The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume I Part 18

Ma.s.sINGER.

Born at Salisbury, 1584.--Died, 1640.

With regard to Ma.s.singer, observe,

1. The vein of satire on the times; but this is not as in Shakspeare, where the natures evolve themselves according to their incidental disproportions, from excess, deficiency, or mislocation, of one or more of the component elements; but is merely satire on what is attributed to them by others.

2. His excellent metre--a better model for dramatists in general to imitate than Shakspeare's,--even if a dramatic taste existed in the frequenters of the stage, and could be gratified in the present size and management, or rather mismanagement, of the two patent theatres. I do not mean that Ma.s.singer's verse is superior to Shakspeare's or equal to it. Far from it; but it is much more easily constructed and may be more successfully adopted by writers in the present day. It is the nearest approach to the language of real life at all compatible with a fixed metre. In Ma.s.singer, as in all our poets before Dryden, in order to make harmonious verse in the reading, it is absolutely necessary that the meaning should be understood;--when the meaning is once seen, then the harmony is perfect. Whereas in Pope and in most of the writers who followed in his school, it is the mechanical metre which determines the sense.

3. The impropriety, and indecorum of demeanour in his favourite characters, as in Bertoldo in the Maid of Honour, who is a swaggerer, talking to his sovereign what no sovereign could endure, and to gentlemen what no gentleman would answer without pulling his nose.

4. Shakspeare's Ague-cheek, Osric, &c. are displayed through others, in the course of social intercourse, by the mode of their performing some office in which they are employed; but Ma.s.singer's 'Sylli' come forward to declare themselves fools 'ad arbitrium auctoris,' and so the diction always needs the 'subintelligitur' ('the man looks as if he thought so and so,') expressed in the language of the satirist, and not in that of the man himself:--

'Sylli.' You may, madam, Perhaps, believe that I in this use art To make you dote upon me, by exposing My more than most rare features to your view; But I, as I have ever done, deal simply, A mark of sweet simplicity, ever noted In the family of the Syllis. Therefore, lady, Look not with too much contemplation on me; If you do, you are in the suds.

'Maid of Honour', act i. sc. 2.

The author mixes his own feelings and judgments concerning the presumed fool; but the man himself, till mad, fights up against them, and betrays, by his attempts to modify them, that he is no fool at all, but one gifted with activity and copiousness of thought, image and expression, which belong not to a fool, but to a man of wit making himself merry with his own character.

5. There is an utter want of preparation in the decisive acts of Ma.s.singer's characters, as in Camiola and Aurelia in the Maid of Honour.

Why? Because the 'dramatis personae' were all planned each by itself.

Whereas in Shakspeare, the play is 'syngenesia;' each character has, indeed, a life of its own, and is an 'individuum' of itself, but yet an organ of the whole, as the heart in the human body. Shakspeare was a great comparative anatomist.

Hence Ma.s.singer and all, indeed, but Shakspeare, take a dislike to their own characters, and spite themselves upon them by making them talk like fools or monsters; as Fulgentio in his visit to Camiola, (Act ii. sc.

2.) Hence too, in Ma.s.singer, the continued flings at kings, courtiers, and all the favourites of fortune, like one who had enough of intellect to see injustice in his own inferiority in the share of the good things of life, but not genius enough to rise above it, and forget himself.

Beaumont and Fletcher have the same vice in the opposite pole, a servility of sentiment and a spirit of partizanship with the monarchical faction.

6. From the want of a guiding point in Ma.s.singer's characters, you never know what they are about. In fact they have no character.

7. Note the faultiness of his soliloquies, with connectives and arrangements, that have no other motive but the fear lest the audience should not understand him.

8. A play of Ma.s.singer's produces no one single effect, whether arising from the spirit of the whole, as in the As You Like It; or from any one indisputably prominent character as Hamlet. It is just "which you like best, gentlemen!"

9. The unnaturally irrational pa.s.sions and strange whims of feeling which Ma.s.singer delights to draw, deprive the reader of all sound interest in the characters;--as in Mathias in the Picture, and in other instances.

10. The comic scenes in Ma.s.singer not only do not harmonize with the tragic, not only interrupt the feeling, but degrade the characters that are to form any part in the action of the piece, so as to render them unfit for any tragic interest. At least, they do not concern, or act upon, or modify, the princ.i.p.al characters. As when a gentleman is insulted by a mere blackguard,--it is the same as if any other accident of nature had occurred, a pig run under his legs, or his horse thrown him. There is no dramatic interest in it.

I like Ma.s.singer's comedies better than his tragedies, although where the situation requires it, he often rises into the truly tragic and pathetic. He excells in narration, and for the most part displays his mere story with skill. But he is not a poet of high imagination; he is like a Flemish painter, in whose delineations objects appear as they do in nature, have the same force and truth, and produce the same effect upon the spectator. But Shakspeare is beyond this;--he always by metaphors and figures involves in the thing considered a universe of past and possible experiences; he mingles earth, sea and air, gives a soul to every thing, and at the same time that he inspires human feelings, adds a dignity in his images to human nature itself:--

Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye; Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchymy, &c.

(33rd Sonnet.)

'Note.'--Have I not over-rated Gifford's edition of Ma.s.singer?--Not,--if I have, as but just is, main reference to the rest.i.tution of the text; but yes, perhaps, if I were talking of the notes. These are more often wrong than right. In the Maid of Honour, Act i. sc. 5. Astutio describes Fulgentio as "A gentleman, yet no lord." Gifford supposes a transposition of the press for "No gentleman, yet a lord." But this would have no connection with what follows; and we have only to recollect that "lord" means a lord of lands, to see that the after lines are explanatory. He is a man of high birth, but no landed property;--as to the former, he is a distant branch of the blood royal;--as to the latter, his whole rent lies in a narrow compa.s.s, the king's ear! In the same scene the text stands:

'Bert'. No! they are useful For your 'imitation;'--I remember you, &c.;--

and Gifford condemns Mason's conjecture of 'initiation' as void of meaning and harmony. Now my ear deceives me if 'initiation' be not the right word. In fact,'imitation' is utterly impertinent to all that follows. Bertoldo tells Antonio that he had been initiated in the manners suited to the court by two or three sacred beauties, and that a similar experience would be equally useful for his initiation into the camp. Not a word of his imitation. Besides, I say the rhythm requires 'initiation,' and is lame as the verse now stands.

LECTURE VIII.

'DON QUIXOTE'.

CERVANTES.

Born at Madrid, 1547;-Shakspeare, 1564; both put off mortality on the same day, the 23rd of April, 1616,--the one in the sixty-ninth, the other in the fifty-second, year of his life. The resemblance in their physiognomies is striking, but with a predominance of acuteness in Cervantes, and of reflection in Shakspeare, which is the specific difference between the Spanish and English characters of mind.

I. The nature and eminence of Symbolical writing;--

II. Madness, and its different sorts, (considered without pretension to medical science);--

To each of these, or at least to my own notions respecting them, I must devote a few words of explanation, in order to render the after critique on Don Quixote, the master work of Cervantes' and his country's genius easily and throughout intelligible. This is not the least valuable, though it may most often be felt by us both as the heaviest and least entertaining portion of these critical disquisitions: for without it, I must have foregone one at least of the two appropriate objects of a Lecture, that of interesting you during its delivery, and of leaving behind in your minds the germs of after-thought, and the materials for future enjoyment. To have been a.s.sured by several of my intelligent auditors that they have reperused Hamlet or Oth.e.l.lo with increased satisfaction in consequence of the new points of view in which I had placed those characters--is the highest compliment I could receive or desire; and should the address of this evening open out a new source of pleasure, or enlarge the former in your perusal of Don Quixote, it will compensate for the failure of any personal or temporary object.

I. The Symbolical cannot, perhaps, be better defined in distinction from the Allegorical, than that it is always itself a part of that, of the whole of which it is the representative.--"Here comes a sail,"--(that is, a ship) is a symbolical expression. "Behold our lion!" when we speak of some gallant soldier, is allegorical. Of most importance to our present subject is this point, that the latter (the allegory) cannot be other than spoken consciously;--whereas in the former (the symbol) it is very possible that the general truth represented may be working unconsciously in the writer's mind during the construction of the symbol;--and it proves itself by being produced out of his own mind,--as the Don Quixote out of the perfectly sane mind of Cervantes, and not by outward observation, or historically. The advantage of symbolical writing over allegory is, that it presumes no disjunction of faculties, but simple predominance.

II. Madness may be divided as--

1. hypochondriasis; or, the man is out of his senses.

2. derangement of the understanding; or, the man is out of his wits.

3. loss of reason.

4. frenzy, or derangement of the sensations.

Cervantes's own preface to Don Quixote is a perfect model of the gentle, every where intelligible, irony in the best essays of the Tatler and the Spectator. Equally natural and easy, Cervantes is more spirited than Addison; whilst he blends with the terseness of Swift, an exquisite flow and music of style, and above all, contrasts with the latter by the sweet temper of a superior mind, which saw the follies of mankind, and was even at the moment suffering severely under hard mistreatment;[1]

and yet seems every where to have but one thought as the undersong-- "Brethren! with all your faults I love you still!"--or as a mother that chides the child she loves, with one hand holds up the rod, and with the other wipes off each tear as it drops!

Don Quixote was neither fettered to the earth by want, nor holden in its embraces by wealth;--of which, with the temperance natural to his country, as a Spaniard, he had both far too little, and somewhat too much, to be under any necessity of thinking about it. His age too, fifty, may be well supposed to prevent his mind from being tempted out of itself by any of the lower pa.s.sions;--while his habits, as a very early riser and a keen sportsman, were such as kept his spare body in serviceable subjection to his will, and yet by the play of hope that accompanies pursuit, not only permitted, but a.s.sisted, his fancy in shaping what it would. Nor must we omit his meagerness and entire featureliness, face and frame, which Cervantes gives us at once: "It is said that his surname was 'Quixada' or 'Quesada,'" &c.--even in this trifle showing an exquisite judgment;--just once insinuating the a.s.sociation of 'lantern-jaws' into the reader's mind, yet not retaining it obtrusively like the names in old farces and in the Pilgrim's Progress,--but taking for the regular appellative one which had the no meaning of a proper name in real life, and which yet was capable of recalling a number of very different, but all pertinent, recollections, as old armour, the precious metals hidden in the ore, &c. Don Quixote's leanness and featureliness are happy exponents of the excess of the formative or imaginative in him, contrasted with Sancho's plump rotundity, and recipiency of external impression.

He has no knowledge of the sciences or scientific arts which give to the meanest portions of matter an intellectual interest, and which enable the mind to decypher in the world of the senses the invisible agency--that alone, of which the world's phenomena are the effects and manifestations,--and thus, as in a mirror, to contemplate its own reflex, its life in the powers, its imagination in the symbolic forms, its moral instincts in the final causes, and its reason in the laws of material nature: but--estranged from all the motives to observation from self-interest--the persons that surround him too few and too familiar to enter into any connection with his thoughts, or to require any adaptation of his conduct to their particular characters or relations to himself--his judgment lies fallow, with nothing to excite, nothing to employ it. Yet,--and here is the point, where genius even of the most perfect kind, allotted but to few in the course of many ages, does not preclude the necessity in part, and in part counterbalance the craving by sanity of judgment, without which genius either cannot be, or cannot at least manifest itself,--the dependency of our nature asks for some confirmation from without, though it be only from the shadows of other men's fictions.

Too uninformed, and with too narrow a sphere of power and opportunity to rise into the scientific artist, or to be himself a patron of art, and with too deep a principle and too much innocence to become a mere projector, Don Quixote has recourse to romances:--