Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
How differently would Homer or Dante have answered that question!
Their tragedy would have been illumined by a sense of the divinity
of life and beauty, or by a sense of the sanctity of suffering and
death. Their faith had enveloped the world of experience in a world
of imagination, in which the ideals of the reason, of the fancy, and
of the heart had a natural expression. They had caught in the reality
the hint of a lovelier fable,--a fable in which that reality was
completed and idealized, and made at once vaster in its extent and more
intelligible in its principle. They had, as it were, dramatized the
universe, and endowed it with the tragic unities. In contrast with such
a luminous philosophy and so well-digested an experience, the silence
of Shakespeare and his philosophical incoherence have something in
them that is still heathen; something that makes us wonder whether the
northern mind, even in him, did not remain morose and barbarous at its
inmost core.
But before we allow ourselves such hasty and general inferences, we
may well stop to consider whether there is not some simpler answer to
our question. An epic poet, we might say, naturally deals with cosmic
themes. He needs supernatural machinery because he depicts the movement
of human affairs in their generality, as typified in the figures of
heroes whose function it is to embody or to overcome elemental forces.
Such a poet's world is fabulous, because his inspiration is impersonal.
But the dramatist renders the concrete reality of life. He has no
need of a superhuman setting for his pictures. Such a setting would
destroy the vitality of his creations. His plots should involve only
human actors and human motives: the _deus ex machina_ has always been
regarded as an inter-loper on his stage. The passions of man are his
all-sufficient material; he should weave his whole fabric out of them.
To admit the truth of all this would not, however, solve our problem.
The dramatist cannot be expected to put cosmogonies on the boards.
Miracle-plays become dramatic only when they become human. But the
supernatural world, which the playwright does not bring before the
foot-lights, may exist nevertheless in the minds of his characters
and of his audience. He may refer to it, appeal to it, and imply it,
in the actions and in the sentiments he attributes to his heroes. And
if the comparison of Shakespeare with Homer or Dante on the score of
religious inspiration is invalidated by the fact that he is a dramatist
while they are epic poets, a comparison may yet be instituted between
Shakespeare and other dramatists, from which his singular insensibility
to religion will as readily appear.
Greek tragedy, as we know, is dominated by the idea of fate. Even when
the gods do not appear in person, or where the service or neglect
of them is not the moving cause of the whole play,--as it is in the
"Bacchæ" and the "Hippolytus" of Euripides,--still the deep conviction
of the limits and conditions of human happiness underlies the fable.
The will of man fulfils the decrees of Heaven. The hero manifests a
higher force than his own, both in success and in failure. The fates
guide the willing and drag the unwilling. There is no such fragmentary
view of life as we have in our romantic drama, where accidents make the
meaningless happiness or unhappiness of a supersensitive adventurer.
Life is seen whole, although in miniature. Its boundaries and its
principles are studied more than its incidents. The human, therefore,
everywhere merges with the divine. Our mortality, being sharply defined
and much insisted upon, draws the attention all the more to that
eternity of Nature and of law in which it is embosomed. Nor is the
fact of superhuman control left for our reflection to discover; it is
emphatically asserted in those oracles on which so much of the action
commonly turns.
When the Greek religion was eclipsed by the Christian, the ancient way
of conceiving the ultra-human relations of human life became obsolete.
It was no longer possible to speak with sincerity of the oracles and
gods, of Nemesis and [Greek: hubris]. Yet for a long time it was not
possible to speak in any other terms. The new ideas were without
artistic definition, and literature was paralyzed. But in the course
of ages, when the imagination had had time and opportunity to develop
a Christian art and a Christian philosophy, the dramatic poets were
ready to deal with the new themes. Only their readiness in this respect
surpassed their ability, at least their ability to please those who had
any memory of the ancient perfection of the arts.
The miracle-plays were the beginning. Their crudity was extreme and
their levity of the frankest; but they had still, like the Greek plays,
a religious excuse and a religious background. They were not without
dramatic power, but their offences against taste and their demands upon
faith were too great for them to survive the Renaissance. Such plays as
the "Polyeucte" of Corneille and the "Devocion de la Cruz" of Calderon,
with other Spanish plays that might be mentioned, are examples of
Christian dramas by poets of culture; but as a whole we must say that
Christianity, while it succeeded in expressing itself in painting
and in architecture, failed to express itself in any adequate drama.
Where Christianity was strong, the drama either disappeared or became
secular; and it has never again dealt with cosmic themes successfully,
except in such hands as those of Goethe and Wagner, men who either
neglected Christianity altogether or used it only as an incidental
ornament, having, as they say, transcended it in their philosophy.
The fact is, that art and reflection have never been able to unite
perfectly the two elements of a civilization like ours, that draws its
culture from one source and its religion from another. Modern taste has
ever been, and still is, largely exotic, largely a revolution in favour
of something ancient or foreign. The more cultivated a period has been,
the more wholly it has reverted to antiquity for its inspiration. The
existence of that completer world has haunted all minds struggling for
self-expression, and interfered, perhaps, with the natural development
of their genius. The old art which they could not disregard distracted
them from the new ideal, and prevented them from embodying this ideal
outwardly; while the same ideal, retaining their inward allegiance,
made their revivals of ancient forms artificial and incomplete. The
strange idea could thus gain admittance that art was not called to deal
with everything; that its sphere was the world of polite conventions.
The serious and the sacred things of life were to be left unexpressed
and inarticulate; while the arts masqueraded in the forms of a Pagan
antiquity, to which a triviality was at the same time attributed which
in fact it had not possessed. This unfortunate separation of experience
and its artistic expression betrayed itself in the inadequacy of what
was beautiful and the barbarism of what was sincere.
When such are the usual conditions of artistic creation, we need
not wonder that Shakespeare, a poet of the Renaissance, should have
confined his representation of life to its secular aspects, and that
his readers after him should rather have marvelled at the variety of
the things of which he showed an understanding than have taken note of
the one thing he overlooked. To omit religion was after all to omit
what was not felt to be congenial to a poet's mind. The poet was to
trace for us the passionate and romantic embroideries of life; he was
to be artful and humane, and above all he was to be delightful. The
beauty and charm of things had nothing any longer to do with those
painful mysteries and contentions which made the temper of the pious
so acrid and sad. In Shakespeare's time and country, to be religious
already began to mean to be Puritanical; and in the divorce between the
fulness of life on the one hand and the depth and unity of faith on
the other, there could be no doubt to which side a man of imaginative
instincts would attach himself. A world of passion and beauty without
a meaning must seem to him more interesting and worthy than a world of
empty principle and dogma, meagre, fanatical, and false. It was beyond
the power of synthesis possessed by that age and nation to find a
principle of all passion and a religion of all life.
This power of synthesis is indeed so difficult and rare that the
attempt to gain it is sometimes condemned as too philosophical, and
as tending to embarrass the critical eye and creative imagination
with futile theories. We might say, for instance, that the absence of
religion in Shakespeare was a sign of his good sense; that a healthy
instinct kept his attention within the sublunary world; and that he
was in that respect superior to Homer and to Dante. For, while they
allowed their wisdom to clothe itself in fanciful forms, he gave us his
in its immediate truth, so that he embodied what they signified. The
supernatural machinery of their poems was, we might say, an accidental
incumbrance, a traditional means of expression, which they only half
understood, and which made their representation of life indirect and
partly unreal. Shakespeare, on the other hand, had reached his poetical
majority and independence. He rendered human experience no longer
through symbols, but by direct imaginative representation. What I have
treated as a limitation in him would, then, appear as the maturity of
his strength.
There is always a class of minds in whom the spectacle of history
produces a certain apathy of reason. They flatter themselves that they
can escape defeat by not attempting the highest tasks. We need not
here stop to discuss what value as truth a philosophical synthesis may
hope to attain, nor have we to protest against the æsthetic preference
for the sketch and the episode over a reasoned and unified rendering
of life. Suffice it to say that the human race hitherto, whenever it
has reached a phase of comparatively high development and freedom,
has formed a conception of its place in Nature, no less than of the
contents of its life; and that this conception has been the occasion
of religious sentiments and practices; and further, that every art,
whether literary or plastic, has drawn its favourite themes from this
religious sphere. The poetic imagination has not commonly stopped
short of the philosophical in representing a superhuman environment of
man.
Shakespeare, however, is remarkable among the greater poets for being
without a philosophy and without a religion. In his drama there is
no fixed conception of any forces, natural or moral, dominating and
transcending our mortal energies. Whether this characteristic be
regarded as a merit or as a defect, its presence cannot be denied.
Those who think it wise or possible to refrain from searching for
general principles, and are satisfied with the successive empirical
appearance of things, without any faith in their rational continuity or
completeness, may well see in Shakespeare their natural prophet. For
he, too, has been satisfied with the successive description of various
passions and events. His world, like the earth before Columbus, extends
in an indefinite plane which he is not tempted to explore.
Those of us, however, who believe in circumnavigation, and who think
that both human reason and human imagination require a certain totality
in our views, and who feel that the most important thing in life is the
lesson of it, and its relation to its own ideal,--we can hardly find
in Shakespeare all that the highest poet could give. Fulness is not
necessarily wholeness, and the most profuse wealth of characterization
seems still inadequate as a picture of experience, if this picture is
not somehow seen from above and reduced to a dramatic unity,--to that
unity of meaning that can suffuse its endless details with something of
dignity, simplicity, and peace. This is the imaginative power found in
several poets we have mentioned,--the power that gives certain passages
in Lucretius also their sublimity, as it gives sublimity to many
passages in the Bible.
For what is required for theoretic wholeness is not this or that
system but some system. Its value is not the value of truth, but that
of victorious imagination. Unity of conception is an æsthetic merit
no less than a logical demand. A fine sense of the dignity and pathos
of life cannot be attained unless we conceive somehow its outcome
and its relations. Without such a conception our emotions cannot be
steadfast and enlightened. Without it the imagination cannot fulfil
its essential function or achieve its supreme success. Shakespeare
himself, had it not been for the time and place in which he lived, when
religion and imagination blocked rather than helped each other, would
perhaps have allowed more of a cosmic background to appear behind his
crowded scenes. If the Christian in him was not the real man, at least
the Pagan would have spoken frankly. The material forces of Nature,
or their vague embodiment in some northern pantheon, would then have
stood behind his heroes. The various movements of events would have
appeared as incidents in a larger drama to which they had at least
some symbolic relation. We should have been awed as well as saddened,
and purified as well as pleased, by being made to feel the dependence
of human accidents upon cosmic forces and their fated evolution. Then
we should not have been able to say that Shakespeare was without a
religion. For the effort of religion, says Goethe, is to adjust us to
the inevitable; each religion in its way strives to bring about this
consummation.
[1] "And so aboute foure of the clocke in the afternoone, the Kynge
when he saw no apparaunce of enemies, caused the retreite to be blowen,
and gathering his army togither, gave thankes to almightie god for
so happy a victory, causing his prelates and chapleines to sing this
psalm, _In exitu Israeli de Egipto_, and commandyng every man to kneele
downe on the grounde at this verse; _Non nobis, domine, non nobis, sed
nomini tuo da gloriam_. Which done, he caused _Te Deum_, with certain
anthems, to be song, giving laud & praise to god, and not boasting of
his owne force or any humaine power." HOLINSHED.
VII
THE POETRY OF BARBARISM
I
It is an observation at first sight melancholy but in the end, perhaps,
enlightening, that the earliest poets are the most ideal, and that
primitive ages furnish the most heroic characters and have the clearest
vision of a perfect life. The Homeric times must have been full of
ignorance and suffering. In those little barbaric towns, in those camps
and farms, in those shipyards, there must have been much insecurity
and superstition. That age was singularly poor in all that concerns
the convenience of life and the entertainment of the mind with arts
and sciences. Yet it had a sense for civilization. That machinery of
life which men were beginning to devise appealed to them as poetical;
they knew its ultimate justification and studied its incipient
processes with delight. The poetry of that simple and ignorant age was,
accordingly, the sweetest and sanest that the world has known; the
most faultless in taste, and the most even and lofty in inspiration.
Without lacking variety and homeliness, it bathed all things human in
the golden light of morning; it clothed sorrow in a kind of majesty,
instinct with both self-control and heroic frankness. Nowhere else can
we find so noble a rendering of human nature, so spontaneous a delight
in life, so uncompromising a dedication to beauty, and such a gift of
seeing beauty in everything. Homer, the first of poets, was also the
best and the most poetical.
From this beginning, if we look down the history of Occidental
literature, we see the power of idealization steadily decline. For
while it finds here and there, as in Dante, a more spiritual theme
and a subtler and riper intellect, it pays for that advantage by a
more than equivalent loss in breadth, sanity, and happy vigour. And if
ever imagination bursts out with a greater potency, as in Shakespeare
(who excels the patriarch of poetry in depth of passion and vividness
of characterization, and in those exquisite bubblings of poetry and
humour in which English genius is at its best), yet Shakespeare also
pays the price by a notable loss in taste, in sustained inspiration,
in consecration, and in rationality. There is more or less rubbish in
his greatest works. When we come down to our own day _we_ find poets of
hardly less natural endowment (for in endowment all ages are perhaps
alike) and with vastly richer sources of inspiration; for they have
many arts and literatures behind them, with the spectacle of a varied
and agitated society, a world which is the living microcosm of its own
history and presents in one picture many races, arts, and religions.
Our poets have more wonderful tragedies of the imagination to depict
than had Homer, whose world was innocent of any essential defeat,
or Dante, who believed in the world's definitive redemption. Or, if
perhaps their inspiration is comic, they have the pageant of mediæval
manners, with its picturesque artifices and passionate fancies, and the
long comedy of modern social revolutions, so illusory in their aims and
so productive in their aimlessness. They have, moreover, the new and
marvellous conception which natural science has given us of the world
and of the conditions of human progress.
With all these lessons of experience behind them, however, we find
our contemporary poets incapable of any high wisdom, incapable of any
imaginative rendering of human life and its meaning. Our poets are
things of shreds and patches; they give us episodes and studies, a
sketch of this curiosity, a glimpse of that romance; they have no total
vision, no grasp of the whole reality, and consequently no capacity for
a sane and steady idealization. The comparatively barbarous ages had a
poetry of the ideal; they had visions of beauty, order, and perfection.
This age of material elaboration has no sense for those things. Its
fancy is retrospective, whimsical, and flickering; its ideals, when
it has any, are negative and partial; its moral strength is a blind
and miscellaneous vehemence. Its poetry, in a word, is the poetry of
barbarism.
This poetry should be viewed in relation to the general moral crisis
and imaginative disintegration of which it gives a verbal echo; then
we shall avoid the injustice of passing it over as insignificant, no
less than the imbecility of hailing it as essentially glorious and
successful. We must remember that the imagination of our race has been
subject to a double discipline. It has been formed partly in the school
of classic literature and polity, and partly in the school of Christian
piety. This duality of inspiration, this contradiction between the two
accepted methods of rationalizing the world, has been a chief source
of that incoherence, that romantic indistinctness and imperfection,
which largely characterize the products of the modern arts. A main
cannot serve two masters; yet the conditions have not been such as to
allow him wholly to despise the one or wholly to obey the other. To be
wholly Pagan is impossible after the dissolution of that civilization
which had seemed universal, and that empire which had believed itself
eternal. To be wholly Christian is impossible for a similar reason, now
that the illusion and cohesion of Christian ages is lost, and for the
further reason that Christianity was itself fundamentally eclectic.
Before it could succeed and dominate men even for a time, it was
obliged to adjust itself to reality, to incorporate many elements of
Pagan wisdom, and to accommodate itself to many habits and passions at
variance with its own ideal.
In these latter times, with the prodigious growth of material life in
elaboration and of mental life in diffusion, there has supervened upon
this old dualism a new faith in man's absolute power, a kind of return
to the inexperience and self-assurance of youth. This new inspiration
has made many minds indifferent to the two traditional disciplines 5
neither is seriously accepted by them, for the reason, excellent from
their own point of view, that no discipline whatever is needed. The
memory of ancient disillusions has faded with time. Ignorance of the
past has bred contempt for the lessons which the past might teach. Men
prefer to repeat the old experiment without knowing that they repeat it.
I say advisedly ignorance of the past, in spite of the unprecedented
historical erudition of our time for life is an art not to be learned
by observation, and the most minute and comprehensive studies do not
teach us what the spirit of man should have learned by its long living.
We study the past as a dead object, as a ruin, not as an authority
and as an experiment. One reason why history was less interesting
to former ages was that they were less conscious of separation
from the past. The perspective of time was less clear because the
synthesis of experience was more complete. The mind does not easily
discriminate the successive phases of an action in which it is still
engaged; it does not arrange in a temporal series the elements of a
single perception, but posits them all together as constituting a
permanent and real object. Human nature and the life of the world
were real and stable objects to the apprehension of our fore-fathers
; the actors changed, but not the characters or the play. Men were
then less studious of derivations because they were more conscious of
identities. They thought of all reality as in a sense contemporary,
and in considering the maxims of a philosopher or the style of a poet,
they were not primarily concerned with settling his date and describing
his environment. The standard by which they judged was eternal; the
environment in which man found himself did not seem to them subject of
any essential change.
To us the picturesque element in history is more striking because we
feel ourselves the children of our own age only, an age which being
itself singular and revolutionary, tends to read its own character into
the past, and to regard all other periods as no less fragmentary and
effervescent than itself. The changing and the permanent elements are,
indeed, everywhere present, and the bias of the observer may emphasize
the one or the other as it will: the only question is whether we find
the significance of things in their variations or in their similarities.
Now the habit of regarding the past as effete and as merely a
stepping-stone to something present or future, is unfavourable to any
true apprehension of that element in the past which was vital and which
remains eternal. It is a habit of thought that destroys the sense of
the moral identity of all ages, by virtue of its very insistence on the
mechanical derivation of one age from another. Existences that cause
one another exclude one another; each is alien to the rest inasmuch as
it is the product of new and different conditions. Ideas that cause
nothing unite all things by giving them a common point of reference and
a single standard of value.