The velvet softness of the skin is rendered with the utmost fidelity; the vestments in which the Pope is clothed are also most faithfully depicted, the damask shines with a glossy luster; the furs which form the linings of his robes are soft and natural, while the gold and silk are copied in such a manner that they do not seem to be painted, but really appear to be silk and gold. There is also a book in parchment decorated with miniatures, a most vivid imitation of the object represented, with a silver bell, finely chased, of which it would not be possible adequately to describe the beauty. Among other accessories, there is, moreover, a ball of burnished gold on the seat of the Pope, and in this—such is its clearness—the divisions of the opposite window, the shoulders of the Pope, and the walls of the room, are faithfully reflected; all these things are executed with so much care, that I fully believe no master ever has done, or ever can do anything better.
The velvet softness of the skin is rendered with the utmost fidelity; the vestments in which the Pope is clothed are also most faithfully depicted, the damask shines with a glossy luster; the furs which form the linings of his robes are soft and natural, while the gold and silk are copied in such a manner that they do not seem to be painted, but really appear to be silk and gold. There is also a book in parchment decorated with miniatures, a most vivid imitation of the object represented, with a silver bell, finely chased, of which it would not be possible adequately to describe the beauty. Among other accessories, there is, moreover, a ball of burnished gold on the seat of the Pope, and in this—such is its clearness—the divisions of the opposite window, the shoulders of the Pope, and the walls of the room, are faithfully reflected; all these things are executed with so much care, that I fully believe no master ever has done, or ever can do anything better.
A man who can perform such miracles for the rich and powerful can command his own price, and is master of everything except his own passions. Raphael’s old uncle wrote, begging him to return to his home town and take himself a respectable wife. The young painter’s reply has come down to us. “If I had done as you wished,” he says, “I should not be where I am now.” And he goes on to tell where he is—
At the present time I have property in Rome worth three thousand gold ducats, and an income of fifty gold crowns, as his Holiness gives me a salary of three hundred gold ducats for superintending the fabric of St. Peter, which will continue as long as I live; and I am sure to earn more from other sources and am paid whatever I choose to ask for my work. And I have begun to paint another room for his Holiness which will bring me one thousand two hundred gold ducats, so that you see, my dearest uncle, that I do honor to you and to all my family and to my country.... What city in the world can compare with Rome, what enterprise is more worthy than this of Peter, which is the first temple in the world? And these are the grandest works which have ever been seen, and will cost more than a million in gold, and the Pope has decided to spend sixty thousand ducats a year on the fabric and can think of nothing else.
At the present time I have property in Rome worth three thousand gold ducats, and an income of fifty gold crowns, as his Holiness gives me a salary of three hundred gold ducats for superintending the fabric of St. Peter, which will continue as long as I live; and I am sure to earn more from other sources and am paid whatever I choose to ask for my work. And I have begun to paint another room for his Holiness which will bring me one thousand two hundred gold ducats, so that you see, my dearest uncle, that I do honor to you and to all my family and to my country.... What city in the world can compare with Rome, what enterprise is more worthy than this of Peter, which is the first temple in the world? And these are the grandest works which have ever been seen, and will cost more than a million in gold, and the Pope has decided to spend sixty thousand ducats a year on the fabric and can think of nothing else.
While Raphael was thus flourishing and proud of his world, a German monk by the name of Martin Luther was nailing his condemnation of the papacy upon the door of the church at Wittenberg. But our painter-prince was so busy, he had so many commissions to portray newpopes and cardinals, new annunciations and transfigurations and illuminations and immaculate conceptions, that he probably never even heard of the barbarian rebel in the far North. He remained to the end the perfect exemplar of leisure-class art, and is today the darling of pious peasant-wives, and sentimental school-marms doing culture-pilgrimages: in short, of all who wish to develop their emotions at the expense of their brains, and to shut their eyes to the grim realities of life, out of which alone true and vital beauty can grow.
Among its numerous artists of beauty Renaissance Italy produced one man who did not find life a garden of pleasure; one man who, when he sinned, did not do it with easy grace and cheerful heart; a man who faced the mysteries of life, and took seriously the terrors which the medieval mind has conjured for itself. This man was a rebel against the wanton and cruel spirit of his age; a rebel also against nature, those cruelties which time and death inflict upon our race. He was a lonely man, pursued by the jealousies and greeds of his rivals, tortured by his own sensuality and by fears of eternal torment. He lived a life of futile and agonized revolt, and produced some magnificent and terrible art.
In this book it is our task to study the artist in relation to the masters of money; and we shall find no more tragic illustrations of the waste that is wrought in the life of genius by the powers of greed, than are revealed to us in the story of Michelangelo Buonarroti. He is ranked as one of the greatest sculptors of all time; he was also one of the greatest of painters, and a great poet. Like most of those who have visioned the sublime and the colossal, he was a man of frail physique, fear-haunted all his life. As a child he was beaten by his father, who sought to break him of the desire to become an artist. At the age of nine he was taken to hear the thunderings of Savonarola, another frail prophet who had arisen to denounce the vices of the church in Florence. When Michelangelo was twenty-three, Savonarola was publicly hanged, afterhaving been excommunicated by the Borgia pope. The young painter at that time was beguiling himself with Greek beauty; but the terrible fate of the prophet cannot have failed to impress him, and helps to account for the religious fervors of his later years. Two worlds struggled in his soul, the world of pagan beauty and luxurious pleasure, and the world of heavenly raptures and fanatical asceticism.
This artist’s abilities were quickly recognized. The same pope, Julius II, who was showering Raphael with golden ducats, adopted Michelangelo as his chief glorifier, and the two of them spent a year or two preparing colossal plans for the pope’s tomb, something greater than any tomb ever seen on earth before, a perfect mountain of marble, with more than forty statues of colossal size. Here we see Michelangelo’s fate; one of the great masters of life, with a mighty message concerning the destiny of man, he is obliged to get the money by which he lives, and the marble which he carves, from a vain and greedy politician in churchly raiment. He is permitted to make statues of David and of Moses, of Day and Night and Morning and Evening, and other great symbolic ideas; but he must carve them for the tomb of some pope or potentate, and must spend the greater part of his life in quarreling—not merely with this pope or potentate, but with officials and subordinates, all hating, intriguing, threatening to stab or to poison.
In the sentimental rubbish which historians and art critic’s write about the Middle Ages, we are told that mighty cathedrals and temples were produced by the co-operative devotion and reverence of whole communities of worshipers. When you come to investigate the facts, you find that they were produced amid a chaos of wrangling and cheating and lying, exactly as a modern public building, or a battleship, or a fleet of aeroplanes is produced. The chief architect of Pope Julius II was a dissipated and murderous rascal, who was putting rotten walls into the Vatican buildings—walls which have had to be repaired incessantly ever since. He carried on intrigues against Michelangelo, and succeeded in persuading the pope that it was bad luck for anyone to build his own tomb while he was alive. So the pope dropped the project, and Michelangelo was left in debt, having to pay out of hisown pocket the costs of transporting the mountain of marble. The sculptor stormed the Vatican and insisted upon being paid, and the pope had him put out by a groom.
Next he was required to make a bronze statue of his most holy pope. He protested that he did not know anything about casting bronze, but he worked at it for more than a year, making a wretched failure of it, and ruining his health. Then he was ordered to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He protested that he did not know how to paint ceilings, it was hard and exhausting work; but again the pope insisted, and Michelangelo spent four years at this, painting his colossal and terrifying symbols upside down. Because he took so long at it, the pope was enraged, insisting upon seeing the work and criticizing it, flying into a fury and beating Michelangelo with his staff, then sending a messenger with five hundred ducats to salve his feelings.
Julius II died and Leo X came in. Michelangelo had made a new contract with the heirs of the dead pope to complete the tomb, and had started work on thirty-two colossal statues. But the new pope wanted Michelangelo’s fame for himself, and so for ten years the poor sculptor was pulled and hauled between two rival groups. It was the fashion of other sculptors and painters, when thus loaded down with work, to hire a number of assistants and put the job through in a hurry. But Michelangelo suffered from conscientiousness; he thought that nobody else could do his work as he wanted it done, and he sweated and agonized and groaned under the burden of these contracts. More marble was needed, and he was dragged about between the rival owners of marble quarries. The unsuccessful owners intrigued with the boatmen to make it impossible for the marble to be moved; just like a certain teamsters’ strike which I had occasion to investigate in Chicago some twenty years ago—the riots and mobbings and showers of brick-bats and broken heads and bullet-riddled bodies were caused by a great mail-order house having paid for a strike against a rival mail-order house!
There came another pope, this time a Medici. He wanted a tomb to his ancestors, who were splendid and wealthy merchants in Florence. Also there was to be a colossus in the Medici gardens, a difficult matter, because of the lack of room; Michelangelo discussed the problemin a letter to a friend, which has come down to us. Read this picture of a man of genius trying to please a wealthy and fastidious patron:
I have thought about the Colossus; I have indeed thought a great deal about it. It seems to me that it would not be well placed outside the Medici gardens because it would take up too much room in the street. A better place, I think, would be where the barber’s shop is. There it would not be so much in the way. As for the expenses of expropriation, I think to reduce them we could make the figure seated, and as it could be hollowed, the shop could be placed inside so the rent would not be lost. It seems to me a good idea to put in the hand of the Colossus a horn of abundance, and this could be hollow and would serve as a chimney. The head could also be made use of, I should think; for the poultryman, my very good friend who lives on the square, said to me secretly that it would make a wonderful dovecote. I have another and still better idea—but in that case the statue must be made very much larger, which would not be impossible, for towers are made with stone—and that is that the head should serve as a bell-tower to S. Lorenzo, which now has none. By placing the bells so that the sound would come out of the mouth it would seem as if the giant cried for mercy, especially on holidays when they use the big bells.
I have thought about the Colossus; I have indeed thought a great deal about it. It seems to me that it would not be well placed outside the Medici gardens because it would take up too much room in the street. A better place, I think, would be where the barber’s shop is. There it would not be so much in the way. As for the expenses of expropriation, I think to reduce them we could make the figure seated, and as it could be hollowed, the shop could be placed inside so the rent would not be lost. It seems to me a good idea to put in the hand of the Colossus a horn of abundance, and this could be hollow and would serve as a chimney. The head could also be made use of, I should think; for the poultryman, my very good friend who lives on the square, said to me secretly that it would make a wonderful dovecote. I have another and still better idea—but in that case the statue must be made very much larger, which would not be impossible, for towers are made with stone—and that is that the head should serve as a bell-tower to S. Lorenzo, which now has none. By placing the bells so that the sound would come out of the mouth it would seem as if the giant cried for mercy, especially on holidays when they use the big bells.
Michelangelo was in Florence when the republican revolution against the Medici took place. The artist sympathized with the revolutionists, against his patrons; he proposed to make for the revolutionists a gigantic statue of David and Goliath, but they decided he had better use his energies in fortifying the walls! When the city was taken, and the slaughter of the rebels began, Michelangelo hid for a month or two. Then he was commanded to come forth and resume his task of glorifying his conquerors! He did so, and was put to work on the tomb of the Medici. Needless to say, the figures on the tomb are not figures of serene contentment and spiritual peace! Romain Rolland describes them as an “outburst of despair” whereby the sculptor “drowned his shame at raising this monument of slavery.”
Another pope came, and wanted Michelangelo for his chief glorifier. The artist pleaded his old contracts, but the pope was furious, and commanded him to tear them up. He was put to work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and the result was the marvelous painting, “The Last Judgment,” in which all the terrors and torments of the Middle Ages are summed up. It was one of the world’s greatest paintings; but the pious of the time were shocked,and the pope put some of his other painters to putting panties on the nude saints. From time to time other shocked ecclesiastics had this or that article of clothing painted into the picture; and because they used any color they happened to have lying about, we can now form little idea of Michelangelo’s vision of the Day of Doom.
All this time the artist was being hounded by the heirs of his first pope; but the present pope insisted that he should be the architect of St. Peter’s; so here we see the old man, over seventy, still fighting the grafters and hounded by conspirators. It appears that in Renaissance Rome, when a grafter was caught, and threatened to expose his fellow-grafters, he was shot, and the world was told that he had committed suicide; exactly as it happens in Washington, D. C., in these our days of oil-thieves and bootleggers! Michelangelo was still afraid, as he had been all his life; but he was still more afraid of God, and determined to finish St. Peter’s as a means of saving his soul at the Last Judgment.
So he stuck and fought the grafters. There came yet another pope—the artist had to win each one in turn, thwarting a whole new set of intriguing enemies. We find him at the age of eighty-eight, exposing thieves who are building the walls of St. Peter’s out of rotten materials—and around him the thieves are stabbing each other. At last, at the age of ninety, he lies on his death-bed, his terrific labors at an end; and between his dying gasps he confides to a friend his one regret, that he has to die just when he has succeeded in learning the alphabet of his art!
When civilization emerged from the Dark Ages, the fighting man went about with a hard-shell covering, like a crab, and was called a knight. Both he and his horse underwent a long training, and when it was finished he was a fighting engine which could roll over anything else existing in the world. He went on crusades, and drove back the Saracen and the Turk from Europe. In these days of real and cruel danger he produced a genuine Art of Power: for example, “The Song of Roland,” an eleventhcentury French poem, telling of a terrific all-day battle against invading infidel hordes.
But afterwards, when chivalry had become established, it developed its Art of Beauty; a fantastic literature about ideal beings, who conformed to an artificial and complicated code of etiquette, and spent their time rescuing beautiful young ladies from the claws of various monsters. There grew up a whole genealogy of these literary knights, and enormous long poems were composed about them. When I was at Columbia University, acquiring culture, one of the tasks set me was the reading of Ariosto, an Italian poet of the sixteenth century, and I valiantly struggled through a dozen cantos of these absurd adventures. They resemble a Griffith moving picture, in which there is a villain engaged in an elaborate process of raping a beautiful virgin, while the gallant hero is galloping on his way to a rescue. But Ariosto regales us with more details of the attempted rape; for in these old times people were not afraid of the animal aspects of life.
In the distant island of Britain some rough country fellows trained themselves to shoot arrows through the joints of the knightly armor. A little later came the invention of gunpowder, and that finished the hard-shell crabs on horseback. But the literary world also resembles a crab, in that it walks backward, with its eyes on the past. Invariably you find that what is called scholarship and culture is several generations behind the practical life of men; and so the poets went on composing elaborate and fantastic romances of chivalry. The test of excellence in literature was the refinement and elegance and remoteness from life of this perverted leisure-class art: until Cervantes came along and laughed it to death.
He was born in Spain in the middle of the sixteenth century, noble but poor. He first lived his great book, and then in old age he wrote it. He went to Rome in the retinue of a papal ambassador, and later on took up the chivalrous career, a crusade. The Turks were in possession of the Mediterranean, and the Spaniards were trying to drive them out; Cervantes, though ill of a fever, fought desperately at the battle of Lepanto, and was twice wounded. After five years of such war he was sailing home, when the Turks captured him, and for several years he was a slave in Algiers—a gallant and romanticslave, the darling of his companions and the terror of his masters. He made several attempts to escape, and finally was ransomed by his relatives, and came home to Spain, crippled and poor—to reflect, like so many returned soldiers, upon the bitterness of dead glory.
He became a government agent, collecting naval stores. He was not a great success: one of his subordinates defaulted, and he was put in prison. He lived in straitened circumstances, in a household with five women relatives and his sense of humor. Then he tried writing; for twenty years he wrote every kind of thing which a man of his time could imagine would bring a living, but all in vain. He was not a university man and so the critics of his time considered him presumptuous in attempting to break into their sacred ranks. Until he was fifty-eight his life was a failure.
Then he hit upon the idea of ridiculing the established literature of chivalry, by bringing it into contact with the every-day realities of Spain. He created a character very much like himself; except that the old Don Quixote had read so many romances that his head was turned, and he began to take them seriously, mounted his old nag and rode out to rescue damsels, and to mistake a barber’s basin shining in the sun for a helmet, and wind-mills for giants who must be overthrown. The story rambles along from one comical adventure to the next, and brings in almost every type of person in Spain. It became an instant and enormously popular success; but poor Cervantes got practically nothing out of it, because editions were pirated all over the country. He was a failure to the end—and curiously enough, did not get any satisfaction even from his fame. He was ashamed of his popular book, and quite sure that mankind would some day appreciate his long poems, “The Journey to Parnassus,” and the pastoral romance, “Galatea,” and the romantic poem, “Persiles and Sigismunda.”
Many of the world’s greatest writers have thus fallen victim to culture-snobbery. Shakespeare was despised by the academic critics of his own time, and apparently did not think enough of his own plays to see that posterity got a correct edition of them. When I was a boy we all read “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn,” and “laughed our heads off” over them; but if anybody hadsuggested to us that Mark Twain might be one of the world’s great writers, we should have thought it a Mark Twain joke.
“Don Quixote” was produced, definitely and deliberately, as a piece of propaganda. We no longer know even the names of these long-winded romances of chivalry, so we do not realize that the author, in ridiculing them, is trying to teach us something. Also, there is another kind of propaganda that Cervantes put into the book, his ideas concerning one of the gravest problems confronting mankind through the ages. What shall be the relation of the idealist, the dreamer of good and beautiful things, to the world of ugliness and greed in which he finds himself? He has a vision of something splendid, but the world knows nothing about that vision, and cannot be made to understand it; if he tries to apply it, the world will call him crazy, it will treat him so badly that before he gets through he may be really crazy. But what, after all, is it to be crazy? Is it to believe in the possibility of something splendid in life? Or is it to believe that life must always be the hateful and ugly thing we now see it?
Nobody can be sure just how much Cervantes realized all this himself. There are many cases of men of genius writing, out of their sorrow and their laughter, things more wise and more deep than they know. Did Shakespeare intend Shylock to be a comic character, to be howled at and pelted by the Jew-hating mob of his time, or did he realize that in this half-comic, half-tragic figure he was voicing the grief and protest of a persecuted race?
What Cervantes has done in “Don Quixote” is to supply the critics and interpreters with material for speculation through many ages to come. He gave his crack-brained old gentleman a devoted servant, with no particle of his master’s idealism or insanity. Sancho Panza is entirely normal, from the world’s point of view, a sturdy and practical fellow; yet he gets into just as many absurd scrapes as his master—because he is ignorant, and is betrayed by his own greed. So we are brought back again and again to the question: Who is it that is really crazy in this shifting and uncertain world? Is a reader of literature insane because he sets out to apply the ideas of thatliterature in real life? Or does insanity lie with writers who produce and critics who praise literature which cannot be applied to real life, and is not intended to be so applied? If, as I believe, the latter answer is correct—then how many foolish persons there are writing books today!
It is interesting to note how many of the world’s great monuments of art were produced by men who saw their country traveling the road to ruin, and pleaded in vain with the ruling classes. Cervantes himself was a devout Catholic, and would not have understood us if we had told him that Don Quixote typified the Spain of his time; the Spain which believed that the human mind could be shackled by religious bigotry, and forced by dungeon and torture and the stake to accept a set of theological dogmas. The Spaniards slaughtered or drove into exile their most intelligent population, the Moors; and Cervantes approved it. They set out to conquer the world for their hateful faith, and Cervantes saw their powerful Armada overthrown and destroyed by the little ships of sturdy, independent Englishmen, who had recently kicked out the pope from their country and taken charge of their own thinking. This pope had by formal decree presented England to Spain; but the old, crack-brained Don Quixote empire had been unable to take possession, and the sad gentleman-soldier, Cervantes, died without having understood any of these world-events.
Says Mrs. Ogi: “This is getting to be quite a respectable literary book: the very thing for club ladies here in Southern California, who hire somebody to read books for them, and tell them what the books are about. Here you’ve read thousands of books for them!”
Says Ogi: “They’ll get all the culture of the ages in a lecture lasting three-quarters of an hour. I remember your telling how the Negro mammies chew up the babies’ food for them, and then feed it back into the babies’ mouths.”
“Yes, but don’t you tell that!” cries Mrs. Ogi.
“A little too Renaissancy?” laughs her husband.
“With reasonable care,” persists the other, “you can break into literary society with this book. I understand you’re leading up to English literature; and that is where respectability begins and ends.”
“You forget my Russian and German readers. Also, I’m sorry to report, we have to have another chapter of economics and politics.”
“What’s happened now?”
“Free institutions have got a new start, and we have to understand the process. We have to make an appraisal of the parliamentary system; and if we make one that is just, we shall displease all parties to the controversy. You remember how during the war this Ogi family used to argue until three o’clock in the morning. The most difficult question in all history had to be decided, and kept decided for four years. Was there really a choice between British capitalism and German autocracy? Was there any real life left in the parliamentary system, anything worth saving in political democracy; or must we go over to working class dictatorship? We listened to the partisans of each side as they stormed at us; there were millions of separate facts, and we had to appraise them and strike a balance. And just when we thought we had it, some Irishman or Hindoo would come along with fresh examples of British governmental imbecility.”
“But what’s that got to do with the book?” demands Mrs. Ogi.
“We have to make the same decision in our study of world culture. Here is Elizabethan England, and we have to appraise it, and appraise Shakespeare. Are we going to agree with Bernard Shaw and scold him because he isn’t a Socialist? Are we going to agree with Tolstoy and scrap him because he isn’t a saint? Evidently I’m expected to do those things. Here’s a letter from George Sterling, who disapproves most strenuously of my thesis, but who says, ‘From your point of view Shakespeare is your biggest and most vulnerable game.’”
“Well,” says Mrs. Ogi, “what’s Shakespeare to you, or you to Shakespeare?”
“For one thing, he’s an old friend. For another, he’s a whole universe in himself—”
“Surely a respectable opinion!”
“I’m sorry to be respectable, but I want to be just. It is easy to name great and important qualities that Shakespeare lacked, and damn him for that lack. On the other hand, one can think of hideous qualities he lacked—and honor him for their absence. Most important of all, he wasn’t a medieval bigot. If he doesn’t ascend to the heights of moral idealism, at least he avoids wallowing in what Sterling calls ‘the liquid manure of superstition.’ He is a modern man, who looks at life with clear eyes, and judges it on its own merits. Coming from Catholic Europe to Elizabethan England is like coming out of a morgue, and standing on a headland where the wind blows from the sea. Shakespeare knew that, and all the men of his time knew it; they were defending themselves from the Inquisition, they were saving the race-mind.
“The future world poet was twenty-four years old when the Spanish Armada was harried down the English channel by the little ships of Drake and Frobisher. He had already come up to London, and perhaps he heard the guns. Anyhow, all England knew that the pope had by formal decree turned over their country to be a vassal of Spain; they knew that King Philip was preparing against them the most powerful fleet in history. They waited, in just such an agony of suspense as we knew during the long struggle in France. And just as Æschylus was inspired by the battle of Marathon to write Greek patriotic propaganda, so Shakespeare was inspired by the defeat of the Armada to write English patriotic propaganda. Now, in weighing the value of that propaganda, we have to judge the society in which Shakespeare lived, the balance of democratic and aristocratic forces, of progress and reaction it contained. We can’t do that without a theory of political evolution—”
“I’ll tell you what you do,” says Mrs. Ogi. “You start in and tell us some facts about Shakespeare’s plays, and what’s in them, and work in your theory of political evolution as you go along. Then, as I go along, I’ll take a pencil and mark most of it out!”
A few months ago I had the pleasure of spending twenty-four hours with a Chicago millionaire who specializes in knowing all there is to know on the subject of ciphers. During the war he gave our army practically all its information on this subject; so precious was his knowledge that, for fear the enemy might get him, he was kept for a year and a half locked up in the fire-proof, bomb-proof, burglar-proof and bullet-proof vault where his books and manuscripts are preserved.
Sitting in this vault, the owner showed me the greatest collection of Bacon and Shakespeare first editions in America. For several hours he pointed out the ciphers in these editions, and coming home on the train I read the narrative which is hidden in these ciphers, the secret life of Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, wherein he claims to have been a natural son of Queen Elizabeth, and the author of most of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare. It seems strange that one has to learn about these things in French; but so it stands, in a series of articles by General Cartier, published in the “Mercure de France,” September, 1922.
If I were going to have an opinion on this subject, I should want at least two years to devote, without interruption, to a study of this cipher literature, and to the lives of Bacon and Shakespeare, and a comparison of their literary styles. Lacking this leisure in the present crisis of man’s fate, I content myself with saying that here is one of the most fascinating mysteries in the world, and that I am not one of those comfortable people who know a thing to be impossible, merely because it is new and strange. Having said this much, I proceed upon the orthodox assumption that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare were written by the actor of that name.
He was born in 1564 at Stratford-on-Avon, his father being a merchant who early fell into misfortune. There are legends that the son was wild, and ran away to London to escape prosecution for deer-stealing. He became a hanger-on of theatrical companies, held horses at the doors of theaters, became connected with the Duke ofLeicester’s company, acted in various plays, was called upon to revise and patch up manuscripts, and finally wrote plays of his own which were popular successes. He made money, bought several pieces of property at Stratford, won the friendship of some of the powerful and great, and finally returned to his home town, to die at the age of fifty-two.
That is all we know about the greatest poet of all time. How he managed to escape attention, how above all he failed to see to it that the world got authentic copies of his plays, is a mystery only partly explained by the fact that playwriting and acting were disreputable occupations. Actors had been strolling vagabonds, liable to be thrown into jail by any constable, like a workingman out of a job in the United States. Only by getting the protection of some noble earl could they be safe from persecution; and if you had become a friend of noble earls, and a gentleman of property in your home-town, you did not boast of plays you had written, any more than if you lived on Fifth Avenue today you would boast of a saloon you had once kept.
Shakespeare’s first plays are romantic comedies in the style of the time. It was the tradition of the pastoral, fostered by elegant ladies and gentlemen who know nature as a place for picnics. It is a world of beauty, wit and “charm”; everybody is young, everybody’s occupation is falling in love with some other pretty body, and problems exist only to be solved in the last act.
When I was young I saw Julia Marlowe in “As You Like It,” and was ravished with delight. Now I look back on it, in the broad daylight of my present knowledge about life; I recall the thousand traps into which I fell because of ignorance of sex, ignorance of money, ignorance of almost everything about my fellow human beings. I recall the people I have known who fell into these same traps, and were not able to extricate themselves, but paid for their romantic illusions with poverty, drunkenness, disease, divorce, insanity, suicide. So I am compelled to declare that these “charming” comedies are as false to life as the average moving picture of our time, in which the problems of labor and capital are solved by the honest labor leader marrying the daughter of the great captain of industry.
I have to go further and maintain that this betrayal of life was deliberate; the writer himself knew more than he told us. Shakespeare is fond of jeering at the “groundlings,” and those who stoop to tickle their unwashed ears. In the Shakespearean theater the cheap seats were in the pit, or what we call the orchestra; the aristocrats sat on the sides of the stage, and frequently got drunk, and amused themselves by sprawling in their seats and tripping up the actors and guying the show. These elegant ones were not “groundlings,” and it was no disgrace to a romantic poet to rise in the world by giving them what they wanted. Shakespeare was even cynical enough to laugh at them for their silly taste; he called one of his comedy successes “As You Like It,” and another “Twelfth Night, or What you Will.”
This man was gifted with the most marvelous tongue that has yet appeared on earth. Golden, glowing, gorgeous words poured out of him at a moment’s notice all his life; he covered everything he wrote with the glamour of poetry. This gift was his fortune; but also it was a trap, because it saved him the need of thinking. It is a trap for us, because it tempts us into sharing his emotions without thinking. But force yourself to think, ask yourself what is the actual value of the ideas the mighty poet is expressing, and you discover that many of them are commonplace, many are worldly and cheap, many are the harsh prejudices of his time and class.
In these early days Shakespeare wrote a long narrative poem, which helps us to know him. It is dedicated to the young Earl of Southampton, his patron, and is called “Venus and Adonis”; a typical example of the pseudo-classical romantic rubbish which the cultured world of that time called “art.” Nature has provided for the mixing and distributing of the qualities of living creatures by a system of sex exchanges. Throughout the higher forms of life, and with men and women in their primitive, natural condition, the act of sex fertilization occupies less than the entire time of the creature. But now a leisure-class arises, parasitic upon its fellows; and the members of this class seek to divert their idle time by the endless elaboration of the sex function.
“Venus and Adonis” tells the story of an effort of the goddess of love to secure the sexual attentions of a reluctant youth. The striking thing about the poem is the extent to which the Greek ideal of the goddess of fecundity has been debased—I will not say to the animal level, because the animals are decent and sensible in their sex affairs; I say to the level of the high-priced brothel, where the jaded rich are beguiled. Venus in this poem has no idea of making herself spiritually or intellectually attractive to the youth; she does not know how to be sublime and goddess-like, she does not know how to be wise, or even to be witty and gay. She only knows how to force her unwanted flesh more and more persistently upon the youth, to wallow upon his body, disgusting both the youth and the reader.
The fact that “Venus and Adonis” is full of verbal splendor, like everything else that Shakespeare wrote, makes it more and not less offensive to an intelligent person. By means of our intelligence we have invented the microscope, and thereby we know that decay is not less decay because it happens to be phosphorescent. We can surely say that there was decay in the fashionable world of Shakespeare’s time, when twelve editions of “Venus and Adonis” were called for, while for a mighty tragedy like “Othello” there was not demand enough to secure its printing until six years after its author was dead!
When I was young the orthodox critics of Shakespeare taught, and everybody accepted the idea, that there was no poet who had been more aloof from his own work, and that it was impossible to tell anything about him from the characters he portrayed. But now comes Frank Harris with his book, “The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life-Story.” Harris contends that no poet has revealed himself more continuously than Shakespeare; the character speaking out of the plays is that of a man tormented all his life by sensuality, and fighting in pain and bewilderment to save a brilliant intellect from ruin by excess.
Frank Harris is such a man himself; he makes no secret of the fact that this has been his tragic life-story. So, as we read the book, our first question is, to whatextent has Frank Harris read himself into Shakespeare. It has been a long time since I read the plays straight through, and I should want to do it again before I felt I had an opinion. Meantime, we can say this much: if the Shakespeare of Frank Harris is not Shakespeare, but a work of imagination, it is one of the most fascinating works of imagination in the world, fully as significant as any character in any of Shakespeare’s plays.
All critics would assent to the statement that Shakespeare began with youthful glorification of his leisure-class friends, their graces and their charms; and that as the years passed he met with a series of disillusionments, which drove him to bitterness, almost to madness. But it is to be noted that throughout this period of disillusionment he remains purely personal, he never rises above the “good man” theory of life. You know how it is in our politics; if there is corruption, it is because we have elected bad men to office. The test of one’s ability to think straight on social questions is the outgrowing of this “good man” theory.
“Just a moment,” says Mrs. Ogi, who has not entirely outgrown this theory herself. “Do you deny that there are some things a good man can do in the world that would not be done otherwise?”
“Of course; I’m willing to admit that any social system would work, if we could manage to get good men in charge, and to keep them there. The trouble about evil systems is that they keep good men out of power; they turn good men into bad men, even before they get into office. They keep us from finding the good men; they make us think that bad men are good—until ruin has come and it’s too late.”
“But think of the frightful pictures that Shakespeare drew of evil men in power!”
“Shakespeare was a man of refinement, he loathed brutality and cruelty. That was a part of his propaganda, his hatred of power blindly used; he comes back again and again to cry out against it, to defend the gentle and the innocent and the kind. In those ways he was far ahead of his time; for those things we love him, they help to make him a world poet. But here is the point—with Shakespeare it is all a family matter, inside the leisure class. Some bad member of the family has got power,and our attention is concentrated upon turning him out, and putting in some good member of the family, who will make wiser use of power.
“We shall find that the leisure-class artist is frequently permitted this kind of criticism. He has his friends among the ruling class, he comes to think of himself as belonging; so he has a right to find fault. You know how it is with Mrs. Ogi; she will say things about her own family—they are ignorant, they are arrogant, they are this and that. But it is the part of discretion for her husband to remain silent at such times. Mrs. Ogi will entertain the company with tales about the absent-mindedness and general absurdity of her own husband; but it will be the part of discretion for the company to dissent gently from such ridicule.”
“If you stay married to me long enough,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you will know enough about human nature to be able to write a novel. But now we are talking about Shakespeare. Aren’t you ahead of the time in expecting him to have revolutionary feelings?”
“Not at all. There was plenty of revolt, both political and social, in Shakespeare’s day; there had been two centuries of social protest before he was born. John Ball, the rebel priest, had been hanged and quartered for asking the dangerous question:
‘When Adam delved and Eve spanWho then was the gentleman?’
‘When Adam delved and Eve spanWho then was the gentleman?’
‘When Adam delved and Eve spanWho then was the gentleman?’
“So, if Shakespeare had wanted to cast in his lot with the poor he had his opportunity. But there was nothing of that sort in him. He was a brilliant youth who had come up to London, poor and friendless, to become intimate with noble earls and wealthy gentlemen, to dedicate his poems and sonnets to them, and have his plays produced by their licensed companies. If they proved faithless, if they insulted and humiliated a man of genius, if their brilliant ladies and dashing maids of honor intrigued with him and then betrayed him—he would fly into a rage and write plays of almost insane fury, such as ‘Timon of Athens’ and ‘King Lear,’ or pictures of grim and somber cruelty such as ‘Measure for Measure.’ But when these plays failed, he would learn his lesson and go back to writing romantic dreams, pretty fairy stories like‘A Winter’s Tale’ and ‘The Tempest.’ In these latter we find the wistful sadness of the old man who has learned that life is not the beautiful thing it ought to be, but who sighs in vain for an all-powerful magician to come and set it right. Again, you see, the ‘good man’ theory; while the social classes whose destiny it is to abolish parasitism are the object of Shakespeare’s haughty and aristocratic sneers.”
“Ah, now!” says Mrs. Ogi. “That’s the part of the story you’re saving for a climax!”
Shakespeare’s historical plays cover a period of three hundred years; the breakdown of the feudal system, and its replacement by a monarchy more or less controlled by a parliament. We have ten plays dealing with this period. Some of them Shakespeare wrote entirely, getting his data from old chronicles; others he worked over from older plays. He was careless about his facts; and how little grasp he had of fundamentals you may judge from the circumstance that “King John” does not even refer to the signing of Magna Charta. He might easily have had a character in this play make a speech on the subject of the people binding the insolence of their rulers. But he had no interest in such matters.
What Shakespeare did was to make a series of chronicle plays dealing with the intrigues and quarrels and fightings of the English nobility. He followed tradition, but never hesitated to change the characters in order to heighten the dramatic interest. The result has replaced English history in the minds of all English school-boys, and those grown-up school-boys called statesmen. Their national poet flatters their vanities and encourages their insular prejudices. He did not like the Irish, he did not like the Welsh, he did not like the Scotch, he did not like the French, and of course he did not like the Spaniards. He liked the Romans, apparently because they resembled the English ruling classes.
John of Gaunt in his dying speech proclaims England in a series ofrapturous similes “this other Eden, demi-paradise ... this happy breed of men, this little world, this precious stone set in the silver sea ... this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”... And that is all right, that is the correct way for Englishmen to feel about England. But do they permit Frenchmen to feel that way about France, to love and defend their country, and manage it in their own way? The answer is, they do not. Frenchmen are to see English kings laying claim to their throne; they are to see English armies invading their country, destroying their cities and laying waste their fields; and they are to hear the great poet of England cheering on the invader with his golden eloquence, burdening his play with wearisome speeches to prove the validity of the English claim to the throne of France, and explaining to Frenchmen that it is for their own good that their country is invaded by a superior race.
Stranger yet, we shall find American scholars and critics enraptured over such English imperialist poetry! I go to my local library to see what the learned gentry have to say on this subject, and the most up-to-date thing I find is a book called “English History in Shakespeare’s Plays,” by a professor of a university in Louisiana. He quotes the passage in which Henry V incites his troops to the attack on Harfleur:
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,Or close the wall up with our English dead.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,Or close the wall up with our English dead.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,Or close the wall up with our English dead.
Says our scholar: “We are now greeted by the noble strain; a strain unworn by constant quotation, unhackneyed by trite allusions. Like the splendid harmonies of a master-musician it throbs and thrills us as we read, in spite of the declamations of the schoolroom and the parsing exercises of childhood.”
Joan of Arc arose to inspire her people to drive out these invaders; and the English burned her as a witch. A hundred and sixty years had passed—surely time enough for sober second thought, surely time for England’s national poet to do what he could to wipe this blot from his country’s good name. But the maid of Orleans had to look elsewhere for vindication than to Shakespeare, friend of the rich and powerful, who never advocated an unpopular cause in all his forty plays. He represents Joan according to the basest of the prejudices of his “groundlings”; a vain, boastful creature, unchaste, and not denying her unchastity.
In the series of plays dealing with King Henry VI comes a still more significant incident, the rebellion of Jack Cade. For three hundred years the blood and treasure of the English people had been wasted in these foreign wars, and incessant civil wars of rival earls and dukes and barons. In the middle of the fifteenth century there was widespread distress, and in Kent occurred an uprising; a popular leader took the city of London, and forced some promises of reforms, and was then betrayed and killed. This incident fell into Shakespeare’s lap—an opportunity for delicious gentlemanly wit at the expense of the exploited workers. “Be brave, then,” cries Cade, “for your captain is brave and vows reformation. There shall be in England seven half-penny loaves sold for a penny, the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops, and I will make it felony to drink small beer.”
Just as soon as the Cade of Shakespeare gets power he sets himself up to be a nobleman, and offers to strike one of his followers dead for failing to recognize his claim. He addresses Lord Say, one of the persons against whom the indignation of the people had been roused: