SHAKESPEAREAN SENTIMENT
Everyone possesses at the bottom of his heart, as it were, a synthetic
or compendious image of a poet like Shakespeare, who belongs to the
common patrimony of culture, and in his memory the definitions of him
that have been given and have become current formulae. It is well
to fix the mind upon that image, to remember these formulae, and to
extract from them their principal meanings, with the view of obtaining,
at least in a preliminary and provisory manner, the characteristic
spiritual attitude of Shakespeare, his poetical sentiment.
The first observation leaps to the eye and is generally admitted:
namely, that no particular feeling or order of feelings prevails
in him; it cannot be said of him that he is an amorous poet, like
Petrarch, a desperately sad poet like Leopardi, or heroic, as Homer.
His name is adorned rather with such epithets as _universal_ poet,
as perfectly _objective,_ entirely _impersonal,_ extraordinarily
_impartial._ Sometimes even his _coldness_ has been remarked--a
coldness certainly sublime, "that of a sovran spirit, which has
described the complete curve of human existence and has survived all
sentiment" (Schlegel).
Nor is he a poet of _ideals,_ as they are called, whether they be
religious, ethical, political, or social. This explains the antipathy
frequently manifested towards him by apostles of various sorts, of
whom the last was Tolstoi, and the unsatisfied desires that take fire
in the minds of the right thinking, urging them always to ask of any
very great man for something more, for a supplement. They conclude
their admiration with a sigh that there should really be something
missing in him--he is not to be numbered along those who strive for
more liberal political forms and for a more equable social balance,
nor has he had bowels of compassion for the humble and the plebeian. A
certain school of German critics (Ulrici, Gervinus, Kreyssig, Vischer,
etc.), perhaps as an act of opposition to such apparent accusations
(I would not recommend the reading of these authors, whom I have felt
obliged to peruse owing to the nature of my task) began to represent
Shakespeare as a lofty master of morality, a casuist most acute and
reliable, who never fails to solve an ethical problem in the correct
way, a prudent and austere counsellor in politics, and above all, an
infallible judge of actions, a distributor of rewards and punishments,
graduated according to merit and demerit, paying special attention that
not even the slightest fault should go unpunished. Now setting aside
the fact that the ends attributed to him were not in accordance with
his character as a poet and bore evidence only to the lack of taste of
those critics; setting aside that the design of distributing rewards
and punishments according to a moral scale, which they imagine to exist
and praise in him, was altogether impossible of accomplishment by any
man or even by any God, since rewards and punishments are thoughts
altogether foreign to the moral consciousness and of a purely practical
and judicial nature; setting aside these facts, which are generally
considered unworthy of discussion and jeered at in the most recent
criticism, as the ridiculous survivals of a bygone age, even if we make
the attempt to translate these statements into a less illogical form,
and assume that there really existed in Shakespeare an inclination for
problems of that sort, they shew themselves to be at variance with
simple reality. Shakespeare caressed no ideals of any sort and least
of all political ideals; and although he magnificently represents
political struggles also, he always went beyond their specific
character and object, attaining through them to the only thing that
really attracted him; life.
This _sense of life_ is also extolled in his work, which for that
reason is held to be eminently _dramatic,_ that is to say, animated
with a sense of life considered in itself, in its eternal discord, its
eternal harshness, its bitter-sweet, in all its complexity.
To feel life potently, without the determination of a passion or an
ideal, implies feeling it unilluminated by faith, undisciplined by
any law of goodness, not to be corrected by the human will, not to be
reduced to the enjoyment of idyllic calm, or to the inebriation of
joy; and Shakespeare has indeed been judged in turn not religious, not
moral, no assertor of the freedom of the will, and no optimist. But no
one has yet dared to judge him to be irreligious, immoral, a fatalist,
or a pessimist, for these adjectives are seen not to suit him, as soon
as they are pronounced.
And here too were required the strange aberration of fancy of a Taine,
his singular incapacity for receiving clear impressions of the truth,
in order to portray the feeling of Shakespeare towards man and life as
being fundamentally irrational, based on blind deception, a sequence of
hasty impulses and swarming images, without an autonomous centre, where
truth and wisdom are accidental and unstable effects, or appearances
without substance. These are simply exercises in style, repeated with
variants from other writers; they do not even present a caricature
of the art of Shakespeare, since even for this, some connection with
fact is necessary. Shakespeare, who has so strong a feeling for the
bounds set to the human will, in relation to the Whole, which stands
above it, possesses the feeling for the power of human liberty in equal
degree. As Hazlitt says, he, who in some respects is "the least moral
of poets," is in others "the greatest of moralists." He who beholds the
unremovable presence of evil and sorrow, has his eye open and intent
in an equal degree upon the shining forth of the good, the smile of
joy, and is healthy and virile as no pessimist ever was. He who nowhere
in his works refers directly to a God, has ever present within him the
obscure consciousness of a divinity, of an unknown divinity, and the
spectacle of the world, taken by itself, seems to him to be without
significance, men and their passions a dream, a dream that has for
intrinsic and correlative end a reality which, though hidden, is more
solid and perhaps more lofty.
But we must be careful not to insist too much upon these positive
definitions and represent his sentiment as though it were one in which
negative elements were altogether overcome. The good, virtue, is
without doubt stronger in Shakespeare than evil and vice, not because
it overcomes and resolves the other term in itself, but simply because
it is light opposed to darkness, because it is the good, because it is
virtue. This is because of its special quality, which the poet discerns
and seizes in its original purity and truth, without sophisticating
or weakening it. Positive and negative elements do really become
interlaced or run into one another, in his mode of feeling, without
becoming reconciled in a superior harmony. Their natural logic can be
expressed in terms of rectitude, justice and sincerity; but their logic
and natural character also finds its expression in terms of ambition,
cupidity, egoism and satanic wickedness. The will is accurately aimed
at the target, but also, it is sometimes diverted from it by a power,
which it does not recognise, although it obeys it, as though under
a spell. The sky becomes serene after the devastating hurricane,
honourable men occupy the thrones from which the wicked have fallen,
the conquerors pity and praise the conquered. But the desolation of
faith betrayed, of goodness trampled upon, of innocent creatures
destroyed, of noble hearts broken, remains. The God that should pacify
hearts is invoked, his presence may even be felt, but he never appears.
The poet does not stand beyond these struggling passions, attraction
and repugnance, love and hate, hope and despair, joy and sorrow; but
he is beyond being on the side of one or the other. He receives them
all in himself, not that he may feel them all, and pour tears of
blood around them, but that he may make of them his unique world, the
Shakespearean world, which is the world of those undecided conflicts.
What poets appear at first sight more different than Shakespeare and
Ariosto? Yet they have this in common, that both look upon something
that is beyond particular emotions, and for this reason it has been
said of both of them, more than once, that "they speak but little to
the heart." They are certainly sentimental and agitated by the passions
to a very slight degree; the "humour" of both has been referred to, a
word that we avoid here, because it is so uncertain of meaning and of
such little use in determining profound emotions of the spirit. Ariosto
veils and shades all the particular feelings that he represents, by
means of his divine irony; and Shakespeare, in a different way, by
endowing all with equal vigour and relief, succeeds in creating a sort
of equilibrium, by means of reciprocal tension, which, owing to its
mode of genesis, differs in every other respect from the harmony in
which the singer of the _Furioso_ delights. Ariosto surpasses good
and evil, retaining interest in them only on account of the rhythm of
life, so constant and yet so various, which arises, expands, becomes
extinguished and is reborn, to grow and again to become extinguished.
Shakespeare surpasses all individual emotions, but he does not
surpass, on the contrary, he strengthens our interest in good and
evil, in sorrow and joy, in destiny and necessity, in appearance and
reality, and the vision of this strife is his poetry. Thus the one has
been metaphorically called "imaginative"; the other "realistic," and
the one has been opposed to the other. They are opposed to one another,
yet they meet at one point, not at the general one of both being poets,
but at the specific point of being cosmic poets, not only in the sense
in which every poet is cosmical, but in the particular sense above
explained. Let us hope that it is not necessary to recommend that this
should be understood with the necessary reservations, that is to say,
as the trait that dominates the two poets in a different way and does
not exclude the other individual traits of feature, above all not
that which belongs to all poetry whatsoever. The limits set to every
critical study, which should henceforth be known to all, are laid
down by the impossibility of ever rendering in logical terms the full
effect of any poetry or of other artistic work, since it is clear that
if such a translation were possible, art would be impossible, that is
to say, superfluous, because admitting of a substitute. Criticism,
nevertheless, within those limits, performs its own office, which is to
discern and to point out exactly where lies the poetical motive and to
formulate the divisions which aid in distinguishing what is proper to
every work.
For the rest, if Ariosto has often been compared to contemporary
painters, with the object of drawing attention to his harmonic
inspiration, Ludwig has been unable to abstain from making similar
comparisons for Shakespeare. He found the most adequate image for
his dramas in the portraits and landscapes of Titian, of Giorgione,
of Paul Veronese, as contrasting with the amiability of Correggio,
the insipidity of the Caracci, the affected manner of Guido and of
Carlo Dolce, the crudity of the naturalists Caravaggio and Ribera.
In Shakespeare, as in those great Venetians, there is everywhere
"existence," life upon earth, transfigured perhaps, but devoid of
restlessness, of aureoles and of sentimentalisms, serene even where
tragic.
This sense of strife in vital unity, this profound sense of life,
prevents the vision from becoming simplified and superficialised in the
antitheses of good and evil, of elect and reprobate beings, and causes
the introduction of conflict, in varying measure and degree, in every
being. Thus the battle is fought at the very heart of things. Hence the
aspect of mystery that surrounds the actions and events portrayed by
Shakespeare, which is not to be understood in the general sense that
every vision of art is a mystery, but rather in the special sense of a
course of events of which the poet not only does not possess (and could
not possess) the philosophical explanation, but never discovers the
reposeful term, peace after war, the acceptance of war as a means to a
more lofty peace. For this reason is everywhere diffused the terror of
the Unknown, which surrounds on every side and conceals a countenance
that may be more terrible than terrible life itself, in the development
of which human beings are involved--a countenance terrible for what
it will reveal, and perhaps sublime and ecstatic, giving in its very
terribleness, terror and rapture together. The mystery lies not only in
the occasional appearance of spectres, demons, witches, in the poetry,
but in the whole atmosphere of which they form only a part, assisting
by their presence in a more direct determination. This mystery was well
expressed by the first great critics who penetrated into the world of
Shakespearean poetry, Herder and Goethe, to the second of whom belongs
the simile of the Shakespearean drama as "open books of Destiny, in
which blows the wind of emotional life here and there stripping their
leaves in its violence." In Shakespeare's musicality we are everywhere
sensible of a voluptuous palpitation before the mystery which at times
reflects upon itself and supplies the link between music and love,
music and sadness, music and unknown Godhead.
We must insist upon the word "sentiment," which we have adopted for
the description of this spiritual condition, in order that it may not
be mistaken for a concept or mode of thought Or philosopheme, which
occurs when the word "conception" or "mode of conceiving life" is taken
in a literal and material manner as applied to Shakespeare and in
general to the poets--when, for instance, it is asked by what special
quality does Shakespeare's "conception of tragedy" differ from Greek
and French tragedy, and the like, as though in such a case, it were a
question of concepts and systems. Shakespeare is not a philosopher:
his spiritual tendency is altogether opposed to the philosophic, which
dominates both sentiment and the spectacle of life with thought that
understands and explains it, reconciling conflicts under a single
principle of dialectic. Shakespeare, on the contrary, takes both and
renders them in their vital mobility--they know nothing of criticism
or theory--and he does not offer any solution other than the evidence
of visible representation. For this reason, when he is characterised
and receives praises for his "objectivity," his "impersonality," his
"universality," and those who do this are not satisfied even with
their incorrect description of the real psychological differences
noted above, but proceed to claim a philosophical character for his
spiritual attitude, it is advisable to reject them all, confronting his
objectivity with his poetic subjectivity, his impersonality with his
personality, his universality with his individual mode of feeling. The
cosmic oppositions, in imagining which he symbolises reality and life,
not only are not philosophical solutions for him in his plays, but they
are not even problems of thought; only rarely do they tend to take the
form of bitter interrogations, which remain without answer. Equally
fantastic and arbitrary are the attempts to compose a philosophical
theory from the work of Shakespeare who is alternately, theistic,
pantheistic, dualistic, deterministic, pessimistic and optimistic,
by extracting it from his plays in the same manner as that employed
in the case of the philosophy implied in a historical or political
treatise; because there is certainly a philosophy implied in these
latter cases, embodied in the historical and political judgments which
they contain. In the case of Shakespeare, however, which is that of
poets in general, to extract it means to place it there, that is, to
think and to draw conclusions ourselves under the imaginative stimulus
of the poet, and to place in his mouth, through a psychological
illusion, our own questions and answers. It would only be possible to
discuss a philosophy of Shakespeare if, like Dante, he had developed
one in certain philosophical sections of his poems; but this is not so,
because the thoughts that he utters fulfil no other function than that
of poetical expressions, and when they are taken from their contexts,
where they sound so powerful and so profound, they lose their virtue
and appear to be indeterminate, contradictory or fallacious.
It is quite another question as to whether his sentiment was based upon
what are called mental or philosophical _presumptions_ and as to what
these, properly speaking, were; because, as regards the first point,
it must be at once admitted that a sentiment does not appear without a
basis of certain mental presumptions or concepts, that is to say, of
certain convictions, affirmations, negations and doubts. As regards the
second point, the legitimacy of the enquiry will be admitted, and it
will also be noted that this forms one of several historical enquiries,
relating to Shakespeare in his poetry, to which belongs the place
unduly usurped by ineptitudes and superficialities on the theme of his
private affairs; his domestic relations, his business transactions, and
his pretended love intrigues with Mary Fitton and the hostess Madam
Davenant.
It is also true that the researches into the mental presumptions of
Shakespeare have often strayed into the external and the anecdotic, as
is the case with such problems as the religion that he followed and
his political opinions. Stated in this way, they likewise sink to the
level of biographical problems, indifferent to art. That Shakespeare
belonged to the Anglican and not to the Catholic confession (as some
still maintain, and in 1864 Rio wrote a whole book on the subject),
and opposed Puritanism in one quality or the other; that he supported
Essex in his conspiracy, or on the contrary was on the side of Queen
Elizabeth, has nothing to do with the mental presuppositions immanent
in his poetry. He may have been impious and profane in active practical
life as a Greene or a Marlowe, or a devout papist, worshipping with
secret superstition, like an adept of Mary Stuart, and nevertheless he
may have composed poetry with different presuppositions, upon thoughts
that had entered his mind and had there become formed and dominated in
his spirit, without for that reason having changed the faith previously
selected and observed. The research of which we speak does not concern
the superficial, but the profound character of the man; it is not
concerned with the congealed and solidified stratum, but with the tide
that flows beneath it, which others would call the unconscious in
relation to the conscious, whereas, it would be more exact to invert
the two qualifications. Presuppositions are the philosophemes that
everyone carries with him, gathering them from the times and from
tradition, or forming them anew by means of his own observations and
rapid reflections. In poetical works, they form the condition remote
from the psychological attitude, which generates poetical visions.
In this depth of consciousness, Shakespeare shows himself clearly to
be outside, not only Catholicism, but also Protestantism, not only
Christianity, but every religious, or rather every transcendental and
theological conception. Here he also resembles the Italian poet of
the Renaissance, Ariosto, though reaching the position by different
ways and with different results. His sentiment would have appeared
in an altogether different guise, if a theological conception, such
as the belief in an eternal life, in a judging God, in rewards and
punishments beyond this world, in the view that earthly life is a trial
and a pilgrimage, had been lively and active in him. He knows no other
than the vigorous passionate life upon earth, divided between joy and
sorrow, with around and above it, the shadow of a mystery.
It is with natural wonder, then, that we read of Shakespeare,
especially among German authors, as a spirit altogether dominated by
the Christian ideas proper to the Reformation, whereas, with regard
to Christianity, he was altogether lacking, both in the theology
of Judaic-Hellenic origin and in the tendency to asceticism and
mysticism. On the other hand we cannot admit the opposite statement
that he was a pagan, in the somewhat popular sense of self-satisfied
hedonism, because it is not less evident that his moral discernment,
his sense of what is sinful, his delicacy of conscience, his humanity,
bear a strong imprint of Christian ethics. Indeed, it is precisely
owing to this lofty and exquisite ethical judgment, united to the
vision of a world, which moves by its own power or anyhow by some
mysterious power, frequently opposing or overthrowing or perverting the
forces directed to the good, that this tragic conflict arises in him.
To this double presupposition must be added, as inference, a third,
the negation, the scepticism, or the ignorance of the conception of
a rational course of events and of a Providence that governs it. Not
even does he accept inexorable Fate as sole master of men and Gods;
nor the determinism of individual character as another kind of Fate,
a naturalistic Fate, as some of his interpreters have believed; he
remains unaffected by the hard Asiatic or African dualistic idea of
predestination; on the contrary, he recognizes human spontaneity and
liberty, as forces that prove their own reality in the fact itself,
though he nevertheless permits liberty and necessity to clash and the
one sometimes to overpower the other, without establishing a relation
between the two, without suspecting their identity in opposition,
without discovering that the two elements at strife form the single
river of the real, and therefore failing to rise to the level of the
modern theodicy, which is History. Our wonderment bursts forth anew,
in observing the emphatic and insistent statements of such writers as
for instance Ulrici as to the historicity of the thought and of the
tragedies of Shakespeare, where just what is altogether absent is the
historical conception of life, which was possessed by Dante, though in
the form of the mediaeval philosophy of history. And since historicity
is both political and social ideality, Shakespeare must have been and
is wanting, as has been said, in true political faith and passion.
He has however been credited with this by publicists and political
polemists like Gervinus, who have desired to count so great a name
among their number, have imagined him possessed with the passion for it
and even believed that it was crowned in him with doctrinal wisdom.
It is difficult to decide by what ways and means these presuppositions
were formed in his inmost soul, for with this question we reenter the
biographical problem as to his education, the company he kept, his
reading, his experiences; and upon all these subjects little or no
exact information is available. Did he observe the fervour of life
which prevailed in the England of his day with sympathetic soul and
vigilant eye? Did he lend an ear to discussions upon theological and
metaphysical questions and carry away from them a sense of their
emptiness? Did he frequent the youth of the universities, which just at
that time gave several university wits to literature and to the drama?
Did he read the _Laus Stultitiae_ of Erasmus, moral and religious
dialogues and treatises, the English humanists, the Platonicians,
the ancient and modern historians, as he certainly read Montaigne
at a later date? Did he read Machiavelli and the other political
writers of Italy, and those who had begun to sketch the doctrine of
the temperament and the passions, such as Huarte and Charron, did he
know Bruno, or had he heard of him and of his doctrines? Or did the
influence of these men and books reach him by various indirect paths,
at second or third hand, through conversation, or as by a figure of
speech we say, from his environment? And what part of those doubts,
negations and beliefs of his, was due to his vivacity and certainty of
intuition, or to his own continuous and steady rumination in himself,
rather than to the course of his studies? But even if we possessed
abundant notes on this subject, we should still remain without much
information, because the processes of the formation of the individual
escape for the most part the observation of others and frequently even
the memory of him in whom they have actually occurred, and the facility
with which they are forgotten proves that what is really important to
preserve, is not these, but their result.
And what is here of importance is the relation of these mental
presuppositions with the life of the time, with the general culture
of the period, with the historical phase through which the human
spirit was then passing. In these respects, Shakespeare was truly, as
he has appeared to those who have best understood him, a man of the
Renaissance, of that age, which, with its navigation, its commerce, its
philosophies, its religious strifes, its natural science, its poems,
its pictures, its statues, its graceful architecture, had set earthly
life in full relief, and no longer permitted it to lose its colours,
become pallid and dissolve in the rays of another world external to
it, as had happened through the long period of the Middle Ages. But
Shakespeare did not belong to the pleasure-seeking, joyous and pagan
Renaissance, which is but a small aspect of the great movement, but
rather to that side of it which was animated with new wants, with new
religious tendencies, with the spirit of new philosophical research,
full of doubts, permeated with flashes from the future. These flashes,
which appeared only in the great thinkers, who were not yet able to
arrest them and make of them distributors of a calm and equable light,
were also irreducible to a radiant centre in its greatest poet, in whom
philosophy served as a presupposition and did not form the essence
of his mental life. It is therefore vain to seek in Shakespeare for
what neither Bruno nor Campanella attained, nor even Descartes and
Spinoza at a later date, namely the historical concept, of which we
have already spoken, and it is also vain to talk of his Spinozistic or
Shellingian pantheism.
Shakespeare nevertheless has assumed in the past and sometimes assumes
even in our eyes, the appearance of a philosopher and of a master, or
a precursor of the loftiest truths, which have since come to light.
It is a fact that modern idealistic and historical philosophy has not
experienced equal attraction towards any other poet, recognising in
him the soul of a brother. How can this be? The answer is contained
in what we have been noting and establishing. Shakespeare's mental
presuppositions, which rejected the Middle Ages and were on a level
with the new times, seeking and failing to find unity and harmony
and above all that vigorous feeling of his for the cosmic strifes,
breaking out from them and rising to the sphere of poetry, seems to
offer material already prepared and to some extent also shaped to the
dialectician, for he sometimes almost suggests the right word to the
moralist, the politician, the philosopher of art. He might also be
called a "pre-philosopher," owing to this power of stimulation that
he possesses, and this appellation would have the further advantage
of making it well understood that there is no use attempting to make
of him a philosopher. And precisely because it is impossible to
extract a definite and particular doctrine from his pre-philosophy
and poetry, can many of different kinds be extracted, according to
diversity of minds and the progress of the times. Hence, if some
have maintained that the logical complement of that poetical vision
is speculative idealism, dialectic, anti-ascetic morality, romantic
aesthetic, realistic politics, the historical conception of the real,
and have maintained this with reason, basing their views upon doctrines
which they believed to be true, and have justly thought that the
logical complement of beauty is truth; others have possibly arrived at
pessimistic conclusions from that vision and assertion of conflicts;
and others have striven and are striving to effect the restauration of
some of the presumptions that are negated or are absent, such as faith
in another world and in divine and transcendental justice. This latter
position has been maintained as well as it possibly could have been,
with the aid of much research, by an Italian mind of the first order,
Manzoni, who was both a severe Catholic and a fervent Shakespearean. He
found in the profundity of Shakespeare the profoundest morality, and
remarked that "the representation of profound sorrows and indeterminate
terrors," as given by Shakespeare, "comes near to virtue," because
"when man comes inquisitively forth from the beaten path of things
known and from the accidents that he is accustomed to combat, and
finds himself in the infinite region of possible evils, he feels his
weakness, the cheerful ideas of defence and of vigour abandon him. Then
he thinks that virtue only, a clear conscience, and the help of God
alone can be of some succour to his mind in that condition." And thus
he concluded with characteristic certainty: "Let everyone look into
himself after reading a tragedy of Shakespeare, and observe whether he
does not experience a similar emotion in his own soul."