It may be doubted whether any language be rich enough to maintain more
than one truly great poet,--and whether there be more than one period,
and that very short, in the life of a language, when such a phenomenon as
a great poet is possible. It may be reckoned one of the rarest pieces of
good-luck that ever fell to the share of a race, that (as was true of
Shakespeare) its most rhythmic genius, its acutest intellect, its
profoundest imagination, and its healthiest understanding should have
been combined in one man, and that he should have arrived at the full
development of his powers at the moment when the material in which he was
to work--that wonderful composite called English, the best result of the
confusion of tongues--was in its freshest perfection. The
English-speaking nations should build a monument to the misguided
enthusiasts of the Plain of Shinar; for, as the mixture of many bloods
seems to have made them the most vigorous of modern races, so has the
mingling of divers speeches given them a language which is perhaps the
noblest vehicle of poetic thought that ever existed.
Had Shakespeare been born fifty years earlier, he would have been cramped
by a book-language not yet flexible enough for the demands of rhythmic
emotion, not yet sufficiently popularized for the natural and familiar
expression of supreme thought, not yet so rich in metaphysical phrase as
to render possible that ideal representation of the great passions which
is the aim and end of Art, not yet subdued by practice and general
consent to a definiteness of accentuation essential to ease and congruity
of metrical arrangement. Had he been born fifty years later, his ripened
manhood would have found itself in an England absorbed and angry with the
solution of political and religious problems, from which his whole nature
was averse, instead of in that Elizabethan social system, ordered and
planetary in functions and degrees as the angelic hierarchy of the
Areopagite, where his contemplative eye could crowd itself with various
and brilliant picture, and whence his impartial brain--one lobe of which
seems to have been Normanly refined and the other Saxonly
sagacious--could draw its morals of courtly and worldly wisdom, its
lessons of prudence and magnanimity. In estimating Shakespeare, it should
never be forgotten, that, like Goethe, he was essentially observer and
artist, and incapable of partisanship. The passions, actions, sentiments,
whose character and results he delighted to watch and to reproduce, are
those of man in society as it existed; and it no more occurred to him to
question the right of that society to exist than to criticise the divine
ordination of the seasons. His business was with men as they were, not
with man as he ought to be,--with the human soul as it is shaped or
twisted into character by the complex experience of life, not in its
abstract essence, as something to be saved or lost. During the first half
of the seventeenth century, the centre of intellectual interest was
rather in the other world than in this, rather in the region of thought
and principle and conscience than in actual life. It was a generation in
which the poet was, and felt himself, out of place. Sir Thomas Browne,
out most imaginative mind since Shakespeare, found breathing-room, for a
time, among the "_O altitudines!_" of religious speculation, but soon
descended to occupy himself with the exactitudes of science. Jeremy
Taylor, who half a century earlier would have been Fletcher's rival,
compels his clipped fancy to the conventual discipline of prose, (Maid
Marian turned nun,) and waters his poetic wine with doctrinal eloquence.
Milton is saved from making total shipwreck of his large-utteranced
genius on the desolate Noman's Land of a religious epic only by the lucky
help of Satan and his colleagues, with whom, as foiled rebels and
republicans, he cannot conceal his sympathy. As purely poet, Shakespeare
would have come too late, had his lot fallen in that generation. In mind
and temperament too exoteric for a mystic, his imagination could not have
at once illustrated the influence of his epoch and escaped from it, like
that of Browne; the equilibrium of his judgment, essential to him as an
artist, but equally removed from propagandism, whether as enthusiast or
logician, would have unfitted him for the pulpit; and his intellectual
being was too sensitive to the wonder and beauty of outward life and
Nature to have found satisfaction, as Milton's could, (and perhaps only
by reason of his blindness,) in a world peopled by purely imaginary
figures. We might fancy him becoming a great statesman, but he lacked the
social position which could have opened that career to him. What we mean
when we say _Shakespeare_, is something inconceivable either during the
reign of Henry the Eighth, or the Commonwealth, and which would have been
impossible after the Restoration.
All favorable stars seem to have been in conjunction at his nativity.
The Reformation had passed the period of its vinous fermentation, and its
clarified results remained as an element of intellectual impulse and
exhilaration; there were small signs yet of the acetous and putrefactive
stages which were to follow in the victory and decline of Puritanism. Old
forms of belief and worship still lingered, all the more touching to
Fancy, perhaps, that they were homeless and attainted; the light of
sceptic day was baffled by depths of forest where superstitious shapes
still cowered, creatures of immemorial wonder, the raw material of
Imagination. The invention of printing, without yet vulgarizing letters,
had made the thought and history of the entire past contemporaneous;
while a crowd of translators put every man who could read in inspiring
contact with the select souls of all the centuries. A new world was thus
opened to intellectual adventure at the very time when the keel of
Columbus had turned the first daring furrow of discovery in that
unmeasured ocean which still girt the known earth with a beckoning
horizon of hope and conjecture, which was still fed by rivers that flowed
down out of primeval silences, and which still washed the shores of
Dreamland. Under a wise, cultivated, and firm-handed monarch also, the
national feeling of England grew rapidly more homogeneous and intense,
the rather as the womanhood of the sovereign stimulated a more chivalric
loyalty,--while the new religion, of which she was the defender, helped
to make England morally, as it was geographically, insular to the
continent of Europe.
If circumstances could ever make a great national poet, here were all the
elements mingled at melting-heat in the alembic, and the lucky moment of
projection was clearly come. If a great national poet could ever avail
himself of circumstances, this was the occasion,--and, fortunately,
Shakespeare was equal to it. Above all, we may esteem it lucky that he
found words ready to his use, original and untarnished,--types of thought
whose sharp edges were unworn by repeated impressions. In reading
Hakluyt's Voyages, we are almost startled now and then to find that even
common sailors could not tell the story of their wanderings without
rising to an almost Odyssean strain, and habitually used a diction that
we should be glad to buy back from desuetude at any cost. Those who look
upon language only as anatomists of its structure, or who regard it as
only a means of conveying abstract truth from mind to mind, as if it were
so many algebraic formulae, are apt to overlook the fact that its being
alive is all that gives it poetic value. We do not mean what is
technically called a living language,--the contrivance, hollow as a
speaking-trumpet, by which breathing and moving bipeds, even now, sailing
o'er life's solemn main, are enabled to hail each other and make known
their mutual shortness of mental stores,--but one that is still hot from
the hearts and brains of a people, not hardened yet, but moltenly ductile
to new shapes of sharp and clear relief in the moulds of new thought. So
soon as a language has become literary, so soon as there is a gap between
the speech of books and that of life, the language becomes, so far as
poetry is concerned, almost as dead as Latin, and (as in writing Latin
verses) a mind in itself essentially original becomes in the use of such
a medium of utterance unconsciously reminiscential and reflective, lunar
and not solar, in expression and even in thought. For words and thoughts
have a much more intimate and genetic relation, one with the other, than
most men have any notion of; and it is one thing to use our mother-tongue
as if it belonged to us, and another to be the puppets of an
overmastering vocabulary. "Ye know not," says Ascham, "what hurt ye do to
Learning, that care not for Words, but for Matter, and so make a Divorce
betwixt the Tongue and the Heart." _Lingua Toscana in bocca Romana_ is
the Italian proverb; and that of poets should be, _The tongue of the
people in the mouth of the scholar_. I imply here no assent to the early
theory, _or,_ at any rate, practice, of Wordsworth, who confounded
plebeian modes of thought with rustic forms of phrase, and then atoned
for his blunder by absconding into a diction more Latinized than that of
any poet of his century.
Shakespeare was doubly fortunate. Saxon by the father and Norman by the
mother, he was a representative Englishman. A country boy, he learned
first the rough and ready English of his rustic mates, who knew how to
make nice verbs and adjectives courtesy to their needs. Going up to
London, he acquired the _lingua aulica_ precisely at the happiest moment,
just as it was becoming, in the strictest sense of the word,
_modern,_--just as it had recruited itself, by fresh impressments from
the Latin and Latinized languages, with new words to express the new
ideas of an enlarging intelligence which printing and translation were
fast making cosmopolitan,--words which, in proportion to their novelty,
and to the fact that the mother-tongue and the foreign had not yet wholly
mingled, must have been used with a more exact appreciation of their
meaning.[119] It was in London, and chiefly by means of the stage, that a
thorough amalgamation of the Saxon, Norman, and scholarly elements of
English was brought about. Already, Puttenham, in his "Arte of English
Poesy," declares that the practice of the capital and the country within
sixty miles of it was the standard of correct diction, the _jus et norma
loquendi._ Already Spenser had almost re-created English poetry,--and it
is interesting to observe, that, scholar as he was, the archaic words
which he was at first overfond of introducing are often provincialisms of
purely English original. Already Marlowe had brought the English unrhymed
pentameter (which had hitherto justified but half its name, by being
always blank and never verse) to a perfection of melody, harmony, and
variety which has never been surpassed. Shakespeare, then, found a
language already to a certain extent _established_, but not yet fetlocked
by dictionary and grammar mongers,--a versification harmonized, but which
had not yet exhausted all its modulations, nor been set in the stocks by
critics who deal judgment on refractory feet, that will dance to Orphean
measures of which their judges are insensible. That the language was
established is proved by its comparative uniformity as used by the
dramatists, who wrote for mixed audiences, as well as by Ben Jonson's
satire upon Marston's neologisms; that it at the same time admitted
foreign words to the rights of citizenship on easier terms than now is in
good measure equally true. What was of greater import, no arbitrary line
had been drawn between high words and low; vulgar then meant simply what
was common; poetry had not been aliened from the people by the
establishment of an Upper House of vocables, alone entitled to move in
the stately ceremonials of verse, and privileged from arrest while they
forever keep the promise of meaning to the ear and break it to the sense.
The hot conception of the poet had no time to cool while he was debating
the comparative respectability of this phrase or that; but he snatched
what word his instinct prompted, and saw no indiscretion in making a king
speak as his country nurse might have taught him.[120] It was Waller who
first learned in France that to talk in rhyme alone comported with the
state of royalty. In the time of Shakespeare, the living tongue resembled
that tree which Father Huc saw in Tartary, whose leaves were
languaged,--and every hidden root of thought, every subtilest fibre of
feeling, was mated by new shoots and leafage of expression, fed from
those unseen sources in the common earth of human nature.
The Cabalists had a notion, that whoever found out the mystic word for
anything attained to absolute mastery over that thing. The reverse of
this is certainly true of poetic expression; for he who is thoroughly
possessed of his thought, who imaginatively conceives an idea or image,
becomes master of the word that shall most amply and fitly utter it.
Heminge and Condell tell us, accordingly, that there was scarce a blot in
the manuscripts they received from Shakespeare; and this is the natural
corollary from the fact that such an imagination as his is as
unparalleled as the force, variety, and beauty of the phrase in which it
embodied itself.[121] We believe that Shakespeare, like all other great
poets, instinctively used the dialect which he found current, and that
his words are not more wrested from their ordinary meaning than followed
necessarily from the unwonted weight of thought or stress of passion they
were called on to support. He needed not to mask familiar thoughts in the
weeds of unfamiliar phraseology; for the life that was in his mind could
transfuse the language of every day with an intelligent vivacity, that
makes it seem lambent with fiery purpose, and at each new reading a new
creation. He could say with Dante, that "no word had ever forced him to
say what he would not, though he had forced many a word to say what _it_
would not,"--but only in the sense that the mighty magic of his
imagination had conjured out of it its uttermost secret of power or
pathos. When I say that Shakespeare used the current language of his day,
I mean only that he habitually employed such language as was universally
comprehensible,--that he was not run away with by the hobby of any theory
as to the fitness of this or that component of English for expressing
certain thoughts or feelings. That the artistic value of a choice and
noble diction was quite as well understood in his day as in ours is
evident from the praises bestowed by his contemporaries on Drayton, and
by the epithet "well-languaged" applied to Daniel, whose poetic style is
as modern as that of Tennyson; but the endless absurdities about the
comparative merits of Saxon and Norman-French, vented by persons
incapable of distinguishing one tongue from the other, were as yet
unheard of. Hasty generalizers are apt to overlook the fact, that the
Saxon was never, to any great extent, a literary language. Accordingly,
it held its own very well in the names of common things, but failed to
answer the demands of complex ideas, derived from them. The author of
"Piers Ploughman" wrote for the people,--Chaucer for the court. We open
at random and count the Latin[122] words in ten verses of the "Vision"
and ten of the "Romaunt of the Rose," (a translation from the French,)
and find the proportion to be seven in the former and five in the latter.
The organs of the Saxon have always been unwilling and stiff in learning
languages. He acquired only about as many British words as we have Indian
ones, and I believe that more French and Latin was introduced through the
pen and the eye than through the tongue and the ear. For obvious reasons,
the question is one that must be decided by reference to prose-writers,
and not poets; and it is, we think, pretty well settled that more words
of Latin original were brought into the language in the century between
1550 and 1650 than in the whole period before or since,--and for the
simple reason, that they were absolutely needful to express new modes and
combinations of thought.[123] The language has gained immensely, by the
infusion, in richness of synonyme and in the power of expressing nice
shades of thought and feeling, but more than all in light-footed
polysyllables that trip singing to the music of verse. There are certain
cases, it is true, where the vulgar Saxon word is refined, and the
refined Latin vulgar, in poetry,--as in _sweat_ and _perspiration_; but
there are vastly more in which the Latin bears the bell. Perhaps there
might be a question between the old English _again-rising_ and
_resurrection;_ but there can be no doubt that _conscience_ is better
than _inwit_, and _remorse_ than _again-bite_. Should we translate the
title of Wordsworth's famous ode, "Intimations of Immortality," into
"Hints of Deathlessness," it would hiss like an angry gander. If, instead
of Shakespeare's
"Age cannot wither her,
Nor custom stale her infinite variety,"
we should say, "her boundless manifoldness," the sentiment would suffer
in exact proportion with the music. What homebred English could ape the
high Roman fashion of such togated words as
"The multitudinous sea incarnadine,"--
where the huddling epithet implies the tempest-tossed soul of the
speaker, and at the same time pictures the wallowing waste of ocean more
vividly than the famous phrase of Aeschylus does its rippling sunshine?
Again, _sailor_ is less poetical than _mariner_, as Campbell felt, when
he wrote,
"Ye mariners of England,"
and Coleridge, when he chose
"It was an ancient mariner,"
rather than
"It was an elderly seaman";
for it is as much the charm of poetry that it suggest a certain
remoteness and strangeness as familiarity; and it is essential not only
that we feel at once the meaning of the words in themselves, but also
their melodic meaning in relation to each other, and to the sympathetic
variety of the verse. A word once vulgarized can never be rehabilitated.
We might say now a _buxom_ lass, or that a chambermaid was _buxom_, but
we could not use the term, as Milton did, in its original sense of
_bowsome_,--that is, _lithe, gracefully bending_.[124]
But the secret of force in writing lies not so much in the pedigree of
nouns and adjectives and verbs, as in having something that you believe
in to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it. It is
when expression becomes an act of memory, instead of an unconscious
necessity, that diction takes the place of warm and hearty speech. It is
not safe to attribute special virtues (as Bosworth, for example, does to
the Saxon) to words of whatever derivation, at least in poetry. Because
Lear's "oak-cleaving thunderbolts," and "the all-dreaded thunder-stone"
in "Cymbeline" are so fine, we would not give up Milton's Virgilian
"fulmined over Greece," where the verb in English conveys at once the
idea of flash and reverberation, but avoids that of riving and
shattering. In the experiments made for casting the great bell for the
Westminster Tower, it was found that the superstition which attributed
the remarkable sweetness and purity of tone in certain old bells to the
larger mixture of silver in their composition had no foundation in fact
It was the cunning proportion in which the ordinary metals were balanced
against each other, the perfection of form, and the nice gradations of
thickness, that wrought the miracle. And it is precisely so with the
language of poetry. The genius of the poet will tell him what word to use
(else what use in his being poet at all?); and even then, unless the
proportion and form, whether of parts or whole, be all that Art requires
and the most sensitive taste finds satisfaction in, he will have failed
to make what shall vibrate through all its parts with a silvery
unison,--in other words, a poem.
I think the component parts of English were in the latter years of
Elizabeth thus exquisitely proportioned one to the other. Yet Bacon had
no faith in his mother-tongue, translating the works on which his fame
was to rest into what he called "the universal language," and affirming
that "English would bankrupt all our books." He was deemed a master of
it, nevertheless; and it is curious that Ben Jonson applies to him in
prose the same commendation which he gave Shakespeare in verse, saying,
that he "performed that in our tongue which may be compared or preferred
either to _insolent Greece or haughty Rome_"; and he adds this pregnant
sentence: "In short, within his view and about his time were all the wits
born that could honor a language or help study. Now things daily fall:
wits grow downwards, eloquence grows backwards." Ben had good reason for
what he said of the wits. Not to speak of science, of Galileo and Kepler,
the sixteenth century was a spendthrift of literary genius. An attack of
immortality in a family might have been looked for then as scarlet-fever
would be now. Montaigne, Tasso, and Cervantes were born within fourteen
years of each other; and in England, while Spenser was still delving over
the _propria quae maribus_, and Raleigh launching paper navies,
Shakespeare was stretching his baby hands for the moon, and the little
Bacon, chewing on his coral, had discovered that impenetrability was one
quality of matter. It almost takes one's breath away to think that
"Hamlet" and the "Novum Organon" were at the risk of teething and measles
at the same time. But Ben was right also in thinking that eloquence had
grown backwards. He lived long enough to see the language of verse become
in a measure traditionary and conventional. It was becoming so, partly
from the necessary order of events, partly because the most natural and
intense expression of feeling had been in so many ways satisfied and
exhausted,--but chiefly because there was no man left to whom, as to
Shakespeare, perfect conception gave perfection of phrase. Dante, among
modern poets, his only rival in condensed force, says: "Optimis
conceptionibus optima loquela conveniet; sed optimae conceptiones non
possunt esse nisi ubi scientia et ingenium est; ... et sic non omnibus
versificantibus optima loquela convenit, cum plerique sine scientiâ et
ingenio versificantur."[125]
Shakespeare must have been quite as well aware of the provincialism of
English as Bacon was; but he knew that great poetry, being universal in
its appeal to human nature, can make any language classic, and that the
men whose appreciation is immortality will mine through any dialect to
get at an original soul. He had as much confidence in his home-bred
speech as Bacon had want of it, and exclaims:--
"Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme."
He must have been perfectly conscious of his genius, and of the great
trust which he imposed upon his native tongue as the embodier and
perpetuator of it. As he has avoided obscurities in his sonnets, he would
do so _a fortiori_ in his plays, both for the purpose of immediate effect
on the stage and of future appreciation. Clear thinking makes clear
writing, and he who has shown himself so eminently capable of it in one
case is not to be supposed to abdicate intentionally in others. The
difficult passages in the plays, then, are to be regarded either as
corruptions, or else as phenomena in the natural history of Imagination,
whose study will enable us to arrive at a clearer theory and better
understanding of it.
While I believe that our language had two periods of culmination in
poetic beauty,--one of nature, simplicity, and truth, in the ballads,
which deal only with narrative and feeling,--another of Art, (or Nature
as it is ideally reproduced through the imagination,) of stately
amplitude, of passionate intensity and elevation, in Spenser and the
greater dramatists,--and that Shakespeare made use of the latter as he
found it, I by no means intend to say that he did not enrich it, or that
any inferior man could have dipped the same words out of the great poet's
inkstand. But he enriched it only by the natural expansion and
exhilaration of which it was conscious, in yielding to the mastery of a
genius that could turn and wind it like a fiery Pegasus, making it feel
its life in every limb. He enriched it through that exquisite sense of
music, (never approached but by Marlowe,) to which it seemed eagerly
obedient, as if every word said to him,
"_Bid me_ discourse, I will enchant thine ear,"--
as if every latent harmony revealed itself to him as the gold to Brahma,
when he walked over the earth where it was hidden, crying, "Here am I,
Lord! do with me what thou wilt!" That he used language with that
intimate possession of its meaning possible only to the most vivid
thought is doubtless true; but that he wantonly strained it from its
ordinary sense, that he found it too poor for his necessities, and
accordingly coined new phrases, or that, from haste or carelessness, he
violated any of its received proprieties, I do not believe. I have said
that it was fortunate for him that he came upon an age when our language
was at its best; but it was fortunate also for us, because our costliest
poetic phrase is put beyond reach of decay in the gleaming precipitate in
which it united itself with his thought.
That the propositions I have endeavored to establish have a direct
bearing in various ways upon the qualifications of whoever undertakes to
edit the works of Shakespeare will, I think, be apparent to those who
consider the matter. The hold which Shakespeare has acquired and
maintained upon minds so many and so various, in so many vital respects
utterly unsympathetic and even incapable of sympathy with his own, is one
of the most noteworthy phenomena in the history of literature. That he
has had the most inadequate of editors, that, as his own Falstaff was the
cause of the wit, so he has been the cause of the foolishness that was in
other men, (as where Malone ventured to discourse upon his metres, and
Dr. Johnson on his imagination,) must be apparent to every one,--and also
that his genius and its manifestations are so various, that there is no
commentator but has been able to illustrate him from his own peculiar
point of view or from the results of his own favorite studies. But to
show that he was a good common lawyer, that he understood the theory of
colors, that he was an accurate botanist, a master of the science of
medicine, especially in its relation to mental disease, a profound
metaphysician, and of great experience and insight in politics,--all
these, while they may very well form the staple of separate treatises,
and prove, that, whatever the extent of his learning, the range and
accuracy of his knowledge were beyond precedent or later parallel, are
really outside the province of an editor.
We doubt if posterity owe a greater debt to any two men living in 1623
than to the two obscure actors who in that year published the first folio
edition of Shakespeare's plays. But for them, it is more than likely that
such of his works as had remained to that time unprinted would have been
irrecoverably lost, and among them were "Julius Caesar," "The Tempest,"
and "Macbeth." But are we to believe them when they assert that they
present to us the plays which they reprinted from stolen and
surreptitious copies "cured and perfect of their limbs," and those which
are original in their edition "absolute in their numbers as he
[Shakespeare] conceived them"? Alas, we have read too many theatrical
announcements, have been taught too often that the value of the promise
was in an inverse ratio to the generosity of the exclamation-marks, too
easily to believe that! Nay, we have seen numberless processions of
healthy kine enter our native village unheralded save by the lusty shouts
of drovers, while a wretched calf, cursed by stepdame Nature with two
heads, was brought to us in a triumphal car, avant-couriered by a band of
music as abnormal as itself, and announced as the greatest wonder of the
age. If a double allowance of vituline brains deserve such honor, there
are few commentators on Shakespeare that would have gone afoot, and the
trumpets of Messieurs Heminge and Condell call up in our minds too many
monstrous and deformed associations.
What, then, is the value of the first folio as an authority? For eighteen
of the plays it is the only authority we have, and the only one also for
four others in their complete form. It is admitted that in several
instances Heminge and Condell reprinted the earlier quarto impressions
with a few changes, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse;
and it is most probable that copies of those editions (whether
surreptitious or not) had taken the place of the original prompter's
books, as being more convenient and legible. Even in these cases it is
not safe to conclude that all or even any of the variations were made by
the hand of Shakespeare himself. And where the players printed from
manuscript, is it likely to have been that of the author? The probability
is small that a writer so busy as Shakespeare must have been during his
productive period should have copied out their parts for the actors
himself, or that one so indifferent as he seems to have been to the
immediate literary fortunes of his works should have given much care to
the correction of copies, if made by others. The copies exclusively in
the hands of Heminge and Condell were, it is manifest, in some cases,
very imperfect, whether we account for the fact by the burning of the
Globe Theatre or by the necessary wear and tear of years, and (what is
worthy of notice) they are plainly more defective in some parts than in
others. "Measure for Measure" is an example of this, and we are not
satisfied with being told that its ruggedness of verse is intentional, or
that its obscurity is due to the fact that Shakespeare grew more
elliptical in his style as he grew older. Profounder in thought he
doubtless became; though in a mind like his, we believe that this would
imply only a more absolute supremacy in expression. But, from whatever
original we suppose either the quartos or the first folio to have been
printed, it is more than questionable whether the proof-sheets had the
advantage of any revision other than that of the printing-office.
Steevens was of opinion that authors in the time of Shakespeare never
read their own proof-sheets; and Mr. Spedding, in his recent edition of
Bacon, comes independently to the same conclusion.[126] We may be very
sure that Heminge and Condell did not, as vicars, take upon themselves a
disagreeable task which the author would have been too careless to
assume.
Nevertheless, however strong a case may be made out against the Folio of
1623, whatever sins of omission we may lay to the charge of Heminge and
Condell, or of commission to that of the printers, it remains the only
text we have with any claims whatever to authenticity. It should be
deferred to as authority in all cases where it does not make Shakespeare
write bad sense, uncouth metre, or false grammar, of all which we believe
him to have been more supremely incapable than any other man who ever
wrote English. Yet we would not speak unkindly even of the blunders of
the Folio. They have put bread into the mouth of many an honest editor,
publisher, and printer for the last century and a half; and he who loves
the comic side of human nature will find the serious notes of a
_variorum_ edition of Shakespeare as funny reading as the funny ones are
serious. Scarce a commentator of them all, for more than a hundred years,
but thought, as Alphonso of Castile did of Creation, that, if he had only
been at Shakespeare's elbow, he could have given valuable advice; scarce
one who did not know off-hand that there was never a seaport in
Bohemia,--as if Shakespeare's world were one which Mercator could have
projected; scarce one but was satisfied that his ten finger-tips were a
sufficient key to those astronomic wonders of poise and counterpoise, of
planetary law and cometary seeming-exception, in his metres; scarce one
but thought he could gauge like an ale-firkin that intuition whose edging
shallows may have been sounded, but whose abysses, stretching down amid
the sunless roots of Being and Consciousness, mock the plummet; scarce
one but could speak with condescending approval of that prodigious
intelligence so utterly without congener that our baffled language must
coin an adjective to qualify it, and none is so audacious as to say
Shakesperian of any other. And yet, in the midst of our impatience, we
cannot help thinking also of how much healthy mental activity this one
man has been the occasion, how much good he has indirectly done to
society by withdrawing men to investigations and habits of thought that
secluded them from baser attractions, for how many he has enlarged the
circle of study and reflection; since there is nothing in history or
politics, nothing in art or science, nothing in physics or metaphysics,
that is not sooner or later taxed for his illustration. This is partially
true of all great minds, open and sensitive to truth and beauty through
any large arc of their circumference; but it is true in an unexampled
sense of Shakespeare, the vast round of whose balanced nature seems to
have been equatorial, and to have had a southward exposure and a summer
sympathy at every point, so that life, society, statecraft, serve us at
last but as commentaries on him, and whatever we have gathered of
thought, of knowledge, and of experience, confronted with his marvellous
page, shrinks to a mere foot-note, the stepping-stone to some hitherto
inaccessible verse. We admire in Homer the blind placid mirror of the
world's young manhood, the bard who escapes from his misfortune in poems
all memory, all life and bustle, adventure and picture; we revere in
Dante that compressed force of lifelong passion which could make a
private experience cosmopolitan in its reach and everlasting in its
significance; we respect in Goethe the Aristotelian poet, wise by
weariless observation, witty with intention, the stately _Geheimerrath_
of a provincial court in the empire of Nature. As we study these, we seem
in our limited way to penetrate into their consciousness and to measure
and master their methods; but with Shakespeare it is just the other way;
the more we have familiarized ourselves with the operations of our own
consciousness, the more do we find, in reading him, that he has been
beforehand with us, and that, while we have been vainly endeavoring to
find the door of his being, he has searched every nook and cranny of our
own. While other poets and dramatists embody isolated phases of character
and work inward from the phenomenon to the special law which it
illustrates, he seems in some strange way unitary with human nature
itself, and his own soul to have been the law and life-giving power of
which his creations are only the phenomena. We justify or criticise the
characters of other writers by our memory and experience, and pronounce
them natural or unnatural; but he seems to have worked in the very stuff
of which memory and experience are made, and we recognize his truth to
Nature by an innate and unacquired sympathy, as if he alone possessed the
secret of the "ideal form and universal mould," and embodied generic
types rather than individuals. In this Cervantes alone has approached
him; and Don Quixote and Sancho, like the men and women of Shakespeare,
are the contemporaries of every generation, because they are not products
of an artificial and transitory society, but because they are animated by
the primeval and unchanging forces of that humanity which underlies and
survives the forever-fickle creeds and ceremonials of the parochial
corners which we who dwell in them sublimely call The World.
That Shakespeare did not edit his own works must be attributed, we
suspect, to his premature death. That he should not have intended it is
inconceivable. Is there not something of self-consciousness in the
breaking of Prospero's wand and burying his book,--a sort of sad
prophecy, based on self-knowledge of the nature of that man who, after
such thaumaturgy, could go down to Stratford and live there for years,
only collecting his dividends from the Globe Theatre, lending money on
mortgage, and leaning over his gate to chat and bandy quips with
neighbors? His mind had entered into every phase of human life and
thought, had embodied all of them in living creations;--had he found all
empty, and come at last to the belief that genius and its works were as
phantasmagoric as the rest, and that fame was as idle as the rumor of the
pit? However this may be, his works have come down to us in a condition
of manifest and admitted corruption in some portions, while in others
there is an obscurity which may be attributed either to an idiosyncratic
use of words and condensation of phrase, to a depth of intuition for a
proper coalescence with which ordinary language is inadequate, to a
concentration of passion in a focus that consumes the lighter links which
bind together the clauses of a sentence or of a process of reasoning in
common parlance, or to a sense of music which mingles music and meaning
without essentially confounding them. We should demand for a perfect
editor, then, first, a thorough glossological knowledge of the English
contemporary with Shakespeare; second, enough logical acuteness of mind
and metaphysical training to enable him to follow recondite processes of
thought; third, such a conviction of the supremacy of his author as
always to prefer his thought to any theory of his own; fourth, a feeling
for music, and so much knowledge of the practice of other poets as to
understand that Shakespeare's versification differs from theirs as often
in kind as in degree; fifth, an acquaintance with the world as well as
with books; and last, what is, perhaps, of more importance than all, so
great a familiarity with the working of the imaginative faculty in
general, and of its peculiar operation in the mind of Shakespeare, as
will prevent his thinking a passage dark with excess of light, and enable
him to understand fully that the Gothic Shakespeare often superimposed
upon the slender column of a single word, that seems to twist under it,
but does not,--like the quaint shafts in cloisters,--a weight of meaning
which the modern architects of sentences would consider wholly
unjustifiable by correct principle.
Many years ago, while yet Fancy claimed that right in me which Fact has
since, to my no small loss, so successfully disputed, I pleased myself
with imagining the play of Hamlet published under some _alias_, and as
the work of a new candidate in literature. Then I _played_, as the
children say, that it came in regular course before some well-meaning
doer of criticisms, who had never read the original, (no very wild
assumption, as things go,) and endeavored to conceive the kind of way in
which he would be likely to take it. I put myself in his place, and tried
to write such a perfunctory notice as I thought would be likely, in
filling his column, to satisfy his conscience. But it was a _tour de
force_ quite beyond my power to execute without grimace. I could not
arrive at that artistic absorption in my own conception which would
enable me to be natural, and found myself, like a bad actor, continually
betraying my self-consciousness by my very endeavor to hide it under
caricature. The path of Nature is indeed a narrow one, and it is only the
immortals that seek it, and, when they find it, do not find themselves
cramped therein. My result was a dead failure,--satire instead of comedy.
I could not shake off that strange accumulation which we call self, and
report honestly what I saw and felt even to myself, much less to others.
Yet I have often thought, that, unless we can so far free ourselves from
our own prepossessions as to be capable of bringing to a work of art some
freshness of sensation, and receiving from it in turn some new surprise
of sympathy and admiration,--some shock even, it may be, of instinctive
distaste and repulsion,--though we may praise or blame, weighing our
_pros_ and _cons_ in the nicest balances, sealed by proper authority, yet
we shall not criticise in the highest sense. On the other hand, unless we
admit certain principles as fixed beyond question, we shall be able to
render no adequate judgment, but only to record our impressions, which
may be valuable or not, according to the greater or less ductility of the
senses on which they are made. Charles Lamb, for example, came to the old
English dramatists with the feeling of a discoverer. He brought with him
an alert curiosity, and everything was delightful simply because it was
strange. Like other early adventurers, he sometimes mistook shining sand
for gold; but he had the great advantage of not feeling himself
responsible for the manners of the inhabitants he found there, and not
thinking it needful to make them square with any Westminster Catechism of
aesthetics. Best of all, he did not feel compelled to compare them with
the Greeks, about whom he knew little, and cared less. He took them as he
found them, described them in a few pregnant sentences, and displayed his
specimens of their growth, and manufacture. When he arrived at the
dramatists of the Restoration, so far from being shocked, he was charmed
with their pretty and unmoral ways; and what he says of them reminds us
of blunt Captain Dampier, who, in his account of the island of Timor,
remarks, as a matter of no consequence, that the natives "take as many
wives as they can maintain, and as for religion, they have none."
Lamb had the great advantage of seeing the elder dramatists as they were;
it did not lie within his province to point out what they were not.
Himself a fragmentary writer, he had more sympathy with imagination where
it gathers into the intense focus of passionate phrase than with that
higher form of it, where it is the faculty that shapes, gives unity of
design and balanced gravitation of parts. And yet it is only this higher
form of it which can unimpeachably assure to any work the dignity and
permanence of a classic; for it results in that exquisite something
called Style, which, like the grace of perfect breeding, everywhere
pervasive and nowhere emphatic, makes itself felt by the skill with which
it effaces itself, and masters us at last with a sense of indefinable
completeness. On a lower plane we may detect it in the structure of a
sentence, in the limpid expression that implies sincerity of thought; but
it is only where it combines and organizes, where it eludes observation
in particulars to give the rarer delight of perfection as a whole, that
it belongs to art. Then it is truly ideal, the _forma mentis aeterna,_
not as a passive mould into which the thought is poured, but as the
conceptive energy which finds all material plastic to its preconceived
design. Mere vividness of expression, such as makes quotable passages,
comes of the complete surrender of self to the impression, whether
spiritual or sensual, of the moment. It is a quality, perhaps, in which
the young poet is richer than the mature, his very inexperience making
him more venturesome in those leaps of language that startle us with
their rashness only to bewitch us the more with the happy ease of their
accomplishment. For this there are no existing laws of rhetoric, for it
is from such felicities that the rhetoricians deduce and codify their
statutes. It is something which cannot be improved upon or cultivated,
for it is immediate and intuitive. But this power of expression is
subsidiary, and goes only a little way toward the making of a great poet.
Imagination, where it is truly creative, is a faculty, and not a quality;
it looks before and after, it gives the form that makes all the parts
work together harmoniously toward a given end, its seat is in the higher
reason, and it is efficient only as a servant of the will. Imagination,
as it is too often misunderstood, is mere fantasy, the image-making
power, common to all who have the gift of dreams, or who can afford to
buy it in a vulgar drug as De Quincey bought it.
The true poetic imagination is of one quality, whether it be ancient or
modern, and equally subject to those laws of grace, of proportion, of
design, in whose free service, and in that alone, it can become art.
Those laws are something which do not
"Alter when they alteration find,
And bend with the remover to remove."
And they are more clearly to be deduced from the eminent examples of
Greek literature than from any other source. It is the advantage of this
select company of ancients that their works are defecated of all turbid
mixture of contemporaneousness, and have become to us pure _literature_,
our judgment and enjoyment of which cannot be vulgarized by any
prejudices of time or place. This is why the study of them is fitly
called a liberal education, because it emancipates the mind from every
narrow provincialism whether of egoism or tradition, and is the
apprenticeship that every one must serve before becoming a free brother
of the guild which passes the torch of life from age to age. There would
be no dispute about the advantages of that Greek culture which Schiller
advocated with such generous eloquence, if the great authors of antiquity
had not been degraded from teachers of thinking to drillers in grammar,
and made the ruthless pedagogues of root and inflection, instead of
companions for whose society the mind must put on her highest mood. The
discouraged youth too naturally transfers the epithet of _dead_ from the
languages to the authors that wrote in them. What concern have we with
the shades of dialect in Homer or Theocritus, provided they speak the
spiritual _lingua franca_ that abolishes all alienage of race, and makes
whatever shore of time we land on hospitable and homelike? There is much
that is deciduous in books, but all that gives them a title to rank as
literature in the highest sense is perennial. Their vitality is the
vitality not of one or another blood or tongue, but of human nature;
their truth is not topical and transitory, but of universal acceptation;
and thus all great authors seem the coevals not only of each other, but
of whoever reads them, growing wiser with him as he grows wise, and
unlocking to him one secret after another as his own life and experience
give him the key, but on no other condition. Their meaning is absolute,
not conditional; it is a property of _theirs_, quite irrespective of
manners or creed; for the highest culture, the development of the
individual by observation, reflection, and study, leads to one result,
whether in Athens or in London. The more we know of ancient literature,
the more we are struck with its modernness, just as the more we study the
maturer dramas of Shakespeare, the more we feel his nearness in certain
primary qualities to the antique and classical. Yet even in saying this,
I tacitly make the admission that it is the Greeks who must furnish us
with our standard of comparison. Their stamp is upon all the allowed
measures and weights of aesthetic criticism. Nor does a consciousness of
this, nor a constant reference to it, in any sense reduce us to the mere
copying of a bygone excellence; for it is the test of excellence in any
department of art, that it can never be bygone, and it is not mere
difference from antique models, but the _way_ in which that difference is
shown, the direction it takes, that we are to consider in our judgment of
a modern work. The model is not there to be copied merely, but that the
study of it may lead us insensibly to the same processes of thought by
which its purity of outline and harmony of parts were attained, and
enable us to feel that strength is consistent with repose, that
multiplicity is not abundance, that grace is but a more refined form of
power, and that a thought is none the less profound that the limpidity of
its expression allows us to measure it at a glance. To be possessed with
this conviction gives us at least a determinate point of view, and
enables us to appeal a case of taste to a court of final judicature,
whose decisions are guided by immutable principles. When we hear of
certain productions, that they are feeble in design, but masterly in
parts, that they are incoherent, to be sure, but have great merits of
style, we know that it cannot be true; for in the highest examples we
have, the master is revealed by his plan, by his power of making all
accessories, each in its due relation, subordinate to it, and that to
limit style to the rounding of a period or a distich is wholly to
misapprehend its truest and highest function. Donne is full of salient
verses that would take the rudest March winds of criticism with their
beauty, of thoughts that first tease us like charades and then delight us
with the felicity of their solution; but these have not saved him. He is
exiled to the limbo of the formless and the fragmentary. To take a more
recent instance,--Wordsworth had, in some respects, a deeper insight, and
a more adequate utterance of it, than any man of his generation. But it
was a piece-meal insight and utterance; his imagination was feminine, not
masculine, receptive, and not creative. His longer poems are Egyptian
sand-wastes, with here and there an oasis of exquisite greenery, a grand
image, Sphinx-like, half buried in drifting commonplaces, or the solitary
Pompey's Pillar of some towering thought. But what is the fate of a poet
who owns the quarry, but cannot build the poem? Ere the century is out he
will be nine parts dead, and immortal only in that tenth part of him
which is included in a thin volume of "beauties." Already Moxon has felt
the need of extracting this essential oil of him; and his memory will be
kept alive, if at all, by the precious material rather than the
workmanship of the vase that contains his heart. And what shall we
forebode of so many modern poems, full of splendid passages, beginning
everywhere and leading nowhere, reminding us of nothing so much as the
amateur architect who planned his own house, and forgot the staircase
that should connect one floor with another, putting it as an afterthought
on the outside?
Lichtenberg says somewhere, that it was the advantage of the ancients to
write before the great art of writing ill had been invented; and
Shakespeare may be said to have had the good luck of coming after Spenser
(to whom the debt of English poetry is incalculable) had reinvented the
art of writing well. But Shakespeare arrived at a mastery in this respect
which sets him above all other poets. He is not only superior in degree,
but he is also different in kind. In that less purely artistic sphere of
style which concerns the matter rather than the form his charm is often
unspeakable. How perfect his style is may be judged from the fact that it
never curdles into mannerism, and thus absolutely eludes imitation.
Though here, if anywhere, the style is the man, yet it is noticeable
only, like the images of Brutus, by its absence, so thoroughly is he
absorbed in his work, while he fuses thought and word indissolubly
together, till all the particles cohere by the best virtue of each. With
perfect truth he has said of himself that he writes
"All one, ever the same,
Putting invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell his name."
And yet who has so succeeded in imitating him as to remind us of him by
even so much as the gait of a single verse?[127] Those magnificent
crystallizations of feeling and phrase, basaltic masses, molten and
interfused by the primal fires of passion, are not to be reproduced by
the slow experiments of the laboratory striving to parody creation with
artifice. Mr. Matthew Arnold seems to think that Shakespeare has damaged
English poetry. I wish he had! It is true he lifted Dryden above himself
in "All for Love"; but it was Dryden who said of him, by instinctive
conviction rather than judgment, that within his magic circle none dared
tread but he. Is he to blame for the extravagances of modern diction,
which are but the reaction of the brazen age against the degeneracy of
art into artifice, that has characterized the silver period in every
literature? We see in them only the futile effort of misguided persons to
torture out of language the secret of that inspiration which should be in
themselves. We do not find the extravagances in Shakespeare himself. We
never saw a line in any modern poet that reminded us of him, and will
venture to assert that it is only poets of the second class that find
successful imitators. And the reason seems to us a very plain one. The
genius of the great poet seeks repose in the expression of itself, and
finds it at last in style, which is the establishment of a perfect mutual
understanding between the worker and his material.[128] The secondary
intellect, on the other hand, seeks for excitement in expression, and
stimulates itself into mannerism, which is the wilful obtrusion of self,
as style is its unconscious abnegation. No poet of the first class has
ever left a school, because his imagination is incommunicable; while,
just as surely as the thermometer tells of the neighborhood of an
iceberg, you may detect the presence of a genius of the second class in
any generation by the influence of his mannerism, for that, being an
artificial thing, is capable of reproduction. Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe,
left no heirs either to the form or mode of their expression; while
Milton, Sterne, and Wordsworth left behind them whole regiments uniformed
with all their external characteristics. We do not mean that great poetic
geniuses may not have influenced thought, (though we think it would be
difficult to show how Shakespeare had done so, directly and wilfully,)
but that they have not infected contemporaries or followers with
mannerism. The quality in him which makes him at once so thoroughly
English and so thoroughly cosmopolitan is that aëration of the
understanding by the imagination which he has in common with all the
greater poets, and which is the privilege of genius. The modern school,
which mistakes violence for intensity, seems to catch its breath when it
finds itself on the verge of natural expression, and to say to itself,
"Good heavens! I had almost forgotten I was inspired!" But of Shakespeare
we do not even suspect that he ever remembered it. He does not always
speak in that intense way that flames up in Lear and Macbeth through the
rifts of a soil volcanic with passion. He allows us here and there the
repose of a commonplace character, the consoling distraction of a
humorous one. He knows how to be equable and grand without effort, so
that we forget the altitude of thought to which he has led us, because
the slowly receding slope of a mountain stretching downward by ample
gradations gives a less startling impression of height than to look over
the edge of a ravine that makes but a wrinkle in its flank.
Shakespeare has been sometimes taxed with the barbarism of profuseness
and exaggeration. But this is to measure him by a Sophoclean scale. The
simplicity of the antique tragedy is by no means that of expression, but
is of form merely. In the utterance of great passions, something must be
indulged to the extravagance of Nature; the subdued tones to which pathos
and sentiment are limited cannot express a tempest of the soul The range
between the piteous "no more but so," in which Ophelia compresses the
heart-break whose compression was to make her mad, and that sublime
appeal of Lear to the elements of Nature, only to be matched, if matched
at all, in the "Prometheus," is a wide one, and Shakespeare is as truly
simple in the one as in the other. The simplicity of poetry is not that
of prose, nor its clearness that of ready apprehension merely. To a
subtile sense, a sense heightened by sympathy, those sudden fervors of
phrase, gone ere one can say it lightens, that show us Macbeth groping
among the complexities of thought in his conscience-clouded mind, and
reveal the intricacy rather than enlighten it, while they leave the eye
darkened to the literal meaning of the words, yet make their logical
sequence, the grandeur of the conception, and its truth to Nature clearer
than sober daylight could. There is an obscurity of mist rising from the
undrained shallows of the mind, and there is the darkness of
thunder-cloud gathering its electric masses with passionate intensity
from the clear element of the imagination, not at random or wilfully, but
by the natural processes of the creative faculty, to brood those flashes
of expression that transcend rhetoric, and are only to be apprehended by
the poetic instinct.
In that secondary office of imagination, where it serves the artist, not
as the reason that shapes, but as the interpreter of his conceptions into
words, there is a distinction to be noticed between the higher and lower
mode in which it performs its function. It may be either creative or
pictorial, may body forth the thought or merely image it forth. With
Shakespeare, for example, imagination seems immanent in his very
consciousness; with Milton, in his memory. In the one it sends, as if
without knowing it, a fiery life into the verse,
"Sei die Braut das Wort,
Bräutigam der Geist";
in the other it elaborates a certain pomp and elevation. Accordingly, the
bias of the former is toward over-intensity, of the latter toward
over-diffuseness. Shakespeare's temptation is to push a willing metaphor
beyond its strength, to make a passion over-inform its tenement of words;
Milton cannot resist running a simile on into a fugue. One always fancies
Shakespeare _in_ his best verses, and Milton at the key-board of his
organ. Shakespeare's language is no longer the mere vehicle of thought,
it has become part of it, its very flesh and blood. The pleasure it gives
us is unmixed, direct, like that from the smell of a flower or the flavor
of a fruit. Milton sets everywhere his little pitfalls of bookish
association for the memory. I know that Milton's manner is very grand. It
is slow, it is stately, moving as in triumphal procession, with music,
with historic banners, with spoils from every time and every region, and
captive epithets, like huge Sicambrians, thrust their broad shoulders
between us and the thought whose pomp they decorate. But it is manner,
nevertheless, as is proved by the ease with which it is parodied, by the
danger it is in of degenerating into mannerism whenever it forgets
itself. Fancy a parody of Shakespeare,--I do not mean of his words, but
of his _tone_, for that is what distinguishes the master. You might as
well try it with the Venus of Melos. In Shakespeare it is always the
higher thing, the thought, the fancy, that is pre-eminent; it is Caesar
that draws all eyes, and not the chariot in which he rides, or the throng
which is but the reverberation of his supremacy. If not, how explain the
charm with which he dominates in all tongues, even under the
disenchantment of translation? Among the most alien races he is as
solidly at home as a mountain seen from different sides by many lands,
itself superbly solitary, yet the companion of all thoughts and
domesticated in all imaginations.
In description Shakespeare is especially great, and in that instinct
which gives the peculiar quality of any object of contemplation in a
single happy word that colors the impression on the sense with the mood
of the mind. Most descriptive poets seem to think that a hogshead of
water caught at the spout will give us a livelier notion of a
thunder-shower than the sullen muttering of the first big drops upon the
roof. They forget that it is by suggestion, not cumulation, that profound
impressions are made upon the imagination. Milton's parsimony (so rare in
him) makes the success of his
"Sky lowered, and, muttering thunder, some sad drops
Wept at completion of the mortal sin."
Shakespeare understood perfectly the charm of indirectness, of making his
readers seem to discover for themselves what he means to show them. If he
wishes to tell that the leaves of the willow are gray on the under side,
he does not make it a mere fact of observation by bluntly saying so, but
makes it picturesquely reveal itself to us as it might in Nature:--
"There is a willow grows athwart the flood,
That shows his _hoar_ leaves in the glassy stream."
Where he goes to the landscape for a comparison, he does not ransack wood
and field for specialties, as if he were gathering simples, but takes one
image, obvious, familiar, and makes it new to us either by sympathy or
contrast with his own immediate feeling. He always looked upon Nature
with the eyes of the mind. Thus he can make the melancholy of autumn or
the gladness of spring alike pathetic:--
"That time of year thou mayst in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or few, or none, do hang
Upon those boughs that shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang."