“He encouraged me to write a short paper, in the form of a letter to _The
Spectator_, on the inner meaning of the whole poem, which I did, simply
upon the lines he himself indicated. He often said, however, that an
allegory should never be pressed too far.” Are all the lovely passages
of human passion and human pathos in these ‘Idylls’ allegorical—that is
to say—make-believe? The reason why allegorical poetry is always
second-rate, even at its best, is that it flatters the reader’s intellect
at the expense of his heart. Fancy “the allegorical intent” behind the
parting of Hector and Andromache, and behind the death of Desdemona!
Thank Heaven, however, Tennyson’s allegorical intent was a destructive
afterthought. For, says the biographer, “the allegorical drift here
marked out was fundamentally changed in the later schemes in the
‘Idylls.’” According to that delicate critic, Canon Ainger, there is a
symbolical intent underlying ‘The Lady of Shalott’:—
“The new-born love for something, for some one in the wide world from
whom she has been so long secluded, takes her out of the region of
shadows into that of realities.”
But what concerns us here is the fact that when Shakespeare wrote,
although he yielded too much now and then to the passion for gongorism
and euphuism which had spread all over Europe, it was against the nature
of his genius to be influenced by the contemporary passion for allegory.
That he had a natural dislike of allegorical treatment of a subject is
evident, not only in his plays, but in his sonnets. At a time when the
sonnet was treated as the special vehicle for allegory, Shakespeare’s
sonnets were the direct outcome of emotion of the most intimate and
personal kind—a fact which at once destroys the ignorant drivel about the
Baconian authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, for what Bacon had was fancy,
not imagination, and Fancy is the mother of Allegory, Imagination is the
mother of Drama. The moment that Bacon essayed imaginative work, he
passed into allegory, as we see in the ‘New Atlantis.’
It might, perhaps, be said that there are three kinds of poetical
temperament which have never yet been found equally combined in any one
poet—not even in Shakespeare himself. There is the lyric temperament, as
exemplified in writers like Sappho, Shelley, and others; there is the
meditative temperament—sometimes speculative, but not always accompanied
by metaphysical dreaming—as exemplified in Lucretius, Wordsworth, and
others; and there is the dramatic temperament, as exemplified in Homer,
Æschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. In a certain sense the Iliad is
the most dramatic poem in the world, for the dramatic picture lives
undisturbed by lyrism or meditation. In Æschylus and Sophocles we find,
besides the dramatic temperament, a large amount of the lyrical
temperament, and a large amount of the meditative, but unaccompanied by
metaphysical speculation. In Shakespeare we find, besides the dramatic
temperament, a large amount of the meditative accompanied by an
irresistible impulse towards metaphysical speculation, but, on the whole,
a moderate endowment of the lyrical temperament, judging by the few
occasions on which he exercised it. For fine as are such lyrics as
“Hark, hark, the lark,” “Where the bee sucks,” &c., other poets have
written lyrics as fine.
In a certain sense no man can be a pure and perfect dramatist. Every ego
is a central sun found which the universe revolves, and it must needs
assert itself. This is why on a previous occasion, when speaking of the
way in which thoughts are interjected into drama by the Greek dramatists,
we said that really and truly no man can paint another, but only himself,
and what we call character-painting is at the best but a poor mixing of
painter and painted—a third something between these two, just as what we
call colour and sound are born of the play of undulation upon organism.
Very likely this is putting the case too strongly. But be this as it
may, it is impossible to open a play of Shakespeare’s without being
struck with the way in which the meditative side of Shakespeare’s mind
strove with and sometimes nearly strangled the dramatic. If this were
confined to ‘Hamlet,’ where the play seems meant to revolve on a
philosophical pivot, it would not be so remarkable. But so hindered with
thoughts, reflections, meditations, and metaphysical speculations was
Shakespeare that he tossed them indiscriminately into other plays,
tragedies, comedies, and histories, regardless sometimes of the character
who uttered them. With regard to metaphysical speculation, indeed, even
when he was at work on the busiest scenes of his dramas, it would seem—as
was said on the occasion before alluded to—that Shakespeare’s instinct
for actualizing and embodying in concrete form the dreams of the
metaphysician often arose and baffled him. It would seem that when
writing a comedy he could not help putting into the mouth of a man like
Claudio those words which seem as if they ought to have been spoken by a
metaphysician of the Hamlet type, beginning,
Ay, but to die and go we know not where.
It would seem that he could not help putting into the mouth of Macbeth
those words which also seem as if they ought to have been spoken on the
platform at Elsinore, beginning,
To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow.
And if it be said that Macbeth was a philosopher as well as a murderer,
and might have thought these thoughts in the terrible strait in which he
then was, surely nothing but this marvellous peculiarity of Shakespeare’s
temperament will explain his making Macbeth stop at Duncan’s bedroom
door, dagger in hand, to say,
Now o’er the one half world Nature seems dead, &c.
And again, though Prospero was very likely a philosopher too, even he
steals from Hamlet’s mouth such words of the metaphysician as these:—
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
That this is one of Shakespeare’s most striking characteristics will not
be denied by any competent student of his works. Nor will any such
student deny that, exquisite as his lyrics are, they are too few and too
unimportant in subject-matter to set beside his supreme wealth of
dramatic picture, and his wide vision as a thinker and a metaphysical
dreamer.
Now on which of these sides of Shakespeare does Tennyson touch? Is it on
the lyrical side? Shakespeare’s fine lyrics are so few that they would
be lost if set beside the marvellous wealth of Tennyson’s lyrical work.
On one side only of Shakespeare’s genius Tennyson touches, perhaps, more
closely than any subsequent poet. As a metaphysician none comes so near
Shakespeare as he who wrote these lines:—
And more, my son! for more than once when I
Sat all alone, revolving in myself
The word that is the symbol of myself,
The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,
And passed into the Nameless, as a cloud
Melts into Heaven. I touch’d my limbs, the limbs
Were strange not mine—and yet no shade of doubt,
But utter clearness, and thro’ loss of Self.
The gain of such large life as match’d with ours
Were Sun to spark—unshadowable in words,
Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world.
Here, then, seems to be the truth of the matter: while Shakespeare had
immense dramatic power, and immense meditative power with moderate lyric
power, Tennyson had the lyric gift and the meditative gift without the
dramatic. His poems are more full of reflections, meditations, and
generalizations upon human life than any poet’s since Shakespeare. But
then the moment that Shakespeare descended from those heights whether his
metaphysical imagination had borne him, he became, not a lyrist, as
Tennyson became, but a dramatist. And this divides Shakespeare as far
from Tennyson as it divides him from any other first-class writer. We
admirers of Tennyson must content ourselves with this thought, that,
wonderful as it is for Shakespeare to have combined great metaphysical
power with supreme power as a dramatist, it is scarcely less wonderful
for Tennyson to have combined great metaphysical power with the power of
a supreme lyrist. Nay, is it not in a certain sense more wonderful for a
lyrical impulse such as Tennyson’s to be found combined with a power of
philosophical and metaphysical abstraction such as he shows in some of
his poems?
IV. CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI.
1830–1894.