All my emotion and imaginingWere of the finest tissue that is woven,From sense and thought....I seemed to be created every morn.A golden trumpet pealed along the sky:The sun arose: the whole earth rushed upon me.Sometimes the tree that stroked my windowpaneWas more than I could grasp; sometimes my thoughtAbsorbed the universe.
It is true that these words are put in the mouth of that one of his dramatis personæ who is of the most melancholy and brooding disposition; but he who can make another say—
I am haunted by the heavens and the earth;... I am besieged by things that I have seen:Followed and watched by rivers; snared and heldIn labyrinthine woods and tangled meads;Hemmed in by mountains; waylaid by the sun;Environed and beset by moon and stars;Whispered by winds and summoned by the sea.
—he who can put this thought in another's mouth has necessarily first experienced some measure of it himself.
But it is not merely about external nature that our Fleet Street journalists talk. Theyspeak of such questions of man and life and destiny as are wont to engage any gathering of thoughtful men, and particularly those who are poetically disposed. The contrasts between the beauty of rural nature and the squalor of life, especially the life of the town, these and other matters receive such suggestive treatment as can be given to them by a poet who has no desire to become a preacher, and no desire to pose as an exhaustive philosopher. Upon such questions the many-sided poet, whose sympathies are wide, and whose moods are varied, will touch with a certain suggestiveness; he will flash a ray of cheerfulness into the haunts of pessimism, or throw a new pathos into common situations. And Mr. Davidson possesses a large measure of this many-sidedness, this versatility of sympathy. He appears a very human man, a man unfettered by cant or creed, observing men and things from various sides, and entering into their circumstance. Is he without a creed? From his verses on theMaking of a Poetit would appear so—
No creed for me! I am a man apart:A mouthpiece for the creeds of all the world;
A martyr for all mundane moods to tear;The slave of every passion, and the slaveOf heat and cold, of darkness and of light;A trembling lyre for every wind to sound.I am a man set to overhearThe inner harmony, the very tuneOf nature's heart; to be a thoroughfareFor all the pageantry of Time: to catchThe mutterings of the Spirit of the HourAnd make them known.
Nevertheless he, or one of his avatars, can also say of the celebration of Christmas with its "sweet thoughts and deeds"—
A fearless, ruthless, wanton band,Deep in our hearts we guard from scatheOf last year's log a smouldering brand,To light at Yule the fire of faith.
He makes no vulgar boast about escaping from the fetters of religion. He spares us any flouts of intellectual superiority. He is apparently an evolutionist, but withal finds little saving grace in that doctrine, and is not uninclined to envy the old days
When Heaven and Hell were nigh.
It is true that behind his Basil and Herbert and Brian and Sandy and Menzies and Ninian,who converse there in Fleet Street, we find it hard to discover any definite synthetic philosophy of Davidson himself. On the other hand, we have no particular wish to discover one. He is a poet, not a Herbert Spencer. We may reasonably be content to catch the side-lights which a poet throws from a large and liberal nature; to be led by him to different points of view. If the result is that we find the man himself to evade us, we can only admit that the same result occurs with Shakespeare. Indeed, there is a hint that a synthetic philosophy is exactly what Davidson never seeks to attain. Says Ninian:—
Sometimes, when I forget myself, I talkAs though I were persuaded of the truthOf some received or unreceived belief;But always afterwards I am ashamedAt such lewd lapses into bigotry.
And though another immediately ejaculates
Intolerantly tolerant!
we have a feeling that the poet has betrayed an attitude of mind not wholly unlike his own.
His outlook is both bright and dark. The modern dragons, it has been said, are dooming "religion and poetry." The answer comes—
They may doom till the moon forsakesHer dark, star-daisied lawn;They may doom till Doomsday breaksWith angels to trumpet the dawn;While love enchants the youngAnd the old have sorrow and care,No song shall be unsung,Unprayed no prayer.
Nature is full of joy, man may find abounding delight of life in the midst of it; but what of his destiny?
For the fate of the elves is nearly the sameAs the terrible fate of men;To love, to rue, to be, and pursueA flickering wisp of the fen.We must play the game with a careless smile,Though there's nothing in the hand;We must toil as if it were worth our whileSpinning our ropes of sand;And laugh, and cry, and live, and dieAt the waft of an unseen hand.
And again—
I am not thinking solely of myself,But of the groaning cataract of life,The ruddy stream that leaps importunateOut of the night, and in a moment vaultsThe immediate treacherous precipice of time,Splashing the stars, downward into the night.
And apart from destiny, which is beyondhuman control, society is much at fault. Not only is Davidson plainly democratic, he expresses the complaints and aspirations of the higher type of those who might be socialists, if socialism were allowed to be a development, and not tyrannously imposed as a system. He talks of—
... Slaves in Pagan Rome—In Christian England—who begin to testThe purpose of their state, to strike for restAnd time to feel alive in.
And—
Hoarsely they beg of Fate to giveA little lightening of their woe,A little time to love, to live,A little time to think and know.
There are other wrong elements in society besides poverty, and the poet finds occasion to express one in particular. But what Mrs. Grand requires three volumes to discuss is treated with infinitely more effect by him in a dozen lines. The purport may be gathered from these three:—
... My heart!Who wore it out with sensual drudgeryBefore it came to me? What warped its valves?It has been used; my heart is secondhand.
This is not the time to exhaust the Davidsonian philosophy, if there be such. We are treating the writer as a poet, and the examples which I have quoted of his joy in nature and his fellow-feeling with mankind, should, I think, demonstrate that he has the gifts of vivid seeing, of vivid feeling, and of vivid expression. If genuine poetry consists of two essentials, substance and form, we cannot deny the substance in Mr. Davidson. He has the gift of "high seriousness," which Arnold declares to be a requisite of all that is classic. He is not always deep; he is not faultless. The same writer who can condense a thought thus—
On Eden's daisies couched, they feltThey carried Eden in their heart,
is also capable of writing, as poetry, these lines:—
For no man ever understood a woman,No woman ever understood a man,And no man ever understood a man:No woman ever understood a woman,And no man ever understood himself;No woman ever understood herself.
We can only surmise that Mr. Davidson had just been reading Whitman, and was under the temporary hallucination that this poor stuff was profound thinking. But all poets, nay,all prose-writers, even the greatest, have their lapses into bathos. Yes, even—and I say it with trembling—even Shakespeare.
Let us look, now, for a few moments, more closely, in order to appreciate the particular elements of his genius, as manifested in the form which is his style.
And first, his language. To be perfect, expression must be luminous yet terse, vigorous, yet in taste and keeping. It must be without mannerisms, without inadequacy, without flatness, without obscurity. "Clear, but with distinction," is the brief definition of Aristotle. Davidson has learned his lesson well from Shelley and Wordsworth and Arnold. He cultivates all the virtues, and not without success. He has not been tempted to leave the true path and court singularity, whether in the shape of Browning's verbal puzzles or of Swinburne's luscious and alliterative turgidness. His diction is of the simplest. Says one of his personæ—
I love not brilliance; give me wordsOf meadow-growth and garden plot,Of larks and black-caps; gaudy birds,Gay flowers and jewels like me not.
It is astonishing how expressive the simpleword can become in the hands of a master. Dante's verb and noun are now proverbial. As for Mr. Davidson, Gray's clear-cut lines in theElegycan supply no more instances of perfect aptness than those which I quoted some time ago of the lark. Notice the exactness of choice in—
The patchwork sunshinenetsthe lea,The flitting shadowshalt and passForlorn, the mossy humble-beeLoungesalong the flowerless grass,
and in "I heard thehuskywhisper of the corn." Yet I am disposed to think that, like many another finished artist, he has passed through stages of various practice, and has exercised much self-restraint before attaining to that naturalness which, as Goethe reiterates, is the last crown of art-discipline. From sundry indications I conclude that passages of hisFleet-street Eclogueswere written independently at different dates, and have been fitted later into the dialogue form. However that may be, it is possible to detect instances in which he falls below his own maturer ideal of natural language. The diction, that is to say the choice of mere vocables, is eminently natural, except for the odd words "muted,""writhen," "watchet-hued," "dup," "swound," which I have collected with a rather laborious captiousness. But diction is only part of expression, and, as I have just hinted, it would seem as if, before his lesson in pure style was fully learned, he had passed under the fascination of the mannerists, and particularly of Pope. Otherwise it is hard to account for such entirely eighteenth century lines as—
And brimming echoes spill the pleasant din,
or—
The sloping shores that fringe the velvet tides;
and (speaking of steamers)—
Or, fiery-hearted, cleave with iron limbsAnd brows precipitous the pliant sea.
How different are these mechanical constructions from that expression of the birds
hid in the white warm cloudMantling the thorn.
Whether I am right or wrong as to the process of his development, the fact remains that he can be, if he chooses, a master in language of poetic simplicity. Even a fire of garden rubbish can be expressed without becoming altogether unpoetical when one speaks of
the spicy smokeOf withered weeds that burn where gardens be.
Perhaps there do exist some things which cannot be made poetical in any diction whatsoever. Tennyson could only express "tea" by "and on the board the fluttering urn," and if Mr. Davidson has to speak of whisky and calls it
amber spirit that enshrines the heartOf an old Lothian summer,
we have to recognise that he has come very well out of a difficulty. If at another time he refers to it as
things which journalists require,
we must remember that the context implies a certain humour.
"Clear, but not flat," is an easy maxim to utter, but, as Wordsworth too often shows, the danger of falling from studied simplicity into bald prose is always present; and for that reason do smaller artists rather choose to trick their thoughts in verbal jewellery. We cannot say that Davidson, who undertakes to run the risk, never makes the fatal step. In the address to the daisy—
Oh, little brave adventurer!We human beings love youso,
the last word, and indeed the whole line, verges on the infantile. So it is a shock when, after a passage of some pretensions, we come upon the lines—
My way of life led me to London town,And difficulties, which I overcame;
or—
But yet my waking intuition,That longed to execute its mission.
It is extremely difficult to realise that the same man wrote these sorry lines who, in another place, adopts this for his style—
... Here spring appearsCaught in a leafless brake, her garland torn,Breathless with wonder, and the tears half driedUpon her rosy cheek.
For our comfort and his let us remember that it was the same Wordsworth who wrote both theOde on the Intimations of Immortalityand also the lines—
I've measured it from side to side:It's three feet long and two feet wide!
Nevertheless flaws of this kind are few, and it is almost unfair for me to be the means perhaps of conveying even thus much impression offaultiness about verses which sustain so high a general level of excellence of language.
In point of melody and harmony and flow of verse there can be no doubt that our poet is, for instance, an excellent writer of songs, in which a vigorous simplicity is the prime requisite. They lilt along with great vivacity and ease. But elsewhere I could wish that here and there he would amend his rhymes. "Reviewer" and "literature," "pierced" and "athirst," "noise" and "voice," "inquisition" and "division," "trees" and "palaces," "shade is" and "ladies," "giftless" and "swiftness," are far from pleasing; and though I am almost ashamed to play the detective in work which is mostly full of charm, I find myself distressed by such cacophonies as—
Hid in its hoard of haws,
and—
Pierces a rushlight's ray's length into it.
John Davidson, then, is a genuine son of his age; free in his thought, wide in his sympathies, eager for the amelioration of man's estate, divided between the hopes of science and the regret for a lost religion, compelled to fall back on the everlasting consolations oflove and nature, an ardent lover of the country and its sights and sounds, constrained to draw word-pictures of the things which thus delight him, and drawing them with the consummate skill of the man who keeps his eye on the essentials of the thing he draws. His charm lies in his frank sincerity, and in the clear healthy sweetness of his utterance. That he is a poet none can doubt; if he is comparatively young, as I surmise he is, and if he pursues his true development, he may, I believe, easily take his place in the first rank, not only as a successor, but as the successor, of Tennyson.
On William Watson I shall dwell less long. To begin with, he is already better known. Moreover, his special virtues as a poet are more easy to apprehend, for they lie somewhat prominently upon the surface. Better still, he apparently apprehends them himself, and is in that unusually happy position for an artist, of knowing exactly where his own strength lies. And undoubtedly in those departments his strength is great. We need not hold the mention of them in reserve. I have already quoted a passage of admirable rhetorical and musical skill and taste from theLachrymæ Musarum. That was sufficient to illustrateone of this poet's great gifts—the gift of writing splendid verse, as harmonious as Milton's and as choice in expression as Tennyson's. His other chief endowment is that of literary critic. On Burns, Shelley, and Wordsworth he has said almost the final saying, and assuredly in almost the final language. We may pick faults now and again in his expression, and we may suspect a mannerism here and there, especially when we read large quantities of his verse at one time; nevertheless, each individual piece which fairly represents him is very nearly perfect in its way.
The works of his with which I am acquainted are the volumes entitledWordsworth's Grave and Other Poems,The Father of the Forest and Other Poems,Lachrymæ Musarum, and the series of sonnets upon Armenia, calledThe Purple East. There is in Watson nothing of the dramatist or of the epic writer. He is a lyrist and a sonneteer. He is also a critic, and might very conceivably be a satirist. But, whatever he is in writing, he is mainly and before all things an intellectual rather than an emotional poet; he is an artist rather than a seer. His poems are constructions of taste and intellectual judgment. Let me take, as an example, his poem upon theFatherof the Forest. A yew tree, which may be fifteen centuries old, is addressed by him; and, musing on the historical scenes it must have lived through, he gives us a series of verses which touch musically upon salient epochs and characteristic figures in the history of England. To this the yew practically replies that the so-called historical events amount to nothing, and that "wars and tears" will repeat themselves, until men are some day civilized into pursuing but one object, which shall be Beauty. The piece itself reveals nothing profound, awakes no particular emotion. Given the first idea of the plot, so to speak—an idea which is not far to seek for any reflective man—the rest of the material follows as a matter of course. But where is the man besides Mr. Watson who will give us such lines as—
The South shall bless, the East shall blight,The red rose of the Dawn shall blow;The million-lilied stream of night,Wide in ethereal meadows flow.
I do not say that the poet is without his measure of feeling; but it is rather the pensive feeling of a Jaques, the dainty interest of a Matthew Arnold, than any surge of emotion. The poet seems to me to encourage his brain to feel—to give it that passing luxury with a certain amount of deliberation.
TheHymn to the Seais the only real poem written in the English language in hexameters and pentameters. There have been many attempts at these metres, but they have been failures, one and all. And nothing shows Mr. Watson's skill, nay genius, more than the fact that his attempt is a great and conspicuous success. The sea, confined within its shores, never resting, yet never able to pass its bounds, at war with the winds, and serving the moon with its tides, is compared to man, with his unrest, his limitations, his aspirations. As before, when the clue is once given, the thread is easily followed to the end. The result is simply an intellectual operation done into verbal music. Yet who but William Watson, having to speak of the moon as mistress of the sea, could express his fancy in words like these:—
When, as yonder, thy mistress, at height of her mutable glories,Wise from the magical East, comes like a sorceress pale.Ah, she comes, she arises—impassive, emotionless, bloodless,Wasted and ashen of cheek, zoning her ruins with pearl.Once she was warm, she was joyous, desire in her pulses abounding:Surely thou lovedst her well, then, in her conquering youth!Surely not all unimpassioned, at sound of thy rough serenading,She from the balconied night unto her melodist leaned,—Leaned unto thee, her bondsman, who keepest to-day her commandments,All for the sake of old love, dead at thy heart though it lie.
Surely such verse would have a claim to endurance, even if the thought were less of a thought than it is.
Autumn, again, is a short piece upon the suggestions of that season. What would those suggestions naturally be? Obviously, the passing and perishing of all things that are. True; but to express those suggestions, obvious as they are, as Watson expresses them, requires a rhetorical power and a taste in melodious words such as would make their possessor eminent in the judgment of men who care anything for beauty. There may be no particular depth in the work; it may be less passionate, less full of thought, than theOde to the West Wind, but we could ill afford to spare such combinations of sound as—
Elusive notes in wandering wafture borneFrom undiscoverable lips, that blowAn immaterial horn.
InLiberty Rejectedwe meet once more with the similitude of the moon and the tide. Mr. Watson's range of purely intellectual imagination is, like that of his emotion, limited. But we do not mind meeting the comparison again, when the lover who refuses to be free expresses himself thus—
The ocean would as soonEntreat the moonUnsay the magic verseThat seals him hersFrom silver noon to noon.
When he touches upon nature, we feel again that Watson is not "letting himself go." When he escapes from town it is not to revel and to make us revel in the sheer delight of rural sights and sounds. He feels as before, with the eye and the understanding, not with the buoyant blood of the full heart. No matter, he feels enough to give us this quatrain—
In stainless daylight saw the pure seas roll;Saw mountains pillaring the perfect sky:Then journeyed home to carry in his soulThe torment of the difference till he die.
Why should I go on to quote such lines as—
That thousand-memoried unimpulsive sea,
or,
Curls the labyrinthine seaDuteous to the lunar will.
Enough that, thanks to a study of Spenser, Milton, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and therefore a delicate taste in word and phrase, and thanks also to an innate genius for verbal music, restrained from Swinburnian riot by a true artistic instinct, Mr. Watson is a poet most delightful to the physical and the mental ear. That he has taken pains with his study is avowed by himself. Beginning with Shelley and passing through Keats to Wordsworth, he says—
In my young days of fervid poesyHe drew me to him with his strange far light,—He held me in a world all clouds and gleams,And vasty phantoms, where ev'n Man himselfMoved like a phantom 'mid the clouds and gleams.Anon the Earth recalled me; and a voiceMurmuring of dethroned divinitiesAnd dead times, deathless upon sculptured urn—And Philomela's long-descended painFlooding the night—and maidens of romanceTo whom asleep St. Agnes' love-dreams come—Awhile constrained me to a sweet duresseAnd thraldom, lapping me in high content,Soft as the bondage of white amorous arms.And then a third voice, long unheeded—heldClaustral and cold, and dissonant and tame—Foundme at last with ears to hear. It sangOf lowly sorrows and familiar joys,Of simple manhood, artless womanhood,And childhood fragrant as the limpid morn;And from the homely matter nigh at hand,Ascending and dilating, it disclosedSpaces and avenues, calm heights and breadthsOf vision, whence I saw each blade of grassWith roots that groped about eternity,And in each drop of dew upon each bladeThe mirror of the inseparable All.
It is also clear from such reminiscences as—
The laurel glorious from that wintry hair,
which is practically Tennyson, or
The maker of this verse, which shall endureBy splendour of its theme, that cannot die,
which, if I mistake not, is echoed Spenser, or—
And ghostly as remembered mirth,
which is largely Tennyson again.
I do not call these plagiarisms, I call them reflections of wide and retentive reading.
William Watson has thus formed a style which is almost perfect. I say "almost," not quite. There are some few mannerisms which we might wish away. He speaks of "greatly inert," "greatly lost in thee," "greatly slain," "doomed splendidly to die," "loudly weak," "immutably prevail," and "vainlygreat," till we are forced to recognize what looks very much like a trick. He has occasional moments of tautology, which may possibly be deliberate, but is none the better for that, as when he says:—
Not mine the rich and showering hand, that strewsThe facile largess of a stintless muse.
And
The retrospect in Time's reverted eyes.
And worst of all—
"Fair clouds of gulls thatwheelandswerveIn unanimity divine,Withundulation serpentine,And wondrous consentaneouscurve."
He sometimes falls into lines which ring of the mint of Pope—
No guile may capture and no force surprise.
Or—
Defames the sunlight and deflowers the morn.
Or—
Towers to a lily, reddens to a rose.
In one passage only do I find him falling, falling, falling into the flattest style of theExcursion:—
"I overheard a kind-eyed girl relateTo her companions how a favouring chanceBy some few shillings weekly had increasedThe earnings of her household."
But as I read this, I murmur to myself those lines from Wordsworth—
"And I have travelled far as Hull to seeWhat clothes he might have left, or other property,"
and wonder how it is that such aberrations can befal even the very man who seems most determined to avoid them.
Watson's second endowment is still one of taste and intellect. It is the gift of literary criticism. The special charm of the great poets is so subtly apprehended by him, and so exquisitely expressed, that it will be a source of much surprise if many of his concise verdicts do not become the household words of students of literature. Let me quote a passage from his poem onWordsworth's Grave:—
You who have loved, like me, his simple themes,Loved his sincere large accent nobly plain,And loved the land whose mountains and whose streamsAre lovelier for his strain.It may be that his manly chant, besideMore dainty numbers, seems a rustic tune;It may be, thought has broadened, since he died,Upon the century's noon;It may be that we can no longer shareThe faith which from his fathers he received;It may be that our doom is to despairWhere he with joy believed;—Enough that there is none since risen who singsA song so gotten of the immediate soul,So instant from the vital fount of thingsWhich is our source and goal;And though at touch of later hands there floatMore artful tones than from his lyre he drew,Ages may pass e'er trills another noteSo sweet, so great, so true.
Take again—
Not Milton's keen, translunar music thine;Not Shakespeare's cloudless, boundless, human view;Not Shelley's flush of rose on peaks divine;Nor yet the wizard twilight Coleridge knew.
And these:—
Shelley, the hectic flamelight rose of verse,All colour and all odour and all bloom.
And on Burns—
But as, when thunder crashes nigh,All darkness opes one flaming eye,And the world leaps against the sky,So fiery clearDid the old truths that we pass byTo him appear.
These, then, are the prominent poetical virtues of William Watson, virtues which none canavoid observing—his magnificent power of expression and his literary acumen. He is an intellectual poet, and therefore not devoid of substance. Yet his substance alone would never make him avates. I can imagine that in prose criticisms and in satire he would make a distinguished figure. Here is his answer to Mr. Alfred Austin when the laureate advised him to be patient with the Armenian question:—
"The poet laureate assured me—first, that whosoever in any circumstances arraigns this country for anything that she may do or leave undone thereby covers himself with shame; secondly, that although the continued torture, rape, and massacre of a Christian people, under the eyes of a Christian continent, may be a lamentable thing, it is best to be patient, seeing that the patience of God Himself can never be exhausted; and, thirdly, that if I were but with him in his pretty country house, were but comfortably seated 'by the yule log's blaze,' and joining with him in seasonable conviviality, the enigmas of Providence and the whole mystery of things would presently become transparent to me, and more especially after 'drinking to England' I should be enabled to understandthat 'she bides her hour behind the bastioned brine.'"
It would be hard to better that.
But though I call him intellectual, and more artistic than inspired, I have no wish to underrate the intrinsic poetry in such lines as these, on theGreat Misgiving:—
Ah, but the apparition—the dumb sign—The beckoning finger bidding me foregoThe fellowship, the converse, and the wine,The songs, the festal glow!And, ah, to know not, while with friends I sit,And while the purple joy is passed about,Whether 'tis ampler day divinelier litOr homeless night without.
Nor the graceful fancy in these, fromBeauty's Metempsychosis:—
From wave and star and flower,Some effluence rareWas lent thee; a divine but transient dower;Thou yield'st it back from eyes and lips and hairTo wave and star and flower.Should'st thou to-morrow die,Thou still shalt beFound in the rose, and met in all the sky;And from the ocean's heart shalt sing to me,Should'st thou to-morrow die.
I have also said that Mr. Watson knows hisown strength and his limitations. Let me conclude by quoting a passage from hisApologia, the very style of which will be in itself the justification of the man whom it argues to justify:—
... Because I have full oftIn singers' selves found me a theme of song,Holding these also to be very partOf Nature's greatness....
And though I be to these but as a knollAbout the feet of the high mountains, scarceRemarked at all, save when a valley cloudHolds the high mountains hidden, and the knollAgainst the clouds shows briefly eminent;Yet, ev'n as they, I, too, with constant heart,And with no light or careless ministry,Have served what seemed the voice; and unprofaneHave dedicated to melodious endsAll of myself that least ignoble was.For though of faulty and of erring walk,I have not suffered aught in me of frailTo blur my song; I have not paid the worldThe evil and the insolent courtesyOf offering it my baseness for a gift.And unto such as think all Art is cold,All music unimpassioned, if it breatheAn ardour not of Eros' lips, and glowWith fire not caught from Aphrodite's breast,Be it enough to say, that in Man's lifeIs room for great emotions unbegotOf dalliance and embracement, unbegotEven of the purer nuptials of the soul;And one not pale of blood, to human touchNot tardily responsive, yet may knowA deeper transport and a mightier thrillThan comes of commerce with mortality,When, rapt from all relation with his kind,All temporal and immediate circumstance,In silence, in the visionary moodThat, flashing light on the dark deep, perceivesOrder beyond this coil and errancy;Isled from the fretful hour he stands alone,And hears the eternal movement, and beholdsAbove him and around and at his feet,In million-billowed consentaneousness,The flowing, flowing, flowing of the world.
There is nothing both wholly new and wholly true to be said concerning Shakespeare. Eckermann, who played Boswell to Goethe's Johnson, was once disposed to discuss Shakespeare with that great master. Alone of modern poets Goethe has revealed a capacity in some degree comparable with that of the myriad-minded Englishman. Yet Goethe replied to Eckermann, "We cannot talk about Shakespeare; everything is inadequate." If the German intellectual colossus, whose conversation bestrode the narrow world from comparative anatomy and scientific optics to the principles of art, could not talk of Shakespeare; if a poet whose writings, next to those of our own unrivalled bard, are most thickly studded with great stars of thought, could not talk of Shakespeare, what is to be said by us puniermen who are compelled to peep about for matter of discourse? "Everything is inadequate." That perhaps is the reason why talk about Shakespeare, even from the sanest of men, is apt to convert itself into perfervid rhapsody. Meanwhile, from those whose sanity is less assured, it runs to the delirium of some harebrained cipher of Shakespeare-Geheimnis, and an amused world is asked to listen while some female Dogberry asserts that the truth, too long concealed, has been proved, and it will soon go near to be thought, thatRomeo and Julietwas written by none other than Anne Hathaway.
I do not come before you to-night with either a rhapsody or a mare's-nest. Nor do I come with criticism of that marvellous creator, who, to use the bold expression of the Frenchman,après Dieu créa le plus. When, with the progress of the years, a supreme writer is read more and more over all the world; when his plays are translated from English into Hebrew and Japanese, and performed in Roumanian and Hindustani, criticism should become simply a humble endeavour to realize the various powers and beauties which constitute such triumphant greatness.
That is my attitude to-night. To me Shakespeare—though not flawless, because human—is the crown and consummation of literature. Ardently and reverently as I admire Homer, Æschylus, Dante and Goethe, my mind places even these on somewhat lower seats than the creator ofHamletandOthello. My object is to review—however imperfectly—what went to his making, what elements of gift and character, circumstance, training and experience were so mixed in him that nature could stand up and say: "This is a man." This is not the same idle performance as to descant rapturously upon his purely inborn genius. It is no purpose of mine to attempt a definition or dissection of genius. It is only in our youth or ignorance that we possess the confidence to define such abstractions as beauty, goodness, genius, and art. Still less do I propound a recipe for its manufacture. If I knew the secret of its attainment I should first try it upon myself.
Shakespeare was made by the right native genius, by the right environment, and by the right training. We will take these factors in that order.
Genius, like every other good gift and everyperfect gift, "is from above, and cometh down from the Father of Lights." We feel its presence when we are fortunate enough to meet with it. In our hearts we know that it is some strange and incommunicable faculty for performing with a divine ease those achievements which are the despair of other men, or to which they can only make some approach by "infinite pains."
Brains have been classified as brains of one, two and three storeys. As you cannot, by thinking, add a cubit to your stature, so can you not, by thinking, add a storey to your brain. You may furnish and brighten the one storey or the two storeys with which your mental house was built before your birth. You may open the windows and let in the sun and air. By the best education and habit you may fill that house with art and beauty and light and comfort, or, by the worst, you may render it ugly, foul, bleak and dark; but you can never add a new floor. Shakespeare's brain was not only built by mother Nature in three storeys, but those storeys were lofty and roomy in an astonishing degree. They were also full of windows.
His natural gifts were vast. No writer ever possessed such a manifoldness, or rather,totality of them. In a different branch of art, one cannot but think of Michael Angelo, who could carve the Moses, paint the Sistine ceiling, or build St. Peter's, with equal grasp and mastery over conceptions each too sublime for ordinary men.
If we analyse and enumerate the endowments lavished by Nature on her "darling" of the Avon, we shall find, as in the case of Angelo, that he not only displays each separate gift, but that he displays each in its highest form and fullest measure. His own modesty may be permitted to envy this man's art or that man's scope, but never was envy more misplaced.
This is no rhapsody. Longinus tells us that an unassailable verdict upon the sublime must be the consensus of different ages, pursuits, tastes and walks in life. Concerning Shakespeare's gifts there is no discord among the competent—the Hazlitts, Coleridges, Emersons, Carlyles. Some of those gifts can be cultivated in considerable measure, some in a less; some lie beyond all training and all art. But no art or cultivation whatever can bring any one of them to the Shakespearean height and fulness, if Nature herself has been less kind than shewas to the child of John Shakespeare, that unsuspecting burgess of Stratford town.
If, before we attempt to realise the supremacy of Shakespeare in any particular attribute, we have recognised how miserably we ourselves have managed, at some time or other, to fail in every one of them; if, before we approach an appreciation of Shakespeare, we have applied to other great creators the same analysis which we are about to apply to him; if we have learned from the most instructive examples what is meant by creation, by imagination, by insight, by wisdom, by wit, by humour, by eloquence, and by verbal music; then we cannot fail to acknowledge that here is the all-round, the all-comprehensive genius, superlatively dowered with each and all of them; that here is the entire mind, where others are partial; that here, as I believe some one has put it, is the man who, when others have said, or depicted, or argued, or pleaded, seems to come along and say, "let me show you how this should be done," and so does it once and for ever.
It is but few, one may believe, who are fully conscious of the reasons why Shakespeare could fill the Elizabethan pit with the rough London apprentices and the Elizabethan boxeswith superfine gallants and courtiers; why he has been a delight equally to the worldling, to whom always "the play's the thing," and to the sedate scholar, who has perchance never set foot in a theatre, and to whom a play is a dramatic poem printed in a book. Yet the reason is simple. It is because Shakespeare's gifts are numerous and varied enough to appeal to populace and gallant, to worldling and student; they meet to the full each and every demand that can be made upon a work of dramatic art.
To begin with, he possesses the true constructive power, the first secret of the playwright's craft. He can visualise an extensive or complicated passage of human life, with its cross streams of action, its moving world of persons, its intricate motives and passions—whether it surround Julius Cæsar in ancient Rome or Othello in Cyprus or one of his kings of English history—whether he find it recorded in Holinshed, or in Plutarch, or in some novel of Italy—and, with the swift intuition of the master craftsman, he grasps the essentials, arranges and links them, and renders them organic and compact. With sure judgment of effect he adds to his original or subtracts from it, and he rounds off the whole into anabsorbing and unflagging story to be told in action during but "two hours traffic of the stage." No one can fully realise this immense selective and constructive power until he has analysed the action ofMacbeth, and observed the marvellous skill which has compressed into those five short acts a whole world of great and little things done and said and thought.
But greater and rarer still than this architectural gift is the creative power which lies in imagination. And by imagination I do not mean merely the play of fancy in Mercutio's famous speech, nor simply the conjuring up of pictures as in Clarence's dream, nor the invention of those perfect similitudes which meet us everywhere. In these, it is true, Shakespeare is consummate. But I mean that deeper and more pervasive power, which beholds beings of the imagination as if they were flesh and blood realities, and presents men and women of the past or of nowhere as if they were breathing in the living present before our eyes; the shaping power which—to make a quotation that never stales—
gives to airy nothingA local habitation and a name—
so that to us Elsinore for ever means Hamlet,Verona means Juliet, and we think of Shylock and Jessica as historical beings who veritably once trod the Piazza and the Merceria of Venice. The great novelist who wroteVanity Fairpossessed a rare measure of this power; but in him it was limited by the limitations of his sympathies and by his less amiable view of men. So was it with Carlyle. In Shakespeare it is boundless. To him all ages, all sorts and conditions of men and women, are understandable and worthy of interest. Intuitively he knows them, walks with them, talks with them, feels with them. They may be heroes, sages, fools, villains: they may be witty or stupid, refined or gross. Their characters may be direct and plain as those of Lear and Kent, or they may be as subtly shaded as that of Hamlet or of the melancholy soliloquist of Arden. He can in imagination traverse the whole gamut of feeling. He can be what or whom he will. This is the imagination in which Shakespeare is unsurpassable. This more than all powers, unless it be that of humour, is the one which Nature must bestow, and which nothing but Nature can bestow. And this is the power which alone can make drama convincing and immortal. Compare with the living and breathing reality of the characters in even the poorest of the Shakespearean plays, the wordy automata of Swinburne'sFalieroor the frigid figures who talk through Tennyson'sCup. There are those who compare Scott with Shakespeare in the gift of visualising and vitalising the past. We Englishmen may leave it to the Scotchman Carlyle to settle with that comparison. For my own part, as a student of antiquity, I would maintain that, despite all petty anachronism, Shakespeare in his Roman plays comes nearer to the essential truth than any merely professional student can ever come. What he gives us is not archæology, not the exact Forum nor the precise etiquette of the toga, but the man, the Cæsar, the Coriolanus, the greasy populace, their heart and mind—these he sees with the penetrating eye of an imagination which never fails.
Of imagination, in this sense, wit and humour are a vital part. Without them you may imagine an Othello or a Lear, but you cannot imagine a Falstaff, a Touchstone, a Mercutio, or a Bottom. In this domain Shakespeare is sometimes thought to be rivalled by Aristophanes and Molière. Yet one who read all three will find that these are his rivals ratherin broad strokes of humour and flashes of wit than in the subtler virtues of his humour. His humour is all-pervading, it is colour woven into the whole tissue of thinking, speaking, and action. Nay, true humour is like the colour of a flower or leaf. It belongs to the nature of the plant, and is carried in the sap of its life. To talk like Falstaff, you must in imagination become Falstaff, feel as he would do, think as he would think. You cannot lay on the Falstaffian humour by a reasoning process from the outside. The result may be clever, but it will lack just that subtle and evasive quality which the modern cant seeks to describe by the word "inevitable." A merely brilliant man—a Sheridan, for instance—might make the endeavour, and gain some considerable applause. But Shakespeare for the moment lived the part, the humour came to him with the part, whether the humour of clowns and gravediggers, of Jaques, or of the moody prince of Denmark.
Essential also to such humour is the broad and tolerant temper which can not only suffer fools gladly, as being a large and representative class of God's creatures, but can actually rejoice in their folly as a thing delectable to a healthy contemplation.
But when the piece has been thus constructed with a master hand, and when the characters have been informed by imagination with all the convincingness of infinitely varied life, with humour, with sound and healthy and impartial understanding, much is still left. There is still to be considered the language or expression in which all is clothed. And in this respect the writer who has written best in any tongue, falls, when compared with Shakespeare, a step into the rear. Not Milton, for all his organ flood of noble phrase; not Shelley, for all his burning and rapturous utterance, can vie with the actor-playwright of the Globe in his gift of eloquence. It is entirely marvellous and beyond all explanation. No mere study or scholarship could attain to that inexhaustible fund, not merely of words, but of the right words. Orators and writers there are a many who never fail to find a word, and a good word, for the rounding of their sentences. But Shakespeare's words are not merely good words; they are the best words. Even the bare vocabulary of Burke or Macaulay would seem second-rate beside the vocabulary of Shakespeare. It is a commonplace to dilate upon the fact that Shakespeare has used 15,000 words, while Milton, ourpoet of widest reading and erudition, has but 8,000. I do not attach so much importance to that enumeration. The subjects, the sides of life, the classes of persons of whom Shakespeare treats, are so comprehensive of high and low, serious and jocose, while Milton's are confined to a range of such seriousness and dignity, that the comparison is but fallacious. Nevertheless this vast repertoire of words is in itself an amazing phenomenon. Still more amazing is the consummate tact with which he makes use of them, in sentences so terse and clear that they increasingly pass into the proverbs of everyday. And most amazing is that, with all his characters, and all their speeches, he never repeats himself. No better proof could be given that the speaker is for the moment not Shakespeare, but the character in which he has sunk himself. We need not pretend that he does not sometimes run riot in his power; yet, how seldom, in the day of his maturity, is that "sometimes," when we rightly understand his meanings.
Let critics, observing always who speaks and in what spirit he speaks, try to improve a word in a typical passage of Shakespeare. They speedily realise the error of their ways.
Take at random the very simplest line, say:"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank"; substitute some other word for "sweet" or "sleeps," and examine the result. The very sound of the line possesses the tone of the moonlight and the hour, the mood of Lorenzo and Jessica. Try an easy-looking similitude:—
How like a younker or a prodigalThe scarfed bark puts from her native bay,Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind!How like a prodigal doth she return,With over-weather'd ribs and ragged sails,Lean, rent, and beggared by the strumpet wind!
And, if the man who writes this nervous Saxon, writes elsewhere—
No, this my hand will ratherThe multitudinous seas incarnadine,
that also is a lesson to those who have any notion of what is meant by the right word in the right place.
To me Shakespeare is the most stupendously eloquent man who ever set pen to paper. Shakespeare, says Goethe, offers us golden apples in silver dishes. But Goethe was a foreigner, he perhaps hardly realised that the dishes of English expression are, to the English readerwho responds to the niceties of his own tongue, not less golden than the apples.
To these perfections let us add another, his superb sense of rhythm. Properly speaking, this is but an integral part of perfect eloquence. It is the concern of the poet, not only to make the words express the meaning, but to make the cadence express the tone and mood; to make it, in fact, answer to those rhythmic vibrations of the brain which go with all states of mental exaltation. It is Emerson who observes that "Shakespeare's sonnets are like the tone of voice of some incomparable person." He was doubtless thinking of their general effect upon our mood and spirit, but his remark is true of the mere movement of Shakespeare's lyric lines:—
Full many a glorious morning have I seenFlatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,Kissing with golden face the meadows green,Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.
Or—
When in the chronicle of wasted timeI see descriptions of the fairest wights,And beauty making beautiful old rhymeIn praise of ladies dead, and lovely knights,
and so on.
Here, as in the dramas, are no mechanicaltricks, no obvious compassing of sickly sweetnesses. The accent falls where it should, unstrained. The disguised alliteration comes, as almost always in Milton also, not from set and conscious purpose, but from the promptings of a mind vibrating with harmonious suggestion.
This catalogue of virtues has been long, but it has required some self-command to prevent it from being longer. It justifies the exclamation with which Mr. Sidney Lee closes his life of Shakespeare, an exclamation which he deftly borrows from Hamlet: "How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in apprehension how like a God!"
So much for Nature's making. With such lavish powers, or at least potentialities, was Shakespeare born. It is appalling to reflect that their fruit might all have been lost to the world if John Shakespeare, the father, had been but a little poorer than he actually was; if William, the son, had been sent to the plough-tail without the rudiments of education, and so had been banished for ever from contact with bright spirits and all the brilliant motley of London life. His fate would have been that of Gray's rural "mute inglorious Milton" and the headstone with "Here lies William Shakespeare" would have meant nothing outside the parish, and very little inside it. It is an alarming thought also that, had he been born half a century later, though with every educational advantage, his manhood would have fallen under the grim Puritan tyranny, and he would never have written a play. It is a peculiarly happy combination of circumstances which we must thank for the making of Shakespeare as he is.
Nature produced the wonderful plant, but, for its perfect development, a plant requires a congenial soil and atmosphere; it needs light and water; it needs protection from early destruction, or stunting, or starvation. It may seem heterodox, but I would maintain stubbornly, against all the phalanx of Baconians and Bedlamites, that, for the cultivation of Shakespeare's peculiar genius, circumstances were almost wholly propitious. His very poverty was his stimulus. Even that school education of his, which is made by misunderstanding to appear so scant and pitiful, was, I doubt not, better adapted to his career than if he had been filled with all the learning of Verulam or Ben Jonson. But of that anon.
The first happy circumstance was the epoch atwhich he saw the light. In modern times two forms of poetry contend for the supremacy. The third kind, the epic, is dead. No Homer or Virgil can ever more arise, unless as a novelist in prose. Of the two perennial kinds, one is the lyric—the consummate blending of language and music which utters the cry of individual passion from the individual heart. The other is the drama, the presentation of human life in visible form, realised in all its complexity of motives, characters and moods. Both of these flourished mightily in Shakespeare's generation. Lyric poets were innumerable. The whole country rang with songs. The Elizabethan Miscellanies and Rhapsodies and Dainty Devices are testimony stronger even than the great names of Spenser and the sonneteers. No less did drama appeal to high and low, the Puritan always excepted. But the day of the Puritan had not yet dawned. The taste of society of every grade was for the theatre, but a theatre without scenery, in which it was required of the drama that it should be rich in high poetry. Poetry was just then both a fashion and a passion of the nation, as it never was before and never has been since. To a man born, like Shakespeare, with both the lyric and the dramaticgift, the age was full of example and stimulus, and, better still, full of challenge and exacting poetic standards. There is an immense difference between writing an artistic sonnet for a wide public which desires to read artistic sonnets, or composing a poetic drama for a wide public which desires to see poetic dramas, and doing these things for a narrow public which, after all, rather tolerates your efforts than demands them.
We are not concerned with the question what Shakespeare might have been if he had lived in his prime to-day. He might perhaps have become a superlative novel-writer, since that is the field in which creation appears to be playing its chief part. But our concern is to perceive what causes helped to fashion him to that which he in fact became.
Let us first glance for a few moments at those spacious times of great Elizabeth. Why so wondrously prolific in song and play? Why so provocative of genius?
First, we may lay down the proposition that it is not times of national misery and poverty, not times of insecurity and fear, not times of weak convictions and cynicism, that produce a wealth of either great poets or great art. Thereis not one distinguished literary or artistic period of any country at which the national spirit was not full of the animation, enterprise, and confidence of a general well-being, or at which it was not possessed by high ideas and strong aims or strong convictions. I am speaking in broad summary. Whatever qualifications may be made for unique phenomena, this statement in the main is true. At such periods the mental vitality of a community is high; the air is charged with intellectual and artistic electricity, and great talents everywhere become the receivers and gathering-points of those electric currents. Hence poets, artists, and other creators appear simultaneously in clusters; production is abundant both in matter and in kind. At such times there is nothing withdrawn or particularly refined about the creations which pour forth. There is no room for the dilettante orpetit maître, and not much for the professional critic; it is the age of strong men; writing, painting, sculpture are full of vigour, inspiration, earnestness.
It was so at Athens in that glorious age of Pericles and the succeeding generation, the age of the great tragedians, of Thucydides, of Aristophanes and of Phidias. It was so—though withmen of less original genius—in the Augustan Rome of Virgil, Horace and Livy. It was so in the rich and ardent cities of Renaissance Italy, where Da Vinci, Raphael, Michel Angelo, and Titian flourished in the same space of thirty years. It was so in the France of Louis Quatorze, when Corneille, Racine, Molière, Pascal, and numbers of others of hardly smaller note, were writing side by side. And it was so in the times of great Elizabeth. According to Emerson there is a mental zymosis or contagion prevailing in society at such epochs. Some one has said that "No member of either house of the British Parliament will be ranked among the orators whom Lord North did not see or who did not see Lord North." If so, the cause will be found to lie in the encouragement which noble oratory then received, whereas at a later day it has "fallen into abatement and low price."
The age of Elizabeth was one of material prosperity and comfort. It was, in the main, well with men's bodies and well with their minds. They possessed not only the leisure, not only the means, but also the disposition to enjoy. It is not for the artist in any field to scorn the material prosperity of the community in which he works. After all, as history will show, it isthat prosperity which makes him possible. "Plain living and high thinking" is good for himself; it is good for a nation; but plain living does not mean poverty, squalor or starvation, while high thinking cannot be done without leisure and resource. You cannot build glorious Gothic cathedrals or order sublime Madonnas out of nothing.