Part 2 (2/2)
And meanwhile the demons of life dance on. Dante may build up his great triple universe in his great triple rhyme, and encase it in walls of bra.s.s. But still they dance on. We may tremble at the supreme poet's pride and wonder at the pa.s.sion of his humility--but ”the d.a.m.ned grotesques make arabesques, like the wind upon the sand!”
SHAKESPEARE
There is something pathetic about the blind devotion of humanity to its famous names. But how indiscriminate it is; how lacking in discernment!
This is, above all, true of Shakespeare, whose peculiar and quite personal genius has almost been buried under the weight of popular idolatry. No wonder such critics as Voltaire, Tolstoi, and Mr.
Bernard Shaw have taken upon themselves to intervene. The Frenchman's protest was an aesthetic one. The more recent objectors have adopted moral and philosophic grounds. But it is the unreasoning adoration of the mob which led to both attacks.
It is not difficult to estimate the elements which have gone to make up this Shakespeare-G.o.d. The voices of the priests behind the Idol are only too clearly distinguishable. We hear the academic voice, the showman's voice, and the voice of the ethical preacher. They are all absurd, but their different absurdities have managed to flow together into one powerful and unified convention. Our popular orators gesticulate and clamour; our professors ”talk Greek;” our ethical Brutuses ”explain;” and the mob ”throw up their sweaty night-caps;”
while our poor Caesar of Poetry sinks down out of sight, helpless among them all.
Charles Lamb, who understood him better than anyone--and who loved Plays--does not hesitate to accuse our Stage-Actors of being the worst of all in their misrepresentation. He doubts whether even Garrick understood the subtlety of the roles he played, and the few exceptions he allows in his own age make us wonder what he would say of ours.
Finally there is the ”Philosophical Shakespeare” of the German appreciation, and this we feel instinctively to be the least like the original of all!
The irony of it is that the author of Hamlet and the Tempest does not only live in a different world from that of these motley exponents.
He lives in an antagonistic one. Shakespeare was as profoundly the enemy of scholastic pedantry as he was the enemy of puritan squeamishness. He was almost unkindly averse to the breath of the profane crowd. And his melancholy scepticism, with its half-humorous a.s.sent to the traditional pieties, is at the extremest opposite pole from the ”truths” of metaphysical reason. The Shakespeare of the Popular Revivals is a fantastic caricature. The Shakespeare of the College Text-Books is a lean scarecrow. But the Shakespeare of the philosophical moralists is an Hob-goblin from whom one flees in dismay.
Enjoying the plays themselves--the interpreters forgotten--a normally intelligent reader cannot fail to respond to a recognisable Personality there, a Personality with apathies and antipathies, with prejudices and predilections. Very quickly he will discern the absurd unreality of that monstrous Idol, that ubiquitous Hegelian G.o.d. Very soon he will recognize that in trying to make their poet everything they have made him nothing.
No one can read Shakespeare with direct and simple enjoyment without discovering in his plays a quite definite and personal att.i.tude towards life. Shakespeare is no Absolute Divinity, reconciling all oppositions and transcending all limitations. He is not that ”cloud-capped mountain,” too lofty to be scanned, of Matthew Arnold's Sonnet. He is a sad and pa.s.sionate artist, using his bitter experiences to intensify his insight, and playing with his humours and his dreams to soften the sting of that brutish reality which he was doomed to unmask. The best way of indicating the personal mood which emerges as his final att.i.tude is to describe it as that of the perfectly natural man confronting the universe. Of course, there is no such ”perfectly natural man,” but he is a legitimate lay-figure, and we all approximate to him at times. The natural man, in his unsophisticated hours, takes the Universe at its surface value, neither rejecting the delicate compensations, nor mitigating the cruelty of the grotesque farce. The natural man accepts _what is given._ He swallows the chaotic surprises, the extravagant accidents, the whole fantastic ”pell-mell.” He accepts, too, the traditional pieties of his race, their ”hope against hope,” their gracious ceremonial, their consecration of birth and death. He accepts these, not because he is confident of their ”truth” but because _they are there;_ because they have been there so long, and have interwoven themselves with the chances and changes of the whole dramatic spectacle.
He accepts them spontaneously, humorously, affectionately; not anxious to improve them--what would be the object of that?--and certainly not seeking to controvert them. He reverences this Religion of his Race not only because it has its own sad, pathetic beauty, but because it has got itself involved in the common burden; lightening such a burden here, making it, perhaps, a little heavier there, but lending it a richer tone, a subtler colour, a more significant shape. It does not trouble the natural man that Religion should deal with ”the Impossible.” Where, in such a world as this, does _that_ begin? He has no agitating desire to reconcile it with reason.
At the bottom of his soul he has a shrewd suspicion that it rather grew out of the earth than fell from the sky, but that does not concern him. It may be based upon no eternal verity. It may lead to no certain issue. It may be neither very ”useful” or very ”moral.” But it is, at any rate, a beautiful work of imaginative art, and it lends life a certain dignity that nothing can quite replace. As a matter of fact, the natural man's att.i.tude to these things does not differ much from the att.i.tude of the great artists. It is only that a certain l.u.s.t for creation, and a certain demonic curiosity, scourge these latter on to something beyond pa.s.sive resignation.
A Da Vinci or a Goethe accepts religion and uses it, but between it and the depths of his own mind remains forever an inviolable film of sceptical ”white light.” This ”qualified a.s.sent” is precisely what excites the fury of such individualistic thinkers as Tolstoi and Bernard Shaw. It were amusing to note the difference between the ”humour” of this latter and the ”humour” of Shakespeare. Shaw's humour consists in emphasizing the absurdity of human Custom, compared with the good sense of the philosopher. Shakespeare's humour consists in emphasizing the absurdity of philosophers, compared with the good sense of Custom. The one is the humour of the Puritan, directed against the ordinary man, on behalf of the Universe. The other is the humour of the Artist, directed against the Universe, on behalf of the ordinary man.
Shakespeare is, at bottom, the most extreme of Pessimists. He has no faith in ”progress,” no belief in ”eternal values,” no transcendental ”intuitions,” no zeal for reform. The universe to him, for all its loveliness, remains an outrageous jest. The cosmic is the comic. Anything may be expected of this ”pendant world,” except what we expect; and when it is a question of ”falling back,” we can only fall back on human-made custom. We live by Illusions, and when the last Illusion fails us, we die. After reading Shakespeare, the final impression left upon the mind is that the world can only be justified as an aesthetic spectacle. To appreciate a Show at once so sublime and so ridiculous, one needs to be very brave, very tender, and very humorous. Nothing else is needed. ”Man must abide his going hence, even as his coming hither. Ripeness is all.” When Courage fails us, it is--”as flies to wanton boys are we to the G.o.ds.
They kill us for their sport.” When tenderness fails us, it is--”Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time.” When humour fails us, it is--”How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, seem to me all the uses of this world!”
So much for Life! And when we come to Death, how true it is, as Charles Lamb says, that none has spoken of Death like Shakespeare!
And he has spoken of it so--with such an absolute grasp of our mortal feeling about it--because his mood in regard to it is the mood of the natural man; of the natural man, unsophisticated by false hopes, undated by vain a.s.surance. His att.i.tude towards death neither sweetens ”the unpalatable draught of mortality” nor permits us to let go the balm of its ”eternal peace.” How frightful ”to lie in cold obstruction and to rot; this sensible warm motion to become a kneaded clod!” and yet, ”after life's fitful fever,” how blessed to ”sleep well!”
What we note about this mood--the mood of Shakespeare and the natural man--is that it never for a moment dallies with philosophic fancies or mystic visions. It ”thinks highly of the soul,” but in the natural, not the metaphysical, sense. It is the att.i.tude of Rabelais and Montaigne, not the att.i.tude of Wordsworth or Browning. It is the tone we know so well in the Homeric poems. It is the tone of the Psalms of David. We hear its voice in ”Ecclesiastes,” and the wisdom of ”Solomon the King” is full of it. In more recent times, it is the feeling of those who veer between our race's traditional hope and the dark gulf of eternal silence. It is the ”Aut Christus aut Nihil”
of those who ”by means of metaphysic” have dug a pit, into which metaphysic has disappeared!
The gaiety and childlike animal spirits of Shakespeare's Comedies need not deceive us. Why should we not forget the whips and scorns for a while, and fleet the time carelessly, ”as they did in the golden age?” Such simple fooling goes better with the irresponsibility of our fate than the more pungent wit of the moral comedians. The tragic laughter which the confused issues of life excite in subtler souls is not lacking, but the sweet obliquities of honest clowns carry us just as far. Shakespeare loves fools as few have loved them, and it is often his humour to put into their mouth the ultimate wisdom.
It is remarkable that these plays should commence with a ”Midsummer Night's Dream” and end with a ”Tempest.” In the interval the great sombre pa.s.sions of our race are sounded and dismissed; but as he began with t.i.tania, so he ends with Ariel. From the fairy forest to the enchanted island; from a dream to a dream.
With Shakespeare there is no Wagnerian, Euripidean ”apologia.”
There is no ”Parsifal” or ”Baccha.n.a.ls.” From the meaningless tumult of mortal pa.s.sions he returns, with a certain ironic weariness, to the magic of Nature and the wonder of youth. Prospero, dismissing his spirits ”into thin air,” has the last word; and the last word is as the first: ”we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” The easy-going persons who reluct at the idea of a pessimistic Shakespeare should turn the pages of Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and Timon of Athens. What we guessed as we read Hamlet and Lear grows a certainty as we read these plays.
Here the ”gentle Shakespeare” does the three things that are most unpardonable. He unmasks virtue; he betrays Woman; and he curses the G.o.ds. The most intransigent of modern revolutionaries might learn a trick or two from this sacred poet. In Lear he puts the very voice of Anarchy into the mouth of the King--”Die for adultery?
No!” ”Handy-dandy, which is the Magistrate and which is the Thief?” ”A dog's obeyed in office.”
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