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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 şun 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.

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 ef fect, 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 forever 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 levi ty. Thus far criticism will go. But some thing is still wanting. A man might have a those qualities, and every other quality ic the most minute examiner can introduce into his catalogue of the virtues and facts of Hotspur, and yet he would not be Hotspur. Almost every thing that we have said of him applies equally to Falconbrid. Yet in the mouth of Falconbridge, most of his speeches would seem out of place. a real life, this perpetually occurs. We are sensible of wide differences between men whom, if we are 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 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 genus mammalia, and the order gliris. There are 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

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

ralist is to a real porcupine, the remarks of | greatest of human calamities, without once vio criticism are to the images of poetry. What lating the reverence due to it; at that discrimiit so imperfectly decomposes, it cannot per- nating delicacy of touch which makes a characfectly reconstruct. It is evidently as impossi- ter exquisitely ridiculous without impairing its ble to produce an Othello or a Macbeth by re- worth, its grace, or its dignity. In Don Quixote versing an analytical process so defective as are several dissertations on the principles of it would be for an anatomist to form a living poetic and dramatic writing. No passages in man out of the fragments of his dissecting the whole work exhibit stronger marks of labour room. In both cases, the vital principle eludes and attention; and no passages in any work the finest instruments, and vanishes in the with which we are acquainted are more worthvery instant in which its seat is touched. | less and puerile. In our time they would scarcely Hence those who, trusting to their critical obtain admittance into the literary department skill, attempt to write poems, give us not im- of the Morning Post. Every reader of the Diages of things, but catalogues of qualities. vine Comedy must be struck by the veneration Their characters are allegories; not good men which Dante expresses for writers far inferior and bad men, but cardinal virtues and deadly to himself. He will not lift up his eyes from sins. We seem to have fallen among the ac- the ground in the presence of Brunetto, all quaintances of our old friend Christian: some- whose works are not worth the worst of his times we meet Mistrust and Timorous: some-own hundred cantos. He does not venture to times Mr. Hate-good and Mr. Love-lust; and then again Prudence, Piety, and Charity.

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 Æneid. The most trivial passages he regards as ora

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 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 those awful and lovely creations on which laelements, that he becomes a critic. In the ter critics delight to dwell-Farinata lifting moment in which the skill of the artist is per- his haughty and tranquil brow from his couch ceived, the spell of the art is broken. 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 literarules 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 he pre-eminently excelled. Like the fool in causes which have not in the slightest degree the story, who ruined his dwelling by digging tended to produce them. They feel pleasure for gold, which, as he had dreamed, was conin reading a book. They never consider that cealed under its foundations, they laid waste this pleasure may be the effect of ideas, which one of the noblest works of human genius, by some unmeaning expression, striking on the seeking in it for buried treasures of wisdom, first link or a chain of associations, may have which existed only in their own wild reveries. called up in their own minds-that they have The finest passages were little valued till they themselves furnished to the author the beauties had been debased into some monstrous allewhich they admire. gory. Louder applause was given to the lecture on fate and free-will, or to the ridiculous astronomical theories, than to those remendous lines which disclose the secrets of the

Cervantes is the delight of all classes of readers. Every schoolboy thumbs to pieces the most wretched translations of his romance, 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

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MACAULAY'S MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS.

during the play, at the end of which Jones asked him which of the players he liked best. To "Little more worth remembering occurred dignation at the question, the King, without this he answered, with some appearance of indoubt.'-'Indeed, Mr. Fartridge,' says Mrs. Miller, 'you are not of the same opinion with the own; 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, be tween 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.'"

cesca 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. should perhaps say, that they felt them too much We to admire them. The progress of a nation from barbarism to civilization 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 darkbrowed 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 sented as a very bad theatrical critic. But pretty Poll, the boat with the shoulder-of-mut- none of those who laugh at him possess the In this excellent passage Partridge is repreton 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 him ing 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 calling down the applauses of the audience, is decays. We cannot at once enjoy the flowers hissed and pelted without mercy. It would be of the spring of life and the fruits of its autumn, the same in England, if we, for one moment, the pleasures of close investigation and those thought that Shylock or Iago was standing be of agreeable error. the front of the stage and behind the scenes. infancy at Athens, it produced similar effects We cannot sit at once in fore us. We cannot be under the illusion of the specta- on the ardent and imaginative spectators. It is While the dramatic art was in its cle, while we are watching the movements of said that they blamed schylus for frightening the ropes and pulleys which dispose it. us, that when Phrynichus produced his tragedy on the fall of Miletus, they fined him in a them into fits with his Furies. Herodotus tells 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, have treated a messenger who should have they treated the author of it as they would 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.

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. was the matter, and whether he was afraid of Jones asked him what the warrior upon the stage?-O, la, sir,' said he, 'I perceive now it is what you told me. I 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 he only person.'-Why, who,' cries Jones, lost thou take to be such a coward here besides yself?-Nay, you may call me a coward if u will; but if that little man there upon the age is not frightened, I never saw any man ghtened in my life.'... He sat with his eyes ed partly on the Ghost and partly on Hamlet, d with his mouth open; the same passions ich succeeded each other in Hamlet, suceded likewise in him.

grief and horror produced in us by works of the imagination amounted to real torture. We should act in the same manner, if the 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

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.

forth our tears, to the art by which those images the heart only knoweth, a joy with which a have been selected and combined. We applaud stranger intermeddleth not. The machinery, the genius of the writer. We applaud our own by which ideas are to be conveyed from one sagacity and sensibility, and we are comforted. person to another, is as yet rude and defective. Yet, though we think that, in the progress of Between mind and mind there is a great gulf. nations towards refinement, the reasoning The imitative arts do not exist, or are in their powers are improved at the expense of the ima- lowest state. But the actions of men amply gination, we acknowledge, that to this rule prove that the faculty which gives birth to there are many apparent exceptions. We are those arts is morbidly active. It is not yet the not, however, quite satisfied that they are more inspiration of poets and sculptors; but it is the than apparent. Men reasoned better, for ex- amusement of the day, the terror of the night, ample, in the time of Elizabeth than in the the fertile source of wild superstitions. It time of Egbert; and they also wrote better turns the clouds into gigantic shapes, and the poetry. But we must distinguish between poetry winds into doleful voices. The belief which and a mental act, and poetry as a species of springs from it is more absolute and undoubtcomposition. If we take it in the latter sense, ing than any which can be derived from eviits excellence depends, not solely on the vigour dence. It resembles the faith which we reof the imagination, but partly also on the in- pose in cur own sensations. Thus, the Arab, struments which the imagination employs. when covered with wounds, saw nothing but Within certain limits, therefore, poetry may be the dark eyes and the green kerchief of a beckimproving, while the poetical faculty is decay-oning Houri. The Northern warrior laughed ing. 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 Yet the effect of these early performances, something compared with which the High-imperfect as they must necessarily be, is imlander at the door of the snuff-shop would de- mense. All deficiencies are to be supplied serve admiration. If an uninitiated Raphael by the susceptibility of those to whom they are were to attempt a painting, it would be a mere addressed. We all know what pleasure a daub; indeed, the connoisseurs say, that the wooden doll, which may be bought for sixearly works of Raphael are little better. Yet, pence, will afford to a little girl. She will rewho can attribute this to want of imagination? quire no other company. She will nurse it, Who can doubt that the youth of that great ar- dress it, and talk to it all day. No grown-up tist was passed amidst an ideal world of beauti- man takes half so much delight in one of the ful and majestic forms? Or, who will attribute incomparable babies of Chantrey. In the same the difference which appears between his first manner, savages are more affected by the rude rude essays, and his magnificent Transfigura- compositions of their bards than nations more tion, to a change in the constitution of his advanced in civilization by the greatest masmind? In poetry, as in painting and sculpture, terpieces of poetry. 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

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, alt the riches of the earth, however widely dis persed, 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

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of glorious illusions, but when it becomes too | wonderful models of former times are justly copious, it altogether destroys the visual power. appreciated. The frigid productions of a later As the development of the mind proceeds, age are rated at no more than their proper symbols, instead of being employed to convey value. Pleasing and ingenious imitations of images, are substituted for them. Civilized the manner of the great masters appear. Poetmen think as they trade, not in kind, but by ry has a partial revival, a St. Martin's Summeans of a circulating medium. In these cir- mer, which, after a period of dreariness and cumstances the sciences improve rapidly, and decay, agreeably reminds us of the splendour criticism among the rest; but poetry, in the of its June. A second harvest is gathered in; highest sense of the word, disappears. Then though, growing on a spent soil, it has not the comes the dotage of the fine arts, a second heart of the former. Thus, in the present age, childhood, as feeble as the former, and far Monti has successfully imitated the style of more hopeless. This is the age of critical Dante; and something of the Elizabethan inpoetry, of poetry by courtesy, of poetry to spiration has been caught by several eminent which the memory, the judgment, and the wit countrymen of our own. contribute far more than the imagination. We produce another Inferno, or England another readily allow that many works of this descrip- Hamlet. We look on the beauties of the moBut never will Italy tion are excellent; we will not contend with dern imitations with feelings similar to those those who think them more valuable than the with which we see flowers disposed in vases great poems of an carlier period. We only to ornament the drawing-rooms of a capital. maintain that they belong to a different species We doubtless regard them with pleasure, with of composition, and are produced by a differ- greater pleasure, perhaps, because, in the midst ent faculty. of the distant spots on which they flourish in of a place ungenial to them, they remind us spontaneous exuberance. sap, the freshness, and the bloom. Or, if we may borrow another illustration from Queen But we miss the Scheherezade, we would compare the writers of this school to the jewellers who were emthe palace of Aladdin. Whatever skill or cost ployed to complete the unfinished window of 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 any thing comparable to the wonders which a spirit of a higher order had wrought in a single night.

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 im- we are acquainted confirms, we think, the The history of every literature with which perfect state. What is accidental is for a long principles which we have laid down. time confounded with what is essential. Ge- Greece we see the imaginative school of poetneral theories are drawn from detached facts.ry gradually fading into the critical. EschyIn How many hours the action of a play may be lus and Pindar were succeeded by Sophocles; allowed to occupy-how many similes an epic Sophocles by Euripides; Euripides by the poet may introduce into his first book-whe- Alexandrian versifiers. ther a piece which is acknowledged to have a critus alone has left compositions which debeginning and end may not be without a mid-serve to be read. The splendid and grotesque Of these last, Theodle, and other questions as puerile as these, fairy-land of the Old Comedy, rich with such formerly occupied the attention of men of let- gorgeous hues, peopled with such fantastic ters in France, and even in this country. shapes, and vocal alternately with the sweetPoets, in such circumstances as these, exhibit est peals of music and the loudest bursts of all the narrowness and feebleness of the criti- elvish laughter, disappeared forever. The cism by which their manner has been fashion- masterpieces of the New Comedy are known ed. From outrageous absurdity they are pre- to us by Latin translations of extraordinary served indeed by their timidity. perpetually sacrifice nature and reason to ar- expressions of the ancient critics, it is clear But they merit. From these translations, and from the bitrary canons of taste. In their eagerness to that the original compositions were distinavoid the mala prohibita of a foolish code, they guished by grace and sweetness, that they are perpetually rushing on the mala in se. sparkled with wit and abounded with pleasing Their great predecessors, it is true, were as sentiments, but that the creative power was bad critics as themselves, or perhaps worse; gone. Julius Cæsar called Terence a half but those predecessors, as we have attempted Menander-a sure proof that Menander was to show, were inspired by a faculty indepen- not a quarter Aristophanes. dent 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, inust at best be imperfect, approaches nearer and nearer to exactness. The merits of the

The literature of the Romans was merely a The pupils started from the point at which continuation of the literature of the Greeks. 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

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