A Dish of Orts : Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare

But next to the interest of knowing that a man could love so well, comes the association of this fact with his art. He who could look abroad upon men, and understand them all—who stood, as it were, in the wide-open gates of his palace, and admitted with welcome every one who came in sight—had in the inner places of that palace one chamber in which he met his friend, and in which his whole soul went forth to understand the soul of his friend. The man to whom nothing in humanity was common or unclean; in whom the most remarkable of his artistic morals is fair-play; who fills our hearts with a saintly love for Cordelia and an admiration of Sir John Falstaff the lost gentleman, mournful even in the height of our laughter; who could make an Autolycus and a Macbeth both human, and an Ariel and a Puck neither human—this is the man who loved best. And we believe that this depth of capacity for loving lay at the root of all his knowledge of men and women, and all his dramatic pre-eminence. The heart is more intelligent than the intellect. Well says the poet Matthew Raydon, who has hardly left anything behind him but the lamentation over Sir Philip Sidney in which the lines occur,—

 
  “He that hath love and judgment too
  Sees more than any other do.”
 

Simply, we believe that this, not this only, but this more than any other endowment, made Shakspere the artist he was, in providing him all the material of humanity to work upon, and keeping him to the true spirit of its use. Love looking forth upon strife, understood it all. Love is the true revealer of secrets, because it makes one with the object regarded.

“But,” say some impatient readers, “when shall we have done with Shakspere? There is no end to this writing about him.” It will be a bad day for England when we have done with Shakspere; for that will imply, along with the loss of him, that we are no longer capable of understanding him. Should that time ever come, Heaven grant the generation which does not understand him at least the grace to keep its pens off him, which will by no means follow as a necessary consequence of the non-intelligence! But the writing about Shakspere which has been hitherto so plentiful must do good just in proportion as it directs attention to him and gives aid to the understanding of him. And while the utterances of to-day pass away, the children of to-morrow are born, and require a new utterance for their fresh need from those who, having gone before, have already tasted life and Shakspere, and can give some little help to further progress than their own, by telling the following generation what they have found. Suppose that this cry had been raised last century, after good Dr. Johnson had ceased to produce to the eyes of men the facts about his own incapacity which he presumed to be criticisms of Shakspere, where would our aids be now to the understanding of the dramatist? Our own conviction is, when we reflect with how much labour we have deepened our knowledge of him, and thereby found in him the best—for the best lies not on the surface for the careless reader—our own conviction is, that not half has been done that ought to be done to help young people at least to understand the master mind of their country. Few among them can ever give the attention or work to it that we have given; but much may be done with judicious aid. And a profound knowledge of their greatest writer would do more than almost anything else to bind together as Englishmen, in a true and unselfish way, the hearts of the coming generations; for his works are our country in a convex magic mirror.

When a man finds that every time he reads a book not only does some obscurity melt away, but deeper depths, which he had not before seen, dawn upon him, he is not likely to think that the time for ceasing to write about the book has come. And certainly in Shakspere, as in all true artistic work, as in nature herself, the depths are not to be revealed utterly; while every new generation needs a new aid towards discovering itself and its own thoughts in these forms of the past. And of all that read about Shakspere there are few whom more than one or two utterances have reached. The speech or the writing must go forth to find the soil for the growth of its kernel of truth. We shall, therefore, with the full consciousness that perhaps more has been already said and written about Shakspere than about any other writer, yet venture to add to the mass by a few general remarks.

And first we would remind our readers of the marvel of the combination in Shakspere of such a high degree of two faculties, one of which is generally altogether inferior to the other: the faculties of reception and production. Rarely do we find that great receptive power, brought into operation either by reading or by observation, is combined with originality of thought. Some hungers are quite satisfied by taking in what others have thought and felt and done. By the assimilation of this food many minds grow and prosper; but other minds feed far more upon what rises from their own depths; in the answers they are compelled to provide to the questions that come unsought; in the theories they cannot help constructing for the inclusion in one whole of the various facts around them, which seem at first sight to strive with each other like the atoms of a chaos; in the examination of those impulses of hidden origin which at one time indicate a height of being far above the thinker’s present condition, at another a gulf of evil into which he may possibly fall. But in Shakspere the two powers of beholding and originating meet like the rejoining halves of a sphere. A man who thinks his own thoughts much, will often walk through London streets and see nothing. In the man who observes only, every passing object mirrors itself in its prominent peculiarities, having a kind of harmony with all the rest, but arouses no magician from the inner chamber to charm and chain its image to his purpose. In Shakspere, on the contrary, every outer form of humanity and nature spoke to that ever-moving, self-vindicating—we had almost said, and in a sense it would be true, self-generating—humanity within him. The sound of any action without him, struck in him just the chord which, in motion in him, would have produced a similar action. When anything was done, he felt as if he were doing it—perception and origination conjoining in one consciousness.

But to this gift was united the gift of utterance, or representation. Many a man both receives and generates who, somehow, cannot represent. Nothing is more disappointing sometimes than our first experience of the artistic attempts of a man who has roused our expectations by a social display of familiarity with, and command over, the subjects of conversation. Have we not sometimes found that when such a one sought to give vital or artistic form to these thoughts, so that they might not be born and die in the same moment upon his lips, but might exist, a poor, weak, faded simulacrum alone was the result? Now Shakspere was a great talker, who enraptured the listeners, and was himself so rapt in his speech that he could scarcely come to a close; but when he was alone with his art, then and then only did he rise to the height of his great argument, and all the talk was but as the fallen mortar and stony chips lying about the walls of the great temple of his drama.

But, along with all this wealth of artistic speech, an artistic virtue of an opposite nature becomes remarkable: his reticence. How often might he not say fine things, particularly poetic things, when he does not, because it would not suit the character or the time! How many delicate points are there not in his plays which we only discover after many readings, because he will not put a single tone of success into the flow of natural utterance, to draw our attention to the triumph of the author, and jar with the all-important reality of his production! Wherever an author obtrudes his own self-importance, an unreality is the consequence, of a nature similar to that which we feel in the old moral plays, when historical and allegorical personages, such as Julius Caesar and Charity, for instance, are introduced at the same time on the same stage, acting in the same story. Shakspere never points to any stroke of his own wit or art. We may find it or not: there it is, and no matter if no one see it!

Much has been disputed about the degree of consciousness of his own art possessed by Shakspere: whether he did it by a grand yet blind impulse, or whether he knew what he wanted to do, and knowingly used the means to arrive at that end. Now we cannot here enter upon the question; but we would recommend any of our readers who are interested in it not to attempt to make up their minds upon it before considering a passage in another of his poems, which may throw some light on the subject for them. It is the description of a painting, contained in “The Rape of Lucrece,” towards the end of the poem. Its very minuteness involves the expression of principles, and reveals that, in relation to an art not his own, he could hold principles of execution, and indicate perfection of finish, which, to say the least, must proceed from a general capacity for art, and therefore might find an equally conscious operation in his own peculiar province of it. For our own part, we think that his results are a perfect combination of the results of consciousness and unconsciousness; consciousness where the arrangements of the play, outside the region of inspiration, required the care of the wakeful intellect; unconsciousness where the subject itself bore him aloft on the wings of its own creative delight.

There is another manifestation of his power which will astonish those who consider it. It is this: that, while he was able to go down to the simple and grand realities of human nature, which are all tragic; and while, therefore, he must rejoice most in such contemplations of human nature as find fit outlet in a “Hamlet,” a “Lear,” a “Timon,” or an “Othello,” the tragedies of Doubt, Ingratitude, and Love, he can yet, when he chooses, float on the very surface of human nature, as in “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” “The Comedy of Errors,” “The Taming of the Shrew;” or he can descend half way as it were, and there remain suspended in the characters and feelings of ordinary nice people, who, interesting enough to meet in society, have neither received that development, nor are placed in those circumstances, which admit of the highest and simplest poetic treatment. In these he will bring out the ordinary noble or the ordinary vicious. Of this nature are most of his comedies, in which he gives an ideal representation of common social life, and steers perfectly clear of what in such relations and surroundings would be heroics. Look how steadily he keeps the noble-minded youth Orlando in this middle region; and look how the best comes out at last in the wayward and recalcitrant and bizarre, but honest and true natures of Beatrice and Benedick; and this without any untruth to the nature of comedy, although the circumstances border on the tragic. When he wants to give the deeper affairs of the heart, he throws the whole at once out of the social circle with its multiform restraints. As in “Hamlet” the stage on which the whole is acted is really the heart of Hamlet, so he makes his visible stage as it were, slope off into the misty infinite, with a grey, starless heaven overhead, and Hades open beneath his feet. Hence young people brought up in the country understand the tragedies far sooner than they can comprehend the comedies. It needs acquaintance with society and social ways to clear up the latter.

The remarks we have made on “Hamlet” by way of illustration, lead us to point out how Shakspere prepares, in some of his plays, a stage suitable for all the representation. In “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” the place which gives tone to the whole is a midnight wood in the first flush and youthful delight of summer. In “As You Like it” it is a daylight wood in spring, full of morning freshness, with a cold wind now and then blowing through the half-clothed boughs. In “The Tempest” it is a solitary island, circled by the mysterious sea-horizon, over which what may come who can tell?—a place where the magician may work his will, and have all nature at the beck of his superior knowledge.

The only writer who would have had a chance of rivalling Shakspere in his own walk, if he had been born in the same period of English history, is Chaucer. He has the same gift of individualizing the general, and idealizing the portrait. But the best of the dramatic writers of Shakspere’s time, in their desire of dramatic individualization, forget the modifying multiformity belonging to individual humanity. In their anxiety to present a character, they take, as it were, a human mould, label it with a certain peculiarity, and then fill in speeches and forms according to the label. Thus the indications of character, of peculiarity, so predominate, the whole is so much of one colour, that the result resembles one of those allegorical personifications in which, as much as possible, everything human is eliminated except what belongs to the peculiarity, the personification. How different is it with Shakspere’s representations! He knows that no human being ever was like that. He makes his most peculiar characters speak very much like other people; and it is only over the whole that their peculiarities manifest themselves with indubitable plainness. The one apparent exception is Jaques, in “As You Like it.” But there we must remember that Shakspere is representing a man who so chooses to represent himself. He is a man in his humour, or his own peculiar and chosen affectation. Jaques is the writer of his own part; for with him “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women,” himself first, “merely players.” We have his own presentation of himself, not, first of all, as he is, but as he chooses to be taken. Of course his real self does come out in it, for no man can seem altogether other than he is; and besides, the Duke, who sees quite through him, rebukes him in the manner already referred to; but it is his affectation that gives him the unnatural peculiarity of his modes and speeches. He wishes them to be such.

There is, then, for every one of Shakspere’s characters the firm ground of humanity, upon which the weeds, as well as the flowers, glorious or fantastic, as the case may be, show themselves. His more heroic persons are the most profoundly human. Nor are his villains unhuman, although inhuman enough. Compared with Marlowe’s Jew, Shylock is a terrible man beside a dreary monster, and, as far as logic and the lex talionis go, has the best of the argument. It is the strength of human nature itself that makes crime strong. Wickedness could have no power of itself: it lives by the perverted powers of good. And so great is Shakspere’s sympathy with Shylock even, in the hard and unjust doom that overtakes him, that he dismisses him with some of the spare sympathies of the more tender-hearted of his spectators. Nowhere is the justice of genius more plain than in Shakspere’s utter freedom from party-spirit, even with regard to his own creations. Each character shall set itself forth from its own point of view, and only in the choice and scope of the whole shall the judgment of the poet be beheld. He never allows his opinion to come out to the damaging of the individual’s own self-presentation. He knows well that for the worst something can be said, and that a feeling of justice and his own right will be strong in the mind of a man who is yet swayed by perfect selfishness. Therefore the false man is not discoverable in his speech, not merely because the villain will talk as like a true man as he may, but because seldom is the villainy clear to the villain’s own mind. It is impossible for us to determine whether, in their fierce bandying of the lie, Bolingbroke or Norfolk spoke the truth. Doubtless each believed the other to be the villain that he called him. And Shakspere has no desire or need to act the historian in the decision of that question. He leaves his reader in full sympathy with the perplexity of Richard; as puzzled, in fact, as if he had been present at the interrupted combat.

If every writer could write up to his own best, we should have far less to marvel at in Shakspere. It is in great measure the wealth of Shakspere’s suggestions, giving him abundance of the best to choose from, that lifts him so high above those who, having felt the inspiration of a good idea, are forced to go on writing, constructing, carpentering, with dreary handicraft, before the exhausted faculty has recovered sufficiently to generate another. And then comes in the unerring choice of the best of those suggestions. Yet if any one wishes to see what variety of the same kind of thoughts he could produce, let him examine the treatment of the same business in different plays; as, for instance, the way in which instigation to a crime is managed in “Macbeth,” where Macbeth tempts the two murderers to kill Banquo; in “King John,” when the King tempts Hubert to kill Arthur; in “The Tempest,” when Antonio tempts Sebastian to kill Alonzo; in “As You Like it,” when Oliver instigates Charles to kill Orlando; and in “Hamlet,” where Claudius urges Laertes to the murder of Hamlet.

He shows no anxiety about being original. When a man is full of his work he forgets himself. In his desire to produce a good play he lays hold upon any material that offers itself. He will even take a bad play and make a good one of it. One of the most remarkable discoveries to the student of Shakspere is the hide-bound poverty of some of the stories, which, informed by his life-power; become forms of strength, richness, and grace. He does what the Spirit in “Comus” says the music he heard might do,—

 
              “create a soul
  Under the ribs of death;”
 

and then death is straightway “clothed upon.” And nowhere is the refining operation of his genius more evident than in the purification of these stories. Characters and incidents which would have been honey and nuts to Beaumont and Fletcher are, notwithstanding their dramatic recommendations, entirely remodelled by him. The fair Ophelia is, in the old tale, a common woman, and Hamlet’s mistress; while the policy of the Lady of Belmont, who in the old story occupies the place for which he invented the lovely Portia, upon which policy the whole story turns, is such that it is as unfit to set forth in our pages as it was unfit for Shakspere’s purposes of art. His noble art refuses to work upon base matter. He sees at once the capabilities of a tale, but he will not use it except he may do with it what he pleases.

If we might here offer some assistance to the young student who wants to help himself, we would suggest that to follow, in a measure, Plutarch’s fashion of comparison, will be the most helpful guide to the understanding of the poet. Let the reader take any two characters, and putting them side by side, look first for differences, and then for resemblances between them, with the causes of each; or let him make a wider attempt, and setting two plays one over against the other, compare or contrast them, and see what will be the result. Let him, for instance, take the two characters Hamlet and Brutus, and compare their beginnings and endings, the resemblances in their characters, the differences in their conduct, the likeness and unlikeness of what was required of them, the circumstances in which action was demanded of each, the helps or hindrances each had to the working out of the problem of his life, the way in which each encounters the supernatural, or any other question that may suggest itself in reading either of the plays, ending off with the main lesson taught in each; and he will be astonished to find, if he has not already discovered it, what a rich mine of intellectual and spiritual wealth is laid open to his delighted eyes. Perhaps not the least valuable end to be so gained is, that the young Englishman, who wants to be delivered from any temptation to think himself the centre around which the universe revolves, will be aided in his endeavours after honourable humility by looking up to the man who towers, like Saul, head and shoulders above his brethren, and seeing that he is humble, may learn to leave it to the pismire to be angry, to the earwig to be conceited, and to the spider to insist on his own importance.

But to return to the main course of our observations. The dramas of Shakspere are so natural, that this, the greatest praise that can be given them, is the ground of one of the difficulties felt by the young student in estimating them. The very simplicity of Shakspere’s art seems to throw him out of any known groove of judgment. When he hears one say, “Look at this, and admire,” he feels inclined to rejoin, “Why, he only says in the simplest way what the thing must have been. It is as plain as daylight.” Yes, to the reader; and because Shakspere wrote it. But there were a thousand wrong ways of doing it: Shakspere took the one right way. It is he who has made it plain in art, whatever it was before in nature; and most likely the very simplicity of it in nature was scarcely observed before he saw it and represented it. And is it not the glory of art to attain this simplicity? for simplicity is the end of all things—all manners, all morals, all religion. To say that the thing could not have been done otherwise, is just to say that you forget the art in beholding its object, that you forget the mirror because you see nature reflected in the mirror. Any one can see the moon in Lord Rosse’s telescope; but who made the reflector? And let the student try to express anything in prose or in verse, in painting or in modelling, just as it is. No man knows till he has made many attempts, how hard to reach is this simplicity of art. And the greater the success, the fewer are the signs of the labour expended. Simplicity is art’s perfection.

But so natural are all his plays, and the great tragedies to which we would now refer in particular, amongst the rest, that it may appear to some, at first sight, that Shakspere could not have constructed them after any moral plan, could have had no lesson of his own to teach in them, seeing they bear no marks of individual intent, in that they depart nowhere from, nature, the construction of the play itself going straight on like a history. The directness of his plays springs in part from the fact that it is humanity and not circumstance that Shakspere respects. Circumstance he uses only for the setting forth of humanity; and for the plot of circumstance, so much in favour with Ben Jonson, and others of his contemporaries, he cares nothing. As to their looking too natural to have any design in them, we are not of those who believe that it is unlike nature to have a design and a result. If the proof of a high aim is to be what the critics used to call poetic justice, a kind of justice that one would gladly find more of in grocers’ and linen-drapers’ shops, but can as well spare from a poem, then we must say that he has not always a high end: the wicked man is not tortured, nor is the good man smothered in bank-notes and rose-leaves. Even when he shows the outward ruin and death that comes upon Macbeth at last, it is only as an unavoidable little consequence, following in the wake of the mighty vengeance of nature, even of God, that Macbeth cannot say Amen; that Macbeth can sleep no more; that Macbeth is “cabined cribbed, confined, bound in to saucy doubts and fears;” that his very brain is a charnel-house, whence arise the ghosts of his own murders, till he envies the very dead the rest to which his hand has sent them. That immediate and eternal vengeance upon crime, and that inner reward of well-doing, never fail in nature or in Shakspere, appear as such a matter of course that they hardly look like design either in nature or in the mirror which he holds up to her. The secret is that, in the ideal, habit and design are one.

Most authors seem anxious to round off and finish everything in full sight. Most of Shakspere’s tragedies compel our thoughts to follow their persons across the bourn. They need, as Jean Paul says, a piece of the next world painted in to complete the picture, And this is surely nature: but it need not therefore be no design. What could be done with Hamlet, but send him into a region where he has some chance of finding his difficulties solved; where he will know that his reverence for God, which was the sole stay left him in the flood of human worthlessness, has not been in vain; that the skies are not “a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours;” that there are noble women, though his mother was false and Ophelia weak; and that there are noble men, although his uncle and Laertes were villains and his old companions traitors? If Hamlet is not to die, the whole of the play must perish under the accusation that the hero of it is left at last with only a superadded misery, a fresh demand for action, namely, to rule a worthless people, as they seem to him, when action has for him become impossible; that he has to live on, forsaken even of death, which will not come though the cup of misery is at the brim.

But a high end may be gained in this world, and the vision into the world beyond so justified, as in King Lear. The passionate, impulsive, unreasoning old king certainly must have given his wicked daughters occasion enough of making the charges to which their avarice urged them. He had learned very little by his life of kingship. He was but a boy with grey hair. He had had no inner experiences. And so all the development of manhood and age has to be crowded into the few remaining weeks of his life. His own folly and blindness supply the occasion. And before the few weeks are gone, he has passed through all the stages of a fever of indignation and wrath, ending in a madness from which love redeems him; he has learned that a king is nothing if the man is nothing; that a king ought to care for those who cannot help themselves; that love has not its origin or grounds in favours flowing from royal resource and munificence, and yet that love is the one thing worth living for, which gained, it is time to die. And now that he has the experience that life can give, has become a child in simplicity of heart and judgment, he cannot lose his daughter again; who, likewise, has learned the one thing she needed, as far as her father was concerned, a little more excusing tenderness. In the same play it cannot be by chance that at its commencement Gloucester speaks with the utmost carelessness and off-hand wit about the parentage of his natural son Edmund, but finds at last that this son is his ruin.

Edgar, the true son, says to Edmund, after having righteously dealt him his death-wound,—

 
  “The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
  Make instruments to scourge us:
  The dark and vicious place where thee he got
  Cost him his eyes.”
 

To which the dying and convicted villain replies,—

 
          “Thou hast spoken right; ‘tis true:
  The wheel is come full circle; I am here.”
 

Could anything be put more plainly than the moral lesson in this?

It would be easy to produce examples of fine design from his comedies as well; as for instance, from “Much Ado about Nothing:” the two who are made to fall in love with each other, by being each severally assured of possessing the love of the other, Beatrice and Benedick, are shown beforehand to have a strong inclination towards each other, manifested in their continual squabbling after a good-humoured fashion; but not all this is sufficient to make them heartily in love, until they find out the nobility of each other’s character in their behaviour about the calumniated Hero; and the author takes care they shall not be married without a previous acquaintance with the trick that has been played upon them. Indeed we think the remark, that Shakspere never leaves any of his characters the same at the end of a play as he took them up at the beginning, will be found to be true. They are better or worse, wiser or more irretrievably foolish. The historical plays would illustrate the remark as well as any.

But of all the terrible plays we are inclined to think “Timon” the most terrible, and to doubt whether justice has been done to the finish and completeness of it. At the same time we are inclined to think that it was printed (first in the first folio, 1623, seven years after Shakspere’s death) from a copy, corrected by the author, but not written fair, and containing consequent mistakes. The same account might belong to others of the plays, but more evidently perhaps belongs to the “Timon.” The idea of making the generous spendthrift, whose old idolaters had forsaken him because the idol had no more to give, into the high-priest of the Temple of Mammon, dispensing the gold which he hated and despised, that it might be a curse to the race which he had learned to hate and despise as well; and the way in which Shakspere discloses the depths of Timon’s wound, by bringing him into comparison with one who hates men by profession and humour—are as powerful as anything to be found even in Shakspere.

We are very willing to believe that “Julius Caesar” was one of his latest plays; for certainly it is the play in which he has represented a hero in the high and true sense. Brutus is this hero, of course; a hero because he will do what he sees to be right, independently of personal feeling or personal advantage. Nor does his attempt fail from any overweening or blindness, in himself. Had he known that the various papers thrown in his way, were the concoctions of Cassius, he would not have made the mistake of supposing that the Romans longed for freedom, and therefore would be ready to defend it. As it was, he attempted to liberate a people which did not feel its slavery. He failed for others, but not for himself; for his truth was such that everybody was true to him. Unlike Jaques with his seven acts of the burlesque of human life, Brutus says at the last,—