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. 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.
[Footnote 37: From the essay entitled "Shakespeare Once Again,"
printed in the first series entitled "Among My Books." Copyright,
1870, by James Russell Lowell. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.]
We do not mean that great poetic geniuses may not have influenced
thought (tho 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 aeration 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 can not express a
tempest of the soul. The range between the piteous "no more but so,"
in which Ophelia compresses the heartbreak 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,
Braeutigam 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 can not resist running a simile on into a
fugue.
One always fancies Shakespeare in his best verses, and Milton at the
keyboard 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 unmixt, 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 preeminent; 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.