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Untitled Article
just on a par with the tragedies they themselves would have written , and which—heaven preserve us !—some of them did write ! The last extract we can make of these French criticisms on Shakspeare , embodies a melancholy fact , though we demur in one important respect to the inference : —
" Accuracy in the representation of inanimate objects is the spirit of the literature and the arts of our time . It denotes the decay of the higher class of poetry and of the genuine drama . We are content with minor beauties when we cannot attain great aims . Our stage represents
to perfection the chair and its velvet coverings , but the actor is not equally successful in portraying the character who is seated in the chair . But having once descended to these minute representations of material objects , it cannot be dispensed with , for the public taste becomes materialised and demands it . "—Vol . i . p . 251 .
And for this we have to thank the patent Showmen . The decline of the drama is not owing to an inability in the age to produce high dramatic genius , but because the productions of such genius would meet with no sort of patronage or countenance from public purveyors . Private , as well as public sympathy , or the chance of it , is thus superseded . Meantime , the materiality of the Dutch school of inanimate accuracy and high finish of tankards , and turnips , and dress and upholstery , is very much admired by the vulgar . The unrefined , and those who cannot readily appreciate the ideal , have a natural tendency to this bad taste ; how much more so when they are regularly taught every night to admire it as the highest pitch of excellence . We pass on to Chateaubriand ' s strictures on Milton ; and , as they contain nothing of new , and very little of old value in criticism , we just pass over them .
" Young , " proceeds our critic , " has founded a bad school , and was not himself a good master . lie owed part of his early reputation to the picture presented in the opening of his Night Thoughts . ' A minister of the Most High , an aged father , who has lost his only daughter , awakes in the middle of the night to mourn upon graves ; with Death , Time , and Eternity , he associates the only great thing that man has within himself—grief . This is a striking picture .
" But draw nearer , when the imagination , roused by the exordium of the poet , has already created a world of sorrows and of reveries , you find nothing of what you have been promised . You find a man racking his brain for tender . and melancholy ideas , and who arrives only at a morose philosophy . * * There is nothing natural in his tenderness , nothing ideal in his grief : it is always a heavy hand moving slowly over the lyre . "—Vol . ii . p . 251 .
This is much hotter , and nearly amounts to what Hazlitt has said in a few words , who designates Young as " a gloomy epigrammatist . " We might , however , question the metaphysics of Chateaubriand , when he says that u grief is the only great thing that mail lias within himself . " The sense of grandeur and the images
Untitled Article
594 Sketches of English Literature .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1836, page 594, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2662/page/6/
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