The Catholic World
Chapter 81 : But still more may we say that, in all such positions as that which we have a.s.signed

But still more may we say that, in all such positions as that which we have a.s.signed to Shakespeare, there has always been a culminating point to which succeeds decline--if not downfall. It is so in art.

Immediately after the death of Raphael, and the dispersion of his school, art took a downward direction, and has never risen again to the same height. And while he marks the highest elevation ever reached in the arts of Europe, a similar observation will apply to their particular schools. Leonardo and Luini in Lombardy; the Carracci in Bologna; Fra Angelico in Umbria; Garofalo in Ferrara, not only take the place of chiefs in their respective districts, but mark the period from which degeneracy has to date. And so surely is it in our case, whatever may have been the course of literature which led up to Shakespeare, without p.r.o.nouncing judgment on Spenser, or "rare Ben Jonson," it is certain that after him, although England has possessed great poets, there stands not one forward among them as Shakespeare's compet.i.tor. Milton, and Dryden, and Addison, and Rowe have given us specimens of high dramatic writing of no mean quality; others as well, and even these have written much and n.o.bly, in lofty as in familiar verse; yet not one has the public judgment of the nation placed on a level with him. The intermediate s.p.a.ce from them to our own times has left only the traces of a weak and enervated school. It would be unbecoming to speak disparagingly of the poets of the present age; but no one, I believe, has ventured to consider them as superior to the n.o.ble spirits of our Augustan age. The easy descent from the loftiest eminence is not easily reclimbed.

Surely, then, we may consider Shakespeare, as an ancient mythologist would have done, as "enskied" among "the invulnerable clouds," where no shaft, even of envy, can a.s.sail him. From this elevation we may safely predict that he never can be plucked.

III.

The next point which seems to claim attention is the very root of all that I have said or shall have still to say. To what does Shakespeare owe this supremacy, or whence flow all the extraordinary qualities which we attribute to him? You are all prepared with the answer in one single word his GENIUS.

The genius of Shakespeare is our familiar thought and ready expression when we study him, and when we characterize him. Nevertheless, simple and intelligible as is the word, it is extremely difficult to a.n.a.lyze or to define it. Yet everything that is great and beautiful in his writings seems to require an explanation of the cause to which it owes its origin.

One great characteristic of genius, easily and universally admitted, is, that it is a gift, and not an acquisition. It belongs inherently to the person possessing it; it cannot be transmitted by heritage; it cannot be infused by parental affection; it cannot be bestowed by earliest care; neither can it be communicated by the most finished {557} culture or the most studied education. It must be congenital, or rather inborn to its possessor. It is as much a living, a natural power, as is reason to every man. As surely as the very first germ of the plant contains in itself the faculty of one day evolving from itself leaves, flowers, and fruit, so does genius hold, however hidden, however unseen, the power to open, to bring forth, and to mature what other men cannot do, but what to it is instinctive and almost spontaneous. It may begin to manifest itself with the very dawn of reason; it may remain asleep for years, till a spark, perhaps accidentally, kindles up into a sudden and irrepressible splendor that unseen intellectual fuel which has been almost unknown to its unambitious owner.

In our own minds we easily distinguish between the highest abilities or the most rare attainments, when the fruit of education and of application, and what we habitually distinguish as the manifestation of genius. But still we do not find it so easy to reduce to words this mental distinction; the one, after all, however gracefully and however brightly, walks upon the earth, adorning it by the good or fair things which it scatters on its way; the other has wings, and flies above the surface--it is like the aurora of Homer or of Thorwaldsen, which, as it flies above the plane of mortal actions, sheds down its flowers along its brilliant path upon those worthy to gaze upward toward it.

We connect in our minds with genius the ideas of flas.h.i.+ng splendor and eccentric movement. It is an intellectual meteor, the laws of which cannot be defined or reduced to any given theory. We regard it with a certain awe, and leave it to soar or to droop, to s.h.i.+ne or disappear, to dash irregularly first in one direction and then in another; no one dare curb it or direct it; but all feel sure that its course, however inexplicable, is subject to higher and controlling rule. But in order to define more closely what we in reality understand by genius, it may be well to consider its action in divided and more restricted spheres of activity. For although we habitually attribute this singular quality to many, and often but on light grounds, it is seldom that we do so seriously and deliberately without some qualifying epithet. We speak of a military genius, of a mechanical genius, of a poetical genius, of a musical genius, or of an artistic genius. All these expressions contain a restrictive clause. We do not understand when we use them that the person to whom they were attributed possessed any power beyond the limits of a particular sphere. We do not mean by the use of the word genius that the soldier knew anything of poetry, or the printer of mechanism. We understand that each in his own profession or stage of excellence possessed a complete elevation over the bulk of those who followed the same pursuits; a superiority so visible, so acknowledged, and so clearly individual, that no one else considered it inferiority, still less felt shame at not being able to rise to the same level. They gather round them acknowledged disciples and admirers, who rather glory to have been guided by their teaching, and formed on their example.

And in what consisted that complete though limited excellence? If I might venture to express a judgment, I would say that genius in these different courses of science or art may be defined a natural sympathy with all that relates to each of them, with the power of giving full and certain execution to the mental conception. The military genius is one who, either untrained by studious preparation, or else starting out of the lines in which many were ranged level with himself, seizes the staff of command, and receives the homage of comrades and superiors. While others have been plodding through the long drill of theory and of practice, he is found to have discovered a new system of the science, bold, irregular, but successful. But to possess this genius, there must be a universal sympathy with all that relates {558} to its own peculiar province. The military genius of which we are speaking must embrace or acquire that which relates to the soldier's life and duty, from the _dress_ of a single soldier, from his duties in the sentry-box, or on the picquet, to the practice of the regiment and the evolutions of a field-day; from the complete command of tens of thousands on the battle-field, with an eagle's eye and a lion's heart, to the scientific planning, on the chessboard of an empire, of the campaign, which he meditates, move by move and check by check, till the final victory is crowned in the capital city. He who has not given proof of his being equal to all this, has not made good his claim to military genius. But such a one will find, wherever he puts his hand, generals and marshals, each able to command a host, or to take his place in his roughest of enterprises.

I need not pa.s.s through other forms of genius to reach similar results; Stephenson, from the labor of the mine, creating that system of mechanical motion, which may be said to have subdued the world, and bound the earth in iron links; Mozart giving concerts at the age of seven that astonished gray-headed musicians; Raphael, before the ordinary age of finished pupilage, master of every known detail in art of oil or fresco, drawing, expression, and grand composition; Giotto, caught in the field as a young shepherd by Cimabue, drawing his sheep upon a stone, and soon becoming the master of modern art. [Footnote 107] These and many others repeat to us what I have said of the military genius--an inborn capacity, comprehensive and complete, with the power of fully carrying out the suggestions of mind. Had there been a single portion of their pursuits in which they did not excel, if the result of their work had not exhibited the happy union and concord of the many qualities requisite for its perfection, they never would have attained the attribution of genius.

[Footnote 107: The early manifestation of artistic power is so frequent and well known, that it would be superfluous to enumerate other instances. The expression _"anch' io son pittore"_ is become proverbial. One of the Carracci, on being translated from an inferior profession to the family studio, was found at once to possess the pictorial skill of his race. At the present, Mintropp at Dusseldorf, and Ackermann at Berlin, are both instances of very high artists, the one in drawing, the other in sculpture, both originally shepherds.]

If this sympathy with one branch of higher pursuits pa.s.ses beyond it and a.s.sociates with it a similar facility of acquisition and execution in some other and distinct art or science, it is clear that the claim to genius is higher and more extensive. Raphael was before the world a painter, but he could scarcely have been so without embracing every other department of art. Before the science of perspective was matured or popularly known, when, in consequence, defects are to be found in the disposition of figures, and in the adjustment of aerial distances, [Footnote 108] his architecture shows an instinctive familiarity with its rules and proportions; a proof that he possessed an architectural eye. And consequently the one statue which he is supposed to have carved, and the one palace which he is said to have built, show how easily he could have undertaken and executed beautiful works in either of those two cla.s.ses of art. In Orcagna and Michelangelo we have the three branches of art supremely united; and the second of these adds poetry and literature to his artistic excellence. In like manner, Leonardo has left proof of most varied and accurate mechanical as well as literary genius.

[Footnote 108: See Mr. Lloyd's article on "Raphael's School of Athens," in Mr. Woodward's _Fine Art Quarterly Review_, January, 1864, p. 67.]

It is evident, however, that while a genius has its point of concentration, every remove from this, though wider, will be fainter and less complete. We may describe it as Shakespeare himself describes glory, and say:

"Genius is like a circle in the water, Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself, Till, by broad spreading, it disperse to naught."

(_"Henry VI.," act i., scene 3._)

The sympathies with more remote subjects and pursuits will be rather the means of ill.u.s.tration, adornment, and {559} pleasing variety, than for the essential requirements of the princ.i.p.al aim. But though less minute in their application, in the hand of genius they will be wonderfully accurate and apt.

IV.

All that I have been saying is applicable in the most complete and marvellous way to Shakespeare's genius. His sympathies are universal, perfect in their own immediate use, infinitely varied, and strikingly beautiful, when they reach remoter objects. And hence, though at first sight he might be cla.s.sified among those who have displayed a literary genius, he stretches his mind and his feelings so beyond them on every side, that to him, almost, perhaps, beyond any other man, the simple distinctive, without any qualification, belongs. No one need fear to call Shakespeare simply a grand, a sublime genius.

The centre-point of his sympathies is clearly his dramatic art. From this they expand, for many degrees, with scarce perceptible diminution, till they lose themselves in far distant, and, to him, unexplored s.p.a.ce. This nucleus of his genius has certainly never been equalled before or since. Its essence consists in what is the very soul of the dramatic idea, the power to throw himself into the situation, the circ.u.mstances, the nature, the acquired habits, the feelings, true or fict.i.tious, of every character which he introduces.

This forms, in fact, the most perfect of sympathies. We do not, of course, use the word in that more usual sense of harmony of affection, or consent of feeling. Shakespeare has sympathy as complete for Shylock or Iago as he as for Arthur or King Lear. For a time he lives in the astute villain as in the innocent child; he works his entire power of thought into intricacies of the traitor's brain; he makes his heart beat in concord with the usurer's sanguinary spite, and then, like some beautiful creature in the animal world, draws himself out of the hateful evil, and is himself again; and able, even, often to hold his own n.o.ble and gentle qualities as a mirror, or exhibit the loftiest, the most generous, and amiable examples of our nature. And this is all done without study, and apparently without effort. His infinitely varied characters come naturally into their places, never for a moment lose their proprieties, their personality, and the exact flexibility which results from the necessary combination in every man of many qualities. From the beginning to the end each one is the same, yet reflecting in himself the lights and shadows which flit around him.

This extraordinary versatility stands in striking contrast with the dramatic productions of other countries. The Greek tragedian is Greek throughout--his subjects, his mythology, his sentences, play wonderfully indeed, but yet restrictedly, within a given sphere. And Rome is but the imitator in all its literature of its great mistress and model.

"Graiis eloquium, Gratis dedit ore rotundo, Musa loqui."

Even through the French school, with the strict adhesion to the ancient rule of the unities, seems to have descended the partiality for what may be called the chastely cla.s.sical subjects. Not so with Shakespeare.

Who, a stranger might ask, is the man, and where was he born, and where does he live, that not only his acts and scenes are placed in any age, or in any land, but that he can fill his stage with the very living men of the time and place represented; make them move as easily as if he held them in strings; and make them speak not only with general conformity to their common position, but with individual and distinctive propriety, so that each is different from the rest? Did he live in ancient Rome, strolling the Forum, or climbing the Capitol; hear ancient matrons converse with modest dignity; listen to conspirators among the columns of its porticos; mingle among senators around Pompey's {560} statue; or with plebeians crowding to hear Brutus or Anthony harangue? Was he one accustomed to idle in the piazza of St. Mark, or shoot his gondola under the Rialto? Or was he a knight or even archer in the fields of France or England during the period of the Plantagenets or Tudors, and witnessed and wrote down the great deeds of those times, and knew intimately and personally each puissant lord who distinguished himself by his valor, by his wisdom, or even by his crimes? Did he live in the courts of princes, perchance holding some office which enabled him to listen to the grave utterances of kings and their counsellors, or to the witty sayings of court jesters? Did he consort with banished princes, and partake of their sports or their sufferings? In fine, did he live in great cities, or in shepherds' cottages, or in fields and woods; and does he date from John and live on to the eighth Henry--a thread connecting in himself the different epochs of mediaeval England? One would almost say so; or multiply one man into many, whose works have been united under one man.

This ubiquity, if we may so call it, of Shakespeare's sympathies, const.i.tutes the unlimited extent and might of his dramatic genius. It would be difficult to imagine where a boundary line could at length have been drawn, beyond which nothing original, nothing new, and nothing beautiful, could be supposed to have come forth from his mind.

We are compelled to say that his genius was inexhaustible.

V.

This rare and wonderful faculty becomes more interesting if we follow it into further details.

I remember an anecdote of Garrick, who, in company with another performer of some eminence, was walking in the country, and about to enter a village. "Let us pa.s.s off," said the younger comedian to his more distinguished companion, "as two intoxicated fellows." They did so, apparently with perfect success, being saluted by the jeers and abuse of the inhabitants. When they came forth at the other end of the village, the younger performer asked Garrick how he had fulfilled his part. "Very well," was the reply, "except that you were not perfectly tipsy in your legs."

Now, in Shakespeare there is no danger of a similar defect. Whatever his character is intended to be it is carried out to its very extremities. Nothing is forgotten, nothing overlooked. Many of you, no doubt, are aware that a controversy has long existed whether the madness of Hamlet is intended by Shakespeare to be real or simulated.

If a dramatist wished to represent one of his persons as feigning madness, that a.s.sumed condition would be naturally desired by the writer to be as like as possible to the real affliction. If the other persons a.s.sociated with him could at once discover that the madness was put on, of course the entire action would be marred, and the object for which the pretended madness was designed would be defeated by the discovery. How consummate must be the poet's art, who can have so skilfully described, to the minutest symptoms, the mental malady of a great mind, as to leave it uncertain to the present day, even among learned physicians versed in such maladies, whether Hamlet's madness was real or a.s.sumed.

This controversy may be said to have been brought to a close by one of the ablest among those in England who have every opportunity of studying the almost innumerable shades through which alienation of mind can pa.s.s. [Footnote 109] And so delicate are the changeful characteristics which Shakespeare describes, that Dr. Conolly considers that a twofold form of {561} disease is placed before us in the Danish prince. He concludes that he was laboring under real madness, yet able to put on a fict.i.tious and artificial derangement for the purposes which he kept in view. Pa.s.sing through act by act and scene by scene, a.n.a.lyzing, with experienced eye, each new symptom as it occurs, dividing and anatomatizing, with the finest scalpel, every fibre of his brain, he exhibits, step by step, the transitionary characters of the natural disease in a mind naturally, and by education, great and n.o.ble, but thrown off his pivot by the anguish of his sufferings and the strain of aroused pa.s.sion. And to this is superadded another and not genuine affection, which serves its turn with that estranged mind when it suits it to act, more especially that part which the natural ailment did not suffice for. Now, Dr. Conolly considers these symptoms so accurately as well as minutely described, that he throws out the conjecture that Shakespeare may have borrowed the account of them from some unknown papers by his son-in-law, Dr.

Hall.

[Footnote 109: "A Study of Hamlet," by John Conolly, M.D., London, 1863. In p. 52 the author quotes Mr. Coleridge and M. Killemain as holding the opinion that Shakespeare has "contrived to blend both (feigned and real madness) in the extraordinary character of Hamlet; and to join together the light of reason, the cunning of intentional error, and the involuntary disorder of a soul."]

But let it be remembered that in those days mental phenomena were by no means accurately examined or generally known. There was but little attention paid to the peculiar forms of monomania, or to its treatment, beyond restraint and often cruelty. The poor idiot was allowed, if harmless, to wander about the village or the country, to drivel or gibber amidst the teasing or ill-natured treatment of boys or rustics. The poor maniac was chained or tied in some wretched out-house, at the mercy of some heartless guardian, with no protector but the constable. Shakespeare could not be supposed, in the little town of Stratford, nor indeed in London itself, to have had opportunities of studying the influence and the appearance of mental derangement of a high-minded and finely-cultivated prince. How then did Shakespeare contrive to paint so highly-finished and yet so complex an image? Simply by the exercise of that strong sympathetic will which enabled him to transport, or rather to trans.m.u.te, himself into another personality. While this character was strongly before him he changed himself into a maniac; he felt intuitively what would be his own thought, what his feelings, were he in that situation; he played with himself the part of the madman, with his own grand mind as the basis of its action; he grasped on every side the imagery which he felt would have come into his mind, beautiful even when dislorded, sublime even when it was grovelling, brilliant even when dulled, and clothed it in words of fire and of tenderness, with a varied rapidity which partakes of wildness and of sense. He needed not to look for a model out of himself, for it cost him no effort to change the angle of his mirror and sketch his own countenance awry. It was but little for him to pluck away the crown from reason and contemplate it dethroned.

Before taking leave of Dr. Conolly's most interesting monography, I will allow myself to make only one remark. Having determined to represent Hamlet in this anomalous and perplexing condition, it was of the utmost importance to the course and end of this sublime drama, that one princ.i.p.al incident should be most decisively separated from Hamlet's reverse of mind. Had it been possible to attribute the appearance of the Ghost, as the Queen, his mother, does attribute it in the fifth act, to the delusion of his bewildered phantasy, the whole groundwork of the drama would have crumbled beneath its superinc.u.mbent weight. Had the spectre been seen by Hamlet, or by him first, we should have been perpetually troubled with the doubt whether or not it was the hallucination of a distracted, or the invention of a deceitful brain. But Shakespeare felt the necessity of making this apparition be held for a reality, and therefore he makes it the very first incident in his tragedy, antecedent to the slightest symptom {562} of either natural or affected derangement, and makes it first be seen by two witnesses together, and then conjointly by a third unbelieving and fearless witness. It is the testimony of these three which first brings to the knowledge of the incredulous prince this extraordinary occurrence. One may doubt whether any other writer has ever made a ghost appear successively to those whom we may call the wrong persons, before showing himself to the one whom alone he cared to visit. The extraordinary exigencies of Shakespeare's plot rendered necessary this unusual fiction. And it serves, moreover, to give the only color of justice to acts which otherwise must have appeared unqualified as mad freaks or frightful crimes.

What Dr. Conolly has done for Hamlet and Ophelia, Dr. Bucknill had previously performed on a more extensive scale. In his "Psychology of Shakespeare" [Footnote 110] he has minutely investigated the mental condition of Macbeth, King Lear, Timon, and other characters. On Hamlet he seems inclined to take a different view from Dr. Conolly; inasmuch as he considers the simulated madness the princ.i.p.al feature, and the natural unsoundness which it is impossible to overlook as secondary. But this eminent physician, well known for his extensive studies of insanity, bears similar testimony to the extraordinary accuracy of Shakespeare's delineations of mental diseases; the nicety with which he traces their various steps in one individual, the accuracy with which he distinguishes these morbid affections in different persons. He seems unable to account for the exact minuteness in any other way than by external observation. He acknowledges that "indefinable possession of genius, call it spiritual tact or insight, or whatever term may suggest itself, by which the great lords of mind estimate all phases of mind with little aid from reflected light," as the mental instrument through which Shakespeare looked upon others at a distance or within reach of minute observation. Still he seems to think that Shakespeare must have had many opportunities of observing mental phenomena. I own I am more inclined to think that the process by which the genius of Shakespeare reached this painful yet strange accuracy was rather that of introversion than of external observation.

At any rate, it is most interesting to see eminent physicians maintaining by some means or other that Shakespeare arrived by some sort of intuition at the possession of a psychological or even medical knowledge, fully verified and proved to be exact by the researches two centuries later of distinguished men in a science only recently developed. Mrs. Jameson has well distinguished the different forms of mental aberration in Shakespeare's characters, when she says that "Constance is frantic, Lear is mad, Ophelia is insane." [Footnote 111]

[Footnote 110: Pages 58 and 100.]

[Footnote 111: "Characteristics of Women." New York 1833, p. 142.]

VI.

This last quotation may serve to introduce a further and a more delicate test of Shakespeare's insight into character. That a man should be able to throw himself into a variety of mind and characters among his fellow-men, may be not unreasonably expected. He has naturally a community of feelings, of pa.s.sions, of temptations, and of motives with them. He can understand what is courage, what ambition, what strength or feebleness of mind. Inward observation and matured experience help much to guide him to a conception and delineation of the character of his fellow-men. But of the stronger emotions, the wilder pa.s.sions, the subdued gentleness and tenderness, the heroic endurance, the meek bearing, and the saintly patience of the woman, he can have had no experience. Looking into himself for a reflection, he will probably find a blank.

{563}

It has often been said that in his female characters Shakespeare is not equal to himself. The work to which I have just alluded meets, I think completely, this objection, which, I believe, even Schlegel raises. It required a lady, with mind highly cultivated, with the nicest powers of discrimination, and with happiness of expression, to vindicate at once Shakespeare and her s.e.x. The difficulty of this task can hardly be appreciated without the study of its performance. Its great difficulty consists in the almost family resemblance of the different portraits which make up Shakespeare's female gallery. There is scarcely any room for events, even for incident, still less for actions, say for bold and unfeminine deeds. Several of the heroines of Shakespeare are subjected to similar persecutions, and almost the same trials. In almost every one the affections and their expression have alone to interest us. From Miranda, the desert-nurtured child in the simplicity of untempted innocence, to Isabella in her cloistered virtue, or Hermione in her unyielding fort.i.tude--there are such shades, such varying yet delicate tints, that not two of these numerous conceptions can be said to resemble another. And whence did Shakespeare derive his models? Some are lofty queens, others most n.o.ble ladies, some foreigners, some native; different types in mind and heart, as in the lineament or complexion. Where did he find them?

Where did he meet them? In the cottages of Stratford, or in the purlieus of Blackfriars? Among the ladies of the court, or in the audience in his pit? No one can say--no one need say. They were the formations of his own quickened and fertile brain, which required but one stroke, one line, to sketch him a portrait to which he would give immortality. Far more difficult was this success, and not less completely was it achieved, in that character which medical writers seem hardly to believe could be but a conception. We may compare the mind of Shakespeare to a diamond pellucid, bright, and untinted, cut into countless polished facets, which, in constant movement, at every smallest change of direction or of angle caught a new reflection, so that not one of its brilliant mirrors could be for a moment idle, but by a power beyond its control was ever busy with the reflection of innumerable images, either distinct or running into one another, or repeated each so clearly as to allow him, when he chose, to fix it in his memory.

VII.

We may safely conclude that, in whatever const.i.tutes the dramatic art in its strictest sense, Shakespeare possessed matchless sympathies with all its attributes. The next and most essential quality required for true genius is the power to give outward life to the inward conception. Without this the poet is dumb. He may be a "mute, inglorious Milton;" he cannot be a speaking, n.o.ble Shakespeare. I should think that I was almost insulting such an audience, were I to descant upon Shakespeare's position among the bards and writers of England, and of the modern world. Upon this point there can scarcely be a dissentient opinion. His language is the purest and best, his verses the most flowing and rich; and as for his sentiments, it would be difficult without the command of his own language to characterize them. No other writer has ever given such periods of sententious wisdom.