SCHLEGEL ON THE DRAMA

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

‘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 namesIn fame’s eternal records shine for aye.’

——‘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 andaffectation 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 orbeauty 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 thiskind 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 thechef-d’œuvresof 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 recountingin 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, thenaïvetéof 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 availedhimself 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 instanthe 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. Heattaches 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 describeshis 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 AlphonsoII.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 bothuncorrected 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, calledIl 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 fairervalleys. 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 wingestwain;’ 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, andreliance 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 thechef-d’œuvresof 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 thesame 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.’

——‘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, quicknessand 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 ofpoetry 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, andfar 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 merelyon 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 thenucleusof the prevailing system of German criticism, and the foundation of his whole work, namely, the essential distinction between the peculiar spirit of the modern orromanticstyle of art, and the antique orclassical. 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’shut, 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 imaginationopened 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.

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