Fine Art in Romantic Literature [pp. 52-66]

Fine Art in Romantic Literature.
his faith in feminine innocence and candor,
and both, as being the greatest sufferers by
their own mistakes, are rather to be pitied
than condemned. More humane and charitable than Swift, Thackeray has not been
able to divest himself of a belief in man's
capabilities of goodness. The concentrated
gall and venom of Swift's later years is diluted and sweetened before it flows from
Thackeray's pen. He perceives the foibles
and baseness of human nature, but does not
gloat over the weakness he discloses. He anatomizes with an unsparing hand, but is devoid of Swift's morbid pleasure in the evidences of disease. When he laughs, it is
like a man of the world, and not like a lunatic or a fiend. Becky Sharp serves as a foil
to Amelia; Colonel Newcome would still
ennoble the name of gentleman, were he
surrounded by twice as many knaves and
worldlings. But in his perception of evil,
keen in proportion to his admiration for virtue and moral beauty, Thackeray must be
ranked with Swift, and, if our deductions are
correct, with Hamlet. Herein, too, he must
be classed with Aristophanes, a genius born
out of due time, but yet sufficiently accounted
for by the quickened spiritual sense which
Socrates awoke in his contemporaries, as
Juvenal is explained by the leaven of Chris tianity in the later Roman civilization; and
with Cervantes, whose Don Quixote is not
more earnest and chivalrous than his Sancho
Panza is lumpish and uncouth. Since we
are endeavoring to discover the character istics of Romantic literature, it may repay
us to seek in Greek and Roman antiquity for
a parallel to Sancho Panza. Turn over the
pages of the Iliad, and search among the
multitude of its personages for the buffoon,
the low, underbred individual who shall
bring out in relief the heroism and magna nimity of the leaders. You find but one,
Thersites, and he is quickly dismissed with
an admonition and a beating. In the Odys sey no such incarnation of ignoble or currish
propensities is to be found. But in Dante's
great poem, the epic of mediaevalism, one
circle after another of the Inferno is filled
with unheroic creatures, or with the loath
some opposites of all that the great Italian
most admired. Of the least obnoxious members of the former class Dante is evidently
loath to speak, but passes judgment on them
in this wise:
"This miserable mode
Maintain the melancholy souls of those
Who lived withouten infamy or praise.
Commingled are they with that caitiff choir
Of Angels, who have not rebellious been,
Nor faithful were to God; but were for self.
The heavens expelled them, not to be less fair;
Nor them the nethermore abyss receives;
For glory none the damned would have from
them."
If such be his estimate of this merely inglorious troop, the malefactors are likely to be
sorely troubled, and so, indeed, they are. The
significant fact is, that Dante admits them to
his Inferno, thus bestowing impartial justice
on all classes; and that the everlasting blessedness of Paradise is enhanced by contrast
with the torments of the damned. Longfellow has compared the Divina Commedia
to a Gothic cathedral, and as the former
has its depraved and fiendish creatures, so
the latter has its gargoyles subdued to me nial use, and its grotesque carvings of ape
and contorted human countenance on the
folding seats of the cathedral choir. The
eye of the beholder, endeavoring to compass
the manifold and bewildering beauty of some
exquisite facade, wandering from carven
angel to carven saint, is suddenly arrested by
the hideous mouth and spiny or scraggy neck
of some monster of deformity. Or, while
his ear is drinking in the rich and plaintive
harmonies which, slowly detached from the
organ, go floating through the interior, and
the sunlight, poured in rose and amethyst
through the painted window, envelopes him
in garments of transfiguring radiance, he be comes aware of a demon grinning at him
from the opposite stall, and turning all his
imaginations of heaven into gloomy sugges'
tions of unending wickedness and woe.
But these contrasts are of the very essence
of Romantic literature. The Greek dramas
knew nothing of them, for the abyss of evil
had not yet opened before the feet of dram atist and audience. But when Shakespeare
1885.]
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