"Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain top with sovereign eye;
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face;
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with his disgrace;
Even so my sun one early morn did shine,
With all triumphant splendor on my brow;
But out, alack! he was but one hour mine;
The region cloud hath masked him from me now;
Yet him, for this, my love no whit disdaineth,
Suns of this world may stain, when heaven's sun staineth."
From Shakespeare, the marvel of dramatic genius, turn to Milton, and we find the opposite tendency unfolded.
The "Paradise Lost" is indeed dramatic in form, with different characters and dialogues, in hell, on earth, and in heaven. But in essence it is undramatic. Milton is never for a moment lost in his characters; his grand and noble soul is always appearing. Every one speaks as Milton would have spoken had Milton been in the same place, and looked at things from the same point of view. Sin and Satan, for example, both talk like John Milton. Sin is very conscientious, and before she will unlock the gate of hell she is obliged to argue herself into a conviction that it is right to do so. Satan, she says, is her father, and children ought to obey their parents; so, since he tells her to unlock the gate, she ought to do so. Death reproaches Satan, in good set terms, for his treason against the Almighty; and Satan, as we all know, utters the noblest sentiments, and talks as Milton would have talked, had Milton been in Satan's position.[1]
Coming down nearer to our own time, we find a duad of great English poets, usually associated in our minds,—Byron and Scott.
Scott was almost the last of the dramatic poets of England, using the word dramatic in its large sense. His plays never amounted to much; but his stories in verse and in prose are essentially dramatic. In neither does he reveal himself. In all his poetry you scarcely find a reference to his personal feelings. In the L'Envoi to the "Lady of the Lake" there is a brief allusion of this sort, touching because so unusual, and almost the only one I now recall. Addressing the "Harp of the North" he says:—
"Much have I owed thy strains through life's long way,
Through secret woes the world has never known,
When on the weary night dawned wearier day,
And bitterer was the grief devoured alone;
That I o'erlive such woes, Enchantress! is thine own."
Scott, like Chaucer, brings before us a long succession of characters, from many classes, countries, and times. Scotch barons and freebooters, English kings, soldiers, gentlemen, crusaders, Alpine peasants, mediæval counts, serfs, Jews, Saxons,—brave, cruel, generous,—all sweep past us, in a long succession of pictures; but of Scott himself nothing appears except the nobleness and purity of the tone which pervades all. He is therefore eminently a dramatic or objective writer.
But Byron is the exact opposite. The mighty exuberance of his genius, which captivated his age, and the echoes of which thrill down to ours, in all its vast overflow of passion, imagination, wit,—ever sounded but one strain,—himself. His own woes, his own wrongs are the ever-recurring theme. Though he wrote many dramas, he was more undramatic than Milton. Every character in every play is merely a thinly disguised Byron. It was impossible for him to get away from himself. If Tennyson's lovely line tells the truth when he says,—
"Love took up the harp of life and smote on all its chords with might;
Smote the chord of self, that, trembling, passed in music out of sight:"