"The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal enterance of Duncan
Under your battlements."
Here Shakespeare, with his wonted tact, makes use of a vulgar
superstition, of a type in which mortal presentiment is already embodied,
to make a common ground on which the hearer and Lady Macbeth may meet.
After this prelude we are prepared to be possessed by her emotion more
fully, to feel in her ears the dull tramp of the blood that seems to make
the raven's croak yet hoarser than it is, and to betray the stealthy
advance of the mind to its fell purpose. For Lady Macbeth hears not so
much the voice of the bodeful bird as of her own premeditated murder, and
we are thus made her shuddering accomplices before the fact. Every image
receives the color of the mind, every word throbs with the pulse of one
controlling passion. The epithet _fatal_ makes us feel the implacable
resolve of the speaker, and shows us that she is tampering with her
conscience by putting off the crime upon the prophecy of the Weird
Sisters to which she alludes. In the word _battlements_, too, not only is
the fancy led up to the perch of the raven, but a hostile image takes the
place of a hospitable; for men commonly speak of receiving a guest under
their roof or within their doors. That this is not over-ingenuity, seeing
what is not to be seen, nor meant to be seen, is clear to me from what
follows. When Duncan and Banquo arrive at the castle, their fancies, free
from all suggestion of evil, call up only gracious and amiable images.
The raven was but the fantastical creation of Lady Macbeth's over-wrought
brain.
"This castle hath a pleasant seat, the air
Nimbly and sweetly doth commend itself
Unto our gentle senses.
This _guest_ of summer,
The _temple-haunting_ martlet, doth approve
By his _loved mansionry_ that the heaven's breath
Smells _wooingly_ here; no jutty, frieze,
Buttress, or coigne of vantage, but this bird
Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle."
The contrast here cannot but be as intentional as it is marked. Every
image is one of welcome, security, and confidence. The summer, one may
well fancy, would be a very different hostess from her whom we have just
seen expecting _them_. And why _temple-haunting_, unless because it
suggests sanctuary? _O immaginativa, che si ne rubi delle cose di fuor_,
how infinitely more precious are the inward ones thou givest in return!
If all this be accident, it is at least one of those accidents of which
only this man was ever capable. I divine something like it now and then
in Aeschylus, through the mists of a language which will not let me be
sure of what I see, but nowhere else. Shakespeare, it is true, had, as I
have said, as respects English, the privilege which only first-comers
enjoy. The language was still fresh from those sources at too great a
distance from which it becomes fit only for the service of prose.
Wherever he dipped, it came up clear and sparkling, undefiled as yet by
the drainage of literary factories, or of those dye-houses where the
machine-woven fabrics of sham culture are colored up to the last
desperate style of sham sentiment. Those who criticise his diction as
sometimes extravagant should remember that in poetry language is
something more than merely the vehicle of thought, that it is meant to
convey the sentiment as much as the sense, and that, if there is a beauty
of use, there is often a higher use of beauty.
What kind of culture Shakespeare had is uncertain; how much he had is
disputed; that he had as much as he wanted, and of whatever kind he
wanted, must be clear to whoever considers the question. Dr. Farmer has
proved, in his entertaining essay, that he got everything at second-hand
from translations, and that, where his translator blundered, he loyally
blundered too. But Goethe, the man of widest acquirement in modern times,
did precisely the same thing. In his character of poet he set as little
store by useless learning as Shakespeare did. He learned to write
hexameters, not from Homer, but from Voss, and Voss found them faulty;
yet somehow _Hermann und Dorothea_ is more readable than _Luise_. So far
as all the classicism then attainable was concerned, Shakespeare got it
as cheap as Goethe did, who always bought it ready-made. For such
purposes of mere aesthetic nourishment Goethe always milked other
minds,--if minds those ruminators and digesters of antiquity into asses'
milk may be called. There were plenty of professors who were forever
assiduously browsing in vales of Enna and on Pentelican slopes among the
vestiges of antiquity, slowly secreting lacteous facts, and not one of
them would have raised his head from that exquisite pasturage, though Pan
had made music through his pipe of reeds. Did Goethe wish to work up a
Greek theme? He drove out Herr Böttiger, for example, among that fodder
delicious to him for its very dryness, that sapless Arcadia of
scholiasts, let him graze, ruminate, and go through all other needful
processes of the antiquarian organism, then got him quietly into a corner
and milked him. The product, after standing long enough, mantled over
with the rich Goethean cream, from which a butter could be churned, if
not precisely classic, quite as good as the ancients could have made out
of the same material. But who has ever read the _Achilleis_, correct in
all _un_essential particulars as it probably is?
It is impossible to conceive that a man, who, in other respects, made
such booty of the world around him, whose observation of manners was so
minute, and whose insight into character and motives, as if he had been
one of God's spies, was so unerring that we accept it without question,
as we do Nature herself, and find it more consoling to explain his
confessedly immense superiority by attributing it to a happy instinct
rather than to the conscientious perfecting of exceptional powers till
practice made them seem to work independently of the will which still
directed them,--it is impossible that such a man should not also have
profited by the converse of the cultivated and quick-witted men in whose
familiar society he lived, that he should not have over and over again
discussed points of criticism and art with them, that he should not have
had his curiosity, so alive to everything else, excited about those
ancients whom university men then, no doubt, as now, extolled without too
much knowledge of what they really were, that he should not have heard
too much rather than too little of Aristotle's _Poetics_, Quinctilian's
_Rhetoric_, Horace's _Art of Poetry_, and the _Unities_, especially from
Ben Jonson,--in short, that he who speaks of himself as
"Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what he most enjoyed contented least,"
and who meditated so profoundly on every other topic of human concern,
should never have turned his thought to the principles of that art which
was both the delight and business of his life, the bread-winner alike for
soul and body. Was there no harvest of the ear for him whose eye had
stocked its garners so full as wellnigh to forestall all after-comers?
Did he who could so counsel the practisers of an art in which he never
arrived at eminence, as in Hamlet's advice to the players, never take
counsel with himself about that other art in which the instinct of the
crowd, no less than the judgment of his rivals, awarded him an easy
pre-eminence? If he had little Latin and less Greek, might he not have
had enough of both for every practical purpose on this side pedantry? The
most extraordinary, one might almost say contradictory, attainments have
been ascribed to him, and yet he has been supposed incapable of what was
within easy reach of every boy at Westminster School. There is a
knowledge that comes of sympathy as living and genetic as that which
comes of mere learning is sapless and unprocreant, and for this no
profound study of the languages is needed.
If Shakespeare did not know the ancients, I think they were at least as
unlucky in not knowing him. But is it incredible that he may have laid
hold of an edition of the Greek tragedians, _Graecè et Latinè_, and then,
with such poor wits as he was master of, contrived to worry some
considerable meaning out of them? There are at least one or two
coincidences which, whether accidental or not, are curious, and which I
do not remember to have seen noticed. In the _Electra_ of Sophocles,
which is almost identical in its leading motive with _Hamlet_, the Chorus
consoles Electra for the supposed death of Orestes in the same
commonplace way which Hamlet's uncle tries with him.
[Greek: Thnaetou pephukas patros, Aelektra phronei;
Thnaetos d' Orestaes; oste mae lian stene,
Pasin gar aemin tout' opheiletai pathein.]
"Your father lost a father;
That father lost, lost his....
But to perséver
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness....
'T is common; all that live must die."
Shakespeare expatiates somewhat more largely, but the sentiment in both
cases is almost verbally identical. The resemblance is probably a chance
one, for commonplace and consolation were always twin sisters, whom
always to escape is given to no man; but it is nevertheless curious. Here
is another, from the _Oedipus Coloneus_:--
[Greek: Tois toi dikaiois cho brachus nika megan.]
"Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just."
Hamlet's "prophetic soul" may be matched with the [Greek: promantis
thumos] of Peleus, (Eurip. Androm. 1075,) and his "sea of troubles," with
the [Greek: kakon pelagos] of Theseus in the _Hippolytus_, or of the
Chorus in the _Hercules Furens_. And, for manner and tone, compare the
speeches of Pheres in the _Alcestis_, and Jocasta in the _Phoenissae_,
with those of Claudio in _Measure for Measure_, and Ulysses in _Troilus
and Cressida_.
The Greek dramatists were somewhat fond of a trick of words in which
there is a reduplication of sense as well as of assonance, as in the
_Electra_:--
[Greek: Alektra gaeraskousan anumenaia te].