human life stupidity is a most valuable element. He had nothing of
the impatience which sharp logical narrow minds habitually feel when
they come across those who do not apprehend their quick and precise
deductions. No doubt he talked to the stupid players, to the stupid
door-keeper, to the property man, who considers paste jewels ‘very
preferable, besides the expense’—talked with the stupid apprentices of
stupid Fleet Street, and had much pleasure in ascertaining what was
their notion of ‘King Lear.’ In his comprehensive mind it was enough if
every man hitched well into his own place in human life. If every one
were logical and literary, how would there be scavengers, or watchmen,
or caulkers, or coopers? Narrow minds will be subdued to what they ‘work
in.’ The ‘dyer’s hand’ will not more clearly carry off its tint, nor
will what is moulded more precisely indicate the confines of the mould.
A patient sympathy, a kindly fellow-feeling for the narrow intelligence
necessarily induced by narrow circumstances,—a narrowness which, in some
degrees, seems to be inevitable, and is perhaps more serviceable than
most things to the wise conduct of life—this, though quick and half-bred
minds may despise it, seems to be a necessary constituent in the
composition of manifold genius. ‘How shall the world be served?’ asks the
host in Chaucer. We must have cart-horses as well as race-horses, draymen
as well as poets. It is no bad thing, after all, to be a slow man and to
have one idea a year. You don’t make a figure, perhaps, in argumentative
society, which requires a quicker species of thought, but is that the
worse?
‘_Hol._ _Via_, Goodman Dull; thou hast spoken no word all this
while.
_Dull._ Nor understood none neither, sir.
_Hol._ _Allons_, we will employ thee.
_Dull._ I’ll make one in a dance or so, or I will play on the
tabor to the worthies, and let them dance the hay.
_Hol._ Most dull, honest Dull, to our sport away.’
And such, we believe, was the notion of Shakespeare.
S. T. Coleridge has a nice criticism which bears on this point. He
observes that in the narrations of uneducated people in Shakespeare, just
as in real life, there is a want of prospectiveness and a superfluous
amount of regressiveness. People of this sort are unable to look a long
way in front of them, and they wander from the right path. They get on
too fast with one half, and then the other hopelessly lags. They can
tell a story exactly as it is told to them (as an animal can go step by
step where it has been before), but they can’t calculate its bearings
beforehand, or see how it is to be adapted to those to whom they are
speaking, nor do they know how much they have thoroughly told and how
much they have not. ‘I went up the street, then I went down the street;
no, first went down and then—but you do not follow me; I go before you,
sir.’ Thence arises the complex style usually adopted by persons not
used to narration. They tumble into a story and get on as they can. This
is scarcely the sort of thing which a man could foresee. Of course a
metaphysician can account for it, and like Coleridge, assure you that
if he had not observed it, he could have predicted it in a moment; but,
nevertheless, it is too refined a conclusion to be made out from known
premises by common reasoning. Doubtless there is some reason why negroes
have woolly hair (and if you look into a philosophical treatise, you
will find that the author could have made out that it would be so, if he
had not, by a mysterious misfortune, known from infancy that it was the
fact),—still one could never have supposed it oneself. And in the same
manner, though the profounder critics may explain in a satisfactory and
refined manner, how the confused and undulating style of narration is
peculiarly incident to the mere multitude, yet it is most likely that
Shakespeare derived his acquaintance with it from the fact, from actual
hearing, and not from what may be the surer, but is the slower process
of metaphysical deduction. The best passage to illustrate this is that
in which the nurse gives a statement of Juliet’s age; but it will not
exactly suit our pages. The following of Mrs. Quickly will suffice:—
‘Tilly-fally, Sir John, never tell me; your ancient swaggerer
comes not in my doors. I was before Master Tizzick, the
Deputy, the other day; and, as he said to me,—it was no longer
ago than Wednesday last,—Neighbour Quickly, says he;—Master
Dumb, our minister, was by then;—Neighbour Quickly, says he,
receive those that are civil; for, saith he, you are in an ill
name:—now, he said so, I can tell you whereupon; for, says
he, you are an honest woman, and well thought on; therefore
take heed to what guests you receive: Deceive, says he, no
swaggering companions.—There comes none here;—you would bless
you to hear what he said:—no, I’ll no swaggerers.’
Now, it is quite impossible that this, any more than the political
reasoning on the parentage of Cade, which was cited before, should have
been written by one not habitually and sympathisingly conversant with the
talk of the illogical classes. Shakespeare felt, if we may say so, the
force of the bad reasoning. He did not, like a sharp logician, angrily
detect a flaw, and set it down as a fallacy of reference or a fallacy
of amphibology. This is not the English way, though Dr. Whately’s logic
has been published so long (and, as he says himself, must now be deemed
to be irrefutable, since no one has ever offered any refutation of it).
Yet still people in this country do not like to be committed to distinct
premises. They like a Chancellor of the Exchequer to say, ‘It has during
very many years been maintained by the honourable member for Montrose
that two and two make four, and I am free to say, that I think there is a
great deal to be said in favour of that opinion; but, without committing
her Majesty’s Government to that proposition as an abstract sentiment,
I will go so far as to assume two and two are not sufficient to make
five, which, with the permission of the House, will be a sufficient basis
for all the operations which I propose to enter upon during the present
year.’ We have no doubt Shakespeare reasoned in that way himself. Like
any other Englishman, when he had a clear course before him, he rather
liked to shuffle over little hitches in the argument, and on that account
he had a great sympathy with those who did so too. He would never have
interrupted Mrs. Quickly; he saw that her mind was going to and fro over
the subject; he saw that it was coming right, and this was enough for
him, and will be also enough of this topic for our readers.
We think we have proved that Shakespeare had an enormous specific
acquaintance with the common people; that this can only be obtained by
sympathy. It likewise has a further condition.
In spiritedness, the style of Shakespeare is very like to that of Scott.
The description of a charge of cavalry in Scott reads, as was said
before, as if it was written on horseback. A play by Shakespeare reads
as if it were written in a playhouse. The great critics assure you, that
a theatrical audience must be kept awake, but Shakespeare knew this of
his own knowledge. When you read him, you feel a sensation of motion,
a conviction that there is something ‘up,’ a notion that not only is
something being talked about, but also that something is being done. We
do not imagine that Shakespeare owed this quality to his being a player,
but rather that he became a player because he possessed this quality of
mind. For after, and notwithstanding everything which has, or may be
said against the theatrical profession, it certainly does require from
those who pursue it a certain quickness and liveliness of mind. Mimics
are commonly an elastic sort of persons, and it takes a little levity of
disposition to enact even the ‘heavy fathers.’ If a boy joins a company
of strolling players, you may be sure that he is not a ‘good boy;’ he
may be a trifle foolish, or a thought romantic, but certainly he is not
slow. And this was in truth the case with Shakespeare. They say, too,
that in the beginning he was a first-rate link-boy; and the tradition is
affecting, though we fear it is not quite certain. Anyhow you feel about
Shakespeare that he could have been a link-boy. In the same way you feel
he may have been a player. You are sure at once that he could not have
followed any sedentary kind of life. But wheresoever there was anything
_acted_ in earnest or in jest, by way of mock representation or by way
of serious reality, there he found matter for his mind. If anybody could
have any doubt about the liveliness of Shakespeare, let them consider the
character of Falstaff. When a man has created _that_ without a capacity
for laughter, then a blind man may succeed in describing colours. Intense
animal spirits are the single sentiment (if they be a sentiment) of
the entire character. If most men were to save up all the gaiety of
their whole lives, it would come about to the gaiety of one speech in
Falstaff. A morose man might have amassed many jokes, might have observed
many details of jovial society, might have conceived a Sir John, marked
by rotundity of body, but could hardly have imagined what we call his
rotundity of mind. We mean that the animal spirits of Falstaff give him
an easy, vague, diffusive sagacity which is peculiar to him. A morose
man, Iago, for example, may know anything, and is apt to know a good
deal; but what he knows is generally all in corners. He knows number 1,
number 2, number 3, and so on, but there is not anything continuous, or
smooth, or fluent in his knowledge. Persons conversant with the works of
Hazlitt will know in a minute what we mean. Everything which he observed
he seemed to observe from a certain soreness of mind; he looked at people
because they offended him; he had the same vivid notion of them that
a man has of objects which grate on a wound in his body. But there is
nothing at all of this in Falstaff; on the contrary, everything pleases
him, and everything is food for a joke. Cheerfulness and prosperity
give an easy abounding sagacity of mind which nothing else does give.
Prosperous people bound easily over all the surface of things which
their lives present to them; very likely they keep to the surface; there
are things beneath or above to which they may not penetrate or attain,
but what is on any part of the surface, that they know well. ‘Lift
not the painted veil which those who live call life,’ and they do not
lift it. What is sublime or awful above, what is ‘sightless and drear’
beneath,—these they may not dream of. Nor is any one piece or corner of
life so well impressed on them as on minds less happily constituted. It
is only people who have had a tooth out, that really know the dentist’s
waiting-room. Yet such people, for the time at least, know nothing but
that and their tooth. The easy and sympathising friend who accompanies
them knows everything; hints gently at the contents of the _Times_, and
would cheer you with Lord Palmerston’s replies. So, on a greater scale,
the man of painful experience knows but too well what has hurt him, and
where and why; but the happy have a vague and rounded view of the round
world, and such was the knowledge of Falstaff.
It is to be observed that these high spirits are not a mere excrescence
or superficial point in an experiencing nature; on the contrary, they
seem to be essential, if not to its idea or existence, at least to its
exercise and employment. How are you to know people without talking to
them, but how are you to talk to them without tiring yourself? A common
man is exhausted in half an hour; Scott or Shakespeare could have gone on
for a whole day. This is, perhaps, peculiarly necessary for a painter of
English life. The basis of our national character seems to be a certain
energetic humour, which may be found in full vigour in old Chaucer’s
time, and in great perfection in at least one of the popular writers
of this age, and which is, perhaps, most easily described by the name
of our greatest painter—Hogarth. It is amusing to see how entirely the
efforts of critics and artists fail to naturalise in England any other
sort of painting. Their efforts are fruitless; for the people painted are
not English people: they may be Italians, or Greeks, or Jews, but it is
quite certain that they are foreigners. We should not fancy that modern
art ought to resemble the Mediæval. So long as artists attempt the same
class of paintings as Raphael, they will not only be inferior to Raphael,
but they will never please, as they might please, the English people.
What we want is what Hogarth gave us—a representation of ourselves. It
may be that we are wrong, that we ought to prefer something of the old
world, some scene in Rome or Athens, some tale from Carmel or Jerusalem;
but, after all, we do not. These places are, we think, abroad, and had
their greatness in former times; we wish a copy of what now exists, and
of what we have seen. London we know, and Manchester we know, but where
are all these? It is the same with literature, Milton excepted, and even
Milton can hardly be called a popular writer: all great English writers
describe English people, and in describing them, they give, as they must
give, a large comic element; and, speaking generally, this is scarcely
possible, except in the case of cheerful and easy-living men. There
is, no doubt, a biting satire, like that of Swift, which has for its
essence misanthropy. There is the mockery of Voltaire, which is based on
intellectual contempt; but this is not our English humour—it is not that
of Shakespeare and Falstaff; ours is the humour of a man who laughs when
he speaks, of flowing enjoyment, of an experiencing nature.
Yet it would be a great error if we gave anything like an exclusive
prominence to this aspect of Shakespeare. Thus he appeared to those
around him—in some degree they knew that he was a cheerful, and humorous,
and happy man; but of his higher gift they knew less than we. A great
painter of men must (as has been said) have a faculty of conversing, but
he must also have a capacity for solitude. There is much of mankind that
a man can only learn from himself. Behind every man’s external life,
which he leads in company, there is another which he leads alone, and
which he carries with him apart. We see but one aspect of our neighbour,
as we see but one side of the moon; in either case there is also a dark
half, which is unknown to us. We all come down to dinner, but each has a
room to himself. And if we would study the internal lives of others, it
seems essential that we should begin with our own. If we study this our
_datum_, if we attain to see and feel how this influences and evolves
itself in our social and (so to say) public life, then it is possible
that we may find in the lives of others the same or analogous features;
and if we do not, then at least we may suspect that those who want them
are deficient likewise in the secret agencies which we feel produce them
in ourselves. The metaphysicians assert, that people originally picked
up the idea of the existence of other people in this way. It is orthodox
doctrine that a baby says: ‘I have a mouth, mamma has a mouth: therefore
I’m the same species as mamma. I have a nose, papa has a nose, therefore
papa is the same genus as me.’ But whether or not this ingenious idea
really does or does not represent the actual process by which we
originally obtain an acquaintance with the existence of minds analogous
to our own, it gives unquestionably the process by which we obtain our
notion of that part of those minds which they never exhibit consciously
to others, and which only becomes predominant in secresy and solitude and
to themselves. Now, that Shakespeare has this insight into the musing
life of man, as well as into his social life, is easy to prove; take, for
instance, the following passages:—
‘This battle fares like to the morning’s war,
When dying clouds contend with growing light;
What time the shepherd, blowing of his nails,
Can neither call it perfect day nor night.
Now sways it this way, like a mighty sea,
Forc’d by the tide to combat with the wind;
Now sways it that way, like the self-same sea
Forc’d to retire by fury of the wind:
Sometime, the flood prevails; and then, the wind:
Now, one the better; then, another best;
Both tugging to be victors, breast to breast,
Yet neither conqueror, nor conquered;
So is the equal poise of this fell war.
Here on this molehill will I sit me down.
To whom God will, there be the victory!
For Margaret my queen, and Clifford too,
Have chid me from the battle; swearing both
They prosper best of all when I am thence.
Would I were dead! if God’s good will were so;
For what is in this world but grief and woe?
Oh God! methinks it were a happy life,
To be no better than a homely swain:
To sit upon a hill, as I do now,
To carve out dials quaintly, point by point,
Thereby to see the minutes how they run:
How many make the hour full complete,
How many hours bring about the day,
How many days will finish up the year,
How many years a mortal man may live.
When this is known, then to divide the time:
So many hours must I tend my flock;
So many hours must I take my rest;
So many hours must I contemplate;
So many hours must I sport myself;
So many days my ewes have been with young;
So many weeks ere the poor fools will yean;
So many years ere I shall shear the fleece;
So minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years,
Pass’d over to the end they were created,
Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave.
Ah, what a life were this! how sweet! how lovely!
Gives not the hawthorn bush a sweeter shade
To shepherds, looking on their silly sheep,
Than doth a rich embroider’d canopy
To kings, that fear their subjects’ treachery?
O yes, it doth; a thousand-fold it doth.
And to conclude,—the shepherd’s homely curds,
His cold thin drink out of his leather bottle,
His wonted sleep under a fresh tree’s shade,
All which secure and sweetly he enjoys,
Is far beyond a prince’s delicates,
His viands sparkling in a golden cup,
His body couchèd in a curious bed,
When care, mistrust, and treason wait on him.’
‘A fool, a fool!—I met a fool i’ the forest,
A motley fool!—a miserable world;—
As I do live by food, I met a fool;
Who laid him down and basked him in the sun,
And railed on lady Fortune in good terms,
In good set terms,—and yet a motley fool.
“Good-morrow, fool,” quoth I: “No, sir,” quoth he,
“Call me not fool, till heaven hath sent me fortune:”
And then he drew a dial from his poke,
And looking on it with lack-lustre eye,
Says, very wisely, “It is ten o’clock:
Thus may we see,” quoth he, “how the world wags;
’Tis but an hour ago since it was nine;
And after an hour more,’twill be eleven;
And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot,
And thereby hangs a tale.” When I did hear
The motley fool thus moral on the time,
My lungs began to crow like chanticleer,
That fools should be so deep-contemplative;
And I did laugh, sans intermission,
An hour by his dial.’
No slight versatility of mind and pliancy of fancy could pass at will
from scenes such as these to the ward of Eastcheap and the society
which heard the chimes at midnight. One of the reasons of the rarity
of great imaginative works is that in very few cases is this capacity
for musing solitude combined with that of observing mankind. A certain
constitutional though latent melancholy is essential to such a nature.
This is the exceptional characteristic in Shakespeare. All through
his works you feel you are reading the popular author, the successful
man; but through them all there is a certain tinge of musing sadness
pervading, and, as it were, softening their gaiety. Not a trace can
be found of ‘eating cares’ or narrow and mind-contracting toil, but
everywhere there is, in addition to shrewd sagacity and buoyant wisdom, a
refining element of chastening sensibility, which prevents sagacity from
being rough, and shrewdness from becoming cold. He had an eye for either
sort of life:—
‘Why, let the stricken deer go weep,
The hart ungallèd play;
For some must watch, and some must sleep,
Thus runs the world away.’
In another point also Shakespeare, as he was, must be carefully
contrasted with the estimate that would be formed of him from such
delineations as that of Falstaff, and that was doubtless frequently made
by casual though only by casual frequenters of the Mermaid. It has been
said that the mind of Shakespeare contained within it the mind of Scott;
it remains to be observed that it contained also the mind of Keats. For,
beside the delineation of human life, and beside also the delineation of
nature, there remains also for the poet a third subject—the delineation
of _fancies_. Of course, these, be they what they may, are like to, and
were originally borrowed either from man or from nature—from one or
from both together. We know but two things in the simple way of direct
experience, and whatever else we know must be in some mode or manner
compacted out of them. Yet ‘books are a substantial world, both pure
and good,’ and so are fancies too. In all countries men have devised to
themselves a whole series of half-divine creations—mythologies Greek and
Roman, fairies, angels, beings who may be, for aught we know, but with
whom, in the meantime, we can attain to no conversation. The most known
of these mythologies are the Greek, and what is, we suppose, the second
epoch of the Gothic, the fairies; and it so happens that Shakespeare has
dealt with them both and in a remarkable manner. We are not, indeed,
of those critics who profess simple and unqualified admiration for the
poem of ‘Venus and Adonis.’ It seems intrinsically, as we know it from
external testimony to have been, a juvenile production, written when
Shakespeare’s nature might be well expected to be crude and unripened.
Power is shown, and power of a remarkable kind; but it is not displayed
in a manner that will please or does please the mass of men. In spite of
the name of its author, the poem has never been popular—and surely this
is sufficient. Nevertheless, it is remarkable as a literary exercise, and
as a treatment of a singular, though unpleasant subject. The fanciful
class of poems differ from others in being laid, so far as their scene
goes, in a perfectly unseen world. The type of such productions is
Keats’s ‘Endymion.’ We mean that it is the type, not as giving the
abstract perfection of this sort of art, but because it shows and
embodies both its excellences and defects in a very marked and prominent
manner. In that poem there are no passions and no actions, there is no
art and no life; but there is beauty, and that is meant to be enough, and
to a reader of one-and-twenty it is enough and more. What are exploits
or speeches? What is Cæsar or Coriolanus? What is a tragedy like Lear,
or a real view of human life in any kind whatever, to people who do not
know and do not care what human life is? In early youth it is, perhaps,
not true that the passions, taken generally, are particularly violent,
or that the imagination is in any remarkable degree powerful; but it
is certain that the fancy (which though it be, in the last resort, but
a weak stroke of that same faculty, which, when it strikes hard, we
call imagination, may yet for this purpose be looked on as distinct) is
particularly wakeful, and that the gentler species of passions are more
absurd than they are afterwards. And the literature of this period of
human life runs naturally away from the real world; away from the less
ideal portion of it, from stocks and stones, and aunts and uncles, and
rests on mere half-embodied sentiments, which in the hands of great poets
assume a kind of semi-personality, and are, to the distinction between
things and persons, ‘as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto
wine.’ The ‘Sonnets’ of Shakespeare belong exactly to the same school
of poetry. They are not the sort of verses to take any particular hold
upon the mind permanently and for ever, but at a certain period they take
too much. For a young man to read in the spring of the year among green
fields and in gentle air, they are the ideal. As first of April poetry
they are perfect.