Satanic agency, Luther, of course, did this as he did every thing else,
gigantically. The Devil, as Luther conceived him, was not the Satan of
Milton; although, had Luther set himself to realize the Miltonic
narrative, his conception might not have been dissimilar. But it was as
the enemy of mankind, working in human affairs, that Luther conceived the
Devil. We should expect his conception therefore to tally with Goethe's in
some respects, but only as a conception of Luther's would tally with one
of Goethe's. Luther's conception was truer to the strict Scriptural
definition than either Milton's or Goethe's. Mephistopheles being a
character in a drama, and apparently fully occupied in his part there, we
cannot bring ourselves to recognise in him that virtually omnipotent being
to whom all evil is owing, who is leavening the human mind everywhere as
if the atmosphere round the globe were charged with the venom of his
spirit. In the case of Milton's Satan we have no such difficulty, because
in his case a whole planet is at stake, and there are only two individuals
on it. But Luther's conception met the whole exigency of Scripture. His
conception was distinctly that of a being to whose operation all the evil
of all times and all places is owing, a veritable [Greek: pneuma] diffused
through the earth's atmosphere. Hence his mind had to entertain the notion
of a plurality of devils; for he could conceive the Arch-Demon acting
corporeally only through imps or emanations. Goethe's Mephistopheles might
pass for one of these.
It would be possible farther to illustrate Luther's conception of the Evil
Principle by quoting many of his specific sayings about diabolic agency.
It would be found from these that his conception was that of a being to
whom evil of all kinds was dear. The Devil with him was a meteorological
agent. Devils, he said, are in woods, and waters, and dark poolly places,
ready to hurt passers-by; there are devils also in the thick black clouds,
who cause hail and thunders and lightnings, and poison the air and the
fields and the pastures. "When such things happen, philosophers say they
are natural, and ascribe them to the planets, and I know not what all."
The Devil he believed also to be the patron of witchcraft. The Devil, he
said, had the power of deceiving the senses, so that one should swear he
heard or saw something while really the whole was an illusion. The Devil
also was at the bottom of dreaming and somnambulism. He was likewise the
author of diseases. "I hold," said Luther, "that the Devil sendeth all
heavy diseases and sicknesses upon people." Diseases are, as it were, the
Devil striking people; only, in striking, he must use some natural
instrument, as a murderer uses a sword. When our sins get the upper hand,
and all is going wrong, then the Devil must be God's hangman, to clear
away obstructions and to blast the earth with famines and pestilences.
Whatsoever procures death, that is the Devil's trade. All sadness and
melancholy come of the Devil. So does insanity; but the Devil has no
farther power over the soul of a maniac. The Devil works in the affairs of
nations. He looks always upward, taking an interest in what is high and
pompous; he does not look downward, taking little interest in what is
insignificant and lowly. He likes to work on the great scale, to establish
an influence over the central minds which manage public affairs. The Devil
is also a spiritual tempter. He is the opponent of the Divine grace in the
hearts of individuals. This was the aspect of the doctrine of Satanic
agency which was most frequent in preaching; and, accordingly, Luther's
propositions on the point are very specific. He had ascertained the laws
of Satanic operation upon the human spirit. The Devil, he said, knows
Scripture well, and uses it in argument. He shoots fearful thoughts, which
are his fiery darts, into the hearts of the godly. The Devil is acquainted
even with those mysterious enjoyments, those spiritual excitements, which
the Christian would suppose a being like him must be ignorant of. "What
gross inexperienced fellows," Luther says, "are those Papist commentators!
They are for interpreting Paul's 'thorn in the flesh' to be merely fleshly
lust; because they know no other kind of tribulation than that." But,
though the Devil has great power over the human mind, he is limited in
some respects. He has no means, for instance, of knowing the thoughts of
the faithful until they give them utterance. Again, if the Devil be once
foiled in argument, he cannot tempt that soul again on the same tack. The
Papacy being with Luther the grand existing form of evil, he of course
recognised the Devil in _it_. If the Papacy were once overthrown, Satan
would lose his stronghold. Never on earth again would he be able to pile
up such another edifice. No wonder, then, that at that moment all the
energies of the enraged and despairing Spirit were employed to prop up the
reeling and tottering fabric. Necessarily, therefore, Luther and Satan
were personal antagonists. Satan saw that the grand struggle was with
Luther. If he could but crush him by physical violence, or make him forget
God, then the world would be his own again. So, often did he wrestle with
Luther's spirit; often in nightly heart-agonies did he try to shake
Luther's faith in Christ. But he was never victorious. "All the Duke
Georges in the universe," said Luther, "are not equal to a single Devil;
and I do not fear the Devil." "I should wish," he said, "to die rather by
the Devil's hands than by the hands of Pope or Emperor; for then I should
die, at all events, by the hands of a great and mighty Prince of the
World: but, if I die through him, he shall eat such a bit of me as shall
be his suffocation; he shall spew me out again; and, at the last day, I,
in requital, shall devour him." When all other means were unavailing,
Luther found that the Devil could not stand against humour. In his hours
of spiritual agony, he tells us, when the Devil was heaping up his sins
before him, so as to make him doubt whether he should be saved, and when
he could not drive the Devil away by uttering sentences of Holy Writ, or
by prayer, he used to address him thus: "Devil, if, as you say, Christ's
blood, which was shed for my sins, be not sufficient to insure my
salvation, can't you pray for me yourself, Devil?" At this the Devil
invariably fled, "_quia est superbus spiritus et non potest ferre
contemptum sui_."
What Luther called "wrestling with the Devil" we at this day call "low
spirits." Life must be a much more insipid thing than it was then. O what
a soul that man must have had; under what a weight of feeling, that would
have crushed a thousand of us, _he_ must have trod the earth!
SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE.
SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE.[2]
If there are any two portraits which we all expect to find hung up in the
rooms of those whose tastes are regulated by the highest literary culture,
they are the portraits of Shakespeare and Goethe.
There are, indeed, many and various gods in our modern Pantheon of genius.
It contains rough gods and smooth gods, gods of symmetry and gods of
strength, gods great and terrible, gods middling and respectable, and
little cupids and toy-gods. Out of this variety each master of a household
will select his own Penates, the appropriate gods of his own mantelpiece.
The roughest will find some to worship them, and the smallest shall not
want domestic adoration. But we suppose a dilettante of the first class,
one who, besides excluding from his range of choice the deities of war,
and cold thought, and civic action, shall further exclude from it all
those even of the gods of modern literature who, whether by reason of
their inferior rank, or by reason of their peculiar attributes, fail as
models of universal stateliness. What we should expect to see over the
mantelpiece of such a rigorous person would be the images of the English
Shakespeare and the German Goethe.
On the one side, we will suppose, fixed with due gance against the
luxurious crimson of the wall, would be a slab of black marble exhibiting
in relief a white plaster-cast of the face of Shakespeare as modelled from
the Stratford bust; on the other, in a similar setting, would be a copy,
if possible, of the mask of Goethe taken at Weimar after the poet's death.
This would suffice; and the considerate beholder could find no fault with
such an arrangement. It is true, reasons might be assigned why a third
mask should have been added--that of the Italian Dante; in which case
Dante and Goethe should have occupied the sides, and Shakespeare should
have been placed higher up between. But the master of the house would
point out how, in that case, a fine taste would have been pained by the
inevitable sense of contrast between the genial mildness of the two
Teutonic faces and the severe and scornful melancholy of the poet of the
Inferno. The face of the Italian poet, as being so different in kind, must
either be reluctantly omitted, he would say, or transferred by itself to
the other side of the room. Unless, indeed, with a view to satisfy the
claims both of degree and of kind, Shakespeare were to be placed alone
over the mantelpiece, and Dante and Goethe in company on the opposite
wall, where, there being but two, the contrast would be rather agreeable
than otherwise! On the whole, however, and without prejudice to new
arrangements in the course of future decorations, he is content that it
should be as it is.
And so, reader, for the present are we. Let us enter together, then, if it
seems worth while, the room of this imaginary dilettante during his
absence; let us turn the key in the lock, so that he may not come in to
interrupt us; and let us look for a little time at the two masks he has
provided for us over the mantelpiece, receiving such reflections as they
may suggest. Doubtless we have often looked at the two masks before; but
that matters little.
* * * * *
As we gaze at the first of the two masks, what is it that we see? A face
full in contour, of good oval shape, the individual features small in
proportion to the entire countenance, the greater part of which is made up
of an ample and rounded forehead and a somewhat abundant mouth and chin.
The general impression is that rather of rich, fine, and very mobile
tissue, than of large or decided bone. This, together with the length of
the upper lip, and the absence of any set expression, imparts to the face
an air of lax and luxurious calmness. It is clearly a passive face rather
than an active face, a face across which moods may pass and repass rather
than a face grooved and charactered into any one permanent show of
relation to the outer world. Placed beside the mask of Cromwell, it would
fail to impress, not only as being less massive and energetic, but also as
being in every way less marked and determinate. It is the face, we repeat,
of a literary man, one of those faces which depend for their power to
impress less on the sculptor's favourite circumstance of distinct osseous
form than on the changing hue and aspect of the living flesh. And yet it
is, even in form, quite a peculiar face. Instead of being, as in the
ordinary thousand and one portraits of Shakespeare, a mere general face
which anybody or nobody might have had, the face in the mask (and the
singular portrait in the first folio edition of the poet's works
corroborates it) is a face which every call-boy about the Globe Theatre
must have carried about with him in his imagination, without any trouble,
as specifically Mr. Shakespeare's face. In complexion, as we imagine it,
it was rather fair than dark; and yet not very fair either, if we are to
believe Shakespeare himself (Sonnet 62)--
"But when my glass shows me myself indeed,
Beated and chopped with tanned antiquity--"
a passage, however, in which, from the nature of the mood in which it was
written, we are to suppose exaggeration for the worse. In short, the face
of Shakespeare, so far as we can infer what it was from the homely
Stratford bust, was a genuine and even comely, but still unusual, English
face, distinguished by a kind of ripe intellectual fulness in the general
outline, comparative smallness in the individual features, and a look of
gentle and humane repose.
Goethe's face is different. The whole size of the head is perhaps less,
but the proportion of the face to the head is greater, and there is more
of that determinate form which arises from prominence and strength in the
bony structure. The features are individually larger, and present in their
combination more of that deliberate beauty of outline which can be
conveyed with effect in sculpture. The expression, however, is also that
of calm intellectual repose; and, in the absence of harshness or undue
concentration of the parts, one is at liberty to discover the proof that
this also was the face of a man whose life was spent rather in a career of
thought and literary effort than in a career of active and laborious
strife. Yet the face, with all its power of fine susceptibility, is not so
passive as that of Shakespeare. Its passiveness is more the passiveness of
self-control, and less that of natural constitution; the susceptibilities
pass and repass over a firmer basis of permanent character; the tremors
among the nervous tissues do not reach to such depths of sheer nervous
dissolution, but sooner make impact against the solid bone. The calm in
the one face is more that of habitual softness and ease of humour; the
calm in the other is more that of dignified, though tolerant,
self-composure. It would have been more easy, one thinks, to take
liberties with Shakespeare in his presence than to attempt a similar thing
in the presence of Goethe. The one carried himself with the air of a man
often diffident of himself, and whom, therefore, a foolish or impudent
stranger might very well mistake till he saw him roused; the other wore,
with all his kindness and blandness, a fixed stateliness of mien and look
that would have checked undue familiarity from the first. Add to all this
that the face of Goethe, at least in later life, was browner and more
wrinkled; his hair more dark; his eye also nearer the black and lustrous
in species, if less mysteriously vague and deep; and his person perhaps
the taller and more symmetrically made.[3]
But a truce to these guesses! What do we actually know respecting those
two men, whose masks, the preserved similitudes of the living features
with which they once fronted the world, are now before us? Let us turn
first to the one and then to the other, till, as we gaze at these poor
eyeless images, which are all we now have, some vision of the lives and
minds they typify shall swim into our ken.
* * * * *
Shakespeare, this Englishman who died two hundred and sixty years ago,
what is he now to us his countrymen, who ought to know him best? A great
name, in the first place, of which we are proud! That this little foggy
island of England should have given birth to such a man is of itself a
moiety of our acquittance among the nations. By Frenchmen Shakespeare is
accepted as at least equal to their own first; Italians waver between him
and Dante; Germans, by race more our brethren, worship him as their own
highest product too, though born by chance amongst us. All confess him to
have been one of those great spirits, occasionally created, in whom the
human faculties seem to have reached that extreme of expansion on the
slightest increase beyond which man would burst away into some other mode
of being and leave this behind. And why all this? What are the special
claims of Shakespeare to this high worship? Through what mode of activity,
practised while alive, has he won this immortality after he is dead? The
answer is simple. He was an artist, a poet, a dramatist. Having, during
some five-and-twenty years of a life not very long, written about forty
dramatic pieces, which, after being acted in several London theatres,
were printed either by himself or by his executors, he has, by this means,
bequeathed to the memory of the human race an immense number of verses,
and to its imagination a great variety of ideal characters and
creations--Lears, Othellos, Hamlets, Falstaffs, Shallows, Imogens,
Mirandas, Ariels, Calibans. This, understood in its fullest extent, is
what Shakespeare has done. Whatever blank in human affairs, as they now
are, would be produced by the immediate withdrawal of all this
intellectual capital, together with all the interest that has been
accumulated on it: _that_ is the measure of what the world owes to
Shakespeare.
This conception, however, while it serves vaguely to indicate to us the
greatness of the man, assists us very little in the task of defining his
character. In our attempts to do this--to ascend, as it were, to the
living spring from which have flowed those rich poetic streams--we
unavoidably rely upon two kinds of authority: the records which inform us
of the leading events of his life; and the casual allusions to his person
and habits left us by his contemporaries.
To enumerate the ascertained events of Shakespeare's life is unnecessary
here. How he was born at Stratford-on-Avon, in Warwickshire, in April,
1564, the son of a respectable burgess who afterwards became poor; how,
having been educated with some care in his native town, he married there,
at the age of eighteen, a farmer's daughter eight years older than
himself; how, after employing himself as scrivener or schoolmaster, or
something of that kind, in his native county for a few years more, he at
length quitted it in his twenty-fourth year, and came up to London,
leaving his wife and three children at Stratford; how, connecting himself
with the Blackfriars theatre, he commenced the career of a poet and
play-writer; how he succeeded so well in this that, after having been a
flourishing actor and theatre-proprietor, and a most popular man of genius
about town for some seventeen years, he was able to leave the stage while
still under forty, and return to Stratford with property sufficient to
make him the most considerable man of the place; how he lived here for
some twelve years more in the midst of his family, sending up occasionally
a new play to town, and otherwise leading the even and tranquil existence
of a country gentleman; and how, after having buried his old mother,
married his daughters, and seen himself a grandfather at the age of
forty-three, he was cut off rather suddenly near his fifty-third birthday,
in the year 1616:--all this is, or ought to be, as familiar to educated
Englishmen of the present day as the letters of the English alphabet. M.
Guizot, with a little inaccuracy, has made these leading facts in the life
of the English poet tolerably familiar even to our French neighbours.
But, while such facts, if conceived with sufficient distinctness, serve to
mark out the life of the poet in general outline, it is rather from the
few notices of him that have come down to us from his contemporaries that
we derive the more special impressions regarding his character and ways
with which we are accustomed to fill up this outline. These notices are
various; those of interest may, perhaps, be about a dozen in all; but the
only ones that take a very decided hold on the imagination are the three
following:--
_Fuller's Fancy-picture of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson at the Mermaid
Tavern._--"Many were the wit-combats betwixt him and Ben Jonson;
which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English
man-of-war. Master Jonson, like the former, was built far higher in
learning; solid, but slow in his performances. Shakespeare, with the
English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could
turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by
the quickness of his wit and invention."--_Written, about 1650, by
Thomas Fuller, born in 1608._
_Aubrey's Sketch of Shakespeare at second hand._--"This William,
being inclined naturally to poetry and acting, came to London, I
guess, about 18; and was an actor at one of the play-houses, and did
act exceedingly well. (Now B. Jonson was never a good actor, but an
excellent instructor.) He began early to make essays at dramatic
poetry, which at that time was very low; and his plays took well. He
was a handsome, well-shaped man; very good company, and of a very
ready and pleasant smooth wit. The humour of the constable in '_A
Midsummer Night's Dream_,' he happened to take at Grendon, in Bucks,
which is the road from London to Stratford; and there was living that
constable about 1642, when I first came to Oxon. Mr. Jos. Howe is of
that parish; and knew him. Ben Jonson and he did gather humours of
men daily wherever they came.... He was wont to go to his native
country once a year. I think I have been told that he left 200_l._ or
300_l._ per annum, there and thereabout, to a sister. I have heard
Sir William Davenant and Mr. Thomas Shadwell, who is accounted the
best comedian we have now, say that he had a most prodigious wit, and
did admire his natural parts beyond all other dramatical writers. He
was wont to say that he never blotted out a line in his life. Said
Ben Jonson, 'I wish he had blotted out a thousand.'"--_Written, about
1680, by John Aubrey, born 1625._
_Ben Jonson's own Sketch of Shakespeare._--"I remember the players
have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his
writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer
hath been 'Would he had blotted a thousand!'; which they thought a
malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their
ignorance, who chose that circumstance to commend their friend by
wherein he most faulted; and to justify mine own candour: for I loved
the man, and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as
any. He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an
excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions; wherein he
flowed with that facility that _sometimes it was necessary he should
be stopped_: '_Sufflaminandus erat_,' as Augustus said of Haterius.
His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too!
Many times he fell into those things could not escape laughter; as
when he said, in the person of Caesar, one speaking to him, 'Caesar,
thou dost me wrong,' he replied, 'Caesar did never wrong but with just
cause,' and such like; which were ridiculous. But he redeemed his
vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than
to be pardoned."--_Ben Jonson's "Discoveries."_
It is sheer nonsense, with these and other such passages accessible to
anybody, to go on repeating, as people seem determined to do, the
hackneyed saying of the commentator Steevens, that "all that we know of
Shakespeare is, that he was born at Stratford-on-Avon; married and had
children there; went to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote plays
and poems; returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried."[4]
It is our own fault, and not the fault of the materials, if we do not know
a great deal more about Shakespeare than that; if we do not realize, for
example, these distinct and indubitable facts about him--his special
reputation among the critics of his time, as a man not so much of
erudition as of prodigious natural genius; his gentleness and openness of
disposition; his popular and sociable habits; his extreme ease, and, as
some thought, negligence in composition; and, above all, and most
characteristic of all, his excessive fluency in speech. "He sometimes
required stopping," is Ben Jonson's expression; and whoever does not see a
whole volume of revelation respecting Shakespeare in that single trait has
no eye for seeing anything. Let no one ever lose sight of that phrase in
trying to imagine Shakespeare.
Still, after all, we cannot be content thus. With regard to such a man we
cannot rest satisfied with a mere picture of his exterior in its aspect of
repose, or in a few of its common attitudes. We seek, as the phrase is, to
penetrate into his heart--to detect and to fix in everlasting portraiture
that mood of his soul which was ultimate and characteristic; in which, so
to speak, he came ready-fashioned from the Creator's hands; towards which
he always sank when alone; and on the ground-melody of which all his
thoughts and actions were but voluntary variations. As far short of such a
result as would be any notion we could form of the poet Burns from a mere
chronological outline of his life, together with a few stories such as are
current about his moral irregularities, so far short of a true
appreciation of Shakespeare would be that idea of him which we could
derive from the scanty fund of the external evidence.