English literary criticism Part 14

But if the jingle of names a.s.sists the memory, may it not also quicken the fancy? and there are other things worth having at our fingers'

ends, besides the contents of the almanac. Pope's versification is tiresome from its excessive sweetness and uniformity. Shakespeare's blank verse is the perfection of dramatic dialogue.

All is not poetry that pa.s.ses for such: nor does verse make the whole difference between poetry and prose. The _Iliad_ does not cease to be poetry in a literal translation; and Addison's _Campaign_ has been very properly denominated a Gazette in rhyme. Common prose differs from poetry, as treating for the most part either of such trite, familiar, and irksome matters of fact, as convey no extraordinary impulse to the imagination, or else of such difficult and laborious processes of the understanding, as do not admit of the wayward or violent movements either of the imagination or the pa.s.sions.

I will mention three works which come as near to poetry as possible without absolutely being so; namely, the _Pilgrim's Progress_, _Robinson Crusoe_, and the Tales of Boccaccio. Chaucer and Dryden have translated some of the last into English rhyme, but the essence and the power of poetry was there before. That which lifts the spirit above the earth, which draws the soul out of itself with indescribable longings, is poetry in kind, and generally fit to become so in name, by being "married to immortal verse". If it is of the essence of poetry to strike and fix the imagination, whether we will or no, to make the eye of childhood glisten with the starting tear, to be never thought of afterwards with indifference, John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe may be permitted to pa.s.s for poets in their way. The mixture of fancy and reality in the _Pilgrim's Progress_ was never equalled in any allegory.

His pilgrims walk above the earth, and yet are on it. What zeal, what beauty, what truth of fiction! What deep feeling in the description of Christian's swimming across the water at last, and in the picture of the s.h.i.+ning Ones within the gates, with wings at their backs and garlands on their heads, who are to wipe all tears from his eyes! The writer's genius, though not "dipped in dews of Castalie", was baptized with the Holy Spirit and with fire. The prints in this book are no small part of it. If the confinement of Philoctetes in the island of Lemnos was a subject for the most beautiful of all the Greek tragedies, what shall we say to Robinson Crusoe in his? Take the speech of the Greek hero on leaving his cave, beautiful as it is, and compare it with the reflections of the English adventurer in his solitary place of confinement. The thoughts of home, and of all from which he is for ever cut off, swell and press against his bosom, as the heaving ocean rolls its ceaseless tide against the rocky sh.o.r.e, and the very beatings of his heart become audible in the eternal silence that surrounds him.

Thus he says:

As I walked about, either in my hunting, or for viewing the country, the anguish of my soul at my condition would break out upon me on a sudden, and my very heart would die within me to think of the woods, the mountains, and deserts I was in; and how I was a prisoner, locked up with the eternal bars and bolts of the ocean, in an uninhabited wilderness, without redemption. In the midst of the greatest composures of my mind, this would break out upon me like a storm, and make me wring my hands, and weep like a child. Sometimes it would take me in the middle of my work, and I would immediately sit down and sigh, and look upon the ground for an hour or two together, and this was still worse to me, for if I could burst into tears or vent myself in words, it would go off, and the grief having exhausted itself would abate.

The story of his adventures would not make a poem like the _Odyssey_, it is true; but the relater had the true genius of a poet. It has been made a question whether Richardson's romances are poetry; and the answer perhaps is, that they are not poetry, because they are not romance. The interest is worked up to an inconceivable height; but it is by an infinite number of little things, by incessant labour and calls upon the attention, by a repet.i.tion of blows that have no rebound in them. The sympathy excited is not a voluntary contribution, but a tax. Nothing is unforced and spontaneous. There is a want of elasticity and motion. The story does not "give an echo to the seat where love is throned". The heart does not answer of itself like a chord in music.

The fancy does not run on before the writer with breathless expectation, but is dragged along with an infinite number of pins and wheels, like those with which the Liliputians dragged Gulliver pinioned to the royal palace. Sir Charles Grandison is a c.o.xcomb. What sort of a figure would he cut, translated into an epic poem, by the side of Achilles? Clarissa, the divine Clarissa, is too interesting by half. She is interesting in her ruffles, in her gloves, her samplers, her aunts and uncles--she is interesting in all that is uninteresting. Such things, however intensely they may be brought home to us, are not conductors to the imagination. There is infinite truth and feeling in Richardson; but it is extracted from a _caput mortuum_ of circ.u.mstances: it does not evaporate of itself. His poetical genius is like Ariel confined in a pine-tree, and requires an artificial process to let it out. Shakespeare says:

Our poesy is as a gum, which oozes From whence 'tis nourished... our gentle flame Provokes itself, and, like the current, flies Each bound it chafes.

I shall conclude this general account with some remarks on four of the princ.i.p.al works of poetry in the world, at different periods of history--Homer, the Bible, Dante, and, let me add, Ossian. In Homer, the principle of action or life is predominant: in the Bible, the principle of faith and the idea of Providence; Dante is a personification of blind will; and in Ossian we see the decay of life and the lag end of the world. Homer's poetry is the heroic: it is full of life and action: it is bright as the day, strong as a river. In the vigour of his intellect, he grapples with all the objects of nature, and enters into all the relations of social life. He saw many countries, and the manners of many men; and he has brought them all together in his poem. He describes his heroes going to battle with a prodigality of life, arising from an exuberance of animal spirits: we see them before us, their number and their order of battle, poured out upon the plain "all plumed like ostriches, like eagles newly bathed, wanton as goats, wild as young bulls, youthful as May, and gorgeous as the sun at midsummer", covered with glittering armour, with dust and blood; while the G.o.ds quaff their nectar in golden cups, or mingle in the fray; and the old men a.s.sembled on the walls of Troy rise up with reverence as Helen pa.s.ses by them. The mult.i.tude of things in Homer is wonderful; their splendour, their truth, their force and variety.

His poetry is, like his religion, the poetry of number and form: he describes the bodies as well as the souls of men.

The poetry of the Bible is that of imagination and of faith: it is abstract and disembodied: it is not the poetry of form, but of power; not of mult.i.tude, but of immensity. It does not divide into many, but aggrandizes into one. Its ideas of nature are like its ideas of G.o.d.

It is not the poetry of social life, but of solitude: each man seems alone in the world, with the original forms of nature, the rocks, the earth, and the sky. It is not the poetry of action or heroic enterprise, but of faith in a supreme Providence, and resignation to the power that governs the universe. As the idea of G.o.d was removed farther from humanity and a scattered polytheism, it became more profound and intense, as it became more universal, for the Infinite is present to everything: "If we fly into the uttermost parts of the earth, it is there also; if we turn to the east or the west, we cannot escape from it". Man is thus aggrandized in the image of his Maker. The history of the patriarchs is of this kind; they are founders of a chosen race of people, the inheritors of the earth; they exist in the generations which are to come after them. Their poetry, like their religious creed, is vast, unformed, obscure, and infinite; a vision is upon it; an invisible hand is suspended over it. The spirit of the Christian religion consists in the glory hereafter to be revealed; but in the Hebrew dispensation Providence took an immediate share in the affairs of this life. Jacob's dream arose out of this intimate communion between heaven and earth: it was this that let down, in the sight of the youthful patriarch, a golden ladder from the sky to the earth, with angels ascending and descending upon it, and shed a light upon the lonely place, which can never pa.s.s away. The story of Ruth, again, is as if all the depth of natural affection in the human race was involved in her breast. There are descriptions in the book of Job more prodigal of imagery, more intense in pa.s.sion, than anything in Homer; as that of the state of his prosperity, and of the vision that came upon him by night. The metaphors in the Old Testament are more boldly figurative.

Things were collected more into ma.s.ses, and gave a greater _momentum_ to the imagination.

Dante was the father of modern poetry, and he may therefore claim a place in this connection. His poem is the first great step from Gothic darkness and barbarism; and the struggle of thought in it, to burst the thraldom in which the human mind had been so long held, is felt in every page. He stood bewildered, not appalled, on that dark sh.o.r.e which separates the ancient and the modern world; and saw the glories of antiquity dawning through the abyss of time, while revelation opened its pa.s.sage to the other world. He was lost in wonder at what had been done before him, and he dared to emulate it. Dante seems to have been indebted to the Bible for the gloomy tone of his mind, as well as for the prophetic fury which exalts and kindles his poetry; but he is utterly unlike Homer. His genius is not a sparkling flame, but the sullen heat of a furnace. He is power, pa.s.sion, self-will personified.

In all that relates to the descriptive or fanciful part of poetry, he bears no comparison to many who had gone before, or who have come after him; but there is a gloomy abstraction in his conceptions, which lies like a dead weight upon the mind--a benumbing stupor, a breathless awe, from the intensity of the impression--a terrible obscurity, like that which oppresses us in dreams--an ident.i.ty of interest, which moulds every object to its own purposes, and clothes all things with the pa.s.sions and imaginations of the human soul--that make amends for all other deficiencies. The immediate objects he presents to the mind are not much in themselves; they want grandeur, beauty, and order; but they become everything by the force of the character he impresses upon them. His mind lends its own power to the objects which it contemplates, instead of borrowing it from them. He takes advantage even of the nakedness and dreary vacuity of his subject. His imagination peoples the shades of death, and broods over the silent air. He is the severest of all writers, the most hard and impenetrable, the most opposite to the flowery and glittering; the writer who relies most on his own power, and the sense of it in others, and who leaves most room to the imagination of his readers. Dante's only endeavour is to interest; and he interests by exciting our sympathy with the emotion by which he is himself possessed. He does not place before us the objects by which that emotion has been created; but he seizes on the attention, by showing us the effect they produce on his feelings; and his poetry accordingly gives the same thrilling and overwhelming sensation which is caught by gazing on the face of a person who has seen some object of horror. The improbability of the events, the abruptness and monotony in the _Inferno_, are excessive: but the interest never flags, from the continued earnestness of the author's mind. Dante's great power is in combining internal feelings with external objects. Thus the gate of h.e.l.l, on which that withering inscription is written, seems to be endowed with speech and consciousness, and to utter its dread warning, not without a sense of mortal woes. This author habitually unites the absolutely local and individual with the greatest wildness and mysticism. In the midst of the obscure and shadowy regions of the lower world, a tomb suddenly rises up with the inscription, "I am the tomb of Pope Anastasius the Sixth": and half the personages whom he has crowded into the _Inferno_ are his own acquaintance. All this, perhaps, tends to heighten the effect by the bold intermixture of realities, and by an appeal, as it were, to the individual knowledge and experience of the reader. He affords few subjects for picture. There is, indeed, one gigantic one, that of Count Ugolino, of which Michael Angelo made a basrelief, and which Sir Joshua Reynolds ought not to have painted.

Another writer whom I shall mention last, and whom I cannot persuade myself to think a mere modern in the groundwork, is Ossian. He is a feeling and a name that can never be destroyed in the minds of his readers. As Homer is the first vigour and l.u.s.tihead, Ossian is the decay and old age of poetry. He lives only in the recollection and regret of the past. There is one impression which he conveys more entirely than all other poets; namely, the sense of privation, the loss of all things, of friends, of good name, of country; he is even without G.o.d in the world. He converses only with the spirits of the departed; with the motionless and silent clouds. The cold moonlight sheds its faint l.u.s.tre on his head; the fox peeps out of the ruined tower; the thistle waves its beard to the wandering gale; and the strings of his harp seem, as the hand of age, as the tale of other times, pa.s.ses over them, to sigh and rustle like the dry reeds in the winter's wind! The feeling of cheerless desolation, of the loss of the pith and sap of existence, of the annihilation of the substance, and the clinging to the shadow of all things, as in a mock-embrace, is here perfect. In this way, the lamentation of Selma for the loss of Salgar is the finest of all. If it were indeed possible to show that this writer was nothing, it would only be another instance of mutability, another blank made, another void left in the heart, another confirmation of that feeling which makes him so often complain, "Roll on, ye dark brown years, ye bring no joy on your wing to Ossian!"

CHARLES LAMB.

(1775-1834)

VI. ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY.

The essay on the _Artificial Comedy of the Last Century_ is one of the _Essays of Elia_, published in the _London Magazine_ between 1820 and 1822. The paradox started by Lamb was taken up by Leigh Hunt in his edition of the _Comic Dramatists of the Restoration_, and was attacked by Macaulay in his well-known review of Hunt's work. It is characteristic of Lamb to have bound up his defence of these writers with an account of Kemble and other actors of the day. His peculiar strength lay in his power of throwing himself into the very mood and temper of the writers he admired, and no critic has more completely possessed the secret of living over again the life of a literary masterpiece. His genius was, in fact, akin to the genius of an actor, an actor who, not for the moment but permanently, becomes the part that he seeks to represent. And he was never so much at home as when he was ill.u.s.trating his own reading of a drama from the tones and gestures of the stage. It may be doubted whether, under stress of this impulse, he was not led to force the a.n.a.logy between Sheridan and the dramatists of the Restoration. The a.n.a.logy doubtless exists, but in his wish to bring home to his readers the inner meaning of plays, then no longer acted, he was perhaps tempted to press a resemblance to works, familiar to every play-goer, further than it could fairly be made to go. The mistake, if mistake it were, is pardonable. And it serves to ill.u.s.trate the essential nature of Lamb's genius as a critic, and of the new element that he brought into criticism. This was the invincible belief that poetry is not merely an art for the few, but something that finds an echo in the common instincts of all men, something that, coming from the heart, naturally clothes itself in fitting words and gives individual colour to each tone, gesture, and expression. These, therefore, we must study if we would penetrate to the open secret of the artist, if we would seize the vital spirit of his utterance and make it our own. Lamb's sense of poetic form, his instinct for subtle shades of difference, was far keener than Hazlitt's.

And for that very reason he may be said to have seen yet more clearly than Hazlitt saw, how inseparable is the tie that binds poetry to life.

It is not only in its deeper undertones, Lamb seems to remind us, but in its finest shades of voice and phrasing, that poetry is the echo of some mood or temper of the soul. This is the vein that he opened, and which, with wider scope and a touch still more delicate, has since been explored by Mr. Pater.

The two shorter pieces speak for themselves. They are taken from the _Specimens of English Dramatic Poets_ (1808).

The artificial comedy, or comedy of manners, is quite extinct on our stage. Congreve and Farquhar show their heads once in seven years only, to be exploded and put down instantly. The times cannot bear this. Is it for a few wild speeches, an occasional licence of dialogue? I think not altogether. The business of their dramatic characters will not stand the moral test. We screw everything up to that. Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the pa.s.sing pageant of an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications of profligacy in a son or ward in real life should startle a parent or guardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests left. We see a stage libertine playing his loose pranks of two hours' duration, and of no after consequence, with the severe eyes which inspect real vices with their bearings upon two worlds. We are spectators to a plot or intrigue (not reducible in life to the point of strict morality), and take it all for truth. We subst.i.tute a real for a dramatic person, and judge him accordingly. We try him in our courts, from which there is no appeal to the _dramatis persona_, his peers. We have been spoiled with--not sentimental comedy--but a tyrant far more pernicious to our pleasures which has succeeded to it, the exclusive and all-devouring drama of common life; where the moral point is everything; where, instead of the fict.i.tious half-believed personages of the stage (the phantoms of old comedy), we recognize ourselves, our brothers, aunts, kinsfolk, allies, patrons, enemies,--the same as in life,--with an interest in what is going on so hearty and substantial, that we cannot afford our moral judgment, in its deepest and most vital results, to compromise or slumber for a moment. What is there transacting, by no modification is made to affect us in any other manner than the same events or characters would do in our relations.h.i.+ps of life. We carry our fireside concerns to the theatre with us. We do not go thither like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure of reality, so much as to confirm our experience of it; to make a.s.surance double, and take a bond of fate. We must live our toilsome lives twice over, as it was the mournful privilege of Ulysses to descend twice to the shades. All that neutral ground of character, which stood between vice and virtue; or which in fact was indifferent to neither, where neither properly was called in question; that happy breathing-place from the burthen of a perpetual moral questioning--the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistry--is broken up and disfranchised, as injurious to the interests of society. The privileges of the place are taken away by law. We dare not dally with images, or names, of wrong. We bark like foolish dogs at shadows. We dread infection from the scenic representation of disorder, and fear a painted pustule. In our anxiety that our morality should not take cold, we wrap it up in a great blanket surtout of precaution against the breeze and suns.h.i.+ne.

I confess for myself that (with no great delinquencies to answer for) I am glad for a season to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict conscience,--not to live always in the precincts of the law- courts,--but now and then, for a dream-while or so, to imagine a world with no meddling restrictions--to get into recesses, whither the hunter cannot follow me--

Secret shades Of woody Ida's inmost grove, While yet there was no fear of Jove.

I come back to my cage and my restraint the fresher and more healthy for it. I wear my shackles more contentedly for having respired the breath of an imaginary freedom. I do not know how it is with others, but I feel the better always for the perusal of one of Congreve's-- nay, why should I not add even of Wycherley's--comedies. I am the gayer at least for it; and I could never connect those sports of a witty fancy in any shape with any result to be drawn from them to imitation in real life. They are a world of themselves almost as much as fairy-land. Take one of their characters, male or female (with few exceptions they are alike), and place it in a modern play, and my virtuous indignation shall rise against the profligate wretch as warmly as the Catos of the pit could desire; because in a modern play I am to judge of the right and the wrong. The standard of police is the measure of political justice. The atmosphere will blight it; it cannot live here. It has got into a moral world, where it has no business, from which it must needs fall headlong; as dizzy, and incapable of making a stand, as a Sweden-borgian bad spirit that has wandered unawares into the sphere of one of his Good Men, or Angels. But in its own world do we feel the creature is so very bad?--The Fainalls and the Mirabels, the Dorimants and the Lady Touchwoods, in their own sphere, do not offend my moral sense; in fact, they do not appeal to it at all. They seem engaged in their proper element. They break through no laws or conscientious restraints. They know of none. They have got out of Christendom into the land--what shall I call it?-of cuckoldry--the Utopia of gallantry, where pleasure is duty, and the manners perfect freedom. It is altogether a speculative scene of things, which has no reference whatever to the world that is. No good person can be justly offended as a spectator, because no good person suffers on the stage. Judged morally, every character in these plays--the few exceptions only are mistakes--is alike essentially vain and worthless.

The great art of Congreve is specially shown in this, that he has entirely excluded from his scenes--some little generosities in the part of Angelica [Footnote: In _Love for Love_] perhaps excepted--not only anything like a faultless character, but any pretensions to goodness or good feelings whatsoever. Whether he did this designedly, or instinctively, the effect is as happy as the design (if design) was bold. I used to wonder at the strange power which his _Way of the World_ in particular possesses of interesting you all along in the pursuits of characters, for whom you absolutely care nothing--for you neither hate nor love his personages--and I think it is owing to this very indifference for any, that you endure the whole. He has spread a privation of moral light, I will call it, rather than by the ugly name of palpable darkness, over his creations; and his shadows flit before you without distinction or preference. Had he introduced a good character, a single gush of moral feeling, a revulsion of the judgment to actual life and actual duties, the impertinent Goshen would have only lighted to the discovery of deformities, which now are none, because we think them none.

Translated into real life, the characters of his, and his friend Wycherley's dramas, are profligates and strumpets,--the business of their brief existence, the undivided pursuit of lawless gallantry. No other spring of action, or possible motive of conduct, is recognized; principles which, universally acted upon, must reduce this frame of things to a chaos. But we do them wrong in so translating them. No such effects are produced, in their world. When we are among them, we are amongst a chaotic people. We are not to judge them by our usages.

No reverend inst.i.tutions are insulted by their proceedings--for they have none among them. No peace of families is violated--for no family ties exist among them. No purity of the marriage bed is stained--for none is supposed to have a being. No deep affections are disquieted, no holy wedlock bands are snapped asunder--for affection's depth and wedded faith are not of the growth of that soil. There is neither right nor wrong,--grat.i.tude or its opposite,--claim or duty,--paternity or sons.h.i.+p. Of what consequence is it to Virtue, or how is she at all concerned about it, whether Sir Simon or Dapperwit steal away Miss Martha; or who is the father of Lord Froth's or Sir Paul Pliant's children?

The whole is a pa.s.sing pageant, where we should sit as unconcerned at the issues, for life or death, as at the battle of the frogs and mice.

But, like Don Quixote, we take part against the puppets, and quite as impertinently. We dare not contemplate an Atlantis, a scheme out of which our c.o.xcombical moral sense is for a little transitory ease excluded. We have not the courage to imagine a state of things for which there is neither reward nor punishment. We cling to the painful necessities of shame and blame. We would indict our very dreams.

Amidst the mortifying circ.u.mstances attendant upon growing old, it is something to have seen the _School for Scandal_ in its glory. This comedy grew out of Congreve and Wycherley, but gathered some allays of the sentimental comedy which followed theirs. It is impossible that it should be now _acted_, though it continues, at long intervals, to be announced in the bills. Its hero, when Palmer played it at least, was Joseph Surface. When I remember the gay boldness, the graceful solemn plausibility, the measured step, the insinuating voice--to express it in a word--the downright _acted_ villany of the part, so different from the pressure of conscious actual wickedness,--the hypocritical a.s.sumption of hypocrisy,--which made Jack so deservedly a favourite in that character, I must needs conclude the present generation of playgoers more virtuous than myself, or more dense. I freely confess that he divided the palm with me with his better brother; that, in fact, I liked him quite as well. Not but there are pa.s.sages,--like that, for instance, where Joseph is made to refuse a pittance to a poor relation,--incongruities which Sheridan was forced upon by the attempt to join the artificial with the sentimental comedy, either of which must destroy the other--but over these obstructions Jack's manner floated him so lightly, that a refusal from him no more shocked you, than the easy compliance of Charles gave you in reality any pleasure; you got over the paltry question as quickly as you could, to get back into the regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns.

The highly artificial manner of Palmer in this character counteracted every disagreeable impression which you might have received from the contrast, supposing them real, between the two brothers. You did not believe in Joseph with the same faith with which you believed in Charles. The latter was a pleasant reality, the former a no less pleasant poetical foil to it. The comedy, I have said, is incongruous; a mixture of Congreve with sentimental incompatibilities; the gaiety upon the whole is buoyant; but it required the consummate art of Palmer to reconcile the discordant elements.

A player with Jack's talents, if we had one now, would not dare to do the part in the same manner. He would instinctively avoid every turn which might tend to unrealize, and so to make the character fascinating.

He must take his cue from his spectators, who would expect a bad man and a good man as rigidly opposed to each other as the deathbeds of those geniuses are contrasted in the prints, which I am sorry to say have disappeared from the windows of my old friend Carrington Bowles, of St. Paul's Churchyard memory--(an exhibition as venerable as the adjacent cathedral, and almost coeval) of the bad and good man at the hour of death; where the ghastly apprehensions of the former,--and truly the grim phantom with his reality of a toasting-fork is not to be despised,--so finely contrast with the meek complacent kissing of the rod,--taking it in like honey and b.u.t.ter,--with which the latter submits to the scythe of the gentle bleeder, Time, who wields his lancet with the apprehensive finger of a popular young ladies' surgeon.

What flesh, like loving gra.s.s, would not covet to meet half-way the stroke of such a delicate mower?

John Palmer was twice an actor in this exquisite part. He was playing to you all the while that he was playing upon Sir Peter and his lady.

You had the first intimation of a sentiment before it was on his lips.

His altered voice was meant to you, and you were to suppose that his fict.i.tious co-flutterers on the stage perceived nothing at all of it.

What was it to you if that half reality, the husband, was overreached by the puppetry--or the thin thing (Lady Teazle's reputation) was persuaded it was dying of a plethory? The fortunes of Oth.e.l.lo and Desdemona were not concerned in it. Poor Jack has pa.s.sed from the stage in good time, that he did not live to this our age of seriousness. The pleasant old Teazle _King_, too, is gone in good time. His manner would scarce have pa.s.sed current in our day. We must love or hate--acquit or condemn--censure or pity--exert our detestable c.o.xcombry of moral judgment upon everything. Joseph Surface, to go down now, must be a downright revolting villain--no compromise--his first appearance must shock and give horror--his specious plausibilities, which the pleasurable faculties of our fathers welcomed with such hearty greetings, knowing that no harm (dramatic harm even) could come, or was meant to come, of them, must inspire a cold and killing aversion.

Charles (the real canting person of the scene--for the hypocrisy of Joseph has its ulterior legitimate ends, but his brother's professions of a good heart centre in down right self-satisfaction) must be _loved_ and Joseph _hated_. To balance one disagreeable reality with another, Sir Peter Teazle must be no longer the comic idea of a fretful old bachelor bridegroom, whose teasings (while King acted it) were evidently as much played off at you, as they were meant to concern anybody on the stage,--he must be a real person, capable in law of sustaining an injury--a person towards whom duties are to be acknowledged--the genuine crim. con. antagonist of the villainous seducer Joseph. To realize him more, his sufferings under his unfortunate match must have the downright pungency of life--must (or should) make you not mirthful but uncomfortable, just as the same predicament would move you in a neighbour or old friend.

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

No piece was, perhaps, ever so completely cast in all its parts as this _manager's comedy_. Miss Farren had succeeded to Mrs. Abington in Lady Teazle; and Smith, the original Charles, had retired when I first saw it. The rest of the characters, with very slight exceptions, remained. I remember it was then the fas.h.i.+on to cry down John Kemble, who took the part of Charles after Smith; but, I thought, very unjustly.

Smith, I fancy, was more airy, and took the eye with a certain gaiety of person. He brought with him no sombre recollections of tragedy. He had not to expiate the fault of having pleased beforehand in lofty declamation. He had no sins of Hamlet or of Richard to atone for. His failure in these parts was a pa.s.sport to success in one of so opposite a tendency. But, as far as I could judge, the weighty sense of Kemble made up for more personal incapacity than he had to answer for. His harshest tones in this part came steeped and dulcified in good-humour.

He made his defects a grace. His exact declamatory manner, as he managed it, only served to convey the points of his dialogue with more precision. It seemed to head the shafts to carry them deeper. Not one of his sparkling sentences was lost. I remember minutely how he delivered each in succession, and cannot by any effort imagine how any of them could be altered for the better. No man could deliver brilliant dialogue-the dialogue of Congreve or of Wycherley-because none understood it-half so well as John Kemble. His Valentine, in _Love for Love_, was, to my recollection, faultless. He flagged sometimes in the intervals of tragic pa.s.sion. He would slumber over the level parts of an heroic character. His Macbeth has been known to nod. But he always seemed to me to be particularly alive to pointed and witty dialogue.

The relaxing levities of tragedy have not been touched by any since him--the playful court-bred spirit in which he condescended to the players in Hamlet--the sportive relief which he threw into the darker shades of Richard--disappeared with him. He had his sluggish moods, his torpors--but they were the halting-stones and resting-place of his tragedy--politic savings, and fetches of the breath--husbandry of the lungs, where nature pointed him to be an economist--rather, I think, than errors of the judgment. They were, at worst, less painful than the eternal, tormenting, unappeasable vigilance,--the "lidless dragon eyes", of present fas.h.i.+onable tragedy.

VII.--ON WEBSTER'S _d.u.c.h.eSS OF MALFI_.

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

VIII.--ON FORD'S _BROKEN HEART_.

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

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