“O Proserpina,
For the flowers now, that, frighted, thou let’st fall
From Dis’s waggon! daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets, dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes,
Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses,
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phœbus in his strength, a malady
Most incident to maids.”
And then comes this criticism:
“Observe how the imagination in these last lines goes into the very
inmost soul of every flower, after having touched them all at first
with that heavenly timidness, the shadow of Proserpine’s, and gilded
them with celestial gathering, and never stops on their spots or
their bodily shape; while Milton sticks in the stains upon them and
puts us off with that unhappy freak of jet in the very flower that,
without this bit of paper-staining, would have been the most precious
to us of all. ‘There is pansies, that’s for thoughts.’”
I do not know whether this comparison has ever been the subject of
adverse comment: I have often heard it praised. To me, I confess, it
seems a compendium of all the faults that a critic of poetry should
avoid: waywardness, preciosity, inattention, and the uncritical use of
critical labels. In the first place the critic has ignored what is of
the first consequence, the motive of the two pieces, and has treated
them as parallel flower-passages from a volume of elegant extracts;
whereas no criticism can be to the point that does not recognize that
Milton’s flowers are being gathered for a funeral, and Shakespeare’s
are not to be gathered at all; they are visionary spring flowers, seen
in glory through the autumn haze. Without going at length through
each passage it is worth noticing that Shakespeare’s lines about the
primrose are open to precisely the same censure, no more and no less,
as Mr Ruskin accords to Milton’s pansy. The epithet “pale” is very far
from “going into the very inmost soul” of the primrose, which is a
hardy flower, and not in the least anæmic; it “sticks in the stains”
upon the surface as much as the “freaked with jet”; and this, again,
so far from being “unhappy,” gives the reason why the pansy was chosen
for the hearse among the flowers that “sad embroidery wear.” A second
point to notice concerns the lines that are marked “nugatory.” Both
Shakespeare and Milton had the instinct to see that just as, on the
one hand, a flower-passage must not be a mere catalogue, so, on the
other, each item must not be unduly emphasized. And so we find that,
while Milton has his “tufted crow-toe and pale jessamine,” and his
“well-attir’d woodbine” to make up the bunch, Shakespeare also has his
“Bold oxlips, and
The crown-imperial, lilies of all kinds,
The flower-de-luce being one!”
a “nugatory” passage which Mr Ruskin omits from his quotation. So much,
then, for the contrast of Imagination and Fancy, which critics might
now be content to let die.
In resuming what has been said about the two great characteristics of
the poetical mind, its passion and its imagination, it may be useful
to illustrate from the picture that our great dramatist has drawn of
the poetical character in the person of Macbeth. Macbeth, indeed, was
a poet without a conscience; but that circumstance is to the advantage
of our illustration, since we shall not be able to confuse his morality
with his poetry. There are several points that may be noticed.
1. First, though on this much stress must not be laid, we observe
Macbeth’s power of summoning up, and vividly objectifying impressions
of sense. He sees an air-drawn dagger. He hears a voice say, “Sleep no
more.”
2. Secondly, and this is fundamental, we remark the passionate
intensity with which he realizes whatever comes before him, his own
states of mind, or events that happen, and sees them in all their
attendant circumstances and consequences. No fact that at all interests
him remains a barren fact to him, and most facts do interest him. When
he is contemplating the death of Duncan he appreciates thoroughly and
entirely all that is involved in that death:--
“He’s here in double trust:
First, as I am his kinsman, and his subject,
Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off.”
So he goes from point to point, realizing as he goes. Even more
striking is the way in which he is moved after the murder by Duncan’s
untroubled condition, thoroughly appreciating it:--
“Duncan is in his grave;
After life’s fitful fever, he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch him further!”
Or consider the passage at the end of the play, where he is
contemplating his own deserted state:--
“I have liv’d long enough; my way of life
Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, but dare not.”
Especially characteristic here of the poet seems to me the pause on the
idea of curses, to realize them, before going further, “curses, not
_loud_, but _deep_.”
3. In the third place, we remark that, as Macbeth realizes with such
vividness and such emotion the qualities of everything that appeals to
him, so one thing is always suggesting another with similar qualities:--
“Then comes my fit again; I had else been perfect;
Whole as the _marble_, founded as the _rock_,
As broad and general as the casing _air_;
But now I am cabin’d, cribb’d, confined.”
When the ghostly voice that he hears, the echo of his own imaginative
mind, suggests to him the terrible thought that he has murdered not
the king only, but Sleep, the greatest friend of man, he is at once
absorbed in the thought of all the wonder and mystery of sleep, which
he draws out into a long string of images; forgetting all about the
business he had been engaged in, and the bloody daggers in his hand,
until his practical wife in blank amazement breaks in with, “What do
you mean?” No one, again, is likely to forget the desolate images under
which he sums up his idea of the worthlessness and meaninglessness of
human life:
“Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is seen no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
4. I would point out, further, as a frequent trait of the poetic
nature, Macbeth’s simplicity; shown partly by his interest in his own
moods; for example, in such sayings as “False face must hide what the
false heart doth know”; more curiously in his speculation why he could
not say “Amen” when the groom he was about to murder said, “God bless
us”; most curiously in his irritation at ghost-walking:--
“The times have been
That, when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end; but now they rise again,
With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,
And push us from our stools; this is more strange
Than such a murder is.”
5. Finally, though in this I am trespassing on a subject which I
hope to discuss in a second lecture, we cannot but observe Macbeth’s
extraordinary talent for expression. I will give but one instance.
Shakespeare, whether by design or chance, has reserved for him what
is, perhaps, the most remarkable presentment in literature of the
phenomenon of falling night--
“Light thickens,”
an expression which gives not only the fact of growing darkness, but
also its qualities.
The picture of the poetical nature that Shakespeare has given us in
Macbeth is considerably heightened if by the side of it we add for
contrast his Richard II. Without working out the parallel in any
detail, it will be enough to call attention to two points. In the first
place, Richard has no imagination in the sense which we have seen
reason to give to that term; he has no intuition into the scope and
meaning and consequences of human actions. Compare, for instance, with
Macbeth’s picture of old age, Richard’s picture of a dethroned king:--
“I’ll give my jewels for a set of beads,
My gorgeous palace for a hermitage;
My gay apparel for an almsman’s gown,
My figured goblets for a dish of wood;
My sceptre for a palmer’s walking staff,
My subjects for a pair of carved saints;
And my large kingdom for a little grave,” &c.
The points in the picture which rouse Richard’s emotion, and which
he sets out before us, are all merely superficial; never once does
he touch the real heart of the matter. The other noticeable thing is
that Richard is much less interested in persons or events than in his
feelings about them, and then only in such as are lamentable; and
perhaps, it would be true to add, less in the lamentable feelings than
in the pathetic language in which they can be expressed. He “hammers
out” a simile as though it was an end in itself, and is moved by a
curious phrase so as almost to forget his troubles. In the coronation
scene, after Richard has cast down the looking-glass with the words,
“How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face,”
Bolingbroke, with all a practical man’s contempt of play-acting and
rhetoric, satirically replies:--
“The shadow of your sorrow hath destroyed
The shadow of your face,”
whereupon Richard is at once arrested:--
“Say that again!
The shadow of my sorrow! ha! let’s see!”
Could there be a more vivid portrait of the “minor poet” or
sentimentalist?