Our author thus explains the object of his work—
‘Before I proceed farther, I wish to say a few words respecting the spirit of my criticism—a study to which I have devoted a great part of my life. We see numbers of men, and even whole nations, so much fettered by the habits of their education and modes of living, that nothing appears natural, proper, or beautiful, which is foreign to their language, their manners, and their social relations. In this exclusive mode of seeing and feeling, it is no doubt possible, by means of cultivation, to attain a great nicety of discrimination in the narrow circle within which they are circumscribed. But no man can be a true critic or connoisseur, who does not possess a universality of mind,—who does not possess that flexibility which, throwing aside all personal predilections and blind habits, enables him to transport himself into the peculiarities of other ages and nations,—to feel them as it were from their proper and central point,—and to recognize and respect whatever is beautiful and grand under those external circumstances which are necessary to their existence, and which sometimes even seem to disguise them. There is no monopoly of poetry for certain ages and nations; and consequently, that despotism in taste, by which it is attempted to make those rules universal, which were at first perhaps arbitrarily established, is a pretension which ought never to be allowed. Poetry, taken in its widest acceptation, as the power of creating what is beautiful, and representing it to the eye or ear, is a universal gift of Heaven; which is even shared to a certain extent by those whom we call barbarians and savages. Internal excellence is alone decisive; and where this exists, we must not allow ourselves to be repelled by external circumstances.
‘It is well known, that, three centuries and a half ago, the study of ancient literature, by the diffusion of the Greek language (for the Latin was never extinct) received a new life: The classical authors were sought after with avidity, and made accessible by means of the press; and the monuments of ancient art were carefully dug up, and preserved. All this excited the human mind in a powerful manner, and formed a decided epoch in the history of our cultivation: the fruits have extended to our times, and will extend to a period beyond the power of our calculation. But the study of the ancients was immediately carried to a most pernicious excess. The learned, who were chiefly in possession of this knowledge, and who were incapable of distinguishing themselves by their own productions, yielded an unlimited deference to the ancients,—and with great appearance of reason, as they are models in their kind. They maintained, that nothing could be hoped for the human mind, but in the imitation of the ancients; and they only esteemed, in the works of the moderns, whatever resembled, or seemed to bear a resemblance, to those of antiquity. Every thing else was rejected by them as barbarous and unnatural. It was quite otherwise with the great poets and artists. However strong their enthusiasm for the ancients, and however determined their purpose of entering into competition with them, they were compelled by the characteristic peculiarity of their minds to proceed in a track of their own,—and to impress upon their productions the stamp of their own genius. Such was the case with Dante among the Italians, the father of modern poetry: he acknowledged Virgil for his instructor; but produced a work, which of all others differs the most from the Æneid, and far excels it, in our opinion, in strength, truth, depth, and comprehension. It was the same afterwards with Ariosto, who has been most unaccountably compared to Homer; for nothing can be more unlike. It was the same in the fine arts with Michael Angelo and Raphael, who were without doubt well acquainted with the antique. When we ground our judgment of modern painters merely on their resemblance to the ancients, we must necessarily be unjust towards them. As the poets for the most part acquiesced in the doctrines of the learned, we may observe a curious struggle in them between their natural inclination and their imagined duty. When they sacrificed to the latter, they were praised by the learned; but, by yielding to their own inclinations, they became the favourites of the people. What preserves the heroic poems of a Tasso or a Camoens to this day alive, in the hearts and on the lips of their countrymen, is by no means their imperfect resemblance to Virgil or even to Homer,—but, in Tasso, the tender feeling of chivalrous love and honour, and in Camoens the glowing inspiration of patriotic heroism.’
The author next proceeds to unfold that which is the nucleus of the prevailing system of German criticism, and the foundation of his whole work, namely, the essential distinction between the peculiar spirit of the modern or romantic style of art, and the antique or classical. There is in this part of the work a singular mixture of learning, acuteness and mysticism. We have certain profound suggestions and distant openings to the light; but, every now and then, we are suddenly left in the dark, and obliged to grope our way by ourselves. We cannot promise to find a clue out of the labyrinth; but we will at least attempt it. The most obvious distinction between the two styles, the classical and the romantic, is, that the one is conversant with objects that are grand or beautiful in themselves, or in consequence of obvious and universal associations; the other, with those that are interesting only by the force of circumstances and imagination. A Grecian temple, for instance, is a classical object: it is beautiful in itself, and excites immediate admiration. But the ruins of a Gothic castle have no beauty or symmetry to attract the eye; and yet they excite a more powerful and romantic interest from the ideas with which they are habitually associated. If, in addition to this, we are told that this is Macbeth’s castle, the scene of the murder of Duncan, the interest will be instantly heightened to a sort of pleasing horror. The classical idea or form of any thing, it may also be observed, remains always the same, and suggests nearly the same impressions; but the associations of ideas belonging to the romantic character, may vary infinitely, and take in the whole range of nature and accident. Antigone, in Sophocles, waiting near the grove of the Furies—Electra, in Æschylus, offering sacrifice at the tomb of Agamemnon—are classical subjects, because the circumstances and the characters have a correspondent dignity, and an immediate interest, from their mere designation. Florimel, in Spenser, where she is described sitting on the ground in the Witch’s hut, is not classical, though in the highest degree poetical and romantic: for the incidents and situation are in themselves mean and disagreeable, till they are redeemed by the genius of the poet, and converted, by the very contrast, into a source of the utmost pathos and elevation of sentiment. Othello’s handkerchief is not classical, though ‘there was magic in the web;’—it is only a powerful instrument of passion and imagination. Even Lear is not classical; for he is a poor crazy old man, who has nothing sublime about him but his afflictions, and who dies of a broken heart.
Schlegel somewhere compares the Furies of Æschylus to the Witches of Shakespear—we think without much reason. Perhaps Shakespear has surrounded the Weird Sisters with associations as terrible, and even more mysterious, strange, and fantastic than the Furies of Æschylus; but the traditionary beings themselves are not so petrific. These are of marble,—their look alone must blast the beholder;—those are of air, bubbles; and though ‘so withered and so wild in their attire,’ it is their spells alone which are fatal. They owe their power to ‘metaphysical aid’: but the others contain all that is dreadful in their corporal figures. In this we see the distinct spirit of the classical and the romantic mythology. The serpents that twine round the head of the Furies are not to be trifled with, though they implied no preternatural power: The bearded Witches in Macbeth are in themselves grotesque and ludicrous, except as this strange deviation from nature staggers our imagination, and leads us to expect and to believe in all incredible things. They appal the faculties by what they say or do;—the others are intolerable, even to sight.
Our author is right in affirming, that the true way to understand the plays of Sophocles and Æschylus, is to study them before the groupes of the Niobe or the Laocoon. If we can succeed in explaining this analogy, we shall have solved nearly the whole difficulty. For it is certain, that there are exactly the same powers of mind displayed in the poetry of the Greeks as in their statues. Their poetry is exactly what their sculptors might have written. Both are exquisite imitations of nature; the one in marble, the other in words. It is evident, that the Greek poets had the same perfect idea of the subjects they described, as the Greek sculptors had of the objects they represented; and they give as much of this absolute truth of imitation, as can be given by words. But, in this direct and simple imitation of nature, as in describing the form of a beautiful woman, the poet is greatly inferior to the sculptor; It is in the power of illustration, in comparing it to other things, and suggesting other ideas of beauty or love, that he has an entirely new source of imagination opened to him; and of this power, the moderns have made at least a bolder and more frequent use than the ancients. The description of Helen in Homer, is a description of what might have happened and been seen, as ‘that she moved with grace, and that the old men rose up with reverence as she passed;’ the description of Belphœbe in Spenser, is a description of what was only visible to the eye of the poet.
‘Upon her eyelids many graces sat,
Under the shadow of her even brows.’
The description of the soldiers going to battle in Shakespear, ‘all plumed like estriches, like eagles newly bathed, wanton as goats, wild as young bulls,’ is too bold, figurative, and profuse of dazzling images, for the mild, equable tone of classical poetry, which never loses sight of the object in the illustration. The ideas of the ancients were too exact and definite, too much attached to the material form or vehicle in which they were conveyed, to admit of those rapid combinations, those unrestrained flights of fancy, which, glancing from heaven to earth, unite the most opposite extremes, and draw the happiest illustrations from things the most remote. The two principles of imitation and imagination indeed, are not only distinct, but almost opposite. For the imagination is that power which represents objects, not as they are, but as they are moulded according to our fancies and feelings. Let an object be presented to the senses in a state of agitation and fear—and the imagination will magnify the object, and convert it into whatever is most proper to encourage the fear. It is the same in all other cases in which poetry speaks the language of the imagination. This language is not the less true to nature because it is false in point of fact; but so much the more true and natural, if it conveys the impression which the object under the influence of passion makes on the mind. We compare a man of gigantic stature to a tower; not that he is any thing like so large, but because the excess of his size, beyond what we are accustomed to expect, produces a greater feeling of magnitude and ponderous strength than an object of ten times the same dimensions. Things, in short, are equal in the imagination, which have the power of affecting the mind with an equal degree of terror, admiration, delight or love. When Lear calls upon the Heavens to avenge his cause, ‘for they are old like him,’ there is nothing extravagant or impious in this sublime identification of his age with theirs; for there is no other image which could do justice to the agonising sense of his wrongs and his despair!
The great difference, then, which we find between the classical and the romantic style, between ancient and modern poetry, is, that the one more frequently describes things as they are interesting in themselves,—the other for the sake of the associations of ideas connected with them; that the one dwells more on the immediate impressions of objects on the senses—the other on the ideas which they suggest to the imagination. The one is the poetry of form, the other of effect. The one gives only what is necessarily implied in the subject; the other all that can possibly arise out of it. The one seeks to identify the imitation with an external object,—clings to it,—is inseparable from it,—is either that or nothing; the other seeks to identify the original impression with whatever else, within the range of thought or feeling, can strengthen, relieve, adorn or elevate it. Hence the severity and simplicity of the Greek tragedy, which excluded everything foreign or unnecessary to the subject. Hence the unities: for, in order to identify the imitation as much as possible with the reality, and leave nothing to mere imagination, it was necessary to give the same coherence and consistency to the different parts of a story, as to the different limbs of a statue. Hence the beauty and grandeur of their materials; for, deriving their power over the mind from the truth of the imitation, it was necessary that the subject which they made choice of, and from which they could not depart, should be in itself grand and beautiful. Hence the perfection of their execution; which consisted in giving the utmost harmony, delicacy, and refinement to the details of a given subject. Now, the characteristic excellence of the moderns is the reverse of all this. As, according to our author, the poetry of the Greeks is the same as their sculpture; so, he says, our own more nearly resembles painting,—where the artist can relieve and throw back his figures at pleasure,—use a greater variety of contrasts,—and where light and shade, like the colours of fancy, are reflected on the different objects. The Muse of classical poetry should be represented as a beautiful naked figure: the Muse of modern poetry should be represented clothed, and with wings. The first has the advantage in point of form; the last in colour and motion.