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Page 22
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. 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. But poetry acts in another and diviner
manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it
the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought.
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes
familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it reproduces 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
coexists. 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. A man,
to be greatly good, must imagine intensely 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. The great
instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers
to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the
circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thought 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 for ever craves fresh food. Poetry
strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature
of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. 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
creations, which participate in neither 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. 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.
Those in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is less intense,
as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser, 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.
Homer and the cyclic poets were followed at a certain interval
by the dramatic and lyrical poets of Athens, who flourished
contemporaneously 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. For although the scheme of Athenian society was deformed
by many imperfections which the poetry existing in chivalry and
Christianity has 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 preceded the death of Socrates.
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. 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. For written poetry
existed at that epoch simultaneously with the other arts, and it is
an idle inquiry 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. We know no more of cause and effect than
a constant conjunction of events: poetry is ever found to coexist
with whatever other arts contribute to the happiness and perfection
of man. I appeal to what has already been established to distinguish
between the cause and the effect.
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
understood or practised according to the true philosophy of it,
as at Athens. 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 proportion and unity one towards the other. On the modern
stage a few only of the elements capable of expressing the image
of the poet's conception are employed at once. We have tragedy
without music and dancing; and music and dancing without the highest
impersonations of which they are the fit accompaniment, and both
without religion and solemnity. Religious institution has indeed
been usually banished from the stage. 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. The modern practice of blending comedy with tragedy,
though liable to great abuse in point of practice, is undoubtedly
an extension of the dramatic circle; but the comedy should be
as in KING LEAR, universal, ideal, and sublime. It is perhaps the
intervention of this principle which determines the balance in
favour of KING LEAR against the OEDIPUS 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. KING
LEAR, if it can sustain this 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. Calderon, in his religious AUTOS, has attempted
to fulfil some of the high conditions of dramatic representation
neglected by Shakespeare; such as the establishing a relation
between the drama and religion and the accommodating them to music
and dancing; but he omits the observation of conditions still
more important, and more is lost than gained by the substitution
of the rigidly-defined and ever-repeated idealisms of a distorted
superstition for the living impersonations of the truth of human
passion.
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