we think of Shylock and Jessica as historical beings who veritably once
trod the Piazza and the Merceria of Venice. The great novelist who wrote
_Vanity Fair_ possessed a rare measure of this power; but in him it was
limited by the limitations of his sympathies and by his less amiable
view of men. So was it with Carlyle. In Shakespeare it is boundless. To
him all ages, all sorts and conditions of men and women, are
understandable and worthy of interest. Intuitively he knows them, walks
with them, talks with them, feels with them. They may be heroes, sages,
fools, villains: they may be witty or stupid, refined or gross. Their
characters may be direct and plain as those of Lear and Kent, or they
may be as subtly shaded as that of Hamlet or of the melancholy
soliloquist of Arden. He can in imagination traverse the whole gamut of
feeling. He can be what or whom he will. This is the imagination in
which Shakespeare is unsurpassable. This more than all powers, unless it
be that of humour, is the one which Nature must bestow, and which
nothing but Nature can bestow. And this is the power which alone can
make drama convincing and immortal. Compare with the living and
breathing reality of the characters in even the poorest of the
Shakespearean plays, the wordy automata of Swinburne's _Faliero_ or the
frigid figures who talk through Tennyson's _Cup_. There are those who
compare Scott with Shakespeare in the gift of visualising and vitalising
the past. We Englishmen may leave it to the Scotchman Carlyle to settle
with that comparison. For my own part, as a student of antiquity, I
would maintain that, despite all petty anachronism, Shakespeare in his
Roman plays comes nearer to the essential truth than any merely
professional student can ever come. What he gives us is not archaeology,
not the exact Forum nor the precise etiquette of the toga, but the man,
the Caesar, the Coriolanus, the greasy populace, their heart and
mind--these he sees with the penetrating eye of an imagination which
never fails.
Of imagination, in this sense, wit and humour are a vital part. Without
them you may imagine an Othello or a Lear, but you cannot imagine a
Falstaff, a Touchstone, a Mercutio, or a Bottom. In this domain
Shakespeare is sometimes thought to be rivalled by Aristophanes and
Moliere. Yet one who read all three will find that these are his rivals
rather in broad strokes of humour and flashes of wit than in the
subtler virtues of his humour. His humour is all-pervading, it is colour
woven into the whole tissue of thinking, speaking, and action. Nay, true
humour is like the colour of a flower or leaf. It belongs to the nature
of the plant, and is carried in the sap of its life. To talk like
Falstaff, you must in imagination become Falstaff, feel as he would do,
think as he would think. You cannot lay on the Falstaffian humour by a
reasoning process from the outside. The result may be clever, but it
will lack just that subtle and evasive quality which the modern cant
seeks to describe by the word "inevitable." A merely brilliant man--a
Sheridan, for instance--might make the endeavour, and gain some
considerable applause. But Shakespeare for the moment lived the part,
the humour came to him with the part, whether the humour of clowns and
gravediggers, of Jaques, or of the moody prince of Denmark.
Essential also to such humour is the broad and tolerant temper which can
not only suffer fools gladly, as being a large and representative class
of God's creatures, but can actually rejoice in their folly as a thing
delectable to a healthy contemplation.
But when the piece has been thus constructed with a master hand, and
when the characters have been informed by imagination with all the
convincingness of infinitely varied life, with humour, with sound and
healthy and impartial understanding, much is still left. There is still
to be considered the language or expression in which all is clothed. And
in this respect the writer who has written best in any tongue, falls,
when compared with Shakespeare, a step into the rear. Not Milton, for
all his organ flood of noble phrase; not Shelley, for all his burning
and rapturous utterance, can vie with the actor-playwright of the Globe
in his gift of eloquence. It is entirely marvellous and beyond all
explanation. No mere study or scholarship could attain to that
inexhaustible fund, not merely of words, but of the right words. Orators
and writers there are a many who never fail to find a word, and a good
word, for the rounding of their sentences. But Shakespeare's words are
not merely good words; they are the best words. Even the bare vocabulary
of Burke or Macaulay would seem second-rate beside the vocabulary of
Shakespeare. It is a commonplace to dilate upon the fact that
Shakespeare has used 15,000 words, while Milton, our poet of widest
reading and erudition, has but 8,000. I do not attach so much importance
to that enumeration. The subjects, the sides of life, the classes of
persons of whom Shakespeare treats, are so comprehensive of high and
low, serious and jocose, while Milton's are confined to a range of such
seriousness and dignity, that the comparison is but fallacious.
Nevertheless this vast repertoire of words is in itself an amazing
phenomenon. Still more amazing is the consummate tact with which he
makes use of them, in sentences so terse and clear that they
increasingly pass into the proverbs of everyday. And most amazing is
that, with all his characters, and all their speeches, he never repeats
himself. No better proof could be given that the speaker is for the
moment not Shakespeare, but the character in which he has sunk himself.
We need not pretend that he does not sometimes run riot in his power;
yet, how seldom, in the day of his maturity, is that "sometimes," when
we rightly understand his meanings.
Let critics, observing always who speaks and in what spirit he speaks,
try to improve a word in a typical passage of Shakespeare. They speedily
realise the error of their ways.
Take at random the very simplest line, say: "How sweet the moonlight
sleeps upon this bank"; substitute some other word for "sweet" or
"sleeps," and examine the result. The very sound of the line possesses
the tone of the moonlight and the hour, the mood of Lorenzo and Jessica.
Try an easy-looking similitude:--
How like a younker or a prodigal
The scarfed bark puts from her native bay,
Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind!
How like a prodigal doth she return,
With over-weather'd ribs and ragged sails,
Lean, rent, and beggared by the strumpet wind!
And, if the man who writes this nervous Saxon, writes elsewhere--
No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
that also is a lesson to those who have any notion of what is meant by
the right word in the right place.
To me Shakespeare is the most stupendously eloquent man who ever set pen
to paper. Shakespeare, says Goethe, offers us golden apples in silver
dishes. But Goethe was a foreigner, he perhaps hardly realised that the
dishes of English expression are, to the English reader who responds to
the niceties of his own tongue, not less golden than the apples.
To these perfections let us add another, his superb sense of rhythm.
Properly speaking, this is but an integral part of perfect eloquence. It
is the concern of the poet, not only to make the words express the
meaning, but to make the cadence express the tone and mood; to make it,
in fact, answer to those rhythmic vibrations of the brain which go with
all states of mental exaltation. It is Emerson who observes that
"Shakespeare's sonnets are like the tone of voice of some incomparable
person." He was doubtless thinking of their general effect upon our mood
and spirit, but his remark is true of the mere movement of Shakespeare's
lyric lines:--
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.
Or--
When in the chronicle of wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights,
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme
In praise of ladies dead, and lovely knights,
and so on.
Here, as in the dramas, are no mechanical tricks, no obvious compassing
of sickly sweetnesses. The accent falls where it should, unstrained. The
disguised alliteration comes, as almost always in Milton also, not from
set and conscious purpose, but from the promptings of a mind vibrating
with harmonious suggestion.
This catalogue of virtues has been long, but it has required some
self-command to prevent it from being longer. It justifies the
exclamation with which Mr. Sidney Lee closes his life of Shakespeare, an
exclamation which he deftly borrows from Hamlet: "How noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in apprehension how like a God!"
So much for Nature's making. With such lavish powers, or at least
potentialities, was Shakespeare born. It is appalling to reflect that
their fruit might all have been lost to the world if John Shakespeare,
the father, had been but a little poorer than he actually was; if
William, the son, had been sent to the plough-tail without the
rudiments of education, and so had been banished for ever from contact
with bright spirits and all the brilliant motley of London life. His
fate would have been that of Gray's rural "mute inglorious Milton" and
the headstone with "Here lies William Shakespeare" would have meant
nothing outside the parish, and very little inside it. It is an alarming
thought also that, had he been born half a century later, though with
every educational advantage, his manhood would have fallen under the
grim Puritan tyranny, and he would never have written a play. It is a
peculiarly happy combination of circumstances which we must thank for
the making of Shakespeare as he is.
Nature produced the wonderful plant, but, for its perfect development, a
plant requires a congenial soil and atmosphere; it needs light and
water; it needs protection from early destruction, or stunting, or
starvation. It may seem heterodox, but I would maintain stubbornly,
against all the phalanx of Baconians and Bedlamites, that, for the
cultivation of Shakespeare's peculiar genius, circumstances were almost
wholly propitious. His very poverty was his stimulus. Even that school
education of his, which is made by misunderstanding to appear so scant
and pitiful, was, I doubt not, better adapted to his career than if he
had been filled with all the learning of Verulam or Ben Jonson. But of
that anon.
The first happy circumstance was the epoch at which he saw the light.
In modern times two forms of poetry contend for the supremacy. The third
kind, the epic, is dead. No Homer or Virgil can ever more arise, unless
as a novelist in prose. Of the two perennial kinds, one is the
lyric--the consummate blending of language and music which utters the
cry of individual passion from the individual heart. The other is the
drama, the presentation of human life in visible form, realised in all
its complexity of motives, characters and moods. Both of these
flourished mightily in Shakespeare's generation. Lyric poets were
innumerable. The whole country rang with songs. The Elizabethan
Miscellanies and Rhapsodies and Dainty Devices are testimony stronger
even than the great names of Spenser and the sonneteers. No less did
drama appeal to high and low, the Puritan always excepted. But the day
of the Puritan had not yet dawned. The taste of society of every grade
was for the theatre, but a theatre without scenery, in which it was
required of the drama that it should be rich in high poetry. Poetry was
just then both a fashion and a passion of the nation, as it never was
before and never has been since. To a man born, like Shakespeare, with
both the lyric and the dramatic gift, the age was full of example and
stimulus, and, better still, full of challenge and exacting poetic
standards. There is an immense difference between writing an artistic
sonnet for a wide public which desires to read artistic sonnets, or
composing a poetic drama for a wide public which desires to see poetic
dramas, and doing these things for a narrow public which, after all,
rather tolerates your efforts than demands them.
We are not concerned with the question what Shakespeare might have been
if he had lived in his prime to-day. He might perhaps have become a
superlative novel-writer, since that is the field in which creation
appears to be playing its chief part. But our concern is to perceive
what causes helped to fashion him to that which he in fact became.
Let us first glance for a few moments at those spacious times of great
Elizabeth. Why so wondrously prolific in song and play? Why so
provocative of genius?
First, we may lay down the proposition that it is not times of national
misery and poverty, not times of insecurity and fear, not times of weak
convictions and cynicism, that produce a wealth of either great poets or
great art. There is not one distinguished literary or artistic period
of any country at which the national spirit was not full of the
animation, enterprise, and confidence of a general well-being, or at
which it was not possessed by high ideas and strong aims or strong
convictions. I am speaking in broad summary. Whatever qualifications may
be made for unique phenomena, this statement in the main is true. At
such periods the mental vitality of a community is high; the air is
charged with intellectual and artistic electricity, and great talents
everywhere become the receivers and gathering-points of those electric
currents. Hence poets, artists, and other creators appear simultaneously
in clusters; production is abundant both in matter and in kind. At such
times there is nothing withdrawn or particularly refined about the
creations which pour forth. There is no room for the dilettante or
_petit maitre_, and not much for the professional critic; it is the age
of strong men; writing, painting, sculpture are full of vigour,
inspiration, earnestness.
It was so at Athens in that glorious age of Pericles and the succeeding
generation, the age of the great tragedians, of Thucydides, of
Aristophanes and of Phidias. It was so--though with men of less
original genius--in the Augustan Rome of Virgil, Horace and Livy. It was
so in the rich and ardent cities of Renaissance Italy, where Da Vinci,
Raphael, Michel Angelo, and Titian flourished in the same space of
thirty years. It was so in the France of Louis Quatorze, when Corneille,
Racine, Moliere, Pascal, and numbers of others of hardly smaller note,
were writing side by side. And it was so in the times of great
Elizabeth. According to Emerson there is a mental zymosis or contagion
prevailing in society at such epochs. Some one has said that "No member
of either house of the British Parliament will be ranked among the
orators whom Lord North did not see or who did not see Lord North." If
so, the cause will be found to lie in the encouragement which noble
oratory then received, whereas at a later day it has "fallen into
abatement and low price."
The age of Elizabeth was one of material prosperity and comfort. It was,
in the main, well with men's bodies and well with their minds. They
possessed not only the leisure, not only the means, but also the
disposition to enjoy. It is not for the artist in any field to scorn the
material prosperity of the community in which he works. After all, as
history will show, it is that prosperity which makes him possible.
"Plain living and high thinking" is good for himself; it is good for a
nation; but plain living does not mean poverty, squalor or starvation,
while high thinking cannot be done without leisure and resource. You
cannot build glorious Gothic cathedrals or order sublime Madonnas out of
nothing.
Elizabethan England lived in comfort. It lived also in the security of
at least internal peace. The Civil Wars, which had unsettled men of all
ranks and distracted their thoughts and energies, were over. Those
thoughts and energies now sought another outlet. On the whole it was
also an age of tolerance. England had not entered upon its phase of
Puritan bigotry, nor on its licentious Anti-Puritan vengeance. Religion
was in less degree a battle-ground. There were, of course, hostilities
of Protestants, Catholics, and Brownists, but the two hundred and odd
sects of the twentieth century were still far off, and men's time and
intellectual energies--of which there is but a limited amount--were not
wasted in futile discussion of sectarian minutiae.
At ease in mind, body and estate, it was natural that the age should be
one of frank enjoyment--enjoyment of all that gladdens mind or eye or
ear, enjoyment of rich clothes, fine houses, shows, pageantries, music,
song, stories, and plays. In the revels which Scott in his _Kenilworth_
makes Leicester prepare for the reception of Elizabeth, he is drawing
upon his study of the times. Above all entertainments the play was the
thing, and whether performed before the mixed auditory of the new
theatres of Shoreditch or on the Southwark side, or before the Benchers
of the Inns of Court, or before the Queen's Majesty herself, the drama
received a welcome compared with which its appreciation in our midst is
as cold as it is stinted.
And yet all this might have produced in literature and art nothing but
pomp and show, or amusement more or less vulgar. In the theatre it might
have ended in farce or melodrama. But happily, along with prosperity and
the feeling for enjoyment, conditions were at work which made for the
keenest activity of mind and every form of intellectual expansion. It
would be to enlarge upon a trite theme indeed, if one dwelt upon the
enterprise and discovery of bold spirits like Francis Drake, and upon
the eager curiosity, the ready imagination, the universal
open-mindedness, which ran through the nation, as new worlds were opened
or looked for in the western or southern seas.
More important, all-important in truth, was the avid mastery of new
knowledge which had followed the Renaissance and the invention of
printing. The ancient writers of Greece and Rome were all recovered, and
were being greedily absorbed. Old thoughts, ideas, fancies,
knowledge--long buried and shamefully forgotten--had become new again.
The curiosity which followed the voyages of Drake or Raleigh to America,
followed also the explorations of the scholar in the ever-opening seas
of ancient literature. The age became one of wide and plenteous reading.
Moreover men read then, as they ought to read, for the matter. They tore
the heart out of books, from Homer to Seneca; they were greedy for the
substance, the thoughts, the imaginations, the fancies. If they could
not read the originals, they insisted on the translations. Nor did they
stay at the classics. They devoured books in Italian and French. Never
has England been so cosmopolitan, at least so European, in its
absorption of ideas and knowledge. It is only since the icebound
Puritan days that England has become insular, self-contained, in part
hugely conceited, and in part absurdly diffident, concerning itself. The
best work of Byron and Shelley aimed at breaking down this attitude, and
if we are again growing out of our insularity--which is open to much
doubt--it is in no small measure due to writers of their kind.
I do not offer all these commonplaces as information. I offer them
simply as reminders, and as a necessary introduction to the remark which
I have next to make--that the enlightenment, the education, above all
the spirit, derived from this wealth of reading were precisely that sort
of enlightenment and education and spirit which make for splendid
poetry. The learning of the day was in no wise scientific in the
narrower modern sense. It was not of the material and utilitarian, still
less of the sordid, kind. The age was the least Philistine of all epochs
of English history. We were not yet a nation of shopkeepers. It is
inevitable that nowadays an immense proportion of our study and reading
should run to social and economic questions, to applied sciences, to the
investigation of germs and gases, political problems, electric forces,
and manures. There is, I have often maintained, no necessary antagonism
whatever between these intellectual pursuits and the pursuit of art and
literature. One should be but the complement of the other. Goethe and
Shelley could combine the love of both science and poetry. If the
physicist and the artistic creator quarrel, then each is blind in one
mental eye.
Be that as it may, the fact for us just now is that the reading and
learning of those spacious Elizabethan days were such that, with the
brightening of the intellect, there was no dimming of the imagination.
On the contrary, the effect of the recovery and the spread of all the
rich, warm, many-coloured creations of the world's best minds, was to
steep the English nation in enthusiasm for great lyrics, great dramas,
any great production which carried with it the warmth and brightness and
exhilarating breath of noble poetry.
There was no weakening of character in this, no loss of practical
efficiency. A Sidney or a Raleigh could fight as well as turn a verse; a
Shakespeare could prove as sound a man of business as he was a poet.
Elizabethan men were all-round men, like the best men in Periclean
Athens.
Moreover, the recovered classics imparted not only enthusiasm, but
standards. An ambitious writer of the Elizabethan age must do his best
to live up to Homer and Plato, to Virgil and Catullus, just as he must
live up to Petrarch.
And one thing more. When Spenser or Shakespeare or their contemporaries
took up their pens, there was ready to their use the magnificent
Elizabethan English tongue--a store inexhaustibly rich, and all the
richer for being free from huge piles of needless rubbish, called
vocabulary, which modern times have heaped into the long-suffering
dictionary. The speech of the English Bible, which rightly seems to us
so inimitably noble in its simplicity, was but the contemporary speech
of educated England. Fine expressive words had not yet been soiled with
all ignoble use. They had not been debauched by slang or vulgarized by
affectation. The Elizabethan language possessed the noble solid grandeur
of a statue of Phidias or Angelo. At its best now it is apt to pose like
the enervated Apollo Belvedere or an over-refined production of Canova.
Says that vigorous writer, Lowell: "In reading Hakluyt's Voyages, we are
almost startled now and then to find that even common sailors could not
tell the story of their wanderings without rising to an almost Odyssean
strain, and habitually used a diction that we should be glad to buy back
from desuetude at any cost."
Here, then, is an epoch of history, prosperous, high-spirited, tolerant,
enterprising, joyous, alert for knowledge, enamoured of high fancies and
imagination. Here also is a language of ample scope and noble powers.
And into the midst of a London like this there comes up from Stratford,
we know not how, a man marvellously dowered with all those supreme gifts
which I have endeavoured to describe.
Towards the making of Shakespeare, Nature has contributed her utmost.
For the full encouragement of his genius the environment is most apt. It
remains briefly to see what experience did for him, or what he did for
himself. What was his preparation?
His origin was lowly, and, as with Robert Burns, we may be glad of it.
He thus saw intimately certain sides of life and conditions of men which
otherwise he might never have touched so closely. He learned to know all
their strange and naive humours, their ignorance and muddlement. From
them he realised those strong and elemental passions which finer folk
attenuate or disguise. He acquired a stock of sinewy and home-coming
Saxon phrase, which often stood him in good stead, and which forms no
small factor in his vast eloquence. He is manifestly a man who forgot
nothing. In after days he mingled with wits and players, with poets and
peers, but, while ever acquiring diction of wider range and choicer
degree, he kept always ready to hand the language of peasant and clown.
No man ever enjoyed more full instruction in the speech, the thoughts,
or the manners, of all degrees of men.
Of women toward the social summits he perhaps never knew so much, but he
had not studied their humbler sisters in vain, and beneath all the width
of ruff and opulence of silk, he knew well enough what primal feelings
lurked, what affections, what jealousies, what caprices of the eternal
feminine. As for the mere externals of their behaviour, he had abundant
opportunities of noting them.
When modern readers censure Shakespeare for dubious things which he
makes his gentlewomen say and do, they are apt to forget how surprising
were the canons of behaviour and decorum for gentlewomen under good
Queen Bess. For my part I am prepared in all such cases to give their
keen-eyed and marvellous contemporary the benefit of the doubt. He would
not represent ladies as any coarser than they were.