"He hath a tear for pity, and a hand Open as day for melting charity."
"That daffed the world aside, And bid it pa.s.s."
"He is come to ope The purple testament of bleeding war."
"She sat, like patience on a monument, Smiling at grief."
"That strain again; it had a dying fall: O, it came o"er my ear like the sweet south, That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odor."
"For courage mounts with occasion."
"Here I and sorrows sit; Here is my throne; bid kings come bow to it."
"Death"s dateless night."
"Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale, Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man."
"The tongues of dying men Enforce attention like deep harmony."
"Falstaff sweats to death, And lards the lean earth as he walks along."
"I have set my life upon a cast, And I will stand the hazard of the die."
""T is better to be lowly born, And range with humble livers in content, Than be perked up in glistering grief, And wear a golden sorrow."
"An old man broken with the storms of state."
"Care keeps his watch in every old man"s eye."
"Night"s candles are burnt out, and jocund day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops."
"Within the book and volume of my brain."
"One vial full of Edward"s blood is cracked, And all the precious liquor spilt."
In such quest as this, one is enticed as if he followed the windings of a stream under the shadows of the trees. Past waterfall and banks of flowers and choiring of the birds, he goes on forever, except he force himself to pause. Shakespeare is always an enticement, whose turns of poetic thought and verbiage are a pure delight. Note this quality in the quotations--a word naturally expresses a thought. Shakespeare"s figures express a series of thoughts as varied landscapes seen in pictures; in consequence, to read him is to see resemblances in things, because we have sharpened vision and can not, after reading him, be blind as we were before, but feel the plethora of our world with the poetic. After he has spoken for us and to us, the world"s capacity is enlarged; we are, in truth, not so much as those who have read poetry as we are like those who have seen the world pa.s.s before our eyes. We thought the world a stream run dry; but lo! the bed is full of waters, flooded from remote hills, where snowdrifts melt and make perpetual rivers. After hearing him, we expect things of our world; its fertility seems so exhaustless.
Shakespeare has no hint of invalidism about him, but is the person, not the picture, of perfect health. Not an intimation of the hypochondriac nor of the convalescent do I find in him. He is healthy, and his voice rings out like a bell on a frosty night. Take his hand, and you feel shaking hands, not with Aesculapius, but with Health. To be ailing when Shakespeare is about is an impertinence for which you feel compelled to offer apology. Does not this express our feeling about this poet? He is well, always well, and laughs at the notion of sickness. He starts a-walking, and unconsciously runs, as a schoolboy after school. His smile breaks into ringing laughter; and he, not you, knows why he either smiles or laughs. He and sunlight seem close of kin. A mountain is a challenge he never refuses, but scales it by bounds, like a deer when pursued by the hunter and the hound. He is not tonic, but bracing air and perfect health and youth, which makes labor a holiday and care a jest. Shakespeare is never morose. Dante is the picture of melancholy, Shakespeare the picture of resilient joy.
Tennyson beheld "three spirits, mad with joy, dash down upon a wayside flower;" and our dramatist is like them. Life laughs on greeting him; the grave grows dim to sight when he is near, and you see the deep sky instead, and across it wheel wild birds in happy motion. In Tennyson is perpetual melancholy--the mood and destiny of poetry, as I suppose--but Shakespeare is not melancholy, nor does he know how to be.
His face is never sad, I think, and he is fonder of Jack Falstaff than we are apt to suppose; for health riots in his blood. He weeps, smiles breaking through his weeping, and he turns from the grave of tragedy with laughter leaning from his eyes. Aeschylus is a poet whose face was never lit even with the candle-light of smiles; but Shakespeare, writer of tragedy, is our laughing poet. This plainly confounds our philosophy of poetry, since humor is not poetry; but he binds humor to his car as Achilles, Hector, and laughs at our upset philosophies, crying: "This is my Lear, weep for him; this my Hamlet, break your hearts for him; this my Desdemona, grow tender for her woe,--but enough: this is my Rosalind and my Miranda, my Helena and Hermione, my Orlando and Ferdinand, my Ba.s.sanio and Leontes; laugh with them"--and you render swift obedience, saying, with Lord Boyet, in "Love"s Labor Lost,"
"O, I am stabbed with laughter!"
He is court jester, at whose quips the generations make merry. You can not be somber nor sober long with him, though he is deep as seas, and fathomless as air, and lonely as night, and sad betimes as autumn. He is not frivolous, but is joyous. The bounding streams, the singing trees, the leaping stags along the lake, the birds singing morning awake,--Shakespeare incorporates all these in himself. He is what may be named, in a spiritual sense, this world"s animal delight in life.
There is a view of life sullen as November; and to be sympathetic with this mood is to ruin life and put out all its lights. Shakespeare"s resiliency of spirit would teach us what a dispa.s.sionate study of our own nature would have taught us, that to succ.u.mb to this gloom is not natural; to feel the weight of burdens all the time would conduct to insanity or death; therefore has G.o.d made bountiful provision against such outcome in the lift of cloud and lightening of burden. We forget sleep is G.o.d"s rest-hour for spirit; and, besides, we read in G.o.d"s Book how, "at eventide, it shall be light," an expression at once of exquisite poetry and acute observation. Our lives are healthy when natural. The crude Byronic misanthropy, even though a.s.sumed, finds no favor in Shakespeare"s eyes.
Shakespeare is this world"s poet--a truth hinted at before, but now needing amplifying a trifle. There is in him this-worldliness, but not other-worldliness, his characters not seeming to the full to have a sense of the invisible world. He is love"s poet. His lovers are imperishable because real. He is love"s laureate. Yet are his loves of this world. True, there are spurts of flight, as of an eagle with broken wing, when, as in Hamlet, he faults this world and aspires skyward, yet does not lose sight of the earth, and, like the wounded eagle in "Sohrab and Rustum," lies at last
"A heap of fluttering feathers."
Plainly, Shakespeare was a voyager in this world, and a discoverer, sailing all seas and climbing tallest alt.i.tudes to their far summits; but flight was not native to him, as if he had said:
"We have not wings, we can not soar; But we have feet to scale, and climb."
I can not think him spiritual in the gracious sense. His contemporary, Edmund Spenser, was spiritual, as even Milton was not. This world made appeal to this poet of the Avon on the radiant earthly side; the very clouds flamed with a glory borrowed from the sun as he looked on them.
His world was very fair. In more than a poetic sense was
"All the world a stage."
Life was a drama, hastening, shouting, exhilarating, turbulent, free, roistering, but as triumphant as Elizabeth"s fleet and G.o.d"s stormy waters were over Philip"s great Armada. Hamlet was the terribly tragic conception in Shakespeare because he was hopeless. Can you conceive Shakespeare writing "In Memoriam?" Tennyson was pre-eminently spiritual, and "In Memoriam" is his breath dimming the window-pane on which he breathed. That was Tennyson"s life, but was patently no brave part of Shakespeare. He knew to shape tragedy, such as Romeo and Juliet; but how to send abroad a cry like Enoch Arden"s prayer lay not in him. He compa.s.sed our world, but found no way to leave what proved a waterlogged ship; and how to pilot to
"The undiscovered country, from whose bourne No traveler returns,"
puzzles Shakespeare"s will as it had Hamlet"s.
So not even our great Shakespeare can monopolize life. Some landscapes have not lain like a picture beneath his eyes; he did not exhaust poetry nor life, and room is still left for
"New men, strange faces, other minds,"
for whom,
"Though much is taken, much abides; and though We are not that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are-- One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
III
Caliban
Your great poet is eminently sane. Not that this is the conception current concerning him--the reverse being the common idea--that a poet is a being afflicted with some strange and uncla.s.sified rabies. He is supposed to be possessed, like the Norwegian Berserker, whose frenzy amounted to volcanic tumult. The genesis of misconceptions, however, is worth one"s while to study; for in a majority of cases there is in the misconception a sufficient flavoring of truth to make the erroneous notion pa.s.s as true. At bottom, the human soul loves truth, nor willingly believes or receives a lie. Our intellectual sin is synecdoche, the putting a part truth for a whole truth. Generalization is dangerous intellectual exercise. Our premise is insufficient, and our conclusion is self-sufficient, like some strutting scion of a decayed house. Trace the origin of this idea of a poet"s non-sanity.
He was not ordinary, as other men, but was extraordinary, and as such belonged to the upper rather than the lower world; for we must be convinced how wholly the ancients kept the super-earthly in mind in their logical processes--an att.i.tude wise and in consonance with the wisest of this world"s thinking. Heaven must not be left out of our computations, just as the sun must not be omitted in writing the history of a rose or a spike of golden-rod. In harmony with this exalted origin of the poet went the notion that he was under an afflatus. A breath from behind the world blew in his face; nay, more, a breath from behind the world blew n.o.ble ideas into his soul, and he spake as one inspired of the G.o.ds. This conception of a poet is high and worthy; nothing gross grimes it with common dust. Yet from so n.o.ble a thought--because the thought was partial--grew the gross misconception of the poet as beyond law, as not amenable to social and moral customs, as one who might transgress the moral code with impunity, and stand unreproved, even blameless. He was thought to be his own law--a man whose course should no more be reproved or hindered than the winds. The poet"s supremacy brought us to a wrong conclusion.
The philosopher we a.s.sumed to be balanced, the poet to be unbalanced.
Sh.e.l.ley, and Poe, and Heine, and Byron, and Burns elucidate this erroneous hypothesis of the poet. We pa.s.s lightly their misrule of themselves with a tacit a.s.sumption of their genius having shaken and shocked their moral faculties as in some giant perturbation.
I now recur to the initial suggestion, that the great poet is sane.
The poet is yet a man, and man is more than poet. Manhood is the regal fact to which all else must subordinate itself. Nothing must be allowed to disfranchise manhood; and he who manumits the poet from social and ethical bonds is not logical, nor penetrative into the dark mystery of soul, nor is he the poet"s friend. Nor is he a friend who a.s.sumes that the poet, because a poet, moves in eccentric paths rather than in concentric circles. Hold with all tenacity to the poet"s sanity. He is superior, and lives where the eagles fly and stars run their far and splendid courses; but he is still man, though man grown tall and sublime. To the truth of this view of the great poet bear witness Aeschylus, and Dante, and Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Tennyson, and Browning, in naming whom we are lighting on high summits, as clouds do, and leaving the main range of mountains untouched.
Shakespeare is absolutely sane. Not Blondin, crossing Niagara on a thread for a pathway, was so absolute in his balance as Shakespeare.
He saw all the world. Nor is this all; for there are those who see an entire world, but see it distorted as an anamorphism. There is a cartoon world, where everybody is apprehended as taking on other shapes than his own, and is valued in proportion as he is susceptible of caricature. But plate-gla.s.s is better for looking through than is a prism. What men need is eyes which are neither far-sighted nor near-sighted, but right-sighted. Shakespeare was that. There is no hint of exaggeration in his characters. They are people we have met on journeys, and some of whom we have known intimately. To be a poet it is not necessary to be a madman--a doctrine wholesome and encouraging.
I lay down, then, as one of the canons for testing a poet"s greatness, this, "Is he sane?" and purpose applying the canon to Robert Browning, giving results of such application rather than the _modus operandi_ of such results. I a.s.sert that he bears the test. No saner man than Browning ever walked this world"s streets. He was entirely human in his love of life for its own sake, in his love of nature and friends and wife and child. His voice, in both speech and laughter, had a ring and joyousness such as reminded us of Charles d.i.c.kens in his youth.
His appreciation of life was intense and immense. This world and all worlds reported to him as if he were an officer to whom they all, as subalterns, must report. The pendulum in the clock on a lady"s mantel-shelf is not more natural than the pendulum swung in a cathedral tower, though the swing of the one is a slight and the swing of the other a great arc. Browning is a pendulum whose vibrations touch the horizons. He does business with fabulous capital and on a huge scale, and thinks, sees, serves, and loves after a colossal fashion, but is as natural in his large life as a lesser man is in his meager life.
"Caliban upon Setebos" is a hint of the man"s immense movement of soul and his serene rationality.
Browning will be preacher; and as preachers do--and do wisely--he takes a text from the Scriptures, finding in a psalm a sentence embodying the thought he purposes elaborating, as a bud contains the flower. The Bible may safely be a.s.serted to be the richest treasure-house of suggestive thought ever discovered to the soul. In my conviction, not a theme treated in the domain of investigation and reason whose chapters may not be headed from the Book Divine. In his "Cleon,"