Those who are susceptible to this effect of poetry find it not only, perhaps not most, in the ideals which she has sometimes described, but in a child"s song by Christina Rossetti about a mere crown of wind-flowers, and in tragedies like _Lear_, where the sun seems to have set for ever. They hear this spirit murmuring its undertone through the _Aeneid_, and catch its voice in the song of Keats"s nightingale, and its light upon the figures on the Urn, and it pierces them no less in Sh.e.l.ley"s hopeless lament, _O world, O life, O time_, than in the rapturous ecstasy of his _Life of Life_. This all-embracing perfection cannot be expressed in poetic words or words of any kind, nor yet in music or in colour, but the suggestion of it is in much poetry, if not all, and poetry has in this suggestion, this "meaning," a great part of its value. We do it wrong, and we defeat our own purposes when we try to bend it to them:
We do it wrong, being so majestical, To offer it the show of violence; For it is as the air invulnerable, And our vain blows malicious mockery.
It is a spirit. It comes we know not whence. It will not speak at our bidding, nor answer in our language. It is not our servant; it is our master.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 78: From "Oxford Lectures on Poetry," 1909. Printed by courtesy of The Macmillan Company.]
GREEK TRAGEDY[79]
G. LOWES d.i.c.kINSON
The character of Greek tragedy was determined from the very beginning by the fact of its connection with religion. The season at which it was performed was the festival of Dionysus; about his altar the chorus danced; and the object of the performance was the representation of scenes out of the lives of ancient heroes. The subject of the drama was thus strictly prescribed; it must be selected out of a cycle of legends familiar to the audience; and whatever freedom might be allowed to the poet in his treatment of the theme, whatever the reflections he might embroider upon it, the speculative or ethical views, the criticism of contemporary life, all must be subservient to the main object originally proposed, the setting forth, for edification as well as for delight, of some episodes in the lives of those heroes of the past who were considered not only to be greater than their descendants, but to be the sons of G.o.ds and worthy themselves of worship as divine.
By this fundamental condition the tragedy of the Greeks is distinguished sharply, on the one hand from the Shakespearian drama, on the other from the cla.s.sical drama of the French. The tragedies of Shakespeare are devoid, one might say, or at least comparatively devoid, of all preconceptions. He was free to choose what subject he liked and to treat it as he would; and no sense of obligation to religious or other points of view, no feeling for traditions descended from a sacred past and not lightly to be handled by those who were their trustees for the future, sobered or restrained for evil or for good his half-barbaric genius. He flung himself upon life with the irresponsible ardour of the discoverer of a new continent; shaped and re-shaped it as he chose; carved from it now the cynicism of _Measure for Measure_, now the despair of _Hamlet_ and of _Lear_, now the radiant magnanimity of _The Tempest_, and departed leaving behind him not a map or chart, but a series of mutually incompatible landscapes.
What Shakespeare gave, in short, was a many-sided representation of life; what the Greek dramatist gave was an interpretation. But an interpretation not simply personal to himself, but representative of the national tradition and belief. The men whose deeds and pa.s.sions he narrated were the patterns and examples on the one hand, on the other the warnings of his race; the G.o.ds who determined the fortunes they sang, were working still among men; the moral laws that ruled the past ruled the present too; and the history of the h.e.l.lenic race moved, under a visible providence, from its divine origin onward to an end that would be prosperous or the reverse according as later generations should continue to observe the worship and traditions of their fathers descended from heroes and G.o.ds.
And it is the fact that in this sense it was representative of the national consciousness, that distinguishes the Greek tragedy from the cla.s.sical drama of the French. For the latter, though it imitated the ancients in outward form, was inspired with a totally different spirit.
The kings and heroes whose fortunes it narrated were not the ancestors of the French race; they had no root in its affections, no connection with its religious beliefs, no relation to its ethical conceptions. The whole ideal set forth was not that which really inspired the nation, but at best that which was supposed to inspire the court; and the whole drama, like a tree transplanted to an alien soil, withers and dies for lack of the nourishment which the tragedy of the Greeks unconsciously imbibed from its encompa.s.sing air of national tradition.
Such then was the general character of the Greek tragedy--an interpretation of the national ideal. Let us now proceed to follow out some of the consequences involved in this conception.
In the first place, the theme represented is the life and fate of ancient heroes--of personages, that is to say, greater than ordinary men, both for good and for evil, in their qualities and in their achievements, pregnant with fateful issues, makers or marrers of the fortunes of the world. Tragic and terrible their destiny may be, but never contemptible or squalid. Behind all suffering, behind sin and crime, must lie redeeming magnanimity. A complete villain, says Aristotle, is not a tragic character, for he has no hold upon the sympathies; if he prosper, it is an outrage on common human feeling; if he fall into disaster, it is merely what he deserves. Neither is it admissible to represent the misfortunes of a thoroughly good man, for that is merely painful and distressing; and least of all is it tolerable gratuitously to introduce mere baseness, or madness, or other aberrations from human nature. The true tragic hero is a man of high place and birth who having a nature not ign.o.ble has fallen into sin and pays in suffering the penalty of his act. Nothing could throw more light on the distinguishing characteristics of the Greek drama than these few remarks of Aristotle, and nothing could better indicate how close, in the Greek mind, was the connection between aesthetic and ethical judgments. The canon of Aristotle would exclude as proper themes for tragedy the character and fate, say, of Richard III--the absolutely bad man suffering his appropriate desert; or of Kent and Cordelia--the absolutely good, brought into unmerited affliction; and that not merely because such themes offend the moral sense, but because by so offending they destroy the proper pleasure of the tragic art. The whole aesthetic effect is limited by ethical presuppositions; and to outrage these is to defeat the very purpose of tragedy.
Specially interesting in this connection are the strictures pa.s.sed on Euripides in the pa.s.sage of the _Frogs_ of Aristophanes to which allusion has already been made. Euripides is there accused of lowering the tragic art by introducing--what? Women in love! The central theme of modern tragedy! It is the boast of Aeschylus that there is not one of his plays which touches on this subject:
"I never allow"d of your lewd Sthen.o.boeas Or filthy detestable Phaedras--not I!
Indeed I should doubt if my drama throughout Exhibit an instance of woman in love!"[80]
And there can be little doubt that with a Greek audience this would count to him as a merit, and that the shifting of the centre of interest by Euripides from the sterner pa.s.sions of heroes and of kings to this tenderer phase of human feeling would be felt even by those whom it charmed to be a declension from the height of the older tragedy.
And to this limitation of subject corresponds a limitation of treatment.
The Greek tragedy is composed from a definite point of view, with the aim not merely to represent but also to interpret the theme. Underlying the whole construction of the plot, the dialogue, the reflections, the lyric interludes, is the intention to ill.u.s.trate some general moral law, some common and typical problem, some fundamental truth. Of the elder dramatists at any rate, Aeschylus and Sophocles, one may even say that it was their purpose--however imperfectly achieved--to "justify the ways of G.o.d to man." To represent suffering as the punishment of sin is the constant bent of Aeschylus; to justify the law of G.o.d against the presumption of man is the central idea of Sophocles. In either case the whole tone is essentially religious. To choose such a theme as Lear, to treat it as Shakespeare has treated it, to leave it, as it were, bleeding from a thousand wounds, in mute and helpless entreaty for the healing that is never to be vouchsafed--this would have been repulsive, if not impossible, to a Greek tragedian. Without ever descending from concrete art to the abstractions of mere moralising, without ever attempting to subst.i.tute a verbal formula for the full and complex perception that grows out of a representation of life, the ancient dramatists were nevertheless, in the whole apprehension of their theme, determined by a more or less conscious speculative bias; the world to them was not merely a splendid chaos, it was a divine plan; and even in its darkest hollows, its pa.s.ses most perilous and bleak, they have their hand, though doubtful perhaps and faltering, upon the clue that is to lead them up to the open sky.
It is consonant with this account of the nature of Greek tragedy that it should have laid more stress upon action than upon character. The interest was centred on the universal bearing of certain acts and situations, on the light which the experience represented threw on the whole tendency and course of human life, not on the sentiments and motives of the particular personages introduced. The characters are broad and simple, not developing for the most part, but fixed, and fitted therefore to be the mediums of direct action, of simple issues, and typical situations. In the Greek tragedy the general point of view predominates over the idiosyncrasies of particular persons. It is human nature that is represented in the broad, not this or that highly specialised variation; and what we have indicated as the general aim, the interpretation of life, is never obscured by the predominance of exceptional and so to speak, accidental characteristics. Man is the subject of the Greek drama; the subject of the modern novel is Tom and d.i.c.k.
Finally, to the realisation of this general aim, the whole form of the Greek drama was admirably adapted. It consisted very largely of conversations between two persons, representing two opposed points of view, and giving occasion for an almost scientific discussion of every problem of action raised in the play; and between these conversations were inserted lyric odes in which the chorus commented on the situation, bestowed advice or warning, praise or blame, and finally summed up the moral of the whole. Through the chorus, in fact, the poet could speak in his own person, and impose upon the whole tragedy any tone which he desired. Periodically he could drop the dramatist and a.s.sume the preacher; and thus ensure that his play should be, what we have seen was its recognised ideal, not merely a representation but an interpretation of life.
But this without ceasing to be a work of art. In attempting to a.n.a.lyse in abstract terms the general character of the Greek tragedy we have necessarily thrown into the shade what after all was its primary and most essential aspect; an aspect, however, of which a full appreciation could only be attained not by a mere perusal of the test, but by what is unfortunately for ever beyond our power, the witnessing of an actual representation as it was given on the Greek stage. For from a purely aesthetic point of view the Greek drama must be reckoned among the most perfect of art forms.
Taking place in the open air, on the sunny slope of a hill, valley and plain or islanded sea stretching away below to meet the blazing blue of a cloudless sky, the moving pageant, thus from the first set in tune with nature, brought to a focus of splendour the rays of every separate art. More akin to an opera than to a play it had, as its basis, music.
For the drama had developed out of the lyric ode, and retained throughout what was at first its only element, the dance and song of a mimetic chorus. By this centre of rhythmic motion and pregnant melody the burden of the tale was caught up and echoed and echoed again, as the living globe divided into spheres of answering song, the clear and precise significance of the plot, never obscure to the head, being thus brought home in music to the pa.s.sion of the heart, the idea embodied in lyric verse, the verse transfigured by song, and song and verse reflected as in a mirror to the eye by the swing and beat of the limbs they stirred to consonance of motion. And while such was the character of the odes that broke the action of the play, the action itself was an appeal not less to the ear and to the eye than to the pa.s.sion and the intellect. The circ.u.mstances of the representation, the huge auditorium in the open air, lent themselves less to "acting" in our sense of the term, than to att.i.tude and declamation. The actors raised on high boots above their natural height, their faces hidden in masks and their tones mechanically magnified, must have relied for their effects not upon facial play, or rapid and subtle variations of voice and gesture, but upon a certain statuesque beauty of pose, and a chanting intonation of that majestic iambic verse whose measure would have been obscured by a rapid and conversational delivery. The representation would thus become moving sculpture to the eye, and to the ear, as it were, a sleep of music between the intenser interludes of the chorus; and the spectator without being drawn away by an imitative realism from the calm of impa.s.sioned contemplation into the fever and fret of a veritable actor on the scene, received an impression based throughout on that clear intellectual foundation, that almost prosaic lucidity of sentiment and plot, which is preserved to us in the written text, but raised by the accompanying appeal to the sense, made as it must have been made by such artists as the Greeks, by the grouping of forms and colours, the recitative, the dance and the song, to such a greatness and height of aesthetic significance as can hardly have been realised by any other form of art production.
The nearest modern a.n.a.logy to what the ancient drama must have been is to be found probably in the operas of Wagner, who indeed was strongly influenced by the tragedy of the Greeks. It was his ideal like theirs, to combine the various branches of art, employing not only music but poetry, sculpture, painting and the dance, for the representation of his dramatic theme; and his conception also to make art the interpreter of life, reflecting in a national drama the national consciousness, the highest action and the deepest pa.s.sion and thought of the German race.
To consider how far in this attempt he falls short of or goes beyond the achievement of the Greeks, and to examine the wide dissimilarities that underlie the general ident.i.ty of aim, would be to wander too far afield from our present theme. But the comparison may be recommended to those who are anxious to form a concrete idea of what the effect of a Greek tragedy may have been, and to clothe in imagination the dead bones of the literary text with the flesh and blood of a representation to the sense.
Meantime, to a.s.sist the reader to realise with somewhat greater precision the bearing of the foregoing remarks, it may be worth while to give an outline sketch of one of the most celebrated of the Greek tragedies, the _Agamemnon_ of Aeschylus.
The hero of the drama belongs to that heroic house whose tragic history was among the most terrible and the most familiar to a Greek audience.
Tantalus, the founder of the family, for some offence against the G.o.ds, was suffering in Hades the punishment which is christened by his name.
His son Pelops was stained with the blood of Myrtilus. Of the two sons of the next generation, Thyestes seduced the wife of his brother Atreus; and Atreus in return killed the sons of Thyestes, and made the father unwittingly eat the flesh of the murdered boys. Agamemnon, son of Atreus, to propitiate Artemis, sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia, and in revenge was murdered by Clytemnestra his wife. And Clytemnestra was killed by Orestes, her son, in atonement for the death of Agamemnon. For generations the race had been dogged by crime and punishment; and in choosing for his theme the murder of Agamemnon the dramatist could a.s.sume in his audience so close a familiarity with the past history of the House that he could call into existence by an allusive word that sombre background of woe to enhance the terrors of his actual presentation. The figures he brought into vivid relief joined hands with menacing forms that faded away into the night of the future and the past; while above them hung, intoning doom, the phantom host of Furies.
Yet at the outset of the drama all promises well. The watchman on the roof of the palace, in the tenth year of his watch, catches sight at last of the signal fire that announces the capture of Troy and the speedy return of Agamemnon. With joy he proclaims to the House the long-delayed and welcome news; yet even in the moment of exultation lets slip a doubtful phrase hinting at something behind, which he dares not name, something which may turn to despair the triumph of victory.
Hereupon enter the chorus of Argive elders, chanting as they move to the measure of a stately march. They sing how ten years before Agamemnon and Menelaus had led forth the host of Greece, at the bidding of the Zeus who protects hospitality, to recover for Menelaus Helen his wife, treacherously stolen by Paris. Then, as they take their places and begin their rhythmic dance, in a strain of impa.s.sioned verse that is at once a narrative and a lyric hymn, they tell, or rather present in a series of vivid images, flashing as by illumination of lightning out of a night of veiled and sombre boding, the tale of the deed that darkened the starting of the host--the sacrifice of Iphigenia to the G.o.ddess whose wrath was delaying the fleet at Aulis. In verse, in music, in pantomime, the scene lives again--the struggle in the father"s heart, the insistence of his brother chiefs, the piteous glance of the girl, and at last the unutterable end; while above and through it all rings like a knell of fate the refrain that is the motive of the whole drama:
"Sing woe, sing woe, but may the Good prevail."
At the conclusion of the ode enters Clytemnestra. She makes a formal announcement to the chorus of the fall of Troy; describes the course of the signal-fire from beacon to beacon as it sped, and pictures in imagination the scenes even then taking place in the doomed city. On her withdrawal the chorus break once more into song and dance. To the music of a solemn hymn they point the moral of the fall of Troy, the certain doom of violence and fraud descended upon Paris and his House. Once more the vivid pictures flash from the night of woe--Helen in her fatal beauty stepping lightly to her doom, the widower"s nights of mourning haunted by the ghost of love, the horrors of the war that followed, the slain abroad and the mourners at home, the change of living flesh and blood for the dust and ashes of the tomb. At last with a return to their original theme, the doom of insolence, the chorus close their ode and announce the arrival of a messenger from Troy. Talthybius, the herald, enters as spokesman of the army and king, describing the hardships they have suffered and the joy of the triumphant issue. To him Clytemnestra announces, in words of which the irony is patent to the audience, her sufferings in the absence of her husband and her delight at the prospect of his return. He will find her, she says, as he left her, a faithful watcher of the home, her loyalty sure, her honour undefiled. Then follows another choral ode, similar in theme to the last, dwelling on the woe brought by the act of Paris upon Troy, the change of the bridal song to the trump of war and the dirge of death; contrasting, in a profusion of splendid tropes, the beauty of Helen with the curse to which it is bound; and insisting once more on the doom that attends insolence and pride. At the conclusion of this song the measure changes to a march, and the chorus turn to welcome the triumphant king.
Agamemnon enters, and behind him the veiled and silent figure of a woman. After greeting the G.o.ds of his House, the King, in brief and stilted phrase, acknowledges the loyalty of the chorus, but hints at much that is amiss which it must be his first charge to set right.
Hereupon enters Clytemnestra, and in a speech of rhetorical exaggeration tells of her anxious waiting for her lord and her inexpressible joy at his return. In conclusion she directs that purple cloth be spread upon his path that he may enter the house as befits a conqueror. After a show of resistance, Agamemnon yields the point, and the contrast at which the dramatist aims is achieved. With the pomp of an eastern monarch, always repellent to the Greek mind, the King steps across the threshold, steps, as the audience knows, to his death. The higher the reach of his power and pride the more terrible and swift is the nemesis; and Clytemnestra follows in triumph with the enigmatic cry upon her lips: "Zeus who art G.o.d of fulfilment, fulfil my prayers." As she withdraws the chorus begin a song of boding fear, the more terrible that it is still indefinite. Something is going to happen--the presentiment is sure. But what, but what? They search the night in vain. Meantime, motionless and silent waits the figure of the veiled woman. It is Ca.s.sandra, the prophetess, daughter of Priam of Troy, whom Agamemnon has carried home as his prize. Clytemnestra returns to urge her to enter the house; she makes no sign and utters no word. The queen changes her tone from courtesy to anger and rebuke; the figure neither stirs nor speaks; and Clytemnestra at last with an angry threat leaves her and returns to the palace. Then, and not till then, a cry breaks from the stranger"s lips, a pa.s.sionate cry to Apollo who gave her her fatal gift. All the sombre history of the House to which she has been brought, the woe that has been and the woe that is to come, pa.s.ses in pictures across her inner sense. In a series of broken e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns, not sentences but lyric cries, she evokes the scenes of the past and of the future. Blood drips from the palace; in its chambers the Furies crouch; the murdered sons of Thyestes wail in its haunted courts; and ever among the visions of the past that one of the future floats and fades, clearly discerned, impossible to avert, the murder of a husband by a wife; and in the rear of that, most pitiful of all, the violent death of the seer who sees in vain and may not help. Between Ca.s.sandra and the Chorus it is a duet of anguish and fear; in the broken lyric phrases a phantom music wails; till at last, at what seems the breaking-point, the tension is relaxed, and dropping into the calmer iambic recitative, Ca.s.sandra tells her message in plainer speech and clearly proclaims the murder of the King.
Then, with a last appeal to the avenger that is to come, she enters the palace alone to meet her death.--The stage is empty. Suddenly a cry is heard from within; again, and then again; while the chorus hesitate the deed is done; the doors are thrown open, and Clytemnestra is seen standing over the corpses of her victims. All disguise is now thrown off; the murderess avows and triumphs in her deed; she justifies it as vengeance for the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and sees in herself not a free human agent but the incarnate curse of the House of Tantalus. And now for the first time appears the adulterer Aegisthus, who has planned the whole behind the scenes. He too is an avenger, for he is the son of that Thyestes who was made to feed on his own children"s flesh. The murder of Agamemnon is but one more link in the long chain of hereditary guilt; and with that exposition of the pitiless law of punishment and crime this chapter of the great drama comes to a close. But the _Agamemnon_ is only the first of a series of three plays closely connected and meant to be performed in succession; and the problem raised in the first of them, the crime that cries for punishment and the punishment that is itself a new crime, is solved in the last by a reconciliation of the powers of heaven and h.e.l.l, and the pardon of the last offender in the person of Orestes. To sketch, however, the plan of the other dramas of the trilogy would be to trespa.s.s too far upon our s.p.a.ce and time. It is enough to have ill.u.s.trated, by the example of the _Agamemnon_, the general character of a Greek tragedy; and those who care to pursue the subject further must be referred to the text of the plays themselves.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 79: From "The Greek View of Life," 1909 (sixth edition). By permission of Messrs. Doubleday, Page & Co.]
[Footnote 80: From Aristophanes" "Frogs," l. 1043. Translated by Frere.]
SHAKESPEARE[81]
THOMAS CARLYLE
As Dante, the Italian man, was sent into our world to embody musically the Religion of the Middle Ages, the Religion of our Modern Europe, its Inner Life; so Shakespeare, we may say, embodies for us the Outer Life of our Europe as developed then, its chivalries, courtesies, humours, ambitions, what practical way of thinking, acting, looking at the world, men then had. As in Homer we may still construe Old Greece; so in Shakespeare and Dante, after thousands of years, what our modern Europe was, in Faith and in Practice, will still be legible. Dante has given us the Faith or soul; Shakespeare, in a not less n.o.ble way, has given us the Practice or body. This latter also we were to have; a man was sent for it, the man Shakespeare. Just when that chivalry way of life had reached its last finish, and was on the point of breaking down into slow or swift dissolution, as we now see it everywhere, this other sovereign Poet, with his seeing eye, with his perennial singing voice, was sent to take note of it, to give long-enduring record of it. Two fit men: Dante, deep, fierce as the central fire of the world; Shakespeare, wide, placid, far-seeing, as the Sun, the upper light of the world. Italy produced the one world-voice; we English had the honour of producing the other.
Curious enough how, as it were by mere accident, this man came to us. I think always, so great, quiet, complete and self-sufficing is this Shakespeare, had the Warwickshire Squire not prosecuted him for deer-stealing, we had perhaps never heard of him as a Poet! The woods and skies, the rustic Life of Man in Stratford there, had been enough for this man! But indeed that strange outbudding of our whole English Existence, which we call the Elizabethan Era, did not it too come as of its own accord? The "Tree Igdrasil" buds and withers by its own laws,--too deep for our scanning. Yet it does bud and wither, and every bough and leaf of it is there, by fixed eternal laws; not a Sir Thomas Lucy but comes at the hour fit for him. Curious, I say, and not sufficiently considered: how everything does co-operate with all; not a leaf rotting on the highway but is indissoluble portion of solar and stellar systems; no thought, word or act of man but has sprung withal out of all men, and works sooner or later, recognisably or irrecognisably, on all men! It is all a Tree: circulation of sap and influences, mutual communication of every minutest leaf with the lowest talon of a root, with every other greatest and minutest portion of the whole. The Tree Igdrasil, that has its roots down in the Kingdoms of Hela and Death, and whose boughs overspread the highest Heaven!
In some sense it may be said that this glorious Elizabethan Era with its Shakespeare, as the outcome and flowerage of all which had preceded it, is itself attributable to the Catholicism of the Middle Ages. The Christian Faith, which was the theme of Dante"s Song, had produced this Practical Life which Shakespeare was to sing. For Religion then, as it now and always is, was the soul of Practice; the primary vital fact in men"s life. And remark here, as rather curious, that Middle-Age Catholicism was abolished, so far as Acts of Parliament could abolish it, before Shakespeare, the n.o.blest product of it, made his appearance.
He did make his appearance nevertheless. Nature at her own time, with Catholicism or what else might be necessary, sent him forth; taking small thought of Acts of Parliament. King-Henrys, Queen-Elizabeths go their way; and Nature too goes hers. Acts of Parliament, on the whole, are small, notwithstanding the noise they make. What Act of Parliament, debate at St. Stephen"s,[82] on the hustings or elsewhere, was it that brought this Shakespeare into being? No dining at Freemasons" Tavern, opening subscription-lists, selling of shares, and infinite other jangling and true or false endeavouring! This Elizabethan Era, and all its n.o.bleness and blessedness, came without proclamation, preparation of ours. Priceless Shakespeare was the free gift of Nature; given altogether silently; received altogether silently, as if it had been a thing of little account. And yet, very literally, it is a priceless thing. One should look at that side of matters too.
Of this Shakespeare of ours, perhaps the opinion one sometimes hears a little idolatrously expressed is, in fact, the right one; I think the best judgment not of this country only: but of Europe at large, is slowly pointing to the conclusion, That Shakespeare is the chief of all Poets. .h.i.therto; the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world, has left record of himself in the way of Literature. On the whole, I know not such a power of vision, such a faculty of thought, if we take all the characters of it, in any other man. Such a calmness of depth; placid joyous strength; all things imaged in that great soul of his so true and clear, as in a tranquil unfathomable sea! It has been said, that in the constructing of Shakespeare"s Dramas there is, apart from all other "faculties" as they are called, an understanding manifested, equal to that in Bacon"s _Novum Organum_. That is true; and it is not a truth that strikes every one. It would become more apparent if we tried, any of us for himself, how, out of Shakespeare"s dramatic materials, _we_ could fashion such a result! The built house seems all so fit,--everyway as it should be, as if it came there by its own law and the nature of things,--we forget the rude disorderly quarry it was shaped from. The very perfection of the house, as if Nature herself had made it, hides the builder"s merit. Perfect, more perfect than any other man, we may call Shakespeare in this: he discerns, knows as by instinct, what condition he works under, what his materials are, what his own force and its relation to them is. It is not a transitory glance of insight that will suffice; it is deliberate illumination of the whole matter; it is a calmly _seeing_ eye; a great intellect, in short. How a man, of some wide thing that he has witnessed, will construct a narrative, what kind of picture and delineation he will give of it--is the best measure you could get of what intellect is in the man. Which circ.u.mstance is vital and shall stand prominent; which unessential, fit to be suppressed; where is the true _beginning_, the true sequence and ending? To find out this, you task the whole force of insight that is in the man. He must _understand_ the thing; according to the depth of his understanding, will the fitness of his answer be. You will try him so. Does like join itself to like; does the spirit of method stir in that confusion, so that its embroilment becomes order? Can the man say, _Fiat lux_, Let there be light; and out of chaos make a world? Precisely as there is _light_ in himself, will he accomplish this.
Or indeed we may say again, it is in what I called Portrait-painting, delineating of men and things, especially of men, that Shakespeare is great. All the greatness of the man comes out decisively here. It is unexampled, I think, that calm creative perspicacity of Shakespeare. The thing he looks at reveals not this or that face of it, but its inmost heart, and generic secret: it dissolves itself as in light before him, so that he discerns the perfect structure of it. Creative, we said: poetic creation, what is this too but _seeing_ the thing sufficiently?
The _word_ that will describe the thing, follows of itself from such clear intense sight of the thing. And is not Shakespeare"s _morality_, his valour, candour, tolerance, truthfulness; his whole victorious strength and greatness, which can triumph over such obstructions, visible there too? Great as the world! No _twisted_, poor convex-concave mirror, reflecting all objects with its own convexities and concavities; a perfectly _level_ mirror--that is to say withal, if we will understand it, a man justly related to all things and men, a good man.
It is truly a lordly spectacle how this great soul takes-in all kinds of men and objects, a Falstaff, an Oth.e.l.lo, a Juliet, a Coriola.n.u.s; sets them all forth to us in their round completeness; loving, just, the equal brother of all. _Novum Organum_, and all the intellect you will find in Bacon, is of a quite secondary order; earthy, material, poor in comparison with this. Among modern men, one finds, in strictness, almost nothing of the same rank. Goethe alone, since the days of Shakespeare, reminds me of it. Of him too you say that he _saw_ the object; you may say what he himself says of Shakespeare: "His characters are like watches with dial-plates of transparent crystal; they show you the hour like others, and the inward mechanism also is all visible."
The seeing eye! It is this that discloses the inner harmony of things; what Nature meant, what musical idea Nature has wrapped-up in these often rough embodiments. Something she did mean. To the seeing eye that something were discernible. Are they base, miserable things? You can laugh over them, you can weep over them; you can in some way or other genially relate yourself to them--you can, at lowest, hold your peace about them, turn away your own and others" face from them, till the hour come for practically exterminating and extinguishing them! At bottom, it is the Poet"s first gift, as it is all men"s, that he have intellect enough. He will be a Poet if he have: a Poet in word; or failing that, perhaps still better, a Poet in act. Whether he write at all, and if so, whether in prose or in verse, will depend on accidents: who knows on what extremely trivial accidents,--perhaps on his having had a singing-master, on his being taught to sing in his boyhood! But the faculty which enables him to discern the inner heart of things, and the harmony that dwells there (for whatsoever exists has a harmony in the heart of it, or it would not hold together and exist), is not the result of habits or accidents, but the gift of Nature herself; the primary outfit for a Heroic Man in what sort soever. To the Poet, as to every other, we say first of all _See_. If you cannot do that, it is of no use to keep stringing rhymes together, jingling sensibilities against each other, and _name_ yourself a Poet; there is no hope for you. If you can, there is, in prose or verse, in action or speculation, all manner of hope. The crabbed old Schoolmaster used to ask, when they brought him a new pupil, "But are ye sure he"s _not a dunce_?" Why, really one might ask the same thing, in regard to every man proposed for whatsoever function; and consider it as the one inquiry needful: Are ye sure he"s not a dunce? There is, in this world, no other entirely fatal person.
For, in fact, I say the degree of vision that dwells in a man is a correct measure of the man. If called to define Shakespeare"s faculty, I should say superiority of Intellect, and think I had included all under that. What indeed are faculties? We talk of faculties as if they were distinct, things separable; as if a man had intellect, imagination, fancy, etc., as he has hands, feet and arms. That is a capital error.