Comparative Literature/Book 5/Chapter 2

by Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett

CHAPTER II.

MAN IN NATIONAL LITERATURE.

§ 89. At first sight it might seem that the individual and not the social spirit laid the foundations of national literature throughout Europe. In such early extant specimens of Saxon, German, and French poetry as Beowulf, the Lay of the Nibelungs, and the oldest Chansons de Geste, the note of communal song is subordinated to that of personal glory. Whatever choral odes or hymns the clans and village communities of Teuton and Celt may have possessed, we have now but scanty indications of their existence; and such glimpses of communal literature as we do find are to be observed only through a dense growth of individualised poetry.

At this fact, however apparently inimical to our view of literary development, we need not be surprised; for the most powerful causes united to obscure the social beginnings of modern European literatures. Clan songs and hymns, full of pagan worship and unchristian conceptions of clan duties, like Blood-revenge and a Shadow=world such as the gathering-place of the Hebrew kinsmen, could have little to attract the class to which we are indebted for almost all we know of European barbarism—the Christian clergy. Moreover, contact with Roman life and habits of military service in the imperial armies must have done much to weaken clanship and strengthen the power of the chiefs long before the inroads of the barbarians commenced. This aristocracy of chiefs had as little interest in treasuring up the folk-songs of their tribesmen (which could not but contain many a reminder of the social equality typified by the story of the Vase of Soissons) as the monks; and, even if they had the desire to perpetuate such songs, they lacked the requisite degree of education. Thus on all sides causes combined to obscure the very existence of any rude literary beginnings save those which the individualising life of the chiefs and, later on, the seigneurs permitted, or the laborious learning of the monks attempted in their Latin world-language in the belief that it alone was the proper instrument of literature. Local isolation and feudal individualism could not create national languages or sentiments; the universal religion of Christ had its world-language already made; it seemed for a time as if no social maker of national literature were to arise.

We cannot now enter upon that vast field at present attracting the labours of antiquarians, jurists, historical economists—the changes undergone by the clans of barbaric Europe in their degradation into the serfs of feudal lords. Even a general picture of these changes could not fail to introduce features more or less untrue in certain places, and suggesting a transition in some cases too rapid, in others too slow. In Northern Italy, for example, town life and the municipal system, upon which Rome's empire had been based, were so strong that the barbarians readily adopted city organization, and feudalism as known elsewhere was checked in its development. In Southern France, also, the municipal system continued to hold its own; and here, as among the Italian towns, arose by degrees an individualism of the old Greek and Roman stamp, and quite different from that of the feudal castle. Elsewhere, however, the old domination of city life was overthrown, and a lasting preponderance of the country over the town established. It was during this preponderance of country life that the villagers, dependent on feudal lords and their men-at-arms, fell into a serfdom frequently more oppressive than pagan slavery. Unbound to their masters by any ties of sentiment or kinship, held together solely by the force of their local despot, hopeless for the future, ignorant of the past, shut out from each other and made the enemies of each other by their lords' raids, these villages, whether descended from provincials of Rome or barbarian clans, could feel none of that free enthusiasm in life which makes the flesh and blood of song. Before the life of men in groups could again become a song-maker, some degree of social happiness, some width of social sympathy, some sense of a free equality which slaves attached to the land or person of a lord could not feel, needed to be developed. This development was the work of the towns throughout Europe; it is with their struggle into independence from feudal control that social sentiments, the earliest makers of song, rise as in resurrection from the grave in which they had been buried with the old clan communities of Celt and Teuton.

§ 90. Thus from the fifth to the twelfth centuries, from the fall of Rome to the rise of the cities, two individualising types of human character prevail—the monk and the baron; and the Christian resignation of the former as well as the brutal or chivalrous prowess of the latter need not here be illustrated from Latin chronicle or early chanson. For neither of these types can any deep sense of personality be claimed. The man of mail, you may see from his songs, thinks of personality as so much blood, bone, and muscle, whose duty it is to joust or war, if possible, in the romanceful twilight of love and chivalry, but in any case to war. The man of prayer, if his sense of personality be less material, clothes his spiritual self and his entire spirit-world in sensual shapes, and would treat as a heretic any who might hint an objection against such earthly dress. Warrior and saint alike touch but the surface of personality; if it be so objective for the former as to be identified with animal strength, it is for the latter the sensual prop on which his "Realism" is supported. How is the growth of the cities connected with these types of weak personality? If these show themselves in monkish chronicle or baronial "epic," do not the commune and the bourg reflect themselves in a literary form of their own?

It is no mere accident that brings together the rise of the modern European drama and that of towns; a brief contrast of feudal and town life will prove this. The lord in his fortified castle, surrounded by his family and armed retinue—such is the centre of each feudal molecule. Beyond the castle walls a group of serfs cultivates the lord's lands; and, though the village church may stand as a reminder that there-is an ideal of human unity before which even the gulf which separates serf and lord disappears, the castle chapel has its own caretaker of souls who is himself of knightly parentage, loftily patronises the village priest, and reminds the villagers that the Christian ideal of human equality is indeed only an ideal. Between this outer circle of the feudal group and the lord's family there is, in fact, no tie save that of force, no spiritual link save the ceremonial of Christian worship. This ceremonial is, indeed, a drama in miniature; but so long as there is only one gigantic personality of force (that of the lord), so long as bonds of social sympathy are wanting, sacred story alone can supply the personages or incidents of a dramatic spectacle.

Let us change the scene to a medieval town. Insurrection, or aid from the king, or commerce, has been here at work; that servile circle of the feudal camp which had been hewers of wood and drawers of water now lives within stone walls, and can stand a siege or make a sally as well as the best of armoured knights. The burghers have little feeling of fellowship with other towns; their group is rather an offensive and defensive alliance against all comers than any forecast of national burghership and the modern rule of the European bourgeois. But though their social sympathies are narrow, they are also intensely real; moreover, an infantine subdivision of labour and trade is going on; the magistracy and the clergy are being organised; new types of character, far different from knight and squire and man-at-arms, are being developed. If modern prose is being roughly hammered into shape in the townsmen's assemblies and their preachers' pulpits, the elements of a drama are also at hand. How does the communal life of the medieval bourg display itself in the townsmen's drama?

The relation of Mysteries, Miracle-plays, Moralities, to the growth of towns all over Europe is a subject which has not received the attention it deserves; and the consequences have been that neither has the peculiar nature of this early drama been understood as reflecting contemporary social life, nor has the growth of the drama of personal character out of these old spectacles been explained as accompanying the evolution of society. We must at the outset get rid of a fallacy which blinds the eyes of many students to the influences of the towns upon the early drama of modern Europe—the fallacy of finding in the Biblical incidents and personages of the Mysteries and Miracle-plays the key to all their characteristics. The abstract, allegorical, impersonal characters of these spectacles cannot be attributed to the nature of the Christian faith; for in the early days of that faith profound problems of personal being—personal immortality, responsibility, and the like—had formed, with subtle speculations on the subject of the Trinity, the great questions of Christianised Greek intellect. The truth is that a new communal life was giving a new prominence to the impersonal, the allegorical, in religion and philosophy and poetry. Men again, but under very different conditions from those of the clan, had merged their sense of personality in that of group life, content to leave to feudal lords those sentiments of individualism which, in the ears of serfs or townsmen but lately freed from serfdom, sounded of the lord's tyranny and the tortures of hell, devoutly believed and hoped to be reserved for such strongly marked personalities. No doubt there are wide differences between a body of feudal serfs fighting their way to burghership and clan corporations of kinsmen. No doubt there are differences almost as wide between a commune of France, or a chartered town of medieval Spain, Germany, England, and the city commonwealths of Greece before they began to lose the clan feeling of identity between the citizen and his city group. Yet in one fundamental point the characteristics of the city commonwealth and the clan are repeated in these European organisations—in the subordination of the individual to the corporation of which he is a member. It is here that we discover the social maker of the medieval drama's abstract and allegorical and impersonal characteristics.

§ 91. The communal authorship of the Mysteries and Miracle-plays recalls that clan ownership of early song to which we have elsewhere alluded. "Le Mystère du Vieil Testament," for example, "n'est-pas une œuvre personnelle dont il y ait lieu de rechercher l'auteur; c'est une œuvre collective, qui a dû s'elaborer lentement pendant le cours du xvᵉ siècle."^[1] Whatever importance the clergy possessed as the first makers of rude plays, both the making and acting, sooner or later, passed into the hands of guilds—either the trade-guilds of the town, or bodies of literary craftsmen who (like the Homêridæ or the Hebrew musician-clans) assumed the familiar organisation of the guild. Thus, the Chester Mysteries, performed for the last time in 1574, were acted by trading companies of that city. In France it was out of the Town-Guilds that the Confrèrie de la Passion was formed—a fraternity which, chiefly composed of tradesmen and citizens of Paris, played Mysteries from 1402 to 1548. At Coventry particular parts of the Mystery were assigned to particular trading companies; thus, the Smiths' Company acted the Trial and Crucifixion, the Cappers' Company acted the Resurrection and the Descent into Hell.^[2] In Germany Master-Singer Guilds for the composition and recitation of verse were established at Mayence, Ulm, Nürnberg, and other towns, the old "Singing School" at Nürnberg being maintained as late as 1770. The famous scene of the Tower of Babel in the Mystère du Vieil Testament, in which the carpenter Gaste-Bois (Spoil-wood), the mason Casse-Tuileau (Break-tile), and the rest, are medieval guildsmen doing duty as Nimrod's workmen, graphically illustrates the dramatic workmanship of these literary guilds. But the impersonal view of human character taken by these corporations is a more interesting evidence of communal feeling than this impersonal authorship, just as the gradual disappearance of sacred and allegorical characters before the growth of individualism in the towns is a still more interesting evidence of the dependence of literature on social evolution. Let us take a bird's-eye view of this dramatic evolution from communal to individual life.

I. The sacred spectacle, exhibited by the clergy in town or monastery, either written completely in Latin, or intermixed with French or German, as the case may be, presents divine personages who, like the heroes of the early Attic stage, present at once an abstract and historical character. The first great Miracle-play of German origin (The Rise and Fall of Antichrist, an Easter play of the tenth century, found in the Convent of Tegernsee in the Bavarian Highlands) is in Latin, and contains such personages as Paganism and the Jewish Synagogue (introduced as women), Mercy, Justice, Hypocrisy, Heresy. In the old French Miracle-play, The Wise and Foolish Virgins, "Christ speaks, or rather sings, in the words of the Latin Bible; but he then repeats what he has said in Provençal verse, which is also used by the Virgins." In fact, the Latin Mysteries were easily elaborated out of the Officia of the Church; and old remains of Officia used for this dramatic purpose have been discovered at Freising in Bavaria, at Orleans, Limoges, and Rouen. "From the time of Gregory the Great the Mass itself became an almost dramatic celebration of the world-tragedy of Golgotha. It embraced the whole scale of religious emotion, from the mournful cry of the Miserere to the jubilee of the Gloria in excelsis."

II. Though the personages of the Latin Mysteries were already rather allegorical and abstract than individual and concrete, the use of vernacular languages and the consequent influx of prevalent ideas so much increased this tendency, that in most literary histories attempts are made to distinguish the Mysteries, with their sacred personages, from the Moralities, with their allegorical characters, Virtue, Vice, Pity, and the rest. But we cannot distinguish these spectacles by any fixed line; we can only say that the popularisation of the drama which is marked by the use of the vernacular languages is accompanied by an increased love of abstractions and allegories; and the student of contemporary social life cannot fail to observe how this love of impersonal being reflects that tendency towards corporate or guild life which is the most striking characteristic of the growing towns. It must not be forgotten that nameless characters (such as L'Evesque, Le Prescheur, L'Ermite, in the Miracles de Notre Dame) are not individuals properly so called, but types of classes, and as such deriving their interest from a social life which (like that of the German towns even in the days of Hans Sachs) could be marked off into trades almost as distinct as Eastern castes. The prevalence of allegorical thought and ideas of men in classes or types can, indeed, be illustrated from all kinds of medieval literature as well as the drama; the satirical allegory of Piers Ploughman, or Rabelais, or Das Narrenschiff of Sebastian Brandt, with its hundred and ten classes of fools, might be readily traced to conditions of social life. So, too, in Chaucer's famous tales, Knight and Squire, Prioress and Monk and Friar, the Shipman, the Doctor of Physic, and the rest, in spite of individualising touches, are primarily types of social classes; while in the Haberdasher, Carpenter, Webbe, Dyer, Tapicer, all "clothed in one livery of a solemn and great fraternity," we have the guild directly introduced. Every reader of medieval literature knows the popularity and perpetual allegory of the Roman de la Rose, echoed in the Faux-Dangier, Déplaisir, Espérance, of even the lyric poet Charles d'Orleans; so, too, in the chivalrous allegory of Spenser we may find these corporate modes of thought decked in feudal trappings, and meeting that individualising spirit of the Elizabethan age, which, in the drama of Marlowe and Shakspere, displaced the abstract and typical by the individual and concrete.

III. But the names of Marlowe and Shakspere suggest a third stage of the early European drama, in which we approach the analysis of personal character more closely than in the sacred or allegorical spectacle, yet not so closely as some enthusiastic worshippers of the great English dramatist would have us believe. When we find historical personages in such Miracle-plays as Robert le Diable or Guillaume du Desert side by side with allegorical personages, we may be sure that the historical drama is not so closely connected with profound analysis of individual character as has been sometimes assumed. When it is remembered that the Mysteries were primarily sacred histories (certain English Mysteries, for example, presenting a picture of the world’s progress from the Creation and anticipating its future to the Day of Judgment), the secular history and the sacred spectacle cannot be separated by a very wide gulf. Let it also be remembered that one of the marked features of the Chinese drama—in which analysis of individual character is, as already explained, peculiarly deficient—is the frequent use of historical incidents and personages. The historical drama and subtle analyses of character are, in fact, rather opposed than, as some maintain, closely connected. No doubt there are wide differences between what may be termed an antiquarian historical drama, such as modern dramatists have sometimes attempted, and "histories" in the Shaksperian sense. No doubt Shakspere, in some of his historical plays, was as little hampered in his creative imagination as the Attic dramatists, when they used the heroes of old Greek story as a canvas on which almost any variety of character might be depicted. Still, we must admit that the truly creative conception of dramatic art is opposed to the necessary restrictions-of historic fact, and must look upon the early "histories," with their improprieties of time and place and character, rather as secular imitations of the sacred story detailed in the Mysteries, than as a sign that the drama had now passed out of its religious tutelage and the region of moral abstractions into the sphere of artistic "realism." For dramatic "realism" means something more than the copying of historic fact; it means the putting together of a character in such a way that it shall wear the look of an individual reality without being an exact reproduction of any personage we already know; it means that the dramatic personage must be at once an individual and something more, an abstract type and something less—in a word, a double-faced entity containing both an individual and a general element, and so reproducing in art the most profound truth of human experience—that individual being is only realisable as a contrast between self and not-self.

IV. This dramatic realism is only possible where social conditions foster sufficient personal freedom in action and thought to allow a vivid realisation of personal as distinct from corporate being; it is only possible where socialism is not carried into such an excess as to merge individuality in group life, and where individualism is not carried into such an excess as to make personality insignificant by destroying all bonds of social thought and action. Dramatic realism needs personal freedom from communal restraints, various types of personality, and, coexisting with this freedom and variety, a fund of social sympathies and a belief in the dignity and mysterious greatness of individual being. In Elizabethan England and the Spain of Charles V. and Philip II., a variety of causes had supplied these elements of dramatic art. In both countries the individualism of the feudal lords had been forced to live in peaceful relations with the corporate life of the towns by a strong centralism holding in its hands the reins of local government. In France, too, a like growth of central authority was drawing together these types of ultra-corporate and ultra-individual life. Indeed, it is at this confluence of the feudal with the corporate spirit that we reach the full stream of national literature in each European country; and perhaps the best point from which we may view the meeting of the waters is supplied by a dramatist whose fatherland was destined to bitterly experience the want of a central arbitrator between the nobles and the towns.

§ 92. Hans Sachs, born at Nürnberg in 1494, stands on the borderland which divides the old allegorising drama, with its acting guilds and impersonal authorship, from the drama of personal authorship and individualised character, Sachs, as Dr. Karl Hase^[3] observes, "attempts no subjective development of character, but simply causes his personages to translate into action, or more often into dialogue only, the event which he wishes to represent." Like the writers of Mysteries, also, he places Christianity and heathendom closely together. "Next to God the Father and God the Son appear Jupiter and Apollo; at the Last Judgment the bark of Charon bears the departed souls; with the Judgment of Solomon appears the Choice of Paris." But, though proprieties of time and place are ignored, the life of the great German free towns being transferred to Hebrew and Christian story, though tragedy and comedy are still combined as in the Mysteries or in a Chinese play, the subdivision of labour in towns is, in the theatre of Hans Sachs, individualising the types of the old spectacle, and Sachs' conception of the burghers and the nobles, as divided by God Himself into castes, marks the union of two spirits—that of the hereditary feudal seigneurs and that of the town corporations.

Sachs' comedy, Eve's Unlike Children, introduced by the usual herald of the Mysteries, illustrates this union of town and castle, feudal lord and trading burgher. The division of labour is attributed to God, who, having come down from heaven to examine Cain and Abel in Dr. Luther's Catechism, is shocked by the contemptuous ignorance of Cain, whose time is spent in running wild about the streets (clearly a reminiscence of the German town rather than the plains of Asia), and who, with his wicked brothers, four in number, ranged before the Lord, expresses "a passionate dislike for the examination." The Lord laments their impiety, which is to bring down an inherited curse in the shape of hard labour.

 

"Therefore on earth shall be your place
As a poor, rough, and toiling race,
As peasants, woodmen, charcoal-burners,
Herdsmen, hangmen, knackers, turners,
Grooms, broom-makers, beadles, tailors,
Serfs, shoemakers, carters, sailors,
Jacob's brethren, rustics coarse,
Hireling men with one resource—
A labouring life and little gain."

 

Dr. Hase notices as a remarkable fact that Hans Sachs, not only here but elsewhere, has adopted "the harsh aristocratic theory which would derive the scions of every noble house from a pious and divinely favoured ancestry, and the pith of the nation, which supports the upper classes, from a race under the divine ban." But when it is remembered how the medieval trades tended to adopt a spirit of caste in their guilds, and how the towns had sprung for the most part out of hereditary serfs, this peculiar version of the old clan ethics of inherited sin need not surprise us. Sachs afterwards rearranged this play under the name How God the Lord blesses the Children of Adam and Eve; and here we again meet the doctrine of a divine fate in the social status of men. Eve brings her four favourite children to Adam as the most likely to please the Lord. Adam praises them, but inquires for the rest of his children who ought also to receive God’s blessing. Eve replies that they are too ugly and dirty to be shown; "some are hidden in the hay in the stable, some are asleep behind the fireplace." Adam thinks differently, but agrees to bring forward the four better-looking children, The Lord comes, and at Eve's request blesses these four children. The first shall be a great king, and as such receives the gift of a sceptre; the next shall be a warrior, and is presented with shield and sword; the third shall be a burgomaster with judicial staff, and the fourth a wealthy merchant, whose portion is a set of weights and measures, Every one shall remain in his own station—an idea thoroughly in keeping with the spirit of medieval guilds. The Lord then takes the children for a walk in Paradise. Meanwhile Eve, left to herself, regrets that she had not brought forward the other children also; and, though the sun has almost set, the Lord waits for Eve to present the four boys whom she now takes out of the hay. They, however, have not learned to pray properly; and Eve receives from the Lord a reprimand in consequence. Still the Lord is not unwilling to bless them. The first shall be a shoemaker, and his gift is a last; the second receives a weaver's shuttle; the third, a shepherd's pouch; the fourth shall be a peasant, and to him is given a ploughshare. Eve, astonished, asks—

 

"O, thou most gracious Lord of heaven,
Why is thy blessing so uneven?
Since sons they are of Adam born,
All equal, why hold four in scorn?
Since some as great men thou hast blest,
Why common folk should be the rest—
Shoemakers, weavers, herdsmen, hinds?"

 

But the Lord replies that each has been selected according to his natural fitness, and points out the dependence of each rank of society on the other.

 

"One class is even as another,
Each rank of service to its brother. …
Be each man on his calling bent,
And every man shall be content."

 

§ 93. But, while the individualism of the feudal lords and the socialism of corporate life were thus meeting under the shadow of central government, there was one part of Europe in which, from an early date, the conflict of the individual with the group had made its appearance. The Lombard League, victorious in its conflict with the world-empire of Barbarossa, had allowed the city commonwealths of Italy to develop within their walls an individualising spirit which could ill brook the reins of the Christian world-religion. The conflict between this individualising life of the Italian republics and the spiritual brotherhood of Christianity inspires the chant-like song of Dante, on whose inexpressibly mournful face the deadliest struggle of which human nature is capable—the struggle of intensely individual with intensely corporate feeling—seems graven as in scars. But in the Divina Commedia individualism is victorious, and in the Italian cities wealth and faction displaced the social spirit of Christianity by one of personal passion scarcely to be paralleled save in the decaying republics of ancient Greece. At first glance the Italian towns would seem the veritable home of a drama full of individual characterisation. But excessive individualism is almost as fatal to dramatic progress as a corporate life in which all differences of personality are lost. Innumerable units, raised out of individual littleness by no bond of corporate union, become too ephemeral to attract the analyses of the artist, who will soon prefer to turn to physical nature or to Fate. Individual being, which only comes out distinctly on a great background of social sentiments, could not alone supply the Italian republics with an original drama. Moreover, the similarity of the Italian dialects to Latin turned men's attention to classical models, in which they found a spirit like their own already expressed; and, when the plays of Seneca were supplemented by the recovered masterpieces of Greece, it was clear that any indigenous Italian drama was doomed.

Thus their social conditions and the peculiar nearness of classical associations united to make the Italian drama an imitation of classical models. Such, for example, was the Rosmunda of Rucellai, represented before Leo X. at Florence in 1515—a play which retains the classical chorus, and contains direct imitations of the Antigone; such, also, is the Sophonisba of Trissino, which (though not published till 1524) suggested the former, and is written on the Greek model, being divided, not into acts, but only by choral odes. It is significant that Trissino found his mode; in Euripides, the tragedian of Attic individualism. The declamatory tone, which had been one of the marks of decadence in the Athenian drama, and (as has been pointedly observed) "fixes the attention of the hearer on the person of the actor rather than on his relation to the scene," soon disclosed itself in the Italian theatres; and even such poets as Ariosto and Tasso failed to create a real and lifelike drama within the shell of the classical form. In half a century the appearance of the Pastoral drama, based on the Theocritean dramatic idyll, and in less than a century that of the Opera, showed how poets were turning (as Agathon and Chæremon had turned) from the dramatist's function—creation of individual character—to physical nature and the embellishments of music.

But though the Italian drama was not destined to do great things in its own country, its influences on other countries were powerful. In England and Spain, indeed, corporate and individual being met and produced dramatic originality as striking as the same conscious conflict had struck out in Athens. Here the development of the drama from the social figures of the early spectacles to subtle displays of individual personality was unbroken. In Shakspere himself the marks of the old spectacles are evident. Beside his many real fictions, which so wonderfully unite the breadth of a general type with the deepest individual personality, we find figures such as Rumour in the Induction to the Second Part of Henry IV., reminding us of many a symbolical character in the Mysteries; the half-mythical, half-divine Hymen in As You Like It stands side by side with characters so carefully individualised as Rosalind and Celia; Shakspere's clowns clearly present a transition from typical personages like the old Vice to such a marked individuality as that of Touchstone; moreover, the allegorical personage Time, who, "as chorus" at the opening of Act IV. in Winter's Tale, apologises for sliding over sixteen years, reminds us that Shakspere's disregard of the "unities," as well as his mixture of tragic with comic scenes, was largely due to the influence of Mysteries and Moralities.^[4] Individualism is indeed the dominant note in Shakspere's drama, but it maintains its profound interest because of the multitude of voices above which it is clearly heard; the secret of the master lies not in his having "incarnated feudalism in literature" (as Walt Whitman says), not in his having championed the cause of the nobles (as Rümelin tells us), but in his combining, as Æschylus and Sophocles before him had combined, the conflicting spirits of corporate and individual life now walking side by side through the streets of Elizabethan London. Here, for a time at least, was no place for classical and Italian restrictions; the remonstrances of Sidney (Defence of Poesie), against "our tragedies and comedies observing rules neither of honest civilitie nor of skilful poetrie," knew not that a more vigorous life than even that of Periclean Athens was producing for itself its own dramatic principles.

But if Elizabethan London did not supply an audience sufficiently polite and erudite to appreciate the classical and Italian restrictions, the courtly centralism of Paris, opposed to strong emotions as breaches of etiquette, easily submitted its theatre to classical imitation. In 1552, only five years after the Parliament of Paris had suppressed the Fraternity of the Passion, Jodelle, father of the regular French drama, exhibited his tragedy of Cléopatre before Henry II. The play is simple, devoid of action and stage effect, full of long speeches, with a chorus at the end of every act; but, as if anticipating the future destroyer of national drama in France, the troop of performers, whose Mysteries had been so lately interdicted, "availed themselves of an exclusive privilege granted by Charles VI., and, preventing the representation of the Cléopatre by public actors, forced Jodelle to have it performed by his friends." No trade-union of actors, however, could check the growth of classical taste. The Agamemnon of Toutain, taken from Seneca, the dramatist whose rushlight was to be too often preferred by French artists to the full splendour of Attic tragedy, was published in 1557; and in 1580 were published the eight tragedies of Robert Garnier, which closely follow the plots of Seneca or Euripides, contain long speeches, relate events chiefly by messengers, and employ the chorus between every act.

Between the writers of any particular age, says Shelley, in the preface to his Revolt of Islam, "there must be a resemblance which does not depend upon their own will. They cannot escape from subjection to a common influence which arises out of an infinite combination of circumstances belonging to the times in which they live; though each is in a degree the author of the very influence by which his being is thus pervaded." The symmetry of form and analysis of individual character in the plays of Euripides and Sophocles exactly suited the time-spirit of Paris after the Wars of Religion had centralised culture in the courts of Louis XIII. and the "Grand Monarch." It has been said that the famous line of Corneille's Médée (1635)—

 

"Que vous reste-t-il contre tant d'ennemis?
—Moi!"

 

was the cogito, ergo sum of French tragedy, and struck its keynote—that of individual character.^[5] If such study of character had been extended to all sorts and conditions of men and women in French society, if it had not been fettered by proprieties of Parisian etiquette and classical taste, France would have possessed a truly national drama. As it was, however, the Parisian tragedy failed to truthfully reflect even the life of Paris, much less that of France in general. On the one hand, the characters and social life of the classical theatre are Gallicised; in Andromaque the stigmas of slavery are wiped out, in Iphigénie Achilles is gifted with Parisian gallantry, in Phèdre the centre of interest is shifted from the hero of Euripides to a heroine more in accordance with Parisian sentiment.^[6] On the other, the Parisian theatre was divorced from the provincial life of France and condemned to rapidly exhaust its narrowly restricted supplies of thought and sentiment; hence even the wit of Molière, confined within a narrow circle of individuality, tends to run into types—Le Misanthrope, Le Grondeur—rather than to create a living personality like that of Falstaff. Macaulay, comparing Bunyan and Shelley as writers who have "given to the abstract the interest of the concrete," observed that "there can be no stronger sign of a mind destitute of the poetical faculty than the tendency so common among writers of the French school to turn images into abstractions, no stronger sign of a mind truly poetical than a disposition to reverse this abstracting process and to make individuals out of generalities." But neither Macaulay nor the French dramatists seem to have known that individuality depends for life and variety on the range of social evolution which the artist has within his ken—a range which may be limited not only by the degree of evolution actually reached in the given group, but also by the proprieties- of an élite circle or the restrictions of classical imitation.

§ 94. For a time it looked as if courtly and classical associations were destined to produce a stationary state of national literature throughout Europe, and all inspiration was to be lost by men who had not learned that the form of literature cannot live apart from the spirit; that style consists not in mere arrangement of words, but in the harmony of thought and speech, and that this harmony is fullest where social life is most widely sympathetic, while at the same time individual life is most profoundly deep. In the masterpieces of Dryden and Pope, an age of refined but shallow individualism leaves its marks in character-portraits not to be surpassed for clearness of outline and boldness of touch; but, as Emerson has said, "to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius," and for such belief the Paris of Boileau offered as little scope as the London of Johnson. From the middle of the seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth centuries, personal satire, that witness to weak social sympathies, rules the literatures of London and Paris. Before the belief of which Emerson speaks could become possible a new resurrection of the social spirit had to take place—Boileau and the court had to be replaced by Rousseau and the Revolution. In the towns corporate feelings had been chilled in France and England by the shadow of the individualising central monarchy; but now the manifest disbelief of courtly individualism in itself, as well as new commercial and industrial activities, were arousing sentiments of personal equality and corporate union. It would be clearly impossible within our limits to describe the many causes which contributed to create democratic individualism side by side with industrial socialism—the great conflicting spirits in whom we live and move and have our being. Suffice it to say that in place of monarchical individualism now grown effete, in place of feudal individualism ousted by central force, in place of the narrow socialism of the medieval communes, came a conflict between personal and social action and thought on a scale which the world has never before witnessed. Since the close of the eighteenth century vast movements of men in masses have strengthened more and more the social spirit, have deepened more and more, by repulsion where in no other way, the sense of individuality. How this return to corporate life, how this deepening of individuality, have affected and are affecting literature, it would be a life-task to illustrate and explain; we shall here offer only some striking examples of their influences.

In Germany the literary centralism and courtly proprieties of Paris had found from the first a hazardous dominion. Without any definite national centre, and containing marked social contrasts in its local governments, cities, and feudal nobility, Germany could not easily fall in with the stereotyped literary ideas of Paris and her recognition of individual life within a very special and narrow circle as the only proper domain for the literary artist. Besides, what evidence was there, after all, that the models of Parisian taste were really classical? The countrymen of Sachs were not long in putting this question and answering it for themselves in a manner fatal to Parisian pretensions. Hence Lessing's endeayour to establish a truly German drama by criticism such as that of his Dramaturgie, and by creation such as that of his Minna von Barnhelm, "the first truly national drama that appeared on the German stage." Ten years later (1773) appeared Götz von Berlichingen, which displayed German independence not only in a disregard of French dramatic rules, but also in finding materials for a national drama in the old days of the Ritterthum. Contemporary life and national history were thus alike expanding the horizon of the literary artist beyond Parisian limits. Types of individuality, of social life, not admissible within the purlieus of the Parisian theatre, were receiving attention; nay, the very idea of the stage as a great moral agent (Schiller's favourite idea) showed the rise of a social spirit totally at variance with Parisian taste. We might illustrate the rise of this new spirit in such type-characters as Saladin the Mussulman, Nathan the Jew, and the Christian Knight-Templar in Lessing's Nathan; but we prefer to turn to the work of a greater than Lessing.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe, born at Frankfurt am Main on the 28th of August, 1749, was no believer in social Utopias such as the author of the Contrat Social might imagine in his State of Nature; but none the less was his a real voice from the new social spirit of European life. If the instruments to which he looked for the propagation of new doctrines—brotherhoods of men of high character and training as described in Wilhelm Meister—remind us of the bard-clans which appear at the rude beginnings of literary culture, his appreciation of Hans Sachs’ Poetical Mission,^[7] and his abstract or allegorical personages in Faust, display deep sympathy with that corporate side of human life which since the days of the Mysteries had been almost ignored in literature. The "Prologue for the Theatre," in this latter famous piece, which, especially in the often unread Second Part, contains all the elements of the early European drama—sacred personages, allegory, mixture of comedy and tragedy, disregard of the unities—contrasts individual and collective life in a manner which would seem to mark this contrast as the primary thought in Goethe's mind. "Speak not to me," says the Poet to the Manager, "of that motley multitude at whose very aspect one's spirit takes flight; veil from me that undulating throng which sucks us, against our will, into the whirlpool." "You can only subdue the mass by mass," responds the Manager; "each eventually picks out something for himself. … Consider you have soft wood to split; and only look whom you are writing for." But the Poet is not ready to subject himself to Das Gemeine; "the Poet, forsooth, is to sport away the highest right which Nature bestows upon him. By what stirs he every heart? Is it not the harmony—which bursts from out his breast, and sucks the world back again into his heart?" A mysterious union of individual with social being, almost worthy of an Oriental philosopher-poet; but Goethe's Mystery-play is indeed throughout the great mystery of individual contrasted with social life, the mikrocosm contrasted with that makrocosm of corporate unity at whose sign Faust, thrilled with rapture, sees "Nature herself working in his soul’s presence." On which side is Goethe? Is he for the individual mikrocosm, or for the group—the makrocosm? "It is a great pleasure to transport one's self into the spirit of the times," says Wagner. "What you term the spirit of the times," Faust replies, "is at bottom only your own spirit in which the times are reflected.”" This looks like individualism of Byron's type. But "before the gate" moves a world of social types—mechanics, servant-girls, students, the townsmen, the beggar, the soldier—"under the gay quickening glance of the Spring;" and as the "motley crowd" presses out of the town, "from the damp rooms of mean houses, from the bondage of mechanical drudgery, from the confinement of gables and roofs, from the stifling narrowness of streets," Faust, in the gladness of a truly social spirit, cries, "Here is the heaven of the multitude; big and little are huzzaing joyously; here I am a man." Not so Mephistopheles—"the devil is an egoist;" not so the wretched pedant Wagner, who is an enemy to coarseness of every sort," and hates to see "people run riot as if the devil were driving them, and call it merriment, call it singing." Yes, the dominant spirit of Faust is social; and in the Second Part especially the signs of corporate and impersonal being come thick upon us—in a symbolisation of social progress, in allegorical personages such as the four grey women, Want and Guilt, Care and Need. But perhaps the true intent of Goethe is not to take sides with either the individual or the social spirit, but to reconcile their pretensions in an ideal of practical culture.

Before the eyes of Victor Hugo some such reconciliation seems likewise to loom forth as a grand ideal. His best work, like that of Goethe, is impersonal in tone; his ideals are such as an age of social sympathies might suggest—Justice, Liberty, Progress. If Hugo is weak in individual portraiture, it is because there rises before his mind the vast figure of "Humanity" in which the countless differences of individual being disappear. "If his perception of individual character is ordinarily not very exact, some compensation for this lies in his abundant sympathy with that common manhood and womanhood which is more precious than personal idiosyncrasies."^[8] In Les Chants du Crépuscule, for example, "the individual appears, but his individuality is important less for its own sake than because it reflects the common spiritual characteristics of the period." Above all, in La Légende des Siècles we have (as Hugo himself tells us in his preface) "an effort to express Humanity in a kind of cyclic work, to paint it successively and simultaneously under all the aspects—of history, fable, philosophy, religion, science—which unite in one immense movement of ascent towards the light; to show in a kind of mirror, dark and clear, that grand figure, one and multiple, gloomy and radiant—Man." Contrast this picture of the human race "considered as a grand collective individual accomplishing epoch after epoch a series of acts on the earth," with the picture of the world's past and future offered by a Miracle-play; contrast the profound depths of personality in Faust with the personages of a Morality-play; what an expansion of social sympathies, what an immense deepening of individual consciousness!

It would be easy to multiply examples of the social spirit as the grand maker of modern literature—the Prometheus of Shelley, the Ahasuerus of Edgar Quinet. It would be easy to illustrate the union of this social spirit with a spirit profoundly individual alike in the novels of George Eliot and the poetry of Walt Whitman. But our contrast of Faust with the medieval drama reminds us that, besides expanded sympathies and deepened personality, this social evolution of Europe was leaving other marks on its national literatures in new aspects of Nature and animal life. The splendid descriptions of Nature in Faust—Spring budding as old Winter flies to the bleak mountains, the green-girt cottages shimmering in the setting sun, the sunrise at the opening of the Second Part—contrast strikingly with the few bald allusions to Nature in the Mysteries and Moralities. Byron calls his Heaven and Earth and his Cain "Mysteries;" but not only is his intense individualism, reflected in that of Cain as of Manfred, utterly at variance with the impersonal character of the early spectacles, and even fatal to any dramatic capacity by its inability to project sympathy beyond self, but the descriptions of Nature in these so-called "Mysteries" distinguish them alike from the rude drama of allegory and the mature drama of personal character. In the old impersonal drama of England, France, Germany, we have few touches of Nature even so slight as the Gossip's Song—"the flood comes flitting in full fast"—in the Chester Plays.^[9] In the personal drama, that of Shakspere himself, for example, we have only splendid glimpses of Nature—the "oak whose antique root peeps out upon the brook that brawls along this wood," or "yon gray lines that fret the clouds are messengers of day"—as if Shakspere felt the open introduction of Nature to be as unsuited to his drama as that of the impersonal "many-headed monster." Byron's lone Japhet among the rocky wilds of the Caucasus lamenting the wave that shall engulf the rugged majesty that looks eternal, Byron's painfully individualised Cain watching with Lucifer the myriad lights of worlds sweep by in the blue wilderness of space as "leaves along the limped streams of Eden," are almost equally removed from the Mysteries and the mature drama. How is it that we find Nature socialised on a vast scale in Faust? How is it that we find the individual and Nature thus darkly face to face in Byron? It is to these questions that we now propose to turn.

Footnotes

1. Baron James de Rothschild's Introduction, p. iv.
2. Cf. History of Early English Guilds, Early English Text Society, 1870.
3. Miracle-Plays and Sacred Dramas, by Dr. Karl Hase; translated by A. W. Jackson, and edited by Rev. W. W. Jackson (Trübner, 1880).
4. Milton's original plan of Paradise Lost as an allegorical drama, with abstract personages and a chorus, would have curiously blended the manner of the Mysteries with classical form. Even in Samson Agonistes, as is well known, we have a double allegory.
5. Cf. Histoire de France, H. Martin, liv. xiii. p. 552.
6. Cf. Géruzez, His. de la Litt, Fran., vol. ii. pp. 246, sqq.; A. W. Schlegel, Lect. on Dram. Art., lect. xviii.
7. In this poem Goethe admirably hits off the allegorical spirit of Sachs, by introducing the symbolical personages Industry (a maiden with a wreath of corn upon her head), and the aged woman who bears indifferently the names Historia, Mythologia, Fabula.
8. Dowden, Studies in Literature, 1789–1877, p. 437.
9. Edition of Thomas Wright, p. 53.