Chapter V: Part 5

Since that period, national pride has daily extended and redoubled this admiration. It nevertheless remained barren of results, and Shakspeare, to use the language of Sir Walter Scott, "reigned a Grecian prince over Persian slaves, and they who adored him did not dare attempt to use his language." {123} A new impulse can not be entirely due to old recollections; and an old epoch, that it may bear new fruit, needs to be again fertilized by a movement analogous to that which gave it its first fertility.

This movement has made itself felt in Europe, and England also is beginning to feel its impulse, as Sir Walter Scott's novels sufficiently demonstrate. But England will not be the only country indebted to Shakspeare for the new direction which is manifesting itself in her drama, as well as in other branches of her literature. In the literary movement by which it is now agitated, Continental Europe turns its eyes toward Shakspeare. Germany has long adopted him as a model rather than as a guide; and thereby it has, perhaps, suspended in their course those vivifying juices which impart their vigor and freshness only to fruits of native growth. Nevertheless, the path on which Germany has entered is leading to the discovery of true wealth; and if she will but work her own mines, a rich and fertile vein will not be wanting. The literature of Spain, a natural fruit of her civilization, already possesses its own original and distinct character. Italy alone and France, the fatherlands of modern classicism, are not yet recovered from their astonishment at the first shock given to those opinions which they have established with the rigor of necessity, and maintained with the pride of faith. Doubt presents itself to us as yet only as an enemy whose attacks we are beginning to fear; it seems as though discussion bears a threatening aspect, and that examination can not probe without undermining and overturning. In this position we hesitate, as if about to destroy that which will never be replaced; we are afraid of finding ourselves without law, and of discovering nothing but the insufficiency or illegitimacy of those principles upon which we were formerly wont to rely without disquietude.

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This disturbance of mind can not cease so long as the question remains undecided between science and barbarism, the beauties of order and the effects of disorder; so long as men persist in seeing, in that system of which the first outlines were traced by Shakspeare, nothing but an allowance of unrestrained liberty and undefined latitude to the flights of the imagination, as well as to the course of genius. If the romantic system has beauties, it necessarily has its art and rules. Nothing is beautiful, in the eyes of man, which does not derive its effects from certain combinations, the secret of which can always be supplied by our judgment when our emotions have attested its power. The knowledge or employment of these combinations constitutes art. Shakspeare had his own art. We must seek it out in his works, examine into the means which he employs, and the results to which he aspires. Then only shall we possess a true knowledge of his system; then we shall know how far it is capable of increased development, according to the nature of dramatic art, considered in its application to modern society.

It is, in fact, nowhere else--neither in past times, nor among peoples unacquainted with our habits--but among ourselves, and in ourselves, that we must seek the conditions and necessities of dramatic poetry. Differing in this respect from other arts, in addition to the absolute rules imposed upon it, as on all others, by the unchangeable nature of man, dramatic art has relative rules which flow from the changeful state of society. In imitating the antique style, modern statuaries labor under no other constraint but the difficulty of equaling its perfection; and the most fervent and powerful adorer of antiquity would not venture to reproduce, even upon the most submissive stage, all that he admires in a tragedy of Sophocles. {125} It is easy to discern the cause of this. When contemplating a statue or a picture, the spectator receives at first, from the sculptor or the painter, the first impression which occurs to him; but it rests with himself to continue the work. He stops and looks; his natural disposition, his recollections and thoughts, group themselves around the leading idea which is presented to his view, and gradually develop within him the ever-increasing emotion which will soon hold entire dominion over him. The artist has done nothing but awaken in the spectator the faculty of conceiving and feeling; it takes hold of the movement which has been communicated to it, follows it up in its own direction, accelerates it by its own strength, and thus creates for itself the pleasure which it enjoys. Before a picture of a martyrdom, one person is moved by the expression of fervent piety, another by the manifestation of resigned grief; some are filled with indignation at the cruelty of the executioners. A tinge of courageous satisfaction which is evident in the look of the victim, reminds the patriot of the joys of devotion to a sacred cause; and the soul of the philosopher is elevated by the contemplation of man sacrificing himself for truth. The diversity of these impressions is of little consequence; they are all equally natural and equally free; each spectator chooses, as it were, the feeling which suits him best, and when it has once entered into his soul, no external fact can disturb its supremacy, no movement can interrupt the course of that to which every man yields himself according to his inclination.

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In the prolonged course of dramatic action, on the contrary, all becomes changed at every step, and each moment produces a new impression. The painter is satisfied with establishing one first and unvarying connection between his picture and the spectator. The dramatic poet must incessantly renew this relation, and maintain it through all the vicissitudes of the most various positions. All the acts in which human existence is manifested, all the forms which it assumes, and all the feelings which may modify it during the continuance of an always complicated event--these are the numerous and changeful objects which he presents to the public view; and he is never allowed to separate himself from his spectators, or to leave them for an instant alone and at liberty; he must be incessantly acting upon them, and must at every step excite in their souls emotions analogous to the ever-changing position in which he has placed them. How can he succeed in this, unless he carefully adapts himself to their dispositions and inclinations; unless he supplies the actual requirements of their mind; unless he addresses himself constantly to ideas which are familiar to them, and speaks to them in the language which they are accustomed to hear? Passion will not appear to us so touching if it be displayed in a manner contrary to our habits; and sympathy will not be awakened with the same vivacity in regard to interests of which we have ceased to be personally conscious. The necessity for appeasing the gods by a human sacrifice does not, in our mind, give that force to the speeches of Menelaus which it would have imparted to them among the Greeks, who were attached to their faith: the stern chastity of Hippolytus does not interest us in his fate: and virtue itself, in order to obtain from us that affectionate reverence which it has a right to expect, needs to connect itself with duties which our habits have taught us to respect and cherish.

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Subject, therefore, at once to the conditions of the arts of imitation and to those of the purely poetical arts; bound, like epic poetry in its narratives, to set human life in motion; and called upon, like painting and sculpture, to present in its person and under its individual features--the dramatic poet is obliged to include, within the probabilities of one action, all the means which he requires to make it understood. His characters can only tell us what they would say if they were actually there, really occupied with the fact which they represent. The epic poet, as it were, does the honors, to his readers, of the edifice into which he introduces them; he accompanies them with his own speeches, assists them by his explanations, and, by the description of manners, times, and places, prepares them for the scene which he is about to disclose to their view, and opens to them in every sense the world into which he is desirous to transport them, and himself also. The dramatic personage comes forward alone, concerned with himself only; he places himself, without preliminary explanation, in communication with the spectator; and without calling or guiding them, he must make his audience follow him. Thus separated from one another, how can they succeed in coming into connection, unless a profound and general analogy already exists between them? Evidently those heroes, who do nothing for the public but speak and feel in their presence, will be understood and received by them only so far as they coincide with them in their mode of conceiving, feeling, and speaking; and dramatic effect can result only from their aptitude to unite in the same impressions.

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The impressions of man communicated to man--this is, in fact, the sole source of dramatic effects. Man alone is the subject of the drama; man alone is its theatre. His soul is the stage upon which the events of this world come to play their part; it is not by their own virtue, but merely by their relations to the moral being whose destiny occupies our attention, that events take part in the action; every dramatic character abandons them as soon as they aspire to exercise a direct influence over us, instead of acting by the intermediary of a visible person, and by means of the emotion which we receive, in our turn, from the emotion which they have excited in him. Why is the narrative of Theramenes epic, and not dramatic? Because he addresses himself to the spectator, and not to Theseus. Theseus, being already aware of his son's death, is no longer capable of experiencing the impressions occasioned by the narrative; and if, while still in uncertainty, he were only to arrive at a knowledge of his misfortune through the anguish of such a recital, the poetical ornaments with which it is, perhaps, overloaded would not prevent it from being dramatic, for the impressions which it produces would be to us those of a person interested in the result: we should be conscious of them in the heart of Theseus.

In the heart of man alone can the dramatic fact take place; the event which is its occasion does not constitute it. The death of the lover is rendered dramatic by the grief of his mistress--the danger of the son by the terror of his mother; and however horrible may be the idea of the murder of a child, Andromache inspires us with greater solicitude than Astyanax. An earthquake and the physical convulsions which accompany it will furnish only a spectacle for contemplation, or the subject of an epic narrative; but the rain is dramatic upon the bald head of old Lear, and especially in the heart of his companions, racked by the pity which they feel for him. {129} The apparition of a spectre would have no effect upon the audience unless some one on the stage were alarmed by it; and to produce the dramatic effect of Lady Macbeth's somnambulism, Shakspeare has taken care that it should be witnessed by a physician and a waiting-woman, whom he has employed to transmit to us the terrible impressions which it produces upon themselves.

Thus man alone occupies the stage; his existence is displayed upon it, animated and aggrandized by the events which are connected with it, and which owe their theatrical character to this connection alone. In comedy, events, being of less magnitude than the passion which they excite in man, derive a laughable importance from this passion; in tragedy, being more powerful than the means which man has at his disposal, they move us by the exhibition of his grandeur and his weakness. The comic poet invents them freely, for his art consists in originating, in man himself and his absurdities, those events by which man is agitated. This invention is rarely a merit in the tragic poet, for his work is to discern and exhibit man and his soul in the midst of the events to which he is subjected. If it be generally requisite that the subject of tragedy should be taken from the history of the great and powerful, it is because the strong impressions which it aims at producing upon us can only be communicated to us by strong characters, incapable of succumbing beneath the blows of an ordinary destiny. It is in the development of high fortune and its terrible vicissitudes that the whole man appears, with all the wealth and energy of his nature. Thus the spectacle of the world, concentrated in an individual, is revealed to us upon the stage; thus, by the medium of the soul which receives their impress, events reach us through sympathy, the source of dramatic illusion.

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If material illusion were the aim of the arts, the wax-figures of Curtius would surpass all the statues of antiquity, and a panorama would be the ultimate effort of painting. If their object were to impose upon the reason, and to impart to the imagination a shock sufficiently powerful to pervert the judgment to such a degree that a theatrical representation could be taken for the accomplishment of a real and actual fact, a very few scenes would suffice to work up the spectators to such a pitch of excitement that its effect would soon be to interrupt the performance by the violence of their emotions. If even it were desired that, in presence of objects imitated by art of any kind, the soul, affected at least by the reality of the impressions which it receives from them, should really experience those feelings of which the image is produced in it by a fictitious representation, the labor of genius would have succeeded only in multiplying, in this world, the pains of life and the exhibition of human miseries. These feelings, however, occupy and pervade us, and on their existence depends the effect which the poet aims to produce upon us. We must believe in them in order to yield to them; and we could not believe in them unless we assigned to them a cause worthy to awaken them. When our tears flow before Raphael's picture of Christ bearing his cross, before we can allow them to flow, we must believe that we bestow them upon that sorrowful compassion which we should feel at really beholding such dreadful sufferings. {131} If, in the emotions with which we are inspired by the sight of Tancred dying on the stage, we did not think we could recognize the emotions which we should feel for Tancred dying in reality, we should be displeased with ourselves for indulging in a pity which was not rendered legitimate by its application to sorrows that at least were possible. And yet we deceive ourselves; that which we then discern in our breasts is not that power which is awakened at the aspect of the suffering of our fellows--a power full of bitterness if reduced to inactivity, but full of activity if it be allowed liberty and hope to render assistance. It is not this power, but its shadow--the image of our features repeated with striking accuracy, but without life, in a mirror. Moved at the aspect of what we should be capable of experiencing, we give up our imagination to it without having any demands to make upon our will. No one is tormented with an irrepressible desire to shout out to Tancred, Orosmane, or Othello, that they are laboring under a mistake; no one suffers through not being able to rush to the assistance of Gloster against the execrable Duke of Cornwall. The unendurable painfulness of the position of the spectators of such a scene is removed by the idea that it is utterly unreal; an idea which is presented to our minds, and which we retain without clearly perceiving its presence, because we are absorbed by the contemplation of the more vivid impressions which crowd upon our brain. If this idea were clearly present to our thoughts, it would dissipate the whole _cortège_ of illusions which surround us, and we should summon it to our assistance to deaden their effect, if they should change into a subject for real grief. Bat so long as the spectator takes delight in forgetting it, art should studiously avoid every thing that might remind him that the spectacle which he contemplates is not real. Hence arises the necessity of bringing all the parts of the performance into harmonious unison, and of not diffusing unequally the force of the illusion, which loses strength as soon, as it allows itself to be perceived. {132} This is what would happen if, at the moment when he is indulging in feelings which are familiar to him, the spectator were disconcerted by the presentation of forms of manners entirely foreign to his experience. Hence also arises the necessity of giving a certain amount of attention to the accessories not in order to increase the illusion, but in order not to interfere with it. The actor alone is expected to produce that moral illusion which is aimed at by the drama. Where could we find means equal to those which he possesses for so doing? What imitation could stand beside his? What object in nature could be so well represented as man, when it is man himself who represents it? Let not dramatic art, therefore, seek assistance from other imitations which are far inferior to that which man can offer it; all that the machinist and the decorator have to do with the moral illusion is to remove every thing that might injure its effect. Perhaps even art would have reason to dread too great efforts on their part to do it service; who can tell whether a too brilliant magic of painting, employed to enhance the effect of the decorations, would not weaken the dramatic effect by diverting the attention to the enchantments of another art?

These accesssory imitations are dangerous auxiliaries, whether, by their perfection, they usurp the effect to which they ought merely to contribute, or whether they destroy it by their inefficiency. In England, as we have seen, the early stage was entirely unacquainted with the art of decoration, a recent homage paid to probability, which becomes really useful to the dramatic illusion when, without pretending to increase it, it simply prevents it from having to surmount obstacles of too uncouth a nature, and enables the mind of the spectator to picture to itself with greater distinctness the position into which it is required to transport itself. {133} Imaginations more susceptible than they were delicate, and more easily affected than undeceived, had no need of that management which is now demanded by a restless reason, incessantly occupied in exercising surveillance over even our pleasures. Those spectators, who exacted so little with regard to the decoration of the theatre, exacted a great deal in reference to the material movement of the scene; though indulgent to the insufficiency and rudeness of theatrical imitations, they were fond of variety, and scarcely perceived the improprieties which resulted therefrom. Just as a man might, without diminishing their emotion, represent to them the sensitive Ophelia or the delicate Desdemona, they could see stationed at one end of the stage the cannon which was to kill the Duke of Bedford at the opposite end, and this great event did not strike them less forcibly on account of the poverty of the arrangement; indeed, they could receive with all the force of dramatic illusion the touching impression of the death of the two Talbots on a field of battle, which was animated, by the movements of four soldiers!

When the illusion becomes at once more difficult and more necessary to imaginations less quickly seduced, and to minds less easily amused, it is the study of art to remove every object that might prove injurious to it; and, as the representation of material objects becomes more perfect, it interferes less in the action of the drama, which is almost exclusively reserved for man, who alone can impart to it the appearance of reality. It was to man that, notwithstanding the habits of his time, Shakspeare felt that he must look for the production of this great effect. The movement of the stage, which, before his time, had constituted the chief interest of dramatic works, became in his plays a simple accessory which the taste of his age did not allow him to omit, and which, perhaps, his own taste did not require him to sacrifice, but which he reduced to its true value. {134} It matters little, therefore, that, in his dramas, the moral illusion may still be sometimes disturbed by the imperfect representation of objects which theatrical imitation could not compass; Shakspeare did not the less discern the true source of this illusion, and did not seek the means of producing it elsewhere.

He was equally well acquainted with its nature also; he felt that an illusion of this kind, akin to no error of the senses or the reason, but the simple result of a disposition of the soul, which forgets all extraneous things in order to contemplate itself, could only be sustained by the perpetual consent of the spectator to the seduction which the poet is desirous to exercise over him, and that this seductive influence must therefore be maintained unintermittingly. Whatever might be the power of a dramatic representation, it could not, from the outset, obtain a sufficient hold upon us to deliver us over in a defenseless state to all the feelings which will take possession of us in proportion as we advance in the position in which it has placed us. The imagination must lend itself gradually to this new position, and the soul must accustom itself to it, and accept the sway of the impressions which must arise from it, just as, when we experience an unexpected piece of good or bad fortune, we require some time to bring our feelings to a level with our fate. But if, after having obtained our consent to this position, and after having moved us by the impressions which accompany it, the poet imprudently attempts to make us pass into a new position, attended by new impressions, the work must be begun over again, and will require all the more effort, because it will be necessary to efface the traces of a work already accomplished. {135} Then the imagination becomes chilled and disturbed; the spectator refuses to lend himself to a movement from which he is diverted after having been desired to yield himself unresistingly to its influence. The illusion vanishes, and with it the interest also; for dramatic interest, in common with dramatic illusion, can only be attached to impressions which are continued and renewed in one and the same direction.

Unity of impression, that prime secret of dramatic art, was the soul of Shakspeare's great conceptions, and the instinctive object of his assiduous labor, just as it is the end of all the rules invented by all systems. The exclusive partisans of the classic system believed that it was impossible to attain unity of impression, except by means of what are called the three unities. Shakspeare attained it by other means. If the legitimacy of these means were recognized, it would greatly diminish the importance hitherto attributed to certain forms and rules, which are evidently invested with an abusive authority, if art, in order to accomplish its designs, does not need the restrictions which they impose upon it, and which often deprive it of a portion of its wealth.

The mobility of our imagination, the variety of our interests, and the inconstancy of our inclinations, have given to times, and even to places, a power which should not be lost sight of by the poet who is desirous to make use of the affections of man in order to excite the sympathy of his fellows. If he presents his hero to them at intervals too widely distant in the duration of his existence, they will inquire, "What has become of the man whom we knew six months ago?" just as naturally as, when meeting a friend six months after the occurrence of an event which has plunged him into grief, we begin by inquiring discreetly into the state of that grief which we once saw so painfully manifested, for fear lest we should enter into communication with his soul before we know what feeling we shall have to participate. {136} If compelled to give an account of the changes which have occurred during the course of six months or a year, to spectators who, only a short time previously, saw him disappear from the stage, would not the tragic hero present a strange incongruity with himself? would not the thread of his identity be broken? and, far from feeling the same interest in him, should we not have some difficulty in avowing him to be the same person?

From this condition of human nature has been derived the true motive of the unities of time and place, which have often been most preposterously founded upon a pretended necessity of satisfying the reason by accommodating the duration of the real action to that of the theatrical representation; as if the reason could consent to believe that, during the interval of a few minutes between the acts, the persons of the drama had passed from evening to morning without having slept, or from morning to evening without having eaten; and as if it were more easy to take three hours for a day than for a week, or even for a month!

Nevertheless, it can not be denied that the mind feels a certain repugnance to behold intervals of time and place disappear before it, without its being able to account for their departure, or receiving any modification from it. The more these intervals are prolonged, the more does this discontent increase, for the mind feels that many things are thus concealed from its knowledge of which it is its province to dispose, and it would not like to be told too often, as Crispin says to Géronte, "_C'est votre lethargie_." {137} But these difficulties are not insurmountable by the skill of art; if the mind becomes easily alarmed at that which, without its consent, disturbs the settled habits of its character, it is easy to make it forget them. Place it in view of the object toward which you have succeeded in directing its desires, and, in its forward spring to reach it, it will no longer care to measure the space which you compel it to traverse. When reading an interesting work, our strongly-excited attention transports us without difficulty from one time to another; our thought concentrates itself upon the event at which we expect to arrive, and sees nothing in the interval which separates us from it; and as it enables us to reach it, without having, as it were, changed our place, we are scarcely conscious that we have been obliged to change the time. When Claudius and Laertes have agreed together upon the duel in which Hamlet is to be slain, between that moment and the consummation of their plans we care little to know whether two hours or a week have elapsed.

This arises from the fact that the chain of the impressions has not been broken, and the position of the characters has not been changed; their places have continued the same; their ardor is not less energetic; time has not acted upon them; it counts for nothing in the feelings with which they inspire us; it finds them, and us with them, in the same disposition of soul; and thus the two periods are brought together by that unity of impression which makes us say, when thinking of an event which occurred long ago, but the traces of which are still fresh in our memory, "It seems as though it had happened only yesterday."

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In fact, what care we about the time which elapses between the actions with which Macbeth fills up his career of crime? When he commands the murder of Banquo the assassination of Duncan is still present to our eyes, and seems as though it had been committed only yesterday; and when Macbeth determines upon the massacre of Macduff's family, we fancy we see him still pale from the apparition of Banquo's ghost. None of his actions has terminated without necessitating the action which follows it; they announce and involve each other, thus forcing the imagination to go forward, full of trouble and sad expectation. Macbeth, who, after having killed Duncan, is urged, by the very terror which he feels at his crime, to kill the chamberlains, to whom he intends to attribute the murder, does not permit us to doubt the facility with which he will commit new crimes whenever occasion requires. The witches, who, at the opening of the play, have taken possession of his destiny, do not allow us to hope that they will grant any respite to the ambition and the necessities of his crimes. Thus all the threads are laid open to our eyes from the beginning; we follow, we anticipate the course of events; we stint no haste to arrive at that which our imagination devours beforehand; intervals vanish with the succession of the ideas which should occupy them; one succession alone is distinctly marked in our mind, and that is, the succession of the events which compose the absorbing spectacle which sweeps us onward in its rapidity. In our view, they are as closely connected in time as they are intimately linked together in thought; and any duration that may separate them is a duration as empty and unperceived as that of sleep--as all those epochs in which the soul is manifested by no sensible symptom of its existence. What, in our mind, is the connection of the hours in comparison with this train of ideas? and what poet, subjecting himself to unity of time, would deem it sufficient to establish, between the different parts of his work, that powerful bond of union which can result only from unity of impression? So true is it that this alone is the object, whereas the others are only the means.

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These means may, undoubtedly, sometimes have their efficiency; the rapidity of a great action executed, or a great event accomplished, within the space of a few hours, fills the imagination, and animates the soul with a movement to which it yields with ardor. But few actions really permit so sudden an action; few events are composed of parts so exactly connected in time and space; and, without alluding to the improbabilities which are consequent upon their forced cohesion, the surprises which result from it very often disturb the unity of impression, which is the rigorous condition of dramatic illusion. Zaire, passing suddenly from her devoted love for Orosmane to entire submission to the faith and will of Lusignan, has some difficulty in restoring to us, in her new position, as much illusion as she has made us lose by so abrupt a change. Voltaire sought his effects in the contrast of perfectly happy love with love in despair; a powerful means, it is true, but less powerful, perhaps, than the preoccupation of a constant and unchanging position, which develops itself only to redouble the feeling which it has at first inspired. When we have thoroughly established ourselves in an affection, it is far from prudent to attempt to move us in favor of an opposite affection. Corneille has not shown us Rodrigue and Chimène together before the quarrel between their fathers; he felt so little desire to impress us with the idea of their happiness, that Chimène, when told of it, can not believe it, and disturbs by her presentiments the too delightful position of which the poet is exceedingly careful not to put us in possession, lest we should afterward find it too difficult to sacrifice it to that duty which will soon command us to leave it. {140} In the same manner we have become associated with the feelings of Polyeucte, and have trembled for him before becoming aware of the love of Pauline for Sévère; if our first interest had been attached to this love, perhaps it would have been difficult for us afterward to feel much for Polyeucte, whose presence would be importunate. Thus, when Zaire has awakened our emotion as a lover, we are inclined to think that she abandons the position in which she has placed us rather too easily, in order to fulfill her duty as a daughter and a Christian. The philosophical indifference which Voltaire has imparted to her in the first scene, in order to facilitate her subsequent conversion, renders still more improbable the devotedness with which she so quickly enters upon a duty so recently discovered. If, on the other hand, at the outset, Voltaire had described her to us as troubled with scruples, and disquieted with regard to her happiness, fear would have prepared us beforehand to comprehend in all its extent, at its first appearance, the misfortune which threatens her, and to see her yield to it with that abandonment which is improbable because it is too sudden.

The employment of sudden changes of fortune, by which it is attempted to disguise, beneath a great alteration in circumstances, the too sudden transitions which the rule of unity in point of time may impose, frequently renders the inconveniences of this rule more striking, by depriving it of the means of making preparation for the different impressions which it accumulates within too limited a space. It is, on the contrary, by a single impression that Shakspeare, at least in his finest compositions, takes possession at the very outset, of our thought, and, by means of our thought, of space also. {141} Beyond the magic circle which he has traced, he leaves nothing sufficiently powerful to interfere with the effect of the only unity of which he has need. Change of fortune may exist in reference to the persons of the drama, but never to the spectator. Before we are informed of Othello's happiness, we know that Iago is preparing to destroy it; the Ghost which is to devote the life of Hamlet to the punishment of a crime, appears on the stage before he does; and before we have seen Macbeth virtuous, the utterance of his name by the Witches tells us that he is destined to become guilty. In the same manner, in "Athalie," the whole idea of the drama is displayed, in the first scene, in the character and promises of the high-priest; the impression is begun, and it will continue and increase always in the same direction. Thus, who could say that an interval of eight days, interposed, if necessary, between the promises of Joad and their performance, would have broken the unity of impression which results from the invariable constancy of his plans?

To constancy of character, feelings, and resolutions exclusively belongs that moral unity which, braving time and distance, includes all the parts of an event in a compact action, in which the gaps of material unity are no longer perceptible. A violently excited passion could not aim at such an effect; it has its momentary storms, the course of which, being subject to external and variable causes, must in a short time reach its term. As soon as jealousy has seized upon the heart of Othello, if any interval separated that moment from the time which witnesses the death of Desdemona, the unity would be broken; nothing would attest to us the link which must unite the first transports of the Moor to his final resolution; the action must therefore hasten rapidly forward, and must hurry him onward to his destruction, which a day's reflection would perhaps prevent him from consummating. {142} In the same manner, the simple description of events, unless the presence of a great individual character should, by dominating over them, impress upon them its own unity, will make us feel the want of the material unities; and the efforts which Shakspeare has made, in his historical dramas, to approximate to them, or to disguise their absence, are a new homage paid to that moral unity which is sufficient for every thing when the poet possesses it, and which nothing can replace when he has it not. In "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," Shakspeare, inattentive to the course of time, allows it to pass unnoticed. In his historical plays, on the other hand, he conceals and dissembles its lapse by all the artifices that can deceive us in reference to its duration; the scenes follow and announce each other in such a way, that an interval of several years seems to be included within a few weeks, or even a few days. All the probabilities are sacrificed to this theatrical unity, which time would break too easily between events which are not linked together by a uniform principle. The scene in which Richard II. learns from Aumerle the departure of Bolingbroke into exile, is that in which he announces that he is himself about to go to Ireland; and it is not yet thoroughly known at court whether he has actually embarked on this voyage, when the news is received of the disembarkation of Bolingbroke, returning with an army, under the pretext of asserting his rights to the succession of his father, who has died in the interval, but, in reality, to take possession of the crown; in which attempt he has almost succeeded before Richard, cast by a tempest upon the coasts of England, can have been informed of his arrival. And we are told at the end of the play, which, dating from the banishment of Bolingbroke, can not have lasted more than fifteen days, that Mowbray, who was exiled at the same time, has made several journeys to the Holy Land during the interval, and is at last dead in Italy.

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These monstrous extravagances would assuredly not be numbered among the proofs of Shakspeare's genius, if they did not attest the empire assumed over him by the great dramatic thought to which he sacrificed all beside. Whether in his historical plays, he multiplies improbabilities and impossibilities in order to conceal the flight of time, or whether, in his finest tragedies, he allows it to pass without the slightest notice, he invariably pursues and attempts to maintain unity of impression, the great source of dramatic effect. We may see in "Macbeth," the true type of his system, with what art he overcomes the difficulties which arise from it, and links together in the soul of the spectator the chain of places and times which is constantly being broken in reality. Macbeth, when resolved on the destruction of Macduff, whom he fears, learns that he has taken flight into England; and he leaves the stage, announcing his intention to surprise his castle, and to put to death his wife, his children, and all who bear his name. The next scene opens in Macduff's castle, by a conversation between Lady Macduff and her relative, Rosse, who has come to inform her of her husband's departure, and to express his fears for her own safety. The two scenes, thus closely connected in thought, seem to be so in time also; distance has disappeared; and who would think of pointing out, as an interval of which some recount should be given, the leagues which separate Macduff's castle from Macbeth's palace, and the time that would be required to traverse them. {144} We have entered without effort into this new part of the position; it follows its course; the assassins appear; the massacre commences. We pass into England; we behold the arrival of Macduff in that country; the terrible events of which he is ignorant fill up, for us, the interval which must separate his departure from his arrival. Rosse appears some time after him, and informs him of his misfortune. Both describe to Malcolm the desolation of Scotland, and the general hatred which Macbeth has incurred. The army which is destined to overthrow the tyrant is collected together, and the order for departure is given. But, while the army is on its road, the poet recalls our imagination toward Macbeth; with him we prepare for the approach of the troops, whose march is effected without any thing occurring to inform us of its duration, or to lead us to make inquiries about it. Scarcely ever, in Shakspeare, do the personages of the drama arrive immediately in the place for which they have set out; so abrupt a conjunction would be contrary to the natural order of the succession of ideas. We have seen Richard II. set out for the castle of John of Gaunt; it is therefore in John of Gaunt's castle that we await the arrival of Richard, whose journey has taken place without our mind being able to complain of not having been consulted with regard to the time which it occupied. In the same manner, between two events evidently separated by an interval long enough for us not to like to see it disappear without taking some part in it, Shakspeare interposes a scene which may belong with equal propriety to either the first or the second epoch, and he makes us pass from one to the other without shocking us by its intimate connection with the scene which immediately precedes or follows it. Thus, in "King Lear," between the time when Lear divides his kingdom among his daughters, and the moment when Goneril, already tired of her father's presence, determines to get rid of him, the scenes at Gloster's castle, and the commencement of Edmund's intrigue, are interposed. {145} Guided by that instinct which is the science of genius, the poet knows that our imagination will traverse without effort both time and space with him, if he spares those moral improbabilities which could alone arrest its progress. With this view, he sometimes accumulates material unlikelihoods, and sometimes exhausts the ingenuity of his art; but, ever attentive to the object at which he aims, he can reduce to unity of action those artifices and preparatory means which he employs to remove every thing that could interfere with the dramatic illusion, and to dispose freely of our thought.

Unity of action, being indispensable to unity of impression, could not escape Shakspeare's notice. But how, it may be asked, could he maintain it in the midst of so many events of so changeful and complicated a nature--in that immense field which includes so many places, so many years, all conditions of society, and the development of so many positions? Shakspeare succeeded in maintaining it, nevertheless: in "Macbeth," "Hamlet," "Richard III.," and "Romeo and Juliet," the action, though vast, does not cease to be one, rapid and complete. This is because the poet has seized upon its fundamental condition, which consists in placing the centre of interest where he finds the centre of action. The character which gives movement to the drama is also the one upon which the moral agitation of the spectator is bestowed. Duplicity of action, or at least of interest, has been urged against Racine's tragedy of "Andromaque," and the charge is not without foundation; it is not that all the parts of the action do not work together toward the same end, but the interest is divided, and the centre of action is uncertain. {146} If Shakspeare had had to treat of such a subject, which, it must be said, is not in great conformity to the nature of his genius, he would have made Andromache the centre of the action as well as of the interest. Maternal love would have pervaded the entire drama, displaying its courage as well as its fears, its strength as well as its sorrows. Shakspeare, indeed, would not have hesitated to introduce the child upon the stage, as Racine subsequently did in "Athalie," when he had grown more bold. All the emotions of the spectator would have been directed toward a single point: we should have beheld Andromache, with greater activity, trying other means to save Astyanax than "the tears of her mother," and constantly riveting upon her son and herself an attention which Racine has too often diverted to the means of action which he was constrained to derive from the vicissitudes of the destiny of Hermione. According to the system imposed upon our dramatic poets in the seventeenth century, Hermione should be the centre of the action; and so, in fact, she is. Upon a stage which daily became more subject to the authority of the ladies and of the court, love seemed destined to take the place of the fatality of the ancients: a blind power, as inflexible as fatality, and, like it, leading its victims toward an object defined from the very outset, love became the fixed point around which all things should revolve. In "Andromaque," love makes Hermione a simple personage, swayed by her passion, referring to it every thing that occurs beneath her view, and careful to bring events into subjection to herself, in order to make them serve and satisfy her affection. Hermione alone directs and gives movement to the drama; Andromaque only appears to suffer the agony of a position as powerless as it is painful. {147} Such an idea may admit of admirable developments of the passive affections of the heart; but it does not constitute a tragic action; and in those developments which do not lead immediately to action, our interest runs the risk of wandering astray, and returns afterward with difficulty into the only direction in which it can be maintained.

When, on the contrary, the centre of action and the centre of interest are identical--when the attention of the spectator has been fixed upon the hero of the drama, at once active and unchanging, whose character, though it remains ever the same, will lead to incessant changes in his destiny--then the events in agitation around such a man strike us only by their relation to him, and the impression which we receive from them assumes the color which he has himself imparted to them. Richard III. proceeds from plot to plot; every new success redoubles the terror with which we are inspired at the outset by his infernal genius; the pity which each one of his victims successively awakes, becomes merged in the feelings of hate which accumulate upon their persecutor; none of these particular feelings diverts our impressions to its own advantage; they are directed incessantly, and always with increasing vigor, toward the author of so many crimes; and thus Richard, the centre of action, is at the same time the centre of interest also; for dramatic interest is not only the unquiet pity which we feel for misfortune, or the passionate affection with which we are inspired by virtue; it is also hatred, the thirst for vengeance, the invocation of Heaven's justice upon the malefactor, as well as the prayer for the salvation of the innocent. All strong feelings, capable of exciting the human soul, can draw us in their train, and inspire us with passionate interest, they have no need to promise us happiness, or to gain our attachment by tenderness: we can also raise ourselves to that sublime contempt for life which makes men heroes and martyrs, and to that noble indignation beneath which tyrants succumb.

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Every element may enter into an action, thus reduced to one sole centre, from which emanate, and to which are related, all the events of the drama, and all the impressions of the spectator. Every thing that moves the heart of man, every thing that agitates his life, may combine to produce dramatic interest, provided that, being directed toward the same point, and marked with the same impress, the most various facts present themselves only as satellites of the principal fact, the brilliancy and power of which they serve to augment. Nothing will appear trivial, insignificant, or puerile, if it imparts greater vitality to the predominant position, or greater depth to the general feeling. Grief is sometimes redoubled by the aspect of gayety; in the midst of danger, a joke may increase our courage. Nothing is foreign to the impression but that which destroys it; it nourishes itself, and gains greater power from every thing that can mingle with it. The prattle of young Arthur with Hubert becomes heart-rending from the idea of the horrible barbarity which Hubert is about to practice upon him. We are filled with emotion by the sight of Lady Macduff lovingly amused by the witty sallies of her little son, while at her door are the assassins who have come to massacre that son, and her other children, and afterward herself. Who, but for these circumstances, would take a deep interest in this scene of maternal childishness? But, if this scene were omitted, should we hate Macbeth as much as we ought to do for this new crime? {149} In "Hamlet," not only is the scene of the grave-diggers connected with the general idea of the piece by the kind of meditations which it inspires, but--and we know it--it is Ophelia's grave which they are digging in Hamlet's presence; and to Ophelia will relate, when he is informed of this circumstance, all the impressions which have been kindled in his soul by the sight of those hideous and despised bones, and the indifference which is felt for the mortal remains of those who were once beautiful and powerful, honored or beloved. No detail of these mournful preparations is lost to the feeling which they occasion; the coarse insensibility of the men devoted to the habits of such a trade, their songs and jokes, all have their effect; and the forms and means of comedy thus enter, without effort, into tragedy, the impressions of which are never more keen than when we see them about to fall upon a man who is already their unwitting subject, and who is amusing himself in presence of the misfortune of which he is unaware.

Without this use of the comic, and without this intervention of the inferior classes, how many dramatic effects, which contribute powerfully to the general effect, would become impossible! Accommodate to the taste of the pleasantry of our age the scene with Macbeth's porter, and there is no one who will not shudder at the thought of the discovery that will follow this exhibition of jovial buffoonery, and of the spectacle of carnage still concealed beneath these remnants of the intoxication of a festival. {150} If Hamlet were the first brought into connection with his father's ghost, what preparation and explanations would be indispensable to place us in the state of mind in which a prince, a man belonging to the highest class of society, must be in order to believe in a ghost! But the phantom appears first to soldiers, men of simple a kind, who are more ready to be alarmed than astonished at it; and they relate the story to one another in the night-watch:

"Last night of all,
When yond' same star, that's westward from the pole,
Had made his course t' illume that part of heaven
Where now it burns, Marcellus, and myself,
The bell then beating one--

Marcellus.

Peace! break thee off: look, where it comes again!"

The effect of terror is produced, and we believe in the spectre before Hamlet has ever heard it mentioned.

Nor is this all; the intervention of the inferior classes furnishes Shakspeare with another means of effect, which would be impracticable in any other system. The poet who can take his actors from all ranks of society, and place them in all positions, may also bring every thing into action--that is to say, may remain constantly dramatic. In "Julius Caesar," the scene opens with a living picture of popular movements and feelings; what explanation or conversation could make us so well acquainted with the nature of the seductive influence exercised by the Dictator over the Romans, of the kind of danger to which liberty is exposed, and of the error, as well as the peril, of the republicans who hope to restore liberty by the death of Caesar? When Macbeth determines to get rid of Banquo, he has not to inform us of his project in the person of a confidant, or to receive an account of the execution of the deed in order to make us aware of it: he sends for the assassins and converses with them; we witness the artifices by which a tyrant renders the passions and misfortunes of man subservient to his designs; and we afterward see the murderers lie in wait for their victim, strike the fatal blow, and return, with blood-stained hands, to demand their reward. Banquo can then appear to us; the real presence of crime has produced all its effect, and we reject none of the terrors which accompany it.

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