The German philosophy has made a distinction between the Subjective and the Objective, which has been found so convenient that it has been already naturalized and is almost acclimated in our literature.

The distinction is this: in all thought there are two factors, the thinker himself, and that about which he thinks. All thought, say our friends the Germans, results from these two factors: the subject, or the man thinking; and the object, what the man thinks about. All that part of thought which comes from the man himself, the Ego, they call subjective; all that part which comes from the outside world, the non-Ego, they call objective.

I am about to apply this distinction to literature and art; but instead of the terms Subjective and Objective, I shall use the words Lyric and Dramatic.

For example, when a writer or an artist puts a great deal of himself into his work, I call him a lyric writer or artist. Lyrical, in poetry, is the term applied to that species of poetry which directly expresses the individual emotions of the poet. On the other hand, I call an artist or poet dramatic when his own personality disappears, and is lost in that which he paints or describes. A lyric or subjective writer gives us more of himself than of the outside world; a dramatic or objective writer gives us more of the outside world than of himself.

Lyric poetry is that which is to be sung; the lyre accompanies song. Now, song is mainly personal or subjective. It expresses the singer's personal emotions, feelings, desires; and for these reasons I select this phrase "lyric" to express all subjective or personal utterances in art.

The drama, on the other hand, is a photograph of life; of live men and women acting themselves out freely and individually. The dramatic writer ought to disappear in his drama; if he does not do so he is not a dramatic writer, but a lyrist in disguise.

The dramatic element is the power of losing one's self—opinions, feeling, character—in that which is outside and foreign, and reproducing it just as it is. In perfect dramatic expression the personal equation is wholly eliminated. The writer disappears in his characters; his own hopes and fears, emotions and convictions, do not color his work.

But the lyric element works in the opposite way. In song, the singer is prominent more than what he sings. He suffuses his subject with his own thoughts and feelings. If he describes nature, he merely gives us the feelings it awakens in his own mind. If he attempts to write a play, we see the same actor thinly disguised reappearing in all the parts.

Now, there is a curious fact connected with this subject. It is that great lyric and dramatic authors or artists are apt to appear in duads or pairs. Whenever we meet with a highly subjective writer, we are apt to find him associated with another as eminently objective. This happens so often that one might imagine that each type of thought attracts its opposite and tends to draw it out and develop it. It may be that genius, when it acts on disciples who are persons of talent, draws out what is like itself, and makes imitators; when it acts on a disciple who himself possesses genius, it draws out what is opposite to itself and develops another original thinker. Genius, like love, is attracted by its opposite, or counterpart. Love and genius seek to form wholes; they look for what will complete and fulfill themselves. When, therefore, a great genius has come, fully developed on one side, he exercises an irresistible attraction on the next great genius, in whom the opposite side is latent, and is an important factor in his development. Thus, perhaps, we obtain the duads, whose curious concurrence I will now illustrate by a few striking instances. Beginning our survey with English literature, who are the first two great poets whose names occur to us? Naturally, Chaucer and Spenser. Now, Chaucer is eminently dramatic and objective in his genius; while Spenser is distinctly a lyrical and subjective poet.

Chaucer tells stories; and story-telling is objective. One of the most renowned collections of stories is the "Arabian Nights;" but who knows anything about the authors of those entertaining tales? They are merely pictures of Eastern life, reflected in the minds of some impersonal authors, whose names even are unknown.

Homer is another great story-teller; and Homer is so objective, so little of a personality, that some modern critics suppose there may have been several Homers.

Chaucer is a story-teller also; and in his stories everything belonging to his age appears, except Chaucer himself. His writings are full of pictures of life, sketches of character; in one word, he is a dramatic or objective writer. He paints things as they are,—gives us a panorama of his period. Knights, squires, yeomen, priests, friars, pass before us, as in Tennyson's poem "The Lady of Shalott."

The mind of an objective story-teller, like Chaucer, is the faithful mirror, which impartially reflects all that passes before it, but cracks from side to side whenever he lets a personal feeling enter his mind, for then the drama suddenly disappears and a lyric of personal hope or fear, gladness or sadness, takes its place.

Spenser is eminently a lyric poet. His own genius suffuses his stories with a summer glow of warm, tender, generous sentiment. In his descriptions of nature he does not catalogue details, but suggests impressions, which is the only way of truly describing nature. There are some writers who can describe scenery, so that the reader feels as if he had seen it himself. The secret of all such description is that it does not count or measure, but suggests. It is not quantitative but qualitative analysis. It does not apply a foot rule to nature, but gives the impression made on the mind and heart by the scene. I have never been at Frascati nor in Sicily, but I can hardly persuade myself that I have not seen those places. I have distinct impressions of both, simply from reading two of George Sand's stories. I have in my mind a picture of Frascati, with deep ravines, filled with foliage; with climbing, clustering, straggling vines and trees and bushes; with overhanging crags, deep masses of shadow below, bright sunshine on the stone pines above. So I have another picture of Sicilian scenery, wide and open, with immense depths of blue sky, and long reaches of landscape; ever-present Etna, soaring snow-clad into the still air; an atmosphere of purity, filling the heart with calm content. It may be that Catania and Frascati are not like this; but I feel as if I had seen them, not as if I had heard them described.

It is thus that Spenser describes nature; by touching some chord of fancy in the soul. Notice this picture of a boat on the sea:—

You notice that you are in the boat yourself, and everything is told as it appears to you there; you see the bending of the "stiff oars" by your side, and the little bubbles dancing on the water, and the islands, not as they are, rock-anchored, but as they seem to you, floating on the water. This is subjective description,—putting the reader in the place, and letting him see it all from that point of view. So Spenser speaks of the "oars sweeping the watery wilderness;" and of the gusty winds "filling the sails with fear."

Perhaps the highest description ought to include both the lyric and dramatic elements. Here is a specimen of sea description, by an almost unknown American poet, Fenner, perfect in its way. The poem is called "Gulf Weed:"—

All nature becomes alive in the Spenserian description. Take, for example, the wonderful stanza which describes the music of the "Bower of Bliss:"—

Consider the splendid portrait of Belphoebe:—

If we examine this picture, we see that it is not a photograph, such as the sun makes, but a lover's description of his mistress. He sees her, not as she is, but as she is to him. He paints her out of his own heart. In her eyes he sees, not only brilliancy and color, but heavenly light; he reads in them an untouched purity of soul. Looking at her forehead, he sees, not whiteness and roundness, but goodness and honor. Shakespeare's lovers always describe their mistresses in this way, out of their own soul and heart. It is his own feeling that the lover gives, seeing perhaps "Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt."

After Chaucer and Spenser the next great English poets whose names naturally occur to us are Shakespeare and Milton.

Now, Shakespeare was the most objective dramatic writer who ever lived; while Milton was eminently and wholly a subjective and lyrical writer.

It is true that Shakespeare was so great that he is one of the very few men of genius in whom appear both of these elements. In his plays he is so objective that he is wholly lost in his characters, and his personality absolutely disappears; in his sonnets he "unlocks his heart" and is lyrical and subjective; he there gives us his inmost self, and we seem to know him as we know a friend with whom we have lived in intimate relations for years. Still, he will be best remembered by his plays; and into them he put the grandeur and universality of his genius; so we must necessarily consider him as the greatest dramatic genius of all time. But he belonged to a group of dramatic poets of whom he was the greatest: Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, Ford, Webster,—any one of whom would make the fortune of the stage to-day. It was a great age of dramatic literature, and it came very naturally to meet a demand. The play then was what the novel is to-day. As people to-day have no sooner read a new novel than they want another, so, in Shakespeare's time, they had no sooner seen a new play than they ran to see another. Hence the amazing fertility of the dramatic writers. Thomas Heywood wrote the whole or a part of two hundred and twenty plays. The manager of one of the theatres bought a hundred and six new plays for his stage in six years; and in the next five years a hundred and sixty. The price paid to an author for a play would now be equal to about two or three hundred dollars. The dramatic element, as is natural, abounds in these writings, though in some of them the author's genius is plainly lyrical. Such, for example, is Massinger's, who always reminds me of Schiller. Both wrote plays, but in both writers the faculty of losing themselves in their characters is wanting. The nobleness of Schiller appears in all his works, and constitutes a large part of their charm. So in Massinger all tends to generosity and elevation. His worst villains are ready to be converted and turn saints at the least provocation. Their wickedness is in a condition of unstable equilibrium; it topples over, and goodness becomes supreme in a single moment. Massinger could not create really wicked people; their wickedness is like a child's moment of passion or willfulness, ending presently in a flood of tears, and a sweet reconciliation with his patient mother. But how different was it with Shakespeare! Consider his Iago. How deeply rooted was his villainy! how it was a part of the very texture of his being! He had conformed to it the whole philosophy of his life. His cynical notions appear in the first scene. Iago believes in meanness, selfishness, everything that is base; to him all that seems good is either a pretense or a weakness. The man who does not seek the gratification of his own desires is a fool. There is to Iago nothing sweet, pure, fair, or true, in this world or the next. He profanes everything he touches. He sneers at the angelic innocence of Desdemona; he sneers at the generous, impulsive soul of Othello. When some one speaks to him of virtue, he says "Virtue? a fig! ’tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to which our wills are gardeners." You can plant nettles or lettuce as you please. That is to say, there is no reality in goodness. The virtue of Desdemona will be gone to-morrow, if she takes the whim. The Moor's faith in goodness is folly; it will cause him to be led by the nose. There is no converting such a man as that; or only when, by means of terrible disappointments and anguish, he is brought to see the reality of human goodness and divine providence. And that can hardly happen to him in this world.

Iago is a murderer of the soul, Macbeth a murderer of the body. The wickedness of Macbeth is different from that of Iago; that of Shylock and of Richard Third different again from either. Macbeth is a half-brute, a man in a low state of development, with little intellect and strong passions. Shylock is a highly intellectual man, not a cynic like Iago, but embittered by ill-treatment, made venomous by cruel wrong and perpetual contempt. Oppression has made this wise man mad. Richard Third, originally bad, has been turned into a cruel monster by the egotism born of power. He has the contempt for his race that belongs to the aristocrat, who looks on men in humbler places as animals of a lower order made for his use or amusement. Now, this wonderful power of differentiating characters belongs to the essence of the dramatic faculty. Each of these is developed from within, from a personal centre, and is true to that. Every manifestation of this central life is correlated to every other. If one of Shakespeare's characters says but ten words in one scene, and then ten words more in another, we recognize him as the same person. His speech bewrayeth him. So it is in human life. Every man is fatally consistent with himself. So, after we have seen a number of pictures by any one of the great masters, we recognize him again, as soon as we enter a gallery. We know him by a certain style. Inferior artists have a manner; great artists have a style; manner is born of imitation; style of originality. So, there is a special quality in every human being, if he will only allow it to unfold. The dramatic faculty recognizes this. Its knowledge of man is not a philosophy, nor a mere knowledge of human nature, but a perception of individual character. It first integrates men as human beings; then differentiates them as individuals. Play-writers, novelists, and artists who do not possess this dramatic genius cannot grow their characters from within, from a personal centre of life; but build them up from without, according to a plan. In description of nature, however, Shakespeare is, as he ought to be, subjective and lyric; he touches nature with human feelings. Take his description of a brook:—

The brook is gentle; then it becomes angry; then it is pacified and begins to sing; then it stops to kiss the sedge; then it is a pilgrim; and it walks willingly on to the ocean.

So in his sonnet:—

From Shakespeare, the marvel of dramatic genius, turn to Milton, and we find the opposite tendency unfolded.

The "Paradise Lost" is indeed dramatic in form, with different characters and dialogues, in hell, on earth, and in heaven. But in essence it is undramatic. Milton is never for a moment lost in his characters; his grand and noble soul is always appearing. Every one speaks as Milton would have spoken had Milton been in the same place, and looked at things from the same point of view. Sin and Satan, for example, both talk like John Milton. Sin is very conscientious, and before she will unlock the gate of hell she is obliged to argue herself into a conviction that it is right to do so. Satan, she says, is her father, and children ought to obey their parents; so, since he tells her to unlock the gate, she ought to do so. Death reproaches Satan, in good set terms, for his treason against the Almighty; and Satan, as we all know, utters the noblest sentiments, and talks as Milton would have talked, had Milton been in Satan's position.1

Coming down nearer to our own time, we find a duad of great English poets, usually associated in our minds,—Byron and Scott.

Scott was almost the last of the dramatic poets of England, using the word dramatic in its large sense. His plays never amounted to much; but his stories in verse and in prose are essentially dramatic. In neither does he reveal himself. In all his poetry you scarcely find a reference to his personal feelings. In the L'Envoi to the "Lady of the Lake" there is a brief allusion of this sort, touching because so unusual, and almost the only one I now recall. Addressing the "Harp of the North" he says:—

Scott, like Chaucer, brings before us a long succession of characters, from many classes, countries, and times. Scotch barons and freebooters, English kings, soldiers, gentlemen, crusaders, Alpine peasants, mediÆval counts, serfs, Jews, Saxons,—brave, cruel, generous,—all sweep past us, in a long succession of pictures; but of Scott himself nothing appears except the nobleness and purity of the tone which pervades all. He is therefore eminently a dramatic or objective writer.

But Byron is the exact opposite. The mighty exuberance of his genius, which captivated his age, and the echoes of which thrill down to ours, in all its vast overflow of passion, imagination, wit,—ever sounded but one strain,—himself. His own woes, his own wrongs are the ever-recurring theme. Though he wrote many dramas, he was more undramatic than Milton. Every character in every play is merely a thinly disguised Byron. It was impossible for him to get away from himself. If Tennyson's lovely line tells the truth when he says,—

then Byron never really loved; for in his poetry the chord of self never passes out of sight.

In his plays the principal characters are Byron undiluted—as Manfred, Sardanapalus, Cain, Werner, Arnold. All the secondary characters are Byron more or less diluted,—Byron and water, may we say? Never, since the world began, has there been a poet so steeped in egotism, so sick of self-love as he; and the magnificence of his genius appears in the unfailing interest which he can give to this monotonous theme.

But he was the example of a spirit with which the whole age was filled to saturation. Almost all the nineteenth century poets of England are subjective, giving us their own experience, sentiments, reflections, philosophies. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, revolve in this enchanted and enchanting circle. Keats and Coleridge seem capable of something different. So, in the double star, made up of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the first is absolutely personal and lyric, the second sometimes objective and dramatic. And in that other double star of Shelley and Keats the same difference may be noted.

A still more striking instance of the combination of these antagonisms is to be found in our time, in Robert Browning and his wife. Mrs. Browning is wholly lyric, like a bird which sings its own tender song of love and hope and faith till "that wild music burdens every bough;" and those "mournful hymns" hush the night to listening sympathy.

But in her husband we have a genuine renaissance of the old dramatic power of the English bards. Robert Browning is so dramatic that he forgets himself and his readers too, in his characters and their situations. To study the varieties of men and women is his joy; to reproduce them unalloyed, his triumph.

One curious instance of this self-oblivious immersion in the creations of his mind occurs to me. In one of his early poems called "In a Gondola"—as it first appeared—two lovers are happily conversing, until in a moment, we know not why, the tone becomes one of despair, and they bid each other an eternal farewell. Why this change of tone there is no explanation. In a later edition he condescends to inform us, inserting a note to this effect: "He is surprised and stabbed." This is the opposite extreme to Milton's angels carefully explaining to each other that they possess a specific levity which enables them to drop upward.

If we think of our own poets whose names are usually connected,—Longfellow and Lowell, for instance,—we shall easily see which is dramatic and which lyric. But the only man of truly dramatic faculty whom we have possessed was one in whom the quality never fully ripened,—I mean Edgar Allan Poe.

In foreign literature we may trace the same tendency of men of genius to arrange themselves in couplets. Take, for instance, in Italy, Dante and Petrarch; in France, Voltaire and Rousseau; in Germany, Goethe and Schiller. Dante is dramatic, losing himself in his stern subject, his dramatic characters; his awful pictures of gloomy destiny. Petrarch is lyrical, personal, singing forever his own sad and sweet fate. Again, Voltaire is essentially dramatic,—immersed in things, absorbed in life, a man reveling in all human accident and adventure, and aglow with faith in an earthly paradise. The sad Rousseau goes apart, away from men; standing like Byron, among them, but not of them; in a cloud of thoughts that are not their thoughts. And, once more, though Goethe resembles Shakespeare in this, that some of his works are subjective, and others objective,—though, in the greatness of his mind he reconciles all the usual antagonisms of thought,—yet the fully developed Goethe, like the fully developed Shakespeare, disappears in his characters and theme. Life to him, in all its forms, was so intensely interesting that his own individual and subjective sentiments are left out of sight. But Schiller stands opposed to Goethe, as being a dramatist devoid of dramatic genius, but full of personal power; so grand in his nobleness of soul, so majestic in the aspirations of his sentiment, so full of patriotic ardor and devotion to truth and goodness, that he moves all hearts as he walks through his dramas,—the great poet visible in every scene and every line. As his tried and noble friend says of him in an equally undying strain:—

Goethe's characters and stories covered the widest range: Faust, made sick with too much thought, and seeking outward joy as a relief; Werther, a self-absorbed sentimentalist; Tasso, an Italian man of genius, a mixture of imagination, aspiration, sensitive self-distrust; susceptible to opinion, sympathetic; Iphigenia, a picture of antique calm, simplicity, purity, classic repose, like that of a statue; Hermann and Dorothea, a sweet idyl of modern life, in a simple-minded German village with an opinionated, honest landlord, a talkative apothecary, a motherly landlady, a sensible and good pastor, and the two young lovers.

This law of duality, or reaction of genius on genius, will also be found to apply to artists, philosophers, historians, orators. These also come in pairs, manifesting the same antagonistic qualities.

Some artists are lyric; putting their own souls into every face, every figure, making even a landscape alive with their own mood; adding—

In every landscape of Claude we find the soul of Claude; in every rugged rock-defile of Salvator we read his mood. These artists are lyric; but there are also great dramatic painters, who give you, not themselves, but men and women; so real, so differentiated, characters so full of the variety and antagonism of nature, that the whole life of a period springs into being at their touch.

Take for instance two names, which always go together, standing side by side at the summit of Italian art,—Michael Angelo and Raphael. Though Raphael was a genius of boundless exuberance, and poured on the wall and canvas a flood of forms, creating as nature creates, without pause or self-repetition, yet there is a tone in all which irresistibly speaks of the artist's own soul. He created a world of Raphaels. Grace, sweetness, and tenderness went into all his work. Every line has the same characteristic qualities.

Turn to the frescoes by Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel. As we look up at those mighty forms—prophets, sibyls, seers, with multitudes of subordinate figures—we gradually trace in each prophet, king, or bard an individual character. Each one is himself. How fully each face and attitude is differentiated by some inward life. How each—David, Isaiah, Ezekiel, the Persian and the Libyan sibyl—stands out, distinct, filled with a power or a tenderness all his own. Michael Angelo himself is not there, except as a fountain of creative life, from whose genius all these majestic persons come forth as living realities.

Hanging on my walls are the well-known engravings of Guido's Aurora and Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper. One of these is purely lyrical; the other as clearly dramatic.

The Aurora is so exquisitely lovely, the forms so full of grace, the movement of all the figures so rapid yet so firm, that I can never pass it without stopping to enjoy its charms. But variety is absent. The hours are lovely sisters, as Ovid describes sisters:—

But when we turn to the Last Supper, we see the dramatic artist at his best. The subject is such as almost to compel a monotonous treatment, but there is a wonderful variety in the attitudes and grouping. Each apostle shows by his attitude, gesture, expression, that he is affected differently from all the others. Even the feet under the table speak. Stand before the picture; put yourself into the attitude of each apostle, and you will immediately understand his state of mind.2

The mediÆval religious artists were subjective, sentimental, lyrical. In a scene like the crucifixion, all the characters, whether apostles, Roman soldiers, or Jewish Pharisees, hang their heads like bulrushes.

But see how Rubens, that great dramatic painter, represents the scene. The Magdalen, wild with grief, with disheveled hair, has thrown herself at the foot of the cross, clasping and kissing the feet of Jesus. On the other faces are terror, dismay, doubt, unbelief, mockery, curiosity, triumph, despair,—according to each person's character and attitude toward the event. Meantime the Roman centurion, seated on his splendid horse, is deliberately and carefully striking his spear into the side of the sufferer. His face expresses only that he has a duty to perform and means to fulfill it perfectly.

As Rubens is greatly dramatic, his pupil and follower, Vandyke, is a great lyrical artist, whose noble aspiration and generous sentiment shows itself in all his work.

The school of Venice, with Titian and Tintoretto at its head, is grandly dramatic and objective. The school of Florence, with Guido and Domenichino at its head, eminently lyrical and subjective.

If we had time, we might show that the two masters of Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle, are, the one lyrical, and intensely subjective, platonizing the universe; and the other as evidently objective, immersed in the study of things; rejoicing in their variety, their individuality, their persistence of type.

The two masters of Greek history, Herodotus and Thucydides, stand opposed to each other in the same way. Herodotus is the story-teller, the dramatic raconteur, whose charming tales are as entertaining as the "Arabian Nights." Thucydides is the personal historian who puts himself into his story, and determines its meaning and moral according to his own theories and convictions.

We have another example in Livy and Tacitus.

The two great American orators most frequently mentioned together are Webster and Clay. Though you would smile if I were to call either of them a lyric or a dramatic speaker, yet the essential distinction we have been considering may be clearly seen in them. Clay's inspiration was personal, his influence, personal influence. His theme was nothing; his treatment of it everything. But Webster rose or fell with the magnitude and importance of the occasion and argument. When on the wrong side, he failed, for his intellect would not work well except in the service of reality and truth. But Clay was perhaps greatest when arguing against all facts and all reason. Then he summoned all his powers,—wit, illustration, analogy, syllogisms, appeals to feeling, prejudice, and passion; and so swept along his confused and blinded audience to his conclusions.

I think that subjective writers are loved more than dramatic. We admire the one and we love the other. We admire Shakespeare and love Milton; we admire Chaucer and love Spenser; we admire Dante and love Petrarch; we admire Goethe and love Schiller; and if Byron had not been so selfish a man, we should have loved him too. We admire Michael Angelo and love Raphael; we admire Rubens and love Vandyke; we admire Robert Browning and love Mrs. Browning. In short, we care more for the man who gives us himself than for the man who gives us the whole outside world.

I have been able to give you only a few hints of this curious distinction in art and literature. But if we carry it in our mind, we shall find it a key by which many doors may be unlocked. It will enable us to classify authors, and understand them better.