A. C. Bradley

“ To hold, again, that this variation of intensity is a defect is like holding that a face would be more beautiful if it were all eyes, a picture better if the illumination were equally intense all over it, a symphony better if it consisted of one movement, and if that were all crisis. And to speak as if a small poem could do all that a long one does, and do it much more completely, is to speak as though a humming-bird could have the same kind of beauty as an eagle, the rainbow in a fountain produce the same effect as the rainbow in the sky, or a moorland stream thunder like Niagara. ”

“ But in truth I do not at all believe in this sort of perfectibility. The nature of the world will not admit of it—the inhabitants of the world will correspond to itself. Let the fish philosophise the ice away from the rivers in winter time, and they shall be at continual play in the tepid delight of summer. Look at the Poles, and at the sands of Africa—whirlpools and volcanoes. Let men exterminate them, and I will say that they may arrive at earthly happiness. The point at which man may arrive is as far as the parallel state in inanimate nature, and no further. ”

“ The ‘men and women’ that haunt the reader’s imagination are not so much men of action as lovers, artists, men of religion. And when they act (as for example in The Ring and the Book, or the dramas) what rivets attention, and is first recalled to memory by their names, is not the action, but its reflection in the soul of the doer or spectator. Such, at least, is my experience; and in the end a critic can only offer to others his considered experience. But with Homer and Shakespeare and Milton it is otherwise. Even with Dante it is otherwise. ”

“ Imagination is, for Shelley, ‘the great instrument of moral good.’ The ‘secret of morals is love.’ It is not ‘for want of admirable doctrines that men hate and despise and censure and deceive and subjugate one another’: it is for want of love. And love is ‘a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action or person not our own.’ ‘A man,’ therefore, ‘to be greatly good must imagine intensely and comprehensively.’ And poetry ministers to moral good, the effect, by acting on its cause, imagination. ”

“ The poet who drew Hamlet and Othello can never have thought that even the ideal man of action would lack that light upon the brow which at once transfigures them and marks their doom. It is as easy to believe that, because the lunatic, the lover, and the poet are not far apart, Shakespeare would have chosen never to have loved and sung. Even poor Timon, the most inefficient of the tragic heroes, has something in him that Henry never shows. ”

“ He is under no illusion about her, knows all her faults, sees through her wiles, believes her capable of betraying him. It makes no difference. She is his heart’s desire made perfect. To love her is what he was born for. What have the gods in heaven to say against it? To imagine heaven is to imagine her; to die is to rejoin her. To deny that this is love is the madness of morality. He gives her every atom of his heart.
She destroys him. Shakespeare, availing himself of the historic fact, portrays, on Antony’s return to her, the suddenness and the depth of his descent. ”

“ Is there not such good in Macbeth? It is not a question merely of moral goodness, but of good. It is not a question of the use made of good, but of its presence. And such bravery and skill in war as win the enthusiasm of everyone about him; such an imagination as few but poets possess; a conscience so vivid that his deed is to him beforehand a thing of terror, and, once done, condemns him to that torture of the mind on which he lies in restless ecstasy ”

“ And when we are so finding it, we are absorbed in its greatness, and have no thought either of the limits of that or of its equality or inferiority to anything else. The lion of whom we are thinking, ‘An elephant could kill him,’ is no sublime lion. The Falls of Schaffhausen are sublime when you are lost in astonishment at them, but not when you are saying to yourself ‘What must Niagara be!’ This seems indubitable, and hence we may say that, in one sense, all sublimity has unmeasured greatness, and that no greatness is sublime which we apprehend as finite. ”

“ A man who loved power as much as thousands of insignificant people love it, would have made a sterner struggle than Antony’s against his enchantment. He can hardly be said to struggle at all. He brings himself to leave Cleopatra only because he knows he will return. In every moment of his absence, whether he wake or sleep, a siren music in his blood is singing him back to her; and to this music, however he may be occupied, the soul within his soul leans and listens. ”

“ His language, indeed, unlike Wordsworth’s or Byron’s, is, in his mature work, always that of a poet; we never hear his mere speaking voice; but he is frequently diffuse and obscure, and even in fine passages his constructions are sometimes trailing and amorphous. The glowing metal rushes into the mould so vehemently that it overleaps the bounds and fails to find its way into all the little crevices. But no poetry is more manifestly inspired, and even when it is plainly imperfect it is sometimes so inspired that it is impossible to wish it changed. ”

“ They quickened his perception, already growing keen, of the weaknesses and mannerism of Hunt’s verse and his own. Through them he saw a false but useful picture of himself, as a silly boy, dandled into self-worship by foolish friends, and posturing as a man of genius. He kept his faith in his genius, but he felt that he must prove it. He became impatient of dreaming. Poetry, he felt, is not mere luxury and rapture, it is a deed. We trace at times a kind of fierceness. He turns against his old self harshly. ”

“ He has imagination, the temper of an artist who revels in abundant and rejoicing appetites, feasts his senses on the glow and richness of life, flings himself into its mirth and revelry, yet feels the poetry in all this, 295 and is able also to put it by and be more than content with the hardships of adventure. Such a man could never have sought a crown by a murder like Macbeth’s, or, like Brutus, have killed on principle the man who loved him, or have lost the world for a Cressida. ”

“ The struggle in Lear’s little island seems to us to have an infinitely wider scope. It is here that we are sometimes reminded of Troilus and Cressida, and the cold and disenchanting light that is there cast on the Trojan War. The spectacle which he portrays leaves Shakespeare quite undazzled; he even makes it appear inwardly small. The lordship of the world, we ask ourselves, what is it worth, and in what spirit do these ‘world-sharers’ contend for it? They are no champions of their country like Henry V. The conqueror knows not even the glory of battle. ”

“ Is it that, when the glow has faded, Cleopatra’s ecstasy comes to appear, I would not say factitious, but an effort strained and prodigious as well as glorious, not, like Othello’s last speech, the final expression of character, of thoughts and emotions which have dominated a whole life? Perhaps this is so, but there is something more, something that sounds paradoxical: we are saddened by the very fact that the catastrophe saddens us so little; it pains us that we should feel so much triumph and pleasure. ”

“ In either case there may be sublimity, but then there is the impression of immense power. In the same way the silence of night, when it seems sublime, is apprehended not as the absence but as the subdual of sound,—the stillness wrought by a power so mighty that at its touch all the restless noises of the day fall dumb,—or the brooding of an omnipotent peace over the world. ”

“ Think of sublime figures or ideas in the world of fiction or of history, and you find that, whether they are radiant or gloomy, violent or peaceful, terrible or adorable, they all impress the imagination by their immense or even irresistible might. It is so with Achilles, standing alone beyond the wall, with the light of the divine flame soaring from his head, while he sends across the trench that shout at whose far-off sound the hearts of the Trojans die within them ”

“ Painters and musicians are poets. Plato and Bacon, even Herodotus and Livy, were poets, though there is much in their works which is not poetry. So were the men who invented the arts of life, constructed laws for tribes or cities, disclosed, as sages or founders of religion, the excellence of justice and love. And every one, Shelley would say, who, perceiving the beauty of an imagined virtue or deed, translates the image into a fact, is so far a poet. For all these things come from imagination. ”

“ And in the far-off day when the ‘plastic stress’ of this power has mastered the last resistance and is all in all, outward nature, which now suffers with man, will be redeemed with him, and man, in becoming politically free, will become also the perfect lover. Evidently, then, poetry, as the world now is, must be one of the voices of this power, or one tone of its voice. To use the language so dear to Shelley, it is the revelation of those eternal ideas which lie behind the many-coloured, ever-shifting veil that we call reality or life. ”

“ Tragedies which represent man as the mere plaything of chance or a blank fate or a malicious fate, are never really deep: it is satisfactory to see that Maeterlinck, a man of true genius, has now risen above these ideas. But, where those factors of tragedy are present which Hegel emphasises, the impression of something fateful in what we call accident, the impression that the hero not only invites misfortune by his exceptional stature and exceptional daring, but is also, if I may so put it, strangely and terribly unlucky, is in many plays a genuine ingredient in tragic effect. ”

“ And we may find analogues of the meaning of poetry outside it, which may help us to appropriate it. The other arts, the best ideas of philosophy or religion, much that nature and life offer us or force upon us, are akin to it. But they are only akin. Nor is it the expression of them. Poetry does not present to imagination our highest knowledge or belief, and much less our dreams and opinions; but it, content and form in unity, embodies in its own irreplaceable way something which embodies itself also in other irreplaceable ways, such as philosophy or religion. ”

“ But the truths they exaggerate are equally essential; and the commoner mistake in criticism is to understate the second. It is plain that the love of Antony and Cleopatra is destructive; that in some way it clashes with the nature of things; that, while they are sitting in their paradise like gods, its walls move inward and crush them at last to death. This is no invention of moralising critics; it is in the play; and any one familiar with Shakespeare would expect beforehand to find it there. ”

“ The audience was not composed mainly of groundlings; and even the groundlings in that age had drama in their blood. But I venture to disbelieve that the main fault in these matters lies, in any age, with the audience. It is like the populace in Shakespeare’s plays, easy to lead wrong but just as easy to lead right. If you give people in the East End, or even in the Albert Hall, nothing but third-rate music, most of them will be content with it, and possibly may come to disrelish what is better. ”

“ Law—the rule, however imperfect, of the general reasonable will—is a vast achievement and priceless possession; but it is not favourable to striking events or individual actions on the grand scale. Beneath the surface, and breaking through it, there is doubtless an infinity of poetic matter; but this is inward, or it fails to appear in impressive forms; and therefore it may suit the lyric or idyll, the monologue or short story, the prose drama or novel, but hardly the long poem or high tragedy. Even war, for reasons not hard to find, is no longer the subject that it was. ”

“ We know too well what must happen in a world so splendid, so false, and so petty. We turn for relief from the political game to those who are sure to lose it; to those who love some human being better than a prize, to Eros and Charmian and Iras; to Enobarbus, whom the world corrupts, but who has a heart that can break with shame; to the lovers, who seem to us to find in death something better than their victor’s life.
This presentation of the outward conflict has two results. First, it blunts our feeling of the greatness 292 of Antony’s fall from prosperity. ”

“ It is the nature of the tragic hero, at once his greatness and his doom, that he knows no shrinking or half-heartedness, but identifies himself wholly with the power that moves him, and will admit the justification of no other power. However varied and rich his inner life and character may be, in the conflict it is all concentrated in one point. Antigone is the determination to do her duty to her dead brother; Romeo is not a son or a citizen as well as a lover, he is lover pure and simple, and his love is the whole of him. ”

“ Assuredly we read with admiration, and the signs of native genius we meet with in abundance—in greater abundance, I think, than in the poetry and criticism of Germany, if Goethe is excepted. But the freedom of spirit, the knowledge, the superiority to prejudice and caprice and fanaticism, the openness to ideas, the atmosphere that is all about us when we read Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, we do not find. Can we imagine any one of those four either inspired or imprisoned as Shelley was by the doctrines of Godwin? ”

“ He may seem to think of poetry solely as the direct expression of perfection in some form, and accordingly to imagine its effect as simply joy or delighted aspiration. Much of his own poetry, too, is such an expression; and we understand when we find him saying that Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human character, and unveiled in Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses ‘the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism, and persevering devotion to an object.’ But poetry, it is obvious, is not wholly, perhaps not even mainly, of this kind. ”

“ Would a mountain, a river, or a building be sublime to us if we did not read their masses and lines as symbols of force? Would even the illimitable extent of sea or sky, the endlessness of time, or the countlessness of stars or sands or waves, bring us anything but fatigue or depression if we did not apprehend them, in some way and however vaguely, as expressions of immeasurable power—power that created them, or lives in them, or can count them; so that what impresses us is not the mere absence of limits, but the presence of something that overpowers any imaginable limit? ”