—‘stronger Shakespear felt for man alone.’
Who, indeed, in recalling the names of Imogen, of Miranda, of Juliet, of Desdemona, of Ophelia and Perdita, does not feel that Shakespear has expressed the very perfection of the feminine character, existing only for others, and leaning for support on the strength of its affections? The only objection to his female characters is, that he has not made them masculine. They are indeed the very reverse of ordinary tragedy-queens. In speaking of Romeo and Juliet, he says, ‘It was reserved for Shakespear to unite purity of heart, and the glow of imagination, sweetness and dignity of manners, and passionate violence, in one ideal picture.’ The character of Juliet was not to be mistaken by our author. It is one of perfect unconsciousness. It has nothing forward, nothing coy, nothing affected, nothing coquettish about it:—It is a pure effusion of nature.
‘Whatever,’ says our critic, ‘is most intoxicating in the odour of a southern spring, languishing in the song of the nightingale, or voluptuous on the first opening of the rose, is breathed in this poem. But, even more rapidly than the earliest blossoms of youth and beauty decay, it hurries on from the first timid declaration of love and modest return, to the most unlimited passion—to an irrevocable union; then, amidst alternating storms of rapture and despair, to the death of the two lovers, who still appear enviable as their love survives them, and as, by their death, they have obtained a triumph over every separating power. The sweetest and the bitterest; love and hatred; festivity and dark forebodings; tender embraces and sepulchres; the fulness of life and self-annihilation—are all here brought close to each other: And all these contrasts are so blended in the harmonious and wonderful work into a unity of impression, that the echo which the whole leaves behind in the mind resembles a single but endless sigh.’
In treating of the four principal tragedies, Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet and Lear, he goes deeper into the poetry and philosophy of those plays than any of the commentators. But we dare not now encroach on the patience of our readers with any farther citations.
The remarks on the doubtful pieces of Shakespear are most liable to objection. We cannot agree, for instance, that Titus Andronicus is in the spirit of Lear, because in his dotage he mistakes a fly which he has killed for his black enemy the Moor. Thomas Lord Cromwell, and Sir John Oldcastle, which he praises highly, are very indifferent. Pericles, prince of Tyre, is not much to our taste. There is one fine scene in it, where Marina rouses the prince from his lethargy, by the proofs of her being his daughter. Yet this is not like Shakespear. The Yorkshire Tragedy is very good; but decidedly in the manner of Heywood. The account given by Schlegel, of the contemporaries and immediate successors of Shakespear is good, though it might have been better. That of Ben Jonson is particularly happy. He says, that he described not characters, but ‘humours,’ that is, particular modes of expression, dress and behaviour in fashion at the time, which have since become obsolete, and the imitation of them dry and unintelligible. The finest thing in Ben Jonson (not that it is by any means the only one), is the scene between Surly and Sir Epicure Mammon, where the latter proves his possession of the philosopher’s stone, by a pompous display of the riches, luxuries and pleasures he is to derive from it; and, by a happy perversion of logic, satisfies himself, though not his hearer, of the existence of the cause, by a strong imagination of the effects which are to follow from it. He is also very successful in his character of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. They describe the passions at their height, not in their progress—the extremes, not the gradations of feeling. Their plays, however, have great power and great beauty. The Faithful Shepherdess is the origin of Milton’s Comus. ‘Rule a Wife and Have a Wife’ is one of the very best comedies that ever was written; and holds, to this day, undisputed possession of the stage. Yet, as our critic observes, there is in the general tone of their writings a certain crudeness and precocity, a heat, a violence of fermentation, a disposition to carry every thing to excess, which is not pleasant. Their plays are very much what young noblemen of genius might be supposed to write in the heyday of youthful blood, the sunshine of fortune, and all the petulance of self-opinion. They have completely anticipated the German paradoxes. Schlegel has no mercy on the writers of the age of Charles II. He compares Dryden himself to ‘a man walking upon stilts in a morass.’ He justly prefers Otway to Rowe; but we think he is wrong in supposing, that if Otway had lived longer he would have done better. His plays are only the ebullitions of a fine, enthusiastic, sanguine temperament: and his genius would no more have improved with age, than the beauty of his person. Of our comic writers, Congreve, Wycherley, Vanburgh, &c., M. Schlegel speaks very contemptuously and superficially. It is plain that he knows nothing about them, or he would not prefer Farquhar to all the rest. If, after our earlier dramatists, we have any class of writers who are excellent, it is our comic writers.
We cannot go into our author’s account of the Spanish drama. The principal names in it are Cervantes, Calderon, and Lope de Vega. Neither can we agree in the praises which he lavishes on the dramatic productions of these authors. They are too flowery, lyrical, and descriptive. They are pastorals, not tragedies. They have warmth; but they want vigour.
Our author may be supposed to be at home in German literature; but his doctrines appear to us to be more questionable there, than upon any other subject. What the German dramatists really excel in, is the production of effect: but this is the very thing which their fastidious countryman most despises and abhors. They really excel all others in mere effect; and there is no nation that can excel all others in more than one thing. Werter is, in our opinion, the best of all Goethe’s works; but because it is the most popular, our author takes an opportunity to express his contempt for it. Count Egmont, which is here spoken highly of, seems to us a most insipid and preposterous composition. The effect of the pathos which is said to lie concealed in it, is utterly lost upon us. Nathan the Wise, by Lessing, is also a great favourite of Schlegel; because it is unintelligible except to the wise. As the French plays are composed of a tissue of common-placs, the German plays of this stamp are a tissue of paradoxes, which have no foundation in nature or common opinion,—the pure offspring of the author’s fantastic brain. For the same reason, Schiller’s Wallenstein is here preferred to his Robbers. But we cannot so readily give up our old attachment to the Robbers. The first reading of that play is an event in every one’s life, which is not to be forgotten.
Madame de Staël has very happily ridiculed this pedantic’s taste in criticism.
‘By a singular vicissitude in taste, it has happened, that the Germans at first attacked our dramatic writers, as converting all their heroes into Frenchmen. They have, with reason, insisted on historic truth as necessary to contrast the colours, and give life to the poetry. But then, all at once, they have been weary of their own success in this way, and have produced abstract representations, in which the relations of mankind were expressed in a general manner, and in which time, place and circumstance, passed for nothing. In a drama of this kind by Goethe, the author calls the different characters the Duke, the King, the Father, the Daughter, &c., without any other designation.
‘Such a tragedy is only calculated to be acted in the palace of Odin, where the dead still continue their different occupations on earth; where the hunter, himself a shade, eagerly pursues the shade of a stag; and fantastic warriors combat together in the clouds. It should appear, that Goethe at one period conceived an absolute disgust to all interest in dramatic compositions. It was sometimes to be met with in bad works; and he concluded, that it ought to be banished from good ones. Nevertheless, a man of superior mind ought not to disdain what gives universal pleasure; he cannot relinquish his resemblance with his kind, if he wishes to make others feel his own value. Granting that the tyranny of custom often introduces an artificial air into the best French tragedies, it cannot be denied that there is the same want of natural expression in the systematic and theoretical productions of the German muse. If exaggerated declamation is affected, there is a certain kind of intellectual calm which is not less so. It is a kind of arrogated superiority over the affections of the soul, which may accord very well with philosophy, but is totally out of character in the dramatic art. Goethe’s works are composed according to different principles and systems. In the Tasso and Iphigenia, he conceives of tragedy as a lofty relic of the monuments of antiquity. These works have all the beauty of form, the splendour and glossy smoothness of marble;—but they are as cold and as motionless.’