The nascent love for the country lass, but without any attempt at
utterance, or an opportunity of knowing her, except as the hint
the
Greek: oti esti
of the inward imagination, is happily
conceived in both parts; first, as confirmative of the
shrinking back of the mind on itself, and its dread of having a
cherished image destroyed by its own judgment; and secondly, as
showing how necessarily love is the passion of novels. Novels are
to love as fairy tales to dreams. I never knew but two men of
taste and feeling who could not understand why I was delighted
with the
Arabian Nights' Tales
, and they were likewise the
only persons in my knowledge who scarcely remembered having ever
dreamed. Magic and war itself a magic are the
day-dreams of childhood; love is the day-dream of youth and early
manhood.
(C. 2.) "Scarcely had ruddy Phoebus spread the
golden tresses of his beauteous hair over the face of the wide
and spacious earth; and scarcely had the little painted birds,
with the sweet and mellifluous harmony of their forked tongues,
saluted the approach of rosy Aurora, who, quitting the soft couch
of her jealous husband, disclosed herself to mortals through the
gates of the Mauchegan horizon; when the renowned Don Quixote,"
&c.
How happily already is the abstraction from the senses, from
observation, and the consequent confusion of the judgment, marked
in this description! The knight is describing objects immediate
to his senses and sensations without borrowing a single trait
from either. Would it be difficult to find parallel descriptions
in Dryden's plays and in those of his successors?
(C. 3.) The host is here happily conceived as one who from his
past life as a sharper, was capable of entering into and
humouring the knight, and so perfectly in character, that he
precludes a considerable source of improbability in the future
narrative, by enforcing upon Don Quixote the necessity of taking
money with him.
(C. 3.) "Ho, there, whoever thou art, rash knight,
that approachest to touch the arms of the most valorous
adventurer that ever girded sword," &c.
Don Quixote's high eulogiums on himself "the most valorous
adventurer!" but it is not himself that he has before him,
but the idol of his imagination, the imaginary being whom he is
acting. And this, that it is entirely a third person, excuses his
heart from the otherwise inevitable charge of selfish vanity; and
so by madness itself he preserves our esteem, and renders those
actions natural by which he, the first person, deserves it.
(C. 4.) Andres and his master. The manner in which Don Quixote
redressed this wrong, is a picture of the true revolutionary
passion in its first honest state, while it is yet only a
bewilderment of the understanding. You have a benevolence
limitless in its prayers, which are in fact aspirations towards
omnipotence; but between it and beneficence the bridge of
judgment that is, of measurement of personal power
intervenes, and must be passed. Otherwise you will be bruised by
the leap into the chasm, or be drowned in the revolutionary
river, and drag others with you to the same fate.
(C. 4.) Merchants of Toledo.
When they were come so near as to be seen and heard,
Don Quixote raised his voice, and with arrogant air cried out:
"Let the whole world stand; if the whole world does not confess
that there is not in the whole world a damsel more beautiful
than," &c.
Now mark the presumption which follows the self-complacency of
the last act! That was an honest attempt to redress a real wrong;
this is an arbitrary determination to enforce a Brissotine or
Rousseau's ideal on all his fellow creatures.
Let the whole world stand!
'If there had been any experience in proof of the excellence of
our code, where would be our superiority in this enlightened
age?'
"No! the business is that without seeing her,
you believe, confess, affirm, swear, and maintain it;
and if
not, I challenge you all to battle."
4
Next see the persecution and fury excited by opposition however
moderate! The only words listened to are those, that without
their context and their conditionals, and transformed into
positive assertions, might give some shadow of excuse for the
violence shown! This rich story ends, to the compassion of the
men in their senses, in a sound rib-roasting of the idealist by
the muleteer, the mob. And happy for thee, poor knight! that the
mob were against thee! For had they been with thee, by the change
of the moon and of them, thy head would have been off.
(C. 5.) first part The idealist recollects the causes that
had been accessary to the reverse and attempts to remove them
too late. He is beaten and disgraced.
(C. 6.) This chapter on Don Quixote's library proves that the
author did not wish to destroy the romances, but to cause them to
be read as romances that is, for their merits as poetry.
(C. 7.) Among other things, Don Quixote told him, he
should dispose himself to go with him willingly; for some
time or other such an adventure might present, that an island
might be won, in the turn of a hand, and he be left governor
thereof.
At length the promises of the imaginative reason begin to act on
the plump, sensual, honest common sense accomplice, but
unhappily not in the same person, and without the
copula
of the judgment, in hopes of the substantial good things,
of which the former contemplated only the glory and the colours.
(C. 7.) Sancho Panza went riding upon his ass, like
any patriarch, with his wallet and leathern bottle, and with a
vehement desire to find himself governor of the island which his
master had promised him.
The first relief from regular labour is so pleasant to poor
Sancho!
(C. 8.) "I no gentleman! I swear by the great God,
thou liest, as I am a Christian. Biscainer by land, gentleman by
sea, gentleman for the devil, and thou liest: look then if thou
hast any thing else to say."
This Biscainer is an excellent image of the prejudices and
bigotry provoked by the idealism of a speculator. This story
happily detects the trick which our imagination plays in the
description of single combats: only change the preconception of
the magnificence of the combatants, and all is gone.
(B. II. c. 2.) "Be pleased, my lord Don Quixote, to
bestow upon me the government of that island," &c.
Sancho's eagerness for his government, the nascent lust of actual
democracy, or isocracy!
(C. 2.) "But tell me, on your life, have you ever
seen a more valorous knight than I, upon the whole face of the
known earth? Have you read in story of any other, who has, or
ever had, more bravery in assailing, more breath in holding out,
more dexterity in wounding, or more address in giving a fall?"
"The truth is," answered Sancho, "that I never read any
history at all; for I can neither read nor write; but what I dare
affirm is, that I never served a bolder master," &c.
This appeal to Sancho, and Sancho's answer are
exquisitely humorous. It is impossible not to think of the French
bulletins and proclamations. Remark the necessity under which we
are of being sympathized with, fly as high into abstraction as we
may, and how constantly the imagination is recalled to the ground
of our common humanity! And note a little further on, the
knight's easy vaunting of his balsam, and his quietly deferring
the making and application of it.
(C. 3.) "Happy times and happy ages," &c.
5
Note the rhythm of this, and the admirable beauty and wisdom of
the thoughts in themselves, but the total want of judgment in Don
Quixote's addressing them to such an audience.
(B. III. c. 3.) Don Quixote's balsam, and the vomiting and
consequent relief; an excellent hit at
panacea nostrums,
which cure the patient by his being himself cured of the medicine
by revolting nature.
"Peace! and have patience; the day will come,"
&c.
The perpetual promises of the imagination!
"Your Worship," said Sancho, "would make a better
preacher than knight errant!"
Exactly so. This is the true moral.
(C. 6.) The uncommon beauty of the description in the
commencement of this chapter. In truth, the whole of it seems to
put all nature in its heights and its humiliations, before
us.
(Ib.) Sancho's story of the goats:
"Make account, he carried them all over," said Don
Quixote, "and do not be going and coming in this manner; for at
this rate, you will not have done carrying them over in a
twelvemonth." "How many are passed already?" said Sancho,
&c.
Observe the happy contrast between the
all-generalizing mind of the mad knight, and Sancho's
all-particularizing memory. How admirable a symbol of the
dependence of all
copula
on the higher powers of the mind,
with the single exception of the succession in time and the
accidental relations of space. Men of mere common sense have no
theory or means of making one fact more important or prominent
than the rest; if they lose one link, all is lost. Compare Mrs.
Quickly and the Tapster.
And note also
Sancho's good heart, when his master is about to leave him. Don
Quixote's conduct upon discovering the fulling-hammers, proves he
was meant to be in his senses. Nothing can be better conceived
than his fit of passion at Sancho's laughing, and his sophism of
self-justification by the courage he had shown.
Sancho is by this time cured, through experience, as far as his
own errors are concerned; yet still is he lured on by the
unconquerable awe of his master's superiority, even when he is
cheating him.
(C. 8.) The adventure of the Galley-slaves. I think this is the
only passage of moment in which Cervantes slips the mask of his
hero, and speaks for himself.
Don Quixote desired to have it, and bade him take the
money, and keep it for himself. Sancho kissed his hands for the
favour, &c.
Observe Sancho's eagerness to avail himself of the permission of
his master, who, in the war sports of knight-errantry, had,
without any selfish dishonesty, overlooked the
meum
and
tuum.
Sancho's selfishness is modified by his involuntary
goodness of heart, and Don Quixote's flighty goodness is debased
by the involuntary or unconscious selfishness of his vanity and
self-applause.
(C. 10.) Cardenio is the madman of passion, who meets and easily
overthrows for the moment the madman of imagination. And note the
contagion of madness of any kind, upon Don Quixote's interruption
of Cardenio's story.
(C. 11.) Perhaps the best specimen of Sancho's proverbializing is
this:
"And I (Don Q.) say again, they lie, and will lie two
hundred times more, all who say, or think her so." "I neither
say, nor think so," answered Sancho: "let those who say it, eat
the lie, and swallow it with their bread: whether they were
guilty or no, they have given an account to God before now: I
come from my vineyard, I know nothing; I am no friend to
inquiring into other men's lives; for he that buys and
lies shall find the lie left in his purse behind; besides,
naked was I born, and naked I remain; I neither win nor lose; if
they were guilty, what is that to me? Many think to find bacon,
where there is not so much as a pin to hang it on: but who
can hedge in the cuckoo? Especially, do they spare God
himself?"
(Ib.) "And it is no great matter, if it be in
another hand; for by what I remember, Dulcinea can neither write
nor read," &c.
(P. II. B. III. c. 9.) Sancho's account of what he had seen on
Clavileno is a counterpart in his style to Don Quixote's
adventures in the cave of Montesinos. This last is the only
impeachment of the knight's moral character; Cervantes just gives
one instance of the veracity failing before the strong cravings
of the imagination for something real and external; the picture
would not have been complete without this; and yet it is so well
managed, that the reader has no unpleasant sense of Don Quixote
having told a lie. It is evident that he hardly knows whether it
was a dream or not; and goes to the enchanter to inquire the real
nature of the adventure.
Footnote 1
:
Bien como quien se engendrò en una carcel, donde toda
incomodidad tiene su assiento, y todo triste ruido hace su
habitacion.
Like one you may suppose born in a prison, where
every inconvenience keeps its residence, and every dismal sound
its habitation. Pref. Jarvis's Tr.
Ed.
Footnote 2
:
No estaba muy bien con.
Ed.
Footnote 3
:
Pero con todo
.
Ed.
Footnote 4
:
Donde no, conmigo sois en batalla, gente descomunal!
Ed.
Footnote 5
:
Dichosa edad y siglos dichosos aquellos, &c.
Ed.
Footnote 6
:
See the
Friend
, vol. iii. p. 138.
Ed.
Summary on Cervantes
A Castilian of refined manners; a gentleman, true to religion,
and true to honour.
A scholar and a soldier, and fought under the banners of Don John
of Austria, at Lepanto, lost his arm and was captured.
Endured slavery not only with fortitude, but with mirth; and by
the superiority of nature, mastered and overawed his barbarian
owner.
Finally ransomed, he resumed his native destiny, the awful task
of achieving fame; and for that reason died poor and a prisoner,
while nobles and kings over their goblets of gold gave relish to
their pleasures by the charms of his divine genius. He was the
inventor of novels for the Spaniards, and in his
Persilis and
Sigismunda
, the English may find the germ of their
Robinson Crusoe
.
The world was a drama to him. His own thoughts, in spite of
poverty and sickness, perpetuated for him the feelings of youth.
He painted only what he knew and had looked into, but he knew and
had looked into much indeed; and his imagination was ever at hand
to adapt and modify the world of his experience. Of delicious
love he fabled, yet with stainless virtue.
Contents
Contents, p.2
I. Perhaps the most important of our intellectual
operations are those of detecting the difference in similar, and
the identity in dissimilar, things. Out of the latter operation
it is that wit arises; and it, generically regarded, consists in
presenting thoughts or images in an unusual connection with each
other, for the purpose of exciting pleasure by the surprise. This
connection may be real; and there is in fact a scientific wit;
though where the object, consciously entertained, is truth, and
not amusement, we commonly give it some higher name. But in wit
popularly understood, the connection may be, and for the most
part is, apparent only, and transitory; and this connection may
be by thoughts, or by words, or by images. The first is our
Butler's especial eminence; the second, Voltaire's; the third,
which we oftener call fancy, constitutes the larger and more
peculiar part of the wit of Shakspeare. You can scarcely turn to
a single speech of Falstaff's without finding instances of it.
Nor does wit always cease to deserve the name by being transient,
or incapable of analysis. I may add that the wit of thoughts
belongs eminently to the Italians, that of words to the French,
and that of images to the English.
II. Where the laughable is its own end, and neither
inference, nor moral is intended, or where at least the writer
would wish it so to appear, there arises what we call drollery.
The pure, unmixed, ludicrous or laughable belongs exclusively to
the understanding, and must be presented under the form of the
senses; it lies within the spheres of the eye and the ear, and
hence is allied to the fancy. It does not appertain to the reason
or the moral sense, and accordingly is alien to the imagination.
I think Aristotle has already excellently defined the
laughable, Greek: tho geloion , as consisting of, or depending
on, what is out of its proper time and place, yet without danger
or pain. Here the impropriety Greek: tho ahtapon is the positive qualification; the
dangerlessness Greek: tho akindunon the negative.
Neither the understanding without an object of the senses, as for
example, a mere notional error, or idiocy; nor any external
object, unless attributed to the understanding, can produce the
poetically laughable. Nay, even in ridiculous positions of the
body laughed at by the vulgar, there is a subtle personification
always going on, which acts on the, perhaps, unconscious mind of
the spectator as a symbol of intellectual character. And hence
arises the imperfect and awkward effect of comic stories of
animals; because although the understanding is satisfied in them,
the senses are not. Hence too, it is, that the true ludicrous is
its own end. When serious satire commences, or satire that is
felt as serious, however comically drest, free and genuine
laughter ceases; it becomes sardonic. This you experience in
reading Young, and also not unfrequently in Butler. The true
comic is the blossom of the nettle.
III. When words or images are placed in unusual
juxta-position rather than connection, and are so placed merely
because the juxta-position is unusual we have the odd or
the grotesque; the occasional use of which in the minor ornaments
of architecture, is an interesting problem for a student in the
psychology of the Fine Arts.
IV. In the simply laughable there is a mere disproportion
between a definite act and a definite purpose or end, or a
disproportion of the end itself to the rank or circumstances of
the definite person; but humour is of more difficult description.
I must try to define it in the first place by its points of
diversity from the former species. Humour does not, like the
different kinds of wit, which is impersonal, consist wholly in
the understanding and the senses. No combination of thoughts,
words, or images will of itself constitute humour, unless some
peculiarity of individual temperament and character be indicated
thereby, as the cause of the same. Compare the comedies of
Congreve with the Falstaff in Henry IV. or with Sterne's
Corporal Trim, Uncle Toby, and Mr. Shandy, or with some of
Steele's charming papers in the Tatler, and you will feel
the difference better than I can express it. Thus again, (to take
an instance from the different works of the same writer), in
Smollett's Strap, his Lieutenant Bowling, his Morgan the honest
Welshman, and his Matthew Bramble, we have exquisite humour,
while in his Peregrine Pickle we find an abundance of
drollery, which too often degenerates into mere oddity; in short,
we feel that a number of things are put together to counterfeit
humour, but that there is no growth from within. And this indeed is the origin of the word, derived from
the humoral pathology, and excellently described by Ben
Jonson:
So in every human body,
The choler, melancholy, phlegm, and blood,
By reason that they flow continually
In some one part, and are not continent,
Receive the name of humours. Now thus far
It may, by metaphor, apply itself
Unto the general disposition:
As when some one peculiar quality
Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw
All his effects, his spirits, and his powers,
In their confluctions, all to run one way,
This may be truly said to be a humour.
1
Hence we may explain the congeniality of humour with pathos, so
exquisite in Sterne and Smollett, and hence also the tender
feeling which we always have for, and associate with, the humours
or hobby-horses of a man. First, we respect a humourist, because
absence of interested motive is the ground-work of the character,
although the imagination of an interest may exist in the
individual himself, as if a remarkably simple-hearted man should
pride himself on his knowledge of the world, and how well he can
manage it: and secondly, there always is in a genuine humour
an acknowledgement of the hollowness and farce of the world, and
its disproportion to the godlike within us. And it follows
immediately from this, that whenever particular acts have
reference to particular selfish motives, the humourous bursts
into the indignant and abhorring; whilst all follies not selfish
are pardoned or palliated. The danger of this habit, in respect
of pure morality, is strongly exemplified in Sterne.
This would be enough, and indeed less than this has passed, for a
sufficient account of humour, if we did not recollect that not
every predominance of character, even where not precluded by the
moral sense, as in criminal dispositions, constitutes what we
mean by a humourist, or the presentation of its produce, humour.
What then is it? Is it manifold? Or is there some one humorific
point common to all that can be called humourous? I am not
prepared to answer this fully, even if my time permitted; but I
think there is; and that it consists in a certain reference
to the general and the universal, by which the finite great is
brought into identity with the little, or the little with the
finite great, so as to make both nothing in comparison with the
infinite. The little is made great, and the great little, in
order to destroy both; because all is equal in contrast with the
infinite.
"It is not without reason, brother
Toby, that learned men write dialogues on long noses."
I would suggest, therefore, that whenever a finite is
contemplated in reference to the infinite, whether consciously or
unconsciously, humour essentially arises. In the highest humour,
at least, there is always a reference to, and a connection with,
some general power not finite, in the form of some finite
ridiculously disproportionate in our feelings to that of which it
is, nevertheless, the representative, or by which it is to be
displayed. Humourous writers, therefore, as Sterne in particular,
delight, after much preparation, to end in nothing, or in a
direct contradiction.
That there is some truth in this definition, or origination of
humour, is evident; for you cannot conceive a humourous man who
does not give some disproportionate generality, or even a
universality to his hobby-horse, as is the case with Mr. Shandy;
or at least there is an absence of any interest but what arises
from the humour itself, as in my Uncle Toby, and it is the idea
of the soul, of its undefined capacity and dignity, that gives
the sting to any absorption of it by any one pursuit, and this
not in respect of the humourist as a mere member of society for a
particular, however mistaken, interest, but as a man.
The English humour is the most thoughtful, the Spanish the most
etherial the most ideal of modern literature. Amongst
the classic ancients there was little or no humour in the
foregoing sense of the term. Socrates, or Plato under his name,
gives some notion of humour in the Banquet, when he argues that
tragedy and comedy rest upon the same ground. But humour properly
took its rise in the middle ages; and the Devil, the Vice of the
mysteries, incorporates the modern humour in its elements. It is
a spirit measured by disproportionate finites. The Devil is not,
indeed, perfectly humourous; but that is only because he is the
extreme of all humour.
Footnote 1
:
Every Man Out Of His Humour
. Prologue.
Footnote 2
:
Trist. Sh
. Vol. iii. c. 37.
Rabelais 1
Born at Chinon, 1483-4. Died 1553.
One cannot help regretting that no friend of Rabelais, (and
surely friends he must have had), has left an authentic account
of him. His buffoonery was not merely Brutus' rough stick, which
contained a rod of gold; it was necessary as an amulet against
the monks and bigots. Beyond a doubt, he was among the deepest as
well as boldest thinkers of his age. Never was a more plausible,
and seldom, I am persuaded, a less appropriate line than the
thousand times quoted,
Rabelais laughing in his easy chair
of Mr. Pope. The caricature of his filth and zanyism proves how
fully he both knew and felt the danger in which he stood. I could
write a treatise in proof and praise of the morality and moral
elevation of Rabelais' work which would make the church stare and
the conventicle groan, and yet should be the truth and nothing
but the truth. I class Rabelais with the creative minds of the
world, Shakspeare, Dante, Cervantes, &c.
All Rabelais' personages are phantasmagoric allegories, but
Panurge above all. He is throughout the
Greek: panourgia
the wisdom, that is, the cunning of the human animal,
the understanding, as the faculty of means to purposes without
ultimate ends, in the most comprehensive sense, and including
art, sensuous fancy, and all the passions of the understanding.
It is impossible to read Rabelais without an admiration mixed
with wonder at the depth and extent of his learning, his
multifarious knowledge, and original observation beyond what
books could in that age have supplied him with.
(B. III. c. 9.) How Panurge asketh counsel of
Pantagruel, whether he should marry, yea or no.
Note this incomparable chapter. Pantagruel stands for the reason
as contradistinguished from the understanding and choice, that
is, from Panurge; and the humour consists in the latter asking
advice of the former on a subject in which the reason can only
give the inevitable conclusion, the syllogistic
ergo
, from
the premisses provided by the understanding itself, which puts
each case so as of necessity to predetermine the verdict thereon.
This chapter, independently of the allegory, is an exquisite
satire on the spirit in which people commonly ask advice.
Footnote 1
: No
note remains of that part of this Lecture which treated of
Rabelais. This seems, therefore, a convenient place for the
reception of some remarks written by Mr. C. in Mr. Gillman's copy
of Rabelais, about the year 1825. See
Table Talk
, vol. i.
p. 177.
Ed.
Swift 1
Born in Dublin, 1667. Died 1745.
In Swift's writings there is a false misanthropy grounded upon an
exclusive contemplation of the vices and follies of mankind, and
this misanthropic tone is also disfigured or brutalized by his
obtrusion of physical dirt and coarseness. I think
Gulliver's
Travels
the great work of Swift. In the voyages to Lilliput
and Brobdingnag he displays the littleness and moral
contemptibility of human nature; in that to the Houyhnhnms he
represents the disgusting spectacle of man with the understanding
only, without the reason or the moral feeling, and in his horse
he gives the misanthropic ideal of man that is, a being
virtuous from rule and duty, but untouched by the principle of
love.
Footnote 1
:
From Mr. Green's note.
Ed.
Sterne
Born at Clonmel, 1713. Died 1768.
With regard to Sterne, and the charge of licentiousness which
presses so seriously upon his character as a writer, I would
remark that there is a sort of knowingness, the wit of which
depends 1st, on the modesty it gives pain to; or, 2dly, on
the innocence and innocent ignorance over which it triumphs; or,
3dly, on a certain oscillation in the individual's own mind
between the remaining good and the encroaching evil of his nature
a sort of dallying with the devil a fluxionary act of
combining courage and cowardice, as when a man snuffs a candle
with his fingers for the first time, or better still, perhaps,
like that trembling daring with which a child touches a hot tea
urn, because it has been forbidden; so that the mind has in its
own white and black angel the same or similar amusement, as may
be supposed to take place between an old debauchee and a prude,
she feeling resentment, on the one hand, from a prudential
anxiety to preserve appearances and have a character, and, on the
other, an inward sympathy with the enemy. We have only to suppose
society innocent, and then nine-tenths of this sort of wit would
be like a stone that falls in snow, making no sound because
exciting no resistance; the remainder rests on its being an
offence against the good manners of human nature itself.
This source, unworthy as it is, may doubtless be combined with
wit, drollery, fancy, and even humour, and we have only to regret
the misalliance; but that the latter are quite distinct from the
former, may be made evident by abstracting in our imagination the
morality of the characters of Mr. Shandy, my Uncle Toby, and
Trim, which are all antagonists to this spurious sort of wit,
from the rest of Tristram Shandy, and by supposing, instead of
them, the presence of two or three callous debauchees. The result
will be pure disgust. Sterne cannot be too severely censured for
thus using the best dispositions of our nature as the panders and
condiments for the basest.
The excellencies of Sterne consist
1.
In bringing forward into distinct consciousness those
minutiae of thought and feeling which appear trifles, yet have an
importance for the moment, and which almost every man feels in
one way or other. Thus is produced the novelty of an individual
peculiarity, together with the interest of a something that
belongs to our common nature. In short, Sterne seizes happily on
those points, in which every man is more or less a humourist.
And, indeed, to be a little more subtle, the propensity to notice
these things does itself constitute the humourist, and the
superadded power of so presenting them to men in general gives us
the man of humour. Hence the difference of the man of humour, the
effect of whose portraits does not depend on the felt presence of
himself, as a humourist, as in the instances of Cervantes and
Shakspeare nay, of Rabelais too; and of the humourist, the
effect of whose works does very much depend on the sense of his
own oddity, as in Sterne's case, and perhaps Swift's; though
Swift again would require a separate classification.