that of the other. In the ‘Witch,’
he has indulged his fancy more than his melancholy, and wantoned in the
felicity of embryo and crude conceits even to excess.

‘And there lay Visions, swift, and sweet, and quaint,
Each in its thin sheath like a chrysalis;
Some eager to burst forth, some weak and faint
With the soft burthen of intensest bliss;

‘And odours in a kind of aviary
Of ever-blooming Eden-trees she kept,
Clipt in a floating net, a love-sick Fairy
Had woven from dew-beams while the moon yet slept;
As bats at the wired window of a dairy,
They beat their vans; and each was an adept,
When loosed and missioned, making wings of winds,
To stir sweet thoughts or sad in destined minds.’ p. 34.

We give the description of the progress of the ‘Witch’s’ boat as a
slight specimen of what we have said of Mr. Shelley’s involved style and
imagery.

‘And down the streams which clove those mountains vast,
Around their inland islets, and amid
The panther-peopled forests, whose shade cast
Darkness and odours, and a pleasure hid
In melancholy gloom, the pinnace past:
By many a star-surrounded pyramid
Of icy crag cleaving the purple sky,
And caverns yawning round unfathomably.

· · · · ·

‘And down the earth-quaking cataracts which shiver
Their snow-like waters into golden air,
Or under chasms unfathomable ever
Sepulchre them, till in their rage they tear
A subterranean portal for the river,
It fled—the circling _sunbows_ did upbear
Its fall down the hoar precipice of spray,
Lighting it far upon its lampless way.’

This we conceive to be the very height of wilful extravagance and
mysticism. Indeed it is curious to remark every where the proneness to
the marvellous and supernatural, in one who so resolutely set his face
against every received mystery, and all traditional faith. Mr. Shelley
must have possessed, in spite of all his obnoxious and indiscreet
scepticism, a large share of credulity and wondering curiosity in his
composition, which he reserved from common use, and bestowed upon his
own inventions and picturesque caricatures. To every other species of
imposture or disguise he was inexorable; and indeed it is only his
antipathy to established creeds and legitimate crowns that ever tears
the veil from his _ideal_ idolatries, and renders him clear and
explicit. Indignation makes him pointed and intelligible enough, and
breathes into his verse a spirit very different from his own boasted
spirit of Love.

The _Letter to a Friend in London_ shows the author in a pleasing and
familiar, but somewhat prosaic light; and his _Prince Athanase, a
Fragment_, is, we suspect, intended as a portrait of the writer. It is
amiable, thoughtful, and not much overcharged. We had designed to give
an extract, but from the apparently personal and doubtful interest
attached to it, perhaps it had better be read altogether, or not at all.
We rather choose to quote a part of the _Ode to Naples_, during her
brief revolution,—in which immediate and strong local feelings have at
once raised and pointed Mr. Shelley’s style, and made of light-winged
“toys of feathered cupid,” the flaming ministers of Wrath and Justice.

· · · · ·

‘Naples! thou Heart of men which ever pantest
Naked, beneath the lidless eye of heaven!
Elysian City which to calm enchantest
The mutinous air and sea: they round thee, even
As sleep round Love, are driven!
Metropolis of a ruined Paradise
Long lost, late won, and yet but half regained!

· · · · ·

‘What though Cimmerian Anarchs dare blaspheme
Freedom and thee! thy shield is as a mirror
To make their blind slaves see, and with fierce gleam
To turn his hungry sword upon the wearer.
A new Acteon’s error
Shall their’s have been—devoured by their own hounds!
Be thou like the imperial Basilisk
Killing thy foe with unapparent wounds!
Gaze on oppression, till at that dead risk
Aghast she pass from the Earth’s disk,
Fear not, but gaze—for freemen mightier grow,
And slaves more feeble, gazing on their foe;
If Hope and Truth and Justice may avail,
Thou shalt be great—All hail!

· · · · ·

‘Didst thou not start to hear Spain’s thrilling pæan
From land to land re-echoed solemnly,
Till silence became music? From the Æean[18]
To the cold Alps, eternal Italy
Starts to hear thine! The Sea
Which paves the desart streets of Venice, laughs
In light and music; widowed Genoa wan
By moonlight spells ancestral epitaphs,
Murmuring, where is Doria? fair Milan,
Within whose veins long ran
The vipers[19] palsying venom, lifts her heel
To braise his head. The signal and the seal
(If Hope and Truth and Justice can avail)
Art Thou of all these hopes.—O hail!

‘Florence! beneath the sun,
Of cities fairest one,
Blushes within her bower for Freedom’s expectation;
From eyes of quenchless hope
Rome tears the priestly cope,
As ruling once by power, so now by admiration
An athlete stript to run
From a remoter station
For the high prize lost on Philippi’s shore:—
As then Hope, Truth, and Justice did avail,
So now may Fraud and Wrong!—O hail!

‘Hear ye the march as of the Earth-born Forms
Arrayed against the everliving Gods?
The crash and darkness of a thousand storms
Bursting their inaccessible abodes
Of crags and thunder-clouds?
See ye the banners blazoned to the day,
Inwrought with emblems of barbaric pride?
Dissonant threats kill Silence far away,
The serene Heaven which wraps our Eden, wide
With iron light is dyed!
The Anarchs of the North lead forth their legions,
Like Chaos o’er creation, uncreating;
An hundred tribes nourished on strange religions
And lawless slaveries,—down the aërial regions
Of the white Alps, desolating,
Famished wolves that bide no waiting,
Blotting the glowing footsteps of old glory,
Trampling our columned cities into dust,
Their dull and savage lust
On Beauty’s corse to sickness satiating—
They come! The fields they tread look black and hoary
With fire—from their red feet the streams run gory!

‘Great Spirit, deepest Love!
Which rulest and dost move
All things which live and are, within the Italian shore;
Who spreadest heaven around it,
Whose woods, rocks, waves, surround it:
Who sittest in thy star, o’er Ocean’s western floor,
Spirit of beauty! at whose soft command
The sunbeams and the showers distil its foison
From the Earth’s bosom chill;
O bid those beams be each a blinding brand
Of lightning! bid those showers be dews of poison!
Bid the Earth’s plenty kill!
Bid thy bright heaven above,
Whilst light and darkness bound it,
Be their tomb who planned
To make it ours and thine!
Or with thine harmonising ardours fill
And raise thy sons, as o’er the prone horizon
Thy lamp feeds every twilight wave with fire—
Be man’s high hope and unextinct desire
The instrument to work thy will divine!
Then clouds from sunbeams, antelopes from leopards,
And frowns and fears from Thee
Would not more swiftly flee
Than Celtic wolves from the Ausonian shepherds.
Whatever, Spirit, from thy starry shrine
Thou yieldest or withholdest, O let be
This city of thy worship ever free!’

This Ode for Liberty, though somewhat turbid and overloaded in the
diction, we regard as a fair specimen of Mr. Shelley’s highest
powers—whose eager animation wanted only a greater sternness and
solidity to be sublime. The poem is dated _September 1820_. Such were
then the author’s aspirations. He lived to see the result,—and yet Earth
does not roll its billows over the heads of its oppressors! The reader
may like to contrast with this the milder strain of the following
stanzas, addressed to the same city in a softer and more desponding
mood.

‘The sun is warm, the sky is clear,
The waves are dancing fast and bright,
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
The purple noon’s transparent light
Around its unexpanded buds;
Like many a voice of one delight,
The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,
The City’s voice itself is soft, like Solitude’s.

‘I see the Deep’s untrampled floor
With green and purple seaweeds strown;
I see the waves upon the shore,
Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown:
I sit upon the sands alone,
The lightning of the noon-tide ocean
Is flashing round me, and a tone
Arises from its measured motion,
How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion.

‘Yet now despair itself is mild,
Even as the winds and waters are;
I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne and yet must bear,
Till death like sleep might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air
My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea
Breathe o’er my dying brain its last monotony.

‘Some might lament that I were cold,
As I, when this sweet day is gone,
Which my lost heart, too soon grown old,
Insults with this untimely moan;
They might lament—for I am one
Whom men love not,—and yet regret,
Unlike this day, which, when the sun
Shall on its stainless glory set,
Will linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet.’

We pass on to some of Mr. Shelley’s smaller pieces and translations,
which we think are in general excellent and highly interesting. His
_Hymn of Pan_ we do not consider equal to Mr. Keats’s sounding lines in
the Endymion. His _Mont Blanc_ is full of beauties and of defects; but
it is akin to its subject, and presents a wild and gloomy desolation.
GINEVRA, a fragment founded on a story in the first volume of the
‘_Florentine Observer_,’ is like a troublous dream, disjointed, painful,
oppressive, or like a leaden cloud, from which the big tears fall, and
the spirit of the poet mutters deep-toned thunder. We are too much
subject to these voluntary inflictions, these ‘moods of mind,’ these
effusions of ‘weakness and melancholy,’ in the perusal of modern poetry.
It has shuffled off, no doubt, its old pedantry and formality; but has
at the same time lost all shape or purpose, except that of giving vent
to some morbid feeling of the moment. The writer thus discharges a fit
of the spleen or a paradox, and expects the world to admire and be
satisfied. We are no longer annoyed at seeing the luxuriant growth of
nature and fancy clipped into armchairs and peacocks’ tails; but there
is danger of having its stately products choked with unchecked
underwood, or weighed down with gloomy nightshade, or eaten up with
personality, like ivy clinging round and eating into the sturdy oak! The
_Dirge_, at the conclusion of this fragment, is an example of the manner
in which this craving after novelty, this desire ‘to elevate and
surprise,’ leads us to ‘overstep the modesty of nature,’ and the bounds
of decorum.

‘Ere the sun through heaven once more has roll’d
_The rats in her heart
Will have made their nest_,
And the worms be alive in her golden hair,
While the spirit that guides the sun,
Sits throned in his flaming chair,
She shall sleep.’

The ‘worms’ in this stanza are the old and traditional appendages of the
grave;—the ‘rats’ are new and unwelcome intruders; but a modern artist
would rather shock, and be disgusting and extravagant, than produce no
effect at all, or be charged with a want of genius and originality. In
the unfinished scenes of Charles I., (a drama on which Mr. Shelley was
employed at his death) the _radical_ humour of the author breaks forth,
but ‘in good set terms’ and specious oratory. We regret that his
premature fate has intercepted this addition to our historical drama.
From the fragments before us, we are not sure that it would be fair to
give any specimen.

The TRANSLATIONS from Euripides, Calderon, and Goethe in this Volume,
will give great pleasure to the scholar and to the general reader. They
are executed with equal fidelity and spirit. If the present publication
contained only the two last pieces in it, the _Prologue in Heaven_, and
the _May-day Night_ of the Faust (the first of which Lord Leveson Gower
has omitted, and the last abridged, in his very meritorious translation
of that Poem), the intellectual world would receive it with an _All
Hail!_ We shall enrich our pages with a part of the _May-day Night_,
which the Noble Poet has deemed untranslateable.

‘_Chorus of Witches._ The stubble is yellow, the corn is green,
Now to the brocken the witches go;
The mighty multitude here may be seen
Gathering, witch and wizard, below.
Sir Urean is sitting aloft in the air;
Hey over stock; and hey over stone!
’Twixt witches and incubi, what shall be done?
Tell it who dare! tell it who dare!

_A Voice._ Upon a snow-swine, whose farrows were nine,
Old Baubo rideth alone.

_Chorus._ Honour her to whom honour is due,
Old mother Baubo, honour to you!
An able sow, with old Baubo upon her,
Is worthy of glory, and worthy of honour!
The legion of witches is coming behind,
Darkening the night, and outspeeding the wind.

_A Voice._ Which way comest thou?

_A Voice._ Over Ilsenstein;
The owl was awake in the white moonshine;
I saw her at rest in her downy nest,
And she stared at me with her broad, bright eye.

_Voices._ And you may now as well take your course on to Hell,
Since you ride by so fast, on the headlong blast.

_A Voice._ She dropt poison upon me as I past.
Here are the wounds—

_Chorus of Witches._ Come away! come along!
The way is wide, the way is long,
But what is that for a Bedlam throng?
Stick with the prong, and scratch with the broom!
The child in the cradle lies strangled at home,
And the mother is clapping her hands—

_Semi-Chorus of Wizards I._ We glide in
Like snails when the women are all away;
And from a house once given over to sin
Woman has a thousand steps to stray.

_Semi-Chorus II._ A thousand steps must a woman take,
Where a man but a single spring will make.

_Voices above._ Come with us, come with us, from Felunsee.

_Voices below._ With what joy would we fly, through the upper sky!
We are washed, we are ’nointed, stark naked are we:
But our toil and our pain is forever in vain.

_Both Chorusses._ The wind is still, the stars are fled,
The melancholy moon is dead;
The magic notes, like spark on spark,
Drizzle, whistling through the dark.
Come away!

_Voices below._ Stay, oh stay!

_Meph._ What thronging, dashing, raging, rustling;
What whispering, babbling, hissing, bustling;
What glimmering, spurting, stinking, burning,
As Heaven and Earth were overturning.
There is a true witch-element about us.
Take hold on me, or we shall be divided—
Where are you?

_Faust (from a distance)._ Here.

_Meph._ What!
I must exert my authority in the house.
Place for young Voland! Pray make way, good people.
Take hold on me, Doctor, and with one step
Let us escape from this unpleasant crowd:
They are too mad for people of my sort.
I see young witches naked there, and old ones
Wisely attired with greater decency.
Be guided now by me, and you shall buy
A pound of pleasure with a drachm of trouble.
I hear them tune their instruments—one must
Get used to this damned scraping. Come, I’ll lead you
Among them; and what there you do and see
As a fresh compact ’twixt us two shall be.
How say you now? This space is wide enough—
Look forth, you cannot see the end of it—
An hundred bonfires burn in rows, and they
Who throng around them seem innumerable:
Dancing and drinking, jabbering, making love,
And cooking are at work. Now tell me, friend,
What is there better in the world than this?

_Faust._ In introducing us, do you assume
The character of wizzard or of devil?

_Meph._ In truth, I generally go about
In strict incognito: and yet one likes
To wear one’s orders upon gala days.
I have no ribbon at my knee; but here
At home, the cloven foot is honourable.
See you that snail there?—she comes creeping up,
And with her feeling eyes hath smelt out something.
I could not, if I would, mask myself here.
Come now, we’ll go about from fire to fire:
I’ll be the pimp and you shall be the lover.’ p. 409.

The preternatural imagery in all this medley is, we confess,
(comparatively speaking) meagre and monotonous; but there is a squalid
nudity, and a fiendish irony and scorn thrown over the whole, that is
truly edifying. The scene presently after proceeds thus.

‘_Meph._ Why do you let that fair girl pass from you,
Who sung so sweetly to you in the dance?

_Faust._ A red mouse in the middle of her singing
Sprung from her mouth!

_Meph._ That was all right, my friend;
Be it enough that the mouse was not grey.
Do not disturb your hour of happiness
With close consideration of such trifles.

_Faust._ Then saw I—

_Meph._ What?

_Faust._ Seest thou not a pale
Fair girl, standing alone, far, far away?
She drags herself now forward with slow steps,
And seems as if she moved with shackled feet;
I cannot overcome the thought that she
Is like poor Margaret!

_Meph._ Let it be—pass on—
No good can come of it—it is not well
To meet it.—It is an enchanted phantom,
A lifeless idol; with its numbing look
It freezes up the blood of man; and they
Who meet its ghastly stare are turned to stone,
Like those who saw Medusa.

_Faust._ Oh, too true!
Her eyes are like the eyes of a fresh corpse
Which no beloved hand has closed, alas!
That is the heart which Margaret yielded to me—
Those are the lovely limbs which I enjoyed!

_Meph._ It is all magic, poor deluded fool;
She looks to every one like his first love.

_Faust._ Oh, what delight! what woe! I cannot turn
My looks from her sweet piteous countenance.
How strangely does a single blood-red line,
Not broader than the sharp edge of a knife,
Adorn her lovely neck!

_Meph._ Aye, she can carry
Her head under her arm upon occasion;
Perseus has cut it off for her! These pleasures
End in delusion!’—

The latter part of the foregoing scene is to be found in both
translations; but we prefer Mr. Shelley’s, if not for its elegance, for
its simplicity and force. Lord Leveson Gower has given, at the end of
his volume, a translation of Lessing’s Faust, as having perhaps
furnished the hint for the larger production. There is an old tragedy of
our own, founded on the same tradition, by Marlowe, in which the author
has treated the subject according to the spirit of poetry, and the
learning of his age. He has not evaded the main incidents of the fable
(it was not the fashion of the dramatists of his day), nor sunk the
chief character in glosses and episodes (however subtle or alluring),
but has described Faustus’s love of learning, his philosophic dreams and
raptures, his religious horrors and melancholy fate, with appropriate
gloom or gorgeousness of colouring. The character of the old
enthusiastic inquirer after the philosopher’s stone, and dealer with the
Devil, is nearly lost sight of in the German play: its bold development
forms the chief beauty and strength of the old English one. We shall
not, we hope, be accused of wandering too far from the subject, if we
conclude with some account of it in the words of a contemporary writer.
‘The _Life and Death of Dr. Faustus_, though an imperfect and unequal
performance, is Marlowe’s greatest work. Faustus himself is a rude
sketch, but is a gigantic one. This character may be considered as a
personification of the pride of will and eagerness of curiosity,
sublimed beyond the reach of fear and remorse. He is hurried away, and,
as it were, devoured by a tormenting desire to enlarge his knowledge to
the utmost bounds of nature and art, and to extend his power with his
knowledge. He would realize all the fictions of a lawless imagination,
would solve the most subtle speculations of abstruse reason; and for
this purpose, sets at defiance all mortal consequences, and leagues
himself with demoniacal power, with “fate and metaphysical aid.” The
idea of witchcraft and necromancy, once the dread of the vulgar, and the
darling of the visionary recluse, seems to have had its origin in the
restless tendency of the human mind, to conceive of, and aspire to, more
than it can achieve by natural means; and in the obscure apprehension,
that the gratification of this extravagant and unauthorized desire can
only be attained by the sacrifice of all our ordinary hopes and better
prospects, to the infernal agents that lend themselves to its
accomplishment. Such is the foundation of the present story. Faustus, in
his impatience to fulfil at once, and for a few short years, all the
desires and conceptions of his soul, is willing to give in exchange his
soul and body to the great enemy of mankind. Whatever he fancies,
becomes by this means present to his sense: whatever he commands, is
done. He calls back time past, and anticipates the future: the visions
of antiquity pass before him, Babylon in all its glory, Paris and Œnone:
all the projects of philosophers, or creations of the poet, pay tribute
at his feet: all the delights of fortune, of ambition, of pleasure and
of learning, are centred in his person; and, from a short-lived dream of
supreme felicity and drunken power, he sinks into an abyss of darkness
and perdition. This is the alternative to which he submits; the bond
which he signs with his blood! As the outline of the character is grand
and daring, the execution is abrupt and fearful. The thoughts are vast
and irregular, and the style halts and staggers under them.’[20]

LADY MORGAN’S LIFE OF SALVATOR

VOL. XL.] [_July 1824._

We are not among the devoted admirers of Lady Morgan. She is a clever
and lively writer—but not very judicious, and not very natural. Since
she has given up making novels, we do not think she has added much to
her reputation—and indeed is rather more liable than before to the
charge of tediousness and presumption. There is no want, however, either
of amusement or instruction in her late performances—and we have no
doubt she would write very agreeably, if she was only a little less
ambitious of being always fine and striking. But though we are thus
clear-sighted to her defects, we must say, that we have never seen
anything more utterly unjust, or more disgusting and disgraceful, than
the abuse she has had to encounter from some of our Tory journals—abuse,
of which we shall say no more at present, than that it is incomparably
less humiliating to the object than to the author.

Common justice seemed to require this observation from us—nor will it
appear altogether out of place when we add, that we cannot but suspect
that it is to a feeling connected with that subject that we are indebted
for the work now before us. Salvator Rosa was, like his fair biographer,
in hostility with the High-church and High-monarchy men of his day; and
the enemy of the Holy Alliance, in the nineteenth century, must have
followed with peculiar interest the fortunes of an artist who was so
obnoxious to the suspicions of the Holy Office in the seventeenth.

There are few works more engaging than those which reveal to us the
private history of eminent individuals; the lives of painters seem to be
even more interesting than those of almost any other class of men; and,
among painters, there are few names of greater note, or that have a more
powerful attraction, than that of Salvator Rosa. We are not sure,
however, that Lady Morgan’s work is not, upon the whole, more calculated
to dissolve than to rivet the spell which these circumstances might, at
first, throw over the reader’s mind. The great charm of biography
consists in the individuality of the details, the familiar tone of the
incidents, the bringing us acquainted with the persons of men whom we
have formerly known only by their works or names, the absence of all
exaggeration or pretension, and the immediate appeal to facts instead of
theories. We are afraid, that, if tried by these rules, Lady Morgan will
be found _not_ to have written _biography_. A great part of the work is,
accordingly, very fabulous and apocryphal. We are supplied with few
anecdotes or striking _traits_, and have few _data_ to go upon, during
the early and most anxious period of Salvator’s life; but a fine
opportunity is in this way afforded to _conjecture_ how he did or did
not pass his time; in what manner, and at what precise era, his peculiar
talents first developed themselves; and how he must have felt in certain
situations, supposing him ever to have been placed in them. In one
place, for example, she employs several pages in describing Salvator’s
being taken by his father from his village-home to the College of
Somasco, with a detailed account of the garments in which he and his
father may be presumed to have been dressed; the adieus of his mother
and sisters; the streets, the churches by which they passed; in short,
with an admirable panoramic view of the city of Naples and its environs,
as it would appear to any modern traveller; and an assurance at the end,
that ‘Such was the scenery of the Vomiro in the beginning of the
seventeenth century; such is it now!’ Added to all which, we have, at
every turn, pertinent allusions to celebrated persons who visited Rome
and Italy in the same century, and perhaps wandered in the same
solitudes, or were hid in the recesses of the same ruins; and learned
dissertations on the state of the arts, sciences, morals, and politics,
from the earliest records up to the present day. On the meagre thread of
biography, in short, Lady Morgan has been ambitious to string the
flowers of literature and the pearls of philosophy, and to strew over
the obscure and half-forgotten origin of poor Salvator the colours of a
sanguine enthusiasm and a florid imagination! So fascinated indeed is
she with the splendour of her own style, that whenever she has a simple
fact or well-authenticated anecdote to relate, she is compelled to
apologize for the homeliness of the circumstance, as if the flat
realities of her story were unworthy accompaniments to the fine
imaginations with which she has laboured to exalt it.

We could have wished, certainly, that she had shown less pretension in
this respect. Women write well, only when they write naturally: And
therefore we could dispense with their inditing prize-essays or solving
_academic questions_;—and should be far better pleased with Lady Morgan
if she would condescend to a more ordinary style, and not insist
continually on playing the diplomatist in petticoats, and strutting the
little Gibbon of her age!

Another circumstance that takes from the interest of the present work
is, that the subject of it was both an author and an artist, or, as Lady
Morgan somewhat affectedly expresses it, a painter-poet. It is chiefly
in the latter part of this compound character, or as a satirist, comic
writer and actor, that he comes upon the stage in these volumes; and the
enchantment of the scene is hurt by it.

The great secret of our curiosity respecting the lives of painters is,
that they seem to be a different race of beings, and to speak a
different language from ourselves. We want to see what is the connecting
link between pictures and books, and how colours will translate into
words. There is something mystical and anomalous to our conceptions in
the existence of persons who talk by natural signs, and express their
thoughts by pointing to the objects they wish to represent. When they
put pen to paper, it is as if a dumb person should stammer out his
meaning for the first time, or as if the bark of a tree (repeating the
miracle in Virgil) should open its lips and discourse. We have no notion
how Titian could be witty, or Raphael learned; and we wait for the
solution of the problem, as for the result of some curious experiment in
natural history. Titian’s acquitting himself of a compliment to Charles
V., or Raphael’s writing a letter to a friend, describing his idea of
the Galatea, excites our wonder, and holds us in a state of breathless
suspense, more than the first having painted all the masterpieces of the
Escurial, or than the latter’s having realized the divine idea in his
imagination. Because they have a language which we want, we fancy they
must want, or cannot be at home in ours;—we start and blush to find,
that, though few are painters, all men are, and naturally must be,
orators and poets. We have a stronger desire to see the autographs of
artists than of authors or emperors; for we somehow cannot imagine in
what manner they would form their tottering letters, or sign their
untaught names. We in fact exercise a sort of mental superiority and
imaginary patronage over them (delightful in proportion as it is mixed
up with a sense of awe and homage in other respects); watch their
progress like that of grown children; are charmed with the imperfect
glimmerings of wit or sense; and secretly expect to find them,—or
express all the impertinence of an affected surprise if we do not—what
Claude Lorraine is here represented to have been out of his painting
room, little better than natural changelings and drivellers. It pleases
us therefore to be told, that Gaspar Poussin, when he was not painting,
rode a hunting; that Nicolas was (it is pretended) a miser and a
pedant—that Domenichino was retired and modest, and Guido and Annibal
Caracci unfortunate! This is as it should be, and flatters our
self-love. Their works stand out to ages bold and palpable, and dazzle
or inspire by their beauty and their brilliancy;—That is enough—the rest
sinks into the ground of obscurity, or is only brought out as something
odd and unaccountable by the patient efforts of good-natured curiosity.
But all this fine theory and flutter of contradictory expectations is
balked and knocked on the head at once, when, instead of a dim and
shadowy figure in the back-ground, a mere name, of which nothing is
remembered but its immortal works, a poor creature performing miracles
of art, and not knowing how it has performed them, a person steps
forward, bold, gay, _gaillard_, with all his faculties about him, master
of a number of accomplishments which he is not backward to display,
mingling with the throng, looking defiance around, able to answer for
himself, acquainted with his own merits, and boasting of them, not
merely having the gift of speech, but a celebrated _improvisatore_,
musician, comic actor and buffoon, patriot and cynic, reciting and
talking equally well, taking up his pen to write satires, and laying it
down to paint them. There is a vulgarity in all this practical bustle
and restless stage-effect, that takes away from that abstracted and
simple idea of art which at once attracts and baffles curiosity, like a
distinct element in nature. ‘Painting,’ said Michael Angelo, is jealous,
and requires the whole man to herself.’ And there is some thing sacred
and privileged in the character of those heirs of fame, and their
noiseless reputation, which ought not, we think, to be gossipped to the
air, babbled to the echo, or proclaimed by beat of drum at the corners
of streets, like a procession or a puppet-show. We may peep and pry into
the ordinary life of painters, but it will not do to strip them
stark-naked. A speaking portrait of them—an anecdote or two—an
expressive saying dropped by chance—an incident marking the bent of
their genius, or its fate, are delicious; but here we should draw the
curtain, or we shall profane this sort of image-worship. Least of all do
we wish to be entertained with private brawls, or professional
squabbles, or multifarious pretensions. ‘The essence of genius,’ as Lady
Morgan observes, ‘is concentration.’ So is that of enthusiasm. We lay
down the ‘Life and Times of Salvator Rosa,’ therefore, with less
interest in the subject than when we took it up. We had rather not read
it. Instead of the old and floating traditions on the subject,—instead
of the romantic name and romantic pursuits of the daring copyist of
Nature, conversing with her rudest forms, or lost in lonely
musing,—eyeing the clouds that roll over his head, or listening to the
waterfal, or seeing the fresh breeze waving the mountain-pines, or
leaning against the side of an impending rock, or marking the bandit
that issues from its clefts, ‘housing with wild men, with wild usages,’
himself unharmed and free,—and bequeathing the fruit of his
uninterrupted retirement and out-of-doors studies as the best legacy to
posterity,—we have the Coviello of the Carnival, the _causeur_ of the
saloons, the political malecontent, the satirist, sophist, caricaturist,
the trafficker with Jews, the wrangler with courts and academies, and,
last of all, the painter of history, despising his own best works, and
angry with all who admired or purchased them.

The worst fault that Lady Morgan has committed is in siding with this
infirmity of poor Salvator, and pampering him into a second Michael
Angelo. The truth is, that the judgment passed upon him by his
contemporaries was right in this respect. He was a great landscape
painter; but his histories were comparatively forced and abortive. If
this had been merely the opinion of his enemies, it might have been
attributed to envy and faction; but it was no less the deliberate
sentiment of his friends and most enthusiastic partisans; and if we
reflect on the nature of our artist’s genius or his temper, we shall
find that it could not well have been otherwise. This from a child was
wayward, indocile, wild and irregular, unshackled, impatient of
restraint, and urged on equally by success or opposition into a state of
jealous and morbid irritability. Those who are at war with others, are
not at peace with themselves. It is the uneasiness, the turbulence, the
acrimony within that recoils upon external objects. Barry abused the
Academy, because he could not paint himself. If he could have painted up
to his own _idea_ of perfection, he would have thought this better than
exposing the ill-directed efforts or groundless pretensions of others.
Salvator was rejected by the Academy of St. Luke, and excluded, in
consequence of his hostility to reigning authorities, and his unlicensed
freedom of speech, from the great works and public buildings in Rome;
and though he scorned and ridiculed those by whose influence this was
effected, yet neither the smiles of friends and fortune, nor the
flatteries of fame, which in his lifetime had spread his name over
Europe, and might be confidently expected to extend it to a future age,
could console him for the loss, which he affected to despise, and would
make no sacrifice to obtain. He was indeed hard to please. He denounced
his rivals and maligners with bitterness; and with difficulty tolerated
the enthusiasm of his disciples, or the services of his patrons. He was
at all times full of indignation, with or without cause. He was easily
exasperated, and not willing soon to be appeased, or to subside into
repose and good humour again. He slighted what he did best; and seemed
anxious to go out of himself. In a word, irritability rather than
sensibility, was the category of his mind: he was more distinguished by
violence and restlessness of will, than by dignity or power of thought.
The truly great, on the contrary, are sufficient to themselves, and so
far satisfied with the world. ‘Their mind to them is a kingdom,’ from
which they look out, as from a high watchtower or noble fortress, on the
passions, the cabals, the meannesses and follies of mankind. They shut
themselves up ‘in measureless content;’ or soar to the great, discarding
the little; and appeal from envious detraction or ‘unjust tribunals
under change of times,’ to posterity. They are not satirists, cynics,
nor the prey of these; but painters, poets, and philosophers.

Salvator was the victim of a too morbid sensibility, or of early
difficulty and disappointment. He was always quarrelling with the world,
and lay at the mercy of his own piques and resentments. But antipathy,
the spirit of contradiction, captious discontent, fretful impatience,
produce nothing fine in character, neither dwell on beauty, nor pursue
truth, nor rise into sublimity. The splenetic humourist is not the
painter of humanity. Landscape painting is the obvious resource of
misanthropy. Our artist, escaping from the herd of knaves and fools,
sought out some rude solitude, and found repose there. Teased by the
impertinence, stung to the quick by the injustice of mankind, the
presence of the works of nature would be a relief to his mind, and
would, by contrast, stamp her striking features more strongly there. In
the coolness, in the silence, in the untamed wildness of mountain
scenery, in the lawless manners of its inhabitants, he would forget the
fever and the anguish, and the artificial restraints of society. We
accordingly do not find in Salvator’s rural scenes either natural beauty
or fertility, or even the simply grand; but whatever seizes attention by
presenting a barrier to the will, or scorning the power of mankind, or
snapping asunder the chain that binds us to the kind—the barren, the
abrupt, wild steril regions, the steep rock, the mountain torrent, the
bandit’s cave, the hermit’s cell,—all these, while they released him
from more harassing and painful reflections, soothed his moody spirit
with congenial gloom, and found a sanctuary and a home there. Not only
is there a corresponding determination and singleness of design in his
landscapes (excluding every approach to softness, or pleasure, or
ornament), but the strength of the impression is confirmed even by the
very touch and mode of handling; he brings us in contact with the
objects he paints; and the sharpness of a rock, the roughness of the
bark of a tree, or the ruggedness of a mountain path are marked in the
freedom, the boldness, and firmness of his pencilling. There is not in
Salvator’s scenes the luxuriant beauty and divine harmony of Claude, nor
the amplitude of Nicolas Poussin, nor the gorgeous richness of
Titian—but there is a deeper seclusion, a more abrupt and total escape
from society, more savage wildness and grotesqueness of form, a more
earthy texture, a fresher atmosphere, and a more obstinate resistance to
all the effeminate refinements of art. Salvator Rosa then is, beyond all
question, the most _romantic_ of landscape painters; because the very
violence and untractableness of his temper threw him with instinctive
force upon those objects in nature which would be most likely to sooth
and disarm it; while, in history, he is little else than a caricaturist
(we mean compared with such men as Raphael, Michael Angelo, &c.),
because the same acrimony and impatience have made him fasten on those
subjects and aspects of the human mind which would most irritate and
increase it; and he has, in this department, produced chiefly distortion
and deformity, sullenness and rage, extravagance, squalidness, and
poverty of appearance. But it is time to break off this long and
premature digression, into which our love of justice and of the arts
(which requires, above all, that no more than justice should be done to
any one) had led us, and return to the elegant but somewhat fanciful
specimen of biography before us. Lady Morgan (in her flattery of the
dead, the most ill-timed and unprofitable, but least disgusting of all
flattery) has spoken of the historical compositions of Salvator in terms
that leave no distinction between him and Michael Angelo; and we could
not refrain from entering our protest against such an inference, and
thus commencing our account of her book with what may appear at once a
piece of churlish criticism and a want of gallantry.

The materials of the first volume, containing the account of Salvator’s
outset in life, and early struggles with fortune and his art, are
slender, but spun out at great length, and steeped in very brilliant
dyes. The contents of the second volume, which relates to a period when
he was before the public, was in habits of personal intimacy with his
future biographers, and made frequent mention of himself in letters to
his friends which are still preserved, are more copious and authentic,
and on that account—however Lady Morgan may wonder at it—more
interesting. Of the artist’s infant years, little is known, and little
told; but that little is conveyed with all the ‘pride, pomp, and
circumstance of glorious’ authorship. It is said, that the whole matter
composing the universe might be compressed in a nutshell, taking away
the porous interstices and flimsy appearances: So, we apprehend, that
all that is really to be learnt of the subject of these Memoirs from the
first volume of his life, might be contained in a single page of solid
writing.

It appears that our artist was born in 1615, of poor parents, in the
Borgo de Renella, near Naples. His father, Vito Antonio Rosa, was an
architect and landsurveyor, and his mother’s name was Giulia Grecca, who
had also two daughters. Salvator very soon lost his full baptismal name
for the nickname of Salvatoriello, in consequence of his mischievous
tricks and lively gesticulations when a boy, or, more probably, this was
the common diminutive of it given to all children. He was intended by
his parents for the church, but early showed a truant disposition, and a
turn for music and drawing. He used to scrawl with burnt sticks on the
walls of his bed-room, and contrived to be caught in the fact of
sketching outlines on the chapel-walls of the Certosa, when some priests
were going by to mass, for which he was severely whipped. He was then
sent to school at the monastery of the _Somasco_ in Naples, where he
remained for two years, and laid in a good stock of classical learning,
of which he made great use in his after life, both in his poems and
pictures. Salvator’s first knowledge of painting was imbibed in the
workshop of Francesco Francanzani (a painter at that time of some note
in Naples), who had married one of his sisters, and under whose eye he
began his professional studies. Soon after this he is supposed to have
made a tour through the mountains of the Abruzzi, and to have been
detained a prisoner by the banditti there. On the death of his father,
he endeavoured to maintain his family by sketches in landscape or
history, which he sold to the brokers in Naples, and one of these (his
_Hagar in the Wilderness_), was noticed and purchased by the celebrated
Lanfranco, who was passing the broker’s shop in his carriage. Salvator
finding it in vain to struggle any longer with chagrin and poverty in
his native place, went to Rome, where he met with little encouragement,
and fell sick, and once more returned to Naples. An accident, or rather
the friendship of an old school-fellow, now introduced him into the
suite of the Cardinal Brancaccia, and his picture of Prometheus brought
him into general notice, and recalled him to Rome. About the same time,
he appeared in the Carnival with prodigious _eclat_ as an
_improvisatore_ and comic actor; and from this period may be dated the
commencement of his public life as a painter, a satirist, and a man of
general talents.

Except on these few tangible points the Manuscript yawns dreadfully; but
Lady Morgan, whose wit or courage never flags, fills up the hollow
spaces, and ‘skins and films the _missing_ part,’ with an endless and
dazzling profusion of digressions, invectives, and hypotheses. It is
with pleasure that we give a specimen of the way in which she thus
magnifies trifles, and enlarges on the possibilities of her subject.
Salvator was born in 1615. As the birth of princes is announced by the
discharge of artillery and the exhibition of fireworks, her ladyship
thinks proper to usher in the birth of her hero with the following
explosion of imagery and declamation.

‘The sweeping semicircle which the most fantastic and singular city of
Naples marks on the shore of its unrivalled bay, from the Capo di
Pausilippo to the Torrione del Carmine, is dominated by a lofty chain of
undulating hills, which take their distinctive appellations from some
local peculiarity or classical tradition. The high and insulated rock of
St. Elmo, which overtops the whole, is crowned by that terrible fortress
to which it gives its name—a fearful and impregnable citadel, that,
since the first moment when it was raised by an Austrian conqueror to
the present day, when it is garrisoned by a Bourbon with Austrian
troops, has poured down the thunder of its artillery to support the
violence, or proclaim the triumphs of foreign interference over the
rights and liberties of a long-suffering and oft-resisting people.

‘Swelling from the base of the savage St. Elmo, smile the lovely heights
of _San Martino_, where, through chestnut woods and vineyards, gleam the
golden spires of the monastic palace of the Monks of the Certosa.[21] A
defile cut through the rocks of the _Monte Donzelle_, and shaded by the
dark pines which spring from their crevices, forms an umbrageous pathway
from this superb convent to the _Borgeo di Renella_, the little capital
of a neighbouring hill, which, for the peculiar beauty of its position,
and the views it commands, is still called “_l’ameno villaggio_.” At
night the fires of Vesuvius almost bronze the humble edifices of
Renella; and the morning sun, as it rises, discovers from various
points, the hills of Vomiro and Pausilippo, the shores of Puzzuoli and
of Baiæ, the islets of Nisiti, Capri, and Procida, till the view fades
into the extreme verge of the horizon, where the waters of the
Mediterranean seem to mingle with those clear skies whose tint and
lustre they reflect.

‘In this true “_nido paterno_” of genius, there dwelt, in the year 1615,
an humble and industrious artist called Vito Antonia Rosa—a name even
then not unknown to the arts, though as yet more known than prosperous.
Its actual possessor, the worthy Messire Antonio, had, up to this time,
struggled with his good wife Giulia Grecca and two daughters still in
childhood, to maintain the ancient respectability of his family. Antonio
was an architect and landsurveyor of some note, but of little gains; and
if, over the old architectural portico of the Casaccia of Renella might
be read,

“_Vito Antonio Rosa, Agremensore ed Architecto_;”

the intimation was given in vain! Few passed through the decayed Borgo
of Renella, and still fewer, in times so fearful, were able to profit by
the talents and profession which the inscription advertised. The family
of Rosa, inconsiderable as it was, partook of the pressure of the times;
and the pretty Borgo, like its adjacent scenery, (no longer the haunt of
Consular voluptuaries, neither frequented by the great nor visited by
the curious) stood lonely and beautiful—unencumbered by those fantastic
_belvideras_ and grotesque pavilions, which in modern times rather
deform than beautify a site, for which Nature has done all, and Art can
do nothing.

‘The cells of the Certosa, indeed, had their usual complement of lazy
monks and “_Frati conversi_.” The fortress of St. Elmo, then as now,
manned by Austrian troops, glittered with foreign pikes. The cross rose
on every acclivity, and the sword guarded every pass: but the villages
of Renella and San Martino, of the Vomiro and of Pausilippo, were
thinned of their inhabitants to recruit foreign armies; and this earthly
paradise was dreary as the desert, and silent as the tomb.

‘The Neapolitan barons, those restless but brave feudatories, whose
resistance to their native despots preserved something of the ancient
republican spirit of their Greek predecessors, now fled from the
capital. They left its beautiful environs to Spanish viceroys, and to
their official underlings; and sullenly shut themselves up in their
domestic fortresses of the Abruzzi or of Calabria. “La Civiltà,” a class
then including the whole of the middle and professional ranks of society
of Naples, was struggling for a bare existence in the towns and cities.
Beggared by taxation levied at the will of their despots, and collected
with every aggravation of violence, its members lived under the
perpetual _surveillance_ of foreign troops and domestic _sbirri_, whose
suspicions their brooding discontents were well calculated to nourish.

‘The people—the debased, degraded people—had reached that maximum of
suffering beyond which human endurance cannot go. They were famished in
the midst of plenty, and, in regions the most genial and salubrious,
were dying of diseases, the fearful attendants on want. Commerce was at
a stand, agriculture was neglected, and the arts, under the perpetual
dictatorship of a Spanish court-painter, had no favour but for the
_Seguaci_ of Lo Spagnuoletto.

‘In such times of general distress and oppression, when few had the
means or the spirit to build, and still fewer had lands to measure or
property to transfer, it is little wonderful that the humble architect
and landsurveyor of Renella,’ &c.

And so she gets down to the humble parentage of her hero; and after
telling us that his father was chiefly anxious that he should _not_ be
an artist, and that both parents resolved to dedicate him to religion,
she proceeds to record, that he gave little heed to his future vocation,
but manifested various signs of a disposition for all the fine arts.
This occasioned considerable uneasiness and opposition on the part of
those who had destined him to something very different; and ‘the cord of
paternal authority, drawn to its extreme tension, was naturally
snapped.’—And upon this her volatile pen again takes _its roving
flight_.

‘The truant Salvatoriello fled from the restraints of an uncongenial
home, from Albert Le Grand and Santa Caterina di Sienna, and took
shelter among those sites and scenes whose imagery soon became a part of
his own intellectual existence, and were received as impressions long
before they were studied as subjects. Sometimes he was discovered by the
_Padre Cercatore_ of the convent of Renella, among the rocks and caverns
of Baiæ, the ruined temples of Gods, and the haunts of Sibyls. Sometimes
he was found by a gossip of Madonna Giulia, in her pilgrimage to a
“_maesta_,” sleeping among the wastes of the Solfatara, beneath the
scorched branches of a blasted tree, his head pillowed by lava, and his
dream most probably the vision of an infant poet’s slumbers. For even
then he was

“the youngest he
That sat in shadow of Apollo’s tree,”

seeing Nature with a poet’s eye, and sketching her beauties with a
painter’s hand.’ p. 45.

Now this is well imagined and quaintly expressed; it pleases the fair
writer, and should offend nobody else. But we cannot say quite so much
of the note which is appended to it, and couched in the following terms.

‘Rosa drew his first impressions from the magnificent scenery of
Pausilippo and Vesuvius; Hogarth found his in a pot-house at Highgate,
where a drunken quarrel and a broken nose “first woke the God within
him.” Both, however, reached the sublime in their respective
vocations—Hogarth in the grotesque, and Salvator in the majestic!’

Really these critics who have crossed the Alps do take liberties with
the rest of the world,—and do not recover from a certain giddiness ever
after. In the eagerness of partisanship, the fair author here falsifies
the class to which these two painters belonged. Hogarth did _not_ excel
in the ‘grotesque,’ but in the ludicrous and natural,—nor Salvator in
the ‘majestic,’ but in the wild and gloomy features of man or nature;
and in talent Hogarth had the advantage—a million to one. It would not
be too much to say, that he was probably the greatest observer of
manners, and the greatest comic genius, that ever lived. We know no one,
whether painter, poet, or prose-writer, not even Shakspeare, who, in his
peculiar department, was so teeming with life and invention, so
over-informed with matter, so ‘full to overflowing,’ as Hogarth was. We
shall not attempt to calculate the quantity of pleasure and amusement
his pictures have afforded, for it is quite incalculable. As to the
distinction between ‘high and low’ in matters of genius, we shall leave
it to her Ladyship’s other critics. But shall Hogarth’s world of truth
and nature (his huge total farce of human life) be reduced to ‘a drunken
quarrel and a broken nose?’ We will not retort this sneer by any insult
to Salvator; he did not paint his pictures in opposition to Hogarth.
There is an air about his landscapes sacred to our imaginations, though
different from the close atmosphere of Hogarth’s scenes; and not the
less so, because the latter could paint something better than ‘a broken
nose.’ Nothing provokes us more than these exclusive and invidious
comparisons, which seek to raise one man of genius by setting down
another, and which suppose that there is nothing to admire in the
greatest talents, unless they can be made a foil to bring out the weak
points or nominal imperfections of some fancied rival.

We might transcribe, for the entertainment of the reader, the passage to
which we have already referred, describing Salvator’s departure, in the
company of his father, for the college of the _Congregazione Somasco_;
but we prefer one which, though highly coloured and somewhat dramatic,
is more to our purpose—the commencement of Salvator’s studies as an
artist under his brother-in-law Francanzani. We cannot, however, do this
at once: for, in endeavouring to lay our hands upon the passage, we were
as usual intercepted by showers of roses and clouds of perfume. Lady
Morgan’s style resembles ‘another morn risen on mid-noon.’ We must make
a career therefore with the historian, and reach the temple of painting
through the sounding portico of music. It appears that Salvator, after
he left the brotherhood of the _Somasco_, with more poetry than logic in
his head, devoted himself to music; and Lady Morgan preludes her
narration with the following eloquent passage.

‘All Naples—(where even to this day love and melody make a part of the
existence of the people)—all Naples was then resounding to guitars,
lutes and harps, accompanying voices, which forever sang the fashionable
_canzoni_ of Cambio Donato, and of the Prince di Venusa.[22] Neither
German phlegm, nor Spanish gloom, could subdue spirits so tuned to
harmony, nor silence the passionate _serenatas_ which floated along the
shores, and reverberated among the classic grottoes of Pausilippo.
Vesuvius blazed, St. Elmo thundered from its heights, conspiracy brooded
in the caves of Baiæ, and tyranny tortured its victim in the dungeons of
the Castello Nuovo; yet still the ardent Neapolitans, amidst all the
horrors of their social and political _position_,[23] could snatch
moments of blessed forgetfulness, and, reckless of their country’s woes
and their own degradation, could give up hours to love and music, which
were already numbered in the death-warrants of their tyrants.... It was
at this moment, when peculiar circumstances were awakening in the region
of the syrens “the hidden soul of harmony,” when the most beautiful
women of the capital and the court gave a public exhibition of their
talents and _their charms_, and glided in their feluccas on the
moonlight midnight seas, with harps of gold and hands of snow, that the
contumacious students of the _Padri Somaschi_ escaped from the
restraints of their cloisters, and the horrid howl of their _laude
spirituali_, to all the intoxication of sound and sight, with every
sense in full accordance with the musical passion of the day. It is
little wonderful, if, at this epoch of his life, Salvator gave himself
up unresistingly to the pursuit of a science, which he cultivated with
ardour, even when time had preached his tumultuous pulse to rest; or if
the floating capital of genius, which was as yet unappropriated, was in
part applied to that species of composition, which, in the youth of man
as of nations, precedes deeper and more important studies, and for
which, in either, there is but one age. All poetry and passion, his
young Muse “dallied with the innocence of love;” and inspired strains,
which, though the simple breathings of an ardent temperament, the
exuberance of youthful excitement, and an overteeming sensibility, were
assigning him a place among the first Italian lyrists of his age. Little
did he then dream that posterity would apply the rigid rules of
criticism to the “idle visions” of his boyish fancy; or that his bars
and basses would be conned and analyzed by the learned umpires of future
ages—declared “not only admirable for a _dilettante_, but, in point of
melody, superior to that of most of the masters of his time.”[24]

* * * * *

‘It happened at this careless, gay, but not idle period of Salvator’s
life, than an event occurred which hurried on his vocation to that art,
to which his parents were so determined that he should _not_ addict
himself, but to which Nature had so powerfully directed him. His
probation of adolescence was passed: his hour was come; and he was about
to approach that temple whose threshold he modestly and poetically
declared himself unworthy to pass.

“Del immortalide al tempio augusto
Dove serba la gloria e i suoi tesori.”

‘At one of the popular festivities annually celebrated at Naples in
honour of the Madonna, the beauty of Rosa’s elder sister captivated the
attention of a young painter, who, though through life unknown to
“fortune,” was not even then “unknown to fame.” The celebrated and
unfortunate Francesco Francanzani, the inamorata of La Signorina Rosa,
was a distinguished pupil of the Spagnuoletto school; and his picture of
San Giuseppe, for the Chiesa Pellegrini, had already established him as
one of the first painters of his day. Francanzani, like most of the
young Neapolitan painters of his time, was a turbulent and factious
character, vain and self-opinionated; and, though there was in his works
a certain grandeur of style, with great force and depth of colouring,
yet the impatience of his disappointed ambition, and indignation at the
neglect of his acknowledged merit, already rendered him reckless of
public opinion.[25]

‘It was the peculiar vanity of the painters of that day to have
beautiful wives. Albano had set the example’—[as if any example need be
set, or the thing had been done in concert]—‘Domenichino followed it to
his cost; Rubens turned it to the account of his profession; and
Francanzani, still poor and struggling, married the portionless daughter
of the most indigent artist in Naples, and thought perhaps more of the
model than the wife. This union, and, still more, a certain sympathy in
talent and character between the brothers-in-law, frequently carried
Salvator to the _stanza_ or work-room of Francesco. Francesco, by some
years the elder, was then deep in the faction and intrigues of the
Neapolitan school; and was endowed with that bold eloquence, which,
displayed upon bold occasions, is always so captivating to young
auditors. It was at the foot of his kinsman’s easel, and listening to
details which laid perhaps the foundation of that contemptuous opinion
he cherished through life for schools, academies, and all incorporated
pedantry and pretension,[26] that Salvator occasionally amused himself
in copying, on any scrap of _board_ or paper which fell in his way,
whatever pleased him in Francesco’s pictures. His long-latent genius
thus accidentally awakened, resembled the _acqua buja_, whose cold and
placid surface kindles like spirits on the contact of a spark. In these
first, rude, and hasty sketches, Francanzani, as Passeri informs us, saw
“_molti segni d’un indole spirituosa_” (great signs of talent and
genius); and he frequently encouraged, and sometimes corrected, the
copies _which so nearly approached the originals_. But Salvator, who was
destined to imitate none, but to be imitated by many, soon grew
impatient of repeating another’s conceptions, and of following in an art
in which he already perhaps felt, with prophetic throes, that he was
born to lead. His visits to the workshop of Francanzani grew less
frequent; his days were given to the scenes of his infant wanderings; he
departed with the dawn, laden with his portfolio filled with primed
paper, and a pallet covered with oil colours; and it is said, that even
then he not only sketched, but coloured from nature. When the pedantry
of criticism (at the suggestion of envious rivals) accused him of having
acquired, in his colouring, too much of the _impasting_ of the
_Spagnuoletto_ school, it was not aware that his faults, like his
beauties, were original; and that he sinned against the rules of art,
only because he adhered too faithfully to nature.’—[Salvator’s flesh
colour is as remarkably dingy and _Spagnuolettish_, as the tone of his
landscapes is fresh and clear.]—‘Returning from these arduous but not
profitless rambles, through wildernesses and along precipices,
impervious to all save the enterprise of fearless genius, he sought
shelter beneath his sister’s roof, where a kinder welcome awaited him
than he could find in that home where it had been decreed from his birth
that _he should not be a painter_.

‘Francanzani was wont, on the arrival of his brother-in-law, to rifle
the contents of his portfolio; and he frequently found there
compositions hastily thrown together, but selected, drawn, and coloured
with a boldness and a breadth, which indicated the confidence of a
genius sure of itself. The first accents of “the thrilling melody of
sweet renown” which ever vibrated to the heart of Salvator, came to his
ear on these occasions in the Neapolitan _patois_ of his relation, who,
in glancing by lamp-light over his labours, would pat him smilingly on
the head, and exclaim, “_Fruscia, fruscia, Salvatoriello—che va buono_,”
(“Go on, go on, this is good”)—simple plaudits! but frequently
remembered in after-times (when the dome of the Pantheon had already
rung with the admiration extorted by his Regulus) as the first which
cheered him in his arduous progress.’ p. 94.

The reader cannot fail to observe here how well every thing is made out:
how agreeably every thing is assumed: how difficulties are smoothed
over, little abruptnesses rounded off: how each circumstance falls into
its place just as it should, and answers to a preconceived idea, like
the march of a verse or the measure of a dance: and how completely that
imaginary justice is everywhere done to the subject, which, according to
Lord Bacon, gives poetry so decided an advantage over history! Yet this
is one of our fair authoress’s most severe and literal passages. Her
prose-Muse is furnished with wings; and the breeze of Fancy carries her
off her feet from the plain ground of matter-of-fact, whether she will
or no. Lady Morgan, in this part of her subject, takes occasion to
animadvert on an opinion of Sir Joshua’s respecting our artist’s choice
of a particular style of landscape painting.

‘_Salvator Rosa_,’ says Sir J. Reynolds, ‘_saw the necessity of trying
some new source of pleasing the public in his works. The world were
tired of Claude Lorraine’s and G. Poussin’s long train of imitators._’

‘_Salvator therefore struck into a wild, savage kind of nature, which
was new and striking._’

‘The first of these paragraphs contains a strange anachronism. When
Salvator _struck into a new line_, Poussin and Claude, who, though his
elders, were his contemporaries, had as yet no train of imitators. The
one was struggling for a livelihood in France, the other was cooking and
grinding colours for his master at Rome. Salvator’s early attachment to
Nature in her least imitated forms, was not the result of speculation
having any reference to the public: it was the operation of original
genius, and of those particular tendencies which seemed to be breathed
into his soul at the moment it first quickened. From his cradle to his
tomb he was the creature of impulse, and the slave of his own vehement
volitions.’—_Note_, p. 97–8.

We think this is spirited and just. Sir Joshua, who borrowed from almost
all his predecessors in art, was now and then a little too ready to
detract from them. We dislike these attempts to explain away successful
talent into a species of studied imposture—to attribute genius to a
plot, originality to a trick. Burke, in like manner, accused Rousseau of
the same kind of _malice prepense_ in bringing forward his paradoxes—as
if he did it on a theory, or to astonish the public, and not to give
vent to his peculiar humours and singularity of temperament.

We next meet with a poetical version of a picturesque tour undertaken by
Salvator among the mountains of the Abruzzi, and of his detention by the
banditti there. We have much fine writing on the subject; but after a
world of charming theories and romantic conjectures, it is left quite
doubtful whether this last event ever took place at all—at least we
could wish there was some better confirmation of it than a vague rumour,
and an etching by Salvator of a ‘_Youth taken captive by banditti, with
a female figure pleading his cause_,’ which the historian at once
identifies with the adventures of the artist himself, and ‘moralizes
into a thousand similes.’ We are indemnified for the dearth of
satisfactory evidence on this point by animated and graceful transitions
to the history and manners of the Neapolitan banditti, their
physiognomical distinctions and political intrigues, to the grand
features of mountain scenery, and to the character of Salvator’s style,
founded on all these exciting circumstances, real or imaginary. On the
death of his father, Vito Antonio, which happened when he was about
seventeen, the family were thrown on his hands for support, and he
struggled for some time with want and misery, which he endeavoured to
relieve by his hard bargains with the _rivenditori_ (picture-dealers) in
the _Strada della Carità_, till necessity and chagrin forced him to fly
to Rome. The purchase of his _Hagar_ by Lanfranco is the only bright
streak in this period of his life, which cheered him for a moment with
faint delusive hope.

The art of writing may be said to consist in thinking of nothing but
one’s subject: the art of book-making, on the contrary, can only subsist
on the principle of laying hands on everything that can supply the place
of it. The author of the ‘Life and Times of Salvator Rosa,’ though
devoted to her hero, does not scruple to leave him sometimes, and to
occupy many pages with his celebrated contemporaries, Domenichino,
Lanfranco, Caravaggio, and the sculptor Bernini, the most splendid
coxcomb in the history of art, and the spoiled child of vanity and
patronage. Before we take leave of Naples, we must introduce our readers
to some of this good company, and pay our court in person. We shall
begin with Caravaggio, one of the _characteristic_ school both in mind
and manners. The account is too striking in many respects to be passed
over, and affords a fine lesson on the excesses and untamed
irregularities of men of genius.

‘In the early part of the seventeenth century, the manner of the
Neapolitan school was purely _Caravaggesque_. Michael Angelo Amoreghi,
better known as _Il Caravaggio_ (from the place of his birth in the
Milanese, where his father held no higher rank than that of a stone
mason), was one of those powerful and extraordinary geniuses which are
destined by their force and originality to influence public taste, and
master public opinion, in whatever line they start. The Roman School, to
which the almost celestial genius of Raphael had so long been as a
tutelary angel, sinking rapidly into degradation and feebleness,
suddenly arose again under the influence of a new chief, whose
professional talent and personal character stood opposed in the strong
relief of contrast to that of his elegant and poetical predecessor.

‘The influence of this “_uomo intractabile e brutale_,” this _passionate
and intractable man_, as he is termed by an Italian historian of the
arts, sprang from the depression of the school which preceded him.
Nothing less than the impulsion given by the force of contrast, and the
shock occasioned by a violent change, could have produced an effect on
the sinking art such as proceeded from the strength and even coarseness
of Caravaggio. He brought back nature triumphant over mannerism—nature,
indeed, in all the exaggeration of strong motive and overbearing
volition; but still it _was_ nature; and his bold example dissipated the
languor of exhausted imitation, and gave excitement even to the tamest
mediocrity and the feeblest conception.... When on his first arrival in
Rome (says Bellori) the cognoscenti advised him to study from the
antiques, and take Raphael as his model, he used to point to the
promiscuous groups of men and women passing before him, and say, “those
were the models and the masters provided him by Nature.” Teased one day
by a pedant on the subject, he stopped a gipsey-girl who was passing by
his window, called her in, placed her near his easel, and produced his
splendid _Zingara in atto di predire l’avventure_, his well-known and
exquisite Egyptian Fortune-teller. His _Gamblers_ was done in the same
manner.

‘The temperament which produced this peculiar genius was necessarily
violent and gloomy. Caravaggio tyrannized over his school, and attacked
his rivals with other arms than those of his art. He was a professed
duellist; and having killed one of his antagonists in a rencontre, he
fled to Naples, where an asylum was readily granted him. His manner as a
painter, his character as a man, were both calculated to succeed with
the Neapolitan school; and the _maniera Caravaggesca_ thenceforward
continued to distinguish its productions, till the art, there, as
throughout all Europe, fell into utter degradation, and became lost
almost as completely as it had been under the Lower Empire.

‘In a warm dispute with one of his own young friends in a tennis-court,
he had struck him dead with a racket, having been himself severely
wounded. Notwithstanding the triumphs with which he was loaded in
Naples, where he executed some of his finest pictures, he soon got weary
of his residence there, and went to Malta. His superb picture of the
Grand Master obtained for him the cross of Malta, a rich golden chain,
placed on his neck by the Grand Master’s own hands, and two slaves to
attend him. But all these honours did not prevent the new knight from
falling into his old habits. _Il suo torbido ingegno_, says Bellori,
plunged him into new difficulties; he fought and wounded a noble
cavalier, was thrown into prison by the Grand Master, escaped most
miraculously, fled to Syracuse, and obtained the suffrages of the
Syracusans by painting his splendid picture of the _Santa Morte_, for
the church of Santa Lucia. In apprehension of being taken by the Maltese
knights, he fled to Messina, from thence to Palermo, and returned to
Naples, where hopes were given him of the Pope’s pardon. Here, picking a
quarrel with some military men at an inn door, he was wounded, took
refuge on board a felucca, and set sail for Rome. Arrested by a Spanish
guard, at a little port (where the felucca cast anchor), by mistake, for
another person, when released he found the felucca gone, and in it all
his property. Traversing the burning shore under a vertical sun, he was
seized with a brain-fever, and continued to wander through the deserts
of the Pontine Marshes, till he arrived at Porto Ercoli, when he expired
in his fortieth year.’ p. 139.

We have seen some of the particulars differently related; but this
account is as probable as any; and it conveys a startling picture of the
fate of a man led away by headstrong passions and the pride of
talents,—an intellectual outlaw, having no regard to the charities of
life, nor knowledge of his own place in the general scale of being. How
different, how superior, and yet how little more fortunate, was the
amiable and accomplished Domenichino (the ‘most sensible of painters’),
who was about this time employed in painting the dome of St. Januarius!

‘Domenichino reluctantly accepted the invitation (1629); and he arrived
in Naples with the zeal of a martyr devoted to a great cause, but with a
melancholy foreboding, which harassed his noble spirit, and but ill
prepared him for the persecution he was to encounter. Lodged under the
special protection of the _Deputati_, in the _Palazzo dell’
Arcivescovato_, adjoining the church, on going forth from his sumptuous
dwelling the day after his arrival, he found a paper addressed to him
sticking in the key-hole of his anteroom. It informed him, that if he
did not instantly return to Rome, he should never return there with
life. Domenichino immediately presented himself to the Spanish viceroy,
the _Conte Monterei_, and claimed protection for a life then employed in
the service of the church. The piety of the count, in spite of his
partiality to the faction [of Spagnuoletto], induced him to pledge the
word of a grandee of Spain, that Domenichino should not be molested; and
from that moment a life, no longer openly assailed, was embittered by
all that the littleness of malignant envy could invent to undermine its
enjoyments and blast its hopes. Calumnies against his character,
criticisms on his paintings, ashes mixed with his colours, and anonymous
letters, were the miserable means to which his rivals resorted; and to
complete their work of malignity, they induced the viceroy to order
pictures from him for the Court of Madrid; and when these were little
more than laid in in dead colours, they were carried to the viceregal
palace, and placed in the hands of Spagnuoletto to retouch and alter at
pleasure. In this disfigured and mutilated condition, they were
despatched to the gallery of the King of Spain. Thus drawn from his
great works by despotic authority, for the purpose of effecting his
ruin, enduring the complaints of the _Deputati_, who saw their
commission neglected, and suffering from perpetual calumnies and
persecutions, Domenichino left the superb picture of the _Martyrdom of
San Gennaro_, which is now receiving the homage of posterity, and fled
to Rome; taking shelter in the solemn shades of Frescati, where he
resided some time under the protection of Cardinal Ippolito
Aldobrandini. It was at this period that Domenichino was visited by his
biographer Passeri, then an obscure youth, engaged to assist in the
repairs of the pictures in the cardinal’s chapel. “When we arrived at
Frescati,” says Passeri in his simple style, “Domenichino received me
with much courtesy; and hearing that I took a singular delight in the
belles-lettres, it increased his kindness to me. I remember me, that I
gazed on this man as though he were an angel. I remained till the end of
September, occupied in restoring the chapel of St. Sebastian, which had
been ruined by the damp. Sometimes Domenichino would join us, singing
delightfully to recreate himself as well as he could. When night set in
we returned to our apartment, while he most frequently remained in his
own, occupied in drawing, and permitting none to see him. Sometimes,
however, to pass the time, he drew caricatures of us all, and of the
inhabitants of the villa; and when he succeeded to his satisfaction, he
was wont to indulge in immoderate fits of laughter; and we, who were in
the adjoining room, would run in to know his reason, and then he showed
us his spirited sketches (_spiritose galanterie_). He drew a caricature
of me with a guitar, one of Canini the painter, and one of the guarda
roba, who was lame with the gout, and of the subguarda roba, a most
ridiculous figure. To prevent our being offended, he also caricatured
himself. These portraits are now preserved by Signor Giovanni Pietro
Bellori in his study.” _Vita di Domenichino._—Obliged, however, at
length, to return to Naples to fulfil his fatal engagements, overwhelmed
both in mind and body by the persecutions of his _soi-disant_ patrons
and his open enemies, he died, says Passeri, “_fra mille crepacuori_,”
amidst a _thousand heart-breakings_, with some suspicion of having been
poisoned, in 1641.’ p. 150.

We could wish Lady Morgan had preserved more of this _simple style of
Passeri_. We confess we prefer it to her own more brilliant and
artificial one; for instance, to such passages as the following,
describing Salvator’s first entrance into the city of Rome.

‘In entering the greatest city of the world at the Ave Maria, the hour
of Italian recreation’—(Why must he have entered it at this hour, except
for the purpose of giving the author an apology for the following
eloquent reflections?)—‘in passing from the silent desolate suburbs of
San Giovanni to the Corso (then a place of crowded and populous resort),
where the princes of the Conclave presented themselves in all the pomp
and splendour of Oriental satraps, the feelings of the young and
solitary stranger must have suffered a revulsion, in the consciousness
of his own misery. Never, perhaps, in the deserts of the Abruzzi, in the
solitudes of Otranto, or in the ruins of Pæstum, did Salvator experience
sensations of such utter loneliness, as in the midst of this gaudy and
multitudinous assemblage; for in the history of melancholy _sensations_
there are few comparable to that _sense_ of _isolation_, to that
_desolateness_ of soul, which accompanies the first entrance of the
friendless on a world where all, save they, have ties, pursuits, and
homes.’ p. 174.

When we come to passages like this, so buoyant, so airy, and so
brilliant, we wish we could forget that history is not a pure voluntary
effusion of sentiment, and that we could fancy ourselves reading a page
of Mrs. Radcliffe’s Italian, or Miss Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw!
Presently after, we learn, that ‘Milton and Salvator, who, in genius,
character, and political views, bore no faint resemblance to each other,
though living at the same time both in Rome and Naples, remained
mutually unknown. The obscure and indigent young painter had, doubtless,
no means of presenting himself to the great republican poet of
England;—if, indeed, he had then ever heard of one so destined to
illustrate the age in which both flourished.’—p. 176. This is the least
apposite of all our author’s critical juxtapositions; if we except the
continual running parallel between Salvator, Shakspeare, and Lord Byron,
as the three demons of the imagination personified. Modern critics can
no more confer rank in the lists of fame, than modern heralds can
confound new and old nobility.

Salvator’s first decided success at Rome, or in his profession, was in
his picture of Prometheus, exhibited in the Pantheon, when he was
little more than twenty, and which stamped his reputation as an artist
from that time forward, though it did not lay the immediate foundation
of his fortune. In this respect, his rejection by the Academy of St.
Luke, and the hostility of Bernini, threw very considerable obstacles
in his way. Lady Morgan celebrates the success of this picture at
sufficient length, and with enthusiastic sympathy, and accompanies the
successive completion of his great historical efforts afterwards, the
_Regulus_, the _Purgatory_, the _Job_, the _Saul_, and the _Conspiracy
of Catiline_, with appropriate comments; but, as we are tainted with
heresy on this subject, we shall decline entering into it, farther
than to say generally, that we think the colouring of Salvator’s flesh
dingy, his drawing meagre, his expressions coarse or violent, and his
choice of subjects morose and monotonous. The figures in his
landscape-compositions are admirable for their spirit, force, wild
interest, and daring character; but, in our judgment, they cannot
stand alone as high history, nor, by any means, claim the first rank
among epic or dramatic productions. His landscapes, on the contrary,
as we have said before, have a boldness of conception, a unity of
design, and felicity of execution, which, if it does not fill the mind
with the highest sense of beauty or grandeur, assigns them a place by
themselves, which invidious comparison cannot approach or divide with
any competitor. They are original and _perfect_ in their kind; and
that kind is one that the imagination requires for its solace and
support; is always glad to return to, and is never ashamed of, the
wild and abstracted scenes of nature. Having said thus much by way of
explanation, we hope we shall be excused from going farther into the
details of an obnoxious hypercriticism, to which we feel an equal
repugnance as professed worshippers of fame and genius! Our readers
will prefer, to our sour and fastidious (perhaps perverse) criticism,
the lively account which is here given of Salvator’s first appearance
in a new character—one of the masks of the Roman carnival—which had
considerable influence in his subsequent pursuits and success in life.

‘Towards the close of the Carnival in 1639, when the spirits of the
revellers (as is always the case in Rome) were making a brilliant rally
for the representations of the last week, a car, or stage, highly
ornamented, drawn by oxen, and occupied by a masked troop, attracted
universal attention by its novelty and singular representations. The
principal personage announced himself as a certain Signor Formica, a
Neapolitan actor, who, in the character of Coviello, a charlatan,
displayed so much genuine wit, such bitter satire, and exquisite humour,
rendered doubly effective by a Neapolitan accent and national
gesticulations, that other representations were abandoned; and gipsies
told fortunes, and Jews hung in vain. The whole population of Rome
gradually assembled round the novel, the inimitable Formica. The people
relished his flashes of splenetic humour aimed at the great; the higher
orders were delighted with an _improvisatore_, who, in the intervals of
his dialogues, sung to the lute, of which he was a perfect master, the
Neapolitan ballads, then so much in vogue. The attempts made by his
fellow-revellers to obtain some share of the plaudits he so abundantly
received, whether he spoke or sung, asked or answered questions, were
all abortive; while he, (says Baldinucci), “at the head of every thing
by his wit, eloquence, and brilliant humour, drew half Rome to himself.”
The contrast between his beautiful musical and poetical compositions,
and those Neapolitan gesticulations in which he indulged, when, laying
aside his lute, he presented his vials and salves to the delighted
audience, exhibited a versatility of genius, which it was difficult to
attribute to any individual then known in Rome. Guesses and suppositions
were still vainly circulating among all classes, when, on the close of
the Carnival, Formica, ere he drove his triumphal car from the Piazza
Navona, which, with one of the streets in the Trasevere, had been the
principal scene of his triumph, ordered his troop to raise their masks,
and, removing his own, discovered that Coviello was the sublime author
of the Prometheus, and his little troop the “Partigiani” of Salvator
Rosa. All Rome was from this moment (to use a phrase which all his
biographers have adopted) “_filled with his fame_.” That notoriety which
his high genius had failed to procure for him, was obtained at once by
those lighter talents which he had nearly suffered to fall into neglect,
while more elevated views had filled his mind.’ p. 253.

Lady Morgan then gives a very learned and sprightly account of the
characters of the old Italian comedy, with a notice of Moliere, and
sprinklings of general reading, from which we have not room for an
extract. Salvator, after this event, became the rage in Rome; his
society and conversation were much sought after, and his _improvisatore_
recitations of his own poetry, in which he sketched the outline of his
future Satires, were attended by some of the greatest wits and most
eminent scholars of the age. He on one occasion gave a burlesque comedy
in ridicule of Bernini, the favourite court-artist. This attack drew on
him a resentment, the consequences of which, ‘like a wounded snake,
dragged their slow length’ through the rest of his life. Those who are
the loudest and bitterest in their complaints of persecution and
ill-usage are the first to provoke it. In the warfare waged so fondly
and (as it is at last discovered) so unequally with the world, the
assailants and the sufferers will be generally found to be the same
persons. We would not, by this indirect censure of Salvator, be
understood to condemn or discourage those who have an inclination to go
on the same _forlorn hope_: we merely wish to warn them of the nature of
the service, and that they ought not to prepare for a triumph, but a
martyrdom! If they are ambitious of that, let them take their course.

Salvator’s success in his new attempt threw him in some measure, from
this time forward, into the career of comedy and letters: painting,
however, still remained his principal pursuit and strongest passion. His
various talents and agreeable accomplishments procured him many friends
and admirers, though his hasty temper and violent pretensions often
defeated their good intentions towards him. He wanted to force his
Histories down the throats of the public and of private individuals, who
came to purchase his pictures, and turned from, and even insulted those
who praised his landscapes. This jealousy of a man’s self, and
quarrelling with the favourable opinion of the world, because it does
not exactly accord with our own view of our merits, is one of the most
tormenting and incurable of all follies. We subjoin the two following
remarkable instances of it.

‘The Prince Francesco Ximenes having arrived in Rome, found time, in the
midst of the honours paid to him, to visit Salvator Rosa; and, being
received by the artist in his gallery, he told him frankly, that he had
come for the purpose of seeing and purchasing some of those beautiful
small landscapes, whose manner and subjects had delighted him in many
foreign galleries.—“Be it known then to your Excellency,” interrupted
Rosa impetuously, “that _I know nothing of landscape-painting_!
Something indeed I do know of painting _figures_ and _historical
subjects_, which I strive to exhibit to such eminent judges as yourself,
in order that once for all I may banish from the public mind that
fantastic humour of supposing I am a landscape, and not an historical
painter.”

‘Shortly after, a very rich cardinal, whose name is not recorded, called
on Salvator to purchase some pictures; and as his Eminence walked up and
down the gallery, he always paused before some certain _quadretti_, and
never before the historical subjects, while Salvator muttered from time
to time between his clenched teeth, “_Sempre, sempre, pæsi piccoli_.”
When at last the Cardinal glanced his eye over some great historical
picture, and carelessly asked the price as a sort of company question,
Salvator bellowed forth “_Un milione_.” His Eminence, stunned or
offended, hurried away, and returned no more.’

Other stories are told of the like import. And yet if Salvator had been
more satisfied in his own mind of the superiority of his historical
pictures, he would have been less anxious to make others converts to his
opinion. So shrewd a man ought to have been aware of the force of the
proverb about _nursing the ricketty child_.

One of the most creditable _traits_ in the character of Salvator is the
friendship of Carlo Rossi, a wealthy Roman citizen, who raised his
prices and built a chapel to his memory; and one of the most pleasant
and flattering to his talents is the rivalry of Messer Agli, an old
Bolognese merchant, who came all the way to Florence (while Salvator was
residing there) to enter the lists with him as the clown and
quack-doctor of the _commedia della arte_.

We loiter on the way with Lady Morgan—which is a sign that we do not
dislike her company, and that our occasional severity is less real than
affected. She opens many pleasant vistas, and calls up numerous themes
of never-failing interest. Would that we could wander with her under the
azure skies and golden sunsets of Claude Lorraine, amidst classic groves
and temples, and flocks, and herds, and winding streams, and distant
hills and glittering sunny vales,

——‘Where universal Pan,
Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance,
Leads on the eternal spring;’—

or repose in Gaspar Poussin’s cool grottos, or on his breezy summits, or
by his sparkling waterfalls!—but we must not indulge too long in these
delightful dreams. Time presses, and we must on. It is mentioned in this
part of the narrative which treats of Salvator’s contemporaries and
great rivals in landscape, that Claude Lorraine, besides his natural
stupidity in all other things, was six-and-thirty before he began to
paint (almost the age at which Raphael died), and in ten years after
was—what no other human being ever was or will be. The lateness of the
period at which he commenced his studies, render those unrivalled
masterpieces which he has left behind him to all posterity a greater
miracle than they would otherwise be. One would think that perfection
required at least a whole life to attain it. Lady Morgan has described
this divine artist very prettily and poetically; but her description of
Gaspar Poussin is as fine, and might in some places be mistaken for that
of his rival. This is not as it should be; since the distance is
immeasurable between the productions of Claude Lorraine and all other
landscapes whatever—with the single exception of Titian’s
backgrounds.[27] Sir Joshua Reynolds used to say (such was his opinion
of the faultless beauty of his style), that ‘there would be another
Raphael before there was another Claude!’

The first volume of the present work closes with a spirited account of
the short-lived revolution at Naples, brought about by the celebrated
Massaniello. Salvator contrived to be present at one of the meetings of
the patriotic conspirators by torchlight, and has left a fine sketch of
the unfortunate leader. An account of this memorable transaction will be
found in Robertson, and a still more striking and genuine one in the
Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz.

We must hasten through the second volume with more rapid strides.
Salvator, after the failure and death of Massaniello, returned to Rome,
disappointed, disheartened, and gave vent to his feelings on this
occasion by his two poems, _La Babilonia_, and _La Guerra_, which are
full of the spirit of love and hatred, of enthusiasm and bitterness.[28]
About the same time, he painted his two allegorical pictures of ‘Human
Frailty,’ and ‘Fortune.’ These were exhibited in the Pantheon; and from
the sensation they excited, and the sinister comments that were made on
them, had nearly conducted Salvator to the Inquisition. In the picture
of ‘Fortune,’ more particularly, ‘the nose of one powerful ecclesiastic,
and the eye of another, were detected in the brutish physiognomy of the
swine who were treading pearls and flowers under their feet; a Cardinal
was recognised in an ass scattering with his hoof the laurel and myrtle
which lay in his path, and in an old goat reposing on roses. Some there
were who even fancied the infallible lover of Donna Olympia, the Sultana
Queen of the Quirinal! The cry of atheism and sedition—of contempt of
established authorities—was thus raised under the influence of private
pique and long-cherished envy. It soon found an echo in the painted
walls where the Conclave sat “in close divan,” and it was bandied about
from mouth to mouth till it reached the ears of the Inquisitor, within
the dark recesses of his house of terrors.’ II. 20.

The consequence was, that our artist was obliged to fly from Rome, after
waiting a little to see if the storm would blow over, and to seek an
asylum in the court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany at Florence. Here he
passed some of the happiest years of his life, flattered by princes,
feasting nobles, conversing with poets, receiving the suggestions of
critics, painting landscapes or history as he liked best, composing and
reciting his own verses, and making a fortune, which he flung away again
as soon as he had made it, with the characteristic improvidence of
genius. Of the gay, careless, and friendly intercourse in which he
passed his time, the following passages give a very lively intimation.

‘It happened that Rosa, in one of those fits of idleness to which even
his strenuous spirit was occasionally liable, flung down his pencil, and
sallied forth to communicate the infection of his _far niente_ to his
friend Lippi. On entering his _studio_, however, he found him labouring
with great impetuosity on the back-ground of his picture of the _Flight
into Egypt_; but in such sullen vehemence, or in such evident
ill-humour, that Salvator demanded, “Che fai, amico?”—“What am I about?”
said Lippi; “I am going mad with vexation. Here is one of my best
pictures ruined: I am under a spell, and cannot even draw the branch of
a tree, nor a tuft of herbage.”—“Signore Dio!” exclaimed Rosa, twisting
the paletti off his friend’s thumb, “what colours are here?” and
scraping them off, and gently pushing away Lippi, he took his place,
murmuring, “Let me see! who knows but I may help you out of the scrape?”
Half in jest and half in earnest, he began to touch and retouch, and
change, till nightfall found him at the easel, finishing one of the best
back-ground landscapes he ever painted. All Florence came the next day
to look at his _chef-d’œuvre_, and the first artists of the age took it
as a study.

‘A few days afterwards, Salvator called upon Lippi, found him preparing
a canvas, while Malatesta read aloud to him and Ludovico Seranai the
astronomer, the MS. of his poem of the Sphynx. Salvator, with a
noiseless step, took his seat in an old Gothic window, and, placing
himself in a listening attitude, with a bright light falling through
stained glass upon his fine head, produced a splendid study, of which
Lippi, without a word of his intention, availed himself; and executed,
with incredible rapidity, the finest picture of Salvator that was ever
painted. Several copies of it were taken with Lippi’s permission, and
Ludovico Seranai purchased the original at a considerable price. In this
picture Salvator is dressed in a cloth habit, with richly slashed
sleeves, turnovers, and a collar. It is only a head and bust, and the
eyes are looking towards the spectator.’ II. 66.

At one time, his impatience at being separated from Carlo Rossi and
other friends was so great, that he narrowly risked his safety to obtain
an interview with them. About three years after he had been at Florence,
he took post-horses, and set off for Rome at midnight. Having arrived at
an inn in the suburbs, he despatched messages to eighteen of his
friends, who all came, thinking he had got into some new scrape;
breakfasted with them, and returned to Florence, before his Roman
persecutors or his Tuscan friends were aware of his adventure.

Salvator, however, was discontented even with this splendid lot, and
sought to embower himself in entire seclusion, and in deeper bliss, in
the palace of the Counts Maffei at Volterra, and in the solitudes in its
neighbourhood. Here he wandered night and morn, drinking in that slow
poison of reflection which his soul loved best—planning his _Catiline
Conspiracy_—preparing his Satires for the press—and weeding out their
Neapolitanisms, in which he was assisted by the fine taste and quick
tact of his friend Redi. This appears to have been the only part of his
life to which he looked back with pleasure or regret. He however left
this enviable retreat soon after, to return to Rome, partly for family
reasons, and partly, no doubt, because the deepest love of solitude and
privacy does not wean the mind, that has once felt the feverish
appetite, from the desire of popularity and distinction. Here, then, he
planted himself on the Monte Pincio, in a house situated between those
of Claude Lorraine and Nicholas Poussin—and used to walk out of an
evening on the fine promenade near it, at the head of a group of gay
cavaliers, musicians, and aspiring artists; while Nicholas Poussin, the
very genius of antiquity personified, and now bent down with age
himself, led another band of reverential disciples, side by side, with
some learned virtuoso or pious churchman! Meantime, commissions poured
in upon Salvator, and he painted successively his _Jonas_ for the King
of Denmark—his _Battle-piece_ for Louis XIV., still in the Museum at
Paris—and, lastly, to his infinite delight, an Altar-piece for one of
the churches in Rome. Salvator, about this time, seems to have imbibed
(even before he was lectured on his want of economy by the _Fool_ at the
house of his friend Minucci) some idea of making the best use of his
time and talents.

‘The Constable Colonna (it is reported) sent a purse of gold to Salvator
Rosa on receiving one of his beautiful landscapes. The painter, not to
be outdone in generosity, sent the prince another picture, as a
present,—which the prince insisted on remunerating with another purse;
another present and another purse followed; and this struggle between
generosity and liberality continued, to the tune of many other pictures
and presents, until the prince, finding himself a loser by the contest,
sent Salvator two purses, with an assurance that he gave in, _et lui
céda le champ de bataille_.’

Salvator was tenacious in demanding the highest prices for his pictures,
and brooking no question as to any abatement; but when he had promised
his friend Ricciardi a picture, he proposed to restrict himself to a
subject of one or two figures; and they had nearly a quarrel about it.

‘In April 1662,’ says his biographer, ‘and not long after his return to
Rome, his love of wild and mountainous scenery, and perhaps his
wandering tendencies, revived by his recent journey, induced him to
visit Loretto, or at least to make that holy city the _shrine_ of a
pilgrimage, which it appears was one rather of taste than of devotion.
His feelings on this journey are well described in one of his own
_Letters_ inserted in the Appendix. “I could not,” says Salvator, “give
you any account of my return from Loretto, till I arrived here on the
sixth of May. I was for fifteen days in perpetual motion. The journey
was beyond all description curious and picturesque: much more so than
the route from hence to Florence. There is a strange mixture of savage
wildness and domestic scenery, of plain and precipice, such as the eye
delights to wander over. I can safely swear to you, that the tints of
these mountains by far exceed all I have ever observed under your Tuscan
skies; and as for your Verucola, which I once thought a dreary desert, I
shall henceforth deem it a fair garden, in comparison with the scenes I
have now explored in these Alpine solitudes. O God! how often have I
sighed to possess, how often since called to mind, those solitary
hermitages which I passed on my way! How often wished that fortune had
reserved for me such a destiny! I went by Ancona and Torolo, and on my
return visited Assisa—all sites of extraordinary interest to the genius
of painting. I saw at Terni (four miles out of the high road) the famous
waterfal of Velino; an object to satisfy the boldest imagination by its
terrific beauty—a river dashing down a mountainous precipice of near a
mile in height, and then flinging up its foam to nearly an equal
altitude! Believe, that while in this spot, I moved not, saw not,
without bearing you full in my mind and memory.” See p. 277.

He begins another letter, of a later date, on his being employed to
paint the altar of San Giovanni de Fiorentini, thus gaily:—

‘_Sonate le campane_—Ring out the chimes!—At last after thirty years
existence in Rome, of hopes blasted and complaints reiterated against
men and gods, the occasion is accorded me for giving one altar-piece to
the public.’

His anxiety to finish this picture in time for a certain festival, kept
him, he adds, ‘secluded from all commerce of the pen, and from every
other in the world; and I can truly say, that I have forgotten myself,
even to neglecting to eat; and so arduous is my application, that when I
had nearly finished, I was obliged to keep my bed for two days; and had
not my recovery been assisted by emetics, certain it is it would have
been all over with me in consequence of some obstruction in the stomach.
Pity me then, dear friend, if for the glory of my pencil, I have
neglected to devote my pen to the service of friendship.’—_Letter to the
Abate Ricciardi._

Passeri has left the following particulars recorded of him on the day
when this picture (_the Martyrdom of Saint Damian and Saint Cosmus_) was
first exhibited.

‘He (Salvator) had at last exposed his picture in the San Giovanni de’
Fiorentini; and I, to recreate myself, ascended on that evening to the
heights of _Monte della Trinità_, where I found Salvator walking arm in
arm with Signor Giovanni Carlo dei Rossi, so celebrated for his
performance on the harp of three strings, and brother to that Luigi
Rossi, who is so eminent all over the world for his perfection in
musical composition. And when Salvator (who was my intimate friend)
perceived me, he came forward laughingly, and said to me these precise
words:—“Well, what say the malignants now? Are they at last convinced
that I _can_ paint on the great scale? Why, if not, then e’en let
Michael Angelo come down, and do something better. Now at least I have
stopped their mouths, and shown the world what I am worth.” I shrugged
my shoulders. I and the Signor Rossi changed the subject to one which
lasted us till nightfall; and from this (continues Passeri in his
rambling way[29]) it may be gathered how _gagliardo_ he (Salvator) was
in his own opinion. Yet it may not be denied but that he had all the
endowments of a marvellous great painter! one of great resources and
high perfection; and had he no other merit, he had at least that of
being the originator of his own style. He spoke, this evening, of Paul
Veronese more than of any other painter, and praised the Venetian school
greatly. _To Raphael he had no great leaning_, for it was the fashion of
the Neapolitan School to call him hard, _di pietra_, dry,’ &c. p. 172.

Our artist’s constitution now began to break, worn out perhaps by the
efforts of his art, and still more by the irritation of his mind. In a
letter dated in 1666, he complains,

‘I have suffered two months of agony, even with the abstemious regimen
of chicken broth! My feet are two lumps of ice, in spite of the woollen
hose I have imported from Venice. I never permit the fire to be quenched
in my own room, and am more solicitous than even the Cavalier Cigoli,’
(who died of a cold caught in painting a fresco in the Vatican). ‘There
is not a fissure in the house that I am not daily employed in diligently
stopping up, and yet with all this I cannot get warm; nor do I think the
torch of love, or the caresses of Phryne herself, would kindle me into a
glow. For the rest, I can talk of any thing but my pencil: my canvass
lies turned to the wall; my colours are dried up now, and for ever; nor
can I give my thoughts to any subject whatever, but chimney-corners,
brasiers, warming-pans, woollen gloves, woollen caps, and such sort of
gear. In short, dear friend, I am perfectly aware that I have lost much
of my original ardour, and am absolutely reduced to pass entire days
without speaking a word. Those fires, once mine and so brilliant, are
now all spent, or evaporating in smoke. Woe unto me, should I ever be
reduced to exercise my pencil for bread!’

Yet after this, he at intervals produced some of his best pictures. The
scene, however, was now hastening to a close; and the account here given
of his last days, though containing nothing perhaps very memorable, will
yet, we think, be perused with a melancholy interest.

‘A change in his complexion was thought to indicate some derangement of
the liver, and he continued in a state of great languor and depression
during the autumn of 1672; but in the winter of 1673, the total loss of
appetite, and of all power of digestion, reduced him almost to the last
extremity; and he consented, at the earnest request of Lucrezia and his
numerous friends, to take more medical advice. He now passed through the
hands of various physicians, whose ignorance and technical pedantry come
out with characteristic effect in the simple and matter-of-fact details
which the good Padre Baldovini has left of the last days of his eminent
friend. Various cures were suggested by the Roman faculty for a disease
which none had yet ventured to name. Meantime the malady increased, and
showed itself in all the life-wearing symptoms of sleeplessness, loss of
appetite, intermitting fever, and burning thirst. A French quack was
called in to the sufferer; and his prescription was, that he should
drink water abundantly, and nothing but water. While, however, under the
care of this Gallic Sangrado, a confirmed dropsy unequivocally declared
itself; and Salvator, now acquainted with the nature of his disease,
once more submitted to the entreaties of his friends; and, at the
special persuasion of the Padre Francesco Baldovini, placed himself
under the care of a celebrated Italian empiric, then in great repute in
Rome, called Dr. Penna.

‘Salvator had but little confidence in medicine. He had already, during
this melancholy winter, discarded all his physicians, and literally
_thrown physic to the dogs_. But hope, and spring, and love of life,
revived together; and, towards the latter end of February he consented
to receive the visits of Penna, who had cured Baldovini (on the good
father’s own word) of a confirmed dropsy the year before. When the
doctor was introduced, Salvator, with his wonted manliness, called on
him to answer the question he was about to propose with honesty and
frankness, viz. _Was his disorder curable?_ Penna, after going through
certain professional forms, answered, “that his disorder was a simple,
and not a complicated dropsy, and that therefore it was curable.”

‘Salvator instantly and cheerfully placed himself in the doctor’s hands,
and consented to submit to whatever he should subscribe. “The remedy of
Penna,” says Baldovini, “lay in seven little vials, of which the
contents were to be swallowed every day.” But it was obvious to all,
that as the seven vials were emptied, the disorder of Rosa increased;
and on the seventh day of his attendance, the doctor declared to his
friend Baldovini, that the malady of his patient was beyond his reach
and skill.

‘The friends of Salvator now suggested to him their belief that his
disease was brought on and kept up by his rigid confinement to the
house, so opposed to his former active habits of life; but when they
urged him to take air and exercise, he replied significantly to their
importunities, “I take exercise! I go out! if this is your counsel, how
are you deceived!” At the earnest request, however, of Penna, he
consented to see him once more; but the moment he entered his room he
demanded of him, “if he _now_ thought that he was curable?” Penna, in
some emotion, prefaced his verdict by declaring solemnly, “that he
should conceive it no less glory to restore so illustrious a genius to
health, and to the society he was so calculated to adorn, than to save
the life of the Sovereign Pontiff himself; but that, as far as his
science went, the case was now beyond the reach of human remedy.” While
Penna spoke, Salvator, who was surrounded by his family and many
friends, fixed his penetrating eyes on the physician’s face, with the
intense look of one who sought to read his sentence in the countenance
of his judge ere it was verbally pronounced;—but that sentence was now
passed! and Salvator, who seemed more struck by surprise than by
apprehension, remained silent and in a fixed attitude! His friends,
shocked and grieved, or awed by the expression of his countenance, which
was marked by a stern and hopeless melancholy, arose and departed
silently one by one. After a long and deep reverie, Rosa suddenly left
the room, and shut himself up alone in his study. There in silence, and
in unbroken solitude, he remained for two days, holding no communication
with his wife, his son or his most intimate friends; and when at last
their tears and lamentations drew him forth, he was no longer
recognisable. Shrunk, feeble, attenuated, almost speechless, he sunk on
his couch, to rise no more!

‘Life was now wearing away with such obvious rapidity, that his friends,
both clerical and laical, urged him in the most strenuous manner to
submit to the ceremonies and forms prescribed by the Roman Catholic
church in such awful moments. How much the solemn sadness of those
moments may be increased, even to terror and despair, by such pompous
and lugubrious pageants all who have visited Italy—all who still visit
it, can testify. Salvator demanded what they required of him. They
replied, “in the first instance to receive the sacrament as it is
administered in Rome to the dying.”—“To receiving the sacrament,” says
his confesser Baldovini, “he showed no repugnance (_non se mostrò
repugnante_); but he vehemently and positively refused to allow the
host, with all the solemn pomp of its procession, to be brought to his
house, which he deemed unworthy of the divine presence.”

‘The rejection of a ceremony which was deemed in Rome indispensably
necessary to salvation, and by one who was already stamped with the
church’s reprobation, soon took air; report exaggerated the circumstance
into a positive expression of infidelity; and the gossipry of the Roman
Anterooms was supplied for the time with a subject of discussion, in
perfect harmony with their slander, bigotry, and idleness. “As I went
forth from Salvator’s door,” relates the worthy Baldovini, “I met the
_Canonica Scornio_, a man who has taken out a license to speak of all
men as he pleases. ‘And how goes it with Salvator?’ demands of me this
Canonico. ‘Bad enough, I fear.’—‘Well, a few nights back, happening to
be in the anteroom of a certain great prelate, I found myself in the
centre of a circle of disputants, who were busily discussing whether the
aforesaid Salvator would die a schismatic, a Huguenot, a Calvinist, or a
Lutheran?’—‘He will die, Signor Canonico,’ I replied, ‘when it pleases
God, a better Catholic than any of those who now speak so slightingly of
him!’—and so I pursued my way.”

‘On the 15th of March Baldovini entered the patient’s chamber. But, to
all appearance, Salvator was suffering great agony. “How goes it with
thee, Rosa?” asked Baldovini kindly, as he approached him. “Bad, bad!”
was the emphatic reply. While writhing with pain, the sufferer after a
moment added:—“To judge by what I now endure, the hand of death grasps
me sharply.”

‘In the restlessness of pain, he now threw himself on the edge of the
bed, and placed his head on the bosom of Lucrezia, who sat supporting
and weeping over him. His afflicted son and friend took their station at
the other side of his couch, and stood watching the issue of these
sudden and frightful spasms in mournful silence. At that moment a
celebrated Roman physician, the Doctor Catanni, entered the apartment.
He felt the pulse of Salvator, and perceived that he was fast sinking.
He communicated his approaching dissolution to those most interested in
the melancholy intelligence, and it struck all present with unutterable
grief. Baldovini, however, true to his sacred calling, even in the depth
of his human affliction, instantly despatched the young Agosto to the
neighbouring Convent _della Trinità_, for the holy Viaticum. While life
was still fluttering at the heart of Salvator, the officiating priest of
the day arrived, bearing with him the holy apparatus of the last
mysterious ceremony of the church. The shoulders of Salvator were laid
bare, and anointed with the consecrated oil: some prayed fervently,
others wept, and all even still hoped; but the taper which the Doctor
Catanni held to the lips of Salvator, while the Viaticum was
administered, burned brightly and steadily! Life’s last sigh had
transpired, as Religion performed her last rite.’ p. 205.

Salvator left a wife and son, (a boy of about thirteen), who inherited a
considerable property, in books, prints, and bills of exchange, which
his father had left in his banker’s hands for pictures painted in the
last few years of his life.

We confess we close these volumes with something of a melancholy
feeling. We have, in this great artist, another instance added to the
list of those who, being born to give delight to others, appear to have
lived only to torment themselves, and, with all the ingredients of
happiness placed within their reach, to have derived no benefit either
from talents or success. Is it, that the outset of such persons in life
(who are raised by their own efforts from want and obscurity) jars their
feelings and sours their tempers? Or that painters, being often men
without education or general knowledge, overrate their own pretensions,
and meet with continual mortifications in the rebuffs they receive from
the world, who do not judge by the same individual standard? Or is a
morbid irritability the inseparable concomitant of genius? None of these
suppositions fairly solves the difficulty; for many of the old painters
(and those the greatest) were men of mild manners, of great modesty, and
good temper. Painting, however, speaks a language known to few, and of
which all pretend to judge; and may thus, perhaps, afford more occasion
to pamper sensibility into a disease, where the seeds of it are sown too
deeply in the constitution, and not checked by proportionable
self-knowledge and reflection. Where an artist of genius, however, is
not made the victim of his own impatience, or of idle censures, or of
the good fortune of others, we cannot conceive of a more delightful or
enviable life. There is none that implies a greater degree of thoughtful
abstraction, or a more entire freedom from angry differences of opinion,
or that leads the mind more out of itself, and reposes more calmly on
the grand and beautiful, or the most casual object in nature. Salvator
died young. He had done enough for fame; and had he been happier, he
would perhaps have lived longer. We do not, in one sense, feel the loss
of painters so much as that of other eminent men. They may still be said
to be present with us bodily in their works: we can revive their memory
by every object we see; and it seems as if they could never wholly die,
while the ideas and thoughts that occupied their minds while living
survive, and have a palpable and permanent existence in the forms of
external nature.

AMERICAN LITERATURE—DR. CHANNING

VOL. I.] [_October 1829._

Of the later American writers, who, besides Dr. Channing, have acquired
some reputation in England, we can only recollect Mr. Washington Irving,
Mr. Brown, and Mr. Cooper. To the first of these we formerly paid an
ample tribute of respect; nor do we wish to retract a tittle of what we
said on that occasion, or of the praise due to him for brilliancy, ease,
and a faultless equability of style. Throughout his polished pages, no
thought shocks by its extravagance, no word offends by vulgarity or
affectation. All is gay, but guarded,—heedless, but sensitive of the
smallest blemish. We cannot deny it—nor can we conceal it from ourselves
or the world, if we would—that he is, at the same time, deficient in
nerve and originality. Almost all his sketches are like patterns taken
in silk paper from our classic writers;—the traditional manners of the
last age are still kept up (stuffed in glass cases) in Mr. Irving’s
modern version of them. The only variation is in the transposition of
dates; and herein the author is chargeable with a fond and amiable
anachronism. He takes Old England for granted as he finds it described
in our stock-books of a century ago—gives us a Sir Roger de Coverley in
the year 1819, instead of the year 1709; and supposes old English
hospitality and manners, relegated from the metropolis, to have taken
refuge somewhere in Yorkshire, or the fens of Lincolnshire. In some
sequestered spot or green savannah, we can conceive Mr. Irving enchanted
with the style of the wits of Queen Anne;—in the bare, broad, straight,
mathematical streets of his native city, his busy fancy wandered through
the blind alleys and huddled zig-zag sinuosities of London, and the
signs of Lothbury and East-Cheap swung and creaked in his delighted
ears. The air of his own country was too poor and thin to satisfy the
pantings of youthful ambition; he gasped for British popularity,—he
came, and found it. He was received, caressed, applauded, made giddy:
the national politeness owed him some return, for he imitated, admired,
deferred to us; and, if his notions were sometimes wrong, yet it was
plain he thought of nothing else, and was ready to sacrifice every thing
to obtain a smile or a look of approbation. It is true, he brought no
new earth, no sprig of laurel gathered in the wilderness, no red bird’s
wing, no gleam from crystal lake or new-discovered fountain, (neither
grace nor grandeur plucked from the bosom of this Eden-state like that
which belongs to cradled infancy); but he brought us _rifaciméntos_ of
our own thoughts—copies of our favourite authors: we saw our self
admiration reflected in an accomplished stranger’s eyes; and the lover
received from his mistress, the British public, her most envied favours.

Mr. Brown, who preceded him, and was the author of several novels which
made some noise in this country, was a writer of a different stamp.
Instead of hesitating before a scruple, and aspiring to avoid a fault,
he braved criticism, and aimed only at effect. He was an inventor, but
without materials. His strength and his efforts are convulsive
throes—his works are a banquet of horrors. The hint of some of them is
taken from Caleb Williams and St. Leon, but infinitely exaggerated, and
carried to disgust and outrage. They are full (to disease) of
imagination,—but it is forced, violent, and shocking. This is to be
expected, we apprehend, in attempts of this kind in a country like
America, where there is, generally speaking, no _natural imagination_.
The mind must be excited by overstraining, by pulleys and levers. Mr.
Brown was a man of genius, of strong passion, and active fancy; but his
genius was not seconded by early habit, or by surrounding sympathy. His
story and his interests are not wrought out, therefore, in the ordinary
course of nature; but are, like the monster in Frankenstein, a man made
by art and determined will. For instance, it may be said of him, as of
Gawin Douglas, ‘Of Brownies and Bogilis full is his Buik.’ But no ghost,
we will venture to say, was ever seen in North America. They do not walk
in broad day; and the night of ignorance and superstition which favours
their appearance, was long past before the United States lifted up their
head beyond the Atlantic wave. The inspired poet’s tongue must have an
echo in the state of public feeling, or of involuntary belief, or it
soon grows harsh or mute. In America, they are ‘so well policied,’ so
exempt from the knowledge of fraud or force, so free from the assaults
of _the flesh and the devil_, that in pure hardness of belief they hoot
the _Beggar’s Opera_ from the stage: with them, poverty and crime,
pickpockets and highwaymen, the lock-up-house and the gallows, are
things incredible to sense! In this orderly and undramatic state of
security and freedom from natural foes, Mr. Brown has provided one of
his heroes with a demon to torment him, and fixed him at his back;—but
what is to keep him there? Not any prejudice or lurking superstition on
the part of the American reader: for the lack of such, the writer is
obliged to make up by incessant rodomontade, and face-making. The want
of genuine imagination is always proved by caricature: monsters are the
growth, not of passion, but of the attempt forcibly to stimulate it. In
our own unrivalled Novelist, and the great exemplar of this kind of
writing, we see how ease and strength are united. Tradition and
invention meet half way; and nature scarce knows how to distinguish
them. The reason is, there is here an old and solid ground in previous
manners and opinion for imagination to rest upon. The air of this bleak
northern clime is filled with legendary lore: Not a castle without the
stain of blood upon its floor or winding steps: not a glen without its
ambush or its feat of arms: not a lake without its Lady! But the map of
America is not historical; and, therefore, works of fiction do not take
root in it; for the fiction, to be good for any thing, must not be in
the author’s mind, but belong to the age or country in which he lives.
The genius of America is essentially mechanical and modern.

Mr. Cooper describes things to the life, but he puts no motion into
them. While he is insisting on the minutest details, and explaining all
the accompaniments of an incident, the story stands still. The elaborate
accumulation of particulars serves not to embody his imagery, but to
distract and impede the mind. He is not so much the master of his
materials as their drudge: He labours under an epilepsy of the fancy. He
thinks himself bound in his character of novelist to tell the truth, the
whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Thus, if two men are struggling
on the edge of a precipice for life or death, he goes not merely into
the vicissitudes of action or passion as the chances of the combat vary;
but stops to take an inventory of the geography of the place, the shape
of the rock, the precise attitude and display of the limbs and muscles,
with the eye and habits of a sculptor. Mr. Cooper does not seem to be
aware of the infinite divisibility of mind and matter; and that an
‘abridgment’ is all that is possible or desirable in the most individual
representation. A person who is so determined, may write volumes on a
grain of sand or an insect’s wing. Why describe the dress and appearance
of an Indian chief, down to his tobacco-stopper and button-holes? It is
mistaking the province of the artist for that of the historian; and it
is this very obligation of painting and statuary to fill up all the
details, that renders them incapable of telling a story, or of
expressing more than a single moment, group, or figure. Poetry or
romance does not descend into the particulars, but atones for it by a
more rapid march and an intuitive glance at the more striking results.
By considering truth or matter-of-fact as the sole element of popular
fiction, our author fails in massing and in impulse. In the midst of
great vividness and fidelity of description, both of nature and manners,
there is a sense of jejuneness,—for half of what is described is
insignificant and indifferent; there is a hard outline,—a little manner;
and his most striking situations do not tell as they might and ought,
from his seeming more anxious about the mode and circumstances than the
catastrophe. In short, he anatomizes his subjects; and his characters
bear the same relation to living beings that the botanic specimens
collected in a portfolio do to the living plant or tree. The sap does
not circulate kindly; nor does the breath of heaven visit, or its dews
moisten them. Or, if Mr. Cooper gets hold of an appalling circumstance,
he, from the same tenacity and thraldom to outward impressions, never
lets it go: He repeats it without end. Thus, if he once hits upon the
supposition of a wild Indian’s eyes glaring through a thicket, every
bush is from that time forward furnished with a pair; the page is
studded with them, and you can no longer look about you at ease or in
safety. The high finishing we have spoken of is particularly at variance
with the rudeness of the materials. In Richardson it was excusable,
where all was studied and artificial; but a few dashes of red ochre are
sufficient to paint the body of a savage chieftain; nor should his
sudden and frantic stride on his prey be treated with the precision and
punctiliousness of a piece of _still life_. There are other American
writers, (such as the historiographer of _Brother Jonathan_,) who carry
this love of veracity to a pitch of the marvellous. They run riot in an
account of the dishes at a boarding-house, as if it were a banquet of
the Gods; and recount the overturning of a travelling stage-waggon with
as much impetuosity, turbulence, and exaggerated enthusiasm, as if it
were the fall of Phaeton. ’ In the absence of subjects of real interest,
men make themselves an interest out of nothing, and magnify mole-hills
into mountains. This is not the fault of Mr. Cooper: He is always true,
though sometimes tedious; and correct, at the expense of being insipid.
His _Pilot_ is the best of his works; and truth to say, we think it a
masterpiece in its kind. It has great unity of purpose and feeling.
Every thing in it may be said

——‘To suffer a _sea-change_
Into something new and strange.’

His Pilot never appears but when the occasion is worthy of him; and when
he appears, the result is sure. The description of his guiding the
vessel through the narrow strait left for her escape, the sea-fight, and
the incident of the white topsail of the English man-of-war appearing
above the fog, where it is first mistaken for a cloud, are of the first
order of graphic composition; to say nothing of the admirable episode of
Tom Coffin, and his long figure coiled up like a rope in the bottom of
the boat. The rest is _common-place_; but then it is American
common-place. We thank Mr. Cooper he does not take every thing from us,
and therefore we can learn something from him. He has the saving grace
of originality. We wish we could impress it, ‘line upon line, and
precept upon precept,’ especially upon our American brethren, how
precious, how invaluable _that_ is. In art, in literature, in science,
the least bit of nature is worth all the plagiarism in the world. The
great secret of Sir Walter Scott’s enviable, but unenvied success, lies
in his transcribing from nature instead of transcribing from books.

Anterior to the writers above mentioned, were other three, who may be
named as occupying (two of them at least) a higher and graver place in
the yet scanty annals of American Literature. These were Franklin, the
author (whoever he was) of the _American Farmer’s Letters_, and Jonathan
Edwards.

Franklin, the most celebrated, was emphatically an American. He was a
great experimental philosopher, a consummate politician, and a paragon
of common sense. His _Poor Robin_ was an absolute manual for a country
in leading-strings, making its first attempts to go alone. There is
nowhere compressed in the same compass so great a fund of local
information and political sagacity, as in his _Examination before the
Privy Council_ in the year 1754. The fine _Parable against
Persecution_, which appears in his miscellaneous works, is borrowed
from Bishop Taylor. Franklin is charged by some with a want of
imagination, or with being a mere prosaic, practical man; but the
instinct of the true and the useful in him, had more genius in it than
all the ‘metre-ballad-mongering’ of those who take him to task.

The _American Farmer’s Letters_, (published under a feigned name[30] a
little before the breaking out of the American war,) give us a tolerable
idea how American scenery and manners may be treated with a lively,
poetic interest. The pictures are sometimes highly coloured, but they
are vivid and strikingly characteristic. He gives not only the objects,
but the feelings, of a new country. He describes himself as placing his
little boy in a chair screwed to the plough which he guides, (to inhale
the scent of the fresh furrows,) while his wife sits knitting under a
tree at one end of the field. He recounts a battle between two snakes
with an Homeric gravity and exuberance of style. He paints the dazzling,
almost invisible flutter of the humming-bird’s wing: Mr. Moore’s airiest
verse is not more light and evanescent. His account of the manners of
the Nantucket people, their frank simplicity, and festive rejoicings
after the perils and hardships of the whale-fishing, is a true and
heartfelt picture. There is no fastidious refinement or cynical
contempt: He enters into their feelings and amusements with the same
alacrity as they do themselves; and this is sure to awaken a
fellow-feeling in the reader. If the author had been thinking of the
effect of his description in a London drawing-room, or had insisted on
the most disagreeable features in the mere littleness of national
jealousy, he would have totally spoiled it. But health, joy, and
innocence, are good things all over the world, and in all classes of
society; and, to impart pleasure, need only be described in their
genuine characters. The power to sympathize with nature, without
thinking of ourselves or others, if it is not a definition of genius,
comes very near to it. From this liberal unaffected style, the Americans
are particularly cut off by habitual comparisons with us, or upstart
claims of their own;—by the dread of being thought vulgar, which
necessarily makes them so, or the determination to be fine, which must
for ever prevent it. The most interesting part of the author’s work is
that where he describes the first indications of the breaking out of the
American war—the distant murmur of the tempest—the threatened inroad of
the Indians like an inundation on the peaceful back-settlements: his
complaints and his auguries are fearful. But we have said enough of this
_Illustrious Obscure_; for it is the rule of criticism to praise none
but the over-praised, and to offer fresh incense to the idol of the day.

It is coming more within canonical bounds, and approaching nearer the
main subject of this notice, to pay a tribute to the worth and talents
of Jonathan Edwards; the well-known author of the _Treatise on the
Will_, who was a Massachusetts divine and most able logician. Having
produced _him_, the Americans need not despair of their metaphysicians.
We do not scruple to say, that he is one of the acutest, most powerful,
and, of all reasoners, the most conscientious and sincere. His closeness
and candour are alike admirable. Instead of puzzling or imposing on
others, he tries to satisfy his own mind. We do not say whether he is
right or wrong; we only say that his method is ‘an honest method:’ there
is not a trick, a subterfuge, a verbal sophism in his whole book. Those
who compare his arguments with what Priestley or Hobbes have written on
the same question, will find the one petulant and the other dogmatical.
Far from taunting his adversaries, he endeavours with all his might to
explain difficulties; and acknowledges that the words _Necessity_,
_Irresistible_, _Inevitable_, &c., which are applied to external force,
acting in spite of the will, are misnomers when applied to acts, or a
necessity emanating from the will itself; and that the repugnance of his
favourite doctrine to common sense and feeling, (in which most of his
party exult as a triumph of superior wisdom over vulgar prejudice,) is
an unfortunate stumbling-block in the way of truth, arising out of the
structure of language itself. His anxiety to clear up the scruples of
others, is equal, in short, to his firmness in maintaining his own
opinion.

We could wish that Dr. Channing had formed himself upon this manly and
independent model, instead of going through the circle of reigning
topics, to strike an affected balance between ancient prejudice and
modern paradox; to trim to all opinions, and unite all suffrages; to
calculate the vulgar clamour, or the venal sophistry of the British
press, for the meridian of Boston. Dr. Channing is a great tactician in
reasoning; and reasoning has nothing to do with tactics. We do not like
to see a writer constantly trying to steal a march upon opinion without
having his retreat cut off—full of pretensions, and void of offence. It
is as bad as the opposite extreme of outraging decorum at every step;
and is only a more covert mode of attracting attention, and gaining
surreptitious applause. We never saw any thing more guarded in this
respect than Dr. Channing’s _Tracts_ and _Sermons_—more completely
suspended between heaven and earth. He keeps an eye on both worlds;
kisses hands to the reading public all round; and does his best to stand
well with different sects and parties. He is always in advance of the
line, in an amiable and imposing attitude, but never far from succour.
He is an Unitarian; but then he disclaims all connexion with Dr.
Priestley, as a materialist; he denounces Calvinism and the Church of
England; but to show that this proceeds from no want of liberality,
makes the _amende honorable_ to Popery and Popish divines;—is an
American Republican and a French Bourbonist—abuses Bonaparte, and
observes a profound silence with respect to Ferdinand—likes wit,
provided it is serious—and is zealous for the propagation of the Gospel
and the honour of religion; but thinks it should form a coalition with
reason, and be surrounded with a halo of modern lights. We cannot
combine such a system of checks and saving clauses. We are dissatisfied
with the want not only of originality of view, but of moral daring. And
here we will state a suspicion, into which we have been led by more than
one American writer, that the establishment of civil and religious
liberty is not quite so favourable to the independent formation, and
free circulation of opinion, as might be expected. Where there is a
perfect toleration—where there is neither Censorship of the press nor
Inquisition, the public take upon themselves the task of _surveillance_,
and exercise the functions of a literary police, like so many familiars
of the _Holy Office_. In a monarchy, or mixed government, there is an
appeal open from the government to the people; there is a natural
opposition, as it were, between prejudice, or authority, and reason: but
when the community take the power into their own hands, and there is but
one body of opinion, and one voice to express it, there can be no
_reaction_ against it; and to remonstrate or resist, is not only a
public outrage, but sounds like a personal insult to every individual in
the community. It is differing from the company; you become a _black
sheep in the flock_. There is no excuse or mercy for it. Hence the too
frequent cowardice, jesuitism, and sterility, produced by this
republican discipline and drilling. Opinions must march abreast—must
keep in rank and file, and woe to the caitiff thought that advances
before the rest, or turns aside! This uniformity, and equal purpose on
all sides, leads (if not checked) to a monstrous Ostracism in public
opinion. Whoever outstrips, or takes a separate path to himself, is
considered as usurping an unnatural superiority over the whole. He is
treated not with respect or indulgence, but indignity.

We like Dr. Channing’s Sermons best; his Criticisms less; his Politics
least of all. We think several of his Discourses do great honour to
himself and his profession, and are highly respectable models of
pulpit-composition. We would instance more particularly, and recommend
to the perusal of our readers, that _On the Duties of Children_. The
feeling, the justness of observation, the tenderness, and the severity,
are deserving of all praise. The author here appears in a truly amiable
and advantageous light. This composition alone makes us believe, that he
is a good, and might, with proper direction and self-reliance, have been
even a great man. We shall give a long extract with the more pleasure,
as we are assuredly actuated by no ill-will towards the reverend author,
and only wish to point out how very considerable ability, and probable
uprightness of intention, may be warped and injured by a wrong bias, and
candidateship for false and contradictory honours.

‘_First_, You are required to view and treat your parents with respect.
Your tender, inexperienced age requires that you think of yourselves
with humility, and conduct yourselves with modesty; that you respect the
superior age, and wisdom, and improvements of your parents, and observe
towards them a submissive deportment. Nothing is more unbecoming you;
nothing will render you more unpleasant in the eyes of others, than
froward or contemptuous conduct towards your parents. There are
children, and I wish I could say there are only a few, who speak to
their parents with rudeness, grow sullen at their rebukes, behave in
their presence as if they deserved no attention, hear them speak without
noticing them, and rather ridicule than honour them. There are many
children at the present day who think more highly of themselves than of
their elders; who think that their own wishes are first to be gratified;
who abuse the condescension and kindness of their parents, and treat
them as servants rather than superiors. Beware, my young friends, lest
you grow up with this assuming and selfish spirit. Regard your parents
as kindly given you by God, to support, direct, and govern you in your
present state of weakness and inexperience. Express your respect for
them in your manner and conversation. Do not neglect those outward signs
of dependence and inferiority which suit your age. You are young, and
you should therefore take the lowest place, and rather retire than
thrust yourselves forward into notice. You have much to learn, and you
should therefore hear, instead of seeking to be heard. You are
dependent, and you should therefore ask instead of demanding what you
desire, and you should receive every thing from your parents as a
favour, and not as a debt. I do not mean to urge upon you a slavish fear
of your parents. Love them, and love them ardently; but mingle a sense
of their superiority with your love. Feel a confidence in their
kindness; but let not this confidence make you rude and presumptuous,
and lead to indecent familiarity. Talk to them with openness and
freedom; but never contradict with violence; never answer with passion
or contempt.

‘_Secondly_, You should be grateful to your parents. Consider how much
you owe them. The time has been, and it was not a long time past, when
you depended wholly on their kindness,—when you had no strength to make
a single effort for yourselves,—when you could neither speak nor walk,
and knew not the use of any of your powers. Had not a parent’s arm
supported you, you must have fallen to the earth, and perished. Observe
with attention the infants which you often see, and consider that a
little while ago you were as feeble as they are: you were only a burden
and a care, and you had nothing with which you could repay your parents’
affection. But did they forsake you? How many sleepless nights have they
been disturbed by your cries! When you were sick, how tenderly did they
hang over you! With what pleasure have they seen you grow up in health
to your present state; and what do you now possess which you have not
received from their hands? God, indeed, is your great parent, your best
friend, and from him every good gift descends; but God is pleased to
bestow every thing upon you through the kindness of your parents. To
your parents you owe every comfort: you owe to them the shelter you
enjoy from the rain and cold, the raiment which covers, and the food
which nourishes you. While you are seeking amusements, or are employed
in gaining knowledge at school, your parents are toiling that you may be
happy, that your wants may be supplied, that your minds may be improved,
that you may grow up and be useful in the world. And when you consider
how often you have forfeited all this kindness, and yet how ready they
have been to forgive you, and to continue their favours, ought not you
to look upon them with the tenderest gratitude? What greater monster can
there be than an unthankful child, whose heart is never warmed by the
daily expressions of parental solicitude; who, instead of requiting his
best friend by his affectionate conduct, is sullen and passionate, and
thinks his parents will do nothing for him, because they will not do all
he desires? Consider how much better they can decide for you than you
can for yourselves. You know but little of the world in which you live.
You hastily catch at every thing which promises you pleasure; and unless
the authority of a parent should restrain you, you would soon rush into
ruin, without a thought or a fear. In pursuing your own inclinations,
your health would be destroyed, your minds would run to waste, you would
grow up slothful, selfish, a trouble to others, and burdensome to
yourselves. Submit, then, cheerfully to your parents. Have you not
experienced their goodness long enough to know, that they wish to make
you happy, even when their commands are most severe? Prove, then, your
sense of this goodness by doing cheerfully what they require. When they
oppose your wishes, do not think that you have more knowledge than they.
Do not receive their commands with a sour, angry, sullen look, which
says, louder than words, that you obey only because you dare not rebel.
If they deny your requests, do not persist in urging them, but consider
how many requests they have already granted you. Do not expect that your
parents are to give up every thing to you, but study to give up every
thing to them. Do not wait for them to threaten, but when a look tells
you what they want, fly to perform it. This is the way in which you can
best reward them for all their pains and labours. In this way you will
make their house pleasant and cheerful. But if you are disobedient,
perverse, and stubborn, you will make home a place of contention, noise,
and anger, and your best friends will have reason to wish that you had
never been born. A disobedient child almost always grows up ill-natured
and disobliging to all with whom he is connected. None love him, and he
has no heart to love any but himself. If you would be amiable in your
temper and manner, and desire to be beloved, let me advise you to begin
your life with giving up your wills to your parents.

‘Again, You must express your respect for your parents, by placing
unreserved confidence in them. This is a very important part of your
duty. Children should learn to be honest, sincere, open-hearted to their
parents. An artful, hypocritical child is one of the most unpromising
characters in the world. You should have no secrets which you are
unwilling to disclose to your parents. If you have done wrong, you
should openly confess it, and ask that forgiveness which a parent’s
heart is so ready to bestow. If you wish to undertake any thing, ask
their consent. Never begin any thing in the hope you can conceal your
design. If you once strive to impose on your parents, you will be led
on, from one step to another, to invent falsehoods, to practise
artifice, till you will become contemptible and hateful. You will soon
be detected, and then none will trust you. Sincerity in a child will
make up for many faults. Of children, he is the worst who watches the
eyes of his parents, pretends to obey as long as they see him, but as
soon as they have turned away, does what they have forbidden. Whatever
else you do, never deceive. Let your parents learn your faults from your
own lips, and be assured they will never love you the less for your
openness and sincerity.’—(_Sermons and Tracts_, p. 233.)

The whole discourse is prettily turned, and made out with great
simplicity and feeling. There is a want neither of heart nor head. Dr.
Channing here does well, for he trusts to his own observations and
convictions. We may also give what he says in answer to Fenelon, on the
subject of _self-annihilation_, as another favourable specimen of free
enquiry, and of a higher or more philosophical cast.

‘We have said that self-crucifixion and love to God are, in Fenelon’s
system, the two chief constituents, or elements, of virtue and
perfection. To these we will give separate attention, although in truth,
they often coalesce, and always imply one another. We begin with
self-crucifixion, or what is often called self-sacrifice, and on this we
chiefly differ from the expositions of our author. Perhaps the word
_self_ occurs more frequently than any other in Fenelon’s writings, and
he is particularly inclined to place it in contrast with, and in
opposition to, God. According to his common teaching, God and self are
hostile influences or attractions, having nothing in common; the one the
concentration of all evil, the other of all good. Self is the principle
and the seat of all guilt and misery. He is never weary of pouring
reproach on self; and, generally speaking, sets no limits to the duty of
putting it to a painful death. Now, language like this has led men to
very injurious modes of regarding themselves and their own nature, and
made them forgetful of what they owe to themselves. It has thrown a
cloud over man’s condition and prospects. It has led to self-contempt, a
vice as pernicious as pride. A man, when told perpetually to crucify
_himself_, is apt to include under this word his whole nature; and we
fear that, under this teaching, our nature is repressed, its growth
stinted, its free movements chained, and, of course, its beauty, grace,
and power impaired. We mean not to charge on Fenelon this error of which
we have spoken, or to hold him responsible for its effects. But we do
think that it finds shelter under his phraseology; and we deem it so
great, so pernicious, as to need a faithful exposition. Men err in
nothing more than in disparaging and wronging their own nature. None are
just to themselves. The truth on this great subject is indeed so
obscured, that it may startle as a paradox. A human being, justly
viewed, instead of being bound to general self-crucifixion, cannot
reverence and cherish himself too much. This position, we know, is
strong; but strong language is needed to encounter strong delusion. We
would teach that great limitations must be set to the duty of renouncing
or denying ourselves, and that no self-crucifixion is virtuous but that
which concurs with, and promotes self-respect. We will unfold our
meaning, beginning with positions which we presume will be controverted
by none.’

Dr. Channing, after showing that the mind, the body, and even self-love,
are parts of our nature which cannot well be dispensed with, thus
proceeds:—

‘Now, it is not true that self-love is our only principle, or that it
constitutes ourselves any more than other principles; and the wrong done
to our nature by such modes of speech, needs to be resisted. Our nature
has other elements or constituents, and vastly higher ones, to which
self-love was meant to minister, and which are at war with its excesses.
For example, we have reason or intellectual energy given us for the
pursuit and acquisition of truth; and this is essentially a
disinterested principle, for truth, which is its object, is of a
universal, impartial nature. The great province of the intellectual
faculty is to acquaint the individual with the laws and order of the
divine system; a system, which spreads infinitely beyond himself, and of
which he forms a small part; which embraces innumerable beings equally
favoured by God, and which proposes, as its sublime and beneficent end,
the ever-growing good of the whole. Again, human nature has a variety of
affections, corresponding to our domestic and most common relations;
affections, which in multitudes overpower self-love, which make others
the chief object of our care, which nerve the arm for ever-recurring
toil by day, and strengthen the wearied frame to forego the slumbers of
the night. Then there belongs to every man the general sentiment of
humanity, which responds to all human sufferings—to a stranger’s tears
and groans, and often prompts to great sacrifices for his relief. Above
all, there is the moral principle, that which should especially be
called a man’s self; for it is clothed with a kingly authority over his
whole nature, and was plainly given to bear sway over every desire. This
is evidently a disinterested principle. Its very essence is
impartiality. It has no respect of persons. It is the principle of
justice, taking the rights of all under its protection, and frowning on
the least wrong, however largely it may serve ourselves. This moral
nature especially delights in, and enjoins a universal charity, and
makes the heart thrill with exulting joy, at the sight or hearing of
magnanimous deeds, of perils fronted, or death endured in the cause of
humanity. Now, these various principles, and especially the last, are as
truly ourselves as self-love. When a man thinks of himself, these ought
to occur to him as his chief attributes. He can hardly injure himself
more than by excluding these from his conception of himself, and by
making self-love the great constituent of his nature.

‘We have urged these remarks on the narrow sense often given to the word
_self_, because we are persuaded that it leads to degrading ideas of
human nature, and to the pernicious notion that we practise a virtuous
self-sacrifice in holding it in contempt. We would have it understood,
that high faculties form this despised self, as truly as low desires;
and we would add, that when these are faithfully unfolded, this self
takes rank among the noblest beings in the universe. To illustrate this
thought, we ask the reader’s attention to an important, but
much-neglected, view of virtue and religion. These are commonly spoken
of in an abstract manner, as if they were distinct from ourselves—as if
they were foreign existences, which enter the human mind, and dwell
there in a kind of separation from itself. Now, religion and virtue,
wherever they exist, are the mind itself, and nothing else. A good man’s
piety and virtue are not distinct possessions; they are himself, and all
the glory which belongs to them, belongs to himself. What is religion?
Not a foreign inhabitant—not something alien to our nature, which comes
and takes up its abode in the soul. It is the soul itself, lifting
itself up to its Maker. What is virtue? It is the soul listening to, and
revering and obeying a law which belongs to its very essence—the law of
duty. We sometimes smile when we hear men decrying human nature, and in
the same breath extolling religion to the skies, as if religion were any
thing more than human nature acting in obedience to its chief law.
Religion and virtue, as far as we possess them, are ourselves; and the
homage which is paid to these attributes, is in truth a tribute to the
soul of man. Self-crucifixion, then, should it exclude self-reverence,
would be any thing but virtue.

‘We would briefly suggest another train of thought leading to the same
result. Self-crucifixion, or self-renunciation, is a work, and work
requires an agent. By whom, then, is it accomplished? We answer, by the
man himself, who is the subject of it. It is he who is summoned to the
effort. He is called by a voice within, and by the law of God, to put
forth power over himself, to rule his own spirit, to subdue every
passion. Now, this inward power, which self-crucifixion supposes and
demands, is the most signal proof of a high nature which can be given.
It is the most illustrious power which God confers. It is a sovereignty
worth more than that over outward nature. It is the chief constituent of
the noblest order of virtues; and its greatness, of course, demonstrates
the greatness of the human mind, which is perpetually bound and summoned
to put it forth. But this is not all; self-crucifixion has an object, an
end. And what is it? Its great end is to give liberty and energy to our
nature. Its aim is not to break down the soul, but to curb those lusts
and passions which “war against the soul,” that the moral and
intellectual faculties may rise into new life, and may manifest their
divine original. Self-crucifixion, justly viewed, is the suppression of
the passions, that the power and progress of thought, and conscience,
and pure love, may be unrestrained. It is the destruction of the brute,
that the angel may unfold itself within. It is founded on our godlike
capacities, and the expansion and glory of these is the end. Thus the
very duty, which by some is identified with self-contempt, implies and
imposes self-reverence. It is the belief and the choice of perfection,
as our inheritance and our end.’

This is extremely well meant, and very ably executed. There is a _primâ
philosophiâ_ view of the subject, which is, we think, above the ordinary
level of polemical reasoning in our own country. In the line of argument
adopted by our author, there is a strong reflection of the original and
masterly views of the innate capacity of the soul for piety and
goodness, insisted on in Bishop Butler’s _Sermons_—a work which has
fallen into neglect, partly because of the harshness and obscurity of
its style, but more because it contains neither a libel on human nature,
nor a burlesque upon religion. There is much in the above train of
thought silently borrowed from this profound work. Dr. Channing’s
argument is, we think, good and sound against the misanthropes in
philosophy, and the cynics in religion, who alike maintain the absolute
falsity of all human virtue; but the Bishop of Cambray might say, that,
with respect to him, it was not a practical answer, so much as a verbal
evasion; neither meeting his views nor removing the source of his
complaints. Fenelon assuredly, in wishing to annihilate self, did not
wish to extirpate charity and faith, but to crush the old serpent, the
great enemy of these. There is no doubt of the capacity of the soul for
good and evil; the only question is, which principle prevails and
triumphs. The satirist and the man of the world laugh at the pretension
to superior sanctity and disinterestedness; the pious enthusiast may
then be excused if he weeps at the want of them.

How far does that likeness to God, and sympathy with the whole human
race, which Fenelon deprecates the want of, and Dr. Channing boasts of,
as the inseparable attribute and chief ornament of man, really take
place or not in the present state of things, and as a preparation for
another and infinitely more important one? If we regard the moral
capacity of man, _self_ is a unit that counts millions. Its essence and
its glory, says our optimist, is to comprehend the whole human race in
its benevolent regards. Does it do so? The understanding runs along the
whole chain of being; the affections stop, for the most part, at the
first link in the chain. Sense, appetite, pride, passion, engross the
whole of this self, and leave it nearly indifferent, if not averse, to
all other claims on its attention. In order that the moral attainments
should keep pace with the vaunted capacity of man, knowledge should be
identified with feeling. We know that there are a million of other
beings of as much worth, of the same nature, made in the image of God
like ourselves. Have we the same sympathy with every one of these? Do we
feel a million times more for all of them put together, than for
ourselves? The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and
uneasiness, than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings.
Fenelon laments bitterly and feelingly this disparity between duty and
inclination, this want of charity, and eating of self into the soul.
What is the consequence of the disproportionate ratios in which the head
and the heart move? This paltry _self_, looking upon itself as of more
importance than all the rest of the world, fancies itself the centre of
the universe, and would have every one look upon it in the same light.
Not being able to sympathize with others as it ought, it hates and
envies them; is mad to think of its own insignificance in the general
system; cannot bear a rival or a superior; despises and tramples on
inferiors, and would crush and annihilate all pretensions but its own,
that it might be _all in all_. The worm puts on the monarch, or the god,
in thought and in secret; and it is only when it can do so in fact, and
in public, and be the tyrant or idol of its fellows, that it is at ease
or satisfied with itself. Fenelon was right in crying out (if it could
have done any good) for the crucifying of this importunate self, and
putting a better principle in its stead.

Dr. Channing’s Essays on Milton and Bonaparte are both done upon the
same false principle, of making out a case _for_ or _against_. The one
is full of common-place eulogy, the other of common-place invective.
They are pulpit-criticisms. An orator who is confined to expound the
same texts and doctrines week after week, slides very naturally and
laudably into a habit of monotony and paraphrase; is not allowed to be
‘wise above what is written;’ is grave from respect to his subject, and
the authority attached to the truths he interprets; and if his style is
tedious or his arguments trite, he is in no danger of being interrupted
or taken to task by his audience. Such a person is unavoidably an
advocate for certain received principles; often a dull one. He carries
the professional license and character out of the pulpit into other
things, and still fancies that he speaks ‘with authority, and not as the
scribes.’ He may be prolix without suspecting it; may lay a solemn
stress on the merest trifles; repeat truisms, and apologize for them as
startling discoveries; may play the sophist, and conceive he is
performing a sacred duty; and give what turn or gloss he pleases to any
subject,—forgetting that the circumstances under which he declares
himself, and the audience which he addresses, are entirely changed. If,
as we readily allow, there are instances of preachers who have
emancipated themselves from these professional habits, we can hardly add
Dr. Channing to the number.

His notice of Milton is elaborate and stately, but neither new nor
discriminating. One of the first and most prominent passages is a
defence of poetry:—

‘Milton’s fame rests chiefly on his poetry; and to this we naturally
give our first attention. By those who are accustomed to speak of poetry
as light reading, Milton’s eminence in this sphere may be considered
only as giving him a high rank among the contributors to public
amusement. Not so thought Milton. Of all God’s gifts of intellect, he
esteemed poetical genius the most transcendent. He esteemed it in
himself as a kind of inspiration, and wrote his great works with
something of the conscious dignity of a prophet. We agree with Milton in
his estimate of poetry. It seems to us the divinest of all arts; for it
is the breathing or expression of that sentiment which is deepest and
sublimest in human nature; we mean, of that thirst or aspiration, to
which no mind is wholly a stranger, after something purer and lovelier,
something more powerful, lofty, and thrilling, than ordinary and real
life affords. No doctrine is more common among Christians than that of
man’s immortality; but it is not so generally understood, that the germs
or principles of his whole future being are _now_ wrapped up in his
soul, as the rudiments of the future plant in the seed. As a necessary
result of this constitution, the soul, possessed and moved by these
mighty though infant energies, is perpetually stretching beyond what is
present and visible, struggling against the bounds of its earthly
prison-house, and seeking relief and joy in imaginings of unseen and
ideal being. This view of our nature, which has never been fully
developed, and which goes farther towards explaining the contradictions
of human life than all others, carries us to the very foundation and
sources of poetry. He who cannot interpret by his own consciousness what
we have now said, wants the true key to works of genius. He has not
penetrated those sacred recesses of the soul, where poetry is born and
nourished, and inhales immortal vigour, and wings herself for her
heavenward flight. In an intellectual nature, framed for progress and
for higher modes of being, there must be creative energies, powers of
original and ever-growing thought; and poetry is the form in which these
energies are chiefly manifested. It is the glorious prerogative of this
art, that it “makes all things new” for the gratification of a divine
instinct. It indeed finds its elements in what it actually sees and
experiences, in the worlds of matter and mind; but it combines and
blends these into new forms and according to new affinities; breaks
down, if we may so say, the distinctions and bounds of nature; imparts
to material objects life, and sentiment, and emotion, and invests the
mind with the powers and splendours of the outward creation; describes
the surrounding universe in the colours which the passions throw over
it, and depicts the mind in those moods of repose or agitation, of
tenderness or sublime emotion, which manifest its thirst for a more
powerful and joyful existence. To a man of a literal and prosaic
character, the mind may seem lawless in these workings; but it observes
higher laws than it transgresses, the laws of the immortal intellect; it
is trying and developing its best faculties; and in the objects which it
describes, or in the emotions which it awakens, anticipates those states
of progressive power, splendour, beauty, and happiness, for which it was
created.’

There is much more to the same purpose: The whole, to speak freely, is a
laboured and somewhat tumid paraphrase on Lord Bacon’s definition of
poetry, (which has been often paraphrased before,) where he prefers it
to history, ‘as having something divine in it, and representing
characters and objects not as they are, but as they ought to be.’ This
is the general feature of our author’s writings; they cannot be called
mere common-place, but they may be fairly termed _ambitious_
common-place: That is, he takes up the newest and most plausible opinion
at the turn of the tide, or just as it is getting into vogue, and would
fain arrogate both the singularity and the popularity of it to himself.
He hits the public between what they are tired of hearing, and what they
never heard before. He has here, however, put the seal of orthodoxy on
poetry, and we are not desirous to take it off. If he is inclined to
stand sponsor to the Muses, and confirm their offspring at the Fount, he
is welcome to do so. It is curious to see strict Professors for a long
time denouncing and excommunicating Poetry as a wanton, and then, when
they can no longer help it, clasping hands with her as the handmaid of
truth; and instead of making her the daughter of ‘the father of lies,’
identifying her with the vital spirit of religion and our happiest
prospects.

Dr. Channing is aware, however, that poetry is sometimes liable to
abuse, and has given a handle to the ungodly; and as a set-off and salvo
to this objection, has a fling at Lord Byron, as the demon who scatters
‘poison and death;’ while Sir Walter Scott is the beneficent genius of
poetry, unfolding and imparting new energies and the most delightful
impulses to the human breast. In pronouncing the latter sentence, he
bows to popular opinion; in the former he considers just as properly
what he owes to his profession.

The bulk of the account of Milton, both as a poet and a prose-writer,
is, we are constrained to say, mere imitation or amplification of what
has been said by others. He observes, _ex cathedrâ_, and with due
gravity, that the _forte_ of Milton is sublimity—that the two first
books of _Paradise Lost_ are unrivalled examples of that quality. He
then proceeds to show, that he is not without tenderness or beauty,
though he has not the graphic minuteness of Cowper or of Crabbe; he next
praises his versification in opposition to the critics—dwells on the
freshness and innocence of the picture of Adam and Eve in
Paradise—maintains that our sympathy with Satan is nothing but the
admiration of moral strength of mind—acknowledges the harshness and
virulence of Milton’s controversial writings, but blames Dr. Johnson for
doing so. All this we have heard or said before. We are not edified at
all, nor are we greatly flattered by it. It is as if we should convey a
letter to a friend in America, and should find it transcribed and sent
back to us with a heavy postage.

We do not, then, set much store by our author’s criticisms, because
they sometimes seem to be, in a great measure, borrowed from our own
lucubrations. We set still less store by his politics, for they are
borrowed from others. We have no objection to the most severe or
caustic probing of the character of the late ruler of France; but we
_do_ object, in the name both of history and philosophy, to
misrepresentations and falsehoods, as the groundwork of such remarks.
When England has exploded them, half in shame, and half in anger, the
harpy echo lingers in America. The ugly mask has been taken off; but
Dr. Channing chooses to lecture on the mask in preference to the head.
It would serve no useful purpose, however, to follow him in the
details of his _Analysis of the Character of Bonaparte_. But we shall
extract one of his most elaborate passages, in which he favours us
with his opinion of the victors at Waterloo and Trafalgar:—

‘The conqueror of Napoleon, the hero of Waterloo, undoubtedly possesses
great military talents; but we have never heard of his eloquence in the
senate, or of his sagacity in the cabinet; and we venture to say, that
he will leave the world without adding one new thought on the great
themes, on which the genius of philosophy and legislature has meditated
for ages. We will not go down for illustration to such men as Nelson, a
man great on the deck, but debased by gross vices, and who never
pretended to enlargement of intellect. To institute a comparison, in
point of talent and genius, between such men and Milton, Bacon, and
Shakspeare, is almost an insult to these illustrious names. Who can
think of these truly great intelligences; of the range of their minds
through heaven and earth; of their deep intuition into the soul; of
their new and glowing combinations of thought; of the energy with which
they grasped and subjected to their main purpose the infinite materials
of illustration which nature and life afford; who can think of the forms
of transcendent beauty and grandeur which they created, or which were
rather emanations of their own minds; of the calm wisdom, and fervid,
impetuous imagination which they conjoined; of the dominion which they
have exercised over so many generations, and which time only extends and
makes sure; of the voice of power, in which, though dead, they still
speak to nations, and awaken intellect, sensibility, and genius, in both
hemispheres;—who can think of such men, and not feel the immense
inferiority of the most gifted warriors, whose elements of thought are
physical forces and physical obstructions, and whose employment is the
combination of the lowest class of objects on which a powerful mind can
be employed?’

We are here forcibly reminded of Fielding’s character of Mr. Abraham
Adams. ‘Indeed, if this good man had an enthusiasm, or what the vulgar
call a blind side, it was this: he thought a Schoolmaster the greatest
character in the world, and himself the greatest of all schoolmasters,
neither of which points he would have given up to Alexander the Great at
the head of his army.’ So Dr. Channing very gravely divides greatness
into different sorts, and places himself at the top among those who
_talk_ about things—commanders at the bottom among those who only _do_
them. He finds fault with Bonaparte for not coming up to his standard of
greatness; but in order that he may not, raises this standard too high
for humanity. To put it in force would be to leave the ancient and
modern world as bare of great names as the wilds of North America. To
make common sense of it, any one great man must be all the others. Homer
only sung of battles, and it was honour enough for Alexander to place
his works in a golden cabinet. Dr. Channing allows Bonaparte’s supremacy
in war; but disputes it in policy. How many persons, from the beginning
of the world, have united the two in a greater degree, or wielded more
power in consequence? If Bonaparte had not gained a single battle, or
planned a single successful campaign; if he had not scattered Coalition
after Coalition, but invited the Allies to march to Paris; if he had not
quelled the factions, but left them to cut one another’s throats and his
own; if he had not ventured on the _Concordat_, or framed a Code of Laws
for France; if he had encouraged no art or science or man of genius; if
he had not humbled the pride of ‘ancient thrones,’ and risen from the
ground of the people to an equal height with the Gods of the
earth,—showing that the art and the right to reign is not confined to a
particular race; if he had been any thing but what he was, and had done
nothing, he would then have come up to Dr. Channing’s notions of
greatness, and to his boasted standard of a hero! We in Europe, whether
friends or foes, require something beyond this negative merit: we think
that Cæsar, Alexander, and Charlemagne, were ‘no babies;’ we think that
to move the great masses of power and bind opinions in a spell, is as
difficult as the turning a period or winding up a homily; and we are
surprised that stanch republicans, who complain that the world bow to
birth and rank alone, should turn with redoubled rage against intellect,
the instant it became a match for pride and prejudice, and was the only
thing that could be opposed to them with success, or could extort a
moment’s fear or awe for human genius or human nature.

Dr. Channing’s style is good, though in general too laboured, formal,
and sustained. All is brought equally forward,—nothing is left to tell
for itself. In the attempt to be copious, he is tautological; in
striving to explain every thing, he overloads and obscures his meaning.
The fault is the uniform desire to produce an effect, and the
supposition that this is to be done by main force.

In one sermon, Dr. Channing insists boldly and loudly on the necessity
that American preachers should assume a loftier style, and put forth
energies and pretensions to claim attention in proportion to the excited
tone of public feeling, and the advances of modern literature and
science. He reproaches them with their lukewarmness, and points out to
them, as models, the novels of Scott and the poetry of Byron. If Dr.
Channing expects a grave preacher in a pulpit to excite the same
interest as a tragedy hero on the stage, or a discourse on the meaning
of a text of Scripture to enchain the feelings like one of the Waverley
Novels, it will be a long time first. The mere proposal is _putting the
will for the deed_, and an instance of that republican assurance and
rejection of the idea of not being equal to any person or thing, which
convinces pretenders of this stamp that there is no reason why they
should not do all that others can, and a great deal more into the
bargain.

FLAXMAN’S LECTURES ON SCULPTURE

VOL. I.] [_October 1829._

These Lectures were delivered at the Royal Academy in an annual Course,
instituted expressly for that purpose. They are not, on the whole, ill
calculated to promote the object for which they were originally
designed,—to guide the taste, and stimulate the enquiries of the
student; but we should doubt whether there is much in them that is
likely to interest the public. They may be characterised as the work of
a sculptor by profession—dry and hard; a meagre outline, without
colouring or adventitious ornament. The Editor states, that he has left
them scrupulously as he found them: there are, in consequence, some
faults of grammatical construction, of trifling consequence; and many of
the paragraphs are thrown into the form of notes, or loose memorandums,
and read like a table of contents. Nevertheless, there is a great and
evident knowledge of the questions treated of; and wherever there is
knowledge, there is power, and a certain degree of interest. It is only
a pen guided by inanity or affectation, that can strip such subjects of
instruction and amusement. Otherwise, the body of ancient or of modern
Art is like the loadstone, to which the soul vibrates, responsive,
however cold or repulsive the form in which it appears. We have,
however, a more serious fault to object to the present work, than the
mere defects of style, or mode of composition. It is with considerable
regret and reluctance, we confess, that though it may add to the
student’s knowledge of the art, it will contribute little to the
_understanding_ of it. It abounds in rules rather than principles. The
examples, authorities, precepts, are full, just, and well-selected. The
terms of art are unexceptionably applied; the different styles very
properly designated; the mean is distinguished from the lofty; due
praise is bestowed on the _graceful_, the _grand_, the _beautiful_, the
_ideal_; but the reader comprehends no more of the meaning of these
qualities at the end of the work than he did at the beginning. The tone
of the Lectures is dogmatical rather than philosophical. The judgment
for the most part is sound, though no new light is thrown on the grounds
on which it rests. Mr. Flaxman is contented to take up with traditional
maxims, with adjudged cases, with the acknowledged theory and practice
of art: and it is well that he does so; for when he departs from the
habitual bias of his mind, and attempts to enter into an explanation or
defence of first principles, the reasons which he advances are often
weak, warped, insufficient, or contradictory. His arguments are neither
solid nor ingenious: They are merely quaint and gratuitous. If we were
to hazard a general opinion, we should be disposed to say that a certain
setness and formality, a certain want of flexibility and power, ran
through the character of his whole mind. His compositions as a sculptor
are classical,—cast in an approved mould; but, generally speaking, they
are elegant outlines,—poetical abstractions converted into marble, yet
still retaining the essential character of words; and the Professor’s
opinions and views of art as here collected, exhibit barely the surface
and crust of commonly-received maxims, with little depth or originality.
The characteristics of his mind were precision, elegance, cool judgment,
industry, and a laudable and exclusive attachment to _the best_. He
wanted richness, variety, and force. But we shall not dwell farther on
these remarks here; as examples and illustrations of them will occur in
the course of this article.

The first Lecture, on the history of early British Sculpture, will be
found to contain some novel and curious information. At its very
commencement, however, we find two instances of perverse or obscure
reasoning, which we cannot entirely pass over. In allusion to the
original institution and objects of the Royal Academy, the author
observes, that ‘as the study of Sculpture was at that time confined
within narrow limits, so the appointment of a Professorship in that art
was not required, until the increasing taste of the country had given
great popularity to the art itself, and native achievements had called
on the powers of native Sculpture to celebrate British heroes and
patriots.’ Does Mr. Flaxman mean by this to insinuate that Britain had
neither patriots nor heroes to boast of, till after the establishment of
the Royal Academy, and a little before that of the Professorship of
Sculpture? If so, we cannot agree with him. It would be going only a
single step farther to assert that the study of Astronomy had not been
much encouraged in this country, till the discovery of the _Georgium
Sidus_ was thought to call for it, and for the establishment of an
Observatory at Greenwich! In the next page, the Lecturer remarks,
‘Painting is honoured with precedence, because Design or Drawing is more
particularly and extensively employed in illustration of history.
Sculpture immediately follows in the enumeration, because the two arts
possess the same common principles, expressed by Painting in colour, and
by Sculpture in form.’ Surely, there is here some confusion, either in
the thoughts or in the language. First, Painting takes precedence of
Sculpture, because it illustrates history by design or form, which is
common to both; next, Sculpture comes after Painting, because it
illustrates by form, what Painting does not illustrate by form, but by
colour. We cannot make any sense of this. It is from repeated similar
specimens that we are induced to say, that when Mr. Flaxman reasons, he
reasons ill. But to proceed to something more grateful. The following is
a condensed and patriotic sketch of the rise and early progress of
Sculpture in our own country:

‘The Saxons destroyed the works of Roman grandeur in Britain, burnt the
cities from sea to sea, and reduced the country to barbarism again; but
when these invaders were settled in their new possessions, they erected
poor and clumsy imitations of the Roman buildings themselves had ruined.
The Saxon Painting is rather preferable to their Sculpture, which,
whether intended to represent the human or brutal figure, is frequently
both horrible and burlesque. The buildings erected in England from the
settlement of the Saxons to the reign of Henry I., continued nearly the
same plain, heavy repetitions of columns and arches. So little was
Sculpture employed in them, that no sepulchral statue is known in
England before the time of William the Conqueror.

‘Immediately after the Roman Conquest, figures of the deceased were
carved, in bas-relief, on their gravestones, examples of which may be
seen in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey, representing two abbots of
that church, and in Worcester Cathedral, those of St. Oswald and Bishop
Wulstan. The Crusaders returned from the Holy Land; eager to imitate the
arts and magnificence of other countries, they began to decorate the
architecture with rich foliage, and to introduce statues against the
columns; as we find in the west door of Rochester Cathedral, built in
the reign of Henry I. Architecture now improved; Sculpture also became
popular. The custom of carving a figure of the deceased in bas-relief on
the tomb, seems likely to have been brought from France, where it was
continued, in imitation of the Romans. Figures placed against columns
might also be copied from examples in that country, of which one
remarkable instance was a door in the church of St. Germain de Prez, in
Paris, containing several statues of the ancient kings of France,
projecting from columns; a work of the 10th century, of which there are
prints in Montfaucon’s _Antiquities_.

‘Sculpture continued to be practised with such zeal and success, that in
the reign of Henry III. efforts were made deserving our respect and
attention at this day. Bishop Joceline rebuilt the Cathedral Church of
Wells from the pavement, which having lived to finish and dedicate, he
died in the year of our Lord 1242. The west front of this church equally
testifies the piety and comprehension of the Bishop’s mind; the
sculpture presents the noblest, most useful and interesting subjects
possible to be chosen. On the south side, above the west door, are
alto-relievos of the Creation in its different parts, the Deluge, and
important acts of the Patriarchs. Companions to these on the north side
are alto-relievos of the principal circumstances in the life of our
Saviour. Above these are two rows of statues larger than nature, in
niches, of kings, queens, and nobles, patrons of the church, saints,
bishops, and other religious, from its first foundation to the reign of
Henry III. Near the pediment is our Saviour come to judgment, attended
by angels and his twelve apostles. The upper arches on each side, along
the whole of the west front, and continued in the north and south ends,
are occupied by figures rising from their graves, strongly expressing
the hope, fear, astonishment, stupefaction, or despair, inspired by the
presence of the Lord and Judge of the world in that awful moment. In
speaking of the execution of such a work, due regard must be paid to the
circumstances under which it was produced, in comparison with those of
our own times. There were neither prints nor printed books to assist the
artist. The Sculptor could not be instructed in Anatomy, for there were
no Anatomists. Some knowledge of Optics, and a glimmering of
Perspective, were reserved for the researches of so sublime a genius as
Roger Bacon, some years afterwards. A small knowledge of Geometry and
Mechanics was exclusively confined to two or three learned monks in the
whole country; and the principles of those sciences, as applied to the
figure and motion of man and inferior animals, were known to none!
_Therefore_ this work is _necessarily ill drawn_, and deficient in
principle, and much of the sculpture is rude and severe; yet in parts
there is a beautiful simplicity, an irresistible sentiment, and
sometimes a grace, excelling more modern productions.

‘It is very remarkable that Wells Cathedral was finished in 1242, two
years after the birth of Cimabue, the restorer of painting in Italy; and
the work was going on at the same time that Nicolo Pisano, the Italian
restorer of sculpture, exercised the art in his own country: it was also
finished forty-six years before the Cathedral of Amiens, and thirty-six
before the Cathedral of Orvieto was begun; and it seems to be the first
specimen of such magnificent and varied sculpture, united in a series of
sacred history, that is to be found in Western Europe. It is, therefore,
probable that the general idea of the work might be brought from the
East by some of the Crusaders. But there are two arguments strongly in
favour of the execution being English: the family name of the Bishop is
English, “Jocelyn Troteman”; and the style, both of sculpture and
architecture, is wholly different from the tombs of Edward the Confessor
and Henry III., which were by Italian artists.

‘The reign of Edward I. produced a new species of monument. When Eleanor
the beloved wife of that monarch died, who had been his heroic and
affectionate companion in the Holy War, he raised some crosses of
magnificent architecture, adorned with statues of his departed queen,
wherever her corpse rested on the way to its interment in Westminster
Abbey. Three of these crosses still remain, at Northampton, Geddington,
and Waltham. The statues have considerable simplicity and delicacy; they
partake of the character and grace particularly cultivated in the school
of Pisano; and it is not unlikely, as the sepulchral statue and tomb of
Henry III. were executed by Italians, that these statues of Queen
Eleanor might be done by some of the numerous travelling scholars from
Pisano’s school.

‘The long and prosperous reign of Edward III. was as favourable to
literature and liberal arts, as to the political and commercial
interests of the country. So generally were painting, sculpture, and
architecture encouraged and employed, that besides the buildings raised
in this reign, few sacred edifices existed, which did not receive
additions and decorations. The richness, novelty, and beauty of
architecture may be seen in York and Gloucester Cathedrals, and many of
our other churches: besides the extraordinary fancy displayed in various
intricate and diversified figures which form the mullions of windows,
they were occasionally enriched with a profusion of foliage and
historical sculpture, equally surprising for beauty and novelty. In the
chancel of Dorchester Church, near Oxford, are three windows of this
kind, one of which, besides rich foliage, is adorned with twenty-eight
small statues relating to the genealogy of our Saviour; and the other
two with alto-relievos from acts of his life.’

Mr. Flaxman then proceeds to trace the progress of Sculpture, and the
growing passion for it in this country, through the reign of Henry VII.
to the period when its prospects were blighted by the Reformation, and
many of its monuments defaced by the Iconoclastic fury of the Puritans
and zealots in the time of Charles I. The Lecturer seems to be of
opinion that the genius of sculpture in our island was arrested, in the
full career of excellence, and when it was approaching the goal of
perfection, by these two events; which drew aside the public attention,
and threw a stigma on the encouragement of sacred sculpture; whereas, it
would perhaps be just as fair to argue, that these events would never
have happened, had it not been for a certain indifference in the
national character to mere outward impressions, and a slowness to
appreciate, or form an enthusiastic attachment to objects that appeal
only to the imagination and the senses. We may be influenced by higher
and more solid principles,—reason and philosophy; but that makes nothing
to the question. Mr. Flaxman bestows great and deserved praise on the
monuments of Aylmer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, and Edmund Crouchback,
in Westminster Abbey, which are by English artists, whose names are
preserved; but speaks slightingly of the tomb of Henry VII. and his
wife, in Henry VII.’s Chapel, by Torregiano; from whom, on trivial and
insufficient grounds, he withholds the merit of the other sculptures and
ornaments of the chapel. This is prejudice, and not wisdom. We think the
tomb alone will be monument enough to that artist in the opinion of all
who have seen it. We have no objection to, but on the contrary applaud
the Lecturer’s zeal to repel the imputation of incapacity from British
art, and to detect the lurking traces and doubtful prognostics of it in
the records of our early history; but we are, at the same time,
convinced that tenaciousness on this point creates an unfavourable
presumption on the other side; and we make bold to submit, that whenever
the national capacity bursts forth in the same powerful and striking way
in the Fine Arts that it has done in so many others, we shall no longer
have occasion to praise ourselves for what we either have done, or what
we are to do:—the world will soon be loud in the acknowledgment of it.
Works of ornament and splendour must dazzle and claim attention at the
first sight, or they do not answer their end. They are not like the
deductions of an abstruse philosophy, or even improvements in practical
affairs, which may make their way slowly and under-ground. They are not
a light placed under a bushel, but like ‘a city set on a hill, that
cannot be hid.’ To _appear_ and to _be_, are with them the same thing.
Neither are we much better satisfied with the arguments of the learned
professor to show that the series of statuary in Wells Cathedral is of
native English workmanship. The difference of style from the tombs of
Edward the Confessor and Henry III. by Italians, can be of little weight
at a period when the principles of art were so unsettled, and each
person did the best he could, according to his own taste and knowledge;
and as to the second branch of the evidence, viz. that ‘the family name
of the Bishop is English, Jocelyn Troteman,’ it sounds too much like a
parody on the story of him who wanted to prove his descent from the
‘Admirable Crichton,’ by his having a family cup in his possession with
the initials A. C.!

We dwell the longer and more willingly on the details and recollections
of the early works of which the author speaks so feelingly, as first
informed with life and sentiment, because all relating to that remote
period of architecture and sculpture, exercises a peculiar charm and
fascination over our minds. It is not art in its ‘high and palmy state,’
with its boasted refinements about it, that we look at with envy and
wonder, so much as in its first rude attempts and conscious yearning
after excellence. They were, indeed, the favoured of the earth, into
whom genius first breathed the breath of life; who, born in a night of
ignorance, first beheld the sacred dawn of light—those Deucalions of
art, who, after the deluge of barbarism and violence had subsided, stood
alone in the world, and had to sow the seeds of countless generations of
knowledge. We can conceive of some village Michael Angelo, with a soul
too mighty for its tenement of clay, whose longing aspirations after
truth and good were palsied by the refusal of his hand to execute
them,—struggling to burst the trammels and trying to shake off the load
of discouragement that oppressed him: What must be his exultation to see
the speaking statue, the stately pile, rise up slowly before him,—the
idea in his mind embodied out of nothing, without model or precedent,—to
see a huge cathedral heave its ponderous weight above the earth, or the
solemn figure of an apostle point from one corner of it to the skies;
and to think that future ages would, perhaps, gaze at the work with the
same delight and wonder that his own did, and not suffer his name to
sink into the same oblivion as those who had gone before him, or as the
brutes that perish;—this was, indeed, to be admitted into the communion,
the ‘holiest of holies’ of genius, and to drink of the waters of life
freely! Art, as it springs from the source of genius, is like the act of
creation: it has the same obscurity and grandeur about it. Afterwards,
whatever perfection it attains, it becomes mechanical. Its strongest
impulse and inspiration is derived, not from what it has done, but from
what it has to do. It is not surprising that from this state of anxiety
and awe with which it regards its appointed task,—the unknown bourne
that lies before it, such startling revelations of the world of truth
and beauty are often struck out when one might least expect it, and that
Art has sometimes leaped at one vast bound from its cradle to its grave!
Mr. Flaxman, however, strongly inculcates the contrary theory, and is
for raising up Art to its most majestic height by the slow and
circuitous process of an accumulation of rules and machinery. He seems
to argue that its advance is on a gradually inclined plane, keeping pace
and co-extended with that of Science; ‘growing with its growth and
strengthening with its strength.’ It appears to us that this is not
rightly to weigh the essential differences either of Science or of Art;
and that it is flying in the face both of fact and argument. He says, it
took sculpture nine hundred or a thousand years to advance from its
first rude commencement to its perfection in Greece and Egypt: But we
must remember, that the greatest excellence of the Fine Arts, both in
Greece, Italy, and Holland, was concentrated into little more than a
century; and again, if Art and Science were synonymous, there can be no
doubt that the knowledge of anatomy and geometry is more advanced in
England in the present day than it was at Athens in the time of
Pericles; but is our sculpture therefore superior? The answer to this
is, ‘No; but it ought to be, and it will be.’ Spare us, good Mr.
Prophesier! Art cannot be transmitted by a receipt, or theorem, like
Science; and cannot therefore be improved _ad libitum_: It has
inseparably to do with individual nature and individual genius.

The Second Lecture is on Egyptian Sculpture, and here Mr. Flaxman
displays the same accurate information and diligent research as before.
The Egyptian statues, the Sphinx, the Memnon, &c. were, as is well
known, principally distinguished for their size, and the immense labour
and expense bestowed upon them. The critic thus justly characterizes
their style and merits:

‘The Egyptian statues stand equally poised on both legs, having one foot
advanced, the arms either hanging straight down on each side; or, if one
is raised, it is at a right angle across the body. Some of the statues
sit on seats, some on the ground, and some are kneeling; but the
position of the hands seldom varies from the above description; their
attitudes are of course simple, rectilinear, and without lateral
movement; the faces are rather flat, the brows, eyelids, and mouth
formed of simple curves, slightly but sharply marked, and with little
expression; the general proportions are something more than seven heads
high; the form of the body and limbs rather round and effeminate, with
only the most evident projections and hollows. Their tunics, or rather
draperies, are in many instances without folds. Winckelman has remarked,
that the Egyptians executed quadrupeds better than human figures; for
which he gives the two following reasons: first, that as professions in
that country were hereditary, genius must be wanting to represent the
human form in perfection; secondly, That superstitious reverence for the
works of their ancestors prevented improvements. This is an amusing, but
needless hypothesis: for there are statues in the Capitoline Museum with
as great a breadth, and choice of grand parts proper to the human form,
as ever they represented in their lions, or other inferior animals. In
addition to these observations on Egyptian statues, we may remark, the
forms of their hands and feet are gross; they have no anatomical detail
of parts, and are totally deficient in the grace of motion. This last
defect, in all probability, was not the consequence of a superstitious
determination to persist in the practice of their ancestors; it is
accounted for in another and better way.

‘Pythagoras, after he had studied several years in Egypt, sacrificed a
hundred oxen in consequence of having discovered, that a square of the
longest side of a right-angled triangle is equal to the two squares of
the lesser sides of the same triangle; and thence it follows, that the
knowledge of the Egyptians could not have been very great at that time
in geometry. This will naturally account for that want of motion in
their statues and relievos, which can only be obtained by a careful
observation of nature, assisted by geometry.’

This is, we apprehend, one of the weak points of Mr. Flaxman’s
reasoning. That geometry may be of great use to fix and ascertain
certain general principles of the art, we are far from disputing; but
surely it was no more necessary for the Egyptian sculptor to wait for
the discovery of Pythagoras’s problem before he could venture to detach
the arms from the sides, than it was for the Egyptians themselves to
remain swathed and swaddled up like mummies, without the power of
locomotion, till Pythagoras came with his geometrical diagram to set
their limbs at liberty. If they could do this without a knowledge of
mechanics, the sculptor could not help seeing it, and imperfectly
copying it, if he had the use of his senses or his wits about him. The
greater probability is, that the sepulchral statues were done from, or
in imitation of the mummies; or that as the imitation of variety of
gesture or motion is always the most difficult, these stiff and
monotonous positions were adopted (and subsequently adhered to from
custom) as the safest and easiest. After briefly noticing the defects of
the Hindoo and other early sculpture, the author proceeds to account for
the improved practice of the Greeks on the same formal and mechanic
principles.

‘We find,’ he says, ‘upon these authorities (Vitruvius and the elder
Pliny), that geometry and numbers were employed to ascertain the powers
of motion and proportions; optics and perspective (as known to the
ancients) to regulate projections, hollows, keeping, diminution,
curvatures, and general effects in figures, groups, insulated or in
relief, with accompaniments; and anatomy, to represent the bones,
muscles, tendons, and veins, _as they appear on the surface of the human
body and inferior animals_.

‘In this enlightened age, when the circle of science is so generally and
well understood—when the connexion and relation of one branch with
another is demonstrated, and their principles applied from necessity and
conviction, wherever possibility allows, in the liberal and mechanical
arts, as well as all the other concerns of life—no one can be weak or
absurd enough to suppose it is within the ability and province of human
genius, without the principles of science previously acquired—by _slight
observation only_—to become possessed of the forms, characters, and
essences of objects, in such a manner as to represent them with truth,
force, and pathos at once! No; we are convinced by reason and
experience, that “life is short and art is long;” and the perfection of
all human productions depends on the indefatigable accumulation of
knowledge and labour through a succession of ages.’—P. 55.

This paragraph, we cannot but think, proceeds altogether on a false
estimate: it is a misdirection to the student. In following up the
principles here laid down, the artist’s life would not only be short,
but misspent. Is there no medium, in our critic’s view of this matter,
between a ‘slight observation’ of nature, and scientific demonstration?
If so, we will say there can be no fine art at all: For mere abstract
and formal rules cannot produce truth, force, and pathos in individual
forms; and it is equally certain that ‘slight observation’ will not
answer the end, if all but learned pedantry is to be accounted casual
and superficial. This is to throw a slur on the pursuit, and an
impediment in the way of the art itself. Mr. Flaxman seems here to
suppose that our observation is profound and just, not according to the
delicacy, comprehensiveness, or steadiness of the attention we bestow
upon a given object: but depends on the discovery of some other object
which was before hid; or on the intervention of mechanical rules, which
supersede the exercise of our senses and judgments—as if the outward
appearance of things was concealed by a film of abstraction, which could
only be removed by the spectacles of books. Thus, anatomy is said to be
necessary ‘to represent the bones, muscles tendons, and veins, as they
appear on the surface of the human body;’ so that it is to be presumed,
that the anatomist, when he has with his knife and instruments laid bare
the internal structure of the body, sees at a glance what he did not
before see; but that the artist, after poring over them all his life, is
blind to the external appearance of veins, muscles, &c., till the seeing
what is concealed under the skin enables him for the first time to see
what appears through it. We do not deny that the knowledge of the
internal conformation helps to explain and to determine the _meaning_ of
the outward appearance; what we object to as unwarrantable and
pernicious doctrine, is substituting the one process for the other, and
speaking slightly of the study of nature in the comparison. It shows a
want of faith in the principles and purposes of the Art itself, and a
wish to confound and prop it up with the grave mysteries and formal
pretensions of Science; which is to take away its essence and its pride.
The student who sets to work under such an impression, may accumulate a
great deal of learned lumber, and envelope himself in diagrams,
demonstrations, and the whole circle of the sciences; but while he is
persuaded that the study of nature is but a ‘slight’ part of his task,
he will never be able to draw, colour, or _express_ a single object,
farther than this can be done by a rule and compasses. The crutches of
science will not lend wings to genius. Suppose a person were to tell us,
that if he pulled off his coat and laid bare his arm, this would give us
(with all the attention we could bestow upon it) no additional insight
into its form, colour, or the appearance of veins and muscles on the
surface, unless he at the same time suffered us to _flay it_; should we
not laugh in his face as wanting common sense, or conclude that he was
laughing at us? So the late Professor of Sculpture lays little stress in
accounting for the progress of Grecian art on the perfection which the
human form acquired, and the opportunities for studying its varieties
and movements in the Olympic exercises; but considers the whole miracle
as easily solved, when the anatomist came with his probe and ploughed up
the surface of the flesh, and the geometrician came with his line and
plummet, and demonstrated the centre of gravity. He sums up the question
in these words: ‘In the early times of Greece, Pausanias informs us the
twelve Gods were worshipped in Arcadia, under the forms of rude stones;
and before Dædalus the statues had eyes nearly shut, the arms attached
to their sides, and the legs close together! but _as geometry,
mechanics, arithmetic, and anatomy improved, painting and sculpture
acquired action, proportion and detailed parts_.’ As to the slight
account that is made in this reasoning of the immediate observation of
visible objects, the point may be settled by an obvious dilemma: Either
the eye sees the whole of any object before it; or it does not. If it
sees and comprehends the whole of it with all its parts and relations,
then it must retain and be able to give a faithful and satisfactory
resemblance, without calling in the aid of rules or science to prevent
or correct errors and defects; just as the human face or form is
perfectly represented in a looking-glass. But if the eye sees only a
small part of what any visible object contains in it,—has only a
glimmering of colour, proportion, expression &c., then this incipient
and imperfect knowledge may be improved to an almost infinite degree by
close attention, by study and practice, and by comparing a succession of
objects with one another; which is the proper and essential province of
the artist, independently of abstract rules or science. On further
observation we notice many details in a face which escaped us at the
first glance; by a study of faces and of mankind practically, we
perceive expressions which the generality do not perceive; but this is
not done by rule. The fallacy is in supposing that all that the first
naked or hasty observation does not give, is supplied by science and
general theories, and not by a closer and continued observation of the
thing itself, so that all that belongs to the latter department is
necessarily casual and slight.

Mr. Flaxman enforces the same argument by quoting the rules laid down by
Vitruvius, for ascertaining the true principles of form and motion. This
writer says, ‘If a man lies on his back, his arms and legs may be so
extended, that a circle may be drawn round, touching the extremities of
his fingers and toes, the centre of which circle shall be his navel:
also, that, a man standing upright, the length of his arms when fully
extended is equal to his height; thus that the circle and the square
equally contain the general form and motion of the human figure.’ From
these hints, and the profound mathematical train of reasoning with which
Leonardo da Vinci has pursued the subject, the author adds, that a
complete system of the principles followed by the ancient Greek
sculptors may be drawn out: that is to say, that because all the
inflections of figure and motion of which the human body is susceptible,
are contained within the above-mentioned circle or square, the knowledge
of all this formal generality _includes_ a knowledge of all the
subordinate and implied particulars. The contortions of the Laocoon, the
agony of the Children, the look of the Dying Gladiator, the contours of
the Venus, the grace and spirit of the Apollo, are all, it seems,
contained within the limits of the circle or the square! Just as well
might it be contended, that having got a square or oval frame, of the
size of a picture by Titian or Vandyke, every one is qualified to paint
a face within it equal in force or beauty to Titian or Vandyke.

In the same spirit of a determination to make art a handmaid attendant
upon Science, the author thus proceeds: ‘Pliny says, lib. xxxiv. c. 8,
Leontius, the contemporary of Phidias, first expressed tendons and
veins—_primus nervos et venas expressit_—which was immediately after the
anatomical researches and improvements of Hippocrates, Democritus, and
their disciples; and we shall find in the same manner all the
improvements in art followed improvements in science.’ Yet almost in the
next page, Mr. Flaxman himself acknowledges, that even in the best times
of Grecian sculpture, and the era of Phidias and Praxiteles, dissections
were rare, and anatomy very imperfectly understood, and cites ‘the
opinion of the learned Professor of Anatomy, that the ancients artists
owed much more to the study of living than dead bodies.’ Sir Anthony
Carlisle, aware of the deficiencies of former ages in this branch of
knowledge, and yet conscious that he himself would be greatly puzzled to
carve the Apollo or the Venus, very naturally and wisely concludes, that
the latter depends upon a course of study, and an acquaintance with
forms very different from any which he possesses. It is a smattering and
affectation of science that leads men to suppose that it is capable of
more than it really is, and of supplying the undefined and evanescent
creations of art with universal and infallible principles. There cannot
be an opinion more productive of presumption and sloth.

The same turn of thought is insisted on in the Fourth Lecture, _On
Science_; and indeed nearly the whole of that Lecture is devoted to a
fuller developement and exemplification of what appears to us a servile
prejudice. It would be unjust, however, to Mr. Flaxman, to suppose, or
to insinuate, that he is without a better sense and better principles of
art, whenever he trusted to his own feelings and experience, instead of
being hoodwinked by an idle theory. Nothing can be more excellent than
the following observations which occur towards the conclusion of the
Lecture on _Composition_:

‘What has been delivered comprises some of the rules for composing, and
observations on composition, the most obvious, and perhaps not the least
useful. They have been collected from the best works and the best
writings, examined and compared with their principles in nature. Such a
comprehensive view may be serviceable to the younger student, in
pointing his way, preventing error, and showing the needful materials;
_but after all, he must perform the work himself_! All rules, all
critical discourses, can but awaken the intelligence, and stimulate the
will, with advice and directions, for a beginning of that which is to be
done. They may be compared to the scaffolding for raising a magnificent
palace; it is neither the building nor the decoration, but it is the
workman’s indispensable help in erecting the walls which enclose the
apartments, and which may afterwards be enriched with the most splendid
ornaments. Every painter and sculptor feels a conviction that a
considerable portion of science is requisite to the productions of
liberal art; but he will be equally convinced, that whatever is produced
from principles and rules only, added to the most exquisite manual
labour, is no more than a mechanical work. Sentiment is the life and
soul of fine art; without which it is all a dead letter! Sentiment gives
a sterling value, an irresistible charm to the rudest imagery or most
unpractised scrawl. By this quality a firm alliance is formed with the
affections in all works of art. With an earnest watchfulness for their
preservation, we are made to perceive and feel the most sublime and
terrific subjects, following the course of sentiment, through the
current and mazes of intelligence and passion, to the most delicate and
tender ties and sympathies.’

From the account of Grecian sculpture, in the third Lecture, which is
done with care and judgment, we select the following descriptions of the
Minerva and Jupiter of Phidias:—

‘Within the temple (at the Acropolis of Athens) stood the statue of
Minerva, thirty-nine feet high, made by Phidias, of ivory and gold,
holding a victory, six feet high, in her right hand, and a spear in her
left, her tunic reaching to her feet. She had her helmet on, and the
Medusa’s head on her ægis; her shield was adorned with the battle of the
gods and giants, the pedestal with the birth of Pandora. Plato tells us
that the eyes of this statue were precious stones. But the great work of
this chief of sculptors, the astonishment and praise of after ages, was
the Jupiter at Elis, sitting on his throne, his left hand holding a
sceptre, his right extending victory to the Olympian conquerors, his
head crowned with olive, and his pallium decorated with birds, beasts,
and flowers. The four corners of the throne were dancing victories, each
supported by a sphinx, tearing a Theban youth. At the back of the
throne, above his head, were the three horns, or seasons, on one side,
and on the other the three Graces. On the bar, between the legs of the
throne, and the panels, or spaces, between them, were represented many
stories—the destruction of Niobe’s children, the labours of Hercules,
the delivery of Prometheus, the garden of Hesperides, with the different
adventures of the heroic ages. On the base, the battle of Theseus with
the Amazons; on the pedestal, an assembly of the gods, the sun and moon
in their cars, and the birth of Venus. The height of the work was sixty
feet. The statue was ivory, enriched with the radiance of golden
ornaments and precious stones, and was justly esteemed one of the seven
wonders of the world.

‘Several other statues of great excellence, in marble and in bronze, are
mentioned among the works of Phidias, particularly a Venus, placed by
the Romans in the forum of Octavia; two Minervas, one named
Callimorphus, from the beauty of its form; and it is likely that the
fine statue of this goddess in Mr. Hope’s gallery is a repetition in
marble of Phidias’s bronze, from its resemblance in attitude, drapery,
and helmet, to the reverse of an Athenian coin. Another statue by him
was an Amazon, called Eutnemon, from her beautiful legs. There is a
print of this in the _Museum Pium Clementinum_.’

With the name of Phidias, Mr. Flaxman couples that of Praxiteles, and
gives the following spirited sketch of him and his works:—

‘Praxiteles excelled in the highest graces of youth and beauty. He is
said to have excelled not only other sculptors, but himself, by his
marble statues in the Ceramicus of Athens; but his Venus was preferable
to all others in the world, and many sailed to Cnidos for the purpose of
seeing it. This sculptor having made two statues of Venus, one with
drapery, the other without, the Coans preferred the clothed figure, on
account of its severe modesty, the same price being set upon each. The
citizens of Cnidos took the rejected statue, and afterwards refused it
to King Nicomedes, who would have forgiven them an immense debt in
return; but they were resolved to suffer any thing, so long as this
statue, by Praxiteles, ennobled Cnidos. The temple was entirely open in
which it was placed, because every view was equally admirable. This
Venus was still in Cnidos during the reign of the Emperor Arcadius,
about 400 years after Christ. Among the known works of Praxiteles are
his Satyr, Cupid, Apollo, the Lizard-killer, and Bacchus leaning on a
Faun.’

But we must stop short in this list of famous names and enchanting
works, or we should never have done. This seems to have been the
fabulous age of sculpture, when marble started into life as in a
luxurious dream, and men appeared to have no other employment than ‘to
make Gods in their own image.’ The Lecturer bestows due and eloquent
praise on the horses in the Elgin collection, which he supposes to have
been done under the superintendence, and probably from designs by
Phidias; but we are sorry he has not extended his eulogium to the figure
of the Theseus, which appears to us a world of grace and grandeur in
itself, and to say to the sculptor’s art, ‘_Hitherto shalt thou come,
and no farther!_’ What went before it was rude in the comparison; what
came after it was artificial. It is the perfection of _style_, and would
have afforded a much better exemplification of the force and meaning of
that term than the schoolboy definition adopted in the Lecture on this
subject; namely, that as poets and engravers used a _stylos_, or style,
to execute their works, the name of the instrument was metaphorically
applied to express the art itself. _Style_ properly means the mode of
representing nature; and this again arises from the various character of
men’s minds, and the infinite variety of views which may be taken of
nature. After seeing the Apollo, the Hercules, and other celebrated
works of antiquity, we seem to have exhausted our stock of admiration,
and to conceive that there is no higher perfection for sculpture to
attain, or to aspire to. But at the first sight of the Elgin Marbles, we
feel that we have been in a mistake, and the ancient objects of our
idolatry fall into an inferior class or style of art. They are
comparatively, and without disparagement of their vast and almost
superhuman merit, _stuck-up_ gods and goddesses. But a new principle is
at work in the others which we had not seen or felt the want of before
(not a studied trick, or curious refinement, but an obvious truth,
arising from a more intimate acquaintance with, and firmer reliance on,
nature;)—a principle of fusion, of motion, so that the marble flows like
a wave. The common _antiques_ represent the most perfect forms and
proportions, with each part perfectly understood and executed; every
thing is brought out; every thing is made as exquisite and imposing as
it can be in itself; but each part seems to be cut out of the marble,
and to answer to a model of itself in the artist’s mind. But in the
fragment of the Theseus, the whole is melted into one impression like
wax; there is all the flexibility, the malleableness of flesh; there is
the same alternate tension and relaxation; the same sway and yielding of
the parts; ‘the right hand knows what the left hand doeth’; and the
statue bends and plays under the framer’s mighty hand and eye, as if,
instead of being a block of marble, it was provided with an internal
machinery of nerves and muscles, and felt every the slightest pressure
or motion from one extremity to the other. This, then, is the greatest
grandeur of style, from the comprehensive idea of the whole, joined to
the greatest simplicity, from the entire union and subordination of the
parts. There is no ostentation, no stiffness, no overlaboured finishing.
Every thing is in its place and degree, and put to its proper use. The
greatest power is combined with the greatest ease: there is the
perfection of knowledge, with the total absence of a conscious display
of it. We find so little of an appearance of art or labour, that we
might be almost tempted to suppose that the whole of these groups were
done by means of _casts_ from fine nature; for it is to be observed,
that the commonest cast from nature has the same _style_ or character of
union and reaction of parts, being copied from that which has life and
motion in itself. What adds a passing gleam of probability to such a
suggestion is, that these statues were placed at a height where only the
general effect could be distinguished, and that the back and hinder
parts, which are just as scrupulously finished as the rest, and as true
to the mould of nature, were fixed against a wall where they could not
be seen at all; and where the labour (if we do not suppose it to be in a
great measure abridged mechanically) was wholly thrown away. However, we
do not lay much stress on this consideration; for we are aware that ‘the
labour we delight in physics pain,’ and we believe that the person who
_could_ do the statue of the Theseus, _would_ do it, under all
circumstances, and without fee or reward of any kind. We conceive that
the Elgin Marbles settle another disputed point of vital interest to the
arts. Sir Joshua Reynolds contends, among others, that grandeur of style
consists in giving only the _masses_, and leaving out the details. The
statues we are speaking of repudiate this doctrine, and at least
demonstrate the possibility of uniting the two things, which had been
idly represented to be incompatible, as if they were not obviously found
together in nature. A great number of parts may be collected into one
mass; as, on the other hand, a work may equally want minute details, or
large and imposing masses. Suppose all the light to be thrown on one
side of a face, and all the shadow on the other: the _chiaroscuro_ may
be worked up with the utmost delicacy and pains in the one, and every
vein or freckle distinctly marked on the other, without destroying the
general effect—that is, the two broad masses of light and shade. Mr.
Flaxman takes notice that there were two eras of Grecian art before the
time of Pericles and Phidias, when it was at its height. In the first
they gave only a gross or formal representation of the objects, so that
you could merely say, ‘This is a man, that is a horse.’ To this clumsy
concrete style succeeded the most elaborate finishing of parts, without
selection, grace or grandeur. ‘Elaborate finishing was soon afterwards’
[after the time of Dædalus and his scholars] ‘carried to excess:
undulating locks and spiral knots of hair like shells, as well as the
drapery, were wrought with the most elaborate care and exactness; whilst
the tasteless and barbarous character of the face and limbs remained
much the same as in former times.’ This was the natural course of
things, to denote first the gross object; then to run into the opposite
extreme, and give none but the detached parts. The difficulty was to
unite the two in a noble and comprehensive idea of nature.

We are chiefly indebted for the information or amusement we derive from
Mr. Flaxman’s work, to the historical details of his subject. We cannot
say that he has removed any of the doubts or stumbling-blocks in our
way, or extended the landmarks of taste or reasoning. We turned with
some interest to the Lecture on _Beauty_; for the artist has left
specimens of this quality in several of his works. We were a good deal
disappointed. It sets out in this manner: ‘That beauty is not merely an
imaginary quality, but a real essence, may be inferred from the harmony
of the universe; and the perfection of its wondrous parts we may
understand from all surrounding nature; and in this course of
observation we find, that man has more of beauty bestowed on him as he
rises higher in creation.’ The rest is of a piece with this
exordium,—containing a dissertation on the various gradations of being,
of which man is said to be at the top,—on the authority of Socrates, who
argues, ‘that the human form is the most perfect of all forms, because
it contains in it the principles and powers of all inferior forms.’ This
assertion is either a flat contradiction of the fact, or an _antique_
riddle, which we do not pretend to solve. Indeed, we hold the ancients,
with all our veneration for them, to have been wholly destitute of
philosophy in this department; and Mr. Flaxman, who was taught when he
was young to look up to them for light and instruction in the philosophy
of art, has engrafted too much of it on his Lectures. He defines beauty
thus: ‘The most perfect human beauty is that _most free from deformity_,
either of body or mind, and may be therefore defined—The most perfect
soul is the most perfect body.’

In support of this truism, he strings a number of quotations together,
as if he were stringing pearls:

‘In Plato’s dialogue concerning the beautiful, he shows the power and
influence of mental beauty on corporeal; and in his dialogue, entitled
“The greater Hippias,” Socrates observes in argument, “that as a
beautiful vase is inferior to a beautiful horse, and as a beautiful
horse is not to be compared to a beautiful virgin, in the same manner a
beautiful virgin is inferior in beauty to the immortal Gods; for,” says
he, “there is a beauty incorruptible, ever the same.” It is remarkable,
that, immediately after, he says, “Phidias is skilful in beauty.”
Aristotle, the Scholar of Plato, begins his Treatise on Morals
thus:—“Every art, every method and institution, every action and
council, seems to seek some good; therefore the ancients pronounced the
beautiful to be good.” Much, indeed, might be collected from this
philosopher’s treatises on morals, poetics, and physiognomy, of the
greatest importance to our subject; but for the present we shall produce
only two quotations from Xenophon’s _Memorabilia_, which contain the
immediate application of these principles to the arts of design. In the
dialogue between Socrates and the sculptor Clito, Socrates concludes,
that “Statuary must represent the emotions of the soul by form;” and in
the former part of the same dialogue, Parrhasius and Socrates agree
that, “the good and evil qualities of the soul may be represented in the
figure of man by painting.” In the applications from this dialogue to
our subject, we must remember, philosophy demonstrates that rationality
and intelligence, although connected with animal nature, rises above it,
and properly exists in a more exalted state. From such contemplations
and maxims, the ancient artists sublimated the sentiments of their
works, expressed in the choicest forms of nature; thus they produced
their divinities, heroes, patriots, and philosophers, adhering to the
principle of Plato, that “nothing is beautiful which is not good;” it
was this which, in ages of polytheism and idolatry, still continued to
enforce a popular impression of divine attributes and perfection.’

If the ancient sculptors had had nothing but such maxims and
contemplations as these to assist them in forming their statues, they
would have been greatly to seek indeed! Take these homilies on the
Beautiful and the Good, together with Euclid’s Elements, into any
country town in England, and see if you can make a modern Athens of it.
The Greek artists did not learn to put expression into their works,
because Socrates had said, that ‘statuary must represent the emotions of
the soul by form;’ but he said that they ought to do so, because he had
seen it done by Phidias and others. It was from the diligent study and
contemplation of the ‘choicest forms of nature,’ and from the natural
love of beauty and grandeur in the human breast, and not from ‘shreds
and patches,’ of philosophy, that they drew their conceptions of Gods
and men. Let us not, however, be thought hard on the metaphysics of the
ancients: they were the first to propose these questions, and to feel
the curiosity and the earnest desire to know what the _beautiful_ and
the _good_, meant. If the will was not tantamount to the deed, it was
scarcely their fault; and perhaps, instead of blaming their partial
success, we ought rather to take shame to ourselves for the little
progress we have made, and the dubious light that has been shed upon
such questions since. If the Professor of Sculpture had sought for the
principles of beauty in the antique statues, instead of the _scholia_ of
the commentators, he probably might have found it to resolve itself
(according, at least, to their peculiar and favourite view of it) into a
certain symmetry of form, answering in a great measure, to harmony of
colouring, or of musical sounds. We do not here affect to lay down a
metaphysical theory, but to criticise an historical fact. We are not
bold enough to say that beauty in general depends on a regular gradation
and correspondence of lines, but we may safely assert that Grecian
beauty does. If we take any beautiful Greek statue, we shall find that,
seen in profile, the forehead and nose form nearly a perpendicular
straight line; and that finely turned at that point, the lower part of
the face falls by gentle and almost equal curves to the chin. The cheek
is full and round, and the outline of the side of the face a general
sloping line. In front, the eyebrows are straight, or gently curved; the
eyelids full and round to match, answering to that of Belphœbe, in
Spenser—

‘Upon her eyebrows many Graces sat,
Under the shadow of her even brows:’

The space between the eyebrows is broad, and the two sides of the nose
straight, and nearly parallel; the nostrils form large and distinct
curves; the lips are full and even, the corners being large; the chin is
round, and rather short, forming, with the two sides of the face, a
regular oval. The opposite to this, the Grecian model of beauty, is to
be seen in the contour and features of the African face, where all the
lines, instead of corresponding to, or melting into, one another, in a
kind of _rhythmus_ of form, are sharp, angular, and at cross-purposes.
Where strength and majesty were to be expressed by the Greeks, they
adopted a greater squareness, but there was the same unity and
correspondence of outline. Greek grace is harmony of movement. The
_ideal_ may be regarded as a certain predominant quality or character
(this may be ugliness or deformity as well as beauty, as is seen in the
forms of fauns and satyrs) diffused over all the parts of an object, and
carried to the utmost pitch, that our acquaintance with visible models,
and our conception of the imaginary object, will warrant. It is
extending our impressions farther, raising them higher than usual, from
the _actual_ to the _possible_.[31] How far we can enlarge our
discoveries from the one of these to the other, is a point of some
nicety. In treating on this question, our author thus distinguishes the
Natural and the Ideal Styles:

‘The Natural Style may be defined thus: a representation of the human
form, according to the distinction of sex and age, in action or repose,
expressing the affections of the soul. The same words may be used to
define the Ideal Style, but they must be followed by this
addition—_selected from such perfect examples as may excite in our minds
a conception of the preternatural_. By these definitions will be
understood that the Natural Style is peculiar to humanity, and the Ideal
to spirituality and divinity.’

We should be inclined to say, that the female divinities of the ancients
were Goddesses because they were _ideal_, rather than that they were
_ideal_ because they belonged to the class of Goddesses; ‘By their own
beauty were they deified.’ Of the difficulty of passing the line that
separates the actual from the imaginary world, some test may be formed
by the suggestion thrown out a little way back; _viz._ that the _ideal_
is exemplified in systematizing and enhancing any idea whether of beauty
or deformity, as in the case of the fauns and satyrs of antiquity. The
expressing of depravity and grossness is produced here by approximating
the human face and figure to that of the brute; so that the mind runs
along this line from one to the other, and carries the wished-for
resemblance as far as it pleases. But here both the extremes are equally
well known, equally objects of sight and observation: insomuch that
there might be a literal substitution of the one for the other; but in
the other case, of elevating character and pourtraying Gods as men, one
of the extremes is missing; and the combining the two, is combining a
positive with an unknown abstraction. To represent a Jupiter or Apollo,
we take the best species, (as it seems to us,) and select the best of
that species: how we are to get beyond that _best_, without any given
form or visible image to refer to, it is not easy to determine. The
_ideal_, according to Mr. Flaxman, is ‘the scale by which to heaven we
do ascend;’ but it is a hazardous undertaking to soar above reality, by
embodying an abstraction. If the ancients could have seen the immortal
Gods, with their bodily sense, (as it was said that Jupiter had revealed
himself to Phidias,) they might have been enabled to give some
reflection or shadow of their countenances to their human likenesses of
them: otherwise, poetry and philosophy lent their light in vain. It is
true, we may magnify the human figure to any extent we please, for that
is a mechanical affair; but how we are to add to our ideas of grace or
grandeur, beyond any thing we have ever seen, merely by contemplating
grace and grandeur that we have never seen, is quite another matter. If
we venture beyond the highest point of excellence of which we have any
example, we quit our hold of the natural, without being sure that we
have laid our hands on what is truly divine; for that has no earthly
image or representative—nature is the only rule or ‘legislator.’ We may
combine existing qualities, but this must be consistently, that is, such
as are found combined in nature. Repose was given to the Olympian
Jupiter to express majesty; because the greatest power was found to
imply repose, and to produce its effects with the least effort. Minerva,
the Goddess of Wisdom, was represented young and beautiful; because
wisdom was discovered not to be confined to age or ugliness. Not only
the individual excellencies, but their bond of union, were sanctioned by
the testimony of observation and experience. Bacchus is represented with
full, exuberant features, with prominent lips, and a stern brow, as
expressing a character of plenitude and bounty, and the tamer of savages
and wild beasts. But this _ideal_ conception is carried to the brink;
the mould is full, and with a very little more straining, it would
overflow into caricature and distortion. Mercury has wings, which is
merely a grotesque and fanciful combination of known images. Apollo was
described by the poets (if not represented by the statuary) with a round
jocund face, and golden locks, in allusion to the appearance and rays of
the sun. This was an allegory, and would be soon turned to abuse in
sculpture or painting. Thus we see how circumscribed and uncertain the
province of the _ideal_ is, when once it advances from ‘the most perfect
nature to spirituality and divinity.’ We suspect the improved Deity
often fell short of the heroic original; and the Venus was only the most
beautiful woman of the time, with diminished charms and a finer name
added to her. With respect to _ideal_ expression, it is superior to
common _every-day_ expression, no doubt; that is, it must be raised to
correspond with lofty characters placed in striking situations; but it
is tame and feeble compared with what those characters would exhibit in
the supposed circumstances. The expressions in the _Incendio del Borgo_
are striking and grand; but could we see the expression of terror in the
commonest face in real danger of being burnt to death, it would put all
imaginary expressions to shame and flight.

Mr. Flaxman makes an attempt to vindicate the golden ornaments, and eyes
of precious stones, in the ancient statues, as calculated to add to the
awe of the beholder, and inspire a belief in their preternatural power.
In this point of view, or as a matter of religious faith, we are not
tenacious on the subject, any more than we object to the wonder-working
images and moving eyes of the patron saints in Popish churches. But the
question, as it regards the fine arts in general, is curious, and
treated at some length, and with considerable intricacy and learning, by
the Lecturer.

‘We certainly know,’ he says, ‘that the arts of painting and sculpture
are different in their essential properties. Painting exists by colours
only, and form is the peculiarity of sculpture; but there is a principle
common to both, in which both are united, and without which neither can
exist—and this is drawing; and in the union of light, shadow, and
colour, sculpture may be seen more advantageously by the chill light of
a winter’s day, or the warmer tints of a midsummer’s sun, according to
the solemnity or cheerfulness of the subject. These positions will be
generally agreed to; but the question before us is, “How far was Phidias
successful in adding colours to the sculpture of the Athenian Minerva,
and the Olympian Jupiter?”—which examples were followed by succeeding
artists.

‘We have all been struck by the resemblance of figures in coloured
wax-work to persons in fits, and therefore such a representation is
particularly proper for the similitude of persons in fits, or the
deceased: but the Olympian Jupiter and the Athenian Minerva were
intended to represent those who were superior to death and disease. They
were believed immortal, and therefore the stillness of these statues,
having the colouring of life, during the time the spectator viewed them,
would appear divinity in awful abstraction or repose. Their stupendous
size alone was preternatural; and the colouring of life without motion
increased the sublimity of the statue and the terror of the pious
beholder. The effect of the materials which composed these statues has
also been questioned. The statues themselves (according to the
information of Aristotle, in his book concerning the world) were made of
stone, covered with plates of ivory, so fitted together, that at the
distance requisite for seeing them, they appeared one mass of ivory,
which has much the tint of delicate flesh. The ornaments and garments
were enriched with gold, coloured metals, and precious stones.

‘Gold ornaments on ivory are equally splendid and harmonious, and in
such colossal forms must have added a dazzling glory, like electric
fluid running over the surface: the figure, character, and splendour
must have had the appearance of an immortal vision in the eyes of the
votary.

‘But let us attend to the judgment passed on these by the ancients: we
have already quoted Quintilian, who says, “they appear to have added
something to religion, the work was so worthy of the divinity.” Plato
says, “the eyes of Minerva were of precious stones,” and immediately
adds, “Phidias was skilful in beauty.” Aristotle calls him “the wise
sculptor.” An opinion prevailed that Jupiter had revealed himself to
Phidias; and the statue is said to have been touched by lightning in
approbation of the work. After these testimonies, there seems no doubt
remaining of the effect produced by these coloured statues; but the very
reasons that prove that colours in sculpture may have the effect of
supernatural vision, _fits_, or _death_, prove at the same time that
such practice is utterly improper for the general representation of the
human figure: _because, as the tints of carnation in nature are
consequences of circulation, wherever the colour of flesh is seen
without motion, it resembles only death, or a suspension of the vital
powers_.

‘Let not this application of colours, however, in the instances of the
Jupiter and Minerva, be considered as a mere arbitrary decision of
choice or taste in the sculptor, to render his work agreeable in the
eyes of the beholder. It was produced by a much higher motive. It was
the desire of rendering these stupendous forms[32] living and
intelligent to the astonished gaze of the votary, and to confound the
sceptical by a flash of conviction, that something of divinity resided
in the statues themselves.

‘The practice of painting sculpture seems to have been common to most
countries, particularly in the early and barbarous states of society.
But whether we look on the idols of the South Seas, the Etruscan painted
sculpture and _terra-cotta_ monuments, or the recumbent coloured statues
on tombs of the middle ages, we shall generally find the practice has
been employed to enforce superstition, or preserve an exact similitude
of the deceased.

‘These, however, are in themselves perverted purposes. The real ends of
painting, sculpture, and all the other arts, are to elevate the mind to
the contemplation of truth, to give the judgment a rational
determination, and to represent such of our fellow-men as have been
benefactors to society, not in the deplorable and fallen state of a
lifeless and mouldering corpse, but in the full vigour of their
faculties when living, or in something corresponding to the state of the
good received among the just made perfect.’

All this may be very true and very fine; what the greater part of it has
to do with the colouring of statues, we are at a loss to comprehend.
Whenever Mr. Flaxman gives a reason, it usually makes against himself;
but his faith in his conclusion is proof against contradiction. He says,
that adding flesh-colour to statues gives an appearance of death to
them, _because the colour of life without motion argues a suspension of
the vital powers_. The same might be said of pictures which have colour
without motion; but who would contend, that because a chalk-drawing has
the tints of flesh (denoting circulation) superadded to it, this gives
it the appearance of a person in fits, or of death? On the contrary, Sir
Joshua Reynolds makes it an objection to coloured statues, that, as well
as wax-work, they were too much like life. This was always the scope and
‘but-end’ of his theories and rules on art, that it should avoid coming
in too close contact with nature. Still we are not sure that this is not
the true reason, _viz._ that the imitation ought not to amount to a
deception, nor be effected by gross or identical means. We certainly
hate all wax-work, of whatever description; and the idea of colouring a
statue gives us a nausea; but as is the case with most bigoted people,
the clearness of our reasoning does not keep pace with the strength of
our prejudices. It is easy to repeat that the object of painting is
colour and form, while the object of sculpture is form alone; and to
ring the changes on the purity, the severity, the abstract truth of
sculpture. The question returns as before; Why should sculpture be more
pure, more severe, more abstracted, than any thing else? The only clew
we can suggest is, that from the immense pains bestowed in sculpture on
mere form, or in giving solidity and permanence, this predominant
feeling becomes an exclusive and unsociable one, and the mind rejects
every addition of a more fleeting or superficial kind as an excrescence
and an impertinence. The form is hewn out of the solid rock; to tint and
daub it over with a flimsy, perishable substance, is a mockery and a
desecration, where the work itself is likely to last for ever. A statue
is the utmost possible developement of form; and that on which the whole
powers and faculties of the artist have been bent: It has a right then,
by the laws of intellectual creation, to stand alone in that simplicity
and unsullied nakedness in which it has been wrought. _Tangible form_
(the primary idea) is blind, averse to colour. A statue, if it were
coloured at all, ought to be inlaid, that is, done in mosaic, where the
colour would be part of the solid materials. But this would be an
undertaking beyond human strength. Where art has performed all that it
can do, why require it to begin its task again? Or if the addition is to
be made carelessly and slightly, it is unworthy of the subject. Colour
is at best the mask of form: paint on a statue is like paint on a real
face,—it is not of a piece with the work, it does not belong to the
face, and justly obtains the epithet of _meretricious_.

Mr. Flaxman, in comparing the progress of ancient and modern sculpture,
does not shrink from doing justice to the latter. He gives the
preference to scriptural over classical subjects; and, in one passage,
seems half inclined to turn short round on the Greek mythology and
morality, and to treat all those Heathen Gods and Goddesses as a set of
very improper people:—as to the Roman bas-reliefs, triumphs, and
processions, he dismisses them as no better than so many ‘vulgar,
military gazettes.’ He, with due doubt and deference, places Michael
Angelo almost above the ancients. His statues will not bear out this
claim; and we have no sufficient means of judging of their paintings. In
his separate groups and figures in the _Sistine Chapel_, there is, we
indeed think, a conscious vastness of purpose, a mighty movement, like
the breath of Creation upon the waters, that we see in no other works,
ancient or modern. The forms of his Prophets and Sibyls are like moulds
of _thought_. Mr. Flaxman is also strenuous in his praises of the _Last
Judgment_; but on that we shall be silent, as we are not converts to his
opinion. Michael Angelo’s David and Bacchus, done when he was young, are
clumsy and unmeaning; even the grandeur of his Moses is confined to the
horns and beard. The only works of his in sculpture which sustain Mr.
Flaxman’s praise, are those in the chapel of Lorenzo de Medici at
Florence; and these are of undoubted force and beauty.

We shall conclude our extracts with a description of Pisa, the second
birth-place of art in modern times; and in speaking of which, the
learned Lecturer has indulged a vein of melancholy enthusiasm, which has
the more striking effect as it is rare with him.

‘The Cathedral of Pisa, built by Buskettus, an architect from Dulichium,
was the second sacred edifice (St. Mark’s, in Venice, being the first)
raised after the destruction of the Roman power in Italy. It has
received the honour of being allowed by posterity to have taken the lead
in restoring art; and indeed the traveller, on entering the city gates,
is astonished by a scene of architectural magnificence and singularity
not to be equalled in the world. Four stupendous structures of white
marble in one group—the solemn Cathedral, in the general parallelogram
of its form, resembling an ancient temple, which unites and simplifies
the arched divisions of its exterior; the Baptistry, a circular
building, surrounded with arches and columns, crowned with niches,
statues, and pinnacles, rising to an apex in the centre, terminated by a
statue of the Baptist; the Falling Tower, which is thirteen feet out of
the perpendicular, a most elegant cylinder, raised by eight rows of
columns surmounting each other, and surrounding a staircase; the
Cemetery, a long square corridor, 400 by 200 feet, containing the
ingenious works of the improvers of painting down to the sixteenth
century. This extraordinary scene, in the evening of a summer’s day,
with a splendid red sun setting in a dark-blue sky, the full moon rising
in the opposite side, over a city nearly deserted, affects the
beholder’s mind with such a sensation of magnificence, solitude, and
wonder, that he scarcely knows whether he is in this world or not.’

After the glossiness, and splendour, and gorgeous perfection of Grecian
art, the whole seems to sink into littleness and insignificance,
compared with the interest we feel in the period of its restoration, and
in the rude, but mighty efforts, it made to reach to its former height
and grandeur;—with more anxious thoughts, and with a more fearful
experience to warn it—with the ruins of the old world crumbling around
it, and the new one emerging out of the gloom of Gothic barbarism and
ignorance—taught to look from the outspread map of time and change
beyond it—and if less critical in nearer objects, commanding a loftier
and more extended range, like the bursting the bands of death asunder,
or the first dawn of light and peace after darkness and the tempest!

WILSON’S LIFE AND TIMES OF DANIEL DEFOE

VOL. L.] [_January 1830._

This is a very good book, but spun out to too great a length. Mr. Wilson
will not bate an inch of his right to be tediously minute on any of the
topics that pass in review before him, whether they relate to public or
private matters, the author’s life and writings, or the answers to them
by Tutchin and Ridpath. He is indeed so well furnished with materials,
and so full of his subject, that instead of studying to reduce the size
of his work, he very probably thinks he has shown forbearance in not
making it longer. We could not wish a more distinct or honest
chronicler. There is scarcely a sentence, or a sentiment in his work,
that we disapprove, unless we were to quarrel with what is said in
dispraise of the _Beggar’s Opera_. In general, his opinions are sound,
liberal, and enlightened, and as clear and intelligible in the
expression as the intention is upright and manly. The style is plain and
unaffected, as is usually the case where a writer thinks more of his
subject than of himself. Mr. Wilson appears as the zealous and
consistent friend of civil and religious liberty; and not only never
swerves from, or betrays his principles, but omits no opportunity of
avowing and enforcing them. He has ‘excellent iteration in him.’ If he
repeats the old story over again, that liberty is a blessing, and
slavery a curse,—if he depicts persecution and religious bigotry in the
same unvarying and odious colours, and never sees the phantom of _divine
right_ without proceeding to have a tilting-bout with it,—as honest
Hector Macintire could not be prevented by his uncle, Mr. Jonathan
Oldbuck, from encountering a _seal_ whenever he saw one,—we confess,
notwithstanding, that we like this pertinacity better than some people’s
indifference or tergiversation. The biographer of Defoe, like Defoe
himself, is a Whig, and of the true stamp; that is, he is a staunch and
incorruptible advocate of Whig principles, and of the great aims the
leaders of the Revolution had in view, as opposed to the absurd and
mischievous doctrines of their adversaries; though this does not bribe
his judgment, but rather makes him more anxious in pointing out and
lamenting the follies, weaknesses, and perversity of spirit, which
sometimes clogged their proceedings, defeated their professed objects,
and turned the cause of justice and freedom into a by-word, and the
instrument of a cabal.

Mr. Wilson cannot be charged with going too copiously or
indiscriminately into the details of Defoe’s private life. The anecdotes
and references of this kind are ‘thinly scattered to make up a
show,’—_rari nantes in gurgite vasto_. Little was known before on this
head, and the author, with all his diligence and zeal, has redeemed
little from obscurity and oblivion. But he makes up for the deficiency
of personal matter, by a superabundance of literary and political
information. All that is to be gleaned of Defoe’s individual history
might be stated in a short compass.

Daniel Defoe, or Foe, as the name was sometimes spelt, was born in
London in the year 1661, in the parish of St. Giles’s, Cripplegate. His
father, James Foe, was a butcher; and his grandfather, Daniel, the first
person among his ancestors of whom any thing is positively known, was a
substantial yeoman, who farmed his own estate at Elton, in
Northamptonshire. The old gentleman kept a pack of hounds, which
indicated both his wealth and his principles as a royalist; for the
Puritans did not allow of the sports of the field, though his grandson
(_contra bonos mores_) sometimes indulged in them. In alluding to this
circumstance, Defoe says, ‘I remember my grandfather had a huntsman, who
used the same familiarity (that of giving party names to animals) with
his dogs; and he had his Roundhead and his Cavalier, his Goring and his
Waller; and all the generals in both armies were hounds in his pack,
till, the times turning, the old gentleman was fain to scatter his pack,
and make them up of more dog-like sirnames.’ It was probably from this
relative that Defoe inherited a freehold estate, of which he was not a
little vain; and which seems to have influenced his opinions in his
theory of the right of popular election, and of the British
constitution. His father was a person of a different cast—a rigid
dissenter; and from him his son appears to have imbibed the grounds of
his opinions and practice. He was living at an advanced age in 1705. The
following curious memorandum, signed by him at this period, throws some
light on his character, as well as on that of the times:—‘Sarah Pierce
lived with us, about fifteen or sixteen years since, about two years,
and behaved herself so well, that we recommended her to Mr. Cave, that
godly minister, which we should not have done, had not her conversation
been according to the gospel. From my lodgings, at the Bell in Broad
Street, having lately left my house in Throgmorton Street, October 10,
1705. Witness my hand, JAMES FOE.’

Young Defoe was brought up for the ministry, and educated with this view
at the dissenting academy of Mr. Charles Morton, at Newington-Green,
where Mr. Samuel Wesley, the father of the celebrated John Wesley, and
who afterwards wrote against the dissenters, was brought up with him.
Whether from an unsettled inclination, or his father’s inability to
supply the necessary expenses, he never finished his education here. He
not long after joined in Monmouth’s rebellion in 1685, and narrowly
escaped being taken prisoner with the rest of the Duke’s followers. It
is supposed he owed his safety to his being a native of London, and his
person not being known in the west of England, where that movement
chiefly took place. He now applied himself to business, and became a
kind of hose-factor. He afterwards set up a Dutch tile-manufactory at
Tilbury, in Essex, and derived great profit from it; but his being
sentenced to the pillory for his _Shortest Way with the Dissenters_,
(one of the truest, ablest, and most seasonable pamphlets ever
published,) and the heavy fine and imprisonment that followed, involved
him in distress and difficulty ever after. He occasionally, indeed,
seemed to be emerging from obscurity, and to hold his head above water
for a time, (and at one period had built himself a handsome house at
Stoke-Newington, which is still to be seen there,) but this show of
prosperity was of short continuance; all of a sudden, we find him
immersed in poverty and law as deeply as ever; and it would appear that,
with all his ability and industry, however he might be formed to serve
his country or delight mankind, he was not one of those who are born to
make their fortunes,—either from a careless, improvident disposition,
that squanders away its advantages, or a sanguine and restless temper,
that constantly abandons a successful pursuit for some new and gilded
project. Defoe took an active and enthusiastic part in the Revolution of
1688, and was personally known to King William, of whom he was a sort of
idolater, and evinced a spirit of knight-errantry in defence of his
character and memory whenever it was attacked. He was released from
prison (after lying there two years) by the interference and friendship
of Harley, who introduced him to Queen Anne, by whom he was employed on
several confidential missions, and more particularly in effecting the
Union with Scotland. His personal obligations to Harley fettered his
politics during the four last years of Queen Anne, and threw a cloud
over his popularity in the following reign, but fixed no stain upon his
character, except in the insinuations and slanders of his enemies,
whether of his own or the opposite party. It was not till after he had
retired from the battle, covered with scars and bruises, but without a
single trophy or reward, in acknowledgment of his indefatigable and
undeniable services in defence of the cause he had all his life
espoused—when he was nearly sixty years of age, and struck down by a fit
of apoplexy—that he thought of commencing novel-writer, for his
amusement and subsistence. The most popular of his novels, _Robinson
Crusoe_, was published in the year 1719, and he poured others from his
pen, for the remaining ten or twelve years of his life, as fast, and
with as little apparent effort, as he had formerly done lampoons,
reviews, and pamphlets.

We are in the number of those who, though we profess ourselves mightily
edified and interested by the researches of biography, are not always
equally gratified by the actual result. Few things, in an ordinary life,
can come up to the interest which every reader of sensibility must take
in the author of _Robinson Crusoe_. ‘Heaven lies about us in our
infancy;’ and it cannot be denied, that the first perusal of that work
makes a part of the illusion:—the roar of the waters is in our ears,—we
start at the print of the foot in the sand, and hear the parrot repeat
the well-known sounds of ‘Poor Robinson Crusoe! Who are you? Where do
you come from; and where are you going?’—till the tears gush, and in
recollection and feeling we become children again! One cannot understand
how the author of this world of abstraction should have had any thing to
do with the ordinary cares and business of life; or it almost seems that
he should have been fed, like Elijah, by the ravens. What boots it then
to know that he was a hose-factor, and the owner of a tile-kiln in
Essex—that he stood in the pillory, was over head and ears in debt, and
engaged in eternal literary and political squabbles? It is, however,
well to be assured that he was a man of worth as well as genius; and
that, though unfortunate, and having to contend all his life with
vexations and disappointments, with vulgar clamour and the hand of
power, yet he did nothing to leave a blot upon his name, or to make the
world ashamed of the interest they must always feel for him. If there is
nothing in a farther acquaintance with his writings to raise our
admiration higher, (which could hardly happen without a miracle,) there
is a great deal to enlarge the grounds of it, and to strengthen our
esteem and confidence in him. To say nothing of the incessant war he
waged with crying abuses, with priestcraft and tyranny, and the straight
line of consistency and principle which he followed from the beginning
to the end of his career,—he was a powerful though unpolished satirist
in verse, (as his _True-born Englishman_ sufficiently proves);—was
master of an admirable prose style;—in his _Review_, (a periodical paper
which was published three times a week for nine years together,) led the
way to that class of essay-writing, and those dramatic sketches of
common life and manners, which were afterwards so happily perfected by
Steele and Addison;—in his _Essays on Trade_, anticipated many of those
broad and liberal principles which are regarded as modern
discoveries;—in his Moral Essays, and some of his Novels, undoubtedly
set the example of that minute description and perplexing casuistry, of
which Richardson so successfully availed himself;—was among the first to
advocate the intellectual equality, and the necessity of improvements in
the education of women;—suggested the project of _Saving Banks_, and an
_Asylum for Idiots_;—among other notable services and claims to
attention, by his thoughts on the best mode of watching and lighting the
streets of the metropolis, might be considered as the author of the
modern system of police;—and even in party matters, and the heats and
rancorous differences of jarring sects, generally seized on that point
of view which displayed most moderation and good sense, and in his
favourite conclusions and arguments, was half a century before his
contemporaries, who, for that reason, made common cause against him.

Defoe ‘was too fond of the right to pursue the expedient;’ and had much
too dry, hard, and concentrated an understanding of the truth, to allow
of any compromise with it from courtesy to the feelings or opinions of
others. This kept him in perpetual hot water. It was a virtue, but
carried to a repeated excess. It set the majority against him, and
turned his dearest friends into his bitterest foes. If you make no
concessions to the world, you must expect no favours from it. Our
author’s blindness and simplicity on this head, amount to the
_dramatic_. He went on censuring and contradicting all sects and
parties, setting them to rights, recommending peace to them, praying
each to give up its darling prejudice and absurdity; and then he wonders
that ‘a man of peace and reason,’ like himself, should be the butt of
universal contumely and hatred. If an individual differs from you in
common with others, you do not so much mind it—it is the act of a body,
and implies no particular assumption of superior wisdom or virtue; but
if he not only differs from you, but from his own _side_ too, you then
can endure the scandal no longer; but join to hunt him down as a prodigy
of unheard-of insolence and presumption, and to get rid of him and his
boasted honesty and independence together. While, therefore, the author
of the _True-born Englishman_, _The Shortest Way with the Dissenters_,
and the _Legion Petition_, thought he was deserving well of God and his
country, he was ‘heaping coals of fire on his own head.’ Nothing
produces such antipathy in others as a total seeming want of sympathy
with them. Defoe was urged on by a straight-forwardness and sturdiness
of feeling, which did not permit him to give up a single iota of his
convictions; but it was ‘stuff of the conscience’ with him; there was
nothing of spleen, malevolence, or the spirit of contradiction in his
nature. Still, we consider him rather as an acute, zealous, and
well-informed partisan, than as a general and dispassionate reasoner. He
was a distinguished polemic, rather than a philosopher. Though he
exercised his understanding powerfully and variously, yet it was always
under the guidance of a certain banner—in support of ‘a foregone
conclusion.’ He was too much in the heat of the battle—too constantly
occupied in attacking or defending one side or the other, to consider
fairly whether both might not be in the wrong. He asked himself, (as he
was obliged to do in his own vindication,)—‘Why am I in the right?’ and
gave admirable reasons for it, supposing it to be so; but he never
thought of asking himself the farther question,—‘Am I in the right or
no?’ This would have been entering on a new and unexplored tract, and
might have led to no very welcome results. As an example of what we
mean—Defoe, though a most strenuous and persevering advocate for the
rights of conscience and toleration to those dissenters who, in his
view, agreed with the church in the _essentials_ of Christianity, was,
notwithstanding, far from being disposed to extend the same indulgence
to Socinians, Anabaptists, or other heretical persons. Of course, he
would conceive that he, and those with whom he acted in concert, were
not criminal in excluding others from the privilege in question; but he
did not enlarge his views beyond this point, so as to change places with
those who entirely differed with him; and in this respect fell short of
the philosophical and liberal opinions of Locke, and even Toland, who
placed toleration on the broad ground of a general principle, whatever
exceptions might arise from particular circumstances, and urgent
political expediency. We should, therefore, hardly be warranted in
admitting Defoe into the class of perfectly free and unshackled
speculative thinkers; though we certainly may rank him among the
foremost of polemical writers for vigour, and ability of execution.

It will be easily conceived, that in the variety of subjects of which
his author treated, and in the number and importance of the events in
which he took part, either in person, or with his pen, Mr. Wilson, whose
industry and patience seem to have increased with the field he had to
traverse, is at no loss for materials either for reflection or
illustration. The only fault is, that the life of Defoe is sometimes
lost in the history of the events of his time, like a petty current in
the ocean. Nevertheless, the writer has traced these events and their
causes so faithfully and clearly, and with such pertinent reflections,
that we readily pass over this fault, and can forgive the slowness of a
pencil that only _drags_ from the weight of truth and good intention.

Mr. Wilson has extracted from Defoe’s _Review_ (7. p. 296,) his account
of the origin and application of the far-famed terms—Whig and Tory; and
it is so curiously circumstantial, that we shall lay it before our
readers, though some of them, no doubt, are already well acquainted with
it.

‘The word Tory is Irish, and was first made use of there in the time of
Queen Elizabeth’s wars in Ireland. It signified a kind of robber, who
being listed in neither army, preyed in general upon the country,
without distinction of English or Spaniard. In the Irish massacre, anno
1641, you had them in great numbers, assisting in every thing that was
bloody and villainous; and particularly when humanity prevailed upon
some of the Papists to preserve Protestant relations. These were such as
chose to butcher brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, the dearest
friends and nearest relations; these were called _Tories_. In England,
about the year 1680, a party of men appeared among us, who, though
pretended Protestants, yet applied themselves to the ruin and
destruction of their country. They began with ridiculing the Popish
plot, and encouraging the Papists to revive it. They pursued their
designs, in banishing the Duke of Monmouth and calling home the Duke of
York; then in abhorring, petitioning, and opposing the bill of
exclusion; in giving up charters, and the liberties of their country, to
the arbitrary will of their prince; then in murdering patriots,
persecuting dissenters, and at last, in setting up a Popish prince, on
pretence of hereditary right, and tyranny on pretence of passive
obedience. These men, for their criminal preying upon their country, and
their cruel, bloody disposition, began to show themselves so like the
Irish thieves and murderers aforesaid, that they quickly got the name of
Tories. Their real god-father was Titus Oates, and the occasion of his
giving them the name as follows—the author of this happened to be
present: There was a meeting of some honest people in the city, upon the
occasion of the discovery of some attempt to stifle the evidence of the
witnesses [to the Popish plot], and tampering with Bedloe and Stephen
Dugdale. Among the discourse, Mr. Bedloe said, he had letters from
Ireland, that there were some Tories to be brought over hither, who were
privately to murder Dr. Oates and the said Bedloe. The Doctor, whose
zeal was very hot, could never after this hear any man talk against the
plot, or against the witnesses, but he thought he was one of these
Tories, and called almost every man a Tory that opposed him in
discourse; till at last the word Tory became popular, and it stuck so
close to the party in all their bloody proceedings, that they had no way
to get it off; so at last they owned it, just as they do now the name of
High-flyer.

‘As to the word _Whig_, it is Scotch. The use of it began there when the
western men, called Cameronians, took arms frequently for their
religion. Whig was a word used in those parts for a kind of liquor the
Western Highlandmen used to drink, whose composition I do not
remember,[33] and so became common to the people who drank it. It
afterwards became a denomination of the poor harassed people of that
part of the country, who, being unmercifully persecuted by the
government, against all law and justice, thought they had a civil right
to their religious liberties, and therefore frequently resisted the
arbitrary power of their princes. These men, tired with innumerable
oppressions, ravishings, murders, and plunderings, took up arms about
1681, being the famous insurrection at Bothwell-bridge. The Duke of
Monmouth, then in favour here, was sent against them by King Charles,
and defeated them. At his return, instead of thanks for the good
service, he found himself ill-treated for using them too mercifully; and
Duke Lauderdale told King Charles with an oath, that the Duke had been
so civil to Whigs, because he was a Whig himself in his heart. This made
it a court-word; and in a little time, all the friends and followers of
the Duke began to be called Whigs; and they, as the other party did by
the word Tory, took it freely enough to themselves.’

The cruelties of this reign, and the sufferings of the people, for
conscience and religion, on this and so many other occasions, formed a
striking contrast to the voluptuous effeminacy and callous indifference
of the court; and this insolent and pampered want of sympathy, by adding
wanton insult to intolerable injury, undermined all respect for the
throne in the minds of a numerous class of the community, and took away
all pity for its fall in the succeeding reign. Charles, however, who
seemed to oppress his subjects only for his amusement, and played the
tyrant as an appendage to the character of the fine gentleman, did not
proceed to extremities, or throw off the mask, whatever his secret
wishes or designs might be, by openly attacking large masses of power
and opinion. James was a true monk,—a blind, narrow, gloomy bigot; and
did not stop short in his mad and obstinate career, till he drove the
country to rebellion, and himself into exile. As the French wit said of
him, seeing him coming out of a Popish chapel abroad, ‘There goes a very
honest gentleman, who gave up a kingdom for a mass.’ By great good luck
he succeeded, for it turned upon a nice point at last. On James’s
accession to the throne, addresses of loyalty and devotion poured in
from all quarters, notwithstanding his well-known principles and
designs. An address from the Middle Temple expressed the sentiments of
that body of scholars and gentlemen, in a strain of fulsome servility.
The University of Oxford promised to obey him ‘without limitations or
restrictions;’ and the king’s promise, in his speech from the throne,
(says Burnet,) passed for a thing so sacred, that those were looked upon
as ill-bred who put into their address, ‘our religion established by
law, excepted.’ The pulpits resounded with thanksgiving sermons, and the
doctrine of passive obedience and non-resistance; and the clergy were
forward in tendering the unconditional surrender of their rights and
liberties for themselves, their fellow-subjects, and their posterity. If
James did not before think himself _God’s vicegerent upon earth_, he
must have thought so now. But he no sooner took them at their word, and
proceeded to appoint papists to be heads of colleges, and to induct them
to protestant livings, and to send the bishops to the Tower for refusing
to set their seal to his arbitrary mandates; that is, he no sooner
alarmed the clergy for their authority spiritual, and their revenues
temporal,—so that judgment began, as Dr. Sherlock expressed it, in the
house of God,—than they turned round, and sent their loyalty and their
monarch a-packing together. Had it not been for this attack on the
Church of England, the People of England might have been left to
struggle with the hand of power and oppression how they could; and would
have received plenty of reproofs and taunts from orthodox pulpits, on
their refractory and unnatural behaviour in resisting lawful authority.
Mr. Wilson has quoted an eloquent passage from Defoe, in which he
admirably exposes the indifference of the nation, at this period, to
principles, and their short-sightedness as to consequences, till they
actually arrived. We give the passage, both for the sense and style. It
alludes to the favourers of the _Exclusion Bill_.

‘How earnestly did those honest men, whose eyes God had opened to see
the danger, labour to prevent the mischiefs of a Popish tyranny? How did
they struggle in Parliament, and out of Parliament, to exclude a prince
that did not mock them, but really promised them in as plain language as
actions could speak, that he would be a tyrant; that he would erect
arbitrary power upon the foot of our liberties, as soon as he had the
reins in his hands? How were the opposers of this inundation oppressed
by power, and borne down in the stream of it? And when they were
massacred by that bloody generation, how did they warn us at their
deaths of the mischiefs that were coming? Yet all this while, deaf as
the adder to the voice of the charmer, stupid and hard as the nether
millstone, we would not believe, nor put our hand to our deliverance,
till that same Popery, that same tyranny, and that very party we
struggled with, were sent to be our instructors; and then we learnt the
lesson presently. Tyranny taught us the value of liberty; oppression,
how to prize the fence of laws; and Popery showed us the danger of the
Protestant religion. Then passive pulpits beat the ecclesiastical drum
of war; absolute subjection took up arms; and obedience for
conscience-sake resisted divine right. And who taught them this
heterodox lesson? Truly, the same schoolmaster they had hanged us for
telling them of, the same dispensing power they had enacted, and the
same tyranny they had murdered us for opposing.’

Defoe gives a very curious account of the insults offered to James II.
after his fall, and of which he was an eyewitness.

‘The king (after the Prince of Orange had entered London) had proceeded
to the Kentish coast, and embarked on board a vessel with the intention
of going to France; but being detained by the wind, Sir Edward Hales,
one of his attendants, sent his footman to the post-office at Feversham,
where his livery was recognised. Being traced to the vessel, it was
immediately boarded by some people from the town, who, mistaking the
king for a popish priest, searched his person, and took from him four
hundred guineas, with some valuable seals and jewels. The rank of the
individual treated with so much indignity was not long undiscovered;
for, there being a constable present who happened to know him, he threw
himself at his feet, and, begging him to forgive the rudeness of the
mob, ordered restitution of what had been taken from him. The king,
receiving the jewels and seals, distributed the money amongst them.
After this, he was conducted to Feversham, where fresh insults were
heaped upon fallen majesty.’—‘While there, he found himself in the hands
of the rabble, who, upon the noise of the king’s being taken, thronged
from all parts of the country to Feversham, so that the king found
himself surrounded, as it were, with an army of furies; the whole
street, which is very wide and large, being filled, and thousands of the
noisy gentry got together. His majesty, who knew well enough the temper
of the people at that time, but not what they might be pushed on to do
at such a juncture, was very uneasy, and spoke to some of the gentlemen,
who came with more respect, and more like themselves, to the town on
that surprising occasion. The king told them he was in their hands, and
was content to be so, and they might do what they pleased with him; but
whatever they thought fit to do, he desired they would quiet the people,
and not let him be delivered up to the rabble, to be torn in pieces. The
gentlemen told his majesty they were sorry to see him used so ill, and
would do any thing in their power to protect him; but that it was not
possible to quell the tumult of the people. The king was distressed in
the highest degree; the people shouting and pressing in a frightful
manner to have the door opened. At length, his majesty observing a
forward gentleman among the crowd, who ran from one party to another,
hallooing and animating the people, the king sent to tell him he desired
to speak with him. The message was delivered with all possible civility,
and the little Masaniello was prevailed with to come up stairs. The king
received him with a courtesy rather equal to his present circumstances
than to his dignity; told him, what he was doing might have an event
worse than he intended; that he seemed to be heating the people up for
some mischief; and that as he had done him no personal wrong, why should
he attack him in this manner; that he was in their hands, and they might
do what they pleased; but he hoped they did not design to murder him.
The fellow stood, as it were, thunderstruck, and said not one word. The
king, proceeding, told him he found he had some influence with the
rabble, and desired he would pacify them; that messengers were gone to
the parliament at London, and that he desired only they would be quiet
till their return. What the fellow answered to the king I know not; but
as I immediately enquired, they told me he did not say much, but
this—“What can I do with them? and, what would you have me do?” But as
soon as the king had done speaking, he turned short, and made to the
door as fast as he could to go out of the room. As soon as he got fairly
to the stairhead, and saw his way open, he turns short about to the
gentlemen, to one of whom he had given the same churlish answer, and
raising his voice, so that the king, who was in the next room, should be
sure to hear him, he says, “_I have a bag of money as long as my arm,
halloo, boys, halloo!_” The king was so filled with contempt and just
indignation at the low-spirited insolence of the purse-proud wretch,
that it quite took off the horror of the rabble, and only smiling, he
sat down and said, “Let them alone, let them do their worst.”’

It seems the man was a retired grocer; and Defoe, in his _Complete
Tradesman_, (says his biographer,) relates the circumstance, to show,
that to be vain of mere wealth denotes a baseness of soul, and is often
accompanied by a conduct unworthy of a rational creature.

In the midst of his distress, the King, it appears, had applied for
protection to a clergyman, who treated him with cool indifference. The
fact is thus noticed by Defoe:

‘When the king was taken at Sheerness, and had fallen into the hands of
the rabble, he applied himself to a clergyman who was there, in words to
this effect: “Sir, it is men of your cloth who have reduced me to this
condition; I desire you will use your endeavours to still and quiet the
people, and disperse them, that I may be freed from this tumult.” The
gentleman’s answer was cold and insignificant; and going down to the
people, he returned no more to the king. Several of the gentry and
clergy thereabouts,’ adds our author, ‘who had formerly preached and
talked up this mad doctrine, (passive obedience,) never offered the king
their assistance in that distress, which, as a man, whether prince or
no, any one would have done: it therefore to me renders their integrity
suspected, when they pretended to an absolute submission, and only meant
that they expected it from their neighbours, whom they designed to
oppress, but resolved never to practise the least part of it themselves,
if ever it should look towards them.’

In another place, Defoe observes,

‘I never was, I thank God for it, one of those that betrayed him, or any
one else. I was never one that flattered him in his arbitrary
proceedings, or made him believe I would bear oppression and injustice
with a tame Issachar-like temper; those who did so, and then flew in his
face, I believe, as much betrayed him as Judas did our Saviour; and
their crime, whatever the Protestant interest gained by it, is no way
lessened by the good that followed.’

The same spirit of integrity and candour, the same desire to see fair
play, and to do justice to all parties,—in a word, the same spirit of
common sense and common honesty which marks this passage, runs through
all Defoe’s writings; and as it raised him up a host of enemies among
the abettors and abusers of power, so it left him neither friends nor
shelter in his own party, to whose faults and errors he gave as little
quarter; thinking himself bound to condemn them as freely and frankly.
Hence he had a life of uneasiness,—an old age of pain. In reading the
above description of James’s situation, the hand is passed thoughtfully
over the brow, and we for a moment forget the crimes of the monarch in
the misfortunes of the man. It is laid down by Mr. Burke, that none but
mild, inoffensive princes, ever bring themselves to the condition of
being objects of insult or pity to their subjects; and that tyrants, who
deserve punishment, know well how to guard themselves against it, and
‘to keep their seats firm.’ Let us see how far this doctrine is made
good in the case of James; or how far his own misdeeds brought their
rare, but natural punishment upon his head. We will let Mr. Wilson speak
to this point:—

‘The fate of James,’ he says, ‘would have been more entitled to pity, if
he had not stained his character by so many acts of wanton and
cold-blooded cruelty. That his merciless character was well known to the
nation, appears by the intrepid retort of Colonel Ayloffe, who had been
condemned to death, but was advised by James to make some disclosures,
it being in his power to pardon. “I know,” says he, “it is in your
power, but it is not in your nature, to pardon.” That compassion was a
total stranger to his breast, no one can doubt who reads the following
affecting narrative: Monsieur Roussel, a French protestant divine of
great learning and integrity, and minister of the Reformed Church at
Montpelier in France, having witnessed the demolition of his own place
of worship, soon after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, ventured,
at the desire of his people, to preach in the night-time upon its ruins,
and was attended by some thousands of his flock. For this offence he was
condemned, by the intendant of Languedoc, to be broke upon the wheel;
but, having withdrawn from the place, it was ordered that he should be
hanged in effigy. After encountering numerous hazards, he succeeded in
effecting his escape from France; and reaching Ireland, was chosen
pastor of the French church in Dublin. James, who, for the sake of
courting popularity, had formerly affected a charitable disposition
towards the French refugees, threw off the mask when he landed in that
country, and was surrounded by French counsellors. Being no longer under
any temptation to disguise his natural temper and his hatred to the
reformed religion, he committed one of those breaches of good faith
which must for ever consign his name to infamy. For, instead of
protecting a stranger who had been persecuted in his own country for a
conscientious discharge of his religious duties, and had sought an
asylum under the laws of another, where he had lived for some years in
peaceable exile, the base wretch delivered up this unoffending person to
the French ambassador, Count D’Avaux, who sent him in chains to France,
there to undergo the terrible punishment prepared for him by his inhuman
murderers.[34] Such an action requires no comment; nor can any term of
reproach be too strong to designate the monster who could lend himself
to its perpetration.’

Yet many people, seeing the poor and forlorn figure which the exiled
sovereign made with a few followers in the remote and silent court of
St. Germain’s, wanted to have him back; thinking that, to curtail him of
the power to repeat such acts as that just related, and to deluge a
country with blood, was the last degree of hardship, and a sad indignity
offered to a king! Defoe was not in the number of these sentimentalists;
and he had enough to do after his countrymen’s ‘courage had been screwed
to the sticking-place,’ to keep it there, and warn them against a
relapse into Popery and slavery. One of his first publications had been
an Address to the Dissenters, to caution them against accepting the
terms of a general Toleration, which, on his accession to the throne,
James II. had insidiously held out to all parties, and which was to
include Papists as well as Dissenters. This was not a bait for Defoe’s
keen jealousy and strong repugnance to the encroachments of power to be
taken in by. There was, however, some danger that the Dissenters, from
their timidity and love of ease, and their being habitually too much
engrossed by themselves and their own grievances, might be tempted to
purchase the proffered grace at the price of allowing the Papists the
same liberty; which was (at this period), under the barefaced pretence
of liberality, and a tenderness for scrupulous consciences, to throw
open the flood-gates of the most unbounded bigotry and intolerance. But
the hatred and dread of Popery was, at this time, the ruling passion, in
which the Dissenters shared in its utmost rancour and virulence; and
this old grudge and hereditary antipathy had the effect of counteracting
their natural coldness and phlegm, and a certain narrowness and
formality in their views. Some of the weakest among them were,
notwithstanding, for running into the snare, and did not easily forgive
Defoe for pointing it out to them. The Marquis of Halifax had written a
pamphlet on the same side of the question, called, ‘A Letter to a
Dissenter, upon occasion of his Majesty’s late Declaration of
Indulgence, 1687.’ The title of Defoe’s work is not now known. In
speaking of it himself, some years after, he says,

‘The next time I differed with my friends was when King James was
wheedling the Dissenters to take off the penal laws and test, which I
could by no means come into. And as in the first I used to say, I had
rather the Popish House of Austria should ruin the Protestants in
Hungary than the infidel House of Ottoman should ruin both Protestant
and Papist by overrunning Germany; so, in the other, I told the
Dissenters I had rather the Church of England should pull our clothes
off by fines and forfeitures, than that the Papists should fall both
upon the Church and the Dissenters, and pull our skins off by fire and
faggot.’[35]

The allusion in the foregoing passage is to an early Piece of Defoe’s,
(not reprinted among his tracts), in which he had drawn his sword (for
his weapon would be out) in defence of the Pope against the Turks. The
occasion was this: The Hungarian Reformers having been persecuted and
proscribed by the Austrian monarch, had risen in arms against him; and
the Turks, availing themselves of the opportunity, had marched to their
assistance, and laid siege to Vienna. Most of the English Protestants
(as men think the nearest danger greatest, and hate their old enemies
most,) were inclined to rejoice at this tumbling of a Popish despot, and
the success of their Hungarian brethren. But Defoe, who saw farther than
others, (and perhaps took a little pride in doing so,) viewed the matter
in a different light, and deprecated the possible triumph of the
Crescent over the Cross, and the subjugation of all Christendom, which
might be the consequence. Logically speaking, he was right; but
prudentially, he was perhaps wrong. The powers of Europe took the alarm
as well as he, and combined to rescue the Austrian monarch from the
gripe of the Mussulman. They succeeded; but could obtain no terms for
the Hungarian peasants. Had the Emperor been left to fight his own
battles against the Turks, he might have been frightened into measures
of moderation and justice towards his own subjects; and there was, in
the meantime, little probability of a Mahometan army overrunning Europe.

Defoe’s first publication was a satirical pamphlet, called _Speculum
Crape-gownorum_; intended to ridicule the fopperies and affectation of
the younger clergy, as a set-off to some severe attacks on the mode of
preaching among the Dissenters. This performance bears the date of 1682,
when Defoe was only twenty-one, so that he commenced author very young.
From that period he hardly ever ceased writing for the rest of his life;
and a list of his works would alone fill a long article. The pasquinade
just mentioned is attributed, by Mr. Godwin, in his _Lives of the
Philipses_, to John Philips; but Mr. Wilson gives it to Defoe, on his
own authority; and certainly his report is to be trusted, for he was a
person of unchallengeable veracity. He was always a warm partisan of the
Dissenters, (among whom he was born and bred,) and was ever ready to
take up their quarrel either with wit or argument, for which he got
small thanks. He was not, however, to be put off by their dulness or
ingratitude. He was old enough to remember the times of their
persecution and ‘fiery ordeal;’ and it is at this source that the spirit
of liberty is tempered and steeled to its keenest edge. Defoe’s
political firmness may, in part, also be traced to this union between
the feelings of civil and religious liberty. An attachment to freedom,
for the advantages it holds out to society, may be sometimes overruled
by a calculation of prudence, or of the opposite advantages held out to
the individual; but a resistance to power for conscience-sake, and as a
dictate of religious duty, rests on a positive ground, which is not to
be shaken or tampered with, and has the seeds of permanence and
martyrdom in it. What Mr. Burke calls ‘the _Hortus Siccus_ of Dissent’
is therefore the hotbed of resistance to the encroachments of ambition;
and when, by long-continued struggles, the disqualifications of
Dissenters are taken off, and the zeal which had been kept alive by hard
usage and penal laws subsides into indifference or scepticism, we doubt
whether there is any lever left, in mere public opinion, strong enough
to throw off the pressure of unjust and ruinous power.

With these feelings, and, after the fears which he and all good men must
have entertained for the safety of their religion, and the freedom of
their country, it is not to be wondered at if Defoe hailed the arrival
of the Prince of Orange with the greatest joy. He kept the anniversary
of his landing, the 4th of November, all his life after. We find an
account of him as one of those who went in procession with their
Majesties to Guildhall, as a guard of honour, the year following.
Oldmixon, who gives the account, has mixed up with it some of his
unfounded prejudices against our author:

‘Their Majesties,’ he says, ‘attended (Oct. 29, 1689,) by their royal
highnesses the Prince and Princesses of Denmark, and by a numerous train
of nobility and gentry, went first to a balcony, prepared for them at
the Angel in Cheapside, to see the show; which, for the great number of
livery-men, the full appearance of the militia and artillery company,
the rich adornments of the pageants, and the splendour and good order of
the whole proceeding, out-did all that had been seen before upon that
occasion; and what deserved to be particularly mentioned, says a
reverend historian, was a royal regiment of volunteer-horse, made up of
the chief citizens, who, being gallantly mounted and richly accoutred,
were led by the Earl of Monmouth, now Earl of Peterborough, and attended
their Majesties from Whitehall. Among these troopers, who were, for the
most part, Dissenters, was Daniel Defoe, at that time a hosier in
Freeman’s-yard, Cornhill; the same who afterwards was pilloried for
writing an ironical invective against the Church; and did after that
list in the service of Mr. Robert Harley, and those brethren of his who
broke the confederacy, and made a shameful and ruinous peace with
France.’[36]

Oldmixon evidently singles out his brother author in this gallant
procession with an eye of envy rather than friendship; and the invidious
turn given to his politics only means, that all those were _black sheep_
who did not go the absurd lengths of Oldmixon and his party in every
thing.

The joy and exultation of Defoe on this great and glorious occasion was
not of long duration, but was soon turned to gall and bitterness.
‘Though that his joy was joy,’ yet both friends and foes laboured hard
to ‘throw such changes of vexation on it, that it might lose all
colour.’ His admiration of King William was the ruling passion of his
life. He was his hero, his deliverer, his friend: he was bound to him by
the ties of patriotism, of religion, and of personal obligation. But
this ruling passion was also the torment of his breast, because his
well-grounded enthusiasm was not seconded by the unanimous public voice,
and because the services of the great champion of liberty and of the
Protestant cause did not meet with that glow of gratitude and affection
in the minds of the people (when their immediate danger was blown over)
that they richly merited. Defoe had not only ridden in procession with
his Majesty, but he was afterwards closeted with him, and consulted by
him on more than one question: so that his self-importance, as well as
his sense of truth and justice, was implicated in the attacks which were
made on the person and character of his royal patron and benefactor.
Nothing can, in our opinion, exceed the good behaviour of William, nor
the ill return he received from those he had been sent for, to deliver
them from Popish bondage and darkness. Being no longer bowed to the
earth by a yoke that they could not lift, and having got a king of their
own choosing, they thought they could not exercise their new-acquired
liberty and independence better than by using him as ill as possible,
and reviling him for the very blessings which he had been the chief
means of bestowing on them, and which his presence was absolutely
necessary to continue to them. Having seen their hereditary,
_passive-obedience_ monarch, King James, quietly seated on the other
side of the Channel, and being no longer in bodily fear of being
executed as rebels, or burnt as heretics, the good people of England
began to find a flaw in the title of the new-made monarch, because he
was not, and did not pretend to be, absolute; and to sacrifice to the
_manes_ of divine right, by taking every opportunity, and resorting to
every artifice to insult his person, to revile his reputation, to wound
his feelings, and to cramp and thwart his measures for his own and their
common safety. The Tories and high-fliers lamented that the crown was
without its most precious jewel and ornament, _hereditary right_; and
though they acknowledged the necessity of the case upon which they
themselves had acted, yet they thought the time might come when this
necessity might cease, and for their lawful King to be brought back
again, ‘with conditions.’ Pulpits, long accustomed to unqualified
submission, now echoed the double-tongued distinction of a king _de
jure_ and a king _de facto_. This party, whose old habits were inimical
to the new order of things, but who made a virtue of necessity, tendered
their allegiance to the Prince of Orange reluctantly and ungraciously;
while the Non-jurors bearded him to his face. The Country Gentlemen, (at
that time a formidable party, ‘not pierceable by power of any
argument,’) only felt themselves at a loss from not having the
Dissenters and Nonconformists to hunt down as usual. William they
regarded as an interloper, who had no rights of his own, and who
hindered other people from exercising theirs, in molesting and
domineering over their neighbours. What made matters worse, was his
being a foreigner; his Dutch origin was one of the things constantly
thrown in his teeth, and that staggered the faith and loyalty of many of
his well-meaning subjects, who could not comprehend the relation in
which they stood to a sovereign of alien descent. The phrase, _True-born
Englishman_, became a watchword in the mouths of the malecontent party;
and at that name, (as often as it was repeated), the Whig and Protestant
interest grew pale. It was to meet, and finally quell this charge, that
Defoe penned his well-known poem of _The True-born Englishman_—a satire
which, if written in doggerel verse, and without the wit or pleasantry
of Butler’s Hudibras, is a masterpiece of good sense and just
reflection, and shows a thorough knowledge both of English history and
of the English character. It is indeed a complete and unanswerable
exposure of the pretence set up to a purer and loftier origin than all
the rest of the world, instead of our being a mixed race from all parts
of Europe, settling down into one common name and people. Defoe’s satire
was so just and true, that it drove the cant, to which it was meant to
be an antidote, out of fashion; and it was this piece of service that
procured the writer the good opinion and notice of King William. It did
not, however, equally recommend him to the public. If it silenced the
idle and ill-natured clamours of a party, by telling the plain
truth,—that truth was not the more welcome for being plain or effectual.
Though this handle was thus taken from malevolence and discontent, the
tide of unpopularity had set in too strong from the first arrival of the
king, not to continue and increase to the end of his reign; so that at
last worn out with rendering the noblest services, and being repaid with
the meanest ingratitude, he thought of retiring to Holland, and leaving
his English crown of thorns to any one who chose to claim it.

The state of parties, at this period of our history, presents a riddle
that has not been solved. It has been referred to the gloom and
discontent of the English character; but other countries have of late
exhibited the same problem, with the same result. It may be resolved
into that propensity in human nature, through which, when it has got
what it wants, it requires something else which it cannot have. The
English people, at the period in question, wanted a contradiction,—that
is, to have James and William on the throne together; but this they
could not have, and so they were contented with neither. If they had
recalled James, they would have sent him back again. They wanted him
back again _with conditions_, and security for his future good
behaviour. They wanted his title to the throne without his abuse of
power; an absolute sovereign, with a reserve of the privileges of the
people; a Popish prince, with a Protestant church; a deliverance from
chains without a deliverer; and an escape from tyranny without the stain
of resistance to it. They wanted not out of two things one which they
could have, but a third, which was impossible; and as they could not
have all, they were determined to be pleased with nothing. This greatly
annoyed Defoe, who set his face against so absurd a manifestation of the
spirit of the times. It embittered his satisfaction in the virtues of
the sovereign, and the glories of his reign,—in his exploits abroad,—the
moderation and justice of his administration at home; nor was he
consoled for the malignity of his prince’s enemies or the indifference
of his friends, either by writing _Odes_ on his battles and victories,
or _Elegies_ and _Epitaphs_ on his death.

He was still less fortunate in following up the dictates of what he
thought right, or in what he called ‘speaking a word in season,’ in the
subsequent reign. Queen Anne, who succeeded to the crown on the death of
King William, was placed in no very graceful or dutiful position, as
keeping her brother from the throne, which she occupied as the next
Protestant heir, but to which, in the opinion of many, and perhaps in
her own, he had a prior indefeasible right. She had been brought up with
bigoted notions of religion; and in proportion as she felt the political
ground infirm under her feet, she wished to stand well with the Church.
There was, through her whole reign, therefore, a strong increasing bias
to High-Church principles. The promise of toleration to the dissenters
soon sunk into an _indulgence_, and ended in the threat and the
intention of putting in force the severest laws against them, under
pretence that the Church was in danger. The Clergy sung the same song as
the Queen, adding a burden of their own to it;—breathing nothing in
their sermons but suspicion and hatred of the dissenters, reviving and
inflaming old animosities, and encouraging their parishioners to proceed
even to open violence against the frequenters of conventicles. Their
services in bringing about the Revolution were forgotten; and nothing
was insisted on but their share in the great Rebellion, and the
beheading of Charles I. A university preacher (Sacheverell) talked of
‘hoisting the bloody flag’ against the dissenters, and treated all those
of the Moderate Party and Low Church as false brethren, who did not
enlist under the banner. Another proposed shutting up not only the
dissenters’ Meeting-Houses, but their Academies, and thus taking from
them the education of their children. A third was for using gentle
violence with the Queen to urge her to severe and salutary measures
against Nonconformists; and considered her as under _duresse_ in not
being allowed to give full scope to the sentiments labouring in her
bosom in favour of the Church of England. Defoe marked all this with
quick and anxious eye; he saw the storm of persecution gathering, and
ready to burst with tenfold vengeance, from its having been so long
delayed; he thought it high time to warn his brethren of the impending
mischief, and to point out to the government, in a terrible and palpable
way, the dangerous and mad career to which the zealots of a party were
urging them headlong. ‘So should his anticipation prevent their
discovery.’ He collected all the poisoned missiles and combustible
materials he could lay his hands on, and putting them together in one
heap, brought out his _Shortest Way with the Dissenters_. If it startled
his adversaries and threw a blaze of light upon the subject, the
explosion chiefly hurt himself. What beyond contradiction proved the
truth of the satire was, that it was, at first, taken seriously by many
of the opposite side, who thought it a well-timed and spirited Manifesto
from a true son of the Church; and several young divines in the country,
on perusing it, sent for more copies of it, with high commendations, as
the triumph of their views and party. Their rage, when they found out
their mistake, was proportionable, and no treatment was bad enough for
so vile an incendiary. The book was forthwith prosecuted by authority,
as a malignant slander against the Church, and a seditious libel on the
government. The author, as before noticed, was sentenced to the pillory,
and to a heavy fine, with imprisonment during the queen’s pleasure;
which, as already mentioned, was the immediate and ultimate ruin of his
affairs and prospects in life. Defoe bore his disgrace and misfortunes
with the spirit of a man, and with a sort of grumbling patience peculiar
to himself. He wrote on the occasion a _Hymn to the Pillory_, which
contains some bad poetry and manly feeling; and indeed his apparent
indifference is easily accounted for from a consciousness of the
_flagrant_ rectitude of his case. Pope has made an ungenerous allusion
to the circumstances in the _Dunciad_:—

‘See where on high stands unabash’d Defoe!’

Pope’s imagination had too much effeminacy to stomach, under any
circumstances, this kind of petty, squalid martyrdom; nor had he
strength of public principle enough to form to himself the practical
antithesis of ‘dishonour honourable!’ The amiable in private life, the
exalted in rank and station, alone fixed his sympathy, and engrossed his
admiration. The exquisite compliments with which he has embalmed the
memory of some of his illustrious friends, who stand ‘condemned to
everlasting fame,’ are a discredit to his own. His apostrophe to Harley,
beginning,

‘Oh soul supreme, in each hard instance tried,
Above all pain, all passion, and all pride,’

contrasts strangely with the time-serving, vain, versatile, and
unprincipled character of that minister; and Mr. Wilson ought to have
written a good book, for he has spoiled the effect of some of the finest
lines in the English language. It was a bold step in Pope to put the
author of _Robinson Crusoe_ into the _Dunciad_ at all; Swift also has a
fling at him as ‘the fellow that was pilloried;’ and Gay is equally
sceptical and pedantic, as to his possessing more than ‘the superficial
parts of learning.’ We know of no excuse for the illiberality of the
literary junto with regard to a man like Defoe, but that he returned the
compliment to them; and in fact, if we were to take the character of men
of genius from their judgment of each other, we must sometimes come to a
very different conclusion from what the world have formed.

That Defoe should have incurred the hatred, and been consigned to the
vengeance, of the High-Church party for thus honestly exposing their
designs against the Dissenters, is but natural; the wonderful part is,
that he equally excited the indignation and reproaches of the Dissenters
themselves; who disclaimed his work as a scandalous and inflammatory
performance, and called loudly (in concert with their bitterest foes,)
for the condign punishment of the author. They almost with one voice,
and as if seized with a contagion of folly, cried shame upon it, as an
underhand and designing attempt to make a premature breach between them
and the established church; to sow the seeds of groundless jealousy and
ill-will; and to make them indirectly participators in, and the
sufferers by, a scurrilous attack on the reverence due to religion and
authority. Defoe was made the scapegoat of this paltry and cowardly
policy, and was given up to the tender mercies of the opposite party
without succour or sympathy. This extreme blindness to their own
interests can only be explained by the consideration that the
Dissenters, as a body, were at this time in a constant state of
probation and suffering; they had enough to do with the evils they
actually endured, without ‘flying to others that they knew not of;’ they
stood in habitual awe and apprehension of their spiritual lords and
masters;—would not be brought to suspect their further designs lest it
should provoke them to realise their fears; and as they had not strength
nor spirit to avert the blow, did not wish to see till they felt it. The
alacrity and prowess of Defoe was a reproach to their backwardness; the
truth of his appeal implied a challenge to meet it; and they answered,
with the old excuse, ‘why troublest thou us before our time?’ The
Dissenters too, at this period, were men of a formal and limited scope
of mind, not much versed in the general march of human affairs; they
required literal and positive proof for every thing, as well as for the
points of faith on which they held out so manfully; and their obstinacy
in maintaining these, and suffering for them, was matched by their timid
circumspection and sluggish impracticability with respect to every thing
else. Their deserting Defoe, who marched on at the head of the
battle,—pushed forward by his keen foresight and natural impatience of
wrong,—is not out of character; though equally repugnant to sound policy
or true spirit. They fixed a stigma on him, therefore, as a breeder of
strife, a false prophet, and a dangerous member of the community; and,
what is certainly inexcusable, when, afterwards, his jest was turned to
melancholy earnest;—when every thing he had foretold was verified to the
very letter, when the whole force of the government was arrayed against
them, and Sacheverell in person unfurled ‘his bloody flag,’ and paraded
the streets with a mob at his heels, pulling down their meeting-houses,
burning their private dwellings, and making it unsafe for a Dissenter to
walk the streets,—they did not take off the stigma they had affixed to
the author of _The Shortest Way with the Dissenters_; did not allow that
he was right and they were wrong, but kept up their unjust and illiberal
prejudices, and even aggravated them in some instances, as if to prove
that they were well-founded. Bodies of men seldom retract or atone for
the injuries they have done to individuals. It will hardly seem credible
to the modern reader, that in pursuance of this old sectarian grudge,
and in conformity with the same narrow spirit, some years after this,
when Queen Anne, who, from the death of her son, Prince George, had no
hope of leaving an heir to the crown, turned her thoughts to the
restoration of the Pretender, and when Defoe, in the general alarm and
agitation which this uncertainty of the designs of the Court occasioned,
endeavoured to ridicule and defeat the project, by pointing out, in his
powerful and inimitable way, the incalculable benefits that would ensue
from setting aside the Hanoverian succession, and bringing in the right
line, one William Benson, (a Dissenter, a stanch friend to the House of
Hanover, and the same who had a monument erected to Milton,) in his
absurd prejudice against Defoe,—in his conviction that he was a renegado
and a Marplot, and in his utter incapacity to conceive the meaning of
irony,—actually set on foot a prosecution against the author as in
league with the Pretender; wanted to have him accused of high treason,
and obstinately persisted in, and returned to the charge; and that it
was only through the friendly zeal and interest of Harley, and his
representations to the queen, that he was pardoned and released from
Newgate, whither he had been committed on the judges’ warrant, for
writing something in defence of his pamphlet, after its presentation by
the Grand Jury, and his being compelled to give bail to appear for
trial! ‘The force of _dulness_ could no farther go.’

Defoe had before this given violent offence to the Dissenters, by
_dissenting_ from and ‘disobliging’ them on a number of technical and
doubtful points—a difference of which they seemed more tenacious than of
the greatest affronts or deadliest injuries. Among others, he had
opposed the principles of _occasional conformity_; that is, the liberty
practised by some Dissenters, of going to church during their
appointment to any public office, as they were prohibited from attending
their own places of worship in their official costume. Nothing could be
clearer, than that, if it was a point of conscience with these persons
not to conform to the service of the established church, their being
chosen mayor, sheriff, or alderman, did not give them a dispensation to
that purpose. But many of the demure and purse-proud citizens of London,
(among whom Mr. William Benson was a leader and a shining light,)
resented their not being supposed at liberty to appear at church in
their gold chains and robes of office, though contrary to their usual
principles of nonconformity;—as children think they have a right to
visit fine places in their new clothes on holidays. Their rage against
Defoe was at its height, when he had nothing to say against Harley’s
Tory administration, for bringing in _The Occasional Conformity Bill_,
to debar Dissenters of this puerile and contradictory privilege. It was
to the kindness and generosity of Harley, on this as well as on former
occasions, in affording our author pecuniary aid, of which he was in the
utmost need, (being without means, friends, and in prison,) and in
rescuing him from the grasp of his own party, that we owe his silence on
political and public questions during the last years of Queen Anne; and
a line of conduct that, in the present day, seems wavering and
equivocal. His gratitude for private benefits hardly condemned him to
withhold his opinions on public matters; but at that time, personal and
private ties bore greater sway over general and public duties than is
the case at present. We entirely acquit Defoe of dishonest or unworthy
motives. He might easily have gone quite over to the other side, if he
had been inclined to make a market of himself: but of this he never
betrayed the remotest intention, and merely refused to join in the hue
and cry against a man who had twice saved him from starving in a
dungeon. Be this as it may, Defoe never recovered from the slur thus
cast upon his political integrity, and was under a cloud, and
discountenanced during the following reign; though the establishment of
this very Protestant succession had been the object of the labours of
his whole life, and was the wish that lay nearest his heart to his
latest breath.

Defoe had, in the former reign, been at various times employed at her
majesty’s desire, and in her service, particularly in accomplishing the
Union with Scotland in 1707. He displayed great activity and zeal in
accommodating the differences of all parties; and his _History_ of that
event has been pronounced by good judges to be a masterpiece. But as to
the numerous transactions in which he was concerned, and his various
publications and controversies, we must refer the reader to Mr. Wilson,
who has furnished ample details and instructive comments. For ourselves,
we must ‘hold our hands and check our pride,’ or we should never have
done. Of all Defoe’s multifarious effusions, the only one in which there
is a want of candour and good faith, or in which he has wilfully blunted
and deadened his _moral sense_, is his Defence, or (which is the same
thing) his Apology for the Massacre of Glencoe. But King William was his
idol, and he could no more see any faults in him than spots in the sun.
Our old friend Daniel also tries us hard, when he rails at the poor
servants, or ‘fine madams,’ as he calls them, who get a little better
clothes and higher wages when they come up to London, than they had in
the country; when he _runs a-muck_ at stage-plays, and the triumphs of
the mimic scene;—confounding ‘Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, with Lucifer,
Prince of Darkness.’ But these were the follies and prejudices of the
time, aided by a little tincture of vulgarity, and the sourness of
sectarian bigotry.

We pass on to his Novels, and are sorry that we must hasten over them.
We owe them to the ill odour into which he had fallen as a politician.
His fate with his party reminds one a little of the reception which the
heroine of the _Heart of Mid-Lothian_ met with from her sister, because
she would not tell a lie for her; yet both were faithful and true to
their cause. Being laid aside by the Whigs, as a suspected person, and
not choosing to go over to the other side, he retired to
Stoke-Newington, where, as already mentioned, he had an attack of
apoplexy, which had nearly proved fatal to him. Recovering, however, and
his activity of mind not suffering him to be idle, he turned his
thoughts into a new channel, and, as if to change the scene entirely,
set about writing Romances. The first work that could come under this
title was _The Family Instructor_;—a sort of controversial narrative, in
which an argument is held through three volumes, and a feverish interest
is worked up to the most tragic height, on ‘the abomination’ (as it was
at that time thought by many people, and among others by Defoe) of
letting young people go to the play. The implied horror of dramatic
exhibitions, in connexion with the dramatic effect of the work itself,
leaves a curious impression. Defoe’s polemical talents are brought to
bear to very good purpose in this performance, which was in the form of
Letters; and it is curious to mark the eagerness with which his pen,
after having been taken up for so many years with dry debates and
doctrinal points, flies for relief to the details and incidents of
private life. His mind was equally tenacious of facts and arguments, and
fastened on each, in its turn, with the same strong and unremitting
grasp. _Robinson Crusoe_, published in 1719, was the first of his
performances in the acknowledged shape of a romance; and from this time
he brought out one or two every year to the end of his life. As it was
the first, it was decidedly the best; it gave full scope to his genius;
and the subject mastered his prevailing bias to religious controversy,
and the depravity of social life, by confining him to the
unsophisticated views of nature and the human heart. His other works of
fiction have not been read, (in comparison)—and one reason is, that many
of them, at least, are hardly fit to be read, whatever may be said to
the contrary. We shall go a little into the theory of this.

We do not think a person brought up and trammelled all his life in the
strictest notions of religion and morality, and looking at the world,
and all that was ordinarily passing in it, as little better than a
contamination, is, _a priori_, the properest person to write novels: it
is going out of his way—it is ‘meddling with the unclean thing.’
Extremes meet, and all extremes are bad. According to our author’s
overstrained Puritanical notions, there were but two choices, God or the
Devil—Sinners and Saints—the Methodist meeting or the Brothel—the school
of the press-yard of Newgate, or attendance on the refreshing ministry
of some learned and pious dissenting Divine. As the smallest falling off
from faith, or grace, or the most trifling peccadillo, was to be
reprobated and punished with the utmost severity, no wonder that the
worst turn was given to every thing; and that the imagination having
once overstepped the formidable line, gave a loose to its habitual
nervous dread, by indulging in the blackest and most frightful pictures
of the corruptions incident to human nature. It was as well (in the cant
phrase) ‘to be in for a sheep as a lamb,’ as it cost nothing more—the
sin might at least be startling and uncommon; and hence we find, in this
style of writing, nothing but an alternation of religious horrors and
raptures, (though these are generally rare, as being a less tempting
bait,) and the grossest scenes of vice and debauchery: we have either
saintly, spotless purity, or all is rotten to the core. How else can we
account for it, that all Defoe’s characters (with one or two exceptions
for form’s sake) are of the worst and lowest description—the refuse of
the prisons and the stews—thieves, prostitutes, vagabonds, and
pirates—as if he wanted to make himself amends for the restraint under
which he had laboured ‘all the fore-end of his time’ as a moral and
religious character, by acting over every excess of grossness and
profligacy by proxy! How else can we comprehend that he should really
think there was a salutary moral lesson couched under the history of
_Moll Flanders_; or that his romance of _Roxana, or the Fortunate
Mistress_, who rolls in wealth and pleasure from one end of the book to
the other, and is quit for a little death-bed repentance and a few
lip-deep professions of the vanity of worldly joys, showed, in a
striking point of view, the advantages of virtue, and the disadvantages
of vice? It cannot be said, however, that these works have an _immoral_
tendency. The author has contrived to neutralise the question; and (as
far as in him lay) made vice and virtue equally contemptible or
revolting. In going through his pages, we are inclined to vary Mr.
Burke’s well-known paradox, that ‘vice, by losing all its grossness,
loses half its evil,’ and say that vice, by losing all its refinement,
loses all its attraction. We have in them only the pleasure of sinning,
and the dread of punishment here or hereafter;—gross sensuality, and
whining repentance. The morality is that of the inmates of a house of
correction; the piety, that of malefactors in the condemned hole. There
is no sentiment, no atmosphere of imagination, no ‘purple light’ thrown
round virtue or vice;—all is either the physical gratification on the
one hand, or a selfish calculation of consequences on the other. This is
the necessary effect of allowing nothing to the frailty of human
nature;—of never strewing the flowers of fancy in the path of pleasure,
but always looking that way with a sort of terror as to forbidden
ground: nothing is left of the common and mixed enjoyments and pursuits
of human life but the coarsest and criminal part; and we have either a
sour, cynical, sordid sell-denial, or (in the despair of attaining this)
a reckless and unqualified abandonment of all decency and character
alike:—it is hard to say which is the most repulsive. Defoe runs equally
into extremes in his male characters as in his heroines. _Captain
Singleton_ is a hardened, brutal desperado, without one redeeming trait,
or almost human feeling; and, in spite of what Mr. Lamb says of his
lonely musings and agonies of a conscience-stricken repentance, we find
nothing of this in the text: the captain is always merry and well if
there is any mischief going on; and his only qualm is, after he has
retired from his trade of plunder and murder on the high seas, and is
afraid of being assassinated for his ill-gotten wealth, and does not
know how to dispose of it. Defoe (whatever his intentions may be) is
led, by the force of truth and circumstances, to give the Devil his
due—he puts no gratuitous remorse into his adventurer’s mouth, nor
spoils the _keeping_ by expressing one relenting pang, any more than his
hero would have done in reality. This is, indeed, the excellence of
Defoe’s representations, that they are perfect _fac-similes_ of the
characters he chooses to pourtray; but then they are too often the worst
specimens he can collect out of the dregs and sink of human nature.
_Colonel Jack_ is another instance, with more pleasantry, and a common
vein of humanity; but still the author is flung into the same walk of
flagrant vice and immorality;—as if his mind was haunted by the entire
opposition between grace and nature—and as if, out of the sphere of
spiritual exercise and devout contemplation, the whole actual world was
a necessary tissue of what was worthless and detestable.

We have, we hope, furnished a clue to this seeming contradiction between
the character of the author and his works; and must proceed to a
conclusion. Of these novels we may, nevertheless, add, for the
satisfaction of the inquisitive reader, that _Moll Flanders_ is utterly
vile and detestable: Mrs. Flanders was evidently born in sin. The best
parts are the account of her childhood, which is pretty and affecting;
the fluctuation of her feelings between remorse and hardened impenitence
in Newgate; and the incident of her leading off the horse from the inn
door, though she had no place to put it in after she had stolen it. This
was carrying the love of thieving to an _ideal_ pitch, and making it
perfectly disinterested and mechanical. _Roxana_ is better—soaring a
higher flight, instead of grovelling always in the mire of poverty and
distress; but she has neither refinement nor a heart; we are only
dazzled with the outward ostentation of jewels, finery, and wealth. The
scene where she dances in her Turkish dress before the king, and obtains
the name of Roxana, is of the true romantic cast. The best parts of
_Colonel Jack_ are the early scenes, where there is a spirit of mirth
and good fellowship thrown over the homely features of low and vicious
life;—as where the hero and his companion are sitting at the
three-halfpenny ordinary, and are delighted, even more than with their
savoury fare, to hear the waiter cry, ‘Coming, gentlemen, coming,’ when
they call for a cup of small-beer; and we rejoice when we are told as a
notable event, that ‘about this time the Colonel took upon him to wear a
shirt.’ The _Memoirs of a Cavalier_ are an agreeable mixture of the
style of history and fiction. These Memoirs, as is well known, imposed
upon Lord Chatham as a true history. In his _History of Apparitions_,
Defoe discovers a strong bias to a belief in the marvellous and
preternatural; nor is this extraordinary, for, to say nothing of the
general superstition of the times, his own impressions of whatever he
chose to conceive are so vivid and literal, as almost to confound the
distinction between reality and imagination. He could ‘call spirits from
the vasty deep,’ and they ‘would come when he did call for them.’ We
have not room for an enumeration of even half his works of fiction. We
give the bust, and must refer to Mr. Wilson for the whole length. After
_Robinson Crusoe_, his _History of the Plague_ is the finest of all his
works. It has an epic grandeur, as well as heart-breaking familiarity,
in its style and matter.

Notwithstanding the number and success of his publications, Defoe, we
lament to add, had to struggle with pecuniary difficulties, heightened
by domestic afflictions. To the last, when on the brink of death, he was
on the verge of a jail; and the ingratitude and ill-behaviour of his son
in embezzling some property which Defoe had made over for the benefit of
his sisters and mother, completed his distress. He was supported in
these painful circumstances by the assistance and advice of Mr. Baker,
who had married his youngest daughter, Sophia. The subjoined letter
gives a melancholy but very striking picture of the state of his
feelings at this sad juncture:—

‘DEAR MR. BAKER,—I have yo^r very kind and affecc’onate Letter of the
1st: But not come to my hand till y^e 10th; where it had been delay’d I
kno’ not. As your kind manner, and kinder Thought, from w^{ch} it flows,
(for I take all you say to be as I always believed you to be, sincere
and Nathaniel like, without Guile) was a particular satisfacc’on to me;
so the stop of a Letter, however it happened, deprived me of that
cordial too many days, considering how much I stood in need of it, to
support a mind sinking under the weight of an afflicc’on too heavy for
my strength, and looking on myself as abandoned of every Comfort, every
Friend, and every Relative, except such only as are able to give me no
assistance.

‘I was sorry you should say at y^e beginning of your Letter, you were
debarred seeing me. Depend upon my sincerity for this, I am far from
debarring you. On y^e contrary, it would be a greater comfort to me than
any I now enjoy, that I could have yo^r agreeable visits w^{th} safety,
and could see both you and my dearest Sophia, could it be without giving
her y^e grief of seeing her father _in tenebris_, and under y^e load of
insupportable sorrows. I am sorry I must open my griefs so far as to
tell her, it is not y^e blow I rec^d from a wicked, perjur’d, and
contemptible enemy, that has broken in upon my spirit, w^{ch} as she
well knows, has carryed me on thro’ greater disasters than these. But it
has been the injustice, unkindness, and, I must say, inhuman dealing of
my own son, w^{ch} has both ruined my family, and, in a word, has broken
my heart; and as I am at this time under a weight of very heavy illness,
w^{ch} I think will be a fever, I take this occasion to vent my grief in
y^e breasts who I know will make a prudent use of it, and tell you, that
nothing but this has conquered, or could conquer me. _Et tu! Brute!_ I
depended upon him, I trusted him, I gave up my two dear unprovided
children into his hands; but he has no compassion, and suffers them and
their poor dying mother to beg their bread at his door, and to crave, as
if it were an alms, what he is bound under hand and seal, besides the
most sacred promises, to supply them with; himself, at y^e same time,
living in a profusion of plenty. It is too much for me. Excuse my
infirmity, I can say no more; my heart is too full. I only ask one thing
of you as a dying request. Stand by them when I am gone, and let them
not be wrong’d, while he is able to do them right. Stand by them as a
brother; and if you have any thing within you owing to my memory, who
have bestow’d on you the best gift I had to give, let y^m not be injured
and trampled on by false pretences, and unnatural reflections. I hope
they will want no help but that of comfort and council; but that they
will indeed want, being too easie to be manag’d by words and promises.

‘It adds to my grief that it is so difficult to me to see you. I am at a
distance from Lond^n in Kent; nor have I a lodging in London, nor have I
been at that place in the Old Bailey, since I wrote you I was removed
from it. At present I am weak, having had some fits of a fever that have
left me low. But those things much more.

‘I have not seen son or daughter, wife or child, many weeks, and kno’
not which way to see them. They dare not come by water, and by land here
is no coach, and I kno’ not what to do.

‘It is not possible for me to come to Enfield, unless you could find a
retired lodging for me, where I might not be known, and might have the
comfort of seeing you both now and then; upon such a circumstance, I
could gladly give the days to solitude, to have the comfort of half an
hour now and then, with you both, for two or three weeks. But just to
come and look at you, and retire immediately, tis a burden too heavy.
The parting will be a price beyond the enjoyment.

‘I would say, (I hope) with comfort, that ’tis yet well. I am so near my
journey’s end, and am hastening to the place where y^e weary are at
rest, and where the wicked cease to trouble; be it that the passage is
rough, and the day stormy, by what way soever He please to bring me to
the end of it, I desire to finish life with this temper of soul in all
cases: _Te Deum Laudamus_.

‘I congratulate you on y^e occasion of yo^r happy advance in y^r
employment. May all you do be prosperous, and all you meet with
pleasant, and may you both escape the tortures and troubles of uneasie
life. May you sail y^e dangerous voyage of life with _a forcing wind_,
and make the port of heaven _without a storm_.

‘It adds to my grief that I must never see the pledge of your mutual
love, my little grandson. Give him my blessing, and may he be to you
both your joy in youth, and your comfort in age, and never add a sigh to
your sorrow. But, alas! that is not to be expected. Kiss my dear Sophy
once more for me; and if I must see her no more, tell her this is from a
father that loved her above all his comforts, to his last breath.—Yo^r
unhappy, D. F.

‘About two miles from Greenwich, Kent,
_Tuesday, August 12, 1730_.’

‘From this scene of sorrow,’ says Mr. Wilson, ‘we must now hasten to an
event, that dropped before it the dark curtain of time. Having received
a wound that was incurable, there is too much reason to fear that the
anguish arising from it sunk deep in his spirits, and hastened the
crisis that, in a few months, brought his troubles to a final close. The
time of his death has been variously stated; but it took place upon the
24th of April, 1731, when he was about seventy years of age, having been
born in the year 1661. Cibber and others state that he died at his house
at Islington; but this is incorrect. The parish of St. Giles,
Cripplegate, in which he drew his first breath, was also destined to
receive his last. This we learn from the parish register, which has been
searched for the purpose; and farther informs us, that he went off in a
lethargy. He was buried from thence, upon the 26th of April, in
Tindall’s Burying-ground, now most known by the name of Bunhill-Fields.
The entry in the register, written probably by some ignorant person, who
made a strange blunder of his name, is as follows: “1731, April 26. Mr.
Dubow. Cripplegate.” His wife did not long survive him.’

MR. GODWIN

VOL. LI.] [_April 1830._

We find little of the author of Caleb Williams in the present work,
except the name in the title-page. Either we are changed, or Mr. Godwin
is changed, since he wrote that masterly performance. We remember the
first time of reading it well, though now long ago. In addition to the
singularity and surprise occasioned by seeing a romance written by a
philosopher and politician, what a quickening of the pulse,—what an
interest in the progress of the story,—what an eager curiosity in
divining the future,—what an individuality and contrast in the
characters,—what an elevation and what a fall was that of Falkland;—how
we felt for his blighted hopes, his remorse, and despair, and took part
with Caleb Williams as his ordinary and unformed sentiments are brought
out, and rendered more and more acute by the force of circumstances,
till hurried on by an increasing and incontrollable impulse, he turns
upon his proud benefactor and unrelenting persecutor, and in a mortal
struggle, overthrows him on the vantage-ground of humanity and justice!
There is not a moment’s pause in the action or sentiments: the breath is
suspended, the faculties wound up to the highest pitch, as we read. Page
after page is greedily devoured. There is no laying down the book till
we come to the end; and even then the words still ring in our ears, nor
do the mental apparitions ever pass away from the eye of memory. Few
books have made a greater impression than Caleb Williams on its first
appearance. It was read, admired, parodied, dramatised. All parties
joined in its praise. Those (not a few) who at the time favoured Mr.
Godwin’s political principles, hailed it as a new triumph of his powers,
and as a proof that the stoicism of the doctrines he inculcated did not
arise from any defect of warmth or enthusiasm of feeling, and that his
abstract speculations were grounded in, and sanctioned by, an intimate
knowledge of, and rare felicity in, developing the actual vicissitudes
of human life. On the other hand, his enemies, or those who looked with
a mixture of dislike and fear at the system of ethics advanced in the
_Enquiry concerning Political Justice_, were disposed to forgive the
author’s paradoxes for the truth of imitation with which he had depicted
prevailing passions, and were glad to have something in which they could
sympathize with a man of no mean capacity or attainments. At any rate,
it was a new and startling event in literary history for a metaphysician
to write a popular romance. The thing took, as all displays of
unforeseen talent do with the public. Mr. Godwin was thought a man of
very powerful and versatile genius; and in him the understanding and the
imagination reflected a mutual and dazzling light upon each other. His
St. Leon did not lessen the wonder, nor the public admiration of him, or
rather ‘seemed like another morn risen on mid-noon.’ But from that time
he has done nothing of superlative merit. He has imitated himself, and
not well. He has changed the glittering spear, which always detected
truth or novelty, for a leaden foil. We cannot say of his last work
(Cloudesley),—‘Even in his ashes live his wonted fires.’ The story is
cast indeed something in the same moulds as Caleb Williams; but they are
not filled and running over with molten passion, or with scalding tears.
The situations and characters, though forced and extreme, are without
effect from the want of juxtaposition and collision. Cloudesley (the
elder) is like Caleb Williams, a person of low origin, and rebels
against his patron and employer; but he remains a characterless,
passive, inefficient agent to the last,—forming his plans and
resolutions at a distance,—not whirled from expedient to expedient, nor
driven from one sleepless hiding-place to another; and his lordly and
conscience-stricken accomplice (Danvers) keeps his state in like manner,
brooding over his guilt and remorse in solitude, with scarce an object
or effort to vary the round of his reflections,—a lengthened paraphrase
of grief. The only dramatic incidents in the course of the narrative
are, the sudden metamorphosis of the Florentine Count Camaldoli into the
robber St. Elmo, and the unexpected and opportune arrival of Lord
Danvers in person, with a coach and four and liveries, at Naples, just
in time to save his ill-treated nephew from a violent death. The rest is
a well-written essay, or theme, composed as an exercise to gain a
mastery of style and topics.

There is, indeed, no falling off in point of style or command of
language in the work before us. Cloudesley is better written than Caleb
Williams. The expression is everywhere terse, vigorous, elegant:—a
polished mirror without a wrinkle. But the spirit of the execution is
lost in the inertness of the subject-matter. There is a dearth of
invention, a want of character and grouping. There are clouds of
reflections without any new occasion to call them forth;—an expanded
flow of words without a single pointed remark. A want of acuteness and
originality is not a fault that is generally chargeable upon our
author’s writings. Nor do we lay the blame upon him now, but upon
circumstances. Had Mr. Godwin been bred a monk, and lived in the good
old times, he would assuredly either have been burnt as a free-thinker,
or have been rewarded with a mitre, for a tenth part of the learning and
talent he has displayed. He might have reposed on a rich benefice, and
the reputation he had earned, enjoying the _otium cum dignitate_, or at
most relieving his official cares by revising successive editions of his
former productions, and enshrining them in cases of sandal-wood and
crimson velvet in some cloistered hall or princely library. He might
then have courted

——‘retired leisure,
That in trim gardens takes its pleasure,’—

have seen his peaches ripen in the sun; and, smiling secure on fortune
and on fame, have repeated with complacency the motto—_Horas non numero
nisi serenas!_ But an author by profession knows nothing of all this. He
is only ‘the iron rod, the torturing hour.’ He lies ‘stretched upon the
rack of restless ecstasy:’ he runs the everlasting gauntlet of public
opinion. He must write on, and if he had the strength of Hercules and
the wit of Mercury, he must in the end write himself down:

‘And like a gallant horse, fallen in first rank,
Lies there for pavement to the abject rear,
O’er-run and trampled on.’

He cannot let well done alone. He cannot take his stand on what he has
already achieved, and say, Let it be a durable monument to me and mine,
and a covenant between me and the world for ever! He is called upon for
perpetual new exertions, and urged forward by ever-craving necessities.
The _wolf_ must be kept from the door: the _printer’s devil_ must not go
empty-handed away. He makes a second attempt, and though equal perhaps
to the first, because it does not excite the same surprise, it falls
tame and flat on the public mind. If he pursues the real bent of his
genius, he is thought to grow dull and monotonous; or if he varies his
style, and tries to cater for the capricious appetite of the town, he
either escapes by miracle or breaks down that way, amidst the shout of
the multitude and the condolence of friends, to see the idol of the
moment pushed from its pedestal, and reduced to its proper level. There
is only one living writer who can pass through this ordeal; and if he
had barely written half what he has done, his reputation would have been
none the less. His inexhaustible facility makes the willing world
believe there is not much in it. Still, there is no alternative.
Popularity, like one of the Danaides, imposes impossible tasks on her
votary,—to pour water into sieves, to reap the wind. If he does nothing,
he is forgotten; if he attempts more than he can perform, he gets
laughed at for his pains. He is impelled by circumstances to fresh
sacrifices of time, of labour, and of self-respect; parts with
well-earned fame for a newspaper puff, and sells his birth-right for a
mess of pottage. In the meanwhile, the public wonder why an author
writes so badly and so much. With all his efforts, he builds no house,
leaves no inheritance, lives from hand to mouth, and, though condemned
to daily drudgery for a precarious subsistence, is expected to produce
none but works of first-rate genius. No; learning unconsecrated,
unincorporated, unendowed, is no match for the importunate demands and
thoughtless ingratitude of the reading public.

——‘O, let not virtue seek
Remuneration for the thing it was!
To have done, is to hang,
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mockery;—
That all, with one consent, praise new-born gaudes,
Though they are made and moulded of things past;
And give to dust, that is a little gilt,
More laud than gilt o’er-dusted.’

If we wished to please Mr. Godwin, we should say that his last work was
his best; but we cannot do this in justice to him or to ourselves. Its
greatest fault is, that (as Mr. Bayes would have declared) there is
nothing ‘to elevate and surprise’ in it. There is a story, to be sure,
but you know it all beforehand, just as well as after having read the
book. It is like those long straight roads that travellers complain of
on the Continent, where you see from one end of your day’s journey to
the other, and carry the same prospect with you, like a map in your
hand, the whole way. Mr. Godwin has laid no ambuscade for the unwary
reader—no picturesque group greets the eye as you pass on—no sudden turn
at an angle places you on the giddy verge of a precipice. Nevertheless,
our author’s courage never flags. Mr. Godwin is an eminent rhetorician;
and he shows it in this, that he expatiates, discusses, amplifies, with
equal fervour, and unabated ingenuity, on the merest accidents of the
way-side, or common-places of human life. Thus, for instance, if a youth
of eleven or twelve years of age is introduced upon the carpet, the
author sets himself to show, with a laudable candour and
communicativeness, what the peculiar features of that period of life
are, and ‘takes an inventory’ of all the particulars,—such as sparkling
eyes, roses in the cheeks, a smooth forehead, flaxen locks, elasticity
of limb, lively animal spirits, and all the flush of hope,—as if he were
describing a novelty, or some _terra incognita_, to the reader. In like
manner, when a young man of twenty is confined to a dungeon as belonging
to a gang of banditti, and going to be hanged, great pains are taken
through three or four pages to convince us, that at that period of life
this is no very agreeable prospect; that the feelings of youth are more
acute and sanguine than those of age; that, therefore, we are to take a
due and proportionate interest in the tender years and blighted hopes of
the younger Cloudesley; and that if any means could be found to rescue
him from his present perilous situation, it would be a great relief, not
only to him, but to all humane and compassionate persons. Every man’s
strength is his weakness, and turns in some way or other against
himself. Mr. Godwin has been so long accustomed to trust to his own
powers, and to draw upon his own resources, that he comes at length to
imagine that he can build a palace of words upon nothing. When he
lavished the colours of style, and the exuberant strength of his fancy,
on descriptions like those of the character of Margaret, the wife of St.
Leon, or of his musings in the dungeon of Bethlem Gabor, or of his
enthusiasm on discovering the philosopher’s stone, and being restored to
youth and the plenitude of joy by drinking the _Elixir Vitæ_;—or when he
recounts the long and lasting despair which succeeded that utter
separation from his kind, and that deep solitude which followed him into
crowds and cities,—deeper and more appalling than the dungeon of Bethlem
Gabor,—we were never weary of being borne along by the golden tide of
eloquence, supplied from the true sources of passion and feeling. But
when he bestows the same elaboration of phrases, and artificial
arrangement of sentences, to set off the most trite and obvious truisms,
we confess it has to us a striking effect of the _bathos_. Lest,
however, we should be thought to have overcharged or given a false turn
to this description, we will enable our readers to judge for themselves,
by giving the passage to which we have just alluded, as a specimen of
this overstrained and supererogatory style.

—‘The condition in which he was now placed could not fail to have a
memorable effect on the mind of Julian. Shut up in a solitary dungeon,
without exercise or amusement, he had nothing upon which to occupy his
thoughts but the image of his own situation. He had hitherto lived,
particularly during the last twelve months, in a dream. He grieved most
bitterly, most persistingly, for the death of Cloudesley (the elder). He
had been instigated by his grief to seek the society of the companions
he had left in the Apennines. He did not desire any new connexions; he
would have shrunk from the encounter of new faces.

‘All this was well. But the case was different, when he understood from
the language and manner of those who had him in custody, the only
persons he saw, that he would probably barely be taken out of prison to
be led to the scaffold. This was a kind of shock, greatly calculated to
awaken a man out of a dream. Julian was young, and had seen little of
the diversified scenes of human life. Existence is a thing that is
regarded in a very different light by the young and the old. The springs
of human nature are of a limited sort, and lie in a narrow compass; and
when we grow old, our desires are declining, our faculties have lost
their sharpness, and we are reasonably contented “to close our eyes and
shut out daylight.” But to the young it is a very different thing,
particularly perhaps at twenty years of age. We are just come into the
possession of all our faculties, and begin fully to be aware of our own
independence. Every thing is new to us; and the larger half at least of
what is new, is also agreeable. Pleasure spreads before us all its
allurements; knowledge unrolls its ample page. We have every thing to
learn, and every thing to enjoy. Ambition proffers its variegated
visions; and we are at a loss on which side to fix our choice. It is
easy to dally with death. The young man is like the coquette of the
other sex: She has little objection to trifling with a displeasing and
superannuated lover, so long as she is satisfied she is not within his
clutches.

‘But all these considerations sink into nothing when contrasted with the
horrible death that was prepared for him. Julian had hitherto been a
stranger to adversity and pain. The path of his juvenile years had been
smoothed to him by the exemplary cares of Cloudesley and Eudocia. To his
own apprehension he was the favourite of fortune. All that he had read
of tragic and disastrous in the annals of mankind seemed like a drama,
prepared to make him wise by the sorrows of others, without costing him
a particle of the bitter price of experience. All that he had
encountered of displeasing was when he was the inmate of Borromeo; and
this, though felt by him as intolerable, he was aware had been planned
in a spirit of kindness. How terrible, therefore, was the reverse that
had now fallen upon him! That he, who had never contemplated the
slightest mischief to a human creature, whose life had been all
kindness, and beneficence, and good humour, should suddenly be treated
as the vilest of criminals, shut up in a dungeon, and destined to the
scaffold, was a thought that overturned all his previous conceptions of
human society and life. It filled him with wildness and horror; it drove
him to frenzy. From time to time he was ready to burst into paroxysm,
and dash out his desperate brains against the bars of his prison. To
exchange the most beautiful scene that Paradise ever exhibited, for
utter desolation and tremendous hurricane, that should tear up rocks
from their foundations, and overwhelm the produce of the earth with
rushing and uncontrollable waves, would feebly express the revolution
that took place in his mind. He repented that he had ever again sought
the society of these alluring but pernicious friends.’—Vol. III. p. 288.

Was so much circumlocution necessary to prove that it is a disagreeable
thing to be shut up in a prison, and led out to the gallows? This is the
style of the _orator_, where the whole object is to turn a plain moral
adage in as many different ways as possible, and not that of the
romance-writer, who has, or ought to have, too many rare and surprising
adventures on his hands, to stoop to this trifling, snail-paced method.
According to the foregoing studied description, it should seem, that for
a man to feel shocked at being immured in a gaol, or broke on the wheel,
is ‘a pass of wit.’ When the author has conjured up all the aggravations
of the particular case, and compared it to the nicest shade of
difference with his former or his future possible history, he then feels
satisfied that his hero would like it little better than he does, and
inflicts a tardy horror and repentance on him. With submission, this may
be the scholastic or rational process for exciting pity and terror;
nature takes a shorter _cut_, and jumps at a conclusion without all this
formality and cool calculation of grains and scruples in the scale of
misfortune.

We have a graver charge yet to bring against Mr. Godwin on the score of
style, than that it leads him into useless amplification: from his
desire to load and give effect to his descriptions, he runs different
characters and feelings into one another. By not stopping short of
excess and hyperbole, he loses the line of distinction, and ‘o’ersteps
the modesty of nature.’ All his characters are patterns of vice or
virtue. They are carried to extremes,—they are abstractions of woe,
miracles of wit and gaiety,—gifted with every grace and accomplishment
that can be enumerated in the same page; and they are not only prodigies
in themselves, but destined to immortal renown, though we have never
heard of their names before. This is not like a veteran in the art, but
like the raptures of some boarding-school girl in love with every new
face or dress she sees. It is difficult to say which is the most
extraordinary genius,—the improvisatori Bernardino Perfetti, or his
nephew, Francesco, or young Julian. Mr. Godwin still sees with ‘eyes of
youth.’ Irene is a Greek, the model of beauty and of conjugal faith.
Eudocia, her maid, who marries the elder Cloudesley, is a Greek too, and
nearly as handsome and as exemplary in her conduct. Again, on the same
principle, the account of Irene’s devotion to her father and her
husband, is by no means clearly discriminated. The spiritual feeling is
exaggerated till it is confounded with the passionate; and the
passionate is spiritualized in the same incontinence of tropes and
figures, till it loses its distinctive character. Each sentiment, by
being overdone, is neutralized into a sort of platonics. It is obvious
to remark, that the novel of Cloudesley has no hero, no principal
figure. The attention is divided, and wavers between Meadows, who is a
candidate for the reader’s sympathy through the first half volume, and
whose affairs and love adventures at St. Petersburg are huddled up in
haste, and broke off in the middle; Lord Danvers, who is the guilty
sufferer; Cloudesley, his sullen, dilatory Mentor; and Julian, (the
supposed offspring of Cloudesley, but real son of Lord Alton, and nephew
of Lord Danvers,) who turns out the fortunate youth of the piece. The
story is awkwardly told. Meadows begins it with an account of himself,
and a topographical description of the Russian empire, which has nothing
to do with the subject; and nearly through the remainder of the work,
listens to a speech of Lord Danvers, recounting his own history and that
of Julian, which lasts for six hundred pages without interruption or
stop. It is the longest parenthesis in a narrative that ever was known.
Meadows then emerges from his _incognito_ once more, as if he had been
hid behind a curtain, and gives the _coup-de-grace_ to his own
auto-biography, and the lingering sufferings of his patron. The plot is
borrowed from a real event that took place concerning a disputed
succession in the middle of the last century, and which gave birth not
long after to a novel with the title of _Annesley_. We should like to
meet with a copy of this work, in order to see how a writer of less
genius would get to the end of his task, and carry the reader along with
him without the aid of those subtle researches and lofty declamations
with which Mr. Godwin has supplied the place of facts and circumstances.
The published trial, we will hazard a conjecture, has more ‘mark and
likelihood’ in it. This is the beauty of Sir Walter Scott: he takes a
legend or an actual character as he finds it, while other writers think
they have not performed their engagements and acquitted themselves with
applause, till they have slobbered over the plain face of nature with
paint and varnish of their own. They conceive that truth is a
plagiarism, and _the thing as it happened_ a forgery and imposition on
the public. They stand right before their subject, and say, ‘Nay, but
hear me first!’ We know no other merit in the Author of Waverley than
that he is never this opaque, obtrusive body, getting in the way and
eclipsing the sun of truth and nature, which shines with broad universal
light through his different works. If we were to describe the secret of
this author’s success in three words, we should say, that it consists in
the _absence of egotism_.

Mr. Godwin, in his preface, remarks, that as Caleb Williams was intended
as a paraphrase of ‘Blue Beard,’ the present work may be regarded as a
paraphrase of the story of the ‘Children in the Wood.’ _Multeum abludit
imago._ He has at least contrived to take the sting of simplicity out of
it. It is a very adult, self-conscious set of substitutes he has given
us for the two children, wandering hand-in-hand, the robin-redbreast,
and their leafy bed. The grand eloquence, the epic march of Cloudesley,
is beyond the ballad-style. In a word, the fault of this and some other
of the author’s productions is, that the critical and didactic part
overlays the narrative and dramatic part; as we see in some editions of
the poets, where there are two lines of original text, and the rest of
the page is heavy with the lumber and pedantry of the commentators. The
writer does not call characters from the dead, or conjure them from the
regions of fancy, to paint their peculiar physiognomy, or tell us their
story, so much as (like the anatomist) to dissect and demonstrate on the
insertion of the bones, the springs of the muscles, and those understood
principles of life and motion which are common to the species. Now, in a
novel, we want the individual, and not the _genus_. The tale of
Cloudesley is a dissertation on remorse. Besides, this truth of science
is often a different thing from the truth of nature, which is modified
by a thousand accidents, ‘subject to all the skyey influences;’—not a
mechanical principle, brooding over and working every thing out of
itself. Nothing, therefore, gives so little appearance of a resemblance
to reality as this abstract identity and violent continuity of purpose.
Not to say that this cutting up and probing of the internal feelings and
motives, without a reference to external objects, tends, like the
operations of the anatomist, to give a morbid and unwholesome taint to
the surrounding atmosphere.

Mr. Godwin’s mind is, we conceive, essentially active, and therefore may
naturally be expected to wear itself out sooner than those that are
passive to external impressions, and receive continual new accessions to
their stock of knowledge and acquirement:—

——‘A fiery soul that working out its way,
Fretted the pigmy body to decay,
And o’er-inform’d its tenement of clay.’

That some of this author’s latter works are (in our judgment)
comparatively feeble, is, therefore, no matter of surprise to us, and
still less is it matter of reproach or triumph. We look upon it as a
consequence incident to that constitution of mind and operation of the
faculties. To quarrel with the author on this account, is to reject all
that class of excellence of which he is the representative, and perhaps
stands at the head. A writer who gives us _himself_, cannot do this
twenty times following. He gives us the best and most prominent part of
himself first; and afterwards ‘but the lees and dregs remain.’ If a
writer takes patterns and _fac-similes_ of external objects, he may give
us twenty different works, each better than the other, though this is
not likely to happen. Such a one makes use of the universe as his
_common-place-book_; and there is no end of the quantity or variety. The
other sort of genius is his own microcosm, deriving almost all from
within; and as this is different from every thing else, and is to be had
at no other source, so it soon degenerates into a repetition of itself,
and is confined within circumscribed limits. We do not rank ourselves in
the number of ‘those base plebeians,’ as Don Quixote expresses it, ‘who
cry, _Long life to the conqueror!_’ And, so far, the author is better
off than the warrior, that, ‘after a thousand victories once foiled,’ he
does not remain in the hands of his enemies,

‘And all the rest forgot, for which he toil’d.’

He is not judged of by his last performance, but his best,—that which is
seen farthest off, and stands out with time and distance; and in this
respect, Mr. Godwin may point to more than one monument of his powers of
no mean height and durability. As we do not look upon books as fashions,
and think that ‘a great man’s memory may last more than half a year,’ we
still look at our author’s talents with the same respect as ever—on his
industry and perseverance under some discouragements with more; and we
shall try to explain as briefly and as impartially as we can, in what
the peculiarity of his genius consists, and on what his claim to
distinction is founded.

Mr. Godwin, we suspect, regards his _Political Justice_ as his great
work—his passport to immortality; or perhaps he balances between this
and _Caleb Williams_. Now, it is something for a man to have two works
of so opposite a kind about which he and his admirers can be at a loss
to say, in which he has done best. We never heard his title to
originality in either of these performances called in question: yet they
are as distinct as to style and subject-matter, as if two different
persons wrote them. No one in reading the philosophical treatise would
suspect the embryo romance: those who personally know Mr. Godwin would
as little anticipate either. The man differs from the author, at least
as much as the author in this case apparently did from himself. It is as
if a magician had produced some mighty feat of his art without warning.
He is not deeply learned; nor is he much beholden to a knowledge of the
world. He has no passion but a love of fame; or we may add to this
another, the love of truth; for he has never betrayed his cause, or
swerved from his principles, to gratify a little temporary vanity. His
senses are not acute: but it cannot be denied that he is a man of great
capacity, and of uncommon genius. How is this seeming contradiction to
be reconciled? Mr. Godwin is by way of distinction and emphasis an
author; he is so not only by habit, but by nature, and by the whole turn
of his mind. To make a book is with him the prime end and use of
creation. His is the _scholastic_ character handed down in its integrity
to the present day. If he had cultivated a more extensive intercourse
with the world, with nature, or even with books, he would not have been
what he is—he could not have done what he has done. Mr. Godwin in
society is nothing; but shut him up by himself, set him down to write a
book,—it is then that the electric spark begins to unfold itself,—to
expand, to kindle, to illumine, to melt, or shatter all in its way. With
little knowledge of the subject, with little interest in it at first, he
turns it slowly in his mind,—one suggestion gives rise to another,—he
calls home, arranges, scrutinizes his thoughts; he bends his whole
strength to his task; he seizes on some one view more striking than the
rest, he holds it with a convulsive grasp,—he will not let it go; and
this is the clew that conducts him triumphantly through the labyrinth of
doubt and obscurity. Some leading truth, some master-passion, is the
secret of his daring and his success, which he winds and turns at his
pleasure, like Perseus his winged steed. An idea having once taken root
in his mind, grows there like a germ: ‘at first no bigger than a
mustard-seed, then a great tree overshadowing the whole earth.’ The
progress of his reflections resembles the circles that spread from a
centre when a stone is thrown into the water. Everything is enlarged,
heightened, refined. The blow is repeated, and each impression is made
more intense than the last. Whatever strengthens the favourite
conception is summoned to its aid: whatever weakens or interrupts it is
scornfully discarded. All is the effect, not of feeling, not of fancy,
not of intuition, but of one sole purpose, and of a determined will
operating on a clear and consecutive understanding. His _Caleb Williams_
is the illustration of a single passion; his _Political Justice_ is the
insisting on a single proposition or view of a subject. In both, there
is the same pertinacity and unity of design, the same agglomeration of
objects round a centre, the same aggrandizement of some one thing at the
expense of every other, the same sagacity in discovering what makes for
its purpose, and blindness to every thing but that. His genius is not
dramatic; but it has something of an heroic cast: he gains new trophies
in intellect, as the conqueror overruns new provinces and kingdoms, by
patience and boldness; and he is great because he wills to be so.

We have said that Mr. Godwin has shown great versatility of talent in
his different works. The works themselves have considerable monotony;
and this must be the case, since they are all bottomed on nearly the
same principle of an uniform _keeping_ and strict totality of
impression. We do not hold with the doctrines or philosophy of the
_Enquiry concerning Political Justice_; but we should be dishonest to
deny that it is an ingenious and splendid—and we may also add, useful
piece of sophistical declamation. If Mr. Godwin is not right, he has
shown what is wrong in the view of morality he advocates, by carrying it
to the utmost extent with unflinching spirit and ability.

Mr. Godwin was the first _whole-length_ broacher of the doctrine of
_Utility_. He took the whole duty of man—all other passions, affections,
rules, weaknesses, oaths, gratitude, promises, friendship, natural
piety, patriotism,—infused them in the glowing cauldron of universal
benevolence, and ground them into powder under the unsparing weight of
the convictions of the individual understanding. The entire and
complicated mass and texture of human society and feeling was to pass
through the furnace of this new philosophy, and to come out renovated
and changed without a trace of its former Gothic ornaments, fantastic
disproportions, embossing, or relief. It was as if an angel had
descended from another sphere to promulgate a new code of morality; and
who, clad in a panoply of light and truth, unconscious alike of the
artificial strength and inherent weakness of man’s nature,—supposing him
to have nothing to do with the flesh, the world, or the Devil,—should
lay down a set of laws and principles of action for him, as if he were a
pure spirit. But such a mere abstracted intelligence would not require
any rules or forms to guide his conduct or prompt his volitions. And
this is the effect of Mr. Godwin’s book—to absolve a rational and
voluntary agent from all ties, but a conformity to the independent
dictates and strict obligations of the understanding:—

‘Within his bosom reigns another lord,
_Reason_, sole judge and umpire of itself.’

We own that if man were this pure, abstracted essence,—if he had not
senses, passions, prejudices,—if custom, will, imagination, example,
opinion, were nothing, and reason were _all in all_;—if the author, in a
word, could establish as the foundation, what he assumes as the result
of his system, namely, the omnipotence of mind over matter, and the
triumph of truth over every warped and partial bias of the heart—then we
see no objection to his scheme taking place, and no possibility of any
other having ever been substituted for it. But this would imply that the
mind’s eye can see an object equally well whether it is near or a
thousand miles off,—that we can take an interest in the people in the
moon, or in ages yet unborn, as if they were our own flesh and
blood,—that we can sympathize with a perfect stranger, as with our
dearest friend, at a moment’s notice,—that habit is not an ingredient in
the growth of affection,—that no check need be provided against the
strong bias of self-love,—that we can achieve any art or accomplishment
by a volition, master all knowledge with a thought; and that in this
well-disciplined intuition and faultless transparency of soul, we can
take cognizance (without presumption and without mistake) of all causes
and consequences, an equal and impartial interest in the chain of
created beings,—discard all petty feelings and minor claims,—throw down
the obstructions and stumbling-blocks in the way of these grand
cosmopolite views of disinterested philanthropy, and hold the balance
even between ourselves and the universe. It were ‘a consummation
devoutly to be wished;’ and Mr. Godwin is not to be taxed with blame for
having boldly and ardently aspired to it. We meet him on the ground, not
of the desirable, but the practicable. It were better that a man were an
angel or a god than what he is; but he can neither be one nor the other.
Enclosed in the shell of self, he sees a little way beyond himself, and
feels what concerns others still more slowly. To require him to attain
the highest point of perfection, is to fling him back to grovel in the
mire of sensuality and selfishness. He must get on by the use and
management of the faculties which God has given him, and not by striking
more than one half of these with the dead palsy. To refuse to avail
ourselves of mixed motives and imperfect obligations, in a creature like
man, whose ‘very name is frailty,’ and who is a compound of
contradictions, is to lose the substance in catching at the shadow. It
is as if a man would be enabled to fly by cutting off his legs. If we
are not allowed to love our neighbour better than a stranger, that is,
if habit and sympathy are to make no part of our affections, the
consequence will be, not that we shall love a stranger more, but that we
shall love our neighbour less, and care about nobody but ourselves.
These partial and personal attachments are ‘the scale by which we
ascend’ to sentiments of general philanthropy. Are we to act upon pure
speculation, without knowing the circumstances of the case, or even the
parties?—for it would come to that. If we act from a knowledge of these,
and bend all our thoughts and efforts to alleviate some immediate
distress, are we to take no more interest in it than in a case of merely
possible and contingent suffering? This is to put the known upon a level
with the unknown, the real with the imaginary. It is to say that habit,
sense, sympathy, are nonentities. It is a contradiction in terms. But if
man were such a being as Mr. Godwin supposes, that is, a perfect
intelligence, there would be no contradiction in it; for then he would
have the same knowledge of whatever was possible, as of his gross and
actual experience, and would feel the same interest in it, and act with
the same energy and certainty upon a sheer hypothesis, as now upon a
_matter-of-fact_. We can look at the clouds, but we cannot stand upon
them. Mr. Godwin takes one element of the human mind, the
_understanding_, and makes it the whole; and hence he falls into
solecisms and extravagances, the more striking and fatal in proportion
to his own acuteness of reasoning, and honesty of intention. He has,
however, the merit of having been the first to show up the abstract, or
_Utilitarian_, system of morality in its fullest extent, whatever may
have been pretended to the contrary; and those who wish to study the
question, and not to take it for granted, cannot do better than refer to
the _first_ edition of the _Enquiry concerning Political Justice_; for
afterwards Mr. Godwin, out of complaisance to the public, qualified, and
in some degree neutralized, his own doctrines.

Our author, not contented with his ethical honours, (for no work of the
kind could produce a stronger sensation, or gain more converts than this
did at the time,) determined to enter upon a new career, and fling him
into the _arena_ once more; thus challenging public opinion with
singular magnanimity and confidence in himself. He did not stand
‘shivering on the brink’ of his just-acquired reputation, and fear to
tempt the perilous stream of popular favour again. The success of Caleb
Williams justified the experiment. There was the same hardihood and
gallantry of appeal in both. In the former case, the author had screwed
himself up to the most rigid logic; in the latter, he gave unbounded
scope to the suggestions of fancy. It cannot be denied that Mr. Godwin
is, in the pugilistic phrase, an _out-and-outer_. He does not stop till
he ‘reaches the verge of all we hate:’ is it to be wondered if he
sometimes falls over? He certainly did not do this in Caleb Williams or
St. Leon. Both were eminently successful; and both, as we conceive,
treated of subjects congenial to Mr. Godwin’s mind. The one, in the
character of Falkland, embodies that love of fame and passionate respect
for intellectual excellence, which is a cherished inmate of the author’s
bosom; (the desire of undying renown breathes through every page and
line of the story, and sheds its lurid light over the close, as it has
been said that the genius of war blazes through the Iliad;)—in the hero
of the other, St. Leon, Mr. Godwin has depicted, as well he might, the
feelings and habits of a solitary recluse, placed in new and imaginary
situations: but from the philosophical to the romantic visionary, there
was perhaps but one step. We give the decided preference to Caleb
Williams over St. Leon; but if it is more original and interesting, the
other is more imposing and eloquent. In the suffering and dying
Falkland, we feel the heart-strings of our human being break; in the
other work, we are transported to a state of fabulous existence, but
unfolded with ample and gorgeous circumstances. The palm-tree waves over
the untrodden path of luxuriant fiction; we tread with tiptoe elevation
and throbbing heart the high hill-tops of boundless existence; and the
dawn of hope and renovated life makes strange music in our breast, like
the strings of Memnon’s harp, touched by the morning’s sun. After these
two works, he fell off; he could not sustain himself at that height by
the force of genius alone, and Mr. Godwin has unfortunately no resources
but his genius. He has no Edie Ochiltree at his elbow. His _New Man of
Feeling_ we forget; though we well remember the old one by our Scottish
Addison, Mackenzie. Mandeville, which followed, is morbid and
disagreeable; it is a description of a man and his ill-humour, carried
to a degree of derangement. The reader is left far behind. Mr. Godwin
has attempted two plays, neither of which has succeeded, nor could
succeed. If a tragedy consisted of a series of soliloquies, nobody could
write it better than our author. But the essence of the drama depends on
the alternation and conflict of different passions, and Mr. Godwin’s
_forte_ is harping on the same string. He is a reformist, both as it
regards the world and himself. If he is told of a fault, he amends it if
he can. His _Life of Chaucer_ was objected to as too romantic and
dashing; and in his late _History of the Commonwealth_, he has gone into
an excess the other way. His style creeps, and hitches in dates and
authorities. We must not omit his _Lives of Edward and John Phillips_,
the nephews of Milton—an interesting contribution to literary history;
and his _Observations on Judge Eyre’s Charge to the Jury in 1794_,—one
of the most acute and seasonable political pamphlets that ever appeared.
He some years ago wrote an _Essay on Sepulchres_, which contained an
idle project enough, but was enriched with some beautiful reflections on
old and new countries, and on the memorials of posthumous fame. It is a
singular circumstance that our author should maintain for twenty years,
that Mr. Malthus’s theory (in opposition to his own) was unanswerable,
and then write an answer to it, which did not much mend the matter. It
is worth knowing (in order to trace the history and progress of the
intellectual character) that the author of _Political Justice_ and
_Caleb Williams_ commenced his career as a dissenting clergyman; and the
bookstalls sometimes present a volume of _Sermons_ by him, and we
believe, an _English Grammar_.

We cannot tell whether Mr. Godwin will have reason to be pleased with
our opinion of him; at least, he may depend on our sincerity, and will
know what it is.

NOTES
CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE EDINBURGH REVIEW

Hazlitt was a regular, though not a frequent contributor to _The
Edinburgh Review_ from 1814 until 1830, the year of his death. How he
came to be introduced so early to Jeffrey’s notice is not known.
Possibly the introduction came through Longman & Co., who had published
Hazlitt’s _Reply to Malthus_ (1807), and who had been the London
publishers of the _Review_ since its foundation in 1802. Hazlitt at any
rate was proud of the connection, and had a high regard for Jeffrey,
whom he called ‘the prince of critics and the king of men.’ See vol.
II., _Liber Amoris_, p. 314 and note, and cf. also vol. IV. _The Spirit
of the Age_, pp. 310–318. In _The Atlas_ for June 21, 1829, there is a
short article, ‘Mr. Jeffrey’s Resignation of the Editorship of _The
Edinburgh Review_,’ which is not unlike Hazlitt, but cannot be
confidently attributed to him.

In the text of the present volume are printed all Hazlitt’s
contributions to _The Edinburgh Review_ as to the authorship of which
there is no reasonable doubt. In the following notes two articles are
included, Hazlitt’s authorship of which, though probable, cannot be
regarded as certain. In addition to these, the following have been
attributed to him: (1) Wat Tyler and Mr. Southey (1817, vol. XXVIII. p.
151); (2) The History of Painting in Italy (1819, vol. XXXII. p. 320);
(3) Byron’s _Sardanapalus_ (1822, vol. XXXVI. p. 413); and (4) an
article or articles on the Scotch Novels. See Ireland’s _List of the
Writings of William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt_, p. 75, a letter from Mr.
Ireland in _Notes and Queries_, 5th Series, XI. 165, and Mr. W. C.
Hazlitt’s ‘Chronological Catalogue’ of Hazlitt’s writings published in
the _Memoirs of William Hazlitt_, vol. I. pp. xxiv-xxx. It is almost
certain that Hazlitt wrote none of these reviews, and they have
therefore been excluded from the present edition. The first (Wat Tyler
and Mr. Southey) is included in Lord Cockburn’s list of Jeffrey’s
contributions to the _Edinburgh_ (_Life of Francis Jeffrey_, 1874 ed. p.
407). This list, it must be admitted, is not thoroughly trustworthy, but
the internal evidence against Hazlitt’s authorship is very strong. It is
incredible that Hazlitt could have written a long article like this on
such a subject (cf. _Political Essays_, vol. III. pp. 192 _et seq._)
without betraying his identity by a single phrase. The second of these
articles, a review of Stendhal’s _History of Painting in Italy_, Mr.
Ireland attributes to Hazlitt on merely internal evidence. Mr. W. C.
Hazlitt does not include it in his Catalogue. That Hazlitt was
acquainted with Stendhal and was fond of writing on Art are reasons why
he might have _wished_ to review the book, but they tell strongly
against his having written this particular article, which is very dull
indeed, and shows not a single trace of Hazlitt’s manner from beginning
to end. The review of Byron’s _Sardanapalus_ has been attributed to
Hazlitt on the strength, no doubt, of a letter which he himself wrote to
P. G. Patmore on March 30, 1822. In this letter he says, ‘My
Sardanapalus is to be in [_i.e._ in the _Edinburgh_]. In my judgment
Myrrha is most like S. W. [Sarah Walker], only I am not like
Sardanapalus.’ See Mr. Le Gallienne’s edition of _Liber Amoris_ (1894)
p. 212. Whatever the explanation may be, the review of _Sardanapalus_
which _did_ appear in the _Edinburgh_ was written by Jeffrey himself and
is included in his _Contributions to the Edinburgh Review_ (1844), vol.
II. p. 333. There is no evidence that Hazlitt wrote any of the numerous
reviews of the Scotch Novels. According to Patmore (_My Friends and
Acquaintance_, III. 155–157), Hazlitt was anxious to review Bulwer in
_The Edinburgh Review_, and proposed the matter, first to Jeffrey, and,
on his retirement, to Napier, personally in London. The subject,
however, was, in Patmore’s phrase, ‘interdicted.’

DUNLOP’S HISTORY OF FICTION

PAGE

5. _Dunlop’s History of Fiction._ John Colin Dunlop’s (d. 1842) _The
History of Fiction: being a Critical Account of the most
celebrated Prose Fictions, from the earliest Greek Romances to
the novels of the Present Age_, was published in 3 vols., 1814.

7. Νείατον ἐς κενεῶνα. _Iliad_, V. 857.

‘_Romulus_,’ _etc._ Horace, _Epistles_, II. i. 5–6.

8. _Bossu._ René Le Bossu (1631–1680), author of a _Traité du poème
épique_ (1675), referred to in _Tristram Shandy_, III. 12.
Dryden calls him ‘the best of modern critics’ (Preface to
_Troilus and Cressida_).

9. _Bandello._ Matteo Bandello (1480–1562), whose _Tales_ appeared in
four volumes, 1554–1573.

_Ariosto._ Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533), whose _Orlando Furioso_
(from which the ‘contrivance’ referred to by Hazlitt was
borrowed) was published in 1516–1532.

11. _Middleton._ Conyers Middleton (1683–1750). See his _Letter from
Rome_, 1729.

_Bayes_. See the Duke of Buckingham’s _The Rehearsal_, Act I. Sc.
1.

13. _Quidlibet audendi, etc._ Horace, _Ars Poetica_, 10.

15. _Bell of Antermony._ John Bell (1691–1780), whose _Travels from
St. Petersburg in Russia to various parts of Asia_ was published
in 1763.

16. _Mr. Cumberland’s novels._ Richard Cumberland (1732–1811), author
of _The West Indian_ (1771), published two novels, _Arundel_
(1789) and _Henry_ (1795).

_Marianne_. By Claude Prosper Jolyot de Marivaux (1688–1763),
published between 1731 and 1741.

18. _Warburton._ Warburton’s argument is summarised by Dunlop (chap.
ii.) from _The Divine Legation of Moses_.

19. _Bayes’s most expeditious recipe, etc._ _The Rehearsal_, Act I.
Sc. 1.

20. _Mr. Southey’s translation._ Southey’s translation of _Amadis of
Gaul_ was published in four vols. 1803.

_M. de St. Palaye._ Jean-Baptiste de la Curne de Sainte-Palaye
(1697–1781), author of _Mémoires sur l’Ancienne Chevalerie_,
1759–1781.

24. _Mr. Ellis._ Scott’s friend, George Ellis (1753–1815) published
his _Specimens of early English Metrical Romances_ in three
vols. in 1805.

_D’Urfé._ Thomas D’Urfey (1653–1723), the dramatist and
song-writer.

_Betsy Thoughtless._ Eliza Haywood’s (1693?–1756) _The History of
Miss Betsy Thoughtless_, published in 1751. See Dunlop’s
_History of Fiction_, chap. xiv.

STANDARD NOVELS AND ROMANCES

This is ostensibly a review of Madame D’Arblay’s _The Wanderer_,
published in 1814. Nearly the whole of it was incorporated by Hazlitt in
his Lecture on the English Novelists. Cf. vol. VIII. pp. 106 _et seq._
and notes. In his Essay ‘A Farewell to Essay-Writing,’ Hazlitt says that
this review was the result of a discussion at Lamb’s, ‘sharply seasoned
and well sustained till midnight.’ Though the review cannot be
considered as harsh towards Madame D’Arblay, it led to Hazlitt being
dropped out of Admiral Burney’s whist parties. See Crabb Robinson’s
_Diary_, chap. xiii. This fact perhaps partly accounts for Hazlitt’s
contemptuous reference to the Burneys in his Essay ‘On the Aristocracy
of Letters,’ where, after praising Madame D’Arblay, he says, ‘The rest
have done nothing, that I know of, but keep up the name.’ See vol. VI.
(_Table Talk_), p. 209.

PAGE

25. _Crebillon._ Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon (1707–1777), son
of the dramatist.

_The celebrated French philosopher._ Hazlitt was perhaps thinking
of Diderot’s well-known eulogy of Richardson (_Œuvres_, V.
212–227).

39. _The Story of Le Febre._ See _Tristram Shandy_, Book VI. chap. vi.
_et seq._

SISMONDI’S LITERATURE OF THE SOUTH.

Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi (1773–1842) published his
_Histoire des Républiques Italiennes du Moyen-Age_ in 16 vols, between
1807 and 1818; his _Littérature du midi de l’Europe_ (here reviewed and
afterwards—in 1823—translated by Thomas Roscoe) in 4 vols. in 1813; and
his _Histoire des Français_ in 31 vols., 1821–1844. Roscoe’s translation
forms two volumes of Bohn’s Standard Library. The translations in the
present review are presumably by Hazlitt himself.

PAGE

45. _Metastasio._ Pietro Antonio Bonaventura Trapassi (1698–1782),
poet and librettist.

_Alfieri._ Vittorio, Count Alfieri (1749–1803), the dramatist and
poet.

_Goldoni._ Carlo Goldoni (1707–1793), the comic dramatist.

46. _Professor Boutterwek._ Friedrich Bouterwek (1765–1828), author of
_Geschichte der neuern Poesie und Beredsamkeit_ (1801–1819).

_Millot’s History of the Troubadours._ _Histoire Littéraire des
Troubadours_ (1774), by Claude François Xavier Millot
(1726–1785).

_Tiraboschi._ Girolamo Tiraboschi (1731–1794), author of _Storia
della Letteratura Italiana_ (1772–1782).

_Velasquez._ Louis Joseph Velasquez de Velasco (1722–1772), author
of several works on Spanish poetry and antiquities.

‘_Rose like an exhalation._’ _Paradise Lost_, I. 711.

56. _Preserved by Cervantes, etc._ _Don Quixote_, Part I., Book I.,
chap. vi.

61. _Dante._ Cf. _Lectures on the English Poets_, vol. V. pp. 17, 18,
and notes.

62. _That withering inscription._ At the beginning of Canto III. of
the _Inferno_.

_The Story of Geneura._ It is clear from the note that Hazlitt is
referring to the story of Francesca of Rimini in Canto V. of the
_Inferno_. Paolo and Francesca read together the story of
Lancelot and Guinevere.

Note. ‘_And all that day we read no more!_’ _Inferno_, Canto V.

63. ‘_Because on earth_,’ _etc._ Hazlitt is fond of quoting these
lines, which, however, do not appear to be Dante’s. Possibly the
explanation is to be found in a letter from Lamb to Bernard
Barton (Feb. 17, 1823), where he says: ‘I once quoted two lines
from a translation of Dante, which Hazlitt very greatly admired,
and quoted in a book, as proof of the stupendous power of that
poet; but no such lines are to be found in the translation,
which has been searched for the purpose. I must have dreamed
them, for I am quite certain I did not forge them knowingly.
What a misfortune to have a lying memory!’

‘_I am the tomb_,’ _etc._ _Inferno_, Canto XI.

_As when Satan is compared, etc._ Hazlitt seems to be confusing
Dante with Milton. See _Paradise Lost_, IV. 196.

‘_Instinct with life._’ Cf. ‘Instinct with spirit.’ _Paradise
Lost_, vi. 752.

_Count Ugolino._ _Inferno_, Canto XXXIII. Lamb shared Hazlitt’s
dislike of Reynolds’s picture. See _Works_ (ed. E. V. Lucas), I.
75 and 149. Patmore (_My Friends and Acquaintance_, II. 252)
compares Hazlitt with Ugolino.

‘_By the sole strength_,’ _etc._ See _Paradiso_, Canto I.

65. _The Sonnet of Petrarch._ No. CCLI. See _Sismondi_, chap. X.

68. _The story of the two holiday lovers._ _The Decameron_, 4th Day,
Novel VII.

69. _Pulci._ Luigi Pulci (1432–?1484), author of _Il Morgante
Maggiore_ (1481).

_Boyardo._ Matteo Maria Boiardo (1434–1494), whose _Orlando
Innamorato_ was published in 1486. Francesco Berni’s
(1490?–1536) version appeared in 1541.

71. ‘_Giace l’alta Cartago._’ _Jerusalem Delivered_, Canto XV. St. 20.

_The speech of Satan._ _Ibid._ Canto IV.

72. ‘_I rather envied_,’ _etc._ Montaigne, _Essays_, Book II., chap.
xii.

73. ‘_Like the swift Alpine torrent_,’ _etc._ From the final chorus of
_Il Torrismondo_.

74. _Chaucer and Spenser._ Much of what follows was repeated by
Hazlitt in his lecture on Chaucer and Spenser. See vol. V., pp.
19–44, and notes.

75. _Rousseau’s description of the Elisée._ _La Nouvelle Héloïse_,
Partie IV., Lettre XI.

76. _In looking back, etc._ These two concluding paragraphs were
lifted into Hazlitt’s lecture on Shakspeare and Milton. See vol.
V. pp. 44–46, and notes.

SCHLEGEL ON THE DRAMA.

August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s (1767–1845) ‘Lectures on Dramatic Art and
Literature’ were delivered in Vienna in 1808. Hazlitt reviews the
English translation, published in 1815, by John Black (1783–1855), who
afterwards became editor of _The Morning Chronicle_.

PAGE

79. _The admirable translator._ Schlegel had translated Shakespeare (9
vols. 1797–1810), and Calderon (_Spanish Theatre_, 2 vols.,
1803–1809).

_Madame de Staël._ Schlegel lived for many years at Madame de
Staël’s house at Coppet.

81. _Florimel._ _The Faerie Queene_, Book III., Canto VII.

82. ‘_There was magic in the web._’ _Othello_, Act III. Sc. 4.

_Schlegel somewhere compares, etc._ Lectures XXV.

‘_So withered_,’ _etc._ _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 3.

‘_Metaphysical aid._’ _Ibid._, Act I. Sc. 5.

83. ‘_That she moved with grace_,’ _etc._ Possibly Hazlitt was
thinking of the scene in the _Iliad_ (III. 150, _et seq._),
where at the Scaean Gate the Trojan elders see Helen for the
first time.

‘_Upon her eyelids_,’ _etc._ _The Faerie Queene_, Book II., Canto
III., St. 25.

‘_All plumed_,’ _etc._ _Henry IV._, Part I., Act IV. Sc. 1.

‘_For they are old_,’ _etc._ _King Lear_, Act II. Sc. 4.

85. ‘_Antres vast_,’ _etc._ Othello, Act I. Sc. 3.

_Orlando’s enchanted sword, etc._ In Ariosto’s _Orlando Furioso_.

86. ‘_New-lighted_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 4.

‘_The evidence of things seen._’ _Hebrews_, xi. 1.

86. ‘_Broods_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, I. 21–22.

‘_The ignorant present time._’ _Macbeth_, Act. I. Sc. 5.

88. _Jones._ Sir William Jones (1746–1794), the Orientalist.

98. ‘_Tu y seras, ma fille._’ Racine, _Iphigénie_, Act II. Sc. 3.

‘_The dry chips_,’ _etc._ Cowley, Ode, _Of Wit_.

100. ‘_Tries conclusions infinite._’

Cf. ‘She hath pursued conclusions infinite
Of easy ways to die.’
_Antony and Cleopatra_, Act V. Sc. 2.

106. _The infant Joaz._ _Athalie_, Act II. Sc. 9.

_The speech of Phædra._ _Phèdre_, Act IV. Sc. 6.

107. _Mr. Schlegel speaks highly, etc._ See Lecture XXI. For Hazlitt on
Molière cf. vol. VIII. pp. 28–9 (_English Comic Writers_), where
much of this passage is repeated.

108. _Extremes meet, etc._ Hazlitt quoted this paragraph in _The Round
Table_ (vol. I. pp. 97–8).

111. ‘_Not a jot_,’ _etc._ _Othello_, Act III. Sc. 3.

‘_Light thickens._’ _Macbeth_, Act III. Sc. 2.

‘_Why stands Macbeth_,’ _etc._ _Ibid._, Act IV. Sc. 1.

116. ‘_Ethereal mould_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Paradise Lost_, II. 139 and V.
285.

‘_Stronger Shakespear_,’ _etc._ Collins, _Epistle to Sir Thomas
Hanmer_, 64.

117. _The scene between Surly and Sir Epicure Mammon._ _The Alchemist_,
Act II. Sc. 1.

118. ‘_A man walking upon stilts_,’ _etc._ Lecture XXVIII.

119. ‘_By a singular vicissitude_,’ _etc._ Madame de Staël’s _De l’
Allemagne_, chap. xxii.

_LEIGH HUNT’S ‘RIMINI’_

The _Edinburgh Review_ for June, 1816 (vol. XXVI. pp. 476–491) contained
a notice of Leigh Hunt’s _The Story of Rimini_. Lord Cockburn includes
this review in his List of Lord Jeffrey’s articles in the _Edinburgh_
(see _Life of Francis Jeffrey_); Mr. W. C. Hazlitt (_Memoirs_, I. pp.
xxv. and 225) attributes it to Hazlitt; and Mr. Ireland, in his
Bibliography of Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt, marks it as doubtful. The
Blackwood set regarded or professed to regard Hazlitt as the author, as
appears from a passage in Lockhart’s attack on Hunt in the first number
(October 1817) of _Blackwood’s Magazine_: ‘The very culpable manner in
which his [Hunt’s] chief poem was reviewed in the _Edinburgh Review_ (we
believe it is no secret, at his own impatient and feverish request, by
his partner in the _Round Table_), was matter of concern to more readers
than ourselves.... Mr. Jeffrey does ill when he delegates his important
functions into such hands as those of Mr. Hazlitt.’ Lockhart, however,
knew nothing about Hunt or Hazlitt, and his ‘no secret’ (which afforded
an opportunity for a hit at Jeffrey) does not throw any light on the
question. Hunt denied the insinuation. See _Memoirs of William Hazlitt_,
I. 225. The review does not read like Hazlitt, but, from a letter which
he afterwards addressed to Leigh Hunt, it would seem that at the least
he had some hand in it. The letter is dated April 21, 1821 (see _Four
Generations of a Literary Family_, I. 133), and contains an account of
Hazlitt’s grievances against Leigh Hunt. In course of it, he says: ‘For
instance, I praised you in the _Edinburgh Review_.’ There does not seem
to be any praise of Hunt to which this passage can refer except this
review, which is possibly the result of some rather free handling of
Hazlitt’s MS. by Jeffrey.

The review is given below. The long extracts from the poem are roughly
indicated by the first and last line, though in a few cases some of the
intermediate lines are omitted in the review.

_The Story of Rimini, a Poem._ By LEIGH HUNT. pp. 111. London,
Murray, 1816.

‘There is a great deal of genuine poetry in this little volume; and
poetry, too, of a very peculiar and original character. It reminds us,
in many respects, of that pure and glorious style that prevailed among
us before French models and French rules of criticism were known in this
country, and to which we are delighted to see there is now so general a
disposition to recur. Yet its more immediate prototypes, perhaps, are to
be looked for rather in Italy than in England: at least, if it be copied
from any thing English, it is from something much older than
Shakespeare; and it unquestionably bears a still stronger resemblance to
Chaucer than to his immediate followers in Italy. The same fresh, lively
and artless pictures of external objects,—the same profusion of gorgeous
but redundant and needless description,—the same familiarity and even
homeliness of diction,—and, above all, the same simplicity and
directness in representing actions and passions in colours true to
nature, but without any apparent attention to their effect, or any
ostentation, or even visible impression as to their moral operation or
tendency. The great distinction between the modern poets and their
predecessors, is, that the latter painted more from the eye and less
from the mind than the former. They described things and actions as they
saw them, without expressing, or at any rate without dwelling on the
deep-seated emotions from which the objects derived their interest, or
the actions their character. The moderns, on the contrary, have brought
these most prominently forward, and explained and enlarged upon them
perhaps at excessive length. Mr. Hunt, in the piece before us, has
followed the antient school; and though he has necessarily gone
something beyond the naked notices that would have suited the age of
Chaucer, he has kept himself far more to the delineation of visible,
physical realities, than any other modern poet on such a subject.

‘Though he has chosen, however, to write in this style, and has done so
very successfully, we are not by any means of opinion, that he either
writes or appears to write it as naturally as those by whom it was first
adopted; on the contrary, we think there is a good deal of affectation
in his homeliness, directness, and rambling descriptions. He visibly
gives himself airs of familiarity, and mixes up flippant, and even cant
phrases, with passages that bear, upon the whole, the marks of
considerable labour and study. In general, however, he is very
successful in his attempts at facility, and has unquestionably produced
a little poem of great grace and spirit, and, in many passages and many
particulars, of infinite beauty and delicacy.

‘In the subject he has selected, he has ventured indeed upon sacred
ground; but he has not profaned it. The passage in Dante, on which the
story of Rimini is founded, remains unimpaired by the English version,
and has even received a new interest from it. The undertaking must be
allowed to have been one of great nicety. An imitation of the manner of
Dante was an impossibility. That extraordinary author collects all his
force into a single blow: His sentiments derive an obscure grandeur from
their being only half expressed; and therefore, a detailed narrative of
this kind, a description of particular circumstances done upon this
ponderous principle, an enumeration of incidents leading to a
catastrophe, with all the pith and conclusiveness of the catastrophe
itself, would be intolerable. Mr. Hunt has arrived at his end by varying
his means; and the effect of his poem coincides with that of the
original passage, mainly, because the spirit in which it is written is
quite different. With the personages in Dante, all is over before the
reader is introduced to them; their doom is fixed;—and his style is as
peremptory and irrevocable as their fate. But the lovers, whose memory
the muse of the Italian poet had consecrated in the other world, are
here restored to earth, with the graces and the sentiments that became
them in their lifetime. Mr. Hunt, in accompanying them to its fatal
close, has mingled every tint of many-coloured life in the tissue of
their story—blending tears with smiles, the dancing of the spirits with
sad forebodings, the intoxication of hope with bitter disappointment,
youth with age, life and death together. He has united something of the
voluptuous pathos of Boccacio with Ariosto’s laughing graces. His court
dresses, and gala processions he has borrowed from Watteau. His sunshine
and his flowers are his own! He himself has explained the design of his
poem in the Preface. [_A long passage from the Preface is quoted._]

‘The poem opens with the following passage of superb description:—

[“The sun is up, and ’tis a morn of May,” to
“And pilgrims, chanting in the morning sun.”]

‘Such is the manner in which the business of the day is ushered in. The
rest of the first canto is taken up in describing the preparations for
receiving the bridegroom, the processions of knights that precede his
expected arrival; the dresses, &c.—There is something in all this part
of the poem which gives back the sensation of the scene and the
occasion;—a glancing eye, a busy ear, great bustle and gaiety, and,
where it is required, great grace of description. Perhaps the subject is
too long dwelt upon; and there is, occasionally, a repetition of nearly
the same images and expressions. The reader may take the following as
fair specimens:

[“And hark! the approaching trumpets, with a start,” to
“The shift, the tossing, and the fiery tramping.”]

‘After all, the future husband does not appear, but his younger brother,
Paulo, who comes as his proxy to take the bride to Rimini; and it is to
the mistaken impression thus made on her mind that all the subsequent
distress is owing. His person, his dress, the gallantry of Paulo’s
demeanour, are very vividly described, and the effect of his appearance
on the surrounding multitude.

[“And on a milk-white courser, like the air,” to
“These catch the extrinsic and the common eye.”]

‘The Second Canto gives an account of the bride’s journey to Rimini, in
the company of her husband’s brother, which abounds in picturesque
descriptions. Mr. Hunt has here taken occasion to enter somewhat
learnedly into the geography of his subject; and describes the road
between Ravenna and Rimini, with the accuracy of a topographer, and the
liveliness of a poet. There is, however, no impertinent minuteness of
detail; but only those circumstances are dwelt upon, which fall in with
the general interest of the story, and would be likely to strike
forcibly upon the imagination in such an interval of anxiety and
suspense. We have only room for the concluding lines.

[“Various the trees and passing foliage here,” to
“Night and a maiden silence wrap the plains.”]

‘We have detained our readers longer than we intended, from that which
forms the most interesting part of the poem, the Third Canto, of which
the subject is the fatal passion between Paulo and Francesca. We shall
be ample in our extracts from this part of the poem, because we have no
other way of giving an idea of its characteristic qualities. Mr. Hunt,
as we have already intimated, does not belong to any of the modern
schools of poetry; and therefore we cannot convey our idea of his manner
of writing, by reference to any of the more conspicuous models. His
poetry is not like Mr. Wordsworth’s, which is metaphysical; nor like Mr.
Coleridge’s, which is fantastical; nor like Mr. Southey’s, which is
monastical. But it is something which we have already endeavoured to
sketch by its general features, and shall now enable the reader to study
in detail in the following extracts.

‘The first disappointment of the warm-hearted bride, and the portraits
of the rival brothers, are sketched with equal skill and delicacy.

[“Enough of this. Yet how shall I disclose,” to
“And like a morning beam, wake to him every morrow.”]

‘Paulo’s growing passion for Francesca is described with equal delicacy
and insight into the sophistry of the human heart. He is represented as
first concealing his attachment from himself; then struggling with it;
then yielding to it.

[“Till ’twas the food and habit day by day,” to
“’Twas but the taste of what was natural.”]

‘But we hasten on to the principal event and the catastrophe of the
poem. The scene of the fatal meeting between the lovers is laid in the
gardens of the palace, which are here described with the utmost elegance
and beauty.

[“So now you walked beside an odorous bed,” to
“A summer-house so fine in such a nest of green.”]

‘Such is the landscape:—now for the figures.

[“All the green garden, flower-bed, shade and plot,” to
“To ask the good King Arthur for assistance.”]

‘We cannot give the whole extract of the story,—only she becomes more
deeply engaged as she comes to the love scenes.—What follows, we think
is very exquisitely written.

[“Ready she sat with one hand to turn o’er,” to
“Desperate the joy.—That day they read no more.”]

‘We do not think the execution of the fourth and last Canto quite equal
to that of the third: Yet there are passages in it of the greatest
beauty; and an air of melancholy breathes from the whole with
irresistible softness and effect.

‘The feelings of Francesca, arising from the consciousness of her
melancholy situation and broken vows, are thus finely represented.

[“And oh, the morrow, how it used to rise!” to
“That Heaven would take her, if it pleased, away.”]

‘From the distress and agitation of her mind, she afterwards betrays the
secret of her infidelity to her husband in her sleep. This leads to a
rencounter between the two brothers, which is fatal to Paulo, who runs
voluntarily upon his brother’s sword; and partly from the shock of the
news, partly from previous grief preying on her mind and body, Francesca
dies the same day. Her death is profoundly affecting, and leaves an
impression on the imagination, icy, cold, and monumental. The squire of
Paulo is admitted to the side of her sad couch, to tell the dismal
story—and repeats, in the Prince’s own words, how he had been forced to
fight with his brother—

[“——And that although,” to
“The gentle sufferer was at peace in death.”]

‘The bodies of the two lovers are sent back, by order of the husband, to
Ravenna, to be buried in one tomb. We shall close our extracts with the
account of the arrival of this mournful procession, so different in
every respect from the former one.

[“The days were then at close of autumn—still,” to
“Young hearts betrothed used to go there to pray.”]

‘We have given these extracts at length, that our readers might judge of
the story of Rimini, less on our authority, than its own merits; and we
have few remarks to add to those which we ventured to make at the
beginning. The diction of this little poem is among its chief
beauties—and yet its greatest blemishes are faults in diction.—It is
very English throughout—but often very affectedly negligent, and so
extremely familiar as to be absolutely low and vulgar. What, for
example, can be said for such lines as

“She had stout notions on the marrying score,” or
“He kept no reckoning with his sweets and sours;—” or
“And better still—in my idea at least,” or
“The two divinest things this world has got.”

‘We see no sort of beauty either in such absurd and unusual phrases as
“a clipsome waist,”—“a scattery light,” or “flings of sunshine,”—nor any
charm in such comparatives as “martialler,” or “tastefuller,” or
“franklier,” or in such words as “whisks,” and “swaling,” and “freaks
and snatches,” and an hundred others in the same taste. We think the
author rather heretical too on the subject of versification—though we
have much less objection to his theory than to his practice. But we
cannot spare him a line more on the present occasion—and must put off
the rest of our admonitions till we meet him again.’

_COLERIDGE’S ‘CHRISTABEL’_

In the _Edinburgh Review_ for September, 1816 (vol. XXVII. pp. 58–67),
appeared a review of Coleridge’s _Christabel_, as to the authorship of
which there has been a good deal of discussion. Coleridge himself
believed that it was written by Hazlitt. (See _post_, note to p. 155.)
Hazlitt never acknowledged the authorship, and there is indeed no
external evidence upon the subject. Mr. Dykes Campbell (_Samuel Taylor
Coleridge_, p. 225, note 1) regards the ascription of the review to
Hazlitt as being ‘probably, though not certainly, correct.’ Neither Mr.
Ireland nor Mr. W. C. Hazlitt ascribes it to Hazlitt. Quite recently the
question of Hazlitt’s authorship, determined one way or the other by a
consideration of the internal evidence, has been the subject of a
controversy in _Notes and Queries_ (9th Series, A. 388, 429: XI. 170,
269), to which reference should be made. Mr. Andrew Lang in his _Life of
J. G. Lockhart_ (vol. I. pp. 139–142) refers to the review at some
length as a kind of set-off against Lockhart’s early indiscretions in
_Blackwood_. Without discussing the authorship of the review, he is
indignant with Jeffrey for having admitted it into the _Edinburgh_. The
present editors are disposed to think that the review is substantially
the work of Hazlitt, though, as in the case of the review of _Rimini_,
it may be conjectured that Jeffrey used his editorial pen pretty freely.
Since absolute certainty is not at present attainable, the review,
instead of being printed in the text, is given below.

_Christabel: Kubla Khan, a Vision. The Pains of Sleep._ By S. T.
COLERIDGE, Esq. London. Murray, 1816.

‘The advertisement by which this work was announced to the publick,
carried in its front a recommendation from Lord Byron,—who, it seems,
has somewhere praised Christabel, “as a wild and singularly original and
beautiful poem.” Great as the noble bard’s merits undoubtedly are in
poetry, some of his latest _publications_ dispose us to distrust his
authority, where the question is what ought to meet the public eye; and
the works before us afford an additional proof, that his judgment on
such matters is not absolutely to be relied on. Moreover, we are a
little inclined to doubt the value of the praise which one poet lends
another. It seems now-a-days to be the practice of that once irritable
race to laud each other without bounds; and one can hardly avoid
suspecting, that what is thus lavishly advanced may be laid out with a
view to being repaid with interest. Mr. Coleridge, however, must be
judged by his own merits.

‘It is remarked, by the writers upon the Bathos, that the true
_profound_ is surely known by one quality—its being wholly bottomless;
insomuch, that when you think you have attained its utmost depth in the
work of some of its great masters, another, or peradventure the same,
astonishes you, immediately after, by a plunge so much more vigorous, as
to outdo all his former outdoings. So it seems to be with the new
school, or, as they may be termed, the wild or lawless poets. After we
had been admiring their extravagance for many years, and marvelling at
the ease and rapidity with which one exceeded another in the unmeaning
or infantine, until not an idea was left in the rhyme—or in the insane,
until we had reached something that seemed the untamed effusion of an
author whose thoughts were rather more free than his actions—forth steps
Mr. Coleridge, like a giant refreshed with sleep, and as if to redeem
his character after so long a silence, (“his poetic powers having been,
he says, from 1808 till very lately, in a state of suspended animation,”
p. v.) and breaks out in these precise words—

“’Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,
And the owls have awaken’d the crowing cock;
Tu—whit!——Tu—whoo!
And hark, again! the crowing cock,
How drowsily it crew.
Sir Leoline, the Baron rich,
Hath a toothless mastiff bitch;
From her kennel beneath the rock
She makes answer to the clock,
Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour;
Ever and aye, moonshine or shower,
Sixteen short howls, not over loud:
Some say she sees my lady’s shroud.
Is the night chilly and dark?
The night is chilly, but not dark.” Pp. 3,4.

‘It is probable that Lord Byron may have had this passage in his eye,
when he called the poem “wild” and “original”: but how he discovered it
to be “beautiful,” is not quite so easy for us to imagine.

‘Much of the art of the wild writers consists in sudden
transitions—opening eagerly upon some topic, and then flying from it
immediately. This indeed is known to the medical men, who not
unfrequently have the care of them, as an unerring symptom. Accordingly,
here we take leave of the Mastiff Bitch, and lose sight of her entirely,
upon the entrance of another personage of a higher degree,

“The lovely Lady Christabel,
Whom her father loves so well”—

And who, it seems, has been rambling about all night, having, the night
before, had dreams about her lover, which “made her moan and _leap_.”
While kneeling, in the course of her rambles, at an old oak, she hears a
noise on the other side of the stump, and going round, finds, to her
great surprize, another fair damsel in white silk, but with her dress
and hair in some disorder; at the mention of whom, the poet takes
fright, not, as might be imagined, because of her disorder, but on
account of her beauty and her fair attire—

“I guess, ’twas frightful there to see
A lady so richly clad as she—
Beautiful exceedingly!”

Christabel naturally asks who she is, and is answered, at some length,
that her name is Geraldine; that she was, on the morning before, seized
by five warriors, who tied her on a white horse, and drove her on, they
themselves following, also on white horses; and that they had rode all
night. Her narrative now gets to be a little contradictory, which gives
rise to unpleasant suspicions. She protests vehemently, and with oaths,
that she has no idea who the men were; only that one of them, the
tallest of the five, took her and placed her under the tree, and that
they all went away, she knew not whither; but how long she had remained
there she cannot tell—

“Nor do I know how long it is,
For I have lain in fits, I _wis_;”

—although she had previously kept a pretty exact account of the time.
The two ladies then go home together, after this satisfactory
explanation, which appears to have conveyed to the intelligent mind of
Lady C. every requisite information. They arrive at the castle, and pass
the night in the same bed-room; not to disturb Sir Leoline, who, it
seems, was poorly at the time, and, of course, must have been called up
to speak to the chambermaids, and have the sheets aired, if Lady G. had
had a room to herself. They do not get to their bed, however, in the
poem, quite so easily as we have carried them. They first cross the
moat, and Lady C. “took the key that fitted well,” and opened a little
door, “all in the middle of the gate.” Lady G. then sinks down “belike
through pain”; but it should seem more probably from laziness; for her
fair companion having lifted her up, and carried her a little way, she
then walks on “as she were not in pain.” Then they cross the court—but
we must give this in the poet’s words, for he seems so pleased with
them, that he inserts them twice over in the space of ten lines—

“So free from danger, free from fear,
They crossed the court—right glad they were.”

‘Lady C. is desirous of a little conversation on the way, but Lady G.
will not indulge her Ladyship, saying, she is too much tired to speak.
We now meet our old friend, the mastiff bitch, who is much too important
a person to be slightly passed by—

“Outside her kennel, the mastiff old
Lay fast asleep, in moonshine cold.
The mastiff old did not awake,
Yet she an angry moan did make!
And what can ail the mastiff bitch?
Never till now she uttered yell
Beneath the eye of Christabel.
Perhaps it is the owlet’s scritch:
For what can ail the mastiff bitch?”

‘Whatever it may be that ails the bitch, the ladies pass forward, and
take off their shoes, and tread softly all the way up stairs, as
Christabel observes that her father is a bad sleeper. At last, however,
they do arrive at the bed-room, and comfort themselves with a dram of
some home-made liquor, which proves to be very old; for it was made by
Lady C.’s mother; and when her new friend asks if she thinks the old
lady will take her part, she answers, that this is out of the question,
in as much as she happened to die in childbed of her. The mention of the
old lady, however, gives occasion to the following pathetic
couplet.—Christabel says,

“O mother dear, that thou wert here!
I would, said Geraldine, she were!”

‘A very mysterious conversation next takes place between Lady Geraldine
and the old gentlewoman’s ghost, which proving extremely fatiguing to
her, she again has recourse to the bottle—and with excellent effect, as
appears by these lines.

“Again the wild-flower wine she drank;
Her fair large eyes ’gan glitter bright,
And from the floor whereon she sank,
The lofty Lady stood upright:
She was most beautiful to see,
Like a Lady of a far countrée.”

—From which, we may gather among other points, the exceeding great
beauty of all women who live in a distant place, no matter where. The
effects of the cordial speedily begin to appear; as no one, we imagine,
will doubt, that to its influence must be ascribed the following speech—

“And thus the lofty lady spake—
All they, who live in the upper sky,
Do love you, holy Christabel!
And you love them—and for their sake
And for the good which me befel,
Even I in my degree will try,
Fair maiden, to requite you well.”

‘Before going to bed, Lady G. kneels to pray, and desires her friend to
undress, and lie down; which she does “in her loveliness”; but being
curious, she leans “on her elbow,” and looks towards the fair
devotee,—where she sees something which the poet does not think fit to
tell us very explicitly.

“Her silken robe, and inner vest,
Dropt to her feet, and full in view,
Behold! her bosom and half her side——
A sight to dream of, not to tell!
And she is to sleep by Christabel.”

‘She soon rises, however, from her knees; and as it was not a
double-bedded room, she turns in to Lady Christabel, taking only “two
paces and a stride.” She then clasps her tight in her arms, and mutters
a very dark spell, which we apprehend the poet manufactured by shaking
words together at random; for it is impossible to fancy that he can
annex any meaning whatever to it. This is the end of it.

“But vainly thou warrest,
For this is alone in
Thy power to declare,
That in the dim forest
Thou heard’st a low moaning,
And found’st a bright lady, surpassingly fair:
And didst bring her home with thee in love and in charity,
To shield her and shelter her from the damp air.”

‘The consequence of this incantation is, that Lady Christabel has a
strange dream—and when she awakes, her first exclamation is, “Sure I
have sinn’d”—“Now heaven be praised if all be well!” Being still
perplexed with the remembrance of her “too lively” dream—she then
dresses herself, and modestly prays to be forgiven for “her sins
unknown.” The two companions now go to the Baron’s parlour, and
Geraldine tells her story to him. This, however, the poet judiciously
leaves out, and only signifies that the Baron recognized in her the
daughter of his old friend Sir Roland, with whom he had had a deadly
quarrel. Now, however, he despatches his tame poet, or laureate,
called Bard Bracy, to invite him and his family over, promising to
forgive every thing, and even make an apology for what had passed. To
understand what follows, we own, surpasses our comprehension. Mr.
Bracy, the poet, recounts a strange dream he has just had, of a dove
being almost strangled by a snake; whereupon the Lady Geraldine falls
a hissing, and her eyes grow small, like a serpent’s,—or at least so
they seem to her friend; who begs her father to “send away that
woman.” Upon this the Baron falls into a passion, as if he had
discovered that his daughter had been seduced; at least, we can
understand him in no other sense, though no hint of such a kind is
given; but, on the contrary, she is painted to the last moment as full
of innocence and purity.—Nevertheless,

“His heart was cleft with pain and rage,
His cheeks they quiver’d, his eyes were wild,
Dishonour’d thus in his old age;
Dishonour’d by his only child;
And all his hospitality
To th’ insulted daughter of his friend
By more than woman’s jealousy,
Brought thus to a disgraceful end——”

‘Nothing further is said to explain the mystery; but there follows
incontinently, what is termed “_The conclusion of Part the Second_.” And
as we are pretty confident that Mr. Coleridge holds this passage in the
highest estimation; that he prizes it more than any other part of “that
wild, and singularly original and beautiful poem Christabel,” excepting
always the two passages touching the “toothless mastiff Bitch;” we shall
extract it for the amazement of our readers—premising our own frank
avowal that we are wholly unable to divine the meaning of any portion of
it.

“A little child, a limber elf,
Singing, dancing to itself,
A fairy thing with red round cheeks,
That always finds and never seeks;
Makes such a vision to the sight
As fills a father’s eyes with light;
And pleasures flow in so thick and fast
Upon his heart, that he at last
Must needs express his love’s excess
With words of unmeant bitterness.
Perhaps ’tis pretty to force together
Thoughts so all unlike each other;
To mutter and mock a broken charm,
To dally with wrong that does no harm.
Perhaps ’tis tender too, and pretty,
At each wild word to feel within
A sweet recoil of love and pity.
And what if in a world of sin
(O sorrow and shame should this be true!)
Such giddiness of heart and brain
Comes seldom save from rage and pain,
So talks as it’s most used to do.”

‘Here endeth the Second Part, and, in truth, the “singular” poem itself;
for the author has not yet written, or, as he phrases it, “embodied in
verse,” the “three parts yet to come;”—though he trusts he shall be able
to do so “in the course of the present year.”

‘One word as to the metre of Christabel, or, as Mr. Coleridge terms it,
“_the_ Christabel”—happily enough; for indeed we doubt if the peculiar
force of the definite article was ever more strongly exemplified. He
says, that though the reader may fancy there prevails a great
_irregularity_ in the metre, some lines being of four, others of twelve
syllables, yet in reality it is quite regular; only that it is “founded
on a new principle, namely, that of counting in each line the accents,
not the syllables.” We say nothing of the monstrous assurance of any man
coming forward coolly at this time of day, and telling the readers of
English poetry, whose ear has been tuned to the lays of Spenser, Milton,
Dryden, and Pope, that he makes his metre “on a new principle!” but we
utterly deny the truth of the assertion, and defy him to show us _any_
principle upon which his lines can be conceived to tally. We give two or
three specimens, to confound at once this miserable piece of coxcombry
and shuffling. Let our “wild, and singularly original and beautiful”
author, show us how these lines agree either in number of accents or of
feet.

“Ah wel-a-day!”—
“For this is alone in”—
“And didst bring her home with thee in love and in charity”—
“I pray you drink this cordial wine”—
“Sir Leoline”—
“And found a bright lady surpassingly fair”—
“Tu—whit!——Tu—whoo!”

‘_Kubla Khan_ is given to the public, it seems, “at the request of a
poet of great and deserved celebrity;”—but whether Lord Byron the
praiser of “the Christabel,” or the Laureate, the praiser of Princes, we
are not informed. As far as Mr. Coleridge’s “own opinions are
concerned,” it is published, “not upon the ground of any _poetic_
merits,” but “as a PSYCHOLOGICAL CURIOSITY!” In these opinions of the
candid author, we entirely concur; but for this reason we hardly think
it was necessary to give the minute detail which the Preface contains,
of the circumstances attending its composition. Had the question
regarded “_Paradise Lost_,” or “_Dryden’s Ode_” we could not have had a
more particular account of the circumstances in which it was composed.
It was in the year 1797, and the summer season. Mr. Coleridge was in bad
health;—the particular disease is not given; but the careful reader will
form his own conjectures. He had retired very prudently to a lonely
farm-house; and whoever would see the place which gave birth to the
“psychological curiosity,” may find his way thither without a guide; for
it is situated on the confines of Somerset and Devonshire, and on the
Exmoor part of the boundary; and it is, moreover, between Porlock and
Linton. In that farm-house, he had a slight indisposition, and had taken
an anodyne, which threw him into a deep sleep in his chair, (whether
after dinner or not he omits to state), “at the moment that he was
reading a sentence in Purchas’s Pilgrims,” relative to a palace of Kubla
Khan. The effects of the anodyne, and the sentence together, were
prodigious: They produced the “curiosity” now before us; for, during his
three-hours sleep, Mr. Coleridge “has the most vivid confidence that he
could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines.” On
awaking, he “instantly and eagerly” wrote down the verses here
published; when he was (he says “_unfortunately_”) called out by a
“person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour;”
and when he returned, the vision was gone. The lines here given smell
strongly, it must be owned, of the anodyne; and, but that an under dose
of a sedative produces contrary effects, we should inevitably have been
lulled by them into forgetfulness of all things. Perhaps a dozen more
such lines as the following would reduce the most irritable of critics
to a state of inaction.

“A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she play’d,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread:
For he on honey-dew hath fed.” &c. &c.

‘There is a good deal more altogether as exquisite—and in particular a
fine description of a wood, “ancient as the hills;” and “folding sunny
spots of _greenery_!” But we suppose this specimen will be sufficient.

‘Persons in this poet’s unhappy condition, generally feel the want of
sleep as the worst of their evils; but there are instances, too, in the
history of the disease, of sleep being attended with new agony, as if
the waking thoughts, how wild and turbulent soever, had still been under
some slight restraint, which sleep instantly removed. Mr. Coleridge
appears to have experienced this symptom, if we may judge from the title
of his third poem, “_The Pains of Sleep_;” and, in truth, from its
composition—which is mere raving, without any thing more affecting than
a number of incoherent words, expressive of extravagance and
incongruity.—We need give no specimen of it.

‘Upon the whole, we look upon this publication as one of the most
notable pieces of impertinence of which the press has lately been
guilty; and one of the boldest experiments that has yet been made on the
patience or understanding of the public. It is impossible, however, to
dismiss it, without a remark or two. The other productions of the Lake
School have generally exhibited talents thrown away upon subjects so
mean, that no power of genius could ennoble them; or perverted and
rendered useless by a false theory of poetical composition. But even in
the worst of them, if we except the White Doe of Mr. Wordsworth and some
of the laureate odes, there were always some gleams of feeling or of
fancy. But the thing now before us, is utterly destitute of value. It
exhibits from beginning to end not a ray of genius; and we defy any man
to point out a passage of poetical merit in any of the three pieces
which it contains, except, perhaps, the following lines in p. 32, and
even these are not very brilliant; nor is the leading thought original—

“Alas! they had been friends in youth;
But whispering tongues can poison truth;
And constancy lives in realms above;
And life is thorny; and youth is vain;
And to be wroth with one we love,
Doth work like madness in the brain.”

‘With this one exception, there is literally not one couplet in the
publication before us which would be reckoned poetry, or even sense,
were it found in the corner of a newspaper or upon the window of an inn.
Must we then be doomed to hear such a mixture of raving and driv’ling,
extolled as the work of a “_wild and original_” genius, simply because
Mr. Coleridge has now and then written fine verses, and a brother poet
chooses, in his milder mood, to laud him from courtesy or from interest?
And are such panegyrics to be echoed by the mean tools of a political
faction, because they relate to one whose daily prose is understood to
be dedicated to the support of all that courtiers think should be
supported? If it be true that the author has thus earned the patronage
of those liberal dispensers of bounty, we can have no objection that
they should give him proper proofs of their gratitude; but we cannot
help wishing, for his sake, as well as our own, that they would pay in
solid pudding instead of empty praise; and adhere, at least in this
instance, to the good old system of rewarding their champions with
places and pensions, instead of puffing their bad poetry, and
endeavouring to cram their nonsense down the throats of all the loyal
and well affected.’

COLERIDGE’S LAY SERMON

The authorship of this review has also been the subject of controversy.
See the authorities cited on p. 411. Mr. Dykes Campbell, in the note
there quoted, says that, as in the case of _Christabel_, the ascription
of the review to Hazlitt is ‘probably, though not certainly correct.’
The editors regarded the internal evidence of Hazlitt’s authorship as so
overwhelmingly strong, especially after a comparison of the article with
Hazlitt’s review of the same work in _The Examiner_ (see _Political
Essays_, III. 143–152), that they decided to include it in the text. It
has not been thought necessary to give references to all Hazlitt’s
quotations from the _Lay Sermon_. References, when they are given, are
to the edition in Bohn’s Standard Library.

PAGE

120. ‘_Fancies and Good-nights._’ _Henry IV._, Part II., Act III. Sc.
2.

_Odd ends of verse, etc._ _Hudibras_, I. iii. 1011–2.

‘_Chase his fancy’s rolling speed._’ Cf. _On a Distant Prospect of
Eton College_, 29.

121. ‘_Babbles of green fields._’ _Henry V._, Act II. Sc. 3.

‘_Alarmists by trade._’ _A Lay Sermon_, p. 309.

‘_A gentle Husher_,’ _etc._ _The Faerie Queene_, Book I. Canto IV.
Stanza 13.

_Joanna Southcote._ Joanna Southcott (1750–1814), the fanatic and
impostor, whose prophesies had recently caused a good deal of
excitement.

122. ‘_Thick-coming fancies._’ _Macbeth_, Act V. Sc. 3.

123. _The ‘Friend.’_ Published in numbers at irregular intervals
between June 1809 and March 1810. Coleridge published a
recast—‘a complete Rifacimento’—of _The Friend_ in 1818.

‘_Like the swan’s down feather_,’ _etc._ _Antony and Cleopatra_,
Act III. Sc. 2.

124. ‘_They are not sought for_,’ _etc._ These words are quoted by
Coleridge from _Ecclesiasticus_, xxxviii. 33–34. See _A Lay
Sermon_, 308–309.

126. ‘_Twice ten degrees_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, X. 669–670.

‘_With jealous leer malign._’ _Ibid._, IV. 503.

127. ‘_Fraught with potential infidelity._’ _A Lay Sermon_, p. 329.

131. _The Watchman._ _The Watchman_ ran from March to May, 1796.
Coleridge gives an account of his tour to procure subscribers.
See _Biographia Literaria_, Chap. X. The _Conciones ad Populum_,
originally published in 1795, were reprinted in _Essays on his
own Times_ (1850).

_One of Goldsmith’s Essays._ See _A Lay Sermon_, p. 319 note.

_As Gulliver did, etc._ See _A Voyage to Brobdingnag_, Chap. V.

132. ‘_As Alps o’er Alps arise._’ Pope, _An Essay on Criticism_, II.
232.

134. ‘_High enthroned_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, III. 58.

135. ‘_It is by means_,’ _etc._ See Hobbes, _Leviathan_, Part I. Chap.
IV. 5, 15.

COLERIDGE’S LITERARY LIFE

This review, though claimed for Jeffrey by Lord Cockburn, and marked
doubtful by Mr. Ireland, is certainly Hazlitt’s. Nearly the whole of the
long passage on Burke (pp. 150–154 of the present volume), after doing
duty in _The Champion_ (Oct. 5, 1817), was published by Hazlitt in
_Political Essays_ as the first of two ‘Characters of Mr. Burke’ which
appeared in that volume. See vol. III. pp. 250–253.

PAGE

135. ‘_It will be found_,’ _etc._ Chap. I.

‘_At school_,’ _etc._ _Ibid._

138. _Bowles’s Sonnets._ William Lisle Bowles’s (1762–1850) famous
_Fourteen Sonnets written chiefly on Picturesque Spots during a
Journey_ appeared anonymously in 1789. More sonnets were added
in later editions. The sonnets of Thomas Warton (1728–1790) are
frequently quoted by Hazlitt, and were eulogised by him in his
_Lectures on the English Poets_ (see vol. V. pp. 120–1). See
Chap. I. of _Biographia Literaria_ for Coleridge’s praise of
Bowles.

138. _Jacob Behmen._ Jakob Boehme (1575–1624), the mystic.

The _Morning Post._ Coleridge’s contributions to _The Morning
Post_ (chiefly during 1800) were reprinted in _Essays on his own
Times_ (1850).

139. ‘_It is not, however_,’ _etc._ Note at the end of Chap. III.

_The Cannings, the Giffords, and the Freres._ William Gifford
(1756–1826) was the editor of the _Anti-Jacobin_ (1797–8), and
George Canning (1770–1827) and _John Hookham Frere_ (1769–1846)
were the chief contributors. See an article in _The Athenæum_
for May 31, 1890, on ‘Coleridge and _The Anti-Jacobin_.’

140. ‘_Publicly_,’ _etc._ _Biographia Literaria_, Chap. III.

142. ‘_Full of wise saws_,’ _etc._ _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc. 7.

‘_It has been hinted_,’ _etc._ _Biographia Literaria_, Chap. IV.

143. _Mr. C. thinks fit, etc._ Chap. V.

144. _A series of citations._ Hazlitt probably refers to an article in
_The Examiner_ for March 31, 1816, which consists to a large
extent of quotations from Hobbes’s _Leviathan_, and which is
referred to in a later volume of the present edition; but he was
never tired of proclaiming the greatness and originality of
Hobbes. Cf. the essay or lecture ‘On the writings of Hobbes,’
published in _Literary Remains_.

145. ‘_Sound book-learnedness._’ _A Lay Sermon_ (Bohn), p. 327.

‘_Wander down_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, XI. 282–284.

‘_Towards the close_,’ _etc._ Chap. X.

150. ‘_As our very sign-boards_,’ _etc._ _Ibid._

‘_Let the scholar_,’ _etc._ _Ibid._

_It is not without reluctance, etc._ The greater part of this
character of Burke, down to the foot of p. 154, was repeated in
_Political Essays_. See vol. III. pp. 250 _et seq._, and notes.

155. _Any account of it at all._ At this point in The Edinburgh Review
a long note, signed F. J., is appended, in which Jeffrey replies
to what he describes as ‘averments of a personal and injurious
nature’ against the _Edinburgh Review_. A great part of the note
relates to Coleridge’s attack on Jeffrey in Chap. III. of the
_Biographia Literaria_ (see Bohn’s edition, p. 25 note), but
part of it concerns Hazlitt. Coleridge had said (Chap. xxiv.):
‘In the _Edinburgh Review_ it [_Christabel_] was assailed with a
malignity and a personal hatred that ought to have injured only
the work in which such a tirade was suffered to appear: and this
review was generally attributed (whether rightly or no I know
not) to a man, who both in my presence and in my absence has
repeatedly pronounced it the finest poem in the language.’
Jeffrey refers to this passage, and states that when he visited
Coleridge at Keswick, there was some talk about the poem. ‘We
spoke,’ he says, ‘of _Christabel_, and I advised him to publish
it; but I did not say it was either the finest poem of the kind,
or a fine poem at all; and I am sure of this, for the best of
all reasons, that at this time, and indeed till after it was
published, I never saw or heard more than four or five lines of
it, which my friend Mr. Scott once repeated to me. That eminent
person, indeed, spoke favourably of it; and I rather think I
told Mr. C. that I had heard him say, that it was to it he was
indebted for the first idea of that romantic narrative in
irregular verse, which he afterwards exemplified in his _Lay of
the Last Minstrel_, and other works. In these circumstances, I
felt a natural curiosity to see this great original; and I can
sincerely say, that no admirer of Mr. C. could be more
disappointed or astonished than I was, when it did make its
appearance. I did not review it.’ With regard to _A Lay Sermon_,
Coleridge had said (_Biographia Literaria_, chap. xxiv.): ‘A
long delay occurred between its first annunciation and its
appearance; it was reviewed, therefore, by anticipation with a
malignity so avowedly and exclusively personal as is, I believe,
unprecedented even in the present contempt of all common
humanity that disgraces and endangers the liberty of the press.
After its appearance, the author of this lampoon was chosen to
review it in the _Edinburgh Review_: and under the single
condition, that he should have written what he himself really
thought, and have criticised the work as he would have done had
its author been indifferent to him, I should have chosen that
man myself, both from the vigour and the originality of his
mind, and from his particular acuteness in speculative
reasoning, before all others. I remembered Catullus’s lines
[lxxiii.]:

“Desine de quoquam quicquam bene velle mereri,
Aut aliquem fieri posse putare pium.
Omnia sunt ingrata: nihil fecisse benigne est:
Immo, etiam taedet, taedet obestque magis.
Ut mihi, quem nemo gravius nec acerbius urget
Quam modo qui me unum atque unicum amicum habuit.”

But I can truly say, that the grief with which I read this
rhapsody of predetermined insult had the rhapsodist himself for
its whole and sole object: and that the indignant contempt which
it excited in me, was as exclusively confined to his employer
and suborner.’ Coleridge here refers to the first of the two
reviews of _A Lay Sermon_, contributed by Hazlitt to _The
Examiner_ in 1816. See _Political Essays_, vol. III. pp.
138–142. Jeffrey’s reply is as follows: ‘As to the review of the
_Lay Sermon_, I have only to say, in one word, that I never
employed or suborned any body to abuse or extol it or any other
publication. I do not so much as know or conjecture what Mr. C.
alludes to as a malignant lampoon or review by anticipation,
which he says had previously appeared somewhere else. I never
saw nor heard of any such publication. Nay, I was not even aware
of the existence of the _Lay Sermon_ itself, when a review of it
was offered me by a gentleman in whose judgment and talents I
had great confidence, but whom I certainly never suspected, and
do not suspect at this moment, of having any personal or partial
feelings of any kind towards its author. I therefore accepted
his offer, and printed his review, with some retrenchments and
verbal alterations, just as I was setting off, in a great hurry,
for London, on professional business, in January last.’

156. ‘_The dew of Castalie._’ Cf. ‘With verses, dipt in deaw of
Castalie.’ Spenser, _The Ruines of Time_, l. 431.

‘_Sky-tinctured._’ _Paradise Lost_, V. 285.

‘_Thoughts that voluntary move_,’ _etc._ _Ibid._, III. 37–38.

157. ‘_The golden cadences of poesy._’ _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, Act IV.
Sc. 2.

‘_Poets_ [lovers and madmen] _have such seething brains_.’ _A
Midsummer Night’s Dream_, Act V. Sc. 1.

_With Plato._ _The Republic_, Book X.

158. ‘_Pleasurable poetic fervour._’ Hazlitt probably had in his mind
chap. xviii. of the _Biographia Literaria_. The words suggest
that conception of poetry which was expressed by Wordsworth in
his _Preface to the Lyrical Ballads_ (especially in the extended
1802 form), and which was frequently repeated by Coleridge. See,
in addition to the _Biographia Literaria_, _Lectures on
Shakespere, etc._ (Bohn’s ed.), p. 49.

158. Note.—Maturin’s _Bertram_ was attacked in _The Courier_, ‘the pen
being either wielded or guided by Coleridge,’ but the attack in
_Biographia Literaria_ was a different one. See Dykes Campbell’s
_Samuel Taylor Coleridge_, 223 note 1.

LETTERS OF HORACE WALPOLE

A review of _Letters from the Hon. Horace Walpole to George Montagu,
Esq. From the year 1736 to 1770_, published in 1818. This and other
volumes of Walpole’s correspondence were reprinted in Peter Cunningham’s
collected edition of _Walpole’s Letters_ (9 vols., 1857–1859), where the
passages quoted by Hazlitt may be found.

PAGE

159. _Princess Amelia._ George II.’s daughter. See Walpole’s _Letters_,
_passim_.

_George Selwyn._ George Augustus Selwyn (1719–1791), the wit,
Walpole’s ‘oldest acquaintance and friend.’

_Mr. Chute._ John Chute (1703–1776), a great friend of Walpole’s.
See especially a letter to Sir Horace Mann, 27 May, 1776.

160. ‘_Of outward show_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, VIII. 539.

_Pam._ The Knave of Clubs, and the best trump at one form of Loo.

161. _Balmerino._ Arthur Elphinstone, sixth Lord Balmerino (1688–1746),
beheaded for participation in the Rebellion of 1745.

‘_Are kept in ponderous vases._’ Pope, _The Rape of the Lock_, V.
115.

163. ‘_Have got the start_,’ _etc._ _Julius Cæsar_, Act I. Sc. 2.

_Poor Bentley._ Richard Bentley (1708–1782), son of the scholar.

‘_High fantastical._’ _Twelfth Night_, Act I. Sc. 1.

164. _Müntz._ John Henry Müntz, a Swiss, who painted and copied
paintings for Walpole.

‘_That which he esteemed_,’ _etc._ _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 7.

_Mr. Mason._ William Mason (1724–1797), the poet and friend of
Gray.

165. _The Mysterious Mother._ Walpole’s tragedy (1768).

166. ‘_Himself and the universe._’ Hazlitt elsewhere says of Wordsworth
(vol. I. p. 113), ‘it is as if there were nothing but himself
and the universe.’

‘_Admit no discourse_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 1.

168. _Lord Ferrers._ Laurence Shirley (1720–1760), fourth Earl Ferrers,
was hanged for the murder of his steward, John Johnson.

169. ‘_Sleep no more_,’ _etc._ _Macbeth_, Act II. Sc. 2.

172. _Smithson._ Sir Hugh Smithson (1715–1786), married in 1740 the
heiress of the Percy estates, succeeded to the title of Earl of
Northumberland in 1750, and was created Duke in 1766.

_Pope._ Hazlitt refers presumably to ‘Song, by a Person of
Quality,’ beginning, ‘Flutt’ring spread thy purple pinions.’

‘_Very chargeable._’ _A New Way to Pay Old Debts_, Act III. Sc. 2.

LIFE OF SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS

Joseph Farington’s (1747–1821) _Memoirs of the Life of Sir Joshua
Reynolds_ was published in 1819. This review was republished in
_Criticisms on Art_ (1843–4), and in _Essays on the Fine Arts_ (1873).

PAGE

172. _Dispute between their late President, etc._ Relating to the
election of Joseph Bonomi as professor of perspective. Reynolds
resigned his membership of the Academy in Feb. 1790, but
afterwards withdrew his resignation. Edmond Malone (1741–1812)
published a Memoir of Reynolds in 1797.

173. ‘_Pleased with a rattle_,’ _etc._ Pope, _Essay on Man_, II. 276.

174. _Richardson._ Jonathan Richardson (1665–1745), author of _A Theory
of Painting_ (1715).

_Hudson._ Thomas Hudson (1701–1779), portrait-painter.

177. _The French materialists._ See Helvétius, _De l’Esprit_, Discourse
III.

178. ‘_A greater general capacity_,’ _etc._ See Johnson’s _Life of
Cowley._

180. _Hayman._ See VOL. I. (_The Round Table_) note to p. 149.

_Highmore._ _Ibid._

‘_Darted contagious fire._’ _Paradise Lost_, IX. 1036.

181. _Gandy._ See vol VI. (_Table Talk_), note to p. 21.

184. _In the days of Montesquieu._ See his _De l’ Esprit des Lois_.

185. ‘_Like flowers_,’ _etc._ Macbeth, Act IV. Sc. 3.

186. _Says Schlegel._ _Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature_, I.

‘_Like the forced pace_,’ _etc._ _Henry IV._, Part I. Act III. Sc.
1.

‘_With coy, reluctant_,’ _etc._ ‘And sweet, reluctant, amorous
delay.’ _Paradise Lost_, IV. 311.

_Terrae filii._ Cf. Persius, _Satires_, VI. 59.

‘_The crown which Ariadne_,’ _etc._ Cf. _The Faerie Queene_, Book
VI. Canto X. St. 13.

‘_Their affections_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 1.

187. _In that part of the country._ Winterslow presumably.

‘_Returning with a choral song_,’ _etc._ Wordsworth, _Ruth_,
53–54.

‘_We also are not Arcadians!_’ Hazlitt frequently quoted the old
saying, attributed to Schidoni, ‘Et ego in Arcadia vixi.’ See,
_e.g._ _Table Talk_, vol. VI. p. 168.

188. ‘_The unbought grace of life._’ Burke, _Reflections on the
Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 89).

190. _Leo._ Leo X. (1475–1521), son of Lorenzo de’ Medici.

_Piranesi’s drawings._ Giambattista Piranesi (1720–1778), engraver
of architecture and ancient ruins.

_Winckelman._ Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), author of
_Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums_ (1764).

191. ‘_All eyes_’ _etc._ Cf. _Isaiah_, xlv. 22–23, and _Romans_, xiv.
11.

‘_Amazing brightness_,’ _etc._ Otway, _Venice Preserved_, Act I.
Sc. 1.

‘_A present deity_,’ _etc._ Dryden, _Alexander’s Feast_, 35–36.

_The Madona of Foligno._ Raphael’s, in the Vatican.

_The ceiling at Parma._ Painted by Girolamo Mazzola, a pupil of
Correggio.

192. _Leonardo’s Last Supper._ This famous fresco, now almost entirely
destroyed, was at the convent of S. Maria delle Grazie at Milan.

_The institution of Academies, etc._ Cf. vol I. _The Round Table_,
p. 160 and note, and vol. IX. p. 311 _et seq._

195. ‘_The cat and canary-bird_,’ _etc._ See _ante_, p. 193.

‘_Leaving the thing_,’ _etc._ _Philippians_, iii. 13.

196. _The Catalogue Raisonnée._ Cf. vol. I., _The Round Table_, pp. 140
_et seq._

‘_With jealous leer malign._’ _Paradise Lost_, IV. 503.

197. _Grampound._ The borough was disfranchised for corrupt practices
in 1821.

‘_That is true history._’ This was said by Fuseli. See vol. VI.
(_Mr. Northcote’s Conversations_), p. 340.

199. _Mr. West’s pictures._ Benjamin West (1738–1820), president of the
Royal Academy from 1792. Cf. vol. IX. pp. 318 _et seq._

_Barry._ James Barry (1741–1806). Hazlitt refers to one of the
pictures Barry painted for the Society of Arts in John Street,
Adelphi.

200. ‘_The bodiless creations_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 4,
ll. 136–137.

‘_Like the baseless fabric_,’ _etc._ _The Tempest_, Act IV. Sc. 1.

_Mr. Haydon._ Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786–1846). Mr. W. C.
Hazlitt has given an account of his relations with Hazlitt. See
_Memoirs_, I. 209–213, and _Four Generations of a Literary
Family_, I. 234–236. At his house Hazlitt met Keats.

‘_So from the root_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, V. 479–481.

201. _His own Penitent Girl._ Hazlitt seems to refer to a figure in the
_Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem_.

_His Christ._ Haydon’s picture, _Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem_,
was first exhibited in 1820. At the private view, Haydon says
(Tom Taylor’s _Life_, I. 371), ‘the room was full, Keats and
Hazlitt were up in a corner, really rejoicing.’ Hazlitt is
introduced into the picture ‘looking at the Saviour as an
investigator.’ The picture is now in America. For Mrs. Siddons’s
opinion of the picture see _Life_, I. 372.

_Mr. Haydon is a devoted, etc._ See his letter in _The Examiner_,
March 17, 1816.

THE PERIODICAL PRESS

This essay is referred to by Brougham, who, on August 18, 1837, wrote to
Macvey Napier (then editor of the _Edinburgh Review_): ‘I wish the
_Newspaper Press_ had not been flattered so much; at any rate its
glaring faults should have been pointed out. This was done, and very ill
done, in 1823, when it had hardly any sins to answer for.’ (_Selections
from the Correspondence of Macvey Napier_, p. 199).

PAGE

204. ‘_We are_ [I am] _nothing, if not critical_. _Othello_, Act II.
Sc. 1. The words were used by Hazlitt as the motto to _A View of
the English Stage_.

_Terra plena, etc._ _Æneid_, I. 460.

‘_Large discourse_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act IV. Sc. 4.

205. ‘_The pomp of elder days._’ Thomas Warton’s Sonnet, ‘Written in a
blank leaf of Dugdale’s _Monasticon_.’

206. ‘_Cabin’d_,’ _etc._ _Macbeth_, Act III. Sc. 4.

207. _The Children of the Mist._ In _The Legend of Montrose_.

‘_A chemist_,’ _etc._ _Absalom and Achitophel_, I. 550.

208. _Sir Thomas Lawrence._ President of the Royal Academy from 1820
till his death in 1830.

‘_Though he should have_,’ _etc._ Adapted from _1 Corinthians_,
xiii. 1.

‘_The toe of the scholar_,’ _etc._ Varied from _Hamlet_, Act V.
Sc. 1.

209. ‘_Take the good_,’ _etc._ Dryden, _Alexander’s Feast_, 106.

210. ‘_Make the age to come her own._’ Cowley, _The Motto_, l. 2.

_Mille ornatus habet, etc._ ‘Mille habet ornatus, mille decenter
habet.’ From the first of the Sulpicia poems which are in Book
IV. of the _Elegies of Tibullus_, but the authorship of which is
not certainly known.

‘_Now this_,’ _etc._ Spenser, _Muiopotmos_, St. 22.

‘_To beguile the time_,’ _etc._ _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 5.

211. ‘_Squeak and gibber._’ _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 1.

_The St. James’s Chronicle._ Started in 1760 as a tri-weekly,
independent Whig evening paper. It was for a time edited by
James Mill.

212 note. Mrs. Radcliffe, the novelist, was married in 1787 to
William Radcliffe, an Oxford graduate and a student of law,
described by Sir Walter Scott (_Lives of the Novelists_) as
‘afterwards proprietor and editor of the _English Chronicle_.’

213. _The Morning Chronicle._ Founded June 28, 1769. The early notable
editors were William Woodfall (1746–1803), James Perry
(1756–1821), who was editor from 1789 to 1817, and John Black
(1783–1855). For Perry cf. vol. VI. _Table Talk_, p. 292.

_Porson._ Richard Porson (1759–1808) was Perry’s brother-in-law.

_Jekyll._ Joseph Jekyll (d. 1837) contributed many of his jokes to
_The Morning Chronicle_.

214. _The Marquis Marialva._ _Gil Blas_, Livre VII. chap x.

215. _Lord Nugent._ Presumably Robert, Earl Nugent (1702–1788), who
retired from parliamentary life in 1784. It is odd that Hazlitt
should refer to so well-known a man as a Lord Nugent.

_The Times Newspaper._ John Walter (1739–1812) in 1785 started
_The Daily Universal Register_, the name of which was changed on
Jan. 1, 1788 to _The Times or Daily Universal Register_, and on
March 18, 1788 to _The Times_.

_A steam-engine._ See vol. III. _Political Essays_, p. 158.

216. ‘_Ever strong_,’ _etc._ _King John_, Act III. Sc. 1.

‘_Whiff and wind._’ _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.

‘_Aggravate its voice_,’ _etc._ _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, Act
I. Sc. 2.

217. _Mr. Walter._ John Walter the Second (1776–1847).

_A writer in his employ._ Hazlitt’s brother-in-law, Dr.
(afterwards Sir John) Stoddart, who left _The Times_ in 1817 and
started _The Day and New Times_, called from 1818 onwards _The
New Times_. Hazlitt frequently attacks him.

‘_Champion’s Legitimacy_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Macbeth_, Act III. Sc. 1.

219. _The late queen._ Queen Caroline, George IV.’s wife, who died in
1821, shortly after her trial.

_The Courier._ An evening paper bought in 1799 by Coleridge’s
friend Daniel Stuart (1766–1846), under whose management it
quickly gained a large circulation.

‘_The force of dulness_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘The force of nature could no
farther go.’ Dryden, _Lines printed under the engraved portrait
of Milton_.

_The ingenious editor._ William Mudford (1782–1848) was editor for
some years before 1828.

220. _The Sun._ An evening paper started in 1792 by Pitt’s friend,
George Rose.

_The Traveller._ Started about 1803 by Edward Quin (d. 1823). It
was amalgamated with _The Globe_ in 1823.

_The Morning Post._ Founded in 1772.

_Cobbett._ William Cobbett (1762–1835) who started _The Weekly
Political Register_ in 1802.

_We once tried, etc._ Jeffrey attacked Cobbett in the _Edinburgh_
(July 1807, vol. X. p. 386).

_The Examiner._ Founded by John and Leigh Hunt in 1808. Hazlitt
had of course been intimately associated with the paper.

_The News._ A Sunday paper started in 1805.

_The Observer._ Another Sunday paper first made successful by
William Innell Clement (d. 1852), who afterwards bought _The
Morning Chronicle_.

221. _The Weekly Literary Journals, Gazettes._ Of which _The Literary
Gazette_, founded in 1817 and edited for a long time by William
Jerdan (1782–1869), was the chief. Others were _The Literary
Journal_ (founded by James Mill in 1803) and _The Literary
Chronicle_.

‘_Coming Reviews_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘And coming events cast their
shadows before.’ Campbell, _Lochiel’s Warnings_, l. 56.

_The Scotsman._ Started in 1817 by Charles Maclaren (1782–1866),
who was editor from 1820 to 1845.

_The Gentleman’s Magazine._ Founded in 1731 by Johnson’s first
employer, Edward Cave (1691–1754).

_Mr. Blackwood’s._ Founded in April 1817 by William Blackwood
(1776–1834) as _The Edinburgh Monthly Magazine_. With the
seventh number (Oct. 1, 1817) the title was changed to
‘Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine.’ The thousandth number appeared
in February, 1899.

_The European._ Founded by James Perry in 1782.

_The Lady’s._ _The Lady’s Magazine; or entertaining Companion for
the fair sex_, 1717–1818. A new series began in 1820.

_The London._ _The London Magazine_ was started in January 1820,
with John Scott (1723–1821) as editor, and for some years
maintained a very high level of excellence. See Talfourd’s
_Final Memorials of Charles Lamb_ (II. 1–9), and Mr. Bertram
Dobell’s _Sidelights on Charles Lamb_. Hazlitt was a regular
contributor.

_The Monthly._ _The Monthly Magazine_ founded in 1796 by Richard
(afterwards Sir Richard) Phillips (1767–1840).

_The New Monthly._ _The New Monthly Magazine_ was started by Henry
Colburn (d. 1855) in 1814, in opposition to Phillips’s magazine.
A new series, edited by Thomas Campbell, began in 1821. Many of
Hazlitt’s best-known essays were contributed to it. The working
editor was Cyrus Redding (1785–1870).

_The head of Memnon._ Hazlitt might have seen a plate of this in
_The London Magazine_ for February, 1821.

_Dr. Johnson’s dispute, etc._ See Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_ (ed.
G. B. Hill), I. 154.

222. _Elia._ Lamb wrote many of his _Elia_ essays in _The London
Magazine_, chiefly between 1820 and 1823.

_The author of Table Talk._ Hazlitt himself.

_The Confessions of an Opium-Eater._ Published in _The London
Magazine_ for September and October, 1821.

_Tales of Traditional Literature._ A series of tales by Allan
Cunningham (1784–1842), republished in 1822 as ‘Traditional
Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry.’

_Mr. Geoffrey Crayon._ Washington Irving (1783–1859), whose
_Sketch Book_, to which Hazlitt probably refers, appeared in New
York, 1819–1820.

‘_With a blush_,’ _etc._ _Troilus and Cressida_, Act I. Sc. 3.

223. _The Editor, we are afraid, etc._ Talfourd, in his _Final
Memorials of Charles Lamb_, gives a lively account of Campbell’s
fastidious editorship of the _New Monthly_.

‘_Lively_’ [waking], _etc._ _Coriolanus_, Act IV. Sc. 5.

‘_The sin_,’ _etc._ _Hebrews_, xii. 1.

225. _The Anti-Jacobin._ Cf. _ante_, p. 139 and note.

‘_The manna_,’ _etc._ Pulci’s _Morgante Maggiore_. See _ante_, p.
69.

‘_The pelting_,’ _etc._ _King Lear_, Act III. Sc. 4.

227. _A well-known paper._ _John Bull_, Oct. 27, 1822. On the previous
Tuesday (Oct. 22) young Las Cases ‘applied a horsewhip to the
shoulders’ of Sir Hudson Lowe, with a view, as he said, to
provoke a duel. Lowe obtained a warrant for the apprehension of
Las Cases, who, however, retired to France. The radical papers
made great fun of the incident. See _The Examiner_, Nov. 3,
1822.

_A man of classical taste, etc._ Hazlitt refers to Leigh Hunt and
_The Story of Rimini_. See vol. I. (_A Letter to William
Gifford_), pp. 376–378 and notes.

228. _A young poet._ On Keats and his Critics see vol. VI. (_Table
Talk_), p. 98 and note, and vol. IV. (_The Spirit of the Age_),
pp. 302–307 and notes.

_Author of the Baviad, etc._ William Gifford.

229. _Such a paper was detected, etc._ This was _John Bull_, Theodore
Hook’s weekly paper, which on August 18, 1822, accused Mr. Fyshe
Palmer, member for Reading, of having said that ‘he should have
a dinner at the Crown on the occasion, with a haunch of venison,
and turtle, and _lots of punch_.’ The detection was quoted from
_The Times_ in _John Bull_, Sep. 15, 1822.

LANDOR’S IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS

Hazlitt here reviews the first two volumes of Walter Savage Landor’s
(1775–1864) _Imaginary Conversations_, published in 1824. A second
edition, ‘corrected and enlarged,’ appeared in 1826, and vol. III.
completing the ‘first series,’ in 1828. Vols. IV. and V. constituting
the ‘second series,’ were published in 1829. For an account of Hazlitt’s
visit to Landor at Florence in 1825 see Forster’s _Walter Savage Landor,
a Biography_, II. 201–211, where a subsequent letter from Hazlitt to
Landor is quoted, in which he says: ‘I am much gratified that you are
pleased with the _Spirit of the Age_. Somebody ought to like it, for I
am sure there will be plenty to cry out against it. I hope you did not
find any sad blunders in the second volume; but you can hardly suppose
the depression of body and mind under which I wrote some of those
articles.’ This review of the _Imaginary Conversations_ seems to have
been cut about a good deal by Jeffrey.

PAGE

231. ‘_Great wits_,’ _etc._ _Absalom and Achitophel_, I. 163.

233. ‘_It travels in a road_’ [strait], _etc._ _Troilus and Cressida_,
Act III. Sc. 3.

235. _Dashed and brewed._ Dryden, _Absalom and Achitophel_, I. 114.

‘_To every good word_,’ _etc._ _Epistle to Titus_, I. 16.

238. ‘_All in conscience_,’ _etc._ Chaucer, _Prologue_, 150.

Note. _Tâtar._ Cf., _e.g._,

‘Persian and Copt and Tatar, in one bond
Of erring faith conjoin’d.’
_Roderick, the Last of the Goths_, I. 18–19.

See also _Notes and Queries_, tenth Series, I. 11, 12.

242. ‘_The fairest princess under sky._’ _The Faerie Queene_,
Introductory Stanzas, IV.

‘_Paint the lily_,’ _etc._ _King John_, Act IV. Sc. 2.

243. ‘_Famous poets’ verse._’ Spenser, _The Faerie Queene_, I. XI. 27,
and III. IV. 1.

‘_The spur_,’ _etc._ _Lycidas_, 70.

_Belvidera’s sorrows._ In Otway’s _Venice Preserved_.

245. _Occasion and Furor._ _The Faerie Queene_, Book II. Canto IV.

‘_Cymocles_,’ _etc._ _Ibid._, Book II. Canto VI.

_The philosopher of Malmesbury._ Hobbes.

250. _Horace’s ‘nine years.’_ ‘Nonumque prematur in annum.’ _Ars
Poetica_, 388.

‘_Que, si sous Adam_,’ _etc._ A line in Boileau’s tenth satire.
See the Conversation between the Abbé Delille and Walter Landor.

_General Mina._ The second volume of _Imaginary Conversations_ was
dedicated to General Espoz y Mina (1784–1835), the Spanish
patriot who opposed Napoleon, and, later, the tyranny of the
restored Bourbons.

_Balasteros._ Francisco Ballasteros (1770–1832), the Spanish
general, who had capitulated to the French invaders in 1823, and
been banished for life.

251. _Caviare to the multitude_ [general]. _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.

254. _Articles in The Friend._ See _The Friend_, February 8, 1810.
Coleridge referred to this essay, and quoted passages from it in
one of the articles he wrote in _The Courier_ in 1811. See
_Essays on his own Times_, III. 829 _et seq._ These articles are
probably alluded to by Hazlitt when he speaks of ‘strong
allusions ... in a celebrated journal.’

255. ‘_Final hope_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, II. 143.

‘_To shut_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘She opened; but to shut excelled her
power.’ _Paradise Lost_, II. 883–884.

_Bolivar._ Simon Bolivar (1783–1830), ‘the Liberator’ of South
America. Landor dedicated to him the third volume of his
_Imaginary Conversations_.

_Gebir._ Published anonymously in 1798. ‘Many parts of it,’ says
Landor (Preface to 1831 edition), ‘were first composed in Latin;
and I doubted in which language to complete it.’

‘_Pleased they remember_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Gebir_, I. 168–169.

_Count Julian._ Published anonymously in 1812.

SHELLEY’S POSTHUMOUS POEMS

The volume here reviewed was published in 1824 by John and Henry L.
Hunt. Hazlitt had little sympathy with Shelley either as a man or a
poet. The grounds of his distrust of him as a man are given more than
once, most fully, perhaps, in the essay ‘On Paradox and Common-Place’
(_Table Talk_, VI. 148–150), which led to the quarrel between Hazlitt
and Leigh Hunt in 1821. See _Memoirs of William Hazlitt_, I. 304–315,
and _Four Generations of a Literary Family_, I. 130–135. As for
Shelley’s poetry, P. G. Patmore suggests that Hazlitt knew little or
nothing of it. ‘Though I have often,’ he says (_My Friends and
Acquaintance_, III. 136), ‘heard him speak disparagingly of Shelley as a
poet, I never heard him refer to a single line or passage of his
published writings.’ Hazlitt met Shelley at Leigh Hunt’s, and the two
discussed Monarchy and Republicanism until three in the morning.’ See
Mary Shelley’s journal of 1817, quoted in Professor Dowden’s _Life_, II.
103.

PAGE

256. ‘_Too fiery_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘You know the fiery quality of the
duke.’ _King Lear_, Act II. Sc. 4.

‘_Beyond the visible_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Paradise Lost_, VII. 22.

‘_All air._’ Cf. ‘He is pure air and fire.’ _Henry V._, Act III.
Sc. 7.

257. ‘_So divinely wrought_,’ _etc._ Cf. John Donne, _An Anatomy of the
World, Second Anniversary_, 245–246.

‘_And dallies_,’ _etc._ _Richard III._, Act I. Sc. 3.

‘_More subtle web_,’ _etc._ _The Faerie Queene_, Book II. Canto
XII. St. 77.

259. ‘_There the antics sit._’ _Richard II._, Act. III. Sc. 2.

‘_Palsied eld._’ _Measure for Measure_, Act III. Sc. 1.

260. _Mr. Shelley died, etc._ When Shelley’s body was cast ashore near
Via Reggio (July 18, 1822), a volume of Keats’s poems was found
in one pocket, and a volume of Sophocles in the other.

_Two out of four poets, patriots, and friends._ The four poets
were presumably Shelley, Keats, Byron and Leigh Hunt.

_Keats died young, etc._ Cf. vol. VI. (_Table Talk_) p. 99.

_A third has since been added, etc._ Byron died at Mesolonghi,
April 19, 1824.

261. _Mrs. Shelley._ Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (1797–1851) married to
Shelley, Dec. 30, 1816.

_Alastor._ Originally published in 1816.

_Translation of the May-day Night._ Published in _The Liberal_.

_Julian and Maddalo._ This poem, first published in _Posthumous
Poems_, had been sent to Leigh Hunt in 1819 for publication by
Ollier.

264. ‘_Made as flax._’ Cf. _Judges_, XV. 14.

267. _The Letter to a Friend in London._ The _Letter to Maria Gisborne_
presumably.

‘_Toys of feathered cupid._’ _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 3.

269. ‘_The sun is warm_,’ _etc._ _Stanzas written in dejection near
Naples._

270. _Mr. Keats’s sounding lines._ _Endymion_, Book I. 232 _et seq._

‘_Weakness and melancholy._’ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.

271. ‘_To elevate and surprise._’ The Duke of Buckingham’s _Rehearsal_,
Act I. Sc. 1.

‘_Overstep the modesty._’ Hamlet, Act III., Sc. 2.

‘_Good set terms._’ _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc. 7.

_Lord Leveson Gower._ Lord Francis Leveson Gower (1800–1857), son
of the second Marquis of Stafford, inherited a large property
from his uncle, Francis Henry Egerton, Earl of Bridgewater,
assumed the name of Egerton, and in 1846 was created Earl of
Ellesmere. His translation of _Faust_ appeared in 1823.

275. Note. See vol. V. pp. 202–203, and notes.

LADY MORGAN’S LIFE OF SALVATOR

This _Life_ appeared in 1823. Sydney Owenson (1783?–1859), author of
_The Wild Irish Girl_ in (1806), and many other less known books, was
the daughter of Robert Owenson, the actor, and in 1812 married Sir
Thomas Charles Morgan, the physician and philosopher. Cf. _The Spirit of
the Age_ (vol. IV.), p. 308, and _The Plain Speaker_ (vol. VII.), p.
220. This review was republished in _Criticisms on Art_ (1843–4) and in
_Essays on the Fine Arts_ (1873).

PAGE

278. _The miracle in Virgil._ _Æneid_, III. 37–40.

279. ‘_Housing with wild men_,’ _etc._ Coleridge, _Zapolya_, Act II.
Sc. 1.

280. ‘_Their mind_,’ _etc._ Sir Edward Dyer’s poem, beginning ‘My mind
to me a kingdom is.’

‘_In measureless content._’ _Macbeth_, Act II. Sc. 1.

‘_Unjust tribunals_,’ _etc._ _Samson Agonistes_, 695.

282. ‘_Pride, pomp_,’ _etc._ _Othello_, Act III. Sc. 3.

283. _The celebrated Lanfranco._ Giovanni Lanfranco (1581–1647), the
painter.

‘_Skins and films_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 4.

287. ‘_Another moon_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, V. 311.

291. ‘_According to Lord Bacon_,’ _etc._ _Advancement of Learning_, Bk.
II. iv. p. 2.

‘_Burke, in a like manner_,’ _etc._ See _A Letter to a Member of
the National Assembly_, 1791 (_Works_, Bohn, II. p. 535, _et
seq._)

292. ‘_Moralizes_,’ _etc._ _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc. 1.

_Bernini._ Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), the sculptor.

296. _Passeri._ Giovanni Battista Passeri (1610?–1679), author of _Vite
de’Pittori, Scultori, e Architetri_, _etc._ (1772).

_Mrs. Radcliffe’s Italian._ Ann Radcliffe’s _The Italian_, 1797.

_Thaddeus of Warsaw._ By Jane Porter (1776–1850), published in
1803.

298. ‘_Like a wounded snake_,’ _etc._ Pope, _An Essay on Criticism_
(II.), 357.

300. ‘_Where universal Pan_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, IV. 266–268.

301. _Massaniello._ Tommaso Aniello—called Masaniello—(1623–1647), the
fisherman leader of the Neapolitan revolt against the Spanish
viceroy in 1647.

AMERICAN LITERATURE—DR. CHANNING

This review is stated to be Hazlitt’s in the volume of _Selections from
the Correspondence of the late Macvey Napier_, p. 70 note. Jeffrey
writes to Napier, Nov. 23, 1829 (_Ibid._ pp. 69–70): ‘Your American
reviewer is not a first-rate man, a clever writer enough, but not deep
or judicious, or even very fair. I have no notion who he is. If he is
young he may come to good, but he should be trained to a more modest
opinion of himself, and to take a little more pains, and go more
patiently and thoroughly into his subject.’ Carlyle, on the other hand,
writes, Jan. 27. 1830 (_Ibid._ p. 78): ‘I liked the last [number] very
well; the review of Channing seemed to me especially good.’ It is very
strange that Jeffrey should not have recognised Hazlitt’s manner.
Procter (_An Autobiographical Fragment_, p. 261) quotes a letter from
Jeffrey of May 12, 1826, in which he says, ‘Can you tell me anything of
our ancient ally Hazlitt?’

PAGE

310. _Mr. Brown._ Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810), one of the
earliest of American writers, author of _Wieland_ (1798),
_Ormond_ (1799), _Arthur Mervyn_ (1800), _Edgar Huntley_ (1801),
_Clara Howard_ (1801), and _Jane Talbot_ (1804). The first four
of these are mentioned by Peacock as amongst the books ‘which
took the deepest root in Shelley’s mind, and had the strongest
influence on the formation of his character.’

310. _Mr. Cooper._ James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), whose most famous
novel, _The Last of the Mohicans_, had appeared in 1826.

311. _An ample tribute of respect._ See reviews in the _Edinburgh_ of
_The Sketch Book_ (Aug. 1820), and _Bracebridge Hall_ (Nov.
1822). Both were written by Jeffrey.

_Frankenstein._ Mrs. Shelley’s novel (1818).

‘_Of Brownies_,’ _etc._ ‘Of Brownies and of bogillis full this
buke.’ Gawin Douglas, _Aeneis_, VI. Prol. 18.

_They hoot the Beggar’s Opera, etc._ Cf. vol. VIII. (_Dramatic
Essays_), p. 473 and note.

312. _Our own unrivalled novelist._ Sir Walter Scott.

313. _The historiographer of Brother Jonathan._ Hazlitt refers to John
Neal’s _Brother Jonathan: or the New Englanders_. 3 vols.
Edinburgh, 1825.

_His Pilot._ 1823.

‘_To suffer_,’ _etc._ _The Tempest_, Act I. Sc. 2.

314. ‘_Line upon line_,’ _etc._ _Isaiah_, xxviii. 10.

_Franklin._ Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790).

_Poor Robin._ _Poor Richard’s Almanac_, begun by Franklin in 1732,
and continued with great success for twenty-five years.

_1754._ This apparently should be 1764.

‘_Metre-ballad-mongering._’ Cf. _Henry IV._, Part I. Act III. Sc.
1.

315. _Jonathan Edwards._ Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), whose _Freedom
of the Will_ appeared in 1754. Cf. Hazlitt’s philosophical
lectures in vol. XI.

‘_An honest method._’ _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.

316. _Dr. Channing._ William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), minister of a
Congregational church in Boston from 1803. He had visited
England in 1822. Hazlitt is here reviewing _Sermons and Tracts_:
including _Remarks on the Character and Writings of Milton, and
of Fenelon; and an analysis of the Character of Napoleon
Bonaparte_, 1829.

320. _In answer to Fenelon._ Channing’s ‘Remarks’ were upon a volume of
Selections from Fénelon, published in Boston, 1829.

323. _Bishop Butler’s Sermons._ 1726.

325. ‘_Wise above what is written._’ Cf. _1 Corinthians_, iv. 6.

‘_With authority_,’ _etc._ _S. Matthew_, vii. 29.

326. ‘_As having something_,’ _etc._ _The Advancement of Learning_,
Book II. iv. 2.

327. ‘_The father of lies._’ Cf. Burton, _The Anatomy of Melancholy_,
Partition I. Sec. IV. Member i. Subsection 4.

328. _Fielding’s character of Mr. Abraham Adams._ _Joseph Andrews_,
Book III. chap. 5.

329. ‘_No babies._’ ‘I am no baby.’ _Titus Andronicus_, Act V. Sc. 3.

FLAXMAN’S LECTURES ON SCULPTURE

A review of John Flaxman’s (1755–1826) _Lectures on Sculpture_ (1829).
The review was republished in _Criticisms on Art_ (1843–4) and in
_Essays on the Fine Arts_ (1873). Flaxman had been professor of
sculpture at the Royal Academy from 1810. In his _Memoirs of William
Hazlitt_ (II. 269) Mr. W. C. Hazlitt gives a number of marginal notes
made by Hazlitt upon his copy of Flaxman’s Lectures probably with a view
to this article.

PAGE

335. _Torregiano._ Pietro Torrigiano (c. 1470–1522), the Florentine
sculptor who broke Michael Angelo’s nose. He came to England in
1509.

‘_A city_,’ _etc._ _S. Matthew_, V. 14.

336. ‘_High and palmy._’ _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 1.

‘_Growing with its growth._’ Pope, _Essay on Man_, II. 136.

341. _Sir Anthony Carlisle._ Sir Anthony Carlisle (1768–1840), the
surgeon, studied for a time at the Royal Academy, and wrote an
essay ‘On the Connection between Anatomy and the Fine Arts,’ to
which Hazlitt probably refers.

344. ‘_To make Gods_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Genesis_, i. 26.

‘_Hitherto_,’ _etc._ _Job_, xxxviii. 11.

345. ‘_The labour_,’ _etc._ _Macbeth_, Act II. Sc. 3.

348. ‘_Shreds and patches._’ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 4.

‘_Upon her eyebrows_,’ _etc._ _The Faerie Queene_, Book II. Canto
III. St. 25.

349. ‘_By their own beauty_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘By our own spirits are we
deified.’ Wordsworth, _Resolution and Independence_, 47.

350. ‘_The scale_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Paradise Lost_, VIII. 591–592.

351. _Incendio del Borgo._ Raphael’s fresco in the Vatican.

WILSON’S LIFE AND TIMES OF DANIEL DEFOE

Walter Wilson’s (1781–1847) _Memoirs of the Life and Times of Daniel
Defoe_ was published in 3 vols. in 1830.

PAGE

355. _Tutchin and Ridpath._ John Tutchin (1661?–1707) and George
Ridpath (d. 1726), two Whig contemporaries of Defoe, successive
editors of _The Observator_.

_Dispraise of the Beggars’ Opera._ See Wilson’s _Memoirs, etc., of
Defoe_, III. 595–596.

356. ‘_Excellent iteration in him._’ Cf. _Henry IV._, Part I. Act I.
Sc. 2.

_As honest Hector Macintyre, etc._ See _The Antiquary_, chap. XX.

‘_Thinly scattered_,’ _etc._ _Romeo and Juliet_, Act V. Sc. 1.

_Rari nantes, etc._ _Æneid_, I. 118.

356. ‘_I remember my grandfather_,’ _etc._ Wilson’s _Memoirs, etc., of
Defoe_, I. 6, and Defoe’s _Review_, vii. Pref.

357. _Mr. Samuel Wesley._ Samuel Wesley the elder (1662–1735), whose
attack on the education of the Dissenters (1703) engaged him in
a controversy.

_Shortest Way with the Dissenters._, 1702.

358. _Harley._ Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford (1661–1724).

‘_Heaven lies about us_,’ _etc._ Wordsworth, Ode, _Intimations of
Immortality_, 66.

‘_Poor Robinson Crusoe_,’ _etc._ _Robinson Crusoe_, Section XV.

358. _True-born Englishman._ 1701.

_Review._ 1704–1713.

_Essays on Trade._ Defoe wrote several tracts on the subject of
trade.

360. _Legion Petition._ ‘Legion’s Memorial’ to the House of Commons in
reference to the Kentish Petition of 1701. A second Memorial
appeared in the following year.

‘_Heaping coals of fire_,’ _etc._ _Romans_, xii. 20.

‘_Stuff of the conscience._’ _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 2.

‘_A foregone conclusion._’ _Othello_, Act III. Sc. 3.

361. _Toland._ John Toland (1670–1722), the deist.

362. Note. See Wilson’s _Memoirs, etc., of Defoe_, I. 73 note.

363. ‘_There goes a very honest gentleman_,’ _etc._ According to Madame
de La Fayette (_Mémoires de la Cour de France_), it was Louvois’
brother, the Archbishop of Rheims, who, on seeing James come
from Mass, said: ‘Voilà un fort bon homme, il a quitté trois
royaumes pour une messe.’

_Dr. Sherlock._ William Sherlock (1641?–1707), one of the
non-jurors for a short time after the Revolution.

364. _An eloquent passage._ See Wilson’s _Memoirs, etc., of Defoe_, I.
76–77 and Defoe’s _Review_, IV. 643–644.

_The Exclusion Bill._ Passed by the House of Commons and rejected
by the House of Lords, 1680.

_A very curious account._ Wilson’s _Memoirs, etc., of Defoe_, I.
156 _et seq._

366. _His Complete Tradesman._ _The Complete English Tradesman_, 1727.

367. ‘_To keep their seats firm._’ _Reflections on the Revolution in
France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 97).

‘_The fate of James_,’ _etc._ Wilson’s _Memoirs, etc., of Defoe_,
I. 162–163.

368. ‘_Courage had been screwed_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 7.

_An Address to the Dissenters._ This pamphlet (1687) seems to have
been Bishop Burnet’s. See Lee’s _Life of Defoe_ and _Notes and
Queries_, 4th Ser. IV. 253, 307.

_The Marquis of Halifax._ George Savile, Marquis of Halifax
(1633–1695). The pamphlet referred to by Hazlitt appeared in
1686.

369. _An early Piece._ Lee (_Life of Defoe_, I. 15) regards this piece
(1683) and _Speculum Crape-gownorum_ (1682) as spurious.

_Lives of the Philipses._ William Godwin’s _Lives of Edward and
John Philips_, 1815.

Note. _An Appeal to Honour and Justice._ 1715.

370. ‘_The Hortus Siccus of Dissent._’ _Reflections on the Revolution
in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 14).

_Oldmixon._ John Oldmixon (1673–1742), whose _History of England
during the Reign of the Royal House of Stuart_ was published in
3 vols. 1729–1739.

371. ‘_Though that his joy_,’ _etc._ _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 1.

372. ‘_Not pierceable_‘, _etc._ Cf. ‘Not perceable with power of any
starr.’ _The Faerie Queene_, Book I. Canto I. St. 7.

373. ‘_Speaking a word_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Proverbs_, XV. 23.

374. _Sacheverell._ Henry Sacheverell (1674–1724). The sermon referred
to was preached before the University of Oxford on June 2, 1702.
See Wilson’s _Memoirs, etc. of Defoe_, II. 27–28.

‘_So should his anticipation_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.

375. _A Hymn to the Pillory._ 1703.

‘_See where on high_,’ _etc._ ‘Earless on high stood unabash’d De
Foe.’ _The Dunciad_, II. 147.

‘_Dishonour, honourable._’ Cf. ‘Honour dishonourable.’ _Paradise
Lost_, IV. 314.

‘_Condemned to everlasting fame._’ ‘Damned to everlasting fame.’
Pope, _Essay on Man_, IV. 284.

‘_Oh soul supreme_,’ _etc._ Pope, _Moral Essays_, Epistle V.
23–24.

‘_The fellow that was pilloried._’ See Swift’s _A Letter from a
Member of the House of Commons in Ireland, to a Member of the
House of Commons in England, concerning the Sacramental Test_
(1709).

‘_The superficial part of learning._’ Gay, in his _Present State
of Wit_ (1711), spoke of Defoe as a ‘fellow, who had excellent
natural parts, but wanted a small foundation of learning.’

376. ‘_Flying to others_,’ _etc._ Hamlet, Act III. Sc. 1.

376. ‘_Why troublest thou_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘Art thou come hither to
torment us before the time?’ _S. Matthew_, viii, 29.

377. _William Benson._ William Benson (1682–1754). Defoe was prosecuted
and imprisoned for his anti-Jacobite tracts of 1713, _Reasons
against the Succession of the House of Hanover, etc._

‘_The force of dulness_,’ _etc._ Cf. Dryden, _Lines printed under
the Engraved Portrait of Milton_, 5.

378. _His History of that event._ _History of the Union of Great
Britain_, 1709.

_Apology for the Massacre of Glencoe._ In Defoe’s _History of the
Union_, 4to. edition, pp. 68–73.

‘_Hamlet, Prince of Denmark_,’ _etc._ See Wilson’s _Memoirs, etc.,
of Defoe_, II. 457.

379. _His novels._ Those referred to by Hazlitt are _Moll Flanders_,
1721; _Roxana_, 1724; _Captain Singleton_, 1720; _Colonel Jack_,
1722; and _Memoirs of a Cavalier_, 1720.

_The Family Instructor._ 1715–1718.

‘_Meddling with the unclean thing._’ Cf. _2 Corinthians_, VI. 17.

380. ‘_All the fore-end of his time._’ _Cymbeline_, Act III. Sc. 3.

‘_Vice, by losing_,’ _etc._ Burke, _Reflections on the Revolution
in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 89).

‘_Purple light._’ Cf. ‘The bloom of young Desire and purple light
of Love.’ Gray, _The Progress of Poesy_, 41.

381. _What Mr. Lamb says, etc._ See Lamb’s ‘Estimate of De Foe’s
Secondary Novels,’ written for Wilson’s _Life of Defoe_ (III.
636). The paper is reprinted in _The Works of Charles and Mary
Lamb_, ed. E. V. Lucas, I. 325–327.

382. _Imposed upon Lord Chatham._ See Wilson’s _Memoirs, etc., of
Defoe_, III. 509.

_History of Apparitions._ _An Essay on the History and Reality of
Apparitions_, 1727.

‘_Call spirits_,’ _etc._ _Henry IV._, Part I., Act III. Sc. 1.

_History of the Plague._ _Journal of the Plague Year_, 1722.

MR. GODWIN

This was ostensibly a review of _Cloudesley_, published in 1830. Some
years previously Sir James Mackintosh had suggested that Hazlitt should
be asked to review Godwin’s novels. Towards the end of 1823 he wrote to
Godwin: ‘I see your novels advertised to-day. Could you ask Mr. Hazlitt
to review them in the _Edinburgh Review_. He is a very original thinker,
and notwithstanding some singularities which appear to me faults, a very
powerful writer. I say this, though I know he is no panegyrist of mine.
His critique might serve all our purposes, and would, I doubt not,
promote the interests of literature also.’ (C. Kegan Paul, _William
Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries_, II. 289.) The _Edinburgh_ had
reviewed Godwin’s _Fleetwood_ (vol. VI. p. 182), and had praised _Caleb
Williams_ very highly in a review of the _Lives of Edward and John
Philips_ (XXV. p. 485). Cf. Hazlitt’s sketch of Godwin in _The Spirit of
the Age_, vol. IV. pp. 200 _et seq._, and notes.

PAGE

385. _Dramatised._ _Caleb Williams_ was dramatised by George Colman the
younger as _The Iron Chest_. See vol. VIII. (_A View of the
English Stage_), p. 342.

386. ‘_Seemed like another morn_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, V. 310–311.

‘_Even in his ashes_,’ _etc._ Cf. Gray, _Elegy written in a
Country Church-Yard_, 92.

387. _Otium cum dignitate._ Cicero, _Pro Sestio_, XLV. 98.

‘_Retired leisure_,’ _etc._ _Il Penseroso_, 49–50.

387. _Horas non numero, etc._ The motto of a sun-dial near Venice. See
Hazlitt’s essay ‘On a Sun-Dial.’

‘_The iron rod_,’ _etc._ Vaguely quoted from _Paradise Lost_, II.
90–92.

‘_Stretched upon the rack_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Macbeth_, Act III. Sc. 2.

‘_And like a gallant horse_,’ _etc._ _Troilus and Cressida_, Act
III. Sc. 3.

_There is only one living writer._ Scott, no doubt.

388. ‘_O let not virtue_,’ _etc._ Loosely quoted from _Troilus and
Cressida_, Act III. Sc. 3.

‘_To elevate and surprise._’ The Duke of Buckingham’s _The
Rehearsal_, Act I. Sc. 1.

‘_Takes an inventory._’ Ben Jonson, _The Alchemist_, Act III. Sc.
2.

391. ‘_A pass of wit._’ Cf. ‘Wit shall not go unrewarded while I am
king of this country. “Steal by line and level” is an excellent
pass of pate.’ _The Tempest_, Act IV. Sc. 1.

‘_O’ersteps_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.

392. _Annesley._ Hazlitt refers to the well-known case of James
Annesley (1715–1760), who claimed to be the legitimate son and
heir of Lord Altham. The story will be found in Howell’s _State
Trials_ (vols. XVI. and XVII.), and has been used by other
novelists besides Godwin. See _Peregrine Pickle_ (chap. 98)
and Charles Reade’s _The Wandering Heir_. Godwin, in the
advertisement to _Cloudesley_, says: ‘It is but just that the
reader should be informed that a novel has been already written
on this theme, and printed in the year 1743, under the title of
“Memoirs of an unfortunate young Nobleman, Returned from a
Thirteen Years’ Slavery in America.”’ This is presumably the
work referred to by Hazlitt as ‘a novel with the title of
_Annesley_.’ In 1756 appeared _The Case of the Honourable J. A.,
humbly offered to all lovers of truth and justice_.

‘_Mark and likelihood._’ _Henry IV._, Part I., Act III. Sc. 2.

393. _Multum abludit imago._ Horace, _Satires_, II. 3, 320.

‘_Subject_ [servile] _to all_,’ _etc._ _Measure for Measure_, Act
III. Sc. 1.

‘_A fiery soul_,’ _etc._ Dryden, _Absalom and Achitophel_, I.
156–158.

394. ‘_But the lees_,’ _etc._ Loosely quoted from _Macbeth_, Act II.
Sc. 3.

‘_After a thousand victories_,’ _etc._ Shakespeare, Sonnet XXV.

‘_A great man’s memory_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.

395. ‘_At first no bigger_,’ _etc._ Cf. _S. Matthew_, xiii. 31.

397. ‘_A consummation_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 1.

‘_The scale by which we ascend._’ Cf. _Paradise Lost_, VIII.
591–592.

398. ‘_Reaches the verge_,’ _etc._ Cf. Pope, _Moral Essays_, II. 52.

399. _His New Man of Feeling._ _Fleetwood; or, The New Man of Feeling_,
1805.

_Mandeville._ 1817.

_Life of Chaucer._ 1803.

_Essay on Sepulchres._ 1809.

_Mr. Malthus’s theory._ See vol. IV. (_The Spirit of the Age_), p.
296.

400. _Sermons._ _Sketches of History, in Six Sermons_, 1784.

_An English Grammar._ The grammar was written by Hazlitt himself
and published by Mrs. Godwin at the Skinner Street house. See
vol IV., Bibliographical Note on p. 388. It contained a letter
written by Godwin under the pseudonym of Edward Baldwin.

Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press

-----

Footnote 1:

We have not forgotten Defoe as one of our own writers. The author of
Robinson Crusoe was an Englishman; and one of those Englishmen who
make us proud of the name.

Footnote 2:

See, among a thousand instances, the conclusion of the story of
Geneura.—‘And all that day we read no more!’

Footnote 3:

The late Mr. Burke was a writer of a very splendid imagination, and
great command of words. This was, with many persons, a sufficient
ground for concluding that he was a mere rhetorician, without depth of
thought or solidity of judgment.

Footnote 4:

‘Gli occhi di ch’io parlai si caldamente
E le braccia, e le mani, e i piedi, e ‘l viso
Che m’ havean si da me stesso diviso,
E fatto singular fra l’ altra gente;
Le crispe chiome d’ or puro lucente,
E ‘l lampeggiar de l’ angelico riso,
Che solean far in terra un paradiso,
Poco pulvere son che nulla sente!
Ed io pur vivo! onde mi doglio e sdegno.
Rimaso senza ‘l lume, ch’ amai tanto,
In gran fortuna, e ‘n disarmato legno.
Or sia qui fine al mio amoroso canto.
Secca e la vena de l’ usato ingegno
E la cetera mia rivolta in pianto.’

Literally as follows. ‘Those eyes of which I spoke so warmly, and the
arms, and the hands, and the feet, and the face, which have robbed me
of myself, and made me different from others; those crisped locks of
pure shining gold, and the lightning of that angelical smile, which
used to make a heaven upon earth, are now a little dust which feels
nothing!—And I still remain! whence I lament and disdain myself, left
without the light which I loved so much, in a troubled sea, and with
dismantled bark. Here then must end all my amorous songs. Dry is the
vein of my exhausted genius, and my lyre answers only in
lamentations!’

Footnote 5:

The universality of Shakespear’s genius has, perhaps, been a
disadvantage to his single works: the variety of his resources has
prevented him from giving that intense concentration of interest to
some of them which they might have had. He is in earnest only in Lear
and Timon. He combined the powers of Æschylus and Aristophanes, of
Dante and Rabelais, in his own mind. If he had been only half what he
was, he might have seemed greater.

Footnote 6:

Do not publications generally find their way there, without a
_direction_? R.

Footnote 7:

Why to Great Britain alone? R.

Footnote 8:

‘Multiscience (or a variety and quantity of acquired knowledge) does
not teach intelligence. But the Sibyll with wild enthusiastic mouth
shrilling forth unmirthful, inornate, and unperfumed truths, reaches
to a thousand years with her voice through the power of God.’

Footnote 9:

With all proper allowances for the effects of the Mundungus, we must
say that this answer appears to us very curiously characteristic of
the exaggerated and canting tone of this poet and his associates. A
man may or may not think time misemployed in reading newspapers:—but
we believe no man, out of the Pantisocratic or Lake school, ever
dreamed of denouncing it as unchristian and impious—even if he had not
himself begun and ended his career as an Editor of newspapers. The
same absurd exaggeration is visible in his magnificent eulogium on the
conversational talents of his Birmingham Unitarians.

Footnote 10:

See his criticisms on Bertram, vol. II., reprinted from the Courier.

Footnote 11:

We are aware that time conquers even nature, and that the characters
of nations change with a total change of circumstances. The modern
Italians are a very different race of people from the ancient Romans.
This gives us some chance. In the decomposition and degeneracy of the
sturdy old English character, which seems fast approaching, the mind
and muscles of the country may be sufficiently relaxed and softened to
imbibe a taste for all the refinements of luxury and show; and a
century of slavery may yield us a crop of the Fine Arts, to be soon
buried in sloth and barbarism again.

Footnote 12:

This name, for some reason or other, does not once occur in these
Memoirs.

Footnote 13:

The Editor of the Englishman for many years was a Mr. Radcliffe. He
had been formerly attached to some of our embassies into Italy, where
his lady accompanied him; and here she imbibed that taste for
picturesque scenery, and the obscure and wild superstitions of
mouldering castles, of which she has made so beautiful a use in her
Romances. The fair authoress kept herself almost as much _incognito_
as the Author of Waverley; nothing was known of her but her name in
the title-page. She never appeared in public, nor mingled in private
society, but kept herself apart, like the sweet bird that sings its
solitary notes, shrowded and unseen.

Footnote 14:

Many of these articles (particularly the Theatrical Criticism) are
unavoidably written over night, just as the paper is going to the
press, without correction or previous preparation. Yet they will often
stand a comparison with more laboured compositions. It is curious,
that what is done at so short a notice should bear so few marks of
haste. In fact, there is a kind of _extempore_ writing, as well as
_extempore_ speaking. Both are the effect of necessity and habit. If a
man has but words and ideas in his head, he can express himself in a
longer or a shorter time (with a little practice), just as he has a
motive for doing it. Where there is the necessary stimulus for making
the effort, what is given from a first impression, what is struck off
at a blow, is in many respects better than what is produced on
reflection, and at several heats.

Footnote 15:

One of Mr. Landor’s refinements in spelling.

Footnote 16:

‘Calculating the prices of provisions, and the increase of taxes, the
poet-laureate, in the time of Elizabeth, had about four times as much
as at present: so that Cecil spoke reasonably, Elizabeth
royally.’—_Note by the Author._

We were unwilling to suppress this hint for the increase of the
laureate’s salary, considering how worthily the situation is filled at
present; and Mr. Landor’s recommendation must be peremptory at court.
We observe that our author’s spelling of the word ‘laureate’ is the
same as Mr. Southey’s. Is the latter indebted to the same source for
the learned Orientalism of _Tâtar_ for Tartar? What a significant age
we live in! How many extravagant conclusions and false assumptions
lurk under that one orthoepy! He who innovates in things where custom
alone is concerned, must be proof against its suggestions in all other
cases; and when reason and fancy come into play, must indeed be a law
to himself.

Footnote 17:

We do not see this question in the same point of view as our author.
By his leave (as a mere general and speculative question), the
conquerors become amalgamated with the conquered: barbarism becomes
civilized. The claim of tyrants to rule over slaves is the only
principle that is eternal. These are the only two races, whose
interests are never reconciled.

Footnote 18:

‘Ææa, the island of Circe.’

Footnote 19:

‘The viper was the armorial device of the Visconti, tyrants of Milan.’

Footnote 20:

Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth.

Footnote 21:

‘The pavilions of the Caliphs of Bagdad were not so deliciously
placed, nor so sumptuously raised, as this retreat of the self-denying
brotherhood of the Certosa. It was founded in the fourteenth century
by Charles, son of Robert of Arragon, King of Naples.’

Footnote 22:

Evelyn, who visited Naples about this time, observes that ‘the country
people are so jovial and so addicted to music, that the very
husbandmen almost universally play on the guitar, singing and
accompanying songs in praise of their sweethearts, and will commonly
go to the field with their fiddle. They are merry, witty, and genial,
all of which I attribute to their ayre.’—_Memoirs_, vol. I.

Footnote 23:

‘Among the women were the Signorine Leonora and Caterina, who were
never heard but with rapture’ (says Della Valle, a contemporary of
Salvator, in speaking of the female musicians of this time)
‘particularly the elder who accompanied herself on the arch lute. I
remember their mother in her youth, when she sailed in her felucca
near the grotto of Pausilippo, with her golden harp in her hand; but
in our times these shores were inhabited by syrens, not only beautiful
and tuneful, but virtuous and beneficent.’

Footnote 24:

Burney’s History of Music. Dr. Burney purchased an old music book of
Salvator’s compositions, of his granddaughter, in 1773, and brought it
over with him to England.

Footnote 25:

He was thrown into gaol and executed, for his concern in some
desperate enterprise.

Footnote 26:

Why so? Was it not said just before, that this painter was deep in the
Neapolitan school? But Lady Morgan will have it so, and we cannot
contradict her.

Footnote 27:

We might refer to the back-ground of the St. Peter Martyr. Claude,
Gaspar, and Salvator could not have painted this one back-ground among
them! but we have already remarked, that _comparisons are odious_.

Footnote 28:

The Cardinal Sforza Pallavicini, having been present by his own
request at the recitation of one of these pieces, and being asked his
opinion, declared, that ‘Salvator’s poetry was full of splendid
passages, but that, as a whole, it was unequal.’

Footnote 29:

Lady Morgan is always quarrelling with Passeri’s style, because it is
not that of a modern Blue-stocking.

Footnote 30:

Hector St. John.

Footnote 31:

Verse and poetry has its source in this principle: it is the harmony
of the soul imparted from the strong impulse of pleasure to language
and to indifferent things; as a person hearing music walks in a
sustained and measured step over uneven ground.

Footnote 32:

It does not appear that the general form was coloured, as Mr. Flaxman
seems to argue.

Footnote 33:

‘It was the refuse, or what was called the _whig_, of the milk; and
was applied,’ says a Tory writer, ‘to what was still more sour, a
Scotch Presbyterian.’

Footnote 34:

Oldmixon’s History of England.

Footnote 35:

Defoe’s ‘Appeal to Honour and Honesty.’

Footnote 36:

Oldmixon’s History of England, vol. III. p. 36.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in
spelling.
2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
4. Denoted superscripts by a caret before a single superscript
character or a series of superscripted characters enclosed in
curly braces, e.g. M^r. or M^{ister}.

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