He seemed at first disposed to
excuse this by saying, that there are different subjects for poetry, and
that poets are not willing to be restricted in their choice.
excuse this by saying, that there are different subjects for poetry, and
that poets are not willing to be restricted in their choice.
Coleridge - Biographia Literaria copy
True!
but here comes a difference.
Fortune is blind, but the poet has
his eyes open, and is besides as complaisant as fortune is capricious.
He makes every thing turn out exactly as we would wish it. He gratifies
us by representing those as hateful or contemptible whom we hate and
wish to despise.
P. (aside. ) That is, he gratifies your envy by libelling your superiors.
D. He makes all those precise moralists, who affect to be better than
their neighbours, turn out at last abject hypocrites, traitors, and
hard-hearted villains; and your men of spirit, who take their girl and
their glass with equal freedom, prove the true men of honour, and, (that
no part of the audience may remain unsatisfied,) reform in the last
scene, and leave no doubt in the minds of the ladies, that they will
make most faithful and excellent husbands: though it does seem a pity,
that they should be obliged to get rid of qualities which had made them
so interesting! Besides, the poor become rich all at once; and in the
final matrimonial choice the opulent and high-born themselves are made
to confess; that VIRTUE IS THE ONLY TRUE NOBILITY, AND THAT A LOVELY
WOMAN IS A DOWRY OF HERSELF! !
P. Excellent! But you have forgotten those brilliant flashes of loyalty,
those patriotic praises of the King and Old England, which, especially
if conveyed in a metaphor from the ship or the shop, so often solicit
and so unfailingly receive the public plaudit! I give your prudence
credit for the omission. For the whole system of your drama is a moral
and intellectual Jacobinism of the most dangerous kind, and those
common-place rants of loyalty are no better than hypocrisy in your
playwrights, and your own sympathy with them a gross self-delusion.
For the whole secret of dramatic popularity consists with you in the
confusion and subversion of the natural order of things, their causes
and their effects; in the excitement of surprise, by representing the
qualities of liberality, refined feeling, and a nice sense of honour,
(those things rather which pass among you for such), in persons and in
classes of life where experience teaches us least to expect them; and
in rewarding with all the sympathies, that are the dues of virtue, those
criminals whom law, reason, and religion have excommunicated from our
esteem!
And now--good night! Truly! I might have written this last sheet without
having gone to Germany; but I fancied myself talking to you by your own
fireside, and can you think it a small pleasure to me to forget now and
then, that I am not there? Besides, you and my other good friends have
made up your minds to me as I am, and from whatever place I write you
will expect that part of my "Travels" will consist of excursions in my
own mind.
LETTER III
RATZEBURG.
No little fish thrown back again into the water, no fly unimprisoned
from a child's hand, could more buoyantly enjoy its element, than I this
clean and peaceful house, with this lovely view of the town, groves,
and lake of Ratzeburg, from the window at which I am writing. My spirits
certainly, and my health I fancied, were beginning to sink under the
noise, dirt, and unwholesome air of our Hamburg hotel. I left it
on Sunday, Sept. 23rd, with a letter of introduction from the poet
Klopstock, to the Amtmann of Ratzeburg. The Amtmann received me with
kindness, and introduced me to the worthy pastor, who agreed to board
and lodge me for any length of time not less than a month. The vehicle,
in which I took my place, was considerably larger than an English
stage-coach, to which it bore much the same proportion and rude
resemblance, that an elephant's ear does to the human. Its top was
composed of naked boards of different colours, and seeming to have been
parts of different wainscots. Instead of windows there were leathern
curtains with a little eye of glass in each: they perfectly answered
the purpose of keeping out the prospect and letting in the cold. I
could observe little therefore, but the inns and farmhouses at which
we stopped. They were all alike, except in size: one great room, like
a barn, with a hay-loft over it, the straw and hay dangling in tufts
through the boards which formed the ceiling of the room, and the floor
of the loft. From this room, which is paved like a street, sometimes
one, sometimes two smaller ones, are enclosed at one end. These are
commonly floored. In the large room the cattle, pigs, poultry, men,
women, and children, live in amicable community; yet there was an
appearance of cleanliness and rustic comfort. One of these houses I
measured. It was an hundred feet in length. The apartments were taken
off from one corner. Between these and the stalls there was a small
interspace, and here the breadth was forty-eight feet, but thirty-two
where the stalls were; of course, the stalls were on each side eight
feet in depth. The faces of the cows, etc. were turned towards the room;
indeed they were in it, so that they had at least the comfort of seeing
each other's faces. Stall-feeding is universal in this part of Germany,
a practice concerning which the agriculturist and the poet are likely
to entertain opposite opinions--or at least, to have very different
feelings. The woodwork of these buildings on the outside is left
unplastered, as in old houses among us, and, being painted red and
green, it cuts and tesselates the buildings very gaily. From within
three miles of Hamburg almost to Molln, which is thirty miles from it,
the country, as far as I could see it, was a dead flat, only varied by
woods. At Molln it became more beautiful. I observed a small lake nearly
surrounded with groves, and a palace in view belonging to the King of
Great Britain, and inhabited by the Inspector of the Forests. We were
nearly the same time in travelling the thirty-five miles from Hamburg to
Ratzeburg, as we had been in going from London to Yarmouth, one hundred
and twenty-six miles.
The lake of Ratzeburg runs from south to north, about nine miles in
length, and varying in breadth from three miles to half a mile. About a
mile from the southernmost point it is divided into two, of course very
unequal, parts by an island, which, being connected by a bridge and a
narrow slip of land with the one shore, and by another bridge of immense
length with the other shore, forms a complete isthmus. On this island
the town of Ratzeburg is built. The pastor's house or vicarage, together
with the Amtmann's Amtsschreiber's, and the church, stands near the
summit of a hill, which slopes down to the slip of land and the little
bridge, from which, through a superb military gate, you step into
the island-town of Ratzeburg. This again is itself a little hill, by
ascending and descending which, you arrive at the long bridge, and so to
the other shore. The water to the south of the town is called the Little
Lake, which however almost engrosses the beauties of the whole the
shores being just often enough green and bare to give the proper
effect to the magnificent groves which occupy the greater part of their
circumference. From the turnings, windings, and indentations of the
shore, the views vary almost every ten steps, and the whole has a sort
of majestic beauty, a feminine grandeur. At the north of the Great Lake,
and peeping over it, I see the seven church towers of Luebec, at the
distance of twelve or thirteen miles, yet as distinctly as if they
were not three. The only defect in the view is, that Ratzeburg is built
entirely of red bricks, and all the houses roofed with red tiles. To the
eye, therefore, it presents a clump of brick-dust red. Yet this evening,
Oct. 10th, twenty minutes past five, I saw the town perfectly beautiful,
and the whole softened down into complete keeping, if I may borrow a
term from the painters. The sky over Ratzeburg and all the east was a
pure evening blue, while over the west it was covered with light sandy
clouds. Hence a deep red light spread over the whole prospect, in
undisturbed harmony with the red town, the brown-red woods, and the
yellow-red reeds on the skirts of the lake. Two or three boats, with
single persons paddling them, floated up and down in the rich light,
which not only was itself in harmony with all, but brought all into
harmony.
I should have told you that I went back to Hamburg on Thursday (Sept.
27th) to take leave of my friend, who travels southward, and returned
hither on the Monday following. From Empfelde, a village half way from
Ratzeburg, I walked to Hamburg through deep sandy roads and a dreary
flat: the soil everywhere white, hungry, and excessively pulverised; but
the approach to the city is pleasing. Light cool country houses, which
you can look through and see the gardens behind them, with arbours and
trellis work, and thick vegetable walls, and trees in cloisters and
piazzas, each house with neat rails before it, and green seats within
the rails. Every object, whether the growth of nature or the work of
man, was neat and artificial. It pleased me far better, than if the
houses and gardens, and pleasure fields, had been in a nobler taste:
for this nobler taste would have been mere apery. The busy, anxious,
money-loving merchant of Hamburg could only have adopted, he could not
have enjoyed the simplicity of nature. The mind begins to love nature by
imitating human conveniences in nature; but this is a step in intellect,
though a low one--and were it not so, yet all around me spoke
of innocent enjoyment and sensitive comforts, and I entered with
unscrupulous sympathy into the enjoyments and comforts even of the
busy, anxious, money-loving merchants of Hamburg. In this charitable and
catholic mood I reached the vast ramparts of the city. These are huge
green cushions, one rising above the other, with trees growing in the
interspaces, pledges and symbols of a long peace. Of my return I have
nothing worth communicating, except that I took extra post, which
answers to posting in England. These north German post chaises are
uncovered wicker carts. An English dust-cart is a piece of finery, a
chef d'auvre of mechanism, compared with them and the horses! --a savage
might use their ribs instead of his fingers for a numeration table.
Wherever we stopped, the postilion fed his cattle with the brown rye
bread of which he eat himself, all breakfasting together; only the
horses had no gin to their water, and the postilion no water to his gin.
Now and henceforward for subjects of more interest to you, and to
the objects in search of which I left you: namely, the literati and
literature of Germany.
Believe me, I walked with an impression of awe on my spirits, as
W----and myself accompanied Mr. Klopstock to the house of his brother,
the poet, which stands about a quarter of a mile from the city gate.
It is one of a row of little common-place summer-houses, (for so they
looked,) with four or five rows of young meagre elm trees before the
windows, beyond which is a green, and then a dead flat intersected with
several roads. Whatever beauty, (thought I,) may be before the poet's
eyes at present, it must certainly be purely of his own creation. We
waited a few minutes in a neat little parlour, ornamented with the
figures of two of the Muses and with prints, the subjects of which were
from Klopstock's odes. The poet entered. I was much disappointed in his
countenance, and recognised in it no likeness to the bust. There was
no comprehension in the forehead, no weight over the eye-brows, no
expression of peculiarity, moral or intellectual, on the eyes, no
massiveness in the general countenance. He is, if anything, rather below
the middle size. He wore very large half-boots, which his legs filled,
so fearfully were they swollen. However, though neither W---- nor
myself could discover any indications of sublimity or enthusiasm in his
physiognomy, we were both equally impressed with his liveliness, and his
kind and ready courtesy. He talked in French with my friend, and with
difficulty spoke a few sentences to me in English. His enunciation was
not in the least affected by the entire want of his upper teeth. The
conversation began on his part by the expression of his rapture at the
surrender of the detachment of French troops under General Humbert.
Their proceedings in Ireland with regard to the committee which they
had appointed, with the rest of their organizing system, seemed to have
given the poet great entertainment. He then declared his sanguine belief
in Nelson's victory, and anticipated its confirmation with a keen and
triumphant pleasure. His words, tones, looks, implied the most vehement
Anti-Gallicanism. The subject changed to literature, and I inquired
in Latin concerning the history of German poetry and the elder German
poets. To my great astonishment he confessed, that he knew very little
on the subject. He had indeed occasionally read one or two of their
elder writers, but not so as to enable him to speak of their merits.
Professor Ebeling, he said, would probably give me every information of
this kind: the subject had not particularly excited his curiosity.
He then talked of Milton and Glover, and thought Glover's blank verse
superior to Milton's. W---- and myself expressed our surprise: and
my friend gave his definition and notion of harmonious verse, that
it consisted, (the English iambic blank verse above all,) in the apt
arrangement of pauses and cadences, and the sweep of whole paragraphs,
"with many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out,"
and not in the even flow, much less in the prominence of antithetic
vigour, of single lines, which were indeed injurious to the total
effect, except where they were introduced for some specific purpose.
Klopstock assented, and said that he meant to confine Glover's
superiority to single lines. He told us that he had read Milton, in
a prose translation, when he was fourteen [77]. I understood him thus
myself, and W---- interpreted Klopstock's French as I had already
construed it. He appeared to know very little of Milton or indeed of our
poets in general. He spoke with great indignation of the English prose
translation of his MESSIAH. All the translations had been bad, very
bad--but the English was no translation--there were pages on pages
not in the original--and half the original was not to be found in the
translation. W---- told him that I intended to translate a few of his
odes as specimens of German lyrics--he then said to me in English, "I
wish you would render into English some select passages of THE MESSIAH,
and revenge me of your countryman! ". It was the liveliest thing which he
produced in the whole conversation. He told us, that his first ode was
fifty years older than his last. I looked at him with much emotion--I
considered him as the venerable father of German poetry; as a good man;
as a Christian; seventy-four years old; with legs enormously swollen;
yet active, lively, cheerful, and kind, and communicative. My eyes felt
as if a tear were swelling into them. In the portrait of Lessing
there was a toupee periwig, which enormously injured the effect of his
physiognomy--Klopstock wore the same, powdered and frizzled. By the
bye, old men ought never to wear powder--the contrast between a large
snow-white wig and the colour of an old man's skin is disgusting, and
wrinkles in such a neighbourhood appear only channels for dirt. It is
an honour to poets and great men, that you think of them as parts of
nature; and anything of trick and fashion wounds you in them, as much as
when you see venerable yews clipped into miserable peacocks. --The author
of THE MESSIAH should have worn his own grey hair. --His powder and
periwig were to the eye what Mr. Virgil would be to the ear.
Klopstock dwelt much on the superior power which the German language
possessed of concentrating meaning. He said, he had often translated
parts of Homer and Virgil, line by line, and a German line proved always
sufficient for a Greek or Latin one. In English you cannot do this. I
answered, that in English we could commonly render one Greek heroic line
in a line and a half of our common heroic metre, and I conjectured that
this line and a half would be found to contain no more syllables than
one German or Greek hexameter. He did not understand me [78]: and I, who
wished to hear his opinions, not to correct them, was glad that he did
not.
We now took our leave. At the beginning of the French Revolution
Klopstock wrote odes of congratulation. He received some honorary
presents from the French Republic, (a golden crown I believe), and,
like our Priestley, was invited to a seat in the legislature, which he
declined. But when French liberty metamorphosed herself into a fury, he
sent back these presents with a palinodia, declaring his abhorrence of
their proceedings: and since then he has been perhaps more than enough
an Anti-Gallican. I mean, that in his just contempt and detestation
of the crimes and follies of the Revolutionists, he suffers himself to
forget that the revolution itself is a process of the Divine Providence;
and that as the folly of men is the wisdom of God, so are their
iniquities instruments of his goodness. From Klopstock's house we walked
to the ramparts, discoursing together on the poet and his conversation,
till our attention was diverted to the beauty and singularity of the
sunset and its effects on the objects around us. There were woods in the
distance. A rich sandy light, (nay, of a much deeper colour than sandy,)
lay over these woods that blackened in the blaze. Over that part of
the woods which lay immediately under the intenser light, a brassy mist
floated. The trees on the ramparts, and the people moving to and fro
between them, were cut or divided into equal segments of deep shade and
brassy light. Had the trees, and the bodies of the men and women, been
divided into equal segments by a rule or pair of compasses, the portions
could not have been more regular. All else was obscure. It was a
fairy scene! --and to increase its romantic character, among the moving
objects, thus divided into alternate shade and brightness, was a
beautiful child, dressed with the elegant simplicity of an English
child, riding on a stately goat, the saddle, bridle, and other
accoutrements of which were in a high degree costly and splendid. Before
I quit the subject of Hamburg, let me say, that I remained a day or two
longer than I otherwise should have done, in order to be present at the
feast of St. Michael, the patron saint of Hamburg, expecting to see
the civic pomp of this commercial Republic. I was however disappointed.
There were no processions, two or three sermons were preached to two
or three old women in two or three churches, and St. Michael and
his patronage wished elsewhere by the higher classes, all places of
entertainment, theatre, etc. being shut up on this day. In Hamburg,
there seems to be no religion at all; in Luebec it is confined to the
women. The men seemed determined to be divorced from their wives in the
other world, if they cannot in this. You will not easily conceive a more
singular sight, than is presented by the vast aisle of the principal
church at Luebec, seen from the organ loft: for being filled with female
servants and persons in the same class of life, and all their caps
having gold and silver cauls, it appears like a rich pavement of gold
and silver.
I will conclude this letter with the mere transcription of notes, which
my friend W---- made of his conversations with Klopstock, during the
interviews that took place after my departure. On these I shall make but
one remark at present, and that will appear a presumptuous one, namely,
that Klopstock's remarks on the venerable sage of Koenigsburg are to my
own knowledge injurious and mistaken; and so far is it from being true,
that his system is now given up, that throughout the Universities of
Germany there is not a single professor who is not either a Kantean or
a disciple of Fichte, whose system is built on the Kantean, and
presupposes its truth; or lastly who, though an antagonist of Kant, as
to his theoretical work, has not embraced wholly or in part his moral
system, and adopted part of his nomenclature. "Klopstock having wished
to see the CALVARY of Cumberland, and asked what was thought of it in
England, I went to Remnant's (the English bookseller) where I procured
the Analytical Review, in which is contained the review of Cumberland's
CALVARY. I remembered to have read there some specimens of a blank verse
translation of THE MESSIAH. I had mentioned this to Klopstock, and he
had a great desire to see them. I walked over to his house and put the
book into his hands. On adverting to his own poem, he told me he began
THE MESSIAH when he was seventeen; he devoted three entire years to the
plan without composing a single line. He was greatly at a loss in
what manner to execute his work. There were no successful specimens of
versification in the German language before this time. The first three
cantos he wrote in a species of measured or numerous prose. This, though
done with much labour and some success, was far from satisfying him. He
had composed hexameters both Latin and Greek as a school exercise, and
there had been also in the German language attempts in that style of
versification. These were only of very moderate merit. --One day he was
struck with the idea of what could be done in this way--he kept his
room a whole day, even went without his dinner, and found that in the
evening he had written twenty-three hexameters, versifying a part of
what he had before written in prose. From that time, pleased with his
efforts, he composed no more in prose. Today he informed me that he
had finished his plan before he read Milton. He was enchanted to see an
author who before him had trod the same path. This is a contradiction
of what he said before. He did not wish to speak of his poem to any one
till it was finished: but some of his friends who had seen what he had
finished, tormented him till he had consented to publish a few books in
a journal. He was then, I believe, very young, about twenty-five.
The rest was printed at different periods, four books at a time. The
reception given to the first specimens was highly flattering. He was
nearly thirty years in finishing the whole poem, but of these thirty
years not more than two were employed in the composition. He only
composed in favourable moments; besides he had other occupations. He
values himself upon the plan of his odes, and accuses the modern lyrical
writers of gross deficiency in this respect. I laid the same accusation
against Horace: he would not hear of it--but waived the discussion.
He called Rousseau's ODE TO FORTUNE a moral dissertation in stanzas.
I spoke of Dryden's ST. CECILIA; but he did not seem familiar with our
writers. He wished to know the distinctions between our dramatic and
epic blank verse. He recommended me to read his HERMANN before I read
either THE MESSIAH or the odes. He flattered himself that some time or
other his dramatic poems would be known in England. He had not heard of
Cowper. He thought that Voss in his translation of THE ILIAD had done
violence to the idiom of the Germans, and had sacrificed it to the
Greeks, not remembering sufficiently that each language has its
particular spirit and genius. He said Lessing was the first of their
dramatic writers. I complained of NATHAN as tedious. He said there was
not enough of action in it; but that Lessing was the most chaste of
their writers. He spoke favourably of Goethe; but said that his SORROWS
OF WERTER was his best work, better than any of his dramas: he preferred
the first written to the rest of Goethe's dramas. Schiller's ROBBERS he
found so extravagant, that he could not read it. I spoke of the scene of
the setting sun. He did not know it. He said Schiller could not live.
He thought DON CARLOS the best of his dramas; but said that the plot
was inextricable. --It was evident he knew little of Schiller's works:
indeed, he said, he could not read them. Buerger, he said, was a true
poet, and would live; that Schiller, on the contrary, must soon be
forgotten; that he gave himself up to the imitation of Shakespeare, who
often was extravagant, but that Schiller was ten thousand times more so.
He spoke very slightingly of Kotzebue, as an immoral author in the first
place, and next, as deficient in power. At Vienna, said he, they are
transported with him; but we do not reckon the people of Vienna either
the wisest or the wittiest people of Germany. He said Wieland was a
charming author, and a sovereign master of his own language: that in
this respect Goethe could not be compared to him, nor indeed could any
body else. He said that his fault was to be fertile to exuberance. I
told him the OBERON had just been translated into English. He asked me
if I was not delighted with the poem. I answered, that I thought the
story began to flag about the seventh or eighth book; and observed, that
it was unworthy of a man of genius to make the interest of a long poem
turn entirely upon animal gratification.
He seemed at first disposed to
excuse this by saying, that there are different subjects for poetry, and
that poets are not willing to be restricted in their choice. I answered,
that I thought the passion of love as well suited to the purposes of
poetry as any other passion; but that it was a cheap way of pleasing
to fix the attention of the reader through a long poem on the mere
appetite. Well! but, said he, you see, that such poems please every
body. I answered, that it was the province of a great poet to raise
people up to his own level, not to descend to theirs. He agreed, and
confessed, that on no account whatsoever would he have written a work
like the OBERON. He spoke in raptures of Wieland's style, and pointed
out the passage where Retzia is delivered of her child, as exquisitely
beautiful. I said that I did not perceive any very striking passages;
but that I made allowance for the imperfections of a translation. Of the
thefts of Wieland, he said, they were so exquisitely managed, that the
greatest writers might be proud to steal as he did. He considered the
books and fables of old romance writers in the light of the ancient
mythology, as a sort of common property, from which a man was free to
take whatever he could make a good use of. An Englishman had presented
him with the odes of Collins, which he had read with pleasure. He
knew little or nothing of Gray, except his ELEGY written in a country
CHURCH-YARD. He complained of the fool in LEAR. I observed that he
seemed to give a terrible wildness to the distress; but still he
complained. He asked whether it was not allowed, that Pope had written
rhymed poetry with more skill than any of our writers--I said I
preferred Dryden, because his couplets had greater variety in their
movement. He thought my reason a good one; but asked whether the rhyme
of Pope were not more exact. This question I understood as applying to
the final terminations, and observed to him that I believed it was the
case; but that I thought it was easy to excuse some inaccuracy in the
final sounds, if the general sweep of the verse was superior. I told him
that we were not so exact with regard to the final endings of the lines
as the French. He did not seem to know that we made no distinction
between masculine and feminine (i. e. single or double,) rhymes: at
least he put inquiries to me on this subject. He seemed to think that
no language could be so far formed as that it might not be enriched by
idioms borrowed from another tongue. I said this was a very dangerous
practice; and added, that I thought Milton had often injured both his
prose and verse by taking this liberty too frequently. I recommended to
him the prose works of Dryden as models of pure and native English. I
was treading upon tender ground, as I have reason to suppose that he has
himself liberally indulged in the practice. "
The same day I dined at Mr. Klopstock's, where I had the pleasure of a
third interview with the poet. We talked principally about indifferent
things. I asked him what he thought of Kant. He said that his reputation
was much on the decline in Germany. That for his own part he was not
surprised to find it so, as the works of Kant were to him utterly
incomprehensible--that he had often been pestered by the Kanteans;
but was rarely in the practice of arguing with them. His custom was to
produce the book, open it and point to a passage, and beg they would
explain it. This they ordinarily attempted to do by substituting their
own ideas. I do not want, I say, an explanation of your own ideas, but
of the passage which is before us. In this way I generally bring the
dispute to an immediate conclusion. He spoke of Wolfe as the first
Metaphysician they had in Germany. Wolfe had followers; but they could
hardly be called a sect, and luckily till the appearance of Kant,
about fifteen years ago, Germany had not been pestered by any sect of
philosophers whatsoever; but that each man had separately pursued his
inquiries uncontrolled by the dogmas of a master. Kant had appeared
ambitious to be the founder of a sect; that he had succeeded: but that
the Germans were now coming to their senses again. That Nicolai and
Engel had in different ways contributed to disenchant the nation; but
above all the incomprehensibility of the philosopher and his philosophy.
He seemed pleased to hear, that as yet Kant's doctrines had not met with
many admirers in England--did not doubt but that we had too much wisdom
to be duped by a writer who set at defiance the common sense and common
understandings of men. We talked of tragedy. He seemed to rate highly
the power of exciting tears--I said that nothing was more easy than to
deluge an audience, that it was done every day by the meanest writers.
I must remind you, my friend, first, that these notes are not intended
as specimens of Klopstock's intellectual power, or even "colloquial
prowess," to judge of which by an accidental conversation, and this with
strangers, and those too foreigners, would be not only unreasonable, but
calumnious. Secondly, I attribute little other interest to the remarks
than what is derived from the celebrity of the person who made them.
Lastly, if you ask me, whether I have read THE MESSIAH, and what I
think of it? I answer--as yet the first four books only: and as to my
opinion--(the reasons of which hereafter)--you may guess it from what
I could not help muttering to myself, when the good pastor this morning
told me, that Klopstock was the German Milton--"a very German Milton
indeed! ! ! "
Heaven preserve you, and S. T. COLERIDGE.
CHAPTER XXIII
Quid quod praefatione praemunierim libellum, qua conor omnem offendiculi
ansam praecidere? [79] Neque quicquam addubito, quin ea candidis omnibus
faciat satis. Quid autem facias istis, qui vel ob ingenii pertinaciam
sibi satisfieri nolint, vel stupidiores sint, quam ut satisfactionem
intelligant? Nam quemadmodum Simonides dixit, Thessalos hebetiores esse,
quam ut possint a se decipi, ita quosdam videas stupidiores, quam ut
placari queant. Adhaec, non mirum est invenire quod calumnietur,
qui nihil aliud quaerit, nisi quod calumnietur. ERASMUS ad Dorpium,
Theologum.
In the rifacimento of THE FRIEND, I have inserted extracts from the
CONCIONES AD POPULUM, printed, though scarcely published, in the year
1795, in the very heat and height of my anti-ministerial enthusiasm:
these in proof that my principles of politics have sustained no
change. --In the present chapter, I have annexed to my Letters
from Germany, with particular reference to that, which contains a
disquisition on the modern drama, a critique on the Tragedy of BERTRAM,
written within the last twelve months: in proof, that I have been as
falsely charged with any fickleness in my principles of taste. --The
letter was written to a friend: and the apparent abruptness with which
it begins, is owing to the omission of the introductory sentences.
You remember, my dear Sir, that Mr. Whitbread, shortly before his death,
proposed to the assembled subscribers of Drury Lane Theatre, that the
concern should be farmed to some responsible individual under certain
conditions and limitations: and that his proposal was rejected,
not without indignation, as subversive of the main object, for the
attainment of which the enlightened and patriotic assemblage of
philodramatists had been induced to risk their subscriptions. Now this
object was avowed to be no less than the redemption of the British stage
not only from horses, dogs, elephants, and the like zoological rarities,
but also from the more pernicious barbarisms and Kotzebuisms in morals
and taste. Drury Lane was to be restored to its former classical renown;
Shakespeare, Jonson, and Otway, with the expurgated muses of Vanbrugh,
Congreve, and Wycherley, were to be reinaugurated in their rightful
dominion over British audiences; and the Herculean process was to
commence, by exterminating the speaking monsters imported from the banks
of the Danube, compared with which their mute relations, the emigrants
from Exeter 'Change, and Polito (late Pidcock's) show-carts, were tame
and inoffensive. Could an heroic project, at once so refined and so
arduous, be consistently entrusted to, could its success be rationally
expected from, a mercenary manager, at whose critical quarantine the
lucri bonus odor would conciliate a bill of health to the plague in
person? No! As the work proposed, such must be the work-masters. Rank,
fortune, liberal education, and (their natural accompaniments, or
consequences) critical discernment, delicate tact, disinterestedness,
unsuspected morals, notorious patriotism, and tried Maecenasship, these
were the recommendations that influenced the votes of the proprietary
subscribers of Drury Lane Theatre, these the motives that occasioned the
election of its Supreme Committee of Management. This circumstance alone
would have excited a strong interest in the public mind, respecting the
first production of the Tragic Muse which had been announced under such
auspices, and had passed the ordeal of such judgments: and the tragedy,
on which you have requested my judgment, was the work on which the great
expectations, justified by so many causes, were doomed at length to
settle.
But before I enter on the examination of BERTRAM, or THE CASTLE OF ST.
ALDOBRAND, I shall interpose a few words, on the phrase German Drama,
which I hold to be altogether a misnomer. At the time of Lessing, the
German stage, such as it was, appears to have been a flat and servile
copy of the French. It was Lessing who first introduced the name and the
works of Shakespeare to the admiration of the Germans; and I should not
perhaps go too far, if I add, that it was Lessing who first proved to
all thinking men, even to Shakespeare's own countrymen, the true nature
of his apparent irregularities. These, he demonstrated, were deviations
only from the accidents of the Greek tragedy; and from such accidents as
hung a heavy weight on the wings of the Greek 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 truth of
nature, the Plays of Shakespeare were incomparably more coincident
with the principles of Aristotle, than the productions of Corneille
and Racine, notwithstanding the boasted regularity of the latter. Under
these convictions were Lessing's own dramatic works composed. Their
deficiency is in depth and imagination: their excellence is in the
construction of the plot; the good sense of the sentiments; the sobriety
of the morals; and the high polish of the diction and dialogue. In
short, his dramas are the very antipodes of all those which it has been
the fashion of late years at once to abuse and enjoy, under the name of
the German drama. Of this latter, Schiller's ROBBERS was the earliest
specimen; the first fruits of his youth, (I had almost said of his
boyhood), and as such, the pledge, and promise of no ordinary genius.
Only as such, did the maturer judgment of the author tolerate the Play.
During his whole life he expressed himself concerning this production
with more than needful asperity, as a monster not less offensive to good
taste, than to sound morals; and, in his latter years, his indignation
at the unwonted popularity of the ROBBERS seduced him into the contrary
extremes, viz. a studied feebleness of interest, (as far as the interest
was to be derived from incidents and the excitement of curiosity);
a diction elaborately metrical; the affectation of rhymes; and the
pedantry of the chorus.
But to understand the true character of the ROBBERS, and of the
countless imitations which were its spawn, I must inform you, or at
least call to your recollection, that, about that time, and for some
years before it, three of the most popular books in the German language
were, the translations Of YOUNG'S NIGHT THOUGHTS, HERVEY'S MEDITATIONS,
and RICHARDSON'S CLARISSA HARLOW. Now we have only to combine the
bloated style and peculiar rhythm of Hervey, which is poetic only on
account of its utter unfitness for prose, and might as appropriately
be called prosaic, from its utter unfitness for poetry; we have only,
I repeat, to combine these Herveyisms with the strained thoughts, the
figurative metaphysics and solemn epigrams of Young on the one hand; and
with the loaded sensibility, the minute detail, the morbid consciousness
of every thought and feeling in the whole flux and reflux of the mind,
in short the self-involution and dreamlike continuity of Richardson on
the other hand; and then to add the horrific incidents, and mysterious
villains, (geniuses of supernatural intellect, if you will take the
authors' words for it, but on a level with the meanest ruffians of
the condemned cells, if we are to judge by their actions and
contrivances)--to add the ruined castles, the dungeons, the trap-doors,
the skeletons, the flesh-and-blood ghosts, and the perpetual moonshine
of a modern author, (themselves the literary brood of the CASTLE OF
OTRANTO, the translations of which, with the imitations and improvements
aforesaid, were about that time beginning to make as much noise in
Germany as their originals were making in England),--and as the compound
of these ingredients duly mixed, you will recognize the so-called German
drama. The olla podrida thus cooked up, was denounced, by the best
critics in Germany, as the mere cramps of weakness, and orgasms of a
sickly imagination on the part of the author, and the lowest provocation
of torpid feeling on that of the readers. The old blunder, however,
concerning the irregularity and wildness of Shakespeare, in which the
German did but echo the French, who again were but the echoes of our own
critics, was still in vogue, and Shakespeare was quoted as authority for
the most anti-Shakespearean drama. We have indeed two poets who wrote as
one, near the age of Shakespeare, to whom, (as the worst characteristic
of their writings), the Coryphaeus of the present drama may challenge
the honour of being a poor relation, or impoverished descendant. For
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.
The so-called German drama, therefore, is English in its origin, English
in its materials, and English by re-adoption; and till we can prove that
Kotzebue, or any of the whole breed of Kotzebues, whether dramatists or
romantic writers, or writers of romantic dramas, were ever admitted
to any other shelf in the libraries of well-educated Germans than were
occupied by their originals, and apes' apes in their mother country,
we should submit to carry our own brat on our own shoulders; or rather
consider it as a lack-grace returned from transportation with such
improvements only in growth and manners as young transported convicts
usually come home with.
I know nothing that contributes more to a clearer insight into the true
nature of any literary phaenomenon, than the comparison of it with some
elder production, the likeness of which is striking, yet only apparent,
while the difference is real. In the present case this opportunity is
furnished us, by the old Spanish play, entitled Atheista Fulminato,
formerly, and perhaps still, acted in the churches and monasteries of
Spain, and which, under various names (Don Juan, the Libertine,
etc. ) has had its day of favour in every country throughout Europe. A
popularity so extensive, and of a work so grotesque and extravagant,
claims and merits philosophical attention and investigation. The first
point to be noticed is, that the play is throughout imaginative.
Nothing of it belongs to the real world, but the names of the places and
persons. The comic parts, equally with the tragic; the living, equally
with the defunct characters, are creatures of the brain; as little
amenable to the rules of ordinary probability, as the Satan Of PARADISE
LOST, or the Caliban of THE TEMPEST, and therefore to be understood
and judged of as impersonated abstractions. Rank, fortune, wit, talent,
acquired knowledge, and liberal accomplishments, with beauty of person,
vigorous health, and constitutional hardihood,--all these advantages,
elevated by the habits and sympathies of noble birth and national
character, are supposed to have combined in Don Juan, so as to give him
the means of carrying into all its practical consequences the doctrine
of a godless nature, as the sole ground and efficient cause not only of
all things, events, and appearances, but likewise of all our thoughts,
sensations, impulses and actions. Obedience to nature is the only
virtue: the gratification of the passions and appetites her only
dictate: each individual's self-will the sole organ through which nature
utters her commands, and
"Self-contradiction is the only wrong!
For, by the laws of spirit, in the right
Is every individual character
That acts in strict consistence with itself. "
That speculative opinions, however impious and daring they may be, are
not always followed by correspondent conduct, is most true, as well as
that they can scarcely in any instance be systematically realized, on
account of their unsuitableness to human nature and to the institutions
of society. It can be hell, only where it is all hell: and a separate
world of devils is necessary for the existence of any one complete
devil. But on the other hand it is no less clear, nor, with the
biography of Carrier and his fellow atheists before us, can it be denied
without wilful blindness, that the (so called) system of nature (that
is, materialism, with the utter rejection of moral responsibility, of
a present Providence, and of both present and future retribution)
may influence the characters and actions of individuals, and even of
communities, to a degree that almost does away the distinction between
men and devils, and will make the page of the future historian resemble
the narration of a madman's dreams. It is not the wickedness of Don
Juan, therefore, which constitutes the character an abstraction, and
removes it from the rules of probability; but the rapid succession of
the correspondent acts and incidents, his intellectual superiority,
and the splendid accumulation of his gifts and desirable qualities, as
co-existent with entire wickedness in one and the same person. But this
likewise is the very circumstance which gives to this strange play its
charm and universal interest. Don Juan is, from beginning to end, an
intelligible character: as much so as the Satan of Milton. The poet asks
only of the reader, what, as a poet, he is privileged to ask: namely,
that sort of negative faith in the existence of such a being, which we
willingly give to productions professedly ideal, and a disposition
to the same state of feeling, as that with which we contemplate the
idealized figures of the Apollo Belvidere, and the Farnese Hercules.
What the Hercules is to the eye in corporeal strength, Don Juan is
to the mind in strength of character. The ideal consists in the happy
balance of the generic with the individual. The former makes the
character representative and symbolical, therefore instructive; because,
mutatis mutandis, it is applicable to whole classes of men. The latter
gives it living interest; for nothing lives or is real, but as definite
and individual. To understand this completely, the reader need only
recollect the specific state of his feelings, when in looking at a
picture of the historic (more properly of the poetic or heroic) class,
he objects to a particular figure as being too much of a portrait;
and this interruption of his complacency he feels without the least
reference to, or the least acquaintance with, any person in real life
whom he might recognise in this figure. It is enough that such a figure
is not ideal: and therefore not ideal, because one of the two factors
or elements of the ideal is in excess. A similar and more powerful
objection he would feel towards a set of figures which were mere
abstractions, like those of Cipriani, and what have been called Greek
forms and faces, that is, outlines drawn according to a recipe. These
again are not ideal; because in these the other element is in excess.
"Forma formans per formam formatam translucens," [80] is the definition
and perfection of ideal art.
This excellence is so happily achieved in the Don Juan, that it is
capable of interesting without poetry, nay, even without words, as in
our pantomime of that name. We see clearly how the character is formed;
and the very extravagance of the incidents, and the super-human
entireness of Don Juan's agency, prevents the wickedness from shocking
our minds to any painful degree. We do not believe it enough for this
effect; no, not even with that kind of temporary and negative belief or
acquiescence which I have described above. Meantime the qualities of his
character are too desirable, too flattering to our pride and our wishes,
not to make up on this side as much additional faith as was lost on
the other. There is no danger (thinks the spectator or reader) of my
becoming such a monster of iniquity as Don Juan! I never shall be an
atheist! I shall never disallow all distinction between right and wrong!
I have not the least inclination to be so outrageous a drawcansir in my
love affairs! But to possess such a power of captivating and enchanting
the affections of the other sex! --to be capable of inspiring in a
charming and even a virtuous woman, a love so deep, and so entirely
personal to me! --that even my worst vices, (if I were vicious), even
my cruelty and perfidy, (if I were cruel and perfidious), could not
eradicate the passion! --to be so loved for my own self, that even with a
distinct knowledge of my character, she yet died to save me! --this, sir,
takes hold of two sides of our nature, the better and the worse. For the
heroic disinterestedness, to which love can transport a woman, can
not be contemplated without an honourable emotion of reverence towards
womanhood: and, on the other hand, it is among the miseries, and abides
in the dark ground-work of our nature, to crave an outward confirmation
of that something within us, which is our very self, that something,
not made up of our qualities and relations, but itself the supporter and
substantial basis of all these. Love me, and not my qualities, may be
a vicious and an insane wish, but it is not a wish wholly without a
meaning.
Without power, virtue would be insufficient and incapable of revealing
its being. It would resemble the magic transformation of Tasso's heroine
into a tree, in which she could only groan and bleed. Hence power is
necessarily an object of our desire and of our admiration. But of all
power, that of the mind is, on every account, the grand desideratum of
human ambition. We shall be as Gods in knowledge, was and must have been
the first temptation: and the coexistence of great intellectual lordship
with guilt has never been adequately represented without exciting
the strongest interest, and for this reason, that in this bad and
heterogeneous co-ordination we can contemplate the intellect of man more
exclusively as a separate self-subsistence, than in its proper state
of subordination to his own conscience, or to the will of an infinitely
superior being.
This is the sacred charm of Shakespeare's male characters in general.
They are all cast in the mould of Shakespeare's own gigantic intellect;
and this is the open attraction of his Richard, Iago, Edmund, and others
in particular. But again; of all intellectual power, that of superiority
to the fear of the invisible world is the most dazzling. Its influence
is abundantly proved by the one circumstance, that it can bribe us into
a voluntary submission of our better knowledge, into suspension of all
our judgment derived from constant experience, and enable us to peruse
with the liveliest interest the wildest tales of ghosts, wizards,
genii, and secret talismans. On this propensity, so deeply rooted in our
nature, a specific dramatic probability may be raised by a true poet, if
the whole of his work be in harmony: a dramatic probability, sufficient
for dramatic pleasure, even when the component characters and incidents
border on impossibility. The poet does not require us to be awake and
believe; he solicits us only to yield ourselves to a dream; and this
too with our eyes open, and with our judgment perdue behind the curtain,
ready to awaken us at the first motion of our will: and meantime,
only, not to disbelieve. And in such a state of mind, who but must be
impressed with the cool intrepidity of Don john on the appearance of his
father's ghost:
"GHOST. --Monster! behold these wounds!
"D. JOHN. --I do! They were well meant and well performed, I see.
"GHOST. ------Repent, repent of all thy villanies.
My clamorous blood to heaven for vengeance cries,
Heaven will pour out his judgments on you all.
Hell gapes for you, for you each fiend doth call,
And hourly waits your unrepenting fall.
You with eternal horrors they'll torment,
Except of all your crimes you suddenly repent. (Ghost sinks. )
"D. JOHN. --Farewell, thou art a foolish ghost. Repent, quoth he!
what could this mean? Our senses are all in a mist sure.
"D. ANTONIO. --(one of D. Juan's reprobate companions. ) They are not!
'Twas a ghost.
"D. LOPEZ. --(another reprobate. ) I ne'er believed those foolish tales
before.
"D. JOHN. --Come! 'Tis no matter. Let it be what it will, it must be
natural.
"D. ANT. --And nature is unalterable in us too.
"D. JOHN. --'Tis true! The nature of a ghost can not change our's. "
Who also can deny a portion of sublimity to the tremendous consistency
with which he stands out the last fearful trial, like a second
Prometheus?
"Chorus of Devils.
"STATUE-GHOST. --Will you not relent and feel remorse?
"D. JOHN. --Could'st thou bestow another heart on me I might. But
with this heart I have, I can not.
"D. LOPEZ. --These things are prodigious.
"D. ANTON. --I have a sort of grudging to relent, but something holds
me back.
"D. LOP. --If we could, 'tis now too late. I will not.
"D.
his eyes open, and is besides as complaisant as fortune is capricious.
He makes every thing turn out exactly as we would wish it. He gratifies
us by representing those as hateful or contemptible whom we hate and
wish to despise.
P. (aside. ) That is, he gratifies your envy by libelling your superiors.
D. He makes all those precise moralists, who affect to be better than
their neighbours, turn out at last abject hypocrites, traitors, and
hard-hearted villains; and your men of spirit, who take their girl and
their glass with equal freedom, prove the true men of honour, and, (that
no part of the audience may remain unsatisfied,) reform in the last
scene, and leave no doubt in the minds of the ladies, that they will
make most faithful and excellent husbands: though it does seem a pity,
that they should be obliged to get rid of qualities which had made them
so interesting! Besides, the poor become rich all at once; and in the
final matrimonial choice the opulent and high-born themselves are made
to confess; that VIRTUE IS THE ONLY TRUE NOBILITY, AND THAT A LOVELY
WOMAN IS A DOWRY OF HERSELF! !
P. Excellent! But you have forgotten those brilliant flashes of loyalty,
those patriotic praises of the King and Old England, which, especially
if conveyed in a metaphor from the ship or the shop, so often solicit
and so unfailingly receive the public plaudit! I give your prudence
credit for the omission. For the whole system of your drama is a moral
and intellectual Jacobinism of the most dangerous kind, and those
common-place rants of loyalty are no better than hypocrisy in your
playwrights, and your own sympathy with them a gross self-delusion.
For the whole secret of dramatic popularity consists with you in the
confusion and subversion of the natural order of things, their causes
and their effects; in the excitement of surprise, by representing the
qualities of liberality, refined feeling, and a nice sense of honour,
(those things rather which pass among you for such), in persons and in
classes of life where experience teaches us least to expect them; and
in rewarding with all the sympathies, that are the dues of virtue, those
criminals whom law, reason, and religion have excommunicated from our
esteem!
And now--good night! Truly! I might have written this last sheet without
having gone to Germany; but I fancied myself talking to you by your own
fireside, and can you think it a small pleasure to me to forget now and
then, that I am not there? Besides, you and my other good friends have
made up your minds to me as I am, and from whatever place I write you
will expect that part of my "Travels" will consist of excursions in my
own mind.
LETTER III
RATZEBURG.
No little fish thrown back again into the water, no fly unimprisoned
from a child's hand, could more buoyantly enjoy its element, than I this
clean and peaceful house, with this lovely view of the town, groves,
and lake of Ratzeburg, from the window at which I am writing. My spirits
certainly, and my health I fancied, were beginning to sink under the
noise, dirt, and unwholesome air of our Hamburg hotel. I left it
on Sunday, Sept. 23rd, with a letter of introduction from the poet
Klopstock, to the Amtmann of Ratzeburg. The Amtmann received me with
kindness, and introduced me to the worthy pastor, who agreed to board
and lodge me for any length of time not less than a month. The vehicle,
in which I took my place, was considerably larger than an English
stage-coach, to which it bore much the same proportion and rude
resemblance, that an elephant's ear does to the human. Its top was
composed of naked boards of different colours, and seeming to have been
parts of different wainscots. Instead of windows there were leathern
curtains with a little eye of glass in each: they perfectly answered
the purpose of keeping out the prospect and letting in the cold. I
could observe little therefore, but the inns and farmhouses at which
we stopped. They were all alike, except in size: one great room, like
a barn, with a hay-loft over it, the straw and hay dangling in tufts
through the boards which formed the ceiling of the room, and the floor
of the loft. From this room, which is paved like a street, sometimes
one, sometimes two smaller ones, are enclosed at one end. These are
commonly floored. In the large room the cattle, pigs, poultry, men,
women, and children, live in amicable community; yet there was an
appearance of cleanliness and rustic comfort. One of these houses I
measured. It was an hundred feet in length. The apartments were taken
off from one corner. Between these and the stalls there was a small
interspace, and here the breadth was forty-eight feet, but thirty-two
where the stalls were; of course, the stalls were on each side eight
feet in depth. The faces of the cows, etc. were turned towards the room;
indeed they were in it, so that they had at least the comfort of seeing
each other's faces. Stall-feeding is universal in this part of Germany,
a practice concerning which the agriculturist and the poet are likely
to entertain opposite opinions--or at least, to have very different
feelings. The woodwork of these buildings on the outside is left
unplastered, as in old houses among us, and, being painted red and
green, it cuts and tesselates the buildings very gaily. From within
three miles of Hamburg almost to Molln, which is thirty miles from it,
the country, as far as I could see it, was a dead flat, only varied by
woods. At Molln it became more beautiful. I observed a small lake nearly
surrounded with groves, and a palace in view belonging to the King of
Great Britain, and inhabited by the Inspector of the Forests. We were
nearly the same time in travelling the thirty-five miles from Hamburg to
Ratzeburg, as we had been in going from London to Yarmouth, one hundred
and twenty-six miles.
The lake of Ratzeburg runs from south to north, about nine miles in
length, and varying in breadth from three miles to half a mile. About a
mile from the southernmost point it is divided into two, of course very
unequal, parts by an island, which, being connected by a bridge and a
narrow slip of land with the one shore, and by another bridge of immense
length with the other shore, forms a complete isthmus. On this island
the town of Ratzeburg is built. The pastor's house or vicarage, together
with the Amtmann's Amtsschreiber's, and the church, stands near the
summit of a hill, which slopes down to the slip of land and the little
bridge, from which, through a superb military gate, you step into
the island-town of Ratzeburg. This again is itself a little hill, by
ascending and descending which, you arrive at the long bridge, and so to
the other shore. The water to the south of the town is called the Little
Lake, which however almost engrosses the beauties of the whole the
shores being just often enough green and bare to give the proper
effect to the magnificent groves which occupy the greater part of their
circumference. From the turnings, windings, and indentations of the
shore, the views vary almost every ten steps, and the whole has a sort
of majestic beauty, a feminine grandeur. At the north of the Great Lake,
and peeping over it, I see the seven church towers of Luebec, at the
distance of twelve or thirteen miles, yet as distinctly as if they
were not three. The only defect in the view is, that Ratzeburg is built
entirely of red bricks, and all the houses roofed with red tiles. To the
eye, therefore, it presents a clump of brick-dust red. Yet this evening,
Oct. 10th, twenty minutes past five, I saw the town perfectly beautiful,
and the whole softened down into complete keeping, if I may borrow a
term from the painters. The sky over Ratzeburg and all the east was a
pure evening blue, while over the west it was covered with light sandy
clouds. Hence a deep red light spread over the whole prospect, in
undisturbed harmony with the red town, the brown-red woods, and the
yellow-red reeds on the skirts of the lake. Two or three boats, with
single persons paddling them, floated up and down in the rich light,
which not only was itself in harmony with all, but brought all into
harmony.
I should have told you that I went back to Hamburg on Thursday (Sept.
27th) to take leave of my friend, who travels southward, and returned
hither on the Monday following. From Empfelde, a village half way from
Ratzeburg, I walked to Hamburg through deep sandy roads and a dreary
flat: the soil everywhere white, hungry, and excessively pulverised; but
the approach to the city is pleasing. Light cool country houses, which
you can look through and see the gardens behind them, with arbours and
trellis work, and thick vegetable walls, and trees in cloisters and
piazzas, each house with neat rails before it, and green seats within
the rails. Every object, whether the growth of nature or the work of
man, was neat and artificial. It pleased me far better, than if the
houses and gardens, and pleasure fields, had been in a nobler taste:
for this nobler taste would have been mere apery. The busy, anxious,
money-loving merchant of Hamburg could only have adopted, he could not
have enjoyed the simplicity of nature. The mind begins to love nature by
imitating human conveniences in nature; but this is a step in intellect,
though a low one--and were it not so, yet all around me spoke
of innocent enjoyment and sensitive comforts, and I entered with
unscrupulous sympathy into the enjoyments and comforts even of the
busy, anxious, money-loving merchants of Hamburg. In this charitable and
catholic mood I reached the vast ramparts of the city. These are huge
green cushions, one rising above the other, with trees growing in the
interspaces, pledges and symbols of a long peace. Of my return I have
nothing worth communicating, except that I took extra post, which
answers to posting in England. These north German post chaises are
uncovered wicker carts. An English dust-cart is a piece of finery, a
chef d'auvre of mechanism, compared with them and the horses! --a savage
might use their ribs instead of his fingers for a numeration table.
Wherever we stopped, the postilion fed his cattle with the brown rye
bread of which he eat himself, all breakfasting together; only the
horses had no gin to their water, and the postilion no water to his gin.
Now and henceforward for subjects of more interest to you, and to
the objects in search of which I left you: namely, the literati and
literature of Germany.
Believe me, I walked with an impression of awe on my spirits, as
W----and myself accompanied Mr. Klopstock to the house of his brother,
the poet, which stands about a quarter of a mile from the city gate.
It is one of a row of little common-place summer-houses, (for so they
looked,) with four or five rows of young meagre elm trees before the
windows, beyond which is a green, and then a dead flat intersected with
several roads. Whatever beauty, (thought I,) may be before the poet's
eyes at present, it must certainly be purely of his own creation. We
waited a few minutes in a neat little parlour, ornamented with the
figures of two of the Muses and with prints, the subjects of which were
from Klopstock's odes. The poet entered. I was much disappointed in his
countenance, and recognised in it no likeness to the bust. There was
no comprehension in the forehead, no weight over the eye-brows, no
expression of peculiarity, moral or intellectual, on the eyes, no
massiveness in the general countenance. He is, if anything, rather below
the middle size. He wore very large half-boots, which his legs filled,
so fearfully were they swollen. However, though neither W---- nor
myself could discover any indications of sublimity or enthusiasm in his
physiognomy, we were both equally impressed with his liveliness, and his
kind and ready courtesy. He talked in French with my friend, and with
difficulty spoke a few sentences to me in English. His enunciation was
not in the least affected by the entire want of his upper teeth. The
conversation began on his part by the expression of his rapture at the
surrender of the detachment of French troops under General Humbert.
Their proceedings in Ireland with regard to the committee which they
had appointed, with the rest of their organizing system, seemed to have
given the poet great entertainment. He then declared his sanguine belief
in Nelson's victory, and anticipated its confirmation with a keen and
triumphant pleasure. His words, tones, looks, implied the most vehement
Anti-Gallicanism. The subject changed to literature, and I inquired
in Latin concerning the history of German poetry and the elder German
poets. To my great astonishment he confessed, that he knew very little
on the subject. He had indeed occasionally read one or two of their
elder writers, but not so as to enable him to speak of their merits.
Professor Ebeling, he said, would probably give me every information of
this kind: the subject had not particularly excited his curiosity.
He then talked of Milton and Glover, and thought Glover's blank verse
superior to Milton's. W---- and myself expressed our surprise: and
my friend gave his definition and notion of harmonious verse, that
it consisted, (the English iambic blank verse above all,) in the apt
arrangement of pauses and cadences, and the sweep of whole paragraphs,
"with many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out,"
and not in the even flow, much less in the prominence of antithetic
vigour, of single lines, which were indeed injurious to the total
effect, except where they were introduced for some specific purpose.
Klopstock assented, and said that he meant to confine Glover's
superiority to single lines. He told us that he had read Milton, in
a prose translation, when he was fourteen [77]. I understood him thus
myself, and W---- interpreted Klopstock's French as I had already
construed it. He appeared to know very little of Milton or indeed of our
poets in general. He spoke with great indignation of the English prose
translation of his MESSIAH. All the translations had been bad, very
bad--but the English was no translation--there were pages on pages
not in the original--and half the original was not to be found in the
translation. W---- told him that I intended to translate a few of his
odes as specimens of German lyrics--he then said to me in English, "I
wish you would render into English some select passages of THE MESSIAH,
and revenge me of your countryman! ". It was the liveliest thing which he
produced in the whole conversation. He told us, that his first ode was
fifty years older than his last. I looked at him with much emotion--I
considered him as the venerable father of German poetry; as a good man;
as a Christian; seventy-four years old; with legs enormously swollen;
yet active, lively, cheerful, and kind, and communicative. My eyes felt
as if a tear were swelling into them. In the portrait of Lessing
there was a toupee periwig, which enormously injured the effect of his
physiognomy--Klopstock wore the same, powdered and frizzled. By the
bye, old men ought never to wear powder--the contrast between a large
snow-white wig and the colour of an old man's skin is disgusting, and
wrinkles in such a neighbourhood appear only channels for dirt. It is
an honour to poets and great men, that you think of them as parts of
nature; and anything of trick and fashion wounds you in them, as much as
when you see venerable yews clipped into miserable peacocks. --The author
of THE MESSIAH should have worn his own grey hair. --His powder and
periwig were to the eye what Mr. Virgil would be to the ear.
Klopstock dwelt much on the superior power which the German language
possessed of concentrating meaning. He said, he had often translated
parts of Homer and Virgil, line by line, and a German line proved always
sufficient for a Greek or Latin one. In English you cannot do this. I
answered, that in English we could commonly render one Greek heroic line
in a line and a half of our common heroic metre, and I conjectured that
this line and a half would be found to contain no more syllables than
one German or Greek hexameter. He did not understand me [78]: and I, who
wished to hear his opinions, not to correct them, was glad that he did
not.
We now took our leave. At the beginning of the French Revolution
Klopstock wrote odes of congratulation. He received some honorary
presents from the French Republic, (a golden crown I believe), and,
like our Priestley, was invited to a seat in the legislature, which he
declined. But when French liberty metamorphosed herself into a fury, he
sent back these presents with a palinodia, declaring his abhorrence of
their proceedings: and since then he has been perhaps more than enough
an Anti-Gallican. I mean, that in his just contempt and detestation
of the crimes and follies of the Revolutionists, he suffers himself to
forget that the revolution itself is a process of the Divine Providence;
and that as the folly of men is the wisdom of God, so are their
iniquities instruments of his goodness. From Klopstock's house we walked
to the ramparts, discoursing together on the poet and his conversation,
till our attention was diverted to the beauty and singularity of the
sunset and its effects on the objects around us. There were woods in the
distance. A rich sandy light, (nay, of a much deeper colour than sandy,)
lay over these woods that blackened in the blaze. Over that part of
the woods which lay immediately under the intenser light, a brassy mist
floated. The trees on the ramparts, and the people moving to and fro
between them, were cut or divided into equal segments of deep shade and
brassy light. Had the trees, and the bodies of the men and women, been
divided into equal segments by a rule or pair of compasses, the portions
could not have been more regular. All else was obscure. It was a
fairy scene! --and to increase its romantic character, among the moving
objects, thus divided into alternate shade and brightness, was a
beautiful child, dressed with the elegant simplicity of an English
child, riding on a stately goat, the saddle, bridle, and other
accoutrements of which were in a high degree costly and splendid. Before
I quit the subject of Hamburg, let me say, that I remained a day or two
longer than I otherwise should have done, in order to be present at the
feast of St. Michael, the patron saint of Hamburg, expecting to see
the civic pomp of this commercial Republic. I was however disappointed.
There were no processions, two or three sermons were preached to two
or three old women in two or three churches, and St. Michael and
his patronage wished elsewhere by the higher classes, all places of
entertainment, theatre, etc. being shut up on this day. In Hamburg,
there seems to be no religion at all; in Luebec it is confined to the
women. The men seemed determined to be divorced from their wives in the
other world, if they cannot in this. You will not easily conceive a more
singular sight, than is presented by the vast aisle of the principal
church at Luebec, seen from the organ loft: for being filled with female
servants and persons in the same class of life, and all their caps
having gold and silver cauls, it appears like a rich pavement of gold
and silver.
I will conclude this letter with the mere transcription of notes, which
my friend W---- made of his conversations with Klopstock, during the
interviews that took place after my departure. On these I shall make but
one remark at present, and that will appear a presumptuous one, namely,
that Klopstock's remarks on the venerable sage of Koenigsburg are to my
own knowledge injurious and mistaken; and so far is it from being true,
that his system is now given up, that throughout the Universities of
Germany there is not a single professor who is not either a Kantean or
a disciple of Fichte, whose system is built on the Kantean, and
presupposes its truth; or lastly who, though an antagonist of Kant, as
to his theoretical work, has not embraced wholly or in part his moral
system, and adopted part of his nomenclature. "Klopstock having wished
to see the CALVARY of Cumberland, and asked what was thought of it in
England, I went to Remnant's (the English bookseller) where I procured
the Analytical Review, in which is contained the review of Cumberland's
CALVARY. I remembered to have read there some specimens of a blank verse
translation of THE MESSIAH. I had mentioned this to Klopstock, and he
had a great desire to see them. I walked over to his house and put the
book into his hands. On adverting to his own poem, he told me he began
THE MESSIAH when he was seventeen; he devoted three entire years to the
plan without composing a single line. He was greatly at a loss in
what manner to execute his work. There were no successful specimens of
versification in the German language before this time. The first three
cantos he wrote in a species of measured or numerous prose. This, though
done with much labour and some success, was far from satisfying him. He
had composed hexameters both Latin and Greek as a school exercise, and
there had been also in the German language attempts in that style of
versification. These were only of very moderate merit. --One day he was
struck with the idea of what could be done in this way--he kept his
room a whole day, even went without his dinner, and found that in the
evening he had written twenty-three hexameters, versifying a part of
what he had before written in prose. From that time, pleased with his
efforts, he composed no more in prose. Today he informed me that he
had finished his plan before he read Milton. He was enchanted to see an
author who before him had trod the same path. This is a contradiction
of what he said before. He did not wish to speak of his poem to any one
till it was finished: but some of his friends who had seen what he had
finished, tormented him till he had consented to publish a few books in
a journal. He was then, I believe, very young, about twenty-five.
The rest was printed at different periods, four books at a time. The
reception given to the first specimens was highly flattering. He was
nearly thirty years in finishing the whole poem, but of these thirty
years not more than two were employed in the composition. He only
composed in favourable moments; besides he had other occupations. He
values himself upon the plan of his odes, and accuses the modern lyrical
writers of gross deficiency in this respect. I laid the same accusation
against Horace: he would not hear of it--but waived the discussion.
He called Rousseau's ODE TO FORTUNE a moral dissertation in stanzas.
I spoke of Dryden's ST. CECILIA; but he did not seem familiar with our
writers. He wished to know the distinctions between our dramatic and
epic blank verse. He recommended me to read his HERMANN before I read
either THE MESSIAH or the odes. He flattered himself that some time or
other his dramatic poems would be known in England. He had not heard of
Cowper. He thought that Voss in his translation of THE ILIAD had done
violence to the idiom of the Germans, and had sacrificed it to the
Greeks, not remembering sufficiently that each language has its
particular spirit and genius. He said Lessing was the first of their
dramatic writers. I complained of NATHAN as tedious. He said there was
not enough of action in it; but that Lessing was the most chaste of
their writers. He spoke favourably of Goethe; but said that his SORROWS
OF WERTER was his best work, better than any of his dramas: he preferred
the first written to the rest of Goethe's dramas. Schiller's ROBBERS he
found so extravagant, that he could not read it. I spoke of the scene of
the setting sun. He did not know it. He said Schiller could not live.
He thought DON CARLOS the best of his dramas; but said that the plot
was inextricable. --It was evident he knew little of Schiller's works:
indeed, he said, he could not read them. Buerger, he said, was a true
poet, and would live; that Schiller, on the contrary, must soon be
forgotten; that he gave himself up to the imitation of Shakespeare, who
often was extravagant, but that Schiller was ten thousand times more so.
He spoke very slightingly of Kotzebue, as an immoral author in the first
place, and next, as deficient in power. At Vienna, said he, they are
transported with him; but we do not reckon the people of Vienna either
the wisest or the wittiest people of Germany. He said Wieland was a
charming author, and a sovereign master of his own language: that in
this respect Goethe could not be compared to him, nor indeed could any
body else. He said that his fault was to be fertile to exuberance. I
told him the OBERON had just been translated into English. He asked me
if I was not delighted with the poem. I answered, that I thought the
story began to flag about the seventh or eighth book; and observed, that
it was unworthy of a man of genius to make the interest of a long poem
turn entirely upon animal gratification.
He seemed at first disposed to
excuse this by saying, that there are different subjects for poetry, and
that poets are not willing to be restricted in their choice. I answered,
that I thought the passion of love as well suited to the purposes of
poetry as any other passion; but that it was a cheap way of pleasing
to fix the attention of the reader through a long poem on the mere
appetite. Well! but, said he, you see, that such poems please every
body. I answered, that it was the province of a great poet to raise
people up to his own level, not to descend to theirs. He agreed, and
confessed, that on no account whatsoever would he have written a work
like the OBERON. He spoke in raptures of Wieland's style, and pointed
out the passage where Retzia is delivered of her child, as exquisitely
beautiful. I said that I did not perceive any very striking passages;
but that I made allowance for the imperfections of a translation. Of the
thefts of Wieland, he said, they were so exquisitely managed, that the
greatest writers might be proud to steal as he did. He considered the
books and fables of old romance writers in the light of the ancient
mythology, as a sort of common property, from which a man was free to
take whatever he could make a good use of. An Englishman had presented
him with the odes of Collins, which he had read with pleasure. He
knew little or nothing of Gray, except his ELEGY written in a country
CHURCH-YARD. He complained of the fool in LEAR. I observed that he
seemed to give a terrible wildness to the distress; but still he
complained. He asked whether it was not allowed, that Pope had written
rhymed poetry with more skill than any of our writers--I said I
preferred Dryden, because his couplets had greater variety in their
movement. He thought my reason a good one; but asked whether the rhyme
of Pope were not more exact. This question I understood as applying to
the final terminations, and observed to him that I believed it was the
case; but that I thought it was easy to excuse some inaccuracy in the
final sounds, if the general sweep of the verse was superior. I told him
that we were not so exact with regard to the final endings of the lines
as the French. He did not seem to know that we made no distinction
between masculine and feminine (i. e. single or double,) rhymes: at
least he put inquiries to me on this subject. He seemed to think that
no language could be so far formed as that it might not be enriched by
idioms borrowed from another tongue. I said this was a very dangerous
practice; and added, that I thought Milton had often injured both his
prose and verse by taking this liberty too frequently. I recommended to
him the prose works of Dryden as models of pure and native English. I
was treading upon tender ground, as I have reason to suppose that he has
himself liberally indulged in the practice. "
The same day I dined at Mr. Klopstock's, where I had the pleasure of a
third interview with the poet. We talked principally about indifferent
things. I asked him what he thought of Kant. He said that his reputation
was much on the decline in Germany. That for his own part he was not
surprised to find it so, as the works of Kant were to him utterly
incomprehensible--that he had often been pestered by the Kanteans;
but was rarely in the practice of arguing with them. His custom was to
produce the book, open it and point to a passage, and beg they would
explain it. This they ordinarily attempted to do by substituting their
own ideas. I do not want, I say, an explanation of your own ideas, but
of the passage which is before us. In this way I generally bring the
dispute to an immediate conclusion. He spoke of Wolfe as the first
Metaphysician they had in Germany. Wolfe had followers; but they could
hardly be called a sect, and luckily till the appearance of Kant,
about fifteen years ago, Germany had not been pestered by any sect of
philosophers whatsoever; but that each man had separately pursued his
inquiries uncontrolled by the dogmas of a master. Kant had appeared
ambitious to be the founder of a sect; that he had succeeded: but that
the Germans were now coming to their senses again. That Nicolai and
Engel had in different ways contributed to disenchant the nation; but
above all the incomprehensibility of the philosopher and his philosophy.
He seemed pleased to hear, that as yet Kant's doctrines had not met with
many admirers in England--did not doubt but that we had too much wisdom
to be duped by a writer who set at defiance the common sense and common
understandings of men. We talked of tragedy. He seemed to rate highly
the power of exciting tears--I said that nothing was more easy than to
deluge an audience, that it was done every day by the meanest writers.
I must remind you, my friend, first, that these notes are not intended
as specimens of Klopstock's intellectual power, or even "colloquial
prowess," to judge of which by an accidental conversation, and this with
strangers, and those too foreigners, would be not only unreasonable, but
calumnious. Secondly, I attribute little other interest to the remarks
than what is derived from the celebrity of the person who made them.
Lastly, if you ask me, whether I have read THE MESSIAH, and what I
think of it? I answer--as yet the first four books only: and as to my
opinion--(the reasons of which hereafter)--you may guess it from what
I could not help muttering to myself, when the good pastor this morning
told me, that Klopstock was the German Milton--"a very German Milton
indeed! ! ! "
Heaven preserve you, and S. T. COLERIDGE.
CHAPTER XXIII
Quid quod praefatione praemunierim libellum, qua conor omnem offendiculi
ansam praecidere? [79] Neque quicquam addubito, quin ea candidis omnibus
faciat satis. Quid autem facias istis, qui vel ob ingenii pertinaciam
sibi satisfieri nolint, vel stupidiores sint, quam ut satisfactionem
intelligant? Nam quemadmodum Simonides dixit, Thessalos hebetiores esse,
quam ut possint a se decipi, ita quosdam videas stupidiores, quam ut
placari queant. Adhaec, non mirum est invenire quod calumnietur,
qui nihil aliud quaerit, nisi quod calumnietur. ERASMUS ad Dorpium,
Theologum.
In the rifacimento of THE FRIEND, I have inserted extracts from the
CONCIONES AD POPULUM, printed, though scarcely published, in the year
1795, in the very heat and height of my anti-ministerial enthusiasm:
these in proof that my principles of politics have sustained no
change. --In the present chapter, I have annexed to my Letters
from Germany, with particular reference to that, which contains a
disquisition on the modern drama, a critique on the Tragedy of BERTRAM,
written within the last twelve months: in proof, that I have been as
falsely charged with any fickleness in my principles of taste. --The
letter was written to a friend: and the apparent abruptness with which
it begins, is owing to the omission of the introductory sentences.
You remember, my dear Sir, that Mr. Whitbread, shortly before his death,
proposed to the assembled subscribers of Drury Lane Theatre, that the
concern should be farmed to some responsible individual under certain
conditions and limitations: and that his proposal was rejected,
not without indignation, as subversive of the main object, for the
attainment of which the enlightened and patriotic assemblage of
philodramatists had been induced to risk their subscriptions. Now this
object was avowed to be no less than the redemption of the British stage
not only from horses, dogs, elephants, and the like zoological rarities,
but also from the more pernicious barbarisms and Kotzebuisms in morals
and taste. Drury Lane was to be restored to its former classical renown;
Shakespeare, Jonson, and Otway, with the expurgated muses of Vanbrugh,
Congreve, and Wycherley, were to be reinaugurated in their rightful
dominion over British audiences; and the Herculean process was to
commence, by exterminating the speaking monsters imported from the banks
of the Danube, compared with which their mute relations, the emigrants
from Exeter 'Change, and Polito (late Pidcock's) show-carts, were tame
and inoffensive. Could an heroic project, at once so refined and so
arduous, be consistently entrusted to, could its success be rationally
expected from, a mercenary manager, at whose critical quarantine the
lucri bonus odor would conciliate a bill of health to the plague in
person? No! As the work proposed, such must be the work-masters. Rank,
fortune, liberal education, and (their natural accompaniments, or
consequences) critical discernment, delicate tact, disinterestedness,
unsuspected morals, notorious patriotism, and tried Maecenasship, these
were the recommendations that influenced the votes of the proprietary
subscribers of Drury Lane Theatre, these the motives that occasioned the
election of its Supreme Committee of Management. This circumstance alone
would have excited a strong interest in the public mind, respecting the
first production of the Tragic Muse which had been announced under such
auspices, and had passed the ordeal of such judgments: and the tragedy,
on which you have requested my judgment, was the work on which the great
expectations, justified by so many causes, were doomed at length to
settle.
But before I enter on the examination of BERTRAM, or THE CASTLE OF ST.
ALDOBRAND, I shall interpose a few words, on the phrase German Drama,
which I hold to be altogether a misnomer. At the time of Lessing, the
German stage, such as it was, appears to have been a flat and servile
copy of the French. It was Lessing who first introduced the name and the
works of Shakespeare to the admiration of the Germans; and I should not
perhaps go too far, if I add, that it was Lessing who first proved to
all thinking men, even to Shakespeare's own countrymen, the true nature
of his apparent irregularities. These, he demonstrated, were deviations
only from the accidents of the Greek tragedy; and from such accidents as
hung a heavy weight on the wings of the Greek 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 truth of
nature, the Plays of Shakespeare were incomparably more coincident
with the principles of Aristotle, than the productions of Corneille
and Racine, notwithstanding the boasted regularity of the latter. Under
these convictions were Lessing's own dramatic works composed. Their
deficiency is in depth and imagination: their excellence is in the
construction of the plot; the good sense of the sentiments; the sobriety
of the morals; and the high polish of the diction and dialogue. In
short, his dramas are the very antipodes of all those which it has been
the fashion of late years at once to abuse and enjoy, under the name of
the German drama. Of this latter, Schiller's ROBBERS was the earliest
specimen; the first fruits of his youth, (I had almost said of his
boyhood), and as such, the pledge, and promise of no ordinary genius.
Only as such, did the maturer judgment of the author tolerate the Play.
During his whole life he expressed himself concerning this production
with more than needful asperity, as a monster not less offensive to good
taste, than to sound morals; and, in his latter years, his indignation
at the unwonted popularity of the ROBBERS seduced him into the contrary
extremes, viz. a studied feebleness of interest, (as far as the interest
was to be derived from incidents and the excitement of curiosity);
a diction elaborately metrical; the affectation of rhymes; and the
pedantry of the chorus.
But to understand the true character of the ROBBERS, and of the
countless imitations which were its spawn, I must inform you, or at
least call to your recollection, that, about that time, and for some
years before it, three of the most popular books in the German language
were, the translations Of YOUNG'S NIGHT THOUGHTS, HERVEY'S MEDITATIONS,
and RICHARDSON'S CLARISSA HARLOW. Now we have only to combine the
bloated style and peculiar rhythm of Hervey, which is poetic only on
account of its utter unfitness for prose, and might as appropriately
be called prosaic, from its utter unfitness for poetry; we have only,
I repeat, to combine these Herveyisms with the strained thoughts, the
figurative metaphysics and solemn epigrams of Young on the one hand; and
with the loaded sensibility, the minute detail, the morbid consciousness
of every thought and feeling in the whole flux and reflux of the mind,
in short the self-involution and dreamlike continuity of Richardson on
the other hand; and then to add the horrific incidents, and mysterious
villains, (geniuses of supernatural intellect, if you will take the
authors' words for it, but on a level with the meanest ruffians of
the condemned cells, if we are to judge by their actions and
contrivances)--to add the ruined castles, the dungeons, the trap-doors,
the skeletons, the flesh-and-blood ghosts, and the perpetual moonshine
of a modern author, (themselves the literary brood of the CASTLE OF
OTRANTO, the translations of which, with the imitations and improvements
aforesaid, were about that time beginning to make as much noise in
Germany as their originals were making in England),--and as the compound
of these ingredients duly mixed, you will recognize the so-called German
drama. The olla podrida thus cooked up, was denounced, by the best
critics in Germany, as the mere cramps of weakness, and orgasms of a
sickly imagination on the part of the author, and the lowest provocation
of torpid feeling on that of the readers. The old blunder, however,
concerning the irregularity and wildness of Shakespeare, in which the
German did but echo the French, who again were but the echoes of our own
critics, was still in vogue, and Shakespeare was quoted as authority for
the most anti-Shakespearean drama. We have indeed two poets who wrote as
one, near the age of Shakespeare, to whom, (as the worst characteristic
of their writings), the Coryphaeus of the present drama may challenge
the honour of being a poor relation, or impoverished descendant. For
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.
The so-called German drama, therefore, is English in its origin, English
in its materials, and English by re-adoption; and till we can prove that
Kotzebue, or any of the whole breed of Kotzebues, whether dramatists or
romantic writers, or writers of romantic dramas, were ever admitted
to any other shelf in the libraries of well-educated Germans than were
occupied by their originals, and apes' apes in their mother country,
we should submit to carry our own brat on our own shoulders; or rather
consider it as a lack-grace returned from transportation with such
improvements only in growth and manners as young transported convicts
usually come home with.
I know nothing that contributes more to a clearer insight into the true
nature of any literary phaenomenon, than the comparison of it with some
elder production, the likeness of which is striking, yet only apparent,
while the difference is real. In the present case this opportunity is
furnished us, by the old Spanish play, entitled Atheista Fulminato,
formerly, and perhaps still, acted in the churches and monasteries of
Spain, and which, under various names (Don Juan, the Libertine,
etc. ) has had its day of favour in every country throughout Europe. A
popularity so extensive, and of a work so grotesque and extravagant,
claims and merits philosophical attention and investigation. The first
point to be noticed is, that the play is throughout imaginative.
Nothing of it belongs to the real world, but the names of the places and
persons. The comic parts, equally with the tragic; the living, equally
with the defunct characters, are creatures of the brain; as little
amenable to the rules of ordinary probability, as the Satan Of PARADISE
LOST, or the Caliban of THE TEMPEST, and therefore to be understood
and judged of as impersonated abstractions. Rank, fortune, wit, talent,
acquired knowledge, and liberal accomplishments, with beauty of person,
vigorous health, and constitutional hardihood,--all these advantages,
elevated by the habits and sympathies of noble birth and national
character, are supposed to have combined in Don Juan, so as to give him
the means of carrying into all its practical consequences the doctrine
of a godless nature, as the sole ground and efficient cause not only of
all things, events, and appearances, but likewise of all our thoughts,
sensations, impulses and actions. Obedience to nature is the only
virtue: the gratification of the passions and appetites her only
dictate: each individual's self-will the sole organ through which nature
utters her commands, and
"Self-contradiction is the only wrong!
For, by the laws of spirit, in the right
Is every individual character
That acts in strict consistence with itself. "
That speculative opinions, however impious and daring they may be, are
not always followed by correspondent conduct, is most true, as well as
that they can scarcely in any instance be systematically realized, on
account of their unsuitableness to human nature and to the institutions
of society. It can be hell, only where it is all hell: and a separate
world of devils is necessary for the existence of any one complete
devil. But on the other hand it is no less clear, nor, with the
biography of Carrier and his fellow atheists before us, can it be denied
without wilful blindness, that the (so called) system of nature (that
is, materialism, with the utter rejection of moral responsibility, of
a present Providence, and of both present and future retribution)
may influence the characters and actions of individuals, and even of
communities, to a degree that almost does away the distinction between
men and devils, and will make the page of the future historian resemble
the narration of a madman's dreams. It is not the wickedness of Don
Juan, therefore, which constitutes the character an abstraction, and
removes it from the rules of probability; but the rapid succession of
the correspondent acts and incidents, his intellectual superiority,
and the splendid accumulation of his gifts and desirable qualities, as
co-existent with entire wickedness in one and the same person. But this
likewise is the very circumstance which gives to this strange play its
charm and universal interest. Don Juan is, from beginning to end, an
intelligible character: as much so as the Satan of Milton. The poet asks
only of the reader, what, as a poet, he is privileged to ask: namely,
that sort of negative faith in the existence of such a being, which we
willingly give to productions professedly ideal, and a disposition
to the same state of feeling, as that with which we contemplate the
idealized figures of the Apollo Belvidere, and the Farnese Hercules.
What the Hercules is to the eye in corporeal strength, Don Juan is
to the mind in strength of character. The ideal consists in the happy
balance of the generic with the individual. The former makes the
character representative and symbolical, therefore instructive; because,
mutatis mutandis, it is applicable to whole classes of men. The latter
gives it living interest; for nothing lives or is real, but as definite
and individual. To understand this completely, the reader need only
recollect the specific state of his feelings, when in looking at a
picture of the historic (more properly of the poetic or heroic) class,
he objects to a particular figure as being too much of a portrait;
and this interruption of his complacency he feels without the least
reference to, or the least acquaintance with, any person in real life
whom he might recognise in this figure. It is enough that such a figure
is not ideal: and therefore not ideal, because one of the two factors
or elements of the ideal is in excess. A similar and more powerful
objection he would feel towards a set of figures which were mere
abstractions, like those of Cipriani, and what have been called Greek
forms and faces, that is, outlines drawn according to a recipe. These
again are not ideal; because in these the other element is in excess.
"Forma formans per formam formatam translucens," [80] is the definition
and perfection of ideal art.
This excellence is so happily achieved in the Don Juan, that it is
capable of interesting without poetry, nay, even without words, as in
our pantomime of that name. We see clearly how the character is formed;
and the very extravagance of the incidents, and the super-human
entireness of Don Juan's agency, prevents the wickedness from shocking
our minds to any painful degree. We do not believe it enough for this
effect; no, not even with that kind of temporary and negative belief or
acquiescence which I have described above. Meantime the qualities of his
character are too desirable, too flattering to our pride and our wishes,
not to make up on this side as much additional faith as was lost on
the other. There is no danger (thinks the spectator or reader) of my
becoming such a monster of iniquity as Don Juan! I never shall be an
atheist! I shall never disallow all distinction between right and wrong!
I have not the least inclination to be so outrageous a drawcansir in my
love affairs! But to possess such a power of captivating and enchanting
the affections of the other sex! --to be capable of inspiring in a
charming and even a virtuous woman, a love so deep, and so entirely
personal to me! --that even my worst vices, (if I were vicious), even
my cruelty and perfidy, (if I were cruel and perfidious), could not
eradicate the passion! --to be so loved for my own self, that even with a
distinct knowledge of my character, she yet died to save me! --this, sir,
takes hold of two sides of our nature, the better and the worse. For the
heroic disinterestedness, to which love can transport a woman, can
not be contemplated without an honourable emotion of reverence towards
womanhood: and, on the other hand, it is among the miseries, and abides
in the dark ground-work of our nature, to crave an outward confirmation
of that something within us, which is our very self, that something,
not made up of our qualities and relations, but itself the supporter and
substantial basis of all these. Love me, and not my qualities, may be
a vicious and an insane wish, but it is not a wish wholly without a
meaning.
Without power, virtue would be insufficient and incapable of revealing
its being. It would resemble the magic transformation of Tasso's heroine
into a tree, in which she could only groan and bleed. Hence power is
necessarily an object of our desire and of our admiration. But of all
power, that of the mind is, on every account, the grand desideratum of
human ambition. We shall be as Gods in knowledge, was and must have been
the first temptation: and the coexistence of great intellectual lordship
with guilt has never been adequately represented without exciting
the strongest interest, and for this reason, that in this bad and
heterogeneous co-ordination we can contemplate the intellect of man more
exclusively as a separate self-subsistence, than in its proper state
of subordination to his own conscience, or to the will of an infinitely
superior being.
This is the sacred charm of Shakespeare's male characters in general.
They are all cast in the mould of Shakespeare's own gigantic intellect;
and this is the open attraction of his Richard, Iago, Edmund, and others
in particular. But again; of all intellectual power, that of superiority
to the fear of the invisible world is the most dazzling. Its influence
is abundantly proved by the one circumstance, that it can bribe us into
a voluntary submission of our better knowledge, into suspension of all
our judgment derived from constant experience, and enable us to peruse
with the liveliest interest the wildest tales of ghosts, wizards,
genii, and secret talismans. On this propensity, so deeply rooted in our
nature, a specific dramatic probability may be raised by a true poet, if
the whole of his work be in harmony: a dramatic probability, sufficient
for dramatic pleasure, even when the component characters and incidents
border on impossibility. The poet does not require us to be awake and
believe; he solicits us only to yield ourselves to a dream; and this
too with our eyes open, and with our judgment perdue behind the curtain,
ready to awaken us at the first motion of our will: and meantime,
only, not to disbelieve. And in such a state of mind, who but must be
impressed with the cool intrepidity of Don john on the appearance of his
father's ghost:
"GHOST. --Monster! behold these wounds!
"D. JOHN. --I do! They were well meant and well performed, I see.
"GHOST. ------Repent, repent of all thy villanies.
My clamorous blood to heaven for vengeance cries,
Heaven will pour out his judgments on you all.
Hell gapes for you, for you each fiend doth call,
And hourly waits your unrepenting fall.
You with eternal horrors they'll torment,
Except of all your crimes you suddenly repent. (Ghost sinks. )
"D. JOHN. --Farewell, thou art a foolish ghost. Repent, quoth he!
what could this mean? Our senses are all in a mist sure.
"D. ANTONIO. --(one of D. Juan's reprobate companions. ) They are not!
'Twas a ghost.
"D. LOPEZ. --(another reprobate. ) I ne'er believed those foolish tales
before.
"D. JOHN. --Come! 'Tis no matter. Let it be what it will, it must be
natural.
"D. ANT. --And nature is unalterable in us too.
"D. JOHN. --'Tis true! The nature of a ghost can not change our's. "
Who also can deny a portion of sublimity to the tremendous consistency
with which he stands out the last fearful trial, like a second
Prometheus?
"Chorus of Devils.
"STATUE-GHOST. --Will you not relent and feel remorse?
"D. JOHN. --Could'st thou bestow another heart on me I might. But
with this heart I have, I can not.
"D. LOPEZ. --These things are prodigious.
"D. ANTON. --I have a sort of grudging to relent, but something holds
me back.
"D. LOP. --If we could, 'tis now too late. I will not.
"D.
