Classic Poem

Quid quod praefatione praemunierim libellum, qua conor omnem offendiculi
ansam praecidere? Neque quicquam addubito, quin ea candidis omnibus
faciat satis. Quid autem facias istis, qui vel ob ingenii pertinaciam
sibi satisfieri nolint, vel stupidiores sint, quam ut satisfactionem
intelligant? Nam quemadmodum Simonides dixit, Thessalos hebetiores esse,
quam ut possint a se decipi, ita quosdam videas stupidiores, quam ut
placari queant. Adhaec, non mirum est invenire quod calumnietur,
qui nihil aliud quaerit, nisi quod calumnietur. ERASMUS ad Dorpium,
Theologum.


In the rifacimento of THE FRIEND, I have inserted extracts from the
CONCIONES AD POPULUM, printed, though scarcely published, in the year
1795, in the very heat and height of my anti-ministerial enthusiasm:
these in proof that my principles of politics have sustained no
change.--In the present chapter, I have annexed to my Letters
from Germany, with particular reference to that, which contains a
disquisition on the modern drama, a critique on the Tragedy of BERTRAM,
written within the last twelve months: in proof, that I have been as
falsely charged with any fickleness in my principles of taste.--The
letter was written to a friend: and the apparent abruptness with which
it begins, is owing to the omission of the introductory sentences.

You remember, my dear Sir, that Mr. Whitbread, shortly before his death,
proposed to the assembled subscribers of Drury Lane Theatre, that the
concern should be farmed to some responsible individual under certain
conditions and limitations: and that his proposal was rejected,
not without indignation, as subversive of the main object, for the
attainment of which the enlightened and patriotic assemblage of
philodramatists had been induced to risk their subscriptions. Now this
object was avowed to be no less than the redemption of the British stage
not only from horses, dogs, elephants, and the like zoological rarities,
but also from the more pernicious barbarisms and Kotzebuisms in morals
and taste. Drury Lane was to be restored to its former classical renown;
Shakespeare, Jonson, and Otway, with the expurgated muses of Vanbrugh,
Congreve, and Wycherley, were to be reinaugurated in their rightful
dominion over British audiences; and the Herculean process was to
commence, by exterminating the speaking monsters imported from the banks
of the Danube, compared with which their mute relations, the emigrants
from Exeter 'Change, and Polito (late Pidcock's) show-carts, were tame
and inoffensive. Could an heroic project, at once so refined and so
arduous, be consistently entrusted to, could its success be rationally
expected from, a mercenary manager, at whose critical quarantine the
lucri bonus odor would conciliate a bill of health to the plague in
person? No! As the work proposed, such must be the work-masters. Rank,
fortune, liberal education, and (their natural accompaniments, or
consequences) critical discernment, delicate tact, disinterestedness,
unsuspected morals, notorious patriotism, and tried Maecenasship, these
were the recommendations that influenced the votes of the proprietary
subscribers of Drury Lane Theatre, these the motives that occasioned the
election of its Supreme Committee of Management. This circumstance alone
would have excited a strong interest in the public mind, respecting the
first production of the Tragic Muse which had been announced under such
auspices, and had passed the ordeal of such judgments: and the tragedy,
on which you have requested my judgment, was the work on which the great
expectations, justified by so many causes, were doomed at length to
settle.

But before I enter on the examination of BERTRAM, or THE CASTLE OF ST.
ALDOBRAND, I shall interpose a few words, on the phrase German Drama,
which I hold to be altogether a misnomer. At the time of Lessing, the
German stage, such as it was, appears to have been a flat and servile
copy of the French. It was Lessing who first introduced the name and the
works of Shakespeare to the admiration of the Germans; and I should not
perhaps go too far, if I add, that it was Lessing who first proved to
all thinking men, even to Shakespeare's own countrymen, the true nature
of his apparent irregularities. These, he demonstrated, were deviations
only from the accidents of the Greek tragedy; and from such accidents as
hung a heavy weight on the wings of the Greek poets, and narrowed
their flight within the limits of what we may call the heroic opera. He
proved, that, in all the essentials of art, no less than in the truth of
nature, the Plays of Shakespeare were incomparably more coincident
with the principles of Aristotle, than the productions of Corneille
and Racine, notwithstanding the boasted regularity of the latter. Under
these convictions were Lessing's own dramatic works composed. Their
deficiency is in depth and imagination: their excellence is in the
construction of the plot; the good sense of the sentiments; the sobriety
of the morals; and the high polish of the diction and dialogue. In
short, his dramas are the very antipodes of all those which it has been
the fashion of late years at once to abuse and enjoy, under the name of
the German drama. Of this latter, Schiller's ROBBERS was the earliest
specimen; the first fruits of his youth, (I had almost said of his
boyhood), and as such, the pledge, and promise of no ordinary genius.
Only as such, did the maturer judgment of the author tolerate the Play.
During his whole life he expressed himself concerning this production
with more than needful asperity, as a monster not less offensive to good
taste, than to sound morals; and, in his latter years, his indignation
at the unwonted popularity of the ROBBERS seduced him into the contrary
extremes, viz. a studied feebleness of interest, (as far as the interest
was to be derived from incidents and the excitement of curiosity);
a diction elaborately metrical; the affectation of rhymes; and the
pedantry of the chorus.

But to understand the true character of the ROBBERS, and of the
countless imitations which were its spawn, I must inform you, or at
least call to your recollection, that, about that time, and for some
years before it, three of the most popular books in the German language
were, the translations Of YOUNG'S NIGHT THOUGHTS, HERVEY'S MEDITATIONS,
and RICHARDSON'S CLARISSA HARLOW. Now we have only to combine the
bloated style and peculiar rhythm of Hervey, which is poetic only on
account of its utter unfitness for prose, and might as appropriately
be called prosaic, from its utter unfitness for poetry; we have only,
I repeat, to combine these Herveyisms with the strained thoughts, the
figurative metaphysics and solemn epigrams of Young on the one hand; and
with the loaded sensibility, the minute detail, the morbid consciousness
of every thought and feeling in the whole flux and reflux of the mind,
in short the self-involution and dreamlike continuity of Richardson on
the other hand; and then to add the horrific incidents, and mysterious
villains, (geniuses of supernatural intellect, if you will take the
authors' words for it, but on a level with the meanest ruffians of
the condemned cells, if we are to judge by their actions and
contrivances)--to add the ruined castles, the dungeons, the trap-doors,
the skeletons, the flesh-and-blood ghosts, and the perpetual moonshine
of a modern author, (themselves the literary brood of the CASTLE OF
OTRANTO, the translations of which, with the imitations and improvements
aforesaid, were about that time beginning to make as much noise in
Germany as their originals were making in England),--and as the compound
of these ingredients duly mixed, you will recognize the so-called German
drama. The olla podrida thus cooked up, was denounced, by the best
critics in Germany, as the mere cramps of weakness, and orgasms of a
sickly imagination on the part of the author, and the lowest provocation
of torpid feeling on that of the readers. The old blunder, however,
concerning the irregularity and wildness of Shakespeare, in which the
German did but echo the French, who again were but the echoes of our own
critics, was still in vogue, and Shakespeare was quoted as authority for
the most anti-Shakespearean drama. We have indeed two poets who wrote as
one, near the age of Shakespeare, to whom, (as the worst characteristic
of their writings), the Coryphaeus of the present drama may challenge
the honour of being a poor relation, or impoverished descendant. For
if we would charitably consent to forget the comic humour, the wit, the
felicities of style, in other words, all the poetry, and nine-tenths of
all the genius of Beaumont and Fletcher, that which would remain becomes
a Kotzebue.

The so-called German drama, therefore, is English in its origin, English
in its materials, and English by re-adoption; and till we can prove that
Kotzebue, or any of the whole breed of Kotzebues, whether dramatists or
romantic writers, or writers of romantic dramas, were ever admitted
to any other shelf in the libraries of well-educated Germans than were
occupied by their originals, and apes' apes in their mother country,
we should submit to carry our own brat on our own shoulders; or rather
consider it as a lack-grace returned from transportation with such
improvements only in growth and manners as young transported convicts
usually come home with.

I know nothing that contributes more to a clearer insight into the true
nature of any literary phaenomenon, than the comparison of it with some
elder production, the likeness of which is striking, yet only apparent,
while the difference is real. In the present case this opportunity is
furnished us, by the old Spanish play, entitled Atheista Fulminato,
formerly, and perhaps still, acted in the churches and monasteries of
Spain, and which, under various names (Don Juan, the Libertine,
etc.) has had its day of favour in every country throughout Europe. A
popularity so extensive, and of a work so grotesque and extravagant,
claims and merits philosophical attention and investigation. The first
point to be noticed is, that the play is throughout imaginative.
Nothing of it belongs to the real world, but the names of the places and
persons. The comic parts, equally with the tragic; the living, equally
with the defunct characters, are creatures of the brain; as little
amenable to the rules of ordinary probability, as the Satan Of PARADISE
LOST, or the Caliban of THE TEMPEST, and therefore to be understood
and judged of as impersonated abstractions. Rank, fortune, wit, talent,
acquired knowledge, and liberal accomplishments, with beauty of person,
vigorous health, and constitutional hardihood,--all these advantages,
elevated by the habits and sympathies of noble birth and national
character, are supposed to have combined in Don Juan, so as to give him
the means of carrying into all its practical consequences the doctrine
of a godless nature, as the sole ground and efficient cause not only of
all things, events, and appearances, but likewise of all our thoughts,
sensations, impulses and actions. Obedience to nature is the only
virtue: the gratification of the passions and appetites her only
dictate: each individual's self-will the sole organ through which nature
utters her commands, and

"Self-contradiction is the only wrong!
For, by the laws of spirit, in the right
Is every individual character
That acts in strict consistence with itself."

That speculative opinions, however impious and daring they may be, are
not always followed by correspondent conduct, is most true, as well as
that they can scarcely in any instance be systematically realized, on
account of their unsuitableness to human nature and to the institutions
of society. It can be hell, only where it is all hell: and a separate
world of devils is necessary for the existence of any one complete
devil. But on the other hand it is no less clear, nor, with the
biography of Carrier and his fellow atheists before us, can it be denied
without wilful blindness, that the (so called) system of nature (that
is, materialism, with the utter rejection of moral responsibility, of
a present Providence, and of both present and future retribution)
may influence the characters and actions of individuals, and even of
communities, to a degree that almost does away the distinction between
men and devils, and will make the page of the future historian resemble
the narration of a madman's dreams. It is not the wickedness of Don
Juan, therefore, which constitutes the character an abstraction, and
removes it from the rules of probability; but the rapid succession of
the correspondent acts and incidents, his intellectual superiority,
and the splendid accumulation of his gifts and desirable qualities, as
co-existent with entire wickedness in one and the same person. But this
likewise is the very circumstance which gives to this strange play its
charm and universal interest. Don Juan is, from beginning to end, an
intelligible character: as much so as the Satan of Milton. The poet asks
only of the reader, what, as a poet, he is privileged to ask: namely,
that sort of negative faith in the existence of such a being, which we
willingly give to productions professedly ideal, and a disposition
to the same state of feeling, as that with which we contemplate the
idealized figures of the Apollo Belvidere, and the Farnese Hercules.
What the Hercules is to the eye in corporeal strength, Don Juan is
to the mind in strength of character. The ideal consists in the happy
balance of the generic with the individual. The former makes the
character representative and symbolical, therefore instructive; because,
mutatis mutandis, it is applicable to whole classes of men. The latter
gives it living interest; for nothing lives or is real, but as definite
and individual. To understand this completely, the reader need only
recollect the specific state of his feelings, when in looking at a
picture of the historic (more properly of the poetic or heroic) class,
he objects to a particular figure as being too much of a portrait;
and this interruption of his complacency he feels without the least
reference to, or the least acquaintance with, any person in real life
whom he might recognise in this figure. It is enough that such a figure
is not ideal: and therefore not ideal, because one of the two factors
or elements of the ideal is in excess. A similar and more powerful
objection he would feel towards a set of figures which were mere
abstractions, like those of Cipriani, and what have been called Greek
forms and faces, that is, outlines drawn according to a recipe. These
again are not ideal; because in these the other element is in excess.
"Forma formans per formam formatam translucens," {80} is the definition
and perfection of ideal art.

This excellence is so happily achieved in the Don Juan, that it is
capable of interesting without poetry, nay, even without words, as in
our pantomime of that name. We see clearly how the character is formed;
and the very extravagance of the incidents, and the super-human
entireness of Don Juan's agency, prevents the wickedness from shocking
our minds to any painful degree. We do not believe it enough for this
effect; no, not even with that kind of temporary and negative belief or
acquiescence which I have described above. Meantime the qualities of his
character are too desirable, too flattering to our pride and our wishes,
not to make up on this side as much additional faith as was lost on
the other. There is no danger (thinks the spectator or reader) of my
becoming such a monster of iniquity as Don Juan! I never shall be an
atheist! I shall never disallow all distinction between right and wrong!
I have not the least inclination to be so outrageous a drawcansir in my
love affairs! But to possess such a power of captivating and enchanting
the affections of the other sex!--to be capable of inspiring in a
charming and even a virtuous woman, a love so deep, and so entirely
personal to me!--that even my worst vices, (if I were vicious), even
my cruelty and perfidy, (if I