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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of
Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4), by Thomas Babington Macaulay

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Title: The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4)
Contributions To The Edinburgh Review

Author: Thomas Babington Macaulay

Posting Date: June 14, 2008 [EBook #2168]
Release Date: May, 2000

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WRITINGS OF LORD MACAULAY ***




Produced by Mike Alder and Sue Asscher





THE MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS AND SPEECHES OF LORD MACAULAY.

Contributions To The Edinburgh Review

By Thomas Babington Macaulay


VOLUME II.



CONTENTS.


CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE EDINBURGH REVIEW.

John Dryden. (January 1828. )

History. (May 1828. )

Mill on Government. (March 1829. )

Westminster Reviewer's Defence of Mill. (June 1829. )

Utilitarian Theory of Government. (October 1829. )

Sadler's Law of Population. (July 1830. )

Sadler's Refutation Refuted. (January 1831. )

Mirabeau. (July 1832. )

Barere. (April 1844. )




MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS OF LORD MACAULAY.




CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE EDINBURGH REVIEW.




JOHN DRYDEN. (January 1828. )


"The Poetical Works of John Dryden". In 2 volumes.
University Edition. London, 1826.


The public voice has assigned to Dryden the first place in the
second rank of our poets,--no mean station in a table of intellectual
precedency so rich in illustrious names. It is allowed that, even of
the few who were his superiors in genius, none has exercised a more
extensive or permanent influence on the national habits of thought and
expression. His life was commensurate with the period during which
a great revolution in the public taste was effected; and in that
revolution he played the part of Cromwell. By unscrupulously taking the
lead in its wildest excesses, he obtained the absolute guidance of it.
By trampling on laws, he acquired the authority of a legislator. By
signalising himself as the most daring and irreverent of rebels, he
raised himself to the dignity of a recognised prince. He commenced his
career by the most frantic outrages. He terminated it in the repose of
established sovereignty,--the author of a new code, the root of a new
dynasty.

Of Dryden, however, as of almost every man who has been distinguished
either in the literary or in the political world, it may be said that
the course which he pursued, and the effect which he produced, depended
less on his personal qualities than on the circumstances in which he was
placed. Those who have read history with discrimination know the fallacy
of those panegyrics and invectives which represent individuals
as effecting great moral and intellectual revolutions, subverting
established systems, and imprinting a new character on their age. The
difference between one man and another is by no means so great as the
superstitious crowd supposes. But the same feelings which in ancient
Rome produced the apotheosis of a popular emperor, and in modern Rome
the canonisation of a devout prelate, lead men to cherish an illusion
which furnishes them with something to adore. By a law of association,
from the operation of which even minds the most strictly regulated
by reason are not wholly exempt, misery disposes us to hatred, and
happiness to love, although there may be no person to whom our misery
or our happiness can be ascribed. The peevishness of an invalid vents
itself even on those who alleviate his pain. The good humour of a man
elated by success often displays itself towards enemies. In the
same manner, the feelings of pleasure and admiration, to which the
contemplation of great events gives birth, make an object where they
do not find it. Thus, nations descend to the absurdities of Egyptian
idolatry, and worship stocks and reptiles--Sacheverells and Wilkeses.
They even fall prostrate before a deity to which they have themselves
given the form which commands their veneration, and which, unless
fashioned by them, would have remained a shapeless block. They persuade
themselves that they are the creatures of what they have themselves
created. For, in fact, it is the age that forms the man, not the man
that forms the age. Great minds do indeed re-act on the society which
has made them what they are; but they only pay with interest what they
have received. We extol Bacon, and sneer at Aquinas. But, if their
situations had been changed, Bacon might have been the Angelical Doctor,
the most subtle Aristotelian of the schools; the Dominican might have
led forth the sciences from their house of bondage. If Luther had been
born in the tenth century, he would have effected no reformation. If
he had never been born at all, it is evident that the sixteenth century
could not have elapsed without a great schism in the church. Voltaire,
in the days of Louis the Fourteenth, would probably have been, like most
of the literary men of that time, a zealous Jansenist, eminent among the
defenders of efficacious grace, a bitter assailant of the lax morality
of the Jesuits and the unreasonable decisions of the Sorbonne. If Pascal
had entered on his literary career when intelligence was more general,
and abuses at the same time more flagrant, when the church was polluted
by the Iscariot Dubois, the court disgraced by the orgies of Canillac,
and the nation sacrificed to the juggles of Law, if he had lived to see
a dynasty of harlots, an empty treasury and a crowded harem, an army
formidable only to those whom it should have protected, a priesthood
just religious enough to be intolerant, he might possibly, like every
man of genius in France, have imbibed extravagant prejudices against
monarchy and Christianity. The wit which blasted the sophisms of
Escobar--the impassioned eloquence which defended the sisters of Port
Royal--the intellectual hardihood which was not beaten down even by
Papal authority--might have raised him to the Patriarchate of the
Philosophical Church. It was long disputed whether the honour of
inventing the method of Fluxions belonged to Newton or to Leibnitz. It
is now generally allowed that these great men made the same discovery
at the same time. Mathematical science, indeed, had then reached such
a point that, if neither of them had ever existed, the principle must
inevitably have occurred to some person within a few years. So in our
own time the doctrine of rent, now universally received by political
economists, was propounded, almost at the same moment, by two writers
unconnected with each other. Preceding speculators had long been
blundering round about it; and it could not possibly have been missed
much longer by the most heedless inquirer. We are inclined to think
that, with respect to every great addition which has been made to
the stock of human knowledge, the case has been similar; that without
Copernicus we should have been Copernicans,--that without Columbus
America would have been discovered,--that without Locke we should have
possessed a just theory of the origin of human ideas. Society indeed has
its great men and its little men, as the earth has its mountains and its
valleys. But the inequalities of intellect, like the inequalities of the
surface of our globe, bear so small a proportion to the mass, that, in
calculating its great revolutions, they may safely be neglected. The sun
illuminates the hills, while it is still below the horizon, and truth is
discovered by the highest minds a little before it becomes manifest to
the multitude. This is the extent of their superiority. They are the
first to catch and reflect a light, which, without their assistance,
must, in a short time, be visible to those who lie far beneath them.

The same remark will apply equally to the fine arts. The laws on which
depend the progress and decline of poetry, painting, and sculpture,
operate with little less certainty than those which regulate the
periodical returns of heat and cold, of fertility and barrenness. Those
who seem to lead the public taste are, in general, merely outrunning
it in the direction which it is spontaneously pursuing. Without a just
apprehension of the laws to which we have alluded the merits and defects
of Dryden can be but imperfectly understood. We will, therefore, state
what we conceive them to be.

The ages in which the master-pieces of imagination have been produced
have by no means been those in which taste has been most correct. It
seems that the creative faculty, and the critical faculty, cannot exist
together in their highest perfection. The causes of this phenomenon it
is not difficult to assign.

It is true that the man who is best able to take a machine to pieces,
and who most clearly comprehends the manner in which all its wheels and
springs conduce to its general effect, will be the man most competent to
form another machine of similar power. In all the branches of physical
and moral science which admit of perfect analysis, he who can resolve
will be able to combine. But the analysis which criticism can effect
of poetry is necessarily imperfect. One element must for ever elude its
researches; and that is the very element by which poetry is poetry. In
the description of nature, for example, a judicious reader will easily
detect an incongruous image. But he will find it impossible to explain
in what consists the art of a writer who, in a few words, brings some
spot before him so vividly that he shall know it as if he had lived
there from childhood; while another, employing the same materials,
the same verdure, the same water, and the same flowers, committing
no inaccuracy, introducing nothing which can be positively pronounced
superfluous, omitting nothing which can be positively pronounced
necessary, shall produce no more effect than an advertisement of a
capital residence and a desirable pleasure-ground. To take another
example: the great features of the character of Hotspur are obvious to
the most superficial reader. We at once perceive that his courage is
splendid, his thirst of glory intense, his animal spirits high, his
temper careless, arbitrary, and petulant; that he indulges his own
humour without caring whose feelings he may wound, or whose enmity he
may provoke, by his levity. Thus far criticism will go. But something
is still wanting. A man might have all those qualities, and every other
quality which the most minute examiner can introduce into his catalogue
of the virtues and faults of Hotspur, and yet he would not be
Hotspur. Almost everything that we have said of him applies equally
to Falconbridge. Yet in the mouth of Falconbridge most of his speeches
would seem out of place. In real life this perpetually occurs. We are
sensible of wide differences between men whom, if we were required to
describe them, we should describe in almost the same terms. If we were
attempting to draw elaborate characters of them, we should scarcely
be able to point out any strong distinction; yet we approach them with
feelings altogether dissimilar. We cannot conceive of them as using
the expressions or the gestures of each other. Let us suppose that a
zoologist should attempt to give an account of some animal, a porcupine
for instance, to people who had never seen it. The porcupine, he might
say, is of the class mammalia, and the order glires. There are whiskers
on its face; it is two feet long; it has four toes before, five behind,
two fore teeth, and eight grinders. Its body is covered with hair and
quills. And, when all this has been said, would any one of the auditors
have formed a just idea of a porcupine? Would any two of them have
formed the same idea? There might exist innumerable races of animals,
possessing all the characteristics which have been mentioned yet
altogether unlike to each other. What the description of our naturalist
is to a real porcupine, the remarks of criticism are to the images
of poetry. What it so imperfectly decomposes it cannot perfectly
reconstruct. It is evidently as impossible to produce an Othello or a
Macbeth by reversing an analytical process so defective, as it would
be for an anatomist to form a living man out of the fragments of his
dissecting-room. In both cases the vital principle eludes the finest
instruments, and vanishes in the very instant in which its seat is
touched. Hence those who, trusting to their critical skill, attempt to
write poems give us, not images of things, but catalogues of qualities.
Their characters are allegories--not good men and bad men, but cardinal
virtues and deadly sins. We seem to have fallen among the acquaintances
of our old friend Christian: sometimes we meet Mistrust and Timorous;
sometimes Mr Hate-good and Mr Love-lust; and then again Prudence, Piety
and Charity.

That critical discernment is not sufficient to make men poets, is
generally allowed. Why it should keep them from becoming poets, is not
perhaps equally evident; but the fact is, that poetry requires not an
examining but a believing frame of mind. Those feel it most, and write
it best, who forget that it is a work of art; to whom its imitations,
like the realities from which they are taken, are subjects, not for
connoisseurship, but for tears and laughter, resentment and affection;
who are too much under the influence of the illusion to admire the
genius which has produced it; who are too much frightened for Ulysses
in the cave of Polyphemus to care whether the pun about Outis be good
or bad; who forget that such a person as Shakspeare ever existed, while
they weep and curse with Lear. It is by giving faith to the creations
of the imagination that a man becomes a poet. It is by treating those
creations as deceptions, and by resolving them, as nearly as possible,
into their elements, that he becomes a critic. In the moment in which
the skill of the artist is perceived, the spell of the art is broken.

These considerations account for the absurdities into which the greatest
writers have fallen, when they have attempted to give general rules for
composition, or to pronounce judgment on the works of others. They are
unaccustomed to analyse what they feel; they, therefore, perpetually
refer their emotions to causes which have not in the slightest degree
tended to produce them. They feel pleasure in reading a book. They
never consider that this pleasure may be the effect of ideas which
some unmeaning expression, striking on the first link of a chain of
associations, may have called up in their own minds--that they have
themselves furnished to the author the beauties which they admire.

Cervantes is the delight of all classes of readers. Every school-boy
thumbs to pieces the most wretched translations of his romance, and
knows the lantern jaws of the Knight Errant, and the broad cheeks of
the Squire, as well as the faces of his own playfellows. The most
experienced and fastidious judges are amazed at the perfection of that
art which extracts inextinguishable laughter from the greatest of human
calamities without once violating the reverence due to it; at that
discriminating delicacy of touch which makes a character exquisitely
ridiculous, without impairing its worth, its grace, or its dignity. In
Don Quixote are several dissertations on the principles of poetic and
dramatic writing. No passages in the whole work exhibit stronger marks
of labour and attention; and no passages in any work with which we
are acquainted are more worthless and puerile. In our time they would
scarcely obtain admittance into the literary department of the Morning
Post. Every reader of the Divine Comedy must be struck by the veneration
which Dante expresses for writers far inferior to himself. He will not
lift up his eyes from the ground in the presence of Brunetto, all whose
works are not worth the worst of his own hundred cantos. He does
not venture to walk in the same line with the bombastic Statius. His
admiration of Virgil is absolute idolatry. If, indeed, it had been
excited by the elegant, splendid, and harmonious diction of the Roman
poet, it would not have been altogether unreasonable; but it is
rather as an authority on all points of philosophy, than as a work of
imagination, that he values the Aeneid. The most trivial passages he
regards as oracles of the highest authority, and of the most recondite
meaning. He describes his conductor as the sea of all wisdom--the sun
which heals every disordered sight. As he judged of Virgil, the Italians
of the fourteenth century judged of him; they were proud of him; they
praised him; they struck medals bearing his head; they quarrelled for
the honour of possessing his remains; they maintained professors
to expound his writings. But what they admired was not that mighty
imagination which called a new world into existence, and made all its
sights and sounds familiar to the eye and ear of the mind. They said
little of those awful and lovely creations on which later critics
delight to dwell--Farinata lifting his haughty and tranquil brow from
his couch of everlasting fire--the lion-like repose of Sordello--or the
light which shone from the celestial smile of Beatrice. They extolled
their great poet for his smattering of ancient literature and history;
for his logic and his divinity; for his absurd physics, and his most
absurd metaphysics; for everything but that in which he pre-eminently
excelled. Like the fool in the story, who ruined his dwelling by digging
for gold, which, as he had dreamed, was concealed under its foundations,
they laid waste one of the noblest works of human genius, by seeking in
it for buried treasures of wisdom which existed only in their own wild
reveries. The finest passages were little valued till they had been
debased into some monstrous allegory. Louder applause was given to
the lecture on fate and free-will, or to the ridiculous astronomical
theories, than to those tremendous lines which disclose the secrets
of the tower of hunger, or to that half-told tale of guilty love, so
passionate and so full of tears.

We do not mean to say that the contemporaries of Dante read with less
emotion than their descendants of Ugolino groping among the wasted
corpses of his children, or of Francesca starting at the tremulous kiss
and dropping the fatal volume. Far from it. We believe that they admired
these things less than ourselves, but that they felt them more. We
should perhaps say that they felt them too much to admire them. The
progress of a nation from barbarism to civilisation produces a change
similar to that which takes place during the progress of an individual
from infancy to mature age. What man does not remember with regret the
first time that he read Robinson Crusoe? Then, indeed, he was unable
to appreciate the powers of the writer; or, rather, he neither knew nor
cared whether the book had a writer at all. He probably thought it not
half so fine as some rant of Macpherson about dark-browed Foldath,
and white-bosomed Strinadona. He now values Fingal and Temora only as
showing with how little evidence a story may be believed, and with
how little merit a book may be popular. Of the romance of Defoe he
entertains the highest opinion. He perceives the hand of a master in ten
thousand touches which formerly he passed by without notice. But, though
he understands the merits of the narrative better than formerly, he is
far less interested by it. Xury, and Friday, and pretty Poll, the boat
with the shoulder-of-mutton sail, and the canoe which could not be
brought down to the water edge, the tent with its hedge and ladders, the
preserve of kids, and the den where the old goat died, can never again
be to him the realities which they were. The days when his favourite
volume set him upon making wheel-barrows and chairs, upon digging caves
and fencing huts in the garden, can never return. Such is the law of our
nature. Our judgment ripens; our imagination decays. We cannot at once
enjoy the flowers of the spring of life and the fruits of its autumn,
the pleasures of close investigation and those of agreeable error. We
cannot sit at once in the front of the stage and behind the scenes. We
cannot be under the illusion of the spectacle, while we are watching the
movements of the ropes and pulleys which dispose it.
The chapter in which Fielding describes the behaviour of Partridge at
the theatre affords so complete an illustration of our proposition, that
we cannot refrain from quoting some parts of it.

"Partridge gave that credit to Mr Garrick which he had denied to Jones,
and fell into so violent a trembling that his knees knocked against each
other. Jones asked him what was the matter, and whether he was afraid of
the warrior upon the stage? --'O, la, sir,' said he, 'I perceive now it
is what you told me. I am not afraid of anything, for I know it is but
a play; and if it was really a ghost, it could do one no harm at such a
distance and in so much company; and yet, if I was frightened, I am not
the only person. '--'Why, who,' cries Jones, 'dost thou take to be such
a coward here besides thyself? '--'Nay, you may call me a coward if you
will; but if that little man there upon the stage is not frightened, I
never saw any man frightened in my life'. . . He sat with his eyes fixed
partly on the ghost and partly on Hamlet, and with his mouth open; the
same passions which succeeded each other in Hamlet, succeeding likewise
in him. . .

"Little more worth remembering occurred during the play, at the end of
which Jones asked him which of the players he liked best? To this he
answered, with some appearance of indignation at the question, 'The
King, without doubt. '--'Indeed, Mr Partridge,' says Mrs Miller, 'you
are not of the same opinion with the town; for they are all agreed that
Hamlet is acted by the best player who was ever on the stage. '--'He the
best player! ' cries Partridge, with a contemptuous sneer; 'why I could
act as well as he myself. I am sure if I had seen a ghost, I should have
looked in the very same manner, and done just as he did. And then to be
sure, in that scene, as you called it, between him and his mother, where
you told me he acted so fine, why any man, that is, any good man, that
had such a mother, would have done exactly the same. I know you are
only joking with me; but indeed, madam, though I never was at a play in
London, yet I have seen acting before in the country, and the King for
my money; he speaks all his words distinctly, and half as loud again as
the other. Anybody may see he is an actor. '"

In this excellent passage Partridge is represented as a very bad
theatrical critic. But none of those who laugh at him possess the tithe
of his sensibility to theatrical excellence. He admires in the wrong
place; but he trembles in the right place. It is indeed because he is
so much excited by the acting of Garrick, that he ranks him below the
strutting, mouthing performer, who personates the King. So, we have
heard it said that, in some parts of Spain and Portugal, an actor who
should represent a depraved character finely, instead of calling down
the applauses of the audience, is hissed and pelted without mercy.
It would be the same in England, if we, for one moment, thought that
Shylock or Iago was standing before us. While the dramatic art was in
its infancy at Athens, it produced similar effects on the ardent and
imaginative spectators. It is said that they blamed Aeschylus for
frightening them into fits with his Furies. Herodotus tells us that,
when Phyrnichus produced his tragedy on the fall of Miletus, they fined
him in a penalty of a thousand drachmas for torturing their feelings by
so pathetic an exhibition. They did not regard him as a great artist,
but merely as a man who had given them pain. When they woke from the
distressing illusion, they treated the author of it as they would have
treated a messenger who should have brought them fatal and alarming
tidings which turned out to be false. In the same manner, a child
screams with terror at the sight of a person in an ugly mask. He has
perhaps seen the mask put on. But his imagination is too strong for his
reason; and he entreats that it may be taken off.

We should act in the same manner if the grief and horror produced in us
by works of the imagination amounted to real torture. But in us these
emotions are comparatively languid. They rarely affect our appetite or
our sleep. They leave us sufficiently at ease to trace them to their
causes, and to estimate the powers which produce them. Our attention is
speedily diverted from the images which call forth our tears to the art
by which those images have been selected and combined. We applaud the
genius of the writer. We applaud our own sagacity and sensibility; and
we are comforted.

Yet, though we think that in the progress of nations towards refinement
the reasoning powers are improved at the expense of the imagination, we
acknowledge that to this rule there are many apparent exceptions. We
are not, however, quite satisfied that they are more than apparent. Men
reasoned better, for example, in the time of Elizabeth than in the time
of Egbert; and they also wrote better poetry. But we must distinguish
between poetry as a mental act, and poetry as a species of composition.
If we take it in the latter sense, its excellence depends not solely on
the vigour of the imagination, but partly also on the instruments which
the imagination employs. Within certain limits, therefore, poetry may be
improving while the poetical faculty is decaying. The vividness of the
picture presented to the reader is not necessarily proportioned to the
vividness of the prototype which exists in the mind of the writer. In
the other arts we see this clearly. Should a man, gifted by nature with
all the genius of Canova, attempt to carve a statue without instruction
as to the management of his chisel, or attention to the anatomy of
the human body, he would produce something compared with which the
Highlander at the door of a snuff shop would deserve admiration. If an
uninitiated Raphael were to attempt a painting, it would be a mere daub;
indeed, the connoisseurs say that the early works of Raphael are little
better. Yet, who can attribute this to want of imagination? Who can
doubt that the youth of that great artist was passed amidst an ideal
world of beautiful and majestic forms? Or, who will attribute the
difference which appears between his first rude essays and his
magnificent Transfiguration to a change in the constitution of his
mind? In poetry, as in painting and sculpture, it is necessary that
the imitator should be well acquainted with that which he undertakes to
imitate, and expert in the mechanical part of his art. Genius will not
furnish him with a vocabulary: it will not teach him what word most
exactly corresponds to his idea, and will most fully convey it to
others: it will not make him a great descriptive poet, till he has
looked with attention on the face of nature; or a great dramatist,
till he has felt and witnessed much of the influence of the passions.
Information and experience are, therefore, necessary; not for the
purpose of strengthening the imagination, which is never so strong as in
people incapable of reasoning--savages, children, madmen, and
dreamers; but for the purpose of enabling the artist to communicate his
conceptions to others.

In a barbarous age the imagination exercises a despotic power. So strong
is the perception of what is unreal that it often overpowers all the
passions of the mind and all the sensations of the body. At first,
indeed, the phantasm remains undivulged, a hidden treasure, a wordless
poetry, an invisible painting, a silent music, a dream of which the
pains and pleasures exist to the dreamer alone, a bitterness which the
heart only knoweth, a joy with which a stranger intermeddleth not. The
machinery, by which ideas are to be conveyed from one person to another,
is as yet rude and defective. Between mind and mind there is a great
gulf. The imitative arts do not exist, or are in their lowest state.
But the actions of men amply prove that the faculty which gives birth
to those arts is morbidly active. It is not yet the inspiration of poets
and sculptors; but it is the amusement of the day, the terror of the
night, the fertile source of wild superstitions. It turns the clouds
into gigantic shapes, and the winds into doleful voices. The belief
which springs from it is more absolute and undoubting than any which can
be derived from evidence. It resembles the faith which we repose in our
own sensations. Thus, the Arab, when covered with wounds, saw nothing
but the dark eyes and the green kerchief of a beckoning Houri. The
Northern warrior laughed in the pangs of death when he thought of the
mead of Valhalla.

The first works of the imagination are, as we have said, poor and rude,
not from the want of genius, but from the want of materials. Phidias
could have done nothing with an old tree and a fish-bone, or Homer with
the language of New Holland.

Yet the effect of these early performances, imperfect as they must
necessarily be, is immense. All deficiencies are supplied by the
susceptibility of those to whom they are addressed. We all know what
pleasure a wooden doll, which may be bought for sixpence, will afford
to a little girl. She will require no other company. She will nurse it,
dress it, and talk to it all day. No grown-up man takes half so much
delight in one of the incomparable babies of Chantrey. In the same
manner, savages are more affected by the rude compositions of their
bards than nations more advanced in civilisation by the greatest
master-pieces of poetry.

In process of time, the instruments by which the imagination works are
brought to perfection. Men have not more imagination than their rude
ancestors. We strongly suspect that they have much less. But they
produce better works of imagination. Thus, up to a certain period, the
diminution of the poetical powers is far more than compensated by the
improvement of all the appliances and means of which those powers
stand in need. Then comes the short period of splendid and consummate
excellence. And then, from causes against which it is vain to struggle,
poetry begins to decline. The progress of language, which was at first
favourable, becomes fatal to it, and, instead of compensating for the
decay of the imagination, accelerates that decay, and renders it more
obvious. When the adventurer in the Arabian tale anointed one of his
eyes with the contents of the magical box, all the riches of the earth,
however widely dispersed, however sacredly concealed, became visible to
him. But, when he tried the experiment on both eyes, he was struck
with blindness. What the enchanted elixir was to the sight of the body,
language is to the sight of the imagination. At first it calls up
a world of glorious allusions; but, when it becomes too copious, it
altogether destroys the visual power.

As the development of the mind proceeds, symbols, instead of being
employed to convey images, are substituted for them. Civilised men think
as they trade, not in kind, but by means of a circulating medium. In
these circumstances, the sciences improve rapidly, and criticism among
the rest; but poetry, in the highest sense of the word, disappears. Then
comes the dotage of the fine arts, a second childhood, as feeble as the
former, and far more hopeless. This is the age of critical poetry, of
poetry by courtesy, of poetry to which the memory, the judgment, and the
wit contribute far more than the imagination. We readily allow that many
works of this description are excellent: we will not contend with those
who think them more valuable than the great poems of an earlier period.
We only maintain that they belong to a different species of composition,
and are produced by a different faculty.

It is some consolation to reflect that this critical school of poetry
improves as the science of criticism improves; and that the science
of criticism, like every other science, is constantly tending towards
perfection. As experiments are multiplied, principles are better
understood.

In some countries, in our own for example, there has been an interval
between the downfall of the creative school and the rise of the
critical, a period during which imagination has been in its decrepitude,
and taste in its infancy. Such a revolutionary interregnum as this will
be deformed by every species of extravagance.

The first victory of good taste is over the bombast and conceits which
deform such times as these. But criticism is still in a very imperfect
state. What is accidental is for a long time confounded with what is
essential. General theories are drawn from detached facts. How many
hours the action of a play may be allowed to occupy,--how many similes
an Epic Poet may introduce into his first book,--whether a piece, which
is acknowledged to have a beginning and an end, may not be without a
middle, and other questions as puerile as these, formerly occupied the
attention of men of letters in France, and even in this country.
Poets, in such circumstances as these, exhibit all the narrowness and
feebleness of the criticism by which their manner has been fashioned.
From outrageous absurdity they are preserved indeed by their timidity.
But they perpetually sacrifice nature and reason to arbitrary canons of
taste. In their eagerness to avoid the mala prohibita of a foolish
code, they are perpetually rushing on the mala in se. Their great
predecessors, it is true, were as bad critics as themselves, or perhaps
worse, but those predecessors, as we have attempted to show, were
inspired by a faculty independent of criticism, and, therefore, wrote
well while they judged ill.

In time men begin to take more rational and comprehensive views of
literature. The analysis of poetry, which, as we have remarked, must at
best be imperfect, approaches nearer and nearer to exactness. The merits
of the wonderful models of former times are justly appreciated. The
frigid productions of a later age are rated at no more than their proper
value. Pleasing and ingenious imitations of the manner of the great
masters appear. Poetry has a partial revival, a Saint Martin's Summer,
which, after a period of dreariness and decay, agreeably reminds us
of the splendour of its June. A second harvest is gathered in; though,
growing on a spent soil, it has not the heart of the former. Thus, in
the present age, Monti has successfully imitated the style of Dante;
and something of the Elizabethan inspiration has been caught by several
eminent countrymen of our own. But never will Italy produce another
Inferno, or England another Hamlet. We look on the beauties of the
modern imaginations with feelings similar to those with which we see
flowers disposed in vases, to ornament the drawing-rooms of a capital.
We doubtless regard them with pleasure, with greater pleasure, perhaps,
because, in the midst of a place ungenial to them, they remind us of the
distant spots on which they flourish in spontaneous exuberance. But we
miss the sap, the freshness, and the bloom. Or, if we may borrow another
illustration from Queen Scheherezade, we would compare the writers
of this school to the jewellers who were employed to complete the
unfinished window of the palace of Aladdin. Whatever skill or cost could
do was done. Palace and bazaar were ransacked for precious stones. Yet
the artists, with all their dexterity, with all their assiduity, and
with all their vast means, were unable to produce anything comparable
to the wonders which a spirit of a higher order had wrought in a single
night.

The history of every literature with which we are acquainted confirms,
we think, the principles which we have laid down. In Greece we see
the imaginative school of poetry gradually fading into the critical.
Aeschylus and Pindar were succeeded by Sophocles, Sophocles by
Euripides, Euripides by the Alexandrian versifiers. Of these last,
Theocritus alone has left compositions which deserve to be read. The
splendour and grotesque fairyland of the Old Comedy, rich with such
gorgeous hues, peopled with such fantastic shapes, and vocal alternately
with the sweetest peals of music and the loudest bursts of elvish
laughter, disappeared forever. The master-pieces of the New Comedy are
known to us by Latin translations of extraordinary merit. From these
translations, and from the expressions of the ancient critics, it is
clear that the original compositions were distinguished by grace and
sweetness, that they sparkled with wit, and abounded with pleasing
sentiment; but that the creative power was gone. Julius Caesar called
Terence a half Menander,--a sure proof that Menander was not a quarter
Aristophanes.

The literature of the Romans was merely a continuation of the literature
of the Greeks. The pupils started from the point at which their masters
had, in the course of many generations arrived. They thus almost wholly
missed the period of original invention. The only Latin poets whose
writings exhibit much vigour of imagination are Lucretius and Catullus.
The Augustan age produced nothing equal to their finer passages.

In France that licensed jester, whose jingling cap and motley coat
concealed more genius than ever mustered in the saloon of Ninon or of
Madame Geoffrin, was succeeded by writers as decorous and as tiresome as
gentlemen ushers.

The poetry of Italy and of Spain has undergone the same change. But
nowhere has the revolution been more complete and violent than in
England. The same person who, when a boy, had clapped his thrilling
hands at the first representation of the Tempest might, without
attaining to a marvellous longevity, have lived to read the earlier
works of Prior and Addison. The change, we believe, must, sooner or
later, have taken place. But its progress was accelerated, and its
character modified, by the political occurrences of the times, and
particularly by two events, the closing of the theatres under the
Commonwealth, and the restoration of the House of Stuart.

We have said that the critical and poetical faculties are not only
distinct, but almost incompatible. The state of our literature during
the reigns of Elizabeth and James the First is a strong confirmation of
this remark. The greatest works of imagination that the world has ever
seen were produced at that period. The national taste, in the meantime,
was to the last degree detestable. Alliterations, puns, antithetical
forms of expression lavishly employed where no corresponding opposition
existed between the thoughts expressed, strained allegories, pedantic
allusions, everything, in short, quaint and affected, in matter and
manner, made up what was then considered as fine writing. The eloquence
of the bar, the pulpit, and the council-board, was deformed by conceits
which would have disgraced the rhyming shepherds of an Italian academy.
The king quibbled on the throne. We might, indeed, console ourselves by
reflecting that his majesty was a fool. But the chancellor quibbled in
concert from the wool-sack: and the chancellor was Francis Bacon. It
is needless to mention Sidney and the whole tribe of Euphuists; for
Shakspeare himself, the greatest poet that ever lived, falls into the
same fault whenever he means to be particularly fine. While he abandons
himself to the impulse of his imagination, his compositions are not only
the sweetest and the most sublime, but also the most faultless, that the
world has ever seen. But, as soon as his critical powers come into play,
he sinks to the level of Cowley; or rather he does ill what Cowley did
well. All that is bad in his works is bad elaborately, and of malice
aforethought. The only thing wanting to make them perfect was, that he
should never have troubled himself with thinking whether they were
good or not. Like the angels in Milton, he sinks "with compulsion and
laborious flight. " His natural tendency is upwards. That he may soar, it
is only necessary that he should not struggle to fall. He resembles an
American Cacique, who, possessing in unmeasured abundance the metals
which in polished societies are esteemed the most precious, was utterly
unconscious of their value, and gave up treasures more valuable than the
imperial crowns of other countries, to secure some gaudy and far-fetched
but worthless bauble, a plated button, or a necklace of coloured glass.

We have attempted to show that, as knowledge is extended and as the
reason develops itself, the imitative arts decay. We should, therefore,
expect that the corruption of poetry would commence in the educated
classes of society. And this, in fact, is almost constantly the case.
The few great works of imagination which appear in a critical age are,
almost without exception, the works of uneducated men. Thus, at a
time when persons of quality translated French romances, and when the
universities celebrated royal deaths in verses about tritons and fauns,
a preaching tinker produced the Pilgrim's Progress. And thus a ploughman
startled a generation which had thought Hayley and Beattie great poets,
with the adventures of Tam O'Shanter. Even in the latter part of the
reign of Elizabeth the fashionable poetry had degenerated. It retained
few vestiges of the imagination of earlier times. It had not yet been
subjected to the rules of good taste. Affectation had completely tainted
madrigals and sonnets. The grotesque conceits and the tuneless numbers
of Donne were, in the time of James, the favourite models of composition
at Whitehall and at the Temple. But, though the literature of the Court
was in its decay, the literature of the people was in its perfection.
The Muses had taken sanctuary in the theatres, the haunts of a class
whose taste was not better than that of the Right Honourables and
singular good Lords who admired metaphysical love-verses, but whose
imagination retained all its freshness and vigour; whose censure and
approbation might be erroneously bestowed, but whose tears and laughter
was never in the wrong. The infection which had tainted lyric and
didactic poetry had but slightly and partially touched the drama. While
the noble and the learned were comparing eyes to burning-glasses, and
tears to terrestrial globes, coyness to an enthymeme, absence to a pair
of compasses, and an unrequited passion to the fortieth remainder-man in
an entail, Juliet leaning from the balcony, and Miranda smiling over the
chess-board, sent home many spectators, as kind and simple-hearted
as the master and mistress of Fletcher's Ralpho, to cry themselves to
sleep.

No species of fiction is so delightful to us as the old English drama.
Even its inferior productions possess a charm not to be found in any
other kind of poetry. It is the most lucid mirror that ever was held up
to nature. The creations of the great dramatists of Athens produce the
effect of magnificent sculptures, conceived by a mighty imagination,
polished with the utmost delicacy, embodying ideas of ineffable majesty
and beauty, but cold, pale, and rigid, with no bloom on the cheek, and
no speculation in the eye. In all the draperies, the figures, and the
faces, in the lovers and the tyrants, the Bacchanals and the Furies,
there is the same marble chillness and deadness. Most of the characters
of the French stage resemble the waxen gentlemen and ladies in the
window of a perfumer, rouged, curled, and bedizened, but fixed in
such stiff attitudes, and staring with eyes expressive of such utter
unmeaningness, that they cannot produce an illusion for a single moment.
In the English plays alone is to be found the warmth, the mellowness,
and the reality of painting. We know the minds of men and women, as we
know the faces of the men and women of Vandyke.

The excellence of these works is in a great measure the result of
two peculiarities, which the critics of the French school consider as
defects,--from the mixture of tragedy and comedy, and from the length
and extent of the action. The former is necessary to render the drama
a just representation of a world in which the laughers and weepers are
perpetually jostling each other,--in which every event has its
serious and ludicrous side. The latter enables us to form an intimate
acquaintance with characters with which we could not possibly become
familiar during the few hours to which the unities restrict the poet.
In this respect, the works of Shakspeare, in particular, are miracles
of art. In a piece, which may be read aloud in three hours, we see a
character gradually unfold all its recesses to us. We see it change with
the change of circumstances. The petulant youth rises into the politic
and warlike sovereign. The profuse and courteous philanthropist sours
into a hater and scorner of his kind. The tyrant is altered, by the
chastening of affliction, into a pensive moralist. The veteran general,
distinguished by coolness, sagacity, and self-command, sinks under a
conflict between love strong as death, and jealousy cruel as the grave.
The brave and loyal subject passes, step by step, to the extremities
of human depravity. We trace his progress, from the first dawnings of
unlawful ambition to the cynical melancholy of his impenitent remorse.