The Three Devils: Luther's, Milton's, and Goethe's Part 2

To enumerate the ascertained events of Shakespeare's life is unnecessary here. How he was born at Stratford-on-Avon, in Warwicks.h.i.+re, in April, 1564, the son of a respectable burgess who afterwards became poor; how, having been educated with some care in his native town, he married there, at the age of eighteen, a farmer's daughter eight years older than himself; how, after employing himself as scrivener or schoolmaster, or something of that kind, in his native county for a few years more, he at length quitted it in his twenty-fourth year, and came up to London, leaving his wife and three children at Stratford; how, connecting himself with the Blackfriars theatre, he commenced the career of a poet and play-writer; how he succeeded so well in this that, after having been a flouris.h.i.+ng actor and theatre-proprietor, and a most popular man of genius about town for some seventeen years, he was able to leave the stage while still under forty, and return to Stratford with property sufficient to make him the most considerable man of the place; how he lived here for some twelve years more in the midst of his family, sending up occasionally a new play to town, and otherwise leading the even and tranquil existence of a country gentleman; and how, after having buried his old mother, married his daughters, and seen himself a grandfather at the age of forty-three, he was cut off rather suddenly near his fifty-third birthday, in the year 1616:--all this is, or ought to be, as familiar to educated Englishmen of the present day as the letters of the English alphabet. M.

Guizot, with a little inaccuracy, has made these leading facts in the life of the English poet tolerably familiar even to our French neighbours.

But, while such facts, if conceived with sufficient distinctness, serve to mark out the life of the poet in general outline, it is rather from the few notices of him that have come down to us from his contemporaries that we derive the more special impressions regarding his character and ways with which we are accustomed to fill up this outline. These notices are various; those of interest may, perhaps, be about a dozen in all; but the only ones that take a very decided hold on the imagination are the three following:--

_Fuller's Fancy-picture of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson at the Mermaid Tavern._--"Many were the wit-combats betwixt him and Ben Jonson; which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war. Master Jonson, like the former, was built far higher in learning; solid, but slow in his performances. Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention."--_Written, about 1650, by Thomas Fuller, born in 1608._

_Aubrey's Sketch of Shakespeare at second hand._--"This William, being inclined naturally to poetry and acting, came to London, I guess, about 18; and was an actor at one of the play-houses, and did act exceedingly well. (Now B. Jonson was never a good actor, but an excellent instructor.) He began early to make essays at dramatic poetry, which at that time was very low; and his plays took well. He was a handsome, well-shaped man; very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit. The humour of the constable in '_A Midsummer Night's Dream_,' he happened to take at Grendon, in Bucks, which is the road from London to Stratford; and there was living that constable about 1642, when I first came to Oxon. Mr. Jos. Howe is of that parish; and knew him. Ben Jonson and he did gather humours of men daily wherever they came.... He was wont to go to his native country once a year. I think I have been told that he left 200_l._ or 300_l._ per annum, there and thereabout, to a sister. I have heard Sir William Davenant and Mr. Thomas Shadwell, who is accounted the best comedian we have now, say that he had a most prodigious wit, and did admire his natural parts beyond all other dramatical writers. He was wont to say that he never blotted out a line in his life. Said Ben Jonson, 'I wish he had blotted out a thousand.'"--_Written, about 1680, by John Aubrey, born 1625._

_Ben Jonson's own Sketch of Shakespeare._--"I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been 'Would he had blotted a thousand!'; which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, who chose that circ.u.mstance to commend their friend by wherein he most faulted; and to justify mine own candour: for I loved the man, and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any. He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions; wherein he flowed with that facility that _sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped_: '_Sufflaminandus erat_,' as Augustus said of Haterius.

His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too!

Many times he fell into those things could not escape laughter; as when he said, in the person of Csar, one speaking to him, 'Csar, thou dost me wrong,' he replied, 'Csar did never wrong but with just cause,' and such like; which were ridiculous. But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned."--_Ben Jonson's "Discoveries."_

It is sheer nonsense, with these and other such pa.s.sages accessible to anybody, to go on repeating, as people seem determined to do, the hackneyed saying of the commentator Steevens, that "all that we know of Shakespeare is, that he was born at Stratford-on-Avon; married and had children there; went to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote plays and poems; returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried."[4]

It is our own fault, and not the fault of the materials, if we do not know a great deal more about Shakespeare than that; if we do not realize, for example, these distinct and indubitable facts about him--his special reputation among the critics of his time, as a man not so much of erudition as of prodigious natural genius; his gentleness and openness of disposition; his popular and sociable habits; his extreme ease, and, as some thought, negligence in composition; and, above all, and most characteristic of all, his excessive fluency in speech. "He sometimes required stopping," is Ben Jonson's expression; and whoever does not see a whole volume of revelation respecting Shakespeare in that single trait has no eye for seeing anything. Let no one ever lose sight of that phrase in trying to imagine Shakespeare.

Still, after all, we cannot be content thus. With regard to such a man we cannot rest satisfied with a mere picture of his exterior in its aspect of repose, or in a few of its common att.i.tudes. We seek, as the phrase is, to penetrate into his heart--to detect and to fix in everlasting portraiture that mood of his soul which was ultimate and characteristic; in which, so to speak, he came ready-fas.h.i.+oned from the Creator's hands; towards which he always sank when alone; and on the ground-melody of which all his thoughts and actions were but voluntary variations. As far short of such a result as would be any notion we could form of the poet Burns from a mere chronological outline of his life, together with a few stories such as are current about his moral irregularities, so far short of a true appreciation of Shakespeare would be that idea of him which we could derive from the scanty fund of the external evidence.

And here it is that, in proceeding to make up the deficiency of the external evidence by going to the only other available source of light on the subject, namely the bequeathed writings of the man himself, we find ourselves obstructed at the outset by an obvious difficulty, which does not exist to the same extent in most other cases. We can, with comparative ease, recognise Burns himself in his works; for Burns is a lyrist, pouring out his own feelings in song, often alluding to himself, and generally under personal agitation when he writes. Shakespeare, on the other hand, is a dramatist, whose function it was not to communicate, but to create.

Had he been a dramatist of the same school as Ben Jonson, indeed--using the drama as a means of spreading, or, at all events, as a medium through which to insinuate, his opinions, and often indicating his purposes by the very names of his _dramatis person_ (as Downright, Merecraft, Eitherside, and the like)--then the task would have been easier. But it is not so with Shakespeare. Less than almost any man that ever wrote does he inculcate or dogmatise. He is the very type of the poet. He paints, represents, creates, holds the mirror up to nature; but from opinion, doctrine, controversy, theory, he holds instinctively aloof. In each of his plays there is a "central idea," to use the favourite term of the German critics--that is, a single thought round which all may be exhibited as consciously or unconsciously crystallized; but there is no pervading maxim, no point set forth to be argued or proved. Of none of all the plays can it be said that it is more than any other a vehicle for fixed articles in the creed of Shakespeare.

One quality or attribute of Shakespeare's genius we do, indeed, contrive to seize out this very difficulty of seizing anything--that quality or attribute of _many-sidedness_ of which we have heard so much for the last century and a half. The immense variety of his characters and conceptions, embracing as it does Hamlets and Falstaffs, Kings and Clowns, Prosperos and Dogberrys, and his apparently equal ease in handling them all, are matters that have been noted by one and all of the critics. And thus, while his own character is lost in his incessant s.h.i.+ftings through such a succession of masks, we yet manage, as it were in revenge, to extract from the very impossibility of describing him an adjective which does possess a kind of quasi-descriptive value. It is as if of some one that had baffled all our attempts to investigate him we were to console ourselves by saying that he was a perfect Proteus. We call Shakespeare "many-sided;" not a magazine, nor a young lady at a party, but tells you that; and in adding this to our list of adjectives concerning him we find a certain satisfaction, and even an increase of light.

But it would be cowardice to stop here. The old sea-G.o.d Proteus himself, despite his subtlety and versatility, had a real form and character of his own, into which he could be compelled, if one only knew the way. Hear how they served this old gentleman in the Odyssey:

"We at once, Loud shouting, flew on him, and in our arms Constrained him fast; nor the sea-prophet old Called not incontinent his s.h.i.+fts to mind.

First he became a long-maned lion grim; A dragon then, a panther, a huge boar, A limpid stream, and an o'ershadowing tree.

We, persevering, held him; till, at length, The subtle sage, his ineffectual arts Resigning weary, questioned me and spoke."

And so with _our_ Proteus. The many-sidedness of the dramatist, let it be well believed and pondered, is but the versatility in form of a certain personal and substantial being, which const.i.tutes the specific mind of the dramatist himself. Precisely as we have insisted that Shakespeare's face, as the best portraits represent it to us, is no mere general face or face to let, but a good, decided, and even rather singular face, so, we would insist, he had as specific a character, as thoroughly a way of his own in thinking about things and going through his morning and evening hours, as any of ourselves. "Man is only many-sided," says Goethe, "when he strives after the highest because he _must_, and descends to the lesser because he _will_;" that is, as we interpret, when he is borne on in a certain n.o.ble direction in all that he does by the very structure of his mind, while, at his option, he may keep planting this fixed path or not with a sportive and flowery border. By the necessity of his nature, Shakespeare was compelled in a certain earnest direction in all that he did; and it is our part to search through the thickets of imagery and gratuitous fiction amid which he spent his life, that this path may be discovered. As the lion, or the limpid stream, or the overshadowing tree, into which Proteus turned himself, was not a real lion, or a real stream, or a real tree, but only Proteus as the one or as the other; so, involved in each of Shakespeare's characters,--in Hamlet, in Falstaff, or in Romeo,--involved in some deep manner in each of these diverse characters, is Shakespeare's own nature.

If Shakespeare had not been precisely and wholly Shakespeare, and not any other man actual or conceivable, could Hamlet or Falstaff, or any other of his creations, have been what they are?

But how to evolve Shakespeare from his works, how to compel this Proteus into his proper and native form, is still the question. It is a problem of the highest difficulty. Something, indeed, of the poet's personal character and views we cannot help gathering as we read his dramas.

Pa.s.sages again and again occur of which, from their peculiar effect upon ourselves, from their conceivable reference to what we know of the poet's circ.u.mstances, or from their evident superfluousness and warmth, we do not hesitate to aver "There speaks the poet's own heart." But to show generally how much of the man has pa.s.sed into the poet, and how it is that his personal bent and peculiarities are to be surely detected inhering in writings whose essential character it is to be arbitrary and universal, is a task from which a critic might well shrink, were he left merely to the ordinary resources of critical ingenuity without any positive and ascertained clue.

In this case, however, all the world ought to know, there is a positive and ascertained clue. Shakespeare has left to us not merely a collection of dramas, the exercises of his creative phantasy in a world of ideal matter, but also certain poems which are a.s.suredly and expressly autobiographic. Criticism seems now pretty conclusively to have determined, what it ought to have determined long ago, that the _Sonnets_ of Shakespeare are, and can possibly be, nothing else than a poetical record of his own feelings and experience--a connected series of entries, as it were, in his own diary--during a certain period of his London life.

This, we say, is conclusively determined and agreed upon; and whoever does not, to some extent, hold this view knows nothing about the subject.

Ulrici, who is a genuine investigator, as well as a profound critic, is, of course, right on this point. So, also, in the main, is M. Guizot, although he mars the worth of the conclusion by adducing the foolish theory of _Euphuism_--that is, of the adoption of an affected style of expression in vogue in Shakespeare's age--in order to explain away that which is precisely the most important thing about the Sonnets, and the very thing _not_ to be explained away: namely, the depth and strangeness of their pervading sentiment, and the curious hyperbolism of their style.

In truth, it is the very closeness of the contact into which the right view of the Sonnets brings us with Shakespeare, the very value of the information respecting him to which it opens the way, that operates against it. Where we have so eager a desire to know, there we fear to believe, lest what we have once cherished on so great a subject we should be obliged again to give up, or lest, if our imaginations should dare to figure aught too exact and familiar regarding the traits and motions of so royal a spirit, the question should be put to us, what _we_ can know of the halls of a palace, or the mantled tread of a king? Still the fact is as it is. These Sonnets of Shakespeare _are_ autobiographic--distinctly, intensely, painfully autobiographic, although in a style and after a fas.h.i.+on of autobiography so peculiar that we can cite only Dante in his _Vita Nuova_, and Tennyson in his _In Memoriam_, as having furnished similar examples of it.

We are not going to examine the Sonnets in detail here, nor to tell the story which they involve as a whole. We will indicate generally, however, the impression which, we think, a close investigation of them will infallibly leave on any thoughtful reader, as to the characteristic personal qualities of that mind the larger and more fact.i.tious emanations from which still cover and astonish the world.

The general and aggregate effect, then, of these Sonnets, as contributing to our knowledge of Shakespeare as a man, is to antiquate, or at least to reduce very much in value, the common idea of him implied in such phrases as William the Calm, William the Cheerful, and the like. These phrases are true, when understood in a certain very obvious sense; but, if we were to select that designation which would, as we think, express Shakespeare in his most intimate and private relations to man and nature, we should rather say William the Meditative, William the Metaphysical, or William the Melancholy. Let not the reader, full of the just idea of Shakespeare's wonderful concreteness as a poet, be staggered by the second of these phrases. The phrase is a good phrase; etymologically, it is perhaps the best phrase we could here use; and whatever of inappropriateness there may seem to be in it proceeds from false a.s.sociations, and will vanish, we hope, before we have done with it. Nor let it be supposed that, in using, as nearly synonymous, the word Melancholy, we mean anything so absurd as that the author of Falstaff was a Werther. What we mean is that there is evidence in the Sonnets, corroborated by other proof on all hands, that the mind of Shakespeare, when left to itself, was apt to sink into that state in which thoughts of what is sad and mysterious in the universe most easily come and go.

At no time, except during sleep, is the mind of any human being completely idle. All men have some natural and congenial mood into which they fall when they are left to talk with themselves. One man recounts the follies of the past day, renewing the relish of them by the recollection; another uses his leisure to hate his enemy and to scheme his discomfiture; a third rehea.r.s.es in imagination, in order to be prepared, the part which he is to perform on the morrow. Now, at such moments, as we believe, it was the habit of Shakespeare's mind, obliged thereto by the necessity of its structure, to ponder ceaselessly those quest ions relating to man, his origin, and his destiny, in familiarity with which consists what is called the spiritual element in human nature. It was Shakespeare's use, as it seems to us, to revert, when he was alone, to that ultimate mood of the soul in which one hovers wistfully on the borders of the finite, vainly pressing against the barriers that separate it from the unknown; that mood in which even what is common and under foot seems part of a vast current mystery, and in which, like Arabian Job of old, one looks by turns at the heaven above, the earth beneath, and one's own moving body between, interrogating whence it all is, why it all is, and whither it all tends.

And this, we say, is Melancholy. It is more. It is that mood of man, which, most of all moods, is thoroughly, grandly, specifically human. That which is the essence of all worth, all beauty, all humour, all genius, is open or secret reference to the supernatural; and this is sorrow. The att.i.tude of a finite creature, contemplating the infinite, can only be that of an exile, grief and wonder blending in a wistful longing for an unknown home.

As we consider this frame of mind to have been characteristic of Shakespeare, so we find that as a poet he has not forgotten to represent it. We have always fancied Hamlet to be a closer translation of Shakespeare's own character than any other of his personations. The same meditativeness, the same morbid reference at all times to the supernatural, the same inordinate development of the speculative faculty, the same intellectual melancholy, that are seen in the Prince of Denmark, seem to have distinguished Shakespeare. Nor is it possible here to forget that minor and lower form of the same fancy--the ornament of _As You Like It_, the melancholy Jaques.

"_Jaques._ More, more, I prithee, more.

_Amiens._ It will make you melancholy, Monsieur Jaques.

_Jaques._ I thank it. More, I prithee, more! I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs. More. I prithee, more!

_Amiens._ My voice is ragged; I know I cannot please you.

_Jaques._ I do not desire you to please me; I desire you to sing.

_Rosalind._ They say you are a melancholy fellow.

_Jaques._ I am so; I do love it better than laughing.

_Rosalind._ Those that are in extremity of either are abominable fellows, and betray themselves to every modern censure worse than drunkards.

_Jaques._ Why, 'tis good to be sad and say nothing.

_Rosalind._ Why, then, 'tis good to be a post.

_Jaques._ I have neither the scholar's melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician's, which is fantastical; nor the courtier's, which is proud; nor the soldier's, which is ambitious; nor the lawyer's, which is politic; nor the lady's, which is nice; nor the lover's, which is all these: but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness."

Jaques is not Shakespeare; but in writing this description of Jaques Shakespeare drew from his knowledge of himself. His also was a "melancholy of his own," a "humorous sadness in which his often rumination wrapt him."

In that declared power of Jaques of "sucking melancholy out of a song" the reference of Shakespeare to himself seems almost direct. Nay more, as Rosalind, in rating poor Jaques, tells him on one occasion that he is so abject a fellow that she verily believes he is "out of love with his nativity, and almost chides G.o.d _for making him of that countenance that he is_," so Shakespeare's melancholy, in one of his Sonnets (No. 29), takes exactly the same form of self-dissatisfaction.

"When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself and curse my fate, Wis.h.i.+ng me like to one more rich in hope, _Featured like him_, like him with friends possessed, Desiring this man's art and that man's scope, With what I most enjoy contented least; Yet, in these thoughts myself almost despising, Haply I think on thee," &c.

Think of that, reader! That mask of Shakespeare's face, which we have been discussing, Shakespeare himself did not like; and there were moments in which he was so abject as actually to wish that he had received from Nature another man's physical features!

If Shakespeare's melancholy was, like that of Jaques, a complex melancholy, a melancholy "compounded of many simples"--extracted perhaps at first from some root of bitter experience in his own life, and then fed, as his Sonnets clearly state, by a habitual sense of his own "outcast" condition in society, and by the sight of a hundred social wrongs around him, into a kind of abject dissatisfaction with himself and his fate--yet, in the end, and in its highest form, it was rather, as we have already hinted, the melancholy of Hamlet, a meditative, contemplative melancholy, embracing human life as a whole, the melancholy of a mind incessantly tending from the real ([Greek: ta physika]) to the metaphysical ([Greek: ta meta ta physika]), and only brought back by external occasion from the metaphysical to the real.

Do not let us quarrel about the words, if we can agree about the thing.

Let any competent person whatever read the Sonnets, and then, with their impression on him, pa.s.s to the plays, and he will inevitably become aware of Shakespeare's personal fondness for certain themes or trains of thought, particularly that of the speed and destructiveness of time.

Death, vicissitude, the march and tramp of generations across life's stage, the rotting of human bodies in the earth--these and all the other forms of the same thought were familiar to Shakespeare to a degree beyond what is to be seen in the case of any other poet. It seems to have been a habit of his mind, when left to its own tendency, ever to indulge by preference in that oldest of human meditations, which is not yet trite: "Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble; he cometh forth as a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth as a shadow, and continueth not." Let us cite a few examples from the Sonnets:--

"When I consider everything that grows Holds in perfection but a little moment, That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows Whereon the stars in secret influence comment."-- _Sonnet 15._

"If thou survive my well-contented clay, When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover."-- _Sonnet 32._

"No longer mourn for me when I am dead Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell."-- _Sonnet 71._

"The wrinkles, which thy gla.s.s will truly show, Of mouthed graves will give thee memory; Thou by thy dial's shady stealth may'st know Time's thievish progress to eternity."-- _Sonnet 77._

"Or I shall live your epitaph to make, Or you survive when I in earth am rotten."-- _Sonnet 81._

These are but one or two out of many such pa.s.sages occurring in the Sonnets. Indeed, it may be said that, whenever Shakespeare p.r.o.nounces the words time, age, death, and the like, it is with a deep and cutting personal emphasis, quite different from the usual manner of poets in their stereotyped allusions to mortality. Time, in particular, seems to have tenanted his imagination as a kind of grim and hideous personal existence, cruel out of mere malevolence of nature. Death, too, had become to him a kind of actual being or fury, morally unamiable, and deserving of reproach: "that churl Death."

If we turn to the plays of Shakespeare, we shall find that in them too the same morbid sensitiveness to all a.s.sociations with mortality is continually breaking out. The vividness, for example, with which Juliet describes the interior of a charnel-house partakes of a spirit of revenge, as if Shakespeare were retaliating, through her, upon an object horrible to himself:--