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Our poesy is as a gum, which oozes
From whence 'tis nourished... our gentle flame
Provokes itself, and, like the current, flies
Each bound it chafes.
I shall conclude this general account with some remarks on four of the
principal works of poetry in the world, at different periods of
history--Homer, the Bible, Dante, and, let me add, Ossian. In Homer,
the principle of action or life is predominant: in the Bible, the
principle of faith and the idea of Providence; Dante is a
personification of blind will; and in Ossian we see the decay of life
and the lag end of the world. Homer's poetry is the heroic: it is full
of life and action: it is bright as the day, strong as a river. In the
vigour of his intellect, he grapples with all the objects of nature,
and enters into all the relations of social life. He saw many countries,
and the manners of many men; and he has brought them all together in
his poem. He describes his heroes going to battle with a prodigality
of life, arising from an exuberance of animal spirits: we see them
before us, their number and their order of battle, poured out upon the
plain "all plumed like ostriches, like eagles newly bathed, wanton as
goats, wild as young bulls, youthful as May, and gorgeous as the sun
at midsummer", covered with glittering armour, with dust and blood;
while the gods quaff their nectar in golden cups, or mingle in the
fray; and the old men assembled on the walls of Troy rise up with
reverence as Helen passes by them. The multitude of things in Homer
is wonderful; their splendour, their truth, their force and variety.
His poetry is, like his religion, the poetry of number and form: he
describes the bodies as well as the souls of men.
The poetry of the Bible is that of imagination and of faith: it is
abstract and disembodied: it is not the poetry of form, but of power;
not of multitude, but of immensity. It does not divide into many, but
aggrandizes into one. Its ideas of nature are like its ideas of God.
It is not the poetry of social life, but of solitude: each man seems
alone in the world, with the original forms of nature, the rocks, the
earth, and the sky. It is not the poetry of action or heroic enterprise,
but of faith in a supreme Providence, and resignation to the power
that governs the universe. As the idea of God was removed farther from
humanity and a scattered polytheism, it became more profound and
intense, as it became more universal, for the Infinite is present to
everything: "If we fly into the uttermost parts of the earth, it is
there also; if we turn to the east or the west, we cannot escape from
it". Man is thus aggrandized in the image of his Maker. The history
of the patriarchs is of this kind; they are founders of a chosen race
of people, the inheritors of the earth; they exist in the generations
which are to come after them. Their poetry, like their religious creed,
is vast, unformed, obscure, and infinite; a vision is upon it; an
invisible hand is suspended over it. The spirit of the Christian
religion consists in the glory hereafter to be revealed; but in the
Hebrew dispensation Providence took an immediate share in the affairs
of this life. Jacob's dream arose out of this intimate communion between
heaven and earth: it was this that let down, in the sight of the
youthful patriarch, a golden ladder from the sky to the earth, with
angels ascending and descending upon it, and shed a light upon the
lonely place, which can never pass away. The story of Ruth, again, is
as if all the depth of natural affection in the human race was involved
in her breast. There are descriptions in the book of Job more prodigal
of imagery, more intense in passion, than anything in Homer; as that
of the state of his prosperity, and of the vision that came upon him
by night. The metaphors in the Old Testament are more boldly figurative.
Things were collected more into masses, and gave a greater _momentum_
to the imagination.
Dante was the father of modern poetry, and he may therefore claim a
place in this connection. His poem is the first great step from Gothic
darkness and barbarism; and the struggle of thought in it, to burst
the thraldom in which the human mind had been so long held, is felt
in every page. He stood bewildered, not appalled, on that dark shore
which separates the ancient and the modern world; and saw the glories
of antiquity dawning through the abyss of time, while revelation opened
its passage to the other world. He was lost in wonder at what had been
done before him, and he dared to emulate it. Dante seems to have been
indebted to the Bible for the gloomy tone of his mind, as well as for
the prophetic fury which exalts and kindles his poetry; but he is
utterly unlike Homer. His genius is not a sparkling flame, but the
sullen heat of a furnace. He is power, passion, self-will personified.
In all that relates to the descriptive or fanciful part of poetry, he
bears no comparison to many who had gone before, or who have come after
him; but there is a gloomy abstraction in his conceptions, which lies
like a dead weight upon the mind--a benumbing stupor, a breathless
awe, from the intensity of the impression--a terrible obscurity, like
that which oppresses us in dreams--an identity of interest, which
moulds every object to its own purposes, and clothes all things with
the passions and imaginations of the human soul--that make amends for
all other deficiencies. The immediate objects he presents to the mind
are not much in themselves; they want grandeur, beauty, and order; but
they become everything by the force of the character he impresses upon
them. His mind lends its own power to the objects which it contemplates,
instead of borrowing it from them. He takes advantage even of the
nakedness and dreary vacuity of his subject. His imagination peoples
the shades of death, and broods over the silent air. He is the severest
of all writers, the most hard and impenetrable, the most opposite to
the flowery and glittering; the writer who relies most on his own
power, and the sense of it in others, and who leaves most room to the
imagination of his readers. Dante's only endeavour is to interest; and
he interests by exciting our sympathy with the emotion by which he is
himself possessed. He does not place before us the objects by which
that emotion has been created; but he seizes on the attention, by
showing us the effect they produce on his feelings; and his poetry
accordingly gives the same thrilling and overwhelming sensation which
is caught by gazing on the face of a person who has seen some object
of horror. The improbability of the events, the abruptness and monotony
in the _Inferno_, are excessive: but the interest never flags, from
the continued earnestness of the author's mind. Dante's great power
is in combining internal feelings with external objects. Thus the gate
of hell, on which that withering inscription is written, seems to be
endowed with speech and consciousness, and to utter its dread warning,
not without a sense of mortal woes. This author 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 the 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, perhaps,
tends to heighten the effect by the bold intermixture of realities,
and by an appeal, as it were, to the individual knowledge and experience
of the reader. He affords few subjects for picture. There is, indeed,
one gigantic one, that of Count Ugolino, of which Michael Angelo made
a basrelief, and which Sir Joshua Reynolds ought not to have painted.
Another writer whom I shall mention last, and whom I cannot persuade
myself to think a mere modern in the groundwork, is Ossian. He is a
feeling and a name that can never be destroyed in the minds of his
readers. As Homer is the first vigour and lustihead, Ossian is the
decay and old age of poetry. He lives only in the recollection and
regret of the past. There is one impression which he conveys more
entirely than all other poets; namely, the sense of privation, the
loss of all things, of friends, of good name, of country; he is even
without God in the world. He converses only with the spirits of the
departed; with the motionless and silent clouds. The cold moonlight
sheds its faint lustre on his head; the fox peeps out of the ruined
tower; the thistle waves its beard to the wandering gale; and the
strings of his harp seem, as the hand of age, as the tale of other
times, passes over them, to sigh and rustle like the dry reeds in the
winter's wind! The feeling of cheerless desolation, of the loss of the
pith and sap of existence, of the annihilation of the substance, and
the clinging to the shadow of all things, as in a mock-embrace, is
here perfect. In this way, the lamentation of Selma for the loss of
Salgar is the finest of all. If it were indeed possible to show that
this writer was nothing, it would only be another instance of
mutability, another blank made, another void left in the heart, another
confirmation of that feeling which makes him so often complain, "Roll
on, ye dark brown years, ye bring no joy on your wing to Ossian!"
CHARLES LAMB.
(1775-1834)
VI. ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY.
The essay on the _Artificial Comedy of the Last Century_ is one of the
_Essays of Elia_, published in the _London Magazine_ between 1820 and
1822. The paradox started by Lamb was taken up by Leigh Hunt in his
edition of the _Comic Dramatists of the Restoration_, and was attacked
by Macaulay in his well-known review of Hunt's work. It is
characteristic of Lamb to have bound up his defence of these writers
with an account of Kemble and other actors of the day. His peculiar
strength lay in his power of throwing himself into the very mood and
temper of the writers he admired, and no critic has more completely
possessed the secret of living over again the life of a literary
masterpiece. His genius was, in fact, akin to the genius of an actor,
an actor who, not for the moment but permanently, becomes the part
that he seeks to represent. And he was never so much at home as when
he was illustrating his own reading of a drama from the tones and
gestures of the stage. It may be doubted whether, under stress of this
impulse, he was not led to force the analogy between Sheridan and the
dramatists of the Restoration. The analogy doubtless exists, but in
his wish to bring home to his readers the inner meaning of plays, then
no longer acted, he was perhaps tempted to press a resemblance to
works, familiar to every play-goer, further than it could fairly be
made to go. The mistake, if mistake it were, is pardonable. And it
serves to illustrate the essential nature of Lamb's genius as a critic,
and of the new element that he brought into criticism. This was the
invincible belief that poetry is not merely an art for the few, but
something that finds an echo in the common instincts of all men,
something that, coming from the heart, naturally clothes itself in
fitting words and gives individual colour to each tone, gesture, and
expression. These, therefore, we must study if we would penetrate to
the open secret of the artist, if we would seize the vital spirit of
his utterance and make it our own. Lamb's sense of poetic form, his
instinct for subtle shades of difference, was far keener than Hazlitt's.
And for that very reason he may be said to have seen yet more clearly
than Hazlitt saw, how inseparable is the tie that binds poetry to life.
It is not only in its deeper undertones, Lamb seems to remind us, but
in its finest shades of voice and phrasing, that poetry is the echo
of some mood or temper of the soul. This is the vein that he opened,
and which, with wider scope and a touch still more delicate, has since
been explored by Mr. Pater.
The two shorter pieces speak for themselves. They are taken from the
_Specimens of English Dramatic Poets_ (1808).
The artificial comedy, or comedy of manners, is quite extinct on our
stage. Congreve and Farquhar show their heads once in seven years only,
to be exploded and put down instantly. The times cannot bear this. Is
it for a few wild speeches, an occasional licence of dialogue? I think
not altogether. The business of their dramatic characters will not
stand the moral test. We screw everything up to that. Idle gallantry
in a fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of an evening, startles us
in the same way as the alarming indications of profligacy in a son or
ward in real life should startle a parent or guardian. We have no such
middle emotions as dramatic interests left. We see a stage libertine
playing his loose pranks of two hours' duration, and of no after
consequence, with the severe eyes which inspect real vices with their
bearings upon two worlds. We are spectators to a plot or intrigue (not
reducible in life to the point of strict morality), and take it all
for truth. We substitute a real for a dramatic person, and judge him
accordingly. We try him in our courts, from which there is no appeal
to the _dramatis persona_, his peers. We have been spoiled with--not
sentimental comedy--but a tyrant far more pernicious to our pleasures
which has succeeded to it, the exclusive and all-devouring drama of
common life; where the moral point is everything; where, instead of
the fictitious half-believed personages of the stage (the phantoms of
old comedy), we recognize ourselves, our brothers, aunts, kinsfolk,
allies, patrons, enemies,--the same as in life,--with an interest in
what is going on so hearty and substantial, that we cannot afford our
moral judgment, in its deepest and most vital results, to compromise
or slumber for a moment. What is there transacting, by no modification
is made to affect us in any other manner than the same events or
characters would do in our relationships of life. We carry our fireside
concerns to the theatre with us. We do not go thither like our
ancestors, to escape from the pressure of reality, so much as to confirm
our experience of it; to make assurance double, and take a bond of
fate. We must live our toilsome lives twice over, as it was the mournful
privilege of Ulysses to descend twice to the shades. All that neutral
ground of character, which stood between vice and virtue; or which in
fact was indifferent to neither, where neither properly was called in
question; that happy breathing-place from the burthen of a perpetual
moral questioning--the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted
casuistry--is broken up and disfranchised, as injurious to the interests
of society. The privileges of the place are taken away by law. We dare
not dally with images, or names, of wrong. We bark like foolish dogs
at shadows. We dread infection from the scenic representation of
disorder, and fear a painted pustule. In our anxiety that our morality
should not take cold, we wrap it up in a great blanket surtout of
precaution against the breeze and sunshine.
I confess for myself that (with no great delinquencies to answer for)
I am glad for a season to take an airing beyond the diocese of the
strict conscience,--not to live always in the precincts of the law-
courts,--but now and then, for a dream-while or so, to imagine a world
with no meddling restrictions--to get into recesses, whither the hunter
cannot follow me--
Secret shades
Of woody Ida's inmost grove,
While yet there was no fear of Jove.
I come back to my cage and my restraint the fresher and more healthy
for it. I wear my shackles more contentedly for having respired the
breath of an imaginary freedom. I do not know how it is with others,
but I feel the better always for the perusal of one of Congreve's--
nay, why should I not add even of Wycherley's--comedies. I am the gayer
at least for it; and I could never connect those sports of a witty
fancy in any shape with any result to be drawn from them to imitation
in real life. They are a world of themselves almost as much as
fairy-land. Take one of their characters, male or female (with few
exceptions they are alike), and place it in a modern play, and my
virtuous indignation shall rise against the profligate wretch as warmly
as the Catos of the pit could desire; because in a modern play I am
to judge of the right and the wrong. The standard of police is the
measure of political justice. The atmosphere will blight it; it cannot
live here. It has got into a moral world, where it has no business,
from which it must needs fall headlong; as dizzy, and incapable of
making a stand, as a Sweden-borgian bad spirit that has wandered
unawares into the sphere of one of his Good Men, or Angels. But in its
own world do we feel the creature is so very bad?--The Fainalls and
the Mirabels, the Dorimants and the Lady Touchwoods, in their own
sphere, do not offend my moral sense; in fact, they do not appeal to
it at all. They seem engaged in their proper element. They break through
no laws or conscientious restraints. They know of none. They have got
out of Christendom into the land--what shall I call it?-of
cuckoldry--the Utopia of gallantry, where pleasure is duty, and the
manners perfect freedom. It is altogether a speculative scene of things,
which has no reference whatever to the world that is. No good person
can be justly offended as a spectator, because no good person suffers
on the stage. Judged morally, every character in these plays--the few
exceptions only are mistakes--is alike essentially vain and worthless.
The great art of Congreve is specially shown in this, that he has
entirely excluded from his scenes--some little generosities in the
part of Angelica [Footnote: In _Love for Love_] perhaps excepted--not
only anything like a faultless character, but any pretensions to
goodness or good feelings whatsoever. Whether he did this designedly,
or instinctively, the effect is as happy as the design (if design) was
bold. I used to wonder at the strange power which his _Way of the
World_ in particular possesses of interesting you all along in the
pursuits of characters, for whom you absolutely care nothing--for you
neither hate nor love his personages--and I think it is owing to this
very indifference for any, that you endure the whole. He has spread
a privation of moral light, I will call it, rather than by the ugly
name of palpable darkness, over his creations; and his shadows flit
before you without distinction or preference. Had he introduced a good
character, a single gush of moral feeling, a revulsion of the judgment
to actual life and actual duties, the impertinent Goshen would have
only lighted to the discovery of deformities, which now are none,
because we think them none.
Translated into real life, the characters of his, and his friend
Wycherley's dramas, are profligates and strumpets,--the business of
their brief existence, the undivided pursuit of lawless gallantry. No
other spring of action, or possible motive of conduct, is recognized;
principles which, universally acted upon, must reduce this frame of
things to a chaos. But we do them wrong in so translating them. No
such effects are produced, in their world. When we are among them, we
are amongst a chaotic people. We are not to judge them by our usages.
No reverend institutions are insulted by their proceedings--for they
have none among them. No peace of families is violated--for no family
ties exist among them. No purity of the marriage bed is stained--for
none is supposed to have a being. No deep affections are disquieted,
no holy wedlock bands are snapped asunder--for affection's depth and
wedded faith are not of the growth of that soil. There is neither right
nor wrong,--gratitude or its opposite,--claim or duty,--paternity or
sonship. Of what consequence is it to Virtue, or how is she at all
concerned about it, whether Sir Simon or Dapperwit steal away Miss
Martha; or who is the father of Lord Froth's or Sir Paul Pliant's
children?
The whole is a passing pageant, where we should sit as unconcerned at
the issues, for life or death, as at the battle of the frogs and mice.
But, like Don Quixote, we take part against the puppets, and quite as
impertinently. We dare not contemplate an Atlantis, a scheme out of
which our coxcombical moral sense is for a little transitory ease
excluded. We have not the courage to imagine a state of things for
which there is neither reward nor punishment. We cling to the painful
necessities of shame and blame. We would indict our very dreams.
Amidst the mortifying circumstances attendant upon growing old, it is
something to have seen the _School for Scandal_ in its glory. This
comedy grew out of Congreve and Wycherley, but gathered some allays
of the sentimental comedy which followed theirs. It is impossible that
it should be now _acted_, though it continues, at long intervals, to
be announced in the bills. Its hero, when Palmer played it at least,
was Joseph Surface. When I remember the gay boldness, the graceful
solemn plausibility, the measured step, the insinuating voice--to
express it in a word--the downright _acted_ villany of the part, so
different from the pressure of conscious actual wickedness,--the
hypocritical assumption of hypocrisy,--which made Jack so deservedly
a favourite in that character, I must needs conclude the present
generation of playgoers more virtuous than myself, or more dense. I
freely confess that he divided the palm with me with his better brother;
that, in fact, I liked him quite as well. Not but there are
passages,--like that, for instance, where Joseph is made to refuse a
pittance to a poor relation,--incongruities which Sheridan was forced
upon by the attempt to join the artificial with the sentimental comedy,
either of which must destroy the other--but over these obstructions
Jack's manner floated him so lightly, that a refusal from him no more
shocked you, than the easy compliance of Charles gave you in reality
any pleasure; you got over the paltry question as quickly as you could,
to get back into the regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns.
The highly artificial manner of Palmer in this character counteracted
every disagreeable impression which you might have received from the
contrast, supposing them real, between the two brothers. You did not
believe in Joseph with the same faith with which you believed in
Charles. The latter was a pleasant reality, the former a no less
pleasant poetical foil to it. The comedy, I have said, is incongruous;
a mixture of Congreve with sentimental incompatibilities; the gaiety
upon the whole is buoyant; but it required the consummate art of Palmer
to reconcile the discordant elements.
A player with Jack's talents, if we had one now, would not dare to do
the part in the same manner. He would instinctively avoid every turn
which might tend to unrealize, and so to make the character fascinating.
He must take his cue from his spectators, who would expect a bad man
and a good man as rigidly opposed to each other as the deathbeds of
those geniuses are contrasted in the prints, which I am sorry to say
have disappeared from the windows of my old friend Carrington Bowles,
of St. Paul's Churchyard memory--(an exhibition as venerable as the
adjacent cathedral, and almost coeval) of the bad and good man at the
hour of death; where the ghastly apprehensions of the former,--and
truly the grim phantom with his reality of a toasting-fork is not to
be despised,--so finely contrast with the meek complacent kissing of
the rod,--taking it in like honey and butter,--with which the latter
submits to the scythe of the gentle bleeder, Time, who wields his
lancet with the apprehensive finger of a popular young ladies' surgeon.
What flesh, like loving grass, would not covet to meet half-way the
stroke of such a delicate mower?
John Palmer was twice an actor in this exquisite part. He was playing
to you all the while that he was playing upon Sir Peter and his lady.
You had the first intimation of a sentiment before it was on his lips.
His altered voice was meant to you, and you were to suppose that his
fictitious co-flutterers on the stage perceived nothing at all of it.
What was it to you if that half reality, the husband, was overreached
by the puppetry--or the thin thing (Lady Teazle's reputation) was
persuaded it was dying of a plethory? The fortunes of Othello and
Desdemona were not concerned in it. Poor Jack has passed from the stage
in good time, that he did not live to this our age of seriousness. The
pleasant old Teazle _King_, too, is gone in good time. His manner would
scarce have passed current in our day. We must love or hate--acquit
or condemn--censure or pity--exert our detestable coxcombry of moral
judgment upon everything. Joseph Surface, to go down now, must be a
downright revolting villain--no compromise--his first appearance must
shock and give horror--his specious plausibilities, which the
pleasurable faculties of our fathers welcomed with such hearty
greetings, knowing that no harm (dramatic harm even) could come, or
was meant to come, of them, must inspire a cold and killing aversion.
Charles (the real canting person of the scene--for the hypocrisy of
Joseph has its ulterior legitimate ends, but his brother's professions
of a good heart centre in down right self-satisfaction) must be _loved_
and Joseph _hated_. To balance one disagreeable reality with another,
Sir Peter Teazle must be no longer the comic idea of a fretful old
bachelor bridegroom, whose teasings (while King acted it) were evidently
as much played off at you, as they were meant to concern anybody on
the stage,--he must be a real person, capable in law of sustaining an
injury--a person towards whom duties are to be acknowledged--the genuine
crim. con. antagonist of the villainous seducer Joseph. To realize him
more, his sufferings under his unfortunate match must have the downright
pungency of life--must (or should) make you not mirthful but
uncomfortable, just as the same predicament would move you in a
neighbour or old friend.
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