Part 4 (1/2)
The Greeks insisted that nothing should be in a play that did not tend to the catastrophe. They did not believe in the episode--in the sudden contrasts of light and shade--in mingling the comic and the tragic.
The sunlight never fell upon their tears, and darkness did not overtake their laughter. They believed that nature sympathized or was in harmony with the events of the play. When crime was about to be committed--some horror to be perpetrated--the light grew dim, the wind sighed, the trees s.h.i.+vered, and upon all was the shadow of the coming event.
Shakespeare knew that the play had little to do with the tides and currents of universal life--that Nature cares neither for smiles nor tears, for life nor death, and that the sun s.h.i.+nes as gladly on coffins as on cradles.
The first time I visited the Place de la Concorde, where during the French Revolution stood the guillotine, and where now stands an Egyptian obelisk--a bird, sitting on the top, was singing with all its might.--Nature forgets.
One of the most notable instances of the violation by Shakespeare of the cla.s.sic model, is found in the 6th Scene of the I. Act of Macbeth.
When the King and Banquo approach the castle in which the King is to be murdered that night, no shadow falls athwart the threshold. So beautiful is the scene that the King says:
”This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself Unto our gentle senses.”
And Banquo adds:
”This guest of summer, The temple-haunting martlet, does approve By his loved mansionry that the heaven's breath Smells wooingly here; no jutty, frieze, b.u.t.tress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle.
Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed The air is delicate.”
Another notable instance is the porter scene immediately following the murder. So, too, the dialogue with the clown who brings the asp to Cleopatra just before the suicide, ill.u.s.trates my meaning.
I know of one paragraph in the Greek drama worthy of Shakespeare. This is in ”Medea.” When Medea kills her children she curses Jason, using the ordinary Billingsgate and papal curse, but at the conclusion says: ”I pray the G.o.ds to make him virtuous, that he may the more deeply feel the pang that I inflict.”
Shakespeare dealt in lights and shadows. He was intense. He put noons and midnights side by side. No other dramatist would have dreamed of adding to the pathos--of increasing our appreciation of Lear's agony, by supplementing the wail of the mad king with the mocking laughter of a loving clown.
X.
THE ordinary dramatists--the men of talent--(and there is the same difference between talent and genius that there is between a stone-mason and a sculptor) create characters that become types. Types are of necessity caricatures--actual men and women are to some extent contradictory in their actions. Types are blown in the one direction by the one wind--characters have pilots.
In real people, good and evil mingle. Types are all one way, or all the other--all good, or all bad, all wise or all foolish.
Pecksniff was a perfect type, a perfect hypocrite--and will remain a type as long as language lives--a hypocrite that even drunkenness could not change. Everybody understands Pecksniff, and compared with him Tartuffe was an honest man. Hamlet is an individual, a person, an actual being--and for that reason there is a difference of opinion ias to his motives and as to his character. We differ About Hamlet as we do about Caesar, or about Shakespeare himself.
Hamlet saw the ghost of his father and heard again his father's voice, and yet, afterwards, he speaks of
”the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns.”
In this there is no contradiction. The reason outweighs the senses. If we should see a dead man rise from his grave, we would not, the next day, believe that we did. No one can credit a miracle until it becomes so common that it ceases to be miraculous.
Types are puppets--controlled from without--characters act from within.
There is the same difference between characters and types that there is between springs and water-works, between ca.n.a.ls and rivers, between wooden soldiers and heroes.
In most plays and in most novels the characters are so shadowy that we have to piece them out with the imagination.
One waking in the morning sometimes sees at the foot of his bed a strange figure--it may be of an ancient lady with cap and ruffles and with the expression of garrulous and fussy old age--but when the light gets stronger, the figure gradually changes and he sees a few clothes on a chair.
The dramatist lives the lives of others, and in order to delineate character must not only have imagination but sympathy with the character delineated. The great dramatist thinks of a character as an entirety, as an individual.
I once had a dream, and in this dream I was discussing a subject with another man. It occurred to me that I was dreaming, and I then said to myself: If this is a dream, I am doing the talking for both sides--consequently I ought to know in advance what the other man is going to say. In my dream I tried the experiment. I then asked the other man a question, and before he answered made up my mind what the answer was to be. To my surprise, the man did not say what I expected he would, and so great was my astonishment that I awoke.