Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters Part 15

"Heaven's cherubin, hors'd Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, That tears shall drown the wind."

With these I suspect may be fitly cla.s.sed, notwithstanding its delicacy, the following from Iachimo's description of Imogen, when he comes out of the trunk in her chamber:

"The flame o' the taper Bows toward her; and would under-peep her lids, To see th' enclosed lights, now canopied Under these windows, white and azure, lac'd With blue of heaven's own tinct."

Also this, from the soliloquy of Posthumus in repentance for the supposed death of Imogen by his order:

"My conscience, thou art fetter'd More than my shanks and wrists: you good G.o.ds give me The penitent instrument to pick that bolt, Then free for ever!"

I add still another example; from one of old Nestor's speeches on the selection of a champion to fight with the Trojan hero:

"It is suppos'd, He that meets Hector issues from our choice: And choice, being mutual act of all our souls, Makes merit her election; and doth boil, As 'twere from forth us all, a man distill'd Out of our virtues."

All these--and I could quote a hundred such--are, to my thinking, instances of happy and, I will add, even wise audacity: at least, if there be any overstraining of imagery, I can easily shrive the fault, for the subtile felicity involved in them. They are certainly quite at home in the millennium of poetry which Shakespeare created for us; albeit I can well remember the time when such transcendent raptures were to me as

"Some joy too fine, Too subtle-potent, tun'd too sharp in sweetness, For the capacity of my ruder powers."

It would be strange indeed if a man so exceedingly daring did not now and then overdare. And so I think the Poet's boldness in metaphor sometimes makes him overbold, or at least betrays him into infelicities of boldness. Here are two instances, from _The Tempest_, v. 1:

"The charm dissolves apace; And as the morning steals upon the night, Melting the darkness, so their rising senses Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle Their clearer reason."

"Their understanding Begins to swell; and the approaching tide Will shortly fill the reasonable sh.o.r.e That now lies foul and muddy."

And here is another, of perhaps still more questionable character, from _Macbeth_, i. 7:

"His two chamberlains Will I with wine and wa.s.sail so convince, That memory, the warder of the brain, Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason A limbeck only."

What, again, shall be said of the two following, where Coriola.n.u.s snaps off his fierce scorn of the mult.i.tude?--

"What's the matter, you dissentious rogues, That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion, Make yourselves scabs?"

"So shall my lungs Coin words till their decay against those measles, Which we disdain should tetter us, yet sought The very way to catch them."

Either from overboldness in the metaphors, or from some unaptness in the material of them, I have to confess that my mind rather rebels against these stretches of poetical prerogative. Still more so, perhaps, in the well-known pa.s.sage of _King Henry the Fifth_, iv. 3; though I am not sure but, in this case, the thing rightly belongs to the speaker's character:

"And those that leave their valiant bones in France, Dying like men, though buried in your dunghills, They shall be fam'd; for there the Sun shall greet them, And draw their honours reeking up to heaven; Leaving their earthly parts to choke your clime, The smell whereof shall breed a plague in France.

Mark, then, abounding valour in our English; That, being dead, like to the bullet's grazing, Break out into a second course of mischief, Killing in relapse of mortality."

But, whatever be the right mark to set upon these and some other instances, I find but few occasions of such revolt; and my only wonder is, how any mere human genius could be so gloriously audacious, and yet be so seldom chargeable with pa.s.sing the just bounds of poetical privilege.

Metaphors are themselves the aptest and clearest mode of expressing much in little. No other form of speech will convey so much thought in so few words. They often compress into a few words what would else require as many sentences. But even such condensations of meaning did not--so it appears--always answer Shakespeare's purpose: he sometimes does hardly more than _suggest_ metaphors, throwing off several of them in quick succession. We have an odd instance of this in one of Falstaff's speeches, Second Part of _King Henry the Fourth_, i. 2: "Well, he may sleep in security; for he hath the horn of abundance, and the lightness of his wife s.h.i.+nes through it: and yet cannot he see, though he have his own lantern to light him." Here we have a thick-coming series of punning metaphors, all merely suggested. So Brutus, when hunting after reasons for killing Caesar: "It is the bright day that brings forth the adder." Here the metaphor suggested is, that the suns.h.i.+ne of kingly power will develop a venomous serpent in the hitherto n.o.ble Julius. So, again, Cleopatra, when Antony dies: "O, see, my women, the crown o' the earth doth melt";--"O, wither'd is the garland of the war, the soldier's pole is fall'n";--"Look, our lamp is spent, it's out." And so in Macbeth's,--"The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees is left this vault to brag of";--"Better be with the dead than on the torture of the mind to lie in restless ecstasy";--"Come, seeling night, scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day." Also one of the Thanes, when they are about to make their ultimate set-to against Macbeth:

"Meet we the medicine of the sickly weal; And with him pour we in our country's purge Each drop of us."

_Macbeth_ indeed has more of this character than any other of the Poet's dramas; he having judged, apparently, that such a style of suggested images was the best way of _symbolizing_ such a wild-rus.h.i.+ng torrent of crimes, remorses, and retributions as that tragedy consists of.

Near akin to these is a number of pa.s.sages like the following from one of Antony's speeches:

"The hearts That spaniel'd me at heels, to whom I gave Their wishes, do discandy, melt their sweets On blossoming Caesar; and this pine is bark'd, That overtopp'd them all."

Here we have several distinct images merely suggested, and coming so thick withal, that our powers might be swamped but for the prodigious momentum or gale of thought that carries us through. I am aware that several such pa.s.sages have often been censured as mere jumbles of incongruous metaphors; but they do not so strike any reader who is so unconscientious of rhetorical formalities as to care only for the meaning of what he reads; though I admit that perhaps no mental current less deep and mighty than Shakespeare's would waft us clean over such thought-foundering pa.s.sages.

There is one other trait of the Poet's style which I must briefly notice. It is the effect of some one leading thought or predominant feeling in silently modifying the language, and drawing in sympathetic words and phrases by unmarked threads of a.s.sociation. Thus in the hero's description of Valeria, in _Coriola.n.u.s_, v. 3:

"The n.o.ble sister of Publicola, The moon of Rome; chaste as the icicle, That's curded by the frost from purest snow, And hangs on Dian's temple."

Here, of course, the leading thought is chast.i.ty; and observe how, as by a kind of silent sympathy, all the words and images are selected and toned in perfect unison with that thought, so that the whole may be said literally to relish of nothing else. Something of the same, though in a manner perhaps still better, because less p.r.o.nounced, occurs in _As You Like It_, ii. 1, where, the exiled Duke having expressed his pain that the deer, "poor dappled fools, being native burghers of this desert city," should on their own grounds "have their round haunches gor'd," one of the attendant lords responds:

"Indeed, my lord, The melancholy Jaques grieves at that.

To-day, my Lord of Amiens and myself Did steal behind him, as he lay along Under an oak whose antique root peeps out Upon the brook that brawls along this wood; To the which place a poor sequester'd stag, That from the hunter's aim had ta'en a hurt, Did come to languish: and indeed, my lord, The wretched animal heav'd forth such groans, That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat Almost to bursting; and the big round tears Cours'd one another down his innocent nose In piteous chase; and thus the hairy fool, Much marked of the melancholy Jaques, Stood on th' extremest verge of the swift brook, Augmenting it with tears."

Here the predominant feeling of the speaker is that of kindred or half-brotherhood with the deer; and such words as _languish, groans, coat, tears, innocent_, and _hairy fool_, dropping along so quietly, impart a sort of semi-humanizing tinge to the language, so that the very pulse of his feeling seems beating in its veins.

The Poet has a great many pa.s.sages from which this feature might be ill.u.s.trated. And it often imparts a very peculiar charm to his poetry;--a charm the more winning, and the more wholesome too, for being, I will not say un.o.btrusive, but hardly perceptible; acting like a soft undertone accompaniment of music, which we are kept from noticing by the delicate concert of thought and feeling it insensibly kindles and feeds within us. Thus the Poet touches and rallies all our most hidden springs of delight to his purpose, and makes them unconsciously tributary to the refreshment of the hour; stealing fine inspirations into us, which work their effect upon the soul without prating of their presence, and not unlike the virtue that lets not the left hand know what the right hand doeth. And all this, let me tell you, is a very different thing from merely making "the sound an echo to the sense,"--as much better too as it is different.

Everybody conversant with the subject knows that an author's style, if genuine, (and it is not properly a style, but a mannerism, if ungenuine,) is a just measure of his mind, and an authentic registration of all his faculties and forces. It has indeed pa.s.sed into a proverb, that "the style is the man." And there is no other English writing, probably no uninspired writing in the world, of which this is so unreservedly true as of Shakespeare's; and this, because his is the most profoundly genuine: here the style--I mean in his characteristic pieces--is all his own,--rooted perfectly in and growing entirely from the man himself,--and has no borrowed sap or flavour whatever. And as he surpa.s.ses all others alike in breadth and delicacy of perception, in sweep and subtilty of thought, in vastness of grasp and minuteness of touch, in fineness of fibre and length and strength of line; so all these are faithfully reflected in his use of language. There is none other so overwhelming in its power, none so irresistible in its sweetness. If his intellect could crush the biggest and toughest problems into food, his tongue was no less able to voice in all fitting accents the results of that tremendous digestion. Coleridge, the profoundest of critics, calls him "an oceanic mind," and this language, as expressing the idea of mult.i.tudinous unity, is none too big for him; Hallam, the severest of critics, describes him as "thousand-souled," and this has grown into common use as no more than just; another writer makes his peculiarity to consist in "an infinite delicacy of mind"; and whatsoever of truth and fitness there may be in any or all of these expression's has a just exponent in his style.

All which may suffice to explain why it is that Shakespeare's style has no imitators. He were indeed a very hardy or else a very imbecile man, who should undertake to imitate it. All the other great English poets, however, have been imitated in this respect, and some of them with no little success. Thomson's _Castle of Indolence_, for example, is an avowed imitation of Spenser; and that, I think, is Thomson's best poem. Beattie's _Minstrel_, too, is another happy imitation of the same great original. I cannot say so much for any of Milton's or Wordsworth's imitators, though both have had many of them. But no one, apparently, ever thinks of trying to tilt in Shakespeare's t.i.tanic armour.

MORAL SPIRIT.

Much of what may need to be said on this topic will come in more fitly in speaking of particular plays and characters. A few observations of a very inclusive scope will be sufficient here.

And I will begin by saying that soundness in this respect is the corner-stone of all artistic excellence. Virtue, or the loving of worthy objects, and in a worthy manner, is most a.s.suredly the highest interest of mankind;--an interest so vital and fundamental, that nothing which really conflicts with it, or even postpones it to any other regards, can possibly stand the test of any criticism rooted in the principles of human nature. To offend in this point is indeed to be guilty of all: things must be substantially right here, else there can be nothing right about them. So that, if an author's moral teaching or moral influence be essentially bad; or even if it be materially loose and unsound, so as to unstring the mind from thinking and doing that which is right; nay, even if it be otherwise than positively wholesome and elevating as a whole; then I more than admit that no amount of seeming intellectual or poetical merit ought to s.h.i.+eld his workmans.h.i.+p from reprobation, and this too on the score of art. But then, on the other hand, I must insist that our grounds of judgment in this matter be very large and liberal; and that to require or to expect a poet to teach better morals than are taught by Nature and Providence argues either a disqualifying narrowness of mind in us, or else a certain moral valetudinarianism which poetry is not bound to respect. For a poet has a right to the benefit of being tried by the moral sense and reason of mankind: it is indeed to that seat of judgment that every great poet virtually appeals; and the verdict of that tribunal must be an ultimate ruling to us as well as to him.

But one of the first things to be considered here is the natural relation of Morality to Art. Now I believe Art cannot be better defined than as the creation or the expression of the Beautiful. And truth is the first principle of all Beauty. But when I say this, I of course imply that truth which the human mind is essentially const.i.tuted to receive as such. And in that truth the moral element holds, const.i.tutionally, the foremost place. I mean, that the human mind draws and cannot but draw to that point, in so far as it is true to itself: for the moral consciousness is the rightful sovereign in the soul of man, or it is nothing; it cannot accept a lower seat without forfeiting all its rights, and disorganizing the whole intellectual house. So that a thing cannot be morally false and artistically true at the same time. And in so far as any workmans.h.i.+p sins in the former kind, just so far, whatever other elements of the Beautiful it may have, it still lacks the very bond of order which is necessary, to retain them in power; nay, the effect of those other elements is to cultivate a taste which the whole thing fails to satisfy; what of true beauty is present tends to awaken a craving for that part which is wanting.

Nor need we have any fear but that in the long run things will come right in this matter. In this, however, as in most things, truth is the daughter of time. The moral sense and reason is so strong a force in the calm and disinterested judgments of mankind, that it must and will prevail: its verdict may be some time in coming, but come it will, sooner or later, and will ultimately have things all its own way. For the aesthetic conscience is probably the most impartial and inexorable of the human powers; and this, because it acts most apart from any regards of self-interest or any apprehension of consequences.

The elections of taste are in a special sort exempt both from hope of profit and from fear of punishment. And man's sense of the Beautiful is so much in the keeping of his moral reason,--secret keeping indeed, and all the surer for being secret,--that it cannot be bribed or seduced to a _constant_ admiration of any beauty where the moral element is wanting, or even where it is excluded from its rightful place. In other words, the law of goodness or of moral rect.i.tude is so closely interwoven with the nature and truth of things, that the human mind will not set up its rest with any workmans.h.i.+p in Art where that law is either set at nought or discrowned. Its natural and just prerogatives will a.s.sert themselves in spite of us; and their triumph is a.s.sured the moment we go to resisting them. That which appeals merely to our sense of the Beautiful, and which has nothing to recommend it but as it touches that sense, must first of all have the moral element of beauty, and this too in the foremost place, else it stands no chance of a permanent hold upon us.

It is indeed true that works of art, or things claiming to be such, in which this law of natural proportion is not respected or not observed, may have a transient popularity and success: nay, their success may be the greater, or at least the louder and more emphatic, for that very disproportion: the mult.i.tude may, and in fact generally do, go after such in preference to that which is better. And even men not exactly of the mult.i.tude, but still without the preparation either of a natural or a truly educated taste,--men in whom the sense of beauty is outvoiced by cravings for what is sensational, and who are ever mistaking the gratification of their lower pa.s.sions for the satisfaction of their aesthetic conscience;--such men may be and often are won to a pa.s.sing admiration of works in which the moral law of Art is plainly disregarded: but they seldom tie up with them; indeed their judgment never stays long enough in one place to acquire any weight; and no man of true judgment in such things ever thinks of referring to their preference but as a thing to be avoided. With this spirit of ignorant or lawless admiration the novelty of yesterday is eclipsed by the novelty of to-day; other things being equal, the later instance of disproportion always outbids the earlier. For so this spirit is ever taking to things which are impotent to reward the attention they catch. And thus men of such taste, or rather such want of taste, naturally fall in with the genius of sensationalism; which, whatever form it takes on, soon wears that form out, and has no way to sustain itself in life but by continual transmigration. Wherever it fixes, it has to keep straining higher and higher: under its rule, what was exciting yesterday is dull and insipid to-day; while the excess of to-day necessitates a further excess to-morrow; and the inordinate craving which it fosters must still be met with stronger and stronger emphasis, till at last exhaustion brings on disgust, or the poor thing dies from blowing so hard as to split its cheeks.

It is for these reasons, no doubt, that no artist or poet who aims at present popularity, or whose mind is possessed with the spirit of such popularity, ever achieves lasting success. For the great majority of men at any one time have always preferred, and probably always will prefer, that which is disproportioned, and especially that which violates the law of moral proportion. This, however, is not because the mult.i.tude have no true sense of the Beautiful, but because that sense is too slow in their minds to prevent their being caught and carried away by that which touches them at lower points. Yet that sense is generally strong enough to keep them from standing to the objects of their present election; so that it is ever drawing them back one by one to the old truth from which the new falsehood withdrew them. Thus, however the popular current of the day may set, the judgment of the wise and good will ultimately give the law in this matter; and in that judgment the aesthetic and the moral conscience will ever be found to coincide. So that he who truly works upon the principle, "Fit audience let me find, though few," will in the long run have the mult.i.tude too: he will not indeed be their first choice, but he will be their last: their first will be ever s.h.i.+fting its objects, but their last will stand firm. For here we may justly apply the aphoristic saying of Burke: "Man is a most unwise and most wise being: the individual is foolish; the mult.i.tude is foolish for the moment, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise."

I have said that in the legislation of Art the moral sense and reason must not only have a voice, but a prerogative voice: I have also said that a poet must not be required to teach better morals than those of Nature and Providence. Now the law of moral proportion in Art may be defeated as well by overworking the moral element as by leaving it out or by making too little of it. In other words, redundancy of conscience is quite as bad here as deficiency; in some respects it is even worse, because its natural effect is to set us on our guard against the subtle invasions of pious fraud: besides, the deficiency we can make up for ourselves, but the evil of such suspicions is not so easily cured. For of all the things that enter into human thought, I suppose morality is the one wherein we are naturally least tolerant of special-pleading; and any thing savouring of this is apt to awaken our jealousy at once; probably from a sort of instinct, that, the better the cause, the less need there is, and the more danger there is too, of acting as its attorney or advocate. And the temptation to "lie for G.o.d" is one to which professed moral teachers are so exposed, that their lessons seldom have much effect: I even suspect that, in many cases, if not in most, their moralizing is of so obtrusive a kind, that it rather repels than wins the confidence of the pupils.

Then too moral demonstrativeness is never the habit either of the best poets or of the best men. True virtue indeed is a very modest and retiring quality; and we naturally feel that they who have most of it have "none to speak of." Or, to take the same thing on another side, virtue is a law of action, and not a distinct object of pursuit: those about us may know what object we are pursuing, but the mind with which we pursue it is a secret to them; they are not obliged to know it; and when we undertake to force that knowledge upon them, then it is that they just will not receive it. They will sometimes learn it from our life, never from our lips. Thus a man's moral rect.i.tude has its proper seat inside of him, and is then most conspicuous when it stays out of sight, and when, whatever he does and wherever he goes, he carries it with him as a thing of course, and without saying or even thinking any thing about it. It may be that our moral instincts are made to work in this way, because any ambition of conscience, any pride or ostentation of virtue, any air of moral vanity or conceit, any wearing of rect.i.tude on the outside, as if put on for effect, or "to be seen of men," if it be not essentially fict.i.tious and false, is certainly in the most direct course of becoming so. And how much need there still is of those eloquently silent lessons in virtue which are fitted to inspire the thing without any boasting of the name,--all this may well be judged when we consider how apt men are to build their hopes on that which, as Burke says, "takes the man from his house, and sets him on a stage,--which makes him up an artificial creature, with painted, theatric sentiments, fit to be seen by the glare of candlelight."

These positions indicate, I believe, pretty clearly the right course for poetry to pursue in order to keep the just law of moral proportion in Art. Ethical didacticism is quite out of place in workmans.h.i.+p of this kind. To go about moralizing as of set purpose, or to be specially dealing in formal precepts of duty, is not the poet's business. I repeat, that moral demonstrativeness and poetry do not go well together. A poet's conscience of virtue is better kept to himself, save as the sense and spirit thereof silently insinuate themselves into the shapings of his hand, and so live as an undercurrent in the natural course of truth and beauty. If he has the genius and the heart to see and to represent things just as they really are, his moral teaching cannot but be good; and the less it stands out as a special aim, the more effective it will be: but if, for any purpose, however moral, he goes to representing things otherwise than as they are, then just so far his moral teaching will miss its mark: and if he takes, as divers well-meaning persons have done, to flouris.h.i.+ng his ethical robes in our faces, then he must be content to pa.s.s with us for something less or something more than a poet: we may still read him indeed from a mistaken sense of duty; but we shall never be drawn to him by an unsophisticated love of the Beautiful and the True.

So much for what I hold to be the natural relation of Morality to Art.