as it arose again in a Christian age, divorced from the accidental
setting which Greek manners had given it, we may be better able to
understand its essence. It is nothing else than the application to
passion of that pursuit of something permanent in a world of change,
of something absolute in a world of relativity, which was the essence
of the Platonic philosophy. If we may give rein to the imagination
in a matter which without imagination could not be understood at
all, we may fancy Plato trying to comprehend the power which beauty
exerted over his senses by applying to the objects of love that
profound metaphysical distinction which he had learned to make in his
dialectical studies--the distinction between the appearance to sense
and the reality envisaged by the intellect, between the phenomenon
and the ideal. The whole natural world had come to seem to him like
a world of dreams. In dreams images succeed one another without
other meaning than that which they derive from our strange power
of recognition--a power which enables us somehow, among the most
incongruous transformations and surroundings, to find again the objects
of our waking life, and to name those absurd and unmannerly visions by
the name of father or mother or by any other familiar name. As these
resemblances to real things make up all the truth of our dream, and
these recognitions all its meaning, so Plato thought that all the truth
and meaning of earthly things was the reference they contained to a
heavenly original. This heavenly original we remember and recognize
even among the distortions, disappearances, and multiplications of its
earthly copies.
This thought is easily applicable to the affections; indeed, it is not
impossible that it was the natural transcendence of any deep glance
into beauty, and the lessons in disillusion and idealism given by that
natural metaphysician we call love, that first gave Plato the key to
his general system. There is, at any rate, no sphere in which the
supersensible is approached with so warm a feeling of its reality, in
which the phenomenon is so transparent and so indifferent a symbol of
something perfect and divine beyond. In love and beauty, if anywhere,
even the common man thinks he has visitations from a better world,
approaches to a lost happiness; a happiness never tasted by us in
this world, and yet so natural, so expected, that we look for it at
every turn of a corner, in every new face; we look for it with so much
confidence, with so much depth of expectation, that we never quite
overcome our disappointment that it is not found.
And it is not found,--no, never,--in spite of what we may think when
we are first in love. Plato knew this well from his experience. He
had had successful loves, or what the world calls such, but he could
not fancy that these successes were more than provocations, more
than hints of what the true good is. To have mistaken them for real
happiness would have been to continue to dream. It would have shown
as little comprehension of the heart's experience as the idiot shows
of the experience of the senses when he is unable to put together
impressions of his eyes and hands and to say, "Here is a table; here
is a stool." It is by a parallel use of the understanding that we put
together the impressions of the heart and the imagination and are
able to say, "Here is absolute beauty: here is God." The impressions
themselves have no permanence, no intelligible essence. As Plato said,
they are never anything fixed but are always either becoming or ceasing
to be what we think them. There must be, he tells us, an eternal and
clearly definable object of which the visible appearances to us are the
manifold semblance; now by one trait now by another the phantom before
us lights up that vague and haunting idea, and makes us utter its name
with a momentary sense of certitude and attainment.
Just so the individual beauties that charm our attention and enchain
the soul have only a transitive existence; they are momentary visions,
irrecoverable moods. Their object is unstable; we never can say what
it is, it changes so quickly before our eyes. What is it that a mother
loves in her child? Perhaps the babe not yet born, or the babe that
grew long ago by her suffering and unrecognized care; perhaps the man
to be or the youth that has been. What does a man love in a woman?
The girl that is yet, perhaps, to be his, or the wife that once chose
to give him her whole existence. Where, among all these glimpses, is
the true object of love? It flies before us, it tempts us on, only
to escape and turn to mock us from a new quarter. And yet nothing
can concern us more or be more real to us than this mysterious good,
since the pursuit of it gives our lives whatever they have of true
earnestness and meaning, and the approach to it whatever they have of
joy.
So far is this ideal, Plato would say, from being an illusion, that it
is the source of the world, the power that keeps us in existence. But
for it, we should be dead. A profound indifference, an initial torpor,
would have kept us from ever opening our eyes, and we should have no
world of business or pleasure, politics or science, to think about at
all. We, and the whole universe, exist only by the passionate attempt
to return to our perfection, by the radical need of losing ourselves
again in God. That ineffable good is our natural possession; all we
honour in this life is but the partial recovery of our birthright;
every delightful thing is like a rift in the clouds through which we
catch a glimpse of our native heaven. If that heaven seems so far away
and the idea of it so dim and unreal, it is because we are so far from
perfect, so much immersed in what is alien and destructive to the soul.
Thus the history of our loves is the record of our divine
conversations, of our intercourse with heaven. It matters very
little whether this history seems to us tragic or not. In one sense,
all mortal loves are tragic because never is the creature we think
we possess the true and final object of our love; this love must
ultimately pass beyond that particular apparition, which is itself
continually passing away and shifting all its lines and colours. As
Heraclitus could never bathe twice in the same river, because its water
had flowed away, so Plato could never look twice at the same face, for
it had become another. But on the other hand the most unsuccessful
passion cannot be a vain thing. More, perhaps, than if it had found
an apparent satisfaction, it will reveal to us an object of infinite
worth, and the flight of the soul, detached by it from the illusions of
common life, will be more straight and steady toward the ultimate good.
Such, if we are not mistaken, is the lesson of Plato's experience
and also of that of the Italian poets whom we have quoted. Is this
experience something normal? Is it the rational outcome of our own
lives? That is a question which each man must answer for himself.
Our immediate object will have been attained if we have made more
intelligible a tendency which is certainly very common among men, and
not among the men least worthy of honour. It is the tendency to make
our experience of love rational, as scientific thinking is a tendency
to make rational our experience of the outer world. The theories of
natural science are creations of human reason; they change with the
growth of reason, and express the intellectual impulses of each nation
and age. Theories about the highest good do the same; only being less
applicable in practice, less controllable by experiment, they seldom
attain the same distinctness and articulation. But there is nothing
authoritative in those constructions of the intellect, nothing coercive
except in so far as our own experience and reflection force us to
accept them. Natural science is persuasive because it embodies the
momentum of common sense and of the practical arts; it carries on
their spontaneous processes by more refined but essentially similar
methods. Moral science is persuasive under the same conditions, but
these conditions are not so generally found in the minds of men. Their
conscience is often superstitious and perfunctory; their imagination is
usually either disordered or dull. There is little momentum in their
lives which the moralist can rely upon to carry them onward toward
rational ideals. Deprived of this support his theories fall to the
ground; they must seem, to every man whose nature cannot elicit them
from his own experience, empty verbiage and irrelevant dreams.
Nothing in the world of fact obliges us to agree with Michael Angelo
when he says that eternity can no more be separated from beauty than
heat from fire. Beauty is a thing we experience, a value we feel;
but eternity is something problematical. It might well happen that
beauty should exist for a while in our contemplation and that eternity
should have nothing to do with it or with us. It might well happen
that our affections, being the natural expression of our instincts in
the family and in the state, should bind us for a while to the beings
with whom life has associated us--a father, a lover, a child--and that
these affections should gradually fade with the decay of our vitality,
declining in the evening of life, and passing away when we surrender
our breath, without leading us to any single and supreme good, to any
eternal love. If, therefore, the thoughts and consolations we have
been rehearsing have sounded to us extravagant or unnatural, we cannot
justify them by attempting to prove the actual existence of their
objects, by producing the absolute beauty or by showing where and how
we may come face to face with God. We may well feel that beauty and
love are clear and good enough without any such additional embodiments.
We may take the world as it is, without feigning another, and study
actual experience without postulating any that is hypothetical. We can
welcome beauty for the pleasure it affords and love for the happiness
it brings, without asking that these things should receive supernatural
extensions.
But we should have studied Plato and his kindred poets to little
purpose if we thought that by admitting all this we were rejecting more
than the mythical element that was sometimes mixed with their ideal
philosophy. Its essence is not touched by any acknowledgment of what
seems true or probable in the realm of actual existence. Nothing is
more characteristic of the Platonic mind than a complete indifference
to the continuance of experience and an exclusive interest in its
comprehension. If we wish to understand this classic attitude of
reason, all we need do is to let reason herself instruct us. We do
not need more data, but more mind. If we take the sights and the loves
that our mortal limitations have allowed of, and surrender ourselves
unreservedly to their natural eloquence; if we say to the spirit that
stirs within them, "Be thou me, impetuous one"; if we become, as
Michael Angelo says he was, all eyes to see or all heart to feel, then
the force of our spiritual vitality, the momentum of our imagination,
will carry us beyond ourselves, beyond an interest in our personal
existence or eventual emotions, into the presence of a divine beauty
and an eternal truth--things impossible to realize in experience,
although necessarily envisaged by thought.
As the senses that perceive, in the act of perceiving assert an
absolute reality in their object, as the mind that looks before and
after believes in the existence of a past and a future which cannot
now be experienced, so the imagination and the heart behold, when they
are left free to expand and express themselves, an absolute beauty
and a perfect love. Intense contemplation disentangles the ideal from
the idol of sense, and a purified will rests in it as in the true
object of worship. These are the oracles of reason, the prophecies of
those profounder spirits who in the world of Nature are obedient unto
death because they belong intrinsically to a world where death is
impossible, and who can rise continually, by abstraction from personal
sensibility, into identity with the eternal objects of rational life.
Such a religion must elude popular apprehension until it is translated
into myths and cosmological dogmas. It is easier for men to fill out
the life of the spirit by supplementing the facts of experience by
other facts for which there is no evidence than it is for them to
master the given facts and turn them to spiritual uses. Many can fight
for a doubtful fact when they cannot perform a difficult idealization.
They trust, as all men must, to what they can see; they believe in
things as their faculties represent things to them. By the same right,
however, the rationalizer of experience believes in his visions; he
rests, like the meanest of us, in the present object of his thought.
So long as we live at all we must trust in something, at least in the
coherence and permanence of the visible world and in the value of the
objects of our own desires. And if we live nobly, we are under the same
necessity of believing in noble things. However unreal, therefore,
these Platonic intuitions may seem to those of us whose interests lie
in other quarters, we may rest assured that these very thoughts would
dominate our minds and these eternal companionships would cheer our
desolation, if we had wrestled as manfully with the same passions and
passed through the transmuting fire of as great a love.
VI
THE ABSENCE OF RELIGION IN SHAKESPEARE
We are accustomed to think of the universality of Shakespeare as not
the least of his glories. No other poet has given so many-sided an
expression to human nature, or rendered so many passions and moods
with such an appropriate variety of style, sentiment, and accent. If,
therefore, we were asked to select one monument of human civilization
that should survive to some future age, or be transported to another
planet to bear witness to the inhabitants there of what we have been
upon earth, we should probably choose the works of Shakespeare. In them
we recognize the truest portrait and best memorial of man. Yet the
archæologists of that future age, or the cosmographers of that other
part of the heavens, after conscientious study of our Shakespearian
autobiography, would misconceive our life in one important respect.
They would hardly understand that man had had a religion.
There are, indeed, numerous exclamations and invocations in
Shakespeare which we, who have other means of information, know to
be evidences of current religious ideas. Shakespeare adopts these,
as he adopts the rest of his vocabulary, from the society about
him. But he seldom or never gives them their original value. When
Iago says "'_sblood_" a commentator might add explanations which
should involve the whole philosophy of Christian devotion; but this
Christian sentiment is not in Iago's mind, nor in Shakespeare's, any
more than the virtues of Heracles and his twelve labours are in the
mind of every slave and pander that cries "_hercule"_ in the pages of
Plautus and Terence. Oaths are the fossils of piety. The geologist
recognizes in them the relics of a once active devotion, but they are
now only counters and pebbles tossed about in the unconscious play of
expression. The lighter and more constant their use, the less their
meaning.
Only one degree more inward than this survival of a religious
vocabulary in profane speech is the reference we often find in
Shakespeare to religious institutions and traditions. There are monks,
bishops, and cardinals; there is even mention of saints, although
none is ever presented to us in person. The clergy, if they have any
wisdom, have an earthly one. Friar Lawrence culls his herbs like a
more benevolent Medea; and Cardinal Wolsey flings away ambition with
a profoundly Pagan despair; his robe and his integrity to heaven are
cold comfort to him. Juliet goes to shrift to arrange her love affairs,
and Ophelia should go to a nunnery to forget hers. Even the chastity
of Isabella has little in it that would have been out of place in
Iphigenia. The metaphysical Hamlet himself sees a "true ghost," but so
far reverts to the positivism that underlies Shakespeare's thinking as
to speak soon after of that "undiscovered country from whose bourn no
traveller returns." There are only two or three short passages in the
plays, and one sonnet, in which true religious feeling seems to break
forth. The most beautiful of these passages is that in "Richard II,"
which commemorates the death of Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk--
"Many a time hath banished Norfolk fought
For Jesu Christ in glorious Christian field,
Streaming the ensign of the Christian cross
Against black Pagans, Turks, and Saracens;
And, toiled with works of war, retired himself
To Italy; and there, at Venice, gave
His body to that pleasant country's earth,
And his pure soul unto his captain Christ,
Under whose colours he had fought so long."
This is tender and noble, and full of an indescribable chivalry and
pathos, yet even here we find the spirit of war rather than that of
religion, and a deeper sense of Italy than of heaven. More unmixed is
the piety of Henry V after the battle of Agincourt:--
"O God, thy arm was here;
And not to us, but to thy arm alone,
Ascribe we all!--When, without stratagem,
But in plain shock and even play of battle,
Was ever known so great and little loss,
On one part and on the other?--Take it, God,
For it is none but thine....
Come, go we in procession to the village,
And be it death proclaimed through our host,
To boast of this, or take that praise from God,
Which is his only....
Do we all holy rites;
Let there be sung _Non nobis_ and _Te Deum_."
This passage is certainly a true expression of religious feeling, and
just the kind that we might expect from a dramatist. Religion appears
here as a manifestation of human nature and as an expression of human
passion. The passion, however, is not due to Shakespeare's imagination,
but is essentially historical: the poet has simply not rejected, as he
usually does, the religious element in the situation he reproduces.[1]
With this dramatic representation of piety we may couple another, of a
more intimate kind, from the Sonnets:--
"Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
Fooled by these rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine by selling hours of dross,
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
Then shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men,
And death once dead, there's no more dying then."
This sonnet contains more than a natural religious emotion inspired by
a single event. It contains reflection, and expresses a feeling not
merely dramatically proper but rationally just. A mind that habitually
ran into such thoughts would be philosophically pious; it would be
spiritual. The Sonnets, as a whole, are spiritual; their passion is
transmuted into discipline. Their love, which, whatever its nominal
object, is hardly anything but love of beauty and youth in general,
is made to triumph over time by a metaphysical transformation of the
object into something eternal. At first this is the beauty of the race
renewing itself by generation, then it is the description of beauty in
the poet's verse, and finally it is the immortal soul enriched by the
contemplation of that beauty. This noble theme is the more impressively
rendered by being contrasted with another, with a vulgar love that by
its nature refuses to be so transformed and transmuted. "Two loves,"
cries the poet, in a line that gives us the essence of the whole, "Two
loves I have,--of comfort, and despair."
In all this depth of experience, however, there is still wanting any
religious image. The Sonnets are spiritual, but, with the doubtful
exception of the one quoted above, they are not Christian. And, of
course, a poet of Shakespeare's time could not have found any other
mould than Christianity for his religion. In our day, with our wide and
conscientious historical sympathies, it may be possible for us to find
in other rites and doctrines than those of our ancestors an expression
of some ultimate truth. But for Shakespeare, in the matter of religion,
the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing; he
chose to leave his heroes and himself in the presence of life and of
death with no other philosophy than that which the profane world can
suggest and understand.
This positivism, we need hardly say, was not due to any grossness or
sluggishness in his imagination. Shakespeare could be idealistic when
he dreamed, as he could be spiritual when he reflected. The spectacle
of life did not pass before his eyes as a mere phantasmagoria. He
seized upon its principles; he became wise. Nothing can exceed
the ripeness of his seasoned judgment, or the occasional breadth,
sadness, and terseness of his reflection. The author of "Hamlet"
could not be without metaphysical aptitude; "Macbeth" could not
have been written without a sort of sibylline inspiration, or the
Sonnets without something of the Platonic mind. It is all the more
remarkable, therefore, that we should have to search through all the
works of Shakespeare to find half a dozen passages that have so much
as a religious sound, and that even these passages, upon examination,
should prove not to be the expression of any deep religious conception.
If Shakespeare had been without metaphysical capacity, or without
moral maturity, we could have explained his strange insensibility to
religion; but as it is, we must marvel at his indifference and ask
ourselves what can be the causes of it. For, even if we should not
regard the absence of religion as an imperfection in his own thought,
we must admit it to be an incompleteness in his portrayal of the
thought of others. Positivism may be a virtue in a philosopher, but it
is a vice in a dramatist, who has to render those human passions to
which the religious imagination has always given a larger meaning and
a richer depth.
Those greatest poets by whose side we are accustomed to put Shakespeare
did not forego this advantage. They gave us man with his piety and
the world with its gods. Homer is the chief repository of the Greek
religion, and Dante the faithful interpreter of the Catholic. Nature
would have been inconceivable to them without the supernatural, or man
without the influence and companionship of the gods. These poets live
in a cosmos. In their minds, as in the mind of their age, the fragments
of experience have fallen together into a perfect picture, like the
bits of glass in a kaleidoscope. Their universe is a total. Reason
and imagination have mastered it completely and peopled it. No chaos
remains beyond, or, if it does, it is thought of with an involuntary
shudder that soon passes into a healthy indifference. They have a
theory of human life; they see man in his relations, surrounded by a
kindred universe in which he fills his allotted place. He knows the
meaning and issue of his life, and does not voyage without a chart.
Shakespeare's world, on the contrary, is only the world of human
society. The cosmos eludes him; he does not seem to feel the need
of framing that idea. He depicts human life in all its richness and
variety, but leaves that life without a setting, and consequently
without a meaning. If we asked him to tell us what is the significance
of the passion and beauty he had so vividly displayed, and what is the
outcome of it all, he could hardly answer in any other words than those
he puts into the mouth of Macbeth:--