By temperament and education Walt Whitman was fitted to be a prophet of this kind. He became a quack poet, and hampered his talents by the imposition of a monstrous parade of rattletrap theories and professions.
If he had not been endowed with a perfectly marvellous capacity, a wealth of nature beyond the reach and plumb of his rodomontade, he would have been ruined from the start. As it is, he has filled his work with grimace and vulgarity. He writes a few lines of epic directness and cyclopean vigor and naturalness, and then obtrudes himself and his mission.
He has the bad taste bred in the bone of all missionaries and palmists, the sign-manual of a true quack. This bad taste is nothing more than the offensive intrusion of himself and his mission into the matter in hand.
As for his real merits and his true mission, too much can hardly be said in his favor. The field of his experience was narrow, and not in the least intellectual. It was narrow because of his isolation from human life. A poet like Browning, or Heine, or Alfred de Musset deals constantly with the problems and struggles that arise in civilized life out of the close relationships, the ties, the duties and desires of the human heart. He explains life on its social side. He gives us some more or less coherent view of an infinitely complicated matter. He is a guide-book or a note-book, a highly trained and intelligent companion.
Walt Whitman has no interest in any of these things. He was fortunately so very ignorant and untrained that his mind was utterly incoherent and unintellectual. His mind seems to be submerged and to have become almost a part of his body. The utter lack of concentration which resulted from living his whole life in the open air has left him spontaneous and unaccountable. And the great value of his work is, that it represents the spontaneous and unaccountable functioning of the mind and body in health.
It is doubtful whether a man ever enjoyed life more intensely than Walt Whitman, or expressed the physical joy of mere living more completely.
He is robust, all tingling with health and the sensations of health. All that is best in his poetry is the expression of bodily well-being.
A man who leaves his office and gets into a canoe on a Canadian river, sure of ten days" release from the cares of business and housekeeping, has a thrill of joy such as Walt Whitman has here and there thrown into his poetry. One might say that to have done this is the greatest accomplishment in literature. Walt Whitman, in some of his lines, breaks the frame of poetry and gives us life in the throb.
It is the throb of the whole physical system of a man who breathes the open air and feels the sky over him. "When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed" is a great lyric. Here is a whole poem without a trace of self-consciousness. It is little more than a description of nature. The allusions to Lincoln and to the funeral are but a word or two--merest suggestions of the tragedy. But grief, overwhelming grief, is in every line of it, the grief which has been trans.m.u.ted into this sensitiveness to the landscape, to the song of the thrush, to the lilac"s bloom, and the sunset.
Here is truth to life of the kind to be found in King Lear or Guy Mannering, in aeschylus or Burns.
Walt Whitman himself could not have told you why the poem was good. Had he had any intimation of the true reason, he would have spoiled the poem. The recurrence and antiphony of the thrush, the lilac, the thought of death, the beauty of nature, are in a balance and dream of natural symmetry such as no cunning could come at, no conscious art could do other than spoil.
It is ungrateful to note Whitman"s limitations, his lack of human pa.s.sion, the falseness of many of his notions about the American people.
The man knew the world merely as an observer, he was never a living part of it, and no mere observer can understand the life about him. Even his work during the war was mainly the work of an observer, and his poems and notes upon the period are picturesque. As to his talk about comrades and Manhattanese car-drivers, and bra.s.s-founders displaying their brawny arms round each other"s brawny necks, all this gush and sentiment in Whitman"s poetry is false to life. It has a lyrical value, as representing Whitman"s personal feelings, but no one else in the country was ever found who felt or acted like this.
In fact, in all that concerns the human relations Walt Whitman is as unreal as, let us say, William Morris, and the American mechanic would probably prefer Sigurd the Volsung, and understand it better than Whitman"s poetry.
This falseness to the sentiment of the American is interwoven with such wonderful descriptions of American sights and scenery, of ferryboats, thoroughfares, cataracts, and machine-shops that it is not strange the foreigners should have accepted the gospel.
On the whole, Whitman, though he solves none of the problems of life and throws no light on American civilization, is a delightful appearance, and a strange creature to come out of our beehive. This man committed every unpardonable sin against our conventions, and his whole life was an outrage. He was neither chaste, nor industrious, nor religious. He patiently lived upon cold pie and tramped the earth in triumph.
He did really live the life he liked to live, in defiance of all men, and this is a great desert, a most stirring merit. And he gave, in his writings, a true picture of himself and of that life,--a picture which the world had never seen before, and which it is probable the world will not soon cease to wonder at.
A STUDY OF ROMEO
The plays of Shakespeare marshal themselves in the beyond. They stand in a place outside of our deduction. Their cosmos is greater than our philosophy. They are like the forces of nature and the operations of life in the vivid world about us. We may measure our intellectual growth by the new horizons we see opening within them. So long as they continue to live and change, to expand and deepen, to be filled with new harmony and new suggestion, we may rest content; we are still growing. At the moment we think we have comprehended them, at the moment we see them as stationary things, we may be sure something is wrong; we are beginning to petrify. Our fresh interest in life has been arrested. There is, therefore, danger in an attempt to "size up" Shakespeare. We cannot help setting down as a c.o.xcomb any man who has done it to his own satisfaction. He has pigeon-holed himself. He will not get lost. If you want him, you can lay your hand on him. He has written an autobiography.
He has "sized up" himself.
In writing about Shakespeare, it is excusable to put off the armor of criticism, and speak in a fragmentary and inconclusive manner, lest by giving way to conviction, by encouraging ourselves into positive beliefs, we hasten the inevitable and grow old before our time.
Perhaps some such apology is needed to introduce the observations on the character of Romeo which are here thrown together, and the remarks about the play itself, the acting, and the text.
It is believed by some scholars that in the second quarto edition of Romeo and Juliet, published in 1599, Shakespeare"s revising hand can be seen, and that the differences between the first and second editions show the amendments, additions, and corrections with which Shakespeare saw fit to embellish his work in preparing it for the press. If this were actually the case; if we could lay the two texts on the table before us, convinced that one of them was Shakespeare"s draft or acting copy, and the other Shakespeare"s finished work; and if, by comparing the two, we could enter into the workshop and forge of his mind,--it would seem as if we had at last found an avenue of approach towards this great personality, this intellect the most powerful that has ever illumined human life. No other literary inquiry could compare in interest with such a study as this; for the relation which Shakespeare himself bore to the plays he created is one of the mysteries and blank places in history, a gap that staggers the mind and which imagination cannot overleap.
The student who examines both texts will be apt to conclude that the second is by no means a revised edition of the first, but that (according to another theory) the first is a pirated edition of the play, stolen by the printer, and probably obtained by means of a reporter who took down the lines as they were spoken on the stage. The stage directions in the first edition are not properly the stage directions of a dramatist as to what should be done on the stage, but seem rather the records of an eye-witness as to what he saw happen on the stage. The mistakes of the reporter (or the perversions of the actors) as seen in the first edition generally injure the play; and it was from this circ.u.mstance--the frequency of blotches in the first edition--that the idea gained currency that the second edition was an example of Shakespeare"s never-failing tact in bettering his own lines.
Perhaps, after all, it would little advance our understanding of the plays, or solve the essential puzzle,--that they actually had an author,--if we could follow every stroke of his revising pen. We should observe, no doubt, refinement of characterization, changes of stage effect, the addition of flourishes and beauties; but their origin and true meaning, the secret of their life, would be as safe as it is at present, as securely lost in the midst of all this demonstration as the ma.n.u.scripts themselves were in the destruction of the Globe Theatre.
If we must then abandon the hope of seeing Shakespeare in his workshop, we may, nevertheless, obtain from the pirated text some notion of the manner in which Shakespeare was staged in his own day, and of how he fared at the hands of the early actors. Romeo and Juliet is an exceptionally difficult play to act, and the difficulties seem to have been about the same in Shakespeare"s time as they are to-day. They are, in fact, inherent in the structure of the work itself.
As artists advance in life, they develop, by growing familiar with the conditions of their art, the power of concealing its limitations,--a faculty in which even the greatest artists are often deficient in their early years. There is an anecdote of Schumann which somewhat crudely ill.u.s.trates this. It is said that in one of his early symphonies he introduced a pa.s.sage leading up to a climax, at which the horns were to take up the aria in triumph. At the rehearsal, when the moment came for the horns to trumpet forth their message of victory, there was heard a sort of smothered braying which made everybody laugh. The composer had arranged his climax so that it fell upon a note which the horns could not sound except with closed stops. The pa.s.sage had to be rewritten. The young painter is frequently found struggling with subjects, with effects of light, which are almost impossible to render, and which perhaps an older man would not attempt. It is not surprising to find among the early works of Shakespeare that some of the characters, however true to life,--nay, because true to life,--are almost impossible to be represented on the stage. Certainly Romeo presents us with a character of the kind.
Shakespeare"s knowledge of human nature seems to have antedated his knowledge of the stage. In imagining the character of Romeo, a character to fit the plot of the old story, he took little thought for his actors.
In conjuring up the probabilities which would lead a man into such a course of conduct as Romeo"s, Shakespeare had in his mind the probabilities and facts in real life rather than the probabilities demanded by the stage.
Romeo must be a man almost wholly made up of emotion, a creature very young, a lyric poet in the intensity of his sensations, a child in his helplessness beneath the ever-varying currents and whirlpools of his feeling. He lives in a walking and frenzied dream, comes in contact with real life only to injure himself and others, and finally drives with the collected energy of his being into voluntary shipwreck upon the rocks of the world.
This man must fall in love at first sight. He must marry clandestinely.
He must be banished for having taken part in a street fight, and must return to slay himself upon the tomb of his beloved.
Shakespeare, with his pa.s.sion for realism, devotes several scenes at the opening of the play to the explanation of Romeo"s state of mind. He will give us a rationalistic account of love at first sight by bringing on this young poet in a blind chaos of emotion owing to his rejection by a woman not otherwise connected with the story. It is perfectly true that this is the best and perhaps the only explanation of love at first sight. The effect upon Romeo"s very boyish, unreal, and almost unpleasant lovesickness of the rejection (for which we must always respect Rosaline) is to throw him, and all the unstable elements of which he is made, into a giddy whirl, which, after a day or two, it will require only the glance of a pair of eyes to precipitate into the very elixir of true love.
All this is true, but no audience cares about the episode or requires the explanation. Indeed, it jars upon the sentimental notion of many persons to this day, and in many stage versions it is avoided.
These preparatory scenes bring out in a most subtle way the egoism at the basis of Romeo"s character,--the same lyrical egoism that is in all his language and in all his conduct. When we first see Romeo, he is already in an uneasy dream. He is wandering, aloof from his friends and absorbed in himself. On meeting Juliet he pa.s.ses from his first dream into a second dream. On learning of the death of Juliet he pa.s.ses into still a third and quite different dream,--or stage of dream,--a stage in which action is necessary, and in which he displays the calculating intellect of a maniac. The mental abstraction of Romeo continues even after he has met Juliet. In Capulet"s garden, despite the directness of Juliet, he is still in his reveries. The sacred wonder of the hour turns all his thoughts, not into love, but into poetry. Juliet"s anxieties are practical. She asks him about his safety, how he came there, how he expects to escape. He answers in madrigals. His musings are almost impersonal. The power of the moonlight is over him, and the power of the scene, of which Juliet is only a part.
"With love"s light wings did I o"er-perch these walls; For stony limits cannot hold love out, And what love can do that dares love attempt; Therefore thy kinsmen are no let to me.
Lady, by yonder blessed moon I swear That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops--
It is my soul that calls upon my name: How silver-sweet sound lovers" tongues by night, Like softest music to attending ears."
These reflections are almost "asides." They ought hardly to be spoken aloud. They denote that Romeo is still in his trance. They have, however, another and unfortunate influence: they r.e.t.a.r.d the action of the play. As we read the play to ourselves, this accompaniment of lyrical feeling on Romeo"s part does not interfere with our enjoyment.
It seems to accentuate the more direct and human strain of Juliet"s love.
But on the stage the actor who plays Romeo requires the very highest powers. While speaking at a distance from Juliet, and in a constrained position, he must by his voice and gestures convey these subtlest shades of feeling, throw these garlands of verse into his talk without interrupting its naturalness, give all the "asides" in such a manner that the audience feels they are in place, even as the reader does. It is no wonder that the role of Romeo is one of the most difficult in all Shakespeare. The demands made upon the stage are almost more than the stage can meet. The truth to nature is of a kind that the stage is almost powerless to render.
The character of Romeo cannot hope to be popular. Such pure pa.s.sion, such unreasonable giving way, is not easily forgiven in a man. He must roll on the floor and blubber and kick. There is no getting away from this. He is not Romeo unless he cries like a baby or a Greek hero. This is the penalty for being a lyric poet. Had he used his mind more upon the problems of his love, and less upon its celebration in petalled phrases, his mind would not have deserted him so lamentably in the hour of his need. In fact, throughout the play, Romeo, by the exigencies of the plot, is in fair danger of becoming contemptible. For one instant only does he rise into respectability,--at the moment of his quarrel with Tybalt. At this crisis he is stung into life by the death of Mercutio, and acts like a man. The ranting manner in which it is customary to give Romeo"s words in this pa.s.sage of the play shows how far most actors are from understanding the true purport of the lines; how far from realizing that these few lines are the only opportunity the actor has of establishing the character of Romeo as a gentleman, a man of sense and courage, a formidable fellow, not unfit to be the hero of a play:--
"Alive, in triumph! and Mercutio slain!
Away to heaven, respective lenity, And fire-ey"d fury be my conduct now!
Now, Tybalt, take the "villain" back again That late thou gay"st me;--for Mercutio"s soul Is but a little way above our heads, Staying for thine to keep him company: Either thou, or I, or both, must go with him."
The first three lines are spoken by Romeo to himself. They are a reflection, not a declamation,--a reflection upon which he instantly acts. He a.s.sumes the calmness of a man of his rank who is about to fight. More than this, Romeo, the man of words and moods, when once roused, as we shall see later, in a worser cause,--when once pledged to action,--Romeo shines with a sort of fatalistic spiritual power. He is now visibly dedicated to this quarrel. We feel sure that he will kill Tybalt in the encounter. The appeal to the supernatural is in his very gesture. The audience--nay, Tybalt himself--gazes with awe on this sudden apparition of Romeo as a man of action.
This highly satisfactory conduct is soon swept away by his behavior on hearing the news of his banishment. The boy seems to be without much stamina, after all. He is a pitiable object, and does not deserve the love of fair lady.
At Mantua the tide of his feelings has turned again, and by one of those natural reactions which he himself takes note of he wakes up unaccountably happy, "and all this day an unaccustom"d spirit lifts him above the ground with cheerful thoughts." It is the lightning before the thunderbolt.
"Her body sleeps to Capel"s monument, And her immortal part with angels lives.
I saw her laid low in her kindred"s vault, And presently took post to tell it you."
Balthasar makes no attempt to break the news gently. The blow descends on Romeo when he least expects it. He is not spared. The conduct of Romeo on hearing of Juliet"s death is so close to nature as to be nature itself, yet it happens to be conduct almost impossible to be given on the stage. _He does nothing._ He is stunned. He collapses. For fully five minutes he does not speak, and yet in these five minutes he must show to the audience that his nature has been shaken to its foundations.