Platform Monologues Part 8

The Making of a Shakespeare

There is nothing both wholly new and wholly true to be said concerning Shakespeare. Eckermann, who played Boswell to Goethe's Johnson, was once disposed to discuss Shakespeare with that great master. Alone of modern poets Goethe has revealed a capacity in some degree comparable with that of the myriad-minded Englishman. Yet Goethe replied to Eckermann, "We cannot talk about Shakespeare; everything is inadequate." If the German intellectual colossus, whose conversation bestrode the narrow world from comparative anatomy and scientific optics to the principles of art, could not talk of Shakespeare; if a poet whose writings, next to those of our own unrivalled bard, are most thickly studded with great stars of thought, could not talk of Shakespeare, what is to be said by us punier men who are compelled to peep about for matter of discourse? "Everything is inadequate." That perhaps is the reason why talk about Shakespeare, even from the sanest of men, is apt to convert itself into perfervid rhapsody. Meanwhile, from those whose sanity is less a.s.sured, it runs to the delirium of some harebrained cipher of Shakespeare-Geheimnis, and an amused world is asked to listen while some female Dogberry a.s.serts that the truth, too long concealed, has been proved, and it will soon go near to be thought, that _Romeo and Juliet_ was written by none other than Anne Hathaway.

I do not come before you to-night with either a rhapsody or a mare's-nest. Nor do I come with criticism of that marvellous creator, who, to use the bold expression of the Frenchman, _apres Dieu crea le plus_. When, with the progress of the years, a supreme writer is read more and more over all the world; when his plays are translated from English into Hebrew and j.a.panese, and performed in Roumanian and Hindustani, criticism should become simply a humble endeavour to realize the various powers and beauties which const.i.tute such triumphant greatness.

That is my att.i.tude to-night. To me Shakespeare--though not flawless, because human--is the crown and consummation of literature. Ardently and reverently as I admire Homer, aeschylus, Dante and Goethe, my mind places even these on somewhat lower seats than the creator of _Hamlet_ and _Oth.e.l.lo_. My object is to review--however imperfectly--what went to his making, what elements of gift and character, circ.u.mstance, training and experience were so mixed in him that nature could stand up and say: "This is a man." This is not the same idle performance as to descant rapturously upon his purely inborn genius. It is no purpose of mine to attempt a definition or dissection of genius. It is only in our youth or ignorance that we possess the confidence to define such abstractions as beauty, goodness, genius, and art. Still less do I propound a recipe for its manufacture. If I knew the secret of its attainment I should first try it upon myself.

Shakespeare was made by the right native genius, by the right environment, and by the right training. We will take these factors in that order.

Genius, like every other good gift and every perfect gift, "is from above, and cometh down from the Father of Lights." We feel its presence when we are fortunate enough to meet with it. In our hearts we know that it is some strange and incommunicable faculty for performing with a divine ease those achievements which are the despair of other men, or to which they can only make some approach by "infinite pains."

Brains have been cla.s.sified as brains of one, two and three storeys. As you cannot, by thinking, add a cubit to your stature, so can you not, by thinking, add a storey to your brain. You may furnish and brighten the one storey or the two storeys with which your mental house was built before your birth. You may open the windows and let in the sun and air.

By the best education and habit you may fill that house with art and beauty and light and comfort, or, by the worst, you may render it ugly, foul, bleak and dark; but you can never add a new floor. Shakespeare's brain was not only built by mother Nature in three storeys, but those storeys were lofty and roomy in an astonis.h.i.+ng degree. They were also full of windows.

His natural gifts were vast. No writer ever possessed such a manifoldness, or rather, totality of them. In a different branch of art, one cannot but think of Michael Angelo, who could carve the Moses, paint the Sistine ceiling, or build St. Peter's, with equal grasp and mastery over conceptions each too sublime for ordinary men.

If we a.n.a.lyse and enumerate the endowments lavished by Nature on her "darling" of the Avon, we shall find, as in the case of Angelo, that he not only displays each separate gift, but that he displays each in its highest form and fullest measure. His own modesty may be permitted to envy this man's art or that man's scope, but never was envy more misplaced.

This is no rhapsody. Longinus tells us that an una.s.sailable verdict upon the sublime must be the consensus of different ages, pursuits, tastes and walks in life. Concerning Shakespeare's gifts there is no discord among the competent--the Hazlitts, Coleridges, Emersons, Carlyles. Some of those gifts can be cultivated in considerable measure, some in a less; some lie beyond all training and all art. But no art or cultivation whatever can bring any one of them to the Shakespearean height and fulness, if Nature herself has been less kind than she was to the child of John Shakespeare, that unsuspecting burgess of Stratford town.

If, before we attempt to realise the supremacy of Shakespeare in any particular attribute, we have recognised how miserably we ourselves have managed, at some time or other, to fail in every one of them; if, before we approach an appreciation of Shakespeare, we have applied to other great creators the same a.n.a.lysis which we are about to apply to him; if we have learned from the most instructive examples what is meant by creation, by imagination, by insight, by wisdom, by wit, by humour, by eloquence, and by verbal music; then we cannot fail to acknowledge that here is the all-round, the all-comprehensive genius, superlatively dowered with each and all of them; that here is the entire mind, where others are partial; that here, as I believe some one has put it, is the man who, when others have said, or depicted, or argued, or pleaded, seems to come along and say, "let me show you how this should be done,"

and so does it once and for ever.

It is but few, one may believe, who are fully conscious of the reasons why Shakespeare could fill the Elizabethan pit with the rough London apprentices and the Elizabethan boxes with superfine gallants and courtiers; why he has been a delight equally to the worldling, to whom always "the play's the thing," and to the sedate scholar, who has perchance never set foot in a theatre, and to whom a play is a dramatic poem printed in a book. Yet the reason is simple. It is because Shakespeare's gifts are numerous and varied enough to appeal to populace and gallant, to worldling and student; they meet to the full each and every demand that can be made upon a work of dramatic art.

To begin with, he possesses the true constructive power, the first secret of the playwright's craft. He can visualise an extensive or complicated pa.s.sage of human life, with its cross streams of action, its moving world of persons, its intricate motives and pa.s.sions--whether it surround Julius Caesar in ancient Rome or Oth.e.l.lo in Cyprus or one of his kings of English history--whether he find it recorded in Holinshed, or in Plutarch, or in some novel of Italy--and, with the swift intuition of the master craftsman, he grasps the essentials, arranges and links them, and renders them organic and compact. With sure judgment of effect he adds to his original or subtracts from it, and he rounds off the whole into an absorbing and unflagging story to be told in action during but "two hours traffic of the stage." No one can fully realise this immense selective and constructive power until he has a.n.a.lysed the action of _Macbeth_, and observed the marvellous skill which has compressed into those five short acts a whole world of great and little things done and said and thought.

But greater and rarer still than this architectural gift is the creative power which lies in imagination. And by imagination I do not mean merely the play of fancy in Mercutio's famous speech, nor simply the conjuring up of pictures as in Clarence's dream, nor the invention of those perfect similitudes which meet us everywhere. In these, it is true, Shakespeare is consummate. But I mean that deeper and more pervasive power, which beholds beings of the imagination as if they were flesh and blood realities, and presents men and women of the past or of nowhere as if they were breathing in the living present before our eyes; the shaping power which--to make a quotation that never stales--

gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name--

so that to us Elsinore for ever means Hamlet, Verona means Juliet, and we think of Shylock and Jessica as historical beings who veritably once trod the Piazza and the Merceria of Venice. The great novelist who wrote _Vanity Fair_ possessed a rare measure of this power; but in him it was limited by the limitations of his sympathies and by his less amiable view of men. So was it with Carlyle. In Shakespeare it is boundless. To him all ages, all sorts and conditions of men and women, are understandable and worthy of interest. Intuitively he knows them, walks with them, talks with them, feels with them. They may be heroes, sages, fools, villains: they may be witty or stupid, refined or gross. Their characters may be direct and plain as those of Lear and Kent, or they may be as subtly shaded as that of Hamlet or of the melancholy soliloquist of Arden. He can in imagination traverse the whole gamut of feeling. He can be what or whom he will. This is the imagination in which Shakespeare is unsurpa.s.sable. This more than all powers, unless it be that of humour, is the one which Nature must bestow, and which nothing but Nature can bestow. And this is the power which alone can make drama convincing and immortal. Compare with the living and breathing reality of the characters in even the poorest of the Shakespearean plays, the wordy automata of Swinburne's _Faliero_ or the frigid figures who talk through Tennyson's _Cup_. There are those who compare Scott with Shakespeare in the gift of visualising and vitalising the past. We Englishmen may leave it to the Scotchman Carlyle to settle with that comparison. For my own part, as a student of antiquity, I would maintain that, despite all petty anachronism, Shakespeare in his Roman plays comes nearer to the essential truth than any merely professional student can ever come. What he gives us is not archaeology, not the exact Forum nor the precise etiquette of the toga, but the man, the Caesar, the Coriola.n.u.s, the greasy populace, their heart and mind--these he sees with the penetrating eye of an imagination which never fails.

Of imagination, in this sense, wit and humour are a vital part. Without them you may imagine an Oth.e.l.lo or a Lear, but you cannot imagine a Falstaff, a Touchstone, a Mercutio, or a Bottom. In this domain Shakespeare is sometimes thought to be rivalled by Aristophanes and Moliere. Yet one who read all three will find that these are his rivals rather in broad strokes of humour and flashes of wit than in the subtler virtues of his humour. His humour is all-pervading, it is colour woven into the whole tissue of thinking, speaking, and action. Nay, true humour is like the colour of a flower or leaf. It belongs to the nature of the plant, and is carried in the sap of its life. To talk like Falstaff, you must in imagination become Falstaff, feel as he would do, think as he would think. You cannot lay on the Falstaffian humour by a reasoning process from the outside. The result may be clever, but it will lack just that subtle and evasive quality which the modern cant seeks to describe by the word "inevitable." A merely brilliant man--a Sheridan, for instance--might make the endeavour, and gain some considerable applause. But Shakespeare for the moment lived the part, the humour came to him with the part, whether the humour of clowns and gravediggers, of Jaques, or of the moody prince of Denmark.

Essential also to such humour is the broad and tolerant temper which can not only suffer fools gladly, as being a large and representative cla.s.s of G.o.d's creatures, but can actually rejoice in their folly as a thing delectable to a healthy contemplation.

But when the piece has been thus constructed with a master hand, and when the characters have been informed by imagination with all the convincingness of infinitely varied life, with humour, with sound and healthy and impartial understanding, much is still left. There is still to be considered the language or expression in which all is clothed. And in this respect the writer who has written best in any tongue, falls, when compared with Shakespeare, a step into the rear. Not Milton, for all his organ flood of n.o.ble phrase; not Sh.e.l.ley, for all his burning and rapturous utterance, can vie with the actor-playwright of the Globe in his gift of eloquence. It is entirely marvellous and beyond all explanation. No mere study or scholars.h.i.+p could attain to that inexhaustible fund, not merely of words, but of the right words. Orators and writers there are a many who never fail to find a word, and a good word, for the rounding of their sentences. But Shakespeare's words are not merely good words; they are the best words. Even the bare vocabulary of Burke or Macaulay would seem second-rate beside the vocabulary of Shakespeare. It is a commonplace to dilate upon the fact that Shakespeare has used 15,000 words, while Milton, our poet of widest reading and erudition, has but 8,000. I do not attach so much importance to that enumeration. The subjects, the sides of life, the cla.s.ses of persons of whom Shakespeare treats, are so comprehensive of high and low, serious and jocose, while Milton's are confined to a range of such seriousness and dignity, that the comparison is but fallacious.

Nevertheless this vast repertoire of words is in itself an amazing phenomenon. Still more amazing is the consummate tact with which he makes use of them, in sentences so terse and clear that they increasingly pa.s.s into the proverbs of everyday. And most amazing is that, with all his characters, and all their speeches, he never repeats himself. No better proof could be given that the speaker is for the moment not Shakespeare, but the character in which he has sunk himself.

We need not pretend that he does not sometimes run riot in his power; yet, how seldom, in the day of his maturity, is that "sometimes," when we rightly understand his meanings.

Let critics, observing always who speaks and in what spirit he speaks, try to improve a word in a typical pa.s.sage of Shakespeare. They speedily realise the error of their ways.

Take at random the very simplest line, say: "How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank"; subst.i.tute some other word for "sweet" or "sleeps," and examine the result. The very sound of the line possesses the tone of the moonlight and the hour, the mood of Lorenzo and Jessica.

Try an easy-looking similitude:--

How like a younker or a prodigal The scarfed bark puts from her native bay, Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind!

How like a prodigal doth she return, With over-weather'd ribs and ragged sails, Lean, rent, and beggared by the strumpet wind!

And, if the man who writes this nervous Saxon, writes elsewhere--

No, this my hand will rather The mult.i.tudinous seas incarnadine,

that also is a lesson to those who have any notion of what is meant by the right word in the right place.

To me Shakespeare is the most stupendously eloquent man who ever set pen to paper. Shakespeare, says Goethe, offers us golden apples in silver dishes. But Goethe was a foreigner, he perhaps hardly realised that the dishes of English expression are, to the English reader who responds to the niceties of his own tongue, not less golden than the apples.

To these perfections let us add another, his superb sense of rhythm.

Properly speaking, this is but an integral part of perfect eloquence. It is the concern of the poet, not only to make the words express the meaning, but to make the cadence express the tone and mood; to make it, in fact, answer to those rhythmic vibrations of the brain which go with all states of mental exaltation. It is Emerson who observes that "Shakespeare's sonnets are like the tone of voice of some incomparable person." He was doubtless thinking of their general effect upon our mood and spirit, but his remark is true of the mere movement of Shakespeare's lyric lines:--

Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.

Or--

When in the chronicle of wasted time I see descriptions of the fairest wights, And beauty making beautiful old rhyme In praise of ladies dead, and lovely knights,

and so on.

Here, as in the dramas, are no mechanical tricks, no obvious compa.s.sing of sickly sweetnesses. The accent falls where it should, unstrained. The disguised alliteration comes, as almost always in Milton also, not from set and conscious purpose, but from the promptings of a mind vibrating with harmonious suggestion.

This catalogue of virtues has been long, but it has required some self-command to prevent it from being longer. It justifies the exclamation with which Mr. Sidney Lee closes his life of Shakespeare, an exclamation which he deftly borrows from Hamlet: "How n.o.ble in reason!

how infinite in faculty! in apprehension how like a G.o.d!"

So much for Nature's making. With such lavish powers, or at least potentialities, was Shakespeare born. It is appalling to reflect that their fruit might all have been lost to the world if John Shakespeare, the father, had been but a little poorer than he actually was; if William, the son, had been sent to the plough-tail without the rudiments of education, and so had been banished for ever from contact with bright spirits and all the brilliant motley of London life. His fate would have been that of Gray's rural "mute inglorious Milton" and the headstone with "Here lies William Shakespeare" would have meant nothing outside the parish, and very little inside it. It is an alarming thought also that, had he been born half a century later, though with every educational advantage, his manhood would have fallen under the grim Puritan tyranny, and he would never have written a play. It is a peculiarly happy combination of circ.u.mstances which we must thank for the making of Shakespeare as he is.

Nature produced the wonderful plant, but, for its perfect development, a plant requires a congenial soil and atmosphere; it needs light and water; it needs protection from early destruction, or stunting, or starvation. It may seem heterodox, but I would maintain stubbornly, against all the phalanx of Baconians and Bedlamites, that, for the cultivation of Shakespeare's peculiar genius, circ.u.mstances were almost wholly propitious. His very poverty was his stimulus. Even that school education of his, which is made by misunderstanding to appear so scant and pitiful, was, I doubt not, better adapted to his career than if he had been filled with all the learning of Verulam or Ben Jonson. But of that anon.

The first happy circ.u.mstance was the epoch at which he saw the light.

In modern times two forms of poetry contend for the supremacy. The third kind, the epic, is dead. No Homer or Virgil can ever more arise, unless as a novelist in prose. Of the two perennial kinds, one is the lyric--the consummate blending of language and music which utters the cry of individual pa.s.sion from the individual heart. The other is the drama, the presentation of human life in visible form, realised in all its complexity of motives, characters and moods. Both of these flourished mightily in Shakespeare's generation. Lyric poets were innumerable. The whole country rang with songs. The Elizabethan Miscellanies and Rhapsodies and Dainty Devices are testimony stronger even than the great names of Spenser and the sonneteers. No less did drama appeal to high and low, the Puritan always excepted. But the day of the Puritan had not yet dawned. The taste of society of every grade was for the theatre, but a theatre without scenery, in which it was required of the drama that it should be rich in high poetry. Poetry was just then both a fas.h.i.+on and a pa.s.sion of the nation, as it never was before and never has been since. To a man born, like Shakespeare, with both the lyric and the dramatic gift, the age was full of example and stimulus, and, better still, full of challenge and exacting poetic standards. There is an immense difference between writing an artistic sonnet for a wide public which desires to read artistic sonnets, or composing a poetic drama for a wide public which desires to see poetic dramas, and doing these things for a narrow public which, after all, rather tolerates your efforts than demands them.

We are not concerned with the question what Shakespeare might have been if he had lived in his prime to-day. He might perhaps have become a superlative novel-writer, since that is the field in which creation appears to be playing its chief part. But our concern is to perceive what causes helped to fas.h.i.+on him to that which he in fact became.

Let us first glance for a few moments at those s.p.a.cious times of great Elizabeth. Why so wondrously prolific in song and play? Why so provocative of genius?

First, we may lay down the proposition that it is not times of national misery and poverty, not times of insecurity and fear, not times of weak convictions and cynicism, that produce a wealth of either great poets or great art. There is not one distinguished literary or artistic period of any country at which the national spirit was not full of the animation, enterprise, and confidence of a general well-being, or at which it was not possessed by high ideas and strong aims or strong convictions. I am speaking in broad summary. Whatever qualifications may be made for unique phenomena, this statement in the main is true. At such periods the mental vitality of a community is high; the air is charged with intellectual and artistic electricity, and great talents everywhere become the receivers and gathering-points of those electric currents. Hence poets, artists, and other creators appear simultaneously in cl.u.s.ters; production is abundant both in matter and in kind. At such times there is nothing withdrawn or particularly refined about the creations which pour forth. There is no room for the dilettante or _pet.i.t maitre_, and not much for the professional critic; it is the age of strong men; writing, painting, sculpture are full of vigour, inspiration, earnestness.

It was so at Athens in that glorious age of Pericles and the succeeding generation, the age of the great tragedians, of Thucydides, of Aristophanes and of Phidias. It was so--though with men of less original genius--in the Augustan Rome of Virgil, Horace and Livy. It was so in the rich and ardent cities of Renaissance Italy, where Da Vinci, Raphael, Michel Angelo, and t.i.tian flourished in the same s.p.a.ce of thirty years. It was so in the France of Louis Quatorze, when Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Pascal, and numbers of others of hardly smaller note, were writing side by side. And it was so in the times of great Elizabeth. According to Emerson there is a mental zymosis or contagion prevailing in society at such epochs. Some one has said that "No member of either house of the British Parliament will be ranked among the orators whom Lord North did not see or who did not see Lord North." If so, the cause will be found to lie in the encouragement which n.o.ble oratory then received, whereas at a later day it has "fallen into abatement and low price."

The age of Elizabeth was one of material prosperity and comfort. It was, in the main, well with men's bodies and well with their minds. They possessed not only the leisure, not only the means, but also the disposition to enjoy. It is not for the artist in any field to scorn the material prosperity of the community in which he works. After all, as history will show, it is that prosperity which makes him possible.

"Plain living and high thinking" is good for himself; it is good for a nation; but plain living does not mean poverty, squalor or starvation, while high thinking cannot be done without leisure and resource. You cannot build glorious Gothic cathedrals or order sublime Madonnas out of nothing.

Elizabethan England lived in comfort. It lived also in the security of at least internal peace. The Civil Wars, which had unsettled men of all ranks and distracted their thoughts and energies, were over. Those thoughts and energies now sought another outlet. On the whole it was also an age of tolerance. England had not entered upon its phase of Puritan bigotry, nor on its licentious Anti-Puritan vengeance. Religion was in less degree a battle-ground. There were, of course, hostilities of Protestants, Catholics, and Brownists, but the two hundred and odd sects of the twentieth century were still far off, and men's time and intellectual energies--of which there is but a limited amount--were not wasted in futile discussion of sectarian minutiae.

At ease in mind, body and estate, it was natural that the age should be one of frank enjoyment--enjoyment of all that gladdens mind or eye or ear, enjoyment of rich clothes, fine houses, shows, pageantries, music, song, stories, and plays. In the revels which Scott in his _Kenilworth_ makes Leicester prepare for the reception of Elizabeth, he is drawing upon his study of the times. Above all entertainments the play was the thing, and whether performed before the mixed auditory of the new theatres of Sh.o.r.editch or on the Southwark side, or before the Benchers of the Inns of Court, or before the Queen's Majesty herself, the drama received a welcome compared with which its appreciation in our midst is as cold as it is stinted.

And yet all this might have produced in literature and art nothing but pomp and show, or amus.e.m.e.nt more or less vulgar. In the theatre it might have ended in farce or melodrama. But happily, along with prosperity and the feeling for enjoyment, conditions were at work which made for the keenest activity of mind and every form of intellectual expansion. It would be to enlarge upon a trite theme indeed, if one dwelt upon the enterprise and discovery of bold spirits like Francis Drake, and upon the eager curiosity, the ready imagination, the universal open-mindedness, which ran through the nation, as new worlds were opened or looked for in the western or southern seas.

More important, all-important in truth, was the avid mastery of new knowledge which had followed the Renaissance and the invention of printing. The ancient writers of Greece and Rome were all recovered, and were being greedily absorbed. Old thoughts, ideas, fancies, knowledge--long buried and shamefully forgotten--had become new again.