world, was no man's work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand
wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. Our English Bible is a
wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the English language.
But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but centuries and
churches brought it to perfection. There never was a time when there was
not some translation existing. The Liturgy, admired for its energy and
pathos, is an anthology of the piety of ages and nations, a translation
of the prayers and forms of the Catholic church,--these collected, too,
in long periods, from the prayers and meditations of every saint and
sacred writer all over the world. Grotius makes the like remark in
respect to the Lord's Prayer, that the single clauses of which it is
composed were already in use in the time of Christ, in the Rabbinical
forms. He picked out the grains of gold. The nervous language of the
Common Law, the impressive forms of our courts and the precision and
substantial truth of the legal distinctions, are the contribution of all
the sharp-sighted, strong-minded men who have lived in the countries
where these laws govern. The translation of Plutarch gets its excellence
by being translation on translation. There never was a time when there
was none. All the truly idiomatic and national phrases are kept, and all
others successively picked out and thrown away. Something like the same
process had gone on, long before, with the originals of these books. The
world takes liberties with world-books. Vedas, Aesop's Fables, Pilpay,
Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad, Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not the
work of single men. In the composition of such works the time thinks,
the market thinks, the mason, the carpenter, the merchant, the farmer,
the fop, all think for us. Every book supplies its time with one good
word; every municipal law, every trade, every folly of the day; and the
generic catholic genius who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his
originality to the originality of all, stands with the next age as the
recorder and embodiment of his own.
We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, and the Shakspeare
Society, for ascertaining the steps of the English drama, from the
Mysteries celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the final
detachment from the church, and the completion of secular plays, from
Ferrex and Porrex, and Gammer Gurton's Needle, down to the possession of
the stage by the very pieces which Shakspeare altered, remodelled, and
finally made his own. Elated with success and piqued by the growing
interest of the problem, they have left no bookstall unsearched, no
chest in a garret unopened, no file of old yellow accounts to decompose
in damp and worms, so keen was the hope to discover whether the boy
Shakspeare poached or not, whether he held horses at the theatre door,
whether he kept school, and why he left in his will only his second-best
bed to Anne Hathaway, his wife.
There is something touching in the madness with which the passing age
mischooses the object on which all candles shine and all eyes are
turned; the care with which it registers every trifle touching Queen
Elizabeth and King James, and the Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs, and
Buckinghams; and lets pass without a single valuable note the founder of
another dynasty, which alone will cause the Tudor dynasty to be
remembered,--the man who carries the Saxon race in him by the
inspiration which feeds him, and on whose thoughts the foremost people
of the world are now for some ages to be nourished, and minds to receive
this and not another bias. A popular player;--nobody suspected he was
the poet of the human race; and the secret was kept as faithfully from
poets and intellectual men as from courtiers and frivolous people.
Bacon, who took the inventory of the human understanding for his times,
never mentioned his name. Ben Jonson, though we have strained his few
words of regard and panegyric, had no suspicion of the elastic fame
whose first vibrations he was attempting. He no doubt thought the praise
he has conceded to him generous, and esteemed himself, out of all
question, the better poet of the two.
If it need wit to know wit, according to the proverb, Shakspeare's time
should be capable of recognizing it. Sir Henry Wotton was born four
years after Shakspeare, and died twenty-three years after him; and I
find, among his correspondents and acquaintances, the following persons:
Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Essex,
Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton, Sir Henry Vane, Isaac
Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham Cowley, Bellarmine, Charles Cotton, John
Pym, John Hales, Kepler, Vieta, Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi,
Arminius; with all of whom exists some token of his having communicated,
without enumerating many others whom doubtless he saw,--Shakspeare,
Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, the two Herberts, Marlow, Chapman
and the rest. Since the constellation of great men who appeared in
Greece in the time of Pericles, there was never any such society;--yet
their genius failed them to find out the best head in the universe. Our
poet's mask was impenetrable. You cannot see the mountain near. It took
a century to make it suspected; and not until two centuries had passed,
after his death, did any criticism which we think adequate begin to
appear. It was not possible to write the history of Shakspeare till now;
for he is the father of German literature: it was with the introduction
of Shakspeare into German, by Lessing, and the translation of his works
by Wieland and Schlegel, that the rapid burst of German literature was
most intimately connected. It was not until the nineteenth century,
whose speculative genius is a sort of living Hamlet, that the tragedy of
Hamlet could find such wondering readers. Now, literature, philosophy,
and thought, are Shakspearized. His mind is the horizon beyond which, at
present, we do not see. Our ears are educated to music by his rhythm.
Coleridge and Goethe are the only critics who have expressed our
convictions with any adequate fidelity: but there is in all cultivated
minds a silent appreciation of his superlative power and beauty, which,
like Christianity, qualifies the period.
The Shakspeare Society have inquired in all directions, advertised the
missing facts, offered money for any information that will lead to
proof,--and with what result? Beside some important illustration of the
history of the English stage, to which I have adverted, they have
gleaned a few facts touching the property, and dealings in regard to
property, of the poet. It appears that from year to year he owned a
larger share in the Blackfriars' Theatre: its wardrobe and other
appurtenances were his: that he bought an estate in his native village
with his earnings as writer and shareholder; that he lived in the best
house in Stratford; was intrusted by his neighbors with their
commissions in London, as of borrowing money, and the like; that he was
a veritable farmer. About the time when he was writing Macbeth, he sues
Philip Rogers, in the Borough-court of Stratford, for thirty-five
shillings, ten pence, for corn delivered to him at different times; and
in all respects appears as a good husband, with no reputation for
eccentricity or excess. He was a good-natured sort of man, an actor and
shareholder in the theatre, not in any striking manner distinguished
from other actors and managers. I admit the importance of this
information. It was well worth the pains that have been taken to
procure it.
But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these
researches may have rescued, they can shed no light upon that infinite
invention which is the concealed magnet of his attraction for us. We are
very clumsy writers of history. We tell the chronicle of parentage,
birth, birthplace, schooling, schoolmates, earning of money, marriage,
publication of books, celebrity, death; and when we have come to an end
of this gossip no ray of relation appears between it and the
goddess-born; and it seems as if, had we dipped at random into the
"Modern Plutarch," and read any other life there, it would have fitted
the poems as well. It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the
rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past and
refuse all history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and Collier, have wasted
their oil. The famed theatres, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the Park, and
Tremont have vainly assisted. Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and
Macready dedicate their lives to this genius; him they crown, elucidate,
obey, and express. The genius knows them not. The recitation begins; one
golden word leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry and
sweetly torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible homes. I
remember I went once to see the Hamlet of a famed performer, the pride
of the English stage; and all I then heard and all I now remember of the
tragedian was that in which the tragedian had no part; simply Hamlet's
question to the ghost:--
"What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon?"
That imagination which dilates the closet he writes in to the world's
dimension, crowds it with agents in rank and order, as quickly reduces
the big reality to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks of his
magic spoil for us the illusions of the green-room. Can any biography
shed light on the localities into which the Midsummer Night's Dream
admits me? Did Shakspeare confide to any notary or parish recorder,
sacristan, or surrogate in Stratford, the genesis of that delicate
creation? The forest of Arden, the nimble air of Scone Castle, the
moonlight of Portia's villa, "the antres vast and desarts idle" of
Othello's captivity,--where is the third cousin, or grand-nephew, the
chancellor's file of accounts, or private letter, that has kept one word
of those transcendent secrets? In fine, in this drama, as in all great
works of art,--in the Cyclopaean architecture of Egypt and India, in the
Phidian sculpture, the Gothic minsters, the Italian painting, the
Ballads of Spain and Scotland,--the Genius draws up the ladder after
him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives way to a new
age, which sees the works and asks in vain for a history.
Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare; and even he can tell
nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us,--that is, to our most
apprehensive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from off his tripod
and give us anecdotes of his inspirations. Read the antique documents
extricated, analysed and compared by the assiduous Dyce and Collier; and
now read one of these skyey sentences,--aerolites,--which seem to have
fallen out of heaven, and which not your experience but the man within
the breast has accepted as words of fate, and tell me if they match--if
the former account in any manner for the latter; or which gives the most
historical insight into the man.
Hence, though our external history is so meagre, yet, with Shakspeare
for biographer, instead of Aubrey and Rowe, we have really the
information which is material; that which describes character and
fortune; that which, if we were about to meet the man and deal with him,
would most import us to know. We have his recorded convictions on those
questions which knock for answer at every heart,--on life and death, on
love, on wealth and poverty, on the prizes of life and the ways whereby
we come at them; on the characters of men, and the influences, occult
and open, which affect their fortunes; and on those mysterious and
demoniacal powers which defy our science and which yet interweave their
malice and their gift in our brightest hours. Who ever read the volume
of the Sonnets without finding that the poet had there revealed, under
masks that are no masks to the intelligent, the lore of friendship and
of love; the confusion of sentiments in the most susceptible, and, at
the same time, the most intellectual of men? What trait of his private
mind has he hidden in his dramas? One can discern, in his ample pictures
of the gentleman and the king, what forms and humanities pleased him;
his delight in troops of friends, in large hospitality, in cheerful
giving. Let Timon, let Warwick, let Antonio the merchant answer for his
great heart. So far from Shakspeare's being the least known, he is the
one person, in all modern history, known to us. What point of morals, of
manners, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the
conduct of life, has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified
his knowledge of? What office, or function, or district of man's work
has he not remembered? What king has he not taught state, as Talma
taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy?
What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What
gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?
Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on Shakspeare
valuable that does not rest purely on the dramatic merit; that he is
falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think as highly as these
critics of his dramatic merit, but still think it secondary. He was a
full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and images,
which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand. Had he been less, we
should have had to consider how well he filled his place, how good a
dramatist he was,--and he is the best in the world. But it turns out
that what he has to say is of that weight as to withdraw some attention
from the vehicle; and he is like some saint whose history is to be
rendered into all languages, into verse and prose, into songs and
pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so that the occasion which gave the
saint's meaning the form of a conversation, or of a prayer, or of a code
of laws, is immaterial compared with the universality of its
application. So it fares with the wise Shakspeare and his book of life.
He wrote the airs for all our modern music; he wrote the text of modern
life; the text of manners; he drew the man of England and Europe, the
father of the man in America; he drew the man, and described the day,
and what is done in it; he read the hearts of men and women, their
probity, and their second thought and wiles; the wiles of innocence, and
the transitions by which virtues and vices slide into their contraries;
he could divide the mother's part from the father's part in the face of
the child, or draw the fine demarcations of freedom and of fate; he
knew the laws of repression which make the police of nature; and all the
sweets and all the terrors of human lot lay in his mind as truly but as
softly as the landscape lies on the eye. And the importance of this
wisdom of life sinks the form, as of Drama or Epic, out of notice. 'T is
like making a question concerning the paper on which a king's message
is written.
Shakspeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he is
out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others, conceivably. A
good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain and think from
thence; but not into Shakspeare's. We are still out of doors. For
executive faculty, for creation, Shakspeare is unique. No man can
imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety compatible with
an individual self,--the subtilest of authors, and only just within the
possibility of authorship. With this wisdom of life is the equal
endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He clothed the creatures of
his legend with form and sentiments as if they were people who had lived
under his roof; and few real men have left such distinct characters as
these fictions. And they spoke in language as sweet as it was fit. Yet
his talents never seduced him into an ostentation, nor did he harp on
one string. An omnipresent humanity co-ordinates all his faculties. Give
a man of talents a story to tell, and his partiality will presently
appear. He has certain observations, opinions, topics, which have some
accidental prominence, and which he disposes all to exhibit. He crams
this part and starves that other part, consulting not the fitness of the
thing, but his fitness and strength. But Shakspeare has no peculiarity,
no importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no curiosities;
no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he; he has no
discoverable egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small,
subordinately. He is wise without emphasis or assertion; he is strong,
as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without
effort and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and likes
as well to do the one as the other. This makes that equality of power in
farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs; a merit so incessant that
each reader is incredulous of the perception of other readers.
This power of expression, or of transferring the inmost truth of things
into music and verse, makes him the type of the poet and has added a new
problem to metaphysics. This is that which throws him into natural
history, as a main production of the globe, and as announcing new eras
and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without loss or
blur: he could paint the fine with precision, the great with compass,
the tragic and the comic indifferently and without any distortion or
favor. He carried his powerful execution into minute details, to a hair
point, finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as he draws a mountain;
and yet these, like nature's, will bear the scrutiny of the solar
microscope.
In short, he is the chief example to prove that more or less of
production, more or fewer pictures, is a thing indifferent. He had the
power to make one picture. Daguerre learned how to let one flower etch
its image on his plate of iodine, and then proceeds at leisure to etch a
million. There are always objects; but there was never representation.
Here is perfect representation, at last; and now let the world of
figures sit for their portraits. No recipe can be given for the making
of a Shakspeare; but the possibility of the translation of things into
song is demonstrated.
His lyric power lies in the genius of the piece. The sonnets, though
their excellence is lost in the splendor of the dramas, are as
inimitable as they; and it is not a merit of lines, but a total merit of
the piece; like the tone of voice of some incomparable person, so is
this a speech of poetic beings, and any clause as unproducible now as a
whole poem.
Though the speeches in the plays, and single lines, have a beauty which
tempts the ear to pause on them for their euphuism, yet the sentence is
so loaded with meaning and so linked with its foregoers and followers,
that the logician is satisfied. His means are as admirable as his ends;
every subordinate invention, by which he helps himself to connect some
irreconcilable opposites, is a poem too. He is not reduced to dismount
and walk because his horses are running off with him in some distant
direction: he always rides.
The finest poetry was first experience; but the thought has suffered a
transformation since it was an experience. Cultivated men often attain a
good degree of skill in writing verses; but it is easy to read, through
their poems, their personal history: any one acquainted with the parties
can name every figure; this is Andrew and that is Rachel. The sense thus
remains prosaic. It is a caterpillar with wings, and not yet a
butterfly. In the poet's mind the fact has gone quite over into the new
element of thought, and has lost all that is exuvial. This generosity
abides with Shakspeare. We say, from the truth and closeness of his
pictures, that he knows the lesson by heart. Yet there is not a trace
of egotism.
One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his
cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet,--for beauty is his
aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation but for its grace: he
delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that
sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds
over the universe. Epicurus relates that poetry hath such charms that a
lover might forsake his mistress to partake of them. And the true bards
have been noted for their firm and cheerful temper. Homer lies in
sunshine; Chaucer is glad and erect; and Saadi says, "It was rumored
abroad that I was penitent; but what had I to do with repentance?" Not
less sovereign and cheerful,--much more sovereign and cheerful, is the
tone of Shakspeare. His name suggests joy and emancipation to the heart
of men. If he should appear in any company of human souls, who would not
march in his troop? He touches nothing that does not borrow health and
longevity from his festal style.
And now, how stands the account of man with this bard and benefactor,
when, in solitude, shutting our ears to the reverberations of his fame,
we seek to strike the balance? Solitude has austere lessons; it can
teach us to spare both heroes and poets; and it weighs Shakspeare also,
and finds him to share the halfness and imperfection of humanity.
Shakspeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the splendor of meaning that
plays over the visible world; knew that a tree had another use than for
apples, and corn another than for meal, and the ball of the earth, than
for tillage and roads: that these things bore a second and finer harvest
to the mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and conveying in all their
natural history a certain mute commentary on human life. Shakspeare
employed them as colors to compose his picture. He rested in their
beauty; and never took the step which seemed inevitable to such genius,
namely, to explore the virtue which resides in these symbols and imparts
this power:--what is that which they themselves say? He converted the
elements which waited on his command, into entertainments. He was master
of the revels to mankind. Is it not as if one should have, through
majestic powers of science, the comets given into his hand, or the
planets and their moons, and should draw them from their orbits to glare
with the municipal fireworks on a holiday night, and advertise in all
towns, "Very superior pyrotechny this evening"? Are the agents of
nature, and the power to understand them, worth no more than a street
serenade, or the breath of a cigar? One remembers again the trumpet-text
in the Koran,--"The heavens and the earth and all that is between them,
think ye we have created them in jest?" As long as the question is of
talent and mental power, the world of men has not his equal to show. But
when the question is, to life and its materials and its auxiliaries, how
does it profit me? What does it signify? It is but a Twelfth Night, or
Midsummer Night's Dream, or Winter Evening's Tale: what signifies
another picture more or less? The Egyptian verdict of the Shakspeare
Societies comes to mind; that he was a jovial actor and manager. I
cannot marry this fact to his verse. Other admirable men have led lives
in some sort of keeping with their thought; but this man, in wide
contrast. Had he been less, had he reached only the common measure of
great authors, of Bacon, Milton, Tasso, Cervantes, we might leave the
fact in the twilight of human fate: but that this man of men, he who
gave to the science of mind a new and larger subject than had ever
existed, and planted the standard of humanity some furlongs forward into
Chaos,--that he should not be wise for himself;--it must even go into
the world's history that the best poet led an obscure and profane life,
using his genius for the public amusement.
Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite, German and Swede, beheld
the same objects: they also saw through them that which was contained.
And to what purpose? The beauty straightway vanished; they read
commandments, all-excluding mountainous duty; an obligation, a sadness,
as of piled mountains, fell on them, and life became ghastly, joyless, a
pilgrim's progress, a probation, beleaguered round with doleful
histories of Adam's fall and curse behind us; with doomsdays and
purgatorial and penal fires before us; and the heart of the seer and the
heart of the listener sank in them.