doctrinal is avoided; all that intellectual tackling, so to speak, is
struck away that would afford the soul any relief whatever from the whole
sensation of the supernatural. Although we cannot, therefore, in honest
keeping with popular language, call Shakespeare, as Ulrici does, the most
Christian of poets, we believe him to have been the man in modern times
who, breathing an atmosphere full of Christian conceptions, and walking
amid a civilization studded with Christian institutions, had his whole
being tied by the closest personal links to those highest generalities of
the universe which the greatest minds in all ages have ever pondered and
meditated, and round which Christianity has thrown its clasp of gold.
Shakespeare, then, we hold to have been essentially a meditative,
speculative, and even, in his solitary hours, an abject and melancholy
man, rather than a man of active, firm, and worldly disposition. Instead
of being a calm, stony observer of life and nature, as he has been
sometimes represented, we believe him to have been a man of the gentlest
and most troublesome affections, of sensibility abnormally keen and deep,
full of metaphysical longings, liable above most men to self-distrust,
despondency, and mental agitation from causes internal and external, and a
prey to many secret and severe experiences which he did not discuss at the
Mermaid tavern. This, we say, is no guess; it is a thing certified under
his own hand and seal. But, this being allowed, we are willing to agree
with all that is said of him, by way of indicating the immense variety of
faculties, dispositions, and acquirements, of which his character was
built up. Vast intellectual inquisitiveness, the readiest and most
universal humour, the truest sagacity and knowledge of the world, the
richest and deepest capacity of enjoying all that life presented: all
this, as applied to Shakespeare, is a mere string of undeniable
commonplaces. The man, as we fancy him, who of all others trod the
oftenest the extreme metaphysic walk which bounds our universe in, he was
also the man of all others who was related most keenly by every fibre of
his being to all the world of the real and the concrete. Better than any
man he knew life to be a dream; with as vivid a relish as any man he did
his part as one of the dreamers. If at one moment life stood before his
mental gaze, an illuminated little speck or disc, softly rounded with
mysterious sleep, the next moment this mere span shot out into an
illimitable plain, whereon he himself stood--a plain covered with forests,
parted by seas, studded with cities and huge concourses of men, mapped out
into civilizations, over-canopied by stars. Nay, it was precisely because
he came and went with such instant transition between the two extremes
that he behaved so genially and sympathetically in the latter. It was
precisely because he had done the metaphysic feat so completely once for
all, and did not bungle on metaphysicizing bit by bit amid the real, that
he stood forth in the character of the most concrete of poets. Life is an
illusion, a show, a phantasm: well then, that is settled, and _I_ belong
to that section of the illusion called London, the seventeenth century,
and woody Warwickshire! So he may have said; and he acted accordingly. He
walked amid the woods of Warwickshire, and listened to the birds singing
in their leafy retreats; he entered the Mermaid tavern with Ben Jonson
after the theatre was over, and found himself quite properly related, as
one item in the illusion, to that other item in it, a good supper and a
cup of canary. He accepted the world as it was, rejoiced in its joys, was
pained by its sorrows, reverenced its dignities, respected its laws, and
laughed at its whimsies. It was this very strength and intimacy and
universality of his relations to the concrete world of nature and life
that caused in him that spirit of acquiescence in things as they were,
that evident conservatism of temper, that indifference, or perhaps more,
to the specific contemporary forms of social and intellectual movement,
with which he has sometimes been charged as a fault. The habit of
attaching weight to what are called abstractions, of metaphysicizing bit
by bit amid the real, is almost an essential feature in the constitution
of men who are remarkable for their faith in social progress. It was
precisely, therefore, because Shakespeare was such a votary of the
concrete, because he walked so firmly on the green and solid sward of that
island of life which he knew to be surrounded by a metaphysic sea, that
this or that metaphysical proposal with respect to the island itself
occupied him but little.
How, then, _did_ Shakespeare relate himself to this concrete world of
nature and life in which his lot had been cast? What precise function with
regard to it, if not that of an active partisan of progress, did he accept
as devolving naturally on _him_? The answer is easy. Marked out by
circumstances, and by his own bent and inclination, from the vast
majority of men, who, with greater or less faculty, sometimes perhaps with
the greatest, pass their lives in silence, appearing in the world at their
time, enjoying it for a season, and returning to the earth again,--marked
out from among these, and appointed to be one of those whom the whole
earth should remember and think of; yet precluded, as we have seen, by his
constitution and fortune, from certain modes of attaining to this
honour--the special function which, in this high place, he saw himself
called upon to discharge, and by the discharge of which he has ensured his
place in perpetuity, was simply that of _expressing_ what he felt and saw.
In other words, Shakespeare was specifically and transcendently a literary
man. To say that he was the greatest _man_ that ever lived is to provoke a
useless controversy, and comparisons that lead to nothing, between
Shakespeare and Caesar, Shakespeare and Charlemagne, Shakespeare and
Cromwell; to say that he was the greatest _intellect_ that ever lived, is
to bring the shades of Aristotle and Plato, and Bacon and Newton, and all
the other systematic thinkers, grumbling about us, with demands for a
definition of intellect, which we are by no means in a position to give;
nay, finally, to say that he is the greatest _poet_ that the world has
produced (a thing which we would certainly say, were we provoked to it,)
would be unnecessarily to hurt the feelings of Homer and Sophocles, Dante
and Milton. What we will say, then, and challenge the world to gainsay, is
that he was the greatest _expresser_ that ever lived. This is glory
enough, and it leaves the other questions open. Other men may have led, on
the whole, greater and more impressive lives than he; other men, acting on
their fellows through the same medium of speech that he used, may have
expended a greater power of thought, and achieved a greater intellectual
effect, in one consistent direction; other men, too (though this is very
questionable), may have contrived to issue the matter which they did
address to the world in more compact and perfect artistic shapes. But no
man that ever lived said such splendid things on all subjects universally;
no man that ever lived had the faculty of pouring out on all occasions
such a flood of the richest and deepest language. He may have had rivals
in the art of imagining situations; he had no rival in the power of
sending a gush of the appropriate intellectual effusion over the image and
body of a situation once conceived. From a jewelled ring on an alderman's
finger to the most mountainous thought or deed of man or demon, nothing
suggested itself that his speech could not envelope and enfold with ease.
That excessive fluency which astonished Ben Jonson when he listened to
Shakespeare in person astonishes the world yet. Abundance, ease,
redundance, a plenitude of word, sound, and imagery, which, were the
intellect at work only a little less magnificent, would sometimes end in
sheer braggartism and bombast, are the characteristics of Shakespeare's
style. Nothing is suppressed, nothing omitted, nothing cancelled. On and
on the poet flows; words, thoughts, and fancies crowding on him as fast as
he can write, all related to the matter on hand, and all poured forth
together, to rise and fall on the waves of an established cadence. Such
lightness and ease in the manner, and such prodigious wealth and depth in
the matter, are combined in no other writer. How the matter was first
accumulated, what proportion of it was the acquired capital of former
efforts, and what proportion of it welled up in the poet's mind during and
in virtue of the very act of speech, it is impossible to say; but this at
least may be affirmed without fear of contradiction, that there never was
a mind in the world from which, when it was pricked by any occasion
whatever, there poured forth on the instant such a stream of precious
substance intellectually related to it. By his powers of expression, in
fact, Shakespeare has beggared all his posterity, and left mere
practitioners of expression nothing possible to do. There is perhaps not a
thought, or feeling, or situation, really common and generic to human
life, on which he has not exercised his prerogative; and, wherever he has
once been, woe to the man that comes after him! He has overgrown the
whole system and face of things like a universal ivy, which has left no
wall uncovered, no pinnacle unclimbed, no chink unpenetrated. Since he
lived the concrete world has worn a richer surface. He found it great and
beautiful, with stripes here and there of the rough old coat seen through
the leafy labours of his predecessors; he left it clothed throughout with
the wealth and autumnal luxuriance of his own unparalleled language.
* * * * *
This brings us, by a very natural connexion, to what we have to say of
Goethe. For, if, with the foregoing impressions on our mind respecting the
character and the function of the great English poet, we turn to the mask
of his German successor and admirer, which has been so long waiting our
notice, the first question must infallibly be What recognition is it
possible that, in such circumstances, we can have left for _him_? In other
words, the first consideration that must be taken into account in any
attempt to appreciate Goethe is that he came into a world in which
Shakespeare had been before him. For a man who, in the main, was to pursue
a course so similar to that which Shakespeare had pursued this was a
matter of incalculable importance. Either, on the one hand, the value of
all that the second man could do, if he adhered to a course very similar,
must suffer from the fact that he was following in the footsteps of a
predecessor of such unapproachable excellence; or, on the other hand, the
consciousness of this, if it came in time, would be likely to _prevent_
too close a resemblance between the lives of the two men, by giving a
special direction and character to the efforts of the second. Hear Goethe
himself on this very point:--
"We discoursed upon English literature, on the greatness of
Shakespeare, and on the unfavourable position held by all English
dramatic authors who had appeared after that poetical giant. 'A
dramatic talent of any importance,' said Goethe, 'could not forbear
to notice Shakespeare's works; nay, could not forbear to study them.
Having studied them, he must be aware that Shakespeare has already
exhausted the whole of human nature in all its tendencies, in all its
heights and depths, and that, in fact, there remains for him, the
aftercomer, nothing more to do. And how could one get courage to put
pen to paper, if one were conscious, in an earnest appreciating
spirit, that such unfathomable and unattainable excellencies were
already in existence? It fared better with me fifty years ago in my
own dear Germany. I could soon come to an end with all that then
existed; it could not long awe me, or occupy my attention. I soon
left behind me German literature, and the study of it, and turned my
thoughts to life and to production. So on and on I went, in my own
natural development, and on and on I fashioned the productions of
epoch after epoch. And, at every step of life and development, my
standard of excellence was not much higher than what at such a step
I was able to attain. But, had I been born an Englishman, and had all
those numerous masterpieces been brought before me in all their power
at my first dawn of youthful consciousness, they would have
overpowered me, and I should not have known what to do. I could not
have gone on with such fresh light-heartedness, but should have had
to bethink myself, and look about for a long time to find some new
outlet.'"--_Eckermann's Conversations of Goethe_, i. pp. 114, 115.
All this is very clear and happily expressed. Most Englishmen that have
written since Shakespeare _have_ been overawed by the sense of his vast
superiority; and Goethe, if he had been an Englishman, would have partaken
of the same feeling, and would have been obliged, as he says, to look
about for some path in which competition with such a predecessor would
have been avoided. Being, however, a German, and coming at a time when
German literature had nothing so great to boast of but that an ardent
young man could hope to produce something as good or better, the way was
certainly open to him to the attainment, in his own nation, of a position
analogous to that which Shakespeare had occupied in his. Goethe might, if
he had chosen, have aspired to be the Shakespeare of Germany. Had his
tastes and faculties pointed in that direction, there was no reason,
special to his own nation, that would have made it very incumbent on him
to thwart the tendency of his genius and seek about for a new outlet in
order to escape injurious comparisons. But, even in such circumstances, to
have pursued a course _very_ similar to that of Shakespeare, and to have
been animated by a mere ambition to tread in the footsteps of that master,
would have been death to all chance of a reputation among the highest.
Great writers do not exclusively belong to the country of their birth; the
greatest of all are grouped together on a kind of central platform, in the
view of all peoples and tongues; and, as in this select assemblage no
duplicates are permitted, the man who does never so well a second time
that which the world has already canonized a man for doing once has little
chance of being admitted to co-equal honours. More especially in the
present case would too close a resemblance to the original, whether in
manner or in purpose, have been regarded in the end as a reason for
inferiority in place. As the poet of one branch of the great Germanic
family of mankind, Shakespeare belonged indirectly to the Germans, even
before they recognised him; in him all the genuine qualities of Teutonic
human nature, as well as the more special characteristics of English
genius, were embodied once for all in the particular form which had
chanced to be his; and, had Goethe been, in any marked sense, only a
repetition of the same form, he might have held his place for some time as
the wonder of Germany, but, as soon as the course of events had opened up
the communication which was sure to take place at some time between the
German and the English literatures, and so made his countrymen acquainted
with Shakespeare, he would have lost his extreme brilliance, and become
but a star of the second magnitude. In order, then, that Goethe might hold
permanently a first rank even among his own countrymen, it was necessary
that he should be a man of a genius quite distinct from that of
Shakespeare, a man who, having or not having certain Shakespearian
qualities, should at all events signalize such qualities as he had by a
marked character and function of his own. And, if this was necessary to
secure to Goethe a first rank in the literature of Germany, much more was
it necessary to ensure him a place as one of the intellectual potentates
of the whole modern world. If Goethe was to be admitted into this select
company at all, it could not be as a mere younger brother of Shakespeare,
but as a man whom Shakespeare himself, when he took him by the hand, would
look at with curiosity, as something new in species, produced in the earth
since his own time.
Was this, then, the case? Was Goethe, with all his external resemblance in
some respects to Shakespeare, a man of such truly individual character,
and of so new and marked a function, as to deserve a place among the
highest, not in German literature alone, but in the literature of the
world as a whole? We do not think that anyone competent to give an opinion
will reply in the negative.
A glance at the external circumstances of Goethe's life alone (and what a
contrast there is between the abundance of biographic material respecting
Goethe and the scantiness of our information respecting Shakespeare!) will
beget the impression that the man who led such a life must have had
opportunities for developing a very unusual character. The main facts in
the life of Goethe are:--that he was born at Frankfort-on-the-Main in
1749, the only surviving son of parents who ranked among the wealthiest in
the town; that, having been educated with extreme care, and having
received whatever experience could be acquired by an impetuous
student-life, free from all ordinary forms of hardship, first at one
German town and then at another, he devoted himself, in accordance with
his tastes, to a career of literary activity; that, after unwinding
himself from several love-affairs, and travelling for the sake of farther
culture in Italy and other parts of Europe, he settled in early manhood at
Weimar, as the intimate friend and counsellor of the reigning duke of that
state; that there, during a long and honoured life, in the course of which
he married an inferior housekeeper kind of person, of whom we do not hear
much, he prosecuted his literary enterprise with unwearied industry, not
only producing poems, novels, dramas, essays, treatises, and criticisms in
great profusion from his own pen, but also acting, along with Schiller and
others, as a director and guide of the whole contemporary intellectual
movement of his native land; and that finally, having outlived all his
famous associates, become a widower and a grandfather, and attained the
position not only of the acknowledged king and patriarch of German
literature, but also, as some thought, of the wisest and most serene
intellect of Europe, he died so late as 1832, in the eighty-third year of
his age. All this, it will be observed, is very different from the life of
the prosperous Warwickshire player, whose existence had illustrated the
early part of the seventeenth century in England; and it necessarily
denoted, at the same time, a very different cast of mind and temper.
Accordingly, such descriptions as we have of Goethe from those who knew
him best convey the idea of a character notably different from that of the
English poet. Of Shakespeare personally we have but one uniform
account--that he was a man of gentle presence and disposition, very good
company, and of such boundless fluency and intellectual inventiveness in
talk that his hearers could not always stand it, but had sometimes to
whistle him down in his flights. In Goethe's case we have two distinct
pictures.
In youth, as all accounts agree in stating, he was one of the most
impetuous, bounding, ennui-dispelling natures that ever broke in upon a
society of ordinary mortals assembled to kill time. "He came upon you,"
said one who knew him well at this period, "like a wolf in the night." The
simile is a splendid one, and it agrees wonderfully with the more subdued
representations of his early years given by Goethe himself in his
Autobiography. Handsome as an Apollo and welcome everywhere, he bore all
before him wherever he went, not only by his talent, but also by an
exuberance of animal spirits which swept dulness itself along, took away
the breath of those who relied on sarcasm and their cool heads, inspired
life and animation into the whole circle, and most especially delighted
the ladies. This vivacity became even, at times, a reckless humour,
prolific in all kinds of mad freaks and extravagances. Whether this
impetuosity kept always within the bounds of mere innocent frolic is a
question which we need not here raise. Traditions are certainly afloat of
terrible domestic incidents connected with Goethe's youth, both in
Frankfort and in Weimar; but to what extent those traditions are founded
on fact is a matter which we have never yet seen any attempt to decide
upon evidence. More authentic for us, and equally significant, if we could
be sure of our ability to appreciate them rightly, are the stories which
Goethe himself tells of his various youthful attachments, and the various
ways in which they were concluded. In Goethe's own narratives of these
affairs there is a confession of error, arising out of his disposition
passionately to abandon himself to the feelings of the moment without
looking forward to the consequences; but whether this confession is to be
converted by his critics into the harsher accusation of heartlessness and
want of principle is a thing not to be decided by any general rule as to
the matter of inconstancy, but by accurate knowledge in each case of the
whole circumstances of that case. One thing these love-romances of
Goethe's early life make clear--that, for a being of such extreme
sensibility as he was, he had a very strong element of self-control. When
he gave up Rica or Lilli, it was with tears, and no end of sleepless
nights; and yet he gave them up. Shakespeare, we believe (and there is an
instance exactly in point in the story of his Sonnets), had no such power
of breaking clear from connexions which his judgment disapproved. Remorse
and return, self-reproaches for his weakness at one moment followed the
next by weakness more abject than before--such, by his own confession, was
the conduct, in one such case, of our more passive and gentle-hearted
poet. Where Shakespeare was "past cure," and "frantic-mad with evermore
unrest," Goethe but fell into "hypochondria," which reason and resolution
enabled him to overcome. Goethe at twenty-five gave up a young, beautiful
and innocent girl, from the conviction that it was better to do so.
Shakespeare at thirty-five was the abject slave of a dark-complexioned
woman, who was faithless to him, and whom he cursed in his heart. The
sensibilities in the German poet moved from the first, as we have already
said, over a firmer basis of permanent character.