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THE

COLLECTED WORKS OF WILLIAM HAZLITT

IN TWELVE VOLUMES

VOLUME TEN

All rights reserved

Margaret Hazlitt.
(1771–1844)
From an oil painting by John Hazlitt.

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF
WILLIAM HAZLITT

EDITED BY A. R. WALLER

AND ARNOLD GLOVER

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

W. E. HENLEY

❦

Contributions to the Edinburgh Review

❦

1904

LONDON: J. M. DENT & CO.

McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.: NEW YORK

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

CONTENTS

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE EDINBURGH REVIEW

CONTENTS

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE EDINBURGH REVIEW

DUNLOP’S HISTORY OF FICTION

Vol. xxiv.]      [November 1814.

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

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

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

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

‘Romulus et Liber pater, et cum Castore Pollux;

Post ingentia facta Deorum in templa recepti.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And wonders wild of Arabesque combine

With Gothic imagery of darker shade.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

STANDARD NOVELS AND ROMANCES

Vol. xxiv.]      [February 1815.

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

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

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

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

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

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

——‘still prompts the eternal sigh,

For which we wish to live, or dare to die!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Books are a real world, both pure and good,

Round which, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,

Our pastime and our happiness may grow!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SISMONDI’S LITERATURE OF THE SOUTH

Vol. xxv.]      [June 1815.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Si prisonnier ne dit point sa raison

Sans un grand trouble, et douloureux soupçon,

Pour son consort qu’il fasse une chanson

J’ai prou d’amis, mais bien pauvre est leur don;

Honte ils auront, si faute de rançon,

Je suis deux hivers pris.

Qu’ils sachent bien, mes hommes, mes barons,

Anglais, Normands, Poitevins et Gascons,

Que je n’ai point si pauvres compagnons

Que pour argent n’ouvrisse leurs prisons.

Point ne les veux taxer de trahison,

Mais suis deux hivers pris.

Pour un captif plus d’ami, de parent!

Plus que ses jours ils epargnent l’argent;

Las! que je sens me douloir ce tourment!

Et si je meurs dans mon confinement,

Qui sauvera le renom de ma gent,

Car suis deux hivers pris?

Point au chagrin ne vaudrais succomber!

Le roi françois peut mes terres brûler,

Fausser la paix qu’il jura de garder;

Pourtant mon cœur je sens se rassurer,

Si je l’en crois, mes fers vont se briser,

Mais suis deux hivers pris.

Fiers ennemis, dont le cœur est si vain,

Pour guerrayer, attendez donc la fin

De mes ennemis; me trouverez enfin,

Dites-le leur, Chail et Pensavin,

Chers troubadours, qui me plaignez en vain

Car suis deux hivers pris.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Sweet is the dialect of Arno’s vale!

Though half consumed, I gladly turn to hear.’

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

——‘because on earth their names

In fame’s eternal records shine for aye.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All this is true; though it might be said of many other authors: But what ought to have been said of him is, that there is in Boccacio’s serious pieces a truth, a pathos, and an exquisite refinement of sentiment, which is not to be met with in any other prose writer whatever. We think M. Sismondi has missed a fine opportunity of doing the author of the Decameron that justice which has not been done him by the world. He has in general passed for a mere narrator of lascivious tales or idle jests. This character probably originated in the early popularity of his attacks on the monks, and has been kept up by the grossness of mankind, who revenged their own want of refinement on Boccacio, and only saw in his writings what suited the coarseness of their own tastes. But the truth is, that he has carried sentiment of every kind to its very highest purity and perfection. By sentiment we would here understand the habitual workings of some one powerful feeling, where the heart reposes almost entirely upon itself, without the violent excitement of opposing duties or untoward circumstances. In this way, nothing ever came up to the story of Frederigo Alberigi and his falcon. The perseverance in attachment, the spirit of gallantry and generosity displayed in it, has no parallel in the history of heroical sacrifices. The feeling is so unconscious too, and involuntary, is brought out in such small, unlooked-for, and unostentatious circumstances, as to show it to have been woven into the very nature and soul of the author. The story of Isabella is scarcely less fine, and is more affecting in the circumstances and the catastrophe. Dryden has done justice to the impassioned eloquence of the Tancred and Sigismunda; but has not given an adequate idea of the wild preternatural interest of the story of Honoria. Cimon and Iphigene is by no means one of the best, notwithstanding the popularity of the subject. The proof of unalterable affection given in the story of Jeronymo, and the simple touches of nature and picturesque beauty in the story of the two holiday lovers, who were poisoned by tasting of a leaf in the garden at Florence, are perfect masterpieces. The epithet of Divine was well bestowed on this great painter of the human heart. The invention implied in his different tales is immense: but we are not to infer that it is all his own. He probably availed himself of all the common traditions which were floating in his time, and which he was the first to appropriate. Homer appears the most original of all authors—probably for no other reason than that we can trace the plagiarism no farther. Several of Shakespeare’s plots are taken from Boccacio; and indeed he has furnished subjects to numberless writers since his time, both dramatic and narrative. The story of Griselda is borrowed from the Decameron by Chaucer; as is the knight’s Tale (Palamon and Arcite) from his poem of the Theseid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is not possible for any two writers to be more opposite than Spenser and Chaucer. Spenser delighted in luxurious enjoyment;—Chaucer in severe activity of mind. Spenser was, perhaps, the most visionary of all the poets;—Chaucer the most a man of observation and of the world. He appealed directly to the bosoms and business of men. He dealt only in realities; and, relying throughout on facts or common tradition, could always produce his vouchers in nature. His sentiment is not the voluntary indulgence of the poet’s fancy, but is founded on the habitual prejudices and passions of the very characters he introduces. His poetry, therefore, is essentially picturesque and dramatic: In this he chiefly differs from Boccacio, whose power was that of sentiment. The picturesque and the dramatic in Chaucer, are in a great measure the same thing; for he only describes external objects as connected with character,—as the symbols of internal passion. The costume and dress of the Canterbury pilgrims,—of the knight,—the ‘squire,—the gap-toothed wife of Bath, speak for themselves. Again, the description of the equipage and accoutrements of the two Kings of Thrace and Inde, in the Knight’s Tale, are as striking and grand, as the others are lively and natural. His descriptions of natural scenery are in the same style of excellence;—their beauty consists in their truth and characteristic propriety. They have a local freshness about them, which renders them almost tangible; which gives the very feeling of the air, the coldness or moisture of the ground. In other words, he describes inanimate objects from the effect which they have on the mind of the spectator, and as they have a reference to the interest of the story. One of the finest parts of Chaucer is of this mixed kind. It is in the beginning of the Flower and the Leaf, where he describes the delight of that young beauty, shrouded in her bower, and listening in the morning of the year to the singing of the nightingale, while her joy rises with the rising song, and gushes out afresh at every pause, and is borne along with the full tide of pleasure, and still increases, and repeats, and prolongs itself, and knows no ebb. The coolness of the arbour,—its retirement,—the early time of the day,—the sudden starting up of the birds in the neighbouring bushes—the eager delight with which they devour and rend the opening buds and flowers, are expressed with a truth and feeling, which make the whole seem like the recollection of an actual scene. Whoever compares this beautiful and simple passage with Rousseau’s description of the Elisée in the New Eloise, will be able to see the difference between good writing and fine writing, or between the actual appearances of nature, and the progress of the feelings they excite in us, and a parcel of words, images and sentiments thrown together without meaning or coherence. We do not say this from any feeling of disrespect to Rousseau, for whom we have a great affection; but his imagination was not that of the poet or the painter. Severity and boldness are the characteristics of the natural style: the artificial is equally servile and ostentatious. Nature, after all, is the soul of art:—and there is a strength in the imagination which reposes immediately on nature, which nothing else can supply. It was this trust in nature, and reliance on his subject, which enabled Chaucer to describe the grief and patience of Griselda,—the faith of Constance,—and the heroic perseverance of the little child, who, going to school through the streets of Jewry,

‘Oh, Alma redemptoris mater, loudly sung,’

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

In looking back to the chef-d’œuvres of former times, we are sometimes disposed to wonder at the little progress which has been made since in poetry, and the arts of imitation in general. But this, perhaps, is a foolish wonder. Nothing is more contrary to fact, than the supposition, that in what we understand by the fine arts, as painting and poetry, relative perfection is the result of repeated success; and that, what has been once well done, constantly leads to something better. What is mechanical, reducible to rule, or capable of demonstration, is indeed progressive, and admits of gradual improvement: but that which is not mechanical or definite, but depends on taste, genius, and feeling, very soon becomes stationary or retrograde, after a certain period, and loses more than it gains by transfusion. The contrary opinion is indeed a common error, which has grown up, like many others, from transferring an analogy of one kind to something quite different, without thinking of the difference in the nature of the things, or attending to the difference of the results. For most persons, finding what wonderful advances have been made in biblical criticism, in chemistry, in mechanics, in geometry, astronomy, &c., i.e. in things depending on inquiry and experiment, or on absolute demonstration, have been led hastily to conclude, that there was a general tendency in the efforts of the human intellect to improve by repetition, and, in all arts and institutions, to grow perfect and mature by time. We look back upon the theological creed of our ancestors, and their discoveries in natural philosophy, with a smile of pity: Science, and the arts connected with it, have all had their infancy, their youth and manhood, and seem to have in them no principle of limitation or decay; and, inquiring no farther, we infer, in the intoxication of our pride, and the height of our self-congratulation, that the same progress has been made, and will continue to be made, in all other things which are the work of man. The fact, however, stares us so plainly in the face, that one would think the smallest reflection must suggest the truth, and overturn our sanguine theories. The greatest poets, the ablest orators, the best painters, and the finest sculptors that the world ever saw, appeared soon after the first birth of these arts, and lived in a state of society which was in other respects rude and barbarous. Those arts which depend on individual genius and incommunicable power, have almost always leaped at once from infancy to manhood—from the first rude dawn of invention to their meridian height and dazzling lustre, and have, in general, declined ever after. This is the peculiar distinction and privilege of science and of art;—of the one, never to arrive at the summit of perfection at all; and of the other, to arrive at it almost at once. Homer, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Dante and Ariosto, (Milton alone was of a later period, and not the worse for it),—Raphael, Titian, Michael Angelo, Correggio, Cervantes and Boccacio—all lived near the beginning of their arts—perfected, and all but created them. These giant sons of genius stand indeed upon the earth; but they tower above their fellows; and the long line of their successors does not interpose any object to obstruct their view, or lessen their brightness. In strength and stature, they are unrivalled; in grace and beauty, they have never been surpassed. In after ages and more refined periods (as they are called), great men have arisen one by one, as it were by throes and at intervals; though, in general, the best of these cultivated and artificial minds were of an inferior order; as Tasso and Pope among poets, Guido and Poussin among painters. But in the earlier stages of the arts, when the first mechanical difficulties had been got over, and the language acquired, they rose by clusters and in constellations—never so to rise again.

The arts of poetry and painting are conversant with the world of thought within us, and of the world of sense without us—with what we know and see and feel intimately. They flow from the living shrine of our own breasts, and are kindled at the living lamp of Nature: But the pulse of the passions assuredly beat as high—the depths and soundings of the human heart were as well understood, three thousand or three hundred years ago, as they are at present. The face of nature, and ‘the human face divine,’ shone as bright then, as they have ever done since. But it is their light, reflected by true genius on art, which marks out the path before it, and sheds a glory round the Muses’ feet, like that which

——‘circled Una’s angel face,

And made a sunshine in the shady place.’

SCHLEGEL ON THE DRAMA

Vol. xxvi.]      [February 1816.

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

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

Our author thus explains the object of his work—

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

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

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

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

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

‘Upon her eyelids many graces sat,

Under the shadow of her even brows.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hear what he says of him.

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

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

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

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

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

Again—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Extremes meet. This is the only way of accounting for that enigma, the French character. It has often been remarked, indeed, that this ingenious nation exhibits more striking contradictions in its general deportment than any other that ever existed. They are the gayest of the gay, and the gravest of the grave. Their very faces pass at once from an expression of the most lively animation, when they are in conversation or action, to a melancholy blank. They are one moment the slaves of the most contemptible prejudices, and the next launch out into all the extravagance of the most dangerous speculations. In matters of taste they are as inexorable as they are lax in questions of morality: they judge of the one by rules, of the other by their inclinations. It seems at times as if nothing could shock them, and yet they are offended at the merest trifles. The smallest things make the greatest impression on them. From the facility with which they can accommodate themselves to circumstances, they have no fixed principles or real character. They are always that which gives them least pain, or costs them least trouble. They can easily disentangle their thoughts from whatever gives them the slightest uneasiness, and direct their sensibility to flow in any channels they think proper. Their whole existence is more theatrical than real—their sentiments put on or off like the dress of an actor. Words are with them equivalent to things. They say what is agreeable, and believe what they say. Virtue and vice, good and evil, liberty or slavery, are matters almost of indifference. They are the only people who were ever vain of being cuckolded, or being conquered. Their natural self-complacency stands them instead of all other advantages!

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

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

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

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

‘The distinguishing property,’ says our author, ‘of the dramatic poet, is the capability of transporting himself so completely into every situation, even the most unusual, that he is enabled, as plenipotentiary of the whole human race, without particular instructions for each separate case, to act and speak in the name of every individual. It is the power of endowing the creatures of his imagination with such self-existent energy, that they afterwards act in each conjuncture according to general laws of nature: the poet institutes, as it were, experiments, which are received with as much authority as if they had been made on real objects. Never, perhaps, was there so comprehensive a talent for the delineation of character as Shakespear’s. It not only grasps the diversities of rank, sex, and age, down to the dawnings of infancy; not only do the king and the beggar, the hero and the pickpocket, the sage and the idiot, speak and act with equal truth; not only does he transport himself to distant ages and foreign nations, and portray in the most accurate manner, with only a few apparent violations of costume, the spirit of the ancient Romans, of the French in their wars with the English, of the English themselves during a great part of their history, of the Southern Europeans (in the serious part of many comedies), the cultivated society of that time, and the former rude and barbarous state of the North; his human characters have not only such depth and precision that they cannot be arranged under classes, and are inexhaustible, even in conception:—no—This Prometheus not merely forms men, he opens the gates of the magical world of spirits; calls up the midnight ghost; exhibits before us his witches amidst their unhallowed mysteries; peoples the air with sportive fairies and sylphs:—and, these beings existing only in imagination, possess such truth and consistency, that, even when deformed monsters like Caliban, he extorts the conviction, that if there should be such beings, they would so conduct themselves. In a word, as he carries with him the most fruitful and daring fancy into the kingdom of nature,—on the other hand, he carries nature into the regions of fancy, lying beyond the confines of reality. We are lost in astonishment at seeing the extraordinary, the wonderful, and the unheard of, in such intimate nearness.

‘If Shakespear deserves our admiration for his characters, he is equally deserving it for his exhibition of passion, taking this word in its widest signification, as including every mental condition, every tone from indifference or familiar mirth to the wildest rage and despair. He gives us the history of minds; he lays open to us, in a single word, a whole series of preceding conditions. His passions do not at first stand displayed to us in all their height, as is the case with so many tragic poets, who, in the language of Lessing, are thorough masters of the legal style of love. He paints in a most inimitable manner, the gradual progress from the first origin. “He gives,” as Lessing says, “a living picture of all the most minute and secret artifices by which a feeling steals into our souls; of all the imperceptible advantages which it there gains; of all the stratagems by which every other passion is made subservient to it, till it becomes the sole tyrant of our desires and our aversions.” Of all poets, perhaps, he alone has portrayed the mental diseases, melancholy, delirium, lunacy, with such inexpressible, and, in every respect, definite truth, that the physician may enrich his observations from them in the same manner as from real cases.

‘And yet Johnson has objected to Shakespear, that his pathos is not always natural and free from affectation. There are, it is true, passages, though, comparatively speaking, very few, where his poetry exceeds the bounds of true dialogue, where a too soaring imagination, a too luxuriant wit, rendered the complete dramatic forgetfulness of himself impossible. With this exception, the censure originates only in a fanciless way of thinking, to which every thing appears unnatural that does not suit its own tame insipidity. Hence, an idea has been formed of simple and natural pathos, which consists in exclamations destitute of imagery, and nowise elevated above every-day life. But energetical passions electrify the whole of the mental powers, and will, consequently, in highly favoured natures, express themselves in an ingenious and figurative manner. It has been often remarked, that indignation gives wit; and, as despair occasionally breaks out into laughter, it may sometimes also give vent to itself in antithetical comparisons.

‘Besides, the rights of the poetical form have not been duly weighed. Shakespear, who was always sure of his object, to move in a sufficiently powerful manner when he wished to do so, has occasionally, by indulging in a freer play, purposely moderated the impressions when too painful, and immediately introduced a musical alleviation of our sympathy. He had not those rude ideas of his art which many moderns seem to have, as if the poet, like the clown in the proverb, must strike twice on the same place. An ancient rhetorician delivered a caution against dwelling too long on the excitation of pity; for nothing, he said, dries so soon as tears; and Shakespear acted conformably to this ingenious maxim, without knowing it.

‘The objection, that Shakespear wounds our feelings by the open display of the most disgusting moral odiousness, harrows up the mind unmercifully, and tortures even our minds by the exhibition of the most insupportable and hateful spectacles, is one of much greater importance. He has never, in fact, varnished over wild and blood-thirsty passions with a pleasing exterior,—never clothed crime and want of principle with a false show of greatness of soul; and in that respect he is every way deserving of praise. Twice he has portrayed downright villains; and the masterly way in which he has contrived to elude impressions of too painful a nature, may be seen in Iago and Richard the Third. The constant reference to a petty and puny race must cripple the boldness of the poet. Fortunately for his art, Shakespear lived in an age extremely susceptible of noble and tender impressions, but which had still enough of the firmness inherited from a vigorous olden time, not to shrink back with dismay from every strong and violent picture. We have lived to see tragedies of which the catastrophe consists in the swoon of an enamoured princess. If Shakespear falls occasionally into the opposite extreme, it is a noble error, originating in the fulness of a gigantic strength: And yet this tragical Titan, who storms the heavens, and threatens to tear the world from off its hinges; who, more fruitful than Æschylus, makes our hair stand on end, and congeals our blood with horror, possessed, at the same time, the insinuating loveliness of the sweetest poetry. He plays with love like a child; and his songs are breathed out like melting sighs. He unites in his genius the utmost elevation and the utmost depth; and the most foreign, and even apparently irreconcileable properties, subsist in him peaceably together. The world of spirits and nature have laid all their treasures at his feet. In strength a demi-god, in profundity of view a prophet, in all-seeing wisdom a protecting spirit of a higher order, he lowers himself to mortals, as if unconscious of his superiority; and is as open and unassuming as a child.

‘Shakespear’s comic talent is equally wonderful with that which he has shown in the pathetic and tragic: it stands on an equal elevation, and possesses equal extent and profundity. All that I before wished was, not to admit that the former preponderated. He is highly inventive in comic situations and motives. It will be hardly possible to show whence he has taken any of them; whereas in the serious part of his drama, he has generally laid hold of something already known. His comic characters are equally true, various and profound, with his serious. So little is he disposed to caricature, that we may rather say many of his traits are almost too nice and delicate for the stage, that they can only be properly seized by a great actor, and fully understood by a very acute audience. Not only has he delineated many kinds of folly; he has also contrived to exhibit mere stupidity in a most diverting and entertaining manner.’ II. 145.

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

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