valleys. He paints nature, not as we find it, but as we expected to find it; and fulfils the deluding promise of our youth. He waves his wand of enchantment, and at once embodies airy beings, and throws a delicious veil over all actual objects. The two worlds of reality and of fiction, seem poised on the wings of his imagination. His ideas indeed seem always more distinct than his perceptions. He is the painter of abstractions, and describes them with dazzling minuteness. In the Mask of Cupid, the god of love claps on high his coloured winges twain;' and it is said of Gluttony in the procession of the Passions,

'In green vine-leaves he was right fitly clad.'

At times he becomes picturesque from his intense love of beauty; as, where he compares Prince Arthur's crest to the appearance of the almond-tree. The love of beauty, however, and not of truth, is the moving principle of his mind; and his delineations are guided by no principle but the impulse of an inexhaustible imagination. He luxuriates equally in scenes of Eastern magnificence, or the still solitude of a hermit's cell-in the extremes of sensuality or refinement. With all this, he neither makes us laugh nor weep. The only jest in his poem is an allegory. But he has been falsely charged with a want of passion and of strength. He has both in an immense degree. He has not indeed the pathos of immediate action or suffering, which is the dramatic; but he has all the pathos of sentiment and romance,-all that belongs to distant objects of terror, and uncertain, imaginary distress. His strength, in like manner, is not coarse and palpable,—but it assumes the character of vastness and sublimity, seen through the same visionary medium, and blended with all the appalling associations of preternatural agency. We will only refer to the Cave of Mammon, and to the description of Celleno in the Cave of Despair. The three first books of the Faery Queen are very superior to the others. It is not fair to compare Spenser with Shakespeare, in point of interest. A fairer comparison would be with Comus. There is only one book of this allegorical kind which has more interest than Spenser (with scarcely less imagination); and that is the Pilgrim's Progress.

It is not possible for any two writers to be more opposite than Spenser and Chaucer. Spenser delighted in luxurious enjoyment;Chaucer in severe activity of mind. Spenser was, perhaps, the most visionary of all the poets;-Chaucer the most a man of observation and of the world. He appealed directly to the bosoms and business of men. He dealt only in realities; and, relying throughout on facts or common tradition, could always produce his vouchers in nature.

His sentiment is not the voluntary indulgence of the poet's fancy, but is founded on the habitual prejudices and passions of the very characters he introduces. His poetry, therefore, is essentially picturesque and dramatic: In this he chiefly differs from Boccacio, whose power was that of sentiment. The picturesque and the dramatic in Chaucer, are in a great measure the same thing; for he only describes external objects as connected with character, as the symbols of internal passion. The costume and dress of the Canterbury pilgrims,-of the knight, the 'squire,—the gap-toothed wife of Bath, speak for themselves. Again, the description of the equipage and accoutrements of the two Kings of Thrace and Inde, in the Knight's Tale, are as striking and grand, as the others are lively and natural. His descriptions of natural scenery are in the same style of excellence ;—their beauty consists in their truth and characteristic propriety. They have a local freshness about them, which renders them almost tangible; which gives the very feeling of the air, the coldness or moisture of the ground. In other words, he describes inanimate objects from the effect which they have on the mind of the spectator, and as they have a reference to the interest of the story. One of the finest parts of Chaucer is of this mixed kind. It is in the beginning of the Flower and the Leaf, where he describes the delight of that young beauty, shrouded in her bower, and listening in the morning of the year to the singing of the nightingale, while her joy rises with the rising song, and gushes out afresh at every pause, and is borne along with the full tide of pleasure, and still increases, and repeats, and prolongs itself, and knows no ebb. The coolness of the arbour,-its retirement,—the early time of the day,—the sudden starting up of the birds in the neighbouring bushes-the eager delight with which they devour and rend the opening buds and flowers, are expressed with a truth and feeling, which make the whole seem like the recollection of an actual scene. Whoever compares this beautiful and simple passage with Rousseau's description of the Elisée in the New Eloise, will be able to see the difference between good writing and fine writing, or between the actual appearances of nature, and the progress of the feelings they excite in us, and a parcel of words, images and sentiments thrown together without meaning or coherence. We do not say this from any feeling of disrespect to Rousseau, for whom we have a great affection; but his imagination was not that of the poet or the painter. Severity and boldness are the characteristics of the natural style: the artificial is equally servile and ostentatious. Nature, after all, is the soul of art:-and there is a strength in the imagination which reposes immediately on nature, which nothing else can supply. It was this trust in nature, and

reliance on his subject, which enabled Chaucer to describe the grief and patience of Griselda,-the faith of Constance, and the heroic perseverance of the little child, who, going to school through the streets of Jewry,

"Oh, Alma redemptoris mater, loudly sung,'

and who, after his death, still triumphed in his song. Chaucer has more of this deep, internal, sustained sentiment than any other writer, except Boccacio, to whom Chaucer owed much, though he did not owe all to him: for he writes just as well where he did not borrow from that quarter, as where he did; as in the characters of the Pilgrims, the Wife of Bath's Prologue,-the 'Squire's Tale, and in innumerable others. The poetry of Chaucer has a religious sanctity about it, connected with the manners of the age. It has all the spirit of martyrdom !

In looking back to the chef-d'œuvres of former times, we are sometimes disposed to wonder at the little progress which has been made since in poetry, and the arts of imitation in general. But this, perhaps, is a foolish wonder. Nothing is more contrary to fact, than the supposition, that in what we understand by the fine arts, as painting and poetry, relative perfection is the result of repeated success; and that, what has been once well done, constantly leads to something better. What is mechanical, reducible to rule, or capable of demonstration, is indeed progressive, and admits of gradual improvement: but that which is not mechanical or definite, but depends on taste, genius, and feeling, very soon becomes stationary or retrograde, after a certain period, and loses more than it gains by transfusion. The contrary opinion is indeed a common error, which has grown up, like many others, from transferring an analogy of one kind to something quite different, without thinking of the difference in the nature of the things, or attending to the difference of the results. For most persons, finding what wonderful advances have been made in biblical criticism, in chemistry, in mechanics, in geometry, astronomy, &c., i.e. in things depending on inquiry and experiment, or on absolute demonstration, have been led hastily to conclude, that there was a general tendency in the efforts of the human intellect to improve by repetition, and, in all arts and institutions, to grow perfect and mature by time. We look back upon the theological creed of our ancestors, and their discoveries in natural philosophy, with a smile of pity: Science, and the arts connected with it, have all had their infancy, their youth and manhood, and seem to have in them no principle of limitation or decay; and, inquiring no farther, we infer, in the intoxication of our pride, and the height of our self-congratulation, that the

same progress has been made, and will continue to be made, in all other things which are the work of man. The fact, however, stares us so plainly in the face, that one would think the smallest reflection must suggest the truth, and overturn our sanguine theories. The greatest poets, the ablest orators, the best painters, and the finest sculptors that the world ever saw, appeared soon after the first birth of these arts, and lived in a state of society which was in other respects rude and barbarous. Those arts which depend on individual genius and incommunicable power, have almost always leaped at once from infancy to manhood--from the first rude dawn of invention to their meridian height and dazzling lustre, and have, in general, declined ever after. This is the peculiar distinction and privilege of science and of art;-of the one, never to arrive at the summit of perfection at all; and of the other, to arrive at it almost at once. Homer, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Dante and Ariosto, (Milton alone was of a later period, and not the worse for it),-Raphael, Titian, Michael Angelo, Correggio, Cervantes and Boccacio-all lived near the beginning of their arts—perfected, and all but created them. These giant sons of genius stand indeed upon the earth; but they tower above their fellows; and the long line of their successors does not interpose any object to obstruct their view, or lessen their brightness. In strength and stature, they are unrivalled; in grace and beauty, they have never been surpassed. In after-ages and more refined periods (as they are called), great men have arisen one by one, as it were by throes and at intervals; though, in general, the best of these cultivated and artificial minds were of an inferior order; as Tasso and Pope among poets, Guido and Poussin among painters. But in the earlier stages of the arts, when the first mechanical difficulties had been got over, and the language acquired, they rose by clusters and in constellations-never so to rise again.

The arts of poetry and painting are conversant with the world of thought within us, and of the world of sense without us—with what we know and see and feel intimately. They flow from the living shrine of our own breasts, and are kindled at the living lamp of Nature: But the pulse of the passions assuredly beat as high-the depths and soundings of the human heart were as well understood, three thousand or three hundred years ago, as they are at present. The face of nature, and the human face divine,' shone as bright then, as they have ever done since. But it is their light, reflected by true genius on art, which marks out the path before it, and sheds a glory round the Muses' feet, like that which

—'circled Una's angel face,

And made a sunshine in the shady place.'

VOL. XXVI.]

SCHLEGEL ON THE DRAMA

[February 1816. THE work is German; and is to be received with the allowances which that school of literature generally requires. With these, however, it will be found a good work and as we should be sorry to begin our account of it with an unmeaning sneer, we will explain at once what appears to us to be the weak side of German literature. In all that they do, it is evident that they are much more influenced by a desire of distinction than by any impulse of the imagination, or the consciousness of extraordinary qualifications. They write, not because they are full of a subject, but because they think it is a subject upon which, with due pains and labour, something striking may be written. So they read and meditate,—and having, at length, devised some strange and paradoxical view of the matter, they set about establishing it with all their might and main. The consequence is, that they have no shades of opinion, but are always straining at a grand systematic conclusion. They have done a great deal, no doubt, and in various departments; but their pretensions have always much exceeded their performance. They are universal undertakers, and complete encyclopedists, in all moral and critical science. No question can come before them but they have a large apparatus of logical and metaphysical principles ready to play off upon it; and the less they know of the subject, the more formidable is the use they make of their apparatus. In poetry, they have at one time gone to the utmost lengths of violent effect, and then turned round, with equal extravagance, to the laborious production of no effect at all. The truth is, that they are naturally a slow, heavy people; and can only be put in motion by some violent and often repeated impulse, under the operation of which they lose all control over themselves— and nothing can stop them short of the last absurdity. Truth, in their view of it, is never what is, but what, according to their system, ought to be. Though they have dug deeply in the mine of knowledge, they have too often confounded the dross and the ore, and counted their gains rather by their weight than their quality. They are a little apt, we suspect, literally to take the will for the deed,and are not always capable of distinguishing between effort and success. They are most at home, accordingly, in matters of fact, and learned inquiries. In art they are hard, forced, and mechanical; and, generally, they may be said to have all that depends on strength of understanding and persevering exertion,-but to want ease, quick