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The delicious scenes which give the play its name and zest, must affect
you in the same serious manner as if you heard the reputation of a
dear female friend attacked in your real presence. Crabtree and Sir
Benjamin--those poor snakes that live but in the sunshine of your
mirth--must be ripened by this hot-bed process of realization into
asps or amphisbaenas; and Mrs. Candour--O! frightful!--become a hooded
serpent. Oh! who that remembers Parsons and Dodd--the wasp and butterfly
of the _School for Scandal_--in those two characters; and charming
natural Miss Pope, the perfect gentle woman as distinguished from the
fine lady of comedy, in the latter part--would forego the true scenic
delight--the escape from life--the oblivion of consequences--the holiday
barring out of the pedant Reflection--those Saturnalia of two or three
brief hours, well won from the world--to sit instead at one of our
modern plays--to have his coward conscience (that forsooth must not
be left for a moment) stimulated with perpetual appeals--dulled rather,
and blunted, as a faculty without repose must be--and his moral vanity
pampered with images of notional justice, notional beneficence, lives
saved without the spectator's risk, and fortunes given away that cost
the author nothing?

No piece was, perhaps, ever so completely cast in all its parts as
this _manager's comedy_. Miss Farren had succeeded to Mrs. Abington
in Lady Teazle; and Smith, the original Charles, had retired when I
first saw it. The rest of the characters, with very slight exceptions,
remained. I remember it was then the fashion to cry down John Kemble,
who took the part of Charles after Smith; but, I thought, very unjustly.
Smith, I fancy, was more airy, and took the eye with a certain gaiety
of person. He brought with him no sombre recollections of tragedy. He
had not to expiate the fault of having pleased beforehand in lofty
declamation. He had no sins of Hamlet or of Richard to atone for. His
failure in these parts was a passport to success in one of so opposite
a tendency. But, as far as I could judge, the weighty sense of Kemble
made up for more personal incapacity than he had to answer for. His
harshest tones in this part came steeped and dulcified in good-humour.
He made his defects a grace. His exact declamatory manner, as he managed
it, only served to convey the points of his dialogue with more
precision. It seemed to head the shafts to carry them deeper. Not one
of his sparkling sentences was lost. I remember minutely how he
delivered each in succession, and cannot by any effort imagine how any
of them could be altered for the better. No man could deliver brilliant
dialogue-the dialogue of Congreve or of Wycherley-because none
understood it-half so well as John Kemble. His Valentine, in _Love for
Love_, was, to my recollection, faultless. He flagged sometimes in the
intervals of tragic passion. He would slumber over the level parts of
an heroic character. His Macbeth has been known to nod. But he always
seemed to me to be particularly alive to pointed and witty dialogue.
The relaxing levities of tragedy have not been touched by any since
him--the playful court-bred spirit in which he condescended to the
players in Hamlet--the sportive relief which he threw into the darker
shades of Richard--disappeared with him. He had his sluggish moods,
his torpors--but they were the halting-stones and resting-place of his
tragedy--politic savings, and fetches of the breath--husbandry of the
lungs, where nature pointed him to be an economist--rather, I think,
than errors of the judgment. They were, at worst, less painful than
the eternal, tormenting, unappeasable vigilance,--the "lidless dragon
eyes", of present fashionable tragedy.

VII.--ON WEBSTER'S _DUCHESS OF MALFI_.

All the several parts of the dreadful apparatus with which the Duchess's
death is ushered in, are not more remote from the conceptions of
ordinary vengeance, than the strange character of suffering which they
seem to bring upon their victims is beyond the imagination of ordinary
poets. As they are not like inflictions _of this life_, so her language
seems _not of this world_. She has lived among horrors till she is
become "native and endowed unto that element". She speaks the dialect
of despair, her tongue has a snatch of Tartarus and the souls in
bale.--What are "Luke's iron crown", the brazen bull of Perillus,
Procrustes' bed, to the waxen images which counterfeit death, to the
wild masque of madmen, the tomb-maker, the bellman, the living person's
dirge, the mortification by degrees! To move a horror skilfully, to
touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear,
to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then step in
with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit--this only a Webster
can do. Writers of an inferior genius may "upon horror's head horrors
accumulate", but they cannot do this. They mistake quantity for quality,
they "terrify babes with painted devils", but they know not how a soul
is capable of being moved; their terrors want dignity, their
affrightments are without decorum.

VIII.--ON FORD'S _BROKEN HEART_.

I do not know where to find in any play a catastrophe so grand, so
solemn, and so surprising as this. This is indeed, according to Milton,
to "describe high passions and high actions". The fortitude of the
Spartan boy who let a beast gnaw out his bowels till he died without
expressing a groan, is a faint bodily image of this dilaceration of
the spirit and exenteration of the inmost mind, which Calantha with
a holy violence against her nature keeps closely covered, till the
last duties of a wife and a queen are fulfilled. Stories of martyrdom
are but of chains and the stake; a little bodily suffering; these
torments

On the purest spirits prey
As on entrails, joints, and limbs,
With answerable pains, but more intense.

What a noble thing is the soul in its strengths and in its weaknesses!
who would be less weak than Calantha? who can be so strong? the
expression of this transcendent scene almost bears me in imagination
to Calvary and the Cross; and I seem to perceive some analogy between
the scenical sufferings which I am here contemplating, and the real
agonies of that final completion to which I dare no more than hint a
reference.

Ford was of the first order of poets. He sought for sublimity, not by
parcels in metaphors or visible images, but directly where she has her
full residence in the heart of man; in the actions and sufferings of
the greatest minds. There is a grandeur of the soul above mountains,
seas, and the elements. Even in the poor perverted reason of Giovanni
and Annabella (in the play which precedes this) we discern traces of
that fiery particle, which in the irregular starting out of the road
of beaten action, discovers something of a right line even in obliquity
and shows hints of an improvable greatness in the lowest descents and
degradations of our nature.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

(1792-1822)

IX. A DEFENCE OF POETRY.

_The Defence of Poetry_ was written in the early months of 1821, the
year before Shelley's death. Its immediate occasion was an essay on
_The Four Ages of Poetry_ by T L Peacock. But all allusions to Peacock's
work were cut out by John Hunt when he prepared it--in vain, as things
proved--for publication in _The Liberal_, and it remains, as Peacock
said, "a defence without an attack". For all essential purposes, the
_Defence_ can only be said to have gained by shaking off its local and
temporary reference. It expresses Shelley's deepest thoughts about
poetry, and marks, as clearly as any writing of the last hundred years,
the width of the gulf that separates the ideals of recent poetry from
those of the century preceding the French Revolution. It may be compared
with Sidney's _Apologie_ on the one hand, and with Wordsworth's Preface
to the _Lyrical Ballads_, or the more abstract parts of Carlyle's
critical writings upon the other. The fundamental conceptions of Shelley
are the same as those of the Elizabethan critic and of his own great
contemporaries. But he differs from Sidney and Wordsworth, and perhaps
from Carlyle also, in laying more stress upon the outward form, and
particularly the musical element, of poetry, and from Sidney in laying
less stress upon its directly moral associations. He thus attains to
a wider and truer view of his subject, and, while insisting as strongly
as Wordsworth insists upon the kinship between the matter of poetry
and that of truth or science, he also recognizes, as Wordsworth commonly
did not, that there is a harmony between the imaginative conception
of that matter and its outward expression, and that beautiful thought
must necessarily clothe itself in beauty of language and of sound.
There is not in our literature any clearer presentment of the
inseparable connection between the matter and form of poetry, nor of
the ideal element which, under different shapes, is the life and soul
of both. [See Shelley's letters to Peacock and Other of February 15
and 22, and of March 20 and 21, 1821]

According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action,
which are called reason and imagination, the former may be considered
as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another,
however produced; and the latter, as mind acting upon those thoughts
so as to colour them with its own light, and composing from them, as
from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the
principle of its own integrity. The one is the [Greek transliterated:
to poiein], or the principle of synthesis, and has for its objects
those forms which are common to universal nature and existence itself;
the other is the [Greek transliterated: to logizein], or principle of
analysis, and its action regards the relations of things simply as
relations; considering thoughts, not in their integral unity, but as
the algebraical representations which conduct to certain general
results. Reason is the enumeration of qualities already known;
imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities, both
separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and
imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to imagination as the
instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to
the substance.

Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be "the expression of
the imagination": and poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man
is an instrument over which a series of external and internal
impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind
over an Aolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing
melody. But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps
within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and
produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of
the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite
them. It is as if the lyre could accommodate its chords to the motions
of that which strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound; even
as the musician can accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre.
A child at play by itself will express its delight by its voice and
motions; and every inflexion of tone and every gesture will bear exact
relation to a corresponding antitype in the pleasurable impressions
which awakened it; it will be the reflected image of that impression;
and as the lyre trembles and sounds after the wind has died away, so
the child seeks, by prolonging in its voice and motions the duration
of the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of the cause. In relation
to the objects which delight a child, these expressions are what poetry
is to higher objects. The savage (for the savage is to ages what the
child is to years) expresses the emotions produced in him by surrounding
objects in a similar manner; and language and gesture, together with
plastic or pictorial imitation, become the image of the combined effect
of those objects, and of his apprehension of them. Man in society,
with all his passions and his pleasures, next becomes the object of
the passions and pleasures of man; an additional class of emotions
produces an augmented treasure of expressions; and language, gesture,
and the imitative arts become at once the representation and the medium,
the pencil and the picture, the chisel and the statue, the chord and
the harmony. The social sympathies, or those laws from which, as from
its elements, society results, begin to develop themselves from the
moment that two human beings coexist; the future is contained within
the present, as the plant within the seed: and equality, diversity,
unity, contrast, mutual dependence, become the principles alone capable
of affording the motives according to which the will of a social being
is determined to action, inasmuch as he is social; and constitute
pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment, beauty in art, truth in
reasoning, and love in the intercourse of kind. Hence men, even in the
infancy of society, observe a certain order in their words and actions,
distinct from that of the objects and the impressions represented by
them, all expression being subject to the laws of that from which it
proceeds. But let us dismiss those more general considerations which
might involve an inquiry into the principles of society itself, and
restrict our view to the manner in which the imagination is expressed
upon its forms.

In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate natural
objects, observing in these actions, as in all others, a certain rhythm
or order. And, although all men observe a similar, they observe not
the same order, in the motions of the dance, in the melody of the song,
in the combinations of language, in the series of their imitations of
natural objects. For there is a certain order or rhythm belonging to
each of these classes of mimetic representation, from which the hearer
and the spectator receive an intenser and purer pleasure than from any
other: the sense of an approximation to this order has been called
taste by modern writers. Every man in the infancy of art observes an
order which approximates more or less closely to that from which this
highest delight results; but the diversity is not sufficiently marked,
as that its gradations should be sensible, except in those instances
where the predominance of this faculty of approximation to the beautiful
(for so we may be permitted to name the relation between this highest
pleasure and its cause) is very great. Those in whom it exists in
excess are poets, in the most universal sense of the word; and the
pleasure resulting from the manner in which they express the influence
of society or nature upon their own minds, communicates itself to
others, and gathers a sort of reduplication from that community. Their
language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before
unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension,
until the words which represent them, become, through time, signs for
portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral
thoughts; and then, if no new poets should arise to create afresh the
associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead
to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse. These similitudes or
relations are finely said by Lord Bacon to be "the same footsteps of
nature impressed upon the various subjects of the world" [Footnote:
_De Augment. Scient._, cap. I, lib. iii.]--and he considers the faculty
which perceives them as the storehouse of axioms common to all
knowledge. In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a
poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to
apprehend the true and the beautiful; in a word, the good which exists
in the relation subsisting, first between existence and perception,
and secondly between perception and expression. Every original language
near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem: the
copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the
works of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of the
creations of poetry.

But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order,
are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and
architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of
laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts
of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with
the beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension of the agencies
of the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original
religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus,
have a double face of false and true. Poets, according to the
circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called,
in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet
essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not
only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws
according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds
the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower
and the fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets
in the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell the form as
surely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the pretence of
superstition, which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy rather
than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet participates in the
eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his
conceptions, time and place and number are not. The grammatical forms
which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons, and
the distinction of place, are convertible with respect to the highest
poetry without injuring it as poetry; and the choruses of Aschylus,
and the book of Job, and Dante's Paradise, would afford, more than any
other writings, examples of this fact, if the limits of this essay did
not forbid citation. The creations of sculpture, painting, and music
are illustrations still more decisive.

Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits of action are
all the instruments and materials of poetry; they may be called poetry
by that figure of speech which considers the effect as a synonym of
the cause. But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those
arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are
created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the
invisible nature of man. And this springs from the nature itself of
language, which is a more direct representation of the actions and
passions of our internal being, and is susceptible of more various and
delicate combinations than colour, form, or motion, and is more plastic
and obedient to the control of that faculty of which it is the creation.
For language is arbitrarily produced by the imagination, and has
relation to thoughts alone; but all other materials, instruments, and
conditions of art have relations among each other, which limit and
interpose between conception and expression. The former is as a mirror
which reflects, the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, the light of
which both are mediums of communication. Hence the fame of sculptors,
painters, and musicians, although the intrinsic powers of the great
masters of these arts may yield in no degree to that of those who have
employed language as the hieroglyphic of their thoughts, has never
equalled that of poets in the restricted sense of the term; as two
performers of equal skill will produce unequal effects from a guitar
and a harp. The fame of legislators and founders of religions, so long
as their institutions last, alone seems to exceed that of poets in the
restricted sense; but it can scarcely be a question whether, if we
deduct the celebrity which their flattery of the gross opinions of the
vulgar usually conciliates, together with that which belonged to them
in their higher character of poets, any excess will remain.

We have thus circumscribed the word poetry within the limits of that
art which is the most familiar and the most perfect expression of the
faculty itself. It is necessary, however, to make the circle still
narrower, and to determine the distinction between measured and
unmeasured language; for the popular division into prose and verse is
inadmissible in accurate philosophy.

Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and
towards that which they represent, and a perception of the order of
those relations has always been found connected with a perception of
the order of the relations of thoughts. Hence the language of poets
has ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound,
without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less
indispensable to the communication of its influence than the words
themselves, without reference to that peculiar order. Hence the vanity
of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that
you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as
seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a
poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no
flower--and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.

An observation of the regular mode of the recurrence of harmony in the
language of poetical minds, together with its relation to music,
produced metre, or a certain system of traditional forms of harmony
and language. Yet it is by no means essential that a poet should
accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that the harmony,
which is its spirit, be observed. The practice is indeed convenient
and popular, and to be preferred, especially in such composition as
includes much action: but every great poet must inevitably innovate
upon the example of his predecessors in the exact structure of his
peculiar versification. The distinction between poets and prose writers
is a vulgar error. The distinction between philosophers and poets has
been anticipated. Plato was essentially a poet--the truth and splendour
of his imagery, and the melody of his language, are the most intense
that it is possible to conceive. He rejected the measure of the epic,
dramatic, and lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony in
thoughts divested of shape and action, and he forbore to invent any
regular plan of rhythm which would include, under determinate forms,
the varied pauses of his style. Cicero sought to imitate the cadence
of his periods, but with little success. Lord Bacon was a poet.
[Footnote: See the Filum Labyrinthi, and the Essay on Death
particularly.] His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm, which
satisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom of his
philosophy satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which distends, and
then bursts the circumference of the reader's mind, and pours itself
forth together with it into the universal element with which it has
perpetual sympathy. All the authors of revolutions in opinion are not
only necessarily poets as they are inventors, nor even as their words
unveil the permanent analogy of things by images which participate in
the life of truth; but as their periods are harmonious and rhythmical,
and contain in themselves the elements of verse; being the echo of the
eternal music. Nor are those supreme poets, who have employed
traditional forms of rhythm on account of the form and action of their
subjects, less capable of perceiving and teaching the truth of things,
than those who have omitted that form. Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton
(to confine ourselves to modern writers) are philosophers of the very
loftiest power.

A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There
is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a
catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time,
place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of
actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing
in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all other
minds. The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period of
time, and a certain combination of events which can never again recur;
the other is universal, and contains within itself the germ of a
relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible
varieties of human nature. Time, which destroys the beauty and the use
of the story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should
invest them, augments that of poetry, and for ever develops new and
wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains. Hence
epitomes have been called the moths of just history; they eat out the
poetry of it. A story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures
and distorts that which should be beautiful: poetry is a mirror which
makes beautiful that which is distorted.

The parts of a composition may be poetical, without the composition
as a whole being a poem. A single sentence may be considered as a
whole, though it may be found in the midst of a series of unassimilated
portions; a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought.
And thus all the great historians, Herodotus, Plutarch, Livy, were
poets; and although the plan of these writers, especially that of Livy,
restrained them from developing this faculty in its highest degree,
they made copious and ample amends for their subjection by filling all
the interstices of their subjects with living images.

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