THE TEMPEST.
PREFACE
It
is observed by Mr. Pope, that 'If ever any author deserved the name
of an ORIGINAL, it was Shakespeare. Homer himself drew not his art so
immediately from the fountains of nature; it proceeded through
AEgyptian strainers and channels, and came to him not without some
tincture of the learning, or some cast of the models, of those before
him. The poetry of Shakespeare was inspiration: indeed, he is not so
much an imitator, as an instrument of nature; and it is not so just
to say that he speaks from her, as that she speaks through him.His
CHARACTERS are so much nature herself, that it is a sort of injury to
call them by so distant a name as copies of her. Those of other poets
have a constant resemblance, which shows that they received them from
one another, and were but multipliers of the same image: each
picture, like a mock-rainbow, is but the reflection of a reflection.
But every single character in Shakespeare, is as much an individual,
as those in life itself; it is as impossible to find any two alike;
and such, as from their relation or affinity in any respect appear
most to be twins, will, upon comparison, be found remarkably
distinct. To this life and variety of character, we must add the
wonderful preservation of it; which is such throughout his plays,
that had all the speeches been printed without the very names of the
persons, I believe one might have applied them with certainty to
every speaker.'The
object of the volume here offered to the public, is to illustrate
these remarks in a more particular manner by a reference to each
play. A gentleman of the name of Mason, the author of a Treatise on Ornamental Gardening (not Mason the
poet), began a work of a similar kind about forty years ago, but he
only lived to finish a parallel between the characters of Macbeth and
Richard III which is an exceedingly ingenious piece of analytical
criticism. Richardson's Essays include but a few of Shakespeare's
principal characters. The only work which seemed to supersede the
necessity of an attempt like the present was Schlegel's very
admirable Lectures on the Drama, which give by far the best account
of the plays of Shakespeare that has hitherto appeared. The only
circumstances in which it was thought not impossible to improve on
the manner in which the German critic has executed this part of his
design, were in avoiding an appearance of mysticism in his style, not
very attractive to the English reader, and in bringing illustrations
from particular passages of the plays themselves, of which Schlegel's
work, from the extensiveness of his plan, did not admit. We will at
the same time confess, that some little jealousy of the character of
the national understanding was not without its share in producing the
following undertaking, for 'we were piqued' that it should be
reserved for a foreign critic to give 'reasons for the faith which we
English have in Shakespeare'. Certainly, no writer among ourselves
has shown either the same enthusiastic admiration of his genius, or
the same philosophical acuteness in pointing out his characteristic
excellences. As we have pretty well exhausted all we had to say upon
this subject in the body of the work, we shall here transcribe
Schlegel's general account of Shakespeare, which is in the following
words:'Never,
perhaps, was there so comprehensive a talent for the delineation of
character as Shakespeare's. It not only grasps the diversities of
rank, sex, and age, down to the dawnings of infancy; not only do the
king and the beggar, the hero and the pickpocket, the sage and the
idiot, speak and act with equal truth; not only does he transport
himself to distant ages and foreign nations, and pourtray in the most
accurate manner, with only a few apparent violations of costume, the
spirit of the ancient Romans, of the French in their wars with the
English, of the English themselves during a great part of their
history, of the Southern Europeans (in the serious part of many
comedies) the cultivated society of that time, and the former rude
and barbarous state of the North; his human characters have not only
such depth and precision that they cannot be arranged under classes,
and are inexhaustible, even in conception:—no—this Prometheus not
merely forms men, he opens the gates of the magical world of spirits;
calls up the midnight ghost; exhibits before us his witches amidst
their unhallowed mysteries; peoples the air with sportive fairies and
sylphs:—and these beings, existing only in imagination, possess
such truth and consistency, that even when deformed monsters like
Caliban, he extorts the conviction, that if there should be such
beings, they would so conduct themselves. In a word, as he carries
with him the most fruitful and daring fancy into the kingdom of
nature,—on the other hand, he carries nature into the regions of
fancy, lying beyond the confines of reality. We are lost in
astonishment at seeing the extraordinary, the wonderful, and the
unheard of, in such intimate nearness.'If
Shakespeare deserves our admiration for his characters, he is equally
deserving of it for his exhibition of passion, taking this word in
its widest signification, as including every mental condition, every
tone from indifference or familiar mirth to the wildest rage and
despair. He gives us the history of minds; he lays open to us, in a
single word, a whole series of preceding conditions. His passions do
not at first stand displayed to us in all their height, as is the
case with so many tragic poets, who, in the language of Lessing, are
thorough masters of the legal style of love. He paints, in a most
inimitable manner, the gradual progress from the first origin. "He
gives", as Lessing says, "a living picture of all the most
minute and secret artifices by which a feeling steals into our souls;
of all the imperceptible advantages which it there gains; of all the
stratagems by which every other passion is made subservient to it,
till it becomes the sole tyrant of our desires and our aversions."
Of all poets, perhaps, he alone has pourtrayed the mental
diseases,—melancholy, delirium, lunacy,—with such inexpressible,
and, in every respect, definite truth, that the physician may enrich
his observations from them in the same manner as from real cases.'And
yet Johnson has objected to Shakespeare, that his pathos is not
always natural and free from affectation. There are, it is true,
passages, though, comparatively speaking, very few, where his poetry
exceeds the bounds of true dialogue, where a too soaring imagination,
a too luxuriant wit, rendered the complete dramatic forgetfulness of
himself impossible. With this exception, the censure originates only
in a fanciless way of thinking, to which everything appears unnatural
that does not suit its own tame insipidity. Hence, an idea has been
formed of simple and natural pathos, which consists in exclamations
destitute of imagery, and nowise elevated above every-day life. But
energetical passions electrify the whole of the mental powers, and
will, consequently, in highly favoured natures, express themselves in
an ingenious and figurative manner. It has been often remarked, that
indignation gives wit; and, as despair occasionally breaks out into
laughter, it may sometimes also give vent to itself in antithetical
comparisons.'Besides,
the rights of the poetical form have not been duly weighed.
Shakespeare, who was always sure of his object, to move in a
sufficiently powerful manner when he wished to do so, has
occasionally, by indulging in a freer play, purposely moderated the
impressions when too painful, and immediately introduced a musical
alleviation of our sympathy. He had not those rude ideas of his art
which many moderns seem to have, as if the poet, like the clown in
the proverb, must strike twice on the same place. An ancient
rhetorician delivered a caution against dwelling too long on the
excitation of pity; for nothing, he said, dries so soon as tears; and
Shakespeare acted conformably to this ingenious maxim, without
knowing it.'The
objection, that Shakespeare wounds our feelings by the open display
of the most disgusting moral odiousness, harrows up the mind
unmercifully, and tortures even our senses by the exhibition of the
most insupportable and hateful spectacles, is one of much greater
importance. He has never, in fact, varnished over wild and
blood-thirsty passions with a pleasing exterior,—never clothed
crime and want of principle with a false show of greatness of soul;
and in that respect he is every way deserving of praise. Twice he has
pourtrayed downright villains; and the masterly way in which he has
contrived to elude impressions of too painful a nature, may be seen
in Iago and Richard the Third. The constant reference to a petty and
puny race must cripple the boldness of the poet. Fortunately for his
art, Shakespeare lived in an age extremely susceptible of noble and
tender impressions, but which had still enough of the firmness
inherited from a vigorous olden time not to shrink back with dismay
from every strong and violent picture. We have lived to see tragedies
of which the catastrophe consists in the swoon of an enamoured
princess. If Shakespeare falls occasionally into the opposite
extreme, it is a noble error, originating in the fulness of a
gigantic strength: and yet this tragical Titan, who storms the
heavens, and threatens to tear the world from off its hinges; who,
more terrible than AEschylus, makes our hair stand on end, and
congeals our blood with horror, possessed, at the same time, the
insinuating loveliness of the sweetest poetry. He plays with love
like a child; and his songs are breathed out like melting sighs. He
unites in his genius the utmost elevation and the utmost depth; and
the most foreign, and even apparently irreconcilable properties
subsist in him peaceably together. The world of spirits and nature
have laid all their treasures at his feet. In strength a demi-god, in
profundity of view a prophet, in all-seeing wisdom a protecting
spirit of a higher order, he lowers himself to mortals, as if
unconscious of his superiority: and is as open and unassuming as a
child.'Shakespeare's
comic talent is equally wonderful with that which he has shown in the
pathetic and tragic: it stands on an equal elevation, and possesses
equal extent and profundity. All that I before wished was, not to
admit that the former preponderated. He is highly inventive in comic
situations and motives. It will be hardly possible to show whence he
has taken any of them; whereas, in the serious part of his drama, he
has generally laid hold of something already known. His comic
characters are equally true, various, and profound, with his serious.
So little is he disposed to caricature, that we may rather say many
of his traits are almost too nice and delicate for the stage, that
they can only be properly seized by a great actor, and fully
understood by a very acute audience. Not only has he delineated many
kinds of folly; he has also contrived to exhibit mere stupidity in a
most diverting and entertaining manner.' Vol. ii, p. 145.We
have the rather availed ourselves of this testimony of a foreign
critic in behalf of Shakespeare, because our own countryman, Dr.
Johnson, has not been so favourable to him. It may be said of
Shakespeare, that 'those who are not for him are against him': for
indifference is here the height of injustice. We may sometimes, in
order 'to do a great right, do a little wrong'. An over-strained
enthusiasm is more pardonable with respect to Shakespeare than the
want of it; for our admiration cannot easily surpass his genius. We
have a high respect for Dr. Johnson's character and understanding,
mixed with something like personal attachment: but he was neither a
poet nor a judge of poetry. He might in one sense be a judge of
poetry as it falls within the limits and rules of prose, but not as
it is poetry. Least of all was he qualified to be a judge of
Shakespeare, who 'alone is high fantastical'. Let those who have a
prejudice against Johnson read Boswell's Life of him: as those whom
he has prejudiced against Shakespeare should read his Irene. We do
not say that a man to be a critic must necessarily be a poet: but to
be a good critic, he ought not to be a bad poet. Such poetry as a man
deliberately writes, such, and such only will he like. Dr. Johnson's
Preface to his edition of Shakespeare looks like a laborious attempt
to bury the characteristic merits of his author under a load of
cumbrous phraseology, and to weigh his excellences and defects in
equal scales, stuffed full of 'swelling figures and sonorous
epithets'. Nor could it well be otherwise; Dr. Johnson's general
powers of reasoning overlaid his critical susceptibility. All his
ideas were cast in a given mould, in a set form: they were made out
by rule and system, by climax, inference, and
antithesis:—Shakespeare's were the reverse. Johnson's understanding
dealt only in round numbers: the fractions were lost upon him. He
reduced everything to the common standard of conventional propriety;
and the most exquisite refinement or sublimity produced an effect on
his mind, only as they could be translated into the language of
measured prose. To him an excess of beauty was a fault; for it
appeared to him like an excrescence; and his imagination was dazzled
by the blaze of light. His writings neither shone with the beams of
native genius, nor reflected them. The shifting shapes of fancy, the
rainbow hues of things, made no impression on him: he seized only on
the permanent and tangible. He had no idea of natural objects but
'such as he could measure with a two-fool rule, or tell upon ten
fingers': he judged of human nature in the same way, by mood and
figure: he saw only the definite, the positive, and the practical,
the average forms of things, not their striking differences—their
classes, not their degrees. He was a man of strong common sense and
practical wisdom, rather than of genius or feeling. He retained the
regular, habitual impressions of actual objects, but he could not
follow the rapid flights of fancy, or the strong movements of
passion. That is, he was to the poet what the painter of still life
is to the painter of history. Common sense sympathizes with the
impressions of things on ordinary minds in ordinary circumstances:
genius catches the glancing combinations presented to the eye of
fancy, under the influence of passion. It is the province of the
didactic reasoner to take cognizance of those results of human nature
which are constantly repeated and always the same, which follow one
another in regular succession, which are acted upon by large classes
of men, and embodied in received customs, laws, language, and
institutions; and it was in arranging, comparing, and arguing on
these kind of general results, that Johnson's excellence lay. But he
could not quit his hold of the commonplace and mechanical, and apply
the general rule to the particular exception, or show how the nature
of man was modified by the workings of passion, or the infinite
fluctuations of thought and accident. Hence he could judge neither of
the heights nor depths of poetry. Nor is this all; for being
conscious of great powers in himself, and those powers of an adverse
tendency to those of his author, he would be for setting up a foreign
jurisdiction over poetry, and making criticism a kind of Procrustes'
bed of genius, where he might cut down imagination to matter-of-fact,
regulate the passions according to reason, and translate the whole
into logical diagrams and rhetorical declamation. Thus he says of
Shakespeare's characters, in contradiction to what Pope had observed,
and to what every one else feels, that each character is a species,
instead of being an individual. He in fact found the general species
or DIDACTIC form in Shakespeare's characters, which was all he sought
or cared for; he did not find the individual traits, or the DRAMATIC
distinctions which Shakespeare has engrafted on this general nature,
because he felt no interest in them. Shakespeare's bold and happy
flights of imagination were equally thrown away upon our author. He
was not only without any particular fineness of organic sensibility,
alive to all the 'mighty world of ear and eye', which is necessary to
the painter or musician, but without that intenseness of passion,
which, seeking to exaggerate whatever excites the feelings of
pleasure or power in the mind, and moulding the impressions of
natural objects according to the impulses of imagination, produces a
genius and a taste for poetry. According to Dr. Johnson, a mountain
is sublime, or a rose is beautiful; for that their name and
definition imply. But he would no more be able to give the
description of Dover cliff in Lear, or the description of flowers in
The Winter's Tale, than to describe the objects of a sixth sense; nor
do we think he would have any very profound feeling of the beauty of
the passages here referred to. A stately common-place, such as
Congreve's description of a ruin in The Mourning Bride, would have
answered Johnson's purpose just as well, or better than the first;
and an indiscriminate profusion of scents and hues would have
interfered less with the ordinary routine of his imagination than
Perdita's lines, which seem enamoured of their own sweetness—Daffodils That
come before the swallow dares, and take The
winds of March with beauty; violets dim, But
sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes, Or
Cytherea's breath.—No
one who does not feel the passion which these objects inspire can go
along with the imagination which seeks to express that passion and
the uneasy sense of delight accompanying it by something still more
beautiful, and no one can feel this passionate love of nature without
quick natural sensibility. To a mere literal and formal apprehension,
the inimitably characteristic epithet, 'violets DIM', must seem to
imply a defect, rather than a beauty; and to any one, not feeling the
full force of that epithet, which suggests an image like 'the sleepy
eye of love', the allusion to 'the lids of Juno's eyes' must appear
extravagant and unmeaning. Shakespeare's fancy lent words and images
to the most refined sensibility to nature, struggling for expression:
his descriptions are identical with the things themselves, seen
through the fine medium of passion: strip them of that connexion, and
try them by ordinary conceptions and ordinary rules, and they are as
grotesque and barbarous as you please!—By thus lowering
Shakespeare's genius to the standard of common-place invention, it
was easy to show that his faults were as great as his beauties; for
the excellence, which consists merely in a conformity to rules, is
counterbalanced by the technical violation of them. Another
circumstance which led to Dr. Johnson's indiscriminate praise or
censure of Shakespeare, is the very structure of his style. Johnson
wrote a kind of rhyming prose, in which he was as much compelled to
finish the different clauses of his sentences, and to balance one
period against another, as the writer of heroic verse is to keep to
lines of ten syllables with similar terminations. He no sooner
acknowledges the merits of his author in one line than the periodical
revolution in his style carries the weight of his opinion completely
over to the side of objection, thus keeping up a perpetual
alternation of perfections and absurdities.We
do not otherwise know how to account for such assertions as the
following: 'In his tragic scenes, there is always something wanting,
but his comedy often surpasses expectation or desire. His comedy
pleases by the thoughts and the language, and his tragedy, for the
greater part, by incident and action. His tragedy seems to be skill,
his comedy to be instinct.' Yet after saying that 'his tragedy was
skill', he affirms in the next page, 'His declamations or set
speeches are commonly cold and weak, for his power was the power of
nature: when he endeavoured, like other tragic writers, to catch
opportunities of amplification, and instead of inquiring what the
occasion demanded, to show how much his stores of knowledge could
supply, he seldom escapes without the pity or resentment of his
reader.' Poor Shakespeare! Between the charges here brought against
him, of want of nature in the first instance, and of want of skill in
the second, he could hardly escape being condemned. And again, 'But
the admirers of this great poet have most reason to complain when he
approaches nearest to his highest excellence, and seems fully
resolved to sink them in dejection, or mollify them with tender
emotions by the fall of greatness, the danger of innocence, or the
crosses of love. What he does best, he soon ceases to do. He no
sooner begins to move than he counteracts himself; and terror and
pity, as they are rising in the mind, are checked and blasted by
sudden frigidity.' In all this, our critic seems more bent on
maintaining the equilibrium of his style than the consistency or
truth of his opinions.—If Dr. Johnson's opinion was right, the
following observations on Shakespeare's plays must be greatly
exaggerated, if not ridiculous. If he was wrong, what has been said
may perhaps account for his being so, without detracting from his
ability and judgement in other things.It
is proper to add, that the account of the MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM has
appeared in another work.April
15, 1817
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