Platform Monologues Part 9

The curiosity which followed the voyages of Drake or Raleigh to America, followed also the explorations of the scholar in the ever-opening seas of ancient literature. The age became one of wide and plenteous reading.

Moreover men read then, as they ought to read, for the matter. They tore the heart out of books, from Homer to Seneca; they were greedy for the substance, the thoughts, the imaginations, the fancies. If they could not read the originals, they insisted on the translations. Nor did they stay at the cla.s.sics. They devoured books in Italian and French. Never has England been so cosmopolitan, at least so European, in its absorption of ideas and knowledge. It is only since the icebound Puritan days that England has become insular, self-contained, in part hugely conceited, and in part absurdly diffident, concerning itself. The best work of Byron and Sh.e.l.ley aimed at breaking down this att.i.tude, and if we are again growing out of our insularity--which is open to much doubt--it is in no small measure due to writers of their kind.

I do not offer all these commonplaces as information. I offer them simply as reminders, and as a necessary introduction to the remark which I have next to make--that the enlightenment, the education, above all the spirit, derived from this wealth of reading were precisely that sort of enlightenment and education and spirit which make for splendid poetry. The learning of the day was in no wise scientific in the narrower modern sense. It was not of the material and utilitarian, still less of the sordid, kind. The age was the least Philistine of all epochs of English history. We were not yet a nation of shopkeepers. It is inevitable that nowadays an immense proportion of our study and reading should run to social and economic questions, to applied sciences, to the investigation of germs and gases, political problems, electric forces, and manures. There is, I have often maintained, no necessary antagonism whatever between these intellectual pursuits and the pursuit of art and literature. One should be but the complement of the other. Goethe and Sh.e.l.ley could combine the love of both science and poetry. If the physicist and the artistic creator quarrel, then each is blind in one mental eye.

Be that as it may, the fact for us just now is that the reading and learning of those s.p.a.cious Elizabethan days were such that, with the brightening of the intellect, there was no dimming of the imagination.

On the contrary, the effect of the recovery and the spread of all the rich, warm, many-coloured creations of the world's best minds, was to steep the English nation in enthusiasm for great lyrics, great dramas, any great production which carried with it the warmth and brightness and exhilarating breath of n.o.ble poetry.

There was no weakening of character in this, no loss of practical efficiency. A Sidney or a Raleigh could fight as well as turn a verse; a Shakespeare could prove as sound a man of business as he was a poet.

Elizabethan men were all-round men, like the best men in Periclean Athens.

Moreover, the recovered cla.s.sics imparted not only enthusiasm, but standards. An ambitious writer of the Elizabethan age must do his best to live up to Homer and Plato, to Virgil and Catullus, just as he must live up to Petrarch.

And one thing more. When Spenser or Shakespeare or their contemporaries took up their pens, there was ready to their use the magnificent Elizabethan English tongue--a store inexhaustibly rich, and all the richer for being free from huge piles of needless rubbish, called vocabulary, which modern times have heaped into the long-suffering dictionary. The speech of the English Bible, which rightly seems to us so inimitably n.o.ble in its simplicity, was but the contemporary speech of educated England. Fine expressive words had not yet been soiled with all ign.o.ble use. They had not been debauched by slang or vulgarized by affectation. The Elizabethan language possessed the n.o.ble solid grandeur of a statue of Phidias or Angelo. At its best now it is apt to pose like the enervated Apollo Belvedere or an over-refined production of Canova.

Says that vigorous writer, Lowell: "In reading Hakluyt's Voyages, we are almost startled now and then to find that even common sailors could not tell the story of their wanderings without rising to an almost Odyssean strain, and habitually used a diction that we should be glad to buy back from desuetude at any cost."

Here, then, is an epoch of history, prosperous, high-spirited, tolerant, enterprising, joyous, alert for knowledge, enamoured of high fancies and imagination. Here also is a language of ample scope and n.o.ble powers.

And into the midst of a London like this there comes up from Stratford, we know not how, a man marvellously dowered with all those supreme gifts which I have endeavoured to describe.

Towards the making of Shakespeare, Nature has contributed her utmost.

For the full encouragement of his genius the environment is most apt. It remains briefly to see what experience did for him, or what he did for himself. What was his preparation?

His origin was lowly, and, as with Robert Burns, we may be glad of it.

He thus saw intimately certain sides of life and conditions of men which otherwise he might never have touched so closely. He learned to know all their strange and nave humours, their ignorance and muddlement. From them he realised those strong and elemental pa.s.sions which finer folk attenuate or disguise. He acquired a stock of sinewy and home-coming Saxon phrase, which often stood him in good stead, and which forms no small factor in his vast eloquence. He is manifestly a man who forgot nothing. In after days he mingled with wits and players, with poets and peers, but, while ever acquiring diction of wider range and choicer degree, he kept always ready to hand the language of peasant and clown.

No man ever enjoyed more full instruction in the speech, the thoughts, or the manners, of all degrees of men.

Of women toward the social summits he perhaps never knew so much, but he had not studied their humbler sisters in vain, and beneath all the width of ruff and opulence of silk, he knew well enough what primal feelings lurked, what affections, what jealousies, what caprices of the eternal feminine. As for the mere externals of their behaviour, he had abundant opportunities of noting them.

When modern readers censure Shakespeare for dubious things which he makes his gentlewomen say and do, they are apt to forget how surprising were the canons of behaviour and decorum for gentlewomen under good Queen Bess. For my part I am prepared in all such cases to give their keen-eyed and marvellous contemporary the benefit of the doubt. He would not represent ladies as any coa.r.s.er than they were.

Of his education, in the narrower sense, we can really make sure of little; but, like that of Burns, it was indisputably far more liberal than the devotees of miracle are wishful to suppose. To-day no competent inquirer doubts that, with the grammar-school at Stratford opening its doors free to the son of John Shakespeare, burgess and alderman, the opportunity was grasped by that struggling but ambitious person. Nor is it doubted that there, under some Holofernes or Sir Hugh Evans, the boy learned his Lyly's grammar, and read his share of Latin authors--his Terence, Ovid, and Seneca, together with Baptista "the old Mantuan." In French he a.s.suredly did more than dabble, if his _Henry V_ be taken as any proof. The other day Mr. Churton Collins essayed to prove, by an array of quotations, that he was tolerably read in Greek. For my own part I confess that I find, in the pa.s.sages of aeschylus cited with pa.s.sages of Shakespeare, no more than happy coincidences in the thinking of two kindred original minds. Yet some Greek at least he had.

Our witness is Ben Jonson. Rare Ben was himself a monument of learning, and to him the ordinary mortal's modic.u.m was but a trifle. When he observes "and though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek," we should do well to take him as meaning precisely what he says. If he had meant "no Latin and no Greek," he would have written it so; the line would have scanned as easily, and the desired point would have been made still more effective. Add to these studies of Shakespeare his early study in the Bible; early familiarity with that book, apart from all questions of character and religion, will always shoot a rich woof of word and thought through all the warp of writing.

Remember that Shakespeare at school was not distracted by hours of mathematics and other agreeable but alien pursuits. Remember also--what is so strangely forgotten--that he was a genius, whose capacious mind would grasp and retain with unique facility. Remember that at school there are boys and boys, and that, while some of them waste time in laboriously endeavouring to a.s.similate the sh.e.l.ls of knowledge along with the oysters, others instinctively use their powers of secretion to better purpose. Remember also that in Elizabethan times school-boy study was a far more strenuous matter than it is in these degenerate days, and that it was not chiefly directed towards examinations.

Be a.s.sured that Shakespeare's school education was as good as your own; or, if you are not convinced of that, be at least a.s.sured that an illiterate man never did, and never will, write even tolerable poetry.

It may seem as if I were acting the traitor to my own profession when I rejoice that Shakespeare was never turned into what is technically called a learned man. He was something better, he was an educated man.

You do not need erudition to be a creator of great works of imagination, whether it be erudition concerning Latin syntax or concerning the Origin of the Concept or concerning the life-history of the worm. What you chiefly require to know is the human heart; and the best books for that knowledge are human beings. Learning is after all but the milch-cow of education. If Shakespeare had been as learned as Ben Jonson, or the so-called University Wits, he might perchance have come to view mankind too much through the medium of books, as Jonson himself did, instead of through his own keen natural orbs of vision.

His soul proud science never taught to stray Far as the Solar walk or Milky Way.

No! but he had soared otherwise to the Solar walk and the Galaxy, he had gladdened at the sight of the sun flattering all Nature with his sovereign eye, and he had felt the full sense of the nocturnal heavens, thick inlaid with patines of bright gold. A learned man, says Bagehot, may study b.u.t.terflies till he forgets that they are beautiful. On the other hand, it is only fair to say that he need forget nothing of the kind. So a man may study Aristotle till he forgets that Aristotle derived his psychology from men and not men from Aristotle.

The real scandalum to Greene and the scholar playwrights was not that Shakespeare was illiterate, but that, not having studied by Cam or Isis, he had no business to be literate. He was an "upstart crow," and what right had he to be "as well able to b.u.mbast out a blank verse as the best of you?" The att.i.tude was perhaps natural to jealous rivals, but it should never have been used to show that Shakespeare was dest.i.tute of a decent school education. Perhaps the most regrettable outcome of this notion is that Milton should have written the amazing line which tells how Shakespeare

Warbled his native woodnotes wild.

Like the famous description of the crab as the little red fish which walks backwards, it contains only three demonstrable errors. Shakespeare does not warble, his notes are not woodnotes, and they are not wild.

He was, moreover, a man of the sort whose education--even book education--never ceases. At a later date in London he manifestly absorbed numerous translations. He knew his way about his Golding's Ovid and North's Plutarch. Before he attempted those splendid poetical exercises the _Venus and Adonis_, the _Lucrece_, and the early sonnets, he had studied, like every one else, the models for sonneteers and lyrists which came from Italy and France, from Petrarch or Du Bellay. It is clear that he was familiar with the Essays of Montaigne. Earlier English literature was no sealed book to him. He also read his own contemporaries. Hence his _Lucrece_ is part Ovid, part Chaucer, part Daniel or Watson; his _Venus and Adonis_ is part Ovid, part Lodge.

Better still than reading is conversation, the rubbing of wits and furbishing of knowledge amid well-informed and bright-minded company.

Tradition tells us that Shakespeare was a member of that brilliant coterie of the Mermaid Tavern, where rare Ben presided, as glorious John presided at a later day in his favoured Coffee-house. Fuller describes the wit-combats between Shakespeare and his learned confrere, and there is no reason to doubt that the nimble man-of-war and the heavy galleon fought many a bout. Of that coterie Beaumont writes to Jonson:--

What things have we seen Done at the Mermaid! Heard words that have been So nimble and so full of subtle flame, As if that every one from whence they came Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest.

The cla.s.sical quotation, the apt allusion, would fly freely in that society. The matter of books new and old would be talked of and discussed. For the purpose of Shakespeare, here was learning to be picked up of the most telling sort. For, let us repeat, reading was then pursued on high levels, and intellectual curiosity was eager. And let us remember always that Shakespeare must have possessed an astonishing instinct for seizing the essentials, which he shaped for himself "in the quick forge and working-house of thought."

Also among the actors into whose company he was perpetually thrown there were men who had, as we should call it, toured through England and Scotland, and sometimes abroad to France, Germany, or Denmark. Scores of his acquaintances must have travelled in Italy, even if they did not return _diavoli incarnati_. Each man brought back description, information, story, which the vivid imagination of Shakespeare, as he listened, turned into abiding picture; and this, after he had chosen his theme from Cinthio or Bandello or elsewhere, he would employ for the background in his Verona or his Venice. How powerfully this can be done by the imagination of genius is well exemplified in _Wilhelm Tell_, which, from its opening verses of _Es lachelt der See_, carries in it the whole sense of Swiss landscape and Swiss air, although Schiller had never set foot in Switzerland.

Over and above all this, a man whose heart and whose interests are alike engaged in a particular profession, be he physician, or inventor, or artist, and who is ambitious to excel and prosper in that profession, will be for ever alert to every hint or lesson which will make for success. Shakespeare was from his heart a playwright; he was at the same time a shrewd business man as partner in a theatre. Not only did he love his work with all the pa.s.sion of a creator, he was also concerned to outvie his professional rivals. The plays of the Globe must be better than the plays of the Fortune. He therefore studied existing dramas, in order to surpa.s.s them, if possible, at every point. He began by recasting or improving the plays of feebler writers, and so learned to distinguish what was effective from what was not. He then went on in the effort--an easy effort it proved to him--to transcend the plays of writers of strength; to transcend them in construction, in characterisation, in intellectual matter, in humour, and in diction; and this means that his aim was, by compulsion, high.

The standard already set was a lofty one. Marlowe's mighty line was not easy to surpa.s.s. There is nothing which provokes the best efforts of genius so powerfully as formidable predecessors and rivals. It is as with the forest trees; if some grow tall, the rest will struggle to grow taller, so that they may escape from the shade into the sun. The University Wits and scholar poets, who had "climbed to the height of Seneca his style," deserve no little thanks for the making of our Shakespeare. If his pieces were to be performed before the Queen's Majesty, or the King's Majesty, and all that cultivated court, or if they were to receive the applause of the learned Benchers of Gray's Inn, they must attain a distinguished level both of living interest and of admirable poetry. Shakespeare's precursors had rendered this high perfection indispensable.

Let me insist also on another consideration, too often overlooked. The Elizabethan stage was without scenery. The bare boards, a curtain at the back, a table and inkstand to represent a court of justice, two or three ragged foils to disgrace the name of Agincourt, and the imagination of the audience did the rest. All the gorgeousness of the modern _mise-en-scene_; all the painting, mechanical contrivances, and elaborate furnishing, were wanting. There was none of that modern realism, which consists in driving a real train across a painted country or eating real sandwiches under a property tree. To a great extent all this elaborate staging has been the death of dramatic art. Among the Elizabethans, the interest depended solely on the action and the acting, on the piece and its language. All these must be excellent. They were not yet considered inferior to those of optical effect. The Elizabethans listened with their minds, not solely with their eyes.

Thus, from his teaching at school, from his wide reading, from bright and varied conversation, from a.s.siduous exercise, Shakespeare derived perpetual education. If, as Bacon declares, "reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man," then Shakespeare was trebly well equipped.

But there was another element in his training, which, for the dramatist, was worth all the rest. This was his habit of observation, an observation shrewd but sympathetic, of all sorts and conditions of men.

The experience lying between his youthful escapades at Stratford and his sober retirement thither was doubtless a wonderful polychrome. He had plodded his way among many peculiar folk as he pa.s.sed from Warwickshire to London by way of Banbury or Oxford. He had stopped at inns in strange company of fools and knaves, pedlars, roisterers and swashbucklers. He had hobn.o.bbed with dull-pated village constables. He had consorted with

Stephen Sly and old John Naps of Greece, And Peter Turf and Henry Pimpernel.

In London he had foregathered with Mrs. Quickly and haply with Doll Tearsheet. All the whimsical miscellany of the Bohemians must have been known to him. We need not doubt that he had sowed wild oats. Doubtless, if he lived the same life now, he would be looked upon askance by good people who knew nothing of his temptations. But he was no neurotic; no genius of the first rank ever is or was. He never lost control of himself, and so did not, like some of his brilliant contemporaries, tread the primrose path which leads down to futility and death. He was always pre-eminently sane. While composing his transcendent _Lear_ and _Oth.e.l.lo_, he was suing Philip Rogers for 1 15s. 10d. While his fancy roamed in the fairyland of _Midsummer Night's Dream_, his investments were in the highest degree judicious.

Elizabethan life, whether in town or country, whether among earls or tapsters, was infinitely more frank, varied, and picturesque than it can ever be again. Men and women displayed more freely their natural idiosyncrasies. Nor did the traveller rush at fifty miles an hour through all this variegated world. He saw it lingeringly and intimately, as Chaucer saw his Pilgrims, or Goldsmith his Village, or Scott his Border peasants.

Bagehot says truly that, to have experiences, one must have the experiencing nature. To make observations, one must have an observing nature, and that nature Shakespeare possessed as no other man has possessed it. He noted everything. So might another, but the superlative merit of Shakespeare's observation is that he noted all and always with humorous and universal sympathy, with an eye absolutely free from the jaundice of Carlyle, as it was free from the bookish astigmatism of Ben Jonson. His mental retina formed a perfect mirror to hold up to nature.

Whether it be true or not that he had seen a veritable Dogberry at Grendon, Bucks, it is certain that he had seen the type somewhere. Best of all, he had not seen it in irritation or contempt. If we are told that Shakespeare presents "no entire and perfect hero, no entire and perfect villain," it is simply because he had--like ourselves--never set eyes on either of those monsters. He also never made the mistake of reading himself into other men, any more than he made the artistic mistake of unlocking his heart and taking a hundred and fifty sonnets to do it. His clear objective picture is never vitiated by the desire to preach. He has no system of ethics, politics, or anything else to teach.

Doubtless Shakespeare had his own views on all important matters of life and death; but in the drama the artist's business is to present us with the kaleidoscope of life, not to insist upon our interpreting it to certain ends, of which he is to be the arbiter. You cannot, perhaps, read _Lear_ without being a better man, or _Hamlet_ without being a wiser; but you are permitted to be better and wiser in your own way, and not in some way ready mapped out for you. Do not let us talk of the ethical purpose of Shakespeare's plays. Let us only speak of their ethical effect. What that effect is has been expressed by Sh.e.l.ley thus: "The gentleness and elevation of mind connected with sacred emotions render men more amiable, more generous and wise, and lift them out of the dull vapours of the little world of self."

Last element in the making of our Shakespeare was one which I dare hardly name, in fear of the deluge of contempt which the minor prophets of artistry will pour upon my head. Well, I take my Philistine courage in my hands, and say that he was thus great because he never wrote for any special cla.s.s of the illuminati; he never troubled his soul with any other theory of art than that it should present interesting and universal truth, truth so manifestly true that it should appeal to all the world of men and women. When Angelo was asked by a sculptor in what light a certain statue should be viewed, his answer was, "in the light of the public square." A statue which will not bear the criticism of that place is a.s.suredly untrue. Shakespeare wrote for the public square, not for exhibition in the gallery of some ephemeral school of taste, nor for the private collection of some self-elected critic, who holds a pouncet-box while he applies his little artificial canons of correctness.

Doubtless a man who writes in this large ma.s.sive spirit, overlooks some trifling blemishes. "Nice customs curtesy to great kings." "Great men,"

says Landor, "often have greater faults than smaller men can find room for." Shakespeare has his, but, of all wise things that Ruskin has said of art, this--which describes our Shakespeare--is perhaps the truest: "There are two characters in which all greatness of art consists--first, the earnest and intense seizing of natural facts; then the ordering those facts by strength of human intellect, so as to make them, for all who look upon them, to the utmost serviceable, memorable and beautiful."

Literature and Life

The Literature Society of Melbourne meets monthly in order to a.s.similate true literature and to study its principles. If its President is ent.i.tled to speak its corporate mind, it approaches this task in a grateful and docile spirit.

There is, I believe, no necessity to defend the existence and aims of a Literature Society. It would be enough if we simply confessed that we meet for the enjoyment of a rational and not unelevating pleasure. It would be enough if we said that literature, like pictorial art and music, is one of the recognized resources for the gladdening of life, and that we meet in order to get as much of that high refreshment as possible in each other's company. And this, indeed, we do so far frankly acknowledge and confess.

But we also claim that there is a more serious aspect of our a.s.sociation. We believe that great literature and its zealous study produce most powerful effects, both upon our inner selves and upon the value and happiness of our lives; that they supply us with a rich equipment, both for our private thinking and feeling and also for social action and social intercourse; that from great literature we derive indefeasible resources, which form glorious company in the midst of solitude, abundant wealth in the midst of poverty, and an unfailing refuge from the too frequent harshness of circ.u.mstance.

Our objects are not those of mere dilettanti, although for my part I should blame no a.s.sociation which boldly inscribed "dilettanti" on its breezy flag. Our "literature" is not mere elegant trifling--although men who do choose to spend an occasional evening in trifling with elegance are men whom we can still afford to respect and perhaps to envy. But literature, as we understand it, is no trifling, however elegant. By literature we mean what Milton has called the "seasoned life of man preserved and stored up in books"; and the seasoned life of man is no trifle. We mean something of which the influence--or the effluence--may profoundly determine the quality of our lives, both as they affect others and as they affect ourselves.