 On the Fear of Death by William Hazlett, read by Arthur Berger. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. On the Fear of Death. Our little life is rounded with sleep. Perhaps the best cure for the Fear of Death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not. This gives us no concern. Why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be? I have no wish to have been alive a hundred years ago or in the reign of Queen Anne. Why should I regret and lay it so much to heart that I shall not be alive a hundred years hence in the reign of I Cannot Tell Home? When Dickerstaff wrote his essays, I knew nothing of the subjects of them. Name much later, and but the other day, as it were, in the beginning of the reign of George III, when Goldsmith, Johnson, Burke, used to meet at the Glow, when Garrick was in his glory, and Reynolds was overhead in ears with his portraits, and Stern brought out the volumes of Tristram Shandy year by year. It was without consulting me. I had not the slightest information of what was going on. The debates in the House of Commons on the American War or the firing at Bunkers Hill disturbed not me. Yet I thought this no evil. I neither ate, drank, nor was merry, yet I did not complain. I had not then looked out into this breathing world, yet I was well, and the world did quite as well without me as I did without it. Why then should I make all this outcry about parting with it, and being no worse off than I was before? There is nothing in the recollection that at a certain time we were not come into the world that the gorge rises at. Why should we revolt at the idea that we must one day go out of it? To die is only to be as we were before we were born, yet no one feels any remorse or regret or repugnance in contemplating this last idea. It is rather a relief and disburdening of the mind. It seems to have been holiday time with us then. We were not called to appear upon the stage of life to wear robes or tatters, to laugh or cry, be hooded or applauded. We had lain produce all this while, snug, out of harm's way, and had slept out our thousands of centuries without wanting to be waked up, at peace and free from care, in a long non-age, in a sleep deeper and calmer than that of infancy, wrapped in the softest and finest dust. And the worst that we dread is, after a short, fretful, feverish being, after vain hopes and idle fears, to sink to final repose again, and forget the troubled dream of life. Ye armed men, night's Templars, that sleep in the stone aisles of that old temple church, were all as silent above, and were a deeper silence ranged below, not broken by the peeling organ. Are ye not contented where ye lie? Or would ye come out of your long homes to go to the holy war? Or do ye complain that pain no longer visits ye, that sickness has done its worst, that ye would pay the last debt to nature, that ye hear no more of the thickening phalanx of the foe, or your lady's wending love? And that while this ball of earth rolls its eternal round, no sound shall ever pierce through to disturb your lasting repose, fixed as the marble of your tombs, breathless as the grave that holds you. And thou, O thou to whom my heart turns, and will turn while it has feeling left, who didst love in vain, and whose first was thy last sigh, wilt not thou to rest in peace, or wilt thou cry to me complaining from thy clay-cold bed, when that sad heart is no longer sad, and that sorrow is dead, which thou would only called into the world to feel? It is certain that there is nothing in the idea of a pre-existent state that excites our longer, like the prospect of a posthumous existence. We are satisfied to have begun life when we did. We have no ambition to have set out on our journey sooner, and feel that we have had quite enough to do to battle our way through since. I cannot say the wars we well remember of King Nine, of old Asarakis, and Anarchis Divine. Neither have we any wish. We are contented to read them in story, and to stand and gaze at the vast sea of time that separates us from them. It was early days then. The world was not well-air enough for us. We have no inclination to have been up and stirring. We do not consider the six thousand years of the world before we were born as so much time lost to us. We are perfectly indifferent about the matter. We do not grieve and lament that we did not happen to be in time to see the grand mask and pageant of human life going on in all that period, though we are mortified at being obliged to quit our stand before the rest of the procession passes. It may be suggested, in explanation of this difference, that we know from various records and traditions what happened in the time of Queen Anne, or even in the reigns of the Assyrian monarchs, but that we have no means of ascertaining what is to happen hereafter but by awaiting the event, and that our eagerness and curiosity are sharpened in proportion as we are on the dark about it. This is not at all the case. For at that rate, we should be constantly wishing to make a voyage of discovery to Greenland or to the Moon, neither of which we have in general the least desire to do. Neither in truth have we any particular solicitude to pry into the secrets of futurity but as a pretext for prolonging our own existence. It is not so much that we care to be alive a hundred or a thousand years hence, any more than to have been alive a hundred or a thousand years ago, but the thing lies here that we would all of us wish the present moment to last forever. We would be as we are and would have the world remain just as it is to please us. The present eye catches the present object to have and to hold while it may and abhors on any terms to have it torn from us and nothing left in its room. It is the pang of parting, the unloosing argress, the breaking asunder, some strong tie, the leaving, some cherished purpose unfulfilled that creates the repugnance to go and makes calamity of so long life as it often is. O thou strong heart, there is such a covenant, twix the world and thee, there loath to break. The love of life then is an habitual attachment, not an abstract principle. Simply to be does not content man's natural desire. We long to be in a certain time, place and circumstance. We would much rather be now on this bank and shoal of time than have our choice of any future period than take a slice of fifty or sixty years out of the millennium, for instance. This shows that our attachment is not confined either to being or to well-being, but that we have an inveterate prejudice in favor of our immediate existence such as it is. The Mountaineer will not leave his rock nor the savages hut. Neither are we willing to give up our present mode of life with all its advantages and disadvantages for any other that could be substituted for it. No man would, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however fortunate. We had his leaf not be as not be ourselves. There are some persons of that reach of soul that they would like to live 250 years hence to see what height of empire America will have grown up in that period or whether the English constitution will last so long. These are points beyond me. But I confess I should like to live to see the downfall of the bourbons. That is a vital question with me and I shall like it the better, the sooner it happens. No young man ever thinks he shall die. He may believe that others will or assented the doctrine that all men are mortal as an abstract proposition, but he is far enough from bringing it home to himself individually. Youth, buoyant activity, and animal spirits hold absolute antipathy with old age as well as with death. Nor have we in the heyday of life any more than in the thoughtlessness of childhood the remotest conception how this sensible warm motion can become a needed clod. Nor how sanguine, florid health and vigor shall turn to withered weak and gray. Or if in a moment of idle speculation we indulge in this notion of the close of life as a theory, it is amazing at what a distance it seems, what a long leisurely interval there is between, what a contrast its slow and solemn approach affords to our present gay dreams of existence. We are the farthest verge of the horizon and think what a way we shall have to look back upon ere we arrive at our journey's end. And without our in the least suspecting it, the mists are at our feet and the shadows of age encompass us. The two divisions of our lives have melted into each other. The extreme points close and meet with none of that romantic interval stretching out between them that we had reckoned upon. And for the rich melancholy solemn hues of age, the seer, the yellow leaf, the deepening shadows of an autumnal evening, we only feel a dank cold mist encircling all objects after the spirit of youth is fled. There is no inducement to look forward. And what is worse, little interest in looking back to what has become so trite and common. The pleasures of our existence have worn themselves out and are gone into the waste of time or have turned their indifferent side to us. The pains by their repeated blows have worn us out and have left us neither spirit nor inclination to encounter them again in retrospect. We don't want to rip out old grievances nor to renew our youth like the phoenix nor to live our lives twice over. Once is enough. As the tree falls, so let it lie. Shut up the book and close the account once and for all. It has been thought by some that life is like the exploring of a passage that grows narrower and darker the farther we advance without a possibility of ever turning back and where we are stifled for want of breath at last. For myself, I do not complain of the greater thickness of the atmosphere as I approach the narrow house. I felt it more formally when the idea alone seemed to suppress a thousand rising hopes and weighed upon the pulses of the blood. At present, I rather feel the thinness and want of support. I stretch out my hand to some object and find none. I am too much in a world of abstraction. The naked map of life is spread out before me and in the emptiness and desolation I see death coming to meet me. In my youth, I could not behold him for the crowd of objects and feelings and hope stood always between us, saying, never mind that old fellow. If I had lived indeed, I should not care to die. But I do not like a contract of pleasure broken off, unfulfilled, a marriage with joy, unconsummated, a promise of happiness, rescinded. My public and private hopes have been left a ruin or remain only to mock me. I would wish them to be re-edified. I should like to see some prospect of good to mankind, such as my life began with. I should like to leave some sterling work behind me. I should like to have some friendly hand to consign me to the grave. On these conditions, I am ready if not willing to depart. I shall then write upon my tomb grateful and contented. But I have thought and suffered too much to be willing to have thought and suffered in vain. In looking back, it sometimes appears to me as if I had in a manner slipped out my life in a dream or shadow on the side of a hill of knowledge where I have fed on books, on thoughts, on pictures, and only heard in half murmurs the trampling of busy feet or the noises of the throng below. Waked out of this dim twilight existence, I have felt a wish to descend to the world of realities and join in the chase. But I fear too late and that I had better return to my bookish chimeras and indolence once more. It is not wonderful that the contemplation and fear of death have become more familiar to us as we approach nearer to it that life seems to add with decay of blood and youthful spirits and that as we find everything about as subject to chance and change as our strength and beauty die, as our hopes and passions are friends and our affections leave us, we begin by degrees to feel ourselves mortal. I have never seen death but once, and that was in an infant. It is years ago. The look was calm and placid and the face was fair and firm. It was as if a wax and image had been laid out in the coffin and strewed with innocent flowers. It was not like death but more like an image of life. No breath moved the lips, no pulse stirred, no sight or sound would enter those eyes or ears more. While I looked at it, I saw no pain was there. It seemed to smile at the short pang of life which was over. But I could not bear the coffin led be closed. It seemed to stifle me and still as a nettle's wave in a corner of the churchyard over his little grave, the welcome breeze helps to refresh me and ease the tightness of my breast. An ivory or marble image, like Chantre's monument of the two children, is contemplated with pure delight. Why do we not grieve and fret that the marble is not alive or fancy that it has a shortness of breath? It never was alive and it is the difficulty of making the transition from life to death the struggle between the two in our imagination that confounds their properties painfully together and makes us conceive that the infant that is but just dead still wants to breathe, to enjoy and look about it and is prevented by the icy hand of death locking up its faculties and benumbing its senses so that if it could it would complain of its own hard state. Perhaps religious considerations reconcile the mind of this change sooner than any others by representing the spirit is fled to another sphere and leaving the body behind it. So in reflecting on death generally we mix up the idea of life with it and thus make it the ghastly monster it is. We think how we should feel, not how the dead feel. Still from the tomb the voice of nature cries even in our ashes live their wanted fires. There is an admirable passage on this subject in Tucker's Light of Nature Pursuit which I shall transcribe as by much the best illustration I can offer of it. The melancholy appearance of a lifeless body the mansion provided for it to inhabit dark, cold, close and solitary are shocking to the imagination but it is to the imagination only not the understanding for whoever consults this faculty will see at first glance there is nothing dismal in all of these circumstances if the corpse were kept wrapped in a warm bed with a roasting fire in the chamber it would feel no comfortable warmth therefrom were store of tapers lighted up as soon as day shuts in it would see no objects to divert it were it left at large it would have no liberty nor if surrounded with company would be cheered thereby neither are the distorted features expressions of pain of easiness or distress this everyone knows and will readily allow upon being suggested yet still cannot behold nor even cast a thought upon those objects without shuttering for knowing that a living person must suffer grievously under such appearances they become habitually formidable to the mind and strike a mechanical horror which is increased by the customs of the world around us there is usually one pang added voluntarily and unnecessarily to the fear of death by our effecting to compassionate the loss which others will have in us if that were all we might reasonably set our minds to rest the pathetic exhortation on country tombstones grieve not for me my wife and children dear etc is for the most part speedily followed to the letter we do not leave so great a void in society as we are inclined to imagine poorly to magnify our own importance and poorly to console ourselves by sympathy even in the same family the gap is not so great the wound closes up sooner than we should expect nay, our room is not infrequently thought better than our company people walk along the streets the day after our deaths just as they did before and the crowd is not diminished while we were living the world seemed in a manner to exist only for us but our delight and amusement because it contributed to them but our heart ceased to beat and it goes on as usual and thinks no more about us than it did in our lifetime the million are devoid of sentiment and care as little for you or for me as if we belong to the moon we'll live the week over in the Sunday's paper or are decently interred in some obituary of the month's end it is not surprising that we are forgotten so soon after we quit this mortal stage we are scarcely noticed while we are on it it is not really that our names are not known in China they have hardly been heard of in the next street we are hand in glove with the universe and think the obligation is mutual this is an evident fallacy if this however does not trouble us now it will not hereafter a handful of dust can have no quarrel to pick with its neighbors or complaint to make against providence and might will exclaim if it had but an understanding in the tongue go thy ways old world swing round in blue ether valuable to every age you and I shall no more jostle it is amazing how soon the rich entitled even some of those who have wielded great political power are forgotten a little rule, a little sway is all the great and mighty have betwixt the cradle and the grave and after a short date they hardly leave a name behind them a great man's memory may at the common rate survive him half a year his heirs and successes take his titles, his power and his wealth all that made him considerable or courted by others and he has left nothing else behind immediate delight or benefit the world posterity are not by any means so disinterested as they are supposed to be they give their gratitude and admiration only in return for benefits conferred they cherish the memory of those to whom they are indebted for instruction and delight and they cherish it just in proportion to the instruction and delight they are conscious they receive the sentiment of admiration springs immediately from this ground and cannot be otherwise than well founded the effeminate clinging to life as such as a general or abstract idea is the effect of a highly civilized and artificial state of society men formerly plunged into all the vicissitudes and dangers of war or stake their all upon a single die or some one passion which if they could not have gratified life became a burden to them now our strongest passion is to think our chief amusement is to read new plays new poems new novels and this we may do at all leisure in perfect security ad infinitum if we look into the old histories and romances before the belletto neutralized human affairs and reduced passion to a state of mental equivocation we find the heroes and heroines not setting their lives at a pin's fee but rather courting opportunities of throwing away in a very wantoness of spirit they raise their fondness for some favorite pursuit to its height to a pitch of madness and then think no price too dear to pay for its full gratification everything else is dross they go to death as to a bridal bed and sacrifice themselves or others without remorse at the thrine of love of honor of religion or any other prevailing feeling Romeo runs his seasick worry bark upon the rocks of death the instant he finds himself deprived of his jewel yet and she clasps his neck in their last agonies and follows him to the same fatal shore one strong idea takes possession of the mind and overrules every other and even life itself, joyless without that, becomes an object of indifference or loathing there is at least more of imagination in such a state of things more vigor of feeling and promptitude to act than in our lingering, languid, protracted attachment to life for its own poor sake it is perhaps also better as well as more heroic to strike at some daring or darling object and if we fail in that to take the consequences manfully than to renew the lease of a tedious, spiritless, charmless existence merely as Pierre says to lose it afterwards in some vile brawl for some worthless object was there not a spirit of martyrdom as well as a spice of the reckless energy of barbarism in this bold defiance of death had not religion something to do with it the implicit belief in a future life which rendered this of less value and embodied something beyond it to the imagination so that the rough soldier, the infatuated lover, the valorous knight, etc. could afford to throw away the present venture and take a leap into the arms of futurity which the modern skeptic sinks back from but all his boasted reason and vain philosophy weaker than a woman I cannot help thinking so myself but I have endeavored to explain this point before and will not enlarge farther on it here a life of action and danger moderates the dread of death it not only gives us fortitude to bear pain but teaches us at every step the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being sedentary and studious men are the most apprehensive on the score Dr. Johnson was an instance and point a few years seemed to him soon over compared with those sweeping contemplations on time at infinity with which he had been used to pose himself in the still life of a man of letters there was no obvious reason for a change he might sit in an armchair and pour out cups of tea to all eternity what it had been possible for him to do so the most rational cure after all for the inordinate fear of death is to set a just value on life if we merely wish to continue on the scene to indulge our headstrong humors and traumatic passions we had better be gone at once and if we only cherish a fondness for existence according to the good we derive from it the pang at parting with it will not be very severe End of On the Fear of Death by William Haslund Letter on the Slave Trade This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org This reading by Todd Cutler Letter on the Slave Trade by Benjamin Franklin published under the pseudonym Historicus On the Slave Trade to the editor of the Federal Gazette March 23, 1790 Sir, reading last night in your excellent paper the speech of Mr. Jackson in Congress against their meddling with the affair of slavery or attempting to mend the condition of the slaves it put me in mind of a similar one made about 100 years since by Sidi Mehmet Ibrahim a member of the Divan of Algiers which may be seen in Martin's account of his consulship, Anno 1687 It was against granting the petition of the sect called Erika or Purist who prayed for the abolition of piracy and slavery as being unjust Mr. Jackson does not quote it perhaps he has not seen it If therefore some of its reasonings are to be found in his eloquent speech it may only show that men's interests and intellects operate and are operated on surprising similarity in all countries and climates when under similar circumstances The African speech as translated is as follows Allah bismillah et cetera God is great and Mehmet is his prophet Have these Erika considered the consequences of granting their petition If we cease our cruises against the Christians how shall we be furnished with the commodities their countries produce and which are so necessary for us If we forbear to make slaves of their people who in this hot climate are to cultivate our lands who are to perform the common labors of our city and in our families must we not then be our own slaves and is there not more compassion and more favor due to us as Muslims than to these Christian dogs We have now about 50,000 slaves in and near Algiers This number if not kept up by fresh supplies will soon diminish and be gradually annihilated If we then cease taking and plundering the infidel ships and making slaves of the seamen and passengers our lands will become of no value for want of cultivation The rents of houses in the city will sink one half and the revenues of government arising from its share of prizes be totally destroyed And for what? To gratify the whims of a whimsical sect who would have us not only for bear making more slaves but even to manumit those we have But who is to indemnify their masters for their loss? Will the state do it? Is our treasury sufficient? Will the Erika do it? Can they do it? Or would they to do what they think justice to the slaves do greater injustice to the owners? And if we set our slaves free what is to be done with them? Few of them will return to their countries They know too well the hardships they must there be subject to They will not embrace our holy religion They will not adopt our manners Our people will not pollute themselves by intermarrying with them Must we maintain them as beggars in our streets or suffer our properties to be the prey of their pillage? For men long accustomed to slavery will not work for a livelihood when not compelled And what is there so pityable in their present condition? Were they not slaves in their own countries? Are not Spain, Portugal, France and the Italian states governed by despots who hold all their subjects in slavery without exception? Even England treated sailors as slaves for they are whenever the government pleases seized and confined in ships of war condemned not only to work but to fight for small wages or a mere substance not better than our slaves are allowed by us Is their condition then made worse by falling into our hands? No, they have only exchanged one slavery for another and I may say a better For here they are brought into a land where the sun of Islamism gives forth its light and shines in full splendor and they have an opportunity of making themselves acquainted with the true doctrine and thereby saving their immortal souls Those who would remain at home have not that happiness Sending the slaves home then would be sending them out of light into darkness I repeat the question What is to be done with them? I have heard it suggested that they may be planted in the wilderness where there is plenty of land for them to subsist on and where they may flourish as a free state But they are, I doubt, too little disposed to labour without compulsion as well as to establish a good government and the wild Arabs would soon molest and destroy or again enslave them While serving us we take care to provide them with everything and they are treated with humanity The labourers in their own country are, as I am well informed worse fed, lodged and clothed The condition of most of them is therefore already mended and requires no further improvement Here their lives are in safety They are not liable to be impressed for soldiers or forced to cut one another's Christian throats as in the war of their own countries If some of the religious mad bigots who now tease us with their silly petitions have in a fit of blind zeal freed their slaves it was not generosity it was not humanity that moved them to the action it was from the conscious burden of a load of sins and hope from the supposed merits of so good a work to be excused damnation How grossly they are mistaken in imagining slavery to be disallowed by the Al-Quran are not the two precepts to quote no more Masters, treat your slaves with kindness Slaves, serve your masters with cheerfulness and fidelity clear proofs to the contrary Nor can the plundering of infidels be in that sacred book forbidden since it is well known from it that God has given the world and all that it contains to his faithful muslims who are to enjoy it of right as fast as they conquer it Let us then hear no more of this detestable proposition the manumission of Christian slaves the adoption of which would by depreciating our lands and houses and ever depriving so many good citizens of their properties create universal discontent and provoke insurrections to the endangering of government and producing general confusion I have therefore no doubt but this wise council will prefer the comfort and happiness of a whole nation of true believers to the whim of a few Erika and dismiss their petition The result was, as Martin tells us that a van came to this resolution the doctrine that plundering and enslaving the Christians is unjust is at best problematic but that it is the interest of this state to continue the practice is clear therefore let the petition be rejected and it was rejected accordingly and since like motives are apt to produce in the minds of men like opinions and resolutions let Mr. Brown venture to predict from this account that the petitions to the Parliament of England for abolishing the slave trade to say nothing of other legislatures and the debates upon them will have a similar conclusion I am, sir, your constant reader and humble servant, Historicus This has been a LibriVax recording on the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from the original type by Alfred Russell Wallace This is a LibriVax recording All LibriVax recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVax.org Read by Anna Simon One of the strongest arguments which have been adduced to prove the original and permanent distinctness of species is that varieties produced in a state of domesticity are more or less unstable and often have a tendency, if left to themselves to return to the normal form of the parent species and this instability is considered to be a distinctive peculiarity of all varieties even of those occurring among wild animals in a state of nature and to constitute a provision for preserving unchanged the originally created distinct species In the absence of scarcity of facts and observations as the varieties occurring among wild animals this argument has had great weight with naturalists and has led to a very general and somewhat prejudiced belief in the stability of species equally general however is to believe in what are called permanent or true varieties races of animals which continually propagate their like but which differ so slightly although constantly from some other race that the one is considered to be a variety of the other which is the variety in which the original species there is generally no means of determining except in those rare cases in which the one race has been known to produce an offspring unlike itself and resembling the other this however would seem quite incompatible with the permanent invariability of species but the difficulties overcome by assuming that such varieties have strict limits and can never again very further from the original type although they may return to it which from the analogy of the domesticated animals is considered to be highly probable if not certainly proved it will be observed that this argument rests entirely on the assumption that varieties occurring in a state of nature are in all respects analogous to or even identical with those of domestic animals and are governed by the same laws as regards to their permanence or further variation but it is the object of the present paper to show that this assumption is altogether false that there is a general principle in nature which will cause many varieties to survive the parent species and to give rise to successive variations departing further and further from the original type and which also produces in domesticated animals the tendencies of varieties to return to the parent form the life of wild animals is a struggle for existence the full exertion of all their faculties and all their energies is required to preserve their own existence and provide for that of their infant offspring the possibility of procuring food during the least favorable seasons and of escaping the attacks of their most dangerous enemies are the primary conditions which determine the existence both of individuals and of entire species these conditions will also determine the population of a species and by a careful consideration of all the circumstances we may be enabled to comprehend and in some degree to explain what at first sight appears so inexplicable the excessive abundance of some species while others closely allied to them are very rare the general proportion that must obtain between certain groups of animals is readily seen large animals cannot be so abundant as small ones the carnivore must be less numerous than the herbivore eagles and lions can never be so plentiful as pigeons and antelopes the wild asses of the Tartarian deserts cannot equal in numbers the horses of the more luxuriant prairies and pampas of America the greater or less fecundity of an animal is often considered to be one of the chief causes of its abundance or scarcity but the general consideration of the fact will show us that it really has little or nothing to do with the matter even the least prolific of animals would increase rapidly if unchecked whereas it is evident that the animal population of the globe must be stationary or perhaps through the influence of man decreasing fluctuations there may be but permanent increase except in restricted localities is almost impossible for example our own observation must convince us that birds do not go on per year in a geometrical ratio as they would do where there are not some powerful check to their natural increase very few birds produce less than two young ones each year while many have six, eight or ten four will certainly be below the average and if we suppose that each pair produce young only four times in their life that will also be below the average supposing them not to die either by violence or want of food yet at this rate how tremendous would be the increase in a few years from a single pair a simple calculation will show that in 15 years each pair of birds would have increased to nearly ten millions whereas we have no reason to believe that the number of the birds of any country increases at all in 15 or in 150 years with such powers of increase the population must have reached its limits and have become stationary in a very few years after the origin of each species it is possible that each year an immense number of birds must perish as many in fact as are born and as on the lowest calculation the progeny are each year twice as numerous as their parents it follows that whatever be the average number of individuals existing in any given country twice that number must perish annually a striking result but one which seems at least highly probable and is perhaps under rather than over the truth it would therefore appear as far as the continuance of the species and the keeping up the average number of individuals are concerned large broods are superfluous on the average all above one become food for hawks and kites wild cats and weasels or perish of cold and hunger as winter comes on this is strikingly proved by the case of particular species for we find that their abundance in individuals bears no relation whatever to their fertility in producing offspring perhaps the most remarkable instance of an immense bird population is that of the passenger pigeon of the united states which lays only one or at most two eggs and is said to rear generally but one young one why is this bird so extraordinarily abundant while others producing two or three times as many young are much less plentiful the explanation is not difficult the food most congenial to this species and on which it thrives best is abundantly distributed over a very extensive region offering such differences of soil and climate that in one part or another of the area the supply never fails the bird is capable of a very rapid and long continued flight so that it can pass without fatigue over the whole of the district it inhabits and as soon as the supply of food begins to fail in one place is able to discover a fresh feeding ground this example strikingly shows us that the procuring a constant supply of wholesome food is almost the sole condition requisite for ensuring the rapid increase of a given species since neither the limited fecundity nor the unrestrained attacks of birds of prey and of man are here sufficient to check it in no other birds are these peculiar circumstances so strikingly combined either their food is more liable to failure or they have not sufficient power of wing to search for it over an extensive area or during some season of the year it becomes very scarce and less wholesome substitute have to be found and thus though more fertile in offspring they can never increase beyond the supply of food in the least favorable seasons many birds can only exist by migrating when their food becomes scarce to regions possessing a milder or at least a different climate though as these migrating birds are seldom excessively abundant it is evident that the countries they visit are still deficient in a constant and abundant supply of wholesome food those whose organization does not permit them to migrate when their food becomes periodically scarce can never attain a large population this is probably the reason why woodpeckers are scarce with us while in the tropics they are among the most abundant of solitary birds thus the house sparrow is more abundant than the red breast because its food is more constant and plentiful seeds of grasses being preserved during the winter and our farm yards and stubble fields furnishing an almost inexhaustible supply why, as a general rule, are aquatic and especially sea birds very numerous in individuals not because they are more prolific than others generally the country but because their food never fails the seashores and river banks daily swarming with a fresh supply of small moluska and crostacea exactly the same law will apply to mammals wild cats are prolific and are few enemies why then are they never as abundant as rabbits? the only intelligible answer is that their supply of food is more precarious it appears evident, therefore that so long as a country remains physically unchanged the numbers of its animal population cannot materially increase if one species does so some others requiring the same kind of food must diminish in proportion the numbers that die annually must be immense the total existence of each animal depends upon itself those that die must be the weakest the very young the aged and the diseased while those that prolong their existence can only be the most perfect in health and vigor those who are best able to obtain food regularly and avoid their numerous enemies it is as we commence by remarking a struggle for existence in which the weakest and least perfectly organized must always succumb now it is clear that what takes place among the individuals of a species must also occur among the several allied species of a group that is, that those which are best adapted to obtain a regular supply of food and to defend themselves against the attacks of their enemies and the vicissitudes of the seasons must necessarily obtain and preserve a superiority in population while those species which from some defect of power or organization are the least capable of counteracting vicissitudes of food supply etc must diminish in numbers and in extreme cases become altogether extinct between these extremes the species will present various degrees of capacity for ensuring the means of preserving life and it is thus we account for the abundance or rarity of species our ignorance will generally prevent us from accurately tracing the effects to their causes but could we become perfectly acquainted with the organization and habits of the various species of animals and could we measure the capacity of each for performing the different acts necessary to its safety and existence under all the varying circumstances by which it is surrounded we might be able even to calculate the proportionate abundance of individuals which is the necessary result if now we have succeeded in establishing these two points first, that the animal population of a country is generally stationary being kept down by a periodical deficiency of food and other checks and second, that the comparative abundance or scarcity of the individuals of the several species is entirely due to their organization and resulting habits which rendering it more difficult to procure a regular supply of food and to provide for their personal safety in some cases than in others can only be balanced by a difference in the population which have to exist in a given area we shall be in a condition to proceed to the consideration of varieties to which the preceding remarks have a direct and very important application most or perhaps all the variations from the typical form of a species must have some definite effect however slight on the habits or capacities of the individuals even a change of color might by rendering them more or less distinguishable affect their safety a greater or less development of hair might modify their habits more important changes such as an increase in the power variations of the limbs or any of the external organs with more or less affect their mode of procuring food or their range of country which they inhabit it is also evident that most changes would affect either favorably or adversely the powers of prolonging existence an antelope with shorter or weaker legs must necessarily suffer more from the attacks of the feline carnivora the passenger pigeon with less powerful wings would sooner or later be affected in its powers of procuring a regular supply of food and in both cases the result must necessarily be a diminution of the population of the modified species if on the other hand any species should produce a variety having slightly increased powers of preserving existence that variety must inevitably in time acquire a superiority in numbers these results must follow as surely as old age in temperance or scarcity of food produce an increased mortality in both cases there may be many individual exceptions but on the average the rule will invariably be found to hold good all varieties will therefore fall into two classes those which under the same conditions would never reach the population of the parent species and those which would in time obtain and keep a numerical superiority now let some alteration of physical conditions occur in the district a long period of drought a destruction of vegetation by locusts the eruption of some new carnivorous animal seeking pasture's new any change in fact tending to render existence more difficult to the species in question and tasking its utmost powers to avoid complete extermination it is evident that of all the individuals composing the species those forming the least numerous and most feebly organized variety would suffer first and where the pressure severe would soon become extinct the same causes continuing in action the parent species would next suffer would gradually diminish in numbers and where the recurrence of similar unfavorable conditions might also become extinct the superior variety would then alone remain and on a return to favorable circumstances would rapidly increase in numbers and occupy the place of the extinct species and variety the variety would now have replaced the species of which it would be a more perfectly developed and more highly organized form it would be in all respects better adapted to secure its safety and to prolong its individual existence and that of the race such a variety could not return to the original form for that form is an inferior one and could never compete with it for existence granted therefore a tendency to reproduce the original type of the species still the variety must ever remain preponderant in numbers and under adverse physical conditions again alone survive but this new improved and populace race might itself in course of time give rise to new varieties exhibiting several diverging modifications of form any of which tending to increase the facilities for preserving existence must by the same general law in their term become predominant here then we have progression and continued divergence deduced from the general laws which regulate the existence of animals in a state of nature and from the undisputed fact that varieties do frequently occur it is not however contended that this result would be invariable a change of physical conditions in the district might at times materially modify it rendering the race which had been the most capable of supporting existence and the former conditions now the least so and even causing the extinction and for a time superior race while the old or parent species and its first inferior varieties continued to flourish variations in unimportant parts might also occur having no perceptible effect on the life preserving powers and the varieties so furnished might run a cause parallel with the parent species either giving rise to further variations or returning to the form a type all we argue for is that certain varieties have a tendency to maintain their existence longer than the original species and this tendency must make itself felt for though the doctrine of chances or averages can never be trusted on a limited scale yet if applied to high numbers the results come nearer to what theory demands and as we approach to an infinity of examples becomes strictly accurate now the scale on which nature works is so vast the numbers of individuals and periods of time with which she deals approach so near to infinity that any cause however slight and however liable to be veiled and counteracted by accidental circumstances must in the end produce its full legitimate results let us now turn to domesticated animals and inquire how varieties produced among them are affected by the principles here enunciated the essential difference in the condition of domestic animals is this that among the former their well-being and very existence depend upon the full exercise and healthy condition of all their senses and physical powers whereas among the latter these are only partially exercised and in some cases are absolutely unused a wild animal has to search and often to labour for every mouthful of food to exercise sight, hearing and smell in seeking it and in avoiding dangers including clemency of the seasons and in providing for the subsistence and safety of its offspring there is no muscle of its body that is not called into daily in hourly activity there is no sense or faculty that is not strengthened by continual exercise the domestic animal on the other hand has food provided for it is sheltered and often confined to guarded against the vicissitudes of the seasons is carefully secured from the attacks of its natural enemies young, without human assistance half of its senses and faculties are quite useless and even the other half are but occasionally called into feeble exercise while even its muscular system is only irregularly called into action now, whenever a variety of such an animal occurs having increased power or capacity in any organ or sense such increase is totally useless is never called into action and may even exist without the animal in the wild animal on the contrary all its faculties and powers being brought into full action for the necessities of existence any increase becomes immediately available is strengthened by exercise and must even slightly modify the food the habits and the whole economy of the race it creates as it were a new animal, one of superior powers and which will necessarily increase in numbers and out lift those inferior to it again in the domesticated animal populations have an equal chance of continuance and those which would decidedly render a wild animal unable to compete with its fellows and continue its existence are no disadvantage whatever in a state of domesticity are quickly fattening pigs short-legged sheep powder pigeons and poodle dogs could never have coming to existence in a state of nature because the very first step towards such inferior forms would have led to the rapid extinction of the race and now exist in competition with our wild allies the great speed but slight endurance of the racehorse the unwieldy strength of the plowman's team would both be useless in a state of nature if turned wild in the pompous such animals would probably soon become extinct or under favorable circumstances might each lose those extreme qualities which would never be called into action and in a few generations would revert to a common type which must be that in which the various powers and faculties are so proportioned to each other as to be best adapted to procure food and secure safety that in which by the full exercise of every part of the organization the animal can alone continue to live domestic varieties when turned wild must return to something near the type of the original wild stock or become altogether extinct we see then that no inferences as to varieties in a state of nature can be deduced from the observation of those occurring among domestic animals that who are so much opposed to each other in every circumstance of their existence that what applies to the one is almost sure not to apply to the other domestic animals are abnormal irregular artificial they're subject to varieties which never occur and never can occur in a state of nature their very existence depends altogether on human care so far are many of them removed from the proportion of faculties that true balance of organization by means of which alone an animal left to its own resources can preserve its existence and continue its race the hypothesis of Lamarck that progressive changes in species have been produced by the attempts of animals to increase the development of their own organs and thus modify their structure and habits has been repeatedly and easily refuted by all writers on the subject of varieties and species sometimes they have been considered that when this was done the whole question has been finally settled but the view here developed renders such a hypothesis quite unnecessary by showing that similar results must be produced by the action of principles constantly at work in nature the powerful retractile talons of the falcon and the cat tribes have not been produced or increased by the volition of those animals but among the different varieties which occurred in the earlier and less highly organized forms of these groups those always survived longest which had the greatest facilities for seizing their prey neither did the giraffe acquire its long neck by desiring to reach the foliage of the more lofty shrubs and constantly stretching its neck for the purpose but because any varieties which occurred among its antitypes with a longer neck than usual at once secured a fresh range of pasture over the same ground as the shorter necked companions and on the first scarcity of food were thereby enabled to outlive them even the peculiar colors of many animals especially insects so closely resembling the soil or the leaves or the trunks on which they habitually reside are explained of the same principle for though in the cause of ages varieties of many tins may have occurred yet those races having colors best adapted to concealment from their enemies would inevitably survive the longest we have also here an acting cause to account for that balance so often observed in nature a deficiency in one set of organs always being compensated by an increased development of some others powerful wings accompanying weak feet or great velocity making up for the absence of defensive weapons for it has been shown that all varieties in which an unbalanced deficiency occurred could not long continue their existence the action of this principle is exactly like that of the centrifugal governor of the steam engine which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they become evident and in a like manner no unbalanced deficiency in the animal kingdom can ever reach any conspicuous magnitude because it would make itself felt at the very first step by rendering existence difficult and extinction almost sure soon to follow an origin such as is here advocated will also agree with the peculiar character of the modifications of form and structure which obtain in organized beings the many lines of divergence from a central type the increasing efficiency and power of a particular organ through a succession of allied species and the remarkable persistence of unimportant parts such as color texture of plumage and hair form of horns or crests through a series of species differing considerably in more essential characters it also furnishes us with a reason for that more specialized structure which professor Owen states to be a characteristic of a recent compared with extinct forms and which would evidently be the result of the progressive modification of any organ applied to a special purpose in the animal economy we believe we have now shown that there is a tendency in nature to the continued progression of certain classes of varieties further and further from the original type a progression to which there appears no reason to assign any definite limits and that the same principle which produces this result in a state of nature will also explain why domestic varieties have a tendency to revert to the original type this progression by minute steps in various directions but always checked and balanced by the necessary conditions subject to which alone existence can be preserved may it is believed be followed out so as to agree with all the phenomena presented by organized beings their extinction and succession in past ages the extraordinary modifications of form instinct and habits which they exhibit turn out February 1858 end of on the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from the original type by Alfred Russell Wallace on the tragedies of Shakespeare by Charles Lamb this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Jolie van Wallachem on the tragedies of Shakespeare considered with a reference to their fitness for stage representation by Charles Lamb taking a turn the other day in the abbey I was struck with the affected attitude of a figure which I do not remember to have seen before and which upon examination proved to be a whole length of the celebrated Miss Garak so I would not go so far with some good Catholics abroad as to shot plays all together out of consecrated ground yet I own I was not a little scandalized at the introduction of theatrical heirs and gestures into a play set apart to reminders of the saddest realities going nearer I found inscribed under this Harlequin figure the following lines to paint fair nature by divine command a magic pencil in his glowing hand with Shakespeare rose then to expand his fame wide of this breathing world a Garak came so sunk in death the forms of hoed room the actors genius bathed them breeze and you so like the Bart himself Garak called them back to day until eternity with power sublime shall mark the mortal hour of horrid time Shakespeare and Garak like twin styles shall shine and earth irradiate with a beam divine it would be an insult to my readers understandings to attempt anything like a criticism on this very go false the thoughts and nonsense but the reflection it let me into was a kind of wonder how from the days of the actor here celebrated to our own it should have been the fashion to compliment every performer in his turn that has luck to please the town in any of the great characters of Shakespeare with the notion of possessing a mind congenial with the poets how people should come thus unaccountably to confirm the power of originating practical images and conceptions with the faculty to read or recite the same when put into words it is observable that we fall into this confusion only in dramatic recitations we never dream that a gentleman who reads a creature in public with great applause is therefore a great poet and philosopher now do you find the Tom Davis bookseller who is recorded to have recited The Paradise Lost better than any man in England in his day though I cannot help thinking there must be some mistake in this tradition was therefore by his intimate friends set upon a level with Milton and of Ors's note what connection that absolute mastery of the heart and soul of man which a great dramatic poet possesses has with those low tricks upon the eye and ear which play by observing a few general effects which some common passion as grieve, anger etc. usually has upon the gestures and exterior can so easily compass to know the eternal workings and movements of a great mind of an Othello or a Hamlet for instance the when and the why and how far they should be moved to what pitch a passion is becoming to get the reins and to pull in the curb exactly at the moment when the drawing in or the slacking is the most graceful seems to demand the reach of intellect of a vastly different extent from that which is employed upon the bare imitation of the signs of these passions in countenance or gesture which its signs are usually observed to be most likely an emphatic and the weakest sort of minds and which its signs can after all but indicate some passion as I said before, anger or grief generally but of the motives and grounds of the passion wherein it differs from the same passion in low and vulgar ages of these the actor can give no more idea by his phase of gesture than the eye without a metaphor can speak of the muscles utter intelligibly sounds but such is the instantaneous nature of the impressions which you take in at the eye and ear at a play house compared with the slow apprehension often times of the understanding in reading that we are wrapped not only to sing the character and the consideration which we pay to the actor but even to identify in our mind in a perverse manner the actor with the character which he represents it is difficult for a frequent playgoer to disembarrase the idea of Hamlet from the person and voice of Mr. K we speak of Lady Macbeth while we are in reality thinking of Mrs. S nor is this confusion and sedental alone to unlettered persons who not possessing the advantage of reading are necessarily dependent upon the sage player for all the pleasure which if they can receive from drama to whom the very idea of what an author is cannot be made comprehensible without some pain and perplexity of mind the error is one from which persons otherwise not merely lettered find it almost impossible to extricate themselves never let you be so in great feel as to forget the very high degree of satisfaction which I received some years back from seeing for the first time a tragedy of Shakespeare performed in which of these two great performers sustained the principal parts it seemed to embody and realise conceptions which at hitherto assumed no distinct shape but dearly do we pay all our life after for this juvenile pleasure the sense of distinctness when the novelty is passed we find our cost of that instead of realising an idea we have only materialised and brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood we have let go a dream in quest of an unattainable substance have cruelly this operate upon the mind to have its free conceptions thus cramped pressed down to the measure of a straight lacing actuality may be judged from the delightful sensation of freshness in which we turn to those plays of Shakespeare which have escaped being performed and to those passages in the acting plays of the same writer which have happily been left out in performance how far the very custom of hearing anything spouted withers and blows upon a fine passage may be seen of those speeches from Henry V etc. which are current in the mouths of school boys from there being to be found in enfield speakers and such kind of books I confess myself utterly unable to appreciate that celebrated Solerley Green Hamlet beginning to be or not to be or to tell whether it be good bad or indifferent it has been so handled and poured about by decrementary boys and men, aton so inhumanly from its living plays and principle of continuity in the play till it has become to me a perfect dead member it may seem a paradox but I cannot help being of opinion that plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage than those of almost any other dramatist whatever their distinguished excellence is a reason that they should be so there is so much in them which comes not under the province of acting with which I and tone and gesture have nothing to do the glory of the scenic art is to personate passion in the terms of passion and the more cause and palpable the passion is the more hold upon the eyes and ears of the spectators the performer obviously possesses for this reason, scalding scenes scenes where two persons talk themselves into a fit of fury and then in a surprising manner talk themselves out of it again have always been the most popular upon our stage and the reason is plain because the spectators are here to palpably appeal to they are the proper judges in this war of words they are the legitimate ring that should be formed around such intellectual prize fighters talking is a direct object of the imitation here but in all the best dramas and then Shakespeare above all how obvious it is that the forms of speaking whether it be in soliloquy or dialogue is only a medium for putting the reader of spectator into possession of that knowledge of the inner structure and workings of mind in the character which he could otherwise never have arrived at in that form of composition by any gift short of intuition we do here as we do with novels written in the epistolary form how many improprieties perfect solicisms in letter writing jury put up with in Clarissa and other books for the sake of the delight which that form upon the hall reduces but the practice of stage representation reduces everything to controversy of allocution every character from the boisterous blasphemings of Bayeset to the shrinking timidity of womanhood must play the orator the love dialogues of Romy and Juliet those silver sweet sounds of lover's tongues by night the more intimate and sacred sweetness of nubshell colloquy between an othello or a posthumous all those delicacies which are so delightful in the reading as when we read of those youthful deliances in paradise as besieged, bare-couple, linked and happy-nuptial leak alone by the inherent fault of stage representation how are these things salient and turned from their very nature by being exposed to a large assembly when such a speech as this image addresses to a lord come drawing out of the mouth of the actress this courtship though normally addressed to the personated posthumous is manifestly aimed at the spectators while to judge of her endearments and her returns of love the character of Hamlet is perhaps that by which since the days of batterton a succession of popular performers have had the greatest ambition to distinguish in themselves the lengths of the part may be one of their reasons but Hamlet himself what does he suffer meanwhile by being dragged forth as a public schoolmaster to give lectures to the crowd why nine parts and ten of what Hamlet does are transactions between himself and his moral sense and the fact that Hamlet himself is the only person to be considered as a proper vehicle for conveying moral instruction and transactions between himself and his moral sense they are the effusions of his solitary musings which he retires to holes and corners and the most requested parts of the palace to pour forth or rather they are the silent meditations with which his bosom is bursting reduced to words for the sake of the reader who must now remain ignorant of what is passing there these profound sorrows and wrongs scare dares utter to deaf oars and chambers how can they be represented by a gesticulating actor who comes and marces them out before an audience making four hundred people his confidence at once I say not that it is the fault of the actor so to do he must pronounce them or a retuno he must accompany them with his eye he must insinuate them into his auditory by some trick of eye tone he must be thinking all the while of his appearance because he knows that all the while the spectators are judging of it and this is a way to represent a shy negligent, retiring hamlet it is true that there is no other mode of conveying a vast quantity of thought and feeling to a great portion of the audience who otherwise would never earn it for themselves by reading the actual acquisition gained this way may for ought I know be inimestible but I am not arguing that Hamlet should not be acted but how much Hamlet is made another thing by being acted I have heard much of the wonders which Garak performed in this part but as I never saw him I must have lived to doubt whether the representation of such a character came within the province of his art those who tell me of him speak of his eye of the magic of his eye and of his commanding voice physical properties vastly desirable in an actor and without which he can never insinuate meaning into an auditory but what have they to do with Hamlet what have they to do with intellect in fact the things aimed at in theatrical representation are to rest the spectators eye upon the form and the gesture to gain a more favourable hearing to what is spoken it is not what the character is but how he looks not what he says but how he speaks it I see no reason to think that if the play of Hamlet were written over again by some such writers Bangs or Lilo retaining the process of the story but totally omitting all the poetry of it all the divine features of Shakespeare his tupandus intellect and only taking care to give us enough of passion dialogue which Bangs or Lilo would never at a loss to furnish I see not how the effect could be much different upon an audience nor how the actor has it in his power to represent Shakespeare to us differently from his representation of Bangs or Lilo Hamlet would still be a useful accomplished prince and must be gracefully personated he might be puzzled in his mind in his conduct seemingly cruel to Ophelia he might see ghost and start at it and address it kindly when he found it to be his father all this in the poorest and most homely language of the servilist creepy after nature that ever consulted the palette of an audience without troubling Shakespeare for the matter and I see not but there would be room for all the power which an actor has to display itself all the passions and changes of passions might remain but those are much less difficult to write or act than a sort it is a trick easy to be tamed it is but rising or falling a note or two in the voice a whisper with a significant foreboding look to announce his approach and so contagious the counterfeit appearance of any emotion is that let the words be what they will the look and tone shall carry it off and make it pass for deep skill in the passions it is common for people to talk of Shakespeare's play being so natural that everybody can understand him they are natural indeed they are ground a deeper nature so deep that the death of them lies out of the reach of most of us you shall hear the same person say that George Barnwell is very natural and Othello is very natural that they are both very deep and them they are the same kind of thing and the one they sit and shed tears because a good sort of young man is tempted by a naughty woman to commit a trifling peccatilio the murder of an uncle or so that is all and so comes to an timely end which is so moving and at the other because of black and more an effect of jealousy kills this innocent white wife and the odds are that 99 out of 100 would willingly be hauled the same catastrophe happen to both the heroes and have thought to rope more due to Othello than to Barnwell but of the texture of Othello's mind the inward construction marvelously laid over with all its strengths and weaknesses its heroic confidences and its human misgivings its agonies of hate springing from the depths of love they see no more than the spectators at a cheap rate or pay their pennies a piece to look through the man's telescope and look through the relester fields to see into the inward plot and topography of the moon some dim thing or rather they see they see enacted personating a passion of grief or anger for instance and they recognise it as a copy of the hugely external effects of such passions but at least as being true to that symbol of the emotion which passes current at the theatre for it but it is awful no more than that but of the grounds of depression its correspondence to a great or heroic nature which is the only worthy object of tragedy that common auditors know anything of this or can have any such notions dint into them by the mere strength of an actor's lungs that apprehensions foreign to them should be thus infused into them by storm I can neither believe nor understand how it can be possible we talk of Shakespeare's admirable innovation of life when we should feel that not from a petty inquisition into those cheap and everyday characters which surrounded him as they surround us but from his own mind which was the borough phrase of Ben Johnson the various sphere of humanity he fed those images of virtue and of knowledge of which every one of us recognising a part think we comprehend in our nature so who and often times mistake the powers that it will be created us for nothing more than indigenous faculties of our own minds which only waited for the action of corresponding virtues in him to return a full and clear echo of the same to return to Hamlet among the distinguishing features of that wonderful character one of the most interesting yet painful is a soreness of mind which makes him treat the intruders of Polonius with harshness the clarity which he puts on in his interviews with Ophelia these tokens of an unhinged mind they be not mixed in the latter case with the profound artifice of love to alienate Ophelia by effected discortices and to prepare her mind for the breaking off of that loving intercourse which can no longer find a place in its business so serious as is that which he has to do a part of his character which to reconcile with our admiration of Hamlet the most patient consideration of his situation is no more than necessary they are what we forgive afterwards and explained by the whole of his character but at the time they are harsh and unpleasant yet such is the actor's necessity of giving strong blows to the audience that I have never seen a player in this character who did not exaggerate and strain to the utmost these ambiguous features these temporary deformities of the character they make him express a vulgar scorn at Pelonius which utterly degrades his gentility and which no explanation can render palatable they make him show contempt and curl up the nose at Ophelia's father contempt in his very grossest and most hateful form but they get applause by it it is natural people say that is the words are scornful and the actor expresses scorn but that they can judge of but why so much is scorn and of that sword they never think of asking so to Ophelia all the Hamlets that I have ever seen ran than rave at her as if she had committed some great crime and the audience are highly pleased because the words of the part are satirical and they are enforced by the strongest expression of satirical indignation of which your face and voice are capable but then was a Hamlet as likely to have put on such a brutal appearance as to a lady whom we loved so dearly is never thought on so truth is that in all such deep factions as had subsisted between Hamlet and Ophelia there is a stock of super-erogatory love if I may venture to use the expression which in any great grief of heart especially where that which raise upon the mind cannot be communicated confers a kind of indulgence upon the grieved party to express itself even to its heart's dearest object in the language of a temporary alienation but it is not alienation it is a distraction purely and so it always makes itself to be felt by that object it is not anger but grief assuming the appearance of anger love awkwardly counterfeiting hate a sweet countenance is when they try to frown but such sternism fears disgust as Hamlet has made show is no counterfeit but a real phase of absolute aversion of irreconcilable alienation it may be said he puts on the madman but then he should only so far put on this counterfeit lunacy as his own real distraction will give him leave such is incompletely imperfectly not in that confirmed practiced way like a mass of his art or as Dame quickly would say like one of those harlotary players I mean no disrespect to any actor but the sort of pleasure which Shakespeare's plays give in the acting seems to me not at all to differ from that which the audience we see from those of other writers and they being in themselves is essentially so different from all others I must conclude that there is something in the nature of acting which levels all distinctions and in fact who does not speak indifferently of the gamester and of Macbeth as fine stage performances and praise the Mrs. Beverly in the same way as the lady Macbeth of Mrs. Ayers Poverdera and Calista and Isabella and de Frieser are they less light than Imogene or than Juliet or than Desdemona are they not spoken of and remembered in the same way is not a female performer as great as you call it in one as in the other did not character shine in every drawing tragedy that is wretched day produced the productions of the hills and the mervies and the browns shall he have that honour to dwell in our minds forever as an inseparable concomitant with Shakespeare a countered mind who can read that affecting sons of Shakespeare which alludes to his profession as a player for my sake do you with fortune child the guilty goddess of my harmful deeds that did not better for my life provide than public means which public custom read then comes in that my name receives a brand that almost then my nature is subdued to what it works in like the die is hand or that other confession alas distraught I have gone here and there and made myself a motley to thy view gourd my own thoughts so cheap what is most dear who can read these instances of jealous self-watchfulness in our sweet Shakespeare and dream of any congeniality between him and one that by every tradition of him appears to have been as mere a player as ever existed to have had his mind tainted with the lowest player's vices envy and jealousy and miserable cravings after applause one who in the exercise of a profession was jealous even though he was a common performer as suit in his way a manager full of managerial tricks and strategies and man finesse that any resemblance should be dreamed of between him and Shakespeare Shakespeare who in the planet due to consciousness of his own powers quit with that noble modesty which we can neither imitate nor appreciate express himself thus of his own sense of his own defects wishing me like to one more rich in hope like him, like him with friends possessed desiring this man's art and that man's scope I am almost disposed to deny to Garrick the merit of being an admirer of Shakespeare a true lover of his excellences he certainly was not for would any true love of them have admitted into his matchless scenes such rival trash as tainting kibber and the rest of them that with their darkness does defront his light have voisted into the acting plays of Shakespeare I believe it's impossible that he could have had a proper reverence for Shakespeare and have condescended to go through that interpolated scene in Richard III which Richard tries to break his wife's heart by telling her he lost another woman and said if she survives this she is immortal as I doubt not he delivered this vulgar staff with as much anxiety of emphasis as any of the genuine parts and for acting it is as well calculated as any but we have seen the parts of Richard lately produce great fame to an actor by his manner of playing it and it lets us into the secret of acting and of popular judgments of Shakespeare derived from acting not one of the spectators who have witnessed Mississi's exertions in that part but has come away with the proper conviction that Richard is a very wicked man with his little children in their beds with something like the pleasure which the giant and ogres in children's books are represented to have taken him their practice or over that is very close and shrewd and lavish cunning for you could see that by his eye but is in fact this the impression we have in reading the Richard of Shakespeare do we feel anything like disgust as we do have that butcher like representation of him that passes for him on the stage a horror at his crimes blends with the effect which we feel but how is it qualified how is it carried off by the rich intellect which he displays his resources, his wit his buoyant spirit, his fast knowledge and insight into characters the poetry of his part not so nettle of all which is made perceivable in Mississi's ways of acting it nothing but his crimes his actions is visible and prominent and staring the murderer sends out but where is the lofty genius the man of vast capacity the profound, the witty accomplished Richard the truth is the characters of Shakespeare are so much the objects of meditation rather than of interest or curiosity as to their actions that while we are reading any of his great criminal characters we think not so much of the crimes which they commit as of the ambition the aspiring spirit the intellectual activity which prompts them to have eloped those moral fences Barnwell is a wretched murderer there is a certain fitness between his neck and the rope, he is a letterman to the gallows nobody who thinks at all can think of any alleviating circumstances in his case to make him a fit object of mercy or to take an instance from the higher what else but a mere assassin is Glen Alvin do you think of anything but of the crime which he commits and the record which he deserves that is all which we really think about him whereas in corresponding characters in Shakespeare so little do the actions comparatively affect us that while the impulse is the inner mind in all its perverted greatness solely assumes real and is exclusively attended to the crime is comparatively nothing but when we see these things represented the acts which they do are comparatively everything the impulse is nothing the state of sublime emotion into which we are elevated with those images of night and horror which with Beth is made to utter that solemn prelude with which he entertains at the time till the bell shall strike which is to call him to murder Duncan when we no longer read it in a book we have given up that farthest ground of abstraction which reading possesses overseeing and come to see a man in his bodily shape before our eyes actually preparing to commit a murder if the acting be true and oppressive as I have witnessed it in this case performance of that part the baneful anxiety about the act the natural longing to prevent it while it yet seems unperpetrated the two close pressing semblance of reality give a pain and an uneasiness which totally destroy all the delight which are words in the book convey where the deed doing never presses upon us with a painful sense of presence it rather seems to belong to history to something past and inevitable if it has anything to do with time at all the sublime images the poetry alone is that which is present to our minds in the reading so to see Lear acted to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking stick turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting we want to take him into shelter and relieve him that is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever produced to me but the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted the contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements than any actor can be to represent Lear they might more easily propose to personally the Satan of Milton upon the stage or one of Michelangelo's several figures the greatest of Lear is not in corporal dimensions but in intellectual the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano there are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea in his mind with all his vast riches it is his mind which is laid bare this case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on even as he himself neglected on the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness the impure tense of rage while we read it we see not Lear but we are Lear and we are sustained by grandeur which baffles the mallors of daughters and storms the aberrations of his reason we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning a methodised from the ordinary purposes of life but exerting its powers as the wind blows where it is listed at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind what have looks or tones to do with that sublime identification of his age with that of the heavens themselves when an illiterate poachers to them for conniving at the injustice of his children he reminds them that they themselves are old what gesture shall we appropriate to this what has a voice or the eye to do with such things but the play is beyond all art as it happens with a show it is too hard and stony it must have lost scenes and a happy ending it is not enough that Cordelia is a daughter she must shine as a lover too Tate has put his hook in the nostrils of this leviathan where Garrick and his followers the showmen of the scene to draw the mighty beast about more easily a happy ending as if the living martyrdom that Leia had gone through the flaying of his feelings alive did not make it fair to dismiss her from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him if he is to live and be happy after if he could sustain this world's burden after why all this pudder of preparation why tremendous with all this unnecessary sympathy as if the child's pleasure of getting his guild robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over again his misuse station as if at his years and with his experience anything was left but to die Leia is essentially impossible to be represented on the stage but how many dramatic personages are there in Shakespeare which is more tractable and feasible if I may so speak than Leia yet from some circumstance some adjunct to their character are improper to be shown to our bodily eye Othello for instance nothing can be more soothing more flattering to the noble part of our natures than to read of a young Venetian lady of highest extraction through the force of love and from a sense of merit in whom she loved laying aside every consideration of kindred and country and colour and wedding with cold black moor or such he has represented the imperfect state of knowledge respecting foreign countries in those days compared to of their own or in compliance with popular notions the demors are now well enough known to be by many shades less worthy of a white moments fancy it is the perfect triumph of virtue over accidents and imagination over the senses she sees Othello's colour in his mind but upon the stage when the imagination is no longer the ruling faculty but we are left to our poor unassisted senses I appeal to everyone that has seen Othello played whether he did not on the contrary sink Othello's mind in his colour whether he did not find something extremely revolting in the courtship Othello and Desdemona and whether the actual side of the thing did not overweigh all that beautiful compromise which you make in reading and the reason it should do so is obvious because there is just so much reality presented to our senses as to give a perception of disagreement with not enough of belief in the internal motives all that which is unseen to overpower and reconcile the first obvious prejudices note of author the error of supposing that because Othello's colour does not offend us in reading it should also not offend us in the seeing as just such a fallacy as opposing that an Adam an Eve in a picture shall affect us just as they do in the poem but in the poem we for a while have paradisical senses given us which vanish when we see a man and his wife without clothes in the picture the painters themselves feel this as is apparent by the awkward shifts they have resource to to make them look not quite naked by sort of prophetic anachronism and to dating the invention of fake leaves so in the reading of the play we see with Desdemona's eyes in the seeing of it we are forced to look with our own and of author's note what we see upon a stage is body and bodily action what you are conscious of in reading is almost exclusively the mind and its movements and this I think may sufficiently count for the very different sort of delight with which the same play so often affects us in the reading and the seeing it requires little reflection to perceive that if those characters in Shakespeare which are within the precedence of nature have yet something in them which appeals to exclusively to the imagination to admit of their being made objects to the senses without suffering a change in the diminutation and the diminution that still strong with the object must lie against representing another line of characters which Shakespeare has introduced to give a wildness and supernatural elevation to his senses as if to remove them still farther from that assimilation to common life in which their excellence is vulgarly supposed to consist when we read the incantations of those terrible beings the witches of Macbeth there is some of the ingredients of their hellish composition savor of the grotesque yet is the effect upon us other than the most serious and appalling that can be imagined do we not feel spellbound as Macbeth was can any mirth accompany a sense of their presence we might as well laugh under consciousness of the principle of evil himself being truly and really present with us but attempt to bring these beings onto a stage and to turn them instantly into so many old women that men and children are to laugh at contrary to the old saying that seeing is believing the sight actually destroys the faith and the mirth in which we indulge at their expense when we see these creatures upon a stage seem to be a sort of indemnification which we make to ourselves for the tarot which they put us in when reading made them an object of belief when we surrendered up our reason to the poet as children to their nurses and their elders and we laugh at our fears as children who thought they saw something in the dark triumph when the bringing in of a candle discovers a vanity of their fears but as exposure of supernatural agents upon a stage as truly bringing in a candle to expose their own delusiveness it is a solitary taper and the book will generate a faith in these terrors a ghost with a chandelier light and in good company disease no spectators a ghost that can be measured by the eye and in its human dimension and a well-dressed audience shall arm the most nervous child against any apprehension as the sight of a well-lighted house and a well-dressed audience shall arm the most nervous child against any apprehensions as Tom Round says of the impenetrable armour over it bully Dawson would afford the devil with such advantages much has been said and deservedly a reprobation of the vile mixture which dryness is throwing into the tempest doubtless, without some such vicious alloy, the impure ears of that age would never have set out to hear so much innocence of love as is contained in the sweet courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda the campus of Shakespeare at all a subject for stage representation it is one thing to read of an enchanter and to believe the wondrous tale while we are reading it but to have a conjurer brought up before us in his conjuring gown with his spirit about him which none but himself and some hundred of favourite spectators before the curtain are supposed to see involves such a quantity of the hateful incredible that all our reverence for the author from perceiving such gross attempts upon the senses to be in the highest degree childish and inefficient spirits and fairies cannot be represented they cannot even be painted they can only be believed but the elaborate and anxious provision of scenery which a luxury of the age demands in these cases works a quite contrary effect to what is intended that of which in comedy or plays of familiar life to the life of imitation a place which appeal to the higher faculties positively destroys the illusion which it is introduced to aid a parlor or a drawing-room a library opening into a garden a garden with an alcove in it a street on the pier of Covent Garden there's well enough in a scene we are content to give as much credit to it as it demands or rather we think little about it it is lesser more than reading painting at the top of a page seen a garden we do not imagine ourselves there but we readily admit the imitation of familiar objects but to think by the help of painted trees and caverns which were known to be painted to transport our minds to Prospero and his island and his lowly cell known of author it will be said these things are done in pictures but pictures and scenes are very different things painting is a world of itself but in scene painting there is the attempt to deceive and there is a discordancy never to be got over between painted scenes and real people end of author's note or by the aid of a fiddle dexterously thrown in in an interval of speaking to make us believe that we hear those supernatural noises of which the island was full the aurorae lecturer at the Haymarket might as well hope by his musical glasses cleverly stationed out of sight behind the separators to make us believe that we do indeed hear the crystal spheres ring out at that time which if it were to enrub our fancy long melt of things time would run back and fetch it the age of gold and speckled vanity would take it soon and die a leprous sin would melt from earthly mould your hell itself would pass away and leave its door as mansions to the peering day the garden of Eden with our first parents in it is not more impossible to be shown on the stage than the enchanted isle with its no less interesting and innocent first settlers the subject of scenery is closely connected with that of the dresses which are so anxiously attended to on our stage I remember the last time I saw Macbeth played the discrepancy I felt the changes of garment which he varied the shiftings and reshiftings like a Romish priest at Mars the luxury of stage improvements and the opportunity of the public eye required this the coronation robe of the Scottish monarch was barely a counterpart to that which our king wears when he goes to Parliament House just so full and cumbersome and set out with her minor pearls and if things must be represented I see not what to find thought within this but in reading the robe are we conscious of some dim images of royalty a crown and scepter may flow to before our eyes but who shall describe the fashion of it do we see in our minds what web or any other robe make you could pattern this is the inevitable consequence of imitating everything to make all things natural whereas the reading of a tragedy is a fine abstraction it presents to the fancy experiences as to make us feel that we are among flesh and blood while by far the greater and better part of our imagination is employed upon the thought an internal machinery of the character but of acting scenery dress the most contemptible things call upon us to judge of their naturalness perhaps it would be no bad similitude to liken the pleasure which we take in seeing one of these fine plays acted compared with that quite delight which you find in the reading of it to the different feelings with which a reviewer and a man that is not a reviewer read to find poem the occurs critical habit the being called upon to judge and pronouns must make it quite a different thing to deformer in seeing these plays acted we are affected just as judges when Humland compares the two pictures of Gerdry's first and second husband to the pictures but in the acting a miniature must be looked out which we know not to be the picture but only to show how finely a miniature may be represented this showing of everything levels all things it makes tricks, bows and curtsies of importance Mrs S never got more fame by anything than by the manner in which she dismisses the guests in the banquetine and Macbeth it is as much remembered any of her thrilling tones or impressive looks but as such a trifle as this enter into the imaginations of the readers of that wild and wonderful scene there's not the mind as misdefeated as rapidly as it can does it care about the gracefulness of the doing it but by acting and judging of acting all these non-essentials are raised into an importance endures to the main interest of the play I have confined my observations to the tragic parts of Shakespeare it would be no very difficult task to extend the enquiry to his comedies and to show why fall stuff shallow, secure ovens and the rest are equally incompatible with stage representation the length to which this assay has run will make it, I'm afraid sufficiently distasteful to the amateurs of the theatre without going any deeper as this subject is present end off on the tragedies of Shakespeare by Charles Lamb