FOOTNOTES:

Ye harp-controling hymns! (or) ye hymns the sovereigns of harps!What God? what Hero?What Man shall we celebrate?Truly Pisa indeed is of Jove,But the Olympiad (or the Olympic games) did Hercules establish,The first-fruits of the spoils of war.But Theron for the four-horsed car,That bore victory to him,It behoves us now to voice aloud:The Just, the Hospitable,The Bulwark of Agrigentum,Of renowned fathersThe Flower, even himWho preserves his native city erect and safe.

But are such rhetorical caprices condemnable only for their deviation from the language of real life? and are they by no other means to be precluded, but by the rejection of all distinctions between prose and verse, save that of metre? Surely good sense, and a moderate insight into the constitution of the human mind, would be amply sufficient to prove, that such language and such combinations are the native produce neither of the fancy nor of the imagination; that their operation consists in the excitement of surprise by the juxtaposition and apparent reconciliation of widely different or incompatible things. As when, for instance, the hills are made to reflect the image of a voice. Surely, no unusual taste is requisite to see clearly, that this compulsory juxtaposition is not produced by the presentation of impressive or delightful forms to the inward vision, nor by any sympathy with the modifying powers with which the genius of the poet had united and inspirited all the objects of his thought; that it is therefore aspecies of wit, a pure work of the will, and implies a leisure and self-possession both of thought and of feeling, incompatible with the steady fervour of a mind possessed and filled with the grandeur of its subject. To sum up the whole in one sentence. When a poem, or a part of a poem, shall be adduced, which is evidently vicious in the figures and contexture of its style, yet for the condemnation of which no reason can be assigned, except that it differs from the style in which men actually converse, then, and not till then, can I hold this theory to be either plausible, or practicable, or capable of furnishing either rule, guidance, or precaution, that might not, more easily and more safely, as well as more naturally, have been deduced in the author’s own mind from considerations of grammar, logic, and the truth and nature of things, confirmed by the authority of works, whose fame is not ofONEcountry nor ofONEage.

FOOTNOTES:[3]I’ve measured it from side to side;’Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.[4]Nay, rack your brain—’tis all in vain,I’ll tell you every thing I know;But to the Thorn, and to the PondWhich is a little step beyond,I wish that you would go:Perhaps, when you are at the place,You something of her tale may trace.I’ll give you the best help I can:Before you up the mountain go,Up to the dreary mountain-top,I’ll tell you all I know.’Tis now some two-and-twenty yearsSince she (her name is Martha Ray)Gave, with a maiden’s true good will,Her company to Stephen Hill;And she was blithe and gay,And she was happy, happy stillWhene’er she thought of Stephen Hill.And they had fix’d the wedding-day,The morning that must wed them both;But Stephen to another maidHad sworn another oath;And, with this other maid, to churchUnthinking Stephen went—Poor Martha! on that woeful dayA pang of pitiless dismayInto her soul was sent;A fire was kindled in her breast,Which might not burn itself to rest.They say, full six months after this,While yet the summer leaves were green,She to the mountain-top would go,And there was often seen.’Tis said a child was in her womb,As now to any eye was plain;She was with child, and she was mad;Yet often she was sober sadFrom her exceeding pain.Oh me! ten thousand times I’d ratherThat he had died, that cruel father!****************************Last Christmas when we talked of this,Old farmer Simpson did maintain,That in her womb the infant wroughtAbout its mother’s heart, and broughtHer senses back again:And, when at last her time drew near,Her looks were calm, her senses clear.No more I know, I wish I did,And I would tell it all to you:For what became of this poor childThere’s none that ever knew:And if a child was born or no,There’s no one that could ever tell;And if ’twas born alive or dead,There’s no one knows, as I have said:But some remember well,That Martha Ray about this timeWould up the mountain often climb.[5]As the ingenious gentleman under the influence of the Tragic Muse contrived to dislocate, ‘I wish you a good morning, Sir! Thank you, Sir, and I wish you the same,’ into two blank-verse heroics:—To you a good morning, good Sir! I wish.You, Sir! I thank: to you the same wish I.In those parts of Mr. Wordsworth’s works which I have thoroughly studied, I find fewer instances in which this would be practicable than I have met in many poems, where an approximation of prose has been sedulously and on system guarded against. Indeed excepting the stanzas already quoted fromThe Sailor’s Mother, I can recollect but one instance: viz. a short passage of four or five lines inThe Brothers, that model of English pastoral, which I never yet read with unclouded eye.—‘James, pointing to its summit, over which they had all purposed to return together, informed them that he would wait for them there. They parted, and his comrades passed that way some two hours after, but they did not find him at the appointed place,a circumstance of which they took no heed: but one of them, going by chance into the house, which at this time was James’s house, learntthere, that nobody had seen him all that day.’ The only change which has been made is in the position of the little wordtherein two instances, the position in the original being clearly such as is not adopted in ordinary conversation. The other words printed initalicswere so marked because, though good and genuine English, they are not the phraseology of common conversation either in the word put in apposition, or in the connexion by the genitive pronoun. Men in general would have said, ‘but that was a circumstance they paid no attention to, or took no notice of;’ and the language is, on the theory of the preface, justified only by the narrator’s being theVicar. Yet if any earcouldsuspect, that these sentences were ever printed as metre, on those very words alone could the suspicion have been grounded.

[3]I’ve measured it from side to side;’Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.

[3]

I’ve measured it from side to side;’Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.

[4]Nay, rack your brain—’tis all in vain,I’ll tell you every thing I know;But to the Thorn, and to the PondWhich is a little step beyond,I wish that you would go:Perhaps, when you are at the place,You something of her tale may trace.I’ll give you the best help I can:Before you up the mountain go,Up to the dreary mountain-top,I’ll tell you all I know.’Tis now some two-and-twenty yearsSince she (her name is Martha Ray)Gave, with a maiden’s true good will,Her company to Stephen Hill;And she was blithe and gay,And she was happy, happy stillWhene’er she thought of Stephen Hill.And they had fix’d the wedding-day,The morning that must wed them both;But Stephen to another maidHad sworn another oath;And, with this other maid, to churchUnthinking Stephen went—Poor Martha! on that woeful dayA pang of pitiless dismayInto her soul was sent;A fire was kindled in her breast,Which might not burn itself to rest.They say, full six months after this,While yet the summer leaves were green,She to the mountain-top would go,And there was often seen.’Tis said a child was in her womb,As now to any eye was plain;She was with child, and she was mad;Yet often she was sober sadFrom her exceeding pain.Oh me! ten thousand times I’d ratherThat he had died, that cruel father!****************************Last Christmas when we talked of this,Old farmer Simpson did maintain,That in her womb the infant wroughtAbout its mother’s heart, and broughtHer senses back again:And, when at last her time drew near,Her looks were calm, her senses clear.No more I know, I wish I did,And I would tell it all to you:For what became of this poor childThere’s none that ever knew:And if a child was born or no,There’s no one that could ever tell;And if ’twas born alive or dead,There’s no one knows, as I have said:But some remember well,That Martha Ray about this timeWould up the mountain often climb.

[4]

Nay, rack your brain—’tis all in vain,I’ll tell you every thing I know;But to the Thorn, and to the PondWhich is a little step beyond,I wish that you would go:Perhaps, when you are at the place,You something of her tale may trace.I’ll give you the best help I can:Before you up the mountain go,Up to the dreary mountain-top,I’ll tell you all I know.’Tis now some two-and-twenty yearsSince she (her name is Martha Ray)Gave, with a maiden’s true good will,Her company to Stephen Hill;And she was blithe and gay,And she was happy, happy stillWhene’er she thought of Stephen Hill.And they had fix’d the wedding-day,The morning that must wed them both;But Stephen to another maidHad sworn another oath;And, with this other maid, to churchUnthinking Stephen went—Poor Martha! on that woeful dayA pang of pitiless dismayInto her soul was sent;A fire was kindled in her breast,Which might not burn itself to rest.They say, full six months after this,While yet the summer leaves were green,She to the mountain-top would go,And there was often seen.’Tis said a child was in her womb,As now to any eye was plain;She was with child, and she was mad;Yet often she was sober sadFrom her exceeding pain.Oh me! ten thousand times I’d ratherThat he had died, that cruel father!****************************Last Christmas when we talked of this,Old farmer Simpson did maintain,That in her womb the infant wroughtAbout its mother’s heart, and broughtHer senses back again:And, when at last her time drew near,Her looks were calm, her senses clear.No more I know, I wish I did,And I would tell it all to you:For what became of this poor childThere’s none that ever knew:And if a child was born or no,There’s no one that could ever tell;And if ’twas born alive or dead,There’s no one knows, as I have said:But some remember well,That Martha Ray about this timeWould up the mountain often climb.

I’ll give you the best help I can:Before you up the mountain go,Up to the dreary mountain-top,I’ll tell you all I know.’Tis now some two-and-twenty yearsSince she (her name is Martha Ray)Gave, with a maiden’s true good will,Her company to Stephen Hill;And she was blithe and gay,And she was happy, happy stillWhene’er she thought of Stephen Hill.

And they had fix’d the wedding-day,The morning that must wed them both;But Stephen to another maidHad sworn another oath;And, with this other maid, to churchUnthinking Stephen went—Poor Martha! on that woeful dayA pang of pitiless dismayInto her soul was sent;A fire was kindled in her breast,Which might not burn itself to rest.

They say, full six months after this,While yet the summer leaves were green,She to the mountain-top would go,And there was often seen.’Tis said a child was in her womb,As now to any eye was plain;She was with child, and she was mad;Yet often she was sober sadFrom her exceeding pain.Oh me! ten thousand times I’d ratherThat he had died, that cruel father!

****************************

Last Christmas when we talked of this,Old farmer Simpson did maintain,That in her womb the infant wroughtAbout its mother’s heart, and broughtHer senses back again:And, when at last her time drew near,Her looks were calm, her senses clear.

No more I know, I wish I did,And I would tell it all to you:For what became of this poor childThere’s none that ever knew:And if a child was born or no,There’s no one that could ever tell;And if ’twas born alive or dead,There’s no one knows, as I have said:But some remember well,That Martha Ray about this timeWould up the mountain often climb.

[5]As the ingenious gentleman under the influence of the Tragic Muse contrived to dislocate, ‘I wish you a good morning, Sir! Thank you, Sir, and I wish you the same,’ into two blank-verse heroics:—To you a good morning, good Sir! I wish.You, Sir! I thank: to you the same wish I.In those parts of Mr. Wordsworth’s works which I have thoroughly studied, I find fewer instances in which this would be practicable than I have met in many poems, where an approximation of prose has been sedulously and on system guarded against. Indeed excepting the stanzas already quoted fromThe Sailor’s Mother, I can recollect but one instance: viz. a short passage of four or five lines inThe Brothers, that model of English pastoral, which I never yet read with unclouded eye.—‘James, pointing to its summit, over which they had all purposed to return together, informed them that he would wait for them there. They parted, and his comrades passed that way some two hours after, but they did not find him at the appointed place,a circumstance of which they took no heed: but one of them, going by chance into the house, which at this time was James’s house, learntthere, that nobody had seen him all that day.’ The only change which has been made is in the position of the little wordtherein two instances, the position in the original being clearly such as is not adopted in ordinary conversation. The other words printed initalicswere so marked because, though good and genuine English, they are not the phraseology of common conversation either in the word put in apposition, or in the connexion by the genitive pronoun. Men in general would have said, ‘but that was a circumstance they paid no attention to, or took no notice of;’ and the language is, on the theory of the preface, justified only by the narrator’s being theVicar. Yet if any earcouldsuspect, that these sentences were ever printed as metre, on those very words alone could the suspicion have been grounded.

To you a good morning, good Sir! I wish.You, Sir! I thank: to you the same wish I.

In those parts of Mr. Wordsworth’s works which I have thoroughly studied, I find fewer instances in which this would be practicable than I have met in many poems, where an approximation of prose has been sedulously and on system guarded against. Indeed excepting the stanzas already quoted fromThe Sailor’s Mother, I can recollect but one instance: viz. a short passage of four or five lines inThe Brothers, that model of English pastoral, which I never yet read with unclouded eye.—‘James, pointing to its summit, over which they had all purposed to return together, informed them that he would wait for them there. They parted, and his comrades passed that way some two hours after, but they did not find him at the appointed place,a circumstance of which they took no heed: but one of them, going by chance into the house, which at this time was James’s house, learntthere, that nobody had seen him all that day.’ The only change which has been made is in the position of the little wordtherein two instances, the position in the original being clearly such as is not adopted in ordinary conversation. The other words printed initalicswere so marked because, though good and genuine English, they are not the phraseology of common conversation either in the word put in apposition, or in the connexion by the genitive pronoun. Men in general would have said, ‘but that was a circumstance they paid no attention to, or took no notice of;’ and the language is, on the theory of the preface, justified only by the narrator’s being theVicar. Yet if any earcouldsuspect, that these sentences were ever printed as metre, on those very words alone could the suspicion have been grounded.

Thetime chosen is early morning, before sunrise, when the jolly company are just quitting the Tabarde Inn. The Knight and Squire with the Squire’s Yeoman lead the Procession; next follow the youthful Abbess, her Nun, and three Priests; her greyhounds attend her:

Of small hounds had she that she fedWith roast flesh, milk, and wastel bread.

Next follow the Friar and Monk; then the Tapiser, the Pardoner, and the Sompnour and Manciple. After these ‘Our Host’, who occupies the centre of the cavalcade, directs them to the Knight as the person who would be likely to commence their task of each telling a tale in their order. After the Host follow the Shipman, the Haberdasher, the Dyer, the Franklin, the Physician, the Ploughman, the Lawyer, the Poor Parson, the Merchant, the Wife of Bath, the Miller, the Cook, the Oxford Scholar, Chaucer himself; and the Reeve comes as Chaucer has described:

And ever he rode hinderest of the rout.

These last are issuing from the gateway of the Innthe Cook and the Wife of Bath are both taking their morning’s draught of comfort. Spectators stand at the gateway of the Inn, and are composed of an old Man, a Woman, and Children.

The Landscape is an eastward view of the country, from the Tabarde Inn in Southwark, as it may be supposed to have appeared in Chaucer’s time, interspersed with cottages and villages. The first beams of the Sun are seen above the horizon; some buildings and spires indicate the situation of the Great City. The Inn is a Gothic building, which Thynne in his Glossary says was the lodging of the Abbot of Hyde, by Winchester. On the Inn is inscribed its title, and a proper advantage is taken of this circumstance to describe the subject of the Picture. The words written over the gateway of the Inn are as follow: ‘The Tabarde Inn, by Henry Baillie, the lodgynge-house for Pilgrims who journey to Saint Thomas’s Shrine at Canterbury.’

The characters of Chaucer’s Pilgrims are the characters which compose all ages and nations. As one age falls, another rises, different to mortal sight, but to immortals only the same; for we see the same characters repeated again and again, in animals, vegetables, minerals, and in men. Nothing new occurs in identical existence; Accident ever varies, Substance can never suffer change nor decay.

Of Chaucer’s characters, as described in hisCanterbury Tales, some of the names or titles are altered by time, but the characters themselves for ever remain unaltered; and consequently they are the physiognomies or lineaments of universal human life, beyond which Nature never steps. Names alter, things never alter. I have knownmultitudes of those who would have been monks in the age of monkery, who in this deistical age are deists. As Newton numbered the stars, and as Linnaeus numbered the plants, so Chaucer numbered the classes of men.

The Painter has consequently varied the heads and forms of his personages into all Nature’s varieties; the horses he has also varied to accord to their riders; the costume is correct according to authentic monuments.

The Knight and Squire with the Squire’s Yeoman lead the Procession, as Chaucer has also placed them first in his Prologue. The Knight is a true Hero, a good, great and wise man; his whole-length portrait on horseback, as written by Chaucer, cannot be surpassed. He has spent his life in the field, has ever been a conqueror, and is that species of character which in every age stands as the guardian of man against the oppressor. His son is like him, with the germ of perhaps greater perfection still, as he blends literature and the arts with his warlike studies. Their dress and their horses are of the first rate, without ostentation, and with all the true grandeur that unaffected simplicity when in high rank always displays. The Squire’s Yeoman is also a great character, a man perfectly knowing in his profession:

And in his hand he bare a mighty bow.

Chaucer describes here a mighty man, one who in war is the worthy attendant on noble heroes.

The Prioress follows these with her female Chaplain:

Another Nonne also with her had she,That was her Chaplaine, and Priests three.

This Lady is described also as of the first rank, rich and honoured. She has certain peculiarities and little delicate affectations, not unbecoming in her, being accompanied with what is truly grand and really polite; her person and face Chaucer has described with minuteness; it is very elegant, and was the beauty of our ancestors till after Elizabeth’s time, when voluptuousness and folly began to be accounted beautiful.

Her companion and her three Priests were no doubt all perfectly delineated in those parts of Chaucer’s work which are now lost; we ought to suppose them suitable attendants on rank and fashion.

The Monk follows these with the Friar. The Painter has also grouped with these the Pardoner and the Sompnour and the Manciple, and has here also introduced one of the rich citizens of London—characters likely to ride in company, all being above the common rank in life, or attendants on those who were so.

For the Monk is described by Chaucer, as a man of the first rank in society, noble, rich, and expensively attended; he is a leader of the age, with certain humorous accompaniments in his character, that do not degrade, but render him an object of dignified mirth, but also with other accompaniments not so respectable.

The Friar is a character of a mixed kind:

A friar there was, a wanton and a merry;

but in his office he is said to be a ‘full solemn man’; eloquent, amorous, witty and satirical; young, handsome and rich; he is a complete rogue,with constitutional gaiety enough to make him a master of all the pleasures of the world:

His neck was white as the flour de lis,Thereto strong he was as a champioun.

It is necessary here to speak of Chaucer’s own character, that I may set certain mistaken critics right in their conception of the humour and fun that occur on the journey. Chaucer is himself the great poetical observer of men, who in every age is born to record and eternize its acts. This he does as a master, as a father and superior, who looks down on their little follies from the Emperor to the Miller, sometimes with severity, oftener with joke and sport.

Accordingly Chaucer has made his Monk a great tragedian, one who studied poetical art. So much so that the generous Knight is, in the compassionate dictates of his soul, compelled to cry out:

‘Ho,’ quoth the Knyght, ‘good Sir, no more of this;That ye have said is right ynough, I wis,And mokell more; for little heavinessIs right enough for much folk, as I guesse.I say, for me, it is a great disease,Whereas men have been in wealth and ease,To heare of their sudden fall, alas!And the contrary is joy and solas.’

The Monk’s definition of tragedy in the proem to his tale is worth repeating:

Tragedie is to tell a certain story,As old books us maken memory,Of hem that stood in great prosperity,And be fallen out of high degree,Into miserie, and ended wretchedly.

Though a man of luxury, pride and pleasure, he is a master of art and learning, though affecting todespise it. Those who can think that the proud huntsman and noble housekeeper, Chaucer’s Monk, is intended for a buffoon or burlesque character, know little of Chaucer.

For the Host who follows this group, and holds the centre of the cavalcade, is a first-rate character, and his jokes are no trifles; they are always, though uttered with audacity, and equally free with the Lord and the Peasant—they are always substantially and weightily expressive of knowledge and experience; Henry Baillie, the keeper of the greatest Inn of the greatest City, for such was the Tabarde Inn in Southwark near London, our Host, was also a leader of the age.

By way of illustration I instance Shakespeare’s Witches inMacbeth. Those who dress them for the stage, consider them as wretched old women, and not, as Shakespeare intended, the Goddesses of Destiny; this shows how Chaucer has been misunderstood in his sublime work. Shakespeare’s Fairies also are the rulers of the vegetable world, and so are Chaucer’s; let them be so considered, and then the poet will be understood, and not else.

But I have omitted to speak of a very prominent character, the Pardoner, the Age’s Knave, who always commands and domineers over the high and low vulgar. This man is sent in every age for a rod and scourge, and for a blight, for a trial of men, to divide the classes of men; he is in the most holy sanctuary, and he is suffered by Providence for wise ends, and has also his great use, and his grand leading destiny.

His companion the Sompnour is also a Devil of the first magnitude, grand, terrific, rich, andhonoured in the rank of which he holds the destiny. The uses to society are perhaps equal of the Devil and of the Angel; their sublimity who can dispute?

In daunger had he at his own gise,The young girls of his diocese,And he knew well their counsel, &c.

The principal figure in the next group is the Good Parson; an Apostle, a real Messenger of Heaven, sent in every age for its light and its warmth. This man is beloved and venerated by all, and neglected by all: he serves all, and is served by none. He is, according to Christ’s definition, the greatest of his age: yet he is a Poor Parson of a town. Read Chaucer’s description of the Good Parson, and bow the head and the knee to Him, Who in every age sends us such a burning and a shining light. Search, O ye rich and powerful, for these men and obey their counsel; then shall the golden age return. But alas! you will not easily distinguish him from the Friar or the Pardoner; they also are ‘full solemn men’, and their counsel you will continue to follow.

I have placed by his side the Sergeant-at-Lawe, who appears delighted to ride in his company, and between him and his brother the Ploughman; as I wish men of law would always ride with them, and take their counsel, especially in all difficult points. Chaucer’s Lawyer is a character of great venerableness, a Judge and a real master of the jurisprudence of his age.

The Doctor of Physic is in this group; and the Franklin, the voluptuous country gentleman, contrasted with the Physician, and, on his other hand, with two Citizens of London. Chaucer’scharacters live age after age. Every age is a Canterbury Pilgrimage; we all pass on, each sustaining one of these characters; nor can a child be born who is not one or other of these characters of Chaucer. The Doctor of Physic is described as the first of his profession, perfect, learned, completely Master and Doctor in his art. Thus the reader will observe that Chaucer makes every one of his characters perfect in his kind; every one is an Antique Statue, the image of a class and not of an imperfect individual.

This group also would furnish substantial matter, on which volumes might be written. The Franklin is one who keeps open table, who is the genius of eating and drinking, the Bacchus; as the Doctor of Physic is the Aesculapius, the Host is the Silenus, the Squire is the Apollo, the Miller is the Hercules, &c. Chaucer’s characters are a description of the eternal Principles that exist in all ages. The Franklin is voluptuousness itself, most nobly portrayed:

It snewed in his house of meat and drink.

The Ploughman is simplicity itself, with wisdom and strength for its stamina. Chaucer has divided the ancient character of Hercules between his Miller and his Ploughman. Benevolence is the Ploughman’s great characteristic; he is thin with excessive labour, and not with old age as some have supposed:

He would thresh, and thereto dike and delve,For Christe’s sake, for every poore wight,Withouten hire, if it lay in his might.

Visions of these eternal principles or characters of human life appear to poets in all ages; theGrecian gods were the ancient Cherubim of Phoenicia; but the Greeks, and since them the Moderns, have neglected to subdue the gods of Priam. These gods are visions of the eternal attributes, or divine names, which, when erected into gods, become destructive to humanity. They ought to be the servants, and not the masters of man or of society. They ought to be made to sacrifice to man, and not man compelled to sacrifice to them; for, when separated from man or humanity, who is Jesus the Saviour, the Vine of Eternity? They are thieves and rebels, they are destroyers.

The Ploughman of Chaucer is Hercules in his supreme Eternal State, divested of his Spectrous Shadow, which is the Miller, a terrible fellow, such as exists in all times and places for the trial of men, to astonish every neighbourhood with brutal strength and courage, to get rich and powerful, to curb the pride of Man.

The Reeve and the Manciple are two characters of the most consummate worldly wisdom. The Shipman, or Sailor, is a similar genius of Ulyssean art, but with the highest courage superadded.

The Citizens and their Cook are each leaders of a class. Chaucer has been somehow made to number four citizens, which would make his whole company, himself included, thirty-one. But he says there was but nine-and-twenty in his company:

Full nine and twenty in a company.

The Webbe, or Weaver, and the Tapiser, or Tapestry Weaver, appear to me to be the same person; but this is only an opinion, for ‘full nine and twenty’ may signify one more or less. ButI daresay that Chaucer wrote ‘A Webbe Dyer’, that is a Cloth Dyer:

A Webbe Dyer and a Tapiser.

The Merchant cannot be one of the Three Citizens, as his dress is different, and his character is more marked, whereas Chaucer says of his rich citizens:

All were yclothed in o liverie.

The characters of Women Chaucer has divided into two classes, the Lady Prioress and the Wife of Bath. Are not these leaders of the ages of men? The Lady Prioress in some ages predominates; and in some the Wife of Bath, in whose character Chaucer has been equally minute and exact; because she is also a scourge and a blight. I shall say no more of her, nor expose what Chaucer has left hidden; let the young reader study what he has said of her: it is useful as a scarecrow. There are of such characters born too many for the peace of the world.

I come at length to the Clerk of Oxenford. This character varies from that of Chaucer, as the contemplative philosopher varies from the poetical genius. There are always these two classes of learned sages, the poetical and the philosophical. The Painter has put them side by side, as if the youthful clerk had put himself under the tuition of the mature poet. Let the Philosopher always be the servant and scholar of Inspiration, and all will be happy.

FOOTNOTES:[6]FromA Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures.

[6]FromA Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures.

Takinga turn the other day in the Abbey, I was struck with the affected attitude of a figure, which I do not remember to have seen before, and which upon examination proved to be a whole-length of the celebrated Mr. Garrick. Though I would not go so far with some good Catholics abroad as to shut players altogether out of consecrated ground, yet I own I was not a little scandalized at the introduction of theatrical airs and gestures into a place set apart to remind us of the saddest realities. Going nearer, I found inscribed under this harlequin figure the following lines:

To paint fair Nature, by divine command,Her magic pencil in his glowing hand,A Shakespeare rose: then, to expand his fameWide o’er this breathing world, a Garrick came.Though sunk in death the forms the Poet drew,The Actor’s genius bade them breathe anew;Though, like the bard himself, in night they lay,Immortal Garrick call’d them back to day:And till Eternity with power sublimeShall mark the mortal hour of hoary Time,Shakespeare and Garrick like twin-stars shall shine,And earth irradiate with a beam divine.

It would be an insult to my readers’ understandingsto attempt anything like a criticism on this farrago of false thoughts and nonsense. But the reflection it led me into was a kind of wonder, how, from the days of the actor here celebrated to our own, it should have been the fashion to compliment every performer in his turn, that has had the luck to please the town in any of the great characters of Shakespeare, with the notion of possessing amind congenial with the poet’s: how people should come thus unaccountably to confound the power of originating poetical images and conceptions with the faculty of being able to read or recite the same when put into words;[7]or what connexion that absolute mastery over the heart and soul of man, which a great dramatic poet possesses, has with those low tricks upon the eye and ear, which a player by observing a few general effects, which some common passion, as grief, anger, &c. usually has upon the gestures and exterior, can so easily compass. To know the internal workings and movements of a great mind, of an Othello or a Hamlet for instance, thewhenand thewhyand thehow farthey should be moved; to what pitch a passion is becoming; to give the reins and to pull in the curb exactly at the moment when the drawing in or the slackening is most graceful; seems to demand a reach of intellect of a vastly differentextent from that which is employed upon the bare imitation of the signs of these passions in the countenance or gesture, which signs are usually observed to be most lively and emphatic in the weaker sort of minds, and which signs can after all but indicate some passion, as I said before, anger, or grief, generally; but of the motives and grounds of the passion, wherein it differs from the same passion in low and vulgar natures, of these the actor can give no more idea by his face or gesture than the eye (without a metaphor) can speak, or the muscles utter intelligible sounds. But such is the instantaneous nature of the impressions which we take in at the eye and ear at a playhouse, compared with the slow apprehension oftentimes of the understanding in reading, that we are apt not only to sink the play-writer in the consideration which we pay to the actor, but even to identify in our minds in a perverse manner, the actor with the character which he represents. It is difficult for a frequent playgoer to disembarrass the idea of Hamlet from the person and voice of Mr. K. We speak of Lady Macbeth, while we are in reality thinking of Mrs. S. Nor is this confusion incidental alone to unlettered persons, who, not possessing the advantage of reading, are necessarily dependent upon the stage-player for all the pleasure which they can receive from the drama, and to whom the very idea ofwhat an author iscannot be made comprehensible without some pain and perplexity of mind: the error is one from which persons otherwise not meanly lettered, find it almost impossible to extricate themselves.

Never let me be so ungrateful as to forget the very high degree of satisfaction which I receivedsome years back from seeing for the first time a tragedy of Shakespeare performed, in which these two great performers sustained the principal parts. It seemed to embody and realize conceptions which had hitherto assumed no distinct shape. But dearly do we pay all our life after for this juvenile pleasure, this sense of distinctness. When the novelty is past, we find to our cost that instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood. We have let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance.

How cruelly this operates upon the mind, to have its free conceptions thus crampt and pressed down to the measure of a strait-lacing actuality, may be judged from that delightful sensation of freshness with which we turn to those plays of Shakespeare which have escaped being performed, and to those passages in the acting plays of the same writer which have happily been left out in performance. How far the very custom of hearing anythingspouted, withers and blows upon a fine passage, may be seen in those speeches fromHenry the Fifth, &c. which are current in the mouths of school-boys from their being to be found inEnfield Speakers, and such kind of books. I confess myself utterly unable to appreciate that celebrated soliloquy inHamlet, beginning ‘To be or not to be’, or to tell whether it be good, bad, or indifferent, it has been so handled and pawed about by declamatory boys and men, and torn so inhumanly from its living place and principle of continuity in the play, till it is become to me a perfect dead member.

It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the plays of Shakespeare are lesscalculated for performance on a stage, than those of almost any other dramatist whatever. Their distinguished excellence is a reason that they should be so. There is so much in them, which comes not under the province of acting, with which eye, and tone, and gesture, have nothing to do.

The glory of the scenic art is to personate passion, and the turns of passion; and the more coarse and palpable the passion is, the more hold upon the eyes and ears of the spectators the performer obviously possesses. For this reason, scolding scenes, scenes where two persons talk themselves into a fit of fury, and then in a surprising manner talk themselves out of it again, have always been the most popular upon our stage. And the reason is plain, because the spectators are here most palpably appealed to, they are the proper judges in this war of words, they are the legitimate ring that should be formed round such ‘intellectual prize-fighters’. Talking is the direct object of the imitation here. But in all the best dramas, and in Shakespeare above all, how obvious it is, that the form ofspeaking, whether it be in soliloquy or dialogue, is only a medium, and often a highly artificial one, for putting the reader or spectator into possession of that knowledge of the inner structure and workings of mind in a character, which he could otherwise never have arrived atin that form of compositionby any gift short of intuition. We do here as we do with novels written in theepistolary form. How many improprieties, perfect solecisms in letter-writing, do we put up with inClarissaand other books, for the sake of the delight which that form upon the whole gives us.

But the practice of stage representation reduceseverything to a controversy of elocution. Every character, from the boisterous blasphemings of Bajazet to the shrinking timidity of womanhood, must play the orator. The love-dialogues of Romeo and Juliet, those silver-sweet sounds of lovers’ tongues by night; the more intimate and sacred sweetness of nuptial colloquy between an Othello or a Posthumus with their married wives, all those delicacies which are so delightful in the reading, as when we read of those youthful dalliances in Paradise

As beseem’dFair couple link’d in happy nuptial leagueAlone:

by the inherent fault of stage representation, how are these things sullied and turned from their very nature by being exposed to a large assembly; when such speeches as Imogen addresses to her lord, come drawling out of the mouth of a hired actress, whose courtship, though nominally addressed to the personated Posthumus, is manifestly aimed at the spectators, who are to judge of her endearments and her returns of love.

The character of Hamlet is perhaps that by which, since the days of Betterton, a succession of popular performers have had the greatest ambition to distinguish themselves. The length of the part may be one of their reasons. But for the character itself, we find it in a play, and therefore we judge it a fit subject of dramatic representation. The play itself abounds in maxims and reflections beyond any other, and therefore we consider it as a proper vehicle for conveying moral instruction. But Hamlet himself—what does he suffer meanwhile by being dragged forth as a public schoolmaster,to give lectures to the crowd! Why, nine parts in ten of what Hamlet does, are transactions between himself and his moral sense, they are the effusions of his solitary musings, which he retires to holes and corners and the most sequestered parts of the palace to pour forth; or rather, they are the silent meditations with which his bosom is bursting, reduced towordsfor the sake of the reader, who must else remain ignorant of what is passing there. These profound sorrows, these light-and-noise-abhorring ruminations, which the tongue scarce dares utter to deaf walls and chambers, how can they be represented by a gesticulating actor, who comes and mouths them out before an audience, making four hundred people his confidants at once? I say not that it is the fault of the actor so to do; he must pronounce themore rotundo, he must accompany them with his eye, he must insinuate them into his auditory by some trick of eye, tone, or gesture, or he fails.He must be thinking all the while of his appearance, because he knows that all the while the spectators are judging of it.And this is the way to represent the shy, negligent, retiring Hamlet.

It is true that there is no other mode of conveying a vast quantity of thought and feeling to a great portion of the audience, who otherwise would never earn it for themselves by reading, and the intellectual acquisition gained this way may, for aught I know, be inestimable; but I am not arguing that Hamlet should not be acted, but how much Hamlet is made another thing by being acted. I have heard much of the wonders which Garrick performed in this part; but as I never saw him, I must have leave to doubt whether therepresentation of such a character came within the province of his art. Those who tell me of him, speak of his eye, of the magic of his eye, and of his commanding voice: physical properties, vastly desirable in an actor, and without which he can never insinuate meaning into an auditory,—but what have they to do with Hamlet? what have they to do with intellect? In fact, the things aimed at in theatrical representation, are to arrest the spectator’s eye upon the form and the gesture, and so to gain a more favourable hearing to what is spoken: it is not what the character is, but how he looks; not what he says, but how he speaks it. I see no reason to think that if the play ofHamletwere written over again by some such writer as Banks or Lillo, retaining the process of the story, but totally omitting all the poetry of it, all the divine features of Shakespeare, his stupendous intellect; and only taking care to give us enough of passionate dialogue, which Banks or Lillo were never at a loss to furnish; I see not how the effect could be much different upon an audience, nor how the actor has it in his power to represent Shakespeare to us differently from his representation of Banks or Lillo. Hamlet would still be a youthful accomplished prince, and must be gracefully personated; he might be puzzled in his mind, wavering in his conduct, seemingly-cruel to Ophelia, he might see a ghost, and start at it, and address it kindly when he found it to be his father; all this in the poorest and most homely language of the servilest creeper after nature that ever consulted the palate of an audience; without troubling Shakespeare for the matter: and I see not but there would be room for all the power which an actor has, to display itself.All the passions and changes of passion might remain: for those are much less difficult to write or act than is thought, it is a trick easy to be attained, it is but rising or falling a note or two in the voice, a whisper with a significant foreboding look to announce its approach, and so contagious the counterfeit appearance of any emotion is, that let the words be what they will, the look and tone shall carry it off and make it pass for deep skill in the passions.

It is common for people to talk of Shakespeare’s plays beingso natural; that everybody can understand him. They are natural indeed, they are grounded deep in nature, so deep that the depth of them lies out of the reach of most of us. You shall hear the same persons say that George Barnwell is very natural, and Othello is very natural, that they are both very deep; and to them they are the same kind of thing. At the one they sit and shed tears, because a good sort of young man is tempted by a naughty woman to commita trifling peccadillo, the murder of an uncle or so, that is all, and so comes to an untimely end, which isso moving; and at the other, because a blackamoor in a fit of jealousy kills his innocent white wife: and the odds are that ninety-nine out of a hundred would willingly behold the same catastrophe happen to both the heroes, and have thought the rope more due to Othello than to Barnwell. For of the texture of Othello’s mind, the inward construction marvellously laid open with all its strengths and weaknesses, its heroic confidences and its human misgivings, its agonies of hate springing from the depths of love, they see no more than the spectators at a cheaper rate,who pay their pennies a-piece to look through the man’s telescope in Leicester-fields, see into the inward plot and topography of the moon. Some dim thing or other they see, they see an actor personating a passion, of grief, or anger, for instance, and they recognize it as a copy of the usual external effects of such passions; for at least as being true tothat symbol of the emotion which passes current at the theatre for it, for it is often no more than that: but of the grounds of the passion, its correspondence to a great or heroic nature, which is the only worthy object of tragedy,—that common auditors know any thing of this, or can have any such notions dinned into them by the mere strength of an actor’s lungs,—that apprehensions foreign to them should be thus infused into them by storm, I can neither believe, nor understand how it can be possible.

We talk of Shakespeare’s admirable observation of life, when we should feel, that not from a petty inquisition into those cheap and every-day characters which surrounded him, as they surround us, but from his own mind, which was, to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson’s, the very ‘sphere of humanity’, he fetched those images of virtue and of knowledge, of which every one of us recognizing a part, think we comprehend in our natures the whole; and oftentimes mistake the powers which he positively creates in us, for nothing more than indigenous faculties of our own minds which only waited the action of corresponding virtues in him to return a full and clear echo of the same.

To return to Hamlet.—Among the distinguishing features of that wonderful character, one of the most interesting (yet painful) is that soreness ofmind which makes him treat the intrusions of Polonius with harshness, and that asperity which he puts on in his interviews with Ophelia. These tokens of an unhinged mind (if they be not mixed in the latter case with a profound artifice of love, to alienate Ophelia by affected discourtesies, so to prepare her mind for the breaking off of that loving intercourse, which can no longer find a place amidst business so serious as that which he has to do) are parts of his character, which to reconcile with our admiration of Hamlet, the most patient consideration of his situation is no more than necessary; they are what weforgive afterwards, and explain by the whole of his character, butat the timethey are harsh and unpleasant. Yet such is the actor’s necessity of giving strong blows to the audience, that I have never seen a player in this character, who did not exaggerate and strain to the utmost these ambiguous features,—these temporary deformities in the character. They make him express a vulgar scorn at Polonius which utterly degrades his gentility, and which no explanation can render palatable; they make him show contempt, and curl up the nose at Ophelia’s father,—contempt in its very grossest and most hateful form; but they get applause by it: it is natural, people say; that is, the words are scornful, and the actor expresses scorn, and that they can judge of: but why so much scorn, and of that sort, they never think of asking.

So to Ophelia.—All the Hamlets that I have ever seen, rant and rave at her as if she had committed some great crime, and the audience are highly pleased, because the words of the part are satirical, and they are enforced by the strongestexpression of satirical indignation of which the face and voice are capable. But then, whether Hamlet is likely to have put on such brutal appearances to a lady whom he loved so dearly, is never thought on. The truth is, that in all such deep affections as had subsisted between Hamlet and Ophelia, there is a stock ofsupererogatory love, (if I may venture to use the expression) which in any great grief of heart, especially where that which preys upon the mind cannot be communicated, confers a kind of indulgence upon the grieved party to express itself, even to its heart’s dearest object, in the language of a temporary alienation; but it is not alienation, it is a distraction purely, and so it always makes itself to be felt by that object: it is not anger, but grief assuming the appearance of anger,—love awkwardly counterfeiting hate, as sweet countenances when they try to frown: but such sternness and fierce disgust as Hamlet is made to show, is no counterfeit, but the real face of absolute aversion,—of irreconcilable alienation. It may be said he puts on the madman; but then he should only so far put on this counterfeit lunacy as his own real distraction will give him leave; that is, incompletely, imperfectly; not in that confirmed practised way, like a master of his art, or, as Dame Quickly would say, ‘like one of those harlotry players.’

I mean no disrespect to any actor, but the sort of pleasure which Shakespeare’s plays give in the acting seems to me not at all to differ from that which the audience receive from those of other writers; and,they being in themselves essentially so different from all others, I must conclude that there is something in the nature of acting which levelsall distinctions. And in fact, who does not speak indifferently of theGamesterand ofMacbethas fine stage performances, and praise the Mrs. Beverley in the same way as the Lady Macbeth of Mrs. S.? Belvidera, and Calista, and Isabella, and Euphrasia, are they less liked than Imogen, or than Juliet, or than Desdemona? Are they not spoken of and remembered in the same way? Is not the female performer as great (as they call it) in one as in the other? Did not Garrick shine, and was not he ambitious of shining in every drawling tragedy that his wretched day produced,—the productions of the Hills and the Murphys and the Browns,—and shall he have that honour to dwell in our minds for ever as an inseparable concomitant with Shakespeare? A kindred mind! O who can read that affecting sonnet of Shakespeare which alludes to his profession as a player:

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