I cannot believe that Shakespeare looked on his Richard II. with any but
sympathetic eyes, understanding indeed how ill-fitted he was to be King,
at a certain moment of history, but understanding that he was lovable and
full of capricious fancy, 'a wild creature' as Pater has called him. The
man on whom Shakespeare modelled him had been full of French elegancies,
as he knew from Hollingshead, and had given life a new luxury, a new
splendour, and been 'too friendly' to his friends, 'too favourable' to his
enemies. And certainly Shakespeare had these things in his head when he
made his King fail, a little because he lacked some qualities that were
doubtless common among his scullions, but more because he had certain
qualities that are uncommon in all ages. To suppose that Shakespeare
preferred the men who deposed his King is to suppose that Shakespeare
judged men with the eyes of a Municipal Councillor weighing the merits of
a Town Clerk; and that had he been by when Verlaine cried out from his
bed, 'Sir, you have been made by the stroke of a pen, but I have been made
by the breath of God,' he would have thought the Hospital Superintendent
the better man. He saw indeed, as I think, in Richard II. the defeat that
awaits all, whether they be Artist or Saint, who find themselves where men
ask of them a rough energy and have nothing to give but some contemplative
virtue, whether lyrical phantasy, or sweetness of temper, or dreamy
dignity, or love of God, or love of His creatures. He saw that such a man
through sheer bewilderment and impatience can become as unjust or as
violent as any common man, any Bolingbroke or Prince John, and yet remain
'that sweet lovely rose.' The courtly and saintly ideals of the Middle
Ages were fading, and the practical ideals of the modern age had begun to
threaten the unuseful dome of the sky; Merry England was fading, and yet
it was not so faded that the Poets could not watch the procession of the
world with that untroubled sympathy for men as they are, as apart from all
they do and seem, which is the substance of tragic irony.
Shakespeare cared little for the State, the source of all our judgments,
apart from its shows and splendours, its turmoils and battles, its
flamings out of the uncivilized heart. He did indeed think it wrong to
overturn a King, and thereby to swamp peace in civil war, and the
historical plays from _Henry IV._ to _Richard III._, that monstrous birth
and last sign of the wrath of Heaven, are a fulfilment of the prophecy of
the Bishop of Carlisle, who was 'raised up by God' to make it; but he had
no nice sense of utilities, no ready balance to measure deeds, like that
fine instrument, with all the latest improvements, Gervinus and Professor
Dowden handle so skilfully. He meditated as Solomon, not as Bentham
meditated, upon blind ambitions, untoward accidents, and capricious
passions, and the world was almost as empty in his eyes as it must be in
the eyes of God.
'Tired with all these, for restful death I cry;--
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgrac'd,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And Art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
And simple truth miscalled simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I begone
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.'
V
The Greeks, a certain scholar has told me, considered that myths are the
activities of the Dæmons, and that the Dæmons shape our characters and our
lives. I have often had the fancy that there is some one Myth for every
man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and
thought. Shakespeare's Myth, it may be, describes a wise man who was blind
from very wisdom, and an empty man who thrust him from his place, and saw
all that could be seen from very emptiness. It is in the story of Hamlet,
who saw too great issues everywhere to play the trivial game of life, and
of Fortinbras, who came from fighting battles about 'a little patch of
ground' so poor that one of his Captains would not give 'six ducats' to
'farm it,' and who was yet acclaimed by Hamlet and by all as the only
befitting King. And it is in the story of Richard II., that unripened
Hamlet, and of Henry V., that ripened Fortinbras. To poise character
against character was an element in Shakespeare's art, and scarcely a
play is lacking in characters that are the complement of one another, and
so, having made the vessel of porcelain Richard II., he had to make the
vessel of clay Henry V. He makes him the reverse of all that Richard was.
He has the gross vices, the coarse nerves, of one who is to rule among
violent people, and he is so little 'too friendly' to his friends that he
bundles them out of doors when their time is over. He is as remorseless
and undistinguished as some natural force, and the finest thing in his
play is the way his old companions fall out of it broken-hearted or on
their way to the gallows; and instead of that lyricism which rose out of
Richard's mind like the jet of a fountain to fall again where it had
risen, instead of that phantasy too enfolded in its own sincerity to make
any thought the hour had need of, Shakespeare has given him a resounding
rhetoric that moves men, as a leading article does to-day. His purposes
are so intelligible to everybody that everybody talks of him as if he
succeeded, although he fails in the end, as all men great and little fail
in Shakespeare, and yet his conquests abroad are made nothing by a woman
turned warrior, and that boy he and Katherine were to 'compound,' 'half
French, half English,' 'that' was to 'go to Constantinople and take the
Turk by the beard,' turns out a Saint, and loses all his father had built
up at home and his own life.
Shakespeare watched Henry V. not indeed as he watched the greater souls in
the visionary procession, but cheerfully, as one watches some handsome
spirited horse, and he spoke his tale, as he spoke all tales, with tragic
irony.