external evidence by going to the only other available source of light on
the subject, namely the bequeathed writings of the man himself, we find
ourselves obstructed at the outset by an obvious difficulty, which does
not exist to the same extent in most other cases. We can, with comparative
ease, recognise Burns himself in his works; for Burns is a lyrist, pouring
out his own feelings in song, often alluding to himself, and generally
under personal agitation when he writes. Shakespeare, on the other hand,
is a dramatist, whose function it was not to communicate, but to create.
Had he been a dramatist of the same school as Ben Jonson, indeed--using
the drama as a means of spreading, or, at all events, as a medium through
which to insinuate, his opinions, and often indicating his purposes by the
very names of his _dramatis personae_ (as Downright, Merecraft, Eitherside,
and the like)--then the task would have been easier. But it is not so with
Shakespeare. Less than almost any man that ever wrote does he inculcate or
dogmatise. He is the very type of the poet. He paints, represents,
creates, holds the mirror up to nature; but from opinion, doctrine,
controversy, theory, he holds instinctively aloof. In each of his plays
there is a "central idea," to use the favourite term of the German
critics--that is, a single thought round which all may be exhibited as
consciously or unconsciously crystallized; but there is no pervading
maxim, no point set forth to be argued or proved. Of none of all the plays
can it be said that it is more than any other a vehicle for fixed articles
in the creed of Shakespeare.
One quality or attribute of Shakespeare's genius we do, indeed, contrive
to seize out this very difficulty of seizing anything--that quality or
attribute of _many-sidedness_ of which we have heard so much for the last
century and a half. The immense variety of his characters and conceptions,
embracing as it does Hamlets and Falstaffs, Kings and Clowns, Prosperos
and Dogberrys, and his apparently equal ease in handling them all, are
matters that have been noted by one and all of the critics. And thus,
while his own character is lost in his incessant shiftings through such a
succession of masks, we yet manage, as it were in revenge, to extract from
the very impossibility of describing him an adjective which does possess a
kind of quasi-descriptive value. It is as if of some one that had baffled
all our attempts to investigate him we were to console ourselves by saying
that he was a perfect Proteus. We call Shakespeare "many-sided;" not a
magazine, nor a young lady at a party, but tells you that; and in adding
this to our list of adjectives concerning him we find a certain
satisfaction, and even an increase of light.
But it would be cowardice to stop here. The old sea-god Proteus himself,
despite his subtlety and versatility, had a real form and character of his
own, into which he could be compelled, if one only knew the way. Hear how
they served this old gentleman in the Odyssey:
"We at once,
Loud shouting, flew on him, and in our arms
Constrained him fast; nor the sea-prophet old
Called not incontinent his shifts to mind.
First he became a long-maned lion grim;
A dragon then, a panther, a huge boar,
A limpid stream, and an o'ershadowing tree.
We, persevering, held him; till, at length,
The subtle sage, his ineffectual arts
Resigning weary, questioned me and spoke."
And so with _our_ Proteus. The many-sidedness of the dramatist, let it be
well believed and pondered, is but the versatility in form of a certain
personal and substantial being, which constitutes the specific mind of the
dramatist himself. Precisely as we have insisted that Shakespeare's face,
as the best portraits represent it to us, is no mere general face or face
to let, but a good, decided, and even rather singular face, so, we would
insist, he had as specific a character, as thoroughly a way of his own in
thinking about things and going through his morning and evening hours, as
any of ourselves. "Man is only many-sided," says Goethe, "when he strives
after the highest because he _must_, and descends to the lesser because he
_will_;" that is, as we interpret, when he is borne on in a certain noble
direction in all that he does by the very structure of his mind, while, at
his option, he may keep planting this fixed path or not with a sportive
and flowery border. By the necessity of his nature, Shakespeare was
compelled in a certain earnest direction in all that he did; and it is our
part to search through the thickets of imagery and gratuitous fiction amid
which he spent his life, that this path may be discovered. As the lion, or
the limpid stream, or the overshadowing tree, into which Proteus turned
himself, was not a real lion, or a real stream, or a real tree, but only
Proteus as the one or as the other; so, involved in each of Shakespeare's
characters,--in Hamlet, in Falstaff, or in Romeo,--involved in some deep
manner in each of these diverse characters, is Shakespeare's own nature.
If Shakespeare had not been precisely and wholly Shakespeare, and not any
other man actual or conceivable, could Hamlet or Falstaff, or any other of
his creations, have been what they are?
But how to evolve Shakespeare from his works, how to compel this Proteus
into his proper and native form, is still the question. It is a problem
of the highest difficulty. Something, indeed, of the poet's personal
character and views we cannot help gathering as we read his dramas.
Passages again and again occur of which, from their peculiar effect upon
ourselves, from their conceivable reference to what we know of the poet's
circumstances, or from their evident superfluousness and warmth, we do not
hesitate to aver "There speaks the poet's own heart." But to show
generally how much of the man has passed into the poet, and how it is that
his personal bent and peculiarities are to be surely detected inhering in
writings whose essential character it is to be arbitrary and universal, is
a task from which a critic might well shrink, were he left merely to the
ordinary resources of critical ingenuity without any positive and
ascertained clue.
In this case, however, all the world ought to know, there is a positive
and ascertained clue. Shakespeare has left to us not merely a collection
of dramas, the exercises of his creative phantasy in a world of ideal
matter, but also certain poems which are assuredly and expressly
autobiographic. Criticism seems now pretty conclusively to have
determined, what it ought to have determined long ago, that the _Sonnets_
of Shakespeare are, and can possibly be, nothing else than a poetical
record of his own feelings and experience--a connected series of entries,
as it were, in his own diary--during a certain period of his London life.
This, we say, is conclusively determined and agreed upon; and whoever does
not, to some extent, hold this view knows nothing about the subject.
Ulrici, who is a genuine investigator, as well as a profound critic, is,
of course, right on this point. So, also, in the main, is M. Guizot,
although he mars the worth of the conclusion by adducing the foolish
theory of _Euphuism_--that is, of the adoption of an affected style of
expression in vogue in Shakespeare's age--in order to explain away that
which is precisely the most important thing about the Sonnets, and the
very thing _not_ to be explained away: namely, the depth and strangeness
of their pervading sentiment, and the curious hyperbolism of their style.
In truth, it is the very closeness of the contact into which the right
view of the Sonnets brings us with Shakespeare, the very value of the
information respecting him to which it opens the way, that operates
against it. Where we have so eager a desire to know, there we fear to
believe, lest what we have once cherished on so great a subject we should
be obliged again to give up, or lest, if our imaginations should dare to
figure aught too exact and familiar regarding the traits and motions of so
royal a spirit, the question should be put to us, what _we_ can know of
the halls of a palace, or the mantled tread of a king? Still the fact is
as it is. These Sonnets of Shakespeare _are_ autobiographic--distinctly,
intensely, painfully autobiographic, although in a style and after a
fashion of autobiography so peculiar that we can cite only Dante in his
_Vita Nuova_, and Tennyson in his _In Memoriam_, as having furnished
similar examples of it.
We are not going to examine the Sonnets in detail here, nor to tell the
story which they involve as a whole. We will indicate generally, however,
the impression which, we think, a close investigation of them will
infallibly leave on any thoughtful reader, as to the characteristic
personal qualities of that mind the larger and more factitious emanations
from which still cover and astonish the world.
The general and aggregate effect, then, of these Sonnets, as contributing
to our knowledge of Shakespeare as a man, is to antiquate, or at least to
reduce very much in value, the common idea of him implied in such phrases
as William the Calm, William the Cheerful, and the like. These phrases are
true, when understood in a certain very obvious sense; but, if we were to
select that designation which would, as we think, express Shakespeare in
his most intimate and private relations to man and nature, we should
rather say William the Meditative, William the Metaphysical, or William
the Melancholy. Let not the reader, full of the just idea of Shakespeare's
wonderful concreteness as a poet, be staggered by the second of these
phrases. The phrase is a good phrase; etymologically, it is perhaps the
best phrase we could here use; and whatever of inappropriateness there may
seem to be in it proceeds from false associations, and will vanish, we
hope, before we have done with it. Nor let it be supposed that, in using,
as nearly synonymous, the word Melancholy, we mean anything so absurd as
that the author of Falstaff was a Werther. What we mean is that there is
evidence in the Sonnets, corroborated by other proof on all hands, that
the mind of Shakespeare, when left to itself, was apt to sink into that
state in which thoughts of what is sad and mysterious in the universe most
easily come and go.
At no time, except during sleep, is the mind of any human being completely
idle. All men have some natural and congenial mood into which they fall
when they are left to talk with themselves. One man recounts the follies
of the past day, renewing the relish of them by the recollection; another
uses his leisure to hate his enemy and to scheme his discomfiture; a third
rehearses in imagination, in order to be prepared, the part which he is to
perform on the morrow. Now, at such moments, as we believe, it was the
habit of Shakespeare's mind, obliged thereto by the necessity of its
structure, to ponder ceaselessly those quest ions relating to man, his
origin, and his destiny, in familiarity with which consists what is called
the spiritual element in human nature. It was Shakespeare's use, as it
seems to us, to revert, when he was alone, to that ultimate mood of the
soul in which one hovers wistfully on the borders of the finite, vainly
pressing against the barriers that separate it from the unknown; that mood
in which even what is common and under foot seems part of a vast current
mystery, and in which, like Arabian Job of old, one looks by turns at the
heaven above, the earth beneath, and one's own moving body between,
interrogating whence it all is, why it all is, and whither it all tends.
And this, we say, is Melancholy. It is more. It is that mood of man,
which, most of all moods, is thoroughly, grandly, specifically human. That
which is the essence of all worth, all beauty, all humour, all genius, is
open or secret reference to the supernatural; and this is sorrow. The
attitude of a finite creature, contemplating the infinite, can only be
that of an exile, grief and wonder blending in a wistful longing for an
unknown home.
As we consider this frame of mind to have been characteristic of
Shakespeare, so we find that as a poet he has not forgotten to represent
it. We have always fancied Hamlet to be a closer translation of
Shakespeare's own character than any other of his personations. The same
meditativeness, the same morbid reference at all times to the
supernatural, the same inordinate development of the speculative faculty,
the same intellectual melancholy, that are seen in the Prince of Denmark,
seem to have distinguished Shakespeare. Nor is it possible here to forget
that minor and lower form of the same fancy--the ornament of _As You Like
It_, the melancholy Jaques.
"_Jaques._ More, more, I prithee, more.
_Amiens._ It will make you melancholy, Monsieur Jaques.
_Jaques._ I thank it. More, I prithee, more! I can suck melancholy
out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs. More. I prithee, more!
_Amiens._ My voice is ragged; I know I cannot please you.
_Jaques._ I do not desire you to please me; I desire you to sing.
* * * * *
_Rosalind._ They say you are a melancholy fellow.
_Jaques._ I am so; I do love it better than laughing.
_Rosalind._ Those that are in extremity of either are abominable
fellows, and betray themselves to every modern censure worse than
drunkards.
_Jaques._ Why, 'tis good to be sad and say nothing.
_Rosalind._ Why, then, 'tis good to be a post.
_Jaques._ I have neither the scholar's melancholy, which is
emulation; nor the musician's, which is fantastical; nor the
courtier's, which is proud; nor the soldier's, which is ambitious;
nor the lawyer's, which is politic; nor the lady's, which is nice;
nor the lover's, which is all these: but it is a melancholy of mine
own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and
indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often
rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness."
Jaques is not Shakespeare; but in writing this description of Jaques
Shakespeare drew from his knowledge of himself. His also was a "melancholy
of his own," a "humorous sadness in which his often rumination wrapt him."
In that declared power of Jaques of "sucking melancholy out of a song" the
reference of Shakespeare to himself seems almost direct. Nay more, as
Rosalind, in rating poor Jaques, tells him on one occasion that he is so
abject a fellow that she verily believes he is "out of love with his
nativity, and almost chides God _for making him of that countenance that
he is_," so Shakespeare's melancholy, in one of his Sonnets (No. 29),
takes exactly the same form of self-dissatisfaction.
"When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
_Featured like him_, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet, in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee," &c.
Think of that, reader! That mask of Shakespeare's face, which we have been
discussing, Shakespeare himself did not like; and there were moments in
which he was so abject as actually to wish that he had received from
Nature another man's physical features!
If Shakespeare's melancholy was, like that of Jaques, a complex
melancholy, a melancholy "compounded of many simples"--extracted perhaps
at first from some root of bitter experience in his own life, and then
fed, as his Sonnets clearly state, by a habitual sense of his own
"outcast" condition in society, and by the sight of a hundred social
wrongs around him, into a kind of abject dissatisfaction with himself and
his fate--yet, in the end, and in its highest form, it was rather, as we
have already hinted, the melancholy of Hamlet, a meditative, contemplative
melancholy, embracing human life as a whole, the melancholy of a mind
incessantly tending from the real ([Greek: ta physika]) to the
metaphysical ([Greek: ta meta ta physika]), and only brought back by
external occasion from the metaphysical to the real.
Do not let us quarrel about the words, if we can agree about the thing.
Let any competent person whatever read the Sonnets, and then, with their
impression on him, pass to the plays, and he will inevitably become aware
of Shakespeare's personal fondness for certain themes or trains of
thought, particularly that of the speed and destructiveness of time.
Death, vicissitude, the march and tramp of generations across life's
stage, the rotting of human bodies in the earth--these and all the other
forms of the same thought were familiar to Shakespeare to a degree beyond
what is to be seen in the case of any other poet. It seems to have been a
habit of his mind, when left to its own tendency, ever to indulge by
preference in that oldest of human meditations, which is not yet trite:
"Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble; he
cometh forth as a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth as a shadow, and
continueth not." Let us cite a few examples from the Sonnets:--
"When I consider everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment."--
_Sonnet 15._
"If thou survive my well-contented clay,
When that churl Death my bones with dust shall
cover."-- _Sonnet 32._
"No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell."--
_Sonnet 71._
"The wrinkles, which thy glass will truly show,
Of mouthed graves will give thee memory;
Thou by thy dial's shady stealth may'st know
Time's thievish progress to eternity."--
_Sonnet 77._
"Or I shall live your epitaph to make,
Or you survive when I in earth am rotten."--
_Sonnet 81._
These are but one or two out of many such passages occurring in the
Sonnets. Indeed, it may be said that, whenever Shakespeare pronounces the
words time, age, death, and the like, it is with a deep and cutting
personal emphasis, quite different from the usual manner of poets in their
stereotyped allusions to mortality. Time, in particular, seems to have
tenanted his imagination as a kind of grim and hideous personal existence,
cruel out of mere malevolence of nature. Death, too, had become to him a
kind of actual being or fury, morally unamiable, and deserving of
reproach: "that churl Death."
If we turn to the plays of Shakespeare, we shall find that in them too the
same morbid sensitiveness to all associations with mortality is
continually breaking out. The vividness, for example, with which Juliet
describes the interior of a charnel-house partakes of a spirit of revenge,
as if Shakespeare were retaliating, through her, upon an object horrible
to himself:--
"Or hide me nightly in a charnel-house,
O'ercovered quite with dead men's rattling bones,
With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls."
More distinctly revengeful is Romeo's ejaculation at the tomb:--
"Thou detestable maw, thou womb of Death,
Gorged with the dearest morsel of the earth,
Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open!"
And who does not remember the famous passage in _Measure for Measure_?--
"_Claudio._ Death is a fearful thing.
_Isabella._ And shamed life is hateful.
_Claudio._ Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts
Imagine howling: 'tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment,
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of Death."
Again in the grave-digging scene in _Hamlet_ we see the same fascinated
familiarity of the imagination with all that pertains to churchyards,
coffins, and the corruption within them.
"_Hamlet._ Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing.
_Horatio._ What's that, my lord?
_Hamlet._ Dost thou think Alexander looked o' this fashion i' the
earth?
_Horatio._ E'en so.
_Hamlet._ And smelt so? pah! (_Puts down the skull._)
_Horatio._ E'en so, my lord!
_Hamlet._ To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not
imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it
stopping a bung-hole?
_Horatio._ 'Twere to reason too curiously to consider so.
_Hamlet._ No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with
modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it: as thus:--Alexander died;
Alexander was buried; Alexander returneth to dust; the dust is earth;
of earth we make loam; and why of that loam whereto he was converted
might they not stop a beer-barrel?
Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:
O that that earth which kept the world in awe
Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw!"
Observe how Shakespeare here defends, through Hamlet, his own tendency
"too curiously" to consider death. To sum up all, however, let us turn to
that unparalleled burst of language in the _Tempest_, in which the poet
has defeated Time itself by chivalrously proclaiming to all time what Time
can do:--
"And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this unsubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made of; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
This, we contend, is no mere poetic phrenzy, inserted because it was
dramatically suitable that Prospero should so express himself at that
place; it is the explosion into words of a feeling during which Prospero
was forgotten, and Shakespeare swooned into himself. And what is the
continuation of the passage but a kind of postscript, describing, under
the guise of Prospero, Shakespeare's own agitation with what he had just
written?--
"Sir, I am vexed;
Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled:
Be not disturbed with my infirmity:
If you be pleased, retire into my cell,
And there repose: _a turn or two I'll walk,
To still my beating mind_."
To our imagination the surmise is that Shakespeare here laid down his pen,
and began to pace his chamber, too agitated to write more that night.
In this extreme familiarity with the conception of mortality in general,
and perhaps also in this extreme sensitiveness to the thought of death as
a matter of personal import, all great poets, and possibly all great men
whatever, have to some extent resembled Shakespeare. For these are the
feelings of our common nature on which religion and all solemn activity
have founded and maintained themselves. Space and Time are the largest and
the outermost of all human conceptions; to stand, therefore, incessantly
upon these extreme conceptions, as upon the perimeter of a figure, and to
view all inwards from them, is the highest exercise of thought to which a
human being can attain. Accordingly, in all great poets there may be
discerned this familiarity of the imagination with the world figured as a
poor little ball pendent in space and moving forward out of a dark past to
a future of light or gloom. But in this respect Shakespeare exceeds them
all; and in this respect, therefore, no poet is more religious, more
spiritual, more profoundly metaphysical, than he. Into an inordinate
amount of that outward pressure of the soul against the perimeter of
sensible things, infuse the peculiar _moral_ germ of Christianity, and you
have the religion of Shakespeare. Thus:--
"And our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."--_Tempest._
Here the poetic imagination sweeps boldly round the universe, severing it
as by a soft cloud-line from the infinite Unknown.
"Poor soul! the centre of my sinful earth,
Fooled by those rebel powers that lead thee 'stray!"
_Sonnet 146._
Here the soul, retracting its thoughts from the far and physical, dwells
disgustedly on itself.
"The dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns."--_Hamlet._
Here the soul, pierced with the new and awful thought of sin, wings out
again towards the Infinite, and finds all dark.
"How would you be,
If He, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you as you are?"--_Measure for Measure._
Here the silver lamp of hope is hung up within the gloomy sphere, to burn
softly and faintly for ever!