.^'■f* Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 92401 31 56678 PR c./ BOHN'S STANDARD LIBRARY. COLERIDGE'S LECTURES AND NOTES ON SHAKSPBRE AND OTHER ENGLISH POETS. LECTUEES AND NOTES ON . MAKSPEEE AND OTHER ENGLISH POETS. BT SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. NOW FIEST COLLECTED, BY T.**ASHE, B.A., OF ST. JOHH'S OOliBQB, CAMBBIDGE, Author of ■' Songs Now and Then," " The Sorrows of Si/psipyle," Sfc. LONDON: GEORGE BELL AND SONS, YOEK STBEET, COVBNT GARDEN. 1884 • > ' .' CHISWICK PRESS : — C. WHITTINGHAM AND CO , TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE. PREFACE. All the extant criticism of Coleridge on the English Dramatists is collected, for the first time, in this volume, and numerous criticisms of his, on other English Poets, have in it been rescued from obscurity, in the form of notes or otherwise. Our thanks are especially due to Mr. Collier, for allowing us to reprint his transcripts ; to Messrs. Macmillan, for the privilege, willingly accorded, of making free use of Crabb Robinson's Diary ; and to Mr. George, of Bristol, without whose friendly and invaluable co-operation we should not have recovered the reports of the Bristol Lectures. Sept., 1883. *jj* Mr. Collier has passed beyoud reach of our thanks, in his ninety fifth year. {Sept. 18, 1883). A 2 CONTENTS. I. LECTURES ON SHAKSPERE AND MILTON. 1811-12. InTKODUCTOET — PAGE § 1. Mr. Collier's Transcripts 3 § 2. Criticisms by Coleridge from Mr. Collier's Diary . . 8 §3. Coleridge on his own Mode of Lecturing . . .19 § 4. Extracts from H. Crabb Robinson's Diary . . .20 § 5. Lectures before 1811-12 29 Lectubs I. 33 Report of the First Lecture. From the " Times " . . 42 Leotukb n. 44 Report of the Third Lecture. From the " Morning Chronicle" 55 Report of the Fourth Lecture. From the "Morning Chronicle" 57 Note of Mr. Collier on the Fourth Lecture. From his Preface 59 Lecture VI ; 61 Lecture VII 80 Report of the Seventh Lecture. From the " Dublin Correspondent" 100 Lecture VIH, in part 103 Report of the latter portion of the Eighth Lecture. From the " Morning Chronicle " 118 Lecture IX 120 Lecture XII. ; • • • ^'^^ Note on the Subjects of the remaining Lectures . . .164 CONTENTS. n. THE LECTURES AND NOTES OF 1818. ' InTKODUCTOKT — PAGE § 1. Two Letters and a Prospectus 169 § 2. The Lectures of 1818 174 §3. The matter published in the "Ecma ins" . . . 175 § 4. Mr. H. H. Carwardine's Memoranda . . . .178 Section I. Poetey, the Dbama, and Shakspekb. Definition of Poetry 183' Greek Drama 187 Progress of the Drama 195 The Drama generally and Public Taste .... 208 Shakspere as a Poet generally 218 Shakspere's Judgment equal to his Genius .... 223 < Becapitulation, and Summary of the Characteristics of Shak- spere's Dramas 231 Section II. Okder of Shakspeee's Plats .... 243 Section III. Notes on Shakspeee's Plats fkom English HiSTOEY 252 King John 255 .—,<- Richard II 255 Henry IV. Part I 2fi8 Part II 270 Henry V 271 Henry VI. Part I. 272 Richard III. ^ . . 273 Section IV. Notes on some othee Plats op Shakspeee. The Tempest 274 Love's Labour's Lost 282 Midsummer Night's Dream 289 Comedy of Errors 292 As You Like It ... , 293 Twelfth Night 295 AU's Well that Ends Well 297 Merry Wives of Windsor 298 ^Measure for Measure 299 Cymbeline . . ." ■ . . 301 Titus Andronicus 304 Troilus and Cressida 305 CONTENTS. IX Section IV. conimiied — page Coriolanus ... 309 Julias Csesar 311 Antony and Cleopatra 313t— Timon of Athens 318 Romeo and Juliet 32L^ Lear .... 329 i_ Hamlet , 342^^ Macbett 368 The Winter's Tale 380 Othello 384 Section V. Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and Massimoee . 395 Section VI. Notes on Ben Jonson 408 WhaUe/s Preface 409 Whalley's Life of Jonson . . . . . . .410 Every Man out of His Humour . . , . . . 41 1 Poetaster 412 Fall of Sojanus 413 Volpone 414 Epicaene 415 The Alchemist . 417 Catiline's Conspiracy 417 Bartholomew Fair 418 The Devil is an Ass 421 The Staple of News 422 The New Inn 423 Section VII. Notes on Beaumont and Fletchee . . 425 Seward's Preface. 1750 . 425 Harris's Commendatory Poem on Fletcher .... 426 Life of Fletcher in Stookdale's Edition. 1811 . . . 427 Maid's Tragedy 428 A King and no King .... . . 430 The Scornful Lady 430 The Custom of the Country 431 The Elder Brother 433 The Spanish Curate 434 Wit Without Money 434 The Humorous Lieutenant 436 The Mad Lover 436 The Loyal Subject 437 Rule a Wife and h'ave^Wife 438 The Laws of Candy -. .438 CONTENTS. Section VII. continued — The Little French Lawyer Valentinian . RoUo . The Wildgoose Chase A Wife for a Month The Pilgrim . The Queen of Corinth The Noble Gentleman The Coronation Wit at several Weapons The Fair Maid of the Inn The Two Noble Kinsmen The Woman Hater PAQB 439 440 443 444 445 445 446 446 447 448 449 450 451 in. LECTURES ON SHAKSPERE AND MILTON, AT BRISTOL. 1813-14. iNTEODnCTOET 455 Lectuee I. General Characteristics of Shakspere . '. 458 Lectuee II. Macbeth . 468 Lecture III. Hamlet . 471 Lecture IV. Winter's Tale. Othello . . . 476 Lecture V. Historical Plays. Richard II. ^ , . . . 478 Lecture VI. Richard III. FalstafP. lago. Shakspere as a Poet generally 486 IV. APPENDIX. I. The Specific Symptoms of Poetic Power elucidated in a Critical Analysis of Shakspere's Venus and Adonis, and Rape of Lucrece. Chapter XV. of the "Biographia Literaria" 493 XI. Shakspere's Method. From the " Friend" . . . .501 III. Notes on Chaucer and Spenser. Remains of Lecture III. of the Course of 1818 509 IV. Notes on Milton. Remains of Lecture X. of the Course of 1818 517 CONTENTS. ■ XI PAGE Extracts from the "Table Talk" 529 Othello 529 Hamlet -. 531 Polonius . , 531 Hamlet and Ophelia 531 ♦•Measure for Measure .... . . 531 The Fox ..'... .... 532 The Little French Lawyer . . ... 532 Shakspere and Milton 532 Women 533 The Style of Shakspere compared with that of Jonson and others 533 Plays of Massinger 534 Shakspere's Villains 535 Love's Labour's Lost 535 A Dramatist's Artifice 536 Bertram 536 Beaumont and Fletcher's Tragedies 537 Milton's Egotism 537 MilDon's Method in " Paradise Lost " .... 538 Chaucer 539 Shakspere of no Age 540 I. LECTURES ON SHAKSPERE AND MILTON. 1811-12. nSTTRODUCTORT. § 1. — Mr. Collier's Transcripts. /'"'OLERIDGE, then in his fortieth year, delivered a course of lectures in the winter of 1811-12, in the Hall of the London Philosophical Society.^ The lectures mainly dealt with Shakspere, but two or three were on MUton, and the first discussed the general principles of poetry ; as, indeed, did they all, more or less. They were given on Monday and Thursday evenings, and were to have been fifteen in number. The course extended, however, to seventeen, and allowing for a probable interval at Christmas, must have been little interrupted ; for the first duly came off on the 18th of November, as announced, and the last on January 27th. As any remains of this course are valuable, it is unfor- tunate we have so few. These, such as they are, consist of contemporary newspaper notices, of some interesting memo- randa in H. Orabb Robinson's Diary, and of transcripts from shorthand notes, by Mr. J. Payne Collier, of the 1st, 2nd, 6th, 7th, 9th, and 12th lectures, and part of the 8th. Mr. Collier published these trajascripts in 1856, having discovered, a few years before, a portion of his notes, all of .which, whatever they had been originally, up to that time had been mislaid. The transcripts must be somewhat • This Society was dissolved in 1820. 4 LECTURES ON SHAKSPEEE AND MILTON. meagre. The first lecture, for instance, as given by Mr. Collier, could be read aloud in a quarter of an hour.' The later ones are more complete. It would, however, be most unnatural not to feel a deep sense of gratitude to Mr. Collier ; for, apart from the fact that his traaiscripts con- tain much precious matter, they are practically all the lectures we possess. Only a small portion of the second division of our book can correctly be called lectures. The volume in which Mr. Collier's transcripts first appeared in a complete form, contains much other matter. We proceed to extract, with his kind permission, such por- tions of his preface as illustrate our subject. Mr. Collier recounts the history of his transcripts as follows : — " The lectures are, as nearly as possible, transcripts of my own short-hand notes, taken at the close of the year 1811, and at the opening of the year 1812. "I am fiilly aware that my memoranda, of forty-five years standing, are more or less imperfect : of some of the lectures I appear to have made only abridged sketches ; of others my notes are much fuller and more extended ; but I am certain, even at this distance of time, that I did not knowingly register a sentence, that did not come from Coleridge's lips, although doubtless I missed, omitted", and mistook points and passages, which now I should have been most rejoiced to have preserved. In completing my transcripts, however, I have added no word or syllable of my own. " I was a very young man when I attended the lectures in question ; but I was not only an enthusiast in all that related to Shakspere and his literary contemporaries, but a warm admirer of Coleridge, and a firm believer in his power of opening my faculties ' And Coleridge's lectures were not short. Dr. Dibdin, in " Remi- niscences of a Literary Life," relates that he attended one at the Royal Institution, and states that " for nearly two hours he, " Coleridge " spoke with unhesitating and uninterrupted fluency." INTEODUCTOET. 5 to the compreliension, and enjojment of poetry, in a degree beyond ajQything that I had then experienced. I had seen something of him, and had heard more about him ; and when my father pro- posed that all his family, old enough to profit by them, should attend the lectures advertised in 1811, 1 seized the opportunity with eagerness. The series was delivered extemporaneously (almost without the assistance of. notes) in a large room at what was called the Scot's Corporation Hall, in Crane Court, Fleet Street ; and on applying for tickets, Coleridge sent us a copy of his prospectus, which, many years afterwards, I was glad to see I had accidentally preserved, and which was in the following form :-:- LONDOIS' PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, SCOT'S COEPOBATION HALL, CKANE COUKT, FLEET STREET, (.ENTRANCE FBOM FETTER LANE.) MR. COLERIDGE "WILL COMMENCE ON MONDAY, NOV. 18th, A COURSE OF LECTURES ON SHAKESPEAR AND MILTON^ IN ILLUSTRATION OF THE PRINCIPLES OP POETRY, AND THEI£ Application as Grounds of Criticism to the most popular Works of later ETiglish Poets, those of the Living included. Aftes an introdactory Lecture on False Criticism, (especially In Poetry,) ^^d oa its Causes : two thirds of the remaining cowcae, will be aasiguedy Ist, to a philo- sophic Analysis and Explanation of all the principal Characters of our great Dramatist, as Othello, Falstaff, Bichard 3d, Iago, Hamlet, &c. : and 2Qd, r^ a critical Comparison of Shaeespeab, in respect of Diction, Imagery, management of the Passions, Judgment in the construction of his Dramas, in short, of all that belongs to bim as a Poet, and as a dramatic Poet, with his contemporaries, or immediate suc- cessors, JoKSoif, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ford, Massingbr, &c. in the endeavour to determine what of Shakespeab's Merits and Defects are common to him with other Writers of the same age, and what remain peculiar to his own Gtenius. The Course will extend to fifteen Lectures, which will be given on Monday and Thursday evenings successively. The Lectures to commence at ^ past 7 o'clock. Single Tickets for the whole Course, 2 Guineas; or 3 Guineas with the pri- vilege of introducing a Lady : may be procured at J. Hatchard's, 190, Piccadilly ; J. Murraj^s, Fleet Street; J. and A. Arch's, Booksellers and Stationers, Coi-uhiU ; Godwin's Juvenile Library, Skinner Street j W. Pople's, 67, Chancery Lane j or by Letter (post paid) to Mr. S. T. Coleridge, J. J. Morgan's, Esq. No. 7, Portland Place, Hammersmith. W. JFbplet Printer, Chancery Lane, London. 6 IiECTUBES ON SHAKSPEEE AND MILTON. After expressing a doubt about the number of weeks tbe delivery of Coleridge's lectures actually covered — a point the dates we have given above from the " Times " set at rest — Mr. Collier makes declaration, in reply to an anonymous writer/ who had charged him with inventing them, that his short-hand notes were taken at the time. There seems no reason whatever to doubt this. The contemporary notices in the papers fairly establish, by their resemblance, the genuineness of the transcripts. " My original notes (he continues) were taken at the close of 1811 and at the opening of 1812. I endeaTOured in the interval between each lecture to transcribe them; but, from other avocations, I was nnable to keep pace with the delivery, and at the termination of the course I must have been considerably in arrear : while I am writing I have two of my short-hand books (sheets of paper stitched together) before me, which remained undeciphered from 1812 until 1854, — a period of forty-two years. During the whole time I did not know what had become of any of them. I attended another course by the same lecturer in 1818, of which I had taken and preserved only a few scattered excerpts ; and I cannot call to mind whether, even at that date, my notes of the previous lectures of 1811-12 were forthcoming. I know that I afterwards searched for them several times unsuc- cessfully ; and with great diligence about the year 1842, when I was engaged in preparing a new edition of Shakspere, to which I apprehended the opinions of Coleridge on the different plays would have been an important recommendation.' I again failed to find them, and in 1850 I took up my residence in the country, carry- ing with me only such furniture as I required, and among it a double chest of drawers, in the highest part of which I subsequently discovered some of, but, I lament to say, by no means all, my lost ' In a brochure entitled " Literary Cookery," which was withdrawn. Mr. Collier had supplied some portions of his transcripts to " Notes and Queries," before their publication in 1856. ' The second portion of this volume was, however, already published at that date^ INTBODTJCTORT. 7 notes. Even these were not brought to light until I was prepar- ing to remove to my present residence, and was employing myself in turning out waste paper and worthless relics from every receptacle. " As doubt, however unfairly and unjustifiably, has been cast on my re-acquisition of these materials, I will just state, with some particularity, of what they consist. 1. Several brochures and fragments of a Diary in my own handwriting, not at all regularly kept, and the earliest entry in which is 10th October, without the year, but unquestionably 1811. 2. Five other small brochures, containing partial transcripts, in long-hand, of Coleridge's first, second, sixth, and eighth lectures. 3. Several brochures, and parts of brochures, of my original short-hand notes, two of which (those of the ninth and twelfth lectures) were complete, but entirely untranscribed. " On turning out these papers from the upper drawer, where they must have been deposited for many years, I looked anxiously for the rest of the series of lectures, but in vain, and to this day I have recovered no more The early transcripts were not in the first person: they, as it were, narrated the observations and criticisms of Coleridge, with constant repetitions of "he said," " he remarked," " he quoted," &c. On the other hand, my original notes, taken flown from the lips of the lecturer, were, of course, in the first person, — " I beg you to observe," " it is my opinion," " we are struck," &c. I therefore re-wrote the whole, comparing my recovered transcripts with my short-hand notes (where I had them) as I proceeded, and putting the earliest lectures as well afe the latest, in the first instead of the third person ; thus making them consistent with each other, and more conformable to the very words Coleridge had employed. " These are what are now offered to the reader. I cannot but be sensible of their many and great imperfections : they are, I am sure, fiill of omissions, owing in some degree to want of facility on my part ; in a greater degree, perhaps, to a mistaken estimate of what it was, or was not, expedient to minute ; and in no little proportion to the fact, that in some cases I relied upon my recollection to fill up chasms in my memoranda. A few defects may be attributed to the inconvenience of my position among other auditors (though the lectures were not always very fully attended), and others to the plain fact, that I was not un- 8 LBOTUEES ON SHAKSPBEB AND MILTON. frequently so engrossed, and absorbed by the almost inspired look and manner of the speaker, that I Tfas, for a time, incapable of per- forming the mechanical duty of writing. I present my notes merely as they are, doing, I know, great injustice to the man and to the subject, but at the same time preserving many criticisms, obser- vations, and opinions, well worthy of attention from their truth, their eloquence, and their originality." § 2. — -Criticisms hy Coleridge from Mr. Collier's Diary. Mr. Collier furnishes numerous extracts from the Diary whicli he kept in 1811. Such, portions of them as fall within our scope, are here given. A few are rescued from forgetfnlness, which hardly do so. " Sunday, \Zth Oct. — In a conversation at my father's, a little while since, he gave the foUowing character of Palstaff, which I wrote down very soon after it was deUvered. " Falstaff was no coward, but pretended to be one merely for the sake of trying experiments on the credulity of mankind : he was a liar with the same object, and not because he loved false- hood for itself. He was a man of such pre-eminent abilities, as to give him a profound contempt for all those by whom he was usually surrounded, and to lead to a determination on his part, in spite of their fancied superiority, to make them his tools and dupes. He knew, however low he descended, that his own talents would raise him, and extricate him from any difficulty. While he was thought to be the greatest rogue, thief, and liar, he BtUl had that about him which could render him not only respect- able, but absolutely necessary to his companions. It was in characters of complete moral depravity, but of first-rate wit and talents, that Shakspere delighted : and Coleridge instanced Richard the Third, Falstafi", and lago. " Coleridge was recently asked his opinion as to the order in which Shakspere had written his plays. His answer was to this effect, as well as I can remember : — that although Malone had collected a great many external particulars regarding the age of each play, they were all, in Coleridge's mind, much less satisfac- tory than the knowledge to be obtained from internal evidence. If he were to adopt any theory upon the subject, it would rather INTEODUCTOBT. 9 be physiological and pathological than chronological. There ap- peared to be three stages in Shakspere's genius ; it did not seem as if in the outset he thought his abUity of a dramatic kind, ex- cepting perhaps as an actor, in which, like many others, he had been somewhat mistaken, though by no means so much as it was the custom to believe. Hence his two poems, ' Venus and Adonis,' and ' Lucrece,' both of a narrative character, which must have been written very early : the first, at all events, must have been produced in the country, amid country scenes, sights and employments; but the last had more the air of a city, and of society." Mr. Collier produces a note here, of doubtful date, of some remarks of Coleridge on Shakspere as an actor : — "It is my persuasion — indeed my firm conviction — so firm that nothing can shake it — the rising of Shakspere's spirit from the grave, modestly confessing his own deficiencies, could not alter my opinion — that Shakspere, in the best sense of the word, was a very great actor ; nothing can exceed the judgment he displays upon that subject. He may not have had the physical advantages of Burbage or Field ; but they would never have become what they were without his most able and sagacious instructions ; and what would either of them have been without Shakspere's plays ? Great dramatists make great actors. But looking at 'him merely as a performer, I am certain that he was greater as Adam, in ' As yon Like It,' than Burbage, as Hamlet, or Richard the Third. Think of the scene between him and Orlando ; and think again, that the actor of that part had to carry the author of that play in his arms I Think of having had Shakspere in one's arms ! It is worth having died two hundred years ago to have heard Shakspere deliver a single line. He must have been a great actor." The entry of the ISth Oct. thus continues : — "With regard to his dramas, they might easily be placed in groups. ' Titus Andronicus ' would, in some sort, stand alone, because it was obviously intended to excite vulgar audiences by its scenes of blood and horror — ^to our ears shocking and disgusting. This was the fashion of plays in Shakspere's youth ; but the taste, if such indeed it were, soon disappeared, as it was sure to do with a man of his character of mind ; and then followed, probably, that 10 LECTtTEES ON SHAKSPBEE AND MILTON. beantifol love-poem 'Romeo and Juliet,' and 'Love's Labour's Lost,' made up entirely of the same passion. These might be succeeded by 'AU's Well that Ends Well,' not an agreeable story, but still fnU of love; and by 'As Tou Like It,' not Shakspere's invention as to plot, but entirely his own as to dialogue, with all the vivacity of wit, and the elasticity of youth and animal spirits. No man, even in the middle period of Hfe, he thought, could have produced it. 'Midsummer Night's Dream' and ' Twelfth Night ' hardly appeared to belong to the complete maturity of his genius : Shakspere was then ripening his powers for such works as ' TroUus and Cressida,' ' Coriolanus,' ' Julius Csesar,' ' Cymbehne,' and ' Othello.' Coleridge professed that he could not yet make up his mind to assign a period to ' The Merchant of Venice,' to ' Much Ado about Nothing,' nor to ' Measure for Measure ; ' but he was convinced that ' Antony and Cleopatra,' ' Hamlet,' ' Macbeth,' ' Lear,' ' The Tempest,' and ' The Winter's Tale,' were late productions, — especially ' The Winter's Tale.' These belonged to the third group. " When asked what he would do with the historical plays, he replied that he was much at a loss. Historical plays had been written and acted before Shakspere took up those subjects ; and there was no doubt whatever that his contributions to the three parts of ' Henry VI.' were very small ; indeed he doubted, in op- position to Malone, whether he had had anything to do with the lirst part of ' Henry VI. : ' if he had, it must have been extremely early in his career. ' Richard II.' and ' Richard IH.' — noble plays, and the finest specimens of their kind — ^mnst have preceded the two parts of ' Henry IV. ; ' and ' Henry VilL' was decidedly a late play. Dramas of this description ought to be treated by them- selves ; they were neither trs^edy nor comedy, and yet at times both. Though far from accurate as to events, in point of cha- racter they were the essential truth of history. ' Let no man (said Coleridge) blame his son for learning history from Shakspere.' " He did not agree with some Germans (whom he had heard talk upon the subject) that Shakspere had had much to do with the doubtful plays imputed to him in the third folio : on the con- trary, he was sure that, if he had touched any of them, it was only very lightly and rarely. Being asked whether he included ' The Two Noble Kinsmen ' among the doubtful plays, he an- swered, ' Decidedly not : there is the clearest internal evidence INTBODTJOTOET. 11 that Shakspere importantly aided Fletcher in the composition of it. Parts are most unlike Fletcher, yet most like Shakspere, while other parts are most like Fletcher, and most unlike Shak- spere. The mad scenes of the Jailor's daughter are coarsely imitated from ' Hamlet ;' those were by Fletcher, and so very inferior, that I wonder how he could so far condescend, Shak- spere would never have imitated himself at all, much less so badly. There is no finer, or more characteristic dramatic writing than some scenes in 'The Two Noble Kinsmen.'" " Thursday, nth Oct. — Yesterday, at Lamb's, I met Coleridge again. I expected to see him there, and I made up mymind that I would remember as much as possible of what he said. " He said that Shakspere was almost the only dramatic poet, who by his characters represented a class, and not an individual : other writers for the stage, and in other respects good ones too, had aimed their satire and ridicule at particular foibles and par- ticular persons, while Shakspere at one stroke lashed thou- sands ; Shakspere struck at a crowd ; Jonson picked out an especial object for his attack. Coleridge drew a parallel between Shakspere and a geometrician : the latter, when tracing a circle, had his eye upon the centre as the important point, but included also in his vision a wide circumference ; so Shakspere, while his eye rested upon an individual character, always embraced a wide circumference of others, without diminishing the separate interest he intended to attach to the being he pourtrayed. Othello was a personage of this description ; but all Shakspere's chief cha- racters possessed, in a greater or less degree, this claim to our admiration. He was not a mere painter of portraits, with the dress, features, and peculiarities of the sitter ; but a painter of likenesses so true that, although nobody could perhaps say they knew the very person represented, all saw at once that it was faithful, and that it must be a likeness. " Lamb led Colei'idge on to speak of Beaumont and Fletcher : he highly extolled their comedies in many respects, especially for the vivacity of the dialogue, but he contended that their tragedies were liable to grave objections. They always proceeded upon something forced and unnatural ; the reader never can reconcile the plot with probability, and sometimes not with possibility. One of their tragedies was founded upon this : — A lady expresses a wish to possess the heart of her lover, terms which that lover understands, all the way through, in a literal sense ; and nothing 12 LBCTUEES ON SHAKSPERE AND MILTON. can satisfy him but tearing out his heart, and having it presented to the heroine, in order to secure her affections, after he was past the enjoyment of them.' Their comedies, however, were much superior, and at times, and excepting in the generalization of humour and application, almost rivalled those of Shakspere. The situations are sometimes so disgusting, and the language so indecent and immoral, that it is impossible to read the plays in private society. The difference in this respect between Shak- spere and Beaumont and Fletcher (speaking of them in their joint capacity) is, that Shakspere always makes vice odious and virtue admirable, while Beaumont and Fletcher do the very re- verse — they ridicule virtue and encourage vice : they pander to the lowest and basest passions of our nature. " Coleridge afterwards made some remarks upon more modern dramatists, and was especially severe upon Dryden, who could degrade his fine intellect, and debase his noble use of the English language in such plays as ' All for Love,' and ' Sebastian,' down to ' Limberham,' and ' The Spanish Friar.' He spoke also of Moore's ' Gamester,' and applauded warmly the acting of Mrs. Siddons. He admitted that the situations were affecting, but maintained that the language of the tragedy was below criticism : it was about upon a par with Kotzebue. It was extremely natural for any one to shed tears at seeing a beautiful woman in the depths of anguish and despair, when she beheld her husband, who had ruined himself by gambling, dying of poison at the very moment he had come into a large fortune, which would have paid all his debts, and enabled him to live in affluence and happiness. ' This (said Coleridge) reminds one of the modern termination of " Romeo and Juliet," — I mean the way in which Garrick, or somebody else, terminated it, — so that Juliet should revive be- fore the death of Romeo, and just in time to be not in time, but to find that he had swallowed a mortal poison. I know that this conclusion is consistent with the old novel upon which the tragedy IS founded, but a narrative is one thing and a drama another, and Shakspere's judgment revolted at such situations on the stage. To be sure they produce tears, and so does a blunt razor shaving the upper lip.' " From hence the conversation diverged to other topics ; and ' The tragedy here referred to by Coleridge is " The Mad Lover." — J. P. G INTEODUCTOET. 13 Southey's ' Curse of Eehama ' having been introduced by one of the company, Coleridge admitted that it was a poem of great talent and ingenuity. Being asked whether he could give it no higher praise, he answered, that it did the greatest credit to the abilities of Southey, but that there were two things in it utterly incompatible. From the nature of the story, it was absolutely necessary that the reader should imagine himself enjoying one of the wildest dreams of a poet's fancy ; and at the same time it was required of him (which was impossible) that he should believe that the soul of the hero, such as he was depicted, was alive to all the feelings and sympathies of tenderness and affection. The reader was called upon to believe in the possibility of the exis- tence of an almighty man, who had extorted from heaven the power he possessed, and who was detestable for his crimes, and yet who should be capable of all the delicate sensibilities subsist- ing between parent and child, oppressed, injured, and punished. Such a being was not in human nature. The design and purpose were excellent, namely, to show the superiority of moral to physical power. " He looked upon ' The Curse of Kehama ' as a work of great talent, but not of much genius ; and he drew the distinction be- tween talent and genius by comparing the first to a watch and the last to an eye : both were beautifiil, but one was only a piece of ingenious mechanism, while the other was a production above all art. Talent was a manufacture ; genius a gift that no labour nor study could supply : nobody could make an eye, but anybody, duly instructed, could make a watch. It was suggested by one of the company, that more credit was given to Southey for imagination in that poem than was due to him, since he had derived so much from the extravagances of Hindu mythology. Coleridge replied, that the story was the work of the poet, and that much of the mythology was his also : having invented his tale, Southey wanted to reconcile it with probability, according to some theory or other, and therefore resorted to oriental fiction. He had picked up his mythology from books, as it were by scraps, and had tacked and fitted them together with much skill, and with such additions as his wants and wishes dictated. " The conversation then turned upon Walter Scott, whose ' Lady of the Lake ' has recently been published, and I own that there appeared on the part of Coleridge some disposition, if not to 14 LECinEBS ON SHAKSPBEB AND MILTON. disparage, at least not to recognize the merits of Scott. He pro- fessed himself comparatively ignorant of Scott's productions, and stated that ' The Lady of the Lake ' had been lying on his table for more than a month, and that he had only been able to get through two divisions of the poem, and had there found many grammatical blunders, and expressions that were not English on this side of the Tweed — nor, indeed, on the other. If (added he) I were called upon to form an opinion of Mr. Scott's poetry, the first thing I should do would be to take away all his names of old castles, which rhyme very prettily, and read very picturesquely ; then, I would remove out of the poem aU the old armour and weapons ; next, I would exclude the mention of all nunneries, abbeys, and priories, and I should then see what would be the residuum — how much poetry would remain. At present, having read so little of what he has produced, I can form no competent opinion ; but I should then be able to ascertain what was the stoiy or fable (for which I give him full credit, because, I dare say, it is very interesting), what degree of imagination was dis- played in narrating it, and how far he was to beadmired for pro- priety and felicity of expression. Of these, at present, others must judge, but I would rather have written one simile by Burns, — " ' Like snow that falls upon a river, A moment white, then gone for ever," — than all the poetry that his countryman Scott — as far as I am yet able to form an estimate — is likely to produce. "Milton's 'Samson Agonistes' being introduced as a topic, Coleridge said, with becoming emphasis, that it was the finest imitation of the ancient Greek drama that ever had been, or ever would be written. One of the company remarked that Steevens (the commentator on Shakspere) ' had asserted that ' Samson Agonistes ' was formed on the model of the ancient Mysteries, the origin of our English drama ; upon which Coleridge burst forth with unusual vehemence against Steevens, asserting that he was no more competent to appreciate Shakspere and Milton, than to form an idea of the grandeur and glory of the seventh heavens. He would require (added Coleridge) a telescope of more than HerscheUiam power to enable him, with his contracted intellectual vision, to see half a quarter as far ; the end of his nose is the INTKODUCTOET. 15 utmost extent of that man's ordinary sight, and even then he cannot comprehend what he sees." " 29." Fa/radise Lost, Book 11. The grandest efforts of poetry are where the imagination is called forth, not to produce a distinct form, but a strong working of the mind, still offering what is still repelled, and again creating what is again rejected ; the result being what the poet wishes to inipress, namely, the substitution of a sub- lime feeling of the unimaginable for a mere image. I have 1 Eead "create." 92 LBCTUEES ON [1811-12 sometimes thougtit that the passage just read might be quoted as exhibiting the narrow limit of painting, as com- pared with the boundless power of poetiy : painting cannot go beyond a certain point; poetry rejects all control, all confinement. Tet we know that sundry painters have attempted pictures of the meeting between Satan and Death at the gates of HeU; and how was Death repre- sented ? Not as Milton has .described him, but by the most defined thing that can be imagined — a skeleton, the dryest and hardest image that it is possible to discover ; which, instead of keeping the mind in a state of activity, reduces it to the merest passivity, — an image, compared with which a square, a triangle, or any other m.athematical figure, is a luxuriant fancy. It is a general but mistaken notion that, because some forms of writing, and some combinations of thought, are not usual, they are not natural ; but we are to recollect that the dramatist represents his characters in every situa- tion of life and in every state of mind, and there is no form of language that may not "oe introduced with effect by a great and judicious poet, and yet be most strictly according to nature. Take punning, for instance, which may be the lowest, but at all events is the most harmless, kind of wit, because it never excites envy. A pun may be a necessary consequence of association : one man, attempting to prove something that was resisted by another, might, when agitated by strong feeling, employ a term used by his adversary with a directly contrary meaning to that for which that adversary had resorted to it : it might come into his mind as one way, and sometimes the best, of ' replying to that adversary. This form of speech is generally produced by a mixture of anger and contempt, and punning is a natural mode of expressing them. It is my intention to pass over none of the important so-called conceits of Shakspere, not a few of which axe LeCT. VII.] SHAKSPEEE AND MILTON. 9iJ introduced into his later productions with great propriety and effect. We are not to forget, that at the time he lived there was an attempt at, and an aflEectation of, quaintness and adornment, which emanated from the Court, and against which satire was directed by Shakspere in the character of Osrick in Hamlet. Among the schoolmen of that age, and earlier, nothing was more common than the use of conceits : it began with the revival of letters, and the bias thus given was very generally felt and acknowledged. I have in my possession a dictionary of phrases, in which the epithets applied to love, hate, jealousy, and such abstract terms, are arranged ; and they consist almost entirely of words taken from Seneca and his imitators, or from the schoolmen, showing perpetual antithesis, and describing the passions by the conjunction and combination of things absolutely irreconcilable.^ In treating the matter thus> I am aware that I am only palliating the practice in Shak- spere : he ought to have had nothing to do with merely temporary peculiarities : he wrote not for his own only, but for all ages, and so far I admit the use of some of his conceits to be a defect. They detract sometimes from his. universality as to time, person, and situation. If we were able to discover, and to point out the peculiar faults, as well as the peculiar beauties of Shakspere, it would materially assist us in deciding what authority ought to be attached to certain portions of what are generally called his works. If we met with a play, or .certain scenes of a play, in which we could trace neither his defects nor his excellences, we should have the strongest reason for believing that he had had no hand in it. In the case of ' Thomas Watson, a contemporary of Shakspere, much praised in his day, fills forty Latin lines with a description of love in the manner Coleridge speaks of. He styles it, morsvivida, mortua vita, dementia pru- dens, dolosavolwptaSjinermisbellator, amara didoedo, morspraevia morti, and so on ad nauseam. Compare Romeo's description of love on p. 91. 94 LECTUEBS ON [1811-12 scenes so oircumstanced we miglit come to the conclusion that they were taken from the older plays, which, in some instances, he reformed or altered, or that they were in- serted afterwards by some under- hand, in order to please the mob. If a drama by Shakspere turned out to be too heavy for popular audiences, the clown might be called in to lighten the representation ; and if it appeared that what was added was not in Shakspere's manner, the con- clusion would be inevitable, that it was not from Shak- spere's pen. It remains for me to speak of the hero and heroine, of Romeo and Juliet themselves ; and I shall do so with unaffected diffidence, not merely on account of the delicacy, but of the greab importance of the subject. I feel that it is impossible to defend Shakspere from the most cruel of all charges — that he is an immoral writer — without enter- ing fully into his mode of portraying female characters, and of displaying the passion of love. It seems to me, that he has done both with greater perfection than any other writer of the known world, perhaps with the single exception of Milton in his delineation of Eve. When I have heard it said, or seen it stated, that Shak- spere wrote for man, but the gentle Fletcher for woman, it has always given me something like acute pain, because to me it seems to do the greatest injustice to Shakspere: when, too, I remember how much character is formed by what we read, I cannot look upon it as a light question, to be passed over as a mere amusement, hke a game of cards or chess. I never have been able to tame down my mind to think poetry a sport, or an occupation for idle hours. Perhaps there is no more sure criterion of refinement in moral character, of the purity of inteUectnal intention, and of the deep conviction and perfect sense of what our own nature really is in all its combinations, than the different definitions different men would give of love. I will not LeCT. VII.] SHAKSPERE AND MILTON. 95 detain you by stating tlie various known definitions, some of which it may be better not to repeat : I will rather give you one of my own, which, I apprehend, is equally free from the extravagance of pretended Platonism (which, like other things which super-moralize, is sure to demoralize) and from its grosser opposite. Considering myself and my fellow-men as a sort of link between heaven and earth, being composed of body and soul, with power to reason and to will, and with that perpetual aspiration which tells us that this is ours for a while, but it is not ourselves ; considering man, I say, in this two-fold character, yet united in one person, I conceive that there can be no correct definition of love which does not correspond with our being, and with that subordination of one part to another which constitutes our perfection. I would say therefore that — " Love is a desire of the whole being to be united ^o some thing, or some being, felt necessary to its completeness, by the most perfect means that nature permits, and reason dictates."' It is inevitable to every noble mind, whether man or woman, to feel itself, of itself, imperfect and insufficient, not as an animal only, but as a moral being. How wonder- fully, then, has Providence contrived for us, by making that which is necessary to us a step in our exaltation to a higher and nobler state ! The Creator has ordained that one should possess qualities which the other has not, and the union of both is the most complete ideal of human character. In everything the blending of the similar with the dissimilar is the secret of all pure dehght. Who shall dare to stand alone, and vaunt himself, in himself, sufficient ? In poetry it is the blending of passion with order that ' See Lecture VIII., and note, containing extract from letter to H. C. Kobinson. 96 LBCTOEBS ON [1811-12 constitutes perfection : this is still more the case in morals, and more than all in the exclusive attachment of the sexes. True it is, that the world and its business may be carried on without marriage ; but it is so evident that Providence intended man (the only animal of all climates, and whose reason is pre-eminent over instinct) to be the master of the world, that marriage, or the knitting together of society by the tenderest, yet firmest ties, seems ordained to render him capable of maintaining his superiority over the brute creation. Man alone has been privileged to clothe himself, and to do all things so as to make him, as it were, a secondary creator of himself, and of his own happiness or misery : in this, as in all, the image of the Deity is im- pressed upon him. Providence, then, has not left us to prudence only ; for the power of calculation, which prudence implies, cannot have existed, but in a state which pre-supposes marriage. If God has done this, shall we suppose that He has given us no moral sense, no yearning, which is something more than animal, to secure that, without which man might form a herd, but could not be a society ? The very idea seems to breathe absurdity. From this union arise the paternal, filial, brotherly and sisterly relations of life ; and every state is but a family magnified. All the operations of mind, in short, all that distingiiishes us from brutes, originate in the more perfect state of domestic life. — One infallible criterion in forming an opinion of a man is the reverence in which he holds women. Plato has said, that in this way we rise from sensuality to affection, from affection to love, and from love to the pure intellectual delight by which we become worthy to conceive that infinite in ourselves, without which it is impossible for man to believe in a God. In a word, the grandest and most delightful of all promises has been LeCT. VII.] SHAKSPERE AND MILTON. 97 expressed to us by this practical state — our marriage with the Redeemer of mankind. I might safely appeal to every man who hears me, who in youth has been accustomed to abandon himself to his animal passions, whether when he first really fell in love, the earHest symptom was not a complete change in his manners, a contempt and a hatred of himself for having excused his conduct by asserting, that he acted according to the dictates of nature, that his vices were the inevitable consequences of youth, and that his passions at that period of life could not be conquered ? The surest friend of chastity is love : it leads us, not to sink the mind in the body, but to draw up the body to the mind — ^the immortal part of our nature. See how contrasted in this respect are some portions of the works of writers, whom I need not name, with other portions of the same works : the ebulli- tions of comic humour have at times, by a lamentable con- fusion, been made the means of debasing our nature, while at other times, even in the same volume, we are happy to notice the utmost purity, such as the purity of love, which above aU other qualities renders us most pure and lovely. Love is not, hke hunger, a mere selfish appetite : it is an associative quahty. The hungry savage is nothing but an animal, thinking only of the satisfaction of his stomach : what is the first effect of love, but to associate the feeling with every object in nature ? the trees whisper, the roses exhale their perfumes, the nightingales sing, nay the very skies smile in unison with the feeling of true and pure love. It gives to every object in nature a power of the heart, without which it would indeed be spiritless. Shakspere has described this passion in various states and stages, beginning, as was most natural, with love in the young. Does he open his play by making Romeo and Juliet in love at first sight — at the first glimpse, as any ordinary thinker would do ? Certainly not : he knew what 98 LBCTUEES ON [1811-12 he was about, and how lie was to aceomplisli what he waa about : he was to develop the whole passion, and he com- mences with the first elements — that sense of imperfection, that yearning to combine itself with something lovely. Romeo became enamoured of the idea he had formed in his own mind, and then, as it were, christened the first real being of the contrary sex as endowed with the per- fections he desired. He appears to be in love with Rosa- line ; but, in truth, he is in love only with his own idea. He felt that necessity of being beloved which no noble mind can be without. Then our poet, our poet who so well knew human nature, introduces Romeo to Juliet, and makes it not only a violent, but a permanent love — a point for which Shakspere has been ridiculed by the ignorant and unthinking. Romeo is first represented in a state most susceptible of love, and then, seeing JuUet, he took and retained, the infection. This brings me to observe upon a characteristic of Shakspere, which belongs to a man of profound thought and high genius. It has been too much the custom, when anything that happened in his dramas could not easily be explained by the few words the poet has employed, to pass it idly over, and to say that it is beyond our reach, and beyond the power of philosophy — a sort of terra incognita for discoverers — a great ocean to be hereafter explored. Others have treated such passages as hints and glimpses of something now non-existent, as the sacred fragments of an ancient and ruined temple, all the portions of which are beautiful, although their particular relation to each other is unknown. Shakspere knew the human mind, and its most minute and intimate workings, and he never intro- duces a word, or a thought, in vain or out of place : if we do not understand him, it is our own fault or the fault of copyists and typographers ; but study, and the possession of some small stock of the knowledge by which he worked Leot. YII.] shakspeeb and milton. 99 will enable us often to detect and explain his meaning. He never -wrote at random, or hit upon points of character and conduct by chance ; and the smallest fragment of his mind not unfrequently gives a clue to a most perfect, regular, and consistent whole. As I may not have another opportunity, the introduction of Friar Laurence into this tragedy enables me to remark upon the different manner in which Shakspere has treated . the priestly character, as compared with other writers. In Beaumont and Fletcher priests are represented as a vulgar mockery ; and, as in others of their dramatic personages, the errors of a few are mistaken for the demeanour of the many : but in Shakspere they always carry with them our love and respect. He made no injurious abstracts : he took no copies from the worst parts of our nature ; and, like the rest, his characters of priests are truly drawn from the general body. It may strike some as singular, that throughout all his productions he has never introduced the passion of avarice. The truth is, that it belongs only to particular parts of our nature, and is prevalent only in particular states of society ; hence it could not, and cannot, be permanent. The Miser of Moliere and Plautus is now looked upon as a species of madman, and avarice as a species of madness. Blwes, of whom everybody has heard, was an individual influenced by an insane condition of mind ; but, as a passion, avarice has disappeared. How admirably, then, did Shakspere foresee, that if he drew such a character it could not be permanent ! he drew characters which would always be natural, and therefore permanent, inasmuch as they were not dependent upon accidental circumstances. There is not one of the plays of Shakspere that is built upon anything but the best and surest foundation ; the characters must be permanent — permanent while men continue men, — because they stand upon what is abso- 100 lECTTJRBS ON [1811-12 lutely necessary to our existence. This cannot be said even of some of the most famous authors of antiquity. Take the capital tragedies of Orestes, or of the husband of Jocasta : great as was the genius of the writers, these dramas have an obvious fault, and the fault lies at the very root of the action. In Qidipus a man is represented oppressed by fate for a crime of which he was not morally guilty ; and while we read we are obHged to say to our- selves, that in those days they considered actions without reference to the real guilt of the persons. There is no character in Shakspere in which envy is pourtrayed, with one solitary exception — Cassius, in " Julius Caesar ; " yet even there the vice is not hateful, inasmuch as it is counterbalanced by a number of excellent qualities and virtues. The poet leads the reader to suppose that it is rather something constitutional, something derived from his parents, something that he cannot avoid, and not some- thing that he has himself acquired ; thus throwing the blame from the will of man to some inevitable circumstance, and leading us to suppose that it is hardly to be looked upon as one of those passions thataptually debase the mind. Whenever love is described as of a serious nature, and much more when it is to lead to a tragical result, it depends upon a law of the mind, which, I believe, I shall hereafter be able to make intelligible, and which would not only justify Shakspere, but show an analogy to aU his other characters. R^ort of the Seventh Lectwre. The following Eeport of the Seventh Lecture, delivered on December 9, appeared in the " Dublin Correspondent," December 17, 1811. We borrow it from " Notes and Queries," August 4, 1855 : — "Dec. 17,1811. " Mr. Coleridge, having concluded the preliminary dis- LbCT. VII.] SHAKSPEEE AND MILTON. 101 cnssions on the nature of the Shaksperian drama, and the genius of the poet, and briefly noticed 'Love's Labour's Lost,' as the link which connected together the poet and the dramatist, proceeded, in his seventh lecture, to an ela* borate review of ' Romeo and Juliet,' a play in which are to be found all the individual excellences of the author, but less happily combined than in his riper productions. This he observed to be the characteristic of genius, that its earliest works are never inferior in beauties, while the merits which taste and judgment can confer are of slow growth. Tybalt and Capulet he showed to be represen- tatives of classes which he had observed in society, while in Mercutio he exhibited the first character of his own con- ception ; a being formed of poetic elements, which medi- tation rather than observation had revealed to him ; a being full of high fancy and rapid thought, conscious of his own powers, careless of life, generous, noble, a perfect gentleman. On his fate hangs the catastrophe of the tragedy. In commenting on the character of the Nurse, Mr. Coleridge strenuously resisted the suggestion that this is a mere piece of Dutch painting ; a portrait in the style of Gerard Dow. On the contrary, her character is exqui- sitely generalized, and is subservient to the display of fine moral contrasts. Her fondness for Juliet is delightfully pathetic. ' What a melancholy world would this be with- out children, how inhuman without old age.' Her loqua- city is characteristic of a vulgar mind, which recollects merely by coincidence of time and place, while cultivated minds connect their ideas by cause and efEect. Having admitted that these lower persons might be suggested to Shakspere by observation, Mr. Coleridge reverted to his ideal characters, and said, 'I ask, where Shakspere ob- served this ? ' (some heroic sentiments by Othello) ' It was his inward eye of meditation on his own nature. He became Othello, and therefore spoke like him. Shakspere 102 LBCTUEES ON [1811-12 became, in fact, all beings but the vicions ; but in drawing his characters he regarded essential not accidental relations. ■ Avarice he never ponrtrayed, for avarice is a factitious passion. The Miser of Plautus and Moliere is already obsolete.' Mr. Coleridge entered into a discussion of the nature of fancy ; showed how Shakspere, composing under a feeling of the unimaginable, endeavouring to reconcile opposites by producing a strong working of the mind, was led to those earnest conceits which are consistent with passion, though frigidly imitated by writers without any. He illustrated this part of his subject by a reference to Milton's conception of Death, which the painters absurdly endeavour to strip of its fanciful nature, and render definite by the figure of a skeleton, the dryest of all images, com- pared with which a square or a triangle is a luxuriant fancy. "Mr. Coleridge postponed the examination of the hero and heroine of the piece, but prefaced his inquiry by re- marks on the nature of love, which he defined to be ' a perfect desire of the whole being to be united to some thing or being which is felt necessary to its perfection, by the most perfect means that nature permits, and reason dictates ; ' and took occasion with great delicacy to contrast this link of our higher and lower nature, this noblest energy of our humane and social being, with what, by a gross misnomer, usurps its name ; and asserted, that the criterion of honour and worth among men is their habit of sentiment on the subject of love. " "We are compelled to omit the partial iUnstration of his ' in the characters of Romeo and Juliet, the continuation of which we are promised in the succeeding lecture." Mr. H. C. Robinson inserted a report of this lecture in the " Morning Chronicle." See Diary, quoted above. Intro- ductory matter, § 2. ' Read " this." LbCT. VIII.] SHAKSPBEE AND MILTOK. 103 LECTURE VIII. TT is impossible to pay a higher compliment to poetry, than to consider the effects it produces in common with religion, yet distinct (as far as distinction can be, where there is no division) in those qualities which re- ligion exercises and diffuses over all mankind, as far as they are subject to its influence. I have often thought that religion (speaking of it only as it accords with poetry, without reference to its more serious impressions) is the poetry of mankind, both having for their objects : — - 1. To geijieralize our notions; to prevent men from confining their attention solely, or chiefly, to their own narrow sphere of action, and to their own individual circumstances. By placing them in certain awful rela- tions it merges the ind^;^dual man in the whole species, and makes it impossible for any one man to think of his future lot, or indeed of his present condition, without at the same time comprising in his view his fellow-creatures. 2. That both poetry and religion throw the object of deepest interest to a distance from us, and thereby not only aid our imaginaition, but in a most important manner subserve the interest of our virtues ; for that man is indeed a slave, who is a slave to his own senses, and whoso mind and imagination cannot carry him beyond the distance which his hand can touch, or even his eye can reach. 3. The grandest point of resemblance between them is, 104 LECTITEES ON [1811-12 that both have for their object (I hardly know whether the English language supplies an appropriate word) the perfecting, and the pointing out to us the indefinite im- provement of our natnre, and fixing our attention upon that. They bid us, while we are sitting in the dark at our little fire, look at the mountain-tops, struggling with darkness, and announcing that light which shall be common to all, in which individual interests shall resolve into one common good, and every man shall find in his fellow man more than a brother. Such being the case, we need not wonder that it has pleased Providence, that the divine truths of religion should have been revealed to us in the form of poetry ; and that at all times poets, not the slaves of any particular sectarian opinions, should have joined to support all those delicate sentiments of the heart (often when they were most opposed to the reigning philosophy of the day) which may be called the feeding streams of religion. I have heard it said that an undevout astronomer is mad. In the strict sense of the word, every being capable of understanding must be mad, who remains, as it were, fixed in the ground on which he treads — who, gifted with the divine faculties of indefinite hope and fear, bom with them, yet settles his faith upon that, in which neither hope nor fear has any proper field for display. Much more truly, however, might it be said that, an nndevout poet is mad : in the strict sense of the word, an undevout poet is an impossibility. I have heard of verse-makers (poets they are not, and never can be) who introduced into their works such questions as these: — Whether the world was made of atoms ? — Whether there is a universe ? — Whether there is a governing mind that supports it? As I have said, verse-makers are not^oets : the poet is one who carries the simpHckyor childhood into the powers of manhood ; whorwith a soul unsubdued by habit, Lect. YIII.] shaksperb and milton. 105 unshackled by custom, contemplates all things with the freshness and the wonder of a child ; and, connecting with it the inquisitive powers of riper years, adds, as far as he can find knowledge, admiration ; and, where knowledge no longer permits admiration, gladly sinks back again into the childlike feeling of devout wonder. The poet is not only the man made to solve the riddle of the universe, but he is also the man who feels where it is not solved. What is old and worn-out, not in itself, but from the dimness of the intellectual eye, produced by worldly passions and pursuits, he makes new : he pours upon it the dew that glistens, and blows round it the breeze that cooled us in our infancy. I hope, therefore, that if in this single lecture I make some demand on the attention of my hearers to a most important subject, upon which depends all sense of the worthiness or nnworthiness of our nature, I shall obtain their pardon. If I afford ■them less amusement, I trust that their own reflections upon a few thoughts will be found to repay them. I have been led to these observations by the tragedy of "Romeo and Juliet," and by some, perhaps, indiscreet expressions, certainly not weU chosen, concerning falling in love at first sight. I have taken one of Shakspere's earliest works, as I consider it, in order to show that he, of -all his contemporaries (Sir Philip Sidney alone excepted), entertained a just conception of the female character. Unquestionably, that gentleman of Europe — that all- accomplished man, and our beloved Shakspere, were the only writers of that age who pitched their ideas of female perfection according to the best researches of philosophy : compared with aU who followed them, they stand as mighty mountains, the islands of a deluge, which has swallowed all the rest in the flood of oblivion.^ 1 " I remember, in conversing on this very point at a subsequent 106 LICTUEES ON [1811-12 I certainly do not mean, as a general maxim, to justify so foolish a thing as what goes by the name of love at first sight; but, to express myself more accurately, I should say that there is, and has always existed, a deep emotion of the mind, which might be called love momentaneoua — not love at first sight, nor known by the subject of it to be or to have been such, but after many years of experience.^ I have to defend the existence of love, as a passion in itself fit and appropriate to human nature ; — I say fit for human nature, and not only so, but peculiar to it, un- shared either in degree or kind by any of our fellow creatures : it is a passion which it is impossible for any creature to feel, but a being endowed with reason, with the moral sense, and with the strong yearnings, which, like all other powerful effects in nature, prophesy some future effect. If I were to address myself to the materialist, with reference to the human kind, and (admitting the three great laws common to all beings, — 1, the law of self- preservation ; 2, that of continuing the race ; and 3, the care of the offspring till protection is no longer needed), — were to ask him, whether he thought any motives of prudence or duty enforced the simple necessity of pre- serving the race ? or whether, after a course of serious reflection, he came to the conclusion, that it would be better to have a posterity, from a sense of duty impelling us to seek that as our object ? — if, I say, I were to ask a period, — I cannot fix the date, — Coleridge made a willing exception in favour of Spenser ; but he added that the notions of the author of the ' Faery Queen ' were often so romantic and heightened by fancy, that he could not look upon Spehser's females as creatures of our world ; whereas the ladies of Shakspere and Sidney were flesh and blood, with their very defects and qualifications giving evidence of their humanity j hence the lively interest taken regarding them." — J. P. C. ^ " Coleridge here," says Mr. Collier, " made a reference to, and cited a passag;e from. Hooker's ' Ecclesiastical Polity.'" LbCT. VIII.] SHAKSPBRE AND MILTON. 107 materialist, whether such was the real cause of the pre- eeryation of the species, he would laugh me to scorn ; he would say that nature was too wise to trust any of her great designs to the mere cold calculations of fallible mortality. Then the question comes to a short crisis : — Is, or is not, our moral nature a part of the end of Providence ? or are we, or are we not, beings meant for society ? Is that society, or is it not, mfeant to be progressive ? I trust that none of my auditors would endure the putting of the question — "Whether, independently of the progression of the race, every individual has it not in his power to be indefinitely progressive ? — for, withoij,t marriage, without exclusive attachment, there could be no human society ; herds, as I said, there might be, but society there could not be ; there could be none of that delightful intercourse between father and child ; none of the sacred affections ; none of the charities of humanity ; none of all those many and complex causes, which have raised us to the state we have already reached, could possibly have existence. All these effects are not found among the brutes ; neither are they found among savages, whom strange accidents have sunk below the class of human beings, insomuch that a stop seems actually to have been put to their pro- gressiveness. We may, therefore, safely conclude that there is placed within us some element, if I may so say, of our nature — something which is as peculiar to our moral nature as any other part can be conceived to be, name it what you will, — ^name it, I will say for illustration, devotion, — name it friendship, or a sense of duty ; but something there is, peculiar to our nature, which answers the moral end ; as we find everywhere in the ends of the moral world, that there are proportionate material and bodily means of accomplishing them. 108 LBCT0EBS ON [1811-12 We are bom, and it is our nature and lot to be com- posed of body and mind ; but when our heart leaps up on hearing of the victories of our country, or of the rescue of the virtuous, but unhappy, from the hands of an oppressor ; when a parent is transported at the restoration of a beloved child from deadly sickness; when the pulse is quickened, from any of these or other causes, do we therefore say, because the body interprets the emotions of the mind and sympathizes with them, asserting its claim to participation, that joy is not mental, or that it is not moral ? Do we assert, that it was owing merely to fulness of blood that the heart throbbed, and the pulse played ? Do we not rather say, that the regent, the mind, being glad, its slave, its willing slave, the body, responded to it, and obeyed the impulse ? If we are possessed with a feeling of having done a wrong, or of having had a wrong done to us, and it excites the blush of shame or the glow of anger, do we pretend to say that, by some accident, the blood suffused itself into veins un- usually small, and therefore that the guilty seemed to evince shame, or the injured indignation ? In these things we scorn such instruction ; and shall it be deemed a sufficient excuse for the materialist to degrade that passion, on which not only many of our virtues depend, but upon which the whole frame, the whole structure of human society rests ? Shall we pardon him this debase- ment of love, because our body has been united to mind by Providence, in order, not to reduce the high to the level of the low, but to elevate the low to the level of the high ? We should be guilty of nothing less than an act of moral suicide, if we consented to degrade that which on every account is most noble, by merging it in what is most derogatory : as if an angel were to hold out to us the welcoming hand of brotherhood, and we turned away from it, to wallow, as it were, with the hog in the mire. LbCT. VIII.] SHAKSPBEE AND MILTON. 109 One of the most lofty and intellectnal of the poets of the time of Shakspere has described this degradation most wonderfully, where he speaks of a man, who, having been converted by the witchery of worldly pleasure and passion, into a hog, on being restored to his human shape still pre- ferred his bestial condition : — " But one, above the rest in special. That had a hog been late, hight Grill by name, Repined greatly, and did him miscall. That from ^ a hoggish form him brought to natural. " Said Gnyon, See the mind of beastly man ! That hath so soon forgot the excellence Of his creation, when he life began. That now he chooseth, with vile difference. To be a beast and lack intelligence. To whom the Palmer thus : — The dunghill kind Delights in filth and foul incontinence : Let Grill be Grill, and have his hoggish mind ; " But let us hence depart, whilst weather serves and wind." ueen. Book U., v. 12, s. 86-7. The first feeling that would strike a reflecting mind, wishing to see mankind not only in an amiable but in a just Hght, would be that beautiful feeling in the moral world, the brotherly and sisterly affections, — ^the existence of strong affection greatly modified by the difference of sex ; made more tender, more graceful, more soothing and coiiciliatory^by the circumstance of difference, yet still re- ' maining perfectly pure, perfectly spiritual. How glorious, 1 Read—" That had from . . . ." ^ The mysterious obliquity of our moral nature touched on here, has been sorrowfully recognized by higher natures than Grill's. The me- diaeval legend of Tannhauser and the hill of Venus admirably embodies this trait of humanity, as the legend of Prometheus does a nobler one. The legend, clearly enough the invention of an ascetic age, enshrines a truth and a warning for all time. 110 LECTTJEBS ON [1811-12 we may say, -would be the efBect, if the instances were rare ; but how much more glorious, when they are so frequent as to be only not universal. This species of affection is the object of religious veneration with all those who love their fellow men, or who know themselves. The power of education over the human mind is herein exemplified, and data for hope are afEorded of yet nn- realized excellences, perhaps dormant in our nature. When we see so divine a moral effect spread through all classes, what may we not hope of other excellences, of unknown quality, still to be developed ? By dividing the sisterly and fraternal aifections from the conjugal, we have, in truth, two loves, each of them as strong as any aSection can be, or ought to be, consistently with the performance of our duty, and the love we should bear to our neighbour. Then, by the former preceding the latter, the latter is rendered more pure, more even, and more constant : the wife has already learned the discipline of pure love in the character of a sister. By the discipline of private life she has already learned how to yield, how to influence, how to command. To all this are to be added the beautiful gradations of attachment which distingxiish human nature ; from sister to wife, from wife to child, to uncle, to cousin, to one of our kin, to one of our blood, to our near neighbour, to our county-man, and to our countryman. The bad results of a want of this variety of orders, of this graceful subordination in the character of attachment, I have often observed in Italy in particular, as well as in other countries, where the young are kept secluded, not only from their neighbours, but from their own families — all closely imprisoned, until the hour when they are ne- cessarily let out of their cages, without having had the opportunity of learning to fly — without experience, re- strained by no kindly feeling, and detesting the control LlCT. VIII.] SHAKSPEEE iND MILTON. Ill which SO long kept them from enjoying the full hubbub of licence. The question is, How have nature and Providence se- cured these blessings to us ? In this way : — that in general the aflEections become those which urge us to leave the paternal nest. We arrive at a definite time of hfe, and feel passions that invite us to enter into the world ; and this new feeling assuredly coalesces with a new object. Suppose we are under the influence of a vivid feeling that is new to us : that feeling will more firmly combine' with an external object, which is likewise vivid from novelty, than with one that is familiar. To this may be added the aversion, which seems to have acted very strongly in rude ages, concerning anything common to us and to the animal creation. That which is done by beasts man feels a natural repugnance to imitate. The desire to extend the bond of relationshipi in families which had emigrated from the patriarchal seed, would likewise have its influence. All these circumstances would render the marriage of brother and sister unfrequent, and in simple ages an ominous feeling to the contrary might easily prevail. Some tradition might aid the objections to such a union ; and, for aught we know, some law might be preserved in the Temple of Isis, and from thence obtained by the pa- triarchs, which would augment the horror attached to such connections. This horror once felt, and soon propagated, the present state of feeling on the subject can easily be explained. Children begin as early to talk of marriage as of death, from attending a wedding, or following a funeral : a new young visitor is introduced into the family, and from association they soon think of the conjugal bond. If a boy tell his parent that he wishes to marry his sister, he is instantly checked by a stern look, and he is shown the 112 LBCTUEBS ON [1811-12 impossibility of such a union. The controlling glance of the parental eye is often more effectual than any form of words that could be employed ; and in mature years a mere look often prevails where exhortation would have failed. As to infants, they are told, without any reason assigned, that it could not be so ; and perhaps the best se- curity for moral rectitude arises from a supposed necessity. Ignorant persons recoil from the thought of doing any- thing that has not been done, and because they have always been informed that it must not be done. The individual has by this time learned the greatest aiid best lesson of the human mind — that in ourselves we are imperfect ; and another truth, of the next, if not of equal, importance — that there exists a possibility of uniting two beings, each identified in their nature, but distinguished in their separate qualities, so that each should retain what distinguishes them, and at the same time each acquire the qualities of that being which is contradistinguished. This is perhaps the most beautiful part of our nature : the man loses not his manly character : he does not become less brave or less resolved to go through fire and water, if necessary, for the object of his affections : rather say, that he becomes far more brave and resolute. He then feels the beginnings of his moral nature : he then is sensible of its imperfection, and of its perfectibility. All the grand and sublime thoughts of an improved state of being then dawn Upon him : he can acquire the patience of woman, which in him is fortitude : the beauty and susceptibility of the female character in him becomes a desire to display all that is noble and dignified. In short, the only true re- semblance to a couple thus united is the pure blue sky of heaven : the female unites the beautiful with the sublime, and the male the sublime with the beautiful. Throughout the whole of his plays Shakspere has evi- dently looked at the subject of love in this dignified light : LbcT. VIII.] SHAKSPERB AND MILTON. 113 he has conceived it not only with moral grandeur, but with philosophical penetration. The mind of man searches for something which shall add to his perfection — which shall assist him ; and he also yearns to lend his aid in com- pleting the moral nature of another. Thoughts like these will occupy many of his serious moments: imagination, will accumulate on imagination, until at last some object attracts his attention, and to this object the whole weight and impulse of his feelings will be directed. Who shall say this is not love ? Here is system, but it is founded upon nature : here are associations ; here are strong feelings, natural to us as men, and they are directed • and finally attached to one object : — ^who shall say this is not love ? ^ Assuredly not the being who is the subject of ' Coleridge, who wrote the poem which cemmences — " All thoughts, all passions, all delights,'' and letters to their sweethearts and wives for his comrades in the Light Dragoons (if we only had . a few of these letters !), thus discourses on love, in a letter to H. C. Eobinson, in 1811, before the delivery of these lectures : — " Hassan's love " — ho is criticizing a romance — " for Amina is beauti- fully described as having had a foundation from early chUdhood. And this I many years ago planned as the subject-matter of a poem, viz. long and deep affections suddenly, in one moment, flash-transmuted into love. In short, I believe that love (as distinguished both from lust and that habitual attachment which may include many objects diversifying itself by degrees only), that that feeling (or whatever it may be more aptly called), that specific mode of being, which one object only can possess, and possess totally, is always the abrupt creation of a moment, though years of dawning may have preceded. I said dawning, for often as I have watched the sun rising from the thinning, diluting blue to the whitening, to the fawn-coloured, the pink, the crimson, the glory, yet still the sun itself has always started up out of the horizon ! Between the brightest hues of the dawning, and the first rim of the sun itself, there is a chasm — all before were differences of degrees, passing and dissolving iuto each other — but this is a difference of kind — a chasm of kiod in a continuity of time ; and as no man who had never watched for I 114 LECTURES ON [1811-12 these sensations. — If it be not love, it is only known that it is not by Him who knows all things. Shakspere has the rise of the sun could understand what I mean, so can no man who has not been in lore understand what love is, though he will be sure to imagine and believe that he does. Thus, is by nature incapable of being in love, though uo man more tenderly attached ; hence he ridi- cules the existence of any other passion than a compound of lust with esteem and friendsliip, confined to one object, first by accidents of asso- ciation, and permanently by the force of habit and a sense of duty. Now this will do very well — it will suffice to make a good husband ; it may be even desirable (if the largest sum of easy and pleasurable sen- sations in this life be the right aim and end of human wisdom) that we should have this, and no more, — but still it is not love — and there is such a passion as love — which is no more a compound than oxygen, though like oxygen it has an almost universal affinity, and a long and finely graduated scale of elective attractions. It combines with lust — ■ but how ? Does lust call forth or occasion love ? Just as much as the reek of the marsh calls up the sun. The sun calls up the vapour — attenuates, lifts it — it becomes a cloud — and now it is the veil of the divinity ; the divinity, transpiercing it at once, liides and declares his presence. We see, we are conscious of liffht alone ; but it is light em- bodied in the earthly nature, which that light itself awoke and sublimated. What is the body , but the fixture of the mind— the stereotype impression ? Arbitrary are the symbols— yet symbols they are. Is terror in my soul ? — my heart beats against ray side. Is grief ? — tears pour in my eyes. In her homely way, the body tries to interpret all the movements of the soul. Shall it not, then, imitate and symbolize that divinest movement of a finite spirit — the yearning to complete itself by union ? Is there not a sex in souls ? We have all eyes, cheeks, lips — but in a lovely woman are not the eyes womanly — yea, every form, in every motion of her whole frame, wcmanly ? Were there not an identity in the substance, man and woman might Join, but they could never unify; were there not throughout, in body and in soul, a con-esponding and adapted difference, there might be addition, but there could be no com- bination. 1 and 1 := 2 ; but 1 cannot be multiplied into 1 : 1 X 1 = 1. At best, it would be an idle echo, the same thing needlessly repeated, as the idiot told the clock — one, one, one, one, &c." Notwithstanding these astute observations, Crabb Robinson ended his long life a bachelor :— possibly, to some extent, because of them. Mr. H. N. Coleridge, in a note to the " Table Talk," remarks of his father-in-law, that he " was a great master in the art of love, but he had Lect. YIII.] shakspbeb and milton. 115 therefore described Romeo as in love in the first instance with Rosaline, and so completely does he fancy himseU in love that he declares, before he has seen Juliet, " When the devout religion of mine eye Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires ; And these, who, often drown'd, could never die. Transparent heretics, be burnt for liars. One fairer than my love ? the all-seeing sun Ne'er savr her match since first the world begun, " Act /., Scene 2. This is in answer to Benvolio, who has asked Romeo to compare the supposed beauty of Rosaline with the actual not studied in Ovid's school ; " and he quotes a passage, that may well be inserted here, from " Coleridge's Poetical Works " : — " Love, truly such, is itself not the most common thing in the world, and mutual love still less so. But that enduring personal attachment, so beautifully delineated by Erin's sweet melodist, and still more touch- ingly, perhaps, in the well-known ballad, ' John Anderson, my Jo, John,' in addition to a depth and constancy of character of no every-day occurrence, supposes a pecuUar sensibility and tenderness of nature ; a constitutional communicativeness and utterance of heart and soul ; a de- light in the detail of sympathy, in the outward and visible signs of the sacrament within, — to count, as it were, the pulses of the life of love. But, above all, it supposes a soul which, even in the pride and summer- tide of life, even in the lustihood of health an'd strength, has felt oftenest and prized highest that which age cannot take away, and which in all our lovings is the love ; I mean, that willing sense of the unsufficingness of the self for itself, which pi-edisposes a generous nature to see, in the total being of another, the supplement and completion of its own ; that quiet perpetual seeking which the presence of the beloved object modulates, not suspends, where the heart momently finds, and, finding again, seeks on ; lastly, when ' life's changeful orb has passed the full,' a confirmed faith in the nobleness of humanity, thus brought home and pressed, as it were, to the very bosom of hourly experience ; it supposes, I say, a heartfelt reverence for worth, not the less deep because divested of its solemnity by habit, by familiarity, by mutual infirmities, and even by a feeling of modesty which will arise in delicate minds, when they are conscious of possessing the same, or the correspondent excellence in their 116 LECTUEBS ON [1811-12 beauty of other ladies ; and in tliis f uU feeling of confidence Romeo is brought to Capulet's, as it were by accident : he sees Juliet, instantly becomes the heretic he has just before declared impossible, and then commences that complete- ness of attachment which forms the whole subject of the tragedy. Surely Shakspere, the poet, the philosopher, who com- bined truth with beauty and beauty with truth, never dreamed that he could interest his auditory in favour of Romeo, by representing him as a mere weathercock, blown round by every woman's breath ; who, having seen one, becanae the victim of melancholy, eating his own heart, concentrating all his hopes and fears in her, and yet, in an instant, changing, and falling madly in love with another. Shakspere must have meant something more than this, for this was the way to make people despise, instead of ad- miring his hero. Romeo tells us what was Shakspere's purpose : he shows us that he had looked at Rosaline with a different feeling from that with which he had looked at Juliet. Rosaline was the object to which his over-full heart had attached itself in the first instance : our imper- fect nature, in proportion as our ideas are vivid, seeks after something in which those ideas may be realized. So with the indiscreet friendships sometimes formed by men of genius : they are conscious of their own weakness, and are ready to believe others stronger than themselves, when, in truth, they are weaker : they have formed an own characters. In short, there must be a mind, which, while it feels the beautiful and the excellent in the beloved as its own, and by right of love appropriates it, can call goodness its playfellow ; and dares make sport of time and infirmity, while, in the person of a thousand-foldly en- deared partner, we feel for aged virtue the caressing fondness that be- longs to the innocence of childhood, and repeat the same attentions and tender courtesies which had been dictated by the same affection to the same object when attired in feminine loveliness or in manly beauty." LbCT. VIII.] SHAKSPEEB AND MILTON. 117 ideal in their own minds, and they want to see it realized ; they require more than shadowy thought. Their own sense of imperfection makes it impossible for them to fasten their attachment upon themselves, and hence the humility of men of true genius : in, peAaps, the first man they meet, they only see what is good ; they have no sense of his deficiencies, and their friendship becomes so strong, that they almost fall down and worship one in every respect greatly their inferior. What is true of friendship is true of love, with a person of ardent feelings and warm imagination. What took place in the mind of Romeo was merely natural ; it is accordant with every day's experience. Amid such various events, such shifting scenes, such changing personages, we are often mistaken, and discover that he or she was not what we hoped and expected : we find that the individual first chosen will not complete our imperfection ; we may have suffered unnecessary pangs, and have indulged idly-directed hopes, and then a being may arise before us, who has more resemblance to the ideal we have formed. We know that we loved the earlier object with ardour and purity, but it was not what we feel for the later object. Our own mind teUs us, that in the first instance we merely yearned after an object, but in the last instance we know that we have found that object, and that it corresponds with the idea we had previously formed.^ ' " Here my original notes abruptly break ofiF : the brochure in which I had inserted them was full, and I took another for the conclusion of the Lecture, which is unfortunately lost." — J. P. C. 118 LBCTUEES ON [1811-12 Meport of the latter portion of the HigMh Lecture. The conclusion of the Eighth Lecture, as reported in. the Morning Chronicle of December 13, 1811, is as follows : " The origin and cause of love -was a consciousness of imperfection, and an unceasing desire to remedy it ; it was a yearning after an ideal image necessary to complete the happiness of man, by supplying what in him was deficient, and Shakspere throughout his works had viewed the passion in this dignified light ; he had conceived it not only with moral grandeur, but with philosophical penetration. Romeo had formed his ideal ; he imagined that Rosaline supplied the deficiency; but the moment he beheld Juliet he dis- covered his mistake ; he felt a nearer affinity to her, he be- came perfectly enamoured, and the love he felt formed the foundation of the tragedy. The feeling of Romeo towards Juliet was wholly different, as he himself expressed it, from that he had experienced towards Rosaline. The Lecturer went on to notice the analogy between the operations of the mind with regard to taste and love, as with the former an ideal had been created which the reason was anxious to realize. Other passions distort whatever object is presented to them. Lear accused the elements of ingratitude, and the madman imagined the straws on which he trampled the golden pavement of a palace ; but, with love, everything was in harmony, and all produced natural and delightful associations. In Mr. Coleridge's opinion the conceits put into the mouths of Romeo and Juliet were perfectly natural to their age and inexperience. It was Shakspere's intention in this play to represent love as exist- ing rather in the imagination, than in the feelings, as was shown by the imaginative dialogue between the hero and heroine in the parting scene in the third act. The passion of the youthful Romeo was wholly different from that of the deliberate Othello, who entered the marriage state with LeCT. VIII.] SHAESPEBE AND MILTON. 119 deep moral reflections on its objects and consequences. The Lecturer insisted that love was an act of 'the will, and ridiculed the sickly nonsense of Sterne and his imitators, French and English, who maintained that it was an in- voluntary emotion. Having adverted to the trueness to nature of the tragic parts of Borneo and Juliet, Mr. Coleridge concluded by referring to Shakspere's description of the Apothecary, too often quoted against those of unfortunate physiognomy, or those depressed by poverty. Shakspere meant much more ; he intended to convey that in every man's face there was either to be found a history or a prophecy ; a history of struggles past, or a prophecy of events to come. In contemplatiug the face of the most abandoned of mankind, many lineaments of villany would be seen, yet in the under features (if he might so express himself) would be traced the . lines that former sufferings and struggles had impressed, which would always sadden, and frequently soften the observer, and raise a determina- tion in him not to despair, but to regard the unfortunate object with the feelings of a brother." 120 ' LKCTUEES OK [1811-12 LECTURE IX. • TT is a known but unexplained phenomenon, that among tlie ancients statuary rose to such a degree of perfec- tion, as almost to baffle the hope of imitating it, and to render the chance of excelling it absolutely impossible ; yet painting, at the same period, notwithstanding the admira- tion bestowed upon it by Pliay and others, has been proved to be an art of much later growth, as it was also of far in- ferior quality. I remember a man of high rank, equally admirable for his talents and his taste, pointing to a common sign-post, and saying that had Titian never Kved, the richness of representation by colour, even there, would never have been attained. In that mechanical branch of painting, perspective, it has been shown that the Bromans were very deficient. The excavations and consequent dis- coveries, at Herculaneum and elsewhere, prove the Roman artists to have been guilty of such blunders, as to give plausibility to the assertions of those who maintain that the ancients were wholly ignorant of perspective. How- ever, that they knew something of it is established by Vitruvius in the introduction to his second book. Something of the same kind, as I endeavoured to explain iu a previous lecture, was the case with the drama of the ancients, which has been imitated by the French, Italians, and by various writers in England since the Restoration. All that is there represented seems to be, as it were, upon one flat surface : the theme, if we may so call it in reference LbCT. IX.] SHAKSPEEE AND MILTON. 121 to music, admits of nothing more than the change of a single note, and excludes that which is the true principle of life — the attaining of the same result by an infinite variety of means. The plays of Shakspere are in no respect imitations of the Greeks : they may be called analogies, because by very different means they arrive at the same end ; whereas the French and Italian tragedies I have read, and the English ones on the same model, are mere copies, though they can- not be called likenesses, seeking the same efEect by adopt- ing the same means, but under most inappropriate and adverse circumstances. I have thus been led to consider, that,the ancient drama (meaning the works of -^sohylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, for the rhetorical productions of the same class by the ■Romans are scarcely to be treated as original theatrical poems) might be contrasted with the Shaksperian drama. — I call it the" Shaksperian drama to distinguish it, because I know of no other writer who has realized the same idea, although I am told by some, that the Spanish poets, Lopez de Vega and Calderon, have been equally successful. The Shaksperian drama and the Grreek drama may be compared to statuary and painting. In statuary, as in the Greek drama, the characters must be few, because the very essence of statuary is a high degree of abstraction, which prevents a great many figures being combined in the same effect. In a grand group of Niobe, or in any other ancient heroic subject, how disgusting even it would appear, if an old nurse were introduced. Not only the number of figures must be circumscribed, but nothing undignified must be placed in company with what is dignified : no one person- age must be brought in that is not an abstraction : all the actors in the scene must not be presented at once to the eye ; and the effect of multitude, if required, must be pro- duced without the intermingling of anything discordant. 122 LECTUEES ON [1811-12 Compare ttis small group witli a pictnre by Raphael or Titian, in which an immense number of figures may. be introduced, a beggar, a cripple, a dog, or a cat ; ■ and by a less degree of labour, and a less degree of abstraction, an effect is produced equally harmonious to the mind, more true to nature with its varied colours, and, in all respects but one, superior to statuary. The man of taste feels satisfied, and to that which the reason conceives possible, a momentary reality is given by the aid of imagination. I need not here repeat what I have said before, regarding the circumstances which permitted Shakspere to make an alteration, not merely so suitable to the age in which he lived, but, in fact, so necessitated by the condition of that age. I need not again remind you of the difference I pointed out between imitation and likeness, in reference to the attempt to give reality to representations on the stage. The distinction between imitation and likeness depends upon the admixture of circumstances of dissirailarity ; an imitation is not a copy, precisely as likeness is not sameness, in that sense of the word " likeness " which implies diffe- rence conjoined with sameness. Shakspere reflected manners in his plays, not by a cold formal copy, but by an imitation ; that is to say, by an admixture of circumstances, not abso- lutely true in themselves, but true to the character and to the time represented. It is fair to own that he had many advantages. The great of that day, instead of surrounding themselves by the ch&ocmx de frise of what is now called high breeding, endeavoured to distinguish themselves by attainments, by energy of thought, and consequent powers of mind. The stage, indeed, had nothing but curtains for its scenes, but this fact compelled the actor, as well as the author, to appeal to the imaginations, and not to the senses of the audience : thus was obtained a power over space and time, which in an ancient theatre would have been absurd, be- LecT. IX.] SHAESPEKE AND MILTON. 123 cause it would have been contradictory. The advantage is vastly in favour of our own early stage : the dramatic poet there relies upon the imagination, upon the reason, and upon the noblest powers of the human heart ; he shakes off the iron bondage of space and time ; he appeals to that which we most wish to be, when we are most worthy of being, while the ancient dramatist binds us down to the meanest part of our nature, and the chief compensation is a simple acquiescence of the mind in the position, that what is represented might possibly have occurred in the time and place required by the unities. It is a poor compliment to a poet to tell him, that he has only the qualifications of a historian. In dramatic composition the observation of the unities of time and place so narrows the period of action, so im- poverishes the sources of pleasure, that of all the Athenian dramas there is scarcely one in which the absurdity is not glaring, of aiming at an object, and utterly failing in the attainment of it : events are sometimes brought into a space in which it is impossible for -them to have occurred, and in this way the grandest efEort of the drama- tist, that of making his play the mirror of life, is entirely defeated. The Hmit allowed by the rules of the Greek stage was twenty-four hours ; but, inasmuch as, even in this case, time must have become a subject of imagination, it was just as reasonable to allow twenty-four months, or even years. The mind is acted upon by such strong stimulants, that the period is indiflEerent ; and when once the boundary of possibility is passed, no restriction can be assigned. In reading Shakspere, we should first consider in which of his plays he means to appeal to the reason, and in which to the imagination, faculties which have no relation to time and place, excepting as in the one case they imply a succession of cause and effect, and in the other form a harmonious 124 LECTURES OK [1811-12 picture, so that the impnlse given by the reason is carried on by the imagination. We have often heard Shakspere spoken of as a child of nature, and some of his modem imitators, without the genius to copy nature, by resorting to real incidents, and treating them in a certain way, have produced, that stage- phenomenon which is neither tragic nor comic, nor tragi- comic, nor comi-tragic, but sentimental. This sort of writing depends upon some very afBecting circumstances, and in its greatest excellence aspires no higher than the genius of an onion, — ^the power of drawing tears ; while the author, acting the part . of a ventriloquist, distributes his own insipidity among the characters, if. characters they can be called, which have no marked and distinguishing features. I have seen dramas of this sort, some translated and some the growth of our own soil, so well acted, and so iU written, that if I could have been made for the time artificially deaf, I should have been pleased with that per- formance as a pantomime, which was intolerable as a play. Shakspere 's characters, from Othello and Macbeth down to Dogberry and the Gtrave-digger, may be termed ideal realities. They are not the things themselves, so much as abstracts of the things, which a great mind takes into itself, and there naturalizes them to its own conception. Take Dogberry : are no important truths there conveyed, no admirable lessons taught, and no valuable allusions made to reigning follies, which the poet saw mnst for ever reign ? He is not the creature of the day, to disappear with the day, but the representative and abstract of truth which must ever be true, and of humour which must ever be humorous. The readers of Shakspere may be divided into two classes : — 1. Those who read his works with feeling and under- standing ; LeCT. IX.] SHAKSPEEE AND MILTON. 125 2. Those who, -without afEeoting to criticize, merely feel, and may be said to be the recipients of the poet's power. Between the two no medium can be endured. The ordinary reader, who does not pretend to bring his under- standing to bear npon the subject, often feels that some real trait of his own has been caught, that some nerve has been touched ; and he knows that it has been touched by the vibration he experiences — a thrill, which tells us that, by becoming better acquainted with the poet, we have be- come better acquainted with ourselves. In the plays of Shakspere every man sees himself, with- out knowing that he does so : as in some of the phenomena of nature, in the mist of the mountain, the traveller be- holds his own figure, but the glory round the head dis- tinguishes it from a mere vulgar copy. In traversing the Brocken, in the north of Germany, at sunrise, the brilliant beams are shot askance, and you see before you a being of gigantic proportions, and of such elevated dignity, that you only know it to be yourself by similarity of action. In the same way, near Messina, natural forms, at determined distances, are represented on an invisible mist, not ' as they really exist, but dressed in all the pris- matic colours of the imagination. So in Shakspere : every form is true, everything has reality for its founda- tion ; we can all recognize the truth, but we see it decorated with such hues of beauty, and magnified to such propor- tions of grandeur, that, while we know the figure, we know also how much it has been refined and exalted by the poet. It is humiliating to reflect that, as it were, because heaven has given us the greatest poet, it has inflicted upon that poet the most incompetent critics : none of them seem to understand even his language, much less the principles upon which he wrote, and the peculiarities which dis- tinguish him from all rivals. I will not now dwell upon 126 LEOTUEIS ON [1811-12 this poiBt, because it is my intention to devote a lectnTe more immediately to the prefaces of Pope and Johnson. Some of Shakspere's contemporaries appear to have nnder- stood him, and imitated him in a way that does the original no small honour; but modem preface-writers and com- mentators, while they praise him as a great genius, when they come to publish notes upon his plays, treat him like a schoolboy ; as if this great genius did not understand him- self, was not aware of his own powers, and wrote without design or purpose. Nearly all they can do is to express the most' Vulgar of all feelings, wonderment — wondering at what they term the irregularity of his genius, sometimes above all praise, and at other times, if they are to be trusted, below all contempt. They endeavour to reconcile the two opinions by asserting that he wrote for the mob ; as if a man of real genius ever wrote for the mob. Shakspere never consciously wrote what was below himself : careless he might be, and his better genius niay not always have attended him ; but I fearlessly sa^, that he never penned a line that he knew would degrade him. No man does any- thing equally well at all times ; but because Shakspere could not always be the greatest of poets, was he therefore to condescend to make himself the least ? ' Testerday afternoon a friend left a book for me by a German critic, of which I have only had time to read a small part ; but what I did read I approved, and I should be disposed to applaud the work much more highly, were it not that in so doing I should, in a manner, applaud myseK. ' " It is certain that my short-hand note in this place affords another instance of mishearing : it runs literally thus — ' but because Shakspere could not always be the greatest of poets, was he therefore to condescend to make himself a beast ? ' For ' a beast,' we must read the least, the antithesis being between ' greatest ' and ' least,' and not between ' poet ' and ' beast.' Yet ' beast ' may be reconciled with sense, as in Macbeth : ' Notes and Emend.' 420."— J. P. C. LeCT. IX.] SHAKSPBEB AND MILTON. 127 The sentiments and opinions are coincident witli those to which I gave utterance in my lectures at the Royal Institu- tion. It is not a little wonderful, that so many ages have elapsed since the time of Shakspere, and that it should remain'for foreigners first to feel truly, and to appreciate justly, his mighty genius. The solution of this circumstance must be sought in the history of our nation : the English have become a busy commercial people, and they have unquestionably derived from this propensity many social and physical advantages : they have grown to be a mighty empire — one of the great nations of the world, whose moral superiority enables it to struggle successfully ' Compare with these remarks an extract from a letter written by- Coleridge in February, 1818, to a gentleman who attended his lectures of that year : — " . . . . Sixteen or rather seventeen years ago, I delivered eighteen lectures on Shakspere at the Eoyal Institution ; three-fourths of which appeared at that time startling paradoxes, although they have since been adopted even by men, who then made use of them as proofs of my flighty and paradoxical turn of mind ; all tending to prove that Shakspere's judg- ment was, if possible, still more wonderful than his genius ; or rather, that the contra-distinction itself between judgment and genius rested on an utterly false theory. This, and its proofs and grounds, have been — I should not have said adopted, but produced as their own legilifiiate children by some, and by others tjie merit of them attributed to a foreign writer, whose lectures were not given orally till two years after mine, rather than to their countryman: though I dare appeal to the most adequate judges, as Sir George Beaumont, the Bishop of Durham, Mr. Sotheby, and afterwards to Mr. Rogers and Lord Byron, whether there is one single principle in Schlegel's work (which is not an admitted draw- back from its merits), that was not established and applied in detail by me." Quoted by H. N. Coleridge, in his "Literary Eemains'' of S. T. Coleridge, with a reference to the "Canterbury Magazine," September, 1834. Coleridge again and again returns to this subject. See, particu- larly, a formal statement, with formal date, prefixed to his notes on " Hamlet," in "the Lectures and Notes of 1818 ; " also § 5 of the Intro- ductory matter to the present course. 128 LICTDEES ON [1811-12 against him, who may be deemed the evil genius of onr planet/ On the other hand, the Germans, unable to distinguish themselves in action, have been driven to speculation : aU their feelings have been forced back into the thinking and reasoning mind. To do, with them is impossible, but in determining what ought to be done, they perhaps exceed every people of the globe. Incapable of acting outwardly, they have acted internally : they first rationally recalled the ancient philosophy, and set their spirits to work with an energy of which England produces no parallel, since those truly heroic times, heroic in body and soul, the days of Elizabeth. If all that has been written upon Shakspere by English- men were burned, in the want of candles, merely to enable us to read one half of what our dramatist produced, we should be great gainers. Providence has given England the greatest man that ever put on and put off mortality, and has thrown a sop to the envy of other nations, by in- .flicting upon his native country the most incompetent critics. I say nothing here of the state in which his text has come down to us, farther than that it is evidently very imperfect ; in many places his sense has been perverted, in 1 When this lecture was delivered, Napoleon was on the eve of his invasion of Bussia. The dislike of Coleridge for Napoleon was reciprocated. While Coleridge still lingered in Italy, in 1806, an order for his arrest arrived from Paris. The Pope himself sent him a passport, and hurried him away. He hastily sailed from Leghoi'n in an American vessel, and a French ship pursuer! them. The captain of the former was thoroughly ' frightened, and compelled Coleridge to throw all his manuscripts into the sea ; — an irreparable loss, affording confirmation of the statement in the text, that Napoleon was " the evil genius of our planet." Later, Napoleon made an attempt to bribe Coleridge, through the French Ambassador at the English Court. See Gillman's " Life of Coleridge." LeCT. IX.] SHAKSPERB AND MILTON. 129 others, if not entirely obscured, so blunderingly represented, as to afBord us only a glimpse of what he meant, without the power of restoring his own expressions. But whether his dramas have been perfectly or imperfectly priiited, it is quite clear that modern inquiry and speculative ingenuity in this kingdom have done nothing ; or I might say, without a solecism, less than nothing (for some editors have multi- plied corruptions) to retrieve the genuine language of the poet. His critics, among us, during the whole of the last century, have neither understood nor appreciated him ; for how could they appreciate what they could not understand ? His contemporaries, and those who immediately followed him, were not so insensible of his merits, or so incapable of explaining them ; and one of them, who might be Milton when a young man of four and twenty, printed, in the second folio of Shakspere's works, a laudatory poem, which, in its kind, has no equal for justness and distinctness of description, in reference to the powers and qualities of lofty genius. It runs thus, and I hope that, when I have finished, I shall stand in need of no excuse for reading the whole of it. " A mind reflecting ages past, whose clear And equal surface can make things appear. Distant a thousand years, and represent Them in their lively colours, just extent : To outrun hasty time, retrieve the fates, KoU back the heavens, blovf ope the iron gates Of death and Lethe, where confused lie ~ Great heaps of ruinous mortality : In that deep dusky dungeon to discern A royal ghost from churls; by art to learn The physiognomy of shades, and give Them sudden birth, wondering how oft they live ; What story coldly tells, what poets feign At second hand, and picture without brain. Senseless and soul-less shows : to give a stage (Ample and true with life) voice, action, age, K 130 LECTUEES ON [1811-12' As Plato's year, and new scene of the world. Them unto us, or us to them had hurl'd : To raise our ancient sovereigns from their herse, Make kings his subjects ; by exchanging verse, Enlive their pale trunks ; that the present age Joys at their joy, and trembles at their rage : Yet so to temper passion, that our ears Take pleasure in their pain, and eyes in tears Both weep and smile ; fearful at plots so sad, Then laughing at our fear ; abus'd, and glad To be abus'd ; affected with that truth Which we perceive is false, pleas'd in that ruth At which we start, and, by elaborate play, Tortur'd and tickl'd ; by a crab-like way Time past made pastime, and in ugly sort Disgorging up his ravin for our sport : — — While the plebeian imp, from lofty throne, Creates and rules a world, and wo cks upon Mankind by secret engines ; now lo move A chilling pity, then a rigorous love ; To strike up and stroke down, both joy and ire To steer th' affections ; and by heavenly fire Mold us anew, stol'n from ourselves : — This, and much more, which cannot be express'd But by himself, his tongue, and his own breast. Was Shakespeare's freehold; which his cunning brain Iraprov'd by favour of the nine-fold train ; The buskin'd muse, the comick queen, the grand And louder tone of Clio, nimble hand And nimbler foot of the melodious pair. The silver-voiced lady, the most fair Calliope, whose speaking silence daunts, And she whose praise the heavenly body chants ; These jointly woo'd him, envying one another ; (Ubeyd by all as spouse, but lov'd as brother) And wrought a curious rube, of sable grave, Fresh green, and pleasant yellow, red most brave, And constant blue, rich purple, guiltless white, The lowly russet, and the scarlet bright ; Branch'd and embroider'd like the painted spring; Bach leaf match'd with a flower, and each string Of golden wire, each line of silk : there run LeCT. IX.] SHAKSPERE AND MILTON. 131 Italian works, whose thread the sisters spun ; And these did sing, or seem to sing, the choice Birds of a foreign note and various voice : Here hangs a mossy rock ; there plays a fair But chiding fountain, purled : not the air. Nor clouds, nor thunder, but were living drawn ; Not out of common tiffany or lawn. But fine materials, which the Muses know, And only know the countries where they grow. Now, when they could no longer him enjoy, In mortal garments pent,— death may destroy, They say, his body ; but his verse shall live, And more than nature takes our hands shall give : In a less volume, but moi-e strongly bound, Shakespeare shall breathe and speak ; with laurel crown'd. Which never fades ; fed with ambrosian meat, In a well-lined vesture, rich, and neat. So with this robe they clothe him, bid him wear it ; Por time shall never stain, nor envy tear it." This poem is subscribed J. M. S., meaning, as some hare explained the initials, " John Milton, Student : " the in- ternal evidence seems to me decisive, for there was, I think, no other man, of that particular day, capable of writing anything so characteristic of Shakspere, so justly thought, and so happily expressed.' It is a mistake to say that any of Shakspere's characters strike us as portraits : they have the union of reason per- ceiving, of judgment recording, and of imagination diffusing ' The startling fact that Coleridge sees " decisive " internal evidence in tnis poem, that it is Milton's, may lessen the regret of some that his lectures on Milton are missing. That " J. M. S." should stand for " John Milton, Student," may be satisfactory to those who hit upon the idea. TJie second folio appeared in 1632, the year that Milton left Cambridge for Horton, after taking his MA. degree. He had already written his two poems on Hubson, and his " Epitaph on, the admirable dramatic poet, W. Shakespeare" without name or initials, appeared in the second folio, along with the verses in the text. AH these three poems, moreover, are in the same metre as the verses in the text, and can easily be compared with tliem. 132 LICTUEES ON [1811-12 OT^r all a magic glory. Wiile the poet registers what is past, he projects the future in a wonderful degree, and makes ns feel, however slightly, and see, however dimly, that state of being in which there is neither past nor - future, but all is permanent in the very energy of nature. Although I have affirmed that all Shakspere's characters are ideal, and the result of his own meditation, yet a just, separation may be made of those in which the ideal is most prominent — where it is put forward more intensely — 'where we are made more conscious of the ideal, though in truth they possess no more nor less ideality : and of those which, though equally idealized, the delusion upon the mind is of their being real. The characters in the various plays may be separated into those where the real is disguised in the ideal, and those where the ideal is concealed from us by the real. The difference is made by the different powers of mind employed by the poet in the representation. At present I shall only speak of dramas where the ideal is predominant: and chiefly for this reason — that those plaj's have been attacked with the greatest violence. The objections to them are not the growth of our own country, but of France — the judgment of monkeys, by some wonder- ful phenomenon, put into the mouths of people shaped Kke nien. These creatures have informed us that Shakspere is a niirnoulons monster, in whom many heterogeneous com- ponents were thrown together, producing a discordant mass of genius — an irregular and ill-assorted structure of gigantic proportions. Among the ideal plays, I will take " The Tempest," by way of example. Various others might be mentioned, but it is impossible to go through every drama, and what I remark on " The Tempest " will apply to all Shakspere's productions of the same class. In this play Shakspere has especially appealed to the imagination, and he has constructed a plot well adapted to LeCT. IX.] SHAKSPEEB AND MILTON. 133 • the purpose. According to his scheme, he did not appeal to anj sensuous impression (the word "sensuous" is authorized by Milton) of time and place, but to the imagi- nation, and it is to be borne in mind, that of old, and as regards mere scenery, his works may be said to have been recited rather than acted — that is to say, description and narration supplied the place of visual exhibition : the audience was told to fancy that they saw what they only heard described ; the painting was not in colours, but in words. This is particularly to be noted in the first scene — a storm and its confusion on board the king's ship. The highest and the lowest characters are brought together, and with what excellence ! Much of the genius of Shakspere is displayed in these happy combinations — the highest and the lowest, the gayest and the saddest ; he is not droll in one scene and melancholy in another, but often both the one and the other in the same scene. Laughter is made to swell the tear of sorrow, and to throw, as it were, a poetic light upon it, while the tear mingles tenderness with the laaghter. Shakspere has evinced the power, which above all other men he possessed, that of introducing the pro- foundest sentiments of wisdom, where they would be ' least expected, yet where they are most truly natural. One admirable secret of his art is, that separate speeches fre- quently do not appear to have been occasioned by those which preceded, and which are consequent upon each other, but to have arisen out of the peculiar character of the speaker. Before I go further, I may take the opportunity of ex- plaining what is meant by mechanic and organic regularity. In the former the copy must appear as if it had come out of the same mould with the original : in the latter there is a law which all the parts obey, conforming themselves to the outward symbols and manifestations of the essentia] 134 LECTTJEES ON [1811-12 principle. If we look to the growth of trees, for instance, we shall observe that trees of the same kind vary consider- ably, according to the circumstances of soil, air, or position ; yet we are able to decide at once whether they are oaks, elms, or poplars. So with Shakspere's characters : he shows us the life and principle of each being with organic regularity. The Boat- swain, in the first scene of " The Tempest," when the bonds of reverence are thrown ofE as a sense of danger impresses all, gives a loose to his feelings, and thus pours forth his vulgar mind to the old Counsellor : — " Hence ! What care these roarers for the name of King ? To cabin : silence ! trouble us not." Gonzalo replies — " Good ; yet remember whom thou hast aboard." To which the Boatswain answers — " None that I more love than myself. Tou are a counsellor : if you can command these elements to silence, and work the peace of the present, we will not hand a rope more ; use your authority : if you cannot, give thanks that you have lived so long, and make yourself ready in your cabin for the mischance of the hour, if it so hap. — Cheerly, good hearts ! — Out of our way, I say." An ordinary draniatist would, after this speech, have re- presented Gonzalo as moralizing, or saying something con- nected with the Boatswain's language ; for ordinary dramatists are not men of genius : they combine their ideas by association, or by logical affinity ; but the vital writer, who makes men on the stage what they are in nature, in a moment transports himself into ■ the very being of each personage, and, instead of cutting out artifi- cial puppets, he brings before us the men themselves. Therefore, Gonzalo soliloquizes, — "I have great comfort from this fellow : methinks, he hath no drowning mark upon him ; his complexion is perfect gallows. Stand fast, good fate, to his hanging ! make the rope of his destiny our LbcT. IX.] SHAKSPBBB AND MILTON. 135 cable, for our own doth little advantage. If he be not born to be hanged, our case is miserable." In this part of the scene we see the true sailor with his contempt of danger, and the old counsellor with his high feeling, who, instead of condescending to notice the words just addressed to him, turns off, meditating with himself, and drawing some comfort to his own mind, by trifling with the ill expression of the boatswaiu's face, founding upon it a hope of safety. Shakspere had pre- determined to make the plot of this play such as to involve a certain number of low characters, and at the beginning he pitched the note of the whole. The first scene ..was meant as a lively commencement of the story ; the reader is prepared for something that is to be developed, and in the next scene he brings forward Prospero and Miranda. How is this done ? By giving to his favourite character, Miranda, a sentence which at once expresses the- violence and fury of the storm, such as it might appear to a witness on the land, and at the same time displays the tenderness of her feelings — the exquisite feelings of a female brought up in a desert, but with all the advantages of education, all that could be communicated by a wise and affectionate father. She possesses all the deli- cacy of innocence, yet with all the powers of her mind unweakened by the combats of hfe. Miranda exclaims : — " O ! I hare suffered With those that I saw suffer : a brave vessel. Who had, no doubt, some noble creatures ' in her, Dash'd all to pieces." The doubt here intimated could have occurred to no 1 Kead " creature." Miranda evidently came to this conclusion, be- cause of the " bravery " or .superior style of the vessel. Doubtless she had seen many others. The whole of Coleridge's criticism grows out of his own misreading of the text, and perishes, with it. 136 LICTUEES ON [1811-J 2 mind but to that of Miranda, who had been bred up in the island with her father and a monster only : she did not know, as others do, what sort of creatures were in a ship ; others never would have introduced it as a conjecture. This shows, that while Shakspei-e is displaying his vast ex- cellence, he never fails to insert some touch or other, which is not merely characteristic of the particular person, but combines two things — the person, and the circumstances acting upon the person. She proceeds : — " ! the cry did knock Against my very heart. Poor souls ! they perish'd. Had I been any god of power, I would Have sunk the sea within the earth, or e'er It should the good ship so have swalloVd, and The fraughting souls within her." She still dwells upon that which was most wanting to the completeness of her nature — these fellow creatures from whona she appeared banished, with only one relict to keep them alive, not in her memory, but in her imagi- nation. Another proof of excellent judgment in the poet, for I am now principally adverting to that point, is to be found in the preparation of the reader for what is to follow. Prospero is introduced, first in his magic robe, which, with the assistance of his daughter, he lays aside, and we then know him to be a being possessed of supernatural powers He then instructs Miranda in the story of their arrival in the island, and this is conducted in such a manner, that the reader never conjectures the technical use the poet has made of the relation, by informing the auditor of what it is necessary for him to know. The next step is the warning by Prospero, that he means, for particular purposes, to lull his daughter to sleep; and here he exhibits the earliest and mildest proof LeCT. IX.] SHAKSPIEE AND MILTON. 137 of magical power. In ordinary and vulgar plays we should have had some person brought upon the stage, whom nobody knows or cares anything about, to let the audience into the secret. Prospero having cast a sleep upon his daughter, by that sleep stops the narrative at the very moment when it was necessary to break it off, in order to excite curiosity, and yet to give the memory and under- standing sufficient to carry on the progress of the history uninterruptedly. Here I cannot help noticing a fine touch of Shakspere's knowledge of human nature, and generally of the great laws of the human mind : I mean Miranda's infant remembrance. Prospero asks her — " Canst thou remember A time before we came unto this cell ? I do not think thou canst, for then thou wast not Out three years old." Miranda answers, " Certainly, sir, I can." Prospero inquires, " By what ? by any other house or person f Of any thing the image tell me, that Hath kept with thy remembrance." To which Miranda returns, " 'Tis far off; And rather like a dream than an assurance That my remembrance warrants. Had I not Four or five women once, that tended me ? " Act I., Scene 2. This is exquisite ! In general, our remembrances of early life arise from vivid colours, especially if we have seen them in motion : for instance, persons when grown up will remember a bright green door, seen when they were quite young ; but Miranda, who was somewhat older, recollected 138 LBCTDBES ON [1811-12 four or five women who tended her. She might know men from her father, and her remembrance of the past might be worn out by the present object, but women she only knew by herself, by the contemplation of her own figure in the foTmtain, and she recalled to her mind what had been. It was not, that she had seen such and such grandees, or such and such peeresses, but she remembered to have seen something like the reflection of herself : it was not herself, and it brought back to her mind what she had seen most like herself. In my opinion the picturesque power displayed by Shak- spere, of all the poets that ever lived, is only equalled, if equalled, by Milton and Dante. The presence of genius is not shown in elaborating a picture : we have had many specimens of this sort of work in modern poems, where all is so dutchified, if I may use the word, by the most minute touches, that the reader naturally asks why words, and not painting, are used. I know a young lady of much taste, who observed, that in reading recent versified accounts of voyages and travels, she, by a sort of instinct, cast her eyes on the opposite page, for coloured prints of what was so patiently and punctually described. The power of poetry is, by a single word perhaps, to instil that energy into the mind, which compels the imagi- nation to produce the picture. Prospero tells Miranda, " One midnight, Fated to the purpose, did Antonio open The gates of Milan ; and i' the dead of darkness, The ministers for the purpose hurried thence Me, and thy crying self." Here, by introducing a single happy epithet, " crpng," in the last line, a complete picture is presented to the mind, and in the production of such pictures the power of genius consists. In reference to preparation, it will be observed that the LeCT. IX.] SHAKSPBEB AND MILTON. 139 storm, and all that precedes the tale, as well as the tale itself, serve to develop completely the m^ain'teharacter of the drama, as well as the design of Prospero. The manner in which the heroine is charmed asleep fits us for what follows, goes beyond our ordinary belief, and gradually leads us to the appearance and disclosure of a being of the jnost fanciful and delicate texture, like Prospero, preter- naturally gifted. In this way the entrance of Ariel, if not absolutely fore- thought by the reader, was foreshown by the writer : in addition, we may remark, that the moral feeling called forth by the sweet words of Miranda, " Alack, what trouble "Was I then to you ! " in which she considered only the sufferings and sorrows of her father, puts the reader in a frame of mind to exert his imagination in favour of an object so innocent and interest- ing. The poet makes him wish that, if supernatural agency were to be employed, it should be used for a being so young and lovely. " The wish is father to the thought," and Ariel is introduced. Here, what is called poetic faith is required and created, and our common notions of philosophy give way before it : this feeling may Ije said to be much stronger than historic faith, since for the exercise of poetic faith the mind is previously prepared. I make this remark, though somewhat digressive, in order to lead to a future subject of these lectures — the poems of Milton. When adverting to those, I shall have to explain farther the dis- tinction between the two. Many Scriptural poems have been written with so much of Scripture in them, that what is not Scripture appears to be not true, and like mingling lies with the most sacred revelations. Now Milton, on the other hand, has taken for his subject that one point of Scripture of which we 140 LECTUEBS OK [1811-12 have the mere fact recorded, and upon this he has most judiciously constructed his whole fable. So of Shakspere's " King Lear : " we have little historic evidence to guide or confine us, and the few facts handed down to -us, and admira.bly employed by the poet, are sufficient, while we read, to put an end to all doubt as to the credibility of the story. It is idle to say that this or that incident is im- probable, because history, as far as it goes, tells us that the fact was so and so. Pour or five lines in the Bible include the whole that is said of Milton's story, and the Poet has called up that poetic faith, that conviction of the mind, which is necessary to make that seem true, which otherwise might have been deemed almost fabulous. But to return to " The Tempest," and to the wondrous creation of Ariel. If a doubt could ever be entertained whether Shakspere was a great poet, acting upon laws arising out of his own nature, and not without law, as has sometimes been idly asserted, that doubt inust be removed by the character of Ariel. The very first words uttered by this being introduce the spirit, not as an angel, above man ; not a gnome, or a fiend, below man ; but while the poet gives him the faculties and the advantages of reason, he divests him of all mortal character, not positively, it is true, but negatively. In air he lives, from air he derives his being, in air he acts ; and all his colours and properties seem to have been obtained from the rainbow and the skies. There is nothing about Ariel that cannot be conceived to exist either at sun- rise or at sun-set : hence all that belongs to Ariel belongs to the delight the mind is capable of re- ceiving from the most lovely external appearances. His answers to Prospero are directly to the question, and nothing beyond ; or where he expatiates, which is not unf requently, it is to himself and upon his own delights, or upon the un- natural situation in which he is placed, though under a kindly power and to good ends. LeCT. IX.] SHAKSPEKB AND MILTON. ' 141 Shakspere has properly made Ariel's very first speech characteristic of him. After he has described the manner in which he had raised the storm and produced its harmless consequences, we find that Ariel is discontented — that he has been freed, it is true, from a cruel confinement, but still that he is bound to obey Prospero, and to execute any commands imposed upon him. We feel that such a state of bondage is almost unnatural to him, yet we see that it is delightf al for him to be so employed. — It is as if we were to command one of the winds in a different direction to that which nature dictates, or one of the waves, now rising- and now sinking, to recede before it bursts upon the shore : such is the feeling we experience, when we learn that a being like Ariel is commanded to fulfil any mortal behest. When, however, Shakspere contrasts the treatment of Ariel by Prospero with that of Sycorax, we are. sensible that the liberated spirit ought to be grateful, and Ariel does feel and acknowledge the obligation ; he immediately assumes the airy being, with a mind so elastically corre- spondent, that when once a feeling has passed from it, not a trace is left behind. Is there anything in nattire from which Shakspere caught the idea of this delicate and; delightful being, with such child-like simplicity, yet with such preternatural powers ? He is neither bom of heaven, nor of earth ; but, as it were,, between both, like a May-blossom kept suspended in air by the fanning hreeze, which prevents it from falling to the ground, and only finally, and by compulsion, touching earth. This reluctance of the Sylph to be under the com- mand even of Prospero is kept up through the whole play, and in the exercise of his admirable judgment Shakspere- has availed himself of it, in order to give Ariel an interest in the event, looking forward to that moment when he was to giin his last and only reward — simple and eternal liberty. 142 LECT0EES ON [1811-12 Another instance of admirable judgment and excellent preparation is to be found in the creature contrasted with Ariel — Calilban ; who is described in such a manner by Prospero, as to lead us to expect the appearance of a foul, unnatural monster. He is not seen at once : his voice is heard ; this is the preparation : he was too offensive . to be seen first in all his deformity, and in nature we do not re- ceive so much disgust from sound as from sight. After we have heard Caliban's voice he does not enter, until Ariel has entered like a water-nymph. All the strength of con- trast is thus acquired without any of the shock of abrupt- ness, or of that unpleasant sensation, which we experience when the object presented is in any way hateful to our vision. The character of Caliban is wonderfully conceived : he is a sort of creature of the earth, as Ariel is a sort of creature of the air. He partakes of the qualities of the brute, but is distinguished from brutes in two ways : — by having mere understanding without moral reason ; and by not possessing the instincts which pertain to absolute animals. Still, Caliban is in some respects a noble being : the poet has raised him far above contempt : he is a man in the sense of the imagination : all the images he uses are drawn from nature, and are highly poetical ; they fit in with the images of Ariel. Caliban gives us images from the earth, Ariel images from the air. Caliban talks of the difficulty of finding fresh water, of the situation of morasses, and of other circumstances which even brute instinct, without reason, could comprehend. No mean figure is employed, no mean passion displayed, beyond animal passion, and repugnance to command. The manner in which the lovers are introduced is equally wonderful, and it is the last point I shall now mention in reference to this, almost miraculous, drama. The same judgment is observable in every scene, still preparing, still LecT. IX.] SHAKSPERE AND- MILTON. 143 inviting, and still gratifying, like a finished piece of music. I have omitted to notice one thing, and* you must give me leave to advert to it before I proceed -. I mean the con- spiracy against the life of Alonzo. I want to show you how well the poet prepares the feelings of the reader for this plot, which was to execute the most detestable of all crimes, and which, iu another play, Shakspere has called the murder of sleep. Antonio and Sebastian at first had no such intention : it was suggested by the magical sleep oast on Alonzo and Gonzalo ; but they are previously introduced scoffing and scorning at what was said by others, without regard to age or situation — without any sense of admiration for the ex- cellent truths they heard delivered, but giving themselves up entirely to the malignant and unsocial feeUng, whi ;h induced them to listen to everything that was said, not for the sake of profiting by the learning and experience of Others, but of hearing something that might gratify Vfinity and seK-love, by making them beHeve that the person speaking was inferior to themselves. This, let me remark, is one of the grand characteristics of a villain ; and it would not be so much a presentiment, as an anticipation of hell, for men to suppose that all man- kind were as wicked as themselves, or might be so, if they were not too great fools. Pope, you are perhaps aware, objected to this conspiracy ; but in my mind, if it could be omitted, the play would lose a charm which nothing could supply. Many, indeed innumerable, beautiful passages might be quoted fj'om this play, independently of the astonishing scheme of its construction. Everybody will call to mind the grandeur of the language of Prospero in that diviue speech, where he takes leave of his magic art ; and were I to indulge myself by repetitions of the kind, I should descend from the character of a lecturer to that of a more 144 LECTUEES ON [1811-12 reciter. Before I terminate, I may particularly recall one short passage, which has fallen under the very severe, but inconsiderate, censure of Pope and Arbuthnot, who pro- nounce it a piece of the grossest bombast. Prospero thus addresses his daughter, directing her attention to Ferdinand : " The fringed curtains of thine eye advance. And say what thou seest yond." Act. I., Scene 2. Taking these words as a periphrase of — " Look what is coming yonder," it certainly niay to some appear to border on the ridiculous, and to fall under the rule I formerly laid down, — that whatever, without injury, can be translated into a foreign language in simple terms, ought to be in simple terms in the original language ; but it is to be borne in mind, that different modes of expression frequently arise from difference of situation and education : a blackguard would use very different words, to express the same thing, to those a gentleman would employ, yet both would be natural and proper ; difference of feeling gives rise to dif- ference of language : a gentleman speaks in polished terms, with due regard to his own rank and position, while a black- guard, a person little better than half a brute, speaks like half a brute, showing no respect for himself, nor for others. But I am content to try the lines I have just quoted by the introduction to them ; and then, I think, you will admit, that nothing could be more fit and appropriate than such . language. How does Prospero introduce them ? He has just told Miranda a wonderful story, which deeply affected her, and filled her with surprise and astonishment, and for his own purposes he afterwards lulls her to sleep. When she awakes, Shakspere has made her wholly inattentive to the present, but wrapped up in the past. An actress, who un- derstands the character of Miranda, would have her eyes LbCT. IX.] SHAKSPBRE and MILTON. 145 cast down, and her eyelids almost covering them, while she was, as it were, living in her dream. At this moment Prpspero sees Ferdinand, and wishes to point him out to his daughter, not only with great, but with scenic solemnity, he standing before her, and before the spectator, in the dig- nified character of a great magician. Something was to appear to Miranda on the sudden, and as unexpectedly as if the hero of a drania were to be on the stage at the instant when the curtain is elevated. It is under such circumstances that Prospero says, in a tone calculated at once to arouse his daughter's attention, " The fringed curtains of thine eye advance, And say what thou seest yond." Turning from the sight of Ferdinand to his thoughtful daughter, his attention was first struck by the downcast appearance of her eyes and eyelids ; and, in my humble opinion, the solemnity of the phraseology assigned to Prospero is completely in character, recollecting his pre- ternatural capacity, in which the most familiar objects in nature present themselves in a mysterious point of view. It is much easier to find fault with a writer by reference to former notions and experience, than to sit down and read him, recollecting his purpose, connecting one feeling with another, and judging of his words and phrases, in propor- tion as they convey the sentiments of the persons repre- sented. Of Miranda we may say, that she possesses in herself all the ideal beauties that could be imagined by the greatest poet of any age or country ; but it is not my purpose now, so much to point out the high poetic powers of Shakspere, as to illustrate his exquisite judgment, and it is solely with this design that I have noticed a passage with which, it seems to me, some critics, and those among the best, have been unreasonably dissatisfied. If Shakspere be the wonder 146 LECTUEBa ON [1811-12 of the ignorant, he is, and ought to be, much more the wonder of the learned : not only from piwfundity oi thought, but from his astonishing and intuitive knowledge of what man must be at all times, and under all circum- stances, he is rather to be looked upon as a prophet than as a poet. Tet, with all these unbounded powers, with all this might and majesty of genius, he makes us feel as if he were unconscious of himself, and of his high destiny, disguising the half god in the simplicity of a child. LeCT. XII.] BHAKSPEEE AND MILTON. 147 LECTURE XII. T N the last lecture I endeavoured to point out in Shak • -•- spere those characters m. which pride of intellect, with- out moral feeling, is supposed to be the ruling impulse, such as lago, Richard III., and even FalstafE. In Richard III., ambition is, as it were, the channel in which this impulse dij-ects itself ; the character is drawn with the greatest fulness and perfection ; and the poet has not only given us that character, grown up and completed, but he has shown us its very source and genera,tion. The infe- riority of his person made the hero seek consolation and compensation in the superiority of his intellect ; he thus endeavoured to counterbalance his deficiency. This striking feature is portrayed mosl? admirably by Shakspere, who represents Richard bringing forward his very defects and deformities as matters of boast. It was the same pride of intellect, or the assumption of it, that made John Wilkes vaunt that, although he was so ugly, he only wanted, with any lady, ten minutes' start of the handsomest man in England. This certainly was a high compliment to him- self ; but a higher to the female sex, on the supposition that Wilkes possessed this superiority of intellect, and re- lied upon it for making a favourable impression, because ladies would know how to estimate his advantages. I will now proceed to offer some remarks upon the tragedy of " Richard II.", on account of its not very ap- parent, but still intimate, connection with "Richard III." 148 LBCTUEES ON [1811-12 As, in the last, Shakspere has painted a man where am- bition is the channel in which the ruling impulse runs, so, in the first, he has given us a character, under the name of Bolingbroke, or Henry IV., where ambition itself, conjoined unquestionably with great talents, is the ruling impulse. In Richard III. the pride of intellect makes use of am- bition as its means ; in Bolingbroke the gratification of am- bition is the end, and talents are the means. One main object of these lectures is to point out the superiority of Shakspere to other dramatists, and no supe- riority can be more striking, thto that this wonderful poet could take two characters, which at first sight seem so much alike, and yet, when carefully and minutely examined, are so totally distinct. The popularity of " Richard 11." is owing, in a great measure, to the masterly delineation of the principal cha- racter ; but were there no other ground for admiring it, it would deserve the highest applause, from the fact that it contains the most magnificent, and, at the same time, the . truest eulogium of our native country that the English language can boast, or which can be produced from any other tongue, not excepting the proud claims of Greece and Rome. When I feel, that upon the morality of Britain depends the safety of Britain, and that her morality is sup- ported and illustrated by our national feeling, I cannot read these grand lines without joy and triumph. Let it be re- membered, that while this country is proudly pre-eminent in morals, her enemy has only maintained his station by superiority in mechanical appliances. Many of those who hear me will, no doubt, anticipate the passage I refer to, and it runs as follows : — " This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise ; This fortress, built by nature for herself LbCT. XII.] SHAKSPERE AND MILTON. 149 Against infection and the hand of war ; This happy breed of men, this little world ; This precious stone set in the silversea, Which serves it in the office of a wall. Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands ; This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, Peared by their breed, and famous by their birth. Renowned for their deeds as far from home, For Christian service and true chivalry. As is the Sepulchre in stubborn Jewry Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's son : This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land. Dear for her reputation through the world. Is now leas'd out, I die pronouncing it. Like to a tenement, or pelting farm. England, bound in with the triumphant sea, Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame. With inky blots, and rotten parchment bonds." Act II., Scene 1. Every motive to patriotism, every cause producing it, is here collected, without one of those cold abstractions so frequently substituted by modern poets. If this passage were recited in a theatre with due energy and under- standing, with a proper knowledge of the words, and a fit expression of their meaning, every man would retire from it secure in his country's freedom, if secure in his own constant virtue. The principal personages in this tragedy are Richard II., Bolingbroke, and York. I will speak of the last first, although it is the least important ; but the keeping of all is most admirable. York is a man of no strong powers of mind, but of earnest wishes to do right, contented in him- self alone, if he have acted well: he points out, to Richard the effects of his thoughtless extravagance, and the dangers by which he is encompassed, but having done so, he is 160 LECTUEBS ON [1811-12 satisfied ; there is no after action on his part ; he does nothing; he remains passive. When old Gaunt is dying, York takes care to give his own opinion to the King, and that done he retires, as it were, into himself. It has been stated, from the first, that one of my pur- poses in these lectures is, to meet and refute popular ob- jections to particular points in the works of our great dramatic poet ; and I cannot help observing here upon the beauty, and true force of nature, with which conceits, as they are called, and sometimes even puns, are introduced. What has been the reigning fault of an age must, at one time or another, have referred to something beautiful in the human mind ; and, however conceits may have been misapplied, however they may have been disadvantageously multiplied, we should recollect that there never was an abuse of anything, but it previously has had its use. Gaunt, on his death-bed, sends for the young King, and Richard, entering, insolently and unfeelingly says to him : " What, comfort, man ! how is't with aged Gaunt ? " Act II., Scene 1. and Gaunt replies : " O, how that name befits my composition ! Old Gaunt, indeed ; and gaunt in being old : Within me grief hath kept a tedious fast, And who abstains from meat, that is not gaunt ? For sleeping England long time have I watched ; Watching breeds leanness, leanness is all gaunt : The pleasure that some fathers feed upon Is my strict fast, I mean my children's looks; And therein fasting, thou hast made me gaunt. Gaunt am I for the grave, gaunt as a grave, Whose hollow womb inherits nought but bones.'' Richard inquires, " Can sick men play so nicely with their names ? " LeCT. XII.] SHAKSPEEE AND MILTON. 161 To whicli Gaunt answers, giving the true justification of conceits : " No ; misery makes sport to mock itself : Since thou dost seek to kill my name in me, I mock my name, great king, to flatter thee." He that knows the state of the human mind in deep passion must know, that it approaches to that condition of madness, which is not absolute frenzy or delirium, but which models all things to one reigning idea ; still it strays from the main subject of complaint, and still it returns to it, by a sort of irresistible impulse. Abruptness of thought, under such circumstances, is true to nature, and no man was more sensible of it than Shakspere. In a modern poem a mad mother thus complains : " The breeze I see is in yon tree : It comes to cool my babe and me." ' This is an instance of the abruptness of thought, so natural to the excitement and agony of grief ; and if it be admired in images, can we say that it is unnatural in words, which are, as it were, a part of our life, of our very existence ? In the Scriptures themselves these plays upon words are to be found, as well as in the best works of the ancients, and in the most delightful parts of Shakspere; and because this additional grace, not well understood, has in some instances been converted into a deformity — because it has been forced into places, where it is evidently improper and unnatural, are we therefore to include the whole appli- cation of it in one general condemnation ? When it seems objectionable, when it excites a feeling contrary to the situation, when it perhaps disgusts, it is our business to inquire whether the conceit has been rightly or wrongly Tised — whether it is in a right or in a wrong place ? 1 Fi-om Wordsworth's poem, " Her Eyes are Wild." 162 LECTUEES ON [1811-12 In order to decide this point, it is obviously necessary to consider tlie state of mind, and the degree of passion, of the person using this play upon words. Resort to this grace may, in some cases, deserve censure, not because it is a play upon words, but because it is a play upon words in a wrong p]ace, and at a wrong time. What is right in one state of mind is wrong in another, and much more depends upon that, than upon the conceit (so to call it) itself. I feel the importance of these remarks strongly, because the greater part of the abuse, I might say filth, thrown out and heaped upon Shakspere, has originated in want of consideration. Dr. Johnson asserts that Shakspere loses the world for a toy, and can no more withstand a pun, or a play upon words, thin his Antony could resist Cleopatra. Certain it is, that Shakspere gained more admiration in his day, and long afterwards, by the use of speech in this way, than modern writers have acquired by the abandonment of the practice : the latter, in adhering to, what they have been pleased to call, the rules of art, have sacrificed nature. Having said thus much on the, often falsely supposed, blemishes of our poet — blemishes which are said to prevail in " Richard II " especially, — I will now advert to the character of the King. He is represented as a man not deficient in immediate courage, which displays itself at his assassination ; or in powers of mind, as appears by the foresight he exhibits throughout the play : still, he is weak, variable, and "womanish, and possesses feelings, which, amiable in a female, are misplaced in a man, and altogether unfit for a king. In prosperity he is insolent and presump- tuous, axid in adversity, if we are to believe Dr. Johnson, he is humane and pious. I cannot admit the latter epithet, because I perceive the utmost consistency of character in Richard : what he was at first, he is at last, excepting as far as he yields to circumstances : what he showed himself at the commencement of the play, he shows himself at the LbCT. XII.] SHAKSPEEB AND MILTON 153 end of it. Dr. Johnson assigns to him rather the virtue of a confessor than that of a king. True it is, that he may be said to be overwhelmed by the earliest misfortune that befalls biTn ; but, so far from his feehngs or disposition being changed or subdued, the very first glimpse of the returning sunshine of hope reanimates his spirits, and exalts him to as strange and unbecoming a degree of elevation, as he was before sunk in mental depression : the mention of those in his misfortunes, who had contributed to his downfall, but who had before been his nearest friends and favourites, calls forth from him expressions of the bitterest hatred and revenge. Thus, where Richard asks : " Where is the Earl of Wiltshire ? Where is Bagot ? What is become of Bushy ? Where is Green ? That they have let the dangerous enemy Measure our confines with such peaceful steps ? If we prevail, their heads shall pay for it. I warrant they have made peace with Bolingbroke." Act ni., Seme 2. Scroop answers : " Peace have they made with him, indeed, my lord." Upon which Richard, without hearing more, breaks out : " villains ! vipers, damn'd without redemption 1 Dogs, easily won to fawn on any man ! » Snakes, in my heart-blood warm'd, that sting my heart ! Three Judases, each one thrice- worse than Judas! Would they make peace ? terrible hell make war Upon their spotted souls for this offence ! " Scroop observes upon this change, and tells the King how they had made their peace « Sweet love, I see, changing his property, Turns to the sourest and most deadly hate. 164 LECTUEES ON [1811-12 Again uncurse their souls : their peace is made With heads and not with hands : those whom you curse Have felt the worst of death's destroying wound. And lie full low, grav'd in the hollow ground." Richard receiving at first an equivocal answer, — " Peace have they inade -with Mm, indeed, my lord," — takes it in the worst sense : his promptness to suspect those who had been his friends turns his love to hate, and calls forth the most tremendous execrations. From the beginning to the end of the play he pours out all the peculiarities and powers of his mind : he catches at new hope, and seeks new friends, is disappointed, despairs, and at length makes a merit of his resignation. He scatters himself into a multitude of images, and in conclusion endeavours to shelter himself from that which is around him by a cloud of his own thoughts. Throughout his whole career may be noticed the most rapid transitions — from the highest insolence to the lowest humility — ^from hope to despair, from the extravagance of love to the agonies of resentment, and from pretended resignation to the bitterest reproaches. The whole is joined with the utmost richness and copiousness of thought, and were there an actor capable of representing Richard, the part would delight us more than any other of Shakspere's master- pieces, — with, perhaps, the single exception of King Lear. I know of no character drawn by our great poet with such unequalled skill as that of Richard II. Next we come to Henry Bolingbroke, the rival of Richard II. He appears as a man of dauntless courage, and of ambition equal to that of Richard III. ; but, as I have stated, the difference between the two is most admi- rably conceived and preserved. In Richard III. all that surrounds him is only dear as it feeds his inward sense of superiority : he is no vulgar tyrant — no Nero or Caligula : he has always an end in view, and vast fertility of means to LbCT. XII.] SHAKSPBEB AND MILTON. 155 accomplish that end. On the other hand, in BoUngbroke we find a man who in the outset has been sorely injured : then, we see him encouraged by the grievances of his country, and by the strange mismanagement of the govern- ment, yet at the same time scarcely daring to look at his own views, or to acknowledge them as designs. He comes home under the pretence of claiming his dukedom, and he professes that to be his object almost to the last ; but, at the last, he avows his purpose to its full extent, of which he was himself unconscious in the earlier stages. This is proved by so many passages, that I will only select one of them ; and I take it the rather, because out of the many octavo volumes of text and notes, the page on which it occurs is, I believe, the only one left naked by the commentators. It is where Bolingbroke approaches the castle in which the unfortunate King has taken shelter : York is in Bolingbroke's company — the same York who is still contented with speaking the truth, but doing nothing for the sake of the truth, — drawing back after he has spoken, and becoming merely passive when he ought to display activity. Northumberland says, " The news is very fair and good, my lord Richard not far from hence hath hid his head." Act III., Soene 3. York rebukes him thus : " It would beseem the Lord Northnmberlana To say JKing Richard : — Alack, the heavy day. When such a sacred king should hide his head ! " Northumberland replies : " Your grace mistakes me : ' only to be brief Left I his title out." » Omit " me." 166 LECTUEBS ON [1811-12 To which York rejoins : " The time hath been, Would you have been so brief with him, he would Have been so brief with you, to shorten you, For taking so the head, your whole head's length.'' Bolingbroke observes, " Mistake not, uncle, farther than you should ; " And York answers, with a play upon the words "take " and "mistake : " " Take not, good cousin, farther than you should, Lest you mistake. ' The heavens are o'er our heads." Here, give me leave to remark in passing, that the play upon words is perfectly natural, and quite in character : the answer is in unison with the tone of passion, and seems connected with some phrase then in popular use. Boling- broke tells York : " I know it, uncle, and oppose not myself Against their will." Just afterwards, Bolingbroke thus addresses himself to Northumberland : " Noble lord,2 Go to the rude ribs of that ancient castle ; Through brazen trumpet send the breath of parle " Into his ruin'd eai's, and thus deliver." Here, in the phrase " into his ruin'd ears," I have no doubt that Shakspere purposely used the personal pronoun, ' 1st Fol., 1623, and Globe Shak., read, " Lest you mistake the . . . » The 1st Fol. reads "lord" and "parle." The Globe Edn. has "lords "and "parley." LeCT. XII.] SHAKSPERE AND MILTON! 157 " his," to show, that although Bolingbroke was only speaking of the castle, his thoughts dwelt on the king. In Milton the pronoun, " her " is employed, in relation to " form," in a manner somewhat similar. Bolingbroke had an equivocation in his mind, and was thinking of the king, while speaking of the castle. He goes on to teU Northumber- land what to say, beginning, " Henry Bolingbroke," which is almost the only instance in which a name forms the whole line ; Shakspere meant it to convey Bolingbroke's opinion of his own importance : — " Henry Bolingbroke On both his knees doth kiss King Richard's hand, And sends allegiance and true faith of heart To his most royal person ; hither come Even at his feet to lay my arms and power. Provided that, my banishment repealed, And lands restor'd again, be freely granted. If not, I'll use th' advantage of my power. And lay the summer's dust with showers of blood, Kain'd from the wounds of slaughter'd Englishmen.'' At this point Bolingbroke seems to have been checked by the eye of York, and thus proceeds in consequence : " The which, how far off from the mind of Bolingbroke It is, such crimson tempest should bedrench . The fresh green lap of fair King Richard's land. My stooping duty tenderly shall show." He passes suddenly from insolence to humility, owing to the silent reproof he received from his uncle. This change of tone would not have taken place, had Bolingbroke been allowed to proceed according to the natural bent of his own mind, and. the flow of the subject. Let me direct attention to the subsequent lines, for the same reason ; they are part of the same speech : 158 LBCTUEBS ON [1811-12 " Let's inarch without the noise of threat'ning drum, That from the ' castle's tatter'd battlements Our fair appointments maj be well perused. Methinks, King Richard and myself should meet With no less terror than the elements , Of fire and water, when their thundering shock At meeting tears the cloudy cheeks of hearen." Having proceeded thus far with the exaggeration of his own importance, York again checks him, and Bolingbroke adds, in a very different strain, " He be ^ the fire, I '11 be the yielding water : The rage be his, while ^ on the earth I rain My waters ; on the earth, and not on him." I have thus adverted to the three great personages in this drama, Richard, Bolingbroke, and York ; and of the whole play it may be asserted, that with the exception of some of the lasi scenes (though they have exquisite beauty), Shakspere seems to have risen to the summit of excellence in the delineation and preservation of character. We will now pass to " Hamlet," in order to obviate some of the general prejudices against the author, in reference to the character of the hero. Much has been objected to which ought to have been praised, and many beauties of the highest kind have been neglected, because they are some- what hidden. The first question we should ask ourselves is — Wha* did Shakspere mean when he drew the character of Hamlet ? He never wrote anything without design, and what was his design when he sat down to produce this tragedy ? My belief is, that he always regarded his story, before he began to write, much in the same light as a, painter regards his ' Bead " this." " Read " Be he." s So, 1st Fol. The Globe Edn. has " whilst." LeCT. XII.] SHAKSPERE AND MILTON 159 canvas, before he begins to paint — as a mere vehicle for his thoughts — as the ground upon which he was to work. What then was the point to which Shakspere directed himself in Hamlet ? He intended to portray a person, in whose view the external world, and all its incidents and objects, were comparatively dim, and of no interest in themselves, and which began to interest only, when they were reflected in the mirror of his mind. Hamlet beheld external things in the same way that a man of vivid imagi- nation, who shuts his eyes, sees what has previously made an impression on his organs. The poet places him in the most stimulating circum- stances that a human being can be placed in. He is the heir apparent of a throne ; his father dies suspiciously ; his mother excludes her son from his throne by marrying his uncle. This is not enough ; but the Ghost of the mur- dered father is introduced, to assure the son that he was put to death by his own brother. What is the effect upon the son ? — ^instant action and pursuit of revenge ? No : endless reasoning and hesitating — constant urging and solicitation of the mind to act, and as constant an escape from action ; ceaseless reproaches of himself for sloth and negligence, while the whole energy of his resolution evapo- rates in these reproaches. This, too, not from cowardice, for he is drawn as one of the bravest of his time — not from want of forethought or slowness of apprehension, for he sees through the very souls of all who surround him, but merely from that aversion to action, which prevails among such as have a world in themselves. How admii-able, too, is the judgment of the poet ! Hamlet's own disordered fancy has not conjured up the spirit of his father ; it has been seen by others ; he is pre- pared by them to witness its re-appearance, and when he does see it, Hamlet is not brought forward as having long brooded on the subject. The moment before the 160 LECTnEES ON [1811-12 Ghost enters, Hamlet speaks of other matters : he men- tions the coldness of the night, and observes that he has not heard the clock strike, adding, in reference to the custom of drinking, that it is " More honour'd in the breach than the observance.'' Act I., Scene 4. Owing to the tranquil state of his mind, he indulges in some moral reflections. Afterwards, the Ghost suddenly enters. " Hot. Look, my lord ! it comes. Ham. Angels and ministers of grace defend us ! " The same thing occurs in " Macbeth : " in the dagger- scene, the moment before the hero sees it, he has his mind appHed to some indifferent matters ; " Go, tell thy mis- tress," &c. Thus, in both cases, the preternatural appear- ance has all the effect of abruptness, and the reader is totally divested of the notion, that the figure is a vision of a highly wrought imagination. Here Shakspere adapts himself so admirably to the situation— in other words, so puts himself into it — that though poetry, his language is the very language of nature. No terms, associated with such feelings, can occur to us so proper as those which he has employed, especially on the highest, the most august, and the most awful subjects that can interest a human being in this sentient world. That this is no mere fancy, I can undertake to establish from hundreds, I might say thousands, of passages. No character he has drawn, in the whole list of his plays, could so well and fitly express himself, as in the language Shak- spere has put into his mouth. There is no indecision about Hamlet, as far as his own sense of duty is concerned ; he knows well what he ought to do, and over and over again he makes up his mind to do it. The moment the players, and the two spies set upon LbCT. XII.] SHAKSPBBB AND MILTON. 161 him, have withdrawn, of whom he takes leave with a line so expressive of his contempt, " Ay so ; good bye you.' — Now I am alone," he breaks out into a delirium of rage against himself for neglecting to perform the solemn duty he had undertaken, and contrasts the factitious and artificial display of feeling by the player with his own apparent indifference ; " What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her ? " Yet the player did weep for her, and was in an agony of grief at her sufferings, while Hamlet is unable to rouse himself to action, in order that he may perform the com- mand of his father, who had come from the grave to incite him to revenge : — " This is most brave ! That I, the son of a dear father murder'd, Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words, And fall a cursing like a very drab, A scuUion." A.ot 11., Seem 2. It is the same feeling, the same conviction of what is his duty, that makes Hamlet exclaim in a subsequent part of the tragedy : " How all occasions do inform against me, - And spur my dull revenge ! What is a man. If his chief good, and market of his time, Be but to sleep and feed ? A beast, no more. — I do not know Why yet I live to say — ' this thing's to do,' Sith I have cause and will and strength and means To do't." Act IV., Scene 4. Yet with all this strong conviction of duty, and with all this resolution arising out of strong conviction, nothing is 1 1st Fol., « God buy' ye " ; Globe Shak. " God be wi' ye." M 162 IBCTUEES ON [1811-12 done. This admiraMe and consistent character, deeply acquainted with, his own feelings, painting them with such wonderful power and accuracy, and firmly persuaded that a moment ought not to be lost in executing the solemn charge committed to him, still yields to the same retiring from reality, which is the result of having, what we express by the terms, a world within himself. Such a mind as Hamlet's is near akin to madness. Dryden has somewhere said,' " Great wit to madness nearly is allied," and he was right ; for he means by "wit " that greatness of genius, which led Hamlet to a perfect knowledge of his own character, which, with all strength of motive, was so weak as to be unable to carry into act his own most obvious duty. With all this he has eT sense of imperfectness, which becomes apparent when he is moralizing on the skull in the churchyard. Something is wanting to his com^plete- ness — something is deficient which remains to be supplied, and he is therefore described as attached to Opheha. His madness is assumed, when he finds that witnesses have been placed behind the arras to listen to what passes, and when the heroine has been thrown in his way as a decoy. Another objection has been taken by Dr. Johnson, and Shakspere has been taxed very severely. I refer to the scene where Hamlet enters and finds his uncle praying, and refuses to take his life, excepting when he is in the height of his iniquity. To assail him at such a moment of confession and repentance, Hamlet declares, " Why,' this is hu-e and salary, not rerenge." Act in., Scene 3. " Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide." Absalom and Achitophel, 163-4. " Eead"0." LeCT. XII.] SHAKSPERE AND MILTON. 163 He therefore forbears, and postpones his uncle's death, until he can catch him in some act " That has no relish of salvation iu't." This conduct, and this sentiment, Dr. Johnson has pro- nounced to be so atrocious and horrible, as to be unfit to be put into the mouth of a human being.^ The fact, how- ever, is that Dr. Johnson did not understand the character of Hamlet, and censured accordingly: the determination to allow the guilty King to escape at such a moment is only part of the indecision and irresoluteness of the hero. Hamlet seizes hold of a pretext for not acting, when he might have acted so instantly and effectually : therefore, he again defers the revenge he was bound to seek, and de- clares his determination to accomplish it at some time, " When he is drunk, asleep, or in his rage, Ur in th' incestuous pleasures of his bed." This, allow me to impress upon you most emphatically, was merely the excuse Hamlet made to himself for not taking advantage of this particular and favourable moment for doing justice upon his guilty uncle, at the urgent in- stance of the spirit of his father. Dr. Johnson farther states, that in the voyage to Eng- land, Shakspere merely follows the novel as he found it, as if the poet had no other reason for adhering to his original ; but Shakspere never followed a novel, because he found such and such an incident in it, but because he saw that the story, as he read it, contributed to enforce, or to explain some great truth inherent in human nature. He never could lack invention to alter or improve a popular narrative ; but he did not wantonly vary from it, when he knew that, as it was related, it would so well apply to his ' See Malone's Shakspere by Boswell, vii. 382, for Johnson's note upon this part of the scene. — J. P. C. 164 LBCTUEES ON [1811-12 own great purpose. He saw at once how consistent it was with tlie character of Hamlet, that after still resolving, and still deferring, still determining to execute, and still postponing execution, he should finally, in the infirmity of his disposition, give himself up to his destiny, and hopelessly place himself in the power, and at the mercy of his enemies. Even after the scene with Osrick, we see Hamlet still indulging in reflection, and hardly thinking of the task he has just undertaken : he is all despatch and resolution, as far as words and present intentions are concerned, but all hesitation and irresolution, when called upon to carry his words and intentions into efEect; so that, resolving to do everything, he does nothing. He is full of purpose, but void of that quality of mind which accomplishes purpose. Anything finer than this conception, and working out of a great character, is merelj^ impossible. Shakspere wished to impress upon us the truth, that action is the chief end of existence — that no faculties of intellect, however brilliant, can be considered valuable, or indeed otherwise than as misfortunes, if they withdraw ns from, or render us re- pugnant to action, and lead us to think and think of doing, until the time has elapsed when we can do anything effec- tually. In enforcing this moral truth, Shakspere has shown the fulness and force of his powers : all that is amiable and excellent in nature is combined in Hamlet, with the exception of one quality. He is a man living in medita- tion, called upon to act by every motive human and divine, but the great object of his life is defeated by continually resolving to do, yet doing nothing but resolve. Note on the Subjects of the Memam/ing Lectwres. The Twelfth Lecture, as advertised in the Times, was to be on " Shakspere and Milton ; " but Milton does not appear LeCT. XII.] SHAKSPEEE AND MILTON. 165 in Mr. Collier's transcript. "We learn from tte same Journal that Lecture Thirteen (which covered eventually two even- ings) was to be on the same subject, with " strictures on the commentators of Shakspere, and especially on Dr. Johnson's Preface ; " that Lecture Fourteen was to be a continuation of " the review of Dr. Johnson's Preface ; " the fifteenth to be " the commencement of a series of lectures on Milton ; " the sixteenth to conclude " the Lectures on Milton," and the seventeenth was to be " the last lecture in illustration of the principles of poetry," and to consist of "strictures on the modem English poets." It would seem that, towards the end, at least, promise and performance varied, and that Milton was all but passed over. See Appendix. Also compare the allusions to these later lectures in the extracts from H. 0. Robinson's Diary, which are given above. II. LECTURES AND NOTES OF 1818. LECTURES AND NOTES OF 1818. INTRODTJCTORr. § 1. Two Letters amd a Prospeotus. jV/TR. COLLIER, in his Preface to the Lectures of 1811-12, suppKestwo letters, from "Wordsworth and Lamb, which he received near the end of 1817. " Mr DEAR Sib, " Coleridge, to whom aU but certain reviewers wish well, intends to try the effect of another course of Lectures in Loudon on Poetry generally, and on Shakspere's Poetry particu- larly. He gained some money and reputation by his last effort of the kind, which was, indeed, to him no effort, since his thoughts as well as his words flow spontaneously. He talks as a bird sings, as if he could not help it : it is his nature. He is now far from well in body or spirits : the former is suffering from various causes, and the latter from depression. No man ever deserved to have fewer enemies, yet, as he thinks and says, no man has more, or more virulent. You have long been among his friends ; and as far as you can go, you will no doubt prove it on this as on other occasions. We are all anxious on his account. He means to call upon you himself, or write from Highgate, where he now is. " Yours sincerely, " W. WOEDSWORTH." » " Near the end of 1817."— J. P. C. 170 LECTUEES AND NOTES OP 1818. " The Garden of England, \Otli Beer} " Deae J. P. C. " I know how zealously you feel for our friend S. T. Coleridge, and I know that you and your family attended his Lectures four or five years ago. He is in bad health, and worse mind, and unless something is done to lighten his heart, he will soon be reduced to his extremities ; and even these are not in the best condition. I am sure that you will do for him what you can, but at present he seems in a mood to do for himself He projects a new course, not of physic, nor of metaphysic, nor a new course of life ; but a new course of lectures on Shakspere and Poetry. There is no man better qualified (always excepting number one) but I am pre-engaged for a series of dissertations on India and India-pendence, to be completed at the expense of the Company, in I know not (yet) how many vols, foolscap folio. I am busy getting up my Hindu mythology, and for the purpose I am once more enduring Southey's curse (of Kehama). To be serious, Coleridge's state and affairs make me so ; and there are particular reasons just now (and have been any time for the last twenty years) why he should succeed. He will do so, with a little encouragement. I have not seen him lately, and he does not know that I am writing. " Yours (for Coleridge's sake) in haste, "C.Lamb." These letters were probably called forth by the following Prospectus,^ vrhich was issued, as Gilhnan tells us, in the autumn of 1817. " There are few families, at present, in the higher and middle classes of English society, in which literary topics and the pro- ductions of the Kne Arts, in some one or other of their rarioOs forms, do not occasionally take their turn in contributing to the entertainment of the social board, and the amusement of the circle at the fire-side. The acquisitions and attainments of the ' " Doubtless written, as Wordsworth's letter, in 1817." Lamb now lived at the corner of Bow Street and Russell Street, and " The Garden of England " was Covent Garden. '^ Printed in Gillman's "Life,'' and previously in vol. i. of the " Remains." INTJBODUCTOET. 171 iutelleot ought, indeed, to hold a very inferior rank in our esti- mation, opposed to moral worth, or even to professional and specific skill, prudence, and industry. But why should they be opposed, when they may be made subservient merely by being subordinated ? It can rarely happen that a man of social dis- position, altogether a stranger to subjects of taste (almost the only ones on which persons of both sexes can converse with a common interest), should pass through the world without at times feeling dissatisfied with himself. The best proof of this is to be found in the marked anxiety which men, who have succeeded in life without the aid of these accomplishments, show in securing them to their children. A young man of ingenuous mind will not wilfcJly deprive himself of any species of respect. He will wish to feel himself on a level with the average of the society in which he lives, though he may be ambitious of distinguishing himself only in his own immediate pursuit or occupation. " Under this conviction, the following Course of Lectures was planned. The several titles wiU best explain the particular subjects and purposes of each ; but the main objects proposed, as the result of all, are the two following : — " I. To convey, in a form best fitted to i-ender them impressive at the time, and remembered afterwards, rules and principles of sound judgment, with a kind and degree of connected informa- tion, such as the hearers, generally speaking, cannot be supposed likely to form, collect, and arrange for themselves, by their own unassisted studies. It might be presumption to say, that any important part of these Lectures could not be derived from books ; but none, I trust, in supposing, that the same informa- tion could not be so svirely or conveniently acquired from such books as are of commonest occurrence, or with that quantity of time and attention which can be reasonably expected, or even wisely desired, of men engaged in business and the. active duties of the world. "II. Under a strong persuasion that little of real value is de- rived by persons in general firom a wide and various reading ; but still more deeply convinced as to the actual mischief of uncon- nected and promiscuous reading, and that it is sure, in a greater or less degree, to enervate even where it does not likewise inflate ; I hope to satisfy many an ingenuous mind, seriously interested in its own development and cultivation, how moderate a number of volumes, if only they be judiciously chosen, will suffice for the 172 LECTURES AND NOTES OF 1818. attainment of every wise and desirable purpose: that is, in addition to those which he studies for specific and professional purposes. It is saying less than the truth to affirm, that an excellent book (and the remark holds almost equally good of a 7 Raphael as of a Milton) is like a well-chosen and well-tended fruit-tree. Its fruits are not of one season only. With the due and natural intervals, we may recur to it year after year, and it will supply the same nourishment and the same gratification, if only we ourselves return with the same healthful appetite. " The subjects of the Lectures are indeed very different, but not (in the strict sense of the term) diverse : they are various, rather than miscellaneous. There is this bond of connection common to them all, — ^that the mental pleaspre which they are calculated to excite is not dependent on accidents of fashion, place or age, or the events or the customs of the day ; but com- mensurate with the good sense, taste, and feeling, to the cultiva- tion of which they themselves so largely contribute, as being all in kind, though not all in the same degree, productions of Genius. " What it would be arrogant to promise, I may yet be permitted to hope, — that the execution will prove correspondent and adequate to the plan. Assuredly my best efforts have not been wanting so to select and prepare the materials, that, at the con- clusion of the Lectures, an attentive auditor, who should consent to aid his future recollection by a few notes taken either during each Lecture or soon after, would rarely feel himself, for the time to come, excluded from taking an intelligent interest in any general conversation likely to occur in mixed society. "S. T. C01.ERIDGE." Syllabus of the Course, " Lecture I. Tuesday Evening, January 27, 1818. — On the manners, morals, literature, philosophy, religion, and the state of society in general, in European Christendom, from the eighth to the fifteenth century (that is, from a.d. 700 to a.d. 1400), more particularly in reference to England, Prance, Italy, and Germany: in other words, a portrait of the (so called) dark ages of Europe. " II. On the tales and metrical romances common, for the most part, to England, Germany, and the North of France ; and on INTRODUCTORY. 173 the English songs and ballads ; continued to the reign of Charles the First. — A few selections will be made from the Swedish, Danish, and German languages, translated for the purpose by the Lecturer. " III. Chaucer and Spenser ; of Petrarch ; of Ariosto, Pulci, and Boiardo. " IV. V. and VI. On the Dramatic Works of Shakspere. In these Lectures will be comprised the substance of Mr. Coleridge's former Courses on the same subject, enlarged and varied by sub- sequent study and reflection. " VII. On Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger ; with the probable causes of the cessation of Dramatic Poetry in England with Shirley and Otway, soon after the Restoration of Charles the Second. "VIII. Of the Life and all the Works of Cbrv antes, but chiefly of his Don Quixote. The Ridicule of Knight-Errantry shewn to have been but a secondary object in the mind of the Author, and not the principal Cause of the Delight which the Work continues to give in aU Nations, and under all the Revolu- tions of Manners and Opinions. " IX. On Rabelais, Swift, and Sterne : on the Nature and Constituents of genuine Humour, and on the Distinctions of the Humorous from the Witty, the Fanciful, the Droll, the Odd, &c. "X. Of Donne, Dante, and Milton. " XI. On the Arabian Nights Entertainments, and on the romantic use of the supernatural in Poetry, and in works of fiction not poetical. On the conditions and regulations urder which such Books may be employed advantageously in the earlier Periods of Education. " XII. On tales of witches, apparitions, &c. as distinguished from the magic and magicians of Asiatic origin. The probable sources of the former, and of the belief in them in certain ages and classes of men. Criteria by which mistaken and exaggerated facts may be distinguished from absolute falsehood and im- posture. Lastly, the causes of the terror and interest which stories of ghosts and witches inspire, in early life at least, whether believed or not. " XIII. On colour, sound, and form, in nature, as connected with Poest: the word 'Poesy' used as the generic or class term, including poetry, music, painting, statuary, and ideal architecture, as its species. The reciprocal relations of poetry 174 LECTURES AND NOTES OP 1818. and philosophy to each other ; and of both to religion, and the moral sense. " XIV. On the corruptions of the English language since the reign of Queen Anne, in our style of writing prose. A few easy rules for the attainment of a manly, unaffected, and pure language, in our genuine mother-tongue, whether for the purposes of writing, oratory, or conversation. Concluding Address." § 2. The Lectures of 1818. The series of lectures, of which the prospectus has been given in § 1, duly commenced on Jan. 27, 1818, and ended on March 13. It will be observed that the fourth, fifth, and sixth lectures only are on Shakspere ; but the seventh is on Ben Jonson, and other English Dramatists, chiefly as contrasted with Shakspere ; and the tenth includes Milton, and probably contains the substance of the missing lectures of 1811-12. Coleridge, looking back on these lectures, was wont to copsider them the most satisfactory he had delivered ; al- though the lecture-room, Gillman says, was in " an un- favourable situation," "near the Temple." They "were delivered," Allsop tell us, in his " Recollections," " in Flower de Luce Court,^ and were constantly thronged by the most attentive and intelligent auditory I have ever seen." Crabb Robinson was absent from London during a por- tion of this course. His few notes of it are meagre. Such as they are, we give them. ' A lecture on Eomeo and Juliet, at the " Crown and Anchor," is alluded to by Colei-idge in his letter to J. Britton. It could not have ftirmed part of the course of 1818. The " Crown and Anchor " was in Arundel Street, Strand. It was a favourite place for lectures and meetings. INTRODUCTOEY. 175 " January 27th, 1818. — ^I went to the Surrey Institution, where I heard Hazlitt lecture on Shakspere and Milton. " Prom hein;e I called at Collier's, and taking Mrs. Collier with me, I went to a lecture by Coleridge in rieur-de-Us Court,' Fleet Street. I was gratified unexpectedly by findiug a large and respectable audience, generally of superior-looking persons, in physiognomy rather than dress. Coleridge treated of the origin of poetry and of Oriental works ; but he had little animation, and an exceedingly bad cold rendered his voice scarcely audible. " February IQth. — The conversation was beginning to be very interesting, when I was obliged to leave the party to attend Coleridge's lecture on Shakspere. Coleridge was apparently ill. " February 20th. — I dined at Collier's, and went to Coleridge. Coleridge was not in one of his happiest moods to-night. < His subject was Cervantes, but he was more than usually prosy, and his tone peculiarly drawling. His digressions on the nature of insanity were carried too far, and his remarks on the book but old, and by him often repeated. " February 27th. — I took tea with Gurney, and invited Mrs. Giirney to accompany me to Coleridge's lecture. It was on Dante and Milton — one of his very best. He digressed less than usual, and really gave information and ideas about the poets he professed to criticize." §. 3. The Matter published in the "Remains." As we have pointed out in § 2, the lectures of 1818 treated of many things besides dramatists ; but it is with these we are mainly concerned. ' Coleridge himself, and Allsop, write " Flower de Luce." The locality, in any case, must have been the " Fleur de Lis Court," at present to be found in Fetter Lane. (First passage to the right from Fleet Street.) With this first note of Ci'abb Robinson's, compare Coleridge's letter to Allsop, of the 28th : " Your friendly letter was first delivered to me at the lecture-room door on yesterday evening, ten minutes before the lecture, and my spirits were so sadly depressed by the circumstance of my hoarse- ness, that I was literally incapable of reading it." 176 LBCTUEBS AJTD NOTES OP 1818 Gillman says, Coleridge " lectured from notes, -whicli lie had carefully made," and that " many of these notes were preserved, and have lately been printed in the ' Literary Remains.' " He alludes, of course, to H. N. Coleridge's " Literary Remains of S. T. Coleridge," 4 vols., 1836-39. But it is difficult to make out what the matter really is, which H. N. Coleridge printed. It is " confusion worse confounded." If the original papers are still in existence, it would be well to search for any dates there may be on them.i Let us see what we have in the " Remains." The editor gives, in vol. i., what notes and the like he has on all the lectures of the course, and on the subjects of those lectures, except the three on Shakspere, — the fourth, fifth, and sixth. In the second volume he puts together, like beads on a string, a number of notes, and portions of lectures, written down before, or written down after delivery (hardly, in any case, reported), on poetry, Shak- spere, and the drama. He heads them, " Shakspere, with introductory matter on Poetry, the Drama, and the Stage." One long note is professedly written by Mr. Justice Cole- ridge, the editor's brother. These, by-and-by, without any warning, become a series of notes on Ben Jonson, and on Beaumont and Fletcher ; whereas," Coleridge's general remarks on these poets (though quite as much on Shakspere as on them) were left in the first volume (Lee. VII.). Now, what are these fragments and notes ? We will state our conclusion plainly, without circumlocution. They by no means merely belong to 1818. They are all the ' Such, for instance, as the two we find in the notes on " As You Like It," and those in Section II. INXBODDCTORT. 177 manuscript notes, and written portions of lectures, accumu- lated by Coleridge through years; oftfen altered, often added to, from time to time ; rearranged, and conned over anew, for each new course ; some used now, some then ; possibly, left in the order in which Coleridge arranged them for the lectures of 1818 ; possibly, altered, added to, rearranged, even later.^ The earlier portion, on the drama and so on, could have been little used in that course, ia which only three lectures were devoted to Shakspere. Accordingly, we find little trace of it in Mr. Carwardine's memoranda (see § 4). On the other hand, we see, from the same memoranda, that Coleridge treated of the plays in three divisions, handling the historical plays in the second ; which would account for the editor's arrangement, or no arrangement, to which we shall allude presently. ' Coleridge, in a letter to AUsop, of Jan., 1821, speaking of a great work he had in contemplation (the opeping sentence is, probably, a marvel of self-deception) writes : — " I have ateady the written materials and contents, requiring only to be put together, from the loose papers and commonplace or memorandum books, and needing no other change, whether of omission, addition, or correction, than the mere act of arranging, and the opportunity of seeing he whole collectively, bring with them of course, — I. Characteristics of ihakspere's Dramatic Works, with a Critical Review of each Play; ogethei" with a relative and comparative Critique on the kind and degree jf the Merits and Demerits of the Dramatic Works of Ben Jonson, Seaumont and Pletcher, and Massinger. The History of the English Drama ; the accidental advantages it afforded to Shakspere, without in the least detracting from the perfect originality or proper creation of the Shaksperian Drama ; the contradistinction of the latter from the Greek Drama, and its still remaining wngvsness, with the causes of this, from the combined influences of Shakspere himself, as man, poet, philosopher, and finally, by conjunction of all these, dramatic poet ; and of the age, events, manners, and state of the English language.. This work, with every art of compression, amounts to three volumes of about five hundred pages each." N 178 LECTURES AND NOTES OP 1818. In the letter to J. Britten, Coleridge explains how he occasionally wrote a lecture, or part of a lecture ; how he made many notes ; how, previous to lecturing, he studied " the mass of material " he had before him ; and then lectured extempore. Thus is reconciled his statement in one place, that his lectures were always different, with that in others, that they were in substance the same. (See Introductory Matter to the Collier series, § 5.) The prospectus of 1818 itself announces, that lectures four, five, and six will comprise " the substance of Mr. Coleridge's former courses on the same subject, enlarged and varied by subsequent study and reflection." Such being really the nature of the materials published in the " Remains," as it seems to us, it will hardly be a liberty, if we put into them a little arrangement. We will state clearly, to avoid misunderstanding, what we have ventured to do. They have been divided into sections, with appropriate headings. The portion treating of the Historical Plays, which will be found, in the " Remains," between the notes on '' Romeo and Juliet" and those on "Lear," has been allotted a separate section. The general remarks on Jonson and others, left by the editor in his first volume, have been in- serted before the notes on those authors. That is all. The criticisms on Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton, in vol. i. are included in our Appendix, for reasons there stated. § 4. — Mr. H. H. Ga/rwar dime's Memorcmda. We subjoin the memoranda of the course, so far as they refer to the Shakspere lectures, of Henry Holgate INTEODTJCTORT. 179 Carwardine, Oolne Priory, Essex, who was personally known to Coleridge. They were found among his papers, in 1867, and published in "Notes and Queries," April 2nd, 1870, whence we extract them. " Coleridge, 6 Feb. ' On Shakspere.' His predecessors, the poets of Italy, France, and England, &c. , drew their aliment from the soil ; there was a nationality ; they were of a country, of a genus, grafted with the chivalrous spirit and sentiment of the North, and with the wild magic imported from the East. He bore no direct witness of the soil from whence he grew ; compare him with the mountain pine. " Self-sustained, deriving his genius immediately from heaven, independent of all earthly or national influence. That such a mind involved itself in a human form is a problem indeed which my feeble powers may witness with admiration, but cannot explain. My words are indeed feeble when I speak of that myriad-minded man, whom all artists feel above all praise. Least of all poets, ancient or modern, does Shakspere appear to be coloured or affected by the age in which he lived — ^he was of all times and countries. " He drew from the eternal of our nature. " When misers were most conunon in his age, yet he has drawn no such character; and why? because it was mere transitory character. Shylock no miser, not the great feature of his character. " In an age of political and religious heat, yet there is no sectarian character of polities or religion. " In an age of superstition, when witchcraft was the passion of the monarch, yet he has never introduced such characters. For the weird sisters are as different as possible. " Judgment and genius are as much one as the fount and the stream that flows from it ; and I must dwell on the judgment ot Shakspere. " When astrological predictions had possession of the mind, he has no such character. It was a transient folly merely of the time, and therefore it did not belong to Shakspere ; and in com- pany with Homer and Milton and whatever is great on earth, he invented the Drama. " The Greek tragedy was tragic opera differing only in this 180 LBCTUEES AND NOTES OF 1818. that in Greek the scenery arid music were subservient to the poetry. In modem opera the poetry is subservient to the music and decoration. " A mere copy never delights us in anything. Why do we go to a tragedy to witness the representation of the woe which we may daily witness ? The ancient tragedians confined their subjects to gods and heroes, and traditional people. Shakspere — a more difficult task — in drawing not only from nature, but from the times as well as things before him, and so true to nature that you never can conceive his characters could speak otherwise than they do in the situation in which they are placed. " common expression — ' How natural Shakspere is ' — and yet so peculiar that if you read but a few detached lines you im- mediately say, ' this must be Shakspere.' " Such peculiar propriety and excellence, and truth to nature, that there is nothing in any man at all like him — a research for that felicity of language current in the courts of Elizabeth and James, but so was Massinger, B. Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, &c., but yet they are not like Shakspere's language. Divide his works into three great classes ; no division can be made that applies to tragedy and comedy, for nature acknowledges none of these distinct sharp lines, and Shakspere is the Poet of Nature, portraying things as they exist; He has, as it were, prophesied what each man in his different passions would have produced. " 1. His Comedies and Romantic Dramas. " 2. His Historical Plays. " 3. His Great Tragedies. " There is a character of observation, a happiness of noticing whatever is external, and arranging them like a gallery of pictures, representing passions, which no man appropriates to himself, and yet acknowledges his share. »; " Character of his mind, depth, and energy of thought. No man was ever a great poet without being a great philosopher. In his earliest poems the poet and philosopher are perpetually struggling with each other till they found a field where they were blended, and flowed in sweetest harmony and strength. " Love's Labour Lost, I affirm, must have been the first of his plays — firstly, it has the least observation, and the characters are merely such as a young man of genius might have made out him- self. But it has other marks ; it is all intellect. There is little to interest as a dramatic representation, yet affording infinite INTBODTJCTOET. 181 matter of beautiful quotation. King and Biron, 'Light seeking light blinds us,' no Instance in which the same thought so happily expressed. In the character of Biron he has the germ of Benedict and Mercutio ; it was the first rough draft, which he afterwards finished with Ben. and Mer. " In Holofernes is contained the sketch of Polonius. He never on any occasion spares pedantry — ' remunerative. Nathaniel. I praise God for your sin,' &c. "Much of this wordiness (here ridiculed) shown in modem poetry ; words nicely balanced till you come to seek the meaning, when you are surprised to find none. " His blank verse has nothing equal to it but that of Milton. Such fulness of thought gives an involution of metre so natural to the expression of passions, which fills and elevates the mind, and gives general truths in full, free, and poetic language. " Lear, Macbeth, &o. " Shakspere, the only one who has made passion the vehicle of general truth, as in his comedy he has made even foUy itself the • vehicle of philosophy. Each speech is what every man feels to be latent in his nature ; what he would have said in that situation if he had had the ability and readiness to do it, and these are multiplied and individualized with the most extraordinary minute- ness and truth. ■ " Of the exquisite judgment of the must conceive a stage without scenery — acting a poor recitation. He frequently speaks to his audience. If, says he, you will listen to me with your minds and not with your eyes to and assist me with your imaginations, I wiU do so and so. " Characteristic of his comedy and romantic drama. " 1st. His characters never introduced for the sake of his plot, but his plot arises out of his characters, nor are all these involved in them. Tou meet people who meet and speak to you as in real life, interesting you diflerently, having some distinctive peculiarity which interests you, and thus the storj is introduced which you appear casually made acquainted with, yet still you feel that it excites an interest — that there is something that is applic- able to certain situations, &c. "Again, his characters have something more than a mere amusing property. 182 LBCTUEBS AND NOTES OF 1818. " For example, in The Tempest, the delight of Trinculo at finding something more sottish than himself and that honours him — the characteristic of base and vulgar minds which Shakspere is fond of lashing and placing in a ridiculous light [read scene between Trinculo and Caliban] ; but Shakspere can make even rude vulgarity the vehicle of profound truths and thoughts. Prospero, the mighty wizard, whose potent art could not only call up all the spirits of the deep, but the characters as they were and are and wiU be, seems a portrait of the bard himself. No magician or magic, in the proper sense of the word — a being to excite either fear or wonder — nothing in common with such characters as were brought from the East. " If there be any imitation in Shakspere, of what is it imitation ? What so earthly as Caliban, so aerial as Ariel, so fanciful, so ex- quisitely light, yet some striving of thought of an undeveloped power. " I know no character in Shakspere to which he has given a pro- pensity to sneer, or scofi", or express contempt, but he has made that man a villain." SECTION I. POETRY, THE DRAMA, AND SHAKSPBEE. Definition of Poetry,'' ■pOETRT is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to ■*■ science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication, of truth ; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of im- mediate pleasure. This definition is useful ; but as it would include novels and other works of fiction, which yet we do not call poems, there must be some additional character by which poetry is not only divided from opposites, but like- wise distinguished from disparate, though similar, modes of composition. Now how is this to be effected ? In animated prose, the beauties of nature, and the passions and accidents of human nature, are often expressed in that natural lan- guage which the contemplation of them would suggest to a pure and benevolent mind ; yet still neither we nor the writers call such a work a poem, though no work could deserve that name which did not include all this, together with something else. What is this ? It is that pleasurable ' See chap. xiv. of the BiograrpMa lAterama, and the first lecture of the course of 1811-12. 184 POBTET, THE DEAMA, [1818 emotion, that peculiar state and degree of excitement, wMct arises in the poet himself in the act of comp osition ; — and in order to understand this, we must combine a more than ordinary sympathy with the objects, emotions, or incidents contemplated by the poet, consequent on a more than common sensibility, with a more than ordinary activity of the mind in respect of the fancy and the imagination. Hence is produced a more vivid reflection of the truths of nature and of the human heart, united with a constant activity modifying and correcting these truths by that sort of pleasurable emotion, which the exertion of aU our faculties gives in a certain degree ; but which can only be felt in perfection under the full play of those powers of mind, which are spontaneous rather than Toluntary, and in which the effort required bears no proportion to the activity enjoyed. This is the state which permits the production of a highly pleasurable whole, of which each part shall also communicate for itself a distinct and conscious pleasure ; and hence arises the definition, which I trust is now in- telligible, that poetry, or rather a poem, is a species of composition, opposed to science, as having intellectual pleasure for its object, and as attaining its end by the use of language natural to us in a state of excitement, — ^but distinguished from other species of composition, not ex- cluded by the former criterion, by permitting a pleasure from the whole consistent with a consciousness of pleasure from the component parts ; — and the perfection of which is, to communicate from each part the greatest immediate pleasure compatible with the largest sum of pleasure on the whole. This, of course, will vary- with the different modes of poetry ; — and that splendour of particular lines, which would be worthy of admiration in an impassioned elegy, or a short indignant satire, would be a blemish and proof of vile taste in a tragedy or an epic poem. It is remarkable, by the way, that Milton in three inoi- Sect. I.] and shakspeee. 185 dental words has implied all which, for the purposes of more distinct apprehension, which at first must be slow-paced in order to be distinct, I have endeavoured to develop in a precise and strictly adequate definition. Speaking of poetry, he says, as in a parenthesis, "which is simple, sensuous, passionate." How awful is the power of words ! — fearful often in their consequences when merely felt, not understood; but most awful when both felt and under- stood ! — Had these three words only been properly under- stood by, and present in the minds of, general readers, not only almost a library of false poetry would have been either precluded or still-born, but, what is of more con- sequence, works truly excellent and capable of enlarging the understanding, warming and purifying the heart, and placing in the centre of the whole being the germs of noble and manlike actions, would have been the common diet of the intellect instead. For the first condition, sim- plicity, — while, on the one hand, it distinguishes poetry from the arduous processes of science, labouring towards an end not yet arrived at, and supposes a smooth and finished road, on which the reader is to walk onward easily, with streams murmuring by his side, and trees and flowers and human dwellings to make his journey as de- lightful as the object of it is desirable, instead of having to toil with the pioneers and painfully make the road on which others are to travel, — -precludes, on the other hand, every affectation and morbid peculiarity ; — the second con- dition, sensuousness, insures that framework of objectivity, that definiteness and articulation of imagery, and that modification of the images themselves, without which poetry becom.es flattened into mere didactics of practice, or evaporated into a hazy, unthoughtful, day-dreaming ; and the third condition, passion, provides that neither thought nor imagery shall be simply objective, but that the passio vera of humanity shall warm and animate both. 186 POBTET, THE DEAMA, [1818 To return, however, to the previous definition, this most genera] and distinctive character of a poem originates in the poetic genius itseK ; and though it comprises whatever can with any propriety be called a poem, (unless that word be a mere lazy synonyme for a composition in metre,) it yet becomes a just, and not merely discriminative, but full and adequate, definition of poetry in its highest and most peculiar sense, only so far as the distinction still results from the poetic genius, which sustains and modifies the emotions, thoughts, and vivid representations of the poem by the energy without effort of the poet's own mind, — by the spontaneous activity of his imagination and fancy, and by whatever else with these reveals itself in the balancing and reconciling of opposite or discordant qualities, same- ness with difference, a sense of novelty and freshness with old or customary objects, a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order, self-possession and judgment with enthusiasm and vehement feeling, — and which, while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature, the manner to the matter, and our admiration of the poet to onr sympathy with the images, passions, characters, and incidents of the poem : — " Doubtless, this could not be, but that she turns Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange. As fire converts to fire the things it burns As we our food into our nature change ! " From their gross matter she abstracts their forms, And draws a kind of quintessence from things. Which to her proper nature she transforms. To bear them light on her celestial wings ! " Thm doth she, when from individual states She doth abstract the universal kinds. Which then reclothed in diverse names and fates Steal access thro' our senses to our minds." ' ^ Sir John Davies on the Immortality of the Soul, sect. iv. The Sect. I.] and shakspeee. 187 Greek Dra/ma. It is truly singular that Plato, — whose philosophy and religion were but exotic at home, and a mere opposition to the finite in all things, genuine prophet and anticipator as he was of the Protestant Christian Bdm, — should have given in his Dialogue of the Banquet a justification of our Shakspere. For he relates that, when all the other guests had either dispersed or fallen asleep, Socrates only, to- gether with Aristophanes and Agathon, remained awake, and that, while he continued to drink with them out of a large goblet, he compelled them, though most reluctantly, to admit that it was the business of one and the same genius to excel in tragic and comic poetry, or that the tragic poet ought, at the same time, to contain within him- self the powers of comedy. Now, as this was directly repugnant to the entire theory of the ancient critics, and contrary to all their experience, it is evident that Plato must have-fixed the eye of his contemplation on the inner- most essentials of the drama, abstracted from the forms of age or country. In another passage he even adds the reason, namely, that opposites illustrate each other's nature, and in their struggle draw forth the strength of the com- batants, and display the conqueror as sovereign even on the territories of the rival power. Nothing can more forcibly exemplify the separative spirit of the Greek arts than their comedy as opposed to their tragedy. But as the immediate struggle of contraries supposes an arena common to both, so both were alike ideal ; that is, the comedy of Aristophanes rose to as great words and lines in italics are substituted, to apply these verses to the poetic genius. The greater part of this latter paragraph may be found adopted, with some alterations, in the Biographia Literwria, chap. 14. — H. N. C. 188 POBTET, THE DEAMA, [1818 a distance above the ludicrous of real life, as the tragedy of Sophocles aboveits tragic events and passions : — and it is in this one point, of absolute ideality, that the comedy of Shakspere and the old comedy of Athens coincide. In this also alone did the Greek tragedy and comedy unite ; in everything else they were exactly opposed to each other. Tragedy is poetry in its deepest earnest : comedy is poetry in unlimited jest. Earnestness consists in the direction and convergence of all the powers of the soul to one aim, and in the voluntary restraint of its activity in conse- quence ; the opposite, therefore, lies in the apparent abandonment of all definite aim or end, and in the removal of all bounds in the exercise of the mind, — attaining its real end, as an entire contrast, most perfectly, the greater the display is of intellectual wealth squandered in the wantonness of sport without an object, and the more abundant the life and vivacity in the creations of the arbitrary wiU. The later comedy, even where it was really comic, was doubtless likewise more comic, the more free it appeared from any fixed aim. Misunderstandings of intention, fruit- less struggles of absurd passion, contradictions of temper, and laughable situations there were ; but stiU the form of the representation itself was serious ; it proceeded as much according to settled laws, and used as much the same means of art, though to a different purpose, as the regular tragedy itself. But in the old comedy the very form itself is whimsical ; the whole work is one great jest, com- prehending a world of jests within it, among which each maintains its own place without seeming to concern itself as to the relation in which it may stand to its fellows. In short, in Sophocles, the constitution of tragedy is mon- archical, but such as it existed in elder Greece, limited by laws, and therefore the more venerable, — all the parts adapting and submitting themselves to the majesty of the SlCT. I.] AND SHAKSPBEE. 189 heroic sceptre : — ^in Aristophanes, comedy, on the contrary, is poetry in its moat democratic form, and it is a funda- mental principle with it, rather to risk all the confusion of anarchy, than to destroy the independence and privileges of its individual constituents, — place, verse, characters, even single thoughts, conceits, and allusions, each turning on the pivot of its own free will. The tragic poet idealizes his characters by giving to the spiritual part of our nature a more decided preponderance over the animal cravings and impulses thaij is met with in real life : the comic poet idealizes his characters by making the animal the governing power, and the intellectual the mere instrument. ' But as tragedy is not a collection of virtues and perfections, but takes care only that the vices and imperfections shall spring from the passions, errors, and prejudices which arise out "of the soul ; — so neither is comedy a mere crowd of vices and follies, but whatever qualities it represents, even though they are in a certain sense amiable, it still displays them as having their origin in some dependence on our lower nature, accompanied with a defect in true freedom of spirit and self-subsistence, and subject to that nnconnection by contradictions of the inward being, to which all folly is owing. The ideal of earnest poetry consists in the union and "harmonious melting down, and fusion of the sensual into the spiritual, — of man as an animal into man as a power of reason and self-government. And this we have represented to us most clearly in the plastic art, or statuary : -where the perfection of outward form is a symbol of the perfection of an inward idea ; where the body is wholly penetrated by the soul, and spiritualized even to a state of glory, and like a transparent substance, the matter, in its own nature darkness, becomes altogether a vehicle and fixture of light, a means of developing its beauties, and unfolding its wealth of various colours without disturbing its unity, or causing 190 POETET, THE DRAMl, [1818 a diirision of the parts. The sportive ideal, on the contrary, consists in the perfect harmony and concord of the higher nature with the animal, as with its ruling principle and its acknowledged regent. The understanding and practical reason are represented as the willing slaves of the senses and appetites, and of the passions arising out of them. Hence we may admit the. appropriateness to the old comedy, as a work of defined art, of allusions and descrip- tions, which morality can never justify, and, only with reference to the author himself, and only as being the effect or rather the cause of the circumstances in which he wrote, can consent even to palliate. The old comedy rose to its perfection in Aristophanes, and in him also it died with the freedom of Greece. Then arose a species of drama, more fitly called dramatic enter- tainment than comedy, but of which, nevertheless, our modern comedy (Shakspere's altogether excepted) is the genuine descendant. Euripides had already brought tragedy lower down and by many steps nearer to the real world than his predecessors had ever done, and the passionate admira- tion which Menander and Philemon expressed for him, and their open avowals that he was their great master, entitle us to consider their dramas as of a middle species, between tragedy and comedy, — not the tragi-comedy, or thing of heterogeneous parts, but a complete whole, founded on principles of its own. Throughout we find the drama of Menander distinguishing itself from tragedy, but not, as the genuine old comedy, contrasting with, and opposing it. Tragedy, indeed, carried the thoughts into the mythologic world, in order to raise the emotions, the fears, and the hopes, which convince the inmost heart that their final cause is not to be discovered in the limits of mere mortal life, and force us into a presentiment, however dim, of a state in which those struggles of inward free will with outward necessity, which form the true subject of the SlCT. I.] AND SHAKSPBRE. 191 tragedian, shall be reconciled and solved ; — the entertain- ment or new comedy, on the other hand, remained within the circle of experience. Instead of the tragic destiny, it introduced the power of chance : even in the few fragments of Menander and Philemon now remaining to us, we find many exclamations and reflections concerning chance and for- tune, as in the tragic poets concerning destiny. In tragedy, the moral law, either as obeyed or violated, above all con- sequences — its own maintenance or violation constituting the most important of all consequences — ^forms the ground ; the new comedy, and our modern comedy in general (Shak- spere excepted as before) lies in prudence or imprudence, enlightened or misled self-love. The whole moral system of the entertainment exactly like that of fable, consists in rules of prudence, with an exquisite conciseness, and at the same time an exhaustive fulness of sense. An old critic said that tragedy was the flight or elevation of life, comedy (that of Menander) its arrangement or ordonnance. Add to these features a portrait-like truth of character, not so far indeed as that a bona fide individual should be described or imagined, but yet so that the features which give interest and permanence to the class should be indi- vidualized. The old tragedy moved in an ideal world, — the old comedy in a fantastic world. As the entertainment, or new comedy, restrained the creative activity both of the fancy and the imagination, it indemnified the understand- ing in appealing to the judgment for the probability of the scenes represented. The ancients themselves acknowledged the new comedy as an exact copy of real life. The gram- marian, Aristophanes, somewhat affectedly exclaimed : — " Life and Menander ! which of you two imitated the other ? " In short, the form of this species ofr drama was poetry ; the stuff or matter was prose. It was prose rendered delightful by the blandishments and measured motions of the muse. Yet even this was not universal. 192 POETRY, THE DEAMA, [1818 The mimes of Sophron, so passionately admired by Plato, were written in prose, and were scenes out of real life conducted in dialogue. The exquisite Feast of Adonis (S,vpaKovinat ri 'ASwvia.^ovv is not genuine." — H. N. C, Sect. I.] and shaksperb. 197 was broken. Ages of darkness succeeded; — not, indeed, tte darkness of Russia or of the barbarous lands uncon- quered by Rome ; for from tbe time of Honorius to the destruction of Constantinople and the consequent introduc- tion of ancient literature into Europe, there was a continued succession of individual intellects ; — the golden chain was never wholly broken, though the connecting links were often of baser metal. A dark cloud, like another sky, covered the entire cope of heaven, — but in this place it thinned away, and white stains of light showed a half eclipsed star behind it, — in that place it was rent asunder, and a star passed across the opening in all its brightness, and then vanished. Such stars exhibited themselves only ; surrounding objects did not partake of their light. There were deep wells of knowledge, but no fertilizing rills and rivulets. For the drama, society was altogether a state of chaos, out of which it was, for a while at le^ast, to proceed anew, as if there had been none before it. And yet it is not unJelightful to contemplate the eduction of good from evil. The ignorance of the great mass of our countrymen was the efficient cause of the reproduction of the drama ; and the preceding darkness and the returning light were alike necessary in order to the creation of a Shakspere. The drama recommenced in England, as it first began in Greece, in religion. The people were not able to read, — the priesthood were unwilling that they should read; and yet their own interest compelled them not to leave the people wholly ignorant of the great events of sacred his- tory. They did that, therefore, by scenic representations, which in after ages it has been attempted to do in Roman Catholic countries by pictures. They presented Mysteries, and often at great expense: and reliques of this system still remain in the south of Europe, dnd indeed throughout Italy, where at Christmas the convents and the great nobles rival each other in the scenic representation of the birth 198 POETBT, THE DRAMA, . [1818 of Christ and its circumstances. I heard two instances mentioned to me at different times, one in Sicily and the other in Rome, of noble devotees, the min of whose fortunes was said to have commenced in the extravagant expense which had been incurred in presenting the jprcesepe or manger. But these Mysteries, in order to answer their design, must not only be instructive, but entertaining ; and as, when they became so, the people began to take pleasure in acting them themselves — in interloping, — (against which the priests seem to have fought hard and yet in vain) the most ludicrous images were mixed with the most awful per- sonations : and whatever the subject might be, however sub- lime, however pathetic, yet the Vice and the Devil, who are the genuine antecessors of Harlequin and the Clown, were necessary component parts. I have myself a piece of this kind, which I transcribed a few years ago at Helmstadt,^ in Germany, on the education of Eve's children, in which after the fall and repentance of Adam, the offended Maker, as in proof of His reconciliation, condescends to visit them, and to catechize the children, — who with a noble contempt of chronology are all brought together from Abel to Noah. The good children say the ten Commandments, the Belief, and the Lord's Prayer ; but Cain and his rout, after he had received a box on the ear for not taking off his hat, and afterwards offering his left hand, is prompted by the devil so to blunder in the Lord's Prayer as to reverse the petitions and say it backward ! ^ Unaffectedly I delare I feel pain at repetitions like ' Coleridge was in Germany from September, 1798, to November, 1799. It is clear that these remarks were written long before 1818. See Introductory Matter, § 3. = Some remarks on this subject, to be found in the notes of Lecture ir., in the " Eemains," vol. i., and in which this piece is described more fully, ai-e here added : — " In this age there was a tendency in writers to the droll and the Sect. I.] and shakspbee. 199 thesej however innocent. As historical documents they are valuable ; but I am sensible that what I can read with my eye with perfect innocence, I cannot without inward fear and misgivings pronounce with my tongue. Let me, however, be acquitted of presumption if I say that I cannot agree with Mr. Malone, that our ancestors did not perceive the ludicrous in these things, or that they paid no separate attention to the serious and comic parts. Indeed his own statement contradicts it. For what purpose should the Vice leap upon the Devil's back and belabour him, but to produce this separate attention ? The people laughed heartily, no doubt. Nor can I conceive any m.ean- ing attached to the words " separate attention," that is not fully answered by one part of an exhibition exciting serious- ness or pity, and the other raising mirth and loud laughter. That they felt no impiety in the affair is most true. For it grotesque, and in the little dramas wliich at that time existed, there were singiilar instances of these. It was the disease of the age. It is a remarkable fact that Luther and Melancthon, the great religious re- formers of that day, should have strongly recommended for the educa- tion of children, dramas, which at present would be considered highly indecorous, if not bordering on a deeper sin. !From one which they par- ticularly recommended, I will give a few extracts ; more I should not think it right to do. The play opens with Adam and Eve washing and dressing their children to appear before the Lord, who is coming £rom heaven to hear them repeat the Lord's Prayer, Belief, &c. In the next scene the Lord appears seated like a schoolmaster, with the children standing round, when Cain, who is behindhand, and a sad pickle, comes running in with a bloody nose and his hat on. Adam says, ' What, with your hat on!' Cain then goes up to shake hands with the Almightj', when Adam says (giving him a cuff), ' Ah, would you give your left hand to the Lord ? ' At length Cain takes his place in the class, and it becomes his turn to say the Lord's Prayer. At this time the Devil (a constant attendant at that time) makes his appearance, and getting behind Cain, whispers in his ear ; instead of the Lord's Prayer, Cain gives it so changed by the transposition of the words, that the meaning is reversed ; yet this is so artfully done by the author, that it is exactly as an obstinate child would answer, who knows his lesson, yet does not 200 POETRY, THE DRAMA, [1818 is the very essence of that system of Christian polytheism, which in all its essentials is now fully as gross in Spain, in Sicily and the south of Italy, as it ever was in England in the days of Henry VI. — (nay, more so ; for a WiclifEe had then not appeared only, but scattered the good seed widely,) it is an essential part, I say, of that system to draw the mind wholly from its own inward whispers and quiet dis- criminations, and to habituate the conscience to pronounce sentence in every case according to the established verdicts of the church and the casuists. I have looked through volume after volume of the most approved casuists, — and stiU I find disquisitions whether this or that act is right, and under what circumstances, to a minuteness that makes reasoning ridiculous, and of a callous and unnatural im- modestv, to which none but a monk could harden himself, who has been stripped of all the tender charities of life, yet is goaded on to make war against them by the unsub- dued hauntings of our meaner nature, even as dogs are choose to say it. In the last scene, horses in rich trappings and car- riages covered with gold are introduced, and the good children are to ride in them and be Lord Mayors, Lords, &c. ; Cain and the bad ones are to be made cobblers and tinkers, and only to associate with such. " This, with numberless others, was written by Hans Sachs, Our simple ancestors, firm in their faith, and pure in their morals, were only amused by these pleasantries, as they seemed to them, and neither they nor the reformers feared their having anj' influence hostile to re- ligion. When I was, many years back, in the north of Germany, there were several innocent superstitions in practice. Among others at Christ- mas, presents used to be given to the children by the parents, and they were delivered on Christmas day by a person who personated, and was supposed by the children to be, Christ : early on Christmas morning he called, knocking loudly at the door, and (having received his instructions) left presents for the good and a rod for the bad. Those who have since been in Germany have found this custom i-elinquished ; it was con- sidered profane and irrational. Yet they have not found the children better, nor the mothers more careful of their offspring ; they have not found their devotion more fervent, their faith more strong; nor their morality more pure." SjSCT. I.] AND SHAKSPERB. 201 said to get tlie hydrophobia from excessive thirst. I fully believe that our ancestors laughed as heartily as their "posterity do at Grimaldi; — and not having been told that they would be punished for laughing, they thought it very innocent ; — and if their priests had left out murder in the catalogue of their prohibitions (as indeed they did under certain circumstances of heresy,) the greater part of them, — the moral instincts common to all men having been smothered and kept from development, — would have ■ thought as little of murder. However this may be, the necessity of at once instructing and gratifying the people produced the great distinction between the Greek and the English theatres ; — for to this we must attribute the origin of tragi-comedy, or a repre- sentation of human events more lively, nearer the truth, and permitting a larger field of moral instruction, a more ample exhibition of the recesses of the human heart, under all the trials and circumstances that most concern us, than was known or guessed at by j3Eschylus, Sophocles, or Euri- pides ; — and at the same time we learn to account for, and — ^relatively to the author — perceive the necessity of the Fool or Glown or both, as the substitutes of the Vice and the Devil, which our ancestors had been so accustomed to see in every exhibition of the stage, that they could not feel any performance perfect without them. Even to this day in Italy, every opera — (even Metastasio obeyed the claim throughout) — must have six characters, generally two pairs of cross lovers, a tyrant and a confidant, or a father and two confidants, themselves lovers ; — and when a new opera appears, it is the universal fashion to ask — which is the tyrant, which the lover ? &c. It is the especial honour of Christianity, that in its worst and most corrupted form it cannot wholly separate itself from morality ; — whereas the other religions in their best form (I do not include Mohammedanism, which is only an 202 POETRY, THE DEAMA, [1818 anomalous corruption of Christianity, like Swedenbor- gianism,) have no connection with it. The very imper- sonation of moral evil under the name of Vice, facilitated all other impersonations ; and hence we see that the Mysteries were succeeded by Moralities, or dialogues 'and plots of allegorical personages. Again, some characters ia real history had become so famous, so proverbial, as Nero for instance, that they were introduced instead of the moral quality, for which they were so noted ; — and in this manner the stage was moving on to the absolute production of heroic and comic real characters, when the restoration of literature, followed by the ever-blessed Reformation, let in upon the kingdom not only new knowledge, but new motive. A useful rivalry commenced between the metro- polis on the one hand, the residence, independently of the court and nobles, of the most active and stirring spirits who had not been regularly educated, or who, from mis- chance or otherwise, had forsaken the beaten track of pre- ferment, — and the universities on the other. The latter prided themselves on their closer approximation to the ancient rules and ancient regularity — taking the theatre of Greece, or rather its dim reflection, the rhetorical tragedies of the poet Seneca, as a perfect ideal, without any critical collation of the times, origin, or circumstances ; — whilst, in the mean time, the popular writers, who could not and would not abandon what they had found to delight their countrymen sincerely, and not merely from inquiries first put to the recollection of rules, and answered in the affir- mative, as if it had been an arithmetical sum, did yet borrow from the scholars whatever they advantageously could, consistently with their own peculiar means of pleasing. And here let me pause for a moment's contemplation of this interesting subject. We call, for we see and feel, the swan and the dove both Sect. I.] and shakspeee. 203 transcendently beautiful. As absurd as it would be to institute a comparison between their separate claims to beauty from any abstract rule common to both, without reference to the life and being of the animals themselves, - — or as if, having first seen the dove, we abstracted its out- lines, gave them a false generalization, called them the principles or ideal of bird-beauty, and then proceeded to criticize the swan or the eagle ; — not less absurd is it to pass judgment on the works of a poet on the mere ground that they have been called by the same class-name with the works of other poets in other times and circumstances, or on any ground, indeed, save that of their inappropriate- ness to their own end and being, their want of significance, as symbols or physiognomy. ! few have there been among critics, who have followed with the eye of the imagination the imperishable yet ever wandering spirit of poetry through its various metempsy- choses, and consequent metamorphoses; — or who have re- joiced in the light of clear perception at beholding with each new birth, with each rare a/vatm;-the human race frame to itself a new body, by assimilating materials of nourishment out of its new circumstances, and work for itself new organs of power appropriate to the new sphere of its motion and activity ! 1 have before spoken of the Romance, or the language formed out of the decayed Roman and the Northern tongues ; and comparing it with the Latin, we find it less perfect in simplicity and relation — the privileges of a language formed by the mere attraction of homogeneous parts ; but yet more rich, more expressive and various, as one formed by more obscure affinities out of a chaos of apparently heterogeneous atoms. As more than a metaphor,— as an analogy of this, I have named the true genuine modern poetry the ro- mantic ; and the works of Shakspere are romantic poetry revealing itself in the drama. If the tragedies of Sophocles 204 POETET, THE DEAMA, [1818 are in the strict sense of the word tragedies, and the come- dies of Aristophanes comedies, we must emancipate our- selves from a false association arising from misapplied names, and find a new word for the plays of Shakspere. For they are, in the ancient sense, neither tragedies nor comedies, nor both in one, — but a different genus, diverse in kind, and not merely different in degree. They may be called romantic dramas, or dramatic romanses. ' A deviation from the simple forms and unities of the ancient stage is an essential principle, and, of course, an appropriate excellence, of the romantic drama. For these unities were to a great extent the natural form of that which iu its elements was homogeneous, and the repre- sentation of which was addressed pre-eminently to the out- ward senses ; — and though the fable, the language and the characters appealed to the reason rather than to the mere understanding, inasmuch as they supposed an ideal state rather than referred to an existing reality, — yet it was a reason which was obliged to accommodate itself to the senses, and so far became a sort of more elevated understanding On the other hand, the romantic poetry — the Shaksperian drama — appealed to the imagination rather than to the senses, and to the reason as contemplating our inward nature, and the workings of the passions in their most retired recesses. But the reason, as reason, is independent of time and space ; it has nothing to do with them ; and hence the certainties of reason have been called eternal truths. As for example — the endless properties of the circle : — what connection have they with this or that age, with this or that country ? — The reason is aloof from time and space ; — the imagination is an arbitrary controller over both ; — and if only the poet have such power of exciting our internal emotions as to make us present to the scene in imagination chiefly, he acquires the right and privilege of using time and space as they exist in imagiaation, and Sect. I.] and shakspeee. 206 obedient only to the laws by wbich the imagination itself acts. These laws it will be my object and aim to point out as the examples occur, which illustrate them. But here let me remark what can never be too often reflected on by all who would intelligently study the works either of the Athenian dramatists, or of Shakspere, that the very essence of the former consists in the sternest separation of the diverse in kind and the disparate in the degree, whilst the latter delights in interlacing by a rainbow-like trans- fusion of hues the one with the other. And here it will be necessary to say a few words on the stage and on stage-illusion. A theatre, in the widest sense of the word, is the general term for all places of amusement through the ear or eye, in which men assemble in order to be amused by some enter- tainment presented to all at the same time and in common. Thus, an old Puritan divine says : — " Those who attend public worship and sermons only to amuse themselves, make a theatre of the church, and turn God's house into the devil's. Theatra cedes diahololatriccB." The most im- portant and dignified species of this genus is, doubtless, the stage (res theatralis histrionica) , which, in addition to the generic definition above given, may be characterized in its idea, oir according to what it does, or ought to, aim at, as a combination of several or of all the fine arts in an har- monious whole, having a distinct end of its own, to which the peculiar end of each of the component arts, taken separately, is made subordinate and subservient, — that, namely, of imitating reality — whether external things, actions, or passions — under a semblance of reality. Thus, Claude imitates a landscape at sunset, but only as a picture : while a forest-scene is not presented to the spectators as a picture, but as a forest ; and though, m the full sense of the word, we are no more deceived by the one than by the other, yet are our feelings very differently affected ; and 206 POETRY, THE DEAMA., [1818 the pleasure derived from the one is not composed of the same elements as that afforded by the other, even on the supposition that the quanimm of both were equal. In the former, a picture, it is a condition of all genuine delight that we should not be deceived : in the latter, stage-scenery (inasmuch as its principal end is not in or for itself, as is the case in a picture, but to.be an assistance and means to an end out of itself) , its very purpose is to produce as much' illusion as its nature permits. These, and all other stage presentations, are to produce a sort of temporary half -faith, which the spectator encourages in himself and supports by a voluntary contribution on his own part, because he knows that it is at all times in his power to see the thing as it really is. \ have often observed that little children are actually deceived by stage- scenery, never by pictures ; though-'fiven jthese produce an effect on their impressible minds, whipK they do not on the minds of adults. The child, ifstrongly impressed, does not indeed positively think the picture to be the reality ; but yet he does not think the contrary. As Sir George Beaumont was show- ing me a very fine engraving from Rubens, representing a storm at sea without any vessel or boat introduced, my little boy, then about five years old, came dancing and singing into the room, and all at once (if I may so say) tumbled m upon the print. He instantly started, stood silent and motionless, with the strongest expression, first of wonder and then of grief, in his eyes and countenance, and at length said, "And where is the ship ? But that is sunk, and the men are all drowned ! " — still keeping his eyes fixed on the print. Now what pictures are to little children, stnge-illusion is to men, provided they retain any part of the child's sensibility ; except, that in the latter instance, the suspension of the act of comparison, which permits this sort of negative belief, is somewhat more assisted by the will, than in that olE a child respecting a picture. Sect. I.] and shakSpeee. 207 The true stage- illusion in this and in all other things consists — not in the mind's judging it to be a forfest, but, in its remission of the judgment that it is not a forest. And this subject of stage-illusion is so important, and so many practical errors and false criticisms may arise, and indeed have arisen, either from reasoning on it as actual delusion (the strange notion, on which the French critics built up their theory, and on which the French poets justify the construction of their tragedies), or from deny- ing it altogether (which seems the end of Dr. Johnson's reasoning, and which, as extremes meet, would lead to the very same consequences, by excluding whatever would not be judged probable by us in our coolest state of feeling, with all our faculties in even balance), that these few re- marks wUl, I hope, be pardoned, if they should serve either to explain or to illustrate the point. For not only are we never absolutely deluded — or anything like it, but the attempt to cause the highest delusion possible to beings in their senses sitting in a theatre, is a gross fault, incident only to low minds, which, feeling that they cannot affect the heart or head permanently, endeavour to call forth the momentary affections. ' There ought never to be more pain than is compatible with co-existing pleasure, and to be amply repaid by thought. Shakspere found the infant stage demanding an inter- mixture of ludicrous character as imperiously as that of Greece did the chorus, and high language siccordant. And there are many advantages in this ; — a greater assimilation to nature, a greater scope of power, more truths, and more feelings ; — ^the effects of contrast, as in Lear and the Fool ; and especially this, that the true language of passion be- comes sufficiently elevated by your having previously heard, in the same piece, the lighter conversation of men under no strong emotion. The very nakedness of the stage, too, was advantageous, — for the drama thence became some- 208 . POBTET, THE DEAMA, [1818 thing between recitation and a re-presentation ; and the absence or paucity of scenes allowed a freedom from the laws of unity of pla^e and unity of time, the observance of which must either confine the drama to as few subjects as may be counted on the fingers, or involve gross improba- bilities, far more striking than the violation would have caused. Thence, also, was precluded the danger of a false ideal,— of aiming at more than what is possible on the whole. What play of the ancients, with reference to their ideal, does not hold out more glaring absurdities than any in Shakspere ? On the Greek plan a man could more easily be a poet than a dramatist ; upon our plan more easily a dramatist than a poet. The Drama generally and Public Taste. Unaccustomed to address such an audience, and having lost by a long interval of confinement the advantages of my former short schooling,^ I had miscalculated in my last lecture the proportion of my matter to my time, and by bad economy and unskilful management, the several heads of my discourse failed in making the entire performance correspond with the promise publicly circulated in the weekly annunciation of the subjects to be treated. It would indeed have been wiser in me, and perhaps better on the whole, if 1 had caused my lectures to be announced only as continuations of the main subject. But if I be, as perforce I must be, gratified by the recollection of whatever has appeared to give you pleasure, I am conscious" of some- thing better, though less flattering, a sense of unfeigned gratitude for your forbearance with my defects. Like afiectionate guardians, you see without disgust the awk- ' This would seem to be a portion of a pre-written lecture for the course of 1807-8. Clearly, " in my last address I defined poetry . . ." does not refer to the last note, on the ' Progress of the Drama.'' Sect. I.] and shakspeee. 209 wardness, and witness with sympathy the growing pains, of a youthful endeavour, and look forward with a hope, which is its own reward, to the contingent results of practice — to its intellectual maturity. In my last address I defined poetry to he the art, or whatever better term our language may afford, of repre- senting external nature and human thoughts, both rela- tively to human affections, so as to cause the production of as great immediate pleasure in each part, as is compatible with the largest possible sum of pleasure on the whole. Now this definition applies equally to painting and music as to poetry ; and in truth the term poetry is alike applic- able to all three. The vehicle alone constitutes the diffe- rence ; and the term " poetry " is rightly applied by eminence to measured words, only because the sphere of their action is far wider, the power of giving permanence to them much more certain, and incomparably greater the facility, by which men, not defective by nature or disease, may be enabled to derive habitual pleasure and instruction from them. On my mentioning these considerations to a painter of great genius, who had been, from a most honourable enthusiasm, extolling his own art, he was so struck with their truth, that he exclaimed, " I want no other arguments ; — poetry, that is, verbal poetry, must be the greatest ; all that proves final causes in the world, proves this ; it would be shocking to think otherwise ! " — And in truth, deeply, ! far more than words can express, as I venerate the Last Judgment and the Prophets of Michel Angelo Buona- rotti, — yet the very pain which I repeatedly felt as I lost myself in gazing upon them, the painful consideration that their having been painted in fresco was the sole cause that they had not been abandoned to all the accidents of a dan- gerous transportation to a distant capital, and that the same caprice, which made the Neapolitan soldiery destroy all the exquisite master-pieces on the walls of the church of 210 POETET, THE DEAMA, [1818 the Trmitado Monte after the retreat of their antagonist barbarians, might as easily have made vanish the rooms and open gallery of RafEael, and the yet more unapprochable •wonders of the sublime Florentine in the Sixtine Chapel, forced upon my mind the reflection : How grateful the human race ought to be that the works of Euclid, Newton, Plato, Milton, Shakspere, are not subjected to similar con- tingencies, — that they and their fellows, and the great, though inferior, peerage of undying intellect, are secured ; — secured even from a second irruption of Goths and Vandals, in addition to many other safeguards, by the vast empire of English language, laws, and religion founded in America, through the overflow of the power and the virtue of my country : — and that now the great and certain works of genuine fame can only cease to act for mankind, when men themselves cease to be men, or when the planet on which they exist, shall have altered its relations, or have ceased to be. Lord Bacon, in the language of the gods, if I may use an Homeric phrase, has expressed a similar thought : — "Lastly, leaving the vulgar arguments, that by learning man excelleth man in that wherein man excelleth beasts; that by learning man ascendeth to the heavens and their motions, where in body he cannot come, and the like ; let us conclude with the dignity and excellency of knowledge and learning in that whereunto man's nature doth most aspire, which is, immortality or continuance : for to thistendeth genera- tion, and raising of houses and families ; to this tend buildings, founda- tions, and monuments ; to this tendeth the desire of memory, fame, and celebration, and in effect the strength of all other human desires. We see then how far the monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power, or of the hands. For have not the verses of Homer continued twenty-five hundred years, or more, without the loss of a syllable or letter ; during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities, have been decayed and demolished ? It is not possible to have the true pictures or statues of Cyrus, Alexander, Csesar ; no nor of the kings or great personages of much later years ; for the originalo cannot last, and the copies cannot but lose of the life and Sect. I.] and shakspeeb. 211 truth. But the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called images, because they generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding ages : so that, if the in- vention of the ship was thought so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from place to place, and consociateth the most remote regions in participation of their fruits ; how much more are letters to be magnified, which as ships pass through the vast seas of time, and make ages so distant to participate of the wisdom, illuminations, and inven- tions, the one of the other ? '" But let us now consider what the drama should be. And first, it is not a copy, but an imitation, of nature. This is the universal principle of the fine arts. In all well laid out grounds what delight do we feel from that balance and antithesis of feelings and thoughts ! How natural ! we say ; — but the very wonder that caused the exclamation, implies that we perceived art at the same moment. We catch the hint from nature itself. Whenever in mountains or cataracts we discover a likeness to any thing artificial which yet we know is not artificial — what pleasure ! And so it is in appearances known to be artificial, which appear to be natural. This applies in due degrees, regelated by steady good sense, from a clump of trees to the " Paradise Lost " or " Othello." It would be easy to apply it to painting and even, though with greater abstraction of thought, and by more subtle yet equally just analogies — to music. But this belongs to others ; — suffice it that one great principle is common to all the fine arts, — a principle which probably is the condition of all consciousness, without which we should feel and imagine only by discontinuous moments, and be plants or brute animals instead of men ; — I mean that ever- varying balance, or balancing, of images, notions, or feel- ings, conceived as in opposition to each other ; — in short, the perception of identity and contrariety ; the least degree ^ " Advancement of Learning," book i. suhfine. — S. T. C. 212 POETET, THE DEAMA, [1818 of which, constitutes likeness, the greatest absolnte diffe- rence ; but the infinite gradations between these two f orni all the play and all the interest of our intellectual and moral being, till it leads us to a feeling and an object more awful than it seems to me compatible with even the present subject to utter aloud, though I am most desirous to sug- gest it. For there alone are all things at once different and the same ; there alone, as the principle of all things, does distinction exist unaided by division ; there are will and reason, succession of time and unmoving eternity, in- finite change and ineffable rest !— " Return Alpheus ! the dread voice is past Which shrunk thy streams ! " - " Thou honour'd flood. Smooth-^owin^' Avon, erown'd with vocal reeds, That strain I heard, was of a higher mood ! — But now my voice proceeds. " We may divide a dramatic poet's characteristics before we enter into the component merits of any one work, and with reference only to those things which are to be the materials of all, into language, passion, and character; always bearing in mind that these must act and react on each other, — the language inspired by the passion, and the language and the passion modified and differenced by the character. To the production of the highest excellencies in these three, there are requisite in the mind of the author ; — good sense ; talent ; sensibility ; imagination ; — and to the perfection of a work we should add two faculties of lesser importance, yet necessary for the ornaments and foliage of the column and the roof — fancy and a quick sense of beauty. As to language ; — it cannot be supposed that the poet should make his characters say aU that they would, or Sect. I.] and shakspeeb. 213 that, his whole drama considered, each scene, or paragraph should be such as, on cool examination, we can conceive it likely that men in such situations would say, in that order, or with that perfection. And yet, according to my feel- ings, it is a Tery inferior kind of poetry, in which, as in the French tragedies, men are made to talk in a style which few indeed even of the wittiest can he supposed to converse in, and which both is, and on a moment's reflec- tion appears to be, the natural produce of the hot-bed of vanity, namely, the closet of an author, who is actuated originally by a desire to excite surprise and wonderment at his own superiority to other men, — instead of having felt so deeply on certain subjects, or in consequence of certain imaginations, as to make it almost a necessity of his nature to seek for sympathy, — ^no doubt, with that honour- able desire of permanent action which distinguishes genius. — Where then is the difference ? — In this, that each part should be proportionate, though the whole may be perhaps impossible. At all events, it should be compatible with sound sense and logic in the mind of the poet himself. It is to be lamented that we judge of books by books^ instead of referring what we read to our own experience. One great use of books is to make their contents a motive for observation. The German tragedies have in some respects been justly ridiculed. In them the dramatist often becomes a novelist in his directions to the actors, and thus degrades tragedy into pantomime. Tet still the con- sciousness of the poet's mind must be diffused over that of the reader or spectator ; but he himself, according to his genius, elevates us, and by being always in keeping, pre- vents us from perceiving any strangeness, though we feel great exultation. Many different kinds of style may be admirable, both in different men, and in different parts of the same poem. See the different language which strong feelings may 214 POETET, THE DEAMA, [1818 justify in Shylock, and learn from Shakspere's conduct of character the. terrible force of very plain and calm diction, when known to proceed from a resolved and impassioned man. ^ It is especially with reference to the drama, and its characteristics in any given nation, or at any particular period, that the dependence of genius on the public taste becomes a matter of the deepest importance. I do not mean that taste which springs merely from caprice or fashionable imitation, and which, in fact, genius can, and by degrees will, create for itself ; but that which arises out of wide-grasping and heart-enrooted causes, which is epidemic, and in the very air that all breathe. This it is which kills, or withers, or corrupts. Socrates, indeed, might walk arm and arm with Hygeia, whilst pestilence, with a thousand furies running to and fro, and clashing against each ' other in a complexity and agglomeration of horrors, was shooting her darts of fire and venom all around him. Even such was Milton ; yea, and such, in spite of all that has been babbled by his critics in pretended excuse for his damning, because for them too profound, excellencies, — such was Shakspere. But alas ! the excep- tions prove the rule. For who will dare to force his way out of the crowd, — not of the mere vulgar, — but of the vain and banded aristocracy of intellect, and presume to join the almost supernatural beings that stand by them- selves aloof ? Of this diseased epidemic influence there are two forms especially preclusive of tragic worth. The first is the necessary growth of a sense and love of the ludicrous, and a morbid sensibility of the assimilative power, — an inflam- mation produced by cold and weakness, — which in the boldest bursts of passion will lie in wait for a jeer at any phrase, that may have an accidental coincidence in the mere words with something base or trivial. For instance, Sect. I.] and shakspeeb. 215 — to express woods, not on a plain, but clothing a hill, which overlooks a valley, or dell, or river, or the sea, — ^the trees rising one above another, as the spectators in an ancient theatre,— I know no .other word in our language, (bookish and pedantic terms out of the question,) but hanging woods, the sylvce swpervmpendentes of Catullus ; ^ yet let some wit call out in a slang tone, — " the gallows ! " and a peal of laughter would damn the play. Hence it is that so many dull pieces have had a decent run, only be- cause nothing unusual above, or absurd below, mediocrity furnished an occasion, — a spark for the explosive materials collected behind the orchestra. But it would take a volume of no ordinary size, however laconically the sense were ex- pressed, if it were meant to instance the effects, and unfold all the causes, of this disposition upon the moral, intellec- tual, and even physical character of a people, with its in- fluences on domestic life and individual deportment. A good document upon this subject would be the history of Paris society and of French, that is, Parisian, literature from the commencement of the latter half of the reign of Louis XIV. to that of Buonaparte, compared with the preceding philosophy and poetry even of Frenchmen themselves. The second form, or more properly, perhaps, another distinct cause, of this diseased disposition is matter of exultation to the philanthropist and philosopher, and of regret to the poet, the painter, and the statuary alone, and to them only as poets, painters, and statuaries ; — ^namely, the security, the comparative equability, and ever increasing sameness of human life. Men are now so seldom thrown into wild circumstances, and violences of excitement, that the language of such states, the laws of association of feel- 1 " Confestim Penios adest, viridantia Tempe, Tempe, quse sylvae cingunt superimpendentes." l,fith. Fel. et Th. 286-7. 216 POETEY, THE DEAMA, [1818 ing with thought, the starts and strange far-flights of the assimilative power on the slightest and least obvious like- ness presented by thoughts, words, or objects, — these are all judged of by authority, not by actual experience, — by what men have been accustomed to regard as symbols of these states, and not the natural symbols, or self-manifes- tations of them. Even, so it is in the language of man, and in that of nature. The sound sun, or the figures s, u, n, are purely arbitrary modes of recalling the object, and for visual mere objects they are not only sufficient, but have infinite advan- tages from their very nothingness per se. But the language of nature is a subordinate Logos, that was in the beginning, and was with the thing it represented, and was the thing it represented. Now the language of Shakspere, in his " Lear ' ' for instance, is a something intermediate between these two ; or rather it is the former blended with the latter, — the arbitrary, not merely recalling the cold notion of the thing, but express- ing the reality of it, and, as arbitrary language is an heir- loom of the human race, being itself a part of that which it manifests. What shall I deduce from the preceding positions ? Even this, — the appropriate, the never to be too much valued advantage of the theatre, if only the actors were what we know they have been, — a delightful, yet most efEectual, remedy for this dead palsy of the public mind. What would appear mad or ludicrous in a book, when presented to the senses under the form of reality, and with the truth of nature, supplies a species of actual experience. This is indeed the special privilege of a great actor over a great poet. No part was ever played in per- fection, but nature justified herself in the hearts of all her children, in what state soever they were, short of absolute moral exhaustion, or downright stupidity. There is no time given to ask questions or to pass judgments ; we are Sect. I.] and shakspeeb. 217 taken by storm, and, though in the histrionic art many a clumsy counterfeit, by caricature of one or two features, may gain applause as a fine likeness, yet never was the very thing rejected as a counterfeit. O ! when I think of the inexhaustible mine of virgin treasure in our Shakspere, that I have been almost daily reading him since I was ten years old, — that the thirty intervening years ^ have been unintermittingly and not fruitlessly employed in the study of the Greek, Latin, English, Italian, Spanish, and German helle lettrists, and the last fifteen years in addition, far more intensely in the analysis of the laws of life and reason as they exist in man, — and that upon every step I have made forward in taste, in acquisition of facts from history or my own observation, and in knowledge of the different laws of being and their apparent exceptions, from accidental collision of disturbing forces, — that at every new accession of information, after every successful exer- cise of meditation, and every fresh presentation of experi- ence, I have unfailingly discovered a proportionate increase of wisdom and intuition in Shakspere ; — when I know this, and know too, that by a conceivable and possible, though hardly to be expected, arrangement of the British theatres, not all, indeed, but a large, a very large, proportion of this indefinite all — (round which no comprehension has yet drawn the line of circumscription, so as to say to itself, " I have seen the whole ") — might be sent into the heads and hearts — into the very souls of the mass of mankind, to whom, except by this living comment and interpretation, it must remain for ever a sealed volume, a deep well without a wheel or a windlass ; — it seems to me a pardonable en- thusiasm to steal away from sober likelihood, and share in 1 This brings us to the lectures of 1811-12. There is much in Mr. Collier's second lecture identical with the matter in this note, and poetry was defined in his first lecture. But the note and the lecture are not the same. 218 POETET, THE DEAMA, [1818 SO rich a feast in the faery world of possibility ! Yet even in the grave cheerfulness of a circumspect hope, much, very much, might be done ; enough, assuredly, to furnish a kind and strenuous nature with ample motives for the attempt to effect what may be effected. Shalcspere as a Poet generally. Clothed in radiant armour, and authorized by titles sure and manifold, as a poet, Shakspere came forward to de- mand the throne of fame, as the dramatic poet of England. His excellencies compelled even his contemporaries to seat him on that throne, although there were giants in those days contending for the same honour. Hereafter I would fain endeavour to make out the title of the English drama as created by, and existing in, Shakspere, and its right to the supremacy of dramatic excellence in general. But he had shown himself a poet, previously to his appearance as a dramatic poet ; and had no " Lear," no " Othello," no " Henry IV.," no " Twelfth Night " ever appeared, we must have admitted that Shakspere possessed the chief, if not every, requisite of a poet,- — deep feeling and exquisite sense of beauty, both as exhibited to the eye in the combinations of form, and to the ear in sweet and appropriate melody ; that these feelings were under the command of his own will ; that in his very first productions he projected his mind out of his own particular being, and felt, and made others feel, on subjects no way connected with himself, except by force of contemplation and that sublime faculty by which a great mind becomes that on which it meditates. To this must be added that affectionate love of nature and natural objects, without which no man could have observed so steadily, or painted so truly and passionately, the very minutest beauties of the external world : — Sect. I.] and shakspeee. 219 " And when thou hast on foot the purblind hare, Mark the poor wretch ; to overshoot his troubles, How he outruns the wind, and with what care He cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles ; The many miisits through the which he goes Are like a labyrinth to amaze his foes. " Sometimes ' he runs among the '■ flock of sheep, To make the cunning hounds mistake their smell ; And sometime where earth-delving conies keep. To stop the loud pursuers in their yell ; And sometime sorteth with a herd of deer : Danger deviseth shiits, wit waits on fear. " Por there his smell with others' being mingled, The hot scent-snuffing hounds are driven to doubt, Ceasing their clamorous cry, till they have singled, With much ado, the cold fault cleanly out, Then do they spend their mouths ; echo replies. As if another chase were in the skies. " By this poor Wat, far off, upon a hill. Stands on his hinder legs with listening ear. To hearken if his foes pursue him still : Anon their loud alarums he doth hear, And now his grief may be compared well To one sore-sick, that hears the passing-bell. " Then shalt thou see the dew-bedabbled wretch Turn, and return, indenting with the way : Each envious briar his weary legs doth scratch, Each shadow makes him stop, each murmur stay. For misery is trodden on by many. And being low, never relieved by any." Venm and Adonis. And the preceding description : — " But, lo! from forth a copse that neighbours by, A breeding jennet, lusty, young and proud, &c." ^ Read " sometime" and "a' 220 POETRY, THE DEAMA, [1818 is mnoh more admirable, tut in parts less fitted for quota- tion. Moreover Shakspere had shown that he possessed fancy, considered as the faculty of bringing together images dissimilar in the main by some one point or more of likeness, as in such a passage as this : — " Full gently now she takes him by the hand, A lily prisoned in a jail of snow, Or ivory in an alabaster band ; So white a friend ingirts so white a foe ! " — lb. And still mounting the intellectual ladder, he had as un- equivocally proved the indwelling in his mind of imagina- tion, or the power by which one image or feeling is made to modify many others, and by a sort of fusion to force many into one ; — that which afterwards showed itself in such might and energy in " Leai-," where the deep anguish of a father spreads the feeling of ingratitude and cruelty over the very elements of heaven ; — and which, combining many circumstances into one moment of consciousness, tends to produce that ultimate end of all human thought and human feeling, unity, and thereby the reduction of the spirit to its principle and fountain, who is alone truly one. Various are the workings of this the greatest faculty of the human mind, both passionate and tranquil. In its tranquil and purely pleasurable operation, it acts chiefly by creating out of many things, as they would have appeared in the de- scription of an ordinary mind, detailed in unimpassioned succession, a oneness, even as nature, the greatest of poets, acts upon us, when we open our eyes upon an extended prospect. Thus the flight of Adonis" in the dusk of the evening : — " Look ! how a bright star shooteth from the sky ; So glides he in the night from Venus' eye ! " How many images and feelings are here brought together Sect. I.] and shakspeek. 221 ■without effort and without discord, in the beauty of Adonis, the rapidity of his flight, the yearning, yet hopelessness, oi the enamoured gazer, while a shadowy ideal character is thrown over the whole ! Or this power acts by impressing the stamp of humanity, and of human feelings, on inani- mate or mere natural objects : — " Lo ! here the gentle lark, weary of rest, From his moist cabinet mounts up on high. And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast The sun ariseth in his majesty. Who doth the world so gloriously behold, The cedar-tops and hills seem burnish'd gold." Or again, it acts by so carrying on the eye of the reader as to make him. almost lose the consciousness of words, — to make him. see everything flashed, as Wordsworth has grandly and appropriately said, — " Flashed ' upon that inward eye , Which is the bhss of solitude ; — and this without exciting any painful or laborious atten- tion, without any anatomy of description, (a fault not un- common in descriptive poetry) — but with the sweetness and easy movement of nature. This energy is an absolute essential of poetry, and of itself would constitute a .poet, though not one of the highest class ; it is, however, a most hopeful symptom, and the " Venus and Adonis " is one continued specipien of it. In this beautiful poem there is an endless activity of thought in all the possible associations of thought with thought, thought with feeling, or with words, of feelings with feelings, and of words with words. " Even as the sun, with purple-colour'd face, Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn, " They flash " is Wordsworth's text. He is speaking of daffodils. 222 POETET, THE DEAMA, [1818 " Rose-cheek'd Adonis hied him to the chase : Hunting he loved, but love he laugh'd to scorn. Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him, And like a bold-faced suitor 'gins to woo him." Remark the humanizing imagery and circumstances of the first two lines, and the activity of thought in the play of words in the fourth line. The whole stanza presents at once the time, the appearance of the morning, and the two persons distinctly characterized, and in six simple verses puts the reader in possession of the whole argument of the poem. " Over one arm the lusty courser's rein, Under the ' other was the tender boy. Who blush'd and pouted in a dull disdain. With leaden appetite, unapt to toy. She red and hot, as coals of glowing fire, He red for shame, but frosty to ^ desire " : — This stanza and the two following afford good instances of that poetic power, which I mentioned above, of making every thing present to the imagination — both the forms, and the passions which modify those forms, either actually, as in the representations of love, or anger, or other human affections : or imaginatively, by the different manner in which inanimate objects, or objects nnimpassioned them- selves, are caused to be seen by the mind in moments of strong excitement, and according to the kind of the excite- ment, — whether of jealousy, or rage, or love, in the only appropriate sense of the word, or of the lower impulses of our nature, or finally of the poetic feeling itself. It is, perhaps, chiefly in the power of producing and reproducing the latter that the poet stands distinct. The subject of the " Venus and Adonis " is unpleasing ; but the poem itself is for that very reason the more illustra- tive of Shakspere. There are men who can write passages of ' Read "her "and " in." Sect. I.] and shakspeee. 223 deepest pathos and even sublimity on circnmstances personal to themselves and stimulative of their own passions ; but they are not, therefore, on this account poets. Read that magnificent burst of woman's patriotism and exultation, Deborah's song of victory ; it is glorious, but nature is the poet there. It is quite another matter to become all things and yet remain the same, — to make the changeful god be felt in the river, the lion and the flame ; — this it is, that is the true imagination. Shakspere writes in this poem, as if he were of another planet, charming you to gaze on tlie movements of Venus and Adonis, as you would on the twinkling dances of two vernal butterflies. Finally, in this poem and the " Rape of Lucrece," Shak- spere gave ample proof of his possession of a most profound, energetic, and philosophical mind, without which he might have pleased, but could not have been a great dramatic poet. Chance and the necessity of his genius combined to lead him to the drama his proper province ; in his conquest of which we should consider both the difiiculties which opposed him, and the advantages by which he was assisted.' Shakspere's Judgment equal to his Genius. Thus then Shakspere appears, from his '• Venus and Adonis " and " Rape of Lucrece " alone, apart from all his great works, to have possessed all the conditions of the true poet. Let me now proceed to destroy, as far as may be in my power, the popular notion that he was a great dramatist by mere instinct, that he grew immortal in his own despite, and sank below men of second or third-rate power, when he attempted aught beside the drama — even as bees con- ' Compare the report of the 3rd Lecture of 18U-12, and chap. xv. of tlie Biographia Literaria, given in the Appendix. 224 POETRY, THE DEAMA, [1818 struct their cells and manufacture their honey to admirable perfection ; but would in vain attempt to build a nest. Now this mode of reconciling a compelled sense of inferiority with a feeling of pride, began in a few pedants, who having read that Sophocles was the great model of tragedy, and Aristotle the infallible dictator of its rules, and finding that the " Lear," " Hamlet," " Othello," and other master- pieces, were neither ia imitation of Sophocles nor m obedience to Aristotle, — and not having (with one or two exceptions) the courage to affirm, that the delight which their country received from generation to generation, in defiance of the alterations of circumstances and habits, was wholly ground- less — took upon them, as a happy medium and refuge, to talk of Shakspere as a sort of beautiful lusus natures, a de- lightful monster, — wildj indeed, and without taste or judg- ment, but like the inspired idiots so much venerated in the East, uttering, amid the strangest follies, the sublimest truths. In nine places out of ten in which I find his awful name mentioned, it is with some epithet of " wild," " irregular," " pure child of nature," &c. If all this he true, we must submit to it ; though to a thinking mind it cannot but be painful to find any excellence, merely human, thrown out of all human analogy, and thereby leaving us neither rules for imitation, nor motives to imitate ; — ^but if false, it is a dangerous falsehood ; — for it affords a refuge to secret self-conceit,— enables a vain man at once to escape his reader's indignation by general swoln panegyrics, and merely by his ipse dixit to treat, as contemptible, what he has not intellect enough to comprehend, or soul to feel, without assigning any reason, or referring his opinion to any demonstrative principle ; — thus leaving Shakspere as a sort of Grand Lama, adored indeed, and his very excre- ments prized as relics, but with no authority or real in- fluence. I grieve that every late voluminous edition of his works would enable me to substantiate the present charge Sect. I.] and shakspeeb. 225 with a variety of facts one-tenth of which would of them- selves exhaust the time allotted to me. Every critic, who has or has not made a collection of black letter books — in it- self a useful and respectable amusement^ — puts on the seven- league boots of self -opinion, and strides at once from an illus- trator into a supreme judge, and blind and deaf, fills his three-ounce phial at the waters of Niagara ; and determines positively the greatness of the cataract to be neither more nor less than his three-ounce phial has been able to receive. I think this a very serious subject. It is my earnest desire — my passionate endeavour, — to enforce at various times and by various arguments and instances the close and reciprocal connection of just taste with pure morality. Without that acquaintance with the heart of man, or that docility and childlike gladness to be made acquainted with it, which those only can have, who dare look at their own hearts — and that with a steadiness which religion only has the power of reconciling with sincere humility ; — without this, and the modesty produced by it, I am deeply convinced that no man, however wide his erudition, however patient his antiquarian researches, can possibly understand, or be worthy of understanding, the writings of Shakspere. Assuredly that criticism of Shakspere will alone be genial which is reverential. The Englishman, who without reverence, a proud and affectionate reverence, can utter the naiae of William Shakspere, stands disqualified for the office of critic. He wants one at least of the very senses, the language of which he is to employ, and will discourse, at best, but as a blind man, while the whole harmonious creation of light and shade with all its subtle interchange of deepening and dissolving colours rises in silence to the silent fiat of the uprising Apollo. However inferior in ability I may be to some who have followed me, I own I am proud that I was the first in time who publicly demon- strated to the full extent of the position, that the supposed 226 POKTET, THE DRAMA, [1818 irregularity and extravagancies of Shakspere were the mere dreams of a pedantry that arraigned the eagle because it had not the dimensions of the swan. In all the suc- cessive courses of lectures delivered by me, siace my first attempt at the Royal Institution, it has been, and it still remains, my object, to prove that in all points from the most important to the most minute, the judgment of Shak- spere is commensurate with his genius, — nay, that his genius reveals itself in his judgment, as in its most exalted •/ form. And the more gladly do I recur to this subject from the clear conviction, that to judge aright, and with distinct consciousness of the grounds of our judgment, con- cerning the works 9f Shakspere, implies the power and the means of judging rightly of all other works of intellect, those of abstract science alone excepted. It is a painful truth that not only individuals, but even whole nations, are ofttimes so enslaved to the habits of their education and immediate circumstances, as not to judge disiuterestedly even on those subjects, the very pleasure arising from which consists in its disinterestedness, namely, on subjects of taste and polite literature. Instead of deciding concerning their own modes and customs by any rule of reason, nothing appears rational, becoming, or beautiful to them, but what coincides with the pecu- liarities of their education. In this narrow circle, indi- viduals may attain to exquisite discrimination, as the French critics have done in their own literature; but a true critic can no more be such without placing him- self on some central point, from which he may command the whole, that is, some general rule, which, founded in reason, or the faculties common to all men, must therefore apply to each, — than an astronomer can explain the move- ments of the solar system without taking his stand in the sun. And let me remark, that this will not tend to pro- duce despotism, but, on the contrary, true tolerance, in the Sect. I.] and shakspbre. 227 critic. He will, indeed, require, as the spirit and substance of a work, something true in human nature itself, and in- dependent of all circumstances ; but in the mode of apply- ing it, he will estimate genius and judgment according to the felicity with which the imperishable soul of intellect shall have adapted itself to the age, the place, and the existing manners. The error he wUl expose lies in revers- ing this, and holding up the mere circumstances as per- petual, to the utter neglect of the power which can alone animate them. For art cannot exist without, or apart from, nature ; and what has man of his own to give to his fellow- man, but his own thoughts and feelings, and his observations so far as they are modified by his own thoughts or feelings ? Let me, then, once more submit this question to minds em^ancipated alike from national, or party, or sectarian prejudice ; — Are the plays of Shakspere works of rude un- cultivated genius, in which the splendour of the parts com- pensates, if aught can compensate, for the barbarous shape- lessness and irregularity of the whole ? — Or is the form equally admirable with the matter, and the judgment of the great poet not less deserving our wonder than his genius ? — Or, again, to repeat the question in other words : — Is Shakspere a great dramatic poet on account only of those beauties and excellencies which he possesses in com- mon with the ancients, but with diminished claims to our love and honour to the full extent of his differences from them ? — Or are these very differences additional proofs of poetic wisdom, at once results and symbols of living power as contrasted with lifeless mechanism — of free and rival originality as contradistinguished from servile imitation, or, more accurately, a blind copying of effects, instead of a true imitation of the essential principles ? ^ — Imagine not ' " It was Lessing who first introduced the name and the works of Shakspere to the admiration of the Germans ; and I should not, perhaps, 228 POBTET, THE DEAMA, [1818 that I am about to oppose genins to rules. No ! the com- parative value of these rales is the very cause to be tried. The spirit of poetry, like all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe itself by rules, were it only to unite power with beauty. It must embody in order to reveal itself ; but a living body is of necessity an organized one ; and what is organization but the connection of parts in and for a whole, so that each part is at once end and means ? — This is no discovery of criticism ; — it is a necessity of the human mind ; and all nations have felt and obeyed it, in the invention of metre, and measured sounds, as the vehicle and vnvoluorwm, of poetry — itself a fellow-growth from the same life, — even as the bark is to the tree ! No work of true genius dares want its appropriate form, neither indeed is there any danger of this. As it must not, so genius cannot, be lawless : for it is even this that con- stitutes it genius — the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination. How then comes it that not only single Zoili, but whole nations have combined in un- hesitating condemnation of our great dramatist, as a sort of African nature, rich in beautiful monsters, — as a wild heath where islands of fertility look the greener from the surrounding waste, where the loveliest plants now "shine out among unsightly weeds, and now are choked by their parasitic growth, so intertwined that we cannot disentangle go too far, if I add that it was Lessing who first proved to all thinkino- men, even to Shakspere's own countrymen, the true nature of his appai-ent irregularities. These, he demonstrated, were deviatious only from the accidents of the Gre*k Tragedy ; aDr! from such accidents as hung a heavy weight on the wings of the Gi-eek poets, and narrowed their flight within the limits of what we may call the heroic opera. He proved that in all the essentials of art, no less than in the tnith of nature, the plays of Shakspere were Incomparably more coincident with the principles of Aristotle than the productions of Corneille and Rticine notwithstanding the boasted regularity of the latter."— ^ioyropAia Liieraria, ubap, xxiii. Sect. I.] and shakspeeb. 229 the weed without snapping the flower ? — In this statement 1 have had no reference to the vulgar abuse of Voltaire,' save as far as his charges are coincident with the decisions of Shakspere's own commentators and (so they would tell you) almost idolatrous admirers. The true ground of the mistake lies in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form. The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material ; — as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retaia wL,5n hardened. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate ; it shapes, as it developes, itself from within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form. Such as the life is, such is the form. Nature, the prime genial artist, in- exhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms ; — each exterior is the physiognomy of the being within, — its true image reflected and thrown out from the concave mirror : — and even such is the appropriate excellence of her chosen poet, of our own Shakspere, — him- self a nature humanized, a genial understanding directing ' " Take a slight specimen of it. ' Je suis bien loin assur^ment de justifier en tout la trag^die d'Hamlet ; o'est wm piece grossiere et barbare, qui ne serait pas snpportie par la plus vile populace de la France et de I'ltalie. Hamlet y devlent fou au second acte, et sa maltrcsse foUe au troisieme ; le prince tue le pere de sa mal- tresse, feignant de tuer un rat, et I'heroine se jette dans la riviere. On fait sa fosse sui- le th^Stre ; des fossoyeurs disent des qttolibets dignes d'eux, en tenant dans leurs mains des tStes de morts ; le prince Hamlet r^pond a leurs grossieretis aiominables par des folies non mains digoH- tantes. Pendant ce temps-la, un des acteurs fait la conqu^te de la Pologne. Hamlet, sa mere, et son beaii-phe boivent ensemble sv/r le thiitre : on choMte h table, on s'y querelle, on se bat, on se tue : on crovrait qtie oet mmrage est le fruit de I'imagination d!%in sauvage ivre.' Dissertation before ' Semiramis.' This is not, perhaps, very like Hamlet ; but nothing can be more hke Voltaire."— H. N. C. 230 POBTET, THE DJEIAMA, • [1818 self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness. I greatly dislike beauties and selections in general ; tut as proof positive of his unrivalled excellence, I should like to try Shakspere by this criterion. Make out your amplest catalogue of all the human faculties, as reason or the moral law, the will, th^ feeling of the coincidence of the two (a feeling sui generis et demonstratio dernionstrationwrn) called the conscience, the understanding or prudence, wit, fancy, imagination, judgment, — and then of the objects on which these are to be employed, as the beauties, the terrors, and the seeming caprices of nature, the realities and the capa- bilities, that is, the actual and the ideal, of the human mind, conceived as an individual or as a social being, as in innocence or in guilt, in a play-paradise, or in a war-field of temptation ; — and then compare with Shakspere under each of these heads all or any of the writers in prose and verse that have ever lived ! Who, that is competent to judge, doubts the result ? — And ask your own hearts, — ask your own common-sense — to conceive the possibility of this man being — I say not, the drunken savage of that wretched sciolist, wliom Frenchmen, to their shame, have honoured before their elder and better worthies, — but the anomalous, the wild, the irregular, genius of our daily criticism ! What ! are we to have miracles in sport ? — Or, I speaik reverently, does God choose idiots by whom to convey divine truths to man ? SbCT. I.] AND SHAKSPEEE. 231 Beca/pitulaiion and Summary of the Gharaateristics of Shahspere's Dramas} In lectures, of wLicli amusement forms a large part of the object, there are some peculiar difficulties. The architect places his foundation out of sight, and the musician tunes his instrument before he makes his appear- ance ; but the lecturer has to try his chords in the presence of the assembly ; an operation not likely, indeed, to pro- duce much pleasure, but yet indispensably necessary to a right understanding of the subject to be developed. Poetry in essence is as familiar to barbarous as to civilized nations. The Laplander and the savage Indian are cheered by it as well as the inhabitants of London and Paris ; — its spirit takes up and incorporates surrounding materials, as a plant clothes itself with soil and climate, whilst it exhibits the working of a vital principle within independent of aU accidental circumstances. And to judge with fairness of an author's works, we ought to distinguish what is inward and essential from what is outward and circumstantial. It is essential to poetry that it be simple, and appeal to the elements and primary laws of our nature ; that it be sensuous, and by its imagery elicit truth at a flash ; that it be impassioned, and be able to move our feelings and awaken our affections. In comparing different poets with each other, we should inquire which have brought into the fullest play our imagination and our reason, or have created the greatest excitement and produced the completest harmony. If we consider great exquisiteness of language and sweetness of metre alone," it is impossible ' "For the most part communicated by Mr. Justice Coleridge." — H. N. C. That is to say, written by Mr. Justice Coleridge, (Sir John Taylor Coleridge,) and revised by Mr. H. N. Coleridge. 2 "That astonishing product of matchless talent and ingenuity. Pope's Translation of the Iliad." — Biographia IMerairia, chap. i. 232 POETRY, THE DEAMA, [1818 to deny to Pope the character of a delightful writer ; but whether he be a poet, must depend upon our definition of the word; and, doubtless, if everything that pleases be poetry, Pope's satires and epistles must be poetry. This I must say, that poetry, as distinguished from other modes of composition, does not rest in metre, and that it is not poetry, if it make no appeal to our passions or our imagina- tion. One character belongs to all true poets, that they write from a principle within, not originating in anything without ; and that the true poet's work in its form, its shapings, and its modifications, is distinguished from all other works that assume to belong to the class of poetry, as a natural from an artificial flower, or as the mimic garden of a child from an enamelled meadow. In the former the flowers are broken from their stems and stuck into the ground ; they are beautiful to the eye and fragrant to the sense, but their colours soon fade, and their odour is transient as the smile of the -planter ; — while the meadow may be visited again and again With renewed delight, its beauty is innate in the soul, and its bloom is of the fresh- ness of nature. The next ground of critical judgment, and point of com- parison, will be as to how far a given poet has been in- fluenced by accidental circumstances. As a living poet must surely write, not for the ages past, but for that in which he lives, and those which are to follow, it is, on the one hand, natural that he should not violate, and oh the other, necessary that he should not depend on, the mere manners and modes of his day. See how little does Shak- spere leave us to regret that he was born in his particular age ! The great sera in modern times was what is called the Restoration of Letters ! — ^the ages preceding it are called the dark ages ; but it would be more wise, perhaps, to call them the ages in which we were in the dark. It is usually overlooked that the supposed dark period was not Sect. I.] and shakspbre. 233 universal, but partial and successive, or alternate ; that tte dark age of England was not the dark age of Italy, but that one country was in its light and vigour, whilst another was in its gloom and bondage. But no sooner had the Reformation sounded through Europe like the blast of an archangel's trumpet, than from king to peasant there arose an enthusiasm for knowledge ; the discovery of a manu- script became the subject of an embassy ; Erasmus read by moonlight, because he could not afford a torch, and begged a penny, not for the love of charity, but for the love of learning. The three great points of attention were religion, morals, and taste ; men of genius as well as men of learn- ing, who in this age need to be so widely distinguished, then alike became copyists of the ancients ; and this, indeed, was the only way by which the taste of mankind could be improved, or their understandings informed. Whilst Dante imagined himself a humble follower of Vir- gil, and Ariosto of Homer, they were both unconscious of that greater power working within them, which in many points carried them beyond their supposed originals. All great discoveries bear the stamp of the age in which they are made ;■ — hence we perceive the effects of the purer religion of the moderns, visible for the most part in their lives ; and in reading their works we should not content ourselves with the mere narratives of events long since passed, but should learn to apply their maxims and con- duct to ourselves. Having intimated that times and manners lend their form and pressure to genius, let me once more draw a slight parallel between the ancient and modern stage, the stages of Greece and of England. The Greeks were poly- theists ; their religion was local ; almost the only object of all their knowledge, art and taste, was their gods ; and, accordingly, their productions were, if the expression may be allowed, statuesque, whilst those of the moderns are 234 POJBTET, THE DEAMA, [1818 picturesque. The Greeks reared a structure, which in its parts, and as a whole, fitted the mind with the calm and elevated impression of perfect beauty and symmetrical pro- portion. The moderns also produced a whole, a more striking whole : but it was by blending materials and fusing the parts together. And as the Pantheon is to York Minster or Westminster Abbey, so is Sophocles com- pared with Shakspere ; in the one a completeness, a satisfac- tion, an excellence, on which the mind rests with compla- cency ; in the other a multitude of interlaced materials, great and little, magnificent and mean, accompanied, indeed, with the sense of a falling short of perfection, and yet, at the same time, so promising of our social and individual progression, that we would not, if we could, exchange it for that repose of the mind which dwells on the forms of symmetry in the acquiescent admiration of grace. This general characteristic of the ancient and modern drama might be illustrated by a parallel of the ancient and modem music ; — the one consisting of melody arising from a suc- cession only of pleasing sounds, — the modern embracing harmony also, the result of combination and the effect of a whole. I have said, and I say it again, that great as was the genius of Shakspere, his judgment was at least equal to it. Of this any one will be convinced, who attentively considers those points in which the dramas of Greece and England differ, from the dissimilitude of circumstances by which each was modified and influenced. The Greek stage had its origin in the ceremonies of a sacrifice, such as of the goat to Bacchus, whom we most erroneously regard as merely the jolly god of wine; — for among the ancients he was venerable, as the symbol of that power which acts without our consciousness in the vital energies of nature, — the vinum mundi, — as Apollo was that of the conscious^ agency of our intellectual being. The heroes of old under! Sect. I.] and shakspeee. 235 the infliience of this Bacchic enthusiasm performed more than hnmai. actions ; — ^hence tales of the favourite cham- pions soon passed into dialogue. On the Greek stage the chorus was always before the audience ; the curtain was never dropped, as we should say ; and change of place being therefore, in general, impossible, the absurd notion of condemning it merely as improbable in itself was never entertained by any one. If we can believe ourselves at Thebes in one act, we may believe ourselves at Athens in the next.^ If a story lasts twenty -four hours or twenty- four years, it is equally improbable. There seems to be no just boundary but what the feelings prescribe. But on the Greek stage where the same persons were perpetually ' before the audience, great judgment was necessary in venturing on any such change. The poets never, there- fore, attempted to impose on the senses by bringing places to men, but they did bring men to places, as in the well- known instance in the Eumenides, where during an evident retirement of the chorus from the orchestra, the scene is changed to Athens, and Orestes is first introduced in the temple of Minerva, and the chorus of Furies come in after- wards in pursuit of him.^ In the Greek drama there were no formal divisions into scenes and acts ; there were no means, therefore, of allow- ing for the necessary lapse of time between one part of the dialogue and another, and unity of time in a strict sense was, of course, impossible. To overcome that difficulty of accounting for time, which is effected on the modern stage ^ See Section iv : Notes on Othello, Act. i. ' " ^sch. Eumen. t. 230 — 239. Notandimi est, scenam jam Athenas translatam sic institm, ut primo Orestes solus conspidatv/r in iemplo ^Minervts swpplex ejus smiidacrwm, venerans ; pernio post autem eum con- \eguantur Eumenides, ^c. Schutz's note. The recessions of the chorus vere termed fuTavaaraaeig. There is another instance in the Ajax, v. |814."— H. N. C. 236 POETET, THE DEAMA, [1818 by dropping a curtain, the judgment and great genius of the ancients supplied music and measured motion, and with the lyric ode filled up the vacuity. In the story of the Agamemnon of ^schylus, the capture of Troy is sup- posed to be announced by a fire lighted on the Asiatic shore, and the transmission of the signal by successive beacons to Mycenaa. The signal is first seen at the 21st line, and the herald from Troy itself enters at the 486th, and Agamemnon himself at the 783rd line. But the practical absurdity of this was not felt by the audience, who, in imagination stretched minutes into hours, while they listened to the lofty narrative odes of the chorus which almost entirely fill up the interspace. Another fact de- serves attention here, namely, that regularly on the Greek stage a drama, or acted story, consisted in reality of three dramas, called together a trilogy, and performed con- secutively in the course of one day. Now you may con- ceive a tragedy of Shakspere's as a trilogy connected in one single representation. Divide " Lear " into three parts, and each would be a play with the ancients ; or take the three -^schylean di-amas of Agamemnon, and divide them into, or call them, as many acts, and they together would be one play. The first act would comprise the usurpation of j3Egisthus, and the murder of Agamemnon : the second, the revenge of Orestes, and the murder of his mother ; and the third, the penance and absolution of Orestes ; — occupy- ing a period of twenty-two years. The stage in Shakspere's time was a naked room with a blanket for a. curtain ; but he made it a field for monarchs. That law of unity, which has its foundations, not in the factitious necessity of custom, but in nature itself, the unity of feeling, is everywhere and at all times observed by Shakspere in his plays. Read " Romeo and Juliet ; " — all is youth and spring ; — youth with all its follies, its virtues, its precipitancies ; — spring with its odours, its flowers, and Sect. I.] and shakspeee. 237 its transiency ; it is one and the same feeling that com- mences, goes through, and ends the play. The old men, the Capulets and the Montagues, are not common old men ; they have an eagerness, a heartiness, a vehemence, the effect of spring ; with Romeo, his change of passion, his sudden marriage, and his rash death, are all the effects of youth : — whilst in Juliet love has all that is tender and melancholy in the nightingale, all that is voluptuous in the rose, with whatever is sweet in the freshness of spring ; but it ends with a long deep sigh like the last breeze of the Italian evening. This unity of feeling and character per- vades every drama of Shakspere. It seems to me that his plays are distinguished from those of all other dramatic poets by the following cha- racteristics : 1. Expectation in preference to surprise. It is Uke th© true reading of the passage ; — " God said, Let there be light, and there was light ; " — not there was light. As the feeling with which we startle at a shooting star, compared with that of watching the sunrise at the pre-established moment, such and so low is surprise compared with, expectation. 2. Signal adherence to the great law of nature, that all opposites tend to attract and temper each other. ■ Passion in Shakspere generally displays libertinism, but involves morality ; * and if there are exceptions to this, they are, independently of their intrinsic value, all of them indicative- of individual character, and, like the farewell admonitions, of a parent, have an end beyond the parental relation. Thus the Countess's beautiful precepts to Bertram, by elevating her character, raise that of Helena her favourite,, and soften down the point in her which Shakspere does not mean us not to see, but to see and to forgive, and at length to justify. And so it is in Polonius, who is the personified memory of wisdom no longer actually possessed^ 238 POETET, THE DEAMA, [1818 I'his admirable character is always misrepresented dh the stage. Shakspere never intended to exhibit him as a buffoon : for although it was natural that Hamlet,— a young man of fire and genius, detesting formality, and dis- hking Polonius on political grounds, as imagining that he had assisted his uncle in his usurpation, — should express himself satirically,- — yet this must not be taken as exactly the poet's conception of him. In Polonius a certain in- duration of character had arisen from long habits of business ; but take his advice to Laertes, and Ophelia's reverence for his memory, and we shall see that he was meant to be represented as a statesman somewhat past his faculties, — his recollections of life all full of wisdom, and showing a knowledge of human nature, whilst what im- mediately takes place before him, and escapes from him, is indicative of weakness. ' But as in Homer all the deities are in armour, even Venus ; so in Shakspere all the characters are strong.4 Hence real folly and dulness are made by him the vehicles of wisdom. There is no difficulty for one being a fool to imitate a fool: but to be, remain, and speak like a wise man and a great wit, and yet so as to give a vivid repre- sentation of a veritable fool, — hio labor, hoc opus est. A drunken constable is not uncommon, nor hard to draw; but see and examine what goes to make up a Dogberry. 3. Keeping at all times iu the high road of life. Shak- spere has no innocent adulteries, no interesting incests, no virtuous vice : — he never renders that amiable which religion and reason alike teach us to detest, or clothes impurity in the garb of virtue, like Beaumont and Fletcher, the Kotzebues of the day. Shakspere's fathers are roused " by ingratitude, his husbands stung by unfaithfulness ; in him, in short, the affections are wounded in those points in which all may, nay, must, feel. Let the morality of Shakspere be contrasted with that of the writers of his Sect. I.] and shakspeee. 239 own, or the succeeding, age, or of thpse of the present day, •who boast their superiority in this respect. No one can dispute that the result of such a comparison is altogether in favour of Shakspere : — even the letters of women of high rank in his age were often coarser than his writings. If he occasionally disgusts a keen sense of delicacy, he never injures the mind ; he neither excites, nor flatters, passion, in order to degrade the subject of it; he does not use the faulty thing for a faulty purpose, nor carries on warfare against virtue, by causing wickedness to appear as no wickedness, through the medium of a morbid sympathy with the unfortunate. In Shakspere vice never walks as in twilight : nothing is purposely out of its place : — he in- verts not the order of nature and propriety, — does not make every magistrate a drunkard or glutton, nor every poor man meek, humane, and temperate ; he has no bene- volent butchers, nor any sentimental rat-catchers. 4. Independence of the dramatic interest on the plot.' The interest in the plot is always in fact on account of the characters, not vice versa, as in almost all other writers ; the plot is a mere canvas and no more. Hence arises the true justification of the same stratagem being used in re- gard to Benedick and Beatrice, — the vanity in each being alike. Take away from the " Much Ado About Nothing" all that which is not indispensable to the plot, either as having little to do with it, or, at best, like Dogberry and his comrades, forced into the service, when any other less ingeniously absurd watchmen and night-constables would have answered the mere necessities of the action ; — take ' "Coleridge's opinion was, that some of the plays of our 'myriad- minded ' bard ought never to be acted, but looked on as poems to be read, and contemplated ; and so fully was he impressed with this feeling, that in his gayer moments he would often say, ' There should be an Act of Parliament to prohibit their representation.'" — Gillman's "Life of Coleridge." 240 POETRY, THE BEAMA, [1818 away Benedick, Beatrice, Dogberry, and the reaction of the former on the character of Hero, — and what will remain ? In other writers the main agent of the plot is always the prominent character ; in Shakspere it is so, or is not so, as the character is in itself calculated, or not calculated, to form the plot. Don John is the main-spring of the plot of this play ; but he is merely shown and then withdrawn. 5. Ipdependence of the interest on the story as the ground-work of the plot. Hence Shakspere never took the trouble of inventing stories.^ It was enough for him to select from those that had been already invented or re- corded such as had one or other, or both, of two recom- mendations, namely, suitableness to his particular purpose, and their being parts of popular tradition,— names of which we had often heard, and of their fortunes, and as to which all we wanted was, to see the man himself. So it is just the man himself, the Lear, the Shylock, the Richard, that Shakspere makes us for the first time acquainted with. Omit the first scene in " Lear, " and yet everything will remain ; so the first and second scenes in the " Merchant of Venice." Indeed it is universally true. 6. Interfusion of the lyrical — that which in its very essence is poetical— not only with the dramatic, as in the . plays of Metastasio, where at the end of the scene conies the aria as the exit speech of the character, — but also in and through the dramatic. Songs in Shakspere are in- troduced as songs only, just as songs are in real life, beauti- fully as some of them are characteristic of the person who has sung or called for them, as Desdemona's " Willow," and ' " The greater part, if not all of his dramas were, as far as the names and the main incidents are concerned, already stock plays. All the stories, at least, on which they are built, pre-existed in the chronicles, ballads, or trans.lations of contemporary or preceding English writers." — Biographia Literaria, Satyrane's Letters, IiCtter ii. Sect. I.] aud shakspbrb. 241 Ophelia's wild snatches, and the sweet carollings in " As You Like It." But the whole of the " Midsummer Night's Dream " is one continued specimen of the dramatized lyrical. And observe how exquisitely the dramatic of Hotspur ; — " Marry, and I'm glad on't with all my heart ; I had rather be a kitten and cry — mew," &c. melts away into the lyric of Mortimer ; — - " I understand thy looks : that pretty Welsh Which thou pourest down from these swelling heavens, I am too perfect in," &c. Hmry IV. Part I. Act III. Scene 1. 7. The characters of the d/rwmatis personcB, like those in real life, are to be inferred by the reader ; — they are not told to him. And it is well worth remarking that Shak- spere's characters, like those in real life, are very commonly misunderstood, and almost always understood by different persons in different ways. The causes are the same in either case. If you take only what the friends of the character say, you may be deceived, and still more so, if that which his enemies say ; nay, even the character him- self sees himself through the medium of his character, and not exactly as he is. Take all together, not omitting a shrewd hint from the clown or the fool, and perhaps your impression will be right ; and you may know whether you have in fact discovered the poet's own idea, by all the speeches receiving light from it, and attesting its reality by reflecting it. Lastly, in Shakspere the heterogeneous is united, as it is in nature. Tou must not suppose a pressure or passion always acting on or in the character ; — passion iu Shakspere is that by which the individual is distinguished from others, not that which makes a different kind of him. Shakspere followed the main march of the human affections. He R 242 POETET, THE DRAMA, AND SHAESPEEE. [1818 entered into no analysis of the passions or faiths of men, but assured himself that such and such passions and faiths ■were grounded in our common nature, and not in the mere accidents of ignorance or disease. This is an important consideration, and constitutes our Shakspere the morning star, the guide and the pioneer, of true philosophy Sect. II.] order of shakspeee's plats. 243 SECTION II. ORDER OF SHAKSPERE'S PLATS.' T 7'ARIOTJS attempts tave been made to arrange the plays of Sliakspere, each according to its priority in time, by proofs derived from external documents. How unsuccessful these have been might easily be shown, not only from the widely different results arrived at by men, ^ For convenience of comparison with later Shaksperian criticisms Prof. Dowdeu's arrangement is subjoined : — 1. Pre-ShaJcsperian Group. Touched by Skakspere. Titus Andronicus : 1588-90. 1 Henry VI. . 1590-1. 2. Early Comedy. Love's Labour's Lost ; 1590. Comedy of Errors : 1591. Two Gentlemen of Verona : 1592-3. Midsummer Night's Dream : 1593-4. 3. Marlowe- Shaksperian Group. Early History. 2 & 3 Henry VI. : 1591-2 Richard III. : 1593. 4. Early Tragedy. Romeo and Juliet : 1591? 1596-7? 5. Middle History. Richard 11: 1594. King John: 1595. 6. Middle Comedy. Merchant of Venice : 1596. 244 OEDEE OP shakspeee's plats. [1818 all deep]y versed in the black-letter books, old plays, pamphlets, manuscript records and catalogues of that age, but also from the fallacious and unsatisfactory nature of the facts and assumptions on which the evidence rests. In that age, when the press was chiefly occnpied with con- troversial or practical divinity, — when the law, the church and the state engrossed all honour and respectability, — 7. Later Hutory. History and Cormdy united. 1 & 2 Henry IV. : 1597-8. Henry V. : 1599. 8. Later Comedy, A. Bough and boisterous. Taming of the Shrew : 1 597 ? Merry Wives of Windsor : 1598 ? B. Joyous, refined, roTnantic. Much Ado about Nothing : 1598. As You Like It: 1599. Twelfth Night : 1600-1. c. Serious, dark, ironical. All's Well that Ends Well : 1601-2 ? Measure for Measure : 1603. Troilus and Cressida : 1603 ? revised 1607 ? 9. Middle Tragedy. Julius Caesar : 1601. Hamlet : 1602. 10. Later Tragedy. Othello: 1S04. Lear : 1605. Macbeth: 1606. Antony and Cleopatra : 16U7. Coriolanus : 1608. Timon of Athens : 1607-8. 11. Somances. Pericles: 1608. Cymbeline: 1609. Tempest: 1610. Winter's Tale : 1610-11. Sect. II.] ordbe of shakspbrb's plats. 245 when a degree of disgrace, levior quoBdam infamioe macula, was attached to the publication of poetry, and even to have sported with the Muse, as a private relaxation, was sup- posed to be — a venial fault, indeed, yet — something beneath the gravity of a wise man, — when the professed poets were so poor, that the very expenses of the press demanded the liberality of some wealthy individual, so that two-thirds of Spenser's poetic works, and those most highly praised by his learned admirers and friends, remained for many years in manuscript, and in manuscript perished, — when the amateurs of the stage were comparatively few, and there- fore for the greater part more or less known to each other, — when we know that the plays of Shakspere, both during and after his life, were the property of the stage, and pub- lished by the players, doubtless according to their notions of acceptability with the visitants of the theatre, — in such an age, and under such circumstances, can an allusion or reference to any drama or poem in the publication of a " contemporary be received as conclusive evidence, that such drama or poem had at that time been pablished? Or, further, can the priority of publication itself prove anything in favour of actually prior composition ? We are tolerably certain, indeed, that the " Yenus and Adonis," and the " Rape of Lucrece," were his two earliest poems, and though not printed until 1693, in the twenty- ninth year of his age, yet there can be little doubt that they had remained by him in manuscript many years. For Mr. Malone has made it highly probable, that he had com- 12. Fragments. Two Noble Kinsmen : 1612. Henry VIII. . 1612-13. Poe'iJis. Venus and Adonis : 1592 ? The Kape of Lucrece : 1593-4. Sonnets: 1595-1605? 246 OEDBE OP shakspike's plats. [1818 menced a writer for the stage in 1691, when he was twenty- seven years old, and Shakspere himself assures ns that the " Venus and Adonis " was the first heir of his invention.' Baffled, then, in the attempt to derive any satisfaction from outward documents, we may easily stand excused if we turn our researches towards the internal evidences furnished by the writings themselves, with no other positive data than the known facts, that the " Venus and Adonis " was printed in 1593, the " Eape of Lucrece " in 1594, and that the " Romeo and Juliet " had appeared in 1595, — and with no other presumptions than that the poems, his very first productions, were written many years earlier, — (for who can believe that Shakspere could have remained to his twenty-ninth or thirtieth year without attempting poetic composition of any kind ?) — and that between these and " Romeo and Juliet " there had intervened one or two other dramas, or the chief materials, at least, of them, although they may very possibly have appeared after the success of the " Romeo and Juliet " and some other circum- stances had given the poetry an authority with the pro- prietors, and created a prepossession in his favour with the theatrical audiences. Classification attem-pted, 1802. First Epoch. The London Prodigal. Cromwell. Henry VI., three parts, first edition. The old King John. Edward III. ' " But if the first heir of my inventien prove deformed, I shall he sorry it had so noble a godfather," &c. — Dedication of the " Venus and Adonis " to Lord Southampton, — S. T. C. Sect. II.] order op shakspbee's plats. 247 The old Taming of the Shrew. Pericles. ' All these are transition-works, Uebergangswerhe ; not his, . yet of him. Second Epoch. All's Well That Ends "Well ;— but afterwards worked up afresh, (imigearheitei) especially ParoUes. The Two Gentlemen of Verona ; a sketch. ■Romeo and Juliet : first draft of it. Third Epoch rises into the full, although youthful, Shakspere : it was the negative period of his perfection. Love's Labour's Lost. Twelfth Night. As Ton Like It. Midsummer Night's Dream. Richard II. Henry IV. and V. Henry VIII. ; Oelegmheitsgedicht. Romeo and Juliet, as at present. Merchant of Venice. Tourth Epoch. Much Ado about Nothing. Merry Wives of Windsor ; first edition. Henry VI. ; rifacvmento. Fifth Epoch. The period of beauty was now past ; and that of SuvoTtie and grandeur succeeds. Lear. Macbeth. Hamlet. ^ Timon of Athens ; an after vibration of Hamlet. 248 OEDEE OF SHAKSPBEE'S PLATS. [1818 Troilus and Cressida ; Uehergang in die Ironie. The Roman Plays. King John, as at present. Merry Wives of Windsor, j ^^^arbeitet. Taming of the Shrew. J MeEisure for Measure. Othello. Tem.pest. Winter's Tale. Oymbeline. Olassification attempted, 1810. Shakspere's earliest dramas 1 take to be, Love's Labour's Lost. All's WeU That Ends Well. Comedy of Errors. Romeo and Juliet. In the second class I reckon Midsummer Night's Dream. As Tou Like It. Tempest.^ Twelfth Night. In the third, as indicating a greater energy — not merely of poetry, but — of all the world of thought, yet still with some of the growing pains, and the awkwardness of growth, I place Troilus and Cressida. Cymbeline. Merchant of Venice. Much Ado about Nothing. Taming of the Shrew. ^ Colericlge lectured at the Royal Institution in 1810. ' Compare the later and improved classification of 1811-12, in Mr. Collier's note on the Fourth Lecture of 1811-12 Sect. II.] oeder op shakspere's plats. 249 In the fourtli, I place the plays contaiaing the greatest characters ; Macbeth. Lear. Hamlet. Othello. And lastly, the historic dramas, in order to be able to show my reasons for rejecting some whole plays, and very many scenes in others. Glassification attempted, 1819. I think Shakspere's earliest dramatic attempt — perhaps even prior in conception to the " Venus and Adonis," and planned before he left Stratford — was " Love's Labour's Lost." Shortly afterwards I suppose " Pericles " and certain scenes in ' Jeronymo " to have been produced : and in the same epoch, I place the " Winter's Tale " and " Cymbeline," difEering from the " Pericles " by the entire rifacvmento of it, when Shakspere's celebrity as poet, and his interest, no less than his influence as manager, enabled him to bring forward the laid by labours of his youth. The example of " Titus Andronicus," which, as well as "Jeronymo," was most popular in Shakspere's first epoch, had led the young dramatist to the lawless mixture of dates and manners. In this same epoch I should place the " Comedy of Errors," remarkable as being the only specimen of poetical farce in our language, that is, in- tentionally such ; so that all the distinct kinds of drama, which might be educed a priori, have their representatives in Shakspere's works. I say intentionally such ; for many of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, and the greater part of Ben Jonson's comedies, are farce-plots. I add " All's Well that Ends Well," originally intended as the counterpart of 250 OEDEE OP shakspere's plays. [1818 "Love's Labour's Lost," "Taming of the Shrew," "Mid- summer Night's Dream," " Much Ado About Nothing," and "Romeo. and Juliet." Second Epoch. Richard II. King John. Henry VI. — rifacimento only. Richard III. Third Epoch. Henry IV. Henry V. Merry Wives of Windsor. Henry VIII., — a sort of historical masque, or show play. Fourth Epoch gives all the graces and facilities of a genius in full possession and habitual exercise of power, and peculiarly of the feminine, the lady's character : — Tempest. As Tou Like It. Merchant of Venice. Twelfth Night, and, finally, at its very point of culmination, — Lear. Hamlet. Macbeth. Othello. Last Epoch, when the energies of intellect in the cycle of genius were, though in a rich and more potentiated form, becoming predominant over passion and creative self-manifestation. Sect. II.] ordir of shakspbeb's plats. 251 Measure for Measure. Timon of Athens. Coriolanus. Julius Csesar. Antony and Cleopatra. Troilus and Cressida. Merciful, wonder-making Heayen ! what a man was this Shakspere ! Myriad-minded, indeed, he was ! 252 NOTES ON SHAKSPERE's PLAY3 [1818 SECTION III. NOTES ON SHAKSPERE'S PLATS FROM ENGLISH HISTORY. ' I "HE first form of poetry is the epic, the essence of which may be stated as the successive in events and charjio- ters. This must be distinguished from narration, in which there must always be a narrator, from whom the objects represented receive a colouring and a manner ; — whereas in the epic, as in the so-called poems of Homer, the whole is completely objective, and the representation is a pure reflection. The next form into which poetry passed was the dramatic : — both forms having a com.mon basis with a certain difference, and that difference not consisting in the dialogue alone. Both are founded on the relation of providence to the human will ; and this relation is the universal element, expressed under different points of view according to the difference of religions, and the moral and intellectual cultivation of different nations. In the epic poem fate is represented as overruling the will, and making it instrumental to the accomplishment of its designs : — Aibg Se tcXeUto ftovtJi. In the drama, the will is exhibited as struggling with fate, a great and beautiful instance and illustration of which is the Prometheus of uiBschylus ; and the deepest effect is produced, when the fate is represented as a higher and SlCT. III.] FROM ENGLISH HISTORT. 253 intelligent will, and the opposition of the individual as springing from a defect. In order that a drama may be properly historical, it is necessary that it shonld be the history of the people to ■whom it is addressed. In the composition, care must be taken that there appear no dramatic improbability, as the reality is taken for granted. It must, likewise, be poetical j — that only, I mean, must be taken which is the permanent in our nature, which is common, and therefore deeply in- teresting to all ages. The events themselves are im- material, otherwise than as the clothing and manifestation of the spirit that is working within. In this mode, the unity resulting from succession is destroyed, but is supplied by a unity of a higher order, which connects the events by reference to the workers, gives a reason for them in the motives, and presents men in their causative character. It takes, therefore, that part of real history which is the least known, and infuses a principle of life and organiza- tion into the naked facts, and makes them all the frame- work of an animated whole. In my happier days, while I had yet hope and onward- looking thoughts, I planned an historical drama of King Stephen, in the manner of Shakspere. Indeed it would be desirable that some man of dramatic genius should drama- tize all those omitted by Shakspere, as far down as Henry VII. Perkin Warbeck would make a most interesting drama. A few scenes of Marlowe's Edward II. might be preserved. After Henry VIII., the events are too well and distinctly known, to be, without plump inverisimilitude, crowded together in one night's exhibition. Whereas, the history of our ancient kings — the events of their reigns, I mean, — are like stars in the sky ; — whatever the real inter- spaces may be, and however great, they seem close to each other. The stars — the events — strike us and remain in our eye, little modified by the difference of dates. An 254 NOTES ON shakspeeb's plats [1818 historic drama is, therefore, a collection of events borrowed from history, but connected together in respect of cause and time, poetically and by dramatic fiction. It would be a fine national custom to act such a series of dramatic his- tories in orderly succession, in the yearly Christmas holi- days, and could not but tend to counteract that mock cosmopolitism, which under a positive term really implies nothing but a negation of, or indifference to, the particular love of our country. By its nationality must every nation retain its independence ; — I mean a nationality quoad the nation. Better thus ; — nationality in each individual, quoad his country, is equal to the sense of individuaHty quoad himself ; but himself as subsensnous, and central. Patriotism is equal to the sense of individuality reflected from every other individual. There may come a higher virtue in both — ^jnst cosmopolitism. But this latter is not possible but by antecedence of the former. Shakspere has included the most important part of nine reigns in his historical dramas — namely — King John, — Richard II. — Henry IV. (two) — Henry V. — Henry VI. (three) including Edward V./ — and Henry VIII., — ^in all ten plays. There remain, therefore, to be done, with excep- tion of a single scene or two that should be adopted from Marlowe — eleven reigns — of which the first two appear the only unpromising subjects ; — and those two dramas must be formed wholly or mainly of invented private stories, which, however, could not have happened except in con- sequence of the events and measures of these reigns, and which should furnish opportunity both of exhibiting the manners and oppressions of the times, and of narrating dramatically the great events ; — if possible — ^the death of the two sovereigns, at least of the latter, should be made to 1 The text is apparently corrupt here. It is clear that we should read, — " Henry VI. (three) and Eichard III., including Edward IV. and Edward V." Sect. III.] from English histoet. 255 liave some influence on the finale of the story. All the rest are glorious subjects ; especially Henry I. (being the struggle between the men of arms and of letters, in the persons of Henry and Becket,) Stephen, Richard I., Edward II., and Henry VII. King Jolm. Act i. sc. 1. Bast. James Gurney, wilt thou give us leave awhile ? Gv/r. Good leave, good Philip.' Bast. Philip ? sparrou) I James, &c. Theobald adopts Warburton's conjecture of " spare me." true Warburton ! and the sanota simvplieitas of honest dull Theobald's faith in him ! Nothing can be more lively or characteristic than " Philip ? Sparrow ! " Had War- burton read old Skelton's "Philip Sparrow," an exquisite and original poem, and, no doubt, popular in Shakspere's time, even Warburton would scarcely have made so deep a plunge into the hathetic as to have deathified " sparrow " into " spare me ! " Act iii. sc. 2. Speech of Faulconbridge : — " Now, by my life, this day grows wondrous hot; Some airy devil hover* in the sky, &o." Theobald adopts Warburton's conjecture of " fiery." 1 prefer the old text ; the word " devil "implies " fiery." Ton need only read the line, laying a full and strong emphasis on '' devil," to perceive the uselessness and taste- lessness of Warburton's alteration. Richard II. I have stated that the transitional link between the epic poem and the drama is the historic drama ; that in the ' "Per an instance of Shakspere's power in minimis, I generally quote James Gurney's character in ' King John.' How individual and comical he is with the four words allowed to his dramatic life! " — Table Talk. March 12, 1827. 256 NOTES ON shakspeee's plays [1818 epic poem a pre-aBnounced fate gradually adjusts and employs the will and the events as its instruments, whilst the drama, on the other hand, places fate and will in opposition to each other, and is then most perfect, when the victory of fate is obtained in consequence of imperfections in the opposing will, so as to leave a final impression that the fate itself is but a higher and a more intelligent will. From the length of the speeches, and the circumstance that, with one exception, the events are all historical, and presented in their results, not produced by acts seen by, or taking place before, the audience, this tragedy is ill suited to our present large theatres. But in itself, and for the ■jpcloset,^ I feel no hesitation in placing it as the first and ' ^most admirable of all Shakspere's purely historical plays. For the two parts of " Henry IV." f orni a speSes oif tnem- selves, which may be named the mixed drama. The dis- tinction does not depend on the mere quantity of historical events in the play compared with the fictions ; for there is as much history in " Macbeth " as in " Richard," but in the relation of the history to the plot. In the purely his- torical plays, the history forms theplot : in the mixed, it directs it ; in the restT'as'^TiiacEeth," " Hamlet," " Cym- beline," " Lear," it subserves it. But, however nnsuited to the stage this drama may be, God forbid that even there it should fall dead on the hearts of jacobinized Englishmen ! Then, indeed, we might say — ^rceteriit gloria mundi ! For the^ gpi rit of patriotic r eminiscence Ja-Jija..all:£ermeating ^ou]_of_l^is_noble_work. It is, perhaps, the jmfist, purely histqricaJ_of_Shaks2ere^dra^^ There are not in it, as in the others, characters introduced merely for the purpose of giving a greater individuality and realness, as in the comic parts of " Henry IV.," by presenting, as it were, our very selves. Shakspere avails himself of every opportunity ' See Note from Gillman, Section I., p. 239. Sect. III.] peom bnolish histoet. 257 to effect the great object of the historic drama, that, namely, of fam.iliarizing the people to the great names of their country, and thereby of exciting a steady patriotism, a love of jnst liberty, and a respect for all those fundamental institutions of social life, which bind men together : — " This royal throne of kings, this soepfcer'd isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi'paradise ; This fortress, built by nature for herself. Against infection, and the hand of war ; This happy breed of men, this little world ; This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall. Or as a moat defensive to a house. Against the envy of less happier lands ; This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, Fear'd by their breed, and famous by their birth," &c. Add the famous passage in King John : — " This England never did, nor ever shall. Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, But when it first did help to wound itself. Now these her princes are come home again, Come the three corners of the world in arms, And we shall shock them : nought shall make us rue. If England to itself do rest but true." And it certainly seems that Shakspere's historic dramas produced a very deep effect on the minds of the English people, and in earlier times they were familiar even to the least informed of all ranks, according to the relation of Bishop Corbett. Marlborough, we know, was not ashamed to confess that his principal acquaintance with English history was derived from them ; and I believe that a large part of the information as to our old names and achieve- ments even now abroad is due, directly or indirectly, to Shakspere. Admirable is the judgment with which Shakspere always s 258 HOTBS ON- shakspeee's plats [1818 in the first scenes prepares, yet how naturally, and with what concealment of art, for the catastrophe. Observe how he here presents the germ of all the after events in Biichard's insince rity, partiality, arbitrarines s, and favorit -. ismj. and in the p roud, t empeatnons, temperament oi his ^iCans. In the very beginning, also, is displayed that ■ feature in Richard's character, which is never forgotten throughout the play — ^his attention to decorum, and hi^ fe eling of the Hngly 'gignit y. These anticipations show with what judgment Shakspere wrote, and illustrate his care to connect the past and future, and unify them with the present by forecast and reminiscence, It is interesting to a critical ear to compare the six opening lines of the play — " Old John of Gaunt, time-hononr'd Lancaster, Hast thou, according to thy oath and band," &c. each closing at the tenth syllable, with the rhythmless metre of the verse in " Henry VI." and " Titus Andronicus," in order that the difference, indeed, the heterogeneity, of the two may be felt etiaTd in similUmis prima superficie. Here the weight of the single words supplies all the relief afforded by intercurrent verse, while the whole represents the mood. And compare the apparently defective metre of BoUngbroke's first line, — " Many years of happy days befall — " with Prospero's, " Twelve years since, Miranda ! twelve years since—" The actor should supply the time by emphasis, and pause on the first syllable of each of these verses. Act i. so. 1. BoUngbroke's speech : — " First, (heaven be the record to my speech !) In the devotion of a subject's love," &c. I remember in the Sophoclean drama no more striking Sect. III.] peom English history. 259 example of the to irptTrov kol asfivov tlian this speech; and the rhymes in the last six lines well express the precon- certedness of Bolingbroke's scheme, so beautifully con- trasted with the vehemence and sincere irritation of Mowbray. lb. Bolingbroke's speech : — " Which blood, like sacrificing Abel's, cries Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth, To mCj for justice and rough chastisement." Note the Sstvov of this " to me,'' which is evidently felt by Richard : — " How high a pitch his resolution soars ! " and the aifected depreciation afterwards : — " As he is but my father's brother's son." lb. Mowbray's speech : — " In haste whereof, most heartily I pray Your highness to assign our trial day." The occasional interspersion of rhymes, and the more frequent winding up of a speech therewith — what purpose was this designed to answer ? In the earnest drama, I mean. Deliberateness ? An attempt, as in Mowbray, to collect himself and be cool at the close ? — I can see that in the following speeches the rhyme answers the end of the Greek chorus, and- distinguishes the general truths from the passions of the dialogue ; but this does not exactly justify the practice,' which is unfrequent in proportion to the excellence of Shakspere's plays. One thing, however, is to be observed, — that the speakers are historical, known, and so far formal, characters, and their reality is already a fact. This should be borne in mind. The whole of this ' Lope de Vega, in his " New Art of Play-Writing " {Arte mievo de hacer comedias, 1609), lays it down as a rule, that an actor should always leave the stage with a pointed observation or a couplet. 260 NOTES ON shakspbee's plats [1818 scene of the quarrel between Mowbray and Bolingbroke seems introduced for the purpose of showing by anticipation the characters of Richard and Bolingbroke. In the latter there is observable a decorous and courtly checking of his anger in subservience to a predetermined plan, especially in his calm speech after receiving sentence of banishment compared with Mowbray's unaffected lamentation. In the one, all is ambitious hope of something yet to come ; in the other it is desolation and a looking backward of the heart. lb. sc. 2. " Gaunt. Heaven's is the quarrel ; for heaven's substitute, His deputy anointed in his right, Hath caused his death : the which, if wrongfully, Let heaven revenge ; for I may never lift An angry arm against his minister.'' Without the hollow extravagance of Beaumont and Fletcher's ultra-royalism, how carefully does Shakspere acknowledge and reverence the eternal distinction between the mere individual, and the symbolic or representative, on which all genial law, no less than patriotism, depends. The whole of this second scene commences, and is antioi- pative of, the tone and character of the play at large. lb. sc. 3. In none of Shakspere's fictitious dramas, or in those founded on a history as unknown to his auditors generally as fiction, is this violent nipture of the succession of time found : — a proof, I think, that the pure historic drama, like " Richard II." and " King John," had its own laws. lb. Mowbray's speech : — " A dearer merit ' Have I deserved at your highness' hand." ' ' See Nares' Glossary. To merit is used by Chapman in the sense of to reward, — " The king will merit it with gifts." n. ix. 259. " Bead " hands." Sect. III.] from inglish histoet. 261 O, the instinctive propriety of Sbakspere in thejshoice of wordai,. ~ lb. Richard's speech : " Nor never by advised purpose meet, To plot, contrive, or eomplot any ill, 'Gainst us, our state, our subjects, or our land." Ah-eady the selfishweakness^of Richard's chara^tej; opens. Nothing wiiTsucF minds~so^ readily" emBraceTas indirect ways softened down to their qitasi-oousoiences by policy, expedience, &c. lb. Mowbray's speech : — " . . . . AH the world's my way. " " The world was all before him." ' — Milt. lb. How long a time lies in one little word ! Four lagging winters, and four wanton springs, End in a word : such is the breath of kings." Admirable anticipation ! lb. sc. 4. . This is a striking conolnsion of a first act,— letting the reader into the secret ; — having before impressed us with the dignified and kingly manners of Richard, yet by well managed anticipations leading us on to the full gratification of pleasure in our own penetration. In this scene a new light is thrown on Richard's character. Until now he has appeared in all the beauty of royalt y ; but here, as soon as he isTeft to himse'lt, t h^-4nh erent weaknessj his character is immediately shown^ It is a weakness, however, of a peculiar kind, not arising from want of per- sonal courage, or any specific defect of faculty, but rather an intellectual f eminineness, which feels a necessity of ever leaning on the breast of others, and of reclining on those • The reference is borrowed from Johnson, and misquoted. " The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest." — Pa/radise Lost, xii. 646. 262 NOTES ON shakspeeb's plats [1818 who are all the while known to be inferiors. To this must be attributed as its consequences all Richard's vices, his tendency to concealment, and his cunning, the whole opera- tion of which is directed to the getting rid of present difficulties. Richard is not meant to be a debauchee ; but we see in him that sophistry which is common to man, by which we can deceive our own hearts, and at one and the same time apologize for, and yet commit, the error. Shak- spere has represented this character in a very peculiar manner. He has not made him amiable with counter- balancing faults ; but has openly and broadly drawn those faults without reserve, relying on Richard's disproportionate sufferings and gradually emergent good qualities for our sympathy ; and this was possible, because his faults are not positive vices, but spring entirely from defect of character. Act ii. sc. 1. " K. Bich. Can sick men play so nicely -nith their names ? " Yes ! on a death-bed there is a feeling which may make all things appear but as puns and equivocations. And a passion there is that carries off its own excess by plays on words as naturally, and, therefore, as appropriately to drama, as by gesticulations, looks, or tones. This belongs to human nature as such, independently of associations and habits from any particular rank of Kfe or mode of employ- ment ; and in this consist Shakspere's vulgarisms, as in Macbeth's — " The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon ! " &e. This is (to equivocate on Dante's words) in truth the nohile volgare eloquema. Indeed it is profoundly true that there is a natural, an almost irresistible, tendency in the mind, when immersed in one strong feeling, to connect that feel- ing with every sight and object around it ; especially if there be opposition, and the words addressed to it are in Sect. III.] feom English histort. 263 any way repugnant to the feeling itaeE, aa here in the instance of Richard's unkind language : " Misei-y makes sport to mock itself." No doubt, something of Shatspere's punning must be attributed to his age, in which direct anfl~f5rmai combats of wit were a favourite pastime of the courtly and accom- plished. I t. was an a ge more favourable, upon the whole, jtovigourof intellect th an the present, in which a dread of being thought pedantic dispirrts and flattens the energies of original minds. But independently of this, I have no hesitation in saying that a pun, if it be congruous with the feeling of the scene, is not only allowable in the dramatic dialogue, but oftentimes one of the most effectual intensives of passion. lb. " K. Bich. Right ; you say true : as Hereford's love, so Ms ; As theirs, so mine ; and all be as it is." The depth of this, compared with the first scene ; — • " How high a pitch," &c. There is scarcely anything in Shaksp ere in its degre e, more admirably dra wn than Xo rk's character ; — jiis re lj^- ^ous loyalty struggHng with a deep grief and indignation at the king's follies ; his adherence to his word and faith, once given in spite of all, even the most natural, feelings. You see in him the weakness of old age, and the over- whelmingness of circumstances, for a time surmounting his sense of duty, — the junction of both exhibited in his boldness in words and feebleness in immediate act ; and then again his effort to retrieve himself in abstract loyalty, even at the heavy price of the loss of his son. This species of accidental and adventitious weakness is brought into parallel with Richard's continually increasing energy of thought, and as constantly diminishing power of acting ; — 264 NOTES ON shaespeee's plays [1818 and thus it is Richard that breathes a harmony and a re- lation into all the characters of the play, lb. sc. 2. " Qtieen. To please the king I did; to please myself I cannot do it ; yet I know no cause Why I should welcome such a guest as grief. Save bidding farewell to so sweet a guest As my sweet Richard : yet again, methinks, Some unborn sorrow, ripe in sorrow's womb. Is coming toward me ; and my inward soul With nothing trembles : at something it grieves, More than with parting from my lord the king." It is clear that Shakspere never ^ meamLJiOLjegresent Richard as a vulgar debauchee, but a man with a wanton- ness of spirit in external sliow, a feminine friendism, an "intensity of woman-like love of those immediately about him, and a mistaking of the delight of being loved by him for a love of him. And naark in this scene Shakspere's gentleness in touching the tender superstitions, the terrm ineognitcB of presentiments, in the human mind : and how sharp a line of distinction he commonly draws between these obscure forecastings of general experience in each individual, and the vulgar errors of mere tradition. Indeed, it may be taken once for all as the truth, that Shakspere, in the absolute universality of his genius, always reverences whatever arises out of our moral nature ; he never profanes his muse with a contemptuous reasoning away of the genuine and general, however unaccountable, feelings of mankind. The amiable part of Richard's character is brought full upon us by his queen's few words — " .... so sweet a guest As my sweet Richard ; — " and Shakspere has carefully shown in him an intense love of his country, well knowing how that feeling would, in a Sect. III.] from English history. 266 pure historic drama, redeem him in the hearts of the audience. Yet even in this love there is something feminine and personal : — " Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand, — As a long parted mother with her child Plays fondly with her tears, and smiles in meeting ; So weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth, And do thee farour ' with my royal hands." With this is combined a constant overflow of emotions from a total incapability of controlling them, and thence a waste of that energy, which should have been reserved for actions, in the passion and effort of mere resolves and menaces. The consequence is moral exhaustion^ and rapid alternations of unmanly despair and ungrounded hope, — every feeling being abandoned for its direct opposite upon the pressure of external accident. And yet when Richard's inward weak- ness appears to seek refuge in his despair, and his ex- haustion counterfeits reppse, the old habit of kingliness, the effect of flatterers from his infancy, is ever and anon producing in him a sort of wordy courage which only serves to betray more clearly his internal impotence. The second and third scenes of the third act combiue and illustrate all this : — He means, my lord, that we are too remiss ; Whilst Bolingbroke, through our security, Grows strong and great, in substance, and in friends. E. Rich, Discomfortable cousin ! know'st thou not, That when the searching eye of heaven is hid Behind the globe, arid ^ lights the lower world, Then thieves and robbers range abroad unseen, ' So, 1st Fol. 1623. The Globe Edition reads "favours." ' For " and " read " that." Retain " bloody ; " though later editions read "boldly," and the Globe Edition adopts it. The 1st Folio has " that " and " bloody." It is right. If the passage is read with strong emphasis on that, lower, and here, it will become plain. 266 NOTES ON shaespbeb's plays [1818 In mui-ders and in outrage, bloody here ; But when, from under this terrestrial ball. He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines. And darts his light through every guilty hole, Then murders, treasons, and detested sins, The cloak of night being pluckt from off their backs. Stand bare and naked, trembling at themselres ? So when this thief, this traitor, Bolingbroke," &c. ***** " Aumerle. Where is the Duke my father with his power ? K. Eich. No matter where ; of comfort no man speak : Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs, Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth," &c. ***** " Awmerle. My father hath a power, enquire of him ; And leai'n to make a body of a limb. K. Sich. Thou chid'st me well : proud Bolingbroke, I come, To change blows with thee for our day of doom. This ague-fit of fear is over-blown ; An easy task it is to win our own." ***** "Scroop. Your uncle York hath' joined with Bolingbroke.—" ***** " K. Rich. Thou hast said enough. Beshrew thee, cousin, which didst lead me forth Of that sweet way I was in to despair ! What say you now ? what comfort have we now ? By heaven, I'll hate him everlastingly, That bids me be of comfort any more." Act iii. sc. 3. Bolingbroke's speech : — " Noble lord,' Go to the rude ribs of that ancient castle," &c. Observe the fine struggle of a haughty sense of power and ambition in Bolingbroke with the necessity for dissimu- lation. * ' Bead "is." ^ So 1st Fol. Globe Ed., " lords." Sect. III.] from inglish history. 267 lb. sc. 4. See here the skill and judgment of our poet in giving reality and individual life, by the introduction of accidents in his historic plays, and thereby making them dramas, and not histories. How beautifu l an islet o f repos e-— a melancholy repose, indeed — is this scene -with the . G-ardener and his Serva iit- And how truly affecting and realizing is the incident of the very horse Barbary, in the scene with the Groom in the last act ! — " Groom. I was a poor groom of thy stable, King, When thou wert King ; who, travelling towards York, With much ado, at length have gotten leayfi To look upon my sometime master's face.' O, how it yearn'd my heart, when I beheld, In Loudon streets, that coronation day. When Bolingbroke rode on roan Barbary! That hor^e, that thou so often hast bestrid ; That horse, that I so carefully have dress'd ! K. Bich. Rode he on Barbai-y ? " Bolingbroke's character, in general, is an instance how Shakspere makes one play introductory to another ; for it is evidently a preparation for " Henry IV.," as Gloster in the third part of " Henry VI." is for " Eichard III." I would once more remark upon the exalted idea of the only true loyalty developed in this noble and impressive play. We have neither the rants of Beaumont and Fletcher, nor the sneers of Massinger ; — the vast importance of the personal character of the sovereign is distinctly enounced, whilst, at the same time, the genuine sanctity which surrounds him is attributed to, and grounded on, the position in which he stands as the convergence and exponent of the life and power of the state. The great end of the body politic appears to be to ' The 1st Fol. has— " To look upon my (sometimes Koyall) master's face." Doubtless, the Groom said " royal," and some critic substituted " some- times royal." The Globe Edition retains the alteration, omitting the brackets. 268 NOTES ON shakspeee's plats [1818 humanize, and assist in the progressiveness of, the animal man ; — but the problem is so complicated with contingencies as to render it nearly impossible to lay down rules for the formation of a state. And should we be able to form a system of government, which should so balance its difEerent powers as to form a check upon each, and so continually remedy and correct itself, it would, nevertheless, defeat its own aim ; — for man is destined to be guided by higher principles, by universal views, which can never be fulfilled in this state of existence, — by a spirit of progressiveness which can never be accomplished, for then it would cease to be. Plato's Republic is like Bunyan's Town of Man- Soul, — a description of an individual, all of whose faculties are in their proper subordination and inter-dependence; and this it is assumed may be the prototype of the state as one great individual. But there is this sophism in it, that it is forgotten that the human faculties, indeed, are parts and not separate things ; but that you could never get chiefs who were wholly reason, ministers who were wholly understanding, soldiers all wrath, labourers all concupis- cence, and so on through the rest. Each of these partakes of, and interferes with, all the others. Henry W. Part I. Act i. so 1. King Henry's speech : " No more the thirsty entrance of thiJ soil Shall daub her lips with her own children's blood." A most obscure passage : but I think Theobald's interpre- tation right, namely, that " thirsty entrance " means the dry penetrability, or bibulous drought, ^of the soil. The obscurity of this passage is of the Shaksperian sort. lb. sc. 2. In this, the first introduction of Falstaff, observe the consciousness and the intentionality of his wit, so that when it does not fl.ow of its own accord, its absence SlCT. III.] PROM ENGLISH HISTOKT. 269 is felt, and an effort visibly made to recall it. Note also throughout how Falstaff's pride is gratified in the power of influencing a prince of the blood, the heir apparent, by means of it. Hence his dislike to Prince John of Lancaster, and his mortification when he finds his wit fail on him : — " P. John. !Fare you well, Falstaff ; I, in my condition. Shall better speak of you than you deserve. Fal. I would you had but the wit ; 'twere better than your dukedom. — Good faith, this same young sober-blooded boy doth not love me ; — nor a man cannot make him laugh," Act ii. so. 1. Second Carrier's speech: — " . . . . breeds fleas like a loach." ' Perhaps it is a misprint, or a provincial pronunciation, for "leach," that is, blood-suckers. Had it been gnats, instead of fleas, there might have been some sense, though small probability, in "Warburton's suggestion of the Scottish " loch." Possibly " loach," or " lutch," may be some lost word for dovecote, or poultry-lodge, notorious for breeding fleas. In Stevens's or my reading, it should properly be " loaches," or " leeches," in the plural ; except that I think I have heard anglers speak of trouts like a salmon. Act iii. sc. 1. " Gflend. Nay, if you melt, then will she run mad." This " nay " so to be dwelt on in speaking, as to be equivalent to a dissyllable — o , is characteristic of the solemn Grlendower : but the imperfect line — "She bids you Upon " the wanton rushes lay you down," &c. IS one of those fine hair-strokes of exquisite judgment 1 " Loaeh. A small fish." " It seems as reasonable to suppose the loach infested with fleas as the tench, which may be meant in a pre- ceding speech." — Narei Glossary, q. v. = Bead " on." Fol. 1623. 270 .NOTES ON shakspebe's plats [1818 peculiar to Shakspere ; — tlms detaching the lady's speech, and giving it the individuality and entireness of a little poem, while he draws attention to it. Henry IV. Part II. Act ii. sc. 2. " F. Sen. Sup any women with him ? Foffe. None, my lord, but old mistress Quickly, and mistress Doll Tear-sheet." ****** " P. Hen. This Doll Tear-sheet should be some road." I am sometimes disposed to think that this respectable young lady's name is a very old corruption for Tear-street —street-walker, terere stratam (viam,). Does not the Prince's question rather show this ? — " This Doll Tear-street should be some road ? " Act iii. sc. 1 . King Henry's speech : ". . . . Then, happy low, lie dovm ; Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown." 1 know no argument by which to persuade any one to be of my opinion, or rather of my feeling : but yet I cannot help feeling that " Happy low-lie-down ! " is either a pro- verbial expression, or the burthen of some old song, and means, " Happy the man, who lays himself down on his straw bed or chafE pallet on the ground or floor ! " lb. sc. 2. Shallow's speech : — " Eah, tah, tah, would 'a say ; bounce, would 'a say," &e. That Beaumont and Tletcher have more than once been guilty of sneering at their great master, cannot, I fear, be denied ; but the passage quoted by Theobald from the " Knight of the Burning Pestle " is an imitation. If it bo Sect. III.] feom English histoet. 271 chargeable with any fault, it is with plagiarism, not with sarcasm. Henry V. Act i. sc. 2. Westmoreland's speech : — " They know your grace hath cavise, and means, and might ; So hath your highness; never King of England Had nobles richer," &o. Does " grace " mean the king's own peculiar domains and legal revenue, and " highness " his feudal rights in the military service of his nobles ? — I have sometimes thought it possible that the words " grace " and " cause " may have been transposed in the copying or printing ; — " They know your cause hath gi'ace," &c. What Theobald meant, I cannot guess. To me his pointing m.akes the passage still more obscure. Perhaps the lines ought to be recited dramatically thus : — " They know your Grace hath cause, and means, and might : — So hath your Highness — never King of England Had nobles richer," &c. He breaks off from the grammar and natural order from earnestness, and in order to give the meaning more passionately. lb. Exeter's speech : — " Yet that is but a emsh'd necessity." Perhaps it may be " crash " for " crass " from crassus clumsy ; or it may be " curt," defective, imperfect : any- thing would be better than Warburton's " 'scus'd," which honest Theobald, of course, adopts. By the bye, it seems clear to me that this speech of Exeter's properly belongs to Canterbury, and was altered by the actors for convenience. Act iv. sc. 3. K. Henry's speech : — 272 NOTES ON shakspebb's plats . [1818 " We would not die in that man's company That fears his fellowship to die with us." Should it not be " live " in the first line ? lb. sc. 5. " Const. 0-diaMe! OH. seigneur ! le jour est perdu, tout est perdM ! Ban. Mart de ma vie! all is confounded, all ! Reproach and everlasting shame Sit mocking in our plumes! — meschaivte fortune ! Tkt not run away ! " Ludicrous as these introductory scraps of French appear, so instantly followed by good, nervous mother-English, yet they are judicious, and produce the impression which Shak- spere intended, — a sudden feeling struck at once on the ears, as well as the eyes, of the audience, that " here come the French, the bafiSed French braggards ! " — ^And this will appear still more judicious, when we reflect on the scanty apparatus of distinguishing dresses in Shakspere's tiring-room. Henry VI. Part I. Act i. sc. 1. Bedford's speech: — " Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night ! Comets, importing change of times and states, Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky ; And with them scourge the bad revolting stars That have consented unto Hem-y's death ! Henry ' the fifth, too famous to live long ! England ne'er lost a king of so much worth." Bead aloud any two or three passages in blank verse even from Shakspere's earliest dramas, as " Love's Labour's Lost," or " Eomeo and Juliet ; " and then read in the same way this speech, with especial attention to the metre ; and ' Read " King Henry.'' Sect. III.] from English history. 273 if you do not feel the impossibility of the latter having been written by Shakspere,' all I dare suggest is, that you may have ears, — for so has another animal, — but an ear you cannot have, mejiidice. Bichard III. This play should be contrasted with " Richard II." Pride of intellect is the characteristic of Richard, carried to the extent of even boastiag to his own mind of his villany, whils.t others are present to feed his pride of superiority ; as in his first speech, act II. sc. 1. Shaispere here, as in all his great parts, developes in a tone of sublime morality the dreadful consequences of placing the moral in subordi- nation to the mere intellectual being. In Richard there is a predominance of irony, accompanied with apparently blunt manners to those immediately about him, but formalized into a more set hypocrisy towards the people as represented by their magistrates. ' See Prof. Dowden's Arrangement of the Plays, Section II., where " Henry VI." is found in the " Pre-Shaksperian Group." 274 NOTES ON SOME OTHEE [1818 SECTION IV. NOTES ON SOME OTHER PLATS OF SHAKSPERE. The Tempest. ' I "HERE is a sort of improbability with which we are -'- shocked in dramatic representation, not less than in a narrative of real hfe. Consequently, there must be rules respecting it; and, as rules are nothing but means to an end previously ascertained — (inattention to which simple truth has been the occasion of all the pedantry of the French school), — we must first determine what the imme- diate end or object of the drama is. And here, as I have previously remarked, I find two extremes of critical de- cision ; — the French, which evidently presupposes that a perfect delusion is to be aimed at, — an opinion which needs no fresh confutation ; and the exact opposite to it, brought forward by Dr. Johnson, who supposes the auditors throughout in the full reflective knowledge of the contrary. In evincing the impossibihty of delusion, he makes no sufiBlcient allowance for an intermediate state, which I have before distinguished by the term, illusion, and have attempted to illustrate its quality and character by refe- rence to our mental state, when dreaming. In both cases we simply do not judge the imagery to be unreal ; there is a negative reality, and no more. Whatever, therefore, tends to prevent the mind from placing itself, or being placed, gradually in that state in which the images have Sect. IY.] plats of shakspeeb. 275 such negative reality for the auditor, destroys this illusion, and is dramatically improbable. Now the production of this effect — a sense of improba- bility — will depend on the degree of excitement in which the mind is supposed to be. Many things would be in- tolerable in the first scene of a play, that would not at all interrupt our enjoyment in the height of the interest, when the narrow cockpit may be made to hold " The vasty field of France, or we may cram Within its wooden O the Yery casques, That did affright the air at Agincourt." Again, on the other hand, many obvious improbabilities will be endured, as belonging to the ground-work of the story rather than to the drama itself, in the first scenes, which would disturb or disentrance us from all illusion in the acme of our excitement ; as for instance, Lear's division of his kingdom, and the banishment of Cordelia. But, although the other excellencies of the drama besides this dramatic probability, as unity of interest, with distinct- ness and subordination of the characters, and appropriate- ness of style, are all, so far as they tepd to increase the inward excitement, means towards accomplishing the chief end, that of producing and supporting this willing illusion, — yet they do not on that account cease to be ends them- selves ; and we must remember that, as such, they carry their own justification with them, as long as they do not contravene or interrupt the total illusion. It is not even always, or of necessity, an objection to them, that they^_, prevent the illusion from rising to as great a height as it might otherwise have attained ; — it is enough that they are simply compatible with as high a degree of it as is requisite for the purpose. Nay, upon particular occasions, a palpa- ble improbability may be hazarded by a great genius for the express purpose of keeping down the interest of a 276 NOTES ON SOME OTHER [1818 merely instrumental scene, whicli would otherwise make too great an impression for the harmony of the entire illusion. Had the panorama been invented in the time of Pope Leo X., Eafiael would still, I doubt not, have smiled in contempt at the regret, that the broom-twigs and scrubby bushes at the back of some of his grand pictures were not as probable trees as those in the exhibition. The " Tempest " is a specimen of the purely romantic drama, in which the interest is not historical, or dependent upon fidelity of portraiture, or the natural connection of events, — but is a birth of the imagination, and rests only on the coaptation and union of the elements granted to, or assumed by, the poet. It is a species of drama which owes no allegiance to time or space, and in which, therefore, errors of chronology and geography— ruo mortal sins in any species — are venial faults, and count for nothing. It addresses itself entirely to the imaginative faculty ; and although the illusion may be assisted by the effect on the senses of the complicated scenery and decorations of modern times, yet this sort of assistance is dangerous. For the principal and only genuine excitement ought to come from within, — from the moved and sympathetic imagination ; whereas, where so much is addressed to the mere external senses of seeing and hearing, the spiritual vision is apt to languish, and the attraction from without will withdraw the mind from the proper and only legitimate interest which is intended to spring from within. The romance opens with a busy scene admirably appro- priate to the kind of drama, and giving, as it were, the key-note to the whole harmony. It prepares and initiates the excitement required for the entire piece, and yet does not demand anything from the spectators, which their previous habits had not fitted them to understand. It is the bustle of a tempest, from which the real horrors are abstracted ; — ^therefore it is poetical, though not in strict- Sect. IV.] plats of shakspieb. 277 aess natural — (the distinction to which. I have so often alluded) — and is purposely restrained from concentering the interest on itself, but used merely as an induction or tuning for what is to follow. In the second scene, Prospero's speeches, till the entrance of Ariel, contain the finest example I remember of retro- spective narration for the purpose of exciting immediate interest, and putting the audience in possession of all the information necessary for the understanding of the plot.^ Observe, too, the perfect probability of the moment chosen by Prospero (the very Shakspere himself,, as it were, of the tempest) to open out the truth to his daughter, his own romantic bearing, and how completely anything that might have been disagreeable to us in the magician, is reconciled and shaded in the humanity and natural feelings of the father. In the very first speech of Miranda the simplicity and tenderness of her character are at once laid open ; it would have been lost in direct contact with the agitation of the first scene. The opinion once prevailed, but, happily, is now abandoned, that Fletcher alone wrote for women; "- — the truth is, that with very few, and those partial, exceptions, the female characters in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher are, when of the light kind, not ^ " Fro. Mark his condition, and th' event ; then tell me. If this might be a brother. Mira. I should sin, To think but nobly of my grandmother; Good wombs have bore bad sons. Pro. Now the condition," &e. Theobald has a note upon this passage, and suggests that Shakspere placed it thus : — " Pro. Good wombs have bore bad sons, — Now the condition. " Mr. Coleridge writes in the margin: "I cannot but believe that ^heobald is quite right."— H. N. C. » See conclusion of Lecture VI., 1811-12. 278 NOTES OK SOME OTHBB [1818 decent ; when heroic, complete viragos. But in Shakspere all the elements of womanhood are holy, and there is the sweet, yet dignified feeling of all that oontirmates society, as sense of ancestry and of sex, with a purity unassailable by sophistry, because it rests not in the analytic processes, but in that sane equipoise of the faculties, during which the feelings are representative of all past experience, — not of the individual only, but of all those by whom she has been educated, and their predecessors even up to the first mother that lived. Shakspere saw that the want of pro- minence, which Pope notices for sarcasm,^ was the blessed beauty of the woman's character, and knew that it arose not from any deficiency, but from the more exquisite harmony of all the parts of the moral being constituting one living total of head and heart. He has drawn it, indeed, in all its distinctive energies of faith, patience, constancy, fortitude, — shown in all of them as following the heart, which gives its results by a nice tact and happy intuition, without the intervention of the discursive faculty, — sees all things in and by the light of the affections, and errs, if it ever err, in the exaggerations of love alone. In all the Shaksperian women there is essentially the same foundation and principle ; the distinct individuality and variety are merely the result of the modification of circum- stances, whether in Miranda the maiden, in Imogen the wife, or in Katharine the'queen. But to return. The appearance and characters of the super or ultra-natural servants are finely contrasted. Ariel has in everything the airy tint which gives the name ; and it is worthy of remark that Miranda is never directly brought into comparison with Ariel, lest the natural and human of the one and the supernatural of the other should tend to neutralize each other ; Caliban, on the other hand, 1 See Appendix : V. ; " Table Talk," Sep. 27, 1830. Sect. IY.] plats of shakspeeb. 279 is all earth, all coadensed and gross in feelings and images ; lie has the dawnings of understanding without reason or the moral sense, and in him, as in some brute animals, this advance to the intellectual faculties, without the moral sense, is marked by the appearance of vice. For it is in the primacy of the moral being only that man is truly human ; in his intellectual powers he is certainly ap- proached by the brutes, and, man's whole system duly considered, those powers cannot be considered other than means to an end, that is, to morality. In this scene, as it proceeds, is displayed the impression made by Ferdinand and Miranda on each other ; it is love at first sight ; — " at the first sight. They have changed eyes : " — and it appears to me, that in all cases of real love, it is at one moment that it takes place. That moment may have been prepared by previous esteem, admiration, or even affection, — yet love seems to require a momentary act of volition, by which a tacit bond of devotion is imposed, — a bond not to be thereafter broken without violating what should be sacred in our nature. How finely is the true Shaksperian scene contrasted with Dryden's vulgar altera- tion of it, in which a mere ludicrous psychological experi- ment, as it were, is tried — displaying nothing but indelicacy without passion. Prospero's interruption of the courtship has often seemed to me to have no suflSicient motive ; still his alleged reason — " lest too light winning Make the prize light " — is enough for the ethereal connections of the romantic imagination, although it would not be so for the historical.^ ' " Fer. Yes, faith, and all his Lords, the Puke of Milan, And his brave son, being twain." 280 NOTES ON SOME OTHBE [181? The whole courting scene, indeed, in the beginning of the third act, between the lovers is a masterpiece ; and the first dawn of disobedience in the mind of Miranda to the command of her father is very finely drawn, so as to seem the working of the Scriptural command, TJiou shalt leave father and mother, &c. ! with what exquisite purity this scene is conceived and executed ! Shakspere may some- times be gross, but I boldly say that he is always mcrral and modest. Alas ! in this our day decency of manners is preserved at the expense of morality of heart, and deli- cacies for vice are allowed, whilst grossness against it is hypocritically, or at least morbidly, condemned. In this play are admirably sketched the vices generally accompanying a low degree of civilization ; and in the first scene of the second act Shakspere has, as in many other places, shown the tendency in bad men to indulge in scorn and contemptuous expressions, as a mode of getting rid of their own uneasy feelings of inferiority to the good, and also, by making the good ridiculous, of rendering the tran- sition of others to wickedness easy. Shakspere never puts habitual scorn into the mouths of other than bad men, as here in the instances of Antonio and Sebastian.' The scene of the intended assassination of Alonzo and Gonzalo is the exact counterpart of the scene between Macbeth and his lady, only pitched in a lower key throughout, as de- signed to be frustrated and concealed, and exhibiting the Theobald remarks that nobody was lost in the wreck ; and yet that no such character is introduced in the fable, as the Duke of Milan's son. Mr. C. notes : " Must not Ferdinand have believed he was lost in the fleet that the tempest scattered ? " — H. N. C. I " Observe the fine humanity of Shakspere in that his sneerers are all worthless villains. Too cunning to attach value to self-praise, and unable to obtain approval from those whom they are compelled to respect, they propitiate their own self-love by disparaging and lowering others." — S. T. C. in "AUsop's Eecollections." See notes on " Othello," Act. ii. so. 1, and Appendix; V. ; Apr. 5, 1833. >, Sect. IV.] plats of shakspere. 281 same profound management in the manner of familiarizing a mind, not immediately recipient, to the suggestion of guilt, by asspciating the proposed crime with something ludicrous or out of place, — something not habitually matter of reverence. By this kind of sophistry the imagination and fancy are first bribed to contemplate the suggested act, and at length to become acquainted with it. Observe how the eiiect of this scene is heightened by contrast with another counterpart of it in low life, — that between the conspirators Stephano, Caliban, and Trinculo in the second scene of the third act, in which th§re are the same essential characteristics. In this play and in this scene of it are also shown the springs of the vulgar in politics, — of that kind of politics which is inwoven with human nature. In his treatment of this subject, wherever it occurs, Shakspere is quite peculiar. In other writers we find the particular opinions of the individual ; in Massinger it is rank republicanism ; in Beaumont and Fletcher even jure dimino principles are carried to excess ; — but Shakspere never promulgates any party tenets. He is always the philosopher and the moralist, but at the same time with a profound veneration for all the established institutions of society, and for those classes which form the permanent elements of the state — especially never introducing a professional character, as such, otherwise than as respectable. If he must have any name, he should be styled a philosophical aristoorat,'^ de- ' May we venture to put just one piece of new cloth on an old garment ? " Then always, and, of course, as the superbest, poetic culmination- expression of Feudalism, the Shaksperian dramas, in the attitudes, dialogue, characters, &c. , of the princes, lords and gentlemen, the per- vading atmosphere, the implied and expressed standard of manners, the high port and proud stomach, the regal embroiclerj- of style, &c."— "Walt Whitman, "Democratic Vistas," 1870. 282 NOTES ON SOME OTHEE [1818 lighting in those hereditary institutions which have a tendency to hind one age to another, and in that distinc- tion of ranks, of which, although few may be in possession, all enjoy the advantages. Hence, again, you will observe the good nature with which he seems always to make sport with the passions and follies of a mob, as with an irrational animal.' He is never angry with it, but hugely content with holding up its absurdities to its face ; and sometimes you may trace a tone of almost affectionate superiority, something like that in which a father speaks of the rogue- ries of a child. See the good-humoured way in which he describes Stephano passing from the most licentious freedom to absolute despotism over Trinculo and Caliban. The truth is, ShakSpere's characters are all genera intensely individualized ; the results of meditation, of which obser- vation supplied the drapery and the colours necessary to combine them with each other. He had virtually surveyed all the great component powers and impulses of human nature, — had seen that their different combinations and subordinations were in fact the individualizers of men, and showed how their harmony was produced by reciprocal disproportions of excess or deficiency. The language in which these truths are expressed was not drawn from any set fashion, but from the profoundest- depths of his moral being, and is therefore for all ages. Love's Labour's Lost. The characters ■ in this play are either impersonated out of Shakspere's own multiformity by imaginative self- position, or out of such as a country town and a school- boy's observation might supply, — the curate, the school- ' " Shakspere's evenness and sweetness of temper were almost pro- verbial in his own age." — Biographia Literaria, chap. ii. Sect. IV.] plats op shakspere. 283 master, the Armado (who even in my time was not extinct in the cheaper inns of North Wales), and so on. .The_ satir e is chiefly on follies of words.. Biron and Rosaline are evidently the pre-existent state of Benedick and Beatrice, and so, perhaps, is Boyet of Lafeu, and Costard of the Tapster in " Measure for Measure ; " and the frequency of the rhymes, the sweetness as well as the smoothness of the metre, and the number of acute and fancifully illustrated aphorisms, are all as they ought to be in a poet's youth. True genius begins by generalizing and condensing; it ends in realizing and expanding. It first collects the seeds. Tet if this juvenile drama had been the only one extant of our Shakspere, and we possessed the tradition only of his riper works, or accounts of them in writers who had not even mentioned this play, — how naany of Shakspere's characteristic features might we not still have discovered in " Love's Labour's Lost," though as in a portrait taken of him in his boyhood. I can never sufficiently admire the wonderful activity of thought throughout the whole of the first scene of the play, rendered natural, as it is, by the choice of the characters, and the whimsical determination on which the drama is founded. A whimsical determination certainly ; — yet not altogether so very improbable to those who are conversant in the history of the middle ages, with their Courts of Love, and all that lighter drapery of chivalry, which engaged even mighty kings with a sort of serio-comic interest, and may well be supposed to have occupied more completely the smaller princes, at a time when the noble's or prince's court contained the only theatre of the' domain or principality. This sort of story, too, was admirably suited to Shakspere's times, when the English court was still the foster- m^ither of the state and the muses ; and when, in consequence, the courtiers, and men of rank anjd 284 NOTES ON SOME OTHER [1818 fashion, affected a display of wit, point, and sententious observation, that would be deemed intolerable at present, — but in which a hundred years of controversy, involving every great political, and every dear domestic, interest, had trained all but the lowest classes to participate. Add to this the very style of the sermons of the time, and the eagerness of the Protestants to distinguish themselves by long and frequent preaching, and it will be found that, from the reign of Henry VIII. to the abdication of James II. no country ever received such a national education as England. ^ Hence the comic matter chosen in the first instance is a ridiculous imitation or apery of this constant striving after logical precision, and subtle opposition of thoughts, together with a making the most of every conception or image, by expressing it under the least expected property belonging to it, and this, again, rendered specially absurd by being applied to the most current subjects and occurrences. The phrases and modes of combination in argument were caught by the most ignorant from the custom of the age, ^nd their ridiculous misapplication of them is most amusingly exhibited in Costard ; whilst examples suited only to the gravest propositions and impersonations, or apostrophes to abstract thoughts impersonated, which are in fact the natural language only of the most vehement agitations of the mind, are adopted by the coxcombry of Armado as mere artifices of ornament. \ The same kind of intellectual action is exhibited in a more serious and elevated strain in many other parts of this play. Biron's speech at the end of the fourth act is an excellent specimen of it. It is logic clothed in rhetoric ; — but observe how Shakspere, in his two-fold being of poet and philosopher, avails himself of it to convey pro- found truths in the most lively images, — the whole remain- ing faithful to the character supposed to utter the lines, Sect. IV.] plats of shakspbrb. 285 and the expressions themselves constituting a further development of that character : — " Other slow arts entirely keep the brain : And therefore finding barren practisers, Scarce shew a harvest of their heavy toil : But love, first learned in a lady's eyes, Lives not alone immured in the brain ; But, with the motion of all elements, Courses as swift as thought in every power ; And gives to every power a double power, Above their functions and their offices. It adds a precious seeing to the eye, A lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind ; A lover's ear will hear the lowest sound, t When the suspicious tread of theft is stopp'd : Love's feeling is more soft and sensible. Than are the tender horns of cockled snails ; Love's tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste ; Por valour, is not love a Hercules, Still climbing trees in the Hesperides ? Subtle as Sphinx ; as sweet and musical As bright Apollo's lute, strung with his hair; And when love speaks, the voice of all the gods Makes ' heaven drowsy with the harmony. Never durst poet touch a pen to write, Until his ink were temper'd with love's sighs ; O, then his lines would ravish savage ears. And plant in tyrants mild humility. From women's eyes this doctrine I derive : They sparkle still the right Promethean fire ; They are the books, the arts, the academes. That shew, contain, and nourish ail the world ; Else, none at all in aught proves excellent. Then fools you were these women to forswear ; Or, keeping what is sworn, you will prove fools. For wisdom's sake, a word that all men love ; Or for love's sake, a word that loves all men ; Or for men's sake, the authors of these women; 1 « And musical as is Apollo's Lute."— Milton's '' Comus," 478. 2 " Make," 1st Fol. 286 NOTES OS SOME OTHBK [1818 Or women's sake, by whom we men are men ; Let us once lose our oaths, to find ourselves, Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths : It is religion, to be thus forsworn : For charity itself fultils the law : And who can sever love from charity ? " — This is quite a study; — sometimes you see this youthful god of poetry connecting disparate thoughts purely by means of resemblances in the words expressing them, — a thing in character in lighter comedy, especially of that kind in which Shakspere delights, namely, the purposed display of wit, though sometimes, too, disfiguring his graver scenes ; — but more often you may see him doubling the natural connection or order of logical consequence in the thoughts by the introduction of an artificial and sought for resemblance in the words, as, for instance, in the third line of the play, — " And then grace us in the disgrace of death ; " ' — this being a figure often having its force and propriety, as justified by the law of passion, which, inducing in the mind an unusual activity, seeks for means to waste its superfluity, — when in the highest degree — in lyric repe- titions and sublime tautology — (at her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he bowed, there he fell down dead),- — and, in lower degrees, in making the words themselves the subjects and materials of that surplus action, and for the same cause that agitates our limbs, and forces our very gestures into a tempest in states of high excitement. ' See " Eichard H.," quoted in Lecture XII., in the Lectures of 1811-12: " Take not, good cousin, farther than you should, Lest you mistake ; " and the poem in Lecture IX. , assigned to Milton : " By a crab-like way Time past made pastime." Sect. IV.] plats of shakspbrb. 287 The mere style of narration in " Love's Labour's Lost," like that of ^geon in the first scene of the " Comedy of Errors," and of the Captain in the second scene of " Macbeth," seems imitated with its defects and its beauties from Sir Philip Sidney ; whose "Arcadia," though not then published, was already well known in manuscript copies, and could hardly have escaped the notice and admiration of Shak- spere as the friend and client of the Earl of Southampton. The^chief defect co nsists in the parentheses and pa re nthetic Ihoughts'aDd de scriptions, suited ne ither to the passioii_of The_S£Mierjjior3thej2M^se_of Jihe _person to whom the information_is^ to J)e__giyen,_but manifestly betraying the aSthor himself, — not by way of continuous undersong, but — palpably, and so as to show themselves addressed to the general reader. However, it is not unimportant to notice how strong a presumption the diction and allusions of this play afford, that, though Shakspere's acquirements in the dead languages might not be such as we suppose in a learned education, his habits had, nevertheless, been scholastic, and those of a student. For a young author's first work almost always bespeaks his recent pursuits, and his first observations of life are either drawn from the immediate employments of his youth, and from the charac- ters and images most deeply impressed on his mind in the situations in which those employments had placed him ; | — or else they are fixed on such objects and occurrences in the world, as are easily connected with, and seem to bear upon, his studies and the hitherto exclusive subjects of his meditation. Just as Ben Jonson, who applied himself to the drama after having served in Flanders, fills his earliest plays with true or pretended soldiers, the wrongs and neglects of the former, and the absurd boasts and knavery of their counterfeits. So Lessing's first comedies are placed in the universities, and consist of events and charac- ters conceivable in an academic life. 288 NOTES ON SOME OTHER [1818 I will only further remark the sweet and tempered gravity, with which Shakspere in the end draws the only fitting moral which such a drama afforded. Here Rosaline rises up to the full height of Beatrice : — " Eos. Oft have I heard of you, my lord Biron, Before I saw you, and the world's large tongue Proclaims you for a man replete with mocks ; Full of comparisons, and wounding flouts. Which you on all estates will execute That lie within the mercy of your wit : To weed this wormwood from your fruitful brain. And therewithal, to win me, if you please, (Without the which I am not to be won,) You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day Visit the speechless sick, and still converse With groaning wretches ; and your talk ^ shall be. With all the fierce endeavour of your wit. To enforce the pained impotent to smile. Biron. To move wild laughter in the throat of death ? It cannot be ; it is impossible ; Mirth cannot move a soul in agony. Bos. Why, that's the way to choke a gibing spirit, Whose influence is begot of that loose grace. Which shallow laughing hearers give to fools: A jest's prosperity lies in the ear Of him that hears it, never in the tongue Of him that makes it ; then, if sickly ears, Deaf 'd with the clamors of their own dear groans, Will hear your idle scorns, continue then, And I will have you, and that fault withal ; But, if they will not, throw away that spirit, And I shall find you empty of that fault, I'iglit joyful of your reformation." Act V. sc. 2. In Biron's speech to the Princess : — and, therefore, like the eye, Full of straying - shapes, of habits, and of forms — > Read "task." '^ So, 1st Fol. The Globe Shak. reads " strange." We quote the Globe edition of Shakspere, as a fair average indication of the con- clusions at which modern ciiticism has arrived Sect. IV.] plats of shakspibb. 289 Either read stray, which I prefer ; or throw fuU back to the preceding lines, — " like the eye, full Of straying shapes," &c. In the same scene : " Biron. And what to me, my love ? and what to me ? Bos. Yon must be purged too, your sins are rank ; ' You are attaint with fault ^ and peijury : Therefore, if you my favour mean to get, A twelvemonth shall you spend, and never rest, But seek, the weary beds of people sick." There can be no donbt, indeed, about the propriety of expunging this speech of Rosaliae's ; it soils the very page that retains it. But I do not agree with Warburton and others in striking out the preceding line also. It is quite in Biron's character ; and Rosaline not answering it imme- diately, Dumain takes up the question for him, and, after he and Longaville are answered, Biron, with evident pro- priety, says; — i my mistress ? " &c.' Act. i. sc. 1. Midswrrmier Night's Bream. " Her. O cross ! too high to be enthrall'd to low — Zffs. Or else misgraffed, in respect of years ; Her. O spite .' too old to be engaged to young — Lt/s. Or else it stood upon the choice of friends ; Her. O hell ! to chuse love by another's eye ! " There is no authority for any alteration ; — but I never can ,' « Rack'd)" 1st Fol. and Globe Ed. " " Faults," 1st Fol. and Globe Ed. » Bead " Studies, my lady ? Mistress, look on me." 17 290 NOTES ON SOME OTHER [1818 help feeling how great an improvement it would be, if the two former of Hermia's exclamations were omitted ; — the third and only appropriate one would then become a beauty, and most natural. lb. Helena's speech : — " I will go tell him of fair Hermia's flight," &c. I am convinced that Shakspere availed himself of the title of this play in his own mind, and worked upon it as a dream throughout, but especially, and, perhaps, unpleas- ingly, in this broad determination of ungrateful treachery in Helena, so undisguisedly avowed to herself, and this, too, after the witty cool philosophizing that precedes. The act itself is natural, and the resolve so to act is, I fear, likewise too true a picture of the lax hold which principles, have on a woman's heart, when opposed to, or even separated from, passion and inclination. For women are less hypocrites to their own minds than men are, because in general they feel less proportionate abhorrence of moral evil in and for itself, and more of its outward consequences, as detection, and loss of character, than men, — their natures being almost wholly extroitive. Still, however just in itself, the representation of this is not poetical ; we shrink from it, and cannot harmonize it with the ideal. Act ii. sc. 1. Theobald's edition. Through bush, throu^ briar — ****** Through flood, through fire — What a noble pair of ears this worthy Theobald must have had ! The eight amphimacers or cretics, — Over hill. Over dale, Thoro' biish, thoro' briar, Over park, ovSr pale, Thoro' flood, thoro' fire — Sect. IV . j plats of shakspeeb. 291 have a delightful efEeot on the ear in their sweet transition to the trochaic, — I do wander ev'ry where SwiftSr than the mobnSs spherS, &c. — The last words as sustaining the rhyme, must be con- sidered, as in fact they are, trochees in time. It may be worth while to give some correct examples in English of the principal metrical feet : — Pyrrhic or Dibrach, u o = Mdp, spirit. Tribrach, u u o = ndhbdp, hastily pronounced. Iambus ' " ' Bebilem faeito Tnawtt, if ^^?. Debilem pede, coxa,' ^c." Warburton's note. I cannot but think this rather an heroic resolve, than an infamous wish. It appears to me to be the grandest symptom of an immortal spirit, when even that bedimmed and overwhelmed spirit recked not of its own immortality, still to seek to be, — to be a mind, a will. As fame is to reputation, so heaven is to an estate, or immediate advantage. The difBerence is, that the self-love of the former cannot exist but by a complete suppression and habitual supplantation of immiediate selfishness. In one point of view, the miser is more estimable than the spendthrift ; — only that the miser's present feelings are as much of the present as the spendthrift's. But cceteris paribus, that is, upon the supposition that whatever is good or lovely in the one coexists equally in the other, then, doubtless, the master of the present is less a selfish being, an animal, than he who lives for the moment with no inheritance in the future. Whatever can degrade man, is supposed in the latter case, whatever can elevate him, in the former. And as to self ; — strange and generous self ! that can only be such a self by a complete divestment of all that men call self, — K)f all that can make it either prac- tically to others, or consciously to the individual himself, difBerent from the human race in its ideal. Such self is but a perpetual religion, an inalienable acknowledgment of Sect. IV.] plats of shakspeeb. 301 God, the sole basis aad ground of being. In this sense, how can I love God, and not love myseK, as far as it is of God ? lb. sc. 2. " Pattern in himself to know, Grace to stand, and virtue go." Worse metre, indeed, but better English would be, — " Grace to stand, virtue to go." Gymbeline. Act i. sc. 1. " You do not meet a man, but frowns : our bloods No more obey the heavens, than our courtiers' Still seem, as does the king's." There can be little doubt of Mr. Tyrwhitt's emendations, of " courtiers " and " king," as to the sense ; — only it is- not impossible that Shakspere's dramatic language may allow of the word, "brows" or "faces" being understood after the word "courtiers'," which might then remain in. the genitive case plural. But the nominative plural makes excellent sense, and is sufficiently elegant, and sounds to- my ear Shaksperian. What, however, is meant by " our- bloods no more obey the heavens ?" — Dr. Johnson's asser- tion that "bloods" signify "countenances," is, I think, mistaken both in the thought conveyed — (for it was never- a popular belief that the stars governed men's coun- tenances,) and in the usage, which requires an antithesis- of the blood, — or the temperament of the four humours, choler, melancholy, phlegm, and the red globules, or the sanguine portion, which was supposed not to be in our own power, but, to be dependent on the influences of the heavenly bodies, — and the countenances which are in our- 302 NOTES ON SOME OTHBE [1818 power really, though from flattery we bring them into a no less apparent dependence on the sovereign, than the former are in actual dependence on the constellations. I have sometimes thought that the word " courtiers " was a misprint for " countenances," arising from an anticipation, by foreglance of the compositor's eye, of the word " courtier " a few lines below. The written r is easily and often confounded with the written n. The compositor read the first syllable cowrt, and — his eye at the same time catching the word "courtier" lower down — he completed the word without reconsulting the copy. It is not unlikely that Shakspere intended first to express, generally the same thought, which a little afterwards he repeats with a particular application to the persons meant ; — a common usage of the pronominal " our," where the speaker does not really mean to include himself ; and the word " you " is an additional confirmation of the " our " being used in this place, for men generally and indefinitely, just as "you do not meet," is the same as, "one does not meet." Act i. sc. 2.1 Imogen's speech : — " — My dearest husband, I something fear my father's wrath ; but nothing (Always reserved my holy duty) what His rage can do on me." Place the emphasis on "me;" for "rage," is a mere repetition of " wrath." J' " Cym. O disloyal thing. That should'st repair my youth, thou heapest A year's age on me." How is it that the commentators take no notice of the un-Shaksperian defect in the metre of the second line, and ' So in 1st Fol. " So. 1 " in Globe Ed. Sect. IV.] plats of shaksperb. 303 what in Shakspere is tie same, in the harmony with the • sense and feeling ? Some word or words must have slipped out after "youth," — possibly "and see : " — " That should'st repair my youth! — and see, thou heap'st," &c lb. SO. 4.' Pisanio's speech : — " — For so long As he could make me with this eye or ear Distinguish him from others," &c. But " this eye," in spite of the supposition of its being used luKTiKCJQ, is very awkward. I should think that either " or " — or " the " was Shakspere's word ; — " As he could make me or with eye or ear." lb. sc. 7.^ lachimo's speech : — " Hath nature given them eyes To see this vaulted arch, and the rich crop Of sea and land, which can distinguish 'twixt The fiery orhs above, and the twinn'd stones Upon the number'd beach." I would suggest "cope" for "crop." As to "twinn'd stones " — ^may it not be a bold catachresis for muscles, cockles, and other empty shells with hinges, which are truly twinned? I would take Dr. Parmer's- "umber'd," which I had proposed before I ever heard of its having been already offered by him : but I do not adopt his inter- pretation of the word, which I think is not derived from wnhra, a shade, but from umber, a dingy yellow-brown soil, which most commonly forms the mass of the sludge on the sea-shore, and on the banks of tide-rivers at low water. One other possible interpretation of this sentence has occurred to me, just barely worth mentioning ; — that the "twinn'd stones" are the augrim stones upon the 1 So in 1st Fol. " Sc. 3 " in Globe Ed. " So in 1st Fol. "Sc. 6 " in Globe Ed. 304 NOTES ON SOME OTHER [1818 namber'd beech, that is, the astronomical tables of beech- wood Act V. so. 6. " Sooth. When as a lion's whelp," &o. It is not easy to conjecture why Shakspere should have introduced this ludicrous scroll, which answers no one purpose, either propulsive, or esplicatory, unless as a joke on etymology. Titus AnS/ronicus. Act i. so. 1. Theobald's note. " I never heard it so much as intimated, that he (Shakspere) had turned his genius to stage-writing, before he associated with the players, and became one of their body." That Shakspere never "turned his genius to stage writing," as Theobald most Theohaldice phrases it, before he became an actor, is an assertion of about as much authority, as the precious story that he left Stratford for deer-steaUng, and that he lived by holding gentlemen's horses at the doors of the theatre, and other trash of that arch-gossip, old Aubrey. The metre is an argument against Titus Andronicus being Shakspere's, worth a score such chronological surmises. Yet I incline to think that both in this play and in Jeronymo, Shakspere wrote some passages, and that they are the earliest of his compositions. Act V. so. 2. I think it not improbable that the lines from — " I am not mad ; I know thee well enough ; — So thou destroy Rapine, and Murder there." were written by Shakspere in his earliest period. But instead of the text — Sect. IV.] plats of shakspeee. 305 " Revenge, which makes the foul offender quake. Tit. Art thou Revenge ? and art' thou sent to me f " — the words in italics ought to be omitted. Troilus and Oressida. Mr. Pope (after Dryden) informs us, that the story of Troilus and Cressida was originally the work of one LoIIius, a Lombard : but Dryden goes yet further ; he declares it to have been written in Latin verse, and that Chaucer translated it. — Lolliiis was a historiographer of Urbino in Italy. Note in Stockdale's edition, 1807. " LoUius was a historiographer of Urbino in Italy." So affirms the notary, to whom the Sienr Stockdale com- mitted the disfacimento of Ayscongh's excellent edition of Shakspere. Pity that the researchful notary has not either told us in what century, and of what history, he was a writer, or been simply content to depose, that LoUius, if a writer of that name existed at all, was a somewhat some- where. The notary speaks of the Troy BoJee of Lydgate, printed in 1513. I have never seen it ; but I deeply regret that Chalmers did not substitute the whole of Lydgate's works from, the MSS. extant, for the almost worthless Gower. y^ The " Troilus and Oressida " of Shakspere can scarcely be classed with his dramas of Greek and Roman history ; but it forms an intermediate link between the fictitious Greek and Roman histories, which we may call legendary dramas, and the proper ancient histories; that is, between the " Pericles" or " Titus Androni'6us," and the " Coriolanus," or "Julius Caesar." " Cymbeline " is a congener with " Pericles," and distinguished from " Lear " by not having any declared prominent object. But where shall we class the "Timon of Athens?" Perhaps immediately below 306 NOTES ON SOME OTHEE [1818' "Lear." It is a Lear of the satirical drama; a Lear of domestic or ordinary life ; — a local eddy of passion on tlie high road of society, while all around is the week-day goings on of wind and weather ; a Lear, therefore, without its soul-searching flashes, its ear-cleaving thunderclaps, its meteoric splendors, — without the contagion and the fearful sympathies of nature, the fates, the furies, the frenzied elements, dancing in and out, now breaking through, and scattering, — now hand in hand with, — the fierce or fantastic group of human passions, crimes, and anguishes, reeling on the unsteady ground, in a wild har- mony to the shock and the swell of an earthquake. But my present subject >was " Troilus and Cressida;" and I suppose that, scarcely knowing what to say of it, I by a cunning of instinct ran ofE to subjects on which I should find it difficult not to say too much, though certain after all that I should still leave the better part unsaid, and the gleaning for others richer than my own harvest. Indeed, there is no one of Shakspere's plays harder to characterize. The name and the remembrances connected with it, prepare us for the representation of attachment no less faithful than fervent on the side of the youth, and of sudden and shameless inconstancy on the part of the lady. And this is, indeed, as the gold thread on which the scenes are strung, though often kept out of sight and out of mind by gems of greater value than itself. But as Shakspere calls forth nothing from the mausoleum of history, or the catacombs of tradition, without giving, or eliciting, some permanent and general interest, and brings forward no subject which he does not moralize or intellectualize, — so here he has drawn in Cressida the portrait of a vehement passion, that, having its true origin and proper cause in warmth of temperament, fastens on, rather than fixes to, some one object by liking and temporary preference. Sect. IV.] plays or shakspeee. 307 " There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks ; her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive of her body." ' This Shakspere has contrasted with the profound affec- tion represented in Troilus, and alone worthy the name of love; — affection, passionate indeed, — swoln with the con- fluence of youthful instincts and youthful fancy, and grow- ing in the radiance of hope nev/ly risen, in short enlarged by the collective sympathies of nature ; — but still having a depth of calmer element in a will stronger than desire, more entire than choice, and which gives permanence to its own act by converting it into faith and duty. Hence with excellent judgment, and with an excellence higher than mere judgment can give, at the close of the play, when- Cressida has sunk into infamy below retrieval and beneath hope, the same will, which had been the substance and the basis of his love, while the restless pleasures and passionate longings, like sea-waves, had tossed but on its surface, — ^this same moral energy is represented as snatch- ing him aloof from all neighbourhood with her dishonour, from all lingering fondness and languishing regrets, whilst it rushes with him into other and nobler ■ duties, and deepens the channel, which his heroic brother's death had left empty for its collected flood. Yet another secondary and subordinate purpose Shakspere has inwoven with his delineation of these two characters, — that of opposing the inferior civilization, but purer morals, of the Trojans to ' " But who is this, what thing of sea or land ? Female of sex it seems, That so bedeck'd, ornate, and gay, Comes this way sailing liike a stately ship Of Tarsus, bound for the isles Of Javan or Gadire With all her bravery on . . . ? " Milton's Bams. Agon. 1. 710-17. 308 NOTES ON SOME OTHER [1818 the refinements, deep policy, but duplicity and sensual corruptions, of the Greeks. To all this, however, so little comparative projection is given, — nay, the masterly group of Agamemnon, Nestor, and Ulysses, and, still more in advance, that of Achilles, Ajax, and Thersites, so manifestly occupy the foreground, that the subservience and vassalage of strength and animal courage to intellect and policy seems to be the lesson most often in our poet's view, and which he has taken little pains to connect with the former more interesting moral impersonated in the titular hero and heroine of the drama. But I am half inclined to believe, that Shakspere's main object, or shall I rather say, his ruling impulse, was to translate the poetic heroes of paganism into the not less rude, but more intellectually vigorous, and more featwely, warriors of Christian chivalry,. — and to substantiate the distinct and graceful profiles or outhnes of the Homeric epic into the flesh and blood of the romantic drama, — in short, to give a grand history-piece in the robust style of Albert Durer. ■ The character of Thersites, in particular, well deserves a more careful examination, as the Caliban of demagogic life ; — the admirable portrait of intellectual power deserted by all grace, all moral principle, all not momentary impulse ; - — ^just wise enough to detect the weak head, and fool enough to provoke the armed fist of his betters ; — one whom malcontent Achilles can inveigle from malcontent Ajax, under the one condition, that he shall be called on to do nothing but abuse and slander, and that he shall be allowed to abuse as much and as purulently as he likes, that is, as he can ; — in short, a mule, — quarrelsome by the original discord of his nature, — a slave by tenure of his own baseness, — ^made to bray and be brayed at, to despise and be despicable. " Aye, Sir, but say -what you will, he is a very clever fellow, though the best friends will fall Sect. IV.] plays of shakspere. 309 out. There was a time when Ajax thought he deserved to have a statue of gold erected to him, and handsome Achilles, at the head of the Myrmidons, gave no little credit to his friend Thersites !" Act iv. sc. 5. Speech of Ulysses : — " O, these encounterers, so glib of tongue, That give a coasting ' welcome ere it comes — " Should it be "accosting?" "Accost her, knight, ac- cost!" in the "Twelfth Night." Yet there sounds a something so Shaksperian in the phrase — " give a coasting welcome," ("coasting" being taken as the epithet and adjective of " welcome,") that had the following words been, " ere they land," instead of " ere it comes," I should have preferred the interpretation. The sense now is, " that give welcome to a salute ere it comes." Ooriolanus. This play illustrates the wonderfully philosophic' impar- tiality of Shakspere's politics. His own country's history furnished him with no matter, but what was too recent to be devoted to patriotism. Besides, he knew that the in- struction of ancient history would seem more dispassionate. In " Ooriolanus " and "Julius Caesar," you see Shakspere's good-natured laugh at mobs. Compare this with Sir Thomas Brown's aristocracy of spirit. Act i. sc. 1. Ooriolanus' speech : — " He that depends Upon your favours, swims with fins of lead, And hews down oaks with rushes. Hang ye ! Trust ye ? " I suspect that Shakspere wrote it transposed ; "Trust ye? Hangeye?" ' So, 1st Fol. "Accosting" is adopted in the Globe Ed. 310 NOTES ON SOME OTHER [1818 lb. sc. 10. Speech, of Aufidins : — " Mine emulation Hath not that honor in't, it had ; for where I thought to crush him in an equal force, True sword to sword ; I'll potch at him some way. Or wrath, or craft may get him. — My valor ' (poison'd With only suffering stain by him) for him Shall fly out of itself: not' sleep, nor sanctuary. Being naked, sick, nor fane, nor capitol, The prayers of priests, nor times of sacrifices, Embankments ' all of fury, shall lift up Their rotten privilege and custom 'gainst My hate to Marcius." I have such deep faith in Shakspere's heart-lore, that 1 take for granted that this is in nature, and not as a mere anomaly ; although I cannot in myself discover any germ of possible feeling, which could wax and unfold itself into such sentiment as this. However, I perceive that in this speech is meant to be contained a prevention of shock at the after-change in Aufidins' character. Act ii. sc. 1. Speech of Menenius : — "The most sovereign prescription in Galen" &c. Was it without, or in contempt of, historical information that Shakspere made the contemporaries of Coriolanus quote Cato and Galen ? I cannot decide to my own satisfaction. lb. sc. 3. Speech of Coriolanus : — " Why in this wolvish gown^ should I stand here — " ' Read (1st Fol. and Globe Ed.) " My valour's poison'd With only suffering stain by him ; for him." Also " nor sleep," and " embarquement." " Embankment " is a plausible suggestion, but " embarquement " is correct. The sense of it is " em- bargoes, impediments." — Dyce's " Shak. Glossary." 2 1st Fol. 1623, " woolvish tongue ; " 2nd Fol. 1632, " gown ; " Globe Ed. " toge," which was Malone's suggestion. Sect. IV.] plats of shakspeeb. 311 That the gown of the candidate was of whitened wool, we know. Does " wolvish " or " woolvish " mean " made of wool ? " If it means " wolfish," what is the sense ? Act iv. sc. 7. Speech of Aafidius : — " All places yield to him ere he sits down," &c. I have always thought this in itself so beautiful speech, ' the least explicable from the mood and full intention of the speaker, of any in the whole works of Shakspere. I cherish the hope that I am mistaken, and that, becoming wiser, I shall discover some profound excellence in that, in which I now appear to detect an imperfection. Julifus GcBsar. Act i. sc. 1. " Mar. What meanest ihou by that ? Mend me, thou saucy fellow ! " The speeches of Mavius and MaruUus are in. blank verse. Wherever regular metre can be rendered truly imitative of character, passion, or personal rank, Shak- spere seldom, if ever, neglects it. Hence this Jine should be read : — " What mean'st by that ? mend me, thou saucy fellow ! " I say regular metre : for even the prose has in the highest and lowest dramatic personage, a Cobbler or a Hamlet, a rhythm so felicitous and so severally appropriate, as to be a virtual metre. lb. sc. 2. " Bru. A soothsayer bids you beware the Ides of March." If my ear does not deceive me, the metre of this line was meant to express that sort of mild philosophic contempt, characterizing Brutus even in his first casual speech. The line is a trimeter, — each dvpodda containing two accented 312 NOTES ON SOME OTHEE [1818 and two unaccented syllables, but variously arranged, as tbus ; — u u I — u u — |u — u — "A sootlisayer | bids you beware | the Ides of Marcli." lb. Speech of Brutus : " Set honor in one eye, and death i' the other. And 1 wili iook on both indifferently." Warburton would read '' death " for " both ; " but I prefer the old text. There are here three things, the public good, the individual Brutus' honor, and his death. The latter two so balanced each other, that he could decide for the first by equipoise; nay — the thought growing — that honour had more weight than death. That Cassius under- stood it as Warburton, is the beauty of Cassius as con- trasted with Brutus, lb. C?esar's speech : — " He loves no plays. As thou dost, Antony ; he hears no music," &e. " This is not a trivial observation, nor does our poet mean barely by it, that Cassius was not a merry, sprightly man ; but that he had not a due temperament of harmony in his disposition." Theobald's note. Theobald ! what a commentator wast thou, when thou would'st affect to understand Shakspere, instead of con- tenting thyself with collating the text ! The meaning here is too deep for a ILue ten-fold the length of thine to fathom. lb. sc. 3. Ceesar's ' speech : — - " Befaciiom for redress of all these griefs; And I will set this foot of mine as far, As who goes farthest." 1 understand it thus : " You have spoken as a con- spirator ; be so in fact, and I will join you. Act on your principles, and realize them in a fact." ' " Csesar's" is a slip of the pen for " Casea's." Sect. IV.] PLiYS of shakspeee. 313 Act ii. sc. 1. Speech of Brutus : — " It must be by his death ; and, for my part, I know no personal cause to spurn at him, But for the general. He would be crown'd : — How that might change his nature, there's the que And, to speak truth of Csesar, I have not known when his aifectibns sway'd More than his reason. So Ceesur may ; Then, lest he may, prevent. This speech is singular ; — at least, I do not at present see into Shakspere's motive, his rationale, or in what point of view he meant Brutus' character to appear. For surely — (this I mean is what I say to myself, with my present quantum of insight, only modified by my experience in how many instances I have ripened into a perception of beauties, where I had before descried faults ;) surely, nothing can seem more discordant with our historical pre- conceptions of Brutus, or more lowering to the intellect of the Stoico-Platonic tyrannicide, than the tenets here attributed to him — to him, the stern Roman republican ; namely, — that he would have no objection to a king, or to CsBsar, a monarch in Rome, would Caesar but be as good a monarch as he now seems disposed to be ! How, too, could Brutus say that he found no personal caiise — none in Csesar's past conduct as a man ? Had he not passed the Rubicon ? Had he not entered'Rome as a conqueror ? Had he not placed his Gauls in the Senate ? — Shakspere, it may be said, has not brought these things forward. — True ; — and this is just the ground of my perplexity. What character did Shakspere mean his Brutus to be ? lb. Speech of Brutus : — " For if thou path, thy native semblance on — " Surely, there need be no scruple in treating this " path " as a mere misprint or mis-script for "put." In what 314 NOTES ON SOME OTHEE [1818 place does Shakspere, — where does any other writer ' of the same age — ^use " path " as a verb for " walk ?" lb. sc. 2. CaBsar's speech : — " She dreamt last' night, she saw my statue — " No doubt, it should be statua, as in the same age, they more often pronounced " heroes " as a trisyllable than dis- syllable. A modem tragic poet would have written, — " Last night she dreamt, that she my statue saw — " But Shakspere never avails himself of the supposed license of transposition, merely for the metre. There is always some logic either of thought or passion to justify it. Act iii. sc. 1. Antony's speech : — " Pardon me, Julius — here wast thou bay'd, brave hart ; Here didst thou fall, and here thy hunters stand Sign'd in thy spoil, and crimson'd in thy death.' world.' thou wast the forest to this hart. And this, indeed, world ! the heart of thee.'' I doubt the genuineness of the last two lines ; — not because they are vile ; but first, on account of the rhythm, which is not Shaksperian, but just the very tune of some old play, from which the actor might have interpolated them ; — and Secondly, because they interrupt, not only the sense and connection, but likewise the flow both of the passion, and (what is with me still more decisive) of the Shak- sperian link of association. As with many another paren- thesis or gloss slipt into the text, we have only to read the passage without it, to see that it never was in it. I venture to say there is no instance in Shakspere fairly like this. Conceits he has ; but they not only rise out of some word ^ Consult Nares' Glossary for other instances. 2 Kead " to-night." ' Bead " lethe." Other authors use the word in the sense of " death." Nares thinks it was pronounced as a monosyllable, when so used, and derived rather from lethicm than lethe. Sect. IV.] plays op shakspeee. 315 in the lines before, bat also lead to the thought in the lines following. Here the conceit is a mere alien : Antony forgets an image, when he is even touching it, and then recollects it, when the thought last in his mind must have led him away from it. Act iv. so. 3. Speech of Brutus : — " What, shall one of us, That struck the foremost man of all this world, But for su/pporting robbers." This seemingly strange assertion of Brutus is unhappily verified in the present day. What is an immense army, in which the lust of plunder has quenched all the duties of the citizen, other than a horde of robbers, or differenced only as fiends are from ordinarily reprobate men ? Csesar supported, and was supported by, such as these; — and even so Buonaparte in our days.^ I know no part of Shakspere that more impresses on me the belief of his genius being superhuman, than this scene between Brutus aud Cassius. In the Gnostic heresy, it might have been credited with less absurdity than most of their dogmas, that the Supreme had employed him to create, previously to his ■ function of representing, characters. Antony and Oleopatra. Shakspere can be complimented only by comparison with himself : all other eulogies are either heterogeneous, as when they are in reference to Spenser or Milton ; or they are flat truisms, as when he is gravely preferred to Corneille, Racine, or even his own immediate successors, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger and the rest. The • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (x. 10, Long's Translation) sets himself down as a robber, because he warred against the Sai'matians. 316 NOTES ON SOMl OTHIE [1818 highest praise, or rather form of praise, of this play, which I can offer in my own mind, is the doubt which the perusal always occasions in me, whether the "Antony and Cleo- patra " is not, in all exhibitions of a giant power in its strength and vigour of maturity, a formidable rival of " Macbeth," " Lear," " Hamlet," and " Othello." Felieiter audax is the motto for its style comparatively with that of Shakspere's other works, even as it is the general motto of all his works compared with those of other poets. Be it remembered, too, that this happy valiancy of style is but the representative and result of all the material excellencies so expressed. This play should be perused in mental contrast with " Romeo and Juliet ; " — as the love of passion and appetite opposed to the love of affection and instinct. But the art displayed in the character of Cleopatra is profound ; in this, especially, that the sense of criminality in her passion is lessened by our insight into its depth and energy, at the very moment that we cannot but perceive that the passion itself springs out of the habitual craving of a licentious nature, and that it is supported and reinforced by voluntary stimulus and songht-for associations, instead of blossoming out of spontaneous emotion. Of all Shakspere's historical plays, " Antony and Cleo- patra " is by far the most wonderful. There is not one in which he has followed history so minutely, and yet there are few in which he impresses the notion of angelic strength so much ; — perhaps none in which he impresses it more strongly. This is greatly owing to the manner in which the fiery force is sustained throughout, and to the numerous momentary flashes of nature counteracting the historic abstraction. As a wonderful specimen of the way in which Shakspere lives up to the very end of this play, read the last part of the concluding scene. And if you would feel the judgment as well as the genius of Shak- Sect. IV.] plays of shakspeeb. 317 epere in your hearts' core, compare this astonishing drama with Dryden's "All For Love." Act. i. sc. 1. Philo's speech : — " His captain's heart, Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper — " It should be " reneagues," or '' reniegues," as " fatigues," &c. lb. " Take but good note, and you shall see in him The triple pillar of the world transformed Into a strumpet's /ooi." Warburton's conjecture of " stool " is ingenious, and would be a probable reading, if the scene opening had discovered Antony with Cleopatra on his lap. But, represented as he is walking and jesting with her, "fool " must be the word. Warburton's objection is shallow, and implies that he con- founded the dramatic with the epic style. The " pillar " of a state is so common a metaphor as to have lost the image in the thing meant to be imaged, lb. sc. 2. " Much is breeding ; Which, like the courser's hair, hath yet but life, And not a serpent's poison." This is so far true to appearance, that a horse-hair, "laid," as Hollinshed says, "in a pail of water," will be- come the supporter of seemingly one worm, though pro- bably of an immense number of small slimy water-lice. The hair will twirl round a finger, and sensibly compress it. It is a common experiment with school boys in Cum- berland and Westmorland. Act ii. sc. 2. Speech of Enobarbus : — " Her gentlewomen, like the Nereids, So many mermaids, tended her i' th' eyes. And made their bends adornings. At the helm A seeming mermaid steers." 818 NOTES ON SOME OTHEE [1818 I have the greatest difficulty in believing that Shakspere wrote the first "mermaids." He never, I think, would have SO weakened by useless anticipation the fine image immediately following. The epithet " seeming " becomes so extremely improper after the whole number had been positively called " so many mermaids." Ti/mon of Athens^ Act i. sc. 1. " Tim. The man is honest. Old Ath, Therefore he will be, Timon. His honesty rewards him in itself." — Warburton's comment — " If the man be honest, for that reason he will be so in this, and not endeavour at the iujustice of gaining my daughter without my consent " — is, like almost all his comments, ingenious iu blunder : he can never see any other writer's thoughts for the mist- working swarm of his own. The meaning of the first line the poet himself explains, or rather unfolds, in the second. " The man is honest ! " — " True ; — and for that very cause, and with no additional or extrinsic motive, he will be so. No man can be justly called honest, who is not so for honesty's sake, itself including its own reward." Note, that " honesty " in Shakspere's age retained much of its old dignity, and that contradistinction of the honestitm from the utile, in which its very essence and definition consist. If it be honestum, it cannot depend on the utile. lb. Speech of Apemantus, printed as prose in Theobald's edition : — " So, so ! aches contract, and starve your supple joints ! " I may remairk here the fineness of Shakspere's sense of musical period, which would almost by itself have suggested ' See notes on " Troilus and Cressida.'' Sect. IV.] plats of shakspeee 319 (if the hundred positive proofs had not been extant), that the word " aches " was then ad liMtimi, a dissyllable — witches. For read it, " aches," in this sentence, and I would challenge you to find any period in Shakspere's writings with the same musical, or, rather dissonant, nota- tion. Try the one, and then the other, by your ear, read- ing the sentence aloud, first with the word as a dissyllable and then as a monosyllable, and you will feel what I mean.^ lb. sc. 2. Cupid's speech : Warburton's correction of— " There taste, touch, all pleas'd from thy table rise — " into " Th' ear, taste, touch, smell," &o. This is indeed an excellent emendation. -Act ii. sc. 1. Senator's speech : — " — nor then silenc'd with ^ ' Commend me to your master ' — and the cap Plays in the right hand, thus : — " Either, methinks, "plays" should be "play'd," or "and" should be changed to '' while." I can certainly understand it as a parenthesis, an interadditive of scorn ; but it does not sound to my ear as in Shakspere's manner. lb. sc. 2. Timon's speech : (Theobald.) " And that unaptness made you ' minister, Thus to excuse yourself." ' It is, of course, a verse, — " Aches contract, and starve your supple joints ! " and is so printed in all later editions. But Mr. C. was reading it in prose in Theobald; and it is curious to see how his ear detected the rhythmical necessity for pronouncing " aches " as a dissyllable, although the metrical necessity seems for the moment to have escaped him. — H. N. C. 2 Read " when " for " with." ' " To'jir." in 1st Fol. and Globe Ed. 320 NOTES ON SOME OTHER [1818 Read your; — at least I cg.iinot otherwise understand tlie line. Ton made my chance indisposition and occasional unaptness your minister — ^that is, the ground . on which yon now excuse yourself. Or, perhaps, no correction is necessary, if we construe " made you " as " did you make ; " " and that uiaptness did you make help you thus to excuse yourself." But the former seems more in Shakspere's manner, and is less liable to be misunderstood.^ Act iii. sc. 3. Servant's speech : — " How fairly this lord strives to appear fonl ! — takes Tirtuous copies to be wicked j lihe those that under hoi, ardent, zeal would set whole rialms on fire. Of such a nature is his politic love." This latter clause I g^-ievously suspect to have been an addition of the players, which had hit, and, being con- stantly applauded, procured a settled occupancy in the prompter's copy. Not that Shakspere does not elsewhere sneer at the Puritans ; but here it is introduced so nolenter volenter (excuse the phrase) by the head and shoulders ! — and is besides so much more likely to have been conceived in the age of Charles I. Act iv. sc. 3. Timon's speech : — " Raise me this beggar, and deni/'t that lord. — " Warburton reads " denude." I cannot see the necessity of this alteration. The editors and commentators are, all of them, ready enough to crv out against Shakspere's laxities and licenses of style, for- getting that he is not merely a poet, but a dramatic poet ; that, when the head and the heart are swelling with ful- ness, a man does not ask himself whether he has gramma- tically arranged, but only whether (the context taken in) he has conveyed, his meaning. " Deny " is here clearly equal to "withhold;" and the "it," quite in the genius of ' "Your" is the received reading now.— H. N. C. Sect. IV.] plats of shakspeee. 321 Tehement conversation, which a syntaxist explains by ellipses and suba/uditurs in a Grreek or Latin classic, yet triumphs over as ignorances in a contemporary, refers to accidental and artificial rank or elevation, implied in the verb "raise." Besides, does the word "denude" occur in any writer before, or of, Shakspere's age ? Borneo and Juliet, I have previously had occasion to speak at large on the subject of the three unities of time, place, and action, as applied to the drama in the abstract, and to the particular stage for which Shakspere wrote, as far as he can be said to have written for any stage but that of the universal mind. I hope I have in some measure succeeded in de- monstrating that the former two, instead of being rules, were mere inconveniences attached to the local peculiarities of the Athenian drama ; that the last alone deserved the name of a principle, and that in the preservation of this unity Shakspere stood pre-eminent. Tet, instead of unity of action, I should greatly prefer the more appropriate, though scholastic and uncouth, words homogeneity, pro- portionateness, and totality of interest, — expressions, which involve the distiuction, or rather the essential difference, betwixt the shaping skill of mechanical talent, and the creative, productive, life-power of inspired genius. In the former each part is separately conceived, and then by a succeeding act put together ; — not as watches are made for whole-sale, — (for there each part supposes a pre-conception of the whole in some mind) — but more like pictures on a motley screen. Whence arises the harmony that strikes us in the wildest natural landscapes, — in the relative shapes ■ of rocks, the harmony of colours in the heaths, ferns, and lichens, the leaves of the beech and the oak, the stems and 322 NOTIS ON SOME OTHEE [1818 rich brown branches of the birch and other mountain trees, varying from verging autumn to returning spring, — com- pared with the visual effect from the greater number of artificial plantations ? — From this, that the natural land- scape is effected, as it were, by a single energy modified ab intra in each component part. And as this is the particular excellence Of the Shaksperian drama generally, so is it especially characteristic of the " Romeo and' Juliet." The groundwork of the tale is altogether in family life, and the events of the play have their first origin in family feuds. Filmy as are the eyes of party-spirit, at once dim and truculent, still there is com,monly some real or sup- posed object in view, or principle to be maintained; and though but the twisted wires on the plate of rosin in the preparation for electrical pictures, it is still a guide in some degree, an assimilation to an outline. But in fam.ily quarrels, which have proved scarcely less injurious to states, wilfulness, and precipitancy, and passion from mere habit and custom, can alone be expected. With his accus- tomed judgment, Shakspere has begun by placing before us a lively picture of all the impulses of the play ; and, as nature ever presents two sides, one for Heraclitus, and one for Democritus, he has, by way of prelude, shown the laughable absurdity of the evil by the contagion of it reaching the servants, who have so little to do with it, but who are under the necessity of letting the superfluity of sensorial power fly off through the escape-valve of wit- combats, and of quarreUing with weapons of sharper edge, all in humble imitation of their masters. Yet there is a sort of unhired fidelity, an ourishness about all this that makes it rest pleasant on one's feelings. All the first scene, down to the conclusion of the Prince's speech, is a motley dance of all ranks and ages to one tune, as if the horn of Huon had been playing behind the scenes. Benvolio's speech — Sect. IY.] plats of sha.ksp¥ee. 323 " Madam, an hour before the worshipp'd sun Peer'd forth the golden window of the east " — and, far more strikingly, the following speecli of old Montague — " Many a morning hath he there been seen With tears augmenting the fresh morning ' dew" — prove that Shakspere meant the Romeo and Juliet to approach to a poem, which, and indeed its early date, may be also inferred from the multitude of rhyming couplets throughout. And if we are right, from the internal evidence, in pronouncing this one of Shakspere's early dramas, it afEords a strong instance of the fineness of his insight into the nature of the passions, that Romeo is in- troduced already love-bewildered. The necessity of loving creates an object for itself in man and woman ; and yet there is a difference in this respect between the sexes, though only to be known by a perception of it. It would have displeased us if Juligt had been represented as already in love, or as fancying herself so ; — but no one, I believe, ever experiences any shock at Romeo's forgetting his' Rosaline, who had been a mere name for the •yearning of his youthful imagination, and rushing into his passion for Juliet. Rosaline was a mere creation of his fancy ; and we should remark the boastful positiveness of Romeo in a love of his own making, which is never shown where love is really near the heart. " When the devout religion of mine eye Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires ! One fairer than my love ! the all-seeing sun Ne'er saw her match, since first the world begun." " The character of the Nurse is the nearest of anything in Shakspere to a direct borrowing from mere observation ; 1 Kead " morning's." " Act i. so. 2. 324 NOTES ON SOME OTHER [1818 and the reason is, that as in infancy and childhood the individual in nature is a representative of a class, — just as in describing one larch tree, you generalize a grove of them, — so it is nearly as much so in old age. The genera- lization is done to the poet's hand. Here you have the garrulity of age strengthened by the feelings of a long- trusted servant, whose sympathy with the mother's afEec- tions gives her privileges and rank in the household; and observe the mode of connection by accidents of time and place, and the childlike fondness of repetition in a second childhood, and also that happy, humble, ducking under, yet constant resurgence against, the check of her superiors ! — "^9^, madam ! — Yet I cannot choose but laugh," &c. In thf, fourth scene we have Mercutio introduced to us. ! how shal^^iEnbe that exquisite ebullience and over- flow of youthBBme, wafted on over the laughing waves of pleasure and prosperity, as a wanton beauty that distorts the face on which she knows her lover is gazing enraptured, and wrinkles her forehead in the triumph of its smooth- ness ! Wit fever wakeful, fancy busy and procreative as an insect, courage, an easy mind that, without cares of its own, is at once disposed to laugh away those of others, and yet to be interested in them, — these and all congenial qualities, melting into the common copula of them all, the man of rank and the gentleman, with all its excellencies and aU its weaknesses, constitute the character of Mercutio I Act i. sc. 5. " Tyb. It fits when such a villain is a guest ; I'll not endure him. Cap. He shall be en4ur'd. What, goodman boy ! — I say, he. shall : — Gro to ; — Am I the master here, or you ? — Go to. . Tou'U not endure him ) — God shall mend my soul — You'll make a mutiny among my guests ! Sect. IV.] plats of shakspbbb. 326 You will set cock-a-hoop ! you'll be the man I Tyb. Why, uncle, 'tis a shame. Cap. Go to, go to, You are a saucy boy I " &c. — How admirable is the old man's impetuosity at once contrasting, yet harmonized, with, young Tybalt's quarrel- some violence ! But it would be endless to repeat obser- vations of this sort. Every leaf is difEerent on an oak tree ; but still we can only say — our tongues defrauding our eyes — " This is another oak-leaf ! " Act ii. sc. 2. The garden scene : Take notice in this enchanting scene of the contrast of Romeo's love with his former fancy ; and weigh the skill shown in justifying him from his inconstancy by making us feel the difference of his passion. Tet this, too, is a love in, although not merely of, the imagination. lb. "Jul. Well, do not swear; although I joy in thee, I have no joy in ' this contract to-night : It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden," &c. With love, pure love, there is always an anxiety for the safety of the object, a disinterestedness, by which it is dis- tinguished from the counterfeits of its name. Compare this scene with Act iii. sc. 1 of the "Tempest." I do not know a more wonderful instance of Shakspere's mastery in playing a distinctly rememberable variety on th^ same remembered air, than in the transporting love- confessions of Romeo and Juliet and Ferdinand and Miranda. There seems more passion in the one, and more dignity in the other; yet you feel that the sweet girlish lingering and busy movement of Juliet, and the calmer and more maidenly fondness of Miranda, might easily pass into each other. 1 Bead "of." 326 NOTES ON SOME OTHEB [1818 lb. sc. 3. The Friar's speech : — The reverend character of the Friar, like all Shakspere's representations of the great professions, is very delightful and tranquillizing, yet it is no digression, but immediately necessary to the carrying on of the plot. lb. sc. 4. "Bom. Good morrow to you both. What counterfeit did I give you ? " &c. Compare again, Romeo's half-exerted, and half real, ease of mind with his first manner when in love with. Rosaline ! His will had come to the clenching point. lb. sc. 6. "■Bom. Do thou but close oiu- hands with holy words, Then love-devouring death do what he dare, It is enough I may but call her mine." The precipitancy, which is the character of the play, is well marked in this short scene of waiting for Juliet's arrival. Act iii. sc. 1. " Mer. No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door ; but 'tis enough : 'twill serve : ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man," &c. How fine an effect the wit and raillery habitual to Mprcutio, even struggling with his pain, give to Romeo's following speech, and at the same time so completely justifying his passionate revenge on Tybalt ! Tb. Benvolio's speech : "But that he tilts With piercing steel at bold Mercutio's breast." — This small portion of untruth in Benvolio's narrative is finely conceived. lb. sc. 2. Juliet's speech : Sect. IV.] plats op shakspeee. 327 " For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night Whiter than new snow on a raven's back." — Indeed the whole of this speech is imagination strained to the highest; and observe the blessed effect on the purity of the mind. What would Dryden have made of it ?— lb. " Nurse. Shame come to Eomeo. Jul. Blister'd be thy tongue Tor such a wish ! " Note the Nurse's mistake of the mind's audible struggles with itself for its decision in toto. lb. sc. 3. Ilomeo's speech : — " 'Tis torture, and not mercy : heaven's ^ here, Where Juliet lives," &o. All deep passions are a sort of atheists, that believe no future, lb. sc. 5. " Cap. Soft, take me with you, take me with you, wife — How! will she none ? " &c. A noble scene ! Don't I see it with my own eyes ? — Yes ! but not with Juliet's. And observe in Capulet's last speech in this scene his mistake, as if love's causes were capable of being generalized. Act iv. sc. 3. Juliet's speech : — " O, look ! methinks I see my cousin's ghost Seeking out Romeo, that did spit his body Upon a rapier's point : — Stay, Tybalt, stay! — Eomeo, I come! this do I drink to thee." Shakspere provides for the finest decencies. It would have been too bold a thing for a girl of fifteen ; — ^but she swallows the draught in a fit of fright. ' Eead " heaven is." 328 NOTES ON SOME OTHBE [1818 lb. sc. 5. As the audience know that Juliet is not dead, this scene is, perhaps, excusable. But it is a strong warning to minor dramatists not to introduce at one time many separate characters agitated by one and the same cir- cumstance. It is difficult to understand what' efEect, whether that of pity or of laughter, Shakspere meant to produce ; — ^the occasion and the characteristic speeches are so little in harmony ! For example, what the Nurse says is excellently suited to the Nurse's character, but gprotesquely unsuited to the occasion. Act T. sc. 1. Romeo's speech :^ " mischief! thon are swift To enter in the thoughts of desperate men ! I do remember an apothecary," &c. This famous passage is so beautiful as to be self- justified ; yet, in addition, what a fine preparation it is for the tomb scene ! lb. sc. 3. Romeo's speech : — " Good gentle youth, tempt not a desperate man, Fly hence and leare me." The gentleness of Romeo was shown before, as softened by love ; and now it is doubled by love and sorrow and awe of the place where he is. lb. . Romeo's speech : — " How oft when men are at the point of death Have they been merry 1 which their keepers call A lightning before death. O, how may I Call this a lightning ?— O, my love, my wife! " &c. Here, here, is the master example how beauty can at once increase and modify passion ! lb. Last scene. Sect. IV.] plats of shakspbbi. 329 How beautiful is the close ! The spring and the -winter meet ; — winter assumes the character of spring, and spring the sadness of winter. Lear. Of all Shakspere's plays " Macbeth " is the most rapid, "Hamilet" the slowest, in movement. "Lear" combines length with rapidity, — ^Uke the hurricane, and the whirl- pool, absorbing while it advances. It begins as a stormy day in summer, with brightness ; but that brightness is lurid, and anticipates the tempest. It was not without forethought, nor is it without its due significance, that the division of Lear's kingdom is in the \ first six lines of the play stated as a thing already deter- '^ mined in all its particulars, previously to the trial of pro- fessions, as the relative rewards of which the daughters > were to be made to consider their several portions. The , strange, yet by no means unnatural, mixture of selfishness, sensibility, and habit of feeling derived from, and fostered ' by, the particular rank and usages of the individual ; — the intense desire of being intensely beloved, — selfish, and yet characteristic of the selfishness of a loving and kindly nature alone ; — the self-supportless leaning for all pleasure on another's breast ; — the cravings after sympathy with a prodigal disinterestedness, frustrated by its own ostenta- tion, and the mode and nature of its claims ; — the anxiety, the distrust, the jealousy, which m^ore or less accompany all selfish affections, and are amongst the surest contra- distinctions of mere fondness from true love, and which originate Lear's eager wish to enjoy his daughter's violent professions, whilst the inveterate habits of sovereignty convert the wish into claim and positive right, and an in- compliance with it into crime and treason; — these facts, 330 NOTES ON SOME OTHBE [1818 these passions, these moral verities, on. which the whole tragedy is founded, are all prepared for, and wiU to the retrospect be found implied, ia these first four or five lines of the play. They let us know that the trial is but a trick ; and that the grossness of the old king's rage is in. part the natural result of a silly trick suddenly and most' unex- pectedly baffled and disappointed. It may here be worthy of notice, that " Lear " is the only serious performance of Shakspere, the interest and situations of which are derived from the assumption of a gross improbability; whereas Beaumont and Fletcher's tragedies are, almost all of them, founded on some out of the way accident or exception to the general experience of mankind. But observe the matchless judgment of our Shakspere. First, improbable as the conduct of Lear is in the first scene, yet it was an old story rooted in the popular faith, — a thing taken for granted already, and consequently without any of the effects of improbability. Secondly, it is merely the canvas for the characters and passions, — a mere occasion for, — and not, in the manner of Beaumont 1 and Fletcher, perpetually recurring as the cause, and sine qua non of, — the incidents and emotions. Let the first scene of this play have been lost, and let it only be under- stood that a fond father had been duped by hypocritical professions of love and duty on the part of two daughters to disinherit the third, previously, and deservedly, more dear to him ; — and all the rest of the tragedy would retain its interest undiminished, and be perfectly intelligible. The accidental is nowhere the groundwork of the passions, but that which is catholic, which in all ages has been, and ever will be, close and native to the heart of man, — parental anguish from filial ingratitude, the genuineness of worth, though coffined in bluntness, and the execrable vileness of a smooth iniquity. Perhaps I ought to have added the " Merchant of Venice ; " but here too the same remarks Sect. IV.] plats of shakspbee. 331 apply. It was an old tale ; and substitute any other danger than that of the pound of flesh (the circnmstance in which the improbability lies), yet all the situations and the emotions appertaining to them remain equally excellent and appropriate. Whereas take away from the "Mad Lover" of Beaumont and Fletcher the fantastic hypothesis of his engagement to cut out his own heart, and have it presented to his mistress, and all the main scenes must go with it. Kotzebue is the German Beaumont and Fletcher, with- out their poetic powers, and without their vis comica} But, like them, he always deduces his situations and pas- sions from marvellous accidents, and the trick of bringing one part of our moral nature to counteract another ; as our pity for misfortune and admiration of generosity and courage to combat our condemnation of guilt, as in adultery, robbery, and other heinous crimes; — and, like them too, he excels in his mode of telling a story clearly and. interestingly, in a series of dramatic dialogues. Only the trick of making tragedy-heroes and heroines out of shopkeepers and barmaids was too low for the age, and too unpoetic for the genius, of Beaumont and Fletcher, inferior in every respect as they are to their great predecessor and contemporary. How inferior wOulrJ they have appeared, had not Shakspere existed for them to imitate ; — which in every play, more or less, they do, and in their tragedies most glaringly : — and yet — (O shame ! shame !) — they miss no opportunity of sneering at the divine man, and sub- detracting from his merits ! To return to Lear. Having thus in the fewest words, and in a natural reply to as natural a question, — ^which ' " If we would charitably consent to forget the comic humour, the wit, the felicities of style, in other words, all the poetry, and nine- tenths of all the genius of Beaumont and Fletcher, that which would remain becomes a Kotzebue." — Biograpkia lAteraria, chap, xxiii. 1 832 NOTES ON SOME OTHER [1818 yet answers tlie secondary purpose of attracting onr atten- tion to the difEerence or diversity between the characters of Cornwall and Albany, — provided the premisses and data, as it were, for our after insight into the nnnd ani mood of the person, whose character, passions, and sufEer- ings are the main subject-matter of the play ; — from Lear, the persona patiens of his drama, Shakspere passes without delay to the second in importance, the chief agent and prime mover, and introduces Edmund to our acquaintance, preparing us with the same felicity of judgment, and in the same easy and natural way, for his character in the seemingly casual communication of its origin and occasion. From the first drawing up of the curtain Edmund has stood before us in the united strength and beauty of earliest manhood. Our eyes have been questioning him. Grifted as he is with high advantages of person, and further endowed by nature with a powerful intellect and a strong energetic will, even without any concurrence of circum- stances "and accident, pride will necessarily be the sin that most easily besets him. But Edmund is also the known and acknowledged son of the princely Gloster : he, there- fore, has both the germ of pride, and the conditions best fitted to evolve and ripen it into a predominant feeling. Tet hitherto no reason appears why it should be other than the not unusual pride of person, talent, and birth, — a pride auxiliary, if not akin, to many virtues, and the natural ally of honourable impulses. But alas ! in his own presence his own father takes shame to himself for the frank avowal that he is his father, — he has " blushed so often to acknowledge him that he is now brazed to it ! " Edmund hears the circumstances of his birth spoken of with a most degrading and licentious levity, — his mother described as a wanton by her own paramour, and the remembrance of the animal stiilg, the low criminal grati- fications connected with her wantonness and prostituted Sect. IV.] plats op shakspbeb. 333 beauty, assigned as the reason, why "the whoreson must be acknowledged ! " This, and the consciousness of its notoriety; the gnawing conviction that every show of respect is an efEort of courtesy, which recalls, while it represses, a contrary feeling ; — this is the ever trickling flow of wormwood and gall into the wounds of pride, — the corrosive virus which inoculates pride with a venom not its own, with envy, hatred, and a lust for that power which in its blaze of radiance would hide the dark spots on his disc, — with pangs of shame personally undeserved and therefore felt as wrongs, and with a blind ferment of vindictive working towards the occasions and causes, es- pecially towards a brother, whose stainless birth and lawful honours were the constant remembrancers of his own debasement, and were ever in the way to prevent all chance of its being unknown, or overlooked and forgotten. Add to this, that with excellent judgment, and provident for the claims of the moral sense, — for that which, relatively to the drama, is called poetic justicCj and as the fittest- means for reconciling the feelings of the spectators to the horrors of Gloster's after sufferings,^at least, of rendering- them somewhat less unendurable ;— (for I will not disguise my conviction, that in this one point the tragic in this play has been urged beyond the outermost mark and me plus ultrQ, of the dramatic)^-Shakspere has precluded all excuse and palliation of the guilt incurred by^both the parents of the base-born Edmund, by Gloster's confession that he was at the time a married man, and already blest with a lawful heir of his fortunes. The mournful alienation of brotherly love, occasioned by the law of primogeniture in noble families, or rather by the unnecessary distinctions, engrafted thereon, and this in children of the same stock, is still almost proverbial on the continent, — especially, as I know from my own observation, in the south of Europe, — and appears to have been scarcely less common in our 334 NOTES ON SOME OTHER [1818 own island before the Revolution of 1688, if we may judge from the characters and sentiments so frequent in our elder comedies. There is the younger brother, for instance, in Beau- mont and Fletcher's play of the " Scornful Lady," on the one side, and Oliver in Shakspere's " As Tou Like It," on the other. Need it be said how heavy an aggravation, in such a case, the stain of bastardy must have been, were it only that the younger brother was liable to hear his own dis- honour and his mother's infamy related by his father with an excusing shrug of the shoulders, and in a tone betwixt waggery and shame ! By the circumstances here enumerated as so many pre- disposing causes, Edmund's character might well be deemed already sufficiently explained ; and our minds prepared for it. But in this tragedy the story or fable constrained Shakspere to introduce wickedness in an outrageous form in the persons of Regan and Goneril. He had read nature too heedfuUy not to know, that courage, intellect, and strength of character, are the most impressive forms of power, and that to power in itself, without reference to any moral end, an inevitable admiration and complacency appertains, whether it be displayed in the conquests of a Buonaparte or Tamerlane, or in the foam and the thunder of a cataract. But in the exhibition of such a character it was of the highest importance to prevent the guilt from passing into utter monstrosity, — which again depends on the presence or absence of causes and temptations sufficient to account for the wickedness, without the necessity of recurring to a thorough fiendishness of nature for its origi- nation. For such are the appointed relations of intellectual power to truth, and of truth to goodness, that it becomes both morally and poetically unsafe to present what is admi- rable, — what our nature compels ns to admire — in the mind, and what is most detestable in the heart, as co- existing in the same individual without any apparent con- Sect. IV.] plats op shakspere. 335 nection, or any modification of the one by tHe ather. That Shakspere has in one instance, that of lago, approached to this, and that he has done it successfully, is, perhaps, the most astonishing proof of his genius, and the opulence of its resources. But in the present tragedy, in which he was compelled to present a Groneril and a Regan, it was most carefully to be avoided ; — and therefore the only one conceivable addition to the inauspicious influences on the preformation of Edmund's character is given, in the infor- mation that all the kindly counteractions to the mischievous feelings of shame, which might have been derived from co- domestication with Edgar and their common father, had been cut off by his absence from home, and foreign educa- tion from boyhood to the present time, and a prospect of its continuance, as if to preclude all risk of his interference with the father's views for the elder and legitimate son : — " He hath been out nine yeai's, and away he shall again.'' Act i. sc. 1. " Cor. Nothing, my lord. Lear. Nothing ? Cor. Nothing. Lea/r. Nothing can come of nothing : speak again. Cor. Unhappy that I am, I cannot heare My heart into my month : I love your majesty According to my bond ; nor more, nor less." There is something of disgust at the ruthless hypocrisy of her sisters, and some little faulty admixture of pride and suUenness in Cordelia's "Nothing;" and her tone is well contrived, indeed, to lessen the glaring absurdity of Lear's conduct, but answers the yet more important pur- pose of forcing away the attention from the nursery-tale, the moment it has served its end, that of supplying the canvas for the picture. This is also materially furthered by Kent's opposition, which displays Lear's moral incapa- 336 NOTES ON SOME OTHER [1818 bility of resigning the sovereign power in the very act of disposing of it. Kent is, perhaps, the nearest to perfect goodness in all Shakspere's characters, and yet the most individualized.^ There is an extraordinary charm in his bluntness, which is that only of a nobleman arising from a contempt of overstrained courtesy; and combined with easy placability where goodness of heart is apparent. His passionate affection for, and fidelity to, Lear act on our^ feelings in Lear's own favour : virtue itself seems to be in company with him. lb. sc. 2. Edmund's speech : — "Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take ' More composition and fierce quality Than doth," &c. Warburton's note upon a quotation from Vanini. Poor Vanini ! — Any one but Warburton would have thought this precious passage more characteristic of Mr. Shandy than of atheism. If the fact really were so (vhich it is not, but almost the contrary) , I do not see why the most confirmed theist might not very naturally utter the same wish. But it is proverbial that the youngest son in a large family is commonly the man of the greatest talents in it ; and as good an authority as Vanini has said — inca- lesoere in venerem ardentius, spei sdbolis injuriosum esse. In this speech of Edmund you see, as soon as a man cannot reconcile himself to reason, how his conscience flies off by way of appeal to nature, who is sure upon such occasions never to find fault, and also how shame sharpens a predisposition in the heart to evil. For it is a profound moral, that shame will naturally generate guilt ; the op- pressed will be vindictive, like Shylock, and in the anguish of undeserved ignominy the delusion secretly springs up, 1 Compare note on Mr. Collier's Sixth Lecture, from The Friend. SlCT. IV.] PLAYS OF SHAESPEEE. 337 of getting over the moral quality of an action by fixing the mind on the mere physical act alone, lb. Edmund's speech : — " This is the excellent foppery of the world ! that, when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeit of our own behaviour), we make guilty of our disasters, the sun, the moon, and the stars," &c. Thus scorn and misanthropy are often the anticipations and mouth-pieces of wisdom in the detection of super- stitions. Both individuals and nations may be free from such prejudices by being below them, as well as by rising above them. lb. sc. 3. The Steward should be placed in exact anti- thesis to Kent, as the only character of utter irredeemable baseness in Shakspere. Even in this the judgment and invention of the poet are very observable ; — for what else could the willing tool of a Groneril be ? Not a vice but this of baseness was left open to him. lb. sc. 4. In Lear old age is itself a character, — its natiiral imperfections being increased by life-long habits of receiving a prompt obedience. Any addition of indivi- duality would have been unnecessary and painful ; for the relations of others to him, of wondrous fidelity and of frightful ingratitude, alone suflSciently distinguish him. Thus Lear becomes the open and ample play-room of nature's passions. "Knight. Since my young lady's going into France, Sir; the fool hath much pin'd away." The Fool is no comic buffoon to make the gfroundlings laugh, — ^no forced condescension of Shakspere's genius to the taste of his audience. Accordingly the poet prepares for his intrx)duction, which he never does with any of his common clowns and fools, by bringing him into living connection with the pathos of the play. He is as wonderful 338 NOTES ON SOME OTHEE [1818 a creation as Caliban ; his wild babblings, and inspired idiocy, articulate and gauge the horrors of the scene. The monster Goneril prepares what is necessary, while the character of Albany renders a still more maddening grievance possible, namely, Regan and Cornwall in perfect sympathy of monstrosity. Not a sentiment, not an image, which can give pleasure on its own account, is admitted ; whenever these creatures are introduced, and they are . brought forward as little as possible, pure horror reigns throughout. In this scene and in all the early speeches of Lear, the one general sentiment of filial ingratitude prevails • as the main spring of the feelings ; — in this early stage the outward object causing the pressure on the mind, which is not yet sufficiently familiarized with the anguish for the imagination to work upon it. lb. " Gon. Do you mark that, my lord ? Alb. I cannot be so partial, Gonerfl, To the great love I bear you. Gon. Pray you, content," &e. Observe the baffled endeavour of Goneril to act on the fears of Albany, and yet his passiveness, his inertia, ; he is not convinced, and yet he is afraid of looking into the thing. Such characters always yield to those who will take the trouble of governing them, or for them. Perhaps, the influence of a princess, whose choice of him had royalized his state, may be some little excuse for Albany's -weakness. lb. sc. 5. " Lear. let me not be mad, not mad, sweet hearen ! Keep me in temper ! I would not be mad ! — " The mind's own anticipation of madness ! The deepest tragic notes are often struck by a half sense of an impend- ing blow. The Fool's conclusion of this act by a grotesque Sect. IV.] plats op shakspkre. 339 prattling seems to indicate the dislocation of feeling that has begun and is to be continued. Act ii. sc. 1. Edmund's speech: — " He replied, Thou unpossessing bastard ! " &c. Thus the secret poison in Edmund's own heart steals forth ; and then observe poor Gloster's — " I/oyal and natural boy ! " as if praising the crime of Edmund's birth ! lb. Compare Regan's — " What, did my father's godson seek your life? He whom my father named ? " with the unfeminine violence of her — " All Tengeance comes too short," &c. and yet no reference to the guilt, but only to the accident, which she uses as an occasion for sneering at her father. Regan is not, in fact, a greater monster than Goneril, but she has the power of casting more venom, lb. sc. 2. Cornwall's speech : — " This is some fellow, Who, having been praised for bluntness, doth affect A saucy roughness," &e. In thus placing these profound general truths in the mouths of such men as Cornwall, Edmund, lago, &c., Shakspere at once gives them utterance, and yet shows how indefinite their application is. lb. sc. 3. Edgar's assumed madness serves the great purpose of taking off part of the shock which would other- wise be caused by the true madness of Lear, and further displays the profound difference between the two. In every attempt at representing madness throughout the whole range of dramatic literature, with the single excep- 340 NOTES ON SOME OTHBB [1818 tion of Lear, it is mere lightheadedness, as especially in Otway. In Edgar's ravings Shakspere all the while lets you see a fixed purpose, a practical end in view ; — ^in Lear s, there is only the brooding of the one anguish, an eddy without progression. lb. ac. 4. Lear's speech : — " The king would speak with Cornwall ; the dear father Would with' his daughter speak," &c. ♦ • » ♦ ♦ " No, but not yet : may be he is not well," &c. The strong interest . now felt by Lear to try to find excuses for his daughter is most pathetic, lb. Lear's speech : — " Beloved Regan, Thy sister!s naught ; — Regan, she hath tied Sharp-tooth'd unkindness, like a vulture, here. I can scarce speak to thee ; — thou'lt not believe Of how depraved a quality — O Regan ! Eeg. I pray you, Sir, take patience ; I have hope. You less know how to value her desert, Than she to scant her duty. Lear. Say, how is that ? " Nothing is so heart-cutting as a cold unexpected defence or palliation of a cruelty passionately complained of, or so expressive of thorough hard-heartedness. And feel the excessive horror of Regan's " O, Sir, you are old!" — and then her drawing from that universal object of reverence and indulgence the very reason for her frightful conclusion — " Say, you have wrong'd her ! " All Lear's faults increase our pity for, him. We refuse to know them otherwise than as means of his sufferings, and aggravations of his daughter's ingratitude. ' lb. Lear's speech : — ■ Read " with." Sect. IV.] plats of shakspbee. 341 " O, reason not the need : our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous," &c. Observe that the tranquillity which follows the first stiimiing of the blow permits Lear to reason. Act ,iii. so. 4. 0, what a world's convention of agonies is here ! All external nature in a storm, all moral nature convulsed, — the real madness of Lear, the feigned madness of Edgar, the babbling of the Pool, the desperate fidelity of Kent — surely such a scene was never conceived before or since ! Take it but as a picture for the eye only, it is more terrific than any which a Michel Angelo, inspired by a Dante, could have conceived, and which none but a Michel Angelo could have executed. Or let it have been uttered to the blind, the bowlings of nature would seem converted into the voice of conscious humanity. This scene ends with the first symptoms of positive derange- ment ; and the intervention of the fifth scene is particularly judicious, — the interruption allowing an interval for Lear to appear in full madness in the sixth scene. lb. sc. 7. Gloster's blinding : — What can I say of this scene ? — There is my reluctance to think Shakspere wrong, and yet — Act iv. sc. 6. Lear's speech : — " Ha ! Gbneril ! — with a white beard ! — They flattered me like a dog ; and told me, I had white hairs in my beard, ere the black ones were there. To say Ay and No to every thing ' I said ! — Ay and No too was no good divinity. When the rain came to wet me once," &c. The thunder recurs, but still at a greater distance from our feelings. lb. sc. 7. Lear's speech : — " Where have I been ? Where am I ? — Fair daylight ? — I am mightily abused. — I should even die with pity To see another thus," &c. ' Bead " thing that I.' 342 NOTES ON SDMI OTHER [181*, How beautifully ihe affecting return of Lear to reason, and the mild pathos of these speeches prepare the mind for the last sad, yet sweet, consolation of the aged sufferer's death ! Hamlet. ["Hamlet" was the play, or rather Hamlet himself was the character, in the intuition and exposition of which I first made my turn for philosophical' criticism, and especially for insight into the genius of Shakspere, noticed. This happened first amongst my acquaintances, as Sir George Beaumont will bear witness ; and subsequently, long before ' Schlegel had delivered at Vienna the lectures on Shakspere, which he afterwards pub- lished, I had given on the same subject eighteen lectures sub- stantially the same, proceeding from the very same point of view, and deducing the same conclusions, so far as I either then agreed, or now agree, with him. I gave these lectures at the Royal Institution, before six or seven hundred auditors of rank and eminence, in the spring of the same year, in which Sir Humphry Davy, a fellow-lecturer,* made his great revolutionary discoveries in chemistry. Even in detail the coincidence of Schlegel with my lectures was so extraordinary, that all who at a later period ^ heard the same words, taken by me from my notes ^ This " long befoi-e " must be set down to a little excitement (for more of which, see succeeding sentence, commencing "Mr. Hazlitt"'), if we were right, and there can be no doubt, in considering Coleridge's first lectures at the Royal Institution, to have been those of 1806-S. See Lectures of 1811-12, Introductory Matter, § 5. Coleridge's state- ments vary only in seeming. In the letter of Feb. 1818 (see Lecture IX., of 1811-12) he says Sehlegel's lectures " were not given oi-ally till two years after mine." This gives 1806. In the note in the text, " in the spring of the same year," &c., refers to 1807. But it clearly was " before." Sehlegel's lectures were delivered at Vienna during the year 1808, and published the year following. (Volesungen iiber dramatische Kunst und LUeratur, 1809, 3 vols.) Schlegel was, by five years, Coleridge's senioi-, having been born in 1767. He was professor at Jena, when Colei-idge was in Germany. * Coleridge lectured at the Royal Institution in 1810. Shot. IV.] plats of shakspeeb. 343 of the lectures at the Royal Institution, concluded a borrowing on my part from Sohlegel. Mi-. Hazlitt, whose hatred of me is in such an inverse ratio to my zealous kindness towards him, as to be defended by his warmest admirer, Charles Lamb — (who, God bless him ! besides his characteristic obstinacy of adherence to old friends, as long at least as they are at all down in the world, is linked as by a charm to Hazlitt's conversation) — only as " frantic ; " — Mr. Hazlitt, I say, himself replied to an asser- tion of my plagiarism from Schlegel in these words ; — " That is a lie ; for I myself heard the very same character of Hamlet from Coleridge before he went to Germany, and when he had neither read nor could read a page of German ! " Now Hazlitt was on a visit to me at my cottage at Nether Stowey, Somerset, in the summer of theyear 1798, in the September of which year I first was out of sight of the shores of Great Britain. Recorded by me, S. T. Coleridge, 7th January, 1819.] The seeming inconsistencies in the conduct and character of Hamlet have long exercised the conjectural ingenuity of critics ; and, as we are always loth to suppose that the cause of defective apprehension is in ourselves, the mystery has been too commonly explained by the very easy process of setting it down as in fact inexplicable, and by resolving the phenomenon into a misgrowth or lusus of the capricious and irregular genius of Shakspere. The shallow and stupid arrogance of these vulgar and indolent decisions I would fain do my best to expose. I believe the character of Hamlet may be traced to Shakspere's deep and accurate science in mental philosophy. Indeed, that this character must have some connection with the common fundamental laws of our nature may be assumed from the fact, that Hamlet has been the darling of every country in which the literature of England has been fostered. In order to understand him, it is essential that we should reflect on the constitution of our own minds. Man is distingui shed from theJ3Eute_animals in proportion as i^hought prevails over sense,: but in the healthy processes ofTihe mind, a balance is constantly maintained between the impressions from out- 344 NOTES ON SOME OTHEK [1818 ward objects and the inward operations of the intellect ; — for if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action. Now one of Shakspere's modes of creating characters is, to conceive any one intel- lectual or moral faculty in morbid excess, and then to place himself, Shakspere, thus mutilated or diseased, under given circumstances. In Hamlet he seems to have wished to exemplify the moral necessity of a due balance between our attention to the objects of our senses, and our meditation ou the workings of our minds, — an equilibrium between the real and the imaginary worlds. Tw ^ Hajalet^ this Jjalance is_^istarbed,^^^his_thou^tSj_and^ the images of_hig_faney, areLfarmore vivid than h is_^tnpl pq^'i^qpt ions , and his very perceptions, instantly passing through the medium of his contemplations, acquire, as they pass, a form and a colour not naturally their own. Hence we see a great, an alm^ost enormous, intellectual activity, and a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it, with all its symptoms and accompanying qualities. This character Shakspere places in circumstances, under which it is obliged to act on the spur of the moment : — Hamlet is brave and careless of death ; but he vacillates from sensibility, and procras- tinates from thought, and loses the power of action in the energy of resolve. Thus it is that this tragedy presents a direct contrast to that of " Macbeth ; " the one proceeds with the utmost slowness, the other with a crowded and breathless rapidity. The effect of this overbalance of the imaginative power is beautifully illustrated in the everlasting broodings and superfluous activities of Hamlet's mind, which, unseated from its healthy relation, is constantly occupied with the world within, and abstracted from the world without, — giving substance to shadows, and throwing a mist over all common-place actualities. It is the nature of thought to Sect. IV.] plays of shakspeeb. 345 be jiidefinitg ; — definiteness belongs to external imagery aloSB; Hence it is that the sense of sublimity arises, not from the sight of an outward object, but from the beholder's reflection upon it ; — not from the sensuous impression, but from the imaginative reflex. Few have seen a celebrated waterfall without feeling something akin to disappointment : it is only subsequently that the image comes back full into the mind, and brings with it a train of grand or beautiful associations. Hamlet feels this ; his senses are in a state of trance, and he looks upon external thiugs as hiero- glyphics. His soliloquy — " O I that this too too solid flesh would melt," &o. springs from that craving after the indefinite — for that which is not — which most easily besets men of genius ; and the self-delusion common to this temper of mind is finely exemplified in the jjharacter which Hamlet gives of him- self :— " It cannot be But I am pigeon-liver'd, and lack gall To make oppression bitter." He mistakes the seeing his chains for the breaking them, delays action till action is of no use, and dies the victim of mere circumstance and accident. , There is a great significancy in the names of Shakspere's plays. In the "Twelfth Night," "Midsummer Night's Dream," "As Tou Like It," and "Winter's Tale," the total effect is produced by a co-ordination of the characters as in a wreath of flowers. But in " Coriolanus," " Lear," "Eomeo and Juliet," "Hapilet," "Othello," &e., the effect arises from the subordination of all to one, either as the prominent person, ov the principal object. " Cymbeline " is the only exception ; and even that has its advantages in preparing the audience for the chaos of time, place, and 346 NOTES ON SOMB OTHER [1818 costume, by throwing the date back into a fabulous king's reign. But as of more importance, so more striking, is the judgment displayed by our truly dramatic poet, as well as poet of the drama, in the management of his first scenes. With the single exception of " Cymbeline," they either place before us at one glance both the past and the future in some efEect, which implies the continuance and full agency of its cause, as in the feuds and party-spirit of the servants of the two houses in the first scene of " Romeo and Juliet ; " or in the degrading passion for shows and public spectacles, and the overwhelming attachment for the newest successful war-chief in the Roman people, already become a populace, contrasted- with the jealousy of the nobles in " Julius Csesar ; " — or they at once commence the action so as to excite a curiosity for the explanation in the following scenes, as in the storm of wind and waves, and the boatswain in the " Tempest," instead of antici- pating our curiosity, as in most other first scenes, and in too many other first acts ; — or they act, by contrast of diction suited to the characters, at once to heighten the efEect, and yet to give a naturalness to the language and rhythm of the principal personages, either as that of Pros- pero and Miranda by the appropriate lowness of the style, — or as in " King John," by the equally appropriate state- liness of official harangues or narratives, so that the after blank verse seems to belong to the rank and quality of the speakers, and not to the poet ; — or they strike at once the key-note, and give the predominant spirit of the play, as in the "Twelfth Night," and in " Macbeth ; "—or finally, the first scene comprises all these advantages at once, as in " Hamlet." Compare the easy language of common life, in which this drama commences, with the direful music and wild wayward rhythm and abrupt lyrics of the opening of Sect. IV.] plats of shakspbeb. 347 "Macbeth." The tone is quite familiar; — there is do poetic description of night, no elaborate information con- veyed by one speaker to another of what both had imme- diately before their senses — (such as the first distich in Addison's " Cato,' which is a translation into poetry of " Past four o'clock and a dark morning ! ") ; — and yet nothing bordering on the comic on the one hand, nor any striving of the intellect on the other. It is precisely the language of sensation among men who feared no charge of effeminacy, for feeling what they had no want of resolution to bear. Yet the armour, the dead silence, the watchful- ness that first interrupts it, the welcome relief of the guard, the cold, the broken expressions of compelled attention to bodily feelings still under control — all excellently accord with, and prepare for, the after gradual rise into tragedy ; — rbut, above all, into a tragedy, the interest of which is as eminently ad et apvd intra, as that of " Macbeth " is directly ad extra. In all the best attested stories of ghosts and visions, as in that of Brutus, of Archbishop Cranmer, that of Ben- venuto Cellini recorded by himself, and the vision of Galileo communicated by him to his favourite pupil Tor- ricelli, the ghost-seers were in a state of cold or chilling damp from without, and of anxiety inwardly. It has been with all of them as with Francisco on his guard, — alone, in the depth and silence of the night; — " 'twas bitter cold, and they were sick at heart, and not a mouse stirring." The attention to minute sounds, — naturally associated with the recollection of minute objects, and the more familiar and trifling, the more impressive from the unusualness of their producing any impression at all — gives a philosophic per- 1 " The dawn is OTcrcast, the morning lowers, And heavily in clouds brings on the day, The great, the important day, big with the fate Of Cato and of Rome." 348 NOTES ON SOME OTHER [1818 tinency to this last image ; but it has likewise its dramatic use and purpose. For its commonness in ordinary con- Tersation tends to produce the sense of reality, and at once hides the poet, and yet approximates the reader or spec- tator to that state in which the highest poetry will appear, and in its component parts, though not in the whole com- position, really is, the language of nature. If I should not speak it, I feel that I should be thinking it; — the voice only is the poet's, — the words are my own. That Shak- spere meant to put an eflEect in the actor's power in the very first words — "Who's there?" — is evident from the impatience expressed by the startled Francisco in the words that follow — " Nay, answer nie : stand and unfold yourself." A brave man is never so peremptory, as when he fears that he is afraid. Observe the gradual transition from the silence and the still recent habit of listening in Francisco's — " I think I hear them " — to the more cheerful call out, which a good actor would observe, in the — " Stand ho ! Who is there ? " Bernardo's inquiry after Horatio, and the repetition of his name and in his own presence, indicate a respect or an eagerness that implies him as one of the persons who are in the foreground; and the scepticism attributed to him, — " Horatio says, 'tis but our fantasy ; Aud will not let belief take hold of him — " prepares us for Hamlet's after eulogy on him as one whose blood and judgment were happily commingled. The actor should also be careful to distinguish the expectation and gladness of Bernardo's "Welcome, Horatio!" from the mere courtesy of his " Welcome, good Marcellus ! " Now observe the admirable indefiniteness of the first opening out of the occasion of all this anxiety. The pre- paration informative of the audience is just as much as was precisely necessary, and no more ; — it begins with the un- certainty appertaining to a question : — Sect. IV.] plays of shakspeeb. 349 " Mar. What, has this thing appear'd again to-night ? — " Even the word " again" has its creddbilizing effect. Then Horatio, the representative of the ignorance of the audience, not himself, but by Marcellns to Bernardo, anticipates the common solution — "'tis but our fantasy!" upon which Maroellus rises into . " This dreaded sight, twice seen of us — " vvhich immediately afterwards becomes "this apparition," and that, too, an intelligent spirit, that is, to be spoken to ! Then comes the confirmation of Horatio's disbelief ; — " Tush .' tush ! 'twill not appear !— " and the silence, with which the scene opened, is again restored in the shivering feeling of Horatio sitting down, at such a time, and with the two eye-witnesses, to hear a story of a ghost, and that, too, of a ghost which had appeared twice before at the very same hour. In the deep feeling which Bernardo has of the solemn nature of what he i^ about to relate, he makes an effort to master his own imaginative terrors by an elev9,tion of style, — itself a con- tinuation of the effort, — and by turning off from the ap- parition, as from something which would force him too deeply into himself, to the outward objects, the realities of nature, which had accompanied it : — " Ber. Last night of all. When yon same star, that's westward from the pole, Had made his course to illume that part of heaven Where now it burns, Marcellus and myself, The bell then beating one " This passage seems to contradict the critical law that what is told, makes a faint impression compared with what is beholden ; for it does indeed convey to the mind more than the eye can see ; whilst the interruption of the narra- tive at the very moment, when we are most intensely 350 NOTES ON SOME OTHBE [181 listening for the sequel, and have our thoughts diverts from the dreaded sight in expectation of the desired, y almost dreaded, tale — this gives all the suddenness ar surprise of the original appearance ; — " Mar. Peace, break thee off; look, where it comes again ! — " Note the judgment displayed in having the two persoi present, who, as having seen the Ghost before, are natuual] eager in confirming their form.er opinions, — whilst tl sceptic is' silent, and after having been twice addressed 1 his friends, answers with two hasty syllables — " Most like, — and a confession of horror : " — It harrows me with fear and wonder." O heaven ! words are wasted on those who feel, and t those who do not feel the exquisite judginent of Shakspei in this scene, what can be said ? — Hume himself could nc but have had faith in this Ghost dramatically, let his anti ghostism have been as strong as Samson against othe ghosts less powerfully raised. Act i. sc. 1. • " Mar. Good now, sit down, and tell me, he that knows, Why this same strict and most observant watch," &c. How delightfully natural is the transition to the retro spective narrative ! And observe, upon the Ghost's re appearance, how much Horatio's courage is increased b having translated the late individual spectator into genera thought and past experience, — and the sympathy of Mai cellus and Bernardo with his patriotic surmises in darin to strike at the Ghost; whilst in a moment, upon it vanishing, the former solemn awe-stricken feeling return upon them : — " We do it wrong, being so majestical, To offer it the show of riolence. — " lb. Horatio's speech : — Sect. IV.] plats op shakspeeb. 351 " I have heard, The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn. Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat Awake the god of day," &e. No Addison could be more careful to be poetical in diction than Shakspere in providing the grounds and sources of its propriety. But how to elevate a thing almost mean by its familiarity, young poets may learn in this treatment of the cock-crow. lb. Horatio's speech : — " And, by my advice. Let ns impart what we have seen to-night Unto young Hamlet ; for, upon my life. The ' spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him." Note the inobtrusive and yet fully adequate mode of intro- ducing the main character, "young Hamlet,'' upon whom is transferred all the interest excited for the acts and con- cerns of the king his father. lb. sc. 2. The audience are now relieved by a change of scene to the royal court, in order that " Hamlet " may not have to take up the leavings of exhaustion. , In the king's speech, observe the set and pedantically antithetic form of the sentences when touching that which galled the heels of conscience, — the strain of undignified rhetoric, — and yet in what follows concerning the public weal, a certain appropriate majesty. Indeed was he not a royal brother ? — lb. King's speech : — '* And now, Laertes, what's the news with you ? " &c. Thus with great art Shakspere introduces a most important, but still subordinate character first, Laertes, who is yet thus graciously treated in consequence of the assistance 1 Read "this." 352 NOTES ON SOME OTHBE [18! given to tbe election of the late king's brother instead his son by Polonins. lb. " Ham. A little more than kin, and less than kind. Xing. How is it that the clouds still hang on you ? Mam. Not so, my lord, I am too much i' the sun." Hamlet opens his mouth with a playing on words, tl complete absence of which throughout characterizes ' Mai beth." This playing on words may be attributed to mar causes or motives, as either to an exuberant activity ( mind, as in the higher comedy of Shakspere generally ;- or to an imitation of it as a mere fashion, as if it wei said — "Is not this better than groaning?" — or to a coi temptuous exultation in minds vulgarized and overset b their success, as in the poetic instance of .Milton's Devi in the battle ; — or it is the language of resentment, as familiar to every one who has witnessed the quarrels of tl lower orders, where there is invariably a profusion of pui ning invective, whence, perhaps, nicknames have in a coi siderable degree sprung up ; — or it is the language ( suppressed passion, and especially of a hardly smothere p3rsonal dislike. The first, and last of these combine i Hamlet's case ; and I have little doubt that Farmer • right in supposing the equivocation carried on in the e: pression "too ranch i' the sun," or son. lb. " Ham. Ay, madam, it is common." Here observe Hamlet's delicacy to his mother, and how tl suppression prepares him for the overflow in the nei speech, in which his character is more developed by brinf ing forward his aversion to externals, and which betray his habit of brooding over the world within him, couple with a prodigality of beautiful words, which are the ha embodyings of thought, and are more than thought, an Sect. IV.] plats op shakspbee. 353' have an outness, a reality sui generis, and yet retain their correspondence and shadowy affinity to the images and movements within. Note also Hamlet's silence to the long speech of the king which follows, and his respectful, but general, answer to his mother. lb. Hamlet's first soliloquy : — " O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew ! " &c. This tcBdvwm vitcB is a common oppression on minds cast in the Hamlet mould, and is caused by disproportionate m.ental exertion, which necessitates exhaustion of bodily feeling. Where there is a just coincidence of external and internal action, pleasure is always the result ; but where the former is deficient, and the mind's appetency of the ideal is unchecked, realities will seem cold and unmoving. In such cases, passion combiues itself with the indefinite alone. In this mood of his mind the relation of the ap- pearance of his father's spirit in arms is made all at once to Hamlet : — it is — Horatio's speech, in particular — a per- fect model of the true style of dramatic narrative ; — ^the purest poetry, and yet iu the most natural language, equally remote from the ink-horn and the plough. lb. sc. 3. This scene must be regarded as one of Shak- spere's lyric movements in the play, and the skill with which it is interwoven with the dramatic parts is peculiarly an excellence of our poet. You experience the sensation of a pause without the sense of a stop. Tou will observe in Ophelia's short and general answer to the long speech of Laertes the natural carelessness of innocence, which cannot think such a code of cautions and prudences necessary to its own preservation. lb. Speech of Polonius : — (in Stockdale's edition.) " Or (not to crack the wind of the poor phrase,) Wronging it thus, you'll tender me a fool." A A 354 NOTES ON SOME OTHEB [1818 I suspect this " wronging " is here used mnch in the same sense as " wringing " or " wrenching ; " and that the paren- thesis should be extended to " thus." ' lb. Speech of Polonius : — " How prodigal the soul Lends the tongue tows : — these blazes, daughter," &c. A spondee has, I doubt not, dropped out of the text Either insert " Go to " after " vows ; " — " Lends the tongue tows : — Go to, these blazes, daughter — " or read " Lends the tongue tows : — These blazes, daughter, mark you — " Shakspere never introduces a catalectic line without intend- ing an equivalent to the foot omitted in the pauses, or the dwelling emphasis, or the diffused retardation. I do not, however, deny that a good actor might, by employing the last mentioned means, namely, the retardation, or solemn knowing drawl, supply the missing spondee with good efEect. But I do not believe that in this or any other of the foregoing speeches of Polonius, Shakspere, meant to bring out the senility or weakness of that personage's mind. In the great ever-recuxring dangers and duties of life, where to distinguish the fit objects for the application of the maxims collected by the experience of a long life, requires no fineness of tact, as in the admonitions to his son and daughter, Polonius is uniformly made respectable. But if an actor were even capable of catching these shades in the character, the pit and the gallery would be mal- content at their exhibition. It is to Hamlet that Polonius is, and is meant to be, contemptible, because in inward- ness and uncontrollable activity of movement, Hamlet's ' It is so pointed in the modern editions. — H. N. C. As also in the 2nd Quarto, 1604, which has " wrong," and in the 1st I"ol. 1623, which has " roaming." The Globe Ed. prints " running." Sect. IV.] plats of shakspeee. 35'5 mind is the logical contrary t6 tiat of Polonius, and be- sides, as I liave observed before, Hamlet dislikes the man, as false to his true allegiance in the matter of the succes- sion to the crown. lb. sc. 4. The unimportant conversation with which this scene opens is a proof of Shakspere's minute know- ledge of human nature. It is a well established fact, that on the brink of any serious enterprise, or event of moment, men almost invariably endeavour to elude the pressure of their own thoughts by turning aside to trivial objects and familiar circumstances : thus this dialogue on the platform begins with remarks on the coldness of the air, and iuquiries, obliquely connected, indeed, with the expected hour of the visitation, but thrown out in a seeming vacuity of topics, as to the striking of the clock and so forth. The same desire to escape from the impending thought is carried on in Hamlet's account of, and moralizing on, the Danish custom of wassailing : he runs ofE from the particalar to the universal, and, in his repugnance to personal and individual concerns, escapes, as it were, from himself in generalizations, and smothers the impatience and uneasy feelings of the moment in abstract reasoning. Besides this, another purpose is answered ; — for by thus entangling the attention of the audience in the nice distinctions and parenthetical sentences of this speech of Hamlet's, Shak- spere takes, them completely by surprise on the appearance of the Grhost, which comes upon them in all the suddenness of its visionary character. Indeed, no modern writer would have dared, like Shakspere, to have preceded this last visitation by two distinct appearances, — or could have contrived that the third should rise upon the former two in impressiveness and solemnity of interest. But in addition to all the other excellencies of Hamlet's speech concerning the wassail-music — so finely revealing the predominant idealism, the ratiocinative meditativeness, 356 NOTES ON SOME OTHER [1818 of his character — it has the advantage of giving nature and probahility to the impassioned continuity of the speech instantly directed to the Ghost. The inomentv/m had been given to his mental activity ; the full current of the thoughts and words had set in, and the very forgetfulness, in the fervour of his argumentation, of the purpose for which he was there, aided in preventing the appearance from benumbing the mind. Consequently, it acted as a new impulse, — a sudden stroke which increased the velocity of the body already in motion, whilst it altered the direction. The co-presence of Horatio, Marcellus, and Bernardo is most judiciously contrived; for it renders the courage of Hamlet and his impetuous eloquence perfectly intelligible. The knowledge, — the unthought of consciousness, — the sensation, — of human auditors, — of flesh and blood sym- pathists — acts as a support and a stimulation a tergo, while the front of the mind, the whole consciousness of the speaker, is filled, yea, absorbed, by the apparition. Add too, that the apparition itself has by its previous appear- ances been brought nearer to a thing of this world. This accrescence of objectivity in a Ghost that yet retains all its ghostly attributes and fearful subjectivity, is truly wonderful. lb. sc. 5. Hamlet's speech : — " O all you host of heaven ! O earth ! What else ? And shall I couple hell ?—'' I remember nothing equal to this burst unless it be the first speech of Prometheus in the Greek drama, after the exit of Vulcan and the two Afrites. But Shakspere alone could have produced the vow of Hamlet to make his memory a blank of all maxims and generalized truths, that "observation had copied there," — followed imme- diately by the speaker noting down the generalized fact, " That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain ! " Sect. IV.] plats op shaksperb. 357 lb. " Mar. Hillo, ho, ho, my lord ! Ham. Hillo, ho, ho, boy ! come bird, come," &c. TMs part of the scene after Hamlet's interview with the Ghost has been charged with an improbable eccentricity. But the truth is, that after the mind has been stretched beyond its usual pitch and tone, it must either sink into exhaustion and inanity, or seek relief by change. It is thus well known that persons conversant in deeds of cruelty, contrive to escape from conscience, by connecting something of the ludicrous with them, and by inventing grotesque terms and a certain technical phraseology to dis- guise the horror of their practices. Indeed, paradoxical as it may appear, the terrible by a law of the human mind always touches on the verge of the ludicrous. Both arise from the perception of somethiug out of the common order of things — something, in fact, out of its place ; and if from this we can abstract danger, the uncommonness will alone remain, and the sense of the ridiculous be excited. The close alliance of these opposites — ^they are not contraries — appears from the circumstance, that laughter is equally the expression of extreme anguish and horror as of joy : as there are tears of sorrow and tears of joy, so is there a laugh of terror and a laugh of merriment. These complex causes will naturally have produced in Hamlet the dis- position to escape from his own feelings of the overwhelm- ing and supernatural by a wild transition to the ludicrous,' — a sort of cunning bravado, bordering on the flights of delirium. For you may, perhaps, observe that Hamlet's ^ A similar recourse to an antic ludicrousness in Hamlet, as an outlet for over-excitement, occurs when the king turns sick at the poisoning in the play. This involuntary evidence of guilt causes Hamlet to exclaim (or to sing, — and we can almost figure him dancing about), " For thou must know, O Damon dear," &o. Act iii. so. 2. 368 NOTES ON SOME OTHBB [1818 wildness is but half false; he plays that subtle trick of pretending to act only when he is very near really being what he acts. The subterraneous speeches of the Ghost are hardly defensible : — but I would call your attention to the charac- teristic difference between this Ghost, as a superstition connected with the most mysterious truths of revealed religion, — and Shakspere's consequent reverence in his treatment of it, — and the foul earthly witcheries and wild language in " Macbeth." Act ii. sc. 1. Polonius and Reynaldo. In all things dependent on, or rather made up of, fine address, the manner is no more or otherwise rememberable than the light motions, steps, and gestures of youth and health. But this is almost everything : — no wonder, there- fore, if that which can be put down by rule in the memory should appear to us as mere poring, maudlin, cunning, — slyness blinking through the watery eye of superannuation. So in this admirable scene, Polonius, who is throughout the skeleton of his own former skill and statecraft, hunts the trail of policy at a dead scent, supplied by the weak fever-smell in his own nostrils. lb. sc. 2. Speech of Polonius : — " My liege, aud madam, to expostulate^" &c. Warburton's note : " TLeu as to tlie jingles, and play on words, let us but look into the sermons of Dr. Donne (the wittiest man of that age), aud we shall find them full of this vein." I have, and that most carefully, read Dr. Donne's sermons, and find none of these jingles. The great art of an orator — to make whatever he talks of appear of impor- tance — this, indeed, Donne has efiected with consummate skill. Sect. IV.] plats of shakspbeb. 359 lb. " Sa/m. Excellent well 5 You are a fishmonger." That is, yon. are sent to fish, out this secret. This ia Hamlet's own meaning, lb. " Sam. For if the sun breeds maggots in a dead dog, Being a god, kissing carrion — " These pm-posely obscure lines, I rather think, refer to some thought in Hamlet's mind, contrasting the lovely daughter with such a tedious old fool, her father, as he, Hamlet, represents Polonius to himself : — " Why, fool as he is, he is some degrees in rank above a dead dog's carcase ; and if ' the sun, being a god that kisses carrion, can raise life out of a dead dog, — why may not good fortune, that favours' fools, have raised a lovely girl out of this dead-alive old fool?" Warburton is often led astray, in his interpreta- tions, by his attention to general positions without the due Shaksperian reference to what is probably passing in the mind of his speaker, characteristic, and es;pository of his particular character and present mood. The subsequent passage, — " O Jephtha, judge of Israel ! what a treasure hadst thou ! " IS confirmatory of my view of these lines, lb. "Sam. You cannot. Sir, take from me anything that -I will more willingly part withal; except my life, except my life, except my life." This repetition strikes me as most admirable. lb. "Sam. Then are our beggars, bodies; and our monarchs, and out- stretched heroes, the beggars' shadows." I do not understand this ; and Shakspere seems to have 360 NOTES ON SOME OTHER [1818 intended the meaning not to be more than snatched at : — " By my fay, I cannot reason ! " lb. "The rugged Pyrrhns — he whose sable arms," &c. This admirable substitution of the epic for the dramatic, giving such a reality to the impassioned dramatic diction of Shakspere's own dialogue, and authorized, too, by the actual style of the tragedies before his time (" Porrex and Ferrex," ' " Titus Andronicus," &c.) — is weU worthy of notice. The fancy, that a burlesque was intended, sinks below criticism : the lines, as epic narrative, are superb. In the thoughts, and even in the separate parts of the diction, this description is highly poetical : in truth, taken by itself, this is its fault that it is too poetical !-^the lan-- guage of lyric vehemence and epic pomp, and not of the drama. But if Shakspere had made the diction truly dramatic, where would have been the contrast between « Hamlet " and the play in " Hamlet ? " lb. " had seen the mohled queen," &c. A mob-cap is still a word in common use for a morning cap, which conceals the whole head of hair, and passes under the chin. It is nearly the same as the night-cap, that is, it is an imitation of it, so as to answer the purpose ("I am not drest for company"), and yet reconciling it with neatness and perfect purity. lb. Hamlet's soliloquy : " O, what a rogue and peasant slave am 1 !" &c. ' The earliest known English tragedy, " The tragedie of Ferrex and Porrex," acted "before the Queene's Maiestie" on "the xviij day of Januarie, 1561, by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple," and first published in 1570. SbCT. IV.] PLATS OF SHAKSPEEE. 361 This is Shakspere's own attestation to the truth of the idea of Hamlet which I have before put forth. lb. " The spirit that I have seen, May be a ' devil : and the devil hath power To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and, perhaps Out of my weakness, and my melancholy, (As he is very potent with such spirits) Abuses me to damn me." Sec Sir Thomas Brown : " I believe that those apparitions and ghosts of departed persons are not the wandering souls of men, but the unquiet walks of devils, prompting and suggesting us unto mischief, blood and villany, instilling and stealing into our hearts, that the blessed spirits are not at rest in their graves, but wander solicitous of the affairs of the world." leA. Pt. I. Sect. 37. Act iii. sc. 1. " To be, or not to be, that is the question," &o. This speech is of absolutely universal interest, — and yet to which of all Shakspere's characters could it have been appropriately given but to Hamlet ? For Jaques it would have been too deep, and for lago too habitual a communion with the heart ; which in every man belongs, or ought to belong, to all mankind. lb. "That undiscover'd country, from whose bourne No traveller returns. — " Theobald's note in defence of the supposed contradiction of this in the apparition of the Ghost. miserable defender ! If it be necessary to remove the apparent contradiction, — if it be not rather a great beauty, 1 Quarto of 1604, "a deale;" 1st Fol. "the Diyell;" Globe Ed. "the devil." 362 NOTES ON SOME OTHBE [1818 — surely, it were easy to say, that no traveller returns to this world, as to his home, or abiding-place. lb. "Ham. Ha, ha ! are you honest ? Oph. My lord ? Ham. Are you fair ? " Here it is evident that the penetrating Hamlet perceives, from the strange and forced manner of Ophelia, that the Sweet girl was not acting a part of her own, but was a decoy ; and his after speeches are not so much directed to her as to the listeners and spies. Such a discovery in a mood so anxious and irritable accounts for a certain harsh- ness in him ;— and yet a wild up-working of love, sporting with opposites in a wilful self -tormenting strain of irony, is perceptible throughout. "I did love you once:" — "I loved you not : " — and particularly in his enumeration of the faults of the sex from which Ophelia is so free, that the mere freedom therefrom constitutes her character. Note Shakspere's charm of composing the female character by the absence of characters, that is, marks and out- juttings. lb. Hamlet's speech : — " I say, we will have no more marriages : those that are married already, all but one, shall live : the rest shall keep as they are." Observe this dallying with the inward purpose, charac- teristic of one who had not brought his mind to the steady acting point. He would fain sting the uncle's mind ; — but to stab his body ! — The soliloquy of Ophelia, which follows, is the perfection of love — so exquisitely unselfish ! lb. sc. 2. This dialogue of Hamlet with the players is one of the happiest instances of Shakspere's power of diversifying the scene while he is carrying on the plot. lb. "Ham. My lord, you play'd once i' the university, you say? (2b Polonius.) Sect. IV.] plats op shakspeee. 363 To have kept Hamlet's love for Ophelia before the audience in any direct form, would have made a breach in the unity of the interest; — but yet to the thoughtful reader it is suggested by his spite to poor Polonius, whom he cannot let rest. lb. The style of the interlude here is distinguished from the real dialogue by rhyme, as in the first interview with the players by epic verse. lb. " Sos. My lord, you once did love me. Ham. So I do still, by these pickers and stealers. " I never heard an actor give this word " so " its proper emphasis. Shakspere's meaning is — " loved you ? Hum ! — so I do still, &c." ^ There has been no change in my opinion: — I think as ill of you as I did. Else Hamlet ' tells an ignoble falsehood, and a useless one, as the last speech to Gruildenstern — "Why, look you now," &e. — proves. lb. Hamlet's soliloquy : — " Now could I drink hot blood. And do such business as the bitter day ^ Would quake to look on." The utmost at which Hamlet arrives, is a disposition, a mood, to do something : — but what to do, is still left un- decided, while every word he utters tends to betray his disguise. Tet observe how perfectly equal to any call of / the moment is Hamlet, let it only not be for the f ature. lb. sc. 4>. Speech of Polonius. Polonius's volunteer obtrusion of himself into this business, while it is appro- priate to his character, still itching after former importance, removes all likelihood that Hamlet should «uspect his » ' So, Quarto of 1604. The 1st Fol. and Globe Ed. read " And do such bitter business as the day." 364 NOTES ON SOME OTHBE [1818 presence, and prevents us from making his death injure Hamlet in our opinion. lb. The king's speech : — " O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven," &o. This speech well marks the difference between crime and guilt of habit. The conscience here is still admitted to audience. Nay, even as an audible soliloquy, it is far less improbable than is supposed by such as haye watched men only in the beaten road of their feelings. But the final — "all maybe weU ! " is remarkable; — ^the degree of merit attributed by the self-flattering soul to its own struggle, though baffled, and to the indefinite half-promise, half- command, to persevere in religious duties. The solution is in the divine medium, of the Christian doctrine of expiation: — ^not what yon have done, but what you are, must determine. lb. Hamlet's speech : — " Now might I do it, pat, now he is praying : And now I'U do it : — And so he goes to heaven ! And so am I revenged ? That would be scann'd," &c. Dr. Johnson's mistaking of the marks of reluctance and procrastination for impetuous, horror-striking, fiendishness ! — Of such importance is it to understand the germ of a character. But the interval taken by Hamlet's speech is truly awful ! And then — «' My words fly up, my thoughts remain below : Words, without thoughts, never to heaven go,"-:- O what a lesson concerning the essential difference be- tween wishing and willing, and the folly of all motive- mongering, while the individual self remains ! lb. so. 4. " Bam. A bloody deed ; — almost as bad, good mother, As kill a king, and marry with his brother. Qfieen. As kill a king ? " Sect. IV.] plats or shakspeeb. 365 I confess that Shakspere has left the character of the Queen in an unpleasant perplexity. Was she, or was she not, conscious of the fratricide ? Act iv. sc. 2. " Sos. Take you me for a spunge, my lord ? Ham. Ay, Sir ; that soaks up the King's countenance, his rewards, his authorities," &c. Hamlet's madness is made to consist in the free utterance\ of all the thoughts that had passed through his mind before; ) — in fact, in telling home-truths. '' Act iv. sc. 5. Ophelia's singing. 0, note the conjunc- tion here of these two thoughts that had never subsisted in disjunction, the love for Hamlet, and her filial love, with the guileless floating on the surface of her pure imagination of the cautions so lately expressed, and the fears not too delicately avowed, by her father and brother concerning the dangers to which her honour lay exposed. Thought, •affliction, passion, murder itself — she turns to favour ajid prettiness. This play of association is instanced in the close : — "My brother shall know of it, and I thank you for your good counsel." lb. Gentleman's speech : — " And as the world were now but to begin, Antiquity forgot, custom not known, The ratifiers and props of every ward ' — They cry," &c. Fearful and self-suspicious as I always feel, when I seem to see an error of judgment in Shakspere, yet I cannot reconcile the cool, and, as Warburton calls it, "rational and consequential," reflection in these lines with the anony- mousness, or the alarm, of this Gentleman or Messenger, as he is called in other editions. 1 Bead " word." 366 NOTES ON SOME OTHER [1818 lb. King's speech : — " There's such divinity doth hedge a king. That treason can but peep to what it would. Acts little of his will." Proof, as indeed all else is, that Shakspere never intended ns to see the King with Hamlet's eyes ; though, I suspect, the managers have long done so. lb. Speech of Laertes : — " To hell, allegiance ! vows, to the blackest devil ! " " Laertes is a good character, but," &c. Wakburton. Mercy on Warburton's notion of goodness ! Please to refer to the seventh scene of this act ; — " I will do it ; And for this purpose I'll anoint my sword," &c. uttered by Laertes after the King's description of Hamlet; — " He being remiss, Most generous, and free from all contriving. Will not peruse the foils." Tet I acknowledge that Shakspere evidently wishes, as much as possible, to spare the character of Laertes, — to break the extreme turpitude of his consent to become an agent and accomplice of the King's treachery; — and to this end he re-introduces Ophelia at the close of this scene to afEord a probable stimulus of passion in her brother. lb. sc. 6. Hamlet's capture by the pirates. This is almost the only play of Shakspere, in which mere accidents, independent of all will, form an essential part of the plot ; — but here how judiciously in keeping with the character of the over-meditative Hamlet, ever at last determined by accident or by a fit of passion ! lb. sc. 7. Note how the King first awakens Laertes's vanity by praising the reporter, and then gratifies it by the report itself, and finally points it by — Sect. IV.] plats op shakspeee. 367 " Sir, this report of his Did Hamlet so envenom with his envy ! " — lb. King's speech : " For goodness, growing to a pleuriay. Dies in his own too much." Theobald's note from Warburton, who conjectures "plethory." I rather think that Shakspere meant "pleurisy," but involved in it the thought of plethora, as supposing pleurisy to arise from too much blood ; otherwise I cannot explain the following line — " And then this should is like a spendthrift sigh, That hurts by easing." In a stitch in the side every one must have heaved a sigh that "hurt by easing." Since writing the above I feel confirmed that " pleurisy " is the right word ; for I find that in the old medical dic- tionaries the pleurisy is often called the " plethory." lb. " Queen. Your sister's drown'd, Laertes. Laer. Drown'd ! O, where ? " That Laertes might be excused in some degree for not cooling, the Act concludes with the affecting death of OpheUa, — who in the beginning lay like a Uttle projection of land into a lake or stream, covered with spray-flowers quietly reflected in the quiet waters, but at length is under- mined or loosened, and becomes a faery isle, and after a brief vagrancy sinks almost without an eddy ! Act V. so. 1. O, the rich contrast between the Clowns and Hamlet, as two extremes ! Tou see in the former the mockery of logic, and a traditional wit valued, like truth, for its antiquity, and treasured up, like a tune, for use. ' lb. so. 1 and 2. Shakspere seems to mean all Hamlet's 368 NOTES ON SOME OTHER [1818 character to be brought together before his final dis- appearance from the scene ; — his meditative excess in the ; grave-digging, his yielding to passion with Laertes, his love for Ophelia blazing out, his tendency to generalize on all occasions in the dialogue with Horatio, his fine gentle- manly manners with Osrick, and his and Shakspere'e own fondness for presentiment : , " But thou would'st not think, how ill all's here about my heart : but it is no matter." Macbeth. "Macbeth" stands in contrast throughout with "Ham- let;" in the manner of opening more especially. In the latter, there is a gradual ascent from the simplest forms of conversation to the language of impassioned intellect, — yet the intellect still remaining the seat of passion : in the former, the invocation is at once made to the imagination and the emotions connected therewith. Hence the move- ment throughout is the most rapid of all Shakspere's plays ; and hence also, with the exception of the disgusting passage of the Porter' (Act ii. sc. 3), which I dare pledge myself to demonstrate to be an interpolation of the actors, there is not, to the best of my remembrance, a single pun or play on words in the whole drama. I have previously given an answer to the thousand times repeated charge against Shakspere upon the subject of his punning, and I here merely mention the fact of the absence of any puns in " Macbeth," as justifying a candid doubt at least, whether even in these figures of speech and fanciful modifications ' It is strange that Coleridge did not see the absolute necessity of interposing just such a scene, between the murder and discovery of it, to relieve the terrible strain on the mind of the audience, — and even might we not add, on the dramatic powers of the poet ? Sect. IV.] plats of shakspeeb. 369 of language, Shakspere may not have followed rules and principles that merit and would stand the test of philo- sophic examination. And hence, also, there is an entire absence of comedy, nay, even of irony and philosophic con- templation, in "Macbeth," — the play being wholly and purely tragic. For the same cause, there are no reasonings of equivocal morality, which would have required a more leisurely. state and a consequently greater activity of mind ; — no sophistry of self-delusion, — except only that previously to the dreadful act, Macbeth mistranslates the recoiling? and ominous whispers of conscience into prudential and selfish reasonings, and, after the deed done, the terrors of remorse into fear from external dangers, — like delirious men who run away from the phantoms of their own brains, or, raised by terror to rage, stab the real object that is within their reach : — whilst Lady Macbeth merely endea- vours to reconcile his and her own sinkings of heart by anticipations of the worst, and an affected bravado in con- fronting them. In all the rest, Macbeth 's language is the grave utterance of the very heart, conscience-sick, even to the last faintings of moral death. It is the same in all the other characters. The variety arises from rage, caused ever and anon by disruption of anxious thought, and the quick transition of fear into it. In " Hamlet " and " Macbeth " the scene opens with superstition; but, in each it is not merely difBerent, but opposite. In the first it is connected with the best and holiest feelings ; in the second with the shadowy, turbulent, and unsanctified cravings of the individual will. Nor is the purpose the same ; in the one the object is to excite, whilst in the other it is to mark a mind already excited. Superstition, of one sort or another, is natural to victorious generals ; the instances are too notorious to need mention- ing. There is so much of chance in jrarfare, and such vast events are connected with the acts of a single individual, — B B 370 KOTES ON SOME OTHER [1818 the representative, in truth, of the efEorts of myriads, and yet to the public and, doubtless, to his own feelings, the aggregate of aU, — that the proper temperament for gene- rating or receiving superstitious impressions is naturally produced. Hope, the master element of a commanding genius, meeting with an active and combining intellect, and an imagination of just that degree of vividness which disquiets and impels the soul to try to realize its images, greatly increases the creative power of the mind ; and hence the images become a satisfying world of themselves, as is the case in every poet and original philosopher : — but hope fully gratified, and yet the elementary basis of the passion remaining, becom.es fear ; and, indeed, the general, who must often feel, even though he may hide it from his own consciousness, how large a share chance had in his successes, may very naturally be irresolute in a new scene, where he knows that all will depend on his own act and election. The Weird Sisters are as true a creation of Shakspere's, as his Ariel and Caliban,- — fates, furies, and materializing witches being the elements. They are wholly different from any representation of witches in the contemporary writers, and yet presented a sufficient external resemblance to the creatures of vulgar prejudice to act immediately on the audience. Their character consists in the imaginative disconnected from the good ; they are the shadowy obscure and fearfully anomalous of physical nature, the lawless of human nature, — elemental avengers without sex or kin : " Fair is foul, and foul is fair ; Hover thro' the fog and filthy air.'' How much it were to be wished in playing "Macbeth," that an attempt should be made to introduce the flexile character-mask of the ancient pantomime ; — that Tlaxman would contribute his genius to the embodying and making sensuously perceptible that of Shakspere ! Sect. IV.] plays op shakspebb. 371 The style and rhythm of the Captain's speeches in the second scene should be illustrated by reference to the interlude in " Hamlet," in which the epic is substituted for the tragic, in order to make the latter be felt as the real- life diction. In " Macbeth," the poet's object was to raise the mind at once to the high tragic tone, that the audience might be ready for the precipitate consummation of guilt in the early part of the play. The true reason for the first appearance of the Witches is to strike the key-note of the character of the whole drama, as is proved by their re- appearance in the third scene, after such an order of the king's as establishes their stfpematural power of infor- mation. I say information, — for so it only is as to Glamis and Cawdor; the "king\hereafter " was still contingent, — still in Macbeth's moral will ; although, if he should yield to the temptation, and thus forfeit his free agency, the link of cause and effect more physico would then commence. I need not say, that the general idea is all that can be required from the poet, — not a scholastic logical consis- tency in all the parts so as to meet metaphysical objectors. But O ! how truly Shaksperian is the opening of Macbeth's character given in the impossessedness of Banquo's mind, wholly present to the present object, — an unsullied, un- scarified mirror ! — And how strictly true to nature it is, that Banquo, and not Macbeth himself, directs our notice to the efEect produced on Macbeth's mind, rendered temp- tible by previois dalliance of the fancy with ambitious thoughts : " Good Sir, why do you start ; and seem to fear Things that do sound so fair ?" And then, again, still unintroitive, addresses the Witches : — . " I' the name of truth. Are ye fantastical, or that indeed Which outwardly ye show ? " 372 NOTES OK SOME OTHEE [1818 BanquS*s questions are those of natural curiosity, — such, as a girl would put after hearing a gipsy teU her school- fellow's fortune ; — all perfectly general, or rather planless. But Macbeth, lost in thought, raises himself to speech only by the Witches being about to depart : — " Stay, you imperfect speakers, tell me more : — " and all that follows is reasoning on a problem already dis- cussed in his mind, — on a hope which he welcomes, and the doubts concerning the attainment of which he wishes to have cleared up. Compare his eagerness, — ^the keen eye with which he has pursued the Witches evanishing — " Speak, I charge you ! " with the easily satisfied mind of the self-uninterested Banquo : — " The air ' hath bubbles, as the water has. And these are of them : — Whither are they vanish'd ?" and then Macbeth's earnest reply, — " Into the air ; and what seem'd corporal, melted As breath into the wind. — ' Would they had, staid ! " Is it too minute to notice the appropriateness of the simile " as breath," &c., in a cold climate ? Still again Banquo goes on wondering like any common spectator : " Were such things here as we do speak about ? " whilst Macbeth persists in recurring to the self-con- cerning : — " Your children shall be kings, Bern. You shall be king. Maoh. And thane of Cawdor too : went it not so ? " So surely is the guilt in its germ anterior to the supposed ' Read " earth." Sect. IV.] plats of shakspere. 373 caase, and immediate temiptation ! Before he can cool, the confirmation of the tempting half of ' the prophecy arrives, and the concatenating tendency of the imagination is fostered by the sudden coincidence : — " Glamis, and thane of Cawdor : The greatest is behind." Oppose this to Banquo's simple surprise : — " What, can the devil speak true ? " lb. Banquo's speech : — " That, trusted home. Might yet enkindle you unto the crown, Besides the thane of Cawdor." I doubt whether " enkindle" has not another sense than that.of "stimulating;" I mean of "kind" and "kin," as ■when rabbits are said to " kindle." However, Macbeth no longer hears anything ah extra : — " Two truths are told. As happy prologues to the swelling act Of the imperial theme." Then in the necessity of recollecting himself — " I thank you, gentlemen." Then he relapses into himself again, and every word of his soliloquy shows the early birth-date of his guilt. He is all- powerful without strength ; he wishes the end, but is irre- solute as to the means ; conscience distinctly warns him, and he lulls it imperfectly : — " If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me Without my stir." Iiost in the prospective of his guilt, he turns round alarmed lest others may suspect what is passing in his own mind, and instantly vents the lie of ambition : 374 NOTES ON SOME OTHER [1818 " My dull brain was wrought With things forgotten ; — And immediately after pours forth the promising courtesies of a usurper in intention : — " Kiud gentlemen, your pains Are register'd where every day I turn The leaf to read them." lb. Macbeth's speech : " Present /earg Are less than horrible imaginings." Warburton's note, and substitution of " feats " for "fears." Mercy on this most wilful ingenuity of blundering, which, nevertheless, was the very Warburton of Warburton — his inmost being ! " Fears," here, are present fear-striking objects, terribilia adstomUa. lb. sc. 4. ! the affecting beauty of the death of Cawdor, and the presentimental speech of the kin g : " There's no art To find the mind's construction in the face : He was a gentleman on whom I built An absolute trust — " Interrupted by — " O worthiest cousin ! " on the entrance of the deeper traitor for whom Cawdor had made way ! And here in contrast with Duncan's " plen- teous joys," Macbeth has nothing but the common-places of loyalty, in which he hides himself, with " our duties." Note the exceeding effort of Macbeth's addresses to the king, his reasoning on his allegiance, and then especially when a new difficulty, the designation of a successor, suggests a new crime. This, however, seems the first dis- tinct notion, as to the plan of realizing his wishes ; and here, therefore, with great propriety, Macbeth's cowardice of his own conscience discloses itself. I always think there is something especially Shaksperian in Duncan's speeches Sect. IV.] plays of shaksperb. 375 throughout this scene, such pourings forth, such abandon- ments, compared with the language of vulgar dramatists, whose characters seem to have made their speeches as the actors learn ;bhem. lb. Duncan's speech : — " Sons, kinsmen, thanes, And yon whose places are the nearest, know. We will establish our estate upon Onr eldest Malcolm, whom we name hereafter The Prince of Cumberland : which honour must Not unaccompanied, invest him only ; But signs of nobleness, like stars, shall shine On all deservers." It is a fancy ; — but I can never read this and the follow- ing speeches of Macbeth, without involuntarily thinking of the Miltonic Messiah and Satan. lb. so. 6. Macbeth is described by Lady Macbeth so as at the same time to reveal her own character. Could he have everything he wanted, he would 'rather have it inno- cently ; — ^ignosant, as alas ! how many of us are, that he who wishes a temporal end for itself, does in truth will the means ; and hence the danger of indulging fancies. Lady Macbeth, like all in Shakspere, is a class individualized : — of high rank, left much alone, and feeding herself with day-dreams of ambition, she mistakes the courage of fantasy for the power of bearing the consequences of the realities of guilt. Hers is the mock fortitude of a iuind deluded by ambition ; she shames her husband with a superhuman audacity of fancy which she cannot support, but sinks in the season of remorse, and dies in suicidal agony Her speech : " Come, all you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here," &c. is that of one who had habitually familiarized her imagina- tion to dreadful conceptions, and was trying to do so stiU more. Her invocations and requisitions are all the false 376 NOTES ON SOME OTHER [1818 efforts of a mind accustomed only hitherto to the shadows of the imagination, vivid enough to throw the every-day substances of life into shadow, hut never as yet brought into direct contact with their own correspondent realities. She evinces no womanly life, no wifely joy, at the return of her husband, no pleased terror at the thought of his past dangers ; whilst Macbeth bursts forth naturally — " My dearest lore " — and shrinks from the boldness with which she presents his own thoughts to him. With consummate art she at first uses as incentives the very circumstances, Duncan's coming to their house, &c., which Macbeth's conscience would most probably have adduced to her as motives of abhorrence or repulsion. Yet Macbeth is not prepared : " We will speak further.'' lb. sc. 6. The lyrical movement with which this scene opens, and the free and unengaged miud of Banquo, loving nature, and rewarded in the love itself, form a highly dramatic contrast with the laboured rhythm and hypo- critical over- much of Lady Macbeth's welcome, in which you cannot detect a ray of personal feeling, but all is thrown upon the " dignities," the general duty. lb. sc. 7. Macbeth's speech : " We will proceed no further in this business : He hath honour'd me of late ; and I hare bought Golden opinions from all sorts of people, Which would be worn now in their newest gloss, Not cast aside so soon." Note the inward pangs and warnings of conscience in- terpreted into prudential reasonings. Act ii. sc. 1. Banquo's speech : " A heavy summons lies like lead upon me, And yet I would not sleep. Merciful powers ! Restrain in me the cursed thoughts, that nature Gives way to in repose." Sect. IV.] plats of shakspere. 377 The disturbance of an innocent soul by painful suspicions 3f another's guilty intentions and wishes, and fear of the cursed thoughts of sensual nature. lb. sc. 2. Now that the deed is done or doing — now that the first reality commences, Lady Macbeth shrinks. The most simple sound strikes terror, the most natural consequences are horrible, whilst previously everything, however awful, appeared a mere trifle ; conscience, which before had been hidden to Macbeth in selfish and pru- dential fears, now rushes in upon him in her own veritable person : " Methought I heard a Toice cry — Sleep no more ! I could not say Amen, When they did say, God bless us ! " And see the novelty given to the most familiar images by a new state of feeling. lb. sc. 3. This low soliloquy of the Porter and his few speeches afterwards, I believe to have been written for the mob by, some other hand, perhaps with Shakspere's con- sent ; and that finding it take, he with the remaining ink of a pen otherwise employed, just interpolated the words — " I'll devil-porter it no further : I had thought to have let in some of all professions, that go the primrose way to th' everlasting bonfire." Of the rest not one syllable has the ever-present being of Shakspere.. Act iii. so. 1. Compare Macbeth's mode of working on the murderers in this place with Schiller's mistaken scene between Butler, Devereixx, and Macdonaldin "Wallenstein." (Part II. act iv. sc. 2.) The comic was wholly out of season. Shakspere never introduces it, but wheil it may react on the tragedy by harmonious contrast. lb. sc. 2. Macbeth's speech : " But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer Ere we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep 378 NOTES ON SOME OTHEB [1818 In the affliction of these terrible dreams That shake us nightly." Ever and ever mistaking the anguish of conscience for fears of selfishness, and thus as a punishment of that selfish- ness, plunging still deeper in guilt and ruin. lb. Macbeth's speech : " Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, Till thou applaud the deed." This is Macbeth's sympathy with his own feelings, and his mistaking his wife's opposite state. lb. so. 4. " Macb. It will have blood, they say ; blood will have blood j Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak ; Augurs, and understood relations, have By magot-pies, and choughs, and rooks, brought forth The secret'st man of blood." The deed is done ; but Macbeth receives no comfort, — no additional security. He has by guilt torn himself live- asunder from nature, and is, therefore, himself in a preter- natural state : no wonder, then, that he is inclined to superstition, and faith in the unknown of signs and tokens, and super-human agencies. Act iv. sc. 1 . " Len. 'Tis two or three, my lord, that bring you word, Macduff is fled to England. Mach. Fled to England ? " The acme of the avenging conscience. lb. sc. 2. This scene, dreadful as it is, is still a relief, because a variety, because domestic, and therefore soothing, as associated with the only real pleasures of life. The con- versation between Lady Macduff and her child heightens the pathos, and is preparatory for the deep tragedy of their assassination. Shakspere's fondness for children is every- where shown ; — in Prince Arthur, in " King John ; " in Sect. IV.] plats of ssakspeeb. 379 the sweet scene in the " Winter's Tale " between Hermione and her son ; nay, even in honest Evans's examination of Mrs. Page's schoolboy. To the objection that Shakspere wounds the moral sense by the nnsnbdued, undisguised description of the most hateful atrocity — that he tears the feelings without mercy, and even outrages the eye itself with scenes of insupportable horror — I, omitting " Titus Andronicus," as not genuine, and excepting the scene of Gloster's blinding in " Lear," answer boldly in the name of Shakspere, not guilty. lb. sc. 3. Malcolm's speech : " Better Macbeth, Than such a one to reign." The moral is — the dreadful effects even on the best minds of the soul-sickening sense of insecurity. lb. How admirably MacdufE's grief is in harmony with the whole play ! It rends, not dissolves, the heart. " The tune of it goes manly." Thus is Shakspere always master of himself and of his subject, — a genuine Proteus : — we see all things in him, as images in a calm lake, most distinct, most accurate, — only more splendid, more glorified. This is correctness in the only philosophical sense. But he requires your sympathy and your submission; you must have that recipiency of moral impression without which the purposes and ends of the drama would be frustrated, and the absence of which demonstrates an utter want of all imagination, a deadness to that necessary pleasure of being innocently — shall I say, deluded ? — or rather, drawn away from ourselves to the music of noblest thought in harmo- nious sounds. Happy he, who not only in the public theatre, but in the labours of a profession, and round the light of his own hearth, still carries a heart so pleasure- fraught ! Alas for Macbeth ! Now all is inward with him ; he 380 NOTES OS SOME OTHEE [1818 has no more prudential prospective reasonings. His wife, the only being who could have had any seat in Ms afEec- tions, dies ; he puts on despondency, the final heart-armour of the wretched, and would fain think everything shadowy and unsubstantial, as indeed all things are to those who cannot regard them as symbols of goodness : — " Out, out, brief candle ! Life's but a walking shadow ; a poor player. That struts and frets his hour upon the stage. And then is heard no more : it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing." The Winter's Tale.' Although, on the whole, this play is exquisitely re- spondent to its title, and even in the fault I am about to mention, still a winter's tale ; yet it seems a mere indolence of the great bard not to have provided in the oracular response (Act ii. sc. 2.) some ground for Hermione's seem- ing death and fifteen years voluntary concealment. This might have been easily effected by some obscure sentence of the oracle, as for example : — " Nor shall he ever recover an heir, if he have ■■ wife before that recovery." The idea of this delightful drama is a genuine jealousy of disposition, and it should be immediately followed by the perusal of " OtheUo," which is the direct contrast of it in every particular. For jealousy is a vice of the mind, a culpable tendency of the temper, having certain well known ' Whoever it was that placed these notes on the " Winter's Tale " and those on " Othello " together, it is certain that Coleridge usually treated the plays together, in order to contrast the jealousy, usually so called, of Othello with that of Leontes. "Macbeth" is arrans^d with " Hamlet " for similar reasons. Sect. IV.] plats op shakspeeb. 381 and well defined effects and concomitants, all of which are visible in Leontes, and, I boldly say, not one of which marks its presence in " Othello ; " — such as, first, an ex- citability by the most inadequate causes, and an eagerness to snatch at proofs ; secondly, a grossness of conception, and a disposition to degrade the object of the passion by sensual fancies and images ; thirdly, a sense of shame of his own feelings exhibited in a solitary moodiness of humour, and yet from the violence of the passion forced to utter itself, and therefore catching occasions to ease the mind by ambiguities, equivoques, by talking to those who cannot, and who are known not to be able to, understand what is said to them, — ^in short, by soliloquy in the form of dialogue, and hence a confused, brokeiy and fragmentary, manner ; fourthly, a dread of vulgar ridicule, as distinct from a high sense of honour, or a mistaken sense of duty ; and lastly, and immediately, consequent on this, a spirit of selfish vindictiveness. Act i. sc. 1 — 2. Observe the easy style of chitchat between Camillo and A.rchidamus as contrasted with the elevated diction on the introduction of the kings and Hermione in the second scene : and how admirably Polixenes' obstinate refusal to Leontes to stay — " There is no tongue that moves ; none, none i' the world. So soon as yours, could win me ; — " prepares for the effect produced by his afterwards yielding to Hermione ; — ^which is, nevertheless, perfectly natural from mere courtesy of sex, and the exhaustion of the will by former efforts of denial, and well calculated to set in nascent action the jealousy of Leontes. This, when once excited, is unconsciously increased by Hermione : — " Yet, good deed, Leontes, I lore thee not a jar o' the clock behind What lady she her lord ; — " 382 NOTES oir some othee [1818 accompanied, as a good actress ought to represent it, by an expression and recoil of apprehension that she had gone too far. " At my request, he would not : — " The first working of the jealous fit ; — " Too hot, too hot :— " The morbid tendency of Leontes to lay hold of the merest trifles, and his grossness immediately afterwards — • " Paddling palms and pinching fingers : — " followed by his strange loss of self-control in his dialogue with the little boy. Act iii. sc. 2. J'aulina's speech : " That thou betray'dst Polixenes, 'twas nothing ; That did but show thee, of a. fool, inconstant, And damnable ingrateful. — " Theobald reads "soul." I think the original word is Shakspere's. 1. My ear feels it to be Shaksperian ; 2. The involved grammar is Shaksperian ; — " show thee, being a fool naturally, to have improved thy folly by inconstancy;" 3. The alteration is most flat, and un- Shaksperian. As to the grossness of the abuse — she calls him " gross and foolish " a few lines below. Act iv. sc. 2. Speech of Autolycus : — " For the life to come, I sleep out the thought of it." Fine as this is, and delicately characteristic of one who had lived and been reared in the best society, and had been precipitated from it by dice and drabbing ; yet stiU it strikes against my feelings as a note out of tune, and as not coalescing with that pastoral tint which gives such a charm to this act. It is too Macbeth-like in the " snapper up of unconsidered trifles." Sect. IV.] plats op shakspeee. 383 lb. so. 4. Perdita's speech : — " From Dis's waggon ! daffodils.'' All epithet is wanted here, not merely or chiefly for the metre, bnt for the balance, for the aesthetic logic. Per- haps, "golden"' -was the word which would set off the "violets dim." lb. " Pale primroses That die unmarried. — " Milton's — " And the rathe primrose that forsaken dies." lb. Perdita's speech : — " Even here undone : I was not much afraid ; ' for once or twice I was about to speak, and tell him plainly. The self-same sun, that shines upon his court, Hides not his visage from our cottage, but Looks on alike. Wilt please you, Sir, be gone ! {To Florizel.) I told you, what would come of this. Beseech you, Of your own state take care : this di-eam of mine, Being ^ awake, I'll queen it no inch farther. But milk my ewes, and weep." O how more than exquisite is this whole speech ! — And that profound nature of noble pride and grief venting themselves in a momentary peevishness of resentment toward Plorizel : — " Wilt please you. Sir, be gone ! " lb. Speech of Autolycus : — " Let me have no lying ; it becomes none but tradesmen, and they often give us soldiers the lie ; but we pay them for it in ^ stamped coin, not stabbing steel j— therefore they do not give us the lie." As we ^ay them, they, therefore, do not give it us. • Read " afear'd." ' Read " being now awake." = Read " with." 384 NOTES ON SOME OTHBE [1818 OtJieUo. Act i. sc. 1. Admirable is the preparation, so truly and peculiarly Shaksperian, in the introduction of Roderigo, as the dupe on whom lago shall first exercise his art, and in so doing display his own character. Roderigo, without any fixed principle, but not without the moral notions and sympathies with honour, which his rank and connections had hung upon him, is already well fitted ajid predisposed for the purpose ; for very want of character and strength of passion, like wind loudest in an empty house, constitute his character. The first three lines happily state the nature and foundation of the friendship between him and lago, — the purse, — as also the contrast of Roderigo's intemperance of mind with lago's coolness, — ^the coolness of a precon- ceiving experimenter. The mere language of protestation — " If ever I did dream of snch a matter, Abhor me, — " which falling in with the associative link, determines Roderigo's continuation of complaint — " Thou told'st me, thou didst hold him in thy hate — " elicits at length a true feeling of lago's mind, the dread of contempt habitual to those, who encourage in themselves, and have their keenest pleasure in, the expression of con- tempt for others. Observe lago's high self-opinion, and the moral, that a wicked man wiU employ real feelings, as well as assume those most alien from his own, as instru- ments of his purposes : — • And, by the faith of man. I know my place,^ I am worth no worse a place.' 1 Read" price. Sect. IVi] plats of shakspeee. 385 I think Tyrwhitt's reading of "life" for "wife"— " A fellow almost damn'd in a fair wife " — the true one, as fitting to lago's contempt for whatever did not display power, and that intellectual power. In what follows, let the reader feel how by and through the glass of two passions, disappointed vanity and envy, the very vices of which he is complaining, are made to act upon him as if they were so many excellencies, and the more appro- priately, because cunning is always admired and wished for by minds conscious of inward weakness ; — but they act only by half, like music on an inattentive auditor, swelling the thoughts which prevent him from listening to it. lb. " Eod. What a full fortune does the thick-lips owe, If he can carry 't thus." Roderigo turns off to Othello; and here comes one, if not the only, seeming justification of our blackamoor or negro Othello. Even if we supposed this an uninterrupted tradition of the theatre, and that Shakspere himself, from want of scenes, and the experience that nothing could be m.ade too marked for the senses of his audience, had prac- tically sanctioned it, — would this prove aught concerning his own intention as a poet for all ages ? Can we imagine him so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous negro plead royal birth, — at a time, too, when negroes were not known except as slaves ? — As for lago's language to Brabantio, it implies merely that Othello was a Moor, that" is, black. Though I think the rivalry of Roderigo sufficient to account for his wilful confusion of Moor and Negro, — yet, even if compelled to give this up, I should think it only adapted for the acting of the day, and should complain of an enormity built on a single word, in direct contradiction to lago's "Barbary horse." Besides, if we could in good earnest believe Shakspere ignorant of the distinction, still c C 386 NOTES ON SOME OTHEB [1818 why should we adopt one disagreeable possibility instead of a ten times greater and more pleasing probability ? It is a common error to mistake the epithets applied by the droMiatis personce to each other, as truly descriptive of what the audience ought to see or know. No doubt Desdemona saw Othello's visage in his mind ; yet, as we are constituted, and most surely as an English audience was disposed in the beginning of the seventeenth century, it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro. It would argue a dispro- portionateness, a want of balance, in Desdemona, which Shakspere does not appear to have in the least contem- plated. lb. Brabantio's speech : — " This accident is not unlike my dream : — " The old careful senator, being caught careless, transfers his caution to his dreaming power at least, lb. lago's speech : — " — For their souls, Another of his fathom they have not, To lead their business : — " The forced praise of Othello followed by the bitter hatred of him in this speech ! And observe how Bra- bantio's dream prepares for his recurrence to the notion of philtres, and how both prepare for carrying on the plot of the arraignment of Othello on this ground. lb. sc. 2. " 0th. 'Tis better as it is.'' How well these few words impress at the outset the truth of Othello's own character of himself at the end that he was " not easily wrought ! " His self-government contradistinguishes him throughout from Leontes. lb. Othello's speech : — Sect. IV.] plats of shakspeeb. 387 " — And my demerits ' May speak, v/nhormetted — " The argument in Theobald's note, where " and bon- netted " is suggested, goes on the assumption that Shak- spere could not use the same word differently in different places ; whereas I should conclude, that as in the passage in "Lear" the word is employed in its direct meaning, so here it is used metaphorically ; and this is confirmed by what has escaped the editors, that it is not " I," but " my demerits " that may speak unbonnetted, — without the symbol of a petitioning inferior. lb. so. 3. Othello's speech : — " Please ' your grace, my ancient ; A man he is of honesty and trust : To Ills conveyance I assign my wife." Compare this with the behaviour of Leontes to his true friend Camillo. lb. sc. 6. " Bra. Look to her, Moor ; have a quick eye to see j She has deceived her father, and may thee. 0th. My life upon her faith." In real life, how do we look back to little speeches as presentimental of, or contrasted with, an affecting event ! Even so, Shakspere, as secure of being read over and over, of becoming a family friend, provides this passage for his readers, and leaves it to them. lb. lago's speech : — " Virtue ? a fig ! 'tis in ourselves, that we are thus, or thus," &c. This speech comprises the passionless character of lago. It is all will in intellect ; and therefore he is here a bold 1 "Demerits" had the same sense as "merits" in Shakspere's time. But see Section III., note on " Eichard II.," Act i. sc. 3. 2 Bead " so please." 388 NOTES ON SOME OTHEE [1818 partizan of a truth, but yet of a truth converted into a falsehood by the absence of all the necessary modifications caused by the frail nature of man. And then comes the last sentiment, — " Our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts, whereof I take this, that you call — love, to be a sect or scion ! " Here is the true lagoism of, alas ! ho.w many ! Note lago's pride of mastery in the repetition of " Go, make money ! " to his anticipated dupe, even stronger than his love of lucre : and when Roderigo is completely won — " I am changed. I'll go seU all my land." when the effect has been fully produced, the repetition of triumph — " Go to ; farewell ; put money enough in your purse ! " •" The remainder — lago's soliloquy — the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity — how awful it is ! Tea, whilst he is still allowed to bear the divine image, it is too fiendish for his own steady view, — for the lonely gaze of a being next to devil, and only not quite devil, — and yet a character which Shakspere has attempted and executed, without disgust and without scandal ! Dr. Johnson has remarked that little or nothing is want- ing to render the " Othello " a regular tragedy, but to have opened the play with the arrival of Othello in Cyprus, and to have thrown the preceding act into the form of narration. Here then is the place to determine, whether such a change would or would not be an improvement ; — nay (to throw down the glove with a full challenge) whether the tragedy would or not by such an arrangement become more regular, ' The line in Shakspere is " Go to ; farewell. Do you hear, Roderigo ? " The words " put money enough in your purse," — ^which, moreover, have not quite a Shakspere ring, — do not form part of the text. Sect. IV.] plats of shakspeeb. 389 — tli^it is, more consonant with the rules dictated by universal reason, on the true, common-sense of mankind, in its application to the particular case. For in all acts of judgment, it can never be too often recollected, and scarcely too often repeated, that rules are means to ends, and, con- sequently, that the end must be determined and understood before it can be known what the rules are or ought to be. Now, from a certain species of drama, proposing to itself the accomplishment of certain ends, — these partly arising from the idea of the species itself, but in part, likewise, forced upon the dramatist by accidental circumstances beyond his power to remove or control, — three rules have been abstracted ; — in other words, the means most con- ducive to the attainment of the proposed ends have been generalized, and prescribed under the names of the three unities, — the unity of time, the unity of place, and the unity of action, — which last would, perhaps, have been as appropriately, as well as more intelligibly, entitled the unity of interest. With this last the present question has no immediate concern : in fact, its conjunction with the former two is a mere delusion of words. It is not properly a rule, but in itself the great end not only of the drama, but of the epic poem, the lyric ode, of all poetry, down to the candle-flame cone of an epigram, — nay of poesy in general, as the proper generic term inclusive of all the fine arts as its species. But of the unities of time and place, which alone are entitled to the name of rules, the history of their origin will be their Eest criterion. Tou might take the Greek chorus to a place, but you could not bring a place to them without as palpable an equivoque as bring- ing Birnam wood to Macbeth at Dunsinane.^ It was the same, though in a less degree, with regard to the unity of time : — the positive fact, not for a moment removed from ^ See concluding division of Section I. 390 NOTES ON SOME OTHER [1818 the senses, the presence, I mean, of the same identical chorus, was a continued measure of time ; — and although the imagination may supersede perception, yet it must be granted to be an imperfection — ^however easily tolerated — to place the two in broad contradiction to each other. In truth, it is a mere accident of terms ; for the Trilogy of the Greek theatre was a drama in three acts, and notwith- standing this, what strange contrivances as to place there are in the Aristophanic Frogs. Besides, if the law of mere actual perception is once violated — as it rep^Aedly is even in the Greek tragedies — why is it more difiB.cult to imagine three hours to be three years than to be a wholp^ day and night ? Act ii. sc. 1. Observe in how many ways Othello is made, first, our acquaintance, then our friend, then the object of our anxiety, before the deeper interest is to be approached ! lb. " Mont. But, good lieutenant, is your general wived ? Cos. Most fortunately : he hath achieved a maid That paragons description, and wild fame ; One that excels the quirks of blazoning pens, And, in the essential vesture of creation, Does bear all excellency.' Here is Cassio's warm-hearted, yet perfectly disengaged, praise of Desdemona, and sympathy with the " most for- tunately " wived Othello : — and yet Cassio is an enthusiastic admirer, almost a worshipper, of Desdemona. O, that detestable code that excellence cannot be loved in any form that is female, but it must needs be selfish ! Observe Othello's "honest," and Cassio's "bold" lago, and Cassio's full guileless-hearted wishes for the safety and love-raptures ' The reading of the Quartos. The Folios have "Does tire the ingeniver ; " the Globe Ed. " ingener." " Ingene " meant " genius, wit," in Shakspere's day. See Nares' " Glossary." Sect. IV.] plats of shakspeee. 391 of Othello and " the divine Desdemona." And also note the exquisite circumstance of Cassio's kissing lago's wife, as if it ought to be impossible that the dullest auditor should not feel Cassio's religious love of Desdemona's purity. lago's answers are the sneers which a proud bad intellect feels towards woman, and expresses to a wife. Surely it ought to be considered a very exalted compliment to women, that all the sarcasms on them in Shakspere are put in the months of villains.' lb. " Des. I am not merry ; but I do beguile," &c. The struggle of courtesy in Desdemona to abstract her attention. lb. "(logo aside.) He takes her by the palm : Ay, well said, whisper; with as little a web as this, will I ensnare as great a fly as Cassio. Ay, smile upon her, do," &c. The importance given to trifles, and made fertile by the villainy of the observer. lb. lago's dialogue with Roderigo : This is the rehearsal on the dupe of the traitor's inten- tions on Othello. lb. lago's soliloquy : "But partly led to diet my revenge, For that I do suspect the lusty Moor Hath leap'd into my seat." This thought, originally by lago's own confession a mere suspicion, is now ripening, and gnaws his base nature as his own " poisonous mineral " is about to gnaw the noble heart of his general. lb. sc. 3. Othello's speech : * See similar remarks in the notes on " The Tempest." 392 NOTES ON SOME OIHBE [1818 " I know, lago, Thy honesty and love doth mince this matter, Making it light to Cassio." Hoaesty and love! Ay, and who but the reader of the play could think otherwise ? lb. lago's soliloquy : " And what's he then that says-^I play the Tillain ? When this advice is free I give, and honest, Probable ' to thinking, and, indeed, the course To win the Moor again." He is not, you see, an absolute fiend; or, at least, he wishes to think himself not so. Act iii. sc. 3. " Ses. Before Emilia here, I give thee warrant of this ° place.'' The over-zeal of innocence in Desdemona. lb. Enter Desdemona and Emilia, " 0th. If she be false, O, then, heaven mocks itself! I'll not believe it." Divine ! The effect of innocence and the better genius ! Act iv. sc. 3. " Mmil. Why, the wrong is but a wrong i' the world ; and having the world for your labour, 'tis a wrong in your own world, and you might quicUly make it right." Warburton's note. What any other man, who had learning enough, might have quoted as a playful and witty illustration of his i-emarks against the Calvinistic thesis, Warburton gravely attributes to Shakspere as intentional ; and this, too, in the mouth of a lady's woman ! ' All the early editions, and Globe Ed., read " proball." The word is not found elsewhere. (Nares' " Glossary.") " Read " thy." Sect. IV.] plats of shakspere. 393 Act V. last scene. Othello's speech : — " Of one, whose hand, Like the base Iiidian, threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe," &c, Theobald's note from Warburton. Thus it is for no-poets to comment on the greatest of poets ! To make Othello say that he, who had. killed his ■wife, was like Herod who killed Mariamne ! — 0, how many beauties, in this one line, were impenetrable to the ever thought-swarming, but idealess, Warburton ! Othello wishes to excuse himself on the score of ignorance, and yet not to excuse himself,— to excuse himself by accusing. This struggle of feeling is finely conveyed in the word " base," which is applied to the rude Indian, not in his own character, but as the momentary representative of Othello's. " Indian "■ — for I retain the old reading — means American, a savage in genere. Finally, let me repea t that Othel lo doe.s_ not kill Des- demona in jealousy,^ but in a convictioj a_forced upon him by t he almost superhuman art of la go, — a nnh a conviction as any man would and must have entertained who had believed lago's honesty as Othello did. We, the audience, know that lago is a villain from the beginning; but in considering the essence of the Shaksperian Othello, we must perseveringly place ourselves in his situation, and under his circumstances. Then we shall immediately feel the fundamental difference between the solemn agony of the noble Moor, and the wretched fishing jealousies of Leontes, and the morbid suspiciousness of Leonatus, who is, in other respects, a fine character. Othello had no life but in Desdemona : — the belief that she, his angel, had fallen from the heaven of her native innocence, wrought a civil war in his heart. She is his counterpart ; and, like ' See Appendix : V., Othello. 394 NOTES ON SOME OTHEE PLATS OF SHAKSPEKE. [1818 him, is almost sanctified in our eyes by her absolute im- suspiciousness, and holy entireness of love. As the curtain drops, which do we pity the most ? Extremwn hune . There are three powers : — Wit, which discovers partial likeness hidden in general diver- sity ; subtlety, which discovers the diversity concealed in general apparent sameness ;-^and profundity, which dis- covers an essential unity under all the semblances of difference. Give to a subtle man fancy, and he is a wit ; to a deep man imagination, and he is a philosopher. Add, again, pleasurable sensibiUty in the threefold form of sympathy with the interesting in morals, the impressive in form, and the harmonious in sound, — and you have the poet. But combine all, — wit, subtlety, and fancy, with pro- fundity, imagination, and moral and physical susceptibility of the pleasurable, — and let the object of action be man universal ; ' and we shall have — 0, rash prophecy ! say, rather, we have — a Shakspere ! ' See opening remarks on Spenser, Appendix : III. Sect V.] jonson, bbattmoht, etc. 395 SECTION V. JONSON, BEAUMONT, FLETCHER, AND MASSINGER.' A CONTEMPOEART is rather an ambiguous term, ^ when applied to authors. It may simply mean that one man lived and wrote while another was yet alive, how- ever deeply the former may have been indebted to the latter as his model. There have been instances in the literary world that might remind a botanist of a singular sort of parasite plant, which rises above ground, indepen- dent and unsupported, an apparent original ; but trace its roots, and you -will find the fibres all terminating in the' root of another plant at an unsuspected distance, which, perhaps, from want of sun and genial soil, and the loss of sap, has scarcely been able to peep above the ground. — Or the word may mean those whose compositions were con- temporaneons in such a sense as to preclude all likelihood of the one having borrowed from the other. In the latter sense I should call Ben Jonson a contemporary of Shak- spere, though be long survived him ; while I should prefer the phrase of immediate successors for Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger, though they too were Shakspere's contemporaries in the former sense. ' We might reasonably have added to this heading, " as compared with Sbakspere," for that is practically the main theme of the chapter. See Appendix : V., Feb. 17, 1833. 396 jonson, biaumont, plbtchee, [1818 Ben Jonson.' Born, 1574.— Died, 1637. Ben Jonson is original; he is, indeed, the only one of the great dramatists of that day who was not either directly produced, or very greatly modified, by Shakspere. In truth, he differs from our great master in everything — in form and in substance — and betrays no tokens of his proximity. He is not original in the same way as Shak- spere is original ; but after a fashion of his own, Ben Jonson is most truly original.^ The characters in his plays are, in the strictest sense of the term, abstractions. Some very prominent feature is taken from the whole man, and that single feature or humour is made the basis upon which the enjiire character is built up. Ben Jonson 's dramatis personm are almost as fixed as the masks of the ancient actors ; you know from the first scene — sometimes from the list of names — exactly what every one of them is to be. He was a very accurately observing man ; but he cared only to observe what was external or open to, and likely to impress, the senses. He individualizes, not so much, if at all, by tlie exhibition of moral or intellectual difierences, as by the varieties and contrasts of manners, modes of speech and tricks of temper ; as in such characters as Puntarvolo, Bobadill, &o. . I believe there is not one whim or affectation in common life noted in any memoir of that age which may not be found drawn and framed in some corner or other of Ben Jensen's dramas ; and they have this merit, in common ' From Mr. Green's note. — H. N. C. '' See Section VI. j notes on " Epicaene," and on " Bartholomew Fair." Sect. V.] and massingbe. 397 with Hogarth's prints, that not a single oircumstanoe is introduced in them which does not play upon, and help to bring out, the dominant humour or humours of the piece. Indeed I ought very particularly to call your attention to the extraordinary skill shown by Ben Jonson in contriving situations for the display of his characters. In fact, his care and anxiety in this matter led him to do what scarcely any of the dramatists of that age did — that is, invent his plots. It is not a first perusal that suffices for the full perception of the elaborate artifice of the plots of the " Alchemist " and the " Silent Woman ; " — that of the former is absolute perfection for a necessary entanglement, and an unexpected, yet natural, evolution. Ben Jonson exhibits a sterling English diction, and he has with great skill contrived varieties of construction ; but his style is rarely sweet or harmonious, in consequence of his labour at point and strength being so evident. In all his works, in verse or prose, there is an extraordinary opulence of thought ; but it is the produce of an amassing power in the author, and not of a growth from within. Indeed a large proportion of Ben Jonson's thoughts may be traced to classic or obscure modern writers, by those who are learned and curious enough to follow the steps of this robust, surly, and observing dramatist. Beaumont. Born, 1586.— Died, 1616. Fletchee. Born, 1576, — Died, 1625. Mr. Weber, to whose taste, industry, and appropriate erudition we owe, I will not say the best (for that would be saying little), but a good, edition of Beaumont and Fletcher, has complimented the "Philaster," which he himself describes as inferior to the " Maid's Tragedy " by the same 398 JONSON, BEAUMONT, ITLETCHIK, [1818 writers, as but little below the noblest of Sbakspere's plays, " Lear," " Macbeth," Othello," Ac, and consequently imply- ing the equality, at least, of the " Maid's Tragedy ; " — and an eminent living critic, — who in the manly wit, strong sterling sense, and robust style of his original works, had presented the best possible credentials of office as charge d'affcdres of literature in general, — and who by his edition of Massinger— a work in which there was more for an editor to do, and in which more was actually well done, than in any similar work within my knowledge — has proved an especial right of authority in the appreciation of dramatic poetry, and hath potentially a double voice with the public in his own right and in that of the critical synod, where, as princeps senatus, he possesses it by his prerogative, — ^has affirmed that Shakspere's superiority to his contemporaries rests on his superior wit alone, while in all the other, and, as 1 should deem, higher excellencies of the drama, character, pathos, depth of thought, &c., he is equalled by Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, and Massinger ! ' Of wit I am engaged to treat in another Lecture. It is a genus of many species ; and at present I shall only say, that the species which is predominant in Shakspere, is so completely Shaksperian, and in its essence so interwoven with all his other characteristic excellencies, that I am equally incapable of comprehending, both how it can be detached from his other powers, and how, being di^arate in kind from the wit of contemporary dramatists, it can be com- pared with theirs in degree. And again — the detachment and the practicability of the comparison being granted — I should, I confess, be rather inclined to Concede the con- trary; — and in the most common species of wit, and in the ordinary application of the term, to yield this particular ' See Mr. Gifford's introductiun to his edition of Massinger. — H. N. C. Sect. Y.] and massingeb. 399 palm to Beaumont and Fletcher, whom here and hereafter I take as one poet with two names, — leaving undivided what a rare love and still rarer congeniality have united. At least, I have never been able to distinguish the presence of Fletcher during the life of Beaumont, nor the absence of Beaumont during the survival of Fletcher.' But waiving, or rather deferring, this question, I protest against the remainder of the position m toto. And indeed, whilst I can never, I trust, show myself blind to the various merits of Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger, or insensible to the greatness of the merits which they possess in common, or to the specific excellencies which give to each of the three a worth of his own, — I confess, that one main object of this Lecture was to prove that Shakspere's eminence is his own, and not that of his age ; — even as the pine-apple, the melon, and the gourd may grow on the same bed; — ^yea, the same circumstances of warmth and soil may be necessary to their full develop- ment, yet do not account for the golden hue, the ambrosial flavour, the perfect shape of the pine-apple, or the tufted crown on its head. Would that those, who seek to twist it ofE, could but promise us in this instance to make it the germ of an equal successor ! What had a grammatical and logical consistency for the ear, — what could be put together and represented to the eye — these poets took from the ear and eye, unchecked by any intuition of an inward impossibility ; — just as a man might put together a quarter of an orange, a quarter of an apple, and the like of a lemon and a pome- granate, and make it look like one round diverse-coloured ' Beaumont was but thirty when he died, and Fletcher lired to be forty -nine. It is true, he was ten years older than Beaumont but there are many plays well known to be by "Fletcher only. A difference of style is written on their faces. See the portraits, in Mr. Dyoe's edition. II TOlS. 400 JONSON, BEAUMONT, FLETCHBE, [1818 fruit.' But nature, which works from within by evolution and assimilation according to a law, cannot do so, nor could Shakspere ; for he too worked iu the spirit of nature, by evolving the gei'm from within by the imaginative power according to an idea. For as the power of seeing is to light, so is an idea in mind to a law in nature. They are correlatives, which suppose each other. The plays of Beaum.ont and Fletcher are mere aggre- gations without unity ; in the Shaksperian drama there is a vitality which grows and evolves itself from within, — a key note which guides and controls the harmonies throughout. What is " Lear ? " — It is storm and tempest — -the thunder at first grumbling in the far horizon, then gathering around us, and at length bursting in fury over our heads, — suc- ceeded by a breaking of the clouds for a while, a last flash of lightning, the closing in of night, and the single hope of darkness ! And " Eomeo and Juliet ? " — It is a spring day, gusty and beautiful in the morn, and closing like an April evening with the song of the nightingale; — ^whilst "Macbeth" is deep and earthy, — composed to the sub- terranean music of a troubled conscience, which converts everything into the wild and fearful ! Doubtless from mere observation, or from the occasional similarity of the writer's own character, more or less in Beaumont and Fletcher and other such writers will happen to be in correspondence with nature, and still more in apparent compatibility with it. But yet the false source is always discoverable, first by the gross contradictions to nature in so many other parts, and secondly, by the want of the impression which Shakspere makes, that the thing said not only might have been said, but that nothing else could be substituted, so as to excite the same sense of its exquisite propriety. I have always thought the conduct ' See Appendix: V., July 1, 18.33, and notes on the "Queen of Corinth," in Section VII. Sect. V.] and massingee. 401 and expressions of Othello and lago in the last scene, when lago is brought in prisoner, a wonderful instance of Shak- spere's consummate judgment : — " 0th. I look down towards his feet; — but that's a fable. If Chat thou be'st a devil, I cannot kill thee, logo. I bleed, Sir; but not kill'd. 0th. I am not sorry neither. Think what a yoUey of execrations and defiances Beaumont and Fletcher would have poured forth here ! Indeed Massinger and Ben Jonson are both more perfect in their kind than Beaumont and Fletcher ; the former in the story and afEecting incidents ; the latter in the exhibi- tion of manners and peculiarities, whims in language, and vanities of appearance. There is, however, a diversity of the most dangerous kind here. Shakspere shaped his characters out of the nature within ; but we cannot so safely say, out of his own nature as an individual person. No ! this latter is itself but a natura naturata, — an effect, a product, not a power. It was Shakspere's prerogative to have the universal, which is potentially in each particular, opened out to him, the homo generalis, not as an abstraction from observation of a variety of men, but as the substance capable of endless modifications, of which his own personal existence was but one, and to use this one as the eye that beheld the other, and as the tongue that could convey the discovery. There is no greater or more common vice in dramatic writers than to draw out of themselves. How I — alone and in the self-sufficiency of my study, as all men are apt to be proud in their dreams — should like to be talking Ttimg ! Shak- spere, in composing, had no I, but the I representative. In Beaumont and Fletcher you have descriptions of cha- racters by the poet rather than the characters themselves j we are told, and impressively told, of their being; but we rarely or never feel that they actually are. D D 402 JONSON, BEAUMONT, rLETCHBE, [1818 Beaumont aad Fletcher are the most lyrical of our dramatists. I think their comedies the best part of their works, although there are scenes of very deep tragic interest in some of their plays. I particularly recommend Monsieur Thomas for good pure comic humour. There is, occasionally, considerable license in their dramas ; and this opens a subject much needing vindication and sound exposition, but which is beset with such diffi- culties for a Lecturer, that I must pass it by. Only as far as Shakspere is concerned, I own, I can with less pain admit a fault in him than beg an excuse for it. I will not, therefore, attempt to palliate the grossness that actually exists in his plays by the customs of his ^ age, or by the far greater coarseness of all his contemporaries, excepting Spenser, who is himself not wholly blameless, though nearly so ; — for I place Shakspere's merit on being of no age. But I would clear away what is, in my judgment, not his, as that scene of the Porter in "Macbeth," and ' Yet he might well have done so. The " Merry Wives of Windsor" was written, it is said, at the virgin Queen's request, and doubtless the poet wrote what he expected would please her. If a license of humour, no longer tolerated in polite society, was not the custom of the time, Hamlet's talk to Ophelia at the play is inexcusable; though it harmonizes easily enough with Shakspei-e's evident idea of Ophelia, — as simple, characterless, and sensuous. The porter's talk cannot be compared with it, because it is not addressed to a woman. Coleridge starts with a theory. Then he says, in effect, "remove all that contradicts it, and it is established." Why did he not get over his difficulty, by recognizing— what is a fact— that the kind of leste humour we find in Shakspere is " of no age." It is endemic as well as epidemic. Furthermore, in Shakspere, if we may be allowed the expression, it never becomes unwholesome. Shakspere was not afraid to turn it to account. The narration of the death of Falstaff (Hen. V. Act. ii. § 3) becomes a masterpiece by a single stroke. See commencement of Section VI., and notes on " Valentinian," Act iii., in Section VII.; also. Appendix : V., Mar. 15, 1834, Sect. V.] and massingbe. 403 many other sncli passages, and abstract what is coarse in manners only, and all that which from the frequency of our own vices, we associate with his words. If this were truly done, little, that could be justly reprehensible would remain. Compare the vile comments, ofEensive and defen- sive, on Pope's "Lust thro' some gentle strainers," &c. with the worst thing in Shakspere, or even in Beaumont and Fletcher ; and then consider how unfair the attack is on our old dramatists ; especially because it is an attack that cannot be properly answered in that presence in which an answer would be most desirable, from the painful nature of one part of the position ; but this very pain is almost a demonstration of its falsehood ! Massingdb. Bom at Salisbury, 1584. — Died, 1640. With regard to Massinger, observe, 1. The vein of satire on the times ; but this is not as in Shakspere, where the natures evolve themselves according to their incidental disproportions, from excess, deficiency, or mislocation, of one or more of the component elements ; but is merely satire on what is attributed to them by others. 2. His excellent metre ' — a better m.odel for dramatists in general to imitate than Shakspere's, — even if a dramatic taste existed in the frequenters of the stage, and could be gratified in the present size and management, or rather mismanagement, of the two patent theatres. I do not 1 See Section VII., notes on Harris's commendatory poem, and on the "lioyal Subject." 404 JONSON, BEAUMONT, FLETCHEE, [1818 mean that Massinger's verse is superior to Shakspere's or equal to it. Far from it ; but it is much more easily con- structed and may be more successfully adopted by writers in the present day. It is the nearest approach to the lan- guage of real life at all compatible with a fixed metre. In Massinger, as in all our poets before Dryden, in order to inake harmonious verse in the reading, it is absolutely necessary that the meaning should be understood ; — when the meaning is once seen, than the harmony is perfect. Whereas in Pope and in most of the writers who followed in his school, it is the mechanical metre which determines the sense. 3. The impropriety, and indecorum of demeanour in his favourite characters, as in Bertoldo in the " Maid of Honour," who is a swaggerer, talking to his sovereign what no sovereign could endure, and to gentlemen what no gentleman would answer without pulling his nose. 4. Shakspere's Ague-cheek, Osric, Ac, are displayed through others, in the course of social intercourse, by the mode of their performing some office in which they are employed ; but Massinger's Sylli come forward to declare themselves fools ad arbitrium auctoris, and so the diction always needs the subintelUgitw ("the man looks as if he thought so and so,") expressed in the language of the satirist, and not in that of the man himself : — " St/Ui. You may, madam, Perhaps, believe that I in this use art To make you dote upon me, by exposing My more than most rare features to your view ; But I, as I have ever done, deal simply, A mark of sweet simplicity, ever noted In the family of the Syllis. Therefore, lady, Look not with too much contemplation on me ; If you do, you are in the suds." Maid of Honour, act 1. sc. 2. The author mixes his own feelings and judgments con- Sect. Y.] and massingee. 405 cerning the presumed fool ; but the man himself, till mad, fights up against them, and betrays, by his attempts to modify them, that he is no fool at all, but one gifted with activity and copiousness of thought, image and expression, which belong not to a fool, but to a man of wit making himself merry with his own character. 5. There is an utter want of preparation in the decisive acts of Massinger's characters, as in Camiola and Aurelia in the " Maid of Honour." Why ? Because the d/ramatis personcB were all planned each by itself. Whereas in Shak- spere, the plfiy is syngenesia; each character has, indeed, a life of its own, and is an mdividMum, of itself, but yet an organ of the whole, as the heart in the human body. Shakspere was a great comparative anatomist. Hence Massinger and all, indeed, but Shakspere, take a dislike to their own characters, and spite themselves upon them by making them talk like fools or monsters ; as Pulgentio in his visit to Camiola (Act ii. sc. 2). Hence too, in Massinger, the continued flings at kings, courtiers, and all the favourites of fortune, like one who had enough of intellect to see injustice in his own inferiority in the share of the good things of life, but not genius enough to rise above it, and forget himself. Beaumont and Fletcher have the same vice in the opposite pole, a servility of sen- timent and a spirit of partizanship with the monarchical faction. 6. Prom the want of a guiding poLut in Massinger's characters, you never know what they are about. In fact they have no character. 7. Note the faultiness of his soliloquies, with connectives and arrangements, that have no other motive but the fear lest the audience should not understand him. 8. A play of Massinger's produces no one single effect, whether arising from the spirit of the whole, as in the "As Tou Like It;" or from any one indisputably pro- 406 JONSON, BEATJMONT, FLETCHEE, [1818 minent character, as Hamlet. It is jnst " which you like best, gentlemen ! " 9. The unnaturally irrational passions and strange whims of feeling which Massinger delights to draw, deprive the reader of all sound interest in the characters ; — as in Mathias in the " Picture," and in other instances.' 10. The comic scenes m Massinger not only do not harmonize with the tragic, not only interrupt the feeling, but degrade the characters that are to form any part in the action of the piece, so as to render them unfit for any tragic interest. At least, they do not concern, or act upon, or modify, the principal characters. As when a gentleman is insulted by a mere blackguard, — it is the same as if any other accident of nature had occurred, a pig run under his legs, or his horse thrown him. There is no dramatic interest in it. I like Massinger's comedies better than his tragedies, although where the situation requires it, he often rises into the truly tragic and pathetic. He excels in narration, and for the most part displays his mere story with skill. But he is not a poet of high imagination ; he is like a Flemish painter, in whose delineations objects appear as they do in nature, have the same force and truth, and produce the same effect upon the spectator. But Shakspere is beyond this ; — he always by metaphors and figures involves in the thing considered a universe of past and possible experiences; he mingles earth, sea and air, gives a soul to everything, and at the same time that he inspires human feelings, adds a dignity in his images to human nature itself : — " Full many a glorious morning have I seen Hatter the mountain tops with soyereign eye ; Kissing with golden face the meadows green. Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchymy," &c. 33rd Sonnet. ■■ See Appendix : V., April 5, 1833. Sect. V.] and massingbr. 407 Note. — Have I not over-rated GifiEord's edition of Mas- singer ? — Not, — if I have, as but just is, main reference to the restitution of the text; but yes, perhaps, if I were talking of the notes. These are more often wrong than right. In the " Maid of Honour," Act. i. sc. 5, Astutio describes Fulgentio as " A gentleman, yet no lord." Grifford supposes a transposition of the press for " No gentleman, yet a lord." But this would have no connection with what follows ; and we have only to recollect that " lord " means a lord of lands, to see that the after lines are explanatory. He is a man of high birth, but no landed property ; — as to the former, he is a distant branch of the blood royal ; — as to the latter, his whole rent lies in a narrow compass, the king's ear ! In the same scene the text stands : " Bert. No ! they are useful For your imitation ; — I. remember you, &c. ; — " and Giffiord condemns Mason's conjecture of " initiation " as void of meaning and harmony. Now my ear deceives me if "initiation " be not the right word. In fact, "imi- tation " is utterly impertinent to all that follows. Bertoldo tells Antonio that he had been initiated in the manners suited to the court by two or three sacred beauties, and that a similar experience would be equally useful for his initiation into the camp. Not a word of his imitation. Besides, I say the rhythm requires " initiation," and is lame as the verse now stands. 408 NOTES ON BEN JONSON. [1818 SECTION VI. NOTES ON BEN JONSON. TT would be amusing to collect out of our dramatists -*- from Elizabeth to Charles I. proofs of the manners of the times. One striking symptom of general coarseness of manners, wJiich may co-exist with great refinement of morals, as, alas ! vice versa, is to be seen in the very fre- quent allusions to the olfactories with their most disgusting stimulants, and these, too, in the conversation of virtuous ladies. This would not appear so strange to one who had been on terms of familiarity with Sicilian and Italian women of rank : and bad as they may, too many of them, actually be, yet I doubt not that the extreme grossness of their language has impressed many an Englishman of the present era with far darker notions than the same language would have produced in the mind of one of Elizabeth's,. or James's courtiers. Those who have read Shakspere only, complain of occasional grossness in his plays ; but compare him with his contemporaries, and the inevitable conviction is", that of the exquisite purity of his imagination.' The observation I have prefixed to the " Volpone " is the key to the faint interest which these noble efforts- of intel- lectual power excite, with the exception of the fragment of the " Sad Shepherd ; " because in that piece only is there any ' See Section V., and note. Sect. VI.] notes on ben jonson. 409 character with whom you can morally sympathize. On the other hand, "Measure for Measure" is the only play of Shakspere's in which there are not some one or more characters, generally many, whom you follow with affec- tionate feeling. For I confess that Isabella, of all Shak- spere's female characters, pleases me the least ; and " Mea- sure for Measure " is, indeed, the only one of his genuine works, which is painful to me.' Let me not conclude this remark, however, without a thankful acknowledgment to the momes of Ben Jonson, that the more I study his writings, I the more admire them ; and the more my study of him resembles that of an ancient classic, in the minutioe of his rhythm, m.etre, choice of words, forms of connection, and so forth, the more numerous have the points of my admiration become. I may add, too, that both the study and the admiration cannot but be disinterested, for to expect therefrom any advantage to the present drama would be ignorance. The latter is utterly heterogeneous from the drama of the Shaksperian age, with a diverse object and contrary prin- ciple. The one was to present a model by imitation of real life, taking from real life all that in it which it ought to be, and supplying the rest ; — the other is to copy what is, and as it is, — at best a tolerable, but most frequently a blundering, copy. In the former the diilerence was an essential element ; in the latter an involuntary defect. We should think it strange, if a tale in dance were announced, and the actors did not dance at all ; — and yet such is modern comedy. Whalley's Preface. " But Jonson was soon sensible, how inconsistent this medley of names and manners was in reason and nature ; and with how little See Appendix : V., June 24, 1827. 410 NOTaS ON BEN JONSON. [1818 propriety it could ever have a place in a legitimate and just picture of real life." Bat did Jonson reflect that the very essence of a play, the very language in which it is written, is a fiction to which all the parts must conform ? Surely, Greek manners in English should be a still grosser improbability than a Greek name transferred to English manners. Ben's per- sonm are too often not characters, but derangements ; — the hopeless patients of a mad-doctor rather, — exhibitions of folly betraying itself in spite of existing reason and pru- dence. He not poetically, but painfully exaggerates every trait ; that is, not by the drollery of the circumstance, but by the excess of the originating feeling. " But to this we might reply, that far from being thought to build his characters upon abstract ideas, he was really accused of represent- ing particular persons then existing; and that even those characters which appear to be the most exaggerated, are said to have had their respective archetypes in nature and life." This degrades Jonson into a libeller, instead of justifying him as a dramatic poet. Non quod verum est, sed quod veridmile, is the dramatist's rule. At all events, the poet who chooses transitory manners, ought to content himself with transitory praise. If his object be reputation, he ought not to expect fame. The utmost he can look for- wards to, is to be quoted by, and to enliven the writings of, an antiquarian. Pistol, Nym and id genus omne, do not please us as characters, but are endured as fantastic crea- tions, |oils to the native wit of FalstafE. — I say wit empha- tically ; for this character so often extolled as the master- piece of humour, neither contains, nor was meant to contain, any humour at all. Whalley's Life of Jonson. "It is to the honour of Jonson's judgment, that the greatest poet of our nation had the same opinion of Donne's genius and wit ; and hath Sect. VI.] notes on ben jonson. ■ 411 preserved part of him from perishing, by putting his thoughts and satire into modern verse." Videlicet Pope ! " He said further to Drummond, Shakspere wanted art, and some- times sense ; for in one of his plays he brought in a number of men, saying they had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, where is no sea near by a hundred miles." I have often thought Shakspere justified in this seeming anachronism. In Pagan times a single name of a German kingdom might well be supposed to comprise a hundred miles more than at present. The truth is, these notes of Drummond's are more disgraceful to himself than to Jonson. It would be easy to conjecture how grossly ' Jonson must have been misunderstood, and what he had said in jest, as of Hippocrates, interpreted in earnest. But this is characteristic of a Scotchman ; he has no notion of a jest, unless you tell him — "This is a joke!" — and still less of that finer shade of feeling, the half-and-haK, in which Englishmen naturally delight. Every Man out of His BJwmowr. Epilogue. " The throat of war be stopt within her land. And turtle-footed peace dance fairie rings About her court." Twrtle-footed is a pretty word, a very pretty word : pray, what does it mean ? Doves, I presume, are not dancers ; and the other sort of turtle, land or sea, green-fat or hawksbUl, would, I should suppose, succeed better in slow minuets than in the brisk rondillo. In one sense, to be sure, pigeons and ring-doves could not dance but with eclai — a daw ? 412 NOTES ON BEN JONSON. [1818 Poetaster. Introduction. " Light ! I salute thee, but with wounded nerves, Wishing thy golden splendour pitchy darkness." There is no reason to suppose Satan's address to the sun in the " Paradise Lost," more than a mere coincidence with these lines ; but were it otherwise, it would be a fine instance, what usurious interest a great genius pays in borrowing. It would not be difficult to give a detailed psychological pr from these constant outbursts of anxious self-assertion, that Jonson was not a genius, a creative power. Subtract that one thing, and you may safely accumulate on his name all other excellencies of a capacious, vigorous, agile, and richly-stored intellect. Act i. sc. 1. " Ovid. While slaves be false, fathers hard, and bawds be whorishi — " The roughness noticed by Theobald and Whalley, may be cured by a simple transposition : — " While fathers hard, slaves false, aud bawds be whorish." Act iv. sc. 3. " Crisp. O — oblatrant — firribund — fatuate — strenuous. — conscious." It would form an interesting essay, or rather series of essays, in a periodical work, were all the attempts to ridicule new phrases brought together, the proportion observed of words ridiculed which have been adopted, and are now comm.on, such as strenuous, conscious, &c., and a trial made how far any grounds can be detected, so that one might determine beforehand whether a word was invented under the conditions of assimilabUity to our lan- guage or not. Thus much is certain, that the ridiculers Sect. VI.] notis on ben jonson. 413 were as often -wrong as right; and Shakspere himself could not prevent the naturalization of accommodation, remuneration, &o. ; or Swift the gross abuse even of the word idea. Fall of Se^anus. Act] "4rrtmtiiis. The name Tiberius, I hope, will keep, howe'er he hath foregone The dignity and power. Silms. Sure, while he lives. Arr. And dead, it comes to Drusus. Should he fall, To the brave issue of Germanicus ; And they are three : too many (ha ?) for him To have a plot upon ? Sil. I do not know The heart of his designs ; but, sure, their face Looks farther than the present. Arr. By the gods, If I could guess he had but such a thought, My sword should cleave him down,'' &c. The anachronic mixture in this Arruntius of the Roman republican, to whom Tiberius must have appeared as much a tyrant as Sejanus, with his James-and-Charles-the-First zeal for legitimacy of descent in this passage, is amusing. Of our great names Milton was, I think, the first who could properly be called a republican. My recollections of Buchanan's works are too faint to enable me to judge whether the historian is not a fair exception. Act ii. Speech of Sejanus : — " Adultery ! it is the lightest ill I will commit. A race of wicked acts Shall flow out of my anger, and o'erspread The world's wide face, which no posterity Shall e'er approve, nor yet keep silent," &c. 414 NOTES ON BEN JONSON. [1818 The more we reflect and examine, examine and reflect, the more astonished shall we be at the immense superiority of Shakspere over his contemporaries : — and yet what con- temporaries ! — giant minds indeed ! Think of Jensen's erudition, and the force of learned authority in that age ; and yet in no genuine part of Shakspere's works is there to be found such an absurd rant and ventriloquism as this, and too, too many other passages fermminated by Jonson from Seneca's tragedies and the writings of the later Romans. I call it ventriloquism, because Sejanus is a puppet, out of which the poet makes his own voice appear to come. Act. V. Scene of the sacrifice to Fortune. This scene is unspeakably irrational. To believe, and yet to scofE at, a present miracle is little less than impossible. Sejanus should have been made to suspect priestcraft and a secret conspiracy against him. VoVpone. This admirable, indeed, but yet more wonderful than admirable, play is from the fertility and vigour of inven- tion, character, language, and sentiment the strongest proof, how impossible it is to keep up any pleasurable interest in a tale, in which there is no goodness of heart in any of the prominent characters. After the third act, this play becomes not a dead, but a painful, weight on the feelings. Zeluco is an instance of the same truth. Bonario and Celia should have been made in some way or other principals in the plot; which they might have been, and the objects of interest, without having been made charac- ters. In novels, the person, in whose fate you are most interested, is often the least marked character of the whole. If it were possible to lessen the paramountcy of Volpone Sect. VI.] notes on bin jonson. Hh himself, a most deligMful com.edy might he produced, by making Celia the ward or niece of Corvino, instead of his wife, and Bonario her lover. Epiecene. This is to my feelings the most entertaining of old Ben's comedies, and, more than any other, would admit of being brought out anew, if under the management of a judicious and stage-understanding play-wright ; and an actor, who had studied Morose, might make his fortune. Act i. so. 1. Clerimont's speech : — "'He would have hanged a, pewterer's 'prentice once on a Shrove Tuesday's riot, for being o' that trade, when the rest were guiei.' " The old copies read quit, i. e. discharged from working, and gone to divert themselves." Whalley's note. It should be quit, no doubt ; but not meaning " dis- charged from working," &o. — but quit, that is, acquitted. The pewterer was at his holiday diversion as well as the other apprentices, and they as forward in the riot as he. But he alone was punished under pretext of the riot, but in fact for his trade. Act ii. sc. 1. ^' Morose. Cannot I, yet, find out a more compendious method, than by this frmi&, to save my servants the labour of speech, and mine ears the discord of sounds ? " What does "trunk " mean here and in the 1st scene of the 1st act ? Is it a large ear- trumpet ? — or rather a tabe, such as passes from parlour to kitchen, instead of a bell ? Whalley's note at the end. " Some critics of the last age imagined the character of Morose to be wholly out of nature. But to vindicate our poet, Mr. Dryden tells us from tradition, and we may venture to take his word, that Jonson was really acquainted with a person of this whimsical turn of mind : and as 416 NOTES ON BEN JONSON. [1818 humour is a personal quality, the poet is acquitted from the charge of exhibiting a monster, or an extravagant unnatural caricatura." If Dryden had not made all additional proof superfluous by his own plays, this very vindication would evince that he had formed a false and vulgar conception of the nature and conditions of the drama and dramatic personation. Ben Jonson would himself have rejected such a plea : — " For he knew, poet never credit gain'd By writing truths, but things, like truths, well feign'd." By "truths" he means "facts." Caricatures are not less so, because they are found existing in real life. Comedy demands characters, and leaves caricatures to farce. The safest and truest defence of old Ben would be to call the Epicene the best of farces. The defect "in Morose, as in other of Jonson's dramatis personoe, lies in this ; — that the accident is not a prominence growing out of, and nourished by, the character which still circulates in it, but that the character, such as it is, rises out of, or, rather, consists in, the accident. Shakspere's comic personages have exqui- sitely characteristic features ; however awry, dispropor- tionate, and laughable they may be, still, like Bardolph's nose, they are features. But Jonson's are either a man with a huge wen, having a circulation of its own, and which we might conceive amputated, and the patient thereby losing all his character ; or they are mere wens themselves instead of men, — wens personified, or with eyes, nose, and mouth cut out, mandrake-fashion. Nota bene. All the above, and much more, will have been justly said, if, and whenever, the drama of Jonson is brought into comparisons of rivalry with the Shaksperian. But this should not be. Let its inferiority to the Shak- sperian be at once fairly owned, — but at the same time as the inferiority of an altogether different genus of the drama. Ori this ground, old Ben would stiU maintain his proud Sect. VI.] notes on ben jonson. 417 height. He, no less than Shakspere, stands on the summit of his hill, and looks round him like a master, — ^though his be Lattrig and Shakspere's Skiddaw. The Alchemist, Act i. BC. 2. Face's speech : — " Will take his oath o' the Greek Xenopkon, If need be, in his pocket." Another reading is " Testament." Probably, the meaning is, — ^that intending to give false evidence, he carried a Grreek Xenophon to pass it ofE for a Greek Testament, and so avoid perjury — as the Irish do, by contriving to kiss their thmnb-naUs instead of the book. Act ii. BC. 2. Mammon's speech : — " I will have all my beds blown up ; not stuft : Down is too hard." Thus the air-cushions, though perhaps only lately brought into use, were invented in idea in the seventeenth century ! Catiline's Gonspiraey. A fondness for judging one work by comparison with others, perhaps altogether of a different class, argues a vulgar taste. Yet it is chiefly on this principle that the Catiline has been rated so low. Take it and Sejanus, as compositions of a particular kind, namely, as a mode of relating great historical events in the liveliest and most interesting manner, and I cannot help wishing that we had whole volumes of such plays. We might as rationally expect the excitement of the " Vicar of Wakefield " from E K 418 NOTES ON BEN- JONSON. [1818 Goldsmith's "History of England," as that of "Lear," " Othello," &c., from the " Sejanus " or " Catiline." Act i. sc. 4. " Cat. Sirrah, what ail you ? (fle spies one of his hoys not answer.) Pag. Nothing. Best. Somewhat modest. Cat. Slave, I will strike your soul out with my foot," &c. This is either an unintelligible, or, in every sense, a most unnatural, passage, — improbable, if not impossible, at the moment of signing and swearing such a conspiracy, to the most Ubidinous satyr. The very presence of the boys is an outrage to probability. I suspect that these lines down to the words " throat opens," should be removed back so as to follow the words " on this part of the house," in the speech of Catiline soon after the entry of the conspirators. A total erasure, however, would be the best, or, rather, the only possible, amendment. • Act ii. so. 2. Sempronia's speech : — " — He is but a new fellow. An inmate here in Rome, as Catiline calls him—" A " lodger " would have been a happier imitation of the mqwilvnus of Sallust. Act iv. sc. 6. Speech of Cethegus : — " Can these or such be any aids to us," &o. "What a strange notion Ben must have formed of a determined, remorseless, all-daring, foolhardiness, to have represented it in such a mouthing Tamburlane, and bom- bastic tongue-bully as this Cethegus of his ! Bartholomew Fair. Induction. Scrivener's speech : — " If there be' neyer a servant-monster 1' the Fair, who can help it, he says, nor a nest of antiques ? " Sect. VI.] notes on ben jonson. 419 The best excuse that can be made for Jonson, and in a somewhat less degree for Beaumont and Fletcher, in respect of these base and silly sneers at Shakspere, is, that his plays were present to men's minds chiefly as acted. They had not a neat edition of them, as we have, so as, by coni- paring the one with the other, to form a just notion of the mighty mind that produced the whole. At all events, and in every point of view, Jonson stands far higher in a moral light than Beaumont and Fletcher. He was a fair con- temporary, and in his way, and as far as Shakspere is con- cerned, an original. But Beaumont and Fletcher were always imitators of, and often borrowers from, him, and yet sneer at him with a spite far more malignant than Jonson, who, besides, has made noble compensation by his praises. Act ii. sc. 3. " Just. I mean a. child of the horn-thumb, a babe of booty, boy, a cutpurse." Does not this confirm, what the passage itself cannot but suggest, the propriety of substituting "booty" for "beauty" in FalstafE's speech, Henry IV. Pt. I. act i. sc. 2, " Let not us, &c. ? " It is not often that old Ben condescends to imitate a modern author ; but Master Dan. Knockhum Jordan and his vapours are manifest reflexes of Nym and Pistol. lb. sc. 5. " Quart. She'll make excellent geer for the coachmakers here in Smithfield, to anoint wheels and axletrees with." Good ! but yet it falls short of the speech of a Mr. Johnes, M.P., in the Common Council, on the invasion intended by Buonaparte : " Houses plundered — then burnt ; — sons conscribed — wives and daughters ravished," Ac, &c. — " But as for you, you luxurious Aldermen ! with your fat will he grease the wheels of his triumphal chariot ! " 420 NOTES ON BEN JONSON. [1818 lb. sc. 6. " Cole. Avoid i' your satin doublet, Nnmps." This reminds me of Shakspere's " Aroint thee, witch ! " I find in several books of tliat age the words aloigne and eloigne — that is, — "keep your distance!" or "ofE with you ! " Perhaps " aroint " was a corruption of " aloigne " by the vulgar. The common etymology from ronger to gnaw seems unsatisfactory. Act iii. sc. 4. ■I. How now, Numps ! almost tired i' your proteetorsliip ? overparted, overparted ?" An odd sort of propheticality in this Numps and old Noll! lb. sc. 6. Knockhum's speech : — " He eats with his eyes, as well as his teeth." A good motto for the Parson in Hogarth's "Election Dinner," — who shows how easily he might be reconciled to the Church of Rome, for he worships what he eats. Act V. sc. 6. " Pup. Si. It is not prophane. Lan. It is not prophane, he says. Sop. It is prophane. Pup. It is not prophane. 5oy. It is prophane. Pup. It is not prophane. Lan. Well said, confute him with Not, still." An imitation of the quarrel between Bacchus and the Frogs in Aristophanes : — XopoE. a\Ka firjv KiKpa^ofnaBa y', OTToaov ff (Itdpvy^ av rjfitSiiv XavSdvy, Si' riiiipag, PpiKiKiKeS,, Kod|, Kod^. Sect. Vt.] notes on ben jonson. 421 AtowaoQ. TovTif yap oil vuaiffeTE. Xopog. ovSi iiffv riitag ai irdvTiog. Aiowaog. oi/Se fi^v itftEig ys Sri ft ovSkirort, The Devil is an Ass. Act i. sc. 1. " Pug. Why any : Fraud, Or CoTetousness, or lady Vanity, Or old Iniquity, I'll call him hither." The words in Italics should probably be given to the master-devil, Satan." Whalley's note. That is, against all probability, and -with a (for Jonson) impossible violation of character'. The words plainly be- long to Png, and mark at once his simpleness and his impatience. lb. sc. 4. Fitz-dottrel's soliloquy : — Compare this exquisite piece of sense, satire, and sound philosophy in 1616 with Sir M. Hale's speech from the bench in a trial of a witch many years afterwards.' Act ii. sc. 1. Meercraft's speech : — " Sir, money's a whore, a bawd, a drudge. — " I doubt not that " money " was the first word of the line, and has dropped out : — " Money ! Sir, money's a," &c. 1 In 1664, at Bury St. Edmonds on the trial of Boae Cullender and Amy Duny.— H. N. C. 42'2 NOTES ON BEN JONSON. [1818 The Staple of News. Act iv. sc. 3. Pecnnia's speech : — " No, he would ha' done, That lay not in his power : he had the use Of your bodies. Band and Wax, and sometimes Statute's." Read (1816), " — he had the use of Your bodies," &c. Now, however, I doubt the legitimacy of my trans- position of the " of " from the beginning of this latter Une to the end of the one preceding ; — for though it facilitates the metre and reading of the latter line, and is frequent in Massiuger, this disjunction of the preposition from its case seems to have been disallowed by Jonson. Perhaps the better reading is — « 0' your bodies," &c.— the two syllables being slurred into one, or rather snatched, or sucked, up into the emphasized " your." In all points of view, therefore, Ben's judgment is just ; for in this way, the liue cannot be read, as metre, without that strong and quick emphasis on "your" which the sense requires; — and had not the sense required an emphasis on " your," the tmesis of the sign of its cases "of," "to," &c., would destroy almost all boundary between the dramatic verse and prose in comedy: — a lesson not to be rash in con- jectural amendments. 1818. lb. sc. 4. "P. pm, I love all men of yirine, frommi/ Princess. — " "Frommy,"/ro»ime, pious, dutiful, &c. Act V. sc. 4. Penny-boy sen. and Porter : — SSCT. VI.] NOTES ON BEN JONSON 423 I dare not, will not, think that honest Ben had "Lear " in his mind in this mock mad scene. The New Itm. Act i. sc. 1. Host's speech : — " A heavy purse, and then two turtles, maiea. — " " Makes," freqnent in old books, and even now used in some counties for mates, or pairs, lb. sc. 3. Host's speech : — " — And for a leap C the vaulting horse, to pla^ the vaulting house. — " Instead of reading with Whalley "ply" for "play," I would suggest " horse " for " house." The meaning would then be obvious and pertinent. The punlet, or pun-maggot, or pun intentional, "horse and house," is below Jonson. The jeu-de-mots just below — " Bead a lecture Upon Aquinas at St. Thomas & Wateriaga — " had a learned smack in it to season its insipidity. lb. sc. 6. Level's speech : — " Then shower'd his bounties on me, like the Hours, That open-handed sit upon the clouds, And press the liberality of heaven Down to the laps of thankful men ! " Like many other similar passages in Jonson, this is tISot XaXcirov iSeiv — a sight which it is difficult to make one's self see, — a picture my fancy cannot copy detached from the words. Act ii. sc. 6. Though it was hard upon old Ben, yet Felton, it must be confessed, was in the right in consider- ing the My, Tipto, Bat Burst, &c., of this play mere dotages. Such a scene as this was enough to damn a new 424 NOTES ON BEN JONSON. [1818 play ; and Nick Staff is worse still, — most abominable stufE indeed ! Act iii. so. 2. Lovel's speech : — " So knowledge first begets beneTolence, BeneTolence breeds friendship, friendship lore. — " Jonson lias elsewhere proceeded thus far ; but the part most difficult and delicate, yet, perhaps, not the least capable of being both morally and poetically treated, is the union itself, and what, even in this life, it can be. Sect. VII.] kotbs on bbadmont and Fletcher. 426 SECTION VII. NOTES ON BEAUMONT AND ELETCHEE. Seward's Preface. 1750. " '"p'HE ' King And No King,' too, is extremely spirited in all its JL characters ; Arbaces holds up a mirror to all men of virtuous principles but violent passions. Hence he is, as it were, at once magnanimity and pride, patience and fury, gentleness and rigour, chastity and incest, and is one of the finest mixtures of virtues and vices that any poet has drawn," &c. These are among the endless instances of the abject state to which psychology had sunk from the reign of Charles I. to the middle of the present reign of George III. ; and even now it is bnt just awaking. lb. Seward's comparison of Julia's speech in the " Two Gentlemen of Verona," act iv. last scene — " Madam, 'twas Ariadne passioning," &c. — with Aspatia's speech in the " Maid's Tragedy " — " I stand upon the sea-beach now," &e. Act ii. and preference of the Mter. It is strange to take an incidental passage of one writer, intended only for a subordinate part, and compare it with the same thought in another writer, who had chosen it for a prominent and principal figure. lb. Seward's preference of Alphonso's poisoning in 426 NOTES ON BEAUMONT AND PLETCHEE. [1818 " A Wife for a Month," act i. sc. 1, to the passage in " King John," act v. sc. 7, — " Poison'd, ill fare! dead, forsook, cast off! " Mr. Seward ! Mr. Seward ! you may be, and I trust you are, an angel ; but you were an ass. lb. " Every reader of taste will see how superior this is to the quotation from Shakspere." Of what taste ? lb. Seward's classification of the Plays : — Surely "Monsieur Thomas," "The Chances," "Beggar's Bush," and the " Pilgrim," should have been placed in the very first class ! Bat the whole attempt ends in a woeful failure. Harris's Commendatory Foem on Fletcher. " I'd have a state of wit conToked, which hath A power to take up on common faith : — " This is an instance of that modifying of quantity by emphasis, without which our elder poets cannot be scanned. " Power," here, instead of being one long syllable — pow'r — must be sounded, not indeed as a spondee, nor yet as a trochee ; but as — " u ; — the first syllable is 1 J. We can, indeed, never expect an authentic edition of our elder dramatic poets (for in those times a drama was a poem), until some man undertakes the work, who has studied the philosophy of metre. This has been found the main torch of sound restoration in the Greek dramatists by Bentley, Porson, and their followers ; — how much more, then, in writers in our own language ! It is true that quantity, an almost iron law with the Greek, is in English rather a subject for a peculiarly fine ear, than any law or Sect. VII.] notes on bbaumont and flbtchbr. 427 even rule ; but, then, instead of it, we have, first, accent ; secondly, emphasis ; and lastly, retardation, and acceleration of the times of syllables according to the meaning of the words, the passion that accompanies them, and even the character of the person that uses them. With due attention to. these, — above all, to that, which requires the most attention and the finest taste, the character, Massinger, for example, might be reduced to a rich and yet regular metre. But then the regulce must be first known ; — though I will venture to say, that he who does not find a line (not cor- rupted) of Massinger's flow to the time total of a trimeter catalectic iambic verse, has not read it aright. But by virtue of the last principle — the retardation or acceleration of time — we have the proceleusmatic foot u u u u, and the dispondoeus , not to mention the choriawibus, the ionics, paeons, and epitrites.^ Since Dryden, the metre of our poets leads to the sense : in our elder and more genuine bards, the sense, including the passion, leads to the metre. Kead even Donne's satires as he meant them to be read, and as the sense and passion demand, and you will find in the lines a manly harmony. Life of Fletcher in StocMale's Edition. 1811. "In general their plots are more regular than Shakspere's. — " This is true, if true at all, only before a court of criticism, which judges one scheme by the laws of another and a diverse one. Shakspere's plots have their own laws- or regulce, and according to these they are regular. ' See note on " The Loyal Subject," and Section V. 428 NOTES ON BEAUMONT AND PLETCHEE. [1818 Maid's Tragedy. Act i. The metrical arrangement is most slorenly throughout. " Strat. As well as masque can be," &o. and all that follows to " who is retum'd " — ^is plainly blank verse, and falls easily into it. lb. Speech of Melantius : — " These soft and silken wars are not for me : The music must be shrill, and all confused. That stirs my blood ; and then I dance with arms." What strange self -trumpeters and tongue-bullies all the brave soldiers of Beaumont and Fletcher are ! Tet I am inclined to think it was the fashion of the age from the Soldier's speech in the " Counter Scuffle ; " and deeper than the fashion B. and F. did not fathom. lb. Speech of Lysippus : — " Yes, but this lady Walks discontented, with her wat'ry eyes Bent on the earth," &c. Opulent as Shakspere was, and of his opulence prodigal, he yet would not have put this exquisite piece of poetry in the mouth of a no-character, or as addressed to a Melan- tius. I wish that B. and F. had written poems instead of tragedies. lb. " Mel. I might run fiercely, not more hastily, Upon my foe." Bead " I might run Tn&re fiercelj^, not more hastily. — " lb. Speech of Calianax : — Sect. YII.] notes on beatjmont and fletohbe. 429 " Office ! I would I could put it off! I am sure 1 sweat quite through my office!" The syllable of reminds the testy statesman of his robe, and he carries on the image. lb. Speech of Melantius : — " —Would that blood, That sea of blood, that I have lost in fight," &o. All B. and F.'s generals are pugilists, or cudgel-fighters, that boast of their bottom and of the claret they have shed. lb. The Masque ; — Cinthia's speech : — " But I will give a greater state and glory, And raise to time a noble memory Of what these lovers are." I suspect that "nobler," pronounced as "nobiler " — «> — , was the poet's word, and that the accent is to be placed on the penultimate of " memory." As to the passage — " Yet, while our reign lasts, let us stretch our power," &c. removed from the text of Cinthia's speech by these foolish editors as unworthy of B. and F. — the first eight lines are not worse, and the last couplet incomparably better, than the stanza retained. Act ii. Amintor's speech : — " Oh, thou hast named a word, that wipes away All thoughts revengeful ! In that sacred name, ' The king,' there lies a terror." It is worth noticing that of the three greatest tragedians, Massinger was a democrat, Beaumont and Fletcher the most servile jure divino royalist, and Shakspere a philo- , sopher ; — if aught personal, an aristocrat. 430 NOTES ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. [1818 A King and No King. Act iv. Speech of Tigranes : — " She, that forgat the greatness of her grief And miseries, that must follow such mad passions. Endless and wild as women ! " &c. Seward's note and suggestion of "in." It would be amusing to learn from some existing friend of Mr. Seward what he meant, or rather dreamed, in this note. It is certainly a difficult passage, of which there are two solutions ; — one, that the writer was somewhat more injudicious than usual ; — the other, that he was very, very much more profound and Shaksperian than usual. Seward's emendation, at all events, is right and obvious. Were it a passage of Shakspere, I should not hesitate to interpret it as characteristic of Tigranes' state of mind, — disliking the very virtues, and therefore half-consciously representing them as mere products of the violence, of the sex in general in all their whims, and yet forced to admire, and to, feel and to express gratitude for, the exertion in his own instance. The inconsistency of the passage would be the consistency of the author. But this is above Beaumont and Fletcher. The Scornful Lady. Act ii. Sir Roger's speech : — "Did I for this consume my quarters in meditations, tows, and woo'd her in heroical epistles ? Did I expound the Owl, and undertake, with labour and expense, the recollection of those thousand pieces, consumed in cellars and tobacco-shops, of that our honour'd Englishman, Nic. Broughton f " &c. SiCT. VII.] NOTES ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 431 Strange, that neither Mr. Theobald, nor Mr. Seward, should have seen that this mock heroic speech is in full- monthed blank verse ! Had they seen this, they would have seen that " quarters " is a substitution of the players for " quires " or " squares," (that is) of paper : — " Consume my quires in meditations, vows, And woo'd her in heroical epistles." They ought, likewise, to have seen that the abbreviated "Ni. Br." of the text was properly "Mi. Dr."— and that Michael Drayton, not Nicholas Broughton, is here ridiculed for his poem " The Owl " and his " Heroical Epistles." lb. Speech of Younger Loveless : — ■ " Mil him some wine. Thou dost not see me moved," &o. These Editors ought to have learnt, that scarce an instance occurs in B. and F. of a long speech not in metre. This is plain staring blank verse. The Custom of the Country. I cannot but think that in a country conquered by a nobler race than the natives, and in which the latter became villeins and bondsmen, this custom, lex merchetcB, may have been introduced for wise purposes, — as of improving the breed, lessening the antipathy of different races, and pro- ducing a new bond of relationship between the lord and the tenant, who, as the eldest born, would, at least, have a chance of being, and a probability of being thought, the lord's child. In the West Indies it cannot have these effects, because the mulatto is marked by nature different from the father, and because there is no bond, no law, no custom, but of mere debauchery. 1815. Act i. so. 1. Rutilio's speech : — " Yei if you play not fair play," &c. 432 NOTES ON BEAUMONT AND rLBTCHEE. [1818 Evidently to be transposed and read thns : — " Yet if you play not fair, above-board too, I')] tell you what — I've a foolish engine here : — I say no more — But if your Honour's guts are not enchanted — " Licentious as the comic metre of B. and F. is, — a far more lawless, and yet far less happy, imitation of the rhythm of animated talk in real life than Massinger's — still it is made worse than it really is by ignorance of the halves, thirds, and two-thirds of a line which B. and F. adopted from the Italian and Spanish dramatists. Thus in KutiUo's speech : — " Though I confess Any man would desire to have her, and by any means," &c. Correct the whole passage — " Though I confess Any man would Desire to have her, and by any means, At any rate too, yet this common hangman That hath whipt off a thousand molds' heads already — That he should glean the harvest, sticks in my stomach ! " In all comic metres the gulping of short syDables, and the abbreviation of syllables ordinarily long by the rapid pronunciation of eagerness and vehemence, are not so much a license, as a law, — a faithful copy of nature, and let them, be read characteristically, the times will be found nearly equal. Thus the three words marked above make a choriambus — o u — , or perhaps a, poBon primus — u o u ; a dactyl, by virtue of comic rapidity, being only equal to an iambus when distinctly pronounced. I have no doubt that all B. and F.'s works might be safely corrected by attention to this rule, and that the editor is entitled to transpositions of all kinds, and to not a few omissions. For the rule of the metre once lost — what was to restrain the actors from interpolation ? Sect. VII.] notes on beaumont and fletchbb. 433 The Elder Brother. Act i. sc. 2. Charles's speech. : — " — For what concerns tillage. Who better can deliver it than Virgil In his Georgicks ? and to cure your herds, His Bucolicks is a master-piece. Fletcher was too good a scholar to fall into so gross a blunder, as Messrs. Sympson and Colman suppose. I read the passage thus : — " For what concerns tillage, Who better can deliver it than VirgiJ, In his G6orgicks, or to cure your herds ; (His Bucolicks are a master-piece.) But when," &c. Jealous of Virgil's honour, he is afraid lest, by referring to the Georgics alone, he might be understood as under- valuing the preceding work. "Not that I do not admire the Bucolics, too, in their way : — But when, &c." Act iii. sc. 3. Charles's speech : — " — She has a face looks like a story; The story of the heavens looks very like her." Seward reads "glory;" and Theobald quotes from Philaster — " That reads the story of a woman's face. — " I can make sense of this passage as little as Mr. Seward ; — the passage from Philaster is nothing to the purpose. Instead of " a story," I have sometimes thought of pro- posing " Astrffla." lb. Angelina's speech : — " You're old and dim, Sir, And the shadow of the earth eclipsed your judgment." Inappropriate to Angelina, but one of the finest lines in our language. F F 434 NOTES ON BEAUMONT AND FLBTCHBE. [1818 Act iv. sc. 3. Charles's speech : — " And lets the serious part of life run by As thin neglected sand, whiteness of name. You must be mine," &c. Seward's note, and reading — " — Whiteness of name, You must be mine ! " Nonsense! "Whiteness of name," is in apposition to "the serious part of life," and means a deservedly pure reputation. The following line — " You mmt be mine ! " means — " Though I do not enjoy you to-day, I shall here- after, and without reproach." The S^panish Gwate. Act iv. sc. 7. Amaranta's speech : — " And still I push'd him on, as he had been coming." Perhaps the true word is " conning," that is, learning, or reading, and therefore inattentive. Wit without Money. Act i. Valentine's speech : — " One without substance," &c. The present text, and that proposed by Seward, are equally vile. I have endeavoured to make the lines sense, though the whole is, I suspect, incurable except by bold conjectural reformation. I would read thus : — " One without substance of herself, that's woman ; Without the pleasure of her life, that's wanton j Tho' she be young, forgetting it 5 tho' fair. Sect. VII.] notes on beadmont and fibtchee. 435 Making her glass the eyes of honest men, Not her own admiration." "That's wanton," or, "that is to say, wantonness." Act ii. Valentine's speech : — " Of half-a-crown a week for pins and puppets — " As there is a syllable wanting in the measure here. Seward. A syllable wanting ! Had this Seward neither ears nor fingers ? The Une is a more than usually regular iambic hendecasyllable. lb. " With one man satisfied, with one rein gniided ; With one faith, one content, one bed ; Aged, she makes the wife, preserves the fame and issue ; A widow is," &c. Is " apaid " — contented — too obsolete for B. and F. ? If not, we might read it thus : — " Content with one faith, with one bed apaid. She makes the wife, preserves the fame and issue ; — '' Or it may be — " — with one breed apaid — " that is, satisfied with one set of children, in opposition to — " A widow is a Christmas-box,'' &c. Colman's note on Seward's attempt to put this play into metre. The editors, and their contemporaries in general, were ignorant of any but the regular iambic verse. A study of the Aristophanic and Plautine metres would have enabled them to reduce B. and F. throughout into metre, except where prose is really intended. 436 NOTES ON BEAUMONT AND rLETOHEE. [1818 The B/wmorous Lieutenant. Act i. sc. 1. Second Ambassador's speech : — " — When your angers, lA&e so many brother billows, rose together, ' And, curling up t/otir foaming crests, defied," &c. This "worse than superfluous " like " is very like an inter- polation of some matter of fact critic — all pus, prose atque venerium,. The " your " in the next line, instead of " their," is likewise yours, Mr. Critic ! Act ii. sc. 1. Timon's speech : — " Another of a new way will be look'd at. — " We must suspect the poets wrote, " of a new da?/." So, immediately after, " Time may For all his wisdom, yet give us a day." Seward's Note. For this very reason I more than suspect the contrary, lb. sc. 3. Speech of Leucippe : — " I'll put her into action for a wastcoat. — " What we call a riding-habit, — some mannish dress. The Mad Lover. Act iv. Masque of beasts : — " — This goodly tree. An usher that stiU grew before his lady, Wither'd at root : this, for he could not woo, A grumbling lawyer : " &c. Sect. VII.] notes on beaumont and fletcheb. 437 Here must have been omitted a line rhyming to " tree ; " and the words of the next line have been transposed : — " This goodly tree, Which leafless, and obscur'd with moss you see, An usher this, that 'fore his lady grew, Wither'd at root : this, for he could not woo," &o. The Loyal Subject. It is well worthy of notice, and yet has not been, I believe, noticed hitherto, what a marked difference there exists in the dramatic writers of the Elizabetho-Jacobsean age — (Mercy on me ! what a phrase for " the writers during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. ! ") — in respect of their political opinions. Shakspere, in this as in all other things, himself and alone, gives the permanent politics of human nature, and the only predilection, which appears, shews itself in his contempt of mobs and the populacy. Mas- singer is a decided Whig ; — Beaumont and Fletcher high- flying, passive-obedience, Tories. The Spanish dramatists furnished them with this, as with many other ingredients. By the by, an accurate and familiar acquaintance with all the productions of the Spanish stage previously to 1620, is an indispensable qualification for an editor of B. and P. ; — and with this qualification a most interesting and instruc- tive edition might be given. This edition of Colman's (Stockdale, 1811) is below criticism. In metre, B. and P. are inferior to Shakspere, on the one hand, as expressing the poetic part of the drama, and to Massinger, on the other, in the art of reconciling metre with the natural rhythm of conversation, — in which, indeed, Massinger is unrivalled. Read him aright, and measure by time, not syllables, and no lines can be more legitimate, — none in which the substitution of equipollent feet, and the modifications by emphasis, are managed with such 438 NOTES ON BBAUMONT AND FLETCHEE. [1818 exquisite judgment.' B. and F. are fond of the twelve syllable (not Alexandrine) line, as — " Too many fears 'tis thought too : and to nourish those — " This has, often, a good effect, and is one of the varieties most common in Shakspere. Bule a Wife and Have a Wife. Act iii. Old Woman's speech : — " — I fear he will knock my Brains out for lying." Mr. Seward discards the words "for lying," because " most of the things spoke of Estifania are true, with only a little exaggeration, and because they destroy all appear- ance of measure." Colman's note. Mr. Seward had his brains out. The humour lies in Estifania's having ordered the Old Woman to tell these tales of her ; for though an intriguer, she is not represented as other than chaste ; and as to the metre, it is perfectly correct. lb. " Marg, As you loTe me, give way. Leon. It shall be better, I will give none, madam," &c. The meaning is : "It shall be a better way, first ; — as it is, I will not give it, or any that you in your present mood would wish." The liomis of Ga/ndy. Act i. Speech of Melitus : — " Whose insolence and never yet match'd pride Can by no character be well express'd, But in her only name, the proud Erota.'' Colman's note. ' See note on Harris's commendatory poem, and Section V. Sect. VII.] notes on beaumont and fletchee, 439 The poet intended no aUusion to the word " Erota " itself; but says that her very name, "the proud Erota," became a character and adage ; as we say, a Quixote or a Brutus : so to say an " Erota," expressed female pride aud insolence of beauty. lb. Speech of Antinous : — " Of my peculiar honours, not derived From succesmry, but purchased with my blood. — " The poet doubtless wrote " successry," which, though not adopted in our language, would be, on many occasions, as here, a much more significant phrase than ancestry. The Little French Lawyer} Act i. sc. 1. Dinant's speech : — " Are you become a patron too ? 'Tis a new one, No move on't," &". Seward reads : — " Are you become a patron too ? Sow long Have you been conning this speech ? 'Tis a new one," &c. If conjectural emendation, like this, be allowed, we might venture to read : — ■• Are yon become a patron to a new tune ? or, " Are you become a patron ? 'Tis a new tune," lb. "Din. Thou wouldst not willingly live a protested coward, or be call'd one ? Cler. Words are but words- Din. Nor wouldst thou take a blow f " Seward's note. ' See Appendix : V., June 24, 1827. 440 NOTES ON BEAUMONT AND FLETOHBE. [1818 miserable ! Dinant sees through. Cleremont's gravity, and the actor is to explain it. " Words are but words," is the last struggle of a£Eected morality. Valentiman. Act i. sc. 3. It is a real trial of charity to read this scene with tolerable temper towards Fletcher. So very slavish^so reptile — are the feelings and sentiments repre- sented as duties. And yet remember he was a bishop's son, and the duty to God was the supposed basis. Personals, including body, house, home, and religion ; — property, subordination, and inter- com.muiiity ; — ^these are the fundamentals of society. I mean here, religion nega- tively taken, — so that the person be not compelled to do or utter, in relation of the soul to God, what would be, in that person, a lie ; — such as to force a man to go to churchj or to swear that he believes what he does not believe. Religion, positively taken, may be a great and useful privilege, but cannot be a right, — were it for this only that it cannot be pre-defined. The ground of this distinction between negative and positive religion, as a social right, is plain. No one of my fellow-citizens is encroached on by my not declaring to him what I believe respecting the super-sensual ; but should every man be entitled to preach against the preacher, who could hear any preacher ? Now it is difEerent in respect of loyalty. There we have positive rights, but not negative rights ; — for every pretended negative would be in effect a positive ; — as if a soldier had a right to keep to himself, whether he would, or would not, fight. .Now, no one of these fundamentals can be right- fully attacked, except when the guardian of it has abused it to subvert one or more of the rest. The reason is, that the guardian, as a fluent, is less than the permanent which he is to guard. He is the temporary and mutable mean, Sect. VII.] notes on beatjmont and flbtghee. 441 and derives his whole value from the end. In short, as robbery is not high treason, so neither is every iinjust act of a king the converse. All must be attacked and endan- gered. Why ? Because the king, as a to A., is a mean to A. or subordination, in a far higher sense than a proprietor, as h to B. is a mean to B. or property. Act ii. sc. 2. Claudia's speech : — " Chimney-pieces ! " &e. The whole of this speech seems corrupt; and if accu- rately printed, — that is, if the same in all the prior editions, irremediable but by bold conjecture. " Till my tackle," should be, I think, while, &c. Act iii. sc. 1. B. and F. always write as if virtue or goodness were a sort of talisman, or strange something, that might be lost without the least fault on the part of the owner. In short, their chaste ladies value their chastity as a material thing, — not as an act or state of being ; and this mere thing being imaginary, no wonder that all their women are represented with the minds of strumpets, except a few irrational humourists, far less capable of exciting our sympathy than a Hindoo, who has had a basin of cow-broth thrown over him ; — for this, though a debasing super- stition, is still real, and we might pity the poor wretch, though we cannot help despising him. But B. and F.'s Lucinas are clumsy fictions. It is too plain that the authors had no one idea of chastity as a virtue, but only such a conception as a blind man might have of the power of seeing, by handling an ox's eye. In " The Queen of Corinth," indeed, they talk differently; but it is all talk, and nothing is real in it but the dread of losing a reputa- tion. Hence the frightful contrast between their women (even those who are meant for virtuous) and Shakspere's. So, for instance, " The Maid in the Mill : " — a woman must not merely have grown old in brothels, but have chuckled 442 NOTES ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. [1818 over every abomination committed in them with a rampant sympathy of imagination, to have had her fancy so drunk with the mirmticB of lechery as this icy chaste virgin evinces hers to have been. It would be worth while to note how many of these plays are founded on rapes, — -how many on incestuous pas- sions, and how many on mere lunacies. Then their virtuous women are either crazy superstitions of a merely bodUy negation of having been acted on, or strumpets in their imaginations and wishes, or, as in this " Maid in the Mill," both at the same time. In the men, the love is merely lust ii^ one direction, — exclusive preference of one object. The tyrant's speeches are mostly taken from the mouths of indignant denouncers of the tyrant's character, with the substitution of " I " for " he," and the omission of the prefatory " he acts as if he thought " so and so. The only feelings they can possibly excite are disgust at the Aeciuses, if regarded as sane loyalists, or compassion, if considered as Bedlamites. So much for their tragedies. But even their comedies are, most of them, disturbed by the fantas- ticalness, or gross caricature, of the persons or incidents. There are few characters that you can really like, — (even though you should have had erased from your mind all the filth, which bespatters the most likeable of them, as Piniero in " The Island Princess " for instance,) — scarcely one whom you can love. How different this from Shakspere, who makes one have a sort of sneaking affection even for his Bamardines ; — whose very lagos and Richards are awful, and, by the counteracting power of profound intel- lects, rendered fearful rather than hateful ; — and even the exceptions, as Goneril and Began, are proofs of superlative judgment and the finest moral tact, in being left utter monsters, nulla virtute redemptoe, and in being kept out of sight as much as possible, — they being, indeed, only means for the excitement and deepening of noblest emotions to- Sect. VII.] notes on beaumont and Fletcher. 443 wards the Lear, Cordelia, Ac, and employed with the severest economy ! Bat even Shakspere's grossness — that which is really so, independently of the increase in modern times of vicious associations with things indifferent, — (for there is a state of manners conceivable so pure, that the language of Hamlet at Ophelia's feet might be a harmless rallying, or playful teazing, of a shame that would exist in Paradise) ' — at the worst, how diverse in kind is it from Beaumont and Fletcher's ! In Shakspere it is the mere generalities of sex, mere words for the most part, seldom or never distinct images,^ all head-work, and fancy-drol- leries ; there is no sensation supposed in the speaker. I need not proceed to contrast this with B. and P. Hollo. This is, perhaps, the most energetic of Fletcher's tragedies. He evidently aimed at a new Richard III. in " RoUo ; " — but as in all his other imitations of Shakspere, he was not philosopher enough to bottom his original. Thus, in " Hollo," he has produced a mere personification of outrageous wickedness, with no fundamental character- istic impulses to make either the tyrant's words or actions philosophically iutelligible. Hence, the most pathetic situations border on the horrible, and what he meant for the terrible, is either hateful, to jxtariTov, or ludicrous. The scene of Baldwin's sentence in the third act is probably ' See Section V. and note, and opening paragraph of Section VI. ' B^ranger himself could not be more delicate : — " Ton pfere dit : Pour gendre, Tra, la, tralala, la, la, la, Flora, faut-il le prendre ? Oui, tout bas repondra Ma timide Flora." La Nourrice. 444 NOTES ON BEAUMONT AND FLBTCHBE. [1818 the grandest working of passion in all B. and F.'s dramas ; — but the very magnificence of filial affection given to Edith, in this noble scene, renders the after scene — (in imitation of one of the least Shaksperian of all Shakspere's works, if it be his, the scene between Richard and Lady Anne), — in which Edith is yielding to a few words and tears, not only unnatural, but disgusting. In Shakspere, Lady Anne is described as a weak, vain, very woman throughout. Act i. sc. 1. " Gis. He is indeed the perfect character Of a good man, and so his actions speak him." This character of Aubrey, and the whole spirit of this and several other plays of the same authors, are interesting as traits of the morals which it was fashionable to teach in the reigns of James I. and his successor, who died a martyr to them. Stage, pulpit, law, fashion, — all conspired to enslave the realm. Massinger's plays breathe the opposite spirit ; Shakspere's the spirit of wisdom which is for all ages. By the by, the Spanish dramatists — Calderon, in particular, — had some influence in this respect, of romantic loyalty to the greatest monsters, as well as in the busy intrigues of B. and F.'s plays. The Wildgoose Chase. Act ii. sc. 1. Belleur's speech : — " — that wench, methinks, If I were but well set on, for she is a. fable. If I were but hounded right, and one to teach me." Sympson reads " affable," which Colman rejects, and says, "the next line seems to enforce" the reading in the text. Pity, that the editor did not explain wherein the sense, " seemingly enforced by the next line," consists. May the SbCT. VII.] NOTES ON BEAUMONT AND FLBTCHBE. 445 true -word be " a sable," that is, a black fox, hunted for its precious fur? Or "at-able," — as we now say, — "she is come-at-able ? " A Wife for a Month. Act iv. sc. 1. Alphonso's speech : — " Betwixt the cold bear and the raging lion Lies my safe way." Seward's note and alteration to — " 'Twixt the cold bears, far from the raging lion — " This Mr. Seward is a blockhead of the provoking species, In his itch for correction, he forgot the words — "lies my safe way ! " The Bear is the extreme pole, and thither he would travel over the space contained between it and " the raging lion." The Pilgrim,. Act iv. sc. 2. Alinda's interview with her father is lively, and happily hit off ; but this scene with Roderigo is truly excellent. Altogether, indeed, this play holds the first place in B. and F.'s romantic entertainments, TJust- spiele, which collectively are their happiest performances, and are only inferior to the romance of Shakspere in the " As Tou Like It," " Twelfth Night," &c. lb. "Aim. To-day you shall wed Sorrow, And Bepentance will come to-morrow." Read "Penitence," or else — " Repentance, she will come to-morrow." 446 NOTES ON BEADMONT AND FLETCHER. [1818 The Queen of GormtJi. Act ii. sc. 1. Merione's speech. Had the scene of this tragi-comedy been laid in Hindostan instead of Corinth, and the gods here addressed been the Yeeshnoo and Co. of the Indian Pantheon, this rant would not have been much amiss. In respect of style and versification, this play and the following of " Bonduca " may be taken as the best, and yet as characteristic, specimens of Beaumont and Fletcher's dramas. I particularly instance the first scene of the " Bonduca." Take Shakespere's "Richard II.," and having selected some one scene of about the same number of lines, and consisting mostly of long speeches, compare it with the first scene in " Bonduca," — not for the idle purpose of finding out which is the better, but in order to see and understand the difference. The latter, that of B. and F., you will find a well arranged bed of flowers, each having its separate root, and its position determined aforehand by the will of the gardener, — each fresh plant a fresh volition. In the former you see an Indian fig-tree, as described by Milton ;— all is growth, evolution, yivcaiq ; — each line, each word almost, begets the following, and the will of the writer is an interfusion, a continuous agency, and not a series of separate acts. Shakspere is the height, breadth, and depth of genius : Beaumont and Fletcher the excellent mechanism, in juxta-position and succession, of talent.' The Noble Oentleman. Why have the dramatists of the times of Elizabeth, James I. and the first Charles become almost obsolete, with the exception of Shakspere ? Why do they no longer belong to the English, being once so popular ? And why ^ Compare Section V. Sect. VII.] notes on beatjmont and fletchee. 447 is Shakspere an exception ? — One thing, among fifty, neces- sary to the full solution is, that they all employed poetry and poetic diction on unpoetic subjects, both characters and situations, especially in their comedy. Now Shakspere is all, all ideal, — of no time, and therefore for all times. Read, for instance, Marine's panegyric in the first scene of this play : — "Know The eminent coart, to them that can be wise. And fasten on her blessings, is a sun," &c. What can be more unnatural and inappropriate — (not only is, but must be felt as such) — than such poetry in the mouth of a silly dupe ? In short, the scenes are mock dialogues, in which the poet solus plays the ventriloquist, but cannot keep down his own way of expressing himself. Heavy complaints have been made respecting the trans- prosing of the old plays by Gibber ; but it never oocnrred to these critics to ask, how it came that no one ever attempted to transprose a comedy of Shakspere's. The Coronation. • Act i. Speech of Seleucus : — " Altho' he be my enemy, should any Of the gay flies that buz about the court, 8it to catch trouts i' the summer, tell me so, I durst," &c. Colman's note. Pshaw ! " Sit " is either a misprint for " set," or the old and still provincial word for " set," as the participle passive of "seat" or "set." I have heard an old Somersetshire gardener say : — " Look, Sir ! I set these plants here ; those yonder I sit yesterday." Act ii. Speech of Arcadius : — 448 NOTES ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. [1818 " Nay, some will swear they love their mistress. Would hazard lives and fortunes," &c Read thus : — " Nay, some will swear they love their mistress so, They would hazard lives and fortunes to preserve One of her hairs brighter than Berenice's, Or young Apollo's ; and yet, after this," &c. " They would hazard " — furnishes an anapsest for an iambus. "And yet," which must be read, anyit, is an instance of the enclitic force in an accented monosyllable. " And yet *' is a complete iam'b'us ; but anyet is, like spirit, a dibrach u u, trocheized, however, by the arsis or first accent damp- ing, though not extinguishing, the second. Wit at Several Weapons. Act i. Oldcraft's speech : — " I'm arm'd at all points," &e It would be very easy to restore all this passage to metre, by supplying a sentence of four syllables, which the reason- ing almost demands, and by correcting the grammar. Read thus : — " Arm'd at all points 'gainst treachery, I hold My humour firm. If, living, I can see thee Thrive by thy wits, I shall have the more courage. Dying, to trust thee with my lands. If not. The best wit, I can hear of, carries them. For since so many in my time and knowledge, Rich children of the city, have concluded For lack of wit in beggary, I'd rather Make a wise stranger my executor, Thau a fool son my heir, and have my lands call'd After my wit than name : and that's my nature ! lb. Oldcraft's speech : — Sect. VII.] notbs on beaumont and fletchee. 449 " To prevent which I have sought out a match for her. — '' Read " Which to prevent I've sought a match out for her." lb. Sir Grregory's speech : — " Do you think " I'll have any of the vfits hang upon me after I am married once ?" Bead it thus : — " Do you think That I'll have any of the wits to hang Upon me after I am mai-ried once ? " and afterwards — " Is it a fashion in London, To marry a woman, and to never see her ? " The superfluous " to " gives it the Sir Andrew Ague- cheek character. The Fair Maid of the Irm Act ii. Speech of Albertus : — " But, Sir, By my life, I vow to take assurance from yon. That right-hand never more shall strike my son. Chop his hand off!" In this (as, indeed, in all other respects ; but most in this) it is that Shakspere is so incomparably superior to Fletcher and his friend, — in judgment ! What can be conceived more unnatural and motiveless than this brutal resolve ? How is it possible to feel the least interest in Albertus afterwards ? or in Cesario after his conduct ? G 450 NOTES ON BEAUMONT AND FLBTCHEE. [1818 T^e Two Noble Kinsmen. On comparing the prison scene of Palamon and Aroite, Act ii. sc. 2, with the dialogue between the same speakers, Act i. sc. 2, I can scarcely retain a doubt as to the first act's having been written by Shakspere. Assuredly it was not written by B. and F. I hold Jonson more probable than either of these two. The main presumption, however, for Shakspere's share in this play rests on a point, to which the sturdy critics of this edition (and indeed all before them) were blind, — ^that is, the construction of the blank verse, which proves beyond all doubt an intentional imitation, if not the proper hand, of Shakspere. Now, whatever improbability there is in the former (which supposes Eletcher conscious of the inferiority, the too poematic m.mMs-dramatic nature, of his versification, and of which there is neither proof, nor hke- lihood) adds so much to the probability of the latter. On the other hand, the harshness of many of these very pas- sages, a harshness unrelieved by any lyrical inter-breath- ings, and still more the want of profundity in the thoughts, keep me from an absolute decision. Act i. sc. 3. Emilia's speech : — ■ SiDce his depart, his sports. Tho' craving seriousness and skill," &c. I conjecture "imports," that is, duties or offices of impor- tance. The flow of the versification in this speech seems to demand the trochaic ending — o ; while the text blends jingle and hisses to the annoyance of less sensitive ears than Fletcher's — not to say, Shakspere's. Sect. VII.] notes ok bbatjmont and flktcher. 461 The Woma/n Hater. Act i. sc. 2. This scene from the beginning is prose printed as blank verse, down to the liae — " E'en all the valiant stomachs in the court — " where the verse recommences. This transition from the prose to the verse enhances, and indeed forms, the comic effect. Lazarillo concludes his soliloijuy with a hymn to the goddess of plenty. III. LECTURES ON SHAKSPERE AND MILTON, AT BRISTOL. 1813-14. LECTURES ON SHAKSPERE AND MILTON AT BRISTOL. 1813-14. INTRODUCTORY. T 11 rE have given Mr. Collier's transcripts of the Lectures of 1811-12. We have given the various notes and fragments preserved by Coleridge, in preparation for his Tolumes of dramatic criticism,' which never appeared ; and such other matter on the same subject as is found in the " Remains." Our materials are not exhausted. Incited, doubtless, by the fame of the course of 1811-12, Coleridge's Bristol friends eagerly closed with his proposal, in the autumn of 1813, to repeat it in that city. Accord- ingly, Coleridge forwarded a Prospectus to Bristol. This was busily circulated, tickets sold, the date of the first lecture fixed, and the lecturer duly informed. On the day appointed, or rather, a few days later, according to Cottle,' the active agent in the business, Coleridge arrived from London. ' See plan of the contents of these projected volumes in note to p. 177. ^ " Early Recollections, chiefly relating to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, during his long residence in Bristol." By Joseph Cottle. 2 vols. 1837. Cottle was the publisher of Coleridge's early poems. Iiong before 1813 he had retired from business, though little older than his friend. 456 LECTnEBS ON SHAKSPEEB, ETC., AT BEISTOL. It, appears that an opening course of five lectures on Shakspere was in the first instance announced. The first lecture of this course was delivered on Thursday, October 28th, 1813. In commencing the second lecture, Oolei-idge, apologizing for his difBuseness in the first, promises a sixth, without extra fee. The remaining five were regularly delivered on successive Tuesdays and Thursdays, up to November 16. Cottle, in his account of them, falls into confusion over the date of these lectures. He puts them, as well as the Milton Lectures, in 1814. Mr. George, of Bristol, has pointed out to us this error. To Mr. George, also, the public is indebted for the full reports which follow of the earlier course, unearthed by him from forgotten pages of " The Bristol Gazette," and from the lumber-room of the Bristol Museum.' These reports are particularly valuable, as supplementing Mr. Collier's imperfect series. On December 30, 1813, Coleridge announced a " second course of Lectures, on the remaining plays of Shakspere," with " an examination of Dr. Johnson's Preface to Shak- spere," and four Lectures on Milton. It is impossible to say whether these additional Shak- spere Lectures were delivered or not. We have found no trace of them. Coleridge was ill and desponding at thia time. At his own wish, he was constantly followed by a servant, whose duty it was to prevent him purchasing opium. One thing is certain, that in " The Mirror," of ^ "The volume containing the Eeports of the 1813 Lectures," writes Mr. George, "I hunted up in the loft of the Bristol Museum, where it had been lying on the floor for many years. The volume contains odd numbers of Bristol papers, ranging from 1803 to 1813." INTEODXICTOET. 467 Saturday, April 2, 1814, without any allusion to Shakspere, four Lectures on Milton are announced, to commence on "Tuesday next." On the 9th, the 3rd and 4th Lectures are announced. So that the Milton Lectures were actually delivered on April 5, 7, 12, and 14. As they would, doubtless, be, in substance, the same as those of 1811-12, which, it will be remembered, Mr. Collier lost, we much regret not to have been able to discover any reports of these Milton Lectures. All we know about them is that they were not well attended.'^ They probably were not reported. The allied armies in Paris, and Napoleon abdicating at Fontainebleau, at the very time of their delivery, would leave small room in men's minds, or in newspaper columns, for literary subjects. ' " An erysipelatous complaint, of an alarming nature, has rendered me barely able to attend and go through with my lecturos, the receipts of which have almost paid the expenses of the room, advertisements," &c. — Coleridge to Cottle, in a letter undated, but evidently referring to the Milton Lectures. 458 LBCTDEES ON SHAKSPBEB AND [1813-14 LECTUEE I. General Gharacteristics of Shahspere} T N lectures of whicli amusement forms a share, diflBcnlties are com.mon to tie first. The architect places his foun- dation out of sight, the musician tunes his instrument before his appearance, but the lecturer has to try his chords in the hearing of the assembly. This will not tend to increase amusement, but it is necessary to the right understanding of the subject to be developed. Poetry in essence is as familiar to barbarous as civilized nations. The Laplander and the savage Indian are equally cheered by it, as the inhabitants of Paris or London; — its spirit incorporates and takes up surrounding materials, as a plant clothes itself with soil and climate, whilst it bears marks of a vital principle within, independent of all acci- dental circumstances. To judge with fairness of an author's works, we must observe, firstly, what is essential, and secondly, what arises ^ With this first report compare pp. 231 et seg., the portion of the " Remains," " for the most part communicated by Mr. Justice Coleridge." How shall we account for the verbal coincidences? We can only suggest that Coleridge used, in 1813, notes he had previously made, and that these notes ultimately fell into Mr. Justice Coleridge's hands. If such is the case, our note on p. 231 should be cancelled. FOLLOWTTsTG Page is Damaged Best Image AVAItABtE LeCT. I.] MILTON, AT BRISTOL. from circumstances. It is essential, as in Miltr poetry be simple, sensuous, and impassionate ' : that it may appeal to the elements and the pry of our nature ; sensuous, since it is only V images that we can elicit truth as at a flash ; im^ since images must he vivid, in order to move our and awaken our affections. In judging of different poets, we ought to inquire , authors have brought into fullest play our imagination a. our reason, or have created the greatest excitements ant. produced the completest harmony. Considering only great exquisiteness of language, and sweetness of metre, it is impossible to deny to Pope the title of a delightful writer ; whether he be a Poet must be determined as we define the word : doubtless if everything that pleases be poetry, Pope's satires and epistles must be poetry. Poetry, as distinguished from general modes of composition, does not rest in metre, it is not poetry if it make no appeal to our imagination, our passions, and our sympathy. One character attaches to all true Poets, they write from a prin- ciple within, independent of everything without. The work of a true Poet, in its form, its shapings and modifica- tions, is distinguished from all other works that assume to belong to the class of poetry, as a natural from an artificial flower; or as the mimic garden of a child, from an enamelled meadow. In the former the flowers are broken from their stems and stuck in the ground ; they are beautiful to the eye and fragrant to the sense, but their colours soon fade, and their odour is transient as the smile of the planter; while the meadow may be visited again ' At the end of the Sixth Report, "The Bristol Gazette" appends some errata. For " as in Milton," we are told to read " as Milton defines it." ^ Read " passionate." The reporter has confused between ^(MOTOwaie and impassioned. FotODWING Page is Damaged Best Image LBCTUEIS ON SHAKSPBEB AND [1813-14! in, with renewed delight ; its beauty is innate in md its bloom is of the freshness of nature. nt ground of judging is how far a Poet is in- accidental circumstances. He writes not for Dut for that in which he lives, and that which is .V. It is natural that he should conform to the ^stances of his day, but a true genius will stand in- ndent of these circumstances : and it is observable of .akspere that he leaves little to regret that he was born ji such an age. The great aera in modern times was what is called the restoration of literature ; the ages which pre- ceded it were called the dark ages ; it would be more wise, perhaps, to say, the ages in which we were in the dark. It is usually overlooked that the supposed dark Kra was not universal, but partial and successive or alternate ; that the dark age of England was not the dark age of Italy ; but that one country was in its light and vigour, while another was in its gloom and bondage. The Reformation sounded through Europe like a trumpet ; from the king to the peasant there was an enthusiasm for knowledge, the dis- covery of a MS. was the subject of an embassy. Erasmus read by moonlight, because he could not afford a torch, and begged a penny, not for the love of charity, but for the love of learning. The three great points of attention were morals, religion, and taste, but it becomes necessary to dis- tinguish in this age mere men of learning from men of genius ; all, however, were close copyists of the ancients, and this was the only way by which the taste of mankind could be improved, and the understanding informed. Whilst Dante imagined himself a copy of Virgil, and Ariosto of Homer, they were both unconscious of that greater power working within them, which carried them beyond their originals ; for their originals were polytheists. All great discoveries bear the stamp of the age in which they were made; hence we perceive the effect of their LeCT. I.] • MILTON, AT BEISTOL. 461 purer religion, whicli was visible in their lives, and in reading of their works we should not content ourselves with the narration of events long since passed, but apply their maxims and conduct to our own. Having intimated that times and manners lend their form and pressure to the genius, it may be useful to draw a slight parallel between the ancient and modem stage, as it existed in Greece and in England. The Greeks were polytheists, their religion was local, the object of all their knowledge, science, and taste, was their Gods ; their pro- ductions were, therefore (if the expression may be allowed), statuesque; — the moderns we m^ay designate as picturesque ; the end, complete harmony. The Greeks reared a structure, which, in its parts and as a whole, filled the mind with the calm and elevated impression of perfect beauty and sym- metrical proportion. The modems, blending materials, produced one striking whole. This may be illustrated by comparing the Pantheon with York Minster or West- minster Abbey. Upon the same scale we may compare Sophocles with Shakspere ; — in the one there is a com- pleteness, a satisfying, an excellence, on which the mind can rest; in the other we see a blended multitude of materials, great and little, magnificent and mean, mingled, if we may so say, with a dissatisfying, or falling short of perfection; yet so promising of our progression, that we would not exchange it for that repose of the mind which dwells on the forms of symmetry in acquiescent admiration of grace. This general characteristic of the ancient and modern poetry, might be exemplified in a parallel of their ancient and modern music : the ancient music consisted of melody by the succession of pleasing sounds : the modem embraces harmony, the result of combination, and effect of the whole. Great as was the genius of Shakspere, his judgment was at least equal. Of this we shall be convinced, if we look 462 LBCTUEES ON SHAKSPERE AND [1813-14 round on the age, and compare tlie nature of the respective dramas of Greece and England, differing from the neces- sary dissimilitude of circumstances by which they are modified and influenced. The Greek stage had its origin in the ceremonies of a sacrifice ; such as the goat to Bacchus ; — it were erroneous to call him only the joUy god of wine, among the ancients he was venerable ; he was the symbol of that power which acts without our consciousness from the vital energies of nature, as Apollo was the symbol of our intellectual consciousness. Their heroes under his influence performed more than human actions ; hence tales of their favourite champions soon passed into dialogue. On the Greek stage the chorus was always before the audience — no curtain dropt — change of place was impos- sible, the absurd idea of its improbability was not indulged. The scene cannot be an exact copy of nature, but only an imitation. If we can believe ourselves at Thebes in one act, we can believe ourselves at Athens in the next. There seems to be no just boundary but what the feelings pre- scribe. In Greece, however, great judgment was necessary, where the same persons were perpetually before the audience. If a story lasted twenty-four hours or twenty-four years, it was equally improbable — they never attempted to impose on the senses, by bringing places to men, though they could bring men to places. Unity of time was not necessary, where no ofEence was taken at its lapse between the acts, or between scene and scene, for where there were no acts or scenes it was impos- sible rigidly to observe its laws. To overcome these diffi- culties the judgment and great genius of the ancients supplied music, and with the charms of their poetry filled up the vacuity. In the story of the Agamemnon of ^schylus, the taking of Troy was supposed to be announced by the lighting of beacons on the Asiatic shore : the mind being beguiled by the narrative ode of the chorus, em- LeCT. I.] MILTON, AT BRISTOL. 463 bracing the events of the siege, hours passed as minutes, and no improbahility was felt at the return of Agamemnon ; and yet examined rigidly he must have passed over from Troy in less than fifteen minutes. Another fact here pre- sented itself, seldom noticed; with the Ancients three plays were performed in one day, they were called Trilogies. In Shakspere we may fancy these Trilogies connected into one representation. If " Lear " were divided into three, each part would be a play with the ancients. Or take the three plays of Agamemnon, and divide them into acts, they would form one play : 1st. Act would be the Usurpation of .ffigisthus, and Murder of Agamemnon ; 2nd. Eevenge of Orestes, and Murder of his Mother ; 3rd. The penance of Orestes ; ' consuming a time of twenty-two years. The three plays being but three acts, the dropping of the curtain was as the conclusion of a play. Contrast the stage of the ancients with that of the time of Shakspere, and we shall be struck with his genius ; with them, it had the trappings of royal and religious ceremony; with him, it was a naked room, a blanket for a curtain ; but with his vivid appeals the imagination figured it out " A field for monarchs." After the rupture of the Northern nations, the Latin language, blended with the modem, produced the Romaunt tongue, the language of the Minstrels : to which term, as distinguishing their Songs and Fabliaux, we owe the word and the species of romance. The romantic may be con- sidered as opposed to the antique, and from this change of manners, those of Shakspere take their colouring. He is ■^ For " Penance of Orestes,'' read " The Trial of Orestes before the Grods." — Errata. 464 LECTURES ON SHAKSPEEE AUD [1813-14 not to be tried by ancient and classic rules, but by the standard of his age. That law of nnity which has its foundation, not in factitions necessity of custom, but in nature herself, is instinctively observed by Shakspere. A unity of feeling pervades the whole of his plays. In " Romeo and Juliet " all is youth and spring — it is youth with its follies, its virtues, its precipitancies ; it is spring with its odours, flowers, and transiency : — the same feeling commences, goes through, and ^nds the play. The old men, the Capulets and Montagues, are not common old men, they have an eagerness, a hastiness, a precipitancy — the effect of spring. With Romeo his precipitate change of passion, his hasty marriage, and his rash death, are all the efBects of youth. With Juliet, love has all that is tender and melancholy in the nightingale, all that is volup- tuous in the rose, with whatever is sweet in the freshness of spring, but it ends with a long deep sigh, like the breeze of the evening. This unity of character pervades the whole of his dramas. Of that species of writing termed tragic-comedy, too much has been produced, but it has been doomed to the shelf. With Shakspere his comic constantly re-acted on his tragic characters. " Lear," wandering amidst the tempest, had all his feelings of distress increased by the overflowings of the wild wit of the Fool, as vinegar poured upon wounds exacerbates their pain ; thus even his comic humour tends to the development of tragic passion. The next character belonging to Shakspere as Shakspere, was the keeping at all times the high road of life. With him there were no innocent adulteries, he never rendered that amiable which religion and reason taught us to detest ; he never clothed vice in the garb of virtue, like Beaumont and rietcher, — the Kotzebues of his day ; his fathers were roused by ingratitude, his husbands were stung by un- faithfulness ; the affections were wounded in those points LeCT. I.] MILTON, AT BEISTOL. 465 ■where all may and all must feel. Another evidence of exquisite judgment in Shakspere was, that he seized hold of popular tales. " Lear " and the " Merchant of Venice " were popular tales, but so excellently managed, both were the representation of men in all ages and at all times. His dramas do not arise absolutely out of some one extraordinary circumstance ; the scenes' may stand inde- pendently of any such one connecting incident, as faithful reflections of men and manners. In his mode of drawing characters there were no pompous descriptions of a man by himself ; his character was to be drawn as in real life, from the whole course of the play, or out of the mouths of his enemies or friends. This might be exemplified in the character of Polonius, which actors have often misrepre- sented. Shakspere never intended to represent him as a bufEoon. It was natural that Hamlet," a young man of genius and fire, detesting formality, and disliking Polonius for political reasons, as imagining that he had assisted his uncle in his usurpation, should express himself satirically ; but Hamlet's words should not be taken as Shakspere's conception of him. In Polonius a certain induration of character arose from long habits of business ; but take his advice ibo Laertes, the reverence of his memory by Ophelia, and we shall find that he was a statesman of business, though somewhat past his faculties. One particular feature which belonged to his character was, that his recollections of past life were of wisdom, and showed a knowledge of human nature, whilst what immediately passed before, and escaped from him, was emblematical of weakness. Another excellence in Shakspere, and in which no other writer equalled him, was in the language of nature. So correct was it that we could see ourselves in all he wrote ; his style and manner had also that felicity, that not a sentence could be read without its being discovered if it were Shaksperian. In observations of living character, H H 466 LECTURES ON SHAESPBEE AND [1813-14 such as of landlords and postilions, Fielding had great ex- cellence, but in drawing from his own heart, and depicting that species of character which no observation could teach, he failed in comparison with Richardson, who perpetually placed himself as it were in a day-dream ; but Shakspere excelled in both ; witness an accuracy of character in the Nurse of Juliet. • On the other hand, the great characters of Othello, lago, Hamlet, and Richard III., as he never could have witnessed anything similar, he appears invari- ably to have asked himself. How should I act or speak in such circumstances ? His comic characters were also peculiar. A drunken constable was not uncommon ; but he could make folly a vehicle for wit, as in Dogberry. Every thing was a sub-stratum on which his creative genius might erect a superstructure. To distinguish what is legitimate in Shakspere from what does not belong to him, we must observe his varied images symbolical of moral truth, thrusting by and seeming to trip up each other, from an impetuosity of thought pro- ducing a metre which is always flowing from one verse into the other, and seldom closing with the tenth syllable of the line — an instance of which may be found in the play of " Pericles," written a century before, but which Shak- spere altered, and where his alteration may be recognized even to half a line. This was the case not merely in his later plays, but in his early dramas, such as " Love's Labour's Lost." The same perfection in the flowing con- tinuity of interchangeable metrical pauses is constantly perceptible. Lastly, contrast his morality with the writers of his own or the succeeding age, or with those of the present day, who boast of their superiority. He never, as before ob- served, deserted the high road of life ; he never made his lovers openly gross or profane ; for common candour must allow that his images were incomparably less so than those LeCT. I.] MILTON, AT' BRISTOL. 467 of his contemporaries. Even tlie letters of females in high life were coarser than his writings. The writings of Beaumont and Fletcher bear no compa- rison ; the grossest passages of Shakspere were purity to theirs ; and it should be remembered that though he might occasionally disgust a sense of delicacy, he never injured the mind ; he caused noexcitement of passion which he flattered to degrade, never used what was faulty for a faulty purpose ; carried on no warfare against virtue, by which wicked- ness may be made to appear as not wickedness, and where our sympathy was to be entrapped by the misfortunes of vice : with him vice never walked as it were in twilight. He never inverted the order of nature and propriety, like some modern writers, who suppose every magistrate to be a glutton or a drunkard, and every poor man humane and temperate ; with him we had no benevolent braziers or sen- timental ratcatchers. Nothing was purposely out of place. If a man speak injuriously of a friend, our vindication of him is naturally warm. Shakspere had been accused of profaneness. He (Mr. C.) from the perusal of him, had acquired a habit of looking into his own heart, and per- ceived the goings on of his nature, and confident he was, Shakspere was a writer of .all others the most calculated to make his readers better as well as wiser. 468 LECTURES ON SHAKSPBEl AND [1813-14 LECTURE II. Macbeth. TV /[R. COLERIDGE'S lecture of last evening on "Mac- ■'■-'■ beth ' ' was marked, characteristically, with that philo- sophical tact which perceives causes, and traces effects, im- palpable to the common apprehension. He seemed to have been admitted into the closet of Shakspere's mind ; to have shared his secret thoughts, and been familiarized with his most hidden motives. Mr. Coleridge began by commenting on the vulgar stage error which transformed the Weird Sisters into witches with broomsticks. They were awful beings, and blended in themselves the Pates and Furies of the ancients with the sorceresses of Gothic and popular superstition. They were mysterious natures : fathers, mothers,' sexless : they come and disappear : they lead evil minds from evil to evil ; and have the power of tempting those who have been the tempters of themselves. The ex- quisite judgment of Shakspere is shown in nothing more than in the different language of the Witches with each other, and with those whom they address : the former dis- plays a certain fierce familiarity, grotesqueness mingled with terror ; the latter is always solemn, dark, and myste- rious. Mr. Coleridge proceeded to show how Macbeth became early a tempter to himself; and contrasted the talkative curiosity of the innocent-minded and open-dis- ' For " fathers, mothers," read " fatherless, motherless." — Errata. LeCT. II.] MILTON, AT BKISTOL. 469 positioned Banquo, in the scene with the Witches, with the silent, absent, and brooding melancholy of his partner. A striking instance of this self-temptation was pointed out in the disturbance of Macbeth at the election of the Prince of Cumberland ; but the alarm of his conscience appears, even while meditating to remove this bar to his own advance- ment, as he exclaims, "Stars! hide your fires!" The ingenuity with which a man evades the promptings of con- science before the commission of a crime, was compared with his total imbecility and helplessness when the crime had been committed, and when conscience can be no longer dallied with or eluded. Macbeth in the first instance enu- merates the different worldly impediments to his scheme of murder : could he put them by, he would " jump the life to come." Yet no sooner is the murder perpetrated, than all the concerns of this mortal life are absorbed and swal- lowed up in the avenging feeling within him : he hears a voice cry, " Macbeth has murder'd sleep : " and therefore, " Grlamis shall sleep no more." The lecturer alluded to the prejudiced idea of Lady Macbeth as a monster ; as a being out of nature and without conscience : on the contrary, her constant effort throughout the play was, if the expression may be forgiven, to bully conscience. She was a woman of a visionary and day- dreaming turn of mind ; her eye fixed on the shadows of her solitary ambition ; and her feelings abstracted, through the deep musings of her absorbing passion, from, the com- mon-life sympathies of flesh and blood. But her con- science, so far from being seared, was continually smarting within her ; and she endeavours to stifle its voice, and keep down its struggles, by inflated and soaring fancies, and appeals to spiritual agency. So far is the woman from being dead within her, that Jier sex occasionally betrays itself in the very moment of dark and bloody imagination. A passage where she alludes 470 LECTDRES ON SHAKSPEEE AND [1813-14 to " plucking her nipple from the boneless gums of her infant," though usually thought to prove a merciless and unwomanly nature, proves the direct opposite : she brings it as the most solemn enforcement to Macbeth of the solemnity of his promise to undertake the plot against Duncan. Had she so sworn, she would have done that which was most horrible to her feelings, rather than break the oath ; and as the most horrible act which it was pos- sible for imagination to conceive, as that which was most revolting to her own feelings, she alludes to the destruction of her infant, while in the act of sucking at her breast. Had she regarded this with savage indifEerenee, there would have been no force in the appeal ; but her very allu- sion to it, and her purpose in this allusion, shows that she considered no tie so tender as that which connected hei with her bab6. Another exquisite trait was the faltering of her resolution, while standing over Duncan in his slumbers : " Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done it." Mr. Coleridge concluded the lecture, of which we have been only able to touch upon a few of the heads, by an- nouncing his intention of undertaking in his next discourse the analysis of the character of Hamlet. It is much to the credit of the literary feeling of Bristol that the room over- flowed.' ' This remark is conclusive that Coleridge's complaint in his letter to Cottle (see note to the Introductory Matter) refers to the Milton lectures. LecT. III.] MILTON, AT BEISTOL. 471 LECTURE III. Hamlet. * I ""HE seeming inconsistencies in the conduct and charac- ter of Hamlet have long exercised the conjectural ingenuity of critics : and as we are always loth to suppose that the cause of defective apprehension is in ourselves, the mystery has been too commonly explained by the very easy process of supposing that it is, in fact, inexplicable, and by resolving the difficulty into the capricious and irregular genius of Shakspere. , Mr. Coleridge, in his third lecture, has effectually exposed the shallow and stupid arrogance of this vulgar and indo- lent decision. He has shown that the intricacies of Hamlet's character may be traced to Shakspere's deep and accurate science in mental philosophy. That this character must have some com.mon connection with the laws of our nature, was assumed by the lecturer, from the fact that Hamlet was the darling of every country where literature was fos- tered. He thought it essential to the understanding of Hamlet's character that we should reflect on the constitu- tion of our own minds. Man was distinguished from the animal in proportion as thought prevailed over sense ; but in healthy processes of the mind, a balance was maintained between the impressions of outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect : if there be an overbalance in the contemplative facultv. man becomes the creature of 472 , LECTUEES ON SHAESPBEE AND [1813-14 meditation, and loses the power of action. Shakspere seems to have conceived a mind in the highest degree of excitement, with this overpowering activity of intellect, and to have placed him in circumstances where he was obliged to act on the spur of the moment. Hamlet, though brave and careless of death, had contracted a morbid sensi- bility from this overbalance in the mind, producing the lingering and vacillating delays of procrastination, and wasting in the energy of resolving the energy of acting. Thus the play of " Hamlet " offers a direct contrast to that of " Macbeth :" the one proceeds with the utmost slowness, the other with breathless and crowded rapidity. The effect of this overbalance of imagination is beauti- fully illustrated in the inward brooding of Hamlet — ^the effect of a superfluous activity of thought. His mind, un- seated from its healthy balance, is for ever occupied with the world within him, and abstracted from external things ; his words give a substance to shadows, and he is dissatisfied with common-place realities. It is the nature of thought to be indefinite, while definiteness belongs to reality. The sense of sublimity arises, not from the sight of an outward object, but from the reflection upon it ; not from the im.- pression, but from the idea. Few have seen a celebrated waterfall without feeling something of disappointment : it is only subsequently, by reflection, that the idea of the waterfall comes full into the mind, and brings with it a train of sublime associations. Hamlet felt this : in him we see a mind that keeps itself in a state of abstraction, and beholds external objects, as hieroglyphics. His soliloquy, " Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt," arises from a craving after the indefinite: a disposition or temper which most easily besets men of genius; a morbid craving for that which is not. The self-delusion common to this temper of mind was finely exemplified in the chara^ier which Hamlet gives of himself : " It cannot be, but I am LeCT. III.] MILTON, AT BRISTOL. 473 pigeon-liver 'd, and lack gall, to make oppression bitter." He mistakes the seeing his chains for the breaking of them ; and delays action, till action is of no use ; and he becomes the victim of circumstances and accident. The lecturer, in descending to particulars, took occasion to defend from the common charge of improbable eccen- tricity, the scene which follows Hamlet's interview with the Ghost. He showed that after the mind has been stretched beyond its usual pitch and tone, it must either sink into exhaustion 'and inanity, or seek relief by change. Persons conversant with deeds of cruelty contrive to escape from their. conscience by connecting something of the ludicrous with them ; and by inventing grotesque terms, and a certain technical phraseology, to disguise the horror of their practices. The terrible, however paradoxical it may appear, will be found to touch on the verge of the ludicrous. Both arise from the perception of something out of the common nature of things, — something out of place : if from this we can abstract danger, the uncommonness alone remains, and the sense of the ridiculous is excited. The close alliance of these opposites appears from the circumstance that laughter is equally the expression of extreme anguish and horror as of joy : in the same manner that there are tears of joy as well as tears of sorrow, so there is a laugh of terror as well as a laugh of merriment. These complex causes will natu- rally have produced in Hamlet the disposition to escape from his own feelings of the overwhelming and superna- tural by a wild transition to the ludicrous, — a sort of cunning bravado, bordering on .the flights of delirium. Mr. Coleridge instanced, as a proof of Shakspere's minute knowledge of human nature, the unimportant conversation which takes place during the expectation of the Ghost's ap- pearance : and he recalled to our notice what all must have observed in common life, that on the brink of some serious 474 LECTDEES ON SHAKSPEEB AND [1813-14 enterprise, or event of moment, men naturally elude the pres- sure of their own thoughts by turning aside to trivial objects and familiar circumstances. So in "Hamlet," the dialogue on the platform begins with remarks on the coldness of the air, and inquiries, obliquely connected indeed with the ex- pected hour of the visitation, but thrown out in a seeming vacuity of topics, as to the striking of the clock. The same desire to escape from the inward thoughts is admir- ably carried on in. Hamlet's moralizing on the Danish custom of wassailing; and a double purpose is here an- swered, which demonstrates the exquisite judgment of Shakspere. By thus entangling the attention of the audience in the nice distinctions and parenthetical sen- tences of Hamlet, he takes them completely by surprise on the appearance of the Ghost, which comes upon them in all the suddenness of its visionary character. No modern writer would have dared, like Shakspere, to have preceded this last visitation by_two distinct appearances, or could have contrived that the third should rise upon the two former in impressiveness and solemnity of interest. Mr. Coleridge at the commencement of this lecture drew a comparison between the characters of Macbeth and Bona- parte — both tyrants, both indifferent to means, however barbarous, to attain their ends ; and he hoped the fate of the latter would be like the former, in failing amidst a host of foes,' which his cruelty and injustice had roused against him. At the conclusion of his lecture, he alluded to the successes of the Allies, and complimented his country on the lead she had taken^ and the example she had set to other nations, in resisting an attack upon the middle classes of society ; for if the French Emperor had succeeded in his attempts to gain universal dominion, there would have ' This lecture was delivered on Nov. 4 : the battle of Leipsic vpas fought on Oct. 18. LeCT. hi.] MILTON, AT BRISTOL. 476 been bat two classes suffered to exist — the bigh and the low. England, justly proud, as she had a right to be, of a Sbakspere, a Milton, a Bacon, and a Newton, could also boast of a Nelson and a Wellington. 476 LECTUEES ON SHAKSPEEB AND [1813-14 LECTURE IV. Winter's Tale. Othello. A T the commencement of the fourth lecture last evening, ■^^ Mr. Coleridge combated the opinion held by some critics, that the writings of Shakspere were like a wilder- ness, in which were desolate places, most beautiful flowers, and weeds ; he argued that even the titles of his plays were appropriate and showed judgment, presenting as it were a bill of fare before the feast. This was peculiarly so in the " Winter's Tale," — a wild story, calculated to interest a circle round a fireside. He maintained that Shakspere ought not to be judged of in detail, but on the whole. A pedant differed from a master in cramping himself with certain established rules, whereas the master regarded rules as always controllable by and subservient to the end. The passion to be deUneated in the " Winter's Tale " was jea- lousy. Shakspere's description of this, however, was per- fectly philosophical: the mind, in its first harbouring of it, became mean and despicable, and the first sensation was perfect shame, arising from the consideration of having possessed an object unworthily, of degrading a person to a thing. The mind that once indulges this passion has a pre- disposition, a vicious weakness, by which it kindles a fire from every spark, and from circumstances the most inno- cent and indifferent finds fuel to feed the flame. This he exemplified in an able manner, from the conduct and LeCT. IV.] MILTON, AT BEISTOI 477 opinion of Leontes, who seized upon occurrences of wliioh lie himself was the cause ; and when speaking of Hermione, combined his anger with images of the lowest sensuality, and pursued the object with the utmost cruelty. This cha- racter Mr. Coleridge contrasted with that of Othello, whom Shakspere had portrayed the very opposite to a jealous man : he was noble, generous, open-hearted ; unsuspicious and unsuspecting ; and who, even after the exhibition of the handkerchief as evidence of his wife's guilt, bursts out ia her praise. Mr. 0. ridiculed the idea of making Othello a negro. He was a gallant Moor, of royal blood, combining a high sense of Spanish and Italian feeling, and whose noble nature was wrought on, not by a fellow with a coun- tenance predestined for the gallows, as some actors repre- sented lago, but by an accomplished and artful villain, who was indefatigable in his exertions to poison the mind of the brave and swarthy Moor. It is impossible, with our limits, to follow Mr. Coleridge through those nice discriminations by which he elucidated the various characters in this excel- lent drama. Speaking of the character .of the women of Shakspere, or rather, as Pope stated, the absence of cha- racter, Mr. Coleridge said this was the highest compliment that could he paid to them : the elements were so com- mixed, so even was the balance of feeling, that no one protruded in particular, — everything amiable as sisters, mothers, and wives, was included in the thought. To form a just estimation and to enjoy the beauties of Shakspere, Mr. Coleridge's lectures should be heard again and again. Perhaps, at some future period, we may occasionally fill our columns with an Analysis of his different Lectures, similar to what we presented last week of the first ; at pre- sent we must content ourselves with generals. 478 LBCTUEES ON SHAkSPlEE AKD [1813-14 LECTURE V. Historical Plays. Richard II. TZPULLY to comprehend tlie nature of the Historic Drama, the difference should be understood between the epic and tragic muse. The latter recognizes and is grounded upon the free-will of man ; the former is under the control of destiny, or, among Christians, an overruling Providence. In the epic, the prominent character is evei under this influence, and when accidents are introduced, they are the result of causes over which our will has no power. An epic play begins and ends arbitrarily ; its only law is, that it possesses beginning, middle, and end. Homer ends with the death of Hector ; the final fate of Troy is left untouched. Virgil ends with the marriage of .^neas ; the historical events are left imperfect. In the tragic, the free-will of man is the first cause, and accidents are never introduced ; if they are, it is considered a great fault. To cause the death of a hero by accident, such as slipping ofE a plank into the sea,' would be beneath the tragic muse, as it would arise from no mental action. Shakspere, in blending the epic with the tragic, has given the impression of the drama to the history of his ' Coleridge had probably in mind a celebrated Duke of Milan who perished in this way, landing from his ship, and rendered helpless by the weight of his armour. LeCT. V.^ MILTON, AT BRISTOL. 479 country. By this means he has bequeathed as a legacy the pure spirit of history. Not that his facts are implicitly to be relied on, or is he to be read, as the Duke of Marl- borough read him, as an historian; but as distance is destroyed by a telescope, and by the force of imagination we see in the constellations, brought close to the eye, a multitude of worlds, so by the law of impressiveness, when we read his plays, we seem to live in the era he portrays. One great object of his historic plays, and particularly of that to be examined (Richard II.), was to make his countrymen more patriotic ; to make Englishmen proud of being Englishmen*. It was a play not much acted. This was not regretted by the lecturer ; for he never saw any of Shakspere'e plays performed, but with a degree of pain, disgust, and indignation. He had seen Mrs. Siddons as Lady, and Kemble as Macbeth : — ^these might be the Macbeths of the Kembles, but they were not the Macbeths of Shakspere. He was therefore not grieved at the enor- mous size and monopoly of the theatres, which naturally produced many bad but few good actors ; and which drove Shakspere from the stage, to find his proper place in the heart and in the closet, where he sits enthroned on a double-headed Parnassus. With him and Milton every- thing that was admirable, everything that was praiseworthy, was to be found. Shakspere showed great judgment in his first scenes ; they contained the germ of the ruling passion which was to be developed hereafter. Thus Richard's hardiness of mind, arising from kingly power ; his weakness and de- bauchery from continual and unbounded fiattery ; and the haughty temper of the barons ; one and the other alternately forming the moral of the play, are glanced at in the first scenes. An historic play requires more excitement than a tragic ; thus Shakspere never loses an opportunity of awakening a patriotic feeling. For this purpose Old Gaunt 480 LECTUEES ON SHAKSPEBB AND [1813-14 accuses Richard of having farmed out the island. What could be a greater rebuke to a king than to be told that " This realm, this England, Is now leased out Like to a tenement, or pelting farm." This speech of Gaunt is most beautiful; the propriety of putting so long a speech into the mouth of an old dying man might easily be shown. It thence partook of the nature of prophecy : — " Methinks I am a prophet new inspired, And thus expiring, do foretell of him." The plays of Shakspere, as before observed of " Romeo and Juliet," were characteristic throughout : — ^whereas that was all youth and spring, this was womanish weak- ness ; the characters were of extreme old age, or partook of the nature of age and imbecility. The length of the speeches was adapted to a delivery between acting and recitation, which produced in the auditors a docility or frame of mind favourable to the poet, and useful to them- selves : — ^how different from modem plays, where the glare of the scenes, with every wished-for object industriously realized, the mind becomes bewildered in surrounding attraction ; whereas Shakspere, in place of ranting, music, and outward action, addresses us in words that enchain the mind, and carry on the attention from scene to scene. Critics who argue against the use of a thing from its abuse, have taken offence at the introduction in a tragedy of that play on words which is called punning. But how stands the fact with nature ? Is there not a tendency in the human mind, when suffering under some great affliction, to associate everything around it with the obtrusive feel- ing, to connect and absorb all into the predominant sen- sation ? Thus Old Gaunt, discontented with his relation. LeCT. v.] MILTON, AT BRISTOL. 481 in the peevishness of age, when Richard asks " how is it with aged Gaunt," breaks forth — " O ! how that name befits my composition ! Old Gaunt, indeed ; and Gaunt in being old. * * » * « Gaunt am I for the grave, Gaunt as a grave," &c. Shakspere, as if he anticipated the hollow sneers of critics, makes Richard reply : — " Can sick men play so nicely with their names ?" To which the answer of Gaunt presents a confutation of this idle criticism, — " No, misery makes sport to mock itself." The only nomenclature of criticism should be the classi- fication of the faculties of the mind, how they are placed, how they are subordinate, whether they do or do not appeal to the worthy feelings of our nature. False criticism is created by ignorance, light removes it; as the croaking of frogs in a ditch is silenced by a candle. The beautiful keeping of the character of the play is con- spicuous in the Duke of York. He, like Gaunt, is old, and, full of a religious loyalty, struggling with indignation at the king's vices and follies, is an evidence of a man giving up all energy under a feehng of despair. The play through- out is a history of the human mind, when reduced to ease its anguish with words instead of action, and the necessary feeling of weakness which such a state produces. The scene between the Queen, Bushy, and Bagot, is also worthy of notice, from the characters all talking high, but perform- ing nothing ; and from Shakspere's tenderness to those presentiments, which, wise as we will be, will still adhere to our nature. Shakspere has contrived to bring the character of Richard, with all his prodigality and hard usage of his friends, still I I 482 LECTUEES ON SHAKSPERE AND [1813-14 witMn the compass of our pity; for we find him m^uch beloved by those who knew him best. The Queen is pas- sionately attached to him, and his good Bishop (Carlisle) adheres to the last. He is not one of those whose punish- ment gives delight ; his failings appear to arise from out- ward objects, and from the poison of flatterers around him ; we cannot, therefore, help pitying, and wishing he had been placed in a rank where he would have been less exposed, and where he might have been happy and useful. The next character which presented itself, was that of Bolingbroke. It was itseK a contradiction to the line of Pope — " Shakspere grew immortal in spite of himself.'' One thing was to be observed, that in all his plays he takes the opportunity of sowing germs, the full development of which appears at a future time. Thus in Henry lY. he prepares us for the character of Henry V., and the whole of Gloucester's character in Henry VI. is so different from any other that we are prepared for Richard III. In BoHng- broke is defined the struggle of inward determination with outward show of humility. His first introduction, where he says to the nobles who came to meet him, — " Welcome, my lords, I wot your love pursues A banished traitor ; all my treasury Is yet but uufelt thanks," &c. could only be compared to Marius, as described by Plutarch, exclaim.ing, on the presentation of the consular robes, Do these " befit a banished traitor ? " concealing in pretended disgrace the implacable ambition that haunted him. In this scene old York again appears, and with high feelings of loyalty and duty reproves Bolingbroke in bold- ness of words, but with feebleness of action : — " Show me thy humble heart, and not thy knee." "Tut! tut! LeCT. Y.] MILTON, AT BRISTOL. 483 Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle : I am no traitor's uncle." ****** " Why, foolish boy, the king is left behind, And in my loyal bosom lies his power." Yet after all this vehemence he concludes — " Well, well, I see the issue of these arms ; I cannot mend it j But if I could, by Him that gave me life, I would attach you all So fare you well, Unless you please to enter in the castle, And there repose you for this night : — " the whole character transpiring in verbal expression. The overflowing of Richard's feelings, and which tends to keep him in our esteem, is the scene where he lands, — " Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand, Tho' rebels wound thee with their horses' hoofs ;" so beautifully descriptive of the sensations of a man and a king attached to his country as his inheritance and his birthright. His resolution and determination of action are depicted in glowing words, thus : — " ?ii when this thief, this traitor Bolingbroke, Shall see us rising in our throne," &c. &c. ****** " For every man that Bolingbroke hath press'd, God for his Eichard hath in heavenly pay A glorious angel." Who, after this, would not have supposed great energy of action ? No ! all was spent, and upon the first ill- tidings, nothing but despondency takes place, with alterna- tives of unmanly despair and unfounded hopes; great activity of mind, without any strength of moral feeling to rouse to action, presenting an awful lesson in the education of princes. 484 LBCTUEES ON SHAKSPEEB AND [1813-14 Here it might be observed, tliat Shakspere, following the best tragedies where moral reflections are introdnced in the choruses, &o., puts general reflections in the mouths of unimportant personages. His great men never moralize, except under the influence of violent passion ; for it is the nature of passion to. generalize. Thus, two fellows in the street, when they quarrel, have recourse to their proverbs, — " It is always the case with such fellows as those," or some such phrase, making a species their object of aversion. Shakspere uniformly elicits grand and noble truths from passion, as sparks are forced from heated iron. Richard's parade of resignation is consistent with the other parts of the play : — . . . . " Of comfort no man speak ; Let's talk of grayes, of worms, and epitaphs," &c easing his heart, and consuming all that is manly in words: never anywhere seeking comfort in despair, but mistaking the moment of exhaustion for quiet, This is finely con- trasted in Bolingbroke's struggle of haughty feeling with temporary dissimulation, in which the latter says : — " Harry Bolingbroke, On both his knees doth kiss King Richard's hand," &c. But, with the prudence of his character, after this hypocri- tical speech, adds — " March on, and mark King Richard how he looks." Shakspere's wonderful judgment appears in his his- torical plays, in the introduction of some incident or other, though no way connected, yet serving to give an air of historic fact. Thus the scene of the Queen and the Gardener realizes the thing, makes the occurrence no longer a segment, but gives an individuality, a liveliness and presence to the scene. After an observation or two upon Shakspere's taking LbCT. v.] MILTON, AT BRISTOL. 486 advantage of making an impression friendly to the charac- ter of his favourite hero Henry V., in the discourse of Bolingbroke respecting his son's absence, Mr. Coleridge said he should reserve his definition of the character of FalstafE until he came to that of Richard III., for in both was an overpriziag of the intellectual above the moral cha- racter ; in the most desperate and the most dissolute the same moral elements were to be found. Of the assertion of Dr. Johnson, that the writings of Shakspere were deficient in pathos, and that he only put our senses into complete peacefulness, Mr. Coleridge held this much preferable to that degree of excitement which was the object of the German drama ; and concluded a very interesting lecture with reading some observations he penned after being present at the representation of a play in Ger- many, in which the wife of a colonel who had fallen into disgrace was frantic first for grief, and afterwards for joy. A distortion of feeling was the feature of the modem drama of Kotzebue and his followers ; its heroes were generous, liberal, brave, and noble, just so far as they could, without the Sacrifice of one Christian virtue ; its misanthropes were tender-hearted, and its tender-hearted were misanthropes. 486 LECTUEBS ON SHAKSPEEE AND [1813-14 LECTURE VI. Edeha^d. III. Falstaff. lago. Shahspere as a Poet generally. T N our fourth page may be seen an analysis of the fifth ■^ Lecture of this gentleman. Last evening he delivered his sixth. It may be necessary here to remark that Mr. Coleridge in his second Lecture stated that from the difEuseness he unavoidably fell into in his introductory discourse, he should be unable to complete the series he had designed without an additional Lecture, which those who had regularly attended would be admitted to gratis. This was the one delivered last night ; that, therefore, intended on Education, would be the seventh instead of the sixth, which is to take place on to-morrow (Thursday '). We must content ourselves with giving to-day a very brief account of the Lecture of last night. Mr. Coleridge com- menced by tracing the history of Tragedy and Comedy among the ancients, with whom both ^ were distinct. Shak- spere, though he had produced comedy in tragedy, had never produced tragi-comedy. With him, as with Aristo- phanes, opposites served to illustrate each other. The ' Nov. 18, 1813. We have no information to furnish on the subject of this Lecture. ' Though we have certainly tampered with , the punctuation, no attempt has been made to correct the English of these reports. LeCT. VI.] MILTON, AT BRISTOL. 487 arena common to both was ideal, the comedy of the Greek and the English dramatist was as much above real life as the tragedy. Tragedy was poetry in the deepest earnest, comedy was mirth in the highest zest, exulting in the removal of all bounds ; an intellectual wealth squandered in sport ;. it had nothing to do with morality ; its lessons were prudential ; it taught to avoid vice ; but if it aimed at admonition, it 'became a middle thing, neither tragedy nor comedy. Mr. C, in deciphering the character of FalstafE, was naturally led to a comparison of the wit of Shakspere with that of his contemporaries (Ben Jonson, &c. &c.), and aptly remarked, that whilst Shakspere gave us wit as salt to our meat, Ben Jonson gave wit as salt instead of meat. After wit, Mr. C. proceeded to define humour, and enteted into a curious history of the origin of the term, distinguishing the sanguine, the temperate, the melancholy, the phlegmatic. Where one fluid predominated over the other, a man was said to be under the influence of that particular humour. Thus a disproportion of black bile rendered a man melancholy. But when nothing serious was the consequence of a predominance of one particular fluid,, the actions performed were humorous, and a man capable of describing them termed a humorist. Shakspere, possessed of wit, humour, fancy, and imagi- nation, built up an outward world from the stores within his mind, as the bee builds a hive from a thousand sweets, gathered from a thousand flowers. He was not only a great Poet but a great Philosopher. The characters of B;ichard III., lago, and FalstafE, were the characters of men who reverse the order of things, who place intellect at the head,' whereas it ought to follow like geometry, to prove and to confirm. No man, either hero or saint, ever acted from an unmixed motive ; for let him do what he '■ See the opening paragraph of Mr. Collier's Xllth Lecture, p. 147. 488 LECTUBBS ON SHAKSPEEB AND [1813-14 ■will rigMly, still conscience whispers "it is your duty." Richard, laughing at conscience, and sneering at religion, felt a confidence in his intellect, which urged him to commit the most horrid crimes, because he felt himself, although inferior in form and shape, superior to those around him ; he felt he possessed a power that they had not. lago, on the same principle, conscious of superior intellect, gave scope to his envy, and hesitated not to ruin a gallant, open, and generous friend in the moment of felicity, because he was not promoted as he expected. Othello was superior in place, but lago felt him inferior in intellect, and unrestrained by conscience, trampled upon him. Palstaff, not a degraded man of genius, like Bums, but a man of degraded genius, with the same consciousness of superiority to hi^ companions, fastened himself on a young prince, to prove how much his influence on an heir apparent could exceed that of statesmen. With this view he hesitated not to practise the most contemptuous of all characters : — an open and professed liar : even his sensuality was subservient to his intellect, for he appeared to drink sack that he might have occasion to show his wit. One thing, however, worthy of observation, was the contrast of labour in Falstafi to produce wit, with the ease with which Prince Henry parried his shaft, and the final contempt which such a character deserved and received from the young king, when FalstafE, calling his friends around him, Nym, Bardolph, Pistol, &c., expected the consummation of that influence which he flattered himself to have established. Mr. 0. conclijded by delivering his opinion of Shak- spere's general character as a Poet, independent of a Di-amatist. His " Venus and Adonis," written at an early age, contained evidence of his qualifications as a Poet: great sweetness nnd melody of sound, with an exquisite richness of language, were symptoms of that genius which. LeCT. VI.] MILTON, AT BEISTOL. 489 further displayed in his "Lucrece," received its consum- mation in his Dramatic -writings. Our limits prevent us from following Mr. Coleridge further. "We do not offer an apology to our readers for having consumed so many of our columns in a brief outline of his interesting Lectures. To gain an insight into human nature, to enjoy the writings and genius of the first dramatic poet of any age, and above all to obtain that knowledge of ourselves, which the Lec- tures of Mr. Coleridge, rich in imagery, language, and wisdom, were calculated to produce, have afforded us so much genuine gratification, that we could not resist the desire of iraparting a share to our readers. IV. APPENDIX. 493 APPENDIX. T^O make our volume as complete a record as possible of -"■ Coleridge's opinions on the English Dramatists, some incidental criticisms from other works of his are appended. His criticisms on English poets, not dramatists, are numerous. In our extracts from Mr. Collier's Preface, all such that he gives have been admitted, to secure them a permanent place. For the same reason, we here include the notes on Chaucer and Spenser, in the Lectures of 1818 ; and those on Milton, in the same Lectures, for a double reason, for they probably contain the substance of the missing lectures of 1811-12. Many criticisms on modern poets wiU be found in the " Table Talk," and in the " Biographia Literaria," — on Bowles, Southey, and Words- worth, mainly. These publications are easily accessible. It may be added that Coleridge often repeats himself, — with variations. The substance of our quotation from the " Friend," for example, may be found in the " Essay on Method ; " and Coleridge's ideas on poetry generally, in the lectures of 1811-12, and in those of 1818, are illustrated by similar ones in the " Biographia Literaria." I. The specific symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a critical aaialysis of Shalcspere't " Venus and Adonis," and " Bape of Lucrece," Chapter xv. of the "Biographia Literaria." In the application of these principles to purposes of practical criticism as employed in. the appraisal of works more or less imperfect, I have endeavoured to discover what the qualities in a poem are, which may be deemed 494 iPPENDIX. promises and specific symptoms of poetic power, as distin- gnislied from general talent determined to poetic com- position by accidental motives, by an act of the will, rather than by the inspiration of a genial and prodnctive nature. In this investigation, I could not, I thought, do better, than keep before me the earliest work of the greatest genius, that perhaps human nature has yet produced, our myriad-minded ' Shakspere. I mean the " Venus and Adonis," and the "Lucrece;" works which give at once strong promises of the strength, and yet obvious proofs of the immaturity, of his genius. From these I abstracted the following marks, as characteristics of original poetic genius in general. 1. In the "Venus and Adonis," the first and most obvious excellence is the perfect sweetness of the versifica- tion ; its adaptation to the subject ; and the power dis- played in varying the march of the words without passing into a loftier and more majestic rhythm than was demanded by the thoughts, or permitted by the propriety of preserv- ing a sense of melody predominant. The delight in rich- ness and sweetness of sound, even to a faulty excess, if it be evidently original, and not the result of an easily imitable mechanism, I regard as a highly favourable promise in the compositions of a young man. " The man that hath not music in his soul " can indeed never be a genuine poet. Imagery (even taken from nature, much more when trans- planted from books, as travels, voyages, and works of natural history) ; affecting incidents ; just thoughts ; in- teresting personal or domestic feelings ; and with these the art of their combination or intertexture in the form of a poem ; may all by incessant effort be acquired as a trade, ' 'Av^p iivpmvovi, a phrase which I have borrowed from a Greek monk, who applies it to a Patriarch of Constantinople. I might have said that I have reclaimed rather than borrowed it, for it seems to belong to Shakspere de jure singulari, et ex privilegio naiuree. — S. T. C. APPENDIX. 495 by a man of talents and mucli reading, who, as I once before observed, has mistaken an intense desire of poetic reputation for a natural poetic genius ; the love of the arbitrary end for a possession of the peculiar means. But the sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift of imagination ; and this, together with the power of reducing multitude into unity of effect, and modifying a series of thoughts by some one predominant thought or feeling, may be cultivated and improved, but can never be learnt. It is in these that " Poeta nascitur nonfit." 2. A second promise of genius is the choice of subjects very remote from the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself. At least I have found, that where the subject is taken immediately from the author's personal sensations and experiences, the excellence of a particular poem is but an equivocal mark, and often a fallacious pledge, of genuine poetic power.' We may perhaps re- member the tale of the statuary, who had acquired con- siderable reputation for the legs of his goddesses, though the rest of the statue accorded but indifferently with ideal beauty; till his wife, elated by her husband's praises, modestly acknowledged that she herself had been his con- stant model. In the " Venus and Adonis," this proof of poetic power exists even to excess. It is throughout as if a superior spirit, more intuitive, more intimately conscious even than the characters themselves, not only of every out- ward look and act, but of the flux and reflux of the mind in all its subtlest thoughts and feelings, were placing the whole before our view ; himself meanwhile unparticipating ' This is at least candid on the part of Coleridge, so many of whose own poems are of this private interpretation. On the other hand, he tells us, in .the preface to the earlier editions of his poems : "If I could judge qf others by myself, I should not hesitate to affirm, that the most interesting passages in all writings are those in which the author develops his own feelings." The statements are not antagonistic. 496 APPENDIX. in the passions, and actuated only by that pleasurable excitement which had resulted from the energetic fervour of his own spirit, in so vividly exhibiting what it had so accurately and profoundly contemplated. I think I should have conjectured from these poems, that even then the great instinct which impelled the poet to the drama was secretly working in him, prompting him by a series and ■ never-broken chain of imagery, always vivid, and because unbroken, often minute ; by the highest effort of the pic- turesque in words, of which words are capable, higher perhaps than was ever realized by any other poet, even Dante not excepted ; to provide a substitute for that visual language, that constant intervention and running comment by tone, look, and gesture, which, in his dramatic works, he was entitled to expect from the players. His Venus and Adonis seem at once the characters themselves, and the whole representation of those characters by the most consummate actors. Tou seem to be told nothing, but to see and hear everything. Hence it is, that from the per- petual activity of attention required on the part of the reader; from the rapid flow, the quick change, and the playful nature of the thoughts and images ; and, above all, from the alienation, and, if I may hazard such an expres- sion, the utter aloofness of the poet's own feelings from those of which he is at once the painter and the analyst ; that though the very subject cannot but detract from the pleasure of a delicate mind, yet never was poem less dan- gerous on a moral account. Instead of doing as Ariosto, and as, still more offensively, Wieland has done; instead of degrading and deforming passion into appetite, the trials of love into the struggles of concupiscence, Shakspere has here represented the animal impulse itself, so as to preclude all sympathy with it, by dissipating the reader's notice among the thousand outward images, and now beautiful, now fanciful circumstances, which form its dresses and its APPENDIX. 4>97 scenery ; or hj diverting our attention from the main sub- ject by those frequent witty or profound reflections -whicli the poet's ever active mind lias deduced from, or connected with, the imagery and the incidents. The reader is forced into too much action to sympathize with the merely passive of our nature. As little can a mind thus roused and awakened be brooded on by mean and instinct emotion, aa the low, lazy mist can creep upon the surface of a lake while a strong gale is driving it onward in waves and billows. 3. It has been before observed that images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves cha- racterize the poet. They become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion ; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion ; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession _to an instant ; or lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet's own spirit, " Which shoots its being through earth, sea, and air." In the two following lines, for instance, there is nothing objectionable, nothing which would preclude them from forming, in their proper place, part of a descriptive poem : " Behold yon row of pines, that shorn and bow'd Bend from the sea-blast, seen at twilight eve." But with the small alteration of rhythm, the same words would be equally in their place in a book of topography, or in a descriptive tour. The same image wiU rise into a semblance of poetry if thus conveyed : " Yon row of bleak and visionary pines, By twilight-glimpse discerned, mark ! how they flee From the fierce sea-blast, all their tresses wild Streaming before them." I have given this as an illustration, by no means as an instance, of that particular excellence which I had in view, K E ^yo APPENDIX. and in which Shakspere, even in his earliest as in his latest works, surpasses all other poets. It is by this that he stiU gives a dignity and a passion to the objects which he pre- sents. Unaided by any previous excitement, they burst upon ns at once iu life and in power. " Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye." Shaksperis 33rcl Sonnet, " Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come — The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured. And the sad augurs mock their own presage : Incertainties now crown themselves assured, And peace proclaims olives of endless age. Now with the drops of this most baJmy time My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes, Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme, While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes ; And thou in this shalt find thy monument, When tyrants' crests, and tombs of brass are spent." Sonnet 107. As of higher worth, so doubtless still more characteristic of poetic genius does the imagery become, when it moulds and colours itself to the circumstances, passion, or character, present and foremost in the mind. For unrivalled instances of this excellence, the reader's own memory will refer him to the "Lear," "Othello," in short to which not of the " great, ever living, dead man's " dramatic works ? Inopem me copia fecit. How true it is to nature, he has himself finely expressed in the instance of love in Sonnet 98 : " Fi-om you have I been absent in the spring, When proud-pied April drest in all his U-im Hath put a spirit of youth in everything ; That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him. Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell Of different flowers in odour and in hue. APPENDIX. 499 Could make me any summer's story tell, Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew : Nor did I wonder at the lily's white, Nor pra,ise the deep vermilion in the rose; They were but sweet, but figures of delight, Drawn after you, you pattern of all those. Yet seem'd it winter still, and you away, As vdth yowr shadow I with these did play !" Scarcely less sure, or if a less valuable, not less indis- pensable mark Tovijiov /liv TloiriTOv ooTig prifia ytwdiov Xdcot, will the imagery supply, when, with more than the power of the painter, the poet gives us the liveliest image of suc- cession with the feeling of simultaneousness ! " With this he breaketh from the sweet embrace Of those fair arms, that bound him to her breast, And homeward through the dark laund runs apace : ****** Look how a bright star shooteth from, the shy! So glides he in the night from Veniis' eye." Venus and Adonis, 1. 811. 4. The last character I shall mention, which would prove indeed but little, except as taken conjointly with the former ; yet without which the former could scarce exist in a high degree, and (even if this were possible) would give promises only of transitory flashes and a meteoric power ; — is depth and energy of thought. No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language. In Shakspere's Poems, the creative power and ^ the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace. Each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other. At length, in the drama they were reconciled, \ \ and fought each with its shield before the breast of the *-* f ' other. Or like two rapid streams that, at their first meet- i 1 • 600 APPENDIX. ing within narrow and rocky banks, mutually strive to repel each other, and intermix reluctantly and in tumult, but soon finding a wider channel and more yielding shores, blend and dilate, and flow on in one current and with one voice. The "Venus and Adonis" did not perhaps allow the display of the deeper passions. But the story of Lucretia seems to favour, and even demand, their intensest workings. And yet we find in Shakspere's manage- ment of the tale neither pathos nor any other dramatic quality. There is the same minute and faithful imagery as in the former poem, in the same vivid colours, inspirited by the same impetuous vigour of thought, and diverging and contracting with the same activity of the assimilative and of the modifying faculties ; and with a yet larger dis- play, a yet wider range of knowledge and reflection ; and lastly, with the same perfect dominion, often domination, over the whole world of language. What, then, shall we say ? even this, that Shakspere, no mere child of nature ; no automaton of genius ; no passive vehicle of inspiration possessed by the spirit, not possessing it; first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till know- ledge, become habitual and intuitive, wedded itself to his habitual feelings ; and at length gave birth to that stupen- dous power, by which he stands alone, with no equal or second in his own class ; to that power which seated him on one of the two glory-smitten summits of the poetic mountain, with MUton as his compeer, not rival. "While the former darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the flood ; the other attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own ideal. All things and modes of action shape themselves anew in the being of Milton ; while Shakspere becomes all things, yet for ever remaining himself. what great men hast thou not produced, England ! my country ! Truly, indeed, APPENDIX. 601 " Must we be free or die, who speak the tongue, Which Shakspere spake ; the faith and morals hold, Whiuh Milton held. In everything we are sprung Of earth's first blood, have titles manifold ! " WORDSWOKTH. II. Shakspere's Method. From the " Friend." The difference between the products of a well disciplined and those of an uncultivated understanding, in relation to what we will now venture to call the Science of Method, is often and admirably exhibited by our great dramatist. "We scarcely need refer our readers to the Clown's evidence, in the first scene of the second act of " Measure for Measure," or to the Nurse in "Romeo and Juliet." But not to leave the position, without an instance to illustrate it, we will take the " easy-yielding " Mrs. Quickly's relation of the circumstances of Sir John Falstaff's debt to her : — " Falstaff. What is the gross sum that I owe thee ? Mrs. Quickly. Marry, if thou wert an honest man, thyself and the money too. Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my Dolphin chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire, on Wednesday in Whitsun week, when the prince broke thy head for liking his father to a singing man of Windsor — thou didst swear to me then, as I was washing thy wound, to marry me and make me my lady thy wife. Canst thou deny it ? Did not goodwife Keeoh, the butcher's wife, come in then and call me gossip Quickly ? — coming in to borrow a mess of vinegar : telling us she had a good dish of prawns — whereby thou didst desire to eat some — whereby I told thee they were ill for a green wound," &c. &c. &e. Henry IV., Part II. Act II. Scene 1. And this, be it observed, is so far from being carried beyond the bounds of a fair imitation, that "the poor, soul's " thoughts and sentences are more closely interlinked than the truth of nature would have required, but that the connections and sequence, which the habit of method can alone give, have in this instance a substitute in the fusion of passion. For the absence of method, which characterizes 502 APPENDIX. the uneducated, is occasioned by an habitual submission of /the understanding to mere events and images as such, and independent of any power in the mind to classify or appro- priate them. The general accompaniments of time and place are the only relations which persons of this class appear to regard in their statements. As this constitutes their leading feature, the contrary excellence, as distin- guishing the well-educated man, must be referred to the contrary habit. Method, therefore, becomes natural to the mind which has been accustomed to contemplate not things only, or for their own sake alone, but likewise and chiefly the relations of things, either their relations to each other, or to the observer, or to the state and apprehension of the -Jhearers. To enumerate and analyze these relations, with the conditions under which alone they are discovei'able, is ~ to teach the science of method. The enviable results of this science, when knowledge has been ripened into those habits which at once secure -and evince its possession, can scarcely be exhibited more forcibly as well as more pleasingly, than by contrasting with the former extract from Shakspere the narration given by Hamlet to Horatio of the occurrences during his pro- posed transportation to England, and the events that in- terrupted his voyage : — " Ham. Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting. That would not let me sleep : methought I lay Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Eashly, And praised be rashness for it, Let us know, Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well, When our deep plots do pall : and that should teach us, There's a divinity that shapes onr ends, Eough-hew them how we wUl, Hot. That is most certain. Ham. Up from my cabin, My sea-gown scarf d about me, in the dark Groped I to find out them ; had my desire, Finger'd their packet ; and, in fine, withdrew APPENDIX. 603 To my ' own room again : making so bold, My fears forgetting manners, to unseal Their grand commission; where I found, Horatio, royal knavery! an exact command, Larded with many several sorts of reasons, Importing Denmark's health, and England's too, With, ho ! such bugs and goblins in my life, That on the supervise, no leisure bated, No, not to stay the grinding of the axe, My head should be struck off! Hor. Is't possible ? Ham^ Here's the commission, — Bead it at more leisure." Act V. Some 2. Here the events, with the circumstances of time and place, are all stated with equal compression and rapidity, not one introduced which could have been omitted without injury to the intelligibility of the whole process. If any tendency is discoverable, as far as the mere facts are in question, it is the tendency to omission ; and, accordingly, the reader will observe that the attention of the narrator is afterwards called back to one material circumstance, which he was hurrying by, by a direct question from the friend to whom the story is communicated, " How was this sealed ? " But by a trait which is indeed peculiarly characteristic of Hamlet's mind, ever disposed to generalize, and meditative to excess (but which, with due abatement and reduction, is distinctive of every powerful and methodizing intellect), all the digressions and enlargements consist of reflections, truths, and principles of general and permanent interest, either directly expressed or disguised in playful satire. " 1 sat me down : Devised a new commission ; wrote it fair. I once did hold it, as our statists do, A baseness to write fair, and labour'd much How to forget that learning ; but, sir, now It did me yeoman's service. Wilt thou know The effect of what I wrote ? 1 Head " mine." 504 APPENDIX. Ror. Aye. good my lord. Ham. An earnest conjuration from the king, As England was his faithful tributary ; As love between them, like the palm, might flourish: As peace should still her wheaten garland wear,^ And many such like 'As 'es of great charge — That on the view and knowing of these contents, He should the bearers put to sudden death, Not shriving time allowed. Har. How was this seal'd ? Ha/m. Why, even in that was heaven ordinant. I had my father's signet in my purse, Which was the model of that Danish seal : Folded the writ up in form of the other ; ■ Subscribed it ; gave't the impression ; placed it safely, The changeling never known. Now, the next day Was our sea-fight ; and what to this was sequent, Thou knowest already. Hot. So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to't ? Ham. Why, man, they did make love to this employment. They are not near my conscience : their defeat Doth by their own insinuation grow. 'Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes Between the pass and fell incensed points Of mighty opposites." It would, perhaps be sufficient to remark of the pre- ceding passage, in connection with the humorous specimen of narration, " Fermenting o'er with frothy circumstance," in Henry IV., that if overlooking the different value of matter in each, we considered the form alone, we should find both immethodical ; Hamlet from the excess, Mrs. Quickly from the want, of reflection and generalization ; and that method, therefore, must result from the due mean or balance between our passive impressions and the mind's ' Coleridge omits the next line — " And stand a comma 'tween their amities," and also, after " these contents," the line — " Without debatement further, more or less." APPENDIX. 605 own reaction on the same. (Whether this reaction does not suppose or imply a primary act positively originating in the mind itself, and prior to the object in order of nature, though co-instantaneous in its manifestation, will be here- after discussed.) But we had a further purpose in thus contrasting these extracts from our " myriad-minded bard " {fjLvpwvovg avrjp). We wished to bring forward, each for itself, these two elements of method, or (to adopt an arith- metical term) its two main factors. Instances of the want of generalization are of no rare occurrence in real life ; and the narrations of Shakspere's Hostess and the Tapster differ from those of the ignorant and unthinking in general by their superior humour, the poet's own gift and infusion, not by their want of method, which is not greater than we often meet with in that class of which they are the dramatic representatives. Instances of the opposite fault, arising from the excess of generaliza- tion and reflection in minds of the opposite class, will, like the minds themselves, occur less frequently in the course of our own personal experience. Yet they will not have been wanting to our readers, nor will they have passed un- observed, though the great poet him self (6 t^v eavroS \j/vj(riv &aei vXijv riva aawixarov fiopfaie TrotKiXatc /lop^wtrac^) has more conveniently supplied the illustrations. To complete, therefore, the purpose aforementioned, that of presenting each of the two components as separately as possible, we ■ chose an instance in which, by the surplus of its own activity, Hamlet's mind disturbs the arrangement, of which that very activity had been the cause and impulse. Thus exuberance of mind, on the one hand, interferes with the forms of method; but sterility of mind, on the other, wanting the spring and impulse to mental action, is wholly destructive of method itself. For in attending too ' (Translation.') — He that moulded his own soul, as some incorporeal material, into various forms. — Themistius. S06 APPENDIX. exclusively to the relations which the past or passing events and objects bear to general truth, and the moods of his own thought, the most intelligent man is sometimes in danger of overlooking that other relation in -which they are likewise to be placed to the apprehension and sympathies of his hearers. His discourse appears like soliloquy inter- mixed with dialogue. But the uneducated and unreflecting talker overlooks all mental relations, both logical and psy- chological ; and consequently precludes all method that is not purely accidental. Hence the nearer the things and incidents in time and place, the more distant, disjointed, and impertinent to each other, and to any common purpose, will they appear in his narration ; and this from the want of a staple, or starting-post, in the narrator himself ; from the absence of the leading thought, which, borrowing a phrase from the nomenclature of legislation, we may not inaptly call the initiative. On the contrary, where the habit of method is present and effective, things the most remote and diverse in time, place, and outward circum- stance, are brought into mental contiguity and succession, the more striking as the less expected. But while we would impress the necessity of this habit, the illustrations adduced give proof that in undue preponderance, and when the prerogative of the mind is stretched into despotism, the discourse may degenerate into the grotesque or the fantastical. With what a profound insight into the constitution of the human soul is this exhibited to us in the character of the Prince of Denmark, where flying from the sense of reality, and seeking a reprieve from the pressure of its duties in that ideal activity, the overbalance of which, with the consequent indisposition to action, is his disease, he compels the reluctant good sense of the high yet healthful- minded Horatio, to follow him in his wayward meditation amid the graves ! " To what base uses we may return, APPENDIX. 607 Horatio ! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bung-hole ? Eor. 'Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so. Sam. No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it. As thus : Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to ' dust — the dust is earth; of earth we make loam: and why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel ? " Imperial Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away!" Act v., Sc. 1. But let it not escape our recollection, that when the objects thus connected are proportionate to the connecting energy, relatively to the real, or at least to the desirable sympathies of mankind; it is from the same character that we derive the genial method in the famous soliloquy, " To be ? or not to be ?" which, admired as it is, and has been, has yet received only the first-fruits of the admiration due to it. We have seen that from the confluence of innumerable impressions in each moment of time the mere passive memory must needs tend to confusion — a rule, the seem- ing exceptions to which (the thunder-bursts in " Lear," for instance) are really confirmations of its truth. For, in many instances, the predominance of some mighty passion takes the . place of the guiding thought, and the result presents the method of nature, rather than the habit of the individual. For thought, imagination (and we may add passion), are, in their very essence, the first, con- nective, the latter, co-adunative ; and it has been shown, that if the excess lead to method misapplied, and to con- nections of the moment, the absence, or marked deficiency, either precludes method altogether, both form and sub- ' Bead "into." 508 APPENDIX stance, or (as the following extract will exemplify) retains tke outward form only. " My liege and madam, to expostulate What majesty should be, what duty is, Why day is day, night night, and time is time. Were nothing but to waste night, day and time. Therefore — since brevity is the soul of wit, And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief. Your noble son is mad : Mad call I it — for, to define true madness, What is't, but to be nothing else but mad ? But let that go. Queen. More matter with less art. Fol. Madam ! I swear, I use no art at all. That he is mad 'tis true : 'tis true, 'tis pity : And pity 'tis, 'tis true (a foolish figure ! But iarewell it, for I will use no art.) Mad let us grant liim, then : and now remains, That we find out the cause of this effect. Or rather say the cause of this defect : For this effect defective comes by cause. Thus it remains, and the remainder thus. Perpend! " Hamlet, Act II., Sc. 2. Does not tlie irresistible sense of the ludicrous in this flourish of the soul-surviving body of old Polonius's intel- lect, not less than in the endless confirmations and most undeniable matters of fact, of Tapster Pompey or " the hostess of the tavern," prove to our feelings, even before the word is found which presents the truth to our under- standings, that confusion and formality are but the opposite poles of the same null-point ? It is Shakspere's peculiar excellence, that throughout the whole of his splendid picture gallery (the reader will excuse the confessed inadequacy of this metaphor), we find individuality everywhere, mere portrait nowhere. In all his various characters, we still feel ourselves communing with the same human nature, which is everywhere present as the vegetable sap in the branches, sprays, leaves, buds. APPENDIX. 609 blossoms, and fruits, their shapes, tastes, and odours. Speaking of the efEect, i.e. his works themselves, we may define the excellence of their method as consisting in that just proportion, that union and interpenetration of the universal and the particular, which must ever pervade all works of decided genius and true science. For method implies a progressive transition, and it is the meaning of the word in the original language. The Greek MidoSos, is literally a way, or path of transit. Thus we extol the Elements of Euclid, or Socrates' discourse with the slave in the Menon, as methodical, a term which no one who holds himself bound to think or speak correctly would apply to the alphabetical order or arrangement of a common dictionary. But as, without continuous transition, there can be no method, so without a pre-conception there can be no transition with continuity. The term, method,, cannot therefore, otherwise than by abuse, be applied to a mere dead arrangement, containing in itself no principle- of progression. III. Notes on GJiauaer and Spenser. Remains of Lecture III. of the course of 1818. Chaucbe. Bom in London, 13'28.— Died 1400.' Chaucer must be read with an eye to the Norman-Prencb Trouveres, of whom he is the best representative in English. He had great powers of invention. As. in Shakspere, his characters represent classes, but in a different manner ; ^ ' rrom Mr. Green's note. — H. N. C. Mr. Green took notes of the course. We may recall Gillman's remark here: "The attempts to copy his lectures verbatim have failed, they are but comments." — Ufe, p. 336. 2 See note to Lecture VI., 1811-12, p. 68. 510 APPENDIX. Shakspere's characters are the representatives of the interior nature of humanity, in which some element has become so predominant as to destroy the health of the mind ; whereas Chaucer's are rather representatives of classes of manners. He is therefore more led to individualize in a mere personal sense. Observe Chaucer's love of nature ; and how happily the subject of his main work is chosen. When you reflect that the company in the Decameron have retired to a place of safety from the raging of a pestilence, their mirth provokes a sense of their unfeelingness ; whereas in Chaucer nothing of this sort occurs, and the scheme of a party on a pilgrimage, with < different ends and occupations, aptly allows of the greatest variety of expression in the tales.^ Spensbe. Born in London, 1553.— Died 1599. There is this difference, among many others, between Shakspere and Spenser : — Shakspere is never coloured by the customs of his age ; what appears of contemporary character in him is merely negative ; it is just not some- thing else. He has none of the fictitious reaKties of the classics, none of the grotesquenesses of chivalry, none of the allegory of the middle ages ; there is no sectarianism either of politics or religion, no miser, no witch, — no common witch, — no astrology — nothing impermanent of however long duration ; but he stands like the yew tree in Lorton vale, which has known so many ages that it belongs to none in particular ; a living image of endless self -repro- duction, like the immortal tree of Malabar. In Spenser ' " Through all the works of Chaucer there reigns a cheerfulness, a manly hilarity, which makes it almost impossible to doubt a corre- spondent habit of feeling in the author himself."— ^io^rapAia Literaria, chap. ii. See Appendix : V., Mar. 15, 1834. APPENDIX. 511 the spirit of chivalry is entirely predominant, although with a much greater infusion of the poet's own individual self into it than is found in any other writer. He has the wit of the southern with the deeper inwardness of the northern genius. No one can appreciate Spenser without some reflection on the nature of allegorical writing. The mere etymological meaning of the word, allegory, — to talk of one thing and thereby convey another, — is too wide. The true sense is this, — the employment of one set of agents and images to convey in disguise a moral meaning, with a likeness to the imagination, but with a difference to the understanding, — those agents and images being so combined as to form a homogeneous whole. This distinguishes it from metaphor, which is part of an allegory. But allegory is not properly distinguishable from fable, otherwise than as the first includes the second, as a genus its species ; for in a fable there must be nothing but what is universally known and acknowledged, but in an allegory there may be that which is new and not previously admitted. The pictures of the great masters, especially of the Italian schools, are genuine allegories. Amongst the classics, the multitude of their gods either precluded allegory altogether, or else made everything allegory, as in the Hesiodic Theogonia ; for you can scarcely distinguish between power and the personifi- cation of power. The- Cupid and Psyche of, or found in, Apuleius, is a phaenomenon. It is the platonic mode of accounting for the faU of man. The Battle of the Soul ' by Prudentius is an early instance of Christian allegory. Narrative allegory is distinguished from mythology as reality from symbol ; it is, in short, the proper intermedium between person and personification. Where it is too strongly individualized, it ceases- to be allegory ; this is often felt in the " Pilgrim's Progress," where the characters ' Psychomacbia. — H. N. C. 5VI APPENDIX. are real persons with nicknames. Perhaps one of the most curious warnings against another attempt at narrative allegory on a great scale, may be found in Tasso's account of what he himself intended in and by his " Jerusalem Delivered." As characteristic of Spenser, I would call your particular attention in the first place to the indescribable sweetness and fluent projection of his verse, very clearly distinguish- able from the deeper and more inwoven harmonies of Shakspere and Milton. This stanza is a good instance of what I mean : — " Yet she, most faithfall ladie, all this while Foi-sakeu, wofull, solitarie mayd, Tar from all peoples preaee, as in exile. In wildernesse and wastfuU deserts strayd To seeke her knight ; who, subtily betrayd Through that late vision which th' enchaunter wrought, Had her abandond ; she, of nought affrayd. Through woods and wastnes wide him daily sought, Yet wished tydinges none of him unto her brought." F. Qu. B. I. c. 3. St. 3. 2. Combined with this sweetness and fluency, the scien- tific construction of the metre of the " Faery Queene " is very noticeable. One of Spenser's arts is that of allitera- tion, and he uses it with great effect in doubling the impression of an image : — " In wildernesse and wastful deserts, — " ***** " Through woods and roastnes roilde, — " ***** " They passe the bitter waves of Acheron, Where many soules sit wailing woefully, And come to^ery j^ood of PAlegeton, Whereas the damned ghosts in torments fry, And with sharp, shrilling shrieks doth bootlesse cry,—" &c. He is particularly given to an alternate alliteration, which is, perhaps, when well used, a great secret in melody : APPENDIX. 513 "A ramping lyon nished suddenly, — * * * « » And sad to see her sorrowful constraint, ***** And on the grasse her (Zaintie 2imbes did lay,—" &e. You cannot read a page of the " Faery Queene," if yon read for that purpose, without perceiving the intentional allitera- tiveness of the words ; and yet so skilfully is this managed, that it never strikes any unwarned ear as artificial, or other than the result of the necessary movement of the verse. 3. Spenser displays great skill in harmonizing his de- scriptions of external nature and actual incidents with the allegorical character and epic activity of the poem. Take these two beautiful passages as illustrations of what I mean: — " By this the northerne wagoner had set His sevenfold teme behind the stedfast starre That was in ocean waves yet never wet. But firme is fixt, and sendeth light from farre To all that in the wide deepe wandring arre ; And chear'efuU chaunticlere with his note shrill Had warned once, that Phoebus' fiery carre In hast was climbing up the easterne hill, Full envious that Night so long his roome did fill ; When those accursed messengers of hell, That feigning dreame, and that faire-forged spright Came," &e.— B. I. c. 2. st. 1. « » * * » • " At last, the golden orientall gate Of greatest Heaven gan to open fayre ; And Phoebus, fresh as brydegrome to liis mate. Came dauncing forth, shaking his deawie hayre ; And hurld his glistring beams through gloomy ayre. Which when the wakeful Elfe perceiv'd, streightway He started up, and did him selfe prepayre In sunbright armes and battailons ' array ; For with that Pagan proud he combat will that day." lb. 0. 5. St. 2. ' Read "battailous." L L 514 APPENDIX. Observe also the exceeding vividness of Spenser's de- scriptions. They are not, in the true sense of the word, picturesque; but are composed of a wondrous series of images, as in our dreams. Compare the following passage with anything you may remember in pari materia in Milton or Shakspere: — " His haughtie helmet, horrid all with gold, Both glorious brightnesse and great terrour bredd, For all the crest a dragon did enfold With greedie pawes, and over all did spredd His golden winges ; his dreadfuU hideous hedd. Close couched on the bever, seemd to throw From flaming mouth bright sparkles fiery redd, That suddeine horrour to faint hartes did show ; And scaly tayle was stretcht adowne his back full low. Upon the top of all his loftie crest A bounch of haires discolourd diversly, With sprinkled pearle and gold full richly drest. Did shake, and seemed to daunce for jollitie ; Like to an almond tree ymounted hye On top of greene Selinis all alone, With blossoms brave bedecked daintily, Whose tender locks do tremble every one At everie little breath that under heaven is blowne.'' lb. c. 7. St. 31-2. 4 Tou will take especial note of the marvellous indepen- dence and true imaginative absence of all particular space or time in the "Faery Queene." It is in the domains neither of history or geography; it is ignorant of all artificial boundary, all material obstacles; it is truly in land of Faery, that is, of mental space. The poet has placed you in a dream, a charmed sleep, and you neither wish, nor have the power, to inquire where you are, or how you got there. It reminds me of some lines of my own : — "Oh! would to Alia! The raven or the sea-mew were appointed APPENDIX. 516 To bring me food! — or rather that my soul Might draw in hfe from the universal air ! It were a lot divine, in some small skiff, Along some ocean's boundless solitude. To iloat for ever with a careless course. And think myself the only being alive!" Semorse, Act IV., So. 3. Indeed Spenser himself, in the conduct of his great poem, may be represented under the same image, his symbolizing purpose being his mariner's compass : — " As pilot well expert in perilous wave, That to a stedfast starre his course hath bent. When foggy mistes or cloudy tempests have The faithfuU light of that faire lampe yblent, And coverd Heaven with hideous dreriment j Upon his cai'd and compas firmes his eye. The maysters of his long experiment. And to them does the steddy helme apply, Bidding his winged vessell fairely forward fly.'' B. II. c. 7. St. 1. So the poet through the realms of allegory. 6. You should note the quintessential character of Chris- tian chivalry in all his characters, but more especially in his women. The Greeks, except, perhaps, in Homer, seem to have had no way of making their women interesting, but by unsexing them, as in the instances of the tragic Medea, Electra, &c. Contrast such characters with Spen- ser's Una, who exhibits no prominent feature, has no par- ticularization, but produces the same feeling that a statue does, when contemplated at a distance : — " From her fayre head her fillet she undight, And layd her stole aside : her angels face. As the great eye of Heaven, shyned bright, And made a sunshine in the shady place ; Did never mortal eye behold such heavenly grace." B. I. c. 3. St. 4. 5] 6 APPENDIX. 6. In Spenser we see the brightest and purest form of that nationality which was so common a characteristic of onr elder poets. There is nothing unamiable, nothing con- temptuous of others, in it. To glorify their country — to elevate England into a queen, an empress of the heart — this was their passion and object ; and how dear and im- portant an object it was or may be, let Spain, in the recol- lection of her Cid, declare ! There is a great magic in national names. What a damper to all interest is a list of "native East Indian merchants ! Unknown names are non- conductors ; they stop all sympathy. No one of our poets has touched this string more exquisitely than Spenser; especially in his chronicle of the British Kings (B. II. c. 10), and the marriage of the Thames with the Medway (B. IV. c. 11), in both which passages the mere names constitute half the pleasure we receive. To the same feel- ing we must in particular attribute Spenser's sweet reference to Ireland: — " Ne thence the Irishe rivevs absent were ; Sith no lesse famous than the rest they be," &c. — lb. ****** "And Mulla mine, whose waves I whilom taught to weep." — lb. And there is a beautiful passage of the same sort in the " Colin Clout's Come Home Again : " — " ' One day,' quoth he, • I sat, as was my trade, ' Under the foot of Mole,'" &o. Lastly, the great and prevailing character of Spenser's mind is fancy under the conditions of imagination, as an ever present but not always active power. He has an imaginative fancy, but he has not imagination, in kind or degree, as Shakspere and Milton have ; the boldest effort of his powers in this way is the character of Talus.^ Add • B. 5. "Legend of Artegall."— H. N. C. APPENDIX. 617 to this a feminine tenderness and almost maidenly purity of feeling, and above all, a deep moral earnestness whicli produces a believing sympathy and acquiescence in the reader, and you have a tolerably adequate view of Spenser's intellectual being. rV. Notes on Milton. Remains of Lecture III. of the Course of 1818.' Milton. Born in London, 1608.— Died, 1674. If we divide the period from the accession of Elizabeth to the Protectorate of Cromwell into two unequal portions, the first ending with the death of James I. the other com- prehending the reign of Charles and the brief glories of the Republic, we are forcibly struck with a difBerence in the character of the illustrious actors, by whom each period is rendered severally memorable. Or rather, the difference in the characters of the great men in each period, leads us to make this division. Eminent as the intellectual powers were that were displayed in both ; yet in the number of great men, in the various sorts of excellence, and not merely in the variety but almost diversity of talents united in the same individual, the age of Charles falls short of its predecessor ; and the stars of the Parliament, keen as their radiance was, in fulness and richness of lustre, yield to the constellation at the court of Elizabeth ; — which can only be paralleled by Greece in her brightest moment, when the titles of the poet, the philosopher, the historian, the states- m.an and the general not seldom formed a garland round ' Mr. H. N. Coleridge appends to the remains of this lecture some notes on Milton from different sources. We have given them, so far as they concern us. 618 APPENDIX. the same head, as in the instances of ottr Sidneys and Ealeighs. But then, on the other hand, there was a vehe- mence of will, an enthusiasm of principle, a depth and an earnestness of spirit, which the charms of individual fame and personal aggrandizement could not pacify, — an aspi- ration after reality, permanence, and general good, — in short, a moral grandeur in the latter period, with, which the low intrigues, Machiavellic maxims, and selfish and servile ambition of the former, stand in painful contrast. The causes of this it belongs not to the present occasion to detail at length ; but a mere allusion to the quick suc- cession of revolutions in religion, breeding a political in- difference in the mass of men to religion itself, the enor- mous increase of the royal power in consequence of the humiliation of the nobility and the clergy — the transference of the papal authority to the crown, — the unfixed state of Elizabeth's own opinions, whose inclinations were as popish as her interests were protestant — the controversial extra- vagance and practical imbecility of her successor — will help to explain the former period; and the persecutions that had given a life and soul interest to the disputes so imprudently fostered by James, — the ardour of a conscious increase of power in the commons, and the greater austerity of manners and maxims, the natural product and most formidable weapon of religious disputation, not merely in conjunction, but in closest combination, with newly awakened political and repubKcan zeal, these perhaps account for the character of the latter sera. In the close of the former period, and during the bloom of the latter, the poet Milton was educated and formed; and he survived the latter, and all the fond hopes and aspirations which had been its life ; and so in evil days,' ' Coleridge is thinking of the passage, — " Standing on earth, not rapt above the pole, Mote safe I sing witli mortal voice, unchanged APPENDIX. 519 standing as the representative of the combined excellence of both periods, he produced the " Paradise Lost " as by an after-throe of natnre. " There are some persons (observes a divine, a contemporary of Milton's) of whom the grace of God takes early hold, and the good spirit inhabiting them carries them on in an even constancy through innocence into virtue, their Christianity beariug equal date with their manhood, and reason and religion, like warp and woof, running together, make up one web of a wise and exemplary life. This (he adds) is a most happy case, wherever it happens ; for besides that there is no sweeter or more lovely thing on earth than the early buds of piety, which drew from our Saviour signal afEeotion to the beloved disciple, it is better to have no wound than to experience the most sovereign balsam, which, if it work a cure, yet usually leaves a scar behind." Although it was and is my intention to defer the consideration of Milton's own character to the conclusion of this Lecture, yet I could not prevail on myself to approach the "Paradise Lost" without impressing on your nainds the conditions under which such a work was in fact producible at all, the original genius having been assumed as the immediate agent and efficient cause ; and these conditions I find in the character of the times and in his own character. The age in which the foundations of his mind were laid, was congenial to it as one golden sera of profound erudition and individual genius ; — that in which the superstructure was carried up, was no less favourable to it by a sternness of discipline and a show of self-control, highly flattering to the imagi- native dignity of an heir of fame, and which won Milton To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days. On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues ; In darkness, and with dangers compass'd round, • And solitude." Par. Lost. vii. 23-8. 520 APPENDIX. over from the dear-loved delights of academic groves and cathedral aisles to the anti-prelatic party. It acted on him, too, no doubt, and modified his studies by a characteristic controversial spirit (his presentation of God is tinted with it) — a spirit not less busy indeed in political than in theological and ecclesiastical dispute, but carrying on the former almost always, more or less, in the g^iise of the latter. And so far as Pope's censure ^ of our poet, — that he makes Grod the Father a school divine — is just, we must attribute it to the character of his age, from which the men of genius, who escaped, escaped by a worse disease, the licentious indifference of a rrenchified court. Such was the nidus or soil, which constituted, in the strict sense of the word, the circumstances of Milton's mind. In his mind itself there were purity and piety absolute ; an imagination to which neither the past nor the present were interesting, except as far as they called forth and enlivened the great ideal, in which and for which he lived; a keen love of truth, which, after many weary pursuits, found a harbour in a sublime listening to the stiU voice in his own spirit, and as keen a love of his country, which, after a disappointment still more depressive, ex- panded and soared into a love of man as a probationer of immortality. These were, these alone could be, the con- ditions under which such a work as the " Paradise Lost " could be conceived and accomplished. By a life -long study Milton had known — " What was of use to know, What best to say could say, to do had done. His actions to his words n greed, his words To his large heart gave utterance due, his heart Contain'd of good, wise, fair, the perfect shape ; " ' See Appendix, V. : Sept. 4, 1833. APPENDIX. 521 and he left the imperishable total, as a bequest to the ages coining, in the " Paradise Lost." ^ Difficult as I shall find it to turn over these leaves with- out catching some passage, which would tempt me to stop, I propose to consider, Ist, the general plan and arrange- ment of the work ; — 2ndly, the subject with its difficulties and advantages ; — Srdly, the poet's object, the spirit in the letter, the ivOi/fuov iv nvOig, the true school-divinity; and lastly, the characteristic excellencies of the poem, in what they consist, and by what means they were produced. 1. As to the plan and ordonnance, of the Poem. Compare it with the "Iliad," many of the books of which might change places without any injury to the thread of the story. Indeed, I doubt the original existence of the " Iliad " as one poem ; it seems more probable that it was put together about the time of the Pisistratidse. The " Iliad " — and, more or less, all epic poems, the sub- jects of which are taken from history — have no rounded conclusion ; they remain, after all, but single chapters from the volume of history, although they are ornamental chapters. Consider the exquisite simplicity of the " Para- dise Lost." It and it alone really possesses a beginning, a middle, and an end ; it has the totality of the poem as distinguished from the db ovo birth and parentage, or straight line, of history. 2. As to the subject. In Homer, the supposed importance of the subject, as the first effort of confederated Greece, is an after-thought of the critics ; and the interest, such as it is, derived from the events themselves, as distinguished from the manner ^ Here Mr. C. notes : " Not perhaps here, but towards, or as, the conclusion, to chastize the fashionable notion that poetry is a relaxation or amusement, one of the superfluous toys and luxuries of the intellect ! To contrast the permanence of poems with the transiency and fleeting moral effects of empires, and what are called, great events." — H. N. C. {)22 APPENDIX. of representing them, is very langnid to all but Greeks. It is a Greek poem. The superiority of the "Paradise Lost " is obvious in this respect, that the interest transcends the limits of a nation. But we. do not generally dwell on this excellence of the " Paradise Lost," because it seems attributable to Christianity itself ; — yet in fact the interest is wider than Christendom, and comprehends the Jewish and Mohammedan worlds ; — nay, still further, inasmuch as it represents the origin of evil, and the combat of evil and good, it 'contains matter of deep interest to all mankind, as forming the basis of all religion, and the true occasion of all philosophy whatsoever. The Fall of Man is the subject; Satan is the cause; man's blissful state the immediate object of his enmity and attack ; man is warned by an angel who gives him an account of all that was requisite to be known, to make the warning at once intelligible and awful ; then the temptation ensues, and the Pall; then the immediate sensible conse- quence ; then the consolation, wherein an angel presents a vision of the history of men with the ultimate triumph of the Redeemer. Nothing is touched in this vision but what is of general interest in religion ; anything else would have been improper. The inferiority of Klopstock's "Messiah" is inexpres- sible. I admit the prerogative of poetic feeling, and poetic faith ; but I cannot suspend the judgment even for a moment. A poem may in one sense be a dream, but it must be a waking dream. In Milton you have a religious faith combined with the moral nature ; it is an efflux ; you go along with it. In Klopstock there is a wilfulness ; he makes things so and so. The feigned speeches and events in the " Messiah " shock us like falsehoods ; but nothing of that sort is felt in the " Paradise Lost," in which no particulars, at least very few indeed, are touched which can come into collision or juxta-position with recorded matter. APPENDIX-. 523 But notwithstanding the advantagos in Milton's subject, there were concomitant insuperable difficulties, and Milton has exhibited marvellous skill in keeping most of them out of sight. High poetry is the translation of reality into the ideal under the predicament of succession of time only. The poet is an historian, upon condition of moral power being the only force in the universe. The very grandeur of his subject ministered a difficulty to Milton. The state- ment of a being of high intellect, warring against the supreme Being, seems to contradict the idea of a supreme Being. Milton precludes our feeling this, as much as pos- sible, by keeping the peculiar attributes of divinity less in sight, making them to a certain extent allegorical only. Again, poetry implies the language of excitement ; yet how to reconcile such language with Grod ? Hence Milton con- fines the poetic passion in God's speeches to the langunge of scripture ; and once only allows the passio vera, or quasi- humana to appear, in the passage, where the Father con- templates his own likeness in the Son before the battle : — " Go then, thou Mightiest, in thy Father's might, Ascend my chariot, guide the rapid wheels That shake Heaven's basis, bring forth all my war. My bow and thunder ; my almighty arms Gird on, and sword upon thy puissant thigh ; Pursue these sons of darkness, drive them out From all Heaven's bounds into the utter deep : There let them learn, as likes them, to despise God and Messiah his anointed king." B. VI. V. 710-18. 3. As to Milton's object : — It was to justify the ways of Grod to man ! The con- troversial spirit observable in many parts of the poem, especially in God's speeches, is immediately attributable to the great controversy of that age, the origination of evil. The Arminians considered it a mere calamity. The Cal- vinists took away all human will. Milton asserted the 524 APPENDIX. will, but declared for the enslavement of the will out of an act of the wiU itself. There are three powers in us, which distinguish us from the beasts that perish ; — 1, reason ; 2, the power of viewing universal truth ; and 3, the power of contracting universal truth into particulars. Religion is the will in the reason, and love in the will. The character of Satan is pride and sensual indulgence, finding in self the sole motive of action. It is the character so often seen in little on the political stage. It exhibits all the restlessness, temerity, and cunning which have marked the mighty hunters of mankind from Nimrod to Napoleon. The common fascination of men is, that these great men, as they are called, must act from some great motive. Milton has carefully marked in his Satan the intense selfish- ness, the alcohol of egotism, which would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. To place this lust of self in opposition to denial of self or duty, and to show what exertions it would make, and what pains endure to accom- plish its end, is Milton's particular object in the character of Satan. But around this character he has thrown a singularity of daring, a grandeur of sufferance, and a ruined splendour, which constitute the very height of poetic sublimity. Lastly, as to the execution : ' — The language and versification of the " Paradise Lost " are peculiar in being so much more necessarily corre- spondent to each than those in any other poem or poet. The connection of the sentences and the position of the words are exquisitely artificial ; but the position is rather according to the logic of passion or universal logic, than to the logic of grammar. Milton attempted to make the English language obey the logic of passion as perfectly as the Greek and Latin. Hence the occasional harshness in the construction. 1 See Appendix, V. : May 12, 1830. APPENDIX. 525 Sublimity is the pre-eminent characteristic of the " Paradise Lost." It is not an arithmetical sublime like Klopstock's, whose rule always is to treat what we might think large as contemptibly small. Klopstock mistakes bigness for greatness. There is a greatness arising from images of effort and daring, and also from those of moral endurance ; in Milton both are united. The fallen angels are human passions, invested with a dramatic reality. The apostrophe to light at the commencement of the third book is particularly beautiful as an intermediate link between Hell and Heaven ; and observe, how the second and third book support the subjective character of the poem. In all modern poetry in Christendom there is an under consciousness of a sinful nature, a fleeting away of externa] things, the mind or subject greater than the object, the reflective character predominant. In the " Paradise Lost" the sublimest parts are the revelations of Milton's own mind, producing itself and evolving its own greatness ; and this is so truly so, that when that which is merely entertaining for its objective beauty is introduced, it at first seems a discord. In the description of Paradise itself you have Milton's sunny side as a man; here his descriptive powers are exercised to the utmost, and he draws deep upon his Italian resources. In the description of Eve, and throughout this part of the poem, the poet is predominant over the theolo- gian. Dress is the symbol of the Fall, but the mark of intellect ; and the metaphysics of dress are, the hiding what is not symbolic and displaying by discrimination what is. The love of Adam and Eve in Paradise is of the highest merit — not phantomatic, and yet removed from everything degrading. It is the sentiment of one rational being towards another made tender by a specific difference in that which is essentially the same in both; it is a union of opposite^ a giving and receiving mutually- 526 APrENDix. of the permanent in either, a completion of each in the other. Milton is not a picturesque, but a musical, poet ; although he has this merit that the object chosen by him for any particular foreground always remains prominent to the end, enriched, but not incumbered, by the opulence of descriptive, details furnished by an exhaustless imagination. I wish the " Paradise Lost " were more carefully read and studied than I can see any ground for believing it is, espe- cially those parts which, from the habit of always looking for a story in poetry, are scarcely read at all, — as for example, Adam's vision of future events in the 11th and 12th books. No one can rise from the perusal of this immortal poem without a deep sense of the grandeur and the purity of Milton's soul, or without feeling how sus- ceptible of domestic enjoyments he really was, notwith- standing the discomforts which actually resulted from an apparently unhappy choice in marriage. He was, as every truly great poet has ever been, a good man ; but finding it impossible to realize his own aspirations, either in religion, or politics, or society, he gave up his heart to the living spirit and light within him, and avenged himself on the world by enriching it with this record of his own trans- cendant ideal. Notes on Milton. 1807.^ (Hayley quotes the following passage : — ) " Time serves not now, and, perhaps, I might seem too profuse to give any certain account of what the mind at home, in the spacious circuits of her musing, hath liberty to propose to herself, though of ^ These notes were written by Mr. Coleridge in a copy of Hayley's "Life of Milton" (4to. 1796), belonging to Mr. Poole. By him they were communicated, and this seems the fittest place for their pub- lication.— H. N. C. APPENDIX. 627 highest hope and hardest attempting ; whether that epic form, whereof the two poems of Homer, and those other two of Virgil and Tasso, are a diffuse, and the Book of Job a brief, model." (p. 69.) These latter words deserve particular notice. I do not doubt that Milton intended his " Paradise Lost " as an epic of the first class, and that the poetic dialogue of the Book of Job was his model for the general scheme of his " Paradise Regained." Readers would not be disappointed in this latter poem, if they proceeded to a perusal of it with a proper preconception of the kind of interest intended to be excited in that admirable work. In its kind it is the most perfect poem extant, though its kind may be inferior in interest — being in its essence didactic — to that other sort, in which instruction is conveyed more effectively, be- cause less directly, in connection with stronger and more pleasurable emotions, and thereby in a closer affinity with action. But might we not as rationally object to an accomplished woman's conversing, however agreeably, be- cause it has happened that we have received a keene^ pleasure from her singing to the harp ? Si genus dt probo et sa/pienti viro haud indignwm, et si poema sit in suo genere perfecUi/m, satis est. Quod si hoc auotor idem altioribus mimeris et carmini diviniori ipsv/m per se djivi/nv/m super- addiderit, mehercule satis est, et plusquam, satis. I cannot, however, but wish that the answer of Jesus to Satan in the 4th book (v. 285),— " Think not but that I know these things ; or think I know them not, not therefore am I short Of knowing what I ought," &e. had breathed the spirit of Hay ley's noble quotation rather than the narrow bigotry of Gregory the Great. The pas- sage is, indeed, excellent, and is partially true ; but partial truth is the worst mode of conveying falsehood. (Hayley, p. 250. Hayley's conjectures on the origin of the " Paradise Lost ") : — 528 APPENDIX. If Milton borrowed a hint from any writer, it was more probably from Strada's " Prolusions," in which the Fall of the Angels is pointed out as the noblest subject for a Christian poet.^ The more dissimilar the detailed images are, the more likely it is that a great genius should catch the general idea. (Hayl. p. 294. Extracts from the Adamo of Andreini :) " I/ucifero. Che dal mio centro oscuro Mi chiama a rimirar cotanta luce ? Who from my dark abyss Calls me to gaze on this excess of light ? " The words in italics are an unfair translation. They may suggest that Milton really had read and did imitate this drama. The original is " in so great light." Indeed the whole version is affectedly and inaccurately Miltonic. lb. V. 11. Che di fango opre festi — Forming thy works of dust (no, dirt. — ) lb. v. 17. Tessa pur Stella a Stella V aggiungo e luna, e sole. — Let him unite above Star upon star, moon, sun." Let him weave star to star, Then join both moon and sun ! " lb. V. 21. Ch 'al fin con biasmo e scorno Vana 1' opra sara, vano il sudore ! Since in the end division Shall prove his works and all his eSbrts vain." ' The reference seems generally to be to the 5th Prolusion of the 1st Book. Hie a/rcws ao tela, quihis olim in magna illo Superum tumultit princeps wmummi Michael confixit auctorem proditianis; hie fulmina huTnarus mentis terror. * * * In nubihics amuOas bello legioaes instruam, atque inde pro re nata anxiliares ad terrain copias evocabo. * * * Hie mihi Calites, quos esseferunt elementomm tutelares, prima ilia corpora miscehunt. Sect. 4. — H. N. C. APPENDIX. 629 Since finally with censure and disdain Vain shall the work be, and his toil be vain ! 1796.^ The reader of Milton must be always on his duty : he is surrounded with sense ; it rises in every line ; every word is to the purpose. There are no lazy intervals ; all has been considered, and demands and merits observation. If this be called obscurity, let it be remembered that it is such an obscurity as is a compliment to the reader ; not that vicious obscurity, which proceeds from a. muddled head. V. Extracts from the " Table Talk.." ^ Othello. — " Othello must not be conceived as a negro, but a high and chivalrous Moorish chief. Shakspere learned the spirit of the character from the .Spanish poetry, which was prevalent in England in his time.^ Jealousy does not strike me as the point in his passion ; I take it to be rather an agony that the creature, whom he had believed angelic, with whom he had garnered up his heart, and whom he could not help still loving, should be proved impure and worthless. It was the struggle not to love her. It was a moral indignation and regret that virtue should so fall : — ' But yet the pity of it, lago ! — O lago ! the j3% °f i*j lago ! ' In addition to this,- his honour . was concerned : ' !From a common-place book of Mr. C.'s, communicated by Mr. J. M. Guteh.— H. N. C. ^ Also edited by H. N. Coleridge, Coleridge's son-in-law and nephew. Considering Coleridge's endless repetitions of himself, and not to over- crowd the text with notes, we hare judged it better to delegate these criticisms to the Appendix. ' Caballeros Granadinos, Aunque Moros, hijos d'algo. — H. N. C. 530 APPENDIX. lago would not have succeeded but by hinting that his honour was compromised. There is no ferocity in Othello ; his mind is majestic and composed. He deliberately deter- mines to die ; and speaks his last speech with a view of showing his attachment to the Venetian state, though it had superseded him. Schiller has the material Sublime ; ^ to produce an effect, he sets you a whole town on fire, and throws infants with their mothers into the flames, or locks up a father in an old tower. But Shakspere drops a handkerchief, and the same or greater efEects follow. Lear is the most tremendous effort of Shakspere as a poet ; Hamlet as a philosopher or meditater ; and Othello is the union of the two. There is something gigantic and unformed in the former two ; but in the latter, everything assumes its due place and proportion, and the whole mature powers of his mind are displayed in admirable equilibrium." —Dec. 29, 1822. " I have often told you that I do not think there is any jealousy, properly so called, in the character of Othello. There is no predisposition to suspicion, which I take to be an essential term in the definition of the word. Desdemona very truly told Emilia that he was not jealous, that is, of a jealous habit, and he says so as truly of himself. logo's suggestions, you see, are quite new to him ; they do not correspond with anything of a like nature previously in his mind. If Desdemona had, in fact, been guilty, no one would have thought of calling Othello's conduct that of a jealous man. He could not act otherwise than he did with the lights he had ; whereas jealousy can never be strictly right. See how utterly unlike Othello is to Leontes, in the 1 This expression— " material Sublime"— like a hundred others which have slipped into general use, came originally from Mr. Coleridge, and was by him, in the first instance, applied to Schiller's " Bobbers." — See Act iv., sc. 5. — H. N. 0. APPENDIX. 531 ' Winter's Tale,' or even to Leonatus, in ' Cymbeline ! ' The jealousy of the first proceeds from an evident trifle, and something like hatred is mingled with it ; and the conduct of Leonatus in accepting the wager, and exposing his wife to the trial, denotes a jealous temper already formed." — June 24, 1827. Hamlet. — "Hamlet's character is the prevalence of the abstracting and generalizing habit over the practical. He does not want courage, skill, will, or opportunity; but every incident sets him thinking ; and it is curious, and at the same time strictly natural, that Hamlet, who all the play seems reason itself, should be impelled, at last, by mere accident, to effect his object. I have a sma6k of J ., Hamlet myself, if I may say so." — June 15, 1827. j iL ^jt w" s\ Folonius. — " A Maxim is a conclusion upon observation J of matters of fact, and is merely retrospective; an[,idea, or, if you like, a Principle, carries knowledge within itself, and is prospective. Polonius is a man of maxims. While he is descanting on matters of past experience, as in that excellent speech to Laertes before he sets out on his travels, he is admirable ; but when he comes to advise or project, he is a mere dotard. Ton see Hamlet, as the man of ideas, despises him. A man of maxims ojily is like a Cyclops with one eye, and -tjhat eye placed in the back of his head." —Jvme 15, 1827. ^ Hamlet and Ophelia. — " In the scene with Ophelia, in the third act, Hamlet is beginning with great and unfeigned tenderness ; but perceiving her reserve and coyness, fancies there are some listeners, and then, to sustain his part, breaks Dut into all that coarseness." — Jume 15, 1827. Measure for Measwe. — " ' Measure for Measure ' is the single exception to the delightfulness of Shakspere's plays. 532 APPENDIX. It is a hateful work, although Shaksperian throughout. Our feelings of justice are grossly wounded in Angelo's escape. Isabella herself contrives to be unamiable, and Claudio is detestable." — June 24, 1827. The Fox. — " I am inclined to consider ' The Fox ' as the greatest of Ben Jonson's works. But his smaller works are fuU of poetry."— Jme 24, 1827. Tlie Little French Lawyer. — " ' Monsieur Thomas ' and the ' Little French Lawyer ' are great favourites of mine amongst Beaumont and Fletcher's plays. How those plays overflow with wit ! And yet I scarcely know a more deeply tragic scene anywhere than that in ' RoUo,' in which Edith pleads for her father's life, and then, when she cannot prevail, rises up and imprecates vengeance on his murderer." —June 24, 1827. Shakspere and Milton. — " Shakspere is the Spinozistic deity — an omnipresent creativeness. Milton is the deity of prescience ; he stands ah extra, lind drives a fiery chariot and four, making the horses feel the iron curb which holds them in. Shakspere's poetry is characterless ; that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakspere ; but John Milton himself is in every line of the " Paradise Lost." Shak- spere's rhymed verses are excessively condensed, — epigrams with the point everywhere ; but in his blank dramatic verse he is diffused, with a linked sweetness long drawn out. No one can understand Shakspere's superiority fully until he has ascertained, by comparison, aU that which he possessed in common with several other great dramatists of his age, and has then calculated the surplus which is entirely Shak- spere's own. His rhythm is so perfect, that you may be almost sure that you do not understand the real force of a line, if it does not run well as you read it. The necessary mental pause after every hemistich or imperfect line is APPENDIX. 533 always equal to the time that wonld have been taken in readittg the complete verse." — May 12, 1830. Women. — " 'Most women have no character at all,' said Pope, and meant it for satire. Shakspere, who knew man and woman much better, saw that it, in fact, was the per- fection of woman to be characterless. Every one wishes a Desdemona or Ophelia for a wife, — creatures who, though they may not always understand you, do always feel you, and feel with jou."—Sept. 27, 1830. The style of Shakspere oom/pared with that of Jonson and others. — " In the romantic drama Beaumont and Fletcher are almost supreme. Their plays are in general most truly delightful. I could read the ' Beggar's Bush ' from morn- ing to night. How sylvan and sunshiny it is ! The ' Little French Lawyer ' is excellent. ' Lawrit ' is conceived and executed from first to last in genuine comic humour. ' Monsieur Thomas ' is also capital. I have no doubt what- ever that the first act and the first scene of the second act of the ' Two Noble Kinsmen ' are Shakspcre's. Beaumont and Fletcher's plots are, to be sure, wholly inartificial ; they only care to pitch a character into a position to make him or her talk; you must swallow all their gross improba- ...s bilities, and, taking it all for granted, attend only to the ^^ j-^ dialogue. How lamentable it is that no gentleman and \ ' " scholar can be found to edit these beautiful plays ! Did V^ the name of criticism ever descend so low as in the hands x^ of those two fools and knaves, Seward and Simpson ?\ ,n There are whole scenes in their edition which I could with \ ,. certainty put back into their original verse, and more that . «could be replaced in their native prose. Was there ever M' such an absolute disregard of literary fame as that displayed by Shakspere, and Beaumont and Fletcher ? In Ben Jonson you have an intense and burning art. 634 APPENDIX. Some of his plots, that of the ' Alchemist,' for example, are perfect. Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher would, if united, have made a great dramatist indeed, and yet not have come near Shakspere ; but no doubt Ben Jonson was the greatest man after Shakspere in that age of dramatic genius. The styles of Massinger's plays and the ' Samson Ago- nistes ' are the two extremes of the arc within which the diction of dramatic poetry may oscillate. Shakspere in his great plays is the midpoint. In the ' Samson Agonistes,' colloquial language is left at the greatest distance, yet something of it is preserved, to render the dialogue pro- bable : in Massinger the style is difEerenced, but differenced in the smallest degree possible, from animated conversation by the vein of poetry. There's such a divinity doth hedge our Shakspere round, that we cannot even imitate his style. I tried to imitate his manner in the ' Remorse,' and, when I had done, I fonnd I had been tracking Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger instead. It is really very curious. At first sight, Shakspere and his contemporary dramatists seem to write in styles much alike : nothing so easy as to fall into that of Massinger and the others ; whilst no one has ever yet prodnced one scene conceived and expressed in the Shaksperian idiom. I suppose it is because Shakspere is universal, and, in fact, has no manner; just as you can so much more readily copy a picture than Nature herself." — Feb. 17, 1833. Plays of Massinger. — " The first act of the ' Virgin Martyr ' is as fine an act as I remember in any play. The ' Very Woman ' is, 1 think, one of the most perfect plays we have. There is some good fun in the first scene between Don John, or Antonio, and Cuculo, his master; and can any- thing exceed the skill and sweetness of the scene between APPENDIX. 635 Hm and his mistress, in which he relates his story ? The ' Bondman ' is also a delightful play. Massinger is always entertaining ; his plays have the interest of novels. But, like most of his contemporaries, except Shakspere, Massinger often deals in exaggerated passion. Male fort senior, in the ' Unnatural Combat, ' however he may have had the moral will to be so wicked, could never have actually done all that he is represented as guilty of, with- out losing bis senses. He would have been, in fact, mad." —April 5, 1833. Shahspere's Villains. — " Biegan and Grtjneril are the only pictures of the unnatural in Shakspere — the pure unnatural; and you will observe that Shakspere has left their hideous- ness unsoftened or diversified by a single line of goodness or common human fraUty. Whereas, in Edmund, for whom passion, the sense of shame as a bastard, and ambition, offer some plausible excuses, Shakspere has placed many redeeming traits. Edmund is what, under certain circumstances, any man of powerful intellect might be, if some other qualities and feelings were cut off. Hamlet is, inclusively, an Edmund, but different from him as a whole, on account of the controlling agency of other principles which Edmund had not. It is worth while to remark the use which Shakspere always makes of his bold villains as vehicles for expressing opinions and conjectures of a nature too hazardous for a wise man to put forth directly as his own, or from any sustained character." — April 5, 1833. Love's Labour's Lost. — " I think I could point out to a half line what is really Shakspere's in 'Love's Labour's Lost,' and some other of the not entirely genuine plays. What he wrote in that play is of his earliest manner, having the all-pervading sweetness which he never lost, and 536 APPENDIX. that extreme condensation which makes the couplets fall into epigrams, as in the 'Venus and Adonis,' and ' Rape of Lucrece.' In the drama alone, as Shakspere soon found out, could the sublime poet and profound philosopher find the conditions of a compromise. In the ' Love's Labour's Lost ' there are many faint sketches of some of his -vigorous portraits in after life — as for example, in particular, of Benedict and Beatrice." ' — April 7, 1833. A jDramatist's Artifice. — " The old dramatists took great liberties in respect of bringing parties in scene together, and representing one as not recognizing the other under some faint disguise. Some of their finest scenes are con- structed on this ground. Shakspere avails himself of this artifice only twice, I think, — in ' Twelfth Night,' where the two are with great skiU kept apart till the end of the play ; and in the ' Comedy of Errors,' which is a pure farce, and should be so considered. The definition of a farce is, an improbability or even impossibility granted in the outset ; see what odd and laughable events will fairly foUow from it ! "—April 7, 1833. Bertram. — " I cannot agree with the solemn abuse which the critics have poured out upon Bertram in, ' All's Well that Ends Well.' He was a young nobleman in feudal times, just bursting into manhood, with all the feelings of pride of birth and appetite for pleasure and liberty natural to such a character so circumstanced. Of course, he had never regarded Helena otherwise than as a dependant in. the family ; and of all that which she possessed of goodness and fidelity and courage, which might atone for her in- ' Mr. Coleridge, of course, alluded to Biron and Rosaline ; and there are other obvious prolusions, as the scene of the masque with the courtiers, compared with the play in " A Midsummer Night's Dream " — H. N. C. APPENDIX. 537 feriority in other respects, Bertram was necessarily in a great measure ignorant. And after all, her prima fade merit was the having inherited a prescription from her old father the doctor, by which she cures the king, — a merit which supposes an extravagance of personal loyalty in Bertram to make conclusive to him in such a matter as that of taking a wife. Bertram had surely good reason to look u;^on the king's forcing him to marry Helena as a very tyrannical act. Indeed, it must be confessed that her character is not very delicate, and it required all Shak- spere's consummate skill to interest us for her; and he does this chiefly by the operation of the other characters, — the Countess, Lafeu, &c. We get to Kke Helena from their praising and commending her so much." — July 1, 1833. Beavmumt a/nd Fletcher's Tragedies. — " In Beaumont and Fletcher's tragedies the comic scenes are rarely so inter- fused amidst the tragic as to produce a unity of the tragic on the whole, without which the intermixture is a fault. In Shakspere, this is always managed with transcendent skill. The Fool in ' Lear ' contributes in a very sensible manner to the tragic wUdness of the whole drama. Beau- mont and Fletcher's serious plays or tragedies are complete hybrids, — neither fish nor flesh, — upon any rules, Greek, Roman, or Grothic ; and yet they are very delightful not- withstanding. No doubt, they imitate the ease of gentle- manly conversation better than Shakspere, who was unable not to be too much associated to succeed perfectly in this." —July 1, 1833. Milton's Egotism. — " In the ' Paradise Lost ' — ^indeed in every one of his poems — it is Milton himself whom you see; his Satan, his Adam, his Raphael, almost his Eve — are all John Milton; and it is a sense of this intense egotism that gives me the greatest pleasure in reading 538 APPENDIX. Milton's works. The egotism of such a man is a revelation of spirit."— ^M^. 18, 1833. Milton's Method in " Paradise Lost." — " In my judgment, An epic poem must either be national or mundane. As to Arthur, you could not by any means make a poem on him national to Englishmen. What have we to do with him ? Milton saw this, and with a judgment at least equal to^his genius, took a mundane theme — one common to aU man- kind. His Adam and Eve are all men and women in- clusively. Pope satirizes Milton for making God the Father talk like a school divine." Pope was hardly the man to criticize Milton. The truth is, the judgment of Milton in the conduct of the celestial part of his story is very exquisite. Wherever Grod is represented as directly acting as Creator, without any exhibition of his own essence, Milton adopts the simplest and sternest language of the Scriptures. He ventures upon no poetic diction, no ampli- fication, no pathos, no affection. It is truly the voice of the Word of the Lord coming to, and acting on, the subject Chaos. But, as some personal interest was demanded for the purposes of poetry, Milton takes advantage of the dramatic representation of God's address to the Son, the Filial Alterity, and in those addresses slips in, as it were by stealth, language of affection, or thought, or sentiment. Indeed, although Milton was undoubtedly a high Arian in his mature life, he does in the necessity of poetry give a greater objectivity to the Father and the Son, than he would have justified in argument. He was very wise in adopting the strong anthropomorphism of the Hebrew ' " Milton's strong pinion now not Heav'n can bound. Now, serpent-like, in prose he sweeps the ground ; In quibbles angel and archangel join, And God the Father turns a school divine." HoR., Book II., Ep. i., 99.— H. N. C. APPENDIX. 639 Scriptures at once. Compare the 'Paradise Lost' with Klopstock's 'Messiah,' and yon will learn to appreciate Milton's judgment and skill quite as much as his genius." -—Sept. 4, 1833. Ghaucer. — " I take unceasing delight in Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old age.' How exquisitely tender he is, and yet how perfectly free from the least touch of sickly melancholy or morbid drooping! The sympathy of the poet with the subjects of his poetry is particularly remarkable in Shakspere and Chaucer; bu:t what the first effects by a strong act of imagination and mental metamorphosis, the last does with- out any effort, merely by the inborn kindly joyousness of his nature. How well we seem to know Chaucer ! How absolutely nothing do we know of Shakspere ! I cannot in the least allow any necessity for Chaucer's poetry, especially the ' Canterbury Tales,' being considsred obsolete. Let a few plain rules be given for sounding the final 6 of syllables, and for expressing the termination of such words as ocean, and nation, &o., as dissyllables, — or let the syllables to be sounded in such cases be marked by a competent metrist. This simple expedient would, with a very few trifling exceptions, where the errors are invete- rate, enable any reader to feel the perfect smoothness and harmony of Chaucer's verse. As to understanding his language, if you read twenty pages with a good glossary, you surely can find no further difficulty, even as it is ; but I should have no objection to see this done : — Strike out those words which are now obsolete, and I will venture to say that I will replace every one of them by words still in 1 Eio-hteen years before, Mr. Coleridge entertained the same feelings towards Chaucer.— H. N. C. The editor of the "Table Talk" here quotes the passage, from the "Biographia Literaria," which we have given in a note. Appendix : III. 540 APPENDIX. use out of Chatioer himself, or Gower his disciple. I don't want this myself : I rather like to see the significaat terms which Chaucer unsuccessfully offered as candidates for admission into our language ; but surely so very slight a change of the text may well be pardoned, even by black- letterati, for the purpose of restoring so great a poet to his ancient and most deserved popularity." — Mar. 15, 1834. Shalcspere of no Age.—" Shakspere is of no age. It is idle to endeavour to support his phrases by quotations from Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, &o. His lan- guage is entirely his own, and the younger dramatists imitated him. The construction of Shakspere's sentences, whether in verse or prose, is the necessary and homo- geneous vehicle of his peculiar manner of thinking. His is not the style of the age. More particularly, Shakspere's blank verse is an absolutely new creation. Bead Daniel ' — the admirable Daniel — in his ' Civil Wars,' and ' Triumphs of Hymen.' The style and language are just such as any very pure and manly writer of the present day — Words- worth, for example — would use ; it seems quite modem in comparison with the style of Shakspere. Ben Jonson's blank verse is very masterly and individual, and perhaps Massinger's is even still nobler, in Beaumont and Fletcher it is constantly slipping into lyricisms. I believe Shakspere was not a whit more intelligible in ^ " This poet's well-merited epithet is that of the ' well-langvaged Daniel;' but, likewise, and by the consent of his contemporaries, no less than all succeeding critics, the ' prosaic Daniel.' Yet those who thus designate this wise and amiable writer, from the frequent incor- respondency of his diction with his metre, in the majority of his com- positions, not only deem them valuable and interesting on other accounts, but willingly admit that there are to be found throughout his poems, and especially in his 'Epistles' and in his ' Hymen's Triumph,' many and exquisite specimens of that style, which, as the neutral ground of prose and verse, is common to both." — Biog. Lit., vol. ii., p. 82.— H. N. C. APPENDIX. 541 his own day than he is now to an educated man, except for a few local allusions of no consequence. As I said, he is of no age — ^nor, I may add, of any religion, or party, or profession. The body and substance' of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind : his observation and reading, which was considerable, sup- plied him with the drapery of his figures." — Ma/r. 15, 1834. INDEX. Aches, 319. Action, 25, 164. Actor, The, 216. Shakspere as an, see "Shak- spere." Adam, in " As you Like It," 9. Addison, 347, 351. "Agamemnon, The," 462 Ages, The Dark, 197, 460. " Alchemist, The," 397, 417, 534. Allegory, 511. Alliteration, 512. « AU's WeU that Ends WeU," 249, 297. Anger, 83. "Antony and Cleopatra," 315. Apollo, 234, 462. Apothecary, The, in "Eomeo and Juliet," 119. Apuleius, 511. Arbaces, in " A King and No King," 425. Ariel, 140, 182. Ariosto, 460, 496. Aristophanes, 187, 189, 190, 420. Aristotle, 51, 224. Art and Nature, 227. "As You Like It," 10, 293. Autolycus, 382. Avarice, 99. Bacchus, 234, 462. Bacon, 64, 65, 66. on literature, 210. Barbauld, Mrs., 26. Bardolph, 75. "Bartholomew Fair," 418. Bastardy, 332. Beaumont, 397. See "Beaumont and Fletcher." Beaumont and Fletcher, 399, 401, 402, 428, 440. compared with Shakspere. See " Shakspere." compared with Jonson, 419. their imitation of Shakspere, 11, 270, 331, 419, 443. their indebtedness to the Spanish Drama, 437, 444. their metre and versification, 402, 431, 432, 435, 437, 446, 540. their sneers at Shakspere, 419. their ultra-royalism, 260, 281, 405, 429, 437. their unnaturalness, 11,533. their women, 277, 299, 441.^ their vice, 12, 443. their virtue, 441, 444. 544 INDEX. Beauty, 203. "Beggar's Bush, The," 533. Benedick, 68. Bertram, 536. Biron, 68, 1«^, 283. Body and I AM, 95, 108, 114. Bohemia, 411. \ Bolingbroke, 154, 260, 266, 482. Bonaparte, 315, 354, 474. and Coleridge, J28. Books, indestructibility- of, 50, 65. use of, 213. See " Beading." Brown, Sir Thomas, 309, 1^61. Brutus, 313. Burbage, 9. ( •Burns, 14, 15, 59. ^ ; Byron, Lord, 26. \ Calderon, 444 Caliban, 142, Campbell, 15,' 182. 16. L -his"GertrudeofWyoming,"16. his " Pleasures of Hope," 16. Capulet, 83. , Care, 17. ; Cassius, 100. " Catiline's Ci^nspiracy," 417. Catullus, 46. I Charles I., 26. age of, 66, 517. Chaucer, 15, 509, 539. comparecj with Shakspere. See " Shakspere." Children, 86, 101, 378. Chorus, Greek, 54, 55, 192. " Christabel," 29. Christianity and Morality, 201. Clarence's Dream, 1 7. Cleopatra, 316. Coleridge, Mrs. H. N., 31. Coleridge, S. T., length of his Lec- tures, 4. Coleridge, S. T., mode of lecturing 5, 19, 20, 64. his audiences, 7, 19, 26, 457, 470. his manner, 7. his Lectures at the Boyal = Institution, 15, 29, 30, 31, 64, 342. and Schlegel, 21, 30, 32, 127, 342. on his contemporaries, 16. on himself as a poet, 16, 33, 34. his way of reading Terse, 17. a French estimate of him, 19. his vagaries, 21, 23, 32. his irresoluteness, 15, 22. his health, 19, 30, 175. hissed, 26. for once ungenerous, 26. his character, 29. his circumlocution, 29. his eyes, 29. his talent, 43. on lore, 114. See "Love," " Marriage," " Materialism." • and Bonapaorte, 128. Comedy and Tragedy, 188, 486. "Comedy of Errors," 249, 292, 536. Commonwealth, The Age of the, 66, 284, 517. Conceits, 66, 93. See " Shakspere." Constance, 40. Contemporary, Definition of a, 395. Contrast, Effect of, 207. Cordelia, 335, " Coriolanus," 309. " Coronation, The,'' 447. Courts of Love, 283. Cowardice, 82, 348. Cressida, 306. Criticism, causes of false, 35, INDEX. 545 Criticism, French, 51, 132, 226, 274. German, 51. must be reverential, 225. Personalities of Modern, 36. Critics, Uneducated, 51, 225. Culture, Effect of, 87, 110. " Custom of the Country, The," 431. "Cymbeline," 249, 301, 305. Daniel, 540. Dante, 233, 460. Darwin, Dr., 48. Davy, Sir Humphry, 31, 64. Deborah, 89. Denude, 321. Desdemona, 391. Dibdin, Dr., 32. Donne, 358, 410, 427. Uow, Gerard, 85. Drama, Ancient, 187. and Shakspere, 29, 121, 461. - — Greek, 121, 187, 193, 234, 390, 461, 463. — modern, 204, 276. origin of, 196. Boman, 196. The, what it should be, 211, 274. Dramatic diction, 214, 403. Drayton, 431. Dream of Clarence, 17. Dreams, 17. Drummond, 411. Dryden, 12, 72, 85, 162, 317, 416. Edgar, 339. Edmund, 332. , " Elder Brother, The," 433. Elizabeth, Reign of, 66, 517. a harlot, 66. Elwes, 99. England, Eulogy of, 148, 257. English language, 71. Envy, 100. "Epicaene,"415. Erasmus, 233, 460. " Every Man out of his Humour," 411. Faces, 119. Falstaff, 8, 28, 147, 268, 402, 419, 487. Fancy and Wit, 74. Farces, 293, 416, 536. " Ferrex and Pollex," 360. Fielding, 88, 466. Fletcher, 397. See " Beaumont and Fletcher." Fleur de Luce Court, 175. Flogging, 22, 24, 61. Fool, The, in " Lear," 29, 54, 337. Fools, in Shakspere. See "Shak- spere." origin of their introduction, 54. French criticism. See "Criticism." language, 70. revolution, 66. Frescoes, 49. Frommy, 422. Generals, superstition of great, 369. Genius, 86, 101, 496. and Talent, 13, 64. and Public Taste, 214. German criticism, 51. drama, 213. language, 70. Ghosts, 347, 361. Gifford, 397, 407. Gloster, in "Lear," 333, 341, 379. Goethe, 27. Gower, 305. Greek Art, &c.. Polytheism; its influence on, 233. N N 646 INDEX. Greek chorus, 54, 55, 192. Drama. Ses " Drama." Language, 70, 71. Grill, in " The Faery Queen," 109. Guilt and Shame, 336. " Hamlet," 29, 329, 472. Hamlet, 25, 27, 158, 228, 329, 342, 471, 50BfS06, 530, 531. Harris's CJommendatory Poem on Fletcher, 426. Hazlitt, 175. " Henry IV.," Part I., 268. Part II., 270. "Henry v.," 271. « Henry "VI.," Part I., 272. Historical Plays, 10, 252, 478. Hogarth, 397, 420. Holofernes, 181. Honest, 318. Hooker, on Poetry, 37. Hume, 28, 350. " Humorous Lieutenant, The," 436. Humour, Origin of the Term, 487. lago, 27, 147, 335, 384, 387, 392, 487. Ignorant, The, 51. their mode of Recollection, 87. "Iliad, The," 521. Images in Poetry, 16, 406. Imagination, 91, 102, 344, 472. Imitation in Poetry, 88, 122. Intellect and Character, 147, 273, 308, 332, 334, 385, 387. and Moral Worth, 171. Isabella, 409. Italian Language, 70, 71. mismanagement of the young, 110. Jealousy, 381. Jealousy of Leontes. See " Leontes. " so called, of Othello. See « Othello." "John, King," 255. Johnson, Dr., 22, 26, 45, 72, 85, 152, 162, 163, 301, 364, 374, 388, 485. Jonson, Ben, 50, 287, 396, 401, 409, 416. and Drummond, 411. compared with Shakspere. See " Shakspere." his characters abstractions, . 396, 410, 416. his imitation of Shakspere, 419. his metre and Tersification, 397, 540. might be in part reproduced, 415. not a genius, 412. Joy and Sorrow, 357. "Julius Caesar," 311. Kemble, 479. Kent, in " Lear," 336. " King and No King, A," 425, 430. "Kinsmen, The Two Noble," 10, 450, 533. Klopstock and Milton, 522, 525. Kotzebue, 12, 331, 464, 485. Laertes, 351, 366. Lamb, 11, 17, 22. a letter by, 170. Language. See "English,"" French," &c., " Language." of passion, 48, 55, 71, 89. poetic, 89, 90. Laurence, Friar, 99. " Laws of Candy, The," 438. " Leav," 53, 54, 140, 240, 329, 400, 507. INDEX. 547 Lear, 337, 530. Leontes, 381, 386, 387, 393, 476, 530. Lessing, 227. Lex Merchetae, 431. Life, increasing sameness of human, 215. Weariness of, 352. " Little French Lawyer, The," 439, 532, 533. Love, 23, 24, 91, 93, 325, 327, 362, 390. among blood relations, 96, 108, 329. and human nature, 106. and license, 97, 108, 114. and marriage, 96, 107. and nature, 97, 307, 316, 328. at first sight, 97, 106, 113, 117, 279. courts of, 283. definition of, 95, 102, 119, 307. "Love's Labour's Lost," 80, 101, 180, 249, 272, 535. "Loyal Subject, The," 437. " Lucrece," 9, 58, 223, 245, 489, 493. Ludicrous, The, as reaction from mental strain, 357, 473. " Macbeth," 329, 344, 352, 368, 400, 469. Macbeth, 369, 371, 374, 468. Lady, 369, 375. "Mad Lover, The," 12, 331, 339, 365, 436. Madness of Undevoutness, 104. " Maid of Honour, The," 405, 407. " Maid of the Mill, The," 441. " Maid's Tragedy, The," 397, 428. Make for mate, 423. Man, 343. Manners and Morality, 76. Manners, English, in Shakspere's Time, 408. Italian, 408. of the Bestoration, 425. Marlborough, 257. Marriage, 96, 107. needful for completion, 112, 114. of brother and sister, 111. Masks, on the stage, 194. Massinger, 401, 403. a democrat, 281, 405, 424, 437. compared with Shakspere. See "Shakspere." his metre and versification, 403, 427, 439, 534, 540. Materialism reproved, 108. Materialist, The, consulted on co- habitation, 106. Mathematics, how not to be taught, 52. "Measure for Measure," 299, 409, 531. Menander, 190. Meroutio, 68, 84, 101, 324. "Merry Wives of Windsor, The," 298, 402. Metastasio, 240. Metre and Versification of Beau- mont and Fletcher, Jonson, Mas- singer, Milton, Shakspere, Spen- ser. See "Beaumont and Flet- cher," " Jonson," &c. remarks on, 290, 354, 422, 426, 432, 448. "Midsummer Night's Dream, A," 241, 289. Milton, 16, 24, 45, 58, 61, 94, 139, 157, 214, 479, 517, 529. an aristocrat, 28, 413. and Klopstock, 522, 525. compared with Shakspere, 532. 548 INDEX. Milton, his " Death," 91, 102. his egotism, 537. his " Liberty of UnliceDsed Printing," 62. his metre and versification, 49, 181, 526, 534. his " Paradise Lost," 519, 538. his " Paradise Regained," 28. his " Samson Agonistes," 14, 534. his Satan, 26. his Women, 94. on Poetiy, 185, 459. Mind and Body, 95, 108, 114. Miranda, 135, 145, 277. Mobled, 360. Molifere, his " Miser," 99. " Monsieur Thomas," 402, 533. Moore's " Gamester," 12. " Moralities," 202. Morality and Christianity, 201. of our ancestors, 200. of our day, 37. Morals and Manners, 76. Motives always mixed, 487. " Much Ado about Nothing," 239. "Mysteries," 197. -■ — as seen by Coleridge in Ger- many, 198. Napoleon. See " Bonaparte." Nature and Art, 227. " New Inn, The," 423. " Noble Gentlemen, The," 446. Novels, 35. Nurse, in " Eomeo and Juliet," 85, 323. CEdipus, 100. Old Age humanizing, 86, 101. Ophelia, 362, 365, 531. " Othello," 384. Othello, 11, 530. contrasted with lago, 27. not a Negro, 385, 477, 529. — not jealous. 26, 381, 386; 393, 477, 530. Painting and Poetry, 92, 102, 209. Passion, Language of, 48, 55, 71, 89. Perdita, 383. "Pericles," 27, 466. " Philaster," 397. « Pilgrim, The," 445. "Pilgrim's Progress, The," 511. Pistol, 82. Plato, 96. his " EepubUc," 268. on Tragedy and Comedy, 187. Playing on Words, 352. See " Shak- spere." Poesy, an original use of the word, 173, 209. Poet, The, a child, 104. not rashly to be classed, 203. requisites of, 57, 189, 459. the true philosopher, 105. the dramatic, characteristics of, 212. " Poetaster, The," 412. Poetry, 55, 90, 231, 252, 458. and painting, 92, 102, 209. and religion, 103. and science, 184. and sculpture, 189. a serious study, 94. definition of, 45, 183, 189. form in, 228. images in, 16, 406. imitation in, 86, 122. Hooker on, 37. Milton on, 185, 459. Polonius, 238, 358, 465, 531. Polytheism, its influence in Greek Art, &c., 233. Pope, 26, 45, 52, 143, 144, 231, 232, 278, 403, 404, 411, 459, 477, 533, 538. Porter, The, in " Hamlet," 368, 377, 402. Power, 334. Primogeniture, 333. Private Life, Discipline of, 110. Proteus, 56. Puns, 73, 92, 262. " Queen of Corinth, The," 446. Eeaders, Pour Classes of, 44. Beading, Value of, 171, 213. Eecitative, 53, 62, 63. Reformation, The, 233, 460. Religion and Poetry, 103. as a Basis of Society, 440. Reviews, Use of, 35, 39. Rhymes in Blank Verse, 259. " Richard II.," 147, 255, 273. Richard II., 152, 258, 479. " Richard in.," 273. Richard III., 27, 147, 273, 487. Richardson, 466. Roderigo, 384. Rogers, Samuel, 18, 26. " Rollo," 443. Roman Drama, 196. Romance Languages, 203, 463. Romeo, 90, 98, 116. " Romeo and Juliet," 80, 81, 83, 89, 101, 236, 321, 400, 464. a modern termination, 12. Komeo and Othello, 118. Rosalind, 294. Rosaline, in "Love's Labour's Lost," 288. in " Romeo and Juliet," 115, 118,323. INDEX. 549 " Rule a Wife and have a Wife," 438. " Sad Shepherd, The," 409. Satan, Milton's, 524. Schlegel. See " Coleridge." Schiller at fault, 377. compared with Shakspere, 530. " Scornful Lady, The," 430. Seott, Sir.Walter, 14, 16. his " Lady of the Lake," 13. Scudamour's Dream, 17. Sculpture, 189. " Sejanus," 413. Selections of Prose and Verse, 230. Self, 301. Seneca, 202. Seward, 426 et passim. his Preface to Beaumont and Fletcher, 425. Shakspere, 14, 57, 179, 394, 401, 533. general characteristics of, 237, 458. as a poet generally, 218, 283, 488. his genius,179, 315, 401. whether an irregular genius, 51, 224, 343, 427. a Proteus, 56, 379. a prophet, 146, 180. a philosopher, 180, 242, 281, 429, 487. an aristocrat, 281, 429. not sectarian, 179, 267, 281, 309, 320, 437, 541. reverential, 264, 326, 467. how far a scholar, 287, 310. as an actor, 9. order of his plays, 8, 58, 59, 243. his historical plays, 10, 252, 478. 650 INDEX. Shakspere, his doubtful plays, 10, 93, 249, 450. and the names of his plays, 345, 380 of no age, 67, 82, 93, 131, 179, 232, 447, 540. and ancient drama, 29, 121, 461. and his age, 67, 399, 447. and his contemporaries, 315, 398, 408, 414. compared with Beaumont and Pletcher, 11, 74, 78, 94, 99, 238, 330, 397, 400, 427, 437, 445, 446, 464, 467, 537. compared with Chaucer, 509. compared with Jonson, 11, 396, 416, 487, 533. compared with Massinger, 398, 403, 406. compared with Milton, 532. compared with Schiller, 530. compared with Spenser, 510, 516. at work, 27, 69, 85, 88, 98, 138, 241, 294, 344, 346, 362, 379, 484, 536. in transition, 81, 101. See " Taste." his method, 501. idealizes, 125, 132, 465. and nature, 29, 56, 58, 68, 84, 88, 99, 124, 137, 160, 179, 180, 229, 237, 355, 400, 401, 465, 508. his judgment, 52, 81, 136, 142, 145, 159, 223, 234, 316, 330, 333, 341, 350, 358, 365, 401, 461, 465, 484. true to himself, 126, 379. his language, 76, 216, 284, 534, 540. his use of images, 406, 497. Shakspere, his songs, 240. his metre and rersification, 181 291, 311, 354, 437, 446, 450, 540. portrays classes of men, 1 1, 68, 82, 85, 124, 282, 323, 336, 375, 508. his portrayal of manners, 122, 465. his portrayal of character, 241. his gentlemen, 67, 85. his women, 78, 94, 105, 277, 299, 362, 391, 409, 477, 533. and the priestly character, 99. — — his fools, 29, 54, 55. his partiality of boys, 378. his portrayal of vice, 8, 12, 27, 143, 182, 239, 280, 334, 337, 391, 464, 535. never portrays avarice, 99, 179. only once portrays envy, 100. his wit, 74, 75, 398. his conceits, puns, and playing on words, 72, 90, 150, 263, 314, 352, 368. his immorality, 76, 94. his coarseness, 77, 262, 402, 408, 443, 466. his critics, 125, 343. text of, 128. poem by MUton on, 129. two classes of readers of, 124. Shame and Guilt, 336. Siddons, Mrs., 12, 479. Sidney, Sir Philip, his "Arcadia," 287. his women, 105. " Silent Woman, The," 397. Skelton's " Philip Sparrow," 255. Society based on marriage, 107. fundamentals of, 440. Sophocles, 51, 461. Sorrow and Joy, 357. INDEX. 651 Soul. See " Mind." Southey, 13, 16. his " Curse of Kehama," 12. not original, 17. " Spanish Curate, The," 434. Spanish Language, 70. Stage, and Beaumont and Flet- cher, 437. Spenser, 17, 67, 109, 245, 510. compared with Shakspere, 510, 516. his women, 104, 515. on sensuality, 109. Stage, The^ 53, 205. —. — Greek, 52, 56, 234, 462. — — origin of English, 54. of Shakspere's day, 52, 122, 236. of our day, 37, 77, 479. source of pleasure in, 53, 206. illusion produced by, 206, 207, 274. masks on, 194. " Staple of News, The," 422. Statuary, 121. Steevens, 14 et passim, Sterne, 119. Superstition, 369. Swift's " Polite Conversation," 85. Talent and Genius, 13, 64, 75. Tannhauser, 109. Taste, 81, 101. Taylor, Jeremy, 36, 82. " Tempest, The," 132, 274. Terms, vague use of, 40, 45. " The Devil is an Ass," 421. Thersites, 308. Think, need of learning to, 38. " Timon of Athens," 305, 318. " Titus Andronicus," 304, 379. Tone, in Reading, 63. See " Cole- ridge," and " Recitative." Tragedy and Comedy, 188, 486. Trilogies, 390, 463. Trinculo, 182. " Troilus and Cressida," 305. "Twelfth Night," 295. "Two Noble Kinsmen, The," 10, 450, 533. Tybalt, 82. Una, 515. Unities, The, 53, 56, 123, 204, 321, " Valentinian," 440. "Venus and Adonis," 9, 57, 219, 222, 245, 488, 493. "Very Woman, The," 534. Villeiny, a praiseworthy custom of, 431. " Virgin Martyr, The," 534. " Volpone," 414, 532. Voltaire, 229. Warburton, 374, et passim. Weber, 397. Weird Sisters, The, 370, 468. Whalley's Preface to Jonson, 409. Life of Jonson, 410. Wieland, 496. "Wife for a Month, A," 445. "Wild Goose Chase, The," 444. Wilkes, 147. " Winter's Tale, The," 380, 476. Wit, 46, 73. See " Shakspere." and Fancy, 74. " Wit at Several Weapons," 448. " Wit without Money," 434. "Woman Hater, The," 451. Women, 96, 290. 552 INDEX. Women of Beaumont and Fletcher, Milton, Shakspere, Sidney, Spen- ser. 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