PERVERTED REPUTATIONS
Sir Henry Irving used to tell how he and Toole had gone together to Stratford, and fallen into talk with one of its inhabitants about his great townsman. After many cross-questions and crooked answers, they arrived at the fact that the man knew that Shakespeare had “written for summat.” “For what?” they enquired. “Well,” replied the man, “I do think he wrote for the Bible.”
This story illustrates a general law which one might, perhaps, if one were inclined to pseudo-scientific categories, call the law of perverted reputations. I am thinking more particularly of literary reputations, which are those I happen chiefly to care about. And literary reputations probably get perverted more frequently than others, for the simple reason that literature always has been and (despite the cheap manuals, Board schools, and the modern improvements) still is an unfathomable mystery to the outer busy world. But, to get perverted, the reputations must be big enough to have reached the ears of that outer world. What happens, thereafter, seems to be something like this. The man in the back street understands vaguely that so-and-so isesteemed a great man. Temperamentally and culturally incapable of appreciating the works of literary art, for which so-and-so is esteemed great, the back-streeter is driven to account for his greatness to himself on grounds suitable to his own comprehension, which grounds in the nature of the case have nothing to do with the fine art of literature. The general tendency is to place these grounds in the region of the marvellous. For the capacity for wonder is as universal as the capacity for literature is strictly limited.
Thus you have the notorious instance of Virgil figuring to the majority of men in the middle ages not as a poet but as a magician. Appreciation of his poetry was for the “happy few”; by the rest his reputation was too great to be ignored, so they gave it a twist to accommodate it to the nature of their own imaginations. In more recent times, indeed in our own day, there is the equally notorious instance of Shakespeare. The Stratford rustic knew nothing of Shakespeare’s plays, but did know (1) that there was a great man called Shakespeare, and (2) that there was a great book called the Bible. He concluded that Shakespeare must have written for the Bible. But I am thinking of a very different perversion of Shakespeare’s reputation. I am thinking of the strange people, exponents of the back-street mind, who, being incapable of appreciating Shakespeare’s poetry and dramatic genius—having in fact no taste for literature as such—have assigned his greatnessto something compatible with their own prosaic pedestrian taste and turned him into a contriver of cryptograms. Again you see the old appetite for wonder reappearing. The imputed reputation, as in Virgil’s case, is for somethingabscons, as Rabelais would have said, something occult.
It is the old story. Superstition comes easier to the human mind than artistic appreciation. But superstition has played an odd freak in the case of Shakespeare. It is actually found side by side with artistic appreciation, of which it presents itself as the superlative, or ecstatic, degree. There is, for instance, an Oxford professor to whom the world is indebted for the most delicate, the most sympathetic, as well as the most scholarly appreciation of Shakespeare in existence. Yet this professor is so affronted by the flesh-and-blood domination of the actresses who play Shakespeare’s heroines, the dangerous competition of their personal charm with the glamour of the text, that he has committed himself to the startling proposition that poetic drama perished with Shakespeare’s boy actors! Jealousy for Shakespeare’s individual supremacy in artistic creation, which must “brook no rival near the throne,” has turned the professor into a misogynist. This I venture to call Shakespearian superstition. And there is another Oxford professor (oh, home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs!) who assures us that we can unravel all Shakespearian problems by a careful study of the text alone. Don’t troubleyour minds about the actual facts in view of which the text had been written and in which it was to be spoken. Don’t ask where Shakespeare’s theatres were and what the audiences were like and what kind of shows they were used to and continued to expect. Don’t bother about the shape of the stage or its position in regard to the public. Stick to the text, and nothing but the text, and all shall be made plain unto you. It is this same professor who occasionally treats Shakespeare’s imaginary characters as though they were real persons, with independent biographies of their own. He obliges us with conjectural fragments of their biographies. “Doubtless in happier days he (Hamlet) was a close and constant observer of men and manners.” “All his life he had believed in her (Gertrude), we may be sure, as such a son would.” Shakespearian superstition again, you see, not merely alongside but actually growing out of artistic appreciation.
Literary critics, as a rule, have suffered less than so-called literary “creators” from perverted reputations. The reason is plain. The man in the back street has never heard of criticism. But what, it will be asked, about the strange case of Aristotle? Well, I submit that in his case the perversion arose from the second cause I have indicated—not from the ignorance of the multitude but from the superstitious veneration of the few. Who was it who began the game by calling Aristotle “the master of those who know”? A poet who was also a scholar. Whodeclared Aristotle’s authority in philosophy to equal St. Paul’s in theology? Roger Bacon (they say; I have not myself asked for this author at Mudie’s orThe TimesBook Club). Who said there could be no possible contradiction between the Poetics and Holy Writ? Dacier, an eminent Hellenist. Who declared the rules of Aristotle to have the same certainty for him as the axioms of Euclid? Lessing, an esteemed “highbrow.” The gradual process, then, by which the real Aristotle, pure thinker, critic investigating and co-ordinating the facts of the actual drama of his time, was perverted into the spurious Aristotle, Mumbo Jumbo of criticism, mysteriarch, depositary of the Tables of the Law, was the same process that we have seen at work in the case of Shakespeare—enthusiastic appreciation toppling over into superstition.
But none of us can afford to put on airs about it.Mutato nomine de te.For, after all, what are these various cases but extreme instances of the “personal equation” that enters into every, even the sanest opinion? Can any one of us do anything else towards appreciating a work of art than remake it within himself? So, if we are to avoid these absurd extremes, let us look to ourselves, do our best to get ourselves into harmony with the artist, and “clear our minds of cant.”