historians, Herodotus, Plutarch, Livy, were poets; and although the plan of
these writers, especially that of Livy, constrained them from developing this
faculty in its highest degree they make copious and ample amends for their
subjection, by filling all the interstices of their subjects with living images.
11
?68 Having determined what is poetry, and who are poets, let us proceed to
estimate its effects upon society.
12
?69 Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it falls,
open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its delight. ?70 In
the infancy of the world, neither poets themselves nor their auditors are fully
aware of the excellency of poetry: for it acts in a divine and unapprehended
manner, beyond and above consciousness: and it is reserved for future
generations to contemplate and measure the mighty cause and effect in all the
strength and splendour of their union. ?71 Even in modern times, no living poet
ever arrived at the fulness of his fame; the jury which sits in judgement upon a
poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers: it must
be [[impanelled]] in pannelled by Time from the selectest of the wise of many
generations. ?72 A Poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness, and sings to
cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors {{Sig. 4v}} are as men
entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and
softened, yet know not whence or why. ?73 The poems of Homer and his
contemporaries were the delight of infant Greece; they were the elements of that
social system which is the column upon which all succeeding civilization has
reposed. ?74 Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human character;
nor can we doubt that those who read his verses were awakened to an ambition of
becoming like to Achilles, Hector and Ulysses: the truth and beauty of
friendship, patriotism and persevering devotion to an object, were unveiled to
the depths in these immortal creations: the sentiments of the auditors must have
been refined and enlarged by a sympathy [[with]] which such great and lovely
impersonations until from admiring they imitated, and from imitation they
identified themselves with the objects of their admiration. ?75 Nor let it be
objected, that these characters are remote from moral perfection, and that they
can by no means be considered as edyfying paterns for general imitation. ?76
Every epoch under names more or less specious has deified its peculiar errors;
Revenge is the naked Idol of the worship of a semi barbarous age; and
self-deceit is the veiled Image of unknown evil before which luxury and satiety
lie prostrate. ?77 But a poet considers the vices of his contemporaries as the
temporary dress in which his creations must be arrayed, and which cover without
concealing the eternal proportions of their beauty. ?78 An epic or dramatic
personage is understood to wear them around his soul, as he may the antient
armour or the modern uniform around his body; whilst it is easy to conceive a
dress more graceful than either. ?79 The beauty of the internal nature cannot be
so far concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form
shall communicate itself to the very disguise; and indicate the shape it hides
from the manner in which it is worn. ?80 A majestic form, and graceful motions
will express themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume. ?81
Few poets of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their
conceptions in its naked truth and splendour; and it is doubtful whether the
alloy of costume, habit etc. be not necessary to temper this planetary music for
mortal ears. {{Sig. 5r}}
13
?82 The whole objection however of the immorality of poetry rests upon a
misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral
improvement of man. ?83 Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry has
created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and domestic life:
nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men hate, and despise, and
censure, and deceive, and subjugate one another. ?84 But poetry acts in another
and a diviner manner. ?00 It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering
it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. ?85
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world; and makes familiar
objects be as if they were not familiar; it re-produces all that it represents,
and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the
minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and
exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it
co-exists. ?86 The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own
nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in
thought, action or person, not our own. ?87 A man to be greatly good, must
imagine in tensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of
another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become
his own. ?88 The great instrument of moral good is the imagination: and poetry
administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. ?89 Poetry enlarges the
circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new
delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature
all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void
forever craves fresh food. ?90 Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ
of the moral nature of man in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.
?91 A Poet therefore would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and
wrong which are usually those of his place and time in his poetical {{Sig. 5v}}
creations, which participate in neither. ?92 By this assumption of the inferior
office of interpreting the effect, in which perhaps after all he might acquit
himself but imperfectly, he would resign a glory in a participation in the
cause. ?93 There was little danger that Homer or any of the eternal poets,
should have so far misunderstood themselves as to have abdicated this throne of
their widest dominion. ?94 Those in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is
less intense as Euripedes, Lucan, Tasso, Spencer have frequently affected a
moral aim and the effect of their poetry is diminished in exact proportion to
the degree in which they compel us to advert to this purpose.
14
?95 Homer and the cyclic poets were followed at a certain interval by the
dramatic and lyrical Poets of Athens; who flourished [[contemporaneously]]
contemporaneosly with all that is most perfect in the kindred expressions of the
poetical faculty; architecture, painting, music, the dance, sculpture,
philosophy, and we may add the forms of civil life. ?96 For although the scheme
of Athenian society was deformed by many imperfections which the poetry existing
in Chivalry and Christianity have erased from the habits and institutions of
modern Europe; yet never at any other period has so much energy, beauty and
virtue been developed; never was blind strength and stubborn form so disciplined
and rendered subject to the will of man, or that will less repugnant to the
dictates of the beautiful and the true, as during the century which preceeded
the death of Socrates. ?97 Of no other epoch in the history of our species have
we records and fragments stamped so visibly with the image of the divinity in
man. ?98 But it is Poetry alone, in form, in action or in language which has
rendered this epoch memorable above all others, and the storehouse of examples
to everlasting time. ?99 For written poetry existed at that epoch simultaneously
with the other arts, and it is an idle enquiry to demand which gave and which
received the light, which all as from a common focus have scattered over the
darkest periods of succeeding time. ?100 We know no more of cause and effect
than a constant conjunction of events: Poetry is ever found to coexist with
whatsoever other arts contribute to the happiness and perfection of man. ?101 I
appeal to what has already been established to distinguish between the cause and
the effect.
15
?102 {{Sig. 6r}} It was at the period here adverted to, that the Drama had its
birth; and however a succeeding writer may have equalled or surpassed those few
great specimens of the Athenian drama which have been preserved to us, it is
indisputable that the art itself never was under stood or practised according to
the true philosophy of it, as at Athens. ?103 For the Athenians employed
language, action, music, painting, the dance, and religious institutions, to
produce a common effect in the representation of the highest idealisms of
passion and of power; each division in the art was made perfect in its kind by
artists of the most consummate skill, and was disciplined into a beautiful pro
portion and unity one towards the other. ?104 On the modern stage a few only of
the elements capable of expressing the image of the poets conception are
employed at once. ?105 We have tragedy without music and dancing; and music and
dancing without the highest impersonation of which they are the fit
accompaniment, and both without religion and solemnity. ?106 Religious
institution has indeed been usually banished from the stage. ?107 Our system of
divesting the actor’s face of a mask, on which the many expressions appropriated
to his dramatic character might be moulded into one permanent and unchanging
expression, is favourable only to a partial and inharmonious effect; it is fit
for nothing — but a monologue where all the attention may be directed to some
great master of ideal mimicry. ?108 The modern practise of blending comedy with
tragedy, though liable to great abuse in point of practise, is undoubtedly an
extension of the dramatic circle; but the comedy should be as in King Lear,
universal, ideal and sublime. ?109 It is perhaps the intervention of this
principle which determines the balance in favour of King Lear against the Œdipus
Tyrannus or the Agamemnon, or, if you will, the trilogies with which they are
connected; unless the intense power of the choral poetry, especially that of the
latter, should be considered as restoring the equilibrium. ?110 King Lear, if it
can sustain the comparison, may be judged to be the most perfect specimen of the
dramatic art existing in the world; in spite of the narrow conditions to which
the poet was subjected by the ignorance of the philosophy of the Drama which has
prevailed in Modern Europe. ?111 Calderon in his religious Autos has attempted
to fulfil some of the high conditions of dramatic representation neglected by
Shakespear; such as the establishing a {{Sig. 6v}} relation between the drama
and religion, and the accomodating them to music and dancing, but he omits the
observation of conditions still more important, and more is lost than gained by
a substitution of the rigidly defined and ever repeated idealisms of a distorted
superstition for the living impersonations of the truth of human passion.
16
?112 But we digress. ?113 — The connexion of scenic exhibitions with the
improvement or corruption of the manners of men, has been universally
recognized: in other words the presence or absence of poetry in its most perfect
and universal form has been found to be connected with good and evil in conduct
or habit. ?114 The corruption which has been imputed to the drama as an effect
begins, when the poetry employ in its constitution, ends: I appeal to the
history of manners whether the [[periods]] of the growth of the one and the
decline of the other have not corresponded with an exactness equal to any other
example of moral cause and effect.
17
?115 The drama at Athens or wheresoever else it may have approached to its
perfection, ever co-existed with the moral and intellectual greatness of the
age. ?116 The tragedies of the Athenian poets are as mirrors in which the
spectator beholds himself, under a thin disguise of circumstance, stript of all,
but that ideal perfection and energy which every one feels to be the internal
type of all that he loves, admires and would become. ?117 The imagination is
enlarged by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty that they distend in
their conception the capacity of that by which they are [[conceived]] concieved;
the good affections are strengthened by pity, indignation, terror and sorrow;
and an exalted calm is prolonged from the satiety of this high exercise of them
into the tumult of familiar life; even crime is disarmed of half its horror and
all its contagion by being represented as the fatal consequence of the
unfathomable agencies of {{Sig. 7r}} nature; error is thus divested of its
wilfulness; men can no longer cherish it as the creation of their choice. ?118
In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred: it
teaches rather self knowledge and self-respect. ?119 Neither the eye or the mind
can see itself unless reflected upon that which it resembles. ?120 The drama so
long as it continues to express poetry, is as a prismatic and many sided mirror,
which collects the brightest rays of human nature and divides and reproduces
them from the simplicity of these elementary forms; and touches them with
majesty and beauty, and multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it with the
power of propagating its like wherever it may fall.
18
?121 But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizes with that
decay. ?122 Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the form of the great
master-pieces of antiquity, divested of all harmonious accompaniment of the
kindred arts; and often the very form misunderstood: or a weak attempt to teach
certain doctrines, which the writer considers as moral truths; and which are
usually no more than specious flatteries of some gross vice or weakness with
which the author in common with his auditors are infected. ?123 Hence what has
been called the classical and the domestic drama. ?00 Addison’s Cato is a
specimen of the one, and would it were not superfluous to cite examples of the
other! ?124 To such purposes Poetry cannot be made subservient. ?00 Poetry is a
sword of lightning ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would
contain it. ?125 And thus we observe that all dramatic writings of this nature
are unimaginative in a singular degree; they affect sentiment and passion: which
divested of imagination are other names for caprice and appetite. ?126 The
period in our own history of the greatest degradation of the drama is the reign
of Charles II when all forms in which poetry had been accustomed to be expressed
become hymns to the triumph of kingly power over liberty and virtue. ?127 Milton
stood alone illuminating an age unworthy of him. ?00 At such periods the
calculating principle pervades all the forms of dramatic exhibition, and poetry
ceases to be expressed upon them. ?128 Comedy loses its ideal universality: wit
succeeds to humour; we laugh from self complacency and triumph instead of
pleasure; malignity, sarcasm |&| contempt succeeds to sympathetic merriment; we
hardly laugh, but we smile. ?129 Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the
divine beauty in life, becomes, from the very veil which it assumes, more active
if less disgusting: {{Sig. 7v}} it is a monster for which the corruption of
society for ever brings forth new food; which it devours in secret.
19
?130 The Drama being that form under which a greater number of modes of
expression of poetry are susceptible of being combined than any other; the
connexion of beauty and social good, is more observable in the drama than in
what ever other form: and it is indisputable that the highest perfection of
human society has ever corresponded with the highest dramatic excellence: and
that the corruption or the extinction of the drama in a nation where it has once
flourished is a mark of a corruption of manners, and an extinction of the
energies which sustain the soul of social life. ?131 But, as Machiavelli says of
political institutions, that life may be preserved and renewed, if men should
arise capable of bringing back the drama to its principles. ?132 And this is
true with respect to poetry in its most extended sense: all language,
institution and form require not only to be produced but to be sustained: the