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Chorus is mostly employed in receiving the confidences of the actors, and, even when projects are infamous, binding themselves by oath not to reveal them: are these the offices of an ideal spectator? And with respect to the moral sentences and expressions of sympathy with the actors, which give a colour of probability to Schlegel's notion, we shall find similar features in our modern opera. Our Chorus also expresses sympathy, utters trite maxims, and is an actor as the ancient chorus was; yet no one ever imagined the retainers, peasants, warriors, or priests who throng the modern stage, were personifications of the ideal spectator.' We repeat the chorus was an actor in the drama; and if it was also an ideal spectator,' we ask, in how far was it actor and how far spectator? Where begun the line of demarcation? The question is not answerable.

We close here our examination of the lectures devoted to the Greek Drama, satisfied with having so far exposed the vicious method which guided the author; but we cannot close without expressing our hearty admiration of their very unusual merit, in spite of drawbacks. Our object in this paper being polemical, we have not noticed all the admirable passages and felicitous illustrations which compensate for the errors we attacked; others before us have praised him, and praised him justly; we must content ourselves with a general recognition of his merits. There is no popular account of the Greek Drama at all comparable to his for spirit and completeness; and his various criticisms on separate plays are animated and interesting. We are the more anxious to place a word of admiration here, because on leaving this portion of his work we leave almost all that we think admirable in it. We have hitherto dealt with him as a man of rash generalization; we have now to speak of him as an advocate.

In his first lecture he has given a description of what a true critic should aspire to; and this passage is worthy of being transcribed in letters of gold. "No man can be a true critic who does not possess a universality of mind, who does not possess a flexibility which, throwing aside all personal predilections and blind habits, enables him to transport himself into the peculiarities of other ages and nations, and to feel them as it were from their central point." Every one has admitted the truth of this, but few have guided themselves by its light. It seems impertinent to thrust forward the truism that the foreign poet wrote to his nation and for his time, and not at all for ours-that we might as well strip him of his language as of his national peculiarities; yet this truism is perpetually being neglected; the work of the foreign poet is always judged according to our tastes and our standards. There is scarcely a critic unaware of the fact that a tragedy of

the Greeks was a totally different thing from the drama of the moderns; different in purpose, spirit, and execution. Nevertheless there is scarcely a critic who, judging of a Greek play, does not test it by the Shakspearian standard: talking of plot, situation, character, and passion as if the work were addressed to a modern pit of after-dinner auditors. So also the critics speak of Racine, as if he were ridiculous for not being an Englishman. Yet the man who refuses to discard his national prejudices and standards, who refuses to regard the French poet with, as far as possible, the eyes of a Frenchman, had better for the sake of honesty and criticism relinquish the task altogether; otherwise he will only be illustrating Coleridge's amusing simile of the critic filling his three-ounce phial at Niagara, and determining positively the greatness of the cataract to be neither more nor less than his three-ounce phial has been able to receive.

We have full right to test Schlegel by his own standard; and according to that we say he has shown himself to be no 'true critic,' for he has failed in placing himself at the 'central point of view.' We will not stop to point out the errors of his very slovenly and inaccurate lectures on the Roman and Italian dramas; but his treatment of Alfieri cannot be passed over in silence.

Alfieri, the greatest of the Italian dramatists, is dismissed in five pages, which contain almost as many blunders as paragraphs. He is here an advocate against the poet, and very sophistical are the arguments he brings forward. "From the tragedy of the Greeks," he says, "with which Alfieri first became acquainted towards the end of his career, he was separated by a wide chasm.” If this be meant as expressing that the form and purpose of the dramas of Alfieri differed from those of the ancients, it is a truism; if that the artistic spirit (such as we before defined it) is different, it is an absurdity. No nation so closely resembles the Greeks, in artistic spirit, as the Italians; no dramatist so closely resembles Eschylus as Alfieri. "I cannot consider his pieces," continues our critic, "as improvements on the French tragedy:" why should he? Let us for an instant grant that Alfieri is the reverse of the Greeks, and no improvement on the French, what then? Does not the matter resolve itself into this; that being an Italian, and addressing Italians, Alfieri is to be judged without reference to Greece or France? His nationality is a quality, not a fault. Yet we are told "his pieces bear no comparison with the better French tragedies in pleasing and brilliant eloquence:" how should they when it was his express desire to avoid declamatory tirades, which he considered undramatic? Göthe has well said that there is a negative criticism which consists in applying a different standard from that chosen by the author, and in this

way you are sure to find him wanting. This Schlegel perpetually uses. Alfieri hated the French, and never thought of imitating

them.

It is in his account of the French drama that Schlegel most unblushingly assumes the advocate's robe. His object is evidently not to place himself at the central point,' but to make the French drama ridiculous. He endeavours to dwarf it by most irrelevant contrasts with the Greek and Shakspearian drama, and only succeeds in displaying his critical incompetence. Let it be remembered however in extenuation, that Schlegel's object was not without its use in his day, though worse than useless now. French taste had for years usurped the German stage. Gottlob Lessing struck the usurper down. By dint of rare acuteness, untiring wit, and his impetuous zeal, he won the battle for ever. Schlegel rode gracefully over the battle-field and counted the slain; then, retiring to the metropolis, published his bulletin. Beside the masculine intellect of a Lessing, clear as crystal and as solid too, Schlegel is a foppish petit maître. But he addressed petits maîtres. The battle had been won in open field, with sweat of brow and strength of hand; but it had to be recounted in drawing-rooms, and for this the hardy warrior, covered with dust and gore, was not so fitted as the perfumed Schlegel, master of small talk and gifted with rhetorical abundance. The warrior and the coxcomb each did his work. Nevertheless, had Lessing and others never lived, Schlegel perhaps would eloquently have expatiated on the beauties of Racine; but when once the breach was made in the citadel, it was so pleasant to ride in, gracefully triumphant !

It is most true that Racine was not a Greek; true that he did not write upon romantic principles; but what then? Was he not a Frenchman, a poet of the higher order, worthy even to be placed beside the illustrious few? Because a Deer is neither Horse nor Elephant, is it nothing? It is a strange synthesis that concludes so; yet, metaphor apart, such is the conclusion of our critic. He admits that we "shall be compelled to allow the execution of the French drama is masterly, perhaps not to be surpassed; but the great question is, how far it is in spirit and inward essence related to the Greek, and whether it deserves to be considered an improvement on it." Not so at all: it is a question every way superfluous, a standard utterly fallacious. The antique drama grew up out of the spirit and artistic feeling of the Greeks, under a set of conditions which can never be again. So also did the French drama grow up out of the national spirit, of which it was the expression. It borrowed a learned air because it addressed a pedantic age; and even in its imitation of the

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ancients it expressed one characteristic of its own time. So also it was tinctured with gallantry, as our own drama was with concetti, because this was the fashion of the day.

The whole of Schlegel's arguments proceed from a wrong starting-point. He insists on the following conditions as indispensable to the poet selecting a mythological subject, viz., that he should enter and enable the spectators to enter into the spirit of antiquity; that he should preserve the simple manners of the heroic ages; that his persons should bear that near resemblance to the gods, which, from their descent and frequency of their immediate intercourse with them, the ancients believed them to possess. It is easy to say this; it is easy to state abstract principles like these, and then condemn the poets who have never realized them. But suppose no poet has realized them, what then are we to say? We assert that the above conditions are not possible; that if possible they are absurd; and that no modern poet has fulfilled them. As Göthe truly says, "for the poet no person is historical. He is to represent the moral world, and for this end bestows on certain persons in history the honour of borrowing their names." The question lies in a nutshell. Had Racine preserved with historical fidelity Greek feelings and ideas, they would have been repugnant to a French audience; his object being to interest and move Frenchmen, he represented Frenchmen, and this because he was a poet, not an archæologist. Schlegel is shocked that 'Bajazet makes love wholly in the European manner;' but no word escapes him respecting Calderon's classical monstrosities; no hint is given that, had Racine represented Bajazet making love in the Turkish manner, the audience must either have shouted with laughter or hissed with disgust. To show how far he carries this carping spirit-upon what minute points he will lay stress-we may quote his discovery, that in the tragical speeches of the French poets, 'we shall generally discover something in them which betrays a reference more or less perceptible to the spectator:' as if this was not true of every dramatist! as if it was not the inseparable condition of the art!

We are quite weary of looking at this lecture: its ignorance is the least of its faults. We can hardly hope to see many of our countrymen very hearty in their admiration of the exquisite Racine, so many obstacles are interposed; but that the feeble ridicule and ungenerous arguments of Schlegel should form another barrier to that end, is truly irritating. People talk of admiring or not admiring Racine, as if it were a matter of taste; but it is in truth a matter of knowledge. He has survived two centuries of criticism, and in spite of every change of taste; the admiration of Europe for two centuries is a pedestal whereon none but the

On Molière.

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highest can repose; those, therefore, who refuse their tribute to Racine are convicted of incompetence to judge him; convicted of want of sufficient knowledge of the language, or want of critical appreciation. Let every opponent reflect on the serious opinions once entertained by eminent Frenchmen with regard to Shakspeare. Oh! that was ignorance!'-Granted; but does it not teach us suspicion of ourselves in judging of the French? When we hear a Frenchman disparage Shakspeare, we invariably suspect his critical power, or his knowledge of our language. Does it never occur to Englishmen that perhaps their contempt of the French is founded on similar causes? We have met with at least five hundred Englishmen declaring themselves to have been mistaken for Frenchmen,' so pure and fluent was their discourse; but we doubt whether more than five of them could perceive the difference between a verse of Racine and one of Quinault, or between a page of George Sand and one of De Balzac; who could feel the impropriety of the celebrated' vieillard stupide' in Hernani,' or understand why the common Italian epithet acerbo would be inadmissible in French poetry. Here then is an obstacle to be overcome by long study alone. Beyond this there is a critical bigotry prevalent, which regards faith in Shakspeare as the only true, and denounces all others as heresies. Yet surely there is room in the palace of art for more than one niche; surely we may worship Shakspeare as the sun, and yet believe Alfieri and Racine to be no inconsiderable planets?

Schlegel's Lecture on Molière is also very bad: it wants heartiness, sympathy, appreciation, and above all, truth. It is full of unfair remarks, and some distinguished blunders. We have no space to follow him much into detail, but will select two specimens wherein he accuses Molière of ignorance of human nature. The Misanthrope,' he says, contains the gross mistake of Alceste choosing Philinte for a friend, although a man whose principles are the exact reverse of his own. He asks also how Alceste comes to be enamoured of a coquette who has nothing amiable in her character, and who entertains us merely by her scandal? Now we need scarcely insist on the very great truth of this selection both of friend and mistress: a selection which though it would have been misplaced in tragedy, because contradicting our ideal nature, is the perfection of comic characterization, because founded on the contradictions of our real nature. The critic also says of L'Avare:' "Harpagon starves his coachhorses: but why has he any? This applies only to a man who with a disproportionately small income wishes to keep up the appearance." Crítics, accusing great poets of ignorance of human nature, should be very certain of their own knowledge. Not only is Harpagon true to nature, but it is wor