Chapter X: Introduction (10)

A London engagement is generally considered by actors as the _ne plus ultra_ of their ambition, as ‘a consummation devoutly to be wished,’ as the great prize in the lottery of their professional life. But this appears to us, who are not in the secret, to be rather the prose termination of their adventurous career: it is the provincial commencement that is the poetical and truly enviable part of it. After that, they have comparatively little to hope or fear. ‘The wine of life is drunk, and but the lees remain.’ In London, they become gentlemen, and the King’s servants: but it is the romantic mixture of the hero and the vagabond that constitutes the essence of the player’s life. It is the transition from their real to their assumed characters, from the contempt of the world to the applause of the multitude, that gives its zest to the latter, and raises them as much above common humanity at night, as in the daytime they are depressed below it. ‘Hurried from fierce extremes, by contrast made more fierce,’—it is rags and a flock-bed which give their splendour to a plume of feathers and a throne. We should suppose, that if the most admired actor on the London stage were brought to confession on this point, he would acknowledge that all the applause he had received from ‘brilliant and overflowing audiences,’ was nothing to the light-headed intoxication of unlooked-for success in a barn. In town, actors are criticised: in country-places, they are wondered at, or hooted at: it is of little consequence which, so that the interval is not too long between. For ourselves, we own that the description of the strolling player in Gil Blas, soaking his dry crusts in the well by the roadside, presents to us a perfect picture of human felicity.

W. H.

NO. 40.] WHY THE ARTS ARE NOT PROGRESSIVE?—A [JAN. 11, 15;
FRAGMENT SEP. 11, 1814.

It is often made a subject of complaint and surprise, that the arts in this country, and in modern times, have not kept pace with the general progress of society and civilisation in other respects, and it has been proposed to remedy the deficiency by more carefully availing ourselves of the advantages which time and circumstances have placed within our reach, but which we have hitherto neglected, the study of the antique, the formation of academies, and the distribution of prizes.

First, the complaint itself, that the arts do not attain that progressive degree of perfection which might reasonably be expected from them, proceeds on a false notion, for the analogy appealed to in support of the regular advances of art to higher degrees of excellence, totally fails; it applies to science, not to art. Secondly, the expedients proposed to remedy the evil by adventitious means are only calculated to confirm it. The arts hold immediate communication with nature, and are only derived from that source. When that original impulse no longer exists, when the inspiration of genius is fled, all the attempts to recal it are no better than the tricks of galvanism to restore the dead to life. The arts may be said to resemble Antæus in his struggle with Hercules, who was strangled when he was raised above the ground, and only revived and recovered his strength when he touched his mother earth.

Nothing is more contrary to the fact than the supposition that in what we understand by the _fine arts_, as painting and poetry, relative perfection is only the result of repeated efforts, and that what has been once well done constantly leads to something better. What is mechanical, reducible to rule, or capable of demonstration, is progressive, and admits of gradual improvement: what is not mechanical or definite, but depends on genius, taste, and feeling, very soon becomes stationary or retrograde, and loses more than it gains by transfusion. The contrary opinion is, indeed, a common error, which has grown up, like many others, from transferring an analogy of one kind to something quite distinct, without thinking of the difference in the nature of the things, or attending to the difference of the results. For most persons, finding what wonderful advances have been made in biblical criticism, in chemistry, in mechanics, in geometry, astronomy, etc.—_i.e._, in things depending on mere inquiry and experiment, or on absolute demonstration, have been led hastily to conclude, that there was a general tendency in the efforts of the human intellect to improve by repetition, and in all other arts and institutions to grow perfect and mature by time. We look back upon the theological creed of our ancestors, and their discoveries in natural philosophy, with a smile of pity; science, and the arts connected with it, have all had their infancy, their youth, and manhood, and seem to have in them no principle of limitation or decay; and, inquiring no farther about the matter, we infer, in the height of our self-congratulation, and in the intoxication of our pride, that the same progress has been, and will continue to be, made in all other things which are the work of man. The fact, however, stares us so plainly in the face, that one would think the smallest reflection must suggest the truth, and overturn our sanguine theories. The greatest poets, the ablest orators, the best painters, and the finest sculptors that the world ever saw, appeared soon after the birth of these arts, and lived in a state of society which was, in other respects, comparatively barbarous. Those arts, which depend on individual genius and incommunicable power, have always leaped at once from infancy to manhood, from the first rude dawn of invention to their meridian height and dazzling lustre, and have in general declined ever after. This is the peculiar distinction and privilege of each, of science and of art; of the one, never to attain its utmost summit of perfection, and of the other, to arrive at it almost at once. Homer, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Dante, and Ariosto (Milton alone was of a later age, and not the worse for it), Raphael, Titian, Michael Angelo, Correggio, Cervantes, and Boccaccio—all lived near the beginning of their arts—perfected, and all but created them. These giant sons of genius stand, indeed, upon the earth, but they tower above their fellows, and the long line of their successors does not interpose any thing to obstruct their view, or lessen their brightness. In strength and stature they are unrivalled, in grace and beauty they have never been surpassed. In after-ages, and more refined periods, (as they are called), great men have arisen one by one, as it were by throes and at intervals: though in general the best of these cultivated and artificial minds were of an inferior order, as Tasso and Pope among poets, Guido and Vandyke among painters. But in the earliest stages of the arts, when the first mechanical difficulties had been got over, and the language as it were acquired, they rose by clusters and in constellations, never to rise again.

The arts of painting and poetry are conversant with the world of thought within us, and with the world of sense without us—with what we know, and see, and feel intimately. They flow from the sacred shrine of our own breasts, and are kindled at the living lamp of nature. The pulse of the passions assuredly beat as high, the depths and soundings of the human heart were as well understood three thousand years ago, as they are at present; the face of nature and ‘the human face divine,’ shone as bright then as they have ever done. It is this light, reflected by true genius on art, that marks out its path before it, and sheds a glory round the Muses’ feet, like that which ‘circled Una’s angel face,

‘And made a sunshine in the shady place.’

Nature is the soul of art. There is a strength in the imagination that reposes entirely on nature, which nothing else can supply. There is in the old poets and painters a vigour and grasp of mind, a full possession of their subject, a confidence and firm faith, a sublime simplicity, an elevation of thought, proportioned to their depth of feeling, an increasing force and impetus, which moves, penetrates, and kindles all that comes in contact with it, which seems, not theirs, but given to them. It is this reliance on the power of nature which has produced those master-pieces by the Prince of Painters, in which expression is all in all, where one spirit, that of truth, pervades every part, brings down heaven to earth, mingles cardinals and popes with angels and apostles, and yet blends and harmonises the whole by the true touches and intense feeling of what is beautiful and grand in nature. It was the same trust in nature that enabled Chaucer to describe the patient sorrow of Griselda; or the delight of that young beauty in the Flower and the Leaf, shrouded in her bower, and listening, in the morning of the year, to the singing of the nightingale, while her joy rises with the rising song, and gushes out afresh at every pause, and is borne along with the full tide of pleasure, and still increases and repeats and prolongs itself, and knows no ebb. It is thus that Boccaccio, in the divine story of the Hawk, has represented Frederigo Alberigi steadily contemplating his favourite Falcon (the wreck and remnant of his fortune), and glad to see how fat and fair a bird she is, thinking what a dainty repast she would make for his Mistress, who had deigned to visit him in his low cell. So Isabella mourns over her pot of Basile, and never asks for any thing but that. So Lear calls out for his poor fool, and invokes the heavens, for they are old like him. So Titian impressed on the countenance of that young Neapolitan nobleman in the Louvre, a look that never passed away. So Nicolas Poussin describes some shepherds wandering out in a morning of the spring, and coming to a tomb with this inscription, ‘I ALSO WAS AN ARCADIAN.’

In general, it must happen in the first stages of the Arts, that as none but those who had a natural genius for them would attempt to practise them, so none but those who had a natural taste for them would pretend to judge of or criticise them. This must be an incalculable advantage to the man of true genius, for it is no other than the privilege of being tried by his peers. In an age when connoisseurship had not become a fashion; when religion, war, and intrigue, occupied the time and thoughts of the great, only those minds of superior refinement would be led to notice the works of art, who had a real sense of their excellence; and in giving way to the powerful bent of his own genius, the painter was most likely to consult the taste of his judges. He had not to deal with pretenders to taste, through vanity, affectation, and idleness. He had to appeal to the higher faculties of the soul; to that deep and innate sensibility to truth and beauty, which required only a proper object to have its enthusiasm excited; and to that independent strength of mind, which, in the midst of ignorance and barbarism, hailed and fostered genius, wherever it met with it. Titian was patronised by Charles V., Count Castiglione was the friend of Raphael. These were true patrons, and true critics; and as there were no others, (for the world, in general, merely looked on and wondered), there can be little doubt, that such a period of dearth of factitious patronage would be the most favourable to the full developement of the greatest talents, and the attainment of the highest excellence.

The diffusion of taste is not the same thing as the improvement of taste; but it is only the former of these objects that is promoted by public institutions and other artificial means. The number of candidates for fame, and of pretenders to criticism, is thus increased beyond all proportion, while the quantity of genius and feeling remains the same; with this difference, that the man of genius is lost in the crowd of competitors, who would never have become such but from encouragement and example; and that the opinion of those few persons whom nature intended for judges, is drowned in the noisy suffrages of shallow smatterers in taste. The principle of universal suffrage, however applicable to matters of government, which concern the common feelings and common interests of society, is by no means applicable to matters of taste, which can only be decided upon by the most refined understandings. The highest efforts of genius, in every walk of art, can never be properly understood by the generality of mankind: There are numberless beauties and truths which lie far beyond their comprehension. It is only as refinement and sublimity are blended with other qualities of a more obvious and grosser nature, that they pass current with the world. Taste is the highest degree of sensibility, or the impression made on the most cultivated and sensible of minds, as genius is the result of the highest powers both of feeling and invention. It may be objected, that the public taste is capable of gradual improvement, because, in the end, the public do justice to works of the greatest merit. This is a mistake. The reputation ultimately, and often slowly affixed to works of genius is stamped upon them by authority, not by popular consent or the common sense of the world. We imagine that the admiration of the works of celebrated men has become common, because the admiration of their names has become so. But does not every ignorant connoisseur pretend the same veneration, and talk with the same vapid assurance of Michael Angelo, though he has never seen even a copy of any of his pictures, as if he had studied them accurately,—merely because Sir Joshua Reynolds has praised him? Is Milton more popular now than when the Paradise Lost was first published? Or does he not rather owe his reputation to the judgment of a few persons in every successive period, accumulating in his favour, and overpowering by its weight the public indifference? Why is Shakspeare popular? Not from his refinement of character or sentiment, so much as from his power of telling a story, the variety and invention, the tragic catastrophe and broad farce of his plays. Spenser is not yet understood. Does not Boccaccio pass to this day for a writer of ribaldry, because his jests and lascivious tales were all that caught the vulgar ear, while the story of the Falcon is forgotten!

W. H.

End of THE ROUND TABLE.

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Footnote 30:

It is Steele’s; and the whole paper (No. 95) is in his most delightful
manner. The dream about the mistress, however, is given to Addison by
the Editors, and the general style of that number is his; though, from
the story being related personally of Bickerstaff, who is also
represented as having been at that time in the army, we conclude it to
have originally come from Steele, perhaps in the course of
conversation. The particular incident is much more like a story of his
than of Addison’s.—H. T.

Footnote 31:

We had in our hands the other day an original copy of the _Tatler_,
and a list of the subscribers. It is curious to see some names there
which we should hardly think of, (that of Sir Isaac Newton is among
them), and also to observe the degree of interest excited by those of
the different persons, which is not adjusted according to the rules of
the Heralds’ College.

Footnote 32:

Pope also declares that he had a particular regard for an old post
which stood in the court-yard before the house where he was brought
up.

Footnote 33:

See also the passage in his prose works relating to the first design
of _Paradise Lost_.

Footnote 34:

‘Oh! for my sake do you with fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmless deeds,
That did not better for my life provide,
Than public means which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.’

At another time, we find him ‘desiring this man’s art, and that man’s
scope’: so little was Shakspeare, as far as we can learn, enamoured of
himself!

Footnote 35:

See an Essay on the genius of Hogarth, by C. Lamb, published in a
periodical work, called the _Reflector_.

Footnote 36:

‘A good sherris-sack hath a twofold operation in it; it ascends me
into the brain, dries me there all the foolish, dull, and crudy
vapours which environ it; and makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive,
full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes, which, delivered over to
the tongue, becomes excellent wit,’ etc.—_Second Part of Henry IV._

Footnote 37:

We have an instance in our own times of a man, equally devoid of
understanding and principle, but who manages the House of Commons by
his _manner_ alone.

Footnote 38:

Mr. Wordsworth, who has written a sonnet to the King on the good that
he has done in the last fifty years, has made an attack on a set of
gipsies for having done nothing in four and twenty hours. ‘The stars
had gone their rounds, but they had not stirred from their place.’ And
why should they, if they were comfortable where they were? We did not
expect this turn from Mr. Wordsworth, whom we had considered as the
prince of poetical idlers, and patron of the philosophy of indolence,
who formerly insisted on our spending our time ‘in a wise
passiveness.’ Mr. W. will excuse us if we are not converts to his
recantation of his original doctrine; for he who changes his opinion
loses his authority. We did not look for this Sunday-school philosophy
from him. What had he himself been doing in these four and twenty
hours? Had he been admiring a flower, or writing a sonnet? We hate the
doctrine of utility, even in a philosopher, and much more in a poet:
for the only real utility is that which leads to enjoyment, and the
end is, in all cases, better than the means. A friend of ours from the
North of England proposed to make Stonehenge of some use, by building
houses with it. Mr. W.’s quarrel with the gipsies is an improvement on
this extravagance, for the gipsies are the only living monuments of
the first ages of society. They are an everlasting source of thought
and reflection on the advantages and disadvantages of the progress of
civilisation: they are a better answer to the cotton manufactories
than Mr. W. has given in the _Excursion_. ‘They are a grotesque
ornament to the civil order.’ We should be sorry to part with Mr.
Wordsworth’s poetry, because it amuses and interests us: we should be
still sorrier to part with the tents of our old friends, the Bohemian
philosophers, because they amuse and interest us more. If any one goes
a journey, the principal event in it is his meeting with a party of
gipsies. The pleasantest trait in the character of Sir Roger de
Coverley, is his interview with the gipsy fortune-teller. This is
enough.

Footnote 39:

The Dissenters in this country (if we except the founders of sects,
who fall under a class by themselves) have produced only two
remarkable men, Priestley and Jonathan Edwards. The work of the latter
on the Will is written with as much power of logic, and more in the
true spirit of philosophy, than any other metaphysical work in the
language. His object throughout is not to perplex the question, but to
satisfy his own mind and the reader’s. In general, the principle of
dissent arises more from want of sympathy and imagination, than from
strength of reason. The spirit of contradiction is not the spirit of
philosophy.

Footnote 40:

The modern Quakers come as near the mark in these cases as they can.
They do not go to plays, but they are great attenders of
spouting-clubs and lectures. They do not frequent concerts, but run
after pictures. We do not know exactly how they stand with respect to
the circulating libraries. A Quaker poet would be a literary
phenomenon.

Footnote 41:

We have made the above observations, not as theological partisans, but
as natural historians. We shall some time or other give the reverse of
the picture; for there are vices inherent in establishments and their
thorough-paced adherents, which well deserve to be distinctly pointed
out.

Footnote 42:

Is all this a rhodomontade, or literal matter of fact, not credible in
these degenerate days?

Footnote 43:

One of the most interesting traits of the amiable simplicity of
Walton, is the circumstance of his friendship for Cotton, one of the
‘swash-bucklers’ of the age. Dr. Johnson said there were only three
works which the reader was sorry to come to the end of, _Don Quixote_,
_Robinson Crusoe_, and the _Pilgrim’s Progress_. Perhaps Walton’s
_Angler_ might be added to the number.

Footnote 44:

Oxberry’s manner of acting this character is a very edifying comment
on the text: he flings his arms about, like those of a figure pulled
by strings, and seems actuated by a pure spirit of infatuation, as if
one blast of folly had taken possession of his whole frame,

‘And filled up all the mighty void of sense.’

Footnote 45:

The following lines are remarkable for a certain cloying sweetness in
the repetition of the rhymes:

_Titania._ Be kind and courteous to this gentleman;
Hop in his walks, and gambol in his eyes;
Feed him with apricocks and dewberries,
With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries;
The honey-bags steal from the humble bees,
And for night tapers crop their waxen thighs,
And light them at the fiery glow-worm’s eyes,
To have my love to bed, and to arise:
And pluck the wings from painted butterflies,
To fan the moon beams from his sleeping eyes;’
Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies.’

Footnote 46:

The late ingenious Baron Grimm, of acute critical memory, was up to
the merit of the _Beggar’s Opera_. In his Correspondence, he says, ‘If
it be true that the nearer a writer is to Nature, the more certain he
is of pleasing, it must be allowed that the English, in their dramatic
pieces, have greatly the advantage over us. There reigns in them an
inestimable tone of nature, which the timidity of our taste has
banished from French pieces. M. Patu has just published, in two
volumes, _A selection of smaller dramatic pieces, translated from the
English_, which will eminently support what I have advanced. The
principal one among this selection is the celebrated _Beggar’s Opera_
of Gay, which has had such an amazing run in England. We are here in
the very worst company imaginable; the _Dramatis Personæ_ are robbers,
pickpockets, gaolers, prostitutes, and the like; yet we are highly
amused, and in no haste to quit them; and why? Because there is
nothing in the world more original or more natural. There is no
occasion to compare our most celebrated comic operas with this, to see
how far we are removed from truth and nature, and this is the reason
that, notwithstanding our wit, we are almost always flat and insipid.
Two faults are generally committed by our writers, which they seem
incapable of avoiding. They think they have done wonders if they have
only faithfully copied the dictionaries of the personages they bring
upon the stage, forgetting that the great art is to chuse the moments
of character and passion in those who are to speak, since it is those
moments alone that render them interesting. For want of this
discrimination, the piece necessarily sinks into insipidity and
monotony. Why do almost all M. Vade’s pieces fatigue the audience to
death? Because all his characters speak the same language; because
each is a perfect resemblance of the other. Instead of this, in the
_Beggar’s Opera_, among eight or ten girls of the town, each has her
separate character, her peculiar traits, her peculiar modes of
expression, which give her a marked distinction from her
companions.’—Vol. i. p. 185.

Footnote 47:

He who speaks two languages has no country. The French, when they made
their language the common language of the Courts of Europe, gained
more than by all their subsequent conquests.

Footnote 48:

There is, however, in the African physiognomy a grandeur and a force,
arising from this uniform character of violence and abruptness. It is
consistent with itself throughout. Entire deformity can only be found
where the features have not only no symmetry or softness in
themselves, but have no connection with one another, presenting every
variety of wretchedness, and a jumble of all sorts of defects, such as
we see in Hogarth or in the streets of London; for instance, a large
bottle-nose, with a small mouth twisted awry.

Footnote 49:

The following version, communicated by a classical friend, is exact
and elegant:

‘He said; and strait the herald Argicide
Beneath his feet his winged sandals tied,
Immortal, golden, that his flight could bear
O’er seas and lands, like waftage of the air.
His rod too, that can close the eyes of men
In balmy sleep, and open them again,
He took, and holding it in hand, went flying:
Till, from Pieria’s top the sea descrying,
Down to it sheer he dropp’d; and scour’d away
Like the wild gull, that, fishing o’er the bay,
Flaps on, with pinions dipping in the brine;—
So went on the far sea the shape divine.’

_Odyssey_, book v.

——‘That was Arion crown’d:—
So went he playing on the wat’ry plain.’

_Faerie Queen._

There is a striking description in Mr. Burke’s Reflections of the late
Queen of France, whose charms had left their poison in the heart of
this Irish orator and patriot, and set the world in a ferment sixteen
years afterwards. ‘And surely never lighted on this orb, which she
hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision.’ The idea is in Don
Quixote, where the Duenna speaks of the air with which the Duchess
‘treads, or rather seems to disdain the ground she walks on.’ We have
heard the same account of the gracefulness of Marie Antoinette from an
artist, who saw her at Versailles much about the same time that Mr.
Burke did. He stood in one corner of a little antechamber, and as the
doors were narrow, she was obliged to pass sideways with her hoop. She
glided by him in an instant, as if borne on a cloud.

Footnote 50:

In a fruit or flower-piece by Vanhuysum, the minutest details acquire
a certain grace and beauty from the delicacy with which they are
finished. The eye dwells with a giddy delight on the liquid drops of
dew, on the gauze wings of an insect, on the hair and feathers of a
bird’s nest, the streaked and speckled egg-shells, the fine legs of
the little travelling caterpillar. Who will suppose that the painter
had not the same pleasure in detecting these nice distinctions in
nature, that the critic has in tracing them in the picture?

Footnote 51:

We here allude particularly to Turner, the ablest landscape painter
now living, whose pictures are, however, too much abstractions of
aerial perspective, and representations not so properly of the objects
of nature as of the medium through which they are seen. They are the
triumph of the knowledge of the artist, and of the power of the pencil
over the barrenness of the subject. They are pictures of the elements
of air, earth, and water. The artist delights to go back to the first
chaos of the world, or to that state of things when the waters were
separated from the dry land, and light from darkness, but as yet no
living thing nor tree bearing fruit was seen upon the face of the
earth. All is ‘without form and void.’ Some one said of his landscapes
that they were _pictures of nothing, and very like_.

Footnote 52:

Raphael not only could not paint a landscape; he could not paint
people in a landscape. He could not have painted the heads or the
figures, or even the dresses, of the St. Peter Martyr. His figures
have always an _in-door_ look, that is, a set, determined, voluntary,
dramatic character, arising from their own passions, or a watchfulness
of those of others, and want that wild uncertainty of expression,
which is connected with the accidents of nature and the changes of the
elements. He has nothing _romantic_ about him.

Footnote 53:

A good-natured man will always have a smack of pedantry about him. A
lawyer, who talks about law, _certioraris_, _noli prosequis_, and silk
gowns, though he may be a blockhead, is by no means dangerous. It is a
very bad sign (unless where it arises from singular modesty) when you
cannot tell a man’s profession from his conversation. Such persons
either feel no interest in what concerns them most, or do not express
what they feel. ‘Not to admire any thing’ is a very unsafe rule. A
London apprentice, who did not admire the Lord Mayor’s coach, would
stand a good chance of being hanged. We know but one person absurd
enough to have formed his whole character on the above maxim of
Horace, and who affects a superiority over others from an uncommon
degree of natural and artificial stupidity.

Footnote 54:

‘Je crois que l’imagination étoit la première de ses facultés, et
qu’elle absorboit même toutes les autres.’—P. 80.

Footnote 55:

‘Il avoit une grande puissance de raison sur les matieres abstraites,
sur les objets qui n’ont de réalité que dans la pensée,’ etc.—P. 81.

Footnote 56:

He did more towards the French Revolution than any other man.
Voltaire, by his wit and penetration, had rendered superstition
contemptible, and tyranny odious: but it was Rousseau who brought the
feeling of irreconcilable enmity to rank and privileges, _above
humanity_, home to the bosom of every man,—identified it with all the
pride of intellect, and with the deepest yearnings of the human heart.

Footnote 57:

We shall here give one passage as an example, which has always
appeared to us the very perfection of this kind of personal and local
description. It is that where he gives an account of his being one of
the choristers at the Cathedral at Chambery: ‘On jugera bien que la
vie de la maîtrise toujours chantante et gaie, avec les Musiciens et
les Enfans de chœur, me plaisoit plus que celle du Séminaire avec les
Peres de S. Lazare. Cependant, cette vie, pour être plus libre, n’en
étoit pas moins égale et réglée. J’étois fait pour aimer
l’indépendance et pour n’en abuser jamais. Durant six mois entiers, je
ne sortis pas une seule fois, que pour aller chez Maman ou à l’Église,
et je n’en fus pas même tenté. Cette intervalle est un de ceux où j’ai
vécu dans le plus grand calme, et que je me suis rappelé avec le plus
de plaisir. Dans les situations diverses où je me suis trouvé,
quelques uns out été marqués par un tel sentiment de bien-être, qu’en
les remémorant j’en suis affecté comme si j’y étois encore. Non
seulement je me rappelle les tems, les lieux, les personnes, mais tous
les objets environnans, la température de l’air, son odeur, sa
couleur, une certaine impression locale qui ne s’est fait sentir que
là, et dont le souvenir vif m’y transporte de nouveau. Par exemple,
tout ce qu’on répétait a la maîtrise, tout ce qu’on chantoit au chœur,
tout ce qu’on y faisoit, le bel et noble habit des Chanoines, les
hasubles des Prêtres, les mitres des Chantres, la figure des
Musiciens, un vieux Charpentier boiteux qui jouoit de la contrebasse,
un petit Abbé biondin qui jouoit du violon, le lambeau de soutane
qu’après avoir posé son épée, M. le Maître endossoit par-dessus son
habit laïque, et le beau surplis fin dont il en couvrait les loques
pour aller au chœur; l’orgueil avec lequel j’allois, tenant ma petite
flûte à bec, m’établir dans l’orchestre, à la tribune, pour un petit
bout de récit que M. le Maître avoit fait exprès pour moi: le bon
diner qui nous attendoit ensuite, le bon appétit qu’on y portoit:—ce
concours d’objets vivement retracé m’a cent fois charmé dans ma
mémoire, autant et plus que dans la realité. J’ai gardé toujours une
affection tendre pour un certain air du _Conditor alme syderum_ qui
marche par iambes; parce qu’un Dimanche de l’Avent j’entendis de mon
lit chanter cette hymne, avant le jour, sur le perron de la
Cathédrale, selon un rite de cette eglise là. Mlle. _Merceret_, femme
de chambre de Maman, savoit un peu de musique; je n’oublierai jamais
un petit motet _afferte_, que M. le Maître me fit chanter avec elle,
et que sa maîtresse écoutait avec tant de plaisir. Enfin tout, jusqu’à
la bonne servante _Perrine_, qui étoit si bonne fille, et que les
enfans de chœur faisoient tant endêver—tout dans les souvenirs de ces
tems de bonheur et d’innocence revient souvent me ravir et
m’attrister.’—_Confessions_, LIV. iii. p. 283.

Footnote 58:

Burns, when about to sail for America after the first publication of
his poems, consoled himself with ‘the delicious thought of being
regarded as a clever fellow, though on the other side of the
Atlantic.’

Footnote 59:

This man (Burke) who was a half poet and a half philosopher, has done
more mischief than perhaps any other person in the world. His
understanding was not competent to the discovery of any truth, but it
was sufficient to palliate a falsehood; his reasons, of little weight
in themselves, thrown into the scale of power, were dreadful. Without
genius to adorn the beautiful, he had the art to throw a dazzling veil
over the deformed and disgusting; and to strew the flowers of
imagination over the rotten carcass of corruption, not to prevent, but
to communicate the infection. His jealousy of Rousseau was one chief
cause of his opposition to the French Revolution. The writings of the
one had changed the institutions of a kingdom; while the speeches of
the other, with the intrigues of his whole party, had changed nothing
but the _turnspit of the King’s kitchen_. He would have blotted out
the broad pure light of Heaven, because it did not first shine in at
the little Gothic windows of St. Stephen’s Chapel. The genius of
Rousseau had levelled the towers of the Bastile with the dust; our
zealous reformist, who would rather be doing mischief than nothing,
tried, therefore, to patch them up again, by calling that loathsome
dungeon the King’s castle, and by fulsome adulation of the virtues of
a Court strumpet. This man,—but enough of him here.

Footnote 60:

This word is not English.

Footnote 61:

Written in 1806.

Footnote 62:

Plato’s cave, in which he supposes a man to be shut up all his life
with his back to the light, and to see nothing of the figures of men,
or other objects that pass by, but their shadows on the opposite wall
of his cell, so that when he is let out and sees the real figures, he
is only dazzled and confounded by them, seems an ingenious satire on
the life of a book-worm.

Footnote 63:

The following lively description of this actress is given by Cibber in
his Apology:—

‘What found most employment for her whole various excellence at once,
was the part of Melantha, in Marriage-à-la-mode. Melantha is as
finished an impertinent as ever fluttered in a drawing-room, and seems
to contain the most complete system of female foppery that could
possibly be crowded into the tortured form of a fine lady. Her
language, dress, motion, manners, soul, and body, are in a continual
hurry to be something more than is necessary or commendable. And
though I doubt it will be a vain labour to offer you a just likeness
of Mrs. Montfort’s action, yet the fantastic impression is still so
strong in my memory, that I cannot help saying something, though
fantastically, about it. The first ridiculous airs that break from her
are upon a gallant never seen before, who delivers her a letter from
her father, recommending him to her good graces as an honourable
lover. Here now, one would think she might naturally shew a little of
the sex’s decent reserve, though never so slightly covered! No, sir;
not a tittle of it; modesty is the virtue of a poor-soul’d country
gentlewoman: she is too much a court-lady, to be under so vulgar a
confusion: she reads the letter, therefore, with a careless, dropping
lip, and an erected brow, humming it hastily over, as if she were
impatient to outgo her father’s commands, by making a complete
conquest of him at once: and that the letter might not embarrass her
attack, crack! she crumbles it at once into her palm, and pours upon
him her whole artillery of airs, eyes, and motion; down goes her
dainty, diving body to the ground, as if she were sinking under the
conscious load of her own attractions; then launches into a flood of
fine language and compliment, still playing her chest forward in fifty
falls and risings, like a swan upon waving water; and, to complete her
impertinence, she is so rapidly fond of her own wit, that she will not
give her lover leave to praise it: Silent assenting bows, and vain
endeavours to speak, are all the share of the conversation he is
admitted to, which at last he is relieved from, by her engagement to
half a score visits, which she _swims_ from him to make, with a
promise to return in a twinkling.’—_The Life of Colley Cibber_, p.
138.

CHARACTERS OF SHAKESPEAR’S PLAYS

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The first edition of the _Characters of Shakespear’s Plays_ (5½ in. × 9 in.) was published in 1817. The imprint reads thus:—London: | Printed by C. H. Reynell, 21, Piccadilly, | for R. Hunter, successor to Mr. Johnson, | in St. Paul’s Church-yard; | and C. and J. Ollier, | Welbeck-street, Cavendish-square. | 1817. The second edition was issued in the following year, and the imprint is:—London: | Printed for Taylor and Hessey, | 93, Fleet Street. | 1818. There are several verbal alterations in the second edition, and one curious _erratum_: ‘In _Lear_, p. 173 [p. 269 present edition] dele line “Not an hour more nor less.’” In the text of the play these words occur between ‘Fourscore and upward’ and ‘And, to deal plainly.’ The second edition also was printed by C. H. Reynell, Broad-street, Golden-square. No further edition was published in Hazlitt’s lifetime, and the present issue has consequently been printed from a copy of the second edition: the proofs, however, have been read with a copy of the first edition, and one or two misprints thereby corrected. In 1818 a pirated American edition was published at Boston.

A contemporary criticism of the volume may be found in the _Edinburgh Review_, 1817, by Francis Jeffrey. See also E. L. Bulwer’s _Some Thoughts on the Genius of Hazlitt_. One hundred pounds was paid to Hazlitt by C. H. Reynell for the copyright, and the first edition, at half a guinea, was sold in six weeks: an adverse criticism by William Gifford in the _Quarterly Review_ (No. 36, January 1818) spoiled the sale of the second edition.

The following announcement appears on the back of the half-title of the second edition:—‘This day is published, Lectures on the English Poets, delivered at the Surry Institution, By William Hazlitt. In one vol. 8vo. price 10s. 6d.’

TO

CHARLES LAMB, ESQ.

THIS VOLUME IS INSCRIBED, AS A MARK OF

OLD FRIENDSHIP

AND LASTING ESTEEM,

BY THE AUTHOR.

CONTENTS

PAGE

Preface 171

Cymbeline 179

Macbeth 186

Julius Cæsar 195

Othello 200

Timon of Athens 210

Coriolanus 214

Troilus and Cressida 221

Antony and Cleopatra 228

Hamlet 232

The Tempest 238

The Midsummer Night’s Dream 244

Romeo and Juliet 248

Lear 257

Richard II. 272

Henry IV. in Two Parts 277

Henry V. 285

Henry VI. in Three Parts 292

Richard III. 298

Henry VIII. 303

King John 306

Twelfth Night; or, What You Will 313

The Two Gentlemen of Verona 318

The Merchant of Venice 320

The Winter’s Tale 324

All’s Well that Ends Well 329

Love’s Labour’s Lost 332

Much Ado About Nothing 335

As You Like It 338

The Taming of the Shrew 341

Measure for Measure 345

The Merry Wives of Windsor 349

The Comedy of Errors 351

Doubtful Plays of Shakespear 353

Poems and Sonnets 357