rely more implicitly on the impulses his fancy must receive from the subject that possesses him; and, because he feels himself elated with its greatness, therefore rather unsolicitous and careless of any artful invention of the means by which he is to carry himself and the incidents, and persons of his action, along.

But perhaps this simpler plan of the story is connected with another peculiarity of this drama, which, as it involves a matter of more general criticism, we shall venture to consider somewhat at large. Mr Milman appears to us, in his present work, to have gone far in affixing a distinctive meaning to a title which has of late grown into favour with our poets, and to which he himself seems not a little inclined, that of a DRAMATIC POEM; which ought certainly to describe a distinct species of poetry, and which he has here, we think, separated by important and decisive characteristics, from proper tragedy. The ground of the distinction is be sought simply in this, that the regular drama is designed for actual representation, the other not. This difference, which may possibly appear, at first sight, rather as something external and accidental, than as affecting the substance of the poetry, is in fact the presence or absence of the one essential characteristic condition which divides the drama from all other works of art, and which therefore must needs impose on it some of its primary laws. For by this intention of being presented in living reality, the drama is made subject, before all other requisitions of art, to the rights of that intense sympathy with which our minds are wrapped up in the PROGRESS of any determination of the fate of human beings, that passes before your eyes; the management of the spectators' high-raised and suspended EXPECTATION becomes the first business of the dramatic art. In other words, the ACTION,—that is, the gradual development and necessitation of the final event, is rendered the first and paramount object of consideration; and hence the rigorous necessity of the rules which respect its conduct,-rules which the youthful lover of poetry is so ready to disdain, and on which the experienced critic so strenuously insists. Hence, for instance, from this passion of strong expectation which looks upon the stage, that great VOL. XII.

law, that every scene shall visibly advance or impede the final result. Hence the law of the strict enchainment of the successive scenes. Hence, from the high importance given to the action, the admitted necessity, that all the principal personages shall appear as agents, in the proper sense of the word; not as mere exhibitions held up of emotion and suffering, as passive subjects of an exterior agency, but with active power, charged in some way or other to further or retard the coming on of that catastrophe in which the purpose of the whole piece is accomplished, and terminates. Hence, above all, the rule so much talked of, that the action shall have a beginning, a middle, and an end; that is, in real and intelligible meaning, that there shall be an opening up of expectation, a carrying of it on with heightenings and irritations of doubtful and anxious suspense, and its close in final certainty. Now, in the unacted drama, that is, in poetry which merely borrows the dramatic form to speak more vividly to the imagination, this expectation of the event, though of course it does not cease, ceases from its preeminence among the many interests that are awake. Its overpowering intensity, by which it commanded the whole mind, is taken off. The living representation, the visible and realized unfolding of a portion of human life and destiny, no longer chains down the spirit through the eyes; and the mind released from the force of its great primal sympathy with the lot of human beings, when their powerful presence is thus taken away, is left free to its own movements, and to the ascendancy of those faculties which, in its own retirement and solitude, have the stronger sway. Now, imagination, which before was held subject, rises into its original power; the higher capacities of thought take their dominion in the mind, which, if such is its disposition, feels itself once more at liberty to look upon all the revolutions of human affairs merely as a subject for its sublime speculation, as a spectacle of wonder and pleasure to its elated fancy. To such a temper of the spirit, which is indeed the high temper of poetry, the slow and gradual unrolling of the links of human fate must be matter of impatient disregard. If such events are then to be made the subject of poetry, it is on the great

E

results themselves, it is on the absolute emotions belonging to their contemplation, that the mind will chuse to dwell. But it has no expecting hope and fear to bestow on their progressive accomplishment, and dispenses the poet from the task of unveiling the mechanism by which the end is brought

on.

Here then is, between the acted and unacted drama, not an accidental, but an essential distinction; a distinction not of subordinate forms, but of principles. In the first a law of expectation, raised into unusual authority by the force of representation, predominates over those which the free mind would prescribe; while in the other, that peculiar and powerful constraint being removed, the mind reverts to its natural liberty, and takes its laws merely from the spontaneous workings and dictates of its own faculties and desires.

To speak with precision, it is the poet's mind which is thus left at liberty. In the ordinary drama, he is bound down from the free exercise of his genius, by the known determinate sympathies of his audience.

In the

other, he is a poet, who may rely on his own power of bearing the sympathy of his reader along with him, as long as he keeps within the capacities of human nature.

This freedom of genius, Mr Milman appears to us to have felt in chusing the manner in which he would treat the subject of Belshazzar. He seems to have seen in it, as an example of the stupendous destruction of glorious human might, under irresistible power, an object of high imagination, a theme capable of the utmost exaltation and fervid enthusiasm of poetry; and in his whole composition, as in a vast picture, chiefly to have developed the parts of such a subject, heightening them severally by their own colours to their full effect; but using the form of the drama, merely as if it were a play acted on the stage of the imagination, to at tain a greater vividness of ideal presentation, and to catch the more readily so much of sympathy with his situations, as might be serviceable, as a subordinate feeling, to heighten the poetical effect, not as paramount, and binding the poetry itself under restraint. To this purpose of attaining a poetical rather than a dramatic effect, we ascribe that freedom from

some of the stricter requisitions of art, which is observable in the conduct of this poem; and to this, perhaps, we should refer in some degree that simplicity of its conduct, which would be a merit, however, in any purpose of the drama.

That there is such a design as that of which we speak, of withdrawing himself from the laws of the exhibited drama, may be traced, in many subordinate ways, in the very artifice and structure of the poem. It appears in the substitution of other means of representation. For example, much of what is intended to be presented to the eye is made visible with a studied art of the poetry; sometimes in what is spoken by the proper persons of the drama, and sometimes by choruses, who abound in the piece, and are of a mixed character, in part seeming to perform the natural office of such choral bands as might in reasonable probability be found taking their human share in such an action, and in part discharging a function assigned to them solely for the behoof of the poet and his reader, representing in their song some part of the process of the action, which he has occasion to make appear; of which the chorus introducing the banquet, (which we have given,) appears to be an artful and happy specimen. Thus also scenes are ventured upon which would be impracticable in real exhibition; but which, in the ideal and unsubstantial representation here designed, have a graceful and striking effect, as that singular one of the gradual ascent of the Tower. By the same means a much wider and more magnificent scenery is gained to the poem than could otherwise be given, since all that lies under the eye of any of the speakers, with all the movement and action proceeding upon it, is thus brought within the scope of this ideal presentation,-a use of which this writer has freely, with manifest purpose, and with rich effect, availed himself. An illustration of the freedom afforded to the poet by the relaxation of the strictness of the more mechanical disposition of the drama, may be observed in that interruption of the banquet-scene, when it is broken off in the midst, and the reader is suddenly taken from it to be presented with the first deliverance of Benina, from which he returns to find the King stretched in the same unbroken astonishment in

which he had left him. A transition which, in this instance, is not only convenient, but gives room for even a heightened impression on the imagination, when, in returning to contemplate the deep consternation of Belshazzar, we perceive it to have continued with unabated intensity, when withdrawn for a while from our observation; but which, in real scenic representation, would be insupportable, chiefly because, from that intense sympathy with the spirit of progressive action in the piece, it becomes an absolute law of the ordinary drama, that the action of every scene shall be completed before it is removed from the eyes of the spectators.

The effect that is intended and attained by thus withdrawing the drama from the bondage of reality, and throwing it wholly into the domain of imagination, will be found to extend vitally throughout, and to discover itself perhaps in unforeseen results; as, for example, in the character of the personages of the poem. We might here speak of the first extraordinary personage, the Destroying Angel, whose introduction, on every ground, is only possible, on the condition that the drama is to the imagination alone. But we wish rather to insist upon the different and more highly poetical character which is hence imparted to some of the human actors. Much of the high and beautiful poetical effect, which will undoubtedly be felt in reading this poem, arises, we believe, from taking the characters out of that strong reality, which belongs to the exhibited drama, and shewing them more in the shadowy and ideal essence of poetical conceptions. Belshazzar himself is of this order. We believe that if the reader, when he has closed the volume, will reflect upon the impression which was made upon his mind, while this kingly phantom was present to his conception, he must admit that the picture scarcely for a moment appeared to him to be even the imaginary presentment of an actual monarch that had lived, but much rather as invested with something of an allegorical greatness and splendour, as if his person were only the poetical embodying of idolized monarchial state and sway. Only in this way can the character be considered as legitimately drawn. Regarded either as a delineation of a living human being, or as a tragic agent,

it would be eminently liable to censure. At the same time, this extreme removal of the person from reality, which in the true drama would be a fault of the worst kind, as it would be fatal to our interest, is not injurious, but favourable to the high poetical effect, which is here principally intended. As much may be said of the Queen Nitocris. She cannot be thought to be even the ideal and exalted portraiture of any Assyrian queen-mother that ever existed. But she is the impersonation of a queen, in the pride and glory of her conceptions; and of a mother, in the fond inextinguishable love of her son. A little reflection will suffice to shew that this difference in the admitted, and even required method of delineation in the two kinds of poetry, arises from the difference on which we have so strongly insisted, on the presence or absence of that first, strong, simple, human sympathy, on which the acted drama founds itself. It is the throbbing heart that awakes the understanding to demand in those to whom its affections, either of love or hate, are claimed, those marked individualizing traits of character, which are the evidence that they bear our nature, and stamp them as living

men.

When the imagination is the chief power to be consulted, it is much more easily satisfied.

Without entering, for illustration of the same views-which we hope throw some light on an important point in the philosophy of the drama-into the details of the several parts of the action of this poem, we shall merely observe upon the last scene, in which the King and his mother are brought to meet and die together before the door of the hut of Imlah, that if this were meant to be represented as the real and historical termination of the existence of the King of Babylon and his mother in the storming of their city, it is an incident so improbable, that the romantic unlikelihood of the situation would at once disfigure the conduct of the piece, and effectually impair the tragic passion of the catastrophe. It could not be pardoned. But if it is intended to shew us, as in a vision of human destinies, the vicissitude of enormous and tyrannic power, in it fall, coming into presence and humbled equality with those whom it has trodden down, being beholden to them even for the common regards and fruitless charities

with which mankind wait upon their dying nature, so as to bring down the intolerable greatness to the level of humanity, before it sinks below that level into dust and into nothing,-if they are led to that home of dark and lowly poverty, merely that we may witness in the awful perishing of power a more utter annihilation,-if they are led from the storm of havoc into that remote and still retreat, merely that we may see, reflected as it were in the mirror of those two kingly spirits, the fall of their state and empire, together with which they become extinguished, then in this merely ideal and poetical conception, the poetry both acquires an interest from the human situation in which it is involved, and saves to our understanding the consideration of the improbability of the situation.

But there is still one other important result we must urge as connected with the essential difference of the two kinds of drama; that is, with respect to the language and the strain of the poetry. On the stage, poetry ceases to be what it is elsewhere, the mere voice of the poet's inspiration. It becomes there the discourse of earnest men, engaged in transacting their own momentous concerns, from whom the strains of high imagination, to whom we are wont to listen with delight, would offend and revolt us. Hence the language of the drama approaches more nearly to the real speech of men, than in any other form of poetry. It must not indeed reach it; for, however nearly it may sometimes draw towards it, it must still remain poetry and art. It is never reality. But in the merely ideal drama, the boldest flights of poetry, and its loftiest language, are in their place.

We have said what we could to explain and justify the spirit of imagination in which the poem is written. We now turn to point out what strikes us as a material defect in the manner in which the subject is conceived. It appears to us, that the true spirit of the event which Mr Milman has had the courage to attempt in poetry, is not carried into his composition. That event is awful to our imagination as a divine chastisement of human wickedness. This is its first great character -the august and terrible assertion of that moral retribution, which we look for, indeed, in the ordinary course of

the human world, as a necessity laid in its constitution; but which, in this instance, breaks forth more signally and fearfully in miraculous interposition. If so, the whole structure and spirit of the poem ought to be fitted to express this character. The facts that should stand out from the narrative ought to be the crimes which provoke the judgment; and its prevalent tone should be in harmony with our contemplation of the more appalling acts of justice, dark, solemn, and severe. Now, this is by no means done; and the failure of the poet in this respect may be marked in many particulars.

It appears remarkably in the tone of the composition. The muse of Mr Milman is not austere and armed with terror, but prodigal of gorgeous beauty. The prevailing style of the imagery, to which the fancy of the reader is here fettered, is an oriental sumptuousness of earthly magnificence in the works of man, and in nature, an oriental splendour of the climates and kingdoms of the sun; and even in leaving the visible world, the spirit of fancy is the same.

This departure from the proper awe of the subject amounts, in specific instances, to a great dramatic impropriety in the persons speaking. So it is in one Personage, which there was some danger in introducing at all, and which could only be justified by the most awful and menacing solemnity investing all his words,—the missioned Angel of Destruction. It is a surprising departure from the propriety of character, and takes greatly from the proper grandeur of such a composition, when this Being, in whom nothing is expected but manifestations of inflamed wrath and power, is made to indulge in describing, with lavish pomp, the splendours of the human empire-a tone prevailing largely in his first, and to be found, too, in his second, and only other appearance, though the description itself is very beautiful.

On like ground, exception must be taken to the poetical interest, already adverted to, which is given to the character of Belshazzar and the QueenMother. The manner in which these are conceived and represented also detracts from the innate moral terror of the subject. One point, indeed, in the King's character is drawn fitly to the purpose intended, the revelling

sense of self-exaltation in his supremacy of terrestrial greatness, rising and hardening itself into impiety. But neither for himself, as the signalized object of the Supreme displeasure, nor as the only person in whom, as predominant to our conception, the general offences that are to be punished could appear as imaged, is he held up to our abhorrence. He is rather made gracious to our imagination, by the regal beauty of his person, by his mother's exceeding and unfailing love, and by a rich and tender luxury of fancy which breathes in his words, imparting to them often a sweet and seductive eloquence. He is courageous withal, and high-minded; and his unwillingness to engage personally in the war is evidently a kingly dislike of its painful and unroyal labours, nothing of fear. Yet it was of the utmost importance to the whole effect of the poem, that our sympathy should be with his destruction. And the urgent importance of a stern solemnity in the tone will on this account appear the more, when it is remembered what force on the part of the poet, what a violence done to our own weak and betraying inclinations, is necessary to rend us from all the customary and oppressive infirmities of our nature, and to arouse and sustain in us the ardent hate of human guilt, and the indignant impatient desire that it may be vindictively swept from the earth.

So even the great city herself, drunk with blood and with wine-she who had filled to the brim the cup of her iniquities, foul and cruel, at once the pollution and the burthen of the earth, appears to us rather beautiful in her magnificence, the diadem'd queen of nations, than as that city of sin, over which wrath burns even long ere it descends to consume.

In all these instances of departure from the intrinsic severity of the subject, the occasion may seem to have been the same, too easy an acquiescence on the part of the author in the natural flow of his own imagination, which perhaps might have made it as great an effort to him to deny himself the gratification of luxuriating in richness and beauty, as to have girded up his spirit to the stern and awful temper of the argument he had undertaken.

We have yet another point to speak of in the character of Mr Mil

man's genius, which has shewn itself both in this and his other works. It has frequently appeared to us, that though human feelings are often very happily caught by him, and when they are so, are made very striking and impressive to his reader, by the beauty of poetry with which they are inwoven; yet that there does appear to be at times a great, and what might almost seem to be a deep essential want of sympathy, with simple and strong human passion. In the present poem, we cannot help singling out one important instance, and observing that, to our conception, neither in Benina herself, nor in her parents, nor in her lover, is there any expression or indication of the real feelings with which the horrible doom to which she is here devoted, would have been contemplated by them, either, in the first place, as hanging over her, or as afterwards, by the last of the three, believed to have been completed.

Independently of this, the renouncing the ordinary love interest of these parties,-by the father, at the outset, voluntarily plighting their future nuptials, thus frankly reducing all anxiety and interest about their fate, to what is essentially involved in the great event of the poem,-is surely a piece of good conduct, which does credit to the poet's moderation and prudence.

The genius which appears most conspicuously in this poem, and perhaps in all the poetry Mr Milman has given to the world, is that of rich and powerful description. Here his good spirit never seems to desert him. To whatever sort of subject he turns, as long as he may riot in the world of sights and sounds, his imagination is exuberant and inexhaustible; and the glowing beauty of his language, as well as its skilful elegance, attest that here he enjoys the happiness of his powers. Perhaps it might be objected, that he delights too much in exhibiting his art, in shewing with what success he can bend to poetry subjects that seem the most to refuse it, dwelling as freely and fearlessly on the delineation of the works and products of human skill, as on those shews of her own beauteous and mystic world, over which nature herself has already breathed the power of poetry. Perhaps it may be said, that the delight of exercising his