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his nation is exchanged for the honest bitter-
ness of scorn and anger. He speaks like one
sick of the calamitous times and abject people
He pines for the
among whom his lot is cast.
strength and glory of ancient Rome, for the
fasces of Brutus and the sword of Scipio, the
gravity of the curule chair, and the bloody pomp
He seems to be
of the triumphal sacrifice.
transported back to the days, when eight hun-
dred thousand Italian warriors sprung to arms
at the rumour of a Gallic invasion. He breathes
all the spirit of those intrepid and haughty pa-
tricians, who forgot the dearest ties of nature
in the claims of public duty, who looked with
disdain on the elephants and on the gold of
Pyrrhus, and listened with unaltered compo-
sure to the tremendous tidings of Cannæ. Like
an ancient temple deformed by the barbarous
architecture of a later age, his character ac-
quires an interest from the very circumstances
which debase it. The original proportions are
rendered more striking, by the contrast which
they present to the mean and incongruous addi-
tions.

The influence of the sentiments which we have described was not apparent in his writings alone. His enthusiasm, barred from the career which it would have selected for itself, seems to have found a vent in desperate levity. He enjoyed a vindictive pleasure in outraging the opinions of a society which he despised. He became careless of those decencies which were expected from a man so highly distinguished in the literary and political world. The sarcastic bitterness of his conversation disgusted those who were more inclined to accuse his licentiousness than their own degeneracy, and who were unable to conceive the strength of those emotions which are concealed by the jests of the wretched, and by the follies of the wise.

The historical works of Machiavelli still remain to be considered. The life of Castruccio Castracani will occupy us for a very short time, and would scarcely have demanded our notice, had it not attracted a much greater share of public attention than it deserves. Few books, indeed, could be more interesting than a careful and judicious account, from such a pen, of the illustrious Prince of Lucca, the most eminent of those Italian chiefs, who, like Pisistratus and Gelon, acquired a power felt rather than seer, and resting, not on law or on prescription, but on the public favour and on their great personal qualities. Such a work would exhibit to us the real nature of that species of sovereignty, so singular and so often misunderstood, which the Greeks denominated tyranny, and which modified in some degree by the feudal system, re-appeared in the commonwealths But this little of Lombardy and Tuscany. composition of Machiavelli is in no sense a history. It has no pretensions to fidelity. It is a trifle, and not a very successful trifle. It is scarcely more authentic than the novel of Belphegor, and is very much duller.

The last great work of this illustrious man was the history of his native city. It was written by the command of the Pope, who, as chief of the house of Medici, was at that time sovereign of Florence. The characters of Cosmo,

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of Piero, and of Lorenzo, are, however, treated
with a freedom and impartiality equally honour-
able to the writer and to the patron. The mise-
ries and humiliations of dependence, the bread
which is more bitter than every other food, the
stairs which are more painful than every other
assent, had not broken the spirit of Machi-
avelli. The most corrupting post in a corrupt
ing profession had not depraved the generous
heart of Clement.

The history does not appear to be the fruit
of much industry or research. It is unques-
tionably inaccurate. But it is elegant, lively,
and picturesque, beyond any other in the Ita-
lian language. The reader, we believe, carries
away from it a more vivid and a more faithful
The
impression of the national character and man-
ners, than from more correct accounts.
truth is, that the book belongs rather to ancient
than to modern literature. It is in the style,
not of Davila and Clarendon, but of Herodotus
and Tacitus; and the classical histories may
almost be called romances founded in fact.
The relation is, no doubt, in all its principal
But the numerous little
points, strictly true.
incidents which heighten the interest, the words,
the gestures, the looks, are evidently furnish-
ed by the imagination of the author. The fash-
ion of later times is different. A more exact
narrative is given by the writer. It may be
doubted whether more exact notions are con-
veyed to the reader. The best portraits are
those in which there is a slight mixture of cari-
cature; and we are not aware, that the best
histories are not those in which a little of the
exaggeration of fictitious narrative is judicious-
ly employed. Something is lost in accuracy;
but much is gained in effect. The fainter lines
are neglected; but the great characteristic
features are imprinted on the mind forever.

The history terminates with the death of Lorenzo de Medici. Machiavelli had, it seems, intended to continue it to a later period. But his death prevented the execution of his design; and the melancholy task of recording the desolation and shame of Italy devolved on Guicciardini.

Machiavelli lived long enough to see the commencement of the last struggle for Florentine liberty. Soon after his death, raonarchy was finally established-not such a monarchy as that of which Cosmo had laid the foundations deep in the constitution and feelings of his countrymen, and which Lorenzo had embellished with the trophies of every science and every art; but a loathsome tyranny, proud and mean, cruel and feeble, bigoted and lascivious. The character of Machiavelli was hateful to the new masters of Italy; and those parts of his theory, which were in strict accordance with their own daily practice, afforded a pretext for blackening his memory. His works were misrepresented by the learned, miscon strued by the ignorant, censured by the church, abused, with all the rancour of simu lated virtue, by the minions of a base despot. ism, and the priests of a baser superstition. The name of the man whose genius had illu minated all the dark places of policy, and to

*Dante Paradiso Canto xvii.

whose patriotic wisdom an oppressed people had owed their last chance of emancipation and revenge, passed into a proverb of infamy

For more than two hundred years his bones lay undistinguished. At length, an English nobleman paid the last honours to the greatest statesman of Florence. In the Church of Santa Croce, a monument was erected to his memory, which is contemplated with reverence by all who can distinguish the virtues

of a great mind through the corruptions of a degenerate age; and which will be approached with still deeper homage, when the object to which his public life was devoted shall be attained, when the foreign yoke shall be broken, when a second Proccita shall avenge the wrongs of Naples, when a happier Rienzi shall restore the good estate of Rome, when the streets of Florence and Bologna shall again resound with their ancient-war cry-Popolo; popolo; muoiano i tiranni!

DRYDEN.*

[EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1828.]

THE public voice has assigned to Dryden | though there may be no person to whom our 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 signalizing 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 canonization 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, al

The Poetical Works of JOHN DRYDEN. In two votumes University Eduion. London, 1826.

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 react 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 Lewis 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 assail ant 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 har lots, an empty treasury and a crowded harem, an army formidable only to those whom t

should have protected, a priesthood just reli- It is true that the man who is best able to gious enough to be intolerant, he might possi- take a machine to pieces, and who most clearbly, like every man of genius in France, have ly comprehends the manner in which all its imbibed extravagant prejudices against mo- wheels and springs conduce to its general efnarchy and Christianity. The wit which fect, will be the man most competent to form blasted the sophisms of Escobar, the impas- another machine of similar power. In all the sioned eloquence which defended the sisters branches of physical and moral science which of Port Royal, the intellectual hardihood which admit of perfect analysis, he who can resolve was not beaten down even by Papal autho- will be able to combine. But the analysis rity, might have raised him to the Patriarchate which criticism can effect of poetry is neces of the Philosophical Church. It was long dis- sarily imperfect. One element must forever puted whether the honour of inventing the elude its researches; and that is the very elemethod of Fluxions belonged to Newton or to ment by which poetry is poetry. In the deLeibnitz. It is now generally allowed that scription of nature, for example, a judicious these great men made the same discovery at reader will easily detect an incongruous imthe same time. Mathematical science, indeed, age. But he will find it impossible to explain had then reached such a point, that if neither in what consists the art of a writer who, in a of them had ever existed, the principle must few words, brings some spot before him so inevitably have occurred to some person within vividly that he shall know it as if he had lived a few years. So in our own time the doctrine there from childhood; while another, employ of rent now universally received by political ing the same materials, the same verdure, the economists, was propounded almost at the same water, and the same flowers, committing same moment, by two writers unconnected no inaccuracy, introducing nothing which can with each other. Preceding speculators had be positively pronounced superfluous, omitting long been blundering round about it; and it nothing which can be positively pronounced could not possibly have been missed much necessary, shall produce no more effect than longer by the most heedless inquirer. We an advertisement of a capital residence and a are inclined to think that, with respect to every desirable pleasure-ground. To take another great addition which has been made to the example, the great features of the character of stock of human knowledge, the case has been Hotspur are obvious to the most superficial similar; that without Copernicus we should reader. We at once perceive that his courage have been Copernicans, that without Colum- is splendid, his thirst of glory intense, his anibus America would have been discovered, mal spirits high, his temper careless, arbitrary, that without Locke we should have possessed and petulant; that he indulges his own humour a just theory of the origin of human ideas. without caring whose feelings he may woundSociety indeed has its great men and its or whose enmity he may provoke, by his levilittle men, as the earth has its mountains ty. Thus far criticism will go. But soemand its valleys. But the inequalities of in- thing is still wanting. A man might have all tellect, like the inequalities of the surface those qualities, and every other quality which of our globe, bear so small a proportion to the most minute examiner can introduce into the mass, that, in calculating its great revo- his catalogue of the virtues and faults of Hot lutions, they may safely be neglected. The spur, and yet he would not be Hotspur. Al sun illuminates the hills, while it is still below most every thing that we have said of him ap the horizon; and truth is discovered by the plies equally to Falconbridge. Yet in the highest minds a little before it becomes mani- mouth of Falconbridge, most of his speeches fest to the multitude. This is the extent of would seem out of place. In real life, this pertheir superiority. They are the first to catch petually occurs. We are sensible of wide dif and reflect a light, which, without their assist-ferences between men whom, if we are required ance, must, in a short time, be visible to those to describe them, we should describe in almost who lie far beneath them. the same terms. If we were attempting to draw The same remark will apply equally to the elaborate characters of them, we should scarcefine arts. The laws on which depend the pro-ly be able to point out any strong distinction; yet gress and decline of poetry, painting, and we approach them with feelings altogether dissoulpture, operate with little less certainty than similar. We cannot conceive of them as using those which regulate the periodical returns of the expressions or gestures of each other. Let heat and cold, of fertility and barrenness. us suppose that a zoologist should attempt to Those who seem to lead the public taste, are, give an account of some animal, a porcupine in general, merely outrunning it in the direc-for instance, to people who had never seen it. tion which it is spontaneously pursuing. With-The porcupine, he might say, is of the genus out a just apprehension of the laws to which mammalia, and the order gliris. There are we have alluded, the merits and defects of Dryden can be but imperfectly understood. We will, therefore, state what we conceive them to be

whiskers on its face; it is two feet long; it has four toes before, five behind, two foreteeth, and eight grinders. Its body is covered with hair and quills. And when all this had been The ages in which the masterpieces of ima- said, would any one of the auditors have gination have been produced, have by no formed a just idea of a porcupine? Would means been those in which taste has been any two of them have formed the same idea: most correct. It seems that the creative fa- There might exist innumerable races of aniculty and the critical faculty cannot exist toge-mals, possessing all the characteristics which ther in their highest perfection. The causes have been mentioned, yet altogether unlike to of this phenomenon it is not difficult to assign. each other. What the description of our natu

ralist is to a real porcupine, the remarks of |
criticism are to the images of poetry. What
it so imperfectly decomposes, it cannot per-
fectly reconstruct. It is evidently as impossi-
ble to produce an Othello or a Macbeth by re-
versing 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 im-
ages 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 ac-
quaintances of our old friend Christian: some-
times we meet Mistrust and Timorous: some-
times Mr. Hate-good and Mr. Love-lust; and
then again Prudence, Piety, and Charity.

greatest of human calamities, without once vio lating 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 Di vine 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 That critical discernment is not sufficient to idolatry. If indeed it had been excited by the make men poets is generally allowed. Why elegant, splendid and harmonious diction of it should keep them from becoming poets, is the Roman poet, it would not have been altonot perhaps equally evident. But the fact is, gether unreasonable; but it is rather as an authat poetry requires not an examining, but a thority on all points of philosophy, than as a believing frame of mind. Those feel it most, work of imagination, that he values the Æneid. and write it best, who forget that it is a work The most trivial passages he regards as oraof art; to whom its imitations, like the reali- cles of the highest authority, and of the most ties from which they are taken, are subjects recondite meaning. He describes his connot for connoisseurship, but for tears and ductor as the sea of all wisdom, the sun which laughter, resentment and affection, who are too heals every disordered sight. As he judged of much under the influence of the illusion to ad- Virgil, the Italians of the fourteenth century mire the genius which has produced it; who judged of him; they were proud of him; they are too much frightened for Ulysses in the praised him; they struck medals bearing his cave of Polyphemus, to care whether the pun head; they quarrelled for the honour of posabout Outis be good or bad; who forget that sessing his remains; they maintained professuch a person as Shakspeare ever existed, sors to expound his writings. But what they while they weep and curse with Lear. It is admired was not that mighty imagination by giving faith to the creations of the imagina- which called a new world into existence, and tion that a man becomes a poet. It is by treat- made all its sights and sounds familiar to the ing those creations as deceptions, and by re-eye and ear of the mind. They said little of solving 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.

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 SorThese considerations account for the absurd-dello-or the light which shone from the celesities into which the greatest writers have fal- tial smile of Beatrice. They extolled their len, when they have attempted to give general great poet for his smattering of ancient litera. rules for composition, or to pronounce judg-ture and history; for his logic and his divinity; ment on the works of others. They are unac-for his absurd physics, and his more absurd customed to analyze what they feel; they, metaphysics; for every thing but that in which 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 or 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.

he pre-eminently excelled. Like the fool in the story, who ruined his dwelling by digging for gold, which, as he had dreamed, was con cealed 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 alle. gory. Louder applause was given to the lecCervantes is the delight of all classes of ture on fate and free-will, or to the ridiculous readers. Every schoolboy thumbs to pieces astronomical theories, than to those rementhe most wretched translations of his romance, dous lines which disclose the secrets of the and knows the lantern jaws of the Knight-tower of hunger; or to that half-told tale c 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

guilty love, so passionate and so full of tears.

We do not mean to say that the contempo. raries of Dante read, with less emotion than their descendants, of Ugolino groping among the wasted corpses of his children, or of Fran D

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"Little more worth remembering occurred cesca starting at the tremulous kiss, and dropping the fatal volume. Far from it. We be- during the play, at the end of which Jones asked lieve that they admired these things less than him which of the players he liked best. To We this he answered, with some appearance of inourselves, but that they felt them more. should perhaps say, that they felt them too much dignation at the question, the King, without to admire them. The progress of a nation from doubt.'-'Indeed, Mr. Fartridge,' says Mrs. Milbarbarism to civilization produces a change Jer, 'you are not of the same opinion with the similar to that which takes place during the own; for they are all agreed that Hamlet is progress of an individual from infancy to ma- acted by the best player who was ever on the He the best player!' cries Partridge, ture age. What man does not remember with stage.'-' regret the first time that he read Robinson Cru- with a contemptuous sneer; 'why I could act soe? Then, indeed, he was unable to appreci- as well as he myself. I am sure, if I had seen ate the powers of the writer; or rather, he nei- a ghost, I should have looked in the very same ther knew nor cared whether the book had a manner, and done just as he did. And then, writer at all. He probably thought it not half to be sure, in that scene, as you called it, beso fine as some rant of Macpherson about dark- tween him and his mother, where you told me browed Foldath, and white-bosomed Strina- he acted so fine, why, any man, that is any dona. He now values Fingal and Temora good man, that had such a mother, would have I know you are only only as showing with how little evidence a done exactly the same. story may be believed, and with how little merit joking with me; but indeed, madam, though I a book may be popular. Of the romance of never was at a play in London, yet I have seen Defoe he entertains the highest opinion. He acting before in the country, and the King for perceives the hand of a master in ten thousand my money; he speaks all his words distinctly, touches, which formerly he passed by without and half as loud again as the other. Anybody notice. But though he understands the merits may see he is an actor.' In this excellent passage Partridge is repreof the narrative better than formerly, he is far less interested by it. Xury, and Friday, and sented as a very bad theatrical critic. pretty Poll, the boat with the shoulder-of-mut- none of those who laugh at him possess the ton sail, and the canoe which could not be tithe of his sensibility to theatrical excellence. brought down to the water's edge, the tent with He admires in the wrong place; but he trem its hedge and ladders, the preserve of kids, and bles in the right place. It is indeed because he the den where the old goat died, can never is so much excited by the acting of Garrick, again be to him the realities which they were. that he ranks him below the strutting, mouthThe days when his favourite volume set himing performer, who personates the King. So, upon making wheel-barrows and chairs, upon we have heard it said, that in some parts of digging caves and fencing huts in the garden, Spain and Portugal, an actor who should recan never return. Such is the law of our na-present a depraved character finely, instead of ture. 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 We cannot sit at once in of agreeable error. 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.

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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 Jones asked him what against each other. was the matter, and whether he was afraid of the warrior upon the stage?-'O, la, sir,' said I ne, I perceive now it is what you told me. am not afraid of any thing, 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, succeeded likewise in him.

Bul

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 be-
While the dramatic art was in its
fore us.
infancy at Athens, it produced similar effects
on the ardent and imaginative spectators. It is
said that they blamed Eschylus for frightening
them into fits with his Furies. Herodotus tells
us, that when Phrynichus produced his trage
dy 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 per-
son 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 cal

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