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The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay. Vol 2

E >> Edinburgh Review >> The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay. Vol 2




In a barbarous age the imagination exercises a despotic power.
So strong is the perception of what is unreal that it often
overpowers all the passions of the mind and all the sensations of
the body. At first, indeed, the phantasm remains undivulged, a
hidden treasure, a wordless poetry, an invisible painting, a
silent music, a dream of which the pains and pleasures exist to
the dreamer alone, a bitterness which the heart only knoweth, a
joy with which a stranger intermeddleth not. The machinery, by
which ideas are to be conveyed from one person to another, is as
yet rude and defective. Between mind and mind there is a great
gulf. The imitative arts do not exist, or are in their lowest
state. But the actions of men amply prove that the faculty which
gives birth to those arts is morbidly active. It is not yet the
inspiration of poets and sculptors; but it is the amusement of
the day, the terror of the night, the fertile source of wild
superstitions. It turns the clouds into gigantic shapes, and the
winds into doleful voices. The belief which springs from it is
more absolute and undoubting than any which can be derived from
evidence. It resembles the faith which we repose in our own
sensations. Thus, the Arab, when covered with wounds, saw
nothing but the dark eyes and the green kerchief of a beckoning
Houri. The Northern warrior laughed in the pangs of death when
he thought of the mead of Valhalla.

The first works of the imagination are, as we have said, poor and
rude, not from the want of genius, but from the want of
materials. Phidias could have done nothing with an old tree and
a fish-bone, or Homer with the language of New Holland.

Yet the effect of these early performances, imperfect as they
must necessarily be, is immense. All deficiencies are supplied
by the susceptibility of those to whom they are addressed. We
all know what pleasure a wooden doll, which may be bought for
sixpence, will afford to a little girl. She will require no
other company. She will nurse it, dress it, and talk to it all
day. No grown-up man takes half so much delight in one of the
incomparable babies of Chantrey. In the same manner, savages are
more affected by the rude compositions of their bards than
nations more advanced in civilisation by the greatest master-
pieces of poetry.

In process of time, the instruments by which the imagination
works are brought to perfection. Men have not more imagination
than their rude ancestors. We strongly suspect that they have
much less. But they produce better works of imagination. Thus,
up to a certain period, the diminution of the poetical powers is
far more than compensated by the improvement of all the
appliances and means of which those powers stand in need. Then
comes the short period of splendid and consummate excellence.
And then, from causes against which it is vain to struggle,
poetry begins to decline. The progress of language, which was at
first favourable, becomes fatal to it, and, instead of
compensating for the decay of the imagination, accelerates that
decay, and renders it more obvious. When the adventurer in the
Arabian tale anointed one of his eyes with the contents of the
magical box, all the riches of the earth, however widely
dispersed, however sacredly concealed, became visible to him.
But, when he tried the experiment on both eyes, he was struck
with blindness. What the enchanted elixir was to the sight of
the body, language is to the sight of the imagination. At first
it calls up a world of glorious allusions; but, when it becomes
too copious, it altogether destroys the visual power.

As the development of the mind proceeds, symbols, instead of
being employed to convey images, are substituted for them.
Civilised men think as they trade, not in kind, but by means of a
circulating medium. In these circumstances, the sciences improve
rapidly, and criticism among the rest; but poetry, in the highest
sense of the word, disappears. Then comes the dotage of the fine
arts, a second childhood, as feeble as the former, and far more
hopeless. This is the age of critical poetry, of poetry by
courtesy, of poetry to which the memory, the judgment, and the
wit contribute far more than the imagination. We readily allow
that many works of this description are excellent: we will not
contend with those who think them more valuable than the great
poems of an earlier period. We only maintain that they belong to
a different species of composition, and are produced by a
different faculty.

It is some consolation to reflect that this critical school of
poetry improves as the science of criticism improves; and that
the science of criticism, like every other science, is constantly
tending towards perfection. As experiments are multiplied,
principles are better understood.

In some countries, in our own for example, there has been an
interval between the downfall of the creative school and the rise
of the critical, a period during which imagination has been in
its decrepitude, and taste in its infancy. Such a revolutionary
interregnum as this will be deformed by every species of
extravagance.

The first victory of good taste is over the bombast and conceits
which deform such times as these. But criticism is still in a
very imperfect state. What is accidental is for a long time
confounded with what is essential. General theories are drawn
from detached facts. How many hours the action of a play may be
allowed to occupy,--how many similes an Epic Poet may introduce
into his first book,--whether a piece, which is acknowledged to
have a beginning and an end, may not be without a middle, and
other questions as puerile as these, formerly occupied the
attention of men of letters in France, and even in this country.
Poets, in such circumstances as these, exhibit all the narrowness
and feebleness of the criticism by which their manner has been
fashioned. From outrageous absurdity they are preserved indeed
by their timidity. But they perpetually sacrifice nature and
reason to arbitrary canons of taste. In their eagerness to avoid
the mala prohibita of a foolish code, they are perpetually
rushing on the mala in se. Their great predecessors, it is true,
were as bad critics as themselves, or perhaps worse, but those
predecessors, as we have attempted to show, were inspired by a
faculty independent of criticism, and, therefore, wrote well
while they judged ill.

In time men begin to take more rational and comprehensive views
of literature. The analysis of poetry, which, as we have
remarked, must at best be imperfect, approaches nearer and nearer
to exactness. The merits of the wonderful models of former times
are justly appreciated. The frigid productions of a later age
are rated at no more than their proper value. Pleasing and
ingenious imitations of the manner of the great masters appear.
Poetry has a partial revival, a Saint Martin's Summer, which,
after a period of dreariness and decay, agreeably reminds us of
the splendour of its June. A second harvest is gathered in;
though, growing on a spent soil, it has not the heart of the
former. Thus, in the present age, Monti has successfully
imitated the style of Dante; and something of the Elizabethan
inspiration has been caught by several eminent countrymen of our
own. But never will Italy produce another Inferno, or England
another Hamlet. We look on the beauties of the modern
imaginations with feelings similar to those with which we see
flowers disposed in vases, to ornament the drawing-rooms of a
capital. We doubtless regard them with pleasure, with greater
pleasure, perhaps, because, in the midst of a place ungenial to
them, they remind us of the distant spots on which they flourish
in spontaneous exuberance. But we miss the sap, the freshness,
and the bloom. Or, if we may borrow another illustration from
Queen Scheherezade, we would compare the writers of this school
to the jewellers who were employed to complete the unfinished
window of the palace of Aladdin. Whatever skill or cost could do
was done. Palace and bazaar were ransacked for precious stones.
Yet the artists, with all their dexterity, with all their
assiduity, and with all their vast means, were unable to produce
anything comparable to the wonders which a spirit of a higher
order had wrought in a single night.

The history of every literature with which we are acquainted
confirms, we think, the principles which we have laid down. In
Greece we see the imaginative school of poetry gradually fading
into the critical. Aeschylus and Pindar were succeeded by
Sophocles, Sophocles by Euripides, Euripides by the Alexandrian
versifiers. Of these last, Theocritus alone has left
compositions which deserve to be read. The splendour and
grotesque fairyland of the Old Comedy, rich with such gorgeous
hues, peopled with such fantastic shapes, and vocal alternately
with the sweetest peals of music and the loudest bursts of elvish
laughter, disappeared forever. The master-pieces of the New
Comedy are known to us by Latin translations of extraordinary
merit. From these translations, and from the expressions of the
ancient critics, it is clear that the original compositions were
distinguished by grace and sweetness, that they sparkled with
wit, and abounded with pleasing sentiment; but that the creative
power was gone. Julius Caesar called Terence a half Menander,--a
sure proof that Menander was not a quarter Aristophanes.

The literature of the Romans was merely a continuation of the
literature of the Greeks. The pupils started from the point at
which their masters had, in the course of many generations
arrived. They thus almost wholly missed the period of original
invention. The only Latin poets whose writings exhibit much
vigour of imagination are Lucretius and Catullus. The Augustan
age produced nothing equal to their finer passages.

In France that licensed jester, whose jingling cap and motley
coat concealed more genius than ever mustered in the saloon of
Ninon or of Madame Geoffrin, was succeeded by writers as decorous
and as tiresome as gentlemen ushers.

The poetry of Italy and of Spain has undergone the same change.
But nowhere has the revolution been more complete and violent
than in England. The same person who, when a boy, had clapped
his thrilling hands at the first representation of the Tempest
might, without attaining to a marvellous longevity, have lived to
read the earlier works of Prior and Addison. The change, we
believe, must, sooner or later, have taken place. But its
progress was accelerated, and its character modified, by the
political occurrences of the times, and particularly by two
events, the closing of the theatres under the Commonwealth, and
the restoration of the House of Stuart.

We have said that the critical and poetical faculties are not
only distinct, but almost incompatible. The state of our
literature during the reigns of Elizabeth and James the First is
a strong confirmation of this remark. The greatest works of
imagination that the world has ever seen were produced at that
period. The national taste, in the meantime, was to the last
degree detestable. Alliterations, puns, antithetical forms of
expression lavishly employed where no corresponding opposition
existed between the thoughts expressed, strained allegories,
pedantic allusions, everything, in short, quaint and affected, in
matter and manner, made up what was then considered as fine
writing. The eloquence of the bar, the pulpit, and the council-
board, was deformed by conceits which would have disgraced the
rhyming shepherds of an Italian academy. The king quibbled on
the throne. We might, indeed, console ourselves by reflecting
that his majesty was a fool. But the chancellor quibbled in
concert from the wool-sack: and the chancellor was Francis
Bacon. It is needless to mention Sidney and the whole tribe of
Euphuists; for Shakspeare himself, the greatest poet that ever
lived, falls into the same fault whenever he means to be
particularly fine. While he abandons himself to the impulse of
his imagination, his compositions are not only the sweetest and
the most sublime, but also the most faultless, that the world has
ever seen. But, as soon as his critical powers come into play,
he sinks to the level of Cowley; or rather he does ill what
Cowley did well. All that is bad in his works is bad
elaborately, and of malice aforethought. The only thing wanting
to make them perfect was, that he should never have troubled
himself with thinking whether they were good or not. Like the
angels in Milton, he sinks "with compulsion and laborious
flight." His natural tendency is upwards. That he may soar, it
is only necessary that he should not struggle to fall. He
resembles an American Cacique, who, possessing in unmeasured
abundance the metals which in polished societies are esteemed the
most precious, was utterly unconscious of their value, and gave
up treasures more valuable than the imperial crowns of other
countries, to secure some gaudy and far-fetched but worthless
bauble, a plated button, or a necklace of coloured glass.

We have attempted to show that, as knowledge is extended and as
the reason develops itself, the imitative arts decay. We should,
therefore, expect that the corruption of poetry would commence in
the educated classes of society. And this, in fact, is almost
constantly the case. The few great works of imagination which
appear in a critical age are, almost without exception, the works
of uneducated men. Thus, at a time when persons of quality
translated French romances, and when the universities celebrated
royal deaths in verses about tritons and fauns, a preaching
tinker produced the Pilgrim's Progress. And thus a ploughman
startled a generation which had thought Hayley and Beattie great
poets, with the adventures of Tam O'Shanter. Even in the latter
part of the reign of Elizabeth the fashionable poetry had
degenerated. It retained few vestiges of the imagination of
earlier times. It had not yet been subjected to the rules of
good taste. Affectation had completely tainted madrigals and
sonnets. The grotesque conceits and the tuneless numbers of
Donne were, in the time of James, the favourite models of
composition at Whitehall and at the Temple. But, though the
literature of the Court was in its decay, the literature of the
people was in its perfection. The Muses had taken sanctuary in
the theatres, the haunts of a class whose taste was not better
than that of the Right Honourables and singular good Lords who
admired metaphysical love-verses, but whose imagination retained
all its freshness and vigour; whose censure and approbation might
be erroneously bestowed, but whose tears and laughter was never
in the wrong. The infection which had tainted lyric and didactic
poetry had but slightly and partially touched the drama. While
the noble and the learned were comparing eyes to burning-glasses,
and tears to terrestrial globes, coyness to an enthymeme, absence
to a pair of compasses, and an unrequited passion to the fortieth
remainder-man in an entail, Juliet leaning from the balcony, and
Miranda smiling over the chess-board, sent home many spectators,
as kind and simple-hearted as the master and mistress of
Fletcher's Ralpho, to cry themselves to sleep.

No species of fiction is so delightful to us as the old English
drama. Even its inferior productions possess a charm not to be
found in any other kind of poetry. It is the most lucid mirror
that ever was held up to nature. The creations of the great
dramatists of Athens produce the effect of magnificent
sculptures, conceived by a mighty imagination, polished with the
utmost delicacy, embodying ideas of ineffable majesty and beauty,
but cold, pale, and rigid, with no bloom on the cheek, and no
speculation in the eye. In all the draperies, the figures, and
the faces, in the lovers and the tyrants, the Bacchanals and the
Furies, there is the same marble chillness and deadness. Most of
the characters of the French stage resemble the waxen gentlemen
and ladies in the window of a perfumer, rouged, curled, and
bedizened, but fixed in such stiff attitudes, and staring with
eyes expressive of such utter unmeaningness, that they cannot
produce an illusion for a single moment. In the English plays
alone is to be found the warmth, the mellowness, and the reality
of painting. We know the minds of men and women, as we know the
faces of the men and women of Vandyke.

The excellence of these works is in a great measure the result of
two peculiarities, which the critics of the French school
consider as defects,--from the mixture of tragedy and comedy, and
from the length and extent of the action. The former is
necessary to render the drama a just representation of a world in
which the laughers and weepers are perpetually jostling each
other,--in which every event has its serious and ludicrous side.
The latter enables us to form an intimate acquaintance with
characters with which we could not possibly become familiar
during the few hours to which the unities restrict the poet. In
this respect, the works of Shakspeare, in particular, are
miracles of art. In a piece, which may be read aloud in three
hours, we see a character gradually unfold all its recesses to
us. We see it change with the change of circumstances. The
petulant youth rises into the politic and warlike sovereign. The
profuse and courteous philanthropist sours into a hater and
scorner of his kind. The tyrant is altered, by the chastening of
affliction, into a pensive moralist. The veteran general,
distinguished by coolness, sagacity, and self-command, sinks
under a conflict between love strong as death, and jealousy cruel
as the grave. The brave and loyal subject passes, step by step,
to the extremities of human depravity. We trace his progress,
from the first dawnings of unlawful ambition to the cynical
melancholy of his impenitent remorse. Yet, in these pieces,
there are no unnatural transitions. Nothing is omitted: nothing
is crowded. Great as are the changes, narrow as is the compass
within which they are exhibited, they shock us as little as the
gradual alterations of those familiar faces which we see every
evening and every morning. The magical skill of the poet
resembles that of the Dervise in the Spectator, who condensed all
the events of seven years into the single moment during which the
king held his head under the water.

It is deserving of remark, that, at the time of which we speak,
the plays even of men not eminently distinguished by genius,--
such, for example, as Jonson,--were far superior to the best
works of imagination in other departments. Therefore, though we
conceive that, from causes which we have already investigated,
our poetry must necessarily have declined, we think that, unless
its fate had been accelerated by external attacks, it might have
enjoyed an euthanasia, that genius might have been kept alive by
the drama till its place could, in some degree, be supplied by
taste,--that there would have been scarcely any interval between
the age of sublime invention and that of agreeable imitation.
The works of Shakspeare, which were not appreciated with any
degree of justice before the middle of the eighteenth century,
might then have been the recognised standards of excellence
during the latter part of the seventeenth; and he and the great
Elizabethan writers might have been almost immediately succeeded
by a generation of poets similar to those who adorn our own
times.

But the Puritans drove imagination from its last asylum. They
prohibited theatrical representations, and stigmatised the whole
race of dramatists as enemies of morality and religion. Much
that is objectionable may be found in the writers whom they
reprobated; but whether they took the best measures for stopping
the evil appears to us very doubtful, and must, we think, have
appeared doubtful to themselves, when, after the lapse of a few
years, they saw the unclean spirit whom they had cast out return
to his old haunts, with seven others fouler than himself.

By the extinction of the drama, the fashionable school of
poetry,--a school without truth of sentiment or harmony of
versification,--without the powers of an earlier, or the
correctness of a later age,--was left to enjoy undisputed
ascendency. A vicious ingenuity, a morbid quickness to perceive
resemblances and analogies between things apparently
heterogeneous, constituted almost its only claim to admiration.
Suckling was dead. Milton was absorbed in political and
theological controversy. If Waller differed from the Cowleian
sect of writers, he differed for the worse. He had as little
poetry as they, and much less wit; nor is the languor of his
verses less offensive than the ruggedness of theirs. In Denham
alone the faint dawn of a better manner was discernible.

But, low as was the state of our poetry during the civil war and
the Protectorate, a still deeper fall was at hand. Hitherto our
literature had been idiomatic. In mind as in situation we had
been islanders. The revolutions in our taste, like the
revolutions in our government, had been settled without the
interference of strangers. Had this state of things continued,
the same just principles of reasoning which, about this time,
were applied with unprecedented success to every part of
philosophy would soon have conducted our ancestors to a sounder
code of criticism. There were already strong signs of
improvement. Our prose had at length worked itself clear from
those quaint conceits which still deformed almost every metrical
composition. The parliamentary debates, and the diplomatic
correspondence of that eventful period, had contributed much to
this reform. In such bustling times, it was absolutely necessary
to speak and write to the purpose. The absurdities of Puritanism
had, perhaps, done more. At the time when that odious style,
which deforms the writings of Hall and of Lord Bacon, was almost
universal, had appeared that stupendous work, the English Bible,-
-a book which, if everything else in our language should perish,
would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and
power. The respect which the translators felt for the original
prevented them from adding any of the hideous decorations then in
fashion. The groundwork of the version, indeed, was of an
earlier age. The familiarity with which the Puritans, on almost
every occasion, used the Scriptural phrases was no doubt very
ridiculous; but it produced good effects. It was a cant; but it
drove out a cant far more offensive.

The highest kind of poetry is, in a great measure, independent of
those circumstances which regulate the style of composition in
prose. But with that inferior species of poetry which succeeds
to it the case is widely different. In a few years, the good
sense and good taste which had weeded out affectation from moral
and political treatises would, in the natural course of things,
have effected a similar reform in the sonnet and the ode. The
rigour of the victorious sectaries had relaxed. A dominant
religion is never ascetic. The Government connived at theatrical
representations. The influence of Shakspeare was once more felt.
But darker days were approaching. A foreign yoke was to be
imposed on our literature. Charles, surrounded by the companions
of his long exile, returned to govern a nation which ought never
to have cast him out or never to have received him back. Every
year which he had passed among strangers had rendered him more
unfit to rule his countrymen. In France he had seen the
refractory magistracy humbled, and royal prerogative, though
exercised by a foreign priest in the name of a child, victorious
over all opposition. This spectacle naturally gratified a prince
to whose family the opposition of Parliaments had been so fatal.
Politeness was his solitary good quality. The insults which he
had suffered in Scotland had taught him to prize it. The
effeminacy and apathy of his disposition fitted him to excel in
it. The elegance and vivacity of the French manners fascinated
him. With the political maxims and the social habits of his
favourite people, he adopted their taste in composition, and,
when seated on the throne, soon rendered it fashionable, partly
by direct patronage, but still more by that contemptible policy,
which, for a time, made England the last of the nations, and
raised Louis the Fourteenth to a height of power and fame, such
as no French sovereign had ever before attained.

It was to please Charles that rhyme was first introduced into our
plays. Thus, a rising blow, which would at any time have been
mortal, was dealt to the English Drama, then just recovering from
its languishing condition. Two detestable manners, the
indigenous and the imported, were now in a state of alternate
conflict and amalgamation. The bombastic meanness of the new
style was blended with the ingenious absurdity of the old; and
the mixture produced something which the world had never before
seen, and which, we hope, it will never see again,--something, by
the side of which the worst nonsense of all other ages appears to
advantage--something, which those who have attempted to
caricature it have, against their will, been forced to flatter--
of which the tragedy of Bayes is a very favourable specimen.
What Lord Dorset observed to Edward Howard might have been
addressed to almost all his contemporaries--

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